We may think that scientists inhabit a precisely focused world, far away from the messy realm of stories and the imagination, but a new film series, Novel Thoughts, from the University of Cambridge shows that there is a bridge between the two.

Reading fiction helps scientists to see the bigger picture and be reminded of the complex richness of human experience. Novels can show the real human stories behind the science, or trigger a desire in a young reader to change lives through scientific discovery. They can open up new worlds, or encourage a different approach to familiar tasks.

For psychologist Dr Amy Milton, reading Requiem for a Dream by Hubert Selby during her PhD had a profound effect on her work. Its bleak portrayal of the downward spiral into addiction spurred her on to complete her thesis on cocaine addiction and to deepen her research into preventing relapse.

“The book gave me a real insight into what it’s like for individuals living with addiction. It summed up how addiction, and the consequences of it, has not always been taken seriously as a disease by psychiatry,” she said.

As a teenager, Professor Carol Brayne’s love of Charles Dickens and George Eliot opened her eyes to a world in which social inequality had a powerful impact on people’s health and wellbeing. She vowed to become a doctor, and is now a leading figure in public health research at Cambridge. Her voracious reading as a young adult helped her understand the importance of seeing the bigger picture, and of finding health interventions that take account of the complexities of people’s lives.

For some, a book came along at just the right time. Professor Clare Bryant, of the Department of Zoology, read A S Byatt’s Possession at a crucial point in her early career. Its page-turning portrayal of two historians racing to uncover hidden truths reminded her of the excitement of scientific discovery, and persuaded her not to turn her back on her own research career.

Books can have a resonance throughout a scientific lifetime. For early-career researcher Guy Pearson, Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree has fascinating parallels with his own work. It may seem surprising that a story of unrequited love in a small West Country village could mirror the process of cell biology, but Pearson was struck by the similarities between the young protagonist’s pursuit of the beautiful and flighty Fancy Day, and his own pursuit of elusive molecular truths.

And Dr Juliet Foster can see that the themes explored in The Madness of a Seduced Woman by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, which she read as a PhD student, still have echoes in her current social psychology research into public understandings of mental illness.

Dr Sarah Dillon, now in the Faculty of English at Cambridge, was the first to explore some of these ideas in a project she developed at the University of St Andrews. Much has been written about science’s influence on literature – from Frankenstein to the futuristic worlds of science fiction – but she wanted to find out if the influence happened in the other direction. Did literature have an impact on the world of science?

Dillon joined forces with social scientist Christine Knight, and astronomer turned creative writer Pippa Goldschmidt to investigate What Scientists Read.

“What we found was that reading literature and ‘non-science’ books did have an influence on their work in quite surprising ways,” said Dillon. “There were lots of examples of scientists being more open to qualitative research methodologies because of valuing the knowledge that literature, even though it’s not ‘true’, gives you.”

The Novel Thoughts film series begins on 8 June with physicist Dr Paul Coxon sharing his childhood reading about the quirky adventures of a boy inventor in the novel SOS Bobomobile. New films will be released every Monday and Friday until 3 July and scientists worldwide are being encouraged to tweet their own inspirational book using #novelthoughts.

Look out for:

Professor Clare Bryant from the Department of Veterinary Medicine discussing Possession by AS Byatt on 12 June.

Karen Yu from the Department of Engineering discussing Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker by George Lucas on 15 June.

Professor Simon Redfern from the Department of Earth Sciences discussing Jamila by Chinghiz Aitmatov on 19 June.

Dr Juliet Foster from the Department of Psychology discussing The Madness of a Seduced Woman by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer on 22 June.

Guy Pearson from the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research discussing Under the Greenwood Tree by Thomas Hardy on 26 June.

Professor Carol Brayne, Director of the Cambridge Institute of Public Health, discussing Middlemarch by George Eliot on 29 June.

Dr Amy Milton from the Department of Psychology discussing Requiem for a Dream by Hubert Selby Junior on 3 July.

In the study, an international team of researchers led by the University of Cambridge and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and including all five World Health Organization (WHO) Influenza Collaborating Centres, reports surprising differences between the various types of seasonal flu virus, which they show to be due to the rate at which the different viruses evolve.

There are four types of influenza viruses that cause seasonal flu in humans: two influenza A viruses (H3N2 and H1N1) and two influenza B viruses (Yamagata and Victoria). While H3N2 viruses are the most common of the seasonal influenza viruses, H1N1 and B viruses also cause epidemics worldwide each year, hence the WHO selects representative strains of all four A and B viruses for inclusion in the seasonal influenza vaccine each year.

Importantly, all four of the viruses cause indistinguishable symptoms and evolve by similar mechanisms to escape immunity induced by prior infections and vaccinations. This ‘antigenic’ evolution is part of why people get influenza multiple times over the course of their lives.

In 2008, an international team led by scientists from the University of Cambridge, writing in the journal Science, showed that H3N2 viruses circulate continuously in east and southeast Asia throughout the year, spreading to the rest of the world each year to cause seasonal flu epidemics. Given the fundamental similarities between H3N2, H1N1, and B infection it was thought that they would also emerge from east and southeast Asia to cause yearly epidemics worldwide. However, the work published today in Nature shows that in fact, H1N1 and B viruses behave very differently from H3N2 viruses.

Senior author Dr Colin Russell, from the Department of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Cambridge, UK, says: “While H3N2 viruses die out between epidemics and new viruses emerge from east and southeast Asia every year, H1N1 and B viruses frequently circulate continuously between epidemics worldwide. This continuous circulation gives rise to a huge diversity in H1N1 and B viruses circulating globally.”

Interestingly, the researchers found that sometimes new H1N1 and B variants emerge from outside east and southeast Asia and are subsequently seeded into Asia, while in other cases H1N1 and B variants circulate in Asia for years without spreading globally.

“It’s really surprising to find that the H3N2 viruses are unique among the seasonal influenza viruses,” adds first author Dr Trevor Bedford from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, USA. “It’s almost as surprising to find that the differences among viruses are associated with a simple phenomenon: how quickly the viruses evolve antigenically.”

The Nature study finds that the rate of global movement of each virus, and its ability to circulate continuously between epidemics, is shaped by how quickly that virus changes its coat to escape immunity in the human population. Viruses that evolve quickly, in particular H3N2, spread around the world rapidly, but die out quickly between epidemics. Viruses that evolve more slowly, like H1N1 and B viruses, spread around the world more slowly but are also better at circulating continuously between epidemics.

The key element about global movement is who is getting infected: faster evolving viruses, like H3N2, can infect adults, who tend to travel more frequently than children, providing more opportunities for the virus to spread. Conversely, more slowly evolving viruses, such as H1N1 and B viruses, primarily infect children. Children get sick with all four seasonal flu viruses, but H3N2 evolves faster so it infects adults more often. This leads to a greater proportion of adult infections with H3N2 relative to H1N1 and B viruses, and faster spread of H3N2 viruses.

“Ultimately, this means that we can look at the viruses circulating in Asia to get a good idea of which H3N2 virus might spread worldwide, but for H1N1 and B it’s tremendously variable and the dominant variant can vary from one region of the world to another,” says Dr Russell.

The Nature study also sheds important light on the role of India in the global spread of seasonal influenza viruses. Scientists and public health officials had long known that China and Southeast Asia were important for the evolution and spread of seasonal influenza viruses. However, based on the analysis of an extensive collection of viruses from India, it is now clear that India may be as central as China to the ongoing evolution of seasonal influenza viruses.

“The focus of influenza research in the past has been on China and southeast Asia, but it seems obvious now that surveillance and public health in India, home to over one sixth of the world’s population, should be a high priority for further development to help safeguard India and the world against seasonal flu,” says Dr Mandeep Chadha of the National Institute of Virology, Pune, India.

The research was primarily funded by the Royal Society and US National Institutes of Health with extensive involvement of the World Health Organization’s Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System.

Reference
Bedford, T et al. Global circulation patterns of seasonal influenza viruses vary with antigenic drift. Nature; 8 June 2015.

At some point in their career, every doctor will encounter a patient whose condition perplexes them, requiring detailed investigation and discussion with colleagues before diagnosis is possible. After all, not every disease is as common as cancer, which affects around one in three of us, or depression, which affects one in 10.

Dr Lucy Raymond from the Department of Medical Genetics specialises in rare diseases. Technically, this means diseases that affect fewer than one in 2,000 people, but in fact, Raymond sees children with learning disabilities so rare that they may be the only person in the UK to be affected.

These conditions are usually caused by one of two scenarios: a spontaneous change to their DNA, not inherited, or a ‘recessive disorder’ where two copies of the same, rare variant are necessary for the disease and each parent unwittingly passes on a copy. Comparing the child’s and their parents’ genomes enables the researchers to pinpoint the gene responsible. In extremely rare cases – where the patient appears to be truly unique – the researchers need to study whether the same variant in mice or zebrafish creates a similar condition.

“Or,” Raymond explains, “we might essentially generate a ‘dating agency’ to try to match our patient with a similar case somewhere else in the world.” With these diseases as rare as they are, the only way for this to be viable would be to have access to tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of potential matches: something the era of ‘big data’ makes possible.

But this presents a potential problem: how to share information about the patient without breaking their confidentiality. Unlike in the USA, where projects such as the Broad Institute’s Exome Aggregation Consortium (ExAC) place genome data in the public domain, data in the UK is deposited in a ‘managed-access’ database: bona fide researchers with a clear research proposal are allowed access, and only then after signing a commitment saying they will not attempt to identify individual patients.

“We have to remember that big data is great, but it isn’t our data: it’s people’s data and we need to be respectful of this. People in the UK are often altruistic; we have free blood donation, we have a tremendous tradition of patients giving to help others. We must not jeopardise this relationship.

“Parents know that even if finding the gene abnormality that is responsible will not immediately help their child, it may help ensure that others don’t have to wait 20 years before their child receives a diagnosis. They’re happy to share the data on that basis, but are less keen on the idea that they’ll lose control of the information.”

For several years, Raymond, Professor Willem Ouwehand and Dr John Bradley have been leading the National Institute for Health Research BioResource for Rare Diseases in Cambridge, which has recruited some 5,800 patients. They are now part of a major initiative launched by Prime Minister David Cameron: the 100,000 Genomes Project. Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust will lead the East of England Genomic Medicine Centre, one of 11 centres across the UK aimed at realising this project and sequencing the genomes of patients affected by cancer or rare diseases.

“The 100,000 Genomes Project is about going forward to having a truly national health service, not a provincial, regional health service,” explains Raymond. “The data will be central, will be national, will be available to researchers and healthcare professionals across the country.”

The sheer number of people recruited will create a powerful dataset and ensure that clinicians and researchers don’t have to start from scratch each time they encounter a new case. In fact, the value of a patient’s genome extends beyond just helping identify the cause of their disease: it’s also important as a ‘control’ to compare against and help find the cause of another patient’s disease. “It’s a form of ‘enforced altruism’. Having all the data stored in a central place means that everybody’s data acts as a control for everybody else’s. It has a multiplying effect.”

Big data also reveals an otherwise glaringly obvious fact that the name ‘rare diseases’ obscures: one in 2,000, even in a population of 64 million, is not an insignificant number of people. “Ten years ago people used to ask ‘Why study rare diseases when they’re so rare?’ It’s only recently that people are coming round to see that, with big data, rare is common.

“Rare diseases are becoming increasingly tractable, too, so now there’s a huge interest in them, which is good: it’s not your fault if your disease is rare. Solving these problems is the next big challenge,” says Raymond with a glint in her eye. “If it was all easy, we wouldn’t be doing it – in typical Cambridge style.”

When the eminent architect T G Jackson designed the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, he added a delightful flourish to the double stairway leading up to the entrance. A pair of brown bears guards one set of steps and a pair of bison the other.

The choice was apposite. In 1904 geologists found fossilised remains of both bears and bison in the gravels of Barrington, a village south east of Cambridge. Bears and bison were just some of the animals roaming northern Europe 120,000 years ago during an inter-glacial period.

The Sedgwick Museum takes its name from Adam Sedgwick, one of the founders of modern geology. It’s one of the world’s oldest geological museums and its collection comprises many millions of objects including spectacular ichthyosaurs found by the fossil collector Mary Anning. The fossils found in the Barrington Beds by a group of Cambridge geologists are on display in Bay 3. Among the exhibits are remains of hippo, red deer, hyena, bison and elephant – as well as bear and bison.

Look carefully at the stone used to sculpt the animals at the museum entrance and you will see that it’s full of tiny fragments of shells. The stone that Jackson chose for the dressings of the building is shelly oolitic limestone of Middle Jurassic age. This stone dates from around 170 million years ago, when marine animals flourished in the warm seas that covered much of the northern hemisphere.

The bears at the Sedgwick Museum mark the start of a ‘building stones of Cambridge’ walk devised by Dr Nigel Woodcock, Reader in Earth Sciences. He said: “The stone used for the dressings of the Sedgwick Museum come from the Clipsham quarry north west of Stamford. The earliest recorded use of Clipsham was for Windsor Castle in the 14th century. Its durability made it a favourite with Victorian architects. In Cambridge, Clipsham was also used for the dressings at Pembroke College, Great St Mary's and King's College Chapel.”

The Sedgwick Museum is not the only Cambridge building to feature bears: one of several late 16th or early 17th century murals high up inside a tower at Madingley Hall (home to University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education) portrays a bear hunt. Until the practise was stopped in the mid-19th century, bears were bred for sport.

Two major conferences at the University of Cambridge, held around Africa Day, looked at the continent, its challenges and its successes.

Africa Together, run by the University’s African Society, hosted a range of speakers at the Cambridge Union for a programme which promised to reimagine Africa.

Business in Africa Conference: Sustainable Growth in Times of Uncertainty, held at the Judge Business School, looked at how Africa was no longer just a land of opportunity, but a region full of success stories.

Speaking at Africa Together, Nungari Mwangi, President of the African Society noted that The African Union has declared 2015 to be the year of women’s empowerment and the content of the event’s programme reflected that.

Keynote speaker Madame Bineta Diop, Special Envoy for Women, Peace and Security, African Union, said in her opening remarks: “Women have been the backbone of African society. When you go into the fields you see that women are the ones that support the family, the community. But their work is not accounted for in measurements of GDP.”

Following her speech the first session tackled Women and Leadership and further sessions touched on entrepreneurship, the media’s perception of the continent, education and heritage.

The audience also heard a poem by St John’s College student Justina Kehinde, which highlighted female African heroes.

Dr Pauline Essah, Manager of the University’s Cambridge-Africa Programme, was part of a panel session looking at African Education Systems. The Cambridge-Africa Programme is a key element in the University of Cambridge’s international strategy and covers several initiatives.

Key note speaker Lord Michael Hastings, of KPMG, said that challenges remain for businesses in Africa, not least infrastructure issues like electricity supplies, but he added that a recent poll showed that in some countries confidence in the future was higher than it had been for a generation.

The following day’s Business in Africa event looked at sustainable growth in the continent and featured well recieved keynote speeches by Ms Mo Abudu (CEO, EbonyLifeTV) and Sola David Bohra, (CEO, Stanbic Bank). Plenary speakers included Devakumar V G Edwin, (Group Executive Director, Dangote Group).

For the first time former postdoctoral researchers will receive a number of the benefits already offered to alumni at the University of Cambridge.

Under the terms of the scheme, thought to be unique among UK universities, former postdocs will be offered a CAMCard, receive the monthly alumni e-newsletter and will eligible to join the University’s global network of alumni groups.

The University has made the move as part of its continuing drive to recognise in more tangible ways the status of postdocs in the University and the contributions they make to University life.

The Vice-Chancellor Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz said: “The University and the Colleges recognise the enormous contribution postdoctoral researchers make through their research, which is central to the mission of the University, so it is right they be extended a similar range of benefits to those available to our alumni. This reflects our continued mission to ensure that the thousands of researchers who work at the University each year are offered help before they arrive at Cambridge, during their working life here and after they leave.”

Postdocs come from all over the world (currently over 90 different nationalities) and, as a workforce of around 3,500, they represent the largest staff grouping in the University.

Under the new scheme which will be rolled out to recent leavers throughout the Summer, former postdocs will also receive regular communications from the University Development and Alumni Relations office and be able to join trips with the alumni travel programme.

The changes come after the launch of the Postdocs Centre by the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs (OPdA) in 2014.

Postdocs are responsible for a high proportion of the research carried out in the University and contribute enormously to the reputation of the University as a leading global research centre.

“As postdocs do not matriculate or graduate, traditional alumni benefits and established processes need to be completely reconsidered.  Most universities have not tackled the issue, “ said Karina Prasad, Head of the OPdA, adding: “Many postdocs end up in positions of influence in academia, industry or public service making them invaluable ambassadors and advocates for the university.”

The Vice-Chancellor and the Alumni Advisory Board felt that the University should extend alumni benefits to former postdocs so this move is very significant and welcome.”

The OPdA is now gathering data on former postdocs so that the benefits can be extended retrospectively.

Where an individual is both an alumnus or alumna and a former postdoc, they will continue to receive all benefits available to alumni. The launch of the benefits was marked at the University yesterday (June 9).

A list of benefits available to former postdocs is available on the OPdA website: http://www.opda.cam.ac.uk.

“Shall we take one of the sheep for a walk?” asks Professor Jenny Morton before we head down to the farmyard.

This seems a strange question at first: we’re all familiar with sheep behaving with a flock mentality, unable to think for themselves. So much so, in fact, that ‘follow like a sheep’ is a commonly used, derogatory phrase in the English language.

Yet, on meeting the sheep, it is immediately clear that these are not just dumb animals. The individual characters portrayed in the animated film Shaun the Sheep might be closer to the truth. “These animals are really smart,” explains Morton, who leads a team in the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience. “They all have their own personalities.”

Morton’s colleague Dr Nicholas Perentos lets Isabella, one of his sheep, out of her pen. She is excited to be out, but doesn’t bound off; rather, she follows Perentos closely at heel, like a Labrador following its master. Once outside, she runs up and down the farmyard, stopping ‘to say hello’ to other sheep before returning expectantly to her handler. “She’s definitely Nic’s sheep,” says Morton. “She knows who I am, but I’m not wearing my usual farm clothes today, so she’s a little wary of me.”

Morton and colleagues are studying the cognitive skills and behaviour of these sheep, using experiments adapted from those carried out with humans. A standard task they use is to give the sheep two options and measure their behaviour: choose option A and they receive pellets, choose B and they receive nothing.

Using electroencephalography (EEG), the researchers can measure patterns of electrical activity across the brain to see what is happening when the sheep make decisions. Recently, they have begun making measurements from deep inside the brain. “We can now record from individual neurons as they fire,” says Perentos. “This might be in response to a particular task or a decision they’re making, or it might be cells that ‘fire’ depending on where they are standing or which way they are turning.” The discovery of these location-specific cells in mice – so-called ‘place cells’ – last year won Professor John O’Keefe from University College London a Nobel Prize.

Once the animal knows the task, the researchers will reverse the choices: now option B gives the pellets, but nudging the lever for option A offers no reward. Rats, monkeys, sheep and humans all learn to switch; but, compared with rodents, sheep react very differently, explains Morton. “When they don’t get their reward they’ll turn around and walk up to Nic, baa-ing, as though they’re saying ‘The apparatus isn’t working, go and sort it out’.”

The sheep’s intelligence is one reason why Morton believes they are a useful animal to help us understand how the brain works. There are some practical reasons – their docile nature makes them easy to manage and their large body size means they can easily carry equipment such as GPS trackers in a harness on their backs, allowing researchers to measure their natural behaviour – but it is the size and structure of their brains that is key.

Sheep’s brains are much larger than those of rodents, similar in size to the brain of a rhesus macaque, and with the complex folds that are seen in primate brains. Crucially, their brains also have basal ganglia similar to ours – this is the area deep in the brain that, along with the cerebral cortex, is responsible for important functions such as the control of movement and ‘executive functions’ such as decision-making, learning and habit formation. It’s this latter facet that makes sheep a useful model for studying brain diseases such as Huntington’s disease and Batten disease that affect the basal ganglia and cerebral cortex.

You may never have heard of Batten disease: it’s extremely rare, and only a handful of infants or children are diagnosed each year in the UK. It is a genetic disease caused when a child carries two copies of an aberrant gene – one copy from each parent. But it is also extremely serious – symptoms include progressive blindness, severe seizures and the loss of language, swallowing and motor skills. Death at a young age is inevitable and there is no cure.

Although Batten disease affects humans, it has never been seen in other primates. It does, however, occur naturally in sheep, though it’s unclear how common it is, as most farmed sheep are killed as lambs for human consumption. The disease was identified in sheep in New Zealand, and it is from these sheep that Morton’s animals were bred. Some of her sheep are imported, others are studied in New Zealand.

Batten disease is very similar in sheep and humans. At first, it is difficult to spot a Batten sheep, but after about a year, they begin to lose their eyesight and show unusual behaviour. After 18 months to two years, they show signs of dementia, often standing motionless in space, and can become agitated if handled by someone other than their usual handler.

Recording brain activity, particularly in areas such as the hippocampus, which is crucial for memory and learning, will give Morton and her team insights into what goes wrong in the disease in sheep. This is one step along the long path towards treating – even curing – the disease in humans.

With collaborators in Australia, Morton is also studying Huntington’s disease, a more common but equally devastating disease. Unlike those with Batten disease, people – and sheep – with Huntington’s do not begin showing symptoms until adulthood. “We have good mouse models for studying Huntington’s disease, but mice are short-lived animals, whereas sheep can live to at least 12 years. This is another huge benefit of studying the disease in sheep.”

There is no question that research using animals remains controversial. There are some who believe that animal research can never be justified. Morton has herself encountered extreme examples of such people in the past and has faced death threats because of her work. But she knows that her work is extremely important for the families of children with Batten disease.

“There’s only one thing worse than being a parent with a child who is blind, losing their motor skills and developing dementia,” she says, “and that’s being a parent with a child who is blind, losing their motor skills and developing dementia, and thinking that no one is asking why. That’s why we have a duty to do our research.”

Inset image: Sheep brain (The District).

Brood parasites are reproductive cheats that evolve ways of duping other birds into raising their young. Examples such as mimicry of host eggs, chicks and fledglings by brood parasitic eggs, chicks and fledglings are amongst the most iconic examples of animal deception in nature.

New research shows that adult brood parasitic female cuckoo finches have evolved plumage colours and patterns to mimic a harmless and abundant species, such as southern red bishops, to deceive possible host birds and reduce the risk of being attacked when approaching host nests to lay their eggs.

Researchers say this is the first time that "wolf in sheep's clothing" mimicry has been shown to exist in any adult bird.

While other brood parasites watch the movements of their host victims by hiding in nearby foliage, the openness of the African savannahs mean that mimicking a plentiful and nontoxic species might be the best way cuckoo finches have of sneaking up on host nests without raising the alarm.

However, the researchers found that the most common victim of the cuckoo finch, the tawny-flanked prinia, has evolved an awareness of the cuckoo finch's disguise and takes no chances - acting with equal aggression towards a female cuckoo finch and bishop alike.

Prinias attacked female cuckoo finches and female bishops equally, and increased the rate of egg rejection after seeing either a female cuckoo finch or female bishop near the nest. Egg rejection involves physically removing the parasitic egg from their nest, allowing them to salvage the majority of their reproductive effort.

At the study site in Zambia, the researchers found a consistently high rate of parasitism by cuckoos among the prinia population, with almost a fifth of all prinia eggs hatching as fledgling cuckoo finches. Cuckoo finches usually remove at least one egg on parasitism, and their hatchlings will out-compete all the host's young.

Researchers say these rates of parasitism might explain the willingness of prinias to attack anything that looks like a dangerous female cuckoo finch and reject more eggs when the risk of parasitism is high. But, the cost of this strategy can be high: during the researchers' experiments, some of the eggs rejected by prinia were their own, triggered by nothing more than a harmless bishop bird that resembles the mimetic cuckoo finch.

"Our findings suggest that female cuckoo finches are aggressive mimics of female bishops, and that prinia hosts have responded to this successful deception with generalised defences against cuckoo finches and harmless bishops alike. This suggests these prinias have decided that it's best to 'play it safe' when the risk of parasitism is high because they can't distinguish between the two species" said Dr William Feeney from Cambridge University's Department of Zoology, who led the research.

"While other brood-parasite species monitor host behaviour from concealed perches in nearby trees, cuckoo finches must seek host nests in open grasslands and savannahs. In such exposed circumstances, resembling an abundant and harmless model may allow female cuckoo finches to remain unnoticed when monitoring hosts nests at a medium range," he said.

The research is published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

To investigate the cuckoo finch's disguise, the research team conducted plumage and pattern analysis using cuckoo skins from the Natural History Museum in Tring. They compared plumage to the cuckoo finches closest evolutionary relatives (Vidua finches), as well as with the skins of similar-looking birds (bishops) that share the same habitat.

In both human and bird visual systems, they found that the plumage of a female cuckoo finch is far closer to the bishops and other species in the weaver family than to those of its closest relative, the Vidua finches.

The researchers also investigated the reaction of prinia breeding pairs to models of female cuckoo finches and bishop birds, as well as the males of both species.

While prinias had very little reaction to the males, the female cuckoo finch and the harmless female bishop bird both received similarly high levels of alarm calls and group attacks from the prinia, known as 'mobbing'.

The researchers then did a final experiment where they presented a male bishop, female bishop and female cuckoo finch and then placed a fake egg in their nest. They found that after seeing the harmful female cuckoo finch or harmless (but similar-looking) female bishop, they increased their rate off egg rejection compared to when they saw a male bishop near their nest.

Added Feeney: "This study is interesting as it's the first time anyone has quantitatively tested for 'wolf in sheep's clothing' mimicry in any adult bird, and also suggests that this type of mimicry is used by brood parasites to deceive hosts at all stages of their nesting cycle."

New research using high-speed gambling experiments shows that, for most of us, the last experience we’ve had can be the defining one when it comes to taking a decision, coming at the expense of other experiences we’ve accumulated further back in time.

The study, published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, supports the idea that the ‘banker’s fallacy’ - focusing on immediate growth at the expense of longer-term stability that would produce better results - is intuitive in the way many of us make quick decisions.

People's natural inclination towards a ‘happy ending’ means that we often ascribe greater value to experiences than they are worth, say researchers, meaning that we end up overvaluing experiences with a final uptick over those that taper at the last minute, despite being of equal or even lesser overall value, and making our next moves on that basis.   

Writing in the journal, they use the analogy of a three-course dinner: it has mediocre starter, a fine main, and an excellent dessert. This will be viewed much more favourably - and have much more weight in any future decision - than the inverse: an excellent starter and ending with a mediocre dessert, despite the fact that overall both experiences share equal value.   

Researchers say that the computational demand to try and factor in all experiences equally would be vast, so our brain constantly updates its internal ‘logbook’ as we go, with each new experience being condensed and then ranked against the previous few for context. Then, a new experience only has to be judged against the running total.

However, a ‘temporal markdown’ comes into play, meaning that the further back an experience, even if still quite recent, the less weight it carries in the next decision despite its relevant value; the most immediate experiences carry much more weight in decision-making than they should - meaning a recent ‘happy ending’ has a hugely disproportionate influence, say researchers.  

They say that a wealth of information and experience “leaks” as a result of this cognitive mechanism, leading to false and delusional beliefs that cause wrong-headed and often short-term decision-making despite historical experience that should convince us of the contrary.

Yet a small number of those tested (nine of the 41 participants) were able to maintain an almost perfect capacity to recall previous experience accurately, without the markdown of past experiences, and make solid long-term decisions as a result - almost as if they were “looking down on time” said lead author Dr Martin Vestergaard.

“Most people we tested fall foul of the ‘banker’s fallacy’, and make poor short-term decisions as a result. This may be because they struggle to access historical experience, or give it the correct value, but we also think they become overly impressed with the moment to moment fluctuation of experiences,” said Vestergaard, from Cambridge University’s Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience.

“While the majority of participants made decisions based only on very or most recent events, a minority were able to maintain a seemingly perfect ability - at least within the parameters of the experiment - to see time on an equal footing, unconstrained by the myopia inherent in the decision-making of most,” he said.

“The next stages of our research will be to use imaging techniques to look at whether this ability is linked to certain parts of the brain, or perhaps social conditioning such as age and education.”

Vestergaard did question age and occupation for the initial study, and found no correlation between those who are older, or who have a more or less technical occupation, with this panoptical ability to flatten time, but says the current sample size is too small to draw conclusions.

The experiment involved participants trying to accumulate money by gambling between two sets of gold coins of varying sizes at high reactions times so participants were forced to go on memory and instinct.

As a child, Dr Paul Coxon from Cambridge’s Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy, was fascinated by the madcap inventions of the boy hero in Jan Wahl’s SOS Bobomobile (illustrated by Fernando Krahn) – and he still likes to tinker with his own inventions in the lab today. 

Here he talks about this favourite book as part of ‘Novel Thoughts’, a series exploring the literary reading habits of eight Cambridge scientists. From illustrated children’s books to Thomas Hardy, from Star Wars to Middlemarch, we find out what fiction has meant to each of the scientists and peek inside the covers of the books that have played a major role in their lives.

‘Novel Thoughts’ was inspired by research at the University of St Andrews by Dr Sarah Dillon (now a lecturer in the Faculty of English at Cambridge) who interviewed 20 scientists for the ‘What Scientists Read’ project. She found that reading fiction can help scientists to see the bigger picture and be reminded of the complex richness of human experience. Novels can show the real stories behind the science, or trigger a desire in a young reader to change lives through scientific discovery. They can open up new worlds, or encourage a different approach to familiar tasks.

View the whole series: Novel Thoughts: What Cambridge scientists read.

Read about Novel Thoughts.

A team of researchers from the University of Cambridge and Cambridge University Hospitals Foundation Trust has discovered that the proposed new NICE thresholds are less effective than international thresholds set by World Health Organization (WHO) at identifying women who are adversely affected by high blood sugar levels during pregnancy.

Diabetes that arises during pregnancy, often disappearing after delivery, is known as gestational diabetes and is becoming increasingly common in the UK. However, there is a lack of consensus about the best way to identify women with the condition. Untreated gestational diabetes can create a risk to the health of both mother and baby and may be associated with pre-eclampsia, excessive amniotic fluid, birth defects, high birthweight, emergency Caesarean section, and low blood sugar levels in the babies after birth. Identifying gestational diabetes during pregnancy allows treatment and dietary advice to be given that reduces the risk of adverse outcomes.

There is a lot of controversy about the best criteria to use to diagnose gestational diabetes. The international criteria recommended by WHO require three blood tests to be taken altogether. One test is taken in the fasting state and the other tests are taken one and two hours after a drink containing sugar. These criteria consider that women with high fasting blood sugars have gestational diabetes, with a 75% increased risk of pregnancy complications. However, these diagnostic thresholds would diagnose substantially more women with gestational diabetes than are currently identified, which may create strain on resources for antenatal care.

In February 2015, NICE introduced new guidelines requiring two blood tests only (fasting and two hours after a sugary drink) and recommending a less strict fasting blood sugar threshold for the diagnosis of gestational diabetes. However, these criteria were identified based on cost effectiveness estimates alone, using old NHS hospital payment data, and have never been tested in clinical practice.

Dr Claire Meek and a team of doctors and scientists assessed the risks related to high blood sugar in over 25,000 women who gave birth at the Rosie Hospital in Cambridge between 2004 and 2008 using anonymised hospital records as part of a service evaluation. They found that women who had borderline levels of fasting blood sugar were at much higher risk of having a high birthweight baby compared to the healthy population. In fact, these babies were on average 350g heavier. Their mothers were twice as likely to have had an emergency Caesarean section and seven times more likely to develop excessive amniotic fluid. These women would be missed using the new NICE criteria.

Using the WHO guidelines instead of the NICE guidelines at the Rosie Hospital would have resulted in 126 more diagnoses of gestational diabetes over five years. Although this accounts for less than one in 200 pregnancies, these pregnancies accounted for a disproportionately high number of poor outcomes – four in 100 cases of high birthweight babies; just under three in 100 cases of pre-eclampsia; and over five in 100 cases of excessive amniotic fluid), many of which might have been preventable with treatment. Overall, the researchers estimate that this issue is likely to affect 3,000 to 4,000 women each year in the UK.

“There is a fundamental difference between the international criteria and the new NICE 2015 criteria: the international criteria are based on minimising the risk of harm to the mother and baby, whereas the NICE criteria have been based upon reducing costs to the NHS,” explains Dr Meek from the Wellcome Trust-MRC Institute of Metabolic Science, University of Cambridge. “While cost effectiveness is important in any health care system, we must not forget the psychological and emotional distress that complications can cause. This cannot be measured in economic terms alone.”

The study authors also express concern that the UK will miss out on international efforts to improve care for women with diabetes in pregnancy by using lower standards than most other countries.

“The new NICE guidelines contain many different recommendations for the management of diabetes in pregnancy and almost all of these recommendations are beneficial and based upon up-to-date evidence,” adds Dr David Simmons from Cambridge University Hospitals. “This is not the case with the diagnostic criteria for gestational diabetes. These should aim to improve health for all pregnant women and their babies by identifying those at greatest risk of complications, and who may benefit the most from dietary changes or other forms of treatment.

“Doctors need to be aware that the new NICE criteria will miss high-risk women, especially those with borderline fasting blood sugar.”

The research was funded by the European Union, the Wellcome Trust and GlaxoSmithKline.

Adapted from a press release from Diabetologia

Reference
Meek, CL et al. Diagnosis of gestational diabetes mellitus: falling through the net. Diabetologia; 12 June 2015

A rare 14^th Century copy of Magna Carta that appears to have been unnoticed for generations, until it was uncovered during research marking the document’s 800^th anniversary, can be viewed online from today (Friday, 12 June).

The copy, which is owned by St John’s College, University of Cambridge, dates back to the reign of Edward I, and is one of just a handful of surviving statute rolls that recite clauses from the famous charter. Edward I was one of the monarchs who reissued a version of the Magna Carta, which was originally produced in 1215, during the reign of King John. 

Although it had been preserved in the College archives, the manuscript appears to have been overlooked – and may indeed have been completely unknown to historians – until now. Its significance was only realised when Professor Nicholas Vincent, from the University of East Anglia and head of the national Magna Carta Project, contacted the College to enquire about documents that be believed contained clauses from the charter.

Professor Vincent realised that the item is, in fact, an early-to-mid 14^th Century example of a type of statute roll that would have been used to circulate parts of Magna Carta throughout medieval England. While these were once commonplace, only about a dozen are known to exist today.

Ahead of the anniversary of Magna Carta, on June 15^th, the College is releasing images of the copy online along with a short accompanying film. Members of the public can also view the charter by making an appointment to visit the College archives.

The document’s importance is thought to have gone undetected because no systematic attempt to collect the surviving copies of Magna Carta had been undertaken until the 800^th anniversary project was launched. Even if historians had seen a record of the St John’s copy in the past, they would probably not have recognised its significance as they would have been unaware that it was in roll form.

In fact, for statute rolls of Magna Carta to survive is very rare. Earlier generations considered the parchment of which they were made very useful for secondary purposes, including lighting fires, and even as animal feed! As a result, most such rolls were lost. Judging by the valuation of similar items at auction, the St John’s copy is thought to be worth several tens of thousands of pounds.

Although it was famously agreed to by King John at Runnymeade, near Windsor, on 15 June 1215, much of Magna Carta had been repealed or rewritten within 10 years of its issue. Modified versions were reissued under both Henry III and Edward I, with some of the more radical clauses in particular removed.

Edward agreed to a renewal of Magna Carta in 1297, and then reissued it on 28 March 1300. The roll at St John’s College recites this 1300 reissue and may have been preserved by the Hospital of St John that once stood on part of what is now the College.

In common with various other copies of Magna Carta that have surfaced in the past, the manuscript is part of a larger document. In this case it was stitched together with a lawyer’s copy of the assize of bread and ale, a law which regulated the price, weight and quality of the bread and beer manufactured and sold in England, and was the first in British history to regulate the production and sale of food. The roll also recites clauses from the Forest Charter, which was issued as a companion document to Magna Carta in 1217 and dealt with rights of access to the royal forest.

The Magna Carta Project, which is led by Professor Vincent, is a collaborative initiative between several universities that aims to track down lost originals of Magna Carta and create an online database featuring commentary, translations, and research findings about the charter. The team are sifting through hundreds of archives as part of their research.

The St John’s copy is being made available to view as part of the nationwide Explore Your Archive Magna Carta campaign, in which archives around the country that have a copy of Magna Carta are being encouraged to make it available to the wider public.

Tracy Deakin, Archivist at St John’s College, said that it was not uncommon for long-forgotten historical documents to resurface from archives, many of which are being made available publically in a manner that was not possible a few decades ago.  “This sort of discovery is a lot more typical than people might think,” she said. “A couple of generations back, archivists did a very different type of job and would not have been able to command the same kind of accessible detail about everything in their archive in the way that we can now.”

For more information about the St John’s College archives, including visiting times, please go to: http://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/archives

The presence of a stratosphere can provide clues about the composition of a planet and how it formed. This atmospheric layer includes molecules that absorb ultraviolet and visible light, acting as a kind of ‘sunscreen’ for the planet it surrounds. Until now, scientists were uncertain whether these molecules would be found in the atmospheres of large, extremely hot planets in other star systems.

The results are published today (12 June) in The Astrophysical Journal.

“Detecting the presence of a stratosphere in an exoplanet and the chemical compound causing it is a major advancement in our ability to study exoplanetary atmospheres,” said co-author Dr Nikku Madhusudhan of the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge.

In Earth’s atmosphere, the stratosphere sits above the troposphere – the turbulent, active-weather region that reaches from the ground to the altitude where nearly all clouds top out. In the troposphere, the temperature is warmer at the bottom – ground level – and cools down at higher altitudes.

The stratosphere is just the opposite. In this layer, the temperature increases with altitude, a phenomenon called temperature inversion. On Earth, temperature inversion occurs because ozone in the stratosphere absorbs much of the sun’s ultraviolet radiation, preventing it from reaching the surface, protecting the biosphere, and therefore warming the stratosphere instead.

Similar temperature inversions occur in the stratospheres of other planets in our solar system, such as Jupiter and Saturn. In these cases, the culprit is a different group of molecules called hydrocarbons. Neither ozone nor hydrocarbons, however, could survive at the high temperatures of most known exoplanets, which are planets outside our solar system. This leads to a debate as to whether stratospheres would exist on them at all.

“Some of these planets are so hot in their upper atmospheres, they’re essentially boiling off into space,” said Avi Mandell, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and a co-author of the study. “At these temperatures, we don’t necessarily expect to find an atmosphere that has molecules that can lead to these multi-layered structures.”

Using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the researchers have settled this debate by identifying a temperature inversion in the atmosphere of WASP-33b, which has about four-and-a-half times the mass of Jupiter. Team members also think they know which molecule in WASP-33b’s atmosphere caused the inversion – titanium oxide.

“These two lines of evidence together make a very convincing case that we have detected a stratosphere on an exoplanet,” said Korey Haynes, lead author of the study. Haynes was a graduate student at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and was working at Goddard with Mandell when the research was conducted.

The researchers analysed observations made with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 by co-author Drake Deming at the University of Maryland. Wide Field Camera 3 can capture a spectrum of the near-infrared region where the signature for water appears. Scientists can use the spectrum to identify water and other gases in a distant planet’s atmosphere and determine its temperature.

Haynes and her colleagues used the Hubble observations, and data from previous studies, to measure emission from water and compare it to emission from gas deeper in the atmosphere. The team determined that emission from water was produced in the stratosphere at about 3300 degrees Celsius. The rest of the emission came from gas lower in the atmosphere that was at a temperature about 1650 degrees Celsius.

The team also presented the first observational evidence that WASP-33b’s atmosphere contains titanium oxide, one of only a few compounds that is a strong absorber of visible and ultraviolet radiation and capable of remaining in gaseous form in an atmosphere as hot as this one.

“Understanding the links between stratospheres and chemical compositions is critical to studying atmospheric processes in exoplanets,” said Madhusudhan. “Our finding marks a key breakthrough in this direction.”

Inset image: NASA scientists detected a stratosphere and chemical compounds on WASP-33b by measuring light emitted from the dayside atmosphere of the planet observed as it passed behind its star (top). Temperatures in the stratosphere increase with height (right) because of molecules absorbing radiation from the star entering from the top and reemitting it locally; otherwise, temperatures would cool down at higher altitudes (left). Credit: NASA/GSFC

Professor Clare Bryant from Cambridge’s Department of Veterinary Medicine explains how reading AS Byatt’s Possession at a crucial point in her early career reminded her of the excitement of research and persuaded her not to turn her back on her life as a scientist.

Here she talks about this favourite book as part of ‘Novel Thoughts’, a series exploring the literary reading habits of eight Cambridge scientists. From illustrated children’s books to Thomas Hardy, from Star Wars to Middlemarch, we find out what fiction has meant to each of the scientists and peek inside the covers of the books that have played a major role in their lives.

‘Novel Thoughts’ was inspired by research at the University of St Andrews by Dr Sarah Dillon (now a lecturer in the Faculty of English at Cambridge) who interviewed 20 scientists for the ‘What Scientists Read’ project. She found that reading fiction can help scientists to see the bigger picture and be reminded of the complex richness of human experience. Novels can show the real stories behind the science, or trigger a desire in a young reader to change lives through scientific discovery. They can open up new worlds, or encourage a different approach to familiar tasks.

View the whole series: Novel Thoughts: What Cambridge scientists read.

Read about Novel Thoughts.

Professor Harshad Kumar Dharamshi Bhadeshia FRS FREng (pictured centre) is the Tata Steel Professor of Metallurgy in the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy and Director of the SKF Steel Technology Centre. His work is focused on transformation theory, which is concerned with the arrangement of atoms in a solid, in order to enable the invention of new iron alloys. He has been awarded the Knights Bachelor for services to Science and Technology.

Professor Christopher Munro Clark (pictured right) is the Regius Professor of History. His research work is centred on the history of 19th-century Germany and continental Europe. He has published numerous studies and books relating to the political and cultural history of religion, Kaiser Willhelm II, and the history of Prussia. He has been awarded the Knights Bachelor for services to British German relations.

Archibald Hugh Duberly, CBE is the Lord-Lieutenant of Cambridgeshire and a Senior Member of Wolfson College. He has been awarded the KCVO.

Professor Christopher Aidan Gilligan (pictured left) is the Head of the Epidemiology and Modelling Group in the Department of Plant Sciences. His work is focused on developing and testing a theoretical framework to understand the mechanisms that control invasion, persistence, scaling and variability of epidemics within changing agricultural and natural landscapes. He is also a Trustee of the Natural History Museum, by Prime Ministerial appointment. He has been awarded the CBE for services to plant health in the field of epidemiology.

Professor Elizabeth Anne Howlett Hall is Professor of Analytical Biotechnology and Head of the Cambridge Analytical Biotechnology Group in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology. Her research work is into heterogenous analytical systems with a primary focus on molecular sensors and directed towards environmental, medical and industrial application. She is also the Chair of Disability Snowsports UK. She has been awarded the CBE for services to higher education and to sport.

Professor Anthony John Holland is Professor of the Psychiatry of Learning Disabilities and Head of the Cambridge Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Group in the Department of Psychiatry. His main areas of research include the relationship between genetic syndromes and associated psychiatric and behavioural disorders, and clinico-legal studies. He is also Chair in Learning Disabilities at the Health Foundation, Fellow and Vice-President of the International Association for the Scientific Study of Intellectual Disability, President of the UK Prader-Willi Association, and President of Cambridge MENCAP. He has been awarded the CBE for services to psychiatry.

Professor James Anthony Jackson FRS is Professor of Active Tectonics and Head of the Department of Earth Sciences. His work exploits techniques in earthquake source seismology, geomorphology, space geodesy and remote sensing to examine how the continents are deforming today on all scales: from the details of the fault rupture in single earthquakes, to how that faulting has created the local geomorphology and structure, to how regional fault patterns and motions can accommodate deformation of vast continental areas. He is also part of the Dynamic Earth and Geohazards Group, and the lead Principal Investigator on the Earthquakes Without Frontiers Project – a joint NERC-ESRC consortium supporting a partnership of physical and social scientists working to help increase resilience to earthquakes in countries in Asia. He has been awarded the CBE for services to environmental science.

John was the most peripatetic of all English monarchs. His 17 years on the throne are often described as a reign of crisis.  In 1214 John lost his lands in France, earning him the name John Lackland. Beset by financial problems, and with his authority threatened by rebellious barons, John was seldom in residence at Windsor and Westminster – but spent much of his time on the move, raising taxes and holding courts, as he toured the country.  

The first ever digital maps of John’s progress around his territories provide clues in visual format – and in certain sections show, almost yard by yard, the routes that King John is likely to have taken. Using geographical imaging systems (GIS), researchers at Cambridge University have built on data from colleagues at the University of East Anglia (UEA) and University College London (UCL) to produce a compelling picture of the progresses of John and his successors, Henry III and Edward I.

The maps reveal that John easily out-travelled those who came after him. In the six months leading up to Magna Carta, for example, he is recorded to have visited some 200 places and travelled well over 1,800 miles as he and his entourage zigzagged their way up and down England, navigating roads that were quagmires in winter.

Historical geographer Dr Max Satchell and PhD candidate Ellen Potter have applied mapping techniques that revolutionise the analytical capacity of data gathered by historians at UEA and UCL.

The Cambridge researchers have restructured thousands of dates and places in lists compiled from royal documents (for example, the signing of charters). By linking the restructured data to places digitally mapped using GIS, the progresses of the monarchs can be followed day-by-day, week-by-week, and year-by-year.

The GIS resource created by Satchell and Potter provides a valuable new tool. Unlike paper maps, the digital mapping enables comparisons to be made between the journeying of John, Henry III and Edward I, whose reigns together span the years 1199 to 1305. The digitised data reveals, for example, that John spent just 4% of his time at Windsor and Westminster while his successor Henry III spent 40% of his rule at these two palaces. Plotted on maps, the progresses of all three rulers can be seen at a glance.

To plot in considerable detail the routes between places visited by the king, Satchell and Potter have drawn on a range of sources, notably Britannia, a volume published by John Ogilby in 1675. Often described as the ‘first road atlas’ of England and Wales, it consists of 100 plates of ‘strip maps’ compiled from information gathered by surveyors who travelled throughout England to measure and record some 7,000 miles of roads connecting major towns.  Each strip map is a visualisation of the road taken between two points, complete with exquisitely drawn hills, rivers and landmarks.

Satchell has, for the first time, used GIS to recover the alignments of the main roads of 1675 from these strips and show with remarkable precision where they ran in the landscape. These main roads did not change much before the 18th century. This means that, where royal routes and Ogilby roads coincide, it is possible to see, almost yard by yard, where John and other kings travelled as they ascended and descended hills, crossed rivers, and stopped to obtain food, supplies and fresh horses.

“We can be pretty certain that the roads Ogilby and his team recorded were little changed from those that King John and other monarchs would have used. Even today the routes taken by sections of many roads have not changed for more than 800 years,” says Satchell.

“For example, when travelling from York to Durham, we know that John sometimes took a coastal route via Scarborough, Guisborough and Stockton-on-Tees. So too did Ogilby's surveyors, much of whose route is very similar to that of the modern A171 through the North York Moors National Park. So this summer, if you’re stuck in a traffic jam on the A171, think what it was like for John and his train of wagons.”

Although we know where John was in the week leading up to Magna Carta, clues to the roads he took have proved elusive. Between 5 and 8 June 1215, he was in residence at Winchester, formerly capital of England. By 9 June, John was in the market town of Odiham, some 20 miles north east of Winchester. Here, the king and his courtiers are likely to have stayed at Odiham Castle. From Odiham, John made his way to Windsor (some 24 miles north east) where the king was present from 10 June to 15 June.

“Undoubtedly, there was a direct road via Odiham which linked Winchester with Windsor and the navigable river Thames. Its existence is hinted by the itineraries of John and Henry III and also in later records, such as the shipment of lead carried by boat up the Thames, offloaded at Windsor and carted overland to repair the roof of Odiham castle in 1371, and wine carried from Southampton to Odiham in 1264. But, by the time the first large-scale maps of Hampshire were made in the 18th century, the road had virtually disappeared,” says Satchell.

”The final leg of John’s passage to Runnymede is solid enough. On 15 June, the king and his retinue journeyed the short distance from Windsor Castle to the fateful field. The barons for their part travelled from London on the main road to the south-west, a route clearly marked by Ogilby on plate 21 of his atlas. They crossed the Thames at Staines Bridge, marked as ‘wooden bridge’ by Ogilby, and turned off its causeway into Runnymede meadow from where they could see the towers of Windsor Castle.”

When on the move, royal baggage trains are thought to have travelled an average of 20 miles a day, moving at walking pace. Satchell and Potter’s mapping work confirms this picture. Distance was limited not just by the state of the roads and the weather but also by the weight of the wagons and carts. “The volume of stuff moved from point to point was quite literally staggering,” says Satchell.

“The royal baggage would have included a portable chapel for worship and a portable treasury which could carry as many as 500,000 silver pennies packed into barrels. In an era when John's misrule meant currency was in short supply, John’s retinue may have carried a significant proportion of the available coinage, a huge burden for horses to haul over unpaved roads.

Astride his own horse and accompanied by intimate companions, John would, of course, have been able to make greater speeds, travelling as much as 60 miles a day on a succession of the best animals. GIS analysis shows that John could make good speed even in winter across challenging terrain. In 1204 he journeyed from Malmesbury up and down the steep slopes of the Cotswolds to celebrate Christmas at Tewkesbury, riding more than 30 miles on a single winter’s day. The day after Christmas he made the return trip.

Travelling light was seldom an option. Wherever he went, John would have relied on a train of wooden wagons and carts, drawn by heavy horses, to convey the goods that he and his household required when at rest.  In addition there would be packhorses, innumerable servants and an armed escort - a veritable cavalcade which must have provided a real spectacle as it crisscrossed the country. If travelling with his army, as he did in times of conflict, John’s baggage train could be over two miles in length.

John is remembered in school history books as the king “who lost his treasure in the wash”. Some 450 years before the draining of the fens in East Anglia, the wide estuary known as the Wash was marshy and treacherous. On 12 October 1216, the royal baggage train attempted to cross the waterway at low tide but got ensnared in the soft sand. Lives, vehicles, and much treasure were lost. John was safe: he took a different route from that taken by his train. But a week later he was dead.

The king’s body was carried in great ceremony some 140 miles from Newark to Worcester where he was buried in the city’s cathedral sometime in late October. Of this final journey, so much slower that many he made in life, nothing else is known. The flow of letters and charters from which John’s itinerary can be recovered ends with one last document – his will. Thereafter John becomes like his subjects whose innumerable toings and froings are lost forever.

Max Satchell is contributing to a major Cambridge University project to document the history of occupations. His specialism is in GIS and transport flows and infrastructure. Ellen Potter is a research assistant within the same group and will shortly start a PhD.

Inset images: The itineraries of John and Henry as king (Max Satchell); The route through Egham, from Ogilby's Britannia; Miniature of King John hunting, in a manuscript of the Liber legume antiquorum regum, C14, on display in Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy (British Library).

The American economist Alan Greenspan once described corruption as “the way human nature functions”, it’s just that successful economies manage to keep it to a minimum. The question, of course, is how.

In the digital age, with its ‘freedom of information’, corrupt uses of public finance for political and corporate cronyism should have fewer dark corners to hide in.

Since the late 2000s, virtually all developed countries digitised and made available public procurement data. However, this data deluge can create the illusion of transparency, with a fog of information so vast as to seem impenetrable.

Previously, exposing corruption often relied on the diligence of journalists and campaigners to sift through data and make connections. Such investigations require time and luck, and can be biased.

But now a team of data-driven sociologists have created a new measurement system for detecting exploitation of public finance, designed to take advantage of the new data avalanche. It’s a system that is likely to rattle those profiting corruptly at the public’s expense (and give activists good cause to salivate).

The team defined key ‘red flags’: contractual situations that suggest high risks of corrupt behaviour. By unleashing ‘creeper’ algorithms and sophisticated text-mining programs on public procurement data to sniff these flags out, the team can map levels of corruption risk at regional and national scale, track corrupt behaviour in tendering organisations, and pinpoint suppliers and even individual contracts that look fishy.

The Corruption Risk Index (CRI) mines available information about expenditure of public finances for political collusion, competition rigging and crony capitalism, all with unrivalled speed and accuracy. Developed by Dr Mihály Fazekas and Professor Lawrence King from the Department of Sociology, it forms the basis of the Digital Whistleblower, or ‘DigiWhist’, led by Cambridge with a consortium of European institutes, and which has just secured €3 million of European Union (EU) Horizon 2020 funding.

“Corruption is probably the number one complaint about people in power, but there were no really objective ways to measure corruption,” explains King.

“Using our methodology, institutionalised corruption can be measured right down to the level of individual contracts and tenders in about 50 countries around the globe since 2008 to 2009 – opening up a whole universe of scientific and policy applications. We aim to make CRI available to citizens, civil society groups and journalists, to hold politicians and political parties accountable for corrupt behaviour.” 

The project began when Fazekas had a brainwave while working on his PhD with King. In many developed nations since 2007, whenever the government purchased something over around €20,000 (or equivalent), the contract and tender data were made digitally available. In many countries, this is around 7% of the GDP – a big chunk of the economy.

Fazekas spoke to experts on public procurement to uncover the box of tricks often employed to fleece the public purse. Cannily, he also talked to companies who had fallen out of favour since their country’s government changed, “so they were happy to tell me how it was back in the day”. This work eventually led to the CRI’s 13 ‘red flags’ of corruption.

For example: very short tender periods (“if a tender is issued on a Friday and awarded on a Monday – red flag”); very specific or suspiciously complex tenders compared with the field (“like writing a job description for a role you want your friend to get”); tender modifications leading to bigger contracts; inaccessible tender documents; very few bidders in highly competitive markets. Different scales and combinations of flags allow researchers to create the risk rankings of the CRI.

Using an initial EU grant, the team conducted a proof of principle with data from Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. They found that firms with a higher CRI score made more money: the final contract value frequently came in much higher than the original estimate. These companies are also more likely to have politicians involved – either managing or owning them – and be registered in tax havens.

Over the next three years, the team aims to do this for procurement data across 34 European countries and the EU institutions, creating a corruption ranking that ranges from national to contract level. “Previous corruption indicators tended to be very blunt instruments. We can analyse regions and sectors but also individual organisations and loan officers. It’s an enormously powerful and fine-grained tool,” adds King.

The DigiWhist project will encompass four different data labs across Europe to collect and ‘clean’ data, and build databases. While their current mechanism has manual elements, the next version – developed by Dr Eiko Yoneki’s team in Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory – will have self-learning algorithms that recognise errors and link to existing solutions from the database. “After an initial teaching phase, it will kind of run on its own,” says Fazekas.

All their findings will be made publicly available, with downloadable databases that can be interrogated by academics, journalists and, indeed, anyone with an interest in what happens to public money and in holding businesses and political parties accountable for corrupt behaviour.

Fazekas believes their results could be married with public crowdsourcing to build a more complete picture of the consequences of siphoning public funds.

“Imagine a mobile app containing local CRI data, and a street that’s in bad need of repair. You can find out when public funds were allocated, who to, how the contract was awarded, how the company ranks for corruption. Then you can take a photo of the damaged street and add it to the database, tagging contracts and companies,” says Fazekas, who is already working with DigiWhist advisors on prototypes.

“The idea that the public are going to be able to interrogate this data on a very localised basis and contribute to it themselves through things like smartphone apps is a compelling one!” Fazekas adds.

For King, health will be a big focus. “One of the big debates is around deregulation and privatisation of health, and whether it increases efficiency. But does it increase corruption?

“There’s been a lot of talk of big data for a while now but not much has come out of it… By having researchers like Mihály, who straddle both tech and social science, I think we’ll start to see the potential for big data to turn into important findings that really do make the world better,” says King. 

Inset images: Raised (CC: Att-NC-SA); Professor Lawrence King and Dr Mihály Fazekas (University of Cambridge).

Karen Yu’s growing love of science as a young girl was galvanised by reading the novelisation of the Star Wars movies (Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker by George Lucas). Her desire to build her own fusion reactor eventually morphed into a PhD in industrial photonics, using lasers for nanoscale manufacturing (if not for lightsabers), at Cambridge’s Department of Engineering.

Here she talks about this favourite book as part of ‘Novel Thoughts’, a series exploring the literary reading habits of eight Cambridge scientists. From illustrated children’s books to Thomas Hardy, from Star Wars to Middlemarch, we find out what fiction has meant to each of the scientists and peek inside the covers of the books that have played a major role in their lives.

‘Novel Thoughts’ was inspired by research at the University of St Andrews by Dr Sarah Dillon (now a lecturer in the Faculty of English at Cambridge) who interviewed 20 scientists for the ‘What Scientists Read’ project. She found that reading fiction can help scientists to see the bigger picture and be reminded of the complex richness of human experience. Novels can show the real stories behind the science, or trigger a desire in a young reader to change lives through scientific discovery. They can open up new worlds, or encourage a different approach to familiar tasks.

View the whole series: Novel Thoughts: What Cambridge scientists read.

Read about Novel Thoughts.

Is there a novel that has inspired you? Let us know! #novelthoughts

Andy is the founding director of the Cambridge Service Alliance and is currently Royal Academy of Engineering Professor of Complex Services. He is internationally recognised for his work on the servitization of manufacturing, organisational performance measurement and management.

Andy has previously held appointments at Cranfield University, London Business School and the Universities of Cambridge and Nottingham.

He was Deputy Director of the Advanced Institute of Management (AIM) Research and elected a Fellow and then President of the European Operations Management Association.

He has written more than 100 books and articles, including Measuring Business Performance and The Performance Prism, and has won numerous awards for his research.

Andy will be taking over as Head of the IfM from Professor Sir Mike Gregory. Mike has been the driving force behind the IfM, creating an environment in which world-class researchers work closely with industry and governments to understand the challenges facing manufacturers around the world, and to educate new generations of manufacturing leaders.

This included setting up IfM Education and Consultancy Services Limited (IfM ECS) to help transfer new ideas and approaches developed at the IfM to companies and policymakers.

All IfM ECS profits are used to fund future research.

Andy comments: “I am delighted to have been given the opportunity to lead the IfM and to build on the foundation laid by Professor Sir Mike Gregory and all of our colleagues. It is a real honour to be asked to help further develop our portfolio of research, education and practice.”

Mike said: “I am ecstatic to welcome Andy Neely to his new role. He knows IfM well and is highly regarded in the wider manufacturing community. He is ideally placed to lead the next stage of development at the IfM.”        

The collection consists of a growing body of approximately 450 works and is Europe’s largest collection of contemporary art by women, the second most significant of its kind in the world.

Featuring major works by acclaimed artists including Tracey Emin, Dame Paula Rego (who will receive an Honorary Degree from the University tomorrow), Cornelia Parker, Eileen Cooper, Maggi Hambling, Mary Fedden and Dame Barbara Hepworth, the collection is housed at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge.

It has evolved through gifts and loans from artists and donors since 1986 and is second in size only to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC.

Paintings, prints, and sculpture are displayed throughout the Grade II* surroundings.

A key resource for the study of artworks by women, the collection enables viewers to trace movements in art in a variety of media over more than 60 years; a period during which women have achieved unprecedented prominence in the visual arts.

Murray Edwards College's position as a preeminent college for women and its sympathetic setting for contemporary art, were determining factors in the establishment of this collection of art by women.

The new catalogue records the evolution of this major collection over the last 29 years, featuring beautiful illustrations alongside a foreword by Ann Jones, Curator of the Arts Council Collection.

Dame Barbara Stocking DBE, President of Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge remarked:  “The outstanding art collection housed here in Murray Edwards College is a hidden gem in the British Art World. We hope the publication of this new catalogue will raise the profile of this important collection of art by women and promote their place in the contemporary art world.”

Professor Martin Roland, Chair of the Art Committee, added:  “From its foundation, the College, then named New Hall, was fortunate in receiving a few valuable donations and loans of works of art; however it was the acquisition of Mary Kelly's Extase in 1986 that spurred us to hope this might be the nucleus of a permanent collection of contemporary art by distinguished women artists.

"Over the 29 years since, we have welcomed further generous gifts and loans from such illustrious artists as Dame Paula Rego, which has helped grow New Hall Art Collection into an internationally recognised resource – one which will continue to develop over years to come.”

The New Hall Art Collection at Murray Edwards College on Huntingdon Road is available for public viewing between 10am and 6pm every day. A programme of temporary exhibitions and events complements the collection.

The catalogue is available from Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, priced £15. www-art.newhall.cam.ac.uk

The full collection can be viewed online at www-art.newhall.cam.ac.uk/the-collection. 

Picture shows a details from 'Ines de Castro' by Dame Paula Rego Oil on canvas. Donated by the artist in 2014