Questioning the hypothesis

First published on the Iridescent blog on 4/9/12.

This is cross-posted on Sciencefare.

In my recent NSTA talk, I advocated a view of the scientific method that did not include the hypothesis. What blasphemy! I felt like Galileo speaking out against the Church or something. But let's face it, hypotheses are stupid and irrelevant for science in our modern age. At best, they are an artifact from the past that has long, long lost its purpose.

Now, I may have ruffled some feathers but I want to point out I'm not the only one - Douglas Llewellyn's session at NSTA 2012, "The Role of Argumentation in Inquiry" session also threw hypotheses in the trash. Additionally this excellent compilation of quotes just published on brainpickings (many from actually scientists!) makes many of the same points I make here. My favorite view of the scientific method, over at Understandingscience.org, doesn't emphasize hypotheses either.

So what is my point? To summarize, I argue that there are three main reasons why hypotheses should not be a part of science education:

• They aren't used in all scientific disciplines equally, or at all.
• When used, they aren't a necessary part of the process or the focus (questions are the focus).
• Educationally, teaching hypotheses makes an otherwise intuitive process more formal and unfriendly.

Week 8: done and done

Hey everyone! So, it's been an eventful 8 weeks, but an extremely productive one.  Thanks for supporting me on this research expedition!  I will be leaving the island this coming Monday, to resume my day job as a curriculum designer for Iridescent.  This blog will turn into my personal blog and homepage, so I encourage you to stay tuned if you're interested in hearing more about science, education, online learning, and games.

To wrap up- first, if you donated at least $100 and would like a particular algae pressing sent to you, now's the time to say so!  I will be sending out the pressings this weekend, so please make your choice by Friday at midnight, otherwise I will select one at random for you.

A quick summary of the results of this summer:

I built a shear flume.  Yay!  It's super sweet and somewhat surprisingly works the way I intended. 

I got a little bit of data showing that the spores of one of the local species are as fast and as strong as the species in my thesis.  Thus the pattern seems general- red algal spores can produce an glue which can set, underwater, in a matter of minutes and is extremely strong once set.  We as humans have yet to manufacture a glue which acts nearly as good as this.

I also found that pH has a negative effect on algal spores- it seems to make them take longer to attach to surface, maybe making it more difficult for them to settle and become adults.

The research doesn't end here!  Becca Guenther, a PhD student at the University of British Columbia, has been following me around for the last few weeks, learning the ins and outs of the flume.  This research (in particular on ocean acidification) will continue as part of her PhD research.  I was really excited to hear her tell me this!  It means all the work I put into this summer will continue to develop into more and more interesting science, as the flume becomes a staple piece of equipment in the lab here at FHL.

I just wanted to end by saying thanks! to everyone who donated money and helped support my research.  I hope the blog was enjoyable, feel free to drop me a line or leave a comment if there's anything you want to hear more about or see.  Thanks again for supporting science!!

Kevin

Week 8: Graphs

Ok!  At this point, I've collected data on the attachment of almost 600 spores. That's what nonstop data collection for 2 weeks straight gets you. That's a lot of data points!  I finally got to plotting this data to share here.  This data is super-fresh, like 2 hours since I generated it.

The main species I've been using is Pterosiphonia bipinnata, (which I initially misidentified as a Polysiphonia). Here's what it looks like under a microscope:

 

It has these cute little tiers of cells that give it a banding pattern.  The spores are made on the inside of the tube of cells, kind of like a jelly-filled long-john donut.  You can see the packet of spores as lines of darkly colored dots.  These packets break into 4 individual spores once released.

Ok, and now to the main story of spore attachment.  I'm plotting the shear stress (or how strongly spores have attached) on the x-axis, with the time that the spores had been settling on the y-axis.  Since what I see is spores that are around at one shear and then gone at the next, I know that the attachment strength of the spores lies in between the forces of when I last saw it to when it was gone.  So I decided to plot the data as a bar, showing the range of where the spore's attachment strength must be, for how long they have settled.

This data is actually really cool!  It confirms the work of my thesis that spores attach really quickly and strongly.  How do I know this?  Well, notice that most of the points group on the left side of the graph, at really low attachment strengths where they are barely attached, or on the right side of the graph, where spores are really strongly attached.  I rarely catch spores at intermediate attachment strengths, meaning spores really just have one of two states: 1) unattached and waiting for a wave to knock them to a better location, and 2) fully attached, unable to be shaken by the strongest waves.  For Pterosiphonia bipinnata (as well as the species in my thesis), it may take several hours for them to "decide" to switch from state 1) to 2), but when they decide to do it, the switch happens faster than we can usually catch in our shear flume (on the order of minutes).

Oddly enough, Pterosiphonia bipinnata takes quite a while to make the decision to attach.  It is rarely attached in anything less than 12 hours, and even after 24 hours most but not all spores have moved to the right side of the graph (indicated by the darker color of the lines at 24 hours).  

At some point, I had accidentally tested a different species, and hadn't noticed till afterwards, when I had an outlier where spores were fully attached in 10 hours in just a few tests.  Going back to them, I found I actually had tested Polysiphonia hendryi. Here's the few data I collected for it:

And last, I ran a few pH tests.  So the big question: how will Pterosiphonia's spores fare in a future, acidic ocean?  The answer: not well.  In 24 hours of attachment, 73% of the spores had attached in the normal waters, but only 35% managed to attach in the acidic water.  It's interesting that as far as I could tell, when the spores did attach, they were just as strong, but seem to be taking longer to make that decision to attach.  I don't have enough trials yet to be fully confident in this story (I still got a few more days here!), but the trend so far is quite strong and I hope it'll hold up to more data.

Week 7: more data

Hey,

Quick update this week, as I'm busy plugging along for more data, now that everything seems to be working dandy (minus a power outage that happened this weekend, and set everything back a day).  Trying to analyze the data as I go, but haven't quit caught up yet.  Hoping to psot some results here by the end of the week.

Also, put a few more pressings up on the page, from the big stuff I collected from the FHL dock.  A few didn't come out so well, but there's still several good ones, if you are looking for the big and busty designer algae.  There'll be another 3-4 pressings added to the list by the end of the week, and then I'll ship them out the week after.  Claim your algae soon!

Week 6: DATA!!!

The last few days were a glorious ride. After struggling with many different species, I finally got on of the local fuzzy red species, Polysiphonia sp. (I'll key it out later), to release spores!  And then I saw the spores with a microscope, blasted them with my flume, and collected some super sweet images. The moment of first data is always a momentous occasion in any research project. At the moment I realized that the last five weeks of effort were going to finally work, I literally screamed "Yes, data!!!" at the top of my lungs.  Becca, who was helping me set this up at the time, looked over at me with an expression that was a mix of "Oh my god this guy is crazy," and "Yeah, I totally understand that feeling."

I found the only way to truly get really good images with the microscope was to eliminate any sort of air/water interface (discovered accidentally, as my microscope casing broken and filled with water).  So I needed to dunk the lens in the water.  I sealed the top of the lens so no water would get in the microscope barrel itself, then dunked the lens in water, and behold!: beautiful spores.  This was Moose's suggestion, and will probably ruin the lens at some point, but for now it's working splendidly.  But replacing a lens every so often isn't the worst operating expense.

Here's a with and without a barrier image, of the same set of spores:

And then, a sequence of image showing the number of spores remaining on the slide after hitting the spores with greater and greater force.  The first picture has 4 spores, which got knocked down to 3 and then 1.  Can you find them?

And last, the data graphic that resulted from this first set.  I had eight spores in view on this test, so I marked the information pertaining to the spores when they were de-attached.  So when the spore became deattached, how long had it been settling, and what force was needed to deattach it.  The points on the farthest right actually never became deattached. The darker points are actually two overlapping data points.

And as a final bit of news, I'll be posting some more algae pressings that are almost dry in the next few days. I got some really big ones in this set from the dock at FHL, after these I'll make one more set of smaller, more delicate (and in my opinion) more beautiful algae.