The current elephant poaching crisis costs African countries around USD $25 million annually in lost tourism revenue, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Communications. Comparing this lost revenue with the cost of halting declines in elephant populations due to poaching, the study determines that investment in elephant conservation is economically favorable across the majority of African elephants’ range.

The research, undertaken by scientists from World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the University of Vermont, and the University of Cambridge, represents the first continent-wide assessment of the economic losses that the current elephant poaching surge is inflicting on nature-based tourism economies in Africa.

“While there have always been strong moral and ethical reasons for conserving elephants, not everyone shares this viewpoint.  Our research now shows that investing in elephant conservation is actually smart economic policy for many African countries,” said Dr. Robin Naidoo, lead wildlife scientist at WWF and lead author on the study.

Poachers kill between 20,000-30,000 African elephants each year for the illegal ivory trade, funded by global organized crime syndicates and fueled largely by demand in China and elsewhere in Asia. In just the past ten years, Africa’s elephants have declined by more than 20 percent.

"We know that within parks, tourism suffers when elephant poaching ramps up. This work provides a first estimate of the scale of that loss, and shows pretty convincingly that stronger conservation efforts usually make sound economic sense even when looking at just this one benefit stream," said study co-author Professor Andrew Balmford, from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology.

The research shows that tourism revenue lost to the current poaching crisis exceeds the anti-poaching costs necessary to stop the decline of elephants in east, southern, and west Africa. Rates of return on elephant conservation in these regions are positive, signaling strong economic incentive for countries to protect elephant populations.

“The average rate of return on elephant conservation in east, west, and south Africa compares favorably with rates of return on investments in areas like education, food security and electricity,” said Dr. Brendan Fisher, an economist at University of Vermont’s Gund Institute for Ecological Economics. “For example, for every dollar invested in protecting elephants in East Africa, you get about $1.78 back. That's a great deal.”

However, for countries in central Africa, the study finds that elephant-based tourism cannot currently be expected to contribute substantially to elephant conservation. In these remote, forested areas where tourism levels are lower and elephants are typically more difficult to see, different mechanisms will be necessary to halt elephant declines.

Taken from a WWF press release. 

Whether it is individuals making choices about their lives, or government officials determining policy, we all rely on evidence. From deciding what medical treatment is best for you, to selecting the best place for an airport runway, statistical evidence helps to inform personal and collective decision making. But the numbers are often presented in ways that are intended to coerce rather than inform.

A new Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, based at the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Mathematics, aims to counter this tendency by ensuring that risk, data and evidence is presented in a clear and balanced way to all of us.

Supported through generous gifts of £5 million by Winton Philanthropies, the Centre will use its knowledge and experience to encourage wide adoption of the best known methods of communicating quantitative evidence clearly and without bias.

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter, Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk and Chair of the new Centre’s Executive Board, said:

“We reject claims that we live in a 'post-truth' society, and that people are fed up with experts. We do acknowledge, however, that the public, professionals and policy-makers are often ill-served by the way in which evidence is communicated.  We hope to work with others to improve how this is done, and empower people to make informed decisions that reflect both existing scientific evidence and their personal values.”

The Centre will carry out research into how we all make decisions in order to develop the best ways to present data,  and will be driven by the needs of different audiences. “As far as we know,” said Professor Spiegelhalter, “it will be the first of its kind in the world.”

One of the Centre’s first projects will be to adapt a website to describe clearly the potential benefits and harms of alternative treatments for women with early breast cancer, for use both by doctors and patients.

Professor Spiegelhalter has other examples of the use of evidence in medical stories in his sight: “Take, for instance, the recent media stories about a new test for Down’s syndrome which the NHS is going to adopt as part of the screening programme offered to pregnant women. The analysis offered does not consider factors that may be of substantial public interest, such as the potential number of terminations. This is an important issue, both for people expecting children and citizens judging policies in society, but the story is rather more complicated than has been reported so far.  We intend our Centre to help in communicating such numbers in a clear way, while acknowledging inevitable uncertainty.”

Speaking ahead of the launch of the Winton Centre, David Harding, founder and CEO of the Winton Group, said: “I know from experience that we often apply quantitative methods to justify our own prejudices. General understanding of statistical reasoning in finance is poor, but I think this also applies to other fields where the stakes are even higher, including medicine and the law. This new Centre will help individuals, governments and the media communicate numerical evidence and risk in much better ways.”

Building on the success of the Winton Programme for the Public Understanding of Risk, the Centre will have four mains strands of activity: collaboration in producing clear descriptions and visualisations of evidence, monitoring and reviewing the communication of statistics, publicising best practice, and engaging widely with UK and international media.

The Centre’s Executive Director, former BBC producer Dr Alexandra Freeman, said: “Numerical evidence should be a valuable tool for us all to form opinions and make decisions. But when it is presented in such a way as to try to persuade us, rather than inform us, we all rightly start to doubt it.”

“We want to present balanced, transparent quantitative evidence about both the pros and cons of different possible actions so that people can make their own informed decisions based on something they can trust.  We also want to help professionals, policy-makers and the media in the handling and presentation of numbers and the evidence behind them. Around the world, statistics are badly abused by those who want to influence our opinions - we want to stop that and put their power back into the hands of individuals.”

www.maths.cam.ac.uk/research/winton-centre-risk-and-evidence-communication

Television’s Opening Night: How the Box was Born will be screened on BBC Four on 2 November 2016, 80 years after Britain first experienced the phenomenon of a live television broadcast. No recordings of the 1936 broadcast remain, so Windfall Films sought to piece together and re-enact every aspect of the historic day, with experts Dallas Campbell and Professor Danielle George, as well as Dr Hugh Hunt from Cambridge's Department of Engineering.

At the home of BBC television, London’s Alexandra Palace, the stage was set for a competition between rival technologies after the Television Committee, set up by the government in 1934, could not choose between the two systems tendered and opted to trial both.

Thus Scotsman Logie Baird’s 240-line mechanical transmission of moving pictures and sound along existing wireless technology was in one studio on the first night, and Marconi’s Emitron electronic 405-line system was in another. The former used a spinning disc and the latter a cathode ray receiver. The ultimate aim was the same – to create a scanned image that could be reproduced by the cathode ray tube of a television screen.

Through the toss of a coin, Logie Baird’s system went first, which was perhaps fitting as he had demonstrated a working television system a decade previously and succeeded in transmitting images from London to Scotland and across the Atlantic.

Logie Baird used a mechanical spinning image device, the Nipkow Disk, which had been invented in 1884. His genius was to perfect the transmission of images over the air waves. When a bright light shone through one hole at a time in this spinning disk it caused a tiny spot of light to scan across the presenter’s face. Hence the camera was known as ‘the flying spot’, explains Hunt, who is a Fellow of Trinity College.

This light was picked up by a photocell and the reflected light intensity relayed by wireless to televisions in people’s homes – as there were only around 300 sets in 1936, many people flocked to Selfridges to watch the phenomenon in their showroom.

The ‘flying spot’ moved from left to right across the presenter’s face to cover the entire screen using 240 lines. The receiving TV set needed a signal to identify the end of each line.  The Baird system incorporated a black band at the end of each line so that the TV set would get a signal to know when to start the next line. Likewise at the end of each screen there were a few blank lines so that the TV would know when to shift the beam back up to the top of the screen.

Together with engineering students Charlie Houseago (Trinity), Anna Maria Kypraiou (Newnham) and Arthur Tombs (Queens’), and colleagues in the Engineering Department, Hunt recreated a scaled-down version of the flying spot camera for the documentary.

As Logie Baird found, synchronizing the television’s flying spot with the camera’s spot was a huge challenge.

Hunt said: "Our disc is 600mm in diameter with 60 holes spinning at 900rpm. This creates a 60 line image at 15 frames per second, not quite up to the original 240 lines at 25 frames per second but we didn’t have the 20 years of development time that Logie Baird had. Still, our image quality was quite remarkable."

The official trial of the two systems was soon halted as Marconi’s EMI system was much more flexible and versatile than Logie Baird’s flying spot – it could film in natural daylight for instance – and the future of television was set. Until the flat-screen technologies of the 1990s, television cameras were essentially derived from the EMI system and televisions in people’s homes were cathode ray tubes.

"As remarkable an invention as it was I don’t think the flying spot was ever going to last," said Hunt. "But that doesn’t detract from Logie Baird’s genius and vision. He could see that people would be captivated by television. His system was developed and perfected over decades at a time when there were no alternatives."

Television’s Opening Night: How the Box was Born will be broadcast on BBC Four at 9pm on Wednesday 2 November.

Originally published on the Trinity College website.

Pain is vital: it is the mechanism that protects us from harming ourselves. If you put your finger into a flame, a signal travels up your nervous system to your brain which tells you to snatch your finger away. This response isn’t as simple as it sounds: the nervous system is complex and involves many areas of the brain.

We’re developing increasingly sophisticated machines to work for us. In the future, robots might live alongside us as companions or carers. If pain is an important part of being human, and often keeps us safe, could we create a robot that feels pain?  These ideas are explored by Cambridge researchers Dr Ewan St John Smith and Dr Beth Singler in their 12-minute film Pain in the Machine.

Already we have technologies that respond to distances and touch. A car, for example, can detect and avoid an object; lift doors won’t shut on your fingers. But although this could be seen as a step towards a mechanical nervous system, it isn’t the same as pain. Pain involves emotion. Could we make machines which feel and show emotion – and would we want to?

Unpleasant though it is, pain has sometimes been described as the pinnacle of human consciousness. The human capacity for empathy is so great that when a robotics company showed film clips of robots being pushed over and kicked, views responded as if the robots were being bullied and abused. Pain is both felt and perceived.

Movies have imagined robots with their own personalities – sometimes cute but often evil. Perhaps the future will bring robots capable of a full range of emotions. These machines might share not only our capacity for pain but also for joy and excitement.

But what about the ethical implications? A new generation of emotionally-literate robots will, surely, have rights of their own

Pain in the Machine is one of four films made by Cambridge researchers for the 2016 Cambridge Shorts series, funded by Wellcome Trust ISSF. The scheme supports early career researchers to make professional quality short films with local artists and filmmakers. Researchers Beth Singler (Faculty of Divinity) and Ewan St John Smith (Department of Pathology) collaborated with Colin Ramsay and James Uren of Little Dragon Films.

As the leading painter at the Court of Henry VIII, Hans Holbein’s magnificent depictions of royalty and nobility affirmed his status as one of the greatest portrait artists of all time. Few would have considered such works the output of a dissident satirist, deeply concerned about the plight of the poor, and committed to religious reform.

But according to a new study of one of his most famous works, The Dance Of Death, satire was not just an area in which Holbein dabbled early in his career, but a central feature of some of his most important work before he came to England.

Based on new research into the highly-charged climate in which the Dance was produced, the study, by historian Professor Ulinka Rublack, Professor of early Modern European History and a Fellow of St John’s College, University of Cambridge, argues that it is perhaps the best surviving example of Holbein as a social commentator, using art to mock establishment hypocrisy.

Her portrait of the artist - as an impoverished and angry, but socially and politically engaged, young man - is a far cry from that of the successful painter who produced iconic images of the Tudor ruling class - not least in his famous depiction of a swaggering Henry VIII.

The study forms the commentary to a new Penguin Classics edition of Holbein’s Dance Of Death. It draws on largely unused sources such as local government records from the time at which the Dance was produced. Rublack finds that early in his career, Holbein was part of a group of subversive, passionate artists who were operating in the new medium of print, amid the politically restless atmosphere of Reformation Europe.

“What’s striking is how many of his images in the Dance were about social justice,” Rublack said. “Holbein was part of a movement which was very concerned with radical questions about welfare and reform.”

“Looking at it as satire, rather like a publication such as Charlie Hebdo today, is probably the way to think about what he was doing at the time. Criticising the Pope and Catholic clergy was dangerous stuff; it could be censored and people could be imprisoned for it. But it’s sobering to think nobody was assassinated for it, which has occurred in response to comparable satire in our own time.”

Created between 1524 and 1526, The Dance Of Death was a series of woodcut prints of grisly images apparently demonstrating the folly of human greed and pride. Holbein, who was born in Augsburg, in Germany, produced it while living and working in Basel, in modern-day Switzerland.

As a concept, it was the latest in a long line of such series drawing on the medieval idea of the Danse Macabre, in which a recurring cast of stock characters - such as a Pope, an emperor, a king, a monk and a peasant - are individually shown being “taken” by death, represented by grinning, dancing skeletons.

The idea was to challenge the piety of the viewer, by showing death as the great leveller that comes to all. However rich and powerful we may be in this world, the Dance told its viewers, we are all the same in the next and should focus on spiritual concerns.

Although the Dance therefore often poured scorn on those in high society, it was not explicitly satirical beyond this. Holbein’s version has traditionally been seen in those terms - as a religiously-themed genre piece, and not an explicitly political statement.

For the new study, Rublack examined local sources, such as council records, to trace the socio-political context in which Holbein was working. Although the Reformation had not yet arrived in Basel (it would in 1529), she discovered that there was already widespread pressure for reform.

Part of this involved dissatisfaction with the Church and its wealth. The study found accounts of local guilds refusing to supply churches in favour of serving the needs of the poor. One record, from 1524, concerned a baker who, seeing civic dignitaries visiting the grave of a Professor who had opposed religious reform, openly attacked them as “donkey-milking fools”.

More broadly, the Basel commune had begun to stress equal rights against the traditional privileged elites. In 1525, for instance, a group of local villagers marched on Basel, demanding the right to elect their own preachers, and in opposition to feudal taxes.

Holbein, Rublack says, could not have been immune to this. For one thing, he lived among craftspeople, bakers and weavers who had begun to fight for religious and social change. But perhaps more significantly, he himself worked in an “alert” circle of like-minded artists such as the painter and printmaker Urs Graf.

Rublack’s commentary suggests that the life of this group must have resembled that of a satirical, counter-cultural clique. “One can only imagine an atmosphere of creative fun and irreverence, which thrived on jokes against monks, priests, the local bishop and popes,” she writes.

Stylistically, Holbein’s Dance broke established norms by for the first time presenting the genre in printed miniatures, which the viewer would have to peer at to understand. Seen in the context of the politics of the time, Rublack suggests it would have been “a shocking new viewing experience”.

Senior Church figures, including the Pope, were typically shown as overweight and obsessed with luxuries, extorting money in particular by selling indulgences - a cause célèbre of the Reformation. But the Dance also directly critiqued political and judicial leaders for ignoring the plight of the poor - including perhaps the Habsburg Emperor Charles of Spain in the stock “emperor” illustration.

By reworking the traditional Dance formula and adding tokens and signifiers which pointed to political concerns specific to its time, Holbein’s Dance was not just a piece for religious meditation but an early form of political cartoon, designed to delight, surprise and offend.

His reason for shifting from subversive satire to the courtly portraits of his later career can, Rublack suggests, be explained by his financial circumstances. Like most artists in Basel, Holbein struggled to find steady work as a painter - indeed, the study points out that respected contemporaries had been forced to resort to painting fences and carnival decorations.

Rather than carry on illustrating books and working in print, Holbein clearly harboured ambitions to paint - but this could only be realised through the sort of work he eventually obtained at the Tudor Court. Earlier works from England, such as The Ambassadors, pursue similar themes of death, faith and salvation, but working for the likes of Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII broadly put an end to his satirical interests.

“What is impressive is that he could have easily made the decision to give up painting, as so many contemporaries did,” Rublack added. “Instead, he made the very risky decision to pursue painting elsewhere. He seems to have known that he had great works like The Ambassadors in him.”

The University of Cambridge recently held a week-long series of Brexit talks and discussions, featuring senior experts in law, politics, history, science and economics from Cambridge and beyond.

The aim was to engage both University students and the local community in debates on how Britain moves towards departure from the European Union in the wake of June’s referendum.

You can listen to some of the talks below, or download from iTunesU here.

How Did We Get Here?

Robert Tombs, Professor of Modern European History at Cambridge's Faculty of History

Robert Tombs is the author of a recent epic history of England, and a renowned expert on nineteenth-century French political history and the relationship between the French and the British. During the EU Referendum campaign, he was a signatory on a letter produced by ‘Historians for Britain’, which supported a Leave vote, and has written about the future of the UK post-Brexit.

Dr Victoria Bateman, Fellow and College Lecturer in Economics at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge

Victoria Bateman is an economic historian at Cambridge, and a Fellow at the Legatum Institute think tank. Her current research focuses on the European economy from early-modern times to the present. Victoria has called for a sexual revolution in economics due to a lack of women in the discipline, and wrote articles in favour of a Remain vote in the run-up to the EU Referendum. She tweets at @vnbateman.

Dr Chris Bickerton, University Lecturer in Politics at POLIS and Official Fellow at Queens’ College, Cambridge

Chris Bickerton’s research focuses on the dynamics of state transformation and the challenges facing representative democracy in Europe. He has written a recently published book called The European Union: A Citizen’s Guide. During the run-up to the EU Referendum, Chris wrote in favour of a Leave vote, making the left-wing case for Brexit. He tweets at @cjbickerton.

Key Issues for the UK and EU Post-Brexit

Coen Teulings, Professor of Labour Economics and Industrial Relations at Cambridge’s Faculty of Economics

As well as holding the Montague Burton Chair at Cambridge, Coen Teulings is a Professor of Economics at the University of Amsterdam. He has written extensively about wages and income inequality, and spent seven years as the Director of the Central Planning Bureau — the Netherlands’ official economic forecasting agency. He has talked publicly about the risks posed by Brexit to free trade.

Athene Donald, Professor of Experimental Physics at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory and Master of Churchill College

Athene Donald has served on the University’s Council and as its gender equality champion. She was appointed a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 2010, and Master of Churchill College in 2013. Athene wrote and talked extensively on the dangers that a Leave vote posed for UK science during the run-up to the EU Referendum. She is a regular blogger, and tweets at @AtheneDonald.

Charles Clarke, former Home Secretary

Charles Clarke is a Visiting Professor at the Policy Institute of Kings College London. He was MP for Norwich South from 1997 to 2010, and served as Home Secretary between 2004 and 2006 in Tony Blair’s Labour Government. During the run-up to the EU Referendum, Charles co-authored a report warning that intelligence relationships would be damaged by a Leave vote.

Process and Politics of the UK Leaving the EU

David Runciman, Professor of Politics and Head of Department at POLIS and Fellow at Trinity Hall, Cambridge

David Runciman’s current research projects include the Leverhulme-funded Conspiracy and Democracy project and Future of Intelligence centre. In 2013, he published the book The Confidence Trap, a history of democratic crises since WWI. David hosts the weekly podcast Talking Politics from his Cambridge office, and has written that the Referendum vote shone a light on the education divide in democracy.

Mark Elliott, Professor of Public Law at the Faculty of Law, and Fellow at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge

Mark Elliott has written a number of books on public law, and is Legal Adviser to the House of Lords Constitution Committee. Mark writes a highly regarded blog called Public Law for Everyone, on which he analyses many of the legal issues surrounding the triggering of Article 50 and Theresa May’s Great Repeal Bill. Mark tweets at @ProfMarkElliott.

Global Britain? The Future of British Trade after Brexit

The Rt. Hon. Greg Hands MP, Minister of State in the Department for International Trade, delivered this year’s Alcuin Lecture at Cambridge’s Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS). Greg was appointed to his current position by Theresa May in July 2016, where he serves as number two to Secretary of State Liam Fox. He tweets at @GregHands.

The UK and Brexit: How, Why and Where Now?

Matthew Elliott, Head of Vote Leave

Matthew Elliott is the former Chief Executive of the Vote Leave campaign. He is now Editor-at-Large of BrexitCentral, recently launched with the aim of “promoting a positive vision of Britain after Brexit”. He was a founder and former Chief Executive of the political think tank The TaxPayers’ Alliance. Matthew tweets at @matthew_elliott.

Catherine Barnard, Professor of European Union Law and Employment Law at the Faculty of Law, and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge

Catherine Barnard is a leading expert on EU internal markets and employment law, publishing extensively in these fields. She is a Senior Fellow of the ESRC’s UK in a Changing Europe initiative, and is jointly leading the EU Migrant Worker research project. Catherine regularly commented in the media during and after the EU Referendum. She has recently written that there could be free movement of workers in any Brexit deal. Catherine tweets at @CSBarnard24.

Jonathan Portes, Principal Research Fellow at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research

In addition to his role at the NIESR, Jonathan Portes is also a Senior Fellow of the UK in a Changing Europe initiative. Previously, he served as Chief Economist at the Cabinet Office. Jonathan’s new book, 50 Capitalism Ideas You Really Need to Know, has just been published. During the run-up to the EU Referendum, he wrote on the misrepresentation of migration by sections of the media. Jonathan tweets at @jdportes.

Anand Menon, Professor of European Politics and Foreign Affairs at King’s College London

Anand Menon is the Director of the UK in a Changing Europe initiative, and has written widely on many aspects of EU politics and policy and on UK-EU relations. As part of the initiative, he recently led on a report suggesting that “Brexit has the potential to test the UK’s constitutional settlement, legal framework, political process and bureaucratic capacities to their limits”. Anand tweets at @anandMenon1.

The answers lie in the second major exhibition of Cambridge University Library’s 600th anniversary – Curious Objects – which puts on display a collection of curiosities that has been centuries in the making.

Opening to the public on November 3, and following on from the hugely successful Lines of Thought, the exhibits on display in Curious Objects cover all corners of the globe and every era of human history, from the Stone Age to the Space Age.

Research for the exhibition has turned up new and rediscovered finds – including the oldest objects in the Library, two black-topped redware pots from Predynastic Egypt, and the oldest written artefact, a Sumerian clay tablet from around 2200 BCE.

As one of only six Legal Deposit libraries in the UK and Ireland, Cambridge University Library has been entitled to a copy of every UK publication since 1710. But it also predates the era of most modern museums and collections, meaning that over the centuries, it has been a depository for all manner of objects, all of which have a part to play in telling the story of one of the world’s greatest libraries.

Among the curious objects going on display are:

• ‘Ectoplasm’ captured during a séance by Helen Duncan (circa 1950) – the last person to be imprisoned under the Witchcraft Act of 1735
• Stone Age tools from Northern Nigeria
• A Predynastic Egyptian drinking vessel
• Fragments of wall paintings from Pompeii (circa 20 BCE-79 CE)
• A pocket globe (1775) tracing Captain Cook’s first voyage
• A spirit trumpet for use at séances
• A Shakespeare tobacco stopper
• Beard and scalp hair posted to Charles Darwin – as a counterargument to claims Darwin made in Descent of Man
• A Soyuz space badge, cigarettes and food packaging from the Cold War-era Soviet Union

 “Shabby and beautiful, quirky and controversial, all the objects on display in our new exhibition provoke our curiosity and prompt questions about the nature of libraries – past present and future,” said Professor Christopher Young, Acting University Librarian.

“Over 600 years, Cambridge University Library has revealed the story of the world around us and the universe beyond - not only through its printed and manuscript treasures, but through this unique and wonderful ‘cabinet of curiosities’ that opens a window onto the nature of collecting.”

As well as the objects listed above, because of its Legal Deposit status, the University Library also has a significant collection of children’s toys, board games and models – often supplied with children’s books and magazines – which continue to arrive at the Library every week.

Cambridge University Library is home to the archive of the Society for Psychical Research, on deposit since 1989 and including the ‘ectoplasm’ and spirit trumpet among a number of artefacts. The Library also holds the collections of the Royal Commonwealth Society, a treasure-trove of information on the Commonwealth and Britain's former colonial territories, containing some forty objects in addition to more than 300,000 printed items, about 800 archival collections and over 120,000 photographs.

“Our curiosity has been rewarded with some exciting finds,” said Dr Jill Whitelock, Head of Special Collections and Lead Curator. “We’ve opened cupboards and found wall paintings from Pompeii, opened a box of medals and found an ancient clay tablet carefully wrapped in tissue paper. It’s wonderful to think that after 600 years there’s still so much to explore in the Library. We hope visitors to the exhibition will enjoy discovering our curious objects too – where else can you see ‘ectoplasm’ alongside Egyptian artefacts?”

Curious Objects runs from November 3, 2016-March 21, 2017. Admission is free.

"For some, today’s ruling is a victory for parliamentary democracy. For others, unelected judges stand in the way of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU. If the Supreme Court gets the final say, voters may still wonder whether their voice matters at all," says Kenneth Armstrong, Professor of European Law from Cambridge's CELS.

For Armstrong, the key aspects of the judgment are:

• It is impermissible for the Prime Minister to invoke the Royal Prerogative[i] as legal authority for a notification to be sent under Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union, to begin the process of withdrawing the UK from the EU.
• The effect of withdrawal will be to remove or limit the rights created by EU law and which are given effect in UK law via the European Communities Act 1972.
• Neither as an interpretation of the European Communities Act, nor of constitutional principle can the Executive by Royal Prerogative alone remove or limit rights protected in domestic law.
• The Referendum Act 2015 – in formal legal terms – only made provision for an advisory referendum. It did not give statutory authority for the triggering of Article 50.

"The High Court was asked by the claimants to limit the power of Theresa May to begin the Article 50 withdrawal process. Requiring the Prime Minister to obtain legislative authorisation from Parliament was contested by the Government on the basis that the electorate had given the Government a clear instruction to leave the EU in the referendum held on 23 June 2016," says Armstrong.

"However, while the outcome of the referendum has given the Government a political mandate to withdraw from the EU, the legal power to notify must be exercised within legal limits. The High Court has concluded that where an exercise of the Royal Prerogative would remove legal rights, derived from EU law but made available in domestic law by Parliament through the European Communities Act, only Parliament can legislate for such rights to be removed."

The case was brought by Gina Miller, an investment manager (the ‘lead claimant’) together with Mr Deir Dos Santos, a hairdresser, both UK citizens resident in the UK. Their claim was supported by a crowd-funded claim – the so-called ‘People’s Challenge’ – in the name of Graeme Pigney and other UK citizens resident in different parts of the UK and in other EU states.

An appeal by the Government to the UK Supreme Court is likely, says Armstrong. Following the recent ruling of the High Court in Belfast dismissing claims that the Prime Minister’s power to trigger Article 50 was limited by the terms of the Northern Ireland Act 1998 and the Belfast ‘Good Friday’ Agreement, the solicitor for Raymond McCord – whose son was murdered by paramilitaries and who is one of the claimants – has also indicated that his case will be appealed to the UK Supreme Court. 

"Before today’s ruling there had been some suggestion that if the judgment had gone against the Government it may not have continued with an appeal to the Supreme Court," says Armstrong. "Today’s judgment and the decision to appeal the Belfast High Court judgment has made it more likely that the Supreme Court will have the final say."

The claimants argued that the Article 50 process once triggered was irrevocable. In a recent interview with the BBC, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard – credited with authoring the text of what is now Article 50 – said that the process was revocable. As a question of EU law this could require an authoritative interpretation by the EU’s top court, the European Court of Justice.

"The High Court seems to have accepted the idea – widely contested by others – that the Article 50 process is irrevocable. As a question of the interpretation of EU law, this could give rise to a request for an interpretation of Article 50 from the Court of Justice," says Armstrong. 

"But the Supreme Court may try and avoid asking the European Court for a ruling, not just because it will delay matters, but also because some will object to the idea that a European court will have a say."

The Prime Minister had already conceded that there would be a parliamentary debate without a vote. And Parliament will have to give its approval at the end of the negotiations before any formal agreement between the EU and the UK can be ratified. Following the High Court’s ruling, Parliament will have a vote on authorising the Prime Minister to trigger Article 50. 

Adds Armstrong: "The problem for the Government is that it will want the legislative authorisation from Parliament to be quick and wholly procedural. For MPs and Lords, however, this is a chance to try and get the Government to reveal more of its Brexit negotiating position. It would be a constitutional crisis for Parliament to refuse to authorise notification and to ignore the result of the referendum. This limits how far Parliamentarians can push their demands." 

[i] The Royal Prerogative refers to one of the sources of legal authority accepted by the courts through which the Crown and Ministers of the Crown may take decisions. In modern times, these prerogative powers are typically exercised by government ministers but over time, they have been removed or limited by Acts of Parliament which instead provide the legal authority for ministers to act. The power to make and ratify treaties falls within the Royal Prerogative.

For Marco Polo, the desert could be a spooky place, filled with evil spirits. Writing in the 13th century, he described the famous singing sands, which “at times fill the air with the sounds of all kinds of musical instruments, and also of drums and the clash of arms.” But the low, loud rumbles coming from the dunes were not the work of spirits. They were the work of physics.

As grains of sand slide down the side of certain dunes, they create vibrations that can be heard for miles around. The sand avalanches trigger the dune’s natural resonance, but only when conditions are just right. It can’t be too humid, and the grains of sand need to be just the right size and contain silica. Only then will an avalanche cause the dunes to start singing.

An avalanche, whether it’s made of sand or snow, is an example of a granular flow, when solid particles flow like liquids, colliding, bouncing around, interacting, separating and coming back together again. Granular flow processes can be found everywhere from the world’s highest mountains to your morning bowl of cereal.

Dr Nathalie Vriend, a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellow in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, is a specialist in granular flows. Her PhD research at the California Institute of Technology unravelled some of the physics at work in the same singing sands that mystified Marco Polo. At Cambridge, her research focuses both on sand dunes and on avalanches, and how to quantify their behaviour, which can have practical applications in industries including pharmaceuticals, oil and gas. Vriend’s work relies as much upon laboratory experiments and fieldwork as it does on mathematical models.

“An avalanche can behave as a solid, liquid or gas, depending on various factors, which is what makes them so difficult to model mathematically,” says Vriend. “For me, modelling their behaviour starts with observation, which I then incorporate into a model – it’s nature where I get my inspiration from. That, and curiosity – I see something and I want to try to explain it.

“Since there are particles which collide and interact in a granular flow, there is a certain degree of randomness to the process, so how do you incorporate that into a model? You try to translate what you’re seeing into a physical description, and then you perform numerical or theoretical simulations to see if the behaviour you get from the models is the same as you observe in nature.”

Despite their somewhat chaotic nature, avalanches and other types of granular flows share some distinct patterns. Owing to a phenomenon known as segregation, larger particles tend to rise to the top in an avalanche, whereas smaller particles sink to the bottom, falling into the gaps between the larger particles. A similar phenomenon can be seen in your breakfast cereal: the smaller, tastier bits always seem to end up at the bottom of the bowl. Larger grains are also pushed to the side and the front, forcing the flow of the avalanche into channels.

Similar processes are at work in sand dunes. As wind blows across a dune, there is segregation of the individual grains of sand, as well as small avalanches taking place on the granular scale. But for a sand dune that is 40 m high, there are also processes taking place on the macro scale. The entire dune itself can move and race across the desert floor. Small dunes migrate faster than large dunes, as if playing a “catch me if you can game”.

A cross section of a typical sand dune would reveal a slope on one side of a ridge, and a sharp drop on the other. As the wind blows across the dune, it pushes grains of sand up the slope, where they gather in a heap. When the heap gets too big, it becomes unstable and tumbles over the other side, causing an avalanche, eventually coming to a stop. This process happens again and again, causing layers to form within the dune. “A sand dune may look like a monolithic mass of sand, but there are multiple layers and structures within it,” says Vriend.

How does this understanding of the anatomy and movement of a sand dune translate into practical applications? Understanding granular flows can be useful in the pharmaceutical industry, where two different active ingredients may need to be mixed properly before a pill is made. Granular flows are also highly relevant to the oil and gas exploration process, and with this in mind Vriend is working with Schlumberger, the oilfield services company.

Sand dunes are major sources of noise in seismic surveys for oil and gas in deserts, which are conducted to probe the location and size of underground oil and gas reserves. The surveys use an acoustic pulse from a source and carefully placed receivers at different points to listen to the signal that is received, which can then be used to calculate what is hidden underground. The problem encountered by surveyors is that the sand dunes are composed of loose sand and therefore have a much lower wave velocity than the rocky desert floor, and as a result they act as traps of wave energy: the energy keeps reverberating and creates a source of noise in the post-processing of the seismic surveys. As part of a secondment at Schlumberger, one of Vriend’s PhD students is performing numerical simulations to understand the origin and features of this noise.

Another industrial problem that Vriend’s group is currently working on is the phenomenon of ‘honking’ grain silos. As grains are let out of the bottom of a silo, the friction of the pellets on the walls of the silo makes a distinctive ‘honking’ sound. Annoying for the neighbours perhaps, but hardly dangerous. However, when the vibrations get loud enough, it can cause a resonance within the silo, leading to structural failure or collapse. Vriend’s students are attempting to understand what affects the way that silos honk, which could someday be used to minimise noise, or even to prevent collapse.

The phenomenon behind honking silos on a busy farm is similar to that which causes massive desert sand dunes to sing, although one could be perceived as an annoyance while the other is considered captivating. For Vriend, however, it’s the real-world observations and the opportunity to spend time in nature that motivate her.

She explains: “What I love about my research, whether it’s looking at silos or avalanches, is that you can observe it, see it, feel it, touch it.”

Inset images: Avalanche Zinal, credit: dahu1. Slip face GPR, credit Matthew Arran.

Toast is burning in one of the ward kitchens at St Christopher’s Hospice in south London. Members of the nursing staff rush to open the windows, laughing at this minor disaster. In a room down the corridor a young man called Kevin is confronting a future in which he will play no part. He’s married with two young children – and has terminal cancer. Imagining his boys growing up without him is more painful than the disease destroying him. Kevin and his wife have accepted that he will soon be gone: she wants him to die at home but he doesn’t want to frighten his sons.

These are just two of the moments captured in The Time to Die a documentary made in the 1990s by Nikki Stockley. Commissioned by the BBC, the film addresses a subject that remains taboo for many of us: death. Stockley focuses on three people whose lives are ending. They and those they love share their feelings. Doris hopes she won’t linger: she doesn’t want to die “inch by inch”. Hazel has lost interest in clothes and no longer looks in the mirror. She has told the hospice staff that she wants to die at home. Her boyfriend fears he would not cope; often he feels like running away.

Earlier this year, academics from three different disciplines (Emma Wilson, Professor of French Literature and the Visual Arts, Dr Stephen Barclay, Senior Lecturer in General Practice and Palliative Care, and Dr Robbie Duschinsky, Lecturer in Social Sciences) sat down to plan a seminar series that would encourage a broad dialogue about care and dying, using the medium of film as a framework. Wilson, who has a specialist  interest in film, proposed that The Time to Die would make a powerful starting point. 

Wilson said: “What I admire so much about Nikki’s documentary is the openness of the interviews, Nikki’s presence, her connection to her subjects, allowing complex emotions to be put into words. It feels like a work of accompaniment, very patient, very calm, opening up possibilities for a non-intrusive presence of the camera in this community, and a tender, caring work of editing, piecing together a visual narrative.”

The first of five seminars planned for the current academic year took place last week. Revd Dr Derek J Fraser, lead chaplain at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, talked about the role of his team in supporting patients and those close to them. A screening of The Time to Die was followed by a Q and A. Stockley took questions from an audience who included health professionals, members of the public, counsellors and representatives from local hospices. The making of a documentary about so sensitive a topic prompted questions about the relationships involved and the editing process.

Stockley spent four weeks filming at St Christopher’s. The Time to Die is, perhaps most importantly, a tribute to those it features, the patients and staff of a hospice acknowledged to be a pioneer in end-of-life care. She spoke of the closeness that developed between her team and the people they filmed – and her own emotional response. “I needed to remind myself that my sadness was nothing compared to those I was filming.” She also talked about the difficulty of negotiating a commission to make a film looking at death.

Junior doctors can expect to deal with as many as 40 to 50 deaths a year in the course of their work. Yet most people, in a society that protects itself from the reality of human frailty and mortality, have never witnessed death close up. Stockley suggested that film could offer a “safe way” of exploring some of the things we ask ourselves (how do people die, what’s it like to die) but seldom give voice to. Even the staff at St Christopher’s seldom talk about their own deaths. Medical statisticians have their devised their own code for death – they call it 'negative patient outcome'.

If The Time to Die is brave, it is also deeply respectful – and quite rightly so. Film, certainly not one made for general viewing, cannot convey the emotional rawness of death. Death has a smell. It can be messy and protracted. It’s exhausting and deeply sad. Death affects the professionals involved as well as patients and their loved ones. At one point in the documentary, a nurse is overcome by emotion and fights back tears. How do we negotiate the line between personal and professional?

Several Cambridge University medical students attended the seminar. Chris Kassam said: “Working with patients at the end of life can leave you feeling overwhelmed by the magnitude of the experience, and the easy option is to withdraw behind a mask of professionalism. I think the film and discussion helped me to realise that what patients and their families may need most at such times is not a doctor but another human being to simply be there with them.”

There is a gentle optimism about The Time to Die– and many of the scenes it captures are revelatory. Patients in palliative care, says a nurse, find it “quite comforting” to see other patients immediately after death. St Christopher’s doesn’t cover the faces of those who die. Instead a single flower is placed on the pillow as the body is wheeled away. Interviews with relatives are reminders that life goes on. “I’ve thrown away his toothbrush,” says Kevin’s wife, shortly after his death. “And now I’m looking at the shoes he wore last time he came home.”

Doctors like to fix things: they train in medicine because they like solving problems and want to make people better. In his introduction, Barclay suggested that this impulse is at the root of the profession’s difficulties with handling death and bereavement.

The Time to Die is a portrait of a hospice dedicated to end-of-life care. A general hospital faces different pressures, many of them driven by time. Fraser said that time was not always the critical factor – it was often a question of finding the right moment and language for a fairly brief conversation. A personal loss had, he said, “changed profoundly” how he approached his role at Addenbrooke’s. “I’ve learnt that there is sometimes nothing to say – no solution. But to validate sadness is so important.”

Among the professionals in the audience was Michelle Reynolds, Acting Head of Staff Counselling at Cambridge University’s Counselling Service. She said: “The combination of the film and Fraser’s own testimony made the seminar an evocative experience. Twenty years have passed since the making of the documentary – and the need for good palliative care is as great as ever. Death doesn’t change its impact on the family, friends and the professionals involved. No-one is immune.”

We don’t know when or how we will die: death is one of the life processes that defies organisation. But with careful planning, an acknowledgment of our wishes and the support of skilled professionals and loving family and friends, there is much we can do. The Time to Die shows no happy endings but demonstrates how much caring means. Kevin dies at St Christopher’s, as he had wanted, with his wife with him. Hazel dies at home, quietly and gently in her boyfriend’s arms. Standing in a rainswept churchyard after Hazel’s funeral, he is quietly proud.

The seminar series continues on Wednesday, 9 November 2016 with guest speakers Professor Bee Wee, NHS England's National Clinical Director for End of Life Care and Dr Anna Elsner, University of Zurich. Professor Wee will discuss developments in national policy and practice in palliative and end of life care since the withdrawal of the Liverpool Care Pathway for the Dying. Dr Elsner will discuss a documentary exploring end-of-life care in Switzerland, 'Die weisse Arche'/'The white ark' (2015) and the Ars Moriendi (arts of dying) tradition. All welcome, no charge, booking required.

Inset image: Physician; credit: Yuya Tamai.
 

Dr Emily Charnock, Faculty of History

Q: Has the 2016 U.S. election been as unprecedented as we have been led to believe?

A: In a word, yes. There have been nasty presidential elections and party splits before (1800, 1860, 1912, and more). But the invective hasn’t normally come straight from the candidates’ mouths. In the modern period, at least, we haven’t seen anything like these direct personal attacks on Clinton’s ethical standards or Trump’s basic fitness for office, not to mention any number of demographic groups.

There are other ways in which this election is unprecedented too. The first female major party candidate, for a start. And the first major candidate without any background in elected office or high military rank in nearly eighty years. The only other one was Wendell Willkie in 1940, also a businessman and former Democrat who became the Republican nominee. But that’s about as far as the parallel with Trump goes, since Willkie was a moderate and an internationalist. Some people have seen parallels with 1964, when another insurgent candidate, Barry Goldwater, won the Republican nomination and split his own party. But Goldwater was a Senator who’d spent years building up a grassroots conservative movement – he didn’t parachute in from outside.

So for its candidates, tone, and sheer unpredictability, I’d definitely put 2016 in the “unprecedented” camp.

Dr Emily Charnock is a University Lecturer in American History

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Professor David Runciman, Head of Department of Politics and International Studies

Q: What does the 2016 U.S. election reveal about the state of American party politics?

A: The party system in the U.S. is grappling with the same issues as two-party systems everywhere, including the UK. Two parties are not enough to accommodate the big political divisions that go beyond left and right. Politics now divides us by gender, by age, by educational experience and by a whole host of other gulfs in social understanding. Yet all these divisions get squeezed into a binary choice: Democrat or Republican? Trump or Clinton?  The strain is showing and the system is creaking.

In the US the strain is greater because it’s a presidential system, which means the stakes are higher. It’s also been subject to widespread gerrymandering, which entrenches partisanship at the expense of compromise. It will need a shock to the system to reform it. Trump could be that shock. But that poses the dilemma of all mature democracies. What if the shock that is capable of reforming the system is also capable of destroying it? What if the price of avoiding the prospect of destruction is to put off the chance of reform? The real danger for the American party system is not that it’s currently so volatile, but that despite its volatility it may be stuck.

Professor David Runciman is the author of The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present

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Professor Gary Gerstle, Paul Mellon Professor of American History 

Q: What has surprised you most about the 2016 U.S. election?

A: The most surprising element of the 2016 election is not Trump himself. For years, the right wing of the Republican Party has been nurturing figures like him who have bred contempt for the ordinary business of politics (compromise and coalitions), incited their supporters with vicious attacks on the integrity of their opponents, and challenged the boundaries of civility. What has been shocking is the inability of the Republican establishment—billionaire GOP donors, leaders of the Congressional Party, and even Murdoch’s influential Fox News—to corral the Trump rebellion as the Romney forces did to right-wing insurgents in 2012.

Equally shocking has been Trump’s successful assault on once unassailable Republican positions, most notably the GOP’s commitment to the free movement of capital, trade, and people and to NATO as a linchpin of American defense and a US led world order.  As in the UK, politics in America no longer looks familiar: a great political party is tearing itself apart, elites and foreigners are scapegoated, parliamentary processes are condemned as corrupt, and strong men offer themselves as antidotes to democratic haplessness.  Usually, the self-destruction of one party propels the other to power; and that might happen on Tuesday.  But these are not ordinary times.

Professor Gary Gerstle is the author of Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present

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Professor Neil Mercer, Emeritus Professor of Education

Q: What does the rhetoric deployed during this presidential campaign tell us about modern political discourse?

A: One of the striking features of the rhetoric used in the televised presidential debates has been the frequent use of ad hominem ("against the person") attacks. For example, Mr Trump claims Mrs Clinton is "crooked". She has depicted him as a misogynist. Rather than attacking the political agenda of an opponent, the speaker instead attacks their character or behaviour, with the aim of destroying the opponent’s credibility in the eyes of the electorate.

Such attacks are characterised as "logical fallacies" in classical rhetoric, because they do not really undermine the truth or value of an opponent’s  political ideas, and so should be treated sceptically by a critical, rational listener. However, as we can see from the media evaluations of the debates and polling predictions, ad hominem attacks can be very effective. People do not make voting choices purely on a logical basis, and the presidential contest is as much about personality as policy.

For many American voters, one criterion for their allegiance seems to be that a candidate is the kind of person who would win a verbal fight on their behalf – by fair means or foul. 

Professor Neil Mercer is Director of Oracy@Cambridge

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Professor Andrew Preston, Professor of American History

Q: How will the election affect US foreign policy?

A: We haven't seen such stark differences on foreign policy in a long time. Hillary Clinton stands for the continuation of liberal internationalism, a bipartisan tradition that believes in US leadership of an integrated world system. Though they may argue about the specifics of implementation, both Democrats and Republicans have upheld this system since the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt 75 years ago.

Liberal internationalism underpinned containment during the Cold War and has fuelled support for globalization over the past two decades. But Donald Trump doesn't believe in liberal internationalism, and he certainly doesn't believe in globalization. Instead, he has railed against Clinton's foreign-policy experience, but he has also attacked his fellow Republicans' worldview. He thinks the Iraq War was a mistake, that George W. Bush didn't do enough to prevent 9/11 from happening, and that international trade agreements are forged at the expense of the working class. All this makes him sound a bit like George McGovern, the left-wing Democrat who challenged Richard Nixon in 1972 on an anti-Vietnam War platform. In fact, it makes Trump sound a lot like Bernie Sanders.

But it's even more telling that Trump has borrowed the isolationist slogan "America First" from the anti-Semitic, anti-interventionist campaign of Charles Lindbergh in 1940-41. Trump's anti-war isolationism isn't akin to the pacifism of a McGovern but the nationalism of a Lindbergh. If he wins on Tuesday, it will mean a retreat of American power. While many will cheer, I have a feeling many more people around the world will fear the new world order to follow.

Professor Andrew Preston is the author of Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy

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Dr Kasia Boddy, Faculty of English

Q: What has American fiction had to say about a possible President Trump?

A: Over the last few months, commentators have vied with each to find the novel which best ‘predicted’ or ‘foreshadowed’ the Presidential election. Popular choices include Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here (1935), in which "general clownishness" paves the way for The American Corporate State and Patriotic Party, and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004), in which "America First" means avoiding "dilution by foreign races". Lewis was thinking of the populist Louisiana governor Huey Long, while Roth, while writing about Charles Lindbergh, was also responding to George W. Bush’s rhetoric of "perpetual fear".

Perhaps it’s reassuring to imagine a similar novel today (and there have already been some attempts), because then we can think of Trump as nothing more than a "character", safely stowed in "alternate history".

There’s no story more satisfying than that of the bullet dodged.

There’s a problem, though: that particular bullet was fired some time ago, and is still the air. Shouldn’t novelists have seen it coming?

A few did. Trump, the flashy entrepreneur, has a bit part in several 90s novels, but it was Brett Easton Ellis' American Psycho (1992) that most precisely delineated the milieu of monied braggadocio from which he emerged. The novel’s protagonist Patrick Bateman, a banker-cum-serial-killer, is obsessed with Trump and is constantly distracted by trying to spot his limo or Ivana and by fantasies of a summons to their yacht.  When a detective interrogates him about a missing colleague (his latest victim), Bateman turns the conversation to Trump’s The Art of the Deal. Mergers and acquisitions, murders and executions – it’s all about making a killing. Ellis is particularly alert to the aggressive, misogynist language of 80s Wall Street, and it will be no surprise to learn that "banter" about "hot numbers" and "hardbodies" takes place in upscale Zagat-rated restaurants rather than in locker rooms.

 In one scene, however, Bateman "snaps" when a girl calls him "honey":

     "‘What do you want me to call you?’ she asks, indignantly. ‘CEO?’ She stifles a giggle.

     ‘Oh Christ.’

     ‘No, really Patrick. What do you want me to call you?’

      King, I’m thinking. King, Evelyn. I want you to call me King."

 Perhaps on November 9 we’ll be calling Bateman’s hero The Man Who Conceded Graciously. It’s hard to imagine.

Dr Kasia Boddy is the editor of The New Penguin Book of American Short Stories

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Professor Simon Goldhill, Professor of Greek Literature and Culture, Director of the Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences

Q: What will guide American voters' choices on November 8?

A: An old friend of mine, when he was in charge of the British Medical Association, and negotiating regularly with the government, told me a secret: "You must always let people think they are voting with their intellects; but you must get them to vote with their feelings."

I thought then he was cynical. Now I see he was prescient.

Fifteen years ago 15% of Republicans thought that all democrats were wholly unacceptable, and a similar percentage of Democrats felt the same about Republicans. Now the figure is 65%. Politics in the United States has become not just polarised, but tribal. And with tribalism, voting with the emotions is a necessary satisfaction.

What are the consequences of this? It would seem that evidence, argument, planning are irrelevant to the raw feeling of the chant, the commitment, the certainty.

For me, the most shocking statement of the campaign has been the Republican assertion that they will object to the name of any Democratic candidate for the Supreme Court. Any candidate? This is tribalism at its most blatantly aggressive. Can government function under such conditions? Can social justice be maintained as an ideal when exclusion is built into the thinking from the start?

It is not a happy time.

Professor Simon Goldhill is the author of A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion, and the Bensons in Victorian Britain

We live in a world in which our appearance - what we wear, what we cover and what we reveal - is highly politicised. Witness the debates, among others, of the wearing of religious symbols in the public arena. Hair is an aspect of appearance loaded with meanings that shift according to context. A billion pound industry trades on the desire to avoid a bad hair day. In the barbershops of hipster London, beards are combed and coaxed into just the right shape.

In early modern Europe, dress was regulated by ‘sumptuary laws’. These regulations set out who could wear what and when, according to a hierarchy of privileges believed to be accorded by God. Some of the laws related not just to clothing but also to hair. In 1637, for example, the authorities of the city of Basel prohibited its male inhabitants from wearing “hair and long tresses that are unseemly and unnecessarily ample and long, that hang down over the eyes, as well as artificial hair and hairpieces.”

Basel was a centre for print, scholarship and radical thought. It and other cities had recently undergone the sweeping religious changes known as the Reformation. In some areas, the Reformation made extravagant excesses a subject of discussion and attempted to regulate clothing in regard to new aesthetics of piety and morals of modesty. In Basel, sumptuary law restricted the usage of gold and silver borders, edgings and braids, and prohibited the wearing of hats decorated with beads, pearls and jewelry.

Dr Stefan Hanß is a historian of material culture and the body in early modern Europe. “When I began to examine the archives of cities such as Augsburg and Nuremburg, I realised that hair is everywhere, mentioned again and again. We’re talking about a period when outward appearance was everything – and a community’s religious purity was defined by its inhabitants’ social and bodily behavior,” he says.  

“Hair is the stuff of emotions and high on the list of things people really mind about. It’s a product of our bodies and part of our identity. That’s why enforced shaving is so demeaning and a punishment commonly meted out to criminals. When authorities impose rules and regulations about hair as a means of discipline, there is often a strong reaction.”

Early modern European cities enacted laws that defined the privileges and duties of different groups. Noblemen, clerics and peasants, for example, were expected to dress and behave in certain ways: what was appropriate for one group was inappropriate for another. In the wake of the Reformation, people were expected to comply with new rules on dress – but, as always, there were some who were determined to test the limits of authority.

Among them was a French noblewoman called Charlotte Duplessis-Mornay whose husband, caught up in religious conflict, moved with his family to Montauban, a small city in southern France’s Midi-Pyrénées. The Protestant clergy of Montauban had made hair a prime issue of religious and social discipline, and had preached against women wearing braids and curly tresses in public. Charlotte, however, refused to changer de coiffure and in 1584 attended church adorned in luxuriant curls.

Charlotte’s defiance provoked what she described in her memoirs as a huge scandale. The Protestant consistory, the city’s disciplinary authority, started official investigations that resulted in the excommunication from the church of her entire family. News of Charlotte’s stance on the question of her hair travelled wider than Montauban. The magistrates of Toulouse were also informed.

Wearing a black scarf that covered her curls, Charlotte appeared in front of the consistory to defend her position. She openly contradicted the consistory’s religious interpretation of hairstyles and pointed out inconsistencies in the Bible on matters of women’s appearance. On one hand, she pointed to the Apostle Paul’s well-known demand that women cover their hair during prayers and, on the other, she quoted biblical passages that declared braids and jewelry to be heavenly adornments of spouses.

Charlotte boldly demanded clarification of her case: “Since it were very pernicious that the opinions of men, although good and holy, should be put in the place of the commandment of God, I desire that this matter may be cleared up for the well-being and the concord of the churches.” She concluded: “Voilà, messieurs, quel est mon but et mon opinion en ce faict.” [Voilà, gentlemen, that’s my goal and my opinion in this matter.”] Sadly, the outcome of her dispute is not known.

Hanß is one of the first historians to pursue in detail the question of how hairstyles mattered in 16th- and 17th-century Germany, the heartland of the Reformation’s upheavals. “Hair is highly significant as it represented much more than civic order,” he says. “In such a hair-literate society, people were innovative and managed their appearances by going to barbershops, using medicinal remedies, and staging distinctive beards and hairstyles.”

Charlotte’s defiance provoked what she described as a huge scandale. The Protestant consistory started official investigations that resulted in the excommunication of her entire family.

In cities, barber guilds flourished and members of these craft guilds opened shops like the one shown in a German print from 1568. Barbers washed, cut and perfumed the customer’s head and facial hair with the many perfumed waters, pomades and medical ointments that were available in their shops. With scissors, razors, tweezers and combs, a man’s hair was delicately groomed to face the day in a perfectly appropriate manner.

“People spent large amounts of money and time on their hair to produce the desired look,” says Hanß. “Within the parameters established by societal norms and by local regulations, people embraced the latest styles and created novel fashions. Dressing to look the part for special occasions, they were always pushing at the boundaries.”

Recipe books contain countless instructions to the proper treatment of hair and hint at an “experimental world in early modern Germany”, in which men and women creatively engaged with expectations by meeting or subverting them. Hanß suggests: “Going to the barber meant visiting a place where razors were used, diseases were cured, and rumours were shared, to manage one’s own physical appearance when going to church services, weddings or market places.”

Historians are puzzling over the question of why, after a period that favoured the clean-shaven, beards made a come-back in the 16th century. An extreme example is the cultivation of long beards among South German urban and Habsburg court élites late in the century. The imperial military councillor, Andreas Rauber, famously grew a beard of two strands that reached down to the floor. It was widely rumoured that Rauber could lift an anvil with his beard.

Hanß suggests that beards had become potent signifiers of nobility and masculinity. “Anatomical and medical treatises defined the growth of facial hair as a byproduct of a man’s sperm. Beards became such a prominent feature of manhood that almost everyone, in stark contrast to the 15th century, decided to have a beard – and some took this to extremes,” he says.

“For men, women and children, hair played an important role in the making of group cultures. Hair can indicate political and religious belonging – and in the case of early modern courts, noblemen signaled their loyalty to their rulers by imitations of princely hairstyles. What we do with our hair conveys a multitude of messages about ourselves – and this was certainly the case in early modern Europe.”

Dr Stefan Hanß has recently submitted a journal article on the confessional, gendered and emotional implications of forced shavings endured by people enslaved in the Habsburg and Ottoman lands. For further information on his research, see http://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/directory/dr-stefan-hanss.

British Prime Minister Theresa May is visiting India on her first significant overseas visit outside the EU – and there is real interest in how it could be a harbinger of Britain’s post-Brexit future. Analysts are cautious about any major breakthroughs or significant trade deals, especially given strained relations between the UK and India over issues of immigration, which affect students and professionals in particular.

But part of the UK’s agenda is to work bilaterally with India on a number of areas of mutual interest at the UK-India Tech Summit. Discussions will include the technological possibilities for “smart cities”, an area that has been identified by the UK delegation as a major focus for the event. This also resonates with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s high profile smart cities initiative, launched last year.

Plans focus on making these urban settlements technologically-enabled, to ensure connectivity and communication using the latest information technologies. But what is missing is a sense of how cities may also be “ecologically smart” by securing the essential needs of their inhabitants – particularly clean air, especially important in smog-hit Delhi, and drinking water. It is also important to recognise that “ecological smartness” must include an understanding of the interests, aspirations and current circumstances of the different groups that live in these places.

Water wisdom

Over the past three years, a project jointly funded by the UK Department for International Development, the Natural Environment Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council, has investigated the ways in which people living in and around six small towns in the Western Himalaya access water through a diversity of sources. These range from springs to piped supply, and the project also examined the sustainability challenges faced by these sources.

Through these multiple and far-ranging case studies in Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Nepal, the team highlighted important lessons relevant to understanding water supply and how it is used and sourced in the urbanising hills. It has also outlined the policy options for securing water supplies for the needs of these hill residents.

There are a number of key lessons that emerge from this project, which provide helpful guidance on how to make all cities ecologically, as well as technologically, “smart”. These are:

The importance of critical water zones. The long-term sustainability of water sources is essential for the maintenance and growth of urban settlements. Urban planning and development occurs within city boundaries – but we must also proactively identify, manage and protect the critical water zones – the areas that are essential for the maintenance and regeneration of water flows across all landscapes, and which are often under threat due to rapid urban expansion, encroachment, changes in land use and deforestation.

Inequality and the politics of water distribution. Within towns, cities and surrounding rural settlements, water is highly unequally distributed. Access is determined by a range of historical and socio-economic factors – and negotiations and conflicts around water access, distribution and quality between up- and downstream settlements characterise life in the hills. The diversion and appropriation of water to urban areas could create new conflicts – and we need to understand them.

Local preferences and diverse water strategies. Households in the hills depend on multiple water sources, complementary to piped water connections. This is to do with cultural preferences – such as a belief that spring water in the mountains is sweeter – and risk management, due to the unreliability of municipal supplies. This continued preference for traditional sources alongside technological innovations should inform interventions to improve water availability, especially in small towns.

Large infrastructure decisions and management choices. States and donors are increasingly developing top-down, large-investment infrastructure projects to supply water in mountain areas. These so-called “solutions” don’t always consider the full range of possible options – especially those that are more local, small-scale and relevant to those they serve.

Multiple overlapping institutions for water supply. Water supply systems to address the needs of small towns are adopting new and varied governance structures. Donor and state-led systems should engage with local people and institutions both up and downstream, to ensure that development is useful to the communities it affects.

Decision-making and research in the hills often takes place with little access to data, as most of the areas do not have long term monitoring and records. In such contexts, different forms of knowledge are required – these include local wisdom, experience over generations, expert opinion, as well as more innovative approaches to address data gaps (such as modelling). As India and the UK look to each other for areas of mutual dialogue, a focus on ecological smartness might provide a unique opportunity for harnessing the considerable wealth of research on these issues in both countries, as well as responding to the challenges that both India and the UK face as they become increasingly urbanised.

The dialogue around technology involving Britain and India must expand to include the importance of finding ways for living well and sustainably in the rapidly urbanising 21st century.

Bhaskar Vira, Reader in Political Economy at the Department of Geography and Fellow of Fitzwilliam College; Director, University of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute, University of Cambridge and Eszter Kovacs, Postdoctoral Researcher in Conservation, Agriculture and Water Management Policy and Practice, University of Cambridge

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

Cancer immunotherapies involve activating a patient’s immune cells to recognise and destroy cancer cells. They have shown great promise in some cancers, but so far have only been effective in a minority of patients with cancer. The reasons behind these limitations are not clear.

Now, researchers at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute at the University of Cambridge have found evidence that the mechanism behind a weight loss condition that affects patients with cancer could also be making immunotherapies ineffective. The condition, known as cancer cachexia, causes loss of appetite, weight loss and wasting in most patients with cancer towards the end of their lives. However, cachexia often starts to affect patients with certain cancers, such as pancreatic cancer, much earlier in the course of their disease.

In research published today in the journal Cell Metabolism, the scientists have shown in mice that even at the early stages of cancer development, before cachexia is apparent, a protein released by the cancer changes the way the body, in particular the liver, processes its own nutrient stores.

“The consequences of this alteration are revealed at times of reduced food intake, where this messaging protein renders the liver incapable of generating sources of energy that the rest of the body can use,” explains Thomas Flint, an MB/PhD student from the University of Cambridge School of Clinical Medicine and co-first author of the study. “This inability to generate energy sources triggers a second messaging process in the body – a hormonal response – that suppresses the immune cell reaction to cancers, and causes failure of anti-cancer immunotherapies.”

“Cancer immunotherapy might completely transform how we treat cancer in the future – if we can make it work for more patients,” says Dr Tobias Janowitz, Medical Oncologist and Academic Lecturer at the Department of Oncology at the University of Cambridge and co-first author. “Our work suggests that a combination therapy that either involves correction of the metabolic abnormalities, or that targets the resulting hormonal response, may protect the patient’s immune system and help make effective immunotherapy a reality for more patients.”

The next step for the team is to see how this discovery might be translated for the benefit of patients with cancer.

“If the phenomenon that we’ve described helps us to divide patients into likely responders and non-responders to immunotherapy, then we can use those findings in early stage clinical trials to get better information on the use of new immunotherapies,” says Professor Duncan Jodrell, director of the Early Phase Trials Team at the Cambridge Cancer Centre and co-author of the study.

“We need to do much more work in order to transform these results into safe, effective therapies for patients, however,” adds Professor Douglas Fearon, Emeritus Sheila Joan Smith Professor of Immunology at the University of Cambridge and the senior author, who is now also working at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Weill Cornell Medical College. “Even so, the results raise the distinct possibility of future cancer therapies that are designed to target how the patient’s own body responds to cancer, with simultaneous benefit for reducing weight loss and boosting immunotherapy.”

The research was largely funded by Cancer Research UK, the Lustgarten Foundation, the Wellcome Trust and the Rosetrees Trust.

Nell Barrie, senior science information manager at Cancer Research UK, said: "Understanding the complicated biological processes at the heart of cancer is crucial for tackling the disease - and this study sheds light on why many cancer patients suffer from both loss of weight and appetite, and how their immune systems are affected by this process. Although this research is in its early stages, it has the potential to help make a difference on both fronts - helping treat weight loss and also improving treatments that boost the power of the immune system to destroy cancer cells."

Reference
Flint, TR et al. Tumor-Induced IL-6 Reprograms Host Metabolism to Suppress Anti-tumor Immunity. Cell Metabolism; 8 Nov 2016; DOI: 10.1016/j.cmet.2016.10.010

Where does science come from? It comes from inside our heads and our imagination. Science is the unknown, from the biggest scale to the tiniest, waiting to be discovered. It is the process of dreaming how the world works and having the courage to follow that dream. Light is a metaphor for conceiving ideas: letting the outside in and the inside out. Where the two meet is the point of vision: the ability to see what might be.

The visual imagination isn’t simply frivolous. It is utterly vital to understanding the scientific and technological developments which have allowed our society to evolve, both historically, and in the present day.

This film is a “love letter to scientific daydreaming”; to the importance of creativity in science; to the old-school sci-fi classics, and the way they captured the imagination. This is about the art of being a scientist.

Believing is Seeing is one of four films made by Cambridge researchers for the 2016 Cambridge Shorts series, funded by Wellcome Trust ISSF. The scheme supports early career researchers to make professional quality short films with local artists and filmmakers. Dr Eleanor Chan (History of Art) and Dr Marcus Fantham (Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology) collaborated with filmmaker Alex Allen.

If you’re based at the Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute, however, the common sense approach is not necessarily the road most travelled – and for good reason. The word ‘counterintuitive’ is one you will hear surprisingly often when you talk to its researchers about their work.

No one illustrates this better than Professor Steve Jackson, who has been at the Institute since it opened 25 years ago and made his name – and a new class of cancer drug – from a seemingly counterintuitive approach to cancer: to switch off a mechanism that is meant to repair our DNA and prevent it mutating, akin to taking out your army medics.

Jackson, like all of the researchers at the Gurdon, is a basic scientist – in other words, his work looks at the fundamental biology that underpins how our bodies work. Basic science is rarely fashionable, rarely flashy, but without it we would have few of the medicines we take for granted today.

However, this process also takes time: Lynparza, the medicine that resulted from Jackson’s work, was granted Marketing Authorisation from the European Commission and the US Food and Drug Administration in 2014, more than two decades after he began researching this area; the drug is now available in over 40 countries worldwide.

In fact, as with a surprising amount of science, his breakthrough moment was the result of a chance observation. He co-discovered an enzyme that was activated by DNA, and then observed that it was actually activated by breaks in DNA. Most DNA used in labs is circular, but Jackson was using ‘strings’ of DNA, which have ends

“If I’d been using circular DNA, I’d have never seen this effect and I never would have developed my career in this direction, but this discovery made me think ‘Wow, maybe because this enzyme is activated by breaks, it must be involved in DNA repair’. When you’re working in basic science and you follow your nose, you can spot things and hopefully recognise what they’re telling you – and in my case, it was saying ‘Maybe you want to work on DNA repair’.”

It was a second DNA repair enzyme – known as PARP – that was to lead to the development of olaparib (marketed as Lynparza) and to Jackson setting up his own company, KuDOS, as he saw its potential as a drug target. KuDOS was eventually bought out by AstraZeneca, the pharmaceutical giant that will soon move its headquarters to Cambridge.

DNA repair is so important to our survival that we have evolved a backup mechanism in case PARP fails, known as homologous recombination, in which DNA is exchanged between identical pieces of DNA to repair it. In some cancer cells – most notably those associated with mutations in the BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes – this mechanism fails. Tumour cells in individuals with these genes carry two ‘bad’ copies of the gene, which inactivates homologous recombination, but the individual’s healthy cells carry one good copy, meaning that they can still carry out this process.

“This was a ‘Eureka’ moment,” says Jackson. “We realised that if you block the PARP repair mechanism in these individuals, the healthy cells revert to their backup and survive, but the tumour cells have no backup and so will die.”

Just under one in three cases of ovarian cancer is caused by the BRCA genes, and it is for these individuals that Lynparza has been licensed. Recent studies suggest that around the same proportion of prostate cancer cases may be linked to BRCA gene mutations, and to one in ten cases of breast cancer; if Lynparza is approved for all of these patients, it could make a huge difference to survival rates. The drug isn’t perfect – it doesn’t work in all BRCA patients and some patients develop resistance to the drug – but it is clearly extending and enhancing many lives.

“We all hope to cure cancer, and PARP inhibitors are curing a small proportion of patients,” says Jackson, “but what we’re doing is moving cancer towards becoming a long-term disease that is kept in check through different phases. That’s a good business model for pharmaceutical companies, ensuring that they invest in this area, but most of all, it’s good for the patients.”

Jackson jokes that he had much more hair when he started out – running his own company alongside his work, and trying to get others to support his approach “nearly did me in,” he laughs. “The hardest thing for me was getting people to buy into the idea as it was counterintuitive: why would you want to inhibit DNA repair? DNA repair’s good – that’s what the pharma companies said, that’s what the venture capitalists initially said.”

Just as Jackson’s work eschews the common sense approach, so too does the work of his colleague Dr Eugenia Piddini. If switching off cells’ repair mechanisms sounds counterintuitive, then so does the idea of stopping the mechanism that is intended to cause diseased cells to fall on their swords – programmed cell death, or ‘apoptosis’.

Like many of the scientists at the Gurdon, Piddini mostly works on much simpler organisms than humans. In addition to studying human cells,  Jackson also works on yeast, while Piddini complements her mammalian studies with work on the fruit fly. We may not have shared a common ancestor for hundreds of millions of years – a billion, even – but we still share many of the fundamental processes that take place in our bodies.

At the last count, since its launch in 1991, the Gurdon has created 200 group leaders around the world. That’s quite an army of scientists fighting counterintuitive battles.

Piddini looks at the competition that takes place between cells, and in particular how cells talk to each other and how this enables the tissue to select the strongest cells. “It’s a kind of quality control,” she explains. “But it’s been suggested for some time that cancer cells somehow disguise themselves, making them look stronger so they can kill off their neighbours and colonise their space.”

She believes this may help explain why, as cancers spread throughout the body – or ‘metastasise’ – they cause organ failure. “There will come a point where there are no longer enough healthy cells for the organ to continue to function.”

Many existing chemotherapy drugs encourage apoptosis. Not only does this cause collateral damage to healthy cells – which is why chemotherapy patients get so sick – but, says Piddini, apoptosis is exactly the process that cancer cells are using against healthy cells. So once again, this leads to a seemingly counterintuitive solution: stop cell death.

“If you can somehow inhibit apoptosis, then you can keep the healthy cells alive. And if you keep the healthy cells alive, you stop the cancer cells spreading and the tumour should die away.”

This is still very early stage research: to some extent, Piddini is where Jackson was not long after he first joined the Gurdon, but as for PARP inhibitors, she believes her approach shows a great deal of promise. “I hope that one day we’ll talk about this in the same way we talk about Steve’s work now,” she says enthusiastically.

Piddini – talked of as one of the rising stars in her field – will be leaving Cambridge next summer for the University of Bristol. Jackson believes her move further emphasises the strengths of the Gurdon Institute.

“You can tell a successful research environment by its alumni,” he says, “by looking at who has trained there and has moved on to lead a group elsewhere.” At the last count, since its launch in 1991, the Gurdon has created 200 group leaders around the world. That’s quite an army of scientists fighting counterintuitive battles.

For centuries, scientists believed that light, like all waves, couldn’t be focused down smaller than its wavelength, just under a millionth of a metre. Now, researchers led by the University of Cambridge have created the world’s smallest magnifying glass, which focuses light a billion times more tightly, down to the scale of single atoms.

In collaboration with European colleagues, the team used highly conductive gold nanoparticles to make the world’s tiniest optical cavity, so small that only a single molecule can fit within it. The cavity – called a ‘pico-cavity’ by the researchers – consists of a bump in a gold nanostructure the size of a single atom, and confines light to less than a billionth of a metre. The results, reported in the journal Science, open up new ways to study the interaction of light and matter, including the possibility of making the molecules in the cavity undergo new sorts of chemical reactions, which could enable the development of entirely new types of sensors.

According to the researchers, building nanostructures with single atom control was extremely challenging. “We had to cool our samples to -260°C in order to freeze the scurrying gold atoms,” said Felix Benz, lead author of the study. The researchers shone laser light on the sample to build the pico-cavities, allowing them to watch single atom movement in real time.

“Our models suggested that individual atoms sticking out might act as tiny lightning rods, but focusing light instead of electricity,” said Professor Javier Aizpurua from the Center for Materials Physics in San Sebastian in Spain, who led the theoretical section of this work.

“Even single gold atoms behave just like tiny metallic ball bearings in our experiments, with conducting electrons roaming around, which is very different from their quantum life where electrons are bound to their nucleus,” said Professor Jeremy Baumberg of the NanoPhotonics Centre at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, who led the research.

The findings have the potential to open a whole new field of light-catalysed chemical reactions, allowing complex molecules to be built from smaller components. Additionally, there is the possibility of new opto-mechanical data storage devices, allowing information to be written and read by light and stored in the form of molecular vibrations.

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 Winton Programme for the Physics of Sustainability, and supported by the Spanish Council for Research (CSIC) and the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU).

Reference:
Felix Benz et al. ‘Single-molecule optomechanics in ‘pico-cavities’.’ Science (2016). DOI: 10.1126/science.aah5243

Inset image: The presence of the sharp metal tip on a plasma sphere concentrates the electric field into its vicinity, initiating a spark. Credit: NanoPhotonics Cambridge

The study, led by the University of Cambridge and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, also suggests that conventional cleaning will not be sufficient to eliminate the pathogen, which can be transmitted through contaminated surfaces or in the air.

Mycobacterium abscessus, a species of multidrug resistant mycobacteria, has recently emerged as a significant global threat to individuals with cystic fibrosis and other lung diseases. It can cause a severe pneumonia leading to accelerated inflammatory damage to the lungs, and may prevent safe lung transplantation. It is also extremely difficult to treat – fewer than one in three cases is treated successfully.

It was previously thought that patients acquired the infection from the environment and that transmission between patients never occurred. The research team had previously studied one specialist CF centre in the UK and identified genetic and epidemiological evidence suggesting person-to-person transmission of M. abscessus but it was unclear whether this was a one off incident.

Now, by sequencing the whole genomes of over 1,000 isolates of mycobacteria from 517 individuals attending CF specialist centres in Europe, the US and Australia, researchers have demonstrated that the majority of CF patients have acquired transmissible forms of M. abscessus that have spread globally. Further analysis suggests that the infection may be transmitted within hospitals via contaminated surfaces and through airborne transmission. This presents a potentially serious challenge to infection control practices in hospitals.

Using a combination of cell-based and mouse models, the researchers showed that the recently-evolved mycobacteria were more virulent, likely to cause more serious disease in patients.

“This mycobacterium can cause very serious infections that are extremely challenging to treat, requiring combination treatment with multiple antibiotics for 18 months or longer,” says Professor Andres Floto from the Department of Medicine, University of Cambridge, and the Cambridge Centre for Lung Infection at Papworth Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. “The bug initially seems to have entered the patient population from the environment, but we think it has recently evolved to become capable of jumping from patient to patient, getting more virulent as it does so.”

Professor Julian Parkhill from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute at Hinxton, Cambridgeshire, adds: “Our research should provide a degree of hope: now that we know the extent of the problem and are beginning to understand how the infection spreads, we can start to respond. Our work has already helped inform infection control policies and provides the means to monitor the effectiveness of these.”

The Adult Cystic Fibrosis Centre at Papworth Hospital, Cambridgeshire, has led the development and implementation of new infection control policies to reduce the risk of transmission, now adopted across the UK and elsewhere. This study has also influenced the design of a new CF unit, due to open within the New Papworth Hospital on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus in 2018, which will incorporate a state-of-the-art air handling system.

One question that the researchers will now aim to answer is how the pathogen manages to spread globally. Their current study has shown that not only can it spread between individuals within specialist centres, but it has also been able to spread from continent to continent. The mechanism for this is unclear, but the researchers speculate that healthy individuals may be unwittingly carrying the mycobacteria between countries.

The sequencing data has also revealed potential new drug targets, and the team is now focused on working with other groups at the University of Cambridge and Colorado State University to develop these further.

Dr Janet Allen, Director of Strategic Innovation at the CF Trust, said: “This paper highlights the risks posed through transmission of multi-drug resistant organisms between people with cystic fibrosis. The team in Cambridge are a world authority in this area. This work demonstrates the global threat of this infection, the risks of cross-infection within and between CF centres, and the need for improved surveillance.  This study exemplifies the enormous impact of CF Trust-funded Strategic Research Centres, which were designed to generate world-class research with the very highest impact. Without the support of the CF community, this landmark study would not have been possible.”

Around one in 2,500 children in the UK is born with cystic fibrosis, a hereditary condition that causes the lungs to become clogged up with thick, sticky mucus. The condition tends to decrease life expectancy among patients.

The research was funded by the Wellcome Trust and the UK Cystic Fibrosis Trust.

Reference
Bryant, JM et al. Emergence and spread of a human transmissible multidrug-resistant nontuberculous mycobacterium. Science; 11 Nov 2016; DOI: 10.1126/science.aaf8156

Speaking at the launch of the Cantab Capital Institute for the Mathematics of Information (CCIMI) last night (10 November), Professor Hawking said: “In a dazzlingly complex world, you have to be able to discern the meaning in the mess. We are, in a figurative and literal sense, awash with what we call data… What we’re only now fully realising is twofold: the sheer quantity of data in any given domain; and the tools we need to make use of the information encoded in it.

“The power of information… only comes from the sophistication of the insights which that information lends itself to. The purpose of using information, in this context, is to drive new insight. For example, I may have taken great pleasure in talking to you about hairy black holes, as I did earlier this year, but the question is: just how hairy are they? What are the implications of the knowledge I believe I have now gained?

“There is another question, and this is really where this Institute comes into its own: what new mathematical tools do I need to open up new fields of insight? This is the heart of the Cantab Capital Institute: to drive forward the development of insight, and so enrich a multitude of fields of relevance to us all.”

Pointing to new insights data analysis has brought in fields from finance to genomics and education, Professor Hawking also praised the work of Institute Director Dr Carola Schönlieb in advancing medical imaging, adding, “the prize of a better-equipped doctor and a healthier patient is strong motivation – beyond the obvious satisfaction of pushing the boundaries of mathematics.”

He also echoed comments he made on artificial intelligence earlier in the year, saying: "“it is imperative we get machine learning right – progress here may represent some of the most important scientific advances in human history.”

The comments came at the launch of the Institute, which sits within the University of Cambridge’s renowned Faculty of Mathematics.

With an emphasis on working across disciplines, world leading academics on information science at the Institute will work with economists and social scientists to advance risk analysis in financial markets and the internet, while collaborations with physicists and engineers will explore software and hardware development security, as well as imaging and structured data processing. Work with biomedical scientists will concentrate on data science in healthcare and biology.

The Institute is a collaboration between the Departments of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) and Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics (DPMMS), established through philanthropic support of £5m from Cantab Capital Partners, a multi-billion dollar systematic hedge fund manager based in Cambridge.

It accommodates research activity on fundamental mathematical problems and methodology for understanding, analysing, processing and simulating data. Data science research performed in the Institute is on the highest international level, aiming to extract relevant information from large- and high-dimensional data with a predictable certainty.

The advance of data science and the solutions to big data questions heavily rely on fundamental mathematical techniques and in particular, their intra-disciplinary engagement. This is at the heart of the Institute, involving mathematical expertise ranging from statistics, applied and computational analysis, to topology and discrete geometry – all with the common goal of advancing data science questions.

With five PhD students, and a large growing faculty, the Institute is working on a number of projects, covering topics from biological transportation networks, to image analysis, to electron tomography. Their work will have a range of applications across a variety of industry sectors and academic disciplines.

Professor Hawking finished by praising the Institute’s development of a semantic search engine for mathematical literature, saying: “In our efforts to drive forward insight from information, we recognise that mathematicians could do with a little organising themselves.”

Hunting brings us close to our prey but the blood of a dying animal, spilling on to our hands, reminds us of our own mortality. Trapping, the use of technology to entice and capture, distances us from the act of killing. But, in their making and their function, traps connect our minds and bodies to the animals we pursue.

Each year, the Enawenê-nawê, an indigenous community in the Amazon, construct monumental fishing dams to harvest migrating fish vital to their diet.  Social anthropologist Dr Chloe Nahum-Claudel carried out her PhD fieldwork with this community, learning a dialect spoken by fewer than 1,000 people. She spent six weeks living alongside a group of 12 men as they constructed a dam.

She says: “I’m interested in the relationship between people’s practical economic lives and how they see the universe. My research with the Enawenê-nawê suggests that their dams are much more than a means to obtain food. The process shapes their minds, bodies and relationships with one another, with their prey, and with spirits and ancestors. My research was timely because these technologies are threatened by the construction of hydroelectric dams in many of the Amazon’s tributaries.”

The process of making traps became a particular focus for Nahum-Claudel when, as she explains, she realised that we touch on our own vulnerability every time we catch another living creature and subject it to our wishes. She recently convened a conference to consider trap-making and how these activities can be used to approach the relationship between humans and other species.

“To trap an animal you have to be very knowledgeable about its habits, its preferences and its weaknesses, and then you have to put all this knowledge into the making of an effective trap, and the placement and disguise of your equipment. That’s why traps offer an interesting way to approach practical encounters between ourselves and other species,” she says.

“I also realised that this was a neglected field of research. There’s been a lot written about hunting – and trapping is one method of catching prey. But unlike hunting, trapping doesn’t have to be fatal; ornithologists studying bird migrations have to trap birds and camera-traps are used to monitor tigers in India. I was interested in bringing people together to see if there were overlaps in the practice of trapping in such diverse contexts.”

Nahum-Claudel’s conference paper, which will form the first chapter of her forthcoming book, describes the Enawenê-nawê’s fishing technology and how it shapes them. The Enawenê-nawê are pescatarians who employ a variety of fishing techniques depending on the seasonal opportunities.

The most impressive and unusual of these technologies are fishing dams built to coincide with the downstream migration of shoal-living fish, which spawn in the flooded forest during the rainy season. Each year teams of fishermen leave their large village while the fish are busy feasting and spawning and set to work building dams to trap the fish as they try to return downstream, once the river levels start to fall.

These dams are two-part technologies. In the first week or so, the men make a weir across the river using timber, bark and lianas from the surrounding forest. Men float the logs downriver and then dive into the fast flowing water to anchor them in the river bed. Frail, elder men later make nets to catch jumping fish. Ideally, the weir closes off the entire river so that not one fish can escape.

Once the weir is complete, the team turn their attention to making 100 or so man-sized traps which are crafted from cylinders of bark and basketry woven from the ribs of palm fronds. The special bark cylinders, which are said to resemble men’s thorax are prised off of tree trunks like waist coats, and must not snap. The completed trap is man-sized and phallic-looking.

In her paper, Nahum-Claudel explains that the activities of weir-building and trap-making demand different kinds of effort and imply contrasting kinds of sociability for the community. As the men construct the weir, moving vigorously between the forest and the water, they liken themselves to the creator deity who built the first dam as he made the world. Like him, they are masters of the boundary between land and water, which, as fisher people, is the crucial one in their universe.

She says: “What I mean by mastery is clear in the expression men use to describe the fish’s demise. They say that the fish ‘drown in the traps’. Men create the conditions in which the fish drown in their own watery dominion and, what’s more, the fish bring about their downfall by entering the traps out of their own curiosity and desire. When the men make traps, the seated handiwork makes them more contemplative. As anyone who does craftwork knows, the activity of making something with your hands encourages a mood of reflection and brings about identification with the object crafted.”

While weir-building is physically demanding and highly organised, tending the traps is more restful and is described by the Enawenê-nawê themselves as ‘lying down to rest’. Camped downstream of the dam, the men may be physically absent but their thoughts and actions are understood to have an impact on their traps’ ability to capture fish – precisely because the trap never loses its bond with the man who has crafted it.

“The men live for the traps, devoting themselves to animating them so that they will catch plenty of fish,” says Nahum-Claudel. “They whisper to their traps and utter magical incantations. Sweet-smelling leaves are rubbed on the mouths of the traps to make them enticing to the fish. The team self-consciously strives to create a joyful atmosphere which the traps ‘desire’. There is much sexual banter – it’s locker-room talk all the time – and I was constantly reminded that I should not be grumpy, argumentative or stingy so as not to sour the mood.”

These practices seem to be about ensuring the traps’ efficacy and protecting the men themselves. Both of these aspects are thought of in terms of fertility. The traps are said to enter the weir ‘like a penis penetrating for the first time’ and the fish are seduced into entering their fragrant openings. As soon as they set the traps in place, the fishermen say that they become like virgins who have had sex for the first time.

“It is as if the traps were their own penises,” Nahum-Claudel says, “because their insertion thrusts men into the same state of vulnerability as teenage boys experience after they have had sex for their first time and their partner bleeds”. Through sex, men become open to the blood of women and they must exercise care in what they eat and in the activities they undertake when their wives menstruate or give birth. The first time this happens to a teenage boy, the restrictions to his activity and diet are strict – he lies down to rest and fast in his hammock for several days.

When the traps enter the weir the team of fishermen act in a very similar way, they fast and they say that they are now ‘lying down to rest’. This suggests that men are open to the blood of the fish caught in the traps – traps which are connected to their own bodies – just as they are open to the blood of women. Nahum-Claudel suggest that the dam fishing endeavour is about mitigating the risks involved in shedding blood while, at the same time, using the channel that exists between traps and men to promote the traps’ fertility. A theme that crops up repeatedly in Enawenê-nawê mythology is that the tables can easily turn and predator can become prey.

“Traps are all about hubris,” says Nahum-Claudel, “men build a deadly dam and drown fish in their own dominion. This activity is playing God, but everything about the men’s behaviour suggests that they are acutely aware of how risky this is, that it could – like a tragic play – end in their own downfall. What they stress as they trap the fish is not their Deity-like mastery but rather the subjection it implies. This feeling fits with the experiences of hunters and fishermen around the world. The proximity of life and death brings into focus human vulnerability so that hunting is rarely a question of unalloyed heroism. Enawenê-nawê dam fishing takes this to extremes because it is based on a monumental technology and entails intensive subjective and social involvement by the fishermen.”

Inset images from top: men harvest fish from their traps at Olowina River’s dam; the traps are ready to be inserted into the upriver face of a dam at Maxikywina River; a man dives down to pull up his trap from its position near the river bed. All photos: Chloe Nahum-Claudel, 2009.