Much work in the humanities could not be done without scholarly editions, and producing such editions consumes vast amounts of time and energy. Apocryphal stories abound about academics whose editorial labours have consumed their careers.

“Scholarly editing has traditionally been about coming up with a stable, pristine text,” explained Dr Jason Scott-Warren, Director of the Cambridge Centre for Material Texts in the Faculty of English. “The greater the cultural significance of a work, the more important it becomes to identify distortions and to correct those distortions, so as to produce a single, perfected version for modern readers.”

Where conventional editing seeks to reconcile conflicting versions for the reader, digital editing, unconstrained by the spatial limitations of the printed page, is about “giving readers access to the material in all its multiplicity,” he continued. “It offers the prospect of ‘un-editing’.”

New digital projects at Cambridge are making what Scott-Warren refers to as the true “mess of history” available in ways hitherto impossible, and are creating opportunities to explore the past lives of texts in ways previously unimaginable.

The medieval and early modern ‘commonplace book’ exemplifies the multiplicity of the raw materials that inform our literary histories. These domestic journals – scrapbooks, essentially, dating from the 15th to the 18th centuries – form the basis of Scriptorium, a digital archive produced by the Faculty of English with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. These volumes bring together disparate texts, such as household accounts, sonnets, prayers and jokes, in unexpected and illuminating ways. “In this rich mulch of materials,” said Scott-Warren, “we might find the scaffold speeches of convicted traitors juxtaposed with contemporary political satires, or medical instructions mingled with proverbs and drinking songs. We begin to understand some of the interactions between genres, and to sense the import of a text in its moment.”

It is the connections across the texts as much as the messages they individually convey that enable Scriptorium’s users to shine a light onto the past. The same principles of deep and lateral connectivity characterise the array of digital editions emerging at Cambridge today, materials ranging from cardinal religious texts to foundational scientific treatises; from the music of Fryderyk Chopin to the plays of Arthur Schnitzler. These new editions feature analytical tools as well as annotations and contextual information that enable users to draw connections between – and so forge new paths of enquiry through – disparate parts of our cultural heritage.

The Cambridge Digital Library, a powerful platform being developed by Cambridge University Library (with funding from the Polonsky Foundation), is further enriching its digital editions by re-presenting their content in innovative ways that transcend boundaries between archive and edition, between traditional roles (librarian, editor, publisher, reader) and between institutions.

A new digital edition of the Board of Longitude archive, for instance, charting the development of science and technology in the 18th century, will incorporate objects – telescopes, clocks, chronometers – from the National Maritime Museum along with abstracts, biographies and essays from experts in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science.

The University Library is amalgamating its online Newton Papers with the fruits of the University of Sussex’s Newton edition and is beginning to link its own Darwin Correspondence edition with the digital archive. It is also employing text-mining techniques to enrich the descriptions of its Genizah collection of 190,000 medieval manuscript fragments documenting the lives of Mediterranean Jews, Arabs and Christians. This will enable the mapping of new relationships between the documents.

“Our next step,” said Digital Library Manager Grant Young, “is to empower readers themselves to annotate, tag, converse with and challenge each other – and us. It’s about leveraging information that will augment the content and establish new connections, building in feedback mechanisms, interactivity and a recommendation facility.”

Where the edition has traditionally been regarded as tantamount to a bible, now the reader can access materials that show that the Bible is, in fact, an edition. Young’s team, in collaboration with the University of Birmingham, has recently released the first major edition in over 100 years of the 5th-century Codez Bezae Cantabrigiensis, one of the handful of manuscripts used to establish the text of the New Testament.

This plurality and the potential eclecticism that results – with fully personalised editions standing at one extreme – can be unsettling. “Perhaps print provides the stability that is necessary for intellectual life to proceed, so that we will need to work out compromises between print and digital media,” suggested Scott-Warren. Through a Digital Humanities Network launched in 2011 by the University, academics, librarians and technicians are looking critically at digital editions in production, and exploring their implications for editorial theory.

The potential empowerment, however, in accessing what Scott-Warren described as “the instability that lies beneath the surface of the text” is clearly apparent in a project devoted to the flux at the heart of the creative process: the Online Chopin Variorum Edition (OCVE), funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Chopin’s music is subject to the variations that occur when transmitting any text in musical notation or performances, but further variants arise from his own, perpetual revisions of his works. Not only is it impossible to determine a neat chronology across his versions: it is not valid to assume that Chopin was refining his work towards a point of perfection. Each version may be understood as definitive in its moment.

The OCVE enables users to compare and annotate passages across sources ranging from Chopin’s manuscripts to revised impressions of the first editions. We can trace, for example, where an altered chord inflects the music with new meaning; or how the absence of a pedal release sign at the end of a piece, interpreted by many modern editors as an omission, can in fact be an instruction to keep the pedal down after the final cadence and allow the music to fade into silence, beyond the limits of the double bar-line.

While this project makes conventional editing far more straightforward, “the really exciting thing about the digital future,” said Professor John Rink, Director of the OCVE, “is the creation of a new understanding of what an edition is, and what it can do. For a user of the OCVE to trace the creative evolution of an idea across sources results in an understanding that potentially is an edition, in and of itself.”

Moreover, the form of an edition in the digital environment is fluid. Chopin’s variants emerge from his experience of performing his music. The integration into these digital editions of material arising in performances, and of actual recordings of performances, is now being explored at Cambridge, along with the use of tools such as time-based mapping and visualisation.

“The edition itself will become a living entity,” said Young – reflecting what Rink described as “the notion of contingency and re-creation at the heart of any work.”

“What we’re really talking about here,” Rink continued, “is a parallel between the way the mind seeks and forms connections between ideas – some straightforward, some subtle – and the way the internet works by facilitating connections. In these emerging new editions a perpetual, kaleidoscopic process is enacted and opened out by virtue of new technologies. This is about nothing less than releasing and then harnessing the human imagination in ways that exploit its infinite creative potential.”

Living in a multicultural, globalised world, it’s hard to imagine the moment when different cultures first met, or a time when people’s knowledge of each other’s worlds was nonexistent.
Yet, on 12 October 1769, seven Maori canoes paddled out from the east coast of New Zealand south of Poverty Bay to investigate a large ship. The vessel was the HMS Endeavour, captained by Captain James Cook, and this was the first time the Maori people had encountered a European.

They were at first reluctant to approach the ship but then, according to the diary of ship’s surgeon William Monkhouse, “very soon enter’d into a traffick with our people for [Tahitian] cloth… giving in exchange their paddles (having little else to dispose of) and hardly left themselves sufficient number to paddle a shore.”

A set of these finely carved and decorated paddles is now housed in the University of Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, where an innovative research project ‘Artefacts of Encounter’ has been working with Polynesian communities to understand what the earliest Europeans to visit the Pacific Islands made of the people they met, and what those people made of them.

Rather than turning to the written evidence of Europeans, the researchers have placed at the heart of their investigation the objects the Polynesians gave in exchange for goods. For the Polynesians, the paddles and pots, feathered cloaks and woven helmets, nose whistles and shell horns are often the only surviving evidence of a contact with other cultures that happened centuries ago.

“Artefacts help us to study what parties on either side of the encounters were trying to achieve through these seminal transactions,” explained researcher Dr Julie Adams. “They help us to consider new evidence of the nature of these encounters and of the changes in social practices, ideas and beliefs they engendered, both in the Pacific and in Europe. Artefacts are key to understanding how socio-cultural change unfolds.”

But with more than 650 voyages from Europe and the Americas entering Polynesia between 1765 and 1840, the artefacts the explorers brought back are both plentiful and largely scattered throughout museums of the world. Artefacts were divided up between crew members as ships returned home; today, no single museum houses the bounty of any single expedition.

Focusing initially on 40 ‘priority’ voyages – among them those of Cook (1768-80), Malaspina (1789-94), d’Entrecasteaux (1791-1793) and d’Urville (1822-40) – the team has re-analysed over 1,000 objects from 30 museums and Carl Hogsden has built a digital research environment that brings them back together for the first time.

Named KIWA after the great Polynesian navigator, the digital resource manages a wealth of widely dispersed data through a series of active collaborations with holding institutions, scholars and Polynesian communities, “enabling the discovery of new connections between hard-to-access material,” as Hogsden explained. KIWA is designed to enable the sharing of data and research insights among the geographically dispersed project team (based in the UK, New Zealand and Brazil) as well as between research and curatorial staff worldwide.

For the Maori wooden paddles, for instance, the researchers have traced back almost 250 years from the artefact to the first encounter – through close study of the wooden paddles themselves, which are intricately decorated in red ochre, as well as through sea charts, ship’s log records, diary entries, inventories and, significantly, discussions with a Maori kin-group whose ancestors may have been among those who exchanged paddles for goods with Cook’s crew.

“The paddles would have been part of a set used to paddle a waka taua, a large canoe embodying the spiritual potency (mana) of a kin-group personified by their chief,” explained Adams. “They were probably given as a gift to Tupaia, the Tahitian priest-navigator-interpreter who accompanied Cook and his men to New Zealand, possibly in an effort to bind him and his own mana to the local genealogical networks.”
Tupaia was to die of typhus at Batavia and his possessions were brought back to Britain, where they were sent by Lord Sandwich, then Lord of the Admiralty and Cook’s patron, to Trinity College, Cambridge, in October 1771. After being exhibited for many decades in Trinity College Library, they were deposited in the Museum in 1914.

Adams, who with Dr Amiria Salmond and others has helped amass the object-centric evidence that underpins the digital resource, explained the resource’s significance: “For the very first time, it is now possible for researchers to reassemble all of the artefacts collected on a certain expedition – such as the Bellingshausen voyage from Russia to the Marquesas Islands in 1803. These are now dispersed across various institutions and have never been studied in their entirety.

“Or researchers could ask the database to show all the carved wooden clubs collected from Tonga, or all objects made from barkcloth, dog skin or feathers, or all the objects collected by an individual, such as the missionary George Bennet who toured Polynesia in the 1820s.”

One aim of the project, which is led by Professor Nicholas Thomas and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, is to expose variations in patterns of exchange among different island groups (including Tonga, the Society Islands and New Zealand) as well as between different voyages over time. Such a comparative approach will enable new conclusions to be drawn not only about the voyages themselves and their immediate aftermath, but about the divergent trajectories of first imperial, then (post-)colonial relationships.

The project has taken a lead from present-day Polynesians, who assert strong ancestral interests in these encounters and their artefacts. A key aspect of the project has been collaboration with a Māori tribal group, Te Aitanga a Hauiti (represented by the arts management group Toi Hauiti) – whose forefathers encountered early European explorers from the arrival of Cook in 1769. For six months, Hogsden worked with Toi a Hauiti to help create a digital research network that allows the Cambridge-based system to share content with a digital archive under development by the Maori community and local web developers, CodeShack.

“This work forms the basis for a reciprocal relationship between networked research hubs where ownership and control of information lies with the source,” explained Hogsden. “Although the networked content is collaboratively produced, the interpretation of digital objects differs. This is important because the Maori community views objects in a highly relational way – everything is connected to everything else – and so whereas our database is object-centric, theirs is relationship-centric. The two databases can nonetheless talk to each other and share content.”

For the paddles, members of the project team visited New Zealand to discuss the objects with the Ngai Tamanuhiri tribe, whose ancestors were probably part of the party who paddled out to the Endeavour in 1769. The importance of the paddles as early examples of kowhaiwhai painting has been recognised by those engaged in the revitalisation of Maori arts, and research is in progress to establish their genealogical connections to present-day Maori communities.

The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology holds a world-class collection of Oceanic, Asian, African and Native American artefacts and has been shortlisted for the Art Fund’s Museum of the Year 2013.
For more information, please visit the Artefacts of Encounter project website http://maa.cam.ac.uk/aofe

The student Combination Room, with the support of the College, hosted volunteers from Guide Dogs UK for ‘Pet-a-Puppy’ Day.

Five volunteer Puppy Walkers and their guide dog puppies visited  over a 3 hour period and lifted the mood of over 100 St Edmund’s College students.

Combination Room Welfare Officer Iris Pissaride was inspired to organise the day after hearing about the success of a similar event organised by Aberdeen University Students' Association.

Since then, Iris has been working with the Guide Dogs Cambridge Branch to make the event happen.

St Edmund’s College students described the day as the “best stress reduction ever” and “amazing fun!”

“We’re always looking for ways to help students get through the exam term and ‘Pet-a-Puppy’ Day has really helped students to relax and de-stress” said Jonathan Crass, Combination Room Treasurer.

Daniel Ingram, Volunteer Development Coordinator for Guide Dogs added: “We would like to thank St Edmund’s College for helping us stage a very enjoyable event and for their kind donation to the charity.

“It is important that our puppies are at ease in all environments. Early socialising in a variety of environments, such as a university, is a vital part of a guide dog puppy’s journey to becoming a guide dog.

“We hope this is just the start of a great relationship between Guide Dogs and St Edmund’s; with many of the students interested in volunteering with us and the possibility of more events in the future.”

The Guide Dog event is just one of a number of events being run in College to help with exam stress. Other events include massages, a weekly tea and cake event on Sundays and hot chocolate available every evening during the peak of exams.

Photo credit: Sarah Ashley

University academics have contributed informally to the work of Villiers Park Educational Trust for many years. A philanthropic donation has now enabled the University to sponsor the Villiers Park Scholars Programme in Hastings until 2015-2016. 

The four-year scheme is free for Scholars and runs from Year 10 to Year 13, including on-going mentoring, residential courses at Villiers Park, university masterclasses, workshops and online study resources.  In addition, Villiers Park works with their teachers to help develop everyday classroom practice that challenges and inspires.

Villiers Park has been running the programme since 2009 in Hastings and in Swindon, two areas where very small numbers of young people remain in education to university level.  Only 21% of Hastings and 24% of Swindon students progressed to higher education compared to a national average of 35% according to the Higher Education Funding Council Polar 3 Report, 2010-2011.  The Scholars Programme sets out to eliminate this differential through helping Scholars to fulfil their academic potential and aim high in their university choices.

Hayley, who is currently in her last year of the programme in Hastings said it has had “an almost life-changing impact on all parts of my life. I became so much more confident, I felt truly motivated for the first time in my life to go out there, prove people wrong and better myself.”

Jon Beard, Director of Undergraduate Recruitment at the University of Cambridge, said “The University is committed to encouraging young people to look beyond their immediate circumstances and aim as high as their academic ability can take them.

“The Hastings Scholars Programme engages the most able students in an area of low aspiration in a sustained programme which could make a real difference to their future choices and success.

“We are delighted to have the opportunity to explore the impact of such work on applications to selective universities with Villiers Park.”

Richard Gould, Chief Executive of Villiers Park Educational Trust, said “We are delighted to be working with the University of Cambridge to support young people with high academic potential from disadvantaged backgrounds.  The University’s support is enabling us to continue working with all secondary schools and colleges in the Hastings area where the Scholars Programme has already had an impact on raising aspirations and enabling the students to reach their full academic potential.  In August 2012 77% of the students achieved A-level grades A* - B and 76% gained a place at university.”

Hospital performance has rarely been out of the news in recent months, following the conclusion of a public inquiry into Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust that argued for “fundamental change” in the culture of the NHS to make sure patients are put first. The news casts a spotlight on what measures the government might take to combat poor care.

One emerging movement in hospital health services is the adoption of pay-for- performance (P4P) schemes to reward better-performing hospitals with cash incentives. In the USA, for instance, the government’s social insurance programme Medicare has launched P4P in efforts to encourage better and more standardised care, and to penalise hospitals with high re-admission rates.

However, it remains unclear as to whether P4P schemes improve patient outcomes, explained Professor Martin Roland, Director of the Cambridge Centre for Health Services Research (CCHSR): “P4P is being widely implemented, especially in the United States, despite a scant evidence base.”

The idea behind P4P is to reward healthcare providers based on how well they perform against a set of pre-agreed criteria, such as whether anti-clotting medication has been given within 30 minutes following a heart attack and how quickly antibiotics are given for patients with pneumonia.

In the first evaluation of a P4P scheme (Advancing Quality) in the UK, a report has suggested that 890 lives were saved across 24 hospitals in the northwest of England over an 18-month period. The analysis of the NHS scheme was carried out by a team of researchers at CCHSR, the University of Manchester and Nottingham University Business School, and was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The Advancing Quality scheme used a ‘tournament’ system, in which only the top performers received a bonus. The researchers evaluated the number of in-hospital deaths due to pneumonia, heart failure and heart attack within 30 days of admission following the scheme’s introduction, compared with the 18 months preceding it, among a total of 134,435 patients admitted for these conditions and controls across the country.

A scheme similar to Advancing Quality had failed to show any improvement in outcomes in the USA. Speculating on reasons for the difference, Roland said: “The context is really important – the level of the incentives, how they are structured and whether clinicians from different hospitals meet together to discuss how they were improving care face to face as they did in the UK, or through ‘webinars’ as in the US.”

Extensive work by CCHSR evaluating P4P programmes has shown that these incentives can have benefits, but also unintended consequences. For instance, care for non-incentivised health problems may be neglected if there are powerful incentives to concentrate time on other conditions.

The CCHSR is a collaboration between the Health Services Research Group in the University’s Institute of Public Health and the Health and Healthcare Policy Programme at the independent and not-for-profit research institution RAND Europe. The centre was recently placed second in a world ranking of health policy think tanks. “The collaboration between the University and RAND Europe has been a great success,” said Roland, “bringing together expertise from two complementary organisations as well as bringing in experts from the US to collaborate on our research.”

“As new ways of delivering health services develop, and public expectations change, it becomes ever more important to evaluate how effectively organisations in primary, secondary, community and social care are performing,” he added. “These are significant contributions to the healthcare debate because only then will policy makers have the knowledge to determine where best to place limited resources.”

Students applying in the 2012 cycle were the first to choose Cambridge knowing they faced a £9,000 tuition fee, the maximum allowed by the UK Government. 

The proportion of successful applicants from under-represented groups, including students from black and minority ethnic backgrounds, students living in areas where low numbers go on to higher education, and students educated in the state sector, also increased. Full data is available here.

As a result, Cambridge remains on target to meet its goal of a more representative undergraduate body, achieved without compromising academic standards. 97.4% of successful applicants achieved at least A*AA or equivalent, counting only their three best A Levels and excluding General Studies and Critical Thinking.

The University attributes the positive trend to its flexible and generous financial support package, its innovative and extensive outreach activities, and its commitment to transparent admissions decisions based on an applicant’s most recent academic results.

- Cambridge Bursary: the University is committed to ensuring that no UK student with the ability to succeed at Cambridge is deterred from applying by financial concerns. The Cambridge Bursary Scheme provides bursaries of up to £3,500 (or £5,650 for some mature students) per year for students with household incomes of less than £42,600.

- Commitment to outreach: The collegiate University invests around £2.7 million a year in a wide range of outreach initiatives across the UK designed to identify and engage with students from under-represented groups, and encourage them to apply. 

- Fair admissions based on the most up-to-date academic data: University research has found that AS marks, achieved in public examinations at the end of Year 12, are a reliable and transparent indicator of future success.  They correlate well with success at Cambridge, and demonstrate progress since GCSE in an objective way. Their use enables Admissions Tutors to make fair decisions which minimise non-academic factors.

Dr Mike Sewell, Director of Admissions for the Cambridge Colleges, said “The collegiate University works hard to reach talented and ambitious students throughout the UK, talk with them about why they should consider Cambridge, and tackle the barriers that might put them off applying.

“Our undergraduates enjoy teaching focused on the individual student, outstanding facilities, a relatively low cost of living, and a generous bursary scheme available to all who need it.

“Our commitment to fair admissions makes this available to students from all backgrounds, who succeed in their application because they have demonstrated academic excellence.

“AS results enable fair and transparent admissions by allowing universities such as Cambridge to make assessments based on a student’s most recent academic attainment.”

The Queen and His Royal Highness The Duke of Edinburgh arrived on the nearby guided bus to be greeted by local primary school children before touring the LMB’s new state-of-the-art building and learning about its cutting edge work on Alzheimer’s, viruses, asthma and other key areas of medical research.

A birthplace of modern molecular biology, the LMB is a world-class, multidisciplinary laboratory exploring some of the most complex problems in basic biological science. The new LMB building is the flagship for the extended Cambridge Biomedical Campus and the official opening is a highlight of the Medical Research Council’s Centenary celebrations, taking place throughout 2013.

Costing £212 million, the new building provides world-class research facilities and additional space for around 600 scientists, PhD students and support staff. The Large Facilities Capital Fund, administered by the predecessor to the current Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, contributed £67 million towards the project and the remainder is funded by the Medical Research Council, and includes income generated from the commercialisation of discoveries made at LMB. The University of Cambridge has also contributed £7.5 million to enable them to house University groups alongside LMB teams.

Sir Hugh Pelham, Director of the LMB, said: “It is a huge privilege to be the director of this great institute, founded by the Medical Research Council over 50 years ago as the new discipline of molecular biology was first emerging.  LMB scientists have enjoyed great success and today continue to provide the knowledge needed to solve fundamental problems in human health.  At the same time they are encouraged to exploit their discoveries – through patents, licensing and business start-ups – helping to advance medical research and improve the UK’s economic competitiveness.

“This magnificent new building was completed to budget and only a few weeks behind schedule.   It was occupied and fully operational within a little over a month.  This event is a tribute to all those who have worked so hard to make this vision become reality.”

Chief Executive of the MRC, Professor Sir John Savill, said: “Anyone who has seen the LMB’s new home will have been struck by the beautiful proportions of this ‘cathedral of science’. This is a superb building for superb scientists engaged in fundamental research that is changing lives.”

David Willetts, Minister for Universities and Science, said: “The LMB has been responsible for some of the most significant breakthroughs in modern medicine. This leading edge building will ensure this legacy continues well into the future. It will support world-class scientists, drive growth and keep the UK at the forefront of research and innovation.”

Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, said: “The LMB and the University of Cambridge are world-leading institutions: this fabulous new home for the LMB, which includes space to house medical researchers from the University, will strengthen this exceptional collaboration even further. As Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge and previously CEO of the MRC, it is wonderful for me to see an exceptional building which symbolises that strong relationship, and provides the scientists with a home of a scale and ambition which matches the vital research that they perform.”

The Queen’s visit mirrored a visit to Cambridge 51 years ago, on Monday 28 May 1962, when she officially opened the LMB’s previous building and Addenbrooke’s Hospital. Following her visit to the LMB on 23 May the Queen, accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh, will open the new Rosie Hospital on the Addenbrooke’s site.

The LMB’s history dates back to 1947, when the Medical Research Council set up a 'Unit for Research on the Molecular Structure of Biological Systems'. Since then the Laboratory has become known as ‘The Nobel Prize factory’: with nine Nobel Prizes shared amongst 13 LMB scientists.

Discoveries made at the LMB have formed the basis of many biotechnology companies, including Domantis, Cambridge Antibody Technology, Ribotargets, Protein Design Labs, Celltech, and Biogen.

The LMB’s greatest success is the development of humanised monoclonal and synthetic antibodies. This breakthrough led to the development of important drugs, such as Herceptin® and Humira. Monoclonal antibodies account for a third of all new therapeutic treatments: for breast cancer, leukaemia, asthma, arthritis, and psoriasis. The LMB is a great success story for the UK – with income from royalties and share sales arising from LMB patents amounting to £330 million over 2005-10.

As part of MRC Open Week, the LMB will be opening its new building to the public on Saturday 22 June. Open to all ages, the LMB Open Day will give visitors an opportunity to view the new building, gain an insight into the Laboratory's work and take part in a range of family-friendly hands-on activities.

A new book co-authored by Professor Barbara Sahakian explores ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ decision-making and the possible improvement of bad or risky decisions with cognitive enhancing drugs. The book, 'Bad Moves: How decision making goes wrong and the ethics of smart drugs', co-authored with Jamie Nicole LaBuzetta, also discusses the increasing lifestyle use of ‘smart drugs’ by healthy people.

Professor Sahakian says the role of emotions in decision-making is not fully understood, but that knowledge about it is increasing. For example, she says, we know that we have to exert cognitive control by our prefrontal cortex over emotional areas of the brain such as the amygdala in order to have good emotional regulation. We also know that there are two forms of decision making: ‘hot’ cognition, which includes emotional and risky decisions, and ‘cold’ cognition, which includes rational or non-emotional decisions.

She says: “Understanding the differences between these two forms of cognition can help us to further discover how emotions are involved in decision making.” In healthy students, an example of ‘hot’ decision-making could be opting to go out the night before an exam which could affect their exam grade. An example of a problem of ‘hot’ cognition could be highly risky behaviour such as when a patient who is in the manic phase of bipolar disorder maxes out their credit cards. In contrast, ‘cold’ cognition might include such decisions as how to organise your day in the most effective way or deciding on ingredients for a meal.

She will be speaking about her research for ‘Bad Moves’ as part of the Cambridge series of talks at this year's Hay Festival. Professor Sahakian directs a laboratory of psychopharmacology at the University of Cambridge which uses cognitive enhancing drugs (‘smart drugs’) and psychological treatments to improve cognition, including decision-making, in patients with psychiatric disorders including Alzheimer’s disease, frontotemporal dementia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), mania and depression.

Her aim is to improve the ability of patients to function successfully in their daily living at school, university, work or home, and to have a better quality of life and wellbeing. Given that 16% of people in the UK have a common mental health problem, such as depression, she feels it is important that there is a better understanding of difficulties people face which hopefully may lead to reduced stigmatisation.

She also has a strong interest in the safety and ethical issues with regard to the increasing lifestyle use of ‘smart drugs’ by healthy people. In particular, she is concerned about safety as there are no long term studies of the use of ‘smart drugs’ in healthy people. Another concern is the accessing of these ‘smart drugs’ over the Internet. Furthermore, there are ethical issues involved in the use of these drugs by healthy people, such as coercion, ‘cheating’ in competitive situations such as exams and the impact this will have on our society. These issues need to be discussed by an informed public.

*“Bad moves. How decision making goes wrong and the ethics of smart drugs” by Barbara J Sahakian and Jamie Nicole LaBuzetta is published by Oxford University Press.

The Arab Spring has brought social and political change to much of the Middle East and North Africa. Despite this, the region’s monarchies, notably in Morocco, have so far proved to be remarkably resilient. This week’s roundtable workshop, Illuminating the Dark Years: Morocco from World War Two to Independence, will discuss the momentous events that characterised the prelude to independence in 1956, and how these events continue to shape the country.

“Amidst the renewed interest in political change and stability in the Middle East and North Africa, there is surprisingly little research into this foundational period of Moroccan history”, said Dr Paul Anderson, Assistant Director of the Centre of Islamic Studies. “We hope to shed more light on this crucial era: the social dynamics that brought about Morocco’s independence, how the monarchy emerged as a national institution, and why it has endured.”

Understanding the roots of Morocco’s modern politics has become all the more significant in recent times of historic political change. In contrast to the drastic political upheaval experienced by many Arab Spring countries, the Moroccan monarchy, which has introduced tentative political reforms and constitutional revisions, still enjoys a degree of legitimacy.

“Monarchies have shown greater staying power compared to other kinds of regimes challenged by the Arab Spring. In many ways, the dynamics behind the emergence of nationalist movements and independent regimes are the key to understanding stability in more recent periods”, Dr Anderson explained.

The workshop is part of the University’s Cambridge Morocco Project which brings together scholars from Moroccan institutions with other regional and international experts from the rest of the world. Pioneered by the University’s Centre of Islamic Studies, in partnership with the Moroccan British Society, the British Council in Morocco and the Woolf Institute in Cambridge, the Project is dedicated to reviving academic links between the UK and Moroccan institutions, with Cambridge at its heart.

The Cambridge Morocco Project will run initially for three years, with upcoming events due to examine employment, livelihoods and poverty, and youth culture.

The workshop runs from Friday 24 - Saturday 25 May 2013 at the Moller Centre. The full workshop programme can be accessed here . For more information on the Centre of Islamic Studies’ work please visit www.cis.cam.ac.uk.

25 January 2011 was the day Egypt’s revolt began. People flooded the streets of cities across the country, calling for an end to the Mubarak regime. Two days later – in a moment unprecedented in history – the government turned off Egypt’s internet, in the hope of quelling massive civil unrest.

It didn’t work. Two weeks later Mubarak stepped down.

The Western media relished portraying the Egyptian uprising as the ‘Facebook revolution’, a digital epoch securing social media’s place in history as a vehicle for political change – an unstoppable galvanising force.

Such views were clearly oversimplistic, especially as the revolution continued apace despite – even because of – the loss of the internet. As one activist stated on his blog, losing the internet at the hands of his own government served as a powerful reminder of “why we’re doing any of this.”

So in what ways did social media influence Egyptian revolution, and how do opposition movements continue to use it? Can researchers capture these digital datasets to analyse social turbulence?

Dr Anne Alexander, a research fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), is investigating the digital fingerprints left by Egyptian people on Facebook, Twitter and other social sites during civil unrest.

“I found myself thrown into a huge amount of social media data in my research as a political scientist working on Egypt. The work I’m able to do, the kind of access I have to sources previously inaccessible outside the country – or in many cases full stop – has changed enormously.”

More than 600,000 Egyptians joined Facebook between January and February 2011. On 2 February, the day the internet switched back on, it was the most accessed website in the country. There were 1.5 million Egypt-related tweets in just the first week of the uprising.

The statistics are startling, and it’s perhaps easy to see why the Western media leapt on them. But, as Alexander points out, “it’s not Twitter that overthrew Mubarak, but mass mobilisation and burning down police stations – that’s what makes revolutions.”

Communication technologies were certainly important for Egypt’s uprising, and not just social media. Smartphones enabled protesters to capture footage of events, which were manually relayed – as networks were down – back to ‘media camps’ set up by activists in touch with outside journalists.

These clips were reported by global news agencies such as the BBC, CNN and – critically for Egyptians – Al Jazeera, the Arabic news network that was the most influential source of information for the nation, far outweighing social media.

While Twitter and Facebook contributed to initial online mobilisation, Alexander found that people she interviewed following the uprising said it was large-scale physical gatherings, rallying cries at Friday prayer and traditional activism that led to revolution.

“People attribute agency to technologies when it should be attributed to people. Facebook did not cause a ‘tipping point’. When the stakes are very high – arrest, torture, death – it takes multiple tipping points to reach crucial moments, showing enormous endurance on the part of the people,” said Alexander in a paper co-authored with Dr Miriyam Aouragh of the University of Oxford.

“You have social change colliding with technology. New media played a part as one of a number of tools used by the people, leaving a remarkable rendering of a moment in history that researchers can interrogate.” 

Recently, Alexander has been studying the ways in which Facebook in particular has been used during industrial action in post-Mubarak Egypt, to both gather and disseminate information.

Last year, public sector workers striking at many of the country’s sugar refineries used Facebook as an “online newspaper” – uploading interviews with strike committee members, media reports for comment and encouraging debate on the ‘wall’.

A common trait in online labour activism is to use Facebook’s capacity for ‘sharing’ to be transparent about contact with management. Posting all output from meetings lends credibility to industrial action.

“The process of making available all dealings with management – from documents to photos of a meeting – reflects peoples raised expectations for democratic accountability post-revolution, and social media can be a platform for this,” said Alexander.

This is particularly important for emerging independent unions as, before the revolution, the trade union federation was – and to some extent still is – an arm of the state.

Striking doctors used social media to gather reports from different provinces, setting up national Facebook pages to channel information, but also to lobby – both the government for increased funding and the wider public for support.

Explanatory videos and leaflets for doctors to distribute among patients were circulated via Facebook, using social media as “essentially a form of PR.”

Some of the most intense debate Alexander encountered in her research has been on constitutional reform in Egypt, as the Muslim Brotherhood – who use a “well- developed ecosystem” of social media – have risen to prominence in the country.

Those opposed have taken to the streets but also to “every social media platform going” and Alexander is able to access voices and opinions that would have been difficult 10 years ago, with “extremely rich” content attached.

For Alexander, social media offers huge opportunities but also challenges. “You have to maintain critical detachment, know the questions and approaches that will help unpick what’s presented – as with any source material.”

The remote access to often thousands of viewpoints, tracking development of events seemingly in ‘real time’ from people on the ground, has unquestionably transformed the ability to research political movements, as well as the movements themselves.

But analysis of social media raises important questions about truth and identity that Alexander finds “disconcerting”.

“The multiplicity of viewpoints, this sense of a godlike panoptical vision that social media seems to provide – offering near-instantaneous presence to events on the other side of the world – can be deceptive.”

As Alexander highlighted, most people who have tried to tweet while evading tear gas will tell you “it’s not instantaneous at all!” and what they choose to share – the viewpoint expressed to the world as fact – is highly selective.

“The digital self has an inevitable aspect of performance, something you’re ‘putting on’ for the outside world, as I’ve discovered through interviews.”  

For Alexander, it is critical to ‘triangulate’ when using social media as a source by combining it with interviews both remotely and face to face.

As emerging fields of digital anthropology and ethnography become increasingly valuable for researchers, tools and approaches will need to be developed – as well as ethical boundaries. “I’m not convinced people understand the extent to which what they say is public, and may put them in harm’s way – now or in a few years,” said Alexander.

“Social media allows access to datasets with an unprecedented range of detail, but presents a host of new challenges for researchers. It’s possible to ask questions in new ways but whether social media data can really transform our understanding of society remains to be seen.”

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

As its name suggests, African Horse Sickness (AHS) is associated with the continent of Africa, where it is feared as a deadly disease. It has long been assumed by British veterinarians and horse-owners that the disease, which is carried by midges, could not spread to cooler northern climates.

But researchers now think that its arrival in northern Europe could be only a matter of time – and perhaps more importantly, that it could spread if it did arrive.

A study undertaken by scientists at the University of Cambridge Department of Veterinary Medicine, in collaboration with the Animal Health Trust and The Pirbright Institute, shows how dangerous it could be for the horse and pony population if AHS was introduced into the UK. The research also identified which regions would be worst hit at different times of the year. 

This information could be vital to strategies for coping with an outbreak if it arrived. The study also emphasises the importance of the continued exclusion of the disease.

The research was led by Dr Gianni Lo Iacono, a multidisciplinary scientist whose expertise lies in the mathematical modelling of a range of problems related to the interface between biology and physics. He worked with a team of colleagues from complementary fields including Professor James Wood, a renowned specialist in infectious diseases.

Most strikingly, East Anglia emerges from the study as the region that is most vulnerable to AHS spread which could occur if the disease was not identified early enough for action to be taken to contain it.

In Africa, the disease is spread by infected insects from species of midge known as Culicoides imicola, which carry the African Horse Sickness virus, an orbivirus of the family Reoviridae. Once a horse is infected by AHS, there is no treatment and no cure: the animal will have a high fever within 24 hours and most infected animals will be dead within 48 hours.

Other equidae, zebras and donkeys, are susceptible to AHS infection but do not have such severe disease. Infected zebras do not exhibit any apparent symptoms: as seemingly healthy animals they are potentially lethal carriers. Donkeys develop symptoms but can survive the disease.

First recorded references of AHS occurred in 1327 in Yemen, and in the mid-1600s following the introduction of horses to southern Africa. The disease was clearly identified by the British Army in South Africa 150 years ago when scores of cavalry horses perished in an epidemic.

Ever since, European horse owners have taken comfort from the fact that the disease could not strike in cooler countries. The British climate was considered too cold for the Culicoides imicola midges to survive. On top of this, the UK (and Europe more generally) has protective mechanisms in place that prohibit horses from Africa entering the country.

A growing number of veterinarians now believe that AHS can now arrive in the UK. Well-documented outbreaks were reported in Morocco (1965, 1989–1991), Spain (1987, 1988,1990) and Portugal (1989). The British climate is warming and global transportation of perishable fresh goods – such as flowers and vegetables – offers a possible route for infected midges to enter the country.

The prospect of AHS brings sharply into focus the need for greater research into ways of preventing an incursion of AHS – and ways to cope in the event of an outbreak. “Our work demonstrates that there is no place for complacency about the ability of the virus to spread here,” said Professor Wood. 

A greater understanding of AHS requires a multi-stranded approach covering the behaviour and life cycle of the midge and the geographical distribution and movement of horses, plus possible routes for infection to enter the country. Midge numbers and activity are highest during the warmer summer months, when the arrival of infection from overseas would be most serious.

In the UK, all horses have passports as a legal requirement but these documents record the owners’ address rather than the location where their animals are kept. If horses were mapped according to their owners address, London, for example, would emerge as the centre with the densest horse population. Clearly most horses owned by Londoners are kept outside the city, many of them within easy driving distance of their owners’ homes.

Correcting this issue posed problems. However, satellite data on land usage and a survey which recorded the distribution of distances between horses and their owners in different land-use settings (people live closer to their horses in rural areas than they do in urban areas) allowed the researchers to produce a more meaningful map of the risk of the disease. This showed that East Anglia is particularly vulnerable to an outbreak: not only is the region warm and dry, but it also has distinct clusters of horses, notably around Newmarket. 

The team has also investigated another important aspect of the disease: the possible 'dilution effect' that could be achieved through keeping animals not susceptible to the virus, such as cattle and sheep, close to horses.

Dr Lo Iacono explained: “In some communities in Africa people keep cattle or sheep near their houses in the belief that this will distract mosquitoes carrying malaria away from people. Some midges show apparent preference for cattle over sheep, so in South Africa deploying cattle to protect sheep from bluetongue (a similar disease to AHS in cattle and sheep) has been proposed as a way to control the disease. On the other hand, the presence of other species might well prove to be an added attraction for midges, exacerbating the threat to horses.”

The research re-emphasises the importance of veterinary education to allow early disease identification, which can reduce the critically important reaction times to allow optimal control.

The tools that Dr Lo Iacono has developed have potential applications in mapping and responding to the spread of other diseases, some of which are ecologically even more complex – such as Rift Valley Fever, a mosquito-borne disease that affects both humans and animals, causing a serious disease and in some cases death.

The research provides a good example of how theoretical models can identify biological knowledge gaps (identifying midge biting preferences). This is now being taken forward in other studies.

‘Where are the horses? With the sheep or cows? Uncertain host location, vector-feeding preferences and the risk of African horse sickness transmission in Great Britain’ by Giovanni Lo Iacono, Charlotte Robin, Richard Newton, Simon Gubbins, and James Wood is published by the Journal of the Royal Society, Interface  (2013) 20130194 doi:10 .1098/rsif.2013.0194  

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

Scientists led by the University of Cambridge and the Medical Research Council (MRC) have developed a new drug that could help reduce the tissue damage that occurs following a heart attack, stroke or major surgery.

Tests in mice have shown that the compound, called MitoSNO, protects heart tissue from reperfusion injury, which occurs when blood flow is restored suddenly after a prolonged period without oxygen. The research was published in the journal Nature Medicine.

All of the 100,000 people a year in the UK who suffer a heart attack will experience reperfusion injury. During a heart attack, the major vessels that supply the heart with blood become blocked, preventing oxygen from reaching an area of the heart tissue. When the patient reaches hospital, doctors remove the blockage using medicines or surgery and restore blood flow to the heart.

By this stage, some damage will already have occurred to the oxygen-starved tissue. But most of the damage actually happens when the blood supply is returned suddenly, triggering the production of harmful molecules, called free radicals, in the cell’s powerhouse – the mitochondria1.

MitoSNO works by briefly ‘switching off’ the mitochondria in the first few minutes after blood flow is returned to prevent a build-up of free radicals that can kill heart cells. To achieve this, MitoSNO is designed to accumulate inside heart mitochondria rapidly after its injection into the blood.

Dr Mike Murphy from the MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit, who led the study, said: “When cells are starved of oxygen for any length of time, they begin to shut down. When blood rushes back the mitochondria go into over-drive, churning out free radicals that cause the cells to die. MitoSNO effectively flicks a switch in the mitochondria, slowing down reactivation during those critical first minutes when blood flow returns and protecting the heart tissue from further damage. 

“We think a similar process happens in other situations where tissue is starved of oxygen for a prolonged period, for example after a stroke or during surgery where major arteries are clamped to prevent blood loss. We are hopeful that if human trials of MitoSNO are successful it could eventually be used in many other areas of medicine.”

MitoSNO was developed at the MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit by Dr Murphy’s team in collaboration with Professor Rob Smith of the University of Otago, New Zealand. Together they specialise in creating new molecules that can enter cells and act specifically on mitochondria. The authors say the fact that MitoSNO works when given as blood is restored to the oxygen-deprived heart is a unique strength, because it could be given to heart attack patients when they get to hospital while blood flow to the heart is restored by reopening the blocked artery with a catheter. At the moment there are no established treatments that can be given at this crucial time.

In the study, the researchers tested MitoSNO in a mouse model of heart attack. MitoSNO was given to the mice by injection just before blood flow to the heart was restored. The area of damaged heart tissue was significantly reduced in the mice that had received MitoSNO compared with the control animals, showing that MitoSNO prevents cell death during reperfusion.

Dr Thomas Krieg from the University of Cambridge, a co-author of the study, said:“There have been some important advances in cardiac medicine in recent years and as a result more people now survive a heart attack than ever before. However, we still have no effective treatments to protect against reperfusion injury. By preserving more of the healthy heart tissue, we hope that we can give people who survive a heart attack an improved quality of life. The fact that there were marked reductions in the total area of damaged heart tissue in our study is also significant because, in humans, this has been linked to survival rates.”

The researchers now hope to secure funding to test their new compound in early human studies.

Professor Stephen Hill, Chair of the MRC’s Molecular and Cellular Medicine Board, which funded the research, said: “We’ve known for a long time that the mitochondria are central to the damage caused by reperfusion injury, but the mechanics of this process at a molecular level have been unclear. These important findings demonstrate the importance of investing in basic laboratory research, which underpins our understanding of human health and disease. In addition, this work indicates that a new class of drug developed by MRC scientists may be worth extending to human trials.”

The research was carried out in collaboration with the University of Rochester, UCL and University of Glasgow and was funded by organisations including the MRC, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and the British Heart Foundation. The technology has been patented by MRC Technology on behalf of the MRC and is available for licensing.

Press release provided by the Medical Research Council.

A family-friendly event at the Fitzwilliam Museum tomorrow (29 May) will highlight one of the country’s finest collections of arms and armour, made across Europe and Southern India from the 15th through 19th centuries for use in wars, parades, jousts and hunts. Treasures include an Italian ‘death head’ siege helmet, a German executioner’s sword, beautifully decorated yet lethal fighting axes and tiger claws from India, horse armour, and even a prosthetic metal arm.

The day-long Armoury Extravaganza will feature a knight on horseback equipped with replica Milanese 16th-century armour. Dominic Sewell (Historic Equitation Ltd) and his mighty black stallion Hawthorn will parade in front of the Fitzwilliam and reveal how armour was designed so that horse and rider could move with remarkable freedom despite the weight of the metal that protected them. Local blacksmith Magnus will be working at his portable forge to show visitors how an armourer in bygone times would have made key pieces of arms and armour. Handling sessions will allow visitors to feel replica swords and try on replica armour and be photographed as knights. Children will make their own weapons out of paper and paint and carry them in the parade behind Knight Dominic and Hawthorn.

Generations of children have marvelled at the Fitzwilliam Museum’s collection of arms and armour which boasts nearly 800 items, only some of which are familiar to visitors. The Extravaganza will allow visitors to see how the new displays in the Armoury are coming along ahead of the grand re-opening this summer: some weapons included in the new displays have not been on display for over a generation; others have never been seen by the public before.

“In our current refurbishment of the Armoury, we are determined to bring more objects out of store and into the public eye and, just as importantly, show them in a way that is both lively and informative. We will be supporting the new displays with a specially-commissioned Kids’ Trail, as well as video clips showing arms and armour being made in the historical way, the arming of a knight to show the correct order in which armour was put on, and a historically accurate joust,” said Dr Victoria Avery, Keeper of Applied Arts at the Fitzwilliam Museum.

The somewhat oppressive blood red of the gallery walls is currently being replaced with a more neutral backdrop which gives the predominantly iron, steel and bronze objects the chance to shine. The exhibits are being re-mounted and lit so that fabulous decorative details can be seen to full advantage. Other items from the Museum’s permanent collections will be included to add another dimension to the displays, including an eye-catching life-size full-length portrait of Philip II in Armour as soon as its conservation by the Hamilton Kerr Institute has been completed.

At the core of the Fitzwilliam’s armoury collection are two major bequests: in 1879 Robert Taylor, an official in the East India Company, gave the Museum his collection of over 200 Indian arms, notably from Ganjam on the east coast. Many are very rare indeed, such as the khanda which is one the world’s finest swords to survive from 16th-century India; and most are beautifully engraved, etched or chiselled, and inlaid with gold or silver. In 1933 James Stewart Henderson, a reclusive millionaire, left the museum his extensive collection of European arms and armour. Among these objects are the spectacular breastplate with a scene of Hercules wrestling Antaeus, made  around 1550 for the court of the Dukes of Brunswick, and the curious-looking Polish Szyszak helmet of around 1680. 

The result is a collection that spans over four centuries and several continents. “We’re now creating groupings which will show the ways in which items such as breast-plates and helmets evolved with time as modes of warfare changed and fashions shifted. We are re-mounting objects to enable visitors to see their insides where these are of interest, as well as to appreciate better their decorative exteriors. And we are commissioning bespoke new articulated armatures for all our armours so that we can hang them securely and correctly, and also pose the knights in more active, realistic poses” said Dr Avery.

The thinking behind the refurbishment of the collection draws on the most frequently asked questions by visitors. “It emerges that people really want to know how the items were made, how and when they were worn, and how heavy they are. They want to get close to the human experiences that the objects are connected to and put them in context” said Dr Avery.

“This understanding encouraged us to bring our displays alive by showing the items in positions that reflect their usage and groupings that allow visual comparisons. For example, although crossbows are often shown mounted vertically on walls, we hope to be able to devise a way to hang them horizontally to reflect the position in which they are held when being used. Likewise, although swords are normally shown with hilt at the top and blade below, we have hung our fascinating  executioner’s sword and calendar sword the other way up so that the writing on the blades can be read.”

One of the many treasures of the collection is a model made by E Granger of Paris of a knight on horseback, wearing armour replicating that of around 1570, which was made as a prize for jousting at the Eglinton Tournament in Scotland in August 1839. On loan to the Royal Armouries in Leeds since 1986, it has been recalled for the new displays. Another ‘must see’ is the spectacular steel parade helmet with lion visor likely to have been made by the Negroli family in Milan for Emperor Charles V. A fabulous example of mid-16th century workmanship, it entered the Museum’s collection in 1938, having come to light at an auction of ‘theatrical junk’ a few years earlier.

For full details of the Armoury Extravaganza event at the Fitzwilliam Museum on Wednesday, 29 May go to http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/whatson/events/article.html?3874

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

The Medical Research Council (MRC) and Wellcome Trust are to invest £24m into obesity research led by the Wellcome Trust-MRC Institute of Metabolic Science (IMS). The IMS, based on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, will investigate the causes and health consequences of obesity and develop new approaches to prevent and treat metabolic diseases, such as diabetes.

The IMS is a joint venture between the MRC, Wellcome Trust, University of Cambridge and Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. Co-directed by Professors Steve O’Rahilly and Nick Wareham, it provides a unique environment linking basic and applied science in metabolic diseases.

The Institute houses not only state-of-the-art facilities for laboratory science, clinical and population research, but also purpose-built clinics providing out-patient care for children and adults with metabolic and endocrine disorders.

This close link to patients ensures that advances in basic science can be applied rapidly to improving patient care and disease prevention. The IMS is also close to the largest concentration of biotechnology companies in Europe, creating excellent opportunities for industrial collaboration.

Funding from the MRC will establish a new MRC Metabolic Diseases Unit (MDU) at the IMS, under the direction of Professor O’Rahilly, as well as new programmes of research at the existing MRC Epidemiology Unit and MRC Human Nutrition Research. The Wellcome Trust investment will create an enhanced Clinical Research Facility dedicated to metabolic studies, as well as providing funding for major core laboratory equipment and studies in animal models.

Stephen O’Rahilly, Co-Director of the Wellcome Trust-MRC IMS and Director of the MRC MDU, University of Cambridge, said: "This joint initiative from the MRC and Wellcome Trust will provide exciting new opportunities to better understand the fundamental causes of disease such as obesity and diabetes and translate that knowledge into improved therapies.”

Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, said: “Obesity has become an urgent public health issue as research continues to reveal its detrimental effects. With obesity doubling between 1980 and 2008 – a span of less than 30 years – investing in obesity research has never been more critical, and the University is delighted with the support of the MRC and the Wellcome Trust.”

Professor Sir John Savill, Chief Executive of the MRC, said: “Obesity is one of the biggest challenges facing the future health of the developed world and understanding the causes and consequences of this condition are major research priority. The MRC is very happy to be partnering with the Wellcome Trust and University of Cambridge in an ambitious joint venture that will unite experts in basic science, population science and experimental medicine to create a world-leading centre for metabolic research.”

Dr Ted Bianco, Acting Director of the Wellcome Trust, said: “With obesity rates soaring across the globe, the need to understand the biological, behavioural and environmental factors that influence metabolic diseases has never been greater. This additional investment from us and the MRC reflects the quality of research that is being undertaken at Cambridge and lays the foundations for taking basic scientific discoveries right through to clinical advances.”

The £24m joint investment will be broken down as follows:

• £10.8m from the MRC to establish a new university unit: the MRC Metabolic Diseases Unit, University of Cambridge (Directed by Professor Steve O’Rahilly and located at the Wellcome Trust-MRC IMS).
• £10.1m from the Wellcome Trust for basic science infrastructure and new clinical research facilities at the IMS, and to support joint working with the Sanger Institute.
• £2.5m from the MRC for research into biomarkers for diabetes at the MRC Epidemiology Unit, University of Cambridge (Directed by Professor Nick Wareham and located at the Wellcome Trust-MRC IMS).
• £1m from the MRC for a collaborative programme to investigate human fat metabolism led by MRC Human Nutrition Research (Directed by Professor Ann Prentice and based at the Elsie Widdowson Laboratory in Cambridge).

Story adapted from Wellcome Trust and MRC press release.

Twitter keeps millions of people in touch, whether it’s sharing their politics with followers or updating their mates with the trivia of everyday life. These tweets are in Welsh: ‘loaaaads o gwaith i neud a di’r laptop ’cau gwithio!’, ‘dio cau dod on!! Mar bwtwm di tori.’ Roughly translated, they read: ‘loads of work to do and the laptop won’t work’ and ‘it won’t come on!! The button’s broke.’

How do you capture changes as they take place in the language we use in everyday life – from buzz words such as ‘sweet’ to tags such as ‘innit’? One answer is to look at tweets. Because they don’t follow the conventions of written language, tweets provide an authentic snapshot of the spoken language. By analysing the content of the 140-character messages, linguists can get to grips with the dynamics of the language played out in real time.

Welsh is spoken by 562,000 people in Wales; 8% of the country’s children learn it at home as their first language and 22% are educated in Welsh.

Like all living languages, Welsh is constantly changing and new varieties are emerging. When Dr David Willis from Cambridge’s Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics set out to research the shifts taking place in Welsh, he used a database of Welsh tweets as a means of identifying aspects of the language that were changing, and then used that information to devise the questionnaires used for oral interviews.

He explained: “When your intention is to capture everyday usage, one of the greatest challenges is to develop questions that don’t lead the respondent towards a particular answer but give you answers that provide the material you need.”

“If I want to find out whether a particular construction is emerging, and where the people who use it come from, I would normally have to conduct a time-consuming pilot study, but with Twitter I can get a rough and ready answer in 30 minutes as people tweet much as they speak,” he said. “My focus is on the syntax of language – the structure or grammar of sentences – and my long-term aim is to produce a syntactic atlas of Welsh dialects that will add to our understanding of current usage of the language and the multi-stranded influences on it. To do this relies on gathering spoken material from different sectors of the Welsh-speaking population to make comparisons across time and space.”

In the late 17th century, the antiquarian Edward Lhuyd conducted an investigation into the dialects of Wales. By the 19th century, Welsh was attracting the attention of European historical linguists such as Johann Kaspar Zeuss. Later, scholars all over Europe, realising that local dialects were receding in the face of industrialisation, sought to record variations in language. Large dialect atlases were undertaken in Germany and France, and speech archives were begun, such as the one that laid the foundations for the National History Museum at St Fagan’s near Cardiff.

In the 1960s the attention moved away from rural areas to the cities where most people by then lived – and researchers started to look at sentence structure, an area of language that presents particular challenges for investigators. Willis’s interest in syntax stemmed from his study of a wide range of minority languages, including Breton, which is, like Welsh, a Celtic language. To create the biggest possible picture of syntactic changes in Welsh as it’s spoken today, he decided to take an inclusive approach and set out to investigate day-to-day speech patterns of a broad range of speakers, aged 18–80.

British Academy funding for a year-long study has enabled Willis and assistant researchers to interview around 160 people across Wales, beginning his analysis with North Wales where the language is thriving and a significant number of children use Welsh as their home language. The study included both those who had acquired Welsh at home and at school.

The spoken questionnaire asked interviewees to repeat in their own words sentences that were presented to them in deliberately ‘odd’ Welsh that mixed different dialects, inviting the interviewee to rephrase the awkwardly phrased sentence to sound more ‘natural’. An example in English might be ‘we’ve not to be there yet, don’t we?’ which a British speaker might be expected to rephrase as ‘we haven’t got to be there yet, have we?’

The data from these interviews are a treasure trove of information in terms of the light their content can shine on how and why the structure of language shifts over time – and give the researcher a valuable database not just for the present study but also for future research.

Changes identified so far include use of pronouns and multiple negatives. An analysis of usage of the Welsh words for ‘anyone’, ‘someone’ and ‘no-one’ reveals that there are differences between those who learnt Welsh in the home (who are more likely to say the equivalent of ‘did someone come to the meeting?’ and ‘I didn’t see no-one’) and those who learnt it at school (who are more likely to say ‘did anyone come to the meeting?’ and ‘I didn’t see anyone’).

One example of multiple negatives reveals a shift in meaning of the Welsh word for refuse, ‘cau’. “We knew that people in the north used the word ‘cau’ to mean ‘won’t’, saying the equivalent of ‘the door refuses to open’ for ‘the door won’t open’. Negative concord – such as saying ‘I haven’t not seen no-one’ for ‘I haven’t seen anyone’ – is a strong feature of Welsh. We’ve now identified two groups in the north: one that still says ‘the door refuses to open’ and the other that have begun to say ‘the door doesn’t refuse to open’. The next step is to work out when and how this change occurred.”

In tracking shifts in the language, GIS mapping is used to plot where interviewees were brought up and enables researchers to look at the geographical spread of particular aspects of syntax, making comparisons between age groups, gender and mode of acquisition.

The research has revealed that, while Welsh does not vary much by social class, there are interesting differences between the variety of Welsh spoken by those who learn it as their first language in the home and that spoken by those who are first exposed to it in nursery or primary school.

“Those who acquire Welsh once they reach school are more likely to use English sentence constructions, which are perfectly good Welsh but differ significantly from the constructions used by those who acquired Welsh at home. For example, they tend to prefer standard focus particles – words that correspond to a strong stress in English sentences like ‘I know YOU’ll be on time’ – over the ones from their local dialect,” said Willis.

With around 22% of the Welsh population educated in Welsh at school, and all children learning it as a second language, data on this aspect of language acquisition may prove valuable in developing Welsh teaching policy – for example, in determining which forms to teach second-language learners or in promoting both dialect and standard written Welsh in schools.

Professor Paul Coldwell’s new artworks and accompanying publication explore the objects and stories around Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s final expedition, highlighting the tragic unfolding of his attempt to be first to the South Pole. Using printmaking and sculpture, Coldwell re-imagines aspects of this final journey to construct images and objects that explore the sense of loss felt around the world at the news of Scott’s death.

“We are delighted to have had the opportunity to work closely with Paul Coldwell on this exciting project, which fulfils the aims of the Polar Museum to encourage artistic responses to the collection,” said Heather Lane, Keeper of Collections. “The results of his research are extraordinarily moving, and we are proud to be the first to exhibit them.”

Paul Coldwell is best known as a pioneer of digital printmaking, digitally weaving together layered images that address themes of memory and identity, exile and loss. His practice often reflects his research in collections or archives to develop bodies of work such as at Kettle’s Yard, the Freud Museum and the Estorick Collection, where he curated the major exhibition Morandi's Legacy: Influences on British Art, to trace connections between futurist Giorgio Morandi and modern British artists.

Coldwell has established an international reputation as a print scholar and curator, frequently representing the UK at major events such as the Ljubljana Print Biennial, the International Print Triennial at Cracow. His work forms part of the permanent collections at the Tate Gallery, MoMA New York and the British Museum.

He is the author of the acclaimed book, Printmaking: a contemporary perspective (2010) and is a regular contributor to the journals Print Quarterly and Art in Print.

A simultaneous retrospective exhibition,  A Layered Practice: Graphic Work 1993–2012 staged by the University of Kent, will be shown at the University of Greenwich 14 June -11 July for which a fully illustrated catalogue will be available.

Re-Imagining Scott: Objects & Journeys will run from 31 May to 20 July 2013 at The Polar Museum, Scott Polar Research Institute, Lensfield Road, Cambridge.

Instead of through pigments, these ‘polymer opals’ get their colour from their internal structure alone, resulting in pure colour which does not run or fade. The materials could be used to replace the toxic dyes used in the textile industry, or as a security application, making banknotes harder to forge. Additionally, the thin, flexible material changes colour when force is exerted on it, which could have potential use in sensing applications by indicating the amount of strain placed on the material.

The most intense colours in nature - such as those in butterfly wings, peacock feathers and opals – result from structural colour. While most of nature gets its colour through pigments, items displaying structural colour reflect light very strongly at certain wavelengths, resulting in colours which do not fade over time.

In collaboration with the DKI (now Fraunhofer Institute for Structural Durability and System Reliability) in Germany, researchers from the University of Cambridge have developed a synthetic material which has the same intensity of colour as a hard opal, but in a thin, flexible film.

Naturally-occurring opals are formed of silica spheres suspended in water. As the water evaporates, the spheres settle into layers, resulting in a hard, shiny stone. The polymer opals are formed using a similar principle, but instead of silica, they are constructed of spherical nanoparticles bonded to a rubber-like outer shell. When the nanoparticles are bent around a curve, they are pushed into the correct position to make structural colour possible. The shell material forms an elastic matrix and the hard spheres become ordered into a durable, impact-resistant photonic crystal.

“Unlike natural opals, which appear multi-coloured as a result of silica spheres not settling in identical layers, the polymer opals consist of one preferred layer structure and so have a uniform colour,” said Professor Jeremy Baumberg of the Nanophotonics Group at the University’s Cavendish Laboratory, who is leading the development of the material.

Like natural opals, the internal structure of polymer opals causes diffraction of light, resulting in strong structural colour. The exact colour of the material is determined by the size of the spheres. And since the material has a rubbery consistency, when it is twisted and stretched, the spacing between spheres changes, changing the colour of the material. When stretched, the material shifts into the blue range of the spectrum, and when compressed, the colour shifts towards red. When released, the material will return to its original colour.

The material could be used in security printing in order to detect fraud. Polymer opals can produce much brighter colour at lower cost than the holograms normally seen on banknotes, and would be more difficult to forge.

The technology could also have important uses in the textile industry. “The World Bank estimates that between 17 and 20 per cent of industrial waste water comes from the textile industry, which uses highly toxic chemicals to produce colour,” said Professor Baumberg. “So other avenues to make colour is something worth exploring.” The polymer opals can be bonded to a polyurethane layer and then onto any fabric. The material can be cut, laminated, welded, stitched, etched, embossed and perforated.

The researchers have recently developed a new method of constructing the material, which offers localised control and potentially different colours in the same material by creating the structure only over defined areas. In the new work, electric fields in a print head are used to line the nanoparticles up forming the opal, and are fixed in position with UV light. The researchers have shown that different colours can be printed from a single ink by changing this electric field strength to change the lattice spacing.

The results were published earlier this month in the journal Advanced Engineering Materials.

Cambridge Enterprise, the University’s commercialisation arm, is currently looking for a manufacturing partner to further develop the technology and take polymer opal films to market.

For more information, please contact sarah.collins@admin.cam.ac.uk.

The verb run has 606 different meanings. It’s the largest single entry in the Oxford English Dictionary, placing it ahead of set, at 546 meanings.

Although words with multiple meanings give English a linguistic richness, they can also create ambiguity: putting money in the bank could mean depositing it in a financial institution or burying it by the riverside; drawing a gun could mean pulling out a firearm or illustrating a weapon.

We can navigate through this potential confusion because our brain takes into account the context surrounding words and sentences. So, if putting money in the bank occurs in a context that includes words like savings and investment, we can guess the meaning of the phrase. But, for computers, so-called lexical ambiguity poses a major challenge.

“Ambiguity is the greatest bottleneck to computational knowledge acquisition, the killer problem of all natural language processing,” explained Dr Stephen Clark. “Computers are hopeless at disambiguation – at understanding which of multiple meanings is correct – because they don’t have our world knowledge.”

Clark leads two large-scale research projects – recently funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the European Research Council – that hope to overcome this bottleneck. Applications of the research include improved internet searching, machine translation, and automated essay marking and summarisation.

“Many of the recent successes in language processing such as online translation tools are based on statistical models that ‘learn’ the relationship between words in different languages. But if we want the computer to really understand text, a new way of processing language is needed,” said Clark.

As Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google, said in 2009: “Wouldn’t it be nice if Google understood the meaning of your phrase rather than just the words that are in that phrase?”

Clark has turned to quantum mechanics and a longstanding collaboration with Bob Coecke, Professor of Quantum Foundations, Logics and Structures at the University of Oxford, and Dr Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh,  Queen Mary (University of London), who works on the applications of logic to computer science and linguistics.

“It turns out that there are interesting links between quantum physics, quantum computing and linguistics,” said Clark. “The high-level maths that Bob was using to describe quantum mechanics, which also applied to some areas of computer science, was surprisingly similar to the maths that I and Mehrnoosh were using to describe the grammatical structure of sentences.

“In the same way that quantum mechanics seeks to explain what happens when two quantum entities combine, Mehrnoosh and I wanted to understand what happens to the meaning of a phrase or sentence when two words or phrases combine.”

Until now, two main approaches have been taken by computer scientists to model the meaning of language. The first is based on the principle in philosophy that the meaning of a phrase can be determined from the meanings of its parts and how those parts are combined. For example, even if you have never heard the sentence the anteater sleeps, you know what it means because you know the meaning of anteater and the meaning of sleeps, and crucially you know how to put the two meanings together.

“This compositional approach addresses a fundamental problem in linguistics – how it is that humans are able to generate an unlimited number of sentences using a limited vocabulary,” said Clark. “We would like computers to have a similar capacity to humans.”

The second, more recent, ‘distributional’ approach focuses on the meanings of the words themselves, and the principle that meanings of words can be worked out by considering the contexts in which words appear in text. “We build up a geometric space, or a cloud, in which the meanings of words sit. Their position in the cloud is determined by the sorts of words you find in their context. So, if you were to do this for dog and cat, you would see many of the same words in the cloud – pet, vet, food– because dog and cat often occur in similar contexts.”

Working with researchers at the Universities of Edinburgh, Oxford, Sussex and York, Clark plans to exploit the strengths of the two approaches through a single mathematical model: “The compositional approach is concerned with how meanings combine, but has little to say about the individual meanings of words; the distributional approach is concerned with word meanings, but has little to say about how those meanings combine.”

By drawing on the mathematics of quantum mechanics, the researchers now have a framework for how these approaches can be combined; the aim over the next five years is to develop this to the stage that a computer can use. Clark has spent the past decade developing a sophisticated parser – a program that takes a sentence of English and works out what the grammatical relationships are between the words. The next step is to add meaning to the grammar.

“To solve disambiguation and build meaning representations of phrases and sentences that computers can use, you need lots of semantic and world knowledge. The idea is to take the parser and combine it with the word clouds to provide a new meaning representation that has never been available to a computer before, which will help solve the ambiguity problem.

“The claim is that language technology based on ‘shallow’ approaches is reaching its performance limit, and the next generation of language technology will require a more sophisticated model of meaning. In the longer term, the aim is to introduce additional modalities into the meaning representation, so that computers can extract meaning from images, for example, as well as text. It’s ambitious but we hope that our innovative way of tackling the problem will finally help computers to understand our ambiguous world.”

In the middle of an African desert, with no water to be found for miles, scattered shells, fishing harpoons, fossilised plants and stone tools reveal signs of life from the water’s edge of another era. In 40°C heat, anthropologists Dr Marta Mirazón Lahr and Professor Robert Foley from Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies (LCHES) are painstakingly searching for clues to the origin and diversification of modern humans, from the artefacts they left behind to the remains of the people themselves.

Kenya, East Africa, has long been known as the ‘cradle of mankind’ following the discovery of fossils thought to be of the first members of the human family, which arose in Africa around 6–7 million years ago. Various distinct species evolved from these ancestors over millions of years, including our own – Homosapiens– around 250,000 years ago.

“A lot of the research on the origins of modern humans has focused on defining their point of origin, then understanding why humans left Africa about 60,000 years ago to colonise the rest of the world – known as the Out of Africa model,” said Mirazón Lahr. “But we have no idea what happened between 200,000 years and 60,000 years ago. We also have very little information on what occurred inside Africa after 60,000 years, when the different population groups and languages we see today evolved. The genetics suggest that the expansion out of Africa is just the tip of a massive population expansion inside the continent.”

Mirazón Lahr’s In Africa project, recently awarded five-year funding from the European Research Council, is investigating the evolutionary history of modern human populations. “The challenge is to find the sites where evidence of these early people can be recovered – their stone tools, the animals they hunted, their ornaments and, ultimately, the fossils of the people themselves,” she said.

East Africa has played a central role in all earlier phases of human evolution. She has chosen to focus on this region based on the theory that its past environment was suitable for sustained occupation over time. But East Africa is huge, and finding the right place to look is absolutely crucial. Mirazón Lahr used satellite technology to find the first clues.

“In the past there were periods of enormous rainfall in the tropics. When glaciers melted in the northern hemisphere, due to climate change, the water evaporated and then fell in the tropics as monsoon rains,” she said. “The lakes were much higher and their margins were wider. We are using satellite images of the region to reconstruct where the ancient lake margins would have been when the lakes were last high, and that’s where we look.”

Mirazón Lahr and Foley have already carried out three field expeditions, in 2009, 2010 and 2011, to investigate their two chosen sites: the Turkana and the Nakuru-Naivasha basins of the Rift Valley in Kenya, and have made some spectacular finds on the ancient Turkana beaches.

“Ten thousand years ago, this area was wetter, with gazelles, hippos and lions, and the beaches are still there even though the water is long gone. We’ve found shells on the surface, and harpoons the people used to fish with. We go there and we just walk,” said Mirazón Lahr. “A lot has already been exposed by the wind, and occasionally we find sites where things are buried, and then we dig.”

“We’re looking at the lithics – stone tools – and how these relate to times of particularly high lake levels,” said Mirazón Lahr. “Then we’re looking at the fauna and, if we’re lucky, we find actual human fossils. The oldest fossil ever found that looks like a modern human is 200,000 years old, and comes from the basin of Lake Turkana. We’re trying to find the fossils that mark the origin of Homo sapiens. The ancient Turkana beach is an incredibly fossil-rich site, and we’ve already found such exciting things!

“We have many human remains – about 700 fragments – mostly dating from between 12,000 and 7,000 years ago, which match the age of this beach. To do the population biology and answer the questions about diversity we need these large numbers. This is already the biggest collection of this age in Africa.”

The primitive technologies that our early ancestors left behind change over time, and comparing finds dated to different times can advance understanding of our evolutionary trajectory. “We think the evolution to modern humans is associated with changes in behaviour and in technology, for example in their tool use,” said Mirazón Lahr. “We’ve already found evidence that they started using animal bones to make tools, which was rare in earlier populations.”

“The people who lived around this lake 10,000 years ago used microliths – a form of miniaturised stone tool technology,” said Foley. “Instead of producing one or two big flakes like the earliest modern humans, they produced lots of very small flakes to make composite tools. This is a sign of the flexibility of the way modern humans adapted to different conditions. We’ve also found a beach in the Turkana Basin from about 200,000 years ago and that has its own very different fossilised fauna, and very different stone tools. The technology and the people changed a lot over the past 200,000 years.”

Mirazón Lahr emphasises that geography and climate played a critical role in the origins and diversification of modern humans. “The times when the lakes were high were periods of plenty in East Africa,” she said. “When it was very wet there were lots of animals, the vegetation could grow, and you can imagine that the people would have thrived.” East Africa had a unique mosaic environment with lake basins, highlands and plains that provided alternative niches for foraging populations over this period. Mirazón Lahr believes that these complex conditions were shaped by varying local responses to global climate change.

“We think that early modern humans could live in the region throughout these long periods, even if they had to move between basins.” With a network of habitable zones, human populations survived by expanding, contracting and shifting ranges according to the changing conditions. By comparing the fossil records from different basins over time, Mirazón Lahr hopes to establish a spatial and temporal pattern of human occupation over the past 200,000 years.

Her approach is a multidisciplinary one, combining genetic, fossil, archaeological and palaeoclimatic information to form an accurate picture of events. Drawing on her wide-ranging interests from molecular genetics to lithics and prehistory, she believes that the way to find novel insights is to consider each problem from various angles.

This approach is intrinsic to the In Africa project, in which she and Foley are not just searching for new fossils, but also trying to build a complete picture of our early ancestors’ lives and the external forces that shaped their evolution, both biological and behavioural. “The project will be one of the first investigations into humans of this date in East Africa,” said Foley. “Given Africa is where we all come from, that’s critical.”

Brain scans that claim to be able to determine whether a criminal is guilty of a crime can be fooled, new research reveals.

The study has shown that people can intentionally suppress incriminating memories and thereby avoid detection in brain activity guilt detection tests.

Such tests, which are commercially available in the United States and are used by law enforcement agencies in several countries, including Japan and India, are based on the logic that criminals will have specific memories of their crime stored in their brain. When presented with reminders of their crime, it was previously assumed that their brain would automatically and uncontrollably recognise these details. Using scans of the brain’s electrical activity, this recognition would be observable, recording a ‘guilty’ response.

However, research by an international team of psychologists from the universities of Cambridge, Kent and Magdeburg as well as the Medical Research Council, has shown that some people can intentionally and voluntarily suppress unwanted memories.

For the study, the researchers had participants conduct a mock crime. These people were later tested on their crime recognition while having their brain activity monitored using electroencephalography (EEG). Critically, when asked to suppress their crime memories, a significant proportion of people managed to reduce their brain’s recognition response and appear innocent.

If suspects can intentionally suppress their memories of a crime and evade detection, the research calls into question the reliability of brain activity guilt detection tests, and suggests careful consideration is needed before such evidence is introduced in criminal trials.

Dr Zara Bergstrom, formerly with the University of Cambridge and currently a lecturer in cognitive psychology at the University of Kent and principal investigator on the research, said: “Brain activity guilt detection tests are promoted as accurate and reliable measures for establishing criminal culpability. Our research has shown that this assumption is not always justified. Using these types of tests to say that someone is innocent of a crime is not valid because it could just be the case that the suspect has managed to hide their crime memories.”

Dr Jon Simons, of the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge, added: “Our findings would suggest that the use of most brain activity guilt detection tests in legal settings could be of limited value. Of course, there could be situations where it is impossible to beat a memory detection test, and we are not saying that all tests are flawed, just that the tests are not necessarily as good as some people claim. More research is also needed to understand whether the results of this research work in real life crime detection.”

Dr Michael Anderson, Senior Scientist at the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, commented: “Interestingly, not everyone was able to suppress their memories of the crime well enough to beat the system. Clearly, more research is needed to identify why some people were much more effective than others.”

Dr Anderson’s group is presently trying to understand such individual differences with brain imaging.