[Intro Music]
Hi scientist! Evelyn from the California Science Center,
here to help you feel a little less stuck at home.
Now behind me, we have an amazing air and space thing. It is our orbiter, Endeavour.
I love it. It's great! And every time I'm in here,
I think about all the amazing experiments that have been sent up into space
to help us understand how things grow or how things function when you're up in space.
Now that made me think of something completely different,
and I decided to do an experiment a couple weeks ago.
Let me show you how that went. Ready?
Here's something you can try at home.
You will need some water, a plastic bottle and some condiment packets.
Now when you feel these condiment packets, sometimes you'll feel a little pressure pushing back on you.
That's because they have a little pocket of air on the inside.
Now you are trying to find a condiment packet that is going to float in water.
Uhh, that one's doing okay.
See if it still floats. Nope, sink all the way t-
Let's try this one. All right, this one might work.
And at home, if you have many types of these, you can try all of them or you can try some of them.
Now earlier, I did find a pretty good ketchup packet to float.
You can see I filled my water – there's a little bit of space at the top.
Now the trick with this is figuring out how much pressure to apply and where to apply the pressure
to control, and be able to control where your ketchup packet goes.
So I can try pressing at the bottom.
Awesome! Let me bring that back up. Do you see how that looks?
So with the pressure that I am applying on the bottle,
actually applies some pressure on the packet
and then we control where it goes.
See if you can get yours at home, to stay right in the middle.
Now that experiment was pretty fun
and then it made me think about something else,
which actually has to do with the space shuttles.
And that is that a couple years ago, they decided – and by they, of course I mean scientists –
decided to send up jellies. Yeah jellies – moon jellies,
to figure out how they grow in space and if growing in space would affect them any differently.
Now it was really cool and we found out that it does have an effect to grow in space versus growing on Earth.
But here at the Science Center we have some moon jellies
and actually let's go find my friend Morgan, she can tell us a little bit.
Welcome to the Curator's Lab. Come on in.
So scientists, here today we have a couple of different stages of the jellyfish life cycle.
You might see things on the plates here,
if you look really closely you might see little animals that kind of look like sea anemones.
And that's actually the second stage in a jellyfish life cycle – they're called polyps.
The polyps can clone themselves and they can multiply themselves hundreds of hundreds of times.
And then they move over into this next little stage here.
And that is called the ephyra stage, so at that point they kind of look like tiny little petals of a flower,
which is kind of cool and then they grow up into a tiny little jellyfish called a Medusa.
So when the Medusa grow a bit bigger, I actually moved them into this bottom space here
and you can see if they've grown already in just a few months.
If you look closely at each of the Medusa, you might be able to see they have four little things
that look like circles, or horseshoes.
And they kind of looked like an orangish color right now. That's actually their stomachs.
So the reason they are orange or a pinkish color is because of this stuff here.
So this is jellyfish food. They're called brine shrimp.
And it's hard to see, but in here there's actually hundreds and hundreds of tiny, little shrimp.
And I feed them to our jellyfish.
If you're looking, um, around, as they move in the water
some of that is their movement from the water itself propelling them around,
but also jellyfish are able to...be able to tell which way's up and which way's down,
using little structures that are kind of like the little, little hairs in our inner ears.
And those hairs help us tell which way's up and down, help us orient ourselves and similar to the jellyfish.
So it's kind of cool, scientists took jellyfish into space a few years ago.
And they wanted to see how jellyfish grow up in space.
So they took jellyfish that were in the ephyra stage – or tiny little ones like the ephyra –
and they took them into space to see how well they grow up.
And they did grow very well, but when they came back down,
they weren't able to swim as well as you might think, because of the zero-gravity situation where they grew up.
So that's a little bit about our jellyfish here.
All the species – all the jellyfish here are in the same species and they are the moon jelly.
And I hope you learned a little bit, something today about jellyfish.
And I hope you're feeling a little bit less stuck at home! Bye, guys.
[Outro music]
Be sure to visit our website Monday through Friday at 10 a.m. for more Stuck at Home Science activities.
[Outro music with whistling]