The research that led to the development of the drug began in the mid-1990s in the lab of Professor Steve Jackson at the Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute at the University of Cambridge. It led to the launch of a university spinout company, KuDOS, which was acquired by pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca in early 2006.

“This is a success story both for basic science and for UK scientific innovation,” says Professor Jackson. “The initial development of Lynparza would not have been possible without the freedom to pursue our own ideas, driven by our own curiosity, supported by charitable funding. Through our links to industry, this research has led to a considerable commercial opportunity for a UK-based company and a drug that will extend and enhance the lives of various cancer sufferers.

“Lynparza is an innovative new anti-cancer medicine that works in a different way to previously-marketed drugs. Unlike traditional anti-cancer drugs, it makes the cancer cells – not the normal cells of the patient – sick. Today’s development should pave the way for further therapies based on this approach.”

The drug works by exploiting inherent weaknesses in the mechanism by which DNA is repaired in certain cancer cells, allowing Lynparza to kill cancer cells but not the patient’s healthy cells. Consequently, the drug has fewer side effects than traditional cancer treatments such as radiotherapy or chemotherapies.

Lynparza inhibits the action of an important protein enzyme in human cells called PARP. This enzyme is usually involved in helping cells repair damage to DNA, a crucial process that cells must do to remain alive. Most cells have a back-up repair mechanism known as homologous recombination, which kicks in when PARP is inhibited. However, some cancer cells lack the necessary proteins to carry out this back-up pathway; when PARP is inhibited in such cancer cells, the cancer cells die.

While there are other cancers that can potentially be treated by Lynparza, the drug has initially been approved to treat ovarian cancer patients who have underlying, inherited mutations in the BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes – mutations that prevent homologous recombination. The normal cells in these patients have one ‘bad’ copy of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, but still have one normal copy, meaning that they can still do homologous recombination – and hence are still able to carry out vital DNA repair. However, the cancer cells in these patients have lost the normal copy of BRCA1 or BRCA2; they are hence unable to carry out homologous recombination and so Lynparza kills the cancer cells, but not the healthy normal cells.

Clinical trials showed that the new drug, which has relatively mild side-effects compared to traditional anti-cancer agents, extends the progression-free survival of patients compared to those on a control treatment. The median progression-free survival was 11.2 months with Lynparza vs 4.3 months with placebo. There was also evidence for extension of overall patient survival.

Professor Jackson’s research has for many years been funded by Cancer Research UK. His group is also supported by grants from the Wellcome Trust, the European Union and the European Research Council.

New research has identified a fundamental mechanism for controlling protein function. Published today (18 December) in the journal Science, the discovery has wide-ranging implications for biotechnology and medicine.

The shape of a protein determines its function, for example whether it is able to interact with another protein or with a drug. But a protein’s shape is not constant – it may change in response to different conditions, or simply as a matter of course. Understanding how this process works is key to figuring out how to manipulate proteins, for example in order to disrupt a disease.

The researchers looked at a family of bacterial RNA-binding proteins that control a basic process in metabolism: one type of bacteria lives in very high temperatures, while the other likes things colder. The goal was to determine how a protein morphs from an active configuration (one that lets it bind to RNA) to an inactive one in two very different environments.

“The process is controlled by mutations, but these mutations aren’t in an obvious place, where the binding happens,” explains Sarah Teichmann, of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), who led the research. “They’re actually working from a distance, indirectly, to change the shape of those sites. We wanted to know how that works at an atomic level.”

“Any stable protein will have a lot of constraints on its mutational pathways,” said Tina Perica of EMBL-EBI, the paper’s lead author. “These mutations have very few options – just like a person walking along a cliff will need to keep to a narrow path. But at the same time, proteins need enough wiggle room to be able to bind to things, like another protein or a drug. To find where the protein could provide that wiggle room, we retraced its steps millions of years into the past, and used a lot of different approaches to figure out what was happening.”

The work was a collaboration between Professor Jane Clarke’s biophysics lab in Cambridge’s Department of Chemistry, and Teichmann’s structure genomics protein evaluation lab. “The power of such multi-disciplinary studies is that we can begin to answer questions that neither of us could do alone,” said Clarke.

“If you know how a species of bacteria has evolved, you can reconstruct proteins that it may have had in the past, but which don’t exist today,” says Yasushi Kondo from MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. “We made a couple of these proteins, and used X-ray crystallography to solve their structures. That let us see details we would never have seen if we’d only studied proteins from the bacteria that live today. When we put that new information together with computational work and simulations, we started to see a clear picture of how these proteins change.”

“These proteins provide a very good example of a fundamental biophysical phenomenon that we think can happen in many proteins, regardless of which organism,” said Teichmann. “We believe our findings will help future research into manipulating proteins, which has potential applications across the life sciences.”

Adapted from EMBL-EBI press release.

The research, led by Dr Claire Gillan and Professor Trevor Robbins (Department of Psychology) is the latest in a series of studies from the Cambridge Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute investigating the possibility that compulsions in OCD are products of an overactive habit-system. This line of work has shifted opinion away from thinking of OCD as a disorder caused by worrying about obsessions or faulty beliefs, towards viewing it as a condition brought about when the brain’s habit system runs amok.

In a study funded by the Wellcome Trust, researchers scanned the brains of 37 patients with OCD and 33 healthy controls (who did not have the disorder) while they repetitively performed a simple pedal-pressing behavioural response to avoid a mild electric shock to the wrist. The researchers found that patients with OCD were less capable of stopping these pedal-pressing habits, and this was linked to excessive brain activity in the caudate nucleus, a region that must fire correctly in order for us to control our habits.

Basic imaging work has long since established that the caudate is over-active when the symptoms of OCD are provoked in patients. That the habits the researchers trained in these patients in the laboratory also triggered the caudate to over-fire adds weight to the suggestion that compulsions in OCD may be caused by the brain’s habit system

The research team thinks these findings are not specific to OCD and that, in fact habits may be behind many aspects of psychiatry.

“It’s not just OCD; there are a range of human behaviours that are now considered examples of compulsivity, including drug and alcohol abuse and binge-eating,” says Dr Gillan, now at New York University. “What all these behaviours have in common is the loss of top-down control, perhaps due to miscommunication between regions that control our habit and those such as the prefrontal cortex that normally help control volitional behaviour. As compulsive behaviours become more ingrained over time, our intentions play less and less of a role in what we actually do.”

The researchers think this is the work of our habit system.

“While some habits can make our life easier, like automating the act of preparing your morning coffee, others go too far and can take control of our lives in a much more insidious way, shaping our preferences, beliefs, and in the case of OCD, even our fears,” says Professor Robbins. “Such conditions – where maladaptive, repetitive habits dominate our behaviour – are among the most difficult to treat, whether by cognitive behaviour therapy or by drugs.”

Co-author Professor Barbara Sahakian adds: “This study emphasizes the importance of treating OCD early and effectively before the dysfunctional behaviour becomes entrenched and difficult to treat. We will now focus on the implications of our work for future therapeutic strategies for these compulsive disorders.”

Dr John Isaac, Head of Neuroscience and Mental Health at the Wellcome Trust comments: “Research such as this marks a shift in how we understand Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, a condition which affects hundreds of thousands of lives in the UK alone. Unravelling the underlying causes of OCD could lead to improved treatment of the condition, and may provide an important step forward in the management of compulsion in other forms, from binge-eating to alcohol abuse.”

Reference
Gillan, C. et al. Functional neuroimaging of avoidance habits in OCD. American Journal of Psychiatry; 19 Dec 2014

Construction has begun on a hi-tech ’living building’ that will allow engineers to ‘ask how it is feeling’ and get a reply.

The James Dyson Building will have a central nervous system of sensors built into it, giving those working inside it a chance to use their surroundings for research and teaching.

It has been made possible by a donation of £8 million from the James Dyson Foundation to create a technology hub at the heart of Cambridge that will provide the University of Cambridge’s brightest engineers with some of the world’s most advanced engineering laboratories.

The new building will house postgraduates and provide spaces to allow students to share concepts; incubator units will let students conduct intensive research. Specialist knowledge on research strategies and funding advice will be available on-site.

The building will support world leading investigation into areas such as carbon nanotubes, electric vehicles, and efficient internal combustion systems for cars.

At the ground-breaking ceremony  Professor David Cardwell, Head of the Department of Engineering, spoke of the significance of the project to support world-leading research and the benefits of installing instrumentation into the fabric of the building.

“It is a very exciting time for engineering. Modern day construction is extremely impressive. There is so much opportunity to use the fabric of the building in terms of research and generating data and teaching students,” said Professor Cardwell. “The modern way is to bring the building to life and this is a fantastic opportunity. It’s the sign of the future and we will be doing much more of this sort of thing as we move forward. There are very exciting times ahead.”

Sensing tools developed at the Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction (CSIC) will provide the ‘central nerves’.

All three speakers at the ceremony, including Bob Ensch, Area Director at Morgan Sindall, the main contractors for the project, and Angus Stephen, Director of Operations for the University's Estate Management, acknowledged the collaboration with CSIC to instrument the building and the opportunity the new resource will offer to facilitate transformative and life-changing technological breakthroughs.

A number of the foundation piles have been instrumented with CSIC fibre-optic sensors which will provide data, including the temperature gradient of the piles, the temperature of the concrete as it sets and strain measurements as the load changes during construction.

Bob Ensch spoke of the ceremony being a defining moment in the construction process and the implications of instrumenting the piles: “Fibre optics are like the nerves in the body and we are on our way to connecting the building up to create a living lab.”

Additional technologies will be added to the fabric of the four-storey, low-carbon and low-energy building as the project, due to be completed in November 2015, progresses to provide a picture of how the structure is behaving. Dr Mohammed Elshafie, Co-Investigator at CSIC, said: “This is a chance to populate a new building in our own back yard with a range of sensing technologies so, when CSIC is working with students and industry, we can demonstrate our sensing devices operating in real time. Installing CSIC sensing technologies transforms the building from a passive block of material into a living creature. We will be able to ask the building how it is feeling and the building will be able to reply.”

Angus Stephen, highlighted the innovative features of the structure to create carbon-free electricity and said the James Dyson Building will be the lowest energy user across the University’s estate.

The James Dyson Building will be complemented by a state-of-the-art Dyson Centre of Engineering Design in the Inglis Building. The event was attended by members of the Dyson family.

Image L-R: Greg Smith (Site Manager, Morgan Sindall), Professor Dame Ann Dowling (President, Royal Academy of Engineering), Angus Stephen (Director of Operations, Estate Management), Professor David Cardwell (Head of Department of Engineering), Tom and Dore Dyson, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz (The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge),  Bob Ensch (Area Director, Morgan Sindall).

The Funding will be provided by the Blavatnik Family Foundation.

As a world-leading university, Cambridge seeks to bring together the most brilliant minds to freely interact, learn and discover. Its goal is to encourage and support the best people from around the world to work and study at the University. The new Blavatnik Fellowships offer an important addition in support of this aim.

The Fellowship programme, which will run for an initial period of five years, will be administered by the British Council in Israel which actively promotes academic and scientific exchange between Israel and the United Kingdom, and is warmly supportive of the initiative.

Fellows will receive an annual stipend of £30,000, and Fellowships will be tenable for up to two years.  It is planned that there will be at least three Fellows appointed each year, although it is anticipated that this number may increase in future years.

The first three Fellows will research in the areas of Engineering, Genetics and Physics.

Potential Fellows are encouraged to apply to the programme by the British Council. Successful applicants are selected by a committee of senior academics.

Professor Eric Miska, the Herchel Smith Professor of Molecular Genetics and Senior Group Leader at the Gurdon Institute at the University of Cambridge said:

“I am delighted to host a Blavatnik Fellow in my lab within the Gurdon Institute. Fellowships such as these enable the exchange of ideas and expertise that is the lifeblood of cutting-edge research. We’re deeply grateful to Leonard Blavatnik and the Blavatnik Family Foundation for their support and hope to host many more fellows in the future.”

Mr Blavatnik, speaking on behalf of the Blavatnik Family Foundation, said: “I am very pleased to strengthen the Foundation’s existing links to Cambridge with this important initiative, which will serve the mutual interests of the University, the Israeli scientific community and those selected to be Blavatnik Fellows.”

Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, said: “We are committed to enabling the very best people from around the world to come to Cambridge, to drive forward our pioneering research and address new questions. We are delighted that the generosity of Leonard Blavatnik and the Blavatnik Family Foundation adds a further way in which we can support this ambition.”

There once was a king afflicted by a terrible sadness. His name was Shahriyar. “He had a hundred concubines, but none had given him a son. He had sent agents to buy him slave girls but whether he stayed with them a day, a night or a year, not one of them would conceive. The wide world shrank in his eyes as, whatever greatness he had achieved, he had no son.”

So begins the English version of Julnar of the Sea and the Marvels of the Sea Encountered by Her, the sixth of 18 stories contained in a collection of Arab medieval fantasy called Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange. Translated into English for the first time, and newly available to millions of readers, the tales open a window on to the enduring preoccupations and wild imaginings of the medieval mind.

Translation is an art, a question of stepping lightly between accuracy and context, tuned to the slightest nuances of meaning and association. When Malcolm Lyons, former Professor of Arabic at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Pembroke College, embarked on the task of bringing these age-old stories to life for the modern reader, he had behind him some six decades of scholarship as an academic deeply interested in the interconnections between civilisations and cultures.

The process of taking an Arabic text and transforming it into accessible English did not daunt Lyons. In his retirement from teaching at the Faculty of Classics and later at the Faculty of Oriental Studies, he has continued working. With his wife Ursula Lyons (Emeritus Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College), he produced a translation of The Thousand and One Nights (published by Penguin Classics in 2008). He is currently working on translations of early Arab tribal epics.

The process of translating Tales of the Marvellous took Lyons 18 months of intensive work at his desk at home in a thatched cottage just outside Cambridge. How difficult was it? “As a student, you’re taught to translate each word with precision. But if you set about translating a story word by word, the resulting text would be dull or demented, or both. As I’ve got older, I’ve become more flexible. The purpose of stories is to speak to the reader so you need to bring them alive while remaining faithful to the spirit of the story,” says Lyons.

The backstory of Tales of the Marvellous is suitably exotic: there is just one copy in the original Arabic, a fabulously precious but battered volume of some 600 handwritten pages held by the mosque of Aya Sofya in Istanbul. The book was discovered in 1933 on the shelves of the mosque’s library by Hellmut Ritter, a German Arabist. Ritter brought its existence to the attention of the academic world but he never translated the stories contained within its fragile and worm-eaten pages.

Scholars following the clues contained in the text believe that Tales of the Marvellous were compiled in the 10th century. Many of the stories in the collection have yet earlier origins. The manuscript itself, imperfectly transcribed in 'vulgar style' in Egypt or Syria, is likely to date from the 14th century or later.  When the book was discovered 80 years ago, it was incomplete: it has no cover and its contents page suggests that there were originally many more stories.

Tales of the Marvellous is thought to be the work of Muslim authors. But its ebb and flow of stories – and stories within stories – mix themes found in Islam, Christianity and paganism. With no boundaries between fact and fiction, reality is suspended. A virgin sleeps with a prince but, when he encounters her again, she is still a virgin; crocodiles have pearls in their ears; bronze statues move and speak. Many of the themes known to storytellers and modern film-makers are found in these pages: love unrequited, the jealousy of siblings, the search for novelty and lust for luxury, the blindness that comes with greed, whether for sex or power.

These are tales brimming with superlatives - jewels, camels and slaves are measured in hundreds and thousands. Yet just when the reader is dizzy with excess the narrative skids to a halt with words of wisdom that travel down the centuries. In Julnar and the Sea, Shahriyar gets the son he has longed for and realises that he will have to cede this throne. He quotes from the poet: “When something is completed, its decline begins;/Say “it is finished” and it starts to fade.” Life is fragile, nothing is permanent.

The cast of players who feature in Tales of the Marvellous takes in the full gamut of the medieval world, both real and imagined – from kings to slaves, from mermaids to shape-shifting jinn. Craftsmen make frequent appearances: among them tailors, cooks, barbers and greengrocers. Stereotypes abound (women are duplicitous; strangers are ugly and wicked; black men are as big as buffalos) and the text is liberally splattered with blood and gore (heads are lopped off, women are raped).

Many of these characters would have been familiar to early audiences and some of the same stories (including Julnar and the Sea) feature in The Thousand and One Nights, a later and much better known compilation. But there are some surprises too. “My favourite among novel characters is the devil in The Story of Shul and Shumul who, uniquely for the devil as far as I know, offers to do a good deed and restore a kidnapped bride back to her prospective husband. The would-be astrologer, helped at one point by a little bird and a locust, in The Story of Abu Disa is also unknown elsewhere,” says Lyons.

Quests are tried-and-tested narratives that bring with them ample possibility for transformations, strange encounters, extraordinary happenings, and travel to exotic islands and beyond. Lyons says: “The notion of transformation was a familiar one – as shown in stories told by the writers Ovid and Apuleius. The sea is a key to wonderment: you can’t see what might be on the other side of it and you can’t take your camels there to find out. So the imagination can run wild.”

The narrative of Julnar and the Sea unfolds in a roller-coaster of twists and turns. Shahriyar gets his girl and Julnar, a sea princess of stunning beauty, gives him a splendid son named Badr.  When Badr grows up, he too needs a bride. Who is good enough for an invincible rider and dangerous fighter, a man destined to succeed as leader?  The quest for a bride takes Badr over land and sea, a tumultuous journey in which he is turned into a red-legged stork and a scheming queen becomes a mule. The happy-ever-after ending comes when Badr weds Jauhara, daughter of the supreme king of the sea, after which “they all lived the best, most pleasant, comfortable and untroubled of lives”.

Tales of the Marvellous benefits from an excellent introduction by Robert Irwin, the historian who quietly persuaded Lyons to undertake the translation. In his references to the craft of story-making, Irvin skips nimbly from other Arab stories to Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and a cartoon series in the New York Evening Post called Ripley Believe It or Not. Discussing classic tricks of the story teller’s trade, he alludes to Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit, in which Peter’s mother says: “You may go into the field or down the lane, but don’t go into Mr McGregor’s garden.” The reader wants, and doesn’t want, Peter to disobey his mother.

What should we make of Tales of the Marvellous, now that six centuries have passed since a scribe sat down with a sharpened quill and ink pot to copy them out on to sheets of parchment? Irwin concludes that the collection is not simply one of folklore; the stories do not read as if they come solely from an oral tradition.  He argues that Tales of the Marvellous should be regarded as an early example of literature – perhaps the very first case of pulp fiction.

Does the translator agree with this description? “I have to admit that I’m not an expert on pulp fiction as I haven’t read any. As a boy I was brought up on stories of fairy mounds and water horses in the Scottish Highlands as well as the Grey Man who follows climbers on the slopes of Ben Macdhui in the Cairngorms,” says Lyons. “It’s certainly true that Tales of the Marvellous wouldn’t get any prizes for literature but nor were they designed to. They are entertainment for audiences of all ages and transport us to places where anything can happen.”

Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange (translated by Malcolm Lyons) is published by Penguin Classics.

Inset images: detail from the Alhambra (cropped) by Frederik Hilmer Svanholm; Istanbul, Aya Sofya (cropped) by Arian Sweggers (both via Flickr Creative Commons); two images from 16th century Persian manuscript, 'The marvels of creation and the oddities of existence' (Cambridge University Library).

A new study has successfully measured the coherence of electron spin – the period of time in which the particle’s elusive quantum state can be read and manipulated – for an electron trapped in conditions that could form the basis of a future quantum internet.

The study, reported in the journal Physical Review Letters, was carried out by researchers at the Universities of Cambridge and Saarbrücken. It reveals the coherence time of an electron trapped in a silicon-based colour centre within a microscopic fragment of diamond. This is a gap, manufactured inside the diamond’s lattice structure, and designed to snare an electron so that it can be manipulated.

At just 45 nanoseconds, the time period for which the electron’s spin is visible seems a miniscule fraction, but for scientists trying to bring this under control, it is, in relative terms, an age.

The “spin” of a particle is its intrinsic angular momentum and can point either up or down. Physicists at numerous leading research universities, including Cambridge, are currently engaged in research which is trying to utilise spin to develop advanced quantum technologies.

In the future, electron spin could be used to represent data and move large amounts of information much faster than is currently possible. This means that better control of spin might well underpin future computing, enable the creation of an entirely new quantum network (or quantum internet), and provide the foundations for a huge range of other technologies, such as advanced sensing devices.

One problem that hinders scientists who are attempting to gain greater command over electron spin for this purpose, however, is that spins in solids cannot be seen, or manipulated, for very long. After a tiny fraction of a second has passed, the spin’s quantum state decays beyond the point of visibility. Therefore, it needs to be retained for long enough for information about the spin to be registered and manipulated.

In the new study, the researchers successfully demonstrated the extent of the coherence of an electron trapped in a “silicon-vacancy” – an impurity in the lattice of carbon atoms that make up diamond. A silicon-vacancy centre provides highly promising conditions for the manipulation of electron spin.

Building on previous research, the researchers put the electron into a “superposition” state, using a technique which involves targeting it with two lasers with carefully-tuned frequencies. In this quantum state, the spin of the electron is potentially both up and down, and it is useful because it provides a basic position from which they can then observe and measure changes using laser pulses. The vision for future spin-based technologies involves creating chains of electrons whose spin will change relative to one another based on this initial superposition concept.

When applied to the electron in the silicon vacancy centre, the method achieved a coherence period of tens of nanoseconds – a fraction of time which, for scientists trying to control spin, is actually ample.

Dr Mete Atature, a researcher at the Cavendish Laboratory and St John’s College, University of Cambridge, who led the study with Professor Christoph Becher in Saarbrcüken, said: “This is incremental research, but it essentially deals with the elephant in the room for these colour centres, which was whether there was long-living coherence for the electron spin or not, and whether we had time to see its quantum state?”

“Arguably this is the most pressing challenge for these colour centres right now. We established that we can not only access the electron spin states, but also sustain an arbitrary superposition of them for 45 nanoseconds. When you bear in mind that it will take us picoseconds to execute laser-based operations to manipulate the spin, it becomes clear that just a fraction of this period is required. So this gives us a lot of possibilities to work with.”

The vacancy centre was created by substituting a silicon atom and a gap in place of two neighbouring carbon atoms in the carbon lattice of a fragment of diamond. Research earlier this year showed that a silicon-based vacancy has the potential to be used for this purpose because the photons – or light particles – emitted by an electron trapped in such conditions are sufficiently bright, and on a sufficiently narrow bandwidth, to be attractive for various applications. The research adds to a growing realisation among scientists that silicon-vacancy centres could provide advantageous conditions for spin and photon control, simultaneously.

“Now we know that silicon vacancies provide an alternative colour centre that has spin coherence, optical detectability and superior optical qualities,” Atature added. “The next challenge is to see if we can extend this spin coherence time by various techniques and, in parallel, see if we can entangle the spin with a single photon with sufficiently high fidelity.”

Writing today in the journal Lancet Global Health, researchers from Cambridge University’s Department of Sociology examine the links between the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

According to the authors, joined by colleagues from Oxford University and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, IMF programs over the years have imposed heavy constraints on the development of effective health systems of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone - the cradle of the Ebola outbreak that has killed more than 6,800 since March this year.

The researchers say that economic policy reforms advocated by the IMF have undermined the capacity of health systems in these three nations – systems already fragile from legacies of conflict and state failure – to cope with infectious disease outbreaks and other such emergencies.

“A major reason why the Ebola outbreak spread so rapidly was the weakness of healthcare systems in the region, and it would be unfortunate if underlying causes were overlooked,” said lead author and Cambridge sociologist Alexander Kentikelenis.

“Policies advocated by the IMF have contributed to under-funded, insufficiently staffed, and poorly prepared health systems in the countries with Ebola outbreaks,” he said.

By reviewing the policies enforced by the IMF before the outbreak - extracting information from the IMF lending programs between 1990 and 2014 - the researchers were able to examine the effects on the three West African nations, and identified three key policy impacts that led to the weakening of the already fragile healthcare systems in these countries:

Firstly, the IMF required economic reforms that reduced government spending. “Such policies have been extremely strict, absorbing funds that could be directed to meeting pressing health challenges,” write the researchers. Although the IMF responded to concerns raised about the impact of these policies by incorporating “poverty-reduction expenditures” that aimed to boost health budgets, the researchers found these conditions were often not met.

“In 2013, just before the Ebola outbreak, the three countries met the IMF’s economic directives, yet all failed to raise their social spending despite pressing health needs,” said Professor Lawrence King, co-author and Cambridge sociologist.

Secondly, the IMF often requires caps on the public-sector wage bill, directly impacting the capacity of these nations to hire and adequately pay key healthcare workers such as doctors and nurses. An independent evaluation of the IMF in 2007 stated that these limits are “often set without consideration of the impact on expenditures in priority areas”.    

“Wage limits set by the IMF have been linked to a ‘brain drain’ of health workers in countries that need them most. For example, the IMF imposed restrictions on wage spending in Sierra Leone over the 2000s. At the same time, the number of health personnel in the country plummeted,” said King.

Thirdly, the IMF campaigns for decentralised healthcare systems. While the idea behind this is to make healthcare more responsive to local needs, the researchers say that in practice this makes it difficult to mobilise coordinated responses to outbreaks of deadly diseases such as Ebola.

However, in recent months, the IMF has announced $430m of funding to help combat Ebola in West Africa, leading IMF Director Christine Lagarde to say it is “good to increase the fiscal deficit when it’s a matter of curing the people […] The IMF doesn’t say that very often.”

“The IMF’s recent change of heart about prioritising public health instead of fiscal discipline is welcome, but this is not the first time we have heard such rhetoric from the IMF leadership. It remains to be seen whether this time is different,” said Kentikelenis.

The authors of the Lancet article point to that journal’s own Commission on Investing in Health, which calls for increases in public health spending and attention to hiring and training health workers. “The experience of Ebola adds a degree of urgency to the implementation of its recommendations,” they write.

New research across thousands of years of human evolution shows that our skeletons have become much lighter and more fragile since the invention of agriculture - a result of our increasingly sedentary lifestyles as we shifted from foraging to farming.

The new study, published today in the journal PNAS, shows that, while human hunter-gatherers from around 7,000 years ago had bones comparable in strength to modern orangutans, farmers from the same area over 6,000 years later had significantly lighter and weaker bones that would have been more susceptible to breaking.

Bone mass was around 20% higher in the foragers - the equivalent to what an average person would lose after three months of weightlessness in space.

After ruling out diet differences and changes in body size as possible causes, researchers have concluded that reductions in physical activity are the root cause of degradation in human bone strength across millennia. It is a trend that is reaching dangerous levels, they say, as people do less with their bodies today than ever before.

Researchers believe the findings support the idea that exercise rather than diet is the key to preventing heightened fracture risk and conditions such as osteoporosis in later life: more exercise in early life results in a higher peak of bone strength around the age of 30, meaning the inevitable weakening of bones with age is less detrimental.

There is, in fact, no anatomical reason why a person born today could not achieve the bone strength of an orangutan or early human forager, say researchers; but even the most physically active people alive are unlikely to be loading bones with enough frequent and intense stress to allow for the increased bone strength seen in the ‘peak point’ of traditional hunter-gatherers and non-human primate bones.

“Contemporary humans live in a cultural and technological milieu incompatible with our evolutionary adaptations. There’s seven million years of hominid evolution geared towards action and physical activity for survival, but it’s only in the last say 50 to 100 years that we’ve been so sedentary - dangerously so,” said co-author Dr Colin Shaw from the University of Cambridge’s Phenotypic Adaptability, Variation and Evolution (PAVE) Research Group. 

“Sitting in a car or in front of a desk is not what we have evolved to do.”

The researchers x-rayed samples of human femur bones from the archaeological record, along with femora from other primate species, focusing on the inside of the femoral head: the ball at the top of the femur which fits into the pelvis to form the hip joint, one of the most load-bearing bone connections in the body.

Two types of tissue form bone: the cortical or ‘hard’ bone shell coating the outside, and the trabecular or ‘spongy’ bone: the honeycomb-like mesh encased within cortical shell that allows flexibility but is also vulnerable to fracture.

The researchers analysed the trabecular bone from the femoral head of four distinct archaeological human populations representing mobile hunter-gatherers and sedentary agriculturalists, all found in the same area of the US state of Illinois (and likely to be genetically similar as a consequence).

The trabecular structure is very similar in all populations, with one notable exception: within the mesh, hunter-gatherers have a much higher amount of actual bone relative to air.

“Trabecular bone has much greater plasticity than other bone, changing shape and direction depending on the loads imposed on it; it can change structure from being pin or rod-like to much thicker, almost plate-like. In the hunter-gatherer bones, everything was thickened,” said Shaw.

This thickening is the result of constant loading on the bone from physical activity as hunter-gatherers roamed the landscape seeking sustenance. This fierce exertion would result in minor damage that caused the bone mesh to grow back ever stronger and thicker throughout life - building to a ‘peak point’ of bone strength which counter-balanced the deterioration of bones with age.

Shaw believes there are valuable lessons to be learnt from the skeletons of our prehistoric predecessors. “You can absolutely morph even your bones so that they deal with stress and strain more effectively. Hip fractures, for example, don’t have to happen simply because you get older if you build your bone strength up earlier in life, so that as you age it never drops below that level where fractures can easily occur.”      

Other theories for humans evolving a lighter, more fragile skeleton include changes in diet or selection for a more efficient, lighter skeleton, which was never reversed.

While the initial switch to farming did cause a dip in human health due to monoculture diets that lacked variety, the populations tested were unaffected by this window in history. “Of course we need a level of calcium to maintain bone heath, but beyond that level excess calcium isn’t necessary,” said Shaw.

The research also counters the theory that, at some point in human evolution, our bones just became lighter - perhaps because there wasn’t enough food to support a denser skeleton. “If that was true, human skeletons would be entirely distinct from other living primates. We’ve shown that hunter-gatherers fall right in line with primates of a similar body size. Modern human skeletons are not systemically fragile; we are not constrained by our anatomy.” 

“The fact is, we’re human, we can be as strong as an orangutan - we’re just not, because we are not challenging our bones with enough loading, predisposing us to have weaker bones so that, as we age, situations arise where bones are breaking when, previously, they would not have” Shaw said.

While the 7,000-year-old foragers had vastly stronger bones than the 700-year-old farmers, Shaw says that neither competes with even earlier hominids from around 150,000 years ago. “Something is going on in the distant past to create bone strength that outguns anything in the last 10,000 years.”

The next step for Shaw and colleagues will be to provide insight into the kind of mobility that gave our ancient ancestors such powerful physical strength.

Inset GIF: CT scan of the femoral head of a hunter-gatherer hip bone

Researchers from the University of Cambridge, in association with Boeing, have successfully tested the first aircraft to be powered by a parallel hybrid-electric propulsion system, where an electric motor and petrol engine work together to drive the propeller. The demonstrator aircraft uses up to 30% less fuel than a comparable plane with a petrol-only engine. The aircraft is also able to recharge its batteries in flight, the first time this has been achieved.

The demonstrator is based on a commercially-available single-seat aircraft, and its hybrid engine was designed and built by engineers at Cambridge with Boeing funding support.

The aircraft uses a combination of a 4-stroke piston engine and an electric motor / generator, coupled through the same drive pulley to spin the propeller. During take-off and climb, when maximum power is required, the engine and motor work together to power the plane, but once cruising height is reached, the electric motor can be switched into generator mode to recharge the batteries or used in motor assist mode to minimise fuel consumption. The same principle is at work in a hybrid car.

“Although hybrid cars have been available for more than a decade, what’s been holding back the development of hybrid or fully-electric aircraft until now is battery technology,” said Dr Paul Robertson of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, who led the project. “Until recently, they have been too heavy and didn’t have enough energy capacity. But with the advent of improved lithium-polymer batteries, similar to what you’d find in a laptop computer, hybrid aircraft – albeit at a small scale – are now starting to become viable.”

The hybrid power system in the Cambridge demonstrator is based on a Honda engine, in parallel with a custom lightweight motor. A power electronics module designed and built in the Engineering Department controls the electrical current to and from the batteries - a set of 16 large lithium-polymer cells located in special compartments built into the wings. The petrol engine is optimally sized to provide the cruise power at its most efficient operating point, resulting in an improved fuel efficiency overall.

“Our mission is to keep our sights on finding innovative solutions and technologies that solve our industry’s toughest challenges and continually improve environmental performance,” said Marty Bradley, Boeing’s principal investigator for the programme. “Hybrid electric is one of several important elements of our research efforts, and we are learning more every day about the feasibility of these technologies and how they could be used in the future.”

While the Cambridge demonstrator is an important step in the development of hybrid or fully-electric aircraft, more research is required before commercial airliners will be powered entirely with electric motors. For example, if all the engines and all the fuel in a modern jetliner were to be replaced by batteries, it would have a total flying time of roughly ten minutes.

Test flights for the project took place at the Sywell Aerodrome, near Northampton. These tests consisted of a series of ‘hops’ along the runway, followed by longer evaluation flights at a height of over 1,500 feet.

Robertson’s team, which includes PhD students Christian Friedrich and Andre Thunot and MEng student Tom Corker, is conducting ongoing test flights to characterise and optimise the system for best performance and fuel economy.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates aviation is responsible for around 2% of global man-made carbon dioxide emissions. The aerospace industry made global commitments to take action that will see carbon neutral growth from 2020 and a net reduction in CO2 emissions of 50% by 2050 compared to 2005 levels. Boeing is a member of Sustainable Aviation (www.sustainableaviation.co.uk), which is responding to these goals in the UK.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology (IoC) have now published the first full scientific study of the landmark crime experiment they conducted on policing with body-worn-cameras in Rialto, California in 2012 — the results of which have been cited by police departments around the world as justification for rolling out this technology.

The experiment showed that evidence capture is just one output of body-worn video, and the technology is perhaps most effective at actually preventing escalation during police-public interactions: whether that’s abusive behaviour towards police or unnecessary use-of-force by police.

The researchers say the knowledge that events are being recorded creates “self-awareness” in all participants during police interactions. This is the critical component that turns body-worn video into a ‘preventative treatment’: causing individuals to modify their behaviour in response to an awareness of ‘third-party’ surveillance by cameras acting as a proxy for legal courts — as well as courts of public opinion — should unacceptable behaviour take place.

During the 12-month Rialto experiment, use-of-force by officers wearing cameras fell by 59% and reports against officers dropped by 87% against the previous year’s figures.    

However, the research team caution that the Rialto experiment is only the first step on a long road of evidence-gathering, and that more needs to be known about the impact of body-worn cameras in policing before departments are “steamrolled” into adopting the technology — with vital questions remaining about how normalising  the provision of digital video as evidence will affect prosecution expectations, as well as the storage technology and policies that will be required for the enormous amount of data captured.    

President Obama recently promised to spend $263m of federal funds on body-worn-video to try and stem the haemorrhaging legitimacy of US police forces among communities across the United States after the killing of several unarmed black men by police caused nationwide anguish, igniting waves of protest.

But some in the US question the merit of camera technology given that the officer responsible for killing Eric Garner — a 43-year-old black man suffocated during arrest for selling untaxed cigarettes — was acquitted by a grand jury despite the fact that a bystander filmed the altercation on a mobile phone, with footage showing an illegal ‘chokehold’ administered on Garner who repeatedly states: “I can’t breathe”. (A medical examiner ruled the death a homicide).      

For the Cambridge researchers, the Rialto results show that body-worn-cameras can mitigate the need for such evidence by preventing excessive use-of-force in the first place. Data from the Rialto experiment shows police officers are deterred from unacceptable uses-of-force — indeed, from using force in general — by the awareness that an interaction is being filmed; but this ‘deterrence’ relies on cognition of surveillance.

While the evidence provided by the video of Garner’s death would suggest a heinous miscarriage of justice, say researchers, the filming itself by a bystander would not generate the self-awareness and consequent behaviour modification during the incident as observed during Rialto’s institutionalised camera use.     

“The ‘preventative treatment’ of body-worn-video is the combination of the camera plus both the warning and cognition of the fact that the encounter is being filmed. In the tragic case of Eric Garner, police weren’t aware of the camera and didn’t have to tell the suspect that he, and therefore they, were being filmed,” said Dr Barak Ariel, from the Cambridge’s IoC, who conducted the crime experiment with Cambridge colleague Dr Alex Sutherland and Rialto police chief Tony Farrar.      

“With institutionalised body-worn-camera use, an officer is obliged to issue a warning from the start that an encounter is being filmed, impacting the psyche of all involved by conveying a straightforward, pragmatic message: we are all being watched, videotaped and expected to follow the rules,” he said.

“Police subcultures of illegitimate force responses are likely to be affected by the cameras, because misconduct cannot go undetected — an external set of behavioural norms is being applied and enforced through the cameras. Police-public encounters become more transparent and the curtain of silence that protects misconduct can more easily be unveiled, which makes misconduct less likely.” In Rialto, police use-of-force was 2.5 times higher before the cameras were introduced.

The idea behind body-worn-video, in which small high-definition cameras are strapped to a police officers’ torso or hat, is that every step of every police-public interaction — from the mundane to those involving deadly force — gets recorded to capture the closest approximation of actual events for evidence purposes, with only case-relevant data being stored.

In Rialto, an experimental model was defined in which all police shifts over the course of a year were randomly assigned to be either experimental (with camera) or control (without camera), encompassing over 50,000 hours of police-public interactions.

The dramatic reduction in both use-of-force incidents and complaints against the police during the experiment led to Rialto PD implementing an initial three-year plan for body-worn cameras. When the police force released the results, they were held up by police departments, media and governments in various nations as the rationale for camera technology to be integrated into policing.

Ariel and colleagues are currently replicating the Rialto experiment with over 30 forces across the world, from the West Yorkshire force and Northern Ireland’s PSNI in the UK to forces in the United States and Uruguay, and aim to announce new findings at the IoC’s Conference for Evidence-Based Policing in July 2015. Early signs match the Rialto success, showing that body-worn-cameras do appear to have significant positive impact on interactions between officers and civilians.       

However, the researchers caution that more research is required, and urge police forces considering implementing body-worn-cameras to contact them for guidance on setting up similar experiments. “Rialto is but one experiment; before this policy is considered more widely, police forces, governments and researchers should invest further time and effort in replicating these findings,” said Dr Sutherland.

Body-worn cameras appear to be highly cost-effective: analysis from Rialto showed every dollar spent on the cameras saved about four dollars on complaints litigations, and the technology is becoming ever cheaper. However, the sheer levels of data storage required as the cameras are increasingly adopted has the potential to become crippling.

“The velocity and volume of data accumulating in police departments — even if only a fraction of recorded events turn into ‘downloadable’ recordings for evidentiary purposes — will exponentially grow over time,” said Ariel. “User licenses, storage space, ‘security costs’, maintenance and system upgrades can potentially translate into billions of dollars worldwide.”

And, if body-worn cameras become the norm, what might the cost be when video evidence isn’t available? “Historically, courtroom testimonies of response officers have carried tremendous weight, but prevalence of video might lead to reluctance to prosecute when there is no evidence from body-worn-cameras to corroborate the testimony of an officer, or even a victim,” said Ariel.

“Body-worn-video has the potential to improve police legitimacy and enhance democracy, not least by calming situations on the front line of policing to prevent the pain and damage caused by unnecessary escalations of volatile situations. But there are substantial effects of body-worn-video that can potentially offset the benefits which future research needs to explore.”

Inset image: screenshot taken from a West Midlands (UK) officer's body-worn-camera.

When an egg cell is fertilised by a sperm, it begins to divide into a cluster of cells known as a blastocyst, the early stage of the embryo. Within this ball of cells, some cells form the inner cell mass – which will develop into the foetus – and some form the outer wall, which becomes the placenta. Cells in the inner cell mass are ‘reset’ to become stem cells – cells that have the potential to develop into any type of cell within the body. A small number of these cells become primordial germ cells (PGCs) – these have the potential to become germ cells (sperm and egg), which in later life will pass on the offspring’s genetic information to its own offspring.

“The creation of primordial germ cells is one of the earliest events during early mammalian development,” says Dr Naoko Irie, first author of the paper from the Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute at the University of Cambridge. “It’s a stage we’ve managed to recreate using stem cells from mice and rats, but until now few researches have done this systematically using human stem cells. It has highlighted important differences between embryo development in humans and rodents that may mean findings in mice and rats may not be directly extrapolated to humans.”

Professor Surani at the Gurdon Institute, who led the research, and his colleagues found that a gene known as SOX17 is critical for directing human stem cells to become PGCs (a stage known as ‘specification’). This was a surprise as the mouse equivalent of this gene is not involved in the process, suggesting a key difference between mouse and human development. SOX17 had previously been shown to be involved in directing stem cells to become endodermal cells, which then develop into cells including those for the lung, gut and pancreas, but this is the first time it has been seen in PGC specification.

The group showed that PGCs could also be made from reprogrammed adult cells, such as skin cells, which will allow investigations on patient-specific cells to advance knowledge of the human germline, infertility and germ cell tumours.  The research also has potential implications for understanding the process of ‘epigenetic’ inheritance. Scientists have known for some time that our environment – for example, our diet or smoking habits – can affect our genes through a process known as methylation whereby molecules attach themselves to our DNA, acting like dimmer switches to increase or decrease the activity of genes. These methylation patterns can be passed down to the offspring.

Professor Surani and colleagues have shown that during the PGC specification stage, a programme is initiated to erase these methylation patterns, acting as a ‘reset’ switch. However, traces of these patterns might be inherited – it is not yet clear why this might occur.

“Germ cells are ‘immortal’ in the sense that they provide an enduring link between all generations, carrying genetic information from one generation to the next,” adds Professor Surani. “The comprehensive erasure of epigenetic information ensures that most, if not all, epigenetic mutations are erased, which promotes ‘rejuvenation’ of the lineage and allows it to give rise to endless generations. These mechanisms are of wider interest towards understanding age-related diseases, which in part might be due to cumulative epigenetic mutations.”

The research was funded by the Wellcome Trust and BIRAX (the Britain Israel Research and Academic Exchange Partnership).

Reference
Irie, N et al. SOX17 is a Critical Specifier of Human Primordial Germ Cell Fate. Cell; 24 Dec 2014

The intricate pencil drawings and watercolours in the sketchbooks were made by Conrad Martens, shipmate to Charles Darwin as they travelled around South America on the voyage of HMS Beagle.

Now, for the first time, all of Martens’ Beagle sketches have been made freely available online through Cambridge University Library’s Digital Library: http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/ and can also be seen in the photo film above.

Martens made the drawings between the summer of 1833 and the early months of 1835. Cambridge University Library owns his two sketchbooks from this period and has made the above audio slideshow to celebrate their addition to the Digital Library.

“These drawings were made almost two centuries ago but even now, they still really vividly bring to life one of the most famous voyages in the world and arguably the most famous in the history of science,” said Dr Alison Pearn, Associate Director of the Darwin Correspondence Project.

“Each of these pages is only 14cm by 20cm. It’s wonderful that everyone now has the opportunity to flick through these sketchbooks in their virtual representation and to follow the journey as Martens and Darwin saw it unfold.”

The first sketchbook begins just before Martens heard that the Beagle was looking for a new ship’s artist, capturing street life in Montevideo in August 1833. The later sketches give a sense of how hard and difficult the journey must have been both on sea and land in uncharted territory.

Martens did not have much time to make his sketches and the notebooks are littered with hastily-scribbled notes to himself about colours, textures and the geology of the landscapes before him.

“Darwin described the Beagle voyage as the most formative experience of his life and to see it through the eyes of one of his companions is a very vivid reminder of the reality of that journey,” added Pearn. “Martens' sketches are a visual counterpart to Darwin’s letters home. Both bring to life a really remarkable adventure in a vast and remote part of the world.”

Geochemical reactions taking place in aquifers – underground layers of water-bearing porous rock –may lead to carbon dioxide being ‘pooled’ for hundreds or even thousands of years, and may force a rethink of how these underground reservoirs are used in carbon capture and storage (CCS) schemes.

The new research, from the University of Cambridge, has shown that aquifers rich in silicate minerals may delay, or even prevent, CO2 from being carried to greater depths, where it may be less likely to leak out of the aquifer and into the atmosphere. The results are published in the journal Nature Communications.

Saline aquifers have been considered the safest and most efficient option for CCS schemes, where anthropogenic carbon emissions are trapped and stored underground so that they do not enter the atmosphere.

Both dissolution in the formation water and transport to depth decrease the risk of CO2 escaping: dissolution reduces the risk of potential upward leakage through fractures in the cap rock of the reservoir, while transport to greater depth increases the rate of dissolution and of potential incorporation of the CO2 into the rock minerals.

“Our research has found that CO2 may not behave as expected when stored in aquifers, challenging some of our previous assumptions about CCS schemes,” said Dr Silvana Cardoso of the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, who led the research.

It has been thought that once the CO2 is dissolved in the aquifer water, making it denser, convection streams develop and carry the mixture to deeper parts of the aquifer. 

Dr Cardoso and her co-author, Jeanne Andres, a former PhD student in the same department, found that chemical reactions between the rock formations and the dissolved CO2 may delay, or even prevent, the CO2 from reaching greater depths by decreasing the strength of the convection streams.

The researchers used a combination of simple laboratory experiments and mathematical analysis to establish the basic interaction between fluid flow and chemical kinetics in a deep porous medium. Their study assessed the impact that the natural chemical reactions between the dissolved CO2 and the rock formation have on the convection streams which carry the CO2 to greater depths.

The researchers found that the behaviour of carbon dioxide depends strongly on the chemical composition of the rock formation: while the streaming of dissolved carbon dioxide persists in carbonate rocks, the chemical interactions in silicate-rich rocks may curb this transport drastically and even inhibit it altogether. For example, for a rock matrix rich in calcium feldspar, the convection streams may be completely shut off just two months after the onset of motion. After this, the carbon dioxide will be transported to depth by much slower diffusional processes.

These results challenge current views of carbon sequestration and dissolution rates in the subsurface, suggesting that pooled carbon dioxide may remain in the shallower regions of the formation for hundreds to thousands of years, while deeper regions of the reservoir can remain virtually carbon free.

The findings could have important practical implications for storage of carbon dioxide in saline aquifers, enabling informed screening of the most effective sites.

“Screening of new sites will need to include not only the size and location of the reservoir, but also the mineralogy of the rock,” said Cardoso. “The present study simply shows that mineralogy has a strong impact on where the CO2 ends up. Which specific mineralogy is best remains to be studied.”

Professor Sharon Peacock and Professor Graeme Barker are among those who have been given honours in this year’s New Year Honours list.

Clinical microbiologist Professor Sharon Peacock was awarded a CBE for her services to Medical Microbiology. Peacock is known for her work with the Wellcome Trust Major Overseas Programme in Thailand where for seven years she directed a wide-ranging programme of bacterial disease research. In the UK she has focused on the role of sequencing technologies in diagnostic microbiology and public health.

Peacock chairs the Cambridge Infectious Diseases Initiative and is deputy director of the Wellcome Trust Cambridge Centre for Global Health Research. She was elected to the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2013. “Delighted” to have won the award, Peacock said: “I have the privilege of working with an outstanding group of scientists at the University of Cambridge and at the Sanger Institute, and this honour reflects their support and efforts. The award also reflects the importance of basic and applied microbiological research for individual and public health.”

Professor Graeme Barker was awarded a CBE for services to Archaeology. The former Disney Professor of Archaeology and director, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, is known for his research focussing on prehistoric archaeology, the relationship between landscape and people, transitions from foraging to farming, and the origins of human behaviour and migrations.

Barker has worked all over the world, including in the rainforest of Borneo, and the deserts of the Middle East and North Africa. One of his major contributions has been work showing how humans have adapted to climate change in the past, and the lessons that can be learned from this today.

Describing himself as “thrilled” to be awarded the CBE he said: “I changed to archaeology half way through my undergraduate degree at Cambridge inspired by meeting Colin Renfrew, then a research fellow, and was privileged to succeed him as Disney Professor in 2004. It has also been a privilege to work in archaeology, which has so much to tell us about what it means to be human. It is a team subject par excellence and in accepting the award I have felt very much that it celebrates the achievements of so many colleagues, and good friends from all parts of the world whose support has been so important to anything I have achieved.

Tim Oates, Group Director of Assessment Research and Development at Cambridge Assessment, was also awarded a CBE, for Services to Education.

Simon Lebus, Group Chief Executive of Cambridge Assessment said “We are all delighted that Tim has been so honoured; it is a signal recognition of the body of work he produced during his time as a Group Director at Cambridge Assessment.”

Oates, who joined Cambridge Assessment in May 2006, said “I would like to thank all those at Cambridge Assessment who enabled me to make this contribution to improving our education system.”

Trevor Llewellyn Richards, formerly Capital Project Liaison Officer at the University’s School of Clinical Medicine, was awarded a BEM for services to Biomedical Research and the Welfare of Animals in Research. Mr Richards was Director of Central Biomedical Resources from 1996 to 2012 and has been described as an “outstanding bio-facilities manager.”

Researchers from the University of Cambridge have developed a new self-assembled material, which, by changing its shape, can amplify small variations in temperature and concentration of biomolecules, making them easier to detect. The material, which consists of synthetic spheres ‘glued’ together with short strands of DNA, could be used to underpin a new class of biosensors, or form the basis for new drug delivery systems.

The interplay between the lipid spheres, called giant vesicles, and the strands of DNA produces a unique response when the material is exposed to changes in temperature. Instead of expanding when heated – as is normally the case – the material contracts, a phenomenon known as negative thermal expansion. Details are published today (7 January) in the journal Nature Communications.

In addition to its role as a carrier of genetic information, DNA is also useful for building advanced materials. Short strands of DNA, dubbed ‘sticky ends’, can be customised so that they will only bind to specific complementary sequences. This flexibility allows researchers to use DNA to drive the self-assembly of materials into specific shapes.

Basing self-assembled materials around vesicles – synthetic versions of the soft sacs which envelop living cells – allows for even more flexibility, since the vesicles are so easily deformable. Using short DNA tethers with a cholesterol ‘anchor’ at one end and an exposed sticky DNA sequence at the other, the vesicles can be stuck together. When assembled into a hybrid DNA-lipid network, the DNA tethers can diffuse and rearrange, resulting in massive vesicle shape changes.

Besides negative thermal expansion, the researchers also found that changes in temperature lead to a significant variation in the porosity of the material, which is therefore highly controllable. A similar response is expected by changing the concentration of the DNA tethers, which could also be replaced by other types of ligand-receptor pairs, such as antibodies.

“The characteristics of this material make it suitable for several different applications, ranging from filtration, to the encapsulation and triggered release of drugs, to biosensors,” said Dr Lorenzo Di Michele of the University’s Cavendish Laboratory, who led the research. “Having this kind of control over a material is like a ‘golden ticket’ of sensing.”

This research is part of the CAPITALS, a UK-wide programme funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). Cambridge Enterprise, the University’s commercialisation arm, is currently looking for commercial partners to help develop this material.

The POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews was opened in Warsaw only last October.

On the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto, it is a spectacular modern award-winning building with extensive collections presenting the whole thousand year history of the Jewish community in Poland, once the largest Jewish Community in the world, which was almost entirely destroyed during the Holocaust.

The core exhibition area includes a multimedia narrative with interactive installations, paintings and oral histories.

“A virtual tour of the POLIN Museum of the history of Polish Jews in Warsaw” is a free event on Friday 16 January from 5pm in the William Mong Hall at Sidney Sussex College.

The Museum’s Programme Director Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett will conduct a stunning virtual tour illustrating the museum’s philosophy and how Poland is rediscovering the Jewish dimension of its history.

This will be followed by a broader discussion on the subject of Jewish memory in contemporary Poland with Dr Roma Sendyka, a researcher at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow.

Cambridge Polish Studies was launched in October 2014, like the Museum, in the University’s Department of Slavonic Studies.

This innovative pilot initiative – sponsored by the Foundation for Polish Science (FNP), the M. B. Grabowski Fund, Trinity College’s Zdanowich Fund, and the School of Arts and Humanities – combines undergraduate education in Polish literature and language with a rich cycle of special events, including guest speakers, public debates, film screenings, and academic conferences.

The initiative aims to make Cambridge a key centre for the study of Poland in the UK and beyond. 

Dr Stanley Bill, the new Lecturer in Polish Studies, said: “We cannot understand the history of Polish culture without the Jewish thread. For centuries the Polish lands were a place of refuge for the Jewish people and a hotbed of religious and cultural innovation.

“Today, many Poles are keen to rediscover this aspect of their own history, learning about the vibrant communities that formed an important part of Polish life before the Nazi genocide. The POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews is already making a crucial contribution to this process.”

Dr Bill works largely on twentieth-century Polish culture, with strong interests in Polish-Jewish and Polish-Ukrainian relations.

Before coming to Cambridge, he worked at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland.

He did his Ph.D. in Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University in the United States. He originally hails from Perth, Australia.

This event is part of an emergent research cluster within the department concentrating on the shared multicultural heritage of today’s Poland and Ukraine.

In Easter term, the eminent Polish philosopher Agata Bielik-Robson will come to Cambridge to discuss the work and legacy of the great Polish-Jewish writer, Bruno Schulz, who was murdered by the Nazis in 1942 in a region that now belongs to Ukraine.

In June, Cambridge Polish Studies will organize a major international conference on Polish-Ukrainian relations in partnership with Cambridge Ukrainian Studies.

For free registration for the event on 16 Januaryclick here

The University Council has appointed three new Pro-Vice-Chancellors who will take up their positions over the next 12 months. They are Professor Eilis Ferran, Professor Chris Abell and Professor Nigel Slater.

They will join Professor Graham Virgo, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education, who took up his post in October last year, and Professor Duncan Maskell, when he starts as Senior Pro-Vice-Chancellor in August 2015.

The five Pro-Vice-Chancellors are responsible for taking forward the University’s strategy and policy development, and supporting the Vice-Chancellor in his or her role in providing leadership to the University. Each post covers areas of strategic importance to the University.

Professor Ferran, whose appointment takes effect on 1 October 2015, will focus on human resources and provide oversight of the University’s international affairs. She is currently Professor of Company and Securities Law in the Faculty of Law, chair of the Faculty and a Professorial Fellow at St Catharine’s College.

Professor Abell will take up his appointment on 1 January 2016, focusing on research. He is Professor of Biological Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry and a Fellow of Christ’s College. In 2013, he became the University’s first Director of the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs, set up to deal with issues relating to the postdoctoral community at Cambridge.

Also taking up post on 1 January 2016, Professor Slater will focus on enterprise and regional affairs. He is currently Head of the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, and is Professor of Chemical Engineering and a Fellow of Fitzwilliam College.

They will take over from Professor Jeremy Sanders (Institutional Affairs), Professor Lynn Gladden (Research) and Dr Jennifer Barnes (International Strategy).

Further biographical details on departmental websites are available via the Further Links section.

Picture, from left to right: Professor Eilis Ferran, Professor Chris Abell and Professor Nigel Slater.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge and Plymouth University have shown that follow-through – such as when swinging a golf club or tennis racket – can help us to learn two different skills at once, or to learn a single skill faster. The research provides new insight into the way tasks are learned, and could have implications for rehabilitation, such as re-learning motor skills following a stroke.

The researchers found that the particular motor memory which is active and modifiable in the brain at any given time depends on both lead-in and follow-through movement, and that skills which may otherwise interfere can be learned at the same time if their follow-through motions are unique. The research is published today (8 January) in the journal Current Biology.

While follow-through in sports such as tennis or golf cannot affect the movement of the ball after it has been hit, it does serve two important purposes: it both helps maximise velocity or force at the point of impact, and helps prevent injuries by allowing a gradual slowdown of a movement.

Now, researchers have found a third important role for follow-through: it allows distinct motor memories to be learned. In other words, by practising the same action with different follow-throughs, different motor memories can be learned for a single movement.

If a new task, whether that is serving a tennis ball or learning a passage on a musical instrument, is repeated enough times, a motor memory of that task is developed. The brain is able to store, protect and reactivate this memory, quickly instructing the muscles to perform the task so that it can be performed seemingly without thinking.

The problem with learning similar but distinct tasks is that they can ‘interfere’ with each other in the brain. For example, tennis and racquetball are both racket sports. However, the strokes for the two sports are slightly different, as topspin is great for a tennis player, but not for a racquetball player. Despite this, in theory it should be possible to learn both sports independently. However, many people find it difficult to perform at a high level in both sports, due to interference between the two strokes.

In order to determine whether we learn a separate motor memory for each task, or a single motor memory for both, the researchers examined either the presence or absence of interference by having participants learn a ‘reaching’ task in the presence of two opposite force-fields.

Participants grasped the handle of a robotic interface and made a reaching movement through an opposing force-field to a central target, followed immediately by a second unopposed follow-through movement to one of two possible final targets. The direction of the force-field was changed, representing different tasks, and the researchers were able to examine whether the tasks are learned separately, in which case there would be no interference, or whether we learn the mean of the two opposing force-fields, in which case there would be complete interference.

The researchers found that the specific motor memory which is active at any given moment depends on the movement that will be made in the near future. When a follow-through movement was made that anticipated the force-field direction, there was a substantial reduction in interference. This suggests that different follow-throughs may activate distinct motor memories, allowing us to learn two different skills without them interfering, even when the rest of the movement is identical. However, while practising a variable follow-through can activate multiple motor memories, practising a consistent follow-through allowed for tasks to be learned much faster.

“There is always noise in our movements, which arrives in the sensory information we receive, the planning we undertake, and the output of our motor system,” said Dr David Franklin of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, a senior author on the research. “Because of this, every movement we make is slightly different from the last one even if we try really hard to make it exactly the same - there will always be variability within our movements and therefore within our follow-through as well.”

When practicing a new skill such as a tennis stroke, we may think that we do not need to care as much about controlling the variability after we hit the ball as it can’t actually affect the movement of the ball itself. “However this research suggests that this variability has another very important point - that it reduces the speed of learning of the skill that is being practiced,” said Franklin.

The research may also have implications for rehabilitation, such as re-learning skills after a stroke. When trying to re-learn skills after a stroke, many patients actually exhibit a great deal of variability in their movements. “Since we have shown that learning occurs faster with consistent movements, it may therefore be important to consider methods to reduce this variability in order to improve the speed of rehabilitation,” said Dr Ian Howard of Plymouth University, the paper’s lead author.

The work was supported by the Wellcome Trust, Human Frontier Science Program, Plymouth University and the Royal Society.

Construction has begun on a hi-tech ’living building’ that will allow engineers to ‘ask how it is feeling’ and get a reply.

The James Dyson Building will have a central nervous system of sensors built into it, giving those working inside it a chance to use their surroundings for research and teaching.

It has been made possible by a donation of £8 million from the James Dyson Foundation to create a technology hub at the heart of Cambridge that will provide the University of Cambridge’s brightest engineers with some of the world’s most advanced engineering laboratories.

The new building will house postgraduates and provide spaces to allow students to share concepts; incubator units will let students conduct intensive research. Specialist knowledge on research strategies and funding advice will be available on-site.

The building will support world leading investigation into areas such as carbon nanotubes, electric vehicles, and efficient internal combustion systems for cars.

At the ground-breaking ceremony  Professor David Cardwell, Head of the Department of Engineering, spoke of the significance of the project to support world-leading research and the benefits of installing instrumentation into the fabric of the building.

“It is a very exciting time for engineering. Modern day construction is extremely impressive. There is so much opportunity to use the fabric of the building in terms of research and generating data and teaching students,” said Professor Cardwell. “The modern way is to bring the building to life and this is a fantastic opportunity. It’s the sign of the future and we will be doing much more of this sort of thing as we move forward. There are very exciting times ahead.”

Sensing tools developed at the Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction (CSIC) will provide the ‘central nerves’.

All three speakers at the ceremony, including Bob Ensch, Area Director at Morgan Sindall, the main contractors for the project, and Angus Stephen, Director of Operations for the University's Estate Management, acknowledged the collaboration with CSIC to instrument the building and the opportunity the new resource will offer to facilitate transformative and life-changing technological breakthroughs.

A number of the foundation piles have been instrumented with CSIC fibre-optic sensors which will provide data, including the temperature gradient of the piles, the temperature of the concrete as it sets and strain measurements as the load changes during construction.

Bob Ensch spoke of the ceremony being a defining moment in the construction process and the implications of instrumenting the piles: “Fibre optics are like the nerves in the body and we are on our way to connecting the building up to create a living lab.”

Additional technologies will be added to the fabric of the four-storey, low-carbon and low-energy building as the project, due to be completed in November 2015, progresses to provide a picture of how the structure is behaving. Dr Mohammed Elshafie, Co-Investigator at CSIC, said: “This is a chance to populate a new building in our own back yard with a range of sensing technologies so, when CSIC is working with students and industry, we can demonstrate our sensing devices operating in real time. Installing CSIC sensing technologies transforms the building from a passive block of material into a living creature. We will be able to ask the building how it is feeling and the building will be able to reply.”

Angus Stephen, highlighted the innovative features of the structure to create carbon-free electricity and said the James Dyson Building will be the lowest energy user across the University’s estate.

The James Dyson Building will be complemented by a state-of-the-art Dyson Centre of Engineering Design in the Inglis Building. The event was attended by members of the Dyson family.

Image L-R: Greg Smith (Site Manager, Morgan Sindall), Professor Dame Ann Dowling (President, Royal Academy of Engineering), Angus Stephen (Director of Operations, Estate Management), Professor David Cardwell (Head of Department of Engineering), Tom and Dore Dyson, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz (The Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge),  Bob Ensch (Area Director, Morgan Sindall).