Five of the most high-risk freshwater invaders from the Ponto-Caspian region around Turkey and Ukraine are now in Britain - including the quagga mussel, confirmed just two weeks ago on 1 October in the Wraysbury River near Heathrow airport.

Researchers say that, with at least ten more of these high-risk species established just across the channel in Dutch ports, Britain could be on the brink of what they describe as an ‘invasional meltdown’: as positive interactions between invading species cause booming populations that colonise ecosystems - with devastating consequences for native species.    

The authors of a new study on 23 high-risk invasive species, published today in the Journal of Applied Ecology, describe Britain’s need to confront the Ponto-Caspian problem - named for the invaders’ homelands of the Black, Azov and Caspian seas - as a “vital element for national biosecurity”.

They say monitoring efforts should be focused on areas at most risk of multiple invasions: the lower reaches of the Rivers Great Ouse, Thames and Severn and the Broadlands, where shipping ballast water and ornamental plant trading is most likely to inadvertently deposit the cross-channel invaders.

All of these areas are projected to see an influx of up to twenty Ponto-Caspian invading species in the near future.

“Pretty much everything in our rivers and lakes is directly or indirectly vulnerable,” said Dr David Aldridge, co-author from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology, who confirmed the quagga find.

“The invader we are most concerned about is the quagga mussel, which alarmingly was first discovered in the UK just two weeks ago. This pest will smother and kill our native mussels, block water pipes and foul boat hulls. We are also really worried about Ponto-Caspian shrimps, which will eat our native shrimps.”

The most aggressive invasive shrimp have ominous monikers: the demon shrimp, bloody red shrimp and the notorious killer shrimp - dubbed the ‘pink peril’.

These organisms have already been recorded in Britain, and experts warn they will act as a gateway for further species due to favourable inter-species interactions that facilitate invasion, such as food provision and ‘commensalism’ - in which one species obtains benefits from another’s place in an ecosystem.

The researchers point to the example of the zebra mussel, a Ponto-Caspian outrider and relation of the quagga first seen in the UK in 1824 and now widespread. Zebra and quagga mussels smother Britain’s native mussels, preventing them from feeding and moving. The invading mussels also provide an ideal home for Ponto-Caspian amphipods such as killer and demon shrimps, which have striped patterns to blend in with the mussels’ shells.

These amphipods, in turn, provide food for larger invaders such as goby fish. Ponto-Caspian gobies have now made their way down the Rhine, one of the main “corridors” to Britain, with populations exploding in the waterways of western France over the last few years. The invading gobies eat native invertebrate and displace native fish such as the already threatened Bullhead.       

Once the Ponto-Caspian species reach coastal areas of The Netherlands, they are transported across the channel in ballast water taken on by cargo ships, or hidden in exported ornamental plants and aquatic equipment such as fishing gear.  

“If we look at The Netherlands nowadays it is sometimes hard to find a non-Ponto-Caspian species in their waterways,” said Aldridge.

“In some parts of Britain the freshwater community already looks more like the Caspian Sea. The Norfolk Broads, for example, typically viewed as a wildlife haven, is actually dominated by Ponto-Caspian zebra mussels and killer shrimps in many places.”

“Invasive species – such as the quagga mussel – cost the UK economy in excess of £1.8 billion every year,” said Sarah Chare, deputy director of fisheries and biodiversity at the UK Environment Agency.

“The quagga mussel is a highly invasive non-native species, affecting water quality and clogging up pipes. If you spot one then please report it to us through the online recording form.”

Through an in-depth analysis of all reported field and experimental interactions between the 23 most high-risk invasive Ponto-Caspian species, the researchers were able to identify 157 different effects - the majority of which enabled positive reinforcement between species (71) or made no difference (64).  

Dates and locations of the first British reports of 48 other freshwater invaders from around the world show that 33% emerged in the Thames river basin, making it the UK hot spot for invaders, followed by Anglian water networks (19%) and the Humber (15%).

The time between a Ponto-Caspian species being reported in The Netherlands and Britain has shrunk considerably - from an average of 30 years at the beginning of the 20th century to just 5 in the last decade.

“Due to globalisation and increased travel and freight transport, the rate of colonisation of invasive species into Britain from The Netherlands keeps accelerating - posing a serious threat to the conservation of British aquatic ecosystems,” said co-author Dr Belinda Gallardo, now based at the Doñana Biological Station in Spain.       

“Cross-country sharing of information on the status and impacts of invasive species is fundamental to early detection, so that risks can be rapidly assessed. A continuing process for evaluating invasive species and detecting new introductions needs to be established, as this problem is increasing dramatically.”

Inset image: quagga mussels found in Wragsbury river by David Aldridge. Killer shrimp by Thomas Smith/Environment Agency

“I’ll pay you, you know, 50,000 dollars, 100,000 dollars… whatever you want… I’m a man of my word.”

A UBS investment banker and ‘man of his word’ is caught trying to bribe a broker. Taken from an incriminating email uncovered after the Libor-fixing scandal – when traders illegally manipulated London interest rates – the sentence illustrates a climate that has a global sector reeling.

Even before news of the scandal broke, PR giant Edelman’s annual Trust Barometer was reporting that public trust in banks had fallen off a cliff, concluding that banking is the “most distrusted global industry.”

People need money. Once they have it, they need to know it’s safe. So people need to trust banks, and banks need people to trust them. If that trust ebbs, the system becomes dangerously unstable. For two philosophers, the current lack of trust sits like a time bomb at the heart of global capitalism.

“One should start by distinguishing trust from trustworthiness. Trust isn’t always valuable, since it may be badly placed. It would be foolish and foolhardy to trust banks when they don’t merit it. Trustworthiness comes first,” said Alex Oliver, Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge. With Professor Boudewijn de Bruin from the University of Groningen, he is co-leading a €1 million, five-year project on Trusting Banks, funded by the Dutch Research Council.

“We are way beyond cheap PR exercises. If the public are to trust banks again, we must promote the key institutional virtues needed for banks to be trustworthy.”

The mid-1980s deregulations were based on the idea that banks have a strong, self-interested reason to behave scrupulously. If they do not, so the reasoning goes, they will be found out, their reputations will suffer and trust will be lost, leading to competitive disadvantage. But this market-based deterrent mechanism has comprehensively failed: witness Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi investment scheme– described as the largest financial fraud in US history – the manipulation of markets, money laundering, mis-selling of payment protection insurance and interest rate swaps, flawed credit ratings and the subprime mortgage crisis. Where will it end?

As those at the top of the sector continue to walk away from financial meltdown with personal fortunes intact, public anger at perceived injustice has mounted. Whether or not banks and their staff deserve this reputation, in the post-crash economic winter there are few, if any, professions and institutions as universally reviled.

For Oliver and De Bruin, this poses a very serious problem. If citizens and businesses distrust banks, they say, a chilling effect will spread as economies slow, unemployment rises and companies and countries go bust. It’s already happening.

“If you talk to bankers, many will blame the public for not trusting them, either for a lack of financial understanding, or for an unwarranted cynicism encouraged by hostile portrayals in the media,” said De Bruin, “but this is a defensive ‘blame the consumer’ strategy – a form of denial.

The decline in public trust tracks a decline in trustworthiness of the financial sector. Trustworthiness needs to be restored first. Trust will follow.”

In developing a theory of trust-worthiness for banks, Oliver and De Bruin will navigate the various conflicting interests inherent in financial relationships – between depositors and borrowers, between bankers and shareholders, and so on – and will chart the complex kinds of interactions needed for successful and trustworthy financial services. To be trustworthy, one must be both able and willing to perform the relevant actions. That is why the research will address key questions of competence and motivation, both of individuals and of organisations.

Oliver and De Bruin are working with a team of two postdoctoral researchers and two PhD students, as well as drawing on the expertise of colleagues in their departments. Using initial results, they designed a ‘Philosophy in Business’ course for the MBA programmes at Cambridge’s Judge Business School, and they have run tailor-made workshops with bankers, from trainees through to boards.

Banks are massively diverse corporate agents. Fine-grained distinctions can be made between retail and investment banking, for example, which are easily conflated in the public mind. Not everyone who works for a bank is a ‘bankster’ driven by a ‘greed is good’ mentality, just as not every university staff member is an ivory tower academic.

“Many bank branch employees are trying to serve communities, and are deeply disturbed by ‘bad apple’ bankers. But their customers tend to tar them with the same broad brush. It’s a good question why rogue doctors don’t have the same effect. Doctors always top the trust polls, while bankers are now in the gutter with tabloid journalists and politicians,” said Oliver.

Virtues, and how an organisation can embody them, are a cornerstone of the project. Connecting with cutting-edge research on corporate entities and corporate decision-making in philosophy and social science, the project will examine how institutional structures can foster the virtues needed for trustworthiness, such as intellectual honesty and humility, open-mindedness, curiosity and truthfulness.

“The solution can sometimes be as simple as putting the right people in the right place, but typically it is not that simple,” said De Bruin, “Organisational change may well be needed, such as rotational policies, in which employees are shifted around to maintain objectivity in their client relationships.”

Oliver and De Bruin are keen to emphasise that their work is not a simple one-way transfer of knowledge from academia to the ‘real world’. “Philosophers and economists have increased our understanding of ‘virtue management’, but there are still many open questions. Answering them requires collaboration not only with other disciplines, but also with the banking world itself. Sharing ideas with bankers often leads to reciprocal illumination, which benefits all parties.”

One of the project’s outcomes will be a ‘financial citizenship’ initiative. Rather than try to teach people about complex financial products, this will focus on empowering citizens through identifying virtues that help them cope with conflicting financial information. A web-based interactive module will enable prospective clients to test whether they are critical and sober-minded enough to see through the marketing tricks used to sell financial products

“Where it once stood for cautious financial advice and a firm handshake, the word ‘banker’ has become slang for a ‘greed merchant’ who gambles other people’s money in rigged games so they alone get rich,” said Oliver. “‘Trust me, I’m a banker!’ is now a well-worn joke. We want to investigate how it can be made good advice.”

Inset image L - R: Alex Oliver, Boudewijn de Bruin

Inset image: Wax bust by Pierre Imans, 1910s–20s. Wax, paint, residual hair, and silk ribbon and cotton net base for wig, resin eyes, H.56 x W.44.5 x D. 21 cm, Fashion Museum, Bath. Credit: © Fashion Museum, Bath and North East Somerset Council

With Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) funding, a team at Cambridge University is exploring whether the element thorium could help to meet the new design’s fuel needs. As well as being three to four times more abundant than uranium, thorium could potentially produce electricity more fuel efficiently and therefore more cheaply.

The aim of the overall project, initiated by the US Department of Energy and led by Georgia Institute of Technology, is to design a power plant whose size would be reduced and safety enhanced by breaking with convention and integrating the main heat exchangers inside the secure pressure vessel where the nuclear reactions take place. This innovation gives the design its name: Integral Inherently Safe Light Water Reactor (I2S-LWR).

The I2S-LWR, which could also be built module by module off-site and then quickly assembled on site, would be suitable for deployment worldwide. In this country, it could contribute to a new era of nuclear power that helps the UK meet its carbon reduction targets and energy security objectives; no new nuclear power station has been built here since Sizewell B began generating in 1995. With a power rating of around 1GW, the output from the I2S-LWR would be comparable with Sizewell B’s 1.2GW rating, but the station should be significantly less costly in real terms.      

The EPSRC-funded part of the project will help the UK reinvigorate its technical expertise in civil nuclear power and attract a new generation of engineers and scientists to the field. Expertise of this kind will be crucial to securing the UK’s nuclear future but has significantly diminished during the 20 year ‘nuclear hibernation’ where no new nuclear power stations have come on stream in this country.

The Cambridge team will focus on how thorium, which can be converted into the isotope uranium-233, could be used alongside uranium silicide to fuel the I2S-LWR. The team will assess the question not just from the perspective of fundamental nuclear reactor physics but also in terms of the scope to achieve high fuel-to-power conversion efficiency and to recycle spent nuclear fuel – key issues impacting the cost-effectiveness of the thorium fuel option.  

 Dr Geoff Parks, who is leading the Cambridge team, says: “The fact that we are part of such a pioneering international project not only reflects the UK’s enduring reputation in nuclear science and engineering – it also provides a platform for the UK to develop a new suite of relevant, globally marketable skills for the years and decades ahead. If all goes to plan, construction of the first I2S-LWRs could begin in around 10 years, making deployment of nuclear power more practical, more cost-effective and more publicly acceptable worldwide.”

Inset image: A visualisation of the I2S-LWR pressure vessel and contents. Credit: Georgia Institute of Technology

When he was growing up in a village in south Punjab, Arif Naveed was surrounded by a family who believed in the importance of education. He excelled, but as he got older he started to question why he had done so well while other bright students in his school had dropped out of the education system.

What had happened? This question has shaped his career as an education researcher and his desire to reform the education system to make it truly transformative for the poorest in society.

Through his PhD at Cambridge, which he begins this month, he plans to go back to basics and test the assumption that education is the best way out of poverty. “I want to test what education does for the poor, if it improves people’s lives and what changes it brings to social structures and power relations at the community and household level,” he says.

Arif’s childhood experiences of education in a poor rural part of Pakistan have been crucial in shaping his research. Born in a small remote village in south Punjab, he is the third youngest of eight children. His parents - and older siblings - played a key role in encouraging his interest in education. His mother never attended school as there were no schools for girls in most of rural Pakistan then, and as a consequence was keen to encourage her children in their studies. His father was head teacher of the local primary school which consisted of just three rooms and three teachers covering six grades. “He was a great role model for us and for the village,” says Arif. “He was well respected in the community and would knock on parents’ doors to ensure their children didn’t miss school. He created an awareness of the importance of schooling in every household.”

Arif has been working on issues relating to education and development for several years since finishing an undergraduate and masters programme in economics. However, after some time working in development, he soon felt that the problems the poor faced in Pakistan were as much cultural and social as economic. In 2006, he transferred to the University of Bath for an interdisciplinary masters in international development with the aid of a Commonwealth Scholarship. Returning to Pakistan, he joined the leading think tank, the Mahbub-ul-Haq Human Development Centre.

He soon started work on a DFID funded, University of Cambridge project led by Professor Christopher Colclough. Arif was the lead researcher for Pakistan and spent two years assessing how education affected the social and human development of poor communities. He oversaw the collection and analysis of data, training field researchers to find out what the poor get out of their schooling, how they acquire skills, how education enhances their life chances and whether such outcomes could be improved through better schooling.

Since then he has been mining the rich data collected by the programme and working with policymakers. He was invited to contribute to the Ninth Five-Year Plan of Pakistan on education, employment and income distribution. He started work on a new model of multidimensional poverty since the government’s definition of poverty focused mainly on household income/consumption levels. “Focusing only on income/consumption does not give a full picture of poverty or wellbeing; the poor lack access to health services, may be illiterate, die younger and have poorer nutrition,” he says, “I made the case for taking into account the coincidence of multiple deprivations poor people face.”

In 2010, Arif joined another think-tank, the Sustainable Development Policy Institute where he researched curriculum content and religious diversity. In 2012 he was asked by the UK’s Department for International Development to help design Punjab’s education reform programme for 2013-18. The programme aims to enroll 2.9m new students in Punjab, 71% of whom will be girls, and to increase primary participation from 78% to 90% of children. It will build more than 15,000 new classrooms, prioritising the poor districts and communities and benefitting girls more.

In 2012, Arif co-authored his first book which highlighted the stark regional disparities in the incidence of multidimensional poverty in Pakistan resulting from the lopsided development practices of the past. This work deepens the poverty debate in Pakistan, making the case for affirmative action to uplift deprived regions. The Planning Commission in Pakistan recently decided to adopt the model while taking into account regional differences. Arif is currently writing his second book which builds on this framework in collaboration with the Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund, which intends to use his approach in future poverty reduction strategies.

One of his latest projects has been a study of the dynamics of the political economy of policy research in Pakistan. His recently completed report highlights the pitfalls associated with the financial dependence of think tanks on international aid agencies, which leads to international development agendas taking precedence over local priorities, and the lack of university engagement with policy processes. The study argues for research funding regimes which respect think tanks’ autonomy over their research agendas and a greater interaction between think tanks and universities to improve the effectiveness of policy research produced in the country.

Arif arrives back in Cambridge, this time on a Gates Cambridge scholarship, having completed an MPhil in Educational Research in 2013 under Professor Madeleine Arnot’s supervision. They recently published their joint research on youth, gender and citizenship in the Punjab, showing how the rural landscape is changing. As schooling takes hold, it acts as a new social differentiator in the rural field and the growing gap between the educated and uneducated is reshaping gender relations and vice versa. For his PhD, which is jointly supervised by Professor Arnot and Professor Anna Vignoles, Arif will extend this family-focused research longitudinally and integrate it with improved econometric modelling to assess whether education can disrupt the intergenerational transmission of poverty. He says: “I want to reconceptualise schooling so that it is genuinely transformative for the poor and helps them realise their true potential.”

Organised by the University of Cambridge’s Realise project for young people in care, and hosted by Newnham College, the Insight Day included an update on student finance, a session on careers, and a tour of the College’s accommodation and study facilities.

Realise aims to support young people in care to access Higher Education by providing taster days at the University of Cambridge, packed with advice, inspiration and support.

A typical Realise event includes academic-led sessions focusing on a particular subject area, an opportunity to explore the University, and age-appropriate talks about support for care leavers at university, student finance and careers. Student ambassadors– and if possible a care leaver - are also on hand throughout the day to discuss student life.

The Insight Day was created in recognition of the important role foster carers and other professionals play in providing advice and support to young people considering whether to stay in education.

“The adults in our lives can have a huge impact on us as we grow up,” explains Claire Gardner, who co-ordinates the Realise project at the University of Cambridge.

“Ensuring that professionals and carers have accurate, up-to-date information about higher education and the support available for care leavers, is crucial to young people in care considering university as a realistic option for them.”

Irene Smith attended as one of a group of foster carers from Essex. “We need to find out ourselves, because it’s changed so much recently,” Irene said. “The information about financial support was especially helpful. 

“It’s also been interesting to see the steps you take to apply through UCAS.

“These days are really good. Each time you come to one you learn a little bit more,” Irene added.

“The Insight Day gave participants the opportunity to shared their experiences of supporting children in care in their education, and the challenges that they faced,” Claire commented.

“Everyone worked together to suggest ways forward, and I feel really positive knowing that these professionals left the event feeling equipped with the information and skills necessary to support the young people in their care to succeed in their education, and aspire to attend university.”

• For more about Realise, and the support available for children in care who are thinking about apply to university, visit: http://www.study.cam.ac.uk/undergraduate/access/care/

Professor Roger Barker has a dream: by the time he retires in 15 years, he would like to see stem cell transplants for Parkinson’s disease available on the NHS.

Fifteen years may seem like plenty of time to realise this dream, but there are so many contingencies that even he admits this may be optimistic. “It assumes that all our clinical trials go smoothly, that industry takes up the technology – and that ‘stem cell tourism’ doesn’t set us back,” he said.

It’s not difficult to understand why people resort to stem cell tourism – going abroad, usually to countries such as India and China, to receive private, unregulated stem cell therapies (however experimental) to treat incurable conditions such as Parkinson’s or multiple sclerosis. There has been much hype surrounding stem cells and, with nothing to lose, isn’t it worth at least trying one of these treatments? The trouble is that they are based on very limited – if any – evidence and have the potential “to go pear-shaped”, said Barker. This could damage public – and, more importantly, regulators’ – confidence in the field and lead to inappropriate restrictions on legitimate research.

The idea of cell transplants to treat Parkinson’s is not new. One of the key characteristics of the disease, which affects around one in 800 people by the time they are elderly, is the death of dopamine-producing cells in the brain. Finding a way to replace these cells could, in theory, lead to dramatic improvements in the patient’s health.

An adult typically has around half a million dopamine cells in the substantia nigra on each side of the brain. When half of these cells have died, the patient will begin showing symptoms, which include a resting tremor, slowness of movement and rigidity. “One of the reasons Parkinson’s disease is so attractive for cell therapies,” explained Barker, “is that it is a tractable problem. If we can get just 100,000 proper nigral dopamine cells in there, it should make a difference.”

Ever since the 1980s, scientists have been trialling ways of replacing dopamine cells with cells taken from aborted fetuses – a practice which, aside from ethical concerns, is not practical on a scale needed to treat the hundreds of thousands of patients in the UK alone.

The trials had mixed success. In some, patients continued to see improvements over 15 years; however, in others, the treatment not only failed, but patients suffered side effects. In part, this was due to an inconsistency in protocols, for example the age of participants, the clinical techniques used for cell delivery and the number of cells transplanted.

Now, with funding from the European Union, Barker and collaborators in Europe have developed a protocol that is more likely to provide safe, consistent and clinically effective benefits for patients. He is leading a trial in Europe to use fetal cells to treat patients, with the aim of “putting cell therapies for Parkinson’s disease back on the map.”

If the trial is successful, by 2018 the researchers hope to begin trialling the use of dopamine cells derived from embryonic stem cells through a new collaboration with teams across Europe, the USA and Japan. (The collaborators in Japan hope to conduct a similar trial using induced pluripotent stem cells – the patients’ own skin cells, reprogrammed to become stem cells.)

The beauty of using stem cells is that they can be programmed to become almost any type of cell within the body. The risk, of course, is that they become the wrong kind of cell or ‘run away with themselves’ to become cancerous. Earlier this year in Lisbon, an experimental stem cell treatment – part of an approved trial to cure paralysis – reportedly led to a paraplegic woman growing a nasal tumour on her back. However, Barker is confident that new protocols have all but eliminated safety concerns – though this risk may be very real in cases of stem cell tourism.

It has still been a challenge to programme the stem cells to become nigral dopamine cells. “You take stem cells and programme them to become ‘neural precursor cells’. These cells make brain; some will turn into dopamine cells and others will want to become forebrain – but if you already have a forebrain, growing another one is not going to help you! Fortunately, we’ve found a way round this to allow us to commit the precursor cells to become the right dopamine cells without the other cells appearing after grafting.”

Pre-clinical studies in mice have shown success in treating Parkinson’s disease with dopamine cells derived from stem cells, but the mice are observed only over a matter of months: Parkinson’s, by contrast, is a disease that progresses over decades. Indeed, postmortems of some of the people who had previously received fetal cell transplants found evidence of the disease in some of the cells in the graft as though the protein involved in Parkinson’s had caused disease in the transplant. “If that’s the case, then even with stem cell therapies we could start to see pathology. But even if that is true, we know it will be decades before we start to see an effect and so this should not prevent them being adopted for treating patients.”

“Of course, just because we can do something doesn’t necessarily mean we should,” added Barker. Treatments already exist for Parkinson’s disease. The drug L-dopa can replace lost dopamine and reverse symptoms – but medication needs to be taken regularly, can cause side effects and eventually becomes relatively ineffective. Deep brain stimulation – electrodes implanted into the brain – can likewise prevent tremors and reduce some of the motor features experienced by Parkinson’s sufferers, but patients need to carry around battery packs under their skin. Cell therapies, on the other hand, are relatively straightforward to administer, injected through a small hole in the skull, and just one shot should last decades.

Even so, Barker is realistic about what stem cell therapies can achieve. “They are likely to be no more effective than existing treatments. We certainly won’t be curing anyone.” He is also aware that to produce cells on a scale large enough for widespread use, the technology will need to be picked up by industry. “And once this becomes a commercial treatment, price may become the biggest issue.”

A new stage show, whose story draws on the thriller genre and takes place in the dark with the audience wearing headphones, will debut at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas.

Commissioned by the Festival, Fiction is described as an anxious journey through the sprawling architecture of our dreams.

The play is described as "a sound journey through complete darkness which plays on the senses, creating a unique theatrical experience that undermines common theatre convention". It is the second collaboration between director David Rosenberg, the co-founder of Shunt and director of Electric Hotel, and writer/novellist Glen Neath whose previous work includes Romcom and The Bench, which have been performed fourteen countries to date. They previously worked together on Ring, which received great acclaim from audiences and critics alike.

The sound, provided by Ben and Max Ringham, is recorded using binaural sound technology, creating a 3D listening sensation, giving the performance an extraordinary intimacy and immediacy. It transports the audience, who become protagonists in the show, into their own dream world, but all is not as it seems, and they won’t be alone. Fiction creates the eerie sensation of presence, even, or perhaps especially, when there’s no one there.

By setting the show in complete darkness, with the audience wearing headphones, David Rosenburg explores ways of creating an alternative reality, building on his previous use of technology and sound in successful earlier works Ring, Electric Hotel and Motor Show. Praise for Ring includes a Wired review which states: “I haven’t been affected by a show as profoundly in a long time.”

Fiction was commissioned by the Cambridge Festival of Ideas, Cambridge Junction and Bournemouth Arts by the Sea Festival. It is funded by Arts Council England and a Wellcome Trust Arts Award. David Rosenberg, Greg Neath and other key members of the creative team of Fiction are available for interview. Performances take place on 28th and 29th October from 7.30-8.30pm in Room J2, Cambridge Junction.

Now in its seventh year, the Festival of Ideas aims to explore some of the most essential and thought-provoking ideas of our time, from rising nationalism, gender and racial politics to digital rights and innovation.  It celebrates the very best of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. Over 250 events ranging from talks, debates and film screenings to exhibitions and comedy nights are held in lecture halls, theatres, museums and galleries around Cambridge and entry to many is free.

Other performance-related events taking place at the Festival of Ideas include:

- Hip hop psych - a hip hop takeover of West Road Concert Hall exploring mental illness through hip hop beats and lyrics, including live performances [20 October]

- METIS present World Factory - Zoe Svendsen, Zhao Chuan and Wu MEng discuss their work with their theatre company Grass Stage, focusing on the politics of creating performance on contemporary issues in China and their collaboration with Cambridge-based METIS [21st October]. Followed by a performance of World Factory: the game which explores the relationship between China and the UK through the lens of the global textile industry [1st November]

- L'apres-midi d'un Foehn - Version 1 - Compagnie Non Nova - a company of prima ballerinas made entirely from a handful of plastic bags [23rd October]

- Panopticon: are we losing our identity in today's Orwellian reality? - an interactive are installation, with live audio-visual performance, investigating and exploring identity and privacy erosion through the rise of the Internet and social media [24th October]

- Semaphore - an evening of dynamic dispatches interpreting between music, dance, film and poetry springing from the creative sci-art-tech investigations fuelling ongoing collaborations between composer Richard Hoadley and choreographer Jane Turner [26th October]

- Your Song - a celebration of community singing in Cambridge, featuring choirs from across the city [29th October]

- Bright Club - six Cambridge researchers get up behind the microphone to have a go at doing stand-up comedy based on their work [30th October]

- Bridget Christie: a Bic for her - award-winning comic and Radio 4 regular Bridget Christie talks gender equality in her smash-hit Edinburgh show [1st November]

- Cambridge young composer of the year - listen to pieces entered for the Cambridge Young Composer of the Year competition, followed by Young Composers Concert [2nd November]

The University of Cambridge Festival of Ideas is sponsored by Cambridge University Press and Anglia Ruskin University. Event partners include Heffers, University of Cambridge Museums, RAND Europe and the Cambridge Junction. The Festival's media partner is BBC Radio Cambridgeshire.

To book tickets for Fiction email tickets@junction.co.uk. For other events at the Festival of Ideas, click here.

On Saturday 18 October Castle Hill will be throwing open its doors for a day filled with family friendly activities, talks, tours, games and music, to showcase the oldest area of Cambridge and its wealth of cultural offerings. 

New events for this year include a family marquee at St Giles, a centenary exhibition at the Methodist Church and tours of former pubs and breweries by the Campaign for Real Ale. 

All venues will open their doors for free for the day. Visitors can discover the remarkable buildings and collections and there will also be a packed programme of events for all ages. No need to book, just turn up and enjoy.

Kettle's Yard archivist, Freida Midgley, will unveil first world war related material from the archive, including letters from war artists. Issam Kourbaj will discuss his installation in St Peter’s Church, ‘In Memoriam’, and artists Karen Guthrie & Nina Pope talk about their exhibition.

Refreshments will be available at St Giles and at the Museum of Cambridge vintage style tearoom. We’re delighted that joining us this year is popular local purveyor of quality fast food ‘Steak & Honour’, serving proper burgers made with local produce.

The Castle Hill area of Cambridge is where the city began in Roman times. The Roman city of Duroliponte was located here and there is even evidence of some pre-Roman activity. The 17th Century timber framed building that contains the wonderful and varied collections of the Museum of Cambridge is next to Kettle's Yard, a beautiful building that houses one of the UK’s most remarkable collections of 20th century art. Opposite Kettle's Yard is St Peter’s, a simple, tiny church with an elegant spire. Originally built in the 11th Century and with Roman tiles in its walls, it is now cared for by the Churches Conservation Trust. On the other side of Castle Street is St Giles’, an active church with a history going back to 1092.

A short walk up the hill, Castle Street Methodist Church celebrates its centenary this year. The church is situated on a site developed during the Roman occupation and the current chapel was built in 1914. Nearby is the Castle Mound, the site of Cambridge Castle, which played an important role in the Civil War, refortified by Oliver Cromwell in 1642. Shire Hall, now occupied by the County Council was the site of the city jail and bricks from the jail walls were used in the building.  Deep beneath the council buildings you will discover the former nuclear bunker. The County Council has converted the space to store significant items from its archaeological collections.  Returning to the present day, the Museum of Cambridge and Kettle's Yard run lively programmes of events relating to social history and to contemporary and modern art.

Further information available here

Influenza pandemics arise when a new virus strain – against which humans have yet to develop widespread immunity – spreads in the human population. There have been five such pandemics in the past 100 years, the worst of which – the 1918 Spanish Flu – cost 50 million lives worldwide. Of these pandemics, three are thought to have spread from birds and one from pigs. However, pandemic influenza strains represent only a tiny fraction of the total diversity of influenza viruses that exist in nature; the threats posed by the majority of these viruses are poorly understood. Assessing which viruses pose the greatest risk of causing the next human pandemic is an enormous challenge.

Steven Riley from Imperial College London, an author of the study, says: “There are too many strains of influenza viruses out there in non-human hosts to make it feasible to make preparations against each one. Instead, we need to get better at assessing the pandemic risks so that we know where best to focus our efforts. At the moment, this assessment is largely driven by a simple idea: animal viruses that cause sporadic human infections pose a greater risk than viruses that have not been documented to infect humans. But in fact, none of the viruses that caused the major pandemics of the last century were detected in humans before they emerged in their pandemic form.”

Writing in the journal eLife, the scientists set out the steps that they consider necessary to increase our ability to assess pandemic risk. As influenza virus genome sequencing becomes cheaper, faster and more readily available, the data it generates has the potential to transform the research community’s ability to predict the pandemic risk. However, it remains extremely difficult to predict just from a virus’s genome what symptoms it will elicit in its host – and hence how deadly the virus is. The researchers call for better integration of experimental data, computational methods and mathematical models, in conjunction with refinements to surveillance methodology.

However, they say that scientific insights into non‐human influenza viruses must not give way to complacency that the most substantial threats have been identified and characterized. They point out that several recent strains including the 2009 H1N1 “swine flu” pandemic virus and the recently emerged H7N9 viruses in China highlight the importance of remaining vigilant against as-yet unrecognized high risk viruses and the value of surveillance for influenza viruses in humans.

“No one can say with anything close to a hundred percent certainty when or where the next pandemic will start or which virus will cause it,” says Dr Colin Russell from the Department of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Cambridge. “We are getting much better at identifying and assessing potential threats, but we must be vigilant about surprises lurking around the corner.

“We need to be prepared for a swift response, with coordinated action, to help mitigate the spread of the next pandemic virus. Without developing this ability to respond, we will have spent billions building systems just for watching the next pandemic unfold.”

The research was supported in part by the Research and Policy for Infectious Disease Dynamics program of the US Department of Homeland Security and the National Institutes of Health.

Reference
Russell, CA et al. Improving pandemic influenza risk assessment. eLife; 15 Oct 2015

The existing strategic partnership between AstraZeneca, MedImmune and the University of Cambridge includes a substantial oncology research programme and co-location of AstraZeneca scientists at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, the largest single facility conducting cancer research in the University of Cambridge.

Patrick Maxwell, Regius Professor, University of Cambridge’s School of Clinical Medicine, says: “These exciting new collaborations will strengthen even further the strategic partnership between the University of Cambridge and AstraZeneca ahead of the company’s relocation to the Cambridge Biomedical Campus. This Campus is the centrepiece of the largest biotech cluster outside the United States, a truly world class environment in which to conduct research aimed at transforming the lives of patients.”

The four agreements involve:

• Neuroscience research

A three-year collaboration between AstraZeneca, MedImmune and the University will focus on advancing research and development in neurodegenerative diseases, an area with a large unmet medical need. Scientists from all three organisations will collectively address gaps in drug discovery, translational biomarkers and personalised healthcare approaches for diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and multiple sclerosis.

The University of Cambridge will contribute world-leading expertise in disease biology, experimental models and tissue samples, while AstraZeneca and MedImmune will provide access to molecular tools, screening capabilities and leading drug development expertise to enable novel target and biomarker discovery and validation. The research will be carried out at MedImmune and University of Cambridge laboratories, with opportunities for investigators to work alongside each other and share knowledge.

“This strategic partnership will promote an increased understanding of disease mechanisms and enable work in basic neuroscience to address unmet therapeutic needs in a variety of serious neurodegenerative diseases,” said Professor Alastair Compston, Professor of Neurology, speaking on behalf of Cambridge Neuroscience, University of Cambridge. “We look forward to working with scientists from MedImmune and AstraZeneca to increase knowledge on brain function and apply this to common neurological conditions.”

• Access to AstraZeneca pipeline compounds

A pivotal Material Transfer Agreement will enable investigators from the University of Cambridge to access key compounds from AstraZeneca’s pipeline for investigation.

• PhD programme to support future leaders in science

A collaboration between MedImmune and the University of Cambridge will include a doctoral training programme whereby PhD candidates will spend significant time at the University of Cambridge and in MedImmune’s laboratories, jointly supervised by the organisations during their four-year studentship.

• Entrepreneur-in-residence programme

This programme will offer guidance and mentorship to academic researchers at the University of Cambridge who are considering the broader application and commercial potential of their scientific programmes. MedImmune will provide support and advice on a range of key issues tailored to the individual academic’s needs such as drug and technology development, business planning, intellectual property, market opportunity, partnering approaches and securing investment.

“We are excited to establish this prestigious strategic alliance between AstraZeneca, MedImmune and the University of Cambridge to progress high quality scientific research,” said Bahija Jallal, Executive Vice President, MedImmune. “We will work together to discover and develop potential new medicines that could have a significant impact on the health of patients with neurodegenerative diseases and cancer.”

“In a world where partnerships and collaborations drive medical innovation, deepening our roots in the vibrant Cambridge life science ecosystem offers compelling advantages for AstraZeneca. These new agreements will not only bring our teams closer to the world-class academic investigators at the University of Cambridge, but will also enable us to actively support the development of the next generation of leading scientists right here in the UK,” said Mene Pangalos, Executive Vice President of Innovative Medicines & Early Development, AstraZeneca.

West African chimpanzees will search far and wide to find Alchornea hirtella, a spindly shrub whose straight shoots provide the ideal tools to hunt aggressive army ants in an ingenious fashion, new research shows.

The plant provides the animals with two different types of tool, a thicker shoot for ‘digging’ and a more slender tool for ‘dipping’.

On locating an army ant colony, chimpanzees will dig into the nest with the first tool - aggravating the insects. They then dip the second tool into the nest, causing the angry ants to swarm up it. Once the slender shoot is covered in ants, the chimpanzees pull it out and wipe their fingers along it: scooping up the ants until they have a substantial handful that goes straight into the mouth in one deft motion.   

This technique - ‘ant dipping’ - was previously believed to be a last resort for the hungry apes, only exploited when the animal’s preferred food of fruit couldn’t be found. But the latest study, based on over ten years of data, shows that, in fact, army ants are a staple in the chimpanzee diet - eaten all year round regardless of available sources of fruit. Ants may be an important source of essential nutrients not available in the typical diet, say researchers, as well as a potential source of protein and fats.

The new research, published today in the American Journal of Primatology, was led by Dr Kathelijne Koops from the University of Cambridge’s Division of Biological Anthropology and Junior Research Fellow of Homerton College.

“Ant dipping is a remarkable feat of problem-solving on the part of chimpanzees,”  said Koops. “If they tried to gather ants from the ground with their hands, they would end up horribly bitten with very little to show for it. But by using a tool set, preying on these social insects may prove as nutritionally lucrative as hunting a small mammal - a solid chunk of protein.”

Koops points out that if Alchornea hirtella is nowhere to be found, chimps will fashion tools from other plants - but seemingly only after an exhaustive search for their preferred tool provider.    

Previous research has shown that chimpanzees will actually select longer tools for faster, more aggressive types of army ants. The average ‘dipping’ tool length across the study was 64 centimetres, but dipping tools got up to 76 cm. 

The question for Koops is one of animal culture: how do chimpanzees acquire knowledge of such sophisticated techniques?   

“Scientists have been working on ruling out simple environmental and genetic explanations for group differences in behaviours, such as tool use, and the evidence is pointing strongly towards it being cultural,” said Koops. “They probably learn tool use behaviours from their mother and others in the group when they are young.”

The research for the ant-dipping study - which took place in Guinea’s Nimba mountains - proved challenging, as the chimpanzees were not habituated to people - so the team acted almost as archaeologists, studying ‘exploited’ ants nests to measure abandoned tool sets and “sifting through faeces for ants heads”.  

To further study these illusive creatures, Koops set up cameras to take extensive video footage of the chimpanzees and their tool use. In doing so, she managed to capture a chimpanzee who has constructed a tool with which to investigate the camera itself - prodding it curiously and then sniffing the end of the tool (VIDEO).   

“This study is part of a big ongoing research project. The next stages will involve looking at social opportunities to learn: how much time do youngsters spend within arm’s length of other individuals; how much time do they spend close to their mother; as well as innate predispositions to explore and engage with objects,” said Koops.

A video clip from the Kalinzu Forest in Uganda, where Koops is currently conducting comparative studies on East African chimpanzees, captures a male chimpanzee seemingly looking on enviously at a female who has managed to construct a much better dipping tool than his own and is feasting heartily as a consequence (VIDEO). Koops suggests this kind of observing of other individuals may lead to learning within a chimpanzee community.

“By studying our closest living relatives we gain a window into the evolutionary past which allows us to shed light on the origins of human technology and material culture,’’ added Koops.

Inset image: Fanwaa the chimpanzee. Credit: Kathelijne Koops

A major programme to celebrate the career of one of Britain’s greatest living composers comes to Cambridge in November.

Secret Theatres: the Music of Harrison Birtwistle brings some of the most respected practitioners of contemporary music to Cambridge in celebration of Birtwistle in his 80th year.

The Arditti String Quartet, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Oliver Knussen, Anssi Karttunen and Nicolas Hodges appear alongside the University of Cambridge’s New Music Ensemble, Choir of King’s College and The King’s Men for this three day festival conceived by Cambridge University’s first Lecturer in Composition, Richard Causton. 

Causton, a composer, is currently working on a new Piano Quintet commissioned by the BBC for the Nash Ensemble and his new work for cello solo, De Profundis (2014), will be given its world premiere by Anssi Karttunen on the last day of the festival.

Causton said: “Secret Theatres marks the most significant new music festival ever to be presented in Cambridge. Not only will it feature a range of works from across Birtwistle’s career, but will also provide entry points for student composers at all levels.”

On the Sunday before the beginning of the festival, Causton leads a practical composition workshop – Taking a Line for a Walk – for local sixth-formers, using Birtwistle’s music as a starting point.

During the course of the festival itself, student composers are invited to attend workshops with the Arditti String Quartet, listen to Birtwistle in conversation with Causton, and participate in one-on-one sessions with the composer.

With the works of Birtwistle at its core, Secret Theatres will also include world premieres by MPhil student Joy Lisney; doctoral students David Roche, Jae-Moon Lee and Patrick Brennan; and third year undergraduate student Alex Tay.

The premieres are programmed alongside a UK première by Alexander Goehr, Emeritus Professor at the Faculty of Music and a close associate of Birtwistle since the 1950s, as well as works by faculty members John Hopkins and Causton.

The programme runs from Thursday, 6 November to Saturday, 8 November.

There has been a great deal of interest recently in how much patients in a vegetative state following severe brain injury are aware of their surroundings. Although unable to move and respond, some of these patients are able to carry out tasks such as imagining playing a game of tennis. Using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, which measures brain activity, researchers have previously been able to record activity in the pre-motor cortex, the part of the brain which deals with movement, in apparently unconscious patients asked to imagine playing tennis.

Now, a team of researchers led by scientists at the University of Cambridge and the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, have used high-density electroencephalographs (EEG) and a branch of mathematics known as ‘graph theory’ to study networks of activity in the brains of 32 patients diagnosed as vegetative and minimally conscious and compare them to healthy adults. The findings of the research are published today in the journal PLOS Computational Biology. The study was funded mainly by the Wellcome Trust, the National Institute of Health Research Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre and the Medical Research Council (MRC).

The researchers showed that the rich and diversely connected networks that support awareness in the healthy brain are typically – but importantly, not always – impaired in patients in a vegetative state. Some vegetative patients had well-preserved brain networks that look similar to those of healthy adults – these patients were those who had shown signs of hidden awareness by following commands such as imagining playing tennis.

Dr Srivas Chennu from the Department of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Cambridge says: “Understanding how consciousness arises from the interactions between networks of brain regions is an elusive but fascinating scientific question. But for patients diagnosed as vegetative and minimally conscious, and their families, this is far more than just an academic question – it takes on a very real significance. Our research could improve clinical assessment and help identify patients who might be covertly aware despite being uncommunicative.”

The findings could help researchers develop a relatively simple way of identifying which patients might be aware whilst in a vegetative state. Unlike the ‘tennis test’, which can be a difficult task for patients and requires expensive and often unavailable fMRI scanners, this new technique uses EEG and could therefore be administered at a patient’s bedside. However, the tennis test is stronger evidence that the patient is indeed conscious, to the extent that they can follow commands using their thoughts. The researchers believe that a combination of such tests could help improve accuracy in the prognosis for a patient.

Dr Tristan Bekinschtein from the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit and the Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, adds: “Although there are limitations to how predictive our test would be used in isolation, combined with other tests it could help in the clinical assessment of patients. If a patient’s ‘awareness’ networks are intact, then we know that they are likely to be aware of what is going on around them. But unfortunately, they also suggest that vegetative patients with severely impaired networks at rest are unlikely to show any signs of consciousness.”

Listen to Srivas Chennu interviewed on the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme below:

Reference
Chennu S et al. Spectral Signatures of Reorganised Brain Networks in Disorders of Consciousness. PLOS Computational Biology; 16 Oct 2014

The Festival of Ideas, now in its seventh year, will run for two weeks until 2 November with events - most of them free - ranging from exhibitions, cinema screenings, debates, immersive performances, participatory workshops and concerts.

The Festival is one of the ways to get involved in serious debate, engage with scholars, learn about cutting edge research, think about new challenges, trends and ideas with the thousands of people who attend events at the Festival of Ideas. Speakers include Booker prize-winning novelist Ben Okri, gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, heterodox economist Ha-Joon Chang, Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, comedian Bridget Christie and poet Blake Morrison.

The theme of this year’s Festival is Identities and many of the talks and debates centre around this. They include:

• Mixed race: the future of identity politics in Britain
  Speakers include writer and broadcaster Sarfraz Manzoor and Chamion Caballero from London South Bank University, whose research informed the BBC's Mixed Britannia series. Other participants in the debate, which will be chaired by journalist Yasmin Alibhai Brown, are Gabriella Beckles-Raymond, a Lecturer in the Theology and Religious Studies Department at Canterbury Christ Church University, and Dinah Morley, vice chair of People In Harmony, a national organisation working to support mixed race people and families. The debate will look at how the growing number of mixed race children in the UK - one of the fastest growing groups - will impact on attitudes to multiculturalism (25 October)
   
• Challenges to sexual identities: global perspectives
  This event will examine the causes of the rise in extremism against gay people in some parts of the world and address what drives tolerance and diversity. Speakers include Peter Tatchell, Susan Golombok, professor of Family Research and director of the Centre for Family Research at the University of Cambridge, Anthony Obinnah, Deputy Secretary of Justice for Gay Africans, and Dr Kath Browne of Brighton University. It will be chaired by Alison Hennegan, a Director of Studies in English at Cambridge and former literary editor of Gay News (25 October)

The Festival will see a host of inspiring interactive sessions for people of all ages, including a pre-history day, a comic creation master class, a hip hop event which explores exploring mental illness through hip hop beats and lyrics, medieval storytelling and family drawing workshops. This year the Festival partners with the Southbank Centre’s Women of the World Festival for a day of events celebrating the achievements of women and the challenges still facing them.

In addition to debates on the pinkification of girlhood and cyberbullying with Caroline Criado-Perez, herself the target of cyberbullies, there is a speed mentoring session with a high-profile range of mentors, including Dame Carol Black, Principal of Newnham College Cambridge and Adviser on Work and Health at the Department of Health, and Dame Barbara Stocking, former CEO of Oxfam GB and President of Murray Edwards College. Dame Carol, author of a recent government report on wellbeing at work, will also talk about how to survive the ups and downs associated with women, particularly those with children, breaking through the glass ceiling. Many of the activities are free, including WOW Marketplace, Give it a go - interactivites activities and demonstrations for all ages, including Cambridge Hands on Science (CHaOS) - and short talks on everything from sexism in science and the future of feminism to domestic violence and immigration.

The Festival is also partnering with Heffers on its unique Classics Forum with experts including Professor Paul Cartledge, Tom Holland and Professor Maria Wyke and with Curating Cambridge, a five-week journey of exploration into the culture, community, passion, diversity, vision and individuality that makes Cambridge what it is. Curating Cambridge includes a number of exhibitions  including The Thing Is… at The Polar Museum, Silent Partners: Artist & Mannequin from Function to Fetish at the Fitzwilliam, and Buddha’s Word: The Life of Books in Tibet and Beyond at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Accompanying events such as lunchtime talks and creative workshops are being offered in connection with these exhibitions and there are many more activities and events.

Other highlights include:

• Playing and Praying? - a panel discussion featuring three academics and two athletes, discussing their work and personal experiences and the parallels between sport and religion, such as the regular and conscious disciplining of body and mind. The panel will explore the ways that sport, faith and society interact in Britain today. It will ask what role faith plays in the sporting lives and motivations of elite athletes, particularly those from religious minorities and how sport and sporting heroes shape the face of religion and relations between faiths in Britain today.  Speakers include Mahfoud Amara, Deputy Director of the Centre for Olympic Studies and Research at Loughborough University, who has a specific interest in sport in Arab and Muslim contexts and in sport, multiculturalism, Adrian Cassidy, a member of the GB Rowing Team until he broke his neck in two places and Salma Bi who plays for Five Ways Old Edwardians at club level and is the first British Asian woman player to be selected for Worcestershire county. (22 October)
• Fiction – a play where the audience will be plunged into darkness to explore the boundary between consciousness and sleep. Commissioned by the Cambridge Festival of Ideas, Cambridge Junction and Bournemouth Arts by the Sea Festival and funded by Arts Council England, Fiction is the second performance by writer Glen Neath and director David Rosenberg using binaural sound and absolute darkness and is described as “an anxious journey through the sprawling architecture of our dreams and an exercise in empathy” (29 October)
• Cambridge Shorts - a premiere for a series of student-led films about new research at the University of Cambridge, from DNA origami to illuminated manuscripts (20 October)
• A climate of conspiracy: a heated debate - Professor David Runciman and Dr Alfred Moore will represent two very different types of climate conspiracists and will debate what the debate on climate change tells us about democracy today, and the hopes we invest in it (24 October)
• India-Pakistan: a common ground - What is the common ground for India and Pakistan in terms of development, economic growth and research. With Dr Joya Chatterji, Dr Ornit Shani, Dr Bhaskar Vira and Dr Kamal Munir (1 November)
• Big Brother 2.0 - a debate by leading experts on whether our privacy is the price we pay for an easier and secure future or whether this is simply a false sense of security (1 November)
• Jedi and witches and indigo children! Oh my! - Beth Singler, a digital anthropologist, discusses the new online religious identities and who they echo wider changes in society and religion (25 October)

The Festival of Ideas is sponsored by Cambridge University Press and Anglia Ruskin University, which also organises events. Event partners include RAND Europe, University of Cambridge Museums, Heffers, the Cambridge Junction and Botanic Garden. The Festival's media partner is BBC Radio Cambridgeshire.

Back in 2007, a team of archaeologists used a nine-month window to investigate a site in the heart of historic Cambridge known to have been occupied since Anglo-Saxon times. The excavation of an area tucked behind All Saints Passage, owned by St John’s College, led to the discovery of a rubble-filled cellar which had lain undisturbed for more than 200 years.

Well before they began the laborious process of removing the debris from the cellar, Craig Cessford and his colleagues at Cambridge Archaeological Unit had obtained information from records held by St John’s College. This preliminary archival work gave them an idea of what they might be likely to find in an area of Cambridge characterised even today by specialist businesses catering for students and shoppers.  

“We knew that a number of businesses had been located on the north side of All Saints Gardens over ten centuries. When we found a teapot and then a second and then a third, we began to get a fair hunch of what we might be dealing with. This was not just an ordinary household but some kind of business serving food and drink,” said Cessford.

“Once we’d recovered a remarkable total of at least 38 teapots – and a host of other ceramic and glass items – in a space of just a few hours in an area that measured just three metres by two metres, we were pretty certain that we’d found Clapham’s coffeehouse, an establishment we know from the records in the archives had existed from around 1746 to around 1779.”

In a talk tomorrow (22 October 2014), Cessford will discuss the work of the archaeologist in looking at ‘clearance deposits’, term used to describe assemblages of materials relating to a particular household or business. Clearance deposits aren’t rubbish dumps. Rather, they are the things people have no further use for – and either can’t be bothered to, or can’t bear to, throw away.  First they are put away as items that might come in useful but then they are forgotten.

“Clearance deposits are often the result of someone leaving a house. Objects that have become redundant to their needs get pushed into a corner – such as a cellar – which is then backfilled. In Cambridge, many buildings are owned by the colleges, which tend to update them when tenants leave. That’s when collections of materials might get buried within the fabric of the building,” said Cessford.

Cambridge Archaeological Unit made more than 500 finds relating to the coffeehouse that once stood on the busy passage that connects Bridge Street to All Saints Gardens.

This ‘ceramic assemblage’ dwarfs all other mid-to-late 18th century finds recovered in Cambridge – including recent material recovered from the site of the Grand Arcade shopping centre – and provides a rare insight into the material culture of the coffeehouse, an institution which was booming as a hub of social, political and economic life.

“Coffeehouses played a central role in social and economic life from the mid-17th century to the late 18th century, not just in Britain but around the world. While they’ve attracted significant attention from historians, relatively little attention has been paid to the material culture associated with them – and very few coffeehouses have been investigated archaeologically,” said Cessford.

At tomorrow’s seminar, Cessford will use the example of Clapham’s coffeehouse to show how a nuanced interpretation of clearance deposits can provide both an intimate portrait of an individual household and offer broader perspectives on the life of those households within the wider community.

Clapham’s was run by William and Jane Clapham whose names can be seen on the base of a number of the vessels.  Records show that when William died in 1765, Jane took over business.

“The items that we found had been shoved into the cellar under what had been Clapham’s coffeehouse and had lain there undisturbed for around 230 years. We were able to lift them from the earth and document the various activities that had taken place in the shop. Many of the items were not even broken or had only been broken when they were dumped in the cellar,” said Cessford.

“It’s clear from the finds that early on in the history of the business, William ordered some Staffordshire-type white glazed stoneware plates, tankards and bowls marked with his initials WC, while Jane ordered some tin-glazed earthenware plates marked with her full name, presumably after William’s death.”

From the sets of ceramics, it appears that the patrons of Clapham’s coffeehouse sat in small groups of three or four around a table, drinking coffee and tea in roughly equal quantities, plus chocolate on a much smaller scale. Alcoholic drinks such as beer, wine, punch and also possibly liqueurs were also popular.

Meals were an important part of coffeehouse life with the Clapham’s deposit suggesting that the proprietors had a close working relationship with adjacent inns and eateries. Among the vessels found at Clapham’s are plates belonging to two local hostelries - the Sun’s Coffee Room and the Rose Tavern – showing that meals were ordered in from elsewhere.

Cessford said: “There are also a large number of small shallow bowls with slightly flared rims which were probably used for snacks.  We also found evidence of how popular desserts were at this time. The presence of a number of jelly glasses, and animal bones that may have been boiled up to make jelly, suggests that calf foot’s jelly may have been one of the house specialities.”

Identifying and cataloguing archaeological material is a major task that has taken several years to complete. Ultimately all the material from the coffeehouse will go into storage organised by Cambridgeshire County Council.

Craig Cessford will be speaking at CRASSH’s Things that Matter seminar series in conversation with Dr Julia Poole about ‘Household Things’ on Wednesday, 22 October 2014. The seminar takes place from 12-2 pm in room SG1 of the Alison Richards Building and is open to the public. No registration is necessary. 

Cessford  will also be talking about Clapham’s coffeehouse to the Cambridge Antiquarian Society on Monday, 3 November 2014, and the results will be published in an academic journal.

Inset images: items found in the former cellar of Clapham's coffeehouse close to All Saints Passage included ceramics marked with the initials WC for William Clapham and the name of his wife Jane Clapham (Cambridge Archaeological Unit)

Norovirus is the most common cause of gastroenteritis in the UK. For most people, infection causes an unpleasant but relatively short-lived case of vomiting and diarrhoea, but chronic infection can cause major health problems for people with compromised immune systems. In many cases, patients who have weaker immune systems suffer from norovirus infection for months to years, with some patients experiencing gastroenteritis for as many as eight years. Outbreaks can cause significant economic losses – in UK hospitals alone, the cost of treating outbreaks is estimated at over £100 million a year, and foodborne outbreaks in the US lead to economic losses of  around $2 billion per year.

The virus is notoriously difficult to study because it will not grow efficiently in the laboratory, therefore scientists often use a mouse norovirus to identify drugs that can inhibit infection. It is one of a class of viruses known as RNA viruses, which have ribonucleic acid (RNA) as their genetic material. Most of the major viruses that have the potential to become epidemics are of this class. RNA viruses replicate and mutate rapidly, making them challenging to develop vaccines or immunity against.

In a study published today in the journal eLife and funded by the Wellcome Trust, a team of researchers led by Professor Ian Goodfellow has shown in mice with a long-term norovirus infection that the experimental drug favipiravir is effective at lowering levels of norovirus in the body, including in both tissue and faeces, which may help in reducing the severity of the disease and onward transmission.

Favipiravir is an experiment antiviral drug which is thought to be effective against a number of RNA viruses such as influenza, West Nile virus, yellow fever virus, and foot-and-mouth disease virus. It is currently also been tested as a potential drug to treat Ebola virus. The University of Cambridge team has shown that the drug works by causing the virus to self-destruct in a process known as ‘lethal mutagenesis’, which causes errors in the virus’s genetic information; because RNA viruses replicate and mutate rapidly, the errors take hold quickly, neutralising the virus and preventing further spread. This is one of the first demonstrations of lethal mutagenesis as a method of fighting viruses in their natural hosts and suggests that it may be possible to tackle other RNA viruses in the same way.

“Norovirus is an unpleasant bug that spreads quickly,” says Professor Goodfellow, a Wellcome Trust Senior Fellow, who led the study. “Most of us will have experienced it at some point and will know that the only option is to ride out an infection, drinking plenty of fluids. But some patients get infections that can last months or years, and this has a real impact on their quality of life. The ease with which infections spread, particularly in places such as hospitals, schools and cruise ships, and the potentially serious health problems norovirus can cause people with weakened immune systems means that we desperately need a way to treat infection.”

Dr Armando Arias, first author, adds: “Our work in mice is very promising and shows that favipiravir can make the virus mutate itself to death. It suggests that as well as treating infected individuals, the drug may also be useful in preventing infection during an outbreak. The next steps will be to test whether this drug is safe and effective at treating patients, too.”

Reference
Arias, A et al. Favipiravir elicits antiviral mutagenesis during virus replication in vivo. eLife; 21 Sept 2014.

When the USA’s Mount St Helens erupted in 1980, just two months after showing signs of reawakening, its blast was equivalent to 1,600 times the energy of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It remains the most economically destructive volcanic event in the USA’s history.

When Eyjafjallajӧkull erupted in 2010 in Iceland, the ash cloud it emitted stranded around half of the world’s air traffic, with an estimated global economic cost of US $5 billion. Recently, magma has been on the move again, this time under and beyond Iceland’s Bárðarbunga volcano.

Volcanoes are the vents through which our planet exhales. Yet, not all volcanoes experience spectacular releases of energy, or even erupt at all: of the 500 or so volcanoes that are currently active worldwide, 20 might be expected to erupt in any one year. But, when volcanoes do erupt, they can cause almost total destruction in the immediate vicinity and the ash clouds they release can affect areas thousands of kilometres away.

Fortunately, the ability to monitor volcanoes has dramatically improved in recent years, thanks in part to the work of scientists like Dr Marie Edmonds in Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences.

Studying the behaviour of volcanoes such as Soufrière Hills in Montserrat, which caused the displacement of two-thirds of the island’s population (over 8,000 people) when it erupted in 1995, Edmonds and colleagues have accumulated huge datasets on everything from the type and quantity of gas belched from volcanoes, to the bulging and deformation of the volcanoes’ shape, to the altitude and quantity of ash thrown up into the stratosphere.

“About 600 million people live close enough to an active volcano to have their lives disturbed or threatened, so there’s a clear need for hazard assessment,” Edmonds said. “We knew that gas monitoring data could be essential for this, but monitoring depended on the use of cumbersome instruments that had to be driven around the crater’s edge.”

In the early 2000s, with funding from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), she and Dr Clive Oppenheimer from the Department of Geography developed a new gas sensor – one that is cheap, miniaturised and can be left long term on the volcano, relaying the data back to the observatory by radio modem. Today, sensors like these are used by scientists worldwide for monitoring volcanoes.

“Previous studies had shown that changes in the emission rate of gases correlated with volcanic activity but, because we have such a long dataset, we began to see another pattern emerging,” said Edmonds. “What you see at the volcano surface is really only the end part of the story.”

The intense temperatures and pressures deep in the earth find release through fissures and cracks, which carry dissolved gases such as carbon dioxide (CO₂), sulphur dioxide (SO₂), hydrogen chloride (HCl) and steam up through the mantle to the crust.

As the magma begins its journey to the surface, the pressure lowers and dissolved gases form tiny bubbles, which start to expand. Close to the surface, the expansion can be so great that it fuels an explosive burst of lava, shooting volcanic gases tens of kilometres into the earth’s atmosphere.

Because each species of gas dissolves at different pressures, the scientists can measure what is released at the surface and use this to work out the depth at which the gases separated from the magma to form bubbles. “The gases are like messages that tell you how the volcano is ‘plumbed’ and what shape that plumbing is in,” explained Edmonds.

“One intriguing pattern to emerge in Soufrière Hills is that the time series for the magma eruption and that for the SO₂ gas eruption are completely unrelated to one another. There have been three big episodes of lava extrusion in the past 15 years and, although HCl flux seems to be a proxy for eruption rate, SO₂ emission is uncoupled from what is happening in the eruption. We think the SO₂ flux is telling us about something much deeper in the system.”

When these results were combined with a study of the rocks spewed from the volcano, Edmonds and colleagues began to piece together an idea of the physics and chemistry happening within.

They believe that a hot magnesium- and iron-rich ‘mafic’ magma is intruding from depth into the shallower magma chamber where it meets a silica- and crystal-rich ‘andesite’ magma that forms the main part of the eruption. However, it is the gas-rich mafic magma that Edmonds and colleagues believe triggers and fuels the eruption, and it is this that surface SO₂ levels are a proxy for.

“This is far from the traditional view of how a magma chamber works,” said Edmonds. “It was thought to be balloon-like but now we think it’s vertically protracted, with different types of magma at different levels.”

“The surface SO₂ is telling us about long-scale processes, of the order of months to years,” explained Edmonds. “Even though there may be no evidence of lava at the summit, if SO₂ is still outgassing then there’s potential for the eruption to resume. We can to an extent use it to forecast a volcanic eruption.”

Recently, Edmonds and colleagues joined forces with researchers at other universities to understand how best to monitor volcanoes and earthquakes in two new NERC-funded projects. The £2.8 million Centre for the Observation and Modelling of Earthquakes, Volcanoes and Tectonics (COMET+) programme run by the University of Leeds will provide new understanding of geohazards to underpin national risk capabilities; and the £3.7 million RiftVolc project will create a long-range eruptive forecast for the largely uncharted volcanoes in the East African Rift Valley.

For Soufrière Hills, monitoring is providing a key input to the risk assessments by the UK government’s Scientific Advisory Committee for Montserrat, a British Overseas Territory. “All the surface signs indicate the volcanic activity is decaying away but, from the SO₂ emissions, the volcano remains active at depth. We think there’s a huge magma reservoir – tens of cubic kilometres beneath the island, much bigger than the island itself. We know from looking at older ash deposits on the island that this volcano is capable of much larger eruptions than we have seen in recent years, perhaps even as large as the Mount St Helens blast.”

A unique copy of the Gutenberg Bible– Europe’s first printed book using moveable type – is to go on display in a spectacular exhibition charting how books were simultaneously cherished and embellished, mistreated and even vandalised, in the first century of the printed age.

Private Lives of Print: The use and abuse of books 1450-1550 opens to the public at Cambridge University Library on October 24. It examines how the earliest owners of books produced with the new technology of print interacted with their books, and features some of the University Library’s most lavish printed treasures, many never before displayed. 

The hand-coloured copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle, the most heavily illustrated book of the 15th century, sits alongside a Book of Hours annotated by Katherine Parr, the last wife of Henry VIII, and an exceptional copy of the Book of St Albans, the first colour printed book in English. 

The Book of St Albans, printed in St Albans in the mid-1480s and attributed to the prioress of nearby Sopwell, is a gentleman’s guide to heraldry, hawking and hunting. It is one of the most famous and collectable books in the history of English printing. An early owner of the Cambridge copy was oblivious to its future value; at the foot of an otherwise untarnished page is a pencil sketch of a passionate couple in flagrante delicto.

Annotations elsewhere indicate a more scholarly interaction between reader and book. Also on display is Cambridge’s copy of the Hypnerotomachia poliphili, an eccentric romance poem, considered by many to be the most beautifully designed book of the Renaissance. In 1518, a 16-year-old owner was moved by the Hypnerotomachia to compose his own poem in the front of  Cambridge University Library’s copy of the book.

Alongside this 16th-century composition is displayed the text of a poem specially composed for the Library by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, who was inspired by a visit to the Library to study the Hypnerotomachia. An extract of Carol Ann Duffy’s poem, which is being published for the first time in a new Library publication celebrating its early printed treasures, Emprynted in thys manere, reads:

“And yet,
that evening in the emptying Library, the human chain,
from Venice 1499 to here and now, joined
warm and open palms to yours, a living link
around the precious charm of a book.
Woodcutter to printer; ink’s solemn vow to page;
word and image in their beautiful Renaissance dance.”

Embellishment and decoration form another strand of the exhibition. Early printers mimicked the products of the flourishing manuscript trade and consequently many early printed books were painstakingly decorated by hand. The exhibition features striking illuminations from some of the leading Italian artists of the period, including the Master of the London Pliny. Initials decorated in gold, red, blue and green are as vivid today as when they were originally executed for religious houses and members of the nobility, and royal houses of Europe, some 500 years ago.

All of the 54 exhibits going on display demonstrate the differing relationships between the earliest printed books and their owners. From marginal drawings of plants and animals and sketches of classical architecture, to the clumsy reader who in 1482 confessed to spilling red ink on his clean page; visitors to the exhibition will find the work of careful hands as well as careless ones.

Exhibition curator Ed Potten said: “We tend to assume that books of this age and importance have always been treasured items treated with the utmost respect and care – but we forget that books were constantly being read, handed down, sold and scribbled upon. Many of the early printed books owned by the Library have every spare space covered with notes and scribbles.

“There is a temptation to view these marginalia and doodles as diminishing and devaluing the books, but it’s precisely these features that make them a joy to study. They offer rare and fascinating insights into the private lives of books – glimpses of the many ways in which books were received and subsequently used by the first generations of printed book owners.”

In parallel with the exhibition, the University Library is launching its latest print publication, Emprynted in thys manere: Early printed treasures from Cambridge University Library. Published to celebrate the conclusion of a five-year research project to catalogue Cambridge’s world-class collections of 15th-century books, it comprises essays by 60 contributors.

Historians, authors, artists and academics from around the world have each chosen their favourite object from Cambridge’s printed collections, many of which also feature in Private Lives of Print.  Sir Quentin Blake describes being transported to “a different world, breathing a different air” by the experience of viewing the Library’s beautifully illuminated edition of Sabellicus. Professor Eamon Duffy, the renowned scholar of the Reformation, describes Katherine Parr’s annotated Book of Hours, “its inscriptions … a poignant monument”. 

The 60 items featured are described over 176 pages and illustrated by 200 full-colour photographs, making the book a fitting tribute to the Library’s remarkable printed collections.

Private Lives of Print runs until 11 April 2015. For details of opening hours go to https://exhibitions.lib.cam.ac.uk/

Inset images: a surprising doodle in the margin of the Book of St Albans (Inc.3.J.4.1[3636]); an ink blot: "I stupidly made this blot on the first of December 1482" (Inc.1.B.3.1b[1330]) (Cambridge University Library)

Much has been written about the promise of stem cells for modern medicine, and cell-based therapies to treat diseases are now being developed by commercial companies in Europe and across the world. But it is their use both to screen medicinal drugs for toxicity and to identify potential new therapies which is increasingly being viewed as one that could have an immediate and far-reaching impact.

Cambridge-based company DefiniGEN supplies the pharmaceutical industry with liver and pancreatic cells that have been reprogrammed from human skin cells. These cells, known as induced pluripotent stem (IPS) cells, are used to test potential new drugs, and can also be used as in vitro models for disease.

The company spun out of the University in 2012 and is one of the first commercial opportunities to arise from Cambridge’s expertise in stem cell research. Its portfolio of products is based on the research of Dr Ludovic Vallier, Professor Roger Pedersen, Dr Tamir Rashid, Dr Nick Hannan and Dr Candy Cho at the Anne McLaren Laboratory for Regenerative Medicine (LRM) in Cambridge.

“Drug failure in the late phase of clinical development is a major challenge to finding new therapeutics which are urgently needed by a broad number of patients with major health-care problems such as diabetes,” said Vallier. “A great deal of time and money are often lost following these false leads, and this limits the capacity of pharmaceutical companies to explore novel therapies. So, identifying toxic drugs as early as possible is vital to the efficiency and safety of the drug discovery process.

“Because we use human cells, our lab has a specific philosophy that all the data we generate is used not only for fundamental research, but also relates back to the clinic,” added Vallier, who holds a joint appointment at the LRM and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, and is also Chief Scientific Officer at DefiniGEN. “We are interested in how stem cells work but we also always ask how the research we’re doing might have a clinical or translational interest.”

IPS cells can be grown outside the body indefinitely, but can also develop into almost any other cell type, providing the opportunity to have a ready source of human cells for testing new drugs. Vallier’s lab is combining basic knowledge in developmental biology and stem cells to develop methods for differentiating IPS cells into liver and pancreatic cells. Despite being generated in a dish, these cells show many of the same characteristics as those generated through natural development.

In particular, the group uses a mix of IPS cells and human embryonic stem (ES) cells to understand the molecular mechanisms that could govern the onset of various metabolic diseases such as those that affect the liver and pancreas.

The liver is a large and complex organ and plays a number of important roles in the body, including digestion and the secretion and production of proteins. It is also the key organ for metabolising drugs and removing toxic substances from the body. For this reason, demonstrating that a drug candidate is not toxic to the liver is a crucial stage in the development of new drugs. It is also a test that most new drug candidates fail – increasing the cost and decreasing the efficiency of the drug development process.

A lack of high-quality human liver cells, or primary hepatocytes, means that inferior models are often used for testing potential new drugs. The cells generated in Vallier’s lab, however, show many of the same functional characteristics as primary hepatocytes, both for toxicology testing and as models of liver disease, including the most commonly inherited metabolic conditions such as familial hypercholesterolaemia and alpha 1-antitrypsin disorder.

Vallier’s team is also able to use these cells to model a diverse range of inherited liver diseases, offering the potential to accelerate the development of new therapies for these conditions. “There is no cure for end-stage liver disease apart from transplantation,” said Vallier. “Due to an acute shortage of donors, many research groups have been looking at alternative means of treating liver failure, including stem-cell-based therapy.”

Understanding the basic mechanisms behind the genesis and development of liver disease is helping his team develop new ways to generate functional liver cells that could be used to treat these conditions in future.

The researchers are taking a similar approach to the pancreas, with a particular focus on diabetes. According to Diabetes UK, 3.2 million people in the UK have been diagnosed with diabetes, and an estimated 630,000 people have the condition, but don’t know it.

A promising therapy to treat type 1 diabetes is transplanting the insulin-producing islet cells of the pancreas, but there are only enough donated islets to treat fewer than 1% of diabetic patients who might benefit from this form of treatment.

Vallier’s group is working to generate large numbers of pancreatic islet cells from stem cells, which could be used for transplantation-based therapy. In addition, they are building in vitro models to study the molecular mechanisms that control pancreatic specification in the embryo. Vallier’s group has identified several genes that could be important for pancreatic development and in determining an individual’s resistance to diabetes.

“Using IPS cells, we’re trying to understand how individual genetics can influence development, insulin production capacity and disease onset,” said Vallier. “Essentially, human IPS cells can be used to model human genetics in a dish, which hasn’t been possible until now.

“Thanks to IPS cells, we’re now able to discover things that are not possible to do using animal models or any in vitro system. Not only will this help us understand more about the mechanisms behind human development, such as how cells in the human embryo develop into organs, but it will also help with drug screening and with making more-precise drugs, which is what’s really needed for the liver and pancreas. These types of in vitro applications are possible now, while cell-based treatments are more in the longer term. But you have to walk before you can run.”