William Smith’s 1815 Geological Map of England and Wales, which measures 8.5ft x 6ft, demonstrated for the first time the geology of the UK and was the culmination of years of work by Smith, who was shunned by the scientific community for many years and ended up in debtors’ prison.

Today, exactly 200 years since its first publication, a copy of Smith’s map – rediscovered after more than a century in a museum box – will go on public display at the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences. Aside from a copy held at The Geological Society in London, the Cambridge map is believed to be the only such map on public display anywhere in the world.

The iconic map, which is still used as the basis of geological maps to this day, had the greatest influence on the science of geology, inspiring a generation of naturalists and fledgling geologists to establish geology as a coherent, robust and important science. The map was so large, that, for practicality’s sake, it was often sold in 15 separate sheets, either loose, or in a leather travelling case.

Museum Director Ken McNamara said: “This is the world’s earliest geological map. Smith was working from a position of no knowledge when he began. Nobody had ever attempted this before and it’s really quite staggering what this one man achieved over ten or fifteen years, travelling up and down the country as a canal surveyor.

“It’s incredibly accurate, even now in 2015. If you compare the current geological map of Great Britain today there are amazing similarities. The British Geological Survey still uses the same colour scheme that Smith devised. Chalk is green. Limestone is yellow and it’s still done like that to this day.”

“This started geology as a modern science. It’s like the Magna Carta of geology, the beginnings of geology as a modern science and that’s why it’s so important.”

Smith’s map proudly announced itself to the world as: “A DELINEATION of the STRATA of ENGLAND and WALES with part of SCOTLAND; exhibiting the COLLIERIES and MINES; the MARSHES and FEN LANDS ORIGINALLY OVERFLOWED BY THE SEA; and the VARIETIES of Soil according to the Variations in the Substrata; ILLUSTRATED by the MOST DESCRIPTIVE NAMES”.

How many of Smith’s great maps still exist is unclear. Around 70 are thought to remain worldwide. The Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge, the oldest geological museum in the world, is lucky enough to have three copies.

For many years the museum knew that it possessed two of Smith’s great maps: one a set of 15 sheets bound together as a book; the other, beautifully preserved, nestles in its leather travelling case. Two years ago, in May 2013, a third copy was rediscovered in the collection. Found folded in a box with some other early geological maps, staff believe it had not seen the light of day since Queen Victoria was on the throne.

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Despite its decades hidden from view, the hand-coloured map had been exposed to harsh light for many years before being packed away. The colours were faded, the paper stained and it carried the stains of faecal deposits from long dead spiders and flies.

The map was then conserved by experts at Duxford, near Cambridge. Nineteenth century dirt and grime was carefully removed, then the original, faded water-colour paint was given a protective coating and subtly restored to enhance the colour of the rock formations. Only 400 were ever produced over at least a four-year period. During that time, Smith continued his geological research and continually made new discoveries, adapting and amending each new edition as he went along. Each individual map took seven or eight days to be coloured.

McNamara said: “Smith suffered many deprivations in his life. He became a bankrupt and ended up in debtor’s prison for a while. Perhaps, almost as galling, he was largely ignored by the geological establishment. However, he gained his due recognition from the Geological Society of London later in life when, in 1831, he was the first person to receive the society’s most prestigious medal, the Wollaston Medal.

“Appropriately, given the hanging of his map in the Sedgwick Museum, it was Adam Sedgwick who presented Smith with his medal. We are, we think, the only museum, library or art gallery in the world to have one of Smith’s legendary maps on public display – and we want as many people as possible to come and see this enormous, iconic and beautiful map for themselves.”

The results are based on further analysis of survey data from more than 70,000 cancer patients, by Cancer Research UK scientists at the University of Cambridge and University College London, published today in theEuropean Journal of Cancer Care.

Of the nearly 60,000 survey respondents diagnosed through their GP, almost a quarter (23 per cent) had been seen three or more times before being referred for cancer tests.

Four in ten (39 per cent) of those who had experienced referral delays were dissatisfied with the support they received from their GP compared to just under three in ten (28 per cent) of those referred after one or two GP visits.

Overall, patients who had seen their GP three or more times before being referred were more likely to report negative experiences across 10 of 12 different aspects of their care. For example, 18 per cent of these patients were dissatisfied with the way they were told they had cancer, compared to 14 per cent among those who were referred more quickly.

Four in ten expressed dissatisfaction with how hospital staff and their GP had worked with each other to provide the best possible care, compared to one in three among those referred promptly.

Dissatisfaction with the overall care received was even higher among the just under one in ten (9 per cent) patients who saw their GP five or more times before being referred.

Study author Dr Georgios Lyratzopoulos, from the Department of Public Health and Primary Care at the University of Cambridge, said: “This research shows that first impressions go a long way in determining how cancer patients view their experience of cancer treatment. A negative experience of diagnosis can trigger loss of confidence in their care throughout the cancer journey.

“When they occur, diagnostic delays are largely due to cancer symptoms being extremely hard to distinguish from other diseases, combined with a lack of accurate and easy-to-use tests. New diagnostic tools to help doctors decide which patients need referring are vital to improve the care experience for even more cancer patients.”

Dr Richard Roope, Cancer Research UK’s GP expert, said: “It’s vital we now step up efforts to ensure potential cancer symptoms can be investigated promptly, such as through the new NICE referral guidelines launched last month to give GPs more freedom to quickly refer patients with worrying symptoms. This will hopefully contribute to improving the patient experience, one of the six strategic priorities recommended by the UK’s Cancer Task Force last week.”

Reference

Mendonca S.C. et al, Pre-referral general practitioner consultations and subsequent experience of cancer care: evidence from the English Cancer Patient Experience Survey,European Journal of Cancer (2015)

Adapted from a press release by Cancer Research UK.

The Therapeutics Consortium, announced today, will connect the intellectual know-how of several large academic institutions with the drug-developing potential of the pharmaceutical industry, to deliver better drugs to the clinic.

From early 2018, the Consortium will form a major constituent of the new Milner Therapeutics Institute, which has been made possible through a £5 million donation from Jonathan Milner and will be located in a new building at the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, the centrepiece of the largest biotech cluster outside the United States.

The Consortium will connect academic and clinical researchers at the University of Cambridge, the Babraham Institute and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute with pharmaceutical companies Astex Pharmaceuticals, AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). It will provide researchers with the potential to access novel therapeutic agents (including small molecules and antibodies) across the entire portfolio of drugs being developed by each of the companies, in order to investigate their mechanism, efficacy and potential. The terms of the Consortium allow for fast and easy access to these agents and information.

Each industry partner within the Therapeutics Consortium has committed funding to spend on collaborative projects and will collectively fund an executive manager to oversee the academic/industry interactions. Collaborative projects are expected to lead to joint publications, supporting a culture of more open innovation.

Professor Tony Kouzarides from the University of Cambridge, who will head the Therapeutics Consortium and the Milner Institute, is currently deputy director at the Gurdon Institute. He says: “The Milner Institute will act as a ‘match-making’ service through the Therapeutics Consortium, connecting the world-leading research potential of the University of Cambridge and partner institutions with the drug development expertise and resources of the pharmaceutical industry. We hope many more pharmaceutical companies will join our consortium and believe this form of partnership is a model for how academic institutions and industry can work together to deliver better medicines.”

Dr Harren Jhoti, President and CEO of Cambridge-based company Astex Pharmaceuticals, now part of Japan’s Otsuka Group, said: “As a company that was founded right here in Cambridge we are delighted to support this new Consortium working together with leading Cambridge academic and clinical researchers to help us to research and develop ever better treatments for patients.”

Mene Pangalos, Executive Vice President, Innovative Medicines & Early Development at AstraZeneca said: “We are pleased to be part of this exciting new consortium that brings together world-leading science and technology into a dedicated multi-disciplinary institute focused on translational research.  The proximity of the Institute to our new R&D centre and global headquarters in Cambridge will ensure our scientists can work closely with those at the Milner Institute.”

Professor Michael Wakelam, Director of the Babraham Institute, said: “The Institute’s participation in the Therapeutics Consortium provides yet one more channel by which our excellence in basic biological research is built upon in partnership with industry-based collaborators. We know from experience that bringing together the best academics and the best pharmacological research is both efficient and enlightening and we look forward to making joint progress.”

Dr Rab Prinjha, Head of GSK’s Epigenetics Discovery Performance Unit, said: “Late-stage attrition is too high – very few investigational medicines entering human trials eventually become an approved treatment.  As an industry, we must improve our success rate by understanding our molecules and targets better.  This innovative institute which builds on GSK’s very successful collaboration with the Gurdon Institute and close links with many groups across Cambridge, aims to increase our knowledge of basic biological mechanisms to help us bring the right investigational medicines into human trials and ultimately to patients.”

The Consortium will initially operate from the Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute, but will move into the Milner Institute in early 2018.

The Milner Therapeutics Institute

One of the major aims of the Institute will be to help understand how drugs work and to push forward new ideas and technologies to improve the development of novel therapies. A major, but not exclusive, focus of the Institute will be cancer.

It is envisaged that the Milner Institute will be equipped with core facilities, such as high-throughput screening of small molecules against cell lines, organoids (‘mini organs’) and tumour biopsies, as well as bioinformatics support to help scientists deal with large datasets. Its facilities will be available to researchers working on collaborative projects within the Therapeutics Consortium and, capacity permitting, to other scientists and clinicians within the Cambridge community.

In addition, the Milner Institute will have space for senior and junior scientists to set up independent research groups. There will also be associated faculty positions, which will be taken up by scientists in different departments, whose research and expertise will benefit from a close association with the Milner Institute.

The Milner Institute will be housed within the new Capella building, alongside the relocated Wellcome Trust/MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, a new Centre for Blood & Leukaemia Research, and a new Centre for Immunology & Immunotherapeutics.

Jonathan Milner, whose donation has made the Milner Therapeutics Institute possible, is a former member of Tony Kouzarides’ research group and experienced entrepreneur. In 1998 they founded leading biotechnology company Abcam together with Professor David Cleevely, which has gone on to employ over 800 people and supply products to 64% of researchers globally.

The treasures of Cambridge University Library’s Chinese collections are the latest addition to the Digital Library website (http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/chinese) which already hosts the works of Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton and Siegfried Sassoon, as well as unique collections on the Board of Longitude and the Royal Commonwealth Society.

The oracle bones (ox shoulder blades and turtle shells) are one of the Library’s most important collections and are the earliest surviving examples of Chinese writing anywhere in the world. They are the oldest form of documents owned by the Library and record questions to which answers were sought by divination at the court of the royal house of Shang, which ruled central China between the 16th and 11th centuries BCE. (http://bit.ly/1RJkZEG).

As the earliest known specimens of the Chinese script, the oracle bone inscriptions are of fundamental importance for Chinese palaeography and our understanding of ancient Chinese society. The bones record information on a wide range of matters including warfare, agriculture, hunting and medical problems, as well as genealogical, meteorological and astronomical data, such as the earliest records of eclipses and comets.

Never before displayed, three of the 800 oracle bones held in the Library can now be viewed in exquisite detail, alongside a 17th-century book which has been described as ‘perhaps the most beautiful set of prints ever made’ (http://bit.ly/1fMfAf3). Estimated to be worth millions on the open market, the ‘Manual of Calligraphy and Painting’ was made in 1633 by the Ten Bamboo Studio in Nanjing.

Charles Aylmer, Head of the Chinese Department at Cambridge University Library, said: “This is the earliest and finest example of multi-colour printing anywhere in the world, comprising 138 paintings and sketches with associated texts by fifty different artists and calligraphers. Although reprinted many times, complete sets of early editions in the original binding are extremely rare.

“The binding is so fragile, and the manual so delicate, that until it was digitized, we have never been able to let anyone look through it or study it – despite its undoubted importance to scholars.”

Other highlights of the digitisation include one of the world’s earliest printed bookshttp://bit.ly/1HRsK0k), a Buddhist text dated between 1127 and 1175. The translator (Xuanzang) was famed for the 17 year pilgrimage to India he undertook to collect religious texts and bring them back to China.

‘The Manual of Famine Relief’ has also been digitised. This 19th-century manuscript contains instructions for the distribution of emergency rations to famine victims and includes practical advice about foraging for natural substitutes to normal foodstuffs in the event of an emergency.

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Elsewhere, a 14th-century banknote (http://bit.ly/1O8QJwB) is one of the more unusual additions to the Chinese Collections. Paper currency first appeared in China during the 7th century, and was in wide circulation by the 11th century, 500 years before its first use in Europe.

By the 12th century the central government had realised the benefits of banknotes for purposes of tax collection and financial administration, and by the late 13th century had printed and issued a national paper currency – accounts of it reached Europe through the writings of Marco Polo and others.

The Library’s banknote, printed on mulberry paper from a cast metal plate, was first issued in 1380. The denomination of the banknote (one thousand cash) is shown by a picture of ten strings of copper cash (10 x 100 = 1000), flanked by a text in seal script which reads: ‘Great Ming Paper Currency; Circulating Throughout the World’. The text underneath threatens forgers with decapitation and promises that anyone denouncing or apprehending them will receive not only a reward of 25 ounces of silver but also all the miscreant’s property.

Huw Jones, part of the digitisation team at Cambridge University Library, said: “The very high quality of the digital images has already led to important discoveries about the material – we have seen where red pigment was used to colour inscriptions on the oracle bones, and seals formerly invisible have been deciphered on several items. We look forward to new insights now that the collection has a truly global audience, and we are already working with an ornithological expert to identify the birds in the Manual of Calligraphy and Painting.”

Cambridge University Library acquired its first Chinese book in 1632 as part of the collection of the Duke of Buckingham, but the first substantial holdings of Chinese books came with the donation of 4,304 volumes by Sir Thomas Wade (1818–1895), first Professor of Chinese in the University from 1888 until his death.

The Chinese collections at Cambridge University Library now number about half a million individual titles, including monographs, reprinted materials, archival documents, epigraphical rubbings and 200,000 Chinese e-books (donated by Premier Wen Jiabao in 2009).

The ‘Cytosponge’ sits within a pill which, when swallowed, dissolves to reveal a sponge that scrapes off cells when withdrawn up the gullet. It allows doctors to collect cells from all along the gullet, whereas standard biopsies take individual point samples.

Oesophageal cancer is often preceded by Barrett’s oesophagus, a condition in which cells within the lining of the oesophagus begin to change shape and can grow abnormally. The cellular changes are cause by acid and bile reflux – when the stomach juices come back up the gullet. Between one and five people in every 100 with Barrett’s oesophagus go on to develop oesophageal cancer in their life-time, a form of cancer that can be difficult to treat, particularly if not caught early enough.

At present, Barrett’s oesophagus and oesophageal cancer are diagnosed using biopsies, which look for signs of dysplasia, the proliferation of abnormal cancer cells. This is a subjective process, requiring a trained scientist to identify abnormalities. Understanding how oesophageal cancer develops and the genetic mutations involved could help doctors catch the disease earlier, offering better treatment options for the patient.

An alternative way of spotting very early signs of oesophageal cancer would be to look for important genetic changes. However, researchers from the University of Cambridge have shown that variations in mutations across the oesophagus mean that standard biopsies may miss cells with important mutations. A sample was more likely to pick up key mutations if taken using the Cytosponge, developed by Professor Rebecca Fitzgerald at the Medical Research Council Cancer Unit at the University of Cambridge.

“The trouble with Barrett’s oesophagus is that it looks bland and might span over 10cm,” explains Professor Fitzgerald. “We created a map of mutations in a patient with the condition and found that within this stretch, there is a great deal of variation amongst cells. Some might carry an important mutation, but many will not. If you’re taking a biopsy, this relies on your hitting the right spot. Using the Cytosponge appears to remove some of this game of chance.”

Professor Fitzgerald and colleagues carried out whole genome sequencing to analyse paired Barrett’s oesophagus and oesophageal cancer samples taken at one point in time from 23 patients, as well as 73 samples taken over a three-year period from one patient with Barrett’s oesophagus.

The researchers found patterns of mutations in the genome – where one ‘letter’ of DNA might change to another, for example from a C to a T – that provided a ‘fingerprint’ of the causes of the cancer. Similar work has been done previously in lung cancer, where it was shown that cigarettes leave fingerprints in an individual’s DNA. The Cambridge team found fingerprints which they believe are likely to be due to the damage caused to the lining of the oesophagus by stomach acid splashing onto its walls; the same fingerprints could be seen in both Barrett’s oesophagus and oesophageal cancer, suggest that these changes occur very early on the process.

Even in areas of Barrett’s oesophagus without cancer, the researchers found a large number of mutations in their tissue – on average 12,000 per person (compared to an average of 18,000 mutations within the cancer). Many of these are likely to have been ‘bystanders’, genetic mutations that occurred along the way but that were not actually implicated in cancer.

The researchers found that there appeared to be a tipping point, where a patient would go from having lots of individual mutations, but no cancer, to a situation where large pieces of genetic information were being transferred not just between genes but between chromosomes.

Co-author Dr Caryn Ross-Innes adds: “We know very little about how you go from pre-cancer to cancer – and this is particularly the case in oesophageal cancer. Barrett’s oesophagus and the cancer share many mutations, but we are now a step closer to understanding which are the important mutations that tip the condition over into a potentially deadly form of cancer.”

The research was funded by the Medical Research Council and Cancer Research UK. The Cytosponge was trialled in patients at the NIHR Clinical Investigation Ward at the Cambridge Clinical Research Facility.

Reference
Ross-Innes, CS et al. Whole-genome sequencing provides new insights into the clonal architecture of Barrett’s esophagus and esophageal adenocarcinoma. Nature Genetics; 20 July 2015

The Royal Society, the UK’s independent academy for science, has announced the recipients of its 2015 Awards, Medals and Prize Lectures. The scientists receive the awards in recognition of their achievements in a wide variety of fields of research. The recipients from the University of Cambridge are:

Professor George Efstathiou FRS (Institute of Astronomy) receives the Hughes Medal for many outstanding contributions to our understanding of the early Universe, in particular his pioneering computer simulations, observations of galaxy clustering and studies of the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background.

Professor Benjamin Simons (Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute, Cavendish Laboratory) receives the Gabor Medal for his work analysing stem cell lineages in development, tissue homeostasis and cancer, revolutionising our understanding of stem cell behaviour in vivo.

Professor Russell Cowburn FRS (Department of Physics) receives the Clifford Paterson Medal and Lecture for his remarkable academic, technical and commercial achievements in nano-magnetics.

Dr Madan Babu Mohan (MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology) receives the Francis Crick Medal and Lecture for his major and widespread contributions to computational biology.

View the full list of recipients.

They are among 42 highly distinguished UK academics from 18 universities welcomed as Fellows by the Academy, taking the total number of living Fellows to over one thousand for the first time.

The Fellows elected from the University of Cambridge are:

Professor Cyprian Broodbank – John Disney Professor of Archaeology, Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research and Fellow of Gonville & Caius College.

Professor Garth Fowden – Sultan Qaboos Professor of Abrahamic Faiths and Senior Research Associate at Peterhouse.

Professor Robert Gordon – Serena Professor of Italian and Fellow of Gonville & Caius College.

Professor Sanjeev Goyal – Professor of Economics and Fellow of Christ’s College.

Professor Peter Mandler – Professor of Modern Cultural History and Bailey Lecturer in History at Gonville & Caius College.

Professor Joachim Whaley – Professor of German History and Thought and Fellow of Gonville & Caius College.

Also receiving a fellowship is Professor Michael Mann, Honorary Professor at the University of Cambridge and Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Lord Stern, President of the British Academy, said: “This year we have the honour of once again welcoming the finest researchers and scholars into our Fellowship. Elected from across the UK and world for their distinction in the humanities and social sciences, they represent an unrivalled resource of expertise and knowledge.

“Our Fellows play a vital role in the work of the Academy; encouraging younger researchers, engaging in public discussion of the great issues and ideas of our time, and contributing to policy reports. Their collective work and expertise are testament to why research in the humanities and social sciences is vital for our understanding of the world and humanity.”

The British Academy is the UK’s expert body that supports and speaks for the humanities and social sciences. It funds research across the UK and in other parts of the world, in disciplines ranging from archaeology to economics, from psychology to history, and from literature to law.

View the full list of British Academy Fellows.

A new approach to self-assemble and tailor complex structures at the nanoscale, developed by an international collaboration led by the University of Cambridge and IBM, opens opportunities to tailor properties and functionalities of materials for a wide range of semiconductor device applications.

The researchers have developed a method for growing combinations of different materials in a needle-shaped crystal called a nanowire. Nanowires are small structures, only a few billionths of a metre in diameter. Semiconductors can be grown into nanowires, and the result is a useful building block for electrical, optical, and energy harvesting devices. The researchers have found out how to grow smaller crystals within the nanowire, forming a structure like a crystal rod with an embedded array of gems. Details of the new method are published in the journal Nature Materials.

“The key to building functional nanoscale devices is to control materials and their interfaces at the atomic level,” said Dr Stephan Hofmann of the Department of Engineering, one of the paper’s senior authors. “We’ve developed a method of engineering inclusions of different materials so that we can make complex structures in a very precise way.”

Nanowires are often grown through a process called Vapour-Liquid-Solid (VLS) synthesis, where a tiny catalytic droplet is used to seed and feed the nanowire, so that it self-assembles one atomic layer at a time. VLS allows a high degree of control over the resulting nanowire: composition, diameter, growth direction, branching, kinking and crystal structure can be controlled by tuning the self-assembly conditions. As nanowires become better controlled, new applications become possible.

The technique that Hofmann and his colleagues from Cambridge and IBM developed can be thought of as an expansion of the concept that underlies conventional VLS growth. The researchers use the catalytic droplet not only to grow the nanowire, but also to form new materials within it. These tiny crystals form in the liquid, but later attach to the nanowire and then become embedded as the nanowire is grown further. This catalyst mediated docking process can ‘self-optimise’ to create highly perfect interfaces for the embedded crystals.

To unravel the complexities of this process, the research team used two customised electron microscopes, one at IBM’s TJ Watson Research Center and a second at Brookhaven National Laboratory. This allowed them to record high-speed movies of the nanowire growth as it happens atom-by-atom. The researchers found that using the catalyst as a ‘mixing bowl’, with the order and amount of each ingredient programmed into a desired recipe, resulted in complex structures consisting of nanowires with embedded nanoscale crystals, or quantum dots, of controlled size and position.

“The technique allows two different materials to be incorporated into the same nanowire, even if the lattice structures of the two crystals don’t perfectly match,” said Hofmann. “It’s a flexible platform that can be used for different technologies.”

Possible applications for this technique range from atomically perfect buried interconnects to single-electron transistors, high-density memories, light emission, semiconductor lasers, and tunnel diodes, along with the capability to engineer three-dimensional device structures.

“This process has enabled us to understand the behaviour of nanoscale materials in unprecedented detail, and that knowledge can now be applied to other processes,” said Hofmann.

A new report co-authored by Cambridge researchers warns that without technological innovation over the next decade, healthcare costs in the UK could be significantly higher than currently projected by the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR). Without productivity improvements, health spending in 2063-64 might need to be 5.0% of GDP higher than is currently projected.

The report, Opportunity Knocks, has been published today by London-based think tank International Longevity Centre-UK (ILC-UK), in conjunction with the Institute of Engineering and Technology and the Engineering Design Centre at the University of Cambridge.

It points out that predictions for the growth in healthcare productivity are optimistic given historic trends, and that technological innovation will be vital to fill the gap. The authors argue that there is significant potential for responding to the challenges of ageing through new developments in wearable technologies, big data, 3D printing, cloud computing, the internet of things, and smart cities.

“Technological innovation is vital to help individuals and society as a whole adapt to ageing,” said Mike Bradley of Cambridge’s Engineering Design Centre, which pioneered the Inclusive Design approach: designing products to be useful to as many people as possible. “But there are still many barriers to be overcome.”

The report suggests that a design response to ageing can also benefit the UK economy: Those over 65 spend around £2.2 billion per week and they could be spending over £6 billion per week (£312 billion per year) by 2037.

However, one in three 85-89 year olds has difficulty shopping for groceries and more than one in ten in this age group has difficulty managing money. More than half of those aged 90 and over have difficulty shopping for groceries and a quarter of this age group have difficulty managing money. Four in ten individuals over 75 and three quarters of individuals over 85 do not have internet access.

The report highlights a range of ideas for new technology which emerged from a workshop organised by ILC-UK, IET and The Engineering Design Centre at The University of Cambridge. The ideas are designed not as ‘solutions to ageing’ but to highlight the potential for innovation in focusing on this consumer group.

• A kettle which monitors blood pressure
• TV ‘buddies’ to allow people to remotely share the experience of watching a programme
• A ‘cuddle cushion’ which would allow relatives being able to send each other cuddles
• A smart water bottle which would prompt people to drink more to prevent dehydration
• Accessible and modern ‘Boris Scooters’ (or Segways) in towns and cities to help people with mild mobility impairments get around
• The development of national ‘trusted information’ systems for online and telephone transactions to reduce the risk of scams

“This report champions the positive impact that technology and design will play in helping us all to live longer, healthier, independent lives. However, we acknowledge that the potential of technology has not been fully realised. We also have to dispel the myth that this is simply a matter of niche solutions for an ageing society,” said Gordon Attenborough, the Institution of Engineering and Technology’s Head of Sectors.

“There’s so much more that we should achieve through the widespread application of existing and emerging technologies. It’s vital that we design and innovate with a broad range of users in mind, wholly inclusive and accessible to all. Achieve that and technology will mitigate the impending costs of an ageing society and deliver the promise it has failed to so far.

David Sinclair, Director of the International Longevity Centre – UK added: “Technology undoubtedly offers significant potential to help respond to the challenges of ageing. But the opportunity of technological innovation in this area has historically been over egged and under realised. For us to maximise the potential of new technologies however we need more evidence on what really works and whether it will save money. We need regulation which protects consumers while not preventing technological innovation. And we need industry to recognise the potential of the older consumer and design for all. Finally, we need a public debate on the challenges and opportunities of using big data to improve the lives of older people.”

Professor John Clarkson, Director of the Engineering Design Centre at Cambridge: “This report highlights that there is a huge commercial opportunity for companies to design inclusively, driving increased customer satisfaction and boosting their market share by delivering more competitive products and services.”

The report also highlights some ideas to maximise the potential of the sharing economy to support our ageing society.

Cooking buddies

A barcode scanner in the home could be used to upload the contents of your fridge to an interface which would share the information with your neighbours. Taking a peek in to each other’s fridges, seeing what people had a surplus of or what was about to go out of date, could encourage neighbours to cook together making meal times more sociable.

Integrated leisure and transport

Leisure activities, such as a trip to the theatre or to a restaurant, could come with transport included. When you book a ticket there could be the option to also book transport. If a large number of people were also booking transport to an event a mini-bus could then be sent to collect them all at a much lower costs than them all booking taxis separately.

Adapted from a ILC-UK press release. 

The technique, reported in the journal Nature Communications, could help in the diagnosis of these conditions in at-risk patients and in the development of new medicines.

Atherosclerosis – hardening of the arteries – is a potentially serious condition where arteries become clogged by a build-up of fatty deposits known as ‘plaques’. One of the key constituents in these deposits is calcium. In some people, pieces from the calcified artery can break away – if the artery supplies the brain or heart with blood, this can lead to stroke or heart attack.

“Hardening, or ‘furring’, of the arteries can lead to very serious disease, but it’s not clear why the plaques are stable in some people but unstable in others,” explains Professor David Newby, the BHF John Wheatley Professor of Cardiology at the Centre for Cardiovascular Science, University of Edinburgh. “We need to find new methods of identifying those patients at greatest risk from unstable plaques.”

The researchers injected patients with sodium fluoride that had been tagged with a tiny amount of a radioactive tracer. Using a combination of scanning techniques (positron emission tomography (PET) and computed tomography (CT)), the researchers were able to track the progress of the tracer as it moved around the body.

“Sodium fluoride is commonly found in toothpaste as it binds to calcium compounds in our teeth’s enamel,” says Dr Anthony Davenport from the Department of Experimental Medicine and Immunotherapeutics at the University of Cambridge, who led the study. “In a similar way, it also binds to unstable areas of calcification in arteries and so we’re able to see, by measuring the levels of radioactivity, exactly where the deposits are building up. In fact, this new emerging technique is the only imaging platform that can non-invasively detect the early stages of calcification in unstable atherosclerosis.”

Following their sodium fluoride scans, the patients had surgery to remove calcified plaques and the extracted tissue was imaged, this time at higher resolution, using a laboratory PET/CT scanner and an electron microscope. This confirmed that the radiotracer accumulates in areas of active, unstable calcification whilst avoiding surrounding tissue.

Dr James Rudd, a cardiologist and researcher from the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Cambridge adds: “Sodium fluoride is a simple and inexpensive radiotracer that should revolutionise our ability to detect dangerous calcium in the arteries of the heart and brain. This will allow us to use current treatments more effectively, by giving them to those patients at highest risk. In addition, after further work, it may be possible to use this technique to test how well new medicines perform at preventing the development of atherosclerosis.”

The Wellcome Trust provided the majority of support for this study, with additional contributions from the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK and the Cambridge NIHR Biomedical Research Centre.

Reference
Irkle, A et al. Identifying active vascular microcalcification by 18F-sodium fluoride positron emission tomography. Nature Communications; 7 July 2015.

A new study has discovered mysterious behaviour of a material that acts like an insulator in certain measurements, but simultaneously acts like a conductor in others. In an insulator, electrons are largely stuck in one place, while in a conductor, the electrons flow freely. The results, published today (2 July) in the journal Science, challenge current understanding of how materials behave.

Conductors, such as metals, conduct electricity, while insulators, such as rubber or glass, prevent or block the flow of electricity. But by tracing the path that electrons follow as they move through a material, researchers led by the University of Cambridge found that it is possible for a single material to display dual metal-insulator properties at once – although at the very lowest temperatures, it completely disobeys the rules that govern conventional metals. While it’s not known exactly what’s causing this mysterious behaviour, one possibility is the existence of a potential third phase which is neither insulator nor conductor.

The duelling metal-insulator properties were observed throughout the interior of the material, called samarium hexaboride (SmB6). There are other recently-discovered materials which behave both as a conductor and an insulator, but they are structured like a sandwich, so the surface behaves differently from the bulk. But the new study found that in SmB6, the bulk itself can be both conductor and insulator simultaneously.

“The discovery of dual metal-insulator behaviour in a single material has the potential to overturn decades of conventional wisdom regarding the fundamental dichotomy between metals and insulators,” said Dr Suchitra Sebastian of the University’s Cavendish Laboratory, who led the research.

In order to learn more about SmB6 and various other materials, Sebastian and her colleagues traced the path that the electrons take as they move through the material: the geometrical surface traced by the orbits of the electrons leads to a construction which is known as a Fermi surface. In order to find the Fermi surface, the researchers used a technique based on measurements of quantum oscillations, which measure various properties of a material in the presence of a high magnetic field to get an accurate ‘fingerprint’ of the material. For quantum oscillations to be observed, the materials must be as close to pure as possible, so that there are minimal defects for the electrons to bump into. Key experiments for the research were conducted at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida.

SmB6 belongs to the class of materials called Kondo insulators, which are close to the border between insulating and conducting behaviour. Kondo insulators are part of a larger group of materials called heavy fermion materials, in which complex physics arises from an interplay of two types of electrons: highly localised ‘f’ electrons, and ‘d’ electrons, which have larger orbits. In the case of SmB6, correlations between these two types of electrons result in insulating behaviour.

“It’s a dichotomy,” said Sebastian. “The high electrical resistance of SmB6 reveals its insulating behaviour, but the Fermi surface we observed was that of a good metal.”

But the mystery didn’t end there. At the very lowest temperatures, approaching 0 degrees Kelvin (-273 Celsius), it became clear that the quantum oscillations for SmB6 are not characteristic of a conventional metal. In metals, the amplitude of quantum oscillations grows and then levels off as the temperature is lowered. Strangely, in the case of SmB6, the amplitude of quantum oscillations continues to grow dramatically as the temperature is lowered, violating the rules that govern conventional metals.

The researchers considered several reasons for this peculiar behaviour: it could be a novel phase, neither insulator nor conductor; it could be fluctuating back and forth between the two; or because SmB6 has a very small ‘gap’ between insulating and conducting behaviour, perhaps the electrons are capable of jumping that gap.

“The crossover region between two different phases – magnetic and non-magnetic, for example – is where the really interesting physics happens,” said Sebastian. “Because this material is close to the crossover region between insulator and conductor, we found it displays some really strange properties – we’re exploring the possibility that it’s a new quantum phase.”

Tim Murphy, the head of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory’s DC Field Facility, where most of the research was conducted, said: “This work on SmB6 provides a vivid and exciting illustration of emergent physics resulting from MagLab researchers refining the quality of the materials they study and pushing the sample environment to the extremes of high magnetic fields and low temperatures.”

The Cambridge researchers were funded by the Royal Society, the Winton Programme for the Physics of Sustainability, the European Research Council and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (UK).

Researchers simulated the trading floor in the lab by having volunteers buy and sell assets amongst themselves. They measured the volunteers’ natural hormone levels in one experiment and artificially raised them in another. When given doses of either hormone, the volunteers invested more in risky assets.

“Our view is that hormonal changes can help us understand traders’ behaviour, particularly during periods of financial instability,” said Dr Carlos Cueva, one of the lead authors of the study, from the Departament of Fundamentos del Análisis Económico at the University of Alicante.

The researchers think the stressful and competitive environment of financial markets may promote high levels of cortisol and testosterone in traders. Cortisol is elevated in response to physical or psychological stress, increasing blood sugar and preparing the body for the fight-or-flight response. Previous studies have shown that men with higher testosterone levels are more likely to be confident and successful in competitive situations.

The authors of the new study suggest the findings should be considered by policymakers looking to develop more stable financial institutions.

Dr Ed Roberts, one of the lead authors of the study, from the Department of Medicine at Imperial College London, said: “Our aim is to understand more about how these hormones affect decision making. Then we can look at the environment in which traders work, and think about whether it’s too stressful or too competitive. These factors could be affecting traders’ hormones and having an impact on their risk-taking.”

First the researchers measured levels of the two hormones in saliva samples of 142 volunteers, male and female, playing an asset trading game in groups of around ten. Those who had higher levels of cortisol were more likely to take risks, and high levels in the group were associated with instability in prices.

In a follow-up experiment, 75 young men were given either cortisol or testosterone before playing the game, once with the hormone and once on a placebo. Both hormones shifted investment towards riskier assets. Cortisol appeared to directly affect volunteers’ preference for riskier assets, while testosterone seemed to increase optimism about how prices would change in the future.

“The results suggest that cortisol and testosterone promote risky investment behaviour in the short run,” said Dr Roberts. “We only looked at the acute effects of the hormones in the lab. It would be interesting to measure traders’ hormone levels in the real world, and also to see what the longer term effects might be.”

Economists have long recognised that the unpredictability of human behaviour can make financial markets unstable. John Maynard Keynes wrote of “animal spirits” and Alan Greenspan and Robert Shiller alluded to “irrational exuberance” as a possible cause of overvaluations in asset markets. However, scientists have only recently begun to explore the physiological basis for this phenomenon.

Professor Joe Herbert, a co-author of this study from the Department of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Cambridge, reported in an earlier field study that traders made significantly higher profits on days when their morning testosterone levels were above their daily average, and that increased variability in profits and uncertainty in the market were strongly correlated with elevations in their cortisol levels.

The research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.

Reference
Cueva, C et al. Cortisol and testosterone increase financial risk taking and may destabilize markets. Scientific Reports, 2015.

Adapted from a press release by Imperial College London