Pluto has been in the news for a number of reasons of late, not the least of which was being deprived of its planet status. Those who consider it to be the ninth planet are mad at the body of astronomers who have demoted Pluto to a dwarf planet status.

There is a lot we do not know about Pluto. Some trivia we have been able to glean from a distance including the fact that a day on Pluto will be equivalent to six and a half earth days. We expect it to be covered in ice and have extremely cold temperatures on the surface. However there has been little actual evidence to support these opinions.

The New Horizons space craft from NASA is on a historic mission to help us understand the planet Pluto better. It has recently begun its six month fly past of Pluto and will be sending home images that will exceed the resolution of the Hubble Telescope based images of Pluto that we currently have.

As the planet reveals its secrets over the next six months, scientists will be eagerly studying all the new data that is revealed in this science project. Perhaps now we will actually know what Pluto is all about instead of merely making informed guesses.

For a while the whole wide world was wondering what the fox said, but then the curiosity died down. Now a new restaurant in London is coming up with a novel plan to introduce you to the fox while you eat. The idea behind dining with the fox is essentially to get to know the wild animal a bit better.

In urban areas foxes are usually seen as a menace that digs up gardens, disturbs trash cans and cuts through fences. The people behind the restaurant want to introduce the slightly more playful and fun side of the fox to the diners. By watching the fox at close quarters and seeing how it reacts and plays with humans is supposed to do the trick.

The restaurant is not yet open, but here’s the kicker, more than fifteen hundred people have already signed up to have a meal with the elusive fox. The novelty of the idea has sure caught the eye of more than one family, who wishes to come in and say hello to the fox.

In a way this is an interesting opportunity to conduct a science experiment to see just how many people would be willing to dine in the presence of a wild animal. So would you dine with a fox?

Predicting how a random crowd will move through an area was always thought to be difficult, however the American Physical Society claims that its all a matter of statistical physics. Gaming in virtual reality can be difficult when you don’t get the crowds around you just right, and now a new law exits to show how pedestrians interact in a crowd.

It is based on the fact that most people will pick the shortest distance to walk along with avoiding any possible collisions with anyone on the way. People do this intuitively, but in the virtual reality world of gaming the programers have to create this effect using software programs.

By applying this statistical physics law they will be able to create a simulation where crowds move in the game much as they would move in real life. As the simulations were worked upon by researchers certain crowd patterns appeared. These patterns, such as the one where a person avoids collision from on comers with greater distance than those who are walking in the same direction, help predict crowd behavior with more accuracy than previous models.

Ioannis Karamouzas of the University of Minnesota who was involved in the scientific study of crowd patterns said that the universality of the law was really surprising, and understanding this can lead to safer building designs and shed some light into the anticipatory nature of human interactions,

The damaged Herculaneum scrolls are an ancient piece of history that can not be viewed unfurled. However now with everyone may be able to read these 2000 year old scrolls that were carbonized in the Mount Vesuvius volcanic eruption of A.D. 79, with a little help from the University of Kentucky Department of Computer Science.

Professor Brent Seales is now working on a software that would help you see the writing on the scrolls as through they were unrolled. The combination of digital imaging techniques and breakthrough technology will ensure that they way we look at history is never the same again.

Each of the Herculaneum scrolls is 20 to 30 feet in length with estimated 3,000 words on it. In terms of volume that will be like the entire works of Shakespeare and then some. They were discovered as charred clumps in the Villa of the Papyri in the ancient Italian city of Herculaneum beginning in 1752. Its been a long time but till this virtual unrolling was made possible by technology, there was just no way to read them.

This science project members hopes that by the time they are done they would have created a software tool and a set of scans of scrolls that together will transform the hopelessly damaged Herculaneum collection into new literary discoveries.

With every new bit of technology that comes out of NASA’s stables it becomes more and more obvious that we now have amazing tools at our disposal to learn more about our solar system. The last science project to catch the eye is a software called OnSight.

OnSight a new technology that has been developed in collaboration between NASA and Microsoft at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasedena. This will enable scientists to work virtually on Mars by using wearable technology which has been named Microsoft HoloLens. Jeff Norris who is JPL’s OnSight project manager said that it will enhance the ways in which we explore Mars and share that journey of exploration with the world.

It uses holographic computing along with visual information overlays to give a person sitting on earth the feel of what the Mars rover is actually seeing on Mars.Dave Lavery, program executive for the Mars Science Laboratory mission at NASA Headquarters in Washington said that OnSight gives our rover scientists the ability to walk around and explore Mars right from their offices.

It fundamentally changes our perception of Mars, and how we understand the Mars environment surrounding the rover, said Dave. This is one science project that Mars enthusiasts across the board will be paying attention to for the next few years.

Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is a beautiful spiral galaxy which seems to be larger than what was earlier imagined. Scientists at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or RPI seem to think that the Milky Way is at least fifty time larger than what we thought based on new findings that reveal that the galactic disk is contoured into several concentric ripples.

Professor Heidi Jo Newberg was leader of the team of scientists that revisited astronomical data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. This was the study published in 2002 which established the presence of a bulging ring of stars beyond the known plane of the Milky Way.

Heidi Newberg said that based on the study they have found that they see at least four ripples in the disk of the Milky Way. While they can only look at part of the galaxy with this data, they assume that this pattern is going to be found throughout the disk. This means that the size of the Milky Way which was so far based on what could be seen in space, is now a faulty estimation of its actual size.

While further scientific studies will be required to check just how large the Milky Way actually is and the number of stars that truly exist in it, it is safe to say that it is larger than the size what we previously thought it was.

Enceladus is a moon of Saturn which the Cassini spacecraft has recently sent back information of. The scientists at NASA have seen signs of present-day hydrothermal activity on the moon which leads them to consider that Enceladus may be harboring suitable environments for living organisms. Naturally this would be miniscule sized life and not full blown intellectual life as present on Earth.

So what is hydrothermal activity? When seawater goes through a rocky crust and then comes out infused with minerals the heat produced is referred to as hydrothermal activity. This is a regular occurrence in the oceans of Earth. Sean Hsu, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado at Boulder says that we can use these tiny grains of rock, spewed into space by geysers, to tell us about conditions on, and beneath the ocean floor of an icy moon.

John Grunsfeld, astronaut and associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington says that the locations in our solar system where extreme environments occur in which life might exist may bring us closer to answering the question: are we alone in the universe? Perhaps this science project will help us find alien life in our own solar system.

Vehicles are the worst polluter of the atmosphere with emissions clogging up the air around us in almost all big cities. Part of the problem is that they use fossil fuels that are not quite as efficient in burning. Another part is that vehicles are heavy mechanical beasts that need tremendous power to be pulled.

At the Indian Institute of Technology a research academy scholar Abhishek Tripathi has begun an experiment to make vehicles lighter. By reengineering the vehicles he hopes to make them more efficient in burning fuel. He has turned to magnesium instead of aluminum to make the frame of his vehicle lighter.

Magnesium is half the weight of aluminum and would work well in theory. However it is also a very brittle metal and can’t always be molded into the shapes required for automobile parts. Instead of using conventional processing techniques such as rolling, forging and extrusion, Tripathi is experimenting with a new technique called Friction Stir Processing or FSP.

FSP is a shorter solid-state processing technique which will be able to make structural changes quickly and in a single step. FSP will be able to address refinement and densification homogenously and fast. This is one science project that could have a major impact on the way vehicles are designed in the future.

First responders have to often risk their lives in order to rescue others. With robots designed to help first responders in their rescue missions the element of risk can be controlled. One of the main reasons why robot rescuers have not become quite as popular as earlier envisioned is because they are extremely energy hungry. They discharge their batteries super fast and soon become useless in areas where they can not be recharged quickly and efficiently.

Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories are tackling this issue of energy efficiency in robots in the hope of creating true robot rescuers who can function just as well as their human counterparts and for just as long as it takes. They are developing technology that will really improve the endurance of biped robots, allowing them operate for extra periods of time while working in the types of locomotion most relevant to disaster response scenarios.

The graduate students are planning to showcase their new technological advances in the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals in June 2015. The goal of this science project here is not to make a big, bad ass robot, but rather an efficient one that can be used in emergency situations as a major tool. It will be interesting to see how these robots develop.

The Earth is covered by water and land constitutes just one fourth of the surface, yet human beings are no where near uncovering the secrets of the deep oceans than a couple of hundred years ago. The human body is much too fragile to endure the harsh environment of the underwater regions for long stretches of time. This limits the ability of human researchers to explore the depths of the ocean first hand in a detailed manner.

For the past few decades there has been considerable work done in the field of oceanology, but scientific research has received a real boost when the field or underwater robotics began to flourish. Researchers at the National University of Singapore are closer to creating underwater robotic creatures with a high degree of artificial intelligence.

The robotic turtles which were designed by NUS are among the most maneuverable robots that have been made available for ocean research. Soon they will be able to produce a whole swarm that can work autonomously together enabling ocean researchers to conduct science experiments that they could not even have dreamed about a decade ago. Perhaps this new breed of underwater robots will finally be able to patrol the ocean the way human beings have never been able to.