Fossil fuels are limited. They are also not considered environmentally friendly. However since they were the most popular type of fuel in the day most automobiles and vehicles run on fossil fuel. If they wish to continue running after the fossil fuels are exhausted, they will definitely have to switch their diet…perhaps to corn!

More precisely to the hydrogen that is generated by the plant waste in a “bioreactor”! Shell Oil funded a study which showed that it was possible to convert 100% of the sugar in corn stalks, cobs and husks leftover in a harvest field into hydrogen gas.

The process used the corn stover to create hydrogen with minimal carbon dioxide emissions as well. And hydrogen gas is one of the greener and cleaner alternatives to petrol. We already have a number of vehicles running on gas in the country, now imagine being able to power them with farm waste!

Whichever way you look at it, pure hydrogen gas created from corn waste is an amazing idea for both energy generation and keeping the environment clean. Perhaps its time to test this science project on a larger scale to see if it truly will be commercially viable.

Smart Phones have become the hand held computers that everyone uses non stop these days to access the information highway. There’s just one draw back. The more Apps you use, the more multi tasking you do, the fast your phone battery gets drained. Recharging is then a forced break in your multi fold activities.

Now imagine that you could recharge your phone battery in just about a minute? Would you buy that device or what!!! Stanford researchers have been working on an inexpensive aluminum battery which could do just that. What’s more the new aluminum batter is supposed to be safer than the alkaline and lithium-ion batteries in use today which do have the nasty habit of occasionally going up in flames.

The aluminum ion battery that they are working on has a lower flammability and higher power storage capacity than batteries currently available in the market. And the secret ingredient is allegedly graphite, which allows the scientsist to give the battery these advantages.

While the new battery is no where near ready to enter the market place in the current date, it will be a sure fire success with all smart phone owners who wish to recharge their mobile phones in under a minute! Here’s wishing this science project a speedy success, after all I own a smart phone too!

The recent Germanwings air crash shocked the aviation community and the world at large. The fact that a pilot could willfully decide to cause an air crash and kill everyone on board was terrifying. What if the next plane you boarded you didn’t have to wait for a terrorist, but simply count on the pilot to crash it?

The solution is a concept that scientists have been working on for a while now – remotely operated planes that fly without pilots. With new artificial intelligence technology taking on a life of its own, it was just a matter of time before someone tried to fly a plane using AI.

At Nasa’s Ames research center, the R&D funds have increased as companies are now willing to find a solution to the pilot problem. The Pentagon already has cutting edge technology that allows it to assist pilots during combat missions. While they have not got rid of the pilot in fighter jets, there are already UAVs on the make in the skies.

Drone and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles are the kernel of the technology which will make it one day possible to construct a science project that allows air crafts to fly without human pilots.

The power requirements on Earth are only going to grow more as the population continues to explode all over the globe. The resources on Earth are not going to be enough to generate the power required in a very short time into the future. In order to meet the power needs of humans the Chinese have decided to harness solar power.

So what’s new about using Solar Power you ask? When the Chinese decide to generate this solar power in outer space, it does seem unique. The Chinese government is planning to put up a solar power station which will be bigger than the International Space Station in orbit at 36,000 kms above the ground by 2050.

The space based power station will be able to harness the sun’s power nearly all the time, and will generate ten times the electricity that any Earth based solar panel will be able to. Considering that China is the world’s top carbon polluter and largest consumer of electricity, it would make economic sense for them to be able to generate their own power. With the help of this particular science project China will be not only able to meet its own power needs, but also supply surplus power to anyone else on Earth who needs it.

What do you do when you live near the night club locality of Hamburg and wake up each morning to a stench of urine left behind when drunk revelers pissed on the walls in your street? You put up signs, place fines and when all else fails you teach your walls to fight back.

Now while the walls do not actually grown an arm and punch the drunk in the face, they do indeed give him a start. Walls have been coated with a super hydro phobic paint coating which makes the urine bounce right back off the wall onto the feet of the drunk.

Needless to say the action has been warned of with signs that read, “Do not pee here. We pee back.” The simple but effective campaign was made possible by a product that goes by the name Ultra Ever Dry commercially. Developed by a US based company called Resource Energy Group, the manufacturers and inventors would never have guessed in a million years the product being used as a pee deterrent.

Just goes to show you never know how your science project may end up helping the world. This sure was an unexpected use of a product designed with some other purpose in mind altogether.

Did you ever wonder if someone truly loved you, or if they were faking it? Love has been an emotion difficult to prove even though poets and lovers down the years have spent millennia trying to do so. Enter modern technology and now you really may have a way to prove that you are in love.

Apparently the cocktail of chemicals that are present in your brain can tell researchers just how love affects you when studied under an MRI scanner. At the University of Science and Technology of China Professor Xiaochu Zhang has conducted a study which claims to be the first provider of evidence of love related alterations in the under lying architecture of the brain.

The results of this scientific study have shed fresh light on the mechanism of romantic love. All emotions can be seen affecting the brain. The subjects were shown images of their partners while hooked up to scanners to test for changes in the brain brought out by romantic love. The changes in brain activity, blood flow and other parameters were earmarked to study the difference in romantic feelings and not so romantic feelings of individuals towards the images shown.

One of the main problems with tall skyscrapers in the neighborhood is that you get little or no sun on the streets when you are on the ground near them. Now an international architecture firm, NBBJ, has come up with a concept that has the skyscraper redirecting the sun’s light to the street.

The design director at NBBJ, Christian Coop said that it was about finding a way in which we can have the tall buildings we need without losing natural light on areas below. British cities have been especially concerned with towers that block out sunlight with more than 230 towers in London itself.

The new design which was recently unveiled involves twin towers curved and angled to minimize any shadow. The architects who worked on the design used an algorithm based on the angles that the sun shone each day over a period of a year. This data was then used to build the most optimal design for a towering structure.

The skyscrapers that are part of this science project are also going to diffuse light to areas below rather than melt the cars on the road unlike the last disaster nicknamed “Walkie Scorchie” where in 2013 the building’s reflected light and heat caused several accidental meltdowns.

Have you ever wished that you had a different eye color? Maybe your brown eyes don’t hold the same appeal that blue eyes do? Well a new 20 second laser procedure may be all that you need to help that wish come true.

Stroma Medical, a company from California, has come up with a new laser surgery for the eyes which removes melanin from the anterior layers of the iris. As melanin is the pigment that is responsible for the brown color when it is removed surgically, the eyes turn blue. This is a permanent and irreversible procedure.

The surgery is yet to be tested in the United States but more than a dozen patients in Mexico and Costa Rica have undergone the procedure. They have deemed it to be safe, but it will still be a while before the company gets all the health approvals in the United States.

Incidentally, the surgery which is going to cost $5000 only disrupts the pigment and the body will remove it naturally. The procedure may be short but for the blue eye to appear it will take several weeks after the surgery. Wonder how useful this science project will be?

The life pulse associated with the constant beating of the heart has long been considered an excellent sign to check for the living. However the Australian scientists have come up with a bionic heart at the Queensland University of Technology which does not pulse. The bionic heart which pumps blood is going to be good for ten years as per the researchers.

Named the BiVACOR this artificial heart has a small bladed disc which spins at two thousand revolutions a minute to pump blood along the body’s arteries and veins. The magnetic levitation technology it uses allows it to be saved from the regular wear and tear that other artificial hearts as none of the key components are touching each other. This increases its long life.

The experimental procedure of replacing a sheep’s heart with the device has shown the idea is a viable one and now the researchers are working on making a more robust prototype for human trials. The actual results of this science project will take another three to five years in becoming visible. A crowd funding campaign has been started to get the five million dollars needed for the development and trial of the bionic heart.

Meditation has been often used as a tool to beat stressful living. However till now there has been no documented evidence that it could actually keep your brain from aging. The researchers at the University of California – Los Angeles had already established in a previous study that people who meditate have less age-related atrophy in the brain’s white matter.

Now this group of researchers has also found out in a new study that meditation appeared to help preserve the brain’s gray matter. It is the grey matter which is the tissue that contains neurons, or brain cells.  When the researchers studied 50 people who had meditated for years and compared them with 50 others who did not meditate they found that while there was loss in grey matter in both groups, those who meditated had lost lost as much as those who did not meditate.

Dr. Florian Kurth, a co-author of the study and postdoctoral fellow at the UCLA Brain Mapping Center, was surprised at the magnitude of the difference shown by the science experiment. Meditation seems like a great way to enhance your cerebral health as Kurth found that large parts of the gray matter in the brains of those who meditated seemed to be better preserved.