The result, published in the journal Nature, allows the mass of the Perseus Cluster – a swarm of thousands of galaxies that spans two million light years across and is one of the most massive known objects in the universe – to be calculated more accurately than before. Once this technique can be extended to other clusters, it will allow cosmologists to use them as better probes of our models of the Universe’s evolution from the Big Bang to the present time.

Hitomi (originally known as ASTRO-H) is the sixth in a series of Japanese x-ray observatories. Led by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), it is a collaboration of over 60 institutes and 200 scientists and engineers from Japan, the US, Canada, and Europe, including from the University of Cambridge. The spacecraft was launched on 17 February 2016 from the Tanegashima Space Center, Japan. However, JAXA announced in April that it was no longer possible to communicate with the satellite.

“Hitomi targeted the Perseus cluster just a week after it arrived in space,” said Matteo Guainazzi, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Hitomi Resident Astronomer at the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, Japan. “Perseus is the brightest x-ray galaxy cluster in the sky. It was therefore the best choice to fully demonstrate the power of the Soft X-ray Spectrometer (SXS), an x-ray micro-calorimeter that promised to deliver an unprecedented accuracy in the reconstruction of the energy of the incoming x-ray photons.” Waiting astronomers were not disappointed.

The Hitomi collaboration found that SXS could measure the turbulence in the cluster to a precision of 10 kilometres/second. But it was the absolute velocity of the gas that took them by surprise. It was just 164 ± 10 kilometres/second. The previous best measurement for Perseus was taken with ESA’s XMM-Newton x-ray observatory. Using a different type of spectrometer, it could only constrain the speed to be lower than 500 kilometres/second.

Hitomi’s measurement is therefore much more precise than any similar measurements performed in x-rays so far. “This is due to the outstanding performance and stability of the SXS in space. This demonstrates that the technology of x-ray micro-calorimeters can yield truly transformational results,” said Guainazzi.

The result indicates that the cluster gas has very little turbulent motions within. Turbulent motions in a fluid are part of our everyday life, as airplane passengers, swimmers, or parents filling a bathtub all experience. The study of such chaotic behaviour is also a powerful tool for astronomers to understand the behaviour of celestial objects.

Turbulent energy in Perseus is just four percent of the energy stored in the gas as heat. This is extraordinary considering that the active galaxy NGC 1275 sits at the heart of the cluster. It is pumping jetted energy into its surroundings, creating bubbles of extremely hot gas. It was thought that these bubbles induce turbulence, which keeps the central gas hot.

Hitomi shows that turbulent motion is almost absent from the cluster, and this gives rise to a mystery: what is keeping the cluster’s widespread gas hot?

“This result from Hitomi is telling us that in terms of how cluster cores work, we have to think very carefully about what is going on,” said the paper’s senior author Professor Andy Fabian of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, and part of the Hitomi collaboration.

Fabian is working on the possibility of sound waves as the means of spreading the energy evenly throughout the gas. This is because in a sound wave, energy can be moved while the medium itself remains more or less stationary.

There are wider implications for this work too. Clusters of galaxies are the largest bound structures in the Universe. At the same time, they are also the smallest self-contained ‘boxes’. This means that matter is not flowing in or out of a cluster of galaxies. Instead, they each represent an island in which cosmic evolution has played out and been recorded.

Computer models of the expanding Universe use the distribution of cluster masses as an observational test of whether they are correct. Calculating the mass of a cluster depends upon the ratio of turbulent to quiescent gas. Any way of more accurately measuring turbulence allows better masses to be calculated, and therefore better computer models of the whole Universe to be developed.

Unfortunately, just a few weeks after the Perseus observation, a malfunction in the attitude control system put Hitomi into an uncontrollable spin that resulted in the break up and loss of the satellite.

“It is really disappointing that we have lost Hitomi and can’t go on with the programme that we had to look at many more clusters,” says Fabian.

The next mission that will be capable of fully following up the Hitomi programme is ESA’s Athena, an X-ray observatory scheduled for launch in the 2020s.

“Scientifically and technically, the Hitomi results are an exciting foretaste of Athena,” said David Lumb, ESA's Athena Study Scientist. “The demonstration of a radically new imaging spectrometer instrument concept gives huge confidence for future developments for Athena.”

Athena will have 100 times more collecting area and 100 times more pixels than Hitomi. Among the key scientific objectives of Athena are to investigate the evolution of clusters of galaxies including their interplay with energy injection from supermassive black holes.

“The Hitomi data show the potential that will be unleashed with Athena vastly increased imaging capability and sensitivity,” said Lumb.

Reference:
Hitomi Collaboration. ‘The quiet intracluster medium in the core of the Perseus cluster.’ Nature (2016). doi:10.1038/nature18627.

Adapted from an ESA press release.

The fossilised remnants of tube-like “dwellings” which housed a primitive type of prehistoric sea worm on the ocean floor have been identified in a new study.

According to researchers, the long, perforated tubes may have looked like narrow chimneys reaching up from the sea bed, and were made by a creature called Oesia, which lived a solitary existence inside them about 500 million years ago.

The findings emerge from a study undertaken by academics from Canada and the UK, in which they reassess fossils originally believed to have come from a type of seaweed called Margaretia. Instead, they found that these were the vestiges of tubular structures which protected these ancient worms.

The research, which is published in the journal BMC Biology, was carried out by academics from the Universities of Cambridge, Toronto and Montréal, and at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.

Part of its importance is that it confirms Oesia was a primitive specimen from a group of creatures called hemichordates. These belong to a bigger group called deuterostomes, of which vertebrates (including humans) form a separate branch. By finding out more about these early creatures, researchers hope eventually to be able to identify and characterise a distant ancestor common to all deuterostomes, from sea worms to humans.

In particular, the research supports the increasingly common view that this ancestor was probably a “filter feeder”, which ate by sucking in water and straining out nutrients. Oesia was one such filter feeder, with gills down most of its body to expel water afterwards, and holes in the walls of its tubular home to let the water in and out.

Karma Nanglu, from the University of Toronto and the study’s lead author, said: “Hemichordates are central to our understanding of how deuterostomes evolved. Through them, we can get clues about the anatomy and lifestyle of the last common ancestor that we all share, and this adds further evidence to the hypothesis that the ancestor was a filter-feeder like Oesia.”

Professor Simon Conway Morris, from St John’s College, University of Cambridge and a co-author, said: “Oesia fossils are pretty enigmatic – they are very rare and until now we could not prove which group they belonged to. Now we know that they were primitive hemichordates – perhaps the most primitive of all.”

The study was possible thanks to the discovery of a rich source of fossilised remains near Marble Canyon, in the Canadian Rockies (Kootenay National Park, B.C.). Parks Canada, which holds jurisdiction over this and other Burgess Shale sites, said, they were “thrilled” by the discovery and “eager to share this exciting new piece of the ever-unfolding Burgess Shale story with visitors”.

“Marble Canyon is one of the most recently discovered fossil localities in the Burgess Shale, a geological formation known for its exceptional quality of fossil preservation,” said co-author Dr. Jean-Bernard Caron, Senior Curator of Invertebrate Palaeontology at the Royal Ontario Museum and Associate Professor at the University of Toronto. Dr. Caron led the research team that discovered Marble Canyon in 2012. “Oesia has been known from an older Burgess Shale site for over 100 years, but the specimens from Marble Canyon are far more abundant and better preserved, giving us unprecedented details of the animal’s internal anatomy.”

The research establishes that Oesia was similar to modern acorn worms with a proboscis, a collar, and a long trunk. Co-author Christopher B. Cameron, Associate Professor at the Université de Montréal said: “Acorn worms are notoriously sparse in the fossil record. Only a handful of fossil species have been described, making the recognition of such an ancient representative of the group particularly noteworthy.”

The average Oesia was about 53mm long, and rarely more than 10mm wide. Unusually, these worms had U-shaped gills running down most the length of their bodies to enable filter feeding. Gill slits seem to be a characteristic common to all deuterostomes; even humans have slits in their necks at an early stage in their embryonic development, and this is seen as evidence that all deuterostomes are related to a distant, common ancestor.

The researchers realised that Oesia must have lived in tubes because among the Marble Canyon finds there are dozens of examples where the fossil remains of the worm are found within those of Margaretia.

Since the 1920s, Margaretia has been classified as a type of algae, albeit one unlike any other known species from this period in prehistory. The direct association with Oesia explains why Margaretia looks so exotic: This was no seaweed, but rather a perforated tube-like structure that the worm inhabited.

The study suggests that in some cases these structures exceeded 50cm in height and that they were typically at least twice the width of the worm, giving it plenty of room. The ends were sealed off, making life inside a rather lonely experience. “Only single worms are found within tubes, suggesting a solitary mode of life,” Nanglu added. “This gives Oesia an interesting mix of characteristics: it has the general appearance and solitary lifestyle of the modern acorn worms, but the tube dwelling lifestyle and posterior attachment structure shown by their closely related sister-group the pterobranchs.”

At some point, the fossil record suggests that acorn worms underwent a transition, leaving their tubes and instead opting for a life under the sea bed. The study argues that as evolution gathered pace and more predators appeared on the scene, digging into the sea floor may simply have been a safer option. Certainly, modern-day acorn worms have adopted this lifestyle; rather than filter feeding they live in the sediment and eat nutrients within it.

“In its own depressing way this is a story of Darwinian competition,” Conway Morris explained. “The levels of competition and predation increased, life sped up and got harder, and animals had to protect themselves more. One way of doing this was to abandon life filter feeding in a tube, and instead to dig into the sediment and eat mud. Once there, they found a new niche and were able to make a perfectly good life for themselves.”

The study, Cambrian suspension-feeding tubicolous hemichordates, is published in the journal BMC Biology. 

Reference: Karma Nanglu, Jean Bernard-Caron, Simon Conway Morris and Christopher B. Cameron. "Cambrian suspension-feeding tubiculous hemichordates". BMC Biology. DOI 10.1186/s12915-016-0271-4.

Inset image shows artist's impression of Oesia inside a tube. Credit: Marianne Collins. 

The study, published in Science by researchers at University of Cambridge, Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and King’s College London, shows that the genetic variation of ribosomal DNA (rDNA) could be driving how the environment within the womb determines an offspring’s attributes. rDNA is the genetic material that forms ribosomes - the protein building machines within the cell.

Lead researcher Professor Vardhman Rakyan from QMUL said: “The fact that genetic variation of ribosomal DNA seems to play such a major role suggests that many human genetics studies in humans could be missing a key part of the puzzle. These studies only looked at a single copy part of individuals’ genomes and never at ribosomal DNA.

“This could be the reason why we’ve only so far been able to explain a small fraction of the heritability of many health conditions, which makes a lot of sense in the context of metabolic diseases, such as type 2 diabetes.”

The environmental factors that play a role alongside genetic factors in determining a person’s attributes are also present in the in-utero environment. When offspring are in the womb, the environment experienced by their mothers (for example, diet, stress, smoking), influences the attributes of their offspring when they are adults. This ‘developmental programming’ is thought to contribute to the obesity and type 2 diabetes epidemic seen today.

A major contributor to this process is ‘epigenetics’. This describes naturally-occurring modifications to genes that control how they are expressed. One such modification involves tagging DNA with chemical compounds called methyl groups. These epigenetic markers determine which genes are expressed or not expressed. Liver cells and kidney cells are genetically identical in terms of their DNA sequence but differ in their epigenetic marks. It has been proposed that in response to a poor in-utero environment, an offspring’s epigenetic profile will change.

The team compared the offspring of pregnant mice when given a low protein diet (8 per cent protein) and a normal diet (20 per cent protein). After they were weaned, all offspring were given a normal diet, and the team then looked at the difference in the offspring’s DNA methylation, from mothers exposed to a low protein diet and those that were not.

Professor Rakyan said: “When cells are stressed, for example when nutrient levels are low, they alter protein production as a survival strategy. In our low protein mice mothers, we saw that their offspring had methylated rDNA. This slowed the expression of their rDNA, which could be influencing the function of ribosomes, and resulted in smaller offspring – as much as 25 per cent lighter.”

These epigenetic effects occur during a critical developmental window while the offspring is in-utero but is a permanent effect that remains into adulthood. A mother’s diet while pregnant is therefore likely to have more severe consequence on the offspring’s epigenetic state than an offspring’s own diet after it has been weaned.

Professor Susan Ozanne from the University of Cambridge Metabolic Research Laboratories and MRC Metabolic Diseases Unit added: “Perhaps our most surprising finding was that, despite all of our mice being bred to be genetically identical, their rDNA was different. In fact, even within an individual mouse, different copies of rDNA were genetically distinct."

In any given genome, there are many copies of rDNA, and the researchers found that not all copies of the rDNA were responding in the same way epigenetically. In offspring from mothers who were fed a low protein diet, it was only one form of rDNA – the ‘A-variant’ - that appeared to undergo methylation and affect weight. Professor Ozanne added: “This variation in rDNA appears to be playing a large role in determining the response of the fetus to the in utero environment and therefore its phenotype later in life.”

This means that the epigenetic response of a given mouse is determined by the genetic variation of the rDNA - those who have more A-variant rDNA end up being smaller.

Heritability (how much the risk of a disease is explained by genetic factors) of type 2 diabetes has been estimated to be between 25 and 80 per cent in different studies. However, less than 20 per cent of the heritability of type 2 diabetes has been explained by genome studies of people with the disease. The major role played by genetic variation of rDNA, together with the fact that rDNA analysis would not have been included in these studies, could explain some of this missing heritability.

The findings also complement other studies that have found that mice that are put on high fat diets have offspring who show increased rDNA methylation. This suggests that methylation is a general stress response and may also explain the rise in obesity that is happening across the world.

The study was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, Research Councils UK, the European Union, British Heart Foundation and Medical Research Council.

Reference
Holland, ML et al. Early life nutrition modulates the epigenetic state of specific rDNA genetic variants in mice. Science; 7 July 2016; DOI: 10.1126/science.aaf7040

Adapted from a press release from Queen Mary University of London

Our skin is kept healthy by a constant turnover, with dying skin cells being shed and replaced by new cells. The process is maintained by ‘progenitor’ cells – the progeny of stem cells – that divide and ‘differentiate’ into fully-functional skin cells to replenish dying skin. These cells are in turn supported by a smaller population of ‘stem cells’, which remain silent, ready to become active and repair skin when it becomes damaged.

However, when this process goes awry, cancers can arise: damaged DNA or the activation of particular genes known as ‘oncogenes’ can trigger a cascade of activity that can lead ultimately to unchecked proliferation, the hallmark of a cancer. In some cases, these tumours may be benign, but in others, they can spread throughout the body – or ‘metastasise’ – where they can cause organ failure.

Until now, there has been intense interest in the scientific field about which types of cell – stem cell, progenitor cell or both – can give rise to tumours, and how those cells become transformed in the process of tumour initiation and growth. Now, in a study published in Nature, researchers led by Professor Cédric Blanpain at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, and Professor Ben Simons at the University of Cambridge, have demonstrated in mice how skin stem and progenitor cells respond to the activation of an oncogene. Their studies have shown that, while progenitor cells can give rise to benign lesions, only stem cells have the capacity to develop into deadly invasive tumours.

The researchers used a transgenic mouse model – a mouse whose genes had been altered to allow the activation of an oncogene in individual stem and progenitor cells. The oncogene was coupled with a fluorescent marker so that cells in which the oncogene was active could be easily identified, and as these cells proliferate, their ‘daughter’ cells could also be tracked. These related, fluorescent cells are known as ‘clones’.

By analysing the number of fluorescently-labelled cells per clone using mathematical modelling, the team was able to show that only clones derived from mutant stem cells were able to overcome a mechanism known as ‘apoptosis’, or programmed cell death, and continue to divide and proliferate unchecked, developing into a form of skin cancer known as basal cell carcinoma. In contrast, the growth of clones derived from progenitor cells becomes checked by increasing levels of apoptosis, leading to the formation of benign lesions.

“It’s incredibly rare to identify a cancer cell of origin and until now no one has been able to track what happens on an individual level to these cells as they mutate and proliferate,” says Professor Blanpain. “We now know that stem cells are the culprits: when an oncogene in a stem cell becomes active, it triggers a chain reaction of cell division and proliferation that overcomes the cell’s safety mechanisms.”

“While this has solved a long-standing scientific argument about which cell types can lead to invasive skin tumours, it is far more than just a piece of esoteric knowledge,” adds Professor Simons from the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. “It suggests to us that targeting the pathways used in regulating cell fate decisions – how stem cells choose between cell proliferation and differentiation – could be a more effective way of halting tumours in their tracks and lead to potential new therapies.”

The work was supported by the FNRS, TELEVIE, the Fondation Contre le Cancer, the ULB fondation, the foundation Bettencourt Schueller, the foundation Baillet Latour, the European Research Council, Wellcome Trust and Trinity College Cambridge.

Reference
Sánchez-Danés, A et al. Defining the clonal dynamics leading to mouse skin tumour initiation. Nature; 8 July 2016; DOI: 10.1038/nature19069

Image
The green-labelled cells show a basal cell carcinoma in mouse tail epidermis derived from a single mutant stem cell and expanding out of the normal epidermis stained in red. Credit: Adriana Sánchez-Danés.

Even before the UK’s Brexit vote was official, the pound’s value plummeted. It has been much reported that sterling has hit record lows. A look at the history of British currency crises shows how dramatic the shock was. That’s not to say Brexit has precipitated a full blown crisis, but a sterling recovery in the short term is not to be expected.

The pound fell to £1 to US$1.28 in the two weeks after the Brexit result. This has only been reached once in all the time these two currencies have existed – for a two-year period in the 1980s. And in the 1980s, the low rate was not due to a fundamentally weak pound, but to a strong dollar. All European currencies at the time fell against the dollar and were saved in 1985 by the Plaza Accord, a commitment by the US and Europe’s major economies to support their currencies through market intervention.

Apart from this brief episode between 1984 and 1985, sterling is now at its lowest against the US dollar since 1792, when the first American dollar was minted. The morning after the announcement of the Brexit result on June 24, sterling had dropped 10% overnight and was down 8% at the end of the trading day. Only four times since 1900 did the pound drop so much in one day – in 1931, 1940, 1949 and 1967. Two of these four falls were government induced devaluations.

In 1967 the British government decided to devalue sterling after several years of poor economic performance, mirroring the declining role of Britain in the world. After several dramatic rescue packages by industrialised countries from 1962-67, sterling was devalued by 14.3%. It led to considerable unrest on dollar and gold markets.

Before then, in 1949, at the insistence of the US, the British government decided to reduce the value of sterling by 30%. The world order had changed after the war and the US had a stronger economic position which needed to be reflected in its currency. Most European nations at the time followed this move and it had a rather positive consequence overall, even if the government was pushed to devalue after the Bank of England had lost money maintaining sterling’s parity with the dollar.

In 1931, the situation was in some ways similar to today. The unexpected shock of the Great Depression forced the British government to devalue sterling against its will. The shock, however, was much more violent and had disastrous global consequences as sterling was a major international currency. Britain was forced to abandon the gold standard, after having officially re-established a parity with gold in 1925. The devaluation marked the beginning of harmful currency and trade wars– something we do not want to see repeated in the wake of Brexit.

Thankfully today, trade wars are unlikely to happen as the World Trade Organisation, built up from 1948 and formally established in 1995, forces all nations to a minimum set of trade agreements. The institution is partly a legacy from the competitive policies of the Great Depression and ensures that none of the signatory parties engages in harmful trade wars. Similarly, the IMF, also created after the events of the Great Depression, is making sure that countries do not engage in currency wars, artificially devaluing currencies to make their exports cheaper.

The fourth time that the pound fell so badly followed the aftermath of Germany’s invasion of France in 1940, which pushed the pound down by almost 10%, just short of the drop the night of the Brexit result.

Crisis or short-term crash?

All the big shocks in the post-war years have been parallel to a progressive decline in the British colonial empire. Is this sterling drop to be the last nail in the coffin of Great Britain slowly becoming little England? To understand this, it’s important to recognise whether the main consequences of Brexit are only on the currency or also on the real economy.

Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff define currency crashes as any drop of 15% over a year. By these measures, the aftermath of Brexit can be seen as a currency crash. However, it is not yet a full-blown crisis, as the impact on the economy is not yet clear. A lower pound might be good for British exports, but not for housing or finance.

This raises the question of whether the Bank of England will intervene and start buying sterling with its dollar reserves to avoid the pound from falling further. The decision would have to come from the Treasury, which is in charge of foreign exchange policy.

Latest foreign currency reserve figures published at the end of June showed that British reserves actually increased between May and June, in line with the trend of previous months. This would indicate that the Bank of England did not use its dollar reserves to support the pound. This has been the Bank’s policy since shortly after 1992, when it lost £3.3bn to speculators on Black Wednesday.

What would help sterling recover is positive news about the balance of payment (the current account deficit sat at £32.6 billion in March 2016), a rise in interest rates or overall economic growth. But due to all the economic and political unrest following Brexit, none of this is likely to happen in the near future so a further depreciation can be expected.

Alain Naef, PhD Candidate in Financial History, University of Cambridge

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

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

The greatest philosophical one-liner of the 20th century – or anti-EU theme tune? “Hell is other people” began life as a snappy soundbite in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos, a short, harsh, brilliant meditation of a play, written in the midst of World War II. It may actually have been delivered first, in rehearsal, by Sartre’s friend and antagonist Albert Camus. Huis Clos is a difficult title to translate – the norm used to be: “No Exit”, stressing some notion of inescapable interdependence. I guess, in the current fissionary climate, it could be rewritten as “Brexit”, or possibly “Brexistentialism”.

I have to ask the unpleasant question of this nation: are we being xenophobic? I am fairly sure Sartre would reply, in his confrontational way: we are not being anywhere near xenophobic enough. Yet. We are not following the Brexistentialist argument where it leads. We have to understand and assume responsibility for the consequences of our own attitudes.

Shortly after the referendum result, I received a message from a young Danish friend: “So you don’t like us any more”, she said. I replied: “We’re not prejudiced. We don’t like anyone”. I was proposing, in other words, an even-handed hostility, an all-round, egalitarian phobia of the other. But I was probably, in the Sartre view of the world, being prematurely utopian, I admit. I suspect that we are still being overly selective in our resentments and revulsion.

Existentialism is usually thought of as a form of radical individualism. There is no “society” in Sartre. Everyone is Shane or Jack Reacher or Lisbeth Salander. Your closest relationship is with your horse or folding toothbrush or computer. In Being and Nothingness, the longer essay Sartre wrote alongside Huis Clos, he makes clear that the core of the self (not that it has a core) is its nexus with other people.

How do I define myself, sitting in this West Village cafe in New York right now? Like so many philosophical answers, it is obvious and yet far-reaching in its implications. I am not this keyboard that I have under my fingers, I am not this cup of black coffee, I am not this woman in sunglasses who is sitting opposite me. I am defined, in short, by a series of negations.

Staring at the void (and seeing nothing)

Anecdotal allegory: I was once at a conference in Geneva where one of the speakers dropped out through illness. I offered to step in to fill the breach. Thank you, replied my good friend Philippe who was overseeing the conference, “Mais on ne peut pas remplir un trou par un vide”. Loosely translated: “You can’t fill a hole with a void”. Funny how certain lines stick in the mind (this was 25 years ago). But, to come to the point (not that there is a point in the entire universe), this is exactly what Sartre proposes we are doing every second of every day: I am a void which I am attempting to fill up with a series of negations. Popeye, on this basis: “I am what I am and that’s all what I am” – is clearly guilty of “bad faith” or delusion. And even he needs a tin of spinach to fully inflate.

Perhaps it was not so surprising in Occupied France in the 1940s that Sartre would conclude that, in our relations with others, we really only have two fundamental options: sadism and masochism. Or (situation normal) some combination of both. There is no third way. As true today as it was then. Which explains why, all too often in the current debates, we refer back to World War II (say, for example, Cameron being accused of “appeasement”), as if we were all retired Spitfire pilots (the “Few” have multiplied to become the many).

Of course the theory omits the crucial question of the collective. Sartre resorted to Marx (Karl) for the answer. But Marx (Groucho) had already defined the problem: “I don’t want to belong to any club that would have me for a member.” Sartre wanted to abolish clubs entirely. He dreamed of a system of evenly distributed particles floating free in the meaningless void. A beautiful concept for sure. Perhaps, ultimately, a form of nostalgia. But, rather like particles in the early universe, we have an irresistible tendency to agglomerate, to clump together. Our particular local clump, or club, can only define itself by opposition to other clubs.

The great French utopian philosopher, Charles Fourier (who provided Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir with the notion of the “pivotal” or significant other) analysed humans in terms of their passions – which he equated with Newtonian gravity, causing us to band together. But the “butterfly” passion also causes us to fly apart and split up.

Freedom’s just another word

We are “condemned to be free” in the sense that all our clubs are strictly provisional (except, in my own case, West Ham United). I am aligning myself with one really quite powerful club even by virtue of writing this article: it is in English, so I am implicitly asserting some measure of competence in English and association with other English speakers.

I try not to get too excited by this sense of belonging, however, because I know that English itself splits into a multiplicity of idiolects. In fact, having in the course of drifting around acquired a fairly strange accent, I no longer know where I belong, geographically or socially.

Neither does anyone else. Unless, of course, they are guilty of bad faith.

We (and I am conscious when I write the word of how fictional, how hypothetical, how mythic it is) have chosen (mythically speaking) the path of “anomie” or singularity, to be governed by no rule. “Romantic anomie” was the sociologist Emile Durkheim’s phrase, in his analysis of the causes of suicide (the first philosophical question, as Camus called it).

Whole countries can have an existential crisis, not just lonely, drifting outsiders. We can be a drop-out too. Driven by a sense of the nausea of existence itself. But equally it will not be too surprising if this drop-out mentality catches on. And “we” just ceases to exist. Maybe it already died. I already feel a certain nostalgia for Brexistentialism.

Andy Martin, Lecturer, Department of French, 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.

Matter falling into a black hole heats up as it plunges to its doom. Before it passes into the black hole and is lost from view forever, it can reach millions of degrees. At that temperature it shines x-rays into space.

In the 1980s, astronomers discovered that the x-rays coming from black holes vary on a range of timescales and can even follow a repeating pattern with a dimming and re-brightening taking 10 seconds to complete. As the days, weeks and then months progress, the pattern’s period shortens until the oscillation takes place 10 times every second. Then it suddenly stops altogether.

This phenomenon was dubbed a Quasi Periodic Oscillation (QPO). During the 1990s, astronomers began to suspect that the QPO was associated with a gravitational effect predicted by Einstein’s general relativity which suggested that a spinning object will create a kind of gravitational vortex. The effect is similar to twisting a spoon in honey: anything embedded in the honey will be ‘dragged’ around by the twisting spoon. In reality, this means that anything orbiting around a spinning object will have its motion affected. If an object is orbiting at an angle, its orbit will ‘precess’ – in other words, the whole orbit will change orientation around the central object. The time for the orbit to return to its initial condition is known as a precession cycle.

In 2004, NASA launched Gravity Probe B to measure this so-called Lense-Thirring effect around Earth. By analysing the resulting data, scientists confirmed that the spacecraft would turn through a complete precession cycle once every 33 million years. Around a black hole, however, the effect would be much stronger because of the stronger gravitational field: the precession cycle would take just a matter of seconds to complete, close to the periods of the QPOs.

An international team of researchers, including Dr Matt Middleton from the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge, has used the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s NuSTAR, both x-ray observatories, to study the effect of black hole H1743-322 on a surrounding flat disc of matter known as an ‘accretion disk’.

Close to a black hole, the accretion disc puffs up into a hot plasma, a state of matter in which electrons are stripped from their host atoms – the precession of this puffed up disc has been suspected to drive the QPO. This can also explain why the period changes - the place where the disc puffs up gets closer to the black hole over weeks and months, and, as it gets closer to the black hole, the faster its Lense-Thirring precession becomes.

The plasma releases high energy radiation that strikes the matter in the surrounding accretion disc, making the iron atoms in the disc shine like a fluorescent light tube. Instead of visible light, the iron releases X-rays of a single wavelength – referred to as ‘a line’. Because the accretion disc is rotating, the iron line has its wavelength distorted by the Doppler effect: line emission from the approaching side of the disc is squashed – blue shifted – and line emission from the receding disc material is stretched – red shifted. If the plasma really is precessing, it will sometimes shine on the approaching disc material and sometimes on the receding material, making the line wobble back and forth over the course of a precession cycle.

It is this ‘wobble’ that has been observed by the researchers.

“Just as general relativity predicts, we’ve seen the iron line wobble as the accretion disk orbits the black hole,” says Dr Middleton. “This is what we’d expect from matter moving in a strong gravitational field such as that produced by a black hole.”

This is the first time that the Lense-Thirring effect has been measured in a strong gravitational field. The technique will allow astronomers to map matter in the inner regions of accretion discs around back holes. It also hints at a powerful new tool with which to test general relativity. Einstein’s theory is largely untested in such strong gravitational fields. If astronomers can understand the physics of the matter that is flowing into the black hole, they can use it to test the predictions of general relativity as never before - but only if the movement of the matter in the accretion disc can be completely understood.

“We need to test Einstein’s general theory of relativity to breaking point,” adds Dr Adam Ingram, the lead author at the University of Amsterdam. “That’s the only way that we can tell whether it is correct or, as many physicists suspect, an approximation – albeit an extremely accurate one.”

Larger X-ray telescopes in the future could help in the search because they could collect the X-rays faster. This would allow astronomers to investigate the QPO phenomenon in more detail. But for now, astronomers can be content with having seen Einstein’s gravity at play around a black hole.

Adapted from a press release by the European Space Agency.

Image: ESA/ATG medialab.

Peace in Mozambique lasted 20 years, between 1992 and 2012.

Following three years of skirmishes, conflict has escalated since 2015. The Mozambican Defence Force has been trying to destroy the military bases belonging to the Mozambican National Resistance (Renamo), the principal opposition to the ruling Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo) in parliament.

At least 10,000 people have fled Mozambique and sought refuge in Malawi, testifying to attacks perpetrated mostly by government soldiers. The conflict has served to consolidate local support for Renamo, which had previously fought the government from 1976 to 1992.

Pragmatic peace

The 1992 Rome Accord, which ended the 16-year war, was greeted at the time as a model of pragmatism. To overcome the misgivings of Renamo’s leader, Afonso Dhlakama, the accord allowed him to retain armed bodyguards.

Other Renamo soldiers were to have been integrated into the police. When this didn’t happen, they stayed loyal to Dhlakama. Renamo’s electoral support peaked in 1999 and then declined: the challenge of the opposition party trapped in a system where loyalty requires redistributing state largesse. Then-President Joaquim Chissano appeased Dhlakama only through diplomacy and patronage.

Things changed with the election of Armando Guebuza as president in 2004. Not only did Guebuza reject Chissano’s conciliatory attitude towards Dhlakama; his presidency also saw state capture by a section of the Frelimo elite at a time when Mozambique’s economy was being transformed by the coal and gas industries.

The emergence of a visibly wealthy elite while most people remained poor was a grievance that Renamo was later to exploit. In 2009, Dhlakama relocated to the northern city of Nampula where, in 2012, Renamo soldiers clashed with police at Renamo’s provincial headquarters. Dhlakama retreated to his wartime redoubt at Satungira in the Gorongosa National Park in Sofala province. Meanwhile, Renamo soldiers were quietly establishing bases in rural areas across the central provinces.

An army of ageing combatants

The next phase of the crisis began with a gathering of Renamo men in Muxúnguè, a town on the north-south arterial road through Sofala province. Residents of the town recalled that by the end of March 2013 several hundred were camped out at the local Renamo office and conducting marching drills.

The men were all at least 40 years old. A peculiar feature of this conflict has been Renamo’s reliance on ageing combatants from the civil war, rather than recruiting fresh blood. On April 3, police fired teargas to disperse the men. The next day, Renamo attacked the police station before retreating to an unknown location in the bush outside the town.

Later that year, Renamo began systematically to ambush vehicles on the national road south of Muxúnguè. Civilian casualties were few, but the threat to the economy alarmed the government. The defence force began counterinsurgency operations against farming communities that it suspected of supporting Renamo.

Negotiations got under way, mediated by Mozambican civil society, but with little apparent enthusiasm from either side. Renamo’s demands centred on three main points. First, it should have the right to appoint officers to the defence force equivalent to those appointed by the government. This was a provision of the Rome Accord, ignored in recent years as retired ex-Renamo officers were replaced by government (in effect, Frelimo) nominees.

Second, Renamo demanded measures to deal with electoral malpractice. Finally, Renamo wanted power to be devolved to the provinces; this would create a patronage base for Renamo – and for that reason would be hard for Frelimo to accept.

The negotiations resulted only in a truce to allow elections to go ahead as scheduled in October 2014. The results revealed a resurgence in support for Renamo and for Dhlakama.

Conflicting historical narratives

Interviews I did in Sofala during the lull that followed the 2014 election, as part of an ongoing research project, gave some clues as to why so many central Mozambicans regard an armed Renamo as a preferable alternative to the status quo.

When people talked about local history, they evoked divisions going back to the independence struggle in the 1960s. In contrast to Frelimo’s official history of undivided nationalism, people in Sofala recall a fractious alliance between leaders from different parts of Mozambique.

They remember a pastor from Sofala called Uria Simango, who as Frelimo vice-president was expected to succeed Eduardo Mondlane, who was killed in 1969. The fact that Simango was outmanoeuvred by Samora Machel, a southerner who led Mozambique to independence in 1975, is understood as part of a pattern of southern domination over the rest of Mozambique.

After independence, Frelimo’s attempts to relocate peasants to communal villages engendered support in Sofala for a Renamo that promised to reverse the collectivisation policy. When people speak of their own poverty today, they contrast it with wealth being amassed by the southern elite.

Frelimo’s crisis of legitimacy

When police demand bribes from farmers taking produce to market, people interpret this as symptomatic of a state that predates on central Mozambicans and has no legitimacy to rule. This suggests a reason why, when Renamo guerrillas reappeared in villages in recent years, they were welcomed by people who harboured long-held resentments.

Refugees from Mozambique’s Tete province whom I interviewed in Malawi this year also saw the state as a predatory force. But unlike people in Sofala, they had no historic allegiance to Renamo. When Renamo established bases in Tete in 2012 many were apprehensive, but warmed to Renamo’s men, who explained they had come to bring “democracy”.

Trouble began only after the 2014 elections. People initially believed Renamo had won, then were confused when they heard Frelimo’s candidate, Filipe Nyusi, had become president.

Refugees said they had expected Renamo to take power for two reasons, each based on a misunderstanding of democracy that Renamo had apparently encouraged. First, because Renamo had a majority in more than half of Mozambique’s provinces, it ought to run the country. Second, they insisted that “democracy means alternation of power”: the fact that Frelimo has been in power since 1975 was reason enough for a change.

Village ‘chiefs’ and ‘secretaries’

Renamo began during 2015 to assert its presence by appointing “chiefs” and “secretaries” in villages, in parallel with the Frelimo appointees who represent the state as well as the party. Not surprisingly, this alarmed the government, which in late 2015 began a new push to defeat Renamo.

Accounts from throughout central Mozambique reveal a consistent strategy. Government troops would try to expel Renamo, and then attack nearby civilians, accusing them of supporting Renamo. They burnt houses, sometimes with the occupants inside. They burnt grain stores, assuming these to be supplies for Renamo.

Some people were shot, others captured and interrogated. Women and men were raped. Renamo soldiers have been more restrained, targeting Frelimo officials. The Mozambican army is currently trying to take Renamo’s Satungira headquarters, but mountainous terrain gives the guerrillas an advantage.

What is happening in Mozambique is not exactly a popular uprising. It was ignited by Dhlakama’s desire for a share of political power, and its associated wealth, in a situation where the state is synonymous with Frelimo. The Rome Accord deserves some blame for centralising politics while allowing an opposition movement to retain access to the means of violence: 20 years later, Dhlakama realised his soldiers were the only asset he had left.

Nevertheless, the recent uprising could not have happened without popular support – support that Renamo mobilised by presenting ideas about history and democracy in a way that resonated with real grievances.

Justin Pearce, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Politics and International Studies & Research Associate of St John's College Cambridge, University of Cambridge

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

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

The World Health Organization estimates that 1.3 billion adults worldwide are overweight, and that a further 600 million are obese. The prevalence of adult obesity is 20% in Europe and 31% in North America.

“On average, overweight people lose about one year of life expectancy, and moderately obese people lose about three years of life expectancy,” says Dr Emanuele Di Angelantonio from the University of Cambridge, the lead author. “We also found that men who were obese were at much higher risk of premature death than obese women. This is consistent with previous observations that obese men have greater insulin resistance, liver fat levels, and diabetes risk than women.”

The study found an increased risk of premature death for people who were underweight, as well as for people classed as overweight. The risk increased steadily and steeply as BMI increased. A similar trend was seen in many parts of the world and for all four main causes of death.

Where the risk of death before age 70 would be 19% and 11% for men and women with a normal BMI, the study found that it would be 29.5% and 14.6% for moderately obese men and women. The authors defined premature deaths as those at ages 35-69 years.

The new study brings together information on the causes of any deaths in 3.9 million adults from 189 previous studies in Europe, North America and elsewhere. At entry to the study all were aged between 20 and 90 years old, and were non-smokers who were not known to have any chronic disease when their BMI was recorded. The analysis is of those who then survived at least another five years.

The authors say that assuming that the associations between high BMI and mortality are largely causal, if those who were overweight or obese had WHO-defined normal levels of BMI, then one in 7 premature deaths in Europe and one in 5 in North America would be avoided.

Reference
The Global BMI Mortality Collaboration. Body-mass index and all-cause mortality: individual-participant-data meta-analysis of 239 prospective studies in four continents. Lancet; 13 July 2016; DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(16)30175-1

Adapted from a press release from The Lancet

The report also sets out four steps that can be taken to put biodiversity at the forefront of decision-making about environmental impact.

The report argues that the importance of biodiversity is often missed by organisations looking to understand and mitigate their impacts on the natural environment, as it is perceived as one of the benefits of protecting natural assets, rather than an asset that itself generates benefits.

Human society across the globe ultimately depends on goods and services provided and replenished by the natural environment. Today it is widely recognised that average global consumption of this ‘natural capital’ far outstrips its ability to regenerate. Biodiversity plays a fundamental role in ecosystem functioning, and therefore underpins this ability to regenerate and the delivery of all ecosystem benefits, according to the report.

One of the report’s lead authors, Thomas Maddox from Fauna & Flora International, said: “Biodiversity is essential to everyday life. It boosts ecosystem productivity and underpins most of the services that we all use and value on a daily basis. It is frequently listed as one of many concerns in natural capital assessments, alongside greenhouse gas emissions or water consumption; however its importance is often missed by businesses, which means that their impact on biodiversity and their dependency upon it is overlooked.”

The report also sets out four positive steps that can be taken to put biodiversity at the forefront of decision-making about environmental impact:

• The stock of natural capital should be at the heart of any natural capital assessment
• Targets with respect to biodiversity should be identified
• Indicators that provide information on the state of biodiversity that a business is responsible for, or has a commitment to, should be developed
• The cost of delivering biodiversity targets should be estimated and reported in natural capital accounts to reflect of a company’s liability with regards to maintenance of natural capital assets on which it depends or has impact

Dr Bhaskar Vira, another lead author on the paper from the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge, and Director of the University of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute, added: “To move forward the positive steps outlined in the paper must be put at the heart of natural capital. When businesses are looking to understand and mitigate their environmental impacts, biodiversity needs to be at the forefront of their assessment.”

A pdf of the paper is downloadable from http://www.conservation.cam.ac.uk/resource/working-papers-and-reports/report-biodiversity-heart-accounting-natural-capital

The Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI; www.cambridgeconservation.org) is a unique collaboration between ten institutions: BirdLife International, British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), Cambridge Conservation Forum (CCF), IUCN, Fauna & Flora International (FFI), RSPB, TRAFFIC, Tropical Biology Association (TBA), UNEP-WCMC and the University of Cambridge. Together the CCI partners aim to deliver transformational approaches to understanding and conserving biodiversity and the wealth of natural capital it represents in order to secure a sustainable future for biodiversity and society through an effective partnership of leaders in research, education, policy and practice.

Archaeologists have made remarkable discoveries about everyday life in the Bronze Age during their ten-month excavation of 3,000-year-old circular wooden houses at Must Farm in Cambridgeshire, a site that has been described as the 'Pompeii of the fens'.

Believed to be the best-preserved Bronze Age dwellings ever found in Britain, the houses were destroyed by a fire that caused the settlement, which was built on stilts, to collapse into the shallow river beneath. The soft river silt encapsulated the remains of the charred dwellings and their contents, which survive in extraordinary detail.

The range and quality of the many finds have astonished members of Cambridge Archaeological Unit and colleagues at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Division of Archaeology. The fire is thought to have happened soon after the construction of the roundhouses.

“The excellent preservation of the site is due to deposition in a water-logged environment, the exclusion of air and the lack of disturbance to the site. The timber and artefacts fell into a partly infilled river channel where they were later buried by more than two metres of peat and silt,” said Professor Charles French from the Division of Archaeology. “Surface charring of the wood and other materials also helped to preserve them.”

Now the excavation is coming to an end, archaeologists are able to build a near complete picture of domestic life in a Bronze Age house: where activities happened, what the roof was made of, what people were wearing, and how their clothes were produced. The materials found provide evidence of farming, crafts and building technologies.

The site has revealed the largest collections in Britain of Bronze Age textiles, beads, domestic wooden artefacts (including buckets, platters, troughs, shafts and handles) and domestic metalwork (axes, sickles, hammers, spears, gouges, razors, knives and awls). It has also yielded a wide range of household items; among them are several complete ‘sets’ of storage jars, cups and bowls, some with grain and food residues still inside. Most of the pots are unbroken and are made in the same style; this too is unprecedented.

“Perhaps uniquely, we are seeing the whole repertoire of living at Must Farm – from food procurement to cooking, eating and waste and the construction and shaping of building materials,” said Professor French. “We see the full tool and weapons kits – not just items that had been lost, thrown away or deposited in an act of veneration – all in one place.” 

Finds of textiles and fibres illuminate the stages of textile production, and include hanks of prepared fibre, thread wound on wooden sticks or into balls, and finished fabrics of various qualities. “The outstanding level of preservation means that we can use methods, such as scanning electron microscopy which magnifies more than 10,000 times, to look in detail at the fibre content and structure,” said Dr Margarita Gleba, an archaeologist specialising in textiles.

“All the textiles appear to have been made from plant fibres. The people at Must Farm used cultivated species, such as flax, as well as wild plants, such as nettle and perhaps trees, to obtain raw materials. Flax provided the finest fibres and was used to weave fine linen fabrics on a loom. The linen textiles found at Must Farm are among the finest from Bronze Age Europe. Wild fibres appear to have been used for coarser fabrics made in a different technique, known as twining.”

Two rare well-preserved Bronze Age tripartite wheels have been found on site. These attest to a world beyond the river and to the ongoing relationship between the wetland settlement and the adjacent managed and cultivated dry land. Despite the site’s situation in a wetland, the majority of the surviving material speaks of an economy based on dry land.

Several undergraduates on Cambridge’s archaeology course have had the chance to assist with the dig, working alongside Cambridge Archaeological Unit to gain first-hand experience of a water-logged site. Professor French said: “Four of our students were able to experience the challenge of digging organic remains in a matrix of organic silt – and dealing with the three-dimensional structures of the collapsed dwellings which require a particular way of thinking.”

Visits to the site by more than 2,000 members of the public have been led by Selina Davenport of Cambridge Archaeological Unit. “One of the things that people find most fascinating is the way in which the site questions the long-held view about life in the fens during the Bronze Age that communities used the resources of the watery environment but lived on dry land,” she said.

“The finds at Must Farm reveal that some communities were living right in the heart of the fen – and that these people were connected to others by an active thoroughfare which linked them to the rest of Britain and to the North Sea.”

The excavation is funded by Historic England and building products supplier Forterra. The work on the site has been carried out by the Cambridge Archaeological Unit. Further work on the finds is taking place at the McDonald Institute, Division of Archaeology, and other centres.

More images (courtesy of Historic England) of some of the finds. 

Warm Jupiters are large, gas-giant exoplanets—planets found around stars other than the Sun. They are comparable in size to Jupiter and Saturn in our Solar System. But unlike the Sun’s family of giant planets, Warm Jupiters orbit their parent stars at roughly the same distance that Mercury, Venus and the Earth circle the Sun. They take ten to two hundred days to complete a single orbit instead of decades. Their origin is heavily debated topic of research.

It is generally thought that Warm Jupiters cannot form on the orbits that we find them on today; they are too close to their parent stars to have accumulated enough mass, and sufficient gas. Instead, it appeared more likely that they had formed in the outer reaches of their planetary systems and had migrated inward to their current positions. However such a migratory history would also leave a trace. The large gravity of any migrating Warm Jupiter would have disturbed any neighbouring or companion planets, ejecting them from the system.

But, instead of finding “lonely”, companion-less Warm Jupiters, the team found that 11 of the 27 targets they studied have companions ranging in size from Earth-like to Neptune-like.

The team’s analysis, published this week in the Astrophysical Journal, demonstrates the existence of two distinct types of warm Jupiters, each with their own formation and dynamical history.

The two types include those that have smaller planetary companions and thus, likely formed near to where we find them today; and warm Jupiters without any companions indicating that they likely migrated to their current positions.

The presence of many smaller sized planetary companions to warm Jupiters provides our strongest evidence that planets similar to Jupiter and Saturn can assemble on orbits shorter than the Earth’s. “And when we take into account that there is more analysis to come,” says lead-author Chelsea Huang, “the number of Warm Jupiters with smaller neighbours may be even higher. We may find that more than half have companions.”

This result came as a “surprise” according to Amaury Triaud, now a research fellow at the Institute of Astronomy, in Cambridge. “Before starting this study, we had not anticipated this remarkable result. This challenges our ideas about which conditions are sufficient for the formation of planets. It reinforces the view that planets form in richer and more diverse ways than what can be glimpsed from the sole study of the Solar system planets.”

Reference

Huang, C et al. Warm Jupiters are less lonely than Hot Jupiters: close neighbors. Astrophysical Journal; 6 July 2016; DOI:10.3847/0004-637X/825/2/98

Based on a press release prepared by the University of Toronto.

-In May thousands of people watched a documentary called The Secret Life of the Human Pups. The film accompanied Spot and friends (men who dress as dogs) as they travelled to a beauty pageant. Its appearance came just a couple of months after the publication of Being a Beast, a book in which veterinarian/barrister Charles Foster describes living in the wild as a badger, fox and stag. The protagonists of film and book may have little in common but they share a desire to escape the narrowness of being human.

People who identify as other than human have been described (and describe themselves as ‘animal-people’, ‘lycanthropes’, ‘therianthropes’   and, most recently, ‘otherkin’. Together they have a history stretching back to antiquity: witness the fabulous beasts which embellish the margins of medieval manuscripts. It was in the course of researching the role of monsters and monstrosity in Renaissance Europe, and the ‘animalesque’ affinities of 16th-century Portuguese witches, prosecuted by the Catholic Inquisition, that researcher Pedro Feijó (MPhil History and Philosophy of Science) decided to lean into the worlds of those who, half a millennium later, inhabit the borders of animality and the margins of humanness.  

Feijó embarked on an exploration of people who are more, or other, than human – and how such people have been perceived and treated by those around them. “We have witnessed, in the last half a century, an explosion of politics grounded on new identities, and on their overcoming. People have been experimenting with and transgressing the limits of what it means to be a woman, of what it means to have a gender, a sex, or a sexual orientation,” Feijó says.

“Across the western world, individuals and collectives are defying our identity as organic beings, in contrast with mechanical ones, and exploring cyborgism. Social movements of trans and disabled people started questioning what it means exactly to be an able body. The neuro-diverse and BIID (Body Integrity Identity Disorder – people who would prefer to be ‘disabled’) have followed in the same footsteps. I thought it would be worth exploring the worlds of those who clash with one central dichotomy: humanity and non-human animality.”

Feijó’s essay Doctors Herding Cats: The Misadventures of Modern Medicine and Psychology with NonhuMan Identities offers a fascinating insight into questions of identity and how they have been mediated. There is no shortage of tales and testimonies about people becoming animals. “The Biblical King Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, roamed the land for seven years as an ox and countless other tales turn on human to animal transformations,” writes Feijó. “During the 18th century, accounts of lycanthropy were left behind as the European Enlightenment movement classified them as irrational and obscure. But people who belong to a kind other than the human seem to have sprung from the blind spots of modernity, and have grown strong and visible for the last four decades.”

Feijó points to a medley of converging influences – among them folklore, spiritualism, Tolkien’s mythopoeia, science fiction, UFO cults and the New Age. By the 1970s, elf groups were well established, and strongly non-apologetic. Explaining their rationale, one of these groups, the Silver Elves, wrote: “We are an elusive people who have learned through time to be both hidden and secretive… yet we accomplish this by being both open and obvious.  People upon hearing that we are elves simply do not believe their own eyes and ears.  They think that we are joking and we share their laughter.”

In the 1990s, with the beginning of the digital revolution, R’ykanadar Korra’ti founded the niche publication Elfkind Digest, initially as a mailing list. “This is not … about role-playing or role-playing games: we’re elves. Deal with it,” wrote Korra’ti. “Initially I expected only to find other elves; as it turned out, I found a large number of people with a large number of self-identifications.”

The term ‘otherkin’ was coined by a contributor to Elkind Digest. “I got tired of typing elf/dragon/orc/etc-kin and just used otherkin,” wrote Torin. As access to the internet spread beyond the professional middle classes, the otherkin community multiplied and diversified. “The first decade of the 21st century witnessed a huge diversification in terms of assumed sexual and gender preferences and identities – especially once otherkin groups migrated to the blog-hosting site, Tumbr,” says Feijó.

In his essay, Feijó highlights the contrast between communities which embrace the experiences of otherkin and the medical corpus which regards non-human identification and behaviour as a subject of inquiry insofar as it is a problem to be treated. He observes: “Psychiatry sees individual patients, otherkin sees a community and a safe space. Where medicine has seen a syndrome to be explained, otherkin have seen affinities with no need for a unified metaphysical justification.” 

Accounts of therianthropy (the psychiatric term for the delusional state of being an animal) exist in 19th century medical literature. Feijó cites an account of a man who behaves as a carnivorous animal in a French asylum: “he walks on all fours, picks up everything he finds in his teeth, and in the same way he uses his teeth to dig up carrots, roots, etc., that he then carries to a corner and swallows, without standing up.” Another source describes a patient who “thinks she has become a dog, a bull, a man: all the parts of her body are deformed, enlarged: she doesn’t recognise herself anymore”.

In the 1960s, heterodox psychological and psychiatric trends began to make space for a very different kind of understanding. The psychiatrist RD Laing, for example, known for his consideration of delusions as valid accounts, gives the example of a friend who, some years earlier, had a psychotic episode in which he had “a voyage into inner space and time” and “at one time I actually seemed to be wandering in a desert landscape as if I were an animal … a kind of rhinoceros or something like that and emitting sounds like a rhinoceros.”  Laing used this example to point out the importance of allowing trips as therapeutic experiences.

But tolerance of difference is shallow – and acceptance of people who feel different, and visibly don’t conform, is frequently tinged with ridicule. Their perceived absurdity was capitalized not only for diagnostic purposes, but also for mercantile ones. “Post-1970s medical literature presents lycanthropes as curiosities, as fetishized subjects and ultimately as immaterial commodities. Lycanthrophy is written about not so much for reasons of intellectual inquiry but because it sells. Something analogous happened in the general online community, where otherkin are routinely laughed at,” says Feijó.

“The problem is that the ridicule seems to reside elsewhere: modern psychiatry and psychology have not been able to keep up-to-date with new post-human perceptions, which have been unable to admit the problems of distinguishing between a phenomenological symptom and a voluntary behaviour, and furthermore which have chosen to pathologize and ruin the lives of many through the insistence on an obsolete paradigm, while the same people could have found a supporting community off- and online.” 

Homo sapiens has existed for a mere 200,000 years or so; the earliest land creatures crawled out of around 400 millennia ago. In the tree of life we share our inheritance with creatures as diverse as amoebas, flatworms, insects, fish and birds.  In 1997 Pat Califia, the well-known queer author of erotic essays, wrote: “I’m never sure if I have gender dysphoria or species dysphoria. I often try to explain that I’m really a starfish trapped in a human body and I’m very new to your planet.”

The narratives of those who share the rejection of their full humanity and an entangled sympathy with other beings have taken a new critical role in the last half century. They pose a simple, uncomfortable question: what does it mean to be human?Feijó proposes:"Following the struggles of those who have seen themselves excluded from mankind, it might be time to ask if the diagnosis didn’t have the wrong focus all along: in the 20th century. Perhaps it could be said that humanity itself is a case of species dysphoria?"

The ability of biological molecules, such as our DNA, to replicate themselves is the foundation of life. It is a process that usually involves complex cellular machinery. However, certain protein structures manage to replicate without any additional assistance, such as the small, disease-causing protein fibres – fibrils – that are involved in neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

These fibrils, known as amyloids, become intertwined and entangled with each other, causing the so-called ‘plaques’ that are found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. Spontaneous formation of the first amyloid fibrils is very slow, and typically takes several decades, which could explain why Alzheimer’s is usually a disease that affects people in their old age. However, once the first fibrils are formed, they begin to replicate and spread much more rapidly by themselves, making the disease extremely challenging to control.

Despite its importance, the fundamental mechanism of how protein fibrils can self-replicate without any additional machinery is not well understood. In a study published today in the journal Nature Physics, a team led by researchers from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge used a powerful combination of computer simulations and laboratory experiments to identify the necessary requirements for the self-replication of protein fibrils.

The researchers found that the seemingly complicated process of fibril self-replication is actually governed by a simple physical mechanism: the build-up of healthy proteins on the surface of existing fibrils.

The researchers used a molecule known as amyloid-beta, which forms the main component of the amyloid plaques found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. They found a relationship between the amount of healthy proteins that are deposited onto the existing fibrils, and the rate of the fibril self-replication. In other words, the greater the build-up of proteins on the fibril, the faster it self-replicates.

They also showed, as a proof of principle, that by changing how the healthy proteins interact with the surface of fibrils, it is possible to control the fibril self-replication.

Dr Anđela Šarić, the study’s first author, says: “One of the mysteries of amyloid plaque formation is how, after their long, slow formation, the speed of their progression becomes much faster. We’ve identified the factors that in fact cause the system to catalyse its own activity, becoming a runaway process. But this discovery suggests that if we’re able to control the build-up of healthy proteins on the fibrils, we might be able to limit the aggregation and spread of plaques.”

Dr Šarić also argues that the findings could be of great interest in the field of nanotechnology. “One of the unfilled goals in nanotechnology is achieving efficient self-replication in manufacturing of nanomaterials. This is exactly what we’ve observed happening with these fibrils – if we’re able to learn the design rules from this process, we may be able to achieve this goal.”

Reference
Saric, A et al. Physical determinants of the self-replication of protein fibrils. Nature Physics; 18 July 2016; DOI: 10.1038/NPHYS3828

Image
Artist’s rendering of protein fibrils (in blue) and healthy proteins from computer simulations

No matter whether you speak English or Urdu, Waloon or Waziri, Portuguese or Persian, the roots of your language are the same. Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the mother tongue – shared by several hundred contemporary languages, as well as many now extinct, and spoken by people who lived from about 6,000 to 3,500 BC on the steppes to the north of the Caspian Sea.

They left no written texts and although historical linguists have, since the 19th century, painstakingly reconstructed the language from daughter languages, the question of how it actually sounded was assumed to be permanently out of reach.

Now, researchers at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford have developed a sound-based method to move back through the family tree of languages that stem from PIE. They can simulate how certain words would have sounded when they were spoken 8,000 years ago.

Remarkably, at the heart of the technology is the statistics of shape.

“Sounds have shape,” explains Professor John Aston, from Cambridge’s Statistical Laboratory. “As a word is uttered it vibrates air, and the shape of this soundwave can be measured and turned into a series of numbers. Once we have these stats, and the stats of another spoken word, we can start asking how similar they are and what it would take to shift from one to another.” 

A word said in a certain language will have a different shape to the same word in another language, or an earlier language. The researchers can shift from one shape to another through a series of small changes in the statistics. “It’s more than an averaging process, it’s a continuum from one sound to the other,” adds Aston, who is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). “At each stage, we can turn the shape back into sound to hear how the word has changed.”

Rather than reconstructing written forms of ancient words, the researchers triangulate backwards from contemporary and archival audio recordings to regenerate audible spoken forms from earlier points in the evolutionary tree. Using a relatively new field of shape-based mathematics, the researchers take the soundwave and visualise it as a spectrogram – basically an undulating three-dimensional surface that represents the shape of that sound – and then reshape the spectrogram along a trajectory ‘signposted’ by known sounds.

While Aston leads the team of statistician ‘shape-shifters’ in Cambridge, the acoustic-phonetic and linguistic expertise is provided by Professor John Coleman’s group in Oxford.

The researchers are working on the words for numbers as these have the same meaning in any language. The longest path of development simulated so far goes backwards 8,000 years from English one to its PIE ancestor oinos, and likewise for other numerals. They have also ‘gone forwards’ from the PIE penkwe to the modern Greek pente, modern Welsh pimp and modern English
five, as well as simulating change from Modern English to Anglo-Saxon (or vice versa), and from Modern Romance languages back to Latin.

(Other audio demonstrations are available here)

“We’ve explicitly focused on reproducing sound changes and etymologies that the established analyses already suggest, rather than seeking to overturn them,” says Coleman, whose research was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

They have discovered words that appear to correctly ‘fall out’ of the continuum. “It’s pleasing, not because it overturns the received wisdom, but because it encourages us that we are getting something right, some of the time at least. And along the way there have also been a few surprises!” The method sometimes follows paths that do not seem to be etymologically correct, demonstrating that the method is scientifically testable and pointing to areas in which refinements are needed.

Remarkably, because the statistics describe the sound of an individual saying the word, the researchers are able to keep the characteristics of pitch and delivery the same. They can effectively turn the word spoken by someone in one language into what it would sound like if they were speaking fluently in another.

They can also extrapolate into the future, although with caveats, as Coleman describes: “If you just extrapolate linearly, you’ll reach a point at which the sound change hits the limit of what is a humanly reasonable sound. This has happened in some languages in the past with certain vowel sounds. But if you asked me what English will sound like in 300 years, my educated guess is that it will be hardly any different from today!”

For the team, the excitement of the research includes unearthing some gems of archival recordings of various languages that had been given up for dead, including an Old Prussian word last spoken by people in the early 1700s but ‘borrowed’ into Low Prussian and discovered in a German audio archive.

Their work has applications in automatic translation and film dubbing, as well as medical imaging (see panel), but the principal aim is for the technology to be used alongside traditional methods used by historical linguists to understand the process of language change over thousands of years.

“From my point of view, it’s amazing that we can turn exciting yet highly abstract statistical theory into something that really helps explain the roots of modern language,” says Aston.

“Now that we’ve developed many of the necessary technical methods for realising the extraordinary ambition of hearing ancient sounds once more,” adds Coleman, “these early successes are opening up a wide range of new questions, one of the central being how far back in time can we really go?”

Audio demonstrations are available here: www.phon.ox.ac.uk/jcoleman/ancient-sounds-audio.html

Inset image: Spectrograms showing how the shape of the sound of a word in one language can be morphed into the sound of the same word in another language; credit: John Aston.

When the 12 founding engineers of chip designer ARM Holdings met in a 14th century barn near Cambridge in 1991 to welcome their new CEO, (now Sir) Robin Saxby, he asked them a brutal question: “Should we strike out for something, or just be in the hand-to-mouth chip design consulting business?”

With Saxby’s enthusiasm and the founding engineers’ belief in their technology, the team decided they would aim to become a global standard. They set a target to embed ARM designs into 100m chips by the year 2000. It was an ambitious goal for a tiny company with only £1.32m of investment from its then-struggling backers Acorn, Apple, and VSLI. At the time, many said it was no more than a pipe dream.

But this week, ARM agreed a US$32 billion sale to Japan’s Softbank. ARM’s chip designs are embedded in more than 95% of the world’s mobile phones, as well as tablets, servers, and many other types of smart devices. Last year, ARM’s designs went into some 15 billion semi-conductor chips. An incredible feat from an inauspicious start. So what lessons does ARM’s success have for other budding British technology companies?

The first is: don’t try to do everything yourself. Instead, specialise in the activities where you have a distinctive advantage. In ARM’s case, that was designing capable, reliable chips that used little power and could be manufactured efficiently in volume at low cost.

Workhorses

Then, catalyse the development of a network of partners around you who will fill in the gaps and make you successful as they strive to grow their own businesses. ARM broke the mould at the time, abandoning the conventional wisdom that to succeed in semiconductors you had to be a vertically integrated company which made huge investments in wafer fabrication such as Intel, or remain as a small band of design consultants.

Instead, it decided to become a “chip-less, fab-less chip company”. It would specialise in designs for Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) chips– the workhorses that control all the background activities users aren’t even aware of. But instead of being a small, specialist provider of designs for RISC processors, ARM was able to turn itself into the pivot of a huge ecosystem, becoming the “glue” that bound a network of hundreds of partners together as well as a magnet for knowledge fragmented between different players.

These include phone and tablet makers, chip fabricators, tool developers, software providers, and makers of complementary chips. Lesson one, therefore, is focus on your core and harness the power of ecosystem partners to do the rest.

Growing the market

That leads on to the second lesson: concentrate what you can do to make the overall ecosystem “pie” bigger, rather than worrying about maximising your share of that pie. Given the difficulties of scaling up a technology company from a UK base, ARM shows the benefits of letting your ecosystem partners drive global scale for you, propelling your product into billions of devices and accumulating a small royalty from each to create a massive flow of cash.

The third lesson is to think global from day one. ARM grew with hardly a single customer in the UK. It realised that the volume, and the lead customers driving the direction of its industry, were scattered around the world. So, from the outset, it’s early customers and partners were in the US, Japan and Korea including Texas Instruments, Sony and Samsung. Later, a few were added in Europe, such as ST Microelectronics and Nokia. ARM had to be global almost from birth. Now clients include leading Chinese players such as Huawei and ZTE.

The SoftBank takeover is certainly not evidence that life will be rosy if and when the UK leaves the European Union. In fact, the deal probably has more to do with the decline in sterling relative to the yen and the dollar, which has made ARM shares cheaper for foreign buyers. Add the fact that ARM has hardly any customers in the UK and few in Europe; most of its sales are in Asia and the US. As a result, it’s pretty well insulated from a downturn in the UK economy.

The genuine threat from Brexit would come from any future restrictions on migration; ARM has a very multi-national army of engineers and faces an extreme shortage of suitably trained developers in Britain. Any problems here, and SoftBank’s soothing words about maintaining and growing ARM’s presence in the UK might fade into history.

But ARM is also attractive to the Japanese firm because it has the potential to become a major player in the “Internet of Things” – the emerging world where smart machines, sensors, and devices talk to each other. It is another lesson for UK tech firms to keep moving into new spaces.

ARM is particularly well placed to benefit from this emerging network, not only because of the strength of its technology and development capacity, but also because its ecosystem approach is a perfect fit for a market that requires a multitude of specialist companies, institutions and governments to work together. Even at a 40% premium over ARM’s share price before the deal was announced, Softbank’s acquisition looks like a smart move.

Peter Williamson, Honorary Professor of International Management at Cambridge Judge Business School, 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.


In a room in the Department of Surgery, a kidney sits inside a chamber connected to tubes and monitors. Solutions and gases are pumping through it and urine is coming out.

In fact, the chamber in itself is not particularly special – it’s an off-the-shelf machine used for cardiac bypass surgery in children: it’s how it has been adapted and the new uses it has found that make it so significant. This machine is able to rejuvenate kidneys deemed not fit for transplant, making them fit and healthy again – and suitable for a recipient.

Professor Andrew Bradley, Head of the Department of Surgery, is quick to point out that it is his team at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, part of Cambridge University Hospitals – particularly Professor Mike Nicholson and Dr Sarah Hosgood – who should take all the credit for this machine, which they refer to as an organ perfusion system.

There is a chronic shortage of suitable organs for transplant and something needs to be done. To help address the problem, in December 2015, Wales became the first country in the UK to make organ donation an ‘opt-out’ system – in other words, doctors would remove the organs from deceased individuals and provide them for use in sick patients unless the individual had explicitly refused consent before their death.

Unfortunately, not every donated organ is suitable for transplant – in the case of kidneys, for example, around 15% are deemed unsuitable. This can be for a variety of reasons, including the age of the donor, their disease history and the length of time the organ has been in cold storage.

“Grading organs is not an exact science – it’s a mixture of factors about the circumstance in which it became available, its storage and how it looks to a trained eye,” says Nicholson. “This isn’t good enough, particularly if it means we’re losing some potentially suitable organs.”

What if there was a way of taking these organs and assessing them systematically? And to take it a step further, could some of them even be rejuvenated? Before coming to Cambridge, Nicholson and Hosgood developed a system while at the University of Leicester that effectively recirculates essential nutrients through the kidney, bringing it back to life.

“We use a combination of red blood cells, a priming solution, nutrients, protective agents and oxygen,” explains Hosgood. “We pump this through the kidney while maintaining a temperature close to our body temperature. It mimics being in the body.”

As the perfusion solution is being circulated, the kidney will begin to function and produce urine. By analysing the contents of this urine and monitoring blood flow, doctors can see how the kidney is performing and whether it might make a viable transplant organ. After just a 60-minute perfusion, the kidneys are resuscitated and are potentially ready for transplantation.

This is no longer just an experiment: since moving to Cambridge, with funding from Kidney Research UK and the National Institute for Health Research, the team has been able to take kidneys rejected from other transplant centres, resuscitate and assess them, then transplant them. In December last year, two individuals on the organ transplant waiting list received the perfect Christmas present courtesy of the Cambridge team: a new kidney.

So far, the team has taken five discarded kidneys and managed to rescue three. “We’re hoping to process another hundred over the next four years,” says Hosgood, who is also working with centres in Newcastle, Edinburgh and at Guy’s Hospital in London, in the hope of replicating their success.

The current kit, which was not purpose-built for organ perfusion, is bulkier and clumsier than ideal, so the team is currently fundraising to help design a dedicated machine, in collaboration with colleagues from the Department of Engineering. “It’s not very mobile, so we couldn’t use it to help resuscitate organs in transit to other centres.”

Nicholson and Hosgood’s success has spurred on other colleagues. Professor Chris Watson describes himself as “piggybacking” on their work to develop a technique for perfusing livers. The situation for liver transplants is even more serious than it is for kidneys: as many as one in five patients on the waiting list will die before a liver becomes available.

So far, his team has taken 12 livers, all but one of which had been rejected by other centres, and successfully resuscitated and transplanted them using a system that builds on the pioneering work of his two colleagues.

“There’s a scene in the Woody Allen film Sleeper where Allen’s character stumbles across a 200-year-old Volkswagen Beetle and manages to start it first time,” he says. “The liver is like that. You take it out of cold storage and expect it to start first time. By first assessing it on our machine, we can be more confident it will work first time.”

In some ways, this has proved more of a challenge than it did for kidneys, he adds. “With kidneys, you can put them in the machine for an hour, resuscitate them and then transplant them. If it doesn’t work immediately, the patient stays on dialysis until it picks up. With a liver, it takes longer to analyse and resuscitate the organ, and if it doesn’t work it’s a disaster for the patient.”

Now that the team has successfully revived and transplanted kidneys and livers, this is by no means the end of the story. There is still much work to be done to further improve the organ – and hence improve the function and prolong survival, says Hosgood.

Once transplanted, organs face a battle with the body’s immune system, which recognises its new occupant as a foreign body. This is one reason why the perfusion system uses only red blood cells, not white – to do so would risk an inflammatory response that could damage the organ.

“Of course, as soon as you transplant the kidney, it will face a similar inflammatory response, but by then it should be in an improved state and able to cope better with what the body throws at it,” she explains. The Department is in the process of recruiting 400 patients for a randomised controlled trial to test this technology.

The perfusion system also enables therapies to be given directly to the kidney. This ensures optimal delivery of the treatment to the targeted organ and avoids any side effects in the patient. One promising avenue of research, in collaboration with Professor Jordan Pober at Yale University (USA), is the use of nanoparticles that target the endothelial cells in the lining of the kidney. These cells play an important role in the inflammatory response after transplantation. “The delivery of nanoparticles in this way may reduce damage to the organ after transplantation,” she adds.

The shortage of suitable organs is not going away. Not even a UK-wide ‘opt-out’ system is likely to completely eradicate the problem. If anything, the crisis is likely to get worse – the flipside of good news stories such as fewer road traffic fatalities and better medicines that reduce the number of young people dying early. The team recognises that the system alone is not the answer, but it brings a new relevance to the old adage “waste not, want not”.

In a study of over 25,000 adults with detailed information about their eating habits, people with a greater diversity of foods in their diet showed a 30% lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes over a ten-year period. Unfortunately, the diets with more variety were 18% more expensive than the less-varied ones.

A healthy diet is critical for preventing and managing type 2 diabetes. Type 2 diabetes affects around 415m adults globally; a figure that is expected to rise to 643m by 2040, mostly in low- and middle-income countries. So governments should support their citizen’s ability to eat well.

For several decades now, governments have recommended that people eat a varied diet. Global five-a-day campaigns stress the consumption of a variety of fruits and vegetables. The theory goes that consuming a variety of foods ensures that a person receives all the necessary vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals that are needed for the body to function and stay healthy. But, what do we really mean by a varied diet and what is its relationship with diabetes?

A varied diet is a healthier diet

Although dietary guidelines have for a long time recommended eating a variety of foods, scientists are not sure exactly what it is about eating a varied diet that might promote health. There has been research on how the variety of foods relate to the nutritional quality of a person’s diet, but little is known about whether the diversity of the diet is related to risk of chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes.

For example, there are no studies on whether a diet containing foods from all five food groups reduces a person’s risk of type 2 diabetes. We also don’t know whether the variety of foods within each of the five food groups is important for health.

People’s diets vary in terms of the different food groups. For example, one person’s diet might consist mainly of meat and grains while another person’s might contain dairy, vegetables and fruit. Diets also vary in the variety of foods within each food group. We were interested in analysing whether the recommendation to consume a wide range of different foods within each food group would have an impact on the risk of developing diabetes.

To do this, we used data collected from middle and older-aged British adults who reported their lifestyles, including their eating habits, when they entered the study and were followed for about ten years. We found that people who routinely ate from all five food groups had a 30% lower risk of type 2 diabetes than people who only ate three food groups or fewer. Also, people eating the widest variety of fruits and vegetables and dairy products also greatly reduced their risk of diabetes compared with people who had a less varied diet. These results could not be explained by other potential risk factors, such as body weight, occupation, income and education, as we took these factors into account in our analysis.

The bill, please

Research shows that healthy eating is expensive. The price gap between more and less healthy foods is growing in the UK and higher food costs may prevent people from eating a healthier diet, particularly those on low incomes. But what about a more varied diet? Is that more expensive, too?

Most epidemiological studies don’t have information about consumer food costs, but our study did because we linked the dietary data to retail food prices. We found that diets containing all five food groups were on average 18% more costly than diets containing three food groups or fewer. And diets with more variety within each of the five food groups were more costly than diets that contained less variety within each food group.

So, while diverse diets may help prevent chronic diseases, health policymakers will need to acknowledge that the adoption of more varied diets, particularly those containing the most variety of vegetables and fruits, may be substantially more costly and may worsen existing socioeconomic inequalities in diet.

What government can do

Financial incentives can improve food choices and some local authorities are experimenting with taxes on unhealthy foods, including on sugar-sweetened beverages. These are a good start, but financial approaches are no silver bullet.

Tweaking food prices may just be fiddling around the edges if governments don’t also deal with systemic issues such as agricultural policies that are out-of-sync with the dietary priorities most governments advocate. And our neighbourhood environments, supermarket shelves and portion sizes may be promoting overconsumption of primarily processed, energy-dense foods.

The government, the private sector and civil society need to bring policy coherence across the food system, including agriculture, business and health. Easy, affordable access to a varied diet will benefit everyone’s health now and in the future.

Pablo Monsivais, Senior University Lecturer, University of Cambridge and Annalijn I Conklin, Research Scholar in Global Health & Policy, University of California, Los Angeles

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.