New research published today in the journal Parasitology shows how the prehistoric inhabitants of a settlement in the freshwater marshes of eastern England were infected by intestinal worms caught from foraging for food in the lakes and waterways around their homes.

The Bronze Age settlement at Must Farm, located near what is now the fenland city of Peterborough, consisted of wooden houses built on stilts above the water. Wooden causeways connected islands in the marsh, and dugout canoes were used to travel along water channels.  

The village burnt down in a catastrophic fire around 3,000 years ago, with artefacts from the houses preserved in mud below the waterline, including food, cloth, and jewellery. The site has been called “Britain’s Pompeii”.

Also preserved in the surrounding mud were waterlogged “coprolites” – pieces of human faeces – that have now been collected and analysed by archaeologists at the University of Cambridge. They used microscopy techniques to detect ancient parasite eggs within the faeces and surrounding sediment.

Very little is known about the intestinal diseases of Bronze Age Britain. The one previous study, of a farming village in Somerset, found evidence of roundworm and whipworm: parasites spread through contamination of food by human faeces.

The ancient excrement of the Anglian marshes tells a different story. “We have found the earliest evidence for fish tapeworm, Echinostoma worm, and giant kidney worm in Britain,” said study lead author Dr Piers Mitchell of Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology.

“These parasites are spread by eating raw aquatic animals such as fish, amphibians and molluscs. Living over slow-moving water may have protected the inhabitants from some parasites, but put them at risk of others if they ate fish or frogs.”

Disposal of human and animal waste into the water around the settlement likely prevented direct faecal pollution of the fenlanders’ food, and so prevented infection from roundworm – the eggs of which have been found at Bronze Age sites across Europe.

However, water in the fens would have been quite stagnant, due in part to thick reed beds, leaving waste accumulating in the surrounding channels. Researchers say this likely provided fertile ground for other parasites to infect local wildlife, which – if eaten raw or poorly cooked – then spread to village residents.

“The dumping of excrement into the freshwater channel in which the settlement was built, and consumption of aquatic organisms from the surrounding area, created an ideal nexus for infection with various species of intestinal parasite,” said study first author Marissa Ledger, also from Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology. 

Fish tapeworms can reach 10m in length, and live coiled up in the intestines. Heavy infection can lead to anaemia. Giant kidney worms can reach up to a metre in length. They gradually destroy the organ as they become larger, leading to kidney failure. Echinostoma worms are much smaller, up to 1cm in length. Heavy infection can lead to inflammation of the intestinal lining.

“As writing was only introduced to Britain centuries later with the Romans, these people were unable to record what happened to them during their lives. This research enables us for the first time to clearly understand the infectious diseases experienced by prehistoric people living in the Fens,” said Ledger.

The Cambridge team worked with colleagues at the University of Bristol’s Organic Chemistry Unit to determine whether coprolites excavated from around the houses were human or animal. While some were human, others were from dogs.

“Both humans and dogs were infected by similar parasitic worms, which suggests the humans were sharing their food or leftovers with their dogs,” said Ledger.

Other parasites that infect animals were also found at the site, including pig whipworm and Capillaria worm. It is thought that they originated from the butchery and consumption of the intestines of farmed or hunted animals, but probably did not cause humans any harm.

The researchers compared their latest data with previous studies on ancient parasites from both the Bronze Age and Neolithic. Must Farm tallies with the trend of fewer parasite species found at Bronze Age compared with Neolithic sites.

“Our study fits with the broader pattern of a shrinking of the parasite ecosystem through time,” said Mitchell. “Changes in diet, sanitation and human-animal relationships over millennia have affected rates of parasitic infection.” Although he points out that infections from the fish tapeworm found at Must Farm have seen a recent resurgence due to the popularity of sushi, smoked salmon and ceviche.

“We now need to study other sites in prehistoric Britain where people lived different lifestyles, to help us understand how our ancestors’ way of life affected their risk of developing infectious diseases,” added Mitchell.

The Must Farm site is an exceptionally well-preserved settlement dating to 900-800 BC (the Late Bronze Age). The site was first discovered in 1999. The Cambridge Archaeological Unit carried out a major excavation between 2015 and 2016, funded by Historic England and Forterra Building Products Ltd.

‘The Stormzy Scholarship’ studentship, announced in August 2018, is a scheme for University of Cambridge students, which will see British black students provided with financial support during their degree courses. 

It will cover the full cost of four tuition fees (2 students in 2018 and 2 students in 2019) and a maintenance grant for up to four years of any undergraduate course. Like last year, this year's studentships will be self-funded by Stormzy, however he hopes to engage more support from additional investors to become part of the scheme. 

The first two students funded under the scheme have now completed their first year. Their identities have been protected to enable them to settle into University life without any additional pressures being placed upon them. Stormzy met with them both last year and has continued to take a great interest in their studies. The two students are expected to graduate in 2021.

A showman like no other, double BRIT-Award winner Stormzy’s remarkable ascent has been accompanied by his honest and relatable character. A true spokesman of black empowerment and social activism, Stormzy is one of the UK’s most inspiring young men who has consistently stood up for people from all areas of life, encouraging his fans and listeners alike to speak openly about their beliefs, vote and fight for their rights.

In 2018, the number of black students admitted reached 61, an all-time high. But at just over 2% of the total intake, the University recognises it is still too few. The University works with Target Oxbridge on a flagship programme to raise aspirations among young black students, providing them with advice on how to apply to both Cambridge and Oxford Universities. This year saw a significant increase in the number of students who registered for the programme. The University also supports a number of access schemes run by its African-Caribbean Society. Students who are members of that Society often act as mentors for applicants. 

Around twenty-five per cent of all students at Cambridge come from a BAME background. The University is committed to doing more to encourage young black students to aspire to the top grades to apply. Stormzy’s support, it believes, can help inspire new generations of black students. The University is also determined to ensure black students feel supported at Cambridge. Many of the Colleges host BAME-themed conferences and the University has helped a number of young black student vloggers launch their online profiles.

To be eligible for a 2019 entry ‘The Stormzy Scholarship’ applicants must be of black heritage and be holding an unconditional offer. Applications must be submitted no later than Sunday 1 September 2019. The students will be selected from a list of applicants by a panel of University staff. The University encourages all students with high academic potential and enthusiasm for their chosen subject to apply. 

For more details on eligibility criteria, follow this link: www.cam.ac.uk/stormzyscholarship

The UCAS system of Adjustment provides students with a second chance of getting on to their first-choice course.

Adjustment is an optional process that allows students who have met and exceeded the terms of the conditional offer that they are holding to refer themselves for consideration by another institution.

Seventy one students from under-represented backgrounds who referred themselves for consideration on A-level results day (15 August) were offered places on courses from English to Computer Science, and 67 accepted. Seventeen medics got places through Adjustment, while others will study Economics, Engineering, Law and Natural Sciences.

Students took to social media to express their delight at earning a place, including Selina B who tweeted: "soooo I’m #GoingToCambridge now ?????? WHat is LIFE. SEE U SOON".

Dr Sam Lucy, Director of Admissions for the Cambridge Colleges, said: “When we announced the Adjustment scheme, we received many emails from students saying the second chance of a place at Cambridge was inspiring them to work even harder to achieve the best A-level results they could.

"It is wonderful to see that so many who may not have managed to show their full academic potential during the main Admissions round have gone on to excel at A-level due to their hard work and determination.”

She added: “We are delighted to have been able to offer so many of them a place at Cambridge in the pilot year of Adjustment and hope that more disadvantaged students will make an application to Cambridge in future years with the knowledge that this route will also be available to them.”

Each student who applied under the Adjustment scheme had to meet at least three criteria (known as ‘contextual flags’) demonstrating they have not had the same educational advantages as others.

Competition for Cambridge’s approximate 3,500 undergraduate places grows fiercer each year, with more than 14,000 students who apply not being made an offer.

Prevailing economic research anticipates the burden of climate change falling on hot or poor nations. Some predict that cooler or wealthier economies will be unaffected or even see benefits from higher temperatures. 

However, a new study co-authored by researchers from the University of Cambridge suggests that virtually all countries – whether rich or poor, hot or cold – will suffer economically by 2100 if the current trajectory of carbon emissions is maintained.

In fact, the research published on Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that – on average – richer, colder countries would lose as much income to climate change as poorer, hotter nations. 

Under a “business as usual” emissions scenario, average global temperatures are projected to rise over four degrees Celsius by the end of the century. This would cause the United States to lose 10.5% of its GDP by 2100 – a substantial economic hit, say researchers.

Canada, which some claim will benefit economically from temperature increase, would lose over 13% of its income by 2100. The research shows that keeping to the Paris Agreement limits the losses of both North American nations to under 2% of GDP. 

Researchers say that 7% of global GDP is likely to vanish by the end of the century unless “action is taken”. Japan, India and New Zealand lose 10% of their income. Switzerland is likely to have an economy that is 12% smaller by 2100. Russia would be shorn of 9% of its GDP, with the UK down by 4%.     

The team behind the study argue that it isn’t just about the number on the thermometer, but the deviation of temperature from its “historical norm” – the climate conditions to which countries are accustomed – that determines the size of income loss. 

“Whether cold snaps or heat waves, droughts, floods or natural disasters, all deviations of climate conditions from their historical norms have adverse economic effects,” said Dr Kamiar Mohaddes, a co-author of the study from Cambridge’s Faculty of Economics.

“Without mitigation and adaptation policies, many countries are likely to experience sustained temperature increases relative to historical norms and suffer major income losses as a result. This holds for both rich and poor countries as well as hot and cold regions.”

“Canada is warming up twice as fast as rest of the world. There are risks to its physical infrastructure, coastal and northern communities, human health and wellness, ecosystems and fisheries – all of which has a cost,” he said. 

“The UK recently had its hottest day on record. Train tracks buckled, roads melted, and thousands were stranded because it was out of the norm. Such events take an economic toll, and will only become more frequent and severe without policies to address the threats of climate change.”

Mohaddes worked on the study with Cambridge PhD candidate Ryan Ng, as well as colleagues from the University of Southern California, USA, Johns Hopkins University, USA, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, and the International Monetary Fund.

Using data from 174 countries dating back to 1960, the research team estimated the link between above-the-norm temperatures and income levels. They then modelled the income effects under a continuation of business-as-usual emissions as well as a scenario in which the world “gets its act together” and holds to the Paris Agreement.

Researchers acknowledge that economies will adapt to changing climates, but argue that their modelling work shows adaptation alone will not be enough.  

The scientific consensus suggests that adapting to climate change takes an average of 30 years, as everything from infrastructure to cultural practice slowly adjusts. But even if this adjustment speeds up to just 20 years, the United States still loses almost 7% of its economy, with over 4% of global GDP gone by the century’s end. 

The team also undertook a more focused approach to the U.S. to gauge the strength of their results. “Cross-country studies are important for the big picture, but averaging data at national levels leads to loss of information in geographically-diverse nations, such as Brazil, China or the United States,” said Mohaddes.     

“By concentrating on the U.S., we were able to compare whether economic activity in hot or wet areas responds to temperature fluctuations around historical norms in the same way as that in cold or dry areas within a single large nation.”

They looked at ten sectors ranging from manufacturing and services to retail and wholesale trade across 48 U.S. states, and found each sector in every state suffered economically from at least one aspect of climate change – whether heat, flood, drought or freeze.   

When scaled up, these are the effects that will create economic losses at the national and global levels, even in advanced and allegedly resilient economies, say the researchers. 

“The economics of climate change stretch far beyond the impact on growing crops,” said Mohaddes. “Heavy rainfall prevents mountain access for mining and affects commodity prices. Cold snaps raise heating bills and high street spending drops. Heatwaves cause transport networks to shut down. All these things add up.”

“The idea that rich, temperate nations are economically immune to climate change, or could even double and triple their wealth as a result, just seems implausible.”

Mohaddes is from Sweden, which some predict will benefit from higher temperatures. “But what about the winter sports depended upon by the Swedish tourism industry?”

“If advanced nations want to avoid major economic damage in the coming decades, the Paris Agreement is a good start.”

Engineers are working on a powerful new 3D head-up display to project safety alerts, such as lane departure, hazard detection, sat nav directions, and to reduce the effect of poor visibility in poor weather or light conditions. Augmented reality would add the perception of depth to the image by mapping the messages directly onto the road ahead.

Studies conducted in Germany show that the use of stereoscopic 3D displays in an automotive setting can improve reaction times on ‘popping-out’ instructions and increase depth judgments while driving.

In the future, the innovative technology could be used by passengers to watch 3D movies. Head- and eye-tracking technology would follow the user’s position to ensure they can see 3D pictures without the need for individual screens or shutter glasses worn at the cinema.

In a fully autonomous future, the 3D displays would offer users a personalised experience and allow ride-sharers to independently select their own content. Several passengers sharing a journey would be able to enjoy their own choice of media – including journey details, points of interest or movies – optimised for where they are sitting.  

The research – undertaken in partnership with the Centre for Advanced Photonics and Electronics (CAPE) at University of Cambridge – is focused on developing an immersive head-up display, which will closely match real-life experience allowing drivers to react more naturally to hazards and prompts.

Valerian Meijering, Human Machine Interface & Head-Up Display Researcher for Jaguar Land Rover, said: “Development in virtual and augmented reality is moving really quickly. This consortium takes some of the best technology available and helps us to develop applications suited to the automotive sector.”

Professor Daping Chu, Director of Centre for Photonic Devices and Sensors and Director of the Centre for Advanced Photonics and Electronics, said: “This programme is at the forefront of development in the virtual reality space – we’re looking at concepts and components which will set the scene for the connected, shared and autonomous cars of the future. CAPE Partners are world-leading players strategically positioned in the value chain network. Their engagement provides a unique opportunity to make a greater impact on society and further enhance the business value of our enterprises.”

The next-generation head-up display research forms part of the development into Jaguar Land Rover’s ‘Smart Cabin’ vision: applying technologies which combine to create a personalised space inside the vehicle for driver and passengers with enhanced safety, entertainment and convenience features as part of an autonomous, shared future.

Adapted from a press release by Jaguar Land Rover

Anyone who has travelled across multiple time zones and suffered jet lag will understand just how powerful our biological clocks are. In fact, every cell in the human body has its own molecular clock, which is capable of generating a daily rise and fall in the number of many proteins the body produces over a 24-hour cycle. The brain contains a master clock that keeps the rest of the body in sync, using light signals from the eyes to keep in time with environment.

Plants have similar circadian rhythms that help them tell the time of day, preparing plants for photosynthesis prior to dawn, turning on heat-protection mechanisms before the hottest part of the day, and producing nectar when pollinators are most likely to visit. And just like in humans, every cell in the plant appears to have its own clock.

Read more: Can plants think? They could one day force us to change our definition of intelligence

But unlike humans, plants don’t have a brain to keep their clocks synchronised. So how do plants coordinate their cellular rhythms? Our new research shows that all the cells in the plant coordinate partly through something called local self-organisation. This is effectively the plant cells communicating their timing with neighbouring cells, in a similar way to how schools of fish and flocks of birds coordinate their movements by interacting with their neighbours.

Previous research found that the time of the clock is different in different parts of a plant. These differences can be detected by measuring the timing of the daily peaks in clock protein production in the different organs. These clock proteins generate the 24-hour oscillations in biological processes.

For instance, clock proteins activate the production of other proteins that are responsible for photosynthesis in leaves just before dawn. We decided to examine the clock across all the major organs of the plant to help us understand how plants coordinate their timing to keep the entire plant ticking in harmony.

What makes plants tick

We found that in thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana) seedlings, the number of clock proteins peaks at different times in each organ. Organs, such as leaves, roots and stems, receive different signals from their local micro-environment, such as light and temperature, and use this information to independently set their own pace.

If rhythms in different organs are out of sync, do plants suffer from a kind of internal jet lag? While the individual clocks in different organs peak at different times, this didn’t result in complete chaos. Surprisingly, cells began to form spatial wave patterns, where neighbour cells lag in time slightly behind one another. It’s a bit like a stadium or “Mexican” wave of sports fans standing up after the people next to them to create a wave-like motion through the crowd.

Our work shows that these waves arise from the differences between organs as cells begin to communicate. When the number of clock proteins in one cell peaks, the cell communicates this to its slower neighbours, which follow the first cell’s lead and produce more clock proteins too. These cells then do the same to their neighbours, and so on. Such patterns can be observed elsewhere in nature. Some firefly species form spatial wave patterns as they synchronise their flashes with their neighbours.

Local decision-making by cells, combined with signalling between them, might be how plants make decisions without a brain. It allows cells in different parts of the plant to make different decisions about how to grow. Cells in the shoot and root can separately optimise growth to their local conditions. The shoot can bend towards where light is unobstructed and the roots can grow towards water or more nutrient-rich soil. It could also allow plants to survive the loss of organs through damage or being eaten by a herbivore.

This might explain how plants are able to continuously adapt their growth and development to cope with changes in their environment, which scientists call “plasticity”. Understanding how plants make decisions isn’t just interesting, it will help scientists breed new plant varieties that can respond to their increasingly changeable environment with climate change.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The material, developed by researchers from the University of Cambridge, is made of tiny particles of gold coated in a polymer shell, and then squeezed into microdroplets of water in oil. When exposed to heat or light, the particles stick together, changing the colour of the material. The results are reported in the journal Advanced Optical Materials.

In nature, animals such as chameleons and cuttlefish are able to change colour thanks to chromatophores: skin cells with contractile fibres that move pigments around. The pigments are spread out to show their colour, or squeezed together to make the cell clear.

The artificial chromatophores developed by the Cambridge researchers are built on the same principle, but instead of contractile fibres, their colour-changing abilities rely on light-powered nano-mechanisms, and the ‘cells’ are microscopic drops of water.

When the material is heated above 32C, the nanoparticles store large amounts of elastic energy in a fraction of a second, as the polymer coatings expel all the water and collapse. This has the effect of forcing the nanoparticles to bind together into tight clusters. When the material is cooled, the polymers take on water and expand, and the gold nanoparticles are strongly and quickly pushed apart, like a spring.

“Loading the nanoparticles into the microdroplets allows us to control the shape and size of the clusters, giving us dramatic colour changes,” said Dr Andrew Salmon from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, the study’s co-first author.

The geometry of the nanoparticles when they bind into clusters determines which colour they appear as: when the nanoparticles are spread apart they are red and when they cluster together they are dark blue. However, the droplets of water also compress the particle clusters, causing them to shadow each other and make the clustered state nearly transparent.

At the moment, the material developed by the Cambridge researchers is in a single layer, so is only able to change to a single colour. However, different nanoparticle materials and shapes could be used in extra layers to make a fully dynamic material, like real chameleon skin.

The researchers also observed that the artificial cells can ‘swim’ in simple ways, similar to the algae Volvox. Shining a light on one edge of the droplets causes the surface to peel towards the light, pushing it forward. Under stronger illumination, high pressure bubbles briefly form to push the droplets along a surface.

“This work is a big advance in using nanoscale technology to do biomimicry,” said co-author Sean Cormier. “We’re now working to replicate this on roll-to-roll films so that we can make metres of colour changing sheets. Using structured light we also plan to use the light-triggered swimming to ‘herd’ droplets. It will be really exciting to see what collective behaviours are generated.”

The research was funded by the European Research Council (ERC) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

Reference:
Andrew R Salmon et al. ‘Motile Artificial Chromatophores: Light-Triggered Nanoparticles for Microdroplet Locomotion and Color Change.’ Advanced Optical Materials (2019). DOI: 10.1002/adom.201900951

Cambridge is one of a small number of medical schools where anatomy is taught via hands-on cadaveric dissection. As the University Clinical Anatomist, I am responsible for organising the anatomy teaching programme. This involves running the Human Dissection Room and the body donation programme. My goal is to ensure optimal use of our generous donors in both teaching and research, with a view to improving patient safety and helping students to develop into scholars, scientists and professionals.

After completing my medical training and working in general surgery, I studied field linguistics and worked among an ethnic minority group in China for a few years. I read medicine at Downing College as an undergraduate and later qualified as a general surgeon. During my surgical training, I also worked as an anatomy demonstrator in the Dissection Room in what was then the Department of Anatomy.

Dissection has been taking place in some of the Colleges since 1565. Our Anatomy School celebrated its 300th anniversary in 2016, and, following a successful bid for funding, we have installed state-of-the-art touchscreens and 3D imaging facilities in the Dissection Room, providing our students with a variety of different ways of learning. Our Human Anatomy Teaching Group has a close relationship with clinicians from Addenbrooke's Hospital, and this has been key to the continuing success of our junior anatomy demonstrating programme, as well as providing fertile ground for relevant anatomical research.

I am responsible for ensuring that there is a good demonstrator-to-student ratio and that the teaching resources for both lectures and practical sessions are up to date and clinically relevant. My role also involves meeting with clinicians to discuss future research projects on topographical anatomy; and there are always papers and dissertations to review at various times of the year. I spend time discussing potential research topics with our demonstrators and encourage them to give conference presentations on their research. As a Councillor of both the Anatomical Society and British Association of Clinical Anatomists, and an external examiner for two other universities, I attend a number of regular meetings outside of Cambridge. I also supervise a number of Part II projects, collaborating with clinicians at Addenbrooke's and other hospitals.

A key moment for me was reviving Part II projects in topographical anatomy for third-year medical students. This was one of my goals when I was appointed, and it has been very fulfilling to see how much students have enjoyed the projects, how they have learned research methods and been excited by novel discoveries, and especially to see how their work may have a significant impact on future clinical practice.

In 2017, The Secret Language of Anatomy was officially launched. This is an illustrated guide to the etymology of anatomical terms that I co-authored with two very able colleagues, a medical artist and a historian. This was an idea I have had for several years and it was very satisfying to see its fruition.

Scientific discovery in any field is immensely exciting. Never stop asking questions, and pursue higher degrees, especially those courses with a significant research component, to enable you to develop the ability to think and solve problems independently. Most of all, be humble and know that there is always something you can learn from everyone around you.

I came to Cambridge from a town in the Midlands to study Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic. My parents were the first in their families to go to university, and I was the first in my extended family to get an Oxbridge degree. I then tried to get a doctorate from Oxford, but this didn't go to plan - I eventually left with an MLitt and an urgent need to get a job.

While job hunting I realised that the really interesting jobs required a numerate degree. So, I enrolled at The Open University to study Computing and Mathematical Sciences. I graduated with a First Class Honours degree five years later. While I was studying I got my first job in tech, doing tech support and technical writing for CARET, a technology innovation unit within Cambridge University. I then expanded my range and starting to do technical management work and software testing, before I moved on to my current job.

Retraining is totally a thing. It's not as easy to do as it was when I did it as a result of the changes to funding and costs for part-time degrees. However, there are now a whole bunch of MOOCs out there, some of which offer qualifications at a more reasonable fee. But retraining opens a whole lot of opportunities in fields where you're likely to find some really interesting questions to work on or interesting projects to support. There are a lot of jobs in science that need project management and communications experience but that don't require you to do top-level research.

I’m now part of the group writing software for Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project. This will be the world’s largest radio telescope, and I’m part of the team that is designing the supercomputer to do data processing for it. We are producing an architecture for this computer, and testing whether this architecture will work by writing and running prototype code. I get to work with people all over the world.

This is a very interesting project to work on - it is stretching the limits of what a radio telescope can do. It's also exploring the limits of what can be done computationally; it requires a completely new way of dealing with astronomy data because there's just so much of it. I also do research as part of my PhD, which is aimed at providing astronomy researchers with a tool-kit for interacting with the ridiculous amounts of data that will be produced by the SKA and other next-generation telescopes.

My work is pretty varied. It involves some research, some programming, some technical project management; and maintaining the collaborative tools used by the project I work on. I also maintain the wiki, the ticket tracking system (we use this so we have some way of recording what work needs to be done), and manage the code repositories for the project. (These days, I delegate a lot of this.) I also managed the formal documentation for the Science Data Processor (SDP) project. As I've learned more, I started chairing technical meetings - I did the project management for the SDP architecture work, and for one of the key software components of the SDP. This involves tracking work, helping people fix problems, note-taking, and helping people work out what's going well and what's not. As part of the architecture team, I also read our documentation, to ensure it makes sense and check that it says what we think it says. As the project has developed, I’ve done more programming and policy development. I go fairly often to the headquarters of the SKA at Jodrell Bank in Cheshire. I've also travelled to South Africa (where one of the SKA telescopes will be built), and to the Netherlands and Malta for SDP Conferences.

I have an ‘academic-related’ support position, but I'm also doing a PhD as part of my job. This involves a lot of meetings, usually teleconferences, a lot of email, and a lot of writing (because if you don't write something down in an international project, it doesn't exist). Cambridge is a great place to be doing my PhD work, because I'm part of an active community of scholars working in my field, and in adjacent areas. The University leads the work on the supercomputer for the SKA, so we are a hub for a lot of international activity. The University also has a Top 100 supercomputer, so I have access to world-leading infrastructure for my work, as well as a specialist platform developed for the SKA, P3-Alaska.

At the start of my PhD I visited Lord's Bridge, the location of the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory, with other first year PhD students. This is a fascinating site - there are traces all around of how the site was used as an ammunition store during the Second World War. Since the war, it's been used as a radio astronomy observatory, and you can see parts of several radio telescopes that had key roles in understanding the radio sky, winning Nobel Prizes in the process. (You can see the remains of the array that Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell used to discover pulsars.) Now the site is used primarily as a testbed for new technology for radio telescopes - there are test antennas there for the HERA project, and for the SKA. But you can see dishes and equipment that describe the history of radio astronomy and interferometry. As a personal project, I’m also finding out about the women who were “computers” in the Cavendish Laboratory, and the programming techniques they used.

Being diagnosed with a serious stress-related health condition meant I had to learn how to refactor my life to allow me to do what I want to do. This is a big part of my life that required major work to come to terms with. There are many compromises I have had to make in order to recover and be able to work full time. This includes discovering new things that can make my condition worse, and finding new ways to manage that. I rely on the support of my line manager to help keep things ticking over OK. 

It’s important to be aware that in physics, computing, and mathematics, at the moment, women will have to get used to being in a minority. I am quite often the only woman or non-binary person in the room - this is something that's changing, but it is currently the case. This is compounded if you’re also a member of another marginalised group. However, there are lots of networks you can join in order to deal with the sensation of being outnumbered. Finally, just because you're finding the maths or science difficult doesn't mean that you're no good at it. Often, it will be hard, but as you work further, stuff that was previously hard will become quite easy to use. You don't have to understand this stuff instantly to be able to make a useful contribution.

People who identify more intensely with a political tribe or ideology share an underlying psychological trait: low levels of cognitive flexibility, according to a new study.

This “mental rigidity” makes it harder for people to change their ways of thinking or adapt to new environments, say researchers. Importantly, mental rigidity was found in those with the most fervent beliefs and affiliations on both the left and right of the political divide.    

The study of over 700 US citizens, conducted by scientists from the University of Cambridge, is the largest – and first for over 20 years – to investigate whether the more politically “extreme” have a certain “type of mind” through the use of objective psychological testing.

The findings suggest that the basic mental processes governing our ability to switch between different concepts and tasks are linked to the intensity with which we attach ourselves to political doctrines – regardless of the ideology.  

“Relative to political moderates, participants who indicated extreme attachment to either the Democratic or Republican Party exhibited mental rigidity on multiple objective neuropsychological tests,” said Dr Leor Zmigrod, a Cambridge Gates Scholar and lead author of the study, now published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.

“While political animosity often appears to be driven by emotion, we find that the way people unconsciously process neutral stimuli seems to play an important role in how they process ideological arguments.” 

“Those with lower cognitive flexibility see the world in more black-and-white terms, and struggle with new and different perspectives. The more inflexible mind may be especially susceptible to the clarity, certainty, and safety frequently offered by strong loyalty to collective ideologies,” she said.

The research is the latest in a series of studies from Zmigrod and her Cambridge colleagues, Dr Jason Rentfrow and Professor Trevor Robbins, on the relationship between ideology and cognitive flexibility.

Their previous work over the last 18 months has suggested that mental rigidity is linked to more extreme attitudes with regards to religiosity, nationalism, and a willingness to endorse violence and sacrifice one’s life for an ideological group.

For the latest study, the Cambridge team recruited 743 men and women of various ages and educational backgrounds from across the political spectrum through the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform.

Participants completed three psychological tests online: a word association game, a card-sorting test – where colours, shapes and numbers are matched according to shifting rules – and an exercise in which participants have a two-minute window to imagine possible uses for everyday objects.

“These are established and standardized cognitive tests which quantify how well individuals adapt to changing environments and how flexibly their minds process words and concepts,” said Zmigrod.

The participants were also asked to score their feelings towards various divisive social and economic issues – from abortion and marriage to welfare – and the extent of “overlap” between their personal identity and the US Republican and Democrat parties.

Zmigrod and colleagues found that “partisan extremity” – the intensity of participants’ attachment to their favoured political party – was a strong predictor of rigidity in all three cognitive tests. They also found that self-described Independents displayed greater cognitive flexibility compared to both Democrats and Republicans.

Other cognitive traits, such as originality or fluency of thought, were not related to heightened political partisanship, which researchers argue suggests the unique contribution of cognitive inflexibility. 

“In the context of today’s highly divided politics, it is important we work to understand the psychological underpinnings of dogmatism and strict ideological adherence,” said Zmigrod.

“The aim of this research is not to draw false equivalences between different, and sometimes opposing, ideologies. We want to highlight the common psychological factors that shape how people come to hold extreme views and identities,” said Zmigrod.

“Past studies have shown that it is possible to cultivate cognitive flexibility through training and education. Our findings raise the question of whether heightening our cognitive flexibility might help build more tolerant societies, and even develop antidotes to radicalization.” 

“While the conservatism and liberalism of our beliefs may at times divide us, our capacity to think about the world flexibly and adaptively can unite us,” she added.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge, who led the study published today in the journal Physiological Reports, say the findings reinforce the importance of an active lifestyle when planning pregnancy.

In the UK, more than a half of all women of reproductive age and almost a third of pregnant women are overweight or obese. This is particularly concerning, as being overweight or obese during pregnancy increases the risk of complications in the mother, such as gestational diabetes, and predisposes both her and her infant to develop metabolic diseases such as type 2 diabetes in the years after pregnancy.

Exercise is known to improve how the body manages blood sugar levels and thereby reduce the risk of type-2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome in non-pregnant women. It also has positive effects prior to and during pregnancy, with beneficial outcomes for both mother and her child, preventing excessive gestational weight gain and the development of gestational diabetes, and the need for insulin use in women who have already developed gestational diabetes. However, little is known about the changes that exercise causes to the tissues of obese pregnant mother.

To answer this questions, researchers at the University of Cambridge fed mice a sugary, high fat diet such that they become obese and then the obese mice were exercised. The mice exercised on a treadmill for 20 minutes a day for at least a week before their pregnancy and then for 12.5 minutes a day until day 17 of the pregnancy (pregnancy lasts for around 20 days in mice).

Mice are a useful model for studying human disease as their biology and physiology have a number of important characteristics in common with those of humans, including showing metabolic changes with obesity/obesity-causing diets and in the female body during pregnancy.

The researchers found that the beneficial effects on metabolic health in obese mothers related to changes in how molecules and cells communicate in maternal tissues during pregnancy.

“A moderate level of exercise immediately before and then during pregnancy leads to important changes in different tissues of the obese mother, effectively making the tissues more like those seen in non-obese mothers,” says Dr Amanda Sferruzzi-Perri, a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellow from the Centre for Trophoblast Research in the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, who co-led the study.

“We believe these changes may explain how exercise improves the metabolism of the obese mother during pregnancy and, in turn, may prevent her babies from developing early signs of type 2 diabetes after birth.”

The key organs of the mother that were affected by exercise were:

• white adipose tissue – the fatty tissue that stores lipids and can be found in different parts around the body, including beneath the skin and around internal organs;
• skeletal muscle – muscle tissue that uses glucose and fats for contraction and movement;
• the liver – the organ that stores, as well as syntheses lipids and glucose.

Exercise affected key signalling pathways – the ways that molecules and cells within tissue communicate – involved in responding to insulin (the hormone that stimulates glucose uptake by white adipose tissue and skeletal muscle), in storage and breakdown of lipids (fats found in the blood and tissue) and in growth and the synthesis of proteins.

White adipose tissue showed the greatest number of changes in response to exercise in the obese pregnant mouse, being restored to a state similar to that seen in the tissue of non-obese mothers. This suggests that insulin resistance of the mother’s white adipose tissue may be the cause of poor glucose-insulin handling in obese pregnancies. The findings are different to that seen in non-pregnant animals, whereby exercise typically affects insulin signalling in the skeletal muscle.

In addition, the team’s previous work showed that exercise improves sensitivity to insulin and glucose handling throughout the whole body in the obese mother. It also prevents the development of insulin resistance in the offspring of obese mothers after birth. Low insulin sensitivity/insulin resistance requires larger amounts of insulin to control blood glucose levels.

“Our findings reinforce the importance of having an active lifestyle and eating a healthy balanced diet when planning pregnancy and throughout for both the mother and her developing child,” says co-lead Professor Susan Ozanne from the Wellcome Trust-Medical Research Council Institute of Metabolic Science at the University of Cambridge.

“This can be important in helping to reduce the risk of adverse health problems in the mother and of later health problems for her child.”

This work received funding from the European Union, Medical Research Council, Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, British Heart Foundation, São Paulo Research Foundation, Centre for Trophoblast Research, and the Royal Society.

Reference
Musial, B et al. Exercise alters the molecular pathways of insulin signalling and lipid handling in maternal tissues of obese pregnant mice. Physiological Reports; 28 August 2019; DOI: 10.14814/phy2.14202

If you were choosing where to live in medieval Ireland you might insist on somewhere ogach which meant ‘eggy’ or ‘abounding in eggs’, but in reference to a particularly fertile region. By contrast, you would never want to hear your cook complaining brachaid, ‘it oozes pus’. And if you were too boisterous at the dining table, you might be accused of briscugad (making something easily broken).

All three words have been brought back to life thanks to a painstaking five-year research project involving a collaboration between Queen’s University Belfast and the University of Cambridge. The team has scoured medieval manuscripts and published texts for words which have either been overlooked by earlier dictionary-makers or which have been erroneously defined.

Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, Professor of Celtic and Medieval Studies at Cambridge says: “The Dictionary offers a window onto a fascinating and important past world. The project extends our understanding of the vocabulary of the time but also offers unique insights into the people who used these words. They reveal extraordinary details about everyday lives, activities, beliefs and relationships, as well as contact with speakers of other languages.”

The revised dictionary spans the development of the Irish language over a thousand years from the sixth century to the sixteenth, from the time just after the arrival of St Patrick all the way down to the era of Elizabeth I. The team has amended definitions, presented evidence to show that some words were in use much earlier than previously thought, and even deleted a few fake words. One of these is tapairis which had been taken to be some kind of medicinal substance but in effect is not a word at all, since it arose from an incorrect division of two other words literally meaning ‘grains of paradise’, the term for Guinea grains.

Lost words

The rediscovered lost words include a term for ‘becomes ignorant'– ainfisigid, based on the word for knowledge: fis. Other words have been shown to have been attested hundreds of years earlier than was previously thought, such as foclóracht meaning vocabulary. Yet, other examples emphasise that the medieval world continues to resonate. One of these is rímaire, which is used as the modern Irish word for computer (in its later form ríomhaire). 

Professor Ní Mhaonaigh explains: “In the medieval period, rímaire referred not to a machine but to a person engaged in the medieval science of computistics who performed various kinds of calculations concerning time and date, most importantly the date of Easter. So it’s a word with a long pedigree whose meaning was adapted and applied to a modern invention.”

The historical dictionary on which the electronic one is based was originally published by the Royal Irish Academy in 23 volumes between 1913 and 1976. “Advances in scholarship since the publication of the first volume had rendered parts of the dictionary obsolete or out of date,” says Greg Toner, leader of the project and Professor of Irish at Queen’s University Belfast. “Our work has enabled us to resolve many puzzles and errors and to uncover hundreds of previously unknown words.”

The online Dictionary serves up a feast of information on subjects as diverse as food, festivals, medicine, superstition, law and wildlife. One of the newly added phrases is galar na rig, literally the king's disease, a term for scrofula which is known in English as king's evil.

Leprechauns, outlaws and turkeys

One of the most globally recognisable words in the Dictionary is perhaps leipreachán. This character is now regarded as quintessentially Irish but scholars now think that leipreachán, and its earlier form lupracán, is not even a native Irish word but one derived from the Luperci, a group associated with the Roman festival of Lupercalia. This included a purification ritual involving swimming and like the Luperci, leprechauns are associated with water in what may be their first appearance in early Irish literature. According to an Old Irish tale known as ‘The Adventure of Fergus son of Léti’, leprechauns carried the sleeping Fergus out to sea. On route, he managed to capture three of them and, in return for sparing their lives, they granted him the ability to breathe underwater.

The project sheds new light on Ireland’s interactions with foreign languages, cultures and goods in the medieval period. The Dictionary points out that útluighe, meaning an outlaw, ultimately goes back to the Old Norse word útlagi, though the term was perhaps borrowed into Irish through English or Anglo-Norman. Its use appears to have been limited – the researchers have only found it once, in a thirteenth-century poem by Giolla Brighde Mac Con Midhe.

Another loanword in Modern Irish is turcaí (turkey) but before this was borrowed from English, this bird was known as cearc fhrancach (turkey hen) or coilech francach (turkey cock). Strictly speaking, the adjective Francach means 'French' or 'of French origin'. This usage to denote a bird native to the Americas may seem odd but in other languages, it is associated with various countries including France, for reasons which remain unclear.

Spreading the word

Professor Toner says: “A key aim of our work has been to open the Dictionary up, not only to students of the language but to researchers working in other areas such as history and archaeology, as well as to those with a general interest in medieval life.”

In a related project, the researchers have been developing educational resources for schools in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland.

The Dictionary launched on 30 August 2019 at the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin. A History of Ireland in 100 Words, drawing on 100 of the Dictionary's words and tracing how they illuminate historical changes will be published in October 2019 by the Royal Irish Academy. 

For more on the newly discovered words, see a piece by Dr Sharon Arbuthnot, a researcher on the project, in the Brainstorm series on National Irish Television (RTÉ).

It is well known that having a child can put a strain on the parents’ relationship, but whether this then has an impact on the child’s own development in its first few years is not known. The quality of a couple’s relationship is known to be related to developmental outcomes such as their behaviour and educational attainment in school-aged children, but has been little studied in relation to parent-infant talk, despite parent-infant talk being important for the child’s development.

To examine the relationship between the quality of a couple’s relationship and parent-infant talk, researchers from the Centre for Family Research at the University of Cambridge studied 93 first-time, heterosexual parents and their interactions with their infants. The team asked parents about the quality of their couple relationship and how satisfied they were and then gave the infants at age seven months a wearable ‘talk pedometer’ that recorded naturalistic parent-infant talk for a full day in which both parents were at home.

The researchers used software to provide an automated analysis of the frequency of adult spoken words to their infant and of parent-infant ‘conversations’.

The findings of the research, which was supported by Wellcome and the Economic and Social Research Council, are published in the Journal of Family Psychology.

After taking depression into account (because of its links with both couple relationship quality and parent-infant talk), the researchers found that the more dissatisfied a couple reported their relationship to be, the more the mother spoke to her infant. Mothers who reported the quality of their relationship to be ‘low’ used around 35% more words than a mother whose relationship was ‘average’ and started around 20% more conversations. However, these effects were only found with infant sons, not daughters.

The researchers did not analyse the content of the mother-infant talk, so it is not possible to say whether the mother was complaining to her infant or talking positively.

“It’s possible that the mum is trying to compensate for the poor relationship she has with her partner by putting more time and effort into her relationship with her other close male social partner, her son,” says Dr Elian Fink from the Centre for Family Research and the Faculty of Education.

“What is particularly interesting is that mums only seem to compensate when they have infant sons, not daughters. It could be that mothers view their daughters as mini versions of themselves rather than of their partners.”

Regardless of infant gender, fathers showed significantly less overall talk and initiated fewer conversations than did mothers, even though the fathers are increasingly becoming involved in parenting and the recordings were taken specifically on a day when both parents were at home. However, the amount that they spoke to their infants was unrelated to the quality of the couple’s relationship.

“Even when dads spend more time around their infants, this doesn’t necessarily mean they are interacting with them more,” adds Dr Fink. “One possible reason may be that there’s still an imbalance in who responds to the basic care needs of their infant. So, for example, if it’s the mother who still shoulders the burden of changing the nappy, this at least offers an opportune time to engage in direct communication with her infant.”

Dr Fink hopes the findings will encourage parents to make a conscious effort to talk more to their infants, whether they are boys or girls.

“Parent-child interaction is important for a child’s development, with conversation playing a particular role for the child’s language development,” she says. “Finding time to talk to children is very important. Using opportunities within the daily routine, such as mealtimes and bedtime, to have conversations with your child may help foster later child talk.”                                        

Reference
Fink, E et al. Couple relationship quality and the infant home language environment: Gender-specific findings. Journal of Family Psychology; 22 Aug 2019; DOI: 10.1037/fam0000590

University of Cambridge researchers have shown that an algorithm can predict the outcomes of complex chemical reactions with over 90% accuracy, outperforming trained chemists. The algorithm also shows chemists how to make target compounds, providing the chemical ‘map’ to the desired destination. The results are reported in two studies in the journals ACS Central Science and Chemical Communications.                                            

A central challenge in drug discovery and materials science is finding ways to make complicated organic molecules by chemically joining together simpler building blocks. The problem is that those building blocks often react in unexpected ways.

“Making molecules is often described as an art realised with trial-and-error experimentation because our understanding of chemical reactivity is far from complete,” said Dr Alpha Lee from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, who led the studies. “Machine learning algorithms can have a better understanding of chemistry because they distil patterns of reactivity from millions of published chemical reactions, something that a chemist cannot do.”                                                                                                                                             

The algorithm developed by Lee and his group uses tools in pattern recognition to recognise how chemical groups in molecules react, by training the model on millions of reactions published in patents.

The researchers looked at chemical reaction prediction as a machine translation problem. The reacting molecules are considered as one ‘language,’ while the product is considered as a different language. The model then uses the patterns in the text to learn how to ‘translate’ between the two languages.

Using this approach, the model achieves 90% accuracy in predicting the correct product of unseen chemical reactions, whereas the accuracy of trained human chemists is around 80%. The researchers say that the model is accurate enough to detect errors in the data and correctly predict a plethora of difficult reactions.

The model also knows what it doesn’t know. It produces an uncertainty score, which eliminates incorrect predictions with 89% accuracy. As experiments are time-consuming, accurate prediction is crucial to avoid pursuing expensive experimental pathways that eventually end in failure.

In the second study, Lee and his group, collaborating with the biopharmaceutical company Pfizer, demonstrated the practical potential of the method in drug discovery.

The researchers showed that when trained on published chemistry research, the model can make accurate predictions of reactions based on lab notebooks, showing that the model has learned the rules of chemistry and can apply it to drug discovery settings.

The team also showed that the model can predict sequences of reactions that would lead to a desired product. They applied this methodology to diverse drug-like molecules, showing that the steps that it predicts are chemically reasonable. This technology can significantly reduce the time of preclinical drug discovery because it provides medicinal chemists with a blueprint of where to begin.

“Our platform is like a GPS for chemistry,” said Lee, who is also a Research Fellow at St Catharine’s College. “It informs chemists whether a reaction is a go or a no-go, and how to navigate reaction routes to make a new molecule.”

The Cambridge researchers are currently using this reaction prediction technology to develop a complete platform that bridges the design-make-test cycle in drug discovery and materials discovery: predicting promising bioactive molecules, ways to make those complex organic molecules, and selecting the experiments that are the most informative. The researchers are now working on extracting chemical insights from the model, attempting to understand what it has learned that humans have not.

“We can potentially make a lot of progress in chemistry if we learn what kinds of patterns the model is looking at to make a prediction,” said Peter Bolgar, a PhD student in synthetic organic chemistry involved in both studies. “The model and human chemists together would become extremely powerful in designing experiments, more than each would be without the other.”

The research was supported by the Winton Programme for the Physics of Sustainability and the Herchel Smith Fund.

References:
Philippe Schwaller et al. ‘Molecular Transformer: A Model for Uncertainty-Calibrated Chemical Reaction Prediction.’ ACS Central Science (2019). DOI: 10.1021/acscentsci.9b00576

Alpha Lee et al. ‘Molecular Transformer unifies reaction prediction and retrosynthesis across pharma chemical space.’ Chemical Communications (2019). DOI: 10.1039/C9CC05122H

Newly digitized vintage film has doubled how far back scientists can peer into the history of underground ice in Antarctica, and revealed that an ice shelf on Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica is being thawed by a warming ocean more quickly than previously thought. This finding contributes to predictions for sea-level rise that would impact coastal communities around the world.

The researchers made their findings by comparing ice-penetrating radar records of Thwaites Glacier with modern data. Their results are reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“By having this record, we can now see these areas where the ice shelf is getting thinnest and could break through,” said lead author Dustin Schroeder from Stanford University, who led efforts to digitize the historical data from airborne surveys conducted in the 1970s. “This is a pretty hard-to-get-to area and we’re really lucky that they happened to fly across this ice shelf.”

Researchers digitized about 250,000 flight miles of Antarctic radar data originally captured on 35mm optical film between 1971 and 1979 as part of a collaboration between Stanford and the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) at the University of Cambridge. The data has been released to an online public archive through Stanford Libraries, enabling other scientists to compare it with modern radar data in order to understand long-term changes in ice thickness, features within glaciers and baseline conditions over 40 years.

Professor Julian Dowdeswell, Director of the Scott Polar Research Institute, a co-author of the paper, commented: “These early records of ice thickness provide an important baseline against which we can measure the rate of change of the Antarctic Ice Sheet over the past 40 or so years. The high-resolution digitization of these records crucially makes them available for a series of important investigations on aspects of Antarctic environmental change.”

The information provided by historic records will help efforts like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its goal of projecting climate and sea-level rise for the next 100 years. By being able to look back 40 to 50 years at subsurface conditions rather than just the 10 to 20 years provided by modern data, scientists can better understand what has happened in the past and make more accurate projections about the future, Schroeder said.

“You can really see the geometry over this long period of time, how these ocean currents have melted the ice shelf – not just in general, but exactly where and how,” said Schroeder. “When we model ice sheet behaviour and sea-level projections into the future, we need to understand the processes at the base of the ice sheet that made the changes we’re seeing.”

The film was originally recorded in an exploratory survey using ice-penetrating radar, a technique still used today to capture information from the surface through the bottom of the ice sheet. The radar shows mountains, volcanoes and lakes beneath the surface of Antarctica, as well as layers inside the ice sheet that reveal the history of climate and flow.

The researchers identified several features beneath the ice sheet that had previously only been observed in modern data, including ash layers from past volcanic eruptions captured inside the ice and channels where water from beneath the ice sheet is eroding the bottom of ice shelves. They also found that one of these channels had a stable geometry for over 40 years, information that contrasts their findings about the Thwaites Glacier ice shelf, which has thinned from 10 to 33 percent between 1978 and 2009.

“The fact that we were able to have one ice shelf where we can say, ‘Look, it’s pretty much stable. And here, there’s significant change’ – that gives us more confidence in the results about Thwaites,” Schroeder said.

The scientists hope their findings demonstrate the value of comparing this historical information to modern data to analyse different aspects of Antarctica at a finer scale. In addition to the radar data, the Stanford Digital Repository includes photographs of the notebooks from the flight operators, an international consortium of American, British and Danish geoscientists.

“It was surprising how good the old data is,” Schroeder said. “They were very careful and thoughtful engineers and it’s much richer, more modern looking, than you would think.”

Reference:
Dustin M. Schroeder et al. ‘Multidecadal observations of the Antarctic ice sheet from restored analog radar records.’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2019). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1821646116

Adapted from a Stanford press release.

The European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grants have been awarded to 408 researchers from across Europe. The awards will help individual researchers to build their own teams and conduct world-leading research across all disciplines, creating an estimated 2,500 jobs for postdoctoral fellows, PhD students and other staff at the host institutions.

The successful Cambridge researchers are:

• Roland Bauerschmidt - Renormalisation, dynamics, and hyperbolic symmetry
• Quentin Berthet - Computational Trade-offs and Algorithms in Statistics
• Felix Deschler - Twisted Perovskites: Control of Spin and Chirality in Highly-luminescent Metal-halide Perovskites
• Lorenzo Di Michele - A DNA NANOtechology toolkit for artificial CELL design
• Louise Hirst - Gliding epitaxy for inorganic space-power sheets
• Sertac Sehlikoglu - Imaginative Landscapes of Islamist Politics Across the Balkan-to-Bengal Complex
• Blake Sherwin - CMB Lensing at Sub-Percent Precision: A New Probe of Cosmology and Fundamental Physics
• Margherita Turco - Human Placental Development and the Uterine Microenvironment

Commenting on the awards, Dr Peter Hedges, Head of the University Research Office at the University of Cambridge, said: “The success of UK researchers, and in particular Cambridge researchers, demonstrates the world-leading position that our country holds in research and innovation. This is a position we have will have to fight hard to maintain in the face of competition from other nations across Europe, the USA and China.

“Six of our successful researchers are non-UK nationals, showing once again that Cambridge has the ability to attract the very best talent from around the world to carry out research at its world class facilities.”

The ERC-funded research will be carried out in 24 countries, with institutions from Germany (73), the UK (64) and the Netherlands (53) to host the highest number of projects. The grants, worth in total €621 million (£560 million), are part of the EU Research and Innovation programme, Horizon 2020.

Carlos Moedas, European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation, said: “Researchers need freedom and support to follow their scientific curiosity if we are to find answers to the most difficult challenges of our age and our future. This is the strength of the grants that the EU provides through the European Research Council: an opportunity for outstanding scientists to pursue their most daring ideas.”

President of the ERC, Professor Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, added: “In this year’s ERC Starting Grant competition, early-career researchers of 51 nationalities are among the winners – a record. It reminds us that science knows no borders and that talent is to be found everywhere. It is essential that, for its future successful development, the European Union keeps attracting and supporting outstanding researchers from around the world. At the ERC we are proud to contribute to this goal by supporting some of the most daring creative scientific talent.” 

I strongly believe that through diversity comes creativity, comes progress. I qualified as an engineer in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, and went on to earn a Master’s Degree in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology from the same university. My PhD is in Bioelectronics from École des Mines de Saint-Étienne in France, and a key moment for me was when I left home to study abroad. Leaving my comfort zone for something unknown was very difficult in the beginning, but proved to be an invaluable experience. I met people from all over the world with different cultures and mind-sets, stretched my mind and expanded my horizons.

I find it very difficult to be around like-minded people; I always look for those with different views. I’m working on a drug discovery platform using bioelectronics, and my work sets out to improve and accelerate drug discovery by providing novel technological solutions for drug screening and disease management. My research focuses on the application of a new class of electronic materials and devices that could replace the in-vitro drug screening assays currently used in medical diagnoses with electronic arrays similar to the electronic chips found in mobile phones.  These could quickly assess the health of our cells, outside of our bodies. 

As an engineer, creating solutions to important yet unresolved issues for healthcare is what truly motivates me. I hope my research will lead to a product that will impact healthcare. The convergence of new technologies with life sciences will revolutionise both diagnosis and therapy. I imagine a healthcare system where the standard one-size-fits-all approach shifts to a more personalised and tailored model.

My most interesting project is one that is working to tackle the global challenge of antimicrobial resistance from a technological standpoint. We are developing biomimetic bacterial membranes on top of our devices and screening newly synthesised antibiotics. Investigating drug-bacterial membrane interactions allows us to directly test the efficacy of known drugs on bacterial resistant strains, as well as allowing us to better understand the action of novel drugs on the membrane properties, and ultimately aid the design and synthesis of target-specific antibiotics. 

I joined Cambridge as a postdoctoral researcher in 2017. My daily routine involves some lab work in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, a lot of reading and writing, and some project management. I spend time in the Maxwell Centre too, where I participate in an entrepreneurship program called Impulse, exploring all the aspects of technology transfer.

Being part of a University where some of the world's most brilliant scientists studied and worked is invaluable. Cambridge combines a historic and traditional atmosphere with cutting edge technological and scientific research in an open, multicultural society. The state-of-the-art facilities, and the openness in innovation and collaborations, along with great science, provide a unique combination that can only lead to excellence.  I also travel frequently for conferences, as well as visiting other laboratories across Europe, the United States and Saudi Arabia. When you work in a multidisciplinary field it is essential to establish and keep good collaborations; since this is the only way to achieve the desirable outcome.

To be successful in a postdoctoral role requires management, teaching, networking, proposal writing and travelling. The amount of time you get to spend in the lab drops significantly compared to the PhD research period. This is in part due to the fact that you are more experienced, thus more efficient, and since you are more independent in research you need to be on top of things.

I think it’s absolutely vital, in every opportunity, for all of us to honour and promote girls and women in science. In October 2017 I was delighted to be awarded a L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Fellowship, an award that honours the contributions of women in science. For me, the award not only represents a scientific distinction but also gives me the unique opportunity, as an ambassador of science, to inspire and motivate young girls to follow the career they desire. Unfortunately, women still struggle when it comes to joining male-dominated fields, and even to establish themselves later at senior roles. We still face stereotypes and social restrictions, even if it is not as obvious today as it was in the past. This is in part due to the fact that still, the key senior roles are predominantly male-occupied, and so there is a lack of female role models as well as female mentality. This makes it harder for women to believe in themselves and achieve their goals.

A question I always ask during my outreach activities at schools is ‘do look like a scientist?’  The answer I get most times is ‘no’! I think this misperception of how professionals in STEMM look, or about what they actually do on a daily basis is what discourages girls early on to follow STEMM careers. This needs to change. On top of that, my advice to women would be to be open, never underestimate themselves and never be put off by stereotypes especially in male-dominated industries. There are excellent examples of highly successful women – leaders in their fields - who managed to excel despite the difficulties. Importantly, many of them successfully combined career and family. 

Opening to the public on Monday 14 October, and curated by Dr Lucy Delap and Dr Ben Griffin, the exhibition will focus on the lived experiences of women at the University, the ongoing fight for equal educational rights, recognition, and inclusion in university activities, and the careers of some of the women who shaped the institution – from leading academics to extraordinary domestic staff and influential fellows’ wives.

The exhibition will showcase the history of women at the University, the persistent marginalisation they were subject to, and the ongoing campaigns for gender justice and change since the establishment of Girton College in Cambridge in 1869, the first residential university establishment for women in the UK. Visitors will have the opportunity to explore rarely seen collections from across the University and colleges. Through a mix of costume, letters and audio-visual material, the fascinating and little-known stories of individual women will be illustrated.

Dr Lucy Delap, exhibition co-curator and Fellow of Murray Edwards College, said: “From the founding of the first women’s college to the present day, the experience of women at Cambridge has differed greatly from their male counterparts.

"Though Girton College was established especially to give women the opportunity to study at the University, there were still many barriers that women faced – the first female students were required to ask permission to attend lectures, were not allowed to take exams without special permission, and usually had to be accompanied by chaperones in public until after the First World War. It was still not until 1948 that Cambridge began to offer degrees to women – the last of the big institutions in the UK to do so.

“Through The Rising Tide we hope to illustrate an all-encompassing picture of the incredible fight for gender equality within the University, while portraying the fascinating journeys of some of the militant, cussed and determined women of our institution too.”

Visitors to the exhibition will learn of the deep opposition and oppression women faced, including the efforts made to keep women out of student societies, the organised campaigns to stop women getting degrees, and the hostility faced by women trying to establish careers as academics. Surviving fragments of eggshells and fireworks illustrate the violent opposition to giving women degrees during the vote on the subject in 1897, as does the note written by undergraduates apologising for the damage that had been done to Newnham College during the riot of 1921.

The exhibition will also reveal the creativity and courage of the women who defiantly resisted such opposition to establish lives and careers within the University. Resistance included: the signing of the 400 page petition demanding women’s degrees in 1880, which will be displayed over the walls of the exhibition; setting up new student societies for women; and finding opportunities for women to lecture.

Sometimes, resistance meant finding ways of avoiding the rules that discriminated against women – between 1904 and 1907, Trinity College Dublin offered women from Newnham and Girton the opportunity to travel to Dublin to graduate officially and receive a full degree. The robes of one of the graduates, which have been stored for many decades, will be displayed in the Women at Cambridge exhibition.

Dr Ben Griffin, exhibition co-curator and Lecturer in Modern British History at Girton College, added: “By telling the story of women at Cambridge, this exhibition also tells the story of how a nineteenth-century institution, which served mainly to educate young men for careers in the church, transformed itself into a recognisably modern university devoted to teaching and research.”

The Rising Tide is a culmination of exhibitions, events and displays exploring the past, present and future of women at the University of Cambridge. Curated by Cambridge University Library in collaboration with students and staff, the events programme, pop-up exhibitions and displays will run at the Library and across the city. Women at Cambridge is the centre-piece of the programme and will launch on Monday 14 October, and run until March 2020. Entry is free.