Think of a TV switching itself on when you say, “Hi TV, power on”. Or perhaps logging into your Facebook, Twitter and Gtalk accounts by merely staring at the TV screen. Sounds like science fiction to you? It is no longer sci – fi but reality thanks to face recognition software integrated in the next generation of smart TVS.

A smart TV today can help you do a lot more than the old box could do even a decade ago. You can have High Definition movie streaming coming over the screen from a website, or browse through a number of interesting apps, or even sit back and catch up with all the stuff that your friends put up on various social media sites.

The smart TV experience is so close to science fiction that the majority of the masses have yet to realize that its no longer sci-fi but reality. Watching futuristic technology march into the home would make you wonder what’s coming next.

Its just a matter of paying attention to the next round of science projects under developement. Still I suppose we have some time to go before the gadgets in the house become so high tech that they begin resenting the humans that they serve.

It took 7 minutes for curiosity to land on Mars after years of preparation. For those seven minutes the entire world was glued to the success of the landing and this is only the beginning of the project. For the first time scientists have received panoramic snapshots of the scenery on the red planet. Many assumptions will be confirmed or trashed as the lab discovers the planet.

Imagine what it would be like to be part of a team sitting here on Earth and driving research vehicles out there on Mars. It would have seemed liked science fiction even a decade ago, but today its  reality that a scientists is driving a remote controlled car and orbiting the Gale Crater on Mars. That he is able to see snapshots and video of the bedrock layers that form the floor of the crater.

Curiosity Mission Manager Mike Watkins of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California has likened the capabilities and skills required to run the Curiosity project to brain surgery. He would not be far off the mark considering the laborious attention to detail and precision skills that come into play in both operations. It is a science project that many will talk about for days to come.

There are more than 1 billion cars on road in the world today for a population of 7 billion human beings. As per studies conducted by the OECD the automobile density will reach its maximum of 650 to 800 cars per 1,000 inhabitants very soon. So does having so many cars on road demonstrate progress? Or is it  a matter of grave concern?

While public transportation has been making life easy for denizens of cities, it is still the private car which is the primary means of transportation for most suburban families. While concentrated research is being conducted in developing new technologies with clean and green fuel there is no denying the fact that it is the fossil fuel powered car that is the mainstay of personal transportation today.

The population needs to move and the pollution from their cars is not enough of a deterrent to make a switch to a more expensive and less reliable means of green transport. They may consider car pooling but beyond that the environment is not too much of a concern. So yes the private car is indeed a boon to the family and a bane to the environment. And till scientific researchers come up with an alternative that can be mass produced and is cheap enough to compete, the fossil fuel powered car is here to stay.

In the last couple of decades the depletion of the ozone layer has become an established fact thanks to a number of scientific research studies which have proved that the hole above the continent of Antarctica in the ozone layer is growing.

The Ozone layer is a gaseous layer in the Earth’s atmosphere which protects us from ultraviolet rays that the sun radiates. It is because of the ozone layer that life as we know it, exists on this planet. Unfortunately the gas layer has been depleting steadily due to human activity and now as new research comes in maybe due to volcanic activity as well.

It has been found that along with lava and rocks volcanoes also throw up large amounts of bromine when they erupt. Bromine is a chemical which destroys ozone. So in effect when a volcano erupts it not only damages the immediate area in its vicinity but also the ozone in the atmosphere above it.

Perhaps it is good to know that man alone is not responsible for the depleting ozone layer, but the fact that mother nature is also giving it a helping hand is surely not glad tidings. More scientific research needs to be done to determine just how fast bromine from volcanic activities is affecting the ozone layer.

As strange as that may sound, the Navy has indeed trained dolphins and sea lions to search for bombs in and around vessels. While they have been fairly successful, they are difficult to train and involve a great deal of expense.

The dolphins have also had some trouble with smaller sized bombs, which may not sink the ship but will still cause considerable damage if left undetected. So does that mean a human diver needs to go under each ship that sails to ensure its not being sabotaged by bombs? Now robotic researchers may have come up with a better solution.

In their science research project Franz Hover, the Finmeccanica Career Development Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and graduate student Brendan Englot have designed algorithms that vastly improve such robots’ navigation and feature-detecting capabilities.

This new group of algorithms makes it a better bet to have robots designed for bomb scouting rather than making use of the dolphins. They have been working with resilient robots that have been constructed in the last decade for underwater reconnaissance missions.It is the progress on these different and unrelated science projects that have made the difference for teh bomb detection missions.

Evolution may have given the zebra stripes while their cousins the horses got away with none, but researchers are still trying to figure out what triggered the difference. In specific an evolutionary ecologist at Lund University in Sweden recently conducted an interesting science experiment.

Susanne Akesson had a theory that insects may have been part of the reason that zebras developed stripes. To test this theory she put out plastic models of black, white and striped horses and coated them all with odorless insect glue. It came to light that horseflies, a kind of insect that affects both zebras and horses, preferred the white or black horse to the striped one.

Since horseflies can lay eggs in the coat and cause infection it made sense to develop a protective mechanism for the zebras. Also horses are bred by humans and may have missed out on the evolutionary advantage due to this reason.While zebras had to pretty much fend for themselves in the African Savannah.

Susanne is hopeful that the scientific study will result in a system of protection from insects for humans. If all else fails, at least we can wear striped clothing to help reduce the number of insects that hover over us on a trek.

Flavonoids are said to provide the human body with a protective effect. They are found in specific plants which are said to increase the body’s immunity. So far there have been no tests designed to check the effectiveness of the anti oxidizing properties of flavanoids.

Scientists at the Institute for Nutrition and Food Sciences at Bonn, in Germany have been growing a special set of herbs to test the effectiveness of the flavonoids that they carry. In place of the regular carbon c12, these plants are grown with a rarer isotope C-13.

This is likely to be easier to measure in blood samples of the experiment volunteers who eat these specially grown herbs. The volunteers will be tested for any other protective effects that their immune system is boosted with. Of course the plants need to be grown before they can be eaten.

The tricky part is the actual growing of these herbs. They have to be kept in a special chamber where the air is controlled. The doctoral student who is tending to these plants is not allowed to breath inside the chamber as the carbon in the carbon dioxide she breathes out will distort the results of the science experiment by altering the carbon type present in the plants.

Children learn their first language at the time that they are exploring the world around them and learning about their own bodies and self. So does it make it easier to learn a new language when you employ your body along with your brain to the task? At the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive  and Brain Sciences in Germany a new research project shows that when you learn a new language you do it better if you use your whole body to learn it.

Italian linguist Manuela Macedonia and fellow researcher Thomas Knosche have conducted an interesting scientific research into the new learning technique. They devised a new artificial language called Vimmi and taught it to 20 test subjects. Besides conventional text and audio methods they included teaching movements of the body accompanying each word.

Words that had specific physical meanings such as bread or cutting were easily assimilated with the actions, but what was surprising to the researchers was that words with more abstract connotations such as actually or so what, which have no obvious gestures but carried body gestures in Vimmi were also remembered with ease due to the body gestures. An interesting language study for a science project.

Global Warming seems like this huge mess that mankind has collectively made of the climate. So how can one individual man or woman do anything that can help set the scales right? What can one person do to make it alright? Quite a lot when you think about it!

During hard economic times, it is difficult to get people to focus on an environmental issue which seems to have little immediate bearing on their lives. However if they act lovingly towards the planet and its resources, it is they themselves who will benefit.

So how can you help as an individual? Global warming takes place due to excessive release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Look for ways to reduce your carbon footprint. Try to use the cycle instead of the car. You will reduce fuel emissions.

Having a barbecue may seem like fun to you but is very bad for the environment. Cook your food in a fuel effective manner preferably without burning too much coal.Fossil fuels are used to generate electricity as well. So the more you use your lights, fans and other electrical gadgets the larger your carbon footprint will be.

The big companies in the corporate world run because they make a profit. If they begin to take responsibility for their manufacturing processes and begin using cleaner fuel, it affects their profitability. When the government makes them clean up environmental messes that they create it runs down their profits and may even in an occasional case shut down the company.

This is why it is difficult to get corporates to take responsibility for climate change and global warming. Governments around the world are making laws that will ensure that the corporates take some heat if they are not environmentally concerned. The Carbon Tax being levied by Australia on its mining industry is a perfect example of this.

Perhaps it is unfair to expect one big company to pay up when all the small companies are contributing to the situation just as much. It may be a worthwhile science project to come up with a measuring system to see just how much greenhouse gas emission comes out of each factory to be able to penalize the company according to its actions.

It is easy to say that the big bad corporates are the ones that are burning the most fossil fuels and causing global warming. It negates the responsibility of the individual for his part in the massive event. Just as every drop in the ocean contributes to its volume, every action of the individual contributes to global warming.