You’ve got a smart phone, he but do you have a smart dress? One which changes its hue each time you move? The latest in creative textile design allows you to have just that. Learn more about this innovative science project.

At the Concordia University in Canada researchers have come up with an interactive electronic fabric that uses body heat of the human wearing the fabric to change its visual look. The project has been aptly named Karma Chameleon said Joanna Berzowska, professor and chair of the department of design and computation arts at the university.

The biggest difference with this fabric is that the electronic components have been woven into the fabric itself rather than being attached to it separately. Many layers of polymers are used in the fabric which start interacting with each other as they are stretched giving rise to the different visual patterns in the fabric.

The textile industry is calling this the new “smart fabric” and there are hopes that the material will soon be available to make actual garments. There is more than one fashion house watching closely to see how this science project develops further. Imagine the possibilities of future garments made using this fabric!

Exploring exoplanets seems to be next on the agenda for NASA. The space exploration authority has decided to send out a satellite in 2017 to study both exoplanets and neutron stars. It is called TESS or Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. TESS will handle the survey of habitable planets in nearby star systems.

As can be imagined while the mission is small the findings will have a huge impact. TESS will try to find terrestrial planets, those which have sizable land, located in the habitable zone around the central star. There are sure to be plenty of gas giants out there but the researchers are looking for some more rocky ones like Earth.

As per the head of the mission TESS will carry out the first space-borne all-sky transit survey, covering 400 times as much sky as any previous mission. It will identify thousands of new planets in the solar neighborhood, with a special focus on planets comparable in size to the Earth.

That much more chance of them finding a substitute Earth. The follow up will include the study of the atmospheres of such suitable planets. The results of this science project will surely have a huge impact on how we view other planets as possible future homes to civilization.

It is great fun to write in the air with your fingers dancing around, but imagine if doing just that you could actually communicate with electronic devices? That is exactly what the scientists of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology are hoping to do when their science project ends.

What they call “air writing” will use a glove to record the movements made by the hand. This data will then be translated by the computer to which the glove communicates into legible text and symbols. The result will be a new interface type being produced in wearable computer applications allowing greater integration of computer in life.

The hands will become virtual keyboards that can write out instructions to computers and work with other technology driven gadgets. Not all the movements are interpreted as writing by the system which remains on in the background. During writing, the airwriting system decodes the letters by a pattern recognition method. It also takes into account individual differences in the writing style.

Soon it will be possible to write a text message on your smart phone without touching it, or even guide yourself using a GPS without fiddling with maps on the screen. The possibilities of the resulting gadgets from this science project are endless.

Fish have a natural sense that allows them to navigate through currents of water and the turbulence that occurs in the water. However robotic fish have not been able to do so till the scientists in the European Union developed lateral line sensing in their science research project. The project which began more than four years ago has been investigating the locomotion of fish using lateral line sensing and then developing underwater robots using these principles found in their biological counterparts.
The results have been extremely encouraging. The new robotic fish enabled with lateral line sensing can orient themselves better in turbulent currents, and navigate to a predetermined destination by controlling their motion. Prof. Maarja Kruusmaa, the Scientific Coordinator of the FILOSE project said that so far flow in robotics was treated as a disturbance that drove the robots away from their planned course.

They have shown that flow is also a source of information that can be exploited to better control the vehicle. The robot fish have been able to save energy by navigating through the flow in regions where the currents are not as strong. The science project opens up a whole new avenue for future under water vehicles.

There is no other electronic device which gets obsolete almost as fast as it is manufactured than the cell phone. With technological innovations coming up through repeated scientific experimentation in research and development there is a new version to each cell phone almost every six months.

So it should come as no surprise that there is yet another innovation in the works in Taiwan. They have been working on the prototype of a transparent cell phone. Nicknamed the ‘Switchable Glass’ technology, the phone has a conductive OLED screen that uses liquid crystal molecules to display text and images.

Electric current is used to align these molecules into images on  a transparent screen that can display clear colored images. It is likely that a finished product will be able to have touch screen activated on both sides of the phone. They are looking at ways to integrate hidden speakers and mics in the phone as well as developing a transparent battery.

Although it sounds really futuristic, the technology exits and a commercial product may be developed using the technology within a year. There are going to be a lot of engineers working on this science project in the current year.

Graphics can enhance the display board of any science fair project but creating them from raw data can be quite a chore for anyone. Not any more if software giant Microsoft has its way. The company is currently developing a prototype of a self sketching whiteboard. The touch screen innovation will allow you to use raw data to formulate tables and charts.

Bongshin Lee, the user interface expert designing the whiteboard, is to demonstrate how preloaded data can be used to to create interactive charts, maps or other diagrams. She hopes to show how the interactive display technology will make it easier to make sense of all the data that is fed into the computer system.

The experimental prototype of the self sketching whiteboard is called SketchInsight. The digital canvas is being used to make sense of the growing amounts of information that is being generated daily in research studies. Once the tool is perfected and developed for commercial use it will beat the current Microsoft Powerpoint application hollow.

As you try and make the display board for your science fair project you will wish that this self sketching whiteboard was already available. It would make the task so much easier.

Are you confused about what to call a space rock? After reading this you will not be.

Comet is a chunk of ice and rock which comes from outside our solar system. It usually has a tail which contains water vapor and dust particles that are formed as the ice surrounding the rock melts when the comet approaches the sun.

Asteroids are chunky pieces of rock which are in orbit around the sun in between the planets Mars and Jupiter. They are believed to be the remnants of a planet that exploded. Sometimes an asteroid may bounce off another asteroid and head towards Earth.

Meteoroid is a rock in space which is larger than a grain of dust and smaller in size than an asteroid. In case it falls through the Earth’s atmosphere and burns up due to the friction it is called a Meteor. Meteors are also called falling stars due to the streak of light that they cause in the night sky.

Meteorite is a large sized meteor which does not burn up completely in the Earth’s atmosphere but retains enough mass to actually strike the Earth. These space rocks are used by scientists for science experiments to study composition and learn more about the solar system. Sometimes they contain valuable minerals in concentrated form.

As a child you have played with Lego and Mega Blocks and enjoyed constructing unique structures out of them. There was the picture which provided guidance on what you were to make, but there was also more fun to be had when you developed structures out of your own imagination. In science projects based on nano technology you do much the same thing.

You get to build new materials, medicines, or electric wires using the basic building blocks of nature. This means that you play around with atoms and molecules of existing materials in order to produce new combinations resulting in new materials. These new materials often have better resistance, or more strength or improved healing capacities compared to the older materials that they have been derived from.

That is how a constant cycle of improvement is maintained. Eventually the new material is converted into a gadget that is tested by the researchers in the laboratory. After the tests are conducted the model is improved based on the results.Now it is tested again by scientists before it is finally developed into a commercially viable gadget.

Now that gadget can be bought and used everyday by normal people around the world. This is the process that each science project follows, more or less give or take a few more steps, to bring new gadgets to you.

An engineering career is full of choices today that did not exist even a decade ago. You can work in exciting new science projects in new fields of research. Or you can work on developing new gadgets that could be helpful to humans in the future. There is a lot you can do as an engineer.

In the field of micro-systems engineering, you work on miniaturizing existing systems. For example you could develop a compact new airbag that can be used to enhance safety of a car driver. Or you could develop tiny microphones that could be used in spy gadgets. Or even develop a miniature of an internal medication pump which provides medication to a patient from within the body when required.

If that’s not exciting enough for you, consider the emerging field of nano-systems. Here you could develop new materials that make batteries last longer or design artificial fibers that make it possible for clothes to become fire proof. Or develop a material that is light weight and strong and can be used to design improved tennis rackets. The possibilities are endless.

There are a large number of career options in engineering that offer new challenges and interesting science projects. Some of them may challenge you and others may provide great satisfaction when the challenge is successfully met. So how are you going to help in engineering the future?

Science has a habit of catching up with science fiction. Its happened time and again that a Sci-Fi author has described a futuristic gadget and a couple of decades down the line scientists actually produce the gadget or a very close likeness to it. That’s why the Bi-centennial man of science fiction is now represented by Rex, the very first bionic man.

This humanoid has been the result of the combined effort of more than 18 universities and companies. He’s got state of the art artificial organs like kidneys, pancreas and spleens from University College London. His artificial lungs were provided by Swansea. The prosthetic legs and ankle were contributed by MIT. He even has synthetic blood from Sheffield University.

Rex was introduced to the world at the Science Museum in London in the first week of February. What drew attention were his brown eyes and six and half feet height. The whole scientific project cost more than one million dollars. What the project has proved is that now it is scientifically possible to create an artificial man from scratch.

It may even be possible to improve on human abilities by providing advanced prosthetic limbs to those who have suffered the loss of their natural limbs. Each advancement in the field makes it easier to find treatment for accident victims. Each science project brings more hope.