The device, made from a single nanowire 1000 times thinner than a human hair, is the smallest spectrometer ever designed. It could be used in potential applications such as assessing the freshness of foods, the quality of drugs, or even identifying counterfeit objects, all from a smartphone camera. Details are reported in the journal Science.

In the 17^th century, Isaac Newton, through his observations on the splitting of light by a prism, sowed the seeds for a new field of science studying the interactions between light and matter – spectroscopy. Today, optical spectrometers are essential tools in industry and almost all fields of scientific research. Through analysing the characteristics of light, spectrometers can tell us about the processes within galactic nebulae, millions of light years away, down to the characteristics of protein molecules.

However, even now, the majority of spectrometers are based around principles similar to what Newton demonstrated with his prism: the spatial separation of light into different spectral components. Such a basis fundamentally limits the size of spectrometers in respect: they are usually bulky and complex, and challenging to shrink to sizes much smaller than a coin. Four hundred years after Newton, University of Cambridge researchers have overcome this challenge to produce a system up to a thousand times smaller than those previously reported.

The Cambridge team, working with colleagues from the UK, China and Finland, used a nanowire whose material composition is varied along its length, enabling it to be responsive to different colours of light across the visible spectrum. Using techniques similar to those used for the manufacture of computer chips, they then created a series of light-responsive sections on this nanowire.

“We engineered a nanowire that allows us to get rid of the dispersive elements, like a prism, producing a far simpler, ultra-miniaturised system than conventional spectrometers can allow,” said first author Zongyin Yang from the Cambridge Graphene Centre. “The individual responses we get from the nanowire sections can then be directly fed into a computer algorithm to reconstruct the incident light spectrum.”

“When you take a photograph, the information stored in pixels is generally limited to just three components – red, green, and blue,” said co-first author Tom Albrow-Owen. “With our device, every pixel contains data points from across the visible spectrum, so we can acquire detailed information far beyond the colours which our eyes can perceive. This can tell us, for instance, about chemical processes occurring in the frame of the image.”

“Our approach could allow unprecedented miniaturisation of spectroscopic devices, to an extent that could see them incorporated directly into smartphones, bringing powerful analytical technologies from the lab to the palm of our hands,” said Dr Tawfique Hasan, who led the study.

One of the most promising potential uses of the nanowire could be in biology. Since the device is so tiny, it can directly image single cells without the need for a microscope. And unlike other bioimaging techniques, the information obtained by the nanowire spectrometer contains a detailed analysis of the chemical fingerprint of each pixel.

The researchers hope that the platform they have created could lead to an entirely new generation of ultra-compact spectrometers working from the ultraviolet to the infrared range. Such technologies could be used for a wide range of consumer, research and industrial applications, including in lab-on-a-chip systems, biological implants, and smart wearable devices.

The Cambridge team has filed a patent on the technology, and hopes to see real-life applications within the next five years.

Reference:
Zongyin Yang et al. ‘Single nanowire spectrometers.’ Science (2019). DOI: 10.1126/science.aax8814

One in four students at Cambridge will be from under-represented and disadvantaged backgrounds in the 2019/20 intake, while over two-thirds of UK undergraduates will be from state schools, according to provisional data.

The success of Cambridge’s UCAS Adjustment scheme pilot this year has contributed to the rise in underrepresented students being admitted.

The University of Cambridge is also developing a range of measures to widen access and help students make the most of their experience including enhanced and extended bursaries for those in financial need and the introduction of a Transition Year programme, the Course Director for which was appointed last week.

Director of Admissions for the Colleges at the University of Cambridge Dr Sam Lucy said: “We have been exploring different ways to identify talented students who will thrive on our courses and help to make our student population truly representative of the UK population; this has included challenging false perceptions that put off applicants.

“It is deeply encouraging to see that our actions to provide educational opportunity for all those who have the potential to study here are paying off.”

Under future plans for increasing access, the University has pledged to admit one third of its intake from the most underrepresented and disadvantaged groups and to eliminate gaps between various groups in continuation, attainment and progression by 2035.

The University of Cambridge Access and Participation Plan can be read on the Cambridge Admissions Office web pages.

In October 2016, the University Catering Service (UCS), which is responsible for 14 outlets across the University of Cambridge and over 1,500 hospitality events each year, implemented the policy, which focused on the areas with the biggest impact without compromising on cost. These were:

• Reducing the consumption of meat, in particular ruminant meat (beef and lamb)
• Improving and increasing the availability of plant-based options
• Removing unsustainable fish from the menu
• Reducing food waste

Our Sustainable Food Journey, published by the University’s Environment and Energy team, reveals that since implementation, despite increases in how much food was purchased, overall carbon emissions across UCS were reduced by 10.5%. There was a 33% reduction in carbon emissions per kilogram of food purchased, and a 28% reduction in land use per kilogram of food purchased.

“Sustainability is extremely important to our students and staff and we wanted to ensure that we were not only responding to their needs, but pushing what was considered possible in a catering environment,” explains Nick White, Head of the UCS. “This has involved making sacrifices, but is has been absolutely the right thing to do. It’s about making the right choice easy.”

Securing support from catering service staff was key to making these changes. Catering staff were briefed on the environmental benefits of the Sustainable Food Policy and why the UCS wanted to implement it. As cooking with meat is a key part of most chef’s training, the UCS provided chefs with vegan cookery classes and a trip to Borough Market to get inspiration for plant-based menus. Meanwhile, café managers were given training on marketing for sustainability rather than profit.

To encourage changes in behaviour among the customers, UCS increased the number and variety of vegetarian and vegan options at the same time as removing ruminant meat. They also used subtle ‘nudge’ techniques, including placing the vegetarian and vegan options before the meat options and changing how food options were labelled.

“If you go to most restaurants, they’ll put a ‘V’ for vegetarian or label something as vegan,” says Catering Manager Paula White. “We didn’t do that, we just put what’s in it. You use your eyes, your nose. If you look at something and think ‘Wow, that looks good’, you’re not first of all thinking ‘Is there beef in that?’”

The Sustainable Food Policy has been widely supported by customers. The UCS now sells more sustainable, plant-based food, and as a bonus, they retain the same level of footfall, and have increased their gross profits by 2% from 2014/2015 to 2017/2018, despite increases in food costs.

Andrew Balmford, Professor of Conservation Science at the University of Cambridge, who advised UCS on how to make the necessary changes, says: “The University’s catering managers have, in a very short time, dramatically reduced the environmental footprint of their operation by removing ruminant meat from its menus, lowering food waste and eliminating unsustainably harvested fish– while simultaneously increasing sales and profit. It is hard to imagine any other interventions that could yield such dramatic benefits in so short a span of time.”

The UCS also decided to stop selling single-use plastic bottles, and have replaced these with glass bottles, cans or bio-degradable bottles. This has led to saving over 30,000 plastic bottles from landfill per year.

On the menu

A typical menu at the University Centre’s Main Dining Hall is:

• Aubergine rogan josh
• Butternut squash lasagne
• Roast chicken
• Breaded pork escalope

The full report is available to read at www.environment.admin.cam.ac.uk.

Cambridge Vice-Chancellor Professor Stephen J Toope joined Zhang Jinghua, Party Secretary of Nanjing City Party Committee and Nanjing Deputy Mayor Jiang Yuejian to turn the first soil at the site where the Centre's dedicated building will rise in Nanjing's Jiangbei New Area.   

The Cambridge University-Nanjing Centre of Technology and Innovation will establish a home for joint research and innovation in collaboration with the Chinese government, industry and China's global research universities that is dedicated to the future of creating 'smart' cities.

"Here in Nanjing, an ancient city and former imperial capital, we are embarking on a unique enterprise," Vice-Chancellor Toope said at the groundbreaking ceremony. "The innovations emerging from this Centre will enable the development of 'smart' cities in which sensors can enable sustainable lifestyles, improve healthcare, limit pollution and make efficient use of energy."

Cambridge and its Chinese partners will share revenue derived from the commercialisation of Intellectual Property (IP) developed at the Centre. It is the University’s first overseas enterprise at this scale.

Funded by the Nanjing Municipality for its first five years, the project will have its own dedicated building as a pilot urban development based on high levels of technological innovation.

At the heart of the new Centre’s activities will be research into technologies that support a modern 21st century city with integrated IT, health care and building management. Innovations emerging from the Centre will enable the development of 'smart' cities in which sensors – applied at the individual level and all the way through to the level of large infrastructure – will enable sustainable lifestyles.

As well as supporting health and wellbeing in new cities, the new Centre will help deliver efficient energy use through its academic and entrepreneurial activities.

The agreement between Cambridge and Nanjing will fund positions in Nanjing, both academic and management, and will allow Cambridge-based academics to engage with specific, long-term projects in Nanjing. It will also support the establishment of a professorship, based in Cambridge, with responsibility as the Centre’s Academic Director.

The project has been driven by Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, although it is hoped that there will be opportunities to widen participation to other departments and Schools. IP generated by research funded through the Centre will be licensed for commercialisation by Cambridge University’s innovation branch, Cambridge Enterprise.

The Centre will seek to demonstrate the power of collaboration with China’s universities, industry, government and other partners to conduct the kind of academic research of excellence today that will make life better for the city dwellers of tomorrow.

One of the two initial projects already approved is to create a high resolution scanner that can provide a low-cost easily accessible method for examining difficult areas of the body, such as bent spines, without using large and expensive CT scans.

That project will be led by Cambridge Engineering Department Professor Richard Prager, in collaboration with China's Southeast University and established local ultrasonic manufacturer Vinno.

A second identified project led by Principal Investigator Professor Toni Vidal-Puig from Cambridge’s Clinical Biochemistry Department, will study the associated complications of increased obesity in China.

Both themes are closely linked to the focus area of local partner, NIHA (Nanjing International Healthcare Area).  

The Vice-Chancellor was joined at the groundbreaking ceremony by representatives from partners Nanjing University, Southeast University, Peking University. Tsinghua University, Fudan University and Zheijiang University as well as Professor Daping Chu of Cambridge's Electrical Engineering Department and Pro-Vice-Chancellor for International Relations Eilis Ferran.

The pilot is being run under the collegiate University’s Student Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy which emphasises the importance of interventions designed to promote good mental health.  

The Mentally Healthy Universities Programme – a £1.5 million partnership between Mind and Goldman Sachs – will offer specialist training for students on resilience, and workplace wellbeing workshops for final year students who are about to graduate and transition into the workplace. The pilot will be delivered collaboratively with a small number colleges.

According to the Higher Education Statistics Agency, the number of students nationally who disclosed a mental health condition almost doubled between 2012 and 2015 to nearly 45,000. However, research suggests that mental health difficulties within Higher Education are currently under-reported as just one in 125 students (0.8%) and around one in 500 staff (0.2%) currently disclose a mental health condition to their university. 

Chad Allen, Project Officer for the Student Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy at the University of Cambridge, said: “We are committed to making sure our students’ academic successes are supported by personal wellbeing, so we’re delighted to be part of this new initiative which will help support the vital work already under way at the University, and ensure students flourish during their education both academically and personally.”

Paul Farmer, Chief Executive of Mind, said:  “We are really excited to be working with Goldman Sachs to better support thousands of university students and staff across England and Wales. We know that both students and staff face many pressures unique to the university environment. This timely opportunity allows us to deliver a programme that responds to the needs of university communities, building on good practice within the sector, to ensure everyone with a mental health problem receives support and respect.”

Richard Gnodde, CEO of Goldman Sachs International, said: “The transition through Higher Education and into the workforce is often a challenging and pressurised time in young people’s lives. We believe employers have an important role to play in changing attitudes towards mental health through providing support, resources and open conversation around an often stigmatised subject. We look forward to supporting Mind and Universities across the UK in establishing this critical programme.”

The 10 participating universities, are:

University of Cambridge

University of Bath

University of Greenwich

University of Bristol

Teesside University

The London School of Economics and Political Science

Leeds Beckett University

University of Sheffield

University of Central Lancashire

Oxford Brookes

They will explore how emerging technologies like those underpinning genomics, AI, clean energy, and smart cities can be used and regulated to create a more equitable and sustainable global community as well as how to encourage sustainable leadership across disciplines and move beyond traditional diplomacy to address global challenges like climate change and social inequalities.

Shaping Horizons 2019 is a Summit and Action Programme rooted in science, policy, and innovation and will strengthen ties and build relationships between young Future Leaders and Senior Leaders from the UK and Latin America. The delegates have been selected from across academia, industry, and government.

Prof. David Cardwell, FREng, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Strategy and Planning at the University of Cambridge, welcomed delegates at the start of the Summit on behalf of the University.

“On every front, the University has been and continues to be engaged with Latin America, including the pleasure of hosting this fantastic summit, Shaping Horizons, where the mission is to empower and promote youth, create networks and to drive change,” Cardwell said.

The week will culminate with the Future Leaders pitching for prize money to support their own innovative social impact projects they have developed through mentorship and learning during the Summit.

Winners will be supported in further developing and launching their projects through the Action Programme which will follow on from the Summit.

Nigel Baker, OBE MVO, Head of the Latin America Department at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office told delegates that all their ideas would help shape the future.

“Shaping Horizons is absolutely driven by the sense of entrepreneurship, innovation, and ideas of the young people involved. It is going to be fascinating to see the proposals that are coming out,” Baker said.

“There are 24 different teams and there are going to be some spectacular proposals and ideas. Some will win prizes, some will not, but I suspect that all of those ideas are going to be applicable in the future.”

Shaping Horizons is a non-profit initiative organised at the University of Cambridge with the support of the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs, and the Cambridge Hub of Global Shapers Community, which is an initiative of the World Economic Forum.

Shaping Horizons was founded by Dr. Matias Acosta, a UK-Canada Fellow at the Centre for Science and Policy, and Theo Lundberg, a NanoDTC PhD Student in the Department of Physics.

“Shaping Horizons was founded to promote sustainability using global, cross-disciplinary cooperation as our driving force,” Acosta said.

“We are a team of 40 undergraduates and academics from across more than 20 departments from the University of Cambridge bringing this initiative forward. Our goal is to build a shared and sustainable future between Latin America and the UK.

"We will be providing more than £30,000 in support for cooperative bilateral projects and also have designed a continuous mentorship programme to maximize the chance of success of each of the ideas.”

Researchers identified an almost complete set of proteins, a proteome, in the dental enamel of the rhino and the genetic information discovered is one million years older than the oldest DNA sequenced from a 700,000-year-old horse.

The findings by scientists from the University of Copenhagen and St John’s College, University of Cambridge, are published in Nature. They mark a breakthrough in the field of ancient biomolecular studies and could solve some of the biggest mysteries of animal and human biology by allowing scientists to accurately reconstruct evolution from further back in time than ever before.

Professor Enrico Cappellini, a specialist in Palaeoproteomics at the Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen, and first author on the paper, said: “For 20 years ancient DNA has been used to address questions about the evolution of extinct species, adaptation and human migration but it has limitations. Now for the first time we have retrieved ancient genetic information which allows us to reconstruct molecular evolution way beyond the usual time limit of DNA preservation.

DNA data that genetically tracks human evolution only covers the last 400,000 years. But the lineages that led to modern humans and to the chimp – the living species genetically closest to humans – branched apart around six to seven million years ago which means scientists currently have no genetic information for more than 90 per cent of the evolutionary path that led to modern humans.

Scientists also don’t know what the genetic links are between us and extinct species such as Homo erectus – the oldest known species of human to have had modern human-like body proportions – because everything that is currently known is almost exclusively based on anatomical information, not genetic information.

Researchers have now used ancient protein sequencing – based on ground-breaking technology called mass spectrometry – to retrieve genetic information from the tooth of a 1.77 million year old Stephanorhinus – an extinct rhinoceros which lived in Eurasia during the Pleistocene. Researchers took samples of dental enamel from the ancient fossil which was discovered in Dmanisi, Georgia, and used mass spectrometry to sequence the ancient protein and retrieved genetic information previously unobtainable using DNA testing. 
Tooth enamel is the hardest material present in mammals. In this study researchers discovered the set of proteins it contains lasts longer than DNA and is more genetically informative than collagen, the only other protein so far retrieved from fossils older than one million years.

Professor Jesper V. Olsen, head of the Mass Spectrometry for Quantitative Proteomics Group at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research, University of Copenhagen, and co-corresponding author on the paper, said: “Mass spectrometry-based protein sequencing will enable us to retrieve reliable and rich genetic information from mammal fossils that are millions of years old, rather than just thousands of years old. It is the only technology able to provide the robustness and accuracy needed to sequence tiny amounts of protein this old.”

Professor Cappellini added: “Dental enamel is extremely abundant and it is incredibly durable, which is why a high proportion of fossil records are teeth.

“We have been able to find a way to retrieve genetic information that is more informative and older than any other source before, and it’s from a source that is abundant in the fossil records so the potential of the application of this approach is extensive.”

Lead author Professor Eske Willerslev, who holds positions at St John’s College, University of Cambridge, and is director of The Lundbeck Foundation Centre for GeoGenetics, Globe Institute, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, at the University of Copenhagen, said: “This research is a game-changer that opens up a lot of options for further evolutionary study in terms of humans as well as mammals. It will revolutionise the methods of investigating evolution based on molecular markers and it will open a complete new field of ancient biomolecular studies.”

This rearranging of the evolutionary lineage of a single species may seem like a small adjustment but identifying changes in numerous extinct mammals and humans could lead to massive shifts in our understanding of the way the world has evolved.

The team of scientists is already implementing the findings in their current research. The discovery could enable scientists across the globe to collect the genetic data of ancient fossils and to build a bigger, more accurate picture of the evolution of hundreds of species including our own.

Reference: 
Enrico Cappellini et al. 'Early Pleistocene enamel proteome from Dmanisi resolves Stephanorhinus phylogeny.' Nature (2019). DOI: ​10.1038/s41586-019-1555-y

Originally published by St John's College, Cambridge

I first became interested in fundamental physics in secondary school, when a teacher described the basic idea behind a grand unified theory. 

Currently, physicists are able to describe the behaviour of the known particles using just four forces. These are called the strong force, the weak force, the electromagnetic force, and the gravitational force. A grand unified theory tries to combine the first three forces together into a single force. (A theory which attempts to also include gravity is known as a theory of everything.)

My current research focuses on how certain special number systems in mathematics might ultimately underlie the behaviour of elementary particles. This can be thought of as a form of unification, but not in the traditional sense.

Mathematical physics is a beautiful subject, which gets better and better the further you go. It is elegant, much unlike the sorts of things that you will learn in first- and second-year physics. If you are interested in physics and are mathematically inclined, then know that the abstract, beautiful material starts appearing more around your third year.

This area of research has not progressed in terms of gender diversity, as most other fields have. This means that if you would like to pursue this line of study, then you will need to develop a very strong sense of self. Sometimes even your own friends and teachers will unintentionally fix ridiculous stereotypes to you. Just do your work, and prove them wrong.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge’s Sainsbury Laboratory (SLCU) and Department of Plant Sciences have discovered that drought stress triggers the activity of a family of jumping genes (Rider retrotransposons) previously known to contribute to fruit shape and colour in tomatoes. Their characterisation of Rider, published today in the journal PLOS Genetics, revealed that the Rider family is also present and potentially active in other plants, including economically important crops such as rapeseed, beetroot and quinoa. This highlights its potential as a source of new trait variations that could help plants better cope with more extreme conditions driven by our changing climate. 

This wide abundance encourages further investigations into how it can be activated in a controlled way, or reactivated or re-introduced into plants that currently have inactive Rider elements so that their trait diversification potential can be regained. Such an approach has the potential to significantly reduce breeding time compared to traditional methods. 

“Transposons carry potential for crop improvement. They are powerful drivers of trait diversity, and while we have been harnessing these traits to improve our crops for generations, we are now starting to understand the molecular mechanisms involved,” said Dr Matthias Benoit, the paper's first author, formerly at SLCU.

Transposons, more commonly called jumping genes, are mobile snippets of DNA code that can copy themselves into new positions within the genome - the genetic code of an organism. They can change, disrupt or amplify genes, or have no effect at all. Discovered in corn kernels by Nobel prize-winning scientist Barbara McClintock in the 1940s, only now are scientists realising that transposons are not junk at all but actually play an important role in the evolutionary process, and in altering gene expression and the physical characteristics of plants.

Using the jumping genes already present in plants to generate new characteristics would be a significant step forward from traditional breeding techniques, making it possible to generate new traits in crops that have traditionally been bred to produce uniform shapes, colours and sizes to make harvesting more efficient and maximise yield. 

 “In a large population size, such as a tomato field, in which transposons are activated in each individual we would expect to see diverse new traits. By controlling this ‘random mutation’ process within the plant we can accelerate this process to generate new phenotypes that we could not even imagine,” said Dr Hajk Drost at SLCU, a co-author of the paper.

Today’s gene targeting technologies are very powerful, but often require some functional understanding of the underlying gene to yield useful results and usually only target one or a few genes. Transposon activity is a native tool already present within the plant, which can be harnessed to generate new phenotypes or resistances and complement gene targeting efforts. Using transposons to generate new mutations offers a transgene-free method of breeding that acknowledges the current EU legislation on Genetically Modified Organisms.

“Identifying that Rider activity is triggered by drought suggests that it can create new gene regulatory networks that would help a plant respond to drought,” said Benoit. “This means we could harness Rider to breed crops that are better adapted to drought stress by providing drought responsiveness to genes already present in crops. This is particularly significant in times of global warming, where there is an urgent need to breed more resilient crops.”

This work was supported by the European Research Council and the Gatsby Charitable Foundation.

Reference
Matthias Benoit et al. Environmental and epigenetic regulation of Rider retrotransposons in tomato. PLOS Genetics (2019). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1008370

Research led by Dr David Fairen-Jimenez, from the Cambridge Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, indicates metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) could present a viable platform for delivering a potent anti-cancer agent, known as siRNA, to cells.

Small interfering ribonucleic acid (siRNA), has the potential to inhibit overexpressed cancer-causing genes, and has become an increasing focus for scientists on the hunt for new cancer treatments.

Fairen-Jimenez’s group used computational simulations to find a MOF with the perfect pore size to carry an siRNA molecule, and that would breakdown once inside a cell, releasing the siRNA to its target. Their results were published today in Cell Press journal Chem.

Some cancers can occur when specific genes inside cells cause over-production of particular proteins. One way to tackle this is to block the gene expression pathway, limiting the production of these proteins.

SiRNA molecules can do just that – binding to specific gene messenger molecules and destroying them before they can tell the cell to produce a particular protein. This process is known as ‘gene knockdown’. Scientists have begun to focus more on siRNAs as potential cancer therapies in the last decade, as they offer a versatile solution to disease treatment – all you need to know is the sequence of the gene you want to inhibit and you can make the corresponding siRNA that will break it down. Instead of designing, synthesising and testing new drugs – an incredibly costly and lengthy process – you can make a few simple changes to the siRNA molecule and treat an entirely different disease.

One of the problems with using siRNAs to treat disease is that the molecules are very unstable and are often broken down by the cell’s natural defence mechanisms before they can reach their targets. SiRNA molecules can be modified to make them more stable, but this compromises their ability to knock down the target genes. It’s also difficult to get the molecules into cells – they need to be transported by another vehicle acting as a delivery agent.

The Cambridge researchers have used a special nanoparticle to protect and deliver siRNA to cells, where they show its ability to inhibit a specific target gene.

Fairen-Jimenez leads research into advanced materials, with a particular focus on MOFs: self-assembling 3D compounds made of metallic and organic building blocks connected together.

There are thousands of different types of MOFs that researchers can make – there are currently more than 84,000 MOF structures in the Cambridge Structural Database with 1000 new structures published each month – and their properties can be tuned for specific purposes. By changing different components of the MOF structure, researchers can create MOFs with different pore sizes, stabilities and toxicities, enabling them to design structures that can carry molecules such as siRNAs into cells without harmful side effects.

“With traditional cancer therapy if you’re designing new drugs to treat the system, these can have different behaviours, geometries, sizes, and so you’d need a MOF that is optimal for each of these individual drugs,” says Fairen-Jimenez. “But for siRNA, once you develop one MOF that is useful, you can in principle use this for a range of different siRNA sequences, treating different diseases.”

“People that have done this before have used MOFs that don't have a porosity that's big enough to encapsulate the siRNA, so a lot of it is likely just stuck on the outside,” says Michelle Teplensky, former PhD student in Fairen-Jimenez’s group, who carried out the research. “We used a MOF that could encapsulate the siRNA and when it's encapsulated you offer more protection. The MOF we chose is made of a zirconium based metal node and we've done a lot of studies that show zirconium is quite inert and it doesn't cause any toxicity issues.”

Using a biodegradable MOF for siRNA delivery is important to avoid unwanted build-up of the structures once they’ve done their job. The MOF that Teplensky and team selected breaks down into harmless components that are easily recycled by the cell without harmful side effects. The large pore size also means the team can load a significant amount of siRNA into a single MOF molecule, keeping the dosage needed to knock down the genes very low.

“One of the benefits of using a MOF with such large pores is that we can get a much more localised, higher dose than other systems would require,” says Teplensky. “SiRNA is very powerful, you don't need a huge amount of it to get good functionality. The dose needed is less than 5% of the porosity of the MOF.”

A problem with using MOFs or other vehicles to carry small molecules into cells is that they are often stopped by the cells on the way to their target. This process is known as endosomal entrapment and is essentially a defence mechanism against unwanted components entering the cell. Fairen-Jimenez’s team added extra components to their MOF to stop them being trapped on their way into the cell, and with this, could ensure the siRNA reached its target.

The team used their system to knock down a gene that produces fluorescent proteins in the cell, so they were able to use microscopy imaging methods to measure how the fluorescence emitted by the proteins compared between cells not treated with the MOF and those that were. The group made use of in-house expertise, collaborating with super-resolution microscopy specialists Professors Clemens Kaminski and Gabi Kaminski-Schierle, who also lead research in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology.

Using the MOF platform, the team were consistently able to prevent gene expression by 27%, a level that shows promise for using the technique to knock down cancer genes.

Fairen-Jimenez believes they will be able to increase the efficacy of the system and the next steps will be to apply the platform to genes involved in causing so-called hard-to-treat cancers.

“One of the questions we get asked a lot is ‘why do you want to use a metal-organic framework for healthcare?’, because there are metals involved that might sound harmful to the body,” says Fairen-Jimenez. “But we focus on difficult diseases such as hard-to-treat cancers for which there has been no improvement in treatment in the last 20 years. We need to have something that can offer a solution; just extra years of life will be very welcome.”

The versatility of the system will enable the team to use the same adapted MOF to deliver different siRNA sequences and target different genes. Because of its large pore size, the MOF also has the potential to deliver multiple drugs at once, opening up the option of combination therapy.

The research is part of a wider project, funded by the EPRSC and European Commission, into treatments for hard-to-treat cancers.

Read the full paper, published in Cell Press journal Chem.

Reference:
Teplensky et al., Chem 5, 1–16 November 14, 2019 ª 2019 Elsevier Inc. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chempr.2019.08.015

It is well known that Shakespeare was a huge influence on Milton. From learning how to write nature poetry to creating charismatic villains, Milton’s debt to his forebear continues to fascinate experts. The younger poet once praised the 'wonder and astonishment' that this 'great heir of fame' conjured up in his readers. 

But now, Jason Scott-Warren from Cambridge’s English Faculty believes he has identified even more tangible evidence of this connection. The realisation began when Scott-Warren read an article by Professor Claire Bourne about an anonymous annotator of a Shakespeare First Folio housed in the Free Library of Philadelphia’s Rare Book Department.

Bourne dated the annotator to the mid-17th century and shared images of the handwritten notes. These include suggested corrections, cross-references to other works and the addition of material such as the prologue to Romeo and Juliet. Studying these, Scott-Warren was struck by how closely they resembled known examples of Milton’s handwriting and after identifying numerous compelling similarities, he decided to share his theory in a blog post for Cambridge’s Centre for Material Texts, of which he is Director. 

Milton is known to have made similarly intelligent and assiduous annotations in other books that survive from his library, but the evidence that Scott-Warren presents is strictly palaeographical. It includes the observation that in both the First Folio and in Milton’s handwriting, the right foot of an ‘h’ misses the ground before it heads up into an ‘e’.

Even more convincingly, Scott-Warren points out that “Milton has an enlarged italic hand, sometimes rather scratchy, sometimes quite elegant, that he uses for headings and suchlike.” The researcher compares, for example, the ‘R’ in the speech-heading for ‘Romeo’ in the Folio to a remarkably similar and distinctive ‘R’ from Milton’s ‘commonplace book’, a handwritten compilation of quotes and notes from the books that he was reading between the 1630s and 1660s.

Scott-Warren offered up his theory tentatively, admitting that further work would be needed to prove it beyond doubt. But several Milton experts from around the world have already expressed their enthusiastic support and offered further evidence.

Dr William Poole from New College Oxford says: “Not only does this hand look like Milton’s, but it behaves like Milton’s writing elsewhere does, doing exactly the things Milton does when he annotates books, and using exactly the same marks.”  

"I was gathering evidence with my heart in my mouth,” Scott-Warren says. “Now, every day someone is suggesting a new similarity. I feel 100% sure, but there are still people out there who remain to be convinced.”

As well as displaying many textual annotations, the folio contains line markings which record the annotator’s lively engagement with plays including Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, The Tempest and King Lear. Scott-Warren says: “You don’t know why he’s singled out a passage for attention, but it forces you to think your way into Milton’s head and it chimes with a lot of what goes on in his poetry. You can really see him constructing himself through Shakespeare.”

In The Tempest, the annotator highlighted the song: 'Come unto these yellow sands, / And then take hands: / Courtsied when you have and kiss’d / The wild waves whist.' The unusual rhyme, of 'kiss’d' and 'whist', is echoed in Milton’s On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity: 'The winds with wonder whist, / Smoothly the waters kist.'

Scott-Warren says: “To see him marking it in the text and responding to it gives you a sense of his sensitivity and alertness to Shakespeare.” 

The First Folio, the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, was published in 1623, seven years after his death, when Milton himself was fifteen. Around 750 were printed but only 233 are known to survive. Scott-Warren is now intending to collaborate with Professor Bourne on a series of articles about the findings.

John Milton was admitted to Christ's College Cambridge in 1624, gaining his BA in 1628 and his MA in 1632.

Professor Lawrence joins the University’s Department of Computer Science and Technology from Amazon Cambridge, where he has been Director of Machine Learning for the past three years. He is also Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Sheffield, where he will retain a visiting position.

Professor Lawrence’s research interests are in probabilistic models with applications in computational biology, personalised health and developing economies. At Sheffield, he led the ML@SITraN group, and helped to develop an Open Data Science Initiative an approach to data science designed to address societal needs.

“There’s so much expertise at Cambridge, in all aspects of systems and data: that’s why I’m so excited about joining,” Lawrence said. “AI and machine learning have the potential to reshape almost every aspect of our lives, but we desperately need more machine learning specialists, or else the promise of AI will not be realised.”

Professor Lawrence completed his PhD at Cambridge’s Department of Computer Science and Technology in 2000. He has previously held positions at Microsoft Research Cambridge and the University of Manchester. In addition to his academic research, he hosts the Talking Machines podcast and is a contributor to the Guardian.

For the past five years, Professor Lawrence has been working with Data Science Africa, an organisation looking to connect machine learning researchers in Africa in order to solve problems on the ground. Professor Lawrence has an advisory role with the group, and says that many of the machine learning approaches used in Africa can have benefits in the developed world as well.

“With data and machine learning, you can have a more advanced data infrastructure in Africa than in some developed countries,” he said. “It’s rare in the UK or Europe that you’re asked to look at a machine learning problem from end to end, but you can do that in Africa, and it leads to better solutions. That’s the kind of approach I want to take to machine learning in my work at Cambridge.”

Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO, DeepMind, said: “I’m delighted to see Cambridge announce its first DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning. Professor Lawrence’s work in computational biology and his thoughtful advocacy for advancing technology in the developing world have been commendable. It’s an honour for DeepMind to be able to support the Department of Computer Science and Technology - from which I gained so much - in this way, and I look forward to seeing machine learning and AI flourish at Cambridge.”

“Neil will have a transformative effect on machine learning and artificial intelligence research at Cambridge,” said Professor Ann Copestake, Head of the Department of Computer Science and Technology. “He will build on our existing strengths in this area, and work with colleagues from across the University to develop new solutions in ethical and sustainable ways.”

“It is vital we have a deep pool of talented scientists in universities and industry so the UK can continue to be a world leader in artificial intelligence,” said Minister for Digital Mark Warman. “This Government is investing millions into skills and talent training, including a number of Turing AI Fellowships in partnership with The Alan Turing Institute, and I welcome the appointment of Professor Neil Lawrence as the inaugural DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at Cambridge. This is one of a range of moves demonstrating the enormous strength of the UK’s research base.”

In addition to the gift to support the DeepMind Professorship, the company are also supporting four Master’s students from underrepresented groups wishing to study machine learning and computer science at Cambridge. The first students supported through this programme will be starting their studies this coming term.

Experimental Results aims to tackle the crisis in the reproducibility of results, provide an outlet for standalone research that currently goes unpublished and to make peer review faster, less onerous and more transparent.

Submissions are now open for the journal, which will give researchers a place to publish valid, standalone experimental results, regardless of whether those results are novel, inconclusive, negative or supplementary to other published work.

It will also publish the outcome of attempts to reproduce previously published experiments, including those that dispute past findings.

The ambitious publication is the brainchild of Fiona Hutton, the Press’s Head of STM Open Access Publishing and addresses concerns she has had since her days in the lab as a cancer research scientist and throughout her career in research publishing.

She said: “Scholarly communication isn’t really reflective of the research process, because the focus is on publishing a concise narrative. The reality is that research results are often confusing, inconclusive, or don’t fit a narrative. Discovery is damaged when the focus becomes the research paper rather than the research output itself.

“I've had countless conversations with scientists about the value of publishing all valid experiments, not just those that fit the narrative of a particular paper or which are deemed to have a high impact. It would save so much time if researchers could see that a particular experiment had already been carried out and what the results were.

“Openly available raw results for these experiments could also be used and interrogated in different ways; ways that the original researcher did not identify, further facilitating discovery and justifying investment in that research."

In addition, Experimental Results will shake up peer review, introducing scorecards to make the process easier, more open and more attractive to potential reviewers, with each reviewer identified by name and with each review published alongside the article in question with its own DOI.

This will allow the journal’s reviewers to have their work recognised. They will also be given discounts on the cost of publishing their own articles in Experimental Results.

Fiona added: “Our goal is to be progressive, to ensure research outputs are correctly reviewed, and to ensure the reviewers we rely on so heavily are rewarded. This makes sense, much like the journal itself makes sense in its reflection of the actual research process.”

While some journals publish full-paper negative or inconclusive results, published stand-alone results are a rarity. Experimental Results will address the issue in a structured way, with open research practices underpinning the entire concept.

The journal will be fully open access, assessed through open peer review, and link to open data where possible.

Fiona said: “Part of the problem is that the peer review process doesn’t actually involve checking the results or repeating the experiment.

“Lots of results come out that people can’t repeat but what do they do? Even if they know of other labs that can’t repeat that experiment, if it’s published in a high impact journal then it’s very difficult to dispute those results. Experimental Results will be a venue for researchers to quickly publish reproducibility experiments.”

The Press’s STM Publishing Director, Caroline Black, said: "We are seeing an increasing acknowledgement that all research outputs – not just the positive, exciting results - should be part of the published record for the advancement of knowledge and reduction of wasted time on redoing work unnecessarily.

“In the past it would have been difficult to publish negative, confirmatory or inconclusive results, as journal editors made decisions on the basis of innovation, interest level and potential for citations. That's beginning to change now.

“People are also looking for alternative types of publication; it's not all about the traditional journal article, complete with introduction, discussion and conclusion setting out the importance of the results. It's great that we are at the forefront of providing them with a new platform."

Press release from Cambridge University Press

I am originally from Mauritius and I completed my undergraduate degree with an MEng in Materials Science from Oxford. I’m now finishing my third year of my PhD in the Cambridge Centre for Medical Materials, where I’m aiming to improve diagnosis and treatment of chronic low back pain.

My project started with me going around butcher shops looking for sheep spines to dissect and image. My main focus is the vertebral end plates, a section of the spine that is responsible for the nutrition of intervertebral discs but highly overlooked when it comes to disorders of the spine, so I’m looking into imaging and quantifying the vascular network in the end plates. My study also involves samples from patients undergoing spinal surgeries and their MRI scans which is the new aspect of this research, enabling the correlation between lab-based observation and clinical observations.

I spend most days dissecting spines which sometimes requires visits to the Vet School. The main technique I use is micro-CT, a non-invasive imaging technique which gives me beautiful scans of bone samples which I then analyse using different software. I also use finite element modelling to simulate blood flow in the vascular network seen in the scans. My collaborators are based in Exeter and I had to make a few trips there to inject dyes in cow tails to image the vascular network in the spine of cows. I also observed one of the surgeries in Ipswich Hospital to collect my samples.

I had a Eureka moment earlier this year when I realised that an experiment I discarded in my first year because it did not fulfil its purpose turned out to solve the biggest question of my PhD! I have been trying to image how the blood vessels end near the disc and an experiment I did in first year trying to image the disc itself was not successful but it did dye the ending of the vessels!

The aim of my research is to equip surgeons with a better understanding of what can be seen on an MRI scan when a patient suffers from back pain, so that diagnosis and treatment are targeted, improving quality of life of patients.

Cambridge has a great science community with lots of inter-departmental collaboration. Help is readily available, for example the Vet School just across the road from my lab trained me to use their bone saw to prepare my samples. Researchers from different labs will happily respond to questions via email, and expertise on different subjects is always available: surgeons have helped me understand the spine better, for instance. Additionally our own lab is well-equipped with three functioning micro-CT scanners, freeze-driers, blade saws as well as our own Tissue Culture Lab. I’ve also had the opportunity to present my work at conferences in Belgium, Netherlands, Germany and Japan with the support of my College, Hughes Hall.

Cambridge has equipped me with all the necessary skills as a leader and a scientist but also with a sense of fulfilment from playing my part in the betterment of society. I have been involved in outreach events including Making Materials Matter organised by Oxbridge and The Ironmongers Association, the Cambridge Science Festival, Women in Physics and school visits by Hughes Hall. I’ve also been involved in an i-teams project organised by the Cambridge Centre for Global Equality where I was part of a team working on the commercialisation of biodegradable wound dressings, developed by researchers in Chemical Engineering, for use in the Gambia and India. I was the editor of a global health think tank managed by Polyegia which resulted in the publication of a policy brief addressing the mental health of refugees in the UK. Together with Project Access, I founded Project Access for Refugees, offering free mentoring to students of a refugee background apply and get into Cambridge and Oxford. I was humbled to be in the finalists for the Vice-Chancellor’s Social Impact award and for being awarded Global Shaper by the World Economic Forum.

My advice to other young women considering a career in STEM is to never be afraid to take a leadership position. Apply for things, shoot high and do not underestimate yourself. It is often hard, but if you work hard and do the best you can, it will work out. Your path might not be the same as you expected or hoped, but keep going! We need to keep on inspiring the next generation of aspiring female scientists.

In July this year, staff at the Cambridge University Botanic Garden registered the United Kingdom’s highest ever temperature: 38.7° C. Temperatures in the glasshouses rose to an unbearable 45° C. It is clear that far from being a unique occurrence, this is part of an evolving pattern. It is widely agreed that in the future we will have to contend with increasingly frequent extreme weather events. Climate change is real, and it is happening here and now.

Today sees the beginning of a global week of action on climate change. Around the world, schoolchildren, parents, teachers, environmental campaigners and concerned citizens will be gathering to raise awareness of the dangers posed by climate change. Here in Cambridge, and with the University’s full support, students and members of staff will be among the demonstrators urging policy-makers to heed the advice of the scientific community.

Part of our responsibility as a globally influential academic institution is to take a leading role in helping our society move towards a sustainable future. As young people take to the streets, it is worth reflecting on what the University of Cambridge is doing to mitigate the environmental threat.

Cambridge chemists and physicists are developing next-generation batteries and solar cells – both of which are vital in the transition to a low-carbon economy. Our engineers are supporting the delivery of electric forms of transport that will be essential for the UK to meet its decarbonisation targets. The Cambridge Creative Circular Plastics Centre is developing methods to eliminate plastic waste.

Flood defences

From working with local communities to improve flood defences along the eastern coast, or alerting us to the increased pace of melting glaciers, to identifying populations who are most likely to shoulder the burden of climate change, our researchers are already deeply invested in helping us better understand the multifaceted nature of the challenge.

Our researchers are not only developing greener fuels, better technologies and more sustainable materials, but addressing all aspects of a zero-carbon future: the impact it will have on what we eat, how we work, how we travel, the way we communicate, how we measure economic progress and the way our societies are organised. Crucially, they are producing the knowledge to ensure that policy decisions are based on the best available evidence.

These academic efforts – arguably the greatest contribution we can make to tackling climate change – are backed up by action within the University itself, as we continue to implement the recommendations made by the Divestment Working Group in 2018.

We are leading by example, and demonstrating what is achievable. Our Sustainable Food Policy, launched in 2016, has already reduced food-related carbon emissions from our catering service by a third, and has been widely held up as an example for large institutions.

More recently, Cambridge became the first university in the world to announce that it has adopted a science-based target for decarbonisation, committing itself to a 75% decrease of its 2015 energy-related carbon emissions by 2030, and to reducing them to absolute zero by 2048. We are working with local authorities to plan a future that offers staff practical and affordable ways of travelling sustainably to and from work. Through our Green Impact programmewe will be seeking ideas from students and staff on how we can accelerate our decarbonisation.

New initiative

Later this term, we will be formally launching a major new initiative, led by Dr Emily Shuckburgh, harnessing the full breadth of the University’s research and teaching capabilities to respond to climate change and support the transition to a sustainable future, both in the UK and globally.  

The new initiative will develop a bold programme of education, research, demonstration projects and knowledge exchange focused on supporting a zero carbon world. Its ambition is to generate and disseminate the ideas and innovations that will shape our future – and to equip a future generation of leaders with the skills to navigate the global challenges of the coming decades.

It is being launched only a few months after the UK became the first major world economy to legislate for net zero emissions. Eliminating greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 will mean a fundamental change over the coming decades in all aspects of our economy, including how we generate energy, and how we build decarbonisation into policy and investment.

Through the initiative we will engage in active collaboration with other universities and research institutes in the UK and beyond, including the newly established Global Universities Alliance on Climate.

Unite behind the science

As the world’s leaders gather in Chile later this year for the latest round of climate change talks, the University will be decisively setting out its stall to demonstrate how it contributes to tackling this most pressing of global challenges.

I am encouraged by the younger generations’ determination to make their voices heard on the key issue of climate change. I am especially struck by the rallying cry from that remarkable activist, Greta Thunberg, to “unite behind the science”, and to put “the best available science [at] the heart of politics”.

That is exactly what Cambridge is determined to do – not only on this day of climate action, or even this week, but for the long term.

Research England, part of UK Research and Innovation, today announced 20 new University Enterprise Zones (UEZs) aimed at helping universities stimulate growth in their local economies, providing vital support for innovative new companies and creating jobs in emerging industries. The £20 million investment will strengthen collaborative ties between universities and businesses. 

Cambridge’s UEZ, Greater Cambridge Health Tech Connect, will look at testing and integrating inter-disciplinary models of incubation across West Cambridge, where many of the University’s physical sciences and engineering departments, including the Maxwell Centre and the Institute for Manufacturing, are based, and the Cambridge Biomedical Campus in the South. It will address real world challenges, including unmet medical needs, using innovative thinking across disciplines.

“Our aim is to create new ways of collaborating across physics, technology, engineering, biology and medicine and use this to drive innovation in healthcare, manufacturing and engineering,” explains Dr Kathryn Chapman, Deputy Director at the Milner Therapeutics Institute.

“This Enterprise Zone will explore and scale up new and existing models of business incubation, strengthening the interdisciplinary bridge between two major Cambridge research hubs. This will drive new research and development, and deliver a model that can be applied more widely to support company incubation.”

The announcement has been welcomed by Professor Andy Neely, Pro-Vice Chancellor for Enterprise and Business Relations at the University of Cambridge, who led the application. “Cambridge has a rich history of scientific discovery and innovation, and its innovation ecosystem is recognised as world leading. This new government funding will help us build and strengthen connections across often very different disciplines, further accelerating innovation across the city and beyond.”

Funding for the UEZs has been announced alongside an investment of £78 million in the second wave of UK Research and Innovation’s Future Leaders Fellowships. Dr Daniel Field from the Department of Earth Sciences and Dr Jamie Blundell from the Department of Oncology have both been named as recipients of new funding.

Universities Minister Chris Skidmore said: “Delivering on our research and innovation ambitions means putting people first, whether they are just starting out in their career or are leading major projects in academia or industry.

“These inspirational Future Leaders Fellows will generate the ideas of the future, helping to shape science and research for the 21st century. But to realise the full potential of these discoveries, their ideas need to be taken out of the lab and turned into real products and services, where they can actually change people’s lives for the better.

“That’s why we are creating 20 new University Enterprise Zones, helping local start-ups to co-locate in universities to build the businesses of the future – all inspired by university research.”

Illustrated statistics showing the success of the Cambridge Cluster and the University's role within it

The device has an enlarged eye-box that is scalable and an increased field of view of 36º that is designed for a comfortable viewing experience. It displays images on the retina using pixel beam scanning which ensures the image stays in focus regardless of the distance that the user is fixating on. Details are reported in the journal Research.

Developed by researchers at the Centre for Advanced Photonics and Electronics (CAPE) in collaboration with Huawei European Research Centre, in Munich, the HMD uses partially reflective beam splitters to form an additional ‘exit pupil’ (a virtual opening through which light travels). This, together with narrow pixel beams that travel parallel to each other, and which do not disperse in other directions, produces a high-quality image that remains unaffected by changes in eye focus.

The results of a subjective user study conducted with more than 50 participants aged between 16 and 60¹ showed the 3D effect to be ‘very convincing’ for objects from 20 cm to 10 m; the images and videos to be of ‘vivid colour’ and high contrast with no observable pixels; and crucially, none of the participants reported any eyestrain or nausea, even after prolonged periods of usage over a few hours or even all day. 

The HMD is of high brightness and suited to a wide range of indoor and outdoor uses. Further research is progressing on exploring its potential use in areas of different applications such as training, CAD (computer-aided design) development, hospitality, data manipulation, outdoor sport, defence applications and construction, as well as miniaturising the current head-mounted prototype to a glasses-based format. 

Professor Daping Chu, Director of the Centre for Photonic Devices and Sensors and Director of CAPE, who led the study, said: “Our research offers up a wearable AR experience that rivals the market leaders thanks to its comfortable 3D viewing which causes no nausea or eyestrain to the user. It can deliver high-quality clear images directly on the retina, even if the user is wearing glasses. This can help the user to see displayed real-world and virtual objects clearly in an immersive environment, regardless of the quality of the user’s vision."

Reference: 
Pawan K. Shrestha, Matt J. Pryn, Jia Jia, et al. ‘Accommodation-Free Head Mounted Display with Comfortable 3D Perception and an Enlarged Eye-box.’ Research (2019). DOI: 10.34133/2019/9273723

¹Participants comprised of industrial representatives and academic researchers familiar with 3D display technology.

Originally published on the Department of Engineering website. 

Politics takes centre stage at the Festival with sessions on everything from the future of democracy, the US elections, Brexit, the rise of populism, power politics in the Far East and growing schisms in the Balkans.

The Festival, which runs from 14th to 27th October, celebrates the enormous impact of arts, humanities and social sciences on our daily lives and encourages lively discussion about many of today's most challenging global issues. With 273 events spanning two weeks, most of them free, the Festival - now in its 12th year - attracts thousands of people to Cambridge.

This year’s event includes political experts such as Professor David Runciman, author of How Democracy Ends, a live edition of the chart-topping podcast Talking Politics and leading politicians David Lammy and Ed Miliband.

David Lammy will be in conversation with journalist Gillian Joseph for the Annual Race Equality Lecture [14th October] about his personal journey and how race and racism has shaped his life as well as a variety of topics including: how racism manifests itself in organisations’ today; the barriers to career opportunities faced by BAME staff and how to overcome them; the lack of BAME role models in senior positions; and how to increase BAME access and representation in leading professions.

Ed Miliband will be speaking with Emily Shuckburgh, Director of the University of Cambridge Carbon Neutral Futures Initiative, about Environmental Justice and how  strong action in the UK can be translated into global action through visionary leadership? [17th October]

One of the biggest political issues of current times is surely the future of democracy in a world of constant upheaval, rising populism and a return to ‘strong man’ leadership.

In How do democracies change? [23rd October] Professor Runciman** highlights how Brexit has shown how easy it is for contemporary democracies to get stuck. He will ask how easy is it to reinvent the way they work once we can see that they are no longer working and will explore the challenge of turning around failing democratic institutions without undermining the idea of democracy itself. Runciman is Professor of Politics and will be launching the Centre for the Future of Democracy at the Bennett Institute in Cambridge in the near future.

He says: “On the one hand Brexit has shown us that our democratic institutions are pretty robust. I don’t think we are at risk of seeing democracy collapse. On the other, it has shown that they aren’t working well at all.   They depend heavily on their adaptability and they haven’t adapted successfully to this challenge – if anything, they have frozen our divisions in place.  What’s most striking is how little thought seems to have been given by politicians to whether the institutions are capable of doing the things they ask of them.  It’s possible to blame individual politicians for particular mistakes: maybe Cameron shouldn’t have called the referendum because he lost it; maybe May shouldn’t have called the election in 2017 because she lost her majority.  But it’s also true that the bigger mistake was to believe the British system could accommodate a referendum or that an election could be used to force the issue of Brexit after it had got stuck in parliament.  Some of what’s gone wrong is political misjudgement but some of it is simply institutional inertia.  Rather than taking a gamble and then hoping the institutions can deliver, maybe we should reform the institutions first.”

Professor Runciman will also be co-hosting, with fellow politics expert Professor Helen Thompson, a live edition of Talking Politics [16th October]. Supported by the London Review of Books, the hosts will be joined by a panel of political experts to explore a wider view on current events at a particularly momentous point in time as we head towards 31st October.

Other events relate to changing trends in British politics, including one linked to a new book reappraising the New Labour years.

In Why Tony Blair was right: the New Labour revolution 25 years on [26th October] Dr Richard Carr, Senior Lecturer in History and Politics at Anglia Ruskin University and author of the new book March of the Moderates, will take a new look at New Labour’s achievements.  Using newly unearthed archives and interviews with key players, his book investigates the relationship between the administrations and sheds new light on big set pieces such as the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, the handover to George W. Bush and the controversial Iraq War. He says: “Those seeking new perspectives on Blair’s partnership with George W. Bush and the Iraq War will find much of interest, as will those seeking a more positive take on the New Labour years.”

Meanwhile, in The changing British voter: taking back control? [19th October] communications expert Justin Jackson from the Department of History at the University of Cambridge and Francesca Granelli from the Department of War Studies at King’s College London will look at how voter patterns have changed over the last 70 years in the light of the sudden rise of new parties, such as the Brexit party, and splits in traditional parties. They will offer three perspectives – behavioural, socio-economic and political – that provide a compelling picture of how the British voter has changed in a few generations.

Several events will cover world politics and conflict:

In The 2020 presidential election: ideological and institutional change in American politics an expert panel will discuss whether President Trump is the cause or a symptom of the upheaval going on in US politics. Taking on topics foreign and domestic, the panelists will cover a sweeping set of issues including the breakdown of the neoliberal consensus, rising polarisation and ideological divisions in both parties and the future of foreign policy in a period of relative decline and great power competition. [19th October]

In Reordering the Balkans [19th October] Timothy Less, director of the Nova Europa consultancy on Eastern Europe, will discuss recent events in the region, such as open discussions between Serbia and Kosovo’s leaders about an exchange of territory along ethnic lines, with the apparent approval of the United States and the European Union, proposals to unify Albania and Kosovo over the next decade and ongoing conflict between Serbs and Croats in Bosnia. Less will ask how long the region’s current borders can hold, what the map will look like in the future, whether the region make a transition to nation statehood without another conflict and what the response of the outside powers should be.

What does the future hold for China in a world of global trade wars, rising concerns about human rights and regional expansion in the form of the Belt and Road Initiative? China: power politics in the Asian age [23rd October]  is a panel discussion with historian Professor Hans van der Ven, human rights expert Professor Eva Pils, Agnes Chong, visiting lecturer at POLIS, and Bhavna Dave from the School of Oriental and African Studies, chaired by Professor Rana Mitter from the University of Oxford.

Other events will seek to look at the ongoing imprint of past conflicts.

Is it possible to forgive and forget after major national traumas? [22nd October] will discuss how to build lasting peace after devastating division, from the civil war in Burundi and apartheid in South Africa to Cold War politics in Germany and the Sino-Japanese war. With Gates Cambridge Scholar Alice Musabende, Hanno Balz, DAAD Lecturer in Modern German and European History, and John Nilsson-Wright, Fuji Bank University Senior Lecturer in Modern Japanese Politics and International Relations at the University of Cambridge and Catherine Jenkins, Chair of the Centre for Law & Conflict at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Chaired by Devon Curtis, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge.

In the film Teatro de Guerra/Theatre of war six veterans [three British and three Argentinian] from the Malvinas/Falklands War of 1982 share their memories and re-enact their experiences together. One of the protagonists of the film, Lou Armour, will be joining after the screening for a Q&A session, in conversation with Erika Teichert from the Centre of Latin American Studies (CLAS), University of Cambridge.[16th October]

In Maroon Nation: the history of revolutionary Haiti, Johnhenry Gonzalez discusses his new book on the history of Haiti, how the country went from the most profitable slave colony to the site of the only successful slave revolt in modern times and ongoing claims for the repatriation of national treasures. [17th October]

*The Cambridge Festival of Ideas programme is available in hard copy around Cambridge and online here. Booking lines are open from 11am-3pm from 23rd September.

Follow the Festival on Twitter at https://twitter.com/camideasfest and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cambridgefestivalofideas?fref=ts

**Read Professor Runciman’s Q & A about his event here.

For more information, contact Mandy Garner on 07789 106435 or email mandy.garner@admin.cam.ac.uk. Picture credit: The British Parliament and Big Ben by Maurice from Zoetermeer, Netherlands ℅ Wikimedia Commons.

Based on observations of more than one hundred children in two different hunter-gatherer communities in sub-Saharan Africa, an international team, led by researchers from the University of Cambridge, found that younger children were generally more likely to play in mixed-gender groups. In small communities, however, boys and girls were more likely to play together, likely due to a lack of playmates of the same gender.

As children get older, they begin to imitate the adults around them and learn culturally-specific gender roles through play. The results, reported in the journal Child Development, demonstrate the similarities with and differences from Western societies, and the importance of context when studying how children acquire various gendered behaviours.

Play is a universal feature of human childhood, and contributes to children’s cultural learning, including gender roles. Studies have shown that children are more likely to play in same-gender groups, with boys more likely to participate in vigorous ‘rough-and-tumble’ play, and girls more likely to pretend in pretense, or imaginary, play such as doll play.

However, as most studies on the development of gender focus on children from Western societies, it is difficult to determine whether observed gender differences are culturally-specific or represent broader developmental trends.

“We all tend to make a lot of assumptions about the development of gender roles, mostly through a Western lens,” said the paper’s first author Sheina Lew-Levy, who recently completed her PhD in Cambridge’s Department of Psychology. “However, very few studies have been done on gender roles in hunter-gatherer communities, whose organisation is distinct from other societies.”

The two hunter-gatherer communities in the study, the Hadza of Tanzania and the BaYaka of Congo, typically live in mobile groups averaging 25-45 individuals and have multiple residences. Labour is generally divided along gender lines, with men responsible for animal products and women responsible for plant products, although they are relatively egalitarian.

Earlier studies of play in hunter-gatherer children have found that children overwhelmingly play in mixed-gender groups, which is less common in Western children over the age of three. The team in the current study, which included researchers from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Washington State University and Duke University, found that children in smaller hunter-gatherer camps were more likely to play in mixed-gender groups than those in larger camps, most likely due to a lack of playmates of the same gender.

Younger boys and girls spend similar amounts of time engaged in play, and they both spent times in games, exercise and object play. Typically, girls and boys engage in gender roles through play. In the BaYaka community, for example, fathers are highly involved in childcare. The researchers found that BaYaka children’s doll play reflected adult child caretaking, with no strong differences in BaYaka boys’ and girls’ play with dolls.

“Context explains many, although not all, gender differences in play,” said Lew-Levy. “We need a more inclusive understanding of child development, including children’s gendered play, across the world’s diverse societies.”

Reference:
Sheina Lew-Levy et al. ‘Gender-typed and gender-segregated play among Tanzanian Hadza and Congolese BaYaka hunter-gatherer children and adolescents.’ Child Development (2019). DOI: 10.1111/cdev.13306

The major turning point in my career as a scientist happened only a couple of years ago during my first postdoc. I was given the freedom to develop my own project with the support of my current boss/mentor, Professor David M Glover. I was evaluating whether or not I wanted to continue on in academia when I approached him with a project idea and asked if he could teach me how to be a primary investigator. He taught me how to write a grant and we were eventually successful in getting funding for my project. With his advice, I have been given the freedom to design my own project and choose the methodology I use in answering the questions that I have. He also supported me in mentoring students and is currently helping me build the career I want. Without this opportunity, I would not have gotten the chance to see if the track I was on was what I really wanted.

I initially became interested in biology growing up in my First Nations/Native American community in the Great Bear Rainforest. My grandfather taught me about many of the animals and plants in the region we are from (Bella Coola, Canada). I continued on this interest throughout my undergraduate studies and into my postgraduate studies, where I became more focused on animal development. I continued on the academic route and became a scientist because I could not picture my life any other way. I cannot think of any other career that offers the type of freedom and creativity that science offers. To anyone interested in becoming a scientist, I will pass on the same advice that I was given: if you love it then do it. Nothing is ever set in stone, if you try something and don't like it then you can always do something else. Additionally, don't be afraid of not fitting the mould. Anyone can be a scientist.

I switched fields of study between all of the degrees that I have obtained, as well as during my postdocs. You are never stuck studying only one thing. I am Canadian, and I completed a double major in Biology and Biochemistry at the University of Victoria. I moved to Sweden and completed my Masters in Biotechnology at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. I completed my PhD in developmental biology in the Department of Zoology in Cambridge with Dr Isabel Palacios. I stayed in Cambridge to do my first postdoc in the Department of Genetics with Dr Yuu Kimata, studying cell cycle regulation and the role of centrosomes within the female germline of Drosophila. I am now on my second postdoc in the lab of Professor David M Glover, still in the Department of Genetics. I am now focused on female reproduction and evolution.

My research sets out to understand one of the fundamental principles of animal fertility, asexual reproduction, using different species of Drosophila as a model. I am interested in this topic because although there are huge differences in the development and intimate body structure that animals have, there are key principles that all animals abide by during their development and how they produce offspring. I hope that my research will help understand fertility in animals and potentially aid in conservation efforts.

One of the unexpected fun parts of my job is collaborating with friends who have complementary skill sets. Since starting my current project, I have found that I enjoy discussing my work more and have built new collaborations with people doing a wide variety of different work. These collaborations have helped my work but also made me enjoy it more fully.

Cambridge is a great place to study and work because of the freedom I have always felt to research 'out-of-the-box' things. In my experience, there is a respect for independent thought and creativity that I have not noticed to such a degree in other universities. A lot of other competitive research institutes put emphasis on productivity, whereas here I feel like there is a lot more emphasis on the overall question one is approaching. There are also very few places in the world where you have access to great thinkers in so many different disciplines. I feel like I can talk to anyone because of the sense of community here. Additionally, there are also amazing facilities and huge support for fledgling scientists.