Your memory is determined by the number of active grey cells that you use in the brain. The more nerves are fired the better you are likely to recall something. These information highways that are created in the brain are a direct result of just how much data you try and remember.

The older generation often remembered a whole lot more information than our generation. They knew phone numbers to almost all members of the immediate family. They had street addresses memorized. They could recall a whole lot of data on their finger tips that today we need to look up on our smartphones.

Neuroscientists are concerned that our present generation is constantly depending on devices and gadgets to hold information. They barely make an effort to remember anything that they can feed into the cloud. This is known as cognitive offloading. The process is making us less reliant on our memory.

The fact that we no longer have to depend on our memories is resulting in a sort of “digital dementia” where the brain’s active grey matter size is shrinking. This atrophy of brain matter has been the subject of science projects and is a very real threat to our combined mental health as a species.

There is a part of the brain which is stimulated when pleasure is felt. This is called the nucleus accumbens. It is responsible for producing and releasing the chemical called dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter and a precursor of other substances including adrenaline.

In scans when the pleasure center of the brain is light up, the individual is experiencing the same high that an addict gets from a fix. In an experiment conducted on rats a lever was given to them which would activate the nucleus accumbens resulting in pleasurable stimulation.

The rats became addicted to the sensation and kept pressing the lever till they dies of exhaustion and starvation. When an addict becomes focused on the next fix, he cares nothing about other things, including survival. The addictions to video games is real. It was proved by a man in South Korea who died after gaming non stop for fifty hours.

Where the internet is concerned, the brain scans have shown that the same pleasure center is stimulated when a person is using the internet. The brain activity displayed is similar to that of a drug addict. However there is no clear cut scientific study which can claim beyond a doubt that the internet is just as addictive as other drugs of choice.

Silk is a fabric which has been fashionable down the centuries. It is also a popular material in science experiments because of some characteristics that the natural material is endowed with. One primary weakness of using silk had been it’s strength. A silk thread would snap quite easily.

However now researchers at the Tsinghua University at China may have overcome this problem with a rather unique approach. They literally sprayed a 0.2% graphene solution (that is essentially carbon nano tubes) on to the mulberry leaves that silk worms eat.

The silk that is produced from worms fed on this enhanced diet is nearly twice as strong compared to the regular silk produced. The additional finding that the researchers reported included the fact that the super strong silk was also sporting a more orderly structure than natural silk.

In addition the super silk had a percentage of graphite which allowed the fiber to conduct electricity. The possibilities of using this fiber are endless. You could have eco friendly protective fabrics, stronger medical implants and designer electronics which you can wear. As the silk production is increased in terms of quantity, this science project will develop much more relevance from an economic point of view.

If a colony is to be settled on Mars, it will have to create a number of resources to survive on the red planet. Being self sufficient will involve being able to use local resources. That’s what the RASSOR is about.

The Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot is a robot designed to mine resources from the surface of the planet, moon, asteroid, etc. that it is landed on. Developed by NASA at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, it scoops up regolith, or the loose rocky material on the surface.

The regolith is then loaded into the device that pulls the water and ice out of the loose material. The chemicals present are then turned into fuel or air for the astronauts present. The main problem the robot faces is being able to operate in low gravity conditions.

It needs to be light enough to travel in outer space on a rocket and it needs to be heavy enough to dig into the surface of the celestial body it lands on. The science project used digging bucket drums on each end of the body of the robot to give it enough traction on the surface. Just how well it will work on Mars is yet to be tested.

There are a number of foods that get recommended when you fall ill. Are these old wives tales or do the foods in question actually have restorative properties related to the illness? Now that technology is developed enough, we get to test the theories and check if the specified foods do help when you fall sick with the said disease.

Take Chicken Soup for instance. It’s the go to remedy for most people when they come down with a cold, but is it really effective in treating the cold? Researchers have found evidence that some chemical in chicken soup interferes with the ability of white blood cells to move to the site of an infection.

White blood cells are what fight the infection and cause inflammation in the throat and sinuses during a cold. So if the number of white blood cells reduces the inflammation is not quite as bad. now what does this mean? The symptoms of the cold i.e. inflammation, is reduced when you drink chicken soup.

No, it will not cure the cold, or make it disappear, but it will make the person suffering from the cold feel better. That’s why you can drink chicken soup the next time you have a cold. Consider making a science project on the different foods that are supposed to aid different diseases.

Normal crystals have an atomic lattice that repeats in space. Time crystals were first proposed in 2012 by Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek. Last year physicist Norman Yao suggested that it was possible to have crystals that repeated in time as well. He lay down measurements that would prove that such a crystal was a stable phase of matter.

Two teams of physicists immediately began working on producing a time crystal such as defined by Norman Yao. The team at the University of Maryland made the time crystal using a one-dimensional chain of ytterbium ions. At Harvard University too they were able to construct a time crystal.

Chris Monroe, from University of Maryland, described the full process and means required to construct a time crystal in the journal Physical Review Letters. He also mentioned that the various phases surrounding the time crystal were akin to the liquid and gas phases of ice.

Currently there doesn’t seem to be any practical use of a time crystal, but research into the new concept still continues. As physicists continue their science projects based on time crystals it is only a matter of time before someone comes up with a brilliant way to utilize this new material.