Yashima Mahajan

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 There are numerous Sycamore trees growing all over our neighborhood. During winter time when their leaves are all gone they are left with these dense puffy balls hanging like ornaments. However, when they fall and open up, we see a whole bunch of cottony seeds explode out of them. I carefully picked out one seed and made a slide for me foldscope. This is how it looks up close. I noticed that they have small thorns. These probably are there for attaching the seeds to things passing by. These nasty little puffballs also seem to cause a lot of allergies out here!

Sycamore Puffballs

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 This is mold from some organic strawberries that got left in the refrigerator a bit too long. Interestingly, I noticed that like the Sycamore puffball, it also has spikes. However these spikes look sort of layered on top of the stem. In this case the mold clung well to the strawberries it was decomposing.

Strawberry Mold

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 Ficus Leaf Cells!
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 These are the plant cells of a green leaf of a ficus tree. You can see that the cells are in a somewhat organized cluster. The cells are polygonal in shape because of their rigid cell walls.  It is fun to see them through my high mag foldscope lens!

Ficus Leaf Cells

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 Dried Ficus Leaf Cells
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 Since the vacuoles of the plant cells don’t have any water, the cells are shriveled up. Hurray for 5th grade science!

Dried Ficus Leaf Cells

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 It was fun looking at my hair with my foldscope. Something I noticed is that hair is actually twisted and bundled together into a long beautiful sparkly strand. Funny thing is that my black hair looks reddish brown up close. The foldscope was so easy to put together and use. I will definitely try using it for other things soon. It is a very good tool to supplement my science learning at school.

Yashima Mahajan

Earth

Posts

Strawberry Mold

Ficus Leaf Cells

Dried Ficus Leaf Cells

A Strand of My Hair

Sycamore Puffballs

Strawberry Mold

Ficus Leaf Cells

Dried Ficus Leaf Cells

A Strand of My Hair

Sycamore Puffballs

Strawberry Mold

Ficus Leaf Cells

Dried Ficus Leaf Cells

A Strand of My Hair

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Foldscope Lens Magnification