Recently, Facebook and Apple announced their decision to offer to pay for female employees to freeze their eggs, in theory, allowing women to ‘have it all’ - to pursue their career aspirations and to have biologically related ‘children’. The announcement by these companies has generated much international debate about social egg freezing itself, and the companies’ offer. While proponents of social egg freezing argue that it is liberating for women, opponents contest that the technology provides an individualist solution to a social problem.

In October 2012, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine declared that egg freezing should no longer be considered experimental. As a young woman scholar of assistive reproductive technologies I have spent much time considering the debates in favor and opposing this technology.

Much of what has been written about egg freezing has come from women, often older, with families, and more established in their careers. Along with three other scholars of assistive reproductive technologies, Alana Cattapan, Lesley Tarasoff, and Jennie Haw, we sought to explore this question regarding the empowerment of these technologies, and to offer our perspective, as women at whom these types of technologies are directed. Coinciding with the media reports about Apple and Facebook was the publication, in the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics (IJFAB), of a piece we wrote that arose from our discussion and debate of the topic.

In the article, we combine our personal experiences with our collective academic knowledge and reflections to challenge the promotion of social egg freezing on a number of grounds. Social egg freezing has been largely lauded for its potential on the basis that it enables women to ‘have it all’, by allowing them to focus on their careers and have children later on. This, however, is a tremendous oversimplification of the real world challenges of working in increasingly competitive environments. This individual ‘solution’ to social reasons for delayed childbearing takes the focus away from much needed structural change surrounding childbearing and parenthood in the workplace and home. While Apple and Facebook’s offer to pay for egg freezing makes it accessible for their female employees, it should not be forgotten that these are expensive technologies that are inaccessible to many women.

The marketing and media coverage of egg freezing has also been problematic. We are concerned about how the marketing of the technology sets out a moral imperative for women to engage in egg freezing, a risky biomedical intervention. The media coverage of the ASRM’s decision to list the experimental label on egg freezing downplayed the physiological risks of the procedure. At this point in time there is little known about the health effects of egg retrieval, and to date there has been no longitudinal research on the health effects of the procedure. There are also risks associated with undergoing pregnancy at an advanced reproductive age. A moral imperative to use this risky technology may be exacerbated by its acceptance and accessibility for Apple and Facebook employees. This may also be accompanied by an expectation of employees to then wait to have children.

Finally, as with other assisted reproductive technologies, the context of this technology continues to be forgotten. This technology should be considered in context of the for-profit, largely unregulated industry providing this service, and the broader politics surrounding the commodification of women’s bodies and tissues in reproductive and scientific research. Little attention has been paid to what will happen with the surplus frozen eggs, and potential for a transnational market for surplus eggs for use in scientific research, or personal use.

While social egg freezing has been lauded for its potential to allow women to ‘have it all’, we argue that there are strong reasons to challenge it. Similarly, there are strong reasons to be critical of offers such as those by Facebook and Apple that condone this technology and that may contribute to a moral imperative for their employees to engage in this risky technology, and to postpone childbearing. To stress our argument in the commentary, egg freezing is not necessarily an empowering option. It is a risky, intrusive procedure for which there is still little research. It is shortsighted, and simultaneously fails to challenge the very conditions that produce its need.

A new approach to mapping and predicting the impact of chemical compounds in the body, which it is hoped could eventually reduce the need for toxicity tests in animals, has been trialed by scientists.

Although still at an early stage, the process involves identifying “molecular initiating events” (MIEs) - the term given to the moment at which a molecule that has entered the body starts to interact with it, kick-starting a sequence of events which leads to a toxic outcome.

By identifying the specific features and properties within individual molecules that cause these events, the researchers argue that it should be possible to make accurate predictions about the effects of new and untested chemical compounds with similar characteristics.

In principle, that would reduce the need to test some chemicals contained within drugs, pesticides, food additives or other consumer products on animals. Instead, scientists would be able to screen a chemical’s molecular structure using customised computer software - a transition they characterise as one from testing “in vivo” (within the living) to “in silico” (on computers).

To prove the point, the new research, reported in the journal Chemical Research in Toxicology, mapped the pathways by which several well-known compounds, such as paracetamol, cause toxic outcomes. By tracing these back to the molecular initiating event, the team were able to identify chemical characteristics, that were present in other molecules exhibiting the same toxicities.

Tim Allen, a PhD researcher in chemistry at St John’s College, University of Cambridge, and the paper’s first author, said: “We are at the very early stages of building predictive tools for different molecules, and this work provides a proof-of-concept foundation for doing much more.”

“At the moment, there is sometimes no alternative to testing some new chemicals on animals to establish whether or not they are going to be safe for human use. Computer modelling is now finally starting to catch up. Eventually, if we can map the adverse outcome pathways of numerous molecules in the way that we have here, we will be able to develop models which mean you don’t have to administer products in vivo and then look for a reaction to establish whether or not they are safe.”

Ultimately, the researchers hope to develop a complete “MIE Atlas”, capturing data about a large number of molecules and their interactions with the body. Existing scientific knowledge of molecular initiating events is patchy and far from complete.

An initiating event can take on a number of forms. For example, a molecule from an ingested drug may bind to a certain protein within an organ, leading to a series of adverse effects. Equally, it may inhibit the production of a specific enzyme that the body would normally produce.

What each event has in common is that a link is established between a certain characteristic feature of the molecule in question - such as its size, shape, or acidity level - and a feature of human biology. “In many ways it represents the boundary between chemistry and biology,” Allen said. “If we can understand the chemistry of existing molecules and how they interact with the body, then we will be able to make predictions about new products and their likely toxicity based on similar characteristics.”

To test the theory, the Cambridge research team examined the pathway by which acetaminophen - better known as paracetamol - causes acute liver failure as a result of an overdose. From a survey of existing scientific literature on this subject, they were able to extrapolate the initiating event, its molecular basis, and accurately identify the likely toxicity of other molecules with a similar characteristic.

The molecular initiating event which leads to paracetamol becoming toxic is an oxidation process which happens when it enters the liver. This produces a toxic molecule called NAPQI, which is normally detoxified relatively quickly. When a person overdoses, however, too much NAPQI is produced, and this reduces the body’s normal defences and can ultimately result in liver failure.

The study identified that the key to this oxidation process is a feature of a paracetamol molecule’s structure known as the “para-aminophenol” fragment, a feature at the centre of the molecule without which this toxicity would not be observed.

Having established this, the researchers looked for similar structures in other substances, to see if they resulted in the same toxicity. The hypothesis proved to be correct in two cases - the compound Phenacetin, a now disused pain relief drug, and Amodiaquine, an anti-malarial agent. Both compounds had the same fragment within their structure, and because of this, both had the same toxic implications for the body when taken in certain quantities.

The research paper also speculates that better knowledge of Molecular Initiating Events could enable scientists to predict not only adverse, but also positive, outcomes which may emanate from the uptake of certain chemical compounds into the human body. The aim of the work, however, is firmly based in toxicology – to build on current in silico approaches, and increase understanding of what goes on during a toxic response.

“The approach seems strong and well-rooted in theory, and the aim of this paper is really to gain more feedback on the merits of widening out this type of research,” Allen said. “What we have done so far represents a tiny fraction of toxicological and chemical space. Further work will allow our approach to become a much more widely-used and valuable tool for toxicologists.”

Boeing is the world’s largest aerospace company, producing tens of billions of dollars-worth of commercial jets and defence systems for customers around the world. DIAL is the IfM’s Distributed Information and Automation Laboratory, which specialises in using data more intelligently within factories and across the supply chain to develop more dynamic services and smarter products. Over the last nine years, DIAL has worked with Boeing on six major projects addressing three key challenges: how to manage supply chains more effectively, how to improve resilience and how to make airports more efficient. While these projects have addressed various aspects of Boeing’s business they have one important thing in common – a commitment to applying research to solve real-world problems. For Boeing, funding research is all about achieving competitive advantage.

For DIAL, it is all about finding solutions which have a significant – and widely applicable – industrial benefit. These complementary aspirations underpin the relationship between DIAL and Boeing and is neatly illustrated by two of their current projects: ALADDIN (Achieving Leveraged Advantage from Distributed Information) and DisTAL (or Disruption Tolerant Automated Lean Factories).
Letting the genie out of the bottle: making data smart

ALADDIN is a collaboration with Boeing’s Research & Technology team, looking at how the vast amounts of data Boeing deals with on a daily basis can be turned into a more valuable commodity for the business. Every time a Boeing 787 takes off it generates roughly half a terabyte of data. While some of it will be critical to the operation, much of it is not.

ALADDIN is particularly interested in the data associated with procurement which suffers from high levels of inconsistency, with the same part often described in a multitude of different ways by Boeing’s many hundreds of suppliers. In a fast-paced manufacturing environment, this inconsistency has the potential to cause problems with shortages and disruptions which can only be averted by labour intensive (and, therefore, costly) data management processes. But this could be avoided altogether if the data were intelligent enough to ‘have organic awareness of its own value’ and be able to predict potential problems. The associated benefit would be that the many people who currently spend their time sifting through and improving data could be deployed on more strategically useful tasks.

Bill Krechel, Technical Lead Engineer in Production System Technology for Boeing Research & Technology, explained: “ALADDIN represents a paradigm shift for us at Boeing: with the completely new and innovative industrial data management ideas and technologies developed by DIAL, many of our day-to-day data issues – which disrupt our operational staff – will be a thing of the past.”

While this project is tackling what Bill describes as a ‘Cambridge-hard’ problem it is by no means a theoretical or speculative exercise. Every project that the Boeing Research & Technology team works on needs to have operational relevance to internal customers who are actively involved in defining and shaping the research output so that the resultant technology can transition into the applicable production environment. For ALADDIN, it is Boeing Defence UK and Boeing Commercial Airplanes who are supporting the project and anticipating usable results. As Philip Woodall, Senior Research Associate in DIAL and lead researcher on ALADDIN, emphasised: “At the end of the project the Cambridge team will be handing over working applications using real datasets, not research prototypes.”
The right amount of resilience

Like ALADDIN, the DisTAL project runs under the auspices of Boeing’s research team but also involves a direct collaboration with Boeing’s Interiors Responsibility Center (IRC) in Everett, Washington where the interiors of all models of Boeing aircraft are designed and built. One of the challenges the IRC faces is that the interiors of planes are highly customised, with each of Boeing’s airline customers having its own branding, and often with different branding for different routes. And the specification of interiors is becoming more and more sophisticated as new technologies emerge and airlines become more attuned to the psychological and physiological effects of flying. The ceiling of the new 787, for example, comes with blue LED lighting to mimic the sky and when the plane is approaching its destination the cabin lights turn from the purples and oranges of a sunrise to yellows, and eventually to white against the blue sky.

These techniques are designed both to soothe passengers during the flight and mitigate some of the effects of jet lag. But, of course, all these developments bring with them new levels of complexity in the production process and the increasing use of specialised composite materials which in the airline industry also need to be strictly controlled to comply with safety regulations.

The IRC factory runs on ‘lean’ manufacturing principles but finds that variability in the composite components can cause disruption to the production line. Alan Thorne, who manages DIAL’s automation laboratory at the IfM, and who, along with Duncan McFarlane, is heading up the DisTAL project, explained: “Lots of companies implement lean but when you ‘lean’ a process and have product variability you can become very vulnerable to disruption. The trick is to find the right balance between being lean and being resilient.”

Craig Battles, Boeing’s Technical Fellow of Robotics and Automation agrees: “Efficient manufacturing operations are really a matter of balance. I believe the IfM can develop formal methods to help us determine those balance points where small additions of capacity or inventory will make our operations much more resilient to disruptions.”

In the first year of the DisTAL project, Duncan and Alan spent a lot of time in Seattle to understand first-hand the types of disruption the factory was experiencing and their underlying causes. They used their well-established disruption analysis tools to pinpoint the issues and identify which products and processes were causing problems. They brought these findings back to Cambridge in order to design and structure the next phase of the research process, looking at more intelligent production control systems that will tolerate higher levels of product variability and which can also dynamically alter the balance between lean and resilient operations to cope with disruptions.

This phase of the research is now underway and has informed recent developments to DIAL’s automation laboratory. The lab has been reconfigured to provide an industrial strength test-bed for DisTAL which will allow the team to explore and evaluate their new production control concepts using parts they have produced in the lab with different quality defects.

From the IfM’s perspective, one of the additional benefits of its work with Boeing is that it gives the undergraduate MET (Manufacturing Engineering Tripos) students an opportunity to get some invaluable hands-on experience, working on very real and very challenging industrial problems. There are currently two student projects tackling aspects of the DisTAL project, one of them concerned with offline programming of robots and the other with understanding the costs of reconfiguring production control code.

With ALADDIN getting ready to start the process of ‘transitioning’ the research results to Boeing and with DisTAL research well underway, DIAL is already gearing up for two new projects. The first brings together some of the concepts underpinning ALADDIN and DisTAL by using intelligent data to predict when suppliers will fail to deliver on time so that Boeing can take pre-emptive steps to avoid potential disruption. The other is looking at the future of airport operations and how they can address the challenges posed by ever increasing numbers of flights and the demand for more bespoke services when airports’ capacity is constrained and their service providers are leaner than ever.

For McFarlane the benefits of the collaboration are clear: “Working with Boeing is challenging yet simple. Their support for research, operations and administration makes setting up, executing and transitioning research programmes a most rewarding process.”

This article originally appeared in the Institute for Manufacturing Review.

Reflecting on the role of an editor in his introduction to the Carcanet Press-published New Poetries V, the poet Michael Schmidt observed: “Where there are schools they look out for the truants.” Starting on Saturday 22 November, a week of free events will celebrate the creative truancy that characterises some of the best poetry in Cambridge.

Co-organised by Schmidt, a writer in residence at St John’s College, John Wells of the University Library, and Vahni Capildeo, the new Judith E. Wilson Creative Writing fellow, and involving numerous other Colleges as well as the University Library, the “Cambridge Poetry Collection”, will feature readings by some of the leading poets connected with Cambridge at the moment.

They include John James, Clive Wilmer, Mark Ford, Simon Jarvis and the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. In addition, there will be opportunities to hear work by new poets, many of whom are current students or staff members at the University. The aim is to enable as many people as possible to enjoy a celebration of the current poetry scene in the University city, while also encouraging dialogue and discussion between its constituent parts. It will also draw attention to the University Library’s expanding archive of Cambridge poets’ manuscripts.

Cambridge has been a nerve centre for innovative poetry since before the days when Edmund Spenser and Christopher Marlowe studied there. For some long-standing poetry-lovers, the “Cambridge Poetry Collection” may also recall the ambitious biennial international Cambridge Poetry Festivals that ran from 1975 to 1985.

Described by the Guardian when it started as “a poetry festival of vast proportions”, the series attracted major names from all over the world. Readings and debates were broadcast by the BBC, and some recordings can still be found in the British Library’s National Sound Archive.

Since the end of that festival’s run, the Cambridge poetry scene has appeared less attentive to a general readership. Hostile critics portray it as dominated by a ‘Cambridge School’. At the same time, however, the group has for years provided a radical challenge to what can seem a lacklustre mainstream mired in convention and complacency. 

The organisers of the new Cambridge Poetry Collection hope to provide stages for some of the best poets, old and new, that the city and its universities have to offer. “Poetry in Cambridge is rich and various. There’s no lack of exciting new work,” Schmidt said. “What’s strange is that often the chance to hear locally-based poets will happen at a festival somewhere else. It will be good to hear Cambridge poetry here again in all its diversity.”

“Some Cambridge writers are formally experimental. Demanding poetry is rewarding poetry – and has been since the time of Spenser. The poet-scholar is no stranger to our tradition and should be celebrated; there is no rule that says the mainstream is not able to flow up hill as well as down! A lot of ‘popular’ poetry is self-limiting and repetitive, obedient to the fashions and plausibilities of the day. You don’t need to belong to a school to see this.”

Compared with the grand international scale of its predecessor - which Schmidt remembers as “without doubt the most exciting poetry festivals I’ve ever attended, and the definitive festivals of their kind” – the Cambridge Poetry Collection is being run on a shoestring. The University Library will host some of the main events while leading lights of the poetry scene around Cambridge have been invited to organise others in their own Colleges. Poets taking part have waived performance fees and venues have been found in Murray Edwards, St John’s, Trinity, Gonville and Caius, Corpus Christi, Fitzwilliam and Jesus Colleges.

The events include a reading by Clive Wilmer of his sequence, Urban Pastorals, the launch of Selected Poems by the 20th-century English poet Nicholas Moore, a debate on “the work of the editor”, and readings by a range of major working poets who are either currently active in Cambridge, or alumni of the University.

The founder of the original Cambridge Poetry Festival, Richard Berengarten, will introduce a showcase of new Cambridge Poets at Corpus Christi College on 25 November. Elsewhere Professor Simon Jarvis, whose work Night Office has been described as “an extraordinary meditation across 224 pages exploring the invisible life of the soul” will appear at the same reading as the London-based Mark Ford, and Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, now Master of Magdalene College and himself a noted poet and translator of poetry. St John’s poet Dan Burt will be reading at Trinity with the legendary Anne Stevenson, and the doyenne of poets, poetry biographers and translators Elaine Feinstein will be joined by Angela Leighton and the award-winning Sean Borodale at St John’s.

“When I arrived at Cambridge two years ago I got to know some of the poets associated with the so-called ‘Cambridge School’. I realised then what Cambridge can do for emerging writers and for readers, how various and challenging the microcosm is, so much more engaging than the bland macrocosm.” Schmidt added. “It seems natural for many of the most vigorous elements in this poetry world to be presented if not together, at least adjacent, and in the same week.”

The Cambridge Poetry Collection will run from Saturday 22 November until Friday 28 November, with free events open to all throughout. Full details can be found at the dedicated website here.

A Victorian website is an impossibility. But reality hasn’t deterred Rhys Morgan and Robert West – a ‘dashing duo’ of Victorian magic-makers – from conjuring up an online presence that teases visitors with a mix of misinformation and promotional puffs for forthcoming events.

There's a rare chance to see Morgan and West live in Cambridge tonight when they appear at the Mong Hall, Sidney Sussex College. The magicians’ code is one of professional secrecy. But, in a post-show discussion, the cane-twirling twosome may be tempted to answer questions about their unusual choice of career.

What does it take to hold a roomful of people in thrall, why do we enjoy being duped and deceived, why is surprise such a powerful ingredient in performance?  Their replies will depend on how much people want to know.

Morgan and West are time-travelling tricksters with curly moustaches and fancy hats. Their show is a delightful fabrication of tall tales, mischief-making and rip-roaring audience participation.  Performances at festivals around the country have received glowing accolades.

According to their online biographies, Morgan and West ‘popped into being’ in 1865. They first met at Oxford (‘that most upholstered seat of learning’) where they discovered a shared love of waistcoats and card tricks. Bored by lectures, they began learning to juggle. They dropped teacups, wrestled with giant silk handkerchiefs, and decided not to breed white rabbits.

No prizes for pointing out that these clever chaps certainly weren’t born in 1865, the year that saw the publication of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. But perhaps they did meet at Oxford where they may even have become disenchanted with laboratory experiments and distracted by the lure of make-believe.  

Morgan and West are coming to Cambridge at the invitation of historian of science Dr Scott Anthony who co-runs the Public History seminar series. He has organised the Michaelmas term’s final meeting to be a spectacular contribution to a programme that seeks to look at history from unlikely, and sometimes irreverent, viewpoints.

Anthony said: “The seminar starts from the premise that ‘history’ is something done mostly by people not employed in universities, and that history is not just about writing essays but feeds into all kinds of creative and socially transformative activity. The interconnections between the history of science and the history of magic are fascinating, but in a more general sense the visit of Morgan and West reminds us that the practice of history is also about layers of perception and ways of knowing."

Guest speakers have ranged from football journalists and conspiracy theorists to film producers and museum curators. Two weeks ago, the audience was treated to a talk by the archivist of the fabled London store, Fortnum & Mason, best known for speciality teas and luxury hampers.

As time-travelling Victorian magicians, Morgan and West are experts in the age-old arts of distraction, persuasion and deception. Their performance is inspired by working with the props and trappings of the Victorian era or, at least, the Victorian era as the public perceives it.

Historical accuracy is a vital aspect of their shows: they spend countless hours researching new tricks to make sure that all the details in the show are true to the period. A heated debate about the validity of elastic bands was resolved by a spot of detective work: they were first patented in the mid-19^th century and, on that basis, got the all-clear to make an appearance in the act.

The last few years have seen growing academic interest in magic, its history as a practice that depends on artful performance, and its historic links with alchemy and thus with science. Both magic and science rely on demonstrations, established codes of conduct, and a willingness on the part of audiences to think ‘outside the box’ – a term borrowed from the 9-dot puzzle well known to magicians.

Psychologist Dr Peter Lamont, from the University of Edinburgh, has emerged as an authority on the history, theory and performance of magic. A practicing magician, Lamont argues against the idea that there is a ‘science of magic’.

In a paper published in 2010, he wrote: “What any experienced magician understands is that the performance of magic involves an endless range of physical and psychological techniques…. However we attempt to understand magic performance, it remains a social phenomenon that is located within, and depends on, the particular circumstances of the performance environment.”

Lamont went on to suggest that magic is among the resources on which science can draw in seeking to understand psychological processes, such as ‘inattentional blindness’ in which observers miss observable events - for example, when one coin is swapped for another right in the centre of their gaze. 

As entertainers, Morgan and West are wary of intellectualising the craft of magic.  Instead, they are keen to stress that they have an unwritten contract with their audience: they provide the magic and the audience looks forward to being astonished.

Tonight’s post-show discussion will be led by eminent historian of science Professor Jim Secord. Secord is Director of the Darwin Correspondence Project and author of a number of books looking at the emergence of modern science in the 19^th century, most recently Visions of Science: Books and readers at the dawn of the Victorian age.

‘The greatest trick ever pulled: performing the history of magic’ takes place at tonight (Wednesday, 19 November) 5-6pm at the Mong Hall, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. All welcome. No need to book. Enquiries to Scott Anthony sma57@cam.ac.uk.

When a group of experimental psychologists moved into their new lab space in Cambridge earlier this year, they took a somewhat unconventional approach to refurbishing their tea room: they had the walls tiled with the Café Wall Illusion.

The illusion, so-named after it was spotted on the wall of a Bristol café in the 1970s, is a much-debated geometrical trick of the eye and brain in which perfectly parallel lines of black and white tiles appear wedge-shaped and sloped.

It’s also an excellent demonstration of how the brain interprets the world in a way that moves beyond what the input is from the eye, as one of the experimental psychologists, Professor Zoe Kourtzi, explained. “In interpreting the world around us, our brains are challenged by a plethora of information. The brain is thought to integrate information from multiple sources and solve the puzzle of perception by taking into account not only the signals registered by the sensory organs but also their context in space and time.

“In the Café Wall Illusion, the brain takes into account the surrounding tiles, but it also relies on our previous knowledge acquired through training and experience when interpreting a new situation.”

From the day we are born, neurons in the brain start to make connections that combine what we can see, hear, taste, touch and smell with our experiences and memories. Neuroscientists refer to the brain’s ‘plasticity’ in explaining this ability to restructure and learn new things, continually building on previous patterns of neuronal interactions.

To unravel the mechanisms that underlie how brains learn, Kourtzi’s team is looking at how brains recognise objects in a cluttered scene. “This aspect is vital for successful interactions in our complex environments,” she explained. “It’s how we recognise a face in a crowd or a landmark during navigation.”

Visual perception is also highly trainable. The brain can use previous experience of similar cues to be quicker at identifying the image from the ‘noise’ – the proverbial needle from the haystack.

But although neuroscientists recognise that this type of brain plasticity is fundamental to our ability to cope with continually changing settings at home, school, work and play, little is known about how we can stimulate our brain to enhance this learning process, right across the life span.

“The process of ‘learning to learn’ is at the core of flexible human behaviours,” explained Kourtzi. “It underpins how children acquire literacy and numeracy, and how adults develop work-related skills later in life.”

One of the important determinants her team has discovered is that being able to multi-task is better than being able to memorise.

“The faster learners are those who can attend to multiple things at the same time and recruit areas of the brain that are involved in attention,” she explained. “Those who are slower at learning try to memorise, as we can see from greater activity in the parts of the brain connected with memory.”

“So, in fact, being able to do the sort of multi-tasking required when interacting in busy environments or playing video games – which requires the processing of multiple streams of information – can improve your ability to learn.”

She also finds that age doesn’t matter: “what seems to matter is your strategy in life – so if older people have really good attentive abilities they can learn as fast as younger people.”

This has important implications for an ageing society. In the UK, there are now more people over State Pension age than there are children. The UK’s Office for National Statistics predicts that, by 2020, people over 50 will make up almost a third of the workforce and almost half of the adult population. The average life expectancy for a man in the UK will have risen from 65 years in 1951 to 91 years by 2050. Older age has become an increasingly active phase of people’s lives, one in which re-training and cognitive resilience is increasingly sought after.

Kourtzi and colleagues are using functional magnetic resonance imaging to detect when areas of the brain are activated in response to a sensory input and how these circuits change with learning and experience. While at the University of Birmingham, she showed that the visual recognition abilities of young and older adults can be enhanced by training, but that the different age groups use different neural circuits to do this.

Young adults use anterior brain centres that are often used in perceptual decisions, where sensory information is evaluated for a decision to be made; older adults, by contrast, use the posterior part of the brain, which is in charge of the ability to attend and select a target from irrelevant clutter. “The clear implication of this is that training programmes need to be geared for age,” said Kourtzi.

Crucially, what she also observed is that some people benefit from training more than others: “although it’s well known that practice makes perfect, some people are better at learning and may benefit more from particular interventions than others. But to determine how and why, we need to go beyond biological factors, like cognition or genetics, to look at social factors: what is it about the way a particular individual has learned to approach learning in their social setting that might affect their ability to learn?”

This multidisciplinary approach to understanding learning lies at the heart of her work. She leads the European-Union-funded Adaptive Brain Computations project, which brings together behavioural scientists, computer scientists, pharmacologists and neuroscientists across eight European universities, plus industrial partners, to understand and test how learning happens.

“In our work, there’s a strong element of translating our findings into practical applications, so creating training programmes that are age appropriate is our ultimate goal,” she added.

“The reason we like the Café Wall Illusion so much is because tricks of visual perception tell us that the brain can see things in a different way to the input. How the brain does this is influenced by context, just as the way we interpret our environment is influenced by learning and previous experience.”

Inset image: Café Wall Illusion, Tony Kerr on Flickr

New research on a number of Canadian lakes show that historical acid deposits as a result of industry have greatly reduced calcium levels in the water - dramatically impacting populations of calcium-rich plankton such as Daphnia water fleas that dominate these ecosystems.

Falling calcium levels mean Daphnia cannot get the nutrients they need to survive and reproduce, and are consequently consuming less food and becoming more susceptible to predators, leaving more algae for other organisms to feed on.

This has left a small jelly-clad organism called Holopedium to take advantage. Holopedium are plankton competitors of the Daphnia that use less calcium, as well as having a jelly coat that affords them greater protection from predators.

Lakes across eastern Canada have seen Holopedium populations explode in the last thirty years; particularly in lakes in the province of Ontario that have seen a recent Eurasian invasion of the spiny water flea - which also favours hunting Daphnia, affording Holopedium even more room in these ecosystems to expand.

Researchers say the average population of these small invertebrate jellies in many Ontario lakes doubled between the mid-1980s and the mid-2000s. They warn that the increasing ‘jellification’ of Canada’s lakes will prevent vital nutrients being passed up the food chain to fish stocks, as well as clogging filtration systems that help the lakes contribute drinking water to many residents in these areas.

The team used data from monthly surveys of lakes that recorded water chemistry and plankton populations for over 30 years, and used the latest statistical techniques to map all the cause-and-effect relationships in these ecosystems to determine that falling water calcium was causing the jelly boom. The results are published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

“As calcium declines, the increasing concentrations of jelly in the middle of these lakes will reduce energy and nutrient transport right across the food chain, and will likely impede the withdrawal of lake water for residential, municipal and industrial uses,” said study co-author Dr Andrew Tanentzap, from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Plant Sciences.

“In Ontario, 20% of government-monitored drinking water systems now come from landscapes containing lakes with depleted calcium concentrations that favour Holopedium, and this is only set to increase.” 

Historically, a lot of acid was deposited throughout the northern hemisphere due to industrialisation. The acid displaced calcium from soil, says Tanentzap. Over a long period, this process pushed all the calcium out of drainage areas that feed these lakes, causing dramatic declines in the water calcium levels.   

“Pollution control may have stopped acid deposits in the landscape, but it’s only now that we are discovering the damage wasn’t entirely reversed,” he said.

Daphniids have a heavily calcified exoskeleton, so need much higher levels of calcium and phosphorous. In low calcium water, Daphnia are much more vulnerable to at least one key predator - the larval phantom midge, or Chaoborus - as their ability to produce defences such as larger bodies, stronger exoskeletons and projecting neck teeth is compromised. Additionally, the Daphniids phosphorous requirements mean they need to eat a lot more.

Holopedium, however, have no exoskeleton, and require only half the phosphorous of Daphnia and just one-tenth the amount of calcium, and the jelly capsule in which Holopedium are contained largely protects them from the predators that live on plankton of this size.

Calcium loss isn’t the only bad news for Daphniids. The team suggest that climate change is causing oxygen decline deep in the lakes, creating better conditions and increasing populations of larval midges - the main predator of Daphnia.  

The team also investigated how far back the jellification of these lakes began. By analysing sediment cores and fossil records, they show that Holopedium have been steadily increasing ever since around 1850 - a time of early industrialisation and consequent acid deposit increases. But the process really gathered pace from the 1980s onwards.   

“It may take thousands of years to return to historic lake water calcium concentrations solely from natural weathering of surrounding watersheds,” said Tanentzap.

“In the meanwhile, while we’ve stopped acid rain and improved the pH of many of these lakes, we cannot claim complete recovery from acidification.  Instead, we many have pushed these lakes into an entirely new ecological state.”

In a study published today in the journal Science, the researchers in the UK, Vietnam, The Netherlands and Australia, led by the University of Cambridge, describe how an immunological phenomenon they refer to as a ‘back boost’ suggests that it may be better to pre-emptively vaccinate against likely future strains than to use a strain already circulating in the human population.

Influenza is a notoriously difficult virus against which to vaccinate. There are many different strains circulating – both in human and animal populations – and these strains themselves evolve rapidly. Yet manufacturers, who need to produce around 350 million doses ahead of the annual ‘flu season’, must know which strain to put in the vaccine months in advance – during which time the circulating viruses can evolve again.

Scientists at the World Health Organisation (WHO) meet each February to select which strain to use in vaccine development. Due to the complexity of human immune responses, this is decided largely through analysis of immune responses in ferrets to infer which strain best matches those currently circulating. However, vaccination campaigns for the following winter flu season usually start in October, by which time the virus may have evolved such that the effectiveness of the vaccine match is reduced.

“It’s a real challenge: the WHO selects a strain of flu using the best information available but is faced with the possibility that the virus will evolve before the flu season,” explains Dr Judy Fonville, one of the primary authors on the paper and a member of WHO Collaborating Centre for Modelling, Evolution and Control of Emerging Infectious Diseases at the University of Cambridge. “Even if it does, though, it’s worth remembering that the flu vaccine still offers much greater protection than having no jab. We’re looking for ways to make an important vaccine even more effective.”

According to the WHO, seasonal influenza causes between 3 and 5 million cases of severe illness each year worldwide, up to 500,000 deaths, as well as significant economic impact. Vaccination policies vary per country, but are typically recommended for those at risk of serious complications, such as pregnant women and the elderly. The seasonal flu vaccine has been described as one of the most cost-effective measures of disease prevention, and vaccination therefore has a large health economic benefit. Currently 350 million people partake in annual vaccination programmes. Yet there is room for improvement.

After gathering an extensive amount of immunological data, the team modelled the antibody response to vaccination and infection using a newly developed computer-based method to create an individual’s ‘antibody landscape’. This landscape visualises an individual’s distinct immune profile like a three dimensional landscape with mountains in areas of immune memory and valleys in unprotected areas. The technique enables a much greater understanding of how our immune system responds to pathogens such as flu that evolve and re-infect us.

A key finding from the work is that upon infection, a response is seen not just to the infecting influenza strain, but to all the strains that an individual has encountered in the past. It is this broad recall of immunity, that they term the ‘back-boost’, that is the basis for the proposed vaccine improvement.

Dr Sam Wilks, one of the primary authors, explains: “Crucially, when the vaccine strain is updated pre-emptively, we see that it still stimulates better protection against future viruses yet this comes at no cost to the protection generated against currently circulating ones.

“Faced with uncertainty about how and when the flu virus might evolve, it’s better to gamble than to be conservative: if you update early, you still stimulate protection against current strains – much worse is if you update too late. Rather than trying to play ‘catch-up’, it’s better to anticipate and prepare for the likely next step of influenza evolution – and there is no penalty for doing it too soon.”

Professor Derek Smith, also from Cambridge, adds why this may lead to improved vaccines in a relatively short timeframe: “The beauty of this approach is that it would not require any change to the current manufacturing process. From the point that the new strain has been selected through to an individual receiving their shot, the steps will be exactly the same. The only difference would be greater protection for the recipient.”

The team is now combining this research with their other work on predicting the way in which the virus will evolve, and plan to combine these two major pieces of work in prospective clinical trials.

The international collaboration included researchers from: the Erasmus Medical Center, the Netherlands; the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit & Wellcome Trust Major Overseas Programme and the National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology, Vietnam; and the WHO Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza at the Victorian Infectious Diseases Reference Laboratory in Melbourne. Its principal funders were the Wellcome Trust and the US National Institutes of Health Centers of Excellence for Influenza Research and Surveillance (CEIRS).

Reference
Fonville, JM et al. Antibody landscapes after influenza virus infection or vaccination. Science; 20 Nov 2014

A team of researchers from the UK, USA, Germany and China have discovered an ancient, deep canyon buried along the Yarlung Tsangpo River in south Tibet, north of the eastern end of the Himalaya. The geologists say that the ancient canyon—hundreds of metres deep in places—effectively rules out a popular model used to explain how the massive and picturesque gorges of the Himalaya became so steep, so fast.

“I was extremely surprised when my colleagues, Jing Liu and Dirk Scherler, showed me the evidence for this canyon in southern Tibet,” says Jean-Philippe Avouac of Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences, who conducted the research while at Caltech. “When I first saw the data, I said, ‘Wow!’ It was amazing to see that the river once cut quite deeply into the Tibetan Plateau because it does not today. That was a big discovery, in my opinion.”

Geologists like Avouac and his colleagues, who are interested in tectonics, the study of the earth's surface and the way it changes, can use tools such as GPS and seismology to study crustal deformation that is taking place today. But if they are interested in studying changes that occurred millions of years ago, such tools are no longer useful because the activity has already happened. In those cases, rivers become a main source of information because they leave behind geomorphic signatures that geologists can interrogate to learn about the way those rivers once interacted with the land—helping them to pin down when the land changed and by how much, for example.

“In tectonics, we are always trying to use rivers to say something about uplift,” Avouac says. “In this case, we used a paleocanyon that was carved by a river. It's a nice example where by recovering the geometry of the bottom of the canyon, we were able to say how much the range has moved up and when it started moving.”

The team reports their findings in the current issue of Science Express.

Last year, civil engineers from the China Earthquake Administration collected cores by drilling into the valley floor at five locations along the Yarlung Tsangpo River, the data from which suggested the presence of a paleocanyon.

The researchers analysed the core data and found that at several locations there were sedimentary conglomerates, rounded gravel and larger rocks cemented together, that are associated with flowing rivers, until a depth of 800 metres or so, at which point the record clearly indicated bedrock. This suggested that the river once carved deeply into the plateau.

To establish when the river switched from incising bedrock to depositing sediments, they measured two isotopes, beryllium-10 and aluminum-26, in the lowest sediment layer. The isotopes are produced when rocks and sediment are exposed to cosmic rays at the surface and decay at different rates once buried, and so allowed the geologists to determine that the paleocanyon started to fill with sediment about 2.5 billion years ago.

The researchers’ reconstruction of the former valley floor showed that the slope of the river once increased gradually from the Gangetic Plain to the Tibetan Plateau, with no sudden changes, or knickpoints. Today, the river, like most others in the area, has a steep knickpoint where it meets the Himalaya, at a place known as the Namche Barwa massif. There, the uplift of the mountains is extremely rapid (on the order of 1 centimetre per year, whereas in other areas 5 millimetres per year is more typical) and the river drops by 2 kilometres in elevation as it flows through the famous Tsangpo Gorge, known by some as the Yarlung Tsangpo Grand Canyon because it is so deep and long.

Combining the depth and age of the paleocanyon with the geometry of the valley, the geologists surmised that the river existed in this location prior to about 3 million years ago, but at that time, it was not affected by the Himalaya. However, as the Indian and Eurasian plates continued to collide and the mountain range purveyed northward, it began impinging on the river. Suddenly, about 2.5 million years ago, a rapidly uplifting section of the mountain range got in the river's way, damming it, and the canyon subsequently filled with sediment.

“This is the time when the Namche Barwa massif started to rise, and the gorge developed,” says co-author Dirk Scherler, now at the GFZ German Research Center for Geosciences in Potsdam, Germany.

That picture of the river and the Tibetan Plateau, which involves the river incising deeply into the plateau billions of years ago, differs quite a bit from the typically accepted geologic vision. Typically, geologists believe that when rivers start to incise into a plateau, they eat at the edges, slowly making their way into the plateau over time.

However, the rivers flowing across the Himalaya all have strong knickpoints and have not incised much at all into the Tibetan plateau. Therefore, the thought has been that the rapid uplift of the Himalaya has pushed the rivers back, effectively pinning them, so that they have not been able to make their way into the plateau. But that explanation does not work with the newly discovered paleocanyon.

The team’s new hypothesis also rules out a model that has been around for about 15 years, called tectonic aneurysm, which suggests that the rapid uplift seen at the Namche Barwa massif was triggered by intense river incision. In tectonic aneurysm, a river cuts down through the earth's crust so fast that it causes the crust to heat up, making a nearby mountain range weaker and facilitating uplift.

The model is popular among geologists, and indeed, Avouac himself published a modelling paper in 1996 that showed the viability of the mechanism. “But now we have discovered that the river was able to cut into the plateau way before the uplift happened,” Avouac says, “and this shows that the tectonic aneurysm model was actually not at work here. The rapid uplift is not a response to river incision.”

The work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the State Key Laboratory for Earthquake Dynamics, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Adapted from Caltech press release.

Archaeological discoveries from the ‘roof of the world’ on the Tibetan Plateau indicate that from 3,600 years ago, crop growing and the raising of livestock was taking place year-round at hitherto unprecedented altitudes.

The findings, published today in Science, demonstrate that across 53 archaeological sites spanning 800 miles, there is evidence of sustained farming and human habitation between 2,500 metres above sea level (8,200ft) and 3,400 metres (11,154ft).

Evidence of an intermittent human presence on the Tibetan Plateau has been dated to at least 20,000 years ago, with the first semi-permanent villages established only 5,200 years ago. The presence of crops and livestock at the altitudes discovered by researchers indicates a more sustained human presence than is needed to merely hunt game at such heights.

Professor Martin Jones, from the Division of Archaeology, and one of the lead researchers on the project, said: “Until now, when and how humans started to live and farm at such extraordinary heights has remained an open question. Our understanding of sustained habitation above 2-3,000m on the Tibetan Plateau has to date been hampered by the scarcity of archaeological data available.

“But our findings show that not only did these farmer-herders conquer unheard of heights in terms of raising livestock and growing crops like barley and millet, but that human expansion into the higher, colder altitudes took place as the continental temperatures were becoming colder.

“Year-round survival at these altitudes must have led to some very challenging conditions indeed – and this poses further, interesting questions for researchers about the adaptation of humans, livestock and crops to life at such dizzying heights.”

Professor Jones hopes more work will now be undertaken to look at genetic resistance in humans to altitude sickness, and genetic response in crop plants in relation to attributes such as grain vernalisation, flowering time response and ultraviolet radiation tolerance – as well as research into the genetic and ethnic identity of the human communities themselves.

Research on the Tibetan Plateau has also raised interesting questions about the timing and introduction of Western crops such as barley and wheat – staples of the so-called ‘Fertile Crescent’. From 4,000-3,600 years ago, this meeting of east and west led to the joining or displacement of traditional North Chinese crops of broomcorn and foxtail millet. The importation of Western cereals enabled human communities to adapt to the harsher conditions of higher altitudes in the Plateau.

In order to ascertain during what period and at what altitude sustained food produced first enabled an enduring human presence, the research group collected artefacts, animal bones and plant remains from 53 sites across the late Yangshao, Majiayao, Qiija, Xindian, Kayue and Nuomuhong cultures.

Cereal grains (foxtail millet, broomcorn millet, barley and wheat) were identified at all 53 sites and animal bones and teeth (from sheep, cattle and pig) were discovered at ten sites. Of the 53 sites, an earlier group (dating from 5,200-3,600 years ago) reached a maximum elevation of 2,527m while a later group of 29 sites (dating from 3,600-2,300 years ago) approached 3,400m in altitude.

Professor Jones believes the Tibetan Plateau research could have wider and further-reaching implications for today’s world in terms of global food security and the possibilities of rebalancing the ‘global diet’; at present heavily, and perhaps unsustainably, swayed in favour of the big three crops of rice, wheat and maize.

He said: “Our current knowledge of agricultural foods emphasises a relatively small number of crops growing in the intensively managed lowlands. The more we learn about the rich ecology of past and present societies, and the wider range of crops they raised in the world’s more challenging environments, the more options we will have for thinking through food security issues in the future.”

In total, Cambridge Digital Library (http://bit.ly/1y7q4e1) is releasing more than 12,000 hi-res images, alongside transcriptions and detailed notes as a result of an international collaboration with the Darwin Manuscript Project, based at the American Museum of Natural History. These papers chart the evolution of Darwin’s journey, from early theoretical reflections while on board HMS Beagle, to the publication of On the Origin of Species – 155 years ago today.

The launch of Darwin’s papers also marks the end of the first phase of funding for Cambridge’s Digital Library, launched to worldwide acclaim in 2011 with the publication of Isaac Newton’s scientific archive. Initial £1.5m funding for the Digital Library was provided by the Polonsky Foundation. Funding for the digitisation and transcription of the Origin papers was provided by the US National Endowment for the Humanities and National Science Foundation.

Cambridge University Library holds almost the entire collection of Darwin’s working scientific papers and the ones being released today are the most important for understanding the development of his evolutionary theory. They are being published simultaneously on the Cambridge Digital Library and Darwin Manuscripts Project websites, with a further release planned for June 2015, covering the notes and drafts of his eight post-Origin books.

None of the Darwin documents available from today have hitherto been digitised to the present high standard of full colour and high resolution, and many have never been transcribed or edited before now.

Professor David Kohn, Director of the Darwin Manuscripts Project, said: “These documents truly constitute the surviving seedbed of the Origin. In them, Darwin hammered out natural selection and the structure of concepts he used to support natural selection. It was here also that he developed his evolutionary narrative and where he experimented privately with arguments and strategies of presentation that he either rejected or that eventually saw the light of day with the Origin’s publication on November 24, 1859.”

The current release includes important documents such as the “Transmutation” and “Metaphysical” notebooks of the 1830s and the 1842 “Pencil Sketch” which sees Darwin’s first use of the term “natural selection”.

It was in Transmutation Notebook B, that Darwin first attempted to formulate a full theory of evolution and it was in Notebooks D and E that natural selection began to take form in late 1838 and early 1839. The further maturation of Darwin’s theory is found in the three experiment notebooks he began in the late 1830s and mid 1850s, and above all in a large mass of previously unpublished loose notes, primarily from the 1830s-1850s, which Darwin organised into portfolios that generally parallel the chapters of the Origin.

Also included will be images of nearly 300 of Darwin's letters with transcriptions and notes provided by the Darwin Correspondence Project, an Anglo-American research group also based in Cambridge University. 

Associate Director, Dr Alison Pearn, said: “The information Darwin received, and the discussions he conducted in these letters played a crucial role in the development of his thinking. It is a really significant step that now for the first time they can be studied and searched in the context of the scientific papers of which they are an integral part.”

Also being published on the Digital Library today is a catalogue of the University Library’s Sanskrit Collections, detailing more than 1,600 manuscripts, 500 of which are fully digitised. Along with important works from the many religious traditions of South Asia, including Vedic, Hindu, Buddhist and Jainist texts – the collection also includes texts on “secular” topics, ranging from works of poetry and drama to treatises on philosophy, mathematics, grammar, astronomy, law, eroticism and medicine.

Anne Jarvis, Cambridge University Librarian, said: “With seed funding from the Polonsky Foundation, we launched the Cambridge Digital Library in 2011 with Isaac Newton’s papers, declaring our ambition of becoming a digital library for the world, opening up our collections to anyone, anywhere on the planet with access to the Internet. Now, after millions of visits to the Digital Library website, we bookend our first phase of development with the launch of Charles Darwin’s papers and our Sanskrit collection. These now sit alongside Newton’s scientific works and a wealth of other material, including the Board of Longitude papers and, most recently, our Siegfried Sassoon archive.”

An international team comprising more researchers than the arthropod has legs (106 researchers) has sequenced the genome of Strigamia maritima, a Northern European centipede, and found that its genome, while less than a tenth the size of a human’s, has around two-thirds the number of genes, distributed across one pair of large chromosomes and seven pairs of tiny ones, including X and Y sex chromosomes. The results are published today in the journal PLOS Biology.

Arthropods are the most species-rich group of animals on Earth. There are four classes of arthropods alive today: insects, crustaceans, chelicerates (which include spiders and scorpions) and myriapods. This latter class, which includes centipedes, is the only class for which no genome has yet been sequenced.

Myriapods arose most likely from marine ancestors that invaded the land more than 400 million years ago. All myriapods have a large number of near-identical segments, most bearing one or two pairs of legs. However, despite their name, centipedes never have a hundred legs. Strigamia maritima, which lives in coastal habitats, can have from 45 to 51 pairs – but the number of pairs is always odd, as it is in all centipedes.

The team found that the centipede genome is more conserved than that of many other arthropods, such as the fruit fly, with less gene loss and scrambling. This suggests that the centipede has evolved slowly from their common ancestor and should allow researchers to draw comparisons between very different animals, which are not obvious when working with fruit flies or other fast evolving insects.  For example, the researchers found parallels in the way that the brain is patterned between centipedes and other very distantly related animals such as marine worms.  Such comparisons will enable scientists to build an overall picture of how genetic changes underlie the diversity of all animals.

“With genomes in hand from each of the four classes of living arthropod, we can now begin to build a picture of the genetic make-up of their common ancestor,” says Dr Frank Jiggins, of the Department of Genetics at the University of Cambridge, one of the researchers involved “For example, by comparing flies and mosquitoes with centipedes, we have shown that the innate immune systems of insects are much older than previously appreciated.”

One of the most surprising findings is that these centipedes appear to have lost the genes encoding all of the known light receptors used by animals, as well as the genes controlling circadian rhythm, the body clock.

“Strigamia live underground and have no eyes, so it is not surprising that many of the genes for light receptors are missing, but they behave as if they are hiding from the light. They must have some alternative way of detecting when they are exposed,” says Professor Michael Akam, Head of the Department of Zoology at Cambridge and one of the lead researchers. “It’s curious, too, that this creature appears to have no body clock – or if it does, it must use a system very different to other animals.”

The centipede’s genome sequence is of more than just scientific interest, argues Professor Akam. “Some of its genes may be of direct use.  All centipedes inject venom to paralyse their prey,” he explains. “Components of venom often make powerful drugs, and the centipede genome will help researchers find these venom genes.”

Reference
Chipman, AD et al. The First Myriapod Genome Sequence Reveals Conservative Arthropod Gene Content and Genome Organisation In the Centipede Strigamia maritima. PLOS Biology; 25 Nov 2014

The film, Our House, is the third in a trilogy of films about life in the care system developed by young people working with a team of professionals as a way of giving them a voice within the care system and providing new skills to help them in future life. The young people were national finalists for the Children in Care Award at the Children & Young People Now Awards 2014, for their work on the first two films, My Name is Joe, about being taken into care, and Finding My Way, about leaving care. Earlier this year, Finding My Way won a documentary award at the BFI Future Film Festival for young film-makers.

The films are part of a research project run by the National Institute for Health Research Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (NIHR CLAHRC) East of England, a collaboration between universities and service providers.  Partners in the film projects are the University of Cambridge, Cambridgeshire County Council and Cambridgeshire Film Consortium. The latest film was jointly funded with a donation from the Isaac Newton University Lodge, Cambridge.

The films have all been created at four-day animation summer schools, held each August for the last three years, at which young people in care and care leavers work with a team of professionals to explore difficult and sensitive issues through sound, music and animation.

“These films work on so many levels", explains Valerie Dunn, a researcher in the Department of Psychiatry, who led the project. “They give young people a voice, ensuring that that their own, authentic experiences can be part of the debate about the services which directly affect their lives. In terms of research, film-making like this is a really exciting way of getting under the skin of a complex issue and working with groups who may be difficult to engage in more traditional approaches.”

During the summer school the young people learned new skills in terms of film-making, animation and sound recording, but their learning also extended to team-building skills, self-expression, learning a work routine, timing, working to deadlines and negotiation skills.  

“Although the end products – the films – are important, the production process is equally, if not more, important,” explains Tom Mellor, a youth worker who facilitated the workshops. “Young people in care often find self-expression difficult and our approach provides a creative way of them exploring and sharing their opinions, experiences, thoughts and feelings. They learn a lot – but so do we, the adults, as we all work towards a common goal in a safe environment. Crucially, we all have a lot of fun along the way.”

Under the tutelage of filmmakers Ryd Cook and Andy Dunn, for each film the young people filmed some live action, either at studios at Anglia Ruskin University or, for the latest film, on location in residential homes. Sound artist James Rogers worked with the young people on the sound track and sound effects. On the latest film he worked with one young man, Twitch, to produce We All Have A Life, We All Have A Story, a rap which ends the film. Animator Lizzy Hobbs taught animation techniques and inspired the young people to create and animate images and consider the overall production.

Speaking about the latest film, Michelle Dean, Children's Social Care Participation Manager at Cambridgeshire County Council, says: “We all learned a great deal through this process about how young people view residential care. They clearly want the choice of living either in a residential setting or in a smaller foster care placement: those who were allowed to choose were better able to settle in. Some young people also have a positive experience of their care, forming very strong attachments to residential staff and preferring residential care to foster care. The staff are the key to success and can be important sources of support and information. But most of all, young people want to be listened to.”

One of the young people is now keen to pursue a career in film design and recently completed a BFI Film Academy week, run by the Cambridgeshire Film Consortium, for talented 16-19 year olds wanting to join the film industry. “I wouldn’t be where I am now if I hadn’t done this film project. I’ve learned loads and it’s been so fantastic,” she says. 

At the annual local authority Children in Care awards last week the young people turned the tables and gave the professionals an Outstanding Achievement Award: “For giving us the help and guidance to make our and other young people’s voices heard. For being so supportive, helpful and understanding. We make such a great team – simply outstanding.”

Between them, the films have over 7,000 views on YouTube. The first two are being used to train foster carers, social workers and young people all over the UK by local authorities, fostering agencies and colleges. My Name is Joe has been incorporated into the new edition of The Skills to Foster, the most widely used training scheme in the UK for prospective foster carers, produced by The Fostering Network. Short Behind the Scenes films show the young people at work.

• My Name is Joe: Behind the Scenes
• Finding My Way: Behind the Scenes

The agreement, intended “to formally recognise a privileged partnership” and to record the mutual interest “in promoting and furthering academic links between the two institutions”, was signed by Dr Jennifer Barnes, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for International Strategy at the University of Cambridge, and by Prof Serge Schiffmann, Vice-Rector for Research at the ULB.

Speaking before the signature, Belgium’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, H.E. Guy Trouveroy, spoke of his great satisfaction at being present at an event that strengthens the very considerable ties that already exist between Belgium and the United Kingdom. He thanked all attendants for helping to bring two of the world’s finest higher education institutions closer together.

Dr Jennifer Barnes said: “Cambridge is committed to excellence in all areas, including in its international partnerships, which is why we value this relationship with the ULB”. She cited the growing number of full-time Belgian students enrolled at Cambridge (there were 66 in the academic year 2013-‘14) as evidence of the trend towards increased bilateral links.

She expressed her special gratitude to the Fondation Wiener-Anspach (FWA), a Belgian public interest organisation established in 1965 to foster academic exchanges between the ULB and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.

The FWA promotes the development of scientific exchanges between the ULB and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge by awarding fellowships and grants, and by supporting research collaborations in all fields. It also organises conferences and encourages contacts between academics by funding short-term visits.

It was established in 1965 by UK-born Phyllis Agnes Beddington to honour the memory of her husband, Philippe Wiener, who died during World War II at Esterwegen concentration camp.

Mrs Beddington later added to her husband's name that of Maurice Anspach, a close family friend and ULB alumnus, in appreciation for his generous help during and after the war.

Representing the FWA at the signing event were its president, Prof Pierre Francotte; its Executive Director, Prof Kristin Bartik; Prof Christina Redfield, a member of the FWA’s Board of Directors; and Prof Mikhail Kissine, a linguist currently involved in a collaborative Cambridge-ULB project funded by the FWA.

Prof Francotte, a ULB and Cambridge alumnus, said: “My time as a student in Cambridge was very important to me, so I am especially pleased to be back today to see this agreement being renewed.”

He remarked on the differences he observed: “The excellent quality of research remains the same in Cambridge. What has changed is the number of tourists. I’m glad we’re meeting on a cold November day, and not in the Summer.”

Among its many activities, the FWA supports the annual Philippe Wiener Lecture, delivered alternately at Cambridge or Oxford by academics and researchers from the ULB, and vice-versa. To mark the renewal of the agreement, the ULB’s Prof Pierre Vanderhaeghen delivered a lecture entitled "From pluripotent stem cells to cortical circuits".

He was welcomed by Prof Ole Paulsen, from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience.

In 2015, the FWA will be launching a programme of trilateral activities to celebrate its 50th anniversary.

Image credit: Natalie Glasberg
Back row, L-R: Prof Kristin Bartik, H.E. Guy Trouveroy, Prof Pierre Francotte
Front row: Prof Serge Schiffmann, Dr Jennifer Barnes

Most of us cannot remember toddling around at the age of 18 months or so, let alone being breast or bottle fed as tiny infants. Our early life is a blank to us. It is a blank in the sense that it is not accessible to so-called “episodic memory,” which means conscious or “re-experiential” recall of autobiographical events.

Sigmund Freud coined the term ‘infantile amnesia’ to describe this phenomenon. He explained the lack of early memory in terms of repressed sexual desires. Today, few people find Freud’s arguments persuasive - but the term, infantile amnesia, and the puzzle it presents to scientists, persists.

In seeking to understand how the brain develops its remarkable capacity for episodic memory, cognitive psychologists have tended to explain amnesia for early lives by arguing that our first experiences have the ‘wrong’ kind of format to be accessed by the backward-casting adult mind.

But what does this primitive format lack and when does memory become truly episodic and adult-like?

A team led by Professor James Russell from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Psychology has shed some light on this fascinating puzzle by carrying out a study on two- and three-year-olds, an age that many developmental psychologists believe to be marked by an absence of episodic memory.

The results of the team’s most recent study ‘Pre-school children’s proto-episodic memory assessed by deferred imitation’ were published online last month (October 2014) in the journal Memory.

Russell and co-researchers Dr Patrick Burns (University of Cambridge) and Dr Charlotte Russell (King’s College, London) conclude that young children fail to engage in re-experiential/episodic memories because they are not yet able to bind where and when information to information about objects and actions when recalling something that they have experienced.

“A young child may simply know that mum is wearing a red blouse today without any recollection of the original event that told them this – for example, seeing mum emerging from the bedroom wearing the blouse, on her way downstairs,” said Russell.

Psychologists use the term spatiotemporal information to describe the when and where of an episode. There are a number of reasons why spatiotemporal information is crucial to episodic memory, but Russell has a distinct approach to the matter, one inspired by the work of the German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant.

Kant argued that perceptual experience itself is marked by its taking place in space and time.  If this is so, Russell argues, re-experiential memory will also be spatiotemporal. According to Kant, the temporal aspect of experience consists of coding the simultaneity and order of elements within the event.

Russell explained: “If we have an experience of an event involving, say, a football and a cat, then spatially each of them will be perceived as being in a certain relation to our body - left or right, near or far.  In addition, they will be near to, or far away from, each other. Temporally, they will either be simultaneously present in the event or appear one after the other.  Crucially, an episodic/re-experiential memory of the event should involve the memory inheriting these spatiotemporal properties.”

Another key feature of re-experiential memory of events is that it will tend to be all-of-a-piece rather than elemental. In other words, because events are experienced holistically rather than element-by-element, the re-experiential memory of them will, again, inherit this holistic property.

“When we hear or read sentences, they will be experienced in a serial or digital manner with phrases embedded in clauses and clauses embedded in sentences. One may call this semantic experience in reference to the term, ‘semantic memory’, used by Endel Tulving in 1972 to distinguish it from episodic memory,” said Russell.

“If we experience an event, by contrast, we experience it as a whole - this is episodic memory.  Let’s return to the example of the child with the red-blouse-wearing mother. In the original event, the child saw mum in a red blouse -  the what of the potential memory -  on her left emerging from the bedroom  - the potential where of the memory - as mum was about to descend the stairs - the potential when of the memory. 

“These spatiotemporal elements were experienced together, as a whole, as elements of one event. They were not fed to the child as bite-sized factual chunks as in ‘the blouse was red', ‘mum was on my left’, ‘after that she went down the stairs’. This kind of elementally-chunked experience could result in a kind of semantic memory.” 

In order to test whether two- and three-year-olds are able not only to retain the what-when-where of an episodic memory but also to recall these three in a holistic, non-elemental way, the team gave more than 370 pre-schoolers two kinds of memory test. In each one, the children had to imitate on the second day what they had seen the experimenter do on the first day.

In the first task the children saw the experimenter move two icons on a touch-screen in a certain order to make the computer show a smiling face and play a happy song. Note that in this task the spatial element (the location to which the icons had to be moved) was defined not only by three-dimensional landmarks but also by the relation to the child’s own body (eg ‘in the corner to my top-right-hand’).

In the second task, the what of the performance was two kinds of action (pumping or twirling) which had to be performed on the handles of a music box belonging to hippo (see photograph) in a certain order to turn it on. Note that in this case the location of the actions could be defined by three-dimensional landmarks such as ‘near the door’ or ‘in front of the window’.

Next, in order to find out if recall was holistic/non-elemental or elemental, the researchers applied a statistical model to determine whether it was likely for children to recall the what-when-where of the memory in elemental fragments (eg just recalling what and where but not when) or whether memory tended to be all-of-a-piece.

The results of the study were very clear.   Although performance was better than chance after two-and-half years in both tasks, only in the second task (the music box in a room) was recall non-elemental/holistic.

The crucial difference between the two tasks was in terms of the spatial information. In the second task, in which there was evidence for genuine episodic memory, the spatial information was environment-centred, such as ‘the twirling took place near the window’.

In explaining the apparent dependency of this primitive form of episodic memory on environment-centred spatial coding, Russell said: “The reasons for this are two-fold. Conceptually, while episodic memory tends to be from our own point of view, the very idea of a ‘point of view’ requires it to be a point of view of something– some objective spatial layout. So anything that encourages the child to code actions and objects in terms of their environment-centred features like ‘near the door’ will tend to reveal episodic abilities, if they are there at all.

“In terms of neuroscience, a structure in the brain called the hippocampus is crucial to the performance both of environment-centred spatial coding and to the laying down of episodic memory traces. We know that the hippocampus is undergoing rapid development around two years of age. Though later episodic abilities, such as those developing around four and five years with the acquisition of a theory of mind, are likely to be more frontal in nature.”

The findings of Russell and co-researchers that episodic memory begins, and infantile amnesia fades away, at the age of around two-and-a-half years appear to fit with the results of studies by other psychologists.

“Professor Madeline Eacott at Durham University found that two-and-a-half was the earliest age at which adults can retrieve re-experiential memories for significant events such as the birth of a sibling. We can also recall events about our own birth, but this is obviously going to be semantic in nature,” said Russell.

While discovering more about the earliest origins of episodic memory is of inherent scientific interest, there are practical applications of this work, and it also affords avenues of investigation beyond infantile amnesia. 

“Firstly, it suggests that very young children may actually be quite accurate reporters – for example, of abusive events. Secondly, it is possible that even younger children would succeed on tasks like the ones we have carried out if the temporal element were simultaneity rather than order. It’s not hard to believe that an 18-month-old can have a re-experiential memory of what happened in the morning,” said Russell.

“I recall the very full account of a zoo trip my daughter gave me when she was a year-and-a-half. Why shouldn’t this have been based on an episodic trace, albeit not one that would be available to adult recall?”

James Russell is a Fellow of Queens’ College.

Three hundred years ago, the British Parliament famously established rewards and funding for improved methods of finding longitude at sea. The longitude (east-west) coordinate of a ship was much more difficult to calculate than its latitude (north-south). The resulting navigational uncertainty endangered maritime trade, travel and defence during Britain’s rise as a powerful seagoing Empire.

The 1714 longitude rewards of up to £20,000 (worth at least £1.5 million in today’s money) attracted diverse intellectuals, inventors, entrepreneurs and daydreamers to develop schemes. These financial incentives rejuvenated the centuries-old ‘search for the longitude’, which had begun to seem hopeless.

Cambridge University historian Dr Alexi Baker has researched the fascinating story of Jane Squire, the only woman to participate openly in the search for longitude. Earlier historians dismissed Squire as ‘nutty’ or ‘strange’ but Baker’s pioneering research reveals a fascinating individual whose life sheds new light on the search for longitude. Squire’s experiences also illuminate the roles played by gender, class and religion in early science and mathematics.

Baker will be discussing Jane Squire at a talk in Cambridge tomorrow (Monday, 1 December 2014) at 1-2 pm. All are welcome.

“The vast majority of longitude participants through the ages were men,” said Baker. “It was not considered proper in 18th century Britain for women to pursue subjects such as navigation, mathematics and related money-making endeavours. Astronomy was permissible as a genteel pastime, but only at a more basic and domestic level.”

Rare exceptions included a mother and daughter who supplied Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne with calculations for the annual Nautical Almanac. By connecting archival clues at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, Squire has also discovered that one of the sisters of painter Sir Joshua Reynolds wrote about longitude anonymously during the 1780s.

However, Squire is the only woman known to have pursued the longitude without concealing her gender. Her complex and educated (if impractical) scheme drew the attention of learned and influential individuals, from the female intellectuals known as ‘bluestockings’ to the Pope.

Squire’s book is the most common longitude work in collections today. It was published in two editions in 1742 (200 pages) and 1743 (160 pages), the first edition in both French and English. Most copies include a fold-out summary and leather binding uniquely decorated with symbols invented by the author. Cambridge University Library holds three such copies in its Rare Books collections.

“Jane Squire was a fascinating individual in her own right, with her outspoken refusal to bend to society’s expectations for women,” said Baker. “In addition, she is vital to the historical record because her books provide a rare account of the early activities of the Commissioners of Longitude, who mainly acted individually rather than communally until the 1760s.”

Baker's research suggests that Parliament did not clearly establish a standing body or ‘Board’ when, in July 1714, it named 24 individual Commissioners as acceptable judges for the new longitude reward.This lack of clarity generated much confusion and was intensely frustrating for people working on proposals.

Christened in York in 1686, Jane was the second daughter of the affluent and well-connected Priscilla and Robert Squire. Little is known about her youth, she never married, and no portrait of her survives.

By the 1720s, Squire had moved to fashionable London. In 1722, she sued individuals including the powerful Edward Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer and Thomas Lord Harley, over marine salvage efforts (“fishing upon wrecks”) in which she had lost large sums. “It was extraordinary for an 18th-century woman to invest in such risky projects, or ‘adventures’, and to fight for her interests with such confidence,” said Baker.

Squire’s lawsuit appears to have been dropped when the main defendants struck a fatal blow by arguing that her Catholicism barred her from the courts. Catholics faced severe penalties and persecution during this period. They had to take an oath of allegiance, following the Jacobite risings and the failed invasion of the ‘Old Pretender’ James Stuart.

In 1726, Squire was committed to the notoriously harsh Fleet Prison in London because of her substantial debts. Upon her release three years later, she dedicated herself to developing a novel and universal way of comprehending and communicating ‘the celestial and terrestrial spheres’.

Her scheme was intended not only to facilitate the finding of longitude at sea but also to move humanity closer to the state which existed before the fall of the Tower of Babel. “Religious motivations like Jane Squire’s were not uncommon in the search for the longitude, nor were they unusual in 18th-century science in general, and did not preclude proposals from consideration,” said Baker.

Squire worked tirelessly in the 1730s, and again in the early 1740s, to get feedback on her scheme from the Commissioners and other learned and influential individuals. She often expressed dissatisfaction with the reticence of most Commissioners, and with women being discouraged from pursuing natural philosophy and mathematics.

She wrote in 1733: “I do not remember any Play-thing, that does not appear to me a mathematical Instrument; nor any mathematical Instrument, that does not appear to me a Play-thing: I see not, therefore, why I should confine myself to Needles, Cards, and Dice.”

In 1741, the Commissioner Sir Thomas Hanmer ruefully agreed with Squire that gender was an obstacle to her efforts: “You are to expect to lye under some Prejudice upon account of your Sex.” Squire’s gender and religion often hindered her, but occasionally opened doors as well, as did the prestige of her family.

The highly detailed proposal set out in Squire’s books drew upon real astronomical research and intellectual trends. But it was far from practicable. The scheme centred on dividing the heavens into more than a million segments which could be recognised visually, so that young sailors would not need advanced mathematics, and which were described through a new universal language.

Other suggestions included correcting for apparent and mean solar time with a newly-invented clock, announcing the time from church steeples with speaking trumpets, and deploying artificial sea creatures as marine buoys to aid in mapping.

Contemporaries were intrigued by this proposal, perhaps mainly because of the Squire’s gender and the comparatively high quality of her publications. The bluestocking poet Elizabeth Carter wrote to a friend in 1743: “You must certainly have seen Mrs. Squire's scheme of the longitude, and I make no doubt understood it; but for my own part I never beheld so incomprehensible a thing in my whole life.”

When Squire died in 1743, the Daily Post memorialised her as “a Lady excellently well vers’d in Astronomy, Philosophy, and most Parts of polite Literature” and suggested that the stress of finishing her second edition was responsible for her demise. Unaware of Jane's death, Pope Benedict XIV and the Bologna Academy of Sciences were meanwhile contemplating the encouragement of such a learned Catholic woman.

In her will, Squire left her friends generous gifts which she expected, ever optimistically, to be paid out of her long-deserved longitude reward. She never received such recognition from the Commissioners of Longitude. But she did leave books which have spread across the world, and which now make important contributions to the historical record.

“Jane Squire uniquely insisted on playing ball with the men, and in doing so as confidently as would a man,” concluded Baker. “However, forging such an untraditional path also brought her great pain, including three years in prison. She appeals so much today because of her outspoken insistence that women should not be barred from traditionally male activities.”

Since 2010, Dr Baker has worked with Professor Simon Schaffer’s project on the Board of Longitude and on the Cambridge University Library’s digitisation of the Board archives. She is a Mellon/Newton Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities [CRASSH].  She is currently writing an entry on Jane Squire for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Dr Alexi Baker will discuss Jane Squire at the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, tomorrow (Monday, 1 December 2014) at 1-2 pm. All are welcome.

Inset images: details from Jane Squire's proposal for determining longitude (Cambridge University Library)

An examination of statistics taken from the Crime Survey of England and Wales between 2006 and 2010 reveals a surprising counter-narrative to commonly-held perceptions of British Muslim communities and their relationships to crime victimization and the criminal justice system.

Analysis of crime data generated by nearly 5,000 Muslims reveals few differences between Muslims and non-Muslims in relation to a range of violent personal crime including assaults, wounding and threats – the types of crime that scholarly literature, media reports and anecdotal evidence all suggest have disproportionately affected Muslim communities.

Likewise, statistical analysis reveals few statistically significant differences between Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Sikh respondents in respect of many personal crime types included within the Crime Survey.
Research carried out by Julian Hargreaves from Cambridge’s Centre of Islamic Studies, and published today by the British Journal of Criminology, also shows surprisingly high levels of positive attitudes towards the police. Among Muslims surveyed by the Crime Survey of England and Wales, 61.2pc of respondents rated their local police as either good or excellent compared to 53pc of non-Muslims.

Despite widespread condemnation of police counter-terrorism measures such as stop and search, data from the Crime Survey reveal that a sizeable majority of Muslim respondents not only reported positive attitudes towards a range of subjects such as police fairness, reliability and relevance to the community but are in many cases more likely to do so than non-Muslim respondents.

“Such findings, derived from a large nationally-representative dataset, clearly challenge the dominant narrative within the criminological literature which describes all or most Muslim people as being at greater risk of violent crime, as well as having a deep-rooted sense of police dissatisfaction,” said Hargreaves.

“Much of the discourse in this area is highly politicised and rhetorical in character, rarely rooted in statistical evidence and seldom substantiated by empirical findings. The findings suggest a growing need to move beyond misleading and potentially damaging generalisations which seek to cast British Muslim communities only as the victims of violent crime and police discrimination.”

Research undertaken by Hargreaves also examined the relationship between socio-economic disadvantage and household crime such as burglary and car theft. Here, the analysis revealed a strong relationship between household crime victimization and the socio-economic disadvantage suffered by many British Muslim communities – topics rarely, if ever, discussed by criminologists and journalists.

The research incorporated data from a ‘Multiple Deprivation Index’, a ten-tier classification system designed to map socio-economic deprivation in the UK. While there were no discernible differences between Muslim and Christian households in each tier (or decile) there were marked differences in the numbers of Muslim and Christian households contained within areas of disadvantage. Two thirds of Muslim households (66.2pc) were distributed among deciles containing the most deprivation and the highest levels of reported household crime.

While Hargreaves’ work provides a fascinating counter-balance to traditional victimization narratives concerning Muslim communities, he is at pains to point out the need to use large-scale and anecdotal evidence together in order to complete as broad a view as possible of Muslim life in 21st century Britain.
“Research in this field is dominated by descriptions of British Muslim communities which appear to eschew the use of large, nationally-representative data samples, placing emphasis instead on interviews and focus groups and on describing the nature of anti-Muslim hostility rather than quantifying the scope and extent of any problems.

“Descriptions of the lived experiences of Muslim victims of crime have undoubtedly provided an invaluable contribution but it is clear that the Crime Survey offers crime statistics at odds with commonly-propagated views – and a greater range of attitudes towards the police than might be assumed from an uncritical reading of the literature.

“Current debates around British Muslim communities, crime and the police – and especially those around the scale of current problems – unfortunately rest on rather inconclusive statistical evidence. Much more research is needed to complete the criminological picture in this area, including large-scale data concerning damage to property such mosques and small businesses. The is also a need for research to focus more often on ‘everyday’ hate crime, such as verbal abuse from strangers, which often goes unreported to both the police and the Crime Survey.”

Many of the complex computer models which are used to predict climate change could be missing an important ozone ‘feedback’ factor in their calculations of future global warming, according to new research led by the University of Cambridge and published today (1 December) in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Computer models play a crucial role in informing climate policy. They are used to assess the effect that carbon emissions have had on the Earth’s climate to date, and to predict possible pathways for the future of our climate.

Increasing computing power combined with increasing scientific knowledge has led to major advances in our understanding of the climate system during the past decades. However, the Earth’s inherent complexity, and the still limited computational power available, means that not every variable can be included in current models. Consequently, scientists have to make informed choices in order to build models which are fit for purpose.

“These models are the only tools we have in terms of predicting the future impacts of climate change, so it’s crucial that they are as accurate and as thorough as we can make them,” said the paper’s lead author Peer Nowack, a PhD student in the Centre for Atmospheric Science, part of Cambridge’s Department of Chemistry.

The new research has highlighted a key role that ozone, a major component of the stratosphere, plays in how climate change occurs, and the possible implications for predictions of global warming. Changes in ozone are often either not included, or are included a very simplified manner, in current climate models. This is due to the complexity and the sheer computational power it takes to calculate these changes, an important deficiency in some studies.

In addition to its role in protecting the Earth from the Sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays, ozone is also a greenhouse gas. The ozone layer is part of a vast chemical network, and changes in environmental conditions, such as changes in temperature or the atmospheric circulation, result in changes in ozone abundance. This process is known as an atmospheric chemical feedback.

Using a comprehensive atmosphere-ocean chemistry-climate model, the Cambridge team, working with researchers from the University of East Anglia, the National Centre for Atmospheric Science, the Met Office and the University of Reading, compared ozone at pre-industrial levels with how it evolves in response to a quadrupling of CO2 in the atmosphere, which is a standard climate change experiment.

What they discovered is a reduction in global surface warming of approximately 20% – equating to 1° Celsius – when compared with most models after 75 years. This difference is due to ozone changes in the lower stratosphere in the tropics, which are mainly caused by changes in the atmospheric circulation under climate change.

“This research has shown that ozone feedback can play a major role in global warming and that it should be included consistently in climate models,” said Nowack. “These models are incredibly complex, just as the Earth is, and there are an almost infinite number of different processes which we could include. Many different processes have to be simplified in order to make them run effectively within the model, but what this research shows is that ozone feedback plays a major role in climate change, and therefore should be included in models in order to make them as accurate as we can make them. However, this particular feedback is especially complex since it depends on many other climate processes that models still simulate differently. Therefore, the best option to represent this feedback consistently might be to calculate ozone changes in every model, in spite of the high computational costs of such a procedure.”

“The results reported here do not imply that climate change ceases to be an issue: rather that the sorts of impacts predicted by recent UN IPCC reports for later this century may be delayed - and even then by only by a few years,” said Dr Manoj Joshi of the University of East Anglia, one of the paper's co-authors. 

“Climate change research is all about having the best data possible,” said Nowack. “Every climate model currently in use shows that warming is occurring and will continue to occur, but the difference is in how and when they predict warming will happen. Having the best models possible will help make the best climate policy.”

A team of researchers have created the world’s first enzymes made from artificial genetic material.

The synthetic enzymes, which are made from molecules that do not occur anywhere in nature, are capable of triggering chemical reactions in the lab.

The research is published in the journal Nature and promises to offer new insights into the origins of life, as well as providing a potential starting point for an entirely new generation of drugs and diagnostics. In addition, the authors speculate that the study increases the range of planets that could potentially host life.

All life on Earth depends on the chemical transformations that enable cellular function and the performance of basic tasks, from digesting food to making DNA. These are powered by naturally-occurring enzymes which operate as catalysts, kick-starting the process and enabling such reactions to happen at the necessary rate.

For the first time, however, the research shows that these natural biomolecules may not be the only option, and that artificial enzymes could also be used to power the reactions that enable life to occur.

The findings build on previous work in which the scientists, from the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge and the University of Cambridge, created synthetic molecules called “XNAs”. These are entirely artificial genetic systems that can store and pass on genetic information in a manner similar to DNA.

Using these XNAs as building blocks, the new research involved the creation of so-called “XNAzymes”. Like naturally occurring enzymes, these are capable of powering simple biochemical reactions.

Dr Alex Taylor, a Post-doctoral Researcher at St John’s College, University of Cambridge, who is based at the MRC Laboratory and was the study’s lead author, said: “The chemical building blocks that we used in this study are not naturally-occurring on Earth, and must be synthesised in the lab. This research shows us that our assumptions about what is required for biological processes – the ‘secret of life’ – may need some further revision. The results imply that our chemistry, of DNA, RNA and proteins, may not be special and that there may be a vast range of alternative chemistries that could make life possible.”

Every one of our cells contains thousands of different enzymes, many of which are proteins. In addition, however, nucleic acids – DNA and its close chemical cousin, RNA – can also form enzymes. The ribosome, the molecular machine which manufactures proteins within all cells, is an RNA enzyme. Life itself is widely thought to have begun with the emergence of a self-copying RNA enzyme.

Dr Philipp Holliger, from the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, said: “Until recently it was thought that DNA and RNA were the only molecules that could store genetic information and, together with proteins, the only biomolecules able to form enzymes.”

“Our work suggests that, in principle, there are a number of possible alternatives to nature’s molecules that will support the catalytic processes required for life. Life’s ‘choice’ of RNA and DNA may just be an accident of prehistoric chemistry.”

“The creation of synthetic DNA, and now enzymes, from building blocks that don’t exist in nature also raises the possibility that if there is life on other planets it may have sprung up from an entirely different set of molecules, and widens the possible number of planets that might be able to host life.”

The group’s previous study, carried out in 2012, showed that six alternative molecules, called XNAs, could store genetic information and evolve through natural selection. Expanding on that principle, the new research identified, for the first time, four different types of synthetic catalyst formed from these entirely unnatural building blocks.

These XNAzymes are capable of catalysing simple reactions, like cutting and joining strands of RNA in a test tube. One of the XNAzymes can even join strands together, which represents one of the first steps towards creating a living system.

Because their XNAzymes are much more stable than naturally occurring enzymes, the scientists believe that they could be particularly useful in developing new therapies for a range of diseases, including cancers and viral infections, which exploit the body’s natural processes.

Dr Holliger added: “Our XNAs are chemically extremely robust and, because they do not occur in nature, they are not recognised by the body’s natural degrading enzymes. This might make them an attractive candidate for long-lasting treatments that can disrupt disease-related RNAs.”

Professor Patrick Maxwell, Chair of the MRC’s Molecular and Cellular Medicine Board and Regius Professor of Physic at the University of Cambridge, said: “Synthetic biology is delivering some truly amazing advances that promise to change the way we understand and treat disease. The UK excels in this field, and this latest advance offers the tantalising prospect of using designer biological parts as a starting point for an entirely new class of therapies and diagnostic tools that are more effective and have a longer shelf-life.”

Funders of the research included the MRC, European Science Foundation and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.

Throughout the animal kingdom, individuals often live and move together in groups, from swarms of insects to troops of primates. Individual animals may benefit from being part of groups, which provide protection from predators and help in finding food. To ensure that individuals reap the benefits of togetherness, group members coordinate their behaviour. As a result, leaders and followers emerge.

Within groups, animals differ from each other in how they cope with their environment and often exhibit distinctive traits, such as boldness or sociability. Even three-spined sticklebacks, the ‘tiddlers’ collected from streams and ponds by generations of schoolchildren, can be described in terms of their personalities: some are bolder and take more risks, while others are more timid and spend more of their time hiding in the weeds.

Research carried out in the Zoology Department at the University of Cambridge suggests that observations of these tiny fish, and how they interact with one another, could provide important insights into the dynamics of social groups, including humans. The findings are published today (2 December 2014) in Animal Behaviour.

Jolle Jolles, lead author of the study, said: “Although we now know that the spectacular collective behaviours we find throughout the animal kingdom can often be explained by individuals following simple rules, little is known about how this may be affected by the personality types that exist within the group.

“Our research shows that personality plays an important role in collective behaviour and that boldness and sociability may have significant, and complementary, effects on the functioning of the group.”

In the study, the researchers studied the behaviours of sticklebacks in tanks containing gravel and weed to imitate patches of a riverbed. The tanks were divided into two lanes by transparent partitions and randomly-selected pairs of fish were placed one in each lane. Separated by the see-through division, the fish were able to see and interact with one another.

The positions and movements of the individual sticklebacks were recorded using sophisticated tracking technology, enabling accurate comparisons to be made of each fish’s role in the collective movement of the pair.

“We found that individuals differed considerably and consistently in their tendency to approach their partner,” said Jolles. The study showed that more sociable individuals tended to be coordinated in their behaviour while less sociable individuals were more inclined to lead.

Dr Andrea Manica, reader at the Department of Zoology and co-author of the paper, added: “Our research revealed that the tendency of fish to approach their partner was strongly linked to their boldness: bolder fish were less sociable than their more timid group mates.”

Jolles explains that sociability may form part of a broader behavioural syndrome. “Our results suggest that bolder, less sociable individuals may often lead simply because they are less reluctant to move away from their partners, whereas shyer, more sociable, individuals become followers because they prioritise staying close to others,” he said.

“Differences in boldness and sociability may be expressions of underlying risk-prone or risk-averse behavioural types, as risk-averse individuals may be more motivated to group together and to respond to other individuals in order to avoid predation.”

The findings of this study suggest that leadership and group coordination can be strongly affected by personality differences in the group and that boldness and sociability may play important but complementary roles in collective behaviour.

“Now we know these personality traits affect the collective movements of pairs of fish, the next step is to understand their role in the functioning and success of larger, more dynamic groups,” said Jolles.

“Although our study was conducted with fish and its results are therefore not directly applicable to humans, it provides new insights into the mechanisms that underlie group behaviour and may therefore even tell us something about ourselves.”

The study, ‘The role of social attraction and its link with boldness in the collective movements of three-spined sticklebacks, is published today (2 December 2014) in Animal Behaviour.