In Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, J M Barrie describes a moment when a young girl, seeking to comfort a tearful Peter, gives him her handkerchief. But he doesn’t know what to do with it. Barrie writes: “… so she showed him, that is to say she wiped her eyes, and then gave it back to him, saying ‘Now you do it,’ but instead of wiping his own eyes he wiped hers, and she thought it would be best to pretend that this is what she had meant”.

With this touching little scene, J M Barrie neatly demonstrates that he had observed, and understood, something that psychologists call intentionality – a feature of ‘theory of mind’. The ability to understand that one’s own knowledge, beliefs and feelings might not be the same as someone else’s is one of the keys to understanding the complexity of human relationships – and is something that most children learn at the age of three or four.

In illustrating this fundamental stage of child development through the interaction of two children, one with a solid grasp of other minds and the other without, Barrie was remarkably prescient. The Peter Pan books were written at the turn of the 20th century and the term ‘theory of mind’ was not used until the late 1970s. In 1985 psychologists showed that failure to employ theory of mind is an important symptom of autism, its related condition Asperger’s Syndrome and various other psychiatric conditions.

In Peter Pan and the Mind of J M Barrie: An Exploration of Cognition and Consciousness, neuroscientist Dr Rosalind Ridley unpacks the magic and oddity of the tales that have captivated audiences for generations. In doing so through the lens of her own expertise, she reveals that Barrie had an almost uncanny grasp of human cognitive development four to eight decades before psychologists began to work on similar questions about the way we develop thinking and reasoning skills.  

Ridley has a distinguished career in neuroscience research with the University of Cambridge and Medical Research Council. Her work has focused on the brain mechanisms underlying cognitive processes such as learning, memory and problem solving. Since childhood Ridley has been an avid reader of literature and poetry – and a collector of books.

Rereading Barrie’s books for children she began to realise the extent to which Barrie had grasped many of the topics that she has spent her working life researching in order to come up with new treatments for dementia and to gain a better understanding of neurological conditions such as stroke which cause cognitive impairments.

Peter Pan and the Mind of J M Barrie is the first book of its kind to explore fully how Barrie delved into the complexity of the developing human mind in his writing. Published at a time when cognitive psychology was in its infancy, the Peter Pan books were immediate hits and continue to inspire pantomimes complete with pirates, princesses and perambulators.

Ridley argues that Barrie’s enduring appeal (along with that of other authors for children, including Lewis Carroll) lies in his study of the unconscious mind – and its many quirks and foibles. Barrie referred to his nonsensical ideas (a boy who flies, a dog who becomes a children’s nanny, a crocodile who has swallowed a clock) as whimsicalities.  These whimsicalities, proposes Ridley, are the means by which Barrie explores the nature of cognition – and that his purpose was to expiate the pain of his own childhood.  

She writes: “It is Barrie’s deliberate use of cognitive mistakes and confusions in order to both amuse and illuminate the way we think that suggests that he was being intentionally analytical rather than descriptive. The weirdness of some of Barrie’s illogical stories suggests that he is tapping into something important in cognition.”

In a wealth of detail, and through close textual analysis, Ridley shows how Barrie created a narrative that works on several levels: as a coming-of-age story, as the myth of a golden age, as a fantasy to delight child and adult readers. Most importantly, asserts Ridley, Barrie invented Peter Pan to “make some sense of his own emotional difficulties, to investigate the interplay between the world of facts and the world of imagination, and to re-discover the heightened experiences of infancy”.

In Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens Barrie describes for readers how the story comes from an inner dialogue with the fictional boy David during walks together in the park. “First I tell it to him, and then he tells it to me, the understanding being that it is quite a different story; and then I retell it with his additions, and so we go on until no one could say whether it is more his story or mine.”

Peter Pan is the boy who doesn’t quite fit in, a ‘betwixt-and-between’ who can fly and, most famously, never ages and never becomes adult. There is, suggests Ridley, a bit of Peter in all of us: “the child who lives in the heart of the adult; memories that we carry with us throughout our life but do not themselves age; dreams that disobey logic; the private world inside our head and those moments of exceptional experience that we rarely talk about”.

Barrie was fascinated by children – they were his preferred companions throughout his adulthood – and he, just like Peter Pan, was in many ways a boy “who could never grow up”. Ridley suggests that the Peter Pan books can be read as an escape from adulthood into a fantastical childhood, where anything can happen, but also as a plea for greater understanding of the mental and emotional needs of children.

A broad university education equipped Barrie to think across disciplines, and in fashionable London he was exposed to the ideas of leading thinkers, including Thomas Huxley, H G Wells and Henry James. The belief that God made the world in seven days had been newly overturned by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution which showed that humans were animals.

Barrie saw children not as miniature adults waiting for their minds to be filled with facts, or small savages needing to be disciplined (as Baden-Powell who founded the Boy Scouts had done), but as developing beings who required nurture and encouragement in order to become sensitive adults. Ridley notes, interestingly, that Barrie believed education was often damaging.

Ostensibly, Barrie wrote the Peter Pan books to entertain five boys whom he met in Kensington Gardens in central London. The nature of his relationship with them (their parents died and he became their guardian) is likely to remain a vexed question.  Despite the almost purple prose in which Barrie described the overnight visit of an imaginary child, Ridley is impressed by the view of the youngest of the boys themselves, who said that Barrie was “an innocent, which is why he could write Peter Pan”.  

Ridley, like most other scholars, sees Barrie’s tragic childhood as pivotal to his creativity. His older brother died in a skating accident and remained more alive in their mother’s thoughts than her surviving son. Ridley writes: “He learnt from his mother’s pre-occupation with his dead brother that things that do not exist physically can be more important in people’s minds than things that do exist.” Barrie’s mother was present but lost to him – and a search for a mother is a strong theme in his books.

Barrie married but was childless (it’s thought that he may never have had sex with his wife). He was painfully aware of his diminutive stature, writing in a letter: “Six foot three inches … if I had really grown to this it would have made a great difference in my life”.  He struggled with sleep problems and described many of the states of consciousness and unconsciousness later identified by psychologists as parasomnias.

An important role of sleep is to consolidate and rationalise memory. Barrie expresses this charmingly in Peter and Wendy: “It is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for next morning, repacking in their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day… It is quite like tidying drawers … When you wake in the morning, the naughtiness and evil passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind; and on top, beautifully aired, are spread out your prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on.”

Ridley describes Barrie as “a naturalist of the mind”. Woven into his stories are dozens of details about human behaviour – from contagious yawning (Wendy’s “light blinked and gave such a yawn that the other two yawned also”) to mental constructs such as time travel (an aspect of memory and recollection) and the power of opposites (“It was her silence that they heard”). They reveal Barrie to be an acute observer of animals and people in a period when the theory of evolution was still hotly contested.

Barrie may have been extraordinarily forward-thinking but he was also a man of his time. Although he champions girls in some respects (“Wendy, one girl is of more use than twenty boys”), his attitude was frequently misogynistic: in creating his female characters he conflates femininity with domesticity. The original Wendy house, that potent symbol of gendered play, is built around Wendy by the fairies who seek to protect her from the cold of the night.

Ridley concludes that Barrie was more than anything interested in “the nature of consciousness and those rare moments of sublime consciousness and sublime imagination that we all experience” – the happiness that so often eluded him.  She ends her voyage into JM Barrie’s mind with a quote from his protégé, A A Milne, creator of Winne the Pooh. In his autobiography, It’s Too Late Now, Milne wrote: “Childhood is not the happiest time of one’s life; but only to a child is pure happiness possible.”

Peter Pan and the Mind of J M Barrie: An Exploration of Cognition and Consciousness by Rosalind Ridley is published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

The Bank of England is expected to announce on Thursday measures to stimulate the UK economy following signs that there will be a significant economic downturn following the vote for Brexit. The Bank may cut interest rates, inject another dose of quantitative easing or conjure up something new to give the economy a monetary boost.

Although some have dubbed this “Super Thursday”, it cannot hope to be anything of the sort. The Bank only has tools to help ameliorate the immediate damaging impact of the Brexit vote. It can do little to address the underlying structural problems of the UK economy; structural problems that are likely to deepen unless the government makes a U-turn and uses fiscal policy as a means to stimulate long-term economic growth.

The impact of the Brexit vote will be revealed over many years. The immediate evidence is patchy but the initial signs are that the economy is slowing down. The Purchasing Managers’ Index, which is a lead indicator of GDP, shows that the UK economy suffered a significant deterioration following the Brexit vote.

Sterling has weakened and this was expected to stimulate manufacturing exports. But the immediate evidence suggests that even manufacturing activity is slowing down. The Bank is also expected to revise downwards its growth forecast for the UK economy – not simply because of its macroeconomic model but also, as the Financial Times has reported, because some of its economists have been talking to businesses and finding out the story from the horse’s mouth.

Stimulating

The Bank, assuming the mantle of the “muscular” interventionist, is expected to introduce further monetary stimulus to help business confidence and encourage spending. This should help to reduce the depth of the emerging downturn and it will assuage markets that at least there has been some response to deal with the impact of the Brexit vote.

But there is little evidence that monetary stimulus alone will address the long-term weaknesses of the UK economy. There are two major limitations of excessive reliance on monetary policy to manage the economy.

First, it does little to expand the capacity of the economy by stimulating new investment. Second, it increases the inequality of wealth: the big gainers are those who own assets which are propped up by the monetary stimulus such as housing, bonds and shares. Very low interest rates have increased demand, but this demand has served to increase the prices of existing assets – such as the cost of housing. It has had little impact on the creation of new assets, such as house building and corporate investment and expansion.

The Big Problem

One of the major long-term problems facing the UK economy is stagnant productivity, the prime determinant of future prosperity and income growth. There are a number of drivers of productivity including investment in capacity, investment in education and the creation of new ideas. Monetary stimulus can do little to stimulate these.

Low interest rates may stimulate private sector investment in normal times, but such investment is discouraged by economic and financial uncertainty. An active fiscal policy is required to address the productivity problem, including state investment in infrastructure, housing and education.

And the productivity problem is likely to get worse in the long-term as the UK wrestles with its post-Brexit legacy. First, the UK will find it more difficult to trade with both Europe and the rest of the world. This will lead to a widening of the UK’s trade deficit or a permanently lower exchange rate – or possibly a combination of both. Second, the level of foreign direct investment into the UK economy is likely to fall as foreign firms remain in, or move into countries within the EU single market.

Third, there will be serious disruptions to the UK’s innovation system. Universities are one of the strong aspects of the UK system, but their ability to attract funding and world-class researchers will be hindered when (or if) the UK leaves the single market. Furthermore, much business research and development in the UK is carried out by overseas firms, which may fall if such firms move or expand abroad.

A New Industrial Policy?

The Brexit vote has led to a new government and a new opportunity to recast economic policy. The new Prime Minister has indicated her support for industrial policy and she has established a new Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. But we have been here before and the rhetoric and rebranding has often not been followed by action.

The decisions of the Bank of England that will be announced on Thursday may be mildly useful, but they can’t hope to be much more than that. They can do little to alter the long-term direction of the economy. The key issue is whether the new government acknowledges the important role for the state in driving long-term growth and re-orientates fiscal policy towards increasing public investment in infrastructure, education and innovation.

Michael Kitson, University Senior Lecturer in International Macroeconomics 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.

Our brains naturally shrink with age, but scientists are increasingly recognising that obesity – already linked to conditions such as diabetes, cancer and heart disease – may also affect the onset and progression of brain ageing; however, direct studies to support this link are lacking.

In a cross-sectional study – in other words, a study that looks at data from individuals at one point in time – researchers looked at the impact of obesity on brain structure across the adult lifespan to investigate whether obesity was associated with brain changes characteristic of ageing. The team studied data from 473 individuals between the ages of 20 and 87, recruited by the Cambridge Centre for Aging and Neuroscience. The results are published in the journal Neurobiology of Aging.

The researchers divided the data into two categories based on weight: lean and overweight. They found striking differences in the volume of white matter in the brains of overweight individuals compared with those of their leaner counterparts. Overweight individuals had a widespread reduction in white matter compared to lean people.

Comparison of grey matter (brown) and white matter (yellow) in sex-matched subjects A (56 years, BMI 19.5) and B (50 years, BMI 43.4). Credit: Lisa Ronan

The team then calculated how white matter volume related to age across the two groups. They discovered that an overweight person at, say, 50 years old had a comparable white matter volume to a lean person aged 60 years, implying a difference in brain age of 10 years.

Strikingly, however, the researchers only observed these differences from middle-age onwards, suggesting that our brains may be particularly vulnerable during this period of ageing.

“As our brains age, they naturally shrink in size, but it isn’t clear why people who are overweight have a greater reduction in the amount of white matter,” says first author Dr Lisa Ronan from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge, “We can only speculate on whether obesity might in some way cause these changes or whether obesity is a consequence of brain changes.”

Senior author Professor Paul Fletcher, from the Department of Psychiatry, adds: “We’re living in an ageing population, with increasing levels of obesity, so it’s essential that we establish how these two factors might interact, since the consequences for health are potentially serious.

“The fact that we only saw these differences from middle-age onwards raises the possibility that we may be particularly vulnerable at this age. It will also be important to find out whether these changes could be reversible with weight loss, which may well be the case.”

Despite the clear differences in the volume of white matter between lean and overweight individuals, the researchers found no connection between being overweight or obese and an individual’s cognitive abilities, as measured using a standard test similar to an IQ test.

Co-author Professor Sadaf Farooqi, from the Wellcome Trust–Medical Research Council Institute of Metabolic Science at Cambridge, says: “We don’t yet know the implications of these changes in brain structure. Clearly, this must be a starting point for us to explore in more depth the effects of weight, diet and exercise on the brain and memory.”

The research was supported by the Bernard Wolfe Health Neuroscience Fund, the Wellcome Trust and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.

Reference
Ronan, L et al. Obesity associated with increased brain-age from mid-life. Neurobiology of Aging; e-pub 27 July 2016; DOI: 10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2016.07.010
 

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact time in history when genre labels were used to classify music, but the fact is that over the past century, and certainly still today, genre labels dominate. Whether organising your iTunes library, receiving music recommendations from apps like Spotify, or buying CDs at a record store, genre is the first way in which we navigate the music we like.

However, technological advances have now put millions of songs at our fingertips through mobile devices. Not only do we have access to more music than ever before, but more music is being produced. Places like SoundCloud have made it possible for anyone to record and publish music for others to hear. With this increased diversity in music that we are exposed to, the lines separating genres have become even more blurred than they were previously.

Genre labels are problematic for several reasons. First, they are broad umbrella terms that are used to describe music that vary greatly in their characteristics. If a person says they are a fan of “rock” music, there is no way of knowing whether they are referring to The Beatles, Bob Dylan, or Jimi Hendrix — but all three vary greatly in style. Or if a person tells you that they are a fan of pop music, how do you know if they are referring to Michael Jackson or Justin Bieber?

Genre labels are also often socially driven with little to do with the actual characteristics of the music. They are labels stamped onto artists and albums by record companies with the intent of targeting a particularly type of audience or age group.

Beyond genre

The fundamental problem is that genre labels often do not accurately describe artists and their music – they simply do not do them justice. A more accurate way to label music would be based solely on their actual musical characteristics (or attributes). Such a labelling system would also likely better account for diversity in a person’s music taste.

Recently, my team of music psychologists addressed this problem by developing a scientific way to create a basic classification system of music that is based on its attributes and not social connotations. The team included expert in musical preferences, Jason Rentfrow (Cambridge), best-selling author and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin (McGill), big data scientists David Stillwell (Cambridge) and Michal Kosinski (Stanford), and music researcher Brian Monteiro. Our research was published this month.

We had more than 100 musical excerpts spanning over 20 genres and subgenres rated on 38 different musical attributes. We then applied a statistical procedure to categorise these musical attributes and discovered that they clustered into three basic categories: “Arousal” (the energy level of the music); “Valence” (the spectrum from sad to happy emotions in the music); and “Depth” (the amount of sophistication and emotional depth in the music). The statistical procedure mapped each song on each these three basic categories. For example, Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” is low on arousal (because of the slow tempo and soft vocals), low on valence (because of the expressed nostalgia and sadness), and high on depth (because of the emotional and sonic complexity expressed through the lyrics and sonic texture).

Arousal, valence, depth

Will people start walking around wearing T-shirts that say “I love Depth in music”, or list themselves as fans of positive valence on their Twitter profiles? I doubt it. But it might be useful if people began to use attributes to describe the music that they like (aggressive or soft; happy or nostalgic). People’s music libraries today are incredibly diverse, typically containing music from a variety of genres. My hypothesis is that if people like arousal in one musical genre, they are likely to like it in another.

Even though these basic three dimensions probably won’t become a part of culture, recommendation platforms, like Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music, and YouTube should find these dimensions useful when coding and trying to accurately recommend music for their users to listen to. Further, it is also useful for scientists, psychologists, and neuroscientists who are studying the effect of music and want an accurate method to measure it.

Our team next sought to see how preferences for these three dimensions were linked to the Big Five. Personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism). Nearly 10,000 people indicated their preferences for 50 musical excerpts and completed a personality measure. People who scored high on “openness to experience” preferred depth in music, while extroverted excitement-seekers preferred high arousal in music. Those who were relatively neurotic preferred negative emotions in music, while those who were self-assured preferred positive emotions in music.

So, just as the old Kern and Hammerstein song suggests, “The Song is You”. That is, the musical attributes that you like most reflect your personality. It also provides scientific support for what Joni Mitchell said in a 2013 interview with CBC:

The trick is if you listen to that music and you see me, you’re not getting anything out of it. If you listen to that music and you see yourself, it will probably make you cry and you’ll learn something about yourself and now you’re getting something out of it.

Find out how you score on the music and personality quizzes at www.musicaluniverse.org.

David M. Greenberg, Music psychologist, 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 best ideas do not respect national boundaries. Great research and scholarship has always relied on cross-border interactions. Rivalries, such as that between Newton and Leibnitz over the invention of calculus, and collaborations, such as those at the CERN project in Switzerland involve people from different nations working on common problems. Since at least the philosopher John Duns Scotus in the 13th century, the mobility of scholars has been a major channel of progress.

The UK’s vote to leave the EU on June 23 poses a challenge to this status quo. The UK will now have to work hard at exploring new ways of belonging in Europe, because in recent decades, EU mobility, collaboration and funding has lain at the heart of the country’s global research excellence.

Looking elsewhere

The referendum result leaves researchers with acute uncertainty about the commitment of the UK to maintain the open environment in which the best research can take place and into which the best researchers are recruited. Unlike many countries, the UK’s recruitment procedures are very open and focused on attracting talent, rather than simply favouring success in a national competition. Many fine people have been able to build whole careers here.

So the uncertainty over the status of non-UK nationals from the EU and European Economic Area is especially disquieting. They make up 16% of academic staff in UK universities and in certain departments it is far more: more than 50% of professors in LSE’s economics department for example.

We know of and have heard of colleagues who are being offered jobs elsewhere in Europe, and we know of prospective job candidates who have turned down positions in the UK since the referendum. At this early stage it is difficult to say whether the humanities and social sciences are more affected than other disciplines in this way but the mood music in the community is very uncertain.

The UK is not as attractive a place for researchers as it was before the referendum. This may be just an initial shock and it may all die down, but on the other hand a reputation once lost is very hard to regain. We have many competitors overseas and the best people move to the most flourishing environments to work.

The language used in the referendum against migrants was felt as a personal attack by many staff at all levels within the academic community, as well as by students. Facing such emotions, it is understandable that many may re-evaluate what they thought they knew about working in UK research.

Cementing collaboration

When it comes to collaboration, UK research is internationally competitive in part because it seeks out the best international partners: 60% of our international collaborations are with our EU partners, and in the EU’s Framework Programme 7, for 23 of the 27 member states, collaborations with UK-based researchers ranked the highest or second most frequent.

Since the referendum, our European partners are noticeably asking us to stand aside as principal investigators or step out of consortia bids entirely.

The government has said that nothing has changed legally. This is true. But partners in the EU are evaluating their options. They may decide, from a “safety first” perspective, that collaborations with the UK come with too big a risk

One simple solution would be for the UK government to guarantee or underwrite every application to the EU’s flagship Horizon 2020 research programme from now until a new relationship with the EU is stabilised. This would mean promising to pay for research if European funding is withdrawn at a later stage. Legally, if nothing has changed, then the government ought to be happy to put its best foot forward in the short term, and thereafter, negotiate accordingly in order to support its world-leading research base. Here is a challenge that the government needs to meet squarely head on if it values national research excellence and its contribution to economic competitiveness and creativity.

Funding at risk

Until now, the UK has been very successful in gaining EU research funding. Such success should not be punished. In the humanities and social sciences, UK-based researchers have won a third of all advanced grants and starting grants ever awarded by the European Research Council (ERC). This is an incredible achievement – a sign of established research excellence.

There is no UK equivalent of the ERC in terms of scope and size so what will happen if we leave the EU and cannot access funding streams such as Horizon 2020? The success and international standing of the humanities and social sciences needs to be protected.

From our rough calculations using data on past and future research allocations in the UK, and data sent to us by the ERC, the value of the awards won by UK-based researchers each year from 2007-15 from the ERC is equivalent to 27.5% of the annual budgets of Economic and Social Research Council and Arts and Humanities Research Council combined. It was around 10% for the life sciences and physical sciences and engineering.

As the government negotiates its new relationship with the EU, it should realise that until now the EU has provided resources that do not exist in the UK. These instruments may well need to be created anew in the UK. If that is the case, the government will need to take some clear and prominent steps to ensure the UK remains bound to and relevant to the global scholarly endeavour if it wants the country to remain attractive to researchers from around the world.

The challenge Britain now faces is one that raises risks for its purpose, identity and capability to compete internationally and remain relevant at home. Business as usual it cannot be. Of course, new international collaborations will be sought and nurtured by UK researchers and institutions. UK research will not remain paralysed after Brexit, but it does not make sense to walk away from the European interactions that have served us so well so far.

Ash Amin, 1931 Chair in Geography and Fellow of Christ's College, University of Cambridge and John Bell, Professor of Law, University of Cambridge

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

Researchers have built a miniature electro-optical switch which can change the spin – or angular momentum – of a liquid form of light by applying electric fields to a semiconductor device a millionth of a metre in size. Their results, reported in the journal Nature Materials, demonstrate how to bridge the gap between light and electricity, which could enable the development of ever faster and smaller electronics.

There is a fundamental disparity between the way in which information is processed and transmitted by current technologies. To process information, electrical charges are moved around on semiconductor chips; and to transmit it, light flashes are sent down optical fibres. Current methods of converting between electrical and optical signals are both inefficient and slow, and researchers have been searching for ways to incorporate the two.

In order to make electronics faster and more powerful, more transistors need to be squeezed onto semiconductor chips. For the past 50 years, the number of transistors on a single chip has doubled every two years – this is known as Moore’s law. However, as chips keep getting smaller, scientists now have to deal with the quantum effects associated with individual atoms and electrons, and they are looking for alternatives to the electron as the primary carrier of information in order to keep up with Moore’s law and our thirst for faster, cheaper and more powerful electronics.

The University of Cambridge researchers, led by Professor Jeremy Baumberg from the NanoPhotonics Centre, in collaboration with researchers from Mexico and Greece, have built a switch which utilises a new state of matter called a Polariton Bose-Einstein condensate in order to mix electric and optical signals, while using miniscule amounts of energy.

Polariton Bose-Einstein condensates are generated by trapping light between mirrors spaced only a few millionths of a metre apart, and letting it interact with thin slabs of semiconductor material, creating a half-light, half-matter mixture known as a polariton.

Putting lots of polaritons in the same space can induce condensation – similar to the condensation of water droplets at high humidity – and the formation of a light-matter fluid which spins clockwise (spin-up) or anticlockwise (spin-down). By applying an electric field to this system, the researchers were able to control the spin of the condensate and switch it between up and down states. The polariton fluid emits light with clockwise or anticlockwise spin, which can be sent through optical fibres for communication, converting electrical to optical signals.

“The polariton switch unifies the best properties of electronics and optics into one tiny device that can deliver at very high speeds while using minimal amounts of power,” said the paper’s lead author Dr Alexander Dreismann from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory.

“We have made a field-effect light switch that can bridge the gap between optics and electronics,” said co-author Dr Hamid Ohadi, also from the Cavendish Laboratory. “We’re reaching the limits of how small we can make transistors, and electronics based on liquid light could be a way of increasing the power and efficiency of the electronics we rely on.”

While the prototype device works at cryogenic temperatures, the researchers are developing other materials that can operate at room temperature, so that the device may be commercialised. The other key factor for the commercialisation of the device is mass production and scalability. “Since this prototype is based on well-established fabrication technology, it has the potential to be scaled up in the near future,” said study co-author Professor Pavlos Savvidis from the FORTH institute in Crete, Greece.

The team is currently exploring options for commercialising the technology as well as integrating it with the existing technology base.

The research is funded as part of a UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) investment in the Cambridge NanoPhotonics Centre, as well as the European Research Council (ERC) and the Leverhulme Trust.

Reference:
A. Dreismann et al. ‘A sub-femtojoule electrical spin-switch based on optically trapped polariton condensates.’ Nature Materials (2016). DOI: 10.1038/nmat4722

A new study has found that having a positive relationship with a teacher around the age of 10-11 years old can markedly influence the development of ‘prosocial’ behaviours such as cooperation and altruism, as well as significantly reduce problem classroom behaviours such as aggression and oppositional behaviour.  

The research also found that beneficial behaviours resulting from a positive teacher-student relationship when a child is on the cusp of adolescence lingered for up to four years – well into the difficult teenage years.   

Researchers found that students with a more positive relationship with their teacher displayed towards peers, on average, 18% more prosocial behaviour (and 10% more up to two years later), and up to 38% less aggressive behaviour (and 9% less up to four years later), over students who felt ambivalent or negative toward their teacher.  

Positivity toward their teacher also resulted in students displaying an average of 56% less ‘oppositional defiant’ behaviour: such as argumentativeness and vindictiveness toward authority figures. This was still reduced by 22% up to three years later.

In fact, the researchers found the beneficial effect on behaviour was as strong, if not stronger, than that of established school-based ‘intervention programmes’ such as counselling and other anti-bullying therapies.

The importance of good teacher relationships on infant behaviour was already known, and programmes have been designed to help preschool teachers improve relationships with pupils, which in turn improves pupil behaviour.

Researchers say the latest results suggest that developing similar programmes for those who teach students in early adolescence has the potential to promote better classroom behaviour in schools that may otherwise rely more on exclusionary practises – such as detentions, or being sent out of class – to manage student behaviour.

“Teachers play an important role in the development of children. Students who feel supported tend to be less aggressive and more prosocial, and we now have evidence that this is the case from preschool right through to adolescence,” said the study’s lead author Dr Ingrid Obsuth.

“Educational and school policies should take this into consideration when supporting teachers in fostering their relationships with students,” she said.

The research was conducted by members of the Violence Research Centre at Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology, along with colleagues from ETH Zurich and the University of Toronto. The findings are published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence.

The researchers analysed data from eight ‘waves’ of a major longitudinal study of culturally-diverse Swiss youth being schooled across Zurich. The latest study involved 1,067 students randomly sampled across 56 of the city’s schools.

Only students who experienced a change of teacher between ages 9 and 10 were used for the study, with data gathered from teachers, students and their parents on an annual and later biannual basis.

Using the multitude of data from interviews and surveys across the years*, the research team used an innovative statistical technique that enabled them to ‘score’ the children on over 100 different characteristics or experiences that could potentially account for good or bad behaviour – from background to past behaviour, parenting to student and teacher genders.

They then matched students in pairs with highly similar scores in all respects except one: how they felt about their teacher, and how the teacher felt about them. This allowed researchers to emulate a ‘randomised-controlled trial’ – the most rigorous way of establishing causal links. The only difference between the students in each pair was that one had the ‘treatment’ of a positive relationship with their teacher, and the other, the ‘control’, did not.

While the researchers approached data collection from both sides of the teacher-student relationship, they say that it is how the student perceives the relationship that is most important for behaviour. Students who saw themselves as having a more positive relationship with their teacher engaged in fewer aggressive behaviours right up to age 15.

Cambridge’s Prof Manuel Eisner, senior author on the study, said: “Most adults remember some teachers that they admired and that fit their learning needs, and others that they felt hard done-by. This is not necessarily only because they have more or less supportive teachers. Each child will respond differently to a teacher's style and personality. Our study shows that once a child develops an impression of a teacher, one way or the other, it can have significant long-term effects on their behaviour.”

“While this is the first study to look at the effect of teacher-student relationships on adolescents, our findings are consistent with previous research suggesting that bonds with prosocial others – whether peers, teachers or institutions – are a protective factor against children engaging in problem behaviours,” he said.

Added Obsuth: “Ideally, building healthy and supportive teacher-student relationships would become part of the curriculum in teacher training and intervention programmes as a way of improving adolescent well-being.”

Mid-way through her book, Making a Good Life: An Ethnography of Nature, Ethics, and Reproduction, Dr Katharine Dow describes walking on a Scottish beach and seeing, for the first time, a minke whale in the wild. It’s a grey day and all she can see is its fin dark against the waves – yet the sighting marks a turning point.  Her exhilaration helps her to connect with the members of the wildlife project she is shortly to join as a volunteer.

She writes: “I began to see for myself what the fuss was about, how some people can end up devoting their lives to saving cetaceans.” But, as highly articulate as she is, she finds it hard to express in words the potency of her feelings about the whale out there in the ocean. “Something about seeing one in the wild, so close to where people were going about their ordinary business, was so strange as to seem magical.”

Dow is a social anthropologist and a research associate in the Reproductive Sociology Research Group. She has a particular interest in assisted reproductive technologies (ART), a field of medicine that is subject to fierce debate on the grounds of the ethics of “tampering with nature”. Academic research into the ramifications of ART has concentrated on those who are directly involved as active participants (for example, would-be parents undergoing treatment or children conceived via sperm donation).

Much less research has taken place into the views of the millions of people not directly involved in ART but, nevertheless, have opinions about scientific advances that, for example, enable a post-menopausal woman to conceive and carry a child. Making a Good Life helps to fill this gap by documenting in detail the views and opinions of a small community in Spey Bay, a coastal village in north-east Scotland.

The community that Dow joined for 20 months in order to carry out her research is a very particular one: it comprises a small number of professionals and volunteers working for a charity dedicated to safeguarding the local environment for wildlife. Spey Bay is a Site of Special Scientific Interest and an important habitat for cetaceans, most notably a 100-strong population of bottlenose dolphins.  

The ‘good life’ in Dow’s title is a key to understanding this small community: members of the centre have chosen to make a contribution to the environment, feel passionately about the safeguarding of vulnerable species, and try to live ‘ethically’ by making careful lifestyle choices. How these people think about ART – and surrounding questions about bringing children into the world – is shaped by their wider feelings, and interactions with, the environment.

Making a Good Life blends Dow’s account of life in a tight-knit community with details of in-depth conversations with her co-workers and others about matters of reproduction, a topic that touches on their personal experiences of being, or thinking about, parenthood. She also brings into the mix an analysis of the ethical issues under discussion, the legislation controlling ART, and work by academic colleagues on questions of kinship and belonging.

As she weaves these strands together, Dow reminds us that we don’t think about, and form opinions about, some of life’s most important questions in watertight thought compartments: how we think about ART is coloured by our wider thoughts about nature – and how our lives fit into, or stand apart from, the environment.  How we feel about issues of reproduction is all about the many contexts – including the families we are part of or separated from – within which we imagine our lives.

The idea of family bonds, particularly the fierce tie between a mother and her young, is something that runs deep in our picture of nature, especially so in the case of iconic species. When a minke whale calf swam into a nearby fishing harbour and was unable to find its way out, it drew crowds of concerned tourists. An adult minke spotted outside the harbour was immediately assumed to be its anxious mother.

Dow writes: “The distant figure of the calf’s putative mother waiting in the firth, apparently unable to help it back from its reckless path into the harbour, added a particular poignancy to this stranding story. People assumed that the calf would be all the more distressed because of its separation from its ‘mother’ and that reuniting them would be the best, and perhaps only, way to ensure its survival.”

While Dow’s interviewees welcome many of the techniques that help people to fulfil their desire to have a child, they are worried by the ‘unnaturalness’ of surrogacy, an arrangement by which a woman carries a child on behalf of someone else. In unpacking the process of surrogacy, she identifies the “postpartum handover of the child”, from surrogate mother to intended parent or parents, as the defining act of this agreement. “Surrogacy is troubling because the surrogate is expected to resist a natural feeling that is supposed to be so strong that refuting it would be emotionally damaging,” she writes with reference to the views expressed by her interviewees.

“The ethical dilemmas provoked by surrogacy demonstrate that motherhood is heavily laden with moral values that inscribe expectations for proper behaviour and relationships and that are articulated in the language of nature, biology and embodied feeling. Any challenge to maternal bonding, like the relinquishing of a child by a surrogate mother, seems to represent a threat to our most basic relationship and source of identity.”

In discussing questions of belonging, Dow shares aspects of her own story. Her father discovered in his mid-40s that he’d been adopted. A half-sister appears in his life and then two more. All had been adopted by different couples, who may not have been informed that their adoptive children had siblings. Dow’s father learns that his mother died giving birth to twins, unattended in a Dundee flat. Mother and twins were found dead, a tragedy that left many unanswered questions.

Events local to Spey Bay, and responses to them as they unfold, punctuate Dow’s narrative. Her book opens with the death of a sperm whale. Its carcass is washed up on the beach a 40-minute drive from the wildlife centre and people congregate to see it. Talking later, the leader of the centre describes the atmosphere as “reverential”. Onlookers are shocked to see that its lower jaw has been hacked off; there is a global black market trade in whale teeth. Whales are protected by law and a criminal investigation is launched.

Reverence and outrage are complex emotions unique to humans – as is a sense of what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’. “Ethics is profoundly emotional …  The public ethics of ART has commonly centred on visceral reactions and often it is difficult for people to explain why something is unethical except to say that it simply seems wrong … Listening to feelings and recognising when we have transgressed 'feeling rules' can be a way of mapping the ethical terrain,” writes Dow.

“One of the best ways of getting at ethics, of following its fluid flow as it is made and reproduced is talking. Data, in ethnographic fieldwork, are not latent in our interlocutors, waiting to be unearthed by the researcher; they come from the space between the ethnographer and the participant. To use an environmentalist metaphor, gathering data is not about extracting a commodity, but responsibly harnessing a renewable resource by redirecting its flow.”

Spey Bay is a place “where the river meets the sea”, the title of a poem by the poet John Mackie, whom Dow meets in the course of researching her book. This merging of the waters neatly echoes Dow’s own breaking of boundaries between gender studies, anthropology and travelogue. She shows us how free-flowing and ultimately elusive our ideas of the world really are.

Making a Good Life: An Ethnography of Nature, Ethics, and Reproduction is published by Princeton University Press. Dr Katharine Dow is a research associate with the Reproductive Sociology Research Group. The group supports research and teaching on the social and cultural implications of new reproductive technologies. It is led by Professor Sarah Franklin.

The established theory about how Ice Age peoples first reached the present-day United States has been challenged by an unprecedented study which concludes that their supposed entry route was “biologically unviable”.

The first people to reach the Americas crossed via an ancient land bridge between Siberia and Alaska but then, according to conventional wisdom, had to wait until two huge ice sheets that covered what is now Canada started to recede, creating the so-called “ice-free corridor” which enabled them to move south.

In a new study published in the journal Nature, however, an international team of researchers used ancient DNA extracted from a crucial pinch-point within this corridor to investigate how its ecosystem evolved as the glaciers began to retreat. They created a comprehensive picture showing how and when different flora and fauna emerged and the once ice-covered landscape became a viable passageway. No prehistoric reconstruction project like it has ever been attempted before.

The researchers conclude that while people may well have travelled this corridor after about 12,600 years ago, it would have been impassable earlier than that, as the corridor lacked crucial resources, such as wood for fuel and tools, and game animals which were essential to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

If this is true, then it means that the first Americans, who were present south of the ice sheets long before 12,600 years ago, must have made the journey south by another route. The study’s authors suggest that they probably migrated along the Pacific coast.

Who these people were is still widely disputed. Archaeologists agree, however, that early inhabitants of the modern-day contiguous United States included the so-called “Clovis” culture, which first appear in the archaeological record over 13,000 years ago. And the new study argues that the ice-free corridor would have been completely impassable at that time.

The research was led by Professor Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary geneticist and Fellow of St John’s College, University of Cambridge, who also holds posts at the Centre for GeoGenetics, University of Copenhagen, and the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge.

“The bottom line is that even though the physical corridor was open by 13,000 years ago, it was several hundred years before it was possible to use it,” Willerslev said.

“That means that the first people entering what is now the US, Central and South America must have taken a different route. Whether you believe these people were Clovis, or someone else, they simply could not have come through the corridor, as long claimed.”

Mikkel Winther Pedersen, a PhD student at the Centre for GeoGenetics, University of Copenhagen, who conducted the molecular analysis, added: “The ice-free corridor was long considered the principal entry route for the first Americans. Our results reveal that it simply opened up too late for that to have been possible.”

The corridor is thought to have been about 1,500 kilometres long, and emerged east of the Rocky Mountains 13,000 years ago in present-day western Canada, as two great ice sheets – the Cordilleran and Laurentide, retreated.

On paper, this fits well with the argument that Clovis people were the first to disperse across the Americas. The first evidence for this culture, which is named after distinctive stone tools found near Clovis, New Mexico, also dates from roughly the same time, although many archaeologists now believe that other people arrived earlier.

“What nobody has looked at is when the corridor became biologically viable,” Willerslev said. “When could they actually have survived the long and difficult journey through it?”

The conclusion reached by Willerslev and his colleagues is that the journey would have been impossible until about 12,600 years ago. Their research focused on a “bottleneck”, one of the last parts of the corridor to become ice-free, and now partly covered by Charlie Lake in British Columbia, and Spring Lake, Alberta – both part of Canada’s Peace River drainage basin.

The team gathered evidence including radiocarbon dates, pollen, macrofossils and DNA taken from lake sediment cores, which they obtained standing on the frozen lake surface during the winter season. Willerslev’s own PhD, 13 years ago, demonstrated that it is possible to extract ancient plant and mammalian DNA from sediments, as it contains preserved molecular fossils from substances such as tissue, urine, and faeces.

Having acquired the DNA, the group then applied a technique termed “shotgun sequencing”. “Instead of looking for specific pieces of DNA from individual species, we basically sequenced everything in there, from bacteria to animals,” Willerslev said. “It’s amazing what you can get out of this. We found evidence of fish, eagles, mammals and plants. It shows how effective this approach can be to reconstruct past environments.”

This approach allowed the team to see, with remarkable precision, how the bottleneck’s ecosystem developed. Crucially, it showed that before about 12,600 years ago, there were no plants, nor animals, in the corridor, meaning that humans passing through it would not have had resources vital to survive.

Around 12,600 years ago, steppe vegetation started to appear, followed quickly by animals such as bison, woolly mammoth, jackrabbits and voles. Importantly 11,500 years ago, the researchers identified a transition to a “parkland ecosystem” – a landscape densely populated by trees, as well as moose, elk and bald-headed eagles, which would have offered crucial resources for migrating humans.

Somewhere in between, the lakes in the area were populated by fish, including several identifiable species such as pike and perch. Finally, about 10,000 years ago, the area transitioned again, this time into boreal forest, characterised by spruce and pine.

The fact that Clovis was clearly present south of the corridor before 12,600 years ago means that they could not have travelled through it. David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University and a co-author on the study, said: “There is compelling evidence that Clovis was preceded by an earlier and possibly separate population, but either way, the first people to reach the Americas in Ice Age times would have found the corridor itself impassable.”

“Most likely, you would say that the evidence points to their having travelled down the Pacific Coast,” Willerslev added. “That now seems the most likely scenario.”

The paper Postglacial viability and colonization in North America's ice-free corridor is published in the journal Nature on 10. August 2016. DOI: 10.1038/nature19085

​Inset images: Map outlining the opening of the human migration routes in North America revealed by the results presented in this study. / Mikkel W. Pedersen and colleague preparing for coring of the lake sediments. All images provided by Mikkel Winther Pedersen, Centre for GeoGenetics, Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen.

Researchers have discovered a gene signature in healthy brains that echoes the pattern in which Alzheimer’s disease spreads through the brain much later in life. The findings, published in the journal Science Advances, could help uncover the molecular origins of this devastating disease, and may be used to develop preventative treatments for at-risk individuals to be taken well before symptoms appear.

The results, by researchers from the University of Cambridge, identified a specific signature of a group of genes in the regions of the brain which are most vulnerable to Alzheimer’s disease. They found that these parts of the brain are vulnerable because the body’s defence mechanisms against the proteins partly responsible for Alzheimer’s disease are weaker in these areas.

Healthy individuals with this specific gene signature are highly likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease in later life, and would most benefit from preventative treatments, if and when they are developed for human use.

Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, is characterised by the progressive degeneration of the brain. Not only is the disease currently incurable, but its molecular origins are still unknown. Degeneration in Alzheimer’s disease follows a characteristic pattern: starting from the entorhinal region and spreading out to all neocortical areas. What researchers have long wondered is why certain parts of the brain are more vulnerable to Alzheimer’s disease than others.

“To answer this question, what we’ve tried to do is to predict disease progression starting from healthy brains,” said senior author Professor Michele Vendruscolo of the Centre for Misfolding Diseases at Cambridge’s Department of Chemistry. “If we can predict where and when neuronal damage will occur, then we will understand why certain brain tissues are vulnerable, and get a glimpse at the molecular origins of Alzheimer’s disease.”

One of the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease is the build-up of protein deposits, known as plaques and tangles, in the brains of affected individuals. These deposits, which accumulate when naturally-occurring proteins in the body fold into the wrong shape and stick together, are formed primarily of two proteins: amyloid-beta and tau.

“We wanted to know whether there is something special about the way these proteins behave in vulnerable brain tissue in young individuals, long before the typical age of onset of the disease,” said Vendruscolo.

Vendruscolo and his colleagues found that part of the answer lay within the mechanism of control of amyloid-beta and tau. Through the analysis of more than 500 samples of healthy brain tissues from the Allen Brain Atlas, they identified a signature of a group of genes in healthy brains. When compared with tissue from Alzheimer’s patients, the researchers found that this same pattern is repeated in the way the disease spreads in the brain.

“Vulnerability to Alzheimer’s disease isn’t dictated by abnormal levels of the aggregation-prone proteins that form the characteristic deposits in disease, but rather by the weaker control of these proteins in the specific brain tissues that first succumb to the disease,” said Vendruscolo.

Our body has a number of effective defence mechanisms which protect it against protein aggregation, but as we age, these defences get weaker, which is why Alzheimer’s generally occurs in later life. As these defence mechanisms, collectively known as protein homeostasis systems, get progressively impaired with age, proteins are able to form more and more aggregates, starting from the tissues where protein homeostasis is not so strong in the first place.

Earlier this year, the same researchers behind the current study identified a possible ‘neurostatin’ that could be taken by healthy individuals in order to slow or stop the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, in a similar way to how statins are taken to prevent heart disease. The current results suggest a way to exploit the gene signature to identify those individuals most at risk and who would most benefit from taking a neurostatin in earlier life.

Although a neurostatin for human use is still quite some time away, a shorter-term benefit of these results may be the development of more effective animal models for the study of Alzheimer’s disease. Since the molecular origins of the disease have been unknown to date, it has been difficult to breed genetically modified mice or other animals that repeat the full pathology of Alzheimer’s disease, which is the most common way for scientists to understand this or any disease in order to develop new treatments.

“It is exciting to consider that the molecular origins identified here for Alzheimer’s may predict vulnerability for other diseases associated with aberrant aggregation – such as ALS, Parkinson’s and frontotemporal dementia,” said Rosie Freer, a PhD student in the Department of Chemistry and the study’s lead author. “I hope that these results will help drug discovery efforts – that by illuminating the origin of disease vulnerability, there will be a clearer target for those working to cure Alzheimer’s.”

“The results of this particular study provide a clear link between the key factors that we have identified as underlying the aggregation phenomenon and the order in which the effects of Alzheimer’s disease are known to spread through the different regions of the brain,” said study co-author Professor Christopher Dobson, who is Master of St John’s College, Cambridge. “Linking the properties of specific protein molecules to the onset and spread of neuronal damage is a crucial step in the quest to find effective drugs to combat this dreadful neurodegenerative condition, and potentially other diseases related to protein misfolding and aggregation.”

Addressing these problems represents the core programme of research of the Centre for Misfolding Diseases, which is directed by Chris Dobson, Tuomas Knowles and Michele Vendruscolo. The primary mission of the Centre is to develop a fundamental understanding of the molecular origins of the variety of disorders associated with the misfolding and aggregation of proteins, which include Parkinson's disease, ALS and type II diabetes as well as Alzheimer's disease, and then to use such understanding for the rational design of novel therapeutic strategies.

Reference:
R. Freer et. al. ‘A protein homeostasis signature in healthy brains recapitulates tissue vulnerability to Alzheimer’s disease.’ Science Advances (2016). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1600947

Plant scientists at the University of Cambridge have found that the cucumber mosaic virus (CMV) alters gene expression in the tomato plants it infects, causing changes to air-borne chemicals – the scent – emitted by the plants. Bees can smell these subtle changes, and glasshouse experiments have shown that bumblebees prefer infected plants over healthy ones.  

Scientists say that by indirectly manipulating bee behaviour to improve pollination of infected plants by changing their scent, the virus is effectively paying its host back. This may also benefit the virus: helping to spread the pollen of plants susceptible to infection and, in doing so, inhibiting the chance of virus-resistant plant strains emerging.

The authors of the new study, published today in the journal PLOS Pathogens, say that understanding the smells that attract bees, and reproducing these artificially by using similar chemical blends, may enable growers to protect or even enhance yields of bee-pollinated crops.

“Bees provide a vital pollination service in the production of three-quarters of the world’s food crops. With their numbers in rapid decline, scientists have been searching for ways to harness pollinator power to boost agricultural yields,” said study principal investigator Dr John Carr, Head of Cambridge’s Virology and Molecular Plant Pathology group.

“Better understanding the natural chemicals that attract bees could provide ways of enhancing pollination, and attracting bees to good sources of pollen and nectar – which they need for survival,” Carr said.

He conducted the study with Professor Beverley Glover, Director of Cambridge University Botanic Garden, where many of the experiments took place, and collaborators at Rothamsted Research.

CMV is transmitted by aphids – bees don’t carry the virus. It’s one of the most prevalent pathogens affecting tomato plants, resulting in small plants with poor-tasting fruits that can cause serious losses to cultivated crops.

Not only is CMV one of the most damaging viruses for horticultural crops, but it also persists in wild plant populations, and Carr says the new findings may explain why:

“We were surprised that bees liked the smell of the plants infected with the virus – it made no sense. You’d think the pollinators would prefer a healthy plant. However, modelling suggested that if pollinators were biased towards diseased plants in the wild, this could short-circuit natural selection for disease resistance,” he said.

“The virus is rewarding disease-susceptible plants, and at the same time producing new hosts it can infect to prevent itself from going extinct. An example, perhaps, of what’s known as symbiotic mutualism.”

The increased pollination from bees may also compensate for a decreased yield of seeds in the smaller fruits of virus-infected plants, say the scientists.

The findings also reveal a new level of complexity in the evolutionary ‘arms race’ between plants and viruses, in which it is classically believed that plants continually evolve new forms of disease-resistance while viruses evolve new ways to evade it.

“We would expect the plants susceptible to disease to suffer, but in making them more attractive to pollinators the virus gives these plants an advantage. Our results suggest that the picture of a plant-pathogen arms race is more complex than previously thought, and in some cases we should think of viruses in a more positive way,” said Carr.

Plants emit ‘volatiles’, air-borne organic chemical compounds involved in scent, to attract pollinators and repulse plant-eating animals and microbes. Humans have used them for thousands of years as perfumes and spices.

The researchers grew plants in individual containers, and collected air with emissions from CMV-infected plants, as well as ‘mock-infected’ control plants.

Through mass spectrometry, researchers could see the change in emissions induced by the virus. They also found that bumblebees could smell the changes. Released one by one in a small ‘flight arena’ in the Botanic Gardens, and timed with a stopwatch by researchers, the bees consistently headed to the infected plants first, and spent longer at those plants.

“Bees are far more sensitive to the blends of volatiles emitted by plants and can detect very subtle differences in the mix of chemicals. In fact, they can even be trained to detect traces of chemicals emitted by synthetic substances, including explosives and drugs,” said Carr.

Analysis revealed that the virus produces a factor called 2b, which reprograms genetic expression in the tomato plants and causes the change in scent.

Mathematical modelling by plant disease epidemiologist Dr Nik Cunniffe, also in the Department of Plant Sciences at Cambridge, explored how the experimental findings apply outside the glasshouse. The model showed how pollinator bias for infected plants can cause genes for disease-susceptibility to persist in plant populations over extremely large numbers of generations.

The latest study is the culmination of work spanning almost eight years (and multiple bee stings). The findings will form the basis of a new collaboration with the Royal Horticultural Society, in which they aim to increase pollinator services for cultivated crops.

With the global population estimated to reach nine billion people by 2050, producing enough food will be one of this century’s greatest challenges. Carr, Glover and Cunniffe are all members of the Cambridge Global Food Security Initiative at Cambridge, which is involved in addressing the issues surrounding food security at local, national and international scales.

The use of state-of-the-art experimental glasshouses at Cambridge Botanic Garden, and equipment at Cambridge and Rothamsted, was funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

Ottoman women shopped. They didn’t just shop; they also ran businesses, owned property and, on occasion, stormed buildings to stage protest meetings. Not only did they flirt and dance – and infuriate their husbands with demands for the latest fashions – but they exerted genuine political and economic power. And they did all this much more visibly than is often assumed.

In Ottoman Women in Public Space, a group of scholars of the Middle East and the Islamic world turn their attention to a neglected topic: what life was actually like for women at the height of an empire that lasted for 600 years (right up until the turn of the 20th century) and, at its most powerful, stretched eastwards from present-day Hungary, southwards to the religious centre of Mecca, and westwards around the southern Mediterranean to the bustling port of Algiers.  

Edited by Dr Kate Fleet and Ebru Boyar (Faculty of History and Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies at Newnham College), Ottoman Women in Public Space is a collection of essays by specialists based in five countries and from a range of academic disciplines. In drawing on sources that span from court records to poetry, the contributors challenge the notion that female life was confined to the sequestered spaces of the harem and the hamam (traditional Turkish bath).

The conventional narrative places Ottoman women firmly in the domestic sphere and fails to see how visible they were outside the home, either in the mahalle (neighbourhood) or beyond. Female lives, viewed in modern western terms, were undoubtedly proscribed. But scholars are now exploring the extent to which women were publically visible, whether they were members of the elite sampling the delights of the pleasure gardens of great cities or peasants labouring in the fields. 

Why have women been missing from histories of the Ottoman empire – and why have narratives about females centred on the seclusion of the harem? As Boyar and Fleet explain, women’s voices are absent in records which were almost exclusively produced by men. When female voices are heard, they are mediated through a male narrator. It’s a universal reality, they point out, that a large proportion of women – those who are older or of low status – have long been effectively ‘invisible’ in public.

How visible a woman was, where she was free to go and what she was able to do, depended largely on who she was. The mobility of noble women was more constricted than that of poor women. In the countryside, female labour was essential to agriculture. An 19th-century engraving of harvesting in Bulgaria shows two women at work. With a child on her lap and a whip in her hand, the younger woman drives a horse and threshing sledge over the crop to separate the grain from the chaff.

In cities the most visible of all women were the thousands of slaves who ranged from poor serving girls to powerful concubines. In a chapter devoted to the extremes of visibility, Fleet writes: “While women were positioned at various points along the trajectory of visibility … slave women moved through the whole gamut of visibility from physical invisibility and seclusion at one end of the spectrum to total exposure on the market place, a level of display unthinkable for any other Ottoman woman, at the other.”

Slaves crossed private/public boundaries. Vital to the smooth-running of the home behind closed doors, they were also a marker of public respectability. A hand-coloured portrait (late 16th century) of a lady walking to the baths accompanied by her slave shows both dressed to impress. The slave’s presence signalled that the lady being accompanied was legitimately out in public and under the close protection of her family.

As commodities, slaves were bought and sold, traded and transported. “The visibility of slaves on the market varied from complete exposure in public slave markets to the more private display within a slave dealer’s house, or presentation of a slave dealer within the konak (residence) of a potential buyer,” writes Fleet. An English visitor to Istanbul at the end of the 16th century described its slave market: “They sell many Christian slaves of all sects and adge, in manner as they sell thier horses, looking them in the eyes, mouth, and all other parts.”

At the other end of the social spectrum, and with more agency at their disposal but less mobility in public spaces, wealthy women devised numerous ways to make their presence felt without jeopardising their reputations: they used perfumes; they appeared on balconies, briefly visible to passers-by; sweet sounds of their voices carried into the street. Their bodies may have been covered as they negotiated public spaces, but they walked with a sway of their hips and used tokens as a secret language to convey messages of love.

Male control of women was underpinned by notions of moral rectitude but women were out and about much more than has previously been thought. They were (at least sometimes) visible to the gaze of foreign observers, curious about a culture so seemingly exotic. In the collection of the Correr Museum in Venice is an illustrated travel manuscript showing scenes of Istanbul in the late 17th century. Among them is a delightful sketch of a group of women enjoying an outing in a boat rowed by three handsome oarsmen sporting splendid black moustaches. 

Notions of honour ran deep in Ottoman society. Boyar writes: “The desire to protect women’s honour had less to do with women than it did with concern with the well-being of society as a whole, for an immoral woman meant an immoral society.” Women could be seen in public but how they behaved, and how they were perceived, was of paramount importance. For women to be seen visiting the graves of their relatives, or shines of holy personages, was acceptable; for women visiting a cemetery to be seen drinking and eating with unrelated men was not.

Women’s lives were controlled not just by the state, argues Boyar, but also by “an imagined moral community” with the “power to label a woman as honourable or dishonourable as it thought fit, leaving the woman concerned with no recourse to this judgment”. However, social perceptions of respectability were fluid – and varied across time and space. An Anatolian visitor to Cairo was shocked to see the wives of high-ranking men riding on donkeys. His reaction was coloured by the practice elsewhere for prostitutes to be punished by being displayed on donkeys.

It was within the intimacy of the mahalle (neighbourhood) that the question of reputation was most potent. “For a woman to be labelled a prostitute had significant ramifications for it left her exposed without the protection of either family, society or the state,” writes Boyar. “She was seen as challenging the imagined moral community and as seeking to build a life outside its boundaries and control.” On one hand condemnation could mean ruin, on the other marginalisation could be empowering. Brothels were everywhere. Not only did prostitutes have access to public spaces but, as an integral part of society, they were sometimes invited to important celebrations and took part in street processions.

By the turn of the 20th century, the Ottoman empire was crumbling. Its demise had opened up new opportunities for women to enter public spheres. As Boyar writes: “Their progress and the speed of change in both the level of their participation and the acceptance of their new position owed much to the dire circumstances that the empire found itself in in that period and to certain changes, in particular the emergence of the press and the development of female education.”

Unsurprisingly, so profound a societal change was by no means unopposed. As late as 1915, a regional governor expressly forbad women discussing the government to “create demoralisation with their lying and inaccurate words and gossip”. But even this condemnation of female gossip shows how much women were present and how their voices were heard in the Ottoman public space.

With this new volume, Fleet and Boyar and their contributors lift the lid on many thousands of lives previously marginalised by academic histories.

Ottoman Women in Public Space is published by Brill.

The research draws on the Cambridge English Corpus and the Sports Corpus – multi-billion word databases of written and spoken English from a huge range of media sources – which also highlight a pronounced gender divide when it comes to the way sporting men and women are discussed.

Academics found that in the Cambridge English Corpus ‘men’ or ‘man’ is referenced twice as much as ‘woman’ or ‘women’, but in the Sports Corpus (a sub-section of words in relation to sport) men are mentioned almost three times more often than women. 

Meanwhile, language around women in sport focuses disproportionately on the appearance, clothes and personal lives of women, highlighting a greater emphasis on aesthetics over athletics.

While returning female athletes like Jessica Ennis-Hill look to defend their Olympic titles in Rio, more is being made in the media of recent births and marriages than their medal hopes in the 2016 Olympics. Notable word associations or combinations for women in sport (but not men) include ‘aged’, ‘older’, ‘pregnant’ and ‘married’ or ‘unmarried’. The top word combinations for men in sport, by contrast, are more likely to be adjectives like ‘fastest’, ‘strong’, ‘big’, ‘real’ and ‘great’ – all words regularly heard to describe male Olympians such as Usain Bolt.

When it comes to performance, it seems as though men also have the competitive edge: interrogation of the databases sees ‘men’ or ‘man’ associated with verbs such as ‘mastermind’, ‘beat’, ‘win’, ‘dominate’ and ‘battle’, whereas ‘woman’ or ‘women’ is associated with verbs such as ‘compete’, ‘participate’ and ‘strive’.

Sarah Grieves, Language Researcher at Cambridge University Press, said: “It’s perhaps unsurprising to see that women get far less airtime than men and that their physical appearance and personal lives are frequently mentioned. The breadth of sources we’ve analysed means we're able to give a unique insight into the language used to describe women and men within the context of sport.”

The only context where women are mentioned more is to mark their sports as ‘other’. Overt gender marking is much more common for women's participation in sport, both in terms of the sport itself (ladies’ singles) and the athletes participating (woman golfer). Men’s sport is often considered the default – for example, we are more inclined to refer to women’s football, whereas men’s football is just called football. According to the Sports Corpus, the sports where this is most likely to happen are athletics, golf, horse-riding, sprinting, football and cycling.

The research also showed higher levels of infantilising or traditionalist language for women in sport, who are more likely to be referred to as ‘girls’ than men are called ‘boys’. Women are twice as likely to be referred to as ‘ladies’, compared to ‘gentlemen’ who are frequently referred to by the neutral term ‘men’.

“It will be interesting to see if this trend is also reflected in our upcoming research on language used at the Rio Olympics,” added Grieves.

The study by Cambridge University Press looked at over 160 million words within the domain of sport using the Cambridge English Corpus, and aimed to examine how the language we use could indicate our gendered attitudes to sport. The Corpus is a huge collection of data, taken from a variety of different sources, including news articles, social media and internet forums.

More information can be found here

When a virus enters our body, it hijacks the machinery and resources in our cells to help it replicate and spread throughout the body. However, the resources on offer fluctuate throughout the day, partly in response to our circadian rhythms – in effect, our body clock. Circadian rhythms control many aspects of our physiology and bodily functions – from our sleep patterns to body temperature, and from our immune systems to the release of hormones. These cycles are controlled by a number of genes, including Bmal1 and Clock.

To test whether our circadian rhythms affect susceptibility to, or progression of, infection, researchers at the Wellcome Trust-Medical Research Council Institute of Metabolic Science, University of Cambridge, compared normal ‘wild type’ mice infected with herpes virus at different times of the day, measuring levels of virus infection and spread. The mice lived in a controlled environment where 12 hours were in daylight and 12 hours were dark.

The researchers found that virus replication in those mice infected at the very start of the day – equivalent to sunrise, when these nocturnal animals start their resting phase – was ten times greater than in mice infected ten hours into the day, when they are transitioning to their active phase. When the researchers repeated the experiment in mice lacking Bmal1, they found high levels of virus replication regardless of the time of infection.

“The time of day of infection can have a major influence on how susceptible we are to the disease, or at least on the viral replication, meaning that infection at the wrong time of day could cause a much more severe acute infection,” explains Professor Akhilesh Reddy, the study’s senior author. “This is consistent with recent studies which have shown that the time of day that the influenza vaccine is administered can influence how effectively it works.”

In addition, the researchers found similar time-of-day variation in virus replication in individual cell cultures, without influence from our immune system. Abolishing cellular circadian rhythms increased both herpes and influenza A virus infection, a dissimilar type of virus – known as an RNA virus – that infects and replicates in a very different way to herpes.

Dr Rachel Edgar, the first author, adds: “Each cell in the body has a biological clock that allows them to keep track of time and anticipate daily changes in our environment. Our results suggest that the clock in every cell determines how successfully a virus replicates. When we disrupted the body clock in either cells or mice, we found that the timing of infection no longer mattered – viral replication was always high. This indicates that shift workers, who work some nights and rest some nights and so have a disrupted body clock, will be more susceptible to viral diseases. If so, then they could be prime candidates for receiving the annual flu vaccines.”

As well as its daily cycle of activity, Bmal1 also undergoes seasonal variation, being less active in the winter months and increasing in summer. The researchers speculate that this may help explain why diseases such as influenza are more likely to spread through populations during winter.

Using cell cultures, the researchers also found that herpes viruses manipulate the molecular ‘clockwork’ that controls our circadian rhythms, helping the viruses to progress. This is not the first time that pathogens have been seen to ‘game’ our body clocks: the malaria parasite, for example, is known to synchronise its replication cycle with the host’s circadian rhythm, producing a more successful infection.

“Given that our body clocks appear to play a role in defending us from invading pathogens, their molecular machinery may offer a new, universal drug target to help fight infection,” adds Professor Reddy.

The research was mostly funded by the Wellcome Trust and the European Research Council.

Reference
Edgar, RS et al. Cell autonomous regulation of herpes and influenza virus infection by the circadian clock. PNAS; e-pub 15 Aug 2016; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1601895113

One of the most important events in the British education calendar is approaching: A-level results day. Beyond A-levels, choosing what you want to do, or what you want to study are two of the big decisions in life. And, as such, they are not easy ones to make. You weigh up alternative options, and find a good number of reasons behind each of them. Many in the Twittersphere are already reliving their own results day memories with one user saying: “Aaaah I remember #Alevelresults day. Led me to a glittering English Literature degree which is why I work in IT”.

Philosopher Ruth Chang– who studied law, but then switched to philosophy – has dedicated her life to the study of hard choices. She explains that when it comes to making difficult decisions, it is often not about which alternative is better, because there is no such alternative.

You might be scratching your head at this point, but just bear with me, because Chang’s philosophy is a good one. The idea is that if you are free from the illusion of a “correct” and an “incorrect” answer, you can more easily make choices in line with an outcome that is more important to you – enabling you to become the kind of person that you want to be. And it’s in this nebulous space of hard choices, that we can be the authors of our own life.

This doesn’t really make the decision any easier, but at least it makes things much more interesting. Because, it doesn’t really matter what you choose, but how you choose it. And this should be done reflectively, slowly, wholeheartedly. Definitely not as a knee-jerk reaction – not in denial, and I hope not out of panic.

Who do you want to be?

To work out which choice is right for you, you first need to decide who you want to be, and to do that, you need to know who you are – which requires careful self-observation. If you have ever tried to practice meditation or mindfulness you might have noticed how difficult it is to watch your own breath without trying to change it. But difficult as it may be, these types of exercises – which involve paying attention to the present moment on purpose and non-judgmentally – can help with (self) observation.

Recent studies show that mindfulness meditation can be effective at reducing anxiety and depression, because it reduces our tendency to react to situations without thinking, and increases our self-compassion. Mindfulness exercises facilitate our awareness of the space between a “trigger” and our response to it. They also train us in bringing our attention back to the present moment after our mind has wandered, without criticising ourselves.

With lower reactivity and higher self-compassion it is easier to explore chains of thought, emotions and sensations without immediately trying to condemn, suppress, or change them. And this carefree exploration may even help new insights to develop and change your perspective on a situation.

If you get to know yourself better, you’ll find it easier to see which things you value and enjoy most – and what you care most about. You’ll be able to come up with new plans that are aligned with these things, integrating your past, present and future – to create your own meaningful story.

So even if the career you so passionately want to do typically leads to unstable employment, which your parents have warned you off, but you know that you value passion above financial stability and feel able to manage uncertainty, then that career may be your best option. You may instead prefer an easy and predictable professional life. Or you might realise through being a bit more self-aware that your real interests lie outside your career – it’s all there to be discovered.

Mindful living

When I learnt meditation I embarked in a deep inner exploration that helped me to see what was important for me, and gave me the courage to go after my dreams. However, mindfulness should not be viewed as an answer for every problem. It is not easy, it requires regular practice, and not everyone likes it or benefits from it. Indeed, there are other ways of effectively exploring the inner self, managing emotions and maintaining a mindful attitude to life. But, at least for some, mindfulness meditation can be a great ally when it comes to making important decisions.

Developing your career can be a fantastic experience if you have chosen it wholeheartedly, even in spite of all the challenges that lie ahead. Essential to this is living in a less automatic way, reminding yourself of why you have chosen this path, and taking up the challenges with some sporting spirit, even if they end up in a career switch.

The very fact that some of us are able to choose what to do in life, try a path, and have some degree of support if we fail is still, unfortunately, a rare privilege. So if we don’t take the risk and go after our dreams, who will? After all, as a friend of mine once said: “Life is the art of doing things for which you are never prepared enough.”

Julieta Galante, Research associate at the Department of Psychiatry, 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.

From vitamin C and echinacea to warm clothes and antibacterial soap, there’s no shortage of ideas about how to prevent and manage colds and flu. Unfortunately, many of these are not based on solid scientific evidence. In fact, medical researchers are only starting to unravel the range of factors that affect our susceptibility to getting an infection. Now we have discovered that our body clock plays an important role – making us more prone to get infected at certain times of the day.

It is perhaps easy to forget that we have co-evolved on this planet with micro-organisms, including bacteria, which may be either beneficial or harmful to us. Similarly, viruses cannot copy themselves without help from our cells. Without us, they simply wouldn’t exist.

So what happens when a virus encounters a cell? First, it has to get in through a protective barrier called the cell membrane. Then it has to hijack the interior of the “host” cell to subvert it and divert all resources to copy itself millions of times. Once an army of identical clones is formed, it breaks out of the cell, usually destroying it in the process. Imagine millions of these new viruses then being able to do exactly the same to other cells nearby. The cycle goes on, with often rapid amplification of the virus through a tissue, and then through the body.

That’s if the virus had it all its own way … But there is always a battle in play between invading organisms and our bodies. Our immune system counteracts the invading organisms and will invoke mechanisms to stop the virus entering, replicating and spreading. This defence system works at the level of individual cells in the body, but also in specialised tissues of the body that are designed to mount a response to such invasions.

It now turns out that our body clock is also an important gatekeeper of virus infections. The body clock is an amazing piece of evolutionary biology. It’s thought that most organisms on our planet have a biological clock that keeps track of the 24-hour day. It can do this by orchestrating chemical reactions and genetic switches that rhythmically control thousands of genes in cells in the cell – turning about 15% of all genes on and off across the day and night.

Timely experiment

So why might viruses care about our body clock? Since our cells are miniature factories, making things that the virus must have to copy itself, the virus is less likely to succeed when the production line is shut down. This is what we tested in the laboratory, by infecting cells and mice at different times of the day. We found that viruses are less able to infect in the late afternoon. In contrast, in the early morning, our cells are hives of biosynthetic activity, at least from the virus’s viewpoint. So, if a virus tries to take over a cell in the early day, it is far more likely to succeed, and spread faster, than if it encounters a rather less favourable climate in the evening.

Perhaps even more interestingly, when the clockwork is disrupted, viruses are more prolific at taking over cells and tissues. Such “clock misalignment” can happen when we do shift work, get jet lagged, or experience the phenomenon of “social jet lag”, which is caused by changes in our sleep schedule on our days off. Therefore, it’s important to know about these interactions because it will undoubtedly help us to find ways to ensure better health for ourselves. For example, since we know shift workers are more likely to get infections, it might be a good idea to give them flu vaccinations.

Knowing about the clock and viruses could also help us to design better public health measures to combat virus spread. You could imagine that during a pandemic limiting exposure during the early daytime could be a small but important intervention to try to prevent viral infection from taking hold. Indeed, a recent study by a team at the University of Birmingham showed that vaccinating people against flu in the morning is more effective than in the evening. This principle could be the same for many unrelated viruses.

The research could also help us crack a longstanding enigma – why do virus infections like flu happen more commonly in the winter months? It turns out that the very same molecular switch – called Bmal1 – that goes up and down in the day and night also changes according to the seasons, going up in the summer and down in the winter. When we artificially lower Bmal1 levels in mice and cells, the virus is able to infect more. As occurs on a daily basis, the waxing and waning of Bmal1 in our bodies could be a reason why we’re less likely to cope with viruses like flu in the winter.

So, if you’re desperate to avoid catching a flu virus that’s been going around the office, rather than trying to boost your immune system with various vitamins, you may want to try to simply work from home in the mornings.

Akhilesh Reddy, Wellcome Trust Senior Fellow in Clinical Sciences at the Department of Clinical Neurosciences, 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.

For audiences around the world, flamenco symbolises the colour and romance of southern Spain. An energetic blend of song, guitar and dance, it is most strongly associated with Andalusia, one of Spain’s 17 autonomous regions. With historic connections to Islamic North Africa, Andalusia stands at a geographical crossroads and its culture is rich with influences from far beyond its shores.

The government of Andalusia has long supported flamenco as an important element of regional identity and a magnet for tourism. In 2010 flamenco was recognised by UNESCO as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (ICH), a designation that signals its contribution to culture worldwide. It was a seminal moment in the history of flamenco which has progressed from a tradition embedded in gypsy and working class communities to a genre taught in conservatoires alongside more classical styles.

The listing of flamenco as an ICH raises important questions about culture and identity: how best to keep regional art forms alive and flourishing in an increasingly globalised world and, most specifically, how musical forms intersect with politics. Dr Matthew Machin-Autenrieth (Faculty of Music) addresses these topics and more in his book Flamenco, Regionalism and Musical Heritage in Southern Spain, a detailed study of the ways in which an iconic performative tradition contributes to the formation of identity at local, regional, national and international levels.

Machin-Autenrieth comes to his subject matter as an ethnomusicologist and classical guitar player interested in the shifting politics of a ‘grassroots’ art form that has been packaged both as a global commodity and as a symbol of regional identity. His understanding of the guitar and grasp of colloquial Spanish, together with his deep interest in the relationship between music and politics, qualify him for the task of unravelling the ways in which music is grounded not just in place but in notions of place which contribute to powerful ‘landscapes’ of belonging.

Much has been written, and contested, about the origins of flamenco which emerged as a genre only in the mid-19th century when it was ‘discovered’ by middle class audiences searching for the exoticism and romanticism of folk traditions. Its deeper roots are entwined with the music of gypsies and other marginalised groups. Its themes play on the highs and lows of human experience – love and loss, death and sorrow – reflecting the suffering of a population living in a region scarred by centuries of feudalism.

Flamenco is not universally popular in its country of origin where some see it as which as a relic of a more ‘backward’ Spain and ‘not really European’. Machin-Autenrieth writes in his introduction: “Many Spaniards I have met (from outside Andalusia) disregard and even detest the conflation of flamenco with Spanish-ness, viewing it as nothing more than an Andalusian-Gypsy tradition. Arguably, a similar process of appropriation is occurring within Andalusia, the tradition being developed by institutions and in the popular media as a definitive symbol of regional identity.”

In setting the context for his discussion, Machin-Autenrieth traces the recent history of flamenco which was repressed and then appropriated by the Franco regime. When the regime ended in the mid-1970s, Spain underwent a process of democratisation and decentralisation in which flamenco was a political tool, becoming a potent marker of the culture of Andalusia.  Its popularity may not be universal across the region but, by virtue of educational initiatives and a programme of festivals, all Andalusians are familiar with its distinctive style.

Music has a powerful cohesive effect on communities, and orally-based traditions in particular offer a voice to groups who might remain unheard. But when music is appropriated by institutions, its authenticity and relevance for local communities may be under threat. Concerns about the alleged commercialisation of flamenco are nothing new. Early in the 20th century, the poet Federico García Lorca and composer Manuel de Falla, both Andalusians themselves, emerged as champions for an art form which had gained negative stereotypes, and was under attack by antiflamenquistas intent on depicting flamenco as an outdated cultural phenomenon out of step with Spain’s European ambitions.  

In recent years, however, flamenco has seen an increase in institutional support in a country where regional identity is high on the agenda. But institutional involvement in the arts can be counter-reproductive.  Making a point that could apply equally to other art forms, Machin-Autenrieth quotes the Spanish sociologist, Aix Gracia, who argues that “the affability with which the administrations treat flamenco in Andalusia, through ‘festivalisation’ and its preservation as a representation of identity, is also its biggest threat… I cannot resist the question: could this art die of success? Or more specifically, could it lose its autonomy?”

In exploring the question of artistic freedom, Machin-Autenrieth attended dozens of flamenco performances and interviewed many of those involved as artists and promoters. He describes the tensions that exist between the styles of flamenco approved by the heritage industry and forms out of favour with the dominant institutions.  Strength of feeling against the institutional development of flamenco led to the emergence of Flamenco es un derecho (Flamenco is a right), a protest movement that claims flamenco is a gift to humanity – but one over which Andalusians have a right.

Much scholarly research on flamenco in Andalusia has focused on the role of three cities (Seville, Cadiz and Jerez) as the defining ‘golden triangle’ for its performance. As well as exploring the regional politics behind flamenco, Machin-Autenrieth looks beyond the ‘golden triangle’ to focus on flamenco in Granada, a city famous for its stunning Moorish architecture. Focusing on specific case studies, he explores the relevance of flamenco for local identity in Granada beyond its regional associations. The book provides an insight into the range of distinct contexts and styles in Granada that speak to a vibrant and historically-significant flamenco community.

Spanish identity, by virtue of the country’s history, is strongly local. To be Andalusian is to feel a strong sense of regional belonging, to be granadino or granadina (from Granada) is to have even stronger allegiance to a city with its own sense of history and tradition. With flamenco, a sense of locality splits even further into the competing styles performed in different clubs and venues. It is this richness of diversity, rather than adherence to proscribed authenticity, that will keep the genre moving forward.

Flamenco, Regionalism and Musical Heritage in Southern Spain is published by Routledge.

Inset images: Flamenco (Paolo Signorini); Flamenco, Regionalism and Musical Heritage in Southern Spain front cover (Routledge).

It’s long been assumed that war-related post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) stems from how well a person copes psychologically with exposure to violence or the threat of violence. A new study, published in the Academy of Management Journal, finds that this is only half the story, however.

The researchers behind the study say that the context through which war is experienced – based on a person’s cultural, professional and organisational background – may be equally important in determining how warfare can be traumatic for some and not for others.

The research focused on military doctors in Afghanistan, and found that the “dissonance” between what the medics experienced on the ground and their values as dedicated professionals resulted in “senselessness, futility and surreality” – factors that can lead to PTSD and other mental health problems.

“This understanding of the connection between PTSD and the context of those who suffer from it could change the way mental health experts analyse, prevent and manage psychological injury from warfare,” said Mark de Rond of University of Cambridge Judge Business School, who co-authored the study with Jaco Lok of the University of New South Wales Business School in Australia.

“The study highlights the urgent and serious nature of dealing with PTSD – beyond the very real impact on many veterans, to others who work in the theatre of war, such as medical personnel,” says Lok.

Between 20 and 30 per cent of the 2.7 million US troops sent to Iraq or Afghanistan between 2001 and 2011 returned with some form of psychological injury, says the US Department of Veterans Affairs, while the British charity Combat Stress reported a four-fold increase in former service personnel seeking help for mental disorders in the past 20 years. In 2013, a former commander of Australian forces in the Middle East warned of a “large wave of sadness coming our way.”

The new study is based on fieldwork by de Rond, Reader in Strategy & Organisation at Cambridge Judge Business School, who was “embedded” with a team of military surgeons at Camp Bastion in Afghanistan for six weeks in 2011 – and includes tales both harrowing and tragi-comic.

“The doctors I was embedded with were known as Rear Located Medics, who don’t have a combat role, so they have less reason to fear for their lives than frontline personnel,” says de Rond. “Studying this group was an excellent way to look beyond psychological reaction to the horrors of warfare in order to also analyse contextual elements that lead to PTSD.”

For example, the Camp Bastion army medics were particularly disturbed by rules of the camp’s small 50-bed field hospital that required the quick transfer of badly mutilated children (often double amputees due to Improvised Explosive Devices encountered while playing) and other Afghan civilians to inferior local hospitals, often within 48 hours, to make way for new battlefield casualties. This was a specific, local organisational requirement.

“(It was) difficult for them to come terms with rules, practices and experiences on the ground that appeared contradictory to their purpose and values, thus amplifying feelings of senselessness,” the study says.

As an example of the surreal hopelessness faced by the medics, the study relates a conversation between two medics: “They talked about the frustration of bringing a stable, anesthetised patient over to some hospital only to be met by an empty van, having to hand over a wired-up patient to someone with no equipment at all.”

This practice tore at the fabric of their professional purpose and responsibility and highlighted the contrast between the medics’ actual experience in a warfare setting with their professional expectations as doctors – a life of “the meaningful, the good and the normal.”

The doctors’ real names are not used, but the study instead substitutes the names of characters such as “Trapper,” “Hawkeye” and “Potter” from the hit TV show “M*A*S*H”.   Among de Rond’s field notes chronicled in the study, some incidents seem like they could have come out of the “M*A*S*H” gallows-humour playbook:

“One of the theatre nurses told me of an experience over Easter weekend, when a double amputee had come in… One of his legs had come off, and (the nurse) was asked to please take it to the mortuary (and from there to the incinerator). As he crossed the ambulance bay carrying a yellow (container) with a leg, he ran into the Commanding Officer and a TNC (Travel Nurse Corps) nurse walking the other way, dressed in bunny ears and carrying Easter eggs.”

Such a contrast “between the human gravity of the situation on the one hand, and the casual nature of everyday rituals and routines on the other” can have a very disorienting effect, the study says.

When such disorientation is sustained over time, it can also permanently damage the ability of everyday rituals and routines to provide a sense of meaning and predictability to life back home. This may be one important reason why many war veterans find it so difficult to adjust back to home life.

Camp Bastion, which was constructed in 2005 and handed over to Afghan forces in 2014, was the largest British overseas military camp since World War II, accommodating 32,000 people. The field hospital was staffed by mostly British and American doctors, with some Danes and Estonians, many of them “battle-hardened” by previous deployments to other war zones such as Bosnia and Sierra Leone.

Reference:
Mark de Rondand Jaco Lok. ‘Some things can never be unseen: the role of context in psychological injury at war.’ Academy of Management Journal (2016). DOI: 10.5465/amj.2015.0681

Adapted from a Cambridge Judge Business School press release.

Astronomers have identified a young star, located almost 11,000 light years away, which could help us understand how the most massive stars in the Universe are formed. This young star, already more than 30 times the mass of our Sun, is still in the process of gathering material from its parent molecular cloud, and may be even more massive when it finally reaches adulthood.

The researchers, led by a team at the University of Cambridge, have identified a key stage in the birth of a very massive star, and found that these stars form in a similar way to much smaller stars like our Sun – from a rotating disc of gas and dust. The results will be presented this week at the Star Formation 2016 conference at the University of Exeter, and are reported in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

In our galaxy, massive young stars – those with a mass at least eight times greater than the Sun – are much more difficult to study than smaller stars. This is because they live fast and die young, making them rare among the 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, and on average, they are much further away.

“An average star like our Sun is formed over a few million years, whereas massive stars are formed orders of magnitude faster — around 100,000 years,” said Dr John Ilee from Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, the study’s lead author. “These massive stars also burn through their fuel much more quickly, so they have shorter overall lifespans, making them harder to catch when they are infants.”

The protostar that Ilee and his colleagues identified resides in an infrared dark cloud - a very cold and dense region of space which makes for an ideal stellar nursery. However, this rich star-forming region is difficult to observe using conventional telescopes, since the young stars are surrounded by a thick, opaque cloud of gas and dust. But by using the Submillimeter Array (SMA) in Hawaii and the Karl G Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, both of which use relatively long wavelengths of light to observe the sky, the researchers were able to ‘see’ through the cloud and into the stellar nursery itself. 

By measuring the amount of radiation emitted by cold dust near the star, and by using unique fingerprints of various different molecules in the gas, the researchers were able to determine the presence of a ‘Keplerian’ disc - one which rotates more quickly at its centre than at its edge.

“This type of rotation is also seen in the Solar System - the inner planets rotate around the Sun more quickly than the outer planets,” said Ilee. “It’s exciting to find such a disc around a massive young star, because it suggests that massive stars form in a similar way to lower mass stars, like our Sun.”

The initial phases of this work were part of an undergraduate summer research project at the University of St Andrews, funded by the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS). The undergraduate carrying out the work, Pooneh Nazari, said, “My project involved an initial exploration of the observations, and writing a piece of software to ‘weigh’ the central star. I’m very grateful to the RAS for providing me with funding for the summer project — I’d encourage anyone interested in academic research to try one!”

From these observations, the team measured the mass of the protostar to be over 30 times the mass of the Sun. In addition, the disc surrounding the young star was also calculated to be relatively massive, between two and three times the mass of our Sun. Dr Duncan Forgan, also from St Andrews and lead author of a companion paper, said, “Our theoretical calculations suggest that the disc could in fact be hiding even more mass under layers of gas and dust. The disc may even be so massive that it can break up under its own gravity, forming a series of less massive companion protostars.”

The next step for the researchers will be to observe the region with the Atacama Large Millimetre Array (ALMA), located in Chile. This powerful instrument will allow any potential companions to be seen, and allow researchers to learn more about this intriguing young heavyweight in our galaxy.

This work has been supported by a grant from the European Research Council.

References:
J.D. Ilee et al. ‘G11.92-0361 MM1: A Keplerian disc around a massive young proto O-star.’ Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2016): DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stw1912

D. H. Forgan et al. ‘Self-gravitating disc candidates around massive young stars.’ Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2016): DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stw1917

We live in a world brimming with images. But the pictures that perhaps most powerfully evoke our individual life stories are seldom seen. Stored in personal albums or pushed to the back of drawers, these are not the images that we necessarily choose to share on social media. Taken on occasions that are both special and ordinary (the first day at school, that family trip to the beach), these photographs are imbued with feelings, many of them complex and complicated. Looked back on from a distance of time passed, they reveal our vulnerability: how we were and how we are, how we and others saw us and see us.

When sociologist Dr Mónica Moreno Figueroa interviewed a group of Mexican women about their lives, she invited them to share their photo albums and reflect on their feelings about their bodies and the multiplicity of connections developing around them over time. Her objective was to explore women’s lived experiences and reveal the powerful role that ideas about beauty and race play in shaping individual lives. Moreno Figueroa sought a complex account from her interviewees, but the route those narratives took and the depth of their emotions surprised her. So much so, that she decided, on publishing her work, not to reproduce any of the women’s photographs.

Much has been written about women and beauty. Far less has been written about the ways in which notions of beauty, femininity, age and race intersect to create strongly perceived ‘differences’ which have profound and enduring effects. To be deemed beautiful confers immediate advantages – yet beauty is fleeting and fragile. A state of being beautiful is either displaced to the past or deferred to the future. As Moreno Figueroa has written, in a paper with her colleague Rebecca Coleman, “beauty is not a ‘thing’ which can be experienced in the present, but is that which is felt in different temporalities”.

Next week (30 August to 3 September 2016) Moreno Figueroa and colleagues (Dr Dominique Grisard from the University of Basel & the Swiss Center for Social Research and Dr Margrit Vogt from the University of Flensburg) will stage a ground-breaking summer school and conference titled ‘The Politics of Beauty’. Participants will include academics and artists who will share professional and personal experiences to encourage wide-ranging debate on topics related to beauty.

As a sociologist concerned with understanding the ‘quality’ of inequality, the depth and feeling of racism and sexism, Moreno Figueroa argues that beauty should be understood as an “embodied affective process” – not so much a state of being as a feeling about being. “We’re inviting our participants to engage with the politics of beauty and its ramifications. How does beauty travel? What kinds of beauty discourses are created and transmitted in such journeys? How are the politics of beauty reconfigured both through its travels and its locatedness? When do they matter and to what effect and extent? These are important questions because they go to the heart of many human experiences,” Grisard, Vogt and Moreno Figueroa write in their invitation to this event.

Moreno Figueroa has written extensively on beauty and race – especially in the context of Latin America – and has helped to raise awareness of the ways in which they contribute to the reproduction of pervasive forms of racism and sexism and the reinforcement of structures of inequality. The Mexican women who shared their photographs were educated lower and middle-class professionals. They were also, like the majority of Mexico’s population, mestiza (racially mixed). The interviews revealed the strong concern with appearance, skin colour, physical features which are in turn deeply intertwined with notions of acceptable femininity and national belonging – and the words that cropped up again and again was morena (dark-skinned) and fea (ugly). One woman reported that, as a child, she used to ask her uncles, when they teased her about her looks, “Why am I so morena?”

“This question sounds naïve but it’s not, as it comes from a context where racial mixture has given a sense that different physical features are possible. Some get ‘lucky’, some don’t,” says Moreno Figueroa. “Mexico is a highly racialised society in which issues of racism, and particularly prejudices about skin colour, are neither acknowledged nor addressed – but have remained hugely influential both in the intimate environment of the family and in the wider world outside it. Deeply embedded in Mexican society are notions of beauty that have their origins in deliberate moves to ‘improve’ indigenous races. Improving meant encouraging marriages that would result in children with lighter skins and ‘fine’ features. Hand-in-hand with notions of improvement come ideas about degeneration.”

In interviewing contemporary mestiza women about their life stories, Moreno Figueroa was asking them to describe the form of racism that exists within the majority population and not the more familiar type of racism directed by a majority to a minority.

“In the context of everyday experience framed by the racial logics of mestizaje, there are no fixed racial positions and people are not engaged in processes of identity politics as found in other parts of the world. This is what is so striking about mestizaje: people are not white or black, but rather, they are whiter than or darker than others,” she says. “The category of mestizo which epitomises Mexican national identity is relative. As the historian Alan Knight has pointed out, mestizo represents an achieved and ascribed status underpinned by whitening practices and promises of whiteness as privilege.”

It is within this framework that the racialisation of understandings of beauty comes to the fore. The infamous Mexican Caste Paintings (Pinturas de Castas) give a sense of how during colonial times artists recreated highly composed scenes that represented the routes for racial and class improvement underlined by aspirations of beauty, refinement and leisure. A union between a Spanish man and an Indigenous woman would produce a mestiza child; one between a Spanish man and a mestiza woman, a castizo child; and between a Spanish man and a castizo woman a Spanish child. In this rationale, in three generations, with careful planning and no mixing with Indigenous or Black blood, people could whiten themselves by ascription and make sure their descendants would fare better in life.

While Moreno Figueroa is cautious to not claim a direct line between the Colonial period (1521-1810) and contemporary Mexico, with the above precedent it is no wonder one of her participants shared the stories of caution when young whiter women were courted by darker men, or of exasperation when a relative decided to marry a woman as dark as him. The reported dialogues are telling: “How come he married her? Can’t he see what she looks like? And even nowadays he’s like 70 years old and his kids are in their 30s they still ask him ‘If you can see you’re so dark, why did you marry such a dark woman?’. They even ask him why he didn’t think about ‘improving the race’.”

While the Mexican racial project is specific to its context, it shares some similar experiences of colonisation with other Latin American countries as well as strong responses to 19th-century scientific racism, such as the trend to develop official ideologies of racial mixture (for example, Mexican Mestizaje or Brazil’s racial democracy) as part of nation-building strategies.  As Moreno Figueroa explains: “These racial projects, and the many others around the world, are tightly entangled with ideas about femininity where notions of beauty, its oppressiveness and fascination, play a central role in filtering privilege and crystalising paths of purity and belonging.”

Beauty might not be tangible, not a ‘thing’, but the promise of it underpins a global business worth many millions of dollars, generated by an industry that trades on vulnerability as well as pleasure. “It would be easy perhaps to dismiss the cosmetics and beauty treatment industries as somehow superficial and exploitative,” says Moreno Figueroa. “But beauty lies in a difficult terrain – it is also a question of hope and pleasure, pain and shame. These are profoundly felt human emotions for both women and men. They deserve our full attention.”

Participants in the summer school and conference  include: Christine Checinska (University of Johannesburg VIAD, South Africa); Diane Negra (University College Dublin, Ireland); Francis Ray White (University of Westminster, UK); Jackie Sanchez Taylor (University of Leicester, UK); Joy Gregory (Slade School of Fine Art, UK); Marcia Ochoa (UC Santa Cruz, USA); Meeta Rani Jha, (University of Winchester, UK); Meredith Jones (Brunel University, UK);  Mimi Thi Nguyen (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA); Ng’endo Mukii (independent film maker, Nairobi, Kenya); Paula Villa (LMU Munich, Germany); Rosalind Gill (City University, London, UK);  Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (Emory University, USA); Sarah Banet-Weiser (USC Annenberg, USA);  and Shirley Tate, (University of Leeds, UK).

For details of the Politics of Beauty summer school and conference go to http://www.sociology.cam.ac.uk/about/events/beauty-summer-school