Ever so often the human mind tries to imagine the scale of the universe it lives in, and ever so often it gets boggled by it. This is why the two short scientific essay type films that the brothers Charles and Ray Eames made way back in 1977 still fascinate the viewers to date.

The short videos are easily available on YouTube if you would like to take a look at the magnitude of the universe in a relative context. It starts with the normal human eye’s view that one would see with the naked eye, then it begins to increase the scope of area by powers of ten. This takes you through city, state, and country pretty quickly. Soon you are looking at the Earth and its place in the solar system, and the milky way galaxy.

Eventually the view expands to the entire known universe. Then it retraces back to normal human eye view, only to begin a reverse journey by shrinking the view by the power of ten. The final stop is coming down to a single atom whose quarks can be observed. That is when this science project helps you realize that the vast regions of outer space and the tiny atom within, are actually pretty similar. Quiet a fascinating concept.

The rising levels of carbon di oxide that are being blamed for climate change were relatively unknown before 1958. In that year American chemist and oceanographer Charles Keeling began the key experiment for measuring the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Keeling set up his observatory at Mauna Loa in Hawaii. He chose the remote location as it was not influenced by any smoky chimneys near by. His initial measurements shows that there was a cyclic dip in the CO2 levels in the summer as plants absorbed more of it from the atmosphere. However by 1961 his measurements showed that levels of CO2 were rising constantly.

He tried to bring his findings to the world, but no one was interested. He even had to struggle for funding. Unfortunately he was not heeded even after managing to scramble for funding to keep the project going for many years. His long running experiment’s data is what helps observers today.

The science project now has over a hundred locations across the globe where CO2 measurements are routinely taken. The Keeling Curve shows us that CO2 concentration was at 315 parts per million by volume in 1958 but has gone up to 401 parts per million by volume in 2014. What’s scary is that its higher than it was in the last eight hundred thousand years, and its still rising.

Evolution in human beings and other species has been well documented. The concept is simple. The traits that are important  for survival are passed on to the next generation. It is credited with developing sharper senses, opposable thumbs and other mental and physical traits that made it easier to survive. The documentation of scientific evidence allows us to proclaim that without evolution, we as a species would definitely have been wiped out.

Considering the fact that all the electronics that we use is also being wiped out, or becoming obsolete as soon as the technology improves, we may be better off if we can program robots to evolve with the new technology. It is with this idea that two research teams in Zurich and Cambridge came up with a science project to build robots that could evolve in successive generations.

The mother robot is essentially a robotic arm which uses small cubes which are baby robots to build new arrangeable patterns of robots that are given a task. The mother is programmed to insert random mutations into the genome of each successive generation. The genetic blueprints of successful robots are the ones that get used next time round while deficient ones are discarded. After about ten generations the robots were performing twice as well as the first generation.

Ever so often the successful treatment of a cancer patient depends on an early and accurate diagnosis. Researchers at the National Institute of Health (NIH), US, have identified a way to check for colon, lung, breast, stomach, and womb cancer with a single blood test. This will surely be a very useful diagnostic tool.

Having identified a striking signature in the DNA of the tumour that occurs in these types of cancers was the first step to developing this tool. They also have found some evidence to support the fact that a similar methylation signature may be present in other types of cancers. This will lead to future blood tests that may be able to identify a wide range of possible cancers in a relatively easy and inexpensive manner.

Dan Kastner from the NIH says that finding the signature was an incredibly arduous and valuable process. He says that the findings would play an important step in developing a test to identify early cancers through a simple blood test. Needless to say that the successful culmination of this science project will make life much easier for health care professionals in terms of successfully diagnosing cancers and getting the right treatment to their patients.

When we think of a Black Hole, one automatically gets the danger sign in the head. However it seems that one need not wave the red flag all the time as they could be useful. A Black Hole could become the ultimate power generator as per Stephen Hawkins.

As per Professor Hawkins a mountain sized black hole could provide enough x-rays and gamma rays to power the entire world’s electricity supply. The single black hole would be able to generate 10 million megawatts of electricity. That is the good part. The not so good part is actually finding a way to harness that power.

Remember we want to tap into the power without unleashing the pull of the black hole on us or our planet. If one tried to place the mountain sized black hole in a power station it would simply get pulled to the centre of the Earth. That is not the ideal location for a power station.

Of course this is assuming that we finally come up with a viable science project that allows us to find small enough black holes and transport them through outer space to us without incident. Lots of strings to be tied up in this project.