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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In a paper published in the Astronomy & Astrophysics Journal, an international team of astronomers reports the discovery of a group of objects that appear to be an emerging accumulation of galaxies in the making — known as a protocluster.

“This discovery is an important step toward reaching our ultimate goal: understanding the assembly of galaxy clusters, the most massive structures that exist in the universe,” said Brenda Frye, an associate professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory and a co-author of the study.

The Milky Way, home to our solar system, belongs to a galaxy cluster known as the Local Group, which in turn is a part of the Virgo supercluster. But what did a supercluster such as Virgo look like 11 billion years ago?

“We still know very little about protoclusters, in part because they are so faint, too faint to be detected by optical light,” Frye said. “At the same time, they are known to radiate brightly in other wavelengths such as the sub-millimeter.”

Initially discovered by the European Space Agency’s Planck telescope as part of an all-sky survey, the protocluster described in the new paper showed up prominently in the far-infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Sifting through a sample of more than 2,000 structures that could be in the process of becoming clusters, researchers came across a protocluster designated as PHz G237.01+42.50, or G237 for short. The observations looked promising, but to confirm its identity required follow-up observations with other telescopes.

Led by Mari Polletta at the National Institute for Astrophysics in Milan, Italy, the team conducted observations using the combined power of the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona, which is managed by UArizona, and the Subaru Telescope in Japan. The team identified 63 galaxies belonging to the G237 protocluster. The original discovery was published in a previous paper, and follow-up observations were also obtained using archival data, the Herschel Space Observatory and the Spitzer Space Telescope.

“You can think of galaxy protoclusters such as G237 as a galaxy shipyard in which massive galaxies are being assembled, only this structure existed at a time when the universe was 3 billion years old,” Frye said. “At the same time, the genealogy may be closer than you think. Because the universe is homogeneous and the same in all directions, we think that the Milky Way may have docked at a protocluster node similar to G237 when it was very young.”

At first, observations of G237 implied a total star formation rate that was unrealistically high, and the team struggled to make sense of the data. The G237 protocluster seemed to be forming stars at a rate of 10,000 times that of the Milky Way. At that rate, the protocluster would be expected to rapidly use up its stellar fuel and subsequently settle down into a complex system similar to the Virgo supercluster.

“Each of the 63 galaxies discovered so far in G237 was like a star factory in overdrive,” Frye said. “It’s as if the galaxies were working on overtime to the assemble stars. The rate of production was unsustainable. At such a pace, the supply chains are expected to break in the near future, and in a way that permanently shuts down the galaxy shipyard.”

Such high yields could only be maintained by a continuous injection of fuel, which for stars is hydrogen gas. Frye said that would require an efficient and unbroken supply chain that drew in unreasonably large amounts of fresh gas to fuel the star-forming factories.

“We don’t know where that gas was coming from,” she said.

Later, the team discovered that some of what it was seeing came from galaxies unrelated to the protocluster, but even after the irrelevant observations were removed, the total star formation rate remained high, at least 1,000 solar masses per year, according to Poletta. In comparison, the Milky Way produces about one solar mass each year.

“The picture we have pieced together now is that of a successful galaxy shipyard, which is working at high efficiency to assemble galaxies and the stars within them and has an energy supply that is more sustainable,” Frye said.

All galaxies in the universe are part of a giant structure that resembles a three-dimensional spider web shape called the cosmic web. The filaments of the cosmic web intersect at the nodes, which equate to the galaxy shipyards in the analogy.

“We believe that the filaments mediate the transfer of hydrogen gas from the diffuse medium of intergalactic space onto these hungry, newly forming protocluster structures in the nodes,” Frye said.

Pointing to future research, Polletta said: “We are in the process of analyzing more observations on this and other Planck protoclusters with the goal of tracing the gas that gives birth to these newly forming stars and feeds the supermassive black holes, to determine its origin and explain the observed extraordinary activity.”

Frye said she is looking forward to combining data from the Large Binocular Telescope with observations from NASA’s the James Webb Space Telescope, to be launched in December.

“Protoclusters offer an opportunity to investigate key questions in astronomy that only this new observatory can answer,” she said, “such as what mechanisms drive the prodigious star formation, and when will the hydrogen supply run out, forcing this galaxy shipyard to close its doors and turn into a supercluster similar to the one our Milky Way is in?”

Please see the paper for a full list of authors and funding information.

The confirmation was made possible using a new method to analyse family lineages using ancient DNA fragments, developed by a team of scientists led by Professor Eske Willerslev of the University of Cambridge and Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre. The results are published today in the journal Science Advances.

The technique searches for ‘autosomal DNA’ in the genetic fragments extracted from a body sample. Since we inherit half of our autosomal DNA from our father and half from our mother, this means genetic matches can be checked irrespective of whether an ancestor is on the father or mother’s side of the family.

Autosomal DNA from Lakota Sioux leader Sitting Bull’s scalp lock was compared to DNA samples from Ernie Lapointe and other Lakota Sioux. The resulting match confirms that Lapointe is Sitting Bull’s great-grandson, and his closest living descendant.

“Autosomal DNA is our non-gender-specific DNA. We managed to locate sufficient amounts of autosomal DNA in Sitting Bull’s hair sample, and compare it to the DNA sample from Ernie Lapointe and other Lakota Sioux — and were delighted to find that it matched,” said Professor Eske Willerslev in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology and Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre, senior author of the report.

Lapointe said: “over the years, many people have tried to question the relationship that I and my sisters have to Sitting Bull.”

Lapointe believes that Sitting Bull’s bones currently lie at a site in Mobridge, South Dakota, in a place that has no significant connection to Sitting Bull and the culture he represented. He also has concerns about the care of the gravesite. There are two official burial sites for Sitting Bull — at Fort Yates, North Dakota and Mobridge — and both receive visitors.

With DNA evidence to back up his claim of a bloodline, Lapointe now hopes to rebury the great Native American leader’s bones in a more appropriate location.

The new technique can be used when very limited genetic data are available, as was the case in this study. The work paves the way for similar DNA testing of the relationship between many other long-dead historical figures and their possible living descendants.

The technique could also be used to answer important questions based on old human DNA that might previously have been considered too degraded to analyse — for example in forensic investigations.

“In principle, you could investigate whoever you want — from outlaws like Jesse James to the Russian tsar’s family, the Romanovs. If there is access to old DNA — typically extracted from bones, hair or teeth, they can be examined in the same way,” said Willerslev, who is a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge.

It took the scientists 14 years to find a way of extracting useable DNA from the 5-6cm piece of Sitting Bull’s hair. The hair was extremely degraded, having been stored for over a century at room temperature in Washington’s Smithsonian Museum before it was returned to Lapointe and his sisters in 2007.

The technique differs from traditional approaches to DNA analysis, which look for a genetic match between specific DNA in the Y chromosome passed down the male line, or, if the long-dead person was female, specific DNA in the mitochondria passed from a mother to her offspring. Neither are particularly reliable, and in this case neither could be used as Lapointe claimed to be related to Sitting Bull on his mother’s side.

Tatanka-Iyotanka, better known as the Native American leader and military leader Sitting Bull (1831-1890), led 1,500 Lakota warriors at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 and wiped out US General Custer and five companies of soldiers. The blood-soaked feat — also known as ‘the Battle of the Greasy Grass’ — will forever symbolise the resistance of Native Americans to the white man’s insatiable appetite for empire-building. Sitting Bull was assassinated in 1890 by the ‘Indian Police’, acting on behalf of the US government.

“Sitting Bull has always been my hero, ever since I was a boy. I admire his courage and his drive. That’s why I almost choked on my coffee when I read in a magazine in 2007 that the Smithsonian Museum had decided to return Sitting Bull’s hair to Ernie Lapointe and his three sisters, in accordance with new US legislation on the repatriation of museum objects,” said Willerslev.

He added: “I wrote to Lapointe and explained that I specialised in the analysis of ancient DNA, and that I was an admirer of Sitting Bull, and I would consider it a great honour if I could be allowed to compare the DNA of Ernie and his sisters with the DNA of the Native American leader’s hair when it was returned to them.”

Until this study, the familial relationship between LaPointe and Sitting Bull was based on birth and death certificates, a family tree, and a review of historical records. This new genetic analysis provides an additional line of evidence to strengthen his claim.

Before the remains from the Mobridge burial site can be reburied elsewhere, they will have to be analysed in a similar way to the hair sample to ensure a genetic match to Sitting Bull. Under US law, Lapointe owns the legal rights to Sitting Bull’s genetic data so can decide who should do the analysis.

This research was funded by the Danish National Research Foundation.