Music is known as the universal language. A good tune can cut across borders with the ease of a knife slicing through melted butter. However each human being has a distinctive set of likes and dislikes for their music. While previous music players could play whatever you chose to listen to, a new music player called Prizm is now able to learn your listening habits and personalise your playlist.

The music system can be paired with speakers using optical cables, Bluetooth or aux and then be synced with your preferred music streaming account. What makes the Prizm an even better choice for a music player is the fact that it can identify variables such as if it is night or day, the number of people who are in the room, the taste of music that it usually is expected to play and other interesting details.

Needless to say there can be some rather amusing bloopers when the automation picks a song that it feels you may like. However on the whole the options that Prizm offers are interesting and make good use of the latest algorithms for automatic choices that gadgets are using. This is one science project that you will have a lot of fun exploring.

If I fall ill I am tucked into bed with medication and chicken soup till my temperature turns normal again. Very often I can have my pet dog in the room with me because he is loyal to a fault and will not leave me alone when he knows that I am feeling unwell. I am worried that he will catch my germs and fall ill as well. Is is possible for dogs to  get sick if the owner is ill?

The short answer to this is – no. You can not make your favourite pet unwell even if you have a particularly contagious flu. This is because the viruses that cause human being to catch the flu are adapted to affect the human body. They are species specific and are not likely to decide to mutate and take up residence in your puppy dog. Does this mean that the pet is never going to fall ill with the flu?

Again the answer to that is no. Just as we have viruses that are specific to human beings, there are viruses specific to other species. Dogs can get sick if the canine version of the flu virus hits them. Also there are other bacterial diseases which science studies have proved are not quite as immune to the species divide.

If you find it tough to get rid of stubborn stains on your clothes the new technology from the Facilitation Centre for Industrial Plasma Technologies or FCIPT in Gandhinagar interest you. The division of the Institute for Plasma Research has manufactured a technology which can render cloth stain proof.

The particle powder developed by FCIPT has titanium metal vaporised with plasma to form titanium oxide. When these are mixed with alcohol and sprayed onto the cloth, the nano particles settle in the cloth and form a protective coat. Now if you drop anything on your clothes the only thing you need to do to get rid of the stain is to place it in the sun.

When the ultra violet rays of sunlight react with the titanium oxide in the presence of oxygen from the atmosphere, the molecules forming the stain are broken down. This in turn makes the stain disappear. Senior scientist C Balasubramanian said that one just has to leave the cloth in the sun for two to three hours and the stain disappears. This process is called a self cleaning cloth.

The FCIPT will be entering into an MoU with Man Made Textile Research Association in Surat to implement in-line plasma treatment technology in textile manufacturing. Now this is a science project that everyone who is a sloppy eater will be cheering for.

One of the challenges in the field of robotics is to find new materials that can be both flexible and strong to build new robots out of. There is constant innovation in the field and now engineers at Cornell University have created a hybrid material featuring stiff metal and soft, porous rubber foam that combines the best properties of both. The material can be stiff when required and elastic when needed. It even has self healing properties.

The metal – foam compound is sort of like the human body with skeletons and muscles said Rob Shepherd the engineering professor involved with the project. The idea blends the rigidity and load-bearing capacity of humans with the ability to dramatically alter shape, like an octopus said Shepherd. When you need the rigidity of the skeleton it is available and then it can be dissolved only to be reformed when next needed.

The material’s ability to morph from the solid to elastic states will give engineers a great deal of levy when constructing robots out of it. Imagine a rigid aircraft with wings which can dissolve and become a submarine? The possibilities of using the new material are too many to list. Only time and new science projects will introduce us to the true scope of the new hybrid material.

The concept of inter-vehicular communication to improve road safety is not a new one. Researchers from the Universitat Politècnica de València have come up with a new 5G radio access system for inter vehicular communication. This cutting edge science project is hoping to make road accidents a thing of the past as they improve the communication between vehicles to ensure that they don’t bump into each other on the go.

The project is a continuation of the METIS project and is internationally funded by the European Commission under Horizon2020. José F. Montserrat, project researcher says that the main novelty of the system is that is allows the continual adjustment of waveforms in such a way that vehicles can communicate with each other, thereby overcoming the hurdle of not having a set station for communication.

The eventual goals of the science project include optimised inter vehicular communication contributing to road safety and lower accident rates. It is just one example of the used of the 5G technology. The hardware consists of three FRGA programmable cards and four antennas. The combination of which will allow the integration of different wave forms into conventional mobile communication systems. A virtual demo on the streets of Madrid is already available.

The Bubble Nebula or NGC 7653 was first photographed by the new NASA/ ESA Hubble Space Telescope. What looks like a huge cosmic soap bubble is actually a cloud of gas and dust illuminated by the brilliant star within it. The extremely striking image is one that has made it to the Hubble Hall of Fame. It has also been chosen as the image for the celebration of Hubble Space Telescope’s 26th year in space!

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched into orbit on 24 April 1990 aboard the space shuttle Discovery.  Each year to commemorate the anniversary a spectacular image taken from the telescope is picked out and displayed to the world as it gains its spot in the hall of fame. The astronomical objects that are pictured here are truly out of this world!

The Bubble Nebula is an emission nebula located 11,000 light-years away from Earth. It is part of the constellation Cassiopeia which was initially discovered in 1787 by  William Herschel. The image is actually a mosaic of four different pictures put together to show us the huge nebula in one image. The bubble’s shell is likely to be caused by stellar winds theorize researchers. Lot more to study in this science project.

The existence of a true ninth planet of the Solar System was proposed by astrophysicists at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. It was based on the observation of a possible ice giant which seemed to show up on the wide field infra-red Survey Explorer undertaken by NASA.

Astrophysicists at the University of Bern have created a model of the possible planet in the outer solar system. The celestial body is likely to be of a radius 3.7 times that of Earth. With a temperature of 226 degrees Celsius, it is likely to have an envelope of helium and hydrogen.

Planet 9 is likely to be a smaller version of Neptune or Uranus. It would have also formed 4.6 billion years ago along with the other planets that evolved in the solar system as per the model projections. The study now gives physical properties to what was earlier just a simple point mass.

While more science projects  from the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope in the future will be able to give us a better idea of just what this Planet 9 is like or if it exists at all, it is interesting to note what educated guesses the astrophysicists have taken at this point of time.

For fans of the movie series Star Wars the world of Tatoonie is nothing new. It is the home planet of Anakin Skywalker, the primary protagonist of the story. A harsh desert world orbiting twin suns in the galaxy’s Outer Rim, Tatooine is a lawless place ruled by Hutt gangsters. It was clearly science fiction because how could a planet be orbiting two suns? It does not compute! Or does it?!

Apparently Astronomers have found out that 680 light-years from Earth lies a planet orbiting three stars. Yes you  read it correctly – three stars! Initially the guys at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics thought that it was a single star, but changed their observation to a binary star system. And now they have confirmed that it is infact a star going around an orbit of the binary star system.

Add to this magnificent phenomenon a planet the size of Jupiter in our solar system, and you have an actual possible Tatoonie on your hands. The celestial bodies are part of the KELT system and it took the observers roughly about thirty years of close scientific observations to understand that KELT B and KELT C were actually two different stars situated really close to each other.

There is a ton of video footage taken at each holiday. These videos may not all be the most interesting of times, but to sift through them and create a video that highlights the best of your trip and holiday can be quite a time consuming job. Now the bright sparks at the Georgia Institute of Technology have made this job a whole lot simpler for you.

They have come up with a novel software program that allows you to automatically sort and edit untouched video footage into the best clips of the material available. Now you don’t have to physically spend hours doing the editing manually, this software does it for you and creates a clip with all the highlights of your holiday.

The algorithm developed by students Daniel Castro and Vinay Bettadapura analyzes the video for images with ideal artistic properties. The scenes that qualify make it to the final version while those which fail simply don’t make the cut. A two week vacation with 24.5 hours of footage was converted quite efficiently into a highlight reel of under a minute. How’s that for cutting things fine?

Naturally this science project will need some improvement and the algorithm will have to make more decisions to make an actual workable home video, but its off to a pretty good start.

The Smartphone is literally the new tool to end all tools. It is present everywhere and is used for just about every possible reason. The little electronic device allows you to get answers to questions you don’t know from search engines, listen to music you like, speak with people you wish to, and play all the games that you could possibly want to.

That means that the smartphone is an inevitable part of your life and stores a lot of personal data. Unfortunately when you decide to use free apps on your smartphone you begin to risk this data. There are plenty of apps that seem to be free and work well, but are in fact leaking out information to their programmers.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology found that most free apps have advertisers that allow them to keep the app free. Unfortunately these advertisement programs use the data on the phone to give you personalized ads. This means that they can predict if you are male or female, what you age demographic is, which part of the country you are in, whether you are married and even what your political inclination is.

Now this information is passed on to the ad generating software and can be tapped into by any hacker worth his salt! Isn’t this diagnosis of the science project conducted really scary?!