There is a ton of video footage taken at each holiday. These videos may not all be the most interesting of times, but to sift through them and create a video that highlights the best of your trip and holiday can be quite a time consuming job. Now the bright sparks at the Georgia Institute of Technology have made this job a whole lot simpler for you.

They have come up with a novel software program that allows you to automatically sort and edit untouched video footage into the best clips of the material available. Now you don’t have to physically spend hours doing the editing manually, this software does it for you and creates a clip with all the highlights of your holiday.

The algorithm developed by students Daniel Castro and Vinay Bettadapura analyzes the video for images with ideal artistic properties. The scenes that qualify make it to the final version while those which fail simply don’t make the cut. A two week vacation with 24.5 hours of footage was converted quite efficiently into a highlight reel of under a minute. How’s that for cutting things fine?

Naturally this science project will need some improvement and the algorithm will have to make more decisions to make an actual workable home video, but its off to a pretty good start.

The Smartphone is literally the new tool to end all tools. It is present everywhere and is used for just about every possible reason. The little electronic device allows you to get answers to questions you don’t know from search engines, listen to music you like, speak with people you wish to, and play all the games that you could possibly want to.

That means that the smartphone is an inevitable part of your life and stores a lot of personal data. Unfortunately when you decide to use free apps on your smartphone you begin to risk this data. There are plenty of apps that seem to be free and work well, but are in fact leaking out information to their programmers.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology found that most free apps have advertisers that allow them to keep the app free. Unfortunately these advertisement programs use the data on the phone to give you personalized ads. This means that they can predict if you are male or female, what you age demographic is, which part of the country you are in, whether you are married and even what your political inclination is.

Now this information is passed on to the ad generating software and can be tapped into by any hacker worth his salt! Isn’t this diagnosis of the science project conducted really scary?!

In an emergency there is a natural tendency for human beings to panic. This is where having a robot emergency guide could come in useful. However the researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology conducted a study to check if people may become a bit over dependant on a robotic guide and not use their own brain. This was the first research project ever conducted in robot – human trust.

As part of the science project 42 volunteers were guided by a brightly lit robot with the words Emergency Guide Robot printed on it to a conference room. Here they were asked to take a survey and complete some tasks, they were not informed about the true test. In some cases the robot which was actually being controlled by a human researchers made them walk around in circles before actually entering the conference room.

In some cases the robot simply stopped moving and the researchers informed the volunteer that the robot had broken down. They fixed it and have them follow the robot again. One incident involved the robot leading them into a hallway filled with artificial smoke and setting off an alarm. The robot then guided the volunteer to an exit deeper into the building rather than outside it.

What was interesting to note in the science project was the fact that despite the robot repeatedly being shown as unreliable, the human beings were more than willing to follow it around and even trust it with their lives. This is not the ideal situation to be in. Human beings need to trust themselves more than a faulty robot which has already let them down a couple of times.

In October 2014 comet C/2013 A1 also called Siding Spring came up close and personal as it crossed the planet Mars. NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution spacecraft (MAVEN) also entered orbit around the planet a few weeks before this fly past. While most instruments on the MAVEN were switched off during the event so as to protect the sensitive equipment, the magnetometer was left running.

Afterwards it was observed that the comet’s powerful magnetic field temporarily merged with, and overwhelmed, the planet’s weak field. Simply speaking the charged particles from the comet’s tail entered the atmosphere of Mars and charged it giving rise to storms. This is incredible given the fact that the two bodies were separated by 140,000 kilometers even at the closest point of the flypast.

Jared Espley, a MAVEN science team member at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland said that the main action took place during the comet’s closest approach, but the planet’s magnetosphere began to feel some effects as soon as it entered the outer edge of the comet’s coma.

Think of this science project as studying a curtain which gets ruffled when a speeding wind flows past the door. This state of affairs lasted for a while before Mars was gradually saw its atmosphere come back to normal.

Alternative fuels are a huge buzz word today as we race towards depleting our stockpiles of fossil fuels. Solar, wind and water power have been harnessed with varying degrees of success by different technologies that researchers have come up with. Now its the time of the ocean to prove that its more than just the largest feature of planet Earth.

Japanese scientists have come up with turbines that are powered by ocean currents in a modified hydroelectricity project. Their green energy comes straight from the bed of the ocean where they have placed a submerged marine turbine to harness the energy of the Kuroshio Current.

Researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology have designed this science project which involves a three blade turbine with a float, a counter weight and a nacelle to house electricity generating components. Testing of the science project has revealed that the turbine is both robust and stable.

The expected output of the alternative power source is likely to reach 1 GW which is the same as a single nuclear reactor. That is the capacity to power close to 400,000 homes. Think it is time to say goodbye to the impending world wide energy crisis when these babies go into mass production!