E. coli or Escherichia coli is a Gram-negative gammaproteobacterium commonly found in the lower intestine of warm-blooded organisms. It is responsible for many stomach infections and can be quite harmful to the gut bacteria already present. The bacteria is also increasingly drug resistant, which makes it a worthy adversary to doctor’s prescriptions.

Now researchers at the Cornell University have come up with a study that has revealed the ability of the E. coli bacteria to defend itself against antibiotics and other poisons. Essentially the space between the inner and outer membranes of the bacteria’s cells have defensive proteins which not only detect a threat to the cell, but also line up like barrel staves to form a tunnel between pumps in the cell’s inner and outer membranes to eject the intruders.

While the study in of itself is fascinating, what’s more important is that the researchers can now customize medication to hinder this defense mechanism of the bacteria. That is now being considered as the subject of a separate scientific study. The results of which would be extremely beneficial to those who may suffer from E. coli infections in the future.

Ever wondered what would be the last survivor on Earth? The hardiest inhabitant of the planet. One that could outlast all other life forms at the end of the planet? Some curious scientists at the University of Oxford decided to conduct a study to find the answer to that question. The answer will surprise you.

The study focused on surviving possible astrophysical events such as asteroid hits, supernova explosions or gamma-ray bursts. Basically it’s all natural disasters they were studying and nothing quite as catastrophic as a nuclear war fallout.

The study which was published in Scientific Reports mentioned the tardigrade as the last survivor in case of these astrophysical events.  The tardigrade is an eight-legged micro-animal that can live without food or water for 30 years.

Also known as the water bear, this microscopic animal is able to endure temperature extremes of up to 150 degrees Celsius. Imagine surviving the deep sea and even the frozen vacuum of space. They live up to 60 years and at a size of 0.5 mm are best observed under a microscope.

Well this is once science study that does not bode too well for the future of homo sapiens in the event that a star bursts close by.

The current woe for all smartphone users is the need to constantly recharge the battery. While some progress has been made towards having batteries that can store energy for longer periods of time, it is still time consuming to recharge them. This is the reason why carrying battery banks along with the phone has become more of a necessity than a luxury.

Research students in the College of Engineering at Drexel University have come up with a science project which hopes to improve the manner in which batteries are charged. They managed to create a new electrode design from a highly conductive, two-dimensional material called MXene.

Professor Yury Gogotsi, who led the research team hopes that using the new electrode design will help make chemical charge storage, used in batteries and pseudocapacitors, as effective as physical storage used in electrical double-layer capacitors, also known as supercapacitors.

To support his hope the researchers managed to charge the thin MXene electrodes in tens of milliseconds. While there is much more work to be done in making an actual battery which can be charged in seconds, it is interesting to note that the commercial applications for such a product will be phenomenal.

The smartphone is powered by a chip which is more powerful than the one powering the space craft Voyager 1 which recently left the solar system. Yes that is the kind of computing power that your mobile smartphone has.

While you may not be looking to launch space crafts for exploration of outer space anytime soon, you can still do a multitude of things with your smartphone that will better help you utilize it’s untapped potential. Trust me, you can do a lot more than update your social media status with your smartphone which will be beneficial to you.

One such field is your health. The smartphone comes equipped with sensors that can be linked with medical apps that allow you to better understand the functioning of your body. They can remind you to take your pills, monitor your heart beats and even tell you just how many calories you burnt when you last exercised.

The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging & Bioengineering is actually using smartphone in a scientific study to help them track the physical activities of volunteers in more than a hundred countries. One of the more illustrative manners in which a smartphone can be put to really good use.

In the last decade a number of brain training programs have become popular. The concept is that by training your brain you can improve your cognitive functioning and make better decisions, thereby improving the quality of your life. The researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, decided to test this assumption.

Associate professor Joseph Kable, who co-led the study wanted to find out more about how the brain functioned, specially regarding addictive behavior. The study had two groups of which one received brain training 30 minutes a day, five days a week for 10 weeks. The second group played online video games for the same duration.

At the end of this duration both groups were given a series of cognitive tests to perform. It was found that the group with brain training did not do any better than the group who played video games. Both group participants showed a mild improvement over their initial performances before the ten weeks activities.

Eventually the finding of this science experiment which were published in the Journal of Neuroscience suggested that the commercial brain training programs really did not make a big difference to the cognitive functioning ability of the person undergoing the training.

Artificial Intelligence is credited with some amazing abilities. University of Adelaide researchers are now hoping to add to these abilities by creating a robot equipped with AI that can actually take a look at your organs and let you know how long you will live. Okay, it’s not quite at that stage right now, but it’s only a matter of time.

Early diagnosis of most serious conditions results in timely medical intervention. This has been known to save lives. Predicting the course of a disease can allow doctors to create tailor made treatment processes for a patient. Dr Luke Oakden-Rayner,  PhD student with the University of Adelaide’s School of Public Health is a radiologist who wishes to make this diagnosis device a reality.

The idea is to combine deep learning with an ability to analyse images received in order to predict the outcome of the disease. The study of 48 patients’ chests was undertaken to to predict which patients would die within five years. When the results were compared to human predictions made by clinical doctors there was an accuracy rate of 68%

This science experiment shows that it is possible to predict just how long a person will love based on the medical data accumulated by the robot using Artificial Intelligence.

Getting robots to play existing pieces of music is as easy as programming them with what to do at what interval of time. However is it possible for a music playing robot to actually come up with a new piece of music all by itself? That’s what researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are trying to find out.

Shimon is a marimba playing robot with four arms and eight sticks. As part of a science experiment to see if Shimon could use deep learning and artificial intelligence to write new music, researchers fed it over five thousand songs ranging from Beethoven to Lada Gaga. Ph.D. student Mason Bretan also added close to two million motifs, riffs and licks of music to the robot’s repertoire.

Mason Bretan says that after Shimon is given the first four measures to use as a starting point, no humans are involved in either the composition or the performance of the music. The robot has composed two pieces of music that are thirty seconds long. Both performances can be seen on YouTube. This is the first time that a robot has generated melody and harmonic structure on its own. Is this the future of music?

It has been observed that many binary star systems exist throughout the galaxies. Scientists from the University of California – Berkeley, have known that stars are usually binary in nature. In a recent study they wanted to ascertain if they were born that way or one captured the other.

They paid attention to the Perseus molecular cloud which is the dense core within which young stars are born. As the astronomers studied this nest egg of baby stars they were able to see that most sun like stars were born as wide binary systems. These are low mass stars.

Eventually these wide binary systems will either split up or become tight binary systems. The studies were based on statistical models which analysed Perseus molecular clouds. It was found that the only model which could produce the accurate current data started with all stars as binary systems.

This gives credibility to the fact that when our sun was born 4.5 billion years ago, it probably did have a twin. It was not an identical twin, and eventually their binary system split up. There may have been as yet unrecorded nemesis which caused the split. It would make an interesting science project to find out more about this twin.

A gecko is a small animal that has fantastic climbing skills. It can go up and down tree and cliff sides with great ease. Part of the reason why this lizard is able to do these feats is due to the ability of their feet to maintain a grip on the surface that they are scrambling over.

Since science always hopes to imitate nature in order to get good prototypes, the scientists at the American Chemical Society feel that studying the grip of the gecko would yield to better adhesives.

They want to come up with adhesives that are double sided, and can stick on sleek surfaces such as glass as well as rougher surfaces. Some adhesives are effective irrespective of the changes in temperature, light or magnetic field. However most of these are functional only under dry climatic conditions.

Scientists are now considering developing hydrogels which can swell and shrink in response to different acidity levels and other conditions. These can also be used on the ends of robots designed for underwater work so that they can latch on and maintain a better grip on whatever they anchor themselves to. Needless to say plenty of science projects need to follow to make such robots a possibility.

Plants use a natural hydraulic pumping process to pull water and nutrients from the soil below to their top most branches and leaves.  This natural process has inspired the engineering students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to come up with a microfluidic pump that they call “Tree on a Chip.”

The chip pumps water for days at a time at a constant rate. One of the potential uses for the chip could be to power small robots. Anette “Peko” Hosoi, the associate department head for operations in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, said that the chip’s passive pumping may be leveraged as a simple hydraulic actuator used by small robots.

Since it is expensive for engineers to make tiny movable parts and pumps to power complex movements in small robots, using the tree on a chip, would help powering hydraulic robots. The team is hoping to miniaturize and create robots like the Boston Dynamic’s Big Dog.

That is a big four legged robot that can perform many tricks such as running over rough terrain and jumping. The robot is also powered by hydraulic actuators. Future science projects would involve creating smaller robots that can do similar tricks.