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.

As healthcare robots can be quite a good replacement for humans. They can stay with the elderly in their homes, remind them to take their medicines, fetch things for them when required, and alert the hospital in case of an emergency. The only drawback is that robots so far have been, well…robotic.

They show no emotion and can not exactly be companions in a social sense. This is what researchers at the University of Hertfordshire are working on remedying with the Care-O-bot® 3. The robot works in a smart-home environment helping the elderly from becoming isolated and warding off loneliness by offering stimulating activities.

Dr Farshid Amirabdollahian leads the team on a science project called ACCOMPANY (Acceptable Robotics Companions for Ageing Years). The team includes nine partner institutions from across five European countries who have worked together for the last three years on this robotic solution. The project focuses on the ability of the robot to recall and remember experiences it undergoes.

Dr Amirabdollahian said that “This project proved the feasibility of having companion technology, while also highlighting different important aspects such as empathy, emotion, social intelligence as well as ethics and its norm surrounding technology for independent living.” Should the robots seem viable they will become the first formal/informal health care givers across France, the Netherlands and the UK.

A science project undertaken by students at the Rockefeller University sought to map out New York’s subway in a most unusual manner. It was not bothered about the nearly five million people who used the trains, but rather the large number of living beings that were too tiny for the eyes to see.

High school student Anya Dunaif, a participant in Rockefeller’s Summer Science Research Program spent her summer developing the “Pathomap”. She took swabs of benches, turnstiles and other public surfaces that see a number of people passing through.

These were then cultured in petri dishes containing three common antibiotics and the resulting bacteria were studied. The scientific study showed that bacteria from five of the 18 swabs she tested grew in spite of the presence of either ampicillin or kanamycin, and in one case, both. None of the cultured bacteria appeared resistant to the third antibiotic, chloramphenicol.

This science experiment was able to prove that resistance is indeed a major threat to modern medicine. Anya Dunaif wasn’t even sure she would see antibiotic-resistant bacteria, let alone multi-drug resistant bacteria. However that is exactly what happened.

Settling a colony on the Moon or Mars or even traveling out of the solar system has been popular grist for science fiction novels. However there are currently very real reasons that may not make this fantasy a possibility any time in the near future. The most important one being how one grows older in space.

Without the conditions that support normal life on Earth, the long distance travel to another celestial body is likely to accelerate the aging of the human immune system. Scientific researchers at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, found that mice in low gravity conditions experience changes in B lymphocyte production in their bone marrow similar to those observed in elderly mice living in Earth conditions.

This basically means that altered gravity can make you age much faster than was imagined earlier. Naturally there will have to be some drastic improvements in medical care in order to ensure that the set of people out to colonize a new world don’t die on the journey out to the new colony.

It is clear that between the frailty of the human body in outer space and the lack of technology to get us to our closest neighbors is going to be a major detriment to colonizing any planet other than ours at present. This is one science project that is going to take more time to take off.

That we are running short of potable water on Earth is no longer a secret. Giving the way our human population is growing there is a good chance of water shortage becoming the reason for our extinction. Researchers hope that the moon will be able to come to our rescue.

There is close to 1.6 billion tonnes of water ice on the poles of the moon. So like the science fiction novel written by Arthur Clarke, if we can get that water to earth, there will be a major reprieve. An additional incentive for the more commercial parts of the human race is that where there is ice, there is usually fuel.

So perhaps mining on the moon may provide us with more fossil fuels.  Shackleton Energy Company (SEC) from Texas has plans to mine the vast reserves of water ice. SEC will convert it into rocket propellant in the form of hydrogen and oxygen, and then sell it to space partners in low Earth orbit.

This will be at a significantly lower price than fuel brought up from Earth. A science project which would no doubt seem lucrative to the owners of the company. “All interested parties agree that the Moon — one step from Earth — is the essential first toehold for humankind’s diaspora to the stars,” says science writer Richard Corfield.