In order to live a long and healthy life, you need to have a healthy body that you pay attention to. You need to eat nutritious food, get exercise and have a good lifestyle. At least that’s what conventional wisdom will tell you, but what if you have been born with a rare condition called Situs Inversus? What’s the possibility of you surviving to a ripe old age then?

Situs Inversus is a rare condition in which the major visceral organs are reversed or mirrored from their normal positions. This means that organs like the liver, stomach, and other internal abdominal organs are shifted from right to left. Rose Marie Bentley, a woman from the Pacific NorthWest never knew she even had this condition.

Her heart was still on the left side of her chest, but the rest of the organs were transposed from right to left. Her body was donated to research in 2017 after she died by her husband. It was only when the students at the Oregon Health and Science University used her cadaver for science experiments during a normal anatomy class that the rare condition was revealed. Now that’s one way to prove that your textbooks were wrong!

The northern lights are a well known phenomena and quite a tourist attraction for those visiting Norway. The beautiful display of the famous auroras was intersected by strange blue lights with geometric patterns on the fifth of April. The gorgeous symmetric patterns may have pleased the eye, but the worried the locals.

These were definitely not part of mother nature’s show. The locals were wondering about the possibility of alien invasions and the discussions about just what caused this phenomena were hot and bothered. Conspiration theories have been the next step, thankfully people were still in the discussion stage. This lasted till NASA owned up to causing these new blue lights in the area.

Apparently NASA was using a pair of rockets in the area to conduct an experiment that was supposed to study the processes taking place within the polar cusp of the Earth. This is the region where the magnetic lines bend down through the planet’s atmosphere, resulting in the creation of the northern lights. Now that was a science experiment that got more results than it had bargained for!

Traditionally cryogenic liquids were used to achieve low temperatures for research and industrial purposes, with a variety of liquefied gases and a range of applications. Liquid nitrogen is the most commonly used cryogenic liquid these days. Another popular cryogenic is liquid helium.

While cryogenic liquids have been used for maintaining cooler temperatures in research laboratories, they are not only potentially hazardous but also extremely expensive. Not to mention rare to harness in the natural state. In addition making sensitive measurements in cryogenic environments poses many difficulties to researchers.

For these reasons research has been ongoing to create a cryogenics free environment, which would still be able to maintain the cooler temperatures that are requisite in certain science experiments. At Oxford Instruments researchers are working on nano technology based instruments that can help eliminate the dangers and uncertainty of using cryogenic liquids.

Since Nano Devices are extremely sensitive, they can be used to make a wide range of temperature measurements. This means that they can be used effectively at room temperature as well as extremely low cryogenic temperatures. As the instruments are improved, they may well take over the niche, removing the need to use cryogenic liquids in science experiments.

The resources we have are limited. That’s why the emphasis on reusing everything we can. We have all heard of recycling waste products so that they may be reused to save the planet more wear and tear. Now we have the concept of up-cycling plastic waste.

From the innovative people on the planet come a number of options to up-cycle your plastic waste. Plastic brown grocery bags have been made into yarn and stitched into a suit. Plastic bottles have been cut and reworked to make storage units for daily necessities. Plastic crocs that have broken have been remade into bird feeders hanging on a tree branch.

While a large number of ideas have been formed around already existing plastic products, at the Swansea University, researchers have come up with a technique to up-cycle the plastic waste bags that were used for food packaging, and make electricity conducting carbon nanotubes from them.
Alvin Orbaek White, who headed this science project hopes that
idea of upcycling waste in this way not only offers a potential solution to the problem of environmental plastic disposal, but by turning it into something useful that we can use for energy

What started out as a simple hobby to fly an unmanned aerial vehicle or UAV has turned into a potential commercial venture with drones flying from location to location with mail, courier items, medical supplies and more. People are buying and flying drones as a hobby and doing all kinds of tricks with them. The number of drones being flown at present is very few compared to what can be envisioned for the future.

As more companies gain permission to fly their drones for whatever commercial or other purposes within the city limits it is going to become increasingly more important to have regulations for flying them. This fact becomes even more important when you consider that last year in the US nearly 69 collisions with drones were avoided. Of course there were some collisions which could not be avoided on record as well.

The aerospace sector needs to be ready to handle this potential crisis. Not only do they have to undertake the issue of flying so many drones safely within city limits, they have to ensure that the buildings and infrastructure is also kept safe. Not to mention keeping the drones out of the zones where commercial airliners are likely to fly in and out of the city airport. This is one huge science project that needs a lot of attention.

Have you ever felt bad because you were the last to be picked for a sports team? It’s disappointing, but you tell yourself that when you are an adult these things will not happen. Guess what? Even when you are pioneering woman astronaut, it may still happen as Anne C McClain and Christina H Koch discovered on the International Space Station. This occurred when they attempted to have the first all female spacewalk.

The mission which would have turned out to be a historic one had it gone through, had to be called off due to the lack of medium sized spacesuits. There is only one medium sized torso component available on the ISS. The duties that require the space walk will still be carried out by two astronauts. the mission comprises of a six hour space walk during which lithium ion batteries will be installed to help power the research laboratory.

While Christina H Koch will still be participating in the mission, Anne C McClain will have to wait for the next one. As for the women only spacewalk? That’s a science project that will have to wait for another day!