In February 2013, the ArcMed Hotel in Gaza City hosted a conference entitled,  ‘War on Gaza: consequences and future prospects’. The conference, arranged by leading Gazan think tanks and civil society organizations, with sponsorship by local media groups, featured speakers from among Gaza’s intellectuals, policymakers (including Hamas politicians), students and some international voices.

Gaza had recently dusted itself off after 2012’s ‘Operation Pillar of Cloud’ and wanted to take stock. The very premise of the conference took for granted that war would come to Gaza again. ‘Pillar of Cloud’ was designed to ‘dismantle the capabilities of Hamas to wage violence upon Israel’. This it did not do.

Indeed, one Hamas official at the conference boasted, “In 2008 we were beaten, 2012 was a draw. Next time we will win!” At the closing session of the conference, Ismail Haniyeh went further, positing that the 8-day war had exposed Israel’s myth of military supremacy and that Hamas had won “a military and political victory”. This input from policy-makers was terrifying for its disconnection with the reality of being Gaza.

The 2012 war began with a general escalation: rockets from Gaza met by shelling from Israel. Details of a truce were negotiated, but as Hamas military chief of staff, Ahmed al-Jabari sat reading the document, he was assassinated by an Israeli airstrike. Israel went on to launch an air and sea offensive. Then something unprecedented happened: Egyptian Prime Minister Hazem Qandil visited Gaza during the bombardments, following visits by buses of Egyptian solidarity activists. Together, Egyptian leaders and public opinion demanded and worked for a ceasefire.

However the Morsi ceasefire was built for immediate respite and addressed no long-term issues. As such, it was a crude stitch across a wound requiring long and difficult surgery. As yet, nobody has seemed willing to consider that procedure. Peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority failed yet again this year, spelling out the certainty of renewed hostilities at some point.

So far, no convincing peace plan has emerged for this latest round of battering Gaza and Hamas. The first ceasefire proposal process was bizarre: Tony Blair talking to Egyptian President Sisi talking to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. It offered about the same prospects for success as the 2012 ceasefire; and Hamas, as well as many other Gazans, demanded a more robust solution.

This situation is self-sustaining, doomed to repeat itself over and over. If we are going to think seriously about ending this cyclical violence, we must begin by understanding why it occurs and then dynamically rethink the inputs that sustain it. There are four key reasons:

First, because it can: Gaza is not the West Bank. The current escalation began in the West Bank with the abduction and murder of three Israeli teenagers near Hebron by a Hebron-based splinter cell, the brutal treatment meted out during the search for them and the reprisals following the confirmation of their deaths. With the West Bank erupting in anger, Hamas and Islamic Jihad joined in with rockets from Gaza. The Israeli military focusing its retaliation on Gaza neatly contained much of the verve of the conflict to a manageable and isolated entity—a political punch bag. It happens in Gaza because that is what Gaza is currently for. Unpacking that are the reasons below.

Without official international support (from Egypt or elsewhere), Hamas’ agenda is at an all-or-nothing point. All it has to do is not surrender; all Gaza has to do is survive another bombardment. The cruel thing is that this strategy is politically effective. Hamas is far more sophisticated than international observers understand: they successfully cleaned up and policed one of the most violent strips of land in the Middle East and stopped a civil war by being better organized and more forceful than any opponent or militia active in the Gaza Strip—and there were a lot of those. This is the group the international community blithely suggests Gazan civilians overthrow, but Gazans’ view of Hamas and of political violence in their name is more complicated than that. Amidst dire conditions and regular conflict (one recent report estimates the strip will be uninhabitable by 2020 when its projected to have over 2 million inhabitants), Gazans have little to lose. Pushing for a better deal from a ceasefire, a better ‘normal’ seems an entirely logical policy. Indeed, as seen in 2008-2009, Hamas can gain a lot of popularity even by losing militarily, while Fatah’s and Palestinian President Abbas’ ratings tumble and general hostility towards Israel among the general Palestinian population rises.

What precisely ‘winning’ is in this scenario—for either side—is far from clear. Both sides seem to have a single, religious state in mind as their ultimate objective. This week Netanyahu intimated a withdrawal of his previous rhetorical support for a two-state solution. Just maintaining the status quo is a short-term step in that direction. Hamas’ stance on the two-state solution had softened of late—with Khaled Meshal going so far as to state in 2007, ‘I speak of an Arab and a Palestinian demand to have a state on the ’67 borders. True, by inference, this will mean there is an entity or a state called Israel’.[1] But yet another war with Gaza is unlikely to persuade them that anything other than a unified Islamic state is in their interest.

Therefore, this fight against Gaza sets Israeli hawks and Hamas as crude apes of each other. Both compete actively for the claim of greater victimhood and develop their long-term goals from this suffering. Israeli calls for Netanyahu to ‘finish inside this time’ and other euphemisms seem to be getting at is a similar fetish of victimhood. With the first, tentative steps of Israeli soldiers into the Gaza Strip came an Israeli fatality, many more followed. An obscene contest of death. Harald Wydra (2013) recently wrote for CRIA on the globalization of empathy for even potential victimhood, referring predominantly to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. That attackers must be victims is a new, mimetic quality of war, international law and public opinion, eloquently described by Wydra.  Dating back to the Second Intifada, Hamas has had the policy of retaliating against Israeli attacks on Palestinians aiming for a strike-for-strike ratio, an equality of ‘horror’.[2] The thing is that Israel has a similar policy with regard to rocket fire from Gaza. Meanwhile, both Hamas and the IDF have well-followed Twitter accounts and seem to put engagement with international public opinion before engagement with each other. This  allows each party to look only to its goals and its winning or losing a global empathy struggle while reality staring each party in the face is conveniently obscured.

Finally, let us imagine that this war does manage to render Hamas harmless (though there are scant figures on insurgencies successfully disarmed through military action rather than political processes that would point to the true likelihood of that). All that scenario represents is a huge promotion for Islamic Jihad, among other groups, who would pick right up where Hamas left off sooner or later. And so the violence would continue, because the structural factors that produce it would not have changed.

The famous definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results. The series of rationalisations that produce this perpetual war in Gaza is surely just madness. But continue it will. Stopping the cycle once and for all will require dynamic new thinking and mutual understanding from all parties.

As Harald Wydra concluded in his article on new wars: ”Therefore, one cannot limit the identity of antagonists to essentialist views that oppose ‘our’ civilizational religious allegiance or cultural heritage to ‘theirs’. Military resources vary enormously; strategic goals of states differ substantially from those of warlords or suicide bombers. Yet, justifications of killings insist on the uniqueness, righteousness and legitimacy of one’s own cause. Rivals model their ‘autonomous’ decisions after the other’s perceived intentions. […] The identity here rather emerges from the mimetic contagion according to which self-attributed collective victimhood provides a moral right for the initiation of hostilities against others.”

Lucy Thirkell is a PhD candidate in the Department of Politics and International Studies, studying the politics of commerce in Gaza City, and a former Editor-in-Chief of CRIA.

Read more from CRIAViews here.

Inset images: Bombed house in Gaza, 2008 by Marius Arnesen (Att - NC); Pray for Gaza by Duncan C (Att - NC)

Many different types of cell, including sperm, bacteria and algae, propel themselves using whip-like appendages known as flagella. These protrusions, about one-hundredth of a millimetre long, function like tiny oars, helping cells move through fluid. Similar, shorter structures called cilia are found on the surfaces of many cells, where they perform roles such as moving liquids over the cell.

Flagella and cilia are remarkably versatile: they transport mucus and expel pathogens from our airways, they establish the left-right asymmetry in developing vertebrate embryos, and transport human eggs through the Fallopian tube. Each cilium or flagellum beats to its own characteristic rhythm, but wherever large groups of these biological paddles are found, they tend to row in sync, as though led by a cox.

Exactly what causes these microscopic rowers to move together is something of a mystery. Experiments in the 1940s demonstrated that the flagella of bull sperm tend to synchronise when they swim close to one another, connected only through the fluid surrounding them. However, the precise mechanism through which groups of cilia and flagella lock into sync with one another is not entirely clear.

A long-standing hypothesis is that movement of the fluid due to the beating flagella could be the reason they move in unison. While previous experimental findings were consistent with mathematical theories describing the fluid motion, these experiments could not exclude other mechanisms for achieving synchronisation, such as chemical signalling or physical connections between flagella.

Now, using a newly devised experimental procedure, researchers from the University of Cambridge have been able to disentangle the various mechanisms, and show that the fluid motion created by two beating flagella is sufficient by itself to cause them to row in sync. The findings are published today (29 July) in the journal eLife.

The team, based in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, included Dr Douglas Brumley (now at MIT), PhD student Kirsty Wan, Dr Marco Polin (now at the University of Warwick), and Professor Raymond E. Goldstein.

The group used high-speed imaging and microscopy to observe the flagella of two physically separated cells of a species of green alga called Volvox carteri. Holding the cells on micromanipulators of the kind used in in vitro fertilisation, they were able to vary systematically the spacing between the cells in the fluid. At wide separations, the two flagella beat at different rates, with rhythms governed by their distinct intrinsic frequencies.

However, the team found that when brought close enough together, the two flagella could lock together into the same rhythm for thousands of beats at a time. In a striking compromise between their natural frequencies, the two flagella each produce flows that are sufficient for the pair to synchronise their motions.

Additionally, by analysing the time series of beating, the team could determine the strength of the interaction between the flagella, which was found to agree with basic fluid dynamical calculations.

“This research was the culmination of many years of work in this area, and we are very excited to see how a quantitative approach to a problem in biology can answer fundamental questions,” said Dr Polin.

In separate work led by Drs Brumley and Polin, the group has been investigating the dynamics of thousands of interacting Volvox flagella that produce coherent patterns like Mexican waves in a stadium, which are also apparently driven by hydrodynamic interactions between the filaments.

At the same time, Wan has been investigating the noisy beating of algal flagella, and has discovered that they exhibit beat-to-beat fluctuations that are qualitatively similar to the fluctuations in human heart beats. “Taken together,” says Goldstein, “these results indicate the remarkable way in which green algae can serve as model organisms for fluid dynamical problems that relate to human health and disease. In this particular case, the coordination of flagella plays vital roles in phenomena ranging from embryo development to respiratory physiology, and thus the search for the mechanisms underlying synchronisation can yield insights on many fronts.”

This work was supported by the European Research Council, the EPSRC, and the Wellcome Trust.

Over 530 million people live in rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa, where rates of cardiovascular and metabolic diseases tend to be much lower than in urban areas. However, many of these areas are becoming increasingly urbanised, with people living within larger populations in more built-up environments, with better access to education, health facilities and utilities, for example.

In an attempt to better understand the impact that urbanisation is having on communities, a  team of researchers from the University of Cambridge, the Medical Research Council/Uganda Virus Research Institute Uganda Research Unit on AIDS, and Deakin University in Australia analysed data from 7,340 people aged 13 years and above across 25 villages in Uganda. Each individual was allocated an ‘urbanicity score’ and this was compared to their lifestyle risk factors, such as alcohol consumption, fruit and vegetable consumption, body mass index (BMI) and physical activity. The results are published today in the journal PLOS Medicine.

Dr Manjinder Sandhu from the Department of Public Health and Primary Care at the University of Cambridge, joint senior author of the study, says: “Over half a billion people live in rural areas across sub-Saharan Africa. We need to understand how the health of these populations will change as the areas develop and become more urbanised to enable countries to plan future healthcare programmes and develop interventions to reduce this risk.”

The researchers found that levels of urbanicity varied markedly across the villages, ranging from those without educational facilities or electricity in households, to villages with a public telephone and a dispensary. However, despite the features of urbanisation being relatively modest, living in more urban villages was associated with increased prevalence of cardiovascular disease risk factors such as physical inactivity, low fruit and vegetable consumption, heavy drinking and high body mass index, even after controlling for other factors such as socioeconomic status.

Johanna Riha, first author and a Gates Cambridge Scholar at the University of Cambridge, says: “Development in rural areas will provide people with much needed access to education, healthcare and improved sanitation, with very positive health benefits. But it could be a double-edged sword and come at a cost of a greater incidence of diseases such as heart disease and diabetes.”

Professor Janet Seeley, joint senior author from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, adds: “Even a small increase in a person’s level of urbanicity appears to be associated with poorer lifestyle choices that raise their risk of cardiovascular and metabolic diseases. As better infrastructure, education and healthcare systems are being developed, we should look for ways to use them to provide an opportunity to design and deliver interventions to help reduce the risk of these diseases.”

The study was supported in part by the African Partnership for Chronic Disease Research.

Held between 2 and 4 July at the Centre for African Wetlands, part of the University of Ghana’s main Legon campus, the event brought together participants from the three CAPREx partner institutions – Cambridge, the University of Ghana, and Uganda’s Makerere University—to discuss the progress made over the past year, and consider the challenges and opportunities ahead.

Launched in 2012, CAPREx is a capacity-building scheme whose central aim is to strengthen Africa's capacity for sustainable excellence in research through close collaborative work with the region's most talented individuals.

It was established through an initial donation of $1.2 Million by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, with additional support from the Alborada Trust ($1 Million) and matched funding from the University of Cambridge. 

CAPREx supports post-doctoral fellowships in engineering and biological sciences (for Ghana), as well as the social sciences and humanities (Uganda). There are also short-term fellowships (in Cambridge) and workshops (in Africa) focusing on building capacity in research management and administration in the African partner universities.

Since its inception in October 2012, 16 CAPREx fellows from Ghana and Uganda have spent time in Cambridge. Their expertise has ranged from gender stereotypes in oral literature, to the study of graphene-based natural dye sensitized solar cells. Three of them have been Research Management Fellows specifically, with one fellow covering a dual role of postdoctoral and research management fellow. In that period, five Cambridge collaborators have visited research fellows at the Universities of Ghana and Makerere.

The Cambridge delegation attending the AGM comprised Dr Jennifer Barnes, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for International Strategy; Prof David Dunne, Director of the Cambridge-Africa Programme; Prof James Wood, Head of the Department of Veterinary Medicine; CAPREX collaborators Prof Mark Carrington and Dr Devon Curtis; Dr Pauline Essah, Coordinator of the Cambridge-Africa Programme; and CAPREx coordinator Jenny Mackay.

Interspersed with the sessions for discussion of achievements, challenges, and logistical and managerial processes, were presentations by CAPREx fellows and a visit to the laboratory managed by CAPREx fellow and lecturer at the Department of Material Science and Engineering, Dr David Dodoo-Arhin. The equipment for this laboratory was purchased using an award from the Cambridge-Africa Alborada Research Fund, for Dr Dodoo-Arhin’s CAPREx fellowship.

During the AGM, a significant, partnership-strengthening meeting took place between the Cambridge delegation, Prof Ernest Okello Ogwang; Deputy Vice Chancellor (Academic Affairs) of Makerere University, and the Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana, Prof Ernest Aryeetey

Commenting on the success of CAPREx so far, Prof David Dunne, Director of CAPREx (and of the umbrella Cambridge-Africa Programme), said: “We are absolutely delighted with the progress and achievements of the CAPREx initiative so far. It has been enriching to have several CAPREx fellows visit Cambridge over the past year, for research collaborations and workshops.

"We look forward to welcoming 16 new African postdoctoral fellows and 4 research management fellows to Cambridge over the next few months. CAPREx is proving to be extremely beneficial for both African and Cambridge research, and the CAPREx partners wish to express their sincere appreciation to all their sponsors for their generous and visionary support."

For more information about the CAPREx initiative and the wider Cambridge-Africa Programme at the University of Cambridge, click here  

A team of Cambridge students have begun a collaboration with people living in the slums of Dar es Salaam, aimed at road-testing ways for students to contribute meaningfully to improving lives in the developing world.

More than 30 students are travelling out to the Tanzanian city to set up four pilot projects as part of the new Cambridge Development Initiative. These include a plan to install the first sewer network in a community where cholera is often rife, and another to establish peer-to-peer learning in schools where class sizes are almost 100.

The longer-term aim, however, is to establish a blueprint for student volunteering which marks a step forward from what organisers describe as the traditional, “bricks-and-mortar” approach. Rather than sending students to developing countries to build one-off community facilities during their holidays, the Cambridge initiative will focus on training and skills development as well as infrastructure, kick-starting sophisticated development projects which can be sustained in the long term.

Set up in partnership with a Tanzanian organisation which works in 10 different city slums, the student-led initiative also hopes to create a lasting link between Cambridge and Dar es Salaam. The hope is that students will travel to the megacity every year, implementing and analysing different development initiatives which have been thoroughly researched and tested during the preceding months.

“The ambition is to create a model for students at other universities who are interested in making an innovative contribution to international development,” Chris Clark, a Master’s student in Development Studies at St John’s College, Cambridge, who will lead the evaluation phase of the pilot projects, explained.

Kelvin Wong, who, along with fellow-student Patrick Hoffman is a co-founder of the Initiative, argues that universities are full of students with valuable skills and experience, which rank as “untapped assets” in the context of international development.

“Students are not necessarily the right people to actually run or build community resources,” he added. “What we can offer is specialist knowledge, which can facilitate such development. Cambridge in particular has provided us with a wealth of expertise and resources right on our doorstep: this has helped position our projects at the cutting edge of development."

Dar es Salaam is one of the world’s fast expanding mega-cities, with a population of over four million, 70% of whom live in so-called “informal settlements”. The rapid growth of this urban sprawl has led to the emergence of slums which lack basic facilities and public services, and where many of the inhabitants cannot find jobs.

The Cambridge Development Initiative will aim, by the end of August, to start four community-based projects which address some of these problems, and can then be sustained by the communities themselves. Each project has been devised during six months of comprehensive research, and all four are based on solutions which have already proven effective elsewhere in the developing world.

They include an engineering scheme to construct a simplified sewer system in the settlement of Vingunguti, part of Dar es Salaam’s Ilala district where more than 80,000 people currently live without any proper sanitation, and where outbreaks of cholera are common.

Education specialists from both Cambridge and the University of Dar es Salaam will meanwhile run summer workshops at the city’s Manzese Secondary School, aimed at supplementing the traditional curriculum and establishing peer-to-peer learning clubs for students.

The Initiative will also bring primary healthcare to some informal settlements for the first time, by opening local health shops and clinics which will offer affordable medicines, regular consultations with nurses in treatment rooms, and run health-awareness schemes in the immediate area. The final project will help Tanzanian university students interested in starting a financially sustainable social enterprise aimed at bettering living conditions in Dar es Salaam’s slums. The project takes the form of a small business incubator designed according to a model which focuses on developing socially conscious small businesses.

All four projects will be thoroughly evaluated by members of the Development Initiative team, with a view to improving the existing model as well as informing future schemes in 2015. “Through surveys, statistics and stories, we will be able to gain an understanding of the impact of our projects while still in the pilot phase,” Clark said. “That will enable us to make informed decisions about how to refine the projects and bring them to scale.”

Further information about the Cambridge Development Initiative can be found at: www.cambridgedevelopment.org

Professor Chris Dobson, Master of St John’s College, has been awarded this year’s Feltrinelli Prize in recognition of his work in the fields of science and medicine.

The Feltrinelli Prize is awarded annually and rotates around categories as diverse as art, music, history, science, medicine and the humanities. The Prize is presented by the Italian Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, the world's oldest existing Academy of Sciences.

Previous prize-winners have included W.H. Auden, Laurence Olivier and Hugh Huxley. Professor Dobson said: “The list of winners of the Feltrinelli Prize is astonishing, and it is an honour to be included amongst them”.

Two of Britain’s leading storytellers, Daniel Morden and Hugh Lupton, have retold Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, for a modern audience.   The new recordings have been piloted in primary and secondary schools across the full ability range, and are now being made available for all teachers to use.

Although they are between two and three thousand years old, the stories are still embedded in everyday language and popular culture. People who don’t know the original tales may still speak of a “Trojan Horse,” boast of a “Midas Touch” or worry about an “Achilles Heel.”

Available from www.classictales.co.uk, Daniel and Hugh’s high-quality recordings are accompanied by teachers’ notes and additional resources, planned by experienced teachers and tested in both KS2 and KS3 classrooms.

The website provides a complete resource for teachers who would like to use classical tales in teaching, and for teachers who are looking for examples of seminal world literature. The pilot phase found the stories to be particularly helpful for teaching reading, writing, speaking and listening skills.

The new recordings are unique because Daniel and Hugh work in the original, oral tradition of storytelling. Their stories are told from memory, not read from a script. Working in the oral tradition preserves the power and excitement of the original tales, and brings the clarity and simplicity necessary to make the stories accessible to modern children.

The Iliad, Odyssey and Metamorphoses were chosen for the project because, although they are thousands of years old, they are still exciting stories which engage and interest children.  The resources also encourage discussion of challenging contemporary questions, such as, “is there a proper way to fight a war?”

“Humans have always used stories to help think about experience, to entertain groups and to educate children,” said Will Griffiths, Director of the Cambridge Schools Classics Project. “These stories aim to achieve all these and more.”

“Our research shows that using classical tales is a great way to engage, inspire and motivate young people across the full ability range,” explains Will.

“We hope that KS2 and 3 teachers will find these new recordings a valuable resource in their classrooms, especially in light of curriculum changes and requirements to teach seminal world literature – what could be more seminal than stories told before the dawn of the written word?”

Dale McCarthy and Gracie Miller are both English Teachers at Nower Hill High School, a multi-cultural, non-selective academy in Greater London.

They have been teaching War with Troy and Return From Troy with 300 year 7 students for the last four years and have had very positive responses to the audio teaching materials.

Reflecting on the value of using recorded tellings of classic tales in the classroom, Gracie said "We think it's really worthwhile because they move from really brilliant listening skills into really brilliant writing skills".

"There are four key areas where it has really helped in our school: the first of which is that it motivates very disengaged boys,” Dale added.

"It provides really good access for dyslexic children and children with other learning difficulties," said Gracie, “and the engaging stories provide stimuli and models for brilliant creative writing."

"It develops opportunities to develop key listening skills", added Dale.

Cambridge University Library is home to the world’s foremost collection of Sassoon material, and has digitised 23 of Sassoon’s journals and two of his wartime poetry notebooks. They are now available to all at the Cambridge Digital Library (http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/), where they sit alongside the papers of Isaac Newton and other priceless treasures of the Library’s collections.

Until now, much of the archive has remained beyond the reach of both researchers and the public because of the documents’ poor physical condition. The only person to have had unrestricted access to Sassoon’s journals and notebooks to date was official biographer Max Egremont.

The digitisation of the Sassoon material, which includes draft copies of his ‘Soldier’s Declaration’ as well as poetry, prose and sketches, fulfils an objective formulated during the Library’s £1.25m fundraising campaign to purchase the Sassoon Archive in 2009. The campaign, spearheaded by Egremont, was also supported by Sir Andrew Motion, Michael Morpurgo and Sebastian Faulks.

Cambridge University Librarian Anne Jarvis said: “The war diaries Sassoon kept on the Western Front and in Palestine are of the greatest significance, both nationally and internationally, and we are honoured to be able to make them available to everyone, anywhere in the world, on the 100^th anniversary of the First World War.

“From his ‘Soldier’s Declaration’ to his eyewitness accounts of the first day of the battle on the Somme, the Sassoon archive is a collection of towering importance, not just to historians, but to anyone seeking to understand the horror, bravery and futility of the First World War as experienced by those on the front lines and in the trenches.”

The digitisations make available online for the first time 23 of Sassoon’s journals from the years 1915-27 and 1931-32, as well as two poetry notebooks from 1916-18 containing rough drafts and fair copies of some of his best-known war poems. Sassoon wrote in a small and legible hand, frequently using his notebooks from both ends. The images of them are both powerful and evocative, showing mud from the trenches and spilled wax, presumably as he sat writing in his dug-out by candlelight.

The journals give a fascinating insight into daily life in the trenches. Sassoon described the first day of the Somme as a ‘sunlit picture of hell’ and the diaries also record the moment he was shot by a sniper at the Battle of Arras, as well as a psychological profile of ‘the soul of an officer’. The poems include previously unpublished material along with early drafts of some of his best-known works including an early version of ‘The Dug-Out’ with an additional, excised verse.

Sassoon’s journals represent much more than a simple diary record. The notebooks were small enough to be carried in the pocket of his army tunic, and he used them to draft poetry, make pencil or ink sketches, list members of his battalion and their fates, make notes on military briefings, and draw diagrams of the trenches.

“The great array of activities, difficulties and dangers that faced him as a serving officer, and the recurring inspiration of his creative responses to his conditions, are represented in the range of uses to which he put these notebooks,” said Cambridge University Library’s John Wells. “Unlike edited, printed transcriptions, the digitisations allow the viewer to form a sense of the physical documents, and to appreciate their unique nature as historical artefacts.”

The Sassoon collection joins other collections being delivered through the Cambridge Digital Library, which aims to make the Library’s great collections openly available to the world. The Digital Library was launched in 2011 and made possible through a generous donation from the Polonsky Foundation.

The work, which appears in the latest issue of the journal Nature Communications, focuses on electric double-layer capacitors (EDLCs), a type of so-called supercapacitor. These are excellent options for powering systems where fast charging and power delivery are crucial, such as in regenerative braking (for use in trains and buses), camera flashes, and in backup computer memory.

“The MRI method really allows us to look inside a functioning electrical storage device and locate molecular events that are responsible for its functioning,” explains Dr Alexej Jerschow, of NYU’s Department of Chemistry, one of the paper’s senior authors.

“The approach allows us to explore electrolyte concentration gradients and the movement of ions within the electrode and electrolyte, both ultimately a cause of poor rate performance in batteries and supercapacitors,” adds co-author Professor Clare Grey of Cambridge’s Department of Chemistry.

The other authors included Andrew Ilott, a post-doctoral researcher in NYU’s Department of Chemistry, and Nicole Trease, a post-doctoral researcher at Stony Brook University.

Capacitors are designed to store electric charge, but their storage capabilities are limited. In recent years, advances have been made to address this shortcoming. Among these has been the creation of supercapacitors, which can store more electrical charge than their predecessors. This is due to an electrical double layer formed at the electrolyte-electrode interface—the process by which energy is stored—which serves to more effectively trap energy than can standard capacitors.

However, the exact nature of this charge process in supercapacitors remains a subject of debate. Previous research has attempted to understand this process through the synthesis of new electrode materials, simulations of the charging process, and by spectroscopy—rather than by direct imaging of a complete functioning device.

In the Nature Communications work, Jerschow, Grey, and their co-authors explored a novel approach to understanding how these devices function: the use of MRI technology, which serves as a looking glass into supercapacitors’ energy storage activity.

This method has a precedent from the same research team. In work published by Nature Materials in 2012, the NYU-Cambridge team developed a method, based on MRI, to look inside a battery without damaging it. Their technique provided a method for helping to improve battery performance and safety by serving as a diagnostic of its internal workings.

In the supercapacitor work, the researchers found that MRI could pinpoint the location and estimate the amount of both positively and negatively charged electrolyte ions--data that are crucial to understanding the energy storage mechanism.

The technique has the potential to analyze functioning devices at different states of charge, and thus to provide information on the microscopic processes which are ultimately responsible for the storage and power capacity of a device.

With this non-invasive method, the researchers say, one could rapidly test the properties of different capacitor materials and thus elucidate their effectiveness in enhancing device performance. They add that techniques could also be useful in assessing factors that affect the longevity of the devices, or the conditioning or “breaking-in” of devices during first use.

The team next plans to investigate how different ions interact with other molecules in the electrolyte mixture, which may be a key to enhanced performance.

The work was supported by the Northeastern Center for Chemical Energy Storage, the US Department of Energy (DESC0001294), and NYSTAR.

Press release courtesy of New York University.

Mesmerisingly beautiful and just under life size at 33.6cm tall, the Virgin of Sorrows’ gently furrowed brows, natural flesh tones, glass eyes and teardrops and eyelashes made from human hair, still elicit a powerful response from the viewer 350 years after it was made. It was most likely created for the private chapel, study or bedchamber of a devout patron, and would almost certainly have been protected under a glass dome and originally paired with a similarly-sized bust of the Ecce Homo (Christ as the Man of Sorrows).

The Virgin of Sorrows is on show in the Museum’s Spanish & Flemish Gallery, alongside other masterpieces by contemporary Baroque sculptors and painters.  The Fitzwilliam Museum has already raised a substantial amount towards the work (including £30,000 from the Art Fund and £10,000 from The Henry Moore Foundation) but needs to secure a further £85,000 by the end of September 2014 in order to acquire the remarkable bust. 

The Spanish Golden Age, early 16th to late 17th century, was a period of incredible artistic and economic output for Spain, seeing the nation rise to one of the greatest empires the world has ever seen.  From the conquest of the New World, to the writing of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, this period changed the course of world politics and culture.  The Fitzwilliam Museum has a small collection of Spanish art, including two works by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, but the more emotive Catholic works, exemplified by painted wood sculpture are extremely rare in British collections. Taste and religion played their part in this: indeed, most of de Mena’s sculptures remain in the churches, monasteries and convents for which they were made.

The Spanish sculptor Pedro de Mena (1628-1688) was taught the art of wood carving by his father, Alonso de Mena (1587-1646), a well-regarded sculptor of traditional religious images in Granada. Following his father’s death, the eighteen-year-old Pedro took over the workshop and was joined by established artist Alonso Cano (1601-1667), who taught him how to realistically paint sculpture. Cano also encouraged Mena to enhance the naturalism of his sculptures by including additional elements, such as eyes and tears made from glass, and eyelashes from human hair.  As such, Mena’s statues and busts have a remarkable lifelike quality, which can be unnerving to the 21st century viewer. Mena left Granada in 1658 and spent the rest of his career in Málaga, becoming increasingly well regarded with prestigious patrons from church and state. Mena was known for his intense faith and was elected by the Inquisition in both Granada and Málaga as a censor of images.

Tim Knox, Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum said:  “The thing about this bust is that it is not one of those lugubrious virgins with rolling eyes that one associates with Spanish religious art. Here instead is a strikingly simple, and arrestingly intense, portrait of a beautiful young woman - an Andalusian peasant girl perhaps? - depicted in that moment of hopeless anguish for the humiliation and loss of her only Son. Pedro de Mena's Mater Dolorosa would be a wonderful addition to our collection.”

You can give online by visiting www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk, or please contact Sue Rhodes, Development Officer, sr295@cam.ac.uk , 01223 332939.

Other Spanish Golden Age initiatives within the University of Cambridge include an ongoing funding campaign to establish a postgraduate scholarship post in the period at Clare College.  The campaign is in the memory of Dr Anthony Close who was a member of the University’s department of Spanish & Portuguese, and one of the world's leading experts on Cervantes, and his masterpiece, Don Quixote.

A Deputy for the Lord-Lieutenant will attend, as will the High Sheriff. The Vice-Chancellor and the Mayor will join them on this special occasion, along with other University and Civic Officers, the Heads of the Colleges and representatives of the armed services, the community and heritage groups in the Cambridge area.

The service is open to all. The sermon will be preached by Professor Simon Lee, Executive Director of the Cambridge Theological Federation.

The University’s war list records 13878 former students and staff who served in the First World War. And of these, 2470 were killed – a figure around the same as the entire Cambridge student population at any one time before the war – and their names are recorded on College war memorials.  In addition to the dreadful casualties inflicted, the war was also a catalyst for change, with profound consequences for both the University and wider society.

A number of initiatives, exhibitions and events are planned at the University to mark the centenary of the First World War over the next four years. These include a major project by the University Library to digitise Siegfried Sassoon’s First World War diaries.

During the University’s Open Cambridge weekend from 12 to13 September, there will be exhibitions including one in the Wren Library, Trinity College, on the College and the First World War, plus a talk on Girton students and the two world wars.

More information on University activities to mark the centenary will be available at www.cam.ac.uk/ww1

In the early 1990s, Professor Joel Robbins spent more than two years living with the Urapmin, a group of people in the far western highlands of Papua New Guinea (PNG).  He was a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Virginia and it was his first extended experience of a culture strikingly different to his own. He slept in a house made of local bush materials, ate taro and sweet potato for every meal, hunted marsupials (“with notable lack of success”) and learned to speak the Urap tongue, a language with only about 400 speakers. It was, he says, a profoundly stimulating experience.

His time living in the Urapmin community prompted Robbins to ask a series of questions that have guided his inquiries ever since. The experiences he had in PNG set him on a trajectory that has led him to propose new theoretical frameworks for anthropology that look beyond older ways of understanding cultural differences and making comparisons.  He first turned to the question of how to understand radical cultural change, and he has more recently worked to identify cross-cultural variation in deeply embedded moral and ethical codes. He calls this latter approach 'the anthropology of the good'.

Described in simple terms, anthropology is the study of humans, and the fascinatingly complex ways in which we live, both now and in the past. Robbins, who arrived in Cambridge last year to take up the Sigrid Rausing Chair of Social Anthropology, is a sociocultural anthropologist. He has become increasingly interested in the path that anthropology has taken over the past 20 years in its study of people and how its changing focus reflects shifts in our collective preoccupations.

Until the late 1980s, anthropologists typically studied ‘the other,’ concentrating their attentions on people whose cultures appeared radically different from their own. Famously, the American anthropologist Margaret Mead returned from Samoa to report that adolescence was handled in ways that contrasted sharply with those observed in the West. Television documentaries focusing on encounters with remote communities perpetuate the image of the anthropologist as intrepid traveller, risking life and limb to document exotic tribal societies in action.

The anthropological study of such “others” was based on an assumption that culture is something deeply rooted in people and acts as enduring glue through generations – especially so in the remote and exotic parts of the world that acted for so long as magnets for anthropological fieldworkers.  What Robbins observed as a young anthropologist in PNG challenged these assumptions in a way that fired his curiosity and set him on course to study the tricky question of cultural change.

“The Urapmin are a remote community - even by PNG standards. There’s no road connecting them to the nearest town or even to their closest neighbours. They have no electricity and they participate very little in the market economy. Because they are so hard to reach, and because so few people speak the Urap language, Western missionaries did not make attempts to convert them,” said Robbins.

“However, in the late 1970s the Urapmin joined a charismatic Christian revival movement that was sweeping through PNG. Within a year, the entire population had converted and since 1978 the Urapmin have seen themselves as a completely Christianised community in which their traditional religion has no role to play. Achieving salvation in Christian terms became one of their most important collective aspirations.

”In embracing Christianity, the Urapmin transformed many aspects of their culture. In the space of just a few months, they rejected their highly elaborate traditional religious system and abandoned the taboos that had for generations shaped most aspects of their daily lives. They tore down their cult houses, threw away the ancestral bones that had been at the centre of their ritual life, and began to pray. The Christian code they adopted was singularly strict, demanding a high level of emotional and moral self-regulation.

“One of the questions I began to ask myself was: what can we learn about the nature of both culture and cultural changes by studying in detail such processes of dramatic transformation,” said Robbins. “This led me to engage deeply with anthropological theory, questioning long-standing assumptions about the enduring nature of traditions.”

On his return from PNG, Robbins wrote a number of works that argued that although newly converted, the Urapmin were deeply engaged with Christian ideas and ways of living.   He went on to help make a name for the anthropological study of Christianity, a religion that the field had largely ignored because, familiar to most Western researchers, it lacked the difference factor anthropologists looked for. 

Pursuing his interest both in Christianity and in cultural change, Robbins began carrying out comparative, literature based research on Pentecostal communities in South America and Africa. Along with Asia and the Pacific Islands, both these regions have seen a rapid growth of Pentecostalism which is fostering everywhere the kinds of dramatic cultural changes it brought about in Urapmin. 

Given the moral strictness of Pentecostal churches, and of Urapmin Christianity in particular, Robbins has also had a long-standing interest in the anthropology of ethics, a major strength of Cambridge anthropology.   This has formed the basis of his most recent theoretical work.

The late 1980s saw a shift take place away from the older anthropology focused on 'the other' or 'the exotic’ – away from an anthropology focused on striking cultural differences.  In its place has arisen an approach that Robbins describes as the ‘anthropology of the suffering’ in which researchers focus their inquiries on people who are in some sense victims – the poor and dispossessed, refugees and migrants, oppressed and marginalised communities – and whose plight and pain connects them to anthropologists and their readers in ways that are understood as a universal part of the human condition. 

Robbins has recently argued that this anthropology of suffering needs to be complemented with an anthropology of the good that returns to questions of cultural difference, though this time focused on differences in the ways people define and try to accomplish what they see as valuable.

It’s significant that Robbins has chosen to concentrate on the good – a concept that’s notoriously elusive. “If you ask people to define what is bad, most will agree that certain actions – with murder and torture and a few others at the top of the list – are the opposite of good.  Consensus about what constitutes good, and how we separate this from bad, is harder to pin down,” he said.

“What I have seen emerging in recent anthropology is a focus on such topics as value and morality, well-being and empathy as well as hope, time and change.  Research in these areas helps us to understand the wide cross-cultural diversity in understandings of the good. The shift to studying such topics has coincided with worldwide concern about human rights and with an explosion in NGOs seeking to foster their own versions of the good in various places.”

Researchers in the arts, humanities and social sciences are increasingly asked to demonstrate the value of their work to society. What does anthropology offer that benefits the world? “Until recently anthropology was a discipline that saw its critical mission as demonstrating that people lived differently in different places. It used those differences to unsettle people’s assumptions that their own ways of life were the only natural and valuable ones – it sought to broaden our worldview,” said Robbins.

“Now we are beginning to see the emergence of new ways of thinking about cultures and I am working to develop an approach to anthropology that encourages a comparative study of how different societies conceive the good. NGOs, for example, have sets of values which they seek to apply in societies which may have moral codes to their own. In attempting to identify these differences, anthropology can make a valuable contribution to global discussions of what should count as pressing social problems and about how to find practical solutions to them.” 

To illustrate his point about the benefits of understanding the values that lie beneath cultural practices, Robbins returns to his study of the Urapmin. “When someone dies in Urapmin, the people who lived with the deceased go to a great deal of trouble to present relatives who have been living elsewhere with a major gift of bows, arrows, hand-woven string bags, cash and local shell money. The recipients do not take everything that’s offered to them but choose only those items for which they can quickly supply a precisely matching return gift. Then a week later, they invite the original givers to a feast and present them with equivalent gifts,” he said.

“This is only one example of the occasions when the Urapmin make a major effort to give each other the same things with little or no delay. Savvy now about the market economy, Urapmin are quick to point out that these exchanges make no ‘profit’.  Asked why they invest so much time and energy in reciprocation of matching items, their explanation involves the notion that these kinds of exchanges develop and deepen relationships, particularly in the face of events like death or dispute that threaten to destroy them.” 

We might say, Robbins suggests, that creating new relationships and strengthening existing ones is one of the primary ways in which the Urapmin seek to foster what they define as the good.

“The challenge is how to expand our own notions of the good so that they can encompass such possibilities as the emphasis the Urapmin put on the value of relationships.  The anthropology of good is in its nascent stages. It can be supported by many kinds of anthropological research already being undertaken from a range of other theoretical perspectives,” he said. 

“Were it to realise its promise, the hope is that anthropology might not only broaden our understandings of the diverse kinds of lives people live in different places, but that it might also help to expand our ways of thinking about such topics as development and justice that do so much to organise contemporary approaches to the wider world.”

The image accompanying this story is taken from Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society by Joel Robbins, published by Berkeley: University of California Press (2004).

A hybrid form of perovskite - the same type of material which has recently been found to make highly efficient solar cells that could one day replace silicon - has been used to make low-cost, easily manufactured LEDs, potentially opening up a wide range of commercial applications in future, such as flexible colour displays.

This particular class of semiconducting perovskites have generated excitement in the solar cell field over the past several years, after Professor Henry Snaith’s group at Oxford University found them to be remarkably efficient at converting light to electricity. In just two short years, perovskite-based solar cells have reached efficiencies of nearly 20%, a level which took conventional silicon-based solar cells 20 years to reach.

Now, researchers from the University of Cambridge, University of Oxford and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich have demonstrated a new application for perovskite materials, using them to make high-brightness LEDs. The results are published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Perovskite is a general 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 several years, their efficiency at converting light into electrical energy has opened up a wide range of potential applications.

The perovskites that were used to make the LEDs are known as organometal halide perovskites, and contain a mixture of lead, carbon-based ions and halogen ions known as halides. These materials dissolve well in common solvents, and assemble to form perovskite crystals when dried, making them cheap and simple to make.

“These organometal halide perovskites are remarkable semiconductors,” said Zhi-Kuang Tan, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory and the paper’s lead author. “We have designed the diode structure to confine electrical charges into a very thin layer of the perovskite, which sets up conditions for the electron-hole capture process to produce light emission.”

The perovskite LEDs are made using a simple and scalable process in which a perovskite solution is prepared and spin-coated onto the substrate. This process does not require high temperature heating steps or a high vacuum, and is therefore cheap to manufacture in a large scale. In contrast, conventional methods for manufacturing LEDs make the cost prohibitive for many large-area display applications.

“The big surprise to the semiconductor community is to find that such simple process methods still produce very clean semiconductor properties, without the need for the complex purification procedures required for traditional semiconductors such as silicon,” said Professor Sir Richard Friend of the Cavendish Laboratory, who has led this programme in Cambridge.

“It’s remarkable that this material can be easily tuned to emit light in a variety of colours, which makes it extremely useful for colour displays, lighting and optical communication applications,” said Tan. “This technology could provide a lot of value to the ever growing flat-panel display industry.”

The team is now looking to increase the efficiency of the LEDs and to use them for diode lasers, which are used in a range of scientific, medical and industrial applications, such as materials processing and medical equipment. The first commercially-available LED based on perovskite could be available within five years.

A team of researchers has created a new way of manufacturing microstructured surfaces that have novel three-dimensional textures. These surfaces, made by self-organisation of carbon nanotubes, could exhibit a variety of useful properties — including controllable mechanical stiffness and strength, or the ability to repel water in a certain direction.

The technique works by inducing carbon nanotubes – extremely thin, hollow cylinders of carbon atoms - to bend as they grow. The mechanism is analogous to the bending of a bimetallic strip, used as the control in old thermostats, as it warms: one material expands faster than another bonded to it. But in this new process, the material bends as it is produced by a chemical reaction.

The process begins by depositing two patterns onto a substrate: one is a catalyst of carbon nanotubes; the second modifies the growth rate of the nanotubes. By offsetting the two patterns, the researchers showed that the nanotubes bend into predictable shapes as they extend. Details of the new technique were recently published in the journal Nature Communications.

The team were able to specify these simple two-dimensional instructions, and cause the nanotubes to form complex shapes in three dimensions. Where nanotubes growing at different rates are adjacent, they push and pull on each other, producing more complex forms.

“This process enables an unprecedented ability to fabricate well-controlled 3D microstructures in high volumes. This will significantly advance our ability to fabricate advanced functional surfaces,” said Dr Michael de Volder of the Institute of Manufacturing at the University of Cambridge, who led the research.

Few high-throughput manufacturing processes can achieve such flexibility in creating three-dimensional structures. This technique is attractive because it can be used to create large expanses of the structures simultaneously, and the shape of each structure can be specified by designing the starting pattern.

The technique could also enable control of other properties, such as electrical and thermal conductivity and chemical reactivity, by attaching various coatings to the carbon nanotubes after they grow. For example, coating the nanotubes with ceramic, using a method called atomic layer deposition, allows the mechanical properties of the structures to be controlled. When a thick coating is deposited, it results in a surface with exceptional stiffness, strength, and toughness relative to its density. When a thin coating is deposited, the structures are very flexible and resilient.

This approach may also enable high-fidelity replication of the intricate structures found on the skins of certain plants and animals, and could make it possible to mass-produce surfaces with specialised characteristics, such as the water-repellent and adhesive ability of some insects. “We’re interested in controlling these fundamental properties using scalable manufacturing techniques,” said Professor John Hart of MIT, one of the paper’s co-authors.

The durability of carbon nanotubes, which could allow them to survive in harsh environments, could be connected to electronics and function as sensors of mechanical or chemical signals.

This research was performed by Dr de Volder and Professor Hart, along with Dr Sei Jin Park at the University of Michigan, and Professor Sameh Tawfick of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The work was supported by the European Research Council, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

Adapted from MIT press release.

The results add to the growing debate around the health consequences of fat, and could partially explain evidence from recent studies that suggests some foods high in saturated fats, such as dairy products, could actually lower the risk of type 2 diabetes.

Saturated fat is typically found in foods with a high proportion of animal fat, such as butter, cheese and red meat, and in fried foods. It is made up of chains of individual fat molecules (fatty acids) that vary in length, depending on how many carbon atoms they contain. These saturated fatty acids have long been considered detrimental to health, and current recommendations suggest they should make up no more than 10 per cent of the calories we eat. However, the role of saturated fat in type 2 diabetes risk is unclear.

In the EPIC-InterAct Study, which was funded mainly by the European Commission under its Framework 6 programme, a team of researchers led by the Medical Research Council (MRC) Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge set out to examine the relationship between blood levels of nine different saturated fatty acids and the risk of developing type 2 diabetes in later life.

The researchers looked at 12,403 people who developed type 2 diabetes from among a group of 340,234 adults across eight European countries. Using a sophisticated method of high-speed blood analysis, developed especially for the project by researchers at MRC Human Nutrition Research, they determined the proportion of each of the nine fatty acids in blood samples from the study participants and related this with later incidence of type 2 diabetes.

They found that saturated fatty acids with an even number of carbon atoms in their chain (14, 16 and 18 carbon atoms) were associated with a higher risk of type 2 diabetes, while saturated fatty acids with an odd number (15 and 17) were associated with a lower risk.

Lead scientist Dr Nita Forouhi, from the MRC Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge, said: “Our findings provide strong evidence that individual saturated fatty acids are not all the same. The challenge we face now is to work out how the levels of these fatty acids in our blood correspond to the different foods we eat.

“These odd-chain saturated fatty acids are well-established markers of eating dairy fats, which is consistent with several recent studies, including our own, that have indicated a protective effect against type 2 diabetes from eating yoghurt and other dairy products. In contrast, the situation for even-chain saturated fatty acids is more complex. As well as being consumed in fatty diets, these blood fatty acids can also be made within the body through a process which is stimulated by the intake of carbohydrates and alcohol.”

The authors therefore conclude that it is too early to make any direct dietary recommendations on the basis of this work.

Professor David Lomas, Chair of the MRC’s Population and Systems Medicine Board, added: “Type 2 diabetes has serious consequences for health and healthcare costs, and its numbers are rising in all world regions. Identifying new ways to not only treat, but prevent the condition are therefore vital. This research arising from 26 research institutions across Europe is an example of the power of international collaboration to generate larger and more reliable studies. By combining large-scale population data with advanced laboratory analysis, this research has delivered a compelling case to look more closely at the contribution of individual components of fat to health and disease.”

Adapted from a press release by the Medical Research Council.

Three Cambridge scientists are among those honoured by the Royal Society this week.

Professor Jeremy Baumberg FRS, Department of Physics, received the Rumford Medal “for his outstanding creativity in nanophotonics, investigating many ingenious nanostructures, both artificial and natural to support novel plasmonic phenomena relevant to Raman spectroscopy, solar cell performance and meta-materials applications.”

The medal is awarded biennially for important discoveries in the field of thermal or optical properties of matter and their applications.

Professor Clare Grey FRS, Department of Chemistry, was awarded the 2014 Davy Medal for further pioneering applications of solid state nuclear magnetic resonance to materials of relevance to energy and the environment.

This medal is awarded annually “for an outstandingly important recent discovery in any branch of chemistry”.

In the lecture prizes Professor Nicholas Davies FRS, Department of Zoology, was awarded the Croonian Lecture for his work on the co-evolved responses of brood parasitic cuckoos and their hosts, the process of co-evolution and adaptation and the biology of the birds.

The researchers, from the University of Exeter and the University of Cambridge, travelled across Zambia and South Africa and took over 14,000 images and many hours of video footage as part of Project Nightjar. The aim was to work out which predators are able to see the hidden eggs of different ground-nesting birds. Back in the lab, they used specially customised software to recreate the visual world of the predators, analysing what makes objects blend in or stand out from their backgrounds, based on real field data – the first time that camouflage data has been directly linked to survival rates of real animals in the field.

The researchers have taken the analysis one step further by recruiting another predator: humans. By playing the ‘citizen science’ game Egglab, people can take their place in the evolutionary tree and spot eggs in images derived from the research. The eggs even ‘evolve’ as the game progresses, yielding yet more data on how types of camouflage evolve in different habitats.

Dr Jolyon Troscianko from the University of Exeter’s Sensory Ecology and Evolution group says Project Nightjar came about because theories about how camouflage works hadn’t been tested in the wild. “It’s very difficult to find a study system where you can link predation with the quality of an animal’s camouflage,” he said.

Along with co-principal investigators Dr Martin Stevens, also from the University of Exeter, and Dr Claire Spottiswoode from the University of Cambridge, the team developed a study system using two classes of ground-nesting birds inspired by Spottiswoode’s previous encounters with nightjars in Africa. “I was bowled over by their camouflage, which led to discussions with Martin about how we could take advantage of these birds for camouflage research, leading to our collaboration on the current project,” she said.   

Nightjars sit tight on their eggs and rely on the camouflage of the adult bird to outwit their predators. As a result, their eggs are less camouflaged because the adults do the work. In contrast, plovers and coursers run from their nests when danger approaches. Their much more exposed eggs have therefore evolved better camouflage to blend in with their backgrounds, saving the developing chick inside. In each case, it’s an arms race between the patterns, colours and contrast of the eggs and the visual acuity of the predators.

Hidden cameras were used to see which predators were eating the eggs. Troscianko recalled that this was a more difficult task than first appeared: “Predation events are unpredictable, which is why this is such a difficult project that has never been done before.”

So far, the researchers have found that colour and contrast are often linked, and both are important. As Dr Stevens explained, “What seems to be happening is that disruptive coloration often arises on a range of background types, but is especially common when the background is more variable. Background matching seems especially important on backgrounds that are more uniform (for example open ground), and when individuals are generalist and eggs evolve against two background types, the camouflage takes longer to improve.”

Stevens explained that the citizen science games and rigorous fieldwork are complementary. “The fieldwork looks at how camouflage of real animals in the wild affects how likely they are to be eaten by a range of predators, and how camouflage is influenced by behaviour and nesting strategies of the birds. The egg game looks at how camouflage evolves against different habitats under controlled conditions.”

Initial data analysis of both the fieldwork results and the citizen science games suggests that egg patterning involves trade-offs between hiding eggs from mammalian eyes or from bird eyes – a classic case of not being able to fool everybody all of the time.   

Professor Steve Young will be the 2015 recipient of the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award.

The annual prize is given to an individual or teams of up to three for “an outstanding contribution to the advancement of speech and/or audio signal processing”

Professor Young is the Senior Pro-Vice-Chancellor, responsible for Planning and Resources, and Professor of Information Engineering in the Information Engineering Division.

The award citation reads:  “For pioneering contributions to the theory and practice of automatic speech recognition and statistical spoken dialogue systems.”

Professor Young works in speech technology, focussing in particular on developing systems which allow a human to interact with a machine using voice.

This involves machines like mobile phones recognising the user’s words, understanding what the words mean, deciding what to do and how to respond and then converting the response in textual form back into speech.

One speech recognition “toolkit” developed by Professor Young almost 20 years ago became a global standard for benchmarking systems, and the basis of many commercial systems and is still widely used.

In a study run through the international PALB2 Interest Group a team of researchers from 17 centres in eight countries led by the University of Cambridge analysed data from 154 families without BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations, which included 362 family members with PALB2 gene mutations. The effort was funded by the European Research Council, Cancer Research UK and multiple other international sources.

Women who carried rare mutations in PALB2 were found to have on average a 35% chance of developing breast cancer by the age of seventy. However, the risks were highly dependent on family history of breast cancer where carriers with more relatives affected by breast cancer, were at higher risk. Only a very small proportion of women worldwide carry such mutations and the researchers point out that additional studies are required to obtain precise estimates of mutation carrier frequency in the population.

PALB2 is known to interact with both the BRCA1 and BRCA2 and was first linked with breast cancer in 2007. As is the case for women who carry mutations in BRCA1 or BRCA2, women with PALB2 mutations who were born more recently tended to be at a higher risk of developing breast cancer than those born earlier. The reason why is unclear, but the researchers speculate that it may be related to factors such as later age at first childbirth, smaller families and better surveillance leading to earlier age of diagnosis.

Dr Marc Tischkowitz from the Department of Medical Genetics at the University of Cambridge, who led the study, says: “Since the BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations were discovered in the mid-90s, no other genes of similar importance have been found and the consensus in the scientific community if  more exist we would have found them by now. PALB2 is a potential candidate to be ‘BRCA3’. As mutations in this gene are uncommon, obtaining accurate risk figures is only possible through large international collaborations like this.

“Now that we have identified this gene, we are in a position to provide genetic counselling and advice. If a woman is found to carry this mutation, we would recommend additional surveillance, such as MRI breast screening.”

The researchers at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, part of Cambridge University NHS Hospitals Trust, have developed a clinical test for PALB2, which will become part of their NHS service. Clinical testing for PALB2 will be available also in certain other diagnostic laboratories worldwide.

There is evidence that cells carrying the PALB2 mutation are sensitive to a new class of drugs known as PARP inhibitors that are currently being trialled in BRCA1/2-related breast cancers. It is possible that these drugs would also work in PALB2-related breast cancer.

Dr Antonis Antoniou from the Centre for Cancer Genetic Epidemiology at the University of Cambridge adds: “Knowing the key genes that significantly increase cancer risk and having precise cancer risk estimates ultimately could help assess the breast cancer risk for each woman and allow better targeting or surveillance.”

Professor Peter Johnson, Cancer Research UK’s chief clinician, said: "We’re learning all the time about the different factors that may influence a woman's chances of developing breast cancer.  This particular mutation doesn't make people certain to develop cancer, but it’s another piece of information to help women make proper informed choices about how they may help to minimise their own risk."

Against a world backdrop of increased concerns about energy security, price fluctuations and, of course, the need to address climate change, six new research projects that aim to gain a fuller understanding of how energy is managed in the country’s non-domestic buildings are launched today.

Funded with £3 million from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), on behalf of the Research Councils UK Energy Programme (RCUKEP), the research will address how to use technology, data and information, mathematics, law and sociology to create better energy strategies and behaviours in the public and private, non-domestic buildings stock.

Among the schemes being funded is a Cambridge project aimed at creating software which will help to reduce the uncertainty in modelling the energy management of a wide variety of buildings.

Non-domestic buildings such as offices, supermarkets, hospitals and factories account for approximately 18 per cent of UK carbon emissions and 13 per cent of final energy consumption.

By 2050, the total UK’s non-domestic floor area is expected to increase by 35 per cent, while 60 per cent of existing buildings will still be in use. This means that substantial retro-fitting is likely and planning what techniques to use to save energy, as well as how to implement change with the cooperation of building occupants, is going to be essential.

Professor Philip Nelson EPSRC’s Chief Executive said: “Improving energy efficiency is an important piece of the energy puzzle. Worldwide energy demand is rising, as are global temperatures and sea levels. We need to find smart solutions to how we use energy while improving the environment in which people have to work, rest or play. These projects will go a long way to help improve our understanding of what goes on in non-domestic buildings and add to the armoury at the disposal of those managing these facilities.”

The new projects will be run at Imperial College London, University of Cambridge, University of Edinburgh, University of Oxford, University of Southampton and the University of Strathclyde.

The Cambridge project is called B-bem: The Bayesian building energy management Portal. The research team is led by Ruchi Choudhary (Department of Engineering) and includes Sebastian Macmillan (IDBE), Koen Steemers and Yeonsook Heo (Department of Architecture), and Michael Pollitt (Cambridge Judge Business School).