Cambridge historian Professor Mary Beard will help fund two Classics students from under-represented backgrounds as part of efforts to encourage more diversity among those studying the subject at the University.

The £80k gift will pay the £10k-a-year living costs of two undergraduates who are from both an under-represented minority ethnic group and a low-income home for the full duration of their degree course. The award will be available from the start of the 2021/22 academic year in October.

Professor Beard, who will retire at the end of 2022 after almost 40 years teaching at the University of Cambridge, said the gift – the Joyce Reynolds Award, named in honour of one of her own, pioneering, Classics tutors - is ‘payback’ for everything Classics has given her, as a student and an academic.

“It’s a retirement present from me,” said Professor Beard. “I am very conscious of what I’ve gained from Classics; no one from my family had a university degree. This subject has been my livelihood, it’s given me the opportunity to do lots of things - and it’s paid my mortgage for 40 years!” 

As well as offering practical support to the students who receive it, Professor Beard said her gift is symbolic of the Faculty of Classic’s commitment to attracting diverse applicants, alongside its schools outreach programmes and its four-year (rather than the usual three-year) Classics course which offers a preliminary year for students with little or no Latin.

“It’s a pledge, that we really do want people from more diverse backgrounds to study Classics. Classics is a subject that has changed, is changing, but needs to change more. We’ve done a lot of work in saying that you don’t have to have Latin and Greek before you come, you can learn it here, that this isn’t just for posh people who’ve done Latin for ages. But you still walk around the Faculty and it looks - although not entirely - very white.

“I have no illusion that giving a couple of scholarships is the solution, but it’s a way of showing we’re serious about equality of opportunity. And if it makes the difference in someone choosing to study here that might otherwise not, if it makes inroads into any anxiety they might understandably have about financing their course, then it’s worth it.

“Classicists go on to get very good jobs. Our students are extremely smart, extremely motivated, intellectually able and flexible. They’re trained to think hard, to express themselves, to write well - qualities that a hell of a lot of employers are looking for. The idea that the only way of being certain of getting a good job is to take a professional, vocational qualification is just untrue. Classics hasn’t made me rich, but I’ve written popular books and I’ve made television programmes and it’s brought me more than I expected or hoped. And I think it’s payback time.”

Zaynab Ahmed, a third year Classics student at Newnham College, said: “I was lucky enough to attend a state grammar that offered Classics/Latin, but it isn’t something that’s taught in many state schools which means a lot of BAME students aren’t exposed to the subject and the opportunities it offers. That’s why the four-year course here is so important, with the preliminary year as a foundation, and this gift will hopefully mean more students from under-represented groups feel able to apply. 

“Classics is a subject I’ve fallen in love with; it’s about the past, but it’s also about how we understand ourselves now. I’m always challenged, and even when I’ve been up to my eyeballs in Plato I’ve never regretted choosing it.”

Widening participation at the University of Cambridge

The University of Cambridge is committed to widening participation. In 2020 we accepted more than 70% of students from state schools, and one in four from under-represented and economically disadvantaged backgrounds. We also accepted a record number of Black students, representing a 50% increase on the previous year.

The University is working hard to encourage students from less privileged backgrounds to apply whether it be through the offering of student bursaries or extra support through a variety of outreach activities. In recent years we have introduced the use of UCAS Adjustment to reconsider candidates who exceed expectations in examinations, created the Get In Cambridge campaign, and in 2021 launched a Foundation Year to further increase the proportion of Cambridge students from state schools, low progression postcodes and from areas of socio-economic deprivation.

This week, more than 500 researchers from over 80 UK and Italian Universities will be joining colleagues from 40 countries to contribute to Climate Exp0. Online, free, and open to all, it’s an opportunity to connect policy, academic and student audiences across the globe, and harness the power of virtual collaboration to help advance a resilient, zero-carbon world. It will feature a range of speakers – from policymakers and academics, to practitioners and students.

Organised by the COP26 Universities Network, the conference aims to raise ambition for tangible outcomes from the UN COP26 Climate Change Conference, jointly hosted by the UK and Italy in Glasgow this November.

At a critical point in the COP26 pre-meetings and negotiations – six months prior to the conference itself – Climate Exp0 will showcase the latest thinking and most relevant UK and international research around five key themes: Adaptation and Resilience; Finance; Green Recovery; Mitigation Solutions and Nature-based Solutions.

Dr Emily Shuckburgh, Chair of the COP26 Universities Network and Director of Cambridge Zero, said: “This is a vital moment for the world. As we look to emerge from the pandemic and build a more resilient, sustainable future, we must harness the ideas and innovations that will support a cleaner and greener future. Climate Exp0 is an exhibition of hope and inspiration to encourage the ambitious global climate action that is required.”

Highlights of this week’s conference include:

Monday
Opening of conference
The Rt Hon Alok Sharma, President of COP26 and Minister Roberto Cingolani, Minister for Ecological Transition, Italy
Climate risk. Opening session setting out the threat we face (09:30 – 10:30).
Dr Emily Shuckburgh Cambridge University; Albert Klein Tank, MET Office and Tim Benton, Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House.

Tuesday
Nature-based solutions and the opportunities they offer (09:00 – 09:30)
Zac Goldsmith, Minister of State for Pacific and the Environment and Emma Howard Boyd, Chair of the Environment Agency, UK

Wednesday
Policies for delivering COP26 mitigation objectives (16:30 – 17:15)
Manuel Pulgar Vidal, Global Head of Climate and Energy at WWF, Former Ministry of Environment of Peru, COP20 President, Jim Watson, Professor of Energy Policy, University College London (UCL) Institute for Sustainable Resources and Jacob Werksman, Principal Advisor, DG-CLIMA, European Commission, Brussels, Belgium

Thursday
Adaptation and resilience challenges in the COP26 meeting (09:30 – 10:30)
Minister Maria Cristina Messa, Ministry of University and Research and The Rt Hon Anne-Marie Trevelyan MP, Minister of State for Business, Energy and Clean Growth, UK

Friday
Ask a Climate Change expert: How can we save our planet? (17:15 – 18:30)
Tamsin Edwards, Reader in Climate Change, Kings College London, Lord Deben, Chairman of the Committee on Climate Change and Brighton Kaoma, Global Director of UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network-Youth Initiative.

The conference is a partnership with ‘Rete delle Universita’ per lo sviluppo Sostenibile (Italian University Network for Sustainable Development), sponsored by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), and with support from UN Climate Change Conference UK 2021 in Partnership with Italy and Cambridge University Press.

The study, published today in Nature Genetics, found that genetic variants in the DNA of mitochondria could increase the risk of developing these conditions, as well influencing characteristics such as height and lifespan.

There was also evidence that some changes in mitochondrial DNA were more common in people with Scottish, Welsh or Northumbrian genetic ancestry, implying that mitochondrial DNA and nuclear DNA (which accounts for 99.9% of our genetic make-up) interact with each other.

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

Our cells also contain mitochondria, often referred to as ‘batteries’, which provide the energy for our cells to function. They do this by converting the food that we eat into ATP, a molecule capable of releasing energy very quickly. Each of these mitochondria is coded for by a tiny amount of ‘mitochondrial DNA’. Mitochondrial DNA makes up only 0.1% of the overall human genome and is passed down exclusively from mother to child.

While errors in mitochondrial DNA can lead to so-called mitochondrial diseases, which can be severely disabling, until now there had been little evidence that these variants can influence more common diseases. Several small-scale studies have hinted at this possibility, but scientists have been unable to replicate their findings.

Now, a team at the University of Cambridge has developed a new technique to study mitochondrial DNA and its relation to human diseases and characteristics in samples taken from 358,000 volunteers as part of UK Biobank, a large-scale biomedical database and research resource.

Dr Joanna Howson, who carried out the work while at the Department of Public Health and Primary Care at the University of Cambridge, said: “Using this new method, we've been able to look for associations between the numerous features that have been recorded for participants of UK Biobank and see whether any correlate with mitochondrial DNA.

“Aside from mitochondrial diseases, we don’t generally associate mitochondrial DNA variants with common diseases. But what we’ve shown is that mitochondrial DNA – which we inherit from our mother – influences the risk of some diseases such as type 2 diabetes and MS as well as a number of common characteristics.”

Among those factors found to be influenced by mitochondrial DNA are: type 2 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, liver and kidney function, blood count parameters, life span and height. While some of the effects are seen more extremely in patients with rare inherited mitochondrial diseases – for example, patients with severe disease are often shorter than average – the effect in healthy individuals tends to be much subtler, likely accounting for just a few millimetres’ height difference, for example.

There are several possible explanations for how mitochondrial DNA exerts its influence. One is that changes to mitochondrial DNA lead to subtle differences in our ability to produce energy. However, it is likely to be more complicated, affecting complex biological pathways inside our bodies – the signals that allow our cells to operate in a coordinated fashion.

Professor Patrick Chinnery from the MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit at Cambridge said: “If you want a complete picture of common diseases, then clearly you’re going to need to factor in the influence of mitochondrial DNA. The ultimate aim of studies of our DNA is to understand the mechanisms that underlie these diseases and find new ways to treat them. Our work could help identify potential new drug targets.”

Regional variations in mitochondrial DNA suggest complex interaction with nuclear DNA

Unlike nuclear DNA, which is passed down from both the mother and the father, mitochondria DNA is inherited exclusively from the mother. This suggests that the two systems are inherited independently and hence there should be no association between an individual’s nuclear and mitochondrial DNA – however, this was not what the team found.

The researchers showed that certain nuclear genetic backgrounds are associated preferentially with certain mitochondrial genetic backgrounds, particularly in Scotland, Wales and Northumbria. This suggests that our nuclear and mitochondrial genomes have evolved – and continue to evolve – side-by-side and interact with each other.

One reason that may explain this is the need for compatibility. ATP is produced by a group of proteins inside the mitochondria, called the respiratory chain. There are over 100 components of the respiratory chain, 13 of which are coded for by mitochondrial DNA; the remainder are coded for by nuclear DNA. Even though proteins in the respiratory chain are being produced by two different genomes, the proteins need to physically interlock like pieces of a jigsaw.

If the mitochondrial DNA inherited by a child was not compatible with the nuclear DNA inherited from the father, the jigsaw would not fit together properly, thereby affecting the respiratory chain and, consequently, energy production. This might subtly influence an individual’s health or physiology, which over time could be disadvantageous from an evolutionary perspective. Conversely, matches would be encouraged by evolution and therefore become more common.

This could have implications for the success of mitochondrial transfer therapy – a new technique that enables scientists to replace a mother’s defective mitochondria with those from a donor, thereby preventing her child from having a potentially life-threatening mitochondrial disease.

“It looks like our mitochondrial DNA is matched to our nuclear DNA to some extent – in other words, you can’t just swap the mitochondria with any donor, just as you can’t take a blood transfusion from anyone,” explained Professor Chinnery. “Fortunately, this possibility has already been factored into the approach taken by the team at Newcastle who have pioneered this therapy.”

The study was funded by Wellcome and the British Heart Foundation. Additional support was provided by the NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre.

Reference
Yonova-Doing, E et al. An atlas of mitochondrial DNA genotype-phenotype associations in the UK Biobank. Nature Genetics; 17 May 2021; DOI: 10.1038/s41588-021-00868-1

Cambridge Advance Online brings together the academic strength of the University, and the publishing strength of Cambridge University Press and Cambridge Assessment to develop a portfolio of 50 short courses over the next five years that will allow learners to develop their skills and specialise in emerging areas that address global challenges. The cross-disciplinary courses - created by the University of Cambridge academics who will lead them – are being designed and developed by Cambridge University Press to meet the needs of today’s professional learners.

Changed attitudes across society to online working and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic have galvanised the University’s digital ambitions, and Cambridge Advance Online aims to reach people around the world who are looking to upskill, gain further education and distinguish themselves in the post-pandemic job market.

The development of a new overarching ‘University of Cambridge Online’ brand – which Cambridge Advance Online, among others, will come under – signals the expansion of the University’s online provision for learners across the globe, while maintaining and enhancing its exceptional in-person education for degree students in Cambridge.

The certificated courses will reflect the Cambridge experience and values, with low student to tutor ratios and academically rigorous standards. They will allow students to engage directly with academics at Cambridge, and are centred on rich interaction between students and subject experts, and enhanced peer-to-peer networking. Each course will offer participants the opportunity to join live sessions with academics and interact in collaborative exercises with learners worldwide. 

The first four Cambridge Advance Online courses will open for enrolment in July. They are: Product Technology Roadmapping; Bionanotechnology from Theory to Practice; Business from Bioscience, and Research Commercialisation and Technology Transfer.

Professor Stephen Toope, Vice-Chancellor, said: “Cambridge Advance Online is opening up academic talent across the University to professional learners around the world. With a hugely successful record in product development and supporting business start-ups, and a thriving university ecosystem contributing to society through research, Cambridge will bring vibrant new perspectives to business through these courses, enhance professional development, and meet the needs of organisations and individuals.

“Although in-person teaching remains at the heart of a Cambridge education, the experience of the past year has further highlighted opportunities to enhance teaching with digital technology, and has only accelerated work already under way to expand our education offer through online learning. Across the University – in Departments and Faculties - the flexibility digital tools can offer has been embraced, as it has across the world.”

Professor Graham Virgo, Senior Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Education), said: “Being able to draw together the combined expertise of the University of Cambridge, Cambridge University Press and Cambridge Assessment allows us to develop these courses using the skills and experience we have ‘in-house’ and puts us in a unique position.

“It means we have the expertise and freedom to create a truly great digital product and be able to wield the right tools rather than make compromises. These courses will be as interactive as we can make them, with Cambridge tutors and academics leading discussions, and will ultimately create global networks of professionals. An exceptional learner experience is key, so Cambridge Advance Online will be tailored to meet the needs of individuals specifically in an online environment, rather than just trying to replicate an in-person teaching environment online.” 

Professor Richard Prager, the Vice-Chancellor’s Senior Advisor on Online Education, said “Excellence in education is at the heart of the mission and success of the University of Cambridge. Cambridge University Press and Cambridge Assessment have unique resources to develop and support a state-of-the-art educational platform and framework. Cambridge Advance Online will bring the best of Cambridge professional education to a wide audience.”

Anna Wood, Managing Director of Cambridge Online Education at the Press, said: “It’s been fantastic to work with the University and to build this new programme of professional courses, which will give forward-thinking professionals the opportunity to harness the latest ideas, discussions, research and innovations from Cambridge to change society for the better.”

More information is available at this link: advanceonline.cam.ac.uk

Further reading: A strange kind of intimacy: Executive education during a pandemic – and beyond

University of Cambridge chemists Shankar Balasubramanian and David Klenerman have been jointly awarded the 2020 Millennium Technology Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious science and technology prizes, by Technology Academy Finland (TAF).

The global prize, awarded at two-year intervals since 2004 to highlight the impact of science and innovation on society, is worth €1 million. Of the nine previous winners of the Millennium Technology Prize, three have subsequently gone on to win a Nobel Prize. This is the first time that the prize has been awarded to more than one recipient for the same innovation, celebrating the significance of collaboration. The announcement of the 2020 award was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Professors Balasubramanian and Klenerman co-invented Solexa-Illumina Next Generation DNA Sequencing (NGS), technology that has enhanced our basic understanding of life, converting biosciences into ‘big science’ by enabling fast, accurate, low-cost and large-scale genome sequencing – the process of determining the complete DNA sequence of an organism’s make-up. They co-founded the company Solexa to make the technology available to the world.

The technology has had – and continues to have – a transformative impact in the fields of genomics, medicine and biology. One measure of the scale of change is that it has allowed a million-fold improvement in speed and cost when compared to the first sequencing of the human genome. In 2000, sequencing of one human genome took over 10 years and cost more than a billion dollars: today, the human genome can be sequenced in a single day at a cost of $1,000. More than a million human genomes are sequenced at scale each year, thanks to the technology co-invented by Professors Balasubramanian and Klenerman, meaning we can understand diseases much better and much more quickly.

Professor Sir Shankar Balsubramanian FRS from the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute and a Fellow of Trinity College, said: “I am absolutely delighted at being awarded the Millennium Technology Prize jointly with David Klenerman, but it’s not just for us, I’m happy on behalf of everyone who has contributed to this work.”

Professor Sir David Klenerman FMedSci FRS from the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, and a Fellow of Christ’s College, said: “It’s the first time that we’ve been internationally recognised for developing this technology. The idea came from Cambridge and was developed in Cambridge. It’s now used all over the world, so I’m delighted largely for the team of people who worked on this project and contributed to its success.”

Next-generation sequencing involves fragmenting sample DNA into many small pieces that are immobilized on the surface of a chip and locally amplified. Each fragment is then decoded on the chip, base-by-base, using fluorescently coloured nucleotides added by an enzyme. By detecting the colour-coded nucleotides incorporated at each position on the chip with a fluorescence detector – and repeating this cycle hundreds of times – it is possible to determine the DNA sequence of each fragment.

The collected data is then analysed using computer software to assemble the full DNA sequence from the sequence of all these fragments. The NGS method’s ability to sequence billions of fragments in a parallel fashion makes the technique fast, accurate and cost-efficient. The invention of NGS was a revolutionary approach to the understanding of the genetic code in all living organisms.

Next-generation sequencing provides an effective way to study and identify new coronavirus strains and other pathogens. With the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the technology is now being used to track and explore mutations in the coronavirus. This work has helped the creation of multiple vaccines now being administered worldwide and is critical to the creation of new vaccines against new dangerous viral strains. The results will also be used to prevent future pandemics.

The technology is also allowing scientists and researchers to identify the underlying factors in individuals that contribute to their immune response to COVID-19. This information is essential to unravelling the reason behind why some people respond much worse to the virus than others.

NGS technology has revolutionised global biological and biomedical research and has enabled the development of a broad range of related technologies, applications and innovations. Due to its efficiency, NGS is widely adopted in healthcare and diagnostics, such as cancer, rare diseases, infectious medicine, and sequencing-based non-invasive prenatal testing.

It is increasingly used to define the genetic risk genes for patients with a rare disease and to define new drug targets for disease in defined patient groups. NGS has also contributed to the creation of new and powerful biological therapies like antibodies and gene therapies.

In the field of cancer, NGS is becoming the standard analytical method for defining personalised therapeutic treatment. The technology has dramatically improved our understanding of the genetic basis of many cancers and is often used both for clinical tests for early detection and diagnostics both from tumours and patients’ blood samples.

In addition to medical applications, NGS has also had a major impact on all of biology as it allows the clear identification of thousands of organisms in almost any kind of sample, which is important for agriculture, ecology and biodiversity research.

Academy Professor Päivi Törmä, Chair of the Millennium Technology Prize Selection Committee, said: “The future potential of NGS is enormous and the exploitation of the technology is still in its infancy. The technology will be a crucial element in promoting sustainable development through personalisation of medicine, understanding and fighting killer diseases, and hence improving the quality of life. Professor Balasubramanian and Professor Klenerman are worthy winners of the prize.”

Professor Marja Makarow, Chair of Technology Academy Finland said: “Collaboration is an essential part of ensuring positive change for the future. Next Generation Sequencing is the perfect example of what can be achieved through teamwork and individuals from different scientific backgrounds coming together to solve a problem.

“The technology pioneered by Professor Balasubramanian and Professor Klenerman has also played a key role in helping discover the coronavirus’s sequence, which in turn enabled the creation of the vaccines – itself a triumph for cross-border collaboration – and helped identify new variants of COVID-19.”

Tomorrow (19 May 2021) Professors Balasubramanian and Klenerman will deliver the Millennium Technology Prize Lecture, talking about their innovation, at 14:30 at the Millennium Innovation Forum. The lecture can be accessed here.

The figures show a record state school intake of 70.6%, up from 68.7% on the previous year. As reported last October, the number of Black students continues to rise, increasing by 50%, and more than a fifth of undergraduate students now come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. 

The statistics include;

• The proportion of students coming from economically disadvantaged areas (as measured by the official indices of multiple deprivation) has risen to 21.6% (from 19.7%).
• The proportion coming from the lowest two POLAR4 quintiles (areas of low participation in Higher Education) has also gone up, from 13% to 14.1%.
• 29.3% of last year’s new arrivals identify as BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic), up from 27.8%.
• The male/female ratio is 48:52.
• There was a 13.3% increase in admissions due to the revision in A-level grades in the summer (3,997 were admitted compared to 3,528 the previous year).
• There were notably high success rates for applications from the north-east and Wales.

Senior Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Professor Graham Virgo, said: "2020 was a challenging year across the Higher Education sector but I’m happy to say, despite the increase in undergraduate admissions, we were able to admit each student who met the terms of their offer, with no forced deferrals. What these statistics show is that we are meeting, or even exceeding, our benchmark targets. It’s encouraging to see the number of BAME students rising again. We have a commitment to seeing more students from underrepresented backgrounds here at Cambridge and this work will continue.”

The Director of Admissions for the Cambridge Colleges, Dr Sam Lucy, said: “Cambridge is delighted to see the number of students coming from disadvantaged backgrounds increasing this year, at a time when many of those students have been particularly affected by the pandemic. This is testament to their resilience and determination and to the hard work of colleagues in Colleges and the University, liaising with schools and their students up and down the country. Our outreach activities have gone online and we have continued to offer mentoring and tutoring support to applicants and offer-holders from less advantaged backgrounds, and provide freely available learning resources for all through our HE+ website (myheplus.com). We will do our best to ensure that our admissions processes take account of the individual challenges that many of our applicants will continue to face.”

The annual statistics can be viewed here: https://www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/apply/statistics
 

The study, which analysed data from more than 4,000 children in England, suggests that those who do more physical activity are likely to have stronger ‘self-regulation’ – the ability to keep themselves in check – and in particular may find it easier to control their emotions at an earlier age. Physical activities which promote self-control in this way, such as swimming or ball sports, also have positive, knock-on effects for academic attainment.

This pattern of association, through which physical activity indirectly influences progress at school by supporting self-regulation, was found to be particularly pronounced among disadvantaged children. The authors of the study, which is published in the journal PLoS ONE, suggest that this may in part be because less-advantaged children often have fewer opportunities to participate in organised recreation and sports, and therefore experience stronger benefits when they do so.

The study was the first ever long-term analysis of the connections between physical activity, self-regulation and academic achievement. Researchers used data captured at three stages during childhood and adolescence: ages seven, 11 and 14.

Fotini Vasilopoulos, who led the study while a research student at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, said: “Research examining the links between physical activity and attainment has produced mixed findings, but there is a positive, indirect relationship because of the impact on mental processes like self-control. This may be particularly important for children from families who find it harder to access sports clubs or other forms of physical activity outside school.”

Dr Michelle Ellefson, Reader in Cognitive Science at the Faculty of Education and a co-author, said: “In the context of COVID in particular, there may be a real temptation to encourage schools to maximise classroom time to stop children falling behind. This study is saying ‘think again’, because playtime and PE lessons benefit the mind in ways that children really need in order to do their best.”

The research used a subset of data covering pupils’ physical activity from the Millennium Cohort Study, which is following the lives of around 19,000 young people born between 2000 and 2002 in the UK.

Researchers also used measures of the children’s behavioural regulation (their ability to manage their behaviour to achieve certain goals) and emotional regulation (control over thoughts and feelings). Standardised test scores and teacher reports were used to measure academic attainment, and a survey of standard risk factors, taken when the children were very young, to establish socio-economic status.

Vasilopoulos and Ellefson then conducted a statistical analysis in two broad stages. First, they examined the direct relationship between physical activity and self-regulation. Next, they examined how far this had an indirect, knock-on effect on achievement. In both cases, they produced a set of correlations which indicated how strong the relationship was, and whether it was positive or negative.

Overall, children who engaged in more physical activity had better emotional regulation – meaning fewer mood swings or emotional outbursts – although there was no corresponding impact on their behavioural regulation.

When the researchers factored in low socio-economic status, however, this positive association was lost. This suggests the direct connection between physical activity and children’s ability to self-regulate is actually being shaped by advantage and wealth. For example, it may reflect the fact that children from disadvantaged settings are known to struggle with emotional regulation. Equally, less-advantaged children often have fewer opportunities to join sports clubs, to participate in activities like swimming and dance lessons, or to access safe, open spaces for games and exercise.

The nature of the indirect pathway through which physical activity, by influencing self-regulation, also has knock-on effects for young people’s attainment, was found to vary between age groups. At age seven, the researchers found a positive relationship with academic progress through emotional control; by age 11, it was physical activity’s impact on behavioural regulation that principally led to any resulting academic benefits.

In both cases, these effects were measurably stronger when low socio-economic status was taken into account. This may be because physical activity has added value for children who might otherwise experience it less. Research by the Social Mobility Commission has, for example, suggested that 34% of disadvantaged children participate in sport less than once a week, compared with 13% of their better-off counterparts.

“The attainment gap is a really complex problem, but we know that some of it is linked to less-advantaged children having poor self-regulation skills early in childhood,” Vasilopoulos said. “Physical activities that help them to do things like focus on a task or maintain attention could be part of the way to bridge that gap.”

In general, the findings indicate that activities which influence emotional control – such as games that involve co-operation, or encourage children to take responsibility for their actions – could be particularly important during early childhood, while those which shape behavioural control may be more important later on. The authors also suggest that schools could build links with sports clubs to create targeted programmes for children experiencing early disadvantage.

“Even giving children less-structured opportunities to run around outside could be of real developmental importance,” Ellefson added. “We really need to ensure that physical activity does not become an area schools feel they can legitimately sacrifice to drive up academic attainment. It has a crucial part to play.”

Reference:
Fotini Vasilopoulos, Michelle R. Ellefson. 'Investigation of the associations between physical activity, self-regulation and educational outcomes in childhood.' PLoS ONE (2021). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0250984

The research, published in two companion papers in Nature Communications Earth and Environment, is the most extensive survey of metal release from any volcano to date – helping scientists understand the spread of metal-rich volcanic fumes and the exposure of communities to volcanic air pollution around Hawai’i.

The 2018 eruption of Kīlauea was the largest in centuries, flooding the eastern edge of the island with roughly a cubic kilometres of lava. Over a thousand people lost their homes and many more suffered from noxious volcanic gases.  

Understanding how volcanic metals are released to the environment is critical from a public health perspective, “We don’t know much about these metal emissions at all, so this work is a key step to understanding the significant, yet underestimated, chemical risks of volcanoes,” said Emily Mason, PhD student at Cambridge Earth Sciences and lead author of one of the papers.

When volcanoes erupt they exhale a cocktail of gases – mostly steam, carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide – laced with evaporated heavy metals, including lead and arsenic. To the communities living alongside volcanoes, these gases are often a considerable source of air pollution and the volatile metals they carry may have long-lasting impacts on both health and environment. 

Volcanologists have been measuring volatile metal emissions from volcanoes for decades, but how these elements are dispersed in the atmosphere following an eruption, to later rain down on the landscape and be taken up in the environment through soils and water bodies, has remained poorly understood.

The team, including researchers from the University of Cambridge, report higher concentrations of airborne heavy metals within a 40 km radius of Kīlauea, meaning that communities living closer to the volcano were disproportionally exposed to metal pollution during the 2018 eruption.

They believe that the strong trade winds at the time of the eruption, combined with the topography of the local area, caused higher rainfall and, therefore metal deposition, closer to the vent. This could mean that an eruption in winter, when wind patterns are reversed, might result in a different distribution of metal deposition.

Their results could help delineate environmental monitoring strategies during and following eruptions – including the targeted testing of community water supplies in at-risk areas – as well as helping planners decide where to build safely around volcanoes.

Emily Mason was one of an all-female team of scientists from the Universities of Cambridge and Leeds that headed out to take gas measurements when Kīlauea erupted. Mason, together with then first-year PhD students Penny Wieser and Rachel Whitty, and early career scientists Evgenia Ilyinskaya and Emma Liu, arrived when the eruption was in full flow and some of their study area was already cut off by lava, “We had to fly in to one location via helicopter. I remember descending through a dense haze of volcanic gas…the acidic air actually stung our skin.” said Mason.

“We tend to think of the more immediate volcanic hazards like ash fall, pyroclastic flows, lava,” said Dr Evgenia Ilyinskaya, from the University of Leeds, who led the research on downwind metal dispersal, “But metal emissions, just like air pollution, are an insidious and often underestimated volcanic hazard – potentially impacting health over long periods.”

During the first few weeks of the eruption, the main air quality concern was volcanic smog, or ‘vog’, which contains mostly sulfur dioxide with traces of heavy metals and volcanic ash. But when molten lava reached the ocean and reacted with seawater it triggered new health warnings, as billowing white clouds of lava haze or ‘laze’ were released; carrying hydrochloric acid and toxic metals.  

Working with collaborators from the USGS, the team took measurements of gases inside the laze and dry vog plumes from both the ground and the air, using specially-fitted drones. They even developed a back frame for their air filters, so they could move equipment quickly through areas where the air was thick with sulphur dioxide.

Mason and co-authors discovered that the two types of gas plume had a very different chemistry, “What really surprised us was the large amounts of copper in the laze plume…the impact of lava-seawater interactions on the biosphere may be significantly underestimated. It’s interesting to note that this type of plume was probably a common feature of the massive outpourings of lava throughout geological history – some of which have been linked to mass extinctions.”

Their long-term goal is to produce pollution hazard maps for volcanoes, showing at-risk areas for metal pollution, a method already used to communicate areas that might be at risk of other volcanic hazards, like lava flows, “Our research is just one part of the puzzle – the idea would be to understand all of these hazards in tandem”.

They aim to apply this method worldwide, but Mason cautions that local atmospheric conditions significantly influence metal dispersal and deposition. Now they want to know how the transport of volcanic metals might differ in cooler, drier environments like the Antarctic – or even in different areas of Hawai’i where rainfall is lower.

Ilyinskaya, Evgenia, et al. "Rapid metal pollutant deposition from the volcanic plume of Kīlauea, Hawai’i." Communications Earth & Environment 2.1 (2021): 1-15.

Mason, Emily, et al. "Volatile metal emissions from volcanic degassing and lava–seawater interactions at Kīlauea Volcano, Hawai’i." Communications Earth & Environment 2.1 (2021): 1-16.

Recently published by Cambridge University Press, the Lexicon provides fresh definitions and translations gleaned by re-reading most of Ancient Greek literature from its foundations in Homer, right through to the early second century AD.

Introducing up-to-date English, the new dictionary clarifies meanings that had become obscured by antiquated verbiage in Liddell and Scott’s Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon which was first published in 1889.

Editor-in-Chief, Professor James Diggle of Queens' College said: “We don’t call βλαύτη 'a kind of slipper worn by fops' as in the Intermediate Lexicon. In the Cambridge Lexicon, this becomes 'a kind of simple footwear, slipper'.”

The team has also rescued words from Victorian attempts at modesty. “We spare no blushes,” said Diggle. “We do not translate the verb χέζω as 'ease oneself, do one's need'. We translate it as 'to shit'. Nor do we explain 'βινέω as 'inire, coire, of illicit intercourse', but simply translate it by the f-word.” 

The two volumes are set to become instantly indispensable for Classics students as well as an important reference work for scholars. 

The team used online databases – the Perseus Digital Library and later the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae – to make this huge corpus more easily accessible and searchable. 

The researchers pored over every word, working steadily through the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet to build up a clear, modern and accessible guide to the meanings of Ancient Greek words and their development through different contexts and authors. The Lexicon features around 37,000 Greek words drawn from the writings of around 90 different authors and set out across more than 1,500 pages. 

The project, which began in 1997, was the brainchild of the renowned Classical philologist and lexicographer John Chadwick (1920–98). The initial plan was to revise the Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon. An abridged version of a lexicon published in 1843, it has never been revised, but until now has remained the lexicon most commonly used by students in English schools and universities. It was hoped that the project might be completed by a single editor within five years.

Diggle was then chair of the project's advisory committee. He said: "Soon after work began it became clear that it was not possible to revise the Intermediate Lexicon; it was too antiquated in concept, design and content. It was better to start afresh by compiling a new lexicon.

“We didn’t realise at the time the magnitude of the task, and it was only because of advances in technology that we were able to take it on. We then had to appoint additional editorial staff and raise a huge amount of financial support. It took us over 20 years because we decided that if we were going to do it we must do it thoroughly.

“At the outset of the project I undertook to read everything which the editors wrote. I soon realised that if we were ever to finish I had better start to write entries myself, and for the last 15 years or more I was fully occupied with it and did little else – it took over my life.”

The Cambridge Greek Lexicon takes a fundamentally different approach to its Victorian predecessor. While entries in the Liddell and Scott lexicon usually start with a word’s earliest appearance in the literature, the Cambridge team realised this might not give its original, or root, meaning. Instead, they begin their entries with that root meaning and then in numbered sections trace the word’s development in different contexts.

Opening summaries help ease the reader into the longer entries, setting out the order of what is to follow, while different fonts signpost the way, helping the reader to distinguish between definitions, translations, and other material, such as grammatical constructions.

The team tackled countless other interesting and challenging words, including πόλις, which will be familiar to many in its English form 'polis'. Diggle said: “Our article shows the variety of senses which the word can have: in its earliest usage 'citadel, acropolis', then (more generally) 'city, town', also 'territory, land', and (more specifically, in the classical period) 'city as a political entity, city-state', also (with reference to the occupants of a city) 'community, citizen body'.”

“'Verbs can be the most difficult items to deal with, especially if they are common verbs, with many different but interrelated uses. ἔχω, (ékhō) is one of the commonest Greek verbs, whose basic senses are 'have' and 'hold'. Our entry for this verb runs to 55 sections. If a verb has as many applications as this, you need to provide the reader with signposts, to show how you have organised the material, to show that you have organised the numbered sections in groups, and to show that these groups follow logically one from the other.”

Professor Robin Osborne, Chair of the Faculty of Classics, said: “The Faculty takes enormous pride in this dictionary and in the way Cambridge University Press have aided us and produced it. It’s a beautiful piece of book making.”

“We invested in the Lexicon to make a contribution to the teaching of Greek over the next century. This puts into the hands of students a resource that will enable them access to Ancient Greek more securely and easily.

“It is hugely important that we continue to engage with the literature of Ancient Greece, not as texts frozen in a past world, but which engage with the world in which we live. There’s been continual engagement with them since antiquity, so we are also engaging with that history, which is the history of European thought.”

The project’s attention to detail also extended to the Press and the typesetters, who took immense care to ensure that consulting the Lexicon would be an easy and pleasurable experience, right down to a specially-created text design. Diggle and his fellow editors inputted their entries for the Lexicon in xml, using a complex system of more than 100 digital tags to ensure each element was automatically rendered in the correct format. 

This also allowed for a constant feedback loop between the editors, the Press and the typesetters, with proofs reviewed and corrected, and the style and content honed as work progressed. 

Michael Sharp, the Lexicon’s Publisher, said: “The Cambridge Greek Lexicon is one of the most important Classics books we have ever published. It represents a milestone in the history of Classics, the University and the Press. I am elated, relieved and immensely proud of the part the Press has played in supporting this project.” 

Professor Diggle said: “The moment of greatest relief and joy was when I was able to sign off the very, very final proofs and say to the Press ‘It’s finished. You can print it’. You can’t imagine what it was like, to realise that we had finally got there; I literally wept with joy.”

There is an unmet need to find drugs that can successfully improve the heart’s ability to pump blood efficiently after it’s been damaged following a heart attack. However, many drugs that make failing heart muscle contract more strongly have been deemed unsafe, leaving a huge gap in heart attack and heart failure treatment. Scientists now believe that they might have identified a new drug target – a protein called MARK4.

In research funded by the British Heart Foundation (BHF), Cambridge scientists found levels of MARK4 were elevated in mouse hearts after a heart attack. When they compared mice with and without MARK4 in the heart, they found hearts without the protein were 57 per cent better at pumping blood. This protective effect was seen 24 hours after a heart attack and lasted for the entire follow-up period of four weeks.

The team identified for the first time that MARK4 fine-tunes a structural network within the heart muscle cell – called the microtubule network – that attaches to the machinery which makes heart muscle cells contract and relax. When MARK4 levels were increased after a heart attack, microtubules were tightly anchored onto the contractile machinery in the heart, causing more resistance and preventing them from functioning normally. When MARK4 levels were reduced, microtubules were loosely anchored, making it easier for the heart to contract and relax.

After a heart attack, in the heart muscle cells of mice without MARK4, the speed of contraction increased by 42 per cent and the speed of relaxation increased by 47 per cent, compared to muscle cells from mice with the MARK4 protein. They were also close to functioning at the same level as healthy heart muscle cells, showing the power of lowering levels of MARK4.

Now, the researchers suggest that drugs to switch off MARK4 could provide a promising new way to improve recovery and help the heart to pump blood more efficiently in people with failing hearts.

Dr Xuan Li, BHF Intermediate Research Fellow at University of Cambridge BHF Centre of Research Excellence, said: “After years of research we’ve revealed an entirely new and promising way that could help the recovery of failing hearts.

“It’s early days, and we now need to test the longer-term effects of switching off MARK4. But if drugs to do that prove successful, the life-changing benefits could be seen in people with other types of heart disease as well as those who’ve had a heart attack and developed heart failure.”

Professor Metin Avkiran, Associate Medical Director at the British Heart Foundation, said: “Heart attacks are a major cause of disability worldwide - people who’ve had a major heart attack are at much greater risk of developing chronic heart failure. There are around 920,000 people living with heart failure in the UK, and we desperately need drugs to drastically improve the heart’s function in these patients.

“These findings are a positive step forward. Further research is needed to refine and test drugs that can target MARK4 before we’ll see them given to people who’ve had a heart attack and develop heart failure.”

This study was also supported by the Isaac Newton Trust, Wellcome, Cancer Research UK and the German Research Foundation.

Reference
Yu, X et al. MARK4 controls ischaemic heart failure through microtubule detyrosination. Nature; 26 May 2021; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03573-5

Adapted from a press release by the British Heart Foundation.

These are the findings of a study by researchers at the Universities of Cambridge, Lincoln, and Minnesota, published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. 

Killer flies (Coenosia attenuata) perform high-speed aerial dives to attack prey flying beneath them, reaching impressive accelerations of up to 36 m/s2, equivalent to 3.6 times the acceleration due to gravity (or 3.6g). This happens because they beat their wings as they fall, combining the acceleration of powered flight with the acceleration of gravity.

This is an impressive feat: diving Falcons, the fastest animals that predate in the air, achieve much lower accelerations of only 6.8m/s2. Falcons dive by folding their wings and simply letting gravity accelerate them towards their prey.

For the tiny Killer fly though, the high speeds achieved in aerial dives could come as a surprise - because the researchers think the fly doesn’t take the effect of gravity into account when diving to intercept a target. 

To get their results, the researchers built a transparent ‘flight arena’ and flew a dummy prey target through it at constant velocity. Killer flies were filmed with high speed video cameras as they attacked the target, and the researchers watched the footage back in slow motion - using this data to reconstruct the entire attack sequence in 3D. 

The study found that Killer flies reached much higher accelerations in flight when taking off from the ceiling of the arena, compared to from the floor or walls. The flies beat their wings at a similar rate wherever they launched from, indicating that their flight speed is determined by a combination of wing power and gravity. 

“When Killer flies took off from the floor or walls of the arena, they moved at the time when they could take the shortest path to the target. But they couldn’t manage that when they took off from the ceiling because the high acceleration caused by gravity changed the expected flight path,” said Sergio Rossoni, a PhD student in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology and first author of the paper.

By diving with super-high acceleration the Killer fly sometimes catches its target prey extremely quickly, but it often misses because its speed makes it challenging to change course mid-dive if the prey moves. But even if the fly doesn’t land on target, the dive quickly reduces its distance from the prey so it can keep sight of it while making the final manoeuvers to catch it.

The researchers think the effect of not accounting for gravity during downward dives might be compensated by another advantage. High speed dives force the potential prey to change direction as the attacker approaches, but to do this the prey has to slow down - making it easier to catch.

Insects that hunt in the air usually attack their prey upwards, because the contrast of the prey against the sky makes it easier to see. Killer flies are unusual insect predators in this respect; hunting downwards against a visually cluttered ground, using eyes that have only coarse resolution, is more difficult. 

“This research into miniature flies helps us understand what shortcuts are acceptable when survival depends on fast decisions and accurate actions, but the sensory capabilities and processing power of the predator are heavily constrained,” said Professor Gonzalez-Bellido at the University of Minnesota, who led the study.

This research was funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and the Royal Society.

Reference
Rossoni, S. et al: ‘Gravity and active acceleration limit the ability of killer flies (Coenosia attenuate) to steer towards prey when attacking from above.’ J.R.Soc.Interface, May 2021. DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2021.0058

The University’s expertise in sustainable transport technology is advising on a West Cambridge Site trial of a fully electric Autonomous Vehicle.

Suitably sci-fi in appearance - prompting double takes from passers-by and offering a striking vision of the future - the 12-seater self-driving shuttle has been developed by engineering firm Aurrigo and Smart Cambridge, a workstream of the Greater Cambridge Partnership (GCP), under the guidance of the Department of Engineering’s Professor John Miles.

“It wasn’t so long ago that if you said ‘electric vehicles’, the first thing people thought of was a milk float,” said Professor Miles, Director of Research in Transitional Energy Strategies. “We didn’t want it to look like a milk float! 

“Autonomous Vehicles (AV) are about encouraging people to get out of their cars and use public transport. Apart from the technical requirements you want to present something that’s comfortable and hopefully inspiring. Something that doesn’t make you feel like you’ve gone to a lot of trouble to leave your car behind - we want to break the mould of people’s thoughts about public transport.”   

Professor Miles, whose work looks at transport energy, future transport systems, and pathways to a zero carbon future, helped bring the project partners together for the trial, which is investigating the technology’s potential to offer out-of-hours travel from city centres and employment sites as part of a public transport service.

“This is about exploring how an AV system might work in a city like Cambridge. The big opportunity that AVs offer is that they don’t need drivers, so we can have more vehicles running more frequently. It means people don’t have to wait at the bus stop, and they don’t need to worry about a timetable.

“It offers an attractive service which means you don’t mind leaving your car in the Park and Ride, because you have something equally good that is part of a shared transport system.” 

By continuously processing its surroundings as it moves along the road, the shuttle is able to cross-reference fixed objects, such as kerbs and signs, with a map uploaded to its on-board computer. When it detects moving objects on its trajectory it can respond appropriately.

“In very simple terms, the vehicle makes decisions akin to what a human might do,” said Professor Miles. “It’s scanning for things that might intercept its path, and at each stage it’s calculating, in fractions of a second, whether it needs to adjust its speed, whether it needs to stop, whether it needs to turn to the left or right.”

And it is the algorithms behind these decisions, and making a computer powerful enough to run them and small enough to package into a shuttle, which is key to taking these vehicles from the test track to the open road.  

“Right now in the AV industry there are very bright computer programmers putting these algorithms together, trying to outperform one another and produce a system that balances capability and size. We’re very close to that point, but of course the technology needs to be developed in sync with regulators and legislation to create a real-world framework. Once that happens, once that tension between capability, price and size is solved, the technology will take off as a commercial offering.” 

The study led by scientists at the MRC Metabolic Diseases Unit which is part of the Wellcome-MRC Institute of Metabolic Science at the University of Cambridge and the MRC Integrated Epidemiology Unit at the University of Bristol is published today in Nature Medicine.

It has been known for a long time that obesity tends to run in families, but it was not until about 20 years ago that scientists started to discover that changes in specific genes can have very large effects on our weight even from early childhood.

One of these genes, the Melanocortin 4 Receptor (MC4R), makes a protein that is produced in the brain where it sends signals to our appetite centres, telling them how much fat we have stored. When the MC4R gene does not work properly, our brains think we have lower fat stores than we do, signalling that we are starving and need to eat.

The research team found that around one in every 340 people may carry a disruptive mutation at MC4R. People who carry these mutations were more likely to have a greater weight from early childhood and, by 18 years of age, they were on average 17 kg (37 lbs or 2.5 stone) heavier, with the majority of this excess weight likely to be fat.

These results were found by studying the MC4R gene in a random sample of around 6,000 participants born in Bristol in 1990-91, who were recruited to Children of the 90s, a health study based at the University of Bristol. This is a unique UK study that recruited approximately 80 percent of the births occurring in a specific region of the South West and which has continued to follow participants. As the Children of the 90s study managed to recruit such a high percentage of mothers during pregnancy, it is one of the most representative and comprehensive studies of its kind.

The authors examined the MC4R gene in all 6,000 people and, whenever a mutation was found, went on to study its functional effects in the laboratory. This meticulous approach has provided the best estimates so far of the frequency and impact of MC4R mutations on people’s weight and body fat. Based on the frequency of mutations in this study, it is possible that around 200,000 people in the UK could carry a substantial amount of additional fat because of mutations in MC4R.

Professor Sir Stephen O’Rahilly, from the University of Cambridge and one of the authors of the study, said: “Parents of obese children are often blamed for poor parenting and not all children obtain appropriate professional help. Our findings show that weight gain in childhood due to a single gene disorder is not uncommon. This should encourage a more compassionate and rational approach to overweight children and their families – including genetic analysis in all seriously obese children.”

Dr Kaitlin Wade, from the University of Bristol’s MRC Integrated Epidemiology Unit and an author on the paper, added: “Work like this is really made possible as a result of the amazing properties presented by a study like Children of the 90s. Having biological samples for sequencing and rich life course data within a representative population sample is critical to allow new understanding and deep characterisation of important biological genetic effects like these.”

Professor Nic Timpson, Children of the 90s' Principal Investigator, and also one of the study’s authors, explained: “This work helps to recalibrate our understanding of the frequency and functional impact of rare MC4R mutations and will help to shape the future management of this important health factor – we extend our thanks to the participants of the Children of the 90s.”

Though the MC4R gene is a striking example, this is only one gene of many that affect our weight and there are likely to be further examples that emerge as genetic sequencing becomes more common.

In the longer term, knowledge of the brain pathways controlled by MC4R should help in the design of drugs that bypass the signalling blockade and help restore people to a healthy weight.

Reference
Wade KH et al. Loss-of-function mutations in the melanocortin 4 receptor in a UK birth cohort. Nature Medicine; 27 May 2021

Adapted from a press release by the Wellcome-MRC Institute of Metabolic Science at the University of Cambridge and the University of Bristol

As we reflect in the weeks ahead on lessons to be learned from the inquest, we are grateful to the many witnesses who testified to the value of Learning Together in helping many of those who take part to make positive progress in their lives.

Statement from Learning Together Co-founders and directors Dr Ruth Armstrong and Dr Amy Ludlow

"Our thoughts today are especially with the families and friends of Jack and Saskia and with everyone else who was injured or with us that day at Fishmongers Hall. We acknowledge the outstanding bravery of many in the Learning Together community, Fishmongers’ Company staff, members of the general public and our emergency services who risked their lives to save and help others. We are heartbroken by the loss of our beloved colleague Jack and student Saskia. We are grateful to everyone who spoke of Learning Together’s positive impact and are determined to reflect on the lessons of these inquests as we move forwards."

The University of Cambridge analysis used five years of Government data, collected from more than 2,800 schools in England, to estimate the likely impact of additional classroom instruction on academic progress, as measured at GCSE.

It found that even substantial increases in classroom teaching time would likely only lead to small improvements. For example, extending Year 11 pupils’ classroom time by one hour per class, in English or maths, was associated with an increase of 0.12 and 0.18 in a school’s ‘value-added’ score – a standard progress measure. This increase appears small, considering that most of the schools in the study had scores ranging between 994 and 1006.

The research also investigated the likely impact for disadvantaged pupils, whose education has been hardest hit by school closures. In keeping with the overall results, it again found that more of the same teaching was likely to do relatively little to improve academic outcomes.

The study was undertaken by Vaughan Connolly, a doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. His paper reporting the findings, published in the London Review of Education, suggests that long-term plans to recoup lost learning may be better off focusing on maximising the value of the existing school day, rather than extending it.

“Simply keeping all students in school for longer, in order to do more maths or more English, probably won’t improve results much; nor is it likely to narrow the attainment gap for those who have missed out the most,” Connolly said.

“This evidence suggests that re-evaluating how time is used in schools – for example, by trimming subject time and replacing it with sessions focusing on ‘learning to learn’ skills – could make a bigger difference. Quality is going to matter much more than quantity in the long run.”

One possible reason why additional instruction time may be relatively ineffective is diminishing returns – namely, that more contact hours simply increase the burden on both teachers and pupils, preventing them from being at their best.

Potentially extending the school day has been widely discussed as one possible component of a forthcoming Government recovery plan for education. While there is international evidence suggesting that additional teaching time only leads to small returns, there had been no large-scale study of this issue in the English school system until now.

The Cambridge study used timetable data gathered from 2,815 schools through the School Workforce Census over five years. It tracked the relationship between changes to the amount of instruction time that pupils received in English, maths, science and humanities subjects, and their academic progress.

‘Progress’ was identified using schools’ value-added scores. The Government gathers these when pupils sit GCSEs at age 16, by comparing their actual results with predictions made after their primary school SATs at age 11.

While the impact of additional classroom tuition on progress varied between subjects and groups, the effects were generally small. For example: one additional hour of instruction for a Year 11 class in English, science, maths, or the humanities, led to an increase in value-added scores of 0.12, 0.09, 0.18 and 0.43 respectively. ‘At a practical level, this seems small, particularly when considering the cost of such time,’ the study notes.

To examine the potential impact of extra classroom time on less-advantaged students, the study also assessed how far it closed the gap between the value-added scores of students on free school meals, and those of students with middle-ranking prior attainment. The results were again found to be modest. For example, an extra 59 minutes per week in English reduced the attainment gap between these groups by about 6.5%; and an extra 57 minutes per week of maths by about 8%.

The findings compare with those of the Education Endowment Foundation’s influential Teaching and Learning toolkit, which summarises international evidence on different teaching interventions and translates their effect sizes into months of progress. It suggests that increased instruction time is likely to lead to two months of progress over an academic year. This compares poorly with the results of other interventions listed in the same document.

In this context, the Cambridge study suggests that methods which focus on increasing the quality of learning in the classroom, rather than the amount of time spent there, may prove more fruitful. It echoes recommendations recently made by the Education Policy Institute which called for ambitious levels of investment in a wider-ranging programme of catch-up measures. The new study suggests that time could be reallocated during the school day, either to support the continuing professional development of staff, or to provide pupils with additional skills.

It also points to research conducted in 2016 in which Key Stage 3 pupils’ test scores improved dramatically after a portion of their regular curriculum was replaced with training in metacognition – the ability to understand how to learn and reason through problems. Other studies, such as a project examining learning recovery after the 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, have similarly suggested that supporting schools to better match their curriculum to student needs may have greater effect than extra classroom time.

“Rather than extending the school day to offer more instruction, a successful recovery agenda may well be one that tailors support and makes room for a wider range of learning within it, in line with the recent suggestions made by the EPI,” Connolly said. “In that sense, less instructional time could actually be more. Certainly, these results suggest that giving children more of the same is unlikely to help if we want to recover what has been lost during the pandemic.”

Even so, writing in Work, Employment and Society, the academics applaud its proponent, American anthropologist David Graeber, who died in September 2020, for highlighting the link between a sense of purpose in one’s job and psychological wellbeing.

Graeber initially put forward the concept of ‘bullshit jobs’ – jobs that even those who do them view as worthless – in his 2013 essay The Democracy Project. He further expanded this theory in his 2018 book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, looking at possible reasons for the existence of such jobs.

Jobs that Graeber described as bullshit (BS) jobs range from doormen and receptionists to lobbyists and public relations specialists through to those in the legal profession, particularly corporate lawyers and legal consultants.

Dr Magdalena Soffia from the University of Cambridge and the What Works Centre for Wellbeing, one of the authors of the article, said: “There’s something appealing about the bullshit jobs theory. The fact that many people have worked in such jobs at some point may explain why Graeber’s work resonates with so many people who can relate to the accounts he gives. But his theory is not based on any reliable empirical data, even though he puts forward several propositions, all of which are testable.”

To test Graeber’s propositions, the researchers turned to the 2005–2015 European Working Conditions Surveys (EWCS), examining reasons that led to respondents answering ‘rarely’ or ‘never’ to the statement: ‘I have the feeling of doing useful work’. The surveys – taken in 2005, 2010 and 2015 – gather measures on the usefulness of the job, workers’ wellbeing and objective data on the quality of work. The number of respondents grew from over 21,000 in 2005 to almost 30,000 in 2015.

According to Graeber, somewhere between 20% and 50% of the workforce – possibly as many as 60% - are employed in BS jobs. Yet the EWCS found that just 4.8% of EU workers said they did not feel they were doing useful work. The figure was slightly higher in the UK and Ireland, but still only 5.6% of workers.

Graeber also claimed that the number of BS jobs has been ‘increasing rapidly in recent years’, despite presenting no empirical evidence. Again the researchers found no evidence to support this conjecture – in fact, the percentage of people in BS jobs fell from 7.8% in 2005 to just 4.8% in 2015 – exactly the opposite of Graeber’s prediction.

His next hypothesis was that BS jobs are concentrated in particular professions, such as finance, law, administration and marketing, and largely absent in others, such as those linked to public services and manual labour. “Many service workers hate their jobs; but even those who do are aware that what they do does make some sort of meaningful difference in the world . . . [Whereas] we can only assume that any office worker who one might suspect secretly believes themselves to have a bullshit job does, indeed, believe this,” he wrote.

When the researchers ranked the occupations by the proportion of people who rated their job as rarely or never useful, they found no evidence for the existence of occupations in which the majority of workers feel their work is not useful.

The authors found that workers in some occupations, such as teachers and nurses, generally see themselves as doing useful jobs, while sales workers are above average in the proportion rating their job as not useful (7.7%). Even so, most of the results contradict Graeber’s assertion. For example, legal professionals and administration professionals are all low on this ranking, and jobs that Graeber rates as being examples of essential non-BS jobs, such as refuse collectors (9.7%) and cleaners and helpers (8.1%), are high on this scale.

Not everything that Graeber suggested was wrong, however. He argued, for example, that BS jobs are a form of ‘spiritual violence’ that lead to anxiety, depression and misery among workers. The team found strong evidence between the perception of one’s job as useless and an individual’s psychological wellbeing, albeit a correlation rather than necessarily a causal link. In the UK in 2015, workers who felt their job was not useful scored significantly lower on the World Health Organisation Well-Being Index than those who felt they were doing useful work (a mean average of 49.3 compared with 64.5). There was a similar gap across other EU nations.

Dr Alex Wood from the University of Birmingham said: “When we looked at readily-available data from a large cohort of people across Europe, it quickly became apparent to us that very few of the key propositions in Graeber’s theory can be sustained – and this is the case in every country we looked at, to varying degrees. But one of his most important propositions – that BS jobs are a form of ‘spiritual violence’ – does seem to be supported by the data.”

Given that, in absolute terms, a substantial number of people do not view their jobs as useful, what then leads to this feeling? The team found that those individuals who felt respected and encouraged by management were less likely to report their work as useless. Conversely, when employees experience management that is disrespectful, inefficient or poor at giving feedback, they were less likely to perceive their work as useful.

Similarly, individuals who saw their job as useful tended to be able to use their own ideas at work – an important element for feeling that your job provides you with the ability to make the most of your skills – was correlated with a perception of usefulness. There was a clear relationship between the extent to which people felt that they had enough time to do their job well and their rating of the usefulness of their job, suggesting that one source of feeling a job to be useless is the pace at which one is working, affecting the ability to realise one’s potential and capabilities. Other factors correlated with feeling that a job was worthwhile included support by managers and colleagues and the ability to influence important decisions and the direction of an organization.

Professor Brendan Burchell from the University of Cambridge said: “Although the data doesn’t always support David Graeber’s claims, his insightful and imaginative work played an important role in raising awareness of the harms of useless jobs. He may have been way off the mark with regards how common BS jobs are, but he was right to link people’s attitudes towards their jobs to their psychological wellbeing, and this is something that employers – and society as a whole – should take seriously.

“Most importantly, employees need to be respected and valued if they in turn are to value – and benefit psychologically as well as financially from – their jobs.”

Reference
Soffia, M, Wood, AJ and Burchell, B. Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs. WES; 3 June 2021; DOI: 10.1177/09500170211015067

The study, published in Nature Communications, was carried out in collaboration with teams at the University of Exeter, India, Switzerland, Singapore, and the US.

HDDs first appeared in the 1950s, but their use as storage devices in personal computers only took off from the mid-1980s. They have become ever smaller in size, and denser in terms of the number of stored bytes. While solid state drives are popular for mobile devices, HDDs continue to be used to store files in desktop computers, largely due to their favourable cost to produce and purchase.

HDDs contain two major components: platters and a head. Data are written on the platters using a magnetic head, which moves rapidly above them as they spin. The space between head and platter is continually decreasing to enable higher densities.

Currently, carbon-based overcoats (COCs) – layers used to protect platters from mechanical damages and corrosion – occupy a significant part of this spacing. The data density of HDDs has quadrupled since 1990, and the COC thickness has reduced from 12.5nm to around 3nm, which corresponds to one terabyte per square inch.  Now, graphene has enabled researchers to multiply this by ten.

The Cambridge researchers have replaced commercial COCs with one to four layers of graphene, and tested friction, wear, corrosion, thermal stability, and lubricant compatibility. Beyond its unbeatable thinness, graphene fulfills all the ideal properties of an HDD overcoat in terms of corrosion protection, low friction, wear resistance, hardness, lubricant compatibility, and surface smoothness.

Graphene enables two-fold reduction in friction and provides better corrosion and wear than state-of-the-art solutions. In fact, one single graphene layer reduces corrosion by 2.5 times.

Cambridge scientists transferred graphene onto hard disks made of iron-platinum as the magnetic recording layer, and tested Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) – a new technology that enables an increase in storage density by heating the recording layer to high temperatures. Current COCs do not perform at these high temperatures, but graphene does. Thus, graphene, coupled with HAMR, can outperform current HDDs, providing an unprecedented data density, higher than 10 terabytes per square inch.

“Demonstrating that graphene can serve as protective coating for conventional hard disk drives and that it is able to withstand HAMR conditions is a very important result. This will further push the development of novel high areal density hard disk drives,” said Dr Anna Ott from the Cambridge Graphene Centre, one of the co-authors of this study.

A jump in HDDs’ data density by a factor of ten and a significant reduction in wear rate are critical to achieving more sustainable and durable magnetic data recording. Graphene based technological developments are progressing along the right track towards a more sustainable world.

Professor Andrea C. Ferrari, Director of the Cambridge Graphene Centre, added: “This work showcases the excellent mechanical, corrosion and wear resistance properties of graphene for ultra-high storage density magnetic media. Considering that in 2020, around 1 billion terabytes of fresh HDD storage was produced, these results indicate a route for mass application of graphene in cutting-edge technologies.” 

Reference
Dwivedi et al. Graphene Overcoats for Ultra-High Storage Density Magnetic Media. Nature Communications 12, 2854 (2021), DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-22687-y.

Adapted from a release from the Cambridge Graphene Centre.

The experiment, designed and run by researchers from the University of Cambridge, had multiple research groups from around the world use the same raw tree-ring data to reconstruct temperature changes over the past 2,000 years.

While each of the reconstructions clearly showed that recent warming due to anthropogenic climate change is unprecedented in the past two thousand years, there were notable differences in variance, amplitude and sensitivity, which can be attributed to decisions made by the researchers who built the individual reconstructions.

Professor Ulf Büntgen from the University of Cambridge, who led the research, said that the results are “important for transparency and truth – we believe in our data, and we’re being open about the decisions that any climate scientist has to make when building a reconstruction or model.”

To improve the reliability of climate reconstructions, the researchers suggest that teams make multiple reconstructions at once so that they can be seen as an ensemble. The results are reported in the journal Nature Communications.

Information from tree rings is the main way that researchers reconstruct past climate conditions at annual resolutions: as distinctive as a fingerprint, the rings formed in trees outside the tropics are annually precise growth layers. Each ring can tell us something about what conditions were like in a particular growing season, and by combining data from many trees of different ages, scientists are able to reconstruct past climate conditions going back hundreds and even thousands of years.

Reconstructions of past climate conditions are useful as they can place current climate conditions or future projections in the context of past natural variability. The challenge with a climate reconstruction is that – absent a time machine – there is no way to confirm it is correct.

“While the information contained in tree rings remains constant, humans are the variables: they may use different techniques or choose a different subset of data to build their reconstruction,” said Büntgen, who is based at Cambridge’s Department of Geography, and is also affiliated with the CzechGlobe Centre in Brno, Czech Republic. “With any reconstruction, there’s a question of uncertainty ranges: how certain you are about a certain result. A lot of work has gone into trying to quantify uncertainties in a statistical way, but what hasn’t been studied is the role of decision-making.

“It’s not the case that there is one single truth – every decision we make is subjective to a greater or lesser extent. Scientists aren’t robots, and we don’t want them to be, but it’s important to learn where the decisions are made and how they affect the outcome.”

Büntgen and his colleagues devised an experiment to test how decision-making affects climate reconstructions. They sent raw tree ring data to 15 research groups around the world and asked them to use it to develop the best possible large-scale climate reconstruction for summer temperatures in the Northern hemisphere over past 2000 years.

“Everything else was up to them – it may sound trivial, but this sort of experiment had never been done before,” said Büntgen.

Each of the groups came up with a different reconstruction, based on the decisions they made along the way: the data they chose or the techniques they used. For example, one group may have used instrumental target data from June, July and August, while another may have only used the mean of July and August only.

The main differences in the reconstructions were those of amplitude in the data: exactly how warm was the Medieval warming period, or how much cooler a particular summer was after a large volcanic eruption.

Büntgen stresses that each of the reconstructions showed the same overall trends: there were periods of warming in the 3^rd century, as well as between the 10^th and 12^th century; they all showed abrupt summer cooling following clusters of large volcanic eruptions in the 6^th, 15^th and 19^th century; and they all showed that the recent warming since the 20^th and 21^st century is unprecedented in the past 2000 years.

“You think if you have the start with the same data, you will end up with the same result, but climate reconstruction doesn’t work like that,” said Büntgen. “All the reconstructions point in the same direction, and none of the results oppose one another, but there are differences, which must be attributed to decision-making.”

So, how will we know whether to trust a particular climate reconstruction in future? In a time where experts are routinely challenged, or dismissed entirely, how can we be sure of what is true? One answer may be to note each point where a decision is made, consider the various options, and produce multiple reconstructions. This would of course mean more work for climate scientists, but it could be a valuable check to acknowledge how decisions affect outcomes.

Another way to make climate reconstructions more robust is for groups to collaborate and view all their reconstructions together, as an ensemble. “In almost any scientific field, you can point to a single study or result that tells you what to hear,” he said. “But when you look at the body of scientific evidence, with all its nuances and uncertainties, you get a clearer overall picture.”

Reference:
Ulf Büntgen et al. 'The influence of decision-making in tree ring-based climate reconstructions.’ Nature Communications (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-23627-6

The researchers, led by the University of Cambridge and the Technical University of Munich, found that by swapping one out of every one thousand atoms of one material for another, they were able to triple the luminescence of a new material class of light emitters known as halide perovskites.  

This ‘atom swapping’, or doping, causes the charge carriers to get stuck in a specific part of the material’s crystal structure, where they recombine and emit light. The results, reported in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, could be useful for low-cost printable and flexible LED lighting, displays for smartphones or cheap lasers.

Many everyday applications now use light-emitting devices (LEDs), such as domestic and commercial lighting, TV screens, smartphones and laptops. The main advantage of LEDs is they consume far less energy than older technologies.

Ultimately, also the entirety of our worldwide communication via the internet is driven by optical signals from very bright light sources that within optical fibres carry information at the speed of light across the globe.

The team studied a new class of semiconductors called halide perovskites in the form of nanocrystals which measure only about a ten-thousandth of the thickness of a human hair. These ‘quantum dots’ are highly luminescent materials: the first high-brilliance QLED TVs incorporating quantum dots recently came onto the market.

The Cambridge researchers, working with Daniel Congreve’s group at Harvard, who are experts in the fabrication of quantum dots, have now greatly improved the light emission from these nanocrystals. They substituted one out of every one thousand atoms with another – swapping lead for manganese ions – and found the luminescence of the quantum dots tripled.

A detailed investigation using laser spectroscopy revealed the origin of this observation. “We found that the charges collect together in the regions of the crystals that we doped,” said Sascha Feldmann from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, the study’s first author. “Once localised, those energetic charges can meet each other and recombine to emit light in a very efficient manner.”

“We hope this fascinating discovery: that even smallest changes to the chemical composition can greatly enhance the material properties, will pave the way to cheap and ultrabright LED displays and lasers in the near future,” said senior author Felix Deschler, who is jointly affiliated at the Cavendish and the Walter Schottky Institute at the Technical University of Munich.

In the future, the researchers hope to identify even more efficient dopants which will help make these advanced light technologies accessible to every part of the world.

Reference:
Sascha Feldmann et al. ‘Charge carrier localization in doped perovskite nanocrystals enhances radiative recombination.’, Journal of the American Chemical Society (2021). DOI:10.1021/jacs.1c01567

Nearly all of the organ systems of the mother’s body need to alter their function during pregnancy so that the baby can grow. If the mother’s body cannot properly adapt to the growing baby this leads to major and common issues including fetal growth restriction, fetal over-growth, gestational diabetes, and preeclampsia – a life-threatening high blood pressure in the mother. 

Many of these complications lead to difficult labours for women with more medical intervention and lifelong issues for the baby including diabetes, heart issues and obesity. 

Pregnancy disorders affect around one in ten pregnant women, but current methods to diagnose them are not sensitive or reliable enough to identify all at-risk pregnancies.

Now scientists have found a way to test hormone levels in the placenta to predict which women will have serious pregnancy complications. Their study is published today in the journal Nature Communications Biology. 

“We found that hormonal biomarkers from the placenta could indicate which women would have pregnancy complications,” said Dr Amanda Sferruzzi-Perri in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience, who led the study.

She added: “We found that these hormonal biomarkers are present from the first trimester of pregnancy. This is a highly important finding given that pregnancy disorders affect around one in ten pregnant women and are often diagnosed too late, when the complications are already wreaking havoc on the mother’s body and the fetal development.”

Using mouse models, researchers looked at the proteins made by the placenta and compared them to blood samples from women who had uneventful pregnancies and those who developed gestational diabetes. The team developed new methods to isolate and study the endocrine cells in the mouse placenta because these cells are responsible for secreting hormones during pregnancy. 

They profiled the placenta to identify the hormones that are secreted to create a comprehensive map of proteins in the mysterious organ. The mouse model map of hormonal proteins from the placenta was then compared with datasets from studies of the human placenta and pregnancy outcomes and researchers discovered a lot of biological overlap. 

Dr Sferruzzi-Perri said: “We found that around a third of the proteins we identified changed in women during pregnancies with disorders. Using a small study to test if these placental proteins will have some clinical value, we also discovered that abnormal levels of hormones were present in the mother’s blood as early as the first trimester – week 12 of gestation – in women who developed gestational diabetes, a pregnancy complication usually diagnosed at 24-28 weeks. 

“We also identified several specific transcription factors – proteins within the cell that turn on or off genes – that are likely to govern the production of placental hormones which have important implications for understanding how we may improve pregnancy outcomes.”

The scientists explored whether these genetic biomarkers were detectable during pregnancy and used a study that tracked pregnancy outcomes in women at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge. They found that blood samples showed these biomarkers in early pregnancy which could lead to earlier diagnosis of complications allowing treatment to begin more quickly.

Dr Claire Meek, a diabetes in pregnancy physician and researcher at Addenbrooke’s, said: “This pregnancy-induced form of diabetes causes accelerated growth of the baby and complications at the time of delivery. Unfortunately, some women already have signs of a big baby at the time of diagnosis at 28 weeks. This new test might be able to identify gestational diabetes earlier in pregnancy, providing opportunities to prevent the disease, or to protect mums and babies from the most harmful complications.” 

Dr Sferruzzi-Perri said: “This work provides new hope that a better understanding of the placenta will result in safer, healthier pregnancies for mothers and babies. Our team is now working to assess whether these discoveries could improve clinical care in future, either through earlier diagnosis or to provide new opportunities to treat these pregnancy complications by targeting the placenta.”

The placenta is a complex biological organ. It forms and grows from the fertilised egg, and attaches to the wall of the uterus. It allows nutrients and oxygen to flow from mother to baby, and removes fetal waste products. Despite its importance, the placenta is a very misunderstood organ and is notoriously difficult to study in pregnant women. But its ability to function properly is vital as it impacts on pregnancy outcomes and the lifelong health of mother and child.

The placenta develops during pregnancy and connects the developing baby to the mother. It serves as the lungs, kidneys, gut and liver for growing babies and carries oxygen and nutrients to the fetus whilst secreting hormones and discarding waste.

Reference

Napso, T. et al. Placental secretome characterization identified candidates for pregnancy complications. Nature Communications Biology, June 2021. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-021-02214-x

Adapted from a press release by St John's College, Cambridge