Body-worn cameras are fast becoming standard kit for frontline law enforcers, trumpeted by senior officers and even the US President as a technological ‘fix’ for what some see as a crisis of police legitimacy. Evidence of effectiveness has, however, been limited in its scope. 

Now, new results from one of the largest randomised-controlled experiments in the history of criminal justice research, led by the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology, show that the use by officers of body-worn cameras is associated with a startling 93% reduction in citizen complaints against police. 

Researchers say this may be down to wearable cameras modifying behaviour through an ‘observer effect’: the awareness that encounters are recorded improves both suspect demeanour and police procedural compliance. Essentially, the “digital witness” of the camera encourages cooler heads to prevail.

The experiment took place across seven sites during 2014 and early 2015, including police from areas such as the UK Midlands and the Californian coast, and encompassing 1,429,868 officer hours across 4,264 shifts in jurisdictions that cover a total population of two million citizens. The findings are published today in the journal Criminal Justice and Behaviour. 

The researchers write that, if levels of complaints offer at least some guide to standards of police conduct – and misconduct – these findings suggest that use of body-worn cameras are a “profound sea change in modern policing”.  

“Cooling down potentially volatile police-public interactions to the point where official grievances against the police have virtually vanished may well lead to the conclusion that the use of body-worn cameras represents a turning point in policing,” said Cambridge criminologist and lead author Dr Barak Ariel. 

“There can be no doubt that body-worn cameras increase the transparency of frontline policing. Anything that has been recorded can be subsequently reviewed, scrutinised and submitted as evidence.”

“Individual officers become more accountable, and modify their behaviour accordingly, while the more disingenuous complaints from the public fall by the wayside once footage is likely to reveal them as frivolous.

“The cameras create an equilibrium between the account of the officer and the account of the suspect about the same event – increasing accountability on both sides.”

However, Ariel cautions that one innovation, no matter how positive, is unlikely to provide a panacea for a deeply rooted issue such as police legitimacy.

Complaints against police are costly: both financially and in terms of public trust, say researchers. In the US, complaints can be hugely expense – not least through multimillion-dollar lawsuits. In the UK last year, the IPCC reported a continuous rise in complaints across the majority of forces.

Ariel worked with colleagues from RAND Europe and six different police forces: West Midlands, Cambridgeshire, West Yorkshire, the Police Service of Northern Ireland, and Rialto and Ventura in California, to conduct the vast experiment.

Each trial was managed by a local point of contact, either an officer or civilian staff member – all graduates of the Cambridge University Police Executive Programme.

Every week for a year, the researchers randomly assigned each officer shift as either with cameras (treatment) or without (control), with all officers experiencing both conditions.

Across all seven trial sites during the 12 months preceding the study, a total of 1,539 complaints were lodged against police, amounting to 1.2 complaints per officer. By the end of the experiment, complaints had dropped to 113 for the year across all sites – just 0.08 complaints per officer – marking a total reduction of 93%.

Surprisingly, the difference between the treatment and control groups once the experiment began was not statistically significant; nor was the variations between the different sites.

Yet the before/after difference caused by the overall experimental conditions across all forces was enormous. While only around half the officers were wearing cameras at any one time, complaints against police right across all shifts in all participating forces almost disappeared. 

Researchers say this may be an example of “contagious accountability”: with large scale behavioural change – in officers but also perhaps in the public – seeping into almost all interactions, even during camera-less control shifts, once the experiment had introduced camera protocols to participating forces.

“It may be that, by repeated exposure to the surveillance of the cameras, officers changed their reactive behaviour on the streets – changes that proved more effective and so stuck,” said co-author Dr Alex Sutherland of RAND Europe.

“With a complaints reduction of nearly 100% across the board, we find it difficult to consider alternatives to be honest,” he said. 

Critically, researchers say these behaviour changes rely on cameras recording entire encounters, and officers issuing an early warning that the camera is on – reminding all parties that the ‘digital witness’ is in play right from the start, and triggering the observer effect. 

In fact, results from the same experiment, published earlier this year, suggest that police use-of-force and assaults on officers actually increase if a camera is switched on in the middle of an interaction, as this can be taken as an escalation of the situation by both officer and suspect.

“The jolt of issuing a verbal reminder of filming at the start of an encounter nudges everyone to think about their actions more consciously. This might mean that officers begin encounters with more awareness of rules of conduct, and members of the public are less inclined to respond aggressively,” explained Ariel.

“We suspect that this is the ‘treatment’ that body-worn cameras provide, and the mechanism behind the dramatic reduction in complaints against police we have observed in our research.”

Drs Barak Ariel and Alex Sutherland will be giving a public talk on this research and the future of policing at the Cambridge Festival of Ideas on Monday 17 October. Book a free place here: http://www.festivalofideas.cam.ac.uk/events/body-worn-cameras-safety-or-...

Returning to Uruguay’s largest landfill (cantera), ‘Felipe Cardoso’ in Montevideo, to conduct fieldwork for my PhD, I was delighted when local social worker and missionary Jorge told me that I could live at his home, in a housing cooperative overlooking the landfill.

I had worked as a labourer in the construction of the cooperative in 2010 and knew that most of the occupants were relocated residents of an infamous shantytown built on top of an old landfill.

I could use the house as a base for exploring Montevideo’s formal and informal waste trade, since many neighbours were urban recyclers, known locally as clasificadores or classifiers. I’d be able to accompany them as they left in the morning to recover value from the trash at sites nearby, often returning in the afternoon on motorbikes, trucks or horse-drawn carts laden with an impressive array of plastics, metals and cardboard, as well as food, clothing and electronics for domestic consumption or neighbourhood sale.

Waiting to move in and impatient to start fieldwork, I had eagerly accepted when one neighbour offered to host me temporarily in his yard. As it transpired, I lived for a week in the most densely populated accommodation I have ever experienced, sharing a shack with his teenage son and the flapping wings and loose bowels of 22 birds. Now, though, Jorge’s house would be my home for the following year. Initially a concrete block lacking windows and doors, I set about making it habitable, mostly using materials scavenged from the landfill.

Of course I could do nothing about the sights, sounds and smells of the landfill itself. It rose over the horizon, the third highest peak of low-lying Montevideo; the beeping of its reversing compacters could be heard throughout the night; and the strangely sweet smell of mixed urban rubbish drifted over in the morning mist.

Each day, some 60 trucks roll into the compound filled with urban rubbish. At the last count (in 2008, and likely to be an underestimate), around 5,000 waste-picking families make a living from Montevideo’s trash, attempting to recover all that is valuable, usable or edible. Their role in a city where waste management has reached crisis points in the past has been lauded as a lesson to society: they help to reduce the environmental and financial cost of landfill and find value in something that might be surplus to some but not others.

Like my interlocutors who recovered materials from there, I had ambivalent feelings about the cantera which, because of its reliable provision, was nicknamed “the mother”. On the one hand, it was an intriguing site for fieldwork where, under the supervision of Dr Sian Lazar, I focused on processes of labour formalisation, the socio-cultural dynamics of the waste and recycling work, and the history of waste infrastructure and aesthetics. On the other hand, it was also a place of hazard, police violence and a smell that lingered on clothes and skin, getting into hair and under fingernails.

I never slept at the dump but this was previously a common practice: clasificadores would camp there for days or weeks at a time, always at the mercy of the feared mounted police who would set tents alight, showing little tolerance for intruders.

The closest I came to the apparently boisterous atmosphere of these encampments was joining clasificadores of the Felipe Cardoso recycling cooperative as they spent the last nights in a building the municipality had ceded them for facilities but which some had appropriated as a residence. With the exception of veteran clasificador Coco, who lived there permanently, the space seemed to function as a temporary refuge for male clasificadores who had been kicked out by their wives! On the night of my visit, we sat and played cards, listened to cumbia music, drank into my supplies of Scotch, and discussed the impending closure of the site and the workers’ relocation to a formal sector recycling plant.

With the municipal government’s attempted formalisation of Montevideo’s recycling trade, it is possible that the days of such precarious, autonomous, clasificador spaces are numbered, to be replaced by hygienic and technologically provisioned infrastructures. Yet at the end of my research trip, many of my neighbours were still making their way to the cantera to classify the tons of waste dumped there daily.

Uruguayan priest Padre Cacho once described clasificadores as “ecological prophets” and I can see what he meant – they have long functioned as ‘prospectors’, mining the urban waste stream for valuable materials that consumers have been happy to discard, and municipal governments to landfill or incinerate.

Now back in Cambridge as an intern at the Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP), I am helping to organise a workshop on the ‘circular economy’ to explore the ways that government and industry are increasingly reconceptualising waste as recoverable resource. At a global level, it is important that shifts in policy benefit rather than dispossess informal sector recyclers, the long-time ‘artisanal miners’ of the waste stream.

Just before leaving Montevideo, the annual landfill clasificador Christmas social afforded me an enduring image of slumber amidst the scraps: an old, intoxicated and weary recycler lying on a recovered floral mattress, his sweated brow resting on a large folded rubbish bag, surrounded by thousands of pesos worth of scrap metal.

Patrick’s policy internship at CSaP is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council Cambridge Doctoral Training Centre.

The University of Cambridge has had the most successful fundraising year in its history, with more than £210 million raised.

The record sum was raised in a combined effort by the University and 31 Colleges as part of the £2 billion “Dear World… Yours, Cambridge” campaign, which focuses on the University’s impact on the world. This brings the campaign total so far to £743 million*.

Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, celebrated the power of collegiate Cambridge and the importance of philanthropy in his annual address to the University at the start of the academic year.

The Vice-Chancellor, in his seventh and final October 1 speech, said: “The collegiate nature of the University has been, and remains, one of our greatest strengths.

“Bound inextricably by history, and by a joint responsibility for students, today the University and the 31 colleges work in a common endeavour more closely than at any time I can remember.

“This has been particularly true since the launch, at the end of last year, of the most ambitious fundraising campaign in the collegiate University’s history.

“Philanthropy is critical to us. It underpins our academic autonomy, and allows us to deliver our transformative research. It brings the best people to study and work with us. They are the people who will produce ideas that change the world.

“Philanthropy is the catalyst for discovery – and it ensures that discoveries continue, even at a time of unparalleled financial challenges. To all of our benefactors we owe our immense, continued gratitude.”

The sums raised this year include a huge variety of gifts from supporters of Cambridge including £35 million from the estate of Ray Dolby to Pembroke College, $25 million from Dr Mohamed A. El-Erian split between Queens’ College and the Faculty of Economics and $27 million from Dr Bill and Weslie Janeway to Economics and an anonymous gift of £20 million to St John’s College for studentships. Earlier gifts to the campaign, which was publicly launched in 2015 and seeks to raise £2 billion, include an £8 million gift from the James Dyson Foundation to support the James Dyson Building and the Dyson Centre for Engineering Design in Cambridge, a donation of £5 million from entrepreneur Jonathan Milner to support the Milner Therapeutics Institute and Consortium; and £5 million from Cantab Capital Partners to create an Institute for Mathematics of Information.

Speaking about the announcement Professor Ian White, Master of Jesus College and Chair of the Colleges’ Committee, said: “Collegiate Cambridge has many strengths. It gives our remarkable students an extraordinary learning experience. It allows us to attract and support outstanding people - academics and students alike. It provides a vibrant space in which people are free to explore their ideas together, and develop new thinking that creates transformational ideas. It is these strengths that have been recognised by the generosity of our supporters.”

Campaign co-chair Dr Mohamed A. El-Erian said: “Cambridge transforms lives and improves the wellbeing of many, so I am delighted this campaign has gained such traction and will help Cambridge deliver more to more people. We are extremely grateful to the donors for a generosity that empowers so many across the University and Colleges to continue their hard and influential work.”

Fellow co-chair Sir Harvey McGrath said: “The University of Cambridge has had a huge impact on the world in many different ways. This outstanding support will help us to continue answering difficult questions and rising to the challenges humanity faces in the 21st century.”

The 10,000th submission, reporting on the impact of eating a Mediterranean diet on the risk of developing cardiovascular disease in a UK population, was deposited by Signe Wulund at the MRC Epidemiology Unit, on behalf of Dr Nita Forouhi, Programme Leader in Nutritional Epidemiology at the MRC Epidemiology Unit, and several co-authors.

The Open Access movement has been growing in strength in academia for many years, and it is increasingly being mandated by funding bodies and government.

Dr Forouhi said: “Through open access our research can reach a worldwide audience. It would be a huge pity if interested researchers, practitioners or policy makers could not read about new research, such as our latest findings on the link between the Mediterranean diet and cardiovascular health in a non-Mediterranean setting, because of something as simple as lacking a journal subscription.

“Open access enables wider dissemination of research findings, and in turn, facilitates better research and evidence-based policy and clinical practice.”

The Cambridge Open Access Service was established within the University Library in 2013 in response to Research Councils UK (RCUK) making Open Access mandatory for anyone accepting their funding. Many other major funders, including the Wellcome Trust, Cancer Research UK and the British Heart Foundation, have similar policies.

In 2014, the Higher Education Funding Council for England announced that Open Access would be compulsory for any article included in the next Research Excellence Framework (REF) exercise. This policy came into force on April 1, 2016, effectively meaning that all research in UK institutions now has to be made freely available.

Since its inception in 2013, the Open Access service has processed 10,000 manuscripts, across all University faculties and departments and worked with 3,000 different members of staff. 6,000 of the papers were covered by the HEFCE open access policy; 4,000 acknowledged RCUK funding and 1,900 COAF (many papers fall into multiple categories, and some into none). More than £5.4 million of Open Access grants from funding bodies have also been distributed.

Meeting these requirements is a major task for the University, and one it has tried to make as simple as possible for researchers. Authors are simply required to upload their manuscript to www.openaccess.cam.ac.uk when it’s accepted for publication, and the Open Access team advise them on what they need to do to comply with funder requirements, eligibility for any funding body grants, and handle depositing the article into Apollo, the University’s institutional repository.

Ten thousand manuscripts have now been received in this way, and the vast majority of them have been able to be made Open Access, free for anyone who wants to read and benefit from them.

The 10,000th article: ‘Prospective association of the Mediterranean diet with cardiovascular disease incidence and mortality and its population impact in a non-Mediterranean population: the EPIC-Norfolk Study’ in BMC Medicine. [DOI:10.1186/s12916-016-0677-4] can be seen here: http://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-016-0677-4 

The Open Access team at the University of Cambridge is part of the Office of Scholarly Communication (OSC), within the University Library. As well as assisting researchers with Open Access and Open Data compliance, it advises on scholarly communication tools, techniques, policies and practices, and provides training. For more details, visit www.osc.cam.ac.uk.

The University of Cambridge today launches its ‘Spotlight on Digital Society’, showcasing world leading research that examines the impact of digital technologies on our society. The theme draws on Cambridge’s Public Policy and Big Data Strategic Research Initiatives and its Digital Humanities Network.

The University's research magazine, Research Horizons, will highlight areas as diverse as cybercrime, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, and how to determine the authenticity of citizen journalism footage. Features in this edition, which will be released over the coming month, include:

Could cryptocurrency help the ‘bottom billion’?
Researchers at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance are looking at whether digital currencies might help the world’s poorest poor, many of whom have no access to a bank account and yet depend on being able to transfer money across borders.

The accidental witness
Smartphones and social media have made it easy for accidental witnesses to capture and share violations and crimes. But how can we tell what’s real and what’s fake? Ella McPherson (Sociology) is developing an automated tool, ‘The Whistle’, to help verify the authenticity of digital evidence.

Making the hidden visible
Despite being founded on ideals of freedom and openness, the internet is under attack from state-sponsored censorship. Sheharbano Khattak (Computer Laboratory) is leading a research project that aims to uncover the scale and consequences of this censorship.

The digital identity crisis
Many of us see our privacy as a basic right. But in the digital world of app-addiction, geolocation tracking and social oversharing, some may have cause to wonder if that right is steadily and sometimes willingly being eroded away. David Erdos (Law) explores the nature of data protection.

Computer says yes! (But is it right?)
Computers that learn for themselves are with us now. As they become more common in ‘high-stakes’ applications like robotic surgery, terrorism detection and driverless cars, Roberto Cipolla and Zoubin Ghahramani and Adrian Weller (Engineering) ask what can be done to make sure we can trust them.

This year’s Cambridge Festival of Ideas (17-30 October) will see speakers tackle what it means to live in a digital society. These include:

Who can really say what to whom on the internet?
The internet used to be an open road, with unrestricted access and use, based on trust and community values. But the rapid rise of spam, censorship, site blocking and automated bots now present obstacles in this road, as panellists from the Computer Laboratory will discuss.
Saturday 22 October: 11:00am - 12:30pm

Don't stop moving: Is the digital world friend or foe in fighting a sedentary future?
We have created a world where we move less and we sit more – from our drive to work, to our office desks, to our evening spent on the sofa – and this is damaging our health. Technology has had a clear role in this, but could this same technology come to our rescue? Saturday 22 October: 3:00pm - 4:00pm

Artificial intelligence: Its future and ours
Jaan Tallinn, founding engineer of Skype, leads an expert panel to discuss the implications on society of artificial intelligence, including a screening of the short film ‘Could and should robots feel pain?’.
Saturday 22 October: 7:00pm - 10:00pm

Schröder Lecture: Faust on Facebook, or how we lose track of everything by recording it all
Roberto Simanowski (City University of Hong Kong) argues that we are annihilating present time by permanently archiving it. The literary figure of Faust famously disregards the experience of the moment, and in this lecture Simanowski takes Faust as his starting point for an unsettling tour through the psychological and political implications of mobile media and social networks.
Thursday 20 October: 5:15pm - 6:30pm

Follow the Spotlight on Digital Society and all the latest discussions – and let us know your views – on Twitter at #digitalsociety.

New information and communication technologies are having a profound impact on many aspects of social, political and economic life, raising important new issues of social and public policy. Surveillance, privacy, data protection, advanced robotics and artificial intelligence are only a few of the many fundamental issues that are now forcing themselves onto the public agenda in many countries around the world.

There have been other great technological revolutions in the past but the digital revolution is unprecedented in its speed, scope and pervasiveness. Today, less than a decade after smartphones were first introduced, around half the adult population in the world owns one – and by 2020, according to some estimates, 80% will.

Smartphones are, of course, much more than phones: they are powerful computers that we carry around in our pockets and handbags and that give us permanent mobile connectivity. While they enable us to do an enormous range of things, from checking and sending emails to ordering a taxi, using a map and paying for a purchase, they also know a lot about us – who we are, where we are, which websites we visit, what transactions we’ve made, whom we’re communicating with, and so on. They are great enablers but also powerful generators of data about us, some of which may be very personal. Do we know who has access to this data? Do we know what they do with it? Do we care?

The rapid rise and global spread of the smartphone is just one manifestation of a technological revolution that is a defining feature of our time. No one in the world today is beyond its reach: the everyday act of making a phone call or using a credit card immediately inserts you into complex global networks of digital communication and information flow.

In fact the digital revolution is often misunderstood because it is equated with the internet and yet is much more than this. It involves several interconnected developments: the pervasive digital codification of information; the dramatic expansion of computing power; the integration of information technologies with communication systems; and digital automation or robotics.

Taken together, these developments are spurring profound changes in all spheres of life, from industry and finance to politics, from the nature of public debate to the character of personal relationships, disrupting established institutions and practices, opening up new opportunities and creating new risks.

In Cambridge, an ambitious new interdisciplinary collaboration around ‘digital society’ is being forged to bring together social scientists and computer scientists to tackle some of the big questions raised by the digital revolution.

The key idea underlying the collaboration is that some of the most important intellectual challenges in this emerging area require both a firm grasp of technology and a deep understanding of processes that are fundamentally social and political in character.

Cambridge is uniquely well-placed to tackle these challenges. As a world-leading university in computer science and technology, the University has been at the forefront of some of the most important developments in this field. Cambridge is also a leading research and development centre for the IT industry. Several significant technology companies are based here, including Microsoft Research, ARM and a sizable number of smaller companies and start-ups. There is also a large group of scholars and researchers in Cambridge in the social sciences and law who are working on aspects of the digital revolution.

By bringing together social scientists and computer scientists on specific research projects, we are forging a new form of interdisciplinary collaboration that will enable us to grapple with some of the big challenges posed by the digital revolution (see panel).

These endeavours dovetail well with research initiatives that are already under way in Cambridge, including the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence,  the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre and the University’s Strategic Research Initiatives and Networks on Big Data, Public Policy, Public Health and Digital Humanities. Cambridge is also a key partner in the UK’s national centre for data science, the Alan Turing Institute, and in the Horizon Digital Economy programme, which aims to tackle the challenge of harnessing the power of ubiquitous computing in a way that is acceptable to society.

While the collaborative work carried out in Cambridge is primarily research-oriented, it is also likely to have significant practical implications. Cambridge has a strong track record in producing world-leading research that feeds directly into real-world applications. As examples, software systems Docker and the Xen hypervisor developed in the Computer Laboratory now run much of the public cloud computing infrastructure, and Raspberry Pi is widely used in technology education in schools.

We are living through a time of enormous social, political and technological change. On the one hand, the digital revolution is enabling massive new powers to be exercised by states and corporations in ways that were largely unforeseen. And, on the other, it is giving rise to new forms of mobilisation and disruption from below by a variety of actors who have found new ways to organise and express themselves in an increasingly networked world. While these and other developments are occurring, the traditional institutions of democratic governance find themselves ill-equipped to understand and keep pace with the new social and technological landscapes that are rapidly emerging around them.

There is no better moment, in our view, to bring together social scientists and computer scientists to tackle the big questions raised by one of the most profound and far-reaching revolutions of our time.

Jon Crowcroft is the Marconi Professor of Communications Systems at Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory and Professor John Thompson is at the Department of Sociology.

I am delighted that Yoshinori Ohsumi won this year’s Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. His pioneering work in yeast led to the discovery of genes and biological processes that are needed for autophagy.

Autophagy (from the Greek for “self-eating”) is the mechanism by which cells break down and recycle cellular content. Without this vital housekeeping role we’d be more prone to cancer, Parkinson’s and other age-related disorders.

Although scientists have been aware of autophagy since the 1960s, it wasn’t until Ohsumi’s experiments with yeast in the 1990s that we began to understand the important role of this biological process.

The autophagy process is remarkably similar across lifeforms. One function that is the same, from yeast to humans, is to protect cells against starvation and related stresses. In these conditions, autophagy allows cells to degrade large molecules into basic building blocks, which are used as energy sources. The discovery of key yeast autophagy genes that was led by Ohsumi was particularly powerful because it helped scientists to quickly identify the genes in mammals that have similar functions. This, in turn, has provided vital tools for laboratories around the world to study the roles of autophagy in human health and disease.

With the knowledge that various mammalian genes are needed for autophagy, researchers could then remove these genes from cells or animals, including mice, and examine their functions. These types of studies have highlighted the importance of autophagy in processes including infection and immunity, neurodegenerative diseases and cancer.

The importance of Ohsumi’s findings

My laboratory, for example, found that autophagy can break down the proteins responsible for various neurological diseases, including forms of dementia (caused by tau), Parkinson’s disease (alpha-synuclein) and Huntington’s disease (mutant huntingtin). We are pursuing the idea that by increasing the autophagy process we could potentially treat some of these conditions.

Another important consequence of Ohsumi’s discoveries is that they allowed subsequent studies that aimed to understand the mechanisms by which autophagy proteins actually control this process. Indeed, Ohsumi’s group have also made seminal contributions in this domain.

This Nobel prize highlights some other key characteristics of Ohsumi and his work. One is that his laboratory works on yeast. At the time he made his discoveries in the 1990s, no one would have guessed that they would have such far-reaching implications for human health. Essentially, he was studying autophagy in yeast because he was curious. This basic research yielded the foundation for an entire field, which has grown rapidly in recent years, especially as its relevance for health has become more apparent. This should serve as a reminder to those influencing science strategy that groundbreaking discoveries are often unexpected and that one should not only support science where the endpoint appears to be obviously relevant to health.

Ohsumi has also nurtured outstanding scientists like Noboru Mizushima and Tamotsu Yoshimori, who have been major contributors to the understanding of autophagy in mammals. Perhaps most importantly, he continues to do interesting and fundamental work. This Nobel prize is very well deserved for the man who opened the door to an important field.

David Rubinsztein, Professor of molecular neurogenetics, University of Cambridge

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

Carrick Therapeutics Ltd, a company which is developing new treatments for the most aggressive and resistant forms of cancer, launched today having secured $95 million in funding, representing the largest early-stage investment in a UK university spin-out.

The company, which has licensed technology developed at the Gurdon Institute at the University of Cambridge, brings together cancer researchers and drug development experts, backed by leading providers of early stage funding, with the aim of building Europe’s leading oncology company.

Carrick Therapeutics has research and development teams located in Dublin and Oxford. The $95 million funding round was led by ARCH Venture Partners and Woodford Investment Management with participation from Cambridge Enterprise Seed Funds, Cambridge Innovation Capital, Evotec AG, GV (Google Ventures) and Lightstone Ventures.

The first technology licensed by the company was developed at the Gurdon Institute and was licensed by Cambridge Enterprise, the University’s technology transfer arm. Carrick received seed funding in 2015 from ARCH Venture Partners and Cambridge Enterprise Seed Funds.

“This investment and in particular the scale of the investment marks a real turning point for investments in Cambridge spin-out companies,” said Bradley Hardiman, Investment Manager for Cambridge Enterprise Seed Funds. “In the past, particularly in Europe, investors have been guilty of drip-feeding money in to companies. This means that companies could be continuously fundraising, distracting them from the critical task of advancing treatments. This ‘war chest’ of funding will enable Carrick to get on with the important work of researching and developing new cancer treatments, making real differences to sufferers of this debilitating disease.”

The company’s vision is to target the molecular pathways that drive the most aggressive and resistant forms of cancer. While other companies are often reliant on a single compound or biological mechanism, Carrick Therapeutics is building a portfolio of treatments that are progressed through understanding the mechanisms that cause cancer and resistance, and are tailored to an individual patient’s tumour.

By linking a network of clinicians and scientists in internationally leading research institutes and hospitals, Carrick will move its portfolio of ground-breaking cancer therapies from laboratory to clinic.

“Our aim is to build Europe’s leading oncology company,” said Carrick Chief Executive Dr Elaine Sullivan, a former Vice President for research and development functions at both Eli Lilly and AstraZeneca. “There is a significant unmet need in cancer treatment, and targeting aggressive and resistant disease is an area where we can make a real difference to patients’ lives.”

Carrick Therapeutics is working on three innovative scientific programmes, and is looking to expand its portfolio through academic and pharmaceutical partnerships.

The company’s worldwide network of collaborating cancer experts includes the world’s leading cancer research charity, Cancer Research UK, and researchers from several of the world’s top universities, including Cambridge, Imperial College London and Oxford.

“The quality of the science and assets, combined with the calibre of the management team makes Carrick Therapeutics a powerful proposition,” said Steven Gillis, Managing Partner of ARCH Venture Partners and a member of the board of Carrick Therapeutics. “As an investor and a scientist I look forward to Carrick Therapeutics being a dominant force in the fight against cancer.”

Adapted from a Cambridge Enterprise press release. 

David Thouless (Trinity Hall, 1952), Duncan Haldane (Christ’s, 1970) and Michael Kosterlitz (Gonville and Caius, 1962) discovered unexpected behaviours of solid materials - and devised a mathematical framework to explain their properties. The discoveries have paved the way for designing new materials with an array of unique properties.

The Prize was divided, one half awarded to Thouless, the other half jointly to Haldane and Kosterlitz. The trio become the 93rd, 94th and 95th Nobel Affiliates of Cambridge to be awarded a Nobel Prize.

“This prize is richly deserved,” said Professor Nigel Cooper of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory. “Through the great breakthroughs they’ve made, Thouless, Haldane and Kosterlitz took a visionary approach to understanding how topology plays a role in novel materials.”

Topology is a mathematical concept that accounts for how certain physical properties are related by smooth deformations: a football can be smoothly deformed into a rugby ball (so these have the same topology), but neither of these can be smoothly deformed into a bicycle tube (which therefore has different topology). The Laureates recognized how novel states of matter could arise due to the differing topologies of how the underlying particles arrange themselves at the microscopic level.

The Nobel Assembly made their announcement this morning (October 4), saying: “This year’s Laureates opened the door on an unknown world where matter can assume strange states. They have used advanced mathematical methods to study unusual phases, or states, of matter, such as superconductors, superfluids or thin magnetic films. Thanks to their pioneering work, the hunt is now on for new and exotic phases of matter. Many people are hopeful of future applications in both materials science and electronics.

“The three Laureates’ use of topological concepts in physics was decisive for their discoveries. Topology is a branch of mathematics that describes properties that only change step-wise. Using topology as a tool, they were able to astound the experts. In the early 1970s, Michael Kosterlitz and David Thouless overturned the then current theory that superconductivity or suprafluidity could not occur in thin layers. They demonstrated that superconductivity could occur at low temperatures and also explained the mechanism, phase transition, that makes superconductivity disappear at higher temperatures.

"In the 1980s, Thouless was able to explain a previous experiment with very thin electrically conducting layers in which conductance was precisely measured as integer steps. He showed that these integers were topological in their nature. At around the same time, Duncan Haldane discovered how topological concepts can be used to understand the properties of chains of small magnets found in some materials.

"We now know of many topological phases, not only in thin layers and threads, but also in ordinary three-dimensional materials. Over the last decade, this area has boosted frontline research in condensed matter physics, not least because of the hope that topological materials could be used in new generations of electronics and superconductors, or in future quantum computers. Current research is revealing the secrets of matter in the exotic worlds discovered by this year’s Nobel Laureates.”

Professor Haldane is the current Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Princeton University. Born in London in 1951, he came to Christ’s as an undergraduate in 1970 to read Natural Sciences. His PhD was conferred in 1978.

Professor Kosterlitz is the Harrison E. Farnsworth Professor of Physics at Brown University, where he joined the faculty in 1982. He was born to German Jewish emigres in 1942 and his father was the pioneering biochemist Hans Walter Kosterlitz. Professor Kosterlitz, who came to Cambridge in 1965, is the 14th Nobel Laureate affiliated to Gonville and Caius.

Professor Thouless, born in 1934, is Emeritus Professor of Physics at Washington University. An undergraduate at Trinity Hall, he was also previously a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, where he was awarded a Doctorate of Science in 1985. He has been a Life Member of the college since 1986.

Professor Thouless was also a Fellow of Churchill College from 1961-65, and in 1961 became its first Director of Studies for Physics. He has also held the position of Visiting Fellow at Churchill. He is Churchill's 31st Nobel Affiliate and Trinity Hall's first.

The Master of Caius, Professor Sir Alan Fersht, today warmly congratulated Prof Kosterlitz, who was his exact contemporary at Caius, coming up to Cambridge to read Natural Sciences in 1962. "This is fantastic news," Sir Alan said. "Mike was obviously an exceptionally clever guy. We went to physics lectures together in our first year, and he continued to specialise in Physics in the second year while I specialised in Chemistry. He was a very good physicist, and moved from the UK to America fairly rapidly.

"He was an absolutely mad climber - he disappeared every weekend to go mountain climbing in the Peak District. He lived on Tree Court, and he built a traverse around the room where he would climb using his fingers and hanging on to the picture rail."

More details on previous Cambridge winners can be found here: https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/research-at-cambridge/nobel-prize.

The first Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded in 1901.

This is great, groundbreaking materials science. The work is "beautiful and deep" with big applications in future electronics #NobelPrize

— Dr Paul Coxon (@paulcoxon) October 4, 2016

Check out our story on #NobelPrize -winning Caian Michael Kosterlitz and find out why he used to climb the walls https://t.co/cf18ZH5Drn

— Gonville & Caius (@CaiusCollege) October 4, 2016

Congratulations to Christ's alumnus Duncan Haldane! https://t.co/Au5SmFQdYv

— Christ's College (@christs_college) October 4, 2016

David Thouless (1952) has been awarded the #NobelPrize in Physics. https://t.co/8rp4iGszW7

— Trinity Hall (@TrinityHallCamb) October 4, 2016

If you wanted to have a quick explanation of topological phases. ☺️ #NobelPrize#Physics#Topologyhttps://t.co/bImU7X5yKL

— Mete Atature (@MeteAtature) October 4, 2016

It all started at Caius... Co-winner of 2016 #NobelPrize for #Physics Michael Kosterlitz in his Matriculation photo at Caius in 1962 pic.twitter.com/M9p3D15fcl

— Gonville & Caius (@CaiusCollege) October 4, 2016

Most people find high fat, high sugar foods particularly appetising. This can lead to eating more calories than we need and can contribute to weight gain. But what influences food choice? The taste, appearance, smell and texture of food are all important, but biology may also play an important role.

Previous studies in mice have shown that disruption of a particular pathway in the brain involving the melanocortin-4 receptor (MC4R) can lead to mice eating a lot more fat. Unusually, these mice eat a lot less sugar. However, the relevance of these findings to eating behaviour in people has been unclear until now.

In a study published today in the journal Nature Communications, researchers at the University of Cambridge gave participants an all-you-can-eat buffet of chicken korma – a popular type of curry – with three options manipulated to look and taste the same, but in which the fat content provided 20% (low), 40% (medium) and 60% (high) of the calories. They tested lean people, obese people, and people who were obese because they have a defect in a gene called MC4R.

After taking a small taster of each meal, people were allowed to eat freely from the three kormas. They could not tell the difference between the foods and were unaware that the fat content varied. The researchers found that, although there was no overall difference in the amount of food eaten between the groups, individuals with defective MC4R ate almost double the amount of high fat korma than lean individuals ate (95% more) and 65% more than obese individuals.

In a second arm of the study, people were given Eton mess, a dessert that includes a mixture of strawberries, whipped cream and broken meringue. Again, there were three options from which participants could freely choose, with sugar content providing 8% (low), 26% (medium) and 54% (high) of calorific content, but with the fat content fixed. Participants could choose freely which ones to eat.

Lean and obese individuals said they liked the high sugar Eton mess more than the other two desserts. However, paradoxically, individuals with defective MC4R liked the high sugar dessert less than their lean and obese counterparts and in fact, ate significantly less of all three desserts compared to the other two groups.

One in 100 obese people have a defect in the MC4R gene which makes them more likely to put on weight. The researchers think that for these individuals, the fact that the MC4R pathway is not working may lead to them preferring high fat food without realising it and therefore contribute to their weight problem. There are many other genes that increase the risk of gaining weight and the impact of these genes on eating behaviour needs to be studied in the future.

Professor Sadaf Farooqi from the Wellcome Trust–Medical Research Council Institute of Metabolic Science at the University of Cambridge, who led the research team, says: “Our work shows that even if you tightly control the appearance and taste of food, our brains can detect the nutrient content. Most of the time we eat foods that are both high in fat and high in sugar. By carefully testing these nutrients separately in this study, and by testing a relatively rare group of people with the defective MC4R gene, we were able to show that specific brain pathways can modulate food preference.”

Professor Farooqi and colleagues think that humans and animals may have evolved pathways in the brain that modulate the preference for high fat food in order to cope with times of famine.

“When there is not much food around, we need energy that can be stored and accessed when needed: fat delivers twice as many calories per gram as carbohydrates or protein and can be readily stored in our bodies,” she explains. “As such, having a pathway that tells you to eat more fat at the expense of sugar, which we can only store to a limited extent in the body, would be a very useful way of defending against starvation.”

The research was supported by the Wellcome Trust, the National Institute for Health Research Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre, the Bernard Wolfe Health Neuroscience Fund and the European Research Council, as well the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme

Reference
van der Klaauw, AA et al. Divergent effects of central melanocortin signalling on fat and sucrose preference in humans. Nature Comms; 4 Oct 2016; DOI: 10.1038/NCOMMS13055

A recent explosion of neuroscience techniques is driving substantial advances in our understanding of the brain. Combined with developments in engineering, machine learning and computing this flowering has helped us enhance our cognitive abilities and potential. In fact, new research into the extraordinary machine in our skulls is helping us keep pace with the rapid rise of artificial intelligence.

Exciting new advances are everywhere, but worth putting front and centre are findings made in the relatively new area of social neuroscience. Research by Molly Crockett at Oxford University has demonstrated how we might influence the social brain and examine the effects of neurotransmitters, such as serotonin, and hormones, such as oxytocin, on social cognition and social interactions. This includes the most fundamental aspects of our daily lives: trust, punishment, moral judgement, conformity and empathy.

Crockett and colleagues used experiments looking at cooperation, and moral dilemmas such as the “trolley problem” where participants must decide who to save from an onrushing railway cart (a similar puzzle was posed in the 2015 Helen Mirren film Eye in the Sky). Among their findings was evidence that serotonin increased an aversion to harming others. This clearly suggests that this brain chemical can promote positive social behaviour.

Recently developed computerised tests, such as EMOTICOM, which assesses a range of cognitive functions, will also make it easier to combine state-of-the-art neuroscience techniques with objective measurement of social and emotional concepts.

Shared knowledge

One amazing feat of combined neuroscience, engineering and computing was achieved by Edda Bilek, Andreas Myer-Lindenberg and colleagues from the Mannheim Central Institute of Mental Health in Germany. They invented a way to study information flow between human pairs during real-time social interaction, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures changes in blood flow in the brain. They were particularly interested in studying joint attention because it arises in early development and is important for social learning.

Their study allowed immersive, audio-visual interaction of two people in linked fMRI scanners, and identified the flow of information between the sender’s and receiver’s temporoparietal junction, a key brain region for social interaction. Not only did the study show that specific social brain systems are drivers of interaction in humans, it demonstrated the strength of integrated research across biological and physical sciences.

In future, this will allow us to study in real time the neural networks involved in other forms of joint social interaction, such as defeat, trust and mutual attraction.

Rapid development of these fMRI techniques, and of neuroimaging, will continue to transform the field of neuroscience. Experiments have tackled topics such as unconscious racial bias, “mind reading” and lying. It is work which helps to pull back the curtain on our understanding of the human mind – and might make us wonder if this glimpse into our thoughts crosses an ethical line in terms of privacy and profiling.

To see the power of fMRI techniques, look to the futuristic experiments by Jack Gallant and colleagues at the University of California. They have developed a method for reconstructing movie segments that a person is watching purely based on fMRI recordings, which track brain activation patterns. More recently, the Gallant laboratory mapped the semantic atlas of the brain. These semantic networks are a sum of our verbal knowledge and how we understand the relationship between words and concepts.

The drugs might work

Outside of the lab and academia, there is an increasing use of so-called lifestyle drugs to enhance cognition, creativity and motivation in the workplace. Drugs such as modafinil, which has effects on noradrenaline, dopamine and GABA/glutamate in the brain, can boost cognitive functions, especially in flexibility of thinking and complex planning.

Such drugs are used to seek a competitive edge at university or work. The Care Quality Commission reported that over a six-year period from 2007 to 2013, there had been a 56% rise in prescriptions for methylphenidate in the UK. London City workers and traders use them to stay awake and alert for long periods of time. German workers use them in jobs where small mistakes might have large consequences. American academics travelling to international meetings use them to counteract jet lag.

Modafinil has been known to reduce accidents in shift workers, thereby increasing safety. In a similar fashion, aniracetam is used by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to boost cognition. One of the original drugs in the same class is piracetam, which increases brain metabolism, while aniracetam has been shown to modulate the receptors in the brain that are thought to enhance cognition.

In parallel, there is a boom in demand for nootropics. These “microdosed” psychdedelics are increasingly a phenomenon in which small amounts of psilocybin mushrooms, LSD or mescaline are taken to enhance perception and creativity. Cognitive processes, including attention, learning and memory, have also been targeted through evidence-based games such as the brain training programme and the Wizard memory game developed by University of Cambridge and Peak. These academia-industry collaborations help to translate neuroscience discoveries into the real world.

AI, AI, Go

At present, the magnificent human brain is superior to artificial intelligence (AI). Computers have to dedicate themselves to playing chess or Go in order to beat us humans. In contrast, we can play chess or Go or perform many other activities and behaviours, often multi-tasking, and we can create new ideas and inventions. We are also social beings and our social and emotional cognition allows us to have “theory of mind”. In other words we can understand and empathise with the thoughts and emotions of others.

However, with the rapid advances in machine learning and computing technology – including face and voice recognition – the potential for artificial intelligence may be limitless. By contrast, there will likely remain limits to the extent to which we can enhance human intelligence.

Nonetheless, the amazing achievements made by basic and clinical neuroscientists will not only help us understand the healthy brain but also improve brain health for everyone, including those with neuropsychiatric disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease, and brain injury.

This piece is co-published with the World Economic Forum as part of its Final Frontier series. You can read more here.

Barbara Sahakian, Professor of Clinical Neuropsychology, University of Cambridge

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

Companies both depend upon and impact the environment, and are subject to interdependent pressures over food, energy, water and the environment. Yet their perspectives are often overlooked by the research community, which lacks access to their business thinking. Equally, businesses find it challenging to engage with the academic community, and to define researchable questions that would benefit from more detailed analysis.

The study, published in the journal Sustainability Science and organised by the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, included over 250 people, including academics and companies such as Asda, EDF Energy, HSBC and Nestlé, to produce research priorities that are both scientifically feasible and include results that can be practically implemented by the business community.

“The process of co-design engages businesses at the outset to help define the challenges, limitations and ambitions of research agendas. These considerations ultimately have important consequences for the impact and practicality of research outputs,” said lead author Dr Jonathan Green, formerly of the University of Cambridge’s Department of Geography. “Greater investment in the complex but productive relations between the private sector and research community will create deeper and more meaningful collaboration and cooperation”.

The project is part of the work of the Nexus Network, an extensive network of researchers and stakeholders coordinated by the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL), the University of Sussex, the University of East Anglia, the University of Sheffield and the University of Exeter, and supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

The study was carried out over five months and involved researchers collecting over 700 questions from business practitioners, academics, policy-makers and members of the public. Over 50 per cent of these questions were submitted by businesses from a range of sectors, including retail, utilities, manufacturing and consumer goods. These questions were then reviewed by an expert group of businesses and researchers, who narrowed this list down to 40 questions that reflect key challenges for corporate sustainability.

Dr Bhaskar Vira, one of the project leads from the Department of Geography and the University of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute said: “We were able to bring together 40 experts with a huge diversity of backgrounds and knowledge. This unique group of senior business practitioners and interdisciplinary researchers, who represented 13 universities, 16 businesses and other important partners including ESRC, were able to inform the debate by their ability to answer both ‘Is this question answerable through an academic research project?’, but also ‘If answered, would this change the way we do business?”

Several themes emerged from the study, highlighting the issues that require more research and better engagement between the academic and business communities. These included research around development of pragmatic yet credible tools that allow businesses to incorporate the interactions between food, energy and water demands in a changing environment into their decision-making; the role of social considerations and livelihoods in business decision-making in relation to sustainable management; identification of the most effective levers for behaviour change; and understanding incentives or circumstances that allow individuals and businesses to take a leadership stance on these issues.

“As pressures start to mount, placing enormous demands upon natural resources, we are increasingly asked for support by businesses who want practical approaches that they can apply to address their growing challenges,” said Dr Gemma Cranston, project lead from CISL. “Co-designing new research is critical to provide business with robust and rigorous approaches that are academically sound but that are also directly applicable to a business context. We have identified priority areas that can guide new research development and look forward to seeing a greater integration of businesses into collaborative research agendas.”

It will be the role of multi-disciplinary groups of researchers and business practitioners to devise the projects that will deliver the solutions to these pressing issues around food, energy, water and the environment.

Reference
Jonathan Green et al. ‘Research priorities for managing the impacts and dependencies of business upon food, energy, water and the environment.’ Sustainability Science (2016). DOI: 10.1007/s11625-016-0402-4

When US presidential hopeful Donald Trump jumped with characteristic abandon into the debate over post-traumatic stress disorder, his comments that some veterans are not “strong enough” to handle the mental stresses of combat were broadly criticised. War veterans, and the media, were quick to respond, many (though not all) furious at the Republican nominee’s ignorance of, and insensitivity towards, a complex injury that affects many. Psychological injury, after all, is rarely a private affair, with families, friends, and colleagues at the receiving end of depressive bouts, violence and substance abuse.

How bad is the problem? The US Department of Veteran Affairs says that about a quarter of the 2.7m US troops sent to Iraq or Afghanistan in the 2001-2011 period returned home with some psychological injury. The last 20 years in Britain has seen a four-fold increase in former service personnel seeking help for mental disorders, according to the charity Combat Stress.

It has long been assumed that war-related PTSD stems from how well a person copes psychologically with exposure to the threat and the reality of violence. While exposure to terrible events is clearly an important trigger of PTSD, it may only tell part of a more complex story.

My 16 months of fieldwork – including a six-week tour of duty – with military doctors during the most recent war in Afghanistan may help to pick it apart. I was surprised to discover that the context through which wars are experienced – and specifically the professional, cultural and organisational context through which people frame their daily experiences – may be just as important in determining who will likely suffer from PTSD and who will not. The research was conducted with Jaco Lok of the University of New South Wales in Australia, and recently published in the Academy of Management Journal.

Medical values

Like other professionals, doctors have been socialised into a set of values by means of their training and experience. These values can collide with the realities of war. On multiple occasions, we discovered a clear dissonance between the values of the medical profession and the futility and senselessness experienced by doctors in wartime situations – regardless of whether or not they were directly exposed to combat. This values-reality collision – even among battle-hardened medics – can contribute significantly to the experience of psychological injury.

To better illustrate how context relates to PTSD, it’s useful to recount my experience at Camp Bastion in 2011. I was embedded with a team of “rear-located medics”, mostly British or American, stationed away from the battlefield. Because they had less reason to fear for their lives than combat personnel, they were a good group to study factors beyond the psychological reaction to battle.

These doctors found some local rules very difficult to accept – particularly the requirement that badly mutilated children (often victims of improvised explosive devices encountered while playing) be quickly transferred from Camp Bastion’s small field hospital to inferior local facilities to make way for battlefield casualties. Such rules ran counter to the doctors’ purpose and values, amplifying feelings of senselessness and futility.

I recall two doctors expressing the frustration of bringing a stable, anaesthetised patient over to some hospital only to be met by an empty van where they had to hand over a casualty, on 60% oxygen and strong analgesics, to a driver with neither equipment nor experience. Practices such as these 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”. This can have a sharply disorienting effect.

So the specific professional and cultural expectations through which doctors filter their experience of war can influence whether and how they experience war as psychologically traumatic. And what applies to doctors is likely to also apply to soldiers: each will interpret their experiences in a context particular to their culture, organisation, and professional values.

Forced normality

To help them cope with experiences of futility, senselessness, and surreality, doctors typically import routines and rituals to restore their sense of normality: Friday night pizza, Sunday morning pancake breakfasts, cinema evenings, sports days, midsummer Christmas celebrations, a carefully tended sunflower patch behind the hospital, a non-alcoholic beer after work. While well-intended, these routines often made reality even more absurd.

When such disorientation is sustained over time, it can damage the ability of everyday rituals and routines to provide a sense of meaning and predictability to life back home. For example, to eat Pizza Hut pizza after emergency surgery on a child may forever taint any future experiences of Pizza Hut. Likewise, as happened during my time with the team, to see a nurse carrying an amputated leg to the incinerator only to run into a colleague dressed in bunny ears and carrying Easter eggs can create experiences of startling dissonance.

Imported routines are “soiled” by being experienced in a particular (and particularly alien) context. This may be one important reason why many war veterans find it so difficult to adjust back to home life. Life at war is very different from life back home, and recreating “home comforts” while on tour may not always be beneficial.

I make no claim to understand all the complexities of PTSD; much less provide all the answers. But a better understanding of context – an acceptance that psychological reaction to “war” goes far beyond mortars and bullets – may help improve the way mental health experts diagnose and manage mental injury stemming from wartime exposure. We owe our veterans, doctors included, that much at least.

Mark de Rond, Professor of Organisational Ethnography, Cambridge Judge Business School

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

Ultra-thin quantum light emitting diodes (LEDs) – made of layered materials just a few atoms thick – have been developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge. Constructed of layers of different ultra-thin materials, the devices could be used in the development of new computing and sensing technologies. The ability to produce single photons using only electrical current is an important step towards building quantum networks on compact chips.

The devices are constructed of thin layers of different materials stacked together: graphene, boron nitride and transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs). The TMD layer contains regions where electrons and electron vacancies, or holes, are tightly confined. When an electron fills an electron vacancy that sits at a lower energy than the electron, the energy difference is released as a photon, a particle of light. In the LED devices, a voltage pushes electrons through the device, where they fill the holes and emit single photons.

A computer built on the principles of quantum mechanics would be both far more powerful and more secure than current technologies, and would be capable of performing calculations that cannot be performed otherwise. However, in order to make such a device possible, researchers need to develop reliable methods of electrically generating single, indistinguishable photons as carriers of information across quantum networks.

The ultra-thin platform developed by the Cambridge researchers offers high levels of tunability, design freedom, and integration capabilities. Typically, single photon generation requires large-scale optical set-ups with several lasers and precise alignment of optical components. This new research brings on-chip single photon emission for quantum communication a step closer. The results are reported in the journal Nature Communications.

“Ultimately, we need fully integrated devices that we can control by electrical impulses, instead of a laser that focuses on different segments of an integrated circuit,” said Professor Mete Atatüre of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, one of the paper’s senior authors. “For quantum communication with single photons, and quantum networks between different nodes, we want to be able to just drive current and get light out. There are many emitters that are optically excitable, but only a handful are electrically driven.”

The layered nature of TMDs makes them ideal for use in ultra-thin structures on chips. They also offer an advantage over some other single-photon emitters for feasible and effective integration into nanophotonic circuits.

With this research, quantum emitters are now seen in another TMD material, namely tungsten disulphide (WS₂). “We chose WS₂ because we wanted to see if different materials offered different parts of the spectra for single photon emission,” said Atatüre, who is a Fellow of St John's College. “With this, we have shown that the quantum emission is not a unique feature of WS₂, which suggests that many other layered materials might be able to host quantum dot-like features as well.”

“We are just scratching the surface of the many possible applications of devices prepared by combining graphene with other materials,” said senior co-author Professor Andrea Ferrari, Director of the Cambridge Graphene. “In this case, not only have we demonstrated controllable photon sources, but we have also shown that the field of quantum technologies can greatly benefit from layered materials. Many more exciting results and applications will surely follow.”

Reference:
C. Palacios-Berraquero et al. ‘Atomically thin quantum light emitting diodes.’ Nature Communications (2016). DOI: 10.1038/ncomms12978

The Nobel Assembly made their announcement this morning (October 10), stating: “Modern economies are held together by innumerable contracts. The new theoretical tools created by Hart and Holmström are valuable to the understanding of real-life contracts and institutions, as well as potential pitfalls in contract design.

"Society’s many contractual relationships include those between shareholders and top executive management, an insurance company and car owners, or a public authority and its suppliers. As such relationships typically entail conflicts of interest, contracts must be properly designed to ensure that the parties take mutually beneficial decisions.

"This year’s laureates have developed contract theory, a comprehensive framework for analysing many diverse issues in contractual design, like performance-based pay for top executives, deductibles and co-pays in insurance, and the privatisation of public-sector activities."

Professor Hart is currently the Andrew E. Furer Professor of Economics at Harvard University. From 1975 to 1981, Hart was an Assistant Lecturer and then Lecturer at the Faculty of Economics, and a Fellow of Churchill College. He was born in London in 1948 and gained his PhD from Princeton University in 1974.

In the mid-1980s, Oliver Hart made fundamental contributions to a new branch of contract theory that deals with the important case of incomplete contracts. Because it is impossible for a contract to specify every eventuality, this branch of the theory spells out optimal allocations of control rights: which party to the contract should be entitled to make decisions in which circumstances?

Hart’s findings on incomplete contracts have shed new light on the ownership and control of businesses and have had a vast impact on several fields of economics, as well as political science and law. His research provides us with new theoretical tools for studying questions such as which kinds of companies should merge, the proper mix of debt and equity financing, and when institutions such as schools or prisons ought to be privately or publicly owned.

Professor Hart becomes the 96th Cambridge affiliate to be awarded a Nobel Prize after last week’s Nobel Prize in Physics went to Cambridge alumni David Thouless (Trinity Hall, 1952), Duncan Haldane (Christ’s, 1970) and Michael Kosterlitz (Gonville and Caius, 1962). 

More details on previous Cambridge winners can be found here: https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/research-at-cambridge/nobel-prize

An estimated one in four people worldwide experience a mental health problem at one point in their life. This bare number might be alarming but even that does not adequately reflect the human suffering, isolation, lost productivity, and brake on human development and general development for countries.

To the individual, mental ill-health can be isolating, exhausting and sometimes deadly, but it also takes its toll more broadly on organisations and businesses around the world. We might think the corporate world is quick to address issues which threaten growth and profits. However, while this common phenomenon drains the economy through absenteeism and healthcare costs, the persistent taboos around mental ill-health slow down the uptake of solutions at businesses, just as they do at the individual and government level.

Financial benefits

It shouldn’t be that difficult. Increasingly, organisations around the world now advocate investment in a mentally healthy workforce as a measure that simply makes good business sense.

It can lower total medical costs, increase productivity, decrease the number of sick days, disability costs, and more. From the perspective of investors and company owners it can simply come down to a matter of better financial performance and enhanced reputation, with the added benefit of a happier, more motivated and engaged workforce.

In reality, each company comes at this from a slightly different angle. As part of the work of the Global Agenda Council on Mental Health from the World Economic Forum, 23 global corporate organisational case studies on mental health strategies were gathered and analysed. Analysis of the these global corporate leaders’ investments in mental health in their workplaces revealed no single motivation. Instead, several tend to work in combination.

1. A healthy and happy workforce is more productive which is good for business and so protecting the mental health of employees makes perfect business sense.

2. It is the “right thing” to do.

3. There are clear benefits to the organisation from employee engagement, loyalty and in terms of wider organisational reputation.

4. It makes sense to manage the costs and liabilities of ill-health (including mental ill-health) of employees.

Taking it on

There is a growing body of evidence on the economic costs related to workplace mental health. This can include absenteeism and presenteeism– where staff spend too long at work despite being ill – as well as the wider costs of staff turnover and recruitment. We also have increasing evidence that there are things companies can do to address risk factors and build resilience to overcome and manage stress for employees.

The case studies we looked at showed that there is a growing tendency for mental health to be tackled as part of a broader health, well-being and safety strategy. Initiatives are increasingly integrated and built around positive health, prevention and early recognition, as well as support and rehabilitation where needed. So what are these companies actually doing?

One key step is often to focus on the work environment itself. It can be simple stuff like increasing the available natural light, fresh air or bringing in plants. The inertia of office routine can be punctured by buying in standing desks – or even treadmill desks. The nature and outlook of a workplace can be shifted by social meeting spaces, healthy food options on site, proper lunch break areas and discounted sports facilities on site or nearby, combined with flexible work arrangements to encourage their use.

It is also common for companies to tackle work-related stress. Again they can look like easy wins, but not everyone does it. One measure that has been shown to significantly decrease stress levels of employees during annual leave is to set up email systems to delete messages while out-of-office is activated. Senders are warned to resend the message once the person returns and the recipient doesn’t come home to a deluge of mail.

Dog’s life

At the more extravagant end of the spectrum, some larger corporate businesses bring in professional coaches to provide personal and group coaching, or provide resting areas for power naps or quiet contemplation. Employers could even turn to pet therapy interventions. There is good evidence that spending time watching, patting or walking a cheerful puppy or dog can significantly bring stress levels down.

Other strategies we found include the company making a public pledge to address mental health issues, as well as taking part in national mental health campaigns like See Me, Time to Change or Beyond Blue. These large corporates also invested in mental health training in the workplace, including themes such as managing mental health, mental health first aid and building resilience, the capacity to adapt in face of challenges.

In the 23 global corporate case studies, common strategies to address mental health in the workplace emerge. Flexible working works, as do policies which allow workers to swap pay for leave. Counselling, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and mindfulness services can also work. An open environment can be crucial. Boosting mental health literacy and mental well-being champions can encourage people to speak up and seek help.

Whether it is a small business or a multi-national FTSE 100 company, tackling mental ill-health is a necessity in today’s world. The case studies referred to here represent only 23 global corporate businesses, but they also represent practices which can make a difference. Every organisation is different and requires a unique set of policies which meet the needs of its staff. The trick then is to identify what those needs are, how a workplace mental health programme could begin to address them, and to bring all employees along as you work out how to implement them.

Tine Van Bortel, Senior Research Associate in Public Health, University of Cambridge

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

In his book Merchants of Culture, Professor John Thompson recounts a conversation with the head of media asset development at a large US publishing house. The topic is the impact and future of digital publishing.

His interviewee, anonymised as Steve, has come from the music industry, where he has seen the digital revolution disrupting traditional models. Tasked with shaping the future of a leading publishing house, Steve is struggling to convince his colleagues to think differently about books and to embrace the digital revolution. He says: “A book is not a book. Books are categories. Books are types. Books are different styles of things.”

Thompson is interested in the changing structure of the book publishing industry as the digital revolution transforms the processes and products of the publishing business in ways that are both visible and invisible to the consumer. The outcome of his present research will be a book that is due to be published in 2017, in which he will describe the volatile, contested environment responsible for delivering texts to millions of readers in an ever-increasing range of formats.

At the heart of Thompson’s conversation with Steve is a discussion about the thousands of files that are the publisher’s most valuable assets – literally its lifeblood. Having digitised its backlist of top sellers, the company holds an archive of 40,000 titles, a figure that is constantly expanding. How these files are archived, managed and protected so they can be delivered to readers in the most suitable formats is vital to the continuing health of the publishing house. The archiving process has been far from simple, requiring the retrieval of files from printers and opening up heated debates about copyright. And the sheer flexibility offered by digitisation introduces new challenges.

Steve explains that, while paper books are relatively simple to deliver (“you’re delivering tree”), the delivery of digital goods is much more complicated. “The thing that people always hoped was the digital world would get simpler and it’s actually a whole lot more complicated because your end result isn’t the same. The end result is a database, the end result is a PDF, it’s an image-based PDF, it’s an XML file, it’s an ad-based, Google-search-engine toolset – we’re going to have many more properties digitally than we possibly could have physically. We have seven physical properties [for our books]… and online we have hundreds of formats and types and styles.”

Few of these challenges were foreseen in the feverish hype of the 1990s that the days of the book were numbered. Paper texts were clunky and old fashioned; digital versions were smart and sleek.

Many new start-ups were launched, seeking to create new forms of the book that exploited the multimedia potential of new technologies. But, despite the hype, sales of e-books remained sluggish and many start-ups failed.

E-books finally began to take off in autumn 2007 when Amazon launched the Kindle, which allowed readers to download books and other content directly onto their devices. Sales of e-books soared: in 2010 one large publisher saw its e-book sales rise from 12% to 26% of its revenue over Christmas week.

Industry pundits had predicted that e-book sales would be driven by business books and by businessmen, but it didn’t work out like that – far from it. “The real areas of growth were commercial fiction and genre fiction – categories like sci-fi, mysteries and crime, romances and thrillers,” says Thompson. “This was a revolution being driven largely by women reading commercial and genre fiction on their Kindles.”

Much has happened since Thompson’s interview with Steve took place in New York, but Thompson has maintained the many publishing contacts who give him first-hand access to the latest industry developments. He is now mid-way through an ambitious project to revisit publishers on both sides of the Atlantic in order to discover “what is happening while it’s happening” in an industry that suddenly finds itself at the centre of a major disruptive transformation.

From 2008 to 2012, e-books grew from less than 1% of total US trade sales to over 20%; this was phenomenal growth in an industry where overall sales remain largely static. Many people working in the industry worried that publishing would go the same way as the music industry. But then something dramatic happened: the growth slowed and levelled off at around 22%, forming a classic S-curve. “When you dig beneath the surface, however, you see that the simple S-curve is misleading because it conceals a great deal of variation between different kinds of books. In the case of romance fiction, the growth begins to level off at around 60%, whereas many categories of nonfiction plateau at between 15% and 25%,” says Thompson.

“By looking at what is happening inside the industry, we can see that some of the fears about the future of the publishing industry were misplaced. Many observers thought that developments in book publishing would follow those in the music sector but that hasn’t happened. There isn’t a single model that describes the impact of the digital revolution on the creative industries – there are multiple models, and the impact varies from industry to industry and sector to sector.”

While no one can be sure how the pattern of e-book sales will develop in the future, the digital revolution has already had an enormous impact on the way the publishing industry works. In what Thompson calls “the hidden revolution”, the processes involved in taking a text through the supply chain, from author to reader, have been thoroughly transformed. Print-on-demand means that a book never goes out of print, and with the advent of self-publishing anyone can publish.

“This means that the numbers of books being published, and the number available, have risen dramatically. But how do readers get to know about what’s out there? New platforms have emerged to supplement the traditional model of the newspaper review,” he says.

The rise of Amazon has played a major part in these developments. “Amazon is part and parcel of the digital revolution. The company started in a garage as a classic internet start-up and its ascendancy took everyone by surprise,” says Thompson. Publishers have benefited from Amazon’s growth but they now find themselves locked in a power struggle with the retail giant, who controls around 67% of all e-book sales in the USA and over 40% of all new book unit sales, print and digital.

Relations have become increasingly fraught, he says. Publishers have tried to retain control of pricing by selling e-books on an ‘agency model’, which allows them to fix the price, while Amazon has used its growing market share to try to extract better terms of trade from publishers. The struggle ebbs and flows and at times becomes vicious, as it did during the 2014 standoff between Amazon and Hachette (one of the Big Five US trade publishers).

Thompson is determined to get to grips with the fine detail of what goes on behind the scenes in the day-to-day publishing processes. “Fifteen years ago I knew little about trade publishing, but we can only understand how this industry works and how it’s changing by immersing ourselves in it and looking carefully at what happens when new technologies collide with the old world of the book.”

An international group of researchers have found that mice use a mechanism similar to that of a jet engine inside their throats in order to make high frequency whistles – the first time such a mechanism has been observed in any animal.

Mice, rats and many other rodents produce ultrasonic songs that they use for attracting mates and territorial defense. These ‘singing’ mice are often used to study communication disorders in humans, such as stuttering. However, until now it was not understood how mice can make these ultrasonic sounds, which may aid in the development of more effective animal models for studying human speech disorders.

Now, new research co-authored at the University of Cambridge and published in the journal Current Biology has found that when mice ‘sing’, they use a mechanism similar to that seen in the engines of supersonic jets.

“Mice make ultrasound in a way never found before in any animal,” said the study’s lead author Elena Mahrt, from Washington State University.

Previously, it had been thought that these ‘Clangers’-style songs were either the result of a mechanism similar to that of a tea kettle, or of the resonance caused by the vibration of the vocal cords. In fact, neither hypothesis turned out to be correct. Instead, mice point a small air jet coming from the windpipe against the inner wall of the larynx, causing a resonance and producing an ultrasonic whistle.

Using ultra-high-speed video of 100,000 frames per second the researchers showed that the vocal folds remain completely still while ultrasound was coming from the mouse’s larynx.

“This mechanism is known only to produce sound in supersonic flow applications, such as vertical takeoff and landing with jet engines, or high-speed subsonic flows, such as jets for rapid cooling of electrical components and turbines,” said Dr Anurag Agarwal, study co-author and head of the Aero-acoustics laboratories at Cambridge’s Department of Engineering. “Mice seem to be doing something very complicated and clever to make ultrasound.”

“It seems likely that many rodents use ultrasound to communicate, but very little is known about this - it is even possible that bats use this cool mechanism to echolocate,” said the study’s senior author Dr Coen Elemans from the University of Southern Denmark. “Even though mice have been studied so intensely, they still have some cool tricks up their sleeves.”

Reference:
Elena Mahrt et al. ‘Mice produce ultrasonic vocalizations by intra-laryngeal planar impinging jets.’ Current Biology (2016) DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2016.08.032.

Adapted from a press release by the University of Southern Denmark.  

Sometimes, just thinking about a social situation can induce panic attacks, which are sudden spikes of intense anxiety that peak within a few minutes and feel like you’re about to have a heart attack, lose control, or go mad. During social situations, people with anxiety might feel short of breath and experience dizziness, sweating, blushing, stuttering, and an upset stomach

Many people are affected by anxiety. In fact, one in 14 people around the world will have an anxiety disorder at any given time, with women and young people being most affected. But it is possible to overcome anxiety and date successfully. Here are some top scientific tips.

Don’t focus on the worst

People with anxiety tend to worry about what might go wrong in a situation and fear that they will do or say something to embarrass themselves. These thoughts not only produce a highly negative mental state characterised by dread and helplessness, but also harmful physiological body changes, such as higher secretion of stress hormones.

Being in such a negative state doesn’t allow you to put your best self forward and shine. An effective way to get over this is to stop focusing on what might go wrong. As soon as a worrying thought pops into your head, let it go. Realise that it is just that – a thought or a mental event that will pass just like many others did. This technique is based on mindfulness, which has been shown to lower anxiety in study after study.

Another thing you can do when you’re feeling stressed or anxious is to take a few minutes and simply focus on your breathing. If thoughts come into your head as you’re doing this, don’t follow them – let them go and bring your mind gently back to your breaths. This meditative technique will relax you and make you feel calmer.

Face your fears

One of the best ways of getting over your anxiety is through repeated exposure to circumstances that scare you – and this doesn’t apply to just dating. Repeated exposure to situations or people that make you feel anxious eventually lessens your fear response and makes you realise that you really are more resilient than you thought you were.

When it comes to social interactions – or any other phobias for that matter – graded exposure is an effective way of getting over those nerves: start small with mildly feared situations and build your way up to more strongly feared circumstances. For example, next time you go to a social event, practice making small talk for a short period of time or make it a point to voice a comment during a group interaction. Next time, practice making small talk for a longer time and with more people. This will retrain your mind to stop seeing social situations as scary and will give you greater control when around others.

Don’t replay conversations in your head

You’ve got that “I just met someone” feeling and you can’t help but replay the conversation you’ve just had over in your head. Studies have shown that rumination – or constantly going over situations or conversations in your mind (especially those you’re uncertain of) – will only increase your anxiety. If there is an issue that needs to be dealt with, focus on fixing it or doing something about it – but without reacting to it. This is called problem-focused coping. According to research studies, people who do this have better mental health, tend to feel more positive and have more positive outcomes in life than those who use emotion-focused coping. For example, if someone does something that bothers you, tell this person, but don’t ruminate or think about it afterwards.

Are they worth it?

Many self-help books talk about what you should do in order to keep someone attracted. But that seems to be totally the wrong way of going about it. He or she may well be attractive and funny – and know just what to say to keep you hooked – but is that enough? Instead of worrying about how you look to the other person or being self-critical, try to find out more about him/her and whether this person is really worth sticking around for. Maybe you’ll discover that this cutie has a lying streak, is unreliable, or says things that he/she doesn’t mean. Is such a person really worth a relationship? Because the only thing worse than being in a bad relationship for a year, is being in a bad relationship for a year and a day.

Olivia Remes, PhD Candidate, University of Cambridge

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