3D printing is making it easier to create a lot of stuff in a cheaper manner. The materials that have been printed with a 3D printer differ from replacement bones for human jaws, tissue material for skin damaged by burns, to things like blocks to use for building a canal house. There sheer potential of 3D printing is mind boggling.

The new item to be 3D printed is a musical instrument. The violin is a classical instrument which has traditionally been constructed from the finest sourced wood. The vibrations from the aucoustic violin require the wood to be a certain complexity of grain structure to give the best sound possible.

Does this mean that it is not possible to print any musical instrument? Not really. In fact an electric violin actually converts the vibrations of the strings into an electric signal which then is amplified into a musical sound.

In this set up there is no need for a resonating chamber. Needless to say a 3D printed electric violin will work just as well as a regular electric violin. The resonances and harmonics from a 3D printed violin are currently being tested by professional violin players to check if this science project has a commercial future!

Black Holes have the reputation of the bad boys of outer space. Nothing phases them, they simply swallow their challengers as soon as the challenger comes close enough. However recent evidence suggests that they may not have quite the digestion we believe them to have.

Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been conducting a science project on a super massive black hole in a galaxy almost 300 million light years away from Earth. They have identified “tidal disruption flare” with a curious pattern in the energy emitted by the flare. It was seen in the Ultra Violet range of the electromagnetic spectrum associated with the black hole.

This pattern was repeated 32 days later, but this time it was in the X-ray band of the electromagnetic spectrum. The MIT observations were confirmed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center telescope as well. They believe that the energy echos are due to  a star being quickly ripper apart by the black hole.

Dheeraj Pasham said that this black hole has not had much to feed on for a while, and suddenly along comes an unlucky star full of matter. What is being seen is that  this stellar material is not just continuously being fed onto the black hole, but it’s interacting with itself — stopping and going, stopping and going. This is telling us that the black hole is ‘choking’ on this sudden supply of stellar debris.

If all of space was involved in a dance as celestial bodies moved around, this pair of dancing partners would really make a special sight. Astronomers at the Michigan State University have found a star that moves around a black hole at the really fast pace of twice an hour.

The unusual dance of the companion star and black hole have been sighted and confirmed by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, NASA’s NuSTAR and the Australia Telescope Compact Array. Arash Bahramian, from University of Alberta, said that this white dwarf is so close to the black hole that material is being pulled away from the star and dumped onto a disk of matter around the black hole before falling in.

Luckily for this star, Bahramian does’t think it will follow this path into oblivion, but instead will stay in orbit. While Bahramian may wish the white dwarf star safe from being sucked into the black hole, others in the astronomy community are not sure that it will continue to whip around the black hole for eternity.

There is a science project that suggests that eventually the dancing star will lose enough mass that it no longer resists the pull of the black hole. How long it will be before that happens is pure speculation. Till then we get to see these celestial dancing partners give us an unusual show.

Did you ever wonder how humans would be able to identify the fact that there were aliens in existence? There have been a number of different ways that researchers have hunted for proof that aliens exist. The latest science project comes from Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

The researchers here have a theory that the mysterious phenomena called fast radio bursts is actually evidence of alien technology. They feel that these bursts might be leakage from planet-sized transmitters powering interstellar probes in distant galaxies. Sounds like science fiction? Well what did you expect with aliens involved?

For Avi Loeb the fact that these fast radio bursts may have an artificial origin, is a fact well worth investigating. These millisecond-long flashes of radio emission were first brought to the attention of the scientific community in the year 2007. At that time they were thought to originate from galaxies far away.

Manasvi Lingam believes that they may be caused by a transmitter that is being used to power a light sail. In order to carry living passengers across interstellar or even intergalactic distances a huge amount of power would need to be continuously generated. And maybe as the transmitter focuses its beam on the light sail we on Earth may see it as fast radio bursts.

No, really it’s actual advice that researchers at Texas Tech University give us. If a student is feeling bad about scoring poorly on an exam which he may or may not have prepared adequately for, it may be a good idea for him to play a video game he enjoys.

The positive feedback that playing the video game well brings to the student will be able to help mitigate the negative self image feelings that the student got due to scoring bad marks. The reason this happens is because playing the game well reaffirms the student’s ability to do well in an area that is important to them.

John Velez, assistant professor at the Department of Journalism & Electronic Media in the Texas Tech University College of Media & Communication, says that parents need to praise their children’s video game playing abilities. Instead of criticizing them for playing all the time and ignoring studies.

This helps the students accept that as they spend more time on the game they do well playing it, so if they spent more time doing studies their grades will also improve. Changing study habits for the students would be easier if they were able to come to this conclusion on their own, said the results of this science project.

A cyborg is a living thing which has electronic parts. At least that’s what the science fiction books tell us. Now scientists are researching ways in which to create a plant which may actually have electronic tissues. Turning the regular plant into a cyborg plant.

Eleni Stavrinidou and her Linköping team have already managed to grow a plant that has a wire going up it’s stem. What’s unusual is not the presence of the wire but the fact that the wire grew inside the plant stem on it’s own. There is naturally a great deal of excitement over this new plant.

Researchers are looking into producing plants that may perhaps work better than the alternatives that Mother Nature has provided us in terms of generating power. Think about the revolution it would create if these cyborg plants could take the sun’s light and convert it right into electrical energy then and there.

It would be the end of the energy crisis as we know it today.  The Linköping team may have started the process off with their science project by getting the wire to grow organically within a plant, but there is a lot more to be done before you will be powering your home with your rose garden.

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.