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.

The Physics Nobel prize this year is being awarded to three Japanese scientists who contributed to the invention of blue light emitting diodes. While the LEDs were first invented way back in the 1960s, those were unavailable in the color blue which throw natural looking light. The LEDs in red and green were often used as indicators in complex machinery and electronic gadgets.

However till the 1990s there was no material which would allow scientists to produce a blue LED. LEDs are made from semi conductors that use voltage to move electrons and positive carriers named holes through many layers of a crystal sandwich. When these two come together in the active layer of the crystal sandwich, photons are produced which essentially show up as light.

In this science project the right combination of semiconductor materials and dopants needed to produce blue light had to be found. The Nobel Committee recognized three researchers as contributing equally to this breakthrough. They are Isamu Akasaki of Meijo University in Nagoya and Nagoya University; Hiroshi Amano of Nagoya University; and Shuji Nakamura, now of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Thanks to this trio, today we have an ongoing revolution in lighting. Blue LEDs will not only allow us to illuminate our homes and offices in natural light, they will also reduce the cost of energy required for doing so. Now this is a socially useful science project that really deserves the recognition it got.

When Arthur C Clarke wrote about four towers extending from the base of the earth right up into space it was pure science fiction. However a Japanese company is now hoping to take the first step towards constructing such a building. The construction company Obayashi  wants to build an elevator that will reach out into space for 96,000 km.

What’s more the Japanese construction giant hopes to achieve this feat by 2050. So there is a very good likelihood of the elevator being constructed in our lifetime. Robotic Cars powered by magnetic linear motors will be able to carry both people and cargo up through the elevator into a newly constructed space station.

The journey into space on the elevator will take seven days, so its not going to as fast as moving through Arthur C Clare’s elevator. This feat is now possible due to the development of carbon nano technology which has the tensile strength about hundred times that of steel’s.

The three cm long carbon nano tubes that will be used in the construction will be ready by 2030. Then the actual construction of this science project will begin. The elevator will seek to replace the current shuttle transport system employed to take people and stuff to the international space station.

India successfully launched its Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) and will now share information with US scientists as they reciprocate by sharing data from NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft. India is the fourth country in the world to have successfully sent a spacecraft into orbit around the red planet.

The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) used a 440 Newton Liquid Apogee Motor (LAM) along with eight smaller liquid engines to position the spacecraft in orbit around Mars on 24 Sept 2014. The spacecraft is now circling Mars in an orbit whose nearest point to Mars (periapsis) is at 421.7 km and farthest point (apoapsis) at 76,993.6 km. The inclination of orbit with respect to the equatorial plane of Mars is 150 degree, and it takes 72 hours 51 minutes 51 seconds to go round the planets once.

In the coming weeks, the spacecraft will be thoroughly tested in Mars orbit and the systematic observation of the planet using the spacecraft’s five scientific instruments is expected to begin. New data will be available for analysis to the scientific community at large and collaborations between researchers from different space agencies is expected. This was a successful science project which should become more interesting to follow in the coming months.

The Chinese government is hoping to set up its own space station in orbit around the planet by 2022. An experimental module is already in orbit as per the state media. China has been revamping its space program in recent years to prove itself a major space power.

Last year three astronauts spent 15 days in orbit on the Tiangong 1 (Heavenly Palace). The Tiangong 1 is China’s experimental space laboratory. This is much smaller than the International Space Station.  Now the follow up to this will be with Tiangong 2 which is likely to be launched in 2016 and the core of the space station they intend to build will be launched in 2018.

Yang Liwei, the first Chinese man in space, and currently deputy head of China’s Manned Space agency said that the space station would be completed by 2022. So far individual nations have shared the International Space Station for space exploration and scientific experimentation as the cost of setting up a new station was not justified.

The Chinese seem keen to rush into space with their own infrastructure in place. It will be interesting to see how they use the experiences of the first space station and their own launched to improve upon the design for a space station. A science project worth watching out for.

Adult human sized pig kidneys have been developed in the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center which seem to have overcome a past drawback. In the new science experiment regenerative medical researchers managed to keep blood vessels in the new organs open and flowing with blood for nearly four hours.

Previously not only were the kidneys built in the lab rodent sized, the blood flow time period was only one hour. So this science project has done ground breaking work in their proof of concept study. The cell removal process leaves behind an intact network of blood vessels that can potentially supply the new organ with oxygen.

The new method of keeping the blood vessels open and  the blood flowing depends on the coating in the vessels that allow the blood cells to keep flowing.  In order to do this they used a combination of cell seeding and antibodies. The breakthrough, once mastered will be useful in creating other complicated organs in the lab as well.

Needless to say that the repercussions of this will be far reaching in the medical world. The concept of organ regeneration artificially has given a lot of potential hope so far, but actual results have not be quite as promising in real life science projects undertaken. Maybe this new technique will change things.

An experimental vaccine is being developed by a French drug company Sanofi Pasteur which is proving quite effective against dengue. CEO of Sanofi Pasteur, Olivier Charmeil said that for the first time ever after 20 years of research and industrial commitment dengue is set to become a vaccine preventable disease.

In the second clinical trial involving 20,875 children in the ages between 9 to 16 the risk of contracting dengue reduced by 60.8%. The children were from countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. The first trial which had been held in Southeast Asia on about 10,000 children and had been 56.5% effective.

The vaccine unfortunately is not very effective in younger children who are more prone to the disease. However it is able to prevent the disease in a majority of test subjects and can always be improved in efficiency. This is one science project that will prove useful in the eradication of a major disease worldwide.

The regular glucose test needle pricks are a necessary evil if you are suffering from diabetes. No matter how much you fear or loathe these regular pin pricks there was no better way to calculate your blood glucose level until now. Researchers at the Princeton University, Engineering School have been working on a new type of laser device.

This new laser device is able to tell the blood glucose content of a diabetic patient without the prerequisite poke with a needle to draw blood. The device is pointed at the person’s palm, passes through the skin cells and is partially absorbed by sugar molecules. This action allows the researchers to calculate the level of blood sugar in the patient’s blood.

With some more work the size of the laser device will be made smaller and its portability will improve. This new device will offer a respite from blood testing to a large number of diabetic patients who are dependent on frequent blood glucose monitoring to adjust their insulin dosage.

The current version is about 84% accurate, but a few more improvements would make the laser device a very viable alternative to blood testing for checking the blood glucose of a patient. Now that is what we call a very useful and fruitful science project.

Different elements are formed at different temperatures and stages of a star. Of that much the scientific community was sure. However the origin of the element fluoride was somewhat controversial with three different theories in play.Now a study conducted by the Lund University in Sweden says that it was likely formed by heavier stars than our sun.

Toothpaste with fluoride is supposed to be great for your teeth, at least that’s what all the television advertisements seem to say.The fluorine that is used in such a common place item of daily use actually was formed in stars eons ago towards the end of their existence. So in a manner of speaking the dead ancestors of the sun gifted us with the fluoride that we use today as the sun and all the planets in the solar system are actually formed from the material that was left over from these ancient stars.

The study involved observing data on five stars which would have contained the element given the light emission patterns of the stars. Light of a certain wavelength indicates a certain element and the science project was able to confirm the origin of fluoride. No matter what the origin of the element, don’t forget to check if your toothpaste contains it to keep your teeth healthy.

The common sense wisdom from down the ages has indicated that the sun affects our climate, and now after considerable study scientists agree. At the Lund University in Sweden a study has reconstructed solar activity during the last ice age and this is helping researchers better understand how the sun affects regional climate.By understanding exactly how the energy of the sun reaches out to affect the climate in our region it would be possible to better forecast the weather.

Raimund Muscheler, Lecturer in Quaternary Geology at Lund University said that the study shows an unexpected link between solar activity and climate change. It shows both that changes in solar activity are nothing new and that solar activity influences the climate, especially on a regional level. Understanding these processes helps us to better forecast the climate in certain regions Raimund concluded.

Currently there is much debate on just how the sun’s level of activity affects our climate on earth. It is believed that reduced activity may lead to colder winters, while others say that atmospheric circulation has a far greater effect on the weather. While the scientists debate what causes the greatest climatic change, studies like this one prove that no single scientific study will adequately answer these questions.