When the film Terminator first spoke of Judgement Day when the robots would take over the planet using Skynet, it was at best a fantasy that seemed many years away. Guess what? Not any more. The autonomous robotic systems that are being designed and used today can actually be seen as a potential threat.

Today these systems need to be able to take instant decisions in situations without getting human input. This has made it possible for robots to act in a manner that they consider best. If these systems are not designed with care we could end up in a situation where the autonomous robotic system decides that its self protection is more important than human life.

It could get more resources to improve itself by manipulation, cyber theft and domination. It may decide to improve its own efficiency by using resources differently from what its creators intended it to. There may also be a problem when it decides to remove design constraints because they are holding back the system development.

Is it beginning to sound more and more like Skynet taking over the world? It should worry you because unless the autonomous robotic systems are designed with care, any of these above situations could prove detrimental to humans around the system. How would you approach this science project?

Did you know that you are actually a super computer? That inside your head is the most complex piece of equipment that has ever been studied by scientists? Yes, your brain is yet to be replicated by anyone anywhere in the world. There are three major projects around the world that are looking to replicate the functioning of the human brain.

The first is the European Union’s Human Brain Project, which aims to simulate a human brain on a supercomputer. The second one is the  U.S. BRAIN Project. Here BRAIN is an acronym for Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies. This project is using a tool-building approach like the scientists at Stanford who have some up with the Neurogrid.

The third comes from IBM and is called the SyNAPSE Project, which is short for Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics. As its name suggests this project hopes to redesign chips to emulate the ability of neurons to make a great many synaptic connections. It is this feature of the brain that allows it to work quickly and solve any problem it faces.

As you can see each team of scientists has picked up a different focus to conduct its research. However each one essentially is a science project based on the functioning of something every human being has, a brain.

Neurogrid is the name of the super fast and energy efficient circuit board constructed by the computer scientists at Stanford. It combines 16 customized ‘Neurocore’ chips on a single circuit the size of an iPad. This contraption aims at using silicon and software to build electronic systems that mimic neurons and synapses that occur in the human brain. The human brain is considered a superlative model and it is very difficult to mimic it and reproduce its actions.

The device was constructed with the support of the National Institutes of Health. It can simulate orders of magnitude more neurons and synapses than other brain mimics on the power it takes to run a tablet computer as per Kwabena Boahen. Boahen is an associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford and was closely involved with the actual construction of the device.

It cost $40,000 to build the Neurogrid prototype board. Boahen says that they are now working on creating a neurocompiler where you do not have to have any knowledge of synapses and neurons  and how the brain works, but can still work the device. The team of scientists he is working with hope to build prosthetic limbs for paralyzed people that can be controlled by a similar chip. That would be a really useful science project.

Even the most complex computer does not compare with the sheer magnificence of the human brain. Understanding how it works has been one of the most challenging scientific projects of the century. Replicating the actions of the brain is what most researchers feel will lead to the biggest advance in robotics.

The scientists at Stanford University have come up with faster and more energy efficient microchips based on the design of the human brain. These new computer brains are nearly 9,000 times faster than the chips currently powering computers in the market today. They also run on 40,ooo times less power than a traditional personal computer.

These improvements bode well for the field of robotics where this newly developed circuit board can be put to experimental use in improving the speed and complexity of movement of robots. It may be possible to have robots move almost as quickly and naturally as humans do when they use this new microchip for processing their actions.

There is still much experimentation to do, but the microchip with its speed and energy efficiency has opened up new frontiers in the worlds of both robotics and computers. New science experiments will only improve on what the scientists at Stanford have managed to achieve.

Do you hate it when your car wheels hit a bumpy patch? That’s nothing compared to what driving on Mars does to your tyres!

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California was recently sent a set of wheels like the ones currently on the Mars Curiosity Rover for study. Scientists are trying to understand just how the wheels are bearing up to damage and how their performance is likely to be affected.

This scientific study was initiated by the Mars Science Laboratory Program (MSL) to understand why the pace of holes appearing in Curiosity’s aluminum wheels increased suddenly last year. The main culprit could be the terrain it was going over that was covered with sharp rocks.

Since 2014 the wheel damage has been brought under control by planning the route taken by the rover better. The science experiments being conducted on the wheels in JPL are hoping to understand how the damage occurs. The researchers will then develop means to reduce the pace of damage.

If they are able to anticipate the level of damage to the wheels, they will also be able to foretell just how the performance of Curiosity will be affected on Mars. This is one scientific study whose results will be applicable right away in the field.

The scientists at the  Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard were looking for a way to place smart DNA nanorobots in the blood stream. So far the body’s immune system would find and erase these DNA nanorobots. In an inspiration from nature the scientists decided to use a virus cloaking strategy for these nanorobots.

They decided to mimic a type of virus that protects its genome by enclosing it in a solid protein case, then layering on an oily coating identical to that in membranes that surround living cells. This contains a bilayer of phospholipid that helps the viruses evade the immune system and delivers them to the cell interior.

So the scientists first folded DNA into a virus-sized octahedron. Using DNA nanotechnology they built in handles to hang lipids, which in turn directed the assembly of a single bilayer membrane surrounding the octahedron. To see if they would survive inside the body they were injected with fluorescent dye and injected into mice.

In the past only the bladder of the mice would glow as they were broken down and processed to send out of the body. however the coated DNA nanorobots were successful. The whole body of the mouse glowed for hours after receiving this coated DNA nanorobot showing that they remained in the blood stream. What an interesting science project.

In one of Issac Asimov’s short stories there is a tale of a robot that is shrunk to a small size and made to enter the human body. The robot then proceeds to conduct a surgery from the inside of the patient and is eventually expelled into space from the nose, exiting the human body. It made for excellent reading, but today it may just be all coming true.

So far any nanodevice launched in to the blood stream would be not allowed to survive long enough to do anything inside the body. At the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard scientists have created the first cloaked DNA nanodevice that can survive the body’s immune defense system.

This now opens up the doorway to producing smart DNA nanorobots that can play doctor inside your body.These smart creatures will be able to identify cancerous growth and manufacture medicine to cure it. They could examine what the human being eats and drinks and identify any toxins present, then isolate them to dispose off later.

They could find and cripple pathogens instantly and do a lot more. The surgery conducting robot may not be available next year, but with more science projects based on DNA nanodevices it may just be a reality in the not too distant future.

The Cassini space craft has been sending back some rather interesting images to NASA scientists. Some believe that it may just have documented the birth of a new moon for the planet Saturn. The images show a small icy object within the rings of the planet which is 20percent brighter than the surrounding area.

The object which is barely half a mile in radius is positioned at the outermost ring and believed to be the cause of an arc of disturbance in the ring measuring 750 miles long and 6 miles wide. The unidentified object has been informally dubbed Peggy and its formation and outward movement aids in our understanding of how Saturn’s icy moons may have formed in more massive rings long ago.

The most famous of  the moons being the cloud-wrapped Titan and ocean-holding Enceladu were probaly formed from the more robust ring structures around the planet in the ancient past. While Peggy may not have enough material in the rings to actually grow to a full sized moon it provided valuable insight in to how the planets formed and moved away from the sun. It really aids in the science project to understand just how the solar system was formed.

There has been an ongoing search to answer the question, “Are we alone in this huge universe?”. When the first exoplanet was found in 1996 there was considerable excitement amongst the astronomers who hoped to find life on another planet. The recent discovery of Kepler-186f has added to this excitement.

Although not quite Earth 2.0 the planet is rocky and has the right distance from its sun to harbor liquid water. This as we all know, is the first step to potentially generating life. The planet orbits a sun that is half the size of ours and much cooler besides. However it does prove that Earth like planets do exist in the habitable zone in other solar systems.

The habitable zone refers to the distance from the sun of the solar system in which planets can comfortably hold liquid water. The liquid water is what forms the primordial soup from which the first single cellular organisms are formed under drastic chemical reactions.

While we may not be looking at ET as yet in the Kepler system, it is comforting to know that there are other planets that humankind could migrate to in the distant future. Now that would be an exciting science project to undertake.

Is that drone spying on you? The security hazard of the future is already here! A new quadcopter drone has the ability to connect with smart phones and steal personal personal data. Snoopy, as the drone has been aptly named, is able to exploit smartphone handsets that are looking for available wi-fi signals.

Snoopy was developed by a security company based in UK and South Africa. Essentially it impersonates the previously used networks that a smart phone has connected to. Once the user logs on to the impersonated network, the rogue operator can gain access to all the information stored on the phone.

This includes the entire phone book, saved passwords for Facebook, email, other social networking site and worst of all any banking details still in the history of the phone.  Needless to say the loss of data could cause significant problems for the smart phone owner. The software that steals the data has been available for sometime, however the technology of the drone used to implement it is new.

Snoopy was revealed in the recent Black Hat security conference in Singapore. Needless to say it has given smart phone manufacturers a great deal to think about. Now they will need a massive science project aimed at protecting their smartphones from Snoopy and its ilk.