Will computers perform 45 pc of human jobs in future?

45 percent of jobs presently conducted by humans will be handed over to the computers within the next 20 years, a group of futurists have warned. According to io9.com, researchers, from University of Oxford’s James Martin School, believe that the takeover will happen in two stages where jobs in services, sales and construction may be the first to go.

Other vulnerable fields in the first stage include transportation/logistics, production labor, and administrative support. In the second stage, scientist think that jobs in management, science and engineering, and the arts will be at risk. (ANI)

Lost river helped lead early ancestors out of Africa

A climate model has suggested that the early humans may have left sub-Saharan Africa behind, by following a vast and fertile river system to the Mediterranean. For many years, it has been speculated that three now-dry North African rivers may have served as pathways for our early ancestors to leave Africa behind.

These rivers would have supplied our ancestors with food while they travelled to the Mediterranean and then on to the Eurasia. Hydrologist Tom Coulthard of the University of Hull, UK and his colleagues made the climate model of the last interglacial period to find out how the monsoon rains may have travelled down the trans-Saharan mountains’ north face and flowed across the landscape.

Coulthard’s colleague Michael Rogerson said that hey found that the most promising of the three re-constructed rivers is the Irharhar, which flowed 800 kilometres due north to humid regions along the Algeria-Tunisia border, New Scientist reported.

Rogerson also suggested that after reaching the end of the Irharhar, they may have taken advantage of marine resources and walked eastward along the North African coast, and traversed the Nile delta before migrating into the Middle East. (ANI)

Why swatting a fly with bare hands is next to impossible!

A new study has revealed that smaller animals tend to perceive time in slow-motion, which means that they can observe movement on a finer timescale than bigger creatures, allowing them to escape from larger predators.

 It was found that smaller animals like insects and small birds, can see more information in one second than a larger animal such as an elephant, the BBC reported.

The study’s lead author Kevin Healy, at Trinity College Dublin (TCD), Ireland, said that the ability to perceive time on very small scales may be the difference between life and death for fast-moving organisms such as predators and their prey.

Meanwhile, the reverse was found in bigger animals, which tend to view the world much slower and may miss things that smaller creatures can rapidly spot.

The current study focused on vertebrates, but the team also found that several fly species have eyes that react to stimulus more than four times quicker than the human eye.

The study suggested that in humans, too, there is variation among individuals.

For example, an experienced goalkeeper can process visual information more quickly, thereby observing where a ball comes from faster than others.

Andrew Jackson, a co-author of the study, said that the speed at which humans absorb visual information is also age-related. Younger people can react more quickly than older people, and this ability falls off further with increasing age.

The study is published in the journal Animal Behaviour. (ANI)

Underwater melt behind 90pc of Antarctica’s ice loss

A new study suggests that more ice leaves Antarctica by melting from the underside of submerged ice shelves than it was earlier believed, which accounts for as much as 90 percent of ice loss in some areas.

Iceberg production and melting causes 2,800 cubic kilometres of ice to leave the Antarctic ice sheet every year. Most of this is replaced by snowfall but any imbalance contributes to a change in global sea level.

For many decades, experts have believed that the most important process responsible for this huge loss was iceberg calving – the breaking off of chunks of ice at the edge of a glacier.

New research, led by academics at the University of Bristol with colleagues at Utrecht University and the University of California, has used satellite and climate model data to prove that this sub-shelf melting has as large an impact as iceberg calving for Antarctica as a whole, and for some areas is far more important.

The findings are crucial for understanding how the ice sheet interacts with the rest of the climate system and particularly the ocean.

During the last decade, the Antarctic ice-sheet has been losing an increasing amount of its volume.

The annual turnover of ice equates to 700 times the four cubic kilometres per year which makes up the entire domestic water supply for the UK.

Researchers found that, for some ice shelves, melting on its underbelly could account for as much as 90 per cent of the mass loss, while for others it was only 10 per cent.

Ice shelves which are thinning already were identified as losing most of their mass from this melting, a finding which will be a good indicator for which ice shelves may be particularly vulnerable to changes in ocean warming in the future. (ANI)

Study of distant dying star may tell how Sun will eventually die

Scientists have found a jet of high-energy particles erupting from a dying star, which could help explain what happens when stars like the Sun reach the end of their lives. Chalmers scientists and colleagues from Germany and Australia used the CSIRO Australia Telescope Compact Array, an array of six 22-meter radio telescopes in New South Wales, Australia, to study a star at the end of its life. The star, known as IRAS 15445-5449, is in the process of becoming a planetary nebula, and lies 23,000 light-years away in the southern constellation Triangulum Australe (the Southern Triangle). Lead author Andres Perez Sanchez, graduate student in astronomy at Bonn University, said that in their data they found the clear signature of a narrow and extremely energetic jet of a type which has never been seen before in an old, Sun-like star.

The strength of the radio waves of different frequencies from the star match the expected signature for a jet of high-energy particles which are, thanks to strong magnetic fields, accelerated up to speeds close to the speed of light.

Similar jets have been seen in many other types of astronomical object, from newborn stars to supermassive black holes.

Wouter Vlemmings, astronomer at Onsala Space Observatory, Chalmers, said that the star’s brightness indicates that it’s in the process of creating a symmetric nebula around the star. (ANI)

How continents formed on Earth

Researchers have provided a new insight on how continents formed early in Earth history. A research led by a University of Calgary geophysicist provided strong evidence against continent formation above a hot mantle plume, similar to an environment that presently exists beneath the Hawaiian Islands.

The analysis indicates that the nuclei of Earth’s continents formed as a byproduct of mountain-building processes, by stacking up slabs of relatively cold oceanic crust, which created thick, strong ‘keels’ in the Earth’s mantle that supported the overlying crust and enabled continents to form.

The Department of Geoscience’s Professor David Eaton developed computer software to enable numerical simulation of the slow diffusive cooling of Earth’s mantle over a time span of billions of years.

Working in collaboration with former graduate student, Assistant Professor Claire Perry from the Universite du Quebec a Montreal, Eaton relied on the geological record of diamonds found in Africa to validate his innovative computer simulations. The study has been published in Nature Geoscience. (ANI)