Robots have become more intelligent and Artificial Intelligence or AI is the cause. The complicated algorithms that form the base of AI are used to solve many repetitive issues in decision making in the industrial sector. It’s a simple logic gate that is at work and ensures that production in an assembly line is as smooth as robotically possible!

Yes, the robots can be a huge help in saving man hours and utilizing resources to the best of their ability. However, would you trust AI to pick a job for a human being to do? Would you turn over your potential future to a robot to pick your next working assignment? That’s the question that researchers at Wiley tried to check with an online study comprising more than three hundred participants.

The study asked participants to make a personal strategic career choice. They were told that they were in the market for a new job, had applied to a number of positions and were accepted by many of these. Now they had to make a choice about the job they wanted to accept. They were told they could pick any job they liked by themselves, or use an algorithm to pick the most appropriate job for them. The scientific experiment in decision-delegation found that the less aware the participant was of the situation, the more likely they were to delegate the decision to AI.

Human beings are social by nature and tend to surround themselves with other people and animals whom they can share their lives with. Giving and receiving care and affection is a way to create stronger bonds for the human beings. Pets are also often considered part of the family.

However, would that affection and offer of protection extend to a robot? Especially when faced with the welfare of another human being? That’s the purpose of the research study being conducted at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.

 Sari Nijssen said that the study set out to answer the following question: “Under what circumstances and to what extent would adults be willing to sacrifice robots to save human lives?” It was all about posing a moral dilemma for the participants. What would they choose to save given what they knew about the human and the robot.

The scientific study was seen to show that when the robot was humanoid and depicted as being compassionate and having perceptions of it’s own, people were much more likely to chose to save it. More so when they didn’t know the human beings and were familiar with the robot.

Gaming has become a huge part of our lives. Everyone has at least a couple of video games that they have downloaded on to their smartphones. If you are on social media websites like Facebook, you are encouraged by games to compete against your friends. So when the researchers at the Brigham Young University decided to checkout how gaming affected office productivity, it was time for coworkers to play video games together.

Researchers got people to play a geocaching game. The study had 352 participants spread over 80 teams. No member of the team would have any connection to another member before this exercise. Before being sent out to geocache after the first time they were randomly asked to either play video games together, or have some quiet time, or have a goal training discussion to improve the geocaching results.

The results of the study that was published in AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction, found that the team that played Video Games saw a 20% increase in productivity in the subsequent tasks that they were asked to carry out. Now that’s a call to action to take your colleagues out to a gaming arcade to bond better and perform better in office. It’s all there in the report of this science project!

If charging phone batteries has been the number one draw back of using smart phones, the researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology may have just come up with the solution. What if your smart phone did not need a battery to function? What if it could be powered by a whole new smart technology?

Professor Tomas Palacios has been experimenting with his team to create a device called the rectenna. A discovery that accepts radio signals and converts them to electric power. Essentially wi-fi signals are captured by an integrated antenna and transformed into DC current suitable to power electric circuits.

The rectenna, as it has been named, will be able to potentially charge a smartphone, laptop, wearable devices as well as medical technology. The rectenna has generated about 40 microwatts of power from the regular 150microwatt based wi-fi signals that are usually available. The study based on the research was published in “Nature” journal.

The medical applications of this science project would prove game changing. Specially in medical implants or pills that are to work on some power once they enter the human system. The potential uses are mind boggling.

People may lose their ability to speak due to a number of reasons. They could have been in an accident, or developed an illness. People suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or from a stroke may lose their power of speaking. Or it could happen due to any other reason, medical or trauma based.

Often when this happened it was no longer possible for them to communicate by talking out loud. Making a huge difference in their life and ability to function. Now a new technology based on Artificial Intelligence(AI) developed by researchers at the Columbia University may change things drastically for such people.

The AI based system monitors the brain activity of the person and helps to translate their thoughts directly into recognizable speech using speech synthesizers. It literally decodes the brain waves into thoughts that can be decoded and shared. Sounds like science fiction, doesn’t it? Luckily the technology has now come into existence.

This is not the first science project attempting to communicate directly with the brain, however it lays the foundation to help mute people communicate in ways they did not imagine before. In the future losing your ability to speak may not equal losing your voice as well. It would make a considerable change in the way such people are viewed by society as well as their ability to integrate into society as contributing members.

The advent of the factory machines sent a number of handicraft workers into oblivion. Similarly the advancement of the technologies powered by Artificial Intelligence are likely to have a significant impact on a number of commonly held human jobs. Brookings Institution has been studying the effect of AI on jobs in the US. They recently came out with a report that said almost 36 million Americans held jobs that were high exposure to automation.

That about 70% of their tasks could soon be performed by machines and robots. Here are some jobs that robots may be soon seen performing as they edge out the human competition. Cooks, waiters, short haul truck drivers and clerical office workers. Mark Muro, lead author of the report, said that humans are going to need to upskill and reskill if they need to change jobs quickly.

As per Muro the changes would occur from the next few years to the next couple of decades in the marketplace. The changes are likely to hit the smaller cities worst where there are no alternative jobs available. While economists say that automation will have an overall positive effect on the labour market, it is a fact that many people are soon going to lose their jobs to robots that are currently just science projects.

Exploring outer space is an adventure that still needs a lot of preparation by the human race. There are not many ways to power a spacecraft with humans that would be able to survive the harsh realities of space, but a NASA funded prototype craft that is steam powered may actually be able to explore these regions on it’s own forever.

The space craft called the WINE is being developed in partnership with NASA and a California based robotics firm called Honeybee Robotics. It can propel itself from asteroid to asteroid by extracting water to fuel it’s ongoing journey. Potentially making it able to explore outer space for unlimited years.

The first trials of the craft were conducted in December 2018 in the lab using simulated asteroid material. The WINE was able to mine the soil, make rocket propellant and launch itself on a jet stream extracted from the material. This can be game changing for how humankind explores the universe.

The science project is in it’s infancy and a number of changes can be made before it’s actually ready to handle outer space. However, the potential for this craft is truly amazing in scope. It could hop from the Moon to the asteroid belt, to Mars and onward using small hops all the way to Pluto.

Your DNA is the key to finding out more about your ancestry. At the University of Sheffield researchers were frustrated with the traditional methodology used to identify a skeleton and assign it to one of the ancient populations that once roamed the planet. The process was long drawn, and not always very accurate.

That’s when Eran Elhaik and his team decided to try something new. They identified a group of mutations that are sufficiently informative to identify and classify ancient populations. The Ancient Ancestry Informative Markers (aAIMs)  use the diversity that was much more prevalent in ancient times to identify which bones belonged to a certain civilization.

As per Elhaik, the people today are a lot more similar than the populations of ancient times. Finding a few relevant markers from an ancient population can make it much easier to identify them. However the problem they faced with this science project is that the ancient DNA is often degraded so much that it’s difficult to extract markers.

The team has managed to improve the system that was already in place. They just need a more comprehensive ancient DNA data base to compare the markers isolated against to improve accuracy even more.

While most of the human population is well aware that doing drugs is a sure fire way to ruin your health and your life, not so many young (and not so young) people are worried about a little weed. If a study, published recently in the Journal of Neuroscience, is to be believed there is simply no way that human beings should smoke cannabis if they don’t want to harm their brains.

Hugh Garavan, a professor at the University of Vermont, US, said that consuming just one or two joints seemed to change grey matter volumes in the young adolescents in the study. Researchers found evidence that an increase in grey matter volume in certain parts of the adolescent brain is a likely consequence of low level marijuana use.

In studies so far the research has been based on subjects who have been using marijuana for a while and are heavily addicted. These subjects are then compared with non-users. This new scientific research is not following the old pattern. It’s focus is on the young people who tend to indulge in a joint or two infrequently. Not surprisingly the grey matter in their brains is affected even with this seemingly low level of consumption.

In New South Wales, Australia, thousands of fish have been found floating dead in lakes and rivers. The heat of the summer Down Under has been responsible for this ecological disaster. The heatwave has been responsible for so much damage that the local government is now thinking of fighting back to help preserve the fish.

The state government has been monitoring the situation since the first batch of rotting fish were found in Lake Hume. They have recently announced a plan to activate 16 battery powered aerators in the drought affected waterways. The idea is to pump oxygen into the rivers to help the fish deal better with the low water levels.

Niall Blair, Minister for regional water said that nothing would stop this fish kill until we get proper river flows and water levels in our dams back up to normal. They are doing everything that they can to limit the damage to the environment.

Considering the hundreds of dead fish that were found floating on Darling River in western New South Wales last week, this may be a science experiment worth taking up for the state government. If they are successful, it may be a new method to save the algal blooms and oxygen starved water ways in the nation during this summer.