Demonstration of veins, arteries and transpiration

Description:

Your veins and arteries carry blood and nutrients around your body. Demonstrate “you are what you eat” with a little help from celery.

Equipment Needed:

Glasses

Celery

Water

Liquid food coloring

The Digital Bits Science Lab Experiment:

Pick a couple of colors of food coloring (hint: green may not work as well, as it’s too close to the color of the celery). Put three drops of the food coloring into your glasses, and fill the glasses halfway with water.

Cut your celery so that, when placed in the glass, you have half of the celery in water, and the other half out of water:

Let the celery sit in the glasses overnight.

The next day, look at your celery. In the picture below, you’ll see two celery sticks cut in half. One stick was soaking in blue water, the other in red. The parts labeled “bottom” were the parts submerged in water overnight. The parts labeled “top” were sticking out above the water overnight.

Notice the food coloring leaking out of the “top” pieces.

What’s happening here? When placed in the water, the celery uses it like it always does – it draws the water up into its “vascular bundle“, the thin lines that are the transport system of a celery stalk. Similar to the way blood flows in our own veins and arteries (as pumped around by our heart), the celery’s vascular bundle uses a process called “transpiration” to move its liquid nutrients.

Our bodies need nutrients and liquids to live, just like a stick of celery. Now, we don’t just sit down in a glass of water; we drink it! But the concept is similar – what we take into our bodies spreads to most every other part of our body. We are what we eat (and drink).

Other articles related to this topic:

• Heat is energy
• Learn colors and color combinations with food coloring
• Food coloring fireworks with oil-water separation
• Duplicating the Greenhouse Effect
• Open your fingers and try to drop something: experiment with the body and its limitations