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Hospitality and real estate sectors have highest rates of common mental health problems

Person using an espresso machine

source: www.cam.ac.uk

Mental health problems such as depression are most common in the hospitality and real estate sectors, but – at least prior to the COVID-19 pandemic – were on the increase across the board, according to new research.

We would still strongly encourage industry leaders to take an urgent look and try to identify and address the underlying issuesShanquan Chen

Researchers from the University of Cambridge and University College London found significant gender disparities of common mental health problems against females in over half of the twenty industries studied, with the smallest gap being in the transport and storage industry and the highest gap being in the arts, entertainment and recreation industry.

In the UK, around one in seven people in the workplace experiences mental health problems, and women are nearly twice as likely to have mental health problems as men. More than half of all sickness absence days can be attributed to mental health conditions. It is estimated that economic losses caused by mental health problems account for about 4.1% of UK GDP, and that better mental health support in the workplace can save UK businesses up to £8 billion per year.

The researchers analysed data from almost 20,000 people aged between 16 and 65 across 20 industries. This data was collected as part of the Health Survey for England, a representative repeated cross-sectional survey of people in England, looking at changes in the health and lifestyles of people all over the country. The results are published in Frontiers in Public Health.

The team found an overall increase in the proportion of people reporting mental health problems, up from 16.0% in 2012-14 to 18.8% in 2016-2018. None of the industries studied experienced significant decreases in prevalence, but three industries – wholesale and retail trade, repair of motor vehicles and motorcycles; construction; and other service activities – saw significant increases.

Common mental health problems were most prevalent among those who were not working, with around one in three (33.7%) people reporting problems. In the hospitality sector (accommodation and food services) and real estate, just under one in four people (23.8% and 23.6, respectively) reported mental health problems.

The lowest prevalence was seen among professional, scientific and technical activities (15.0%), agriculture, forestry and fishing (9.6%) and mining and quarrying (6.2%).

Dr Shanquan Chen from the Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge, said: “Jobs that involve working face to face with the public, particularly where the employee has a degree of responsibility, and those that involve working irregular and long hours can all be emotionally demanding or even expose employees to violence and verbal aggression. This in turn could contribute to higher rates of mental health problems.”

“Nevertheless, we would still strongly encourage industry leaders – particularly in those sectors that fare worst, such as the hospitality and real estate sectors – to take an urgent look and try to identify and address the underlying issues.”

In the majority of industries (11 out of 20), mental health problems were more common among females than they were among males. This was highest in the arts, entertainment and recreation sector, where more than one in four women (26.0%) reported problems compared to around one in 20 (5.6%) of men. Not working also appeared to have a much bigger impact on females (45.0%) compared to males (21.7%).

From 2012-2014 to 2016-2018, gender disparities had widened in all but two sectors – human health and social work activities, and transport storage.

Previous studies have identified some risk factors that have gender-specific impacts on mental health. For example, working full-time decreases the risk of mental problems among males, but not among females; fixed-term contract only increases the risk of mental problems among females; males are more affected by changes in tasks at work, while lack of training, low motivation and weak social support are drivers of mental problems among females. However, the researchers say that the existing evidence cannot explain why there were disparities in some industries but not others.

The study was supported by the Medical Research Council and the NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre.

Reference
Chen, S & Wang, Y. Industry-specific prevalence and gender disparity of common mental health problems in the UK: A national repetitive cross-sectional study. Frontiers in Public Health; 9 Feb 2023; DOI: 10.3389/fpubh.2023.1054964



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Public wareness of ‘nuclear winter’ too low given current risks, argues expert

U.S. Navy nuclear test, Bikini Atoll.

source: www.cam.ac.uk

Survey study of awareness in UK and US populations also shows that brief exposure to latest data on ‘nuclear winter’ deepens doubts over nuclear retaliation.

Ideas of nuclear winter are predominantly a lingering cultural memory, as if it is the stuff of history, rather than a horribly contemporary riskPaul Ingram

There is a lack of awareness among UK and US populations of “nuclear winter”, the potential for catastrophic long-term environmental consequences from any exchange of nuclear warheads.

This is according to the researcher behind new polling conducted last month and released today by the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER).

Paul Ingram, CSER senior research associate, says that – despite risks of a nuclear exchange being at their highest for 40 years due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – what little awareness there is of nuclear winter among the public is mainly residual from the Cold War era.

The scientific theory of nuclear winter sees detonations from nuclear exchanges throw vast amounts of debris into the stratosphere, which ultimately blocks out much of the sun for up to a decade, causing global drops in temperature, mass crop failure and widespread famine.

Combined with radiation fall-out, these knock-on effects would see millions more perish in the wake of a nuclear war – even if they are far outside of any blast zone. Ideas of nuclear winter permeated UK and US culture during the Cold War through TV shows and films such as Threads and The Day After, as well as in novels such as Z for Zachariah.   

The latest survey, conducted online in January 2023, asked 3,000 participants – half in the UK, half in the US – to self-report on a sliding scale whether they felt they knew a lot about “nuclear winter”, and if they had heard about it from:

  • Contemporary media or culture, of which 3.2% in the UK and 7.5% in the US said they had.
  • Recent academic studies, of which 1.6% in the UK and 5.2% in the US claimed they had.
  • Beliefs held during the 1980s, of which 5.4% in the UK and 9% in the US said they had heard of or still recalled.*

“In 2023 we find ourselves facing a risk of nuclear conflict greater than we’ve seen since the early eighties. Yet there is little in the way of public knowledge or debate of the unimaginably dire long-term consequences of nuclear war for the planet and global populations,” said Ingram.

“Ideas of nuclear winter are predominantly a lingering cultural memory, as if it is the stuff of history, rather than a horribly contemporary risk.”  

“Of course it is distressing to consider large-scale catastrophes, but decisions need to account for all potential consequences, to minimise the risk,” said Ingram. 

“Any stability within nuclear deterrence is undermined if it is based on decisions that are ignorant of the worst consequences of using nuclear weapons.”

The survey also presented all participants with fictional media reports from the near future (dated July 2023) relaying news of nuclear attacks by Russia on Ukraine, and vice versa, to gauge support in the UK and US for western retaliation.

In the event of a Russian nuclear attack on Ukraine, fewer than one in five people surveyed in both countries supported in-kind retaliation, with men more likely than women to back nuclear reprisal: 20.7% (US) and 24.4% (UK) of men compared to 14.1% (US) and 16.1% (UK) of women.

The survey used infographics summarising nuclear winter effects laid out in a recent study led by Rutgers University (published by Nature in August 2022).The Rutgers research used climate modelling and observations from forest fires and volcanoes, and found that even a limited nuclear war could see mass starvation of hundreds of millions in countries uninvolved in any conflict.

Half the survey sample in each country (750 in the UK and US) were shown the infographics before they read the fictional news of nuclear strikes, while the other half – a control group – were not.

Support for nuclear retaliation was lower by 16% in the US and 13% in the UK among participants shown the “nuclear winter” infographics than among the control group.**

This effect was more significant for those supporting the parties of the US President and UK Government. Support for nuclear retaliation was lower by 33% among UK Conservative Party voters and 36% among US Democrat voters when participants were briefly exposed to recent nuclear winter research.*** 

Added Ingram: “There is an urgent need for public education within all nuclear-armed states that is informed by the latest research. We need to collectively reduce the temptation that leaders of nuclear-armed states might have to threaten or even use such weapons in support of military operations.”

Ingram points out that if we assume Russia’s nuclear arsenal has a comparable destructive force to that of the US – just under 780 megatons – then the least devastating scenario from the survey, in which nuclear winter claims 225 million lives, could involve just 0.1% of this joint arsenal.

The findings are published in a report on the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk website.

*The responses to each of these three questions were not mutually exclusive, with some participants claiming to know about nuclear winter from two or three different sources.

** Support for nuclear retaliation in the UK was 18.1% in the group that were presented with the infographic, against 20.8% in the control group. 
Support for nuclear retaliation in the US was 17.6% in the group that were presented with the infographic, against 21% in the control group. 

***22.3% of informed UK Conservative Party voters supported nuclear retaliation, against 33.3% of those uninformed. Among US Democrats these figures were 15.8% and 24.6% respectively.

The fieldwork was conducted online by polling company Prolific on the 25 January 2023, with a total of 3000 participants (1500 in the UK and US respectively).



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Researchers devise a new path toward ‘quantum light’

Abstract image
source: www.cam.ac.uk

Researchers have theorised a new mechanism to generate high-energy ‘quantum light’, which could be used to investigate new properties of matter at the atomic scale.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, along with colleagues from the US, Israel and Austria, developed a theory describing a new state of light, which has controllable quantum properties over a broad range of frequencies, up as high as X-ray frequencies. Their results are reported in the journal Nature Physics.

The world we observe around us can be described according to the laws of classical physics, but once we observe things at an atomic scale, the strange world of quantum physics takes over. Imagine a basketball: observing it with the naked eye, the basketball behaves according to the laws of classical physics. But the atoms that make up the basketball behave according to quantum physics instead.

“Light is no exception: from sunlight to radio waves, it can mostly be described using classical physics,” said lead author Dr Andrea Pizzi, who carried out the research while based at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory. “But at the micro and nanoscale so-called quantum fluctuations start playing a role and classical physics cannot account for them.”

Pizzi, who is currently based at Harvard University, worked with Ido Kaminer’s group at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and colleagues at MIT and the University of Vienna to develop a theory that predicts a new way of controlling the quantum nature of light.

“Quantum fluctuations make quantum light harder to study, but also more interesting: if correctly engineered, quantum fluctuations can be a resource,” said Pizzi. “Controlling the state of quantum light could enable new techniques in microscopy and quantum computation.”

One of the main techniques for generating light uses strong lasers. When a strong enough laser is pointed at a collection of emitters, it can rip some electrons away from the emitters and energise them. Eventually, some of these electrons recombine with the emitters they were extracted from, and the excess energy they absorbed is released as light. This process turns the low-frequency input light into high-frequency output radiation.

“The assumption has been that all these emitters are independent from one another, resulting in output light in which quantum fluctuations are pretty featureless,” said Pizzi. “We wanted to study a system where the emitters are not independent, but correlated: the state of one particle tells you something about the state of another. In this case, the output light starts behaving very differently, and its quantum fluctuations become highly structured, and potentially more useful.”

To solve this type of problem, known as a many body problem, the researchers used a combination of theoretical analysis and computer simulations, where the output light from a group of correlated emitters could be described using quantum physics.

The theory, whose development was led by Pizzi and Alexey Gorlach from the Technion, demonstrates that controllable quantum light can be generated by correlated emitters with a strong laser. The method generates high-energy output light, and could be used to engineer the quantum-optical structure of X-rays.

“We worked for months to get the equations cleaner and cleaner until we got to the point where we could describe the connection between the output light and the input correlations with just one compact equation. As a physicist, I find this beautiful,” said Pizzi. “Looking forward, we would like to collaborate with experimentalists to provide a validation of our predictions. On the theory side of things, our work suggests many-body systems as a resource for generating quantum light, a concept that we want to investigate more broadly, beyond the setup considered in this work.”

The research was supported in part by the Royal Society. Andrea Pizzi is a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Reference:
Andrea Pizzi et al. ‘Light emission from strongly driven many-body systems.’ Nature Physics (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41567-022-01910-7



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Combined steroid and statin treatment could reduce ‘accelerated ageing’ in preterm babies, study in rats suggests

Mother is holding a tiny hand of her preterm baby that is in the NICU.
source: www.cam.ac.uk

Potentially life-saving steroids commonly given to preterm babies also increase the risk of long-term cardiovascular problems, but a new study in rats has found that if given in conjunction with statins, their positive effects remain while the potential negative side-effects are ‘weeded out’.

We’re not saying to stop using glucocorticoids, as they are clearly a life-saving treatment. We’re saying that to improve this therapy – to fine tune it – we could combine it with statins.

Cambridge scientists gave new-born rats, which are naturally born prematurely, combined glucocorticoid steroids and statin therapy. The results, published today in Hypertension, show that the combined treatment led to the elimination of negative effects of steroids on the cardiovascular system while retaining their positive effects on the developing respiratory system.

Preterm birth (before 37 weeks) is one of the greatest killers in perinatal medicine today. One in ten babies is born preterm in high-income countries; this can increase to almost 40% in low- and middle-income countries.

Preterm babies are extremely vulnerable because they miss out on a crucial final developmental stage in which the hormone cortisol is produced and released exponentially into the unborn baby’s blood. Cortisol is vital to the maturation of organs and systems that are needed to keep the baby alive once born.

For example, in the lungs, cortisol ensures that they become more elastic. This allows the lungs to expand so the baby can take its first breath. Without cortisol the new-born lungs would be too stiff, which leads to respiratory distress syndrome (RDS) and could be fatal.

The established clinical treatment for any pregnancy threatened with preterm birth is glucocorticoid therapy, given via the mother before the baby is born and/or directly to the baby after birth. These synthetic steroids mimic the natural cortisol by speeding up the development of organs – including the lungs – which means the preterm baby is much more likely to survive.

Lead author Professor Dino Giussani from the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge said: “Glucocorticoids are a clear lifesaver, but the problem with steroids is that they speed up the maturation of all organs. For the baby’s lungs this is beneficial, but for the heart and circulation system it can be damaging – it resembles accelerated ageing.”

A previous clinical study by Professor Paul Leeson’s laboratory at Oxford University found that people who had been exposed to glucocorticoid therapy as unborn babies, via their mothers, showed measures of cardiovascular health typical of people a decade older.

Cambridge researcher Dr Andrew Kane, involved in the rat study, thought that this accelerated ageing could result from steroids causing oxidative stress Steroids lead to an imbalance of molecules known as free radicals, which result in a reduction in nitric oxide. Nitric oxide is very beneficial to the cardiovascular system – it increases blood flow and has anti-oxidant and anti-inflammatory properties.

To test if a lack of nitric oxide could be the origin of the adverse negative cardiovascular side-effects associated with glucocorticoid therapy, the researchers combined the steroid treatment with statins, which are widely used to lower cholesterol and are known to increase nitric oxide.

Researchers gave the synthetic steroid, dexamethasone, combined with the statin, pravastatin, to rat pups. There were three other groups – one receiving dexamethasone alone, one receiving pravastatin alone and a control group that received saline. Measures of respiratory and cardiovascular function were then taken when the rats had grown to ‘childhood’.

The Cambridge scientists found that steroids produced adverse effects on heart and blood vessels, and molecular indices associated with cardiovascular problems. But if statins were given at the same time, the rats were protected from these effects. Crucially, the statins did not affect any of the beneficial effects of steroids on the respiratory system.

“Our discovery suggests that combined glucocorticoid and statin therapy may be safer than glucocorticoids alone for the treatment of preterm babies,” said Professor Giussani.

“We’re not saying to stop using glucocorticoids, as they are clearly a life-saving treatment. We’re saying that to improve this therapy – to fine tune it – we could combine it with statins. This gives us the best of both worlds – we can maintain the benefits of steroids on the developing lungs, but ‘weed out’ their adverse side-effects on the developing heart and circulation, thereby making therapy much safer for the treatment of preterm birth.”

The team plan to replicate the experiment in sheep, which have a similar physiology to humans, before conducting human clinical trials.

The research was funded by the British Heart Foundation and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). Dr Andrew Kane was supported by the Frank Edward Elmore Fund and the James Baird Fund.

Giussani, DA et al. Combined statin and glucocorticoid therapy for the safer treatment of preterm birth. Hypertension; 1 Feb 2023; DOI: 10.1161/HYPERTENSIONAHA.122.19647



The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright ©University of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified.  All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

New form of ice is like a snapshot of liquid water

Part of the set-up for creating medium-density amorphous ice: ordinary ice and steel balls in a jar (not amorphous ice)
source: www.cam.ac.uk

A collaboration between scientists at Cambridge and UCL has led to the discovery of a new form of ice that more closely resembles liquid water than any other and may hold the key to understanding this most famous of liquids.

Our discovery of MDA raises many questions on the very nature of liquid water and so understanding MDA’s precise atomic structure is very importantMichael Davies

The new form of ice is amorphous. Unlike ordinary crystalline ice where the molecules arrange themselves in a regular pattern, in amorphous ice the molecules are in a disorganised form that resembles a liquid.

In their paper, published in Science, the team created a new form of amorphous ice in experiment and achieved an atomic-scale model of it in computer simulation. The experiments used a technique called ball-milling, which grinds crystalline ice into small particles using metal balls in a steel jar. Ball-milling is regularly used to make amorphous materials, but it had never been applied to ice.

The team found that ball-milling created an amorphous form of ice, which unlike all other known ices, had a density similar to that of liquid water and whose state resembled water in solid form. They named the new ice medium-density amorphous ice (MDA).

To understand the process at the molecular scale the team employed computational simulation. By mimicking the ball-milling procedure via repeated random shearing of crystalline ice, the team successfully created a computational model of MDA.

“Our discovery of MDA raises many questions on the very nature of liquid water and so understanding MDA’s precise atomic structure is very important,” said co-author Dr Michael Davies, who carried out the computational modelling. “We found remarkable similarities between MDA and liquid water.”

A happy medium

Amorphous ices have been suggested to be models for liquid water. Until now, there have been two main types of amorphous ice: high-density and low-density amorphous ice.

As the names suggest, there is a large density gap between them. This density gap, combined with the fact that the density of liquid water lies in the middle, has been a cornerstone of our understanding of liquid water. It has led in part to the suggestion that water consists of two liquids: one high- and one low-density liquid.

Senior author Professor Christoph Salzmann said: “The accepted wisdom has been that no ice exists within that density gap. Our study shows that the density of MDA is precisely within this density gap and this finding may have far-reaching consequences for our understanding of liquid water and its many anomalies.”

A high-energy geophysical material

The discovery of MDA gives rise to the question: where might it exist in nature? Shear forces were discovered to be key to creating MDA in this study. The team suggests ordinary ice could undergo similar shear forces in the ice moons due to the tidal forces exerted by gas giants such as Jupiter.

Moreover, MDA displays one remarkable property that is not found in other forms of ice. Using calorimetry, they found that when MDA recrystallises to ordinary ice it releases an extraordinary amount of heat. The heat released from the recrystallization of MDA could play a role in activating tectonic motions. More broadly, this discovery shows water can be a high-energy geophysical material.

Professor Angelos Michaelides, lead author from Cambridge’s Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, said: “Amorphous ice in general is said to be the most abundant form of water in the universe. The race is now on to understand how much of it is MDA and how geophysically active MDA is.”

Reference:
Alexander Rosu-Finsen et al. ‘Medium-density amorphous ice.’ Science (2023). DOI: 10.1126/science.abq2105



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Kettle’s Yard celebrates pioneering art project created with local school pupils

Two students creating art installation drawing on glass
source: www.cam.ac.uk

Students from Castle School have collaborated with Kettle’s Yard gallery to develop a new installation designed to amplify student voices.

The project demonstrates the power of art to empower and celebrate student voice, especially for those who traditionally may not have been provided this opportunity.Helen Creber, Learning and Engagement Coordinator, Kettle’s Yard

This week saw the launch of an exciting, interactive art installation following 18-months of collaboration between Kettle’s Yard, artist-in-residence Georgia Akbar and Castle School in Cambridge students.

Pupils from Castle School, an inclusive school supporting SEND (Special Educational Needs and Disabilities), have been visiting Kettle’s Yard, part of the University of Cambridge, since 2021 for inspiration and the opportunity to work with artist Georgia through experimental, creative workshops.

The result is an inspiring and interactive artwork, inspired by the play of light and windows within Kettle’s Yard. It encourages visitors to look up, to interact and play with light, and notice how light can change the nature or appearance of our environment.

The students combined their interest in film-making, projection, painting, drawing and installation to create the final artwork. They also found themselves so inspired by the artwork, they went on to create a new music composition which plays alongside the work.

The project is the first of its kind for Castle School and Kettle’s Yard. Its aim has been to celebrate, amplify and importantly, be led by student voices. Pupils across the school, from early years up to sixth formers took part.

Click on the images to enlarge and see the installation in more detail1 of 6

Anne Haberfield, Acting Head at Castle School says: “This has been such an amazing project. It’s been so accessible for our students, with each one taking their own unique learning and inspiration from a shared stimulus. Georgia Akbar has facilitated this with her creative flair, attention to detail and positive relationships with each of our students. We are so grateful to Georgia, Kettle’s Yard, the Ragdoll Foundation, and everyone that has supported the project, it is a great creative partnership.”

Helen Creber, Learning and Engagement Coordinator and project lead at Kettle’s Yard says: “This has been an incredibly inspiring project for Kettle’s Yard, extending the legacy of Jim Ede, our founder, of inspiring young people through contemporary art. The project demonstrates the power of art to empower and celebrate student voice, especially for those who traditionally may not have been provided this opportunity.”

The artwork will be displayed at Kettle’s Yard for Twilight at the Museums on Thursday 16 February, 4:30pm to 6:30pm. Visitors are welcome to explore the work during this free event. Following the Twilight event, Castle School will permanently display the artwork at their school as a proud legacy of this project.

Kettle’s Yard is part of the University of Cambridge and is one of Britain’s best galleries – a beautiful and unique house with a distinctive modern art collection, and a gallery exhibiting modern and contemporary art. Supporting this is an established learning and community engagement programme, archive, and programme of chamber concerts. Kettle’s Yard’s mission is to contribute to society by inspiring and engaging audiences through art, learning and research of the highest quality.



The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright ©University of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified.  All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Variety of events to celebrate LGBT+ History Month 2023

A display of book spines to mark LGBT+ History Month

source: www.cam.ac.uk

From talks and book clubs to a film screening, a variety of events are being held across Cambridge to mark LGBT+ History Month.

Founded by the charity Schools OUT and celebrated every February across the UK, the theme this year is #BehindTheLens, celebrating LGBT+ peoples’ contribution to cinema and film from behind the lens.

Events include a lecture by leading former civil servant Sir Richard Heaton KBC, a screening of the film A Fantastic Woman, and an exhibition celebrating literature by LGBTQ writers in the early 20th century.

Dr Duncan Astle, Chair of the LGBTQ+ Network at the University, said:

“Whether it’s Richard’s lecture, the University Library exhibition about challenges faced by LGBTQ writers and their publishers, or a discussion around the classic queer novel, you’ll be sure to find an interesting event throughout February.

“I hope you can join us as we celebrate this important month. Understanding our history is a crucial step towards addressing the many inequalities that sexual and gender minorities still face today.”

This year’s LGBT+ History Month events include:

 

LGBT+ History Month film screening: A Fantastic Woman

6pm, Thursday 16 February

Clare Hall, Herschel Road, Cambridge CB3 9AL

Free and open to all to attend

Clare Hall’s Graduate Student Body Committee presents a screening of A Fantastic Woman (2017) to mark LGBT+ History Month 2023, together with Javier Pérez-Osorio, PhD Candidate from the Centre for Film and Screen.

For more information, click here.

LGBT+ History Month Lecture: Sir Richard Heaton KBC

6pm, Wednesday 22 February

McGrath Centre, St Catharine’s College

Free and open to all to attend

Sir Richard Heaton, Warden of Robinson College, delivers the University of Cambridge’s LGBT+ History Month lecture.

Before coming to Cambridge in 2021, Richard was Permanent Secretary at the Cabinet Office from 2012 to 2015, and at the Ministry of Justice from 2015 to 2020. As a Home Office official earlier in his career, Richard advised Ministers on the reform of sexual offences law, including the contested issue of age of consent and the abolition of the offence of gross indecency.

For more information, click here.

Queer Connections in Literary Cambridge

2.30pm to 4.15pm, Thursday 23 February

Milstein Seminar Rooms, Cambridge University Library

Free and open to all to attend

The early decades of the twentieth century saw a flourishing of literature by LGBTQ writers, many of whom had connections to Cambridge, as students of the University or friends of those who worked here.

Writers like Edward Carpenter, Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke had links with Charles Sayle and Theodore Bartholomew (both members of University Library staff), who in some cases helped them to publish and promote their work through their own networks.

This display of books and archival material from the University Library highlights some of these links and explores the stories of those involved.

For more information click here.

Bulgarian tendencies: The perils of publishing queer books

5.30pm to 6.30pm, Thursday 23 February

Milstein Seminar Rooms, Cambridge University Library

Free and open to all to attend

Justin Bengry, Director of the Centre for Queer History at Goldsmiths, delivers a special talk to mark LGBT History Month on the challenges encountered by authors and publishers whose books explored the lives and experiences of LGBTQ people.

For more information, click here

The Really Popular Book Club: The Hours by Michael Cunningham

7-8pm, Tuesday 28 February

Online via Zoom meetings

Free and open to all to attend

The Really Popular Book Club is the reading group hosted by Cambridge University Libraries. This February, we will be discussing Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Hours. Our special guest for the evening will be Dr Diarmuid Hester, a writer and radical cultural historian who teaches at the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of English. He is the creator of A Great Recorded History, an audio trail of Cambridge focused on the city’s LGBTQ+ past, and the co-founder of Club Urania, a monthly performance and music night for LGBTQ+ people and their friends at Cambridge Junction.

For more information, click here.

Also happening:

6.30-8pm, Monday 20 February: All members of the Churchill College community welcome to take part in ‘Pride Patches’, a collective wellbeing art activity. For more details click here.

7.30–9pm, Tuesday 28 February: Spoken word event with readings of queer works and poetry in the St Catharine’s Chapel.

Throughout the month: King’s College Library and Archives have prepared an exhibition featuring items written by and relating to prominent LGBT King’s figures. College members can visit in the Library but anyone can enjoy here.

Throughout the month: Art and other forms of media nominated by the St Catharine’s community will be displayed in the college’s Shakeshaft Library.



The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright ©University of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified.  All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Self-driving shuttle buses will return to West Cambridge Innovation District for new trial

Self-driving shuttle buses will return to West Cambridge Innovation District for new trial

Inside one of the autonomous vehicles trialled on the West Cambridge Innovation District in 2021
source: www.cam.ac.uk

Autonomous vehicles will carry passengers around the West Cambridge Innovation District as part of a new sustainable transport pilot scheme supported by the University of Cambridge.

Innovation that benefits society is at the heart of the University’s mission, and we are delighted to support the next phase of fully autonomous vehicle trials at the West Cambridge Innovation District.Professor Ian Leslie, Senior Adviser to the Vice-Chancellor

Up to 13 self-driving shuttle buses will be trialled for a year on Cambridge roads from early 2024, following an announcement of new joint government and industry support for self-driving transport technology.

The Cambridge Connector project is being led by the Greater Cambridge Partnership with support from Cambridgeshire County Council’s digital connectivity programme Connecting Cambridgeshire.

It will test an on-demand self-driving shuttle service around Cambridge University’s West Cambridge Innovation District, and the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, to integrate with existing transport services already available in the city. The vehicles will initially have a safety driver on board as backup, but will eventually operate without one, being monitored remotely instead. The government has awarded £8.7 million to the project, matched by industry to a total £17.4 million.

The project is one of seven from around the UK to receive a grant as part of the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles Connected and Automated Mobility programme, which aims to help British companies seize early opportunities to develop experimental projects into offerings ready for the market.

The Cambridge Connector project follows the previous but separate Greater Cambridge Partnership trial of autonomous vehicle technology on the West Cambridge Innovation District in 2021.

Professor Ian Leslie, Senior Adviser to the Vice-Chancellor with special responsibility for Environmental Sustainability, said: “Innovation that benefits society is at the heart of the University’s mission, and we are delighted to support the next phase of fully autonomous vehicle trials at the West Cambridge Innovation District. We believe shuttles could provide a real benefit for staff, students and visitors, and make journey times quicker between our sites and around our sites. 

“By making sustainable travel easier, we hope more people will move away from using private vehicles in Cambridge, contributing towards Cambridge’s vision for the future.”

Cllr Elisa Meschini, Chair of the Greater Cambridge Partnership’s Executive Board, said: “Cambridge is renowned as a place of innovation, where the technology of the future is discovered and realised to benefit the world. This is why it is incredibly exciting to be part of today’s announcement to help develop a new public transport system. 

“In the last two years we have trialled autonomous vehicles and now these innovative self-driving vehicles are the next step to demonstrate how on-demand services will be part of the future for Greater Cambridge.”

Business Secretary Grant Shapps said: “In just a few years’ time, the business of self-driving vehicles could add tens of billions to our economy and create tens of thousands of jobs across the UK. This is a massive opportunity to drive forward our priority to grow the economy, which we are determined to seize.”

Image shows inside of one of the autonomous vehicles trialled on the West Cambridge Innovation District in 2021



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Artificial ancreas Successfully Trialled For Use By Type 2 Diabetes Patients

 

Schematic illustration showing the artificial pancreas

 

Cambridge scientists have successfully trialled an artificial pancreas for use by patients living with type 2 diabetes. The device – powered by an algorithm developed at the University of Cambridge – doubled the amount of time patients were in the target range for glucose compared to standard treatment and halved the time spent experiencing high glucose levels.

 

Many people with type 2 diabetes struggle to manage their blood sugar levels using the currently available treatments, such as insulin injections. The artificial pancreas can provide a safe and effective approach to help them

Charlotte Boughton

Around 415 million people worldwide are estimated to be living with type 2 diabetes, which costs around $760 billion in annual global health expenditure. According to Diabetes UK, in the UK alone, more than 4.9million people have diabetes, of whom 90% have type 2 diabetes, and this is estimated to cost the NHS £10bn per year.

Type 2 diabetes causes levels of glucose – blood sugar – to become too high. Ordinarily, blood sugar levels are controlled by the release of insulin, but in type 2 diabetes insulin production is disrupted. Over time, this can cause serious problems including eye, kidney and nerve damage and heart disease.

The disease is usually managed through a combination of lifestyle changes – improved diet and more exercise, for example – and medication, with the aim of keeping glucose levels low.

Researchers from the Wellcome-MRC Institute of Metabolic Science at the University of Cambridge have developed an artificial pancreas that can help maintain healthy glucose levels. The device combines an off-the-shelf glucose monitor and insulin pump with an app developed by the team, known as CamAPS HX. This app is run by an algorithm that predicts how much insulin is required to maintain glucose levels in the target range.

The researchers have previously shown that an artificial pancreas run by a similar algorithm is effective for patients living with type 1 diabetes, from adults through to very young children. They have also successfully trialled the device in patients with type 2 diabetes who require kidney dialysis.

Today, in Nature Medicine, the team report the first trial of the device in a wider population living with type 2 diabetes (not requiring kidney dialysis). Unlike the artificial pancreas used for type 1 diabetes, this new version is a fully closed loop system – whereas patients with type 1 diabetes need to tell their artificial pancreas that they are about to eat to allow adjustment of insulin, for example, with this version they can leave the device to function entirely automatically.

The researchers recruited 26 patients from the Wolfson Diabetes and Endocrine Clinic at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, part of Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, and a local group of GP surgeries. Patients were randomly allocated to one of two groups – the first group would trial the artificial pancreas for eight weeks and then switch to the standard therapy of multiple daily insulin injections; the second group would take this control therapy first and then switch to the artificial pancreas after eight weeks.

The team used several measures to assess how effectively the artificial pancreas worked. The first was the proportion of time that patients spent with their glucose levels within a target range of between 3.9 and 10.0mmol/L. On average, patients using the artificial pancreas spent two-thirds (66%) of their time within the target range – double that while on the control (32%).

A second measure was the proportion of time spent with glucose levels above 10.0mmol/L. Over time, high glucose levels raise the risk of potentially serious complications. Patients taking the control therapy spent two-thirds (67%) of their time with high glucose levels – this was halved to 33% when using the artificial pancreas.

Average glucose levels fell – from 12.6mmol/L when taking the control therapy to 9.2mmol/L while using the artificial pancreas.

The app also reduced levels of a molecule known as glycated haemoglobin, or HbA1c. Glycated haemoglobin develops when haemoglobin, a protein within red blood cells that carries oxygen throughout the body, joins with glucose in the blood, becoming ‘glycated’. By measuring HbA1c, clinicians are able to get an overall picture of what a person’s average blood sugar levels have been over a period of weeks or months. For people with diabetes, the higher the HbA1c, the greater the risk of developing diabetes-related complications. After the control therapy, average HbA1c levels were 8.7%, while after using the artificial pancreas they were 7.3%.

No patients experienced dangerously-low blood sugar levels (hypoglycaemia) during the study. One patient was admitted to hospital while using the artificial pancreas, due to an abscess at the site of the pump cannula.

Dr Charlotte Boughton from the Wellcome-MRC Institute of Metabolic Science at the University of Cambridge, who co-led the study, said: “Many people with type 2 diabetes struggle to manage their blood sugar levels using the currently available treatments, such as insulin injections. The artificial pancreas can provide a safe and effective approach to help them, and the technology is simple to use and can be implemented safely at home.”

Dr Aideen Daly, also from the Wellcome-MRC Institute of Metabolic Science, said: “One of the barriers to widespread use of insulin therapy has been concern over the risk of severe ‘hypos’ – dangerously low blood sugar levels. But we found that no patients on our trial experienced these and patients spent very little time with blood sugar levels lower than the target levels.”

Feedback from participants suggested that participants were happy to have their glucose levels controlled automatically by the system, and nine out of ten (89%) reported spending less time managing their diabetes overall. Users highlighted the elimination of the need for injections or fingerprick testing, and increased confidence in managing blood glucose as key benefits. Downsides included increased anxiety about the risk of hypoglycaemia, which the researchers say may reflect increased awareness and monitoring of glucose levels, and practical annoyances with wearing of devices.

The team now plan to carry out a much larger multicentre study to build on their findings and have submitted the device for regulatory approval with a view to making it commercially available for outpatients with type 2 diabetes.

The research was supported by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre.

Reference
Daly, AB, Boughton, CK, et al. Fully automated closed-loop insulin delivery in adults with type 2 diabetes: an open-label, single-centre randomised crossover trial. Nat Med; 11 Jan 2023; DOI: 10.1038/s41591-022-02144-z


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Solar-Powered System Converts Plastic and Greenhouse Gases Into Sustainable Fuels

Solar-powered reactor for converting plastic and greenhouse gases into sustainable fuels
source: www.cam.ac.uk

 

Researchers have developed a system that can transform plastic waste and greenhouse gases into sustainable fuels and other valuable products – using just the energy from the Sun.

 

A solar-driven technology that could help to address plastic pollution and greenhouse gases at the same time could be a game-changer in the development of a circular economy

Subhajit Bhattacharjee

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, developed the system, which can convert two waste streams into two chemical products at the same time – the first time this has been achieved in a solar-powered reactor.

The reactor converts carbon dioxide (CO2) and plastics into different products that are useful in a range of industries. In tests, CO2 was converted into syngas, a key building block for sustainable liquid fuels, and plastic bottles were converted into glycolic acid, which is widely used in the cosmetics industry. The system can easily be tuned to produce different products by changing the type of catalyst used in the reactor.

Converting plastics and greenhouse gases – two of the biggest threats facing the natural world – into useful and valuable products using solar energy is an important step in the transition to a more sustainable, circular economy. The results are reported in the journal Nature Synthesis.

“Converting waste into something useful using solar energy is a major goal of our research,” said Professor Erwin Reisner from the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, the paper’s senior author. “Plastic pollution is a huge problem worldwide, and often, many of the plastics we throw into recycling bins are incinerated or end up in landfill.”

Reisner also leads the Cambridge Circular Plastics Centre (CirPlas), which aims to eliminate plastic waste by combining blue-sky thinking with practical measures.

Other solar-powered ‘recycling’ technologies hold promise for addressing plastic pollution and for reducing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but to date, they have not been combined in a single process.

“A solar-driven technology that could help to address plastic pollution and greenhouse gases at the same time could be a game-changer in the development of a circular economy,” said Subhajit Bhattacharjee, the paper’s co-first author.

“We also need something that’s tuneable, so that you can easily make changes depending on the final product you want,” said co-first author Dr Motiar Rahaman.

The researchers developed an integrated reactor with two separate compartments: one for plastic, and one for greenhouse gases. The reactor uses a light absorber based on perovskite – a promising alternative to silicon for next-generation solar cells.

The team designed different catalysts, which were integrated into the light absorber. By changing the catalyst, the researchers could then change the end product. Tests of the reactor under normal temperature and pressure conditions showed that the reactor could efficiently convert PET plastic bottles and CO2 into different carbon-based fuels such as CO, syngas or formate, in addition to glycolic acid. The Cambridge-developed reactor produced these products at a rate that is also much higher than conventional photocatalytic CO2 reduction processes.

“Generally, CO2 conversion requires a lot of energy, but with our system, basically you just shine a light at it, and it starts converting harmful products into something useful and sustainable,” said Rahaman. “Prior to this system, we didn’t have anything that could make high-value products selectively and efficiently.”

“What’s so special about this system is the versatility and tuneability – we’re making fairly simple carbon-based molecules right now, but in future, we could be able to tune the system to make far more complex products, just by changing the catalyst,” said Bhattacharjee.

Reisner recently received new funding from the European Research Council to help the development of their solar-powered reactor. Over the next five years, they hope to further develop the reactor to produce more complex molecules. The researchers say that similar techniques could someday be used to develop an entirely solar-powered recycling plant.

“Developing a circular economy, where we make useful things from waste instead of throwing it into landfill, is vital if we’re going to meaningfully address the climate crisis and protect the natural world,” said Reisner. “And powering these solutions using the Sun means that we’re doing it cleanly and sustainably.”

The research was supported in part by the European Union, the European Research Council, the Cambridge Trust, Hermann and Marianne Straniak Stiftung, and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). Erwin Reisner is a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge.

Reference:
Subhajit Bhattacharjee, Motiar Rahaman et al. ‘Photoelectrochemical CO2-to-fuel conversion with simultaneous plastic reforming.’ Nature Synthesis (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s44160-022-00196-0


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Astronomers Use ‘Little Hurricanes’ To Weigh and Date Planets Around Young Stars

ALMA image of the protoplanetary disc around HL Tauri
source: www.cam.ac.uk

 

Little ‘hurricanes’ that form in the discs of gas and dust around young stars can be used to study certain aspects of planet formation, even for smaller planets which orbit their star at large distances and are out of reach for most telescopes.

 

It’s extremely difficult to study smaller planets that are far away from their star by directly imaging them: it would be like trying to spot a firefly in front of a lighthouse. We need other, different methods to learn about these planets

Roman Rafikov

Researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Institute for Advanced Study have developed a technique, which uses observations of these ‘hurricanes’ by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimetre Array (ALMA) to place some limits on the mass and age of planets in a young star system.

Pancake-like clouds of gases, dust and ice surrounding young stars – known as protoplanetary discs – are where the process of planet formation begins. Through a process known as core accretion, gravity causes particles in the disc to stick to each other, eventually forming larger solid bodies such as asteroids or planets. As young planets form, they start to carve gaps in the protoplanetary disc, like grooves on a vinyl record.

Even a relatively small planet – as small as one-tenth the mass of Jupiter according to some recent calculations – may be capable of creating such gaps. As these ‘super-Neptune’ planets can orbit their star at a distance greater than Pluto orbits the Sun, traditional methods of exoplanet detection cannot be used.

In addition to the grooves, observations from ALMA have shown other distinct structures in protoplanetary discs, such as banana- or peanut-shaped arcs and clumps. It had been thought that at least some of these structures were also driven by planets.

“Something must be causing these structures to form,” said lead author Professor Roman Rafikov from Cambridge’s Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. “One of the possible mechanisms for producing these structures – and certainly the most intriguing one – is that dust particles that we see as arcs and clumps are concentrated in the centres of fluid vortices: essentially little hurricanes that can be triggered by a particular instability at the edges of the gaps carved in protoplanetary discs by planets.”

Working with his PhD student Nicolas Cimerman, Rafikov used this interpretation to develop a method to constrain a planet’s mass or age if a vortex is observed in a protoplanetary disc. Their results have been accepted for publication in two separate papers in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

“It’s extremely difficult to study smaller planets that are far away from their star by directly imaging them: it would be like trying to spot a firefly in front of a lighthouse,” said Rafikov. “We need other, different methods to learn about these planets.”

To develop their method, the two researchers first theoretically calculated the length of time it would take for a vortex to be produced in the disc by a planet. They then used these calculations to constrain the properties of planets in discs with vortices, basically setting lower limits on the planet’s mass or age. They call these techniques ‘vortex weighing’ and ‘vortex dating’ of planets.

When a growing planet becomes massive enough, it starts pushing material from the disc away, creating the tell-tale gap in the disc. When this happens, material on the outside of the gap becomes denser than material on the inside of the gap. As the gap gets deeper and the differences in density become large, an instability can be triggered. This instability perturbs the disc and can eventually produce a vortex.

“Over time, multiple vortices can merge together, evolving into one big structure that looks like the arcs we’ve observed with ALMA,” said Cimerman. Since the vortices need time to form, the researchers say their method is like a clock that can help determine the mass and age of the planet.

“More massive planets produce vortices earlier in their development due to their stronger gravity, so we can use the vortices to place some constraints on the mass of the planet, even if we can’t see the planet directly,” said Rafikov.

Using various data points such as spectra, luminosity and motion, astronomers can determine the approximate age of a star. With this information, the Cambridge researchers calculated the lowest possible mass of a planet that could have been in orbit around the star since the protoplanetary disc formed and was able to produce a vortex that could be seen by ALMA. This helped them put a lower limit on the mass of the planet without observing it directly.

By applying this technique to several known protoplanetary discs with prominent arcs, suggestive of vortices, the researchers found that the putative planets creating these vortices must have masses of at least several tens of Earth masses, in the super-Neptune range.

“In my daily work, I often focus on the technical aspects of performing the simulations,” said Cimerman. “It’s exciting when things come together and we can use our theoretical findings to learn something about real systems.”

“Our constraints can be combined with the limits provided by other methods to improve our understanding of planetary characteristics and planet formation pathways in these systems,” said Rafikov. “By studying planet formation in other star systems, we may learn more about how our own Solar System evolved.”

The research was supported in part by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).

 

References:
Roman R. Rafikov and Nicolas P. Cimerman. ‘Vortex weighing and dating of planets in protoplanetary discs.’ Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2022). DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stac3692 or DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2301.01789

Nicolas P. Cimerman and Roman R. Rafikov. ‘Emergence of vortices at the edges of planet-driven gaps in protoplanetary discs.’ Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2022). DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stac3507


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First UK Proton Beam Therapy Trial For Breast Cancer Launches

An Asian woman in her 60s embraces her mid-30s daughter who is battling cancer - stock photo
source: www.cam.ac.uk

 

Cambridge researchers are jointly leading the first UK trial to test the benefits of proton beam therapy for certain patients with breast cancer.

 

Standard breast radiotherapy is really effective for most people with very few side effects, but there is a small group of patients for whom proton beam therapy may be a better option

Charlotte Coles

The trial will compare proton beam therapy – which can target radiotherapy beams more precisely – with standard radiotherapy for patients who are at greater risk of long-term heart problems after radiotherapy treatment. It will help to determine whether proton beam therapy can help to deliver adequate doses of radiotherapy to breast tissue, while minimising off-target radiation delivered to the heart.

The trial will enrol 192 people across a planned 22 sites in the UK. People allocated to receive proton beam therapy will be treated at either The Christie NHS Foundation Trust in Manchester or University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, with accommodation provided for those who are travelling far from home.

The PARABLE trial is being led by researchers at the University of Cambridge, Institute of Cancer Research, London, and the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust and managed by the Cancer Research UK-funded Clinical Trials and Statistics Unit at The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR). It is funded by a National Institute for Health and Care Research and Medical Research Council partnership. The NHS proton centres – UCLH and The Christie – also provided expert guidance on the trial protocol development.

Every year in the UK over 30,000 people with breast cancer receive radiotherapy following surgery as part of their treatment. Standard breast cancer radiotherapy uses high energy x-rays to kill cancer cells. As well as lowering the risk of cancer coming back, radiotherapy can increase survival rates.

Standard breast cancer radiotherapy is very effective for the vast majority of people and the benefits far outweigh small side effects. However, there can be a very small risk of radiotherapy leading to heart problems much later in life (less than one per cent of people treated). The risk of heart problems later in life due to breast radiotherapy maybe be higher than one per cent for a very small group of people. This is usually because their breast tissue and the lymph nodes which require radiotherapy treatment are located close to the heart, and/or because they have an increased underlying risk of developing heart problems later in life.

Professor Charlotte Coles, Professor of Breast Cancer Clinical Oncology at the University of Cambridge, Consultant Oncologist at Addenbrooke’s Hospital and Chief Investigator of the PARABLE trial, said: “Although only a very small group of people are affected by a higher risk of heart problems later in life, it can still be a serious issue. Most patients treated with radiotherapy have decades of healthy life ahead of them and we need to do everything we can to avoid possible future heart problems related to treatment.

“Standard breast radiotherapy is really effective for most people with very few side effects, but there is a small group of patients for whom proton beam therapy may be a better option.”

Proton beam therapy uses charged particles instead of X-rays to target tumours more precisely. Researchers hope it will allow doctors to deliver the required dose of radiotherapy where it’s needed, while minimising the dose of radiation delivered to the heart, and without increasing the risk of early side effects such as skin redness and changes in breast appearance.

The average radiotherapy dose that the heart is likely to receive from the radiotherapy planning scan can be estimated and together with age and other medical history, this information is used to predict the potential small lifetime risk of heart problems.

Professor Judith Bliss, Director of the Cancer Research UK-funded Clinical Trials and Statistics Unit at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, which is managing the PARABLE trial, said: “The PARABLE trial will measure average dose of radiotherapy delivered to the heart to predict long-term heart damage. Using this early predictor will allow us to uncover the potential benefits of using proton beam therapy for long term heart health in years rather than decades.”

People who are predicted to have at least a two per cent or more potential lifetime risk of heart problems from radiotherapy will be invited to take part.  Around 500 out of every 30,000 people who receive radiotherapy for breast cancer fall into this category. People who enter the trial will either receive standard radiotherapy or proton beam therapy.

The trial will measure radiation dose delivered to the heart as an early predictor of possible heart problems, to avoid the need for lengthy follow up for many years before results are available.

People in the trial will also record their experiences using questionnaires so that researchers can assess side-effects including skin reactions, breast pain and swelling, and other symptoms which are particularly important for patients.

Proton beam therapy has been used in other countries to treat breast cancer, but numbers of participants in these trials are small and there have been no reported trials that directly compare proton beam therapy with standard radiotherapy.

The researchers stress the importance of evaluating the benefits of proton beam therapy – which is expensive and only available in certain locations across the UK – thoroughly in a clinical trial.

Dr Anna Kirby, Consultant Clinical Oncologist at the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, Breast Cancer Radiotherapy Team Lead at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, and Radiotherapy Lead for the PARABLE trial, said: “We have already learnt a huge amount about how to optimise and standardise current breast cancer radiotherapy practices alongside optimising proton beam therapy approaches. We hope that the PARABLE trial will help us to further personalise radiotherapy treatments and ensure that people can access the radiotherapy approach that is best for them, regardless of where they live.

Adapted from a press release from The Institute of Cancer Research


Kim Jones: Patient story

Kim Jones, 44, a school caterer from Ely, was diagnosed with breast cancer in February 2022 after noticing some thickening of the skin and painful twinges in her left breast. Her GP referred her for urgent scans at the breast clinic, and after having mammograms, ultrasounds and biopsies, the diagnosis was confirmed.

Kim was then referred to Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, where she had chemotherapy followed by a mastectomy and lymph node removal. Following acceptance to the PARABLE trial, Kim’s proton beam therapy commenced at The Christie on 24 October.

Kim said: “I was told I might be suitable to participate in the PARABLE trial as it would potentially benefit patients with a high risk of long-term heart complications. As I already had an issue with my heart, the trial seemed like a great idea.

“When I was told that I’d been accepted onto the trial, I felt very lucky to have the opportunity to get this treatment. Clinical trials are incredibly important as they are the best way to evaluate which treatments work the best.”

“The proton beam therapy centre at The Christie is bright and spacious and feels very relaxing. My experience of being treated at The Christie so far has been superb. The staff are wonderful and seem to have thought of everything. Their care is second to none, and I feel completely safe in their hands.”

Following the proton beam therapy, Kim will have further chemotherapy and hormone therapy at Addenbrooke’s.

Kim is married to Mark, and they have two boys, Dylan, age 14, and Elwood, age 11. She enjoys walking, reading, live music and spending time with her family.


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Insulation Only Provides Short-Term Reduction In Household Gas Consumption

Insulation only provides short-term reduction in household gas consumption

Man installing loft insulation
source: www.cam.ac.uk

 

First study to look at long-term effect of home insulation in England and Wales finds fall in gas consumption per household was small and only lasts a few years.

 

We found that energy efficiency retrofits are often combined with home improvements that actually increase consumption, such as extensions

Cristina Penasco

Insulating the lofts and cavity walls of existing UK housing stock only reduces gas consumption for the first year or two, with all energy savings vanishing by the fourth year after a retrofit, according to research from policy experts at the University of Cambridge.

The latest study is the first to track in detail household gas use across England and Wales for at least five years both before and after insulation installation.

Researchers analysed gas consumption patterns of more than 55,000 dwellings over twelve years (2005-2017), and found that cavity wall insulation led to an average 7% drop in gas during the first year. This shrank to 2.7% in the second, and by the fourth year, any energy savings were negligible.

Loft insulation was half as effective as cavity wall, with an initial fall in gas consumption of around 4% on average, dropping to 1.8% after one year and becoming insignificant by the second year. For households with conservatories*, any gains in energy efficiency disappeared after the first year.

The findings suggests that when it comes to home insulation there may be a significant ‘rebound effect’: any savings through energy efficiency get cancelled out by a steady increase in energy use.**

The UK Treasury recently announced some £6 billion in funding to reduce the energy consumption of buildings and industry by 15% over the next eight years, with a major focus on insulation retrofits across the residential sector.

Researchers behind the study, published in the journal Energy Economics, say it is extremely difficult to identify specific causes of the ‘rebound effect’ they found, but behaviours such as turning up the heating, opening windows in stuffy rooms or building extensions may all contribute.

They argue that good insulation is vital, but any drive to insulate UK homes should be combined with investment in heat pump installation and campaigns to encourage behaviour change if 2030 targets for energy independence are to be met.

To capture the overall effect of insulating homes, the researchers accounted for various factors, including the age and size of buildings, the weather and gas prices.

However, they did find that gas price influenced energy use – so the soaring cost of gas may mean greater energy reductions from insulation now than during the study period. The research also found household gas consumption fluctuated less after both loft and cavity wall insulation.

“The recent spotlight on increasing the energy efficiency in UK buildings is both welcome and long overdue, and there are very real benefits to households from good insulation, not least in terms of health and comfort,” said study co-author Prof Laura Diaz Anadon, Director of the Cambridge Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance.

“However, home insulation alone is not a magic bullet. High gas prices will reduce the rebound effect in the short term, as homeowners have the need to keep costs down at the front of their minds. In the long term, simply funding more of the same insulation roll-out to meet the UK’s carbon reduction and energy security targets may not move the dial as much as is hoped.”

Anadon and her Cambridge co-author Dr Cristina Penasco say that insulating old and draughty housing across the UK is a vital step, but argue that not encouraging homeowners to “fully degasify heating” while going through the disruption of a retrofit is a missed opportunity.

Heat pumps, which extract warmth from outside to heat internal radiators, are highly efficient and negate the need for gas boilers. Recent research suggests the UK lags behind many other European countries on heat pump sales, and the UK Committee on Climate Change has also highlighted the need to speed up heat pump deployment.

“When trying to get middle income households to conduct energy renovations, as the government are currently doing, it makes sense to further encourage heat pump installation at the same time,” said Penasco, the study’s first author from Cambridge’s Department of Politics and International Studies.

“This could be through incentives such as more generous and focused grant schemes, as well as obligations for boiler manufacturers and additional investments in skills for installers.”

“We found that energy efficiency retrofits are often combined with home improvements that actually increase consumption, such as extensions.”*** Scotland currently offers grants and interest free loans for heat pumps, while the rest of the UK has reduced VAT in the form of a tax rebate.

Residential housing accounted for almost a third (29.5%) of the UK’s total energy consumption in 2020, according to the International Energy Agency. In the UK, 85% of households use gas as their main heating source.

The study used data collected by the UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change, and compared energy use in individual households before and after insulation, as well as comparing households that did have efficiency renovations with those that did not.

Researchers found that, compared to wealthier areas, households in more deprived areas had half the reductions in gas use: an average of 3% during the first and second year after insulation. Neighbourhoods where deprivation was highest had the lowest reduction in gas consumption.

“Households in more deprived areas often have to limit energy use, so any savings created by home insulation can quickly get redirected into keeping a house warmer for longer,” said Penasco

“This is a good outcome if policies are aimed at reducing fuel poverty in low-income households, but will not help with the UK’s emissions reductions targets or reliance on gas.” In fact, when it came to household income, those in the bottom 20% increased gas consumption straight after insulation.

“National caps on gas prices will not incentivise people to conserve energy,” said Penasco, who argues that energy reduction targets could be set for individual households, and associated with waivers on energy bills in the long run, particularly for low income households.

Added Anadon: “People do not deliberately squander energy savings. There is a need for education to lessen the rebound effect we have documented. Media appearances by ministers to discuss flow temperatures of boilers are positive signs that parts of the government are starting to think about this.”

 

*Conservatories are one of the most popular home improvements in the UK. Data from 2011 suggests that almost 20% of households in England had some form of conservatory, and 80% of those had some form of heating.

** The ‘rebound effect’ is a fundamental concept in economics, and was first identified by William Jevons in 1865, when he observed that more efficient steam engines increased rather than reduced coal use, as engines were put into more widespread use.  

*** Previous research suggests that extensions in the UK increase household energy consumption by 16% on average.   


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Cambridge Achievers Recognised In New Year Honours

Senate House
source: www.cam.ac.uk

 

A number of academics, staff and an undergraduate student at the University of Cambridge feature in this year’s New Year Honours List, the first of the reign of King Charles III.

 

It’s gratifying to see dedicated service acknowledged and rewarded in this way

Dr Anthony Freeling

Economist Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta receives an elevated knighthood. Sir Partha, the Frank Ramsey Professor Emeritus of Economics, is made a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire for services to economics and the natural environment.

Another economist, Dr Graham Gudgin, of the Centre for Business Research, is awarded a CBE for services to economic development in Northern Ireland. He said: “I am delighted to receive this honour in recognition of my time in Belfast running the Northern Ireland Economic Research Centre, as Special Advisor to First Minister, David Trimble, and working with Secretary of State, Owen Paterson, on tax reform for Northern Ireland. It was an honour to be able to use my experience as a member of the Cambridge Economic Policy Group to advance economic ideas and practice in Northern Ireland.”

Professor Krishna Chatterjee, Professor of Endocrinology at the Wellcome-MRC Institute of Metabolic Science, is also awarded a CBE for services to people with endocrine disorders. He said: “I am delighted that my contributions to endocrine disorders have been honoured in this way. This also represents the efforts of many scientists and clinical colleagues in Cambridge, and internationally, with whom I have worked over the years. Together with the patients participating in our research, we strive to advance knowledge and outcomes in rare hormone disorders.”

An MBE is awarded to Elizabeth Blane, a laboratory manager for services to pathogen genome sequencing, and Natural Sciences undergraduate, Dara McAnulty, receives the British Empire Medal for services to nature and the autistic community in his native Northern Ireland. At 18, Dara, a student at Queens’ College, is the youngest person to feature in this year’s list. His ‘Diary of a Young Naturalist’ won the 2020 Wainwright Prize for Nature Conservation.

The University’s Acting Vice-Chancellor, Dr Anthony Freeling, congratulated those being honoured: “How wonderful to see people so closely linked to the Collegiate University being recognised in the New Year Honours list. It’s gratifying to see dedicated service acknowledged and rewarded in this way. My warmest congratulations to those colleagues and friends of the University who have been honoured for their commitment and their achievements.”

 

 


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Men May Not ‘Perceive’ Domestic Tasks as Needing Doing In The Same Way As Women, Philosophers Argue

Men may not ‘perceive’ domestic tasks as needing doing in the same way as women, philosophers argue

Wiping down the countertop
source: www.cam.ac.uk

 

By adding a gender dimension to the theory of “affordance perception” and applying it to the home, a new hypothesis may help answer questions of why women still shoulder most housework, and why men never seem to notice.

 

Men should be encouraged to resist gendered norms by improving their sensitivity to domestic task affordances

Tom McClelland

Philosophers seeking to answer questions around inequality in household labour and the invisibility of women’s work in the home have proposed a new theory – that men and women are trained by society to see different possibilities for action in the same domestic environment.

They say a view called “affordance theory” – that we experience objects and situations as having actions implicitly attached – underwrites the age-old gender disparity when it comes to the myriad mundane tasks of daily home maintenance.

For example, women may look at a surface and see an implied action – ‘to be wiped’ – whereas men may just observe a crumb-covered countertop.

The philosophers believe these deep-seated gender divides in domestic perception can be altered through societal interventions such as extended paternal leave, which will encourage men to build up mental associations for household tasks.

Writing in the journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, they argue that available data – particularly data gathered during the pandemic – suggest two questions require explanation.

One is “disparity”: despite economic and cultural gains, why do women continue to shoulder the vast majority of housework and childcare? The other is “invisibility”: why do so many men believe domestic work to be more equally distributed than in fact it is?

“Many point to the performance of traditional gender roles, along with various economic factors such as women taking flexible work for childcare reasons,” said Dr Tom McClelland, from Cambridge University’s Department of History and Philosophy of Science.

“Yet the fact that stark inequalities in domestic tasks persisted during the pandemic, when most couples were trapped inside, and that many men continued to be oblivious of this imbalance, means this is not the full story.”

McClelland and co-author Prof Paulina Sliwa argue that unequal divisions of labour in the home – and the inability of men to identify said labour – is best explained through the psychological notion of “affordances”: the idea that we perceive things as inviting or “affording” particular actions.

“This is not just looking at the shape and size of a tree and then surmising you can climb it, but actually seeing a particular tree as climbable, or seeing a cup as drink-from-able,” said Sliwa, recently of Cambridge’s philosophy faculty and now at the University of Vienna.

“Neuroscience has shown that perceiving an affordance can trigger neural processes preparing you for physical action. This can range from a slight urge to overwhelming compulsion, but it often takes mental effort not to act on an affordance.”

There are dramatic differences in “affordance perception” between individuals. One person sees a tree as climbable where another does not. Objects offer a vast array of affordances – one could see a spatula as an egg-frying tool or a rhythmic instrument – and a spectrum of sensitivity towards them.

“If we apply affordance perception to the domestic environment and assume it is gendered, it goes a long way to answering both questions of disparity and invisibility,” said McClelland.

According to the philosophers, when a woman enters a kitchen she is more likely to perceive the “affordances” for particular domestic tasks – she sees the dishes as ‘to be washed’ or a fridge as ‘to be stocked’.

A man may simply observe dishes in a sink, or a half-empty fridge, but without perceiving the affordance or experiencing the corresponding mental “tug”. Over time, these little differences add up to significant disparities in who does what.

“Affordances pull on your attention,” said Sliwa. “Tasks may irritate the perceiver until done, or distract them from other plans. If resisted, it can create a felt tension.”

“This puts women in a catch-22 situation: either inequality of labour or inequality of cognitive load.”

This gender-based split in affordance perception could have a number of root causes, say philosophers. Social cues encourage actions in certain environments, often given by adults when we are very young children. Our visual systems update based on what we encounter most frequently.

“Social norms shape the affordances we perceive, so it would be surprising if gender norms do not do the same,” said McClelland.

“Some skills are explicitly gendered, such cleaning or grooming, and girls are expected to do more domestic chores than boys. This trains their ways of seeing the domestic environment, to see a counter as ‘to be wiped’.”

The “gendered affordance perception hypothesis” is not about absolving men say Sliwa and McClelland. Despite a deficit in affordance perception in the home, a man can easily notice what needs doing by thinking rather than seeing. Nor should sensitivity to domestic affordances in women be equated with natural affinity for housework.

“We can change how we perceive the world through continued conscious effort and habit cultivation,” said McClelland. “Men should be encouraged to resist gendered norms by improving their sensitivity to domestic task affordances.”

“A man might adopt a resolution to sweep for crumbs every time he waits for the kettle to boil, for example. Not only would this help them to do the tasks they don’t see, it would gradually retrain their perception so they start to see the affordance in the future.”

Collective efforts to change social norms require policy-level interventions, argue the philosophers. For example, shared parental leave gives fathers the opportunity to become more sensitive to caring-task affordances.

Added Sliwa: “Our focus has been on physical actions such as sweeping or wiping, but gendered affordance perceptions could also apply to mental actions such as scheduling and remembering.”


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UK-Led Robotic Sky Scanner Reveals its First Galactic Fingerprint

Blue, green and red colours, according to velocities derived from the WEAVE spectra, are overlaid on a composite image of Stephan’s Quintet, which features galaxy star light (CFH telescope), and X-ray emission of hot gas (blue vertical band, Chandra X-ray observatory).
source: www.cam.ac.uk

 

A major telescope upgrade has peered through to the distant Universe to reveal the spectra of a pair of galaxies 280 million light years away from Earth.

 

Without even breaking a sweat, WEAVE has provided us with an unprecedented glimpse into the dance of this enigmatic group of galaxies

David Murphy

The spectra provide a first glimpse of the sky from the WHT Enhanced Area Velocity Explorer (WEAVE) – a unique upgrade to the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) in La Palma on the Canary Islands.

After its integration into the WHT last year, WEAVE has now begun its on-sky commissioning phase, ready to reveal more than 12 million spectra of stars and galaxies over the next five years.

The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) is one of the key partners in the operation of the WHT. Data processing, analysis and archiving for WEAVE is led by astronomers from the University of Cambridge, with support from the IAC in Spain and INAF in Italy.

Understanding the Universe through spectra

Spectroscopy is an essential element in an astronomer’s toolbox. Analysing light detected with a telescope reveals useful scientific information, such as the speed of the object observed, the atoms it is made of and its temperature.

If an image tells us what an astronomical object looks like, its spectrum tells us what it is.

First galactic spectra with WEAVE

A galactic spectrum is the combination of spectra from the millions of stars in an observed galaxy. Studying the features of a galaxy spectrum allows astronomers to understand what types of stars the galaxy contains, and the relative abundances of each type of star. This tells us about how the galaxy formed and changed over time.

First-light observations with WEAVE were carried out with the large integral-field unit (LIFU) fibre bundle, one of WEAVE’s three fibre systems. The team observed the heart of the galaxy group Stephan’s Quintet, a group of five interacting galaxies.

The instrument was aimed at NGC 7318a and NGC 7318b, a pair of galaxies at the centre of a major galaxy collision 280 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus.

“The wealth of complexity revealed in this way by a single detailed observation of this pair of nearby galaxies provides insights into the interpretation of the many millions of spectra that WEAVE will obtain from galaxies in the distant Universe and provides an excellent illustration of the power and flexibility of the WEAVE facility,” said Professor Gavin Dalton from the University of Oxford.

The WEAVE LIFU (large integral-field unit) measures separate spectra for 547 different regions in and around the two galaxies, recording the colours of their light from the ultraviolet to the near-infrared.

These spectra reveal the motions of stars and gas, the chemical composition of the stars, the temperatures and densities of the gas clouds, and more. This data will help astronomers learn how galaxy collisions transform the galaxies in the group.

“Without even breaking a sweat, WEAVE has provided us with an unprecedented glimpse into the dance of this enigmatic group of galaxies,” said Dr David Murphy from Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, lead of spectroscopic pipeline development for WEAVE. “This exciting initial release provides a snapshot of the various ways the instrument can provide insights into the universe. Coupled with our rapid-response data-processing pipelines, WEAVE will advance cutting-edge research ranging from the complex chemical fingerprint of our galactic neighbourhood to the very structure and fabric of our universe.”

“Our advanced analysis pipeline consists of a chain of more than 20 state-of-art modules developed to analyse a wide range of astronomical targets, from newly born hot stars to quasars,” said Dr Alireza Molaeinezhad from Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, Lead developer of the Advanced Processing System. “Using this pipeline on the phenomenal first-light data is like wearing 3D-glasses to watch the cosmic dance of galaxies in this system.”

Eight surveys using WEAVE

In the coming five years, the ING (Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes) will assign 70% of the time available on the WHT to eight major surveys with WEAVE, selected out of those proposed by the astronomical communities of the partner countries. All these surveys require spectra of up to millions of individual stars and galaxies, a goal now obtainable thanks to WEAVE’s ability to observe almost 1000 objects at a time.

Over 500 astronomers from across Europe have organized these eight surveys, covering studies of stellar evolution, Milky Way science, galaxy evolution and cosmology. WEAVE will study galaxies near and far to learn the history of their growth, and will obtain millions of spectra of stars in the Milky Way.

“This first light event is a milestone for both the international and UK astronomy communities: WEAVE will provide spectra of millions of stars and galaxies over the next five years,” said Professor Mark Thomson, STFC Executive Chair. “After ten years in development, WEAVE will now finally offer astronomers a new eye to the sky to help them answer questions such as what is dark matter and how did stars form in distant galaxies?”

“These wonderful first light images demonstrate the power of WEAVE to unravel the intricate chemo-dynamical processes at work in this galaxy system,” said Dr Nicholas Walton from the Institute of Astronomy and lead of the WEAVE data analysis system development team. “The analysis of this data, from one of the many observational modes of WEAVE, has used our state-of-the-art science pipelines. We are now ready to handle the nightly data from WEAVE as it embarks on its main science surveys.”

The Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes (ING) is operated on behalf of the STFC in the UK, the Nederlanse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO) in The Netherlands, and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in Spain.

Adapted from an STFC press release.


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Prostate Cancer Risk Prediction Algorithm Could Help Target Testing at Men At Greatest Risk

Middle aged couple
source: www.cam.ac.uk

 

Cambridge scientists have created a comprehensive tool for predicting an individual’s risk of developing prostate cancer, which they say could help ensure that those men at greatest risk will receive the appropriate testing while reducing unnecessary – and potentially invasive – testing for those at very low risk.

 

What we need is a way of identifying those men who are at greatest risk, allowing us to target screening and diagnostic tests where they are most needed, while also reducing the harms for those men who have low risk of the disease. This is what CanRisk-Prostate aims to do

Antonis Antoniou

CanRisk-Prostate, developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge and The Institute of Cancer Research, London, will be incorporated into the group’s CanRisk web tool, which has now recorded almost 1.2 million risk predictions. The free tool is already used by healthcare professionals worldwide to help predict the risk of developing breast and ovarian cancers.

Prostate cancer is the most common type of cancer in men. According to Cancer Research UK, over 52,000 men are diagnosed with the disease each year and there are more than 12,000 deaths. Over three-quarters (78%) of men diagnosed with prostate cancer survive for over ten years, but this proportion has barely changed over the past decade in the UK.

Testing for prostate cancer involves a blood test that looks for a protein known as a prostate-specific antigen (PSA) that is made only by the prostate gland; however, it is not always accurate. According to the NHS website, around three in four men with a raised PSA level will not have cancer. Further tests, such as tissue biopsies or MRI scans, are therefore required to confirm a diagnosis.

Professor Antonis Antoniou from the Department of Public Health and Primary Care at the University of Cambridge said: “Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men in the UK, but population-wide screening based on PSA isn’t an option: these tests are often falsely positive, which means that many men would then be biopsied unnecessarily. Also, many prostate tumours identified by PSA tests are slow-growing and would not have been life-threatening. The treatment of these tumours may do more harm than good.

“What we need is a way of identifying those men who are at greatest risk, allowing us to target screening and diagnostic tests where they are most needed, while also reducing the harms for those men who have low risk of the disease. This is what CanRisk-Prostate aims to do. For the first time, it combines information on the genetic makeup and prostate cancer family history, the main risk factors for the disease, to provide personalised cancer risks.”

Prostate cancer is one of the most genetically determined of common cancers. Inherited faulty versions of the BRCA2, HOXB13 and possibly BRCA1 genes are associated with moderate-to-high risk of prostate cancer, though such faults are rare in the population. In addition, there are several hundred more common genetic variants that each confer a lower risk, but in aggregate they act like ‘volume control’ that moderate or increase the prostate cancer risk.

Writing in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, the researchers – supported by Cancer Research UK – describe the development of the first comprehensive prostate cancer model using genetic and cancer family history data from almost 17,000 families affected by prostate cancer. It uses data on rare genetic faults in moderate-to-high-risk genes and a risk score based on 268 common low-risk variants, together with detailed cancer family history, to predict the future risks.

One in six men (16%) will develop prostate cancer by the time they are 85 years old. Using the model, the team found that the predicted risk was higher for men who had a father diagnosed with prostate cancer – 27% if the father was diagnosed at an older age (80 years) but as high as 42% if the father was diagnosed at a young age (50 years).

The risks were considerably higher for men with genetic faults. For example, 54% of men who carry an alteration in the BRCA2 gene would develop prostate cancer – however, among men with BRCA2 gene faults, the risks were substantially lower if they also had a small number of the low-risk variants, but much higher if they also had a large number of the low-risk variants.

In practice, say the researchers, clinicians will be able to use any combination of cancer family history, rare and common genetic variants to provide a personalised risk.

To validate their model, the team ran the risk model on an independent cohort of over 170,000 men recruited to UK Biobank, a biomedical database and research resource containing anonymised genetic, lifestyle and health information from half a million UK participants. All of these men were free from prostate cancer when they were recruited to the study, but more than 7,600 developed prostate cancer within the subsequent ten years.

When validating their model, the researchers found that 86% of the UK Biobank participants who developed cancer were in the half of men with the highest predicted risks, which suggests that it may be possible to target screening and diagnostic tests to the subgroup of the population at highest risk, among whom the majority of the cancers will occur.

Dr Tommy Nyberg from the MRC Biostatistics Unit at Cambridge said: “We’ve created the most comprehensive tool to date for predicting a man’s risk of developing prostate cancer. We hope this will help clinicians and genetic counsellors assess their clients’ risk and provide the appropriate follow-up.

“Over the next 12 months, we aim to build this tool into the widely used CanRisk tool, which will facilitate the risk-based clinical management of men seen in family cancer clinics and enable risk-adapted early detection approaches to the population at large.”

Professor Ros Eeles from The Institute of Cancer Research, London and co-author on the study said: “This is an important step forward as it will enable clinicians to have conversations with men about their individual risk of prostate cancer based on the most accurate computer model to date. This will help them in making decisions about screening.”

So far, the data used to develop CanRisk-Prostate has been from men of European ancestry. The team hope to be able to include data from men of other ethnicities as further research is undertaken.

The University of Cambridge recently launched the Early Cancer Institute with the aim of detecting cancer early enough to cure it. It is the first physical institute in the UK dedicated to early cancer. A new Cambridge Cancer Research Hospital is also planned for the near future, bringing together clinical and research expertise in a new, world-class hospital, designed in partnership with patients.

There is also an Early Detection and Diagnosis centre at The Institute of Cancer Research and The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust where a prostate risk clinic has been established to translate these findings into targeted screening programmes.

The research was supported by the Cancer Research UK-funded CanRisk programme. Additional support for CanRisk-Prostate was provided by Prostate Cancer UK, The Institute of Cancer Research, Everyman Campaign, National Cancer Research Network UK, National Cancer Research Institute, NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre and the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre at The Institute of Cancer Research and The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust.

Reference
Nyberg, T et al. CanRisk-Prostate: a comprehensive, externally validated risk model for the prediction of future prostate cancer. Journal of Clinical Oncology; 9 Dec 2022; DOI: 10.1200/JCO.22.01453


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COP15: UN and Cambridge Sign Agreement to Bolster Conservation

source: www.cam.ac.uk

 

The UN Convention on Biological Diversity secretariat and the University of Cambridge signed a Memorandum of Understanding on day two of COP15, which recognises that the CCI Masters in Conservation Leadership course hosted by the Department of Geography plays a crucial role in conservation capacity building.

 

Since 2010 the Cambridge Masters in Conservation Leadership has been building the capacity of outstanding future conservation leaders from around the world

Chris Sandbrook, Director of the Masters in Conservation Leadership and CCI Council member

The agreement has been made in recognition of the impact and alignment of the novel Masters course with the goals of the CBD Capacity Development framework and ultimately the importance of education and capacity building in the fight to protect the natural world and the biodiversity within it.

The MoU agreement signed yesterday paves the way for shared initiatives to accelerate building the capacity of national biodiversity experts and conservation leaders, crucial for the delivery of the post-2020 global biodiversity framework. Additionally, it will enable a series of knowledge exchange activities to support effective implementation of the framework.

Established in 2010, the Masters in Conservation Leadership is a ground-breaking course that equips students with the applied leadership and management skills needed to create positive change in conservation. A unique feature of the course is its delivery by a collaboration between the University of Cambridge and the leading conservation organisations, which together comprise the Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI).

Another notable feature of the course is the development of an active global conservation leadership alumni network (UCCLAN), now totalling over 220 alumni in 89 countries around the world. The alumni network has ‘observer status’ at the conference and has already been influential in the wider negotiations.

“Since 2010 the Cambridge Masters in Conservation Leadership has been building the capacity of outstanding future conservation leaders from around the world. Our alumni have the skills, networks and wisdom needed to support delivery of the Convention on Biological Diversity framework being agreed at COP 15,” said Chris Sandbrook, Director of the Masters in Conservation Leadership and CCI Council member. “The MoU we are signing today with the Secretariat of the Convention will enable us to work closely together towards our shared objectives for capacity development. It is a proud moment for me and everyone involved in the Masters.”

The Masters in Conservation Leadership team have been working towards this agreement for several years and are delighted to now finalise the agreement, enabling a cohesive approach to building the leadership capacity needed to create a diverse world in which nature and society thrive.


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Webb Telescope Reaches New Milestone In Its Search For Distant Galaxies

This image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope highlights the region of study by the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES).
source: www.cam.ac.uk

 

New findings confirm that JWST has surpassed the Hubble telescope in its ability to observe the early Universe

 

So many questions about galaxies have been waiting for the transformative opportunity of Webb, and we’re thrilled to be able to play a part in revealing this story

Sandro Tacchella

An international team of astronomers, including scientists at the Universities of Cambridge, Hertfordshire and Oxford, has reported the discovery of the earliest galaxies ever confirmed in our Universe.

Using data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scientists have confirmed observations of galaxies dating back to the earliest days of the Universe, less than 350 million years after the Big Bang – when the Universe was just 2% of its current age.

Images from JWST had previously suggested possible candidates for such early galaxies. Now, their age has been confirmed using long spectroscopic observations, which measure light to determine the speed and composition of objects in space.

These observations have revealed distinctive patterns in the tiny amount of light coming from these incredibly faint galaxies, allowing scientists to establish that the light they are emitting has taken 13.4 billion years to reach us, and corroborating their status as some of the earliest galaxies ever observed.

Scientists can also now confirm that two of these galaxies are further away than any observations made by the Hubble telescope – underlining JWST’s incredible power and ability to detect never-before-seen parts of the earliest Universe.

“It was crucial to prove that these galaxies do indeed inhabit the early Universe, as it’s very possible for closer galaxies to masquerade as very distant galaxies,” said Dr Emma Curtis-Lake from the University of Hertfordshire, lead author on one of two papers on the findings. “Seeing the spectrum revealed as we hoped, confirming these galaxies as being at the true edge of our view, some further away than Hubble could see – it is a tremendously exciting achievement for the mission!”

The findings have been achieved by an international collaboration of more than 80 astronomers from ten countries via the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) programme. The team were allocated just over a month of observation on the telescope, using the two on-board instruments: the Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) and the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). These instruments were developed with the primary purpose of investigating the earliest and faintest galaxies.

“It is hard to understand galaxies without understanding the initial periods of their development,” said Dr Sandro Tacchella from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory and Kavli Institute for Cosmology, co-lead author on the second paper. “Much as with humans, so much of what happens later depends on the impact of these early generations of stars. So many questions about galaxies have been waiting for the transformative opportunity of Webb, and we’re thrilled to be able to play a part in revealing this story.”

“For the first time, we have discovered galaxies only 350 million years after the big bang, and we can be absolutely confident of their fantastic distances,” said Brant Robertson from the University of California Santa Cruz, co-lead author on the second paper. “To find these early galaxies in such stunningly beautiful images is a special experience.”

Across 10 days of their observation time, the JADES team of astronomers focused on a small patch of sky in and around Hubble Space Telescope’s Ultra Deep Field, which for over 20 years has been a favourite of astronomers and has been analysed at the limit of nearly every large telescope to have existed. However, with JWST, the team were able to observe in nine different infrared wavelength ranges, providing an exquisitely sharp and sensitive picture of the field. The image reveals nearly 100,000 galaxies, each billions of light years away, in a pinprick of the sky equivalent to looking at a mobile phone screen across a football field.

The very earliest galaxies were identifiable by their distinctive banded colours, visible in infrared light but invisible in other wavelengths. In one rare continuous 28-hour observation window, the Near-Infrared Spectrograph was used to spread out the light emitting from each galaxy into a rainbow spectrum. This allowed astronomers to measure the amount of light received at each wavelength and study the unique light patterns created by the properties of the gas and stars within each galaxy.

Crucially, four of the galaxies were revealed to originate earlier in the Universe than any previous observations.

“Our observations suggest that the formation of the first stars and galaxies started very early in the history of the Universe,” said Professor Andrew Bunker from the University of Oxford.

“This is a major leap forward in our understanding of how the first galaxies formed,” said Professor Roberto Maiolino from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory and Kavli Institute for Cosmology, co-author on one of the two papers. “We have been able to dissect the light coming from these galaxies in the very early universe and, for the first time, characterise in detail their properties. It’s really fascinating and intriguing to discover how young these systems were and that stellar processes hadn’t yet managed to pollute these galaxies with chemical elements heavier than helium.”

Astronomers in the JADES team now plan to focus on another area of the sky to conduct further spectroscopy and imaging, hoping to reveal more about the earliest origins of our Universe and how these first galaxies evolve with cosmic time.

More information about the findings can be found in a newly-published NASA blog. Pre-prints of the team’s two papers, which have not yet been peer-reviewed, are available online.

The James Webb Space Telescope is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency). Sandro Tacchella is a Fellow of St Edmund’s College, Cambridge.

Adapted from a University of Hertfordshire media release.


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New Initiative to Promote Innovation in the Greater Cambridge Area

Tabitha Goldstaub, Innovate Cambridge’s Executive Director
source: www.cam.ac.uk

100 organisations, including AstraZeneca, Microsoft and Arm, have signed up to a new charter to boost the Cambridge innovation ecosystem and help it address global challenges, announced Innovate Cambridge today (8 December 2022).

 

The charter is a really exciting next step in the development of the Cambridge innovation ecosystem, bringing together key organisations and people to help shape the future of Greater Cambridge and ensure that together we continue to contribute to society.

Andy Neely, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Enterprise and Business Relations

Innovate Cambridge is an initiative to create an inclusive vision for the future of Cambridge and its innovation ecosystem. The initiative was launched in September 2022 by the University of Cambridge, Cambridge Enterprise and Cambridge Innovation Capital. Organisations that have signed up to its charter include local government, start-ups, universities, science parks and investors. As well as announcing its first 100 signatories, Innovate Cambridge has also appointed an Executive Director and established a steering committee.

Tabitha Goldstaub, co-founder of festival and online platform CogX and a UK government advisor, has been appointed Innovate Cambridge’s Executive Director and the Rt Hon. Lord Willetts as Chair of its Steering Committee. Other members of the Steering Committee include Professor Andy Neely, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Enterprise and Business Relations at the University of Cambridge, Professor Yvonne Barnett, Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation for Anglia Ruskin University, Shaun Grady, AstraZeneca’s Senior Vice-President Business Development Operations and Robert Pollock, Chief Executive of Cambridge City Council.

Cambridge has been a global leader in innovation for decades, with its two universities, thriving start-up community, global businesses and strong investment network. But, “standing still is not an option,” said Diarmuid O’Brien, CEO of Cambridge Enterprise: “Many cities and regions across the world are rapidly getting organised to secure their futures. We must learn from and build on their experiences.”

The next step, according to Michael Anstey, Partner at Cambridge Innovation Capital, is for the signatories to the Charter, “to come together to define, and then implement, an inclusive, forward-looking vision for the ecosystem, which ensures the City continues to innovate, compete, and deliver impact on a global scale well into the future.”

Professor Andy Neely, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Enterprise and Business Relations at the University of Cambridge, said: “Cambridge has made a difference to the lives of millions of people around the world. A constant source of new ideas and innovations, the Cambridge innovation ecosystem spawns new ideas, technologies and insights that change the way we live and learn. The charter is a really exciting next step in the development of the Cambridge innovation ecosystem, bringing together key organisations and people to help shape the future of Greater Cambridge and ensure that together we continue to contribute to society.”

Read about some of the Cambridge start-ups that are having an impact in the UK and around the world here.


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Cambridge Signs UN Pledge on Reversing Biodiversity Decline at COP15

source: www.cam.ac.uk

 

The University of Cambridge has signed a nature positive pledge as a founding member of the global Nature Positive Universities network formed in conjunction with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

 

Rebuilding nature is a vital foundation for institutional sustainability and an equitable society

Mike Maunder, Executive Director of Cambridge Conservation Initiative

The Nature Positive Universities Alliance launches at the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15) in Montreal, Canada on Thursday 8 December with 111 universities from 44 countries, who have made individual pledges to start a journey towards becoming nature positive.

The pledge strongly aligns with Cambridge’s Biodiversity Action Plan (BAP) agreed by Council in July 2020. The commitment is to start a Nature Positive journey by determining baselines and setting targets.

“Universities are crucibles where learning and research creates futures. Rebuilding nature is a vital foundation for institutional sustainability and an equitable society. The University of Cambridge by signing up to the Nature Positive University Pledge is amplifying the ambitions of the University’s Biodiversity Action Plan and paving the way for a nature positive university where nature is regenerated to the benefit of students, academics and the city as a whole. The Ecological Advisory Panel and Cambridge Conservation Initiative look forward to delivering this pledge in collaboration with other key players in the University,” Mike Maunder, Chair of the University’s Ecological Advisory Panel and Executive Director of the world-leading Cambridge Conservation Initiative said.

University pledges include four key elements:

  • Carrying out baseline biodiversity assessments
  • Setting specific, time limited and measurable targets for nature
  • Taking bold action to reduce biodiversity impacts, protect and restore species and ecosystems, while influencing others to do the same
  • Transparent annual reporting.

“I am delighted that the University of Cambridge is joining the Nature Positive University Network. Universities make a significant positive contribution to society, but it is vital that we do everything we can to mitigate the harmful unintended impacts that our activities can have on nature. Joining the Nature Positive University Network will inspire us to be more ambitious, enable us to learn from others and hold us to account,” said Professor Chris Sandbrook, Professor of Conservation and Society, Director of the Masters in Conservation Leadership.

The Nature Positive Universities Alliance is a partnership between University of Oxford, UNEP Youth & Education and the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, which brings higher education institutions together to use their unique power and influence as drivers of positive change.

It is a global network of universities that have made an official pledge to work towards a global Nature Positive goal in order to halt, prevent and reverse nature loss through addressing their own impacts and restoring ecosystems harmed by their activities. This push is part of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, a movement to avert climate catastrophe and mass extinction.

All the founding universities announced today have pledged to assess their impacts to determine the most impactful initiatives to introduce, and to report on their progress.


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Pedestrians Choose Healthy Obstacles Over Boring Pavements, Study Finds

Collage imagining a challenging 'Active Urbanism' route applied to Sermon Lane in London
source: www.cam.ac.uk

 

Up to 78% of walkers would take a more challenging route featuring obstacles such as balancing beams, steppingstones and high steps, research has found. The findings suggest that providing ‘Active Landscape’ routes in urban areas could help tackle an “inactivity pandemic” and improve health outcomes.

 

Pedestrians can be nudged into a wider range of physical activities through minor changes to the urban landscape

Anna Boldina

Millions of people in the UK are failing to meet recommended targets for physical activity. Exercising “on the go” is key to changing this but while walking along a pavement is better than nothing it causes no significant increase in heart rate so only qualifies as mild exercise. Walking also fails to significantly improve balance or bone density, unless it includes jumping, balancing, and stepping down.

But would adults opt for such ‘fun’ routes if given the choice? A University of Cambridge-led study published today in the journal Landscape Research suggests that with the right design, most would.

Previous research on ‘healthy route choices’ has focused on people’s likelihood of walking instead of using transport. But this study examined how likely people are to pick a more challenging route over a conventional one and which design characteristics influenced their choices.

Lead author, Anna Boldina, from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Architecture, said: “Even when the increase in level and extent of activity level is modest, when millions of people are using cityscapes every day, those differences can have a major positive impact on public health.”

“Our findings show that pedestrians can be nudged into a wider range of physical activities through minor changes to the urban landscape. We want to help policy makers and designers to make modifications that will improve physical health and wellbeing.”

Boldina began this research after moving from Coimbra in Portugal – where she found herself climbing hills and ancient walls – to London, which she found far less physically challenging.

Working with Dr Paul Hanel from the Department of Psychology at the University of Essex, and Prof. Koen Steemers from Cambridge, Boldina invited almost 600 UK residents to compare photorealistic images of challenging routes – variously incorporating steppingstones, balancing beams, and high steps – with conventional pavements.

Participants were shown images of challenging and conventional tarmac routes and asked which route they would choose. The researchers tested out a range of encouraging / discouraging parameters in different scenarios, including crossing water, shortcuts, unusual sculptures and the presence / absence of a handrail and other people. Participants were asked to score how challenging they thought the route would be from 1 (as easy as walking on level tarmac) to 7 (I would not be able to do it).

Eighty per cent of the study’s participants opted for a challenging route in at least one of the scenarios, depending on perceived level of difficulty and design characteristics. Where a challenging option was shorter than a conventional route, this increased the likelihood of being chosen by 10%. The presence of handrails achieved a 12% rise.

Importance for health

The WHO and NHS recommend at least 150 minutes of ‘moderate’ or 75 minutes of ‘vigorous’ activity spread over a week, including a variety of activities aimed at enhancing bones, muscles, and agility to stay healthy. In addition, adults over 65 are advised to perform strength, flexibility, and balance exercises.

Boldina said: “The human body is a very complex machine that needs a lot of things to keep working effectively. Cycling and swimming are great for your heart and for your leg muscles but do very little for your bone density.”

“To improve cardiovascular health, bone density and balance all at once, we need to add a wider range of exercises into our routine daily walks.”

Psychology of choice

Co-author Dr Paul Hanel said: “Children don’t need much encouragement to try out a balance beam but we wanted to see how adults would respond, and then identify design modifications which made them more likely to choose a challenging route.”

“We found that while embarrassment, anxiety, caution and peer pressure can put some adults off, the vast majority of people can be persuaded to take a more challenging route by paying careful attention to design, safety, difficulty level, location and signage.”

The proportion of participants who were willing to pick a more challenging route varied from 14% for a particular balance beam route to 78% for a route involving wide, low stepping stones and a log with a handrail. The least intimidating routes were found to be those with wide, steady-looking balancing beams and wide steppingstones, especially with the presence of handrails.

The researchers suggest that routes that incorporate more difficult challenges, such as obstacle courses and narrow balancing beams, should be placed in areas more likely to be frequented by younger users.

The participants expressed a range of reasons for picking challenging routes. Unsurprisingly, the study found that challenging routes which also acted as short cuts appealed. Up to 55% of participants chose such routes. The researchers also found that the design of pavements, lighting and flowerbeds, as well as signage helped to nudge participants to choose more challenging routes. Many participants (40%) said the sight of other people taking a challenging route encouraged them to do the same.

The participants who picked conventional routes often had concerns about safety but the introduction of safety measures, such as handrails, increased uptake of some routes. Handrails next to one steppingstones route increased uptake by 12%.

To test whether tendency to choose challenging routes was linked to demographic and personality factors, participants were asked to answer questions about their age, gender, habits, health, occupation, and personality traits (such as sensation seeking or general anxiety).

The researchers found that people of all levels of activity are equally likely to pick a challenging route. But for the most difficult routes, participants who regularly engaged in strength and balancing exercises were more likely to choose them.

Older participants were as supportive of the concept as younger ones but were less likely to opt for the more challenging routes for themselves. Nevertheless, across all age groups, only a small percentage of participants said they would avoid adventurous options completely.

The study applies the idea of “Choice Architecture” (making good choices easier and less beneficial choices harder) plus “Fun theory”, a strategy whereby physical activity is made more exciting; as well as some of the key principles of persuasion: social proof, liking, authority, and consistency.

Future work

The researchers hope to run experiments in physical test sites to see how intentions convert into behaviour, and to measure how changes in habits improve health. In the meantime, Boldina continues to present her findings to policy makers.

Critics might question the affordability and cost effectiveness of introducing ‘Active landscape routes’ in the current economic environment.

In response, the researchers argue that installing stepping stones in a turfed area can be cheaper than laying and maintaining conventional tarmac pavements. They also point out that these measures could save governments far greater sums by reducing demand for health care related to lack of exercise.

 

Reference

A. Boldina et al., ‘Active Landscape and Choice Architecture: Encouraging the use of challenging city routes for fitness’, Landscape Research (2022). DOI: 10.1080/01426397.2022.2142204


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Fitness Levels Accurately Predicted Using Wearable Devices – No Exercise Required

Woman checking her smart watch and mobile phone after run
source: www.cam.ac.uk

 

Cambridge researchers have developed a method for measuring overall fitness accurately on wearable devices – and more robustly than current consumer smartwatches and fitness monitors – without the wearer needing to exercise.

 

You don’t need an expensive test in a lab to get a real measurement of fitness – the wearables we use every day can be just as powerful, if they have the right algorithm behind them

Cecilia Mascolo

Normally, tests to accurately measure VO2max – a key measurement of overall fitness and an important predictor of heart disease and mortality risk – require expensive laboratory equipment and are mostly limited to elite athletes. The new method uses machine learning to predict VO2max – the capacity of the body to carry out aerobic work – during everyday activity, without the need for contextual information such as GPS measurements.

In what is by far the largest study of its kind, the researchers gathered activity data from more than 11,000 participants in the Fenland Study using wearable sensors, with a subset of participants tested again seven years later. The researchers used the data to develop a model to predict VO2max, which was then validated against a third group that carried out a standard lab-based exercise test. The model showed a high degree of accuracy compared to lab-based tests, and outperforms other approaches.

Some smartwatches and fitness monitors currently on the market claim to provide an estimate of VO2max, but since the algorithms powering these predictions aren’t published and are subject to change at any time, it’s unclear whether the predictions are accurate, or whether an exercise regime is having any effect on an individual’s VO2max over time.

The Cambridge-developed model is robust, transparent and provides accurate predictions based on heart rate and accelerometer data only. Since the model can also detect fitness changes over time, it could also be useful in estimating fitness levels for entire populations and identifying the effects of lifestyle trends. The results are reported in the journal npj Digital Medicine.

A measurement of VO2max is considered the ‘gold standard’ of fitness tests. Professional athletes, for example, test their VO2max by measuring their oxygen consumption while they exercise to the point of exhaustion. There are other ways of measuring fitness in the laboratory, like heart rate response to exercise tests, but these require equipment like a treadmill or exercise bike. Additionally, strenuous exercise can be a risk to some individuals.

“VO2max isn’t the only measurement of fitness, but it’s an important one for endurance, and is a strong predictor of diabetes, heart disease, and other mortality risks,” said co-author Dr Soren Brage from Cambridge’s Medical Research Council (MRC) Epidemiology Unit. “However, since most VO2max tests are done on people who are reasonably fit, it’s hard to get measurements from those who are not as fit and might be at risk of cardiovascular disease.”

“We wanted to know whether it was possible to accurately predict VO2max using data from a wearable device, so that there would be no need for an exercise test,” said co-lead author Dr Dimitris Spathis from Cambridge’s Department of Computer Science and Technology. “Our central question was whether wearable devices can measure fitness in the wild. Most wearables provide metrics like heart rate, steps or sleeping time, which are proxies for health, but aren’t directly linked to health outcomes.”

The study was a collaboration between the two departments: the team from the MRC Epidemiology Unit provided expertise in population health and cardiorespiratory fitness and data from the Fenland Study – a long-running public health study in the East of England – while the team from the Department of Computer Science and Technology provided expertise in machine learning and artificial intelligence for mobile and wearable data.

Participants in the study wore wearable devices continuously for six days. The sensors gathered 60 values per second, resulting in an enormous amount of data before processing. “We had to design an algorithm pipeline and appropriate models that could compress this huge amount of data and use it to make an accurate prediction,” said Spathis. “The free-living nature of the data makes this prediction challenging because we’re trying to predict a high-level outcome (fitness) with noisy low-level data (wearable sensors).”

The researchers used an AI model known as a deep neural network to process and extract meaningful information from the raw sensor data and make predictions of VO2max from it. Beyond predictions, the trained models can be used for the identification of sub-populations in particular need of intervention related to fitness.

The baseline data from 11,059 participants in the Fenland Study was compared with follow-up data from seven years later, taken from a subset of 2,675 of the original participants. A third group of 181 participants from the UK Biobank Validation Study underwent lab-based VO2max testing to validate the accuracy of the algorithm. The machine learning model had strong agreement with the measured VO2max scores at both baseline (82% agreement) and follow-up testing (72% agreement).

“This study is a perfect demonstration of how we can leverage expertise across epidemiology, public health, machine learning and signal processing,” said co-lead author Dr Ignacio Perez-Pozuelo.

The researchers say that their results demonstrate how wearables can accurately measure fitness, but transparency needs to be improved if measurements from commercially available wearables are to be trusted.

“It’s true in principle that many fitness monitors and smartwatches provide a measurement of VO2max, but it’s very difficult to assess the validity of those claims,” said Brage. “The models aren’t usually published, and the algorithms can change on a regular basis, making it difficult for people to determine if their fitness has actually improved or if it’s just being estimated by a different algorithm.”

“Everything on your smartwatch related to health and fitness is an estimate,” said Spathis. “We’re transparent about our modelling and we did it at scale. We show that we can achieve better results with the combination of noisy data and traditional biomarkers. Also, all our algorithms and models are open-sourced and everyone can use them.”

“We’ve shown that you don’t need an expensive test in a lab to get a real measurement of fitness – the wearables we use every day can be just as powerful, if they have the right algorithm behind them,” said senior author Professor Cecilia Mascolo from the Department of Computer Science and Technology. “Cardio-fitness is such an important health marker, but until now we did not have the means to measure it at scale. These findings could have significant implications for population health policies, so we can move beyond weaker health proxies such as the Body Mass Index (BMI).”

The research was supported in part by Jesus College, Cambridge and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). Cecilia Mascolo is a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge.

 

Reference:
Dimitris Spathis et al. ‘Longitudinal cardio-respiratory fitness prediction through wearables in free-living environments.’ npj Digital Medicine (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41746-022-00719-1


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Two Cambridge Researchers Awarded Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies

Silvia Vignolini (left), Rachel Oliver (right)
source: www.cam.ac.uk

 

Professor Rachel Oliver and Professor Silvia Vignolini from the University of Cambridge have been awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies. Each award is worth £2.5 million over ten years to develop emerging technologies with high potential to deliver economic and social benefits to the UK.

 

Funded by the UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the Chair in Emerging Technologies scheme aims to identify global research visionaries and provide them with long-term support. The awards will enable the researchers to focus on strategic approaches for taking their technology from the bench to the boardroom.

Professor Rachel Oliver, from the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy, is a Fellow of Robinson College and Director of the Cambridge Centre for Gallium Nitride. Gallium nitride (GaN) is a rising star of the electronics and optoelectronics industries, with GaN-based solid-state lighting bringing about a revolution in how we illuminate our world. Creating porosity in GaN vastly extends the range of materials properties achievable in this key compound semiconductor material. By controlling the porosity, engineers can select the properties they need to create new device concepts or to improve existing products.

Professor Oliver’s aim is to create a set of materials fabrication processes which control the structure and properties of porous gallium nitride. Alongside this, she will develop a modelling toolbox for designing new devices. By developing new devices and embedding porous GaN in the UK’s vibrant and expanding compound semiconductor industry, Oliver hopes to drive this emerging materials platform towards widespread industrial adoption, fuelling the future of the UK compound semiconductor ecosystem.

Potential applications for the new research are both wide-ranging and far-reaching. Developing the use of UV LEDs for disinfection would give healthcare professionals new weapons in the fight against viral epidemics and antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Work on microdisplays using microLEDs could improve augmented and virtual reality headsets. As well as providing immersive experiences for gamers, this technology could be used by organisations for more effective online collaboration. By reducing the need for business travel, the ecological benefits would be significant.

Professor Vignolini and her Bio-inspired Photonics group in the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry have discovered that plants produce bright and vibrant colouration through organising cellulose into sub-micrometer structures that manipulate light. These natural examples have inspired Vignolini to mimic the use of biological building blocks to create sustainable colorants in the lab. She is developing a new generation of manufacturing processes to produce colours using only naturally derived biomaterials, such as cellulose, a biodegradable and abundant plant material.

Vignolini’s vision is that bio-based pigments will replace current alternatives made with energy-intensive and problematic materials.

Professor Sir Jim McDonald FREng FRSE, President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, said: “The Academy places huge importance on supporting excellence in engineering and often the key to engineers fulfilling their potential in tackling global challenges is the gift of time and continuity of support to bring the most disruptive and impactful ideas to fruition.”

 


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COVID Has ‘Ruptured’ Social Skills Af The World’s Poorest Children, Study Suggests

Young children in Ethiopia
source: www.cam.ac.uk

 

Two interlinked studies, involving 8,000 primary pupils altogether, indicate children lost at least a third of a year in learning during lockdown.

 

Education aid and government funding must focus on supporting both the academic and socio-emotional recovery of the most disadvantaged children first

Pauline Rose

School closures during the COVID-19 pandemic have “severely ruptured” the social and emotional development of some of the world’s poorest children, as well as their academic progress, new evidence shows.

In a study of over 2,000 primary school pupils in Ethiopia, researchers found that key aspects of children’s social and emotional development, such as their ability to make friends, not only stalled during the school closures, but probably deteriorated.

Children who, prior to the pandemic, felt confident talking to others or got on well with peers were less likely to do so by 2021. Those who were already disadvantaged educationally – girls, the very poorest, and those from rural areas – seem to have been particularly badly affected.

Both this research and a second, linked study of around 6,000 grade 1 and 4 primary school children, also found evidence of slowed academic progress. Children lost the equivalent of at least one third of an academic year in learning during lockdown – an estimate researchers describe as “conservative”. This appears to have widened an already significant attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and the rest, and there is some evidence that this may be linked to the drop in social skills.

Both studies were by academics from the University of Cambridge, UK and Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia.

Professor Pauline Rose, Director of the Research in Equitable Access and Learning (REAL) Centre at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, said: “COVID is having a long-term impact on children everywhere, but especially in lower-income countries. Education aid and government funding must focus on supporting both the academic and socio-emotional recovery of the most disadvantaged children first.”

Professor Tassew Woldehanna, President of Addis Ababa University, said: “These  severe ruptures to children’s developmental and learning trajectories underline how much we need to think about the impact on social, and not just academic skills. Catch-up education must address the two together.”

Both studies used data from the Research on Improving Systems of Education (RISE) programme in Ethiopia to compare primary education before the pandemic, in the academic year 2018/19, with the situation in 2020/21.

In the first study, researchers compared the numeracy test scores of 2,700 Grade 4 pupils in June 2019 with their scores shortly after they returned to school, in January 2021. They also measured dropout rates. In addition, pupils completed the Children’s Self Report Social Skills scale, which asked how much they agreed or disagreed with statements such as “I feel confident talking to others”, “I make friends easily”, and “If I hurt someone, I say sorry”.

The second study measured relative progress during the pandemic using the numeracy scores of two separate cohorts of Grade 1 and Grade 4 pupils. The first of these cohorts was from the pre-pandemic year; the other from 2020/21.

The results suggest pupils made some academic progress during the closures, but at a slower than expected rate. The average foundational numeracy score of Grade 1 pupils in 2020/21 was 15 points behind the 2018/19 cohort; by the end of the year that gap had widened to 19 points. Similarly, Grade 4 students started 2020/21 10 points behind their predecessor cohort, and were 12 points adrift by the end. That difference amounted to roughly one third of a year’s progress. Similar patterns emerged from the study of children’s numeracy scores before and after the closures.

Poorer children, and those from rural backgrounds, consistently performed worse academically. Dropout rates revealed similar issues: of the 2,700 children assessed in 2019 and 2021, more than one in 10 (11.3%) dropped out of school during the closures. These were disproportionately girls, or lower-achieving pupils, who tended to be from less wealthy or rural families.

All pupils’ social skills declined during the closure period, regardless of gender or location. Fewer children agreed in 2021 with statements such as “Other people like me” or “I make friends easily”. The decline in positive responses differed by demographic, and was sharpest among those from rural settings. This may be because children from remote parts of the country experienced greater isolation during lockdown.

The most striking evidence of a rupture in socio-emotional development was the lack of a predictive association between the 2019 and 2021 results. Pupils who felt confident talking to others before the pandemic, for example, had often changed their minds two years later.

Researchers suggest that the negative impact on social and emotional development may be linked to the slowdown in academic attainment. Children who did better academically in 2021 tended to report stronger social skills. This association is not necessarily causal, but there is evidence that academic attainment improves children’s self-confidence and esteem, and that prosocial behaviours positively influence academic outcomes. It is therefore possible that during the school closures this potential reinforcement was reversed.

Both reports echo previous research which suggests that lower-income countries such as Ethiopia need to invest in targeted programmes for girls, those from rural backgrounds, and the very poorest, if they are to prevent these children from being left behind. Alongside in-school catch-up programmes, action may be required to support those who are out of school. Ghana’s successful Complementary Basic Education initiative provides one model.

In addition, the researchers urge education policy actors to integrate support for  social skills into both catch-up education and planning for future closures. “Social and emotional skills should be an explicit goal of the curriculum and other guidance,” Rose said. “Schools may also want to think about after-school clubs, safe spaces for girls, and ensuring that primary-age children stay with the same group of friends during the day. Initiatives like these will go some way towards rebuilding the prosocial skills the pandemic has eroded.”

Ruptured School Trajectories is published in the journal, Longitudinal and Life Course Studies. Learning Losses during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Ethiopia, is available on the REAL Centre website.


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