Findings also indicated that the availability of more supermarkets could be protective against developing T2D, particularly in suburban and rural neighborhoods.

The study — notable for its large geographic breadth — uses data from a cohort of more than 4 million veterans living in 98 percent of U.S. census tracts across the country. It counted fast-food restaurants and supermarkets relative to other food outlets, and is the first, according to the researchers, to examine this relationship in four distinct types of neighborhoods (high-density urban, low-density urban, suburban, and rural) at the hyperlocal level nationwide.

“Most studies that examine the built food environment and its relationship to chronic diseases have been much smaller or conducted in localized areas,” said Rania Kanchi, MPH, a researcher in the Department of Population Health at NYU Langone and lead author of the study. “Our study design is national in scope and allowed us to identify the types of communities that people are living in, characterize their food environment, and observe what happens to them over time. The size of our cohort allows for geographic generalizability in a way that other studies do not.”

How the Study was Conducted

The research team used data from the U.S. Veterans Health Administration (the largest single-payer healthcare system in the country) that captures more than 9 million veterans seen at more than 1,200 health facilities around the country. Using this data, the researchers then constructed a national cohort of more than 4 million veterans without diabetes from the VA electronic health records (EHR) between 2008 and 2016. Each veteran’s health status was followed through 2018 or until the individual either developed diabetes, died, or had no appointments for more than two years.

Within each of four distinct neighborhood types, the proportion of restaurants that were fast food, and the proportion of food outlets that were supermarkets were tabulated within a one-mile walk in high- density urban neighborhoods, a two-mile drive in low-density urban neighborhoods, a six-mile drive in suburban communities, and a 10-mile drive in rural communities.

Veterans were followed for a median of five and a half years. During that time, 13.2 percent of the cohort were newly diagnosed with T2D. Males developed T2D more frequently than females (13.6 versus 8.2 percent). Non-Hispanic Black adults had the highest incidence (16.9 percent), compared to non-Hispanic Whites (12.9 percent), non-White Asian and Hispanics (12.8 percent), Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders (15 percent), and Native American and Alaskan Indians (14.2 percent).

When stratifying by community types, 14.3 percent of veterans living in high density urban communities developed T2D, while the lowest incidence was among those living in suburban and small town communities (12.6 percent).

Overall, the team concluded that the effect of the food environment on T2D incidence varied by how urban the community was, but did not vary further by region of the country.

“The more we learn about the relationship between the food environment and chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes, the more policymakers can act by improving the mix of healthy food options sold in restaurants and food outlets, or by creating better zoning laws that promote optimal food options for residents,” said Lorna Thorpe, PhD, MPH, professor in the Department of Population Health at NYU Langone and senior author of the study.

One limitation of the study, according to the authors, is that the study may not be fully generalizable to non-veteran populations, as U.S. veterans tend to be predominantly male and have substantially greater health burdens and financial instability than the civilian population. They are also at greater risk of disability, obesity, and other chronic conditions.

The next phase of the research, say Thorpe and Kanchi, will be to better understand the impacts of the built environment on diabetes risk by subgroups. They plan to examine whether or not the relationships between fast-food restaurants, supermarkets and community types vary by gender, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status.

Funding for the study was provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In addition to Thorpe and Kanchi, other NYU Langone researchers include Priscilla Lopez, MPH; Pasquale E. Rummo, PhD; David C. Lee, MD; Samrachana Adhikari, PhD; Mark D. Schwartz, MD, and Brian Elbel, PhD. Other research support was provided by Sanja Avramovich, PhD, Department of Health Administration and Policy, George Mason University; Karen R. Siegel, PhD; Deborah B. Rolka, MS and Giuseppina Imperatore from the Division of Diabetes Translation at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

That’s the story two graduate researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Georgia State University kept reading, from policymakers and other scholars, as they began their own study of technology’s impact on the workplace. But there was another, more nuanced story that ultimately informed their research.

“We saw these images on the internet of worker strikes that were happening all around the world in different cities and realized that there was more going on, something beyond the usual optimistic discourse around this topic,” said Daniel Schiff, a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Public Policy at Georgia Tech.

The photos and stories of unhappy workers protesting conditions in their modern, technologically-enhanced workplaces inspired Schiff and Luísa Nazareno, a graduate researcher in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State, to dig a little deeper. The result is a new study, “The impact of automation and artificial intelligence on worker well-being,” in the journal Technology in Society.

The paper presents a more surprising, dynamic, and complex picture of the recent history and likely future of automation and AI in the workplace. Schiff and Nazareno have incorporated multiple disciplines — economics, sociology, psychology, policy, even ethics — to reframe the conversation around automation and AI in the workplace and perhaps help decision makers and researchers think a bit deeper and more broadly about the human component.

“The well-being of the worker has implications for all of society, for families, even for productivity,” Nazareno said. “If we are really interested in productivity, worker well-being is something that must be taken into account.”

Changing the Discourse

While technological substitution may equal bad tidings in the form of replaced workers, complementarity is typically cast as a universal good, fostering an up-skilled workforce for jobs involving automation and AI, a future in which complemented workers benefit from the greater productivity, creativity, and freedom.

But the researchers found it’s not that simple. As Schiff and Nazareno considered those photos and stories of worker dissatisfaction, they wondered if the integration of automation and AI really does have a uniformly positive impact on worker well-being. It doesn’t, they report, citing that there is “persuasive evidence of negative effects on some dimensions of well-being.”

Based on previous studies and literature, and the general discourse around automation and AI in the workplace, the researchers considered five hypothetical channels through which automation might impact worker well-being: worker freedom, sense of meaning, cognitive load, external monitoring, and job insecurity.

Then they went after the data, diving deep into a 2002-2018 dataset curated from the General Social Survey — GSS, a wide-ranging national sociological survey created in 1972 at the University of Chicago and funded by the National Science Foundation. “We found they had a module for worker well-being in the data,” Nazareno explained.

They applied automation risk measurements (established in a University of Oxford study) to 402 occupations, assessing whether the adoption of automation and AI in the workplace could predict impacts on worker job satisfaction, stress, health, and insecurity — all key components that shape worker well-being.

Their results reveal that workers facing automation risk may generally have less stress on the job, but also suffer from worse health, and experience minimal or negative impacts on job satisfaction. These impacts are more concentrated in occupations facing the highest levels of automation risk, like receptionists, tax preparers, cashiers, credit analysts, and food science technicians, and jobs in transportation, logistics, office, and administrative support.

“There were some interesting contradictions as we explored a few different hypotheses,” Schiff said. “There’s the optimistic outlook about more freedom on the job, but there’s also this concept of loss-of-meaning. Maybe you’re a truck driver, but now you’re just sitting in the passenger seat. Your job’s easier, but it’s not necessarily better. Stress may be down, but you’re not challenged or doing meaningful work.”

Dynamic Process

The researchers also considered some recent paradoxical scenarios, like those that have taken place at technologically enhanced warehouses and distribution centers, where thousands of workers across the world have protested.

“Maybe automation has made your work easier, but now you’re being optimized,” Schiff said. “Every second you’re being monitored, you’re being watched, measured. You have no sense of job security, or for that matter, safety during a pandemic. Maybe it’s a combination of these things, but those benefits related to lower stress are now getting wiped out.”

Nazareno added, “One of our interesting conclusions is that this is a dynamic process. Different things are going on. We tend to think of stress as a bad thing, and it can be. But not all stress is bad, and not all stress is good. Maybe a good job can be stressful, creating a welcome challenge. At the opposite end is boredom.”

Generally, the less control workers feel they have in the inevitable surge of advanced technology in the workplace, the less satisfied they will be.

“Autonomy is a driving factor in worker well-being,” Nazareno said. “One way that policymakers or firms could address negative impacts is to let workers know what’s going on, empower them or involve them in the process, so they don’t feel like they’re losing autonomy and just being surveilled and being dictated to by machines. How a company involves its workers in the process really matters.”

With their new study, Schiff and Nazareno are hoping to fix the lens that policymakers, companies, and other researchers use when considering the impact of automation and artificial intelligence on workers. They believe their findings, which reveal a diverse range of effects on workers as a result of technological complementarity, encourage new research directions.

“Part of our hope here is to help policy decision makers pay more attention to down-the-road impacts, and think more about worker training and health, about restrictions and how automation can be used in different ways, not just wholesale innovation,” Schiff said.

The researchers took the discussion beyond wages and layoffs and paid close attention to what Schiff called, “the sociology or psychology of technological complementarity.”

“We’re trying to tap into questions that haven’t been sufficiently asked or answered,” Schiff said. “So, this study is a preliminary way of opening up a new conversation and changing the discourse.”

Data from the microwave radiometer carried by NASA’s Juno spacecraft shows that Jupiter’s banded pattern extends deep below the clouds, and that the appearance of Jupiter’s belts and zones inverts near the base of the water clouds. Microwave light allows planetary scientists to gaze deep beneath Jupiter’s colourful clouds, to understand the weather and climate in the warmer, darker, deeper layers.

At altitudes shallower than five bars of pressure (or around five times the average atmospheric pressure on Earth), the planet’s belts shine brightly in microwave light, whereas the zones are dark. But everything changes at higher pressures, at altitudes deeper than 10 bars, giving scientists a glimpse of an unexpected reversal in the meteorology and circulation.

Dr Leigh Fletcher, Associate Professor in Planetary Science at the University of Leicester and Participating Scientist for the Juno mission, is lead author of the study, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Planets. He said:

“One of Juno’s primary goals was to peer beneath the cloudy veil of Jupiter’s atmosphere, and to probe the deeper, hidden layers.

“Our study has shown that those colourful bands are just the ‘tip of the iceberg’, and that the mid-latitude bands not only extend deep, but seem to change their nature the further down you go.

“We’ve been calling the transition zone the jovicline, and its discovery has only been made possible by Juno’s microwave instrument.”

Among Jupiter’s most notable attributes is its distinctive banded appearance. Planetary scientists call the light, whiteish bands zones, and the darker, reddish ones belts. Jupiter’s planetary-scale winds circulate in opposite direction, east and west, on the edges of these colourful stripes. A key question is whether this structure is confined to the planet’s cloud tops, or if the belts and zones persist with increasing depth.

An investigation of this phenomenon is one of the primary objectives of NASA’s Juno mission, and the spacecraft carries a specially-designed microwave radiometer to measure emission from deep within the Solar System’s largest planet for the first time.

The Juno team utilise data from this instrument to examine the nature of the belts and zones by peering deeper into the Jovian atmosphere than has ever previously been possible.

Juno’s microwave radiometer operates in six wavelength channels ranging from 1.4 cm to 50 cm, and these enable Juno to probe the atmosphere at pressures starting at the top of the atmosphere near 0.6 bars to pressures exceeding 100 bars, around 250 km deep.

At the cloud tops, Jupiter’s belts appear bright with microwave emission, while the zones remain dark. Bright microwave emission either means warmer atmospheric temperatures, or an absence of ammonia gas, which is a strong absorber of microwave light.

This configuration persists down to approximately five bars. And at pressures deeper than 10 bars, the pattern reverses, with the zones becoming microwave-bright and the belt becoming dark. Scientists therefore believe that something — either the physical temperatures or the abundance of ammonia — must therefore be changing with depth.

Dr Fletcher terms this transition region between five and 10 bars the jovicline, a comparison to the thermocline region of Earth’s oceans, where seawater transitions sharply from relative warmth to relative coldness. Researchers observe that the jovicline is nearly coincident with a stable atmospheric layer created by condensing water.

Dr Scott Bolton, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), is Principal Investigator (PI) for the Juno mission. He said:

“These amazing results provide our first glimpse of how Jupiter’s famous zones and belts evolve with depth, revealing the power of investigating the giant planet’s atmosphere in three dimensions.”

There are two possible mechanisms that could be responsible for the change in brightness, each implying different physical conclusions.

One mechanism is related to the distribution of ammonia gas within the belts and zones. Ammonia is opaque to microwaves, meaning a region with relatively less ammonia will shine brighter in Juno’s observations. This mechanism could imply a stacked system of opposing circulation cells, similar to patterns in Earth’s tropics and mid-latitudes.

These circulation patterns would provide sinking in belts at shallow depths and upwelling in belts at deeper levels — or vigorous storms and precipitation, moving ammonia gas from place to place.

Another possibility is that the gradient in emission corresponds to a gradient in temperature, with higher temperatures resulting in greater microwave emission.

Temperatures and winds are connected, so if this scenario is correct, then Jupiter’s winds may increase with depth below the clouds until we reach the jovicline, before tapering off into the deeper atmosphere — something that was also suggested by NASA’s Galileo probe in 1995, which measured windspeeds as it descended under a parachute into the clouds of Jupiter.

The likely scenario is that both mechanisms are at work simultaneously, each contributing to part of the observed brightness variation. The race is now on to understand why Jupiter’s circulation behaves in this way, and whether this is true of the other Giant Planets in our Solar System.

The global team of researchers, led by UQ’s Dr Jingwei Hou, Professor Lianzhou Wang and Professor Vicki Chen, have unlocked the technology to produce next-generation composite glass for lighting LEDs and smartphone, television and computer screens.

The findings will enable the manufacture of glass screens that are not only unbreakable but also deliver crystal clear image quality.

Dr Hou said the discovery was a huge step forward in perovskite nanocrystal technology as previously, researchers were only able to produce this technology in the bone-dry atmosphere of a laboratory setting.

“The emitting materials are made from nanocrystals, called lead-halide perovskites,” he said. “They can harvest sunlight and concert it into renewable electricity — playing a vital role in low-cost and high-efficiency new generation solar cells and many promising applications like lighting.

“Unfortunately, these nanocrystals are extremely sensitive to light, heat, air and water — even water vapour in our air would kill the current devices in a matter of minutes.

“Our team of chemical engineers and material scientists has developed a process to wrap or bind the nanocrystals in porous glass.

“This process is key to stabilising the materials, enhancing its efficiency and inhibits the toxic lead ions from leaching out from the materials.”

Dr Hou said the technology was scalable and opened the door for many applications.

“At present QLED or quantum dot light-emitting diode screens are considered the top performer for image display and performance,” he said.

“This research will enable us to improve on this nanocrystal technology by offering stunning picture quality and strength.”

Professor Vicky Chen said it was an exciting development.

“Not only can we make these nanocrystals more robust but we can tune their opto-electronic properties with fantastic light emission efficiency and highly desirable white light LEDs, ” Professor Chen said.

“This discovery opens up a new generation of nanocrystal-glass composites for energy conversion and catalysis.”

The findings have been published in the Journal Science.

This research is a collaborative effort from UQ, the University of Leeds, Universite? Paris-Saclay and University of Cambridge.

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