For many people, engineering conjures up images of bridges, tunnels and buildings. But the annual University of Cambridge engineering photo competition shows that not only is engineering an incredibly diverse field, it’s a beautiful one too.

The annual competition showcases the breadth of engineering research at the University, from objects at the nanoscale all the way to major infrastructure. The winning images can be viewed on the Engineering Department’s website from today, alongside dozens of other entries.

The competition, sponsored by ZEISS, international leaders in the fields of optics and optoelectronics, had five categories this year; alongside those for first, second and third place, the ZEISS SEM prize was awarded for a micrograph captured using an electron microscope, and a Head of Department’s prize for the photo or video with the most innovative engineering story behind it.

First prize went to Rachel Garsed for her image of a bullet hole pattern in a liquid crystal, while second prize went to Andrew Payne for his image of a titanium ‘comet’. Other winners included Dilek Ozgit and Andrea De Luca’s image of carbon nanotubes, Kenichi Nakanishi’s image of cave-like formations made from graphene.

The Head of Department’s prize went to Alex Kendall, for a video which demonstrate how a robot tourist would view Cambridge landmarks. Kendall’s system is able to take video or images from a smartphone and reconstruct what it saw in 3D, which can then be used so that a robot can learn both its position and orientation from an image.

The panel of judges included Kenneth Png from ZEISS, and the Department of Engineering's Professor Roberto Cipolla, Dr Allan McRobie, Head of Department Professor David Cardwell, and Director of Research Philip Guildford. Guildford said that the judges were once again impressed by the quality of the images they received.

“I love the way in which the essence of engineering can be captured in a single beautiful image – these intriguing works of art convey wonderful stories of determined engineers battling to crack real world problems and finding the most elegant answers,” he said. 

An election in the Indian state of Bihar, has delivered a resounding and unambiguous verdict on prime minister Narendra Modi’s leadership. And it’s not a positive one.

The electorate in the eastern state has supported a grand alliance of political parties, which coalesced against the ruling National Democratic Alliance (BJP-NDA) – led by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party.

The alliance is led by chief minister Nitish Kumar, who has already served two terms as head of Bihar’s state government. Made up of three parties – Kumar’s Janata Dal (United), Laloo Prasad Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal, and the Indian Congress Party – it has now delivered a massive mandate for him to remain. Together, the coalition has secured 178 seats in the 243-member local assembly. Modi’s BJP-NDA has just 58.

Local and national

Unusually, for what might otherwise have been no more than a regional political skirmish, this election has turned the lens on Modi’s leadership, and on the political strategy that has been directed by his party president, Amit Shah.

Both Modi and Shah chose to occupy centre stage in the almost two-month-long Bihar campaign, eclipsing their local party leadership, who were sidelined.

Modi visited the state and addressed 31 separate election rallies. But this had the affect of raising his personal stake in the outcome, and turning a state election into a mini-referendum on his national leadership.

A bellwether state?

Bihar has always mattered in Indian politics. It is the country’s third largest state, with more than 100 million people. As a Hindi-heartland state, it plays a pivotal role in holding the balance in India’s national parliament, with 40 elected members representing the state in the lower house. Of these 40 seats, the BJP and its NDA allies returned 31 MPs from Bihar in the parliamentary elections in 2014, and were hoping to repeat this performance in the state elections. It was not to be.

Bihar has also been a laggard in terms of development, consistently under-performing compared to both India’s other states and its own potential. Nevertheless, Kumar has championed progressive politics over the past decade and presided over the beginnings of a transformation. Meanwhile, the BJP campaign was divisive, stoking issues that risk polarising Indian society along religious and communal lines.

Artists, writers and intellectuals have criticised what they see as a rising tide of intolerance in India. This has manifested in physical and verbal attacks on minority Muslims and in opposition to the activities of NGOs that have criticised the government, such as Greenpeace.

Those who speak out against such intolerance run the risk of verbal abuse or worse.

The rhetoric that was deployed in the Bihar campaign was increasingly strident, warning of celebrations in Pakistan if the BJP were defeated in Bihar, and playing up the politics of cow slaughter and beef consumption (targeting India’s Muslim community, which makes up more than 16% of Bihar’s population).

Bihari voters rejected this brand of politics, however, choosing instead the combination of social inclusion and Kumar-led development that the grand alliance seemed to represent. Yadav has championed the cause of the lower castes, Dalits and minorities, and the alliance offered a “secular” alternative to the NDA’s more strident Hindu nationalism.

A message to Modi

The prime minister defied the odds by winning the 2014 parliamentary elections but he now looks politically vulnerable. The BJP lost another high-profile local election to the newly-formed Aam Aadmi Party in the Delhi elections earlier this year, showing that he is clearly not an invincible vote-winner.

Modi is still in power in Delhi but this election loss should serve as a warning. He needs to shift from a politics of confrontation and intolerance to building a more inclusive style of governance.

Modi can no longer stay silent while his acolytes and party supporters spread the politics of hate. For a media savvy leader, his failure to respond immediately and act decisively against the perpetrators speaks volumes.

It’s also time to deliver on the promise of job creation and “better days”. Before his election campaign, Modi pledged to provide a generous developmental package for Bihar. His commitment to “cooperative federalism” requires that he deliver on this package even when the state is ruled by his opponents. Modi needs to go beyond political rhetoric, and be prepared to build bridges with those who disagree with him – an isolated, and confrontational, attitude to state governments and to his opponents in the Centre is not likely to help him govern.

The message from Bihar is clear. As Modi faces more important state elections in 2016 and 2017, he should realise that the brand of politics that has been on display in the last few months will not resonate with the public. The question is: is he listening?

Bhaskar Vira, Reader in Political Economy at the Department of Geography and Fellow of Fitzwilliam College; Director, University of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute, University of Cambridge

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the University of Cambridge.

End-of-life care policy in the UK has a focus on enabling patients to die in their preferred place, believed for most people to be home, although whether home is always the best and preferred place of death is of increasing debate.

A systematic review of 61 studies, published today in the open access journal PLOS ONE, which looked at adult preferences for place of death, found that when missing preferences – where the views of participants with no clear preference, or who were unwilling or unable to express or communicate a preference – are taken into consideration, the picture becomes far less clear.

Researchers at the Primary Care Unit and Cambridge Institute of Public Health found that when missing data were excluded, the majority of those questioned preferred to die at home. However, when the large amount of missing data were included in the analysis, it was no longer clear whether home was where most participants with cancer or other conditions preferred to die.

In many reports a large proportion of participants’ preferences were missing. The missing preferences are likely to represent preferences that were not asked or not expressed. Preferences may have been missing because participants were not given the opportunity to state their preference, and so could reflect the difficulty healthcare professionals have in holding conversations about end of life care. Preferences could also be absent because participants did not have a preference to share, which may suggest that place of death is less important to patients than other end of life care issues. Regardless of the reasons, the study authors argue that the exclusion of missing preferences inflates the significance of recorded preferences.

Sarah Hoare, a PhD student at the Cambridge Institute of Public Health, first author of the study, says: "Our review has shown that there is a substantial amount of missing data on UK participants’ preferences for place of death. We do not know what locations, if any, these ‘missing’ preferences are for and so we need to be careful about claiming that the majority of patients wish to die at home.”

While surveys of the general public, even with missing data included, tended to show a strong majority preference for dying at home, there was more variability amongst patients and family members reporting patient preferences. For these groups the extent of missing data meant it was not known what proportion preferred home.

The researchers believe that the variance found between the preferences of the general public and patients could in part be explained by differences in data collection. For example, information provided about the general public was often drawn from large surveys while patient preferences were often collected from patient records. The differences between public and patient preferences may also in part be attributed to the different meanings given by respondents to questions about preferred place of death.

Dr Stephen Barclay, the study’s senior author, adds: “The extent of missing data has major implications for clinical practice. We need to know why patients’ preferences have not been recorded. Is it because they do not have a preference, which in itself needs to be recognised as a legitimate opinion? Or does it reflect the difficulty that healthcare professionals have in holding conversations on this sensitive issue, and so patients have not been given a clear opportunity to state a preference?”

“Surveys of the general public are valuable in assessing public opinion, but they do not appear to reflect dying patient preferences,” adds Ms Hoare. “Likewise, family members do not appear to necessarily reflect patients’ views. This has implications for UK health policy which relies on next-of-kin reports for assessing quality in end-of-life care.”

Reference
Hoare, S et al. Do patients want to die at home? A systematic review of the UK literature, focused on missing preferences for place of death. PLOS ONE; 10 November 2015

Xenarthra is an order of primarily South American mammals that includes sloths, ant-eaters and armadillos. Several are sufficiently endangered to be on the IUCN ‘red list’. In previous millenia, the group was far bigger. It covered many other creatures, now extinct, such as giant ground sloths estimated to have exceeded the size of a male African elephant.

As ‘exotic’ animals, xenarthrans have long fascinated westerners and became a must-have item in ‘cabinets of curiosities’ – collections gathered from a world that was opening up to exploration from the 15th century onwards. In the mid-17th century, the naturalist-physician, Georg Marcgrave, stationed in Dutch Brazil, described the armadillos that he encountered:

"The Tatu or Tatu-peba in Brazilian, Armadillo in Spanish, Encuberto in Portuguese, we Belgians call Armoured-piglet. It is a most powerful animal that lives in the ground, though also in water and soggy places. It is found in various sizes."

As a consequence of the blossoming of scientific enquiry in the 19th century, many leading zoology museums have examples of xenarthrans in their collections. Cambridge’s Museum of Zoology, for example, has a fine collection of specimens collected on expeditions to South America, from the diminutive Pink Fairy Armadillo (Chlamyphorus truncatus) to the towering giant ground sloth (Megatherium americanum) which became extinct some 10,000 years ago.

The ground sloth is one of a number of relatively recently extinct large sloths, one of which Charles Darwin himself helped discover on the voyage of the Beagle. On September 18, 1832, Darwin noted in his dairy that he had dined on “Ostrich dumpling & Armadillos”. The ‘ostrich’ he ate was, in fact, rhea; the abundant armadillos were a staple diet of the local gauchos.

Not long afterwards, Darwin saw for the first time fossils of shells and other animals, embedded in soft sea cliffs, including a specimen of giant ground sloth which was to be named Mylodon darwinii in his honour.

Xenarthans have been a source of fascination to Dr Robert Asher, an evolutionary biologist in the Department of Zoology, ever since he first began studying mammalian diversity as a graduate student some 20 years ago. He’s particularly interested in the evolutionary stories told by the structure of their skeletons – and the ways in which their bones act as clues to their relative position within the tree of life.

Natural history museums in Berlin, Paris and London have in their collections examples of three-toed sloths, including embryos and foetuses. These specimens enabled Dr Robert Asher and his colleague Dr Lionel Hautier (formerly a Cambridge postdoctoral fellow and now at the University of Montpellier) to publish research on an aspect of the anatomy of sloths which sets them apart from almost every other mammal on earth.

The difference lies in the arrangement of vertebrae in sloths’ spinal columns – which can be seen as clues to xenarthrans’ divergent evolutionary pathways over the past few million years.

You might think that animals with long necks would have more neck vertebrae than those with short necks. This is certainly true of some birds and reptiles. But almost every placental mammal on earth (some 5,000 species in total) has seven ‘ribless’ vertebrae in the neck – even creatures with long necks such as giraffes. The three-toed sloth deviates from this rule: many of these tree-living creatures have eight, nine or even ten cervical vertebrae. 

This remarkable diversity was noticed in the 18th century and scientists continue to tease apart the mechanisms by which mammals deviate from the “rule of seven”. In 2009, Asher and colleagues set out to learn more about this intriguing quirk. Neck vertebrae are known as cervicals and the rib-bearing vertebrae below them are known as thoracics. Thoracic vertebrae have facets which allow articulation with the ribs.

Asher and colleagues looked at patterns of bone formation in mammals as they developed. They found that, in all mammals, the centrum (or middle part) of the first thoracic (number eight, counting down from the skull) turns from cartilage to bone earlier than the centra of the posterior-most cervicals. In sloths, too, the eighth vertebrae begins to develop early – but, in their case, this ribless vertebra is located in the neck and generally considered to be ‘cervical’.

“The ‘extra’ vertebrae in sloths’ necks have the same developmental  characteristics as thoracic vertebrae. They are, in effect, ribcage vertebrae, masquerading as neck vertebrae. In sloths, the position of the shoulders, pelvis and ribcage are linked with one another, and compared to their common ancestor shared with other mammals, have shifted down the vertebral column to make the neck longer,” explains Asher.

“Even in sloths, the mammalian ‘rule of seven’ applies to the vertebral centra. The ossification of the centra in a long-necked sloth resembles ossification in other mammals. However, sloths can deviate from the “rule” by shifting the embryonic tissues that give rise to the limb girdles and rib cage relative to the vertebrae, adding what are essentially one or more ribcage vertebrae into the caudal end of their neck. The next question to address is why and how sloths managed this shift.”

Xenarthrans also pack some intriguing surprises when it comes to teeth. Anteaters have no teeth. Sloths have just one set of teeth to see them through life – as do all but one genus of armadillo. Armadillos in the genus Dasypus (including seven- and nine-banded species) are unlike other armadillos in having two sets of teeth during their lifespan: deciduous (or ‘milk’) teeth and permanent teeth.

Most mammals, including humans, shed their baby teeth while they are growing. Recent research by Asher and colleagues from the University of La Plata, Argentina, into the dentition of Dasypus revealed that its permanent teeth erupt long after the animal reaches its full size. “The equivalent scenario in a human would be losing your milk teeth, and gaining all your permanent ones, once you were fully grown and well into your 20s,” says Asher.

In this regard, Dasypus is similar to most species of endemic African mammals (Afrotheria) – a group of animals that includes elephants, manatees, tenrecs, golden moles and sengis. “Eruption of adult teeth after the attainment of full body size and sexual maturity is not unheard of in other mammals,” says Asher. “Some people reading this won’t yet have erupted their ‘wisdom’ teeth or third molars. But few groups do this as pervasively as Afrotherians and Dasypus.“

With gratitude to PhD candidate Natalie Lawrence (Department of History and Philosophy of Science) for her input on early western encounters with ‘exotic’ animals.

Next in the Cambridge Animal Alphabet: Y is for an animal that is an integral part of high-altitude livelihoods throughout the Himalayas, Tibet and Central Asia.

Have you missed the series so far? Catch up on Medium here.

Inset images: Illustration of an armadillo from Historiae Naturalis Brasilae Tatu by Georg Marcgrave; Skeleton of a giant land sloth (Museum of Zoology); Three-toed sloth - Bradypodidae - Luiaard (Martha de Jong-Lantink); Lateral view of 3D reconstruction of computerized tomography (CT) scans of skeleton in the three-toed sloth Bradypus (Hautier et al).

For the second time in four years, the Vatican has been plunged into crisis by the publication of books exposing not only the battles for power within its hallowed walls, but also the misbehaviour of staff members of the Roman curia, the governing bureaucracy of the Roman Catholic Church.

In his latest book, Merchants in the Temple: Inside Pope Francis’ Secret Battle Against Corruption in the Vatican, investigative journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi lays bare the resistance which the Argentinian pope has encountered in his efforts to clean up not only the Vatican Bank (Istituto per le Opere di Religione) but also the wider financial mismanagement that has been endemic in the Vatican for years.

The first claims about financial mismanagement, this time in the Vatican City of which the pope is head of state, came from Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganó who was head of its administration. After his claims were made public, Viganó was packed off to Washington as papal envoy to the US. But the “Vati-leaks” scandal really broke in January 2012 with programmes on Italian television that revealed the goings-on behind the scenes in the Vatican of Benedict XVI.

In May of the same year, Nuzzi published His Holiness: The Secret Papers of Benedict XVI, which further revealed the in-fighting around the ailing and ageing pope, including the existence of an alleged “gay lobby”. Eventually, the investigation by the Papal Gendarmerie, the Vatican police, identified the pope’s butler, Paolo Gabriele, as the person who had removed the papers from Benedict’s private apartment. After being tried and spending a few months in the Vatican jail, Gabriele was eventually pardoned by the pope.

But the scandalous stories swirling around the Vatican in 2012 and early 2013 undoubtedly contributed to Benedict’s decision in February 2013 to resign, the first pope to do so since Celestine V in 1294 (in his case, after only a few months in office). Though in his resignation speech Benedict attributed his decision to age and infirmity, by then he felt that the Vatican was out of control and he clearly had little confidence in his “chief minister”, cardinal secretary Tarcisio Bertone against whom allegations of cronyism and incompetence have been made.

New broom

The subsequent election of cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires, less than a month after Benedict’s resignation, as the first non-European pope in hundreds of years, was the clearest indication that the cardinals of the worldwide Roman Catholic Church wanted change, a cleansing of the Augean Stables and a substantial reform of the Roman curia.

This is indeed the programme on which Francis I has embarked. So far, he has had notable success in making the Vatican Bank more accountable to both the Vatican and European financial authorities and ridding it of dubious accounts whose holders used them for the purposes of money-laundering and even, allegedly, sanctions busting.

But the latest Vati-leaks episode only confirms what has long been known, that resistance inside the Vatican to Francis’ reforms is strong and tenacious and that the bad habits long-established there die hard. Among his revelations are that a canonisation (the investigatory process leading to the declaration that someone is a saint) can cost over half a million pounds (US$755,000) and that costs remain out of control in some dicasteries (departments) of the Roman curia.

There has been unhappiness in Italy for years over the financial privileges and tax exemptions of the Roman curia and related organisations, not to mention the thousands of religious houses – some of which operate extremely profitable businesses throughout the peninsula. But these latest revelations once again cast the Vatican and its financial management in a bad light which, in the long term, will certainly affect the willingness of the Catholic faithful throughout the world to contribute to funding the headquarters of their church through the annual “Peter’s Pence” collections.

Feeling dog collars

The Vatican of Francis I is no happier with the second Vati-leaks episode, than Benedict’s Vatican was with the first and so investigations have been carried out and arrests made. This time they involve a Spanish monsignor, Lucio Angel Vallejo Balda, and an Italian PR expert, Francesca Chaouqui, both recent appointments to Francis’ reform commissions. The Nuzzi revelations are regarded as being hostile to Francis, but it could equally well be argued that they support his cause inasmuch as they demonstrate the strength of opposition to his reforms in the curia and potentially isolate his chief opponents there.

It can also be argued that all this is simply a case of chickens coming home to roost. The fact that the curial bureaucracy is located in a sovereign state, the Vatican City, or in “extra-territorial” buildings scattered through Rome, that it is the servant of an infallible religious leader – the pope – and that the Vatican Bank, in particular, has been virtually immune from effective oversight has inevitably led to mismanagement, cronyism and corruption.

It must also remain a matter of scandal to many Catholics that the curia is largely staffed by priests (and a few nuns) whereas there are many Catholic dioceses throughout the world desperately short of priests to say mass and administer the other sacraments, ironically enough, especially in Latin America.

John Pollard, Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the University of Cambridge.

Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India, is in the UK from November 12 for a three-day visit. There is pressure on both India and the UK to sign a package of business deals to mark the occasion. The pair have a long, shared history, but trade between the two countries ranks low. There are many areas, however, where India’s needs complement the UK’s strengths and we can expect deals to be struck. Here are six areas to watch out for:

1. Defence

There are reports that a large contract will be signed for the sale by BAE Systems to India of up to 20 Hawk trainer aircraft. This deal is likely to involve the actual manufacturing of the aircraft in India, which would fit in nicely with the Modi government’s flagship Make in India programme, designed to provide a much-needed boost to India’s manufacturing sector.

2. Energy

The UK and India signed an agreement on nuclear energy cooperation in July 2010 but it has been held up by an array of impediments in both countries. Expect announcements amid a concerted effort to reduce bureaucratic hurdles on both sides.

3. Finance and investment

India has a huge need for new ways to bring investment into the country, especially to feed its capital-hungry infrastructure sector. Here, the City of London is expected to be of aid by helping market offshore Indian-rupee bonds, which would in turn help finance railway expansion and housing in India.

Vodafone, one of the UK’s largest companies, has a significant presence in India. While Vodafone may announce further investments during Modi’s visit, it is likely that it will join hands with other UK companies in raising concerns with the Indian PM about various tax disputes they have been embroiled in with successive Indian governments.

4. Skills

Skills is huge area of need in India. Every month for the next decade the country will add one million young people to its workforce. If these young people can be suitably trained and employed they will fuel dramatic growth that could see India become the world’s third largest economy by 2030. The UK has significant capabilities in the areas of training plumbers, electricians, carpenters, retail store personnel, and those who work in hospitality and tourism. Importantly, the UK also has many world-leading providers of English language training and assessment.

5. High technology

An important area where India and the UK share significant complimentary strengths is technology – in particular in life sciences, software and, increasingly, hardware. India has vibrant pharmaceutical companies, many of which are making a concerted effort to move into drug discovery and development. The UK on the other hand is home to giants such as GSK and AstraZeneca that have an interest in India as a market, a location to conduct clinical trials, and a place to outsource the processing of clinical trials data. Both countries also have a lively biotech sector where further collaboration can be explored.

6. Frugal innovation

India has developed a global reputation for frugal innovation– the ability to develop highly affordable solutions in a whole range of areas from healthcare to energy, automotive to education, computing and software. The UK, for its part, especially in the triangle of London, Cambridge and Oxford, is increasingly a global hub for lean start-ups in fintech (finance-related technology), edutech (education-related technology) and medical diagnostics. Modi’s visit might well highlight the potential for collaboration between these clusters of frugal entrepreneurship in the UK and India’s own expertise in these areas. Indeed, some of India’s frugal innovation, in healthcare for instance, could even help bail out an NHS that is increasingly financially constrained.

The visit of the leader of India, with its huge and rapidly-growing economy, to the UK is bound to bring exciting announcements. Anything of the scale of the billion pound nuclear agreement the UK did with China recently, though, is unlikely. Instead, a number of smaller deals seems a stronger possibility. Indeed, Philip Hammond, the UK’s foreign secretary, has said: “As the Indian economy has a very large and important private sector, many of the deals will be commercial and private sector deals rather than government to government.”

Jaideep Prabhu, Director, Centre for India & Global Business, University of Cambridge

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the University of Cambridge.

An international team of astronomers, led researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Australian National University, have identified some of the oldest stars in our galaxy, which could contain vital clues about the early Universe, including an indication of how the first stars died.

These stars, which have been at the very centre of the Milky Way for billions of years, contain extremely low amounts of metal: one of the stars is the most metal-poor star yet discovered in the centre of our galaxy. These stars also contain chemical fingerprints which indicate that the very first stars may have died in spectacular deaths known as hypernovae, which were ten times more energetic than a regular supernova. The findings, reported today (11 November) in the journal Nature, could aid in understanding just how much the Universe has changed over the past 13.7 billion years.

For decades, astronomers have been trying to determine what the Universe was like soon after the Big Bang – understanding how the first stars and galaxies formed is crucial to this goal. While some astronomers are looking outward to galaxies billions of light years away to untangle this mystery, others are looking inward to the centre of our galaxy.

If you’ve ever looked up at the night sky from a dark place you might see the centre of the Milky Way. There are billions of stars in our galaxy, and astronomers are interested in picking out the oldest stars and finding out about their chemical composition and movements.

Soon after the Big Bang, the Universe was entirely made up of only hydrogen, helium and small amounts of lithium. All of the other elements, like the oxygen we breathe or the sodium in our toothpaste, have been made inside stars or when they die as supernovae. This has led astronomers to search for extremely metal-poor stars: stars with lots of hydrogen, but very little of any other element.

It had been thought that the very first stars formed in the centre of the galaxy, where the effects of gravity are strongest. But after decades of searches, astronomers found that most stars in the centre of our galaxy have a similar metal content of those much closer to us. While the stars at the centre of the galaxy are about seven billion years older than the Sun, they’re still not old enough to understand what the conditions were like in the early Universe.

Using telescopes in Australia and Chile, astronomers may have landed on a winning strategy to find the oldest stars in the galaxy. Stars with a low metal content look slightly bluer than other stars: a key difference that can be used to sift through the millions of stars at the centre of the Milky Way.

Using images taken with the ANU SkyMapper telescope in Australia, the team selected 14,000 promising stars to look at in more detail, with a spectrograph on a bigger telescope. A spectrograph breaks up the light of the star, much like a prism, allowing astronomers to make detailed measurements.

Their best 23 candidates were all very metal-poor, leading the researchers to a larger telescope in the Atacama desert in Chile. From this data the team identified nine stars with a metal content less than one-thousandth of the amount seen in the Sun, including one with one-ten-thousandth the amount – now the record breaker for the most metal-poor star in the centre of the galaxy.

“If you could compress all the iron in the Sun to the size of your fist, some of these stars would contain just a tiny pebble by comparison,” said Dr Andrew Casey of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, one of the study’s co-authors. “They’re very, very different kinds of stars.”

However, knowing that these stars have low amounts of metal wasn’t enough to be certain that they formed very early in the Universe. They could be stars that formed much later in other parts of the galaxy that weren’t as dense, and they are just now passing through the centre. To separate those possibilities, researchers measured distances and used precise measurements of the stars’ movement in the sky to predict how the stars were moving, and where they had been in the past.

They found that while some stars were just passing through, seven of the stars had spent their entire lives in the very centre of our galaxy. Computer simulations suggest that stars like this must have formed in the very early Universe.

“There are so many stars in the centre of our Galaxy – finding these rare stars is really like looking for a needle in a haystack,” said Casey. “But if we select these stars in the right way, it’s like burning down the farm and sweeping up the needles with a magnet.”

When the very first stars in the galaxy died, they left a chemical signature on the generation of stars reported on in this latest study. This chemical fingerprint suggests the very first stars may have died in spectacular deaths known as hypernovae, an explosion ten times more energetic than a regular supernova. This would make it one of the most energetic things in the Universe, and very different from the kinds of stellar explosions we see today.

“This work confirms that there are ancient stars in the centre of our Galaxy. The chemical signature imprinted on those stars tells us about an epoch in the Universe that’s otherwise completely inaccessible,” said Casey. “The Universe was probably very different early on, but to know by how much, we’ve really just got to find more of these stars: more needles in bigger haystacks.”

Reference:
L.M. Howes et. al. ‘Extremely metal-poor stars from the cosmic dawn in the bulge of the Milky Way.’ Nature (2015). DOI: 10.1038/nature15747

The study, published today in PLOS ONE, shows that cockroaches activate slow twitch muscle fibres only when chewing on tough material such as wood that requires repetitive, hard biting to generate a bite force 50 times stronger than their own body weight.

“As insects play a dominant role in many ecosystems, understanding the amount of force that these insects can exert through their mandibles is a pivotal step in better understanding behavioural and ecological processes and enabling bioinspired engineering,” explains Tom Weihmann from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology, lead author of the study. “Insects provide a major part of the faunal biomass in many terrestrial ecosystems. Therefore they are an important food source but also crucial as decomposers of plants and animals. In this way they are crucial for material cycles and the ecological balance.”

 “Ours is the first study to measure the bite forces of ordinary insects, and we found that the American cockroach, Periplaneta americana, can generate a bite force around 50 times stronger than their own body weight. In relative terms that’s about five times stronger than the force a human can generate with their jaws,” he adds.

Previous studies have focused on the biting action of larger animals, particularly vertebrates, which have jaws full of teeth that they use to grind food, catch prey, or fend off other animals. But insects, like cockroaches, have different biting mouthparts; they have a pair of strong, horizontally aligned bladelike jaws, or mandibles. The mandibles have an important role in the life of insects: being used not only for shredding food, but also for digging, transport, defence, and feeding offspring.

An insect’s mandibles are attached to the head capsule, which consists of thin multi-layered cuticle and forms a complexly structured part of their exoskeleton. The head capsule encloses the driving muscles for all mouth parts and a number of other vital organs of the central nervous and digestive systems. This means that space is limited for the muscles required to operate their scissor-like mandibles; so many insects have muscles with oblique fibres that reduce the amount of thickening that occurs when the muscles contract.

When it comes to investigating biting, cockroaches are the perfect model system – as Weihmann says, they are “extraordinarily ordinary insects with regard to their mouthparts and biting abilities.”

The researchers measured the force of 300 bites made by specimen cockroaches across the whole range of mandible opening angles. They found that the cockroaches could exert various levels of force with their bites, from short, weak bites, to particularly strong bites that lasted much longer.

“The weaker, shorter bites were generated by relatively fast muscle fibres, while the longer, stronger bites were driven by additional muscle fibres that take time to reach their maximum force,” explains Weihmann, “these slower muscle fibres give the mandibles a force boost to allow them to exert up to 0.5 Newtons during sustained grasping or chewing.”

“The employment of slow muscle fibres allows very efficiently generated muscle forces with only a minimum of cross section area, and therefore head volume, required,” he adds.

Weihmann explains that gaining a better understanding of how the delicate structure of the head capsule withstands such powerful forces over an insect’s lifetime could also have interesting applications for bioinspired engineering.

“It is interesting whenever forces have to be transferred within small hollow capsules, particularly if actuators such as tiny motors, advanced piezo-electric actuators or other sophisticated drives need to be attached to the inner sides of the structure, just like mandible muscles do. With increasing miniaturisation, such designs will become increasingly important. Recent technical implementations in this direction are for instance micro probes inserted into blood vessels or micro surgical instruments.”

The work was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the Daimler and Benz Foundation.

Reference:

Tom Weihmann, et al. Fast and powerful: Biomechanics and bite forces of the mandibles in the American cockroach Periplaneta Americana PLOS ONE 11^th November 2015. http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0141226

Inset images: A side view onto the experimental setup wih the force sensor at the left and the specimen at the right (Tom Weihmann); A micro-computed tomography image of a cockroach head showing the driving muscles of the left mandible (Tom Weihmann).

The report, “Unhedgeable Risk: How climate change sentiment impacts investment,” concluded that about half of this potential loss could be avoided through portfolio reallocation, while the other half is “unhedgeable”, meaning that investors cannot necessarily protect themselves from losses unless action on climate change is taken at a system level.

“This new research indicates that no investor is immune from the risks posed by climate change, even in the short run,” said Jake Reynolds, Director, Sustainable Economy at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. “However, it is surprisingly difficult to distinguish between risks that can be addressed by an individual investor through smart hedging strategies, and ones that are systemic and require much deeper transformations in the economy to deal with. That’s what this report attempts to do.”

While existing studies have analysed the direct, physical effects of climate change on long-term economic performance, this new report, commissioned by CISL and the Investment Leaders Group, looks at the short-term risks stemming from how investors react to climate-related information, from policy decisions and technology uptake, to market confidence and weather events.

Reynolds continued, “What’s new about this study is its focus on the potential short-term impacts which could surface at any time. Major events, such as the outcome of the upcoming United Nations climate talks in Paris in December, can send signals which drive market sentiment – sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly – and this study allows us to model the implications.”

The study modelled the impact of three sentiment scenarios on four typical investment portfolios.

The scenarios tested were:

1. Two Degrees, limiting average temperature increase to two degrees Celsius (as recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC]) and collectively making relatively good progress towards sustainability, and future socio-economic development goals.

2. Baseline, where past trends continue (i.e. the business-as-usual BAU scenario) and where there is no significant change in the willingness of governments to step up actions on climate change.

3. No Mitigation, oriented towards economic growth without any special consideration of environmental challenges, rather the hope that pursuing self-interest will allow adaptive responses to any climate change impacts as they arise.

The portfolio structures modelled were:

1. High Fixed Income, comprising 84 per cent fixed income, 12 per cent equity, four per cent cash; mimicking the strategies of insurance companies.

2. Conservative, comprising 60 per cent sovereign and corporate bonds, 40 per cent equity; mimicking certain pension funds.

3. Balanced, comprising 50 per cent equity, 47 per cent fixed income, three per cent commodities; mimicking certain pension funds.

4. Aggressive, comprising 60 per cent equity, 35 per cent fixed income, five per cent commodities; mimicking certain pension funds.

Each scenario was linked to a series of economic and market confidence factors used to explore macroeconomic effects within a global economic model. In turn these were cascaded down to portfolio level through an industry sector analysis. The factors included alternative levels of carbon taxation, fossil energy investment, green investment, energy and food prices, energy demand, market confidence, and housing prices.

The study found that shifts in climate change sentiment could cause global economic growth to reduce over a 5-10 year period in both the Two Degree and No Mitigation scenarios as a consequence of economic adjustment. In the longer-term, however, the study found that economic growth picks up most quickly along a Two Degrees (low carbon) pathway, with annual growth rates of 3.5 per cent not only exceeding the baseline (2.9 per cent), but significantly exceeding the No Mitigation scenario (2.0 per cent).

This is consistent with recent comments by the Governor of the Bank of England about the risk of “potentially huge” losses to financial markets due to climate change in the short term, and the “merit” of stress testing elements of the financial system to understand and deal with climate risks.

Urban Angehrn, Chief Investment Officer of Zurich Insurance Group and member of the Investment Leaders Group, echoed this view: “As an insurer we understand that the potential human impact and economic cost of extreme weather and climate events are vast. Multiplied by population growth, coastal migration and urbanisation, the threat seems even larger. We see it as our responsibility to help our customers and communities to build resilience against such events. As investors, the tools to help us translate that threat into investment decisions are - at present - limited. This report provides us with a meaningful basis to discuss investment strategies that tackle climate risk. It will help us go beyond the significant commitments that Zurich has already made.”

Under the Two Degrees scenario, the Aggressive portfolio suffers the largest loss in the short term, but it recovers relatively quickly and generates returns above and beyond the baseline projection levels by the end of the modelling period. In contrast, under a No Mitigation scenario, a

Conservative portfolio with a 40 per cent weighting to equities (typical of a pension fund) could suffer permanent losses of more than 25 per cent within five years after the shock is experienced.

“Far from being a lost cause, investors can ‘climate proof’ their investments to a significant extent by understanding how climate change sentiment could filter through to returns,” said Scott Kelly, research associate at the Centre for Risk Studies, University of Cambridge Judge Business School, and one of the authors of the report. “However, almost half the risk is “unhedgeable” in the sense that it cannot be addressed by individual investors. System-wide action is necessary to deal with this in the long-term interests of savers.”

The report offers a series of insights for investors, regulators and policy makers including:

• Seeing climate change as a short-term financial risk as well as a long-term economic threat.
• Recognising the value of “stress testing” investment portfolios for a wide range of sustainability risks (not only climate risks) to understand their financial impacts, and how to manage them.
• Pinpointing areas of “unhedgeable” risk where system-wide action is required to address risks that cannot be escaped by individual investors.
• The importance of using capital flows to improve the resilience and carbon profile of the asset base, especially in emerging markets.
• Identifying significant gaps in knowledge where new research is required, including of an interdisciplinary nature.

Originally published on the CISL website.

From 30 November to 11 December, the 21st Session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21/CMP11), will be taking place in Paris. Paris 2015 will be a crucial conference, as it needs to achieve a new international agreement on the climate, applicable to all countries, with the aim of keeping global warming below 2 degrees Celsius.

An event taking place on Monday (16 November), organised by the Cambridge Centre for Climate Science (CCfCS), aims to provide insight into the scientific and political landscape leading up to the Paris summit and beyond.

The speakers at ‘Understanding the Paris Climate Summit’ will discuss some of the climate research taking place at Cambridge, and how it relates to the negotiations taking place in Paris.

“The Paris summit is hugely significant, but it will be primarily focused on the political issues surrounding climate change,” said Professor Peter Haynes of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, and one of the founding members of CCfCS. “There’s a breadth of climate-related research in science and technology happening at the University, and we want to continue to build on that.”

Speakers at Monday’s event will be Sir David King, UK Special Representative for Climate Change, who played a key role in many of the pre-Paris negotiations; Professor Sir Richard Friend from the University’s Cavendish Laboratory, who will discuss future energy prospects; Dr Emily Shuckburgh from the British Antarctic Survey, who will share her personal view of what we know and what we don't know about climate science; and Professor John Pyle from the Department of Chemistry, who will discuss why the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer worked, and why similar protocols to control carbon emissions have been much more difficult.

The Cambridge Centre for Climate Science (CCfCS) has been established to promote research and other activities in Climate Science going on at several Departments of the University of Cambridge (Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Archaeology, Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Geography, Plant Sciences and Scott Polar Research Institute) and at the British Antarctic Survey.

All members of the University are welcome to attend – the full programme is available here. Online registration, while not required, would be helpful for the organisers to determine numbers. 

Anyone who’s watched a cat throwing up after munching on grass knows that our feline friends aren’t natural plant eaters. So you might be surprised to discover that these carnivorous animals share some important genes that are more typically associated with herbivores. And this might help explain why cats aren’t always easy to please when it comes to food.

New research suggests that cats possess the genes that protect vegetarian animals from ingesting poisonous plants by giving them the ability to taste bitter. Animals use their sense of taste to detect whether a potential food is nutritious or harmful. A sweet taste signals the presence of sugars, an important source of energy. A bitter taste, on the other hand, evolved as a defence mechanism against harmful toxins commonly found in plants and unripe fruits.

Evolution has repeatedly tweaked animals' taste buds to suit various dietary needs. Changes in an animal’s diet can eliminate the need to sense certain chemicals in food, and so receptor genes mutate, destroying their ability to make a working protein.

One example of this comes from strictly meat-eating cats, who can no longer taste sweetness. But if bitter detection evolved to warn of plant toxins, then it stands to reason that cats, which (usually) eschew plants, shouldn’t be able to taste bitter either. Humans and other vegetable-munching animals can taste bitter because we possess bitter taste receptor genes. If cats have lost the ability to taste bitterness, we should find that their receptor genes are riddled with mutations.

Geneticists at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia scoured the genome of cats and other carnivorous mammals like dogs, ferrets, and polar bears to see if our carnivorous cousins have bitter genes. They were surprised to find that cats have 12 different genes for bitter taste. Dogs, ferrets, and polar bears are equally well endowed. So, if meat eating animals are unlikely to encounter any bitter morsels, why do they boast genes for tasting bitterness?

Taste test

To find out, Peihua Jiang, a molecular biologist at Monell, put cat taste buds to the test. He inserted the cat taste receptor gene into human tissue cells in the lab. When combined, the cell and the gene act as a taste receptor that responds to chemicals dropped onto it.

Jiang discovered that the cat’s taste receptors responded to bitter chemicals found in toxic plants and to compounds that also activate human bitter receptors. The cat bitter taste receptor, known as Tas2r2, responded to the chemical denatonium benzoate, a bitter substance commonly smeared on the fingernails of nail-biting children.

So why have cats retained the ability to detect bitter tastes? Domestic cats owners know how unpredictable cats' dietary choices can be. Some of the “presents” cats bring to their owners include frogs, toads, and other animals that can contain bitter and toxic compounds in their skin and bodies. Jiang’s results show that bitter receptors empower cats to detect these potential toxins, giving them the ability to reject noxious foods and avoid poisoning.

But how often do meat-loving cats actually get exposed to bitter and toxic compounds in their diet, compared with the plethora of plant toxins that their vegetarian counterparts have to contend with? Jiang suggests this is not enough to explain why cats have retained such an arsenal of receptors.

Instead, cat taste receptors may have evolved for reasons other than taste. In humans, bitter taste receptors are found not only in the mouth, but also in the heart and in the lungs, where they are thought to detect infections. It remains to be seen if feline bitter receptor genes also double-up as disease detectors.

The discovery of feline bitter receptors might explain why cats have got a reputation as picky eaters. But their unfussy canine counterparts have a similar number of bitter taste receptors – so why are cats so finicky? One answer might lie in how the cat receptors detect bitter-tasting compounds. Research published earlier this year by another team of researchers showed that some of the cat taste receptors are especially sensitive to bitter compounds, and even more sensitive to denatonium than the same receptor in humans.

Perhaps cats are also more sensitive to bitter chemicals than dogs, or they may detect a greater number of bitter compounds in their everyday diet. Food that tastes bland to us or to a dog could be an unpleasant gastronomic experience for cats. So rather than branding cats as picky, perhaps we should think of them as discerning feline foodies.

Hannah Rowland, Lecturer in Ecology and Evolution & Research Fellow at Zoological Society of London, University of Cambridge

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the University of Cambridge.

The first sequencing of ancient genomes extracted from human remains that date back to the Late Upper Palaeolithic period over 13,000 years ago has revealed a previously unknown “fourth strand” of ancient European ancestry.

This new lineage stems from populations of hunter-gatherers that split from western hunter-gatherers shortly after the ‘out of Africa’ expansion some 45,000 years ago and went on to settle in the Caucasus region, where southern Russia meets Georgia today.

Here these hunter-gatherers largely remained for millennia, becoming increasingly isolated as the Ice Age culminated in the last ‘Glacial Maximum’ some 25,000 years ago, which they weathered in the relative shelter of the Caucasus mountains until eventual thawing allowed movement and brought them into contact with other populations, likely from further east.

This led to a genetic mixture that resulted in the Yamnaya culture: horse-borne Steppe herders that swept into Western Europe around 5,000 years ago, arguably heralding the start of the Bronze Age and bringing with them metallurgy and animal herding skills, along with the Caucasus hunter-gatherer strand of ancestral DNA – now present in almost all populations from the European continent.

The research was conducted by an international team led by scientists from Cambridge University, Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin. The findings are published today in the journal Nature Communications.       

“The question of where the Yamnaya come from has been something of a mystery up to now,” said one of the lead senior authors Dr Andrea Manica, from Cambridge’s Department of Zoology.

“We can now answer that as we’ve found that their genetic make-up is a mix of Eastern European hunter-gatherers and a population from this pocket of Caucasus hunter-gatherers who weathered much of the last Ice Age in apparent isolation. This Caucasus pocket is the fourth major strand of ancient European ancestry, one that we were unaware of until now,” he said   

Professor Daniel Bradley, leader of the Trinity team, said: “This is a major new piece in the human ancestry jigsaw, the influence of which is now present within almost all populations from the European continent and many beyond.”

Previously, ancient Eurasian genomes had revealed three ancestral populations that contributed to contemporary Europeans in varying degrees, says Manica.

Following the ‘out of Africa’ expansion, some hunter-gatherer populations migrated north-west, eventually colonising much of Europe from Spain to Hungary, while other populations settled around the eastern Mediterranean and Levant, where they would develop agriculture around 10,000 years ago. These early farmers then expanded into and colonised Europe.  

Lastly, at the start of the Bronze Age around 5,000 years ago, there was a wave of migration from central Eurasia into Western Europe – the Yamnaya.

However, the sequencing of ancient DNA recovered from two separate burials in Western Georgia – one over 13,000 years old, the other almost 10,000 years old – has enabled scientists to reveal that the Yamnaya owed half their ancestry to previously unknown and genetically distinct hunter-gatherer sources: the fourth strand.

By reading the DNA, the researchers were able to show that the lineage of this fourth Caucasus hunter-gatherer strand diverged from the western hunter-gatherers just after the expansion of anatomically modern humans into Europe from Africa.  

The Caucasus hunter-gatherer genome showed a continued mixture with the ancestors of the early farmers in the Levant area, which Manica says makes sense given the relative proximity. This ends, however, around 25,000 years ago – just before the time of the last glacial maximum, or peak Ice Age.

At this point, Caucasus hunter-gatherer populations shrink as the genes homogenise, a sign of breeding between those with increasingly similar DNA. This doesn’t change for thousands of years as these populations remain in apparent isolation in the shelter of the mountains – possibly cut off from other major ancestral populations for as long as 15,000 years – until migrations began again as the Glacial Maximum recedes, and the Yamnaya culture ultimately emerges. 

“We knew that the Yamnaya had this big genetic component that we couldn’t place, and we can now see it was this ancient lineage hiding in the Caucasus during the last Ice Age,” said Manica.

While the Caucasus hunter-gatherer ancestry would eventually be carried west by the Yamnaya, the researchers found it also had a significant influence further east. A similar population must have migrated into South Asia at some point, says Eppie Jones, a PhD student from Trinity College who is the first author of the paper.

“India is a complete mix of Asian and European genetic components. The Caucasus hunter-gatherer ancestry is the best match we’ve found for the European genetic component found right across modern Indian populations,” Jones said. Researchers say this strand of ancestry may have flowed into the region with the bringers of Indo-Aryan languages.   

The widespread nature of the Caucasus hunter-gatherer ancestry following its long isolation makes sense geographically, says Professor Ron Pinhasi, a lead senior author from University College Dublin. “The Caucasus region sits almost at a crossroads of the Eurasian landmass, with arguably the most sensible migration routes both west and east in the vicinity.”

He added: “The sequencing of genomes from this key region will have a major impact on the fields of palaeogeneomics and human evolution in Eurasia, as it bridges a major geographic gap in our knowledge.”

David Lordkipanidze, Director of the Georgian National Museum and co-author of the paper, said: “This is the first sequence from Georgia – I am sure soon we will get more palaeogenetic information from our rich collections of fossils.”

Inset image: the view from the Satsurblia cave in Western Georgia, where a human right temporal bone dating from over 13,000 years ago was discovered. DNA extracted from this bone was used in the new research.

Reference:
E.R. Jones et. al. ‘Upper Palaeolithic genomes reveal deep roots of modern Eurasians.’ Nature Communications (2015). DOI: 10.1038/ncomms9912

There is concern among some policymakers that the UK is not as good as it might be at turning its world-class research into thriving industries and businesses. In recent years, the UK government has been looking for new and more reliable ways to ensure valuable innovations can cross the so-called ‘valley of death’ – the point at which they often fail to translate into a technology that can be scaled up and commercialised. However, for government initiatives to be effective, the people who design them (and invest taxpayers’ money in funding them) and the people who put them into practice need to have a better understanding both of the technologies themselves and of the industries within which they are deployed.

Which is where Cambridge’s Institute for Manufacturing’s Centre for Science, Technology and Innovation Policy (CSTI) comes in. 

Before coming to the IfM, its founder and director, Dr Eoin O’Sullivan, was part of the team that set up Science Foundation Ireland. Encounters with research councils and government agencies informed his view that much of the R&D and innovation policy research coming out of universities was ineffective in informing the strategies and programmes of innovation agencies because it was not getting to the right level of detail with regard to technologies and manufacturing systems.

He contends: “For some innovation policy challenges you need to open up the ‘black box’, particularly when you are looking at the specific needs of a new research field or emerging technology. If you don’t do that, the people who are making policy and investment decisions about which technologies, manufacturing processes and sectors to support are doing it in the dark.”

O’Sullivan joined the IfM in 2007, working initially on its Emerging Industries programme. He was also on part-time secondment to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), giving him the opportunity to further explore its evidence needs first hand and to make sure that relevant findings from Emerging Industries were communicated to the right people in BIS, Innovate UK (then TSB) and the research councils. Then, in 2012, with funding from the Gatsby Foundation, he was able to establish the CSTI – a new research centre dedicated to doing the kinds of research which would provide policy practitioners with evidence that could offer firm foundations for their decision-making.

At first glance, the IfM may not seem to be the obvious home for an innovation policy research unit. They tend to be found in business schools or economics faculties. But the CSTI is embedded within a research environment which is actively engaged in understanding the whole spectrum of manufacturing activity, from cutting edge work in nano- and ultra-precision manufacturing processes and production technologies, through product design, technology and innovation management to global supply chains and developing new service-oriented and sustainable business models. This means that policy research here is surrounded by – and highly attuned to – the real manufacturability, scale-up, operational and management challenges that emerging science and technologies face.

But it is not just absorption by osmosis, useful though that is. CSTI offers policy research support to a number of IfM research programmes, including the ‘Bit-by-Bit’ project, which is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Economic and Social Research Council, and is looking at the interconnected technological, commercial and policy issues around the emergence of 3D printing. It is also collaborating with a new IfM research group, Fluids in Advanced Manufacturing, through the ‘Pathways to Manufacturing’ project, which, again, is concerned with the risks and challenges associated with manufacturing a new technology at a commercial scale.  

Forging connections with researchers beyond the IfM is also important. O’Sullivan believes that to understand fully the economic aspects of emerging technologies, engineers, economists and management researchers need to pool their expertise: no one discipline is capable of making significant progress on its own. The Babbage Industrial Network is a CSTI-hosted initiative designed to share ideas and develop a common language across these different specialisms.

As well as making connections across the research community – and contributing to their research findings and recommendations – it is vital for the CSTI team to have close working relationships with government and agency officials in order to understand their evidence needs and, where possible, co-design research projects to address them. 

To this end, there is a steady two-way flow of traffic between CSTI and government departments. Research Associate Dr Charles Featherston, for example, has spent time embedded within the manufacturing policy team at BIS, looking at how different policy levers can be used to nurture emerging manufacturing technologies. Paul McCaffrey, based in the Government Office of Science and project manager for the Government’s recent Foresight project on the future of manufacturing, came to the IfM to reflect on what had been learnt from running the Foresight exercise and to integrate those findings with CSTI’s analysis of how such things are done in other countries. Belinda Clarke, now the Director of AgriTech East, spent time at CSTI in 2014, while she was the lead technologist for Synthetic Biology at Innovate UK, building an evidence base for her calls for funding.

CSTI is also directly involved in developing and delivering services that IfM Education and Consultancy Services (IfM ECS) provides to national and regional governments around the world, helping them understand the global industrial landscape, their place within in it and the opportunities and challenges they face. This includes work IfM ECS is currently doing on behalf of BIS and Innovate UK, looking at high value manufacturing in the UK in order to prioritise investment in key areas of potential growth. 

CSTI’s research addresses a range of difficult questions. What kinds of infrastructure, for example, does an emerging technology need as it ‘pushes’ out of the science base? As a country adopts more proactive industrial sector strategies, what are the particular competitiveness challenges faced by each sector for which there may be innovation, technology or R&D solutions? Standards and regulations are also important: knowing the ‘rules of the game’ and the very direct effect they have on the context for emerging technologies and industries.

University–industry knowledge exchange is another of CSTI’s core research themes. The distinctive CSTI approach is also evident here: getting into the details of the technology to unpick why it is that programmes work for some categories of technology and for certain types of maturity in certain sectors, and not in others. Research Associate Tomas Coates Ulrichsen recently ran a US–UK workshop on long-term strategic partnerships with participants from Berkeley, MIT and Georgia Tech as well as GSK, Boeing and Rolls-Royce. O’Sullivan explained: “By involving the right people and really drilling down into the detail, we uncovered some interesting implications for universities and funding bodies, arising from the fact that big companies are increasingly choosing to work with just a handful of world-class universities.”

Turning science into technologies and then into economic wealth is an international race. To have any chance of competing, policymakers need to understand what makes some countries faster and better at it than others. This has become a key focus of CSTI activity and the team has developed a robust framework for undertaking country comparisons. It recently contributed to the Hauser report on the UK’s Catapult network, looking at how similar bodies work in other countries and what lessons might be learnt for the UK. The team is currently working on a study commissioned by the EPSRC on how different countries are investing in quantum technologies.

In addition to these comparative studies, Research Associate, Dr Carlos López-Gómez, has established a series of International Policy Forums, at which academics and policymakers come together to understand how policy institutions and processes work in different countries. Three have been held so far, focusing on Japan, Singapore and Germany. Carlos is about to go on secondment jointly with the University of Tokyo and the Centre for Research and Development Strategy, part of the Japanese Science and Technology Agency. He will be looking at the role of government-funded bodies – akin to Catapults – which support the translation of science into commercially successful technologies.

CSTI has also been centrally involved in setting up a more policy–practice series of international workshops, convened by IfM, at which senior UK government, agency and industrial representatives build closer links with their counterparts in key countries and share their experiences and best practice. So far, workshops have been held in Japan, India and the USA (at the White House). Another is planned for Berlin early next year, looking particularly at foresight exercises and emerging technology strategy development, with participation from the BIS Innovation Directorate and the Government Office for Science. 

Ultimately, all these countries are facing similar challenges: how do they develop effective policies for manufacturing, for key technologies and sectors and how do they join all of that into a coherent industrial strategy? Getting this right, clearly, has enormous implications for national prosperity. By working with scientists, engineers, management researchers and economists and by not being afraid to open up that ‘black box’, the CSTI team at Cambridge is doing something new and distinctive. O’Sullivan said: “We like to think we are providing a certain type of research-based but practical evidence which is of real value to policymakers and programme planners and which no-one else is really geared up to give them.”

This article was originally published in The IfM Review

The study, led by the University of Cambridge in collaboration with Durham University, Macquarie University, and Trinity College Dublin, found that reductions in the length of the paracingulate sulcus (PCS), a fold towards the front of the brain, were associated with increased risk of hallucinations in people diagnosed with schizophrenia.

The PCS is one of the last structural folds to develop in the brain before birth, and varies in size between individuals. In a previous study, a team of researchers led by Dr Jon Simons from the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge, found that variation in the length of the PCS in healthy individuals was linked to the ability to distinguish real from imagined information, a process known as ‘reality monitoring’.

In this new study, published today in the journal Nature Communications, Dr Simons and his colleagues analysed 153 structural MRI scans of people diagnosed with schizophrenia and matched control participants, measuring the length of the PCS in each participant’s brain. As difficulty distinguishing self-generated information from that perceived in the outside world may be responsible for many kinds of hallucinations, the researchers wanted to assess whether there was a link between length of the PCS and propensity to hallucinate.

The researchers found that in people diagnosed with schizophrenia, a 1 cm reduction in the fold’s length increased the likelihood of hallucinations by nearly 20%. The effect was observed regardless of whether hallucinations were auditory or visual in nature, consistent with a reality monitoring explanation.

“Schizophrenia is a complex spectrum of conditions that is associated with many differences throughout the brain, so it can be difficult to make specific links between brain areas and the symptoms that are often observed,” says Dr Simons. “By comparing brain structure in a large number of people diagnosed with schizophrenia with and without the experience of hallucinations, we have been able to identify a particular brain region that seems to be associated with a key symptom of the disorder.”

The researchers believe that changes in other areas of the brain are likely also important in generating the complex phenomena of hallucinations, possibly including regions that process visual and auditory perceptual information. In people who experience hallucinations, these areas may produce altered perceptions which, due to differences in reality monitoring processes supported by regions around the PCS, may be misattributed as being real. For example, a person may vividly imagine a voice but judge that it arises from the outside world, experiencing the voice as a hallucination.

“We think that the PCS is involved in brain networks that help us recognise information that has been generated ourselves,” adds Dr Jane Garrison, first author of the study, “People with a shorter PCS seem less able to distinguish the origin of such information, and appear more likely to experience it as having been generated externally.

“Hallucinations are very complex phenomena that are a hallmark of mental illness and, in different forms, are also quite common across the general population. There is likely to be more than one explanation for why they arise, but this finding seems to help explain why some people experience things that are not actually real.”

The research was primarily supported by the University of Cambridge Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute, funded by a joint award from the UK Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust.

Reference
Garrison, J.R., Fernyhough, C., McCarthy-Jones, S., Haggard, M., The Australian Schizophrenia Research Bank, & Simons, J.S. (2015). Paracingulate sulcus morphology is associated with hallucinations in the human brain. Nature Communications, 6, 8956.

A century after Sir Ernest Shackleton’s plan to cross Antarctica was dashed on the ice, the relatives of his party’s chief scientific officer are planning to complete their ancestor’s unfinished journey.

Next week, members of the family of James Wordie, geologist and chief scientific officer on Shackleton’s ill-fated Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914-1917, will mark its centenary by setting out on an expedition to the frozen continent. The group of 12, led by noted explorer David Hempelman-Adams, plan to walk and ski the final leg of Shackleton’s intended route to the South Pole, arriving on December 15, almost 100 years after Shackleton hoped to do so himself.

As well as commemorating the anniversary of one of the most dramatic episodes from the heroic age of Antarctic exploration, the project - Endurance 100 - has been devised to encourage fundraising for the creation of a digital legacy that will benefit future generations. The intention is to raise enough money to digitise Wordie’s diaries, and relevant papers belonging both to him and other members of the Endurance expedition. These will be made available for public research with the help of St John’s College, Cambridge, where Wordie was a student, Fellow, and later Master; and the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge.

Enough has already been acquired to begin work on a pilot stage of the project, which involves digitising Wordie’s Weddell Sea diary, which he kept whilst aboard Shackleton’s ship, Endurance. Famously, the crew were forced to abandon ship after the Endurance became icebound. They then drifted on ice floes for several months before reaching Elephant Island, which was uninhabited. From there, Shackleton and five others made a daring, 800-mile sea crossing to South Georgia, from where a rescue was mounted. Wordie’s account concludes in November 1916, when all 28 of the crew returned home.

The remarkably detailed volumes capture the spirit, courage and determination of men trapped in gruelling conditions in Antarctica for nearly two years. They also include Wordie’s scientific considerations and environmental observations, which it is believed will be of significant interest to historians and the scientific community today.

The digitised records will be held by the Scott Polar Research Institute, while a printed copy will be kept at St John’s College. Both institutions have actively supported the project, in particular by hosting fundraising events for the initial digitisation.

The South Pole expedition marks the next phase of the fundraising campaign. It was conceived by Tim Holmes, head of Cambridge property company Endurance Estates, and his wife, Alice, who is Wordie’s granddaughter and an alumna of St John’s. The campaign has also been supported by the novelist and former SAS Sergeant Andy McNab, who has helped to train the group and will be part of the expedition.

While in Antarctica, the team will carry out their own studies, including a psychological evaluation of stress and mood in extreme environments by Medical Officer, Dr Patrick Gillespie, who is another graduate of the College.

“In walking the last 100 miles to the South Pole, this completes some unfinished family business, but it is also a way to understand the hardships and to remember the heroism of those who set out 100 years ago,” Mr Holmes said.

“As a team we feel that one of the best legacies of our trip would be the creation of an archive covering Wordie and the other members of the Endurance expedition, so that their narrative can be available to anyone interested in polar science, its history, and climate change.”

Originally from Glasgow, Wordie was just 25 when Shackleton recruited him for the trans-Antarctic expedition, which he described as the final, “one great main object of Antarctic journeying.” Wordie was fit, young and an experienced Alpine climber, and hoped to be chosen as part of the shore party crossing coast to coast via the Pole.

Instead, the expedition became a famous tale of adventure and survival. Wordie, who was one of those waiting on Elephant Island for four months, is credited with having played a vital role in maintaining morale, and also continued to record scientific findings in his notebook throughout.

It was merely the first chapter in a distinguished career that included eight further polar expeditions, active service in the First World War, an intelligence role in the Second World War, roles at SPRI and the Falkland Island Dependency Survey, and numerous publications. The Wordie Ice Shelf, which broke away from the Antarctic continent due to global warming in 2009, was one of several polar landmarks named in his honour.

In later life, he became one of the more prominent figures in British polar exploration. Most expeditions sought his counsel before departure and he supported and inspired a younger generation of adventurers, including Gino Watkins, Launcelot Fleming, and Vivian Fuchs. Fuchs, a graduate of St John’s, in 1957-1958 led the expedition team that completed the first overland crossing of Antarctica, finally realising the ambitions of Wordie’s own party more than 40 years previously.

It is estimated that the full cost of creating a digital archive could be as much as £50,000, which the Endurance 100 team has set as its initial target. For more information, visit: http://endurance100.org/

“It was already looking at me when I saw it. As it started moving down the hill towards me, I was very aware that I was alone, with the others far ahead and out of sight. I started running down the trail, and could hear its bell jangling as it came after me. Ahead was a plank bridge spanning the rushing torrents and boulders below, and I thought: ‘If it overtakes me on this, if I go over, that’s it.’ By the time I made it across to the shelter of an overhanging rock, my heart was racing and I was shaking. Like many prominent features in this sacred landscape, the rock was inscribed with a mantra, and indeed the very one I’d been reciting as I flew across that bridge.”

Few people have found themselves chased by a yak in the course of their academic research – but that’s what happened to Dr Riamsara Kuyakanon Knapp while studying for her PhD in Cambridge’s Department of Geography. She recalls: “Looking at the photo I took at the time, I can see that it’s blurry because I was trembling and gasping to catch my breath. The yak pursuing me down the trail was a female, or dzo in the local language, and looks quite amicable in retrospect, but I wasn’t taking any chances!”

Her encounter with this female yak took place four years ago high in the Bhutan Himalaya. Yaks are powerfully built and not easily intimidated, and females are known to be protective of their young. Kuyakanon Knapp explains: “I think she was certainly on the lookout – I don’t know why she came after me, perhaps her calf was nearby, somewhere among the herd that was grazing in the rhododendron understory of the ancient evergreen forest. Grazing land in Bhutan, as elsewhere in the Himalaya, isn’t just grassy pastures but also comprises forest understory.”

Bhutan is famous for being the last Buddhist Himalayan kingdom, and is also renowned as a conservation landscape, due to its abundant forests and wildlife. Kuyakanon Knapp’s research focuses on understanding this cultural landscape, how people and environment interact to create a specific sense of “place” and, in particular, on the relationship between environmental conservation and Buddhist beliefs at multiple sites and scales. On the day of her yak encounter, Kuyakanon Knapp was on a pilgrimage trail, which passes through a remote region where the only inhabitants are monastics and herders who pasture their yaks in the high Himalaya during the summer. During the harsh winters yaks are brought down to ‘lower’ altitudes, around 3,500 metres above sea-level.

Yak herding has been part of life in the Himalayas for centuries, and yaks are uniquely adapted to their extreme environments, able to travel through and find forage in thick snow. The domesticated yak (Bos grunniens or ‘grunting ox’) provides most of the resources needed for survival in a tough environment. Its meat is a precious source of protein. Milk from female yaks is drunk raw and churned to make butter and cheese. The animal’s wiry outer wool is used to make yarn for weaving into material for tents and blankets and its under-layer of softer fibre used to make clothing that keeps out the bitter winter cold.

Nothing produced by the yak is wasted. In Tibet, coracles for ferrying across the wide, rapid rivers were made from yak hide – a material that is both light and strong – stretched over a flexible willow frame. Dried yak dung fuels the portable stoves used for cooking. Last but not least, the sturdy yak is used for traction and transport over terrain far too rough for a vehicle.

Kuyakanon Knapp says: “The yak is an integral part of high-altitude livelihoods, particularly in Bhutan, but also throughout the Himalayas, Tibet and Central Asia. They are a much prized and beloved livestock, and yak-rearing knowledge is something people are proud of. In addition to the animals’ practical place in community livelihoods, yaks have a place in legends, songs and festivals. Deities are supplicated and propitiated so that they will safeguard the welfare of herds.” The semi-nomadic Brokpa people of eastern Bhutan have a very special yak cham or ‘yak dance’, and the high-altitude village of Ura in central Bhutan has both the yak lha propitiation ceremony, and yak choe annual festival. Researcher Dr Karma Phuntsho (formerly at Cambridge’s Department of Social Anthropology) has written evocatively about how globalisation manifests in the changing practices a village festival.

Yak herders know their environment intimately, and this knowledge is culturally encoded, as seminal studies by Bhutanese scholars, such as Dasho Karma Ura of the Centre for Bhutan Studies in Thimphu, have shown. Building on this, conservation efforts by the Royal Government of Bhutan, the Bhutan Foundation and WWF have enlisted the help of herders to camera-trap the elusive snow leopard in order to better understand the ecology of this endangered species. The award-winning film The Yak Herder’s Son documents the friendship between a national park ranger and a young yak herder, asking the vital question of how all those who share the land – livestock, predator, herder, ranger – can live together in harmony.

For centuries, Bhutan, a Buddhist Himalayan kingdom, was effectively ‘closed’ to visitors and even today visas are hard to obtain. “As a researcher seeking permission to visit or work in Bhutan, you are likely to go through a rigorous application process. It’s very important to respect national and cultural sensibilities. Accountability and collaboration are essential, as they should be everywhere, but unfortunately this isn’t always the case. Especially in western or Euro-centric knowledge production, there is a real history of colonial extraction and appropriation that we need to be aware of and resist, as it still exists,” says Kuyakanon Knapp.

Westernised urbanites tend to romanticise life in stunningly beautiful and remote areas – and to lament the passing of traditional ways of life - but the reality of making ends meet for the average herder or farmer is far from idyllic. Like everyone else, Bhutanese farmers and villagers want to enjoy some of life’s comforts and for their children to attend school and have more choices.  “Families want to have electricity in their homes, to cook rice and watch television, to have serviceable roads and cars for accessing markets and healthcare,” says Kuyakanon Knapp.

“Despite these shifts, the role of religion and religious devotion in daily life remain great, and this is what drew me to working in Bhutan, to understand a way of modernising without severing culture and tradition. It is deeply impressive to see that, on a fundamental level, most people in the countryside still value spiritual well-being above material well-being. The state is trying to ensure that this need not be a mutually exclusive choice through the Gross National Happiness (GNH) developmental framework.”

The Himalayas have long been a magnet for western travellers, who have included mountaineers, naturalists and collectors. Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) holds an exceptional collection of photographs taken by Frederick and Margaret Williamson, who took advantage of a colonial posting in Sikkim to travel extensively in the region during the 1930s. The adjacent Haddon Library for archaeology and anthropology has a collection of some 62,000 publications gathered over nearly 90 years, including rare books relating to the Himalayas.

“I’ll not forget the time I went into the Haddon and first picked up Nari Rustomji’s Bhutan Venture: A Guest at the Royal Court, documenting his trip to Bhutan in the 1955. He was, in his own words, ‘the first Indian after independence’ to visit Bhutan, which ‘was then regarded, like Tibet, as the forbidden land’. Written in ink on the fly leaf was that this book was a gift to the Haddon Library from the author, via the managers of the Frederick Williamson Memorial Fund. It was a direct connection to the past, to lived experience, and to the thinking and life history of a key historical actor. Rustomji’s admiration for the Bhutanese, and his travels in Bhutan took me straight back to my fieldwork year,” says Kuyakanon Knapp.

“Later I went and looked at some of the images in the Williamson Collection, and also read Margaret Williamson’s book Memoirs of a Political Officer's Wife in Tibet, Sikkim and Bhutan which includes a wonderful description of travelling on the back of a pony and then a yak in the 1930s.”

In recollections published in 1987, Williamson paints a vivid picture of the journey she undertook with her husband. “Having passed a moraine and the Tsogyu lake, we exchanged our ponies for sure-footed yaks, which were better-suited to high-altitude travelling. Mine was a nice, brown, silken-haired animal. We climbed higher and higher until we reached the foot of the glacier. On the way we passed more lakes and also saw some bharal (wild blue sheep). It was hard going even for yak over the ice, but in two and a half hours we reached the Mon-la Kar Chung pass … Gigantic crags … reared up on all sides, with the snow and ice on their knife-edged ridges glistening brilliantly in the crisp morning sunshine. Derrick [Frederick] and I stood there, utterly amazed at the sublime beauty and grandeur of the Himalayas.”

Next in the Cambridge Animal Alphabet: Z is for a transparent animal that provides a surprisingly good model for studying tuberculosis.

Have you missed the series so far? Catch up on Medium here.

Inset images: Travelling by yak in the 1930s, Tibet (©MAA N.101191.WIL, photograph taken by Frederick Williamson); Ku-Dru (Yak skin boats) in Tibet (©MAA N.103814.WIL, photograph by Frederick Williamson); The yak choe festival in the village or Ura (Riamsara Kuyakanon Knapp).

Are there actually Martians out there? Could life survive in boiling water? And more importantly, what is your dog really thinking?

If these are the sort of questions that keep you awake at night, then help is finally at hand, in the form of a new website created by a team of scientists at Cambridge and featuring contributions from a host of leading academics.

Named Forty Two (after Douglas Adams’ famously cryptic solution to the meaning of life), the site is an online resource dedicated to the subject of evolution, and includes video interviews in which researchers including Sir David Attenborough, Simon Conway Morris, Eugene Koonin, and Carenza Lewis offer their views on topics ranging from the nature of evolution itself, to the future of life as we know it.

Aimed at general readers and, in particular, young people who are just starting to get into science, its aim is to provide an innovative and authoritative source of information about evolution on the web.

Its creators also hope to demonstrate that evolution is a subject that is, in itself, evolving. To prove this, the site uses the study of evolution to attempt to answer a host of knotty problems drawn from the fringes of current scientific understanding – questions such as “Can you have blue blood?”, “Do insects copulate with flowers?” and “Can you see heat?”

The site was created by a team led by Simon Conway Morris, Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology and a Fellow of St John’s College at the University of Cambridge. “Evolution is true, and if it didn’t happen, we wouldn’t be here,” he said. “Like all the sciences, evolution is constantly, well, evolving. New insights and unexpected discoveries combine with seeing old things in a completely new light. It is active, dynamic, changing and unpredictable. We wanted to create a website that captures the excitement and thrill of that exploration.”

The site features a unique video archive that collects the thoughts of leading scientists around the world. The most familiar, Sir David Attenborough, is, for example, captured reflecting with troubling pessimism about the future of the planet, in response to the question: “Are you optimistic about the human species?” “The truthful answer is that I am not,” he replies. “It seems to me almost inevitable that things are going to get worse before they get better… and the only way that we can stop that is by reducing carbon emissions very, very quickly indeed.”

Around that archive, the website’s designers have constructed a living database of information about evolutionary studies that illustrates the scope and scale of the scientific discussion that Darwin brought to the fore of public debate more than 150 years ago.

Dr Victoria Ling, from the University’s Department of Earth Sciences, said: “When you type ‘evolution’ into Google you get a lot of information, not all of which is very reliable, but even the sources that are reliable can inadvertently give the impression that evolution was ‘solved’ with Darwin. In fact, evolution remains a vibrant area of research and there’s an awful lot left to learn. We wanted to produce a site which showcases that ongoing discussion, one which has plenty of serious content, but also a strong sense of fun.”

The core material is divided into three main subject areas: “Here And Now”, for topics on which the scientific community has reached a rough consensus; “Near Horizons”, for nagging questions that are hotly debated; and “Far Horizons”, for really big issues that sit at the edge of current knowledge.

Users can also play a careers game that takes a light-hearted look at some of the real tasks real scientists can end up doing in the course of their work. This is personalised to the user’s interests based upon their answers to the questions “What am I into?” “How does my mind work?” and “Where is my focus?”. Historians can meanwhile delve into a selection of potted biographies of scientific pioneers, ranging from familiar figures such as Darwin himself, to lesser-sung heroes and heroines, such as the 19th-century fossil collector Mary Anning, and the American cytogeneticist Barbara McClintock.

Perhaps, however, the site’s most revelatory feature is its selection of Q&A topics so bizarre that they periodically sound more like something out of science fiction, as Douglas Adams himself might have hoped.

Who knew, for example, that rattlesnakes really can “see” heat, in a manner of speaking, thanks to evolved pits close to the front of their faces that relay information about thermal contrasts to the same part of the brain that registers information from the eyes? Or that dogs, which have evolved alertness to human gestures but appear to lack self-awareness may simply be part of a greater consciousness that we ourselves have yet to fathom?

As for the Martians, the answer remains similarly unclear, but Conway-Morris suggests that we might be looking at the wrong planet for alien life. One theory has it that Venus could technically be inhabited by aerial microbes – something equivalent to the extremophiles found on Earth – ekeing out their existence amid the sulphuric clouds shrouding the planet.

“Even today maybe Venusian aerial life wafts its way across the 25 million miles or so of space that separate us,” Conway Morris writes. “Unlikely? Most certainly. Impossible? Perhaps not.”

For more, visit: http://www.42evolution.org/

Additional images taken from www.42evolution.org. 

Do the ethics of a person’s negotiating tactics differ when they negotiate with someone from a different country? A new study co-authored at University of Cambridge Judge Business School suggests that they do.

While some prior studies have looked at the relative negotiating ethics of different nationalities, the new study, entitled “How ethically would Americans and Chinese negotiate? The effect of intra-cultural versus inter-cultural negotiations”, published in the Journal of Business Ethics looks at a significant new factor: it finds that the nationality of the counterparty to negotiations can make people prefer the use of more or less ethical strategies, particularly in areas such as false promises and inappropriate information gathering.

“Business is increasingly global, so ethical concerns are becoming more important in terms of cross-national business and negotiations,” said co-author David De Cremer, KPMG Professor of Management Studies at Cambridge Judge. “This study shows that the other party’s nationality can affect the ethics of negotiating tactics, and this has important implications.”

The study is co-authored by Yu Yang of ShanghaiTech University, David De Cremer of Cambridge Judge Business School, and Chao Wang of the University of Illinois.

The study looks specifically at negotiations between Americans and Chinese, and doesn’t compile data involving other nationalities – but it suggests that the findings are not restricted to negotiations between US and Chinese nationals.

“Our current analysis suggests that people may change their use of ethically questionable tactics when they negotiate with someone from a different country,” the study says. “In negotiations, people adopt different models of what is ethically acceptable for themselves in intra-cultural versus inter-cultural situations.”

Specifically, the study found that American participants were more likely to use “ethically questionable” tactics in negotiations with Chinese (particularly related to dubious information gathering and false promises) than in negotiations with fellow Americans; for their part, Chinese participants were less likely to use ethically questionable tactics in negotiations with Americans (particularly related to false promises and “attacking the opponent’s network,” such as attempting to get the counterparty fired so a new person will take their place) than in intra-cultural negotiations with other Chinese.

“The US and China are currently the two largest economies in the world,” the study says. “Given the importance and complexity of this bilateral relationship, we must address how negotiations in such circumstances are shaped, particularly with respect to the norms and ethics being used when the representatives of both countries approach each other.”

The study is based on 389 American and 421 Chinese participants, all over age 22, with the vast majority employed and with at least some college education.

Participants were outlined a scenario: “You are the lead negotiator for a company that manufactures heavy equipment,” and are about to negotiate a deal to sell expensive excavators; the market is very competitive and your company has not met recent targets, and “if this sale is not secured your company will incur a loss.”

Each person works for a company located either in the US state of Illinois or in Hunan, China; the only variable is the counterparty (and their presumed nationality), who is located either “nearby” in your own country or “far away” (in the US or China), named either “Justin Adams” or “Jia Liu.”

Participants were asked, on a scale of one to seven, their likelihood of using 16 “ethically questionable” (in various degrees) negotiation strategies. In five broad categories, these strategies comprise false promises, misrepresentation to strengthen negotiating position, inappropriate information gathering about the counterparty’s negotiating position, attacking the opponent’s network, and “traditional” competitive bargaining such as inflated opening demands.

The study then calculated participants’ likelihood of overall use of ethically questionable negotiation tactics, as well as a breakdown by category.

“American participants were significantly more likely to use ethically questionable negotiation tactics in inter-cultural negotiations (Mean 3.00) with Chinese counterparts than in intra-cultural negotiations (Mean 2.75) with American counterparts. By contrast, Chinese participants were marginally less likely to use such tactics in inter-cultural negotiations (Mean 3.92) with American counterparts than in intra-cultural negotiations (Mean 4.06) with Chinese counterparts.”

The study concludes: “As current business relationships are increasingly built on a global level, ethical concerns will become an even more important issue in future cross-national business negotiations. As such, we strongly believe that a more nuanced understanding of ethical practices in different countries needs to be developed.”

Reference:
Yu Yang et. al. 'How ethically would Americans and Chinese negotiate? The effect of intra-cultural versus inter-cultural negotiations'. Journal of Business Ethics (2015). DOI: 10.1007/s10551-015-2863-2

Originally published on the Cambridge Judge Business School website. 

The Paris climate talks hope to set out how we can reduce the amount of carbon we’re pumping into the atmosphere. But emissions cuts alone may not be enough. Atmospheric CO₂ is the blanket that keeps our planet warm and any further emissions will mean more global warming. Observations in recent years show that warming is accelerating, that polar ice and glaciers are all melting, that sea level is rising … it all looks rather bleak.

Could we directly engineer the climate and refreeze the poles? The answer is probably yes, and it could be a cheap thing to achieve – maybe costing only a few billion dollars a year. But doing this – or even just talking about it – is controversial.

Some have suggested there is a good business case to be made. We could carefully engineer the climate for a few decades while we work out how to reduce our dependency on carbon, and by taking our time we can protect the global economy and avoid financial crises. I don’t believe this argument for a minute, but you can see it’s a tempting prospect.

Reflecting the sun

One option might be to reflect some of the sun’s energy back into space. This is known as Solar Radiation Management (SRM), and it is the most viable climate engineering technology explored so far.

For instance we could spray sea water up out of the oceans to seed clouds and create more “whiteness”, which we know is a good way to reflect the heat of the sun. Others have proposed schemes to put mirrors in space, carefully located at the point between the sun and the Earth where gravity forces balance. These mirrors could reflect, say, 2% of the sun’s rays harmlessly into space, but the price tag puts them out of reach.

Perhaps a more immediate prospect for cooling the planet is to spray tiny particles high up into the stratosphere, at around 20km altitude – this is twice as high as normal commercial planes fly. To maximise reflectivity these particles would need to be around 0.5 micrometres across, like the finest of dust.

We know from large volcanic eruptions that particles injected at high altitude cool the planet. The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines is the best recent example. It is estimated that more than 10m tonnes of sulphur dioxide were propelled into the high atmosphere and it quickly formed tiny droplets of sulphuric acid (yes, the same stuff found in acid rain) which reflected sunlight and caused global cooling. For about a year after Pinatubo the Earth cooled by around 0.4℃ and then temperatures reverted to normal.

I was involved recently in the SPICE project (Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering) and we looked at the possibility of injecting all sorts of particles, including titanium dioxide, which is also used as the pigment in most paints and is the active ingredient in sun lotion.

The technology to deliver these particles is crazy – we looked at pumping them in a slurry up to 20km into the air using a giant hose suspended by a huge helium balloon. A small-scale experiment was cancelled because even it proved too controversial, too hot. Imagine if we demonstrate that this technology can work. Politicians could then claim there was a technical “fix” for climate change so there would be no need to cut emissions after all.

But this isn’t a ‘quick fix’

There are so many problems with climate engineering. The main one is that we have only one planet to work with (we have no Planet B) and if we screw this one up then what do we do? Say “sorry” I guess. But we’re already screwing it up by burning more than 10 billion tonnes of fossil fuels a year. We have to stop this carbon madness immediately.

Engineering the climate by reflecting sunlight doesn’t prevent more CO₂ being pumped into the atmosphere, some of which dissolves in the oceans causing acidification which is a problem for delicate marine ecosystems.

There is therefore a strong imperative to remove the 600 billion tonnes of fossil carbon that we’ve already puffed into the air in just 250 years. This is known as Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR).

We must work fast to cut our carbon emissions and at the same time we should explore as many climate engineering options as possible, simultaneously. However while reflecting sunlight may be an idea that buys us some time it is absolutely not a solution for climate change and it is still vital that we cut our emissions – we can’t use climate engineering as a get-out clause.

Hugh Hunt, Reader in Engineering Dynamics, University of Cambridge

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the University of Cambridge.