Taking the level of personal care to the next pinnacle is a pocket sized gadget that detects when you are stinking and lets you know. Yes, that used to be what you mother told you, but now apparently you can know when you are stinking even if she’s not around to tell you so.

A Japanese company, Konica Minolta, has come up with this gadget to end what they term “Smell Harassment” at work. The stink detector looks like a tape recorder and can connect to your smartphone via Bluetooth using an app.

Kunkun Body, as the detector is called, can let you know that you stink in four location. These are near the head, behind the ear, under the armpits and around the feet. Apparently the Japanese are very sensitive to offensive smell and the office workers who annoy others with their noxious aromas have a specific term, Sumehara.

It seems that the number one work etiquette  concern is body smell. So the company decided to conduct a science experiment to create the gadget. It is part of a set of self care products that have been crowd funded. The company has no plans to sell the device outside Japan at present.

As humans become more and more obsessed with their health, it fuels the health and fitness industry. One of the most popular current trends is being able to track your fitness through sensors. A common product which helps do this is the Fitbit.

You can count the steps you have taken, the distance you have covered, the rate of your heart and just how many hours of sleep you have had at night. All you have to do is ensure that you are wearing the fitness tracker all through the day and night, and of course that you charge it regularly.

Now researchers at Harvard University have come up with a highly sensitive soft capacitive sensor made out of silicon and paired it with a stretchy fabric that moves and flexes along with the muscles of the body. The combination has allowed them to come up with a fabric which can literally turn into a fitness tracker.

Professor Conor Walsh said that they were excited about this sensor as by leveraging textiles in its construction it is inherently suitable for integration with fabric to make smart robotic apparel. So will the end product of this science experiment be a pair of pajamas that double up as a Fitbit?

Making your password as secure as possible has led to all kinds of new technology being developed. From encryption of typed alpha-numeral passwords, to face recognition software and further on to bio metric fingerprints and voice tones, just about everything as been explored as a security measure.

One of the more popular trends right now is using brainwave-sensing headsets, also known as EEG or electroencephalograph headsets. These are used to control robotic toys and play video games using only the power of your brainwaves. You literally think a direction and it will be followed.

Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham have come up with a potential problem with these EEG headsets. They say that data can be stolen from a user who is wearing them. Suppose that the person logs into their bank account while wearing the headset, it is possible for a hacker to get the brainwaves and decode the password.

The security and privacy threats that can arise from the use of an EEG headset need to be examined and eliminated as their popularity begins to grow. Maybe it should the subject of another science study which can help provide solutions to this rather unique problem.

Our life today is a lot more sedentary than what it was just a couple of decades ago. Humans have begun working on computers and hardly walking around. The levels of inactivity during the day are constantly increasing. This is unfortunately not good news for the body, which tends to be seriously affected by this trend.

Studies are constantly being conducted to evaluate the effect of inactivity on human health. Some people have gone so far as to call sitting the new smoking, in the sense that the inactivity may be just as detrimental to your health as cigarettes were to a previous generation of chain smokers.

A scientific study being conducted by the researchers at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California is considering the state of health of people across 100 countries. Results show that more than five million people die annually from causes that are associated with inactivity. That is a highly disturbing pattern.

Try to avoid sitting still for long periods of time. Even if you must work on a computer for long hours take short breaks where you get up from the chair and walk around for five minutes. Do stretches for your back and ensure that you get some alternative physical exercise in the day as well.

Spiders are known for spinning webs to catch their food. However they also have to travel the area of the web in order to reach their prey. Not to mention making trips up and down the wall on a single strand of the web. Does that mean that spiders also tend to lose control and spin rapidly when descending?

Unlike rappelling for humans where the rope may send the person spinning out of control when twisted, a spider will never spin out of control on it’s thread. This is because the drag-line from the web hardly twists unlike materials such as synthetic fibers that ropes are made out of, or even human hair.

Experiments conducted by the scientists at the American Institute of Physics have found that the material of a spider’s web is unlike any other material found in nature. It has the ability to partially yield when twisted allowing it to remove nearly 75% of the potential energy created by the movement.

Naturally the oscillation is also reduced. This allows it to quickly dissipate the energy which other cause the spider to spin down the drag-line as it moves from the ceiling to the floor. This science study shows that it is nearly impossible for a spider to spin out of control.

Soft robotics is being used by the researches at University of California – San Diego to create a glove that give tactile feedback to the user while experiencing a Virtual Reality program. Jurgen Schulze, a researcher at the Qualcomm Institute at UC San Diego, has assembled the prototype of a glove which can realistically simulate the feeling of playing a virtual piano keyboard.

As of now most Virtual Reality environments use remote type devices that vibrate when the user touches a virtual surface. This is unrealistic as per Jurgen Schulze, who says with their prototype glove they  are trying to make the user feel like they’re in the actual environment from a tactile point of view.

Michael Tolley, a mechanical engineering professor at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego says that the prototype is surprisingly effective. It has a Leap Motion sensor, a custom fluidic control board, and  soft robotic components in the glove that individually inflate or deflate. These allow the glove to mimic through virtual reality what the person would actually feel in the real world. This is an interesting science experiment that seeks to make virtual reality as real as possible.

Today the world has nearly three billion children and adolescents who are using mobile phones and technology associated with them. For these children mobiles are not something of a luxury, but a very much present part of daily life. Many grow up accessing their parent’s mobile phones from a very young age.

Society for Research in Child Development is trying to study the complexity in the effects of the continuous usage of mobile technology on the development of the current generation. Effects of mobile technology on cognitive control is of interest. As is the attention given by parents to early brain development.

Mobiles have been found to have a direct effect on the mood, amount of sleep and mental health of users. Now mobile usage needs to be examined in context of children as well. While the technology offers greater connectivity through cultures, it also increases potential security risks for the children.

One area of study that may have far reaching implications is how adolescents sexting may lead to more risky sexual behavior among teenagers and even younger children.  Not to mention the scientific study on how using mobiles can cause problems in the activities such as driving, walking, biking and jogging.

Electricity is the crux of all civilization as we know it today. If it was possible to transfer electric current in a wireless manner, it would truly revolutionize the way we live. Imagine being able to charge electric vehicles, mobile phones, medical implants and a whole lot more gadgets wirelessly?

A team of researchers at Stanford University have set the ball rolling to make this phenomenon possible. Professor Shanhui Fan and his student Sid Assawaworrarit have made the prototype of a device which can wirelessly charge a moving object at close range.

In the experiment a moving LED bulb was transferred a 1-milliwatt charge wirelessly by the device. While this science project builds on existing technology, there is still a long way to go for the researchers as electric vehicles require tens of kilowatts of electric power to work.

The team is now working on increasing the amount of electric charge that can be transferred by the device. Should they be successful, it will not only help with current gadgets that require recharging, but also open up the field to a host of new gadgets which may be designed without the limitation of having to be charged in a stationery position.

The Great Red Spot is a swirling anticyclonic storm that has been raging through Jupiter for centuries. It has been recorded and seen for years and now analysis of the data is showing that the storm is losing ground.

Apparently at one time the Great Red Spot was large enough for three Earths to fit inside it, but now the size has drastically reduced. It is now the width of merely one Earth. Researchers are now trying to figure what is causing the storm to lose it’s mammoth size.

Is there some unrecorded activity on Jupiter that is causing the energy from the storm to be drained? We don’t know for sure. However, the Great Red Spot is at it’s smallest recorded dimensions since 1930.  It’s diameter is now approximately 10,250 miles across.

Also the shape of the trademark red spot has changed from an oval to a circle. The waist of the Great Red Spot is losing 580 miles per year. Observations from the Hubble telescope have found small eddies feeding into the storm and these may be responsible for changing the internal dynamics of the storm.

It will make an interesting science project to find out exactly how the Great Red Spot has shrunk over the years. It may even shed light on why it is currently shrinking so much faster than ever before.

Empathy is is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within the other person’s frame of reference, as per Wikipedia. It is an important quality for a doctor to have. It allows the doctors to forge a bond with the patient they are trying to treat.

Unfortunately when faced with the task of passing on less than positive news about the illness to the patient or their care takers and family members, doctors can be at a disadvantage. Delivering difficult news about their health needs to be done in a caring and empathetic manner.

This usually comes with practice. Again, the new doctors and interns do not have the advantage of years of experience to learn this. So Michigan Medicine School at the University of Michigan has decided to give them some practice. By allowing them to speak to virtual people in a new science project.

Lifelike humans are seen on a computer screen and supposed to be patients and relatives. The medical student is told about the condition that they need to communicate in a supportive and caring manner. They are then judged on their delivery, words, body language, etc., to see just how good a job they did.