Nicole enjoys swimming competitively and playing basketball and volleyball. She also is involved in martial arts and dance. She would like to become a pediatrician someday. "I enjoy kids and would love to take care of children that are ill," says Nicole.
Dr. John Prince is Nicole's science teacher and mentor.
While studying photosynthesis and its effects on plants, the girls designed a project to try to improve the efficiency of plants in photosynthesis. The purpose of their project was to determine how different wavelengths of light—extremely-low-frequency electromagnetic field (EMF), strobe light, and flashlight—affect the opening and closing of stomata. Stomata are epidermal openings in plants through which they emit water vapor and through which carbon dioxide and oxygen are exchanged. They hypothesized that the stomata would open wider when exposed to darker lights (green/blue) than they do when exposed to lighter lights (yellow/white). Their second hypothesis was that stomata would not open as wide when exposed to EMF.
The girls took tradescantia plant cuttings from outside their school and rooted them indoors. They monitored plant growth by measuring ambient temperature and relative humidity of the environment twice a day, and they set up a television microscope with a visible light source to record all stomata movement on videotape. The girls exposed the stomata to white light (control) and to combinations of the other types of light. Their results supported their first hypothesis: that exposure to dark lights (blue and green) would cause the stomata to open wide and that in the presence of EMF and the colored lights, the stomata would open even wider. The girls determined that the next step for their research would be to test whether the widening of the stomata would have a negative or a positive effect on the long-term growth of the plant.
