Tech
While stories in the media present automation as having the potential to eliminate large swaths of jobs in the near future, a new study by researchers Maury Gittleman and Kristen Monaco argues otherwise.
These authors found that the employment loss among U.S. truck drivers will be significantly less than the 2-3 million reported by some media accounts. They found that three factors attributed to the inflation of this report:
The count of truck drivers is increased due to a misunderstanding of its occupational classification used in federal statistics
A spectacular stack on a ski slope in Canada has led to a University of Queensland researcher determining a simple modification that could improve skier safety on the snow.
UQ's Queensland Brain Institute researcher Dr Will Harrison studied visual perception under different lighting conditions to identify a better method for grooming ski runs.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- If current climate and crop-improvement trends continue into the future, Midwestern corn growers who today rely on rainfall to water their crops will need to irrigate their fields, a new study finds. This could draw down aquifers, disrupt streams and rivers, and set up conflicts between agricultural and other human and ecological needs for water, scientists say.
Bottom Line: A detailed analysis of recent national data on suicide rates among young people ages 15 to 24 reports 6,241 suicides in 2017, and suicide rates at ages 15 to 19 and 20 to 24 that have increased to their highest point since 2000. This study used data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to take a closer look at suicide rates in the United States among young people and to see if increases from 2000 to 2016 were continuing.
A new article published by researchers from University of Puget Sound and University of Washington reports that, based on analysis of public wastewater samples in at least one Western Washington population center, cannabis use both increased and substantially shifted from the illicit market since retail sales began in 2014.
Led by chemist Dan Burgard, the research team analyzed wastewater samples collected from 2013-2016 from two treatment plants that service a community of two hundred thousand in Western Washington.
Plant root systems play a crucial role in ecosystems, radically impacting everything from nutrient cycling to species composition. Despite their importance, scientists are just beginning to develop the tools to understand how these complex systems are structured, how they function, and how structure and function are related. Much of the research into root systems today uses sophisticated new technologies to address basic questions and descriptions.
Updated June 24, 2019 — NOTE: Out of an abundance of caution, The University of Toledo is working with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources to examine the terminology used in this study related to fracking wells. We value the research integrity of our University and hold ourselves to the highest standards as our researchers work to advance science.
HOUSTON -- (June 18, 2019) -- Rice University's solar-powered approach for purifying salt water with sunlight and nanoparticles is even more efficient than its creators first believed.
Researchers in Rice's Laboratory for Nanophotonics (LANP) this week showed they could boost the efficiency of their solar-powered desalination system by more than 50% simply by adding inexpensive plastic lenses to concentrate sunlight into "hot spots." The results are available online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
As a part of JST PRESTO program, Associate professor Masaharu Kobayashi, Institute of Industrial Science, the University of Tokyo, has developed a ferroelectric FET (FeFET) with ferroelectric-HfO2 and ultrathin IGZO channel. Nearly ideal subthreshold swing (SS) and mobility higher than poly-silicon channel have been demonstrated.
Osaka, Japan - Photocatalysts that harness light energy and use it to split water into hydrogen and oxygen attract significant scholarly attention, owing to the appeal of hydrogen as a potential clean energy source. However, the optimization of photocatalyst candidate materials usually requires a considerable time investment. Now, researchers at Osaka University have demonstrated a link between easy-to-measure quantities and catalyst performance that could provide a rapid evaluation method.
Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health and their colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin and the National Institutes of Health Vaccine Research Center have discovered an antibody that broadly inhibits multiple strains of pandemic norovirus, a major step forward in the development of an effective vaccine for the dreaded stomach virus.
A new publication in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science tracks West Indian manatee movements through nearshore and offshore ship channels in the north-central Gulf of Mexico. The publication, "Linking Use of Ship Channels by West Indian Manatees (Trichechus manatus) to Seasonal Migration and Habitat Use", provides new fundamental knowledge on movement ecology of a large, protected marine species and important information to guide future conservation practices.
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. -- If any factory worker could program low-cost robots, then more factories could actually use robotics to increase worker productivity.
This is because workers would be able to shift to taking on more varied and higher-level tasks, and factories could produce a greater variety of products.
That's the idea behind a prototype smartphone app Purdue University researchers have developed that allows a user to easily program any robot to perform a mundane activity, such as picking up parts from one area and delivering them to another.
PULLMAN, Wash. - Suppose you're at a nice restaurant celebrating your anniversary. When a customer at a nearby table complains that it's taking too long to get his meal, you and your spouse overhear the server's brusque response. Would the server's behavior prompt you to leave a smaller tip for your own meal?
When people witness poor customer service, studies indicate they want to seek revenge against the employee, even though they weren't directly affected.
Andriy Zakutayev knows the odds of a scientist stumbling across a new nitride mineral are about the same as a ship happening upon a previously undiscovered landmass.
"If you find any nitride in nature, it's probably in a meteorite," said Zakutayev, a scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).