Almost 400 students who met the conditions of their offer following the issue of revised exam results based on their teacher assessed grades have been admitted. No student has been required to defer entry to 2021. This will result in an undergraduate intake which is more than 10% bigger than it was in 2019. The University usually plans for an intake of around 3,450 undergraduates but this year will be admitting up to 3,890 students. We would like to congratulate all our incoming students who, like so many other students around the UK, have worked so hard in such difficult circumstances.  

Not only have Faculties and Departments been flexible, but there has been a collaborative effort on the part of the Colleges to ensure accommodation and tuition can be found for everyone being admitted in 2020. Colleges have managed to free up extra places for undergraduates this year, at short notice. Everyone has been mindful of the need to minimise the potential impact on the cohort applying for places in 2021. 

The University had exceeded its widening participation targets following the initial release of the results. We will publish more detailed statistics later in the year, but we expect that 70% of UK students will now be coming to us from state schools, surpassing last year’s rate of 68.7%. The proportion of students coming from areas of low participation in higher education (using POLAR 4, Quintiles 1 and 2) has risen from 13% to 14%.  And, using the Index of Multiple Deprivation measure, our intake with this indicator has risen from 18.8% to 21.7%. 

The University’s Vice-Chancellor, Professor Stephen Toope, welcomed the figures:

“This summer has been an exceptionally challenging admissions process. Staff have worked round the clock to ensure that each student who has met their offer secures a place to study at Cambridge. And our Colleges have worked together to provide extra accommodation for the higher than planned for intake. This incredible effort means we are not having to compel any student to defer entry until 2021. I am also proud that we have the highest ever number of state school students arriving this year as well as greater numbers from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, underlying our commitment to providing equality of educational opportunity. We look forward to welcoming all our new students in October.” 

The Michaelmas Term starts on Tuesday 6th October. The University has put together a range of practical tips and advice for students, and staff, to ensure they continue to follow public health guidance. Details of the ‘stay safe’ campaign can be found on these pages: https://www.cam.ac.uk/coronavirus/stay-safe-cambridge-uni

When historian Frederick Jackson Turner presented his famous thesis on the US frontier in 1893, he described the “coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and acquisitiveness” it had forged in the American character.

Now, well into the 21st century, and researchers led by the University of Cambridge have detected remnants of the pioneer personality in US populations of once inhospitable mountainous territory, particularly in the Midwest.

A team of scientists algorithmically investigated how landscape shapes psychology. They analysed links between the anonymised results of an online personality test completed by over 3.3 million Americans, and the “topography” of 37,227 US postal – or ZIP – codes.

The researchers found that living at both a higher altitude and an elevation relative to the surrounding region – indicating “hilliness” – is associated with a distinct blend of personality traits that fits with “frontier settlement theory”.

“The harsh and remote environment of mountainous frontier regions historically attracted nonconformist settlers strongly motivated by a sense of freedom,” said researcher Friedrich Götz, from Cambridge’s Department of Psychology.

“Such rugged terrain likely favoured those who closely guarded their resources and distrusted strangers, as well as those who engaged in risky explorations to secure food and territory.”

“These traits may have distilled over time into an individualism characterised by toughness and self-reliance that lies at the heart of the American frontier ethos” said Götz, lead author of the study.

“When we look at personality across the whole United States, we find that mountainous residents are more likely to have psychological characteristics indicative of this frontier mentality.”

Götz worked with colleagues from the Karl Landsteiner University of Health Sciences, Austria, the University of Texas, US, the University of Melbourne in Australia, and his Cambridge supervisor Dr Jason Rentfrow. The findings are published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.      

The research uses the “Big Five” personality model, standard in social psychology, with simple online tests providing high-to-low scores for five fundamental personality traits of millions of Americans.

The mix of characteristics uncovered by study’s authors consists of low levels of “agreeableness”, suggesting mountainous residents are less trusting and forgiving – traits that benefit “territorial, self-focused survival strategies”.   

Low levels of “extraversion” reflect the introverted self-reliance required to thrive in secluded areas, and a low level of “conscientiousness” lends itself to rebelliousness and indifference to rules, say researchers.

“Neuroticism” is also lower, suggesting an emotional stability and assertiveness suited to frontier living. However, “openness to experience” is much higher, and the most pronounced personality trait in mountain dwellers.

“Openness is a strong predictor of residential mobility,” said Götz. “A willingness to move your life in pursuit of goals such as economic affluence and personal freedom drove many original North American frontier settlers.”

“Taken together, this psychological fingerprint for mountainous areas may be an echo of the personality types that sought new lives in unknown territories.”  

The researchers wanted to distinguish between the direct effects of physical environment and the “sociocultural influence” of growing up where frontier values and identities still hold sway.

To do this, they looked at whether mountainous personality patterns applied to people born and raised in these regions that had since moved away.

The findings suggest some “initial enculturation” say researchers, as those who left their early mountain home are still consistently less agreeable, conscientious and extravert, although no such effects were observed for neuroticism and openness.

The scientists also divided the country at the edge of St. Louis – “gateway to the West” – to see if there is a personality difference between those in mountains that made up the historic frontier, such as the Rockies, and eastern ranges e.g. the Appalachians.

While mountains continue to be a “meaningful predictor” of personality type on both sides of this divide, key differences emerged. Those in the east are more agreeable and outgoing, while western ranges are a closer fit for frontier settlement theory.

In fact, the mountainous effect on high levels of “openness to experience” is ten times as strong in residents of the old western frontier as in those of the eastern ranges.

The findings suggest that, while ecological effects are important, it is the lingering sociocultural effects – the stories, attitudes and education – in the former “Wild West” that are most powerful in shaping mountainous personality, according to scientists.   

They describe the effect of mountain areas on personality as “small but robust”, but argue that complex psychological phenomena are influenced by many hundreds of factors, so small effects are to be expected.

“Small effects can make a big difference at scale,” said Götz. “An increase of one standard deviation in mountainousness is associated with a change of around 1% in personality.”

“Over hundreds of thousands of people, such an increase would translate into highly consequential political, economic, social and health outcomes.”    

Oesophageal cancer is often preceded by Barrett’s oesophagus, a condition in which cells within the lining of the oesophagus begin to change shape and can grow abnormally. The cellular changes are cause by acid and bile reflux – when the stomach juices come back up the gullet.

Barrett's oesophagus and oesophageal cancer are diagnosed using biopsies, which look for signs of dysplasia, the proliferation of abnormal cancer cells. Between one and five people in every 100 with Barrett's oesophagus will go on to develop oesophageal cancer in their life-time, but as this type of cancer can be difficult to treat, particularly if not caught early enough, researchers have been trying to identify ways to catch the disease early.

Professor Rebecca Fitzgerald from the MRC Cancer Unit at the University of Cambridge said: “Early diagnosis of cancer is one of the best strategies to improve patient survival and decrease the side-effects from treatments. However, this strategy can result in overtreatment – patients incorrectly identified as high-risk and given unnecessary treatments. We need to find new ways to accurately spot cancer progression at a very early stage to help us identify those patients at greatest risk.”

A phenomenon commonly seen in the DNA of tumours – but not in healthy tissues – is one whereby whole ‘chunks’ of DNA are either deleted or repeated several times as cells copy and multiply. These are known as ‘copy number alterations’. In a study published today in Nature Medicine, researchers at Cambridge have shown how these DNA ‘signals’ could help diagnose patients earlier.

The team used whole genome sequencing to analyse 777 samples from 88 patients and compared their DNA against that from control samples collected during clinical surveillance for Barrett's oesophagus. They were looking for differences in the DNA between the patients who were eventually diagnosed with cancer versus those who were not.

The researchers found that the genomes in samples from individual patients who went on to develop cancer tended to have a higher number of copy number alterations, and that the number and complexity of such alterations increased over time. They used this information to develop a statistical model that could predict whether a patient was at a high or low risk of cancer from a single, tiny biopsy sample taken years before. The model was then used to predict and classify risks for individuals in a validation cohort of 76 patients and 213 samples.

The model accurately predicted oesophageal cancer eight years before diagnosis for half of all patients who went on to develop the disease. This increased to more than three-quarters of patients one to two years before a diagnosis.

Equally importantly, the model accurately and consistently predicted patients who were at a low risk of developing cancer over many years of clinical surveillance. This meant that these patients did not need to be subjected to regular, invasive monitoring or treatment.

The researchers found a high degree of variability in copy number alternations even within a single biopsy, but even so, the model provided surprisingly stable predictions of a patient’s risk of progression to cancer.

Dr Sarah Killcoyne from the MRC Cancer Unit at the University of Cambridge and EMBL-EBI, joint first author, said: “Our research shows the power of genomic medicine for the early detection of cancer. We combined low-cost sequencing of standard tissue biopsies with statistical modelling to identify which patients were at greatest risk of progressing from Barrett’s oesophagus to oesophageal cancer.”

Eleanor Gregson from the MRC Cancer Unit, joint first author, added: “This new approach could allow us to intervene earlier, helping improve a patient’s outcome, while at the same time avoiding the need for low-risk individuals to have regular and invasive monitoring or even unnecessary treatment.”

The research was funded by the Medical Research Council and United European Gastroenterology, with support from the National Institute for Health Research Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre.

Reference
Killcoyne, S. et al. Genomic copy number predicts esophageal cancer years before transformation. Nat Med; 7 Sept 2020; DOI: 10.1038/s41591-020-1033-y

The co-founder of the Gates Foundation said the scale and urgency of the pandemic has prompted philanthropists to engage in more active collaboration, not only with businesses and government but also with each other.

As an example, he cited the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator involving the Gates Foundation, Mastercard, Wellcome and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, founded by Priscilla Chan and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Gates said that philanthropists are “uniquely positioned to ensure an equitable response to a challenge, in Covid’s case to ensure that diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines reach the billions of people who need them, at an affordable cost.

“Philanthropy is also very good at moving quickly, finding new innovations, trying out things that governments will be very slow to do or might not see, and that will give us a lot of really great tools to deal with the Covid crisis.”

Regarding emerging markets, Gates said that philanthropists “are very keen to increase opportunity for young people in areas like education, health and entrepreneurship. A lot of these really innovative philanthropists are first- or second-generation wealth builders, so they are able to take the latest approaches and leapfrog and improve on practices and really set examples that governments and other philanthropists can benefit from.”

He said there is a “lot of potential” in online giving, because digital platforms have “made it easier for everyone, not just the wealthy, to give to worthy causes” – and that it is “important to think about how this retail giving complements long-term philanthropy as it will continue to grow.”

The Centre for Strategic Philanthropy was launched in June 2020, with a focus on the impact of strategic philanthropy both within and from emerging global growth markets. Founding patron Badr Jafar is CEO of Crescent Enterprises and is a member of the Advisory Board of Cambridge Judge Business School.

When term begins on 8 October, around 15,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students will be resident in accommodation belonging to one of Cambridge's 31 Colleges. To reduce the risk of transmission among the Cambridge community, the University will be launching their own programme to test all of these students on a weekly basis.

Students will use a swab to take a sample from their nose and throat. Swabs will be pooled by household, enabling the University to reduce the number of tests required to around 2,000 per week. For most Colleges, a household will be classified as a unit where students share communal facilities, such as toilets and showers and kitchen facilities.

Samples will be sent to the Cambridge COVID-19 Testing Facility at the Anne McLaren Building on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus. If a pooled household test is positive, the students in the household will be informed within 24 hours and offered individual tests to confirm the positive result. Students with confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection and their household and contacts will be supported in following national guidance on self-isolation and household quarantine.

Participation in the programme will be voluntary; however, it is hoped that the great majority of students will take part. In combination with contact tracing and the University’s established testing facilities for symptomatic students and staff, the programme will help reduce the risk to other students, staff and members of the local community.

Professor Stephen J Toope, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, said: “We look forward to welcoming our students back to Cambridge and want to reassure them – and the wider local community – that we are doing everything we can to make sure they feel safe and supported while they are here. This screening programme is just one of a number of measures that we are putting in place to keep our University and city safe.

“Although the programme is voluntary, we are confident that the overwhelming majority of students will want to take part as this will help ensure they are able to enjoy and make the most of the Cambridge experience in the current challenging circumstances.”

A related testing programme has been operating since early on in the pandemic as a partnership between Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and the University, helping the Trust reduce the risk of hospital-acquired coronavirus infections. It has also enabled staff members potentially exposed to the virus to return to work safely or to isolate as appropriate.

Professor Patrick Maxwell, Regius Professor of Physic at the University of Cambridge, added: “Offering testing to all students in college accommodation, who make up the majority of our student population, will help us reduce the risk of outbreaks by identifying individuals who will often not be aware that they are infected.”

Due to limited capacity, it is not possible to offer testing to all students. The risk of transmission and outbreaks is expected to be higher in college accommodation, where the density of students and potential for interactions are greater; hence, the programme is targeted at these students.

In addition to the asymptomatic screening programme, the University is providing COVID-19 testing free of charge to any member of the University displaying symptoms, along with members of their household, and any student showing possible symptoms should use these facilities. Testing is currently available at either Addenbrooke’s Hospital or at the Department of Engineering.

Additional information is available on the Stay Safe Cambridge Uni website.

Dense metallic hydrogen – a phase of hydrogen which behaves like an electrical conductor – makes up the interior of giant planets, but it is difficult to study and poorly understood. By combining artificial intelligence and quantum mechanics, researchers have found how hydrogen becomes a metal under the extreme pressure conditions of these planets.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, IBM Research and EPFL, used machine learning to mimic the interactions between hydrogen atoms in order to overcome the size and timescale limitations of even the most powerful supercomputers. They found that instead of happening as a sudden, or first-order, transition, the hydrogen changes in a smooth and gradual way. The results are reported in the journal Nature.

Hydrogen, consisting of one proton and one electron, is both the simplest and the most abundant element in the Universe. It is the dominant component of the interior of the giant planets in our solar system – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune – as well as exoplanets orbiting other stars.

At the surfaces of giant planets, hydrogen remains a molecular gas. Moving deeper into the interiors of giant planets however, the pressure exceeds millions of standard atmospheres. Under this extreme compression, hydrogen undergoes a phase transition: the covalent bonds inside hydrogen molecules break, and the gas becomes a metal that conducts electricity.

“The existence of metallic hydrogen was theorised a century ago, but what we haven’t known is how this process occurs, due to the difficulties in recreating the extreme pressure conditions of the interior of a giant planet in a laboratory setting, and the enormous complexities of predicting the behaviour of large hydrogen systems,” said lead author Dr Bingqing Cheng from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory.

Experimentalists have attempted to investigate dense hydrogen using a diamond anvil cell, in which two diamonds apply high pressure to a confined sample. Although diamond is the hardest substance on Earth, the device will fail under extreme pressure and high temperatures, especially when in contact with hydrogen, contrary to the claim that a diamond is forever. This makes the experiments both difficult and expensive.

Theoretical studies are also challenging: although the motion of hydrogen atoms can be solved using equations based on quantum mechanics, the computational power needed to calculate the behaviour of systems with more than a few thousand atoms for longer than a few nanoseconds exceeds the capability of the world’s largest and fastest supercomputers.

It is commonly assumed that the transition of dense hydrogen is first-order, which is accompanied by abrupt changes in all physical properties. A common example of a first-order phase transition is boiling liquid water: once the liquid becomes a vapour, its appearance and behaviour completely change despite the fact that the temperature and the pressure remain the same.

In the current theoretical study, Cheng and her colleagues used machine learning to mimic the interactions between hydrogen atoms, in order to overcome limitations of direct quantum mechanical calculations.

“We reached a surprising conclusion and found evidence for a continuous molecular to atomic transition in the dense hydrogen fluid, instead of a first-order one,” said Cheng, who is also a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College.

The transition is smooth because the associated ‘critical point’ is hidden. Critical points are ubiquitous in all phase transitions between fluids: all substances that can exist in two phases have critical points. A system with an exposed critical point, such as the one for vapour and liquid water, has clearly distinct phases. However, the dense hydrogen fluid, with the hidden critical point, can transform gradually and continuously between the molecular and the atomic phases. Furthermore, this hidden critical point also induces other unusual phenomena, including density and heat capacity maxima.

The finding about the continuous transition provides a new way of interpreting the contradicting body of experiments on dense hydrogen. It also implies a smooth transition between insulating and metallic layers in giant gas planets. The study would not be possible without combining machine learning, quantum mechanics, and statistical mechanics. Without any doubt, this approach will uncover more physical insights about hydrogen systems in the future. As the next step, the researchers aim to answer the many open questions concerning the solid phase diagram of dense hydrogen.

Reference:
Bingqing Cheng et al. ‘Evidence for supercritical behaviour of high-pressure liquid hydrogen.’ Nature (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2677-y.

The WWF’s Living Planet Report 2020 presents a comprehensive overview of the state of our natural world as captured by the Living Planet Index (LPI) of the Zoological Society of London (ZSL). Almost 21,000 populations of over 4,000 vertebrate species were tracked between 1970 and 2016, with contributions from over 125 experts from around the world. 

“The Living Planet Report 2020 underlines how humanity’s increasing destruction of nature is having catastrophic impacts not only on wildlife populations, but on human health and all aspects of our lives,” said Marco Lambertini, Director General of WWF International. 

He added: “In the midst of a global pandemic, it is now more important than ever to take unprecedented and coordinated global action to halt and reverse the loss of biodiversity and wildlife populations across the globe by the end of the decade.” 

The report shows that the main cause of the dramatic decline in species populations on land is habitat loss and degradation, including deforestation, driven by food production. Factors believed to increase the planet’s vulnerability to pandemics, including land-use change and the use and trade of wildlife, are also drivers of the decline. 

Endangered species include the eastern lowland gorilla, whose numbers in the Kahuzi-Biega National Park, Democratic Republic of Congo have seen an estimated 87 percent decline between 1994 and 2015 mostly due to illegal hunting, and the African grey parrot in southwest Ghana, whose numbers fell by up to 99 percent between 1992 and 2014 due to threats posed by trapping for the wild bird trade and habitat loss.

Wildlife populations found in freshwater habitats have suffered a decline of 84 per cent - the starkest average population decline in any biome. For example, the spawning population of the Chinese sturgeon in China’s Yangtze river declined by 97 percent between 1982 and 2015 due to the damming of the waterway.

University of Cambridge zoologists Dr Lynn Dicks and Dr Edgar Turner contributed a summary of global insect decline to the report. They reveal evidence of recent, rapid declines in insect abundance and diversity in some places, but not everywhere. The researchers highlight the importance of long-term monitoring of insect abundance around the world.

Dicks, a Lecturer in Animal Ecology in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology, said: “Most information about insects comes from a small number of countries in the northern hemisphere. There is very little information from large parts of the world such as Africa, South America and Asia, where land use change and agricultural expansion - key drivers of insect decline - are happening fast.” 

She added: “What happens to insects matters a lot to humanity. These small six-legged creatures play central roles in the world’s ecosystems - as waste processors, pollinators, predators, and prey. Without them, humans - and all of nature - could be in a lot of trouble.”

Dr Andrew Terry, ZSL’s Director of Conservation said: “This report is clear evidence of the damage human activity is doing to the natural world. If nothing changes, populations will undoubtedly continue to fall, driving wildlife to extinction and threatening the integrity of the ecosystems on which we all depend. But we also know that conservation works and species can be brought back from the brink. With commitment, investment and expertise, these trends can be reversed.”

Stabilising and reversing the loss of nature caused by humans’ destruction of natural habitats will only be possible if bolder, more ambitious conservation efforts are embraced, and transformational changes made to the way we produce and consume food. Changes include making food production and trade more efficient and ecologically sustainable, reducing waste, and favouring healthier and more environmentally-friendly diets. Implementing these measures together, rather than in isolation, will allow the world to more rapidly alleviate pressures on wildlife habitats. 

The Living Planet Report 2020 launches less than a week before the 75th session of the United Nations General Assembly, when leaders are expected to review the progress made on the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Agreement and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Bringing together world leaders, businesses and civil society, the meeting will develop the post-2020 framework for action for global biodiversity. 

Lambertini said: “With leaders gathering virtually for the UN General Assembly in a few days’ time, this research can help us secure a New Deal for Nature and People which will be key to the long-term survival of wildlife, plant and insect populations and the whole of nature, including humankind.  A New Deal has never been needed more.”

The Living Planet Report is WWF's flagship publication and is produced every two years as a comprehensive study of trends in global biodiversity and the health of the planet. This is the 13th edition.

Adapted from a press release by WWF.

Like the inner tube of bicycle or car tyre, damage to the lungs can lead to a puncture. As air leaks out, it builds up in the cavity between the lung and chest wall, causing the lung to collapse. Known as a pneumothorax, this condition typically affects very tall young men or older patients with severe underlying lung disease.

During the pandemic, a team at the University of Cambridge and Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge University NHS Foundation Trust, observed several patients with COVID-19 who had developed punctured lungs, even though they did not fall into either of these two categories.

“We started to see patients affected by a punctured lung, even among those who were not put on a ventilator,” says Professor Stefan Marciniak from the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research. “To see if this was a real association, I put a call out to respiratory colleagues across the UK via Twitter. The response was dramatic – this was clearly something that others in the field were seeing.”

Professor Marciniak subsequently obtained the appropriate ethical approvals and exchanged anonymised clinic information about 71 patients from around the UK. This led to a study published today in the European Respiratory Journal.

Although the team are unable to provide an accurate estimate of the incidence of punctured lung in COVID-19, admissions data from the 16 hospitals participating in the study revealed an incidence of 0.91%.

“Doctors need to be alert to the possibility of a punctured lung in patients with COVID-19, even in people who would not be thought to be typical at-risk patients,” said Professor Marciniak, who is also a Fellow at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. “Many of the cases we reported were found incidentally – that is, their doctor had not suspected a punctured lung and the diagnosis was made by chance.”

Just under two-thirds (63%) of patients with a punctured lung survived. Individuals younger than 70 years tended to survive well, but older age was associated with a poor outcome – a 71% survival rate among under 70s patients compared with 42% among older patients.

Patients with a punctured lung were three times more likely to be male than female, though this may be accounted for by the fact that large studies of patients with COVID-19 suggest that men are more commonly affected by severe forms the disease. However, the survival rate did not differ between the sexes.

Patients who had abnormally acidic blood, a condition known as acidosis that can result from poor lung function, also had poorer outcomes in COVID-19 pneumothorax.

Dr Anthony Martinelli, a respiratory doctor at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, said: “Although a punctured lung is a very serious condition, COVID-19 patients younger than 70 tend to respond very well to treatment. Older patients or those with abnormally acidic blood are at greater risk of death and may therefore need more specialist care.”

The team say there may be several ways that COVID-19 leads to a punctured lung. These include the formation of cysts in the lungs, which has previously been observed in x-rays and CT scans.

Reference
Martinelli, A, et al. COVID-19 and Pneumothorax: A Multicentre Retrospective Case Series. European Respiratory Journal; 10 Sept 2020; DOI: 10.1183/13993003.02697-2020

Earlier research has shown that autistic people on average die younger than others and that this may be, in part, due to chronic physical health conditions. Previous studies have also shown that autistic people are at higher risk of a variety of health conditions, but we don’t know what is driving these increased risks. Thus, better understanding of the physical health of autistic adults may help us improve both their quality and length of life.

1,156 autistic individuals and 1,212 non-autistic individuals took part in an anonymous, online survey developed by the team about their lifestyle choices and daily habits, personal and family medical history. The results indicate that autistic individuals are, on average, 1.5 to 4.3 times as likely to have a wide variety of health conditions, including low blood pressure, arrhythmias, asthma, and prediabetes. 

This new study is also the first to examine the influence of smoking, alcohol use, and BMI. Surprisingly, the results show that these lifestyle factors (which increase the risk of chronic physical health problems in the general population) do not account for the heightened risk of heart, lung, and diabetic conditions seen among autistic adults.

The study also explored the experiences of female respondents and of older adults, both of whom remain understudied groups. The results revealed that autistic females, even more so than autistic males, are more likely to report increased risks of physical health conditions. In addition, the types of conditions of risk depend on the person’s biological sex. For example, autistic females are 4.3 times more likely to have prediabetes than non-autistic females; however, autistic and non-autistic males are equally likely to have prediabetes. These results suggest that a “one size fits all” approach to the healthcare of autistic people may not be effective.

Elizabeth Weir, the PhD student who led the study, said: “This is a first step in better understanding why autistic individuals are so much more likely to have chronic physical health problems. While smoking, alcohol, and BMI may play a role, we now need to focus on what other biological (e.g. genetic, hormonal, etc), environmental, lifestyle (e.g. diet, exercise, sleep, etc) or healthcare-related factors are contributing to these health disparities.”

Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, Director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge, who was part of the team, said: “This new study highlights the physical health risks to autistic individuals, and has important implications for their healthcare. Understanding the reasons why these disparities exist will allow us to better support autistic individuals and improve the quality and length of their lives.”

Funding for this project was provided by the Autism Research Trust, the Rosetrees Trust, and the Cambridge and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust. 

Reference
Weir, E at al. Increased prevalence of non-communicable physical health conditions among autistic adults. Autism; 9 Sept 2020; DOI: 10.1177/1362361320953652

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, used a numerical experiment to determine the limits of matt structural colour – a phenomenon which is responsible for some of the most intense colours in nature – and found that it extends only as far as blue and green in the visible spectrum. The results, published in PNAS, could be useful in the development of non-toxic paints or coatings with intense colour that never fades.

Structural colour, which is seen in some bird feathers, butterfly wings or insects, is not caused by pigments or dyes, but internal structure alone. The appearance of the colour, whether matt or iridescent, will depending on how the structures are arranged at the nanoscale.

Ordered, or crystalline, structures result in iridescent colours, which change when viewed from different angles. Disordered, or correlated, structures result in angle-independent matt colours, which look the same from any viewing angle. Since structural colour does not fade, these angle-independent matt colours would be highly useful for applications such as paints or coatings, where metallic effects are not wanted.

“In addition to their intensity and resistance to fading, a matt paint which uses structural colour would also be far more environmentally-friendly, as toxic dyes and pigments would not be needed,” said first author Gianni Jacucci from Cambridge’s Department of Chemistry. “However, we first need to understand what the limitations are for recreating these types of colours before any commercial applications are possible.”

“Most of the examples of structural colour in nature are iridescent – so far, examples of naturally-occurring matt structural colour only exist in blue or green hues,” said co-author Lukas Schertel. “When we’ve tried to artificially recreate matt structural colour for reds or oranges, we end up with a poor-quality result, both in terms of saturation and colour purity.”

The researchers, who are based in the lab of Dr Silvia Vignolini, used numerical modelling to determine the limitations of creating saturated, pure and matt red structural colour.

The researchers modelled the optical response and colour appearance of nanostructures, as found in the natural world. They found that saturated, matt structural colours cannot be recreated in the red region of the visible spectrum, which might explain the absence of these hues in natural systems.

“Because of the complex interplay between single scattering and multiple scattering, and contributions from correlated scattering, we found that in addition to red, yellow and orange can also hardly be reached,” said Vignolini.

Despite the apparent limitations of structural colour, the researchers say these can be overcome by using other kinds of nanostructures, such as network structures or multi-layered hierarchical structures, although these systems are not fully understood yet.

Reference:
Gianni Jacucci et al. ‘The limitations of extending nature’s colour palette in correlated, disordered systems.’ PNAS (2020). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2010486117

The Trinity Challenge sets a series of urgent questions to harness the potential of data and analytics to learn and share lessons from the great innovations made to combat COVID-19 and to build resilience against future health emergencies. £10m of funding will be made available to teams to support and scale their innovations across areas including economics, behavioural sciences, and epidemiology. 

The Challenge has been convened by Dame Sally Davies, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. Its Founding Members represent a diverse coalition of world leading organisations across the private, public and social sectors. All are united by the common aim of using data and advanced analytics to develop insights and practical actions to contribute to a world better protected from health emergencies. 

Launching the Challenge, Dame Sally said: “There will be another COVID-19, and there is an opportunity for the international community to learn lessons now and prepare for the future. The Trinity Challenge is a recognition by business, academia and philanthropy of the need for new, breakthrough ideas and approaches to beat the next pandemic.”  

The Challenge has the support of Professor Stephen J Toope, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, who said: “COVID-19 has highlighted the power of data in helping us understand and tackle health emergencies, but it has also revealed the challenges we face in getting the right data to the right people at the right time.

“We need to up our collaborative game so that we cross sectors, disciplines and borders to help us tackle – and even prevent – future health emergencies. The Trinity Challenge is an exciting opportunity to make this happen.”

Professor Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb and Anna Vignoles, co-chairs of the Cambridge Centre for Data-Driven Discovery, will be providing leadership on behalf of the University.

Professor Schönlieb said: “Cambridge is supporting The Trinity Challenge not only because of our expertise and ability to contribute to tackling this pandemic but also because of our key role in producing the next generation of scientists who will be needed to tackle this and future public health threats of this kind.”

Professor Vignoles added: “Our University is world leading in many aspects of the science needed to tackle this pandemic. We are also world leading in terms of our data science. The Cambridge Centre for Data-Driven Discovery convenes data science expertise from right across Cambridge and is highly interdisciplinary in its focus. We have been working closely with The Trinity Challenge team to determine what data we need and how we might use it to address this pandemic.”

The Trinity Challenge is calling on global participants to submit impact-led ideas on how to safeguard our health and economic systems from the threat of global health emergencies. Submissions that make the selection will be supported with access to people, data and resources from Founding Members, to maximise the effectiveness of their solutions and leverage the world-leading expertise and innovation of these institutions. 

Challenge Teams will focus on potential solutions that support and strengthen the global public health ecosystem in a robust and inclusive way. Solutions will be fielded globally through an open and accessible submission process to bring the best minds and ideas together with the aim of developing insights that will benefit the world in the future. 

The Founding Members are: Aviva, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Brunswick Group, University of Cambridge, Discovery Limited, Facebook, Global Virome Project, Google, HKUMed, Imperial College London, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, Internews, Legal and General, LSE, McKinsey and Company, Microsoft, Northeastern University, Optum, Reckitt Benckiser, Tencent, Zenysis Technology.

Full details are available on The Trinity Challenge website.

A new analysis of the successes and failures of green energy companies in the US has found that those with ARPA funding filed for far more patents in the years after launching than other “cleantech” startups from the same time.    

The “innovation advantage” bestowed by ARPA-E – an energy version of the legendary DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) – was not shared by startups funded via other US government initiatives.  

ARPA-type agencies were developed in the US to fund “high risk, high reward” research with the aim of fostering major breakthroughs, often by providing greater freedom to take on highly ambitious technical challenges.

The new findings offer encouragement to a UK government considering its own British ARPA (or ‘BARPA’), but any agency adopting this model requires a focus in order to flourish – and BARPA’s should be climate, argues Professor Laura Diaz Anadon from the University of Cambridge.

“Our US-based research points to the value of ARPA agencies. The UK may well benefit from such an approach in a post-pandemic world, given the technological capital within its universities and private sector,” said Anadon, co-author of the US innovation study.

“The UK should adapt the ARPA model to create an agency for the climate challenge as part of any COVID-19 recovery package. Focusing research and development on next-generation energy storage and renewables, and solutions for decarbonizing shipping, aviation and construction, could boost productivity and deliver large benefits to society,” said Anadon.

Dr Anna Goldstein, first author of the study from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said: “ARPA is not a one-size-fits-all solution. ARPA agencies are mission-focused, and there is no evidence to suggest this model would work well as a fund for general science and technology.”

The research was conducted by the University of Cambridge, UK (Prof. Laura Diaz Anadon), the University of Massachusetts Amherst, US (Dr. Anna Goldstein and Prof. Erin Baker), and the Technical University of Munich in Germany (Prof. Claudia Doblinger). It is published today in the journal Nature Energy.

ARPA-E was established at the US Department of Energy under Obama, using a portion of the economic stimulus package that followed the 2009 financial crisis. To date, it has allocated US$3.38 billion.

The aim was to accelerate innovation in “clean” technologies such as biofuels, smart grids and solar power at a time when it was out of favour with Venture Capital investors, due in part to long development cycles and low initial returns.

For the latest study, researchers investigated whether ARPA-E – a “posterchild” of mission-orientated innovation now under threat from the Trump administration – had translated its unique approach into real-world success.

By constructing a database of 1,287 US cleantech startups, and using patents as a proxy for innovation, they found that companies funded by a fledgling ARPA-E in 2010 went on to file patents at an average of twice the rate of other green energy companies in the years that followed.

The researchers also measured “business success” by looking at how many companies were taken public or acquired by larger firms, as well as levels of private VC funding and overall survival rates. 

While ARPA-funded companies do better than those turned down by ARPA-E, in general they fare no better or worse than other cleantech startups with the same amount of patents and private funding before 2010.

As such, the researchers argue that ARPA-E support alone does not bridge the “valley of death”: the phase between initial funding injection and revenue generation during which startups often fold.

Goldstein said: “It appears that ARPA-E helps startups working on riskier but potentially more disruptive technologies to reach the same levels of success as other, less risky, cleantech firms.”

“However, there is still a need for public funding to bring innovations in clean technology through the ‘valley of death’ so they can become commercial products that compete with legacy technologies and reduce emissions.”

Writing for Cambridge Zero, the University’s new climate change initiative, Laura Diaz Anadon points out that, at just 1.7% of GDP, the UK lags in R&D investment: below the EU28 average, and way behind the US, South Korea and Japan.

“While the UK dramatically increased energy investment over the last 20 years, it is still below the levels this country saw in the 1970s and 1980s,” said Anadon, Professor of Climate Change Policy at the University of Cambridge.

“My co-authors and I would recommend trialing a UK version of ARPA-E that can ramp up energy innovation, and support selected projects through to demonstration phase. R&D investments in energy transition would be an inexpensive but essential component of a Covid-19 recovery package.”

“The UK has solid recent experience in the energy space, but in the past several initiatives have fallen prey to volatile government funding before success can be properly gauged. Future efforts will need consistency as well as a set up that would enable state-of-the-art and independent evaluation.”        

Astronomers have speculated for decades that high clouds on Venus could offer a home for microbes – floating free of the scorching surface, but tolerating very high acidity. The detection of phosphine molecules, which consist of hydrogen and phosphorus, is an important step in the search for life beyond Earth, a key question in science. The results are reported in the journal Nature Astronomy.

The discovery was made by Professor Jane Greaves while she was a visitor at the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy. Greaves and her collaborators used the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) in Hawaii to detect the phosphine, and followed up their discovery on the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. Both facilities observe Venus at a wavelength of about 1 millimetre, much longer than the human eye can see.

“This was an experiment made out of pure curiosity, really – taking advantage of JCMT’s powerful technology, and thinking about future instruments,” said Greaves, who is based at Cardiff University. “I thought we’d just be able to rule out extreme scenarios, like the clouds being stuffed full of organisms. When we got the first hints of phosphine in Venus’ spectrum, it was a shock!”

Luckily, conditions were good at ALMA for follow-up observations while Venus was at a suitable angle to Earth. Processing the data was challenging, however, as ALMA isn’t usually looking for subtle effects in bright objects like Venus.

“In the end, we found that both observatories had seen the same thing – faint absorption at the right wavelength to be phosphine gas, where the molecules are backlit by the warmer clouds below,” said Greaves.

Using existing models of the Venusian atmosphere to interpret the data, the researchers found that phosphine is present but scarce – only about twenty molecules in every billion. The astronomers then ran calculations to see if the phosphine could come from natural processes on Venus. They caution that some information is lacking – in fact, the only other study of phosphorus on Venus came from one lander experiment, carried by the Soviet Vega 2 mission in 1985.

On Earth, phosphine is only made industrially or by microbes that thrive in oxygen-free environments. Co-author Dr William Bains from MIT led the work on assessing natural ways to make phosphine on Venus. Ideas included sunlight, minerals blown upwards from the surface, volcanoes, or lightning, but none of these could make anywhere near enough. Natural sources were found to make at most one ten-thousandth of the amount of phosphine that the telescopes saw.

To create the observed quantity of phosphine on Venus, terrestrial organisms would only need to work at about 10% of their maximum productivity, according to calculations by co-author Dr Paul Rimmer of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory. Any microbes on Venus will likely be very different from their Earth cousins though, to survive in hyper-acidic conditions.

“This discovery brings us right to the shores of the unknown,” said Rimmer. “Phosphine is very hard to make in the oxygen-rich, hydrogen-poor clouds of Venus and fairly easy to destroy. The presence of life is the only known explanation for the amount of phosphine inferred by observations.

“Both of these facts lie at the edge of our knowledge: the observations could be caused by an unknown molecule, or could be caused by chemistry we’re not aware of. Ultimately, the only way to find out what's really happening is to send a mission into the clouds of Venus to take a sample of the droplets and look at them to see what's inside.”

Earth bacteria can absorb phosphate minerals, add hydrogen, and ultimately expel phosphine gas. It costs them energy to do this, so why they do it is not clear. The phosphine could be just a waste product, but other scientists have suggested purposes like warding off rival bacteria.

Co-author Dr Clara Sousa Silva from MIT was also thinking about searching for phosphine as a ‘biosignature’ gas of non-oxygen-using life on planets around other stars because normal chemistry makes so little of it. “Finding phosphine on Venus was an unexpected bonus,” she said. “The discovery raises many questions, such as how any organisms could survive. On Earth, some microbes can cope with up to about 5% acid in their environment – but the clouds of Venus are almost entirely made of acid.”

Other possible biosignatures in the Solar System may exist, like methane on Mars and water venting from the icy moons Europa and Enceladus. On Venus, it has been suggested that dark streaks where ultraviolet light is absorbed could come from colonies of microbes. The Akatsuki spacecraft, launched by the Japanese space agency JAXA, is currently mapping these dark streaks to understand more about this unknown ultraviolet absorber.

The team believes their discovery is significant because they can rule out many alternative ways to make phosphine, but they acknowledge that confirming the presence of ‘life’ needs a lot more work. Although the high clouds of Venus have temperatures up to a pleasant 30 degrees Celsius, they are incredibly acidic – around 90% sulphuric acid – posing major issues for microbes to survive there. The researchers are investigating the possibility that the microbes could shield themselves inside droplets.

The team is now awaiting more telescope time to establish whether the phosphine is in a relatively temperate part of the clouds and to look for other gases associated with life. New space missions could also travel to our neighbouring planet, and sample the clouds to search for signs of life.

Professor Emma Bunce, President of the Royal Astronomical Society, said: “A key question in science is whether life exists beyond Earth, and the discovery by Professor Jane Greaves and her team is a key step forward in that quest. I’m particularly delighted to see UK scientists leading such an important breakthrough – something that makes a strong case for a return space mission to Venus.”

Reference:
Jane S. Greaves et al. ‘Phosphine Gas in the Cloud Decks of Venus.’ Nature Astronomy (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41550-020-1174-4

Adapted from an RAS press release.

Research from Cambridge criminologists suggests that those charged with drug cultivation have often been forced into illegal work as a condition of debt to criminal gangs for smuggling them into the UK.

The researchers, including a Detective Inspector who completed a Masters at Cambridge's Institute of Criminology, argue that police take too narrow a view of modern slavery when it comes to "growers" arrested during cannabis farm raids.

While growers – often Vietnamese nationals – are not always imprisoned within farms, many work under threat of extreme violence towards themselves or family back home, with little in the way of language or contacts in the UK.

The researchers say that arresting officers often lack detailed training on modern slavery, and make only "perfunctory" enquiries: a brief question that places the onus on a victim who doesn't understand their own situation.

As such, migrants end up serving years in UK prisons despite being forced to commit the cultivation crimes by gangs who seize passports and threaten – and administer – violence.

"The abuses of freedom in cannabis farm cases do not tally with traditional perceptions of slavery. Victims may be held against their will, forced to work and unable to leave, despite an unlocked door," said Prof Heather Strang, the study's senior author.

"Big questions remain about how the criminal justice system should ethically manage modern slavery victims who are also illegal immigrants involved in illegal activity," she said.

The new study, published in the Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing, was co-authored by DI Adam Ramiz of Surrey Police as part of his research at Cambridge, where he worked with Strang and Prof Paul Rock from LSE.

Cannabis farms are unassuming abodes in towns and city suburbs that house hundreds of plants in blacked-out rooms, grown with equipment such specialist lighting. A live-in "grower" will work for criminal gangs to feed and protect the Class B drug crop.

The latest study is small in scale – gaining access to growers willing to talk is difficult – but criminologists say that it's an important addition to this under-researched area.

The team looked at criminal histories of 19 Vietnamese nationals arrested in connection with cannabis farming in Surrey and Sussex between 2014-2017, and conducted in-depth interviews with three further growers – two Vietnamese and an Albanian – as well as the arresting officers in those cases.

The growers all described being in hock to human smugglers, working in farms to pay debts, and some spoke of death threats and physical intimidation. Two spoke of dangerous journeys to the UK via lorries, similar to the 39 Vietnamese nationals found dead in Essex last year.

One witnessed murder by smugglers while trekking for days through forests. Another was locked inside the house once in the UK. The victims didn't consider themselves such, as they had wanted to come here, yet had been forced into illegal labour on arrival: smuggling that becomes trafficking.

Interviews with officers revealed police questioning on slavery to be limited, cursory and "binary"– whether or not the grower was physically locked in – and conducted with a presumption of guilt on the that the grower is an offender.

"We found that some officers only had an hour of modern slavery training, and felt that the onus is on trafficking victims to volunteer that information, rather than police to investigate further," said Ramiz, who led the study.

"The brief question or two on slavery will often come after a grower has been given the standard legal advice to say nothing and later to plead guilty," he said.

Police frustrations focus on growers, with one officer talking of "hitting a brick wall" if they won't open up, but researchers say that the legal advice offered to trafficked cannabis growers is routine and uncritical: "go quietly".

They argue that police should "re-frame" their response to cannabis farms so that the possibility of modern slavery is "more fully considered", and suggest detailed training for front-line officers along with greater willingness to refer cases to specialist investigators.

Dame Sara Thornton, the UK's Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, described the study as a "welcome contribution to building an evidence-based approach to preventing modern slavery".

"The Modern Slavery Act includes a statutory defence for those compelled to commit an offence as a direct result of their being a victim of modern slavery. It is essential that the police investigate all lines of enquiry when they come across these complicated cases," said Thornton.

Added Ramiz: "While much more research is needed, these accounts of debt bondage and fierce intimidation suggests the mass cultivation of cannabis is rife with modern slavery, and the grey area between offender and victim in these cases can become a blind spot for UK police."

Case Study:

A 34-year-old Vietnamese man now in an English prison for growing cannabis told researchers he had been a taxi driver, before fleeing his home after taking part in protests against a Chinese oil rig in the disputed South China sea.

Accused of betraying his country by police, he entered into contract with a smuggler after fearing for his life when a friend disappeared following arrest. Unable to pay in full, he ended up in debt bondage to a criminal gang.

Believing he was going to the UK to work in kitchens, the grower found himself in a series of lorries and flights across China and Russia, and taken into Europe via the forests of Poland.

“You have to walk for maybe two, three days… I saw one person had been beaten up… when I turned around he was unconscious… he walked too slow,” the grower told researchers. He believed the person he described had died.

The grower arrived in the UK in a lorry container. He was eventually taken to a house already full of cannabis plants and shown how to tend them, and given an allowance for food and phone calls home.

“I do not dare leave the house without telling them, because I fear for my life… They told me if I tried to escape they would harm my family,” said the grower.

He remembered police asking some questions about being forced to work, and he had told them. His legal advisor asked no such questions. He did not consider himself a trafficking victim, as he had wanted to come to the UK.

The police interviewer of the grower was a 33-year-old probationary police officer. He had been given an interview plan, and told researchers he viewed the matter in simple terms: “…you’re interviewing him as a suspect to get a confession, or to get the points across to get the conviction or charge…”.

No trafficking questions were in the officer’s plan, but he asked some anyway based on the grower’s response. The officer acknowledged his ignorance of modern slavery legislation to researchers.

A further interview was done by the officer’s supervisor, who was in charge of the investigation. He told researchers the training given to police on slavery – one hour-long session – was insufficient, and until guidance improved they had to rely on instinct.

The officer-in-charge entered a submission to the National Referral Mechanism – the framework set up in 2009 to ensure victims of trafficking receive help. The NRM returned a decision that the grower had “consented” to the illegal work, so was not a victim, and he was sentenced to prison.

The researchers argue that investing in the training of refugee doctors is a very effective way to help fill gaps in care provision left exposed by the Covid-19 crisis – taking far less time and money than it does to train a doctor from scratch.

By converting already-skilled people to medical work in the areas where they now live – often regions of European countries in short supply of doctors, nurses, dentists, and so on – it will help move the refugees out of poverty while bolstering the local health services of their adopted homes.

A new short film made by Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Global Human Movement and the Syria Public Health Network (SPHN) follows three refugees in the UK, Germany and Turkey as they set about retraining while discussing their lives new and old, and experiences of escaping war-torn Syria.

The film was produced by Dr Adam Coutts from Cambridge’s Department of Sociology, a cofounder of SPHN, which aims to address policy challenges arising in the humanitarian health response. SPHN provides advocacy, policy briefs and evidence reviews to donors, NGOs and UN agencies.

“Syrian healthcare workers, as with many other displaced professionals, are a well-educated and highly skilled workforce. Their experiences have important policy, economic, humanitarian and academic implications,” said Coutts.  

“Thousands of qualified health professionals in Syria have left the country since 2011 due to military attacks on clinics and hospitals. These essential workers now find themselves excluded from formal job opportunities and sliding into poverty in host communities in the Middle East and Europe.”

“They have already been through enough trauma in escaping a war zone. In the policy to build, build, build it is a great waste to not use their skills!” Coutts said.

One of the refugee medics featured in the film, Ba’raa Krebeh, who fled Homs, Syria in 2019, but now lives in Grimsby, UK “After I got my status I started to look for any opportunity or organisation that could help refugee doctors,” said Krebeh.

He has been assisted by the Lincolnshire Refugee Doctor Project, who helped the 29-year-old medic with housing and support for courses and exams. Krebeh is now working to pass his English test, which he hopes to do in the next couple of months, then will aim to take medical exams and get a hospital placement.

When asked about his future, Krebeh said: “I think I will be here, practising in a hospital in Grimsby.” He hopes to be working as a surgeon in five years’ time. 

“Much more investment and policy attention needs to be given for services such as the Lincolnshire NGO that support refugee doctors and speed up the process of recertification and recruitment,” said Dr Aula Abbara a consultant in infectious diseases at Imperial College NHS Healthcare Trust who also co-chairs the Syria Public Health Network.

“These doctors are usually among the top academic achievers in their cohorts. They may be able to work in specialties where we have shortage in the UK. It’s the same in countries like Germany, where there is a shortfall of thousands of doctors and nurses at present – one expected to become even greater as the population ages,” said Abbara.

“It really is in our interest that we support refugee doctors to enter our workforce. In the aftermath of the Covid-19 crisis we are in desperate need of their knowledge and skills.”

Coutts points out that the ongoing exodus of highly skilled workers from Syria, Iraq and North Africa – characteristic of protracted crises in middle-income, largely urban settings – affects the ability of aid organisations and governments to deliver humanitarian assistance.

“Available evidence on post-conflict reconstruction shows that rebuilding the health workforce is one of the top priorities,” said Coutts. “Employing refugee health workers can help to provide a foundation for the rebuilding of a destroyed health system’

The World Health Organisation estimates a shortfall of 18 million health workers to accelerate universal health coverage by 2030, particularly in low to middle income countries.

Coutts and colleagues argue that displaced healthcare professionals present major opportunities for host communities in the Middle East and the economies of Europe, by strengthening health and welfare systems in the Middle East, Europe and the UK,

Added Coutts: “Our film shows success stories, but these are few. With more support like the Lincolnshire programme many others could return to their vocations quickly and effectively. We think the integration of refugee doctors should be a political priority in countries such as the UK. Health services in the UK and across Europe needs these people.” 

Now cutting-edge DNA sequencing of more than 400 Viking skeletons from archaeological sites scattered across Europe and Greenland will rewrite the history books as it has shown:

• Skeletons from famous Viking burial sites in Scotland were actually local people who could have taken on Viking identities and were buried as Vikings.
• Many Vikings actually had brown hair not blonde hair.
• Viking identity was not limited to people with Scandinavian genetic ancestry. The study shows the genetic history of Scandinavia was influenced by foreign genes from Asia and Southern Europe before the Viking Age.
• Early Viking Age raiding parties were an activity for locals and included close family members.
• The genetic legacy in the UK has left the population with up to six per cent Viking DNA. 

Results of the six-year research project, published in the journal Nature, debunk the modern image of Vikings and was led by Professor Eske Willerslev, a Fellow of St John’s College, University of Cambridge, and director of The Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre, University of Copenhagen.

“We have this image of well-connected Vikings mixing with each other, trading and going on raiding parties to fight Kings across Europe because this is what we see on television and read in books – but genetically we have shown for the first time that it wasn’t that kind of world,” said Willerslev, who is also affiliated with Cambridge’s Department of Zoology. “This study changes the perception of who a Viking actually was – no one could have predicted these significant gene flows into Scandinavia from Southern Europe and Asia happened before and during the Viking Age.”

The word Viking comes from the Scandinavian term ‘vikingr’ meaning ‘pirate’. The Viking Age generally refers to the period from AD800, a few years after the earliest recorded raid, until the 1050s, a few years before the Norman Conquest of England in 1066.

The Vikings changed the political and genetic course of Europe and beyond: Cnut the Great became the King of England, Leif Eriksson is believed to have been the first European to reach North America – 500 years before Christopher Columbus - and Olaf Tryggvason is credited with taking Christianity to Norway. Many expeditions involved raiding monasteries and cities along the coastal settlements of Europe, but the goal of trading goods like fur, tusks and seal fat was often the more pragmatic aim.

“We didn’t know genetically what they actually looked like until now,” said Willerslev. “We found genetic differences between different Viking populations within Scandinavia which shows Viking groups in the region were far more isolated than previously believed. Our research even debunks the modern image of Vikings with blonde hair as many had brown hair and were influenced by genetic influx from the outside of Scandinavia.”

The international team sequenced the whole genomes of 442 mostly Viking Age men, women, children and babies from their teeth and petrous bones found in Viking cemeteries. They analysed the DNA from the remains from a boat burial in Estonia and discovered four Viking brothers died the same day. The scientists have also revealed male skeletons from a Viking burial site in Orkney, Scotland, were not actually genetically Vikings despite being buried with swords and other Viking memorabilia.

There wasn’t a word for Scandinavia during the Viking Age - that came later. But the study shows that the Vikings from what is now Norway travelled to Ireland, Scotland, Iceland and Greenland. The Vikings from what is now Denmark travelled to England. And Vikings from what is now Sweden went to the Baltic countries on their all-male ‘raiding parties’.

“We carried out the largest ever DNA analysis of Viking remains to explore how they fit into the genetic picture of Ancient Europeans before the Viking Age,” said co-first author Dr Ashot Margaryan from the University of Copenhagen. “The results were startling and some answer long-standing historical questions and confirm previous assumptions that lacked evidence.

“We determined that a Viking raiding party expedition included close family members as we discovered four brothers in one boat burial in Estonia who died the same day. The rest of the occupants of the boat were genetically similar suggesting that they all likely came from a small town or village somewhere in Sweden.”

DNA from the Viking remains were shotgun sequenced from sites in Greenland, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, Scandinavia, Poland and Russia.

“We found that Vikings weren’t just Scandinavians in their genetic ancestry, as we analysed genetic influences in their DNA from Southern Europe and Asia which has never been contemplated before,” said co-first author Professor Martin Sikora form the University of Copenhagen. “Many Vikings have high levels of non-Scandinavian ancestry, both within and outside Scandinavia, which suggest ongoing gene flow across Europe.”

The team’s analysis also found that genetically Pictish people ‘became’ Vikings without genetically mixing with Scandinavians. The Picts were Celtic-speaking people who lived in what is today eastern and northern Scotland during the Late British Iron Age and Early Medieval periods.

“Individuals with two genetically British parents who had Viking burials were found in Orkney and Norway,” said co-first author Dr Daniel Lawson from the University of Bristol. “This is a different side of the cultural relationship from Viking raiding and pillaging.”

The Viking Age altered the political, cultural and demographic map of Europe in ways that are still evident today in place names, surnames and modern genetics.

“Scandinavian diasporas established trade and settlement stretching from the American continent to the Asian steppe,” said co-author Professor Søren Sindbæk from Moesgaard Museum in Denmark. “They exported ideas, technologies, language, beliefs and practices and developed new socio-political structures. Importantly our results show that ‘Viking’ identity was not limited to people with Scandinavian genetic ancestry. Two Orkney skeletons who were buried with Viking swords in Viking style graves are genetically similar to present-day Irish and Scottish people and could be the earliest Pictish genomes ever studied.”

“This is the first time we can take a detailed look at the evolution of variants under natural selection in the last 2,000 years of European history,” said co-first author Professor Fernando Racimo from the University of Copenhagen. “The Viking genomes allow us to disentangle how selection unfolded before, during and after the Viking movements across Europe, affecting genes associated with important traits like immunity, pigmentation and metabolism. We can also begin to infer the physical appearance of ancient Vikings and compare them to Scandinavians today.”

The genetic legacy of the Viking Age lives on today with six per cent of people of the UK population predicted to have Viking DNA in their genes compared to 10 per cent in Sweden.

“The results change the perception of who a Viking actually was. The history books will need to be updated,” said Willerslev.

Reference:
Ashot Margaryan et al. ‘Population genomics of the Viking world.’ Nature (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2688-8

Adapted from a St John’s College press release.

India has reported nearly five million COVID-19 cases and well over 80,000 deaths (as of 17 September 2020), making the country one of the worst hit in the world. But an even greater tragedy may have unfolded had India’s government not used nudge theory to maintain one of the world’s strictest and longest lockdowns in the first quarter of the year. This is the view of a new study by Ramit Debnath and Dr Ronita Bardhan from Cambridge’s Behaviour and Building Performance Group, Department of Architecture.

Using machine learning and AI-based algorithms to analyse almost 400 government press releases, they show how India nudged across 14 key policy areas to influence the behaviour of 1.3 billion people, including government employees, scientists, health professionals, manufacturers, food suppliers and students to help fight COVID-19. The researchers argue that nudges from India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, were particularly important in creating herd effect on lockdown and social distancing norms across the nation. 

The study, published in PLoS ONE, found that the government deployed nudge techniques to tackle a wide range of urgent challenges between 15 January and 14 April 2020. Nudging is a design-based public policy approach which uses positive and negative reinforcements to modify the behaviour of a population.

In January and February, policy nudges were focused on evaluating the risk of incoming travellers from China and extending surveillance at international airports. But the narrative soon shifted to address other pressing concerns. By March, nudges sought to impose new restrictions on travel, discouraging people from visiting crowded and public spaces, and strict social distancing. On 24 March, Modi told the nation that “21 days is critical to breaking the infection cycle… or else the country and your family could be set back 21 years”. The next day, the country entered phase 1 of lockdown.

The government nudged to tackle fake news about the virus and to convince the population to strictly adhere to the rules, use masks and wash hand frequently. At the same time, it conducted surveillance in urban areas using smart technologies that included drones, spatial analysis, low-power Bluetooth mobile phone applications and humanoid robots.

Ramit Debnath said: “Nudge-based policy approaches are crucial in a democratic country like India which has a vast population and geo-spatial divide, high levels of illiteracy and an extremely vulnerable health system.”

Ronita Bardhan added: “The government urgently needed to buy time and it had to bring a deeply divided population together to fight a common struggle – this was a huge challenge. Our findings show that the government needed much more than scientific data to convince people, they appealed to powerful values including patriotism, family, religion and community.”

The study highlights the role played by the ‘Prime Minister’s Citizen Assistance and Relief in Emergency Situations Fund’ (PM CARES Fund) which was created to nudge the public to make micro-donations and encourage public participation to help tackle the crisis. On 5 April, the Prime Minister nudged people to voluntarily switch off their lights for ten minutes in solidarity with frontline workers. Most of these nudges were made with social media advertisements, SMS forwards and broadcast media.

The study found that government ministries nudged India’s manufacturing firms to produce PPE, hand sanitiser and masks to meet the national demand, while also seeking to protect the country’s food security and supply chains at a critical time – India’s farmers harvest their winter crops from February to April. 

Meanwhile, the government spurred on India’s scientific community to fight the pandemic, releasing funding through the Department of Science and Technology. Research institutions were encouraged to submit proposals to focus on the development of affordable diagnostics, vaccines, antivirals, disease models, and other R&D to study COVID-19. 

Scientific innovation during this period included robots for encouraging social distancing in public spaces and healthcare centres; and a contact tracing app (AarogyaSetu) using GPS and Bluetooth. Frequent SMS reminders were used to nudge people to use the app. The Ministry of Human Resource Development also nudged the start-up and innovation community in India to participate in the fight for COVID-19 by launching programs like ‘Fight Corona IDEAthon’.

To support education, the government encouraged home-schooling by aggressively advertising the use of the National Digital Library of India. The government even harnessed nostalgia to help keep people at home during lockdown by broadcasting popular ‘80s and ‘90s TV shows on the national channel, Doordarshan.

The study demonstrates how nudge strategies evolved as the crisis unfolded. Between January and the first week of March, for instance, one government ministry (AYUSH) was aggressively nudging people to follow the traditional medicinal practice of Ayurveda and to maintain good health through yoga to increase immunity, while also insisting on disciplined personal hygiene. However, in mid-March, as infection rates increased, the nudges shifted away from traditional treatments to promoting a healthy lifestyle using hashtags like #YOGAathome.

The researchers used topic modelling, a computational social science method that has its basis in text mining and natural language processing. It automatically analyses text data to determine cluster words for a set of documents.

The Government started lifting lockdown restrictions on 7 June 2020, and the spread of the virus has since accelerated. But the benefits of the government’s nudge campaign are still being felt, the researchers believe. Ronita Bardhan says: “Behaviour changes encouraged by nudges earlier in the year, including the wearing of masks and social distancing, are still widely maintained across India. These nudges are still helping to save lives.”

The study does not attempt to assess the success or failure of the Government of India’s policy interventions, rather to understand how context-specific latent nudges were created through policy interventions.

Ramit Debnath is a Gates Cambridge Scholar at Churchill College; Dr Ronita Bardhan is University Lecturer of Sustainability in the Built Environment and a Fellow at Selwyn College.

Reference

R. Debnath R & R. Bardhan, ‘India nudges to contain COVID-19 pandemic: A reactive public policy analysis using machine-learning based topic modelling’, PLoS ONE (2020). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0238972. 

Stephen Toope, Vice-Chancellor, said: “Bill Sr.’s enduring vision in establishing Gates Cambridge 20 years ago has inspired and supported a generation of scholars who are changing the world across myriad disciplines, from digital healthcare for the poor, to tackling food insecurity and proposing new ways to mitigate climate change. Please may I extend the University’s condolences to Bill Sr.’s wife Dr Mimi Gates and the Gates family on the passing of a giant whose outstanding impact on humanity will continue to grow each year, and whose passion for service will always burn in the hearts of the scholars supported by Gates Cambridge Trust.”

Bill Gates Sr., founding Gates Cambridge Trustee, dies at 94

The planet orbits so close to its star that its year lasts only 19 hours, and stellar radiation heats the planet to over 1700 degrees Celsius.

At these temperatures, heavy elements like iron can be ionised in the atmosphere and molecules disassociated, providing a unique laboratory to study the chemistry of planets outside the solar system.

Although the planet weighs twice as much as Neptune, it is also slightly larger and has a similar density. Therefore, LTT 9779b should have a huge core of around 28 Earth masses, and an atmosphere that makes up around 9% of the total planetary mass.

The system itself is around two billion years old, and given the intense irradiation, a Neptune-like planet would not be expected to keep its atmosphere for so long, providing a puzzle for astronomers to solve; how such an improbable system came to be. The results are reported in the journal Nature Astronomy.

LTT 9779 is a Sun-like star located at a distance of 260 light years, a stone’s throw in astronomical terms. It is metal-rich, having twice the amount of iron in its atmosphere than the Sun. This could be a key indicator that the planet was originally a much larger gas giant, since these bodies tend to form close to stars with the highest iron abundances.

Initial indications of the existence of the planet were made using the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), as part of its mission to discover small transiting planets orbiting nearby and bright stars across the whole sky. Such transits are found when a planet passes directly in front of its parent star, blocking some of the starlight, and the amount of light blocked reveals the companion’s size. Planets like these, once fully confirmed, can allow astronomers to investigate their atmospheres, providing a deeper understanding of planet formation and evolution processes.

The transit signal was confirmed in early November 2018 as originating from a planetary mass body, using observations taken at the ESO la Silla Observatory in northern Chile. HARPS uses the Doppler Wobble method to measure planet masses and orbital characteristics. When objects are found to transit, Doppler measurements can be organized to confirm the planetary nature in an efficient manner. In the case of LTT 9779b, the team were able to confirm the planet’s existence after only one week of observations.

Professor James Jenkins from the Department of Astronomy at the Universidad de Chile, who led the team, said: “The discovery of LTT 9779b so early in the TESS mission was a complete surprise; a gamble that paid off. The majority of transit events with periods less than one day turnout to be false-positives, normally background eclipsing binary stars.”  

The planet was uncovered in only the second of 26 sectors of observations that TESS would be observing across the whole sky. Since no similar types of planets were detected in the TESS precursor missions Kepler and K2, the finding was even more exciting.

“We selected this candidate from a TESS alert due to its very short orbital period. After inspecting the light curve, we found it was a good candidate for an upcoming week-long observation campaign using the HARPS spectrograph in La Silla,” said co-author Matías Díaz, also from the Universidad de Chile. “We planned the observations carefully, to maximize the use of the spectrograph and sample the orbit of the candidate in an optimal way. During the first nights of data we saw the observations matched the predicted period of the candidate. Further analysis of the seven nights of observations in November were consistent with a massive Neptune planet.”

LTT 9779b exists in the ‘Neptunian Desert’, a region devoid of planets when we look at the population of planetary masses and sizes. Although icy giants seem to be a fairly common by-product of the planet formation process, this is not the case very close to their stars. The researchers believe these planets get stripped of their atmospheres over cosmic time, ending up as so-called Ultra Short Period planets.

The Kepler mission found that Ultra Short Period planets, those that orbit their stars in one day or less, come mainly in the form of large gas giants or small rocky planets. Models tell us that planets like LTT 9779b should be stripped of their atmospheres through a process called photoevaporation as they move close to their stars. The large gas giants, on the other hand, have strong gravitational fields that can hold onto their atmospheres, and so we end up with a dearth of planets like Neptune with the shortest orbital periods.

“Planetary structure models tell us that the planet is a giant core dominated world, but crucially, there should exist two to three Earth-masses of atmospheric gas,” said Jenkins. “But if the star is so old, why does any atmosphere exist at all? Well, if LTT 9779b started life as a gas giant, then a process called Roche Lobe Overflow could have transferred significant amounts of the atmospheric gas onto the star.”

Roche Lobe Overflow is a process whereby a planet comes so close to its star that the star’s stronger gravity can capture the outer layers of the planet, causing it to transfer onto the star and so significantly decreasing the mass of the planet. Models predict outcomes similar to that of the LTT 9779 system, but they also require some fine-tuning.

“It could also be that LTT 9779b arrived at its current orbit quite late in the day, and so hasn’t had time to be stripped of the atmosphere. Collisions with other planets in the system could have thrown it inwards towards the star. Indeed, since it is such a unique and rare world, more exotic scenarios may be plausible,” said Jenkins.

Members of the Cambridge Astronomy department are part of the Next-Generation Transit Survey (NGTS). The NGTS team conducted follow-up observations of LT9779b’s transit to help confirm the planetary nature of the system and better constrain its properties.

“LTT 9779b is an intriguing planet, being the first of its kind discovered,” said co-author Dr Ed Gillen, from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory. “It is particularly exciting because of its peculiarity: how did this planet come to arrive on such a short period orbit and why does it still possess an atmosphere? Fortunately, the planetary system is located nearby so we can study it in detail, which promises new insights into how such planets come to be and what they are made of.”

Reference:
James S. Jenkins et al. ‘An ultrahot Neptune in the Neptune desert.’ Nature Astronomy (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41550-020-1142-z

Adapted from a Universidad de Chile press release.

In the message His Royal Highness said, “As we emerge from this crisis, the need to decarbonise flight must remain at the top of the agenda. While many are calling for net zero flight by 2050, I would like to challenge you all to think about halving that time frame to 2035.”

To achieve this target, he said “we must acknowledge that the decarbonisation of flight is technically possible. However, more focus is required if it is to be achieved in the necessary time scale.”

In January, The Prince of Wales launched the National Centre for Propulsion and Power at the University of Cambridge’s Whittle Laboratory. The Centre, which is due to open in 2023 will bring together researchers from across UK Universities with industry partners such as Rolls Royce, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Siemens and Dyson to accelerate the development of low-carbon technologies for the propulsion and power sectors.

In his address yesterday, The Prince said: “In partnership with Rolls-Royce and funded by the UK Aerospace Technology Institute the Whittle Laboratory also demonstrated its ability to reduce the time taken to develop technologies by a factor of between 10 and 100, speeding up innovation and testing from months into days. This again proves that it is again possible to accelerate our efforts through resourcefulness and the right mindset. It is only through this type of radical change with industry, government and academia working together that we will have a chance of overcoming the climate and biodiversity challenge.”

Speaking after HRH, at the same conference, Glenn Llewellyn, VP of Zero Emission Aircraft at Airbus explained three concepts for the world’s first zero-emission commercial aircraft which could enter service by 2035 all codenamed “ZEROe”. The concepts each represent a different approach to achieving zero-emission flight, exploring various technology pathways and aerodynamic configurations in order to support Airbus’s ambition of leading the way in the decarbonisation of the entire aviation industry.

All of these concepts rely on hydrogen as a primary power source, an option which Airbus says it believes holds exceptional promise as a clean aviation fuel and is likely to be a solution for aerospace and many other industries to meet their climate-neutral targets.

Guillaume Faury, Airbus CEO, said: “This is a historic moment for the commercial aviation sector as a whole and we intend to play a leading role in the most important transition this industry has ever seen. The concepts we unveil today offer the world a glimpse of our ambition to drive a bold vision for the future of zero-emission flight. I strongly believe that the use of hydrogen – both in synthetic fuels and as a primary power source for commercial aircraft – has the potential to significantly reduce aviation’s climate impact.”