Top 10 Science Discoveries of the 2010s Decade

An interesting list of Live Science's Top 10 scientific discoveries for the 2010s, from the Higgs boson to gravitational waves, and synthetic life to exoplanets in habitable zones and new CRISPR techniques, have fun reading and seeing videos on these game-changing discoveries. We cannot even imagine what discoveries await today's teenage, future scientists!!

Generating electricity from potential differences of natural systems: Rivers meeting Oceans

The notion of "blue energy" is intriguing. What this means is using the coastal regions where rivers of freshwater meet oceans or seas that are salt water. With special filters/membranes, one can use this mixing area of nonionized water with ionized salt water to separate electric charges - effectively making a battery, from which electricity is the result. Because so much of the world's population lives on or within miles of coastlines, there is great interest in this as of now untapped electrical energy. The trick will be to make these membranes on a massive, cost-effective manner; presently these are too expensive for companies to try and scale up to industrial sizes.

While we won't be able to build large power plants in a high school, great projects for those interested in electricity, electrical engineering or electrochemistry would be to try to identify and create 'batteries' with any combination of materials you can find that will allow for a potential (i.e. voltage) difference. Are there other natural systems we could tap into to generate even small amounts of electrical power? Interfaces between different types of soil, minerals, plants, or other? There could be some really interesting, but unknown, combinations out there that could surprise us!

Think about this, be curious, explore and investigate!! Take a multimeter/voltmeter outside and look for combinations to test!