Ask any pet owner and they will swear that their pet can hear and understand everything that they say, not to mention that they respond even though hampered by lack of speech. There are some who will go so far as to say that their dogs can even anticipate what the owners are going to do even before the actual actions take place. So just how intelligent is your pet dog?

The researchers at the University of Sussex decided to find out. The study which was conducted last year shows good evidence that dogs can identify a number or human speech subtleties. The tone of the voice is definitely what they respond to more than the actual words if someone is merely speaking.

However if their owner is actually giving them commands, they listen for the exact words. They will respond to an exact command even if it id delivered in an unfamiliar accent. What’s more, the pet dogs were even able to distinguish between correct commands as opposed to ones with jumbled syllables.

For instance “Come on, then” got a response while “Thumb on, Ken” did not. So you know that the dogs could actually figure out some of the words themselves and not just go with the tone. All in all this science project proved what dog owners around the world already know, dogs are very intelligent beings!

There is nothing quite as disgusting as the sludge that flows through the many sewage drains of our mighty cities. The complex drainage system that literally takes the crap out of your house has a far from pleasing end result. There have been no productive uses of this sewage sludge till now.

At the Universiti Putra Malaysia, researchers are coming up with a way to use dried sewage sludge as an alternative cement material for concrete. As the volume of sludge increases and the environmental laws get more strict about legal ways to dispose of it, this science experiment could actually have far reaching consequences.

What they did is to first produce domestic waste sludge powder or DWSP  by taking regular sludge and then dried it. This was later powdered and mixed with cement at different ratios for different consistencies. 3, 5, 7, 10 and 15% mixtures were made and then compared to regular cement in terms of their compressive strength, water absorption, water permeability and rapid chloride ion penetration.

While more detailed studies and analysis will be required, the researchers have said that there is great potential in the study conducted. DWSP can be used as a partial cement replacement in the future as long as some more science projects figure out just how to use it.

Minerals are defined by their unique combination of chemical composition and crystal structure. Rather like the words in a book some minerals are commonly found while others are rare and define the vocabulary present in a book. A mineral species is only likely to be found in one location about 22 percent of the time. Finding the same mineral species in more than five locations is an extremely rare event.

This is why certain areas are easily mined for a specific mineral while you will have no trace of the same mineral in certain other areas. Rare minerals define our planet’s mineralogical diversity as per Robert Hazen. Hazen has been studying the diversity of minerals in the soil and has analysed large chunks of the Earth’s surface. He believes that thousands of plausible rare minerals either still await discovery or have been buried and lost in Earth’s violent tectonic plate rebalances.

Hazen and his colleagues predicted that nearly 35 percent of sodium minerals remain undiscovered, because more than half of them are white, poorly crystallized, or water soluble. By contrast, fewer than 20 percent of copper, magnesium, and copper minerals have not been discovered. Needless to say the results of this science study will keep mineralogists busy for decades!

That the Earth is unique in our knowledge that it is the only planet with life on it is old news. Now new research at the Carnegie Institute says that the Earth is unique even in its mineralogy. That nowhere in the cosmos is there as much mineral diversity as there is on Earth. With more than fifteen hundred undiscovered minerals and nearly five thousand already known, the diversity of Earth’s minerals is unlikely to be duplicated anywhere in the solar system or even the universe.

Robert Hazen, team leader of the study developed a theory about a decade ago that the large number of minerals found on the planet correspond to the rise of life. That the minerals have been produced either as a direct consequence of biological activity, or have been indirectly influenced by it. Bacterial photosynthesis which increased oxygen concentration in our atmosphere  more than 2.4 billion years ago, has been a primary catalyst for this mineral diversity.

Needless to say, that if biological activity is related to mineral diversity, then a planet with no life is likely to have far less mineral diversity. This means that the scientific study postulates that in the absence of life, no other planet will have the same rich mineralogy as Earth.

At Carnegie Institute Robert Hazen has been working on the unique mineralogy of the planet Earth for more than a decade.  Hazen says that minerals follow the same kind of frequency of distribution as words in a book. For example, the most-used words in a book are extremely common such as ‘and,’ ‘the,’ and ‘a.’ Rare words define the diversity of a book’s vocabulary. The same is true for minerals on Earth, Hazen says.

Hazen also feels that the vast diversity of minerals found on Earth is because of the vast diversity of biological activity that living things perform on Earth. Hazen’s team applied the biological concepts of chance and necessity to mineral evolution and found that

There is no denying that robot are useful when it comes to medical care.  The robotic surgeries are more precise, the robot health care givers for the elderly at home are better than humans, and now the robotic revolution is ready to pass on its benefits to the field of internal medicine.

Futuristic microscopic fish are all set to enter where no robot has been before, inside the human body. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego have taken 3D printing to a new level by churning out a fish that is so small that sixteen of them would fit into the area occupied by a single grain of sand. That is small indeed, but its not the only fascinating thing about these fish.

With magnetic iron oxide nano particles in the head and platinum nano particles in the tail, the fish can be directed through the blood stream by effectively controlling its direction and speed. The body itself is made of a gel which has already been used in other medical applications.

Sending in the microscopic fish to diagnose and even cure ailments is the next step for the researchers.  Needless to say this science project is indeed ground breaking stuff in the field of internal medicine. Although we are still a few years away from the fish living up to their full potential.

The Lotus Leaf has a natural tendency to repel water. A very useful trait for a water based plant to have, as otherwise there would be a great likelihood of the flower and plant not surviving in the marshy waters. The surface of the lotus flower tends to let water slide right off without absorbing it. This is a principle which has inspired a number of liquid repellent projects in science laboratories worldwide.

The latest study in engineering a surface which un-sticks water droplets comes from Penn State Materials Research Institute, where the researchers have developed the first nano, micro-textured highly slippery surface that can work even with tiny water molecules or even water vapour form.

Tak-Sing Wong, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and a faculty member at the institute said that the work  represented a fundamentally new concept in engineered surfaces. Mobility of liquid droplets on rough surfaces is highly dependent on how the liquid wets the surface. We have demonstrated for the first time experimentally that liquid droplets can be highly mobile when in the Wenzel state, Wong added.

There are many practical applications of liquid repellent surfaces from water harvesting in arid areas, to heat exchangers in power plants. The surface designed in this science project will have a multitude of practical uses.

There are traditionally held views on the shape of different galaxies which are now being questioned at the Cardiff University by researchers. It was initially believed that the galaxy was formed in a certain shape and maintained that shape, more or less, over a period of time. This was an accepted practice till a team of scientists have shown over the course of a new study that galaxies can actually change their shapes over a period of time.

At Cardiff University the researchers have been using the Hubble and Herschel telescopes to observe galaxies and classified them into two primary types. The flat, rotating, disc-shaped galaxies like the Milky way is the first shape and the large, oval-shaped galaxies with a swarm of disordered stars is the second shape. As they looked further out in to the night sky and so further into the past, they noticed that the majority of galaxies that formed shortly after the Big Bang were disc shaped.

However when they compared the 83% disc shaped galaxies in the ancient past to the mere 49% disc shaped galaxies in the more recent past, they developed the theory that galaxies indeed change their shapes over a period of time. Of course this science project is in a nascent state and will need a whole lot more collaboration.

Carbon dioxide is often referred to as a waste gas as a by product of breathing. It is also associated with rising temperature levels globally and also has negative connotations as the by product of fossil fuel burning. In short, while plants may need carbon dioxide to make food, we humans are not very fond of it per se.

On the other hand if it is reduced to carbon monoxide it is seen as a building block for a number of other chemical components including renewable fuel. Imagine if you could take the CO2 and remove one oxygen molecule and make it CO with the least bit of effort, you could be sitting on a very useful process indeed.

The department of engineering at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is working on a science project which incorporates molecules of porphyrin CO2 catalysts into a crystal of covalent organic frameworks that absorb carbon dioxide and even reduces it to carbon monoxide.

Christopher Chang, a chemist with Berkeley Lab’s Chemical Sciences Division said that “To date, such porous materials have mainly been used for carbon capture and separation, but in showing they can also be used for carbon dioxide catalysis, our results open up a huge range of potential applications in catalysis and energy.” What specific science projects this will be used in, only time can tell.

Guess how civil unrest and humanitarian crises can be picked out from outer space? Apparently war torn areas depict better quality and cleaner air as seen from space. An article in a science journal analysed the satellite data from observations of major cities in West Asia to reach the conclusion that areas which have seen recent conflict show a rapid decline in nitrogen oxides in their atmosphere.

The main reason for the decline in nitrogen oxides, which are a by product of most manufacturing industries, is the dampener that war like situations place on the economy of an area. So if there is civil unrest and the economy is tanking, there is no production taking place and hence there are less pollutants in the air.

The article mentions studying the data collected from 2005 to 2010, where West Asia was rapidly developing economically. During this time the nitrogen oxide levels were fairly high. However as political conflicts began to assault the area from 2010 to 2015, the level of economic activity took a nose dive.

This also correlated with the clearing up of air in the area above major cities in the West Asia region. While going to war may not be the best solution for reducing air pollution, this science study sure brought home an interesting point.