History is inescapable in Cambridge. I was very moved upon learning recently that the eldest daughter of Olaudah Equiano, the former slave-turned-abolitionist, is buried in St Andrew’s Church, Chesterton, just a stone’s throw away from the centre of Cambridge. She was only four at the time of her death, in 1797.

Equiano’s memoir of kidnap and enslavement was vigorously championed by Thomas Clarkson, whose effigy adorns the outside of St John’s College chapel. Inside the chapel is a statue of William Wilberforce, another St John’s alumnus, who got the Abolition Act of 1807 through Parliament.

One of the criticisms lobbed at the University after it announced plans to commission research into its historical links to the slave trade is that it is wilfully ignoring the role played by some of its members in slavery’s suppression. I disagree. Should justifiable pride in our alumni’s contribution to the abolition campaign prevent us from acknowledging that they did not represent the entire picture?

It has also been suggested that, rather than ruminating on the past, the University should employ its resources and talent towards solving current and future problems. If it was really interested in issues of inequality, one commentator said, the University might wish to turn its attention to issues like unconscious bias and racial profiling in the development of artificial intelligence. In fact, through the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, Cambridge has been actively involved in understanding the impact of A.I. on diversity and social justice.

I reach here for the words of the Rev Dr Michael Banner, Dean and Fellow of Trinity College, who commenting on the announcement said: “Understanding the past and shaping the future are not necessarily separate projects.” Cambridge, I would add, is exceptionally well placed to undertake both of them.

In fact, the two projects cannot be easily disentangled, because a society’s historical baggage and its modern-day challenges are inextricable. “We read the future by the past”, to quote one of our earliest black scholars, Alexander Crummell. I was concerned at the findings of this month’s joint report by Universities UK and the National Union of Students, which once again demonstrated the attainment gap in higher classed degrees between white and black students. Although the gap at Cambridge, at around 14 per cent, is significantly lower than the national average, it is our duty to understand what is happening, and why. Indeed, significant work is underway to identify the reasons for our attainment gap, and what can be done to close it. I know that our Colleges, Departments and Faculties are working hard to increase the numbers of students, teachers and researchers from black and ethnic minority backgrounds, and to include a diverse mix of international students.

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Regular readers of these blog posts will know the value I place on openness – including openness to our own past – and diversity – including the need to tackle issues of widening access and reducing attainment gaps.

Universities flourish when, to quote Walt Whitman, they ‘contain multitudes’; when they embrace different world views, different cultures and different ways of looking at a problem. The most successful universities gather talented students and staff without regard to social background, country of birth or religious upbringing.

When I was at the University of British Columbia, we struggled, like all Canadian institutions, to be genuinely open to the life experience and unique insights of indigenous peoples. But the struggle was deeply rewarding, as indigenous knowledge began to influence new (though actually very old) understandings of how to resolve disputes, how to improve the interactions of humans and the natural environment, how to reconsider approaches to punishment for crime, how to study and improve upon plant-based treatments for some diseases.

The Cambridge context may be different, but for me the commitment to an inclusive and diverse community remains fundamentally the same. In talking with colleagues and students across the University, I am convinced that we genuinely aspire to foster a community of learning that is as attractive to a talented working-class white boy from the North East, or a black girl from a large East London comprehensive school, or a student from a village in western China, as it is to a middle-class student from the Home Counties.

Cambridge can, at first glance, seem an alien and even forbidding place to people who are not familiar with its ways. Its beauty, its history and its traditions, treasured by so many of us, can paradoxically be off-putting to individuals who have grown up in altogether different circumstances. I should know – I was one of them when I came to Cambridge as a scholarship student.

The legacy of slavery forms a part of who we are today, and informs what we wish to achieve. We can never rewrite history, or do away with our architectural heritage – they are rightly a source of great pride – but we can address inequality, and change the feel of the place in our own times. The experience of the here and now.

Many black students and staff have shared their strong belief that the University is unwilling to discuss openly issues of race, and that not acknowledging our full history is just sweeping race under the carpet. So commissioning research into the University’s links to slavery is not just an exercise in looking backwards, but also in shaping our future. Because, to quote the Rev Dr Banner again, “Remembering our past history in the present moment may be the key to living with greater integrity in the future.”

To this end, as was widely publicised, an Advisory Group chaired by Professor Martin Millett was convened earlier this year. Its role will not be to conduct the research itself, but to set the parameters of the research (which will be supported financially by the Vice-Chancellor’s Endowment Fund), to recruit the postdoctoral researchers who will undertake it, and to support them over the course of their work. The Advisory Group will then report the findings and suggest ways of acknowledging the modern impact of our historical links to slavery.

In the process of defining the scope of the research to be conducted, and the shape of the wider initiative, the Advisory Group will be consulting widely and collaborating with experts across the entire collegiate University, and indeed with experts from other institutions.

As it considers appropriate ways of publicly acknowledging the modern impact of slavery, the Advisory Group will engage with the broadest possible range of interests, from our student groups and our Race Equality Champions to University Societies such as the Black Cantabs Society and the African Caribbean Society. In due course, the Advisory Group will be convening town hall forums to ensure that the process of investigating this aspect of the University’s history is, in itself, open and diverse.

I have been hugely encouraged by messages of support for the initiative from all quarters of the collegiate University. There have been offers of help from academic colleagues in Africa, in the United States, and in the Caribbean. There have been expressions of interest from the public.

Some may see an investigation into slavery as a form of unnecessary atonement. I take a different view. If we mean what we say about wanting Cambridge to be open and welcoming, we must ourselves be open to the complex realities of the past as well as the complex challenges of the future. Only then can we embrace Whitman’s spirit, and confidently say that within ourselves – and within our University – we contain multitudes.

The team, led by the University of Cambridge, found that as temperatures increase, trees grow faster, but they also tend to die younger. When these fast-growing trees die, the carbon they store is returned to the carbon cycle.

The results, reported in the journal Nature Communications, have implications for global carbon cycle dynamics. As the Earth’s climate continues to warm, tree growth will continue to accelerate, but the length of time that trees store carbon, the so-called carbon residence time, will diminish.

During photosynthesis, trees and other plants absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and use it to build new cells. Long-lived trees, such as pines from high elevations and other conifers found across the high-northern latitude boreal forests, can store carbon for many centuries.

“As the planet warms, it causes plants to grow faster, so the thinking is that planting more trees will lead to more carbon getting removed from the atmosphere,” said Professor Ulf Büntgen from Cambridge’s Department of Geography, the study’s lead author. “But that’s only half of the story. The other half is one that hasn’t been considered: that these fast-growing trees are holding carbon for shorter periods of time.”

Büntgen uses the information contained in tree rings to study past climate conditions. Tree rings are as distinctive as fingerprints: the width, density and anatomy of each annual ring contains information about what the climate was like during that particular year. By taking core samples from living trees and disc samples of dead trees, researchers are able to reconstruct how the Earth’s climate system behaved in the past and understand how ecosystems were, and are, responding to temperature variation.

For the current study, Büntgen and his collaborators from Germany, Spain, Switzerland and Russia, sampled more than 1100 living and dead mountain pines from the Spanish Pyrenees and 660 Siberian larch samples from the Russian Altai: both high-elevation forest sites that have been undisturbed for thousands of years. Using these samples, the researchers were able to reconstruct the total lifespan and juvenile growth rates of trees that were growing during both industrial and pre-industrial climate conditions.

The researchers found that harsh, cold conditions cause tree growth to slow, but they also make trees stronger, so that they can live to a great age. Conversely, trees growing faster during their first 25 years die much sooner than their slow-growing relatives. This negative relationship remained statistically significant for samples from both living and dead trees in both regions.

The idea of a carbon residence time was first hypothesised by co-author Christian Körner, Emeritus Professor at the University of Basel, but this is the first time that it has been confirmed by data.

The relationship between growth rate and lifespan is analogous to the relationship between heart rate and lifespan seen in the animal kingdom: animals with quicker heart rates tend to grow faster but have shorter lives on average.

“We wanted to test the ‘live fast, die young’ hypothesis, and we’ve found that for trees in cold climates, it appears to be true,” said Büntgen. “We’re challenging some long-held assumptions in this area, which have implications for large-scale carbon cycle dynamics.”

Reference:
Ulf Büntgen et al. ‘Limited capacity of tree growth to mitigate the global greenhouse effect under predicted warming.’ Nature Communications (2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-10174-4

Researchers have used machine learning techniques to accurately predict the mechanical properties of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), which could be used to extract water from the air in the desert, store dangerous gases or power hydrogen-based cars.

The researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, used their machine learning algorithm to predict the properties of more than 3000 existing MOFs, as well as MOFs which are yet to be synthesised in the laboratory.

The results, published in the inaugural edition of the Cell Press journal Matter, could be used to significantly speed up the way materials are characterised and designed at the molecular scale.

MOFs are self-assembling 3D compounds made of metallic and organic atoms connected together. Like plastics, they are highly versatile, and can be customised into millions of different combinations. Unlike plastics, which are based on long chains of polymers that grow in only one direction, MOFs have orderly crystalline structures that grow in all directions.

This crystalline structure means that MOFs can be made like building blocks: individual atoms or molecules can be switched in or out of the structure, a level of precision that is impossible to achieve with plastics.

The structures are highly porous with massive surface area: a MOF the size of a sugar cube laid flat would cover an area the size of six football fields. Perhaps somewhat counterintuitively however, MOFs make highly effective storage devices. The pores in any given MOF can be customised to form a perfectly-shaped storage pocket for different molecules, just by changing the building blocks.

“That MOFs are so porous makes them highly adaptable for all kinds of different applications, but at the same time their porous nature makes them highly fragile,” said Dr David Fairen-Jimenez from Cambridge’s Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, who led the research.

MOFs are synthesised in powder form, but in order to be of any practical use, the powder is put under pressure and formed into larger, shaped pellets. Due to their porosity, many MOFs are crushed in this process, wasting both time and money.

To address this problem, Fairen-Jimenez and his collaborators from Belgium and the US developed a machine learning algorithm to predict the mechanical properties of thousands of MOFs, so that only those with the necessary mechanical stability are manufactured.

The researchers used a multi-level computational approach in order to build an interactive map of the structural and mechanical landscape of MOFs. First, they used high-throughput molecular simulations for 3,385 MOFs. Secondly, they developed a freely-available machine learning algorithm to automatically predict the mechanical properties of existing and yet-to-be-synthesised MOFs.

“We are now able to explain the landscape for all the materials at the same time,” said Fairen-Jimenez. “This way, we can predict what the best material would be for a given task.”

The researchers have launched an interactive website where scientists can design and predict the performance of their own MOFs. Fairen-Jimenez says that the tool will help to close the gap between experimentalists and computationalists working in this area. “It allows researchers to access the tools they need in order to work with these materials: it simplifies the questions they need to ask,” he said.

The research was funded in part by the Royal Society and the European Research Council.

Reference:
Peyman Z. Moghadam et al. ‘Structure-Mechanical Stability Relations of Metal-Organic Frameworks.’ Matter (2019). DOI: 10.1016/j.matt.2019.03.002

Wearable electronic components incorporated directly into fabrics have been developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge. The devices could be used for flexible circuits, healthcare monitoring, energy conversion, and other applications.

The Cambridge researchers, working in collaboration with colleagues at Jiangnan University in China, have shown how graphene – a two-dimensional form of carbon – and other related materials can be directly incorporated into fabrics to produce charge storage elements such as capacitors, paving the way to textile-based power supplies which are washable, flexible and comfortable to wear.

The research, published in the journal Nanoscale, demonstrates that graphene inks can be used in textiles able to store electrical charge and release it when required. The new textile electronic devices are based on low-cost, sustainable and scalable dyeing of polyester fabric. The inks are produced by standard solution processing techniques.

Building on previous work by the same team, the researchers designed inks which can be directly coated onto a polyester fabric in a simple dyeing process. The versatility of the process allows various types of electronic components to be incorporated into the fabric.  

Most other wearable electronics rely on rigid electronic components mounted on plastic or textiles. These offer limited compatibility with the skin in many circumstances, are damaged when washed and are uncomfortable to wear because they are not breathable.

“Other techniques to incorporate electronic components directly into textiles are expensive to produce and usually require toxic solvents, which makes them unsuitable to be worn,” said Dr Felice Torrisi from the Cambridge Graphene Centre, and the paper’s corresponding author. “Our inks are cheap, safe and environmentally-friendly, and can be combined to create electronic circuits by simply overlaying different fabrics made of two-dimensional materials on the fabric.”

The researchers suspended individual graphene sheets in a low boiling point solvent, which is easily removed after deposition on the fabric, resulting in a thin and uniform conducting network made up of multiple graphene sheets. The subsequent overlay of several graphene and hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) fabrics creates an active region, which enables charge storage. This sort of ‘battery’ on fabric is bendable and can withstand washing cycles in a normal washing machine.

“Textile dyeing has been around for centuries using simple pigments, but our result demonstrates for the first time that inks based on graphene and related materials can be used to produce textiles that could store and release energy,” said co-author Professor Chaoxia Wang from Jiangnan University in China. “Our process is scalable and there are no fundamental obstacles to the technological development of wearable electronic devices both in terms of their complexity and performance.”

The work done by the Cambridge researchers opens a number of commercial opportunities for ink based on two-dimensional materials, ranging from personal health and well-being technology, to wearable energy and data storage, military garments, wearable computing and fashion.

“Turning textiles into functional energy storage elements can open up an entirely new set of applications, from body-energy harvesting and storage to the Internet of Things,” said Torrisi “In the future our clothes could incorporate these textile-based charge storage elements and power wearable textile devices.”

The research was supported by the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council, the Newton Trust, the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Ministry of Science and Technology of China. The technology is being commercialised by Cambridge Enterprise, the University’s commercialisation arm.

Reference:
Qiang, S et al. ‘Wearable solid-state capacitors based on two-dimensional material all-textile heterostructures.’ Nanoscale (2019). DOI: 10.1039/C9NR00463G

A game which aims to ‘vaccinate’ people against fake news by teaching them how information can be manipulated for certain ends can be used in a range of different contexts, from countering conspiracy theories and radicalisation to teaching students about bad science.

The Bad News game was developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge in collaboration with the Dutch media collective DROG and is based on inoculation theory which views fake news as similar to a virus to which herd immunity needs to be developed.

Many hundreds of thousands of people have played it since it was launched online last year. “People love playing and learning through games,” says lead researcher Sander van der Linden, Director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab in the Department of Psychology.

Since the launch of the game, which has won several design awards, its potential uses have been multiplying. There is, for instance, an application for funding to do a version on bad science to inoculate students against questionable research practices.

Moreover, through a collaboration with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, coordinated by doctoral researcher Jon Roozenbeek, the game has been translated into 15 languages which makes it possible to do large scale cross-cultural comparisons.

The game will feature in van der Linden's talk, Vaccinating fake news, at this year’s Hay Festival on 25th May where it forms part of the Cambridge Series.

One of the game's big advantages has been its reach. To get the game out to a wide section of the public, the researchers have worked with different social media platforms. There is a Twitter version of the game and a WhatsApp version is being worked on. The researchers have been working with Whatsapp to counter fake news in the Indian elections, partnering with India’s Digital Empowerment Foundation.

They have also brought out a children’s version (Bad News Junior) with more child-friendly content and have created a board game version for schools.

“It’s a new way to do social science research and, in addition to countering fake news, it has the potential to help inoculate people against radicalism and extremism,” says van der Linden. “It involves boiling down content to the main techniques used to persuade people so they can recognise the different stages of indoctrination, from targeting to grooming to activation, if they come up against them.”

In addition, van der Linden and Roozenbeek are working with partners in the Middle East, for instance, to think about how to inoculate young people who might be targets for extremists.

The game is also a good way of engaging with the public and explaining scientific research in an accessible way.

Feedback shows a positive effect for all who play it, but a slightly more marked one in younger people who tend to get the highest scores. “There are small differences with regard to age, ideology and educational background, but everyone seems to be learning,” says van der Linden. “However, the inoculation is more effective the less you have been exposed to the virus.”

A booster shot?

Questions that the researchers are grappling with as they develop the game further include whether there needs to be a ‘booster’ to the original vaccine; whether the game works better in an interactive environment such as social media; whether it needs to draw on people’s real life experiences to be more effective; whether the lessons learned can be applied in a variety of different situations; and whether it can be adapted as technology advances, for instance, so that people can detect deep fake images or video.

Asked about how it can counter specific conspiracy theories or types of fake news, van der Linden says: “We are focusing on the underlying techniques rather than specific contexts. Policymakers’ approaches to fake news, such as fact checking, tend to be more reactive. We want to be proactive and pre-bunk fake news.”

He adds that it is important that the game is ideologically neutral with players able to pick a side. “It’s not about liberal academics attempting to manipulate people about specific issues. It’s about helping people gain resistance against the techniques of manipulation,” he states. For instance, there is a Brexit version of the game in the London Design Museum where players can choose to be pro-Leave or pro-Remain.

Risk and uncertainty

The dangers of the move towards a ‘post-truth’ world also figure in van der Linden’s new book, Risk and Uncertainty in a Post-Truth Society, out in June. The book is co-edited with Ragnar E. Löfstedt, Professor of Risk Management at King’s College London, and aims to rethink the concepts of risk and uncertainty in areas where truth is contested.

For the book van der Linden has worked with David Spiegelhalter, Cambridge’s Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk, and the two academics will talk about the issues it raises at this year’s Cambridge Festival of Ideas in the autumn.

A key finding is that people can handle uncertainty if it is at least measurable. “If you are very vague about the uncertainty of something that is where you see the big psychological impact,” says van der Linden.

That applies to everything from the risks and side effects of taking medications to immigration statistics.  “People do not like it if you say “there will be much more or much less” immigration because it is a very vague statement, but if you give them some relatively precise parameters within which it will increase or decrease they are more thoughtful and trusting about what that could mean.  Making figures more concrete and transparent adds value,” says van der Linden.

The book is aimed at academics and policymakers and should provide food for thought on how to present findings to the press in a responsible way. Van der Linden describes it as optimistic in that it sets out to find ways of presenting uncertainty that don’t lead to the kind of mass panic and conspiracy theories that have become prevalent in recent years. 

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, programmed a small fleet of miniature robotic cars to drive on a multi-lane track and observed how the traffic flow changed when one of the cars stopped.

When the cars were not driving cooperatively, any cars behind the stopped car had to stop or slow down and wait for a gap in the traffic, as would typically happen on a real road. A queue quickly formed behind the stopped car and overall traffic flow was slowed.

However, when the cars were communicating with each other and driving cooperatively, as soon as one car stopped in the inner lane, it sent a signal to all the other cars. Cars in the outer lane that were in immediate proximity of the stopped car slowed down slightly so that cars in the inner lane were able to quickly pass the stopped car without having to stop or slow down significantly.

Additionally, when a human-controlled driver was put on the ‘road’ with the autonomous cars and moved around the track in an aggressive manner, the other cars were able to give way to avoid the aggressive driver, improving safety.

The results, to be presented today at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Montréal, will be useful for studying how autonomous cars can communicate with each other, and with cars controlled by human drivers, on real roads in the future.

“Autonomous cars could fix a lot of different problems associated with driving in cities, but there needs to be a way for them to work together,” said co-author Michael He, an undergraduate student at St John’s College, who designed the algorithms for the experiment.

“If different automotive manufacturers are all developing their own autonomous cars with their own software, those cars all need to communicate with each other effectively,” said co-author Nicholas Hyldmar, an undergraduate student at Downing College, who designed much of the hardware for the experiment.

The two students completed the work as part of an undergraduate research project in summer 2018, in the lab of Dr Amanda Prorok from Cambridge’s Department of Computer Science and Technology.

Many existing tests for multiple autonomous driverless cars are done digitally, or with scale models that are either too large or too expensive to carry out indoor experiments with fleets of cars.

Starting with inexpensive scale models of commercially-available vehicles with realistic steering systems, the Cambridge researchers adapted the cars with motion capture sensors and a Raspberry Pi, so that the cars could communicate via wifi.

They then adapted a lane-changing algorithm for autonomous cars to work with a fleet of cars. The original algorithm decides when a car should change lanes, based on whether it is safe to do so and whether changing lanes would help the car move through traffic more quickly. The adapted algorithm allows for cars to be packed more closely when changing lanes and adds a safety constraint to prevent crashes when speeds are low. A second algorithm allowed the cars to detect a projected car in front of it and make space.

They then tested the fleet in ‘egocentric’ and ‘cooperative’ driving modes, using both normal and aggressive driving behaviours, and observed how the fleet reacted to a stopped car. In the normal mode, cooperative driving improved traffic flow by 35% over egocentric driving, while for aggressive driving, the improvement was 45%. The researchers then tested how the fleet reacted to a single car controlled by a human via a joystick.

“Our design allows for a wide range of practical, low-cost experiments to be carried out on autonomous cars,” said Prorok. “For autonomous cars to be safely used on real roads, we need to know how they will interact with each other to improve safety and traffic flow.”

In future work, the researchers plan to use the fleet to test multi-car systems in more complex scenarios including roads with more lanes, intersections and a wider range of vehicle types.

Reference:
Nicholas Hyldmar, Yijun He, Amanda Prorok. ‘A Fleet of Miniature Cars for Experiments in Cooperative Driving.’ Paper presented at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2019). Montréal, Canada.

Based on results from more than 2000 primary-age schoolchildren from across London, the researchers found that walking or cycling to school is a strong predictor of obesity levels, a result which was consistent across neighbourhoods, ethnicities and socioeconomic backgrounds. The results are reported in the journal BMC Public Health.

The study, led by researchers from the University of Cambridge, is the first to assess the impact of physical activity on childhood overweight and obesity levels for primary schoolchildren by simultaneously relating two of the main types of extracurricular physical activity: daily commuting to school and frequency of participation in sport.

Instead of using Body-mass index (BMI) as a measure of obesity, the researchers measured body fat and muscle mass and assessed how these were correlated with physical activity levels. BMI is the most commonly-used metric to measure obesity levels due to its simplicity, however, it is limited as BMI looks at total weight, including ‘healthy’ muscle mass, rather than fat mass alone.

“Both BMI itself and the points at which high BMI is associated with poor health vary with age, sex and ethnicity,” said Lander Bosch, a PhD candidate in Cambridge’s Department of Geography, and the study’s first author. “While adjustments have been made in recent years to account for these variations, BMI remains a flawed way to measure the health risks associated with obesity.”

The current research is based on data from the Size and Lung Function in Children (SLIC) study, carried out at University College London between 2010 and 2013. More than 2000 London primary schoolchildren, from a range of ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds, were included in the study, which looked at their physical activity levels, body composition and socioeconomic status.

Close to half of children in the study took part in sport every day, and a similar proportion actively commuted to school, travelling on foot, by bicycle or scooter. The researchers found that children who actively commuted to school had lower body fat, and therefore were less likely to be overweight or obese.

Paradoxically, using conventional BMI percentiles, children who took part in sport every day appeared more likely to be overweight or obese than those who engaged in sport less than once a week. However, when looking at fat mass and muscle mass separately, children who engaged in sport every day had significantly more muscle development, while their fat mass did not significantly differ.

“The link between frequent participation in sport and obesity levels has generated inconsistent findings in previous research, but many of these studies were looking at BMI only,” said Bosch. “However, when looking at body fat instead, we showed there was a trend whereby children who were not active were more likely to be overweight or obese. It’s likely that when looking at BMI, some inactive children aren’t classified as obese due to reduced muscle mass.”

The researchers say that it is vital to understand the relationship between obesity levels and different types of physical activity in order to develop informed policy measures that could contribute to the reversal of the childhood obesity epidemic.

“Our findings suggest that interventions promoting regular participation in sports, and particularly active commuting to school could be promising for combating childhood obesity – it’s something so easy to implement, and it makes such a big difference,” said Bosch.

The research was funded in part by the Wellcome Trust, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

Reference:
Lander S.M.M. Bosch et al. ‘Associations of extracurricular physical activity patterns and body composition components in a multi-ethnic population of UK children (the Size and Lung Function in Children study): a multilevel modelling analysis.’ BMC Public Health (2019). DOI: 10.1186/s12889-019-6883-1

Tropical peatlands, found in Southeast Asia, Africa, Central and South America, play an important, and, until recently, underappreciated role for the global climate system, due to their capacity to process and store large amounts of carbon. Across the world, peat covers just three per cent of the land’s surface, but stores one third of the Earth’s soil carbon.

The peatlands are sparsely populated but have been inhabited for centuries by indigenous and Spanish-descended populations. Even now, most communities are only accessible by boat.

Now, a group of researchers led by a University of Cambridge geographer have carried out the first detailed survey of how local communities view and interact with these important landscapes. Their results are reported in the journal Biological Conservation.

Working with colleagues from Peru, the UK researchers spent time with two rural Amazonian communities: a small indigenous community from the Urarina nation and a larger mestizo community of mixed cultural heritage. While other researchers have been engaging with these communities for decades, the study was the first to engage with their views on the uses, cultural significance, management and conservation of peatlands in the Peruvian Amazon.

“These communities are very remote, and very little is known about their relationship with the peatlands,” said Christopher Schulz from Cambridge’s Department of Geography, the paper’s first author. “People living in remote and rural communities are shaping ecosystem management in their surroundings, but their perspectives are rarely heard in wider debates.”

Members of both communities are primarily subsistence farmers, although the mestizo community does have some small shops and conducts some trade outside their community. Both communities, along with others based in the remote, largely-unknown peatlands, are mostly ignored by central government.

The peatlands are home to various guardian spirits, such as the Baainu known among the Urarina people, who is said to trick people into losing their way. The area is also home to various ‘dead lakes’ which are culturally taboo among the mestizo community, who believe that guardian spirits can cause thunderstorms if the lakes are approached. The mestizo community also fear that approaching the dead lakes could lead to getting attacked by anacondas or caimans, or getting sucked into the soft ground.

Away from the lakes, the landscape is dominated by palm trees, which grow well despite the wet, poor peatland soils, and are an important food source for animals and for the Urarina and mestizo communities. The palm fruit and hearts are harvested by both communities for personal consumption and to sell to travelling traders. Both communities also make use of the wood and timber, although it is of lower quality than from trees from non-peatland areas. In the Urarina community, the palm fronds are also used as roofing, although these are increasingly being replaced by corrugated metal roofs.

In addition to their practical applications, palms also have a cultural and spiritual function. In the Urarina community, fibres from the aguaje palm are used for textile production. The Urarina creation myth contains an element in which a wise woman is identified by her ability to weave aguaje fibres into cloth. 

Given the importance of the palm trees to both communities, it has led to issues of conservation. To harvest the aguaje fruits, the trees are currently felled. “Both communities recognise that they have an effect on palm tree populations, but they don’t have any specific conservation strategies as such,” said Schulz. “In the past, different groups have introduced equipment for climbing the palms instead of felling them, so that’s a simple conservation initiative that could be supported.”

“The knowledge accumulated by the Urarina about these permanently wet ecosystems is the best guarantee for their conservation,” said co-author Manuel Martín Brañas from the Peruvian Amazon Research Institute (IIAP).

“Before the scientific community had discovered the importance of these ecosystems for the climatic balance of the planet, the Urarina were already using them in an efficient and sustainable way, they classified them, gave them names, and they had established social controls for not damaging them,” said co-author Cecilia Núñez Pérez, also from IIAP.

Further research will investigate the potential role that conservation NGOs and other relevant stakeholders or institutions could play in the safeguarding of peatland areas, and ecological surveys will be conducted to better understand the ecological composition of the peatland vegetation.

The research was funded in part by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).

Reference:
Christopher Schulz et al. ‘Uses, cultural significance, and management of peatlands in the Peruvian Amazon: Implications for conservation.’ Biological Conservation (2019). DOI: 10.1016/j.biocon.2019.04.005

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, the Central European University, and Columbia University, found that one of the reasons that successful pickpockets are so efficient is that they are able to identify objects they have never seen before just by touching them. Similarly, we are able to anticipate what an object in a shop window will feel like just by looking at it.

In both scenarios, we are relying on the brain’s ability to break up the continuous stream of information received by our sensory inputs into distinct chunks. The pickpocket is able to interpret the sequence of small depressions on their fingers as a series of well-defined objects in a pocket or handbag, while the shopper’s visual system is able to interpret photons as reflections of light from the objects in the window.

Our ability to extract distinct objects from cluttered scenes by touch or sight alone and accurately predict how they will feel based on how they look, or how they look based on how they feel, is critical to how we interact with the world.

By performing clever statistical analyses of previous experiences, the brain can immediately both identify objects without the need for clear-cut boundaries or other specialised cues, and predict unknown properties of new objects. The results are reported in the open-access journal eLife.

“We’re looking at how the brain takes in the continuous flow of information it receives and segments it into objects,” said Professor Máté Lengyel from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, who co-led the research. “The common view is that the brain receives specialised cues: such as edges or occlusions, about where one thing ends and another thing begins, but we’ve found that the brain is a really smart statistical machine: it looks for patterns and finds building blocks to construct objects.”

Lengyel and his colleagues designed scenes of several abstract shapes without visible boundaries between them, and asked participants to either observe the shapes on a screen or to ‘pull’ them apart along a tear line that passed either through or between the objects.

Participants were then tested on their ability to predict the visual (how familiar did real jigsaw pieces appear compared to abstract pieces constructed from the parts of two different pieces) and haptic properties of these jigsaw pieces (how hard would it be to physically pull apart new scenes in different directions).

The researchers found that participants were able to form the correct mental model of the jigsaw pieces from either visual or haptic (touch) experience alone, and were able to immediately predict haptic properties from visual ones and vice versa.

“These results challenge classical views on how we extract and learn about objects in our environment,” said Lengyel. “Instead, we’ve show that general-purpose statistical computations known to operate in even the youngest infants are sufficiently powerful for achieving such cognitive feats. Notably, the participants in our study were not selected for being professional pickpockets -- so these results also suggest there is a secret, statistically savvy pickpocket in all of us.”

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

Reference:
Gábor Lengyel et al. ‘Unimodal statistical learning produces multimodal object-like representations.’ eLife (2019). DOI: 10.7554/eLife.43942

In 2015, the University signed the Concordat on Openness on Animal Research, committing to making available detailed information about its animal research through its website, communications and public engagement activities.

Since then, it has received two Openness Awards for its films looking at how mice are helping in the fight against cancer and how animals, including marmosets, help us understand brain disorders such as obsessive compulsive disorder. These films complement its animal research pages, which include details on the different types of animal used in research at Cambridge and the number of procedures carried out each year.

One of the University’s Animal Welfare and Ethical Review Body Committees takes part each year in the Cambridge Science Festival. This year, it ran a stand at the family weekend at the city’s Guildhall, providing the opportunity for members of the public to discuss the use of animals in research and animal welfare and showcasing 25 years of the ‘3Rs’ of animal research - Replacement, Reduction, Refinement.

Other activities include the ‘Challenge’ technical programme for students from the age of 13 at the Cambridge Academy for Science and Technology. There, the University and the Academy arrange for employers, research organisations and local universities to showcase and discuss their work, providing open engagement and information to students.

Cambridge is one of 13 Leaders recognised out of 121 signatories to the Concordat.

Commenting on the award, Professor Chris Abell, Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research at the University of Cambridge, said: “I am proud that Cambridge has been recognised as a Leader in Openness. I believe our institution has a moral obligation to be open about the important research that takes place in its laboratories.

“Our University has been at the forefront of important discoveries in biology and in human and veterinary medicine, and much of this work would not have been possible without the use of animals.  However, we are not complacent in our use of animals in research and continuously apply the principles of replacement, reduction and refinement in all of this work.”

Dr Martin Vinnell, the University’s Establishment Licence Holder, who is responsible for overseeing its animal research, added: “This award recognises the willingness of all those involved in research here using animals to engage with the public. Our researchers have openly talked about their work using animals to the media and at the Cambridge Science Festival, while the commitment to openness and transparency means that we aim to proactively put as much information as possible on our webpages rather than only responding to requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

“The use of animals in research should not be viewed as a right – and we must therefore ensure the public is well informed of both what we do, and why we do it, whether or not they support this type of research.”

In 2017, researchers at Cambridge carried out just under 160,000 procedures, the vast majority involving mice and zebrafish. The University publishes all of its animal statistics on its website. Last year, the University also began publishing information on the severity of its procedures.

Research involving animals plays an important part in helping researchers understand human biology, and in particular how diseases occur and in the development of new treatments. Without the use of animals, we would not have many of the modern medicines, antibiotics, vaccines and surgical techniques that we take for granted in both human and veterinary medicine.

Some of the important and pioneering work for which Cambridge is best known and which has led to major improvements in people’s lives was only possible using animals, from the development of IVF techniques through to human monoclonal antibodies.

The University places good welfare at the centre of all its animal research and aims to meet the highest standards: good animal welfare and good science go hand-in-hand. Although animals will play a role in biomedical research for the foreseeable future, researchers at the University strive to use only the number of animals necessary to obtain sound scientific data. Our researchers are actively looking at techniques to refine their experiments and help reduce – and ultimately replace – their use.

The study, led by scientists at the University of Cambridge, suggests that matching mitochondrial DNA to nuclear DNA could be important when selecting potential donors for the recently-approved mitochondrial donation treatment, in order to prevent potential health problems later in life.

Almost all of the DNA that makes up the human genome – the body’s ‘blueprint’ – is contained within our cells’ nuclei. This is referred to as ‘nuclear DNA’. Among other functions, nuclear DNA codes for the characteristics that make us individual as well as for the proteins that do most of the work in our bodies.

Our cells also contain mitochondria, often referred to as the ‘batteries’ that provide the energy for our cells to function. Each of these mitochondria is coded for by a tiny amount of ‘mitochondrial DNA’. Mitochondrial DNA makes up only 0.1% of the overall human genome and is passed down exclusively from mother to child.

Until now, scientists had thought that mitochondria were readily interchangeable, serving only to power our bodies, and so an individual’s mitochondria could be replaced with those from a donor with no consequences. However, in the first major population study to use data from the UK-wide 100,000 Genomes Project and its National Institute for Health Research (NIHR)-funded pilot project, researchers compared mitochondrial and nuclear DNA from tens of thousands of people and found that mitochondria may be fine-tuned to the nucleus.

The researchers studied over 1,500 mother-child pairs and found that just under a half (45%) of individuals within these pairs harboured mutations affecting at least 1% of their mitochondrial DNA. Mutations in certain parts of mitochondrial DNA were more likely to be transmitted, such as those in the so-called D-loop region, which controls how mitochondrial DNA copies itself. Conversely, mutations in other parts of mitochondrial DNA were more likely to be suppressed, such as the code for how mitochondria produce their own proteins.

“Children inherit their DNA exclusively from their mother and we wanted to see how this explains the origins of mitochondrial diseases,” says first author Dr Wei Wei from the Medical Research Council (MRC) Mitochondrial Biology Unit and Department of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Cambridge. “What we found was that there is some kind of selection taking place when mitochondrial DNA is transmitted down a generation, allowing some mutations to be passed on and others to be blocked.”

Genetic variants that had previously been observed around the world were more likely to be passed on than completely new ones, the team found. This implies that there is a mechanism that filters the mitochondrial DNA when it is being passed down from mother to child, influencing the likelihood that a particular variant becomes established in the human population.

DNA can give us clues to our ancestry – for example, the pattern of genetic variants in an individual’s DNA might be more common in people of European ancestry than it is in people of Asian ancestry. In most people, genetic variants in both our nuclear and mitochondrial DNA come from the same part of the world. However, in around one in 40 people in the UK sample, the mitochondrial DNA and nuclear DNA did not have matching ancestries. For example, the nuclear DNA could be European whilst the mitochondrial DNA is Asian. This happens because at some point in the maternal lineage, there was a mother from a different ethnic background.

“As mitochondrial DNA has a much higher mutation rate than nuclear DNA, mutation of the mitochondrial genome is a common occurrence. We wanted to study the natural selective forces determining the fate of these mutations,” says Dr Ernest Turro of the Department of Haematology and the MRC Biostatistics Unit, and one of the senior authors of this study.

“Our statistical analysis suggests that, in people with differing mitochondrial and nuclear ancestries, recent mitochondrial mutations are more likely to have been seen before in populations with the same nuclear ancestry than the same mitochondrial ancestry.”

Crucially, these results suggest that changes in our mitochondrial DNA are shaped by our nuclear DNA.

“This discovery shows us that there’s a subtle relationship between the mitochondria and nuclei in our cells that we’re only just starting to understand,” says Professor Patrick Chinnery, Head of the Department of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Cambridge and Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow. “What this suggests to us is that swapping mitochondria might not be as straightforward as just changing the batteries in a device.”

The evidence mirrors that from previous studies in fruit flies and mice, where a mismatch between their mitochondrial and nuclear DNA affected how long the organisms lived for and caused cardiovascular and metabolic complications later in life (diseases in humans that might include heart disease and type 2 diabetes, for example).

The findings could have implications for mitochondrial donation treatment (also known as mitochondrial replacement therapy), says Professor Chinnery, who previously worked with the team at Newcastle University pioneering this treatment. This technique is now licenced for use in the UK to prevent the transmission from mother to child of potentially devastating mitochondrial diseases. It involves substituting a mother’s nuclear DNA into a donor egg while retaining the donor’s mitochondria.

“Mitochondrial replacement therapy is an important new treatment to enable mothers to have children free from terrible mitochondrial diseases, which arise because of severe mutations in mitochondrial DNA,” says Professor Chinnery.

“Our work suggests we’ll need to look carefully at this new treatment to make sure it does not cause unexpected health problems further down the line. It may mean that doctors will need to match the nuclear genome and mitochondrial genome of mitochondrial donors, similar to an organ transplant.”

The team has now begun work looking at those people whose mitochondrial DNA does not match their nuclear DNA to see if this mismatch increases the likelihood that they will be affected by health problems later in life.

The research is the first major population study to arise from data collected as part of the 100,000 Genomes Project, which collects genetic data from patients through the NHS with the aim of transforming the way people are cared for and providing a major new resource for medical research. Pilot data for the study was collected through the NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre.

“The involvement of the 100,00 Genomes Project in major discoveries demonstrates the importance of large-scale, carefully collected datasets with whole genome sequences, which provide new biological insights and pave the way for major healthcare transformations,” says Professor Mark Caulfield, Chief Executive of Genomics England and Co-Director of the William Harvey Research Institute at Queen Mary University of London.

The research was largely funded by the NIHR, Wellcome, the MRC and Genomics England.

Reference
Wei, W et al. Germline selection shapes human mitochondrial DNA diversity. Science; 24 May 2019; DOI: 10.1126/science.aau6520

The study highlights the potential of new technologies to help diagnose and monitor conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, which affects more than 525,000 people in the UK. 

In 2014, Professor John O’Keefe of UCL was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for ‘discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain’. Essentially, this means that the brain contains a mental ‘satnav’ of where we are, where we have been, and how to find our way around.

A key component of this internal satnav is a region of the brain known as the entorhinal cortex. This is one of the first regions to be damaged in Alzheimer’s disease, which may explain why ‘getting lost’ is one of the first symptoms of the disease. However, the pen-and-paper cognitive tests used in clinic to diagnose the condition are unable to test for navigation difficulties.

In collaboration with Professor Neil Burgess at UCL, a team of scientists at the Department of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Cambridge led by Dr Dennis Chan, previously Professor O’Keefe’s PhD student, developed and trialled a VR navigation test in patients at risk of developing dementia. The results of their study are published today in the journal Brain.

In the test, a patient dons a VR headset and undertakes a test of navigation while walking within a simulated environment. Successful completion of the task requires intact functioning of the entorhinal cortex, so Dr Chan’s team hypothesised that patients with early Alzheimer’s disease would be disproportionately affected on the test.

The team recruited 45 patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) from the Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Trust Mild Cognitive Impairment and Memory Clinics. Patients with MCI typically exhibit memory impairment, but while MCI can indicate early Alzheimer’s, it can also be caused by other conditions such as anxiety and even normal aging. As such, establishing the cause of MCI is crucial for determining whether affected individuals are at risk of developing dementia in the future.  

The researchers took samples of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) to look for biomarkers of underlying Alzheimer’s disease in their MCI patients, with 12 testing positive. The researchers also recruited 41 age-matched healthy controls for comparison.

All of the patients with MCI performed worse on the navigation task than the healthy controls. However, the study yielded two crucial additional observations. First, MCI patients with positive CSF markers – indicating the presence of Alzheimer’s disease, thus placing them at risk of developing dementia – performed worse than those with negative CSF markers at low risk of future dementia.

Secondly, the VR navigation task was better at differentiating between these low and high risk MCI patients than a battery of currently-used tests considered to be gold standard for the diagnosis of early Alzheimer’s.

“These results suggest a VR test of navigation may be better at identifying early Alzheimer’s disease than tests we use at present in clinic and in research studies,” says Dr Chan.

VR could also help clinical trials of future drugs aimed at slowing down, or even halting, progression of Alzheimer’s disease. Currently, the first stage of drug trials involves testing in animals, typically mouse models of the disease. To determine whether treatments are effective, scientists study their effect on navigation using tests such as a water maze, where mice have to learn the location of hidden platforms beneath the surface of opaque pools of water. If new drugs are found to improve memory on this task, they proceed to trials in human subjects, but using word and picture memory tests. This lack of comparability of memory tests between animal models and human participants represents a major problem for current clinical trials.

“The brain cells underpinning navigation are similar in rodents and humans, so testing navigation may allow us to overcome this roadblock in Alzheimer’s drug trials and help translate basic science discoveries into clinical use,” says Dr Chan. “We’ve wanted to do this for years, but it’s only now that VR technology has evolved to the point that we can readily undertake this research in patients.”

In fact, Dr Chan believes technology could play a crucial role in diagnosing and monitoring Alzheimer’s disease. He is working with Professor Cecilia Mascolo at Cambridge’s Centre for Mobile, Wearable Systems and Augmented Intelligence to develop apps for detecting the disease and monitoring its progression. These apps would run on smartphones and smartwatches. As well as looking for changes in how we navigate, the apps will track changes in other everyday activities such as sleep and communication.

“We know that Alzheimer’s affects the brain long before symptoms become apparent,” says Dr Chan. “We’re getting to the point where everyday tech can be used to spot the warning signs of the disease well before we become aware of them.

“We live in a world where mobile devices are almost ubiquitous, and so app-based approaches have the potential to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease at minimal extra cost and at a scale way beyond that of brain scanning and other current diagnostic approaches.”

The VR research was funded by the Medical Research Council and the Cambridge NIHR Biomedical Research Centre. The app-based research is funded by the Wellcome, the European Research Council and the Alan Turing Institute.

Reference
Howett, D, Castegnaro, A, et al. Differentiation of mild cognitive impairment using an entorhinal cortex based test of VR navigation. Brain; 28 May 2019; DOI: 10.1093/brain/awz116

Why, when presented with an apple or an ice cream, do we often go for the unhealthy option when our rational mind is telling us that the apple is the better choice? And how can we overcome the underlying automatic and habitual processes that often undermine healthy behaviours and drive the spread of illnesses such as diabetes and heart disease?

For Professor Paul Fletcher, Bernard Wolfe Professor of Health Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, the answer lies in understanding that our decision-making processes are not entirely rational, or even conscious, and so approaches that appeal only to logic may well not be successful.

Professor Fletcher will be speaking about the neuroscience of human behaviour as part of this year’s Cambridge Series at the Hay Festival on 31st May. His talk, Apples or ice-cream? Who - or what - determines what we eat?, will discuss the external stimuli - availability and promotion of cheap sweet, salty and fatty food - and internal processes - including stress and anxiety - that act against rational decision-making.

“The idea that the brain is a puppet master is often wrong,” says Fletcher, who is based at the Cambridge University Department of Psychiatry. “We face a lot of other influences, from our bodies, from the environment, many of which are often below the conscious level. Time and again we act in ways that go against our long-term goals, going for more immediate rewards. But most attempts to mitigate this tendency are largely based on education and information which play to the rational mind.”

He says that those environmental stimuli include brands, which often become conflated with rewards. “Brands send out intrinsically powerful stimuli that generate pleasure in themselves,” he says. He mentions experiments in the US on young children which show that the mere presence of a McDonald’s logo on healthier food “seems to shift the value of those foods”, increasing liking for them.

In the past Professor Fletcher’s research has focused on psychosis, but to understand psychosis and psychotic symptoms such as delusions and hallucinations, he says we need to understand the brain basis for how associations are made and how we come to think of particular environmental stimuli as important.

Mitigating health-harming decisions

In his Hay talk he will outline the complexity of the problems faced by those seeking to tackle the problems associated with unhealthy eating. “The challenge is that we are living in a world that is populated by stimuli that can subtly but powerfully shape our behaviours. Given a lot of our drives towards consumption act at a very immediate, unreflective level it is likely that the best approaches to mitigating health-harming decisions and behaviours have to work on that level,” he says.

Some examples are research on plate and glass sizes, moves to replace sweets at checkouts with healthier foods and research on the impact of hormone levels on the brain’s reward system.

Another crucial factor in determining what and how much we eat comes from signals we are receiving from our bodies, says Professor Fletcher. These can be metabolic, hormonal and neural. Exploring how these signals interact with stimuli in the world is going to be an important part of a comprehensive understanding what drives behaviours, he states.

For Professor Fletcher there is no one panacea to tackling the problem of unhealthy eating, but he says it is clear that it cannot be left to individuals or food and drink manufacturers. Moralising and naming and shaming won’t work either and education alone is not enough. He says “strenuous legislation” is likely to be needed which is linked to a long term plan to tackle behaviour-related disease.  

That means developing a deeper understanding of the neurobiological and psychological underpinnings of decision-making and behaviour. Professor Fletcher adds: “A great deal of psychological understanding and skill has gone into encouraging us to consume unhealthy foods. We need to apply the same levels of skill to help people resist these powerful factors.”

BBC Radio 3 have selected a new orchestral composition by the Music Faculty’s Reader in Composition, Richard Causton to represent the UK at the annual International Rostrum of Composers to be broadcast across 27 countries worldwide. The Rostrum is run in association with UNESCO and the International Music Council.

The piece - Ik zeg: NU  - was based on a story of survival. Three quarters of the World War II Jewish population of the Netherlands were killed by the Nazis. One of some 16,000 Dutch Jews to survive the war was a relative of Richard Causton, Salomon Van Son (now 98 years old), who survived Nazi persecution hidden in a hay barn for almost three years. The farmer who hid him was interrogated by the Germans repeatedly but never revealed where he was. This work is based on Salomon Van Son’s memoir about his experience.
 
Richard explained, “The title, Ik zeg: NU (‘I say: Now’) comes from Sal van Son’s ten-year-old great nephew, who remarked philosophically, ‘I say now now, and a moment later it is already history’.  
 
“This child-like observation of how time passes seemed a brilliant description for music and how we experience it; but beyond that, it also describes life itself. We can never hang on to the moment, it is always slipping through our fingers. So my piece is about the passage of time and a homage to my 98-year-old relative, whose book traces the history of his Jewish family through four centuries, including his own years in hiding from the Nazis in occupied Holland during the Second World War.”
 
Richard constructed a new set of specially-tuned tubular bells especially for use in the piece, and together with the sounds of detuned vibraphones, a prepared piano and accordion, their haunting, resonant sound evokes the complex and elusive nature of passing time. The piece was commissioned by the BBC for the BBC Symphony Orchestra and was first performed at the Barbican Hall, London, in January to huge critical acclaim.
 
“Richard Causton's new work for the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Ik zeg: NU, holds two timeframes in play simultaneously, and brilliantly.” (The Guardian)
 
“Now-ness and then-ness move in parallel in this spacious, beautifully constructed work.” (The Times)
 
“It was a fabulously ear-tickling display of compositional skill, which every now and then took on a poetic resonance.” (The Daily Telegraph) 

Image: Richard Causton pencil score of Ik zeg: NU

Delivered in partnership by the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL) and Unilever, the Awards have already reached over 5,800 inspiring young sustainability entrepreneurs and their organisations over five years, providing tailored support and funding to 37 winners to help them achieve scale for impact. Previous entries have ranged from providing lifesaving supplies to deliver healthy babies, to machine learning technology that prevents food waste.

The world’s problems will only be solved with the ideas and talents of a new generation of leaders who are challenging business as usual. The Awards are an opportunity to support, inspire, reward and collaborate with these leaders; innovators who are the future of sustainability.

The process and prizes

This year, the Awards will recognise initiatives in three categories:

• Improve people’s health and wellbeing
• Improve the health of the planet
• Contribute to a fairer and more socially inclusive world

Through an intensive selection process overseen by CISL, eight winners are selected from thousands of entries. These eight winners are flown to Cambridge for an all-inclusive accelerator programme with CISL, delivered by experts in sustainability, entrepreneurship and scaling for impact. The winners share in €100,000, along with tailored one-to-one mentoring for 12 months.

They also gain the opportunity to pitch to a final judging panel to win the overall prize, HRH The Prince of Wales Young Sustainability Entrepreneur Prize, which includes €50,000 cash.

Previous winners have gone on to:

• Win Forbes’ 30 Under 30 recognition and Acumen fellowships
• Receive visits from Unilever CEO Paul Polman and be mentioned in speeches by Barack Obama
• Feature on Sky News, CNN, Fast Company, and more
• Establish partnerships with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank, Unilever, USAID, and more
• Rapidly scale their business and impact

The Awards are open now until 30 June. 

If you know a brilliant young sustainability entrepreneur who deserves to be recognised make sure to tell them about the awards. Or if this sounds like you, then submit your application before 30 June to be in the running.

Originally published on the CISL website.

The patterns mirror inequalities seen in levels of childhood obesity, suggesting a need for a greater focus on the promotion of vigorous physical activity, particularly for those children from more disadvantaged backgrounds.

Over the past four decades, the global prevalence of childhood obesity has increased tenfold. Obesity in childhood is associated with illness and early death in adulthood, so tackling childhood obesity is increasingly a public health priority for governments.

There are also widening inequalities in obesity prevalence. By age 11, UK children from disadvantaged families are three times as likely to be obese than more advantaged children. There are also stark ethnic and racial differences in levels of childhood obesity, with higher rates of obesity within certain ethnic minorities including children from Black African, Black Caribbean, Pakistani and Bangladeshi backgrounds.

Evidence suggests that more vigorous intensity activity – such as running or swimming – is more strongly linked with reduced waist circumference and body fat than moderate intensity activity. International guidelines say that children should engage in moderate-to-vigorous intensity activity for at least 60 minutes per day.

“When we look at overall physical activity we don’t see clear differences between children from different backgrounds despite clear inequalities in obesity,” says Rebecca Love, a Gates Cambridge Scholar at the Centre for Diet and Activity Research (CEDAR) in the MRC Epidemiology Unit at the, University of Cambridge. “To investigate this further, we looked at whether overall physical activity was hiding inequalities in the intensity with which that activity is performed that might explain these patterns.”

The researchers studied data from almost 5,200 children aged 7 years who were part of the Millennium Cohort Study, a longitudinal study of children born in the UK between September 2000 and January 2002. The children were given accelerometers and their activity measured for a minimum of ten hours for three days. The results are published today in the journal BMJ Open.

The team found that the higher the level of education attained by the mother, the more minutes of vigorous intensity activity her child was likely to have, accounting for time spent in moderate physical activity. Children with mothers with high levels of education accumulated three minutes more vigorous activity per day then those with low levels of education. Similarly, the team found significantly more time spent in vigorous intensity activity incrementally with increasing household income.

Intensity differences were also apparent by ethnicity. White British children perform on average more than three minutes more daily vigorous physical activity in comparison to children from Pakistani and Bangladeshi backgrounds. Children from ‘other ethnic groups’ also accumulated 2.2 minutes fewer daily vigorous intensity activity overall.

It is suggested these differences are relevant on a population level and changes to reduce differences in vigorous physical activity could have population implications for inequalities in adiposity in UK children. The differences were consistent in both boys and girls.

“There are clear differences in the amount of vigorous physical activity a child does depending on their socioeconomic and ethnic background,” explains senior author Dr Esther van Sluijs. “Although individually, these differences are small, at a population level they are likely to make a difference. Changes to reduce existing gaps in vigorous intensity activity could help reduce existing inequalities in levels of obesity in children.”

The team say that there are many factors that might explain the differences, including access to or the cost of participating in sports activities, and a parent working longer, inconsistent work hours within a low-income job. There may also be differences in home and family support for physical activity between ethnic groups.

“Children from different backgrounds can face a number of barriers preventing them from participating in sports or other types of vigorous physical activity,” adds Dr Jean Adams. “We need to find more ways to provide opportunities for all children to get involved in vigorous activity.”

The research was funded by the British Heart Foundation, Department of Health, Economic and Social Research Council, Medical Research Council, and Wellcome. Additional support was provided by Gates Cambridge.

Reference
Love, R et al. Socio-economic and ethnic differences in children’s vigorous intensity physical activity: a cross-sectional analysis of the UK Millennium Cohort Study. BMJ Open; 28 May 2019

The Neptunian Desert is a region close to stars where large planets with their own atmospheres, similar to Neptune, are not expected to survive, since the strong irradiation from the star would cause any gaseous atmosphere to evaporate, leaving just a rocky core behind.

However, NGTS-4b, nicknamed the ‘Forbidden Planet’, still has its atmosphere intact and is the first exoplanet of its kind to be found in the Neptunian Desert. The results are reported in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

NGTS-4b is smaller than Neptune and three times the size of Earth. It is dense and hot, with a mass 20 times that of Earth and an average surface temperature of 1000 degrees Celsius. The planet orbits its star very closely, completing a full orbit in just 1.3 days.

The planet was identified using the Next-Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) observing facility at the European Southern Observatory's Paranal Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert. NGTS is a collaboration between the Universities of Warwick, Leicester, Cambridge, and Queen’s University Belfast, together with Observatoire de Genève, DLR Berlin and Universidad de Chile.

When looking for new planets, astronomers use facilities such as NGTS to look for a dip in the light of a star, which occurs when an orbiting planet passes in front of it, blocking some of the light. Usually, dips of 1% and more can be picked up by ground-based searches, but the NGTS telescopes can pick up a dip of just 0.2%.

This sensitivity means that astronomers can now detect a wider range of exoplanets: those with diameters between two and eight times that of Earth, in between the smaller rocky planets and gas giants.

“This is a very rare planet, and it’s the first time that such a small planet has been detected by a wide-field ground-based telescope,” said co-author Dr Ed Gillen from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, who led the data analysis of the system to determine the mass, radius and orbit of NGTS-4b.

The researchers believe the planet may have moved into the Neptunian Desert recently, in the last one million years, or it was very big and the atmosphere is still evaporating.

“This planet must be tough - it is right in the zone where we expected Neptune-sized planets could not survive,” said lead Dr Richard West from the University of Warwick. “It is truly remarkable that we found a transiting planet via a star dimming by less than 0.2% - this has never been done before by telescopes on the ground, and it was great to find after working on this project for a year.

“We are now searching our data for other similar planets to help us understand how dry this Neptunian Desert is, or whether it is greener than was once thought,” said Gillen.

The research was supported in part by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council.

Reference:
Richard G. West et al. ‘NGTS-4b: A sub-Neptune Transiting in the Desert.’ Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (in press). DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stz1084

Adapted from a University of Warwick press release.

The study, published today in the journal Globalization and Health, analysed over 17,000 pages of emails obtained through Freedom of Information requests made between 2015 and 2018. The documents captured exchanges between academics at US universities and senior figures at a non-profit organisation called the International Life Science Institute, or ILSI.

Comprising of 18 bodies, each of which covers a specific topic or part of the globe, ILSI has always maintained its independence and scientific rigour, despite being funded by multinational corporations such as Nestle, General Mills, Mars Inc, Monsanto, and Coca-Cola.

Founded by former Coca-Cola senior vice president Alex Malaspina in 1978, ILSI states on its website that none of its bodies “conduct lobbying activities or make policy recommendations”. As a non-profit organisation, ILSI is currently exempt from taxation under US Internal Revenue codes. 

However, researchers from the University of Cambridge, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University of Bocconi, and US Right to Know, found emails explicitly discussing tactics for countering public health policies around sugar reduction, as “[T]his threat to our business is serious”. 

These include exchanges with an epidemiology professor at the University of Washington, as well as the US Centre for Disease Control’s then director of heart disease and stroke prevention, all strategising how best to approach the World Health Organisation’s then Director-General Dr Margaret Chan, to shift her position on sugar-sweetened products.

“It has been previously suggested that the International Life Sciences Institute is little more than a pseudo-scientific front group for some of the biggest multinational food and drink corporations globally,” said the study lead author Dr Sarah Steele, a researcher at Cambridge’s Department of Politics and International Studies. 

“Our findings add to the evidence that this non-profit organisation has been used by its corporate backers for years to counter public health policies. We contend that the International Life Sciences Institute should be regarded as an industry group – a private body – and regulated as such, not as a body acting for the greater good.”

In one email, Malaspina, who also served as long-time president at ILSI, described new US guidelines bolstering child and adult education on limiting sugar intake as a “real disaster!”. He writes: “We have to consider how to become ready to mount a strong defence”. Suzanne Harris, then executive director of ILSI, was among the email’s recipients.

James Hill, then director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Colorado, was involved in a separate exchange on the issue of defending industry from the health consequences of its products. Hill argues for greater funding for ILSI from industry as part of “dealing aggressively with this issue”. He writes that, if companies keep their heads down, “our opponents will win and we will all lose”.  

The FOI emails also suggest ILSI constructs campaigns favourable to artificial sweeteners. Emails reveal Malaspina passing on praise from another former ILSI President to a former Coca-Cola employee and the Professor, describing both as “the architects to plan and execute the studies showing saccharine is not a carcinogen”, resulting in the reversal of many government bans.

The FOI responses suggest that ILSI operates strategically with other industry-funded entities, including IFIC, a science communication non-profit organisation. “IFIC is a kind of sister entity to ILSI,” writes Malaspina. “ILSI generates the scientific facts and IFIC communicates them to the media and public.”

“The emails suggest that both ILSI and IFIC act to counter unfavourable policies and positions, while promoting industry-favourable science under a disguised front, including to the media,” said Steele.

In fact, the emails suggest ILSI considers sanctioning its own regional subsidiaries when they fail to promote the agreed industry-favourable messaging. Correspondence reveals discussion of suspending ILSI’s Mexico branch from the parent organisation after soft drink taxation was debated at a conference it sponsored. Mexico has one of the highest adult obesity rates in the world.

Email conversations between Malaspina and the CDC’s Barbara Bowman are open about the need to get the WHO to “start working with ILSI again” and to take into account “lifestyle changes” as well as sugary foods when combatting obesity.

Further exchanges between Malaspina and Washington Professor Adam Drewnowski support ILSI’s role in this. Drewnowski writes of Dr Chan that “we ought to start with some issue where ILSI and WHO are in agreement” to help “get her to the table”.

In a further email, Malaspina points out that he had meetings with the two previous heads of the WHO, going back to the mid-90s, and that if they do not start a dialogue with Dr Chan “she will continue to blast us with significant negative consequences on a global basis”. 

The tide has begun to turn against ILSI in recent years. The WHO quietly ended their “special relations” with ILSI in 2017, and ILSI’s links to the European Food Safety Authority were the subject of enquiry at the European Parliament. The CDC’s Bowman retired in 2016, in the wake of revelations about her close ties with ILSI. Last year, long-time ILSI funder Mars Inc. stopped supporting the organisation. Much of the study’s correspondence precedes these events.

“It becomes clear from the emails and forwards that ILSI is seen as central to pushing pro-industry content to international organisations to support approaches that uncouple sugary foods and obesity,” added Steele.

“Our analysis of ILSI serves as a caution to those involved in global health governance to be wary of putatively independent research groups, and to practice due diligence before relying upon their funded studies.”

Reference
Are industry-funded charities promoting “advocacy-led studies” or “evidence-based science”?: a case study of the International Life Sciences Institute. Globalization and Health; 3 June 2019; DOI: 10.1186/s12992-019-0478-6