The study revealed that each cell in normal facial skin carries many thousands of mutations, mainly caused by exposure to sunlight. Around one in four skin cells in samples from people without cancer were found to carry at least one cancer-associated mutation.

Ultra-deep genetic sequencing was performed on 234 biopsies taken from four patients revealing 3,760 mutations, with more than 100 cancer-associated mutations per square centimetre of skin. Cells with these mutations formed clusters of cells, known as clones, that had grown to be around twice the size of normal clones, but none of them had become cancerous.

“With this technology, we can now peer into the first steps a cell takes to become cancerous,” explains Dr Peter Campbell, a corresponding author from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. “These first cancer-associated mutations give cells a boost compared to their normal neighbours. They have a burst of growth that increases the pool of cells waiting for the next mutation to push them even further. We can even see some cells in normal skin that have taken two or three such steps towards cancer. How many of these steps are needed to become fully cancerous? Maybe five, maybe 10, we don’t know yet.”

The mutations observed showed the patterns associated with the most common and treatable form of skin cancer linked to sun exposure, known as cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma, rather than melanoma, a rarer and sometimes fatal form of skin cancer.

“The burden of mutations observed is high but almost certainly none of these clones would have developed into skin cancer,” says Dr Iñigo Martincorena, first author from the Sanger Institute. “Because skin cancers are so common in the population, it makes sense that individuals would carry a large number of mutations. What we are seeing here are the hidden depths of the iceberg, not just the relatively small number that break through the surface waters to become cancer.”

Skin samples used in this study were taken from four people aged between 55 and 73 who were undergoing routine surgery to remove excess eyelid skin that was obscuring vision. The mutations had accumulated over each individual’s lifetime as the eyelids were exposed to sunshine. The researchers estimate that each sun-exposed skin cell accumulated on average a new mutation in its genome for nearly every day of life.

“These kinds of mutations accumulate over time – whenever our skin is exposed to sunlight, we are at risk of adding to them,” explains Dr Phil Jones, a corresponding author from the Sanger Institute and the MRC Cancer Unit at the University of Cambridge. “Throughout our lives we need to protect our skin by using sun-block lotions, staying away from midday sun and covering exposed skin wherever possible. These precautions are important at any stage of life but particularly in children, who are busy growing new skin, and older people, who have already built up an array of mutations.”

Recent studies analysing blood samples from people who do not have cancer had revealed a lower burden of mutations, with only a small percentage of individuals carrying a cancer-causing mutation in their blood cells. Owing to sun exposure, skin is much more heavily mutated, with thousands of cancer-associated mutations expected in any adult’s skin.

The research was primarily supported by the Wellcome Trust, the Medical Research Council, Cancer Research UK and EMBO.

Adapted from a press release from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute

Reference
Martincorena I, et al. (2015). High burden and pervasive positive selection of somatic mutations in normal human skin. Science.

Language played a key role in state formation and the spread of Christianity, the construction of ethnicity and negotiating positions of social status and group membership in the ancient world. It could reinforce social norms and shed light on taboos. Yet it is often overlooked as a source for understanding ancient civilisations.

A new book by James Clackson, Reader in Comparative Philology in the Faculty of Classics, uses language as a lens for understanding the ancient world.

Language and Society in the Greek and Roman Worlds is about why some languages - Latin and Greek - grew and others shrank and what language can tell us about the way people lived. The principal focus is the Greek and Roman civilisations between around 800 BCE and 400 CE. The book also catalogues how different states in ancient times managed multilingual populations and it highlights the plethora of different languages that existed at the time. Indeed until the last century of the Roman Republic Latin was a minority language, even in Italy.

The theme of multilingualism is one which has implications for our current preoccupation with immigration and one which Clackson will address in his forthcoming talk on 29th May at the Hay Festival where he is one of many academics speaking as part of the Cambridge Series.

He will draw parallels between current British anxiety about hearing other languages than English and fears about English being bastardised by other languages and concerns of the Romans about the influx of foreign people and foreign words into the Latin langauge. “I am interested in the impact of long-term migration on language. In the end, despite concerns, Latin was enriched by migration. Lots of basic Latin words are Greek words and this has translated into the Romance languages such as French where you can trace the impact of Greek in words such as bras, jambe and parler,” says Clackson.

He compares the approach of Greece and Rome to language. Greece had many many minor states, each with their own dialect and often their own alphabet. He says the Greeks were happy to let people speak in other dialects in public places like the courts and lecture rooms. Multilingualism was not an issue. “It was almost invisible. Ancient writers do not generally talk about interpreters or translations. They take it as natural, as something that doesn’t even need to be mentioned,” he says.

It was not until Roman times that something approaching an official language began to emerge. “Roman magistrates, for instance, spoke Latin, even if the audience was Greek-speaking and the speaker could speak Greek. There are documented instances of this,” says Clackson. “It was a way of letting people know who was boss.”

Those in the audience would have to wait for the translation to understand what was being said.

“You can track in Roman times the discussion about how not to sound Greek. In his public speeches, Cicero [pictured] avoids Greek words as much as possible, but in his private letters he is continually using Greek words and phrases. It’s like a different linguistic persona. He said he would never use Greek words in a Latin sentence, but there is evidence that, in private, he did.”

Clackson adds that there appears to have been a gender difference in how language was used, with women who did not have such a public voice, more likely to use native languages.

Despite these differences, there is no written evidence, says Clackson, that language was associated with political resistance to Roman imperialism. Partly this may be because local languages did not have a written system. “If the Romans conquered you, you had to speak Latin and if you wanted to be educated and get on you had to learn Latin,” he says.

People used language fairly pragmatically according to what would get them the best results, he says. “In Roman law, Latin had to be spoken for contracts to be valid so you would be excluded from the economy if you didn’t use Latin, but there was no centralisation of schooling and attempts to impose language in that way. It was not as associated with identity as it is now.”

Nevertheless, the ability to speak the highest form of Greek was also a signifier of status. Many Romans learnt Greek as they saw it as the language of literature and culture.

Clackson’s research is currently focused on whether the Romans treated Greek differently to other languages, whether they were more open to Greek culture and whether that openness was part of their success.

*James Clackson will be speaking at the Hay Festival at 1pm on 29th May on Migration and Language: Ancient Perspectives.

The common cold sore, caused by herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1), is relatively harmless to most people, but for others it can cause life-threatening disease. In intensive care units, for example, the virus commonly leads to severe lung infections. Even in healthy people, in rare cases it can spontaneously cause inflammation of the brain, which can lead to irreversible brain damage.

The genetic material of the virus consists of DNA, like in humans. As soon as HSV-1 has penetrated human cells, it smuggles its DNA into the cell nucleus, where the molecular machinery is located that is used to read the genetic information contained in the DNA and to transcribe it into RNA molecules. This RNA then determines which proteins are produced by the cell.

In the cell nucleus, the virus takes full control of this machinery within a few hours of infection. It uses it to produce its own proteins and produce new virus particles on a massive scale. Formation of the cellular proteins soon becomes almost an irrelevance. In the end, the host cell dies off and thousands of new viruses are released that again infect other cells.

Professor Lars Dölken from the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge and the Institut für Virologie, Würzburg, Germany, together with the bioinformatics team at LMU Munich, led by Professor Caroline Friedel have looked in greater detail at the process of infection. Today in the journal Nature Communications, they report using cell cultures to see how HSV-1 infects human connective tissue cells (fibroblasts) and examine what happens with all the RNA molecules in the cells during the process. The researchers used fibroblasts as this enabled them to look at what the virus does with the cell rather than how the innate immune system responds to the virus.

Just three to four hours after the virus enters the cells it does something quite unexpected. Usually, the process of transcribing DNA into RNA stops when it reaches the end of the genes being transcribed. But in this case, the human cell DNA continued to be transcribed for tens-of-thousands of nucleotides – the A, C, G and Ts of DNA – and often across several neighboring genes. This creates masses of unusable RNA products that can no longer properly translate into proteins.

“It’s like someone transcribing a short story, but instead of stopping at ‘The End’, they carry on and transcribe all the copyright and publication details and ISBN numbers at the beginning and end of the book,” explains Professor Dölken. “This produces lots of meaningless, confusing and useless information.”

Interestingly, the viral DNA is accurately transcribed throughout infection. By interfering with the transcription processes in our own cellular genes, the virus is acting to benefit itself – it causes the cell to shut itself off, preventing the immune system from attacking the virus. It also increases the synthesis of viral proteins and thus aids the production of new virus particles.

This newly discovered mechanism can give the impression that the virus also activates a large number of genes in the cell, but this is actually not the case and may have led previous studies to incorrectly interpret experimental data. According to the findings, hundreds of cellular genes seemingly activated by the viruses are not translated into proteins at all.

“Unlike previous studies which only studied single genes, we also found no indication that the virus generally impedes the processing of RNA in the cell nucleus, known as splicing,” says Dölken. “Instead, it causes unusual splicing events, many of which have never before been observed.”

The research team from Cambridge, Würzburg and Munich set a milestone in methodology with this work: With a single experimental approach it is possible to record all the changes that occur when transcribing and processing RNA as well as their impact on protein production.

Reference
Rutkowski, AJ. Wide-spread disruption of host transcription termination in HSV-1 infection. Nature Communications; 20 May 2015.

First, what lies behind the desire of some politicians to secure the Human Rights Act’s repeal? Second, how might a British Bill of Rights differ from the present legislation? And, third, what constitutional obstacles might lie in the way of the implementation of these reforms?

In relation to the last of those three issues, the argument is developed that although the UK Parliament has the legal power to legislate for the proposed changes, the increasingly multi-layered nature of the British constitution limits Parliament’s capacity to exploit its sovereign legislative authority. In particular, the constraining effects of international law - in the form of the European Convention on Human Rights - and the devolved nature of the modern British constitution are likely to limit the UK Government’s room for manoeuvre. As a result, it is likely to be difficult to deliver upon the manifesto commitments that were made in a legally coherent and constitutionally legitimate manner.

Dr Mark Elliott is a Reader in Public Law at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St Catharine's College. His main research interests are in the fields of constitutional and administrative law. Dr Elliott's recent publications include Elliott and Thomas, Public Law (2nd ed OUP 2014); Elliott, Beatson, Matthews and Elliott's Administrative Law: Text and Materials (OUP 2011, 4th edition); and Forsyth, Elliott, Jhaveri, Scully-Hill and Ramsden (eds), Effective Judicial Review: A Cornerstone of Good Governance (OUP 2010). Dr Elliott was the 2011 Legal Research Foundation Visiting Scholar at The University of Auckland, New Zealand. In 2010, he was awarded a University of Cambridge Pilkington Prize for excellence in University teaching. He writes a blog which includes information for people applying, or thinking of applying, to study Law at university.

For more information about Dr Elliott, you can also refer to his Faculty profile.

Law in Focus is a series of short videos featuring academics from the University of Cambridge Faculty of Law, addressing legal issues in current affairs and the news. These issues are examples of the many which challenge researchers and students studying undergraduate and postgraduate law at the Faculty. Law in Focus is available on YouTube, or to subscribe to in iTunes U.

Pain perception is an evolutionarily-conserved warning mechanism that alerts us to dangers in the environment and to potential tissue damage. However, rare individuals – around one in a million people in the UK – are born unable to feel pain. These people accumulate numerous self-inflicted injuries, often leading to reduced lifespan.

Using detailed genome mapping, two teams of researchers collaborated to analyse the genetic make-up of 11 families across Europe and Asia affected by an inherited condition known as congenital insensitivity to pain (CIP). This enabled them to pinpoint the cause of the condition to variants of the gene PRDM12. Family members affected by CIP carried two copies of the variant; however, if they had only inherited one copy from their parents, they were unaffected.

The team looked at nerve biopsies taken from the patients to see what had gone wrong and found that particular pain-sensing neurons were absent. From these clinical features of the disease, the team predicted that there would be a block to the production of pain-sensing neurons during the development of the embryo – they confirmed this using a combination of studies in mouse and frog models, and in human induced pluripotent stem cells (skin cells that had been reset to their ‘master state’, which enables them to develop into almost any type of cell in the body).

PRDM12 had previously been implicated in the modification of chromatin, a small molecule that attaches to our DNA and acts like a switch to turn genes on and off (an effect known as epigenetics). The researchers showed that all the genetic variants of PRDM12 in the CIP patients blocked the gene's function. As chromatin is particularly important during formation of particular specialised cell types such as neurons, this provides a possible explanation for why pain-sensing neurons do not form properly in the CIP patients.

"The ability to sense pain is essential to our self-preservation, yet we understand far more about excessive pain than we do about lack of pain perception," says Professor Geoff Woods from the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research at the University of Cambridge, who co-led the study. "Both are equally important to the development of new pain treatments – if we know the mechanisms that underlie pain sensation, we can then potentially control and reduce unnecessary pain."

PRDM12 is only the fifth gene related to lack of pain perception to have been identified to date. However, two of the previously-discovered genes have already led to the development of new pain killers that are currently been tested in clinical trials.

"We are very hopeful that this new gene could be an excellent candidate for drug development, particularly given recent successes with drugs targeting chromatin regulators in human disease," adds Dr Ya-Chun Chen from the University of Cambridge, the study’s first author. "This could potentially benefit those who are at danger from lack of pain perception and help in the development of new treatments for pain relief."

Reference
Chen, Y-C et al. Transcriptional regulator PRDM12 is essential for human pain perception. Nature Genetics; 25 May 2015.

An international team of astronomers, including researchers from the University of Cambridge, has identified a young planetary system which may aid in understanding how our own solar system formed and developed billions of years ago.

Using the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) at the Gemini South telescope in Chile, the researchers identified a disc-shaped bright ring of dust around a star only slightly more massive than the sun, located 360 light years away in the Centaurus constellation. The disc is located between about 37 and 55 Astronomical Units (3.4 – 5.1 billion miles) from its host star, which is almost the same distance as the solar system’s Kuiper Belt is from the sun. The brightness of the disc, which is due to the starlight reflected by it, is also consistent with a wide range of dust compositions including the silicates and ice present in the Kuiper Belt.

The Kuiper Belt lies just beyond Neptune, and contains thousands of small icy bodies left over from the formation of the solar system more than four billion years ago. These objects range in size from specks of debris dust, all the way up to moon-sized objects like Pluto – which used to be classified as a planet, but has now been reclassified as a dwarf planet.

The star observed in this new study is a member of the massive 10-20 million year-old Scorpius-Centaurus OB association, a region similar to that in which the sun was formed. The disc is not perfectly centred on the star, which is strong indication that it was likely sculpted by one or more unseen planets. By using models of how planets shape a debris disc, the team found that ‘eccentric’ versions of the giant planets in the outer solar system could explain the observed properties of the ring.

“It’s almost like looking at the outer solar system when it was a toddler,” said principal investigator Thayne Currie, an astronomer at the Subaru Observatory in Hawaii.

The current theory on the formation of the solar system holds that it originated within a giant molecular cloud of hydrogen, in which clumps of denser material formed. One of these clumps, rotating and collapsing under its own gravitation, formed a flattened spinning disc known as the solar nebula. The sun formed at the hot and dense centre of this disc, while the planets grew by accretion in the cooler outer regions. The Kuiper Belt is believed to be made up of the remnants of this process, so there is a possibility that once the new system develops, it may look remarkably similar to our solar system.

“To be able to directly image planetary birth environments around other stars at orbital distances comparable to the solar system is a major advancement,” said Dr Nikku Madhusudhan of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, one of the paper’s co-authors. “Our discovery of a near-twin of the Kuiper Belt provides direct evidence that the planetary birth environment of the solar system may not be uncommon.”

This is the first discovery with the new cutting-edge Gemini instrument. “In just one of our many 50-second exposures we could see what previous instruments failed to see in more than 50 minutes,” said Currie.

The star, going by the designation HD 115600, was the first object the research team looked at. “Over the next few years, I’m optimistic that GPI will reveal many more debris discs and young planets. Who knows what strange, new worlds we will find,” Currie added.

The paper is accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. 

Researchers at the University of Cambridge Centre for Family Research and Psychometrics Centre have completed a study in which they developed the simple questionnaire for teachers, dubbed the Brief Early Skills and Support Index (BESSI).

The government has indicated that it wishes to introduce testing for all children at Reception (when they first enter school at age four) in September this year. These tests seek to provide baseline assessments of a child’s ‘school readiness.’ However, the proposals have been criticised by several teaching organisations as being too narrowly focused and likely to add to the difficulties of an already challenging period for both children and their teachers.

“If schools are to deliver the extra support needed to help children make a successful transition to school, some form of assessment is required, but the tests due to be introduced in September are not what teachers need: they are labour-intensive and potentially stressful for four-year-olds,” says Professor Claire Hughes from the Centre for Family Research, who led the research.

“Teachers need something that is brief but reliable and that harnesses their own skills and experience to identify children in need of extra support. A short teacher questionnaire such as the BESSI could provide all the necessary information and be easier to implement.”

The Cambridge study was a study commissioned by Frank Field MP who, following his 2010 report, The Foundation Years: how to prevent poor children becoming poor adults set up and now chairs the Foundation Years Trust.  Part of the Trust’s work is to develop, implement and promote life chance indicators, which are seen as playing a key role in driving policy and incentivising a focus on improving children’s long-term life chances.

The BESSI questionnaire is unique in being both brief (one page) and broad (including, for example, items about the kinds of support children receive at home).  A previous, much longer questionnaire, the Early Development Instrument (EDI), was designed by a Canadian research team and has enabled teachers in Australia to profile the development and wellbeing of more than 260,000 five-year-olds. This national census revealed worrying regional disparities in the proportion of children with ‘developmental vulnerabilities’, with clear policy implications for mobilizing extra support. However, the EDI is not appropriate for use in the UK because British children start formal schooling one year earlier than children almost everywhere else in the world – a significant time difference in terms of a child’s development and a source of concern for many.

Professor Hughes and colleagues carried out focus groups with teachers in Field’s Birkenhead constituency with a view to getting a first-hand view of variation in children’s school readiness. This highlighted an additional problem: a lack of consensus on how ‘school readiness’ should be defined.

Researchers in the USA have noted that for politicians, whose primary interest is in the extent to which schools produce employable young adults, school readiness hinges on achieving foundation skills in literacy and numeracy.  As Professor Hughes explained, “For teachers, who face the more immediate challenge of 30 small children in a confined space, the obvious starting point is children’s behaviour and emotional and social development.”

Defining school readiness is also complicated by the fact that learning takes many forms – from ‘surface learning’ (e.g. letter recognition) to ‘deep learning’ (e.g. finding patterns or principles).  Some theorists argue that the very term ‘school readiness’ is intrinsically unfair, in that it appears to place the burden of responsibility on the child.  The Cambridge researchers noted that a lack of educational support at home was a frequent issue raised by teachers.

To address these various problems, the researchers developed and piloted the BESSI. So far, this has been tested in three waves involving schools and nurseries in the Wirral, in London and in Manchester.  The first wave was with teachers of over 800 children in Reception, the second was with nursery staff working with a similar number of much younger children, and the third was with teachers of a further 270 children to check the reliability of BESSI ratings.

Amongst other factors, the BESSI provides information about children’s social and behavioural adjustment (e.g. are they able to play with other children or to wait their turn?) as well as measures of their daily living skills (e.g. can they use cutlery and can they go the toilet by themselves?) and language / cognitive skills. Importantly, it also captures variation in family support and includes items about reading, praise and fun at home.  The findings around fun are particularly interesting as they indicate that parental support is not simply a matter of regular reading at home – although there may be a virtuous circle by which parents and children who have fun together are also more likely to read together.

As the researchers expected, some problems, such as distractibility and trouble sitting still, were very common, even among the older children in the sample. However, the BESSI also provided some surprising insights.  First, not only were problems typically almost twice as common in boys as in girls, but these gender differences were also evident in family support. For example, compared with girls, boys received much lower ratings of ‘fun at home’.

Second, children from low-income families lagged behind their more affluent peers – but these differences were removed when scores for family support were taken into account.  In other words, when families facing financial difficulties are still able to have fun together, the children appear better prepared for school – but teachers’ ratings indicated that fun at home was often lacking.

“We should not blame parents who provide low levels of support, or recast problems of inequality as a matter of parental responsibility, or let these findings detract from efforts to reduce inequality in order to give all children a fair start in life,” adds Professor Hughes. “Instead, our hope is that the BESSI will help educational professionals support all children, regardless of family background, who display difficulties during the transition to school or nursery.”

The research was funded by the Westminster Foundation and the Foundation Years Trust.

Reference
Hughes, C et al. Measuring the foundations of school readiness: Introducing a new questionnaire for teachers – The Brief Early Skills and Support Index (BESSI). British Journal of Educational Psychology; 8 May 2015

India’s Minister of State for Science, Technology and Earth Sciences, YS Chowdary, visited the University of Cambridge to witness the signing of a Letter of Intent between the University and India’s Department of Biotechnology (DBT).

The agreement will lead to the creation of a new programme of early-career fellowships, funded jointly by the University of Cambridge and by the DBT, to support research and innovation projects in collaboration with Indian partner institutions.

Mr Chowdary arrived at the University leading a delegation interested in learning about the Cambridge innovation cluster –in particular, about the links between university research and its commercialisation, with a specific emphasis on biotechnology and medical biology.

The visit, held on May 22, also offered an opportunity for the Minister of State to discuss ways of fostering partnerships between Cambridge and India’s leading research institutions, and of creating new opportunities for joint research.

Following a stopover at the Babraham Institute, and a tour of the Cambridge Biomedical Campus led by Professor Ashok Venkitaraman, Director of the MRC Cancer Unit, Mr Chowdary arrived in the city centre for a roundtable discussion involving Professor Venkitaraman; Professor Chris Lowe, Emeritus Professor of Engineering and Biotechnology; Professor Duncan Maskell, Head of the School of Biological Sciences; and Professor Sir Mike Gregory, Director of the Institute for Manufacturing.

Later, the Minister of State met with the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz. During the meeting, the Vice-Chancellor signed the Letter of Intent on behalf of the University.

Also attending were Dr Shailja V Gupta, the DBT’s Director of International Cooperation, and Professor Dinakar Salunke, Executive Director of the Regional Centre for Biotechnology, in Faridabad.

One of the main objectives of the Letter of Intent is to establish a programme of 5-year fellowships for early-career researchers from the University of Cambridge.  Under the terms of the agreement, academics participating in the scheme will be jointly appointed by the DBT and Cambridge. They are expected to spend two years in Cambridge and three years at a partner institution in India carrying out translational research, with a focus on commercialisation and entrepreneurship.

The Letter of Intent also makes reference to a shared interest in the establishment of a centre for crop sciences, and to Cambridge plans for the establishment of a wholly-owned not-for-profit subsidiary in India to support wider collaborative research between Cambridge and Indian Institutions.

Speaking after the signing ceremony, the Vice-Chancellor said: “We are delighted to be partners of India’s Department of Biotechnology in establishing these fellowships. We are also very eager to support the DBT’s plans for the development of India’s research ecosystems through closer links between universities and industry. This is another great example of Cambridge’s commitment to enhancing its engagement with India in ways that will strengthen the capacity for translational and applied research in both India and the United Kingdom.”

Photo Credit: Natalie Glasberg. The University of Cambridge Vice-Chancellor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz signs the Letter of Intent with India’s Minister of State for Science, Technology and Earth Sciences, YS Chowdary.

These statistics refer to applications made from September 2013 onwards, either for entry in October 2014 or deferred entry in October 2015.

The biggest increases in applications were seen in Engineering, Computer Science, Natural Sciences and Psychological & Behavioural Sciences, while applications for arts and humanities courses held steady.

Across all courses, 97.3% of accepted applicants went on to achieve the equivalent of A*AA (380 UCAS tariff points) or better. In the 2013 cycle, this figure was 96.8%.

The proportion of successful UK applicants educated in the state sector increased from 61.4% to 62.2%. The collegiate University’s target, agreed with the Office for Fair Access (OFFA), is to admit between 61 and 63 per cent of its students from the state sector by 2015-16.

The University attributes its continued success in attracting applicants from all backgrounds to its outreach work and to its commitment to transparent admissions decisions based on academic attainment.

In 2013-14, the collegiate University spent over £4.5 million delivering 4,000 access events which led to almost 200,000 interactions with school learners and teachers. The University’s outreach programme includes college and departmental open days, one of the UKs largest residential summer schools, subject masterclasses, Higher Education Taster Days, a student shadowing scheme and school visits.

The University is committed to the principle that no UK student should be deterred from applying to Cambridge for financial reasons, and to this end has one of the most substantial bursary schemes in the UK. In 2013-14, the University awarded bursaries worth more than £6 million to well over 2,000 students from low income backgrounds.

Dr Mike Sewell, Director of Admissions for the Cambridge Colleges, said

“We are delighted to see another increase in the number of talented students applying to study at Cambridge. Our applicants are highly qualified and the University’s admissions process is highly selective.

"Inevitably some impressive applicants will be unsuccessful. We can assure all applicants that they have been assessed holistically as an individual.

"Those who have been successful have won their offers and acceptances on the basis of their academic achievements and by demonstrating their potential to excel at Cambridge.”

In June 1910 Dr Edward Wilson set sail from Cardiff to Antarctica on board the Terra Nova as the Chief of the Scientific Staff on the British Antarctic Expedition led by Captain Scott. On 1 November the following year a group from the Terra Nova set out from Cape Evans across the ice with the intention of reaching the South Pole. The venture ended in tragedy. The members of the British expedition perished on their return from the pole having discovered that the Norwegians had got there first.

Wilson was a talented artist as well as a doctor. He began drawing as a child and throughout his life he made meticulous sketches and watercolours of the natural world.

After his death, his final sketchbook was retrieved from the tent where he and his companions spent their last days. His watercolours were returned from the Cape Evans hut where they had been produced.

Artworks made by Wilson on both the Discovery Expedition of 1901 and the Terra Nova Expedition are testimony to the spirit of discovery and the splendour of the Antarctic.

The Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) is fortunate in holding around 1,900 of Wilson’s drawings and sketches, the majority of them given to SPRI by his wife Oriana. Nineteen of these artworks depict the albatross – several species of which Wilson shows both in close-up studies and soaring above the ocean.

Mrs Heather Lane, former Keeper of the Polar Museum, says: "Wilson is undoubtedly one of the greatest artists of the heroic age of polar exploration. He was one of Scott’s closest friends and on expeditions the person to whom others looked for stability.

"As an artist he was self-taught yet he captured with stunning accuracy both the anatomical structure and the fragile beauty of living things. He was particularly fascinated by birds."

The wandering albatross has the largest wingspan (up to 12 foot) of any bird. Its flight is so efficient that it expends as little energy soaring on currents of air (a type of flight known as 'dynamic soaring') as it does sitting on its nest. In all, there are 22 species of albatross, most of them living in the southern oceans. The majority are under threat, chiefly from longline fishing. Attracted by the bait, the birds become entangled by the hooks and drown.  Estimates put the annual death toll at 100,000 birds.

PhD candidate Tommy Clay (Department of Zoology) is contributing to a British Antarctic Survey (BAS) programme that is creating a detailed picture of their migratory movements. The research is made possible by lightweight battery-powered devices capable of tracking the birds’ movements over multiple years.

Albatrosses pair for life: Wanderers raise at most one chick every two years. They spend a whole year incubating their one egg and looking after the chick. Once the chick is independent, its parents enjoy a recovery period before they breed again, returning to the same breeding spots on remote islands in the southern ocean.

"Until relatively recently, very little has been known about the pattern of albatross movements across their lifespans, which can be more than 60 years. We’re beginning to build up a picture of what individual birds do and why they do it. We now know that in the inter-breeding period, the birds cover huge distances. One Grey-headed albatross, for example, circumnavigated the southern hemisphere in just 46 days," says Clay.

"Albatrosses are regarded as sentinel species for the health of the marine environment. Albatrosses are scavengers – they follow ships and eat the debris thrown into the water. In the North Pacific, dead birds are found with plastic in their stomachs, showing just how widespread – and destructive – is our impact on the oceans."

The long association between the albatross and the seafarer was cemented in 1798 with the publication of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s epic Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In the poem, which was dismissed by early critics as an extravagant cock-and-bull story, the eponymous mariner shoots an albatross in a seemingly motiveless act of cruelty.

When the ship is becalmed (Day after day, day after day,/We stuck, nor breath nor motion; /As idle as a painted ship/ Upon a painted ocean), the dead albatross is hung around the mariner’s neck by his shipmates.

The poem was famously illustrated by Gustav Doré in the 1870s and became one of the most quoted ballads in the English language. Images of the crew dying of thirst out at sea (Water, water, every where,/And all the boards did shrink;/ Water, water, every where,/ Nor any drop to drink) and the dead bird hanging around a man’s neck became embedded in the public imagination.

In the 1930s, albatross entered the Oxford English Dictionary as a word to describe an unshakeable burden.

“The indeterminacy of the mariner’s crime makes the story compelling: we don’t know what makes him pick up his crossbow and shoot a bird that the crew has befriended. Some scholars have read the poem as a Christian narrative in which evil is punished by God. Others, more recently, have argued for an environmental context in which mankind is punished for an attack on the natural world,” says Professor Heather Glen of the Faculty of English.

“Or possibly – and this is in keeping with the poem’s deliberately archaic ballad form – Coleridge is suggesting that the shooting of the albatross is a violation of a much more ancient tradition of welcome to the stranger. In the note with which he headed the poem in 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge announces that it will portray ‘how the Ancient Mariner cruelly, and in contempt of the laws of hospitality, killed a sea-bird; and how he was followed by many and strange judgements’.”

Our unprecedented ability to collect, store and analyse data is opening up new frontiers in science and the humanities, from extending our knowledge of how the universe is built, to creating new understanding of the genetic basis of disease, to discovering the impact of schools on pupil achievement.

It’s causing us to challenge not only long-held ideas about what is possible in research, but also to reflect on the value that we place upon ever-increasing quantification and the effect of pervasive data collection on our role as citizens.

‘Big Data’ has also been highlighted by the UK government as among the country’s ‘Eight Great Technologies’ that will help drive economic growth.

But what actually is big data? Collecting and analysing data on individuals, societies and all aspects of the natural world, is routine in research. So why the current preoccupation with the ‘bigness’ of data?

Part of this is the sheer deluge of data that we are now able to collect and store. Back in 2010, Google CEO Eric Schmidt declared that every two days we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilisation up until 2003. And that was five years ago.

Of course size doesn’t always matter – sometimes big data can mean large datasets that are incredibly messy, with missing or corrupt information, which requires complex mathematical algorithms to make sense of it all.

Another aspect of the current interest in big data is the realisation that just because we can collect data doesn’t mean we are making the best use of it.  In fact, big data is often described as data exceeding our ability to handle it, and for which new analytical methods are required to extract useful information. But this is clearly a moving target, and research is urgently needed to keep up.

Recognising this, the government announced earlier this year that the new £42 million Alan Turing Institute, to be based in London, will carry out research in organising, storing and interrogating big data, headed by the universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford, Warwick and UCL.

A more subtle distinction that sets ‘big data’ apart from just ‘data’ is in the combination of factors that describe it, the so-called ‘Big Vs of Big Data’, including:

• its Volume in terms of size, or the number of variables needed to describe it,
• its Velocity, in how it’s collected and processed in real-time,
• the Variety of its diverse, linked and unstructured datasets,
• its Veracity in terms of where it originates from and how complete it is,
• and finally its Value, and especially how the use, linkage and re-use of data can provide crucial new insights that may have been unforeseen at the time the data was collected.

Cambridge researchers are at the forefront of solving many of the challenges that big data presents. New machine learning algorithms are being developed, to the point that machines can now automate some very human tasks, like image recognition, reading and annotating text, or even writing documents in plain English.

For the very biggest big data projects such as the Large Hadron Collider and the Square Kilometre Array, Cambridge researchers are designing new methods to deal with huge data volumes and clever analytics to understand the fundamental makeup of matter and the origins of the universe.

Developing new mathematics and the algorithms to handle this data explosion go hand in hand with improving the storage and computing infrastructure underlying the big data revolution. Cambridge is home to Wilkes, one of the world’s most energy-efficient supercomputers, while scientists in the Computer Laboratory are building a test-bed data centre, where large-scale ‘experiments’ can be done in a safe environment to optimise the data centres of the future.

And what of the data that we personally generate in our everyday lives? Our researchers are asking whether what we share on social media could tell us about ourselves, how best to take the data captured in hospital records to improve patient treatment and if newly available datasets can be used to uncover corruption and misuse of public funds.  

Questions of privacy, anonymity and consent are a crucial component of our research, and require engagement from governments, lawmakers, ethicists and, by consultation, the public. In a world where datasets can be linked together, where the breadcrumb trail that we leave as we go about our online and offline lives can be recorded, analysed and converted into a detailed picture of our behaviour, movements, actions and thoughts, a radical change to the way we conceive of these notions is taking place.

In order to make practical use of what we learn from these data, distillation and visualisation of the central information is key, and doing so in a way which is robust, comprehensible and actionable relies not only on advances in science but in our statistical literacy and a critical understanding of what the data can tell us, and what is left out.

And in the rush to convert our world into pixels and numbers, perspectives from the humanities and social sciences are needed more than ever before. What are the implications of data-driven hypothesis development for the practice of science, and for how evidence is used to make policy? What room does this data-driven society leave for aspects of the world that cannot be captured by computers? How does big data supplant or shore-up existing power structures?

To answer these questions requires a meeting of minds – between those working with the statistics, mathematics and algorithms underlying the new field of ‘data science’ and the computer scientists and engineers who are building systems to store and manage data, along with those who can offer perspectives in the social sciences and humanities to ensure that big data can deliver benefits in a sustainable and appropriate way. To this end, in 2013, the University created Cambridge Big Data, a Strategic Research Initiative that brings together a diverse research community to allow Cambridge to respond to the ever-increasing challenges of big data.

Professor Paul Alexander (Chair) and Dr Clare Dyer-Smith (Coordinator) Cambridge Big Data

Nathan Clark, Noel Fombanu and Lydia Rutherford, 17-year-old students from Lodge Park Academy in Corby, spent their Easter break interviewing leading academics about their research to create audio blogs about neuroscience and modern life.

Having tapped into Cambridge Neuroscience’s cutting-edge research, Lydia, Nathan and Noel asked members of the public for their personal views to broaden the debate.

Lydia, who interviewed Professor Trevor Robbins about drug abuse and dependence, said

“We all had preconceptions about what the researchers would be like. However we were all pleasantly surprised; instead of mad scientists who used terms we couldn’t comprehend … They relayed their knowledge in ways that were accessible which made the interviews very relaxed.”

Listen to Lydia’s audio blog below

Nathan, who interviewed Dr Emma Cahill on the topic of memory and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), said

“Memory is a very important subject as it is part of everyday life so therefore affects every-one. It was also interesting to learn about PTSD because now I know how to aid people with similar problems in the future.”

Listen to Nathan’s audio blog below

Noel, who interviewed engineer Dr David Franklin about the role that neuroscience has to play in robotics, said

“Dr Franklin knew a lot about his field and even allowed me to experience some of the machines that he was working on.”

Listen to Noel’s audio blog below

Dr Hannah Critchlow, who develops and runs public engagement projects with members of Cambridge Neuroscience, said

“It was a pleasure to work with these talented students and watch them interrogate my colleagues with such intelligence and confidence. Lydia, Nathan and Noel not only got to grips with complex research but also mastered the art of interviewing – no mean feat. Their blogs are fascinating.”

The David Ross Educational Trust establishes educational initiatives and supports other organisations to inspire young people to reach their potential.

The University of Cambridge is committed to widening participation both at the University itself and in higher education more generally. In 2013-14, the collegiate University delivered 4,000 access events which led to almost 200,000 interactions with school learners and teachers. The University’s widening participation programme includes college and departmental open days, one of the UKs largest residential summer schools, subject masterclasses, Higher Education Taster Days, a student shadowing scheme and school visits.

Rush hour can be maddening. Roads congested with traffic, public transport overcrowded, pavements heaving with people. But as well as the frustration, there’s a sinister side to the commute to work: every breath you take could be adding to your risk of dying prematurely.

Air pollution is the world’s largest single environmental health risk, causing one in every eight deaths according to figures released last year by the World Health Organization. In the UK, 30,000 people die prematurely every year as a result of poor air quality, and it costs the NHS and wider economy many billions each year.

Traffic is the main culprit; however, industry, domestic heating, power generation and burning are all contributors to pollution. And although the effects of pollution might be noticeable on a particularly smoggy day in a large city, decades of exposure to only slightly higher levels – a level we wouldn’t even notice – can increase the risk of heart and lung diseases, stroke and cancer.

“To work out the factors we should be worried about, and how we can intervene, we need to rethink how we measure what’s going on,” explains atmospheric scientist Professor Rod Jones.

In the UK, the Automatic Urban and Rural Network provides valuable hour-by-hour assessments of air quality. But with only 171 monitoring stations at fixed sites nationwide, large areas of the country remain uncovered. Cost is the main limitation to developing a higher density network.

With this in mind, Jones’ team, together with industrial partners and other universities, has been developing low-cost pollution detectors that are small enough to fit in your pocket, stable enough to be installed as long-term static detectors around a city, and sensitive enough to detect small changes in air quality on a street-by-street basis. Their findings are now informing research projects aimed at improving air quality in major cities across Europe and North America.

The detectors are based on electrochemical sensors developed by project partner Alphasense for industrial safety, where detection of toxic gases is needed at the parts-per-million level. Monitoring air quality, however, requires parts-per-billion sensitivity. “Rod and I had the confidence to believe that we could push our sensors to lower concentration levels, and yet keep sensor costs low,” says Dr John Saffell, Technical Director at Alphasense.

The electrochemical devices the team developed can measure a wide range of pollutants, including carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and ozone, and they contain laser technology (developed by the University of Hertfordshire) to detect particulates from cars and lorries. The addition of a GPS aerial allows air quality data and location to be mapped simultaneously.

A series of proof-of-concept studies followed. Personal devices were strapped to bicycles, carried in cars and on buses, and static devices were attached to lampposts and stationed at roadsides and at critical pollutant sites. Fifty static devices were also deployed around London Heathrow Airport to record 22 months in the life of one of the busiest airports in the world.

“This was the first time technology like this had been tested in real-world situations as a high-density network,” says Jones, whose research at Heathrow was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council. “We could see huge variability in the exposure to pollution that people encounter as they move around the urban environment, including ‘hotspots’.

At Heathrow, we could see the airport turning on and off during the day, individual aircraft taxing and taking off, and the effects of wind direction and the perimeter and M25 motorway road traffic.”

They also discovered that sensor performance can create new opportunities. Jones and colleagues had to develop new smart software methods capable of separating local pollution events from background signals (pollution transported from long range) and then to calibrate sensors across networks. Plus, they needed to move from being able to process the data after it has been collected to doing so in real-time.

The team has been working with Cambridge Environmental Research Consultants – developers of world-leading air quality modelling software – combining the unprecedented level of data created by the pollution-monitoring studies with model output to enhance the understanding of pollution dispersion.

For instance, sensors can be used to ask whether pollution along bus routes is improved by upgrading the exhaust processing on a bus fleet; whether people living at the top of high-rise buildings experience more or less pollution than people at street level; and to what extent changing a route to work, even from one side of the road to another, can affect an individual’s exposure.

Last year, the first commercial product (AQMesh) was released by UK manufacturer Geotech, which specialises in environmental monitoring equipment. AQMesh uses Alphasense sensors to sample every 10 seconds, and data processing is carried out in real-time using cloud computing software similar to that developed by the Cambridge team.

“When the project started in 2006 there were lone voices calling for a different approach to air quality monitoring,” explains Geotech’s Commercial Manager Amanda Randle. “The Cambridge team and Alphasense helped us to understand the sensor’s full potential, and now we have a product that can be placed exactly where it’s needed and provides valuable information.”

And now the approach pioneered in Cambridge is helping to inform two of the largest air quality research studies of their kind.

The AirSensa project, run by the non-profit organisation Change London, aims to deploy large numbers of air quality sensors across the whole of Greater London. Alphasense is providing the sensors and supporting the engineering; and Cambridge is helping with data interpretation in a project whose ethos is “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.”

Meanwhile, the methodologies the researchers developed in the pilot study at Heathrow are contributing to CITI-SENSE, an EU-funded €12.7 million project providing wireless networks to eight cities across Europe. CITI-SENSE involves 27 partner institutions from academia, the healthcare sector and industry (including Alphasense and Geotech), as well as the general public. Citizens across Europe will be involved in data collection through personal monitors and in community decision-making to choose monitoring solutions for spaces such as schools and urban public spaces.

“Even though the effects of poor air quality on health are well known, irrefutable evidence of the scale of the air quality issue and the benefits of ameliorating strategies is urgently needed,” adds Jones. “CITI-SENSE provides a test-bed for both rolling out the new technologies that are coming online and for drawing on the ‘power of the Citizen’ to guide how society responds.”

Inset image: upper, pollution sensor (credit Rod Jones); lower, Alphasense

The team of British scientists, funded by the Wellcome Trust, is using semi-conductor next-generation sequencing technology developed by Thermo Fisher Scientific to generate data in a lab facilitated by Public Health England and International Medical Corps. The genetic analysis is being made freely available to the scientific community.

Since the first reported case in March 2014, the Ebola outbreak has claimed nearly 11,000 lives in West African countries. Professor Ian Goodfellow, Head of Virology at the University of Cambridge, travelled to Sierra Leone in December last year and then again in March this year to help set up a new diagnostics centre attached to an Ebola Treatment Centre in one of the country’s worst affected parts. He returned a third time, together with his postdoc Dr Armando Arias, to study the virus at a molecular level using the sequencing technology.

“Sequencing the genome of a virus can tell us a lot about how it spreads and changes as it passes from person to person. While this information is invaluable to researchers, the rapid sharing of data does not always occur,” said Professor Paul Kellam at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, who is leading the team to map the genomic data captured by Professof Goodfellow and colleagues. “It used to take months to process samples that had to be brought back to labs in the UK for analysis. Having sequencing capabilities on the ground helps generate data in a matter of days or at the longest weeks, which should have a profound impact on how the Ebola virus is researched and inevitably addressed on a global scale.”

Rapid sequencing enables epidemiologists to decipher the source of individual strains, and helps eliminate the need to rely upon Ebola patients to tell them how and where they contracted the virus, as different strains can be tracked as they are transmitted from person to person.

“Only by understanding the Ebola virus and other pathogens, which cause so much suffering in countries like Sierra Leone, can we take meaningful steps to protect communities from future outbreaks,” said Goodfellow. “My hope is that this technology will be used by the next generation of Sierra Leonean scientists and researchers to help provide a sustainable research and surveillance system in the future.”

The next-generation sequencing system was installed at the laboratory adjacent to an Ebola Treatment Centre in Makeni, which was funded by the UK’s Department for International Development. In order to ensure a lasting benefit for the project beyond the current crisis, the next-generation sequencing system is expected to be installed at the University of Makeni, where it will be used by local scientists to study Ebola, and other pathogens that affect the region.

“We’ve learned many painful lessons from the Ebola outbreak, not least of which is that as a scientific community we must become less secretive with the data that is generated,” added Dr Jeremy Farrar, Director of the Wellcome Trust. “The collective expertise of the world’s infectious disease experts is more powerful than any single lab, and the best way of tapping into this is to enhance the capacity to generate the data in the countries affected, rather than having to fly samples out to other countries and then to make the data openly and safely available, as soon as possible.”

Adapted from a press release from Thermo Fisher Scientific, USA

New research has found that the 6 gram brown thornbill mimics the hawk alarm calls of neighbouring species to scare a nest predator by convincing it that a much bigger and scarier predator – the brown goshawk – is on its way.

Currawongs, which raid the nests and hunt the chicks of thornbills, are also prey to goshawks. Although currawongs normally benefit from listening in on hawk alarm calls of other species, thornbills exploit this and turn it against them.

As well as issuing their own hawk alarm call, thornbills mimic those of the local species to create the impression of an impending hawk attack, which in turn distracts the pied currawong - a predator 40 times larger than the thornbill - providing thornbill nestlings with an opportunity to escape.

While animals often mimic dangerous or toxic species to deter predators, the thornbill is a surprising example of a species mimicking another harmless species to trick a predator.

The research, conducted by scientists at the University of Cambridge and the Australian National University (ANU), is published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.   

“The enormous size difference between a tiny thornbill and a 0.5kg goshawk might make it difficult for thornbills to mimic hawk vocalisations accurately, limiting them to mimicking the chorus of hawk alarm calls given by small local species instead,” said Jessica McLachlan, a PhD student from Cambridge’s Department of Zoology, who co-authored the study.

“As hawks are silent when hunting, the alarm calls of local species may be the only sound that warns of a hawk’s presence,” she said. 

The researchers studied the thornbills and currawongs living in and around the Australian National Botanic Gardens in Canberra. They devised a series of experiments in which they placed stuffed currawongs in front of thornbill nests to test when thornbills use such trickery, followed by experiments testing how currawongs respond to the calls of thornbills.

They found that thornbills used their own and mimicked hawk alarm calls when their nests are under attack. They also found that currawongs delayed attacks for twice as long when mimetic and non-mimetic alarm calls were played together as opposed to non-mimetic calls played alone.

“Distracting a currawong attacking the nest could give older thornbill nestlings a chance to escape and hide in the surrounding vegetation,” said Dr Branislav Igic from ANU, who led the study.

“It’s perhaps the thornbills best nest defence in this circumstance because physical attacks on the much larger currawong are hopeless,” Igic said.

Inset image: Pied currawong. Credit: Jessica McLachlan

The architectural design work was undertaken by Kate Hearle, one of the first female students at the College, who learnt to row at Trinity Hall and went on to compete in the Olympic Games in Seoul and Barcelona. 

The improvements have included renovations to the façade of the boathouse which was over a century old, a new workshop and internal reorganization to create improved changing facilities, new ergometer rooms and gym facilities. 

Work began on the boathouse on 27th May 2014 and Phase 1 and 2 were completed in time for this year’s May Bumps. 

Phase 3 includes plans for a two-storey extension to the west which would house a four-seater rowing tank and training room to enable crews to train regardless of weather and time of day.

Trinity Hall wishes to provide its Boat Club with a modern facility to encourage participation in rowing and to improve the training environment for the crews. 

Kate Hearle of Tigerhill Architects said: “I am determined that THBC shall continue to introduce people to rowing, encourage them and support their achievements at whatever level that may be.  I am grateful for the tireless support offered to me by the Club when I was a student and the huge enjoyment I have had, and still get, from the sport.  I am pleased to have been able to redesign the boathouse to provide more modern facilities.” 

Kate read architecture at Trinity Hall and went on to win a silver medal in the Commonwealth Games in 1994.

The refurbishment work has been made possible partly through donations from former members of the Boat Club.  Over £750,000 was raised. 

Current students also undertook a 25hr ergothon in October last year to raise funds for the boathouse and national charity Cardiac Risk in the Young.

The Latham-Scott boathouse was designed by an alumnus, Montague Wheeler, who studied at the College in the 1890s. 

Proposals for the boathouse were first discussed in 1885, but building work did not commence until 1902. 

It was made possible through the legacy of former Master, Henry Latham. 

Further updates to the facilities occurred in the 1970s through the legacy of alumnus Michael Nightingale and the College is grateful to alumnus Dr Walter Scott whose generosity made these latest refurbishments possible.  Walter Scott will be opening the boathouse on 13th June.   

Trinity Hall Boat Club is one of the oldest College boatclubs and is historically one of the most successful Cambridge Colleges at Henley Royal Regatta.   

“I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians, and I’m not kidding,” Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google famously observed in 2009. It seems a difficult assertion to take seriously, but six years on, there is little question that their skills are at a premium.

Indeed, we may need statisticians now more than at any time in our history. Even compared with a decade ago, we can now gather, produce and consume unimaginably large quantities of information. As Varian predicted, statisticians who can crunch these numbers are all the rage. A new discipline, ‘Data Science’, which fuses statistics and computational work, has emerged.

“People are awash in data,” reflects Zoubin Ghahramani, Professor of Information Engineering at Cambridge. “This is occurring across industry, it’s changing society as we become more digitally connected, and it’s true of the sciences as well, where fields like biology and astronomy generate vast amounts of data.”

Over the past few years, Richard Samworth, Professor of Statistics, has watched the datarati step out from the shadows. “It’s probably fair to say that statistics didn’t have the world’s best PR for quite a long time,” he says. “Since this explosion in the amount of data that we can collect and store, opportunities have arisen to answer questions we previously had no hope of being able to address. These demand an awful lot of new statistical techniques.”

‘Big data’ is most obviously relevant to the sciences, where large volumes of information are gathered to answer questions in fields such as genetics, astronomy and particle physics, but it also has more familiar applications. Transport authorities gather data from electronic ticketing systems like Oyster cards to understand more about passenger movements; supermarkets closely monitor customer transactions to react to shoppers’ predilections. As users of social media, many of us disclose data about ourselves that is as valuable to marketing as it is relevant to psychoanalytics. Increasingly, we are also ‘lifeloggers’, monitoring our own behaviour, health, diet and fitness, through smart technology.

This information, as Ghahramani points out, is no use on its own: “It fills hard drives, but to extract value from it, we need methods that learn patterns in the data and allow us to make predictions and intelligent decisions.” This is what statisticians, computer scientists and machine learning specialists bring to the party – they build algorithms, which are coded as computer software, to see patterns. At root, the datarati are interpreters.

Despite their ‘sexy’ new image, however, not enough data scientists exist to meet this rocketing demand. Could some aspects of the interpretation be automated using artificial intelligence instead, Ghahramani wondered? And so, in 2014 and with funding from Google, the first incarnation of The Automatic Statistician was launched online. Despite minimal publicity, 3,000 users uploaded datasets to it within a few months.

Once fed a dataset, the Automatic Statistician assesses it against various statistical models, interprets the data and – uniquely – translates this interpretation into a short report of readable English. It does this without human intervention, drawing on an open-ended ‘grammar’ of statistical models. It is also deliberately conservative, only basing its assessments on sound statistical methodology, and even critiquing its own approach.

Ghahramani and his team are now refining the system to cope with the messy, incomplete nature of real-world data, and also plan to develop its base of knowledge and to offer interactive reports. In the longer term, they hope that the Automatic Statistician will learn from its own work: “The idea is that it will look at a new dataset and say, ‘Ah, I’ve seen this kind of thing before, so maybe I should check the model I used last time’,” he explains.

While automated systems rely on existing models, new algorithms are needed to extract useful information from evolving and expanding datasets. Here, the role of human statisticians is vital.

To characterise the problem, Samworth presents a then-and-now comparison. During the past century, a typical statistical problem might, for instance, have been to understand the relationship between the initial speed and stopping distance of cars based on a sample size of 50.

These days, however, we can record information on a huge number of variables at once – the weather, road surface, make of car, wind direction, and so on. Although the extra information has the potential to yield better models and reduce uncertainty, in many areas, the number of features measured is so high it may even exceed the number of observations. Identifying appropriate models in this context is a serious challenge, which requires the development of new algorithms.

To resolve this, statisticians rely on a principle called ‘sparsity’; the idea that only a few bits of the dataset are really important. The statistician identifies these needles in the haystack. Various algorithms have been developed to select the important variables, so that the initial sprawl of information starts to become manageable and patterns can be extracted.

Together with his colleague Dr Rajen Shah in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, Samworth has developed a method for refining any such variable selection technique called ‘Complementary Pairs Stability Selection’. This applies the original method to random subsamples of the data instead of the whole, and does this over and over again. Eventually, the variables that appear on a high proportion of the subsamples emerge as those meriting further attention.

Scanning Google Scholar for citations of the paper in which this was proposed, Samworth finds that his algorithm has been used in numerous research projects. One looks at how to improve fundraising for disaster zones, another examines potential biomarkers for breast cancer survival, and a third identifies risk factors connected with childhood malnutrition.

How does he feel when he sees his work being applied so far and wide? “It’s funny,” he says. “My training is in mathematics and I still get a kick from proving a theorem, but it’s also rewarding to see people using your work. It’s often said that the good thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone’s back yard. I suppose this demonstrates why that’s true.”

Inset image: left to right, Zoubin Ghahramani and Richard Samworth

Although our genetic information – the ‘code of life’ – is written in our DNA, our genes are turned on and off by epigenetic ‘switches’. For example, small methyl molecules attach to our DNA in a process known as methylation and contribute to the regulation of gene activity, which is important for normal development.  Methylation may also occur spontaneously or through our interaction with the environment – for example, periods of famine can lead to methylation of certain genes – and some methylation patterns can be potentially damaging to our health.  Almost all of this epigenetic information is, however, erased in germ cells prior to transmission to the next generation.

Professor Azim Surani from the Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute at the University of Cambridge, explains: “Epigenetic information is important for regulating our genes, but any abnormal methylation, if passed down from generation to generation, may accumulate and be detrimental to offspring. For this reason, the information needs to be reset in every generation before further information is added to regulate development of a newly fertilised egg. It’s like erasing a computer disk before you add new data.”

When an egg cell is fertilised by a sperm, it begins to divide into a cluster of cells known as a blastocyst, the early stage of the embryo. Within the blastocyst, some cells are reset to their master state, becoming stem cells, which have the potential to develop into any type of cell within the body. A small number of these cells become primordial germ cells with the potential to become sperm or egg cells.

In a study funded primarily by the Wellcome Trust, Professor Surani and colleagues showed that a process of reprogramming the epigenetic information contained in these primordial germ cells is initiated around two weeks into the embryo’s development and continues through to around week nine. During this period, a genetic network acts to inhibit the enzymes that maintain or programme the epigenome until the DNA is almost clear of its methylation patterns.

Crucially, however, the researchers found that this process does not clear the entire epigenome: around 5% of our DNA appears resistant to reprogramming. These ‘escapee’ regions of the genome contain some genes that are particularly active in neuronal cells, which may serve important functions during development.  However, data analysis of human diseases suggests that such genes are associated with conditions such as schizophrenia, metabolic disorders and obesity.

Walfred Tang, a PhD student who is the first author on the study, adds: “Our study has given us a good resource of potential candidates of regions of the genome where epigenetic information is passed down not just to the next generation but potentially to future generations, too. We know that some of these regions are the same in mice, too, which may provide us with the opportunity to study their function in greater detail.”

Epigenetic reprogramming also has potential consequences for the so-called ‘dark matter’ within our genome. As much as half of human DNA is estimated to be comprised of ‘retroelements’, regions of DNA that have entered our genome from foreign invaders including bacteria and plant DNA. Some of these regions can be beneficial and even drive evolution – for example, some of the genes important to the development of the human placenta started life as invaders. However, others can have a potentially detrimental effect – particularly if they jump about within our DNA, potentially interfering with our genes. For this reason, our bodies employ methylation as a defence mechanism to suppress the activity of these retroelements.

“Methlyation is effective at controlling potentially harmful retroelements that might harm us, but if, as we’ve seen, methylation patterns are erased in our germ cells, we could potentially lose the first line of our defence,” says Professor Surani.

In fact, the researchers found that a notable fraction of the retroelements in our genome are ‘escapees’ and retain their methylation patterns – particularly those retroelements that have entered our genome in our more recent evolutionary history. This suggests that our body’s defence mechanism may be keeping some epigenetic information intact to protect us from potentially detrimental effects.

Reference
Tang, WWC et al. A unique gene regulatory network resets the human germline epigenome for development. Cell; 4 June 2015

Charities have long wrestled with the issue of persuading people to donate their time to worthy causes. Many potential time-givers donate money instead due to the perceived psychological costs of giving their time – which is by definition limited.

But new research co-authored at the University of Cambridge finds that ‘moral identity’ can overcome time aversion because it affirms and reinforces this identity, especially when the cost of giving time rises – and charities can use this key insight in recruiting people for time-giving tasks.

Significantly, the study found that charities can issue 'moral cues' that trigger such moral identity and make people more likely to donate their time to good causes – a key practical finding for the charitable sector. Defining 'moral identity' around a set of nine traits including kindness, caring and generosity, the study found that moral identity can be activated by showing people images of 'moral exemplars' such as Gandhi and Mother Teresa, and quotations focused on the same idea such as: “Wherever there is a human being, there is a chance for kindness.”

According to the study, a strong moral identity may reduce time aversion not despite the higher cost of giving time, but rather because of it. Put another way, giving time more strongly reinforces the moral self, compared to giving money, according to the researchers, who call time aversion a ‘socio-psychological malady.’

The study, entitled “I don’t want the money, I just want your time: how moral identity overcomes the aversion to giving time to pro-social causes”, has just been accepted for publication by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

“The study has significant implications for how charities and other good causes recruit volunteers for time-giving tasks,” says co-author Eric Levy, of Cambridge Judge Business School. “We found that there is a strong connection between moral identity and the willingness to donate time.”

One key finding was that when the cost of giving time rises, people with a high moral identity may be more motivated to give their time, and those with a low moral identity are more averse to giving their time. Conversely, in low-cost situations, those with a high moral identity are less apt to give their time than are people with low moral identity.

This suggests that charities need to consider levels of ‘moral salience’ in their promotional material and other outreach to potential time-givers.

According to the study, if charities wish to recruit volunteers for low-time-cost tasks they may be better off targeting individuals whose moral identities occupy a less central role within their self-concept. Conversely, if they wish to recruit volunteers for tasks with a high time cost they may do well to target individuals whose moral identities occupy a more central role in their self-concept.

The research paper comprises four separate studies. The first finds that moral identity can make giving time appear less costly; the second and third find that a ‘moral cue’ reduces time aversion even in unpleasant situations (such as emptying dirty hospital bedpans) and when time appears to be scarce (by enhancing a perceived connection between the time-giver and the beneficiary of the time donation); the fourth accounts for the real costs of time, finding that the ‘chronic salience of moral identity’ especially lessens time aversion when giving time becomes increasingly costly.

The study was co-authored by Americus Reed II of the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; Adam Kay, a doctoral student at the University of British Columbia; Stephanie Finnel, a marketing support services specialist at BAYADA Home Health Care; Karl Aquino of the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia; and Eric Levy of University of Cambridge Judge Business School.

Adapted from a Cambridge Judge Business School story.

The University of Cambridge’s YouTube channel has reached over 50,000 subscribers and over 10 million views through nearly 700 videos on many aspects of the University’s research and life in Cambridge. From cancer assassins to the energy crisis, and from hopping insects to hidden whales (by way of a large vat of fake snot) – here are your ten favourite Cambridge videos.

10 – The future of energy?

One of the biggest challenges we face today is energy – with skyrocketing demand and the potentially catastrophic impacts of emitting so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Three Cambridge academics look at three ways we can cut our CO2 emissions, saying that we must act now in order to avoid the serious risks of man-made global warming.

9 – Airflow across a wing

Aerodynamics expert Professor Holger Babinsky from the Department of Engineering debunks a popular, yet misleading, explanation of how wings lift.

8 – The Garage Laboratory

“What we have here is a giant papier-mâché pink nose, which I feel is always a good start.” Dave Ansell explains why snot is good for your lungs, and how to make electricity from hairy legs.

7 – How many light bulbs? from Cambridge Ideas

Professor David Mackay, author of Sustainable Energy – without the hot air, calculates that the average British person is using 125 lightbulbs’ worth of power every day. In a passionate, personal analysis he presents the real numbers involved in tackling the energy crisis and the alternatives to fossil fuels.

6 – Whale tale: a Dutch seascape and its lost Leviathan

When Shan Kuang from the Hamilton Kerr Institute began work restoring a 17th-century painting, she made a surprising discovery as a mysterious figure started to appear standing on the horizon line.

5 – Mechanical gears in jumping insects

“Grandad, I’ve found these plant-hoppers in my garden!” Professor Malcom Burrows explains how his 5-year-old grandson came to the rescue and helped him make an important discovery. Previously believed to be only man-made, high-speed videos of insects jumping show that evolution developed a functioning gear system long before we did.

4 – The strange new world of nanoscience, narrated by Stephen Fry

Welcome to the nanoscale – where everything behaves strangely. It can take you into atoms and beyond the stars.

3 – Introducing graphene

The world meets graphene (and Mr G) – the first 2-dimensional material, sought after since 1859: light, strong, and with an excellent utility belt.

2 – Killer T cell: the cancer assassin

Inside all of us lurks a serial killer. Cytotoxic T cells patrol our bodies, hunting down and eliminating cancer cells before moving on to their next target. This amazing footage allows us to watch them in action.

1 – Killer T cell attacking cancer

At number one, having reached over one million views, this video shows in detail how a killer T cell of the immune system attacks and destroys a cancer cell.

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