Hide and Seek: Looking for Children in the Past opens today and runs until January 29, 2017, at Cambridge University’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, bringing together collections held by the University and Cambridgeshire County Council.

Unprecedented in its scope and ambition, Hide and Seek examines why so little is known about the life of children when children have outnumbered adults for most of human history.

Some of the objects on display will be familiar: Roman and medieval dolls are exhibited next to a children’s sledge and a Roman baby’s feeding bottle. Other exhibits, however, are not immediately recognisable as children’s objects at all: pots with small fingerprints, a tiny handmade axe made 400,000 years ago, gold-work as fine as a human hair; each have stories to tell about the children whose lives were intertwined with the objects now on display in the 21st century.

By looking carefully at all of this evidence, exhibition curator Jody Joy hopes the year-long show will redress our paucity of understanding about the ways in which youngsters interacted with both the adult and childhood worlds around them.

“Hide and Seek looks for glimpses of children’s lives in East Anglia and across England, from a child’s footprint made one million years ago, to toys and artefacts from the 20th century,” said Joy. “Children’s stories so rarely feature in the narratives that museums present. This exhibition aims to redress the balance.

“It is difficult to find children in the past, but not impossible. Throughout the show we present new research and interpretations to help provide a better understanding of children’s lives and to challenge our own assumptions about children and childhood.

“14th century illustrations from an illuminated manuscript show us that children in the 1300s enjoyed sledging and skating just as much as we do now. But we also want to show that evidence for the lives of children can be found beyond the obvious.”

To that end, the exhibition also looks past the artefacts of childhood such as toys, children’s clothes and burials. Local crime records, for example, reveal the sorry tale of 13-year-old Thomas Bradley from Burwell in Cambridgeshire, who in 1843 was sentenced to 15 years’ transportation to Australia for setting fire to stacks of corn and straw.

Likewise, an indenture document for ten-year-old Amey Basin, signed on May 11, 1764, outlines her apprenticeship to Thomas Wayman Sr, a dairyman, until she reached 21 or was married; and explains the responsibilities and expectations of apprentices and their employers in 18th century England.

Other exhibits, such as a pair of 19th century children’s handcuffs and a coroner’s report regarding the death of three-year-old Michael Higgins in 1837, illuminate the innumerable perils facing children throughout history.

“It was dangerous being a child in the past,” added Joy. “From prehistory until the Victorian period, 30-50 per cent of children did not survive to adulthood. Disease, germs and household accidents all took their toll.”

Perhaps some of the most challenging and uncomfortable exhibits in display are the artefacts speaking of the death and burial of children.

In 1990, the grave of a one-year-old Roman child was found in Cambridgeshire. Now on display at the museum, the body had been carefully placed in a lead coffin much too large for the infant inside. A wooden box full of ceramic figures was placed on top of the coffin before burial, although it is unknown whether these were intended as toys or religious items. Sometimes, the evidence on display raises more questions than answers.

Concluding the exhibition, the remains of an Anglo-Saxon girl (hidden behind a partition), challenges visitors to consider the often grey area between childhood and adulthood.

In 2010, the body, believed to be aged between 12-15 years old, was unearthed alongside the finest grave goods from an extraordinary 5th-6th century burial site. It is rare to find child burials from the Anglo-Saxon period despite children outnumbering adults and despite the high infant mortality rate. Archaeologists think children may have been buried in different ways to adults, and the fragile bones of infants do not survive long in the soil.

The burial site was discovered in Oakington, just north of Cambridge. Excavators were surprised to find an exceptionally high proportion of child burials. Nearly half of the burials discovered belonged to individuals under the age of 12, and 27 per cent of the 128 burials were children under six; many containing small vessels which researchers are now analysing to identify their contents and understand more about the young children who were buried with them.

Added Joy: “The skeleton is of an individual we would regard as a child, but she has been buried as if she were an adult. Ongoing research, new discoveries and excavations help us develop our understanding of children’s lives. Each new discovery can enrich our understanding of what life was like for children in the past.”

Other key exhibits include:

• Baby feeding bottles from the Roman and Victorian periods
• A bracelet for a Roman child
• 19th century samplers, stitched by three generations from the same family
• Some of the oldest marbles ever found in England

Hide and Seek: Looking for Children in the Past runs from January 30, 2016 to January 29, 2017. The exhibition has been funded by a generous grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund. It is a joint project between Cambridgeshire County Council and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Entry is free.

The combination of erosion and melting ice caps led to a massive increase in volcanic activity at the end of the last ice age, according to new research. As the climate warmed, the ice caps melted, decreasing the pressure on the Earth’s mantle, leading to an increase in both magma production and volcanic eruptions. The researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, have found that erosion also played a major role in the process, and may have contributed to an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.

“It’s been established that melting ice caps and volcanic activity are linked – but what we’ve found is that erosion also plays a key role in the cycle,” said Dr Pietro Sternai of Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences, the paper’s lead author, who is also a member of Caltech’s Division of Geological and Planetary Science. “Previous attempts to model the huge increase in atmospheric CO₂ at the end of the last ice age failed to account for the role of erosion, meaning that CO₂ levels may have been seriously underestimated.”

Using numerical simulations, which modelled various different features such as ice caps and glacial erosion rates, Sternai and his colleagues from the University of Geneva and ETH Zurich found that erosion is just as important as melting ice in driving the increase in magma production and subsequent volcanic activity. The results are published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Although the researchers caution not to draw too strong a link between anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change and increased volcanic activity as the timescales are very different, since we now live in a period where the ice caps are being melted by climate change, they say that the same mechanism will likely work at shorter timescales as well.

Over the past million years, the Earth has gone back and forth between ice ages, or glacial periods, and interglacial periods, with each period lasting for roughly 100,000 years. During the interglacial periods, such as the one we live in today, volcanic activity is much higher, as the lack of pressure provided by the ice caps means that volcanoes are freer to erupt. But in the transition from an ice age to an interglacial period, the rates of erosion also increase, especially in mountain ranges where volcanoes tend to cluster.

Glaciers are considered to be the most erosive force on Earth, and as they melt, the ground beneath is eroded by as much as ten centimetres per year, further decreasing the pressure on the volcano and increasing the likelihood of an eruption. A decrease in pressure enhances the production of magma at depth, since rocks held at lower pressure tend to melt at lower temperatures.

When volcanoes erupt, they release more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, creating a cycle that speeds up the warming process. Previous models that attempted to explain the increase in atmospheric CO₂ during the end of the last ice age accounted for the role of deglaciation in increasing volcanic activity, but did not account for erosion, meaning that CO₂ levels may have been significantly underestimated.

A typical ice age lasting 100,000 years can be characterised into periods of advancing and retreating ice – the ice grows for 80,000 years, but it only takes 20,000 years for that ice to melt.

“There are several factors that contribute to climate warming and cooling trends, and many of them are related to the Earth’s orbital parameters,” said Sternai. “But we know that much faster warming that cooling can’t be caused solely by changes in the Earth’s orbit – it must be, at least to some extent, related to something within the Earth system itself. Erosion, by contributing to unload the Earth’s surface and enhance volcanic CO₂ emissions, may be the missing factor required to explain such persistent climate asymmetry.”

Reference:
Pietro Sternai et al. ‘Deglaciation and glacial erosion: a joint control on magma productivity by continental unloading.’ Geophysical Research Letters (2016). DOI: 10.1002/2015GL067285

​Inset image: 3D model simulation of a glaciation on the Villarrica Volcano (Chile). Credit: Pietro Sternai

The brain is an organ of extraordinary complexity. At a genetic level, over half of our genes are dedicated to the brain – building it and keeping it functional over a lifetime. At a cognitive level, the brain controls the ways we react to every situation and how the consequences of these reactions, according to reward or punishment, shape us as individuals.

To understand these things at a mechanistic level is a huge challenge – one that transcends biology. It increasingly involves novel alliances with mathematicians, physical scientists, computational scientists, psychologists and philosophers, and yields intellectual capital that stretches from pharmacology, psychiatry and philosophy through to education, engineering, ethics and economics.

When it became clear nearly ten years ago that neuroscience was growing at an extraordinarily fast rate and across a huge range of disciplinary lines, the University set up Cambridge Neuroscience (see panel). Today this Strategic Research Initiative consists of over 700 researchers in more than 60 different departments across the University of Cambridge and its local institutes.

However, despite the incredible advances in science and technology that we have witnessed over the past century, we have not yet seen them translated into benefits for tackling brain disease in the same way as has been the case for cancer. The human brain with its approximately 10 billion neurons making 10 trillion synapses is clearly the most complex puzzle on the planet, and there are a myriad of ways it can go wrong or deteriorate. Translational research – which promises to translate the fundamental advances of neuroscience to progress in the understanding and treatment of brain and mental health disorders – has therefore become the cornerstone of Cambridge Neuroscience.

Dementia is one area where there is an urgent need to capitalise on the innovative research taking place and translate discoveries into effective treatments. In February 2015, the Prime Minister set out the government’s latest phase of its national programme to tackle one of the biggest global health and social care challenges, stating that it aims for England to be “the best place in the world” to undertake research into dementia and other neurodegenerative diseases.

To this end, Alzheimer’s Research UK (ARUK) announced Europe’s first Drug Discovery Institutes (DDIs) for neurodegenerative diseases that cause dementia in late 2013. This ambitious initiative is a network of three DDIs, based at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford and University College London. The ARUK Cambridge DDI will build collaborations between Cambridge researchers, developing drug discovery projects based on the world-leading research carried out at the University. Led by drug discovery experts working in partnership with many of the UK’s academic leaders in this area, the alliance aims to attract 90 scientists across the three DDIs, all focused on neurodegenerative diseases. It now forms one of the largest and most coordinated efforts to find new drugs for dementia.

Cambridge Neuroscience also has a formidable track record when it comes to breaking down the barriers between science and business. A three-year collaboration between AstraZeneca, MedImmune and Cambridge Neuroscience, agreed in 2014, with a total value of approximately $6 million focuses on advancing research and development in neurodegenerative diseases. Scientists from all three parties are collectively addressing gaps in drug discovery, translational biomarkers and personalised healthcare approaches for diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis. This type of strategic partnership promotes an increased understanding of disease mechanisms and enables work in basic neuroscience to address unmet therapeutic needs in a variety of serious neurodegenerative diseases.

Another recent example of Cambridge Neuroscience working innovatively in partnership with industry and other universities is a Wellcome Trust Strategic Award for Neuroimmunology of Mood Disorders and Alzheimer’s Disease. This major consortium, led from Cambridge, brings together Janssen, GSK, Lundbeck and Pfizer, as well as academics from Oxford, King’s College London, Southampton, Cardiff, Glasgow and Sussex, to explore the novel idea that immunological and inflammatory mechanisms may contribute to depression and dementia. One potential advantage of this strategy is that many anti-inflammatory drugs have already been developed for disorders like rheumatoid arthritis. So, if the consortium can discover the specific immune mechanisms implicated in these neuropsychiatric disorders, there is an opportunity to “repurpose” existing medicines to deliver therapeutic impact more rapidly than the 15–20 year timeline of a more conventional drug development project.

In 2014, Cambridge received a number of prestigious awards from the Medical Research Council totalling up to £28 million, which have provided funding for a new ultra-high field 7T magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) system, a new combined positron emission tomography (PET)/MRI system, an upgraded 3T MRI system, and expanded and enhanced radiochemistry facilities, as well as equipment for high-performance computing to handle the large quantities of data generated by the new scanners. Funding from the University will additionally support procurement of a new 9.4T MRI system for animal neuroimaging. This will help us develop new ways of classifying and simulating brain disease in animals, leading to better diagnosis and more effective drug discovery in humans.

Looking to the future, our aim is for these significant advances in imaging technology and expertise to help bring together basic and clinical neuroscientists with a focus on understanding and treatment of mental health symptoms in a proposed Centre for the Translational Neuroscience of Mental Health.

In September 2016, Cambridge Neuroscience will graduate from being a Strategic Research Initiative to become one of the University’s first Interdisciplinary Research Centres, demonstrating the University’s commitment to maintaining Cambridge’s position as a world class leader in multi-disciplinary neuroscience research.

Our aim is to maintain high standards of creativity and innovation in our approach to studying the brain in order to meet some of the greatest scientific challenges of the 21st century: understanding how brains are organised and grow, how they function normally to produce thoughts and feelings, how they can be affected by disease to cause neurological and mental health symptoms and, ultimately, how we can find better treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia, autism and many other disabling disorders of brain and mind.    

Neuroscience and brain research will be celebrated in a public festival planned for 16–18 September 2016 in Cambridge. For more details, see www.neuroscience.cam.ac.uk/events

Professor Ed Bullmore and Professor Bill Harris are Co-Chairs and Dr Dervila Glynn is the Coordinator of Cambridge Neuroscience.

Bridget Kendall joined the BBC in 1983 as a trainee for the BBC World Service and over her career has become one of the Corporation’s most respected international correspondents, with 30 years of experience of reporting from the field. She served as BBC Moscow correspondent and BBC Washington correspondent.

Since 1998 she has held the senior role of BBC Diplomatic correspondent, reporting on and analysing major global crises and conflicts, and their impact on Britain and the world.

She will take up office in July 2016 and succeeds Professor Adrian Dixon, who has been Master since 2008.

Professor Dixon said: “This is a great day in the evolving history of Peterhouse. Bridget will bring to the College her exceptional skills in communication and knowledge of international affairs. She also provides an outstanding role model for students and young academics alike.

“Peterhouse has enjoyed great benefit by electing Masters from a wide range of backgrounds: these include the Church, the Armed Forces, the Diplomatic Services as well as Academia. A distinguished BBC correspondent brings yet a new dimension and I greatly look forward to working with Bridget during the summer handover.”

As a former Moscow correspondent and fluent Russian speaker, she has a particular interest in Russia and its relations with the West.  She witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union at first hand, as well as conflicts in Chechnya, Georgia, Tadjikistan, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Ukraine.

She has conducted interviews with a range of international leaders, including British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, US President George H Bush, Hillary Clinton, King Abdullah of Jordan, President Yushchenko of Ukraine, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia. She has also twice conducted long interviews with President Vladimir Putin, broadcast live from inside the Kremlin in 2001 and 2006.

Since 2008 she has been the principal host of The Forum, the BBC World Service flagship discussion programme which is also broadcast on Radio Four, and which brings together top global thinkers from a range of disciplines to highlight cutting edge research and explore new ideas. 

"I feel very privileged to have been chosen by the Fellows of Peterhouse to be their next Master,” Bridget Kendall said. This is an exceptional College with a distinguished history and record of academic excellence. It represents all that is best about Cambridge University.

“On my visits to the College I have been struck by its friendly atmosphere and the way it has turned its reputation of being the University's oldest and smallest college to its advantage: balancing a respect for traditions with a readiness to adapt and innovate, and remaining small enough to foster an intimate environment, yet seek engagement with the wider world. I am thrilled to be joining the College and look forward to collaborating with everyone at Peterhouse on the challenges and opportunities ahead." 

She was the first woman to win the coveted James Cameron Award for distinguished journalism in 1992 in recognition of her reports on events in the former Soviet Union. Later that year, she won a Bronze Sony Radio Award for Reporter of the Year and received an MBE in the 1994 New Year's Honours list.

Bridget Kendall is on the Advisory Board of Wilton Park and a Visiting Professor at Lincoln University. She is a former Trustee of Asia House and was a Council member for the Royal United Services Institute.

She was educated at the Perse School for Girls, Cambridge (now The Stephen Perse Foundation). She read modern languages at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, spending two years in Russia on British Council Scholarships in 1977 and 1982. 

Examining the conversion journeys of nearly fifty British men of all ages, ethnicities and faiths, Narratives of Conversion to Islam in Britain: Male perspectives, allows an unprecedented examination of the challenges and concerns facing converts to Islam in the UK today.

The landmark report, produced by Cambridge’s Centre of Islamic Studies, captures the isolation and dislocation felt by many new converts, and the sense of being a ‘minority within a minority’ as they adjust to life as a follower of one of the most maligned and misunderstood faiths in the UK.

With converts drawn from white, black and South Asian backgrounds from across the UK, Cambridge assembled nearly 50 British males over the course of the 18-month project in an attempt to understand and record the experiences of British male converts to Islam. The converts came from a diverse range of geographical and socio-economic backgrounds.

The Male perspectives report follows Cambridge’s hugely successful report into female conversion in 2013 (http://bit.ly/1lNy3tW) which has been downloaded more than 150,000 times from the Centre of Islamic Studies’ website and attracted widespread media coverage.

Speaking under Chatham House Rules, the converts gathered together in Cambridge over three weekends to record their responses to a wide-ranging list of themes, questions and provocations.

Among the key findings to emerge from the Male perspectives project were:

• There is often targeting of converts by the British Security Services to work as informants
• White converts lose their white privilege on conversion
• Conversion to Islam in prison is usually driven by a desire to instil discipline into a prisoner’s life. But upon release, Muslims find little support from their families or Muslim communities, increasing the risk of reoffending
• Converts live in a liminal space: cut off from their families and friends and only tenuously integrated within heritage Muslim communities.
• Recognition that women converts experience worse hardships through wearing the hijab and other religious dress
• There are many routes to Islam: love and marriage; friendship; conviction and rational choice; music, arts, architecture and pondering the beauty of the universe

Shahla Awad Suleiman, Teaching and Outreach Associate at the Centre of Islamic Studies, and Project Manager of the report, said: “Narratives of Conversion sets out the contours of the relationship between converts and heritage Muslims, warts and all, and builds on the findings of our hugely successful work with female converts.

“Allowing our male converts to set the agenda and speak frankly and openly about the very real issues they have to face and wrestle with has given us – and anyone who reads the report – real insight into the challenges facing 21st century converts to Islam.”

Professor Yasir Suleiman, Director of Cambridge’s Centre of Islamic Studies, said: “In the West, conversion to Islam has been tarnished by claims of extremism (violent and non-violent), radicalisation, and, sadly, terrorism. It has also fallen victim to the general apathy towards faith in largely secular societies causing those who convert to be described by some as not only eccentrics, misfits, outcasts and rebels, but also as renegades, traitors or enemies of a fifth column who have turned their back on their original culture(s).

“Converts can be made to feel outsiders from the lives they have left behind and as new members of the faith they have embraced upon conversion. This report reveals that conversion to Islam is as much as matter of the head as it is for the heart and soul.

“What this report also illuminates is the importance of convert-specific organisations. There is not enough support for the convert community as things stand. But by sharing their experiences frankly and honestly, this diverse group of converts revealed a profound sense of their pride in both Islam and their British heritage, despite the often negative portrayal of converts in the mainstream press.”

Other topics discussed in the report include the mixed response of heritage Muslims to converts, homosexuality and polygyny.

Although the symposium and reports were conducted under conditions of anonymity (quotes are not attributed within the report), several of the converts have agreed to speak on the record about their conversion experiences.

Abdul Maalik Tailor, who converted to Islam from Hinduism, and now runs Islamic-themed tours of London, suffered considerably after converting.

“A number of things happened to me when I embraced Islam twenty years ago,” he said. “It was a very challenging time and an experience I won’t forget about. I suffered physical and emotional abuse from my family. It was a very testing time.

“For myself and other brown converts, it always goes back to the issue of partition between India and Pakistan and Bangladesh. My relatives thought I had become brainwashed. I was basically given an ultimatum: give up the religion or get out. I was 18 at the time. And I had to leave after being beaten up.

“A year later my father passed away and there was an expectation that I had to fulfil all the Hindu rituals as I was the only son. I had to say, ‘I can’t do it’, which was a challenge; I would have preferred to have a lot more support from the Muslim community at that time.”

Another participant, Adrian (Jamal) Heath, said: “I always joke with people that it’s a bit like ‘coming out’ and I’ve discovered a lot of people who concealed this until the later stages. I was exposed as a Muslim to friends and family inadvertently and my parents took it hard. They didn't came to my wedding. I was also subject to some ridicule at work, which I now look back on as completely unacceptable in the modern world. I was ridiculed for my prayer times and to my face by people who had education and should have known better.

“As a white man in modern Britain, I’d never come across the feeling of being in a minority before and that actually quite shocked me.”

Another theme that provoked widespread discussion was the media portrayal of Muslims.

Convert Warren (Raiyyan) Clementson said: “Generally speaking, when I see converts on TV, they have been radicalised or involved in extremist activity. So for me personally, it’s a double whammy. Firstly, the negative portrayal of Muslims as a whole and within that, a sub-context of the convert community being portrayed in a radical light, or that they’re most susceptible to ideologies of violence. Being a convert myself, and having met so many other converts, this is a fallacy.”

Abdul Maalik Tailor questioned why there seemed to be such a propensity for negativity in the portrayals of both Islam and converts to the religion.  

“You find a number of stories that concentrate on radicalisation. If there are successful Muslim converts who have contributed to society and to Britain, they won’t get highlighted by the media. Why do the media have a set agenda to try and demonise us?”

Shahla Awad Suleiman added: “By pulling together these narratives of conversion we have dealt with topics of enormous importance, not just to Muslims, but British society at large.

“There is now a need for more work on the friends and families of converts, heritage Muslims’ views and reception of converts, the children of converts, and more work on conversion to Islam in Britain away from the security prism.”

The report Narratives of Conversion to Islam in Britain: Male Perspectives can be downloaded here: http://www.cis.cam.ac.uk/ 

The honorary degree of Doctor of Law was conferred on the Secretary-General in recognition of his humanitarian work, support for women’s rights and achievements in pursuit of global peace and security.

The honour comes in Mr Ban’s last year as Secretary-General of the United Nations, a position he has held since 1 January 2007.

He took his bachelor's degree in international relations at Seoul National University before earning a master's degree in public administration at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

At the time of his election as Secretary-General, Mr Ban was South Korea's Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

His 37 years of service with that Ministry included postings in New Delhi, Washington DC and Vienna, and a variety of portfolios, including foreign policy and national security.

 Mr Ban’s ties to the UN date back to 1975, when he worked for the Ministry's UN Division.

His extensive diplomatic efforts have helped to put climate change at the forefront of the global agenda, while his notable support of women’s rights, including backing for many high-profile campaigns, has seen the creation of the agency UN Women, plus the establishment of a new Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict.

Throughout his time at the UN, he has driven forward improvements to the UN peacekeeping operations.

Accountability for violations of human rights has received high-level attention through inquiries related to Gaza, Guinea, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, legal processes in Lebanon and Cambodia, and advocacy for the "responsibility to protect," the new UN norm aimed at preventing or halting genocide and other grave crimes.

He has also worked to strengthen humanitarian response in the aftermath of disasters in Myanmar (2008), Haiti (2010) and Pakistan (2010), and mobilised UN support for the democratic transitions in North Africa and the Middle East.

Mr Ban has also increased efforts to rejuvenate the disarmament agenda.

The University has been conferring honorary degrees for some 500 years.

One of the earliest recorded ceremonies was in 1493, when the University honoured the poet John Skelton. An honorary degree is the highest accolade the University can bestow.

Researchers have constructed the first comprehensive model of how neurons in the brain behave when faced with a complex decision-making process, and how they adapt and learn from mistakes.

The mathematical model, developed by researchers from the University of Cambridge, is the first biologically realistic account of the process, and is able to predict not only behaviour, but also neural activity. The results, reported in The Journal of Neuroscience, could aid in the understanding of conditions from obsessive compulsive disorder and addiction to Parkinson’s disease.

The model was compared to experimental data for a wide-ranging set of tasks, from simple binary choices to multistep sequential decision making. It accurately captures behavioural choice probabilities and predicts choice reversal in an experiment, a hallmark of complex decision making.

Our decisions may provide immediate gratification, but they can also have far-reaching consequences, which in turn depend on several other actions we have already made or will make in the future. The trouble that most of us have is how to take the potential long-term effects of a particular decision into account, so that we make the best choice.

There are two main types of decisions: habit-based and goal-based. An example of a habit-based decision would be a daily commute, which is generally the same every day. Just as certain websites are cached on a computer so that they load faster the next time they are visited, habits are formed by ‘caching’ certain behaviours so that they become virtually automatic.

An example of a goal-based decision would be a traffic accident or road closure on that same commute, forcing the adoption of a different route.

“A goal-based decision is much more complicated from a neurological point of view, because there are so many more variables – it involves exploring a branching set of possible future situations,” said the paper’s first author Dr Johannes Friedrich of Columbia University, who conducted the work while a postdoctoral researcher in Cambridge’s Department of Engineering. “If you think about a detour on your daily commute, you need to make a separate decision each time you reach an intersection.”

Habit-based decisions have been thoroughly studied by neuroscientists and are fairly well-understood in terms of how they work at a neural level. The mechanisms behind goal-based decisions however, remain elusive.

Now, Friedrich and Dr Máté Lengyel, also from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, have built a biologically realistic solution to this computational problem. The researchers have shown mathematically how a network of neurons, when connected appropriately, can identify the best decision in a given situation and its future cumulative reward.

“Constructing these sorts of models is difficult because the model has to plan for all possible decisions at any given point in the process, and computations have to be performed in a biologically plausible manner,” said Friedrich. “But it’s an important part of figuring out how the brain works, since the ability to make decisions is such a core competence for both humans and animals.”

The researchers also found that for making a goal-based decision, the synapses which connect the neurons together need to ‘embed’ the knowledge of how situations follow on from each other, depending on the actions that are chosen, and how they result in immediate reward.

Crucially, they were also able to show in the same model how synapses can adapt and re-shape themselves depending on what did or didn’t work previously, in the same way that it has been observed in human and animal subjects.

“By combining planning and learning into one coherent model, we’ve made what is probably the most comprehensive model of complex decision-making to date,” said Friedrich. “What I also find exciting is that figuring out how the brain may be doing it has already suggested us new algorithms that could be used in computers to solve similar tasks,” added Lengyel.

The model could be used to aid in the understanding of a range of conditions. For instance, there is evidence for selective impairment in goal-directed behavioural control in patients with obsessive compulsive disorder, which forces them to rely instead on habits. Deep understanding of the underlying neural processes is important as impaired decision making has also been linked to suicide attempts, addiction and Parkinson's disease.

Reference:
Johannes Friedrich and Máté Lengyel. ‘Goal-Directed Decision Making with Spiking Neurons.’ The Journal of Neuroscience (2016). DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2854-15.2016

In the fifth year of the Syrian refugee crisis, donors and humanitarian agencies still remain unsure about which policies and interventions have been most effective, and continue to rely on a largely reactive response, say a group of researchers, aid workers and Syrian medical professionals.

Response approaches to date have often been short-termist, sometimes duplicating work and have very little evidence of effectiveness or impact, they say.

As national leaders and UN delegates gather in London today for the Support Syria Donor Conference, members of the Syrian Public Health Network warn that unless aid is provided on condition of evidence-gathering and transparency so funding can be directed to interventions that work, the health, education and livelihoods of refugees will continue to deteriorate.

They caution that Syrians in neighbouring countries such as Lebanon and Jordan – where services are stretched to breaking point – will suffer the most from ineffective interventions unless governments and NGOs of wealthy nations to do more to link allocation of donor funds to evidence, something that Network members have highlighted in a briefing for the UK's Department for International Development.

“A focus on health and health services is notably absent in the donor conference agenda yet it is a fundamental determinant on the success of education and livelihoods policies,” said Dr Adam Coutts, Cambridge University researcher and member of the Syria Public Health Network.

“What funding there is for refugee healthcare risks disappearing unless governments insist on an evidence basis for aid allocation, similar to that expected in domestic policy-making.

“It is estimated that there are now over 4.3 million Syrian refugees in neighbouring frontline countries, and over half these people are under the age of 18. This level of displacement is unprecedented and given how short funds are, we need to be sure that programmes work,” said Coutts, from Cambridge's Department of Politics and International Studies.

“New ideas and approaches need to be adopted in order to reduce the massive burdens on neighbouring frontline states.”

Researchers say that the health response should do more to address the so-called ‘non-communicable diseases’ which ultimately cause more deaths: slow, silent killers such as diabetes, heart disease and, in particular, mental disorders. This means moving towards the development of universal health care systems in the region and building new public health services.

The calls for more evidence come on the back of an article published last week in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, in which members of the Syria Public Health Network (SPHN) address the response to mental disorders among displaced Syrians.

Clinics in some camps in Turkey and Lebanon report almost half of occupants suffering from high levels of psychological distress. However, many Syrians in neighbouring countries live outside the camps – up to 80% in Jordan, for example – which means cases are unreported. 

In Lebanon, despite political commitment to mental health, there are just 71 psychiatrists, mostly in Beirut.

“The implementation of short-term mental health interventions which often lack culturally relevant or practically feasible assessment tools risk diverting funds away from longer term, evidence based solutions,” said Coutts.

Moreover, a shortage of Syrian mental health professionals – less than 100 prior to the conflict has now fallen to less than 60 – is worsened by some neighbouring countries preventing Syrian doctors of any specialism from practising. Along with Physicians for Human Rights, SPHN members are calling for restrictions to be lifted on practising licenses for displaced Syrian health professionals.  

“To date Syrian medical workers in Lebanon and Jordan are a largely untapped workforce who are ready to work and help with the response. However, due to labour laws and the dominance of private health service providers it is very difficult if not impossible for them to work legally,” said SPHN member Dr Aula Abbara.

Emerging evidence from the Syrian crisis, as well as evidence from previous conflicts, is pointing to psychological treatments which show some effectiveness:

Pilot studies with refugees in Turkish camps using ‘telemental’ projects, the delivery of psychiatric care through telecommunications, suggest that such techniques are effective in supporting healthcare professionals on the ground.

The ‘teaching recovery techniques’ method is designed to boost children’s capacity to cope with the psychological aftermath of war. These techniques have been used in communities in the aftermath of major natural disasters and conflicts, and have shown promise.

While SPHN members caution that adequate testing of these interventions is required, they argue that this is precisely the point: more evidence of what works.

Added Coutts: “A more scientific approach is needed so that precious and increasingly scarce financial aid is put to the most effective use possible. At the moment, NGOs and governments are not making sufficient reference to evidence in determining health, education and labour market policies for the largest displacement of people since World War Two.”    

Research for a new book has shown how his beloved library may have contributed to his death, and how his passion for music led him to the love of his life: a French dancer with whom he had two children, ‘Fitz’ and ‘Billy’.

The Fitzwilliam Museum: a History is written by Lucilla Burn, Assistant Director for Collections at the Fitzwilliam. She said: “Lord Fitzwilliam’s life has been described as ‘deeply obscure’. Many men of his class and period, who sought neither fame nor notoriety, nor wrote copious letters or diaries, do not leave a conspicuous record. But by going through the archives and letters that relate to him, for the first time we can paint a fuller picture of his history, including aspects of his life that have previously been unknown, even to staff here at the Fitzwilliam.”

Lord Fitzwilliam died on the 4th of February 1816, and founded the Fitzwilliam Museum through the bequest to the University of Cambridge of his splendid collection of art, books and manuscripts, along with £100,000 to build the Museum. This generous gift began the story of one of the finest museums in Britain, which now houses over half a million artworks and antiquities.

Other than his close connection to Cambridge and his love of art and books, a motivation for Fitzwilliam’s bequest may have been his lack of legitimate heirs. The new details of his mistress help to explain why he never married.

In 1761 Richard Fitzwilliam entered Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and in 1763 his Latin ode, Ad Pacem, was published in a volume of loyal addresses to George III printed by the University of Cambridge. He made a strong impression on his tutor, the fiercely ambitious Samuel Hallifax, who commissioned Joseph Wright of Derby to paint a fine portrait of Fitzwilliam on his graduation with an MA degree in 1764.

Fitzwilliam’s studies continued after Cambridge; he travelled widely on the continent, perfecting his harpsichord technique in Paris with Jacques Duphly, an eminent composer, teacher and performer. A number of Fitzwilliam’s own harpsichord compositions have survived, indicating he was a gifted musician.
But from 1784 he was also drawn to Paris by his passionate attachment to Marie Anne Bernard, a dancer at the Opéra whose stage name was Zacharie. With Zacharie, Fitzwilliam fathered three children, two of whom survived infancy – little boys known to their parents as ‘Fitz’ and ‘Billy’. How the love affair ended is unknown, but its fate was clouded, if not doomed, by the French Revolution.

We do not know what happened to Zacharie after her last surviving letter, written to Lord Fitzwilliam late in December 1790. Her health was poor, so it is possible that she died in France. However, the elder son, ‘Fitz’, Henry Fitzwilliam Bernard, his wife Frances and their daughter Catherine were alive and living in Richmond with Lord Fitzwilliam at the time of the latter’s death in 1816. It is not known what happened to ‘Billy’.

At the age of seventy, early in August 1815, Lord Fitzwilliam fell from a ladder in his library and broke his knee. This accident may have contributed to his death the following spring; and on 18 August that year Fitzwilliam drew up his last will and testament. Over the course of his life he had travelled extensively in Europe; by the time of his death he had amassed around 144 paintings, including masterpieces by Titian, Veronese and Palma Vecchio, 300 carefully ordered albums of Old Master prints, and a magnificent library containing illuminated manuscripts, musical autographs by Europe’s greatest composers and 10,000 fine printed books.

His estates were left to his cousin’s son, George Augustus Herbert, eleventh Earl of Pembroke and eighth Earl of Montgomery. But he also carefully provided for his relatives and dearest friends. The family of Fitzwilliam’s illegitimate son, Henry Fitzwilliam Bernard (‘Fitz’), including his wife and daughter, received annuities for life totalling £2,100 a year.
On his motivation for leaving all his works of art to the University, he wrote: “And I do hereby declare that the bequests so by me made to the said Chancellor Masters and Scholars of the said University are so made to them for the purpose of promoting the Increase of Learning and the other great objects of that Noble Foundation.”

Fitzwilliam Museum Director Tim Knox said: “The gift Viscount Fitzwilliam left to the nation was one of the most important of his age. This was the period when public museums were just beginning to emerge. Being a connoisseur of art, books and music, our Founder saw the importance of public collections for the benefit of all. But we are also lucky that his life circumstances enabled him to do so - had there been a legitimate heir, he might not have been able to give with such liberality. From the records we have discovered he appears to have been as generous as he was learned: he arranged music concerts to raise funds for charity, and helped many people escaping the bloodiest moments of the French Revolution. We are delighted to commemorate our Founder in our bicentenary year.”

Exhibitions and events for the Fitzwilliam Museum’s Bicentenary will be taking place throughout 2016. These include two key exhibitions opening in February, a retrospective of its history, Celebrating the First 200 Years: The Fitzwilliam Museum 1816 – 2016, and a major exhibition of Egyptian antiquities, Death on the Nile: Uncovering the afterlife of ancient Egypt. For more information visit www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk.

The idea that different populations of cells compete within the body, with winners and losers, was discovered in the 1970s and is thought to be a ‘quality control’ mechanism to rid the tissue of damaged or poorly-performing cells. With the discovery that genes involved in cancer promote this process, scientists have speculated that so-called ‘cell competition’ might explain how tumours grow within our tissues.

Now, researchers at the Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge, have used fruit flies genetically manipulated to develop intestinal tumours to show for the first time that as the tumour grows and its cells proliferate, it kills off surrounding healthy cells, making space in which to grow. The results of the study, funded by Cancer Research UK, are published in the journal Current Biology.

Image: Tumour cells (green) growing in the intestine of a fruit fly. Credit: Golnar Kolahgar

Dr Eugenia Piddini, who led the research, believes the finding may answer one of the longstanding questions about cancer. “We know that as cancer spreads through the body – or ‘metastasises’ – it can cause organ failure,” she says. “Our finding suggests a possible explanation for this: if the tumour kills surrounding cells, there will come a point where there are no longer enough healthy cells for the organ to continue to function.”

The cancer cells encourage a process known as apoptosis, or ‘cell death’, in the surrounding cells, though the mechanism by which this occurs is currently unclear and will be the subject of further research.

By manipulating genetic variants within the surrounding cells to resist apoptosis, the researchers were able to contain the tumour and prevent its spread. This suggests drugs that carry out the same function – inhibiting cell death – may provide an effective way to prevent the spread of some types of cancer. This is counter to the current approach to fighting cancer: most current drugs used in chemotherapy encourage cell death as a way of destroying the tumour, though this can cause ‘collateral damage’ to healthy cells, hence why chemotherapy patients often become very sick during treatment.

In fact, some drugs that inhibit cell death are already being tested in clinical trials to treat conditions such as liver damage; if proven to be safe, they may provide options for potential anti-cancer drugs. However, further research is needed to confirm that this approach will be suitable for treating cancer.

“It sounds counterintuitive not to encourage cell death as this means you’re not attacking the tumour itself,” says Dr Eugenia Piddini. “But if we think of it like an army fighting a titan, it makes sense that if you protect your soldiers and stop them dying, you stand a better chance of containing – and even killing – your enemy.”

The work, which was carried out by postdoctoral researcher Saskia Suijkerbuijk and colleagues in the Piddini group, used fruit flies because they are much simpler organisms to study than mammals; however, many of the genes being studied are conserved across species – in other words, the genes, or genes with an identical or very similar function, are found in both the fruit fly and mammals.

Dr Alan Worsley, senior science information officer at Cancer Research UK, said: “Tumours often need to elbow healthy cells out of the way in order to grow. This intriguing study in fruit flies suggests that if researchers can turn off the signals that tell healthy cells to die, they could act as a barrier that boxes cancer cells in and stunts their growth. We don’t yet know if the same thing would work in patients, but it highlights an ingenious new approach that could help to keep early stage cancers in check.”

Reference
Suijkerbuijk, SJE et al. Cell competition drives the growth of intestinal adenomas in Drosophila. Current Biology; 22 Feb 2016. dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2015.12.043

To read these words, light is first refracted by the cornea, through the pupil in the iris and onto the lens, which focuses images onto the retina. The images are received by light-sensitive cells in the retina, which transmit impulses to the brain. These impulses are carried by a set of neurons called the retinal ganglion cells. Once the impulses reach the brain, the brain then has to piece together the information it receives into an understandable image. All of this happens in a fraction of a second.

Information travels from the retina to the brain via axons – the long, threadlike parts of neurons – sent out by the retinal ganglion cells. During embryonic development, axons are sent out to find their specific targets in the brain, so that images can be processed.

For an axon in a growing embryo, the journey from retina to brain is not a straightforward one. It’s a very long way for a tiny axon, through a constantly changing series of environments that it has never encountered before. So how do axons know where to go, and what can it tell us about how the brain is made and maintained?

Two University of Cambridge researchers, Professor Christine Holt of the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience, and Dr Stephen Eglen of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, are taking two different, but complementary, approaches to these questions.

With funding from the European Research Council and the Wellcome Trust, Holt’s research group is aiming to better understand the molecular and cellular mechanisms that guide and maintain axon growth, which in turn will aid better understanding of how nerve connections are first established.

“It’s an impressive navigational feat,” says Holt. “The pathway between the retina and the brain may look homogeneous, but in reality it’s like a patchwork quilt of different molecular domains.”

On the pathway through this patchwork quilt, there is a set of distinct beacons, breaking the axon’s journey down into separate steps. Every time the growing axon reaches a new beacon, it has to make a decision about which way to go. At the tip of the axon is a growth cone, which ‘sniffs out’ certain chemical signals emitted from the beacons, helping it to steer in the right direction.

The growth cones are receptive to certain signals and blind to others, so depending on what the axon encounters when it reaches a particular beacon, it will behave in a certain way. Holt’s research group uses a variety of techniques to determine what the signals are at the steering points where axons alter their direction of growth or their behaviour, such as the optic chiasm where certain axons cross to the opposite side of the brain, or at the point where they first leave the eye.

While Holt uses experiments to understand the development of the visual system, Eglen uses mathematical models as a complementary technique to try to answer the same questions.

“You’ve got much more freedom in a theoretical model than you do in an experiment,” he says. “A common experimental approach is to remove something genetically and see what happens. I think of that a little like taking the battery out of your car. Doing that will tell you that the battery is necessary for the car to function, but it doesn’t really tell you why.”

Theoretical models allow researchers to approach the questions around neural development from a different angle. To capture the essence of the neural system, they try to represent the building blocks of development and see what kind of behaviour would result.

But no model yet can fully capture the complexities of how the visual system develops, which Eglen views not only as a challenge for him as a mathematician, but also as a challenge back to the experimental community.

“It had been thought that if we built a model and took out all of the guidance molecules, there would be no topographic order whatsoever,” says Eglen. “But instead we found that there is still residual order in how the neurons are wired up, so there must be extra molecules or mechanisms that we don’t know about. What we’re trying to do is to take biology and put it into computers so that we can really test it.”

“In the past 15–20 years, there’s been a revolution in terms of being able to identify the specific molecules that act as guidance receptors or signals, but there’s still so much we don’t yet know, which is why we’re using both theoretical and experimental techniques to answer these questions,” says Holt. “And in addition to this question of wiring, we’re also looking at the problem of mapping – how do the terminal ends of the axons find their ultimate destination in the brain?”

Holt’s group has found that the same guidance molecule can have different roles depending on what aspect of growth is going on – but the question then becomes how do you wire the brain with so few molecules?

Adding to the complexity was another puzzling discovery – that the growth cones of axons can make proteins. Previous knowledge held that new proteins could be synthesised only within the main cellular part of each neuron, the cell body (where the nucleus is located), and then transported into axons. However, Holt’s group found that the growth cones of axons are also capable of synthesising proteins ‘on demand’ when they encounter new guidance beacons, suggesting that messenger RNA (mRNA) molecules play a role in helping axons to navigate to their correct destinations. mRNAs are the molecules from which new proteins are synthesised, and further experiments found that axons contain hundreds or even thousands of different types of this nuclear material.

In addition to their role in axon growth when the brain is wiring itself up during development, certain types of mRNA are also important in maintaining the connections in the adult brain, by keeping mitochondria – the energy-producing ‘batteries’ of cells – healthy, which, in turn, keeps axons healthy.

“It is a whole new view to the idea of degeneration in later life – a lot of different components have to work together to get local protein synthesis to work, so if just one of those components fails, degeneration can occur,” says Holt. “We’ve also found that many of the types of mRNA that are being translated in axons are the same ones that you see in diseases like Huntingdon’s and Parkinson’s, so basic knowledge of this sort is essential for the development of clinical therapies in nerve repair and for understanding these and other neurodegenerative disorders.”

The largest ever study of howling in the ‘canid’ family of species – which includes wolves, jackals and domestic dogs – has shown that the various species and subspecies have distinguishing repertoires of howling, or “vocal fingerprints”: different types of howls are used with varying regularity depending on the canid species.

Researchers used computer algorithms for the first time to analyse howling, distilling over 2,000 different howls into 21 howl types based on pitch and fluctuation, and then matching up patterns of howling.

They found that the frequency with which types of howls are used – from flat to highly modulated – corresponded to the species of canid, whether dog or coyote, as well as to the subspecies of wolf.

For example, the howling repertoire of the timber wolf is heavy with low, flat howls but doesn’t feature the high, looping vocal that is the most frequently used in the range of howls deployed by critically-endangered red wolves.

Lead researcher Dr Arik Kershenbaum from the University of Cambridge describes these distinctive howl repertoires as resembling vocal dialects, with each species having its own identifiable use of the various howl types. He says the findings could be used to track and manage wild wolf populations better, and help mitigate conflict with farmers.

The origins of language development in humans are mysterious, as the vocalisations of our closest existing biological relatives such as chimpanzees are relatively simple. Kershenbaum and colleagues believe that studying the sounds of other intelligent species that use vocal communication for cooperative behaviour – such as wolves and dolphins – may provide clues to the earliest evolution of our own use of language.

“Wolves may not be close to us taxonomically, but ecologically their behaviour in a social structure is remarkably close to that of humans. That’s why we domesticated dogs – they are very similar to us,” said Kershenbaum, from Cambridge’s Department of Zoology.     

“Understanding the communication of existing social species is essential to uncovering the evolutionary trajectories that led to more complex communication in the past, eventually leading to our own linguistic ability” he said.

The research was conducted by a team of scientists from the UK, US, Spain and India, and is published in the journal Behavioural Processes.

The researchers made use of howls recorded from both captive and wild animals, from Australia and India, to Europe and the United States, creating a database of 6,000 howls that was whittled down to 2,000 for the study. This included combing YouTube for domestic dog howls.

These were then fed into machine learning algorithms to classify the howls into discrete types. Studies on howling in the past have had to rely on subjective human comparisons by looking at soundwave patterns, but the new algorithms allowed the howl types to be compared objectively, revealing that the various species have characteristically different repertoires of howl type usage.

While the howling repertoires of most of the 13 species analysed were very distinct, some bore close similarities to each other that may influence interbreeding and, in at least one case, threaten the survival of a species.

Red wolves, hunted to the brink of extinction in the mid-20th century, were the focus of a reintroduction programme instigated by the US government, which has recently been halted due to a lack of success.

Part of the problem was red wolves breeding with coyotes, and the resultant hybridisation diluted attempts to maintain this rare wolf species. The researchers found significant overlap between the howling vocabulary of the red wolf and the coyote – with both favouring highly modulated, whining howls such as the one classed by researchers as ‘type three’.

“The survival of red wolves in the wild is threatened by interbreeding with coyotes, and we found that the howling behaviour of the two species is very similar. This may be one reason why they are so likely to mate with each other, and perhaps we can take advantage of the subtle differences in howling behaviour we have now discovered to keep the populations apart,” said Kershenbaum.

Other conservation uses for the new findings may involve refining the use of playbacks to recreate more accurate howling behaviours that imitate territorial markings, thereby encouraging wolf packs to steer clear of farms and livestock.

However, we know very little about the meaning of different howl types and what they are actually communicating, says Kershenbaum, because – as with dolphins, that other highly vocal, smart and social species which he studies – wolves are extremely difficult to study in the wild.

“You don’t observe natural wolf behaviour in zoos, only in the wild, and you need to know where the animals are when howling before you can really begin to try and discern meanings. But, as with dolphin pods, physically following a wild wolf pack is virtually impossible,” explained Kershenbaum.

“We are currently working on research in Yellowstone National Park in the US using multiple recording devices and triangulation technology to try and pick up howl sounds and location. In this way we might be able to tell whether certain calls relate to distance communication or pack warnings, for example,” he said.

For Kershenbaum, wolves and dolphins show remarkable parallels with each other in social behaviour, intelligence and vocal communication – all comparisons that extend to humans.

“As well as being intelligent and cooperative species, wolves and dolphins have remarkably similar vocal characteristics. If you slow a dolphin whistle down about 30 times it sounds just like a wolf howl, something I often do in my lectures,” he said. 

“The presence of complex referential communication in species that must communicate to survive was probably a crucial step in the evolution of language. I think we can shed a lot of light on early evolution of our own use of language by studying the vocalisation of animals that are socially and behaviourally similar to us, if not necessarily taxonomically closely related.”               

The full line-up was unveiled today, showing Fringe events taking place from 1-4 March all over the city with a dedicated day of events at Cambridge Junction on 5 March. As well as talks, debates and performances, focusing on politics, education and empowerment, the Junction will host a marketplace of stalls and live music, speed mentoring, a career clinic, free crèche and stand-up comedy. WOW Extras events take place 6-17 March.

Vernon, writer of the critically acclaimed Hot Feminist, joins the debate on whether women are Seen And Not Heard on 5 March. Barrister and women’s rights champion Charlotte Proudman will be in conversation with activists and outreach workers to mark International Women's Day on 7 March.

WOW Cambridge is in its second year, and planning the programme for 2016 was a city-wide effort, with ideas submitted during a community ‘think-in’ back in October.

Executive Producer Sigrid Fisher said the community feel will continue throughout the festival. She added: "We want this to be accessible to everyone. I'm looking forward to women and men coming to WOW as it’s for anyone and everyone who wants to celebrate women and talk about gender equality.

“I am delighted that this year’s inspiring and diverse programme promises to provide not just an invaluable opportunity to celebrate women’s strengths, achievements and spirit but also to challenge the issues and barriers to success women still face.

“I look forward to people coming together here to share ideas and experiences and form new and lasting networks.”

WOW originated in London and has grown into the largest festival of its kind since it started in 2011, with 15 festivals on five continents, including Baltimore, Brisbane, Londonderry and Harlem involving a total of over a million people across the world.

For more information and the full festival line-up, visit www.wowcambridge.cam.ac.uk.

LycaHealth’s donation will support two different projects to be undertaken by Cambridge University as part of the Lyca Group’s mission, to bring together people from all different backgrounds and be a part of the fabric of communities in which they have a presence.

The donation will be split in two ways: £50,000 will go towards the “Sri Lankan Language Fund” enabling the University to establish a dedicated Sri Lankan language scheme for a period of five years. The donation cost will cover intensive full-time summer courses, or part-time ‘in-sessional’ programmes at the university.

A further £100,000 will be used to improve public health in Sri Lanka through a pre-pilot project, run by the University of Cambridge to extend the expertise of the Sri Lankan Heart Infarction and Neurological Event Study (SHINES). Building on the University’s exceptional record of public health support in Pakistan and Bangladesh the donation will cover local medical staffing costs, laboratory supplies and equipment, travel and training expenses. The seed donation will mean that within 3-5 years, SHINES will have gained a sufficient evidence base to secure long-term funding from larger medical bodies.

Jocelyn Wyburd, Director of the University of Cambridge Language Centre said:

"I was fortunate enough to have the chance to visit Sri Lanka on holiday last summer for the first time and loved it! I'm therefore all the more excited about this relationship with LycaHealth and to have the chance to promote Sri Lanka's languages and an interest in the country to others."

The University's Language Centre provides resources and courses to support language learning by all members of the University community. It stocks learning resources in some 170 languages, including in the major two Sri Lankan languages (Tamil and Sinhala) and are able to offer supported self-study of these languages as individuals might require. The Sri Lankan language fund will enable the Centre to expand this provision, promoting the learning of Sri Lankan languages, not least to those who might be engaged in fieldwork in Sri Lanka as part of the accompanying public health initiative.

Jocelyn Wyburd added: “We will engage further with Sri Lankan students in the University to support learners face to face and to help us to develop supplementary online learning resources. We will also be able to provide financial support to Sri Lankan students who wish to develop further their academic skills in English to support their studies in the University."

Prema Subaskaran, Chairperson of LycaHealth, said: “We are delighted to be making the donations to such a reputable University as Cambridge, to implement study on these worth-while causes. The investment mirrors our ethos of expanding the importance of healthcare across the globe whilst bringing together people from all types of backgrounds.”

The donation comes soon after LycaHealth’s first centre was opened in London. The centre, located in Canary Wharf was opened by Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London. The Canary Wharf centre is the first step in LycaHealth’s growth plans, with further centres planned to open around the UK, South Asia and eventually Africa over the next five years.

Cambridge’s current £2 billion fundraising campaign for the University and Colleges focuses on Cambridge’s impact on the world.  Cambridge will be working with philanthropists to address major global problems, as it has done throughout the course of its history. More than £590 million has already been raised, including the gift from LycaHealth, and 30,000 donors have already given to the campaign.

Photographed L - R

Dr Manpreet Gulati, CEO of LycaHealth; Prema Subaskaran, Chairperson of LycaHealth; Subaskaran Allirajah, Chairman of Lyca Group.

Dr Emanuele Di Angelantonio , Director, University Department of Public Health and Primary Care; Jocelyn Wyburd, Director, University of Cambridge Language Centre; Chris Chaney, Director of Major Gifts, University of Cambridge

As in economics, there is a law of diminishing returns in neuroscience – doubling the investment going in doesn’t equal double the performance coming out. With a bigger brain comes more available resources that can be allocated to certain tasks, but everything has a cost, and evolution weighs the costs against the benefits in order to make the most efficient system.

“Larger brains are specialised for high performance, so there’s a definite advantage to being bigger and better,” says Professor Simon Laughlin of the Department of Zoology, whose research looks at the cellular costs associated with various neural tasks. “But since most animals actually have very small brains, there must also be advantages to being small.” Indeed, there is strong selection pressure to have the minimum performance required in order to survive and it’s not biologically necessary to be the best, only to be better than the nearest competitor.

So does size matter? Do small insects with relatively few neurons have the same capabilities as much larger animals? “When an animal is limited, is it because their neural system just can’t cope? Or is it because they’re actually optimised for their particular environment?” asks Dr Paloma Gonzalez-Bellido from Cambridge’s Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience.

With funding from the US Air Force, Gonzalez-Bellido is studying the hunting behaviours of various flying insects – from tiny killer flies, slightly larger robber flies to large dragonflies – to determine how their visual systems influence their attack strategy, and what sorts of trade-offs they have to make in order to be successful.

Dragonflies are among the largest flying insects, and hunt smaller insects such as mosquitoes while patrolling their territories. They have changed remarkably little in the 300 million years since they evolved – most likely because they are so well optimised for their particular environmental niche.

“Other researchers have found that dragonflies are capable of doing complex things like internally predicting what their body is going to do and compensating for that – for instance, if they’re chasing a target and turn their wings, another signal will be sent to turn their head, so that the target stays in the same spot in their visual field,” says Gonzalez-Bellido. “But are smaller animals, such as tiny flies, capable of achieving similarly complex and accurate feats?”

Gonzalez-Bellido also studies the killer fly, or Coenosia attenuata. These quick and ruthless flies are about four millimetres long, and will go after anything they think they can catch – picky eaters they are not. However, the decision to go after their next meal is not as simple as taking off after whatever tasty-looking morsels happen to fly by. As soon as a killer fly takes off after its potential prey, it exposes itself and runs the risk of becoming a meal for another killer fly.

To help these predacious and cannibalistic flies eat (and prevent them from being eaten), they need to fly fast and to see fast. Insects see at speeds much higher than most other animals, but even for insects, killer flies and dragonflies see incredibly fast, at rates as high as 360 hertz (Hz) – as a comparison, humans see at around 60 Hz.

“For prey animals, the most important thing is to get out of the way quickly – it doesn’t matter whether they know exactly what’s coming, just that it doesn’t catch them,” says Gonzalez-Bellido. “Predators need to be both fast and accurate in their movements if they’re going to be successful – but for very small predators such as insects, there are trade-offs that need to be made.”

By making the ‘pixels’ on their photoreceptors (the light-sensitive cells in the retina) as narrow as possible, killer flies trade sensitivity for resolution. In bright light, they see better than their similar-sized prey, the common fruit fly. However, the cap on sensitivity and resolution imposed upon killer flies by their tiny eyes means that they can only see and attack things that fly close by.

While dragonflies, with their larger eyes and better resolution, can take their time and use their brain power to calculate whether a prey is suitable for an attack, killer flies attack before they’ve had a chance to determine whether it’s something they can actually catch, subdue or eat – or they risk missing their prey altogether. Once a killer fly gets relatively close to its potential prey, it has to decide whether to keep going or turn back – this is one of the trade-offs resulting from evolving such a tiny visual system.

In the early 2000s, Laughlin determined the energy efficiency of single neurons, by estimating the numbers of ATP molecules – the molecules that deliver energy in cells – used per bit of information coded. To do this he compared photoreceptors in various insects. Laughlin and his colleagues found that photoreceptors are like cars – the higher the performance, the more energy they require, and costs rise out of proportion with performance. “For any system, whether it’s in a tiny insect or a large mammal, you don’t want something which is over-engineered, because it’s going to cost more,” says Laughlin. “So what’s the root of inefficiency, and how did nature evolve efficient nerve cells from the bottom up?”

Researchers in the Department of Engineering are taking the reverse approach to answer questions about how the brain works so efficiently by looking at systems from the top down. “If you reverse engineer an animal’s behavioural strategy by asking how an animal would solve a task under specific constraints and then work out the optimal solution, you’ll find it’s often the case that animals are pretty close to optimal,” says Dr Guillaume Hennequin, who looks at how neurons work together to produce behaviour.

Hennequin studies how brain circuits are wired in such a way that they become optimised for a task: how primates such as monkeys are able to estimate the direction of a moving object, for example. “How brain circuits generate optimal interpretations of ambiguous information received from imperfect sensors is still not known,” he says. “Coping with uncertainty is one of the core challenges that brains must confront.”

Different animals come up with their own solutions. Both dragonflies and killer flies have systems that are optimal, but optimal in their own ways. It’s beneficial for killer flies to be so small, since this gives them high manoeuvrability, enabling them to catch prey that turns at speed. Dragonflies are much bigger, and can do things that killer flies can’t, but their size means they can’t turn or stop on a dime, like a killer fly can.

“By answering some of the questions around efficiency in brain circuits, large or small, we may be able to understand fundamental principles about how brains work and how they evolved,” says Laughlin.

Inset images: top to bottom: robber fly, dragon fly, killer fly; credit: Sam Fabian.

The latest diplomatic coup for Pope Francis I – whose papacy has been marked by an ever-more expansive foreign policy– is the announcement of an interesting development in relations between the Roman Catholic and the Russian Orthodox churches, relations that have been more-or-less non-existent for more than 1000 years.

On February 12, Pope Francis – who will be on his way to visit Mexico – will meet Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill at Havana Airport in Cuba. Kirill is not the formal head of the world’s estimated 200m Orthodox Christians – that is his All-Holiness Bartholomew, the Ecumenical Patriarch, whose seat is in Istanbul, not Moscow.

But the Orthodox churches are effectively independent, national units with Bartholomew enjoying only a sort of “primacy of honour” over them – rather like the archbishop of Canterbury over the world-wide Anglican Communion. The Russian Church is easily the largest of the Orthodox churches with more than 80-100m members. Consequently, the Russian Church and its Patriarch have enormous influence in the Orthodox world, arguably even more than Bartholomew himself.

The Vatican’s relations with Russian Orthodoxy have historically been poor. The papacy was at loggerheads with the Tsars over their treatment of Polish Catholics when Poland was ruled by them. And during World War I, the Vatican feared a possible Russian victory over the Ottoman Empire, leading to a reinvigorated Orthodoxy and the creation of a sort of “Vatican on the Bosphorus”.

In 1917 it thought Catholicism could profit from the collapse of Tsardom and the subsequent disestablishment of the Orthodox Church but those hopes were quickly dashed by the Soviets’ “Godless campaigns” which were aimed at all religious groups, not just the Orthodox. The end of the Soviet Union in 1991 did not improve relations between the Catholic and Orthodox churches – on the contrary, the Russian Orthodox Church has consistently accused the Vatican of proselytism, of trying to poach its own faithful, a not entirely unjustified accusation.

Bones of contention

So what will Francis and Kirill talk about? They will seek détente, a general improvement in their relations, but this will be difficult given the highly nationalistic mood of Russian Orthodoxy at the moment. As in previous centuries, many Russian Orthodox prelates are deeply suspicious of Western Europe – Catholic, Protestant and secular – which they see as an area of religious and moral decadence.

The schism between eastern and western Christianity, which originated in the 7th and 8th centuries and centres around the dispute over the nature of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, but also in the Orthodox rejection of the Bishop of Rome’s claims to universal primacy over Christians, is still unresolved despite ecumenical gestures on the part of Rome.

Another issue between Rome and Moscow is the question of Ukraine. Rome is unhappy about Putin’s annexation of the Crimea and his assistance for the pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine which sections of the Orthodox Church have supported with jingoistic fervour. In the western Ukraine, the Greek Catholic Church, which – like the Orthodox – has a married clergy and shares similar liturgical practices, is nevertheless in communion with Rome. No love is lost between the Greek Catholics and the Ukrainian Orthodox.

Will Francis and Kirill talk about this thorny problem? One issue which they will certainly discuss and on which they may reach a measure of agreement is the persecution of Christians in the Middle East, though even here the situation is complicated by Putin’s foreign policy objectives in Syria.

“Old man in a hurry”

Pope Francis is 80 this December and has only one lung. He was elected on a reform ticket and so far has succeeded in sorting out the scandal-ridden Vatican Bank– and Vatican finances in general. He has started the process of reforming the Roman curia (the central government of the Catholic Church in the Vatican) and devolving power to local bishops.

He has other objectives, including re-establishing diplomatic relations with China and thereby achieving some sort of re-unification of the state-controlled Catholic Patriotic Association and those Chinese Catholics who lie outside the CPA and are therefore subject to occasional governmental repression. Vatican diplomacy also played an important role in bringing about the restoration of diplomatic relations between the USA and Cuba last year.

He probably also nurtures hopes of an historic compromise between the Catholic and the Orthodox churches – and his meeting with Kirill may prove to be a step in that direction. It is, however, unlikely to lead to any radical change in the relationship in Francis’ lifetime. This schism runs deep.

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.

Inset image: Patriarch Kirill (Larry Koester).

When BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour used the topic ‘purity’ as a talking point for a late night discussion, the themes that emerged ranged from sex to food to spirituality. The common denominator was the female body and the ways in which women feel, and are judged, as pure and impure. For most of the contributors, purity was perceived as a state experienced on a personal basis – through control and denial – often at great cost to themselves.  

In her introduction, the presenter Lauren Laverne equated chastity (“a word you don’t hear bandied about much these days”) with celibacy and she wasn’t challenged by her guests. And why would she be? Chastity has come to mean abstinence from sex and is often used synonymously with virginity. However, for members of the world’s religions chastity has a much wider meaning that is lost in the language of secular Britain. Four centuries ago the opposite was true: chastity was one of the most important virtues, not just for individuals but for the public discourses through which the period’s greatest political controversies played out.

In her book Chastity in Early Stuart Literature and Culture, Dr Bonnie Lander Johnson (Faculty of English) describes how chastity became a cult that was as much embodied by the ceremonies and performances of the court as it was espoused by the anti-court Puritan writers working in the new world of popular print. Lander Johnson writes that chastity, as an important Christian virtue, was “one of the key conceptual frameworks through which individual men and women understood their relationship to their own bodies, to their community, to the wider Christian world and to God”. But “the same virtue that could protect the body from infection and a marriage from dissolution could eventually help to topple a government and undo a King”.

Chastity played a powerful role in both national affairs and international relations. Elizabeth I was famously the Virgin Queen of the Protestant country created by her father Henry VIII. Her unsullied state was much more than simply personal. It offered her subjects a vision of the nation itself as both impenetrable against outside invasion and purified of the ‘popery’ of Catholicism. The Protestantism of the Church of England was chaste and pure; in the vitriol of religious schisms, the Roman church was “the whore of Babylon”.

The Virgin Queen’s Stuart successors were on shakier ground. Charles I married Henrietta Maria of France, a devoutly Catholic princess who had spent her childhood in a convent and was dedicated to her mission of re-Catholicising England. She arrived in her adopted country not only with a fabulous trousseau of worldly goods, but also an entourage of friars and firm ideas about devotion and decorum. Although fiercely loyal to her husband and supportive of his power as monarch, she did not recognise his status as head of the English Church.

For England’s Catholics, living mostly in obscurity and practicing their faith illegally, Henrietta Maria became the unofficial leader of the Catholic Church in England. While the King and Queen lived harmoniously together for over two decades, the religious tensions that had only barely been kept in check since the establishment of the Protestant Church began to erupt around them. At the heart of these tensions was a debate over which of the country’s religious and political factions could lay the greatest claim to the virtue of chastity.

“Importantly, chastity was not the same as virginity,” writes Lander Johnson. “Virginity was an anatomical state that preceded sexual activity; chastity was a state, both spiritual and psychological, that could be observed through all stages of a person’s adult life.”  Sanctified by God, marriage and sexual relations between man and wife could be chaste – as could childbirth. By implication, a ‘chaste’ relationship produced a healthy child. By the same token, an ‘unchaste’ union created a monster. When the child in question was born of a royal marriage that was surrounded by accusations of religious ‘unchastity’, the outcome could have far-reaching effects.

The royal household was under intense scrutiny as religious factions tussled for ascendancy. When Charles and Henrietta Maria’s first child died at birth, suspicions about the chastity of their marriage as an inter-religious union grew. The remarkably resilient Queen went on to give birth to a further eight children, seven of whom survived.

This fecundity was celebrated in court masques and portraits. The central message of the court’s various spectacles and ceremonies was that the chastity of the royal marriage, and of the nation, was sanctified and maintained by the Queen’s prodigious fertility. For this reason, Lander Johnson argues, the Queen’s birthing ceremonies need to be considered as important events among the many forms of art, writing, and performance generated in the 1630s.

Each delivery was an elaborate performance, carefully orchestrated to draw down the greatest blessings from God, to ensure the most fortuitous outcome, and to communicate Henrietta Maria’s piety, purity and queenly authority. The Queen’s many births also became platforms for debates over the relative chastity of the Catholic and Protestant Churches. Who was allowed to attend the Queen in these important and dangerous moments? Who would most safely deliver the future head of the nation and Church?

The Queen’s unsuccessful first birth was mourned across the country, and at the English and French courts. It had been attended by Chamberlen, Physician to the King, a figure viewed with suspicion by the Queen, her French cohort and her family at home in France. Chamberlen was not only Protestant but a man (something the French, with their excellent reputation for female scholar-midwives, thought particularly unchaste). But Chamberlen was also a maverick whose secret instruments (eventually revealed to be an early form of forceps) were increasingly thought to do as much damage as good to mothers and babies.

In her grief over her first child, Henrietta Maria took charge of her subsequent births, employing a French midwife and surrounding herself with nuns, Catholic nurses, pictures of the Virgin Mary and all the comforts of Catholic devotion: incense, music and gestural prayer. The second birth was a success, producing an heir both healthy and male: the future Charles II.

The Queen marked each of her births with elaborate court masques that celebrated her chastity, fertility and spirituality. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Queen’s religious convictions and devotional tastes became increasingly popular in and around the court. In response, the pro-Parliamentary plain-religionists who eventually deposed the King worked harder than ever to claim the virtue of chastity for their cause and to accuse the Queen of infecting the King and the Throne with her unchaste religious practices. In a new world of public debate, dissenters made full use of mass print technology to rapidly disseminate their fiery sermons and commonwealth political theory.

Throughout the 1630s the court’s claims to chastity, primarily through the prodigiously fertile body of the Queen and her elaborate masques, were highly successful. But the young John Milton was preparing to enter the debate with his own masque of chastity. Milton’s skilful recoding of the virtue as Protestant spiritual adventure bolstered the moral strength of pro-Parliamentary arguments. Within a decade the King, Queen and their many children were dead or in hiding and the court’s depiction of chastity as familial, fertile, and spectacular was replaced with a version of chastity more at home in the written word, more masculine, and more martial: a steely and inviolate virtue fit for revolution.

Lander Johnson has written her first book in order to look in depth at chastity as a theme running through the life of the royal court, and the circles of power around it, in the first half of the 17th century – as seen through the literature of William Shakespeare, John Milton and a number of lesser known poets and playwrights, including John Ford. It is a scholarly book, aimed at an academic readership, but it touches on universal human preoccupations – how we see ourselves, how we want to be seen, how we curate our own image through private and public performance.  

“I was motivated to explore constructions of chastity, and manifestations of the virtue in literature, by a desire to recover a moral code that is rapidly disappearing from current cultural awareness but which was of the greatest importance to our predecessors and a primary consideration in our revolutionary history,” says Lander Johnson.

“I’m interested in the ways a society’s beliefs, in all times and places, can shape those words and images that have the power to sway public opinion so decisively. Today we are interested in tolerance and equality. Even if we don’t practice these modern virtues as much as we like to think we do, they have the power to grant moral strength to any public speech, debate, or Facebook post.”

Chastity in Early Stuart Literature by Bonnie Lander Johnson is published by Cambridge University Press http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/literature/renaissance-and...

Researchers looking at child development often use search-and-find tasks to look at the ways in which children apply what they are learning about the physical world. Tests carried out on toddlers reveal that something quite remarkable happens in child development between the ages of two and five – a stage identified by both educationalists and neuroscientists as critical to the capacity for learning.

Dr Sara Baker is a researcher into early childhood at the Faculty of Education. She is interested in the role of the brain’s prefrontal lobe in how young children learn to adapt their understanding to an ever-shifting environment. Many of her studies chart changes in children’s ways of thinking about the world. She uses longitudinal designs to examine the shape of individual children’s learning curves month by month.

Research by Baker and colleagues is contributing to an understanding of the acquisition of skills essential to learning. She explains: “The brain’s frontal lobe is one of the four major divisions of the cerebral cortex. It regulates decision-making, problem-solving and behaviour. We call these functions executive skills – they are at the root of the cognitive differences between humans and other animals. My executive functions enable me to resist a slice of cake when I know I’m soon having dinner.”

In an experiment designed to identify the age at which executive skills develop, Baker and colleagues used a row of four interconnected boxes to test children’s ability to apply their knowledge of basic physics. A ball rolled down an incline entered the first box and disappeared. A barrier (its top visible) was slotted in between two of the boxes to stop the ball rolling any further. The children were asked to open the door of the box in which the ball was hidden.

Aged 29–31 months, only 32% of the children correctly identified the location of the ball by working out that the barrier would have stopped it. Aged 32–36 months, 66% of children were successful. Toddlers under the age of three appear to understand the principles of solidity and continuity, but have trouble acting on this knowledge. A single month in a child’s age affected their ability to carry out the task correctly.

Baker’s interest in children’s development of executive skills dates from the moment a decade ago when she picked up a picture book while sitting in the foyer of a nursery school; the narrative focused on opposites: big/small, light/dark, hot/cold. How would children respond if they were asked to point to the opposite picture to the one depicting the word they heard spoken? This question became the topic for her PhD. Her findings confirmed that the huge variability of children’s executive skills could explain the range of social and cognitive behaviours we see emerging in the early years. What we learn at this stage, and what we learn to apply, sets us on course for life.

Most three-year-olds find the ‘opposites’ task hard. Given two pictures of bears, one big, one small, they automatically point to the big bear when they hear the word ‘big’ spoken aloud. They point to the big bear even when they have been asked (and appear to have understood) to point to the image that is the opposite of the word they hear.

Five-year-olds are much more successful in carrying out the task explained to them. “By age five, most children have acquired the ability to override their impulses, and put them on hold, in order to follow a request,” says Baker. “The ability to control impulses is vital to children’s socialisation, their ability to share and work in groups – and ultimately to be adaptable and well adjusted.”

What happens in children’s brains and minds to enable them to make these important leaps in understanding? The answer involves an understanding of neuroscience as well as child development. Baker and colleagues are engaged in multidisciplinary projects including examining how individuals with autism may perceive and learn about the physical world differently from those without a diagnosis. Her team is also developing a pedagogical, play-based approach in collaboration with teachers.

“Executive function is a hot topic in education. When we talk to teachers about the psychology behind frontal lobe development, they immediately recognise how important self-regulation is, and will tell you about the child who can’t concentrate. It might be the case that this child is struggling with their executive functions: their working memory or inhibitory control might be flagging,” says Baker.

“The tricky part is to grasp the processes developing in the child’s brain and come up with ways to encourage that development. In early years’ education, playful learning and giving children freedom to explore could help to encourage independence as well as the ability to know when to ask for help, both of which depend on self-regulatory skills. If we want to encourage adaptability and self-reliance, we have to look beyond the formal curriculum.”

Baker’s research into children’s ability to apply knowledge to successfully predict the location of an object hidden from view revealed much more than simply which age group was successful. She says: “In looking at the data from tasks, it’s not enough to focus only on children’s failures. We need to look at why they search for an object in a particular place. Often they’re applying something else that they’ve learnt.”

When younger children opened the same door twice in the boxes experiment, despite the barrier having been moved, they were applying logic: an object may be precisely where it was found before. After all, it’s always worth looking for the house keys first where they should be.

In another experiment (involving dropping balls into opaque tubes that crossed each other), the younger children applied their knowledge of gravity (the ball would fall down the tube) but failed to take into account that the tubes were not straight. Baker says: “When children repeat a mistake, they reveal something about their view of the world and, as researchers, we learn how their brain is developing. As teachers and parents, our role is to help children to overcome that strong, but wrong, impulse.”

During the course of a day, your frontal lobe will have enabled you to do far more than find your keys. The synaptic firing of millions of cells in your brain may have guided you through a tricky situation with colleagues or prompted you to make a split-second decision as you crossed a busy road. “The development of this vital area of your brain happened well before you started formal education and will continue throughout your lifetime,” says Baker.

They are:

"Tanni" Grey-Thompson, The Baroness Grey-Thompson, President of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, Paralympic athlete (Doctor of Law).

Ms Helena Morrissey, of Fitzwilliam College, CEO of Newton Investment Management and Founder and Chair of the 30% Club, business leader and gender champion (Doctor of Law).

Professor Sir Keith Peters, Honorary Fellow of Christ's College and Clare Hall, Regius Professor of Physic Emeritus, physician and immunologist (Doctor of Medical Science).

Sir Jonathan Ive, Chief Design Officer at Apple Inc., designer (Doctor of Science).

Dame Zaha Hadid, architect and Royal Academician (Doctor of Letters).

Sir Nicholas Hytner, Honorary Fellow of Trinity Hall, formerly Director of the National Theatre, director of theatre, film, and opera (Doctor of Letters).

Sir Nicholas Serota, Honorary Fellow of Christ's College, Director of the Tate, art historian and museum director (Doctor of Letters).

Professor Joanna MacGregor, Honorary Fellow of Murray Edwards College, Professor of the University of London and Head of Piano at the Royal Academy of Music, pianist, conductor, and composer (Doctor of Music).

The Council has also submitted the names of two individuals distinguished by their contributions to the County, City or University of Cambridge, seeking authority for their admission as Masters of Arts honoris causa at an earlier Congregation on Saturday, 23 April 2016, at which the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, will preside.

They are:

Sir Hugh Duberly, of Wolfson College, HM Lord-Lieutenant for Cambridgeshire and formerly High Sheriff of the County

Miss Susan Edwards, formerly Civic and Twinning Officer for the City of Cambridge and Executive Assistant to The Right Worshipful The Mayor

The behaviour of our cells is determined by a combination of the activity of its genes and the chemical reactions needed to maintain the cells, known as metabolism. Metabolism works in two directions: the breakdown of molecules to provide energy for the body and the production of all compounds needed by the cells.

Knowing the genome – the complete DNA ‘blueprint’ of an organism – can provide a substantial amount of information about how a particular organism will look. However, this does not give the complete picture: genes can be regulated by other genes or regions of DNA, or by ‘epigenetic’ modifiers – small molecules attached to the DNA that act like switches to turn genes on and off.

Previous studies have suggested that another player in gene regulation may exist: the metabolic network – the biochemical reactions that occur within an organism. These reactions mainly depend on the nutrients a cell has available – the sugars, amino acids, fatty acids and vitamins that are derived from the food we eat.

To examine the scale at which this happens, an international team of researchers, led by Dr Markus Ralser at the University of Cambridge and the Francis Crick Institute, London, addressed the role of metabolism in the most basic functionality of a cell. They did so using yeast cells. Yeast is an ideal model organism for large scale experiments at it is much simpler to manipulate than animal models, yet many of its important genes and fundamental cellular mechanisms are the same as or very similar to those in animals and humans.

The researchers manipulated the levels of important metabolites – the products of metabolic reactions – in the yeast cells and examined how this affected the behaviour of the genes and the molecules they produced. Almost nine out of ten genes and their products were affected by changes in cellular metabolism.

“Cellular metabolism plays a far more dynamic role in the cells than we previously thought,” explains Dr Ralser. “Nearly all of a cell’s genes are influenced by changes to the nutrients they have access to. In fact, in many cases the effects were so strong, that changing a cell’s metabolic profile could make some of its genes behave in a completely different manner.

“The classical view is that genes control how nutrients are broken down into important molecules, but we’ve shown that the opposite is true, too: how the nutrients break down affects how our genes behave.”

The researchers believe that the findings may have wide-ranging implications, including on how we respond to certain drugs. In cancers, for example, tumour cells develop multiple genetic mutations, which change the metabolic network within the cells. This in turn could affect the behaviour of the genes and may explain with some drugs fail to work for some individuals.

“Another important aspect of our findings is a practical one for scientists,” explains says Dr Ralser. “Biological experiments are often not reproducible between laboratories and we often blame sloppy researchers for that. It appears however, that small metabolic differences can change the outcomes of the experiments. We need to establish new laboratory procedures that control better for differences in metabolism. This will help us to design better and more reliable experiments.”

Reference
Alam, MT et al. The metabolic background is a global player in Saccharomyces gene expression epistasis. Nature Microbiology; 1 Feb. DOI: 10.1038/nmicrobiol.2015.30