When Google X first revealed their self driving car it was considered a publicity stunt which would die a natural death. However the autonomous car has managed to drive 2.64 million kilometers since 2009 and yes it is not exactly perfect just yet.

In it’s monthly report Google admits that the car went crashing, albeit extremely slowly, into a bus. It also had to get out of the path of a broom -wielding woman chasing a duck across a road in a wheelchair. Yes that actually did happen.

What’s more the self driving car is learning how to honk like a performing art. Not fuelled with human emotion and passion, but to be polite, considerate, and only honk when it makes driving safer for everyone. It would be an interesting science project to determine just what the “honking algorithm” should have.

There are about 34 prototype vehicles on road now as part of the autonomous car program with Google X. The cars drive about ten to fifteen thousand autonomous miles per week and have manual controls activated for part of their journeys as well.  Most of the driving takes place around Mountain View in California,  Austin (Texas), Phoenix (Arizona), and Kirkland (Washington State).

One of the most painful parts of monitoring blood glucose through traditional glucose monitors is the daily pin prick required. A new type of monitor is now being used in Europe, it’s not yet available in the US, which does away with the daily pin prick. The FreeStyle Libre uses a small sensor which is covered by a water resistant patch the size of a coin.

The sensor is inserted under the skin and remains there for 14 days. After one hour of being implanted in the body it will give glucose readings and monitor trends on a touch screen device that is brought close to the sensor. It is usually applied to the upper arm and the insertion process does not require any specialised training.

The touch screen device can scan the sensor through the clothes and is very unobtrusive. You take less than four seconds to perform the scan and a single ding sound lets you know that the process is over. Now you can read your glucose related data instantly. It’s accuracy is high and can be used for dosing insulin. This is one science project that will really make a difference in the way diabetics health care is handled in the future.

So you want to go to Mars and you know you have to train to live in that hostile terrain. Where do you go to train for that – apparently Utah! Utah’s Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS), run by the Mars Society is giving future Mars visitors an idea of what they will have to face while walking through stands of Ericameria nauseosa and Epehdra viridis.

The Mars Desert Research Station was constructed in 2002 and has been continuously visited by a wide range of researchers, including astrobiologists, soil scientists, journalists, engineers, and geologists. The researchers practice collecting fungi, algae, cyanobacteria, lichens, and vascular plants from the grounds in simulated research. The suits restrict their vision and movement just as it would be on Mars.

At present they may be simply donning spacesuits and play acting about being on Mars but the working conditions on the Red Planet are likely to be rather similar to what these people are doing right now. It’s a matter of getting used to the type of science projects that they will be involved in, if they make it through the program and land up as the first colonisers of Mars.

Pluto may no longer be a part of the nine planets of the Solar System officially, but it is still very much a topic of interest to many researchers and novices. When the spacecraft New Horizons sent back images of Pluto from it’s flypast, a whole new basket of information was revealed about the distant, dwarf planet.

The fact that Pluto is a cold planet is not a surprise to anyone given it’s distance from the sun. What is an interesting fact is that the icy surface of the planet is constantly renewed by a process known as convection. The layer of solid nitrogen ice within Pluto’s distinctive “heart” feature, which is a large plain informally known as Sputnik Planum, was brought out in images from New Horizons.

The ice on the surface is not millions of years old, rather it seems relatively newly formed as per the data the scientists have gathered. This points to some sort of geological activity under the surface for the planet. The soft nitrogen ice is a pliable material for the geological changes to occur. The scientific study of this phenomenon is going to continue for a while before definite reasons can be found for its origin.

Getting robotic arms designed may seem old hat but making them do exactly what they have been programmed to, is not always a cakewalk. Stanford Professor and IEEE Fellow, Oussama Khatib encourages his students to come up with new possibilities using the control theory and the various robotic arms in the lab. These include  the Kuka LWR, the Kuka IIWA, the Barrett WAM, and the Kinova Jaco. For those not aware of the fact, these are huge robotic arms used in the indutries to perform tasks such as assembly, welding, and painting.

The student team has now got to come up with something that needs computer vision and force control. The idea is to get them to make the robotic arm perform a function that has to be predecided and programmed. The students who take Khatib’s class get to come up with more creative and innovative uses of the industrial robotic arms. In most cases the results can be quite unexpected.

Past science projects have included complicated stuff like figuring out the best move in a game of dominos, or staying one step ahead of a moving model space station to prepare for docking, or learning to play a tune on a xylophone by listening to it.