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.