Whenever we speak of plastics there is the addendum of it being man made. Most science projects that involve making materials out of different kinds of plastics use artificial processes, so it is interesting to note that natural plastic does exist in space.

The Cassini space craft which NASA is using to study Titan, one of the planet Saturn’s moons, has discovered propylene in the lower atmosphere. Propylene is a chemical which is found on Earth in food grade storage containers, car bumpers and other cosmetic products. However on Earth it is mostly a man made plastic molecule.

The space craft’s Composite Infrared Spectrometer or CIRS was used to measure the infrared light, akin to heat radiation, emitted from Saturn and its moons. CIRS used the thermal fingerprints of different chemicals to isolate and identify the composition of the lower atmosphere. Propylene is the first molecule that was discovered on Titan using this process.

Earlier Voyager had detected hydrocarbons on Titan in a flypast. Researchers hope to find out even more about Titan using both space based and on ground instruments. The study of Titan is an ongoing science project which should reveal a lot more as time goes by.

Ozone is a greenhouse gas and can cause conditions similar to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So it is a concern to know that airline flights across the globe are releasing ozone into the atmosphere. To determine which flights were releasing the most ozone was the objective of the science project taken on by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The MIT team used a global chemistry-transport model to check which areas of the globe were most likely to generate the most ozone. The study showed that the area over the Pacific was the most sensitive to ozone creation and that the flights that were taking off from Australia and New Zealand were the ones that were generating the most of this green house gas.

The study estimated that 1 kg of aircraft emissions, specifically oxides of nitrogen (NO_x) such as nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide, will result in an extra 15 kg of ozone being produced in a year in the region. This is three times higher than the production in North America and five times higher than the figures for Europe.

The researchers also found that there was 40 percent more production of NO_x in the month of October as compared to the month of April. While there is no immediate manner in which this production can be curbed, this scientific experiment has shown up a potential danger to the environment in the Pacific region.

Any Star Trek fan worth his salt will tell you that instant video communication is the only way to go. In a step to make this science fiction tool a reality NASA has launched a new laser communication system in its latest lunar mission. LADEE or Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, carried with it a new technology called LLCD or Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration.

This two way laser communication technology may one day be able to support the kind of 3D videos that were common place in the old sci-fi series. It has been developed by MIT or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at its Lincoln Laboratory. Communications in space began with Radio Frequency when NASA first moved into space and now they have moved up to laser technology with LLCD.

This is likely to transfer six times as much data with a 25% decrease in energy and a faster return time. All in all this science project seems to have no drawbacks, except the fact that it has never been tested in outer space before. Hopefully with the LADEE using this technology it will no longer be an unproven maverick but something viable that all future missions can use.

NASA has admitted that while Curiosity has been a well received science experiment, the rover in effect does not have a brain of its own. In fact the instructions passed to it from the mission control established on Earth take forty minutes to get to it. In order to overcome this drawback future rovers will be smarter in design.

Now if Curiosity meets a stone en route it will take a photograph and send it back to the handler sitting on Earth, who will then instruct it on how to proceed. In an updated version of the space rover it will be able to ascertain what the rock it sees is using comparative date and then decide on its own if it needs to be further investigated or not.

The micro management that takes place in the case of the Mars Rover Curiosity will be highly limited in future, more advanced rovers built for new missions says NASA. Unlike how each day’s schedule is uploaded for Curiosity from the mission control center, the future rovers will be able to fix their own agenda based on how and where they are located.

Of course some degree of control will still be maintained over the science projects from Earth. They are even working on over ruling a certain task that the rover might fix for itself on a given day and replace it with something the scientists want done that day. It will be an exciting new world for the rovers of the next mission.

The Earth tends to wobble just a little when it spins on its axis rather like how a toy top wobbles on its axis. This action has been linked to nitrogen fixation in organisms in the ocean by researchers. Scientific teams from the Princeton University and the Swiss Institute of Technology in Zurich have reported that nitrogen fixation pattern was closely matched by the changing orientation of Earth’s axis of rotation, or axial precession.

Data proves that the axial precession occurs approximately every 26,000 years. This in turn leads to an upwelling of deep water in the equatorial Atlantic Ocean at this time that brings nitrogen deficient water to the top. Blue green algae on the surface now converts this into nitrogen rich water which can be used by other biological agents.

This pattern of nitrogen fixation was studied based on data collected over several years and led to the hypothesis that it matched the historical record of axial precession which led to the ocean water upwelling. This allows the Earth to survive severe ecological disturbances as well as balances the nitrogen cycle as per the researchers.

So in a manner of speaking every 26,000 years the Earth acts as a chef to fix nitrogen rich water for its ocean dwelling consumers. Interesting science project to read about.

If you are suspended in the air with your eyes closed and asked to point to the ground, in most cases you will be accurately able to do so. This is because human beings have miniscule crystalline stones in our ear cavities. They float here when we are suspended in the air and sink in when they sense gravity.

This allows us to know what side is up and down based on how the crystalline stones sink into the ear cavities. Plants can also sense gravity and always plant their roots in the direction of the gravitational pull they experience. Given the fact that they do not have ears or crystalline stones in those ears, how do they sense gravity?

This is what botanists at Miami University in Ohio led by John Kiss are trying to figure out. Plant roots have dense, ball like cells at the tip of their roots which are called statoliths. That is Greek for stationary stone. Professor Kiss feels that the statoliths are gravity receptors of the plants.

His idea was supported when they hit upon using a few plants on the international space station to check if the claim was valid. Sure enough with nearly zero gravity on the International Space Station the cells could not figure out which way was down and the roots just tend to float around in the air. Now that’s a science experiment that gives an interesting visual result.

No matter how deep you bury the seed, the little seeding will always grow with its shoot up and roots headed down. Not only that, if you took a bunch of little seedlings and buried them with their shoots in the ground and the roots in the air, they would sense that they were upside down.The seedlings would then take a double U turn to make sure that they were again positioned with the shoot up and root down.

Thomas Andrew Knight of the British Royal Society, was certain that plants could sense gravity and would always send out their roots towards the gravitational pull. This was the hypothesis to be tested nearly 200 years ago by Thomas in a crazy experiment involving spinning plates. He planted some seedlings on a disk and then has a water wheel move the disk at a speed of 150 revolutions per minute for a period of several days.

In such a situation, if you know you basic physics principles, the centrifugal force pushes the gravity outwards. So Thomas felt that the plants would also point their roots to the outside of the spinning disc if they were influenced by gravity. This is precisely what did happen. So now you know thanks to this old science experiment that the reason why plants don’t get confused about up and down is due to gravity.

What do you do if you live in a cold valley which barely ever manages to get any sun from September to March? You build an artificial sun if you live in the Norwegian town of Rjukan! Well, almost, what engineers are trying to do, is to reflect the light of the real sun using three enormous rectangular mirrors into the valley town to give it some sunlight. Talk about mammoth science projects.

The Mirror Project involves 328-square foot large heliostatic mirrors, of the kind that are used in solar projects. They will be placed at the edge of the mountains that surround Rjukan and be controlled by computer. A sensor will monitor the angle of the sun and then tilt the mirrors in accordance to enable the maximum sunlight to be reflected. The sensor itself is to be solar powered.

The reflected sunlight will target the town center, and hopefully convert it into a sunny place to be in. Earlier in the month helicopters were used to move the giant mirrors into position. The first tests of the system are slated to begin in the month of September. The town people are paying a fortune to get the science project organized. Lets hope that the sunny rays that hit the town are worth it for them!

The next generation of super computers will be quantum computers which work on qubits. This would replace the current method of using 0s and 1s in the conventional machines. However the scientists who have been working on this  science project have not yet been able to solve the problem of storage of information in quantum computers.

Physicists at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands have been using carbon nano tubes, which are very small hollow tubes made out of carbon, to aid them in developing this new type of storage. They are attempting to measure, control and store these qubits in the carbon nano tubes.

In order to do so, they used a carbon nano tube that was shaped as a ‘U’ and added two electrons on its surface. The spin of an electron is a type of qubit and they hoped to be able to study its behavior in the carbon nano tube. They generated positive and negative electronic fields into which the nano tube was placed and the behavior of the electrons was observed.

Moving the elctron from one spin state to the next was the equivalent of 0s and 1s in the conventional machines. This is an exciting development and may help the science project researchers in building the next generation of storage device for the super computers of the future.

Access to the internet is taken for granted in most developed countries, however the ground reality is that there are over five billion human beings on Earth who have no access to the internet. Google X Lab has decided to tackle this issue with its science project using translucent balloons as transmitters.

The concept involves hooking up 30 huge helium filled balloons to strong transmitters that can provide 3G speed internet connectivity over an area of 780 square miles. The balloons will be launched into the stratosphere and will receive their signals from stations on the ground situated 60 miles apart.

Users would need to install a basket ball sized receiver in their homes to access the internet via the low flying balloon as it crossed over head. Project Loon, as it is being referred to by the California based company, hopes to have enough balloons in the air to ensure uninterrupted internet connectivity.

This way as each balloon reaches the end of its connectivity limit to a particular place on the ground, another balloon is ready to float into position to take over transmitting the signals. Allowing even remotely located areas to have connections to the world wide web. This is one science project that will have a huge impact.