One of the most common banes of technology and internet in our lives is remembering a large assortment of passwords to access all the information we need. Email, banking, social media sites, you name it and its has its own online password. And forgetting one of them is simply not an option.

For those of us afflicted with forgetting a great many things, the days of diligently writing down whatever passwords we do not wish to forget, may soon be over. The FIDO Alliance is a non profit organization which brings together the might of Microsoft, Google, VISA, MasterCard and PayPal. Their admirable purpose? To kill passwords as we know them.

What the group is working on is being able to use biometric data such as finger prints, voice recognition or even face recognition as a replacement for traditional word based, written passwords. The system would include a two stage authentication where in besides the biometric identification a unique USB key would also be provided.

This is a science project with great potential uses and is under development at present. Implementation of this system on a planet of ever increasing internet users is going to be a large and perhaps costly affair.

Potatoes have always been considered a weight watcher’s worst enemy. They are usually the first food to be stomped out of the diet by any obesity management program. Plus most dietitians consider the humble potato a nightmare, so when you say potato for diet control, people may be excused for considering you crazy.

Only you are not crazy, because researchers at McGill’s University have managed to dig out a fact about potatoes that left everyone, including themselves, flabbergasted. Apparently when mice were being fed an obesity rich diet which included an extract of 30 potatoes daily, they actually went from 25 grams to 16 grams, losing weight.

When details of this science project were studied it was found that the potato extract could actually be a blessing for obese people and those suffering from type 2 diabetes. Of course they do not recommend eating 30 potatoes a day, but rather using the extract in a supplementary form.

There is also talk of being able to make it available as a separate cooking ingredient to use in the kitchen. Although its a long while away from becoming a reality on your kitchen shelf, it is nice to know that this science experiment has taken away some of the angst associated with potatoes.

Apparently the candy you eat can work as a deodorant and that is what the makers of Deo Perfume Candy claim. This Bulgarian sweet treat contains a chemical that is secreted through the pores and brings a sweet smell along with it. Spays, Roll Ons and Sticks have been around for a while now, but edible deodorant? That’s the latest craze.

The company offers the candy in two flavors, rose and vanilla, but does it really work? Apparently research conducted in Japan found that a compound in garlic had the ability to emerge through the pores of the skin and scent it. That’s when the manufacturers of the candy decided that they needed something similar but better smelling.

After some experimental research they came up with these two flavored candies which actually tend to make the skin smell sweeter, not exactly roses and vanilla, but somewhat pleasant anyway. The candy deo is now available for sale online and people are buying them as the latest fad.

However there is just one more issue you would have to chomp through at least a couple of packets of candy to be able to experience the deo effect. That is a science project that only who can afford to put on some weight can undertake.

For many years now with the theory of plate tectonics firmly in place people have said that volcanoes are caused when molten material from the Earth’s core manages to seep through to the surface. Now Geophysicists at Virginia Tech are hoping to challenge this theory as they argue that Volcanoes may be caused by something a lot closer.

Something called the asthenosphere, to be precise. This is a layer fairly close to the surface of the Earth lying between 80 to 200 km deep in the Earth’s surface. Don L. Anderson, an emeritus professor with the Seismological Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology, and Scott King, a professor of geophysics in the College of Science at Virginia Tech feel that this layer is responsible for volcanoes and not the previously believed shifting of plates.

They feel that a hot layer just below the plates is what the volcanoes spew out rather than material coming from deep conduits located halfway to the center of the Earth. While traditionally geologists have viewed the asthenosphere as an inactive layer, the new research paper says that it could be the actual source of volcanic activity. While the findings of this science project are interesting more studies need to be conducted to confirm this new hypothesis.

At the Umegaoka Long Term Care Health Facility in Yokohama, Japan dementia patients are been given furry, snow white colored robotic seals. The elderly patients pet the seals, and brush its hair giving them a task which they can easily perform and feel a sense of self worth. The seal is called Paro and its only task is to give love and emotional support to patients who may not even remember their own names on certain days.

Scientific studies have shown that robots can indeed make great care takers for the elderly who essentially are looking for some company or something useful to do to pass their time. If the robot can play a game of chess, or help them move about with greater ease, it is aiding in this purpose. This is why scientists are working all over the world to provide more useful medically sound robots.

The ongoing science project to make robots a larger part of healing and therapy  in Japan comes from the fact that the populations is increasing and the number of care givers currently available in the workforce are unable to keep up with the number of existing patients. Robots who can be trained in healing will be able to take considerable pressure off these care givers.

A whole new profession is coming up thanks to all the science experiments being done to make robots more intelligent. At the Socially Intelligent Machines Lab in Georgia Tech there is a teacher who teaches a one of a kind student, a robot! Andrea Thomas is helping to train a robot nicknamed Curi, who incidentally has light up ears.

Andrea’s lab is working on possible personal robots who will have to learn to navigate through the human world without much aid or direction. So they are working on robots being able to ask the right questions and collect the right information to answer these questions.

It could be something quite as mundane as Curi scooping pasta in the kitchen from the cooking pan to the plate, or something more complex like identifying a book and bringing it to Andrea from another room. Once a task has been conducted successfully the robot is then asked to repeat it and reinforce what new things Curi picked up.

The science project sort of like training a child, but in this case the robot does not have to relearn a task that has been perfected once. Andrea also studies how people respond to robots and how they interact together. This gives her more information to perfect her algorithms.

These days robots are being created to do a number of menial tasks which can be hazardous, repetitive and tiring for human beings to perform. Scientists working on robots for the future envision making them actual companions and care givers to humans. It would be a boon to know that your eighty year old aunt is being constantly monitored by a personal robot who ensure that she is served her meals on time, takes her correct medication periodically, and even goes off for a constitutional walk each morning.

All this can become a reality in the future when robots are able to function with greater autonomy. However today when you look at a life like robot that looks like a person but doesn’t have the same fluency of movement and speech that you would expect from a real person, how do you feel? A scientific study will be able to shed more light on this aspect soon.

In most cases people feel equally drawn and repelled by robots that look like humans. This affection and aversion is caused by the way our brain processes what we see. It looks like a person but does not act and speak like a person, so there is an error in what is perceived. While we are aware that its a robot on a conscious level at an inner level we have not truly processed this detail leading to the mixed reaction

Just as your real mother takes care of you, this electronic version is supposed to monitor your actions and give you feedback for your well being. Sen.se have come up with what they call the most user friendly monitoring system which makes dumb things around the house smart. In fact they call it “Mother”!

In order to use this tracking technology people need to place sensors on regular, everyday items such as your toothbrush, the coffee pot, or even a water bottle. These sensors called cookies measure motion with accelerometers, temperature with thermometers, and relay all the information they record via WiFi to the central Mother unit.

Now the sensor on the toothbrush ensures that you brush your teeth properly, and in case you did not the information is displayed on the app which reads like a daily newspaper. It will give you headlines saying that you drank too much coffee or did not have enough water to meet your daily water intake.

In short the science project will let you know exactly how your daily habits are affecting your health. Just like what mother used to do when you were small. So how many of your would like to volunteer for an electronic mother to take care of you?!

A team of researchers at the University of Illinois led by professor Wilfred van der Donk and professor Satish K. Nair have solved a 25 year old riddle on how a specific type of natural antibiotic molecule is formed. They focused on a class of compounds that have antibiotic properties, a common one studied was Nisin.

Nisin is naturally occurring in milk and has been used as a combatant for food borne pathogens since the 1960s. The sequence of the gene has been known to researchers, but after the peptide is formed it undergoes changes to give it the final form. This is a five ringed structure in which two rings disrupt the creation of bacteria’s cell walls and the remaining three destroy the bacteria’s membranes.

The mystery lay in how the peptide which is like a noodle gets shaped into the final form. The researchers established that  the amino acid glutamate was essential to nisin’s transformation. The dehydratase held the peptide and allowed the ring structures to be established. Then the newly formed molecule was hardened into place to hold the new shape.

The researchers were able to throw light on a problem that can now have many practical uses. This is a useful science project to producers of medicine.

On Earth we get to see a spectacular show every few years when a comet circling the sun comes within visual range. Astronomers tend to keep track of all the comets and most of the ones around the sun have been plotted out ages ago, although new stars are constantly being studied to see what comets go around them.

Each star is likely to have a couple of comets floating around it in an ecliptic orbit, but this star called Bata Pictoris really takes the cake with 500 comets going around it in orbit. It is located about63 light-years from the Sun. The astronomers using the The HARPS instrument at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile are calling this the largest census of comets around another star ever created.

The comets have been categorized into two families based on the observations of speed, light, size and gas clouds around them. An older set of exocomets that have made multiple passages near the star, and another younger set exocomets that probably came from the recent breakup of one or more larger objects around the star. This study lasted from 2003 to 2011 and took into account more than a thousand observations. It has been a long and fulfilling science project.