10 August 2019 | New Scientist | 7Fluid dynamics Automation
Chelsea Whyte Chelsea Whyte
FLUID travelling through tiny pipes
can be damaged or slowed down
by the pipe’s walls, a problem that
affects some parts of the blood
pumps used during heart surgery.
A new type of liquid pipe that has
no walls could solve this dilemma
by allowing fluid to flow with
nearly no friction.
The pipes were made using
a ferrofluid, a liquid containing
suspended magnetic particles.
Thomas Hermans at the University
of Strasbourg in France and his
colleagues placed this liquid inside
a plastic case lined with magnets,
which were used to manipulate
the ferrofluid and create a channel
where another fluid could flow.
“We call them anti-tubes,”
says Hermans. In one test, the
group found that honey flowed
70 times faster through
ferrofluidic channels than
through a conventional plastic
tube of the same diameter
(ChemRxiv, doi. org/ c85g).
This could help in the study of
fluid dynamics or in pharmaceutical
processes that involve manipulating
small amounts of liquids. By rapidly
adding and removing magnets, the
fluid inside the liquid tube can be
forced to flow, in a similar way to
the rollers used in peristaltic pumps
commonly used to pump blood
through a heart during surgery.
“With those, the red blood
cells can break and haemoglobin
is released into blood plasma, which
triggers all kinds of bad things for
the patient,” says Hermans. In tests,
Hermans and his team found that
the breakdown of haemoglobin in
human blood was about 11 times
lower with their pipe than in a
traditional peristaltic pump.
Thomas Russell at the University
of Massachusetts Amherst says
the system may be susceptible to
interference from other magnetic
fields, but that future tests
would have to confirm this. ❚
‘Anti-tubes’ for
pumping blood
are made of liquid
IMAGINE you were about to
be replaced. Would you prefer
to lose your job to a robot or
another person? If you said
robot, you are in the majority.
“Being replaced by
modern technology versus
being replaced by humans
has different psychological
consequences,” says Armin
Granulo at the Technical
University of Munich, Germany.
He and his colleagues set out to
examine these differences.
The team asked 300 people
to judge whether they would
prefer an existing employee
to be replaced by a robot or a
human. In that scenario, 62 per
cent of people said they would
prefer to have a human step in.
But when they were asked to
shift their perspective and
imagine losing their own job,
63 per cent would rather their
own job was taken by a robot.
In a follow-up, the teamasked 251 people to indicate
the intensity of their negative
emotions, such as sadness,
anger or frustration, when
imagining new employees
being replaced by humans
or robots. When the questionsreferred to replacing other
people’s jobs with robots, the
respondents said they had
stronger negative emotions
than when they considered
losing their own job to a robot.
The team found that people
rated robots as less threatening
to their self-identity than
human replacements in a job
setting. That may be because
people don’t feel they can or
must compete with a robot or
a piece of software in the sameway as they might with another
person, says Granulo.
The group also surveyed
296 workers from the
manufacturing industry.
A third of these workers thought
their current job could be
replaced by technology in the
near future and expressed the
same pattern of preference for
being replaced by robots rather
than people (Nature Human
Behaviour, doi. org/c85t).
In 2013, Carl Frey and Michael
Osborne at the University of
Oxford categorised jobs by how
easily they could be done by
machines and found that about
half the jobs in the US could be
performed by robots in the next
20 years. Other studies have
come up with different figures,
but most researchers agree that
large numbers of jobs will be
automated in the near future.
“Workers prefer automated
plants to non-automated plants
because they don’t have to do as
much heavy lifting. But people
mind the transitions. When
something was just being
introduced, they did worry
about loss of responsibility,
that could worry them about
their jobs,” says Frey.
He says that some jobs
may simply shift to adapt to
technological advances. For
example, a bank teller 40 years
ago handled more cash and
dealt with transactions that
an ATM may take care of today.
“But those jobs still exist.
Now, a bank teller is more of a
relationship manager. The job
disappeared, but we don’t think
of it that way, because what
matters to people is if they
are replaced,” says Frey. ❚People prefer to lose jobs
to robots over humans
REUTERS/ALY SONGPeople find robots less
threatening to their
identity than humans63%
of people would rather be
replaced by a robot than a human