As we age, we see a progressive decline of function occur throughout the body, but until now it has not been clear why this decline occurs and why it happens at different rates for different parts of the body. To understand this process, scientists must unpick all of the mechanisms of ageing at the molecular level, for every tissue.

The immune system is like a symphony orchestra, with many different types and subtypes of cells working together to fight infections. But as the immune system ages, its response to infection weakens for reasons that are not yet clear. One long-standing debate amongst scientists concerns two central hypotheses: either the functional degradation is caused by a loss of cellular performance, or it is down to a loss of coordination among cells.

To resolve the debate, scientists at the University of Cambridge, the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute studied many different cell types, analysing ‘average’ gene expression profiles. To do so, they employed high-resolution single-cell sequencing technology to create new insights into how cell-to-cell variability is linked with ageing. The researchers sequenced the RNA of naïve and memory CD4+ T cells in young and old mice, in both stimulated and unstimulated states.

Their findings clearly showed that loss of coordination is a key component of the impaired immune performance caused by T cell ageing.

“You could think of DNA sequencing as a fruit smoothie,” explains Dr John Marioni, Group Leader at EMBL-EBI and at the University of Cambridge’s Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute (CRUK-CI). “Traditional sequencing technology is a bit like taking a sip of the smoothie, then trying to guess what the ingredients are. Single-cell genomics now lets us study the ingredients individually, so we get direct insight into the constituent parts. Extrapolating, this means that single-cell sequencing allows researchers to individually look at thousands of genes at any given time.”

Dr Duncan Odom, Group Leader at the CRUK-CI and associate faculty at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, shares a further analogy to explain how immune cells fight infection. “Imagine the immune system as a ‘cell army’, ready to protect the body from infection. Our research revealed that this army is well coordinated in young animals, with all the cells working together and operating like a Greek phalanx to block the infection.”

Image: Spencer Phillips, The European Bioinformatics Institute 

The researchers say this tight coordination makes the immune system stronger, and allows it to fight infection more effectively. The team’s study shows that as the animal gets older, cell coordination breaks down.

“Although individual cells might still be strong, the lack of coordination between them makes their collective effectiveness lower,” Odom adds.

Previous studies have shown that in young animals, immunological activation results in tightly regulated gene expression. This study further reveals that activation results in a decrease in cell-to-cell variability. Ageing increased the heterogeneity of gene expression in populations of two mice species, as well as in different types of immune cells. This suggests that increased cell-to-cell transcriptional variability may be a hallmark of ageing across most mammalian tissues

“There is a great deal of interest in how biological ageing happens, but not much is known about molecular ageing,” says Dr Celia Pilar Martinez-Jimenez, experimental lead from the CRUK-CI. “This research initiative explored a new facet of cell response to disease, while also tackling questions related to ageing.”

Nils Eling, computational lead of the project and PhD student at EMBL-EBI and CRUK-CI adds: “The advantage of analysing gene expression from single cells is to detect how cell populations synchronise their response. It is interesting to see that ageing strongly distorts this response – a phenomenon which could not be observed before.”

The interdisciplinary study paves the way for a more in-depth exploration of the mechanisms by which different types of cells age. It also illustrates the potential of single-cell sequencing to enable a richer understanding of cell development and activity.

Reference
Martinez-Jimenez, C.P., Eling, N et al Ageing increases cell-to-cell transcriptional variability upon immune stimulation. Science; 30 Mar 2017; DOI: 10.1126/science.aah4115

Adapted from a press release from EMBL-EBI

And despite Cambridge University Library having room for more than 2.5 million books on its open shelves – more than any other open-access collection in Europe – its 31.8 miles of open shelving are increasingly close to capacity.

Fortunately, help will soon be at hand as work on a new £17.1million off-site storage facility began earlier this month with a traditional ground-breaking ceremony at the new construction site on the outskirts of Ely.

It is hoped that the first books will begin arriving from early 2018 to the Lancaster Way Business Park, near Ely. The business park is built on the site of former World War Two bomber base, RAF Witchford. At current estimates, the store would not reach capacity until 2030 at the earliest.

The new store will provide long-term storage for low-use printed material acquired by the main University Library, affiliated libraries and other faculty and departmental libraries of the University. The off-site storage facility will provide 106km (65miles) of storage space on around 30,000 shelves. There is also potential to expand the site by 25 percent in the longer term.

The highest shelf at the Ely site (11m) is the height of two adult giraffes and the capacity of the store is equal to 18 Olympic swimming pools. If the shelving was laid out end-to-end, it would stretch from Cambridge to London.

Acting University Librarian Professor Chris Young said: “The new store will help resolve the problem of chronic overcrowding of libraries across the university  and ensure that the most appropriate printed material is kept in the most appropriate and useful location for all our readers.

“The off-site storage will also help the University Library support teaching, learning and research by allowing us to plan new spaces and rethink our existing facilities and services. Only very low-use material will be considered for ingest for which there is little expected future demand.

“Through its Legal Deposit role the University Library has been collecting and preserving the published output of the UK and Ireland in all its variety since 1710, helping to build one of the world’s great academic library collections.  The new store will ensure that we fulfil our responsibilities as a national repository of research material by enabling us to house the publications in suitable conditions and make them available to future generations of researchers and library users.”

Once the migration process is under way, the delivery of printed material to the Ely store is expected to continue as a high volume activity until at last 2025. Should readers request material, the physical item will be retrieved and transported to the UL. Requests of material from the store, aim to be delivered to the University Library within one to two working days.

“More than 30 sites within a 50-mile radius of Cambridge were evaluated on size, ground conditions, land cost, and transport links before the Ely site was confirmed as the preferred location,” added Young. “Our new facility will future-proof the university libraries’ storage needs for a decade and more, especially given the projected effect of a gradual transition from print to digital-only publishing over the same period.

“The main University Library alone has more than 260,000 annual visits and more than 300,000 items borrowed per year. We want people to have the best possible experience every time they visit – and the new storage facility will allow us to run both the main University Library and our affiliated libraries much more efficiently.”

The tweets have been collected below. A longer piece from Prof Elliott on the White Paper and the key areas of constitutional law and politics it engages, is available on his blog site Public Law for Everyone.
 

The White Paper

General approach

EU law and UK law

The case law of the Court of Justice of the EU

Supremacy of EU law

Delegated powers

Parliamentary scrutiny

Devolution

I’m standing 100 feet underground in a fluorescent-white room. In the centre, stand four rows of server cabinets. I’m following Matej, a data centre technician, as he carries out some diagnostic tests on the facility’s IT equipment. To get here we had to go through several security checks, including a high-tech biometric fingerprint scanner and a good old-fashioned, low-tech massive door.

The IT equipment is distributed over multiple floors, each going deeper and deeper below ground into the seemingly infinite depths of the data centre. There is a constant hum of electrical voltage down here; it’s the kind of vibratory, carcinogenic sound you would normally associate with pylon power lines and it makes you think you’re probably being exposed to some sort of brain-frying electric field. I ask Matej about this and he tells me, “it’s probably ok.”

When Matej is finished in this room we head downstairs. Our footsteps sound hollow and empty on the elevated metallic walkways. A complex highway of thick, encaged cables runs above our heads, along with large pipes circulating water around the data centre for cooling purposes. As we descend the galvanised steel stairway, it’s like boarding a spaceship that’s buried deep beneath the Earth’s surface.

The room we enter is almost completely white. The only other colour down here comes from thousands of server lights blinking rapidly like fireflies behind the electro-zinc-coated ‘Zintec’ doors of the server cabinets. We have entered the realm of data, an alien world of tiny, undulating lights that seem almost alive. These iridescent lights flash as data travels to and from the facility through fibre-optic cables at speeds of around 670 million miles per hour, close to the speed of light.

Take a walk inside a data centre with Alex

This building has been designed with the sole purpose of providing optimal living conditions for data growth and survival. An ambient room temperature of around 20–21°C and a humidity level of 45–55% must constantly be maintained. In this sterile, dustless world of brushed metal surfaces, data live and thrive like precious crystals. Server cabinets become stalagmite formations sparkling frenetically with the digital activity of millions of people doing their daily things in that exact moment all around the world.

Virtually all our daily activity – both online and offline – entails the production of data, with 2.5 billion gigabytes of data being produced every 24 hours. This is stored in the 8.6 million data centres that have spread acoss the globe. Yet, few of us realise that we are using data centres.

Data centres now underpin an incredible range of activities and utilities across government, business and society, and we rely on them for even the most mundane activities: our electricity and water accounts are located in data centres, a single Google search can involve up to five data centres, information from the train tickets we swipe at turnstiles are routed through data centres. These places process billions of transactions every day and extreme efforts are made to ensure that they do not fail.

One such effort is the increasingly common practice of storing data underground in ‘disaster-proof’ facilities – in the same way that seed and gene banks store biological material that is essential for human survival. What does this say about the importance of data to our society? This is what I am down here researching. Working with data centres, IT security specialists, cloud computing companies and organisations that are trying to raise awareness about the vulnerabilities of digital infrastructures, I am exploring the cultural hopes, fears and imaginations of data as it pertains to what many are calling our ‘digital future’.

My fieldwork has led me to focus on the fears of disaster and technological failure that motivate data centre practices and discourses, from routine Disaster Recovery plans to storing hard drives in Faraday cages to protect them against electromagnetic threats. The current mass exodus into ‘the cloud’ is raising important questions about our increasing societal dependence upon digital technology and the resilience, sustainability and security of the digital infrastructure that supports our online and offline lives. Fears of a ‘digital’ disaster occurring in the future are also reflected in cultural artefacts such as TV shows about global blackouts and books about electromagnetic pulse events. In an age of constant and near compulsory connection to computers, tablets and smartphones, how would we survive if they all suddenly and simultaneously ceased to function?

 Data centres are being configured as infrastructures critical not only for supporting our data-based society, but also for backing up and even potentially re-booting ‘digital civilisation’, if it should collapse. My fieldwork is not all doom and disaster, though. In fact, sometimes it’s quite spectacular. Right now I am standing in a heavily air-conditioned aisle flanked on each side by large, monolithic cabinets of server racks.

“This is one of my favourite things,” Matej says, as he flicks the overhead lights off and plunges us into an abyssal darkness punctured only by server lights, flashing like phytoplankton all around us. For a moment, we watch these arrhythmic lights flickering, beautiful and important, some vanishingly small.

But these little lights have immense significance. Something huge is happening down here. It feels like you are witnessing something incomprehensibly vast, something so massively distributed, complex and connected to all of us that it’s hard to even know what you are seeing take place. It’s like looking at the stars.

Alex is a PhD student with the Division of Social Anthropology. His research is supervised by Dr Christos Lynteris, and is funded by the Cambridge Home and EU Scholarship Scheme.

In his keynote speech, Professor Baron-Cohen, Director of the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge, argued that even with the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities having been adopted in 2006, people with autism still do not enjoy human rights to the same extent as everyone else.

At least 1% of the world’s population is on the autism spectrum, which equates to some 70 million people with autism on the planet.  Autism is a spectrum of neurological disabilities involving difficulties with social relationships, communication, adjusting to unexpected change, dealing with ambiguity, and entailing sensory hypersensitivity and anxiety. Autism also leads to a different perceptual and learning style, so that the person has a preference for detail, and develops unusually narrow interests, and an unusually strong preference for facts, patterns, repetition and routine.

“People with autism account for a significant minority of the population worldwide, yet we are failing them in so many respects,” he said. “This creates barriers to their participation in society and to their autonomy that must be addressed. We have had a UN Convention to support people with disabilities for over 10 years now and yet we still are not fulfilling their basic human rights.”

In his speech, Professor Baron-Cohen reminded the UN that in Nazi Germany during the Holocaust, people with intellectual disability were killed in their thousands, under the compulsory euthanasia laws. Many of these individuals likely had autism, even before we had a name for it, as the first report of autism by Dr Leo Kanner was published during the Second World War.

However, historical violations of the human rights of people with autism go back further than that: in the US, in the 1920s, many States passed laws to compulsorily sterilize people with intellectual disability, including those whom today we would recognize had autism, in the name of eugenics.

Professor Baron-Cohen highlighted six examples where he believes the human rights of people with autism are not being met.

First, the right to dignity: According to the National Autistic Society in the UK, half of adults with autism report they have been abused by someone they thought was a friend. Half of adults with autism report they stay home because of fear of being abused in some way. Individuals with intellectual disability, including those with autism, are three times more likely to be victims of abuse or neglect, robbery, or assault.

Second, the right to education: one in five children with autism have been excluded from school. Whatever the reason for being excluded, they are being deprived of the right to education.  And of the other 80% of children with autism who have stayed in school, half report having been bullied, which is a risk factor for depression.

Third, the right to equal access to public services: one in three adults with autism experiences severe mental ill health because of lack of support. In Professor Baron-Cohen’s clinic for adults with Asperger Syndrome, a subgroup of autism, two thirds have felt suicidal and one third have felt so bad that they have attempted suicide. Research from the Universities of Cambridge and Coventry in the UK found that among those who have died by suicide, approximately 12% had definite or probable autism. Professor Baron-Cohen called for a minute’s silence to remember those people with autism who have died by suicide.

Finding such a high rate of autism in people who have died by suicide is not surprising when you consider how many of these individuals did not have the benefit of early diagnosis, explained Professor Baron-Cohen. Early diagnosis is possible in childhood – there are screening measures that can detect autism in young toddlers, but most countries do not screen for autism.

He drew attention to the fact that in the UK, in many areas, the waiting time for a diagnosis can be up to a year or longer, and that in high- and middle-income countries, people with autism may receive a formal diagnosis, but in low-income countries, the majority of people with autism may remain undiagnosed, either because of stigma, ignorance, or lack of basic services.

Fourth, the right to work and employment: Professor Baron-Cohen said that only 15% of adults with autism are in full time employment, despite many having good intelligence and talents. The right to work should extend to everyone, whatever support they might need. Unemployment is another well-known risk factor for depression.

He commended some enlightened employers, like the German company Auticon, the Danish company Specialisterne, and the German company SAP, for setting an example of how to help people with autism into employment and how employers can make reasonable adjustments for people with autism.

Fifth, the right to protection from discrimination, and the right to a cultural life, and to rest and leisure: He described how many people with autism have been asked to leave a supermarket or a cinema, because of their different behaviour. He said this is discrimination and again would never be tolerated for other kinds of disabilities.

In addition, half of adults with autism report feeling lonely, a third of them do not leave the house most days, and two thirds of them feel depressed because of loneliness. One in four adults with autism have no friends at all.

Finally, the right to protection of the law, and the right to a fair, impartial trial: one in five young people with autism have been stopped and questioned by the police, and 5% have been arrested. Two-thirds of police officers report they have received no training in how to interview a person with autism. Many legal cases involving someone with autism result in imprisonment for crimes the person with autism may not have committed, or for crimes others committed, but the person with autism became tangled up in, because of their social naivete. Some of these crimes are the result of the person with autism becoming obsessed with a particular topic, a product of their disability, and yet the courts often ignore autism as a mitigating factor.

Professor Baron-Cohen ended his address with a call to action. “We must take action. I want to see an investigation into the violation of human rights in people with autism. I want to see increased surveillance of their needs, in every country. And I want us to be continuously asking people with autism what their lives are like, and what they need, so that they are fully involved in shaping their future. Only this way can we ensure their human rights are met.”

Q&A

Into space

Q: How big is the universe … and is it the only one?

Our cosmic horizons have grown enormously over the last century, but there is a definite limit to the size of the observable universe. It contains all the things from which light has been able to reach us since the Big Bang, about 14 billion years ago. But the new realisation is that the observable universe may not be all of reality. There may be more beyond the horizon, just as there’s more beyond the horizon when you’re observing the ocean from a boat.

What’s more, the galaxies are likely to go on and on beyond this horizon, but more interestingly, there is a possibility that our Big Bang was not the only one. There may have been others, spawning other universes, disconnected from ours and therefore not observable, and possibly even governed by different physical laws. Physical reality on this vast scale could therefore be much more varied and interesting than what we can observe.

The universe we can observe is governed by the same laws everywhere. We can observe a distant galaxy and see that the atoms emitting the light are just the same as the ones in the lab. But there may be physical domains that are governed by completely different laws. Some may have no gravity, or not allow for nuclear physics. Ours may not even be a typical domain.

Even in our own universe, there are only so many ways you can assemble the same atoms, so if it is large enough it is possible that there is another Earth, even another avatar you. If this were the case, however, the universe would have to be bigger than the observable one by a number which to write down would require all the atoms in the universe. Rest assured, if there’s another you, they are a very, very long way away. They might even be making the same mistakes.

Q: So how likely is alien life in this vast expanse?

We know now that planets exist around many, even most, stars. We know that in our Milky Way galaxy there are likely millions of planets that are in many ways like the Earth, with liquid water. The question then is whether life has developed on them – and we can’t yet answer that.

Although we know how via Darwinian selection a complex biosphere evolved on Earth around 4 billion years ago, we don’t yet understand the actual origin of life – the transition from complex chemistry to the first metabolising, replicating structures. The good news is that we will have a better idea of how that happened within the next ten or 20 years and crucially, how likely it was to happen. This will give us a better understanding of how likely it is to happen elsewhere. In that time, we will also have technologies that will allow us to better search for alien life.

But just because there’s life elsewhere doesn’t mean that there is intelligent life. My guess is that if we do detect an alien intelligence, it will be nothing like us. It will be some sort of electronic entity.

If we look at our history on Earth, it has taken about 4 billion years to get from the first protozoa to our current, technological civilisation. But if we look into the future, then it’s quite likely that within a few centuries, machines will have taken over – and they will then have billions of years ahead of them.

In other words, the period of time occupied by organic intelligence is just a thin sliver between early life and the long era of the machines. Because such civilisations would develop at different rates, it’s extremely unlikely that we will find intelligent life at the same stage of development as us. More likely, that life will still be either far simpler, or an already fully electronic intelligence.

On intelligence

Q: Do you believe that machines will develop intelligence?

There are many people who would bet on it. The second question, however, is whether that necessarily implies consciousness – or whether that is limited to the wet intelligence we have within our skulls. Most people, however, would argue that it is an emergent property and could develop in a machine mind.

Q: So if the universe is populated by electronic super minds, what questions will they be pondering?

We can’t conceive that any more than a chimp can guess the things that we spend our time thinking about. I would guess, however, that these minds aren’t on planets. While we depend on a planet and an atmosphere, these entities would be happy in zero G, floating freely in space. This might make them even harder to detect.

Q: How would humanity respond to the discovery of alien life?

It would certainly make the universe more interesting, but it would also make us less unique. The question is whether it would provoke in us any sense of cosmic modesty. Conversely, if all our searches for life fail, we’d know more certainly that this small planet really is the one special place, the single pale, blue dot where life has emerged. That would make what happens to it not just of global significance, but an issue of galactic importance, too.

And we are likely to be fixed to this world. We will be able to look deeper and deeper into space, but travelling to worlds beyond our solar system will be a post-human enterprise. The journey times are just too great for mortal minds and bodies. If you’re immortal, however, these distances become far less daunting. That journey will be made by robots, not us.

Q: What scientific advances would you like to see over the coming century?

Cheap, clean energy, for one. Artificial meat is another. But the idea is often easier than the application. I like to tell my students the story of two beavers standing in front of a huge hydroelectric dam. “Did you build that?” asks one. “No,” says the other. “But it is based on my idea”. That’s the essential balance between scientific insight and engineering development.

On expertise

Q: Michael Gove [the British politician who was a leader of the campaign for the UK to leave the EU] said people have had enough of experts. Have they?

I wouldn’t expect anything more from Mr Gove, but there is clearly a role for experts. If we’re sick, we go to a doctor, we don’t look randomly on the internet. But we must also realise that most experts only have expertise within their own area, and if we are scientists we should accept that. When science impacts on public policy, there will be elements of economics, ethics and politics where we as scientists speak only as laymen. We need to know where the demarcation line is between where we are experts and where we are just citizens.

If you want to influence public policy as a scientist, there are two ways to do it. You can aspire to be an adviser within government, which can be very frustrating. Or you can try and influence policy indirectly. Politicians are very much driven by what’s in their inbox and what’s in the press, so the scientists with the greatest influence are those who go public, and speak to everyday people. If an idea is picked up by voters, the politicians won’t ignore it.

Q: Brexit – good or bad?

I am surprised to find myself agreeing with Lord Heseltine [former UK Conservative government minister] and Tony Blair [former Labour prime minister], but it is a real disaster, which we have stumbled into. There is a lot of blame to be shared around, by Boris Johnson et al, but also by Jeremy Corbyn [leader of the UK Labour party] for not fighting his corner properly. I have been a member of the Labour Party for a very long time, but I feel badly let down by Corbyn – especially as Labour voters supported Remain two to one. He has been an ineffective leader, and also ambivalent on this issue. A different leader, making a vocal case for Remain, could have tilted the vote.

On the other side, Boris Johnson [now UK foreign secretary – who campaigned for Britain to leave the EU] has been most reprehensible. At least Gove has opinions, which he has long expressed. Boris Johnson had no strong opinions, and the honourable thing to do if that is the case is to remain quiet. But he changed his stance opportunistically (as in the Eton debating society) and swung the vote.

Q: But why is it such a disaster?

My concerns are broad geopolitical ones. In the world as it is now, with America becoming isolationist and an increasingly dominant Russia, for Europe to establish itself as a united and powerful counterweight is more important than ever. We are jeopardising something that has held Europe together, in peace, for 60 years, and could also break up the United Kingdom in the process. We will be remembered for that and it is something to deplore.

One thing astronomers bring to the table is an awareness that we have a long potential future, as well as the universe’s long past – and that this future could be jeopardised by what happens in the coming decades.

Q: More broadly, how much danger is the human race in?

I have spent a lot of time considering how we as a species can make it into the next century – and there are two main classes of problems. First, the collective impact of humanity as its footprint on the planet increases due to a growing population more demanding of resources. Second, the possible misuse by error or design of ever more powerful technology – and most worryingly, bio-tech.

There is certainly a high chance of a major global setback this century, most likely from the second threat, which increasingly allows individual groups to have a global impact. Added to this is the fact that the world is increasingly connected, so anything that happens has a global resonance. This is something new and actually makes us more vulnerable as a species than at any time in our past.

Q: So terrorism will pose an even greater threat in the coming century?

Yes, because of these technologies, terrorists or fanatics will be able to have a greater impact. But there’s also the simple danger of these technologies being misused. Engineering or changing viruses, for example, can be used in benign ways – to eradicate Zika, for example – but there’s obviously a risk that such things can get out of control.

Nuclear requires large, conspicuous and heavily-protected facilities. But the facilities needed for bio-tech, for example, are small-scale, widely understood, widely available and dual use. It is going to be very hard indeed properly to regulate it.

In the short and intermediate term, this is even more worrying than the risks posed by climate change – although in the long term, that will be a very major problem, especially as both people and politicians find it very difficult to focus on things further down the line.

I have been very involved in campaigns to get all countries involved in research and development into alternative, clean energy sources. Making them available and cheap is the only way we are going to move towards a low carbon future. The level of money invested in this form of research should be equivalent to the amount spent on health or defence, and nuclear fusion and fourth generation nuclear fission should be part of that.

Q: In the medieval world, people would start building cathedrals that only later generations would finish. Have we lost that long-term perspective?

That’s right. In fact, one very important input behind the political discussion prior to the Paris climate agreement was the 2015 Papal Encyclical. I’m a council member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, which helped to initiate the scientific meetings which were important in ensuring that the encyclical was a highly respected document. Whatever one thinks of the Catholic church, one cannot deny its long-term vision, its global range and its concern for the world’s poor. I believe that the encyclical, six months before the Paris conference, had a big impact on the leaders and people in South America, Africa and Asia. Religion clearly still has a very important role to play in the world.

Q: Have you ever encountered anything in the cosmos that has made you wonder whether a creator was behind it?

No. Personally, I don’t have any religious beliefs. But I describe myself as a cultural Christian, in that I was brought up in England and the English church was an important part of that. Then again, if I had been born in Iran, I’d probably go to the mosque.

Martin Rees, Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics, University of Cambridge

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The one day workshop was run by the Centre For Business Research (CBR) and the Cambridge Public Policy Strategic Research Initiative. On the day, the CBR's Boni Sones sat down with some of the experts to get their take on the major issues facing Brexit Britain. You can listen to their conversations below:  

Prof Simon Deakin: Social policy post Brexit and workers’ rights

Simon Deakin is a Professor of Law and the Director of the Centre For Business Research. He specialises in labour law, private law, company law and EU law. His research is concerned, more generally, with the relationship between law and the social sciences.

To what extent we remain outside the Single Market is going to be a matter of degree. The current government’s decision for a deep and comprehensive trade agreement actually takes us back in to much of the single market, and we will be bound going forward to single market rules.”

Simon Deakin

Dr Kirsty Hughes: The right to remain of EU nationals

Kirsty Hughes is a University Lecturer in Law specialising in Human Rights and Public Law. She lectures on Civil Liberties, European Human Rights Law and Constitutional Law among other areas, and has a forthcoming book on Privacy Theory.

The suggestion that residency can be used in withdrawal negotiations does seem to be overstating matters given that residency is preserved under human rights law. It will be unlawful for us to expel EU nationals, and given therefore that it would be unlawful it seems particularly insensitive and unfair for EU nationals to be living in a state of uncertainty which is completely unnecessary.

Kirsty Hughes

You can read Dr Hughes's paper on the right to remain of EU nationals in full here. 

Dr Michael Waibel: The financial cost to the UK of leaving the EU

Michael Waibel is a University Lecturer and Deputy-Director of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law. He researches economic law with a particular focus on finance and the settlement of international disputes.

The House of Lords’ assessment as a backdrop to these Brexit negotiations is that there is no legal liability. In purely legal terms I think the House of Lords has got it wrong. The UK is in principle liable for a share of the EU’s budget commitments that the UK made as a member of the EU.

Michael Waibel

You can read Dr Waibel's paper on the financial cost of leaving the EU in full here. 

Dr Graham Gudgin: A critique of treasury estimates of the impact of Brexit

Graham Gudgin is currently Research Associate at Cambridge's Centre For Business Research and part-time Senior Economic Advisor with Oxford Economics. He has been a Special Adviser to the Northern Ireland First Minister on economic policy.

Over the past 15 years we have created about 3 million extra jobs in the UK, but that has been associated with a rise of about 85 per cent of people born from abroad, and a high proportion of these work on or at the minimum wage. That is not great for productivity...

Graham Gudgin

Prof David Howarth: The UK Constitution, the White Paper and the proposed Repeal Act

David Howarth is a Professor of Law and Public Policy in the Department of Land Economy. He served as the Member of Parliament for Cambridge between 2005 and 2010.

A lot of this process is far too short. Designing and drafting new law is not easy. It can’t be done by amateurs, it can’t be done by politicians on the hoof on the floor of the House of Commons. It needs to be thought through and there is just not enough time to think it through.

David Howarth

Dr Martin Steinfeld: The Free Movement of People and EU law

Martin Steinfeld is an Affiliated Lecturer in EU law. He was previously a barrister at the Chancery Bar and worked at both the European Parliament and the Court of Justice of the European Union.

There are many rights that EU citizens exercising their rights to free movement have had for many years. That is a matter for huge discussion on a domestic level in terms of what pieces of legislation may or may not flow to replicate the rights they already have.

Martin Steinfeld

Prof Catherine Barnard, Prof John Bell and Prof Brendan Simms: The White Paper; Brexit and Devolution; the Geopolitics of Brexit

• Catherine Barnard is a Professor of European Union Law and Fellow of the UK in a Changing Europe programme.   
• John Bell is a Professor of Law and Director of the Centre for Public Law.
• Brendan Simms is Professor in the History of International Relations in the Department of Politics and International Studies.

The actual logistics of disentangling ourselves from the EU are incredibly large and it will take a considerable period of time – certainly more than the two years the government thinks it can be done in.

Catherine Barnard

Dr Julian Ghosh: Brexit and our tax laws

Julian Ghosh is a QC and Bye-Fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge. His practice covers all areas of taxation. He is particularly well known for his corporate work and that involving European taxation issues.

[Business] could say you said we were subject to EU law previous to this date but this post two year date decision tells us what that law actually is, so see you in court. It is hopeless for the government and business.

Julian Ghosh

Researchers and students gathered at the Sainsbury Laboratory on Tuesday 4 April for the inaugural African Diaspora Biotech Summit.

Among the participants were 17 postgraduate students and academics from six African countries who had earlier taken part in the Molecular Laboratory Training Workshop, held in Cambridge between 27 March and 3 April.

The Summit and the Laboratory Training Workshop were organised by Carol Ibe, a second year plant sciences Ph.D. student (Newnham College) and Gates Cambridge Scholar.

Carol, who was born in the USA but grew up in Nigeria, is also the founder of JR Biotek, a non-profit organisation that aims to help train future African scientists and build African research capacity.

Opening the day's proceedings, she said:

"Today, we celebrate a unique gathering that brings together more than 70 students, academics and professionals across different disciplines from Africa and the diaspora to discuss the current state of Africa’s bioeconomy, and how we all may work together to find more practical solutions to the problems facing Africa and the African people."

Addressing her fellow African attendees, she added:

"It is time for us to take the lead in encouraging our governments to invest in quality education, training and capacity building, so as to provide our young people and future generations with the right knowledge and skills they need to compete in the global economy.

It is time for us to take the lead in influencing policy decisions that will support industrialisation that will create employment opportunities for our many unemployed graduates.

It is the time for us to take the lead in important discussions and actions that bring about good governance, and which create the right atmosphere for strategic investments in our countries in Africa."

Delivering the day's Welcoming Address, Prof. Eilís Ferran, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Institutional and International Relations, said:

“The narrative is changing – from Africa catching up, to Africa leading. Less brain drain, more brain gain and brain circulation.  Research mobility is critical to addressing the global challenges we all face.

The complexity, the scale, and the urgency of the global challenges demand that we work together.

The University of Cambridge has developed one model of partnership that illustrates our approach to partnerships with African countries.”

Addressing the Workshop participants, who over the past ten days had gained new knowledge and skills through lectures and practical lab work, Prof Ferran concluded:

“You are the pioneers: not only as participants in this inaugural workshop, but because you will go back to your own countries and lead the way in developing innovative solutions to pressing problems.

And though you have been developing the same skills here, you will each return and apply them to issues that are unique to your own communities.

What you are doing today makes me optimistic for the future –the future of Cambridge, and the future of each of your countries.”

**Watch the film to see what the Molecular Laboratory Training Workshop 2017 was like for its participants.**

The Molecular Laboratory Training Workshop 2017 and the African Diaspora Biotech Summit 2017 were supported by the JR Biotek Foundation, the University of Cambridge’s Department of Plant Sciences, the Gates Cambridge Foundation, the Global Food Security Strategic Research Initiative, and Trinity College.

The study found that one in six people believes that measures must be taken to sustain life at any cost even when a patient is in the final stages of an illness such as dementia. However, more than twice as many people would request measures to enable them to die peacefully at this stage. The researchers say this highlights the challenges faced by those providing care and by legislators.

Previous surveys have found strong public support for assisted dying, which includes providing life-ending drugs for the terminally ill to administer themselves, giving assistance to die to disabled people who are not dying, and voluntary euthanasia. In both the UK and the USA, public opinion surveys repeatedly find that around two-thirds of those surveyed are in favour.

However, these surveys often do not capture nuances, say the researchers. To provide more detail, working with polling company Ipsos MORI, the team developed a six-stage vignette featuring a fictitious person living in a care home whose abilities in both decision-making capacity and swallowing are declining. In the final stage, the person is bed bound, unable to swallow, spends most of their time asleep and has no capacity to make decisions about their care.

Around 2,000 people were surveyed – just over half in the USA, using an online survey, and the remainder in the UK via face-to-face interviews. They were asked to choose between four care preferences: sustain life by using any means necessary, including forced feeding and deprivation of liberty; encourage, but not impose, nutrition and hydration by tube or other means; no intervention for artificial nutrition and hydration, but continuation of oral nutrition and hydration as far as possible; and provide measures to help peaceful death. The results are published today in the journal PLOS ONE.

“Debate surrounding assisted dying goes to the heart of clinical ethical principles,” says Dr Gemma Clarke from the Department of Public Health and Primary Care at the University of Cambridge. “Some argue that for a doctor to assist a patient to die is fundamentally inconsistent with their professional role, while others say that delaying death could increase unnecessary physical and psychological suffering, and that patients should have the right to autonomy over their own bodies.”

The survey found very similar patterns in the views of British and American respondents. One in six (17%) expressed a preference for being tube fed when the condition had progressed to near the end of life, a stage where the quality of life available would, to many people, appear minimal. The researchers argue that this suggests that a significant minority have a moral view that life should be supported, even by invasive medical treatment, regardless of the family or medical team’s perception of the individual’s quality of life.

On the other hand, more than double this number (37%) chose to provide measures to help peaceful death at the final stages. This suggests that another, larger minority hold the view that death would be preferable to being sustained by artificial nutrition and hydration in these circumstances.

A preference for measures to preserve life at all costs, potentially involving deprivation of liberty peaked in response to stage 2. Around 30% of respondents would prefer to be forced to attend mealtimes, if experiencing short-term memory problems. However, half of these respondents would not wish this coercion to continue if the condition progressed such that being fed by mouth would require greater coercion such as the use of physical restraint. These respondents may be expressing a nuanced moral intuition: generally favouring preservation of life over respecting individual choice, particularly for potentially vulnerable people, provided that this can be achieved without resorting to physical force.

When it came to people’s liberty, more than four out of five respondents (82%) viewed it as wrong to force people to attend mealtimes if they lived in a care home and had full decision-making capacity. However, this falls to 70% who would not want to be forced to attend meals if they developed short-term memory difficulties, suggesting that the moral intuition to respect individual choice is tempered when there is some question about the patient's ability to appreciate the consequences of their choice, even if their capacity to make decisions remained sufficiently intact for the law to require that those decisions be respected.

Towards the latter stages, where an individual becomes comes increasingly incapacitated, again just over four out of five respondents (around 82%) would not want to be forcibly fed (force-feeding or tube-feeding). This suggests another widespread moral intuition: that when people patients have lost the ability to make decisions for themselves, life-sustaining treatment should be withheld if the risks and burdens are considered to outweigh the benefits.

“It appears that most people who would consider death to be preferable to artificially sustained life would only prefer this at a late stage of illness, when the quantity and quality of remaining life is limited,” says Dr Clarke. 

The researchers found that participants living in households with their children were less likely to choose “measures to help me die peacefully”, which they say is consistent with evidence that dependent children reduces suicide risk. Similarly, participants self- identifying as belonging to black or minority ethnic groups were also less likely to choose this option, suggesting that moral intuitions regarding care at the end of life are culturally influenced. This introduces additional complexity for legislators in multi-cultural societies, particularly where the ethnic and cultural composition of the legislature or medical profession is different to that of the general population. 

Two factors increased the likelihood of respondents expressing a preference for “measures to help me die peacefully”: older age and personal or professional experience of similar illness. This may indicate generational differences in attitudes to end of life care, say the researchers, or that peoples’ views shift as they witness family and friends ageing and dying. They note that in 2015, the UK Parliament, the House of Lords, which has a mean age of 69 years, voted in favour of legalising assisted dying, but their younger counterparts in the House of Commons (mean age 50 years) rejected this measure.

“This is clearly a very complex issue, and surveys of public opinion haven’t always reflected the nuances of people's views,” says senior author Dr Stephen Barclay. “The challenge for legislators is to enact legal frameworks that enable these diverse views and preferences to be respected. The challenge for health and social care professionals is to ensure optimal palliative and end of life care provision for all, in accordance with their wishes and preferences.”

The research was funded by the Dunhill Medical Trust.

Reference
Clarke, G et al. Preferences for care towards the end of life when decision-making capacity may be impaired: A large scale cross-sectional survey of public attitudes in Great Britain and the United States. PLOS ONE; 5 Apr 2017; DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0172104

Eating a high fat and high sugar diet when pregnant leads to metabolic impairments in both the mother and her unborn child, which may “program” them for potential health complications later in life, researchers have shown.

In a study carried out in pregnant mice, a team of academics found that an obesity-causing high fat and high sugar diet disrupted processes within the pregnant mother’s body, leading to poor metabolic control. These changes were found just prior to birth and may make her more susceptible to conditions such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease, as well as to further fat accumulation, in later motherhood.

The exact impact on her child during pregnancy was harder to ascertain, but the researchers found that metabolic dysfunction in the mother compromised the flow of nutrients to the foetus, altering its growth and metabolism at critical stages during its development. This strongly suggests that an obesogenic diet (a diet which promotes obesity) also has consequences for foetal development. It may also explain why babies from mothers who are obese or eat obesogenic diets during pregnancy have a tendency to develop conditions such as obesity, hypertension and type 2 diabetes as adults.

In particular, the researchers found that a higher than recommended intake of fat and sugar exacerbates and distorts metabolic changes which occur naturally as a result of the pregnancy, so that the mother can appropriately allocate nutrients to the foetus.

The study was carried out by a team of researchers at the University of Cambridge. The lead author is Dr Amanda Sferruzzi-Perri, from St John’s College, Cambridge, and the Centre for Trophoblast Research in the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience. She said that the findings were especially relevant for women in western countries.

“In places like the UK, the US and Australia, many women of child-bearing age are also eating higher amounts of fat and sugar than the National Dietary Recommendations,” she said. “We know that obesity during pregnancy is a risk factor for health complications for mother and baby both during and after pregnancy. This study offers insight into the mechanisms operating during pregnancy that may cause this.”

The study involved feeding a diet that contained high amounts of fat and sugar to pregnant mice. The researchers then assessed the impact of this on both the metabolism of the mother and her levels of body fat, compared to mice which were fed a more balanced diet.

They related these changes in whole-body metabolism to the expression of proteins in the mother’s tissues, which are responsible for processing and storing nutrients, as well as to the supply of nutrients, growth and metabolism of her developing foetuses. All of the experiments were carried out in line with the UK Home Office Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986.

Overall, the researchers found that excessive consumption of sugar and fat compromised the mother’s glucose tolerance and her sensitivity to insulin – the hormone that controls blood sugar levels.

Specifically, they found that the mother’s ability to respond to insulin was reduced in tissues like her muscle and fat, which take up glucose from the circulation. By contrast, the sensitivity of the maternal liver to insulin was increased, which reduces glucose production during pregnancy. As a result, the mother was unable adequately to control glucose levels or produce enough glucose to support the pregnancy.

The high fat, high sugar diet also changed the expression of proteins in the mother’s body that control fat storage, leading to an increase in body fat. Collectively, the researchers suggest that these effects promote a “pre-diabetic state” in the mother, resembling many aspects of gestational diabetes; a pregnancy complication which affects up to 5% of women in the UK.

One of the main reasons for this may be that an obesogenic diet exaggerates natural metabolic changes associated with pregnancy. “During a normal pregnancy, the mother’s body will change the way it handles nutrients so that some can be freed up for the foetus,” Sferruzzi-Perri explained. “The mother’s metabolism is shifted to an insulin resistant, glucose intolerant state, such that her own glucose use is limited in favour of foetal supply. We think that in cases where the mother has a high fat, high sugar diet, these metabolic changes are exacerbated or perturbed.”

These effects, the researchers suggest, may alter the mother’s disposition to develop health complications after she has given birth as well – a phenomenon that they refer to as a “metabolic memory”, putting her at greater risk of type 2 diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular problems in later life.

The study also found that the defects in the mother’s metabolism impaired nutrient flow to the foetus, as they resulted in the preferential storage of nutrients within the mother’s tissues, in favour of allocating these to the developing foetus.

Because the placenta also plays an important role in nutrient allocation (as previous studies have shown), the babies of mice fed the obesogenic diet were still born at a normal size. However, because the foetus receives different amounts of nutrients and shows defects in its ability to use these during development, the researchers believe that the child will still be more susceptible to metabolic dysfunction later in life.

“We still don’t know what the exact consequences for the foetus are, but the findings match existing research which already suggests that the individual will suffer from these metabolic problems during adulthood,” Sferruzzi-Perri said. “This is because changes to the nutrient and oxygen supply, at a stage when individual organs are developing, can cause a permanent change in the structure and function of certain tissues.”

The full study, A Western-style obesogenic diet alters maternal metabolic physiology with consequences for fetal nutrient acquisition in mice is published in The Journal of Physiology. DOI: 10.1113/JP273684.

As Brexit looms, Earth scientists have uncovered evidence of Britain’s original split from mainland Europe. Almost half a million years ago, according to new data, water suddenly started cascading over the narrow strip of land that joined England and France – putting pressure on a chalk bridge.

Researchers show that, as a result, this ridge – a natural dam that separated the North Sea from the English Channel – was catastrophically ruptured hundreds of thousands of years later in a two-stage process, ultimately setting Britain’s insular environment in stone. Their results are reported in Nature Communications.

So where did all the water that caused this geological disaster come from? The scientists, from UK, Belgium and France, base their conclusions on a line of deep plunge pools (basins excavated by intense waterfalls) and a network of channels cut in the sea floor south-west of the ridge line. They deduce that these were first formed some 450,000 years ago as a lake of glacial melt water to the north-east in the North Sea basin (the depression where the north sea sits today, some of which was dry land back then) spilled over into what is today the English Channel.

However, exactly why the glacial lake suddenly spilt over remains unknown. One possibility is that part of its ice sheet broke off, causing a surge that prompted the water to flow over. The 33km long land bridge at Dover Strait formed part of an icy landscape at the time. According to the researchers, it looked “more like the frozen tundra in Siberia than the green environment we know today”.

The loose gravel that fills the seafloor plunge pools was first noticed 50 years ago. Indeed, the channel tunnel had to be rerouted to avoid them during its construction. There has long been speculation that they were associated with the remains of the land bridge that formed an ancient route between UK and Europe – and now we finally have some evidence to back this up.

The plunge pools themselves are huge, drilling down some 100 metres into the solid bedrock and measuring several kilometres across. The waterfalls that formed them are estimated to have been 100 metres high, as we know the land bridge stood high above the surrounding landscape.

Second sudden destruction

It seems Dover Strait may have gone through two breaches. The first one, about 450,000 years ago, was rather modest and formed a smaller channel than the one we see today. But the authors suggest that a second, more catastrophic breach subsequently occurred – possibly hundreds of thousands of year later, irrevocably separating Britain from Europe.

This final collapse of the land bridge is marked out by a larger seafloor channel named the Lobourg Channel, which cuts through the earlier structures. This appears to have been carved by a major cataclysmic flood from the North Sea into the English Channel. The timings of the two-stage erosion, including the final destruction of the connecting bridge, are uncertain, but mollusc shells found either side of the breach indicate that it was complete at least 100,000 years ago.

The latest observations are the result of a broad marine geophysics campaign to tackle the problem. Ship-based seismic surveys of the floor of the English Channel have been combined with a type of sonar to provide an astoundingly detailed picture of the sea floor and its sub-surface. Uncertainty remains over the exact timings of each of the events, and researchers have set their sights on drilling into the sea floor to retrieve samples from the plunge pool sediments to determine their precise ages.

The erosion of the land bridge hundreds of thousands of years ago set Britain on its path to becoming an island nation. Subsequent changes in sea level at the end of that ancient ice age further confirmed its insularity, and Britain’s connection to mainland Europe was lost.

Simon Redfern, Professor in Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

To design this bio-inspired material, an international team comprising scientists from China, the United Kingdom, United States and Belgium is mimicking the rule known as ‘Murray’s Law’ which helps natural organisms survive and grow. According to this Law, the entire network of pores existing on different scales in such biological systems is interconnected in a way to facilitate the transfer of liquids and minimize resistance throughout the network. The plant stems of a tree, or leaf veins, for example, optimize the flow of nutrients for photosynthesis with both high efficiency and minimum energy consumption by regularly branching out to smaller scales. In the same way, the surface area of the tracheal pores of insects remains constant along the diffusion pathway to maximize the delivery of carbon dioxide and oxygen in gaseous forms.

The team, led by Prof Bao-Lian Su, a life member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge and who is also based at Wuhan University of Technology in China and at the University of Namur in Belgium, adapted Murray’s Law for the fabrication of the first ever synthetic ‘Murray material’ and applied it to three processes: photocatalysis, gas sensing and lithium ion battery electrodes. In each, they found that the multi-scale porous networks of their synthetic material significantly enhanced the performance of these processes.

Prof Su says:

“This study demonstrates that by adapting Murray’s Law from biology and applying it to chemistry, the performance of materials can be improved significantly. The adaptation could benefit a wide range of porous materials and improve functional ceramics and nano-metals used for energy and environmental applications.”

“The introduction of the concept of Murray’s Law to industrial processes could revolutionize the design of reactors with highly enhanced efficiency, minimum energy, time, and raw material consumption for a sustainable future.”

Writing in Nature Communications this week, the team describes how it used zinc oxide (ZnO) nanoparticles as the primary building block of their Murray material. These nanoparticles, containing small pores within them, form the lowest level of the porous network. The team arranged the ZnO particles through a layer-by layer evaporation-driven self-assembly process. This creates a second level of porous networks between the particles. During the evaporation process, the particles also form larger pores due to solvent evaporation, which represents the top level of pores, resulting in a three level Murray material. The team successfully fabricated these porous structures with the precise diameter ratios required to obey Murray’s law, enabling the efficient transfer of materials across the multilevel pore network.

Co-author, Dr Tawfique Hasan, of the Cambridge Graphene Centre, part of the University’s Department of Engineering, adds:

“This very first demonstration of a Murray material fabrication process is incredibly simple and is entirely driven by the nanoparticle self-assembly. Large scale manufacturability of this porous material is possible, making it an exciting, enabling technology, with potential impact across many applications.”

With its synthetic Murray material, with precise diameter ratios between the pore levels, the team demonstrated an efficient breakdown of an organic dye in water by using photocatalysis.  This showed it was easy for the dye to enter the porous network leading to efficient and repeated reaction cycles. The team also used the same Murray material with a structure similar to the breathing networks of insects, for fast and sensitive gas detection with high repeatability.

The team proved that its Murray material can significantly improve the long term stability and fast charge/discharge capability for lithium ion storage, with a capacity improvement of up to 25 times compared to state of the art graphite material currently used in lithium ion battery electrodes. The hierarchical nature of the pores also reduces the stresses in these electrodes during the charge/discharge processes, improving their structural stability and resulting in a longer life time for energy storage devices.

The team envisions that the strategy could be used effectively in materials designs for energy and environmental applications.

The research was partially supported by the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Reference

Xianfeng Zheng et al: ‘Bio-inspired Murray materials for mass transfer and activity’ Nature Communications 6th April 2017

DOI:10.1038/ncomms14921

That tsunamis can cause death and devastation has become painfully clear over the past two decades. On Boxing Day, 2004, a magnitude 9 earthquake off the coast of Sumatra caused waves several metres high to devastate the Indian Ocean – killing more than 230,000 people in 14 countries. In 2011, another magnitude 9 earthquake, this time off Japan, produced waves up to 20 metres in height, flooding the Fukushima nuclear reactor. It killed more than 15,000 people.

A new study, published in Geophysical Journal International, by my colleagues and me suggests that a 1,000km long fault at the northern end of the Arabian Sea may pose a similar threat.

The Makran, as the southern coastal region of Iran and Pakistan is known, is a subduction zone. In such regions, one of the Earth’s tectonic plates is dragged beneath another, forming a giant fault known as a “megathrust”. As the plates move past each other, they can get stuck, causing stress to build up. At some point the stress becomes high enough that the megathrust breaks in an earthquake.

This was exactly what caused the Sumatra 2004 and Tohoku 2011 earthquakes. When a megathrust moves suddenly, the whole seafloor is offset and the water has to move out of the way over a huge area. This sets off waves with particular characteristics that can cross entire oceans: tsunamis. The phenomenon, along with their potentially large size, makes subduction zone earthquakes particularly dangerous.

But just because a part of a subduction zone produces earthquakes doesn’t mean that the whole megathrust can move in one go. We often see that stress builds up at different rates on different parts of the fault, with some parts sliding smoothly past each other. How much of a megathrust can move in one go is important because it determines the size of the resulting earthquake. The amount that the Makran megathrust can move in earthquakes has been a longstanding question, but the hostile climate and challenging politics of the region have made research there difficult.

We know that the eastern part of the Makran megathrust (in Pakistan) can produce large earthquakes. A magnitude 8.1 quake off the coast of western Pakistan in 1945 caused a tsunami which killed about 300 people along the coasts of Pakistan and Oman. There have been several smaller earthquakes on the megathrust since, including a magnitude 6 in February this year.

If the western part of the Makran (in Iran) also produces earthquakes – and the whole Makran megathrust were to move in one go – it could produce a magnitude 9 earthquake, similar to those in Sumatra and Tohoku.

However, we have never actually recorded a subduction earthquake in this part of Makran. In fact, there are only records of one candidate quake from 1483 – and the actual location of this is disputed. But it’s important to keep in mind that just because we haven’t seen an earthquake doesn’t mean that there couldn’t be one – particularly since the intervals between earthquakes are often hundreds or thousands of years. Historically, not many people have lived in the remote Iranian Makran, a desert which killed Alexander the Great’s army. So earthquakes might simply not have been documented.

GPS data

We used new data to look for tell-tale signs of a possible earthquake. Imagine a piece of paper on a table. If you hold one end and push the other end towards it, the paper crumples up and the distance between the two ends gets shorter. If you let go, the paper flattens out. The fixed end is like a megathrust which is stuck. Indeed, if the Arabian plate is stuck, and stress is building up, southern Iran will be squeezed and shortened. We can look for evidence of this shortening by using a more accurate version of the GPS systems found in smartphones. My coauthors from the National Cartographic Centre in Iran have set up a network of GPS stations to measure how fast different parts of Iran are moving relative to Arabia.

We found that the velocities fit with Iran being shortened near the coast, suggesting that stress is indeed building up – and meaning there could be a large subduction earthquake in the future. This fits with recent work looking at large boulders along the coast of Oman, thought to have been deposited by tsunamis. The locations of these boulders suggest that the tsunami which brought them there would need to have come from a subduction earthquake, either in western Makran or along the entire subduction zone – including Pakistan. These boulders were probably deposited in the last 5,000 years, but we can’t know for sure.

This is a hazard that people need to be aware of, particularly those living in coastal regions around the Arabian Sea. Rapid urbanisation along the Omani and Pakistani coasts in recent years has increased the population exposed to earthquakes and tsunamis in the Makran. Karachi, at the eastern end of the subduction zone, is now a megacity and home to around 25m people. Much of Muscat, the Omani capital, is less than 10 metres above sea level, making it vulnerable to tsunamis. The port of Gwadar in Pakistan, which was badly damaged in a 1945 earthquake, is also undergoing massive development.

To help protect these people, and make sure that they are properly prepared, we need to understand this hazard better. Education and early warning are both key – exercises testing the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning System are a step in the right direction, especially if they engage the public.

At the moment, we can only say that a large earthquake in the Makran is consistent with the limited data which we have available. By continuing to work with scientists in Iran and Pakistan to make more measurements I hope that in the future we will have a much better idea of what to expect from this subduction zone.

Camilla Penney, PhD Candidate in Geophysics, University of Cambridge

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Sixteen University of Cambridge academics will take part in the Cambridge Series at the prestigious Hay Festival this year, showcasing a broad range of the University’s research excellence.

As the celebrated literary festival celebrates its 30th anniversary, the Cambridge academics will speak on subjects ranging from whether robots should feel pain to refreezing the Arctic.

This is the ninth year running that the Series has formed part of the festival.

The Series is part of the University of Cambridge’s commitment to public engagement. The Festival runs from 25th May to 4th June and is now open for bookings.

This year’s line-up includes, from science, Professor Theresa Marteau, Director of the Behaviour and Health Research Unit, on why risk information doesn't change our unhealthy behaviour; David Tong, Professor of Theoretical Physics, on quantum fields, the fundamental building blocks of matter; Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, Professor of Mammalian Development and Stem Cell Biology, on how far science should go to investigate the beginning of life; The Reverend Alasdair Coles, Professor of Neuroimmunology on the immune system and the brain; Dr Kourosh Saeb Parsy, Lecturer at the Department of Surgery, on the future of organ transplantation; and Dame Athene Donald, Professor of Experimental Physics and Master of Churchill College, on how gender stereotypes damage innovation.

Dr Hugh Hunt, Reader in the Department of Engineering, will talk about whether it is possible to refreeze the Arctic. Professor Daping Chu, Director of Centre for Photonic Devices and Sensors and Director of the Centre for Advanced Photonics and Electronics (CAPE), will outline his work on the car of the future and the use of Head-Up Display technology together with his Jaguar Land Rover collaborators. Dr Michelle Oyen, Reader in Bioengineering will discuss her research on the carbon footprint of popular building materials like steel and concrete and approaches for substituting new bio-inspired materials instead.

From the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Dr Beth Singler, Research Associate on the Human Identity in an age of Nearly-Human Machines project at the  Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, will ask could, and should, robots feel pain? Dr Elizabeth Drayson, Lorna Close Fellow in Spanish at Murray Edwards College will talk about her new book, The Moor's Last Stand, which tells the story of how seven centuries of Muslim rule in Spain came to an end. Dame Carol Black, Principal of Newnham College, will discuss her government review on how drugs, alcohol and obesity affect people's ability to work. Dr Preti Taneja, Fellow Commoner at Jesus College and a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker, will speak about the hidden history, politics and urgent contemporary relevance of Shakespeare's plays in India in relation to her debut novel, We That Are Young.

Bridging the world of science and literature is Professor Ros Ridley, Fellow Emerita at Newnham College and former Head of the Medical Research Council (United Kingdom)'s Comparative Cognition Research Team in the Department of Psychology, will view the Peter Pan stories through the eyes of a neuroscientist in order to explore J M Barrie's interest in cognition, theory of mind and the nature of consciousness.

Also taking part in the Festival from the University of Cambridge are Professor Richard Evans, Lord Martin Rees, Professor Simon Baron Cohen, Professor Paul Cartledge and Professor Barbara Sahakian.

Peter Florence, director of the Hay Festival, said: "Cambridge University nurtures and challenges the world’s greatest minds, and offers the deepest understanding of the most intractable problems and the most thrilling opportunities. And for one week a year they bring that thinking to a field in Wales and share it with everyone. That’s a wonderful gift."

Ariel Retik, Festival and Outreach Co-ordinator (Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences), said: "The Hay Festival is one of the best known literary festivals in the world and offers a wonderful public platform for the University’s research.  The Cambridge Series is now well established after nine years and enables our researchers to engage with the public across a broad range of subjects, many of which are vital for confronting today’s global challenges."

*To book tickets go to www.hayfestival.org. For the full line-up of the Cambridge Series and times, click here.
 

The mucosal lining inside the uterus is called the endometrium. Over the course of the menstrual cycle, its composition changes, becoming thicker and rich with blood vessels in preparation for pregnancy, but if the woman does not conceive, the uterus sheds this tissue, causing the woman’s period.

A team from the Centre for Trophoblast Research, which this year celebrates its tenth anniversary, was able to grow the organoids in culture from cells derived from endometrial tissue and maintain the organoids in culture for several months, faithfully reproducing the genetic signature of the endometrium – in other words, the pattern of activity of genes in the lining of the uterus. They also demonstrated that the organoids respond to female sex hormones and early pregnancy signals, secreting what are collectively known as ‘uterine milk’ proteins that nourish the embryo during the first months of pregnancy.

The findings of the study, funded by the Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust and the Centre for Trophoblast Research, are published today in the journal Nature Cell Biology.

The organoids are capable of generating both secretory (red) and epithelial  (cyan) cells of the uterus. Image: Centre for Trophoblast Research

“These organoids provide a major step forward in investigating the changes that occur during the menstrual cycle and events during early pregnancy when the placenta is established,” says Dr Margherita Turco, the study’s first author. “These events are impossible to capture in a woman, so until now we have had to rely on animal studies.”

“Events in early pregnancy lay the foundations for a successful birth, and our new technique should provide a window into this events,” adds Professor Graham Burton, Director of the Centre for Trophoblast Research, and joint senior author with Ashley Moffett of the study. “There’s increasing evidence that complications of pregnancy, such as restricted growth of the fetus, stillbirth and pre-eclampsia – which appear later in pregnancy – have their origins around the time of implantation, when the placenta begins to develop.”

Research in animal species such as mice and sheep has shown that factors secreted by the endometrial glands are critical for enabling a developing fertilised egg (known as the ‘conceptus’) to implant into the wall of the uterus. There is also strong evidence that the conceptus sends signals to the endometrial glands that then stimulate the development of the placenta. In this way, the conceptus is able to stimulate its own development through a ‘dialogue’ with the mother; if it fails, the result is loss of the pregnancy or severe growth restriction of the fetus.

Professor Burton and colleagues believe that using the organoids will allow them to investigate in greater detail how the conceptus communicates with the glands, identifying the full repertoire of factors released in response and testing their effects on placental tissues. His team will be collaborating with the Bourn Hall Clinic – a fertility clinic near Cambridge – to investigate whether parts of this circuitry are impaired or deficient in women experiencing difficulty in conceiving, and if so to devise potential new treatments. 

The technique also enables the researchers to grow organoids from endometrial cancer cells. As proof-of-principle, this will allow them to model and understand diseases of the endometrium, including cancer of the uterus and endometriosis.

Organoid cultures have proven to be powerful tools for investigating the behaviour of other organ systems. Members of the Centre for Trophoblast Research are confident that their new advance will provide a much-needed window on events during the earliest stages of pregnancy, when the conceptus and mother first physically interact.

Reference
Turco, MY et al. Long-term, hormone-responsive organoid cultures of human endometrium in a chemically defined medium. Nature Cell Biology; 10 April 2017; DOI: 10.1038/ncb3516

During a ten-day research trip, the team carried out many proof-of-concept flights at the summits of both Volcán de Fuego and Volcán de Pacaya in Guatemala.  Using lightweight modern sensors they measured temperature, humidity and thermal data within the volcanic clouds and took images of multiple eruptions in real-time.

This is one of the first times that bespoke fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been used at a volcano such as Fuego, where the lack of close access to the summit vent has prevented robust gas measurements. Funding from the Cabot Institute has helped the team to develop technologies to enable this capability. The UAVs were successfully flown at distances of up to 8 km away, and at a height of over 3 km above the launch site.

The group plan to return to Guatemala later in the year with a wider range of sensors including a gas analyser, a four-stage filter pack; carbon stubs for ash sampling; thermal and visual cameras, and atmospheric sensors.

Dr Emma Liu, a volcanologist from the Department of Earth Sciences at Cambridge, said: “Drones offer an invaluable solution to the challenges of in-situ sampling and routine monitoring of volcanic emissions, particularly those where the near-vent region is prohibitively hazardous or inaccessible.

“These sensors not only help to understand emissions from volcanoes, they could also be used in the future to help alert local communities of impending eruptions – particularly if the flights can be automated.”

Dr Kieran Wood, Senior Research Associate in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Bristol, added: “Even during this initial campaign we were able to meet significant science and engineering targets. For example, multiple imaging flights over several days captured the rapidly changing topography of Fuego’s summit. These showed that the volcano was erupting from not just one, but two active summit vents.”

Taking time out from their sample flights, the research group also used their aircraft to map the topology of a barranca and the volcanic deposits within it. These deposits were formed by a recent pyroclastic flow, a fast-moving cloud of superheated ash and gas, which travelled down the barranca from Fuego. The data captured will assist in modelling flow pathways and the potential impact of future volcanic eruptions on nearby settlements.

Dr Matt Watson, Reader in Natural Hazards in the School of Earth Sciences at Bristol, said: “This is exciting initial research for future investigations, and would not be possible without a very close collaboration between volcanology and engineering.”

Adapted from a press release by the University of Bristol.

Self-awareness in both animals and young children is usually tested using the ‘mirror self-recognition test’ to see if they understand that the reflection in front of them is actually their own. Only a few species have so far shown themselves capable of self-recognition – great apes, dolphins, magpies and elephants. It is thought to be linked to more complex forms of perspective taking and empathy.

Critics, however, have argued that this test is limited in its ability to investigate complex thoughts and understanding, and that it may be less useful in testing animals who rely less on vision than other species.

One potential complement to the mirror test as a measure of self-understanding may be a test of ‘body-awareness’. This test looks at how individuals may recognise their bodies as obstacles to success in a problem-solving task. Such a task could demonstrate an individual’s understanding of its body in relation to its physical environment, which may be easier to define than the distinction between oneself and another demonstrated through success at the mirror test.

To test for body-awareness in Asian elephants, Dr Josh Plotnik, visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge, visiting assistant professor of psychology at Hunter College, City University of New York and founder of conservation charity Think Elephants International, devised a new test of self-awareness together with his colleague Rachel Dale (now a PhD student at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna). The new test was adapted from one in which children were asked to push a shopping trolley, but the trolley was attached to a mat on which they were standing.

In the elephant version of the test, Plotnik and Dale attached a stick to a rubber mat using a rope; the elephants were then required to walk onto the mat, pick up the stick and pass it to an experimenter standing in front of them. The researchers wanted to investigate whether elephants understood the role of their bodies as potential obstacles to success in the task by observing how and when the animals removed themselves from the mat in order to exchange the stick. In one control arm of the test, the stick was unattached to the mat, meaning the elephant could pass the stick while standing on the mat.

The results of the study, which was largely funded by a Newton International Fellowship from the Royal Society awarded to Dr Plotnik, are published today in the journal Scientific Reports.

“Elephants are well regarded as one of the most intelligent animals on the planet, but we still need more empirical, scientific evidence to support this belief,” says Dale. “We know, for example, that they are capable of thoughtful cooperation and empathy, and are able to recognise themselves in a mirror. These abilities are highly unusual in animals and very rare indeed in non-primates. We wanted to see if they also show ‘body-awareness’.”

Plotnik and Dale found that the elephants stepped off the mat to pass the stick to the experimenter significantly more often during the test than during the control arm. Elephants stepped off the mat an average (mean) of around 42 out of 48 times during the test compared to just three times on average during the control.

“This is a deceptively simple test, but its implications are quite profound,” says Dr Plotnik. “The elephants understood that their bodies were getting in the way, so they stepped aside to enable themselves to complete the task. In a similar test, this is something that young children are unable to understand until they are about two years old.

“This implies that elephants may be capable of recognising themselves as separate from objects or their environment. This means that they may have a level of self-understanding, coupled with their passing of the mirror test, which is quite rare in the animal kingdom.”

Species that have demonstrated a capacity for self-recognition in the mirror test all show varying levels of cooperative problem-solving, perspective taking and empathy, suggesting that ‘self-awareness’ may relate to effective cooperative-living in socially intelligent animals. A more developed self-understanding of how an individual relates to those around may underlie more complex forms of empathic perspective taking. It may also underlie how an individual targets help towards others in need. Both aspect are seen in studies of human children.

Both self-awareness as demonstrated by the mirror test and body-awareness as demonstrated by the current study help scientists better understand how an animal’s understanding of self and of its place in the environment may impact social decision-making in the wild.

Plotnik argues that studies such as this are important for helping increase our understanding of and appreciation for the behaviour and intelligence of animals. He also says that understanding elephant behaviour has important implications for the development of human/elephant conflict mitigation strategies in places like Thailand and India, where humans and elephants are competing for land. Only through careful consideration of both human and elephant needs can long-term solutions be sustainable.

“The more we can understand about elephants’ behaviour, the more we can understand what their needs are, how they think and the strains they face in their social relationships,” he says. “This will help us if we are going to try to come up with viable long term solutions to the problems that these animals face in the wild, especially those that bring them into regular conflict with humans.”

Reference
Dale, R, and Plotnik, JM. Elephants know when their bodies are obstacles to success in a novel transfer task. Scientific Reports; 12 April 2017; DOI: 10.1038/srep46309

Minaam Abbas has not yet started his PhD, but he is already co-founder of two businesses with the potential to transform how cancer is treated and how small enterprises are supported.

Minaam, who will start his PhD at Cambridge this autumn as a Gates Cambridge Scholar, is chief operating officer of angioClast, a company aiming to develop drugs that can target blood vessels in the most aggressive forms of brain cancer.

He is also co-founder of Hazina, a social enterprise that aims to turn microfinance on its head by cutting out the middle man and providing an alternative credit rating for the smallest businesses, while also teaching financial literacy.

Minaam's PhD will focus on the new field of epitranscriptomics, looking at how RNA can be modified and how these modifications can be used to fight cancer.

His driving passion is to make a positive impact on people's lives, and through both his research and his businesses he is already doing so. He might not have made it to where he is now, however, without the support of local businesspeople in Pakistan, of individuals and institutions at Cambridge, and now the Gates Cambridge Trust.

Minaam is one of 90 new Gates Cambridge Scholars announced today as part of The Class of 2017. It comprises students from 34 nationalities, and includes the first Native American Scholar, as well as the first ever Scholars from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Luxembourg.

Marina Velickovic, the first Gates Cambridge Scholar from Bosnia and Herzegovina, will do a PhD in International Criminal Law focusing on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia through the lens of gender and ethnicity. Marina has co-authored two books and co-founded the only feminist magazine in Bosnia, She is currently a Visiting Fellow at Goldsmiths College, where she is working on a feminist critique of the legal discourse surrounding conflict-related sexual violence.

Sandile Mtetwa, from Zimbabwe, will do an MPhil in Chemistry focused on improving the properties of photo-active materials used in the process of harnessing clean energy. She is founder of the Trust Simuka-Arise Initiative, in Zimbabwe, which aims to empower young women academically, socially and economically.

Norman Wray from Ecuador is a Constituent Assembly Member and once stood for President of Ecuador. He is a strong advocate of the “Buen Vivir” (Good Living) regime, the rights of nature, and the inclusion of access to water as a human right in the Constitution of Ecuador. His MPhil in Conservation will develop a nature-based, evidence-led approach to the resolution of social, economic, ecological and political problems.

Thierry Mousset, the first Gates Cambridge Scholar from Luxembourg, will do a PhD at the Department of German and Dutch on the use of non-dramatic texts by W.G. Sebald, Mathias Enard and Orhan Pamuk in contemporary stage performances. He says: “I believe that in the current political climate, informed by a sharp rise in anti-Muslim and nationalist rhetoric, it is more important than ever to remind ourselves of the shared history of the two sides of the Mediterranean.”

Gates Cambridge is the University of Cambridge’s leading award for international postgraduate students and was set up in October 2000 through a $210m donation from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation -the largest single donation to a UK university. Those selected need to demonstrate not only academic brilliance but outstanding leadership qualities and a commitment to improving the lives of others.

Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, says: “Gates Cambridge Scholars come from all over the world, but they have some important things in common: great leadership potential, a commitment to improving the lives of others and an unparalleled passion for learning. Melinda and I are pleased to welcome the class of 2017. We have no doubt they will have an incredible impact on topics of global importance.”

Cambridge Vice-Chancellor and Chair of the Gates Cambridge Board of Trustees Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz added: “Cambridge is a global university and the Gates Cambridge programme epitomises both its international, outward-looking nature and its mission to tackle global challenges and to improve the lives of others.”

The mission of the scholarship is to create a dynamic global network of Scholars who use their intellectual and leadership skills to improve the lives of others. Since 2001 the programme has supported over 1,500 Scholars spanning more than 100 countries. The programme has already spawned several multi-disciplinary, international initiatives founded by groups of Scholars. They include the award-winning Simprints, which provides low-cost, fingerprint scanners for frontline workers in fields such as healthcare, finance and education; Favalley, a social hacking enterprise with the mission of turning slums and favelas around the world into the next Silicon Valleys; Action Meter, an e-democracy  web platform for running social campaigns in Estonia; and We are Sister Stories, a digital platform that highlights the strength and resilience of women and girls across the globe.

Minaam Abbas is excited about meeting his fellow Scholars in the autumn, and hopes that being part of a diverse network of Scholars working on global issues will lead to interesting collaborations. He says:  “The Gates Cambridge community inspires me. Amazing ideas can come from people working together in a common space across different subjects, countries and perspectives. Gates Cambridge actively promotes this and encourages people to get together to brainstorm.”
 

This is where we are at in 2017: sophisticated algorithms are both predicting and helping to solve crimes committed by humans; predicting the outcome of court cases and human rights trials; and helping to do the work done by lawyers in those cases. By 2040, there is even a suggestion that sophisticated robots will be committing a good chunk of all the crime in the world. Just ask the toddler who was run over by a security robot at a California mall last year.

How do we make sense of all this? Should we be terrified? Generally unproductive. Should we shrug our shoulders as a society and get back to Netflix? Tempting, but no. Should we start making plans for how we deal with all of this? Absolutely.

Fear of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a big theme. Technology can be a downright scary thing; particularly when its new, powerful, and comes with lots of question marks. But films like Terminator and shows like Westworld are more than just entertainment, they are a glimpse into the world we might inherit, or at least into how we are conceiving potential futures for ourselves.

Among the many things that must now be considered is what role and function the law will play. Expert opinions differ wildly on the likelihood and imminence of a future where sufficiently advanced robots walk among us, but we must confront the fact that autonomous technology with the capacity to cause harm is already around. Whether it’s a military drone with a full payload, a law enforcement robot exploding to kill a dangerous suspect or something altogether more innocent that causes harm through accident, error, oversight, or good ol’ fashioned stupidity.

There’s a cynical saying in law that “wheres there’s blame, there’s a claim”. But who do we blame when a robot does wrong? This proposition can easily be dismissed as something too abstract to worry about. But let’s not forget that a robot was arrested (and released without charge) for buying drugs; and Tesla Motors was absolved of responsibility by the American National Highway Traffic Safety Administration when a driver was killed in a crash after his Tesla was in autopilot.

While problems like this are certainly peculiar, history has a lot to teach us. For instance, little thought was given to who owned the sky before the Wright Brothers took the Kitty Hawk for a joyride. Time and time again, the law is presented with these novel challenges. And despite initial overreaction, it got there in the end. Simply put: law evolves.

Robot guilt

The role of the law can be defined in many ways, but ultimately it is a system within society for stabilising people’s expectations. If you get mugged, you expect the mugger to be charged with a crime and punished accordingly.

But the law also has expectations of us; we must comply with it to the fullest extent our consciences allow. As humans we can generally do that. We have the capacity to decide whether to speed or obey the speed limit – and so humans are considered by the law to be “legal persons”.

To varying extents, companies are endowed with legal personhood, too. It grants them certain economic and legal rights, but more importantly it also confers responsibilities on them. So, if Company X builds an autonomous machine, then that company has a corresponding legal duty.

The problem arises when the machines themselves can make decisions of their own accord. As impressive as intelligent assistants, Alexa, Siri or Cortana are, they fall far short of the threshold for legal personhood. But what happens when their more advanced descendants begin causing real harm?

A guilty AI mind?

The criminal law has two critical concepts. First, it contains the idea that liability for harm arises whenever harm has been or is likely to be caused by a certain act or omission.

Second, criminal law requires that an accused is culpable for their actions. This is known as a “guilty mind” or “mens rea”. The idea behind mens rea is to ensure that the accused both completed the action of assaulting someone and had the intention of harming them, or knew harm was a likely consequence of their action.

So if an advanced autonomous machine commits a crime of its own accord, how should it be treated by the law? How would a lawyer go about demonstrating the “guilty mind” of a non-human? Can this be done be referring to and adapting existing legal principles?

Take driverless cars. Cars drive on roads and there are regulatory frameworks in place to assure that there is a human behind the wheel (at least to some extent). However, once fully autonomous cars arrive there will need to be extensive adjustments to laws and regulations that account for the new types of interactions that will happen between human and machine on the road.

As AI technology evolves, it will eventually reach a state of sophistication that will allow it to bypass human control. As the bypassing of human control becomes more widespread, then the questions about harm, risk, fault and punishment will become more important. Film, television and literature may dwell on the most extreme examples of “robots gone awry” but the legal realities should not be left to Hollywood.

So can robots commit crime? In short: yes. If a robot kills someone, then it has committed a crime (actus reus), but technically only half a crime, as it would be far harder to determine mens rea. How do we know the robot intended to do what it did?

For now, we are nowhere near the level of building a fully sentient or “conscious” humanoid robot that looks, acts, talks, and thinks like us humans. But even a few short hops in AI research could produce an autonomous machine that could unleash all manner of legal mischief. Financial and discriminatoryalgorithmic mischief already abounds.

Play along with me; just imagine that a Terminator-calibre AI exists, and that it commits a crime (let’s say murder) then the task is not determining whether it in fact murdered someone; but the extent to which that act satisfies the principle of mens rea.

But what would we need to prove the existence of mens rea? Could we simply cross-examine the AI like we do a human defendant? Maybe, but we would need to go a bit deeper than that and examine the code that made the machine “tick”.

And what would “intent” look like in a machine mind? How would we go about proving an autonomous machine was justified in killing a human in self-defense or the extent of premeditation?

Let’s go even further. After all, we’re not only talking about violent crimes. Imagine a system that could randomly purchase things on the internet using your credit card – and it decided to buy contraband. This isn’t fiction; it has happened. Two London-based artists created a bot that purchased random items off the dark web. And what did it buy? Fake jeans, a baseball cap with a spy camera, a stash can, some Nikes, 200 cigarettes, a set of fire-brigade master keys, a counterfeit Louis Vuitton bag and ten ecstasy pills. Should these artists be liable for what the bot they created bought?

Maybe. But what if the bot “decided” to make the purchases itself?

Robo-jails?

Even if you solve these legal issues, you are still left with the question of punishment. What’s a 30-year jail stretch to an autonomous machine that does not age, grow infirm or miss its loved ones? Unless, of course, it was programmed to “reflect” on its wrongdoing and find a way to rewrite its own code while safely ensconced at Her Majesty’s leisure. And what would building “remorse” into machines say about us as their builders?

What we are really talking about when we talk about whether or not robots can commit crimes is “emergence” – where a system does something novel and perhaps good but also unforeseeable, which is why it presents such a problem for law.

AI has already helped with emergent concepts in medicine, and we are learning things about the universe with AI systems that even an army of Stephen Hawkings might not reveal.

The hope for AI is that in trying to capture this safe and beneficial emergent behaviour, we can find a parallel solution for ensuring it does not manifest itself in illegal, unethical, or downright dangerous ways.

At present, however, we are systematically incapable of guaranteeing human rights on a global scale, so I can’t help but wonder how ready we are for the prospect of robot crime given that we already struggle mightily to contain that done by humans.

Christopher Markou, PhD Candidate, Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Around 80% of rare diseases are thought to have a genetic component, but currently many patients experience long delays in diagnosis or never receive a diagnosis at all. Recent developments in our ability to obtain whole or partial genome sequences cheaply and efficiently now makes it feasible for patients to benefit from this technology through cheaper, faster diagnosis of disease, and the development of new therapies. Many international projects are currently seeking to capitalise on these developments by sequencing hundreds of thousands of individuals, such as the UK 100,000 Genome Project. However, a major challenge remains how to associate changes in a patient’s DNA to their disease.

“The challenge for scientists is to identify which of the hundreds of thousands of genetic differences between a patient and an unaffected individual might be responsible for their disease,” says Dr Paul Schofield from the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge. “Given the huge complexity of this problem, it has been described as ‘looking for needles in stacks of needles’.”

Now, Dr Schofield and a team of researchers from the UK and Saudi Arabia have developed an algorithm, published this week in the journal PLOS Computational Biology, that can identify variants that modify the normal function of a gene associated with a particular disease.

A framework developed by the team, called PhenomeNET, matches a patient’s phenotype (symptoms) to a large database of gene-to-phenotype associations, including those from studies involving mice and zebrafish, in order to identify disease-causing genes.

Mice and zebrafish are commonly used when studying the biology underlying human diseases as they have a number of important genetic and biological similarities to us. For many years, data on the consequences of naturally-occurring and experimentally-induced genetic variants in these animal models have been collected resulting in a huge ‘Big Data’ resource associating genetic makeup and phenotype, such as the Mouse Genome Database, which contains more than 60,000 of these associations.

By combining PhenomeNET with methods that find harmful variants in a genomic sequence, the team developed the PhenomeNET Variant Predictor (PVP) system, an algorithm that prioritises these variants with their likelihood of involvement in human disease.

“Our algorithm makes use of clinical and experimental data that have been collected for years and uses them to identify the genetic variants underlying the conditions of patients with genetic disorders,” adds Professor Robert Hoehndorf from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia.

Working with Dr Nadia Schoenmakers at the Wellcome Trust-Medical Research Council Institute of Metabolic Science in Cambridge, the team was able to show that the new algorithm can identify genetic changes in patients with congenital thyroid disease, and can reveal candidate genetic changes in ‘Mendelian’ diseases where only a single gene is involved.

“We’ve shown that our algorithm works for simpler diseases and now the real test will be to determine whether a similar approach can be applied to complex diseases, such as diabetes, where multiple genes are involved,” says Professor George Gkoutos from the University of Birmingham.

Reference
Boudellioua I, Mahamad Razali RB, Kulmanov M, Hashish Y, Bajic VB, et al. Semantic prioritization of novel causative genomic variants. PLOS Comp Biol; 17 April 2017; DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005500