The delegation was timed to build on the momentum generated by the G8 Dementia Summit, which took place in London in December 2013.

It included Congresswoman Lois Frankel, Congresswoman Doris Matsui, Rima Cohen, Counselor for Health Policy to the US Secretary of Health and Human Services, and Dr David Reuben, Director of the Multicampus Programme in Geriatrics Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Center for Health Sciences.

The purpose of the trip was to deepen understanding of the ways in which US and UK policymakers and healthcare leaders can jointly address the escalating challenge that the ageing population and specifically Alzheimer’s disease poses to our global society.

Delegates participated in a roundtable discussion on dementia research and Cambridge Cognition’s development of a new electronic iPad device which can assess cognition function. This was led by Barbara Sahakian, Professor of Clinical Neuropsychology and President of the British Association for Psychopharmacology.

In the afternoon, they took part in another roundtable on the public health impact of dementia, led by Professor Carol Brayne, Director, Institute of Public Health. Professor Brayne’s research programme is based on longitudinal population based studies of people aged 65 and above and has been running since 1985. She has been involved in US-UK exchanges between the University of Cambridge and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The delegation met the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz and Dr Jennifer Barnes, Pro-Vice Chancellor for International Strategy, to discuss global engagement and international collaborations between different laboratories.

In the evening they had dinner with Cambridge academics, including Professor Sahakian, Professor Chris Dobson, Master of St John’s, Professor of Chemical and Structural Biology and a leading Alzheimer’s expert, and Dr James Rowe, a clinical neuroscientist specialising in neurodegenerative disease.

During their four-day stay in the UK the delegation also met Secretary of State for Health Jeremy Hunt, Norman Lamb, Minister for State for Care and Support, Hazel Blears, former Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Sir Mark Walport, Chief Scientific Advisor to Her Majesty’s Government, senior health policy officials from the Department of Health and NHS and members of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Dementia.

The delegation was led by Dr Lindsay Chura, a former Gates Cambridge Scholar who is now a Senior Policy Advisor in Science and Innovation at the British Embassy in Washington. 

Chura, who did her PhD in the Department of Psychiatry said: “Through participation in this delegation it is hoped that delegates will develop new perspective on the multifaceted ways in which policymakers from the US and UK can work together to address shifting age demographics through public policy, urban planning, and biomedical research.

“A list of follow-up actions from conversations between US and UK officials was compiled that will advance the Prime Minister’s Dementia Challenge  and the Declaration signed at the G8 Summit on Dementia.”

Professor Sahakian added: "Prime Minister David Cameron has been a champion of early diagnosis and early effective treatment and management for people with Alzheimer's disease, as seen from his March 2012 and December 2013 G8 speeches on dementia. The meetings between the USA Congressional Delegation on Dementia and the UK All Party Parliamentary Group on Dementia will further the aims of President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron in ensuring that people with dementia are detected early and receive the best possible treatments and management currently available. As novel neuroprotective drugs, which halt the underlying disease process, become available, it is essential to ensure people with Alzheimer's disease are given these drugs early in the course of the disease in order to preserve functionality, quality of life and wellbeing."

The delegation comprised:

- Congresswoman Doris Matsui, who represents California’s 6th congressional district, which includes the city of Sacramento, the capitol of California
- Congresswoman Lois Frankel, who represents Florida’s 22nd congressional district
- Rima Cohen, Acting Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation and the Counselor for Health Policy at the US Department of Health and Human Services
- Dr David Reuben, Director, Multicampus Program in Geriatrics Medicine and Gerontology and Chief, Division of Geriatrics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Center for Health Sciences
- Julie Eddy, Chief of Staff for Congresswoman Doris Matsui
- Maisha Leek, Chief of Staff for Congressman Chaka Fattah, representing Pennsylvania’s 2nd Congressional District (Congressman Fattah joined the briefing by video link)
- Stephanie J. Monroe, Director of USAgainstAlzheimer’s African American Network Against Alzheimer’s
- Matthew Mazonkey, Congressional Advisor for British Embassy in Washington, DC

Moss FM, which harnesses plant photosynthesis to power a radio for a short time, is the result of a collaboration between plant scientist Ross Dennis, biochemist Dr Paolo Bombelli and a designer, Fabienne Felder, who has a passion for ‘biophilic design’ inspired by the natural world.

When a plant photosynthesises, energy from the sun is used to convert carbon dioxide into organic compounds that the plant needs to grow. Some of the compounds – such as carbohydrates, proteins and lipids – are leached into the soil where they are broken down by bacteria, which in turn release by-products as part of the process. One of these by-products happens to be electrons, which can be captured by conductive fibres in the soil. It is this that is the key to how this emerging technology, known as biophotovoltaics (BPV), could turn out to be an important addition to the world of renewable energy, making the most of naturally produced energy that would otherwise be wasted.

Fabienne Felder had heard about the Moss Table, the team’s first attempt to showcase this technology by “plugging” large quantities of moss into a table with a built-in lamp, and was keen to work with them.

“The Moss Table was a beautiful design, created by Alex Driver and Carlos Peralta from the Institute for Manufacturing, but it was a concept product, showing how BPV technology could be used in the future. It didn’t produce enough energy actually to power the light, although we were able to run a digital clock from it. When Fabienne approached us, it felt like a good opportunity to create a working model that could show how far we have come in the development of this technology”, said Dennis, whose research in the Department of Plant Sciences into the evolution of early land plants focusses particularly on moss.

Whereas in the Moss Table the designers sought a streamlined look, Felder wanted to ensure that the process of how BPV works would be totally transparent to the viewer, and so she designed Moss FM as a functional product where everything is on show.

“There is still a long way to go in developing BPV to the point where it could be used in commercial products. For now, we are focussing on the science – improving the transport of electrons and making sure we optimise the energy output. We are hoping  in the next five to ten years to be able to achieve an output that is at least as good as current biofuels”,  Dr Bombelli, of the Department of Biochemistry, explained.

Paolo Bombelli and Ross Dennis will be taking their moss-powered technology to the Edinburgh International  Science Festival in April, and to Cambridge’s Botanic Garden later this year at the Festival of Plants, where they will be building a living green wall that they hope will produce enough electricity to charge a mobile phone.

To see Moss FM in action, and to find out more from the researchers themselves,  come along to the Institute of Manufacturing on Saturday 22 March from 1 to 5pm http://www.cam.ac.uk/science-festival/events-and-booking/fantastech

For more information about the Cambridge Science Festival, please visit: www.cam.ac.uk/science-festival

Further news stories about the Cambridge Science Festival can be viewed here:  www.cam.ac.uk/science-festival/news

Will Gaia discover habitable planets similar to the Earth? Is the Universe infinite? Could Gaia be hit by a piece of space debris as in the film Gravity? How many planets are there in the Milky Way?

Children often ask the best questions. These ones come from pupils at schools in Italy, France, Poland and the UK. Their requests for information about space and our Universe are just some of the dozens of questions that will be answered tomorrow by top space scientists as part of a live event. The online Q&A session will link a total of more than 70 institutions across Europe in an ambitious initiative designed to engage school pupils in the excitement of astronomy in general and the science of the Gaia programme, in particular.

Tomorrow’s event is the culmination of an educational outreach project, called Gaia Live in School, which connects more than 2,000 children at 34 schools with leading European space research institutions. The project has been conceived and coordinated by Dr Nicholas Walton, a research fellow at Cambridge University’s Institute of Astronomy, coordinator of the Gaia Research for European Astronomy Training network, and the UK member of the European Space Agency (ESA) Gaia Science Team.

The queries and responses will be filmed by a professional crew at ESA’s European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, and streamed live to the schools involved via a dedicated livestream channel. Responding to the children’s questions will be the Gaia project scientist, Dr Timo Prusti, and the Gaia spacecraft manager, David Milligan. Both are key members of the team at ESA, responsible for Gaia as it embarks on its five-year mission to map a billion stars in our Milky Way.

“Gaia is set to provide the most complete 3-D map of our Galaxy, and allow astronomers to, for instance, directly measure Dark Matter in our galaxy, unravel the formation history of the Milky Way, search for new extra-solar planets, and much more,” said Walton.

“We hope tomorrow will be a fun day for everyone and show children how their everyday mathematics and science can be applied to cutting edge space missions.

The schools taking part in the event are spread right across Europe – from the Canary Islands, Spain in the south to Finland in the north. Each school is linked to a research institute in its area and each one will benefit from two post graduate students from that institute, who will be present in the classroom to work with teachers and act as ‘explainers’. The event has been designed to appeal to children aged around 12, an age when children are mature enough to grasp quite tricky concepts and also extremely open to new ideas.

The ‘explainers’ have all benefited from a training course at ESA’s space technology centre (ESTEC) where they learned how to present advanced scientific content to school-aged children in an accessible way. Teachers from the participating schools have met with the ‘explainers’, to gain information about the background, capabilities and mission of Gaia, enabling them to explain to their pupils what the programme is setting out to achieve and how the international team behind it has been created.

Two Cambridgeshire secondary schools – Parkside Community College and Cottenham Village College – are taking part in Gaia Live in School. Cambridge University PhD student, Iulia Simion, will spend the day with year-7 pupils at Parkside. She said: “We will explore our ‘neighbourhood’ by looking at the general properties of the Solar System and the Milky Way and we will talk about the Gaia mission - introducing the concept of parallax, fundamental for understanding how Gaia estimates distances - using hands-on demonstrations, videos and the live connection to  ESOC.”

Simion, who is doing her PhD on the structure of the Milky Way, says that her interest in astronomy started when she was very young. She explained: “As a child growing up in Romania and Italy I had many books with ‘pretty’ pictures of planets, galaxies, supernovae and comets. I did not particularly like physics at that time, but understanding the scientific mechanisms behind those beautiful images proved, as I got older, to be very rewarding and has led me to become an astronomer."

Walton’s research looks at the structure of the Universe at the largest scales through the study of Supernova, and nearer by in the Milky Way utilising large area imaging surveys to map the galactic plane. For him, the momentum to learn more about the cosmos also came at an early age. He remembers the excitement when the first probes landed on Mars, and beamed those pictures of the red planet back to Earth, and seeing these images at an after-school physics club at secondary school.

The ‘Gaia Live’ Q&As will be accompanied by film clips and the latest astronomical images of the Milky Way and our Solar System to enliven and illustrate the points discussed about the Gaia mission. The session will be followed by demonstrations of how to get involved in the science of space exploration in a hands-on way, such as how to build your own telescope, how Gaia measures the distances to stars just by taking pictures of the sky (using parallax), and how to create your own model of Gaia.

“We hope that the Gaia Live event will inspire a large number of the next generation of scientists, some of whom might well lead the next wave of astronomical and space discovery in future years,” said Walton.

Inset images: David Milligan, Gaia Spacecraft Operations Manager (ESA/J Mai); Iulia Simion.

Parents are strong influences in the lives of young children, with patterns of behaviour established in the early years laying the foundation for future choices. A new study suggests that, when it comes to levels of physical activity, it is mothers who set (or don’t set) the pace.

An analysis of the physical activity levels of more than 500 mothers and pre-schoolers, assessed using activity monitors to produce accurate data, found that the amount of activity that a mother and her child did each day was closely related. Overall, maternal activity levels were strikingly low: only 53% of mothers engaged in 30 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity at least once a week. The UK Government recommends achieving 150 minutes of at least ‘moderate intensity physical activity’ (such as brisk walking) over the week as one of the ways of achieving its physical activity guidelines.

The results of the study are published today (24 March 2014) in the journal Pediatrics. The paper ‘Activity Levels in Mothers and Their Preschool Children’ suggests that, given the link between mothers and young children, policies to improve children’s health should be directed to whole families and seek to engage mothers in particular.

The research was overseen by Dr Esther van Sluijs at the MRC Epidemiology Unit and the Centre for Diet and Activity Research, University of Cambridge, and led by Kathryn Hesketh (formerly of Cambridge and now UCL), in collaboration with researchers at the MRC Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit, University of Southampton.

The study is the first to show a direct association in a large sample of mothers and children, both fitted with activity monitors at the same time. It shows that young children are not ‘just naturally active’ and that parents have an important role to play in the development of healthy activity habits early on in life. The research also provides important evidence for policy makers to inform programmes that promote physical activity in families with young children. Its findings suggest that all family members can benefit from such efforts.

It is well established that physical activity is closely linked to health and disease prevention. Research shows that active mothers appear to have active school-aged children, who are in turn more likely than their less active peers to have good health outcomes. However, there has been little large-scale research into the association between the activity of mothers and that of preschool-aged children or about the demographic and temporal factors that influence activity levels in mothers of young children.

The research published in the Pediatrics paper drew on data obtained from 554 women and their four-year-old children who are participants in the Southampton Women’s Survey, devised and run by the MRC Lifecourse Epidemiology Unit. A major longitudinal study initiated in the late 1990s, the project is following women who were first interviewed in their 20s and 30s, many of whom subsequently gave birth. From confirmation of pregnancy, the programme assesses the health and development of the children born to women in the survey.

Of the 554 mothers whose data was analysed in the Cambridge-led study, many were working and many of the children attended day-care facilities – factors that influenced activity levels of both mothers and children, as well as the association between the two. Other potential influences on maternal activity examined in the study included maternal education, whether the child had siblings, and whether his or her father was present at home.

While previous studies have used a self-report approach to measure activity, in the Southampton Women’s Survey both mothers and youngsters were fitted with Actiheart monitors (combined accelerometer and heart rate monitor) to record with a high degree of accuracy their physical activity levels for up to a week with a high degree of accuracy.  “We used an activity monitor that was attached to participants and worn continuously, even during sleep and water-based activity,” said van Sluijs.

“This approach allowed us to capture accurately both mothers’ and children’s physical activity levels for the whole of the measurement period, matching hour for hour maternal-child activity levels. This comparison provided us with detailed information about how the association between mothers and children’s activity changed throughout the day, and how factors such as childcare attendance and maternal education influenced this relationship.”

The activity levels of parent and child were, for the first time, recorded over whole daytime periods for up to seven days. The resulting data allowed the researchers to plot physical activity throughout the day and over the course of an entire week to see how activities varied across the day and how weekday activity levels compared with weekend activity levels.

The data from mother and child were matched up to see if and how the activity patterns of adults and children correlated. “We saw a direct, positive association between physical activity in children and their mothers – the more activity a mother did, the more active her child. Although it is not possible to tell from this study whether active children were making their mothers run around after them, it is likely that activity in one of the pair influences activity in the other,” said Hesketh.

“For every minute of moderate-to-vigorous activity a mother engaged in, her child was more likely to engage in 10% more of the same level of activity. If a mother was one hour less sedentary per day, her child may have spent 10 minutes less sedentary per day. Such small minute-by-minute differences may therefore represent a non-trivial amount of activity over the course of a week, month and year.”

The direct positive association between mothers and their four-year-old children was apparent for overall daily activity levels and activity segmented over the day (morning, afternoon and evening). This finding suggests that mothers and their children are active concurrently. However, the association differed by child’s weight status, time spent at preschool, duration of mother’s schooling and by time of day and week.

“Our study shows that the relationship between mother and child activity is moderated by demographic and time factors – for example, for moderate-to-vigorous activity, the relationship was stronger for mothers who left school aged 16 compared to those who left aged 18 or more. The association also differed by time of week, with light activity, such as walking, most strongly associated at weekends than on weekdays. The opposite was observed for moderate-to-vigorous activity which was more strongly associated on weekdays,” said van Sluijs.

The research adds a further dimension to what is already known about levels of physical activity in children and adults. Despite strong evidence of the benefits of exercise, activity levels decrease through childhood and into adulthood. This decline extends into the childbearing years. New parents tend to be less active than peers without children and more likely to fail to meet recommended guidelines.

Once women become mothers their activity levels frequently fail to return to pre-parenthood levels and their relative lack of activity may influence that of their small children. “There are many competing priorities for new parents and making time to be active may not always be top of the list. However, small increases in maternal activity levels may lead to benefits for mothers and children. And if activity in mothers and children can be encouraged or incorporated into daily activities, so that more time is spent moving, activity levels are likely to increase in both. In return, this is likely to have long-term health benefits for both,” said Hesketh.
 

Latest research shows that the chemical citrate – a by-product of natural cell metabolism – is mixed with water to create a viscous fluid that is trapped between the nano-scale crystals that form our bones.

This fluid allows enough movement, or 'slip', between these crystals so that bones are flexible, and don't shatter under pressure. It is the inbuilt shock absorber in bone that, until now, was unknown.

If citrate leaks out, the crystals – made of calcium phosphate – fuse together into bigger and bigger clumps that become inflexible, increasingly brittle and more likely to shatter. This could be the root cause of osteoporosis.

The team from Cambridge’s Department of Chemistry and Advanced Imaging Centre used a combination of NMR spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, imaging and computational modelling with the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UCL to reveal the citrate layers in bone.

They say that this is the start of what needs to be an entire shift in focus for studying the cause of brittle bone diseases like osteoporosis, and bone pathologies in general. The study is published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Bone mineral was thought to be closely related to this substance called hydroxyapatite. But what we've shown is that a large part of bone mineral – possibly as much as half of it in fact – is made up of this goo, where citrate is binding like a gel between mineral crystals," said Dr Melinda Duer, who led the study.

"This nano-scopic layering of citrate fluid and mineral crystals in bone means that the crystals stay in flat, plate-like shapes that have the facility to slide with respect to each other. Without citrate, all crystals in bone mineral would collapse together, become one big crystal and shatter.

"It's this layered structure that's been missing from our knowledge, and we can now see that without it you're stuffed."

Duer compares it to two panes of glass with water in the middle, which stick together but are able to slide: "it's the same thing in these flat bone crystals. But you've got to have something that keeps the water there, stops it from drying out and stops the plates from either flying apart or sticking fast together. We now know that thing is citrate."

Citrate is a 'spidery' molecule with four arms, all of which can bond easily to calcium – which bone is packed with, explains Duer. This means that citrate can hold the mineral crystals together at the same time as preventing them from fusing, while trapping the water that allows for the slippery movement which provides bone flexibility. "Without citrate, water would just flow straight through these gaps," she said.

The body actually delivers bone calcium wrapped in citrate, to prevent it fusing with phosphate and forming large solid – and brittle – mineral crystals in the wrong places. Bone tissue has a protein mesh with holes where the calcium is deposited. In healthy tissue, the holes are very small, so that when the calcium is deposited, the citrate that comes with it can't escape and is trapped between crystals – creating the flexible layers of fluid and bone plates.

As people age or suffer repeated bone trauma, the protein mesh isn't repaired so well by the cells that try to replace damaged tissue, but often end up chewing away tissue faster than it can be re-deposited. This causes progressively larger holes in the protein mesh, citrate fluid escapes and crystals fuse together.

What happens then is pure chemistry, says Duer, with little biological control.

The body instigates a form of biological control through the tiny holes in the protein mesh that trap the citrate fluid, along with other molecules that normally control the deposit of mineral. These small spaces force the molecules to be involved with the forming mineral, controlling the process. But if you haven't got the confined space the chemical reactions spiral out of control.

"In the bigger holes in damaged tissue, pure chemistry takes over. Pretty much the moment calcium and phosphate touch, they form a solid. You end up with these expanding clumps of brittle crystal, with water and citrate relegated to the outside of them," she said.

"In terms of chemistry, that solid clump of mineral is the most stable structure. Biomechanically, however, it's hopeless – as soon as you stand on it, it shatters. If we want to cure osteoporosis, we need to figure out how to stop the bigger holes forming in the protein matrix."

The study is the first in a series of findings, with other studies from the team's work on bone chemistry expected to come out later in the year.

Researchers have developed a new mathematical framework capable of describing motions in  superfluids – low temperature fluids that exhibit classical as well as quantum behavior. The framework was used to lift the veil of mystery surrounding strange objects in superfluid helium (detected ten years ago at Brown University). The study, conducted by an international collaboration of researchers from the UK, Russia and France is published today in the journal Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The quantum nature of superfluids manifests itself in the form of quantized vortices, tiny twisters, with the core sizes of the order of an Angstrom (0.1nm – approximately the diameter of an atom) that move through fluid severing and coalescing, forming bundles and tangles. To make these processes even more intricate and distinct from motions in usual classical fluids, these tiny twisters live on the background consisting of a mixture of viscous and inviscid fluid components that constitute superfluid. The mathematical modelling of such complex systems that involve a range of scales is a notoriously difficult problem.

The international team of researchers – Natalia Berloff of the University of Cambridge and Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, Marc Brachet of Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie and Nick Proukakis of Joint Quantum Centre Durham-Newcastle – came up with a novel framework for achieving this task. The team applied their method to elucidate an intriguing phenomenon in liquid helium research.

Electrons immersed in superfluid helium are useful experimental probes. As they move through superfluid they form soft bubbles of about 2 nm in diameter that get trapped by quantized vortices quite similar to how houses and cars become trapped and transported by a tornado.

A research team from Brown University led by Professor Humphrey Maris has studied the effect of oscillating pressures on electron bubbles. As pressure decreases below the criticality, the bubble expands and explodes, reaching micron sizes, with the bubble trapped by a vortex exploding at a pressure larger than that for the free bubble. Maris’ team also discovered another class of object that existed at very low temperatures only and exploded at even larger pressures. They termed these “unidentified electron objects”.

The new approach published in PNAS today allowed the researchers to look at the processes as oscillating pressure was applied to a quantum fluid containing a vortex ring at a range of temperatures. The researchers discovered a novel mechanism of vortex multiplication: the vortex core expands and then contracts, forming a dense array of new vortex rings during the contraction stage. They conjectured that it becomes quite likely that the electron bubble becomes trapped by more than one vortex line, furthermore reducing the pressure change needed for consequent explosions. They have also shown that the mechanism of vortex multiplication is suppressed at higher temperatures, explaining why such objects were found experimentally only at lower temperatures.

Professor Berloff who led the team commented: “It is fascinating to have a tool to look at the dynamics of processes that occur on the Angstrom lengthscales and at ultra-low temperatures in quantum fluids. The mystery of an unidentified electron object is just a teaser problem; we are ready for other challenges.”

“Understanding the intricate features of behavior of quantized vortices is one of the grand unsolved problems that can be tackled with this framework,” added Professor Proukakis.

The research was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the EU and the Skolkovo Foundation.

The focus on local roots went one step further at Haydock Park, the venue for the 2014 North West Oxford and Cambridge Student Conference

Signing in at the registration desk, teacher Adam Nall, accompanying a group of six students from Cheadle Hulme High School, revealed that he had attended the North West OCSC a decade ago and was now working as Oxford and Cambridge Admissions Co-ordinator in the school’s new Sixth Form, having graduated from Sidney Sussex College with a degree in English.

Adam took time out from the programme of talks and masterclasses to share his own experience of applying to Cambridge.

“I was one of two pupils at my school, Werneth School in Stockport, picked by Aim Higher, put on a bus and shipped to Cambridge. We had a tour of Gonville and Caius and stayed overnight in Sidney Sussex, which is where I later went as an undergraduate.

“Cambridge was entirely off my radar until that moment. There’s no experience of university in my family, and no school history of applying to Cambridge.  Aim Higher made me aware. That trip was galvanizing for me; I really set my target of getting in to Cambridge at that moment.

“The Oxford and Cambridge Student Conference that I attended in 2004 added to that sense of “let’s have a go” – the talks provided clarity, they were honest, transparent and encouraging.

“I did have a bit of concern before I applied to Cambridge, but then I remembered my visits. I’d heard northern accents; I’d felt that there were people like me here. Perhaps on paper there’s a difference – some people own country estates, some people come from council estates – but there’s no great divide in terms of what goes on. We were united in why we went there. It was a level playing field.

“After graduating I worked in sales for a few years but I’d done some teaching in India whilst at Cambridge, thanks to grants from my college and the university, and I applied and was accepted for my PGCE with Oxford University.

“I’m now Oxford and Cambridge Admissions Co-ordinator at Cheadle Hulme High School. The school has just opened its 6th Form, so it’s new and exciting.

“I went through the whole journey myself. Cambridge was not going to be a natural transition; there was no precedent for me, but teachers support, Aim Higher, visits and conferences helped to get me there.

“Now I can put people on that bus. If my students are interested, they need to know that they can be, they are allowed to be, they can pursue that passion.

“I see my role as making sure that our very best students go where they deserve to go and those with the potential to excel get recognised and nurtured.”

The free Oxford and Cambridge Student Conferences are just one of the ways both universities are working with teachers and students across the UK to challenge stereotypes and encourage applications from bright students from all backgrounds. 

This year eight conferences are being held in seven different cities across the UK.

At each conference, staff and students from both universities explain their application and admissions procedures, offer up-to-date information about courses, provide an insight into student life, and are available to talk informally to participants about any aspect of life at university, or beyond.

By the end of the month over 10,000 pupils and teachers will have been able to attend a conference in their home region and have their questions about studying at Oxford or Cambridge answered.

• More information about the Oxford and Cambridge Student Conferences is available at http://www.studentconferences.org.uk

Cambridge’s Digital Library digitisation programme – in which rare and important texts are photographed and made available online – is part of a long tradition of the passing on of written knowledge. Down the centuries, scholars have sought out texts for different purposes – to increase scientific understanding, to acquire knowledge developed by other cultures, or to promulgate a particular religious or political viewpoint. Initiatives like the Digital Library are making rare texts, which previously could only be seen by a limited number of people, accessible to all, and allowing readers to engage with them in an active way - zooming in on the tiniest detail, browsing entire documents quickly and easily, linking to related texts and further research, and sharing and discussing what they find online and in social media.

In the 13th century, scholars in the West were hungry for the knowledge that could be gleaned from the Greek speaking world, and one of the Digital Library’s newest additions is a wonderful example of how texts were sought out at that time. A beautiful item in itself, the story of MS Ff.1.24’s journey through the hands of various collectors and scholars, of how it was interpreted, annotated, translated and repackaged, and how digitisation enables the process of interpretation and transmission to still continue today and into the future, makes a fascinating tale.

MS Ff.1.24 is a Greek manuscript dating from tenth century Constantinople, which documents what were believed at the time to be the dying words of the sons of Jacob, the patriarchs of the Old Testament. With the movement of the Crusades, and particularly after the fall of Constantinople in 1204, scholars began to have access to texts in Greek containing important theological, philosophical and scientific learning that was previously unknown in the West. One who was particularly intent on  acquiring this knowledge was Bishop Robert Grosseteste (1179-1253), who came to hear about a book containing the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, held in the library of the Archbishop of Athens. He sent envoys to fetch it for him, and although already in his 60s by that time, taught himself Greek so that he could read and translate it. This was at a time when universities were in their infancy, and scholarly learning hard to come by. For Grosseteste, this manuscript was almost as important as the Bible. He believed it had been translated from an original Hebrew account and within it he identified passages appearing to prophesy the coming of Christ – useful ammunition in his desire to convert Jews to Christianity.

Digital Library users looking at the manuscript today can see in close-up the arresting detail of Grosseteste’s own handwriting on the pages, commenting on the text as he translated it. His Latin version was popular - over eighty manuscripts survive and it was used as a source for further translations into English, French, German, Anglo-Norman, Danish and Czech.

Grosseteste is believed to have left the original Greek manuscript to the Franciscans in Oxford, and little more was heard of it until it appeared in the 16^th century in the library of Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, who was interested in it for its historical rather than its religious importance. Parker’s mission was to prove the independence of the English Church from Rome, and in attempting to do so he amassed a hugely important collection of ancient manuscripts (most now in the Parker Library in Corpus Christi College with a few donated to the University Library). Here again our manuscript underwent change and reinterpretation – Parker did not hold back from making amendments to the books in his possession. A Latin index was added by inserting new pages, with the text being rebound and page numbers added throughout.

In taking its place in the Digital Library, the manuscript has been “annotated” once again –  notes and links having been added to aid understanding  - and the process of interpretation and dissemination continues, with library users not only reading and examining the document, but also sharing ideas and thoughts about it on Twitter and other online media.

“It is a fascinating continuum of transmission”, said Huw Jones, Metadata Specialist for the Digital Library. “This manuscript has been around for a long time and has been used by different people for a number of different, sometimes controversial, reasons – and now people are tweeting about it. Digitisation has enabled us to take unique treasures and give them to the world for free, and created a new way of engaging in a process which is as old as language itself.”

The initial development of the Cambridge Digital Library has been funded through a generous gift from the Polonsky Foundation.

Our knowledge of past civilisations is gleaned from what is left behind – the shards of pots, traces of dwellings and goods from graves. And just as these are clues to the everyday behaviours of individuals long gone, so too are their bodily remains. Locked in their teeth and bones is information that scientists can use to reveal how they lived, such as the food they ate and the distances they travelled.

Dr Ronika Power and Dr Marta Mirazon Lahr from Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies (LCHES) with Dr Tamsin O’Connell from the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research are reading these ‘biographies in bone’ in the skeletons and skulls of people who lived up to 8,000 years ago in the Sahara Desert and across the African continent.

The remains are among those of 18,000 individuals housed in the University of Cambridge’s Duckworth Laboratory– one of the world’s largest repositories of skulls, skeletons, death masks, mummies, hair bundles and blood samples, including a jawbone tens of thousands of years old. Bones from 19th-century plague pits sit alongside axe-cleaved skulls from Iron Age battles, together with the cast of fossil of an early hominin who lived around 3 million years ago, and medically important skeletons distorted by diseases that, with today’s drugs, would never have the chance to run their course.

To describe the ancient Saharan diets, the researchers are measuring the levels of chemical entities called isotopes in the remains. Biological tissues are reservoirs for elements such as carbon and oxygen, which arrive in the body through the food we eat and the environment we live in, and which have variants (isotopes) that can be measured.

“Tooth enamel is formed in the very early years of life and the chemical fingerprints within it don’t change throughout life,” explained O’Connell. “So whatever isotope signals the teeth contain are a result of the geographical area where individuals spent their childhood and the food and drink they consumed there.”

Bone, on the other hand, is ‘remodelled’ throughout life – most of a healthy adult’s skeleton is made in the last ten years of their life. “Isotopes in bone therefore tell you where the person was living in the years leading up to their death.”

Isotope ‘signatures’, together with the geographic distribution of the shape and size of skulls, can therefore be used to look for evidence of migration in ancient populations. “Discontinuities between what the teeth tell us and what the bones tell us may provide evidence that the individual migrated. This in turn opens up questions about the interconnectedness of peoples – the movement of individuals, ideas, knowledge and material culture at very early stages of civilisation,” said Power.

Their work has focused on a group of 120 individuals who lived in pre-Dynastic Egypt around 5,000 BC, two-and-a-half millennia before the pyramids of Giza were built. Tiny scrapings of tooth enamel have been taken from the remains and are currently being analysed for their isotopic content.

These analyses run parallel to those of samples from skeletons of the Garamantes civilisation, who lived in the central Sahara from 1000 BC until AD 1500. The Garamantes samples are being analysed as part of the Trans-Sahara project, which is led by Professor David Mattingly (University of Leicester) and is funded by the European Research Council.

“The little we know about the Garamantes is that they developed sophisticated irrigation systems to cultivate the desert and also that they were traders. There seems to have been an astonishing degree of commercial activity – trade routes across the Sahara linked settlements that were like islands in a sea of sand, and with these came gold, Roman wares, olive oil, ebony, textiles and probably slaves,” said Power.

“Our analysis of this population will identify those individuals who migrated into the central Sahara during their own lifetimes compared with others of potentially diverse ethnic composition who lived in the region all their lives.”

Working with Dr Nick Ray from the University of Leicester, Power will link the biological evidence to the archaeological: “we want to examine how migrants within these Saharan communities expressed their identity through material culture, burial ritual and funerary structures. Did they adopt the customs of their hosts or did they maintain their immigrant identity?”

As the research extends to the analysis of other skeletons in the Duckworth Laboratory and in museums worldwide, the researchers hope to arrive at a better idea of regional mobility over thousands of years in Africa. “No other study has ever comprehensively tested the pre-Dynastic Egyptians with the sort of scientific protocols we are applying here. Without these biological testimonies, we have little to no idea about the extent to which mobility characterised the processes of state formation,” explained Power. “Classical ideas that kingdoms were formed from indigenous people are increasingly being questioned – we are now more aware that culture comprises many elements that come together and that the past was not as homogenous as once thought.”

“Studies such as this highlight the critical role that human remains play in the study of our past – from the life of individuals, to the composition of societies, to cultural aspects. Alongside archaeological and ethnographic artefacts, they provide the basic evidence of life in the past,” added Mirazon Lahr, who is Director of the Duckworth Laboratory.

“New technology is exposing information preserved within the remains as never before – whether it’s genome mapping of humans and their ancestors, or using CT scans to determine differences in the thickness of skull bones – scientific techniques are transforming the nature and extent of the information we can obtain from human remains. And it is now even possible to look for the evolution of disease-resistant genes that are pertinent to modern medicine.

“The scientific importance of these studies can’t be underestimated – many of the remains represent our only means for deriving information on the life, growth and health of past people.”

Knowing what another person wants is not a trivial issue, particularly when the other’s desires are different from our own. The ability to disengage from our own desire to cater to someone else’s wishes is thought to be a unique feature of human cognition.

New research challenges this assumption. Despite wanting something different to eat, male Eurasian jays can disengage from their own current desire in order to feed the female what she wants even when her desires are different to his. The study, which was funded by the BBSRC, is published today in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.

“We found that males could respond to the female’s desire even when their own desire was conflicting. That said, the males were also partially biased by what they wanted – a bias similar to one commonly found in human children and adults,” said Dr Ljerka Ostojić, who led the University of Cambridge study.

For the study, nine male-female pairs of Eurasian jays (a member of the Corvid family) from two colonies were tested during the breeding season – the only time when jays share food. To manipulate what food the males and the females desired, the researchers used a phenomenon termed ‘specific satiety’ – after eating a particular food item to satiety, jays prefer to eat a novel food item that they are not currently sated on.

Once a day the females and males were placed in adjacent compartments with a mesh window in between. The male was then pre-fed either wax moth larvae or mealworm beetle larvae – both favourite treats for jays - until he did not want more. At the same time, the female’s desire was manipulated by giving her the same food as the male (meaning that their desires were matching), a different food from the male (meaning that their desires were conflicting), or her usual diet (meaning that the female’s desire was neutral towards the two types of larvae).

During the pre-feeding, the male had visual access to the female and saw her eat. At the end of pre-feeding, all food was removed. The males were then given 20 choices between a single wax moth larva and a mealworm beetle larva which they could either eat, cache (hide for later) or give to the female.

Not surprisingly, when the male and female birds’ preferences were the same, the male fed the female the food desired by both. However, when the female’s desire differed from the male’s, then he took his partner’s wishes into account, often feeding her the food that she desired. This ability to ascribe to another individual an internal life like one’s own and at the same time understand that the other’s internal, psychological states might differ from one’s own is called state-attribution.

Professor Nicky Clayton, whose Comparative Cognition lab at Cambridge University’s Department of Psychology conducted the study, said: “As humans, we ‘put ourselves into someone else’s shoes’ in order to respond to what the other person wants. Although we are biased by our own current desires, we can inhibit these to put the wants and desires of another before our own. The current findings show that the jays can also do this. So what this research suggests is that a common mechanism might underlie ‘desire-state attribution’ in humans and jays.”

Scientists have for the first time witnessed the mechanism behind explosive energy releases in the Sun’s atmosphere, confirming new theories about how solar flares are created.

New footage put together by an international team led by University of Cambridge researchers shows how entangled magnetic field lines looping from the Sun’s surface slip around each other and lead to an eruption 35 times the size of the Earth and an explosive release of magnetic energy into space.

The discoveries of a gigantic energy build-up bring us a step closer to predicting when and where large flares will occur, which is crucial in protecting the Earth from potentially devastating space weather. The study is published in The Astrophysical Journal.

While solar flares have long been a spectacular reminder of our star’s power, they are also associated with Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) – eruptions of solar material with a twisted magnetic structure flying out of the Sun and into interplanetary space.

Space weather such as CMEs has been identified as a significant risk to the country’s infrastructure by the UK’s National Risk Register. Late last year The UK’s MET Office announced it would set up a daily space weather forecast to work with the USA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC).

The paper’s lead author, Dr Jaroslav Dudik, Royal Society Newton International Fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Mathematical Sciences, said: “We care about this as during flares we can have CMEs and sometimes they are sent in our direction. Human civilisation is nowadays maintained by technology and that technology is vulnerable to space weather. Indeed, CMEs can damage satellites and therefore have an enormous financial cost.”

“They can also threaten airlines by disturbing the Earth’s magnetic field. Very large flares can even create currents within electricity grids and knock out energy supplies.”

One such event hit the Earth before technology was as integrated into human civilization as it is now, but still had a marked effect. In 1859 the Carrington storm made night skies so bright that newspapers could be read as easily as in daylight and telegraph systems caught fire.

Knowing the standard scientific models are right is therefore very important. The standard 3D model of solar flares has shown that they occur in places where the magnetic field is highly distorted.

In these places, the magnetic field lines can continuously reconnect while slipping and flipping around each other. In doing so, new magnetic structures are created.

Long before the flare the magnetic field lines are un-entangled and they appear in a smooth arc between two points on the photosphere (the Sun’s visible surface) – areas called field line footpoints.

In a smooth, none-entangled arc the magnetic energy levels are low but entanglement will occur naturally as the footpoints move about each other. Their movement is caused as they are jostled from below by powerful convection currents rising and falling beneath the photosphere.

As the movement continues the entanglement of field lines causes magnetic energy to build up.

Like a group of straight cords which has been twisted, the lines will hold the energy until it becomes too great and then will release it, “straightening” back to the lower energy state.

Co-author Dr Helen Mason, Head of the Atomic Astro-Physics Group at the University of Cambridge, said: “You build the stress slowly until a point where they are no longer sustainable. The field lines say they have had enough and ‘ping’, they go back to something simple.”

That “ping” creates the solar flare and CME. The word “ping” belies its power of course. Temperatures in the hotspots of the ejection can reach almost 20 million Degrees Celsius.

The theory remained unconfirmed until Dudik was reviewing footage of the Sun for an unrelated project last year.

It is no surprise it has taken so long to make the discovery. The technology that created the video is part of the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) satellite mission which was only launched in 2010 by NASA.

It watches the Sun in the ultra-violet with the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) capturing ultra-high-definition images every 12 seconds.

The final piece of the theoretical jigsaw was put in place in 2012 by French scientists – a paper published just six days before the flare occurred. Dudik admits that the serendipity the discovery is hard to ignore. But in science, fortune favours the prepared: “Suddenly I knew what I was looking at,” he said.

What Dudik witnessed was the ultra-violet dance caused by the magnetic field lines slipping around each other, continuously “unzipping” and reconnecting as the footpoints of the flare loops move around on the surface. But during the flare, the footpoint slipping motion is highly ordered and much faster than the random motions entangling the field before the flare.

Dudik’s observations were helped by the sheer size of the flare he was looking at – it could encompass 35 Earths. Not only that, the flare was of the most energetic kind,  known as an X Class flare, and it took around an hour to reach its maximum.

If it had happened in a smaller flare, the slipping motion might not have been visible, even with NASA’s technology to help.

Although only seen in an X Class flare to date, the mechanism might well be something which happens in all flares, said Dudik: “But we are not yet certain.”

The importance of seeing the evidence of theory cannot be underestimated said Dr Mason: “In recent years there have been a lot of developments theoretically but unless you actually tie that down with observations you can speculate widely and move further away from the truth, not closer, without knowing it.”

Image credits: The SDO/AIA data are courtesy of the NASA/SDO and AIA science teams.

Commercial silicon-based solar cells - such as those seen on the roofs of houses across the country - operate at about 20% efficiency for converting the Sun’s rays into electrical energy. It’s taken over 20 years to achieve that rate of efficiency.

A relatively new type of solar cell based on a perovskite material - named for scientist Lev Perovski, who first discovered materials with this structure in the Ural Mountains in the 19th century - was recently pioneered by an Oxford research team led by Professor Henry Snaith.

Perovskite solar cells, the source of huge excitement in the research community, already lie just a fraction behind commercial silicon, having reached a remarkable 17% efficiency after a mere two years of research - transforming prospects for cheap large-area solar energy generation.

Now, researchers from Professor Sir Richard Friend’s group at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory - working with Snaith’s Oxford group - have demonstrated that perovskite cells excel not just at absorbing light but also at emitting it. The new findings, recently published online in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, show that these ‘wonder cells’ can also produce cheap lasers.

By sandwiching a thin layer of the lead halide perovskite between two mirrors, the team produced an optically driven laser which proves these cells “show very efficient luminescence” - with up to 70% of absorbed light re-emitted.

The researchers point to the fundamental relationship, first established by Shockley and Queisser in 1961, between the generation of electrical charges following light absorption and the process of ‘recombination’ of these charges to emit light. 

Essentially, if a material is good at converting light to electricity, then it will be good at converting electricity to light. The lasing properties in these materials raise expectations for even higher solar cell efficiencies, say the Oxbridge team, which - given that perovskite cells are about to overtake commercial cells in terms of efficiency after just two years of development - is a thrilling prospect.              

“This first demonstration of lasing in these cheap solution-processed semiconductors opens up a range of new applications,” said lead author Dr Felix Deschler of the Cavendish Laboratory. “Our findings demonstrate potential uses for this material in telecommunications and for light emitting devices.”

Most commercial solar cell materials need expensive processing to achieve a very low level of impurities before they show good luminescence and performance.  Surprisingly these new materials work well even when very simply prepared as thin films using cheap scalable solution processing. 

The researchers found that upon light absorption in the perovskite two charges (electron and hole) are formed very quickly - within 1 picosecond - but then take anywhere up to a few microseconds to recombine. This is long enough for chemical defects to have ceased the light emission in most other semiconductors, such as silicon or gallium arsenide. “These long carrier lifetimes together with exceptionally high luminescence are unprecedented in such simply prepared inorganic semiconductors,” said Dr Sam Stranks, co-author from the Oxford University team.

“We were surprised to find such high luminescence efficiency in such easily prepared materials. This has great implications for improvements in solar cell efficiency,” said Michael Price, co-author from the group in Cambridge.

Added Snaith: “This luminescent behaviour is an excellent test for solar cell performance – poorer luminescence (as in amorphous silicon solar cells) reduces both the quantum efficiency (current collected) and also the cell voltage.” 

Scientists say that this new paper sets expectations for yet higher solar cell performance from this class of perovskite semiconductors. Solar cells are being scaled up for commercial deployment by the Oxford spin-out, Oxford PV Ltd. The efficient luminescence itself may lead to other exciting applications with much broader commercial prospects – a big challenge that the Oxford and Cambridge teams have identified is to construct an electrically driven laser.

Pick up any news clipping about Ukraine from the past twenty years, and you are likely to find a cursory description of the country along these lines: ‘Ukraine, roughly the size of France, divided between a pro-EU west and a pro-Russian east’.

A journalist once admitted to me that his editors routinely appended such a refrain even to articles and reports attesting to a different, more complex reality – to a highly diverse but ultimately coherent country. Ukraine was too poorly known in the West beyond nuclear accidents and feuding politicians, he explained. In media discourse it needed a 'brand', an easy shorthand, a consistent diagnosis to account for a host of geopolitical maladies.

A consensus emerged: bipolar disorder.

Ukraine became known as the perennial ‘house divided against itself’, riven along a deep west/east, pro-EU/pro-Russia fault line. Months ago, this reductive cliché used to irritate me. Now it keeps me up at night. As Russian troops amass along Ukraine’s eastern border, it may be the most dangerous idea circulating in Europe today.

Ukraine is not existentially divided. Its body politic is scarred and fractured, but it is whole. Labelling its eastern regions ‘pro-Russian’ – ontologically disposed to a neighbouring state and culture – is not only inaccurate as an historical matter but perilous as an analytical one. We need to appreciate the gravity of this likely scenario: if the Russian Federation invades the east of Ukraine, most residents of such eastern cities as Kharkiv and Donetsk will not open their arms or shrug their shoulders. There will not be a repeat of the Crimean affair, which saw little violence thanks to a Ukrainian military determined not to legitimate Russian provocation with compensatory force.

If Russia invades beyond Crimea, Ukrainians will defend themselves. And Europe will be witness to a war between its largest countries, with dire economic and human costs for us all.

Each day brings new details of a Russian theft of Ukrainian strategic assets – nearly all of Ukraine’s Black Sea Fleet has been sunk or stolen outright – and of a massive Russian military build-up along Ukraine’s eastern border. How massive? ‘Very, very sizeable’, in the words of NATO Supreme Allied Commander Philip Breedlove. ‘Tens of thousands’, say members of the US Armed Services Committee. Andrii Parubii, Secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, recently quantified it in this way: 100,000 Russian troops and more than 370 artillery systems, 270 tanks and 140 combat aircraft.

Meanwhile, across the border, Ukrainians in eastern cities like Kharkiv are organizing masterclasses in triage and first aid, and crowd-sourcing the translation of books about the tactics of light infantry. Others in a vocal minority, by contrast, are beckoning the Russian armed forces in public with enthusiastic shouts of ‘Rossiia!’. Many of these demonstrators are actually touring Russian provocateurs. Kharkiv journalists have devised a canny way to determine their provenance: they simply ask them what time it is. Western Russia is two hours ahead of Ukraine. As it turns out, watches and smartphones tend to run very fast at these demonstrations.

This Russian military escalation and these coordinated public demonstrations in support of Russian intervention may not alarm the casual observer in Britain, who has been told a story about the ‘pro-Russian’ complexion of Ukraine’s east for far too long. But we should be alarmed. Let me explain by stating what should be obvious: Ukraine’s east is ‘pro-Ukrainian’. Its Ukrainian identity is idiosyncratic and contested, but it is dominant. Moreover, it has been historically influential. Kharkiv, in fact, is a central birthplace of the modern Ukrainian national idea.

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, Kharkiv University was a seminal bastion of Ukrainian Romantic thought, a site of vigorous heritage-gathering and artistic creation. The University’s professors – Amvrosii Metlynsky, Petro Hulak-Artemovsky – as well as its students – Mykola Kostomarov, Levko Borovykovsky – strove to elevate the Ukrainian vernacular to the status of a literary language, publishing original poetry and historical research in such Kharkiv journals as The Ukrainian Herald, The Ukrainian Digest, The Ukrainian Journal and The Ukrainian Almanac. By 1876, when the tsar explicitly banned the Ukrainian language from the public life of the Russian Empire, such periodicals ceased to exist in Kharkiv. But they nonetheless laid the ground for an explosion of Ukrainian cultural production in the twentieth century, when Kharkiv was the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and in the twenty-first century, when Kharkiv became accustomed to celebrating the accolades of its native son Serhii Zhadan, one of Ukraine’s most popular writers.

And what about Donetsk, widely known in the West as a ‘pro-Russian’ city populated by miners, oligarchs and football stars? Founded in 1879 by Welsh industrialist John Hughes, Donetsk is an unofficial capital of the Ukrainian national rukh oporu, the dissident ‘defence movement’ that championed the rights of Ukrainians and many other groups in the Soviet era. Ivan Dziuba, who graduated from the Donetsk Pedagogical Institute, wrote the classic underground exposé of Soviet nationalities policy, Internationalism or Russification?; Mykola Rudenko, who penned touching poetic reflections about his Donetsk childhood, led the Ukrainian Helsinki Group; Vasyl Stus, who also attended the Donetsk Pedagogical Institute, was a member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group and the greatest Ukrainian poet of the twentieth century; and Oleksa Tykhy, who worked in Donetsk as a biology teacher, courageously confronted Soviet officialdom over the suppression of Ukrainian national culture. All of these prominent figures were imprisoned for ‘pro-Ukrainian’ activities; both Stus and Tykhy died in the gulag as late as the mid-1980s.

And today? Over the past decade, poll after poll of respondents in Ukraine’s eastern oblasts reveal – to entertain the reductive label one final time – a majority ‘pro-Ukrainian’ sentiment. In a 2005 Razumkov Centre study, for instance, 67% of citizens from Ukraine’s east answered positively in response to the question ‘Do you consider yourself a patriot of Ukraine?’, while 22% answered negatively and 11% found it difficult to answer at all. Likewise, in a 2006 Razumkov Centre study, 62% of respondents in the east said ‘Yes’ to the question ‘Would you choose Ukraine as your fatherland if you had the choice?’, while 20% said ‘No’ and 18% ‘Hard to say’. Keep in mind that in Ukraine per capita GDP was $2,303 in 2006; in Russia it was $6,947. Even despite economic disparity with its powerful neighbour, most residents in Ukraine’s east have made a point of embracing the Ukrainian state as their home.

It is high time we listened to them. With another Russian invasion of Ukraine’s sovereign territory on the horizon, we cannot afford to retreat to stale, intellectually lazy and above all dangerous clichés about Ukraine’s ‘pro-EU’ and ‘pro-Russian’ halves. Ukraine is a large, diverse country that has managed its many differences admirably since winning independence in 1991. Today the Kremlin is trying to fetishize, manipulate and exaggerate these differences through brute force, intimidation, provocation, and propagandistic deception – simply because the Ukrainian people ousted a corrupt, criminal president and fought to determine their own destiny. War is imminent, and the Kremlin is counting on our ignorance and on our tacit questioning of Ukraine’s sovereignty over its eastern territory. We need to respond not only by supporting the new Ukrainian government with ambitious financial assistance but by making Ukrainians, at last, the subjects of their own story.

The two new centres providing postgraduate training are the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) CDT in Sensor Technologies and Application and the EPSRC CDT in Analysis.

The CDT in Sensor Technologies and Application builds on CamBridgeSens, the University's strategic network in sensor research. Professor Clemens Kaminski of the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology and Director of the CDT said: “Sensors are a pervasive technology now, impacting on every aspect of our lives, and markets are already thought to exceed £300bn globally. There is enormous potential here for UK industry and academia to capitalise on these developments, but there are challenges too. Sensor innovation requires foundations in incredibly diverse fields. Traditional, single-discipline PhD programmes are not suited for this task. The CDT will act like a ‘virtual superdepartment’ in sensor technologies to educate the next generation of sensor champions.”

The Cambridge Centre for Analysis also comes on the back of previous high achievement in this area. “We are happy to be able to build on the success of the last four years – and look forward to training some of the best mathematical talent around in the next five cohorts of our CDT,” said Director of the CDT, Professor James Norris of the Department of Pure Maths and Mathematical Statistics.

The EPSRC and other research councils have been able to fund these new Centres, a total of 22 across the country, following a £106 million investment announced in the Budget. The support of industry, universities and charitable partners, on top of the funding for 91 centres previously announced by EPSRC, now brings the total investment in training for future scientists and engineers to over £950m.

Chief Executive of the EPSRC, Professor David Delpy, commented: “The CDT model has proved highly popular with universities and industry and these new Centres will mean that the UK is even better placed to maintain the vital supply of trained scientists and engineers.”

The Polar Museum at the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, is proud to announce that it has successfully raised the £275,000 needed to be able to purchase the 113 photographic negatives, thanks to public support. The negatives represent an extraordinary visual record of Scott’s last expedition, but were in danger of being sold abroad.

The National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) has just awarded the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) a grant of £233,450 to secure the negatives. This clears the final hurdle in the race to secure the funds in time.  The museum has already received generous support from the V&A Purchase Grant Fund and other private donors. In addition, a significant amount was raised through a public appeal campaign, spearheaded by Sir Ranulph Fiennes.

Dame Jenny Abramsky, Chair of the NHMF, said, “Captain Scott’s images provide us with an extraordinary insight into the rigours of his epic but ultimately doomed expedition.  As precious as the corresponding original prints, these negatives record not only day-to-day life in the Antarctic but also the development of Scott’s photographic skills. The National Heritage Memorial Fund - the fund of last resort - is proud to be providing the final part of the funding jigsaw which will ensure these negatives are kept together as part of the Institute’s wider public collection.”

The negatives are a record of Scott’s earliest photographic attempts - under the guidance of expedition photographer Herbert Ponting - through to his unparalleled images of his team on the journey to the South Pole. The force, control and beauty of his portraits and landscapes number them among some of the finest early images of the Antarctic.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes said,“Scott’s negatives can now take their rightful place in Cambridge alongside the camera on which they were taken, as well as the remaining Scott and Herbert Ponting prints - all of which speak so powerfully to us of the courage and sacrifice of those on the British Antarctic Expedition. The negatives have been recently rediscovered, having been thought lost. If the Scott Polar Research Institute had not been successful then there was every chance that they would have been sold abroad and into a private collection."

Professor Julian Dowdeswell, Director of SPRI, said, "The overwhelming level of support and assistance from the public and from charitable trusts and bodies has helped The Scott Polar Research Institute purchase this extraordinary visual record of Scott’s last heroic expedition. As we have no budget for acquisitions, we have been delighted to see how the story of Scott still captures the public imagination. As part of the University of Cambridge, SPRI will ensure that these negatives are cared for to the highest possible standards and, once digitised, we will ensure that these resources will be within reach of a worldwide audience."

Following a period of conservation and research, The Polar Museum plans to mount a public exhibition of the images. 

However, when examined by type of supplementation, the researchers did find that vitamin D3 alone reduced mortality by 11 per cent. The scientists stress that additional research is needed.

The new research, published today in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), was conducted by an international team of researchers and co-led by Dr Rajiv Chowdhury at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Public Health and Primary Care. He said: “With so many people touting vitamin D as a possible panacea, our study provides useful insight into the limitations of the current evidence base of vitamin D supplements and highlights where additional research is needed.”

Previous research has shown that lower levels of vitamin D in the blood are associated with a number of different diseases (to include multiple sclerosis, cancer and cardiovascular disease). However, it was not clear whether vitamin D supplementation when given alone (that is, not co-adminstered with other interventions such as calcium) would reduce the risk of deaths from various causes. In order to help clarify these associations, researchers analysed the results of 73 observational cohort studies and 22 randomised trials of both naturally circulating vitamin D and supplements (either D2 or D3).

In total, these studies involved nearly a million individuals from 26 countries and included patients with established cardiovascular disease as well as lower risk people without the disease. Additionally, differences in study quality were taken into account to identify and minimise bias.

Their analysis reinforced the observational associations of lower levels of circulating vitamin D concentrations with deaths from cardiovascular, cancer, as well as other causes, but they also found that vitamin D supplements in the trials, overall, did not reduce the risk of all-cause mortality significantly. 

However, when stratified by type of supplements, vitamin D3 taken alone reduced mortality significantly by 11% among older adults. By contrast, supplementation with vitamin D2 singly had no overall impact on mortality.

Remarking on the research, Dr Chowdhury added: “Before any recommendation of widespread supplementations with vitamin D3, it is, however, essential that further clinical investigations are conducted into the optimal dosage and safety. It will also be important to examine whether D2 or D3 alone may indeed have different effects on the risk of death in different populations since the current trials were essentially based in elderly high risk populations with a variety of baseline diseases and any beneficial effects on healthy general populations are not yet known.”

The study – one of the largest surveys of gambling and homelessness ever undertaken in the UK – provides new insight into a rarely studied problem and suggests homeless services should offer clients more support to identify and tackle problem gambling.

Although homelessness and problem gambling are two public health concerns, they are rarely considered together. This new study – published in the Journal of Gambling Studies– interviewed 450 people at homeless hostels and shelters in the London Borough of Westminster.

According to lead author Steve Sharman from the Department of Psychology: “Many issues face the homeless population, including drug and alcohol use. In terms of addiction research, most focus has been on drugs, alcohol and smoking, but the gambling field is relatively small in comparison. And while it is possible to spot physiological indicators of drug and alcohol addiction, problem gambling is much harder to identify.”

Finding out more about gambling addiction is important at a time when gambling opportunities are wider than ever. “Gambling has exploded in popularity over the past 20 years, partly due to changes in legislation but also because of new technology,” said Sharman.

“Where previous generations were limited to betting shops and football pools, today there’s everything from online slots to in-play betting. That means people can gamble 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and the more people who gamble, the more people there will be who do so problematically.”

Together with researchers at Kings College London, the National Problem Gambling Clinic, The Connection @ St Martins and other centres in Westminster, Sharman spoke to over 450 homeless people in London.

He assessed levels of problem gambling using a standard clinical diagnostic tool called the Problem Gambling Severity Index. He then compared the results with data from the British Gambling Prevalence Survey.

Compared with the UK population as a whole, where problem gambling affects 0.7% of people, the level of problem gambling among homeless people was 11.6%. “We found that the rate of problem or pathological gambling is significantly higher in the homeless population than the general population,” he said.

In identifying the significant scale of the problem, the study could pave the way to developing new services for the homeless.

“The results are useful because some homeless services don’t ask about gambling in their initial assessments. By showing that this population is vulnerable to gambling addiction, the study should encourage homeless services to include questions about gambling in their assessments. If they can understand the full range of behavioural problems their clients face – not only substance abuse – then they will be able to provide more comprehensive services,” said Sharman.

The next stage of the project will be to unpick the direction of the link between gambling and homelessness – whether gambling is a cause or consequence of homelessness – the links between gambling and alcohol and drug use, and look at so-called negative life events.

“By giving us an indication of life events that precede homelessness and came afterwards, we will get a better understanding of the causes, and whether people start gambling after becoming homeless or became homeless as a result of gambling,” he said.

“Regardless of whether gambling is a cause or a consequence, recognising and addressing this problem will hopefully give affected individuals a better chance of getting off – and more importantly staying off – the streets.”

The McGrath Centre for St Catharine’s College was awarded best Alteration or Extension of an Existing Building, providing the College with a new auditorium and courtyard space. 

Designed by Cambridge-based RH Partnership, the Centre incorporates a beautiful auditorium with retracting seating and wall, as well as a new student bar and JCR, additional meeting rooms and a courtyard space.

The building is named after college alumnus Harvey McGrath whose generous gift helped fund the project.

The restored Divinity School at St John’s College, masterminded by architects Annand and Mustoe, won the 2013 Award for Conservation of an Existing Building. More than three years of planning, archaeological excavation and refurbishment went into the restoration of the Victorian building to provide a large central hall, several teaching rooms and a 180-seat theatre.

The People’s Choice Award for Best Building of the year was won by the new 40-room student accommodation block at Corpus Christi College’s Leckhampton site, off Grange Road, which was designed by Bland Brown and Cole architects. Second in the Public vote was the new home for Materials Science and Metallurgy at West Cambridge.

The Awards are co-sponsored by the Cambridge Forum for the Construction Industry and Cambridge City Council.

Susan Smith, the city council’s senior conservation and design officer, said: “The awards celebrate the more recent, high-quality developments that have been built in the city, and promote continued design excellence.”

At a time when there is growing concern about rising antibiotic resistance, the results – published in the journal PLOS ONE– could lead to new ways of combatting dangerous bacteria.

For many years, people thought bacteria worked by simply consuming resources until they ran out, and then entering a stationary, non-growing, phase. Working with physicists from the Cavendish Laboratory, Hannah Gaimster and David Summers from the Department of Genetics showed that as resources decline, bacteria switch to austerity mode, individually deciding to consume less until conditions improve.

Summers and Gaimster identified this behaviour by studying indole – the chemical behind the bad smell in babies’ nappies (and also used as an ingredient in perfumes) – a key signalling molecule in bacteria.

Scientists have known for many years that bacteria use low concentrations of indole to communicate with each other. This study shows for the first time that bacteria also use the chemical in a completely different and dramatic way – producing high transient pulses of indole that accumulate within a bacterial cell and cause it to enter austerity mode.

According to Gaimster: “The effects of low concentration of indole are subtle, but higher concentrations will do things such as abolish the ability of the cells to divide, or shut down growth completely.”

Working with Escherichia coli, Gaimster and Summers grew two cultures of the bacteria, one was the normal indole-producing E. coli and the other a mutant strain that has lost its ability to make indole.

When they stopped feeding the bacteria for 10 days, they found that the two strains coped with famine in very different ways.

 “Initially the mutants seemed to do better than the wild type bacteria, but when we looked at the longer term, over 10 days the wild type’s viability declined by only one third compared with the mutants, whose viability fell by 80%. This is because without indole, the mutants could not plan ahead and weren’t able to survive as well in the long-term,” she explained.

In a second experiment, they seeded a population of wild type E. coli with 1% of the indole-lacking mutants and filmed what occurred when famine set in.

“When the food began to run out, the normal cells started doing this careful slowing down to make the food last longer, but the mutants ran riot through the culture, increasing many fold in number and eating all the food reserves. That results in disaster for everyone, because they all starve to death,” Gaimster said.

“Our results have many applications because indole plays such an important role in how bacteria respond to stress, including antibiotics. If we can understand how they use signalling systems to cope with the drugs we’re throwing at them, that should help us find new ways to get around their defences,” she said.

By discovering an entirely new way that bacteria use indole to communicate, the study could help scientists find new ways of controlling dangerous bacteria such as MRSA.

As well as opening up new modes of attacking dangerous bacteria, the study illustrates that rather than the simple creatures we assume them to be, bacteria are complex organisms with sophisticated survival strategies.

According to Summers: “I want to destroy the idea that bacteria are simple, because that’s an extraordinarily naïve view of a very sophisticated cell. Compared with humans, bacteria have been evolving for an unbelievably long time, so they will be better at being bacteria than any other organism will be at being itself.”

The 71 sixth formers came from Hereford Sixth Form College, John Masefield High School, The Chase High School and Dyson Perrins High School. 

They are participants in the HE+ project, which aims to encourage and prepare bright students to become competitive applicants to selective universities like Cambridge.

During the residential, the students gained a flavour of university life through staying in college accommodation, attending lectures, undertaking tours of the University and visiting its museums and collections. The residential also included masterclasses led by Cambridge University academics.

Students also met current Cambridge undergraduates, including former Hereford Sixth Form College student, Joe Hooton, now a third year Natural Sciences student, who is one of the University’s CAMbassador team and works to encourage others from his home area to consider Cambridge.

Hereford Sixth Form College student, James Thompson, said, “I thoroughly enjoyed the visit to Christ’s College. The Masterclasses were worthwhile and interesting and it was beneficial to hear what current students had to say about things like interviews, enrolment and what Cambridge is like itself. It has certainly made me interested in applying there.”

Caroline Baylis, the HE+ Consortium Co-ordinator from Hereford Sixth Form College, said, “We are very grateful to staff and students at Christ’s College for their amazing hospitality (and excellent food!) and for challenging us to think more deeply about the subjects presented in the masterclasses.”

• Main Photograph: With Jennie Thornber, Education and Outreach Co-ordinator for the Museum (Back row, 3rd from left) are: Bethany Berry (The Chase High School), Kieran Green (Dyson Perrins High School), Bronwen Hopkins (Hereford Sixth Form College), Kim Palmer (John Masefield High School), Hugo Sansome (Hereford Sixth Form College), Liv Shalofsky (John Masefield High School),Emily Wainwright (Hereford Sixth Form College), Leah Wild (The Chase High School), Ellie Williams (Hereford Sixth Form College)