Cooperative behaviour is a key part of animal family life: parents help offspring by supplying them with food, and siblings can also work together to acquire food. The Cambridge study, published today in Nature Ecology and Evolution, looked at the burying beetle – unusual in the insect world as the parents feed their offspring.

Larvae in small broods are well supplied with food by their parents and grow large. In the parents’ absence, larvae can also help each other to forage for food. However, in the absence of their parents, small broods of larvae are less effective at helping each other and can never grow as big.

“For our study, we played the role of natural selection. In some experimental beetle populations, we chose only the largest beetles to breed at each generation and in some we chose only the smallest beetles,” said Benjamin Jarrett from the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge, who led the study.

“Crucially, we also changed the social conditions within beetle families. In some populations, we allowed parents to help their offspring, but in other populations we removed the parents, and larvae had to help each other. We found that the social conditions made a big difference to how quickly beetle body size evolves over generations.”

Beetles only evolved a larger body size when parents were present to help rear their young. In stark contrast, smaller body size only evolved when beetle parents were removed, and there were too few larvae to help each other.

The experiment helps explain how different species of burying beetle might have evolved their different body sizes. In general, larger species of beetle have more diligent parents than smaller species.

Burying beetles use the dead body of a small animal, like a mouse or bird, for reproduction. The parents shave and bury the carcass, to make it into an edible nest for their larvae. The larvae can feed themselves on the carrion, but the parent beetles also regurgitate partly digested food to them. The species used in this study has quite variable levels of parental care: occasionally larvae have to fend for themselves on the carcass because they have been abandoned by their parents.

“Previous work has focused on the puzzle of how cooperative behaviour evolves, because natural selection seems to favour animals that are selfish,” said Professor Rebecca Kilner, who is senior author of this paper. “We have shown that what happens next, in evolutionary terms, is just as interesting. Once cooperation has evolved, it can change the way in which evolution then unfolds.”

The researchers now hope to uses experimental evolution to understand what happens across many generations when changing the extent of parental care.

“We can remove parents from caring for their offspring in one generation, and we do this to their offspring too, and their grandoffspring, and so on,” added Jarrett. “We currently have populations of beetles that have not had parents looking after them as they grow up for 25 generations.

“What this does is change what evolution is working on. Natural selection is usually acting on the combination of parents and offspring, and now, by removing parents, we have changed the traits on which evolution acts.”

The paper Cooperative interactions within the family enhance the capacity for evolutionary change in body size, published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, can be found here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/241559-017-0178

The University of Cambridge has appointed a world-leading researcher as the first LEGO Professor of Play in Education, Development and Learning.

The Centre for Research on Play in Education, Development and Learning (PEDAL) was established in 2015 with a £4 million grant from the LEGO Foundation that also funded the leadership role that will be taken up by Professor Paul Ramchandani.

Having spent the past 15 years pursuing research focussed on child development Ramchandani, who currently leads the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Research Unit at Imperial College, London, will take up his role at PEDAL in January next year.

Professor Geoff Hayward, Head of the Faculty of Education, said: “Professor Ramchandani has an outstanding research record of international stature. He has the vision, leadership, experience and enthusiasm that PEDAL needs, and we are delighted that he is joining us. This is an exciting area of research which we feel will throw new light on the importance of play in early education.”

Paul Ramchandani. Credit: Morris Zwi.1 of 3

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PEDAL is examining the importance of play in education globally to produce research which supports excellence in education so that children are equipped with 21st century skills like problem solving, team work and self-control.

The work of the centre, based at the University’s Faculty of Education, is currently focused on three strands of research:

• Establishing a long-term study of the features of home and school that promote children’s playfulness, and the outcomes of early play experience for learning and emotional well-being
• Developing an understanding of the underlying brain processes involved in play, and how to measure playfulness
• Devising and evaluating play-based teaching approaches

Part of the Professor’s role heading up the centre will involve translating the research into hard evidence for international and national bodies as they produce policy around children’s right to play.

Professor Ramchandani said: “I am delighted to be taking up this role at Cambridge, and working with those at PEDAL on the challenge of finding the best evidence on where play fits in children’s development and education and how that can be used to give children the best start in life.

“Everyone has an opinion about what role play should have in early education and there is some wonderful research, but there are also big gaps in our knowledge. We need the best evidence possible in order to inform the vital decisions that are made about children’s education and development and I look forward to taking that work forward together with colleagues at Cambridge.”

Professor Anna Vignoles, acting head of PEDAL until Ramchandani takes up the new post, said: “The value of play is relatively under-researched. You have people who are claiming that it enhances learning, that it’s important, that it’s good for children’s wellbeing. All of that might be true, but actually there’s remarkably little evidence for that. The aim of the PEDAL centre is to conduct rigorous research into the importance of play and how playful learning can be used to improve students’ outcomes.”

Bo Stjerne Thomsen, Global Head of Research, the LEGO Foundation said: “There is a great need for establishing  play as a central arena for learning and development in the minds and actions of those influencing children’s lives. PEDAL’s research is hugely important in that regard, and we’re excited that Professor Ramchandani will be taking the helm and join the efforts to underscore the importance of children’s learning through play.”

“Weight loss strategies are often inefficient because the body works like a thermostat and couples the amount of calories we burn to the amount of calories we eat,” says Dr Clémence Blouet from the Metabolic Research Laboratories at University of Cambridge. “When we eat less, our body compensates and burns fewer calories, which makes losing weight harder. We know that the brain must regulate this caloric thermostat, but how it adjusts calorie burning to the amount of food we’ve eaten has been something of a mystery.”

Now, in research published in the open access journal eLife, a team of researchers has identified a new mechanism through which the body adapts to low caloric intake and limits weight loss in mice. Mice share a number of important biological and physiological similarities with humans and so are a useful model for studying how our bodies work.

The researchers tested the role of a group of neurons in a brain region known as the hypothalamus. These ‘agouti-related neuropeptide’ (AGRP) neurons are known for their major role in the regulation of appetite: when activated, they make us eat, but when fully inhibited they can lead to almost complete anorexia.

The team used a genetic trick to switch the AGRP neurons ‘on’ and ‘off’ in mice so that they could rapidly and reversibly manipulate the neurons’ activity. They studied the mice in special chambers than can measure energy expenditure, and implanted them with probes to remotely measure their temperature, a proxy for energy expenditure, in different contexts of food availability.

The researchers demonstrated that AGRP neurons are key contributors to the caloric thermostat that regulates our weight, regulating how many calories we burn. The findings suggest that when activated, these neurons make us hungry and drive us to eat – but when there is no food available, they act to spare energy, limiting the number of calories that we burn and hence our weight loss.

As soon as food becomes available and we start eating, the action of the AGRP neurons is interrupted and our energy expenditure goes back up again to normal levels.

In addition, the researchers also describe a mechanism through which AGRP neurons regulate their activity by detecting how much energy we have on-board and then controlling how many calories we burn.

“Our findings suggest that a group of neurons in the brain coordinate appetite and energy expenditure, and can turn a switch on and off to burn or spare calories depending on what’s available in the environment,” says Dr Blouet, who led the study. “If food is available, they make us eat, and if food is scarce, they turn our body into saving mode and stop us from burning fat.”

“While this mechanism may have evolved to help us cope with famine, nowadays most people only encounter such a situation when they are deliberately dieting to lose weight. Our work helps explain why for these people, dieting has little effect on its own over a long period. Our bodies compensate for the reduction in calories.”

Dr Luke Burke, the study’s first author, adds: “This study could help in the design of new or improved therapies in future to help reduce overeating and obesity. Until then, best solution for people to lose weight – at least for those who are only moderately overweight – is a combination of exercise and a moderate reduction in caloric intake.”

Reference
Burke, LK et al. mTORC1 in AGRP neurons integrates exteroceptive and interoceptive food-related cues in the modulation of adaptive energy expenditure in mice. eLife; 23 May 2017; DOI: 10.7554/eLife.22848

The observations confirm, as had been predicted, that the seventh and outermost planet, TRAPPIST-1h, orbits its star every 18.77 days. The results are reported in the journal Nature Astronomy.

“TRAPPIST-1h was exactly where our team predicted it to be,” said Rodrigo Luger, a PhD student at the University of Washington and the paper’s lead author. The researchers discovered a mathematical pattern in the orbital periods of the inner six planets, which was strongly suggestive of an 18.77 day period for planet h.

TRAPPIST-1A is a middle-aged, ultra-cool dwarf star, much less luminous than the Sun and only a bit larger than Jupiter. The star, which is nearly 40 light years away in the constellation of Aquarius, is named after the ground-based Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST), the facility that first found evidence of planets around it in 2015.

The TRAPPIST survey is led by Michaël Gillon of the University of Liège, Belgium, who is also a co-author on this research. In 2016, Gillon’s team announced the detection of three planets orbiting TRAPPIST-1 and this number was upped to seven in a paper published earlier this year. All seven planets are deemed temperate, meaning that under certain geologic and atmospheric conditions, water could exist in a liquid form. Three of the planets are particularly optimal. In addition the TRAPPIST-1 system is currently the most convenient to remotely explore the atmospheres of planets with sizes similar to Earth.

Such exoplanets are detected when they transit, or pass in front of, their host star, blocking a measurable portion of the light. “We only captured one transit of TRAPPIST-1h last autumn. However, the resonant pattern formed by the other six planets, and the time TRAPPIST-1h takes to pass in front of its star, allowed the team to deduce its orbital period with a precision of a few minutes,” said co-author Amaury Triaud, a Kavli Exoplanet fellow Amaury Triaud at Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy. “This is absolutely remarkable! TRAPPIST-1h represents a perfect illustration of the power of the scientific method, of its ability to make predictions that can later be verified.”

The inner six planets occupy orbits consistent with being in ‘resonance’. All orbital periods are mathematically related and slightly influence each other. Orbital resonances can also be found in our solar system. For instance, Jupiter’s moons Io, Europa and Ganymede are set in a 1:2:4 resonance, meaning that while Ganymede orbits Jupiter once, Europa does so twice, and Io four times. The prediction of TRAPPIST-1h’s orbital period principally relied on extrapolating the known resonant configuration of the inner six planets, to the seventh. This prediction was later confirmed.

The team analysed 79 days of observation data from K2, the second mission of the Kepler Space Telescope, and was able to recover four transits of TRAPPIST-1h across its star. The K2 data was also used to further characterize the orbits of the other six planets, help rule out the presence of additional transiting planets, and learn the rotation period and activity level of the star.

TRAPPIST-1’s seven-planet chain of resonances establishes a record among known planetary systems. The resonances strengthen the long-term stability of the planetary system. It is also likely that these orbital connections were forged early in the life of the TRAPPIST-1 system, when the planets and their orbits were not fully formed.

“Observing TRAPPIST-1 with K2 was an ambitious task,” said Marko Sestovic, a PhD student at the University of Bern and second author of the study. In addition to the complicated signals introduced by the spacecraft’s wobble, the faintness of the star in the optical (the range of wavelengths where K2 observes) placed TRAPPIST-1h “near the limit of what we could detect with K2,” he said. To make matters worse, Sestovic said, one transit of the planet coincided with a transit of TRAPPIST-1b, and one happened during a stellar flare, adding to the difficulty of the observation. “Finding the planet was really encouraging,” Luger said, “since it showed we can still do high-quality science with Kepler despite significant instrumental challenges.”

The research was funded by the NASA Astrobiology Institute via the UW-based Virtual Planetary Laboratory as well as a National Science Foundation Graduate Student Research Fellowship, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the European Research Council and the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council, among other agencies. This work was partially supported by a grant from the Simons Foundation.

Based on a press release by the University of Washington.

Reference:
Rodrigo Luger et al. ‘A seven-planet resonant chain in TRAPPIST-1.’ Nature Astronomy (2017). DOI: 10.1038/s41550-017-0129

A new study published today in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) from researchers at the University of Cambridge and the University of Essex suggests that when it comes to judging scientists, we are more likely to find an attractive scientist interesting, but more likely to consider their less attractive colleagues to be better scientists.

“Given the importance of science to issues that could have a major impact on society, such as climate change, food sustainability and vaccinations, scientists are increasingly required to engage with the public,” says Dr Will Skylark from the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge, who led the study. “We know from studies showing that political success can be predicted from facial appearance, that people can be influenced by how someone looks rather than, necessarily, what they say. We wanted to see if this was true for scientists.”

Dr Skylark and colleagues randomly sampled the faces of scientists from the Physics and Genetics departments at US universities (108 scientists for each field), and then from the Physics and Biological Sciences departments at UK universities (200 scientists for each field) for replication studies.

In the first set of studies, the team asked one group to rate the faces on a variety of traits, such as how intelligent the individual looked, how attractive they were, and their perceived age. Then, two other groups of participants indicated how interested they would be in finding out more about each scientist’s research or how much the person looked like someone who conducts accurate and important research.

The researchers found that people were more interested in learning about the work of scientists who were physically attractive and who appeared competent and moral. Interest was also slightly stronger for older scientists, and slightly lower for females. There was no difference in interest between white and non-white scientists.

However, when it came to judging whether a scientist does high-quality work, people tended to associate this with an individual’s apparent competence and morality – and the more attractive and sociable they were perceived to be, the less people considered them to look like a scientist who conducts good research.

The researchers next investigated whether facial appearance affects people’s choices about which science to engage with by pairing the titles of real science-news stories with faces that had received low or high interest judgments in the first part of the study.

Participants were more likely to choose research that was paired with a photo of an interesting-looking scientist. This bias was present both for male and female scientists, physics and biology news stories, and both video and text formats.

Next, the participants were told that they would read articles from a new magazine section comprising profiles of people discussing their interests and work. The articles were adapted from news websites to make them appear like the scientist was describing his or her own work to a general audience. Participants read two articles, each presented with a photo of its putative author – one with a high ‘good scientist’ rating in the first study and one with a low rating.

Research that was paired with the photo of a ‘good scientist’ was judged to be higher quality, irrespective of the scientist’s gender and discipline – although the effect was small. In addition, quality judgments were higher for physics articles than for biology articles. A similar study found that the attractiveness of the scientist had only a small effect on the perceived quality of their research.

“It seems that people use facial appearance as a source of information when selecting and evaluating science news,” says Dr Skylark. “It’s not yet clear how much this shapes the spread and acceptance of scientific ideas among the public, but the rapid growth in visual media means it may be an increasingly important issue.”

Reference
Gheorghiu, AI, Callan, M and Skylark, WJ. Facial appearance affects science communication. PNAS; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1620542114

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, have used computer simulations to predict the existence of a so-called naked singularity, which interferes with Einstein’s general theory of relativity. This is the first time that a naked singularity, which causes the laws of physics to break down, has been predicted in three-dimensional space. The findings are reported in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Einstein’s general theory of relativity underpins our current understanding of gravity: everything from the estimation of the age of the stars in the universe, to the GPS signals we rely on to help us navigate, is based on his equations. In part, the theory tells us that matter warps its surrounding spacetime, and what we call gravity is the effect of that warp. In the 100 years since it was published, general relativity has passed every test that has been thrown at it, but one of its limitations is the existence of singularities.

A singularity is a point where gravity is so intense that space, time, and the laws of physics, break down. General relativity predicts that singularities exist at the centre of black holes, and that they are surrounded by an event horizon – the ‘point of no return’, where the gravitational pull becomes so strong that escape is impossible, meaning that they cannot be observed from the outside.

For more than 40 years, mathematicians have proposed that whenever singularities form, they will always be hidden from view in this way – this is known as the ‘cosmic censorship conjecture.’ If true, cosmic censorship means that outside of black holes, these singularities have no measurable effect on anything, and the predictions of general relativity remain valid.

In recent years, researchers have used computer simulations to predict the existence of ‘naked singularities’ – that is, singularities which exist outside an event horizon. Naked singularities would invalidate the cosmic censorship conjecture and, by extension, general relativity’s ability to explain the universe as a standalone theory. However, all of these predictions have been modelled on universes which exist in higher dimensions. For example, in 2016, two Cambridge PhD students predicted the existence of a naked singularity, but their predictions were based on a five-dimensional universe.

The new research, by Toby Crisford and Jorge Santos from Cambridge’s Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, has predicted the existence of a naked singularity in a four-dimensional universe – three spatial dimensions, plus time – for the first time.

Their predictions show that a naked singularity can form in a special kind of curved space known as anti-de Sitter space, in which the universe has a distinctive ‘saddle’ shape. According to general relativity, universes can have various shapes, and anti-de Sitter space is one of these possible shapes.

Anti-de Sitter space has a very different structure to flat space. In particular it has a boundary which light can reach, at which point it is reflected back. “It’s a bit like having a spacetime in a box,” said Crisford. “At the boundary, the walls of the box, we have the freedom to specify what the various fields are doing, and we use this freedom to add energy to the system and eventually force the formation of a singularity.”

While the results are not directly applicable to our universe, as ‘forcing’ a singularity is not a procedure which is possible to simulate in flat space, they do open up new opportunities to study other theories to understand the universe. One such theory could involve quantum gravity, which provides new equations close to a singularity.

“The naked singularity we see is likely to disappear if we were to include charged particles in our simulation – this is something we are currently investigating,” said Santos. “If true, it could imply a connection between the cosmic censorship conjecture and the weak gravity conjecture, which says that any consistent theory of quantum gravity must contain sufficiently charged particles. In anti-de Sitter space, the cosmic censorship conjecture might be saved by the weak gravity conjecture.”

Inset image: Image of (1 + 1)-dimensional anti-de Sitter space embedded in flat (1 + 2)-dimensional space. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Reference:
Toby Crisford and Jorge E. Santos. ‘Violating the Weak Cosmic Censorship Conjecture in Four-Dimensional Anti–de Sitter Space.’ Physical Review Letters (2017). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.181101. 

The researchers, from the Universities of Cambridge and Warwick, have developed a wire made from a single string of tellurium atoms, making it a true one-dimensional material. These one-dimensional wires are produced inside extremely thin carbon nanotubes (CNTs) – hollow cylinders made of carbon atoms. The finished ‘extreme nanowires’ are less than a billionth of a metre in diameter – 10,000 times thinner than a human hair.

A single string of atoms is as small as materials based on elements in the periodic table can get, making them potentially useful for semiconductors and other electronic applications. However, these strings can be unstable, as their atoms are constantly vibrating and, in the absence of a physical constraint, they can end up morphing into some other structure or disintegrating entirely.

According to the Cambridge researchers, encapsulating the nanowires is not only a useful method of making stable one-dimensional (1D) materials, it may be necessary to prevent them from disintegrating. The researchers have also shown that it is possible to alter the shape and electronic behaviour of the nanowires by varying the diameters of the tubes which encapsulate them. Their results are reported in the journal ACS Nano.

To make electronics faster and more powerful, more transistors need to be squeezed onto semiconductor chips. For the past 50 years, the number of transistors on a single chip has doubled every two years – this is known as Moore’s law. However, we are getting close to the limit of how small a transistor can be before quantum effects associated with individual atoms and electrons start to interfere with its normal operation. Researchers are currently investigating various ways of keeping up with Moore’s law, and in turn keeping up with our desire for faster, cheaper and more powerful electronics. One-dimensional materials could be one of the solutions to the challenge of miniaturisation.

The Cambridge researchers first used computer simulations to predict the types of geometric structures that would form if tellurium atoms were injected into nanotubes, and found that 1D wires could exist in such a scenario.

Later, lab-based tests, using the most advanced techniques for the synthesis and atomic-resolution visualisation of such extreme materials, were performed by the Warwick researchers to confirm the theoretical predictions. Not only were the researchers able to successfully ‘build’ stable 1D wires, but they found that changing the diameter of the nanotubes lead to changes in the properties of tellurium.

Tellurium normally behaves as a semiconductor, but when injected into carbon nanotubes and confined to one dimension, it starts behaving like a metal. Additionally, while the confinement provided by the CNTs can induce drastic changes in the way that tellurium behaves, the nanotubes themselves do not interact in any other way with the tellurium nanowires.

“When working with materials at very small scales such as this, the material of interest typically needs to be deposited onto a surface, but the problem is that these surfaces are normally very reactive,” said Paulo Medeiros of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, and the paper’s first author. “But carbon nanotubes are chemically quite inert, so they help solve one of the problems when trying to create truly one-dimensional materials.

“However, we’re just starting to understand the physics and chemistry of these systems – there’s still a lot of basic physics to be uncovered.”

Reference:
Paulo V. C. Medeiros et al. ‘Single-Atom Scale Structural Selectivity in Te Nanowires Encapsulated Inside Ultranarrow, Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes.’ ACS Nano (2016). DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.7b02225

The Partnership is a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to collaboration and open dialogue on the opportunities and challenges of AI. Its founding members included Amazon, Apple, Google/DeepMind, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft.

CFI’s Executive Director, Dr Stephen Cave, said: “With AI advancing rapidly, we need a broad coalition to manage its impact for the good of all. The Partnership on AI is a much-needed and timely development, bringing together the leading companies driving the technology, and an increasingly wide range of other groups, including non-profit and academic institutions, such as our Centre based at the University of Cambridge.”

As well as CFI, twenty other organisations have joined The Partnership on AI, including UNICEF and Sony.

The Partnership’s goals are to study and formulate best practices on the development, testing, and fielding of AI technologies, advancing the public’s understanding of AI, to serve as an open platform for discussion and engagement about AI and its influences on people and society and identify and foster aspirational efforts in AI for socially beneficial purposes.

The Partnership on AI was actively designed to bring together a diverse range of voices from for-profit and non-profit, all of whom share the belief in the tenets, and are committed to collaboration and open dialogue on the many opportunities and rising challenges around AI.

Added Cave: “At CFI, we strongly share the Partnership’s mission to ensure that AI develops in a way that is safe, responsible and fair. We are therefore delighted to be joining the Partnership on AI, alongside other organisations including UNICEF, Human Rights Watch, and our partners in Oxford, the Future of Humanity Institute.

“We hope that being a member will provide us with new allies and opportunities in what is likely to be one of the great challenges of the 21st century, and hope to be able to contribute the insight and analysis of our highly interdisciplinary team.”

CFI is a collaboration between the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, Imperial College London and the University of California at Berkeley and is funded by an unprecedented £10 million grant from the Leverhulme Trust.

Its mission is to create the interdisciplinary community that will be needed to make the AI revolution go as well as possible for humanity. At the Centre’s launch in Cambridge last October, Professor Stephen Hawking said: “The rise of powerful AI will be either the best, or the worst thing, ever to happen to humanity. We do not yet know which. The research done by this centre will be crucial to the future of our civilisation and of our species.”

You can find out more about CFI at www.lcfi.ac.uk and @LeverhulmeCFI. You can find out more about the Partnership on AI at: www.partnershiponai.org/the-latest/ and @PartnershipAI

Using the Sweden-based Cell Atlas, researchers examined the spatial distribution of the human proteome (the entire complement of proteins that make up the human body) that correspond to the majority of protein-coding genes. They described in unprecedented detail the distribution of proteins within the various substructures of the human body’s smallest unit, the cell.

Our cells contain ‘organelles’ – specialised substructures that carry out specific functions. These create partitions that form an enclosed environment for chemical reactions tailored to fulfill these functions. Since these functions are tightly linked to specific sets of proteins, knowing the subcellular location of the human proteome is key to understanding the function and underlying mechanisms of the human cell.

The study was led by Emma Lundberg, associate professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and responsible for the High Content Microscopy facility at the Science for Life Laboratory (SciLifeLab) in Stockholm, Sweden. The team generated more than 300,000 images to systematically resolve the spatial distribution of human proteins in cultivated cell lines, and map them to cellular compartments and substructures with single cell resolution.

The Cell Atlas is the result of more than 10 years of research within the Human Protein Atlas programme, and was launched in December 2016. The article in Science describes the detailed analysis of hundreds of thousands of images created as part of this international effort, which also involved groups in the China, South Korea, India, Denmark, and Germany.

“Only by studying the molecular components of the body’s smallest functional unit – the cell – can we reach a full understanding of human biology,” says KTH Professor Mathias Uhlen, director of the Human Protein Atlas.

The published article also includes a comparative study performed by Professor Kathryn Lilley, director of the Cambridge Centre for Proteomics, at Cambridge University, UK, which enabled the antibody-based immunofluorescence (IF) microscopy analysis to be validated by an alternative mapping strategy that used mass spectrometry, hyperLOPIT.

A total of 12,003 proteins targeted by 13,993 antibodies were classified into one or several of 30 cellular compartments and substructures, altogether defining the proteome of 13 major organelles. The organelles with the largest proteomes were the cytosol (4,279) and the nucleus (6,930) and its substructures, such as bodies and speckles.

Importantly, about one-half of the proteins are found in more than one compartment revealing a shared pool of proteins in functionally unrelated parts of the cell. This finding sheds new light on the complexity of cells.

”We have created the most detailed map of how proteins are arranged in a cell using two different high throughput approaches: high content imaging and spatial proteomics,” says Professor Lilley. ”Interestingly, we show a large proportion of human proteins can be found in more than one location in a given cell, overturning many pre-conceptions of how the cell operates.

”The Cell Atlas now provides us with new knowledge that will enable us to explore the functions of individual proteins and their role in human biology and disease.”

The Cell Atlas is an open access resource that can be used by researchers around the world to study proteins or organelles of interest. “The Atlas enables systems biology and cell modeling applications, and it is also a highly valuable resource for machine learning applications in image pattern recognition,” says Lundberg.

Image

• Left: In epidermoid carcinoma cells, that the protein SON (green) is localising into nuclear speckles, a substructure in the nucleus.
• Right : SEPT9 (green) localizes to actin filaments in epidermoid carcinoma cells.

Reference
​Thul, PJ et al. A subcellular map of the human proteome. Science; 11 May 2017; DOI: 10.1126/science.aal3321

Adapted from a press release from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

The study, carried out in marmosets, highlights why non-human primates can be an important model in addition to rodents for understanding brain disorders in humans.

Changes in heart rate and blood pressure such as the ‘fight or flight’ response are a normal part of our emotional reactions. However, it is well known that people with depression or anxiety have an increased risk of heart disease along with distressing negative emotional states. The reasons why have remained unclear.

Now, in a study published in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Dr Hannah Clarke and colleagues from the University of Cambridge and Cambridgeshire & Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust have discovered a link between two key areas of the brain and emotional responses. They also show that our brains control our cardiovascular response – changes in our heart patterns and blood pressure – to emotional situations.

To carry out the study, the researchers used marmosets with small metal tubes implanted into specific brain regions in order to administer drugs that reduce activity temporarily in that brain region. This enabled the researchers to show which regions caused particular responses. The marmosets rapidly adapt to these implants and remain housed with their partners throughout the study.

In the first task, the marmosets were presented with three auditory cues: one that was followed by a mildly aversive stimulus (a loud noise), one that was followed by a non-aversive stimulus (darkness), and one where the subsequent stimulus had a 50/50 chance of being either a loud noise or darkness. The task lasted just 30 minutes and they were exposed to this task a maximum of five days a week over a few months.

As the marmoset began to understand the cues, the researchers observed that the monkey’s heart rate and blood pressure increased in anticipation of the loud noise, and the monkey began to look around more (known as ‘vigilant scanning’). However, the team found that turning off one region (known as Area 25 – the subgenual cingulate cortex) of the prefrontal cortex in the marmosets made them less fearful: their heart rate and blood pressure did not change and they became less vigilant.

In a second task, adapted from a common rodent test of emotion, the team studied the ability of marmosets to regulate their emotional responses. In a single session of thirty minutes, an auditory cue was presented on seven occasions, and each time it was accompanied by a door opening and the marmoset being presented with a rubber snake for five seconds. As marmosets are afraid of snakes they developed similar cardiovascular and behavioural responses to the auditory cue associated with the snake as they did to the cue associated with loud noise. The next day, to break the link between the cue and snake, the researchers stopped showing the marmoset the snake when the cue was sounded.

In this task, inactivating Area 25 meant that the marmoset was quicker to adapt: once the link between the auditory cue and the snake was broken, the marmosets quickly became less fearful in response to the cue, with their cardiovascular and behavioural measurements returning to baseline faster than normal.

In both tasks, inactivating another region (Area 32 – the perigenual cingulate cortex) made normal fearful responses spread to non-threatening situations: the marmosets became less able to discriminate between fearful and non-fearful cues, showing heightened blood pressure and vigilant scanning to both. This is a characteristic of anxiety disorders.

Marmoset brain with Areas 25 and 32 highlighted

“We now see clearly that these brain regions control aspects of heart function as well as emotions,” says Dr Clarke. “This helps our understanding of emotional disorders, which involve a complicated interplay between brain and body.”

Previous studies of anxiety and depression in humans have shown altered activity in comparable brain regions to the marmosets. However, as it is not possible to manipulate the brain regions in humans, it was not previously possible to say whether these brain regions were responsible for the alterations in behaviour and cardiovascular activity, or alternatively whether the changes in brain activity were caused by such alterations.

However, although these marmoset findings provide insight into the mechanisms underlying results from human brain imaging studies, they are opposite to those seen in rats.  This is despite the use of similar experimental tasks and the manipulation of regions of the brain that are thought to be equivalent across the species; in rats, inactivation of the brain regions considered analogous to areas 25 and 32 increase and decrease fear respectively.

The researchers believe these differences are likely to be a result of the more complex prefrontal cortex found in primates such as monkeys and humans.

Animals are only used in research where no other alternatives are available, and researchers always use the most appropriate species. In the vast majority of cases, this involves using mice, rats and zebrafish. Sometimes, however, it is necessary to use species that are closer to humans. While rodents can provide a good model for exploring and understanding many aspects of behaviour, the researchers argue that this study highlights how monkeys can help provide a more detailed and specific understanding of how our brains work.

“Our work highlights the importance of research using marmosets in understanding human conditions that affect many millions of people worldwide,” says Dr Clarke. “Studies using animals such as rats are important for providing insights into behaviour and disease, but for some areas of research, monkeys have greater relevance because their brains are much closer in structure to ours.”

The research was partly-funded by the Wellcome Trust.

Reference
Wallis, CU et al. Opposing roles of primate areas 25 and 32 and their putative rodent homologs in the regulation of negative emotion. PNAS; 1 May 2017; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1620115114

While many members of the general public may have heard of “bitcoin”, the first decentralised cryptocurrency launched in 2009, a new report from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) paints a broader picture of “cryptocurrencies”.

The report shows that cryptocurrencies – broadly defined as digital assets using cryptography to secure transactions between peers without the need for a central bank or other authority performing that role – are increasingly being used, stored, transacted and mined around the globe.

The Global Cryptocurrency Benchmarking Study gathered data from more than 100 cryptocurrency companies in 38 countries, capturing an estimated 75 per cent of the cryptocurrency industry.

Prior to this research, little hard data existed on how many people around the world actively use cryptocurrencies. The conventional wisdom has been that the number of people using bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies was around 1 million people; however, based on newly collected data, including the percentage of the estimated 35 million cryptocurrency “wallets” (software applications that store cryptocurrencies) that are in active use, the CCAF research team estimates that there at least 3 million people actively using cryptocurrency today.

While bitcoin remains the dominant cryptocurrency both in terms of market capitalisation and usage, it has conceded market cap share to other cryptocurrencies – declining from 86 per cent to 72 per cent in the past two years.

The study by the CCAF at Cambridge Judge Business School breaks down the cryptocurrency industry into four key sectors – exchanges, wallets, payments, and mining. Highlights of the findings are:

Exchanges

Cryptocurrency exchanges provide on-off ramps to cryptocurrency systems by offering services to users wishing to buy or sell cryptocurrency.  This sector was the first to emerge in the cryptocurrency industry, and has the most operating entities and employs the most people. Currently, about 52 per cent of small exchanges hold a formal government license, compared to only 35 per cent of large exchanges.

Wallets

Wallets have evolved from simple software programs to sophisticated applications that offer a variety of technical features and services. As a result, the lines between wallets and exchanges are increasingly blurred, with 52 per cent of wallets providing an integrated currency exchange feature.

Payments

Cryptocurrency payment companies generally act as gateways between cryptocurrency users and the broader economy, bridging national currencies and cryptocurrencies. They can fit into two broad categories: firms that use cryptocurrency primarily as a “payment rail” for fast and efficient cross-border transactions, and firms that facilitate the use of cryptocurrency for both users and merchants. The study found that the size of the average business-to-business cryptocurrency payment ($1,878) dwarfs peer-to-peer and consumer-to-business cryptocurrency payments.

Mining

In the absence of a central authority, cryptocurrencies are created by a process called “mining” – usually the performance of a large number of computations to solve a cryptographic “puzzle”. The study shows how cryptocurrency mining has evolved from a hobby activity into a professional, capital-intensive industry in which bitcoin miners earned more than $2 billion in mining revenues since 2009. The cryptocurrency mining map indicates that a significant proportion of publicly known mining facilities are concentrated in certain Chinese provinces.

The study found that more than 1,800 people are now working full time in the cryptocurrency industry, as more companies are engaged across various cryptocurrency sectors.

“Cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin have been seen by some as merely a passing fad or insignificant, but that view is increasingly at odds with the data we are observing,” says Dr Garrick Hileman, Research Fellow at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) at Cambridge Judge Business School, who co-authored the study with Michel Rauchs, Research Assistant at CCAF.

“Currently, the combined market value of all cryptocurrencies is nearly $40 billion, which represents a level of value creation on the order of Silicon Valley success stories like Airbnb,” Dr Hileman says in a foreword to the study. “The advent of cryptocurrency has also sparked many new business platforms with sizable valuations of their own, along with new forms of peer-to-peer economic activity.”

The company, Z Factor Limited, was founded by Professor Jim Huntington of the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research. The new funding has come from existing investor Medicxi, as well as Cambridge Innovation Capital and Cambridge Enterprise, the University’s commercialisation arm.

Z Factor is developing new treatments for Alpha-1-Antitrypsin Deficiency (AATD). AATD, which is a significant cause of liver and lung disease, results from a defect in the gene encoding Alpha-1-antitrypsin, a type of protein. Individuals with two defective copies of the gene, making up around 1 in 2000 of the Western population, typically develop emphysema starting in their 30s. They are also at an increased risk of developing liver diseases such as cirrhosis and cancer. Around 2% of people have one defective copy of this gene, and are at five-fold increased risk of developing Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) as they age.

The most common mutation causing AATD is called the Z mutation, which disrupts the normal folding of the protein. Professor Huntington and his team obtained the crystallographic structure of this mutant form of Alpha-1-antitrypsin, which allowed for the first time the rational design of drugs that could correct folding and prevent the development of associated diseases. These small-molecule drugs act like molecular ‘chaperones’ for the defective protein, accelerating folding to the correct state.

Cambridge Enterprise helped in Z Factor’s formation in 2015, licensing key intellectual property to the company. The company has already identified dozens of molecules that can correct the folding defect caused by the Z mutation, and shown that some of these drug candidates can increase Alpha-1-antitrypsin levels in an in vivo model of AATD.

Z Factor is now working to select the best molecules for use as a drug in human trials. The company expects to reach the clinic with its lead candidate in 2019.

“We are delighted to work once again with Cambridge Enterprise to ensure this exciting basic science is rapidly and efficiently translated into new medicines for a surprisingly common and debilitating cause of liver and lung disease,” said David Grainger, Partner at Medicxi and Executive Chairman at Z Factor.

Following closely on the announcement of investments in ApcinteX and SuperX earlier this year, the Z Factor Series A brings the total raised during 2017 by companies founded by Professor Huntington, one of Cambridge’s most successful serial entrepreneurs, to almost £30 million. “Jim is a leading academic innovator and Z Factor is dedicated to developing a therapy that will address a serious unmet medical need,” said Christine Martin from Cambridge Enterprise, and a Director at Z Factor.

The most barren regions of the Universe are the far-flung corners of intergalactic space. In these vast expanses between the galaxies there are only a few atoms per cubic metre – a diffuse haze of hydrogen gas left over from the Big Bang. Viewed on the largest scales, this diffuse material nevertheless accounts for the majority of atoms in the Universe.  It fills the cosmic web, with its tangled strands spanning billions of light years.

Now a team of astronomers, including Alberto Rorai and Girish Kulkarni, from the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy and Kavli Institute, have made the first measurements of small-scale ripples in this primeval hydrogen gas. Although the regions of cosmic web they studied lie nearly 11 billion light years away, they were able to measure variations in its structure on scales a hundred thousand times smaller, comparable to the size of a single galaxy. Their results appear in the journal Science.

Intergalactic gas is so tenuous that it emits no light of its own. Instead astronomers study it indirectly by observing how it selectively absorbs the light coming from faraway sources known as quasars. Quasars constitute a brief hyperluminous phase of the galactic life-cycle, powered by the infall of matter onto a galaxy’s central supermassive black hole.

Quasars act like cosmic lighthouses — bright, distant beacons that allow astronomers to study intergalactic atoms residing between the quasars’ location and Earth. But because these hyperluminous episodes last only a tiny fraction of a galaxy’s lifetime, quasars are correspondingly rare in the sky, and are typically separated by hundreds of millions of light years from each other.

To probe the cosmic web on much smaller length scales, the astronomers exploited a fortuitous cosmic coincidence: they identified exceedingly rare pairs of quasars, right next to each other in the sky, and measured subtle differences in the absorption of intergalactic atoms measured along the two sightlines.

Schematic representation of the technique used to probe the small-scale structure of the cosmic web using light from a rare quasar pair Credit: Springel at al/J. Neidel MPIA 

Rorai, lead author of the study, says “One of the biggest challenges was developing the mathematical and statistical tools to quantify the tiny differences we measure in this new kind of data”. Rorai developed these tools as part of the research for his doctoral degree, and applied his tools to spectra of quasars obtained with the largest telescopes in the world. These included the 10m diameter Keck telescopes at the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, as well as ESO’s 8m diameter Very Large Telescope on Cerro Paranal, and the 6.5m diameter Magellan telescope at Las Campanas Observatory, both located in the Chilean Atacama Desert.

The astronomers compared their measurements to supercomputer models that simulate the formation of cosmic structures from the Big Bang to the present. “The input to our simulations are the laws of Physics and the output is an artificial Universe which can be directly compared to astronomical data. I was delighted to see that these new measurements agree with the well-established paradigm for how cosmic structures form.” says Jose Oñorbe, from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, who led the supercomputer simulation effort. On a single laptop, these complex calculations would have required almost a thousand years to complete, but modern supercomputers enabled the researchers to carry them out in just a few weeks.

Joseph Hennawi, professor of physics at UC Santa Barbara who led the search for these rare quasar pairs, explains: “One reason why these small-scale fluctuations are so interesting is that they encode information about the temperature of gas in the cosmic web just a few billion years after the Big Bang.”

Astronomers believe that the matter in the Universe went through phase transitions billions of years ago, which dramatically changed its temperature. These phase transitions, known as cosmic reionization, occurred when the collective ultraviolet glow of all stars and quasars in the Universe became intense enough to strip electrons off the atoms in intergalactic space. How and when reionization occurred is one of the biggest open questions in the field of cosmology, and these new measurements provide important clues that will help narrate this chapter of cosmic history.

Reference
Rorai, A et al. Measurement of the small-scale structure of the intergalactic medium using close quasar pairs. Science; 28 Apr 2017; DOI: 10.1126/science.aaf9346

The study, published today in Nature Genetics and led by researchers from the Medical Research Council (MRC) Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge and other scientists in the international ReproGen consortium, also found new genetic evidence linking earlier timing of puberty to higher risk of several cancers known to be sensitive to sex-hormones in later life, including breast, ovary and endometrial cancers in women, and prostate cancer in men. These influences remained after controlling for body weight, which is important as body weight itself influences both the timing of puberty and the risk of some cancers.

Dr John Perry, Senior Investigator Scientist from the MRC Epidemiology Unit and senior author on the paper, says: “Previous studies suggested that the timing of puberty in childhood was associated with risks of disease decades later, but until now it was unclear if those were circumstantial observations, for example secondary to other factors such as body weight.

“Our current study identifies direct causal links between earlier puberty timing itself and increased cancer risk. This link could possibly be explained by higher levels of sex hormones throughout life, but we need to do more work to understand the exact mechanisms involved. We aim to understand these disease links and thereby contribute to the prevention of diseases in later life.”

The timing of puberty varies widely between individuals but tends to run closely within families. Earlier puberty timing may have advantages for some adolescents, for example for boys who engage actively in sports, but it appears to have largely negative effects on later health, such as higher risks of heart disease and some cancers.

By performing detailed assessments of genetic variants across the whole genome in 329,345 women, comprising data from 40 studies in the ReproGen consortium, UK Biobank, and consented 23andMe customers, this study identified 389 independent genetic signals for age at puberty in women. This observation was then confirmed in a further 39,543 women from the deCODE study, Iceland. Many of these genetic associations were also found to influence age at voice breaking, a comparable measure of puberty timing in men.

These findings shed light on the mechanisms that regulate puberty timing. Dr Perry adds: “These newly identified genetic factors explain one quarter of the estimated heritability of puberty timing. Our findings highlight the remarkable biological complexity of puberty timing, with likely thousands of genetic factors, in combination with numerous environmental triggers, acting together to control the timing of this key transition from childhood to adult life.”

Dr Ken Ong, also from the MRC Epidemiology Unit and joint senior author on the paper, says: “One of the more remarkable findings concerns the role of certain types of genes called imprinted genes, which are only active in your body when inherited specifically from one parent but not the other. We identified rare variants in two genes, which both lower the age of puberty when inherited from your father, but have no effect when inherited from your mother. This is intriguing as it suggests that mothers and fathers might benefit differently from puberty occurring at earlier or later ages in their children.”

Reference
Felix R. Day, Deborah J. Thompson, Hannes Helgason et al. Genomic analyses identify hundreds of variants associated with age at menarche and support a role for puberty timing in cancer risk. Nature Genetics; 24 April 2017; DOI: 10.1038/ng.3841

A failure to celebrate conservation successes means we miss vital opportunities to convince the public of “real and practical solutions” they can engage with, says a leading conservationist.

Writing in the journal Oryx, Andrew Balmford, Professor of Conservation Science at the University of Cambridge, argues that any progress risks being reversed if we “let drift the many gains that the conservation movement is making”.

Progress redefines what we consider normal, he says, as in the case of the smoking ban or rights for women. Such “positive shifting baselines” even extend to the green shoots of nature’s recovery through conservation – from birdlife in the UK’s Avalon marshes to monkeys in Brazilian forests.

However, Balmford says conservation improvements can quickly get taken for granted. When combined with the seemingly endless torrent of bad news about nature, he believes the overall effect can render people hopeless.

“If we forget where we’ve come from, we risk allowing things to slip backwards,” he writes, pointing to examples in the UK and US where early species recoveries have already led to official sanctioning of hunting and culling of partially restored populations.

In an effort to shift the balance towards celebrating and reinforcing success, Balmford and colleagues from the Cambridge Conservation Initiative are organising Cambridge University’s contribution to a day of global action. #EarthOptimism will promote a much more positive outlook on the future of the natural world.

Taking place on 22 April, Earth Day, #EarthOptimism summits are being coordinated across more than 20 cities including Washington, London, Dallas and Helsinki. The Cambridge event features an open invitation to hear ‘Stories of Hope’ from noted naturalists such as legendary primatologist and University alumnus Jane Goodall, and Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker.

There will also be a ‘Solutions Fair’, with interactive examples of the choices everyone can make in their lives to take positive actions for the planet: from more sustainable eating to smart purchasing.

“Many of us want to make a difference, but lack credible information about how we can have real impact,” says Balmford. “Empowering people with practical suggestions is key to understanding we are all part of the solution.”

Sir David Attenborough, for whom the new conservation campus building at Cambridge is named, will also be in attendance at Cambridge #EarthOptimism.

“While we cannot ignore the threats to nature, there are a growing number of examples of improvements in the health of species and habitats, along with benefits to human well-being, thanks to conservation action,” said Attenborough.

“But conservation cannot succeed through experts alone. The decisions that we all make in our day-to-day lives are critical for its success.”

Balmford has long argued for the importance of celebrating conservation victories. In 2012, he published a book, Wild Hope, which collected examples of good news from the natural world.

“You have to show people that their actions can change the world,” he says. “You will never motivate people by just giving them bad news.”

In the latest article, Balmford highlights recent reasons to be slightly more cheerful: restored corridors of Brazilian forests leading to a rebound by tiny monkeys called golden lion tamarins; giant pandas no longer categorised as Endangered; and protected areas helping to rebuild fish stocks in the Amazon.

Cambridge #EarthOptimism will feature more good news from nature, including resurgent seabirds and harmonious human-jaguar coexistence.

However, Balmford warns that such progress can fall victim to complacency if people are not aware of and championing these positive changes.

In the UK, he flags the resurgence of some raptor species such as the red kite – down to under forty birds in the 1960s – and the common buzzard. This partial recovery has already led to legalised culling of buzzards, to protect the economic interests of a shooting industry that annually releases millions of non-native game birds into the countryside.

Similarly, in the US limited recovery of wolf populations – still at less than 2% of historic levels – has led to some states delisting wolves as endangered, opening the animal up to hunting.

“If as a result of positive shifting baselines we fail to remind ourselves and others of where we would be without conservation, the progress we have made risks being reversed,” says Balmford.

“Overturning the huge declines that nature is now experiencing will take a long time, and require fundamental shifts in our behaviour. But if we learn from the successes that conservation has already achieved, we can buy ourselves and the world around us much more time for those changes to take place.”

Misfolded proteins build up in the brain in several neurodegenerative diseases and are a major factor in dementias such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s as well as prion diseases. Previously, the team found that the accumulation of misfolded proteins in mice with prion disease over-activates a natural defence mechanism, ‘switching off’ the vital production of new proteins in brain cells. They then found switching protein production back on with an experimental drug halted neurodegeneration. However, the drug tested was toxic to the pancreas and not suitable for testing in humans.

In the latest study, published today in Brain, the team tested 1,040 compounds from the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke, first in worms (C.elegans) which have a functioning nervous system and are a good experimental model for screening drugs to be used on the nervous system and then in mammalian cells. This revealed a number of suitable candidate compounds that could then be tested in mouse models of prion disease and a form of familial tauopathy (frontotemporal dementia – FTD), both of which had been protected by the experimental – but toxic – compounds in the team’s previous studies.

The researchers identified two drugs that restored protein production rates in mice – trazodone hydrochloride, a licensed antidepressant, and dibenzoylmethane, a compound being trialled as an anti-cancer drug. Both drugs prevented the emergence of signs of brain cell damage in most of the prion-diseased mice and restored memory in the FTD mice. In both mouse models, the drugs reduced brain shrinkage which is a feature of neurodegenerative disease.

Professor Giovanna Mallucci, who led the team from the Medical Research Council’s (MRC) Toxicology Unit in Leicester and is now based at the University of Cambridge, was today announced as one of the five associate directors of the UK Dementia Research Institute. She said: “We know that trazodone is safe to use in humans, so a clinical trial is now possible to test whether the protective effects of the drug we see on brain cells in mice with neurodegeneration also applies to people in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias. We could know in 2-3 years whether this approach can slow down disease progression, which would be a very exciting first step in treating these disorders.

“Interestingly, trazodone has been used to treat the symptoms of patients in later stages of dementia, so we know it is safe for this group.  We now need to find out whether giving the drug to patients at an early stage could help arrest or slow down the disease through its effects on this pathway.”

The research was funded by the MRC and Professor Mallucci was also funded by a grant from Alzheimer’s Society and Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation.

Dr Rob Buckle, Chief Science Officer at the MRC, said: “This study builds on previous work by this team and is a great example of how really innovative discovery science can quite quickly translate into the possibility of real drugs to treat disease.”

Dr Doug Brown, Director of Research and Development at the Alzheimer’s Society, said: “We’re excited by the potential of these findings. They show that a treatment approach originally discovered in mice with prion disease might also work to prevent the death of brain cells in some forms of dementia. This research is at a very early stage and has not yet been tested in people – but as one of the drugs is already available as a treatment for depression, the time taken to get from the lab to the pharmacy could be dramatically reduced.”

Reference
Halliday, M et al. Repurposed drugs targeting eIF2α-P-mediated translational repression prevent neurodegeneration in mice. Brain; 20 April 2017; DOI: 10.1093/brain/awx074

Adapted from a press release by the Medical Research Council

Self-awareness in both animals and young children is usually tested using the ‘mirror self-recognition test’ to see if they understand that the reflection in front of them is actually their own. Only a few species have so far shown themselves capable of self-recognition – great apes, dolphins, magpies and elephants. It is thought to be linked to more complex forms of perspective taking and empathy.

Critics, however, have argued that this test is limited in its ability to investigate complex thoughts and understanding, and that it may be less useful in testing animals who rely less on vision than other species.

One potential complement to the mirror test as a measure of self-understanding may be a test of ‘body-awareness’. This test looks at how individuals may recognise their bodies as obstacles to success in a problem-solving task. Such a task could demonstrate an individual’s understanding of its body in relation to its physical environment, which may be easier to define than the distinction between oneself and another demonstrated through success at the mirror test.

To test for body-awareness in Asian elephants, Dr Josh Plotnik, visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge, visiting assistant professor of psychology at Hunter College, City University of New York and founder of conservation charity Think Elephants International, devised a new test of self-awareness together with his colleague Rachel Dale (now a PhD student at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna). The new test was adapted from one in which children were asked to push a shopping trolley, but the trolley was attached to a mat on which they were standing.

In the elephant version of the test, Plotnik and Dale attached a stick to a rubber mat using a rope; the elephants were then required to walk onto the mat, pick up the stick and pass it to an experimenter standing in front of them. The researchers wanted to investigate whether elephants understood the role of their bodies as potential obstacles to success in the task by observing how and when the animals removed themselves from the mat in order to exchange the stick. In one control arm of the test, the stick was unattached to the mat, meaning the elephant could pass the stick while standing on the mat.

The results of the study, which was largely funded by a Newton International Fellowship from the Royal Society awarded to Dr Plotnik, are published today in the journal Scientific Reports.

“Elephants are well regarded as one of the most intelligent animals on the planet, but we still need more empirical, scientific evidence to support this belief,” says Dale. “We know, for example, that they are capable of thoughtful cooperation and empathy, and are able to recognise themselves in a mirror. These abilities are highly unusual in animals and very rare indeed in non-primates. We wanted to see if they also show ‘body-awareness’.”

Plotnik and Dale found that the elephants stepped off the mat to pass the stick to the experimenter significantly more often during the test than during the control arm. Elephants stepped off the mat an average (mean) of around 42 out of 48 times during the test compared to just three times on average during the control.

“This is a deceptively simple test, but its implications are quite profound,” says Dr Plotnik. “The elephants understood that their bodies were getting in the way, so they stepped aside to enable themselves to complete the task. In a similar test, this is something that young children are unable to understand until they are about two years old.

“This implies that elephants may be capable of recognising themselves as separate from objects or their environment. This means that they may have a level of self-understanding, coupled with their passing of the mirror test, which is quite rare in the animal kingdom.”

Species that have demonstrated a capacity for self-recognition in the mirror test all show varying levels of cooperative problem-solving, perspective taking and empathy, suggesting that ‘self-awareness’ may relate to effective cooperative-living in socially intelligent animals. A more developed self-understanding of how an individual relates to those around may underlie more complex forms of empathic perspective taking. It may also underlie how an individual targets help towards others in need. Both aspect are seen in studies of human children.

Both self-awareness as demonstrated by the mirror test and body-awareness as demonstrated by the current study help scientists better understand how an animal’s understanding of self and of its place in the environment may impact social decision-making in the wild.

Plotnik argues that studies such as this are important for helping increase our understanding of and appreciation for the behaviour and intelligence of animals. He also says that understanding elephant behaviour has important implications for the development of human/elephant conflict mitigation strategies in places like Thailand and India, where humans and elephants are competing for land. Only through careful consideration of both human and elephant needs can long-term solutions be sustainable.

“The more we can understand about elephants’ behaviour, the more we can understand what their needs are, how they think and the strains they face in their social relationships,” he says. “This will help us if we are going to try to come up with viable long term solutions to the problems that these animals face in the wild, especially those that bring them into regular conflict with humans.”

Reference
Dale, R, and Plotnik, JM. Elephants know when their bodies are obstacles to success in a novel transfer task. Scientific Reports; 12 April 2017; DOI: 10.1038/srep46309

During a ten-day research trip, the team carried out many proof-of-concept flights at the summits of both Volcán de Fuego and Volcán de Pacaya in Guatemala.  Using lightweight modern sensors they measured temperature, humidity and thermal data within the volcanic clouds and took images of multiple eruptions in real-time.

This is one of the first times that bespoke fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been used at a volcano such as Fuego, where the lack of close access to the summit vent has prevented robust gas measurements. Funding from the Cabot Institute has helped the team to develop technologies to enable this capability. The UAVs were successfully flown at distances of up to 8 km away, and at a height of over 3 km above the launch site.

The group plan to return to Guatemala later in the year with a wider range of sensors including a gas analyser, a four-stage filter pack; carbon stubs for ash sampling; thermal and visual cameras, and atmospheric sensors.

Dr Emma Liu, a volcanologist from the Department of Earth Sciences at Cambridge, said: “Drones offer an invaluable solution to the challenges of in-situ sampling and routine monitoring of volcanic emissions, particularly those where the near-vent region is prohibitively hazardous or inaccessible.

“These sensors not only help to understand emissions from volcanoes, they could also be used in the future to help alert local communities of impending eruptions – particularly if the flights can be automated.”

Dr Kieran Wood, Senior Research Associate in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Bristol, added: “Even during this initial campaign we were able to meet significant science and engineering targets. For example, multiple imaging flights over several days captured the rapidly changing topography of Fuego’s summit. These showed that the volcano was erupting from not just one, but two active summit vents.”

Taking time out from their sample flights, the research group also used their aircraft to map the topology of a barranca and the volcanic deposits within it. These deposits were formed by a recent pyroclastic flow, a fast-moving cloud of superheated ash and gas, which travelled down the barranca from Fuego. The data captured will assist in modelling flow pathways and the potential impact of future volcanic eruptions on nearby settlements.

Dr Matt Watson, Reader in Natural Hazards in the School of Earth Sciences at Bristol, said: “This is exciting initial research for future investigations, and would not be possible without a very close collaboration between volcanology and engineering.”

Adapted from a press release by the University of Bristol.

The mucosal lining inside the uterus is called the endometrium. Over the course of the menstrual cycle, its composition changes, becoming thicker and rich with blood vessels in preparation for pregnancy, but if the woman does not conceive, the uterus sheds this tissue, causing the woman’s period.

A team from the Centre for Trophoblast Research, which this year celebrates its tenth anniversary, was able to grow the organoids in culture from cells derived from endometrial tissue and maintain the organoids in culture for several months, faithfully reproducing the genetic signature of the endometrium – in other words, the pattern of activity of genes in the lining of the uterus. They also demonstrated that the organoids respond to female sex hormones and early pregnancy signals, secreting what are collectively known as ‘uterine milk’ proteins that nourish the embryo during the first months of pregnancy.

The findings of the study, funded by the Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust and the Centre for Trophoblast Research, are published today in the journal Nature Cell Biology.

The organoids are capable of generating both secretory (red) and epithelial  (cyan) cells of the uterus. Image: Centre for Trophoblast Research

“These organoids provide a major step forward in investigating the changes that occur during the menstrual cycle and events during early pregnancy when the placenta is established,” says Dr Margherita Turco, the study’s first author. “These events are impossible to capture in a woman, so until now we have had to rely on animal studies.”

“Events in early pregnancy lay the foundations for a successful birth, and our new technique should provide a window into this events,” adds Professor Graham Burton, Director of the Centre for Trophoblast Research, and joint senior author with Ashley Moffett of the study. “There’s increasing evidence that complications of pregnancy, such as restricted growth of the fetus, stillbirth and pre-eclampsia – which appear later in pregnancy – have their origins around the time of implantation, when the placenta begins to develop.”

Research in animal species such as mice and sheep has shown that factors secreted by the endometrial glands are critical for enabling a developing fertilised egg (known as the ‘conceptus’) to implant into the wall of the uterus. There is also strong evidence that the conceptus sends signals to the endometrial glands that then stimulate the development of the placenta. In this way, the conceptus is able to stimulate its own development through a ‘dialogue’ with the mother; if it fails, the result is loss of the pregnancy or severe growth restriction of the fetus.

Professor Burton and colleagues believe that using the organoids will allow them to investigate in greater detail how the conceptus communicates with the glands, identifying the full repertoire of factors released in response and testing their effects on placental tissues. His team will be collaborating with the Bourn Hall Clinic – a fertility clinic near Cambridge – to investigate whether parts of this circuitry are impaired or deficient in women experiencing difficulty in conceiving, and if so to devise potential new treatments.

The technique also enables the researchers to grow organoids from endometrial cancer cells. As proof-of-principle, this will allow them to model and understand diseases of the endometrium, including cancer of the uterus and endometriosis.

Organoid cultures have proven to be powerful tools for investigating the behaviour of other organ systems. Members of the Centre for Trophoblast Research are confident that their new advance will provide a much-needed window on events during the earliest stages of pregnancy, when the conceptus and mother first physically interact.

Reference
Turco, MY et al. Long-term, hormone-responsive organoid cultures of human endometrium in a chemically defined medium. Nature Cell Biology; 10 April 2017; DOI: 10.1038/ncb3516

The researchers have designed a porous material that utilises a vascular structure, such as that found in the veins of a leaf, and could make energy transfers more efficient. The material could improve the performance of rechargeable batteries, optimizing the charge and discharge process and relieving stresses within the battery electrodes, which, at the moment, limit their life span. The same material could be used for high performance gas sensing or for catalysis to break down organic pollutants in water.

To design this bio-inspired material, an international team comprising scientists from China, the United Kingdom, United States and Belgium is mimicking the rule known as ‘Murray’s Law’ which helps natural organisms survive and grow. According to this Law, the entire network of pores existing on different scales in such biological systems is interconnected in a way to facilitate the transfer of liquids and minimize resistance throughout the network. The plant stems of a tree, or leaf veins, for example, optimize the flow of nutrients for photosynthesis with both high efficiency and minimum energy consumption by regularly branching out to smaller scales. In the same way, the surface area of the tracheal pores of insects remains constant along the diffusion pathway to maximize the delivery of carbon dioxide and oxygen in gaseous forms.

The team, led by Prof Bao-Lian Su, a life member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge and who is also based at Wuhan University of Technology in China and at the University of Namur in Belgium, adapted Murray’s Law for the fabrication of the first ever synthetic ‘Murray material’ and applied it to three processes: photocatalysis, gas sensing and lithium ion battery electrodes. In each, they found that the multi-scale porous networks of their synthetic material significantly enhanced the performance of these processes.

Prof Su says:

“This study demonstrates that by adapting Murray’s Law from biology and applying it to chemistry, the performance of materials can be improved significantly. The adaptation could benefit a wide range of porous materials and improve functional ceramics and nano-metals used for energy and environmental applications.”

“The introduction of the concept of Murray’s Law to industrial processes could revolutionize the design of reactors with highly enhanced efficiency, minimum energy, time, and raw material consumption for a sustainable future.”

Writing in Nature Communications this week, the team describes how it used zinc oxide (ZnO) nanoparticles as the primary building block of their Murray material. These nanoparticles, containing small pores within them, form the lowest level of the porous network. The team arranged the ZnO particles through a layer-by layer evaporation-driven self-assembly process. This creates a second level of porous networks between the particles. During the evaporation process, the particles also form larger pores due to solvent evaporation, which represents the top level of pores, resulting in a three level Murray material. The team successfully fabricated these porous structures with the precise diameter ratios required to obey Murray’s law, enabling the efficient transfer of materials across the multilevel pore network.

Co-author, Dr Tawfique Hasan, of the Cambridge Graphene Centre, part of the University’s Department of Engineering, adds:

“This very first demonstration of a Murray material fabrication process is incredibly simple and is entirely driven by the nanoparticle self-assembly. Large scale manufacturability of this porous material is possible, making it an exciting, enabling technology, with potential impact across many applications.”

With its synthetic Murray material, with precise diameter ratios between the pore levels, the team demonstrated an efficient breakdown of an organic dye in water by using photocatalysis.  This showed it was easy for the dye to enter the porous network leading to efficient and repeated reaction cycles. The team also used the same Murray material with a structure similar to the breathing networks of insects, for fast and sensitive gas detection with high repeatability.

The team proved that its Murray material can significantly improve the long term stability and fast charge/discharge capability for lithium ion storage, with a capacity improvement of up to 25 times compared to state of the art graphite material currently used in lithium ion battery electrodes. The hierarchical nature of the pores also reduces the stresses in these electrodes during the charge/discharge processes, improving their structural stability and resulting in a longer life time for energy storage devices.

The team envisions that the strategy could be used effectively in materials designs for energy and environmental applications.

The research was partially supported by the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Reference

Xianfeng Zheng et al: ‘Bio-inspired Murray materials for mass transfer and activity’Nature Communications 6th April 2017

DOI:10.1038/ncomms14921

In his keynote speech, Professor Baron-Cohen, Director of the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge, argued that even with the UN Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities having been adopted in 2006, people with autism still do not enjoy human rights to the same extent as everyone else.

At least 1% of the world’s population is on the autism spectrum, which equates to some 70 million people with autism on the planet.  Autism is a spectrum of neurological disabilities involving difficulties with social relationships, communication, adjusting to unexpected change, dealing with ambiguity, and entailing sensory hypersensitivity and anxiety. Autism also leads to a different perceptual and learning style, so that the person has a preference for detail, and develops unusually narrow interests, and an unusually strong preference for facts, patterns, repetition and routine.

“People with autism account for a significant minority of the population worldwide, yet we are failing them in so many respects,” he said. “This creates barriers to their participation in society and to their autonomy that must be addressed. We have had a UN Convention to support people with disabilities for over 10 years now and yet we still are not fulfilling their basic human rights.”

In his speech, Professor Baron-Cohen reminded the UN that in Nazi Germany during the Holocaust, people with intellectual disability were killed in their thousands, under the compulsory euthanasia laws. Many of these individuals likely had autism, even before we had a name for it, as the first report of autism by Dr Leo Kanner was published during the Second World War.

However, historical violations of the human rights of people with autism go back further than that: in the US, in the 1920s, many States passed laws to compulsorily sterilize people with intellectual disability, including those whom today we would recognize had autism, in the name of eugenics.

Professor Baron-Cohen highlighted six examples where he believes the human rights of people with autism are not being met.

First, the right to dignity: According to the National Autistic Society in the UK, half of adults with autism report they have been abused by someone they thought was a friend. Half of adults with autism report they stay home because of fear of being abused in some way. Individuals with intellectual disability, including those with autism, are three times more likely to be victims of abuse or neglect, robbery, or assault.

Second, the right to education: one in five children with autism have been excluded from school. Whatever the reason for being excluded, they are being deprived of the right to education.  And of the other 80% of children with autism who have stayed in school, half report having been bullied, which is a risk factor for depression.

Third, the right to equal access to public services: one in three adults with autism experiences severe mental ill health because of lack of support. In Professor Baron-Cohen’s clinic for adults with Asperger Syndrome, a subgroup of autism, two thirds have felt suicidal and one third have felt so bad that they have attempted suicide. Research from the Universities of Cambridge and Coventry in the UK found that among those who have died by suicide, approximately 12% had definite or probable autism. Professor Baron-Cohen called for a minute’s silence to remember those people with autism who have died by suicide.

Finding such a high rate of autism in people who have died by suicide is not surprising when you consider how many of these individuals did not have the benefit of early diagnosis, explained Professor Baron-Cohen. Early diagnosis is possible in childhood – there are screening measures that can detect autism in young toddlers, but most countries do not screen for autism.

He drew attention to the fact that in the UK, in many areas, the waiting time for a diagnosis can be up to a year or longer, and that in high- and middle-income countries, people with autism may receive a formal diagnosis, but in low-income countries, the majority of people with autism may remain undiagnosed, either because of stigma, ignorance, or lack of basic services.

Fourth, the right to work and employment: Professor Baron-Cohen said that only 15% of adults with autism are in full time employment, despite many having good intelligence and talents. The right to work should extend to everyone, whatever support they might need. Unemployment is another well-known risk factor for depression.

He commended some enlightened employers, like the German company Auticon, the Danish company Specialisterne, and the German company SAP, for setting an example of how to help people with autism into employment and how employers can make reasonable adjustments for people with autism.

Fifth, the right to protection from discrimination, and the right to a cultural life, and to rest and leisure: He described how many people with autism have been asked to leave a supermarket or a cinema, because of their different behaviour. He said this is discrimination and again would never be tolerated for other kinds of disabilities.

In addition, half of adults with autism report feeling lonely, a third of them do not leave the house most days, and two thirds of them feel depressed because of loneliness. One in four adults with autism have no friends at all.

Finally, the right to protection of the law, and the right to a fair, impartial trial: one in five young people with autism have been stopped and questioned by the police, and 5% have been arrested. Two-thirds of police officers report they have received no training in how to interview a person with autism. Many legal cases involving someone with autism result in imprisonment for crimes the person with autism may not have committed, or for crimes others committed, but the person with autism became tangled up in, because of their social naivete. Some of these crimes are the result of the person with autism becoming obsessed with a particular topic, a product of their disability, and yet the courts often ignore autism as a mitigating factor.

Professor Baron-Cohen ended his address with a call to action. “We must take action. I want to see an investigation into the violation of human rights in people with autism. I want to see increased surveillance of their needs, in every country. And I want us to be continuously asking people with autism what their lives are like, and what they need, so that they are fully involved in shaping their future. Only this way can we ensure their human rights are met.”

As we age, we see a progressive decline of function occur throughout the body, but until now it has not been clear why this decline occurs and why it happens at different rates for different parts of the body. To understand this process, scientists must unpick all of the mechanisms of ageing at the molecular level, for every tissue.

The immune system is like a symphony orchestra, with many different types and subtypes of cells working together to fight infections. But as the immune system ages, its response to infection weakens for reasons that are not yet clear. One long-standing debate amongst scientists concerns two central hypotheses: either the functional degradation is caused by a loss of cellular performance, or it is down to a loss of coordination among cells.

To resolve the debate, scientists at the University of Cambridge, the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute studied many different cell types, analysing ‘average’ gene expression profiles. To do so, they employed high-resolution single-cell sequencing technology to create new insights into how cell-to-cell variability is linked with ageing. The researchers sequenced the RNA of naïve and memory CD4+ T cells in young and old mice, in both stimulated and unstimulated states.

Their findings clearly showed that loss of coordination is a key component of the impaired immune performance caused by T cell ageing.

“You could think of DNA sequencing as a fruit smoothie,” explains Dr John Marioni, Group Leader at EMBL-EBI and at the University of Cambridge’s Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute (CRUK-CI). “Traditional sequencing technology is a bit like taking a sip of the smoothie, then trying to guess what the ingredients are. Single-cell genomics now lets us study the ingredients individually, so we get direct insight into the constituent parts. Extrapolating, this means that single-cell sequencing allows researchers to individually look at thousands of genes at any given time.”

Dr Duncan Odom, Group Leader at the CRUK-CI and associate faculty at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, shares a further analogy to explain how immune cells fight infection. “Imagine the immune system as a ‘cell army’, ready to protect the body from infection. Our research revealed that this army is well coordinated in young animals, with all the cells working together and operating like a Greek phalanx to block the infection.”

Image: Spencer Phillips, The European Bioinformatics Institute 

The researchers say this tight coordination makes the immune system stronger, and allows it to fight infection more effectively. The team’s study shows that as the animal gets older, cell coordination breaks down.

“Although individual cells might still be strong, the lack of coordination between them makes their collective effectiveness lower,” Odom adds.

Previous studies have shown that in young animals, immunological activation results in tightly regulated gene expression. This study further reveals that activation results in a decrease in cell-to-cell variability. Ageing increased the heterogeneity of gene expression in populations of two mice species, as well as in different types of immune cells. This suggests that increased cell-to-cell transcriptional variability may be a hallmark of ageing across most mammalian tissues

“There is a great deal of interest in how biological ageing happens, but not much is known about molecular ageing,” says Dr Celia Pilar Martinez-Jimenez, experimental lead from the CRUK-CI. “This research initiative explored a new facet of cell response to disease, while also tackling questions related to ageing.”

Nils Eling, computational lead of the project and PhD student at EMBL-EBI and CRUK-CI adds: “The advantage of analysing gene expression from single cells is to detect how cell populations synchronise their response. It is interesting to see that ageing strongly distorts this response – a phenomenon which could not be observed before.”

The interdisciplinary study paves the way for a more in-depth exploration of the mechanisms by which different types of cells age. It also illustrates the potential of single-cell sequencing to enable a richer understanding of cell development and activity.

Reference
Martinez-Jimenez, C.P., Eling, N et al Ageing increases cell-to-cell transcriptional variability upon immune stimulation. Science; 30 Mar 2017; DOI: 10.1126/science.aah4115

Adapted from a press release from EMBL-EBI

Writing in Science this week, the team, from the University of Cambridge, the University of East Anglia and the University of Eastern Finland, describes how it developed a new type of material that uses rotatable molecules to emit light faster than has ever been achieved before. It could lead to televisions, smart-phone displays and room lights which are more power-efficient, brighter and longer lasting than those currently on the market.

Corresponding author, Dr Dan Credgington, of the University of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, says:

“It’s amazing that the very first demonstration of this new kind of material already beats the performance of technologies which have taken decades to develop. If the effect we have discovered can be harnessed across the spectrum, it could change the way we generate light.”

Molecular materials are the driving force behind modern organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). Invented in the 1980s, these devices emit light when electricity is applied to the organic (carbon based) molecules in them. OLED lighting is now widely used in televisions, computers and mobile phones. However it has to overcome a fundamental issue which has limited efficiency when it comes to converting electrical energy into light.

Passing an electric current through these molecules puts them into an excited state, but only 25% of these are ‘bright’ states that can emit light rapidly. The remaining 75% are ‘dark’ states that usually waste their energy as heat limiting the efficiency of the OLED device. This mode of operation produces more heat than light just like in an old fashioned filament light bulb. The underlying reason is a quantum property called ‘spin’ and the dark states have the wrong type.

One approach to tackle this problem is to use rare elements, such as iridium, which help the dark states to emit light by allowing them to change their spin. The problem is this process takes too long, so the energy tied up in the dark states can build up to damaging levels and make the OLED unstable. This effect is such a problem for blue emitting materials (blue light has the highest energy of all the colours) that, in practice, the approach can’t be used.

Dr Le Yang holding one of the most efficient OLED devices, developed in Cambridge 

Chemists at the University of East Anglia have now developed a new type of material where two different organic molecules are joined together by an atom of copper or gold. The resulting structure looks a bit like a propeller. The compounds, which can be made by a simple one-pot procedure from readily available materials, were found to be surprisingly luminescent. By rotating their “propeller”, dark states formed on these materials become twisted, which allows them to change their spin quickly. The process significantly increases the rate at which electrical energy is converted into light achieving an efficiency of almost 100% and preventing the damaging build-up of dark states.

Dr Dawei Di and Dr Le Yang, from Cambridge, were co-lead authors long with Dr Alexander Romanov, from the UEA. He says:

“Our discovery that simple compounds of copper and gold can be used as bright and efficient materials for OLEDs demonstrates how chemistry can bring tangible benefits to society. All previous attempts to build OLEDs based on these metals have led to only mediocre success. The problem is that those materials required the sophisticated organic molecules to be bound with copper but has not met industrial standards. Our results address an on-going research and development challenge which can bring affordable high-tech OLED products to every home.”

Computational modelling played a major role in uncovering this novel way of harnessing intramolecular twisting motions for energy conversion.

Professor Mikko Linnolahti, of the University of Eastern Finland, where this was done, comments:

“This work forms the case study for how we can explain the principles behind the functioning of these new materials and their application in OLEDS.”

The next step is to design new molecules that take full advantage of this mechanism, with the ultimate goal of removing the need for rare elements entirely. This would solve the longest standing problem in the field – how to make OLEDs without having to trade-off between efficiency and stability.

Co-lead author, Dr Dawei Di, of the Cavendish Laboratory, says:

“Our work shows that excited-state spin and molecular motion can work together to strongly impact the performance of OLEDs. This is an excellent demonstration of how quantum mechanics, an important branch of fundamental science, can have direct consequences for a commercial application which has a massive global market.”

Reference:

Dawei Di et al: “High-performance light-emitting diodes based on carbene-metal-amides” is published in Science 30th March 2017

DOI 10.1126/science.aah4345

Schoolchildren who receive words of encouragement from a teacher are significantly more likely to continue their education beyond the age of 16 than those who do not, a new study suggests.

The influence of teacher encouragement appears to be much greater on students whose own parents never progressed past compulsory education – an important indicator of a less advantaged background.

For students from these backgrounds, encouragement increased entry into post-16 education from just over half to around two-thirds.

The research also found that encouragement from a teacher has the greatest influence on those students most likely to be on the margin for university attendance.

The University of Cambridge study used ‘big data’ techniques to look at the long-term impact of student-teacher rapport, and is the first to analyse the role it plays in university access.

The findings, published in the journal Research in Higher Education, show that further education and social mobility policymaking might benefit from increased focus on the “relational aspects” of interactions between teachers and students.

“Teachers are often relegated to course deliverers and classroom managers in the policy discussions around further education. However, it’s clear that teachers have more forms of influencing inequality than is currently appreciated,” said study author Dr Ben Alcott from Cambridge’s Faculty of Education.

“When people speak of a positive school experience, they frequently cite a personal relationship with a teacher, and the encouragement they were given. Our research helps quantify that impact and show its significance, particularly for addressing social mobility.

“The importance of that teacher-student connection can get lost in the midst of exam statistics or heat of political debate.”

Some 4,300 adolescents in England were tracked from the age of thirteen onwards, completing a detailed questionnaire every year for the next seven years. During their last year of compulsory education, the students were asked whether a teacher had encouraged them to stay on in full-time education.

Dr Alcott used mathematical modelling to “match” and compare students with similar attainment, experience and life histories – helping control for the effects these differences had. This makes it possible for the influence of teacher encouragement alone to be measured.

“This approach brings us plausibly close to reading the long-term effect of encouragement from teachers with the data we currently have available,” Alcott said.

He found that, on average across all backgrounds and abilities, rates of entry into post-16 education were eight percentage points higher in students that reported receiving encouragement (74%) over those that said they did not (66%).

Based on previous examination scores (the UK’s SATs), teacher encouragement made the most difference for students with average academic achievement – those often on the verge of going either way when it comes to further education.

For Year 11 (or 10th grade) students in the middle third of results rankings, encouragement was linked to a 10 percentage-point increase in the likelihood of university entry, yet had no observable impact on students in the upper and lower thirds.

The effect of teacher encouragement on students varied considerably depending on background – with the greatest difference seen for students with lower levels of parental education.

For students with parents who lacked any formal qualification, post-16 education enrolment increased 12 percentage points amongst those who received teacher encouragement (64%) compared with those who didn’t (52%).

This effect appeared to last into higher education, with that initial encouragement increasing the likelihood of university entry by 10 percentage points – one-fifth higher than students from similar backgrounds who did not report being encouraged.

Students whose parents had some qualifications, but none past compulsory education, saw encouragement from teachers boost post-16 education by 13 percentage points (67% compared to 54%) and university entry by seven percentage points.

For those with parents who held university degrees, however, teacher encouragement mattered much less: increasing continued education by just six percentage points and making no difference at all to university attendance.

However, Alcott found that students from more advantaged backgrounds were likelier to report being encouraged by a teacher to stay in education.

For example, 22% of students receiving encouragement had a parent with a university degree, compared to 15% of those who did not. Similarly, students who do not report encouragement are a third more likely to have an unemployed parent (12% versus 9%).

Alcott, who formerly taught in a London academy school himself, says: “These results suggest that teachers themselves and the relationships they develop with students are real engines for social mobility.

“Many teachers take the initiative to encourage students in the hope they will progress in education long after they have left the classroom. It’s important that teachers know the effect their efforts have, and the children likely to benefit most.”