The results have been published in the journal Science as part of a wide-ranging international study, led by the University of Cambridge, which genetically analysed the DNA of a series of well-known and controversial ancient remains across North and South America.

The research also discovered clues of a puzzling Australasian genetic signal in the 10,400-year-old Lagoa Santa remains from Brazil revealing a previously unknown group of early South Americans – but the Australasian link left no genetic trace in North America.

Additionally, a legal battle over a 10,600-year-old ancient skeleton – called the ‘Spirit Cave Mummy’ – has ended after advanced DNA sequencing found it was related to a Native American tribe. The researchers were able to dismiss a longstanding theory that a group called Paleoamericans existed in North America before Native Americans. The Paleoamerican hypothesis was first proposed in the 19^th century, but this new study disproves that theory.

“Spirit Cave and Lagoa Santa were very controversial because they were identified as so-called ‘Paleoamericans’ based on craniometry – it was determined that the shape of their skulls was different to current day Native Americans,” said Professor Eske Willeslev, who holds positions at the Universities of Cambridge and Copenhagen, and led the study. “Our study proves that Spirit Cave and Lagoa Santa were actually genetically closer to contemporary Native Americans than to any other ancient or contemporary group sequenced to date.”

The scientific and cultural significance of the Spirit Cave remains, which were found in 1940 in a small rocky alcove in the Great Basin Desert, was not properly understood for 50 years. The preserved remains of the man in his forties were initially believed to be between 1,500 and 2000 years old but during the 1990s new textile and hair testing dated the skeleton at 10,600 years old.

The Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe, a group of Native Americans based in Nevada near Spirit Cave, claimed cultural affiliation with the skeleton and requested immediate repatriation of the remains.

Their request was refused and the tribe sued the US government, a lawsuit that pitted tribal leaders against anthropologists, who argued the remains provided invaluable insights into North America’s earliest inhabitants and should continue to be displayed in a museum.

The deadlock continued for 20 years until the tribe agreed that Professor Willeslev could carry out genome sequencing on DNA extracted from the Spirit Cave for the first time.

“I assured the tribe that my group would not do the DNA testing unless they gave permission and it was agreed that if Spirit Cave was genetically a Native American the mummy would be repatriated to the tribe,” said Professor Willeslev, who is a Fellow of St John’s College.

The team extracted DNA from the inside of the skull proving that the skeleton was an ancestor of present-day Native Americans. Spirit Cave was returned to the tribe in 2016 and there was a private reburial ceremony earlier this year. The tribe were kept informed throughout the two-year project and two members visited the lab in Copenhagen to meet the scientists and they were present when all of the DNA sampling was taken.

The genome of the Spirit Cave skeleton has wider significance because it not only settled the legal and cultural dispute between the tribe and the Government, it also helped reveal how ancient humans moved and settled across the Americas. The scientists were able to track the movement of populations from Alaska to as far south as Patagonia. They often separated from each other and took their chances travelling in small pockets of isolated groups.

Dr David Meltzer, from the Department of Anthropology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, said: “A striking thing about the analysis of Spirit Cave and Lagoa Santa is their close genetic similarity which implies their ancestral population travelled through the continent at astonishing speed. That’s something we’ve suspected due to the archaeological findings, but it’s fascinating to have it confirmed by the genetics. These findings imply that the first peoples were highly skilled at moving rapidly across an utterly unfamiliar and empty landscape. They had a whole continent to themselves and they were travelling great distances at speed.”

The study also revealed surprising traces of Australasian ancestry in ancient South American Native Americans but no Australasian genetic link was found in North American Native Americans.

Dr Victor Moreno-Mayar, from the Centre for GeoGenetics, University of Copenhagen and first author of the study, said: “We discovered the Australasian signal was absent in Native Americans prior to the Spirit Cave and Lagoa Santa population split which means groups carrying this genetic signal were either already present in South America when Native Americans reached the region, or Australasian groups arrived later. That this signal has not been previously documented in North America implies that an earlier group possessing it had disappeared or a later arriving group passed through North America without leaving any genetic trace.”

Dr Peter de Barros Damgaard, from the Centre for GeoGenetics, University of Copenhagen, explained why scientists remain puzzled but optimistic about the Australasian ancestry signal in South America. He explained: “If we assume that the migratory route that brought this Australasian ancestry to South America went through North America, either the carriers of the genetic signal came in as a structured population and went straight to South America where they later mixed with new incoming groups, or they entered later. At the moment we cannot resolve which of these might be correct, leaving us facing extraordinary evidence of an extraordinary chapter in human history! But we will solve this puzzle.”

The population history during the millennia that followed initial settlement was far more complex than previously thought. The peopling of the Americas had been simplified as a series of north to south population splits with little to no interaction between groups after their establishment.

The new genomic analysis presented in the study has shown that around 8,000 years ago, Native Americans were on the move again, but this time from Mesoamerica into both North and South America.

Researchers found traces of this movement in the genomes of all present-day indigenous populations in South America for which genomic data is available to date.

Dr Moreno-Mayar added: “The older genomes in our study not only taught us about the first inhabitants in South America but also served as a baseline for identifying a second stream of genetic ancestry, which arrived from Mesoamerica in recent millennia and that is not evident from the archaeological record. These Mesoamerican peoples mixed with the descendants of the earliest South Americans and gave rise to most contemporary groups in the region.”

Reference: 
J. Victor Moreno-Mayar et al. 'Early human dispersals within the Americas.' Science (2018). DOI: 10.1126/science.aav2621

Adapted from a St John's College press release.

Inset image: Skulls and other human remains from P.W. Lund's Collection from Lagoa Santa, Brazil. Kept in the Natural History Museum of Denmark. Credit: Natural History Museum of Denmark

Working with the television production company Channel 4, they tested over half a million people, including over 36,000 autistic people. The results are published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Empathising-Systemising theory predicts that women, on average, will score higher than men on tests of empathy, the ability to recognize what another person is thinking or feeling, and to respond to their state of mind with an appropriate emotion. Similarly, it predicts that men, on average, will score higher on tests of systemising, the drive to analyse or build rule-based systems.

The Extreme Male Brain theory predicts that autistic people, on average, will show a masculinised shift on these two dimensions: namely, that they will score lower than the typical population on tests of empathy and will score the same as if not higher than the typical population on tests of systemising.

Whereas both theories have been confirmed in previous studies of relatively modest samples, the new findings come from a massive sample of 671,606 people, which included 36,648 autistic people. They were replicated in a second sample of 14,354 people. In this new study, the scientists used very brief 10-item measures of empathy, systemising, and autistic traits.

Using these short measures, the team identified that in the typical population, women, on average, scored higher than men on empathy, and men, on average, scored higher than women on systemising and autistic traits. These sex differences were reduced in autistic people. On all these measures, autistic people’s scores, on average, were ‘masculinised’: that is, they had higher scores on systemising and autistic traits and lower scores on empathy, compared to the typical population.

The team also calculated the difference (or ‘d-score’) between each individual’s score on the systemising and empathy tests. A high d-score means a person’s systemising is higher than their empathy, and a low d-score means their empathy is higher than their systemising.

They found that in the typical population, men, on average, had a shift towards a high d-score, whereas women, on average, had a shift towards a low d-score. Autistic individuals, on average, had a shift towards an even higher d-score than typical males. Strikingly, d-scores accounted for 19 times more of the variance in autistic traits than other variables, including sex.

Finally, men, on average, had higher autistic trait scores than women. Those working in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), on average, had higher systemising and autistic traits scores than those in non-STEM occupations. And conversely, those working in non-STEM occupations, on average, had had higher empathy scores than those working in STEM.

In the paper, the authors discuss how it is important to bear in mind that differences observed in this study apply only to group averages, not to individuals. They underline that these data say nothing about an individual based on their gender, autism diagnosis, or occupation. To do that would constitute stereotyping and discrimination, which the authors strongly oppose.

Further, the authors reiterate that the two theories are applicable to only two dimensions of typical sex differences: empathy and systemising. They do not apply to all sex differences, such as aggression, and to extrapolate the theories beyond these two dimensions would be a misinterpretation.

Finally, the authors highlight that although autistic people on average struggle with ‘cognitive’ empathy – recognizing other people’s thoughts and feelings – they nevertheless have intact ‘affective’ empathy – they care about others. It is a common misunderstanding that autistic people struggle with all forms of empathy, which is untrue.

Dr Varun Warrier, from the Cambridge team, said: “These sex differences in the typical population are very clear. We know from related studies that individual differences in empathy and systemising are partly genetic, partly influenced by our prenatal hormonal exposure, and partly due to environmental experience. We need to investigate the extent to which these observed sex differences are due to each of these factors, and how these interact.”

Dr David Greenberg, from the Cambridge team, said: “Big data is important to draw conclusions that are replicable and robust. This is an example of how scientists can work with the media to achieve big data science.”

Dr Carrie Allison, from the Cambridge team, said: “We are grateful to both the general public and to the autism community for participating in this research. The next step must be to consider the relevance of these findings for education, and support where needed.”

Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, Director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge who proposed these two theories nearly two decades ago, said: “This research provides strong support for both theories. This study also pinpoints some of the qualities autistic people bring to neurodiversity. They are, on average, strong systemisers, meaning they have excellent pattern-recognition skills, excellent attention to detail, and an aptitude in understanding how things work. We must support their talents so they achieve their potential – and society benefits too.”

This study was supported by the Autism Research Trust, the Medical Research Council, Wellcome, and the Templeton World Charity Foundation., Inc. It was conducted in association with the NIHR CLAHRC for Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust, and the NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre.

Reference
Greenberg, DM et al. Testing the Empathizing-Systemising theory of sex differences and the Extreme Male Brain theory of autism in half a million people. PNAS; 12 Nov 2018; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1811032115

If you'd like to complete these measures and participate in studies at the Autism Research Centre please register here. 

An international team of astronomers, including from the University of Cambridge, discovered the massive object when trawling through data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite. The object, named Antlia 2 (or Ant 2), has avoided detection until now thanks to its extremely low density as well as a perfectly-chosen hiding place, behind the shroud of the Milky Way’s disc. The researchers have published their results online today.

Ant 2 is known as a dwarf galaxy. As structures emerged in the early Universe, dwarfs were the first galaxies to form, and so most of their stars are old, low-mass and metal-poor. But compared to the other known dwarf satellites of our Galaxy, Ant 2 is immense: it is as big as the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), and a third the size of the Milky Way itself.

What makes Ant 2 even more unusual is how little light it gives out. Compared to the LMC, another satellite of the Milky Way, Ant 2 is 10,000 times fainter. In other words, it is either far too large for its luminosity or far too dim for its size.

“This is a ghost of a galaxy,” said Gabriel Torrealba, the paper’s lead author. “Objects as diffuse as Ant 2 have simply not been seen before. Our discovery was only possible thanks to the quality of the Gaia data.”

The ESA’s Gaia mission has produced the richest star catalogue to date, including high-precision measurements of nearly 1.7 billion stars and revealing previously unseen details of our home Galaxy. Earlier this year, Gaia’s second data release made new details of stars in the Milky Way available to scientists worldwide.

The researchers behind the current study – from Taiwan, the UK, the US, Australia and Germany – searched the new Gaia data for Milky Way satellites by using RR Lyrae stars. These stars are old and metal-poor, typical of those found in a dwarf galaxy. RR Lyrae change their brightness with a period of half a day and can be located thanks to these well-defined pulses.

“RR Lyrae had been found in every known dwarf satellite, so when we found a group of them sitting above the Galactic disc, we weren’t totally surprised,” said co-author Vasily Belokurov from Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy. “But when we looked closer at their location on the sky it turned out we found something new, as no previously identified object came up in any of the databases we searched through.”

The team contacted colleagues at the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) in Australia, but when they checked the coordinates for Ant 2, they realised they had a limited window of opportunity to get follow-up data. They were able to measure the spectra of more than 100 red giant stars just before the Earth’s motion around the Sun rendered Ant 2 unobservable for months.

The spectra enabled the team to confirm that the ghostly object they spotted was real: all the stars were moving together. Ant 2 never comes too close to the Milky Way, always staying at least 40 kiloparsecs (about 130,000 light-years) away. The researchers were also able to obtain the galaxy’s mass, which was much lower than expected for an object of its size.

“The simplest explanation of why Ant 2 appears to have so little mass today is that it is being taken apart by the Galactic tides of the Milky Way,” said co-author Sergey Koposov from Carnegie Mellon University. “What remains unexplained, however, is the object’s giant size. Normally, as galaxies lose mass to the Milky Way’s tides, they shrink, not grow.”

If it is impossible to puff the dwarf up by removing matter from it, then Ant 2 had to have been born huge. The team has yet to figure out the exact process that made Ant 2 so extended. While objects of this size and luminosity have not been predicted by current models of galaxy formation, recently it has been speculated that some dwarfs could be inflated by vigorous star formation. Stellar winds and supernova explosions would push away the unused gas, weakening the gravity that binds the galaxy and allowing the dark matter to drift outward as well.

“Even if star formation could re-shape the dark matter distribution in Ant 2 as it was put together, it must have acted with unprecedented efficiency,” said co-author Jason Sanders, also from Cambridge.

Alternatively, Ant 2’s low density could mean that a modification to the dark matter properties is needed. The currently favoured theory predicts dark matter to pack tightly in the centres of galaxies. Given how fluffy the new dwarf appears to be, a dark matter particle which is less keen to cluster may be required.

“Compared to the rest of the 60 or so Milky Way satellites, Ant 2 is an oddball,” said co-author Matthew Walker, also from Carnegie Mellon University. “We are wondering whether this galaxy is just the tip of an iceberg, and the Milky Way is surrounded by a large population of nearly invisible dwarfs similar to this one.”

The gap between Ant 2 and the rest of the Galactic dwarfs is so wide that this may well be an indication that some important physics is missing in the models of dwarf galaxy formation. Solving the Ant 2 puzzle may help researchers understand how the first structures in the early Universe emerged. Finding more objects like Ant 2 will show just how common such ghostly galaxies are, and the team is busy looking for other similar galaxies in the Gaia data.

Reference:
G. Torrealba et al. ‘The hidden giant: discovery of an enormous Galactic dwarf satellite in Gaia DR2.’ arXiv: 1811.04082

Read more here.

The crowded and bustling streets of Delhi teem with life. Stop to listen and, above the din of rickshaws, taxis and buses, you’ll hear a multitude of languages, as more than 20 million men, women and children go about their daily lives.

Many were born and raised there, and many millions more have made India’s capital their home, having moved from surrounding neighbourhoods, cities and states or across the country, often in search of a better job, a better home and a better life.

Some arrive speaking fluent Hindi, the dominant language in Delhi (and the official language of government), but many arrive speaking any number of India’s 22 officially recognised languages, let alone the hundreds of regional and tribal languages in a country of more than 1.3 billion people.

Around 950 miles south of Delhi lies Hyderabad, where more than 70% of its seven million people speak Telugu. Meanwhile, in Bihar, in the northeast of India, Urdu has replaced Hindi as the dominant language across this poor and populous state of more than 100 million people.

What links Delhi, Hyderabad and Bihar is a four-year project, Multilingualism and multiliteracy: raising learning outcomes in challenging contexts in primary schools across India, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Department for International Development. Led by Professor Ianthi Tsimpli, from the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, the project involves Dr Dénes Szucs from the Department of Psychology, plus researchers from the University of Reading and project partners in Karnataka, Hyderabad and New Delhi.

The overriding aim of the project is to find out why in a country where multilingualism is so common (more than 255 million people in India speak at least two languages, and nearly 90 million speak three or more languages), the benefits and advantages of speaking more than one language, observed in Europe for instance, do not apply to many of India’s schoolchildren.

For Tsimpli, the answers to this conundrum may lie within the dataset she and her colleagues are compiling with the help of more than 1,000 primary-age schoolchildren across Delhi, Hyderabad and Bihar.

“Each year across India, 600,000 children are tested, and year after year more than half of children in Standard 5 [ten-year-olds] cannot read a Standard 2 [seven-year-olds] task fluently, and nearly half of them could not solve a Standard 2 subtraction task,” says Tsimpli, who co-leads Cambridge Language Sciences, the University’s Interdisciplinary Research Centre that brings together researchers from different fields to tackle ‘grand challenges’ where language is a factor.

“Low literacy and numeracy limit other important capabilities, including critical thinking and problem solving. Low educational achievement can lead to many dropping out of school – a problem disproportionately affecting female students. And the gap between state schools and private schools increases every year.”

She and colleagues are looking at whether these low learning outcomes could be a by-product of an Indian school system whereby the language that children are taught in often differs from the language used at home.

“We are looking at eight to 11-year-old schoolchildren in rural and urban areas,” she explains. “Within those urban areas we make the distinction between boys and girls living in slum and non-slum areas.

“Many children are internal migrants who move from remote, rural areas to urban areas. They are so poor they have to live in slums and, as a result of migration, these children may speak languages that are different to the regional language.

“By looking at the mismatch between home and school languages, and by using tests and other socio-economic and educational variables, we try to find out whether these children are advantaged or disadvantaged in literacy, numeracy, mathematical reasoning, problem solving and cognitive skills.”

Two years into the four-year project, the team has discovered considerable variation in the provision of education across government schools in the three areas, with different teaching practices and standards.

Having tested all 1,000 children, they will now embark on retesting them, looking not only at test results, but also allowing for other variables such as the standard of schooling, the environment and the teaching practices themselves. It’s possible that one of the causes of low performance is the lack of pupil-centred teaching methods; instead, the teacher dominates and there is little room for independent learning.

Although the findings are at a preliminary stage, Tsimpli and her team have found that the medium of instruction used in schools, especially English, may hold back those children who have little familiarity with, or exposure to,the language before starting school and outside of school life.

“Most of the evidence from this and other projects shows that English instruction in very disadvantaged areas might not be the best way to start, at least in the first three years [Standards 1 to 3] of primary,” says Tsimpli.

“What we would recommend for everyone, not just low socio-economic status children, would be to start learning in the language they feel comfortable learning in. The medium of instruction should reflect the strengths of the child. When it does, that child will learn better. English can still be used, but perhaps not as the medium of instruction in primary schools. It could, for example, be one of the subjects that are being taught alongside other subjects, starting perhaps from the third year of primary school.

“We are not suggesting that English be withdrawn – that ship has sailed – but we perhaps have to think more about learner needs. There is perhaps too much uniformity in teaching and less tailoring to the children’s language abilities and needs.”

While the preliminary results show that there is no difference in general intelligence among boys and girls from slum versus urban poor backgrounds, a surprising finding has been that children from slum backgrounds in Delhi do not seem to lag behind other children from other urban poor backgrounds – and in some cases perform better (e.g. in numeracy and literacy tasks).

This unexpected finding may be down to the life experiences of children growing up in slums, where they are likely to mature faster and come into closer contact with the numeracy skills essential for day-to-day survival.

Tsimpli adds that, despite the project only being at its midpoint, it has already caught the attention of government ministers, including Delhi’s Minister for Education, who is keen to use their findings to inform and adjust school policy in India’s capital city and the wider state.

“Delhi may be keen to adopt root-and-branch reform if our findings support it,” explains Tsimpli. “They are as keen as us to understand how the challenging context of deprivation can be attenuated when focusing on the languages children learn and use while at school.

“Our findings don’t mean that you’re doomed if you’re poor. It may be that these low learning outcomes are because of the way education is provided in India, with a huge focus on Hindi and English as the mediums of instruction, to the potential detriment of children unfamiliar with those languages.

“Language is central to the way knowledge is transferred – so the medium of instruction is obviously hugely influential. We hope to be able to show that problem solving, numeracy and literacy can and do improve in children who are educated in a language of instruction that they know. The trick may be to bridge school skills with life skills and make use of the richness of a child’s life experience to help them learn in the most effective ways possible.”

Inset image: credit Ianthi Tsimpli.

Read more about our research on the topic of children in the University's research magazine; download a pdf; view on Issuu.

The figures show that the ten institutions collectively conducted over one third of all UK animal research in 2017. All ten universities appear in the QS 2018 World University Ranking Top 200 and seven appear in the Top 50.

The top ten institutions conducted 1.32 million procedures, 35% of the 3.79 million procedures conducted in Great Britain in 2017. Over 99% of these procedures were carried out on rodents or fish, and in line with national data they were almost evenly split between experimental work and the breeding of genetically modified animals.

The ten universities are listed below alongside the total number of procedures that they carried out in 2017. Each institution’s name links to its animal research webpage which includes more detailed statistics. This is the third year in a row universities have come together to publicise their collective numbers and examples of their research.

All universities are committed to the ‘3Rs’ of replacement, reduction and refinement. This means avoiding or replacing the use of animals where possible; minimising the number of animals used per experiment and optimising the experience of the animals to improve animal welfare. However, as universities expand and conduct more research, the total number of animals used can rise even if fewer animals are used per study.

All ten universities are signatories to the Concordat on Openness on Animal Research in the UK, a commitment to be more open about the use of animals in scientific, medical and veterinary research in the UK. Over 120 organisations have signed the concordat including UK universities, charities, research funders and commercial research organisations.

Wendy Jarrett, Chief Executive of Understanding Animal Research, which developed the Concordat on Openness, said: “The Concordat has fostered a culture of openness at research institutions up and down the country. Institutions now provide an unprecedented level of information about how and why they conduct medical, veterinary and scientific research using animals. Almost two-thirds of the university Concordat signatories provide their animal numbers openly on their websites – accounting for almost 90% of all animal research at UK universities."

Animal research at Cambridge

The University of Cambridge has received two Openness Awards for its films about animal research. The first, Fighting Cancer, was a behind-the-scenes tour of one of its animal facilities, explaining how mice are used to study cancer and featuring images of mice with tumours and undergoing procedures. Its second film, Understanding the OCD Brain, looked at how both animal and human studies are vital to exploring a distressing mental health condition and included footage of its marmoset facility. Researchers from the University regularly speak about their work at its annual Science Festival.

“Animals are used in research at the University of Cambridge in a wide variety of experiments designed to develop new treatments for humans and animals," says Dr Martin Vinnell, Director of University Biomedical Services at the University of Cambridge. "However, as seen from the additional data collection undertaken for the first time in 2018 just under 17% of the animals used at Cambridge were used in scientific procedures which did not required a Home Office licence – instead these animals were humanely killed and by applying new and often cutting edge technologies their cells and tissues were used in experiments.”

Find out more about animal research at Cambridge

Adapted from a press release by Understanding Animal Research

Read our full Shorthand story here.

The largest cross-national study ever conducted on conspiracy theories suggests that around a third of people in countries such as the UK and France think their governments are “hiding the truth” about immigration, and that voting for Brexit and Trump is associated with a wide range of conspiratorial beliefs – from science denial to takeover plots by Muslim migrants.

The research, conducted as part of the University of Cambridge’s Conspiracy & Democracy project, and based on survey work from the YouGov-Cambridge centre, covers nine countries – US, Britain*, Poland, Italy, France, Germany, Portugal, Sweden, Hungary – and will be presented at a public launch in Cambridge on Friday 23 November.

According to project researcher Dr Hugo Leal, anti-immigration conspiracy theories have been “gaining ground” since the refugee crisis first came to prominence in 2015. “The conspiratorial perception that governments are deliberately hiding the truth about levels of migration appears to be backed by a considerable portion of the population across much of Europe and the United States,” he said.

In Hungary, where controversial Prime Minister Viktor Orban is regularly accused of stoking anti-migrant sentiment, almost half of respondents (48%) believe their government is hiding the truth about immigration. Germany was the next highest (35%), with France (32%), Britain (30%) and Sweden (29%) also showing high percentages of this conspiracy among respondents, as well as a fifth (21%) of those in the United States.

Close to half of respondents who voted for Brexit (47%) and Trump (44%) believe their government is hiding the truth about immigration, compared with just 14% of Remain voters and 12% of Clinton voters.  

The researchers also set out to measure the extent of belief in a conspiracy theory known as ‘the great replacement’: the idea that Muslim immigration is part of a bigger plan to make Muslims the majority of a country’s population.

“Originally formulated in French far-right circles, the widespread belief in a supposedly outlandish nativist conspiracy theory known as the ‘great replacement’ is an important marker and predictor of the Trump and Brexit votes,” said Leal. Some 41% of Trump voters and 31% of Brexit voters subscribed to this theory, compared with 3% of Clinton voters and 6% of Remain voters.

Researchers also looked at a number of other popular conspiracy theories. Both Trump and Brexit voters were more likely to believe that climate change is a hoax, vaccines are harmful, and that a group of people “secretly control events and rule the world together”. “We found the existence of a conspiratorial worldview linking both electorates,” said Leal.

He describes the levels of science denial as an “alarming global trend”. In general, researchers found the idea that climate change is a hoax to be far more captivating for right-wing respondents, while scepticism about vaccines was less determined by “ideological affiliation”.

The view that “the truth about the harmful effects of vaccines is being deliberately hidden from the public” ranged from lows of 10% in Britain to a startling quarter of the population – some 26% – in France.      

The conspiracy belief that a secret cabal “control events and rule the world together” varies significantly between European countries such as Portugal (42%) and Sweden (12%). Dr Hugo Drochon, also a researcher on the Leverhulme Trust-funded Conspiracy & Democracy project, suggests this has "public policy implications, because there are structural issues at play here too”.

“More unequal countries with a lower quality of democracy tend to display higher levels of belief in the world cabal, which suggests that conspiracy beliefs can also be addressed at a more ‘macro’ level,” said Drochon.

The research team assessed the levels of “conspiracy scepticism” by looking at those who refuted every conspiratorial view in the study. Sweden had the healthiest levels of overall conspiracy scepticism, with 48% rejecting every conspiracy put to them. The UK also had a relatively strong 40% rejection of all conspiracies. Hungary had the lowest, with just 15% of people not taken in by any conspiracy theories.    

Half of both Remain and Clinton voters were conspiracy sceptics, while 29% of Brexit voters and just 16% of Trump voters rejected all conspiracy theories.  

The question of trust, and which professions the public see as trustworthy, was also investigated by researchers. Government and big business came out worst across all countries included in the study. Roughly three-quarters of respondents in Italy, Portugal, Poland, Hungary and Britain say they distrusted government ministers and company CEOs. Distrust of journalists, trade unionists, senior officials of the EU, and religious leaders are also high in all surveyed countries.

Trust in academics, however, was still relatively high, standing at 57% in the US and 64% in Britain. “We hope these findings can provide incentive for academics to reclaim a more active role in the public sphere, particularly when it comes to illuminating the differences between verifiable truths and demonstrable falsehoods,” said Hugo Leal.

Apart from academics, only family and friends escape the general climate of distrust, with trust reaching levels between 80% and 90% in all countries. Leal argues that this might help explain the credibility assigned to “friend mediated” online social networks.

In all surveyed countries apart from Germany, about half the respondents got their news from social media, with Facebook the preferred platform followed by YouTube. Getting news from social media was less likely to be associated with complete scepticism of conspiracy theories – much less likely in countries such as the US and Italy.

Researchers found that consuming news from YouTube in particular was associated with the adoption of particular conspiratorial views, such as anti-vaccine beliefs in the US and climate change denial in Britain.

“A telling takeaway of the study is that conspiracy theories are, nowadays, mainstream rather than marginal beliefs,” said Leal. “These findings provide important clues to understanding the popularity of populist and nationalist parties contesting elections across much of the western world."

The survey was conducted by YouGov during 13-23 August 2018, with a total sample size of 11,523 adults and results then weighted to be “representative of each market”.  

* Northern Ireland was not included in the survey.

At times of dramatic change and conflict, words can become weapons. Europe is transforming: migration, economic crises and Brexit are shaking the continent’s sense of identity, and debate has turned quickly to division and misunderstanding, to angry Twitter exchanges and pumped-up political stand-offs.

Now, a new Europe-wide project led by Cambridge’s Faculty of Education and closely linked to the University of Cambridge Primary School (UCPS) is encouraging better dialogue – by initially removing language altogether.

The three-year DIALLS project (Dialogue and Argumentation for Cultural Literacy Learning in Schools) will use wordless picturebooks and short films as a stimulus for discussion by children in primary and secondary schools. Exploring their individual and collective responses to the texts within school – and with peers in partner countries from Portugal and Cyprus to Israel and Lithuania – will, researchers believe, help children understand their own cultural identities, while also recognising and respecting those of others in a fast-changing and diverse Europe.

“Our approach is to use the skills of dialogue to promote understanding,” says Dr Fiona Maine, a visual literacy specialist and principal investigator for the €4.4 million project, funded by the European Union Horizon 2020 programme and involving nine universities. “To have an effective dialogue, you need to understand other people’s perspectives and where they are coming from, and perhaps critique your own views.”

Texts without words, needing no translation across borders, are an ideal stimulant for cross-cultural debate, Maine says. “These texts are ambiguous, and so give rich opportunities for discussion.”

A preliminary collection of dozens of materials gathered from across Europe since the project’s launch in May 2018 reflects the fact that many picturebooks have resonance for readers of all ages.The Mediterranean, by the Swiss illustrator Armin Greder, is for older readers and tackles themes of displacement and violence, its beautiful charcoal images confronting the tragic reality of refugees lost at sea. Baboon on the Moon, directed by Christopher Duriez, is a quirky animated film in which a baboon is taken from the jungle to top up the moon’s light each day. At first glance, it’s more playful, yet it addresses similarly powerful notions of home and belonging that could be discussed by all ages.

The next task is to whittle the initial selection down to a core set of 45 texts, likely to include some 30 books, with films and potentially artworks making up the total. It is here that children will themselves get involved in the research, with pupils at UCPS – the UK hub for the project – reviewing and choosing alongside their teachers.

“Student voice is important in the selection,” says Maine. “We’ll ask children which they like, but also which they feel give them real opportunities for discussion.”

The chosen texts, divided for different age groups where appropriate, will then be used by partner schools in each of the nine participant countries to stimulate discussion over 15 lesson sequences. The aim is twofold: children in 300 classes across Europe will explore their responses to the ideas prompted by the books and films, but in doing so will also develop their skills in dialogue and argumentation (the structuring of discussion by hearing and building on others’ points of view). These, in turn, underpin the fundamental goal of the project: to develop children’s “cultural literacy” – not in the sense of knowledge of a defined European culture of art and literature, but in an openness to engage with many different interpretations of it.

“For effective dialogue, in essence, you have to be tolerant, empathetic and inclusive of other positions,” says Maine. “Cultural literacy is not about accessing culture, but about a disposition to engage. Through understanding your own heritage, cultural identity and values and how they are positioned, you are better able to see that actually everybody has a slightly different experience. So it is not about saying ‘us and others’: we are all ‘others’.”

Children’s exploration of this ‘otherness’ will begin in the classroom as they discuss texts with fellow pupils, moving on as the project develops to discussions with children elsewhere in their own country (in England, 30 schools will be involved at first, with more in the third year once resources on using the texts are online).

Children across Europe will be able to share their ideas using a specially created digital platform. One landmark will be a semi-virtual conference in May 2020 bringing together school students to share ideas on the themes explored in the wordless texts, leading to the creation of a “manifesto for cultural literacy for young people in Europe” to sit alongside a set of freely available resources for teachers.

Along the way, children will also develop their own ‘cultural artefacts’ – artwork, stories or short films to be made publicly available in a virtual gallery. In the UK, participating teachers will have access to the Faculty of Education for professional development.

For UCPS, with its close ties to the Faculty and strong research mission, the DIALLS project sits perfectly with its own curriculum priorities. “The real key perhaps to the project is to connect teachers and academics and children, and doing that through different texts,” says UCPS Headteacher Dr James Biddulph. “It fits in with our school’s focus on developing compassionate citizens who are actively involved in their world.”

But with its pan-European scope and ambition to promote understanding, is there a risk the DIALLS initiative could seem unduly idealistic in an era of transition, enormous complexity and debates that can seem so intractable that many in the adult world are tempted to turn away and tune out? How can we expect children to make sense of Europe and its different – and changing – cultures, when even we adults frequently seem unable to do so?

For Maine, the goal is not to find cosy solutions to the world’s problems, but to give children more tools to manage difference positively. “This isn’t about finding answers – we aren’t trying to get people to agree, nor even to seek to agree. This is about listening and understanding. It’s about a way of being.”

Read more about our research on the topic of children in the University's research magazine; download a pdf; view on Issuu.

While their study was carried out in mice, they hope that this finding will translate into humans and provide a potential new drug to help fight obesity.

Obesity is a condition in which individuals accumulate more and more fat until their fat stops functioning. This can lead to diseases such as diabetes. However, not all fat tissue is bad: the fat that accumulates in obesity is known as ‘white fat’, but a second form of fat known as ‘brown fat’ could be used to treat obesity.

Both brown and white fat are made up of fat cells known as adipocytes, but in brown fat, these cells are rich in mitochondria – the ‘batteries’ that power our bodies – which give the tissue its brown colour. Brown fat also contains more blood vessels to allow the body to provide it with oxygen and nutrients.

While white fat stories energy, brown fat burns it in a process known as ‘thermogenesis’. When fully activated, just 100g of brown fat can burn 3,400 calories a day – significantly higher than most people’s daily food intake and more than enough to fight obesity.

We all have some brown fat – or brown adipose tissue, as it is also known – in our bodies, but it is found most abundantly in newborns and in hibernating animals (where the heat produced by brown fat enables them to survive even in freezing temperatures). As we age, the amount of brown fat in our bodies decreases.

Just having more brown fat alone is not enough - the tissue also needs to be activated. Currently, the only ways to activate brown fat are to put people in the cold to mimic hibernation, which is both impractical and unpleasant, or to treat them with drugs known as adrenergic agonists, but these can cause heart attacks. It is also necessary to increase the number of blood vessels in the tissue to carry nutrients to the fat cells and the number of nerve cells to allow the brain to ‘switch on’ the tissue.

In 2012, a team led by Professor Toni Vidal-Puig from the Wellcome Trust-MRC Institute of Metabolic Science, University of Cambridge, identified a molecule known as BMP8b that regulates the activation of brown fat in both the brain and the body’s tissues. They showed that deleting the gene in mice that produces this protein stopped brown fat from functioning.

Now, in a study published today in the journal Nature Communications, Professor Vidal-Puig has led an international team of researchers which has shown that increasing how much BMP8b mice can produce increases the function of their brown fat. This implies that BMP8b, which is found in the blood, could potentially be used as a drug to increase the amount of brown fat amount in humans as well as making it more active. Further research will be necessary to demonstrate if this is the case.

To carry out their research, the team used mice that had been bred to produce higher levels of the protein in adipose tissue. As anticipated, they found that increasing BMP8b levels changed some of the white fat into brown fat, a process known as beiging and thus increased the amount of energy burnt by the tissue.

They showed that higher levels of BMP8b make the tissue more sensitive to adrenergic signals from nerves – the same pathway target by adrenergic agonist drugs. This may allow lower doses of these drugs to be used to activate brown fat in people, hence reducing their risk of heart attack.

Unexpectedly, but importantly, the team also found that the molecule increased the amount of blood vessels and nerves in brown fat.

“There have been a lot of studies that have found molecules that promote brown fat development, but simply increasing the amount of brown fat will not work to treat disease – it has to be able to get enough nutrients and be turned on,” says Professor Vidal-Puig, lead author of the study.

Co-author Dr Sam Virtue, also from the Institute of Metabolic Science, adds: “It’s like taking a one litre engine out of a car and sticking in a two litre engine in its place. In theory the car can go quicker, but if you only have a tiny fuel pipe to the engine and don’t connect the accelerator pedal it won’t do much good. BMP8b increases the engine size, and fits a new fuel line and connects up the accelerator!”

The research was funded by the British Heart Foundation, Medical Research Council, European Research Council, WHRI-Academy and Wellcome.

Reference
Pellegrinelli, V et al. Adipocyte-1 secreted BMP8b mediates adrenergic-induced remodeling of the neurovascular network in adipose tissue. Nature Communications; 26 Nov 2018; DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-07453-x

The system, called LION LBD and developed by computer scientists and cancer researchers at the University of Cambridge, has been designed to assist scientists in the search for cancer-related discoveries. It is the first literature-based discovery system aimed at supporting cancer research. The results are reported in the journal Bioinformatics.                            

Global cancer research attracts massive amounts of funding worldwide, and the scientific literature is now so huge that researchers are struggling to keep up with it: critical hypothesis-generating evidence is now often discovered long after it was published.

Cancer is a complex class of diseases that are not completely understood and are the second-leading cause of death worldwide. Cancer development involves changes in numerous chemical and biochemical molecules, reactions and pathways, and cancer research is being conducted across a wide variety of scientific fields, which have variability in the way that they describe similar concepts.

“As a cancer researcher, even if you knew what you were looking for, there are literally thousands of papers appearing every day,” said Professor Anna Korhonen, Co-Director of Cambridge’s Language Technology Lab who led the development of LION LBD in collaboration with Dr Masashi Narita at Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute and Professor Ulla Stenius at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. “LION LBD uses AI to help scientists keep up-to-date with published discoveries in their field, but could also help them make new discoveries by combining what is already known in the literature by making connections between sources that may appear to be unrelated.”

The ‘LBD’ in LION LBD stands for Literature-Based Discovery, a concept developed in the 1980s which seeks to make new discoveries by combing pieces of information from disconnected sources. The key idea behind the original version of LBD is that concepts that are never explicitly linked in the literature may be indirectly linked through intermediate concepts.

The design of the LION LBD system allows real-time search to discover indirect associations between entities in a database of tens of millions of publications while preserving the ability of users to explore each mention in its original context.

“For example, you may know that a cancer drug affects the behaviour of a certain pathway, but with LION LBD, you may find that a drug developed for a totally different disease affects the same pathway,” said Korhonen.

LION LBD is the first system developed specifically for the needs of cancer research. It has a particular focus on the molecular biology of cancer and uses state-of-the-art machine learning and natural language processing techniques, in order to detect references to the hallmarks of cancer in the text. Evaluations of the system have demonstrated its ability to identify undiscovered links and to rank relevant concepts highly among potential connections.

The system is built using open data, open source and open standards, and is available as an interactive web-based interface or a programmable API.

The researchers are currently working on extending the scope of LION-LBD to include further concepts and relations. They are also working closely with cancer researchers to help and improve the technology for end users.

The system was developed in collaboration with University of Cambridge Language Technology Lab, Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, and Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, and was funded by the Medical Research Council.

Reference:
Sampo Pyysalo et al. ‘LION LBD: a Literature-Based Discovery System for Cancer Biology.’ Bioinformatics (2018). DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/bty845

Stabbed by a lover with a fish-gutting knife. Beaten to death for littering with eel skins. Shot with an arrow during a student street brawl. Shanked by a sore loser after late-night backgammon. 

These were just some of the ways to die violently in the city of London during the 14th century, as catalogued in the ‘Coroners’ Rolls’: the records of the medieval official tasked with documenting sudden and unnatural death – whether accident, suicide or homicide. 

Now, University of Cambridge criminologist Professor Manuel Eisner has plotted all cases of murder from the surviving rolls – covering the years 1300 to 1340 – onto a digital map of the old city to show for the first time the ‘hot spots’ of lethal violence in medieval London.

Building on work conducted by the historian Barbara Hannawalt over forty years ago, Eisner has also produced an analysis of the 142 homicides committed within the city’s boundaries to reveal not just locations but the days, times and favoured methods.

The “murder map” of medieval London will be made publicly available on Wednesday on the website of the Violence Research Centre, which will also host a launch event today at the Institute of Criminology.

“Following notification of a violent death, the Coroner and Sheriffs would summon a jury from the local area to investigate, then record all the findings,” said Eisner.

“The events described in the Coroners’ Rolls show weapons were never far away, male honour had to be protected, and conflicts easily got out of hand. They give us a detailed picture of how homicide was embedded in the rhythms of urban medieval life.”

“By digitally mapping these murder cases, we hope to create an accessible resource for the public to explore these remarkable records,” he said.

Eisner’s map allows people to filter the killings by year, weapon and crime scene, and has updated the language of each case description for modern audiences.      

While the map shows murders occurred across the city, two main homicide ‘hot spots’ emerge, both commercial centres of the time. One was the stretch of Cheapside from St Mary-le-Bow church – the ‘bow bells’ of cockney legend – leading up to St Paul’s Cathedral.

The other was further east: the triangle of Gracechurch, Lombard (then ‘Langbourn’) and Cornhill streets that radiate out from Leadenhall market, the history of which can be traced back to the 14th century.

The majority of murders, some 68%, took place in London’s busy streets and markets, with 21% occurring in private residences. Religious buildings (six murders) may have been more dangerous than brothels (two murders).

As today, medieval homicide was a weekend activity, with almost a third (31%) of murders taking place on a Sunday. “Sunday was the day when people had time to engage in social activities, such as drinking and gaming, which would often trigger frictions that led to assault,” said Eisner.

Around 77% of the murders were committed between early evenings, “around the hour of vespers”, and the first hours after curfew. Daggers and swords dominate the list of murder weapons, used in 68% of all cases. Thick ‘quarter staff’ poles designed for close combat were used in 19% of cases.

Almost all (92%) perpetrators were men. In just four cases a woman was the only suspect. About a third of the cases had more than one suspect, with a number of killings involving brothers or servants helping masters.

Estimates for London populations in the 14th century range from 40,000 to 100,000. Assuming a city of 80,000, Eisner suggests that medieval London murder rates were about 15-20 times higher than we would expect to see in a contemporary UK town of equivalent size.

However, he argues that comparisons with modern society are problematic. “We have firearms, but we also have emergency services. It’s easier to kill but easier to save lives.”

In fact, death by murder could be a slow process in the 14th century. “Over 18% of victims survived at least a week after the initial trauma, probably dying eventually from infections or blood loss,” said Eisner.

One saddle-maker who had his fingers cut off by a rival died of his wounds – and consequently became a homicide victim – a full three weeks later.

While his work takes in everything from bullying prevention to youth crime, violence reduction across the centuries is a major research strand for Prof Eisner. He has studied long-term historical trends in homicide from 1000AD onwards.    

“London in the decades before the Black Death had more homicides relative to the population than London in the 18th or 19th century,” added Eisner.

“The trend in London is in line with the long-term decline of homicide found across cities in Western Europe, a decline that led to the pacified spaces that were essential for the rise of urban life and civility in Europe.”

Many pregnancies fail because the embryo does not implant correctly into the lining of the womb (uterus) and fails to form a placental attachment to the mother. Yet, because of the complexities of studying this early period of our development, very little is understood about what is happening normally and what can go wrong. Animals are too dissimilar to humans to provide a good model of placental development and implantation.

“The placenta is absolutely essential for supporting the baby as it grows inside the mother,” says Dr Margherita Turco, the study’s first author, from the Departments of Pathology and Physiology, Development and Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge. “When it doesn’t function properly, it can result in serious problems, from pre-eclampsia to miscarriage, with immediate and lifelong consequences for both mother and child. But our knowledge of this important organ is very limited because of a lack of good experimental models.”

Efforts to grow human placental cells started over 30 years ago in the Pathology department where Professors Ashley Moffett and Charlie Loke were studying cellular events in the first few weeks of pregnancy.  With their chief technician, Lucy Gardner, they found ways to isolate and characterise placental trophoblast cells.  These techniques, combined with the organoid culture system, enabled the generation of miniature functional models of the early placenta – or ‘mini-placentas’.

In the past few years, a new field of research has blossomed that uses these organoids – often referred to as ‘mini-organs’ – enabling insights into human biology and disease. At the University of Cambridge, one of the world leaders in organoid research, scientists are using organoid cultures to grow everything from ‘mini-brains’ to ‘mini-livers’ to ‘mini-lungs’.

In a study funded by Wellcome and the Centre for Trophoblast Research, the Cambridge team was able to grow organoids using cells from villi – tiny frond-like structures – taken from placental tissue. These trophoblast organoids are able to survive long-term, are genetically stable and organise into villous-like structures that secrete essential proteins and hormones that would affect the mother’s metabolism during the pregnancy. Further analysis showed that the organoids closely resemble normal first-trimester placentas. In fact, the organoids so closely model the early placenta that they are able to record a positive response on an over-the-counter pregnancy test.

Professor Graham Burton, a co-author and Director of the Centre for Trophoblast Research, which last year celebrated its tenth anniversary, says: “These ‘mini-placentas’ build on decades of research and we believe they will transform work in this field. They will play an important role in helping us investigate events that happen during the earliest stages of pregnancy and yet have profound consequences for the life-long health of the mother and her offspring. The placenta supplies all the oxygen and nutrients essential for growth of the fetus, and if it fails to develop properly the pregnancy can sadly end with a low birthweight baby or even a stillbirth.”

In addition, the organoids may shed light on other mysteries surrounding the relationships between the placenta, the uterus and the fetus: why, for example, is the placenta able to prevent some infections passing from the mother’s blood to the fetus while others, such as Zika virus, are able to pass through this barrier? The organoids may also be used for screening the safety of drugs to be used in early pregnancy, to understand how chromosomal abnormalities may perturb normal development, and possibly even provide stem cell therapies for failing pregnancies.

Last year, the same team supported by Cambridge’s Centre for Trophoblast Research reported growing miniature functional models of the uterine lining.

“Now that we’ve developed organoid models of both sides of the interface – maternal tissue and placental tissue – we can start to look at how these two sides talk to each other,” adds Professor Ashley Moffett.

Professor Moffett also co-directed a recent study published in Nature that used genomics and bioinformatics approaches to map over 70,000 single cells at the junction of the uterus and placenta. This study revealed how the cells talk to each other to modify the immune response and enable the pregnancy, presenting new and unexpected cell states in the uterus and placenta, and showing which genes are switched on in each cell.

References

Turco, MY et al. Trophoblast organoids as a model for maternal-fetal interactions during human placentation. Nature; 28 Nov 2018; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0753-3​

Vento-Tormo, R, et al. Single-cell reconstruction of the early maternal–fetal interface in humans. Nature; 14 Nov 2018; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0698-6​

Women who experience pregnancy loss and do not go on to have children are at greater risk of cardiovascular disease, such as heart disease and stroke, compared with women who have only one or two children, according to new research from the University of Cambridge and the University of North Carolina.

The study, published today in the Journal of Women’s Health, also found that women who have five or more children are at an increased risk of cardiovascular disease in later life.

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death among women in every major developed country and most emerging economies. Approximately 28,000 women die from heart attacks each year in the UK. In 2016 alone, 20,000 women died after having a stroke – a higher number that that in men.

During pregnancy, the mother’s body experiences changes during pregnancy including weight gain and accumulation of abdominal fat, higher levels of cholesterol, increased insulin resistance, and changes in the structure of the heart. Although most changes that occur during pregnancy are temporary, these changes are known to be risk factors for cardiovascular disease in the general population.

Previous studies have attempted to assess the relationship between pregnancy and childbirth on the one hand and cardiovascular disease on the other. However, due to limitations in these studies – including not taking into account breastfeeding history and grouping together women who had never been pregnant with those who had been pregnant but experienced pregnancy loss – their results have been inconclusive and sometimes contradictory.

In this new study, a team of researchers in the US and the UK analysed data from more than 8,500 White and African-American women, aged 45-64 years, in the US. This included health service data on cardiovascular disease over a thirty year period (1987-2016) and self-reported data on the number of pregnancies and births, and breastfeeding practices.

Within the study population, 138 women reported having experienced pregnancy loss and having no live born children. 3,108 women had one or two live born children, 3,126 had 3-4 live born children, and 1,694 had five or more live born children.

The researchers found that women who experienced pregnancy loss and did not have any live born children were at 64% greater risk of both coronary heart disease and 46% greater risk of heart failure compared to women with one or two children. Women with five or more births had a 38% higher risk of having serious heart attack, regardless of how long they breastfed for.

The team say that there may be several possible reasons for the link between cardiovascular risk and multiple births. Repeated pregnancies could result in long-lasting changes within the body including weight gain, especially around the waist, and increased levels of cholesterol in the blood. Also, the number of children a woman has also encompasses other factors including child-rearing, age at menopause and health conditions. Therefore, the researchers say it is unclear whether the increased risk of heart failure, coronary heart disease and heart attacks reflect the direct impact of repeated pregnancies, or the stressors associated with rearing multiple children, or both.

The increased risk of coronary heart disease and heart failure found in women with prior pregnancies, but no live born children, may reflect the increased risk previously identified after a history of miscarriage. Several mechanisms have been proposed to underlie the relationship between miscarriage and coronary heart disease, including immune disorders, chronic disease and dysfunction of the endothelium (cells that line the interior of blood vessels).

“Conditions such as heart disease and stroke together are the leading cause of death in women in the developed world and it is essential that we understand why this is the case,” says Dr Clare Oliver-Williams, a Junior Research Fellow at Homerton College who works at from the Department of Public Health and Primary Care at the University of Cambridge. “Our work suggests that there is a relation between cardiovascular disease risk and both pregnancy loss and having a large number of births.

“This study isn’t designed to stress and worry women, especially those who have experienced the distress of pregnancy loss. Instead we want to empower women with knowledge that will help them to reduce their risk.

“Most women know by the age of 40 how many children and pregnancy losses they have had, which is years before most heart attacks and strokes occur. This provides a window of opportunity to make lifestyle changes, such as exercise and diet that can help reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease.”

The research was funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, in the USA, and the British Heart Foundation and Homerton College, University of Cambridge, in the UK.

Reference
Oliver-Williams, C, et al. The association between parity and subsequent cardiovascular disease in women: The Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) Study. The Journal of Women’s Health; 27 Nov 2018; DOI: 10.1089/jwh.2018.7161 

First there was the finding that British primary school children were more at ease naming their favourite Pokémon character than they were at naming a hare, a deer or an oak tree.

Then there were the revisions to a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary: out went everyday nature words like acorn, bluebell and kingfisher, no longer used enough by children to merit inclusion; in came attachment, broadband, voice-mail, reflecting today’s tech-savvy child who is more at home on the internet than they are in the woods.

Fascinated and concerned by these changes, Dr Robert Macfarlane began to wonder about the relationship between childhood and the living world...

READ STORY HERE

The early origins and initial geographical starting point of the pandemic still remain a mystery but in the summer of 1918, there was a second wave of a far more virulent form of the influenza virus than anyone could have anticipated.

Soon dubbed ‘Spanish Flu’ after its effects were reported in the country’s newspapers, the virus rapidly spread across much of the globe to become one of the worst natural disasters in human history.

Doctors, nurses and volunteers were left helpless as their patients, the majority previously healthy young adults, languished and died from respiratory failure. There is now a broad consensus among experts that in just three years, Spanish Flu killed between fifty and one hundred million people. Despite this, public awareness of the disaster and the ongoing threat posed by influenza remains limited.

To mark the centenary and to highlight vital scientific research, the University of Cambridge has made a new film exploring what we have learnt about Spanish Flu, the urgent threat posed by influenza today, and how scientists are preparing for future pandemics. The film presents original photographs from the 1918 outbreak and exclusive interviews with four leading experts:

• Dr Mary Dobson, a historian of infectious diseases 
• Professor Derek Smith, Director of Cambridge’s Centre for Pathogen Evolution
• Dr AJ te Velthuis, a virologist studying how RNA viruses amplify, mutate and cause disease
• Professor Julia Gog, a mathematician of infectious diseases including influenza

The Centre for Digital Built Britain (CDBB) at the University of Cambridge has joined a new alliance with the MTC (Manufacturing Technology Centre) and BRE (Building Research Establishment) to transform the way that infrastructure in the UK is designed, built, and used. The Transforming Construction Alliance brings together experts specialising in digital, manufacturing, building performance standards and construction technology. It has been awarded £72 million by Innovate UK to deliver the Core Innovation Hub (CIH), a key investment to transform productivity in the construction sector within the Transforming Construction Programme, funded from the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund.

Announcing the award at BRE Watford on 30 November 2018, Business & Industry Minister Richard Harrington said: “We have the opportunity to revolutionise construction in the UK and the Core Innovation Hub will help us build smarter, greener and more efficient buildings much faster and cheaper than we do now.

“From the introduction of virtual reality to off-site manufacturing, our modern Industrial Strategy, is helping the UK construction sector to develop new techniques and skills - modernising the sector and delivering the homes and buildings our nation needs.”

The Core Innovation Hub will act as the focal point for construction related innovation, and strengthen links between the research base and businesses. It will support collaboration to develop and commercialise digital and manufacturing technologies for the construction sector to enable the schools, hospitals and infrastructure of the future to be built with strong levels of safety, quality and energy performance.

Through the Core Innovation Hub, the CDBB will continue its development of a framework, pilot projects and set of principles to guide the development of digital twins for built assets and infrastructure, to ensure that the data is interoperable, supporting better integration of services across the built environment. Through its research, policy and change programmes it will support the promotion and adoption of effective information management and the digital transformation of the built environment. These new digital tools, standards and technologies will create new business and export opportunities for the UK infrastructure sector; and ensure that our social and economic infrastructure is designed, built and operated to improve quality of life.

Keith Waller has been appointed Programme Director to lead the Transforming Construction Alliance. A civil engineer by profession, Mr Waller led development of the UK government’s recent Transforming Infrastructure Performance report. “I look forward to working alongside government, industry and the talented teams at MTC, BRE and CDBB to realise the vision of a transformed construction sector,” he said.

“The alliance brings together three trusted organisations with strong research, development and engagement programmes to deliver the evidence base and value case for change, alongside those who will benefit most from it,” said Professor Andy Neely, Pro-Vice Chancellor for Enterprise and Business Relations at the University of Cambridge and Director of the Centre for Digital Built Britain. “CDBB will collaborate widely to deliver a digital programme that will create the framework to underpin the future built environment and grow export opportunities for the UK.”

“There is huge potential for transformation of large parts of the construction sector to a manufacturing industry,” said Neil Rawlinson, Strategic Development Director at MTC. “The widespread appetite for change throughout the industry and the impact that this change will have on so many aspects of life in the UK make us enormously excited to be delivering this pivotal role. The complementary skills of the alliance partners will ensure we deliver for Industry and government.”

The Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund will strengthen research and innovation in science and business in the UK. Its Transforming Construction programme aims to support £600 billion worth of infrastructure and construction projects over the next decade, creating new processes and techniques, including standardisation of modular components for manufacture.

For more information visit the CDBB website.

The Paris Agreement of 2015 has a central aim to keep global temperature rise this century well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to “pursue efforts” to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5°C. This is an ambitious aim – global temperatures are rapidly approaching the 1.5°C target and the 2°C limit is not far away.

The path to 1.5°C requires that the world achieve zero emissions before 2050. It is imperative, therefore, that we stop burning fossil fuels, known as mitigation. However, our present trajectory suggests we’re not on track. COP24 can’t take its eye off this ball –- there is no long-term plan that doesn’t include zero fossil-carbon emissions. The scientific consensus is that we need to reach “net zero” CO₂ emissions by 2050. But to tack closer to a scenario of 1.5°C warming, COP24 should set this target for 2035.

Black, observed temperatures; blue, probable range from decadal forecasts; red, retrospective forecasts; green, climate simulations of the 20th century. Credit: The Met Office

Carbon removal and non-CO₂ emissions

The United Nations, in the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5ºC has accepted that there isn’t any obvious pathway to zero emissions in such a short time frame, so they have pegged their hopes on NETs – Negative Emissions Technologies. These approaches include carbon capture and storage (CCS), which involves sucking CO₂ from the air and storing it deep underground.

Carbon removal along these lines is the second imperative for COP24 in Katowice. Globally we emit around 40 billion tonnes of CO₂ annually, so net zero CO₂ by 2050 will require CO₂ removal of this scale, starting immediately.

Read more: Explainer: what is carbon capture and storage?

But CO₂ isn’t the only problem. We emit other greenhouse gases such as methane, nitrous oxide and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) which all contribute to climate change. Methane is on the rise and is 84 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO₂.

It comes from cows, and it leaks from oil wells and coal mines as “fugitive methane”. It is also seeping out of the melting permafrost in the Arctic. This is a worrying form of “positive feedback” where global warming causes the further release of gases that cause further warming.

Nitrous Oxide, which is 300 times more potent than CO₂, is rising too, caused by modern agriculture. And the concentration of refrigerant gases, such as CFCs, which are thousands of times more potent than CO₂, is not falling as fast as we’d hoped. So COP24 has a third imperative, to prevent the rise of non-CO₂ greenhouse gases. If we can stabilise non-CO₂ greenhouse emissions at present day levels we’ll be doing well, but concentrations are rising fast.

Limiting warming to 1.5°C or 2°C requires mitigation (energy efficiency and renewable generation) and CO₂ removal. Credit: MCC

Desperate times, desperate measures

All of this is going to be hard work. We’re failing to cut down our emissions, the technologies for NETs don’t exist at any meaningful scale, yet and there are no political drivers in place to enforce their deployment. There is also a real risk of a dramatic rise in methane in the near future. COP24 will have to consider emergency plans.

One such plan is very controversial. There are so-called “geoengineering” technologies which can be used to cause changes in global temperatures. One of these is Solar Radiation Management (SRM), which involves injecting tiny aerosol particles high in the atmosphere where they reflect sunlight into space.

We know from the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 that stratospheric aerosols caused a cooling of around 1°C over a year. The northern winter of 1992 saw a dramatic increase in sea ice and a stalling of glacial melting. SRM technologies exist and the first sun-dimming experiments are underway.

A proposed SRM technique which would inject sulphate aerosols into the atmosphere. Credit: Hugh Hunt/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

There is a realistic possibility that deploying SRM can buy us some time to enact the essential measures needed to stop warming at or before 1.5°C. The discussions at COP24 must keep all options on the table, and as unpalatable as geoengineering technologies might seem, their deployment may prove to be unavoidable.

The indicators are all in the danger zone. We are seeing increasing Arctic temperatures, rapid loss of Arctic sea ice, reduced Arctic reflectivity, rapidly melting ice shelves and methane release from permafrost. These are leading to rapidly rising sea levels, coastal flooding and storm surges, increased hurricane and storm activity, dry and hot conditions conducive to wildfires, and drought and crop failure.

The urgency for decisive action is the imperative for COP24. The UN must press on with four major strands for meeting the Paris 1.5°C target:

1. Reduce fossil carbon emissions.

2. Remove carbon from the atmosphere (NETs).

3. Halt the rise of emissions of non-CO₂ greenhouses cases (Methane, Nitrous oxide, CFCs).

4. Investigate techniques for geoengineering, including Solar Radiation Management.

All four of these must proceed simultaneously and in parallel. COP24 must make this perfectly clear. There is utmost urgency and no time to “wait and see”.

Hugh Hunt, Reader in Engineering Dynamics and Vibration, University of Cambridge

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.