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Black hole trio holds promise for gravity wave hunt

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An international team, including University of Cambridge scientists, led by Dr Roger Deane from the University of Cape Town, examined six systems thought to contain two supermassive black holes. The team found that one of these contained three supermassive black holes – the tightest trio of black holes detected at such a large distance – with two of them orbiting each other rather like binary stars. The finding suggests that these closely-packed supermassive black holes are far more common than previously thought.

A report of the research is published in this week’s Nature.

Dr Roger Deane from the University of Cape Town said: ‘What remains extraordinary to me is that these black holes, which are at the very extreme of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, are orbiting one another at 300 times the speed of sound on Earth. Not only that, but using the combined signals from radio telescopes on four continents we are able to observe this exotic system one third of the way across the Universe. It gives me great excitement as this is just scratching the surface of a long list of discoveries that will be made possible with the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).’

The team used a technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) to discover the inner two black holes of the triple system. This technique combines the signals from large radio antennas separated by up to 10,000 kilometres to see detail 50 times finer than that possible with the Hubble Space Telescope. The discovery was made with the European VLBI Network, an array of European, Chinese, Russian and South African antennas, as well as the 305 metre Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Future radio telescopes such as the SKA will be able to measure the gravitational waves from such black hole systems as their orbits decrease.

At this point, very little is actually known about black hole systems that are so close to one another that they emit detectable gravitational waves. According to Prof Matt Jarvis from the Universities of Oxford and the Western Cape, ‘This discovery not only suggests that close-pair black hole systems emitting at radio wavelengths are much more common than previously expected, but also predicts that radio telescopes such as MeerKAT and the African VLBI Network (AVN, a network of antennas across the continent) will directly assist in the detection and understanding of the gravitational wave signal. Further in the future the SKA will allow us to find and study these systems in exquisite detail, and really allow us gain a much better understanding of how black holes shape galaxies over the history of the Universe.’

Dr Keith Grainge of the University of Manchester, an author of the paper, said: ‘This exciting discovery perfectly illustrates the power of the VLBI technique, whose exquisite sharpness of view allows us to see deep into the hearts of distant galaxies. The next generation radio observatory, the SKA, is being designed with VLBI capabilities very much in mind.’

While the VLBI technique was essential to discover the inner two black, the team has also shown that the binary black hole presence can be revealed by much larger scale features. The orbital motion of the black hole is imprinted onto its large jets, twisting them into a helical or corkscrew-like shape. So even though black holes may be so close together that our telescopes cannot tell them apart, their twisted jets may provide easy-to-find pointers to them, much like using a flare to mark your location at sea. This may provide sensitive future telescopes like MeerKAT and the SKA a way to find binary black holes with much greater efficiency.

The discovery of three closely orbiting supermassive black holes in a galaxy more than four billion light years away could help astronomers in the search for gravitational waves: the ‘ripples in spacetime’ predicted by Einstein.

This exciting discovery perfectly illustrates the power of the VLBI technique, whose exquisite sharpness of view allows us to see deep into the hearts of distant galaxies.
Dr Keith Grainge
Helical jets from one supermassive black hole caused by a very closely orbiting companion (see blue dots). The third black hole is part of the system, but farther away and therefore emits relatively straight jets.

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Nanomaterials Up Close: Forest of carbon nanotubes

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“It is easy to become distracted by the inherent beauty of the landscapes that can be found when investigating materials on the nanoscale.

What we are looking at here is a portion of a carpet or “forest” of carbon nanotubes, grown on a scrap of copper foil. Carbon nanotubes are exceptionally tiny rolls of carbon atoms, a few tens of nanometres across but potentially much longer. You can see a few individual tubes here and there in the image looking like errant hairs. However, the larger structures, similar to crested waves on a stormy sea, are many thousands upon thousands of individual tubes grown alongside one another that have attached together to form this “forest”.

We are growing them for use in various electronic devices, such as the electron source in X-ray guns. In fact, this sample is far too disordered to be useful for the intended measurement. These captivating structures have been formed by accident, perhaps from areas of the forest damaged by a careless scrape from a pair of tweezers.

Usually the nanotubes would form a complete and uniform forest, at which point they create one of the blackest materials to be found on earth.”

The image was taken using a scanning electron microscope in the Electrical Engineering Division of the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge. Credit: Thanks to Professor Tim Wilkinson, Professor Ullrich Steiner and Professor Jeremy Baumberg for their ongoing support and to the NanoDTC for funding; EPSRC grant EP/G037221/1.

'Nanomaterials Up Close' is a special series linked to our 'Under the Microscope' collection of videos produced by Cambridge University that show glimpses of the natural and man-made world in stunning close-up.

This image shows a ‘forest’ of carbon nanotubes – thousands upon thousands of tiny rolls of carbon atoms, grown on a scrap of copper foil. James Dolan explains how easy it is to run across beautiful scenery such as this when attempting to fabricate new electronic devices for the first time.

These captivating structures have been formed by accident, perhaps from areas of the forest damaged by a careless scrape from a pair of tweezers
James Dolan
Forest of carbon nanotubes

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HRH The Duke of Edinburgh attends half-century celebrations

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Churchill College celebrated the 50th anniversary of its official opening with a dinner for over 160 members and partners in its dining hall in the presence of His Royal Highness The Duke of Edinburgh. 

The College is also celebrating the anniversary of the official opening with a special display featuring materials from the College archive, which is open to the public this week.

On 5 June 1964 the College pulled out all the stops to welcome HRH The Duke of Edinburgh to perform the official opening of the College. 

His Royal Highness returned to the College last night (25 June 2014) to dine with members and partners to officially mark the end of the College’s 50th Anniversary celebrations and Appeal. The dinner, once again, took place in the College’s magnificent dining hall - the largest in a Cambridge College.

The display includes rare newsreel footage, audio recordings captured on the official opening day itself plus later recollections including: Sir Winston Churchill himself speaking of his hopes for the College which would bear his name; the hasty transformation of the College from a building site to a place fit to welcome a Prince (piloting his own helicopter); a porter watching for his moment to hoist the College flag and the recollections of Natasha Squire, drafted in to devise the menu and dreaming up the idea of a cake in the shape of the Dining Hall.

Visitors are also be able to experience the ambience of the 1960s, with an installation of an original student room featuring functional and beautiful furniture designed exclusively for the College by the celebrated designer Robin Day.

Natalie Adams, College Archivist, said: “This display is about Churchill's pride in its history. It is also a moment to celebrate and to give thanks.”

Over £5 million has been raised through the 50th Anniversary Appeal for a new residential court thanks to the generosity of donors and alumni.

Building will commence in the autumn. The College will also take this opportunity to record its profound gratitude for the hard work and inspirational leadership of Sir David Wallace as his tenure as Master draws to an end.

The display is open to the public until 27 June in the Junior Common Room during College business hours (9am – 6pm). Please visit the Porters’ Lodge for details. For further information please contact: archives@chu.cam.ac.uk.

Churchill College celebrates 50 years since its official opening with a Royal visit and special exhibition.

This display is about Churchill's pride in its history.
Natalie Adams, College Archivist.

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Light in, light out: the ‘rock’ that breaks the rules

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Discovered 175 years ago in Russia’s mineral treasure box – the Ural Mountains – and named after the mineralogist Count Lev Aleksevich von Perovski, perovskite is fast becoming a ‘rock’ to be reckoned with. In 2013, the use of perovskite materials in solar cells was voted as one of the breakthroughs of the year by Sciencemagazine; more recently, the Guardianwebsite declared that they “are the clean tech material development to watch right now.”

Perovskite is a term used to describe a group of materials that have a distinctive crystal structure of cuboid and diamond shapes. They have long been of interest for their superconducting and ferroelectric properties. But, in the past five years, it was discovered that they are also remarkably efficient at absorbing photons of light and that this can be converted into an electric current in photovoltaic solar cells.

A defining moment came in 2012, when Professors Henry Snaith at the University of Oxford and Michael Graetzel at the Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, building on the work of Tsotomu Mayasaka from Tokyo, found that solar cells with perovskite as the active component could be made with greater than 10% power conversion efficiencies for turning the sun’s rays into electrical energy. A mere two years later, Snaith increased this to 17%. For silicon-based solar cells, it’s taken 20 years of research to achieve this level.

Now, researchers in Cambridge have found another property of this remarkable material – it doesn’t just absorb light, it also emits it as a laser.

Led by Professor Sir Richard Friend from the Department of Physics, the researchers have been investigating how perovskites work by exciting the material with light and monitoring energy absorption at incredibly fast timescales, taking ‘snapshots’ a few quadrillionths of a second apart.

As PhD student Michael Price described: “This enables us to monitor directly what is happening to the electrons, which generate the current in the material – where the excitations are and how they are destroyed, essentially how fast they live and die.”

In collaboration with Snaith’s group in Oxford, the scientists are using this fundamental insight to help them understand how the efficiency of perovskite-based photovoltaics might be extended yet further.

The lasing properties (published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters in March) were discovered when Friend’s team measured the photoluminescence efficiency of the material, and found that up to 70% of absorbed photons were emitted under the right conditions. This led to the idea of sandwiching a thin layer of the lead halide perovskite between two mirrors to create an optically driven laser.

“It turns out that perovskites are remarkably fluorescent materials,” explained Friend. This is not in itself a surprise – since the early 1960s a relationship between the generation of electrical charges following light absorbtion and the process of ‘recombination’ of these charges to emit light has been known. “But these materials do so very efficiently,” said Friend. “It’s unusual in a material that is so simply and cheaply prepared.”

“Mix and squirt,” is how Price described the preparation process: “we make a solution of the halide perovskites and spin- coat them onto an electrode. There’s no need for elaborate purification.” This simple process, which the scientists say is scalable, is in contrast to the painstaking growth of crystals needed for other solar cell materials like silicon to ensure that the number of defects in the materials is kept as low as possible.

“Perovskites are cheap and abundant, they are easily fabricated and they have a high efficiency of energy conversion – these three together are the holy grail of photovoltaics, which is why there is such excitement about them at the moment,” added Dr Felix Deschler.

The lasing properties of perovskites raise expectations for even higher solar cell efficiencies, as Friend explained: “There’s a fundamental relationship between how good a material is at emitting light and how well it works in a solar cell.”

The team’s work is based on a programme of research on organic (i.e. carbon-containing) semiconductors that has spanned over 20 years in Friend’s laboratory, most recently as part of the Winton Programme for the Physics of Sustainability, and has resulted in the development of roll-to-roll printing of photovoltaic materials, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and printed transistors for paper displays. The techniques Friend’s group has developed for characterising organic semiconductors are now being deployed on the mostly inorganic perovskite materials.

The current focus is on identifying the fundamental mechanisms that are at play when photons of light raise electrons in the material to higher energy states, and on looking at precisely how and where energy losses occur – an understanding of which will be crucial to maximising the efficiency of these light-harvesting solar cells.

Intriguingly, early results show that the material doesn’t appear to work in the way that might be expected. “For me, the excitement is that these materials break the rules,” said Friend. “Many of their properties are somewhere between those of an organic and an inorganic semiconductor. The way we make them, they should have too many chemical and structural defects to work as well as they do and yet they are as efficient as purified silicon, which is a single crystal.”

Would they be better if cleaned up? “Possibly,” said Friend, “but we want to have our cake and eat it. We want the efficiencies and the ease of preparation.”

Defects in materials normally cause charged electrons to get ‘stuck’ and lose their energy. One possibility for perovskites might be that the defects don’t matter because the material has the capacity to ‘self-heal’.

“There’s something going on... these materials have a tolerance to disorder
which is unusual,” explained Friend. “It’s speculation, but perhaps the material can fill defects on the fly. The way the material is prepared creates a lot of free ions, and these might move around and fill up defects. Imagine a bumpy road with potholes – the ions might fill the potholes and then the electrons have a smooth ride.”

A better understanding of these processes will feed into the collaboration with Snaith’s group, helping the scale-up and commercial deployment of perovskite-based photovoltaics through the Oxford spin-out Oxford Photovoltaics.

Meanwhile, the Cambridge team is also pursuing the material’s light-emitting properties, as Deschler explained: “It opens up a completely new field of applications. The laser industry is huge – they are used in areas that are critical for our lives, including telecommunications, medicine and industry. We think there will be applications for perovskites that extend far beyond thesolar cell.”

In particular, the researchers are now looking at applying the high luminescence efficiency to create light-emitting diodes. Other members in the research group have already had some very promising results in this area, which should be published soon.

“This feels like it’s the dawn of a new field,” said Friend. “So far we’ve looked at the materials as they are. The question now is how good will they be?”

Perovskite materials are the newest contender for breaking the silicon ceiling in solar cell technology. But they don’t just absorb light. Cambridge researchers have found they emit it like a laser, opening up an entirely new field of applications.

Perovskites are cheap and abundant, they are easily fabricated and they have a high efficiency of energy conversion – these three together are the holy grail of photovoltaics.
Professor Sir Richard Friend

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Two million hectare shortfall in UK land possible by 2030, study finds

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By 2030, the UK could require up to 7 million hectares of additional land to meet a growing population’s food, space and renewable energy needs, while increasing the area needed to protect nature and its services, a new report coordinated by the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL) has warned. This represents more than 35% of the UK’s existing agricultural land, and compares with up to 5 million hectares that might be released from a range of potential supply side initiatives.

The report, The Best Use of UK Agricultural Land, was produced by the Cambridge-hosted Natural Capital Leaders Platform in collaboration with Asda, Sainsbury’s, Nestlé, BOCM PAULS, AB Agri, Yara, BASF, and Volac, as well as the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) and the Country Land and Business Association. The aim was to understand the amount of additional land needed, and provide a simple, clear vision for UK agricultural land use alongside a set of principles to guide future decision-making.

Andrew Montague-Fuller, Programme Manager at CISL, and author of the report said: “In this initial analysis, we identified a significant gap between additional land demand and potential supply, as well as a worrying lack of clarity about what agricultural land is expected to deliver. It is clear that more research is needed, and that business, government, farmers, and landowners need to work together to ensure we can meet these growing demands, while also protecting the environment.”

The report quantifies a number of ‘supply-side’ measures that could help to meet additional demand, including improving yields and reducing food waste, while highlighting the need to understand how much land can be used for multiple purposes. But it warns that these initiatives may not be sufficient to close the gap, in which case difficult choices will need to be made.

Dr Chris Brown, Sustainable Business Director at Asda said: “Businesses need clarity to inform supply chain choices and guide investment decisions. We would highly recommend this report to industry colleagues, Government departments and key farming organisations and strongly support the further development of its analysis and joint vision of how UK agricultural land needs to be optimised.”

Andy Richardson, Head of Corporate Communications at Volac, said: “I hope the vision proposed in this report is a catalyst for greater action and integrated thinking on land use. Lack of leadership in this area has the potential to compromise our future food and energy security. We should take the opportunity to join up thinking between Industry and Government by building on this report’s analysis to develop a decision making framework and an action plan.”

Dr Andrea Graham, Chief Land Management Adviser at the NFU, said: "While there are complex trade-offs and tough choices ahead on land use, this report shows that agricultural land will need to be multi-functional, delivering a range of goods and services. We will need the full range of tools to meet future demand, employing the very best technology and innovation to drive efficiency, quality, yields and profitability."

Cambridge-hosted industry platform calls for joint action plan with government

Business, government, farmers, and landowners need to work together to ensure we can meet these growing demands, while also protecting the environment
Andrew Montague-Fuller
Agriculture

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Cambridge team breaks superconductor world record

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A world record that has stood for more than a decade has been broken by a team led by University of Cambridge engineers, harnessing the equivalent of three tonnes of force inside a golf ball-sized sample of material that is normally as brittle as fine china.

The Cambridge researchers managed to ‘trap’ a magnetic field with a strength of 17.6 Tesla - roughly 100 times stronger than the field generated by a typical fridge magnet - in a high temperature gadolinium barium copper oxide (GdBCO) superconductor, beating the previous record by 0.4 Tesla. The results are published today in the journal Superconductor Science and Technology.

The research demonstrates the potential of high-temperature superconductors for applications in a range of fields, including flywheels for energy storage, ‘magnetic separators’, which can be used in mineral refinement and pollution control, and in high-speed levitating monorail trains.

Superconductors are materials that carry electrical current with little or no resistance when cooled below a certain temperature. While conventional superconductors need to be cooled close to absolute zero (zero degrees on the Kelvin scale, or –273 °C) before they superconduct, high temperature superconductors do so above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen (–196 °C), which makes them relatively easy to cool and cheaper to operate.

Superconductors are currently used in scientific and medical applications, such as MRI scanners, and in the future could be used to protect the national grid and increase energy efficiency, due to the amount of electrical current they can carry without losing energy.

The current carried by a superconductor also generates a magnetic field, and the more field strength that can be contained within the superconductor, the more current it can carry. State of the art, practical superconductors can carry currents that are typically 100 times greater than copper, which gives them considerable performance advantages over conventional conductors and permanent magnets.

The new record was achieved using 25 mm diameter samples of GdBCO high temperature superconductor fabricated in the form of a large, single grain using an established melt processing method and reinforced using a relatively simple technique. The previous record of 17.24 Tesla, set in 2003 by a team led by Professor Masato Murakami from the Shibaura Institute of Technology in Japan, used a highly specialised type of superconductor of a similar, but subtly different, composition and structure.

“The fact that this record has stood for so long shows just how demanding this field really is,” said Professor David Cardwell of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, who led the research, in collaboration with Boeing and the National High Field Magnet Laboratory at the Florida State University. “There are real potential gains to be had with even small increases in field.”

To contain such a large field, the team used materials known as cuprates: thin sheets of copper and oxygen separated by more complex types of atoms. The cuprates were the earliest high temperature superconductors to be discovered, and have the potential to be used widely in scientific and medical applications.

While they are high quality superconductors with outstanding potential for practical applications, the cuprates can be as brittle as dried pasta when fabricated in the form of sintered ceramics, so trying to contain a strong magnetic field within bulk forms of the cuprates tends to cause them to explode.

In order to hold in, or trap, the magnetic field, the researchers had to modify both the microstructure of GdBCO to increase its current carrying and thermal performance, and reinforce it with a stainless steel ring, which was used to ‘shrink-wrap’ the single grain samples. “This was an important step in achieving this result,” said Dr John Durrell who led the experiment in Florida.

The lines of magnetic flux in a superconductor repel each other strongly, making containing such a large field difficult. But, by engineering the bulk microstructure, the field is retained in the sample by so-called ‘flux pinning centres’ distributed throughout the material. “The development of effective pinning sites in GdBCO has been key to this success,” said Dr Yun-Hua Shi, who has been responsible for developing the melt process fabrication technique at Cambridge for the past 20 years.

The result was the biggest ever trapped field achieved in a bulk, standalone material at any temperature.

“This work could herald the arrival of superconductors in real-world applications,” said Professor Cardwell. “In order to see bulk superconductors applied for everyday use, we need large grains of superconducting material with the required properties that can be manufactured by relatively standard processes.”

A number of niche applications are currently being developed by the Cambridge team and its collaborators, and it is anticipated that widespread commercial applications for superconductors could be seen within the next five years.

“This record could not have been achieved without the support of our academic and industrial colleagues and partners,” said Professor Cardwell, who is the next Head of the Department of Engineering. “It was a real team effort, and one which we hope will bring these materials a significant step closer to practical applications.”

“Boeing continues to see practical applications for this superconducting material research and we are excited about the possibilities being enabled by the recent advances achieved by the Cambridge team,” said Patrick Stokes, who leads the Boeing-funded research portfolio with Cambridge University.

The research was funded by The Boeing Company and by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, where the measurements were performed, is funded the National Science Foundation and the State of Florida.

New record for a trapped field in a superconductor, beating a record that has stood for more than a decade, could herald the arrival of materials in a broad range of fields.

The fact that this record has stood for so long shows just how demanding this field really is
David Cardwell
A bulk superconductor levitated by a permanent magnet

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‘Extreme sleepover #14’ – all aboard the floating science factory

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The vast and enigmatic ocean covers about three quarters of the Earth, yet the information we have from its depths is comparable with the distribution and size of the holes on a golf course.

I am waking up at sea. It is 7.50am. In 10 minutes, my daily shift on our oceanographic expedition will start and I had better be on deck.

The James Cook, a British Royal Research Ship operated by the Natural Environment Research Council and the National Oceanographic Centre, left Southampton about three weeks ago. Aboard with me are 26 scientists from Cambridge, Zurich, Lisbon, Barcelona and Bremen, plus crew. After rough seas in the Bay of Biscay, an escort of dolphins and a stop in Spain to load geophysical equipment, we have made our way to our working area – the continental margin off Portugal.

It’s an extraordinary region for the study of past ocean chemistry and climate dynamics. Sea floor sediments capture the ocean’s history because the nature and the chemical composition of particles settling to the sea floor varied as the atmospheric and oceanic circulation changed over time.

The pioneering work of Cambridge palaeoclimatologist Professor Sir Nicholas Shackleton showed that these sediments record climate signals from the North Atlantic and the Southern Ocean. The discovery of interhemispherically linked climate changes recorded by tiny microfossils the size of sugar grains preserved in sea floor sediments at a single site was a milestone in the field.

I’m here as part of my PhD research with Dr Luke Skinner and Professor David Hodell, and our mission is to continue Shackleton’s legacy by studying climate history further back in time and in more detail.

The geophysical-acoustic imaging of Iberian margin sediment below the sea floor, one of the objectives of this voyage, was finished several days ago and sediment coring operations have started – or as our geophysicist colleagues call it – playing with mud!

It is very hard to get up from my berth. A quick look out of the porthole... it doesn’t look like a washing machine, it will be a calm day at sea. Making my way to the ship’s working deck and jumping into my already mud-covered overall, I discuss with Natalia from the ‘four-to-eight’ shift what I can expect during my shift.

Stepping out onto the deck, I see a bright-blue sea, glittering like silk as the sun begins to rise... and the arrival of the box corer, a 40 by 40 cm steel box that carves into the sediment to sample a chunk of sea floor mud and ideally some bottom water from just above the sea floor. As we look at the newly retrieved box core we are impressed by the chunk of original sea floor that rose from 4 km below the point we are standing now. Charly, my shift-mate, and I invent names for the tube worms and some gastropods we see, and then start to subsample and scrape off the surface of mud.

The topmost sediment reflects modern conditions and can therefore be used for calibrations. The sediments are extremely cold. It’s 2°C at that depth, quite a contrast to the air temperature of 23°C today.

We hand subsamples over to the micro-sensor measurement and water chemistry groups who work in specialised labs on the ship while we continue sampling for later analyses. Other scientists prepare new water sample measurements and add chemicals to the sampled sediments, the deck crew prepares the deployment of the next coring device, the bridge plans the route to the next station, the geophysicists analyse data, and the kitchen crew prepares another delicious meal… we are a floating science factory at 10°W, 37.5°N on the Atlantic Ocean.

The digital screen showing data from the winch indicates 10 minutes to the retrieval of the kasten corer. This long, steel container penetrates the sediment to much greater depths than the box corer. The deck crew lay the kasten corer horizontally down on the deck for us with a crane and after disassembling the 6-metre-long core barrel, bolt by bolt, we open the lid of the barrel – the moment of revelation. How much has been sampled? What does the sediment look like?

We get a beautiful view of 4 m of original Iberian margin sediments – about 30,000 years of climate history. The changes in colour document the oxygen-rich, bright sediment full of tiny fossils of marine plankton that thrived in the oceans of the past 10,000 years. We even find a fossil coral.

Sediments formed during the last ice age, when the oceans were much cooler, are usually much darker, which suggests that ocean circulation and ecosystems were very different. Everybody is excited about the new samples. Many hands are needed to process the bulky kasten core but this will yield enough study material for a range of different analyses.

By the end of our five-week-long cruise, we will have sampled 166 m of ocean sediment, analysed 1,000 water samples, seismically imaged the sea floor along a track 755 km long and studied 47,000 litres of ocean water. The ocean remains big and mysterious but we are getting closer to its secrets day by day.

Inset images: Julia Gottshalk.

Deep sea sediment cores – they’re cold, they’re muddy, and they’re revealing 30,000 years of climate history – as PhD student Julia Gottschalk reports from her voyage aboard the James Cook research ship last summer.

Stepping out onto the deck, I see a bright-blue sea, glittering like silk as the sun begins to rise... and the arrival of the box corer...
Julia Gottschalk

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Men and books: narratives of desire

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When the first e-reader appeared, printed books were declared dead. It hasn't happened – and there are no signs that it will.The brittle plastic of an e-reader, however colourful the cover, just doesn’t have the physical presence of a printed volume. Nor can a click on the ‘buy now’ button on a well-known website replicate a lunch hour spent browsing in a bookshop  or rummaging through the contents of a market stall piled high with out-of-print treasures.

Books are desirable objects: they are made to be read and to be displayed; they ask to be touched and turned; each volume exudes a distinctive odour. At a conference titled Perversions of Paper, taking place today at Birkbeck College, University of London, Dr Victoria Mills, a Research Fellow in English at Darwin College, will talk about the physical allure of the book in the Victorian era as one strand of her research into the cultures of collecting.

In a presentation on the Erotics of Late Nineteenth-Century Book Collecting, Mills will explore through the literature of that period the obsessive nature of men’s desire for books, not simply to read but to have and to hold. “Book collecting was one of the most popular of the acquisitive hobbies in the 19th century.The craze for book collecting in the first two decades is documented in Thomas Frognall Dibdin’s Bibliomania or Book Madness of 1809. Towards the end of the century, many of the libraries of great English houses were sold off, giving bibliophiles ample opportunity to expand their collections, and a second phase of impassioned book collecting began,” she said.

“This was the era of the ‘book beautiful’ with private presses producing lavishly illustrated and bound books, the first editions of which were highly popular with collectors. But what emerges from my research into late-Victorian bibliomania is that books were desirable not just for their visual appearance but also for their tactile qualities. I suggest that book collecting was an activity based as much on touch as on sight and collectors frequently mention the thrills and pleasures they experienced through physical contact.”

Sensory responses to books as objects to possess and to handle are well documented in the literature that surrounds the craze for book collecting in Britain and France at the end of the 19th century. In his Book-Hunter in Paris (1893), French publisher and journalist Octave Uzanne tells us that “the mere physical pleasure  … to turn over the pages of a book long coveted, to handle an unexpected find, to fondle a binding, to dust the edges, are exquisite joys in which the hand shares with the eye”.

Gender is deeply embedded in the relationship between people and things. Book collecting was (and to some extent still is) a predominantly male world. The spaces of late-19th century book collecting – the private library, club, book shop and book stall – were spaces in which men socialised with other men in their pursuit of, and interaction with, books.

In Victorian literature, Mills traces two contrasting categories of male bibliophile: the velvet-clad dandy aesthetes in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and the fusty bachelor book collectors who feature in works by lesser-known authors, such as American humourist Eugene Field and English novelist George Gissing, two authors who were also book collectors.

In Picture of Dorian Gray Wilde describes how Dorian “…procured from Paris no less than nine copies of the first edition, and had them bound in different colours, so that they might suit his various moods and the changing fancies over a nature over which he seemed, at times, to have almost entirely lost control”. Collecting books plays an important role in masculine self-fashioning – like the putting on of clothes, the binding of books is a means by which Dorian Gray constructs his dandy identity. Wilde himself made a point of distributing his books, with their stunning illustrations, with his own hand. “Touched by him, the books retained traces of his corporeal presence and his gifting of them suggests a notion of inheritance and transmission based on bodily connection,” said Mills.

Much writing on bibliomania focuses on its negative aspects. Obsessive collecting was seen as a symptom of disease – a kind of mania to be treated as an unfortunate affliction. “Across the 19th century, literary depictions of book collecting are riddled with the language of disease,” said Mills. Thomas Frognall Dibdin’s Bibliomania is tag-lined as an account of the ‘history, symptoms, and cure of the fatal disease’. The editor William Carew Hazlitt charts his own bibliomania as a growing addiction; the title of his memoir Confessions of a Collector (1897) echoes Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium Eater (1821).

Such accounts depict the book collector as a pitiable fellow, eaten up with his obsession and oblivious to his outward appearance.  In Book-Lovers, Bibliomaniacs and Book Clubs (1904), Nathan Haskell Dole, President of the Bibliophile Society, pokes fun at the crazed book lover in this cruel little ditty: “Victim of a frenzied passion./He is lean and lank and crusty;/Naught he cares for dress or fashion/And his rusty coat smells musty.”

The association between collecting and disease gathered strength in the late-19th century with the publication of medico-scientific texts about what we now call hoarding.  Max Nordau, a physician, author and social critic, wrote a book titled Degeneration (1895) in which he attacked so-called degenerate art produced by decadents and aesthetes such as Wilde and Joris Karl-Huysmans, whose book À Rebours (Against Nature) (1888) also depicts the activities of an obsessive collector.

Nordau’s Degeneration associated collecting with perversity and immortality: “… the present rage for collecting, the piling up, in dwellings, of aimless bric-a-brac … appears to us in a completely new light when we know that Magnan [a French psychiatrist] has established an irresistible desire among degenerates to accumulate useless trifles …”

Mills is interested in the striking plurality of these representations of book collectors: on one hand book collecting is connected with unbridled and corrupting consumption, on the other it is constructed as a wholesome and worthwhile activity. And she is keen to explore more positive interpretations of the phenomenon of book-love. Following Wilde’s trial and conviction for gross indecency in 1895, affectionate physical contact between men was increasingly associated with perversion and degenerative behaviour.

Book collecting, Mills argues, allowed for the expression of sexually marginalised masculine identities – a means by which men could connect physically and without aggression with other men. “Bibliophiles touch the binding, the skin of the book, but also – by imaginative extrapolation – the skin of other men. The possibility of tenderness between men is suggested through the handling of books,” she said.

Bibliophiles record many examples of their desire to stroke and caress their books . Eugene Field, for example, addresses one of his favourites books thus: “Come, let me take thee from thy shelf and hold thee lovingly in my hands and press thee tenderly to this aged and slow-pulsing heart of mine.”  He also talks reverently of his books “which have felt the caressing pressure of [other] hands”. Andrew Lang, a Scottish author and bibliophile, describes an erotic charge that emanates from touching books that belonged to other men: “our fingers are faintly thrilled, as we touch these books, with the far-off contact of the hands of kings and cardinals, scholars…” (Books and Bookmen, 1892).

Mills suggests that the history of book collecting can be written as a history of intimacy as ideas about literary heritage, and the collecting, giving and bequeathing of books, become closely associated with an eroticised history of male tenderness.

Inset images from The Book Hunter In London (1895) by William Roberts (credit: Victoria Mills).


 

Our choice of books says a lot about us – and our relationships with books as objects can be complex. At a conference taking place today (28 June 2014), Dr Victoria Mills (Faculty of English) will discuss how book collecting may have afforded an expression for marginalised male identities in the late Victorian period. 

Bibliophiles touch the binding, the skin of the book, but also – by imaginative extrapolation – the skin of other men. The possibility of tenderness between men is suggested through the handling of books.
Victoria Mills
Illustration from 'The Book Hunter In London' (1895) by William Roberts.

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Nanomaterials Up Close: Gum Arabic

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"This lustrous picture was taken on an electron microscope, allowing us to see below the wavelength of light. It's actually a very boring scrap of gum arabic powder, which is made from the hardened sap of the Acacia tree, probably collected in Sudan.

Gum arabic is a common additive in food, glue and polish where it works as a thickener and emulsifier.

By covering it in a nanoscale layer of gold, and bombarding it with electrons in a vacuum, we reveal its smooth and alien texture, and the beauty hidden in this plain speck of dust.

We can learn a lot from looking at structures in natural materials at this very small scale. They tells us how we can adapt them to build our own new materials with new characteristics and uses.”

This image was taken while Rox was doing a summer placement with Alex Finnemore in the Thin Films and Interfaces group using the SEM in the Nanoscience Centre. Rox is currently a student in the NanoDTC.

'Nanomaterials Up Close' is a special series linked to our 'Under the Microscope' collection of videos produced by Cambridge University that show glimpses of the natural and man-made world in stunning close-up.

This alien glob is a piece of gum arabic from the hardened sap of the Acacia tree, most likely collected from a tree in Sudan. Rox Middleton explains how the electron microscope has changed the way we are able to interact with objects at the nanoscale, allowing us to enjoy a glimpse of the exquisite abstract forms around us.

We reveal its smooth and alien texture, and the beauty hidden in this plain speck of dust
Rox Middleton
Gum Arabic

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University teaching awards honour excellence

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The 21st annual Pilkington Prizes, which honour excellence in teaching across the collegiate University, were held at Downing College last night.

The prizes are awarded annually to academic staff, with candidates nominated by Schools within the University.

The Pilkington Prizes were initiated by Sir Alastair Pilkington, the first Chairman of the Cambridge Foundation, who believed passionately that the quality of teaching was crucial to Cambridge’s success.

This year’s recipients received their awards at a ceremony attended by Vice-Chancellor Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz and Lord Watson of Richmond CBE, the University’s High Steward.

The prize-winners, and excerpts from their citations, are given below.

Dr Michael Aitken, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Department of Psychology: Michael Aitken is a very popular, charismatic and accomplished lecturer who regularly obtains top marks from students in their feedback, even for what are for them lectures on “boring” topics such as statistical theory and practice. He has a rich understanding of undergraduate education and was instrumental in negotiating the new phase of accreditation of the courses in psychology by the British Psychological Society. However, his major abiding achievement has been to establish a new Tripos in this University, in the Psychological and Behavioural Sciences (PBS).

Dr Alastair Beresford, University Lecturer at the Computer Laboratory, Faculty of Computer Science and Technology: Alastair Beresford has revolutionised programming-language teaching for the Computer Science Tripos in the Computer Laboratory over the past six years. His pioneering work, along with fellow Pilkington Prize recipient Dr Andrew Rice, has seen teaching move away from traditional lectures to video and online exercises. The changes are hugely appreciated by the students, who are able to study at their own pace with substantial support from their supervisors. In addition, he has taken on the role of Chair of the Advanced Taught Course Management Committee.

Dr Sally Boss, University Lecturer in Chemistry, Department of Chemistry: Sally Boss is an outstanding teacher of chemistry who has already had a significant impact on several generations of Cambridge chemists. Her lucid and lively introductions to the intricacies of co-ordination chemistry and the mysteries of polyhedral molecular architectures continue to engage and excite the whole class. In addition she is an outstanding supervisor, undertaking a busy load for both her own College and others. Sally has been instrumental in a substantial revision of the first- and second-year practical courses, giving the classes a new vigour and direction.

Professor Richard Fentiman, Professor of Private International Law, Faculty of Law: Richard Fentiman is an exceptional teacher, whose entertaining and invigorating lectures have engaged students for many years. Described by one as making “even the dreariest topic seem exciting”, he is consistently ranked as one of the top-rated lecturers in the Law Faculty. Professor Fentiman has also made a substantial contribution over the years to faculty administration, serving first as director of the LLM and, more recently, as chair of the degree committee. In addition, Professor Fentiman is considered one of the leaders in his field of research.

Dr Rachael Harris, Senior Language Teaching Officer in Arabic, Faculty of Eastern and Middle Eastern Studies: Rachael Harris is the cornerstone of the Arabic teaching programme in the undergraduate tripos. For the last 26 years at Cambridge she has given heart and soul to the training of our undergraduate students, helping them achieve levels of confident fluency in Arabic recognised as remarkable in the national context. She has blazed a trail in the professionalisation of Arabic language teaching. It is difficult to appreciate the difference between what we currently expect our students to excel at and what they were able to do before Rachael joined us.

Professor Christopher Howe, Professor of Plant and Microbial Biochemistry, Department of Biochemistry: Christopher is not only an extremely gifted didactic teacher in his own right, regularly garnering plaudits from his undergraduate audiences, but for several years he has also served the department diligently and innovatively as its director of undergraduate teaching. His hard work is marked by several virtues: unbounded enthusiasm, creativity, painstaking preparation and organisation, and the courage to take on, and deal effectively with, often vexing tactical and strategic issues.

Dr Sriya Iyer, Isaac Newton Trust Affiliated Lecturer, Faculty of Economics: Sriya Iyer has been teaching development economics in the Faculty of Economics and St Catharine’s College since 2000. Her approach is to teach development economics passionately and enthusiastically using microeconomic and macroeconomic theory, but to infuse learning with a sense of history and a sound intuition for development policy. Sriya has the ability to explain complex points clearly. Her students value her greatly. As one said: “Dr Iyer is a brilliant lecturer. You get the impression she loves what she teaches and that certainly rubs off in the lectures.”

Dr John Maclennan, University lecturer in Earth Sciences, Department of Earth Sciences: John Maclennan has an enviable breadth of geological knowledge, which students benefit from in all four years of the Earth Sciences degree course. All John's teaching is characterised by a deep understanding of the subject and by a lively and motivating presentation of the material. He is particularly good at conveying that observations and interpretations are there be questioned, and that this scientific process is valuable and fun. John's excellent teaching is not confined to lectures. Students especially comment on his skill at demonstrating practical classes, and in running the fourth year field trip to Spain.

Professor Michael Potter, Professor of Logic in the Faculty of Philosophy: Michael Potter is a dedicated and inspiring teacher of undergraduate and research students. As lecturer and supervisor, Michael has been a major force in the teaching of logic, philosophy of mathematics and history of analytic philosophy in the Faculty for over 15 years. He has been instrumental in establishing a flourishing seminar on the philosophy of mathematics and logic. He has made an outstanding contribution to maintaining and enhancing the quality of supervision and small group teaching that makes the experience of studying at Cambridge excellent and unique.

Dr Sally Quilligan, University Lecturer in Clinical Communication, School of Clinical Medicine: Sally Quilligan is a Lecturer in Clinical Communication in the School of Clinical Medicine and an outstanding medical educator.  Sally is committed, conscientious and enthusiastic, always treating the students with respect, paying attention to their views and helping each student develop their potential as effective clinical communicators. Student feedback regularly includes statements such as “she really cares about what we are saying”, “she takes everything we say seriously”, “her feedback is relevant and helpful” and “she is the best facilitator I have had”.

Dr Andrew Rice, Senior Lecturer at the Computer Laboratory, Faculty of Computer Science and Technology: Andrew Rice is recognised for his pioneering work on programming-language teaching for the Computer Science Tripos. Together with Dr Alastair Beresford, Andy has presided over a major shift in how students have carried out their studies over the past six years. Moving away from traditional lectures, he has ensured students can study at their own pace using video and online exercises. A substantial emphasis on the role of the supervisors ensures the teaching remains within the Cambridge context.

Dr Jeremy Webb, Academic Lead for Staff Development, School of Clinical Medicine: Jeremy Webb successfully combines his clinical career as Principal in a busy General Practice in Newmarket with an important educational role at Cambridge for medical students and educators. He is an invaluable member of the Clinical School’s education team.  A founder member of the Graduate Entry Programme, he brought his passionate belief that medical students should be taught more often by general practitioners into the development of the Cambridge Graduate Course in Medicine (CGC) programme. Jeremy has in particular supported students in difficulty, both with pastoral guidance and remedial clinical teaching.

Twelve inspirational academics honoured for the outstanding quality and approach to their teaching

Vice-Chancellor Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz and Lord Watson of Richmond CBE with 2014 Pilkington Teaching Prize winners

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New analysis of 'swine flu' pandemic conflicts with accepted views on how diseases spread

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The most detailed analysis to date of the spread of the H1N1 2009 pandemic influenza virus, known informally as ‘swine flu’, has found that short-range travel was likely the primary driver for the 2009 pandemic in the United States, in contrast with popularly accepted views on the way diseases spread.

The study, based on data gathered from health insurance claims made throughout 2009, found that international air travel, which was previously thought to be important in the pandemic, played only a minor role in its spread within the US.

A team of researchers from University of Cambridge and the US, including Princeton University and National Institutes of Health, analysed data from 271 American cities and their surrounding suburban areas, covering 90% of the population of the 48 contiguous states.

The data were used to test mathematical models to pinpoint the role and importance of factors associated with H1N1’s arrival and spread, including demographics, school opening dates, humidity levels and immunity from previous outbreaks.

According to this new analysis, school-age children accelerated the spread of the pandemic, which was transmitted over short distances, in contrast with widespread reports at the time linking the pandemic to international air travel and population density. The results are published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology.

The H1N1 influenza virus spread rapidly around the globe in 2009 after it was first identified in Mexico. The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that the global death toll from the 2009 pandemic was more than 284,000.

The virus hit the United States in two distinct waves during 2009: one in the spring, which was limited mainly to the North Eastern part of the country; and a second wave in the autumn, which started in the South Eastern US and gradually spread across the whole country over a period of three months.

Previous research on the pandemic found that environmental factors, timing of the end school holidays, population sizes and air travel contributed to its spread, but this new research has found that transmission occurred primarily over short distances and that school age children may have catalysed the spread.

“There is so little detailed analysis of the way in which pandemics spread – so much of the current thinking is based on opinion and presumption,” said Dr Julia Gog of Cambridge’s Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, who led the research. “We have a view of how diseases spread in the medieval times, and it is often said that the modern world is completely different as we have long distance high volume air travel. However what we find here is that although air travel must have caused the initial ‘sparks,’ the bulk of the pandemic wave was very slow, travelling at about 22 kilometres per day. This really challenges our views of modern pandemics.”

In collaboration with researchers from a number of American universities, Dr Gog analysed weekly numbers of patients who reported influenza-like illnesses to their physician, organised by zip code. The data enable the researchers to explore the pandemic’s spread in more detail than had previously been possible, as well as identify any gaps in the data and validate existing models.

“It’s remarkable that in an era of widespread air travel and regional ground transport that this pandemic spread so slowly,” said Dr Gog. While international air travel did play a role in the initial seeding of the outbreaks in spring 2009, it played a relatively minor role in the later spread. The researchers hypothesise that H1N1’s relatively low rate of transmission meant that in many cases, the virus failed to ‘take’ after being introduced to a community through air travel. In contrast, repeated transmission over short distances started chains of infection which then contributed to the overall spatial spread of the pandemic.

The travel patterns of children also appear to have played an important role. While one might assume that the movements of children would primarily be between home and school, there is little available information to confirm this. “This is just not studied,” said Dr Gog. “Especially in densely populated areas, any parent will tell you that their child travels over relatively short distances each day, but we simply don’t have the data to back that up.”

In addition to broadening understanding the dynamics of a pandemic, the researchers hope that the potential role of children in influenza spread might lead to more information on this age group’s role in infection transmission.

New analysis of the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic in the US shows that the pandemic wave was surprisingly slow, and that its spread was likely accelerated by school-age children.

There is so little detailed analysis of the way in which pandemics spread – so much of the current thinking is based on opinion and presumption
Julia Gog
Map of the H1N1 influenza pandemic in 2009. The size of the dots is relative to city size, and the colours relate to the number of influenza cases, with green the lowest and purple the highest.

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From the Front to the Backs: Story of the First Eastern Hospital

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Now, in a film created by the University of Cambridge, Dr Sarah Baylis looks at the lost history of the First Eastern, examining what life was like is this 'small city on the Backs', its impact on Cambridge  and how it was possible that a building of such significance should have been so widely forgotten. It underlines the military hospital's central role in Cambridge as a site of profound individual and collective experience.

While the building of the hospital was underway on a former cricket field belonging to King's and Clare Colleges, patients being repatriated from Europe were housed in the Leys School and Trinity College. The completed hospital, a series of pre-fabricated wooden huts, had up to 1,700 beds, operating theatres and ancillary buildings, a Post Office, shop, cinema and other recreational facilities.  The First Eastern's open air wards and its curative use of direct sunlight and saline baths in the treatment of war wounds attracted a great deal of public attention. Auxiliary hospitals – for convalescents and patients with venereal disease – were also built in the city and surrounding villages.

The hospital brought the town and university into a new proximity, with different kinds of social encounter and shared voluntary efforts.  Professional and volunteer nurses were billeted in empty college rooms, and khaki-clad officers dined at high table. The First Eastern also had a considerable impact on local trades, businesses and suppliers – part compensation for a greatly diminished student population.

For five years the tranquil Backs – where several University colleges back onto the River Cam – were transformed by a relentless stream of horse-drawn and motorised ambulances transporting patients to and from the railway station, deliveries of food, coal, medical supplies and laundry, and for those who could afford it, taxis ferrying thousands of visitors.

When the hospital closed in 1919, the buildings were converted into much needed living units for council tenants waiting to be re-housed. Hundreds of families lived happily in the Burrell's Walk Estate (or 'the Huts' as they were still known) until 1929, when the last physical traces were destroyed. The current University Library building, which now sits on this site, was constructed between 1931 and 1934 by architect Giles Gilbert Scott.

'From the Front to the Backs' draws on a wide range of visual and archival sources, and on research by local writer Philomena Guillebaud, who is interviewed in the film, along with Dr Ana Carden Coyne from the University of Manchester, local librarian Chris Jakes and nonagenarian Edna Welton, whose own family home was one of the former huts of the First Eastern Hospital.

One hundred years since the start of the First World War, few Cambridge residents are likely to be aware that the University Library stands on the site of a former military hospital. The First Eastern General, set up within days of the outbreak of the war, treated tens of thousands of returning casualties between 1914 and 1919 .

A ward in the First Eastern Hospital

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Inspiring day for Future Scholars

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The Future Scholar Awards programme is a Department for Education initiative, focused on young people who have the academic potential to win places at selective universities but who might lack the confidence to see themselves as realistic applicants.

Students came to the University of Cambridge from schools in East Anglia, London, the West Midlands and Yorkshire.  Their day included a tour of one of Cambridge’s 29 undergraduate Colleges, a Q and A with current undergraduates, and the opportunity to try punting on the Cam.

Michael Gannon accompanied a group from Arthur Terry School, Sutton Coldfield, where he is Assistant Headteacher.

“Today has helped to break down barriers, helped our students to aspire, and encouraged them to reach for the skies,” Michael said.

Arthur Terry student Reece was encouraged to come on the visit by his teachers.  “I wanted to see what it was like at a university, so I know what to expect in the future,” said Reece, who hopes to study business at university. “I liked the tour, and that we got to ask questions.”

Rachel Lister, the University of Cambridge’s Head of Student Recruitment and Information, said “We were delighted to take part in the Future Scholars Awards programme and to welcome students to Cambridge from across the country. 

“The event has enabled us to introduce students to our current undergraduates and show that they could study at a leading university.

“We have also had the opportunity to meet with teachers and answer their questions about the University.”

One hundred students from 21 different state schools were welcomed to Cambridge for a day of activities aimed at inspiring the students and informing their teachers about the opportunities available at leading universities, including the University of Cambridge.

Today has helped to break down barriers, helped our students to aspire, and encouraged them to reach for the skies.
Michael Gannon, Assistant Headteacher, Arthur Terry School, Sutton Coldfield.
Future Scholar Reece with Cambridge undergraduates and staff.

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Major Partner Museum status for UCM

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Over the last three years, Cambridge has made full use of previous Arts Council funding to transform the way its eight major museums work in partnership, and to unlock their world-class collections for both Cambridge and the wider world.

Major successes have included the Thresholds poetry project, curated by Carol Ann Duffy, and Discoveries at 2 Temple Place in London.

Discoveries, now transferred to The Fitzwilliam Museum, is the first-ever joint exhibition to involve all University of Cambridge Museums and the first exhibition of Cambridge’s globally important research collections to be held outside the city.

And there was further good news today as Kettle’s Yard received first stage backing from Arts Council England to support the creation of a new Education Wing. The Arts Council funding, totalling £3.5m, is a substantial step towards the campaign target of £8.7m. Arts Council England have also renewed Kettle’s Yard National Portfolio Organisation status and committed £446,271 funding for the next three years.

Dr Jennifer Barnes, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (International Strategy), and Chair of the General Board Museums Committee, said: “These significant awards announced on the same day, recognize the essential role museums and collections play in research, teaching and understanding. Each collection is of global significance, adding an extraordinary dimension to our university, community and region. Cambridge Museums, whether working as a single collection or together, demonstrate that curating the past is about understanding the present and creating new futures. These awards allow us to share that future with all who come to Cambridge, of all ages, whether as visitors, students or researchers.”

UCM plan to use the next round of Arts Council funding to consolidate ongoing progress into understanding, widening and diversifying its audience. Major steps to achieving this have already been undertaken with imaginative learning programmes, digital innovation and deeper connections with communities both in and beyond Cambridge.

UCM is also taking the lead in joining up arts and cultural provision across the city, with Curating Cambridge – a five-week programme of cultural events and activities from October 20 – typifying this new approach.

Tim Knox, Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, said: “Being afforded Major Partner Museum status is a huge privilege and one we take very seriously. Arts Council England has fully supported the great strides we’ve made in recent years and, with their continued support, there is plenty of exciting work yet to be undertaken.”

Liz Hide, University of Cambridge Museums Officer, said: “Here in Cambridge, we are lucky in having many exceptional museums, each of which contribute to the academic, social and community work of the University. Our ongoing goal now is to open up the cultural riches of Cambridge to as wide and diverse an audience as possible.”

Hedley Swain, Area Director, South East, Arts Council England, said: “We are pleased to continue supporting University of Cambridge Museums. It proposes to deliver an ambitious and broad ranging programme of activity that will support transformational access to its key collections. Its programme of activity will help further develop its position as a leading centre of excellence for conservation and collections based research. It will also continue to build on its pioneering community and lifelong learning programmes, whilst also establishing itself as a centre for innovative digital engagement. University of Cambridge Museums also plans to reach more children and young people, with a particular emphasis on using digital platforms, ensuring they have the opportunity to engage with and be inspired by its collections. This work will be underpinned by its exemplar commitment to environmental sustainability, resilience and its support for museums and gallery career and workforce development.”

The vision of securing Cambridge’s reputation as an international centre of museums excellence received a major boost today when Arts Council England awarded University of Cambridge Museums (UCM) nearly £4.5m for 2015-18 and continuing Major Partner Museum status.

Each collection is of global significance, adding an extraordinary dimension to our university, community and region.
Jennifer Barnes
Polar snow goggles from Discoveries at London’s 2 Temple Place, the first joint exhibition from the University of Cambridge Museums, and the first to be held outside the city.

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Downing College welcomes students to 15th Annual South West Open Day

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This year the programme included the opportunity to meet with some of Downing’s Directors of Studies.

At Cambridge, Directors of Studies are responsible for advising students on their studies and overseeing their academic development.  Being able to meet with them gave students an insight into the specifics of the course they were interested in at Cambridge and the chance to have their course questions answered in detail by the experts.

Adam Dudart-Aberdeen came from Truro to find out more about studying English at Cambridge.

“I wanted to get a proper grip on what Cambridge is like, and to find out more about the course,” he said. He was relieved to find that Cambridge was not dominated by the “posh.”

“I’ve found nice normal people here,” Adam said. “It was also a real help to chat to the Director of Studies for English – I’ve found out how the course works, and how much choice you’ve got over its content.”

As well as meeting the academics, current Downing undergraduates were on hand to answer questions about student life, including Downing’s famous free doughnuts and the benefits of its central location.

Physics student William Benfold said “I’m from a state school in Saffron Walden. I volunteered to help show that Cambridge students aren’t terrifying - real people do go to Cambridge!

“I picked Downing because it’s central, it’s close to my lectures and you can play football and Frisbee on the paddock. It’s got a good social side.”

Dorset student Charlotte Cordery plans to study medicine. She was keen to know whether she would fit in at a university like Cambridge.

“I expected Cambridge to be a bit posh and unfriendly, but it was fine,” she said. “I feel like I could fit in, which is what I wanted to find out.

Olivia Crook, from Wadebridge in Cornwall, was looking for help in deciding where to apply to study Geography.

“I didn’t consider Cambridge until I heard about the Open Day,” Olivia confessed. “But being here has changed my mind! The course is really good and the library is amazing.

“I had a lot of misconceptions, that I’d have a scary interview in a place full of scary people – but everyone is really very nice.  Those stereotypes just aren’t true.”

Reece McAllister hopes to study engineering. “I live in Redruth, Cornwall.  Without this Open Day I wouldn’t get the chance to visit Cambridge.

“Cambridge is top of my list. Coming here has helped to dispel a few myths and opened my eyes to life around the university. There is actually a social life!”

Sam Turner, Schools Liaison Officer for Downing College and organiser of the Open Day, said: “This year marked the 15th South West Open Day which Downing has hosted, continuing our longstanding relationships with schools and colleges across Cornwall, Devon and Dorset through the University's Area Links Scheme.

“Much of our work throughout the year takes place in the South West, so it was fantastic to be able to welcome students to Cambridge this time.

“The feedback from this year’s event has been really positive – the students particularly appreciated the chance to speak with the Directors of Studies and ask specific questions about the courses they were interested in.”

Fifty students from Cornwall, Devon and Dorset have been enjoying a taste of Cambridge life thanks to Downing College’s 15th Annual South West Open Day.

I had a lot of misconceptions, that I’d have a scary interview in a place full of scary people – but everyone is really very nice. Those stereotypes just aren’t true.
Olivia Crook, Open Day participant from Wadebridge
Students from Cornwall, Devon and Dorset at Downing College for the South West Open Day

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Arts Council England supports Kettle's Yard’s future plans

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Kettle's Yard today received first stage backing from the Arts Council England Capital Investment Programme Fund. The Arts Council funding totalling £3.5m will substantially support the creation of a new Education Wing and major improvements to the exhibition galleries, alongside better services for visitors including a small cafe. The plans have been drawn up by Jamie Fobert Architects. 

The total campaign target is £8.7m .The Heritage Lottery Fund have already committed £1,982,200 towards the Education Wing from a total grant of £2,456,300, which includes activity costs.

The Arts Council funding is released in two stages: an initial £150,000  development grant, and £3.5 million when Kettle's Yard have developed the plans further and secured the further financial backing needed to proceed.

Andrew Nairne, Director of Kettle's Yard, said: "We are immensely grateful to Arts Council England for this major grant towards our plans, alongside generous existing support from the Heritage Lottery Fund. Our aim is to ensure that Kettle's Yard has state of the art facilities, so that our programme of exhibitions, concerts and learning activities can continue to be outstanding, inspired by the ambition and innovation that characterises the Kettle’s Yard house which Jim Ede created."

Alex van Someren, Chair of the Kettle's Yard Development Committee, said: "This significant investment from Arts Council England is fantastic news for Kettle’s Yard, and for the Cambridge region. As one of the most important cultural organisations in East Anglia, Kettle's Yard will now have the opportunity to bring more internationally significant art to Cambridge, and to engage even wider audiences."

Anne Lonsdale CBE, Chair of Kettle's Yard Committee, said: "Great news! There is so much potential here.  Now we can create the facilities, programmes and exhibitions to match, and pass on the magic of Kettles Yard to new generations."

At the same time as receiving news of the Capital Investment, Kettle’s Yard has also been informed that Arts Council England have renewed Kettle's Yard National Portfolio Organisation status and committed to £446,271 funding for the next three years (£148,757 per year). This is a signal of continuing support for the quality and richness of the programme of arts activity at Kettle's Yard.

Arts Council funding totalling £3.5m will  support the creation of a new Education Wing and major improvements to the exhibition galleries at Kettle's Yard.

Our aim is to ensure that Kettle's Yard has state of the art facilities, so that our programme of exhibitions, concerts and learning activities can continue to be outstanding, inspired by the ambition and innovation that characterises the Kettle’s Yard house which Jim Ede created
Andrew Naime
Kettle's Yard

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Institute of Physics announces 2014 award winners

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The Institute of Physics (IOP) has announced this year’s award winners with three Cambridge academics among their ranks.

In its Gold award category is Professor Michael Payne from University of Cambridge receiving the Swan Medal “for the development of computational techniques that have revolutionised materials design and facilitated the industrial application of quantum mechanical simulations”.

The Swan Medal is given for outstanding contributions to the organisation or application of physics in an industrial or commercial context.

Professor Benjamin Simons received the The IOP’s Franklin Medal and Prize, which is a Subject award given for distinguished research in physics applied to the life sciences including medical and biological physics.

The citation read: “For the application of non-equilibrium statistical mechanic to provide fundamental new insights into the mechanisms that regulate stem cell behaviour in tissue maintenance and disease”.

Recognised with the Paterson Medal and Prize – given for distinguished early career research in applied physics - was Dr Sarah Bohndiek

The citation read: “For her remarkable work in developing advanced molecular imaging techniques and applying them to address questions at the interface of physics, biology and medicine.”

The full list of award winners, including early career, education and outreach awards, can be found at www.iop.org/awards.

Physics awards honour work of Cambridge academics

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First national model for bovine TB calls for greater focus on cattle

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Cows

The model, developed by researchers at the University of Warwick and University of Cambridge, suggests that improved testing, vaccination of cattle and culling of all cattle on infected farms would be the most effective strategies for controlling the disease. It found that whilst badgers – the subject of controversial culling plans to stem the spread of the disease – form part of the environmental reservoir, they only play a relatively minor role in the transmission of infection.

Based on a study of cattle and the causes of bovine TB in Great Britain, the model, published in the journal Nature, sought to ascertain how and why the epidemic has grown over the past 15 years. Using data from the Animal Health and Veterinary Laboratories Agency and the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the researchers developed a mathematical model that incorporated both within- and between-farm bovine TB transmission.

“Our model offers a dispassionate, unbiased view of the spread of bovine TB through the cattle industry of Great Britain,” says Professor Matthew Keeling, from the University of Warwick’s School of Life Sciences and Department of Mathematics. “The model is based on the recorded pattern of positive and negative tests and uses the known movement of cattle around the country. We aim for it to provide policy-makers with the best evidence possible from which to make decisions relating to bovine TB and to contribute to the ongoing discussions on this sensitive issue.”

The model allowed the researchers to tease apart how different routes involved in transmission interact and overlap.

Dr Ellen Brooks-Pollock from the Department of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Cambridge adds: “By using the most recent data, our model predicts that it is most likely that both cattle movements and the local environment are driving the front of the epidemic. Imperfect cattle skin tests contribute to the spread by delaying the time until infected herds are detected for the first time and incorrectly identifying herds as clear of infection.”

One of the key results from the model is the large variation in what happens to farms once they are infected.

“We found that the vast majority of infected farms don’t spread the infection to any other farms before they clear infection themselves. Only a small number of farms spread the infection, and they can cause the majority of new cases”, says Dr Brooks-Pollock.

The researchers argue that the findings are essential for improving the targeting of control measures. If infected farms can be identified and caught early then it might be possible to make substantial progress in tackling the epidemic.

“The model we are putting forward can be used to address several potential control methods – but there is no single panacea,” says Professor Keeling. “All controls have advantages and disadvantages. However, we find only three controls have the power to reverse the current increase in cases: more frequent or more accurate testing, vaccination of cattle and culling all cattle on infected farms.”

The control measures the researchers investigated were designed to be ‘idealised’ control options to understand what measures in theory could stop the increasing epidemic. The researchers did not consider the practicalities or economics of implementing control measures.

The research was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, the Wellcome Trust and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

Adapted from a press release from the University of Warwick.

The majority of outbreaks of bovine TB within cattle herds are caused by multiple transmissions routes – including failed cattle infection tests, cattle movement and reinfection from environmental reservoirs such as infected pastures and wildlife – according to the first national model of bovine TB spread, published today.

It's most likely that both cattle movements and the local environment are driving the bovine TB epidemic
Ellen Brooks-Pollock
Cows (cropped image)

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An interview with Tony Badger: 50 years a historian

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His interest in history, and American history in particular, started when he was 12 and has never wavered. This summer will see Professor Anthony (Tony) Badger step down from his roles as Paul Mellon Professor of American History at Cambridge University and Master of Clare College, Cambridge. 

Badger is a specialist in 20th century America, most notably the troubled politics of the South. He has published widely on topics such as race relations, the depression of the 1930s and the New Deal. His books include FDR: The First Hundred Days, a book widely read by politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, and his scholarship has won him a series of accolades.

Known for his approachability and unswerving loyalty to Bristol Rovers Football Club, Badger is passionate about teaching and is proud of the achievements of his students, many of whom are making their mark on the world, both within academia and beyond. They include the BBC’s Washington correspondent Nick Bryant, actor and writer Sacha Baron Cohen, and the historian Dominic Sandbrook.

Sitting in his office overlooking the gardens at Clare College, Badger looks back on his career of 50 years. He also talks about his future roles which include working for the Foreign Office as the independent reviewer of the release of thousands of archived government files. He’s certainly not going to be idle.

When did you know you wanted to be ahistorian?

When I was 12 my father had a book on his shelves called America Came My Way written in the 1930s by an English baronet, Sir Anthony Jenkinson – it’s still the best book of its kind about that era. Jenkinson had very good connections and he starts with a description of the America’s Cup off Rhode Island and ends with an interview with Shirley Temple in Hollywood. In the middle of the book, Jenkinson goes to Washington and there’s a chapter called ‘Huey Long Takes His Shirt Off’. It’s all about the colourful antics of this senator from Louisiana and was very different to anything I knew about British politics. There was a little asterisk beside the title of the chapter which pointed out that the interview had taken place before Senator Long was assassinated. I read this in 1959: I knew Gandhi had been assassinated a decade before but the notion that an American politician had been killed in this way came as a big shock. Of course, that was all to change in the 1960s. 

What qualities do you need?

To be a historian you need to be able to weigh up the evidence and construct a coherent explanation of events. You need to be able to really get into the subject so that you’re not surprised by things, or rather, to understand when you should be surprised. You are always tempted to apply anachronistic contemporary values. Inevitably when you’re studying the 20th century you’re bound to have strong sympathies with certain characters, in my case Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt and Martin Luther King Jr.

You came up to Cambridge in 1965. What was it like?

I was brought up in Bristol in a family of Welsh school teachers. My parents were both wonderfully encouraging, there were lots of books around, and I went to the local grammar school. I sang in a local church choir and regret I did not carry on seriously when my voice broke. I also played a lot of rugby. History was always my main interest though I wouldn’t say that I was a very good student. When I applied to Cambridge, my future director of studies said that, although I obviously didn’t know very much, I did show the ability to answer the question.

As an undergraduate at Sidney Sussex, I shared a room with a very bright historian who opened my eyes to how I could make best use of my time. But I rather cringe when I look back at what I produced as an undergraduate. Cambridge was an unusual place – almost all male at that time – but Sidney Sussex had few students from what you might call major public schools. Most of us came from maintained grammar schools and I certainly didn’t feel intimidated or different from anyone else.

At the end of my first year I decided to take a course in American history and I suddenly realised that Huey Long, the man I’d read about when I was 12, was actually rather important as a major political challenger to Roosevelt in the 1930s. I wrote a paper for my college history society about all of this – and I’ve continued to be fascinated by the politics of the South during this era. In 2007 I published a chapter about Long – called ‘When I took the Oath of Office, I took no vow of poverty: Race, Corruption and Democracy in Louisiana’ - in a collection of essays.

By the end of my time at Cambridge I’d begun to learn how to work – how to manage my time and how to concentrate rather than ‘sort of’ work, and how to take notes and read things in different ways – which things to read in detail and which things just to skim through. I’m still learning now.

What would you have been if you hadn’t been a historian?

I probably would have been a school teacher – it runs in the family. Before I got a scholarship to go to Hull to take a PhD I had accepted a place to train as a teacher at Bristol University.

You went from Cambridge to Hull to take a PhD – two very different environments?

Taking a PhD at Hull University was the best thing I ever did. I went from somewhere where there were lots of graduate students to a place where I was the only graduate student in American  history. When I first went to Hull it was for my interview and I clearly remember arriving at the station. The centre of Hull at this time was pretty depressing and I thought: ‘I’ll never have the same sense of excitement coming here as I do each time I get back to Cambridge.’ By the time I left Hull, the reverse was true. I came to appreciate the northern environment and later went to work at Newcastle University. Soon I’m going to be living in Yorkshire.

You’ve focused on American politics throughout your career. What difference does it make that you’re English?

I went to America for the first time in my life in 1969 when I was half way through my PhD and spent 13 months in North Carolina. In those days long-distance travel was really expensive so if you got somewhere you stayed as long as you could. It’s very different for our graduate students today - they go back and forth to the States all the time. The focus of the previous generation of historians of America to mine tended to be explaining America to non-Americans and to concentrate on the Anglo-American relationship. What people of my generation wanted to do was to be virtually indistinguishable from American graduate students. We sought to master the sources as thoroughly as American students would and tackle the problems that concerned American historiography - and thus be judged on our credentials on the same basis as American historians.

Over the years I’ve come to think that there is no advantage or disadvantage to being English – it’s just different. A historian from the North of America working on the history of the South is another different experience. It’s been said that you never will understand the south without having been born there. That might be right but it brings with it all kinds of assumptions.  In some ways being an outsider is helpful in that it avoids you getting into a cycle of self-congratulation and lamentation that bedevils American and Southern history.  It took a long time for American historians and commentators to pick up on the distinctive importance of religion in modern American politics which for outsiders really stood out. 

Do we study history in order to learn from the past?

AJP Taylor famously said that we learn about the mistakes of the past in order to make the same mistakes again. I’ve written a fair amount recently on Obama and the lessons of the New Deal because in 2009 explicit comparisons were made between Obama’s administration and Roosevelt’s administration. Obama had different things to face and he didn’t have the same opportunities as FDR. American politicians, particularly Democrats, have always been imprisoned by comparisons with Roosevelt – none of them will ever live up to it. Things are never the same twice but an analysis of history can provide comparative factors and useful pointers about what may or may not happen.

As for politicians having a solid grasp of history, Clare Short once said of Tony Blair that he had very little knowledge of history while Gordon Brown did. It’s not clear what effect that had but I do think a broad historical sense gives you a certain degree of caution. The most obvious lesson of the past for European politicians should have been Iraq and for Americans it’s Vietnam

You’ve been Master of Clare College for the past ten years. What’s special about a Cambridge education?

For students the most important thing in studying history is to get an imaginative understanding of it.  Like classics, it’s not a vocational subject – it teaches you how to weigh up material and make judgments. The most important thing I look for in students is that they enjoy it.  What we have at Cambridge, as one of the world’s leading research universities, is an amazingly favourable environment for students. I taught for 20 years at Newcastle where we had wonderful students but in the history department they are operating with a student-staff ratio at levels which can’t possibly offer the same experience students get at Cambridge. We’re also sitting on fantastic resources here in the form of libraries and so on – so there’s absolutely no excuse for not providing world class undergraduate education.

The real challenge for Cambridge over the next ten to 15 years is to raise the big sums of money needed to sustain the research standard and keep that quality of undergraduate education at the same time.  The pressures on today’s College Fellows from the demands of research are such that a College needs far more of them than we did in the past in order to maintain the current level of teaching. The notion that nothing needs to change is simply wishful thinking.

How do you feel about history teaching in schools?

I feel that the best people to comment on that are teachers themselves. As an American historian I can’t complain. I don’t lament the current state of historical knowledge in our sixth forms, many of which I visit to give talks. Students arriving to start courses at Cambridge don’t come up with lesser skills than their predecessors, they come up with different skills. They are accustomed to working in a modular fashion and, in terms of doing weekly essays at Cambridge, that’s rather good training. They master IT skills that academics have on the whole been fairly slow to grasp - and they certainly know how to work hard.

What have you found most rewarding and most frustrating about your career?

The most rewarding thing has been teaching a special subject in the History Faculty that’s been very popular – it’s a course on Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement. Sometimes I hear from students from years ago who write to tell me what they are doing today – NGO work in Rwanda, for example – as a direct result of doing this course.  I’ve been remarkably lucky to have some very talented PhD students, real self-starters, who have gone into the leading university jobs in American history in this country.

The reality of being a Master of a Cambridge College and a professor are that you are busy but that’s not a complaint. I spent two terms on to the University Council and had a period as chairman of the Cambridge Colleges Committee where you confront the inevitable difficulty of getting things done in a self-governing institution. In retirement I’m looking forward to not being timetabled quite so much

How has the study of history changed in the course of your career?

History looks very different from how it looked in the late 1960s if you’re an American historian. The relatively narrow range of American political and diplomatic history has been enormously enriched by the new social history. One particular example is the history of women: in 1974 I was working at Newcastle University and I invited Carl Degler, the visiting Harmsworth Professor, from Oxford to give a lecture on “Is there a history of women?”  Well, there certainly wasn’t at Newcastle – or most other places – back in 1974.  The emergence of the history of women as a research area and the influx of women into the profession have transformed the subject. History is a much more theoretically sophisticated subject than it was 30 years ago. I look at the courses available to students at Cambridge today and think what a wonderful subject it is. In my own area, it was the great books of the history on slavery that came out in the 1970s that led me to teach race relations as a subject. As an American historian, it was important to know these works – and the best way to do that was to teach them.

Which of your books would you most recommend to readers?

It would have to be FDR: The First Hundred Days which came out in 2008. At first no-one was really interested in it and then it began to attract attention. The financial crisis in the autumn of that year meant that 10 Downing Street got interested in it and just after Christmas, the historian Tristram Hunt wrote in the Observer that this volume was top of the reading list of political classes on both sides of the Atlantic. It developed from a book I published in 1989, a one-volume history of the New Deal called The New Deal: The Depression Years 1933-1940.

What are you doing next?

I’ve got three main things to do.

I’m independent reviewer for the Foreign Office for, firstly the Migrated Archive and their Special Collections. The Migrated Archive is a vast number of papers sent to London from the British administrations of former colonies in their last days rather than handing them over to their successors. The existence of this archive came to light in the Kenya torture trial. My appointment was designed to provide assurance that these papers would get published in their entirety. I did that in 2013.

The Foreign Office then acknowledged that they had a much larger collection of papers that they had not made available – held at the records centre at Hounslow Park. These papers are not as significant, I suspect, as the Migrated Archive and they are much more haphazard in what they cover. The best way of describing this archive is as residual collections – they didn’t come in the normal way under the 30-year rule that governs the annual transfer of documents from any government department to the national archive. These files have been accumulated outside that departmental route – they include stuff from the Allied Control Mission and stuff on the Foreign Office investigation of Burgess and McLean as well as very interesting material from Hong Kong and claims against the German government from British citizens who were victims of Nazi persecution. 

While the Migrated Archive released over the last two years had just over 20,000 files, the Special Collections has 600,000 plus files.  It’s my role to guarantee that these are being released in a timely fashion. This task isn’t quite as massive as it seems as 250,000 of these files relate to Hong Kong and won’t be released until 2047. Another 150,000 files are routine foreign compensation claim files. My role is to prioritise the release of the most important papers as quickly as possible.

The second thing is that I’m chairman of the Kennedy Memorial Trust which administers the Kennedy Scholarships and also the memorial at Runnymede. Thirdly, a former colleague of mine is doing a remarkable job building up American history at Northumbria University in Newcastle and I’m going to be doing some work for them. So, all in all, I’m going to be pretty busy.

For all details of tomorrow's concert go to https://www.adcticketing.com/whats-on/concert/the-masters-concert.aspx.

Inset images: Tony Badger as Bristol choirboy, rugby player and visiting scholar (credit: Tony Badger)

 

The Choir of Clare College will tomorrow (5 July 2014) perform a special concert at West Road as tribute to outgoing Master and eminent historian Professor Tony Badger. With characteristic candour, Badger answers questions about his trajectory from grammar school boy to leading specialist in American political history. 

Tony Badger

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‘Para Ingles ver’ (for the English to see): the other side of the World Cup

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England’s team may have returned home, but eyes remain on Brazil. As the World Cup enters its fourth week, tensions mount in the stadiums but more so in the streets outside, with protests accompanying most matches.

The World Cup is a bitter topic for many Brazilians, already angry at an undemocratic and regressive use of public funds. Football in Brazil owes much of its fame and vibrancy to the most vulnerable social groups. Megastars Romário, Pelé, Ronaldo and Jairzinho all grew up in favelas.

It is these very groups who are being evicted, priced out, repressed and shot at for the sake of FIFA’s mega-event. During the Chile-Spain match in Rio de Janeiro, 25-year-old Afonso Maurício Linhares was shot and killed by the police as he was refereeing a local football match in the Manguinhos favela just 6km from the stadium. In Belo Horizonte, an unfinished overpass constructed for the World Cup collapsed only yesterday, killing two people on a bus while others were trapped inside.

In June 2013, more than two million people took to the streets of Brazilian cities in what came to be known as the ‘Vinegar Revolt’ or ‘Brazilian Autumn’. Sparked by rising bus fares, these protests became a much larger movement against inequality, corruption, privatisation and the everyday brutality of the military police.

In Rio, as in other host cities, simmering discontent continued as World Cup construction projects resulted in unbearable levels of traffic congestion through the city’s hottest summer for 30 years. This popular anger has now re-erupted as the world focuses its attention on a country where an economic boom has done little for the majority of the population.

There is an increasing trend for city governments to use international mega-events to raise their international profile, attract investment, and provide impetus for urban development projects.

The widespread resistance to the World Cup in Brazil places an onus on social scientists, activists and policy makers to ask whether the hosting of mega-events is actually ever ‘good for’ a city, and if so, for whom exactly? The neglected stadiums in Cape Town and Athens loom as a warning for the legacy of Brazil’s World Cup as well as for Rio’s 2016 Olympic Games.

Mega-events have a direct bearing on city planning. They result in programmes that prioritise flashy, short-term initiatives targeted at tourists and TV audiences rather than residents.

Last year I supervised the undergraduate dissertation of Land Economy student Annabel Cooke, who chose to write about the links between the World Cup and the ‘pacification’ projects in Rio’s favelas. These are essentially military invasions of favelas in which a specially created police force wrests control from drug trafficking gangs.

Annabel’s research shows that these programmes are provoked and sustained by Rio’s hosting of the World Cup. The focus of pacification is largely on favelas closest to the stadiums, which leads gangs to relocate to other, poorer favelas, while indiscriminate police violence under the pretext of protecting tourists is increasing across the city.

Image-based or ‘city branding’ policies are nothing new. Brazil has long had to fabricate an image of success and stability to attract investors (from states whose own wealth was generated by resource theft from Brazil and other colonies). There is even a Brazilian saying, ‘para ingles ver’, or ‘for the English to see’. This phrase dates back to a treaty signed in 1826 between Britain and Brazil supposedly ending the slave trade, which actually continued for another six decades.

Many songs written in Rio, particularly in the genre known as ‘funk consciente’, have lyrics that tell a story of two worlds.  Tourists hang out in the south zone, drinking coconut water on Copacabana beach while, in the song-writers’ worlds of the favelas and north zone, thousands of people struggle with the most basic needs of security, food and clean water.

What is the outcome of strategies that are ‘para ingles ver’? If the hosting of mega-events provides the scope and impetus for contemporary urban development, who loses out behind the glossy images, and how are people responding?

As part of my PhD, I am exploring the impact of mega-events on street vendors in Rio. The vendors I interviewed have some important insights into these questions, which are pertinent not just for Brazil but for host cities of international mega-events across the world. My interviewees spoke at length about their feelings of betrayal, invisibility and indignation at the World Cup, but also their involvement in emerging political struggles.

Street vendors are one of the most vulnerable and neglected groups of workers in the city. They suffer from police extortion during the day, assaults on public transport, and pervasive violence back home in the favelas where they live.

I work as a volunteer for a small non-profit workers rights’ organisation called CAMTRA (Casa da Mulher Trabalhadora). Based in the centre of Rio, CAMTRA is doing an extensive survey of female vendors’ impressions and experiences of the Cup.

The first phase of the study showed that many vendors fear that the World Cup would lead to a decrease in living standards due to increased police regulation of vending. The ‘General Cup Law’ passed last year stipulates that only registered established traders can sell within a certain radius of each stadium, meaning that as one vendor asserted: “With the World Cup, only those who already have money will earn.”

For the past year, vendors have faced vastly increased commutes to work, as most live in the North Zone where infrastructure projects by the airport have led to extreme congestion on the roads. In my interviews, vendors made a clear connection between poor services and the huge sums of money being spent on the World Cup. One woman working at a clothes stall exclaimed: ‘This government spending all this money on the world cup! It needs to prioritise, there are people dying in the street here.”

Some vendors had been left homeless as a result of World Cup construction projects, and in CAMTRA’s survey of more than vendors, all those who lived in favelas felt that the police ‘pacification’ projects were directed at tourists rather than residents.

All 30 of the vendors I spoke with in depth were in favour of the street protests, arguing that the unrest was a signal that Brazilians had ‘woken up’ and might achieve some real change. Some of my interviewees recalled the massive protest movement that swept the corrupt President Fernando Collor de Mello out of power in 1992. Many predicted an increase in protests during the World Cup and in the run up to the Olympics. “People are going to come back to the streets, I promise,” an orange juice seller told me, “And in larger numbers than ever before.”

There is some indication that the Brazilian government is responding to the popular mobilisations. Just before the start of the World Cup, President Dilma Rousseff committed to maintain the increase in social spending that her presidency has seen, as part of an agreement made in response to the June 2013 protests.

She has also pledged to ring-fence the hoped-for returns from the ‘Lula’ oil field (a potential gold mine of pre-salt layer oil discovered 250km off the coast of Rio de Janeiro) claiming that in the next 35 years the government would be able to invest R$1 trillion in education and health.

The World Cup and Olympic committees strive to maintain a glossy image of Brazil for corporate investors. Yet an unintended outcome of their mega-events strategy is the international attention seized by critical groups, who will hold the government to account on these public spending promises.

As well as working with CAMTRA, I volunteer as a translator for Rio on Watch, a community journalism website that is seeing high levels of traffic at the moment. As a result of reports and images that shame the government and FIFA, another picture of Brazil has emerged. Protests, state violence and political repression are now widely associated with the country, alongside football, samba and cachaça.

“The favelas cannot be silenced,” insists Ana Paula Gomes de Oliveira, mother of 19-year-old Jonathan de Oliveira Lima who was recently killed by the police in Complexo de Alemao.

More and more people are aware of the blood, sweat and tears behind the stadiums, and political reports are creeping into the sports sections of online news sources. Brazilian protesters are not actually calling on us to boycott the World Cup matches. The popular slogan and hashtag used across Brazil, ‘Nao vai ter copa’ – there will not be a world cup – is not really a threat or campaign to prevent the World Cup from happening. Rather, it is to assert that the World Cup should not be as the governors of the host cities intended – an uncontroversial, investment-garnering, glossing over of the city scapes ‘para ingles ver’. Instead, the slogan ‘Our Cup is in the Streets’ refers to the subversion of the event into another kind of ‘cup’.

This is a ‘cup of strikes’, as the striking public sector workers in Rio claimed, a cup where the eyes of Amnesty International are monitoring human rights abuses on the streets, and where competitions between national football teams are changed into comparisons between national policies. In the photo above, the banner contrasts Brazil and Uruguay. The text reads ‘Uruguay 3, Brazil 0: legalisation of abortion, equal marriage and legalisation of marijuana.’

We do need to look carefully for this ‘other cup’. It’s not going to be publicised along the edges of the stadiums with McDonalds and Hyundai. As the street vendors assert, it is the way in which the dynamics on the streets play that determine what mega-events mean to a country. And for those attending the games, one small way to support the ‘cup of the streets’ is to buy from street vendors rather than from the FIFA-endorsed chains. Just take a short walk from the stadium, and they will be there waiting for you with an ice cold beer.

Inset images: protest poster reads "the parties in the stadiums are not worth the tears in the favelas" (credit: Rio on Watch); bikini seller and tourist (credit: eGuide Travel); caipirinha seller (credit: Keetr); Uruguay versus Brazil banner compares the two countries over recent years (credit: Renato Cinco).

Brazilians are famous for their love of football but millions of ordinary people are angry at the huge sums spent on the World Cup. Lucy McMahon, a PhD candidate in Development Studies, is working as a volunteer for two human rights organisations in Rio de Janiero. She reports on her research among some of the poorest groups.

Mega-events have a direct bearing on city planning. They result in programmes that prioritise flashy, short-term initiatives targeted at tourists and TV audiences rather than residents.
Lucy McMahon
Names of people killed by the police are stencilled on to football shirts

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