How an autistic child learns is very different from how a regular child is taught. It is with this difference in mind that researchers at the University of Southern California came up with the concept of individualized prompts for the autistic child from a humanoid robot to help in learning faster and with greater ease.

Over the course of the experiment a general improvement was noticed in learning imitative behavior in autistic children by interacting with humanoid robots that provided graded cueing. This is a therapy used with such children that shapes their behavior by providing them increasingly specific cues to help them learn new skills.

Nao Robots were used during the scientific study to interact with the children as they were told to perform specific tasks. The Nao Robots would first provide an instruction, followed by verbal clues, and eventually a demonstration of what was expected if the child still was unable to perform the task.

The robots would stop between each clue stage to allow the child to perform the task being described. The robot-mediated interventions in performing a task that was set for the children in the study were highly effective. The pilot science project has given hope that the technique would be successful at a larger scale as well.

Being lost in the mountains is a nightmare that no one wants to face and thanks to these new rescue robots, it may soon become a thing of the past. Researchers at the University of  Twente have been working on a science project involving human rescue workers, a robot on the ground and flying robots in the air.

The unusual combination works together to trace, locate and finally rescue any hapless victim that the difficult mountain terrain may claim. The project, which is called SHERPA, increases the chances of rescuing victims greatly. The Raffaella Carloni and the LEO Centre for Service Robotics are bringing together the mechanical design, the control mechanism and realizing the robotic arm.

The humans on the ground will be equipped with sensors and portable technology giving the rescue operator all the possible information available in a system so that he can make the best possible decision in the situation. The human being and robots can work together in this system in order to complete a worthwhile task – saving human lives.

The combination of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle , the Ground Robot and the Human Rescuers is going to save a great many lives in the future. It is indeed a worthwhile science project that will make a huge difference to the people living or visiting the Alps.

About 7,200 miles above Earth there lies an invisible shield that protects the Earth from killer electrons that have posed a serious threat to astronauts and their equipment in space. The researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have found that this shield is rather like the fictional Force Field that  protected the Star Ship Enterprise in Star Trek.

Essentially it is something between the two previously knownVan Allen radiation belts around the earth which stops these electrons from wreaking havoc on Earth. Professor Daniel Baker who headed the study said that it’s almost like theses electrons are running into a glass wall in space.

The team originally thought the highly charged electrons, which are looping around Earth at more than 100,000 miles per second, would slowly drift downward into the upper atmosphere and gradually be wiped out by interactions with air molecules. But the impenetrable barrier seen by the twin Van Allen belt spacecraft stops the electrons before they get that far, said Baker.

So perhaps it is indeed true that the Earth is protected in more ways than we can begin to imagine. As the team continues its scientific study we should learn more about this invisible shield that protects us.

Mechanical Engineer Bas Lansdorp has started Mars One, a company that will send humans to the red planet in a bid to colonize it. The critics are not quite sure that the vague plan that Mars One has for setting up an establishment are really going to help in any way till technology catches up with what needs to be accomplished.

The four stage plan currently includes launching communication satellites which will allow the colonists to keep in touch with Earth. This includes one in a stationary orbit around Mars and another in orbit around the Sun. This part can actually be accomplished with ease. The second stage is to deliver a rover to scout for the best property to set up the colony on. Considering the success of Curiosity has been traveling just five miles in the last one year, this is going to take a long time with current tech rovers.

The third stage is to set up the habitation pod. This includes sending cargo  and a second rover that will be able to pull the cargo into the location selected for the colony. Not only is it extremely difficult for cargo missions to deliver their loads in close proximity, the kind of power that the transportation rover will need is not yet available.

The final stage of this science project is to bring in the human beings who will physically inhabit the colony. This is of course the most improbable stage as of now. It will be entertaining to see just how well this group of armchair enthusiasts deals with getting out into space.

Bas Lansdorp is a Dutch entrepreneur who is convincing people to take a one-way trip to Mars! What’s more thousands of people from around the world have actually agreed to go. Would you leave Earth to go live on a self sustaining colony in space knowing that no matter what you did you could never ever return home?

While NASA with the blessing of President Obama decided that they would consider landing man on Mars by mid 2030, but only if they could be brought back home safely, the project got delayed due to budget cuts. That is when Bas Lansdorp decided that if governments were too picky it was time for private enterprise to take over the colonization of Mars.

Since April 2013 Lansdorp’s team at Mars One has been screening the resumes of people who want to be a part of the trip from countries across the globe. The first phase of this exercise ended in December 2013 when they narrowed down the hopefuls to 1058 people. It may seem quixotic to you and me, but these people are all set to blast off and never look back.

So far the science project is no where near ready to launch people off the Mars but it makes for interesting news and does seem entertaining to the more Earth bound people. Will it ever succeed? Only time and Bas Lansdorp can tell.

In March 2014 what began as a negligible leak in a gas pipeline managed to escalate to a full blown explosion that created eight fatalities in an apartment building in New York City. A leak in a water pipe may not pose a great hazard, but as this explosion that leveled two whole apartments showed, a gas leak is nothing to ignore.

Kamal Youcef- Toumi is a mechanical engineer at MIT who may have the perfect solution to tracing gas leaks before they cause a tragedy. His team has been working on a science experiment to produce an autonomous robot who will be able to do what no sensor in the world is able to do today, patrol the pipes from within.

The Pipe-Bot as it has been nicknamed is a two liter pet bottle sized prototype which floats through the interior of the pipe looking for pressure differences that may indicate a leak. This data is then sent over with GPS coordinates to a technician who can check the section of the pipe physically and make necessary repairs.

This system when implemented commercially will be far more effective in detecting leaks than the existing acoustic sensors that are currently in use to detect leaks from above the ground.

When we fall ill the body usually gets an infection from outside the body. These infectious cells are then engaged in a battle with our immune system, which is like our protective army inside the body. When all the infected cells are defeated the immune system gets reset from attack mode to wait and watch mode. At times the immune system stays in attack mode a bit longer than it needs to and may end up harming other regular cells of our body.

A research team at Duke University has been studying the worm C. elegans by infecting them with the common bacterial pathogen Salmonella enterica. Gene chip technology was used to see what genes were active during the infection and then when the worms were treated by an antibiotic what genes shut down the immune system’s response.

What they discovered was that there was a master switch of sorts in the genes that turned the immune system on and off depending on the state of infection present in the worm. Now this is critical information which was unveiled by the science project that could have a great many practical uses. The way medication is manipulated in the body could change forever if we could turn our immune system on and off at will.

If you are still in school and think that’s a cool way to get some extra candy, its not going to happen. A scientific study by Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) scientists seems to say that naturally occurring bioactives found in cocoa tend to help reverse age-related memory decline in healthy older adults.

The concept of dietary intervention, which literally means changing your food habits, is not a new one. Many lifestyle diseases such as diabetes and obesity require a dietary intervention plan designed personally by a nutritionist. Older people also have to watch their food habits carefully in order to ensure that nothing goes wrong in their bodies due to lack of nutrition.

With old age simple cognitive abilities such as remembering the name of a friend of where you left the car keys becomes a problem. A specific part of the brain called the dentate gyrus is associated with this memory decline. Flavanols extracted from cocoa beans have shown a favorable response to neuron connections in mice in previous scientific studies.

In the CUMC experiment 37 healthy volunteers in the  age group of 50 to 69 were given either a high or low flavanol diet. The random selection saw people eating either 900mg or 10 mg flavanol in the day. It was found that the people on the high flavanol diet performed significantly better on the standardized memory test. Perhaps following this science project older people everywhere should start eating more chocolate?

A computer has been able to do a whole lot that a man can do, but feelings and emotions have been out of the realm of machines, so far. Now a new type of keyboard can deduce your emotions based on your typing style. It has been tested to be accurate more than 80% of the time.

Researchers form Islamic University of Technology from Bangladesh have come up with a software that records your keyboard strokes and text to analyze what you were thinking while typing. They asked volunteers to type in certain sample texts and using the technology developed analyzed the keystrokes and characteristics to see if they could identify the emotional state of the typist.

Currently the software is able to distinguish between seven emotional states such as joy, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, shame or guilt. The best part of this science project is that no special keyboard or hardware is required to identify the emotions. The software uses basic Java and C# based modules which can be installed into any computer software. These findings could be significant to the development of emotionally aware computer systems as their approach relies on less expensive, and less intrusive, methods than tools like voice analysis, facial sensors, thermal imaging, and gesture tracking.

The Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine has been awarded this year to researchers who literally traced the Brain’s GPS. They are John O´Keefe, May‐Britt Moser and Edvard Moser. The latter duo are a husband wife team who have spent years exploring the work of O’ Keefe from the 1970s.

O’ Keefe found in experiments with rats that a certain part of the brain called the hippocampus would signal each time the rat was in a specific area. Different cells corresponded to different areas in the rat’s domain. He called these place cells. They literally pinpointed the place the rat was at.

When some thirty years later May‐Britt and Edvard Moser began exploring these neurons they found that another set of cells in a neighboring part of the brain, the entorhinal cortex, worked as grid cells. These worked like the grids on a map allowing a person to find a specific area of interest.

It is the combination of the place cells and grid cells in the hippocampus and the entorhinal cortex that allows human beings to move from where they are to where they want to be, much like how a GPS helps a car in the same manner. This science project has thrown light on how we navigate.