A prototype “green bus shelter” that could eventually generate enough electricity to light itself, has been built by a collaboration of University of Cambridge researchers and eco-companies.

The ongoing living experiment, hosted by the Cambridge University Botanic Garden and open to the visiting public, is incorporated in a distinct wooden hub, designed by architects MCMM to resemble a structure like a bus shelter. Eight vertical green wall units – created by green wall specialists, Scotscape – are housed along with four semi-transparent solar panels and two flexible solar panels provided by Polysolar.

The hub has specially adapted vertical green walls that harvest electrons naturally produced as a by-product of photosynthesis and metabolic activity, and convert them into electrical current. It is the brainchild of Professor Christopher Howe and Dr Paolo Bombelli of the Department of Biochemistry. Their previous experiments resulted in a device able to power a radio using the current generated by moss.

The thin-film solar panels turn light into electricity by using mainly the blue and green radiation of the solar spectrum. Plants grow behind the solar glass, ‘sharing the light’ by utilising the red spectrum radiation needed for photosynthesis, while avoiding the scorching effect of UV light. The plants generate electrical currents as a consequence of photosynthesis and metabolic activity during the day and night.

“Ideally you can have the solar panels generating during the day, and the biological system at night. To address the world’s energy needs, we need a portfolio of many

different technologies, and it’s even better if these technologies can operate in synergy,” said Bombell

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The structure of the hub allows different combinations of the photovoltaic and biological systems to be tested. On the north east aspect of the hub, plants receive light directly, without being exposed to too much direct sun. On the south west orientation, a green wall panel is housed behind a semi-transparent solar panel so that the effect on the plants and their ability to generate current can be monitored. Next to that, in the same orientation, a single solar panel stands alone, and two further panels are also mounted on the roof.

“The combination of horticulture with renewable energy production constitutes a powerful solution to food and resource shortages on an increasingly populated planet,” explained Joanna Slota-Newson from Polysolar. “We build our semi-transparent solar panels into greenhouses, producing electrical energy from the sun which can in turn be used to power irrigation pumps or artificial lighting, while offering a controlled environment to improve agricultural yields. In this collaboration with Cambridge University, the public can experience the plants’ healthy growth behind Polysolar panels.”

The green wall panels in the hub are made from a synthetic material containing pockets, each holding a litre of soil and several plants. The pockets are fitted with a lining of carbon fibre on the back, which acts as an anode to receive electrons from the metabolism of plants and bacteria in the soil, and a carbon/catalyst plate on the front which acts as a cathode.

When a plant photosynthesises, energy from the sun is used to convert carbon dioxide into organic compounds that the plant needs to grow. Some of the compounds – such as carbohydrates, proteins and lipids – are leached into the soil where they are broken down by bacteria, which in turn release by-products, including electrons, as part of the process.

Electrons have a negative charge so, when they are generated, protons (with a positive charge) are also created. When the anode and cathode are connected to each other by a wire acting as an external circuit, the negative charges migrate between those two electrodes. Simultaneously, the positive charges migrate from the anodic region to the cathode through a wet system, in this case the soil. The cathode contains a catalyst that enables the electrons, protons and atmospheric oxygen to recombine to form water, thus completing the circuit and permitting an electrical current to be generated in the external circuit.

The P2P hub therfore generates electrical current from the combination of biological and physical elements. Each element of the hub is monitored separately, and members of the public can track the findings in real time, at a dedicated website and on a computer embedded in the hub itself.

Margherita Cesca, Senior Architect and Director of MCMM Architettura, the hub’s designer, is pleased that it has garnered so much interest. “This prototype is intended to inspire the imagination, and encourage people to consider what could be achieved with these pioneering technologies. The challenging design incorporates and showcases green wall and solar panels as well as glass, creating an interesting element which sits beautifully within Cambridge University Botanic Garden,” she said.

Bombelli added: “The long-term aim of the P2P solar hub research is to develop a range of self-powered sustainable buildings for multi-purpose use all over the world, from bus stops to refugee shelters.”

P2P is an outreach activity developed under the umbrella of the BPV (BioPhotoVoltaic) project working in collaboration with green technology companies including MCMM, Polysolar and Scotscape. The BPV project includes scientists from the Departments of Biochemistry, Plant Sciences, Physics and Chemistry at the University of Cambridge, together with the University of Edinburgh, Imperial College London and the University of Cape Town.

The innovative prototype solar hub will be unveiled at the Botanic Garden during an event at the Cambridge Science Festival, Trap the light fantastic: plant to power, on Tuesday 10 March.

The Prime Minister David Cameron announced a £4.8 million partnership yesterday at the Cambridge Science Park to build a new technology centre.

The joint investment between Trinity College and the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills is part of plans to build the Sir John Bradfield Centre in the heart of the science park.

Trinity College, the College of Sir Isaac Newton among many other distinguished scientists, has long been at the centre of scientific innovation in Cambridge University.

The College was an early promoter of technology transfer to industry with the development of the Cambridge Science Park, which is now occupied by more than 90 companies with some 5,000 employees.

The College would like to do more to translate Cambridge research into companies and products; particularly in the very early stage companies.

David Cameron with Sir Gregory Winter

It is known that science incubators can help in these early stages, in particular by providing teams and start-up companies with flexible and affordable space, education, mentoring and finance. It is expected that these companies will thrive in the self-sustaining entrepreneurial culture of the new centre and the Science Park.

Sir Gregory Winter, Master of Trinity College said: “Trinity College is pleased to help on all these fronts by providing a highly flexible building at the heart of the Science Park, and working with other partners to help with education, mentoring and seed financing.

“We hope to promote a culture in which we not only help to develop technologies and companies, but also the entrepreneurs who will build the industries of the future.

“We are particularly pleased to associate this building with Sir John Bradfield, former Senior Bursar of the College, who was instrumental in the creation of the Cambridge Science Park.”

They are naked, beautiful, muscular and ride triumphantly on two ferocious panthers. And now the secret of who created these magnificent metre-high bronze male nudes could well be solved. A team of international experts led by the University of Cambridge and Fitzwilliam Museum has gathered compelling evidence that argues that these masterpieces, which have spent over a century in relative obscurity, are early works by Michelangelo, made just after he completed the marble David and as he was about to embark on the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

If the attribution is correct, they are the only surviving Michelangelo bronzes in the world.

They are a non-matching pair, one figure older and lithe, the other young and athletic. Long admired for the beauty of their anatomy and powerful expressions, their first recorded attribution was to Michelangelo when they appeared in the collection of Adolphe de Rothschild in the 19th century. But, since they are undocumented and unsigned, this attribution was dismissed and over the last 120 years, the bronzes have been attributed to various other talented sculptors.

That changed last autumn when Prof Paul Joannides, Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of Cambridge, connected them to a drawing by one of Michelangelo’s apprentices now in the Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France.

A Sheet of studies with Virgin embracing Infant Jesus, c.1508, is a student’s faithful copy of various slightly earlier lost sketches by Michelangelo. In one corner is a composition of a muscular youth riding a panther, which is very similar in pose to the bronzes, and drawn in the abrupt, forceful manner that Michelangelo employed in designs for sculpture. This suggests that Michelangelo was working up this very unusual theme for a work in three dimensions.

This revelation triggered further art-historical research with input from a number of international experts. The bronzes were compared with other works by Michelangelo and found to be very similar in style and anatomy to his works of 1500-1510; a date confirmed by the preliminary conclusions of initial scientific analysis. Interdisciplinary research is continuing; the findings and conclusions of which will be presented at an international conference on Monday 6 July, 2015.

It is a common misconception that Michelangelo sculpted almost exclusively in marble and never in bronze. However it is historically verifiable that he was associated with bronze throughout his 75-year-long career.  Michelangelo is documented as having made a two-thirds life-size David for a French grandee, and an over twice life-size statue of Pope Julius II.  Sadly neither survives – the first disappeared during the French Revolution; the second was melted down for artillery less than three years after it was made.

Dr Victoria Avery, Keeper of the Applied Arts Department of the Fitzwilliam Museum, commented: “It has been fantastically exciting to have been able to participate in this ground-breaking project, which has involved input from many art-historians in the UK, Europe and the States, and to draw on evidence from conservation scientists and anatomists. The bronzes are exceptionally powerful and compelling works of art that deserve close-up study – we hope the public will come and examine them for themselves, and engage with this ongoing debate.”

The bronzes have gone on display in advance of the Fitzwilliam Museum’s bicentenary in 2016 and before its next major exhibition Treasured Possessions, the result of a interdisciplinary University research project revealing hidden items in the Museum’s reserves. The bronzes and a selection of the evidence are now on display in the Italian galleries at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, from February 3 until 9 August 2015. Admission to the Fitzwilliam is free.

Click on images to enlarge:

Detail of ‘Nude bacchants riding panthers’

Researchers behind the discovery
Prof Paul Joannides – Emeritus Professor of Art History, University of Cambridge
Dr Victoria Avery – Keeper of Applied Arts, Fitzwilliam Museum
Dr Robert van Langh – Head of Conservation, Rijksmuseum
Arie Pappot – Junior conservator of metals, Rijksmuseum
Professor Peter Abrahams – Clinical Anatomist, Warwick Medical School, University of WarwickLead consultants
Martin Gayford – Art critic and author of Michelangelo: An Epic Life (2013)
Dr Charles Avery – Independent art historian, Cambridge (UK)
Dr Andrew Butterfield – Author of The Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio and many other publications on Renaissance art

A new study, published today in the journal PNAS, compares the ability of computers and people to make accurate judgments about our personalities. People’s judgments were based on their familiarity with the judged individual, while computer models used a specific digital signal: Facebook Likes.

The results show that by mining Facebook Likes, the computer model was able to predict a person’s personality more accurately than most of their friends and family. Given enough Likes to analyse, only a person’s spouse rivalled the computer for accuracy of broad psychological traits.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge and Stanford University describe the finding as an “emphatic demonstration” of the capacity of computers to discover an individual’s psychological traits through pure data analysis, showing machines can know us better than we’d previously thought: an “important milestone” on the path towards more social human-computer interactions.

“In the future, computers could be able to infer our psychological traits and react accordingly, leading to the emergence of emotionally-intelligent and socially skilled machines,” said lead author Wu Youyou, from Cambridge’s Psychometrics Centre.

“In this context, the human-computer interactions depicted in science fiction films such as Her seem to be within our reach.”

The researchers say these results might raise concerns over privacy as such technology develops; the research team support policies giving users full control of their digital footprint.

In the study, a computer could more accurately predict the subject’s personality than a work colleague by analysing just ten Likes; more than a friend or a cohabitant (roommate) with 70, a family member (parent, sibling) with 150, and a spouse with 300 Likes.

Given that an average Facebook user has about 227 Likes (and this number is growing steadily), the researchers say that this kind of AI has the potential to know us better than our closest companions.

The latest results build on previous work from the University of Cambridge, published in March 2013, which showed that a variety of psychological and demographic characteristics could be predicted with startling accuracy through Facebook Likes.

In the new study, researchers used a sample of 86,220 volunteers on Facebook who completed a 100-item personality questionnaire through the ‘myPersonality‘ app, as well as providing access to their Likes.

These results provided self-reported personality scores for what are known in psychological practice as the ‘big five’ traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—the OCEAN model. Through this, researchers could establish which Likes equated with higher levels of particular traits e.g. liking ‘Salvador Dali’ or ‘meditation’ showed a high degree of openness.

Users of the ‘myPersonality’ app were then given the option of inviting friends and family to judge the psychological traits of the user through a shorter version of the personality test. These were the human judges in the study—those listed on Facebook as friends or family expressing their judgement of a subject’s personality using a 10-item questionnaire

Researchers were able to get a sample of 17,622 participants judged by one friend or family member, and a sample of 14,410 judged by two.

To gauge the accuracy of these measurements, the online personality judgements were corroborated with a meta-analysis of previous psychological studies over decades which looked at how people’s colleagues, family and so on judge their personality. Researchers found their online values similar to the averages from years of person-to-person research.

In this way, the researchers were able to come up with accuracy comparisons between computer algorithms and the personality judgements made by humans. Given enough Likes, the computers came closer to a person’s self-reported personality than their brothers, mothers or partners.

Dr Michal Kosinski, co-author and researcher at Stanford, says machines have a couple of key advantages that make these results possible: the ability to retain and access vast quantities of information, and the ability to analyse it with algorithmsthe techniques of ‘Big Data’.

“Big Data and machine-learning provide accuracy that the human mind has a hard time achieving, as humans tend to give too much weight to one or two examples, or lapse into non-rational ways of thinking,” he said. Nevertheless, the authors concede that detection of some traits might be best left to human abilities, those without digital footprints or dependant on subtle cognition.

The authors of the study write that automated, accurate, and cheap personality assessments could improve societal and personal decision-making in many ways—from recruitment to romance.

“The ability to judge personality is an essential component of social living—from day-to-day decisions to long-term plans such as whom to marry, trust, hire, or elect as president,” said Cambridge co-author Dr David Stillwell. “The results of such data analysis can be very useful in aiding people when making decisions.”

Youyou explains: “Recruiters could better match candidates with jobs based on their personality; products and services could adjust their behaviour to best match their users’ characters and changing moods.

“People may choose to augment their own intuitions and judgments with this kind of data analysis when making important life decisions such as choosing activities, career paths, or even romantic partners. Such data-driven decisions may well improve people’s lives,” she said.

The researchers say that this kind of data mining and its inferences has hallmarks of techniques currently used by some digital service providers, and that—for many people—a future in which machines read our habits as an open book on a massive scale may seem dystopian to those concerned with privacy.

It’s a concern shared by the researchers. “We hope that consumers, technology developers, and policy-makers will tackle those challenges by supporting privacy-protecting laws and technologies, and giving the users full control over their digital footprints,” said Kosinski.

Take the Facebook personality test yourself here: http://applymagicsauce.com/