Category Archives: RCD

The Repeating Crumley-ONS Project: Next Steps

Slightly over a month ago, I came across the Winnower and began a project in open notebook science. The concept was to upload notes from my notebook to the Winnower, archive the notes, and get DOI’s for each post. Then I would write 2 papers: one to summarize the experiment and the other to theorize a complete publication system that would incentive open documentation of real-time research (open notebook science). I chose the Repeating Crumley experiment for this experiment in ONS, and you can read about the reasoning here.

Well I’m happy to say that I’ve completed Steps 1, 2, and 3! I’ve posted every notebook entry in the RC series (there’s a physics pun there somewhere) to the Winnower and received DOI’s for almost every post. A few posts didn’t translate, at all, on the platform. They are uploaded, but I didn’t bother with the DOI. Regardless, you can go on any of my Winnower posts and get a DOI (or click through to my notebook),  or look through the RC entries and click the DOI to get to the Winnower archive of that post.

One cool side effect of this project was that a Twitter friend noticed a post that had embedded .gifs and I think I am now credited with being the first to publish a scientific paper with embedded .gif’s.

Now it’s time to write the paper based on all this research. I got the process started a couple years ago with a Google Doc about the project. I think I never followed through, because I didn’t value the traditional publication process. I think open science and peer review publication are on a course to merge and the incentives for ONS will shift, but this is a topic for another time.

Anyway, here is the previous write-up which I’ll work on, merge with some info from my dissertation, and to which add some new thoughts.

This part may take some time…

RCD: Day 36

This will be the final data point for this experiment. Looks like seeds don’t grow in 99% D2O as Lewis reported, but Crumley argued against.

RCD: Day 28

Still nothing growing and the old sample that had one sprout stopped growing as well, which leads me to believe it started growing a long time ago, possibly while still in the package and not in D2O, and I just never noticed.

RCD: Day 22

It should be noted that the annual spring cooling system maintenance is occurring as I post this. That means that the lab is excurciatingly warm right now and this may negatively impact the seed growth (which shouldn’t happen anyways).

RCD: Day 14

The sample that is much older than the rest still has the one seed sprouting, and it looks like it sprouted a little more than last week. Otherwise there is still no sprouting in any of the other samples.

RCD: Day 7

Some notes:

  • Sorry for the poor picture quality. I’ll have to figure out something better.
  • I studied every sample and there is exactly one sprout and it is in the sample that has been in D2O for over a month. This is due to one of two reasons: 1) It sprouted before addition to D2O, or 2) there is significant H-D exchange in this sample and the seed eventually sprouted. I’m guessing it is a fluke since there are no other sprouts.

RC7: D2O Only Setup and Day 0 pics

The setup for this experiment was rather simple:

  • Opened 6 analyslides (see Experiments Products page above)
  • poured at least 30 seeds into each analyslide
  • added 6mL of D2O
  • closed chambers and sealed with corning vacuum grease

I’m going to refer to this experiment as RCD from now on both in titles and in the categories on the side. This will be the second to last Repeating Crumley Experiment I do, for thoroughness sake. The final experiment will be my attempt to do a few samples on moist pads to show that the seeds grew because of phenomenon other than D2O. How I plan to achieve this is another story. Preplan? Preplan…

Now on to the pics:

Since the camera setup for the analyslides will be used for a different experiment (coming soon) I’ll just be taking pictures of the seeds as a lump group (but I’ll have to take better ones than this batch). I’ll also do this every 7 days, but I’ll check more frequently than that in case there is some random sprouting.

Also it is worth noting that one of the samples is actually a sample from the last DDW experiment. It was not recorded for data because D2O had nothing to do with purified regular water, but I used it as a control. That was over a month ago and there are still no sprouts.