The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, have shown that microscopic particles can remain intrinsically linked, or entangled, over long distances even if there are random disruptions between them. Using the mathematics of quantum theory, they discovered a simple setup where entangled particles can be prepared and stabilised even in the presence of noise by taking advantage of a previously unknown symmetry in quantum systems.

Their results, reported in the journal Physical Review Letters, open a new window into the mysterious quantum world that could revolutionise future technology by preserving quantum effects in noisy environments, which is the single biggest hurdle for developing such technology. Harnessing this capability will be at the heart of ultrafast quantum computers.

Quantum systems are built on the peculiar behaviour of particles at the atomic level and could revolutionise the way that complex calculations are performed. While a normal computer bit is an electrical switch that can be set to either one or zero, a quantum bit, or qubit, can be set to one, zero, or both at the same time. Furthermore, when two qubits are entangled, an operation on one immediately affects the other, no matter how far apart they are. This dual state is what gives a quantum computer its power. A computer built with entangled qubits instead of normal bits could perform calculations well beyond the capacities of even the most powerful supercomputers.

“However, qubits are extremely finicky things, and the tiniest bit of noise in their environment can cause their entanglement to break,” said Dr Shovan Dutta from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, the paper’s first author. “Until we can find a way to make quantum systems more robust, their real-world applications will be limited.”

Several companies – most notably, IBM and Google – have developed working quantum computers, although so far these have been limited to less than 100 qubits. They require near-total isolation from noise, and even then, have very short lifetimes of a few microseconds. Both companies have plans to develop 1000 qubit quantum computers within the next few years, although unless the stability issues are overcome, quantum computers will not reach practical use.

Now, Dutta and his co-author Professor Nigel Cooper have discovered a robust quantum system where multiple pairs of qubits remain entangled even with a lot of noise.

They modelled an atomic system in a lattice formation, where atoms strongly interact with each other, hopping from one site of the lattice to another. The authors found if noise were added in the middle of the lattice, it didn’t affect entangled particles between left and right sides. This surprising feature results from a special type of symmetry that conserves the number of such entangled pairs.

“We weren’t expecting this stabilised type of entanglement at all,” said Dutta. “We stumbled upon this hidden symmetry, which is very rare in these noisy systems.”

They showed this hidden symmetry protects the entangled pairs and allows their number to be controlled from zero to a large maximum value. Similar conclusions can be applied to a broad class of physical systems and can be realised with already existing ingredients in experimental platforms, paving the way to controllable entanglement in a noisy environment.

“Uncontrolled environmental disturbances are bad for survival of quantum effects like entanglement, but one can learn a lot by deliberately engineering specific types of disturbances and seeing how the particles respond,” said Dutta. “We’ve shown that a simple form of disturbance can actually produce – and preserve – many entangled pairs, which is a great incentive for experimental developments in this field.”

The researchers are hoping to confirm their theoretical findings with experiments within the next year.

The research was funded in part by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

Reference:
Shovan Dutta and Nigel R. Cooper. ‘Long-range coherence and multiple steady states in a lossy qubit array.’ Physical Review Letters (2020). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.125.240404

The results are an important step towards better management and treatment of this devastating condition.

The research from the University of Cambridge and the Wellcome Sanger Institute is part of the global Human Cell Atlas initiative to map every cell type in the human body. The findings reveal intricate cellular mechanisms of how the gut develops.

Crohn’s Disease is a type of Inflammatory Bowel Disease affecting around one in every 650 people in the UK. Incidence has increased dramatically in recent decades, especially in children – who can suffer very aggressive symptoms including abdominal pain, diarrhoea and fatigue. This lifelong condition can have major life implications; the cause is not understood, treatments often don’t work, and there is no cure.

“Crohn’s Disease can be particularly aggressive and more treatment-resistant in children, so there’s a real need to understand the condition when it affects them and perhaps come up with childhood-specific treatments,” said Dr Matthias Zilbauer in the Department of Paediatrics at the University of Cambridge and honorary consultant in paediatric gastroenterology at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, who led the study.

The researchers used a cutting-edge technology called single-cell RNA sequencing to look at gene expression in individual cells of the developing human gut, six to ten weeks after conception. They focused on the inner lining of the gut, called the intestinal epithelium, and found that the cells there divide constantly at this early stage, guided by messages from other cell types. This allows the gut to grow and form the structures needed for good gut function later in life.

Tissues from the guts of children with Crohn’s Disease, aged between four and twelve, were also analysed. The study revealed that some of the cellular pathways active in the epithelium of the foetal gut appear to be reactivated in Crohn’s Disease. These pathways were not active in healthy children of a similar age. The results are published today in the journal Developmental Cell.

“Our results indicate there might be a reprogramming of specific gut cell functions in Crohn’s Disease. We don’t know whether this is the cause of the disease or a consequence of it, but either way it is an exciting step in helping us to better understand the condition,” said Zilbauer.

The findings shed light on fundamental molecular mechanisms of human gut development. The team also found that lab-grown ‘mini-guts’ undergo similar individual cellular changes to those inside a developing foetus. This implies that lab-grown models are a powerful and accurate tool for future research into very early gut development and associated diseases.

“This study is part of the international Human Cell Atlas effort to create a ‘Google map’ of the entire human body. With single-cell RNA sequencing we can look at any tissue and identify the individual cell types it’s made up of, the function of those cells, and even identify new cell types,” said Dr Sarah Teichmann at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, and co-chair of the Human Cell Atlas Organising Committee, whose expertise enabled analysis of the huge amount of data generated by this technique.

She added: “A complex tissue like the gut contains different cell types, and these ‘talk’ to each other – the function of one cell affects the function of another. That’s particularly important in the early stages of gut development, and something we can interrogate using computational analyses of single cell RNA sequencing data.”

While the study focused specifically on the dynamics of intestinal epithelial cells, it generated information on around 90,000 primary human intestinal cells of all types. The researchers have made this data openly available at www.gutcellatlas.org, creating a valuable resource for further research and drug discovery targeted at childhood Crohn’s Disease.

“From my own experience we’re diagnosing Crohn’s Disease in younger and younger children, some even under the age of five – it’s very much an emerging disease. It’s a really nasty, lifelong condition, and when children are diagnosed, the whole family is affected,” said Zilbauer.

He added: “We are determined to advance our knowledge in this area, and hopefully improve the lives of these children in the future.”

This research was supported by the Medical Research Council, Wellcome, and the Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity, Sparks. Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge is a specialist centre for the investigation and treatment of Inflammatory Bowel Disease in children, serving the east of England.

Reference
Elmentaite, R. & Ross, A. et al: ‘Single-cell sequencing of developing human gut reveals transcriptional links to childhood Crohn’s disease.’ Developmental Cell, December 2020. DOI: 10.1016/j.devcel.2020.11.010

The funding will support companies and universities with radical ideas for how we tackle climate change through earth observation or address satellite communications challenges, from providing greater connectivity to remote places to increasing the efficiency of our homes.

Dr Ian Parry from Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy has been awarded funding for high-resolution thermal infrared space telescopes for monitoring the energy efficiency of buildings.

Thermal infrared (TIR) earth observation telescopes in low earth orbit can monitor the energy output of buildings. Parry and his collaborators will build and develop a prototype for the continuous alignment required for a space telescope, as well as developing end-user climate change cases for TIR telescope.

“This technology can give us a global health check to let us know if the world is on target to meet its carbon emissions targets. It also makes it clear who needs to act and what they have to do if the targets aren’t being met,” said Parry. “It’s a bit like trying to get someone to give up smoking. The person knows it’s bad for them and they have good intentions and make promises, but they still fall short of what they need to do until they get a worrying wake-up call from a medical examination.”

Governments sign up to agreements but it’s the behaviour of organisations and individuals that will deliver – or not – the required actions. This technology will allow governments across the world, including our own, to deliver what was promised.

The technology will identify anything bigger than about five metres across that is using large amounts of energy, such as buildings, houses, aircraft, ships or trucks.

“Normally I point my telescope at the stars but by pointing it at the Earth I can help address a really important issue,” said Parry.

“We want the UK to be a world leader in space technology which is why we are supporting our most ambitious innovators who are developing technologies to help solve some of our greatest challenges,” said Science Minister Amanda Solloway. “From slashing carbon emissions to protecting the UK’s critical services from harmful cyber-attacks, today’s funding will unshackle our most entrepreneurial space scientists so that they can transfer their revolutionary ideas into world class products and services, while helping to boost the UK economy.”

The funding comes from the UK Space Agency’s National Space Innovation Programme (NSIP), which is the first UK fund dedicated to supporting the space sector’s development of innovations, allowing us to compete internationally on the world stage with other countries, like France and Germany, which have dedicated national funding for space.

Businesses, universities and research organisations were awarded co-funding for projects that will help the space sector create new high-skill jobs, while developing new skills and technologies on UK soil. Grants from the £15 million funding pot range from between £170,000 and £1.4 million per project.

“Space technologies have become deeply embedded in, and critical to, almost every aspect of our daily lives,” said Dr Graham Turnock, Chief Executive of the UK Space Agency. “With rapid technological innovation, space offers a broad and growing range of opportunities to support economic activity and protect the environment. From the satellites connecting our calls to the ones that tell us when to expect rain when we step outside, space technologies are fundamental to our day-to-day lives.Our space sector is constantly advancing and welcoming new ideas, and through this funding we are championing the best of this British innovation.”

In addition, £5 million of the programme funding has been set aside for international projects, which will focus on increasing exports and securing new inward investment, supporting UK science and the prosperity agenda by funding working relationships between world-leading researchers and institutions and developing space capabilities important to the UK’s security interests.

The UK space sector has grown by over 60% since 2010. The industry already supports £300 billion of UK economic activity through the use of satellite services and is expected to grow further as this new Government support unlocks commercial opportunities.

The UK also remains a member of the European Space Agency. ESA membership allows the UK to cooperate in world-leading science on a global scale, enabling UK scientists and researchers access to a range of international R&D programmes.
A bold response to the world’s greatest challenge

The University of Cambridge is building on its existing research and launching an ambitious new environment and climate change initiative. Cambridge Zero is not just about developing greener technologies. It will harness the full power of the University’s research and policy expertise, developing solutions that work for our lives, our society and our biosphere.

The two new research and policy reports, compiled by academics at the University of Cambridge in collaboration with partners in Ethiopia, draw attention to the combined educational and practical challenges facing the country’s schools as pupils return. The authors suggest that these converging problems, while more severe than those affecting schools in wealthy countries such as the UK, are typical of those confronting millions of parents and teachers across sub-Saharan Africa as the pandemic continues to exact a far less-visible toll on their lives and communities.

The findings are based on telephone interviews with more than 900 teachers and caregivers which were carried out in August. Schools in Ethiopia are currently reopening on a staggered basis for the first time since March, with priority given to schools in rural areas. Since the study was completed, many of the issues it documents will have been compounded by the crisis in Tigray.

Overall, the researchers found that, despite significant efforts by the Ethiopian government to support remote learning, many pupils are likely to have had little or no education during the closure period. Disadvantaged groups – such as poorer children, those in remote areas, and girls – are likely to need specific attention having missed out the most.

But while it is therefore vital that schools reopen, the reports also highlight the huge challenges of making schools COVID-safe at a time when access to a vaccine is still, in all likelihood, months away for many teachers and pupils. They point to cases where schools lack soap and running water, for example, and to concerns about the practicalities of social-distancing in overcrowded classrooms.

The surveys were undertaken by members of the Research for Equitable Access and Learning (REAL) Centre at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, in partnership with colleagues at Addis Ababa University and the Ethiopian Policy Studies Institute, as part of the RISE Ethiopia and Early Learning Partnership projects.

School closures are widely understood to have deepened a long-term ‘learning crisis’ in low- and middle-income countries in which many of the least-advantaged children already struggle to attain basic levels of literacy and numeracy. Professor Pauline Rose, Director of the REAL Centre, said: “These reports describe the situation in Ethiopia, but highlight interlocking problems that apply much more widely.”

“In many parts of the world, COVID-19 has not just made it harder to keep children learning: it also makes it harder to keep them in school. There are multiple constraints affecting low- and middle-income countries which mean that the very poorest and most marginalised children are even greater risk of dropping out of the system altogether than they already were.”

Professor Tassew Woldehanna, President at Addis Ababa University, said: “With schools reopening it is essential that policy-makers have access to the sort of clear, robust evidence presented here. It is critical to targeting those pupils who need the most support, and limiting the effects of lost learning for millions of children.”

The team interviewed 443 primary school teachers and principals and 480 parents and caregivers. They also co-ordinated with surveys by the Oxford-based Young Lives programme, who spoke to a further 64 principals.

Their results show that while many teachers have been quick to adapt to remote teaching and learning, students’ access to education has clearly been uneven. In some rural regions, for example, none of the teachers interviewed had internet access and only around half of households had electricity. The researchers estimate that around two-thirds of the teachers they surveyed had reached fewer than half of their students during the closures.

The uneven provision that this implies is likely to have affected disadvantaged groups, such as poorer children, those in rural areas, and girls (whose education is often considered lower-priority than that of boys), most severely. Many teachers fear that, because these groups’ parents often have low literacy, low regard for education, and recruit their children to support the generation of family income; such children are especially at risk of dropping out of school, or of never returning.

The research also draws attention to COVID-19’s impact on pre-primary education in Ethiopia: a sector which has been neglected by many governments during the pandemic. Only 53% of parents or caregivers with young children had been able to engage in learning activities with pre-primary children during school closures. Just 10% reported any contact with pre-primary teachers.

At the same time, however, the reports highlight significant infrastructure and resource challenges within schools themselves. 38% of parents said that their children’s schools were only ‘somewhat equipped’ with handwashing facilities; 22% said that they were ‘not equipped at all’. About 15% said that they did not have facemasks for their children to wear at school, and 46% could not provide their children with hand sanitiser. A majority of teachers and principals, especially those in rural areas, expressed similar concerns about both hygiene, and a lack of adequate classroom space to maintain social distancing.

The researchers stress that despite the efforts made by the government so far, ongoing interventions will therefore be needed to help all children benefit as schools reopen. Their main recommendations are:

• A targeted, national campaign by government, school management committees and local authorities to keep children in school.
• Extra support (and, if viable, time in school) for students who need to recover lost learning.
• The construction of new classrooms or sheltered areas where possible, as well as the targeted supply of extra hygiene resources such as sanitisers, facemasks and handwashing facilities to those most in need.
• Additional investment in resources and strategies to support remote learning, particularly in the context of further possible outbreaks in schools before the effective delivery of a vaccine.

Both reports are available from the REAL Centre website.

Artificial Intelligence is already a part of our everyday lives in forms like Alexa, Amazon’s virtual assistant, facial identification, and Google maps. Thinking machines have huge potential to greatly enhance life for billions of people, but the technology also has huge potential downsides.

It can embed sexism, as when an algorithm for ranking job applicants automatically downgraded women; or be used for intrusive surveillance using facial recognition algorithms that decide who is a ‘potential criminal’.

The new degree in AI Ethics aims to teach professionals in all areas of life — from engineers and policymakers to health administrators and HR managers — how to use AI for good, not ill.

The programme is led by the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI), an interdisciplinary research centre based at the University of Cambridge. Over the past four years, it has established itself at the forefront of AI ethics research worldwide, working in partnership with the University of Oxford, Imperial College London, and UC Berkeley.

CFI is partnering with the University of Cambridge’s Institute for Continuing Education, which provides flexible and accessible higher education courses for adults, to deliver the 2-year part-time Master’s degree.

Executive Director of CFI, Dr Stephen Cave, said: “Everyone is familiar with the idea of AI rising up against us. It’s been a staple of many celebrated films like Terminator in the 1980s, 2001: A Space Odyssey in the 1960s, and Westworld in the 1970s, and more recently in the popular TV adaptation.

“But there are lots of risks posed by AI that are much more immediate than a robot revolt. There have been several examples which have featured prominently in the news, showing how it can be used in ways that exacerbate bias and injustice.

“It’s crucial that future leaders are trained to manage these risks so we can make the most of this amazing technology. This pioneering new course aims to do just that.”

While society’s understanding of AI ethics has grown fast, bridges from research to real-life applications are scarce, and access to rigorous qualifications in responsible AI are sorely lacking.

Dr Cave says the new degree will address those concerns. “People are using AI in different ways across every industry, and they are asking themselves, ‘How can we do this in a way that broadly benefits society?’

“We have brought together cutting-edge knowledge on the responsible and beneficial use of AI, and want to impart that to the developers, policymakers, businesspeople and others who are making decisions right now about how to use these technologies.”

AI has already demonstrated a range of benefits for humanity. The COVID-19 pandemic has seen artificial intelligence rushed into experimental use at scale, bringing the importance of ethical AI competence into even greater relief. For example, AI has been deployed to fight the pandemic in the development of vaccines, early diagnosis and contact tracing.

But its use has also caused concern, when governments used artificial intelligence to track citizens and prevent them from leaving their homes.

The ‘Master of studies in AI Ethics and Society’ promises to develop leaders who can confidently tackle the most pressing AI challenges facing their workplaces. These include issues of privacy, surveillance, justice, fairness, algorithmic bias, misinformation, microtargeting, Big Data, responsible innovation and data governance.

The curriculum spans a wide range of academic areas including philosophy, machine learning, policy, race theory, design, computer science, engineering, and law. Run by a specialist research centre, the course will include the latest subject research taught by world-leading experts.

Dedicated to meeting the practical needs of professionals, the course will address concrete questions such as:

·     How can I tell if an AI product is trustworthy?

·     How can I anticipate and mitigate possible negative impacts of a technology?

·     How can I design a process of responsible innovation for my business?

·     How do I safeguard against algorithmic bias?

·     How do I keep data private, secure, and properly managed?

·     How can I involve diverse stakeholders in AI decision-making?

The hybrid programme will consist of online classes, and intensive week-long residentials at a University of Cambridge college. It’s been designed in such a flexible format to maximise the opportunities for working professionals to join the course.

Dr James Gazzard said: “The Institute of Continuing Education is delighted to be a partner in this distinctive Master’s course. Our role is to provide adult students with access to cutting edge knowledge and skills.

“As we all consider a post COVID-19 future, we know that the Fourth Industrial Revolution will see the acceleration of the opportunities and threats presented by AI and this course is well placed to support adults to re-skill and up-skill in this important emerging field.”

In addition to its 800-year history of innovation and leadership in technology and the humanities, the University of Cambridge is set within the renowned ‘Silicon Fen’, a hub of AI innovation home to tech giants and start-ups from Microsoft, and Amazon, to ARM, and Apple.

In gathering professionals from across the country and internationally, the course will build diverse networks of professionals, researchers and government leaders dedicated to responsible AI. This will help position the UK as a global leader in beneficial AI, now and into the future.

Applications for the new degree close on 31st March 2021, with the first cohort commencing in October 2021. For further information about the course, please visit: http://lcfi.ac.uk/master-ai-ethics/ 

The measurements of stellar positions, movement, brightness and colours are in the third early data release from the European Space Agency’s Gaia space observatory, and are now publicly available. Initial findings include the first optical measurement of the acceleration of the Solar system.

Launched in 2013, Gaia operates in an orbit around the so-called Lagrange 2 (L2) point, located 1.5 million kilometres behind the Earth in the direction away from the Sun. At L2 the gravitational forces between the Earth and Sun are balanced, so the spacecraft stays in stable position, allowing long-term essentially unobstructed views of the sky.

The primary objective of Gaia is to measure stellar distances using the parallax method. In this case astronomers use the observatory to continuously scan the sky, measuring the apparent change in the positions of stars over time, resulting from the Earth’s movement around the Sun.

Knowing that tiny shift in the positions of stars allows their distances to be calculated. On Earth this is made more difficult by the blurring of the Earth’s atmosphere, but in space the measurements are only limited by the optics of the telescope.

Two previous releases included the positions of 1.6 billion stars. Today’s release brings the total to just under 2 billion stars, whose positions are significantly more accurate than in the earlier data. Gaia also tracks the changing brightness and the positions of the stars over time across the line of sight (their so-called proper motion), and by splitting their light into spectra, measures how fast they are moving towards or away from the Sun and assesses their chemical composition.

The new data include exceptionally accurate measurements of the 300,000 stars within the closest 326 light years to the Sun. The researchers use these data to predict how the star background will change in the next 1.6 million years. They also confirm that the Solar system is accelerating in its orbit around the Galaxy.

This acceleration is gentle, and is what would be expected from a system in a circular orbit. Over a year the Sun accelerates towards the centre of the Galaxy by 7 mm per second, compared with its speed along its orbit of about 230 kilometres a second.

Gaia data additionally deconstruct the two largest companion galaxies to the Milky Way, the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, allowing researchers to see their different stellar populations. A dramatic visualisation shows these subsets, and the bridge of stars between the two systems.

Dr Floor van Leeuwen of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy said: “Gaia is measuring the distances of hundreds of millions of objects that are many thousands of light years away, at an accuracy equivalent to measuring the thickness of hair at a distance of more than 2000 kilometres. These data are one of the backbones of astrophysics, allowing us to forensically analyse our stellar neighbourhood, and tackle crucial questions about the origin and future of our Galaxy.”

Gaia will continue gathering data until at least 2022, with a possible mission extension until 2025. The final data releases are expected to yield stellar positions 1.9 times as accurate as those released so far, and proper motions more than 7 times more accurate, in a catalogue of more than two billion objects.

“The mysteries of the Milky Way and our Solar System have captured the imagination of generations of scientists and astronomers across the world – all eager to learn more about the origins of the Universe,” said Science Minister Amanda Solloway. “Through this remarkable government-backed mission, UK scientists have taken us a giant leap closer to advancing our knowledge of how our Solar System began by painting the most detailed picture yet that could help to redefine astronomy as we know it.”

Adapted from a Royal Astronomical Society press release.

Global GDP will drop three percent below pre-pandemic estimates by the end of 2021, with many Western nations seeing ‘deeper and longer-lasting’ effects compared to China and other Asian economies, a study suggests.

Moreover, nations that adopted less stringent lockdowns – Sweden, for example – will not be shielded from the economic losses of COVID-19, owing to spillovers from other countries.

Published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the macroeconomic study captures the economic volatility caused by the last 40 years of ‘rare events’. It uses this historical data to forecast the longer term effects of the pandemic on individual economies.

The research suggests that economic growth will be stymied in at least 80% of the world’s advanced nations and many emerging market economies due to ‘excess global uncertainty’.

Two Cambridge economists conducted the study with an international team of researchers. They argue that the pandemic will lead to a ‘significant fall in world output’ – the consequences of which could last much of the dawning decade.

“The COVID-19 pandemic is a global shock like no other, involving simultaneous disruptions to both supply and demand in an interconnected world economy,” said co-author Dr Kamiar Mohaddes, a Cambridge Judge Business School economist.

“Infections reduce labour supply and productivity, while lockdowns, business closures, and social distancing also cause supply disruptions. On the demand side, redundancy and the loss of income from death, quarantines, and unemployment plus worsened economic prospects reduce household consumption and firms’ investment.”

The study from Mohaddes, a Fellow of King’s College at Cambridge, and colleagues, including M Hashem Pesaran, Fellow of Trinity College, uses the IMF’s GDP growth forecast revisions between January and April 2020 to identify the COVID-19 economic shock.

The research team created a model of 33 countries covering 90% of the global economy, using data from 1979 onwards – in particular the rare economic shocks – to predict the range of GDP loss likely to be suffered by each nation and region as a result of the pandemic. The study accounts for the ‘nonlinear’ effects of global economic volatility.

“The techniques developed in this study are intended to capture the effects of rare events such as COVID-19, and account for interconnections and spillovers between countries and markets,” said Mohaddes, who worked with colleagues from the International Monetary Fund, Johns Hopkins University and the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

The study suggests that the US and the UK are likely to experience deeper and longer-lasting effects, while China has more than a 50% chance of its economy improving far quicker than its major western counterparts. The odds for the Euro area are ‘skewed negatively’, but it’s likely to experience a speedier and sturdier recovery than the US by the end of 2021.

“Pulled by China, most of the emerging economies in Asia have a higher chance of performing better than the global average,” said Mohaddes. He argues that China and others in the region may fare better globally thanks to their manufacturing bases.

Economies with strong service industries have proved resilient in the past as manufacturing was more exposed to market fluctuations, but COVID-19 and the digital age have turned this on its head: services suffer as people stay at home en masse while goods are still traded through online platforms.

“Non-Asian emerging markets stand out for their vulnerability, and will suffer from a significant output collapse in 2020, with a less than 30% chance of not experiencing an output loss by the end of 2021. Turkey, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia will almost certainly see at least eight quarters of severely depressed economic activity,” Mohaddes said.

The study pays close attention to Mohaddes’ home nation of Sweden, where the government took a markedly different approach, with little in the way of the mandatory social distancing and lockdowns adopted by most countries.

“The Swedish economy will also see a large fall in GDP, very similar to other European economies,” he said. “Our estimates for Sweden illustrate that no country is immune to the economic fallout of the pandemic, because of interconnections and the global nature of the shock.”

The study predicts lower interest rates in core advanced economies – about 100 basis points or 1 percentage point below pre-COVID rates. “The crisis raises precautionary savings and dampens investment demand,” said Mohaddes.

However, he warns that the same cannot be said with certainty about emerging market economies in regions such as Latin America, where borrowing rates can increase rapidly, with implications for ‘debt servicing’.

The study’s calculations involve both the ‘temporal and cross-sectional dimensions’ of data that take into account real and financial drivers of economic activity, as well as common factors such as oil prices and global volatility. Country-specific models include output growth, the real exchange rate, as well as real equity prices and long-term interest rates when available.

Added Mohaddes: “Given its unprecedented nature, any analysis of COVID-19 has to go beyond identifying the economic shock and account for its non-linear effects and cross-country spillovers, as well as the uncertainty surrounding forecasts. This is what we address with our econometric model.”

As HIV copies itself and replicates, it can develop errors, or ‘mutations’, in its genetic code (its RNA). While a drug may initially be able to suppress or even kill the virus, certain mutations can allow the virus to develop resistance to its effects. If a mutated strain begins to spread within a population, it can mean once-effective drugs are no longer able to treat people.

HIV treatment usually consists of a cocktail of drugs that includes a type of drug known as a non-nucleoside reverse-transcriptase inhibitor (NNRTI). However, in recent years, HIV has begun to develop resistance to NNRTIs. Between 10% and 15% of patients in much of sub-Saharan Africa are infected by a strain of HIV resistant to these drugs. If a patient is infected with an NNRTI-resistant strain, they are at a two- to three-fold increased risk of the drug regimen failing.

In 2019, the World Health Organization began to recommend dolutegravir as the preferred first-line treatment for HIV in most populations. Dolutegravir was dubbed a ‘wonder drug’ because it was safe, potent and cost-effective and scientists had seen no drug resistance against it in clinical trials. However, there is little data on the success of dolutegravir against circulating strains of HIV in sub-Saharan Africa.

In a study published today in Nature Communications, an international team of researchers from South Africa, the UK and the USA examined the genetic code of HIV to determine if drug resistance mutations in 874 volunteers living with HIV affected their treatment success. The individuals were enrolled in a clinical trial for people initiating HIV treatment to compare two drug regimens: efavirenz, an NNRTI and prior first-line therapy in the region, and dolutegravir.

The goal of this study was to determine whether drug resistance to efavirenz prior to starting treatment affected treatment success (suppression of the virus in the blood) over the first two years of therapy with both of these two regimens.

As expected, the presence of drug resistance substantially reduced the chances of treatment success in people taking efavirenz, successfully suppressing the virus over 96 weeks in 65% of participants, compared to 85% of non-resistant individuals. However, unexpectedly, the same pattern was true for individuals taking dolutegravir-based treatments: 66% of those with efavirenz resistance mutations remained suppressed over 96 weeks, compared to 84% of those without the mutations. These relationships held true after accounting for other factors, such as treatment adherence.

“We fully expected efavirenz to be less effective among patients HIV strains resistant to NNRTIs,” said Dr Mark Siedner, faculty member at the Africa Health Research Institute in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. “What took us completely by surprise was that dolutegravir – a different class of drug which is generally effective in the face of drug resistance – would also be less effective in people with these resistant strains.

“We are working now to tease out if this was due to the virus or the participants – for instance, if people with resistance are less likely to take their pills regularly. Either way, if this pattern holds true, it could have far reaching impacts on our predictions of long-term treatment control for millions of people taking dolutegravir in the region.”

Professor Ravi Gupta from the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge said: “This a huge concern. Dolutegravir was very much seen as a ‘wonder drug’, but our study suggests it might not be as effective in a significant number of patients who are resistant to another important class of antiretroviral drugs.”

The researchers say it is not clear why efavirenz-resistant mutations should affect susceptibility of dolutegravir, though one hypothesis is that integrase inhibitors such as dolutegravir push the virus to replicate and mutate faster, in turn developing resistance to the new drug in an evolutionary arms race. Alternatively, it could be due to poor adherence to treatment regimens, even though the analysis accounted for adherence by two independent methods. Further research is needed to find out why.

Professor Gupta added: “What this shows is that we urgently need to prioritise point of care tests to identify people with drug resistance HIV, particularly against efavirenz, and to more closely and accurately monitor treatment adherence. The development of such tests is at an advanced stage, but there a lack of investment from funders and philanthropic donors. We urgently need agencies and individuals to step forward and help support these programmes.

“In addition, we need to provide widespread access to viral load monitoring so that we can find those who are struggling, get them on more appropriate regimens, and limit the emergence of resistance when patients are failing therapy.”

The study was carried out by researchers at: the Africa Health Research Institute, University of KwaZulu-Natal, University of Witwatersrand, KwaZulu-Natal Research Innovation and Sequencing Platform, and the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA), in South Africa; the University of Cambridge, University of Liverpool, and Imperial College London in the UK; and Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, USA.

The research was supported by USAID, Unitaid, the South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC), with investigational drug donated by ViiV Healthcare and Gilead Sciences, and by Wellcome and the National Institutes of Health.

Reference
Siedner, MJ et al. Reduced efficacy of HIV-1 integrase inhibitors in patients with drug resistance mutations in reverse transcriptase. Nat Comms; 1 Dec 2020; DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-19801-x

Disgust is a natural response to unpleasant sights, such as rotting food, bodily waste and creepy crawlies, and has evolved to help us survive, encouraging us to avoid things that might spread disease. But for some people, disgust can become pathological, affecting their mental health and quality of life.

In a study published today in Current Biology, researchers at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit show that domperidone, a commonly-prescribed anti-nausea medicine, can help significantly reduce how much volunteers look away from disgusting images.

Domperidone works by stabilising the rhythm of the electrical signals in our stomach muscles. Normally, these signals help the stomach expand and contract, helping move food through the digestive tract. These rhythms become abnormal when we are nauseous or when we are hungry or full, for example. When they are strongly disrupted – for example, when we feel strong revulsion towards something – they can cause us to throw up the contents of our stomach.

In the study, twenty-five volunteers aged 18-35 were randomly assigned to one of two groups: one group to receive domperidone, the second a placebo.

Before taking their pills, the volunteers were shown a series of unpleasant images along with neutral images, such as a scarf or buttons, while the researchers tracked their eye movements. Thirty minutes after taking their tablets, the volunteers were again shown the images while their eye movements were tracked.

Next, the researchers offered an incentive to the volunteers: for every four to eight seconds that they could look at a disgusting image, they would receive 25p – and hear a ‘kerching!’ sound. The volunteers then viewed the images again for a final round, but this time with no incentive.

The volunteers were also asked to rate how disgusting they found the images at the start and end of the trial.

The researchers found that initially, taking domperidone made little difference to the time the volunteers spent looking at a particular image. As could be expected among both groups, the dwell time increased dramatically when they were paid to look at the images.

In the final condition – when the volunteers were no longer being incentivised – the team found that volunteers who had received domperidone spent significantly longer than the placebo group looking at the disgusting images. By the end, people looked at the neutral image roughly 5.5 seconds more than the disgusting image, but under the influence of domperidone, the difference was only about 2.5 seconds.

Domperidone made no difference to how disgusting the volunteers rated the images to be.

“We’ve known for some time that when you see something disgusting, your stomach muscles’ electrical signals become dysregulated, which in some cases causes people to feel sick or their stomach to turn. You’re then likely to avoid that thing,” said Dr Camilla Nord from the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at the University of Cambridge.

“What we’ve shown here is that when we steady the stomach’s electrical signals, people become less avoidant of a disgusting image after engaging with it. Changes in the stomach’s rhythm led to reduced disgust avoidance in our study – and so the stomach’s rhythm must be one cause of disgust avoidance in general.”

“In another recent study, we showed that we do not become immune to looking at disgusting images – a fact supported by the placebo condition in this new study,” said Dr Edwin Dalmaijer, also from the MRC Unit. “This is one reason why treating pathological disgust by exposure is often unsuccessful. Our research suggests domperidone may help.”

“We’ve shown that by calming the rhythms of our stomach muscles using anti-nausea drugs, we can help reduce our instinct to look away from a disgusting image,” added Professor Tim Dalgleish, also from the MRC Unit, “but just using the drug itself isn’t enough: overcoming disgust avoidance requires us to be motivated or incentivised. This could provide us with clues on how we can help people overcome pathological disgust clinically, which occurs in a number of mental health conditions and can be disabling.”

Explaining why the stomach should play a role in our disgust response, Dr Nord added: “When the brain constructs its representation of the environment, it integrates signals from the outside world, such as ‘is it daylight?’ with signals from the inside world, such as ‘am I hungry?’. So your internal environment, and your perception of it, plays a large role in how you experience the world.

“Many studies have shown that the state of our body influences emotion, perception, and action. For example, the timing and your awareness of your heartbeats influences learning, anxiety, and other emotion perception. Our study shows that the state of your stomach also influences your behaviour.”

The research was supported by the Medical Research Council, AXA Research Fund and the National Institute for Health Research Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre.

Reference
Nord, CL & Dalmaijer, E, et al. A causal role for gastric rhythm in human disgust avoidance. Current Biology; 24 Nov 2020; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2020.10.087

Astronomers have detected fast-moving carbon monoxide gas flowing away from a young, low-mass star: a unique stage of planetary system evolution which may provide insight into how our own solar system evolved and suggests that the way systems develop may be more complicated than previously thought.

Although it remains unclear how the gas is being ejected so fast, the team of researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, believe it may be produced from icy comets being vaporised in the star’s asteroid belt. The results have been accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and will be presented at the Five Years After HL Tau virtual conference.

The detection was made with the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA) in Chile, as part of a survey of young ‘class III’ stars, reported in an earlier paper. Some of these class III stars are surrounded by debris discs, which are believed to be formed by the ongoing collisions of comets, asteroids and other solid objects, known as planetesimals, in the outer reaches of recently formed planetary systems. The leftover dust and debris from these collisions absorbs light from their central stars and re-radiate that energy as a faint glow that can be studied with ALMA.

In the inner regions of planetary systems, the processes of planet formation are expected to result in the loss of all the hottest dust, and class IIII stars are those that are left with – at most – dim, cold dust. These faint belts of cold dust are similar to the known debris discs seen around other stars, similar to the Kuiper belt in our own solar system, which is known to host much larger asteroids and comets.

In the survey, the star in question, ‘NO Lup’, which is about 70% the mass of our sun, was found to have a faint, low-mass dusty disc, but it was the only class III star where carbon monoxide gas was detected, a first for this type of young star with ALMA. While it is known that many young stars still host the gas-rich planet-forming discs they are born with, NO Lup is more evolved, and might have been expected to have lost this primordial gas after its planets had formed.

While the detection of carbon monoxide gas is rare, what made the observation unique was the scale and speed of the gas, which prompted a follow-up study to explore its motion and origins.

“Just detecting carbon monoxide gas was exciting, since no other young stars of this type had been previously imaged by ALMA,” said first author Joshua Lovell, a PhD student from the Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy. “But when we looked closer, we found something even more unusual: given how far away the gas was from the star, it was moving much faster than expected. This had us puzzled for quite some time.”

Grant Kennedy, Royal Society University Research Fellow at the University of Warwick, who led the modelling work on the study, came up with a solution to the puzzle. “We found a simple way to explain it: by modelling a gas ring, but giving the gas an extra kick outward,” he said. “Other models have been used to explain young discs with similar mechanisms, but this disc is more like a debris disc where we haven’t witnessed winds before. Our model showed the gas is entirely consistent with a scenario in which it’s being launched out of the system at around 22 kilometres per second, which is much higher than any stable orbital speed.”

Further analysis also showed that the gas may be produced during collisions between asteroids, or during periods of sublimation – the transition from a solid to a gaseous phase – on the surface of the star’s comets, expected to be rich in carbon monoxide ice.

There has been recent evidence of this same process in our own solar system from NASA’s New Horizons mission, when it observed the Kuiper Belt object Ultima Thule in 2019 and found sublimation evolution on the surface of the comet, which happened around 4.5 billion years ago. The same event that vaporised comets in our own solar system billions of years ago may have therefore been captured for the first time over 400 light years away, in a process that may be common around planet-forming stars, and have implications for how all comets, asteroids, and planets evolve.

“This fascinating star is shedding light on what kind of physical processes are shaping planetary systems shortly after they are born, just after they have emerged from being enshrouded by their protoplanetary disk,” said co-author Professor Mark Wyatt, also from the Institute of Astronomy. “While we have seen gas produced by planetesimals in older systems, the shear rate at which gas is being produced in this system and its outflowing nature are quite remarkable, and point to a phase of planetary system evolution that we are witnessing here for the first time.”

While the puzzle isn’t fully solved, and further detailed modelling will be required to understand how the gas is being ejected so quickly, what is sure is that this system is set to be the target of more intense follow-up measurements.

“We’re hoping that ALMA will be back online next year, and we’ll be making the case to observe this system again in greater detail,” said Lovell. “Given how much we have learned about this early stage of planetary system evolution with only a short 30-minute observation, there is still so much more that this system can tell us.”

References:
1: J.B. Lovell et al. ‘Rapid CO gas dispersal from NO Lup’s class III circumstellar disc.’ Paper presented at Five Years After HL Tau. 7-11 December 2020.

2: J.B. Lovell et al. ‘ALMA Survey of Class III stars: Early planetesimal formation and Rapid disc dispersal’, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/staa3335

The ‘12 Days of Winter Wildlife 2020’ aims to encourage everyone to get involved in spotting wildlife over winter, and helping to look after it.

With fascinating facts, films and activities to do at home, the event – which runs from 1st to 12th December 2020 – is suitable for all ages. Experts will cover a range of topics including how to support garden birds and spot winter visitors, and how to find hibernating insects like butterflies and ladybirds.

“There’s so much we can do to help animals survive the coldest months of the year, and we hope this event will show people how they can enjoy playing their part,” said Professor Rebecca Kilner, Director of the Museum.

With activities such as how to make a winter insect hotel, and a test to find out whether your memory is as good as a squirrel, this celebration of winter wildlife will even share tips on creating animal-inspired gifts.

“There’s a lot more winter wildlife in the UK than you might expect – and we hope this event will not only be educational but a lot of fun,” said Dr Roz Wade, Senior Learning & Engagement Coordinator at the Museum of Zoology.

She added: “Lots of interesting birds can be spotted in the UK at this time of year – and for some, winter in the UK is an escape from much colder conditions further north. And despite some of our native animals going into hibernation, many others stay active through winter – from moths to water birds to foxes and squirrels. Not to mention what’s living in the compost heap.”

‘12 Days of Winter Wildlife’ launches at 4:30pm on 1st December 2020 with a YouTube Live event. Bird expert Rob Jaques from the British Trust for Ornithology will be on hand to answer questions from the public, and there will be a virtual tour of Cambridge University Botanic Garden wildlife.

To add to the fun, the launch includes a festive sing-along with a wildlife twist. Written by PhD student Kate Howlett and recorded by Museum volunteers, staff & friends, ‘The 12 Days of Critters’ will be making its debut at the event.

Films, animal facts, activities and more will be posted daily at 9am on the Museum’s blog.

The University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge is temporarily closed to visitors due to the current lockdown measures. Updates on its opening status will be posted on the Museum’s website and Twitter and Facebook pages.

The Museum holds one of the largest and most important natural history collections in the UK, with an extraordinarily rich history dating back to 1814. In 2018 it reopened after a five-year, £4.1million redevelopment – including nearly £2 million from The National Lottery Heritage Fund – to reveal thousands of incredible specimens from across the animal kingdom, including whales, elephants, a giraffe, giant ground sloth, insects, corals as well as items collected by Charles Darwin. 

Magnets often harbour hidden beauty. Take a simple fridge magnet: somewhat counterintuitively, it is ‘sticky’ on one side but not the other. The secret lies in the way the magnetisation is arranged in a well-defined pattern within the material. More intricate magnetisation textures are at the heart of many modern technologies, such as hard drives.

Now, an international team of scientists from the University of Cambridge, the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), ETH Zurich, the Donetsk Institute for Physics and Engineering in Ukraine and the Institute for Numerical Mathematics RAS in Moscow have discovered unexpected magnetic structures inside a tiny pillar made of the magnetic material GdCo₂.

The researchers observed sub-micrometre loop-shaped configurations, which they identified as magnetic vortex rings. Far beyond their aesthetic appeal, these textures might point the way to further complex three-dimensional structures arising in the bulk of magnets and could one day form the basis for new technological applications. Their results are reported in the journal Nature Physics.

Determining the magnetisation arrangement within a magnet is highly challenging, in particular for structures at the micro- and nanoscale, for which studies have been typically limited to looking at a shallow layer just below the surface. That changed in 2017 when researchers at PSI and ETH Zurich introduced a new X‑ray method for the nanotomography of bulk magnets, which they demonstrated in experiments at the Swiss Light Source. That advance opened up a window into the inner life of magnets, providing a tool for determining three-dimensional magnetic configurations at the nanoscale within micrometre-sized samples.

Using these capabilities, the researchers ventured into new territory. The stunning loop shapes they observed appear in the same GdCo₂ micropillar samples in which they had before detected complex magnetic configurations consisting of vortices — the sort of structures seen when water spirals down from a sink — and their topological counterparts, antivortices.

That was a first, but the presence of these textures has not been surprising in itself. Unexpectedly, however, the scientists also found loops that consist of pairs of vortices and antivortices. That observation proved to be puzzling. With the implementation of novel sophisticated data-analysis techniques they eventually established that these structures are so-called vortex rings — in essence, doughnut-shaped vortices.

Vortex rings are familiar to everyone who has seen smoke rings being blown, or who has watched dolphins producing loop-shaped air bubbles, for their own amusement as much as to that of their audience. The newly discovered magnetic vortex rings are captivating in their own right. Not only does their observation verify predictions made some two decades ago, settling the question whether such structures can exist. They also offered surprises. In particular, magnetic vortex rings have been predicted to be a transient phenomenon, but in the experiments now reported, these structures turned out to be remarkably stable.

“One of the main puzzles was why these structures are so unexpectedly stable – like smoke rings, they are only supposed to exist as moving objects,” said Dr Claire Donnelly from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, and the paper’s first author. “Through a combination of analytical calculations and considerations of the data, we determined the root of their stability to be the magnetostatic interaction.”

The stability of magnetic vortex rings could have important practical implications. For one, they could potentially move through magnetic materials, as smoke rings move stably though air, or air-bubble rings through water.

Learning how to control the rings within the volume of the magnet can open interesting prospects for energy-efficient 3D data storage and processing. There is interest in the physics of these new structures, too, as magnetic vortex rings can take forms not possible for their smoke and air counterparts. The team has already observed some unique configurations, and going forward, their further exploration promises to bring to light yet more magnetic beauty.

Reference:
Claire Donnelly et al. ‘Experimental observation of vortex rings in a bulk magnet.’ Nature Physics (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41567-020-01057-3

Adapted from a PSI press release.

We are increasingly using more smart devices like smartphones, smart speakers, and wearable health and wellness sensors in our homes, offices, and public buildings. However, the batteries they use can deplete quickly and contain toxic and rare environmentally damaging chemicals, so researchers are looking for better ways to power the devices.

One way to power them is by converting indoor light from ordinary bulbs into energy, in a similar way to how solar panels harvest energy from sunlight, known as solar photovoltaics. However, due to the different properties of the light sources, the materials used for solar panels are not suitable for harvesting indoor light.

Now, researchers from the University of Cambridge, Imperial College London and Soochow University in China have discovered that new green materials currently being developed for next-generation solar panels could be useful for indoor light harvesting. They report their findings in Advanced Energy Materials.

“By efficiently absorbing the light coming from lamps commonly found in homes and buildings, the materials can turn light into electricity with an efficiency already in the range of commercial technologies,” said co-author Dr Robert Hoye from Imperial College London. “We have also already identified several possible improvements, which would allow these materials to surpass the performance of current indoor photovoltaic technologies in the near future.”

The team investigated perovskite-inspired materials, which were created to circumvent problems with materials called perovskites, which were developed for next-generation solar cells. Although perovskites are cheaper to make than traditional silicon-based solar panels and deliver similar efficiency, perovskites contain toxic lead substances. This drove the development of perovskite-inspired materials, which are instead based on safer elements like bismuth and antimony.

Despite being more environmentally friendly, these perovskite-inspired materials are not as efficient at absorbing sunlight. However, the team found that the materials are much more effective at absorbing indoor light, with efficiencies that are promising for commercial applications. Crucially, the researchers demonstrated that the power provided by these materials under indoor illumination is already sufficient to operate electronic circuits.

“The Internet of Things is critical for many areas, such as improved healthcare, energy conservation, transportation or control of smart buildings,” said co-authro Professor Judith Driscoll from Cambridge’s Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy. “New generations of wireless connected IoT devices function with low-power electronics ideally suited to operate with energy-scavenging devices.”

“Access to sustainable and efficient indoor photovoltaic energy harvesters offers unique opportunities to operate these IoT devices by collecting ambient energy from daily environments extending their operating lifetime and reducing maintenance costs,” said co-author Dr Luigi Occhipinti from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering.

“Our discovery opens up a whole new direction in the search for green, easy-to-make materials to sustainably power our smart devices,” said co-author Professor Vincenzo Pecunia from Soochow University.

In addition to their eco-friendly nature, these materials could potentially be processed onto unconventional substrates such as plastics and fabric, which are incompatible with conventional technologies. Therefore, lead-free perovskite-inspired materials could soon enable battery-free devices for wearables, healthcare monitoring, smart homes, and smart cities.

This research was funded by EPSRC and National Natural Science Foundation of China.

Reference:
Yueheng Peng et al. ‘Lead‐Free Perovskite‐Inspired Absorbers for Indoor Photovoltaics.’ Advanced Energy Material (2020). DOI: 10.1002/aenm.202002761

Originally published on the Imperial College London website.

A bold response to the world’s greatest challenge

The University of Cambridge is building on its existing research and launching an ambitious new environment and climate change initiative. Cambridge Zero is not just about developing greener technologies. It will harness the full power of the University’s research and policy expertise, developing solutions that work for our lives, our society and our biosphere.

New research analysing racial disparities among murder victims across most of Britain over the last two decades shows that people of Asian ethnicity are on average twice as likely as White British people to be killed.

For Black people, however, the risk of homicide has been over five and a half times (5.6) higher than for White British people – on average – during the current century, and this disparity has been on the rise since 2015.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology were surprised to find that official UK data did not include relative risk statistics by ethnicity, as is common in countries such as the US and Australia.

They argue that the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) should publish “relevant denominators with raw numerators” to help with public understanding of crime risk and police resourcing. The work is published as a research note in the Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing.

“Through a series of straightforward calculations, we found substantial racial inequality in the risks of being murdered in England and Wales,” said co-author Professor Lawrence Sherman of the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology.

“The pandemic has given the public a crash course in statistics. It provides an opportunity to present all kinds of data in ways that have more meaning for the population as well as those on the front line of prevention,” Sherman said.

Billy Gazard, a crime statistician for the ONS, said: “We have outlined our plans for improving crime statistics for England and Wales in our July 2020 progress update. Within this update we committed to better addressing inequalities in victimisation and highlighting those groups in society that are at most risk of experiencing crime. We plan to carry out further analysis over the coming year, which will include looking at homicide victimisation rates by ethnicity.”

Cambridge criminologists went back over the last 20 years of annual figures using an approach now familiar to many through coronavirus statistics: rates of cases per 100,000 people. This provided a risk ratio for homicide rates by ethnicity in England and Wales.

The researchers say that, to the best of their knowledge, theirs is the first comparison of ethnic group trends in UK homicide victimisation rates per 100,000 to be published in recent decades, if ever.

They found that homicide risk for White and Asian people has stayed relatively consistent since the turn of the millennium – around one in 100,000 for White people and a little over two in 100,000 for Asian people, consisting primarily of persons of South Asian descent. For Black people, however, risks have fluctuated dramatically over the last 20 years.

The homicide victimisation rate for Black people was highest in the early noughties: almost 10 in 100,000 in 2001. It dropped by 69% between 2001 and 2012 to a low of 3 in 100,000 around 2013. Rates then began to climb again, rising seven times faster than for White people to reach over 5 in 100,000 last year.

When accounting for age, the disparity is starker still: for those aged 16 to 24, the 21st century average puts young Black people over ten and a half times (10.6) more likely than White people to be victims of homicide in England and Wales.

In fact, researchers point out that – per 100,000 people – the most recent data from 2018-19 puts the murder risk of young Black people 24 times higher than that of young White people.

The criminologists found no correlation between changes in homicide risk for different ethnicities. As an example, they point to the last three years of data: the homicide rate for White people aged between 16-24 dropped by 57%, while for young Black people it increased by 31%.

“Policing requires reliable evidence, and changing levels of risk are a vital part of preventative policing,” said Sherman. “Our initial findings reveal risk inequalities at a national level, but they may be far greater or lower in local areas. We would encourage police forces to produce their own calculations of murder rates per 100,000.”

Sherman has long advocated for a more ‘meaningful’ approach to crime data. He has led on the development of the Cambridge Crime Harm Index: a classification system weighted by the impact of an offence on victims, rather than just counting crime numbers.

“Simple statistics show us that the risks of becoming a murder victim are far from equal,” added Sherman. “We need more data analysis of this nature to inform police resource allocation, and promote a more fact-informed dialogue with communities across the country.”

The newly-reported study, by academics at the University of Cambridge, is one of the first to measure the complete value that interventions targeting poor and marginalised children also have for many of their peers, principally through ‘spill-over’ effects which improve the wider education system.

The team tested their model by analysing a programme by CAMFED (the Campaign for Female Education) in Tanzania, which supports the education of disadvantaged girls. They took into account its impact not just on those girls, but on other children at schools where their programme operates. Strikingly, for every $100 spent per girl, per year, the programme resulted in learning gains equivalent to an additional two years of education for all girls and boys at those schools.

The study was carried out by members of the Research for Equitable Access and Learning (REAL) Centre at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge.

Professor Ricardo Sabates, the co-lead researcher, said: “Helping the most marginalised children inevitably costs more, and most cost-effectiveness measures only consider that expense against the impact on those specific pupils. But programmes like CAMFED’s also have spill-over benefits and critically are keeping girls in school who would otherwise have dropped out. We can, and should, factor in those considerations when assessing cost-effectiveness.”

Professor Pauline Rose, Director of the REAL Centre, added: “While it may cost more to reach the most marginalised pupils, the impact of those efforts is far more impressive than we tend to imagine. This research explains why system reforms should focus on those who need the most support. Education systems that function for the most marginalised children function for everyone.”

CAMFED is a non-governmental organisation which improves the education of marginalised girls in Africa and was recently awarded the 2020 Yidan Prize for Education Development. In Tanzania, its bursaries enable thousands of girls to attend secondary school, in tandem with interventions aimed at improving participation and learning among all children in partner schools.

Because most cost-effectiveness analyses only measure the impact of a programme on its direct beneficiaries (in this case marginalised girls), interventions such as CAMFED’s often seem to have limited reach while at the same time appearing more expensive than those targeting a broader demographic. The Cambridge study examined how best to measure the wider impact of CAMFED’s work in Tanzania, and then used this to refine the cost-effectiveness analysis.

The researchers analysed data from CAMFED’s programme over two years. To calculate per-head costs, they distinguished between the different components of the intervention and their assorted beneficiaries. For example, the cost of bursaries was divided by the number of marginalised girls who received them, but the cost of delivering extra-curricular courses in CAMFED-supported schools was divided by the number of all participating students. This provided a basis for identifying average annual unit costs for individual categories of beneficiaries.

Impact was calculated by comparing the English test scores of children from 81 randomly-selected CAMFED-supported schools with children from 60 control schools that received no support. Scores were collected at the start and end of the two years, and the team used data about the children’s socio-economic background to make direct comparisons between pupils from similar settings.

They also compared the dropout rates at both groups of schools, and used this to weight the final cost-effectiveness analysis. This reflected the fact that CAMFED’s programme not only improves learning, but also supports girls who might otherwise have dropped out of school, or never attended at all.

The cost of the programme, when only the most marginalised girls targeted by the bursaries were considered, was apparently steep: at $130.41 per year for each girl receiving financial support. However, the researchers also found that the per-head cost for other boys and girls at the same schools was just $15.40, demonstrating far greater value for money overall. The additional cost of the bursaries was also found to be vital for enabling the most disadvantaged girls to stay in school.

Pupils attending CAMFED-supported schools made significant academic improvements compared with their peers. The improvement in English test scores among girls receiving financial support was about 35% better than comparable girls in the control group. But other girls also performed similarly, while the boys did about 25% better. Girls who received financial support were 25% less likely to drop out of school than those in the control group.

The researchers then calculated the learning gains of pupils on the CAMFED programme per unit cost. When this measure was converted into equivalent years of learning, they found that for every $100 spent on each of the marginalised girls targeted, English learning outcomes improved by the equivalent of an extra 1.45 years of schooling for all pupils. When the increased proportion of marginalised girls remaining in school was factored in, the improvement in both access and learning for all girls and boys across the CAMFED schools was actually equivalent to an additional two years of schooling per $100.

While it is difficult to compare these results with other programmes, the study suggests that the cost-effectiveness of CAMFED’s work in Tanzania is at least commensurate with similar interventions in sub-Saharan Africa that do not target marginalised groups. But the findings may also be conservative. For example, CAMFED’s programme may also have further benefits outside the school system, for example among the siblings and communities of the young women it supports.

“Even though we probably underestimated its impact, this intervention is still extremely cost-effective,” Sabates added. “It shows real improvements in learning are best enabled when we invest in the children at greatest risk of being left behind.”

The research is published in the Journal of Development Effectiveness.

The additional investment will enable COG-UK to grow and strengthen current genomic surveillance efforts spearheaded by the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the University of Cambridge, together with the four UK Public Health Agencies and other COG-UK partners, with the aim of increasing sequencing capacity across the national network and reducing turnaround time from patient sample to genome sequence.

The viral genome sequencing data will be integrated within the four UK Public Health Agencies & NHS Test and Trace to help understand outbreaks and strengthen infection control measures. Integrating real-time viral genomic data into outbreaks investigations identifies patterns linking individual cases and can reveal otherwise unidentifiable opportunities for intervention. Viral genome sequencing also enables monitoring of the evolution of the virus for mutations that may impact on the efficacy of vaccines.

The COVID-19 pandemic, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, represents a major threat to health. The COG-UK Consortium was created to deliver large-scale and rapid whole-genome virus sequencing to local NHS centres, Public Health Agencies and the UK government.

Led by Professor Sharon Peacock of the University of Cambridge & Director Of Science at Public Health England, COG-UK is an innovative partnership of NHS organisations, the four Public Health Agencies of the UK, the Wellcome Sanger Institute and 12 academic institutions from across the UK providing world leading expertise in SARS-CoV-2 genomics and supporting sequencing and analysis capacity nationwide.

Since its launch in March 2020, COG-UK has generated and made publicly available more than 100,000 SARS-CoV-2 genomes, making up over 45 per cent of the global total. This unprecedented effort has not been achieved previously for any pathogen, anywhere in the world.

COG-UK researchers have built a central database and developed cutting-edge analytical methodology and data pipelines for SARS-CoV-2 genomics. COG-UK has led the development of analytical software to define viral lineages and shares methods globally.

Collectively, these data and tools have provided important scientific insights into the spread and evolution of the virus, at local, regional, national and international scales.

However, the steadily rising numbers of cases in the UK requires a prompt increase in the national SARS-CoV-2 genome sequencing capacity, to ensure that the benefits of using genome sequence data can be realised in a rapid and robust manner.

Professor Sharon Peacock, who is the Director of COG-UK, Professor of Public Health and Microbiology at the University of Cambridge and a Director Of Science (Pathogen Genomics) at Public Health England, said: “To fully understand the spread and evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, we must sequence and analyse the viral genomes. The pattern of accumulation of mutations in the genomes enables us to determine the relatedness of virus samples and define viral lineages in order to understand whether local outbreaks are caused by transmission of single or multiple viral lineages. Analysis of viral genome sequences also allow us to monitor the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 and assess whether specific mutations influence transmission, disease severity, or the impact of interventions such as vaccines.”

The four UK Public Health Agencies and COG-UK are working to link SARS-CoV-2 genome data with epidemiological, clinical and contact tracing records nationally.

This will help establish a comprehensive national dataset linking viral sequencing with host genomics, immunology, clinical outcomes and risk factors.

Adapted from a press release from COG-UK

The app uses computer vision techniques to read and record the glucose levels, time and date displayed on a typical glucose test via the camera on a mobile phone. The technology, which doesn’t require an internet or Bluetooth connection, works for any type of glucose meter, in any orientation and in a variety of light levels. It also reduces waste by eliminating the need to replace high-quality non-Bluetooth meters, making it a cost-effective solution to the NHS.

Working with UK glucose testing company GlucoRx, the Cambridge researchers have developed the technology into a free mobile phone app, called GlucoRx Vision, which is now available on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

To use the app, users simply take a picture of their glucose meter and the results are automatically read and recorded, allowing much easier monitoring of blood glucose levels.

In addition to the glucose meters which people with diabetes use on a daily basis, many other types of digital meters are used in the medical and industrial sectors. However, many of these meters still do not have wireless connectivity, so connecting them to phone tracking apps often requires manual input.

“These meters work perfectly well, so we don’t want them sent to landfill just because they don’t have wireless connectivity,” said Dr James Charles from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering. “We wanted to find a way to retrofit them in an inexpensive and environmentally-friendly way using a mobile phone app.”

In addition to his interest in solving the challenge from an engineering point of view, Charles also had a personal interest in the problem. He has type 1 diabetes and needs to take as many as ten glucose readings per day. Each reading is then manually entered into a tracking app to help determine how much insulin he needs to regulate his blood glucose levels.

“From a purely selfish point of view, this was something I really wanted to develop,” he said.

“We wanted something that was efficient, quick and easy to use,” said Professor Roberto Cipolla, also from the Department of Engineering. “Diabetes can affect eyesight or even lead to blindness, so we needed the app to be easy to use for those with reduced vision.”

The computer vision technology behind the GlucoRx app is made up of two steps. First, the screen of the glucose meter is detected. The researchers used a single training image and augmented it with random backgrounds, particularly backgrounds with people. This helps ensure the system is robust when the user’s face is reflected in the phone’s screen.

Second, a neural network called LeDigit detects each digit on the screen and reads it. The network is trained with computer-generated synthetic data, avoiding the need for labour-intensive labelling of data which is commonly needed to train a neural network.

“Since the font on these meters is digital, it’s easy to train the neural network to recognise lots of different inputs and synthesise the data,” said Charles. “This makes it highly efficient to run on a mobile phone.”

“It doesn’t matter which orientation the meter is in – we tested it in all types of orientations, viewpoints and light levels,” said Cipolla, who is also a Fellow of Jesus College. “The app will vibrate when it’s read the information, so you get a clear signal when you’ve done it correctly. The system is accurate across a range of different types of meters, with read accuracies close to 100%”

In addition to blood glucose monitor, the researchers also tested their system on different types of digital meters, such as blood pressure monitors, kitchen and bathroom scales. The researchers also recently presented their results at the 31^st British Machine Vision Conference.

Gluco-Rx initially approached Cipolla’s team in 2018 to develop a cost-effective and environmentally-friendly solution to the problem of non-connected glucose meters, and once the technology had been shown to be sufficiently robust, the company worked with the Cambridge researchers to develop the app.

“We have been working in partnership with Cambridge University on this unique solution, which will help change the management of diabetes for years to come,” said Chris Chapman, Chief Operating Officer of GlucoRx. “We will soon make this solution available to all of our more than 250,000 patients.”

As for Charles, who has been using the app to track his glucose levels, he said it “makes the whole process easier. I’ve now forgotten what it was like to enter the values in manually, but I do know I wouldn’t want to go back to it. There are a few areas in the system which could still be made even better, but all in all I’m very happy with the outcome.”

Reference:
James Charles, Stefano Bucciarelli and Roberto Cipolla. ‘Real-time screen reading: reducing domain shift for one-shot learning.’ Paper presented at the British Machine Vision Conference: https://bmvc2020-conference.com/conference/papers/paper_0512.html

The Universe Unravelled series premieres on Discovery+ in November 2020, coinciding with the UK launch of this new digital platform. The series is aimed at anyone who is curious about the Universe we live in, with no previous knowledge of cosmology required. Across more than 20 short episodes, the series explores what we already know about the Universe, what cosmologists and relativists are working on right now, and where new observations may lead in the future.

The programme is inspired by the late Stephen Hawking’s ground-breaking work on cosmology, black holes and gravitational waves, and features researchers from the Hawking Centre for Theoretical Cosmology (CTC) and the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge.

The series explores the big questions in contemporary research which are being driven by new observations, such as the recent discovery of gravitational waves. It starts with Einstein’s general theory of relativity, describing how massive objects warp the fabric of spacetime and how they can collapse under their own gravity to form black holes. It explores how these black holes can send gravitational waves rippling across spacetime, and what happens if you were to fall into a black hole.

The series also describes the violent explosion that marked the beginning of our Universe, and how the Universe expanded from this initial Big Bang, forming all the structures we observe today – galaxies, stars and planets. It then probes the mysteries that still puzzle cosmologists, such as dark energy and dark matter. The series ends with a future outlook of what we might expect to learn from ambitious new observational programmes. All the basic concepts underlying are presented in an easily accessible manner, and it features stunning graphics, some produced in collaboration with Intel’s Advanced Visualization team.

The series features CTC and Kavli researchers explaining these remarkable concepts. It offers a glimpse of what it’s like to work at the cutting edge of cosmology: confronting sophisticated mathematics with observational data, employing some of the world’s fastest supercomputers, and even daring to challenge Einstein’s highly successful theory in an attempt to explain what has so far defied explanation. Viewers not only learn about the deepest secrets of our Universe, but also find out about the everyday life of students and staff at a world-leading research centre.

The collaboration between Discovery and the CTC started in 2010. A highlight was Discovery live-streaming Stephen Hawking’s 75th birthday symposium which was a huge success watched by millions, especially among younger members of their audience.

The series was filmed at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences and the Institute of Astronomy and produced with the help of science editors from Plus magazine, part of the University’s Millennium Mathematics Project outreach programme.

The CTC team worked closely with Navada Studios, who were responsible for the video production, with editorial oversight from Discovery producers. Funding for the project was provided by the Kavli Foundation, an organisation dedicated to advancing science for the benefit of humanity, promoting public understanding of scientific research, and supporting scientists and their work.

“We are grateful to Discovery and the Kavli Foundation for supporting this unique opportunity to continue Stephen Hawking’s vision of reaching out, especially to younger audiences, to inspire curiosity about our Universe and the huge progress currently being made to unveil its secrets,” said Paul Shellard, CTC Director. “This was a remarkable collaboration in which we were able to work closely with the production team, ensuring both viewer interest and scientific accuracy, which we hope provides a great model for future science outreach.”

The series is available on the new Discovery+ service that can be found at discoveryplus.co.uk, together with a short trailer. To find out more about the Hawking Centre, visit ctc.cam.ac.uk.

SARS-CoV-2 is one of many coronaviruses. All share the characteristic of having the largest single-stranded RNA genome in nature. This genome contains all the genetic code the virus needs to produce proteins, evade the immune system and replicate inside the human body. Much of that information is contained in the 3D structure adopted by this RNA genome when it infects cells.

The researchers say most current work to find drugs and vaccines for COVID-19 is focused on targeting the proteins of the virus. Because the shape of the RNA molecule is critical to its function, targeting the RNA directly with drugs to disrupt its structure would block the lifecycle and stop the virus replicating.

In a study published today in the journal Molecular Cell, the team uncovered the entire structure of the SARS-CoV-2 genome inside the host cell, revealing a network of RNA-RNA interactions spanning very long sections of the genome. Different functional parts along the genome need to work together despite the great distance between them, and the new structural data shows how this is accomplished to enable the coronavirus life cycle and cause disease.

“The RNA genome of coronaviruses is about three times bigger than an average viral RNA genome – it’s huge,” said lead author Dr Omer Ziv at the University of Cambridge’s Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute.

He added: “Researchers previously proposed that long-distance interactions along coronavirus genomes are critical for their replication and for producing the viral proteins, but until recently we didn’t have the right tools to map these interactions in full. Now that we understand this network of connectivity, we can start designing ways to target it effectively with therapeutics.”

In all cells the genome holds the code for the production of specific proteins, which are made when a molecular machine called a ribosome runs along the RNA reading the code until a ‘stop sign’ tells it to terminate. In coronaviruses, there is a special spot where the ribosome only stops 50% of the times in front of the stop sign. In the other 50% of cases, a unique RNA shape makes the ribosome jump over the stop sign and produce additional viral proteins. By mapping this RNA structure and the long-range interactions involved, the new research uncovers the strategies by which coronaviruses produce their proteins to manipulate our cells.

“We show that interactions occur between sections of the SARS-CoV-2 RNA that are very long distances apart, and we can monitor these interactions as they occur during early SARS-CoV-2 replication,” said Dr Lyudmila Shalamova, a co-lead investigator at Justus-Liebig University, Germany.

Dr Jon Price, a postdoctoral associate at the Gurdon Institute and co-lead of this study, has developed a free, open-access interactive website hosting the entire RNA structure of SARS-CoV-2. This will enable researchers world-wide to use the new data in the development of drugs to target specific regions of the virus’s RNA genome.

The genome of most human viruses is made of RNA rather than DNA. Ziv developed methods to investigate such long-range interactions across viral RNA genomes inside the host cells, in work to understand the Zika virus genome. This has proved a valuable methodological basis for understanding SARS-CoV-2.

This research is a collaborative study between the group of Professor Eric Miska at the University of Cambridge’s Gurdon Institute and Department of Genetics, and the group of Professor Friedemann Weber from the Institute for Virology, Justus-Liebig University, Gießen, Germany. The authors are grateful for the support of the Biochemistry Department at the University of Cambridge, who provided specialist laboratory facilities for performing part of this research.

The work was funded by Cancer Research UK, Wellcome, and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).

Ziv explains the research finding in this short video:

Reference
Ziv, O. et al: ‘The short- and long-range RNA-RNA Interactome of SARS-CoV-2.’ Mol Cell, November 2020. DOI: 10.1016/j.molcel.2020.11.004

How you can support Cambridge’s COVID-19 research

The free-to-play Harmony Square is released to the public today, along with a study on its effectiveness published in the Harvard Misinformation Review.

It has been created by University of Cambridge psychologists with support from the US Department of State’s Global Engagement Center and Department of Homeland Security Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

The gameplay is based on “inoculation theory”: that exposing people to a weak “dose” of common techniques used to spread fake news allows them to better identify and disregard misinformation when they encounter it in future.

In this case, by understanding how to incite political division in the game using everything from bots and conspiracies to fake experts, players get a form of “psychological vaccine” against the product of these techniques in the real world.

“Trying to debunk misinformation after it has spread is like shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted. By pre-bunking, we aim to stop the spread of fake news in the first place,” said Dr Sander van der Linden, Director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making lab and senior author of the new study.

Twitter has started using a “pre-bunk” approach: highlighting types of fake news likely to be encountered in feeds during the US election. However, researchers argue that familiarising people with techniques behind misinformation builds a “general inoculation”, reducing the need to rebut each individual conspiracy.

In the 10-minute game Harmony Square, a small town neighbourhood “obsessed with democracy” comes under fire as players bait the square’s “living statute”, spread falsehoods about its candidate for “bear controller”, and set up a disreputable online news site to attack the local TV anchor.

“The game itself is quick, easy and tongue-in-cheek, but the experiential learning that underpins it means that people are more likely to spot misinformation, and less likely to share it, next time they log on to Facebook or YouTube,” said Dr Jon Roozenbeek, a Cambridge psychologist and lead author of the study.

Over the course of four short levels, users learn about five manipulation techniques: trolling to provoke outrage; exploiting emotional language to create anger and fear; artificially amplifying reach through bots and fake followers; creating and spreading conspiracy theories; polarizing audiences.

In a randomised controlled trial, researchers took 681 people and asked them to rate the reliability of a series of news and social media posts: some real, some misinformation, and even some faked misinformation created for the study, in case participants had already come across real-world examples.

They gave roughly half the sample Harmony Square to play, while the other half played Tetris, and then asked them to rate another series of news posts.

The perceived reliability of misinformation dropped an average of 16% in those who completed Harmony Square compared to their assessment prior to playing. The game also reduced willingness to share fake news with others by 11%. Importantly, the players’ own politics – whether they leaned left or right – made no difference.

Having the “control group” who played Tetris allowed the scientists to determine an “effect size” of 0.54 for the study, said Van der Linden.

“The effect size suggests that if the population was split equally like the study sample, 63% of the half that played the game would go on to find misinformation significantly less reliable, compared to just 37% of the half left to navigate online information without the inoculation of Harmony Square,” he said.

The project follows other playful attempts by CISA to illustrate how “foreign influencers” use disinformation to target “hot button” issues. A previous demonstration took the example of whether pineapple belongs on pizza.

However, Harmony Square is based on the findings of a number of studies from the Cambridge team showing how similar gamified approaches to digital literacy significantly reduce susceptibility to fake news and online conspiracies.

The team behind the game, which includes the Dutch media agency DROG and designers Gusmanson, have recently worked with the UK Cabinet Office on Go Viral!, an intervention that specifically tackles conspiracies around COVID-19.

Harmony Square is geared towards the politically charged misinformation that has plagued many democracies over the last decade. “The aftermath of this week’s election day is likely to see an explosion of dangerous online falsehoods as tensions reach fever pitch,” said van der Linden.

“Fake news and online conspiracies will continue to chip away at the democratic process until we take seriously the need to improve digital media literacy across populations. The effectiveness of interventions such as Harmony Square are a promising start,” he said.

The University of Cambridge kicks off its first global Climate Change Festival today (6 November), the first of eight days of free online climate-themed events for all ages.

Cambridge Zero, the University’s climate initiative, has partnered with the academic publishing powerhouse Cambridge University Press to offer a week of live panel sessions, pre-recorded talks demonstrations, stories and games, led by leading thinkers from science, academia, policy and community groups from around the world.

The Festival will start this afternoon with a preview of “A Blueprint for a Green Future,” Cambridge Zero’s report on the necessary policy changes needed build a sustainable future, which will be launched next week. The Director of Cambridge Zero, Dr Emily Shuckburgh, and some of the report’s authors will be discussing how to ensure a green recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and mitigate the worst effects of climate change.

The Festival will also include live talks and panel sessions with leaders in the climate movement including scientist, TV personality and best-selling author Dr Emily Grossman; British environmentalist and writer Sir Jonathan Porritt; US Under Secretary for Science Paul M Dabbar and Australian Indigenous scholar and writer Tyson Yunkaporta.

The Festival takes place at the time when the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) was due to take place in Glasgow, which has been postponed to 2021 due to the pandemic.

The eight days of online events, both live and on-demand, will cover the five themes of COP26: Energy Transitions, Zero Carbon Transport, Finance, Adaptation & Resilience, and Nature, along with a sixth theme of Green Recovery. Each of the eight days also covers one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

University of Cambridge Vice-Chancellor Stephen J. Toope said: “This Climate Change Festival offers us optimism in the midst of a global crisis. By sparking collaboration and dialogue between the academic and non-academic communities, it will help us focus on what we can all achieve together, and shine a light on some of the solutions already being implemented locally, nationally and internationally. Taking place at the time when COP26 would have happened, it is a testimony to our commitment to tackling the global climate crisis.”

Director of Cambridge Zero, Dr Emily Shuckburgh OBE said: “This is the moment to reset our priorities and to re-evaluate our relationships with each other and with the world that sustains us. This Festival is a chance for us to share some of the exciting research and new initiatives underway at Cambridge Zero, and beyond, to show how we all can make a difference and live more sustainably.”

All sessions are free to join with recordings made available to watch again on Cambridge Open Engage, the research and collaboration platform developed by Cambridge University Press.

To learn more about the festival, view the programme and register for events, visit the festival website, or follow @CambridgeZero on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook.

The study, published today in the journal Nature Communications, analysed changes in the geographical range of 16,919 species from 1700 to the present day. The data were also used to predict future changes up to the year 2100 under 16 different climate and socio-economic scenarios.

A diverse abundance of species underpins essential ecosystem functions from pest regulation to carbon storage. Species’ vulnerability to extinction is strongly impacted by their geographical range size, and devising effective conservation strategies requires a better understanding of how ranges have changed in the past, and how they will change under alternative future scenarios.

“The habitat size of almost all known birds, mammals and amphibians is shrinking, primarily because of land conversion by humans as we continue to expand our agricultural and urban areas,” said Dr Robert Beyer in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology, first author of the report.

Some species are more heavily impacted than others. A worrying 16% of species have lost over half their estimated natural historical range, a figure that could rise to 26% by the end of the century.

Species’ geographical ranges were found to have recently shrunk most significantly in tropical areas. Until around 50 years ago, most agricultural development was in Europe and North America. Since then, large areas of land have been converted for agriculture in the tropics: clearance of rainforest for oil palm plantations in South East Asia, and for pasture land in South America, for example.

As humans move their activities deeper into the tropics, the effect on species ranges is becoming disproportionately larger because of a greater species richness in these areas, and because the natural ranges of these species are smaller to begin with.

“The tropics are biodiversity hotspots with lots of small-range species. If one hectare of tropical forest is converted to agricultural land, a lot more species lose larger proportions of their home than in places like Europe,” said Beyer.

The results predict that climate change will have an increasing impact on species’ geographical ranges. Rising temperatures and changing rainfall patterns will alter habitats significantly, for example: other studies have predicted that without climate action, large parts of the Amazon may change from canopy rainforest to a savannah-like mix of woodland and open grassland in the next 100 years.

“Species in the Amazon have adapted to living in a tropical rainforest. If climate change causes this ecosystem to change, many of those species won’t be able to survive – or they will at least be pushed into smaller areas of remaining rainforest,” said Beyer.

He added: “We found that the higher the carbon emissions, the worse it gets for most species in terms of habitat loss.”

The results provide quantitative support for policy measures aiming at limiting the global area of agricultural land – for example by sustainably intensifying food production, encouraging dietary shifts towards eating less meat, and stabilising population growth.

The conversion of natural vegetation to agricultural and urban land, and the transformation of suitable habitat caused by climate change are major causes of the decline in range sizes, and two of the most important threats to global terrestrial biodiversity.

“Whether these past trends in habitat range losses will reverse, continue, or accelerate will depend on future global carbon emissions and societal choices in the coming years and decades,” Professor Andrea Manica in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology, who led the study.

He added: “While our study quantifies the drastic consequences for species’ ranges if global land use and climate change are left unchecked, they also demonstrate the tremendous potential of timely and concerted policy action for halting – and indeed partially reversing – previous trends in global range contractions. It all depends on what we do next.”

This research was supported by the European Research Council.

Reference
Beyer, R.M. & Manica, A.: ‘Historical and projected future range sizes of the world’s mammals, birds and amphibians.’ Nature Communications, Nov 2020. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-19455-9

Having seen a large rise in illegal transactions during the first national lockdown last spring, the researchers will warn at a workshop this afternoon that the second lockdown is likely to result in another surge in cybercrime activities. But they will also be offering insights on how such activity can be disrupted.

The researchers have been collecting the data on illicit trades from HackForums – the world’s largest and most popular online cybercrime community. Two years ago, it set up a market where contracts had to be logged for all transactions as an attempt to protect members of the community from scamming and frauds.

The contract system was introduced in 2018, and then made mandatory in spring 2019, for all market users. It logged all the illicit buying and selling of – among other things – malicious software (malware), currencies including Bitcoin and gift vouchers, eWhoring ‘packs’ (e.g. of photos and videos with sexual content), hacking tutorials and tools that allow users illegally to access or control remote servers.

Ironically, HackForums had introduced the contract logging system in response to its members’ concerns that trades were being abused and they were being scammed. But in doing so, it unwittingly lifted the lid on the way such underground markets operate.

The data the contract logging generated has been collected by researchers here. And after analysing it and using statistical modelling approaches, the researchers have been able to shed important new light on the way a cybercrime market operates, hopefully to the benefit of the security community.

The researchers watched the market initially function as a forum where many individual users conducted one-off transactions. Then it changed. As the contract system became mandatory, within a few months, the market was becoming concentrated around a small group of ‘power-users’ offering goods and services that were attractive to many.

“This small group of users – representing about 5 per cent of all users – are involved in around 70 per cent of all the transactions,” said Anh Vu, a research assistant in the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre and co-author of the paper the Centre has just produced, ‘Turning Up the Dial: the Evolution of a Cybercrime Market through Set-up, Stable, and Covid-19 Eras’ .

And then came the global declaration of the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020. The research team saw the virus and the resulting lockdowns that were introduced significantly “turn up the dial” on the number of market transactions.

“There was a big rise in transactions in what we call the ‘Covid-19 era’,” said Anh. “Looking at the discussion forums, we could see that a period of mass boredom and economic change – when presumably some members were not able to go to school and others had lost their jobs – really stimulated the market.

“Members needed to make money online and they had a lot of time on their hands, and so we saw a rise in trading activity. We expect to see another rise during the second lockdown, but we don’t think it will be as large as during the first.”

The increase in business during the pandemic also meant that contracts for transactions were concluded much faster. Where in the early months of the market, the completion time for contracts was around 70 hours, during the pandemic it dropped to less than 10 hours.

Online underground forums like HackForums are communities used for trading in illicit material and sharing knowledge. The forums support a plethora of cybercrimes, allowing members to learn about and engage in criminal activities such as trading virtual items obtained by illicit means, launching denial of service attacks, or obtaining and using malware. They facilitate a variety of illicit businesses aiming at making easy money.

The Cambridge Cybercrime Centre researchers have done some previous work looking at underground forums. “But this is the first dataset we are aware of that provides insights about the contracts made in these forums,” says Anh. Previously, while traders might meet online in a forum, they would likely trade offline via private messaging. But the introduction of the contract system means all trades are now logged – and can therefore be tracked.

Using the data, the researchers looked at a variety of trading activities taking place in the market. The largest activities were currency exchanges and payments – for example, exchanging Bitcoin (a very popular currency in illicit trading because people believe that it leaves no trace) for PayPal funds.

This activity was followed by trades in gift cards (including Amazon gift cards) and software licences. “When you install a software package like Windows,” Anh said. “You have to input a key to activate it. People often buy software keys illegally in a market like this because it is cheaper for them than purchasing it officially from Microsoft – and sometimes they can obtain it for free in exchange for other items.”

Other products and services they found being traded in the underground market were hacking tutorials, remote access tools and eWhoring materials – photos and videos with sexual content that are sold to a third party, who pays for them believing that they are paying for an online sexual encounter.

They used several methods to try and estimate the values of trades taking place via HackForums and concluded that taking both public and private transactions into account and extrapolating by each contract type, the lower bound total of trades was in excess of $6 million.

What the researchers learned about the operation of an underground cybercrime market is valuable, they believe, to the security community. The logging of contracts when goods were traded has allowed users to build up a form of trust and reputation and this in turn led to the rise of the ‘power-users’ in the market.

“And now we know a small group of power-users are responsible for a large number of transactions, it would make sense to focus interventions on them,” Anh said. “As that will have a much bigger impact than going after a large number of individuals.”

In their paper they suggest interventions to undermine the perceived reputations and trustworthiness of the big players – for example by posting false negative reviews of them and using other methods, known as Sybil attacks, that disrupt the market’s reputation systems.

And the researchers are continuing to watch the market. “We’re interested to know how the marketplace evolves during this second lockdown and afterwards,” said Anh. “And will be looking to see whether any new trading activities emerge.”

Reference: 
‘Turning Up the Dial: the Evolution of a Cybercrime Market through Set-up, Stable, and Covid-19 Eras’ was presented at a seminar series of the 2020 Internet Measurement Conference. It was also presented at the Workshop on Security and Human Behaviour taking place on Thursday 5 November 2020.