There is no denying the fact that using plastic materials has made life a lot more easier for this generation of people. However the overwhelming amount of plastic that ends up in landfills and in the oceans is slowly but surely threatening to suffocate our planet.

To gain a better perspective about just why the plastic menace is so bad, imagine every single tooth brush, straw, plastic spoon or fork that you have ever used in your life. Now imagine them all added up and lying in one place, because there is not way that any of it has decomposed and gone back to nature.

A number of countries are waking up to this perpetual problem understand that if they don’t want to poison the land and seas with plastic, there must be drastic action. The European Union is thus planning to ban plastic consumer goods like glasses, straws, plates and cutlery by 2021.

The scientific research that backs this decision hopes that using environment friendly alternatives will help scale back the percentage of plastic in the garbage from 80% at present to less than half of that number within the five years after the implementation of the ban.

The stages of growth have always been associated closely with the physical changes seen in the body. As the infant grows to a toddler and then to a child, it is easy to see the changes. The child reaches the height of an adult around their late teens and this is why most countries concur that people reach their majority, or adulthood at the age of either 18 or 21 years depending on your country of residence.

A new study conducted by neuro scientists at the University of Cambridge, is looking into the changes that the brain undergoes when growing up. One thing is for certain, the brain develops at different times in every individual. So to define a specific age when a person moves from childhood to adulthood, is practically impossible in terms of brain development.

The degree of individual brain variability only begins to level out when people reach their thirties. This means that effectively the brain of an adult is only seen in people who are aged or more! So if you are below thirty, it’s fine to be considered childish. Now here’s a science project that gives you licence to act as a child for a little while longer.

Gas giants like the planet Jupiter are usually formed further away from the sun and then move closer to it’s orbit. It has now been researched by astronomers at the Lund University and revealed that over the last 700,000 years the planet has been moving ever inwards and has now migrated more than four times the distance that it was away from the sun.

The constant inward migration which was fueled by the gravitational pull of the sun, has been proved in theory in a complex computer simulation.
Simona Pirani, is a doctoral student in astronomy at Lund University as well as the lead author of the study which has used the evidence of the migration in the Trojan asteroids orbiting close to Jupiter to substantiate this theory in the science project.

The Trojan asteroids are two groups of thousands of asteroids  which were located at the same distance from the Sun as Jupiter. They have now positioned themselves around the planet and have the same migratory path. Gradually more than 50% of these asteroids have shifted in front of Jupiter and closer to the sun in the solar system. Leading the researchers to believe that the migration of the asteroids is similar to the journey made by the gas giant planet.

The possibility of settling a colony on Mars has been in the forefront of many research projects. The availability of water would be a major mark in the plus side for sustaining life on the Red Planet. Scientists studying the landscape through the Mars Rovers have been excited to see the traces of water in the past through fissures and canals on the surface of the planet.

NASA’s Curiosity Rover has indicated that deep channels in the Martian surface indicate the presence of big and powerful rivers that once flowed through the landscape. Some of these are believed to be even larger than rivers on Earth. The geological evidence seems to suggest that these huge rivers flowed in hundreds of locations all over Mars around one billion years ago.

This is the time frame that current day scientists feels is when the planet was losing it’s atmosphere and drying out. If human beings are ever to live on the planet, having a sustainable source of water is going to be a requirement that needs to be met. Many science projects are working on solving this issue at present. Only time will tell if they are successful.

The general consensus in popular lore is that when you play some music, you are likely to feel more creative. Research students at the Lancaster University decided to put this popular belief to test. The psychologists devised an experiment where three types of musical backgrounds were provided to the participants of the study who were involved in a problem solving exercise.

The first was background music with foreign (unfamiliar) lyrics. The second was instrumental music without any lyrics. The third was popular music with familiar lyrics. The participants of the scientific research experiment were given verbal tasks to perform as they listened to one of the three types of music playing in the background. If popular theory held true, the ones who were listening to music they identified with, should have been very creative and solved the problems quickly.

That did not seem to happen when the results of the study were collected. Dr Neil McLatchie of Lancaster University said that they found strong evidence of impaired performance when playing background music in comparison to quiet background conditions. The inference was that the music disrupted the verbal working memory and caused the participants to perform their assigned tasks poorly.

Robots have become more intelligent and Artificial Intelligence or AI is the cause. The complicated algorithms that form the base of AI are used to solve many repetitive issues in decision making in the industrial sector. It’s a simple logic gate that is at work and ensures that production in an assembly line is as smooth as robotically possible!

Yes, the robots can be a huge help in saving man hours and utilizing resources to the best of their ability. However, would you trust AI to pick a job for a human being to do? Would you turn over your potential future to a robot to pick your next working assignment? That’s the question that researchers at Wiley tried to check with an online study comprising more than three hundred participants.

The study asked participants to make a personal strategic career choice. They were told that they were in the market for a new job, had applied to a number of positions and were accepted by many of these. Now they had to make a choice about the job they wanted to accept. They were told they could pick any job they liked by themselves, or use an algorithm to pick the most appropriate job for them. The scientific experiment in decision-delegation found that the less aware the participant was of the situation, the more likely they were to delegate the decision to AI.