10 scientific inventions and discoveries that will blow your mind! 

1.  Solar plane




It is a  solar plane  and it safe the atmosphere  A solar-powered plane has made its debut flight in Switzerland in June 2014.
Aeroplanes running on solar energy would reduce our dependence on petroleum and help check pollution.


2. Sports car running on cooking oil


Makers Trident, a British manufacturing company, has launched a sports model Iceni that not only exceeds speeds of 200 km/hr but can travel more than 3000 kilometres on a single tank of cooking oil.


3. Bio-plastic from banana peels that can replace petroleum-based plastics



Elif Belgin, a teenage girl from Turkey, has invented the above, and won the ‘Best Science in Action’ Award at the Google Science Fair internationally in 2013.
Banana peels are a waste and this can help utilise the same, reducing our dependence on petroleum and would also be biodegradable, thus being less harmful ecologically.

4. Automatic Chapati-Maker 


Chapatis are integral to the meals of very many people in our subcontinent. A product of Zimplistic, a Mountain View, California-based company of 20 people, Rotimatic was developed over six years by co-founders Pranoti Nagarkar and Rishi Israni. Nagarkar handled the engineering, and Israni was largely responsible for the software side (there’s no operating system; it runs “bare metal”). Nagarkar said she was inspired to create romantic  after growing tired of trying to perfect her own roti-making skills! This came to light in July 2014. 

 5. LED-lit indoor farm


Developed by Japanese scientist Shigeharu Shimamura, this could be the solution to the impending global food security crisis. The wavelengths of light emitted are most suitable for plants’ growth, and there are no issues like droughts and weeds for such farms. This came to light in July 2014.

 6. Ants better than the Google search engine at processing information


A Chinese-German research team put almost everything that is known about the foraging of ants into equations and algorithms and fed this into their computers. When an ant finds some food in the vicinity of the colony, it takes a tiny piece of it to the nest, leaving a trail of a scent-emanating substance called pheromones. This is more efficient than even the Google search, an interesting fact indeed! This came to light in May 2014.

 7. Discovery of some new useful bacteria


You might be aware that all bacteria are not harmful, like the ones that curdle milk are not. Harun al Rashid, a scientist based in Bangladesh, has discovered a new species of bacteria, which could be of great help for the invention of high quality fertilisers. This came to light in January 2014.

 8. Human blood can be prepared in laboratories


Stem cells can be converted into Red Blood Cells (RBCs) and White Blood Cells (WBCs), and the genetic programme to do so has been decoded by a team of researchers from the University of Wisconsin Madison in the United States, led by Igor Slukvin. This came to light in July 2014.

 9. Human hair can be used for making jewellery boxes, mirror frames and combs

London-based designers, Alex Groves and Azusa Murakami, have done so! They crafted the collection by placing strands of hair in a silicon mould which is filled with a non-toxic, sustainably harvested resin derived from pine trees.

 10. Discovery of a new planet (not in our solar system)


If you remember your lessons from school right, a planet is a heavenly body revolving around a star, and the sun is among the countless stars in the universe, which has very many galaxies. Anyhow, the newly discovered planet referred to here revolves around the star Kepler 10-c. What is unique about this planet is that though it is very large, it is made of rock rather than gas (which weren’t earlier thought of as possible for such large planets) and has an atmosphere with thin clouds, suggesting the possibility of life. This planet has been named Mega-Earth and the announcement was made by the   Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. This has come to light in June 2014.

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