As healthcare robots can be quite a good replacement for humans. They can stay with the elderly in their homes, remind them to take their medicines, fetch things for them when required, and alert the hospital in case of an emergency. The only drawback is that robots so far have been, well…robotic.

They show no emotion and can not exactly be companions in a social sense. This is what researchers at the University of Hertfordshire are working on remedying with the Care-O-bot® 3. The robot works in a smart-home environment helping the elderly from becoming isolated and warding off loneliness by offering stimulating activities.

Dr Farshid Amirabdollahian leads the team on a science project called ACCOMPANY (Acceptable Robotics Companions for Ageing Years). The team includes nine partner institutions from across five European countries who have worked together for the last three years on this robotic solution. The project focuses on the ability of the robot to recall and remember experiences it undergoes.

Dr Amirabdollahian said that “This project proved the feasibility of having companion technology, while also highlighting different important aspects such as empathy, emotion, social intelligence as well as ethics and its norm surrounding technology for independent living.” Should the robots seem viable they will become the first formal/informal health care givers across France, the Netherlands and the UK.

A science project undertaken by students at the Rockefeller University sought to map out New York’s subway in a most unusual manner. It was not bothered about the nearly five million people who used the trains, but rather the large number of living beings that were too tiny for the eyes to see.

High school student Anya Dunaif, a participant in Rockefeller’s Summer Science Research Program spent her summer developing the “Pathomap”. She took swabs of benches, turnstiles and other public surfaces that see a number of people passing through.

These were then cultured in petri dishes containing three common antibiotics and the resulting bacteria were studied. The scientific study showed that bacteria from five of the 18 swabs she tested grew in spite of the presence of either ampicillin or kanamycin, and in one case, both. None of the cultured bacteria appeared resistant to the third antibiotic, chloramphenicol.

This science experiment was able to prove that resistance is indeed a major threat to modern medicine. Anya Dunaif wasn’t even sure she would see antibiotic-resistant bacteria, let alone multi-drug resistant bacteria. However that is exactly what happened.

Settling a colony on the Moon or Mars or even traveling out of the solar system has been popular grist for science fiction novels. However there are currently very real reasons that may not make this fantasy a possibility any time in the near future. The most important one being how one grows older in space.

Without the conditions that support normal life on Earth, the long distance travel to another celestial body is likely to accelerate the aging of the human immune system. Scientific researchers at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, found that mice in low gravity conditions experience changes in B lymphocyte production in their bone marrow similar to those observed in elderly mice living in Earth conditions.

This basically means that altered gravity can make you age much faster than was imagined earlier. Naturally there will have to be some drastic improvements in medical care in order to ensure that the set of people out to colonize a new world don’t die on the journey out to the new colony.

It is clear that between the frailty of the human body in outer space and the lack of technology to get us to our closest neighbors is going to be a major detriment to colonizing any planet other than ours at present. This is one science project that is going to take more time to take off.

That we are running short of potable water on Earth is no longer a secret. Giving the way our human population is growing there is a good chance of water shortage becoming the reason for our extinction. Researchers hope that the moon will be able to come to our rescue.

There is close to 1.6 billion tonnes of water ice on the poles of the moon. So like the science fiction novel written by Arthur Clarke, if we can get that water to earth, there will be a major reprieve. An additional incentive for the more commercial parts of the human race is that where there is ice, there is usually fuel.

So perhaps mining on the moon may provide us with more fossil fuels.  Shackleton Energy Company (SEC) from Texas has plans to mine the vast reserves of water ice. SEC will convert it into rocket propellant in the form of hydrogen and oxygen, and then sell it to space partners in low Earth orbit.

This will be at a significantly lower price than fuel brought up from Earth. A science project which would no doubt seem lucrative to the owners of the company. “All interested parties agree that the Moon — one step from Earth — is the essential first toehold for humankind’s diaspora to the stars,” says science writer Richard Corfield.

Every winter the cold seeps through to the very bones when you step out in to the wind. If you have wished that you could be warmly clad without having to bundle up with so many layers of clothing, this is an invention that you are going to love. Scientists have come up with a technique to make a warmer fabric for use in winters.

They took some cotton cloth and dipped it in a solution of silver nanowire particles. These come together to form a conductive network in the cloth. After experimenting with the solution’s concentration the researchers were able to finally develop a fabric which was able to trap close to 80% of our body heat within while still allowing water to pass through.

The ability of the fabric to breathe, while being able to contain the majority of the body’s internal heat makes it the ideal fabric to make winter clothes from. There is also the possibility of using electricity to warm up the fabric even more for specially cold days.

The cloth warms up to nearly 40°C when powered with a mere 0.9 volts of electricity. Now this is a science project that will aid in reducing your energy bills each winter. If you are nice and warm, you really do not need to heat up the house any more!

Over the years that human beings have managed to push objects past the pull of gravity and into space, there has accumulated a considerable amount of junk orbiting the planet Earth. Today the Air Force is worried about all this junk in space as it could be quite dangerous to future missions. Why is that so, lets find out.

The space junk consists of 500,000 pieces of old satellites, rocket parts, debris from collisions and more floating around the earth in its Geo-stationary orbit. Most of this is like a string of bombs waiting to cause explosions and complications in the future.

NASA says that anything larger than 1 centimeter in diameter poses a threat to the International Space Station. However only objects larger than 10 centimeters are currently being monitored. The Air Force is planning on setting up a powerful new radar system which will be able to pass on a whole lot more information about these dangerous hazards.

The radar system will be based out of Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands and will become operational in 2019. This is one science project that will have a great impact on the study of existing hazards in the orbit around the earth. Then there will be an even more difficult choice to make, how to remove them.

Getting to know someone is a lengthy process. You need to spend time with them, observe how they behave and learn their instinctive reactions in different situations. Given these requirements it would appear that your family and friends would be the people who know you best. However scientific research has turned up another contender to the prize.

As per psychologist Youyou Wu and computer scientist Michal Kosinski of the University of Cambridge the computer knows you better than your family or friends. To test this they got David Stillwell, another Cambridge psychologist, to create a Facebook app called myPersonality.

Facebook users gave access to this app for their likes, dislikes, list of friends and also fed in some answers to questions it asked. They were then “rewarded” with an analysis of how they compared with the rest of the myPersonality user population. The app became a viral hit and more than 4 million people worldwide have contributed to this scientific study.

The researchers used human judgement to compare the computer generated analysis of the user’s personality as part of the science project. The computer generated analysis were more accurate than human judgement based on the likes and profile shown to them. The only people who were more accurate in describing the personality of the person than the computer software were their spouces!

All animals and plants living on Earth have adapted themselves to their local environment as they evolved over the centuries. Plants with larger leaves do better in the tropical rainforests than in arid deserts. Animals that hunt more at night have sharper vision. These are just a couple of examples of adaptations that we know the reasons to.

Then there is the Zebra. Why does the Zebra have stripes? There have been any number of theories put forth by researchers and biologists over the years for the black and white appearance of the Zebra. Some said it helped camouflage them better from their natural predators, others maintained that the stripes helped in regulating body temperature.

Few even suggested that the Zebra’s stripes prevent it from getting bitten by too many insects. At the Royal Society Open Science researchers decided to try and answer this eternal mystery by conducting a scientific study. They quantified the characteristics of stripes on zebras at 16 sites across the animals’ range. Then the researchers examined 29 environmental factors, including temperature, predation, and biting flies, searching for an association between the stripes and the environment.

What the science project threw up was surprising. Apparently the strongest correlation came up between the temperature and the stripes. The lower the temperature the fewer and lighter the Zebra stripes seemed to be in an area. Of course multiple biological processes are involved and it will take a whole lot more observation to figure out the true answer to this question.

Scientific studies that watch the development of a science project over a long period of time are usually difficult to undertake. Following up after just ten years can be difficult task, so when Eric Horvitz, managing director of the Microsoft Research lab in Redmond, Washington proposed a 100 year study of Artificial Intelligence, you can imagine its not going to be easy.

Nicknamed the AI100 study, the actual research will take place at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. It will involve a standing committee of interdisciplinary researchers who deliver a report every 5 years. Horvitz said that machine intelligence will have deep effects on people and society, and the influences will be changing over time. It would be really nice to have a platform where there’s a long vision to the future as well as a really sharp connected memory through sets of studies, he added.

The study has currently defined 18 areas of focus which include everything from political and economic implications to ethics and legal concerns. As Horvitz described the study, it’s not just studying and writing about phenomena, but also about playing the role of soothsayer and providing guidance to government agencies, funding agencies, and researchers—on both the costs and opportunities of AI. This will be one cutting edge science project even though it will last a century.

While Solar Power has been refined and made more accessible by many emerging new technologies, none have had the effect that this latest offering from the researchers at the University of Toronto Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering have had. They have come up with a a new way to harness the power of the sun.

The researchers have just come up with a new way to spray solar cells onto flexible surfaces using miniscule light-sensitive materials known as colloidal quantum dots or CQDs. Illan Kramer and his team have now allowed their invention to become a major step toward making spray-on solar cells easy and cheap to manufacture.

Kramer hopes that in the not so distant future it is his dream that one day you’ll have two technicians with Ghostbusters backpacks come to your house and spray your roof with solar cells. The CQDs can be sprayed onto any kind of shaped surface and convert them into solar cells capable of generating power.

What’s more this technology has also made the devices have better control and improved purity. Now it is just a matter of determining how to scale the CQDs and make this new class of solar technology profitably manufactured. An interesting science project which may just solve our future power problems.