Our feathered friends were always judged by the size of their brains. The mammal way is simple, the larger the brain, the smarter the animal. However with the aviary research over the years, it’s possible to say that the same is not true for birds. Even with their small sized brains, the researchers have been able to come up with a number of instances, where the intelligence shines through.

For instance a Goffin’s Cockatoo taught himself how to cut a piece of cardboard and make it into a tool. A northern Goshawk can assess the density of the trees and intuit how fast they can fly ensuring that they don’t crash into anything in the forest but clear all the openings. Black crows actually know how to wait for the traffic light to turn red before they scoop down on the food that may have fallen onto the road from passing vehicles.

In an experiment conducted in New Zealand, Keas Alpine Parrots figured out that they needed to work together to get the treats inside a wooden tower. The mechanism required two chains on opposite sides of the tower to be pulled simultaneously. A fact that was once demonstrated by the human handler and eventually the parrots in the science project managed to learn how to do the deed as a team.

The Earth has a great number of extremes when it comes to landscape and topography. A fact that Geneva based photographer Steeve Iuncker decided to document in his project called Extreme Cities. He’s been around the globe to the highest city, most crowded one, and even the most polluted one. However the one that really left him in shivers is the world’s coldest city, Yakutsk, Russia.

This is the capital city of the Siberian region known as the Sakha Republic. In the summers the temperature rises to 85 degrees Fahrenheit, but the winters can chill at a regular of – 40 degrees Fahrenheit. The coldest temperature ever recorded at the city center was a mind numbing – 83 degrees Fahrenheit.

As Iuncker remarked, everything is ice, fog and shadows in the city. It was a challenge for him to photograph outside because when he braved the cold and went out frost coated his camera. He cleaned out the frost only to realize that it’s internal mechanisms had literally frozen to a halt. It’s not a place for anyone with a delicate disposition.

The ground is so cold that it can’t be broken, neither for construction purposes nor for graves. The air is literally too cold to fly aircrafts and there is absolutely no way any crops will grow in the region. Markets don’t sell vegetables. Just cold, frozen fish. It would be interesting to conduct a science project listing how one could survive in these conditions.

Currently a satellite is expensive to construct on Earth and send out to space. Most often the components required to construct a satellite are launched to outer space and assembled in orbit around the Earth. This is a monolithic construction which can not be updated and changed to meet new requirements.

The outdated satellites are decommissioned and left to float around the Earth. Contributing to the rubbish in space. What if the satellites could be constructed organically in space? Scientists are considering the possibility of growing a platform on which interlinking pieces could be fitted to meet new requirements.

The satellite platform would be able to change as upgrades needed to be made. It would be possible to create antenna farms or solar power stations on such platforms that could be reassembled rather like a large jigsaw puzzle. Imagine the freedom to create structures in space this would give scientists.

While this idea is still just a thought, it is one which could make a lot of logistic problems easier to solve should it actually materialize. Eventually there will come a science project which will make it a reality. Then it will be much easier to imagine human beings living in space for much longer duration of time.

Human being have been out to space and so have an assortment of animal life, however getting plant life out into space has not quite been a priority till now. Scientists are now wanting to study the effect of zero gravity on the growth of plants, especially larger plants like trees. On the International Space Station they have tried to grow young spruce trees in micro gravity.

The results show that tree seedlings of the spruce grew faster on the ISS than they would have on Earth. However the pine needles did not point downwards. This leads to the hypothesis that it is the presence of gravity that makes the pine needles point downwards on Earth. An analysis of the DNA showed that many plant genes were more active in space.

Experiments on plant life are at a very nascent stage in outer space. It will be a while before scientists are able to pin point the exact effects on larger plants grown for a long term period in micro gravity. Currently we know that in the absence of gravity roots and shoots have trouble orienting themselves in outer space. Many more science projects will need to be conducted to get a proper idea of what happens to plants in space.

A visit to the sea side is said to be good for the health. A walk by the coast would result in a good night’s sleep and not just because of the exercise and fresh air. People believe that specific ions in the air by the sea help human beings absorb oxygen better. This makes being by the sea a very restful experience that is often recommended to people who are recovering from health issues.

Being by the sea has a tendency for people to head out to the beach. This means that they get out in the sunlight and spend time doing activities outside. The body get’s a chance to develop vitamin D which is essential for maintaining good health. Enough dosage of vitamin D can help avoid muscle pain, weak bones that can easily fracture, fatigue, lowered immunity, depression, mood swings and sleep irregularities.

Sea Water is also said to be good for skin conditions. The natural salt and potassium chloride which is present in the sea water is said to speed up healing of damaged skin. It has a strong antihistamine effect and is a good decongestant to boot. Living by the sea to improve health issues may be a good science project to take on.

In movies and fiction we often find the protagonist sending a message in a glass bottle out to sea. The bottle usually makes it to a person who then connects with the protagonist and takes the story forward. The chance of the message being delivered and that too to an appropriate person, causes all kinds of romanticism.

In the real world, do things like that occur? If you put a message in a bottle and sent it out to sea, what are the chances of it being lost? What are the chances of it traveling across the world and reaching another human being? It is the mystery of the matter that keeps the message in a bottle an interesting action and symbol of hope.

In the recorded history of messages traveling in a bottle the longest known single journey was taken by a Doctor Who postcard. The bottle with the postcard was thrown in the sea at Tyne and Wear in the United Kingdom in 2011. About 17 months late the bottle was found in Perth, Western Australia. This made a record distance of 14,500 km for the bottle’s journey. It may make an interesting science project to predict how a bottle would travel in various ocean currents around the world.

A Gas Giant Planet is one which doesn’t have a solid surface like Earth, and it is a whole lot larger than our home planet. A good example from our Solar System would be the planet Jupiter. As far as size is concerned Jupiter is nearly 300 times as big as Earth. However the planet has no firm ground as far as the scientists can tell.

As there are so many gases swirling around in the upper regions of the atmosphere, it is nearly impossible for the scientists to see through to the core to determine what exists at the center of the planet. There have been theories put forth that due to the high pressure that must exist at the center of the gas giants such as Jupiter and Saturn, the core must be a rocky one.

However there are others who argue that the center of a gas giant is likely to have a core of molten metal. The metallic core would have been required for the planet to form initially and now that the gases have been collected, the sore would have become molten due to the pressure. All viable science theories, but there is no true validated answer to this mystery as yet.

A phantom traffic jam occurs when vehicles tend to pile up in a grid lock type of situation despite there being no actual problem. The flow of traffic is an often studied aspect and a group of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, CSAIL have revealed that there is one single thing that all drivers can do to ensure that such a phantom traffic jam does not occur.

Guess what that is? Avoid tailgating the driver in front of you! What’s tailgating? Driving very close to the vehicles ahead of you, sort of riding their tail. The MIT professor involved in the study, Berthold Horn, recommends something he calls “bilateral control”. This entails maintaining an equal distance from the vehicle in front of you as well as from the vehicle behind you.

As per Horn, by simply maintaining this distance constantly drivers are likely to reach their destinations twice as fast. It will not only save time, but also reduce fuel costs for those driving as breaking and accelerating constantly tend to consume more fuel than going at a steady speed for the same period of time.

The findings of this scientific study may not make sense to human beings who want to rush in without looking first, but it is something to think about the next time you tailgate the car before you.

A drone has always had to fly high over building tops because it didn’t have the ability to navigate through busy streets which would have cars, trucks and bicycles floating through them. Now the researchers at the University of Zurich have come up with an algorithm which will allow drones to fly through streets and handle traffic.

Davide Scaramuzza, Professor for Robotics and Perception at the University of Zurich, was involved in the creation of DroNet. The creation of this algorithm was a joint venture for the University of Zurich with the National Centre of Competence in Research NCCR Robotics. Scaramuzza says that DroNet recognizes static and dynamic obstacles and can slow down to avoid crashing into them. With this algorithm we have taken a step forward towards integrating autonomously navigating drones into our everyday life.

The drone uses a regular camera like that of a smartphone, instead of the standard practice of outfitting drones with super specialized sensors. The feed from the camera is run through the software and allows the drone to navigate without the peril of crashing into buildings, vehicles and pedestrians. This is a science project that will ensure that drones can handle low level navigation within city streets with ease.

The gecko has the ability to climb walls and walk the ceiling without falling prey to the forces of gravity. That’s not something that human beings can claim to do. Researchers at the American Chemical Society are working on a dry adhesive which could make it possible, one day, for humans to defy gravity and climb walls as well.

The research is currently aimed at producing a dry adhesive that will be ultra-sticky but is also simple enough to produce in large batches without being prohibitive in cost. The scientists have been experimenting with a stiff polycarbonate using a nanoimprinting technique to build web-like layers. This allows the material to be strong, and easily replicated.

The first layer was sacrificed after the second and third were applied. Once the first layer is dissolved, an additional set of layers of the adhesive were applied based on the weight it was to support.  In tests where the film was attached and detached repeatedly, the adhesive retained it’s stickiness for 50 cycles.

In the science project the researchers placed a layer of this adhesive film on the feet of a miniature robot and had it climb a slope of 30 degrees incline. The robot managed to stay the path and did not fall off.