Bananas Ripening

[McYork]

Doing a project on ripening bananas in or out of brown paper bags. Don't know how to measure how ripe the bananas are. Thinking of using something to exert pressure on the banana. So...at x # of pounds of pressure the skin splits. Any ideas on how to do that? Or better ideas on how to measure the ripeness?

[ScienceIsCool]

Hi McYork

Here's an interesting link that's relevant to you:
[url]www.usc.edu/CSSF/History/2004/Projects/J1621.pdf[/url]

The person uses a multimeter to measure resistance in a banana. You can probably buy a multimeter from $10 upwards (see [url]http://www.techbuys.net/test---measurement-digital-multimeters.html)[/url]. Or maybe borrow one from school.

All the best

[wisteria]

those are interesting sites ScienceIsCool and I know that when a banana is ripe it tends to be soft...

[BroadwayBaby]

You can measure how ripe the banana is by testing the thickness of the skin by seeing how long it will take for a knife to peirce throught the skin. I would suggest making a simple machine to do the peircing because the same amount of pressure needs to be added every time. Search your project idea on [url]www.all-science-fair-projects.com[/url] Hope all goes well!

[BroadwayBaby]

Try this site - [url]http://media.nasaexplores.com/lessons/02-042/5-8_1.pdf[/url] Hope it helps!