When they’re not hanging upside down, stick insects don’t need to stick. In fact, when moving upright, sticking would be a hindrance: so much extra effort required to ‘unstick’ again with every step.

Latest research from Cambridge’s Department of Zoology shows that stick insects have specialised pads on their legs designed to produce large amounts of friction with very little pressure. When upright, stick insects aren’t sticking at all, but harnessing powerful friction to ensure they grip firmly without the need to unglue themselves from the ground when they move.     

In a previous study last year, the team discovered that stick insects have two distinct types of ‘attachment footpads’ - the adhesive ‘toe pads’ at the end of the legs, which are sticky, and the ‘heel pads’, which are not sticky at all. The insect uses different pads depending on direction and terrain. 

By studying the ‘heel pads’ in more detail, researchers discovered the insects have developed a way to generate massive friction when walking upright. They do this through a system of tiny hairs that use combinations of height and curvature to create a ‘hierarchy’ of grip, with the slightest pressure generating very strong friction - allowing stick insects to grip but not stick.

The researchers say the study - published today in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface - reveals yet another example of natural engineering successfully combining “desirable but seemingly contradictory properties of man-made materials” - namely, the best of both hard and soft materials - simply through clever structural design.

“Just by arrangement and morphology, nature teaches us that good design means we can combine the properties of hard and soft materials, making elemental forces like friction go a very long way with just a small amount of pressure,” said David Labonte, lead researcher from the Department of Zoology.

The power of friction relies on ‘contact area’, the amount of close contact between surfaces. In rigid materials, such as steel, even the tiniest amount of surface roughness means there is actually relatively little ‘contact area’ when pressed against other surfaces - so any amount of friction is very small.

On the other hand, soft materials achieve a lot of contact with surfaces, but - due to the larger amount of contact area - there is also a certain amount of adhesion or ‘stick’ not there with hard materials.

To solve this, stick insect’s hairy friction pads employ three main tricks to allow contact area to increase quickly under pressure, creating a scale or ‘hierarchy’ of grip with absolutely no stick:

• Both the pad itself and the tips of the hairs are rounded. This means that, when pressure is applied, more contact area is generated - like pushing down on a rubber ball.
• Some hairs are shorter than others, so the more pressure, the more hairs come into contact with the surface.
• When even more pressure is applied, some of the hairs bend over and make side contact - greatly increasing contact area with very little extra force.

These design features work in harmony to generate large amounts of friction with comparatively tiny amounts of pressure from the insect. Importantly, there is hardly any contact area without some tiny amount of pressure - which means that the specialised ‘frictional hairs’ don't stick.

Arrays of tiny hairs have been found before, for example on the feet of geckos, beetles and flies. However, these hairs are designed to stick, and are used when creatures are vertical or hanging upside down.

Sticky hairs are completely aligned and have flat tips - meaning that they immediately make full contact that hardly changes with additional weight - as opposed to friction hairs, with their higgledy-piggledy height ranges and rounded tips.

“We investigate these insects to try and understand biological systems, but lessons from nature such as this might also be useful for inspiring new approaches in man-made devices,” said Labonte.

He uses the example of a running shoe as a possible man-made item that could be enhanced by stick insect engineering: “If you run, you don’t want your feet to stick to the ground, but you also want to make sure you don’t slip.” 

Adds Labonte: “Stickiness is the force that is needed to overcome when trying to detach one thing from another. If the soles of your feet were made of Scotch tape, it may be helpful when you are walking up walls or hanging upside down, but the rest of the time it would be incredibly frustrating.”

“Stick insects have developed an ingenious way of overcoming the conflict between attachment and locomotion, with a dual pad system that alternates between stick and grip depending on the situation.”

Inset image: Scanning electron microscopy image of conical, micrometre-sized outgrowths that cover the tarsal ‘heel pads’ of some stick insects (false colours). Image by David Labonte & Adam Robinson.

Johannes Tschudi was 23 years old when he and his wife Anna left Germany in 1749 aboard the Crown in search of work and a new life on American soil. He was to take the perilous voyage across the Atlantic a further four times – a remarkable number considering how many migrants, including his wife Anna, died on these trips. But perhaps even more remarkable is the fact that between his first and last voyage, Johannes Tschudi transformed from a trafficked migrant to enter the business of selling souls – he became a human trafficker.

The notion of human trafficking is a familiar one today: individuals, either lured by the prospect of a better life or coerced, are recruited, transported, harboured and ultimately exploited by the trafficker. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that at any one time this billion-dollar business is responsible for 2.5 million victims, many of whom will end up in forced labour, slavery, prostitution or begging.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, trafficking was connected with a rather different purpose, as historian Dr William O’Reilly explained: “Trafficking speeded up the establishment of new settlements in America and eastern Europe, where a labour force was needed. This was a time when people were resigned to the inevitability of emigration. Borders were relatively close and various wars had left individuals questioning their long-term safety. In the 18th century alone, as many as one million emigrated from their homelands in western and central Europe to start new lives, mostly in North America and Hungary.”

In fact, the German people, O’Reilly finds, were one of the most migratory of all national groups at this time. Yet the role of the traffickers to populate these new societies has been largely overlooked.

His research, to be published as a book in 2014, provides fresh insight into the activities of these people movers, arguing that their actions kick-started the first systemisation of migration: “Until the process of moving people became a profitable business enterprise, and connections were made between the supply and demand for human cargo, large-scale migration could not occur.”

On Tschudi’s first journey in 1749, he was one of 476 migrants all connected to him by blood or village; they had been recruited by Johannes Marti. On his final journey in 1767, Tschudi had recruited all 62 passengers on board the Sally bound for Philadelphia. “It seems likely that Marti was, at least in part, responsible for the recruitment of Tschudi as a migrant to the Americas and may have facilitated his re-invention as a recruiting agent himself,” said O’Reilly. “This was a chain migration, but it was also a chain recruitment, where the apprentice learnt from the master agent.”

In studies of migration, movement of people is often considered in terms of ‘push and pull’, in which labour shortages in one area might pull migrants, and poor conditions at home might push them. “But this model does not adequately explain European migration before the 19th century; it would suggest that all migrants acted freely and independently,” said O’Reilly.

“This was not the case here. It was more often directed by traffickers towards a specific territory because of the financial reward they would accrue and it was done so through their command of a niche market in information. By selling labour bonds – a ceel in Dutch – these traffickers sold on more than a person’s labour; they sold their soul, or ziel. Contemporaries considered that these labour-bond sellers became 18th-century soul sellers, the beginning of the modern trafficker.”

O’Reilly’s painstaking study of ships’ logs, maps, newspapers, arrest warrants, customs documents, river networks and letters, across seven countries, has enabled him to paint a remarkable picture of the complex processes that were at work. “Traffickers provided a bridge to a new life in a new land for those wishing to cross. It was a market where labour was retailed most successfully if people like Tschudi acted as brokers, filling ships with ‘human freight’ for the transatlantic crossing.”

In effect, the traffickers were walking propaganda machines. “They had to convince would-be migrants of the benefits of migration, to the point of underhand deception. As one example, some were told ‘roasted pigeons would fly into their mouths without having to work for them’.”

The traffickers also had to thwart negative stories about the harrowing journey fed back by previous migrants. One traveller wrote: “hunger, thirst, and scarcity of all help had cost the lives of the majority on the ship.” Another that many “came close to murdering one another” in the cramped conditions. There were even tales of having to cook and eat dead fellow passengers. O’Reilly estimates mortality at around 15% or even higher as shipping firms in Holland, England and America, seeking to maximise profits, continued to raise the average number of emigrants per vessel.

“Tschudi, and others like him, learned quickly that by counteracting these negative descriptions of the journey with stories of limitless land and bread, of freedom and prosperity, he could turn a handsome profit,” said O’Reilly.

Traffickers could access information about opportunities abroad that was not generally known to potential emigrants. “For me, one definition of trafficking is the sourcing and supply of information leading to migration. In this regard, this is a story across time. From what I’ve found looking at contemporary situations – human trafficking from Moldova, for example – nothing has changed terribly much. The information comes from migrants who return home typically in the employ of other agents, and who then gain money for every migrant they recruit in turn.”

“It opened up information channels for those who, through illiteracy or geographic isolation, would have remained ignorant of the possibilities open to them,” he explained. “But the information was endowed with inflated images and delivered by those adept at marketing it for their audience.”

Tschudi’s dishonesty was publicly revealed. Shortly after the Sally docked in Philadelphia, a letter appeared in the local newspaper on behalf of all the migrants who had taken the journey, denouncing him as a “paragon of wickedness, an arrant liar and an out-an-out deceiver” who had “enticed and seduced nearly fifty people” to travel to America, in part through blackmail, in part through the threat of physical violence. “Their resentment was focused on the arduous journey,” said O’Reilly, “but no doubt by this stage the migrants would also have encountered the realities of settling in a new country and finding suitable employment, and have come to realise that not all was paved with riches as he had described.”

“Tschudi refused to accept the accusations levelled against him but his accusers would not go away,” added O’Reilly, who estimates that migrants would have paid £5–10 for the privilege of emigrating. “Denouncing him, they said that he had tricked them with his tales of encouragement, while all the while ‘he took a sum of money from a merchant… with the promise of delivering to him a number of people’.” Men, and women traffickers too, grew rich on the profit of human trafficking.

O’Reilly’s research highlights the role of traffickers like Tschudi as key to the process of migration. “Facilitator, escort, at times swindler and cheat, the human trafficker bound an ever-shrinking world together with ties of information and opportunity, and in effect aided the development of global labour markets for Europeans.”

For further information about this story, please contact Louise Walsh at louise.walsh@admin.cam.ac.uk

Senior members of the University of Cambridge are calling for a debate on gender progression within the higher education sector.

In a letter published today (20 February) in the Times Higher Education, more than 50 Cambridge staff – among them heads of colleges and departments – appeal for a broader and more inclusive approach to academic appointments and promotions so that talented women stand a better chance of progressing to senior positions.

They argue that conventional success in academia, for example a promotion from Reader to Professor, can often seem as if it is framed by rigid outcomes – a paper published in a leading journal, or the size and frequency of research grants – at the expense of other skill-sets and attributes. Despite the importance of such metrics, on their own they are likely to benefit men more than women, they argue.

A broader, more inclusive approach to success and promotion, where other academic contributions, including teaching, administration and outreach work are valued, would make it easier for women to advance, and universities fulfil their potential as institutions that contribute positively to society.

Data provided by the Higher Education Statistics Agency reveal that there are four male professors for every female professor in UK universities, despite women accounting for 45 per cent of the UK academic workforce.

Professor Dame Athene Donald, Gender Equality Champion at the University of Cambridge, said that she and her colleagues were keen to highlight how a conventional understanding of success in academia appears to disadvantage women.

“Our experience at Cambridge, where we have recently surveyed 126 female academics and administrators on this subject for a new book about success in academia, suggests that this is indeed the case. Women seem to value a broader spectrum of work-based competencies that do not flourish easily under the current system.

“There will always be hardcore metrics for academics, such as grants, or prizes won, and books and papers published - and they are important. But there are opportunities to reward and embed different types of success, such as teaching, outreach and departmental support; activities that lots of very talented women, and indeed men, are involved with, but are not currently a meaningful part of recognition and advancement in universities.

“If universities inhibit the progression of talented female staff, they in turn are unable to reach their full potential. And we know that universities make a huge contribution to society through research, teaching and partnerships with businesses, among many other activities.”

The book, called The Meaning of Success: Insights from Women at Cambridge, will be launched on 5 March. Each of the participants were nominated by peers as successful women, with further interviews and questions being used to understand what shaped their views around success, the barriers they faced on their way to becoming successful, and what techniques they had used to thrive.

The women in the book – from world-leading academics to more junior academic and administrative staff – talk openly and honestly about their achievements, sacrifices, highs and lows.

“This book has provided us with the opportunity at Cambridge to reflect on how success is recognised and rewarded, giving us scope to redefine and extend the qualities and attributes we associate with being successful,” said Dame Athene.

“I hope it provides a useful starting point to engage in an important conversation that we all need to have in higher education.”

Porous films, which use similar properties to those seen in moth eyes in combination with nanoparticles, are being developed into robust, self-cleaning antireflective coatings for use on both plastic and glass.

Details of the coatings, which were developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge, were recently outlined in the journal Nano Letters.

Antireflective coatings need to refract as little light as possible in order to be effective, but it is extremely difficult to produce them as a single layer. Over the past decade, researchers have developed distributed coatings, which resolve this by mimicking the structure of moth eyes.

The antireflective properties of moth eyes come not from a single layer, but from a hexagonal pattern of tiny bumps. The spaces between these bumps are so small that incoming beams of light see the eye’s surface as a single layer, essentially removing the interface between the air and the surface, allowing moths to see at night and be less visible to predators.

The problem with synthetic versions of moth eye coatings is that the tiny spaces which make the coating antireflective in the first place can very quickly become clogged with dirt, which cause the antireflective effect to be lost.

Professor Ulli Steiner and colleagues from the Cavendish Laboratory have developed a new coating which is both antireflective and self-cleaning. In order to develop it, Professor Steiner and his co-inventors came up with a strategy to make layers of plastic with very well-defined small pores, similar to moth eyes. But by making the pores larger than they are in most other types of moth eye coatings, they were able to incorporate titanium dioxide nanocrystals into the structure.

These nanocrystals are photocatalytic — when light falls on them, they start to break down the dirt clogging the pores, until all that is left is carbon dioxide, and water which evaporates off the surface, rendering the material self-cleaning.

In early tests of the material, the titanium dioxide nanoparticles were able to break down all of the oils contained in a fingerprint within 90 minutes. The coating is capable of breaking down most of the standard hydrocarbons that clog most porous antireflective coatings.

The breakthrough research is the first time that these nanoparticles have been effectively incorporated into antireflective coatings, raising the possibility of antireflective, self-cleaning glass or plastic.

The coating adheres to the substrate through sol-gel chemistry, resulting in a durable bond and a coating which will not flake off.

While the material is currently only suitable for outdoor applications as it requires ultraviolet light for photocatalysis to occur, the team are planning more tests to see if the material could be adapted in future for indoor light, which would open up a wide range of potential applications.

The team are currently looking at applications in building glass and solar cells, as much of the sunlight solar cells are meant to capture and convert to energy simply bounces off the surface, and current antireflective coatings become easily clogged with dirt. “When generating energy from solar cells, you have to fight for every percentage gain in efficiency,” said Professor Steiner. “The coating we’ve developed combines two interesting scientific principles, and could increase the amount of light getting into the solar cells.”

Cambridge Enterprise, the University’s commercialisation arm, is currently looking for commercial partners to help develop this material.

Austerity measures in Greece, imposed following a bailout by the international community, have led to devastating social and health consequences for the country’s population, according to a report in yesterday’s Lancet. 

Greece’s health crisis: from austerity to denialism, a paper by Cambridge University sociologist Alexander Kentikelenis and colleagues, shows how rising demand for healthcare as a result of the cuts has coincided with a drop in the provision of services, leading to substantial unmet medical need. 

In 2010 the Greek government agreed to an austerity package overseen by the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, known collectively as the Troika. Since then, Greece has had the largest cutbacks to the health sector seen across Europe, as the bailout package capped public expenditure at 6% of GDP. The country’s public spending on health is now less than any of the other pre-2004 EU members.

“The data reveals that the Greek welfare state has failed to protect people at the time they needed support the most. A rapidly growing number of Greeks are losing access to healthcare as a result of budget cuts and unemployment,” said Kentikelenis.

The authors of the paper acknowledge that Greece’s healthcare system was in need of reorganisation well before its economic plight came to the world’s attention. However, they take the government to task for its denial that the health of the population has been affected as a result of the slashing of budgets.

At a time of increasing health need and falling incomes, Greece’s bailout agreement stipulated shifting the cost of healthcare to patients. The Greek government introduced new charges for visits to outpatient clinics and higher costs for medicines.

The authors’ analysis of the latest available data from the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions revealed a 47% rise in people who felt they did not receive medically necessary healthcare. This increase was linked to a rising inability to afford care and the costs of travel to access health services, according to the authors. Rapidly increasing unemployment since 2009 meant a growing number of people no longer had any form of health cover. 

“Those without insurance would have been eligible for a basic package of health services after means testing, but the criteria for means testing have not been updated to take account of the new social reality,” said Kentikelenis.

“To respond to unmet need, social clinics staffed by volunteer doctors have sprung up in urban centres. Before the crisis such services mostly targeted immigrant populations, but now as many as half the patients are Greek nationals.”

The health problems are particularly pronounced among Greece’s most vulnerable groups who include the poor, the unemployed, the elderly, pregnant women and children, and those with mental health problems. The paper describes the situation faced by these groups as a “public health tragedy”.

There has been a 120% increase in the use of mental health services at a time of funding cuts of 20% in 2010-2011 and a further 55% in 2011-2012. Suicides and the incidence of major depression have rapidly risen.

Austerity measures have also been linked to increased incidence of infectious disease. Following cuts to outreach programmes, including the distribution of syringes and condoms to injection-drug users, in the first year of austerity, a rapid rise of HIV infections was observed: from 15 in 2009 to 484 in 2012. The incidence of tuberculosis among drug users more than doubled in 2013.

Kentikelenis and co-authors point to the experiences of other countries – notably, Iceland and Finland – in surviving financial crises. They argue that, by ring-fencing health and social budgets, and concentrating austerity measures elsewhere, governments can offset the harmful effect of crises on the health of their populations.

“Although the Greek healthcare system had serious inefficiencies before the crisis, the scale and speed of imposed change have constrained the capacity of the public health system to respond to the needs of the population at a time of heightened demand,” Kentikelenis said.

The paper Greece’s health crisis: from austerity to denialism by Alexander Kentikelenis (University of Cambridge), Marina Karanikolos (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine), Aaaron Reeves (University of Oxford), Martin McKee (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) and David Stuckler (University of Oxford) was published by the Lancet on 21 February 2014.

For more information about this story contact Alexandra Buxton, Office of Communications, University of Cambridge, amb206@admin.cam.ac.uk  01223 761673

Inset image: Greeks protest austerity cuts
 

Speed dating, in which potential lovers size each other up in brief 10 minute encounters before moving on to the next person, can be an awkward and time-wasting affair. Finding the perfect research partnership is often just as tough. Speed dating-style techniques are increasingly used at academics conferences, but can be equally frustrating - with busy academics being pushed into too many pointless encounters.

But now a group of scientists led by geneticist Rafael Carazo Salas have constructed a system that could revolutionise conference speed dating - by treating scientists like genes.

Using mathematical algorithms, the team created a method of matching conference-goers according to pre-set criteria, bringing about unforeseen collaboration opportunities while also enabling “would-like-to-meet” match-ups across disciplines and knowledge areas. The results have been recently published in the open-access journal eLife.

Funded by the Royal Society to run a small-scale satellite conference on cell polarity, the researchers wanted to find a way to not only break the ice between scientists who did not know each other, but also to “break the heat” - to encourage big name scientists to step outside of their usual small circle, and mix with up-and-coming scientists.

“We wanted to avoid the usual pattern that happens at conferences, especially at interdisciplinary meetings, of like sticking with like. Then we came up with an idea – what if we treated the delegates like we treat genes, and used mathematical algorithms to build a connectivity picture that could enable new links to be made?” said Carazo Salas, from the Gurdon Institute and Genetics Department of Cambridge University, who co-developed the technique with colleagues Federico Vaggi and Attila Csikasz-Nagy from Fondazione Edmund Mach, Italy.

In the lead-up to the conference, delegates were asked to submit information about their research areas and disciplines and also to come up with a ‘wish list’ of specialist areas that they would like to know more about.

 “The conference started in a predictable way. After the first couple of talks, questions came entirely from people in the first few rows. We then did a brief presentation about the “speed dating” session that was about to happen. People’s eyes lit up when they got the game – the notion of being treated like genes seemed to appeal.”

In the first speed-dating round, the 40 delegates were each paired up with someone who was not known to them and who had a very different knowledge base – so someone specialising in X technique might be paired with a specialist in Y. Pairs were given around 10 minutes to talk and then moved on to new pairs, so that each person met a total of four other people they knew very little about.

“The atmosphere in the room after the first round of speed dating was entirely different. There was a buzz, and at the next set of talks questions came from all over the room, not just the usual couple of rows at the front”.

In the second round, the pairings made use of the wish lists the delegates had created. The calculations, whilst making sure that the ‘acquaintance distance’ was still wide, this time worked on a would-like-to-meet basis: matching people with highly developed skills in a particular research method - such as intravital imaging, microfluidics or phenotype ontology - with those who wanted to learn about that method. The weighting system used in the calculations meant that overall the pairings were optimised to ensure that each pair was as close a match as possible.

“We knew it was risky, but the results were very successful. The delegates had conversations that would never have happened normally, and many came away with new collaboration possibilities that will hopefully broaden out the field.”

The team are now hoping to fine tune their approach by testing it out in other situations – at conferences of varying sizes, and in other disciplines. The computational algorithm could be adapted to handle larger scales (for example, a higher number of participants) or a higher number of requirements (for example, including the degree of seniority or geographical location). 

In this age of globalisation, the country of your birth is not, for many, the country of your home. According to recent figures from the statistical office of the European Union (EU), 80% of the population increase in member states in 2012 was from migration.

Millions of people are pulled into this “flow of humanity” each year, crossing international borders in search of work and security, pulsing to the capitalist heartbeat of our global economy.

For many of the wealthier EU nations, immigration has been starkly defined as a ‘problem’, explained sociologist Dr Thomas Miley. “Relations between native citizens and migrant communities have become increasingly strained as anti-migrant rhetoric tightens its stranglehold on public perception – in the UK, EU and across the world.”

But there is little research into how migrants themselves are reacting to the politicisation of immigration: how does it feel to be treated like a curse on the land you are trying to call home, a citizen of the ‘flow’ and sometimes little else?

“Migrants are seen as having behaviours and attitudes that are completely determined by the countries they come from, but actually they’re here and part of the population, even if they’re not part of the citizenry. We’re interested in how these policies affect the outsiders – outsiders who are inside,” said Miley.

His research is focusing on the extent to which restrictive migration policies impact and ghettoise migrant communities, and how that reverberates back into ‘host’ societies, something Miley became interested in during his formative years in California in the era of Governor Pete Wilson.

Entering office in 1991, Wilson “rode on a wave of public resentment towards migrant Mexican communities during grim economic times for the state,” explained Miley. Wilson was associated with Proposition 187, under which any suspected illegal immigrant had to prove legal residency in order to access basic services such as schools and medical care. “Considered by many civil liberty groups to be among the most toxic migration legislature enacted in modern America, Prop 187 shares eerie similarities to recent UK coalition policies towards new EU migrants. 

“Places like California, as well as Spain – where we are currently conducting research –  welcome migrants when boom times require labour; workers from poorer countries are grateful for better conditions and their precarious situation means they are less likely to mobilise politically. It’s like having an indentured servant,”
said Miley.

“Then, in times of economic crisis and high unemployment, people start pointing fingers. Migration becomes politicised because – in terms of the democratic idea of getting votes – it’s a winner. But it’s not democratic politics; democracy assumes citizenship. Migration is a card that’s easy to play politically because you are targeting people who don’t have the rights of citizens.”  

Spain is the country he knows best, and where the pilot study is taking place. When Miley arrived in Spain as a research fellow in the late 1990s, there was very little external immigration – less than 2% of Spain’s population were born outside of the country. By the mid-2000s, that had risen to over 12%. “In the first few years of the Euro, you had a huge economic boom in Spain, and the conservative government welcomed immigrants from Latin America, tapping into imperial legacies to encourage migrant workers who might integrate better in terms of language, religion and even a shared conservatism.”

Men were required for the construction sector; women for domestic work – such as caring for the elderly. Public opinion polls of the time showed low levels of xenophobia, economic times were good and migration wasn’t an issue for Spaniards. Then the global finance system crashed.

“With the outbreak of the crisis, un-employment has gone through the roof, crushing a whole generation of young Spaniards along with the migrants – the construction sector came to a standstill,” said Miley. “But conditions are still better in Spain than in many of the countries the migrants came from. They have built lives there, so they’re not leaving – in fact it is the young Spanish that are beginning to migrate.”  

As Miley witnessed in California, familiar rhetoric and policies began to creep into Spanish national debate. It became harder for migrants to access healthcare and social security; different communities were offset against each other, given a pecking order in the national consciousness, with Moroccans fairing badly.

But in a country where fascism is still a relatively recent memory, right-wing populism is harder to mobilise without losing the centre ground. “While national politics moved to the right, it had to tread carefully. But at a local level, the right-wing populist game really came into its own,” said Miley.

The pilot study has focused on the Barcelona metropolitan area, with fieldwork interviews taking place among three of Spain’s largest migrant communities – Latin American, Moroccan and Romanian – in two industrial cities called Badalona and Hospitalet. Here, Miley and co-researcher Enric Martínez-Herrera from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona have been asking migrants about their everyday experiences of everything from public transport to mass media, and gathering reactions to specific political discourse. 

Tensions are particularly strained in Badalona, explained Miley. Xavier Albiol was elected mayor in 2011 on a strong anti-migrant line, and is currently on trial accused of discrimination charges, following a campaign pamphlet which featured images of anti-Romanian slogans.

“This is muddied further by conflict between old and new migrant communities, including internal migrants such as working-class Spaniards from the south of the country,” said Miley. “A myriad of attitudes get fused into a general anti-migrant sentiment that has nothing to do with conflict at the local level – where different marginalised groups are pitted against one another.”

He gives the example of Spanish gypsies in Badalona – a historically persecuted minority – whose community leaders have formed an alliance with the far-right mayor, initially against new migrant groups of Romanian gypsies, and then migration generally. “This from an ethnic group synonymous with migratory living,” said Miley.  

Once the Spanish study is finished, Miley and colleagues aim to replicate it in other European capital cities in a major piece of international comparative research, involving doctoral students holding focus groups with immigrants in countries such as France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and the UK.

“We want to find out how local and national political dynamics affect migrants, how their experiences shape attitudes towards the society they live in, and, importantly, to what extent they follow and understand the policies that will impact their lives,” said Miley. 

The project aims to improve public debate in European democracies, he added, by cutting through media hysteria and knee-jerk politics to find out what it means to be a migrant in the 21st century. “We’re distinguishing between politics and policies to look comparatively at how they impact the lives of migrants, and how that in turn affects interactions with domestic populations – the dialectical relationship at the cornerstone of what is known as ‘integration’.”

“For all the bluster, not enough is understood about the attitudes of people who now prop up key institutions across the continent. If migration stopped overnight, this University would be one of many institutions across the EU that couldn’t function.”

The Newton CHESS MPhil Studentship scheme (NCMS) aims to make postgraduate study accessible to students from all backgrounds, by supporting outstanding Home students who want to carry out research MPhils with the goal of continuing to a PhD. 

Each Newton CHESS MPhil studentship will be worth £12,000, which will cover fees and provide a bursary to contribute towards living costs.

40 of these new studentships will be jointly-funded by Colleges and the Isaac Newton Trust, with 19 Colleges providing funding as part of the scheme.

Applicants from the UK for MPhil programmes in all subjects are eligible for the scheme.  Applicants who have applied for funding from CHESS as part of their application will be automatically considered for this funding.

Professor Jon Parry, Director of the Isaac Newton Trust, explains. “Recognising that public funding for research MPhils is increasingly scarce, the Trust wanted to find a way to support more students in this crucial first year of graduate study.

“We see this as a natural follow-on from our earlier initiative in establishing undergraduate bursaries, which has led to the current Cambridge Bursary Scheme. We are particularly pleased that our offer of matching funding has led so many Colleges to contribute money towards these new awards."

Andy Jeffries, Secretary to the University of Cambridge Senior Tutors’ Committee, said “The Senior Tutors' Committee were very keen to support the scheme as although Colleges have for some time provided awards to support MPhil students, being able to match funding with the Isaac Newton Trust has enabled more students to be given awards.”

Gordon Chesterman, Director of the University of Cambridge Careers Service, said “Further study has always been a popular choice for our undergraduates with over 30% following this path each year - one of the highest proportions for any UK university. Embarking on further study is their first step into an academic research career and they will form the future's successful research base in the UK.

“Sources of adequate funding are becoming tighter and more competitive and these generous studentship schemes will attract the brightest students, helping them achieve their longer-term goals whilst removing some of the financial barriers that may have prevented them spending another year at University,” Mr Chesterman added.

The scheme will run for a trial period of up to three years.

For more information about the scheme, and how to apply, visit: http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/students/studentregistry/fees/funding/chess/mphil.html

The Visit Days aim to give high-flying pupils from state schools a chance to explore Cambridge, see behind the scenes at the college, and find out more about studying at university.

A highly-competitive round of “Guess My Degree” made the point that choosing a subject is not always the same as choosing a career – otherwise Sacha Baron Cohen would be a historian, and Gabby Logan would be a lawyer.

Students were given a guided tour of the undergraduate accommodation at St Catharine’s, before setting out on a treasure-hunt around the city.

Eleanor Norman, Assistant Gifted and Talented Co-Ordinator for Comberton Village College, said “The input today has been really helpful, especially for those of our students who haven’t really started thinking about university yet.

“Our 6th Form at Comberton Village College is quite new, and it’s really valuable to the College to be able to bring our high achievers on a day like this.”

Comberton students David and Lucy particularly enjoyed the chance to see behind the scenes with current undergraduates, and the chance to explore some university prospectuses.

“The tour was interesting,” said David. “It was a true insight into college life, especially showing the social side.”

“Looking at different prospectuses has been helpful, showing what different universities have to offer,” he added.

Lucy said “There’s a real myth that Cambridge students are really intellectual – but they’re talking about normal things!  This made Cambridge seem less intimidating to me.”

Encouraging the students to keep in touch, Laura McGarty, Schools Liaison Officer for St Catharine’s and Pembroke Colleges, and the organiser of the day, said “We’re here to give you as much information as possible so that you can make the best decisions possible,

“It’s never too early to start thinking about university.”

In Transit looks at the repatriation of the remains of Norwegian volunteers who fought alongside German SS forces in 1944 – touching upon the legacy of this divisive and troubling episode on individuals, families and communities 70 years on.

Film-maker Heidi Morstang, who will take part in a Q&A following the screening, said: “In Transit deals with the factual aftermath of a battle on the Eastern Front, where a potential homecoming of the remains of Norwegian political traitors is the central focus. 

“The film looks at contemporary issues regarding reconciliation and closure. It touches upon current politics reconciling painful aspects of recent history.” 

Set in an area of Karelia on the Russian/Finnish border close to the Arctic Circle, the film is a cinematic investigation revealing history through landscape and throwing light on the 120 Norwegian soldiers killed fighting Soviet forces.

Only a handful of the SS men managed to escape. The rest of the battalion was either imprisoned in Soviet POW camps, or shot dead and left, unidentified, without being retrieved or formally buried for over 60 years. The Norwegian SS volunteers are still regarded as political traitors by the country of their birth. In 2005 locals unearthed human remains under a thin layer of soil. Since then, locals, historians and forensic archaeologists have located more remains aiming to identify and arrange proper burials for the dead. This work is still ongoing.

Added Morstang: “The film asks questions about whether one should reveal the past, in this case a brutal and undignified past. In Transit explores the physical, psychological and emotional landscapes that the battle and its legacy occupy. It deals with memory and perhaps more importantly, the forgotten and `buried’ chapters in history. It is an aspect of painful heritage.”

Heidi Morstang is a Norwegian photographer and film-maker, and a Lecturer in Photography at Plymouth University. Heidi will show her 20-minute film In Transit accompanied by a series of photographs at Churchill College. The screening is free and further screenings take place on: March 1 (2pm), March 5 (6pm) and March 9 (2pm).

The day included sample lectures from the Education course, a tour of a Cambridge College, and the opportunity to debate controversial issues in education with students from other schools.

Saskia Baron, who came from Maidenhead with a group from Cox Green School, enjoyed the opportunity to see Cambridge for herself. “I wanted to see if it’s for me,” she said. “You do come with a certain expectation of how it’s going to be – but I liked it.”

“It’s the first university I’ve seen around,” said fellow Cox Green student Matt Bull. “Cambridge has got a bit of a reputation; I was surprised by how modern it is, and how nice everyone is.”

Mr Aaron Oliva, Cox Green School’s Deputy Achievement Leader, said “As a school, we want to raise the aspiration of our most able students. Events like this help to get our students thinking about going to the best possible universities.”

Speaking the end of the day, Faculty of Education lecturer and Undergraduate Course Manager Liz Taylor thanked the students for participating and said “You can be sure of an excellent education here at Cambridge. Entrance requirements are high, but you won’t regret applying. I hope to see you in the future, and to teach some of you myself.”

Jacqui Howard, the Faculty of Education’s Schools Liaison Coordinator, who led the event was delighted with the great turn-out. She said “The day was a chance for students to find out just how multi-faceted the Education course at Cambridge is and the range of careers it can lead to. The students threw themselves into some really tricky topics and all of the lecturers were really impressed by them.”

The free events are part of a programme organised by the Faculty of Education to encourage academically talented state school students to aim high in their university ambitions, and to raise awareness of the unique aspects of the undergraduate Education course at Cambridge.

• For more information about studying Education at Cambridge, contact Jacqui Howard, Schools Liaison Coordinator at the Faculty of Education.

Dr Meritxell Huch from the Gurdon Institute, who tonight receives the National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research (NC3Rs) 3Rs Prize, has developed a method that enables adult mouse stem cells to grow and expand into fully functioning three-dimensional liver tissue.

Using this method, cells from one mouse could be used to test 1000 drug compounds to treat liver disease, and reduce animal use by up to 50,000.

Growing hepatocytes (liver cells) in the laboratory has been attempted by liver biologists for many years, since it would reduce their reliance on using mice to study liver disease and would open up new opportunities in medical research and drug safety testing. Until now no laboratory has been successful in deciphering how to isolate and grow these cells.

Liver stem cells are typically found in a dormant state in the liver, only becoming active following injury to produce new liver cells and bile ducts. Dr Huch and colleagues at the Netherlands’ Hubrecht Institute located the specific type of stem cells responsible for this regeneration, which are recognised by a key surface protein (Lgr5+) that they share with similar stem cells in the intestine, stomach and hair follicles.

By isolating these cells and placing them in a culture medium with the right conditions, the researchers were able to grow small liver organoids, which survive and expand for over a year in a laboratory environment. When implanted back into mice with liver disease they continued to grow, ameliorating the disease and extending the survival of the mice.

Having further refined the process using cells from rats and dogs, Dr Huch is now moving onto testing it with human cells, which could potentially translate to the development of a patient’s own liver tissue for transplantation.

Commenting on the new method’s potential to reduce animal use in liver research, Dr Huch said: “Typically a study to investigate one potential drug compound to treat one form of liver disease would require up to 50 live animals per experiment, so testing 1000 compounds would need 50,000 mice. By using the liver culture system I developed, we can test 1000 compounds using cells that come from only one mouse, resulting in a significant reduction in animal use.

“If other laboratories adopt this method then the impact on animal use in the liver research field would be immediate. A vast library of potential drug compounds could be narrowed down to just one or two very quickly and cheaply, which can then be tested further in an animal study.”

Dr Vicky Robinson, Chief Executive of the NC3Rs said: “Growing functioning liver cells in culture has been the Holy Grail for liver biologists for many years, so a limitless supply of hepatocytes could have a huge 3Rs impact both on basic research to understand liver disease and for the screening and safety testing of pharmaceuticals. Researchers need to utilise this alternative technology as soon as possible to ensure the benefits to animals and human health are fully realised.”

Professor Kevin Shakesheff, Director of the UK Regenerative Medicine Hub in Acellular Materials, said: “The work of Dr Huch and team demonstrates how three-dimensional culture and molecular biology combine to open new possibilities in the regeneration of complex tissues. The liver is an excellent target for this work as the human body has an ability to regenerate liver tissue that is very hard to replicate in the lab. Unlocking new mechanisms to generate functional liver creates therapeutic approaches for patients with liver disease or injury and could offer a route to high quality human liver models that enhance drug development.”

It was no coincidence that house price rises, increased housing transactions and a surge in employment within the property industry were seen as signs of an upturn in the economy late last summer. One in four new jobs created in the previous 12 months, it emerged from data produced by the Office for National Statistics, were in the housing sector. Our homes are more than our castles: they are, in many ways, the lifeblood of the economy.

Behind the jibes branding Britain as a nation of estate agents is a highly significant fact. On average, more than half of the moves we make in our lifetimes are within roughly 5 km of our previous addresses. The term migration conjures up an image of large distances – crossing national boundaries or even continents – but the moves we undertake most frequently are much more local and are often motivated by the desire to make what might be seen as relatively minor adjustments to how we live.

At first glance there is nothing remarkable about moving just a few streets or to accommodation with three bedrooms rather than two – or to downsize from a house to an apartment. But the importance of this internal mobility should not, however, be underestimated, either in terms of what these moves mean to the people involved or how they contribute to the bigger picture of local and regional economies.

These aspects of internal migration – and others – are of great interest to Professor Jacqueline Scott and Dr Rory Coulter from the Department of Sociology. Together they are collaborating on research that explores the links between residential mobility (or immobility), life events and household changes, and exchanges of social support within families.

In the early 1990s Scott was responsible for the initial design and implementation of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) – a hugely important resource for the study of changing family and household structures that was begun while she was at the University of Essex. Her research interests include inter-generational relations and shifting gender roles. Coulter, whose PhD focused on the links between moving desires and subsequent moving behaviour, describes his key interest as “the interactions between people and places – how people shape places, and conversely how places shape people”.

Their research into internal migration aims to get to the heart of why we move, when we move, and what those moves mean in terms of the small but vitally important details of our lives. Where we live, and how close (or distant) we are to the people and places most significant in our day-to-day lives, play a huge part in our well-being. A move closer to the station, to the catchment area of a particular school or to a preferred neighbourhood, for instance, may have important personal implications for opportunities for work, education and friendships. When taken with the moves made by others, this has wider implications for the provision of transport, schools and other businesses, services and facilities.

Data extrapolated from BHPS (1991–2008) and its successor survey, Understanding Society, which is run from the University of Essex’s Institute for Social and Economic Research and funded primarily by the Economic and Social Research Council, can give us the much-needed human angle on internal migration. We know, for example, that moves peak early in young adulthood (18–30), and that the frequency of moving declines rapidly after age 35. We know too that changing family trajectories impact on household size and thus on housing demand. But much more remains to be discovered about the finer details of decision-making surrounding internal migration.

As Coulter explained: “Data from panel surveys like BHPS are an incredibly rich resource for studying residential mobility. For example, using BHPS we are able to model exactly when people move home. We can estimate how having a baby affects how likely a couple are to move, as well as the type of dwelling and neighbourhood they choose to move to.

“By enabling us to model the timing of job changes and residential moves, BHPS data also allow us to study how people use residential mobility to co-ordinate their work and family life. In addition, because many panel surveys like BHPS interview every member of selected households, we are able to get multiple people’s perspectives on each relocation event. This allows us to explore which partner’s preferences have the strongest effects on a couple’s moving behaviour, as well as how moves affect the social networks of adults and their children”.Scott is particularly interested in the relationship between residential mobility – or immobility – and family support networks.  This includes looking at how gender affects household moving decisions and who benefits and gains most when a household makes (or does not make) a residential move.

The past 30 years or so have seen families disperse across greater distances as a result of employment change (for example, the decline of traditional industries and the growth of service sector employment) and the expansion of higher education. However, falling levels of state support combined with the demands of an aging population and political aspirations to increase female employment mean that support from family remains a vital aspect of well-being for many people.

“Given that informal networks for supplying and receiving many forms of support (such as childcare from family members) require people to live nearby to each other, it’s surprising that relatively little is known about how support exchanges may influence and be configured by residential mobility behaviour in conjunction with changes in family structures,” said Scott.

One example might be the decisions that underlie elderly people moving to be closer to their children or, conversely, children moving to be closer to their elderly parents. Another might be to investigate how residential moves are prompted by other life events such as childbirth or union dissolution (divorce or relationship break-up).

“We hope that our work will throw light on the question of how residential mobility is linked to family transitions and the changing supply and receipt of social support over the course of people’s lives. The answer to this complex question is likely to be correspondingly complex. To tackle it we will draw on the rich longitudinal data collected by surveys such as BHPS over the last two decades,” said Scott.

“By providing evidence about the links between residential mobility and exchanges of social support within social and kin networks, we anticipate that our work could inform the planning and policy development decisions of a range of government bodies and non-governmental organisations.”

Being awake at night and dozing during the day can be a distressing early symptom of Alzheimer's disease, but how the disease disrupts our biological clocks to cause these symptoms has remained elusive.

Now, scientists from Cambridge have discovered that in fruit flies with Alzheimer's the biological clock is still ticking but has become uncoupled from the sleep-wake cycle it usually regulates. The findings – published in Disease Models & Mechanisms– could help develop more effective ways to improve sleep patterns in people with the disease.

People with Alzheimer's often have poor biological rhythms, something that is a burden for both patients and their carers. Periods of sleep become shorter and more fragmented, resulting in periods of wakefulness at night and snoozing during the day. They can also become restless and agitated in the late afternoon and early evening, something known as 'sundowning'.

Biological clocks go hand in hand with life, and are found in everything from single celled organisms to fruit flies and humans. They are vital because they allow organisms to synchronise their biology to the day-night changes in their environments.

Until now, however, it has been unclear how Alzheimer's disrupts the biological clock. According to Dr Damian Crowther of Cambridge's Department of Genetics, one of the study's authors: "We wanted to know whether people with Alzheimer's disease have a poor behavioural rhythm because they have a clock that's stopped ticking or they have stopped responding to the clock."

The team worked with fruit flies – a key species for studying Alzheimer's. Evidence suggests that the A-beta peptide, a protein, is behind at least the initial stages of the disease in humans. This has been replicated in fruit flies by introducing the human gene that produces this peptide.

Taking a group of healthy flies and a group with this feature of Alzheimer's, the researchers studied sleep-wake patterns in the flies, and how well their biological clocks were working.

They measured sleep-wake patterns by fitting a small infrared beam, similar to movement sensors in burglar alarms, to the glass tubes housing the flies. When the flies were awake and moving, they broke the beam and these breaks in the beam were counted and recorded.

To study the flies' biological clocks, the researchers attached the protein luciferase – an enzyme that emits light – to one of the proteins that forms part of the biological clock. Levels of the protein rise and fall during the night and day, and the glowing protein provided a way of tracing the flies' internal clock.

"This lets us see the brain glowing brighter at night and less during the day, and that's the biological clock shown as a glowing brain. It's beautiful to be able to study first hand in the same organism the molecular working of the clock and the corresponding behaviours," Dr Crowther said.

They found that healthy flies were active during the day and slept at night, whereas those with Alzheimer's sleep and wake randomly. Crucially, however, the diurnal patterns of the luciferase-tagged protein were the same in both healthy and diseased flies, showing that the biological clock still ticks in flies with Alzheimer's.

"Until now, the prevailing view was that Alzheimer's destroyed the biological clock," said Crowther.

"What we have shown in flies with Alzheimer's is that the clock is still ticking but is being ignored by other parts of the brain and body that govern behaviour. If we can understand this, it could help us develop new therapies to tackle sleep disturbances in people with Alzheimer's."

Dr Simon Ridley, Head of Research at Alzheimer's Research UK, who helped to fund the study, said: "Understanding the biology behind distressing symptoms like sleep problems is important to guide the development of new approaches to manage or treat them. This study sheds more light on the how features of Alzheimer's can affect the molecular mechanisms controlling sleep-wake cycles in flies.

"We hope these results can guide further studies in people to ensure that progress is made for the half a million people in the UK with the disease."

Scientists have demonstrated that an abrupt weakening of the summer monsoon affected northwest India 4,100 years ago. The resulting drought coincided with the beginning of the decline of the metropolis-building Indus Civilisation, which spanned present-day Pakistan and India, suggesting that climate change could be why many of the major cities of the civilisation were abandoned.

The research, reported this week in the journal Geology, involved the collection of snail shells preserved in the sediments of an ancient lake bed. By analysing the oxygen isotopes in the shells, the scientists were able to tell how much rain fell in the lake where the snails lived thousands of years ago.

The results shed light on a mystery surrounding why the major cities of the Indus Civilisation were abandoned. Climate change had been suggested as a possible reason for this transformation before but, until now, there has been no direct evidence for climate change in the region where Indus settlements were located.

Moreover, the finding now links the decline of the Indus cities to a documented global scale climate event and its impact on the Old Kingdom in Egypt, the Early Bronze Age civilisations of Greece and Crete, and the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia, whose decline has previously been linked to abrupt climate change.

“We think that we now have a really strong indication that a major climate event occurred in the area where a large number of Indus settlements were situated,” said Professor David Hodell, from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences. “Taken together with other evidence from Meghalaya in northeast India, Oman and the Arabian Sea, our results provide strong evidence for a widespread weakening of the Indian summer monsoon across large parts of India 4,100 years ago.”

Hodell together with University of Cambridge archaeologist Dr Cameron Petrie and Gates scholar Dr Yama Dixit collected Melanoides tuberculata snail shells from the sediments of the ancient lake Kotla Dahar in Haryana, India. “As today, the major source of water into the lake throughout the Holocene is likely to have been the summer monsoon,” said Dixit. “But we have observed that there was an abrupt change, when the amount of evaporation from the lake exceeded the rainfall – indicative of a drought.”

At this time large parts of modern Pakistan and much of western India was home to South Asia’s great Bronze Age urban society. As Petrie explained: “The major cities of the Indus civilisation flourished in the mid-late 3rd and early 2nd millennium BC. Large proportions of the population lived in villages, but many people also lived in  ‘megacities’ that were 80 hectares or more in size – roughly the size of 100 football pitches. They engaged in elaborate crafts, extensive local trade and long-ranging trade with regions as far away as the modern-day Middle East. But, by the mid 2nd millennium BC, all of the great urban centres had dramatically reduced in size or been abandoned.”

Many possible causes have been suggested, including the claim that major glacier-fed rivers changed their course, dramatically affecting the water supply and the reliant agriculture. It has also been suggested that an increasing population level caused problems, there was invasion and conflict, or that climate change caused a drought that large cities could not withstand long-term.

“We know that there was a clear shift away from large populations living in megacities,” said Petrie. “But precisely what happened to the Indus Civilisation has remained a mystery. It is unlikely that there was a single cause, but a climate change event would have induced a whole host of knock-on effects.

“We have lacked well-dated local climate data, as well as dates for when perennial water flowed and stopped in a number of now abandoned river channels, and an understanding of the spatial and temporal relationships between settlements and their environmental contexts. A lot of the archaeological debate has really been well-argued speculation.”

The new data, collected with funding from the Natural Environment Research Council, show a decreased summer monsoon rainfall at the same time that archaeological records and radiocarbon dates suggest the beginning of the Indus de-urbanisation. From 6,500 to 5,800 years ago, a deep fresh-water lake existed at Kotla Dahar. The deep lake transformed to a shallow lake after 5,800 years ago, indicating a weakening of the Indian summer monsoon. But an abrupt monsoon weakening occurred 4,100 years ago for 200 years and the lake became ephemeral after this time.

Until now, the suggestion that climate change might have had an impact on the Indus Civilisation was based on data showing a lessening of the monsoon in Oman and the Arabian Sea, which are both located at a considerable distance from Indus Civilisation settlements and at least partly affected by different weather systems.

Hodell and Dixit used isotope geochemical analysis of shells as a proxy for tracing the climate history of the region. Oxygen exists in two forms – the lighter ¹⁶O and a heavier ¹⁸O variant. When water evaporates from a closed lake (one that is fed by rainfall and rivers but has no outflow), molecules containing the lighter isotope evaporate at a faster rate than those containing the heavier isotopes; at times of drought, when the evaporation exceeds rainfall, there is a net increase in the ratio of ¹⁸O to ¹⁶O of the water. Organisms living in the lake record this ratio when they incorporate oxygen into the calcium carbonate (CaCO3) of their shells, and can therefore be used, in conjunction with radiocarbon dating, to reconstruct the climate of the region thousands of years ago.

Speculating on the effect lessening rainfall would have had on the Indus Civilisation, Petrie said: “Archaeological records suggest they were masters of many trades. They used elaborate techniques to produce a range of extremely impressive craft products using materials like steatite, carnelian and gold, and this material was widely distributed within South Asia, but also internationally. Each city had substantial fortification walls, civic amenities, craft workshops and possibly also palaces. Houses were arranged on wide main streets and narrow alleyways, and many had their own wells and drainage systems. Water was clearly an integral part of urban planning, and was also essential for supporting the agricultural base.

At around the time we see the evidence for climatic change, archaeologists have found evidence of previously maintained streets start to fill with rubbish, over time there is a reduced sophistication in the crafts they used, the script that had been used for several centuries disappears and there were changes in the location of settlements, suggesting some degree of demographic shift.”

“We estimate that the climate event lasted about 200 years before recovering to the previous conditions, which we still see today, and we believe that the civilisation somehow had to cope with this prolonged period of drought,” said Hodell.

The new research is part of a wider joint project led by the University of Cambridge and Banaras Hindu University in India, which has been funded by the British Council UK-India Education and Research Initiative to investigate the archaeology, river systems and climate of north-west India using a combination of archaeology and geoscience. The multidisciplinary project hopes to provide new understanding of the relationships between humans and their environment, and also involves researchers at Imperial College London, the University of Oxford, the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and the Uttar Pradesh State Archaeology Department.

“It is essential to understand the link between human settlement, water resources and landscape in antiquity, and this research is an important step in that direction,” explained Petrie. “We hope that this will hold lessons for us as we seek to find means of dealing with climate change in our own and future generations.”

Inset image upper: one of the snail shells collected for the study.

Inset image lower: Cameron Petrie in the field.

Cities have always been a magnet to migrants. In 2010, a tipping point was reached for the first time when, according to the World Health Organization, the majority of the world’s population lived in cities. By 2050, seven out of 10 people will have been born in – or migrated to – a city. One hundred years ago, that figure was two out of 10.

Today, cities are generally the safest places to live. If you live in one, you’re likely to be richer than someone living in a rural environment. If you’re richer, you’re likely to live longer. If you live in a city, you have better access to hospitals and healthcare, and you’re more likely to be immunised.

But that was not always the case. In 17th- and 18th-century England, city life was lethal – disproportionately so for those migrating from the countryside.

Dr Romola Davenport is studying the effects of migration on the health of those living in London and Manchester from 1750 to 1850, with a particular focus on the lethality of smallpox – the single most deadly disease in 18th-century England. In the century before 1750, England’s population had failed to grow. Cities and towns sucked in tens of thousands of migratory men, women and children – then killed them. It’s estimated that half of the natural growth of the English population was consumed by London deaths during this period. Burials often outstripped baptisms.

In 2013, cities are no longer the death traps they once were, even accounting for the millions of migrants who live in poor, often slum-like conditions. But will cities always be better places to live? What could eliminate the ‘urban advantage’ and what might the future of our cities look like if antibiotics stop working?

By looking at the past – and trying to make sense of the sudden, vast improvement in survival rates after 1750 – Davenport and the University of Newcastle’s Professor Jeremy Boulton hope to understand more about city life and mortality.

“For modern migrants to urban areas there is no necessary trade-off of health for wealth,” said Davenport. “Historically, however, migrants often took substantial risks in moving from rural to urban areas because cities were characterised by substantially higher death rates than rural areas, and wealth appears to have conferred little survival advantage.”

The intensity of the infectious disease environment overwhelmed any advantages of the wealthy – such as better housing, food and heating. Although cities and towns offered unparalleled economic opportunities for migrants, wealth could not compensate for the higher health risks exacted by urban living.

“Urban populations are large and dense, which facilitates the transmission of infectious diseases from person to person or via animals or sewage. Towns functioned as trading posts not only for ideas and goods but also for pathogens. Therefore, growing an urban population relied upon substantial immigration from rural areas,” explained Davenport.

“After 1750, cities no longer functioned as ‘demographic sinks’ because there was a rapid improvement in urban mortality rates in Britain. By the mid-19th century, even the most notorious industrial cities such as Liverpool and Manchester were capable of a natural increase, with the number of births exceeding deaths.”

Davenport has been studying the processes of urban mortality improvement and changing migrant risks using extremely rich source material from the large London parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields. The research, funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Economic and Social Research Council, is now being augmented with abundant demographic archives from Manchester, funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

For both cities, Davenport and colleagues have access to detailed records of the individual burials underlying the Bills of Mortality, which were the main source of urban mortality statistics from the 17th to the 18th century. These give age at death, cause of death, street address and the fee paid for burial, which enables them to study the age and sex distribution of deaths by disease. In addition, baptismal data allow them to ‘reconstitute’ families as well as to measure the mortality rates of infants by social status.

“The records themselves give only a bald account of death,” said Davenport. “But sometimes we can link them to workhouse records and personal accounts, especially among the migrant poor, which really bring home the realities of life and death in early modern London.

“Smallpox was deadly. At its height, it accounted for 10% of all burials in London and an astonishing 20% in Manchester. Children were worst affected, but 20% of London’s smallpox victims were adults – likely to be migrants who had never been exposed to, and survived, the disease in childhood. However in Manchester – a town that grew from 20,000 to 250,000 in a century – 95% of smallpox burials were children in the mid-18th century, implying a high level of endemicity not only in Manchester but also in the rural areas that supplied migrants to the city.

“So studying urban populations can tell us not only about conditions in cities but also about the circulation of diseases in the rest of the population.”

The greater lethality of smallpox in Manchester is, for the moment, still a mystery to researchers; but evidence suggests the potential importance of transmission via clothing or other means – as opposed to the person-to-person transmission assumed in mathematical models of smallpox transmission in bioterrorism scenarios. Although smallpox was eradicated in the late 1970s, both the USA and Russia have stockpiles of the virus – which has led to fears of their use by terrorists should the virus ever fall into the wrong hands. Data on smallpox epidemics before the introduction of vaccination in the late 1790s are very valuable to bioterrorism researchers because they provide insights into how the virus might spread in an unvaccinated population (only a small proportion of the world’s population is vaccinated against smallpox).

From 1770 onwards, there was a rapid decline in adult smallpox victims in both London and Manchester, which Davenport believes could be attributable to a rapid upsurge in the use of smallpox inoculation (a precursor of vaccination) by would-be migrants or a change in the transmissibility and potency of the disease. By the mid-19th century, towns and cities appear to have been relatively healthy destinations for young adult migrants, although still deadly for children.

“Smallpox was probably the major cause of the peculiar lethality of even small urban settlements in the 17th and 18th centuries,” said Davenport, “and this highlights how a single pathogen, like plague or HIV, can dramatically alter the risks associated with migration and migratory patterns.”  

“The close relationship between wealth and health that explains much of the current ‘urban advantage’ is not a constant but emerged in England in the 19th century,” added Davenport. “While wealth can now buy better access to medical treatment, as well as better food and housing, it remains an open question as to whether this relationship will persist indefinitely in the face of emerging threats such as microbial drug resistance.”

Inset image: William Hogarth's A Harlot's Progress, plate 1, showing Molly's arrival in London

New research from a major ‘randomised’ US crime study conducted 23 years ago finds that domestic violence victims whose partners were arrested on common assault charges – mostly without causing injury – were 64% more likely to have died early, compared to victims whose partners were warned but not removed by police. 

Among African-American victims, arrest increased early mortality by a staggering 98% – as opposed to white victims, whose mortality was increased from arrest by just 9%.

The research also found that employed victims suffered the worst effects of their partners’ arrests. Employed black victims with arrested partners suffered a death rate over four times higher than those whose partner received a warning, which is given at the scene and does not create a criminal record. No such link was found in white victims. 

The vast majority of victim deaths following the Milwaukee Domestic Violence Experiment were not murders, accidents or suicides. The victims died from common causes of death such as heart disease, cancer and other internal illnesses.

The study’s authors say that causes are currently unknown but such health impacts are consistent with chronic stress that could have been amplified by partner arrest. They call for a “robust review” of UK and US mandatory arrest policies in domestic violence cases. 

“It remains to be seen whether democracies can accept these facts as they are, rather than as we might wish them to be,” said Professor Lawrence Sherman from Cambridge University’s Institute of Criminology, who authored the study with his colleague Heather M. Harris from University of Maryland.

“The fact that there has never been a fair test of the benefits and harms of so-called ‘positive action’ policy in the UK means that British police can only be guided by US evidence. That evidence clearly indicates more death than life results in at least one large sample.”

“If the current policy is to be continued in the UK, the moral burden of proof now lies with those who wish to continue this mass arrest policy.”

The findings will be announced in the US today and presented in the UK this Wednesday at the winter meeting of the Society of Evidence-Based Policing. They will be published in a forthcoming edition of the Journal of Experimental Criminology.

Previous studies have shown post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) to be prevalent in victims of domestic violence, and that low but chronic PTSS has been linked to premature death from coronary heart disease and other health problems. The authors observed that the impact of seeing a partner arrested could create a traumatic event for the victim, one that raises their risk of death. An arrest may cause more trauma in concentrated black poverty areas than in white working-class neighbourhoods, for reasons not yet understood.    

The exact cause of these surprising results still remains a ‘medical mystery,’ the study’s authors say. But, whatever the explanation, the harmful effects of mandatory arrest poses a challenge to policies that have “been on the books” in most US states and across the UK for decades, they say.

“The evidence shows that black women are dying at a much higher rate than white women from a policy that was intended to protect all victims of domestic violence, regardless of race,” said Sherman. “It is now clear that a pro-arrest policy has failed to protect all victims, and that a robust review of these policies is urgently needed.”

“Because all the victims had an equal chance of having their partners arrested by random assignment, there is no other likely explanation for this difference except that it was caused by seeing their partners arrested.”

The Milwaukee Domestic Violence Experiment took place between 1987 and 1988, with support from the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the US Department of Justice. Sherman, who led the study, described it as “arguably the most rigorous test ever conducted of the effects of arrest”.  

The experiment enrolled 1,125 victims of domestic violence whose average age was 30 years. Each case was the subject of an equal probability ‘lottery’ of random assignment. Two-thirds of the suspects were arrested with immediate jailing. One-third received a warning at the scene with no arrest. In 2012-13, Sherman and Harris searched state and national records for the names of every one of the victims.

The record search showed that a total of 91 victims had died. Of these, 70 had been in the group whose partners were arrested, compared to 21 whose partners had been warned. This translated into 93 deaths per 1,000 victims in the arrest group, versus 57 deaths per 1000 in the warned group. For the 791 black victims (who were 70% of the sample), the rates were 98 per 1,000 for arrest, versus 50 per 1,000 for the warned group.

“These differences are too large to be due to chance,” Sherman said. “They are also too large to be ignored.”

Over 100,000 arrests are made each year in England and Wales for domestic abuse, with most cases not proceeding to prosecution. The cost is substantial, at fifteen to twenty per cent of all arrests police make. Sherman, who has long-campaigned for ‘evidence-based’ policing, said that the “only way proof can be attained is for one or more UK police agencies, or perhaps the College of Policing, to conduct the same experiment that the Milwaukee Police undertook in 1987-88”.

Organised annually by Cambridge University Students Union (CUSU), the shadowing scheme aims to give prospective students from under-represented groups and non-traditional backgrounds the opportunity to experience life at a top university from the inside.

Priority for places on the shadowing scheme is given to applicants with a strong academic track record, but who attend schools or colleges with little experience of sending students to Cambridge or Oxford, and who have few family members with experience of higher education.

“We were delighted to welcome a strong group of mature students this year,” commented Sam Ruiz, CUSU’s Access Officer and organiser of the scheme. “It’s just as important for them to experience Cambridge for themselves as it is for teenagers,”

“The participation of the mature Colleges in the shadowing scheme means that shadows are able to have their questions answered by students and academics familiar with the concerns of mature students, which can be different to those of standard-age undergraduates.”

Kimberley Andrews stayed at Lucy Cavendish College and is interested in studying law. “I had an idea about what it would be like and wanted to see if my ambition was realistic,” she said. “I also wanted to find out more about the living arrangements – as a mother of two, I wanted to be sure that it would be practical to study here with my family. I have realised it is possible to do this as there are many women here who are both mothers and successful students.”

The opportunity for an insight into the workload of a typical Cambridge student was also valued.  Katy Collins attended supervisions with her mentor, an HSPS undergraduate from Wolfson. “After my mentor introduced me as a shadow in lectures and supervisions, the tutors included me just like the students and I really got involved,” she said. “It was a good experience.”

For Ariane Quillery, who is still deciding whether to apply, her time as a shadow reassured her that the academic standard required to cope with an undergraduate course is attainable. “I wanted to see how life as a Cambridge student is,” Ariane explained. “I wasn’t very confident but the scheme has given me the confidence to apply. I feel that I can do this.”

Kimberley also found her confidence developed by the scheme. “The work load is intense, but I feel encouraged by the very supportive atmosphere, especially the supervision system.”

The opportunity to study alongside like-minded people was also important to Giorgia Mineo. “I wanted to see how the teaching works,” Gioriga said. “I’ve been to other universities and didn’t like their approach. I wanted to see how Cambridge does it. I’m very excited now and hope I get the chance to study here. Everyone is so focused, it would help me to study without distraction.”

Although mature students can apply to any of the undergraduate Colleges, four of Cambridge’s Colleges admit only mature undergraduate students.  These Colleges are particularly familiar with those applying through non-standard application routes.

Adderley Wilkinson hopes to study History and shadowed a Wolfson undergraduate. “I’m currently on an Access course,” he said. “Cambridge is incredibly open to mature students and very active about approaching students from different educational backgrounds.

“I wanted to come on the scheme to build my confidence. I’ve really enjoyed it and feel it’s the right choice for me, especially the one-on-one teaching. It’s a great system that’s well worth the rigour of applying,” he added.

Ferzana Yesmine wished she had been able to come on the shadowing scheme in 2013. She is already holding an offer for 2014 entry but wanted to be sure she had made the right decision.

“I wanted some insight into lectures, how the life is, whether I can cope,” Ferzana said. “The girls at Lucy Cavendish have done so much for me. I was very anxious but now I’m feeling much more confident.”

Lucy Cavendish student Ateka Tarajia came to Cambridge as a shadow herself in 2013. Now studying Education with History, she volunteered as a mentor this year. “The shadowing scheme provides an invaluable experience for those who take part, giving a renewed sense of motivation and courage in the preparation and application process,” Ateka said.

The University of Cambridge welcomes applications from high-achieving mature students from wide-ranging backgrounds.  The support for mature students at Cambridge includes a generous bursary package (subject to eligibility), a residential programme to develop study skills, and specific help for those who are parents or have learning difficulties or disabilities.

Dr Lesley MacVinish, Admissions Tutor at Wolfson College, said “It was a pleasure to host such a talented and enthusiastic group of people at Wolfson, and invite them to witness at first hand the level of intellectual adventure that Cambridge affords.”

Dr Emily Tomlinson, Admissions Tutor at Lucy Cavendish College, said "Lucy Cavendish was delighted to welcome our 'shadows' and show them what a warm and diverse community exists at the College."

Applications for the 2015 Shadowing Scheme will open in October 2014. More information is available at: www.applytocambridge.com or www.applytocambridge.com/shadowing

In December 2013 Professor Michael Green of Cambridge University and Professor John Schwarz of California Institute of Technology were awarded the 2014 Fundamental Physics Prize, one of a series of annual 'Breakthrough Prizes' set up to raise the profile of the physical and biological sciences. Their shared $3 mn prize was given for “opening new perspectives on quantum gravity and the unification of forces”.

Green and Schwarz are known for their pioneering work in string theory, postulated as a way of explaining the fundamental constituents of the universe as tiny vibrating strings. Different types of elementary particles arise in this theory as different vibrational harmonics (or ‘notes’). The scope of string theory has broadened over the past few years and is currently being applied to a far wider field than that for which it was first devised, which has taken those who research into it in unexpected directions.

Although the term ‘string theory’ was not coined till 1971, it had its genesis in a paper by the Italian physicist Gabriele Veneziano in 1968, published when Green was a research student in Cambridge. Green was rapidly impressed by its potential and began working seriously on it in the early 1970s. As he explains in the accompanying film, he stuck with string theory during a period when it was overshadowed by other developments in elementary particle physics.

As a result of a chance meeting at the CERN accelerator laboratory in Switzerland in the summer of 1979, Green (then a researcher at Queen Mary, London) began to work on string theory with Schwarz. Green says that the relative absence of interest in string theory during the 1970s and early 1980s was actually helpful: it allowed him and a small number of colleagues to focus on their research well away from the limelight.

“Initially we were not sure that the theory would be consistent, but as we understood it better we became more and more convinced that the theory had something valuable to say about the fundamental particles and their forces,” he says.

In August 1984 the two researchers, while working at the Aspen Center for Physics in Colorado, famously understood how string theory avoids certain inconsistencies (known as ‘anomalies’) that plague more conventional theories in which the fundamental particles are points rather than strings. This convinced other researchers of the potential of string theory as an elegant unified description of fundamental physics. 

“Suddenly our world changed - and we were called on to give lectures and attend meetings and workshops,” remembers Green.

String theory was back on track as a construct that offered a compelling explanation for the fundamental building blocks of the universe: many researchers shifted the focus of their work into this newly-promising field and, as a result of this upturn in interest, developments in string theory began to take new and unexpected directions.

Ideas formulated in the past few years, indicate that string theory has an overarching mathematical structure that may be useful for understanding a much wider variety of problems in theoretical physics that the theory was originally supposed to explain – this includes problems in condensed matter, superconductivity, plasma physics and the physics of fluids.  

Green is a passionate believer in the exchange of ideas and he values immensely his interaction with the latest generation of researchers to be tackling some of the knottiest problems in particle physics and associated fields.

“The best ideas come from the young people entering the field and we need to make sure we continue to attract them into research. It is particularly evident that at present we fail to encourage sufficient numbers of young women to think about careers in physics,” he says. “Scientific research is by its nature competitive and there are, of course, professional jealousies - but there’s also a strong tradition of collaboration in theoretical physics and advances in the subject feel like a communal activity.”

In 2009 Green was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. It comes with a legacy that Green describes as daunting: his immediate predecessor was Professor Stephen Hawking and in its 350-year history the chair has been held by a series of formidable names in the history of mathematical sciences.

The challenges of pushing forward the boundaries in a field that demands thinking in not three dimensions but as many as 11 are tremendous. The explanation of the basic building blocks of nature as different harmonics of a string is only a small part of string theory – and is the feature that is easiest to put across to the general public as it is relatively straightforward to visualise.

“Far harder to articulate in words are concepts to do with explaining how time and space might emerge from the theory,” says Green. “Sometimes you hit a problem that you just can’t get out of your head and carry round with you wherever you are. It’s almost a cliché that it’s often when you’re relaxing that a solution will spontaneously present itself.”

Like his colleagues Green is motivated by wonderment at the world and the excitement of being part of a close community grappling with fundamental questions. He is often asked to justify the cost of research that can seem so remote from everyday life, and that cannot be tested in any conventional sense. In response he gives the example of the way in which quantum mechanics has revolutionised the way in which many of us live.

In terms of developments that may come from advances in string theory, he says: “We can’t predict what the eventual outcomes of our research will be. But, if we are successful, they will certainly be huge - and in the meantime, string theory provides a constant stream of unexpected surprises.”

Michael Green will be giving a lecture – ‘The pointless Universe’ – as part of Cambridge Science Festival on Thursday 13 March, 5pm-6pm, at Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Site, Cambridge. The event is free but requires pre-booking.

For more information about this story contact Alexandra Buxton, Office of Communications, University of Cambridge, amb206@admin.cam.ac.uk 01223 761673
 

A major book launch held this week will highlight the lives and work of women at the University of Cambridge.

The event will feature BBC newsreader Jane Hill interviewing women featured in the book as part of a panel discussion.

The Meaning of Success profiles 26 women at Cambridge – from world-leading academics, to key administrative staff – and features contributions from another 100. 

Professor Dame Athene Donald, Gender Equality Champion at University of Cambridge, says in the preface to the book: “As I read the stories these women reveal, I was moved and I was excited. Within an academic environment, too often the individual stories and voices are lost. Here we can reclaim a few of these and profit from what we hear.”

Women featured are from across the spectrum of staff within the University and include masters of Colleges, senior scientists, office managers, an educational outreach officer and administrative staff.

Interviews with leading female figures within the University include a section on Professor Mary Beard, famous for her popular TV programmes on Roman history.

Famed for her stance against Twitter trolls, the academic is equally strident in ideas of what defines success: “I find that people who are most talented in helping me to rethink my ideas often don’t measure up to the more usual marks of success.”

Working at the Judge Business School as a Research and Teaching Fellow, Dr Shima Barakat started her career as a construction engineer. Her approach to situations is revealed in the book: “My starting point is that I have the power to change something and I go from there.”

Her attitude helped her deal with many situations, including being the only women in a Cairo construction workforce of 400, but she details how there is still a need to do more than expect the individual to change to fit a situation: “Our systems are inconsistent and based on a masculine world view. We need to question them because they determine who gets recognised as successful.”

Each in-depth interview is accompanied by portrait photographs by Pari Naderi – images that will feature in a special Success: Women at Cambridge exhibition to be held next week at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

The book will be launched at a special event on Wednesday, 5 March – at the West Road Concert Hall in Cambridge.

Image: Dr Shima Barakat. Credit: University of Cambridge.