Most smartphones are powered by Lithium ion batteries. These are perfectly safe as long as they are used as per the instructions provided for their care. They will explode, or short circuit as the scientific term goes, under two main conditions. Here are the reasons why the battery could go boom.

The first is a puncture. If the battery gets punctured when the phone is dropped, it could lead to a break in the thin material that segregates the internal cells of the battery. This lead to swelling inside the battery and a potential for an explosion. This process could speed up if bits of metal enter the battery.

The second reason smartphones explode is to do with heat. When a battery is overcharged the excessive current has no place to go. This causes the battery to overheat. Too much heat generated in this manner leads to a thermal highway inside the battery resulting in a breakdown chain reaction.

While no battery in existence today is perfectly safe from these two threats, it must be mentioned that not all batteries are faulty and will explode. Plus scientists are already on to science projects which will provide users with green, clean energy.

A study conducted last year at the Lancaster University by psychologist, Dr David Ellis, was the first scientific study to find a link between a person’s personality and the type of smartphone that they used. Over 500 smartphone owners participated in the study conducted in the United Kingdom.

The study was headed by Dr David Ellis and he said that in this study, they demonstrated for the first time that an individual’s choice of smartphone operating system could provide useful clues when it came to predicting their personality and other individual characteristics.

Heather Shaw from the University of Lincoln who was the co lead on the study said that it was becoming more and more apparent that smartphones were becoming a mini digital version of the user, and many of us don’t like it when other people attempt to use our phones because it can reveal so much about us.

The scientific study compared the users of Android and iPhone smartphones and came up with these facts. Android owners were male, older, honest, agreeable and less likely to break rules for personal gain. On the other hand iPhone users were twice as likely to be women, younger, extroverts, who saw their phones as a status symbol.

Smartphones are an integral part of teenager lifestyle today. A study was undertaken by the Pew Research Centre in Washington D.C. to understand how teenagers interact with and are affected by Smartphone usage.

The study revealed that 73% of teenagers in the United States had ready access to a smartphone. In the majority of cases they own their own phones. 92% of these teenagers reported go online every single day. In fact one forth of them claim to be online almost constantly.

They tend to send a median number of 30 texts in a day. Remember some may be higher and others lower than this median figure, but it is still a fairly large number of texts. This texting, tweeting and posting took place both inside and outside the classroom.

Another study was to conducted by the researchers at Miami University Middletown in Ohio. They restricted the control group to no texts, another group to limited texts related to the class and another group could text as much as they wanted. Students were then made to watch a video.

Later they were given a test on the material on the video and it was found that the control and limited text groups did 70% better on average compared to the group that could text as much as they liked. This science project proves that what teachers have been saying in the class for years.

We’ve all heard about the next generation of cars which can drive themselves freeing the human driver to do what he wants during the commute time. Google’s self driving cars have been on the road for a few years now, and other companies around the world have been designing and testing prototypes as well.

What then are the biggest challenges to design a car that can drive itself? The primary challenge is sensing the environment around it. The surroundings look different to the car when it’s a sunny day and when it’s foggy. This makes it tougher for the car to determine what lies on the road.

The next big challenge is unexpected encounters. A human being has no trouble switching from following traffic lights to being guided by a traffic cop. However the car will need sometime to accept and adjust to this simple change.

Designers are also challenged by the fact that the human in the car needs to interact with it to let it know his wishes. It’s not always a simple drive from destination A to B. There could be an unscheduled stop C or a detour to D that the human wants to make. The car needs to be able to handle these requests promptly and efficiently.

Needless to say these designers have a huge science project on their hands before the self driving cars take over the world’s roads.

Many leading smartphone makers have added biometric finger scans as a new feature in their phones. The idea is to make your phone as secure as possible by using your fingerprint, which is said to be unique to individuals, as your screen lock. It sounds good and markets well, but is it really as secure as you have been led to believe?

Students at Michigan State University decided to test the claim of security by performing an interesting science experiment. They literally took 15 minutes to break the fingerprint security lock on Samsung and Huawei phones. Here’s what they did.

They lifted the fingerprint of the individual whose phone it was. Then they used a standard inkjet printer to print a fingerprint out on paper with a special ink which they had created for the purpose. Once the printout was available they simple scanned it with the locked phone and viola, it was unlocked.

The phone manufacturing companies may say that someone would still have to lift your finger print for the process to work, but given the kind of gadgets that are available and the fact that no one really wears gloves all the time, how difficult could that possibly be? So don’t rely only on the fingerprint lock of your phone, add more security features.

We use a lot of power and most of it mobile. New technologies have been developed repeatedly to make the battery smaller in size, lighter in weight and having the capacity to last longer while doing a number of activities. Unfortunately a smartphone is just as good as it’s battery life and carrying power banks along so that you don’t get stranded with a run down battery has become a way of life.

Charging the battery of the smartphone has been the single biggest challenge for the present generation of phone users. Now scientists are trying to power your smartphone with human activity. All kinds of innovations are being seen, like a finger battery charger which needs to be put on the finger and spun for 130 revolutions to charge the battery of your phone.

Another innovation involves a basic silicon wafer being juiced up in such a manner with layers of charged ions that it can store the energy of a human touch and convert it into power for the phone. Science projects these days are even working on fitting a power converted into the heel of your shoe so that it can generate energy each time you walk and use that juice to power up gadgets around you.