Dwayne’s Study Zombies

Okay. I was reading about this really kewl GED science thing… OSMOSIS! Doesn’t it sound like one of them Egyptian Pharoah guys… yeah, All behold the Great Pharoah Osmosis! Hail Osmosis! Maybe that’s not exactly what osmosis is… but speaking of Egypt, did you know that the Egyptians used a kind of salt called Natron to dry out dead bodies and make them into MUMMIES!?!? And guess what? That’s some GED science…OSMOSIS!

Osmosis is what happens when water can move through something, called a membrane. You’ve got membranes in your body, on the outside of cells. It’s just a fancy name for a thin layer that water can move through.

Well, when there’s a lot of salt on one side of the membrane, and not a lot of salt on the other, the water moves to the salty side to “balance out” the amount of salt in the water. The water seems to want the two sides of the membrane to be equal…kewl, right? So when you put a bunch of salt on a mummy….the water comes out into the salt, and it gets dried up…which is why the mummy lasts…for eternity! Until it wakes! And comes after you!

Seriously, osmosis is pretty important in science… did you know that’s how plants get water through their roots? If the root is dry and the soil is wet…the water zooms in from the wet side to the dry side.

Just one more thing to know for your GED test.

Here’s a kewl link about mummification: http://www.egyptologyonline.com/mummification.htm

And here’s some more science about osmosis: http://curriculum.calstatela.edu/courses/builders/lessons/less/les4/osmosis.html

This entry was posted on Monday, May 5th, 2008 at 1:45 pm and is filed under Biology, Chemistry, GED Science.
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