As the planet’s population grows, the pressure on it’s limited resources increases. In order for us to make the most of the future, we need to adopt a healthier approach to living in harmony with our surroundings. Human activity has already changed the landscape and the climate. It may not be long before it reached the point of no return and causes us to have a breakdown in our current way of life.

Perhaps it is now out of the hands of the government and politicians to orchestrate a change. Perhaps it is now time to see who the actual agents of change can be. Those who care about the planet and it’s future. Those who are willing to create a lifestyle that is actually sustainable, eco friendly and replicated easily.

It is the cities that need to come together with their locally run businesses and citizens. They are the people on ground who can make the small changes that will add up to the big changes that are needed by the planet. It would make an interesting science project to find out just what a family of four could contribute to a sustainable living effort. Think of all the ways that small actions could be incorporated into family level activities.

That little plastic straw that comes attached to your juice box may seem so trivial a matter to be up in arms about, till you really listen to what the environmentalists are telling you. More than 500 million straws are used on the planet everyday. That’s enough to circle the Earth two and half times.

The plastic straws take nearly 200 years to decompose completely. That means every plastic straw that was ever manufactured is still in existence on the planet today. What’s worse, the places that recycle plastic are unable to recycle straws. This means the number of straws is constantly increasing.

Since most litter ends up in the ocean, the straws in the ocean are constantly increasing. This affects the marine ecology. Many sea animals and fish are hurt due to plastic straws. Either because it was hard and poked them, or they ate it and died because they couldn’t digest it.

Think about the number of straws that you used today. Would you really require so many if you could use a glass to empty your tetra pack drink into? Or even drink directly from the bottle? It would make an interesting science project to find out just how many plastic straws are used in a household in a month.

For anyone who has seen a 3D movie, and found stuff flying at them and ducked, you need to prep yourself for an even more intense experience with the emerging 4D technology. Researchers at the University of California in San Diego have come up with a pair of 4D glasses which allow the user to be ‘touched’ by the objects that they see on screen.

The glasses were an off shoot of a science project that dealt with mapping out the areas of the brain that were responsible for multi sensory integration. In this case to see what parts of the brain were actively stimulated with sight and touch. The study is published in the journal “Human Brain Mapping”.

For the lay man the fruits of this science experiment have provided a boost to commercial entertainment possibilities. The device can be used in movies, music, games and other virtual reality using videos to provide an enhanced multi sensory effect to the user. So now you won’t just see the spaceship coming your way, you will actually feel it touch you as it passes by. I’m not too sure I want to wear these 4D glasses when I go to see a horror movie.

As more people begin to use drones there is a very definite threat to the privacy of people. It is possible for a drone to record activities of a full neighborhood without the residents being any the wiser. This can be potentially dangerous specially if used with the wrong intention.

Cyber security researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) and Weizmann Institute of Science have some ideas that can help. They have come up with a simple method that allows a person with a laptop and a flickering object to check if a drone is recording a specific target.

The Israeli researchers have come up with a couple of ways to check if your privacy has been invaded. The best part of the science project is that it can be done by anyone. It does not require any sophisticated hacking or cryptographic breaking skills. It uses smart film and a software along with something called an FVP channel.

They have done a couple of successful demos wherein the cyber security researchers were able to positively identify that a neighboring drone was indeed recording the house. This could go a long way in military use as well as for civilians who will now be able to prove that their neighbors violated their privacy.

The horses we see today have hoofs and not toes. However this wasn’t always the case. The early horses that lived 55 million years ago, such as the Hyracotherium were much smaller and had five toes. As the horses evolved and grew in size, it seems that the excess weight at the end of the legs had a big impact on speed. So to grow faster the horses began to reduce the number of toes and eventually came down to a single toe per leg, or the hoof.

The horse genes are still programmed to develop five toes in the womb, but as the fetus develops the remaining four toes tend to disappear before the eventual birth of the foal. It is the middle toe that develops into the hoof for the horse while the others are lost during the process of the fetus’ development. This allows the horses more swiftness and longer strides to help get away from predators. A fact that played heavily into their survival.

Evolution shows evidence of a number of animals changing over the eons to help survive better. That seems to be the primary reason why horses have hoofs now and no more toes. It would make an interesting science project to see what other animals have lost and gained as a result of their evolution for survival.

A beaver is a semi aquatic rodent known for building dams, canals and lodges. There are two primary types of beavers in the natural world, the North American beaver and Eurasian beaver. Their skill at building their homes in water bodies have earned them the title of the best engineers in the wild.

Beavers build dams to provide protection from predators. They use tree branches, stones, mud and more to assemble the dam structure that has a moat like appearance. They are known to provide their own timber for building the dams by gnawing on tree trunks with their powerful teeth and jaws. A feat that is quite a treat to watch when a beaver is busy collecting material to build a dam.

Then they dig canals under water from which they can access the lodges, or actual residence area. These aquatic engineers use the water filled canals as a deterrent for unwanted guests. One of the largest known beaver lodges is found in Alberta, Canada and is over 500 meters in length. However despite it’s size it is not visible from space, as the rumors claim. It can be a good place to visit to write up a science project report.

The average human being is good to go with a night’s sleep of about 8 hours. However there are animals on the planet that need a lot more sleep than that. Five of the sleepiest animals in the world are described here. At number five is the North American Opossum which needs to sleep for about 18 hours a day.

The fourth sleepiest is the Giant Armadillo who needs about 18.1 hours of rest. It is the largest living species of armadillo. It lives in South America, and is found all the way south till Argentina. Third in line is the Brown Bat which needs 19.9 hours of sleep. The little mouse eared bat belonging to the species Myotis is extremely common in North America.

At number two we have the sloth who sleeps for 20 hours a day. This arboreal mammal is noted for it’s slowness of movement and has inspired enough stories and sayings. Usually found in Central and South America, the sloth is often hanging upside down in the trees of the tropical rainforests.

Taking the number one position on our countdown is the Koala. A koala bear can sleep from 20 to 22 hours in a day. It is an arboreal herbivorous marsupial native to Australia. It would make an interesting science project to list how different animals sleeping habits differ in the wild as compared to in captivity.

If you have ever seen a long line of ants each following the other, you may have wondered about their discipline. After all they are mere insects but they seem to do better than a drill squad when it comes to following each other down the path. The reason that they can literally step into the ant before them’s footstep is to do with a set of chemicals called Pheromones.

Pheromones are the secret to successful communication in an ant hill and outside it. There are nearly 20 different pheromones that come together in different combinations to enable successful communication of messages such as location of food, path to a nesting site, presence of a predator, and being able to defend their territory.

Each species of ant may use a different version of this pheromone language. These chemicals are secreted from the body of the ant in the manner that will be understood by the other ants. These chemical “words” help the ants survive and thrive. That’s why the ants will always toe the line of pheromone trails when they walk outside the ant hill. Now if only there was an equally effective way for human beings to communicate, maybe a science project is required to come up with a universally understood language.

The waste plastic that is thrown into the ocean off the shores of Australia is literally suffocating the natural coral reefs around the island continent. The Asia Pacific coral reefs are said to be inundated with a staggering figure of 11 billion plastic objects. Most of these plastic objects tend to have disease causing bacteria within.

Research has reveled that reefs with plastic waste are twenty times more likely to have diseased corals growing within them. Joleah Lamb, a marine biologist at Cornell University, says that plastic has pits and pores making it the perfect vessel for microbes to colonize. As these microbes get transferred from the plastic to the coral reef, they can cause a lot of damage.

Lamb’s team has been studying coral reefs since 2011 and has been to the underwater location of 159 reefs since that time. They have covered the areas from Thailand, to Indonesia and further out to Australia. There findings have shown that the more plastic that is found around a coral reef, the more likely it is to find diseased coral reefs.

The team projects that by 2025 there will be 40% increase in the amount of plastic found in the coral reefs around the world. This will lead to a major portion of reefs dying, which will then throw the ocean’s ecosystem out of sync. This is an alarming science project prediction.

There’s a lot about our own planet’s biological resources that we are still striving to understand. The virus being the most common biological entity about which not much is known. We still haven’t managed to figure out how to stop the common cold virus from taking root in the human body each season.

Viruses were discovered nearly a century ago and the study of virology has come a far way since then. Yet the researchers at the Portland State University are concerned about the fact that despite a number of viruses being found in space, there has been no consolidated effort to study them.

The branch of astrovirology intrigues Ken Stedman, a biology professor, who teaches at PSU’s College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. As per him, there are more viruses present on Earth than any other cellular organisms. Researchers are just about trying to make sense of them. Space has a lot more viruses to study.

Stedman feels that it is important to study the effect that space has on Earth bound viruses, as well as to check what happens when the viruses found in space are brought down to the planet. He believes this is a scientific study that could provide invaluable information for future generations.