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Gates Cambridge Trust announces new Provost

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Professor Everitt, currently Master of Downing College, Cambridge and a Fellow of both the Royal Society and the Academy of Medical Sciences, has been included on a list of the 100 most cited neuroscientists.  He succeeds the current Provost, Professor Robert Lethbridge, on 1 October 2013.

The Gates Cambridge Scholarships were established in 2000 by a donation of US$210m from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to the University of Cambridge, which represents the largest ever single donation to a UK university.

The Scholarships fund outstanding international postgraduate students who are selected on the basis of their intellectual ability, capacity for leadership, and a commitment to improving the lives of other.

Competition is fierce and global - over 4,000 applicants for 90 Scholarships each year.

Scholars pursue the full range of academic subjects and form a diverse community integrated within the University.  Including the class of 2013, there are currently 1,239 Scholars and Alumni from 96 countries.

Both Bill and Melinda Gates are Honorary Patrons of Gates Cambridge. Mr Gates said: “Melinda and I are delighted that the Gates Cambridge Trust, which the Foundation established in 2000, is going from strength to strength. This high-profile appointment reinforces our confidence in the future of this prestigious international scholarship programme and its capacity to nurture future leaders who will improve the lives of others.”

The University’s Vice-Chancellor and Chair of the Gates Cambridge Trustees, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, stated: “The Gates Cambridge Scholarship programme epitomises what universities' role in society should be: to be at the forefront of addressing global challenges such as poverty reduction. I am very proud of what has been achieved so far and am delighted with the appointment of Professor Barry Everitt, who I know will take the programme through yet another successful stage of its development.”

President of Gates Cambridge Scholars’ Council Andrew Gruen commented on behalf of the 225 scholars currently resident in Cambridge: “As a well-established and well-respected leader in higher education and research, Professor Everitt brings experience and passion that will be of enormous value to the Gates Cambridge Scholar community. I have every confidence he will be a strong mentor to Scholars and will make an already incredible programme even more successful.”

Professor Everitt said: “I am honoured to have been appointed the next Provost of the Gates Cambridge Trust. The Scholarships are exceptionally important to the University and also globally. I look forward to building on the many achievements of the first two Provosts and, in particular, engaging with the Scholar and Alumni communities who are already having such an important impact on the world.”

Professor Everitt's research is in the general area of behavioural neuroscience and is concerned with the neural and psychological mechanisms underlying learning, memory and motivation. His major research focus is the neuropsychology of drug addiction. He has been President of the British Association for Psychopharmacology, the European Brain and Behaviour Society and the European Behavioural Pharmacology Society. He served as Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of Neuroscience and is currently a reviewing editor for Science.

Professor Everitt received the American Psychological Association 'Distinguished Scientific Contribution' Award and the European Behavioural Pharmacology Society 'Distinguished Achievement Award' in 2011 and, in 2012, the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies European Journal of Neuroscience (FENS-EJN) Award and the British Association of Psychopharmacology Lifetime Achievement Award

Leading neuroscientist Professor Barry Everitt has been appointed the next Provost (CEO) of Gates Cambridge – one of the world’s most prestigious scholarship programmes.

This high-profile appointment reinforces our confidence in the future of this prestigious international scholarship programme and its capacity to nurture future leaders who will improve the lives of others.
Bill Gates

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Graphene joins the race to redefine the ampere

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The world’s first graphene single-electron pump (SEP), described in a paper in Nature Nanotechnology, provides the speed of electron flow needed to create a new standard for electrical current based on electron charge. The international system of units (SI) comprises seven base units (the metre, kilogram, second, Kelvin, ampere, mole and candela). Ideally these should be stable over time and universally reproducible. This requires definitions based on fundamental constants of nature which are the same wherever you measure them.

The present definition of the Ampere, however, is vulnerable to drift and instability. This is not sufficient to meet the accuracy needs of present and certainly future electrical measurement. The highest global measurement authority, the Conférence Générale des Poids et Mesures, has proposed that the ampere be re-defined in terms of the electron charge.

The front runner in this race to redefine the ampere is the single-electron pump (SEP). SEPs create a flow of individual electrons by shuttling them in to a quantum dot – a particle holding pen – and emitting them one at a time and at a well-defined rate.  The paper published today describes how a graphene SEP has been successfully produced and characterised for the first time, and confirms its properties are extremely well suited to this application.

A good SEP pumps precisely one electron at a time to ensure accuracy, and pumps them quickly to generate a sufficiently large current. Up to now the development of a practical electron pump has been a two-horse race. Tuneable barrier pumps use traditional semiconductors and have the advantage of speed, while the hybrid turnstile utilises superconductivity and has the advantage that many can be put in parallel. Traditional metallic pumps, thought to be not worth pursuing, have been given a new lease of life by fabricating them out of the world’s most famous super-material - graphene.

Previous metallic SEPs made of aluminium are very accurate, but pump electrons too slowly for making a practical current standard. Graphene’s unique semimetallic two-dimensional structure has just the right properties to let electrons on and off the quantum dot very quickly, creating a fast enough electron flow - at near gigahertz frequency - to create a current standard. The Achilles' heel of metallic pumps, slow pumping speed, has thus been overcome by exploiting the unique properties of graphene.

The scientist at NPL and Cambridge's Department of Physics still need to optimise the material and make more accurate measurements, but today’s paper marks a major step forward in the road towards using graphene to redefine the ampere.

The realisation of the ampere is currently derived indirectly from resistance or voltage, which can be realised separately using the quantum Hall effect and the Josephson Effect. A fundamental definition of the ampere would allow a direct realisation that National Measurement Institutes around the world could adopt. This would shorten the chain for calibrating current-measuring equipment, saving time and money for industries billing for electricity and using ionising radiation for cancer treatment.

Current, voltage and resistance are directly correlated. Because we measure resistance and voltage based on fundamental constants – electron charge and Planck’s constant - being able to measure current would also allow us to confirm the universality of these constants on which many precise measurements rely.

Graphene is not the last word in creating an ampere standard. NPL and others are investigating various methods of defining current based on electron charge. But today’s paper suggests graphene SEPs could hold the answer. Also, any redefinition will have to wait until the Kilogram has been redefined. This definition, due to be decided soon, will fix the value of electronic charge, on which any electron-based definition of the ampere will depend.

The paper also has important implications beyond measurement. Accurate SEPs operating at high frequency and accuracy can be used to make electrons collide and form entangled electron pairs. Entanglement is believed to be a fundamental resource for quantum computing, and for answering fundamental questions in quantum mechanics.

Malcolm Connolly, a research associate at Cambridge, said : “This paper describes how we have successfully produced the first graphene single-electron pump. We have work to do before we can use this research to redefine the ampere, but this is a major step towards that goal. We have shown that graphene outperforms other materials used to make this style of SEP. It is robust, easier to produce, and operates at higher frequency. Graphene is constantly revealing exciting new applications and as our understanding of the material advances rapidly, we seem able to do more and more with it.”

Text courtesy of the National Physical Laboratory.

A new joint innovation by the University of Cambridge and the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), the UK’s National Measurement Institute, could pave the way for redefining the ampere in terms of fundamental constants of physics.

Graphene is constantly revealing exciting new applications and as our understanding of the material advances rapidly, we seem able to do more and more with it
Malcolm Connolly
Electron pumps made from graphene work ten times faster than similar pumps made from conventional three-dimensional materials and can be used to generate larger currents

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University Sermon on 'The Christian Movement in Africa'

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The Ramsden Preacher must preach on Church extension overseas, especially within the Commonwealth of Nations.

Professor Maxwell was educated at the Universities of Manchester and Oxford and his early career included three years teaching in a rural secondary school in Zimbabwe. A Lecturer in International History at Keele from 1994, he was appointed Professor of African History there in 2007, before moving to the Dixie Chair in Cambridge in 2011.

David Maxwell has held Visiting Fellowships or Residencies in Australia, Switzerland and Italy, and been an Honorary Fellow at the University of Zimbabwe, at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Witwatersrand, and at the Département des Sciences Historiques, University of Lubumbashi, DRC.

Professor Maxwell's research interests include the 19th and 20th Century Missionary Movement, Missionary Encounter in Southern and Central Africa, Pentecostalism and Religious Transnationalism, Religious Movements and Politics and the History of Colonial Science. He has held major research grants from the ESRC and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.

His publications include Christians and Chiefs in Zimbabwe: A Social History of the Hwesa People c.1870s-1990s (1999) and African Gifts of the Spirit: Pentecostalism and the Rise of a Zimbabwean Transnational Religious Movement (2006).

In 2012 David Maxwell edited, with Patrick Harries, The Spiritual in the Secular, Missionaries and Knowledge about Africa.

All are welcome and there will be a wine-reception in Michaelhouse afterwards for those present.

Members of the University attending should wear their gowns. Doctors wear scarlet.

David Maxwell, Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History and Fellow of Emmanuel College, will preach the Ramsden Sermon in Great St Mary's, the University Church, at 11.15 a.m. on Whitsunday, 19 May.

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Creativity that counts

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An apocalypse unfolds before the viewer’s eyes, as microscopic dots appear, combine and ‘consume’ a work of art: digital artist Joseph Nechvatal destroys digital representations of his paintings by unleashing a computer virus that ‘gnaws away’ at his creation in real-time and, to do so, he collaborates with programmer Stéphane Sikora.

Many artists like Nechvatal have embraced the benefits of working both digitally and collaboratively to create innovative pieces. The 52-member Intercontinental Music Lab, for instance, creates music that is inspired, arranged and written by different band members without them ever having to meet. “We all understand that the completed song can’t exist without this collective creative input,” explained founding partner Barney Brown.

But what are the implications of collaboration when it comes to deciding who the author of the work is, and who owns the rights to control its use? “The premise is that the digital world is changing both the way people create works and what they create,” explained Professor Lionel Bently from Cambridge’s Faculty of Law. “While there have been many responses from copyright law to the possibility for copyright infringement, there has been very little in terms of rethinking the fundamental concepts – who is the author and what constitutes the work they have created?”

A team of researchers from the Universities of Cambridge (led by Bently), Amsterdam and Bergen is now reaching the completion of a three-year research project that is scrutinising these notions.

Funded with €1 million by HERA, the study is drawing on insights from humanities disciplines to offer a new understanding of copyright norms that can support the continuation of creative collaboration in the digital environment.

“Copyright is often criticised for being rooted in a solitary notion of authorship,” explained lawyer Dr Elena Cooper, who has interviewed 18 digital artists and poets, including Joseph Nechvatal, as part of the project. “The assumption is that creative practices using digital technology radically challenge that concept. The interviews revealed that authorship remains an important concept in the digital age, though there is a real diversity in its meaning, spanning not just collaborative notions, but also solitary ones.

“Moreover, we often think of large-scale multi-author ventures like Wikipedia as being newly enabled by digital technology. But the 70-year process of compiling the Oxford English Dictionary, instigated by the Philological Society in 1857, reveals that large-scale collaborations also existed in the 19th century. This was a process that involved the contribution of thousands of volunteer readers, sub-editors and assistants, alongside the salaried editors.”

Cooper’s research in the archives of Oxford University Press and the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library is revealing a treasure-trove of correspondence that documents what lawyers, unpaid contributors and Philological Society members understood about the copyright implications of the involvement of masses of contributors. Looking at the solutions proposed in the 19th century, she commented: “we may well be able to learn from this experience today.”

Cooper and philosopher Dr Laura Biron are also asking whether ideas about the philosophy of art can help copyright identify the author in cases where many have contributed. “We are examining what institutional theories of the late 20th century say about authorship,” Cooper explained, “and how a new definition based on the role, authority and intent of the artist could help copyright lawyers navigate their way through the competing claims of multiple contributors. This is an intersection between philosophy and law that has not been previously considered.”

In a digital world, literature, art and music are often the result of collaborative efforts. But who owns what, and can copyright law cope? New research aims to find out.

Authorship remains an important concept in the digital age, though there is real diversity in its meaning.
Elena Cooper
'blackeye', Joseph Nechvatal, 2010; computer-robotic-assisted acrylic on canvas and screen with digital animation

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Planes, trains and automobiles....

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The five Information Seminars were hosted by the International School of Aberdeen, Glasgow’s Springburn Academy, and Edinburgh Academy.  Every school in mainland Scotland received an invitation to take part, hear the latest information on courses and applications, and have their questions answered.

Laura McGarty and Ellen Slack, School Liaison Officers from Pembroke and Selwyn Colleges, spoke about student life and offered tips on choosing a college, while Dr Caroline Burt and Dr Mike Sewell gave advice on choosing the right course and preparing a strong application.

“Choosing the right course is fundamental to the chance of getting in to university,” explained Dr Burt, Admissions Tutor for Pembroke College. “Don’t forget that there might be courses which you would enjoy and which suit your abilities, but which you don’t study at school.”

“As Admissions Tutors we’re looking for academic ability, independent thought, interest in your chosen subject and commitment to your studies. You can demonstrate these in your personal statement by discussing books you have read, scientific themes you have investigated, or ways you have explored maths, for example.

“If we interview you, we’re trying to bring out your academic skills and quality. We can’t achieve that by asking trick questions.”

As well as advice to students, the sessions offered teachers the chance to review two real Cambridge application forms – with personal details anonymised – to show first-hand what makes a strong application.

Jack, 16, and Charlotte 15, travelled from Beaconhurst School, Bridge of Allan, to attend the Springburn Academy seminar.

“I don’t know much about university yet, so it’s been good to check out the process,” Jack said. “It’s been quite an eye-opener.”

“The information makes university seem a bit less daunting and mysterious,” Charlotte added.

Caitlin and Fiona, both 16, came to the Glasgow seminar from Kyle Academy in Ayr.

“I wanted to hear tips on the interview, and on how to write a good personal statement,” Caitlin said. “The advice to make the statement 70% about your academic interests and only 30% about other achievements was really helpful.”

For Fiona, the statistics on admissions and on employment were the most useful part of the event. “The fact that everyone’s got the same opportunity to get into a university like Cambridge was reassuring – and that so many people go on to get good jobs afterwards.”

Annette Mackay, Depute Head of Bearsden Academy, brought a large group of S5 and S4 students to the seminar. “We need to be talking about university choices as students come up to their standard grades.

“It’s not practical for me to take a group this size to Cambridge so having this event in Glasgow is very helpful.”

Welcoming participants to the Edinburgh seminars, Marco Longmore, Rector of Edinburgh Academy, said “You all have the ambition and the ability to apply to high-tariff courses.

“Turning that ambition into reality requires good decisions and some key actions.

“The value of a session like this is that it gives you an opportunity to understand the process and the expectations that an institution like Cambridge has of its applicants.

“On the back of that understanding you'll feel much better prepared as you embark upon this process.”

Edinburgh Academy student Patrick Christie, 15, felt better informed as a result of the seminar. “You do know a bit, but it has clarified things – it’s been a good insight into how a university works.”

Beth Crichton, also 15, agreed. “It has been really useful and has clarified things I wasn’t sure about, particularly the application process. It’s good that the Cambridge team have come here so that we don’t have to travel.”

Alice Newey, 16, came from Linlithgow to the Edinburgh seminar. “I know that I want to apply to Cambridge.  It can sometimes feel like an unachievable goal, but being here today has made me feel more comfortable.

“The presentations have set out the academic requirements for getting in. I’m clearer now on what I need to do - and I now know that Cambridge understands Scottish Highers.”

Reflecting on the tour, Ellen Slack, Selwyn College School Liaison Officer, said “It was so interesting to speak with students about how they were developing their passions for particular subjects and starting to think seriously about which to focus on at higher levels.

“It was also lovely to have so many good, interesting questions both during the presentations and informally between sessions.”

Dr Mike Sewell, Admissions Tutor for Selwyn College and Director of Admissions for the Cambridge Colleges, said “Scots students are greatly valued by the University.

“Events like these Information Seminars don’t just provide an opportunity for us to set out our stall and provide information on what Cambridge has to offer bright and ambitious young Scots.

“They’re also a chance for us to listen to Scottish students and their teachers, and find out more about what we can do to encourage Scots to consider us among their higher education options.”

Two Colleges of the University of Cambridge spent a week on the road to show Scottish students and teachers what the university had to offer them.

I’m clearer now on what I need to do - and I now know that Cambridge understands Scottish Highers.
Alice Newey, Linlithgow Academy student
Participants in the Edinburgh Information Seminar

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Lily Cole brings new social network impossible.com to Cambridge students

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Backed by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, *impossible* will first run as a closed beta to Cambridge students, before launching nationally later on in the year. Anyone with access to a @cam.ac.uk email address, will be able to download and access the *impossible* app from iTunes (note stars in title - it can also be accessed through impossible.com.)

The app enables users to post wishes, which are shown to other users likely to be able to help (based on proximity, existing social graphs and matching skills). The emphasis is on giving, rather than bartering with an underlying concept of general reciprocity (give into a community, who may then give back to you).

Impossible is actively seeking feedback on the platform from students, before launching nationally.

Today Lily Cole and members of the Impossible team will be at the “Giving Tree”, the tall horse chestnut in front of King’s College Chapel on King’s Parade, all day until 6pm. Students can visit at any time during the day to meet them, ask questions about the project and to post their own wishes.

Tomorrow evening Lily will take part in a debate at the Union Society alongside Jimmy Wales, David Halpern, Genevieve Vaughn and James Suzman, on the motion “This House believes an economy based on giving is impossible”.

For more information go to King’s Parade today or visit www.impossible.com

Model, actress and King’s College alumna Lily Cole is in Cambridge today and tomorrow to present to Cambridge students a new “gift economy” social networking concept.

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Scientists explore the inner workings of the teenage brain

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Despite adolescence being a high-risk time for developing major psychiatric and drug dependence disorders, very little is known about the teenage brain.

A novel research project jointly led by scientists from the University of Cambridge and UCL (University College London) aims to shed light on what happens to the brain as young people mature as part of a £5.4 million project funded by the Wellcome Trust.

Profiled last night on the BBC News, the U-Change study will use brain scans, questionnaires and genetic testing on 300 people between the ages of 14 and 24 to improve our understanding of how different parts of the brain develop.

Professor Ed Bullmore, lead researcher on this project from the University of Cambridge, said: “The teenage brain struggles with controlling impulsive and emotional behaviour – as most parents of an adolescent can attest. Our research will hopefully shed light on what happens to their brains as they mature.

“It seems very likely that the major cognitive, emotional and behavioural changes of adolescence will turn out to be related to the alterations that occur in brain networks during this period.”

This is the first study of its kind to use both conventional MRI to examine normal youth brain development by taking scans over a period of several years and fMRI, a type of brain scan that enables scientists to see blood flow which represents brain activity and will allow researchers to measure brain function in the same subjects.

Additionally, the volunteers will be asked to answer questionnaires to assess socio-demographics, mental well-being, environment, etc., as well as undergo tests to assess their impulsive and risk-taking behaviour. In order to examine what role genetics may play in brain development, the scientists will also collect saliva and/or blood samples.

Professor Bullmore believes that changes in the wiring of the brain as adolescents mature eventually enable young adults to bring their impulsive behaviour under control. He remarked to the BBC, “I think we are going to find that decision-making processes in the younger teenagers are driven by short-term considerations, immediate emotional states and immediate past history of what was rewarding.”

But he is hopeful that their research could inform interventions which might expedite the process, adding: “You could imagine that it might be possible to develop computerised games or other training programmes that could help adolescents develop advance cognitive skills faster than they otherwise would.”

John Williams, Head of Neuroscience and Mental Health at the Wellcome Trust, said: “We need to understand what happens in the brain as part of normal development before we can start to work out what goes wrong in psychiatric disorders. This research will be key to understanding how these disorders develop and we hope will help to find better treatments.”

The study, which is sponsored by the University of Cambridge and the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust (CPFT), may eventually enable doctors to identify individuals at high risk of developing a psychiatric or drug dependence disorder and to improve intervention. Additionally, by refining our understanding of how these disorders develop, it has the potential to advance treatments for these young people.

The U-Change study is part of a larger programme called the Neuroscience in Psychiatry Network (NSPN), which has been funded by a £5.4 million Strategic Award from the Wellcome Trust to the University of Cambridge and University College London. Future studies as part of the NSPN programme will build on research from the U-Change study on normal brain and mind development but will focus more directly on how psychiatric disorders such as depression, conduct disorder and psychosis arise.

New study to reveal what happens to the human brain as we mature; research will also provide insight into the development of mental disorders

You could imagine that it might be possible to develop computerised games or other training programmes that could help adolescents develop advance cognitive skills
Ed Bullmore
Brain mapping of teenagers

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The artificial pancreas that keeps tabs on sugar

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Type 1 diabetes is a lifelong condition caused when the pancreas stops producing the insulin needed to control blood sugar levels. Patients must carry out frequent finger-prick tests and inject insulin to keep their blood sugar within safe limits. Left untreated, Type 1 diabetes is fatal; even suboptimal control increases the risk of heart disease, stroke, kidney failure, nerve damage and blindness.

Patients under the age of five are a particularly vulnerable group. Too young to recognise the shaking and dizziness that warn of a drop in their blood sugar, they are at high risk of developing overnight hypoglycaemia.

Now, a clinical trial with this age group is testing an ‘artificial pancreas’, developed by the group of Dr Roman Hovorka, Director of Research at the University’s Metabolic Research Laboratories. “Using an off-the-shelf insulin pump and continuous glucose sensor, we’ve developed a computer algorithm to control their function in a closed-loop fashion, delivering the correct amount of insulin according to blood sugar levels,” he said. “By maintaining tight control of blood sugar, this has the potential to revolutionise the treatment of patients with Type 1 diabetes and significantly improve their quality of life.”

The glucose-responsive insulin delivery system has been trialled in adolescents, adults and pregnant women with Type 1 diabetes at the Cambridge Clinical Research Facility (CRF), and follow-on studies are ongoing with these groups at home.

Hovorka has now turned his focus towards using the system to help the very youngest patients. This year, 78,000 children worldwide were diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, and the incidence in under-fives is rising annually by 3% in many countries.

“The risk of these children developing overnight hypoglycaemia, when blood glucose levels drop dangerously low and can lead to a coma, is a major concern for parents,” said Hovorka. “The tiring routine of getting up several times every night to check their child’s blood sugar is disruptive for the whole family.”

In the new trial, running until July 2013, children stay overnight at the CRF with their parents. “Insulin is a hormone that is powerful enough to kill people, so we need to be very careful,” said Hovorka, whose research is funded by the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, US National Institutes of Health, Diabetes Research Network, National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), Diabetes UK and European Commission. “Our trials at the CRF are an essential step, enabling us to document safety and reliability with different groups before we let them test it at home. Our controlled conditions, and proximity to the hospital, provide reassurance that, if there is a problem, we can help.”

The CRF is a joint venture between the University’s School of Clinical Medicine, the NIHR and the Wellcome Trust. It provides facilities for investigators from across the Cambridge Biomedical Campus to carry out clinical trials in patients and healthy volunteers, but is now greatly oversubscribed. Fundraising is currently under way to enable an extension to be built next year, to accelerate the development of effective new treatments and interventions to benefit patients across a wide range of conditions, including obesity and diabetes, immune and inflammatory disorders, and cancer.

For Hovorka, various other trials of the artificial pancreas system are also in progress, including in the control of blood sugar in patients in the Neurosciences Critical Care Unit at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, and his prototype devices are being commercialised by Cambridge Enterprise, the University’s commercialisation arm. “We hope to make the overnight closed-loop system widely available in the next three to five years,” he said.

Development of a sophisticated artificial pancreas holds potential to transform the lives of patients with Type 1 diabetes.

This has the potential to revolutionise the treatment of patients with Type 1 diabetes.
Roman Hovorka
Sugar spoon

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What is English?

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If the Cambridge English Corpus, created by Cambridge University Press, were to be printed on single-sided A4 paper and stacked into a tower, it would stand 600 m high, almost twice the height of the tallest building in the UK. If it was read aloud at an average reading speed, it would take 88,766 hours to read; working 7 hours a day, 5 days a week, that’s 49 years.

The multibillion-word Cambridge English Corpus is a constantly updated record of how English is being used today in all its forms – spoken, written, business, academic, learner and e-language. Amassed over two decades, the electronic database draws on sources that range from the more expected (books, newspapers, journals, radio, television) to the more surprising (song lyrics, junk mail, voicemail messages and recordings from flight control).

Cambridge University Press researchers use the Corpus to investigate the most common words, phrases and grammatical patterns in English, and then use the results to improve English language teaching books.

“Context in English is important,” explained Dr Claire Dembry, Language Research Manager, “we analyse patterns in language and how English changes depending on context and circumstances. For learners of English to become proficient, these sorts of subtle differences can be extremely important, and it is only by amassing a vast number of examples that our writers, lexicographers and researchers can determine how best to describe the patterns of English in our learning materials.”

It all began in the 1990s, when a few CDs of American newspapers in electronic form were loaded into a database that both stored the data and ‘queried’ it, working out the relationships between words. Gradually, the embryo corpus was extended with further material and, today, almost any conceivable form of English can be found in the database.

At an early stage, Cambridge University Press realised that just as important as knowing how English is being used, is the knowledge of the features of English that learners find difficult. “This decision, which led to the Cambridge Learner Corpus, had far-reaching effects and has become probably the single most important unique selling point for the Press’s English Language Teaching publishing,” said Ann Fiddes, Global Language Research Manager.

It turns out that words such as because (misspelled as becouse), which (wich), accommodation (accomodation), advertisement (advertisment) and beautiful (beatiful) are the top five words most commonly misspelled by learners globally.

To arrive at conclusions like this has taken years of painstaking identification (and tagging with computer readable codes) of misspellings and grammatical errors made in Cambridge English Language Assessment Examinations in the Cambridge Learner Corpus.

Comprehensive information about the learners who originally wrote the exam scripts – first language, nationality, age, gender, scores, and so on – is stored.  These data, along with the ‘error tagging’, has enabled Cambridge University Press to publish materials addressing directly the different types of errors of individual markets and individual language groups.

“This is hugely important for the Press and has meant that we have, for example, been able to publish the successful English for Spanish Speakers editions of global products, and become the market leader in Corpus-based publishing,” explained Fiddes.

Now, Cambridge University Press and Cambridge English Language Assessment have joined forces and set their sights on academic English.

The Cambridge English Corpus already contains over 400 million words of academic English – the largest and most extensive collection of its kind.  It takes as its source written and spoken academic language at undergraduate, postgraduate and professional level from a range of academic disciplines and worldwide institutions. New research is pulling in data from sixth-form students as well as other academic levels, covering a much wider range of disciplines, genres and language backgrounds.

“Some interesting patterns have already emerged,” said Fiddes. “In our collection of academic English samples, the size adjectives significant, considerable, substantial and serious are much more frequent than big, massive, enormous and tremendous. In spoken English, however, big tops the list. We also found that in academic English, verbs such as solve, pose, face, resolve, tackle and circumvent frequently occur with the noun problem. These kinds of insights help us to develop a better understanding of the language skills needed by students at English-speaking universities.”

As part of their current research, the team welcomes contributions of academic English to the corpus, and invite anyone interested in participating to contact them for more information (www.cambridge.org/camcae).

“Corpus work is very closely linked with advances in technology and we are investigating automating many of our manual systems, such as error tagging and speech transcription,” added Fiddes. “Our research has already allowed us to partially automate the mark up of errors in learner writing.

“These technologies will increase the speed at which we can maintain our grasp on what English is now, and what it might be in the future. ”

For more information about the Cambridge English Corpus, please visit www.cambridge.org/corpus

English speakers who are 18 or under use the word ‘like’ in conversation over five times as often as speakers who are over 70; ‘because’ is the most misspelled English word globally; the word ‘love’ is said and written over six times more frequently than the word ‘hate’. We know all of this because of a multibillion-word database called the Cambridge English Corpus.

For learners of English to become proficient, subtle differences can be extremely important.
Claire Dembry
Words

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Festival of Plants at Cambridge University Botanic Garden

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A range of events and exhibits timetabled throughout the day include ‘ask the gardener’ sessions, pop-up plant science demonstrations, and plant shopping along the Garden’s majestic Main Walk.

Activity hubs, listed below, make full use of the Garden, which is at its best in late spring with the Bee Borders, new Cory Lawn landscape by Bradley-Hole Schoenaich Landscape Architects, and the Systematic Beds in full
flower:

Pop-up Plant Science
Here some of the top plant scientists from the East of England will be talking about their research and demonstrating scientific experiments to visitors. Visitors will be able to extract plant pigments, take the temperature of a leaf and find out how plants know their ABC!

Talking Plants
Visitors can drop in to the Talking Plants tent to get advice from our expert horticultural staff on horticultural problems and gardening dilemmas. Leading scientists will give short talks about their research focusing on how science underpins how your garden grows.

Plant Promenade
The Garden’s majestic Main Walk will be transformed into a Plant Promenade of shopping stalls with a boutique selection of local independent nurseries with choice plants for sale.

Meet the Family
Learn all about plant families in the Garden’s unique Systematic Beds. Experts will be on hand to explain the key differences between plant families and invite visitors to pull apart some flowers and use the structures to determine which plants belong together and build a family tree. Younger visitors can create fantasy flowers to plant up a fallow bed with a new imaginary plant family!

Tour table
The Tour Table is the meeting point for a selection of expert-led tours of the collections and plants that are looking their best in mid-May – the tree collection, the wildflowers, the Systematic Beds, bee plants, and an introduction to the Garden’s National Collections.

Glasshouses
In the Glasshouses, visitors can travel around the world, discovering the drama of plant diversity supported by habitats ranging from rainforests to deserts. Garden guides will be on hand to answer questions and share plant curiosities such as the giant Coco de Mer, the largest seed in the world. The new Tropical Wetlands house featuring giant South American waterlilies will be officially opened, offering the chance to find out all about life in hot water.

So whether it’s getting advice on which plant goes where or how to home compost, discovering the inner workings of flowers, picking up some unusual plants for the garden, or simply having a fun day out with the family, there’ll be something for everyone at the Botanic Garden’s Festival of Plants.

The festival will take place from 10am to 4pm on Saturday 18 May 2013

A garden event with a difference, the Festival of Plants brings together horticulture and plant science in a day devoted to all things plant, from propagation to pollination, from seed to shopping!

The Botanic Garden

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Pre-closure celebrations at the Museum of Zoology

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The Museum was awarded initial support from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) for the ‘Animals Galore – preserving and safeguarding diversity’ project in January 2013. The project aims to completely refurbish the display spaces of the Museum, to create a Learning Space and School Room and to build new Stores with more space, state-of-the-art preservation conditions and guided public access. The project aims to display and illuminate the history of animal life. New interpretation will tell some of the stories behind the collections and the people associated with them, such as Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, Hugh Edwin Strickland and Hugh Cott. It will also explore the science behind the understanding of animal diversity and the threats to it, and explain how the community of conservation scientists in Cambridge are seeking to preserve biodiversity.

Visit the museum before the transformation begins. Saturday June 1st is the last day the museum will be open to the public until 2016. Visit between 11 and 4 for free hands on activities, behind the scenes tours, story telling and more. Add a butterfly to the swarm of monarch butterflies in the galleries, make your own museum specimen to take home with you, have a go at being a museum curator and hear stories about the amazing Finback Whale skeleton that hangs above the museum.

During the May half term holidays the Museum will be hosting a number of events to celebrate the proposed changes set to happen here. The museum will be open on Bank Holiday Monday 27th May from 11-4. On Tuesday 28th and Thursday 30th May from 11-12 and 2-3 interactive gallery talks will take place in the museum: The Animal Awards. Hear the nominations and vote for the animals you think are the spookiest, most disgusting, most surprising or with the best adaptation. There will also be activity packs available all week with museum trails and other activities, and chances for you to tell us your museum favourites.

“The Museum of Zoology is wonderful space, full of beautiful specimens from mammal skeletons to mollusc shells. We are excited about the proposed changes to the museum, and the opportunity to refresh the displays to showcase the amazing collections held here. The new learning space will give us the capacity to teach groups in the museum and, when not being used for school groups, the space for more interactive displays. These celebrations in May will give people the chance to enjoy the museum before it closes, and to have their say about what they like about and would like to see in the museum.”  (Roz Wade, Education and Outreach Officer)

The museum will have an active outreach programme while it is closed, details of which will be available on the website (www.museum.zoo.cam.ac.uk) and through its facebook page. There are also projects allowing digital access to the collections, including the Animal Bytes blog telling stories behind the collections (www.animalbytescambridge.wordpress.com).

The University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge will be closed to the public from June 2nd 2013. Subject to planning permission, the museum will be undergoing a major redevelopment.

These celebrations in May will give people the chance to enjoy the museum before it closes, and to have their say about what they like about and would like to see in the museum
Roz Wade

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Views of the landscape

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The second half of the18th century witnessed a revolution in agriculture driven by individuals who saw in the emerging scientific methods of producing food the means of securing wealth for themselves and prosperity for the nation. The contemporary sources that tell the story of these improvements in farming provide a window on how people saw the land in its role as a provider, and how they worked with the resources that nature offered on a practical level, putting into motion the practices developed through careful experimentation.

A close reading of these publications and archival materials reveals a complex discourse which drew on artistic and literary traditions as well as the developing field of agricultural improvements. This overlap in the perceptions of land and landscape, how painterly interpretations of the countryside were embedded into at least some of the literature of agricultural improvement, represents one of the strands of my current research as a visiting scholar in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science (HPS).

On Monday, 20 May I will be talking about, ‘Seeing with words: tours, surveys and agricultural improvement in Britain, c 1770–c 1820’, in a presentation that will discuss how one man in particular – Arthur Young - embodied this blurring of boundaries. In an informal presentation intended to outline my preliminary thoughts on the topic, I will encourage my audience to drop the divides between disciplines and explore, through Young and his writing, the creative links which have come to inform our own way of seeing landscape.

The principal motor of agricultural improvement was the enclosure of common and waste lands, which abolished traditional common rights and transferred the land to private ownership. Although enclosure of common and waste lands had started much earlier, the second half of the 18th century saw a much more concentrated effort in that direction. In particular, parliamentary acts were increasingly used to facilitate quicker and more extensive enclosure. By the end of George III’s reign some six million acres had been transferred from waste or common land to privately owned enclosures.

The energetic traveller and commentator Arthur Young (1741-1820) is remembered as a promoter of enclosure and experimental agriculture as the means of improved farming. He was a prolific writer and tireless promoter of agricultural improvement, editor of the Annals of Agriculture between 1784 and 1809, secretary to the Board of Agriculture from its foundation in 1793 to his death, and centre of an international corresponding network that included Sir Joseph Banks, George Washington, the radical chemist Joseph Priestley, the Irish chemist and mineralogist Richard Kirwan, and a number of improving aristocrats in France, Poland and Russia. These letters reveal that agricultural advances were at the top of the agenda in circles that went far beyond that of farmers and landowners.

An easily accessible compilation of Young’s prodigious output is GE Mingay’s Arthur Young and His Times (1975). But even a most thorough perusal of that book, with its selection of farm accounts and experimental observations collated by Young, the economic aspects of farming and the political and social importance of agriculture, does not prepare the reader for the sort of dizzily romantic writing of which Young is capable.

Below is an extract from Six Months Tour Through the North of England in which Young, the man who elsewhere extolls the use of root vegetables and deep ploughing to enhance productivity, takes the reader deep into the intoxicating landscape of an English paradise.

We had not travelled many miles over the moors, before a most enchanting landscape, as if dropt from heaven in the midst of this wild desart, at once blessed our eyes. In ascending a very steep rocky hill, we were obliged to alight and lead our horses; nor was it without some difficulty that we broke through a shrubby steep of thorns, briars, and other underwood; but when it was effected we found ourselves at the brink of a precipice with a sudden and unexpected view before our eyes of a scene more enticingly pleasing than fancy can paint. Would to heaven I could unite in one sketch the cheerfulness of Zuccarelli with the gloomy terrors of Pousin, the glowing brilliancy of Claud, with the romantic wildness of Salvator Rosa. Even with such powers it would be difficult to sketch the view which at once broke upon our ravished eyes.

Incircled by a round of black mountains, we beheld a valley which from its peculiar beauty, one would have taken for the favourite spot of nature, a sample of terrestrial paradise. Half way up the hills in front many rugged and bold projecting rocks discovered their bare points among thick woods which hung almost perpendicular over a deep precipice. In the dark bosom of these rocky shades a cascade glittering in the sun, pours as is from a hollow of the rock, and at its foot forms an irregular bason prettily tufted with wood, from whence it flows in a calm tranquil stream around this small, but beautiful vale, losing itself among rocks in a most romantic manner. Within the banks of this elysian stream, the ground is most sweetly varied in waving slopes and dales, forming five or six grass inclosures of a verdure beautiful as painting can express. Several spreading tress scattered about the edges of these gentle hills have a most charming effect in letting the green slopes illumined by the sun, be seen through their branches; one might almost call it, the clear obscure of nature.

It’s certainly a far cry from Country Life or Farmers Weekly. In reading these words today, part of our surprise that a man devoted to the improvement of agriculture should write such heady prose arises from received notions of the incompatibility of a more utilitarian view of the land and one centred on its aesthetic qualities. Our distinction between nature and culture compartmentalises art from science, fact from feeling.  So historians who deal with Young have tended to concentrate on his economics rather than his aesthetics, on his taste for experiment rather than his experiments with taste. Dismissed as outdated flights of fancy, an important aspect of Young's writing has been lost to modern audiences.

To understand Young’s (to us) overblown allusions to the charm and drama of the landscape it is necessary to bring to mind the cult of the picturesque – a gentler precursor to the romanticism of the later 18th and early 19th centuries and a notion rooted in a sensibility to aesthetic values. In a like manner, much of the scholarship on the picturesque and the place of landscape within it assumes a fundamental antagonism between the dictates of aesthetic sensibility and those of hard nosed utility, a dichotomy that we have come to know as the ‘two cultures’ – the humanities and the sciences. I argue that the distinction we assume between what is practical and what is aesthetically pleasing is not so clear cut.

It is significant that Young’s most popular published works – accounts of extensive tours undertaken in England, Wales, Ireland, France, Italy and Spain in the 1770s and 1780s – are as full of the picturesque as they are of the utilitarian. In his Annals of Agriculture, too, where one might have expected a more focused attention on the practical and useful, Young continued to offer his own general views of various farming regions that included attention to the aesthetics of landscape. In the same forum, Young also published a series of letters by Thomas Ruggles on ‘Picturesque farming’ in which the useful improvement of farming was pursued alongside its aesthetic melioration, which meant applying the principles of scenic beauty so a to render a view of the farm picturesque through the use of trees, hedges and other such features.

Moreover, while Young certainly resisted the more dogmatic attempts to see landscape only according to the rules of painting, there are clear and important parallels between the way Young structured his writing about the aesthetic qualities of landscape and the way in which landscape painters depicted their scenes visually. It is as if Young was painting with words.  In this way, Young takes on the formal rules of William Gilpin, a major theorist of the picturesque aesthetic, but resists his rejection, itself never complete, of the “plough and the spade”.

My research involves parallel studies of literature and history of art with particular attention to ways in which they related epistemologically, socially and discursively. Hilly Landscape, the painting by Charles Towne reproduced here by kind permission of the Fitzwilliam Museum, follows the basic pattern employed by the classical landscape artist, Claude Lorrain. Firstly, the whole view is taken from a high vantage point which allows a distant horizon to be seen even though middle ground between the viewpoint and that horizon can rise up. This prospect gives the whole space a more enclosed frame, albeit leaving the suggestion that there is something beyond which the eye cannot see.

Towne thus achieves the impression of incredible depth and distance associated with Claude. As Richard Wilson (1714-1782), the Welsh landscape painter known as ‘the English Claude’, noted ‘you may walk in Claude’s pictures’. In Towne’s painting this is given added emphasis by the wagon and horse descending into the valley below; our eyes move with the travellers in the painting.

While differing in detail, the passage from Young’s Six Months Tour reproduced above certainly shares a lot of the features found in Hilly Landscape. Whatever we make of the way in which Young situated taste and utility, the two were closely connected. They can, in some respects, be seen as expressions of a single way of seeing that, while different in some respects, shared so many features as to allow slippage from the one to the other.

This could, of course, be something peculiar to Young. William Marshall (1745-1818), a rival of Arthur Young who was equally committed to agricultural improvement, dismissed Young’s ramblings as a confused and confusing hotchpotch of ‘paintings, pigs, and picturesque views’. But whereas Young travelled rapidly through the country to build up his picture of agriculture, Marshall advocated his own method of residing in the region under survey for lengthy periods of time. In other words, his way of seeing was more introverted and perhaps excluded those prospect views that Young shared with some landscape painters.

The same prospect view, moreover, is embedded in Young’s method of noting the agricultural practices of the regions he visited. When he himself farmed, he developed a system of conducting and recording experiments which moved from the practical business of husbandry to the economic costs and benefits that variations of these practices entailed. This approach was applied in his Tours and became also the model for the later Board of Agriculture’s County Surveys. While I don’t want to push this notion too far, it seems that oscillation between the physical and economic aspects of farming has its correspondence in the alternation between light and dark which allows a view of scenic beauty to become visible. In Young’s case, though, what becomes visible is the view of the farm not as a household, as had been very much the case earlier in the 18th century, but as an integrated unit of production. Where the landscape painter brought beauty into view, Young brought utility into view.

This combination of painterly and scientific ways of seeing, I suggest, offered what is possibly one of the first views of the capitalist economy. Whereas economic tracts from the 17th century to the first decade of the 19th offer ‘snapshot’ accounts of various economic subjects from balance of payments and trade to land and rent, money, population and taxation, there is no clear idea that something as unified as ‘an economy’ was perceived to exist. The compositional elements were there, but there was no picture. They lacked the sort of perspectives that made landscape art possible. With Young, who very clearly had a sophisticated sense of the aesthetic and a commitment to what he saw as economically and socially useful improvements, this changes.

Just why Young wrote like he did is, of course, explainable on various fronts. Not least is Young’s personal combination of aesthetics and practical improvement. But Young was by no means alone in this. Several writers of the Board of Agriculture’s County Reports, for example, also moved quite easily from aesthetic to practical concerns. Even William Marshall published works on gardening and the aesthetic improvement of estates. Moreover, the genre of the Tour was itself becoming more popular. Tourists to the Lake District, North Wales and the Scottish Highlands became increasingly common, and so too did travel guides. A sign, perhaps, of the structural changes occurring in both the economy and society, touring and travel literature, of which Young was a pioneer, gave wider currency to the ways of seeing that Young deployed; one of the most popular travel guides on the period, Thomas West’s Guide to the Lake District, even quoted Young at length. More tellingly, though, Young’s mixing of taste with utility would have rendered him a more reliable observer, a more trustworthy authority.

Displaying all the sensibilities of taste that marked a cultured gentleman of the period would give credibility and trustworthiness to what were, as far as his agricultural observations went, radical and often destabilising opinions. In nearly every account of the aesthetic qualities of natural landscapes that Young offered, for example, enclosed lands are present. That such a renowned theorist of aesthetics as Edmund Burke could write to Young asking for practical advice on farming is suggestive in this respect. By combining a radical agenda for improvement with a sense of aesthetic taste, Young secured a more receptive audience ready to see on the farm what they saw in the landscape.

Simon Nightingale will be talking about ‘Seeing with words: tours, surveys and agricultural improvement in Britain, c.1770–c.1820’ on Monday, 20 May, 1pm, at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Free School Lane, Cambridge. All welcome.

For more information on this story contact Alex Buxton, University of Cambridge Communications Office, amb206@admin.cam.ac.uk 01223 761673

In a talk on Monday (20 May 2013) Dr Simon Nightingale will explore how painterly interpretations of the countryside were embedded into the literature of agricultural improvement in a way that might surprise modern readers. 

Dismissed as outdated flights of fancy, an important aspect of Young's writing has been lost to modern audiences.
Dr Simon Nightingale
Charles Towne, Hilly Landscape, Oil on canvas, 38.7cm x 51.1cm (detail)

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Female conversion to Islam in Britain examined in unique research project

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The report (http://bit.ly/12tv0YM), produced by the University’s Centre of Islamic Studies (CIS), in association with the New Muslims Project, Markfield, is a fascinating dissection of the conversion experience of women in Britain in the 21st Century.

The first forum of its kind held in the UK, the study concludes with a series of recommendations for the convert, heritage Muslim, and wider British communities. The 129-page report also outlines the social, emotional and sometimes economic costs of conversion, and the context and reasons for women converting to Islam in a society with pervasive negative stereotypes about the faith.

Project Leader and Director of CIS, Yasir Suleiman, said: “The consistent themes flowing through the report is the need for increased levels of support for the convert community – and the converts’ own potential to be a powerful and transformative influence on both the heritage Muslim community and wider British society.
“Another of the recurring themes was the overwhelmingly negative portrayal of Muslims and Islam in the UK media and what role the convert community might have to play in helping to redress the balance.

This report seeks to dispel misapprehensions and misrepresentations of female converts to Islam.”

A key revelation of the study was the heavily disproportionate attention, bordering on obsession in some cases, given to white, female converts to Islam by both the Muslim and non-Muslim communities alike.

This is often to the detriment of African-Caribbean converts, thought to be the largest ethnic group of converts to Islam, who are often ignored and left feeling isolated by both the Muslim and non-Muslim communities.

Added Suleiman: “White converts can be regarded as ‘trophy’ Muslims and used in a tokenistic fashion by various sections of society, including the media. African-Caribbean converts remain largely invisible, uncelebrated and frequently unacknowledged. They can feel like a minority within a minority and this is something that must be addressed. I found this part of the conversion narratives hardest to bear.”

Meanwhile, the project also reveals the complex relationship between female converts and their families, ranging from exclusion, disbelief and denial - to full and open acceptance of their faith. It also brings to light responses of converts to issues of sexuality and gender including homosexuality, ‘traditional’ roles of women and transgenderism.

Project Manager Shahla Suleiman said: “Considering the stereotypical and largely negative picture Islam has in the media and society at large, and considering that quite a lot of this revolves around the position of women in Islam, we wanted to understand the seemingly paradoxical issue of why highly educated and professionally successful Western women convert to Islam.

“The basis of conversion is faith and spirituality - but conversion is also a social phenomenon that has become political. In this sense, conversion concerns everyone alike in society.

“The debate is just starting and we need to have more informed studies about conversion to Islam that directly address public interest and concern. The struggle for a better future relies on overcoming the politics of exclusion and absolute difference based on an ideological dislike for multiculturality, not just multiculturalism. Fear of immigration, Islam and conversion to it are a proxy for views on race, prejudice, anxiety and fear.”

The converts explored the issues of women’s rights and dress etiquette at some length, with the issue of wearing the hijab and other Islamic forms of dress heavily discussed. Although all views were represented in the debate, a common approach among many coverts was the adaptation of Western style dress to accommodate Islamic concepts of modesty and decency.

Women’s rights are a highly charged political issue within Muslim communities and while participants were not unanimously supportive of feminism as defined in the West, the need to raise the status of women within Muslim communities was fully acknowledged. Attempting to realise the practise of these rights has proven more difficult to achieve. Participants were especially critical of the concept of Sharia Council/courts operating in Britain in terms of the courts’ potential to jeopardise the rights of women.

The report says: ‘Converts serve to confound and challenge negative racist or clichéd narratives depicted in the media of heritage Muslims because their culture and heritage is intrinsically reflective of British culture.

‘But we also find that not all conversions are equal socially in the eyes of some members of the heritage Muslim community. The conversion of white women seems to be more socially valued than African women by some. There is also greater depth to the hijab than is thought to be the case among heritage Muslims and the non-Muslim majority in Britain. There is a distinction to be made between wearing the hijab and being worn by it. This puts the convert women in control. The hijab signals modesty, but it is not intended to hide beauty.’

A ground-breaking report examining the experiences of nearly 50 British women of all ages, ethnicities, backgrounds and faiths (or no faith) – who have all converted to Islam - was launched in London yesterday by the University of Cambridge.

Converts have the potential to be a powerful and transformative influence on both the heritage Muslim community and wider British society
Yasir Suleiman
Narratives of Conversion to Islam - Female Perspectives

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Major motion pictures from our prehistoric past

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We tend to think of archaeological investigation as getting down and dirty with the physical evidence of vanished people – skeletal remains, submerged foundations, the charred detritus of daily life. This is evidence with substance that can be analysed, dated, pieced together. But what do archaeologists do with sculptures that are made of air? In the case of the 150,000-plus engravings of the Valcamonica valley in the Italian Alps, the images have been carved out of the sandstone rock. They are a subtraction from it.

From about 4,000 BC up to medieval times, with activity concentrated in the 1st millennium BC, the peoples of the valley have hewn pictures out of the rocks with stones or tools. Dr Christopher Chippindale, rock art expert and Curator at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and Dr Frederick Baker, film-maker and Senior Research Associate at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, use the local dialect term for these engravings: pitoti, or ‘little puppets’.

Baker describes the pitoti as “Giacometti meets landscape artist Richard Long, by way of Paul Klee.” Human figures – ‘orants’ – with arms raised as if in angular attitudes of worship, weapon-clad warriors sparring in pairs, priests and priestesses with halo-like headdresses, jiving dancers, grazing animals, wagons, wheels, houses and symbols form a communal autobiography of mankind.

Examining and analysing such ephemeral images in the absence of any formal knowledge of the circumstances that produced them, let alone interpreting the curious clustering of the pitoti on around 2,000 rock faces across a 70-km-long valley, has challenged archaeologists since the pitoti were discovered as an archaeological phenomenon over a century ago.

The response of Baker and Chippindale has been to approach the pitoti as pictures, with particular respect to what distinguishes them from paintings: their depth. Using digital imaging technologies such as laser-scanning, graphic animation and ambient cinematic techniques, they have formulated a new research methodology based on ‘visual excavation’ of these images as 3D entities.

This approach has thrown new light on the pitoti. “The first thing that struck me,” said Baker, “was that the pictures look like stills out of an animation. As a film-maker, my response was, ‘What happened next?’. When you take into account their depth this question becomes even more interesting, because the pitoti appear and vanish according to the angle of the sun. When it hits the rock obliquely, the image casts a shadow, and that is what makes the art visible to us. It is a natural 3D effect.”

Baker specialises in film projection. “So watching the sun arc and fall over one of these panels,” he recalled, “and seeing the individual figures leap out then disappear was revelatory. They form a landscape-based proto-cinema.”

The proto-cinematic metaphor is applicable to individual pitoti, some of which appear inexorably in transit to another action: the thrust of a spear; the parry of a shield; the flight of a startled deer. By laser-scanning then animating the engravings, Baker, Chippindale and Andreas Wappel (St Pölten University of Applied Science, Austria) found that our ancestors did record them in motion. “We animated an image of a bird,” explained Baker, “and not only got it to fly in an absolutely naturalistic sense, but found that concentric arcs inside its body were not plumage but follow the graphic logic of a bird’s beating wings.”

With rock faces as screens and the sun as a projector, the valley forms a natural amphitheatre. This begs the question of whether it also worked acoustically. Together with musicians playing instruments including a natural cow-horn, Baker and Chippindale tested the hypothesis that auditory performance was an aspect of a multi-sensory experience.

“We found that three key pitoti sites with distinctive iconography had extraordinary echoes, clearly audible to those standing in front of the art,” explained Baker. “You get a lot of echoes in mountains,” he continued, “but these sites had another common denominator: they are amongst the earliest rock art sites. Archaeologists have long wondered why they were chosen. Now we know that it is the echoes that matter.”

By using performance to explore a hypothesis about performance, the Cambridge team has opened up a new line of archaeo-acoustical research. It took just a day, but it was one that Chippindale will never forget. “This discovery was thrilling,” he said. “It was the most exciting day of my research life.”

3D realisation has thrown up a further indication that some of the pitoti are, literally, in suspended animation. A researcher from one of the partner institutions working with Baker and Chippindale, Marcel Karnapke from the Bauhaus University Weimar, converted a distinctive orant into a sculpture for an exhibition held in Milan and then in Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. “Far from being roughly symmetrical as had been assumed,” said Chippindale, “the figures stand, perfectly balanced, on their toes.”

“This is the power of the zero and the dot,” said Baker of these insights. “The digital level has enabled us to record more exactly, look more closely and, because the digital world is all about mutability and metamorphosis, to test hypotheses.”

Now, this research is being scaled up through an ambitious, pan-European project – 3D Pitoti – which began in March 2013 and is funded by the European Union. With Cambridge’s contribution led from the McDonald Institute, the project will use autonomous micro-aerial vehicles and develop portable robotic scanners to build on the lines of enquiry opened up by Chippindale and Baker, who will be joined by Cambridge archaeologists Professor Charly French and Dr Craig Alexander. The project will present the resulting resources and research in novel graphic, interactive and universally accessible digital forms.

The research will analyse the pitoti from multiple but inter-related perspectives, from the bird’s-eye view (their distribution and classification across the valley) to the human scale (their clustering within one site, and on individual rock panels). While ostensibly random, there are, in fact, significant patterns to the clustering. “These are agglomerations of images rather than compositions,” explained Chippindale. “We know that they were created over the course of centuries. But they are not placed in an unstructured way. There are affinities in terms of the type of image and its size. We can see, too, that artists typically avoided superimposing their images on their predecessors’ art.”

The research will zoom in to analyse whether the arrays of images have narrative meaning. It will examine individual pitoti to address the longstanding debate about the balance in prehistoric art between communal and individual expression. “The prevailing thinking is that the pitoti work on the communal level of, say, Arsenal fans spraying ‘AFC’ on the lampposts of Highbury. But perhaps we’re dealing with individuals like London street artist Banksy, leaving his message to posterity.”

Cambridge archaeologists are illuminating some of the oldest graphic art of the past, by applying some of the most advanced graphic technology of the present.

Watching the sun arc and fall over one of these panels, and seeing the individual figures leap out then disappear was revelatory
Frederick Baker
Pitoti engraving, Valcamonica valley

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Russia: Up close

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Rachel Polonsky, lecturer in the department of Slavonic Studies and author of Molotov’s Magic Lantern, is one of five judges for the new Pushkin House Russian Book Prize, whose winner will be announced at the Hay Festival on 29th May.

She will be taking part in a debate on Russian literature at the Festival, where the University of Cambridge holds an annual series of talks. The aim of the prize is to further understanding of the Russian-speaking world by encouraging strong, intelligent, and accessible non-fiction writing in the English language (including translations) on Russian and Soviet history, culture, politics, economics, and everyday life, including biographies and memoirs. The judges will be looking for a book which can command a wide audience of non-specialists.

Dr Polonsky says that there is a need for more awareness of the complexities of post-Soviet Russian culture and where its deep faultlines lie, with the identity of the bombers of the Boston Marathon just one reminder of why this is important. She adds: "Recently, Russian violence has shown a tendency to spill over its borders, as the murders and unexplained deaths in Great Britain over the past few years show. London has become a refuge for Russian money and the setting for a real-life Russian crime thriller of baffling intricacy; drawing in governments, secret services and big business and inevitably giving rise to lurid media stereotypes. The many books that were sent to the judges of the prize by publishers give a most encouraging picture of the deeper understanding of Russian culture available to readers curious about the realities behind these stereotypes. They included books on the revival of Russian Orthodoxy, the fate of the discipline of archaeology in the USSR and the films of the director Andrei Tarkovsky.”

The six shortlisted books trace a path from 1917 to the present day. Dr Polonsky says: "Together these books show that the political, economic, cultural and social spheres are inseparable. At one end of this century-long span is Douglas Smith’s Former People, which tells the story of the aristocrats who remained in Russia after the revolution, to perish or survive as Soviet citizens. At the other is Masha Gessen’s portrait of Vladimir Putin in The Man without a Face, which describes how the personality and convictions of Russia’s present leader were shaped by the rough culture of post-war Leningrad and his years as a low-ranking agent in the KGB. 

"Karl Schloegel’s Moscow 1937 is a cultural history of the capital city in the darkest year of Stalin’s Great Terror, which covers everything from town planning to show trials, and begins with a scene of magical flight from Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel, The Master and Margarita. Anne Applebaum’s Iron Curtain shows how the Soviet takeover of political power in Eastern Europe after 1945 depended on a takeover of all aspects of cultural, social and private life. She revives the word ‘totalitarianism’, which had fallen out of fashion among historians.  Donald Raleigh’s oral history, Soviet Baby Boomers, is a portrait of the last, ‘post-totalitarian’, Soviet generation. In the background to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of Putinism is the story of Russian oil, which is told in Thane Gustafson’s Wheel of Fortune."

The other judges for the Prize, which includes £5,000 in cash, are Sir Rodric Braithwaite (Chair), former British ambassador to Moscow and author of Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-1989; Lord Skidelsky, Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at Warwick University and author of How Much is Enough?; AD Miller, Economist journalist and author of the Man Booker shortlisted Snowdrops; and Dmitri Trenin, Director of The Carnegie Moscow Center and author of Post-Imperium.

Dr Polonsky says: "We live in an age of unprecedented access to information. Researchers have greater freedom than ever to travel in Russia and are rich in contacts with Russians of all kinds, if they choose to seek them out. In turn, Russians now have access to books written about Russia in the West, many of which are now translated into Russian. The result is a constantly enriched field of writing about all aspects of Russian culture, which the Pushkin House prize is intended to cultivate and celebrate."

A new book prize aimed at furthering our understanding of the Russian-speaking world will help the West to come to terms with the complexity of post-Soviet Russian culture and overcome media stereotypes, according to a University of Cambridge lecturer.

The books that were sent to the judges of this prize give an encouraging picture of the deeper understanding of Russian culture available to readers curious about the realities behind the stereotypes.
Rachel Polonsky
Red Square in winter.

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Experts advocate for stronger measures to protect trees and other plants from pests and pathogens

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As the fungus responsible for ash dieback continues to devastate ash tree populations throughout the UK and other threats to the countryside continue to emerge, experts convened by Defra are advocating for stronger measures to protect the UK’s trees and plants.

The independent Tree Health and Plant Biosecurity Expert Taskforce was established by Defra’s Chief Scientific Adviser, Professor Ian Boyd, late last year to address the current and emerging threats to the UK’s trees and plants. Working with an advisory group made up of various stakeholder organisations, to include industry, Defra, and the Forestry Commission as well as Border Force, the taskforce is proposing a number of initiatives aimed at minimising the risk of plant pests and diseases.

Professor Chris Gilligan, chair of the taskforce and Professor of Mathematical Biology and Head of the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Cambridge, said: “The UK needs to be better prepared for threats to plant health. In the last few years alone, several previously unknown pests and pathogens have emerged, posing significant risks to the UK’s crops as well as trees in woodlands, commercial forests and in urban environments.

“By increasing our understanding of what pests and diseases are the biggest threats and how best to mitigate their impact, we can minimise potentially devastating outbreaks.”

The scientists believe that the threats have increased because of globalisation in trade and travel and the subsequent escalation in volume and diversity of plants and plant products entering the UK, all of which potentially harbour plant pests and pathogens. Once established, pests and pathogens can wreak havoc on biodiversity, timber and crop production, the landscape and, in certain circumstances, human health. (In addition to Chalara, recent examples include horse chestnut leaf mining moth, oak processionary moth, bleeding canker of horse chestnut and Dothistroma needle blight on pines.)

Professor Charles Godfray, a member of the taskforce from the University of Oxford’s Zoology Department & Oxford Martin School said: “Globalisation poses many challenges including to the health of our trees and other plants; the taskforce has tried to suggest proportionate measures that will materially lessen the risks to the nation’s trees and forests without adding unnecessary barriers to trade and commerce.”

Although the remit was to focus on trees and related woody species, the taskforce noted that many of the principles addressed in recommendations for tree health are applicable to pests and diseases that affect other plants (including agricultural, horticultural and biomass crops, indigenous vegetation and ornamental plants).

Taskforce recommendations

Currently, there are numerous risk assessments for individual pests and pathogens at both the national and European level. The taskforce recommends a single national Risk Register for plant health. This new UK Plant Health Risk Register would serve to identify and prioritise pests and pathogens that pose a threat to the UK and to identify what actions must be taken should the threat materialise. 

The taskforce is also advocating an individual at a senior level who is responsible for overseeing the UK Plant Health Risk Register and providing leadership for managing those risks. The Chief Plant Health Officer would work in a similar fashion as the Chief Veterinary Officer, who oversees animal-related emergencies.

The appointee would also be responsible for developing and implementing procedures for preparedness and contingency planning to predict, monitor and control the spread of pests and pathogens. There was also a recommendation that current governance and legislation needed to be reviewed, simplified and strengthened.

Because of globalisation, more and more people and goods are travelling greater distances at an increasingly greater rate. As a result, there is a significant increase in the risk of introducing non-native pests and pathogens. In order to minimise the risks of introduction at the border, the taskforce has made several recommendations regarding the import of trees and other plants. They propose that no plant material for personal use be imported from outside the EU.

The import of live plants, foliage, branches and other plant parts has seen a 71 per cent increase since 1999, dramatically increasing the risk a pathogen or pest might be introduced.  Therefore they also propose the Plant Passport scheme, which currently only applies to some plants associated with pests and pathogens, be strengthened and also applied to seeds as a means of ensuring traceability (showing all ports of calls within the EU and last port before entry to the EU).

Dr Jens-Georg Unger, taskforce member and Head of the Institute for National and International Plant Health in Germany, said: “There have been too many introductions of serious new pests in recent years into EU countries - improvements are needed urgently. Efficient protection can only be achieved by more complete and faster exchange of information between countries and more focussed and better coordinated action in all EU countries. The UK taskforce is an extremely important step for the initiation of such improvements on the national and the EU level.”

Additional recommendations include improving the use of epidemiological intelligence from EU/other regions and work to improve the EU regulations concerned with tree health and plant biosecurity, developing a modern, user-friendly, system to provide quick and intelligent access to information about tree health and plant biosecurity, and addressing key skills shortages.

For more information about this story, please contact: Genevieve Maul, Office of Communications, University of Cambridge. Email: Genevieve.Maul@admin.cam.ac.uk; Tel: 01223 765542.

Ash dieback, caused by the Chalara fungus, prompts re-evaluation of current protocols to protect UK trees and other plants; taskforce recommends threats to plant health be taken as seriously as animal disease

The UK needs to be better prepared for threats to plant health. In the last few years alone, several previously unknown pests and pathogens have emerged, posing significant risks to the UK’s crops as well as trees in woodlands, commercial forests and in urban environments.
Professor Chris Gilligan, chair of the taskforce and Professor of Mathematical Biology and Head of the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Cambridge
Drothistroma needle blight on pines

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South African crime-fiction wave hits Cambridge

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Denmark has Sarah Lund, Sweden has Wallander, Norway has the alcoholic Harry Hole. Now, the South African fictional detective is coming into its own – and coming to Cambridge.

On Tuesday 21 May at the Faculty of English, Margie Orford, author of a bestselling series of novels featuring journalist-turned-psychological profiler Dr Clare Hart, will be discussing the South African crime-fiction wave and what it tells us about South Africa today.

Attention has been focused on crime and policing in South Africa through recent high-profile events. For some South Africans, however, a deep fear of crime is the stuff of daily life – even though the victims of violent crimes are, disproportionately, the vulnerable and the disaffected, despite the perceived extent of the spread of crime into the suburb.

Dr Christopher Warnes, Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Literature at the University of Cambridge, believes that the phenomenal popularity of crime fiction in South Africa demands serious scholarly critical attention. In an article published in the latest issue of the influential Journal of Southern African Studies, he writes that “the number of crime novels written in and about post-apartheid South Africa is assuming the ‘epidemic proportions’ some believe characterise actual crime rates in that country.”

In the wake of the “false certainties of apartheid”, and as South Africans lose faith in the post-apartheid institutions and policies designed to protect them, “the detective,” writes Warnes, “returns to South African literature with a vengeance.”

The crime fiction that has been produced in such volume by mainly white South African writers since the country’s first free election in 1994 has been regarded by critics as escapist and apolitical, where previously, as exemplified by Nobel Prize-winners J. M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer, the novel was charged with a sense of political mission.

But for a society so disturbed by violent crime, “what kind of escapism is it,” asks Warnes, “that takes you so close to your greatest fears, your horrors? If these novels are ‘escapist’, then escapism is clearly not a simple phenomenon. I think that these books are providing some kind of benefit to their millions of readers.”

Through the figure of the detective, the seemingly intractable issue of crime in general is distilled into one shocking case. “The detective then deciphers clues, signs, which open out onto a reading of society at large.” Through this ‘reading’ of fraught situations, the case is solved, order is restored – and larger issues, by extension, are resolved, if only for the duration of the after-glow of a work of fiction.

Yet an explanation of this phenomenon purely in terms of the levels of crime in South Africa does not stand up: crime fiction flourishes in Scandinavia and Japan, which have relatively low crime levels. “These books are ultimately a response to a sense of threat rather than to danger,” says Warnes. “If you were in actual danger, you probably wouldn’t reach for a crime novel to protect you!” Threat is something more subjective, the product of beliefs and preconceptions, and this is where the politics come in, because these novels are about much more than just crime.

This paints a bleak picture of South Africa today, and there is bleakness in these books. Orford prefaces her second novel, Blood Rose, with a line from The Four Quartets by T S Eliot: ‘Here is a place of disaffection’. Although it refers to the setting for the crimes – Walvis Bay in Namibia, it hangs over the novel like the desert dust that pervades the desolate port town.

But redemption and even catharsis are to be found from these books – which are, says Warnes, the product of “an essentially liberal society, seeking to come to terms with transition and flux.” There are signs in these novels, as in post-apartheid fiction at large, that South African society hasn’t yet given up on the sense of possibility and promise that was so much a feature of the Mandela years.

Warnes is struck by the ways in which, through their detective heroes, crime writers like Orford and Deon Meyer are increasingly addressing larger post-apartheid themes. Orford provides Dr Clare Hart with a PhD dissertation based on the hypothesis that ‘because we averted a civil war in South Africa … [the] unspent violence was sublimated into a war against women’. And of Deon Meyer, he says: “in a genre that often embraces banal revenge fantasies, it is surprising to find a critique of the notion of vengeance. Meyer’s damaged detectives find personal rehabilitation through protecting others.”

South Africa’s serious crime-writing squad is blurring some of the boundaries between the politically-conscious apartheid-era novel and the formulaic, popular crime book, as well as playing out the tension between a liberal approach to crime, and embattlement and revenge.

“There is no shortage of serious analysis of change in South Africa,” according to Warnes. “But what is it like to live through it? How does it feel? How do you negotiate its tensions, contradictions and uncertainties, and deal with the sense of threat and indeed the sense of promise? It’s all there, in the novel.”

‘Writing Crime’ with Margie Orford and Dr Christopher Warnes Room GR-05, Faculty of English, West Road, Cambridge 5.00pm on Tuesday 21 May. Free event.

Amid high-profile, real-life murder investigations and growing concerns about public safety, a new breed of crime fiction is sweeping South Africa, as one of its leading writers will tell the University of Cambridge this week.

What kind of escapism is it, that takes you so close to your greatest fears, your horrors? If these novels are ‘escapist’, then escapism is clearly not a simple phenomenon
Christopher Warnes

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Scientists identify molecular trigger for Alzheimer’s disease

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Researchers have pinpointed a catalytic trigger for the onset of Alzheimer’s disease – when the fundamental structure of a protein molecule changes to cause a chain reaction that leads to the death of neurons in the brain.

For the first time, scientists at Cambridge’s Department of Chemistry, led by Dr Tuomas Knowles, Professor Michele Vendruscolo and Professor Chris Dobson working with Professor Sara Linse and colleagues at Lund University in Sweden have been able to map in detail the pathway that generates “aberrant” forms of proteins which are at the root of neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s.

They believe the breakthrough is a vital step closer to increased capabilities for earlier diagnosis of neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, and opens up possibilities for a new generation of targeted drugs, as scientists say they have uncovered the earliest stages of the development of Alzheimer’s that drugs could possibly target. 

The study, published today in the Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences, is a milestone in the long-term research established in Cambridge by Professor Christopher Dobson and his colleagues, following the realisation by Dobson of the underlying nature of protein ‘misfolding’ and its connection with disease over 15 years ago.

The research is likely to have a central role to play in diagnostic and drug development for dementia-related diseases, which are increasingly prevalent and damaging as populations live longer.

In 2010, the Alzheimer’s Research UK showed that dementia costs the UK economy over £23 billion, more than cancer and heart disease combined. Just last week, PM David Cameron urged scientists and clinicians to work together to “improve treatments and find scientific breakthroughs” to address “one of the biggest social and healthcare challenges we face.”

The neurodegenerative process giving rise to diseases such as Alzheimer’s is triggered when the normal structures of protein molecules within cells become corrupted.

Protein molecules are made in cellular ‘assembly lines’ that join together chemical building blocks called amino acids in an order encoded in our DNA. New proteins emerge as long, thin chains that normally need to be folded into compact and intricate structures to carry out their biological function.

Under some conditions, however, proteins can ‘misfold’ and snag surrounding normal proteins, which then tangle and stick together in clumps which build to masses, frequently millions, of malfunctioning molecules that shape themselves into unwieldy protein tendrils.

The abnormal tendril structures, called ‘amyloid fibrils’, grow outwards around the location where the focal point, or 'nucleation' of these abnormal “species” occurs.

Amyloid fibrils can form the foundations of huge protein deposits – or plaques – long-seen in the brains of Alzheimer’s sufferers, and once believed to be the cause of the disease, before the discovery of ‘toxic oligomers’ by Dobson and others a decade or so ago.

A plaque’s size and density renders it insoluble, and consequently unable to move. Whereas the oligomers, which give rise to Alzheimer's disease, are small enough to spread easily around the brain - killing neurons and interacting harmfully with other molecules - but how they were formed was until now a mystery.

The new work, in large part carried out by researcher Samuel Cohen, shows that once a small but critical level of malfunctioning protein ‘clumps’ have formed, a runaway chain reaction is triggered that multiplies exponentially the number of these protein composites, activating new focal points through ‘nucleation’.

It is this secondary nucleation process that forges juvenile tendrils, initially consisting of clusters that contain just a few protein molecules. Small and highly diffusible, these are the ‘toxic oligomers’ that careen dangerously around the brain cells, killing neurons and ultimately causing loss of memory and other symptoms of dementia.

“There are no disease modifying therapies for Alzheimer’s and dementia at the moment, only limited treatment for symptoms. We have to solve what happens at the molecular level before we can progress and have real impact,” said Dr Tuomas Knowles from Cambridge’s Department of Chemistry, lead author of the study and long-time collaborator of Professor Dobson and Professor Michele Vendruscolo.

“We’ve now established the pathway that shows how the toxic species that cause cell death, the oligomers, are formed. This is the key pathway to detect, target and intervene – the molecular catalyst that underlies the pathology.”

The researchers brought together kinetic experiments with a theoretical framework based on master equations, tools commonly used in other areas of chemistry and physics but had not been exploited to their full potential in the study of protein malfunction before.

The latest research follows hard on the heels of another ground breaking study, published in April of this year again in PNAS, in which the Cambridge group, in Collaboration with Colleagues in London and at MIT, worked out the first atomic structure of one of the damaging amyloid fibril protein tendrils. They say the years spent developing research techniques are really paying off now, and they are starting to solve “some of the key mysteries” of these neurodegenerative diseases.

“We are essentially using a physical and chemical methods to address a biomolecular problem, mapping out the networks of processes and dominant mechanisms to ‘recreate the crime scene’ at the molecular root of Alzheimer’s disease,” explained Knowles.

“Increasingly, using quantitative experimental tools and rigorous theoretical analysis to understand complex biological processes are leading to exciting and game-changing results. With a disease like Alzheimer’s, you have to intervene in a highly specific manner to prevent the formation of the toxic agents. Now we’ve found how the oligomers are created, we know what process we need to turn off.”

Inset image: L-R, Professor Christopher Dobson, Dr Tuomas Knowles and Professor Michele Vendruscolo

For more information, please contact fred.lewsey@admin.cam.ac.uk

Paper reference: "Proliferation of amyloid-β42 aggregates occurs through a secondary nucleation mechanism"

Samuel I. A. Cohen, Sara Linse, Leila M. Luheshi, Erik Hellstrand, Duncan A. White, Luke Rajah, Daniel E. Otzen, Michele Vendruscolo, Christopher M. Dobson, and Tuomas P. J. Knowles,

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, May 2013
pnas/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1218402110

 

New research establishes nature of malfunction in protein molecules that can lead to onset of dementia.

We have to solve what happens at the molecular level before we can progress and have real impact
Tuomas Knowles
Image, magnified a million times, of amyloid fibril, the type of protein structures that are formed in Alzheimer’s

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Shortlist announced for Lucy Cavendish College Fiction Prize

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Now in its third year, the prize is awarded to a remarkable, unpublished female writer over the age of 21, whose entry successfully combines literary merit with ‘unputdownability.’

The shortlist attracts interest from major publishing houses, and several former finalists are now published in their own right. Recent successes include Vicki Jarrett’s 2011 entry Nothing is Heavy published by Linen Press in 2012, and Sophia Tobin, whose 2011 entry, The Silversmith's Wife, is soon to be published as part of a two-book deal with Simon and Schuster. Kathryn Simmonds, shortlisted last year, is looking forward to the publication of Love and Fallout, by Seren Publishing in 2014.

This year’s shortlist of seven comprises

  • Helen Bettinson
  • Catherine Chanter
  • Kerry Evans
  • Lynn Fraser
  • Alex Hourston
  • Karen Ross
  • Sarah Stewart

Titles are withheld to protect the blind judging process, but genres represented include historical fiction, psychological thrillers, comedy romance and literary fiction.

Allison Pearson said: "With over 240 entries this year, choosing a shortlist of seven has been incredibly difficult. It's astonishing and gratifying to think that there is so much unpublished talent out there. However, in the end, we managed to narrow it down and found seven wonderful finalists whose work spans sparkling social satire, historical intrigue and futuristic thrillers.  It will be a challenge to pick a winner, but I'm confident that we will find a literary star of the future."

The winner will be announced at a dinner on Thursday, 30 May, attended by representatives from the publishing industry hoping to sign up the literary talents of the future.             

  • Lucy Cavendish is the only college in the country that admits only mature female students. The women who attend it have usually made a clear decision to transform their lives in some way.  The College is particularly strong in Medicine and Veterinary Studies, Law, Engineering, and English. Our President, Professor Janet Todd OBE, is an internationally-renowned scholar of early women writers and author of many biographies and critical works.

 

Allison Pearson, bestselling novelist, newspaper columnist and commentator, and Dr Chloe Preedy, Cambridge University Lecturer in Renaissance Literature and Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, will award this year's Lucy Cavendish College Fiction Prize. 

It will be a challenge to pick a winner, but I'm confident that we will find a literary star of the future.
2103 Lucy Cavendish College Fiction Prize judge Allison Pearson
Lucy Cavendish student

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Shedding light on forests

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Forests are essential for life on earth. They provide a habitat for a myriad of different plant and animal species – too numerous to count but certainly running into millions. Forests are also home to some 5–17 per cent of the global human population, a fact easily overlooked from the urban perspective. How worldwide forests are changing, and the serious threats they face, is the focus of Cambridge University’s Forest Ecology and Conservation Group (FECG), Department of Plant Sciences.

“Whether we live among trees or not, we all depend on forests. They are the lungs of the biosphere, and in providing oxygen function as important sinks of atmospheric carbon dioxide, helping to reduce and offset the build-up of this climate-changing ‘greenhouse’ gas. Forests also have important roles in soil-building and conservation, flood control, and fluxes of chemical elements between the bedrock, soil and atmosphere,” said Dr David Coomes, head of FECG.

Our timber comes from forests – and so too do many foods, medicines and other products. Forests represent the provisioning, regulating, supporting ‘ecosystem services’, upon which economists now attempt to put monetary value in efforts to recognise their importance in the market economy, and further incentivise their protection. Intrinsic, inspirational and spiritual values of forests cannot be costed in the same way, but lend further weight to the imperative of their conservation.

Although forests are so valuable, they are all-too-frequently threatened. The world’s largest rainforest, in Amazonia, is home to over half of the world’s terrestrial fauna and flora, but this has not stopped a massive encroachment of cattle ranching. In Sumatra, over 95 per cent of the lowland forests have been logged and planted with oil palms for the commercial food industry and biodiesel. Current rates of loss of tropical humid forests equate to a 100 m wide strip of land being devoured at 66 km per hour.

Forests also face less obvious threats. Introduced ‘alien’ plants can invade forests and compromise their integrity and functioning. Droughts and fires can impact on the make-up of tree mixtures, and turn forests from carbon sinks to carbon sources, exacerbating the cause of climate change.

FECG aims to understand these challenges better. Dr Coomes explained: “We look at change from a bottom-up approach, working from the first principles of how trees establish, grow, compete with one another for resources, reproduce and die. Repeat measurements from permanent forest plots, sometime as part of national forest inventories, can make an important contribution to knowledge of forest dynamics. Such information provides the critical numbers to plug into computer models, which take a mixed stand of trees and simulate what happens to them under stable or changing environmental conditions.”

While accurate forest plot data are vital, their collection can be laborious and time-consuming. Conventional methods of data gathering – involving individual measurements of tree diameters and heights – provide useful snapshots of what is happening in forests.  But what about the bigger picture – scales of measurement which match the concerns of the millions whose livelihoods depend on it? The gathering of detailed information on a large scale is where remote sensing technologies have a growing role.

Satellite- or aircraft-borne instruments are able to take images of forests and other land covers, and do so across whole landscapes and regions. The resulting images are more than just photographs: they contain layers of detail about different properties of the forest canopy, for example how foliage reflects different wave-bands of light. These properties, cross-referenced with data gathered on the ground, tell us different aspects about what is going on – and how forests change in space as well as time.

“We’ve been increasingly using this ‘top-down’ approach to the study of forests. In particular, we have been developing uses of a new kind of remote sensor – a type of laser scanning known as lidar – in forest science,” explained Dr Simonson, Research Associate in FECG. “For lidar, think radar, though the technology uses laser light rather than radio waves. Lidar involves the firing of laser pulses at very high frequency (many thousands per second) and detecting the backscatter off different objects. In the context of forests, these objects are tree leaves, branches, under-storey plants and the ground surface. These reflectance signals can be timed to minute precision and, based on the speed of light, the relative heights of these objects can be determined.”

Further processing steps, using on-board flight data, transform these clouds of data points into a virtual landscape showing the profile of the terrain and presence of different layers in the forest. Various statistical descriptors of this modelled forest can be extracted and compared to field and other environmental data to help pick up trends. Individual tree crowns can be isolated in the dataset using algorithms that locate their conical or spherical shapes from the canopy surface model. Plans are also afoot in FECG to develop methods for making much fuller use of LiDAR information: using plot data to calibrate leaf-location models linking the distribution of LiDAR-measured  heights to the size and number of trees on the ground.

Dr Simonson described how FECG has been applying lidar in one particular setting. “In Portugal and Spain, cork oak woodlands are not only the source of the cork wine stoppers, but contain important assemblages of plants and animals. We’ve been using lidar to distinguish different types of plant community and associated diversity within these forests, and have demonstrated how this technology can be used not only to map these important habitats, but also to track their change over time. Cork oak forests are one of the habitats being targeted by European environmental protection legislation, and the group hopes to contribute towards developing stringent systems for enforcement and monitoring.” 

Scientists at FECG are using lidar to help answer a range of research questions elsewhere in the world: mixed boreal forests in Canada, tropical moist forests in Sierra Leone, swamp forests of Borneo, and closer to home, lowland deciduous woodlands across southern England. In each case, lidar is employed to model the structures of tree crowns and forest patches. A particular focus is the study of the biomass of forests and tonnage of carbon that trees can lock up in their trunks, branches and root systems. Forest carbon stores represent a highly significant component of the global carbon cycle, and this is recognised by climate change mitigation schemes such as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation).

Lidar provides a potential tool for making the calculations on carbon saved by avoided deforestation, and channelling funds for this purpose. Another strand of research combines two remote sensing data types: lidar and hyperspectral imagery. “Hyperspectral images hold information on the reflectance properties of tree foliage in narrow bandwidths of the electromagnetic spectrum, and these properties relate to chemical characteristics (traits) to do with light capture and growth, longevity and defence, and maintenance and metabolism. Lidar allows us to delineate tree crowns within the hyperspectral imagery, look at the spectral properties and traits of individual trees, and see what factors influence them,” said Dr Coomes.

"Forests will always keep many secrets, but they are so important to us that we need to understand better how they function, how they are changing, and how we can manage that change. Lidar is becoming an important part of the modern toolkit for building that better understanding.”
 

By using advanced imaging technology, scientists are able to map on an unprecedentedly large scale – and in remarkably accurate detail - what is happening to these precious resources worldwide. 

Lidar involves the firing of laser pulses at very high frequency (many thousands per second) and detecting the backscatter off different objects.
Dr Will Simonson

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