Who doesn’t like a well mowed lawn? And who doesn’t hate the effort that getting that perfectly manicured lawn look takes? Well it seems that Honda has decided to answer the horticultural prayers of the green thumbs society. They have come up with an astonishing sensor based lawn mover that works miracles on your patch of green.

This robot that looks astonishing like the Roomba vaccuum cleaner that they came up with is called the Miimo. The robotic lawn mower will trim 2 to 3 mm of grass on your lawn over several sessions during the week. That way you don’t have to sweat it out on the weekends to get the full job done.

Miimo navigates with a combination of controls, timers and sensors while working inside the constraints of a buried boundary wire. That way you are assured that its not going to take off and start trimming the neighbour’s lawn while you are at work.

It works on a lithium ion battery so you will save on the gas costs too. Its got a docking station that allows it to charge its battery which looks similar to the Roomba charging station. This is one science project that will do everything to make sure your patch of green gathers compliments with you bothering too much about it.

Robots are sure moving up in the world these days, they even have their own football world cup. There are a lot of sporting fans cheering at Bristol, England these days, but the teams that they are cheering for do not have any human beings on the playing field.

Twenty six teams of robots have come together to compete in the 16th edition of the FIRA or Federation of International Robotics Association RoboWorld Cup. Just like the human FIFA there are star player and better teams, not to mention major fans.

The players may not be human but they spend a fair amount of time in preparation for their time on the playing field just as their human counterparts from the FIFA do. And besides soccer, which is the main draw other sporting robotic attractions include sprinting, basket ball and weight lifting.

Some robots are built from scratch others are modified after being store bought. And yes there are tributes to the human spirit as well, which can be seen in the robot named Usain Volt, in honor of the Jamaican sprinter Bolt. As you can see that is one well named and rather interesting science project to work on.

Think of a TV switching itself on when you say, “Hi TV, power on”. Or perhaps logging into your Facebook, Twitter and Gtalk accounts by merely staring at the TV screen. Sounds like science fiction to you? It is no longer sci – fi but reality thanks to face recognition software integrated in the next generation of smart TVS.

A smart TV today can help you do a lot more than the old box could do even a decade ago. You can have High Definition movie streaming coming over the screen from a website, or browse through a number of interesting apps, or even sit back and catch up with all the stuff that your friends put up on various social media sites.

The smart TV experience is so close to science fiction that the majority of the masses have yet to realize that its no longer sci-fi but reality. Watching futuristic technology march into the home would make you wonder what’s coming next.

Its just a matter of paying attention to the next round of science projects under developement. Still I suppose we have some time to go before the gadgets in the house become so high tech that they begin resenting the humans that they serve.

It took 7 minutes for curiosity to land on Mars after years of preparation. For those seven minutes the entire world was glued to the success of the landing and this is only the beginning of the project. For the first time scientists have received panoramic snapshots of the scenery on the red planet. Many assumptions will be confirmed or trashed as the lab discovers the planet.

Imagine what it would be like to be part of a team sitting here on Earth and driving research vehicles out there on Mars. It would have seemed liked science fiction even a decade ago, but today its  reality that a scientists is driving a remote controlled car and orbiting the Gale Crater on Mars. That he is able to see snapshots and video of the bedrock layers that form the floor of the crater.

Curiosity Mission Manager Mike Watkins of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California has likened the capabilities and skills required to run the Curiosity project to brain surgery. He would not be far off the mark considering the laborious attention to detail and precision skills that come into play in both operations. It is a science project that many will talk about for days to come.

There are more than 1 billion cars on road in the world today for a population of 7 billion human beings. As per studies conducted by the OECD the automobile density will reach its maximum of 650 to 800 cars per 1,000 inhabitants very soon. So does having so many cars on road demonstrate progress? Or is it  a matter of grave concern?

While public transportation has been making life easy for denizens of cities, it is still the private car which is the primary means of transportation for most suburban families. While concentrated research is being conducted in developing new technologies with clean and green fuel there is no denying the fact that it is the fossil fuel powered car that is the mainstay of personal transportation today.

The population needs to move and the pollution from their cars is not enough of a deterrent to make a switch to a more expensive and less reliable means of green transport. They may consider car pooling but beyond that the environment is not too much of a concern. So yes the private car is indeed a boon to the family and a bane to the environment. And till scientific researchers come up with an alternative that can be mass produced and is cheap enough to compete, the fossil fuel powered car is here to stay.