Till the 1970s the world’s industries were unaware of any hazard associated with burning sulfurous coal. It was only when the hole in the ozone layer started causing climatic problems that the release of aerosols from this process was finally acknowledged. It was due to the presence of these polluting aerosols in the atmosphere that the amount of sunlight reaching the planet’s surface was reduced. This was known as Solar Dimming.

As the world became more environmentally conscious and started to reduce the release of aerosols and other pollutants into the atmosphere the process of solar dimming gradually began to reverse itself. It was at its worst in the 1980s when the pollution was at its highest, but with decades of care and controlling air pollution, the atmosphere is finally beginning to clear out.

A study conducted by researchers at the University of Exeter have shown that solar dimming managed to enhance river flows over regions in the heavily industrialised northern extra-tropics of Europe. They estimated that in the most polluted central Europe river basin, this effect led to an increase in river flow of up to 25% when the aerosol levels were at their peak, around 1980.

With water shortages likely to be one of the biggest impacts of climate change in the future, these findings are important in making projections for the future, said Nicola Gedney, lead author of the scientific study.

As the fuel in a super massive sized star finishes burning up it tends to collapse on itself becoming a black hole. This is what scientists thought happened to all stars that were a certain large size and above. However now new information has come to light about the unusual death of some ancient stars.

These huge primordial stars were 55,000 to 56,000 times the mass of our sun, but did not become black holes when they burnt out. The stars which are counted as the first generation of the universe’s celestial bodies burned out completely instead of turning into black holes.

They sent out chemical elements other than hydrogen and helium into space paving the way for the later generations of stars,  new solar systems and whole galaxies to be formed. Since the beginning of the universe is a mystery that human beings have long pondered and wanted to solve, finding out more about these stars will help us come step step closer to solving the mystery.

Astrophysicists from three different universities have been astounded by the finding that there was a narrow window where super massive stars could explode completely instead of becoming a super massive black hole. As no one has ever found this mechanism before it has led to a great deal of excitement and curiosity over this scientific study.

Becoming invisible has often been the inspiration for many fiction stories. Think of the Invisible Man, the cloak of invisibility owned by Harry Potter or the baseball cap that makes Annabeth disappear. Being invisible and doing as you wish has been a desire that each of us has cherished at one point of time or the other. That is why scientists have also been working on this project to make it a reality.

At the University of Rochester scientists are working on a project which hopes to make cloaking something to make it invisible to the human eye a reality. There have been many high tech approaches to cloaking and the basic idea behind these is to take light and have it pass around something as if it isn’t there, often using high-tech or exotic materials, said John Howell, a professor of physics at the university.

However previous devices have used expensive and hard to get materials in their research. In this science project Professor Howell and graduate student Joseph Choi developed a combination of four standard lenses that keeps the object hidden as the viewer moves up to several degrees away from the optimal viewing position. Of course this science project is far from developing an item of clothing that you can wear and become invisible, but its ground breaking work all the same.

When a human being walks around he constantly monitors the environment and takes his steps accordingly. When a robot has to walk around it has usually got pre-fed data on the path and can not always monitor changes in real time. Robotic engineers need to ensure that the robots that they design don’t go crashing into things in their way.

This design feature is one that has been constantly evolving with each new generation of robots. With the Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) the scientists at MIT have given computers a better chance of not banging into things in their path. The system uses a camera to take images constantly as the robot moves and compare each picture with the last one. They started out using a laser, but since that was cost prohibitive, they switched to relatively cheaper digital cameras.

The new obstacles that enter the field of motion are navigated and the distance from the last point is noted. This constant ongoing evaluation of the unknown environment allows the robot to move comfortably in areas that is has never visited before. With an addition of a voice directions feature the system also has a possible use for blind people to navigate through new paths on their own as well. Now that would be a really useful science project.

Designing a robot that can fetch exactly what you want when you ask for it has been a problem that programmers have worked on long and hard. Now researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have created a new search algorithm that allows robots to find items with a tag more easily.

The radio-frequency identification tag can be stuck on to any object and the robot finds it easier to trace the object. These tags are self adhesive,  inexpensive and can be stuck on any surface of the object. The robot equipped with a radio frequency reader then simply scans the room for the tag and finds the object.

This method is a whole lot more reliable than the current visuals that a robot takes from cameras and lasers. By looking at a particular item the robot is not always able to identify it, but with the radio frequency identification tag, it will always know that it has got the right object.

The researchers have been working with a PR2 robot during the science project. The Robot has an articulated, directionally sensitive set of antennas and a new algorithm that allows the it to successfully find and navigate to the intended objects. The robot may be able to identify the object using this technique but it still needs to be able to pick it up and move.

Clean, pure drinking water is one of the most scarce commodities in the world today. With the growth of the global population the pressure on drinking water is only going to increase. So wouldn’t it be nice if we could convert salty water (the kind available in oceans) to drinking water?

While such science projects have been successful in the past, they have all required great amounts of energy to work. This expenditure on energy needs had made the water thus processed way too expensive to be economically viable on a large scale. The researchers at MIT have been considering this problem and have come up with the perfect solution for energy requirements – Solar Power.

A desalination process called electrodialysis which is powered by solar energy can be used to provide enough clean drinking water to supply the needs of an entire village. Natasha Wright and Amos Winters are researchers with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are working on a science project involving solar panels and saline underground water in Indian villages.

Electrodialysis may just be the creative answer to drinking problem shortage in underdeveloped countries where power grids do not extend to small isolated villages. What remains to be seen is how this project can be set up in under developed nations with minimum cost.

Most gamers know that the system adapts to their playing skills in order to set them stronger challenges. This means that some amount of programming is dedicated to finding out how a gamer thinks and what goals he is likely to set in a given situation. Now researchers at North Carolina State University have come up with a software that can predicting what goal a player is trying to achieve in a video game with far greater accuracy than before.

The Artificial Intelligence based software holds great potential in helping game manufacturers design new ways of improving the gaming experience for players. Dr. James Lester, a professor of computer science said that they developed this software for use in educational gaming, but it has applications for all video game developers.This is a key step in developing player-adaptive games that can respond to player actions to improve the gaming experience, either for entertainment or — in our case — for education, said Dr Lester.

The researchers tested the software called AI on an educational game called “Crystal Island,” which they developed years earlier. the actions of 137 players were tracked and then the software was able to accurately pin point just what the player was trying to achieve in the game. Now that is an entertaining science project I would love to be a part of.

An absolutely ground breaking science experiment was conducted recently where two people who were 8000 km apart managed to speak from one brain to the other without using a telephone! A brain to brain transmission was facilitated between a person in France and another one in India.

Alvaronn Pascual-Leone, from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical center and Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School said that they wanted to find out if communication was possible by reading brain activity. So they used internet linked electro encephalo gram of EEG to send the words “Hola” and “Ciao” from one person to the other using brain activity.

Four subjects were used wherein one was assigned to the brain computer interface or BCI where he sent the words out and the other three were assigned to computer brain interface CBI and had to receive and interpret the message. Both the words were first converted into binary code and emailed to the subjects. The message was transmitted to the subjects in noninvasive brain stimulation such as flashes of light in their peripheral vision.

The light was then decoded in the brain of the subjects. While they did not report feeling anything the subjects successfully received the correct greeting. The science project was a huge success and could lead to a number of applications. So move over smartphones, the brain is here to stay!

Since the time Apps were invented to be downloaded onto a smartphone there has always been a very real possibility that an app could hack your phone and gain personal information. This is why making sure that an app was programmed by a trustworthy site was of paramount importance.

Now a set of computer scientists at the University of California – Riverside have demonstrated that even a trusted app could end up compromising your smart phone. The researchers revealed a flaw in operating systems such as Android, iOS, and Windows which could allow a hacker to gain personal information from your smart phone if you have downloaded the apps for gmail, CHASE Bank and H&R Block.

The researchers were able to hack into these apps with a success rate between 82 to 92%. Surprisingly Amazon app was the most difficult to hack with a success rate of 48%. The science project began because the researchers felt that there was an unparallelled security risk thanks to the many apps that were being developed by so many different developers the world over

Having proved that any app can be hacked the researchers are now working on reducing the risk that apps provide to a smartphone. Anything that makes the smart phone date more difficult to hack will be well worth waiting for.

As a delivery drone takes off from a location to go make a drop at another predetermined location it must make a number of decisions along the way. The Markov Decision Process or MDP consists of the planning that an autonomous vehicle’s course often involves.  This sequential decision-making framework is also called the Tree of Possibilities.

Just like a tree can branch out along each node into a multiple number of branches, the decisions made by the drone will help it move sequentially from its starting to its ending point. Each action can result in a number of more possibilities. The drone can compute the different number of routes it can take to reach a location even before it takes to the air.

Then it can compute the most optimal route based on another set of variables such as distance, time, and climatic conditions. The final route it decides to fly can also be changed mid flight in case it encounters problems. There is literally a huge number of choices that the drone needs to keep making from the time it takes off till the time it returns.

It is the computer programmer’s job to ensure that the algorithm that he writes will take into account all these variables and allow the drone to reach the right decision each time. As you can well imagine, this is not an easy science project.