Last week the government announced an initiative to commemorate the First World War with a programme of cultural events called 14-18 NOW.  Through Arts Council England, it will fund commissions by leading artists from Britain and around the world “to create works that reflect on the impact and legacy of the First World War”.

Art has long been at the mercy of politics. Research by art historian and broadcaster Dr James Fox reveals that a century ago the present government’s predecessor in the shape of Asquith’s wartime cabinet was convinced that art posed such a threat to the security of the nation that it made painting out of doors illegal around the country.

Fox, a Research Fellow at Gonville & Caius College and known to public audiences for his BBC documentaries, first came across the subject while researching his PhD about art and the First World War. He explained: “I kept finding strange passages in which artists confessed to being abused, interrogated and arrested while painting and sketching outdoors. Virtually nothing had been written about the reason for these bizarre experiences, so I set about trawling newspapers, government reports and police records in search of clues. What I discovered was astonishing.”

Fox’s findings were first published in the British Art Journal in 2009. A more extensive discussion of the same topic will form a chapter in his forthcoming book, Business unusual: British art and the First World War, 1914-1924.

With the outbreak of the First World War, the British people – who had only recently become obsessed with spy novels and films – grew paranoid that undercover German agents were infiltrating the nation. “The public became suspicious of almost everyone who didn’t fit in. Of the many groups who suffered from these suspicions, some of the most adversely affected were artists,” said Fox.

The notion that artists might be spies drew some of its credence from none other than Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the scouting movement. Fox said:  “In his book My Adventures as a Spy, Baden-Powell revealed how he and other British spies on the continent had posed as artists and disguised their plans of forts, harbours and industrial areas as innocent sketches of stained glass windows or ivy leaves.

This was one of the reasons why, with the declaration of war in August 1914, artists quickly fell foul of emergency legislation. The Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) imposed a regime of draconian censorship on artworks. It also made it illegal to make “any photograph, sketch, plan, model, or other representation of any naval or military work, or of any dock or harbour, or with the intent to assist the enemy, of any other place or thing”.

The effects were significant. As one artist explained: “No sketching whatever is allowed within four, and in some cases, seven miles of the coast... Even though the subject of the sketch may be a group of trees, a cathedral or a paintable cottage, the rule applies strictly.”

As a result of the legislation, many artists were challenged or arrested: in Scotland the society painter and Royal Academician John Lavery was arrested for painting the Fleet at the Forth Bridge; in Dover the renowned landscape painter Philip Wilson Steer was accosted by “some blighter [who] comes up and wants to see my permit which is very upsetting in the middle of laying a wash”.  Reporting from the west coast of Ireland, the post-impressionist Augustus John poked fun at the nation’s panic with the account that “around the harbour… if one starts sketching one is at once shot by a policeman”. 

Those most severely hit by the restrictions imposed on painting included the artistic communities based in Cornwall, a county where fears about German invasion were strongest. Artists in the clusters at Newlyn, St Ives and Lamorna felt the restrictions keenly at a time when wartime austerity was already depressing art sales.  In Newlyn, the figurative painter Laura Knight wrote that “even to write a perfectly straight line might be interpreted as a sinister act”. In Lamorna, Alfred Munnings (famous for his paintings of horses) remarked that he “dared not be sketching out of doors in the country at all”. 

Fox said: “As the war progressed, art itself began to be perceived in an increasingly negative light, downgraded from merely pointless or unnecessary activity to one that was improper and immoral, encouraging selfish and profligate behaviour when selfless sacrifice was what counted. Artists were bracketed together with other alien identities – Jews, pacifists, profiteers, foreigners, newly naturalised Britons.”

Bohemianism itself signalled a lack of patriotism. When a British artist-couple rented a cottage in the West Country, there were immediate suspicions that they were German agents. The villagers’ vendetta against them prompted the police to call one of the artists in for questioning. He was soon released. The local schoolmistress exclaimed: “If he is not a spy, why does he wear a hat like that?” In London the sculptor Jacob Epstein, with his modernist work and German name, found his studio ransacked.

Fox’s research reveals that in the first month of the war, some 9,000 cases of espionage were reported, yet during the four years of the conflict just 29 spies were convicted. “Hundreds of artists were arrested and questioned, an experience that must have been deeply distressing. But only one of them was found guilty. The Norwegian painter, Alfred Hagn, was sentenced to death after invisible ink was discovered in his hotel room in London, but was extradited after going on hunger strike,” said Fox.

The case that made the biggest impression on the public was that of Philip de László, a famous society portraitist who was Hungarian by birth. His naturalisation as a British subject in 1914, and his easy access to the powerful elite, put him under suspicion. The patriotic newspaper John Bull wrote: “The distinguished character of M. de László’s clientele would have afforded him fine opportunities for obtaining first-class information if he had really been desirous of getting it… Cabinet Ministers… are such busy people that they frequently go on working while the artist plies his brush… King George… walks about the room and dictates to his Secretaries while he is “sitting” for his portrait.”

De László was arrested and interned. He was condemned in the press for being one of “the most dangerous spies” of the war, and many called for him to be executed. “After several years imprisoned without charge, De László, rightly, was exonerated. But it had a huge effect on his career, and it took a long time for him to recover,” said Fox.

The treatment of artists during the First World War seems, with the benefit of hindsight, laughable. Indeed, the notion of middle aged artists being arrested by over-jealous officials while painting pretty watercolours out in the countryside was lampooned in the press at the time.  But Fox reminds us that things are not so different today.

“In recent years the government’s attempts to combat terrorism has led to new legislation that authorised police officers to stop and search anyone who appears to be photographing or filming sensitive locations. The medium might have changed, but the principle is the same. We remain innately suspicious of images”, he said.

The artificial pancreas promises to dramatically improve the quality of life for people with type 1 diabetes, which typically develops in childhood. All previous artificial pancreas trials, in hospitals and in home environments, have seen researchers strictly monitor patients. The latest trial, funded by JDRF, has shown for the first time that unsupervised use of the artificial pancreas overnight can be safe. The results of the trial are published today in the journal Diabetes Care.

Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune condition in which the pancreas is unable to produce insulin, a hormone which regulates blood glucose levels. High levels of glucose can seriously damage the body's organs. People with type 1 diabetes currently rely on multiple insulin injections or pump infusions every day; a child diagnosed at the age of five faces up to 19,000 injections and 50,000 finger prick blood tests by the time they are 18.

Participants in the trial, all aged between 12 and 18, saw improved blood glucose control during the trial, experiencing fewer nights with hypoglycaemic episodes, generally known as ‘hypos’.  A hypo occurs when the blood glucose level of someone living with type 1 diabetes falls dangerously low. Without proper treatment, it may cause unconsciousness and even death.

A real-time information haul of more than 10,000 UK residents with type 1 diabetes, released to JDRF from the mySugr app, suggests that UK people living with the condition experience an average of ten hypos per week.

Actor Jeremy Irvine, star of the Stephen Spielberg film War Horse, has lived with type 1 diabetes since the age of six. He said: “When the chance came for me to take part in early artificial pancreas trials a few years ago, I jumped at the opportunity. I wanted to play my own very small part in moving the artificial pancreas closer to reality. I’m really excited to hear of this latest progress – the scientists behind it are my heroes.”

Dr Roman Hovorka from the University of Cambridge, who is leading the UK effort to develop an effective artificial pancreas, said: “The study is an important stepping stone for the wider use of an artificial pancreas. We have shown that overnight home use is feasible and beneficial – allowing people to live their life more freely.

“The artificial pancreas is expected to transform the treatment of type 1 diabetes and we have proven that this promise holds. The success of this trial means that larger and longer studies are already in the pipeline.”

Katharine Barnard, from the Human Development and Health Academic Unit at the University of Southampton, worked with Dr Hovorka on the trial to evaluate psychosocial impact. She said: “Hypoglycaemia – particularly at night – is a common fear among those living with type 1 diabetes and a major obstacle in achieving optimal blood glucose levels. The findings from this study are positive and are certainly worth investigating further.

“Reassurance, confidence and improved diabetes control are just some of the psychological and physical benefits that patients may witness as artificial pancreas technology continues to develop."

The standard account of the Battle of Clontarf – a defining moment in Irish history which happened 1,000 years ago this week – was partly a “pseudo-history” borrowed from the tale of Troy, new research suggests.

The findings, which are to be published in a forthcoming book about the intellectual culture of medieval Ireland, coincide with extensive celebrations in Dublin marking the millennium of Clontarf, which was fought on Good Friday, April 23, 1014.

In popular history, the battle has been characterised as an epic and violent clash between the army of the Christian Irish High King, Brian Boru, and a combined force led by the rebel king of the territory of Leinster, Máel Mórda, and Sitric, leader of the Dublin-based Vikings. The disputed outcome saw the Vikings beaten off, but at huge cost. Brian himself was killed, and became an iconic figure and Irish martyr.

According to the new study, however, much of what we know about Clontarf may be rooted not in historical fact, but a brilliant work of historical literature which modelled sections of its text on an earlier account of the siege of Troy.

Rather than a trustworthy description of the battle itself, this account – Cogadh Gáedhel re Gallaibh (“The War Of The Irish Against The Foreigners”) – was really a rhetorical masterpiece designed to place Ireland’s legendary past in the context of a grand, classical tradition, stretching back to the works of Homer and classical philosophy.

The study argues that this in itself should be seen as evidence that the cultural achievements of Brian Boru’s successors in medieval Ireland were complex, highly sophisticated, and the equal of anywhere else in Europe.

It also means, however, that despite the widespread portrayal of Clontarf as a heroic, quasi-national conflict in which the lives of Brian and others were sacrificed in the Irish cause, the historical truth is unknown. While the advent of the battle itself and its significance is beyond question, the details of what happened are likely to remain a mystery.

The research was carried out by Dr Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, a Reader in medieval literature and history at St John’s College, University of Cambridge. It will appear in a new book called Classical Literature and Learning in Medieval Irish Narrative, published in Boydell and Brewer’s ‘Studies in Celtic History’ series and edited by Ralph O’Connor.

“The casting of Clontarf as a national struggle in which the aged, holy Brian was martyred still defines what most people know about the battle, and it has probably endured because that was what numerous generations of Irish men and women wanted to read,” Dr Ní Mhaonaigh said.

“Academics have long accepted that Cogadh couldn’t be taken as reliable evidence but that hasn’t stopped some of them from continuing to draw on it to portray the encounter. What this research shows is that its account of the battle was crafted, at least in part, to create a version of events that was the equivalent of Troy. This was more than a literary flourish, it was a work of a superb, sophisticated and learned author.”

Another reason that the story may have endured is a lack of physical evidence for the battle. No archaeological remains have been found, and the precise location, presumed to be somewhere around the modern Dublin suburb of Clontarf, is disputed.

Compared with the very basic information in contemporary chronicles, Cogadh provides by far the most comprehensive account of what happened. It was, however, written about a century later, probably at the behest of Brian’s great-grandson. Historians have rightly treated it as partial, but also as the written version of oral accounts that had been passed on from those who witnessed the battle itself.

The new research suggests that this pivotal source was even more of a cultivated fabrication than previously thought. Through a close study of the text, Dr Ní Mhaonaigh found that the imagery, terminology and ideas draw inspiration from a range of earlier sources – in particular Togail Troí (The Destruction of Troy), an eleventh-century translation of a fifth-century account of the battle for Troy.

In particular, the unknown author explicitly cast Brian’s son, who it is believed led a large part of his father’s army at Clontarf, as an Irish Hector, whom he describes as “the last man who had true valour in Ireland”. Tellingly, Togail Troí is also found in the same manuscript as Cogadh  – suggesting that the author had this to hand when describing the battle.

Rather than pouring cold water on the millennial celebrations by showing the main account of Clontarf to have been an elaborate piece of story-telling, however, the study points out that the work bears witness to the cultural achievements of Brian’s successors.

The parallel between Murchad and Hector in particular was in fact part of a complex and deeply scholarly analogy which drew on the recurring classical motif of the “Six Ages of the World” and “Six Ages of Man”. It shows that whoever wrote it was not simply describing a battle, but crafting a brilliant work of art.

“Whoever wrote this was operating as part of larger, learned European tradition,” Dr Ní Mhaonaigh added. “People should not see the fact that it is a fabricated narrative as somehow a slur against Brian, because what it really shows is that his descendants were operating at a cultural level of the highest complexity and order.”

For further information about this story, please contact: Tom Kirk, tdk25@cam.ac.uk

First prize goes jointly to Kelsey, a student at Bosworth Academy in Leicestershire, and Zara, who is studying at Campion School, Northamptonshire.

In her winning entry, Kelsey wrote: “Everything looked very grand and slightly intimidating at first, nevertheless I soon found out that everybody was very welcoming and you felt as though you belonged there rather quickly. 

“After taking part in the Masterclass, I would most certainly like to apply a university which has a standard of teaching which is close to or equivalent to The University of Cambridge’s high level of performance.  It has allowed me to see the possibilities that I could achieve if I attended somewhere as good as Cambridge.”

Zara’s entry focused on the educational side of the residential: “The trip to the Botanic Garden had significant links with my Geography GCSE syllabus,” she wrote. “We learned about the adaptations in arid and tropical environments.

“The Evening with Galileo and Physics Workshop were also brilliant. I found Galileo's work and determination incredibly fascinating as well as his spontaneity in hypotheses. The actor was energetic and enthusiastic and brought the entire room of us weary teenagers to life. In the Physics Workshop, I was introduced to the application of diffraction which elaborated upon my physics knowledge. I thoroughly enjoyed both of these activities.”

Five other entrants were highly commended. They are:-

• Ben, from Danetre and Southbrook Learning Village. “Upon first hearing of my allocation for a place on the Masterclass, I was slightly worried about the idea of going to a university and stopping there for a few days. This worry was completely irrational! As soon as I entered the grounds the porter welcomed me with a huge smile and the university reps greeted the group with open arms. In each of the sessions we encountered facts that normally would not be brought up in normal curriculum activities. We were presented with the facts surrounding the topics and in depth explanations. This was both fun and educational, and personally I found it much better than normal school work!”
• James, Redborne Upper School. “The science built on things I had learned in the GCSE curriculum, but I found that the activities stretched my way of thinking and gave me a wider understanding on how science is useful in everyday life.  Overall, I found the course useful, as not only did it give me a wider view of science and a better understanding of it at degree level, but it also helped me plan my subject choices for my future and how I should aim to get into a top university, such as Cambridge. Now after attending this unforgettable Masterclass I am determined.”
• Maryam, from Harris Academy Bermondsey. “I learnt that the University of Cambridge is a welcoming and friendly place. It may seem intimidating but is packed with ordinary students that are kind and determined. The experience has increased my obsession with the University and has taught me that it is a place where you create lifelong friends and enjoy studying your favourite subjects.”
• Violeta, from Copleston High School. “My favourite activity of the Masterclass was the lecture on the chemistry of water.  I found that the lecturer, Dr Ben Pilgrim adored his subject so much, just by the way he was delivering it and the way he presented it to me and got me involved with his experiments. His attitude towards the subject made me more focused and inspired to learn.”
• Zainab, from Hamilton Community College. “You will never guess what came through the post today! I got chosen to attend the Easter Residential Science Masterclass Yay! Right now, I’m so delighted; I could jump around like an excited kangaroo. Just imagine all the wonderful things that I’ll be doing, I just can’t wait... This Masterclass really did turn out to be one of the best experiences in my life so far. I absolutely loved the talk on teenagers, it was very engaging and it was very intriguing to know that our brains shrink as we grow older.”

Schools Liaison Officer for Pembroke and St. Catharine’s Colleges, Laura McGarty, said “The Easter Residential Science Masterclass is an opportunity for 90 young people to spend three days in the company of others who enjoy science as much as they do, to find out more about studying science at university, through lectures, practical work and group challenges, and to experience living in College.

“It was a real challenge to choose our diary competition winners. Every entry shows how intellectually inspiring and how enjoyable our students found their time in Cambridge.

“We thoroughly enjoyed our time with the participants, and would like to thank our student ambassadors for sharing their love of science and their experience of university life with the group.”

• Pembroke and St. Catharine’s Colleges are linked to Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Rutland, Suffolk and the London Borough of Southwark through the University of Cambridge Area Links Scheme. Their events are designed to raise aspirations and to encourage applications to Higher Education and to the University of Cambridge.

In a study funded by the Wellcome Trust and the European Research Council researchers at the University of Cambridge reconstructed the chemical make-up of the Earth’s earliest ocean in the laboratory. The team found the spontaneous occurrence of reaction sequences which in modern organisms enable the formation of molecules essential for the synthesis of metabolites. These organic molecules, such as amino acids, nucleic acids and lipids, are critical for the cellular metabolism seen in all living organisms

The detection of one of the metabolites, ribose 5-phosphate, in the reaction mixtures is particularly noteworthy, as RNA precursors like this could in theory give rise to RNA molecules that encode information, catalyze chemical reactions and replicate.

It was previously assumed that the complex metabolic reaction sequences, known as metabolic pathways, which occur in modern cells, were only possible due to the presence of enzymes. Enzymes are highly complex molecular machines that are thought to have come into existence during the evolution of modern organisms. However, the team’s reconstruction reveals that metabolism-like reactions could have occurred naturally in our early oceans, before the first organisms evolved.

Life on Earth began during the Archean geological eon almost 4 billion years ago in iron-rich oceans that dominated the surface of the planet. This was an oxygen-free world, pre-dating photosynthesis, when the redox state of iron was different and much more soluble to act as potential catalysts. In these oceans, iron, other metals and phosphate facilitated a series of reactions which resemble the core of cellular metabolism occurring in the absence of enzymes.

The findings suggest that metabolism predates the origin of life and evolved through the chemical conditions that prevailed in the worlds earliest oceans.

“Our results show that reaction sequences that resemble two essential reaction cascades of metabolism, glycolysis and the pentose-phosphate pathways, could have occurred spontaneously in the earth’s ancient oceans,” says Dr Markus Ralser from the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge and the National Institute for Medical Research, who led the study.

“In our reconstructed version of the ancient Archean ocean, these metabolic reactions were particularly sensitive to the presence of ferrous iron which was abundant in the early oceans, and accelerated many of the chemical reactions that we observe. We were surprised by how specific these reactions were,” he added.

The conditions of the Archean ocean were reconstructed based on the composition of various early sediments described in the scientific literature which identify soluble forms of iron as one of the most frequent molecules present in these oceans.

Alexandra Turchyn from the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge, one of the co-authors of the study said: “We are quite certain that the earliest oceans contained no oxygen, and so any iron present would have been soluble in these oxygen-devoid oceans.  It’s therefore possible that concentrations of iron could have been quite high”.

The different metabolites were incubated at temperatures of 50-90˚C, similar to what might be expected close to the hydrothermal vents of an oceanic volcano. These temperatures would not support the activity of conventional protein enzymes. The chemical products were separated and analyzed by liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry.

Some of the observed reactions could also take place in water but were accelerated by the presence of metals that served as catalysts. “In the presence of iron and other compounds found in the oceanic sediments, we observed 29 metabolism-like chemical reactions, including those that produce some of the essential chemicals of metabolism, for example precursors to the building blocks of proteins or RNA,” says Dr Ralser.

“These results indicate that the basic architecture of the modern metabolic network could have originated from the chemical and physical constraints that existed on Earth billions of years ago.”

Copy adapted from an original press release from the Wellcome Trust.

Reference
Keller et al. (2014) Mol Syst Biol 10:725. Non-enzymatic glycolysis and pentose phosphate pathway-like reactions in a plausible Archean ocean

Sodium channels are implicated in many serious conditions such as heart disease, epilepsy and pain, making them an important potential target for drug therapies. Unfortunately, there is still much scientists do not know about the molecules. New Cambridge research provides fresh and unexpected insight into the structure of sodium channels and, specifically, one of its components - β-subunit molecules - which are responsible for ‘fine-tuning’ the activity of the channel. The research is published in the most recent edition of the Journal ofBiological Chemistry.

Nerves and other electrically-excitable cells communicate with one another by transmitting electrical signals, and sodium channels play a vital role in this process. The sodium channel lies on the surface of the nerve and muscle cells and is composed of a large molecule called the α-subunit, together with smaller β-subunit molecules. The b-subunits ‘fine-tune’ the activity of the channel, so that the initiation, frequency and duration of the action potential can be appropriately regulated. There are ten different forms of α-subunits and four different forms of b-subunits. These are expressed in different types of cells and organs within the body.

The new Cambridge research was carried out by Sivakumar Namadurai and led by Dr Tony Jackson and Dr Dima Chirgadze from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Biochemistry, and focussed on one of the b-subunits, called β3. This molecule is particularly important in regulating sodium channels located on heart cells.

For the study, the researchers used a technique called protein X-ray crystallography to determine the atomic-resolution structure of a part of the b3-subunit called the ‘immunoglobulin domain’. This region of the b3-subunit lies on the outside of the cell and binds to the heart sodium channel α-subunit.

They discovered that three b3-immunoglobulin domains come together to form a trimer (so-called because it is made up of three molecules). Using a technique called atomic force microscopy, Dilshan Balasuriya, led by Professor Mike Edwardson in Cambridge’s Department of Pharmacology, imaged individual b3 trimers and confirmed that the complete b3-subunit trimers cross-linked up to three sodium channel α-subunits.

“Our results were unexpected,” said Dr Jackson. “We have been working on the b3-subunit for about 14 years. In all that time, we have had to infer events at the molecular level indirectly. To actually see the atomic structure of the subunit and how it forms the trimer was one of those rare ‘a-ha!’ moments, like switching on a light bulb.”

Dr Chirgadze added: “Our research has important implications for our understanding of the mechanism of sodium channel behaviour. Up until now there has been an assumption that individual sodium channels function independently. But this might be too simple a view. One very exciting possibility is that the cross-linking of sodium channel α-subunits by b3 trimers could lead to several sodium channels being functionally connected together. If correct, this would allow a more efficient initiation of the action potential.”

Even though male infertility is responsible for half of all cases of infertile couples, decades of misogynistic limelight on infertile women has left a ‘categorical hole’ in medical systems, with very few male fertility specialists and no official board certification for practitioners in the US, says a medical sociologist.

Some men seeking treatment end up further damaged by malpractice – prescribed testosterone, for example, which arrests sperm production – resulting from treatment by specialists in the wrong areas, such as a general urologist or their wife’s doctor.

And those that do manage to engage with male infertility specialists are often fed information about their disorder through metaphors that mask infertility – frequently involving traditional male activities such as plumbing, sport or car mechanics – to the point where two thirds of infertile men interviewed for the study simply didn’t consider themselves infertile.       

“This is not some kind of deep-seated denial on the part of these men. There is an entire culture and medical system that makes it possible for men to be infertile and not even realise it,” said Dr Liberty Barnes from the ReproSoc group in the Department of Sociology, who has authored the book Conceiving Masculinity based on the research. 

“Male infertility is as prevalent as female infertility, but it’s invisible in our society. While female infertility support groups, blogs, news and literature abound, male infertility is hidden from public view.

“In fact, most cases of male infertility are referred to IVF clinics – a process in which women bear the brunt. For many, male infertility is repaired in female bodies.”

Barnes spent over 100 hours shadowing doctors in five clinics in different states right across the US, as well as interviewing many of the couples involved (men and women separately).

Most infertile men, even those who do self-identify as infertile, are able to ‘intellectually reframe’ their infertility issues as a medical condition somehow separate from their self, explains Barnes.

“This separation of body and self, while rare in female infertility, is the standard coping mechanism in men – that their ‘messed-up plumbing’ is not their fault and in most cases repairable.

“Many men cling to the notion that if you have a problem that can be fixed, you don’t have a problem. Instead of telling these men they’re infertile, you hear doctors saying ‘oh, it’s just an issue with your blocked exhaust’.

“The doctors actually provide men with the linguistic strategies to separate body from self.”

Culturally, male fertility is intrinsically bound up with ideas of virility, machismo and sexual potency because it hinges on that very essence of manliness – semen. As William, a businessman in his late thirties interviewed for the research, puts it: “Men should be able to gush sperm all over the place”.  

For Barnes, the prevarication around male infertility is symptomatic of widespread cultural nervousness to expose masculinity as in any way fragile. Masculinity is equated with power; protecting and expressing power is a key function of societies and states. In the book, she cites the global media panic around a 1992 study showing sperm counts were dropping.    

Male infertility hits masculine identities – from the personal to the national – right where it counts, says Barnes. One interviewee described his desire for fatherhood as “kind of the only purpose of life”. Another said it led him to “doubt the toughness” of his penis. 

Consequently, once a man is diagnosed, almost as much effort is taken to socially alleviate this perceived trauma to masculinity as to treat it medically. When interviewed, doctors reeled out a progressive rhetoric. But in the infertility clinics Barnes found a culture designed to enforce gender stereotypes and bolster masculinity. 

“Every doctor I spoke to and medical seminar I went to, I heard time and again: we’ve got to help society move past archaic ideas that reproduction is women’s work. Then when I was in the clinics, it was complete immersion in traditional gender ideology: penis jokes, talk of balls – everything was power and virility,” said Barnes.

Diagnoses were shrouded in metaphors invoking factories/bridges/engines – technological achievement hiding biological failure. One doctor that Barnes shadowed, when prescribing hormone treatment to boost testosterone, would tell patients that side effects include “the urge to hit a ball really hard or drive really fast”. Barnes describes this claim as scientifically debatable. 

The assumed functionality of male sexual biology also translated to the first experience of the clinic – the collection cup. Men describe being pushed into a room or even just behind a curtain with no instruction beyond “fasten the lid tightly”.

Medical institutions assume men can masturbate under any conditions, will enjoy it, and be able to shoot semen straight into a cup, says Barnes. Some interviewees told her the semen they provided was both of particularly poor quality and limited due to stress and the amount they were able to catch. In fact, most men found this confusing and uncomfortable – especially when bluntly confronted with the choice of ‘performing’ or extraction by needle from the testicle.  

Barnes found the extraordinary lack of medical professionals specialising in male infertility as opposed to those in female infertility – as well as absence of official board certification for treating male infertility – to be part of a damaging cycle:

“When I spoke to organisations about this hole in the system, they would tell me it’s because it’s not needed. Men aren’t coming forward for treatment, so there appears to be little demand. But then those that do struggle to find help, which – combined with the social stigma – means that many give up.”  

There is a medical and social price to pay, she says. Research into male infertility is nowhere near as advanced as that for female infertility. And societal silence on the subject means men who want and may well be able to have children if treated are not – or being treated by the wrong people.

Among what medical specialists there are, the cultural invisibility of infertile men is inherently conflicting, says Barnes. On the one hand, male infertility doctors complain about the lack of attention the topic receives. But on the other, they realise this invisibility protects men and masculinity by suppressing the issue.

“If you promote male infertility as a label to encourage more men to come forward for treatment, you will have a harder time helping them pretend they’re not actually infertile,” she said.

Watch Liberty Barnes discuss gender and scientific imagination at a TEDx here.

The Royal Society is a self-governing Fellowship of many of the world’s most distinguished scientists drawn from all areas of science, engineering, and medicine. The Society’s fundamental purpose is to recognise, promote, and support excellence in science and to encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity.

Sir Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society, said: “Science helps us to better understand ourselves and the natural world on which we depend. Building scientific knowledge helps us face some of the planet’s biggest challenges such as food shortages, climate change and tackling disease.These scientists who have been elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society have already contributed much to the scientific endeavour, whether that is in academia, industry or government.”

List of Fellows elected today:

Professor Geoffrey Grimmett, Statistical Laboratory
Professor Richard Hills, Department of Physics
Dr Timothy Holland, Department of Earth Sciences
Professor Martin Johnson, Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience
Professor Vladimir Markovic, Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics
Professor Paul Midgley, Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy
Dr Karalyn Patterson, Department of Clinical Neurosciences
Professor Randy Read, Department of Haematology
Professor David Ron, Department of Clinical Biochemistry
Dr Julian Parkhill, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute

https://royalsociety.org/about-us/fellowship/new-fellows-2014/

Papworth Hospital, the leading specialist heart and lung hospital, will move from its current location outside Cambridge onto the Cambridge Biomedical Campus next to Addenbrooke’s hospital site.

A £165 million deal for a new hospital has been approved by the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne.

Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, said: “This is good news for patients, good news for research and good news for UK plc.

“The exemplary contribution of Papworth in pioneering heart and lung transplants operations and treatment for these diseases has already made a major global contribution.

“This move will accelerate new discoveries and pioneering healthcare to the benefits of patients worldwide as well as the UK’s leadership in these fields.”

New buildings and facilities will be constructed on the site of the Cambridge Bio-medical Campus to accommodate the relocated Papworth Hospital. Its future location is now secure following years of uncertainty, said the Government today (May 1).

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, said: “I’ve been a strong supporter of this move. As I said on a visit to Cambridge last week, there is great value in these two leading hospitals working more closely together and continuing to provide first class medical care.”

The existing buildings at Papworth are more than 75 years old, with some older than 150 years. Moving to brand new purpose-built facilities will ensure the hospital continues to provide world-class medical care and treatment.

The proposed new 310-bed Papworth hospital will boast the latest medical facilities and technologies.

Professor Patrick Maxwell, Regius Professor of Physic at the University of Cambridge and Chief Executive of Cambridge University Health Partners said:

“This is good news on all fronts. From a patient’s perspective, it is absolutely crucial that they have access to the best possible services in the closest proximity to each other. This will mean that patients will have access to a comprehensive range of services in one place.

“Cardiovascular disease is one of the major global killers. Bringing such a renowned specialist heart and lung centre onto the site is an excellent complement to the strengths of Cambridge University Health Partners.”

Professor John Wallwork, Chairman of Papworth Hospital and former cardiac surgeon added: “For many years we have been convinced that the right place for this world class institution to provide high-quality services for patients with heart and lung conditions from across the country is on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus. We now look forward to putting that vision into reality."

The new hospital is to be delivered through a 30-year PFI deal, with confirmation of the service provider to be announced shortly.

The Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander, said: “This ambitious package will ensure that patients across the East of England continue to benefit from access to world-class specialist treatment, will secure Papworth hospital’s future location, and help further develop its world-leading capabilities.”

Construction of the new facilities is projected to begin in 2015 and complete by 2017 to 2018. The plans for this project will be finalised over the coming months, with all funding subject to final approvals as usual.

Around 150 people worldwide are known to suffer from HGPS, a disease which results from a specific genetic mutation which is not inherited. Usually diagnosed around the age of six months, children with HGPS lose their hair, look old and suffer many of the symptoms of ageing, including brittle bones, stroke and heart attacks. They generally live only until their early teens.

In cells from people with HGPS, the nucleus is marked out because, unlike a normal cell’s round nucleus, HGPS cell nuclei are drastically misshapen. Scientists believe this makes the cells more fragile, contributing to HGPS patients’ symptoms.

Proteins called Lamin A and Lamin C play a vital role in nuclear architecture, acting as ‘scaffolding’ for the nucleus. In HGPS, however, mutations in the gene that makes these proteins mean they cannot shape the nucleus correctly.

Working with cells from HGPS patients, researchers from the Wellcome Trust/CRUK Gurdon Institute at the University of Cambridge and the CNRS in France scoured the scientific literature for compounds that might affect nuclear architecture. They then tested a shortlist of the most promising compounds on the cells in the laboratory. Their results are published in the journal Science.

They found that one compound – which they were able to improve, yielding a molecule that they have named Remodelin – effectively improved the damaged nuclei, restoring their shape. Further tests revealed that doing so also improved the health of the cells, making them grow and divide more normally.

The researchers then went on a ‘fishing trip’ to try to work out how the compound worked. According to Dr Delphine Larrieu of the Gurdon Institute, lead author of the study, “Most drugs work by binding to something in the cell, so we went fishing. We attached a chemical ‘hook’ to Remodelin, incubated it with cell extracts, and examined what was attached to it when we reeled it back in.

The target they fished out was NAT10, a protein not previously associated with ageing or HPGS. “From our following work, we now know that Remodelin works by inhibiting NAT10, so we have gone from finding a potential drug to identifying its target and mechanism-of-action,” she said.

The results are exciting because few drugs are available to treat HGPS (those that are available only partially improve some of the symptoms and do not extend people’s life span) and because Remodelin works in a different way. Senior author Professor Steve Jackson says: “Remodelin is different because as well as improving the cellular defects, it is the first molecule to also reduce the high level of DNA damage that occurs in these cells, which is believed to contribute to premature ageing. What we’re particularly excited about is that Remodelin seems to work in a different way from existing drugs, and has broader effects.”

These findings also improve our understanding of normal ageing, because although HGPS is very rare and devastating, it shares many features with normal ageing. Moreover, this could open up new treatments for some forms of cancer, because up- or down-regulation of nuclear-lamina proteins has been linked to the aggressiveness of certain cancers.

“This is an example of how basic cell biology can give rise to potential new opportunities for treating human disease, and although our research is focused on one rare disease, we feel that similar approaches could be useful in identifying new treatments for other serious human diseases,” he said.

The next stage of the research, which is already underway, is to see if Remodelin works in animal models of the disease; if it does, the researchers will be able to trial the drug in patients.

The research was supported by EMBO, Cancer Research UK, the Wellcome Trust and the Medical Research Council.

The work of the medieval saint often began even before birth; the earliest text telling the life story of 6th-century Gildas has him making important pronouncements from the safety of his mother’s womb.  Even after death, patron saints were portrayed in the exercise of astonishing powers. The author of the vernacular Irish text which recounts the life of Saint Bairre of Cork sees the saint resurrect a king’s dead wife by bathing her. The Welsh saint, Beino, is recorded as reducing a recalcitrant king to a pool of water, by force of words alone, a feat worthy of Game of Thrones.

A conference taking place today in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic will see the launch of a project to categorise and chart the thousands of miracle stories recorded about saints of the British Isles between 500 and 1300.  The meeting, Mapping the Miraculous: Hagiographical Motifs and the Medieval World, has been organised by three graduate students at Cambridge - Robert Gallagher, Julianne Pigott and Sarah Waidler - in collaboration with a colleague from St Andrews, Jennifer Key. 

Hagiographers, tasked with writing the biographies of the holy men and women who converted pagan populations or headed Christian communities, relied on the wondrous and weird to establish the bona fides of the saints who populated the religious landscape of early England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. “The layered stories of saints’ acts served multiple purposes in medieval communities, from regulating orthodox religious behaviour to explaining the otherwise unexplainable in the natural world,” said Pigott.

Political expediency was another aspect of saintliness: a timely miracle could save a dynasty. When his local king feared that he would die before producing a male heir, Saint Abban is depicted as coming to his rescue. Abban took the king’s new born daughter in his hands “and prayed to God that the king might have an heir; and the girl he immersed in the font he took out as a boy, and laid it in the king’s bosom. ’Here is thy son,’ he said. And the king was exceedingly glad”.

Pigott explained: “It isn’t difficult to imagine how a narrative such as this might have served the needs of both ruler and ruled. Potentially, it reassured contemporary audiences that, by divine intervention, the proper order of succession would be followed, and life would continue as normal. Though, to the modern reader it’s certainly more complicated.”

The conference is the first step in a project to categorise and chart the thousands of miracle stories recorded about saints of the British Isles between 500 and 1300.  The organisers hope that this collaborative tool will help students and established scholars plot the parallels and divergences between textual accounts of wonder-working across linguistic and geographic boundaries.

Their ultimate intention is to develop an online database – called Mapping Miracles - that will allow scholars to see how miracles recorded in texts that were often composed centuries and hundreds of miles apart, share commonalities and differences. While this week the current Pope made saints of two former popes, the medieval path to sainthood was a much more democratic affair. Authors created, copied and amended miracle accounts to support the case of their chosen holy-man, often to accord with local knowledge and customs.

Gallagher said: “When we began work on this project each of us was struck by the differences in the miracle accounts we has each previously considered to be universal. We all have specialisms in a certain range of vernacular and Latin texts, but when we began this collaborative research, we realised that the assumptions we held as a result of our own work, may not hold true for texts produced in other regions. We hope that Friday’s event will spark a similar degree of enthusiasm from others working in related fields."

As a digital database, Mapping Miracles will offer significant advantages over more conventional efforts at creating indices of literary motifs, as the proposed online format will facilitate complex cross referencing, creating a richer and more nuanced picture of the material, while also allowing scholars from around the world to contribute to the process. “The transformation of a baby, from girl to boy, attributed to Saint Abban is just one example of how the database might be used to categorise a miracle in several ways,” said Pigott. “It’s interesting on a number of levels: the sacramental setting of baptism, the mutability of gender, and the provision of service to a king and his political needs.”

Today’s keynote speaker will be medievalist Professor Robert Bartlett (St Andrews). Well known as a presenter, most recently of the BBC Two series The Plantagenets, he will talk about ‘Narrative Motifs in Medieval Miracle Accounts’.  Other speakers will include Dr Rosalind Love (Cambridge University), who will discuss the Miracles of St Eadburh of Lyminge, and Professor Dorothy Ann Bray who will give an insight into her earlier work on developing an index of miracles in the texts of Irish saints’ lives.  

Waidler said: “Miracles were a strong feature of the extensive bodies of Latin and vernacular literatures produced in these islands throughout the medieval period. Reading these texts today we are offered a window on the medieval mind, helping us to understand how people might have thought about not just the divine, but their own lives and personal concerns. The landscape itself, with its place names, is a record of how deeply the lives of the saints are scored into our culture.

Miracles are told and retold in the texts that survive in medieval and early modern manuscripts we find littered across European libraries. For now, the Mapping Miracles team is focusing on the British Isles but as hagiography is not confined to one geographic region or even one period of history, there’s no reason to suppose that their online project won’t expand accordingly. Gallagher noted: “Part of the fascination of miracles lies in the repetitive nature of narratives that have endured for so long – rather as pop music, much of it is very simplistic in form and content, yet it’s popular for exactly that familiarity.”

Pigott added: “Notional familiarity may be consciously constructed, and we can’t just read repetition as failure to innovate. Medieval authors took the universal and particularised and localised it. I would argue they often turned stereotypes into oicotypes - to borrow a term from folkloric studies. For example, they took Biblical miracles and made them more relevant to local concerns, so the Irish saint conveniently changes water into beer, rather than wine. A miracle tale will resonate more with the reader if they can recognise their own cultural values at play.”

Julianne Pigott is a Gates Cambridge Scholar. For more information on the Mapping Miracles project http://mappingmiracles.wordpress.com/

Inset images: church of Finbarr at Guagán Barra, Cork; statue of St Fanahan, Findchua; Iona; Ardmor; the Skelligs (Julianne Pigott and Sarah Waidler)

Opening tomorrow (May 7), Literature of the Liberation: The French Experience in Print 1944-1946 has been assembled from the unique collection of more than 600 books, cartoons, magazines, photographs and gramophone records donated to Cambridge by collector Sir Charles Chadwyck-Healey.

After four years of occupation, Paris was liberated on August 25, 1944. Virtually straight away, writers, artists, photographers and film-makers tried to capture what the experience had been like. Although a large amount of scholarly and historical attention has been paid to works produced during France’s occupation, Chadwyck-Healey said the University Library exhibition is the first to look at the literary landscape in the aftermath of liberation.

“There’s no collection like this in France or anywhere else,” he said. “This is the first time there has ever been an exhibition solely devoted to the literature of this tumultuous period.

“The days, weeks and months following liberation were such an extraordinary time for people in France. Occupation and liberation were cataclysmic events in French history. They had to deal with the scars of overwhelming defeat, living with the Germans, and then having the Allies sweeping through the country. All this had a profound effect on the national psyche.

“Much of the collection is about shame, but the most surprising thing is the sense of humour, irony and self-deprecation. After liberation, from the very first moments of freedom, there was an extraordinary outpouring of material.”

Chadwyck-Healey’s fascination with the period has seen him amass a huge collection of books and related material since 2001. He estimates there to be around 2,600 books published in the period examined by the exhibition.

“There are many still to be found and we continue to add to the collection to make it as complete as possible” he said. “It is a research collection, and I donated it to Cambridge University Library so that scholars and students can have access to it. There are books by Sartre, Camus and Cocteau, but the majority are by French men and women about whom very little is known.”

Besides the written accounts, the most moving exhibits for many visitors will be the portraits of inmates of Buchenwald made by the artists who were there as fellow prisoners. Three professional artists - Auguste Favier, Pierre Mania and Boris Taslitzky - were active in Buchenwald at the same time and managed not only to get materials to draw and paint, but to keep their work secret from their captors (111 drawings in the case of Taslitzky) until they could be published after the end of the War.

Literature of the Liberation, which is free to the public and runs until October 11, 2014, will be opened by the French Ambassador to London, Bernard Emié, at a launch event on May 6 (see media invite). The exhibition is divided into 12 distinct sub-headings including Fallen Heroes, The Liberation of Paris and Prisoners’ Books.

His Excellency Monsieur Emié said: “I welcome this opportunity to recognise the longstanding links between French history and literature and the collections of the University Library. From its Francophone medieval manuscripts, through its rich holdings of books relating to Montaigne and Rousseau, to this new collection on the Liberation, Cambridge University Library has established itself as a major centre for the study of France’s contribution to world culture.”

University Librarian Anne Jarvis said: “We are delighted to put on display highlights from the Chadwyck-Healey Liberation Collection, in this year of the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of Paris. Sir Charles’s flair and determination as a book-collector have produced a critical resource for the study of this important era of twentieth-century history, and his magnificent gift of the collection underlines the continuing importance of donations – both private and corporate – to the Library’s mission of keeping the University at the cutting edge of research.”

If it was possible for us to drill to the centre of the Earth, about 6,500 km below the thin crust on which we live, the largest part to traverse would be the mantle. Although solid, this complex mix of minerals is capable of flowing, albeit over long timescales, as a consequence of the massive variations in pressure and temperature to which it is subjected.

But even the deepest drill cores have so far failed to penetrate the dynamic, flowing parts of the Earth’s mantle. Studying these deep layers is crucial to understanding the inner workings of our planet and the driving force behind movement of tectonic plates. Magma produced in the mantle feeds volcanic eruptions and supplies the cocktail of chemical elements required for the maintenance of a habitable planet.

Now a new study funded by the Natural Environment Research Council in the University’s Department of Earth Sciences has turned to a unique rock collection, amassed since at least the early 1800s and held within its Sedgwick Museum, to provide fresh understanding of the composition of the mantle. 

The collection contains around 160,000 specimens of rock and about 250,000 slide-mounted rock slices that, at half the width of a human hair, are thin enough to let light through. “The rocks we are interested in are igneous – the frozen remains of magma formed at depths of 100 km or more from the mantle and then spewed out of volcanoes,” explained project leader Dr John Maclennan, who is working with Dr Arwen Deuss and Dr Tim Holland. “They carry a message about the composition of the deep Earth that we can decrypt using rock chemistry.”

Alfred Harker, the Cambridge geologist who curated the collection at the beginning of the 20th century, was one of the pioneers behind using thin sections of rocks for interpreting geological composition. But where once Harker would have looked for distinctive crystals under an optical microscope, today Maclennan can probe each crystal with an electron beam, looking for traces of magnesium, iron, nickel, calcium and a host of other metals.

“Our understanding of how the Earth’s deep interior behaves is limited,” said Maclennan. “For decades there has been a consensus of opinion suggesting that the mantle has a consistent composition throughout. Recently, however, doubts have been raised by geochemists looking at igneous samples from a group of five ocean island groups. If true, it means we need to rethink how the Earth is built.”

Harker’s original collection has grown with the addition of samples from rock archives worldwide, and now contains thousands of samples from scores of volcanic island groups. “It’s an incredible resource – fresh sampling of this material from remote island locations would cost a fortune in investigator time and travel. Some of the islands are so remote that it can be months before a ship returns to collect you,” said Maclennan.

At the Sedgwick Museum’s conservation unit, drawer upon drawer are filled with slides corresponding to rocks gathered from islands such as Réunion, Kerguelen, Marion, Ascension, Pitcairn, Hawaii, Tristan da Cunha, The Marquesas and Samoa.

The properties of crystals in these rocks can tell geologists about the pressure and temperature conditions under which they were formed. The recent technological advances have meant that the rocks can be analysed with much greater precision than ever before. “It’s a good example of the benefits of hanging on to these collections,” said Maclennan. “Harker was visionary in understanding the importance of the rocks he was collecting but it’s taken a century since he began collecting rocks to reach a point where their true worth is apparent.”

Among the feldspar, pyroxene, spinel and other volcanic crystals, the pale green olivine is especially important to the team’s analysis. “Olivine is thought to be the most abundant mineral in the shallow mantle. Melting of the mantle is caused by an increase in temperature, a decrease in pressure, or a change in composition. After hot magma rises away from the more dense mantle rock beneath, it eventually stalls, cools and starts to make crystals. Olivine seems to the first to form, so it gives the best view of what’s happening deep down,” explained Maclennan.

Scientists also use seismic data to study the Earth’s interior. By tracking the progress of seismic waves of energy released by large earthquakes, they can indirectly assess the physical structure of the mantle. “However, it can be a bit like having a CAT scan of the body but no means of interpreting exactly what you are looking at,” he added.

The new study will marry together the geochemistry of the rock crystals with the expected response of each composition to the passage of seismic waves. Then, by comparing this expected response to those actually observed under the island groups from which the rocks came, the researchers hope to arrive at the most comprehensive assessment of mantle structure to date.

“This will tell us what the Earth is,” said Maclennan, “Does it have a mantle that is uniform in structure, or is it heterogeneous? Have the long-held beliefs in a homogeneous structure been rightly challenged in recent times?

“The mantle accounts for about two thirds of the Earth’s mass and is an engine of global change, implicated in processes that control the environment at timescales from hundreds to billions of years. The rock collection presents a wonderful opportunity to significantly improve our fundamental knowledge of the mantle's structure, and how this links to the planet’s habitability, and may also provide long-term benefits to the UK economy in terms of better understanding of energy or mineral resources.”

The Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences holds fossils, rocks and minerals from around the world that cover more than 550 million years of Earth’s history, as well as almost the entire suite of Harker’s papers spanning over 60 years of geological investigations.
 

The donation is the largest gift ever received by Cambridge’s engineering faculty, which has long been the most successful in Europe.

The donation expands the existing work of the Foundation which now supports design, technology and engineering from primary school through to start-up businesses, having donated £35m to these causes.

The building will provide space to a number of Cambridge postgraduate scholars whose research is supported by the Foundation.

Due to open in 2015, the Dyson Engineering Design Centre will become the focal point in teaching Cambridge students about the design process, providing specialised printing machinery, scanners, lasers and routers.

The building will provide the space for over 1,200 bright engineers to conduct their research. An open plan design featuring dozens of incubator units will encourage the sharing of ideas and a collaborative research environment.

Student-led projects housed within the building include solar powered electric racing cars, vehicles engineered for arctic ice, quad-rotor drones and helium balloon spaceflight systems.

A separate new four storey building, the James Dyson Building for Engineering, will house postgraduates and support world leading research in areas including advanced materials, smart infrastructure, electric vehicles, and efficient internal combustion systems for cars.

Bridge links across buildings will allow easy access to testing laboratories housing world-class fluid dynamics machinery, aerodynamics equipment and areas for aeroacoustics analysis. 

Specialist knowledge on research strategies and funding advice will be available on-site, supported by Philip Guildford Director of Research at the Department of Engineering.

Research undertaken in the hub will build on a rich tradition of invention: it was at Cambridge that Harry Riccardo pioneered the internal combustion engine and Frank Whittle revolutionised travel with his jet engine invention.

The Department is located at the heart of the Cambridge cluster, which has created over 1,500 spin-out companies over the last decade.

Technology we take for granted, including: Concorde ‘droop’ nose design, the microchips developed by ARM that now power 90% of the world’s mobile phones, and the pregnancy test.

James Dyson said: “Developing the intellectual property that will help Britain succeed in the global technology race depends on applying our brightest minds to ambitious and exciting research projects. I’m hopeful that this new space for Britain’s best engineers at the University of Cambridge will catalyse great technological breakthroughs that transform how we live”.

Dame Ann Dowling, Head of the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge said: “Academic rigour must meet with practical invention. The Dyson Engineering Design Centre and the James Dyson Building for Engineering bridge the gap, encouraging engineers to apply their minds to creatively experiment and try new things.”

It took an estimated 2.3 billion metric tonnes of grain to feed the world in 2011 – that’s 6,300,000 tonnes per day. These staple foodstuffs, primarily wheat and corn, are traded on global commodities markets, and one sixth of this total is produced in the Midwest of the USA annually. Once harvested, the grain begins an often long journey, stopping first in one of the many elevators (silos) that soar above the Midwestern prairie landscape.

These vast storage facilities house the grain that keeps much of the world supplied with bread, pasta and other basics. In North America many of the tallest elevators are owned by Cargill, one of the world’s biggest private companies. Cargill traces its roots back to a single grain warehouse in 1865, and continues to dominate world markets for commodities such as wheat and cattle.  Companies like Cargill are major traders in organised commodity markets in Chicago and elsewhere. On one exchange, the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), 349 billion bushels of corn, 115 billion bushels of wheat and 184 billion bushels of soya beans changed hands in 2010. 

The power of traders on the exchanges to set prices for basic foodstuffs was established by the late 1800s. In a novel called The Pit (published in 1903), Frank Norris wrote: “Think of it, the food of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people just at the mercy of a few men down there on the Board of Trade. They make the price. They say just how much the peasant shall pay for his loaf of bread. If he can’t pay the price, he simply starves.”

Rasheed Saleuddin, a PhD candidate in the Faculty of History, is studying the economic context in which some of the world’s most powerful trading interests emerged. He explained: “My research looks at the interaction between grain trading pioneers and monopolists such as Cargill, clubby self-regulatory agencies such as the Chicago Board of Trade, well-funded academic investigators, and bureaucrats from a newly-interventionist US Federal Government Companies during the rapid development of grain trading markets in Chicago and elsewhere in the US Midwest during the period between the First and Second Word Wars.”

With extensive experience in trading commodities and ‘derivatives’ (securities linked to the performance of commodities) as a hedge fund manager, Saleuddin’s most recent work revisits the ways in which some of the leading economists working in the latter half of the 20th century explained the causes of the Great Depression of the 1930s. By examining the intricacies of the markets for agricultural commodities, such as wheat and corn, he has been able to critique some important evidence for one view of the causes of the Great Depression. 

“I’ve been able to apply academic evidence accumulated during the interaction between interest groups such as the newly-formed US regulatory agency, the Grain Futures Administration (1922) and the Stanford Food Research Institute, funded by later US President Herbert Hoover in the same year,” he said.

“An agriculture commodity future is a contract, traded on an organised market called an exchange, whereby a specific quantity of certain subset of grades and quality of a natural raw product (such as  wheat or cotton) can be contracted for at a set price in advance of its delivery. For example, a wheat elevator operator storing wheat from the most recent harvest over the winter could enter into a futures contract to sell that wheat for delivery the following May. In May, the operator could deliver the wheat to the other side of the contract, who, crucially but perhaps confusingly, would not necessarily be the original counterparty. More likely, however, both parties would close their contract out before maturity in May, and the elevator operator would make a separate agreement at that time to sell the wheat to a cash buyer.”

The exchange not only provides a place to do business but also sets the rules of engagement, one of which mandates the settlement of the profit or loss on these contracts at the end of each trading day, others of which allow for transferability and fungibility (whereby every contract is identical to every other contract) of any agreement made on the exchange.

Though of earlier origin, exchanges on which these futures could be traded became well established in the US Midwest and coastal cities by the middle of the 19th century. The earliest futures markets in the US traded agricultural products, such as wheat, cotton and maize corn. The wheat market was especially important, according to the accepted history:  it allowed farmers and middlemen, who held grain stores over the winter when the trade routes were inaccessible, to set a price for their inventories in advance of their sale, reducing the risk to further drops in price.

By the interwar period, traders in these futures markets for goods such as wheat or cotton set the prices transacted between farmers and middlemen or middlemen and end-users (including flour millers) in the much larger “spot” or ”cash” markets of those commodities, where most of these agricultural products were traded for immediate delivery by truck or boatload.  

Saleuddin and his academic supervisor D’Maris Coffman are revisiting and reinterpreting the models developed by Stanford agricultural economist and statistician Holbrook Working and his contemporaries during the 1920s and 1930s. “The studies of futures markets carried out in the years between the World Wars could not be replicated in today’s markets due to the increased complexity of modern markets as well as the political difficulties in obtaining compliance from the regulated for the information required,” said Saleuddin.

However, much of the early work done by the USDA, the Federal Trade Commission, Penn, Stanford and others has been ignored by more modern economists, who are less focused on the intellectual history of the study of these markets, and less interested in the context of the data they have been analysing from the period.

When the Great Depression hit North America in late 1929, the consequences were disastrous for the farmers of the Midwest. After record harvests the previous year, and facing oversupply throughout most of the 1920s, demand all of a sudden dried up for most foodstuffs, while Europe imposed quotas and embargoes and Argentina and Australia swamped the markets with their exports.  Another record grain crop in 1931 was harvested with little hope for its resale, domestically or as export. The price of Chicago wheat fell hard and fast from $1.40 per bushel in July 1929 to 49 cents – a fall in value of about two-thirds in just two years. 

Immediately after this, a second disaster hit: what became known as the Dust Bowl was a severe drought across the USA that began in 1933 and severely affected the economic social and political landscape of the US, arguably to this day.  Prices doubled from the depths of the original crash, rising above a dollar by mid-1934. By 1937, 21% of rural families were on emergency government relief. Almost one in ten farms changed hands in 1933, half of those voluntarily.This was the America of John Steinbeck and his epic 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath. It was not until the advent of the Second World War, ten years after the initial stock market crash, that economic output in the US recovered its pre-1929 levels.

This devastating period of economic meltdown caused untold hardship to millions in the Western world. Explanations of its causes were hotly debated at the time and have continued as a focus for discussion among economists.The monetarists, a highly influential school of what has become orthodox economic thought, claim that the Great Depression could have largely been avoided if the US government had provided more money, usually measured as consisting of currency in circulation and bank deposits, into the financial system.   

Saleuddin argues that the problem with this hypothesis is that the cost of money, as measured by the rental value of money, the interest rate, was quite low, indicating anything but a shortage. The response of most economists is to focus on the interest rate after adjusting for price changes in the economy, usually called the “real” rate of interest. Thus, the rate shown in the newspapers, usually called the “nominal” rate of interest is related to the real rate as follows: Real rate of interest = Nominal rate - inflation (or + deflation)

If deflation (a fall in the general price level) was expected in 1929-1932, then, even if the nominal rate of interest was near zero, the expected real rate of interest could have been quite high, thus providing evidence of a shortage of money during the early Depression years.

In 1987 and 1992, well-known economist James Hamilton noticed that the future price was almost always higher than the spot price during the early years of the Depression. Hamilton concluded that people expected inflation, not deflation, after the crash of 1929, and, therefore, a shortage of money is unlikely to be the sole cause, if it was a cause at all, of the Great Depression.

Saleuddin, however, suggests that Hamilton failed to understand Holbrook Working’s famous empirical observation, referred to in modern works as the “Working Curve”, that the futures price of wheat is always higher than the current price whenever there is a huge surplus of grain sitting in storage, as there was during the early years of the Great Depression. “That the spot price was below the futures price for most of the early years of the Depression tells us nothing about the expectations of economic agents during this period,” he said.

“Hamilton ignored the microstructure of the futures markets as well as the context of the times, and so reached erroneous conclusions.This has important policy implications today, especially as one the most prominent supporters of a non-monetarist explanation of the Great Depression, Ben Bernanke, until very recently sat in the most important position in the world for determining economic policy as chair of the US Federal Reserve. Additionally, Hamilton’s work was recently cited, for example, by Bank of Japan governor Haruhiko Kuroda in his defence of his current monetary policy. If Friedman and the monetarists were correct about the cause of the Great Depression, monetary policy would be the sole and prime focus of policy makers. If not, the world must turn to other solutions to close the output gap that has been caused by this most recent global financial crisis.”

The interwar period in the USA was characterised by a globalisation of agricultural commodity markets and severe dislocations, including the return to free markets after the First World War and, of course, the Great Depression of 1929-1939.  The nature of the most severe crisis in over 100 years as well as an understanding of the politics and economics of contemporary (and arguably current) financial markets can only be understood though a detailed examination of archives relating to this period. 

Saleuddin’s research draws on his exploration of a wide range of primary sources – political, business, media, theoretical and empirical – which together will enable him to present a better understanding of markets in general, but especially financial market and US government behaviour during the Great Depression. He said: “In this way, it may just be possible for this history to force a rethink of government policy in the regulation of financial markets as well as management of the economy in general.”

Inset images: Chicago Board of Trade traders, room in old Chicago Board of Trade building, dust bowl in Dallas (all Wikimedia Commons), The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck (Flickr Creative Commons).

The young diggers came from Ely College, Soham Village College, Cottenham Village College and Witchford Village College.

Guided by professional archaeologists from the ACA team, including Carenza Lewis and Paul Blinkhorn, they excavated test pits in back and front gardens, in front of the Village Hall, and behind the Black Horse pub. A large number of clay pipes were found in the pub pit, suggesting that nipping out for a smoke may be a tradition of many centuries’ standing.

According to Carenza, the HEFA is academically demanding but also gives participants a confidence boost.

“We mix up the school groups deliberately so that the students learn to get to know new people and to work alongside them.

“On the final day they join us in Cambridge to find out more about applying to university.

“Every participant gets a full report on the skills they have developed, which they can use to improve their school work and when it is time to write their UCAS applications.”

Access Cambridge Archaeology works with schools across East Anglia. “Our events put schools in contact with the university, which is a world-class university on their doorstep,” Carenza said. “We are particularly keen to work with schools with less experience of getting their students into higher education.”

John Stanford, Chairman of the Fen Edge Archaeology Group, helped to co-ordinate the Rampton HEFA.

“The householders enjoy finding out more about their property,” he said.

“Our members get to learn from the experts on Carenza’s team – it’s great to build links with the professionals and build up our confidence in what we are doing.

“And the involvement of local schoolchildren means that householders see young people in a positive way. It’s great to see what the digs bring out in them.”

Cottenham Village College pupil Rebecca applied for a place on the Field Academy because she is considering taking archaeology at university and wanted to see what happened on a dig.

“It’s been really interesting finding out what’s down there,” she said. “It makes you look a lot more carefully at your surroundings.

“It’s also been really interesting working with Paul and Carenza. It’s amazing how much they know! ‘It’s the bottom of a cooking pot,’ Paul will say. How do you find that out from a fragment?”

“Digs like these put people in touch with their history,” added Carenza. “The test pits help to build a picture of how the whole community developed in the past. And beyond archaeology, they give young people interested in studying any subjects the enthusiasm, confidence, skills and knowledge to aim for top universities”

The two-day residential included a sample lecture, an introduction to Cambridge’s small-group teaching and Collegiate structure, and sessions led by three of the University’s admissions tutors, enabling the advisers and tutors present to find out more about Cambridge’s admissions process and how best to support potential applicants.

Dr Andy Bell, Admissions Tutor for Gonville and Caius College, explained what admissions tutors look for in an application.

“We’re trying to match the applicant to the course, looking at their skills and abilities and the course content,” Dr Bell explained.

“Because we have relatively small numbers of applicants, we don’t have a box-ticking approach, but we do look carefully for evidence of academic skills.”

Dr Emily Tomlinson, Admissions Tutor at Lucy Cavendish College, emphasised the importance of the academic reference in giving a sense of trajectory and of the student’s progress through their A Levels or Access Course.

Alison Gilbert,  Academic & Pastoral Mentor, Middlesbrough College Sixth Form, said that the most valuable message she would take back to her students was that you could win a place at Cambridge with no A*s at GCSE. 

“To see that one person with no A* grades at GCSE got an offer gives hope to a huge swathe of our students,” she commented.

She found the opportunity to have her questions answered was the most useful part of the event. “I work with students on a one-to-one basis so I wanted to get as much information as possible,” Alison said, “and to keep myself up to date with admissions information.

Bernadette Morgan, Senior Tutor at Middlesbrough College Sixth Form, was encouraged by the level of detail with which applications are considered.

“What’s come across is how much individual attention is given,” she said. “There’s a real effort to see the whole person. It feels like Cambridge is committed to looking at our students as individuals.

“I encourage our students to aim for Cambridge, Oxford and Russell Group unis, and there’s a lot of myths that get in the way. We can go back now and say ‘it is realistic for you.’ It’s been really important to get that information, to be able to say ‘Cambridge is accessible if you put the effort in.”

A newly-developed computer simulation has created the first realistic version of the Universe, enabling researchers to understand how galaxies, black holes and other cosmic phenomena evolved from early in the Universe’s development up to the present day.

The simulation, known as Illustris, follows the complex development of both normal and dark matter over 13 billion years, matching many of the features observed in the real Universe for the first time.

Developed by an international team of researchers, Illustris tracks the development of the Universe from 12 million years after the Big Bang up to the present, and identified more than 41,000 galaxies in a cube of simulated space 350 million light years on each side. The results are reported in the May 8th issue of the journal Nature.

Over the past two decades, researchers have been attempting to build accurate computer simulations of the development of the Universe, using computer programs which are capable of encapsulating all the relevant laws of physics governing the formation of galaxies.

Previous attempts to simulate the universe were hampered by lack of computing power and the complexities of the underlying physics. As a result those programs either were limited in resolution, or forced to focus on a small portion of the universe. Earlier simulations also had trouble modelling complex feedback from star formation, supernova explosions, and supermassive black holes.

Illustris employs a sophisticated computer program to recreate the evolution of the universe in high fidelity. It includes both normal matter and dark matter using 12 billion 3D “pixels,” or resolution elements.

Illustris yields a realistic mix of spiral galaxies like the Milky Way and giant elliptical galaxies. It also recreated large-scale structures like galaxy clusters and the bubbles and voids of the cosmic web.

The team dedicated five years to developing the Illustris project. The actual calculations took three months of run time, using a total of 8,000 CPUs running in parallel. In comparison, the same calculations would have taken an average desktop computer more than 2,000 years to complete.

“Until now, no single simulation was able to reproduce the Universe on both large and small scales simultaneously,” says lead author Dr Mark Vogelsberger of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, who conducted the work in collaboration with researchers at the University of Cambridge, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies.

“The Illustris simulation is a remarkable technical achievement,” said Dr Debora Sijacki of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, one of the paper’s co-authors. “It shows us for the first time how the bewildering variety of galaxies and the supermassive black holes at their centres have formed.”

Since light travels at a fixed speed, the farther away astronomers look, the farther back in time they can see. A galaxy one billion light-years away is seen as it was a billion years ago. Telescopes like Hubble can give us views of the early Universe by looking to greater distances. However, astronomers can’t use Hubble to follow the evolution of a single galaxy over time.

“Illustris is like a time machine. We can go forward and backward in time. We can pause the simulation and zoom into a single galaxy or galaxy cluster to see what’s really going on,” said co-author Dr Shy Genel of Harvard University.

A selection of videos and imagery from the project are available online at www.illustris-project.org.

Story adapted from Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics press release.

Designing our Tomorrow (DOT) is a joint project of the Department of Engineering and the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge.

Working in partnership with leading engineering companies and local schools, DOT has developed a distinctive teaching approach and a unique set of resources, ‘DOT in a Box’, for teachers to use in Key Stage 3 Design and Technology classes.

The three boxes being launched today are: Inclusive Design, Sensor Circuits and Picture Holders.

Each box includes a complete set of teaching resources, which would normally cover 12 D & T lessons.

“Inclusive Design” sets the challenge of designing more inclusive cutlery. The BOX includes a set of gloves and glasses that mimic the effects of human aging - the gloves restrict dexterity in a similar way to arthritis; while the glasses mimic the way vision declines from the age of 47. 

Immersion in these and other creative/analytical tools contained in the BOX become the starting point to authentic engineering design challenges.

To help ensure that the case studies and challenges are authentic, leading engineering companies helped to develop the teaching resources:

• Cambridge Design Partners contributed real-world industry case studies to inspire the students, including the design of Dulux PaintPod, a self-cleaning powered painter; and the Waterpebble, a small device with complex electronics to measure water usage in the shower. “We enjoyed the opportunity to demonstrate how interesting product development and engineering work can be, and share this in the classroom,” a spokesman said.

• Heba Bevan, PhD Researcher in Low-power Wireless Sensor Networks at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction, said: “Engaging with students in a creative and relevant way at the age of 13 and 14 is critically important to develop analytical skills and a lifelong love of problem solving. These workshops create a different atmosphere for learning, encouraging teamwork, innovation, and thinking about problems in a multi-dimensional way rather than in a linear input-output manner. I believe that widespread implementation of DOT will lead to an significant increase in the number of students that pursue careers in science and engineering.”

BT, Marshalls and Chesapeake also supported the development of DOT in a Box.

The project has been piloted in a range of schools, including a number from Cambridgeshire to make sure that the resources work for teachers and pupils.

The most recent pilot was funded by the Royal Academy of Engineering through its Ingenious grant scheme.

Ian Hosking, Senior Research Associate at the University of Cambridge’s Engineering Design Centre, said: "Everything is designed. It is how we shape the world around us. Designing Our Tomorrow is about equipping students to design their futures and in particular address the global challenges of population ageing and environmental sustainability."

Bill Nichol, Lecturer in Design Education at the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education, said “Although 71% of 13 and 14 year olds interviewed for the project said that engineering was ‘cool’, less than half felt challenged by their lessons and only 38% said they were considering a career in design and technology.

“By developing and delivering inspirational resources for teaching Design & Technology at Secondary level, DOT hopes that all Key Stage 3 students will enjoy challenging lessons and be inspired to consider design as a real and rewarding career path.”

Researchers believe drug therapies based on their discovery could help up to 15% of the 8,500 people diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in the UK every year. The study, by scientists from the University of Cambridge, is published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

With the advance of DNA sequencing, researchers are increasingly able to identify genes associated with diseases. Unfortunately, more often than not the function of the gene is unknown, making it difficult to develop a treatment based on the discovery.

The new Cambridge research found not only that the TRIM44 gene plays a key role in the development of oesophageal cancer but also discovered how the gene drives the disease. The new research reveals that over-expression (when there are multiple copies) of TRIM44 leads to higher activity of the mTOR gene, which regulates cell growth and division - processes that become uncontrolled in cancer.

“We know how effective treatments targeting the over-expression of genes can be – just look at the success of Herceptin for breast and stomach cancer,” said Professor Rebecca Fitzgerald, lead author of the research from the MRC Cancer Unit at the  University of Cambridge. “As there are already a number of drugs which target mTOR, we are hopeful that our discovery could lead to new treatments within the next five years.”

The researchers have already found that when they treat tumours in mice which are over-expressing TRIM44 with mTOR inhibitors, they reduced in size. Interestingly, they have also performed the same experiments with cells from human breast cancers, and found the same results, indicating that these findings could also be applied to other cancers.

Professor Fitzgerald added: “For cancer of the oesophagus, and other cancers such as breast cancer, when the TRIM44 gene is over-expressed, it can also be used to indicate the likely response of an individual to an mTOR inhibitor drug. By tailoring the treatment to the individual, we increase the chance that it will be effective at fighting the disease.”

Oesophageal cancer is the ninth commonest cancer in the UK, and the sixth most common cause of cancer death. Many people are unaware of cancer of the oesophagus and symptoms are often ignored. As a result, the disease is frequently at an advanced stage when it is diagnosed. Only around 15% of people diagnosed with oesophageal cancer are alive five years later.