Nutrition, Cobalt Content and Sustainability of Glycine max in Martian Soil Analog for Colonization - A Three Year Study

I was hoping for criticism and feedback

Overall it's a pretty cool project!

A few things I noticed, with different degrees of nitpickiness:
*When you state values like, "519.8362 ug/mL", I have to wonder if you've really got 7 significant digits of precision?
* Captions for Figs. 3 & 4 describe error bars but none are plotted. The plots are 3D barplots, and error bars might be visually confusing here. Also, the results are grouped by sample number, but there's no obvious reason to directly compare Earth Sample 1 to Mars Sample 1 rather than to Mars Sample 2. The comparison you're really interested in is between all Earth samples and all Mars samples. A box or violin plot with a dot plot overlayed might be a good way to visualize the measurements.
* Be more explicit about your significance and hypothesis testing: maybe make a table of parameters/results for each t-test. Explain how you derived your critical t value (what confidence interval does it represent?) When you tell us that the difference between two treatments is or isn't significant, what confidence interval is attached to the significance? Maybe explain a little what you mean when you say a null hypothesis is valid/invalid, since this can be a tricky point.
* Reclassify Fig. 5 as a table; flip the inequality signs.
* You ran a negative control (distilled water) to make test for false positives from the cobalt assay. None of your results on this assay were positive, though; you're interested in the rate of false negatives. Did you run one of these?
* In the Results, you don't tell me the direction of the difference between treatments in the stem-protein analysis, or give a size of the change in either the stem- or leaf-protein analysis. When you restate these findings in the conclusion, you tell me about the significance of the differences, but not their size or direction.
* Did you gather any other data on viability/other phenotype? (eg, growth rate, max size, survival curve, percent flowering)
*Some footnotes look incomplete
*Your dataset is small enough that it could be included in a table
* Looking at figure 3, I get the impression that there are two discrete kinds of plant, a low-yielding and a high-yielding type, and more MSSM plants became the low-yielding.
* Looking at figure 4, the sample #10, MSSM treatment looks like an outlier. It's interesting one way or the other, but you might want to try excluding that data point and running the test again to see if your result is robust.
* I wonder if you could mechanically promote soil aeration with something like wooden skewers? Fungal mycellia are important for formation of soil from regolith; if you tossed some oyster mushroom culture into some Martian soil beds, would it help soil growth?

Quote: Originally posted by aga

Glycine ?

Quote: Originally posted by aga

A couple of years back i grew some tomatoes in bare rock (just for mechanical stabilisation) using a chemical mix derived from an 'ideal' tomato recipe. The Weight of Cobalt was minimal, trace even. Glycine ? The main Macro component required would be Water. After skimming your pdf i'd suggest that Magnesium is another Macro ingredient required. If a transplant (pardon the pun) of plants from Earth to Mars is ever contemplated, or feasible, we'd have to start at the micro-level with things like algae. Whatever the plan, it'd have to take into consideration the recycling that the 2nd gen plants would do with the remains of the 1st gen plants.

Quote: Originally posted by MrHomeScientist

Congratulations! I just judged our local district science fair, and our area is pretty disappointing. There are no actual chemistry projects in the chemistry category; just the same ones year after year, gotten from googling "chemistry science fair project". Or from Science Buddies. God I hate Science Buddies.