You’ve heard of road rage when people get stuck in traffic, now let’s talk about load rage. Many millennials suffer from annoyance as they wait for content to be downloaded to their smart phones. In a recent survey conducted by the Chinese phone manufacturing giant One-Plus, it was found that people in the age bracket of 16 to 34 years were five times more likely to lose their temper due to slow download speeds than older users.

More than 2000 smart phone users participated in the survey which also found that half the users in the age bracket of 16 to 24 years would like to reduce their screen time. The users also reported symptoms of burnout, like anxiety and insomnia attributed to the large amount of time that they tend to spend on their smart phones.

The most commonly cited frustration for young people in the survey was the unavailability of WiFi services in their given location. Overall 32% of the survey respondents were worried about the level of dependency on technology today. This is one science project that’s given smart phone users much to think about.

A remote island in the Pacific is being buried in floating plastic garbage. Henderson Island is an uninhabited tropical paradise which is located halfway between New Zealand and Peru. The location would be extremely isolated given that there are no major land masses anywhere near the island.

Unfortunately a freak of geography has made it so that it has one of the highest concentrations of plastic pollution on the planet. Along the beach which is about three kilometers long, nearly 18 tonnes of plastic has accumulated. The sand may not be visible but the several thousand pieces of plastic that get added to the coast surely is an eyesore.

In 1988 the UN World Heritage List had called Henderson Island an untouched paradise. Unfortunately today it’s the final resting place for bottles and containers from Germany, Canada, US, Chile, Argentina and Ecuador. Despite a clean up effort made in 2015, the island continues to be buried under more and more floating plastic that drifts up to its shores. Unless an alternate is found with some science experimentation, the throw away culture of using plastics is going to just make every day worse at the island.

Your chef may soon be a robot. In Singapore a robotics company has come up with a bot nicknamed Sophie, which is capable of making the popular Singaporean dish of laska. A piping hot bowl of this noodle soup is presented to the customer in just 45 seconds, with minimal spills. Now that’s a challenge to any top chef in the field.

The electric sous-chef handles the blanching of the noodles, adding pre-cooked prawns and ladling the spicy coconut soup at the rate of about 80 bowls per hour. A task that a human would find repetitive and fatiguing has now found the perfect solution in a robotic chef. The bot can tirelessly perform the repetitive tasks for as long as needed in the restaurant.

The robot was specifically developed for a restaurant called Orange Clove by a local engineering firm. It’s presence will reduce the number of souz-chefs for laska from two to one. Plus the human chef will now primarily be tasked with replacing ingredients and keeping the station clean rather than actual cooking.

What about the quality? This science project actually produces the same taste as that of a human chef. A customer in the restaurant on the launch of the bot said that it was impossible to tell the difference.

Robots can clean homes and cook, but can they be used to keep a full city clean? The city nation of Singapore is about to demonstrate how. Called “Friendly Bots” because they can speak in English, Malay, Mandarin and Tamil, they also speak the local lingo of Singlish, which incorporates many words into English from these other languages. You can actually have a limited conversation with them.

The friendly bots are currently being used to clean out the hotels, shopping malls and government buildings in Singapore. There are four bots in operation at present and by next March the locals hope to have almost 300 bots working around the city state. They can scrub, mop, vacuum, and sweep autonomously. This will eventually free up many cleaning jobs that humans are currently performing.

In addition they can rap in English and entertain people close by. These hi tech cleaning bots have oval shaped heads with red lights to resemble the humanoid face. They also have wheels that allow them to roll around where they are required. This is one science project that’s making a sweeping statement across the city right now.

Alexa, the smart speaker from Amazon has been helping make life easier for a number of people. From reminders to stock up the depleted milk carton in the fridge to reading out messages that have been received, Alexa has been doing a number of tasks like a virtual assistant. Now the National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom has decided to make Alexa even more useful.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock said, technology like this is a great example of how people can access reliable, world-leading NHS advice from the comfort of their home, reducing the pressure on our hardworking GPs and pharmacists. The people in Britain will soon have the option to say, “Alexa, what are the symptoms of the flu?” To be answered from a data base that will be populated by the doctors in the NHS.

Of course there are concerns about Alexa being used like this by Helen Stokes-Lampard, the chairwoman of the Royal College of GPs. The doctor says that it is vital that independent research is done to ensure that the advice given is safe. Otherwise it could prevent people seeking proper medial help. Will this science project be successful? Only time and Alexa will tell.

Human beings know that wild animals tend to roam the Earth, but till now we didn’t have the requisite technology to figure out just how vast the distances these animals traverse. The frozen Arctic region offers sea ice that animals can cross often leaving one country for another. The Polar Research Institute has been keeping tabs on a few animals that they have been able to tag.

A young arctic fox set off from the Svalbard Archipelago in Norway last year and has been trekking across the sea ice to hit northern Nunavut in Canada this year. The journey took the little blue fox about 76 days and covered a distance of 2175 miles. That’s almost three thousand kilometers. The fox passed through Greenland on his trek and data shows that he moved quickly past areas covered in ice sheets where food was scarce.

The initial records of the feat had incited disbelief. Who could imagine that a tiny fox could be hardy enough to undertake such a long journey over one of the harshest climates known to man. This science project proves that while man may claim the apex position on the planet, he is still to discover what feats his other co-creatures on the planet can do.

Places to go and visit are always interesting. People love to travel to discover new markets, old buildings, historical landmarks and fun amusement centers. It’s all about hanging out and enjoying yourself with a group of friends. Of late safety has become a concern in areas of public gathering. So where would you go to hang out, if you wanted some place safe with great restaurants and enough shops to keep you occupied?

For many people it’s the airport terminal in their town. Terminal Tourism, as it’s been tagged, is all the new rage these days. People get through the security line at the airport and then don’t catch a flight. Instead they sit in a cafe and catch up with their friends. They people watch as travelers come and go with their luggage. They relax in front of the big picture window with a coffee in their hands and spot the airplanes.

Pittsburgh was the first to open up their airport to non travelers in 2017. Since then airports at Tampa, Seattle-Tacoma, and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta, have all followed suit. It would make an interesting science project to just sit at an airport and collect statistics on planes and travelers as you figure out how to make terminal tourism work for you!

There is a lot out in space that could be dangerous to human beings. Extra terrestrial germs could either die in the atmosphere on Earth, or flourish and cause illnesses previously unheard of. This is why when the Apollo II astronauts came back to the planet after the moon landing, there was a scare of germs from the moon accompanying them.

In order to counter the threat of these possible Lunar Germs, the astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins were put into special clothing after being scrubbed down to be disinfected. The three of them were then taken to a quarantine facility to ensure that no germs could contaminate the Earth. At the time these were the most stringent measures that they could think of based on existing scientific norms.

The real question is that were they enough? Did NASA ensure that no lunar germs got to Earth on the return journey of the Apollo II astronauts? A new documentary on Space.com seems to think that it was not. That bugs from space did manage to get into Earth’s atmosphere despite the best efforts made by NASA. Thankfully they were not super bugs that decided to multiply and destroy all known life forms on Earth.

Harvesting vegetables and fruit is much more time consuming than harvesting field crops such as wheat. They are also more manpower consuming. Think about the sheer number of people required to harvest grapes from a vineyard during season. In order to make harvesting an easier task, scientists at Cambridge have been working with a robot prototype.

This vegetable picking robot uses Artificial Intelligence to identify which common agricultural crop is ready to be harvested. It was initially designed by the scientists at the University of Cambridge to recognize and harvest iceberg lettuce in a lab setting. Since then it has been tested in a number of field conditions at a local fruit and vegetable co-operative .

It’s performance has been improving gradually as the robot automatically learns from previous experience. Naturally the “Vegebot”, as it has been nicknamed, is not as fast or efficient as a human worker as of now. Still the paper in the Journal of Field Robotics hopes that it will be improved enough to be put to use in actual field conditions.

Though it may be while, this science project may end up creating a robot that is used to pick your salad in the future. It would work out more economical than hiring human labor for the same task.

A study was conducted at Harvard Medical School on the consumption of energy in households by Hossein Estiri. The computational demographer authored a paper in which he found that energy consumption rose in the age group of 30 to 54 years when people got married, moved to larger homes and raised children. Then the use of energy stabilized for people in their 60s, while surprisingly the use of energy increased in the 70s and continued to go up.

Despite changes in income groups and housing styles, the trend of increased energy consumption in the 70s seemed to apply across the board. Energy consumption in warmer regions was really elevated for older age group people. This could be attributed to more need for air conditioning. Also older people may not be able to maintain their homes well enough to conserve energy.

Another possible factor would be that the appliances they use may be older and less efficient compared to the technology being used by their younger counterparts. Think of old refrigerators, toasters and microwave ovens. There may not be actual need for more energy, but a science project may prove that if the gadgets being used by the people are changed, they may need less energy in the future.