If you want to really make a difference you could consider living off grid to be really green. Unfortunately there will be many things that you will need to give up to make that possible.Can you even imagine just what all you will have to do without if you were to live your life without electricity?

You will have to do without heating or cooling appliances such as refrigerators and air conditioners.  There will be no television and no microwaves. Electrical tools are out and so are hair dryers. No washing machines to do the clothes and no dishwashers to do the dishes. There is no coffee maker to get your morning cup ready.

Are you realizing just what all you will have to give up if you were to live truly green and off grid? Think about it, how will you manage without clock radios, mobile phones, battery operated can openers, PDAs and a million such small conveniences?  It is such small gadgets that we don’t even think about which use a lot of power.

Don’t think that it is not possible to live without these things. These are not essentials that help us to stay alive, these are conveniences which make our lives easier. If generations of human beings could do without them for so long, so can we. Try working out the logistics of living off grid as a science project. See how you can do it.

Ever heard a song which is sung in a language you do not know and still felt peppy and happy? Or did you hear some soulful whinny number and feel depressed and sad? A team of scientists from Duke University in Durham, North Carolina seem to have found out just why music notes can cut through the language barrier in their science project.

It seems that the minor and major keys have a part to play. 4 semi tones above the keynote build an interval in a major and three tones in a minor. So when a speaker reads a text in a subdued voice it mirrors the minor intervals. On the other hand when the text is read out cheerfully it has many major intervals in it.

In addition while reading cheerful texts the different overtones of the vowels arrange their frequency relationships in a manner resembling a major chord. And this fact seems to apply across the different cultures and languages.

These emotion dependent sound patterns prove that music gets understood in the mood that it is made. That means if the tone is happy you will know it even if the language is unfamiliar. So perhaps language came after the evolution of music? The researchers are still working on it. You can work on this science project.

3.6 zettabytes or a 36 followed by twenty zeros is the amount of information that an average American household consumed in 2008. That is the figure that the researchers of a University of California science project had to report. According to them the information that a family was bombarded with from communication channels like books, computers, TV, and newspapers was worth 3.6 zettabytes.

In case you are wondering just how much information that would be, imagine this. If all that information was taken as computer print outs the entire land mass of the USA would be buried under more than 2 meters of paper. And this is only the information that one single household swallowed!

The general media consumption of the average American is tagged by the same research at 34 gigabytes per day. And that figure does not include the usage of office equipment. Since 1980 consumption has increased at about 5.4% each year. And its still rising.

Each year Americans are spending more and more time processing information that is not crucial to them. About 11.8 hours in each day are spent trying to digest the information that communication channels keep throwing up. No wonder sometimes the allure of a clean break from it all on a desert island actually sounds good. Read about more interesting science projects here.