One of the most difficult things to procure when you need running experiments on human beings is actual volunteers. The need for a larger sample pack can just about cripple an experiment even before it takes off. So when the US Government comes up with a genetic and lifestyle study which will need a million volunteers, you can imagine the state of affairs.

President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative led the National Institutes of Health to lead the study which currently involves collection of more statistical data before any medicines can be actually manufactured. The laboratory work includes collection of medical histories as well as actual blood samples from which DNA will later be extracted for study.

The sheer logistics of the science project are admirable. Imagine trying to convince a million volunteers to give up information about themselves for a 10 year project. Things like age, race, income, education, sexual orientation, and gender identity are just the tip of the iceberg that is being studied.

Lifestyle information of the study subject will delve into information such as a person’s regular diet, exercise habits, sleep patterns, drinking and smoking addictions and a whole lot more. Needless to say signing up a million people before the end of the year when the project is due to begin, is going to be a major exercise in itself.

For us to know that the climate has changed we need to find records of what the climate was in a place before. Not every area has the distinction of having had it’s local climate recorded by previous generations, but Henry David Thoreau did Concord, Massachusetts that favour by recording his observations of first flowering times from 1852 to 1858.

Boston University based biologist Richard Primack has now decided to set up a comparative study using the data available from Thoreau’s book called Walden. The book has records for more than 300 types of fauna’s flowering in spring. It also speaks of when the ice melts on the Walden Pond, and when migratory birds came back to the local fields and forests.

Since 2004 Primack has begun a study in to the first flowering times in the area, which is nearly 160 years after the original handwritten data was collected. They have been seeking early blooms in areas of human disturbances. While Thoreau found his flowers along railroad tracks, Primack is finding them near parking lots.

Once the data has been studied it is obvious from the science project that many plants are blooming nearly two weeks earlier than they used to. Also the migratory birds arrive at roughly the same time and the ice breaks up earlier than before.

Scientists at the Washington University have come up with camera technology that surpasses every known camera in terms of speedy clicks. The new camera technology developed by a team led by Lihong V Wang is reported to take pictures a hundred times faster than regular cameras today. Now that is literally taking pictures faster than the speed of light.

Compressed Ultrafast Photography or CUP allows the camera to capture a record 100 billion frames per second. What’s more the speed does not affect the quality of the pictures taken, if anything the resolution of the images is better than the ones clicked by ordinary cameras. It is being called the world’s fastest receive only camera. That means it can use available light for imaging and does not need additional light. Say goodbye to the irritating flash pops.

The high speed of the camera makes this technology useful for studying ultra fast processes such as neurons firing, fuel burning, chemicals exploding, and a whole lot more if combined with a microscope. Needless to say the new camera technology exposed by this science project is likely to prove incredibly popular amongst the scientific community for future studies.

Washington DC is a place full of spectacular sights. Everyone who visits will be flabbergasted with the busy city. Now blind travellers to the city may have expected to immune to the sights, but technology is making it possible for them to have an amazing experience there. The L’Enfant Plaza transit station is a busy, noisy junction with three levels and five different Metro lines converging.

Not exactly the kind of place a blind traveller would be comfortable navigating all on his own. That’s what you can be excused for thinking because you don’t know about the  cooperative robots Aaron Steinfeld, NSF-funded robotic scientist at Carnegie Mellon University and his team are building.

The job of the co-robots is to empower people with disabilities to safely travel and navigate unfamiliar environments. Given the scope of area and constantly changing obstacles in an area such as the station, this is going to be a huge undertaking for the team.

Essentially they hope to be able to give the person a good idea of where they are located, how they can get to where they need to be, and not making the blind person feel as awkward as they would have if they were dealing with areal person in place of a robot. This is one science project that’s really going to make a difference.

Imagine a scenario where you are in a tough to reach spot and end up having a medical emergency. Say you went hiking and got lost. You are diabetic and your medications are not with you. You need to take that insulin or you will go into a coma. Now you are literally miles from civilisation on the side of a mountain that you were hiking up. What do you do?

A few years ago all you could have done was call on your mobile and hope that rescue workers managed to come find you in time. Then you just didn’t have the option of a drone honing in on you using a GPS system and guess what? It’s actually carrying that medicine that you need. All you got to do is wait for it to come land next to you, get your medicine off it and you are saved.

Matternet is a start – up which is looking to do more than deliver just individual medicines to people in trouble. It’s looking at making drops of medicinal packages to emergency or disaster hot areas. Places which have suffered earthquakes, tsunamis, and other disasters would not have to wait for the physical arrival of people to get help. This new drone based science project would be able to get them help much faster.

Medical robotics has undergone a drastic change in the last couple of decades that robots have been used in treating patients. While even today the true potential of robotics has yet to be utilised in the medical industry there is no denying the fact that a number of less invasive treatments have been created using the field.

The new robotic implements in use have made it possible to get much better pre-operative and or real-time imaging for the surgeons making their job so much easier than before. The accuracy of reaching difficult spots during surgery has also been improved with the use of robotic arms. Surgery is not the only medical field that has received aid from robotics.

A lot is being done with robotics in rehabilitation medicine as well. The patients of strokes who need to relearn how to use their limbs can work rather well with medical robotic arms that allow them to progress with their rehabilitation on their own pace. A number of hospitals around the world have begun using such robots to help with patient care after recovery.

Needless to say any new science projects that deal with medical robotics are likely to be rather popular considering the amount of help they already render doctors and patients alike.

For those obsessed with automobile history, the hybrid car is an idea which has been followed down the ages. Even in the popular animation movie Planes, from Disney Studio, we see a hybrid car and plane giving the main character expert advice. Having true door to door transportation for long distance travel that involves flying has been a popular dream.

A dream which may just soon become a reality. The Terrafugia TF-X is the first fully autonomous flying car under development by Boston-based Terrafugia. Its expected release date is listed as eight to twelve years. The  TF–X is a semi-autonomous four-seat hybrid electric flying car with vertical take off and landing capabilities. Now this is the kind of science fiction that comes to life as soon as technology catches up.

It has  retractable wings attached with pusher propellers while aerial thrust is provided by a ducted fan at the rear.It will be able to fit in a single car garage so storage is not going to be a deterrent. Powered by two plug-in hybrid 600-horsepower electric motors and a 300-horsepower fuel engine, the TF-X is planned to have a flight range of 500 miles (805 km) with a cruising flight speed of 200 mph (322 km/h) without the need to refuel or recharge. That’s one science project people are going to want to see.

At the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore robotic engineers are as much in demand as physical therapists. Part of the reason is their physical therapy program developed to help stroke victims relearn how to use their limbs. It starts with a simple computer game played with the “H-man” to sharpen the movement skills and then moves on into individually tailored effort.

Associate Professor Dominico Campolo said that they want to bring these robots to homes and community centres, where you can have multiple stations for patients to play, literally, with other patients or therapists. Basically, you can monitor the patients from the hospital. They are trying to decentralise healthcare.

As per Campolo the “H-man” is a more financially viable option compared to the robots that are already in use in physical therapy units with some hospitals. These robots cost about S$200,000, while the “H-man” costs 20 to 25 per cent of that price making is far more affordable.

The H-man has a had fairly successful trials and is only likely to improve as the researchers continue to fine tune the process. This is one science project which can really change the lives of stroke victims in a positive manner.

Losing weight can be an exhilarating experience for someone who was obese and had an extra layer of fat floating around the centre of the body. With proper diet and exercise the extra kilos can come right off the human body, but when you lose weight what actually happens to the extra fat that was stored earlier in the body?

Our body fat is called triglycerides. This is stored for use as fuel when the body needs to use it for energy. There are enzymes in the blood which will take the triglycerides and break them down into fatty acid chains and glycerol. The fatty acids are a form of energy that cells can absorb.

The fatty acids are further broken down within the cells and fed as fuel to the mitochondria, which is basically the power generator of the cell. Once the fatty acids are used up they disintegrate into carbon di oxide and water. These are again thrown out of the body from our lungs and through our urine respectively.

That is how the fats that have been stored in the body can break down and be absorbed completely. So the next time you decide to conduct a science experiment about how well you can lose weight, be sure to remember just where the body fat goes!

A room mate can have many appealing qualities, but talking in their sleep at night would not be considered one. Why do some people have a habit of talking in their sleep while others don’t? It comes down to a mechanism in the brain which is associated with controlling, or guiding certain neural activity. This allows the person to dream, but without speaking or moving.

When the brain mechanism is not perfect, it does not completely kill the actual talking and moving responses triggered by a dream. While not all the signals will be passed through a fair amount do make it and cause the sleeping person to mumble, maybe groan a bit or at times even very clearly say things while they are technically still asleep.

This is the reason why sleep walking also gets triggered. researchers believe that a person who is under severe stress can have psychological problems which lead to the lack of this neural activity to control the speaking or moving around of a person in sleep. There is no clear evidence on how much stress will trigger this, and if it will affect everyone the same way. That is a study for another science project.