Postal Drones in Switzerland have already began delivery runs, even if they are just practice runs. The country is hoping to have these flying postmen in full swing within the next five years. As of now its a very scaled down test project. The initial testing of the drone’s post delivery abilities will run over the next month. Now when you are waiting for your mail to be delivered, you will not be looking down the road and at your gate, but up in the sky!

And here’s how to identify your postal drone…You will see a snow-white colored drone with four branches. Each will have a propeller aloft it and the branches extend out from a ring which is roughly the size of your toilet seat. The distinguishing mark of course is the yellow box that it will carry which is emblazoned with the Postal Service logo of the Swiss postal services in the middle.

At present a single drone may carry about one kilogram worth of mail over a radius of ten kilo meters in a single charge. That is about 2.2 pounds over 6.2 miles, not bad for an unmanned robot. The science project dealing with the drones is bound to make better versions which can carry more load and deliver it a farther distance in the not so distant future.

Making faster means of transportation is what the human race has mastered over the last century. Just a hundred years ago in 1915 it would take nearly three months for people to “pop across the pond”, but today its a matter of a single day’s flight. Not everyone is happy with the 17 hour long flight that currently runs between the two cities and naturally there are always plans to make the trip last for a lesser time.

A Boston based company called Spike Aerospace is currently testing a design for a Supersonic Aeroplane that may be able to deliver a load of twenty people from London to New York in just about three hours. The plans for the S-512 Supersonic Jet were officially announced way back in 2013. The design has since then been undergoing constant updates to make it safer and feasible.

The aeroplane is likely to have the ability to travel at Mach 1.8 speed which is 1.8 times faster than the speed of sound. Needless to say it would be much faster than the Jumbo Jet which currently plies at a sedate Mach 0.92.  That it is possible to achieve the speed is already proved by the F-18 Hornet, a military fighter jet, however when the science project culminates and this plane is built will be the fastest commercial carrier.

If you see some beautiful swans swimming in Singapore, don’t try to feed them. They might just be robotic swans skimming the water body for signs of pollution. These elegant looking bird like robots were built by researchers at the National University of Singapore (NUS) Environmental Research Institute and the Tropical Marine Science Institute.

They identify the physical and biological components found in fresh water and then pass on the data via a wireless connection to a website. Then the data is studied by researchers to analyse the findings. The whole process is automated to a great degree. The Swan robots also do not need to be directed to swim in the water body as they can travel autonomously for hours at a time.

The elegant posture and pure white feathers of the swan robots have been kept on purpose to ensure that the swans blend in with the natural environment. The participants of this science project look most authentic if you only look at them from the top, below the water the propellers and instruments used to measure the water will fast rob you of the opinion that they are nothing more than birds out for a swim. They even use GPS technology to specifically visit areas of the reservoir that they have been instructed to.

Parents are always looking for toys to keep children amused, entertained and if possible learning skills. A whole industry of educational toys makes its living off this desire. The newest addition to the market is likely to be a robot. This little robot is designed with four in built games that children can play, plus with the ability to be paired with a smartphone and programmed. Called Vortex it is compatible with both Android and iOS devices.

The makers of Vortex are a company called DFRobot, based in Shanghai. DFRobot specializes in developing robotics and open source hardware for the maker community. With the Vortex children will be able to drag and drop modules to enable the robot to do what they wish. The Arduino-based robot runs on four AA batteries and can run for 40 to 90 minutes based on the activities that it has been programmed to perform.

A truly interesting science project, the general activities that Vortex can perform include picking its way through obstacles, detecting lines, and talking in response to verbal stimuli. Different combinations allow the robot to play different games with the children. The four games added to the basic Vortex model include Bumping Fight, Virtual Golf, Driving and Robot Soccer. Vortex can be expanded with other sensors, Ryan Daws said, for temperature, sound, accelerometer, gyroscope, ultrasonic, touch sensor, and more via the I2C socket.

After nearly a decade, the wait is finally over. Pluto finally gets to meet New Horizons and the space craft is now of the farther side of the planet having successfully culminated its flypast. Alice Bowman, the mission operations manager confirmed that they have a healthy spacecraft, they have recorded data of the Pluto system, and they’re outbound from Pluto.

After nearly twenty hours of recording information New Horizons finally sent back confirmation of all systems normal to a packed auditorium where Bowman received them to much jubilation in the room. The sheer magnitude of data waiting to be sorted through will take nearly the next sixteen months to reach the planet. Needless to say with several eager scientists waiting to analyse it, just like waiting for the next episode of your daily soap opera.

Just the three huge greyscale pictures that arrive tomorrow will create a huge amount of buzz as they will allow us to see the surface of Pluto as never seen before. The researchers can expect temperature readings, solar wind measurements, nitrogen molecule counts, and whole lot of other variable recordings made by New Horizons. Needless to say that this is one science project that is going to have astronomers busy for decades.

That the smartphones have taken over the mobile market is a well known fact, but it is also true that the initial smartphones were not exactly practical to use. They were delicate and had features that could easily stop working if merely rattled a bit. Now Turning Robotic Industries has unveiled a super phone. One which their CEO Syl Choa is calling unbreakable and unhackable.

The Turing Phone is a 5.5-inch smartphone, running Android 5.1 and that’s about as conventional as it gets. It has three sharp bold colors and is inspired by sketches of science fiction spaceships. It comes in three models: Pharaoh, Cardinal, and Beowulf. It has no USB port or headphones jack but just a single proprietary jack that looks a little like the MacBook’s MagSafe, and Bluetooth capabilities.

The software that operates the phone is entirely customized and CEO Choa promises that it will be a masterpiece. With fingerprint readers on the side and end to end encryption for all core apps of the phone, he is not kidding. This is one science project that is going possibly increase in value even after you purchase it if the cryptocurrency called Turing Coin inside it begins to appreciate in value. Now if that is not a super phone, what it?

Dawn is the probe that NASA sent out in September 2007 to study the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. So far it has covered investigations of the two largest objects in the asteroid belt, namely Vesta and Ceres. The $466 million space mission has a small set back when the probe went into safe mode.

It may be just a precautionary measure that the system on board Dawn has taken, but observers have made it clear that it will stay in its current orbit around the dwarf planet till the investigations being undertaken are completed. The safe mode action was initiated on June 30th when the space craft’s protective software detected a problem of some sort.

This resulted in Dawn shutting down its engines and while mission team members managed to get Dawn back in action after two days, they are not changing its orbit till they know for sure what caused the initial problem. As part of the mission the probe was to finish four orbits around the dwarf planet, each at a closer orbit.

Currently Dawn has finished two orbits and was about to start on the third one when the problem struck. The mission team had hoped to launch the probe into the next orbit in August this year. Despite the problems this science project has had a fair deal of success.

Think about jetting off to another planet sometime in the future and the rocket with its propellent is the most common image in the mind of any science fiction fan. Perhaps that is why when you are asked to consider a propellent less E-Sail the imagination is left grasping at straws. So what is this new technology and just how viable is it?

“The E-sail utilizes long, charged tethers to convert natural solar wind momentum flux into spacecraft thrust.” Yes, that is just like a sail boat on the ocean back on Earth. There is no fuel involved, its all solar wind powered by a technology that was invented in Finland in 2006.

Finnish Meteorological Institute researchers hope that the technology will be able to make manned flights to Mars a possibility. Here’s what the official line is, “Electric solar wind sail facilitated Manned Mars Initiative (EMMI) makes continuous bidirectional manned Mars flights possible by utilising water mined from the asteroids. In the heart of this scheme is the electric solar wind sail which provides propellantless transportation within the solar system, thus enabling economical asteroid mining.”

Just how viable this E-sail is likely to be in interplanetary distances is a fact that is yet to be tested by this science project.

The Mars rover Curiosity has something called the ChemCam instrument which is short for Chemistry and Camera. This is able to provide information about the chemical composition of rock structures it reaches by pulsing a laser beam at them. The zap induced sparks are then studied with reference to a spectrometer to determine just what the rock is composed of.

The ChemCam had been out of commission due to a laser malfunction and this had made the instrument worthless. However with help from the instrument’s team members at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and in France automated repairs have been conducted on the laser and they seem to have worked.

The repairs included an alternative auto-focus method following loss of use of a small laser. This laser had served for focusing the instrument during the Curiosity rover’s first two years of exploration on Mars. The team took several images using the auto focus and determined which were the best after having them transferred to Earth, before reverting these setting to the actual instrument on Mars

The tedious but successful repairs of the science project have allowed the Curiosity rover to continue in its quest with the newly refurbished rock vision.

That we are obsessed with our neighboring planet is no surprise. Mars is one of the closest celestial bodies that human beings have been able to study from the surface. Sending in probes to the red planet has been a common enough mission. In fact NASA now counts five active mission orbiters around the planet.

Given the fragile nature of the orbiters, and their rather complex systems it is a full time job to ensure that none of the five orbiting space crafts manage to bump into each other as they fly around the planet. So what are these orbiters? NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) and India’s Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) joined the 2003 Mars Express from ESA (the European Space Agency) and two older ones from NASA called the 2001 Mars Odyssey and the 2006 Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) last year.

An enhanced collision-avoidance process guidance system ensures that these critters stay out of the way from each other and avoid the big bang that could end a number of science projects riding on them. Perhaps there is a future for air controllers in the skies of Mars as humans keep sending more and more probes out to orbit and study the planet.