The point in our development when the whole body plan is set, just before individual organs start to develop, is known as gastrulation. Understanding this point in very early development is vital to understanding how humans and animals develop and how things go wrong. One of the biggest challenges in studying gastrulation is the very small number of cells that make up an embryo at this stage.

“If we want to better understand the natural world around us, one of the fundamental questions is, how do animals develop?” says Professor Bertie Gottgens from the Wellcome Trust-Medical Research Council Cambridge Stem Cell Institute at the University of Cambridge. “How do you turn from an egg into an animal, with all sorts of tissues? Many of the things that go wrong, like birth defects, are caused by problems in early development. We need to have an atlas of normal development for comparison when things go wrong.”

Today, thanks to advances in single-cell sequencing, the team was able to analyse over 1000 individual cells of gastrulating mouse embryos. The result is an atlas of gene expression during very early, healthy mammalian development.

“Single-cell technologies are a major change over what we’ve used before – we can now make direct observations to see what’s going on during the earliest stages of development,” says Dr John Marioni, Research Group Leader at EMBL-EBI, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the University of Cambridge. “We can look at individual cells and see the whole set of genes that are active at stages of development, which until now have been very difficult to access.

“Once we have that, we can take cells from embryos in which some genetic factors are not working properly at a specific developmental stage, and map them to the healthy atlas to better understand what might be happening.”

To illustrate the usefulness of the atlas, the team studied what happened when a genetic factor essential for the formation of blood cells was removed.

“It wasn’t what we expected at all. We found that cells which in healthy embryos would commit to becoming blood cells would actually become confused in the embryos lacking the key gene, effectively getting stuck,” says Dr Marioni. “What is so exciting about this is that it demonstrates how we can now look at the very small number of cells that are actually making the decision at the precise time point when the decision is being made. It gives us a completely different perspective on development.”

“What is really exciting for me is that we can look at things that we know are important but were never able to see before – perhaps like people felt when they got hold of a microscope for the first time, suddenly seeing worlds they’d never thought of,” says Professor Gottgens. “This is just the beginning of how single cell genomics will transform our understanding of early development.”

The study was made possible by a Wellcome Trust Strategic Award to study Gastrulation and by the Sanger/EBI Single Cell Genomics Centre.

Reference
Scialdone A, et al. Resolving early mesoderm diversification through single-cell expression profiling. Nature; 6 July 2016; DOI: 10.1038/nature18633

Adapted from a press release from the European Bioinformatics Institute.

Why we live in a universe made of matter, rather than a universe with no matter at all, is one of science’s biggest questions. The behaviour of antimatter, a rare oppositely charged counterpart to normal matter, is thought to be key to understanding why. However, the nature of antimatter is a mystery. Scientists use data from the LHCb and ALPHA experiments at CERN to study antiparticles and antiatoms in order to learn more about it. Some of these scientists, from the University of Cambridge and other UK institutions, will present their work at the Royal Society’s annual Summer Science Exhibition which opens to the public tomorrow (5 July 2016).

At CERN’s Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator, matter and antimatter versions of fundamental particles are produced when the accelerator beams smash into each other. The LHCb experiment records the traces these particles leave behind as they fly outwards from the beam collisions with exquisite precision, enabling scientists to identify the particles and deduce whether they are matter or antimatter. At larger scales, antimatter is studied in CERN’s antiproton decelerator complex, when antiprotons are joined with antielectrons to form anti-hydrogen atoms. The ALPHA experiment holds these antiatoms in suspension so that their structure and behavior can be studied. Both experiments are currently recording data that will enable scientists to carefully build up an understanding of why antimatter appears to behave the way it does.

The University of Cambridge is a founder institute of the LHCb experiment and plays a major part in the construction and operation of the detectors that determine the identity of particles. The detectors use the Ring-Imaging Cherenkov radiation technique via which particles emit radiation as they travel faster than the speed of light in the material of the detectors. The principles behind this technique and the data produced will be on view in the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition for visitors to examine.

Professor Val Gibson of the University of Cambridge and former UK Spokesperson for the experiment said: “Antimatter might sound like science fiction, but it is one of the biggest mysteries in science today. We’re going to show everyone just why it matters so much – from what it can tell us about the earliest universe, to how we study it at the frontiers of research, to how it has everyday uses in medical imaging.“

Visitors to the Exhibition will also be able to see how fundamental particles and antiparticles are identified with the LHCb experiment, talk to researchers to discover what this science is like, try the experimental techniques used to hold and study anti-atoms with the ALPHA experiment, and move, image and locate antimatter within a PET scanner system.

The Royal Society’s Summer Science Exhibition is weeklong festival of cutting edge science from across the UK, featuring 22 exhibits which give a glimpse into the future of science and tech. Visitors can meet the scientists who are on hand at their exhibits, take part in activities and live demonstrations and attend talks. Entrance is free.

A new study of the University of Cambridge anatomy collection suggests that the bodies of foetuses and babies were a “prized source of knowledge” by British scientists of the 18th and 19th centuries, and were dissected more commonly than previously thought and quite differently to adult cadavers.

Historical research combined with the archaeological assessment of collection specimens shows that foetus and infant cadavers were valued for the study of growth and development, and were often kept in anatomical museums.

Researchers say that socio-cultural factors and changes in the law, as well as the spread of infectious disease during the industrial revolution, dictated the availability of these small bodies for dissection.

The study, conducted by Jenna Dittmar and Piers Mitchell from Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, is the first to look specifically at how British scientists investigated the changing anatomy of childhood during the 1800s. The findings are published today in the Journal of Anatomy.

The researchers undertook studies of the skeletal collection retained from the former dissecting room of Cambridge’s department of anatomy, with specimen dates ranging from 1768 to 1913.

While the bodies of adults typically underwent a craniotomy – opening of the top of the skull using a saw – the researchers found that anatomists generally kept the skulls of foetuses and young children in one piece. From a total of 54 foetal and infant specimens in the collection, just one had undergone a craniotomy.

Careful study of the bone surface revealed that soft tissues had been gently removed using knives and brushes in order to preserve as much of the bones of the head as possible, although surgical instruments would have been similar to those used on the fully-grown. Tools for other purposes in adults, such as ‘bone nipper’ forceps, were likely used for dividing diminutive ribcages.

The research suggests that anatomists kept the skeletal remains of foetuses and infants for further study and use as teaching aids, whereas adults were frequently reburied after dissection.

“Foetal and infant bodies were clearly valued by anatomists, illustrated by the measures taken to preserve the remains intact and undamaged,” says Dittmar.

“The skulls appear to have been intentionally spared to preserve them for teaching or display. This may explain why so few children with signs of dissection on their bones have been recovered from the burial grounds of hospitals or parish churches, compared with adults.”

Literature from the late 18th century shows that the size of infant bodies made them preferable for certain ‘anatomical preparations’ in teaching, particularly for illuminating the anatomy of the nervous and circulatory systems, which required an entire body to be injected with coloured wax and displayed.

“The valuable and unique knowledge that could only be obtained from the examination of these developing bodies made them essential to the study of anatomy,” says Dittmar.

“During much of the 18th and 19th century, executed criminals provided the main legal access to cadavers, and it was previously thought that dissection of young children was relatively rare. However, changes in the law may have resulted in infant dissections becoming more common.”

The Murder Act in 1752 gave the judiciary power to allow executed murderers – almost entirely men – to be used for medical dissection. These felons hardly made a dent in the growing demand for bodies, and a black market flourished.

Bodies acquired (often grave robbed) by gangs of ‘resurrectionists’, or body-snatchers, were usually sold by the inch, so those of infants were not very profitable, although there are records of ‘smalls’ being traded.

The Anatomy Act of 1832 allowed workhouses and hospitals to donate the bodies of the poor if unclaimed by family, in an attempt to abate the resurrectionists. Infectious diseases such as cholera and tuberculosis were common killers during the industrial revolution, and a major cause of infant death in hospitals and beyond. Workhouses were desperate places, and nearly always lethal to infants.

Until 1838, a legal loophole did not require a stillborn baby to be registered, and a body could be easily sold to an anatomist through an intermediary. But the New Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 may have had the most significant repercussions of any law for infant material in anatomy collections, say the researchers.

The Act ended parish relief for unmarried women and the availability of assistance from the father of an illegitimate child. Part of Victorian society’s attempt to curtail the illegitimate birth rate, the law succeeded only in contributing to dire situations for poor unwed women, mainly in service positions, who fell pregnant.

“This left very few options for these women: the workhouse, prostitution, abortion and infanticide – all of which were life-threatening,” says Mitchell. By the 1860s, infanticide in England had reached epidemic proportions.

“Our research shows that the major sources of the bodies of very young children were from stillborn babies of destitute mothers, babies who died from infectious diseases, those dying in charitable hospitals, and unmarried mothers who secretly murdered their new-born to avoid the social stigma of single parenthood,” says Mitchell.

“Poor and desperate women at the time of the industrial revolution could not only save the cost of a funeral by passing their child’s body to an anatomist, but also be paid as well. This money would help feed poor families, so the misfortune of one life lost could help their siblings to survive tough times.”

Top inset image: the only foetal skull in the Cambridge to have undergone a craniotomy. 

Faced with the prospect of an imminent volcanic eruption, most people would head for safety, but for one group of Cambridge research students, the aim is to get as close as they realistically can.

That opportunity suddenly presented itself when, on the night of August 28, 2014, members of the University’s Volcano Seismology group were shaken awake by a series of low-magnitude earthquakes. The tremors were being caused by the movement of an underground channel of molten rock which they had been tracking for 10 days as it forced its way north-east from the Barðarbunga volcano in central Iceland.

The group’s work involves measuring and studying such seismic events, which warn that a volcanic eruption may be about to take place. As it became clear that this was now imminent, the team hastily finished deploying field instruments around the tip of the area where they knew the channel was flowing. Just hours later, it ruptured the Earth’s surface, disgorging huge fountains of magma that reached up to 150 metres high, announcing the start of Iceland’s biggest volcanic event for 200 years.

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The story of the group’s dramatic fieldwork – and why it matters – is now the subject of a display at this year’s Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition, which will be taking place in London from 4-10 July 2016.

During the build-up to the eruption, a total of 30,000 mini earthquakes occurred as the molten rock forged a crack through the earth, several kilometres beneath the surface. By analysing these earthquakes, the team were able to understand more about the physical process that was happening under their feet. This knowledge helps to inform both early warning tools that can be used to anticipate a volcanic eruption, and scenario-planning around its potential consequences.

Robert Green, a Seismology PhD student from St John’s College, University of Cambridge, was one of the Cambridge researchers responsible for assessing the tremors around Barðarbunga. “Most people think of a volcano as being a large mountain where molten rock comes straight up from under the ground and erupts directly from the summit, either explosively creating a huge ash cloud, or producing lava which flows down the sides,” he said.

“Those are certainly options, but this one was different. Instead the molten rock moved 46 kilometres underground away from the volcano before it emerged in a completely different place. When it did, the eruption formed a curtain of fire the height of Big Ben.”

Earthquakes such as those measured by Green and his colleagues are caused by the molten flow cracking through rock in the Earth’s crust. As the rocks slide past one another, they cause the ground to shake. In August 2014, it was this seismic activity that indicated that one of these so-called “dyke intrusions” had developed from the Barðarbunga volcano.

The scientific community was quick to respond, deploying researchers from 26 different institutions, including the Cambridge team. This group effectively chased the volcano, travelling in helicopters, snow scooters and offroad vehicles to install seismometers and track its subterranean progress.

They also worked closely with civil and aviation authorities to keep them up to date about potential impact. Airlines feared a repeat of the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption, when a plume of volcanic ash infamously led to the cancellation of 100,000 flights during the Easter holidays.

When the fissure eruption finally happened, it was at the Holuhraun lava field, the site of a 19^th Century volcanic event north of Barðarbunga itself. Some of the Cambridge group’s seismometers had been positioned so close that they had to be hastily retrieved in the face of the advancing lava flow.

The eruption was on a huge scale, lasting from August 2014 until February 2015. During its early stages, about 500 tonnes of rock were flung out of the Earth every second at temperatures of about 1,300 degrees C. The thermal energy was calculated to be equivalent to one Hiroshima atomic bomb being detonated every two minutes for almost six months.

For the researchers, it was an unprecedented opportunity to gather data about the effects of the movement of magma under the ground during such events. “Earthquakes accompanying the movement of magma underground are the best volcano monitoring tool we have, but we don’t yet understand the mechanics of it – precisely why, when and where the earthquakes occur, and why, when and where they don’t,” said Jenny Woods, another member of the team, based at Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences. “These are important things to learn if we want to understand the behaviour of volcanoes and improve eruption prediction.”

In the case of the 2014 eruption, scientists and government teams had to consider the possibility that lava might erupt beneath a local ice cap, causing an ash cloud which could disrupt flights, and a major flood. Even more frightening was the possibility was that it might continue moving until it met another reservoir of molten rock beneath the Askja volcano, triggering a major eruption that would have had devastating consequences for much of northern Iceland.

“There is no certainty during these events that it will even erupt at all,” Green added. “The whole time we were looking at several possible scenarios, one of which was that the lava would just stay in the ground.”

“Tracking the Bárdarbunga intrusion and witnessing the eruption was an utterly surreal experience: arriving in Iceland, deploying instruments in an evacuation zone, being shaken awake by an earthquake, and then being the first group on the scene at the eruption in the middle of the night under the northern lights,” said Woods. “It was a real reminder of the raw power trapped in the earth beneath our feet!”

The study also involved an assessment of the stress changes that occurred within the Earth’s crust as a result of the tremors. These findings could, among other things, help with the assessment of human activities that have a similar effect, not least the highly sensitive question of where and when it is safe to undertake “fracking” for shale gas.

The group’s display at the Royal Society Summer Exhibition, which is aptly entitled “Explosive Earth”, will feature several hands-on activities enabling visitors to discover how researchers monitor the movement of molten rock under the ground, how they triangulate the point of origin from tremors to track the magma’s course, and how an earthquake itself is measured.

A new book written by Cambridge theologians aims to set the agenda for sexuality conversations being held at the Church of England’s General Synod in July by urging the Church towards acceptance and affirmation of committed same-sex relationships. The study warns that a failure to adopt such a stance would be “suicidal”.

Amazing Love, edited by Andrew Davison, Starbridge Lecturer in Theology and Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge, sets out a case for the Church to bless stable gay and lesbian relationships, arguing that such a position is entirely consistent with the Christian tradition of ethical reflection.

The book is deliberately timed to reach members of the General Synod, the “parliament” of the Church of England, who will take part in discussions about sexuality from 10-12 July. These conversations aim to build “good disagreement” on same-sex relationships and will set the framework for a debate in 2017 on changes to the Church’s stance.

To date, the Church of England has failed to comment positively on faithful and committed same-sex relationships and the book argues that the time has come for change.

Amazing Love is the result of a workshop held earlier in the year at St John’s College, University of Cambridge. It aims to show that the celebration of gay and lesbian relationships is consistent with authentic Christian belief by tackling the issues on a number of fronts.

Traditional arguments that reject same-sex relationships have often identified passages in the Bible which appear to prohibit homosexuality, but the book argues that there is no evidence that these passages refer to the strong, loving and stable same-sex relationships that are under discussion.

Duncan Dormor, Dean of Chapel at St John’s College, Cambridge, and a contributor to the book said: “The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is often seen as a passage in the Bible which condemns homosexuality. The story is more likely to be about the abuse of hospitality, but if it does refer to sex, it is about an attempted sexually motivated attack by a mob rather than committed gay and lesbian relationships.”

“Whatever your view on these passages in the Bible, these are not the only sentences that matter in this conversation. Interpretation of the Bible can never be totally objective – different readings depend on factors such as the age, culture and experience of the reader. The big picture of the Bible’s Christian message should trump the details of interpretation.”

The book cites examples of matters which at one time seemed to be supported by the Bible on which Christian teaching has now changed. For example, it can safely be assumed that modern Christians are overwhelmingly of the view that slavery is wrong, but in the Bible it is an accepted institution, with Job, the model of the righteous person, described as a “just” man because he treats his slaves fairly rather than setting them free.

During their campaign, 18th-Century Abolitionists faced strong opposition from fellow Christians on “Biblical” grounds and similar things can be said historically about issues like contraception and lending money with interest, demonstrating how new insights lead Christians to apply scripture to a particular issue in a new way.

The second chapter of Amazing Love draws upon advances in science and how our scientific understanding of homosexuality has evolved. The book argues that grasping scientific facts should be important to members of the Synod and all Christians as they have a responsibility to examine the full range of information available and understand the issues that they are discussing from as rounded a perspective as possible.

Human sexuality is complex, but scientific evidence is conclusive on the following points: Sexuality occurs on a diverse spectrum, it is not consciously chosen and for the vast majority it is not easily changed. The book states that there is clear, robust evidence that for some people, same-sex attraction is “natural, inevitable and beyond their conscious control”.

“Pre-1973, homosexuality was regarded as a mental illness, but the scientific consensus has changed – we now know that being gay or lesbian is not damaging to people, it is the assumption that it is ‘unhealthy’ that damages them. New discoveries can and should shift the background against which well-informed ethical thinking takes place,” added Dormor.

A key premise of the book is that the most fundamental feature of Christian life is following Jesus and that “loving your neighbour” involves listening to others and their experiences. The book warns of the damaging consequences of a Christian culture in which gay and lesbian people do not feel welcome, or are not able to speak about themselves.

The book also notes a shift in contemporary sexual ethics  away from acts and on to thinking about people, relationships and emotional intimacy. “What should concern Christians is not what x does with Y – this mirrors a reductive, materialistic approach to sexuality which Christians would rightly object to in the secular world. There is much more to sexual relationships than particular acts and Christians should be more concerned with the nature and integrity of relationships and their impact on wellbeing.”

The book concludes that taking a hard line on the issue of same-sex relationships would be “suicidal” for the Church and involve “shooting ourselves in the foot in the worst possible way”. It notes that young people care deeply about relationships and marriage and are increasingly “baffled” by the Church’s decision to excluded committed same sex couples from these aspects of life.

“We urge the Church to make a positive and joyful affirmation of same-sex relationships or risk alienating the younger generation. Maintaining the current silence on this issue will only build a barrier preventing us from reaching young people on other important issues surrounding sexual and social ethics,” said Dormor.

Copies of Amazing Love have been sent to all members of the General Synod.

Amazing Love is published on Thursday 30 June by Darton, Longman and Todd. More information can be found via: http://www.darton-longman-todd.co.uk/titles/2181-9780232532654-amazing-love

Claire Pesterfield, a paediatric diabetes specialist nurse at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has type 1 diabetes, which requires insulin injections to manage blood sugar levels. She also has a golden Labrador dog that has been trained by the charity Medical Detection Dogs to detect when her blood sugar levels are falling to potentially dangerous levels.

“Low blood sugar is an everyday threat to me and if it falls too low – which it can do quickly – it can be very dangerous,” says Claire. “Magic is incredible – he’s not just a wonderful companion, but he’s my ‘nose’ to warn me if I’m at risk of a hypo. If he smells a hypo coming, he’ll jump up and put his paws on my shoulders to let me know.”

Hypoglycaemia – low blood sugar – can cause problems such as shakiness, disorientation and fatigue; if the patient does not receive a sugar boost in time, it can cause seizures and lead to unconsciousness. In some people with diabetes, these episodes can occur suddenly with little warning.

Given the reports of dogs alerting owners to blood glucose changes, researchers at the Wellcome Trust-MRC Institute of Metabolic Science, University of Cambridge, believed that certain naturally-occurring chemicals in exhaled breath might change when glucose levels were low. In a preliminary study to test this hypothesis, the scientists gradually lowered blood sugar levels under controlled conditions in 8 women, all around their forties, and all with type 1 diabetes. They then used mass spectrometry – which look for chemical signatures – to detect the presence of these chemicals.

The researchers found that levels of the chemical isoprene rose significantly at hypoglycaemia – in some cases almost doubling. They believe that dogs may be sensitive to the presence of isoprene, and suggest that it may be possible to develop new detectors that can identify elevated levels of isoprene in patients at risk.

“Isoprene is one of the commonest natural chemicals that we find in human breath, but we know surprisingly little about where it comes from,” says Dr Mark Evans, Honorary Consultant Physician at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, University of Cambridge. “We suspect it’s a by-product of the production of cholesterol, but it isn’t clear why levels of the chemical rise when patients get very low blood sugar.

“Humans aren’t sensitive to the presence of isoprene, but dogs with their incredible sense of smell, find it easy to identify and can be trained to alert their owners about dangerously low blood sugar levels. It provides a ‘scent’ that could help us develop new tests for detecting hypoglycaemia and reducing the risk of potentially life-threatening complications for patients living with diabetes. It’s our vision that a new breath test could at least partly – but ideally completely – replace the current finger-prick test, which is inconvenient and painful for patients, and relatively expensive to administer.”

The research was funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre with support from the Cambridge NIHR Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Facility.

Reference
Neupane, S et al. Exhaled Breath Isoprene rises during Hypoglycemia in Type 1 Diabetes. Diabetes Care; 21 June 2016; DOI: 10.2337/dc16-0461

In the early hours of 24 June 2016, the result of the UK referendum on EU membership was announced. By a narrow but clear majority the vote was to leave the European Union. This result has begun a chain of seismic political consequences in UK and the EU, and will have widespread consequences for the law and constitution in the UK.

In this video, Mark Elliott assess the immediate impact of the result.

Professor Mark Elliott is a Professor of Public Law at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St Catharine’s College. His main research interests are in the fields of constitutional and administrative law. He writes a blog: Public Law for Everyone. This video was based on a recent post.

On Monday 20 June, the Vice-Chancellor and Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research presented two sets of inaugural awards; the Impact Awards run by the Research Strategy Office, and the Public Engagement with Research Awards run by the Public Engagement team in the Office of External Affairs and Communications.

Research at the University of Cambridge has had profound effects on society – it is a formal part of the University’s mission.

The Vice-Chancellor’s Impact Awards have been established to recognise and reward those whose research has led to excellent impact beyond academia, whether on the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life.

In this, its inaugural year, there were 71 nominations across all Schools. Nominations were initially judged by School, with one overall best entry selected by external advisor Schlumberger. A prize of £1,000 was awarded to the best impact in each School, with the prize for the overall winner increased to £2,000.

The winners were announced at an award ceremony on 20 June 2016, hosted by Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz. These winners, although very diverse, illustrate only a small part of the wide range of impact that Cambridge’s research has had.

This year’s winners were:

• Dr Mari Jones (Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages)

Norman French has been spoken in Jersey for over 1,000 years. Today, however, this language (Jèrriais to its speakers) is obsolescent: spoken by some 1% of the population. The research of Mari Jones has sought to preserve Jèrriais and has helped raise the profile of the language within Jersey and beyond, with impacts on local and national media, language policy and education, and cultural identity and development.

• Dr Gilly Carr (Department of Archaeology and Anthropology)

The Channel Islands have long had great difficulty in coming to terms with the darker side of the German occupation. The aim of Gilly Carr’s research is to increase awareness of Channel Islander victims of Nazi persecution through creation of a plural ‘heritage landscape’ and via education. The creation of this heritage is a major achievement and will be of significant impact for the Channel Islands.

• Professor Steve Jackson (Wellcome Trust/CRUK Gurdon Institute)

Olaparib is an innovative targeted therapy for cancer developed by Steve Jackson. In 2014 Olaparib was licensed for the treatment of advanced ovarian cancer by the US Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency. The following year, NICE made the drug available on the NHS in England for specific ovarian cancer patients. 2015 saw promising findings from a clinical trial in prostate cancer and Olaparib received Breakthrough Therapy Designation earlier this year. Olaparib is currently in clinical trials for a wide range of other cancer types.

• Professor John Clarkson and Dr Nathan Crilly (Department of Engineering)

It is normal to be different. The demographics of the world are changing, with longer life expectancies and a reduced birth rate resulting in an increased proportion of older people. Yet with increasing age comes a general decline in capability, challenging the way people are able to interact with the ‘designed’ world around them. The Cambridge Engineering Design Centre has worked with the Royal College of Art to address this ‘design challenge’. They developed a design toolkit and realised what was by now obvious, that inclusive design was simply better design.

• Dr Nita Forouhi and Dr Fumiaki Imamura (MRC Epidemiology Unit)

Identifying modifiable risk factors is an important step in helping reduce the health burden of poor diet. Forouhi and Imamura have advanced our understanding of the health impacts of sugars, fats and foods, through both scale and depth of investigation of self-reported information and nutritional biomarkers. They have engaged at an international level with policy and guidance bodies, and have used the media to improve public understanding with the potential for a direct impact on people’s health.

In 2015, the University of Cambridge received a one-year £65k Catalyst Seed Fundgrant from Research Councils UK to embed high quality public engagement with research and bring about culture change at an institutional level.

The Public Engagement with Research Awards were set up to recognise and reward those who undertake quality engagement with research. 69 nominations were received from across all Schools.

This year’s winners were:

• Dr Becky Inkster (Department of Psychiatry)

Dr Inkster’s work work explores the intersection of art and science through the prism of mental health research. Dr Inkster has successfully collaborated with The Scarabeus Theatre in a performance called Depths of My Mind and founded the websiteHipHopPsych, showcasing the latest psychiatry research through hip hop lyrics. Her approach has allowed her to engage with hard-to-reach teenage audiences, encouraging them to reflect on their own mental health. Beyond this work she has explored the use of social media to diagnose mental illness, and has gathered patient perspectives on ethics, privacy and data sharing in preparation for research publication.

• Dr Paolo Bombelli (Department of Biochemistry)

Dr Bombelli’s research looks to utilise the photosynthetic chemistry of plants to create biophotovoltaic devices, a sustainable source of solar power. For over five years, he has been taking his research out of the lab to science festivals, schools and design fairs; tailoring his approach to a wider variety of audiences. Through his engagement, he has reached thousands of people, in multiple countries, and is currently developing an educational toolkit to further engage school students with advances in biophotovoltaic technology. Dr Bombelli’s public engagement work has also advanced his research, namely through a transition from using algae to moss in live demonstrations.

• Dr Ruth Armstrong and Dr Amy Ludlow (Institute of Criminology and Faculty of Law)

Dr Armstrong and Dr Ludlow have collaborated on a research project addressing the delivery of education in the prison sector. Their project, Learning Together, pioneered a new approach to prison education where the end-users, the prisoners, are directly engaged with the design, delivery and evaluation of the research intervention. Adopting this shared dialogue approach has yielded positive results in terms of prisoners’ learning outcomes and has gathered praise from prison staff and government policy makers. Through continued engagement and partnership working, Armstrong and Ludlow have managed to expand their initiative across a broad range of sites and institutional contexts.

• Dr Hazel Wilkinson (Department of English)

Dr Wilkinson is investigating the history of reading and writing habits in the eighteenth century. In collaboration with Dr Will Bowers at the University of Oxford, she has developed an online public platform, journallists.org, which allows readers to engage with installments of periodicals, diaries, letters, and novels, on the anniversaries of the day on which they were originally published, written, or set. Her approach has allowed members of the public to actively participate in research. She has also inspired thousands of readers to engage with under-read eighteenth and nineteenth century texts, often for the very first time.

• Dr Paul Coxon (Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy)

Over the last ten years Dr Coxon has endeavored to engage with audiences often overlooked by traditional public engagement channels. He has given talks in venues as varied as bingo halls, working men’s social clubs and steam fairs to showcase his passion for solar research, steering clear of the “flashes and bangs” approach often associated with Chemistry. He has also designed a Fruit Solar Cell Starter Kit, used in fifty low-income catchment schools across the UK.

• Mr Ian Hosking and Mr Bill Nicholl (Department of Engineering and Faculty of Education)

Ian Hosking and Bill Nicholl are cofounders of Designing Our Tomorrow, a platform for transforming D&T education in schools. Their public engagement initiative began in 2009 and brought together research around inclusive design and creativity in education. Through production of their DOT box, Hosking and Nicholl have taken active research questions into the classroom and given students control of designing technological solutions. Engagement with teachers, students and policymakers is integral to the success of their initiative and has resulted in engineering design being included in the national curriculum and GCSE qualifications.

Researchers are calling for the end to an era of confusion and alarm about children’s heart surgery statistics by launching an innovative communication tool that will help people make sense of published survival data about children’s heart surgery in the UK and Ireland.

The website, Understanding Children’s Heart Surgery Outcomes, which launches today, shows decision makers and parents that hospitals should not be ranked by their survival rates, because hospitals treat different patients — high performing hospitals can have lower survival ratessimply because they are taking on the most complex cases. An individual hospital’s actual survival rate should only be compared to its own predicted range, which is determined by the complexity of the procedures it undertakes, among other factors. The website also sets out why if a hospital’s survival rate is below its predicted range, it need not indicate alarm, but rather serves as a trigger for further investigation.

The website was developed by Christina Pagel from University College London and Sir David Spiegelhalter from the University of Cambridge, in collaboration with the charity Sense about Science and experimental psychologist Tim Rakow from King’s College London. It explains a risk adjustment method known as PRAiS (Partial Risk Adjustment in Surgery).

“This website draws a line under an era of poor risk communication of hospital surgery statistics,” said Tracey Brown, director of Sense about Science. “In 2013 over-interpretation of faulty data resulted in temporary hospital closure of Leeds General Infirmary’s paediatric heart unit. Parents and children were faced with all the additional stress, risks and costs of travelling further for operations, and for others the horrendous unnecessary guilt as they wondered if their child’s outcome would have been better at another unit. There could not be a stronger case for professionals and decision makers using the risk adjustment model and communicating it well.”

Each hospital that performs children’s heart surgery in the UK and Ireland has had its overall survival rates published by the National Congenital Heart Disease Audit (NCHDA) since 2013. The researchers used PRAiS to calculate a predicted range of survival for each specific hospital, taking into account the complexity of each individual child’s medical condition and surgery. No hospital will have exactly the same predicted range of survival as another hospital, because each hospital treated different children.

However, the report the NCHDA publishes is lengthy, hard to find and hard to understand without expert knowledge. Sense about Science ran user-testing workshops to involve the public, patients’ families and medical charities in co-designing the website with Pagel and Spiegelhalter, a first in this area.

“There is an understandable urge to put hospitals in a league table when comparing survival rates,” said Spiegelhalter, Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge. “But rather than try and directly compare hospitals with each other, we need to compare a hospital’s survival rate with what we would predict it to be, taking into account how severe their cases are. This is a tricky idea but, with the help of many families, I think we have made it clear.”

“Because different hospitals treat different children and some children can have more complex medical problems than others, it is not valid to directly compare survival rates between hospitals,” said Pagel, Reader in Operational Research at UCL, who helped develop the formula the NHS uses to evaluate hospital survival rates. “We involved families from the beginning of the project and throughout to help us researchers communicate these complicated concepts clearly. I definitely learned that incorporating their feedback was absolutely crucial to building something useful. An accountable NHS is one where we can all understand how it is doing- and for this you need to listen to patients and families.”

Spiegelhalter and Pagel are calling for other researchers, companies and government to make health statistics accessible to patients and families by making them understandable. Transparency without accessibility is not enough; improved understanding by decision makers, health care professionals, patients and families can prevent misuse, confusion and unfounded anxiety.

Astronomers from Japan, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the European Southern Observatory (ESO) have used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to observe one of the most distant galaxies known. SXDF-NB1006-2 lies at a redshift of 7.2, meaning that we see it only 700 million years after the Big Bang.

The team was hoping to find out about the chemical elements present in the galaxy, as they can tell us about the level of star formation, and provide clues about the period in the history of the Universe known as cosmic reionisation. Their results are reported today in the journal Science.

“Seeking heavy elements in the early Universe is an essential approach to explore the star formation activity in that period,” said Akio Inoue of Osaka Sangyo University, Japan, the paper’s lead author. “Studying heavy elements also gives us a hint to understand how the galaxies were formed and what caused the cosmic reionisation.”

Click image to enlarge.

Schematic diagram of the history of the Universe. Credit: NAOJ1 of 4

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In the time before objects formed, the Universe was filled with electrically neutral gas. But when the first objects began to shine, a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, they emitted powerful radiation that started to break up those neutral atoms, ionising the gas. During this phase — known as cosmic reionisation — the whole Universe changed dramatically. But there is much debate about exactly what kind of objects caused the reionisation. Studying the conditions in very distant galaxies can help to answer this question.

Before observing the distant galaxy, the researchers performed computer simulations to predict how easily they could expect to see evidence of ionised oxygen with ALMA. They also considered observations of similar galaxies that are much closer to Earth, and concluded that the oxygen emission should be detectable, even at vast distances.

They then carried out high-sensitivity observations with ALMA and found light from ionised oxygen in SXDF-NB1006-2, making this the most distant unambiguous detection of oxygen ever obtained. It is firm evidence for the presence of oxygen in the early Universe, only 700 million years after the Big Bang.

“Many astronomers have believed that ionised carbon emits the strongest light from very distant galaxies in the far infrared range and tried to detect them in the carbon emission using ALMA,” said co-author Dr Kazuaki Ota from the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge. “Most of such attempts have failed. However, this study has solely predicted that ionized oxygen emits the strongest light and even detected it from one of the most distant galaxies known. We believe that oxygen could be used as a powerful probe for very distant galaxies.”

Oxygen in SXDF-NB1006-2 was found to be ten times less abundant than it is in the Sun. “The small abundance is expected because the Universe was still young and had a short history of star formation at that time,” said co-author Naoki Yoshida at the University of Tokyo. “Our simulation actually predicted an abundance ten times smaller than the Sun. But we have another, unexpected, result: a very small amount of dust.”

The team was unable to detect any emission from carbon in the galaxy, suggesting that this young galaxy contains very little un-ionised hydrogen gas, and also found that it contains only a small amount of dust, which is made up of heavy elements. “Something unusual may be happening in this galaxy,” said Inoue. “I suspect that almost all the gas is highly ionised.”

The detection of ionised oxygen indicates that many very brilliant stars, several dozen times more massive than the Sun, have formed in the galaxy and are emitting the intense ultraviolet light needed to ionise the oxygen atoms.

The lack of dust in the galaxy allows the intense ultraviolet light to escape and ionise vast amounts of gas outside the galaxy. “SXDF-NB1006-2 would be a prototype of the light sources responsible for the cosmic reionisation,” said Inoue.

“This is an important step towards understanding what kind of objects caused cosmic reionisation,” explained Yoichi Tamura of the University of Tokyo. “Our next observations with ALMA have already started. Higher resolution observations will allow us to see the distribution and motion of ionised oxygen in the galaxy and provide vital information to help us understand the properties of the galaxy.”

Reference:
Inoue et al. “Detection of an oxygen emission line from a high redshift galaxy in the reionization epoch.” Science (2016). DOI: 10.1126/science.aaf0714

Adapted from a press release by NAOJ/ESO

Investors who buy stocks of Real Estate Investment Trusts in search of a “defensive security” should be careful to check those firms’ levels of debt before they commit, a new study suggests.

Real Estate Investment Trusts, or REITs, are publically listed companies that generate income by owning and operating large property portfolios. By purchasing stocks in these companies, investors can share in that income and any capital appreciation, without having to buy the capital-intensive properties themselves.

These stocks are often considered to be low-risk, because they typically generate high dividends for investors and used to be only moderately affected during periods of economic turmoil. As a result, they are often also attractive to the managers of pension and endowment funds looking for high, reliable long-term returns, and are often referred to as “defensive” stocks.

In the new study, however, two researchers from the Universities of Cambridge and Sydney point out that the performance of individual REIT stocks is not always as consistent as this suggests. Instead, they argue that investors should look carefully at certain characteristics within the specific firms.

In particular, they warn that investors should examine these firms’ overall leverage, or the amount of debt that they use to finance their assets. The more indebted the firm is, they suggest, the less robust these so-called defensive stocks are likely to prove, in particular during periods of economic downturn.

The study was co-authored by Dr Eva Steiner, a Fellow and Director of Studies in Land Economy at St John’s College at the University of Cambridge, UK, and Dr Jamie Alcock, from the University of Sydney Business School.

“Investors sometimes think that because stock is generally classified as defensive, not much is going to happen to it in a downturn, but that may not be the case,” Dr Steiner said. “The sensitivity of any stock to variation in the broader market environment will fluctuate over time and investors need to know more about the drivers of this sensitivity so that they can make sensible choices. We found that this depends, among other factors, on the overall financial position of the firm.”

The idea that firm characteristics can be used to predict the overall sensitivity of its stock to market downturns has not been extensively investigated empirically until now. Most research has looked at the impact of broader, macro-economic trends, such as real and monetary conditions, on returns from real estate stocks, and this data suggests that they are, on average, quite resilient.

The new study, however, shows that the state of a specific REIT can offer investors a more nuanced and accurate picture. Steiner and Alcock looked at a large sample of historical data about the returns and overall characteristics of numerous REIT firms in the United States, covering a 20-year period from 1993 to 2013. On average, they examined data for 55 firms during each quarter over the course of the two decades.

Unlike any previous study, they found that leverage was one of the sharpest means of predicting the likely stability of stocks in these companies – especially during downturns. The more debt a firm had, the more its stock proved sensitive to periods of recession – without any additional gains on the upside. The impact of this relationship seemed to be particularly pronounced during periods of extreme difficulty, such as the 2007/8 sub-prime mortgage crisis.

Other company characteristics also proved important predictors of stock sensitivity. For example, more defensive, lower-risk stocks were consistently associated with small, high-growth firms that were less intensively traded.

Similarly, the researchers found that companies which demonstrated strong growth opportunities were less sensitive to such change. This pattern, they suggest, may recur because such opportunities were often circumstantial, one-off prospects specific to those companies alone, meaning that they would not be affected by broader market fluctuations – making an investment in them more secure.

Although the findings could help investors to construct more robust portfolios capable of weathering an economic storm, the researchers point out that they could also offer guidelines for managers within REITs themselves.

“There are implications for investors at two levels – the ones who buy the stock, who need to know that they are making sensible choices, but also the REIT managers, for whom this has implications regarding the risk management of their firms,” Steiner said. “These results could help guide decisions about the investment risk of their firm, for example by choosing the appropriate level of leverage.”

The research was funded by the Real Estate Research Institute. The paper, Fundamental Drivers of Dependence in REIT Returns, is published in The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics.

When a molecule emits a blink of light, it doesn’t expect it to ever come back. However researchers have now managed to place single molecules in such a tiny optical cavity that emitted photons, or particles of light, return to the molecule before they have properly left. The energy oscillates back and forth between light and molecule, resulting in a complete mixing of the two.

Previous attempts to mix molecules with light have been complex to produce and only achievable at very low temperatures, but the researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, have developed a method to produce these ‘half-light’ molecules at room temperature.

These unusual interactions of molecules with light provide new ways to manipulate the physical and chemical properties of matter, and could be used to process quantum information, aid in the understanding of complex processes at work in photosynthesis, or even manipulate the chemical bonds between atoms. The results are reported in the journal Nature.

To use single molecules in this way, the researchers had to reliably construct cavities only a billionth of a metre (one nanometre) across in order to trap light. They used the tiny gap between a gold nanoparticle and a mirror, and placed a coloured dye molecule inside.

“It’s like a hall of mirrors for a molecule, only spaced a hundred thousand times thinner than a human hair,” said Professor Jeremy Baumberg of the NanoPhotonics Centre at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, who led the research.

In order to achieve the molecule-light mixing, the dye molecules needed to be correctly positioned in the tiny gap. “Our molecules like to lie down flat on the gold, and it was really hard to persuade them to stand up straight,” said Rohit Chikkaraddy, lead author of the study.

To solve this, the team joined with a team of chemists at Cambridge led by Professor Oren Scherman to encapsulate the dyes in hollow barrel-shaped molecular cages called cucurbiturils, which are able to hold the dye molecules in the desired upright position.

When assembled together correctly, the molecule scattering spectrum splits into two separated quantum states which is the signature of this ‘mixing’. This spacing in colour corresponds to photons taking less than a trillionth of a second to come back to the molecule.

A key advance was to show strong mixing of light and matter was possible for single molecules even with large absorption of light in the metal and at room temperature. “Finding single-molecule signatures took months of data collection,” said Chikkaraddy.

The researchers were also able to observe steps in the colour spacing of the states corresponding to whether one, two, or three molecules were in the gap.

The Cambridge team collaborated with theorists Professor Ortwin Hess at the Blackett Laboratory, Imperial College London and Dr Edina Rosta at Kings College London to understand the confinement and interaction of light in such tiny gaps, matching experiments amazingly well.

The research is funded as part of a UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) investment in the Cambridge NanoPhotonics Centre, as well as the European Research Council (ERC), the Winton Programme for the Physics of Sustainability and St John’s College.

Reference:
Rohit Chikkaraddy et al. ‘Single-molecule strong coupling at room temperature in plasmonic nanocavities.’ Nature (2016). DOI: 10.1038/nature17974

Scientists have identified new steps in the way plants produce cellulose, the component of plant cell walls that provides strength, and forms insoluble fibre in the human diet.

The findings could lead to improved production of cellulose and guide plant breeding for specific uses such as wood products and ethanol fuel, which are sustainable alternatives to fossil fuel-based products.

Published in the journal Nature Communications today, the work was conducted by an international team of scientists, led by the University of Cambridge and the University of Melbourne.

“Our research identified several proteins that are essential in the assembly of the protein machinery that makes cellulose”, said Melbourne’s Prof Staffan Persson.

“We found that these assembly factors control how much cellulose is made, and so plants without them can not produce cellulose very well and the defect substantially impairs plant biomass production. The ultimate aim of this research would be breed plants that have altered activity of these proteins so that cellulose production can be improved for the range of applications that use cellulose including paper, timber and ethanol fuels.”

The newly discovered proteins are located in an intracellular compartment called the Golgi where proteins are sorted and modified.

“If the function of this protein family is abolished the cellulose synthesizing complexes become stuck in the Golgi and have problems reaching the cell surface where they normally are active” said the lead authors of the study, Drs. Yi Zhang (Max-Planck Institute for Molecular Plant Physiology) and Nino Nikolovski (University of Cambridge).

“We therefore named the new proteins STELLO, which is Greek for to set in place, and deliver.”

“The findings are important to understand how plants produce their biomass”, said Professor Paul Dupree from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Biochemistry.

“Greenhouse-gas emissions from cellulosic ethanol, which is derived from the biomass of plants, are estimated to be roughly 85 percent less than from fossil fuel sources. Research to understand cellulose production in plants is therefore an important part of climate change mitigation.”

“In addition, by using cellulosic plant materials we get around the problem of food-versus-fuel scenario that is problematic when using corn as a basis for bioethanol.”

“It is therefore of great importance to find genes and mechanisms that can improve cellulose production in plants so that we can tailor cellulose production for various needs.”

Previous studies by Profs. Persson’s and Dupree’s research groups have, together with other scientists, identified many proteins that are important for cellulose synthesis and for other cell wall polymers.

With the newly presented research they substantially increase our understanding for how the bulk of a plant’s biomass is produced and is therefore of vast importance to industrial applications.

The work was funded, in part, by the BBSRC and was conducted with the BBSRC Sustainable Bioenergy Centre Cell Wall Sugars Programme.

Adapted from a University of Melbourne press release. 

Alcohol consumption is one of the leading risk factors for disease and has been linked to conditions such as type 2 diabetes, cancer and liver disease. The factors that influence consumption are not clear; a recent Cochrane review published by the Behaviour and Health Research Unit (BHRU) at the University of Cambridge found thatlarger portion sizes and tableware increased consumption of food and non-alcoholic drinks, but found no evidence relating to consumption of alcohol.

To examine whether the size of glass in which alcohol is served affects consumption, the team at the BHRU, together with Professor Marcus Munafo from the University of Bristol, carried out a study in The Pint Shop in Cambridge from mid-March to early July 2015. The establishment has separate bar and restaurant areas, both selling food and drink. Wine (in 125ml or 175ml servings) could be purchased by the glass, which was usually a standard 300ml size.

Over the course of a 16-week period, the owners of the establishment changed the size of the wine glasses at fortnightly intervals, alternating between the standard (300ml) size, and larger (370ml) and smaller (250 ml) glasses.

The researchers found that the volume of wine purchased daily was 9.4% higher when sold in larger glasses compared to standard-sized glasses. This effect was mainly driven by sales in the bar area, which saw an increase in sales of 14.4%, compared to an 8.2% increase in sales in the restaurant. The findings were inconclusive as to whether sales were different with smaller compared to standard-sized glasses.

“We found that increasing the size of wine glasses, even without increasing the amount of wine, leads people to drink more,” says Dr Rachel Pechey from the BHRU at Cambridge. “It’s not obvious why this should be the case, but one reason may be that larger glasses change our perceptions of the amount of wine, leading us to drink faster and order more. But it’s interesting that we didn’t see the opposite effect when we switched to smaller wine glasses.”

Professor Theresa Marteau, Director of the Unit, adds: “This suggests that avoiding the use of larger wine glasses could reduce the amount that people drink.  We need more research to confirm this effect, but if it is the case, then we will need to think how this might be implemented. For example, could it be an alcohol licensing requirements that all wine glasses have to be below a certain size?”

The research was funded by the Department of Health.

Reference
Pechey, R et al. Does wine glass size influence sales for on-site consumption? A multiple treatment reversal design. BMC Public Health; 7 June 2016; DOI: 10.1186/s12889-016-3068-z

The review, published today in the journalBrain and Behavior, also highlighted how anxiety disorders often provide a double burden on people experiencing other health-related problems, such as heart disease, cancer and even pregnancy.

Anxiety disorders, which often manifest as excessive worry, fear and a tendency to avoid potentially stressful situations including social gatherings, are some of the most common mental health problems in the Western world. The annual cost related to the disorders in the United States is estimated to be $42.3 million. In the European Union, over 60 million people are affected by anxiety disorders in a given year.

There have been many studies looking at the number of people affected by anxiety disorders and the groups that are at highest risk, and in an attempt to synthesise the various studies, National Institute for Health Research (NIHR)-funded researchers from the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Public Health carried out a global review of systematic reviews. Out of over 1,200 reviews, the researchers identified 48 reviews that matched their criteria for inclusion.

Between 1990 and 2010, the overall proportion of people affected remained largely unchanged, with around four out of every 100 experiencing anxiety. The highest proportion of people with anxiety is in North America, where almost eight out of every 100 people are affected; the proportion is lowest in East Asia, where less than three in 100 people have this mental health problem.

Women are almost twice as likely to be affected as men, and young individuals – both male and female – under 35 years of age are disproportionately affected.

The researchers also found that people with other health conditions are often far more likely to also experience anxiety disorders. For example, around one in ten adults (10.9%) with cardiovascular disease and living in Western countries are affected by generalised anxiety disorder, with women showing higher anxiety levels than men. People living with multiple sclerosis are most affected – as many as one in three patients (32%) also have an anxiety disorder.

According to first author Olivia Remes from the Department of Public Health and Primary Care at the University of Cambridge: “Anxiety disorders can make life extremely difficult for some people and it is important for our health services to understand how common they are and which groups of people are at greatest risk.

“By collecting all these data together, we see that these disorders are common across all groups, but women and young people are disproportionately affected. Also, people who have a chronic health condition are at a particular risk, adding a double burden on their lives.”

Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) – which is an anxiety disorder characterized by obsessions and compulsions – was found to be a problem in pregnant women and in the period immediately after birth. In the general population, only one in a hundred people are affected by OCD, but the proportion with the disorder was double in pregnant women and slightly higher in post-partum women.

However, the analysis also showed that data on some populations was lacking or of poor quality. This was particularly true for marginalised communities, such as indigenous cultures in North America, Australia and New Zealand, and drug users, street youth and sex workers. Anxiety disorders also represent an important issue among people identifying as lesbian, gay, and bisexual; however, there are not enough studies in these populations, and those that have looked at it are of variable quality.

Dr Louise Lafortune, Senior Research Associate at the Cambridge Institute of Public Health, explains: “Anxiety disorders affect a lot of people and can lead to impairment, disability, and risk of suicide. Although many groups have examined this important topic, significant gaps in research remain.”

Professor Carol Brayne, Director of the Cambridge Institute of Public Health, adds: “Even with a reasonably large number of studies of anxiety disorder, data about marginalised groups is hard to find, and these are people who are likely to be at an even greater risk than the general population. We hope that, by identifying these gaps, future research can be directed towards these groups and include greater understanding of how such evidence can help reduce individual and population burdens.”

Reference
Remes, O et al. A systematic review of reviews on the prevalence of anxiety disorders in adult populations. Brain and Behavior; 6 June 2016; DOI: 10.1002/brb3.497

The Yellow Meranti stands 89.5m tall in an area of forest known as ‘Sabah’s Lost World’ – the Maliau Basin Conservation Area, one of Malaysia’s last few untouched wildernesses. Its height places it ahead of the previous record-holder, an 88.3m Yellow Meranti in the Tawau Hills National Park.

The giant tree was discovered during reconnaissance flights by conservation scientists from the University of Cambridge working with the Sabah Forestry Department to help protect the area’s biodiversity. It comes at a crucial time, as the Sabah government takes measures to protect and restore heavily logged areas in the region.

Measuring a tree’s exact height is tricky when the tree is quite possibly the tallest tree in the Tropics. The only way is to climb it, and to take a tape measure with you. This is precisely what Unding Jami, an expert tree-climber from Sabah, did recently. When he reached the top, he confirmed the tree’s height and texted “I don’t have time to take photos using a good camera because there’s an eagle around that keeps trying to attack me and also lots of bees flying around.”

The tree actually stands on a slope: downhill it’s 91m tall, and uphill it’s around 88m tall. “We’d put it at 89.5m on average,” explains lead researcher Dr David Coomes, from Cambridge’s Department of Plant Sciences. “It’s a smidgen taller than the record, which makes it quite probably the tallest tree recorded in the Tropics!”

At this height, the tree is roughly equivalent to the height of 65 people standing on each other’s shoulders, or 20 double-decker London buses. It’s just a few metres short of London’s Big Ben.

“Trees in temperate regions, like the giant redwoods, can grow up to 30m taller; yet around 90m seems to be the limit in the Tropics. No-one knows why this should be the case,” adds Coomes.

The tree was spotted using a LiDAR scanner – a machine that’s capable of producing exquisitely detailed three-dimensional images of rainforest canopies over hundreds of square kilometres. Its laser range finder hangs from the undercarriage of the research plane, peppering the forest with 200,000 laser pulses every second, and calculating distances in 3D from each reflected pulse. The researchers then ‘stitch’ the images together, enabling them to map the forest tree by tree.

Threatened by habitat loss, the Yellow Meranti (Shorea faguetiana) is classified as endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature ‘Red list’, the world’s most comprehensive inventory of the global conservation status of biological species.

“Interestingly, there may be more of this tree in cyberspace than in the world. It’s one of the trees that players can grow in the computer game Minecraft,” adds Coomes.

“Conserving these giants is really important. Some, like the California redwoods, are among the largest and longest-living organisms on earth. Huge trees are crucial for maintaining the health of the forest and its ecology. But they are difficult to find, and monitor regularly, which is where planes carrying LiDAR can help.”

Globally, around one billion hectares of degraded forest might be restorable, enabling then to continue to contribute to the planet’s biodiversity and its carbon and water cycles. However, a major problem faced by conservation managers is how to survey extensive areas in which conditions can vary in just a few hundred square metres and are continually changing through natural regeneration. “LiDAR scanning together with digital photography and hyperspectral scanners now provide us with unprecedented information on the state of the forest,” explains Coomes.

With funding from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), the Cambridge scientists worked with the Sabah Forestry Department, the South-East Asia Rainforest Research Partnership and the NERC Airborne Remote Sensing Facility.

“The Sabah government is extremely proud of this discovery, which lays credence to the fact that our biodiversity is of global importance,” says Sam Mannan, Director of the Sabah Forestry Department. “Our international collaboration, as in this case, has brought great scientific dividends to the state and we shall continue to pursue such endeavours.”

Adds Coomes: “The discovery of this particular tree comes at a critical moment because, set against a backdrop of decades of forest loss, the Sabah government has decided to protect and restore a huge tract of heavily logged forest just to the east of the Maliau Basin. It’s exciting to know that these iconic giants of the forest are alive and well so close to this major restoration project.”

Inset images: Stephanie Law.

The technique involves identifying genetic variants that mimic the action of a drug on its intended target and then checking in large patient cohorts whether these variants are associated with risk of other conditions, such as cardiovascular disease.

When developing a new drug for market, pharmaceutical companies must not only demonstrate that it is effective at treating a particular condition, but also that the drug does not have any adverse side-effects in patients. For example, the Food and Drug Administration, which approves all new medicines for use in the USA, has defined that any new anti-diabetic medicines need to demonstrate cardiovascular safety. However, in many cases adverse safety profiles do not become apparent until late in the drug development process, by which point millions – possibly even billions – of pounds will have been invested.

In a study published today in the journal Science Translational Medicine, scientists have provided a proof of concept that it is possible to use genetic analyses to demonstrate systematically at a very early stage whether a drug will alter the risk of developing other conditions.

A major class of anti-diabetic therapies are those known as glucose-lowering glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor (GLP1R)-agonists.  These drugs bind to the GLP-1 receptor (which is encoded by the GLP1R gene) to increase insulin production, helping reduce levels of blood sugar. However, the cardiovascular safety, of this class of agents, including the risk of heart disease for example, remains unknown.

By analysing genetic variations in DNA encoding drug targets for type 2 diabetes and obesity in almost 12,000 individuals, the researchers identified a variant in the GLP1Rgene that was associated with lower fasting glucose and a lower risk of type 2 diabetes – in other words, the variant appeared to mimic the action of the diabetes drugs. They confirmed this result in a further 40,000 individuals.

The researchers then used genetic data available through an international data-sharing consortium to study the association of that same variant with coronary heart disease in almost 62,000 individuals with coronary heart disease and over 160,000 controls. In fact, they found that the variant actually reduced the risk of heart disease. Long-term large-scale randomised controlled clinical trials to evaluate the cardiovascular safety of GLP1R-agonists are underway and results from a large trial are scheduled to be released later this month.

“This further suggests that human genetics can support the development of new therapies, and can offer insights into their safety profile early in the development process,” says Dr Robert Scott from the Medical Research Council (MRC) Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge, the study’s first author.

Professor Nick Wareham, Director of the MRC Epidemiology Unit, added: “These findings suggest that beyond their effectiveness in treating diabetes, these drugs may have the added benefit of lowering risk of heart disease.”

“Researching and developing new medicines is a lengthy, expensive and risky journey, and any insights we can gain in to the processes of the body related to disease could help improve our ability to succeed,” says Dr Dawn Waterworth, joint senior author from GSK. “By pooling our resources and expertise in collaborations like this one with Cambridge University, we believe there’s an opportunity to expand our knowledge of disease biology, which in turn could help reduce the risk of late-stage failures and accelerate the development of innovative new treatments for patients.”

The study was primarily funded by GSK and the Medical Research Council.

Reference
Scott, R et al. A genomic approach to therapeutic target validation identifies a glucose-lowering GLP1R variant protective for coronary heart disease. Sci Trans Med; 2 June 2016; DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.aad3744

The study led by Gates Cambridge Scholar Alison Greggor and published in the journal Animal Behaviour, shows that corvids – the family of birds which includes crows, ravens and magpies – are more likely to show fear in relation to unfamiliar objects than other birds. However, if they and other bird species have previously encountered similar objects they are able to overcome some of their fear.

The researchers measured levels of fear of new objects in birds across urban and rural habitats, comparing corvids, a family known for being behaviourally flexible and innovative, with other bird species found in urban areas. The birds’ hesitancy to approach food when different types of objects were nearby was compared to their behaviour when food was presented alone.

The researchers found corvids were more afraid of objects than other birds. However, birds were less fearful if the objects involved were similar to something they may have encountered before, for instance, urban birds were less hesitant in approaching litter.

Alison Greggor, who is doing a PhD in Psychology at the University of Cambridge, said: “From a broad perspective this work aims to help us understand how animals adapt to human-dominated landscapes. We found that although species differ in their overall levels of fear towards new things, populations of all species in urban areas showed lesser fear towards objects that looked like rubbish, but did not show reductions in fear towards all types of novelty. Therefore,  they may actually be learning which specific parts of urban habitats are safe and which are dangerous. In future, others might be able to use this information to predict what types of things animals need to learn to be able to survive in urban areas. Such predictions may help us understand why some species are unable to adjust to urban areas.”

Reference
Greggor, AL et al. Street smart: faster approach towards litter in urban areas by highly neophobic corvids and less fearful birds. Animal Behaviour; 30 May 2016; DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2016.03.029

Anger at the workplace is commonly associated with employees storming out of the office and quitting their jobs, but a new study from the Cambridge Judge Business School suggests that the picture is far more complex.

More broadly, positive emotions are usually thought to lead to constructive outcomes and negative emotions to damaging outcomes for business and other organisations.

A new academic study finds, however, that these generalisations are often a myth: when identification with a company is high, anger over job situations often decreases (rather than boosts) a person’s intention to leave because such employees want to stick it out and improve the organisation rather than walk out in a huff.

Conversely, when a person’s identity with their organisation is low, anger increases their intention to quit, says the study published in the Academy of Management Journal.

Researchers at the Cambridge Judge Business School found that for an individual highly-identified with the organisation, anger directed toward the organisation is similar to self-blame because the organisation is part of their self-definition, and hence such people are less likely to respond to negative feelings by disengaging.

The practical implication of the research, the authors say, is that it is unwise for companies to broadly characterise specific emotions as beneficial or detrimental to the organisation.

“The study suggests that company policies that are designed to promote positive emotions or minimise negative emotions may in fact not have the intended effect,” says Jochen Menges, University Lecturer in Organisational Behaviour at Cambridge Judge Business School and Professor of Leadership at WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management in Germany. “So rather than seeking to suppress certain workplace emotions, companies should instead adopt practices that seek to encourage greater organisational identification.”

The research focused on a large company in the pilot training and certification business, with a final dataset of 135 people employed in the United States and Europe who were evaluated over a one-year period.  They were asked about their intentions to leave the company or remain, and about both general organisation issues (such as schedule and pay) and specific matters related to the job – such as events that “made you feel good at your job,” “made you feel disrespected as a pilot” or “made you feel close to other pilot instructors.”

As a follow-up, the study looked at actual staff turnover at the flight training company six months after the last survey of employees and found a significant correlation between the number of employees intending to leave the company and the actual staff turnover.

The study examined guilt and pride, in addition to anger – and found here, too, a dark side of positive emotion and a bright side of negative emotion. For example, while pride is generally associated with a likelihood to remain at a company, for employees lacking in work-related identifications, a feeling of pride made them more likely to consider moving on.

The research looked at a people’s identity with their occupation as well as organisation, and found that while occupational identity is not as powerful as organisational identity in staff turnover, it does play a complementary role.

Reference:
Samantha Conroy, William Becker and Jochen Menges. ‘The Meaning of My Feelings Depends on Who I Am: Work-related Identifications Shape Emotion Effects in Organizations.’ Academy of Management Journal (2016). DOI: 10.5465/amj.2014.1040

Originally published on the Cambridge Judge Business School website. 

The English Dialects App (free for Android and iOS) was launched in January 2016 and has been downloaded more than 70,000 times. To date, more than 30,000 people from over 4,000 locations around the UK have provided results on how certain words and colloquialisms are pronounced. A new, updated version of the app – which attempts to guess where you’re from at the end of the quiz – is available for download from this week.

Based on the huge new dataset of results, researchers at Cambridge, along with colleagues at the universities of Bern and Zurich, have been able to map the spread, evolution or decline of certain words and colloquialisms compared to results from the original survey of dialect speakers in 313 localities carried out in the 1950s.

One of the major findings is that some features of regional accents, such as pronouncing the ‘r’ in words like ‘arm’ – a very noticeable pronunciation feature which was once normal throughout the West Country and along much of the south coast – are disappearing in favour of the pronunciations found in London and the South-East (see map slideshow).

Lead researcher Dr Adrian Leemann, from Cambridge’s Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, said: “When it comes to language change in England, our results confirm that there is a clear pattern of levelling towards the English of the south-east; more and more people are using and pronouncing words in the way that people from London and the south-east do.

Professor David Britain from the University of Bern added: “People in Bristol speak much more similarly to those in Colchester now than they did fifty years ago. Regional differences are disappearing, some quite quickly. However, while many pockets of resistance to this levelling are shrinking, there is still a stark north-south divide in the pronunciation of certain key words.”

Dialect words are even more likely to have disappeared than regional accents, according to this research. Once, the word ‘backend’ instead of ‘autumn’ was common in much of England, but today very few people report using this word (see map slideshow).

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However, the research has shown some areas of resistance to the patterns of overall levelling in dialect. Newcastle and Sunderland stood out from the rest of England with the majority of people from those areas continuing to use local words and pronunciations which are declining elsewhere. For example, many people in the North-East still use a traditional dialect word for ‘a small piece of wood stuck under the skin’, ‘spelk’ instead of Standard English ‘splinter’.

Other dialect words, like ‘shiver’ for ‘splinter’, are still reported in exactly the same area they were found historically—although they are far less common than they once were (see map slideshow).

The data collected to date shows that one northern pronunciation has proved especially robust: saying words like ‘last’ with a short vowel instead of a long one. In this case, the northern form actually appears to have spread southwards in the Midlands and the West Country compared with the historical survey.

In other cases, new pronunciations were found to be spreading. Pronouncing words like ‘three’ with an ‘f’ was only found in a tiny region in the south east in the 1950s, but the data from today show this pronunciation is much more widespread – 15% of respondents reported saying ‘free’ for ‘three’, up from just 2% in the old Atlas.

Cambridge PhD student Tam Blaxter, who worked alongside Dr Leemann to map the 30,000 responses supplied by the public, suggests that greater geographical mobility is behind the changes when compared to the first systematic nationwide investigation of regional speech, the Survey of English Dialects from the 1950s.

“There has been much greater geographical mobility in the last half century,” said Blaxter. “Many people move around much more for education, work and lifestyle and there has been a significant shift of population out of the cities and into the countryside.

“Many of the results have confirmed what language experts might predict – but until now we just didn’t have the geographical breadth of data to back up our predictions. If we were to do the survey in another 60-70 years we might well see this dialect levelling expanding further, although some places like the north-east seem to have been especially good at preserving certain colloquialisms and pronunciations.”

When the app was originally launched in January, users were quizzed about the way they spoke 26 different words or phrases. The academics behind the app wanted to see how English dialects have changed, spread or levelled out since the Survey of English Dialects. The 1950s project took eleven years to complete and captured the accents and dialects of mainly farm labourers.

Perhaps one of the most surprising results of the data provided so far is how the use of ‘scone’ (to rhyme with ‘gone’ rather than ‘cone’) is much more common in the north of England that many might imagine (see map slideshow).

Adrian Leemann said: “Everyone has strong views about how this word is pronounced but until we launched the app in January, we knew rather little about who uses which pronunciation and where. Our data shows that for the North and Scotland, ‘scone’ rhymes with ‘gone’, for Cornwall and the area around Sheffield it rhymes with ‘cone’ – while for the rest of England, there seems to be a lot of community-internal variation. In the future we will further unpick how this distribution is conditioned socially.”

The launch of the English Dialects App in January has also allowed language use in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland to be compared with language use in England (the original 1950s survey was limited to England and similar surveys of the other parts of the UK were not undertaken at the same time or using the same methods).

The huge levels of feedback have also meant the team have improved the prediction of where users might be from. The app now correctly places 25 per cent of respondents within 20 miles, compared with 37 miles for the old method.

A relationship that has lasted for 100 million years is at serious risk of ending, due to the effects of environmental and climate change. A species of spiny crayfish native to Australia and the tiny flatworms that depend on them are both at risk of extinction, according to researchers from the UK and Australia.

Look closely into one of the cool, freshwater streams of eastern Australia and you might find a colourful mountain spiny crayfish, from the genus Euastacus. Look even closer and you could see small tentacled flatworms, called temnocephalans, each only a few millimetres long. Temnocephalans live as specialised symbionts on the surface of the crayfish, where they catch tiny food items, or inside the crayfish’s gill chamber where they can remove parasites. This is an ancient partnership, but the temnocephalans are now at risk of coextinction with their endangered hosts. Coextinction is the loss of one species, when another that it depends upon goes extinct.

In a new study, researchers from the UK and Australia reconstructed the evolutionary and ecological history of the mountain spiny crayfish and their temnocephalan symbionts to assess their coextinction risk. This study was based on DNA sequences from crayfish and temnocephalans across eastern Australia, sampled by researchers at James Cook University, sequenced at the Natural History Museum, London and Queensland Museum, and analysed at the University of Sydney and the University of Cambridge. The resultsare published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

“We’ve now got a picture of how these two species have evolved together through time,” said Dr Jennifer Hoyal Cuthill from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences, the paper’s lead author. “The extinction risk to the crayfish has been measured, but this is the first time we’ve quantified the risk to the temnocephalans as well – and it looks like this ancient partnership could end with the extinction of both species.”

Mountain spiny crayfish species diversified across eastern Australia over at least 80 million years, with 37 living species included in this study. Reconstructing the ages of the temnocephalans using a ‘molecular clock’ analysis showed that the tiny worms are as ancient as their crayfish hosts and have evolved alongside them since the Cretaceous Period.

Today, many species of mountain spiny crayfish have small geographic ranges. This is especially true in Queensland, where mountain spiny crayfish are restricted to cool, high-altitude streams in small pockets of rainforest. This habitat was reduced and fragmented by long-term climate warming and drying, as the continent of Australia drifted northwards over the last 165 million years. As a consequence, mountain spiny crayfish are severely threatened by ongoing climate change and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has assessed 75% of these species as endangered or critically endangered.

“In Australia, freshwater crayfish are large, diverse and active ‘managers’, recycling all sorts of organic material and working the sediments,” said Professor David Blair of James Cook University in Australia, the paper’s senior author. “The temnocephalan worms associated only with these crayfish are also diverse, reflecting a long, shared history and offering a unique window on ancient symbioses. We now risk extinction of many of these partnerships, which will lead to degradation of their previous habitats and leave science the poorer.”

The crayfish tend to have the smallest ranges in the north of Australia, where the climate is the hottest and all of the northern species are endangered or critically endangered. By studying the phylogenies (evolutionary trees) of the species, the researchers found that northern crayfish also tended to be the most evolutionarily distinctive. This also applies to the temnocephalans of genus Temnosewellia, which are symbionts of spiny mountain crayfish across their geographic range. “This means that the most evolutionarily distinctive lineages are also those most at risk of extinction,” said Hoyal Cuthill.

The researchers then used computer simulations to predict the extent of coextinction. This showed that if all the mountain spiny crayfish that are currently endangered were to go extinct, 60% of their temnocephalan symbionts would also be lost to coextinction. The temnocephalan lineages that were predicted to be at the greatest risk of coextinction also tended to be the most evolutionarily distinctive. These lineages represent a long history of symbiosis and coevolution of up to 100 million years. However they are the most likely to suffer coextinction if these species and their habitats are not protected from ongoing environmental and climate change.

“The intimate relationship between hosts and their symbionts and parasites is often unique and long lived, not just during the lifespan of the individual organisms themselves but during the evolutionary history of the species involved in the association,” said study co-author Dr Tim Littlewood of the Natural History Museum. “This study exemplifies how understanding and untangling such an intimate relationship across space and time can yield deep insights into past climates and environments, as well as highlighting current threats to biodiversity.”

Reference:
Jennifer F. Hoyal Cuthill et al. ‘Australian spiny mountain crayfish and their temnocephalan ectosymbionts: an ancient association on the edge of coextinction?’ Proceedings of the Royal Society B (2016). DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2016.0585

The findings are included in a new report, The Value of Languages, published by the University of Cambridge this week, after wide-ranging consultation with government bodies and agencies including the MoD, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, GCHQ, and the Department for Education.

The report argues for the full contribution of languages to the UK economy and society to be realised across government, rather than falling solely under the remit of the Department for Education, thereby allowing a centralised approach in how language impacts the UK in almost every sphere of 21st-century life.

Recent independent research, highlighted within the report, indicates the language deficit could be costing the UK economy billions of pounds per year.

The Value of Languages draws on discussions at a workshop held in Cambridge, co-chaired by Professor Wendy Ayres-Bennett of the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, and Baroness Coussins, Co-Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Languages. The workshop was attended by representatives from across government and is likely to inform future policy decisions in this area.

Professor Ayres-Bennett said: “It is vital that we communicate clearly and simply the value of languages for the health of the nation. English is necessary, but not sufficient. We cannot leave language policy to the Department for Education alone.

“We need a more coordinated cross-government approach which recognises the value of languages to key issues of our time including security and defence, diplomacy and international relations, and social cohesion and peace-building. Our report aims to raise awareness of the current deficiencies in UK language policy, put forward proposals to address them, and illustrate the strategic value of languages to the UK.”

The report also suggests:

• Education policy for languages must be grounded in national priorities and promote a cultural shift in the attitude towards languages.
• Language policy must be underpinned by organisational cultural change. The report highlights how cultural change is being achieved, for example, in the military with language skills being valued and rewarded financially. Military personnel are encouraged to take examinations to record their language skills, regardless of whether they are language learners or speakers of community or heritage languages.
• Champions for languages both within and outside government are vital.

“Whereas the STEM subjects are specifically highlighted under the responsibilities for the Minister of State for Universities and Science, and there is a Chief Government Scientist, languages lack high-level champions within parliament and Whitehall,” added Ayres-Bennett.  “Modern languages also need media champions. Figures such as Simon Schama for history or Brian Cox for physics and astronomy have helped bring the importance of these subjects to the public’s attention.”

Imminent or immediate problems for government to address include the decline of languages and language learning in the UK from schools through to higher education, where language departments and degree courses are closing; business lost to UK companies through lack of language skills; and an erosion of the UK’s ‘soft power’ in conflict and matters of national security, which are currently limited by a shortage of speakers of strategically important languages

The report finds that the UK is also under-represented internationally, for instance in the EU civil service or in the translating and interpreting departments of the UN – and that the community and heritage languages spoken in the UK are often undervalued.

“A UK strategy for languages would mean that UK businesses can participate fully in the global market place using the language and communication skills of their workforce,” said Professor Ayres-Bennett.

“It would also mean that the UK is able to maximise its role and authority in foreign policy through language and diplomacy. Educational attainment in a wide range of languages brings with it personal cognitive benefits as well as the ‘cultural agility’ vital to international relations and development, as well as enhancing the cultural capital and social cohesion of the different communities of the UK.”

The report cites a number of case studies illustrating the value of languages. For example, a Spanish linguist recruited to GCHQ was from her first day able to use her ‘street language’ acquired during her year abroad and her knowledge of certain Latin American countries to translate communications related to an international drugs cartel looking to transport cocaine into the UK.  Comparing her analysis with those developed by two of her language community colleagues in Russian and Urdu, she was able to create a clear intelligence picture of the likely methods and dates of the imminent drugs importation. Meetings with Law Enforcement agents eventually led to the seizure of large quantities of cocaine and lengthy jail terms for the key players.

Policy workshops and briefings will be a key element of a new £4m research project on multilingualism led by Professor Ayres-Bennett at the University of Cambridge, and funded under the AHRC’s Open World Research Initiative.

The full report can be seen here: http://www.publicpolicy.cam.ac.uk/research-impact/value-of-languages

The controversial theorist Thomas Robert Malthus did not much enjoy travelling. Invited by his friend and fellow political economist, David Ricardo, to stay at the country house of Gatcombe Park in Gloucestershire, he declared that “that part of the world” was simply too far from his home near London, and wrote that he’d resolved “not to make distant excursions more than once a year”.

Now new research confirms that Malthus travelled vicariously all over the world, immersed in the accounts of voyages to the new lands being explored and colonised by Europeans. Malthus’s journeying through the medium of print to far-flung shores in the Americas and Pacific informed the theories on human development, population, and land use (and the precarious balance among them) for which he quickly became famous.

Professors Alison Bashford (Cambridge) and Joyce E Chaplin (Harvard) explore this under-researched aspect of Malthus’s life and works. The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus reveals that the contentious theorist raised profound and prescient questions about the nature of people worldwide – and, in particular, about the collision of interests that resulted when white settlers claimed territories inhabited by indigenous communities.

The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus radically re-casts the famous economist’s ideas from a British and European context, to a world and imperial one. The book is already hailed, by scholars on both sides of the Atlantic, as a stunningly distinctive contribution to interpretations of Malthus. One scholar calls it “the most important new reading of the life and work of Malthus in a generation”.

The seventh child in a well-off family, Malthus was born 250 years ago on 13 February 1766. His father’s social circle included some of the best-known philosophers of the time, including David Hume and Jean Jacques Rousseau.  Like many younger sons of the gentry, Malthus took orders in the Church of England and, after an education at Jesus College, Cambridge, became a curate who corresponded widely. He began to publish pamphlets on topical issues in the stormy last decade of the 18th century.

Though cast as ‘parson Malthus’, for most of his life he was in fact a professor of political economy at the East India Company College in Haileybury. Bashford explains: “This put him at the centre of the imperial world, for several generations educating young men for service as Company clerks in India.”

Malthus is best known for his Essay on the Principle of Population, which first appeared in 1798. In the thesis, both respected and vilified for the past 200 years, he argued that while population multiplies exponentially, food supplies increase only arithmetically. The oscillating mismatch between the two would spell disaster when ‘checked’ by nature through famine or disease, or by humans through war or infanticide.

The most troubling aspect of Malthus’s essay is his interpretation of poverty. While a generation of utopians was imagining a brighter and better future for all, Malthus proposed a much bleaker picture. Some poverty, he argued, was inevitable. As population increased when times were good, so the poorest would perish when times were bad. Disease and famine served as natural checks to over-population. These uncompromising views led Malthus to be much disliked or even hated.

Yet Malthus also thought the number of people on that poverty line could and should be reduced. “Despite assertions that Malthus blamed only the poor for producing too many children, for being the problem, he was in fact at least equally critical of the behaviour of the privileged,” Chaplin points out. “He argued that when the rich had large families, the poor disproportionately suffered any material shortages, therefore wealthier people were morally obliged to produce fewer children.”

Historians have consistently set Malthus within a European context. But Bashford and Chaplin show that his Essay was about the Atlantic and Pacific new worlds as well. It was written within the tradition of ‘stadial’ theories of economic development; these ‘universal histories’ sought to understand all cultures in all places and times. Using Jesuit travel accounts, 18th-century journals of Pacific voyagers, and the writings of new world settlers, Malthus wrote a world history.

Bashford and Chaplin initially approached Malthus from different chronological perspectives. Chaplin had written extensively about English interpretations of colonisation and population, also on Benjamin Franklin’s influential population thesis, which was a key inspiration for Malthus. Meanwhile, Bashford had examined modern theories of population and of 20th-century Malthusianism. They began to talk about population, and Malthus, while Bashford was a visiting professor at Harvard University.

“Several years ago, I opened the 1803 edition of Malthus’s Essay and was entirely surprised to see the name Bennelong,” explains Bashford. “Well known to Australian historians, Bennelong was an Aboriginal leader in the earliest years of British colony of New South Wales, a cultural interlocutor who spent several years in London in the 1790s. But what was he doing in Malthus’s famous Essay?” The need to re-interpret Malthus’s work in the light of colonial and imperial history was clear.

Chaplin then discovered that Franklin’s and Malthus’s works on population had been produced by the same London publisher. “That seemed more than coincidental,” Chaplin says. “Together, the two authors — American and British — and their two books show that new world colonies and the imperial centre were neither topically distant or theoretically distinct.”

Many of the books Malthus used to research and write his world history are in the Old Library at Jesus College. The Malthus Collection includes volumes that belonged to his father, his brother, his learned cousin, Jane Dalton, and Malthus himself. Among them are copies of Benjamin Franklin’s essays, Cook’s journals from the South Sea, and Jesuit accounts of New France and New Spain – all owned by Malthus.

Bashford and Chaplin’s research reveals that, as white settlers began to claim new territories, Malthus occasionally questioned the morality of colonisation, very unusual for his time, and almost unique among his political economy contemporaries. As early as 1803, he anticipated and deplored the fate he foresaw awaiting the inhabitants of the new world as settler populations increasingly claimed lands that seemed to offer almost limitless resources.

Anticipating formal policies for the removal of indigenous people in North America and Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), he wrote: “The right of exterminating, or driving into a corner where they must starve, even the inhabitants of these thinly populated regions, will be questioned in a moral view.”

The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus also explains Malthus’s views on the slave trade. His Essay, written and rewritten between 1798 and 1830, coincided with the height of the abolitionist campaigns, first against the slave trade and then against slavery. He asked William Wilberforce to inform the House of Commons that he was against the slave trade, in large part because quite a few slave traders were using his Principle of Population in their own defence.

“Yet Malthus spoke out against the slave trade somewhat reluctantly,” argue Bashford and Chaplin, “and he never spoke out against slavery itself.” This diffidence is evident in his famous books, analysed in terms of slavery and abolition, for the first time. While it was common at the time to consider slavery in terms of reproduction and population, The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus explains why and how Malthus sidestepped the issue.

The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus analyses, for the first time, the reception history of the work in the very places Malthus examined. He was read and discussed in new world sites that ran from Lexington in Kentucky to Hobart in Tasmania. So eager were new world people to read him that his text appeared in a pirated edition produced in the United States. His ideas entered public discourse:  settler populations, for example, debated his key statement that they should neither exterminate nor drive into ‘a corner’ indigenous populations.

Malthus was bolder than many of his European and American contemporaries and, in terms of continuing arguments over the rights of different global populations, his text remains deeply resonant today.

The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus is published by Princeton University Press.