At times of international upheaval, Western universities must redouble efforts to tackle global problems. We must also build ways to work with partners in nations that do not conform to Western norms and values, while protecting our own principles and standards.

This is not a time to retreat into national pockets of academia but instead to turn our attention to what we do best – seeking solutions to intractable problems by working with partners around the globe.

The scale of the tasks ahead, whether tackling climate change or battling pandemics, requires a level of political commitment and targeted research never previously experienced. Put simply, there is no alternative to international cooperation if we are serious about conquering these challenges.

The mission of the University of Cambridge is 'to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest levels of international excellence'. It is in pursuit of this mission that every year we step up our international engagement.

But we must do so with eyes wide open to an expanding and increasingly complex series of potential risks. These fall into five broad categories: the safety of students and staff; threats to academic freedom; theft of intellectual property for 'dual use'– possibly military – purposes; dependence on funding for research; and a final wider challenge of working with partners having different political, social and cultural values to our own. 

In response, we at Cambridge have agreed a new set of principles that will underpin all aspects of our international engagement and research. Followed carefully, they will help our academics avoid collaborations that pose a threat to security or academic freedom while giving them the confidence and support to work with the broadest set of international partners, ensuring world-leading impact. 

We are focusing on practical help to students and staff to improve their understanding of potential dangers – providing ready access to advice on ethical, reputational or security concerns. We will also be reviewing all our international agreements to check that they specifically protect the freedom of our academics to prosecute their research to greatest effect, even where there is potential for stirring controversy. 

Separately, we will be raising awareness of possible intellectual property theft to mitigate the risk of hostile use of security-sensitive data or technology. Existing procedures to promote due diligence in forming international partnerships will be brought together and strengthened to guarantee openness in research. Just as importantly, we will reinforce our current processes for scrutiny of funding sources to make sure that we maintain our strong institutional autonomy.

All of this work has been framed against the dramatic changes in China’s relationship with the world over the past decade. The 'golden era' of Sino-British relations proclaimed by former UK prime minister David Cameron looks very different five years on, when we in the West are challenged by China’s imposition of the national security law in Hong Kong, continued repression of minorities and sabre-rattling in the South China Sea.  

As someone with an academic background in international law and human rights, I do not minimise those issues and, of course, feel abhorrence at all unjust incarceration, deprivation of rights or torture, wherever committed. Regrettably, these practices are not new and they happen across the globe. Cambridge has researchers involved in high-impact projects based in 120 countries throughout Africa, Asia, South America, Europe and the Middle East. Many of these are in places that do not share Western values, yet the research in areas such as public health or the conservation of nature could have massive benefits to humankind.  

For example, we are one of a number of UK universities (including the University of Oxford and King’s College London) collaborating with the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience at Fudan University, China, to look at the biology underpinning how our brains function. This knowledge will help us understand – and treat – major neurological and psychiatric disorders.

In Uganda, where maternal death rates can be 50 times higher than in high-income countries, Cambridge researchers are collaborating with colleagues at Makerere University to better understand the life-threatening condition pre-eclampsia, which causes high blood pressure during pregnancy and after labour. Working in one of the busiest maternity hospitals in the world, they have already identified genes only found in women of African descent linked to risk of and protection from pre-eclampsia. The team are now developing the first contemporary textbook of obstetrics written by African doctors for African women.

I believe, along with most of my colleagues, that values are upheld - and changes happen - through engagement, not by insulating ourselves from difficult circumstances. This is incidentally also UK foreign policy. In its recent Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy, the government stated its intention to 'develop a better understanding of China and its people', in light of China’s 'growing impact on aspects of our lives' and of 'systemic challenges' that it poses.

The new international engagement principles we have developed at Cambridge will allow us to continue to work on vital research with partners across the world, taking careful regard of risks. They should give us the confidence to engage with China and other countries on our terms. Universities cannot and should not ignore geopolitical tensions, but we cannot be isolated by them.

Stephen J Toope is Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. This article first appeared in the Times Higher Education on 1 October 2021.

Hear from some of the scientists behind the UK’s nationwide sequencing effort to track SARS-CoV-2. Sir Patrick Vallance (the government’s Chief Scientific Adviser) also describes how the expertise that came together during the pandemic is now recognised across the world – and why it’s crucially important to continue to sequence to be ready for future pandemics.

This pioneering work is being carried out by the COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) consortium, which comprises numerous academic institutions, four public health agencies and the Wellcome Sanger Institute, and is administered by the University of Cambridge. “Incredibly impressive, incredibly high quality and incredibly focused on the mission to make sure that as many people benefited from the science as possible,” Sir Patrick Vallance.

The model – developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge, Imperial College London, and the University of Leeds – uses monitored CO2 and occupancy data to predict how many workers are likely to be infected by an asymptomatic but infectious colleague.

Applications of the infection model have demonstrated that most workers in well-ventilated, quiet offices are unlikely to infect each other via airborne particles, but the risk becomes greater if the space is poorly ventilated or if the workers are involved in activities that require more speaking. For instance, the model predicts each infected person could infect two to four others in an adequately ventilated but noisy call centre. Risks are also likely to increase if the infected individual is a ‘super spreader’.

The model also suggests that halving the occupancy of an office could reduce the risk of airborne transmission four-fold. The results are reported in the journal Indoor and Built Environment.

In areas with lower ventilation rates and high occupancy, CO2 levels are higher, so monitoring them can provide a warning to building managers to identify areas where the risk of airborne transmission of COVID-19 are higher. Achievable interventions can then be made, for instance, to improve ventilation or change worker attendance patterns to reduce occupancy.

In shared spaces such as offices and classrooms, exposure to infectious airborne matter builds up, and room occupancy may vary. By using carbon dioxide levels as a proxy for exhaled breath, the model can assess the variable exposure risk as people come and go.

“Ventilation is complicated and airflow is invisible, so it’s hard for people to appreciate the effects in the home or workplace,” said co-author Professor Paul Linden from Cambridge’s Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. “Commercially available CO2 monitors are being installed in schools and I would recommend their installation in the workplace.”

“Our work emphasises the importance of good ventilation in workplaces and in schools,” said lead author Dr Henry Burridge, from Imperial College London. “The model demonstrates that by managing the ventilation and occupancy levels of shared spaces we can manage the risk of airborne infection by a virus such as that which causes COVID-19.”

“The appropriate use of tools such as CO2 monitoring can give building managers a much better understanding of their own ventilation systems and how they are performing for each activity undertaken in the space,” said Professor Andrew Curran, Chief Scientific Adviser at the Health and Safety Executive and lead for the PROTECT study. “For most businesses, a COVID-19 control strategy will involve a blended combination of measures identified through a risk assessment – there is no silver bullet.”

The research was funded by the PROTECT COVID-19 National Core Study and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC, part of UK Research and Innovation).

Reference:
Henry C. Burridge et al. ‘Predictive and retrospective modelling of airborne infection risk using monitored carbon dioxide.’ Indoor and Built Environment (2021). DOI: 10.1177/1420326X211043564

Adapted from an HSE press release.

Phenomenal Women: Portraits of UK Black Female Professors features 45 photographs and biographies of inspiring Black women academics, including award-winning author Bernadine Evaristo, poet and playwright Joan Anim-Addo, and the first woman ever to be appointed head of a UK dental school, Cynthia Pine. It was commissioned and curated by Dr Nicola Rollock, Senior Adviser (Race & Higher Education) to the University of Cambridge’s Vice-Chancellor, and was first shown at London’s Southbank Centre last year.

Photographer Bill Knight OBE – twice winner of the Portrait of Britain competition - travelled across England, Scotland and Wales to capture the images of professors across a broad range of subjects including law, medicine, creative writing and sociology.

Presented in a series of weatherproof structures, the portraits will be on display outside Great St Mary’s Church and in Senate House Yard until 20 December 2021 - timed to coincide with Black History Month 2021. Members of the public can enter Senate House Yard to view the portraits between 7am and 6pm, Monday to Friday, except on days when ceremonies are taking place. 

As well as celebrating the achievements of these women, the exhibition aims to highlight racial inequality in British academia and provide a platform for debate about what it takes to reach the highest level of academic scholarship.

Fewer than 1% of professors in the UK are Black despite increases in overall levels of academic staff, with Black women representing the smallest group when both race and gender are considered together.

They are three times less likely to be professors than their White female counterparts and half as likely as Black men.

The exhibition follows research carried out by Dr Rollock examining the career experiences and strategies of Black female professors at UK universities.

Dr Rollock said: “Initial plans for a UK-wide tour of Phenomenal Women had to be placed on hold due to lockdown. However, I am delighted that many more people will now get to see the exhibition and discover more about these professors, at its current new location in Cambridge.

“The sector is failing Black women and needs to be purposeful and explicit in its efforts to retain and promote them.”

Dr Kamal Munir, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (University Community and Engagement) at the University of Cambridge, said: “The University is committed to creating an inclusive environment which welcomes and nurtures talent from all backgrounds. Ensuring staff diversity is a sector-wide issue for universities, and one that we take very seriously. We have revisited our guidance on staff recruitment as just one of our efforts to effect change in this area, however we are yet to appoint any Black women as professors. We know we have much more to do.  

“We are delighted to host Phenomenal Women. The exhibition presents an important opportunity to highlight the barriers to progression facing these women, recognise their achievements and to help us create a more diverse environment, one that is truly inclusive of all available talent.”

Further information
Portraits on display in Senate House Yard can be viewed by members of the public between 7am and 6pm, Monday to Friday. However, because of planned University ceremonies, the portraits will not be accessible to the public at the following times:

• Tuesday 19 to Monday 25 October 2021
• Monday 1 to Thursday 4 November 2021
• Wednesday 24 to Monday 29 November 2021

Human activity and climate change are causing invasive non-native species to spread rapidly across the globe. Researchers have found that certain invasive species can push lake ecosystems beyond a critical ‘tipping point’, causing a sudden shift from healthy to degraded conditions that is difficult to reverse. 

Invasive fish such as Asian silver carp Hypophthalmichthys molitrix, and crustaceans such as American signal crayfish Pacifastacus leniusculus, were found to significantly reduce the abundance of other important organisms in lakes and degrade water quality. The findings, published today in the journal Global Change Biology, also provide guidance on the best ways to manage waterbodies.

Shallow lakes naturally exist in one of two alternative stable states: either healthy - with clear water with an abundance of vegetation, or degraded - with cloudy water dominated by algae. When a lake is in the latter state, algae use up all the nutrients in the water and block sunlight, preventing the growth of aquatic vegetation that would aid ecosystem recovery. 

Deteriorated, algae-dominated freshwater ecosystems also threaten the health and water security of human populations. Blooms of cyanobacteria, known as ‘blue-green algae’ can produce toxins that contaminate food webs and poison water supplies.

“Algal blooms represent one of the most significant threats to the security of the Earth’s surface freshwaters. Simply undoing the circumstances that triggered a tipping point will not restore the ecosystem - the road to recovery is slow and steep,” said Dr Sam Reynolds in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology, first author of the report. 

However, although invasive species are recognised as a significant threat to global biodiversity, their impacts on ecosystem services may not be uniformly negative. Invasive molluscs, including the zebra mussel Dreissena polymorpha, were found to engineer the opposite biological and environmental response: they delay ecosystem collapse and potentially aid the recovery of degraded lake ecosystems.  

“Managers of drinking water reservoirs, for example, may be able to avoid the cost of dealing with blooms of harmful algae, by removing invasive crayfish but allowing established non-native zebra mussels to remain and act as biological filters,” said Professor David Aldridge, senior author of the report. 

He added: “Early detection and rapid response plans should always be our first line of attack. But in situations where invaders have already established and can no longer be eradicated, it may be appropriate to embrace their positive effects.”

The researchers focused on shallow lake ecosystems, but say that their framework could be applied to other critical ecosystems that experience catastrophic tipping points - such as coral reefs, kelp forests and desert shrublands.

This research was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).

Reference
Reynolds, S. A. & Aldridge, D. C.: 'Global impacts of invasive species on the tipping points of shallow lakes'. Global Change Biology, October 2021. DOI 10.1111/gcb.15893

The Tudor Monarch introduced the world’s first universal welfare state in 1601, groundbreaking at the time, in response to repeated plague outbreaks and famines. The ‘Poor Laws’ required all of England’s 10,000 parishes to take responsibility for their poor – anyone who refused to contribute could face prison. For the next 200 years, England was better placed to weather plagues, crop failures, and recessions than anywhere else in Europe and it laid the foundations for the Industrial Revolution. 

Simon Szreter, Professor of History and Public Policy at Cambridge and co-author of After The Virus – Lessons from the Past for a Better Future, said: “The evidence of history is that societies and economies fare much better with a strong welfare state and when you cut welfare to make savings, you damage society and the economy.

“Elizabeth was able to introduce an extraordinary and comprehensive response to the problems that had worried her for so long. Her ‘Poor Laws’ of 1598 and 1601 put the responsibility on local communities to care for their neighbours to make sure no one would fall into destitution. This included orphans, widows, the old, infirm, sick, involuntarily unemployed and single mothers and their children. This was the world’s first social security and welfare system – nothing like this had existed before.”

In After The Virus, Szreter and his co-author Hilary Cooper, a former government economist and senior policy maker, explore why the UK was so unprepared for the Covid-19 pandemic and suffered one of the highest death rates and worst economic contractions of the major world economies. 

The book draws lessons from history and its authors say that ‘Good Queen Bess’, as Elizabeth I became known, was truly revolutionary and would not have accepted Boris Johnson’s government’s cut to universal credit. The £20 weekly increase to universal credit was introduced last year in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, but it has been controversially halted in October 2021. 

Cooper, an expert in labour markets, children’s services and local development, said: “Elizabeth would absolutely have taxed the rich to support the poor in the aftermath of a virus that has claimed the lives of nearly 140,000 people in the UK. 

Cooper said: “The lesson today is the same: we cut welfare – including education and health - at our peril. Covid-19 hit the poorest the hardest, with death rates highest in deprived areas and among people of colour. We must learn from the successes from our past and start investing in our population’s wellbeing instead of repeating the mistakes of austerity.”

Szreter, Fellow at St John’s College, said: “Britain had the world’s first welfare state – put in place 400 years ago by Elizabeth I – and the country actually became richer for it. With an unavoidable responsibility to provide for the poor the wealthy increased their philanthropy, funding alms houses, schools, apprenticeships and hospitals to prevent them falling into hardship in the first place. 

“It was a welfare system that worked because the prosperous set about contributing and investing in their fellow citizens while Justices of the Peace rigorously enforced payments into the poor law funds. With the old and the sick cared for, the young in particular were liberated to follow the work, migrating to towns and cities where new jobs were becoming available, secure, too, in the knowledge that their parish would support them if things didn’t work out. 

“This security ended famine nearly 150 years ahead of other European nations and paved the basis for Britain to emerge as the world’s first industrial nation. The labour mobility and rapid urban growth that was unique to Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was facilitated by the security the poor law provided.”

Szreter’s research encompasses economic, social and public health history. He was the first non-American to win the American Public Health Association’s Viseltear Prize. He added: “This week’s cuts to universal credit and the continued inflexibility of the five-week wait to receive benefits will not encourage anyone to take risks in today’s labour market, while the dire state of social care leaves many unable to move from where they can easily care for ageing relatives. Welfare savings are simply a false economy.”

Although the book offers optimism and a clear manifesto for change, it also offers a warning – that Covid-19 is a ‘dress rehearsal’ for bigger crises ahead. Cooper explained: “Covid-19 is a warning shot across our bows, there are going to be many more global crises – climate change and biodiversity collapse are the big threats. Perhaps Covid-19 will be the warning the world needed to learn lessons from the past.”

Reference

After the Virus: Lessons from the Past for a Better Future by Hilary Cooper and Simon Szreter is published by Cambridge University Press.
 

The latest phase of the campaign - to encourage more students from underrepresented backgrounds to apply - features a series of films and videos aimed at the UK Bangladeshi and UK Pakistani communities, two of the most underrepresented groups at the University. The targeted social media videos, launched in 2020, were created in partnership with Cambridge undergraduates and student societies to reach teenagers from those communities and break down misconceptions that might put them off applying.

In the films, 10 Cambridge students, who went to state schools in London, Manchester and Bradford before arriving at Cambridge to study subjects including English, History and Classics, compare the perceptions they had of the University as sixth formers with the reality of their lived experience. The films follow them in lectures, prayer spaces and at University cultural and religious society events, as they make it clear that concerns over cultural barriers can be overcome at Cambridge, religious practices can be observed, and people don’t have to change who they are to fit in.

The series – funded philanthropically by alumni - also includes six ‘Myth vs Reality’ videos which, among others, challenge the myth that Cambridge is more expensive to study at than other universities, and highlight the opportunity to choose a women-only college.

Alongside the 'Get in Cambridge' films, the University supported the inaugural South Asian Heritage Month (SAHM) in 2020, by sharing the experiences of our students. To mark the month in 2021, we dedicated our first ever Twitter space with geneticist Professor Sadaf Farooqi to SAHM. We also actively promoted our PhD student and alumnus Bobby Seagull who co-hosted the official SAHM quiz and who in 2021 became an official patron of SAHM. We additionally reached out to all our South Asian student societies and shared images and video content from those who were able to take part including Bangla, India, Sri Lanka and Tamil societies. 

The 'Get In Cambridge' campaign is shortlisted in the ‘Creative Media Award Category’ of the Asian Media Awards 2021, which recognises the work of journalists, writers, broadcasters and bloggers from across the UK. It also highlights the contribution of media professionals in the creative and marketing industry.

Finalists in the Creative Media Award section are:

• ‘Football and Me’ - The Football Association & Rubika Shah, Smoking Bear Productions
• ‘Get In Cambridge’ - University of Cambridge
• Same Voices Unite: West End Stars Raise Awareness for India Covid Relief - Irvine Iqbal
• #StrongerRoots : Every Strand Tells A Story - Ethnic Reach for Vatika UK
• #TakeTheVaccine : Vaccine Hesitancy Campaign for Ethnic Minority Communities - Media Hive

Winners will be announced at a ceremony at the Emirates Old Trafford in Manchester on Friday October 29, 2021. More information here.

'Get In Cambridge'
Cambridge launched social media campaign 'Get In Cambridge' in 2019 to help increase diversity in the undergraduate body. Cambridge alumna and YouTube vlogger Courtney Daniella fronted the first phase of the 'Get In Cambridge' campaign, and in five films described her journey to Cambridge from her single-parent family on a North London council estate. 

A study has found that children who increased their connection to nature during the first COVID-19 lockdown were likely to have lower levels of behavioural and emotional problems, compared to those whose connection to nature stayed the same or decreased - regardless of their socio-economic status.

The study, by researchers at the University of Cambridge and the University of Sussex, also found that children from affluent families tended to have increased their connection to nature during the pandemic more than their less affluent peers. 

Nearly two thirds of parents reported a change in their child’s connection to nature during lockdown, while a third of children whose connection to nature decreased displayed increased problems of wellbeing - either through ‘acting out’ or by increased sadness or anxiety.

The results strengthen the case for nature as a low-cost method of mental health support for children, and suggest that more effort should be made to support children in connecting with nature - both at home and at school. 

The researchers’ suggestions for achieving this include: reducing the number of structured extracurricular activities for children to allow for more time outside, provision of gardening projects in schools, and funding for schools, particularly in disadvantaged areas, to implement nature-based learning programmes.

The study, published today in the journal People and Nature, also offers important guidance in relation to potential future restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We know that access to and engagement with nature is associated with wide-ranging benefits in children and adults, including lowering levels of anxiety and depression, and reducing stress,” said Samantha Friedman, a researcher in the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Family Research, first author of the study.

She added: “The COVID-19 lockdowns meant that children no longer had their normal school activities, routines and social interactions. The removal of these barriers gave us a novel context to look at how changes in connection with nature affected mental health.

“Connecting with nature may have helped buffer some UK children against the effects of the lockdown, but we found that children from less affluent families were less likely to have increased their connection to nature during that time.”

An increased connection to nature was reflected in reports of children spending time gardening, playing in the garden or doing physical activities outdoors. This was commonly linked to having more time available for these activities during lockdown. Conversely, according to parents, a decreased connection to nature was explained by an inability to access some natural spaces due to travel restrictions in place at the time.

“Connecting to nature may be an effective way of supporting children’s wellbeing, particularly as children return to normal routines, such as school and extracurricular activities,” said Dr Elian Fink, a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Sussex who was also involved in the study.

She added: “Our findings could be helpful in redesigning lockdown rules should the UK need to return to these conditions in the future, and particularly to countries whose lockdown restrictions prevented children from accessing nature at all. 

“Extending the amount of time that children can access nature, or extending the distance that children could be allowed to travel to access nature, could have a beneficial impact on their mental health.”

The study used an online survey to collect responses from 376 families in the UK, with children between three and seven years old, between April and July 2020. Over half of these families reported that their child’s connection to nature increased during the first COVID-19 lockdown. The remaining parents whose children’s connection to nature decreased or stayed the same during this period also reported that their children were experiencing greater wellbeing problems. 

A widely-used, gold standard questionnaire was used as a measure of each child’s mental health - assessing emotional problems such as unhappiness, worrying, anxiety and depression; and behavioural problems such as anger and hyperactivity.

“Mental health problems can manifest in different ways in different children. We found that a greater connection with nature was associated with reductions in both emotional and behavioural problems,” said Fink.

She added: “In reality the contrasting experiences of access to nature between different socio-economic groups may be even starker than our study found because respondents to our online study were largely drawn from more affluent societal groups.”

Parents with children between three and seven years old responded to the study survey with reference to one particular child. The researchers focused on this age group because they were likely to experience a lot of disruption due to the pandemic, and also have less understanding of what was happening. 

“Our study revealed the wide range of ways that parents can help children get more connected to nature. This might be a bit daunting to some, but it doesn’t have to be camping in the woods and foraging for food – it really can be as simple as going for a walk near your house or sitting outside for ten minutes a day,” said Friedman.

This research was funded by Newnham College, University of Cambridge.

Reference

Friedman, S. et al: ‘Understanding changes to children’s connection to nature during the Covid-19 pandemic and implications for child well-being.’ People and Nature, Oct 2021. DOI: 10.1002/pan3.10270

Overall, the study supports the hypothesis that the widespread destruction of forests following the asteroid’s impact favoured ground-dwelling mammals over their arboreal counterparts. However, it also provides strong evidence that some tree-dwelling animals also survived the cataclysm, possibly nesting in branches through the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction event.

“The recovery of terrestrial vertebrate life following the end-Cretaceous asteroid impact was one of the most important events in the history of life on Earth,” said senior author Dr Daniel Field, from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences. “In this study, we drew on our previous work at Cambridge to investigate whether there were similarities in the ecological attributes of avian and mammalian survivors of the end-Cretaceous mass extinction.”

The K-Pg mass extinction event occurred when a meteor slammed into Earth at the end of the Cretaceous period. The impact and its aftereffects killed roughly 75% of the animal and plant species on the planet, including whole groups like the non-avian dinosaurs. 

For the study, the researchers analysed patterns of substrate preferences among all modern mammals and their ancestors, working backwards from the present day to before the K-Pg extinction event by tracing these traits along numerous phylogenetic trees — diagrams that illustrate the evolutionary relationships among species.

“Our study takes advantage of an ongoing revolution in our understanding of the tree of life, only made possible by researchers working in association with natural history collections,” said co-lead author Jacob Berv, from the University of Michigan. “By integrating data from such collections with modern statistical techniques, we can address new questions about major transitions in evolutionary history.”

The researchers classified each mammalian species as arboreal, non-arboreal, or semi-arboreal. To be considered arboreal, the species had to nearly always nest in trees. Categorising some species could be tricky. For example, many bat species spend a lot of time among trees but nest in caves, so bats were mostly categorised as non-arboreal or semi-arboreal.

“We were able to see that leading up to the K-Pg event, there was a spike in transitions from arboreal and semi-arboreal to non-arboreal habitat use across our models,” said co-lead author Jonathan Hughes, from Cornell University.

The work builds on a previous study led by Field, which used the same analytical method — known as ancestral state reconstruction — to show that all modern birds evolved from ground-dwelling ancestors after the asteroid strike.

“The fossil record of many vertebrate groups is sparse in the immediate aftermath of the extinction,” said Field, who is also curator of ornithology at the Cambridge Museum of Zoology. “Analytical approaches like ancestral state reconstruction allow us to establish hypotheses for how groups like birds and mammals made it through this cataclysm, which palaeontologists can then test when additional fossils are found.”

The analysis helps illuminate ecological selectivity of mammals across the K-Pg boundary despite the relatively sparse fossil record of mammalian skeletal elements from the periods immediately preceding and following the asteroid’s impact.

How the tree-dwelling ancestors of primates survived the asteroid’s destruction is unclear. According to the authors, it’s possible that some forest fragments survived the calamity or that early primates and their relatives were ecologically flexible enough to modify their substrate preferences in a world mostly denuded of trees.

Reference:
Jonathan J. Hughes et al. ‘Ecological selectivity and the evolution of mammalian substrate preference across the K–Pg boundary.’ Ecology and Evolution (2021). DOI: 10.1002/ece3.8114

Adapted from a Yale news release.

SARS-CoV-2 had spread widely throughout India in the first wave, with initial results from the Indian Council of Medical Research finding one in five (21%) adults and one in four (25%) 10 to 17 year old adolescents had been infected. The figures were much higher in Indian megacities: by February 2021, over a half (56%) of individuals in Delhi were thought to have been infected.

Since the first case of COVID-19 was detected in Delhi in March 2020, the city had experienced multiple outbreaks, in June, September and November 2020. After reaching a high of almost 9,000 cases daily in November 2020, new cases steadily declined, with very few new infections between December 2020 and March 2021.

The situation reversed dramatically in April 2021, going from approximately 2,000 daily cases to 20,000 between 31 March and 16 April. This was accompanied by a rapid rise in hospitalisations and ICU admissions, severely stressing the healthcare system, with daily deaths spiking to levels three-fold higher than previous waves. 

In research published today, an international team of scientists used genomic and epidemiological data, together with mathematical modelling, to study the outbreak. The work was led by the National Centre of Disease Control and the CSIR Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, India, with collaborators from the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London, UK, and the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

To determine whether SARS-CoV-2 variants were responsible for the April 2021 outbreak in Delhi, the team sequenced and analysed viral samples from Delhi from the previous outbreak in November 2020 until June 2021. They found that the 2020 outbreaks in Delhi were unrelated to any variant of concern. The Alpha variant (B.1.1.7) was identified only occasionally, primarily in foreign travellers, until January 2021. The Alpha variant increased in Delhi to about 40% of cases in March 2021, before it was displaced by a rapid increase in the Delta variant (B.1.617.2) in April.

Applying mathematical modelling to the epidemiological and genomic data, the researchers found that the Delta variant was between 30-70% more transmissible than previous SARS-CoV-2 lineages in Delhi, including the Alpha variant. Importantly, the model also suggested that the Delta variant was able to infect people who had previously been infected by SARS-CoV-2 – prior infection provided only 50-90% of the protection against infection with Delta variant that it provides against previous lineages.

To look for actual evidence of reinfection to support their modelling work, the researchers examined a cohort of individuals recruited by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), India. In February, 42.1% of unvaccinated subjects participating in the study had tested positive for antibodies against SARS-CoV-2. In June, the corresponding number was 88.5%, suggesting very high infection rates during the second wave. Among 91 subjects with prior infection before Delta, about one-quarter (27.5%) showed increased levels of antibodies, providing evidence of reinfection.

When the team sequenced all the samples of vaccination-breakthrough cases at a single centre over the period of the study, they found that among 24 reported cases, Delta was seven-fold more likely to lead to vaccination breakthroughs than non-Delta lineages.

Dr Anurag Agrawal from the National Centre of Disease Control and the CSIR Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, India, senior author and co-lead investigator, said: “This work helps understand the global outbreaks of Delta, including in highly vaccinated populations, because the Delta variant can transmit through vaccinated or previously infected people to find those who are susceptible.”

Co-author Professor Ravi Gupta from the Cambridge Institute of Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Disease at the University of Cambridge, UK, said: “The concept of herd immunity is critical in ending outbreaks, but the situation in Delhi shows that infection with previous coronavirus variants will be insufficient for reaching herd immunity against Delta. The only way of ending or preventing outbreaks of Delta is either by infection with this variant or by using vaccine boosters that raise antibody levels high enough to overcome Delta’s ability to evade neutralisation.”

Previous research led by Professor Gupta showed that the Delta variant has most likely spread through its ability to evade neutralising antibodies and its increased infectivity.

The research was supported by the Indian Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, and Department of Biotechnology.

Reference
Mahesh Dhar, Robin Marwal, Radhakrishnan VS, Kalaiarasan Ponnusamy, Bani Jolly, Rahul  Bhoyar, et al. Genomic characterization and Epidemiology of an emerging SARS-CoV-2 variant in Delhi, India. Science; 14 Oct 2021; DOI: 10.1126/science.abj9932

Cytotoxic T cells are specialist white blood cells that are trained by our immune system to recognise and eliminate threats – including tumour cells and cells infected with invading viruses, such as SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19. They are also at the heart of new immunotherapies that promise to transform cancer treatment. 

Professor Gillian Griffiths from the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, who led the research, said: “T cells are trained assassins that are sent on their deadly missions by the immune system. There are billions of them in our blood, each engaged in a ferocious and unrelenting battle to keep us healthy.

“Once a T cell has found its target, it binds to it and releases its toxic cargo. But what is particularly remarkable is that they are then able to go on to kill and kill again. Only now, thanks to state-of-the-art technologies, have we been able to find out how they reload their weapons.”

Today, in a study published in Science, the team have shown that the refuelling of T cells’ toxic weapons is regulated by mitochondria. Mitochondria are often referred to as a cell’s batteries as they provide the energy that power their function. However, in this case the mitochondria use an entirely different mechanism to ensure the killer T cells have sufficient ‘ammunition’ to destroy their targets.

Professor Griffiths added: “These assassins need to replenish their toxic payload so that they can keep on killing without damaging the T cells themselves. This careful balancing act turns out to be regulated by the mitochondria in T cells, which set the pace of killing according to how quickly they themselves can manufacture proteins. This enables killer T cells to stay healthy and keep on killing under challenging conditions when a prolonged response is required.”

Understanding the details of this basic process could ultimately help in the long-term scientific goal of designing and engineering T cells that are better at killing cancer cells, say the researchers. 

To accompany the study, Professor Griffiths and colleagues have released footage showing killer T cells as they hunt down and eliminate cancer cells.

One teaspoon full of blood alone is believed to have around 5 million T cells, each measuring around 10 micrometres in length, about a tenth the width of a human hair. The cells, seen in the video as red or green amorphous ‘blobs’, move around rapidly, investigating their environment as they travel.

When a T cell finds an infected cell or, in the case of the film, a cancer cell, membrane protrusions rapidly explore the surface of the cell, checking for tell-tale signs that this is an uninvited guest. The T cell binds to the cancer cell and injects poisonous ‘cytotoxin’ proteins down special pathways called microtubules to the interface between the T cell and the cancer cell, before puncturing the surface of the cancer cell and delivering its deadly cargo.

The research was funded by Wellcome.

Reference
Lisci, M et al. Mitochondrial translation is required for sustained killing by cytotoxic T cells. Science; 14 Oct 2021; DOI: 10.1126/science.abe9977

In March 2020, the same experiment released evidence of particles breaking one of the core principles of the Standard Model – our best theory of particles and forces – suggesting the possible existence of new fundamental particles and forces.

Now, further measurements by physicists at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory have found similar effects, boosting the case for new physics.

The Standard Model describes all the known particles that make up the universe and the forces that they interact through. It has passed every experimental test to date, and yet physicists know it must be incomplete. It does not include the force of gravity, nor can it account for how matter was produced during the Big Bang, and contains no particle that could explain the mysterious dark matter that astronomy tells us is five times more abundant than the stuff that makes up the visible world around us.

As a result, physicists have long been hunting for signs of physics beyond the Standard Model that might help us to address some of these mysteries.

One of the best ways to search for new particles and forces is to study particles known as beauty quarks. These are exotic cousins of the up and down quarks that make up the nucleus of every atom.

Beauty quarks don’t exist in large numbers in the world around as they are incredibly short-lived – surviving on average for just a trillionth of a second before transforming or decaying into other particles. However, billions of beauty quarks are produced every year by CERN’s giant particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, which are recorded by a purpose-built detector called LHCb.

The way beauty quarks decay can be influenced by the existence of undiscovered forces or particles. In March, a team of physicists at LHCb released results showing evidence that beauty quarks were decaying into particles called muons less often than to their lighter cousins, electrons. This is impossible to explain in the Standard Model, which treats electrons and muons identically, apart from the fact that electrons are around 200 times lighter than muons. As a result, beauty quarks ought to decay into muons and electrons at equal rates. Instead, the physicists at LHCb found that the muon decay was only happening around 85% as often as the electron decay.

The difference between the LHCb result and the Standard Model was about three units of experimental error, or ‘3 sigma’ as it is known in particle physics. This means there is only around a one in a thousand chance of the result being caused by a statistical fluke.

Assuming the result is correct, the most likely explanation is that a new force that pulls on electrons and muons with different strengths is interfering with how these beauty quarks decay. However, to be sure if the effect is real more data is needed to reduce the experimental error. Only when a result reaches the ‘5 sigma’ threshold, when there is less than a one in a million chance of it being due to random chance, will particle physicists start to consider it a genuine discovery.

“The fact that we’ve seen the same effect as our colleagues did in March certainly boosts the chances that we might genuinely be on the brink of discovering something new,” said Dr Harry Cliff from the Cavendish Laboratory. “It’s great to shed a little more light on the puzzle.”

Today’s result examined two new beauty quark decays from the same family of decays as used in the March result. The team found the same effect – the muon decays were only happening around 70% as often as the electron decays. This time the error is larger, meaning that the deviation is around ‘2 sigma’, meaning there is just over a 2% chance of it being due to a statistical quirk of the data. While the result isn’t conclusive on its own, it does add further support to a growing pile of evidence that there are new fundamental forces waiting to be discovered.

“The excitement at the Large Hadron Collider is growing just as the upgraded LHCb detector is about to be switched on and further data collected that will provide the necessary statistics to either claim or refute a major discovery,” said Professor Val Gibson, also from the Cavendish Laboratory.

The results – part of a collaboration with Cambridge Zero, the University’s climate initiative – also found that as the UK prepares to host crucial climate talks in Glasgow next month, barely a third of British adults have noticed that the event is taking place.

According to polling conducted last week, just 31% of British adults have read or heard much about COP26 so far, compared with 63% answering to the contrary – either “not very much” or “nothing at all”. These numbers have also barely changed in two months.

When the same question was asked as part of the main, international fieldwork in August, results showed a slightly larger difference of 28% versus 67%. Predictably, the other populations showed even less impact, such as 17% versus 75% in France, 9% versus 84% in Sweden and 7% versus 83% in Germany.

However, the poll indicates that while survey participants may not be following COP26, a significant majority of the 9,000 people polled across the UK, Germany, France, Denmark, Sweden, Spain and Italy strongly support many of the aims of the talks, at least in principle.

Dr Emily Shuckburgh, Director of Cambridge Zero, said:

“As the impacts of climate change are starting to be felt everywhere, COP26 should be seen as a vital summit where the world must deliver immediate and meaningful climate action. But the bad news is that most people have still barely noticed that the world leaders who can actually take the actions needed will be in our own backyard.”

Dr Joel Rogers de Waal, Academic Director of YouGov, said:

“The good news for COP26 organisers is that in every country surveyed, the vast majority are on board with the programme, at least in principle. In each national sample, most agreed that climate change is a genuine phenomenon and a considerable concern, and rejected the idea that its seriousness is being exaggerated.”

Beyond overall terms of debate, however, the same findings also indicate both strong support for certain environmental agendas – the polling showed widespread enthusiasm for “rewilding”, with 70% support in Britain and 79% in Spain for programmes to restore parts of the country to their natural state – and some obvious challenges.

However, when it comes to making lifestyle changes, participants were less enthusiastic. Despite the clear environmental benefits of eating less meat, all seven countries showed majorities who eat meat at least several times a week. Within the meat-eating section of respondents, only a small proportion claimed to have reduced their meat consumption over the past 12 months, and of those, generally around half or under had done so for environmental reasons.

Attitudes towards environmental action at the policy level are a mixed bag. In nearly every country, large portions support the policy of greatly expanding government investment in renewable energy, such as solar, wind and tidal power, including majorities or pluralities in Britain (66%), Germany (52%), Denmark (65%), Sweden (47%), Spain (74%) and Italy (69%). Only France was an outlier in this respect, where just 24% said the same.

But in other areas, public support is tentative and variable, such as bans on the sale of petrol or diesel cars and vans, or a frequent flyer tax.

Poll results also give a sense of public attitudes towards the new environmental activism. Additional polling for the project at the start of September asked British voters two questions regarding Extinction Rebellion – one about methods, the other about message. On the former, a 53% majority said the methods used by the protest group generally go too far, compared with only 10% saying they got the balance about right and 7% saying they didn’t go far enough. On the latter, however, only 38% thought the environmental warnings of Extinction Rebellion generally overstate the situation, next to a combined 41% saying that they describe the situation about right (32%) or even understate it (9%).

“The most powerful protest movements are those that ultimately manage to inspire and co-opt the wider population, creating a sense of social momentum that becomes impossible for the political centre to ignore,” said de Waal. “By contrast, acts of civic vandalism that specifically target the basic necessities of daily life are more likely to do the opposite, since by infuriating the public, they only make it easier for governments to ignore the message behind the action.”

All figures, unless otherwise stated, are from YouGov Plc. Total sample sizes were: Britain= 1767; Germany=2108; France=1035; Denmark=1009; Sweden=1015; Spain=1050; Italy=1000. Fieldwork was undertaken online between 6th – 23rd August, 2021. For each country, the figures have been weighted and are representative of the adult population aged 18+.

The University of Cambridge Enterprise Fund has joined in a £1 million investment in Carbon Re, a UK climate tech start-up that uses artificial intelligence to cut CO₂ emissions in the global cement industry and other hard-to-abate industrial processes.

Carbon Re combines world-class deep reinforcement learning—a field of artificial intelligence best suited to managing complex decision-making—and industrial sustainability expertise from the University of Cambridge’s Institute for Manufacturing and UCL’s Energy Institute.

Carbon Re’s cloud-based platform, Delta Zero, uses powerful AI tools to achieve operational efficiencies in energy intensive industries, such as cement production, reducing operational costs and carbon emissions to otherwise unachievable levels. Delta Zero enables immediate reductions in energy consumption, cost and carbon emissions, with no capital expenditure.

Carbon Re is currently running pilot projects at cement plants in the EU, Turkey, India, Thailand, and Vietnam. Studies indicate that the Delta Zero platform could save a single cement plant US$2.3–5.9 million per annum and provide a 20% reduction in CO₂ emissions from fuel.

Using AI to analyse a customer’s manufacturing data, Carbon Re recommends ways to cut emissions during cement production by modelling the production environment and dynamically identifying the optimal process for the lowest possible carbon dioxide output and fuel use.

Currently the cement industry is Carbon Re’s primary area of focus, but the company plans to expand into other energy intensive industries, including steel and glass, over the next 12-18 months.

The investment is co-led by the Clean Growth Fund, the UK venture capital fund; the UCL Technology Fund and UCL Business Ltd’s Portico Ventures; and Blue Impact Ventures.

Sherif Elsayed-Ali, CEO of Carbon Re, said: “Our mission is to reduce global emissions at the Gigatonne scale, starting with the cement industry, and to become the leading global AI company to deliver industrial decarbonisation.”

“Energy intensive industries, such as cement, steel and chemicals, are vital to the global economy, producing 75% of all the material in the manufacturing and construction sectors. They also represent more than 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Our advanced software helps these industries cut their energy costs and crucially reduce their carbon emissions. Carbon Re’s AI technology provides heavy industry with an effective solution to address their critical challenges of energy costs and emissions reduction.” 

“The road to a zero-carbon world will be long but with the support of the Clean Growth Fund and our other investors, our AI-products and solutions will evolve to accelerate the transition of energy intensive industries.”

Stephen Price, Clean Growth Fund’s Investment Director, said: “We are all really excited about Carbon Re’s ability to make a huge and positive impact across the world. The pressure is on the hard-to-abate heavy industries, like cement, to cut their emissions, and to do so much faster if Net Zero is to be achieved. By applying Carbon Re’s leading edge AI technology, heavy industry’s transition to more sustainable practices can be accelerated.”

Chris Gibbs, Cambridge Enterprise, said: “Energy intensive industries, like cement, are among the hardest sectors to decarbonise. Carbon Re has a great team and a great technology that can be deployed today to save millions in energy and greenhouse gas emissions. Two prestigious UK universities, the University of Cambridge and UCL, alongside a tremendous group of investors are pleased to back an outstanding business that will bring real value to industry and real value to the planet too.”

Experts argue that many countries simply “repackaged” existing – and often already failing – policies without the necessary funding or retooling to benefit under 24-year-olds: the global demographic hit hardest by the economic consequences of COVID-19. 

In the report commissioned by the UN’s International Labour Organization, the Cambridge team calls on countries to go beyond employment policies that “yo-yo” with each virus surge, and implement longer-term interventions aimed squarely at the young. 

The report suggests that, since the pandemic began, more than one in six young people globally were made redundant, with severe impacts on their mental health and wellbeing. 

It is estimated that over 40% of all young people with a job pre-pandemic – some 178 million young workers – worked in the most affected sectors: tourism, services and retail. Tourism alone saw financial losses eleven times greater than the 2008 financial crash.

Global youth employment fell by more than double the rate of older adults in 2020 (8.7% compared to 3.7%), with loss of work particularly concentrated among young women in middle-income countries. Global female employment rates fell by 5% over the last year, compared to 3.9% for men. 

In the 132 countries that adopted 580 fiscal and economic measures to support businesses during the Covid crisis, only 12% aimed to improve women’s economic security by ensuring that female-dominated sectors received financial support – mainly in Latin America, the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa. 

In some lower-income countries, there are reports of more young women turning to sex work as a result, contributing to rising HIV cases as well as unintended pregnancies. 

Even among high-income nations, the impact on young people’s livelihoods has varied dramatically. For example, between February and April 2020 – as the virus took hold – there was an 11.7 percentage point reduction in labour participation among Canada’s young people, a 7.5 point drop in the US, but just a 1.9 point drop in South Korea. 

Many of those lucky enough to hold onto work saw their incomes fall substantially. By May last year, young people around the world still in work had almost a quarter of their hours cut on average (23%). 

“Young people face distinct challenges which disadvantage them compared to older adults when it comes to finding work post-pandemic,” said report co-author Dr Adam Coutts, from Cambridge’s Department of Sociology.  

“These include less work experience and financial capital, weaker social networks, and higher levels of in-work poverty. They are also much more likely to have to make ends meet via informal cash-in-hand work. 

“Recent school leavers are often ineligible for unemployment benefits or furlough schemes. This left many young people falling through the cracks of policy interventions,” said Coutts.

Co-author Dr Garima Sahai from Cambridge's Department of Geography said: "Young women have been especially hit by the pandemic who have experienced higher job losses, increased unpaid care work, the shadow pandemic of gender-based violence to name only a few effects.”

Researchers argue that “generation lockdown” could face protracted periods of unemployment, making it hard to re-enter the labour market, and get overtaken by “younger and better qualified cohorts”.    

“Young people have been forced to remain at home, stuck with their parents, cut off from friends and partners,” said University of Cambridge co-author Dr Anna Barford. “Anxiety, stress and depression skyrocketed among young people around the world.” 

“For those without ready access to internet connections or laptops, finishing school or hunting for work has been almost impossible at times,” she said.  

“Repeated outbreaks in areas from Europe to sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America will deplete household savings, shrink opportunities and diminish the aspirations of generation lockdown.” 

The report highlights that fact that young people migrate to find work and their place in the world. The pandemic shut down long-established migratory patterns: from young Guatemalans heading north to Mexico, to young Zimbabweans moving to South Africa. Young immigrants were also much more likely to lose work as average incomes fell.  

Most national governments have offered economy-wide fiscal stimulus as well as labour market interventions, from reduced working weeks to temporary furlough schemes and increased social protection.  

Some governments offered lifelines directly to sectors that prop up the youth labour market, such as India’s emergency loan support, which focused on the wholesale and retail trade, manufacturing, rental and business services (with some 100 million young people in the Asia and Pacific region estimated to be employed in these sectors). 

However, the researchers say that only a few nations deployed policy responses tailored to the specific needs of young people affected by the economic fallout of COVID-19. 

These included South Korea’s one-off cash transfers to young jobseekers and government-backed paid apprenticeships in Malaysia, while the EU reinforced its “Youth guarantee” scheme: with member states aiming to provide everyone under the age of 30 with education, traineeship or a job within four months of becoming unemployed.   

The researchers argue that, without “youth-sensitive” employment policies, intergenerational inequalities will be further exacerbated during the pandemic recovery period.

They call for more youth-targeted ALMPs – Active Labour Market Policies – that provide support to boost employability, from vocational training to one-on-one jobseeker counselling, alongside mental health and wellbeing assistance for young people.

One example highlighted by the report's authors is the Indonesian ‘pre-employment card’, the Kartu Pre-Kerja, with $1.3bn allocated to fund skills training for two million young workers. By contrast, Mexico reduced its ALMPs spending to move funding to other parts of the pandemic response.   

“Holistic policy responses require health and non-health government departments and ministries to work together more effectively,” said Coutts. “The pandemic forced them to work together. These new networks and cross-departmental links need to be maintained.”

“Coordination should extend outside government to NGOs, trade unions, employer organisations, policy makers and young people themselves, in order to design better quality and more effective post-pandemic support for young people who have faced 18 months of social and economic chaos,” he added.

A common form of motor neurone disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, often overlaps with frontotemporal dementia (ALS/FTD) and can affect younger people, occurring mostly after the age of 40-45. These conditions cause devastating symptoms of muscle weakness with changes in memory, behaviour and personality. Being able to grow small organ-like models (organoids) of the brain allows the researchers to understand what happens at the earliest stages of ALS/FTD, long before symptoms begin to emerge, and to screen for potential drugs.

In general, organoids, often referred to as ‘mini organs’, are being used increasingly to model human biology and disease. At the University of Cambridge alone, researchers use them to repair damaged livers, study SARS-CoV-2 infection of the lungs and model the early stages of pregnancy, among many other areas of research.

Typically, researchers take cells from a patient’s skin and reprogramme the cells back to their stem cell stage – a very early stage of development at which they have the potential to develop into most types of cell. These can then be grown in culture as 3D clusters that mimic particular elements of an organ. As many diseases are caused in part by defects in our DNA, this technique allows researchers to see how cellular changes – often associated with these genetic mutations – lead to disease.

Scientists at the John van Geest Centre for Brain Repair, University of Cambridge, used stem cells derived from patients suffering from ALS/FTD to grow brain organoids that are roughly the size of a pea. These resemble parts of the human cerebral cortex in terms of their embryonic and fetal developmental milestones, 3D architecture, cell-type diversity and cell-cell interactions.

Although this is not the first time scientists have grown mini brains from patients with neurodegenerative diseases, most efforts have only been able to grow them for a relatively short time frame, representing a limited spectrum of dementia-related disorders. In findings published today in Nature Neuroscience, the Cambridge team reports growing these models for 240 days from stem cells harbouring the commonest genetic mutation in ALS/FTD, which was not previously possible – and in unpublished work the team has grown them for 340 days.

Dr András Lakatos, the senior author who led the research in Cambridge’s Department of Clinical Neurosciences, said: “Neurodegenerative diseases are very complex disorders that can affect many different cell types and how these cells interact at different times as the diseases progress.

“To come close to capturing this complexity, we need models that are more long-lived and replicate the composition of those human brain cell populations in which disturbances typically occur, and this is what our approach offers. Not only can we see what may happen early on in the disease – long before a patient might experience any symptoms – but we can also begin to see how the disturbances change over time in each cell.”

While organoids are usually grown as balls of cells, first author Dr Kornélia Szebényi generated patient cell-derived organoid slice cultures in Dr Lakatos’ laboratory. This technique ensured that most cells within the model could receive the nutrients required to keep them alive.

Dr Szebényi said: “When the cells are clustered in larger spheres, those cells at the core may not receive sufficient nutrition, which may explain why previous attempts to grow organoids long term from patients’ cells have been difficult.”

Using this approach, Dr Szebényi and colleagues observed changes occurring in the cells of the organoids at a very early stage, including cell stress, damage to DNA and changes in how the DNA is transcribed into proteins. These changes affected those nerve cells and other brain cells known as astroglia, which orchestrate muscle movements and mental abilities.

“Although these initial disturbances were subtle, we were surprised at just how early changes occurred in our human model of ALS/FTD,” added Dr Lakatos. “This and other recent studies suggest that the damage may begin to accrue as soon as we are born. We will need more research to understand if this is in fact the case, or whether this process is brought forward in organoids by the artificial conditions in the dish.”

As well as being useful for understanding disease development, organoids can be a powerful tool for screening potential drugs to see which can prevent or slow disease progression. This is a crucial advantage of organoids, as animal models often do not show the typical disease-relevant changes, and sampling the human brain for this research would be unfeasible.

The team showed that a drug, GSK2606414, was effective at relieving common cellular problems in ALS/FTD, including the accumulation of toxic proteins, cell stress and the loss of nerve cells, hence blocking one of the pathways that contributes to disease. Similar drugs that are more suitable as medications and approved for human use are now being tested in clinical trials for neurodegenerative diseases.

Dr Gabriel Balmus from the UK Dementia Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, collaborating senior author, said: “By modelling some of the mechanisms that lead to DNA damage in nerve cells and showing how these can lead to various cell dysfunctions, we may also be able to identify further potential drug targets.”

Dr Lakatos added: “We currently have no very effective options for treating ALS/FTD, and while there is much more work to be done following our discovery, it at least offers hope that it may in time be possible to prevent or to slow down the disease process.

“It may also be possible in future to be able to take skin cells from a patient, reprogramme them to grow their ‘mini brain’ and test which unique combination of drugs best suits their disease.”

The study was primarily funded by the Medical Research Council UK, Wellcome Trust and the Evelyn Trust.

Reference

Szebényi, K et al. Human ALS/FTD Brain Organoid Slice Cultures Display Distinct Early Astrocyte and Targetable Neuronal Pathology. Nature Neuroscience; 21 Oct 2021; DOI: 10.1038/s41593-021-00923-4

These questions have been worrying researchers at the University of Cambridge Department of Computer Science and Technology. Now they are launching a year-long investigation into the ways our information is being collected and whether or not these always comply with regulations and the law.

Working in collaboration with colleagues at Imperial College London, they will probe the data that flows from the Internet of Things – the networked consumer devices, such as smart printers, doorbells and toys, that are an increasing presence in our homes.

Backed by a grant from the Information Commissioner’s Office, the UK’s data protection regulator, they will be investigating what Dr Jat Singh describes as ‘the Internet of Stings’.

Research shows that information from our devices often finds its way to a range of third parties, such as user-tracking and advertising networks that may mine it for valuable information about consumer behaviour. He’s also worried about the occasions when data is transmitted from one country to another where there may be different rules, rights and restrictions around data and its use.

So Singh and the research team want to investigate the transmission of data from our devices to find out if it is in line with relevant law – and to inform consumers about the potential of what we can do to have better control over our information.

“We see ‘smart’ devices increasingly being worn on people's bodies and used in people's homes,” said Singh. “However, it’s often unclear what happens with the data these devices collect: where that data goes and how it is used. This is concerning, given these devices can often collect highly personal, private and sensitive information about ourselves and our lives.

“This project seeks to shed light on the state of current commercial data practices by analysing the nature of data flows from both a technical and a data rights, perspective. We aim to show if there are any data protection implications and concerns in the consumer smart device landscape so that we can empower policymakers, regulators, and individuals alike.”

Dr Singh leads the Compliant & Accountable Systems Research group, a team of researchers working at the intersection of technology and law. They consider ways in which technology could be better designed and deployed to meet legal and regulatory concerns and work to inform policymakers and regulators about the technical realities of new and emerging technologies.

Technical network-monitoring mechanisms have been used to establish the ways in which data is transmitted, the patterns of transmissions, and the destinations it ended up in. “This showed that potentially problematic data-flow appears to be rife in the Internet of Things,” said Singh.

Over the next year, they’ll be taking a detailed look at whether devices actually transmit data in accordance with the privacy policies and other legal obligations of the companies that sell them.

They will also explore the implications of mitigations that consumers might use, such as the implications of blocking particular data flows.

They want to establish the nature and scale of any problems and see if vendor companies are being honest and fully transparent with their consumers and compliant with data protection and other laws. They also want to better inform not only device owners but also regulators and policy-makers about the suspected issues, which may help inform future interventions.

“Problems with the data practices of the consumer smart devices have been suspected for some time, but not fully examined – from both a technical and legal perspective,” said Singh. “We need to do so if we want a better, fairer and more compliant Internet of Things.”

Originally published on the Computer Science and Technology website.

The oneAPI Center of Excellence will focus on advancing cosmological research, open-source code development, and in situ compute and visualisation, as well as teaching computational and visualisation coding techniques.

The Centre for Theoretical Cosmology was established by Professor Stephen Hawking in 2007 within the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. It exists to advance the scientific understanding of our universe, developing and testing mathematical theories for cosmology and black holes.

Over the past six years, Hawking CTC Director Professor Paul Shellard and the COSMOS computing team have collaborated with Intel on developing and optimising several codes with many simulations and visualization results for cosmology study. This includes areas such as the analysis of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), simulations of Einstein’s General Relativity and the creation of gravitational waves during black hole or boson star collisions, and by cosmic string networks.

The COSMOS team, its work and computational and visualisation discoveries together with Intel were documented in the Discovery+ “UNIVERSE UNRAVELED” series currently available in select countries, including the UK.

A major goal of the Hawking CTC is to continue Professor Hawking’s vision of confronting our models of the Universe with the latest observations to reveal deep connections between quantum and galactic scales, while explaining such discoveries in ways understandable by everyone. Hawking recognised that this high-precision data and our complex theories can only touch each other using powerful computers.

“We are honoured to be among the vanguard of institutions chosen to be an Intel oneAPI Center of Excellence, ensuring we build on our longstanding collaboration on in situ visualisation and code modernisation as we prepare to study the Universe at exascale,” said Shellard. “We’re committed to flexible platform-independent programming paradigms so that we can do more with fewer people, focusing on trying out new ideas and new algorithms for our cosmology workflows. The oneAPI development tools offer us a fast pathway on to the widest range of HPC architectures, especially the latest GPU accelerators, so we can respond to the flood of new cosmological data sooner.”

“Intel is pleased to extend the highly impactful work done by the Hawking CTC Intel Graphics and Visualization Institute by adding the centre to our growing family of Intel oneAPI Centers of Excellence,” said Jim Jeffers, senior principal engineer and senior director of Intel Advanced Rendering and Visualization. “As part of this program, the Hawking CTC can take full advantage of state-of-the-art software development tools and advanced CPUs and GPUs to break new ground in understanding our universe. This honours the legacy of Stephen Hawking and his passion, vision, and goal to answer the ultimate questions of our existence, our past and our future.”

Robotic mushroom picking, strawberry yield forecasting and new bio-based materials to drive down the carbon footprint of car manufacturing are the focus of the first three companies to emerge from projects funded by Ceres Agri-Tech– a partnership between five UK universities and three agricultural research institutes.

Led by Cambridge Enterprise, the commercialisation arm of the University of Cambridge, Ceres was launched in 2018 – funded by Research England – to commercialise agri-tech based on university research. The other partners are the University of East Anglia, the University of Hertfordshire, the University of Lincoln and the University of Reading, as well as the NIAB, Rothamsted Research and the John Innes Centre.

The market for fresh mushrooms in the UK is worth £450 million annually. But, until now, the picking has had to be done by hand to prevent damage to the delicate mushrooms. Existing robotic harvesters are not suitable for mushrooms – which is a major issue as the industry struggles to cope with current labour shortages. But Ceres spin-out  Agaricus Robotics is developing a robot that can harvest even the most challenging dense clusters of mushrooms.

“In the UK alone, approximately 4,500 people are required every day to pick mushrooms – with labour costs representing a third of total production costs,” said Agaricus Robotics founder Bashir Al Diri. “It takes up to six months to train a picker and their skill determines the productivity of each mushroom bed. But our mushroom harvesting robot can pick whole crops without bruising the mushrooms and will lead to 20-30% yield increases from optimised 24/7 harvesting 365 days a year.”

Ceres spin-out FruitCast is focused on strawberry yield improvements, with a yield forecasting system based on AI-enabled data analytics. Image data from hand, vehicle or robot mounted cameras is used to measure individual fruit numbers, along with the weight and maturity state of millions of berries each day. This data is combined with weather forecasts in algorithms to predict yield six weeks ahead of existing systems.

“The UK produces 120,000 tonnes of strawberries each year, with a retail value of £659 million,” said Fruitcast founder Raymond Kirk. “Predicting the timing and yield of strawberries is critical for the industry – but extremely difficult to do accurately. We’re creating a system that will not only benefit strawberry growers through improved sales but also reduce supply chain friction and crop waste.”

The third spin-out company is Cellexcel, which has developed a process to make water-resistant materials from flax. The global market for composites – materials made from resin-reinforced fibres – in car manufacturing is predicted to reach nearly £20 billion by 2024. But the most popular composites, such as fibreglass and carbon fibre, are non-renewable and energy-intensive to produce.

“Replacing fibreglass and carbon fibre with renewable bio-based materials like flax promises to increase sustainability and reduce carbon footprints, as well as improving vehicle safety – as bio-composites do not shatter on impact,” said Cellexcel co-founder Richard Stephenson. “However, currently available flax-based composites are not water-resistant and therefore cannot be used on car exteriors – severely limiting their applications. Our process is now set to drive down the carbon footprint of car manufacturing and add value to agricultural products and agricultural waste.”

“The launch of our first three spin-out companies is evidence of the success of the Ceres collaboration and testament to the quality of agri-tech innovation in UK universities,” said Ceres Agri-Tech director Dr Louise Sutherland. “Alongside our commercialisation work with other projects in our pipeline, we are now also embarking on the next phase of Ceres and exploring new funding opportunities to enable us to accelerate our supply of innovative solutions to address the agri-tech problems of today and tomorrow.”