A biological chemist, he was a pioneer in the field of fragment-based drug discovery, a successful entrepreneur, a founding director of Cambridge Enterprise, and the University’s first Director of Postdoctoral Affairs.

A major focus of his highly interdisciplinary research in the Department of Chemistry was to understand the mechanisms of key enzymes and develop approaches to their inhibition, an approach that could lead to new treatments for diseases such as tuberculosis, cystic fibrosis and cancer.

The advances he made in fragment-based drug discovery led him to co-found Astex, a world-leading company in this area, in 1999. Fragment-based approaches are now adopted throughout the pharmaceutical industry and in many academic laboratories.

He also made major contributions to the development of microfluidic microdroplets as a platform for experimental science, with applications in cell biology, chemistry and materials science. This interest resulted in the co-founding of Sphere Fluidics (2010) and Aqdot (2013).

He was an undergraduate and postgraduate student at St John’s College, Cambridge, before conducting postdoctoral research at Brown University, USA. He was named a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2012 and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2016.

Vice-Chancellor Professor Stephen J Toope said: “Chris’ death is a huge loss to the University, and to me personally. Our thoughts and our deepest sympathies are with his wife, Dr Katherine Abell, their son Daniel, and with Chris’ friends and colleagues at the Department of Chemistry, at the Research Operations and Research Strategy Offices, and at Christ’s College.”

Professor Jane Stapleton, Master of Christ’s College, said: “In Christ’s we are devastated by the shocking news of the death of Chris Abell, our warm, wise friend. He has long been held in the greatest esteem by the College to which he devoted so much of his remarkable energy.”

Dr James Keeler, Head of the Department of Chemistry, said: “Chris has for many years been a leading figure in the field of biological chemistry and has been responsible for significant advances in the field. He has also been conspicuously successful in commercialising aspects of his work, most notably as co-founder of Astex. Chris is remembered by us all as an outstanding scientist, a valued and loyal colleague, and a tireless champion for the Department and the University.”

A digital condolences book has been set up at: www.remembr.com/professor.chris.abell.

The research, conducted by scientists at the University of Cambridge and the Institut Pasteur, was published today in the leading journal Nature. It highlights how large COVID-19 outbreaks in European nursing homes, and the potential for missing deaths in some Asian and South American countries, have skewed COVID-19 death data for older age groups, rendering cross-country comparisons of the scale of the pandemic inaccurate.

The researchers say that reporting of deaths from COVID-19 among those under the age of 65 is likely to be far more reliable, and can therefore give clearer insights into the underlying transmission of the virus and enable better comparisons between countries – crucial in guiding government strategies to try to get COVID-19 under control.

“Simply comparing the total number of deaths across countries can be misleading as a representation of the underlying level of transmission of SARS-CoV-2. Most deaths are in older people, but they are the least comparable across countries,” said Megan O’Driscoll, a PhD researcher in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Genetics and first author of the paper.

In countries including the UK, Canada and Sweden, the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected nursing home residents, who account for over 20% of all reported COVID-19 deaths. The level of SARS-CoV-2 transmission among the general population can be difficult to disentangle from these large outbreaks.

By contrast, some countries in Asia and South America have far fewer reported COVID-19 deaths in older people than expected. One potential explanation for these ‘missing deaths’ is that causes of deaths in elderly populations may be less likely to be investigated and reported as countries struggle to contain the epidemic.

“Nursing homes are enclosed communities of people, and once the virus gets in it can spread quickly resulting in higher levels of infection than in the general population. We’re seeing an excessively large number of deaths from COVID-19 in this older age group, particularly in countries that have many nursing homes,” said Dr Henrik Salje in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Genetics, the senior author of the report.

He added: “It’s not just that residents are older than the general population, they are also generally more frail, so a 70-year old living in a nursing home is often more likely to die of COVID-19 than a 70-year old in the general population. To reduce the overall number of COVID-19 deaths it is vital to protect vulnerable elderly communities.”

In their new model, the researchers integrated age-specific COVID-19 death data from 45 countries with 22 national-level seroprevalence surveys. Governments of many countries are using seroprevalence surveys to estimate the number of people in a population with antibodies against the coronavirus. Antibodies indicate if a person has been infected with SARS-CoV-2 at some point, so are a good indicator of population-wide infection rates.

“Our model shows that the number of COVID-19 deaths by age, in people under 65 years old, is highly consistent across countries and likely to be a reliable indicator of the number of infections in the population. This is of critical use in a context where most infections are unobserved,” said O’Driscoll.

The model can be used at a country-wide level to predict a person’s likelihood of dying from COVID-19 following infection, depending on their age. It also works in reverse, to estimate a country’s total number of infections given its number of COVID-19 deaths in an age group, which is particularly useful in places where seroprevalence studies have not been conducted.

Using death data from under-65 age groups only, which is most representative of transmission in the whole population, it shows that by the 1 September this year an average of 5% of the population of a country had been infected with SARS-CoV-2. However, in some places it was much higher, especially South America.

For example, using Peru’s COVID-19 death figures, which equate to 0.01% of the country’s population, the model suggests that over half of the population of Peru has now been infected with SARS-CoV-2 – a figure far higher than expected. This indicates particularly high rates of transmission of the virus in Peru.

But even after excluding data from the over 65’s, the model shows that COVID-19 death rates cannot be compared between some countries, because the relationship between infections and deaths is not consistent when other widespread ‘co-morbidity’ factors are involved.

“It seems that people living in places such as Slovenia and Denmark have a low probability of death following infection with SARS-CoV-2, even after accounting for the ages of their populations, which is very different to what we’ve seen in New York, for example. There are likely to be fundamental differences in the populations across countries, which might include their underlying health,” said Salje.

The model also revealed a strong pattern across countries in the 5-9 year age group, which consistently has the lowest probability of death following SARS-CoV-2 infection.

The work demonstrates how age-specific death data alone can be used to reconstruct the underlying level of SARS-CoV-2 infection in a country and how it has changed over time. The researchers say this approach could be applied at sub-national scale, and may be of particular use in settings where large seroprevalence studies might not be feasible.

This research was funded by the University of Cambridge COVID-19 Rapid Response Grant.

Reference
O’Driscoll, M. et al: ‘Age-specific mortality and immunity patterns of SARS-CoV-2.’ Nature, Nov 2020. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2918-0

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The team, involving 20 researchers from seven countries, used long-range drones kitted out with a range of lightweight sensors to study the Manam volcano – one of the most active volcanoes in Papua New Guinea.

Their findings, published in the journal Science Advances, show how combined measurements from the air, earth and space can be used to understand volcanic contributions to the global carbon cycle, key to sustaining life on Earth.

One of the best ways to detect signs of an impending eruption is to ‘breathalyze’ a volcano by taking regular measurements of volcanic gases. Any change in the ratio of sulfur and carbon dioxide released can warn of an impending eruption. But sampling more remote or hazardous volcanoes like Manam is more challenging.

When the volcano last erupted between 2004 and 2006 the entire island was evacuated – crops were destroyed and water supplies contaminated. The islanders only started to return five years ago.

Previous studies have shown that Manam is one of the world’s biggest emitters of sulphur dioxide, but nothing was known of its CO₂ output.

Measuring volcanic CO₂ emissions is more challenging because it is already present in high concentrations in the atmosphere. The only way to get accurate readings is to take samples from close to active vents.

Collecting samples on Manam would be incredibly risky – not only is the vent flanked by precarious slopes, the volcano is also unmonitored so there would be little warning if an eruption struck.

Using drones equipped with miniaturised gas sensors, spectrometers and sampling devices the team piloted flights right into the plume emerging from Manam’s vent. The measurements captured gas composition, temperature and humidity in real-time.

The project – Aerial-Based Observations of Volcanic Emissions (ABOVE) – saw the first global collaboration between scientists, remote-sensing specialists, engineers and pilots.

Project lead Dr Emma Liu of University College London, who carried out the research while based at Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences, said: “these aerial measurements are pushing the frontiers of the current state-of-the-art in volcano monitoring – from the existing satellite data we know that Manam is a significant source of volcanic emissions, but that data came with a lot of uncertainty because it was measured at a distance.

“The resources of the in-country volcano monitoring institute are small and the team has an incredible workload, but they really helped us make the links with the community living on Manam island.”

Following the fieldwork, the researchers raised funds to buy computers, solar panels and other technology to enable the local community – who have since put together a disaster preparedness group – to communicate via satellite from the island, and to provide drone operations training to Rabaul Volcanological Observatory staff to assist in their monitoring efforts.

ABOVE was part of the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO), a global community of scientists on a ten-year quest to understand more about carbon in Earth.

“Volcanic emissions are a critical stage of the Earth’s carbon cycle – the movement of carbon between land, atmosphere, and ocean – but CO₂ measurements have so far been limited to a relatively small number of the world’s estimated 500 degassing volcanoes,” said co-author Professor Marie Edmonds, also from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences. “Aerial gas measurements, collected along transects through the plume, together with ground-based and satellite data show that Manam is a major volcanic emission source on a global scale, which ranks fifth in terms of its carbon flux.”

Co-author Professor Alessandro Aiuppa (University of Palermo) described the findings as ‘a real advance in our field’, adding: “Ten years ago you could have only stared and guessed what Manam’s CO₂ emissions were.

“If you take into account all the carbon released by global volcanism, it’s less than a percent of the total emission budget, which is dominated by human activity. In a few centuries, humans are acting like thousands of volcanoes. If we continue to pump carbon into the atmosphere, it will make monitoring and forecasting eruptions using aerial gas observations even harder.”

“In order to understand the drivers of climate change you need to understand the carbon cycle in the Earth,” said co-author Professor Tobias Fischer from the University of New Mexico. “We wanted to quantify the carbon emission from this very large carbon dioxide emitter. We had very few data in terms of carbon isotope composition, which would identify the source of the carbon and whether it is the mantle, crust or sediment. We wanted to know where that carbon comes from.”

“Drones are changing not only the way we monitor volcanoes – they also help us to understand what causes eruptions, and how carbon moves between the Earth’s interior and atmosphere,” said Edmonds. “If we know how volcanic emissions interacted with the climate in the past, we are closer to understanding controls on our present-day climate and how it may respond to future human-driven impacts.”

ABOVE was funded by Alfred P. Solan Foundation

Reference:
E.J. Liu et al. ‘Aerial strategies advance volcanic gas measurements at inaccessible, strongly degassing volcanoes.’ Science Advances (2020). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abb9103.

In a study published today in journal Small, the researchers demonstrate that once inside the cancer cells, the nanotubes absorb light, causing them to heat up, thereby killing the cells.

More than 2,600 people are diagnosed in the UK each year with mesothelioma, a malignant form of cancer caused by exposure to asbestos. Although the use of asbestos is outlawed in the UK now, the country has the world’s highest levels of mesothelioma because it imported vast amounts of asbestos in the post-war years. The global usage of asbestos remains high, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, which means mesothelioma will become a global problem.

“Mesothelioma is one of the ‘hard-to-treat’ cancers, and the best we can offer people with existing treatments is a few months of extra survival,” said Dr Arsalan Azad from the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research at the University of Cambridge. “There’s an important unmet need for new, effective treatments.”

In 2018, the University of Cambridge was awarded £10million from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to help develop engineering solutions, including nanotech, to find ways to address hard-to-treat cancers.

In a collaboration between the University of Cambridge and University of Leeds, researchers have developed a form of gold nanotubes whose physical properties are ‘tunable’ – in other words, the team can tailor the wall thickness, microstructure, composition, and ability to absorb particular wavelengths of light.

The researchers added the nanotubes to mesothelioma cells cultured in the lab and found that they were absorbed by the cells, residing close to the nucleus, where the cell’s DNA lies. When the team targeted the cells with a laser, the nanotubes absorbed the light and heated up, killing the mesothelioma cell.

Professor Stefan Marciniak, also from the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research and a Fellow at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, added: “The mesothelioma cells ‘eat’ the nanotubes, leaving them susceptible when we shine light on them. Laser light is able to penetrate deep into tissue without causing damage to surrounding tissue. It then gets absorbed by the nanotubes, which heat up and, we hope in the future, could be used to cause localised cancer-cell killing.”

The team will be developing the work further to ensure the nanotubes are targeted to cancer cells with less effect on normal tissue.

The nanotubes are made in a two-step process. First, solid silver nanorods are created of the desired diameter. Gold is then deposited from solution onto the surface of the silver. As the gold builds-up at the surface, the silver dissolves from the inside to leave a hollow nanotube.

The approach advanced by the Leeds team allows these nanotubes to be developed at room temperature, which should make their manufacture at scale more feasible.

Professor Stephen Evans from the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leeds said: “Having control over the size and shape of the nanotubes allows us to tune them to absorb light where the tissue is transparent and will allow them to be used for both the imaging and treatment of cancers. The next stage will be to load these nanotubes with medicines for enhanced therapies.”

The research was funded by the British Lung Foundation, Victor Dahdaleh Foundation, National Institute for Health Research Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre, Royal Papworth Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, Alpha1-Foundation, Medical Research Council and the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council.

Reference
Ye, S & Azad, AA et al. Exploring High Aspect Ratio Gold Nanotubes as Cytosolic Agents: Structural Engineering and Uptake into Mesothelioma Cells. Small; 25 Oct 2020: DOI: 10.1002/smll.2003793

COVID-19 has become a global pandemic, affecting millions of people worldwide. In many cases, the symptoms include fever, persistent dry cough and breathing difficulties, and can lead to low blood oxygen. However, the infection can cause disease in other organs, including the brain, and in more severe cases can lead to stroke and brain haemorrhage.

A team of researchers at the Stroke Research Group, University of Cambridge, carried out a systematic review and meta-analysis of published research into the link between COVID-19 and stroke. This approach allows researchers to bring together existing – and often contradictory or under-powered – studies to provide more robust conclusions.

In total, the researchers analysed 61 studies, covering more than 100,000 patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19. The results of their study are published in the International Journal of Stroke.

The researchers found that stroke occurred in 14 out of every 1,000 cases. The most common manifestation was acute ischemic stroke, which occurred in just over 12 out of every 1,000 cases. Brain haemorrhage was less common, occurring in 1.6 out of every 1,000 cases. Most patients had been admitted with COVID-19 symptoms, with stroke occurring a few days later.

Age was a risk factor, with COVID-19 patients who developed stroke being on average (median) 4.8 years older than those who did not. COVID-19 patients who experienced a stroke were on average (median) six years younger than non-COVID-19 stroke patients. There was no sex difference and no significant difference in rates of smokers versus non-smokers.

Pre-existing conditions also increased the risk of stroke. Patients with high blood pressure were more likely to experience stroke than patients with normal blood pressure, while both diabetes and coronary artery disease also increased risk. Patients who had a more severe infection with SARS­CoV­2 – the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 – were also more likely to have a stroke.

The researchers found that COVID-19-associated strokes often followed a characteristic pattern, with stroke caused by blockage of a large cerebral artery, and brain imaging showing strokes in more than one cerebral arterial territory. They argue that this pattern suggests cerebral thrombosis and/or thromboembolism are important factors in causing stroke in COVID-19.  COVID-19-associated strokes were also more severe and had a high mortality.

An important question is whether COVID-19 increases the risk of stroke or whether the association is merely a result of COVID-19 infection being widespread in the community.

“The picture is complicated,” explained Dr Stefania Nannoni from the Department of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Cambridge, the study’s first author. “For example, a number COVID-19 patients are already likely to be at increased risk of stroke, and other factors, such as the mental stress of COVID-19, may contribute to stroke risk.

“On the other hand, we see evidence that COVID-19 may trigger – or at least be a risk factor for – stroke, in some cases. Firstly, SARS­CoV­2 more so than other coronaviruses – and significantly more so than seasonal flu – appears to be associated with stroke. Secondly, we see a particular pattern of stroke in individuals with COVID-19, which suggests a causal relationship in at least a proportion of patients.”

The researchers say there may be several possible mechanisms behind the link between COVID-19 and stroke. One mechanism might be that the virus triggers an inflammatory response that causes thickening of the blood, increasing the risk of thrombosis and stroke. Another relates to ACE2 – a protein ‘receptor’ on the surface of cells that SARS-CoV-2 uses to break into the cell. This receptor is commonly found on cells in the lungs, heart, kidneys, and in the lining of blood vessels – if the virus invades the lining of blood vessels, it could cause inflammation, constricting the blood vessels and restricting blood flow.

A third possible mechanism is the immune system over-reacting to infection, with subsequent excessive release of proteins known as cytokine. This so-called ‘cytokine storm’ could then cause brain damage.

The team say their results may have important clinical implications.

“Even though the incidence of stroke among COVID-19 patients is relatively low, the scale of the pandemic means that many thousands of people could potentially be affected worldwide,” said Professor Hugh Markus, who leads the Stroke Research Group at Cambridge.

“Clinicians will need to look out for signs and symptoms of stroke, particularly among those groups who are at particular risk, while bearing in mind that the profile of an at-risk patient is younger than might be expected.”

While the majority of strokes occurred after a few days of COVID-19 symptoms onset, neurological symptoms represented the reason for hospital admission in more than one third of people with COVID-19 and stroke.

Dr Nannoni added: “Given that patients admitted to hospital with symptoms of stroke might have mild COVID-19-related respiratory symptoms, or be completely asymptomatic, we recommend that all patients admitted with stroke be treated as potential COVID-19 cases until the results of screening in the hospital are negative.”

The research was supported by the Medical Research Council, the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), the NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research and the British Heart Foundation.

Reference
Nannoni S, de Groot R, Bell S, Markus HS. Stroke in COVID-19: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Int J Stroke; 26 Oct 2020; DOI: 10.1177/1747493020972922. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 33103610.

Enterococcus faecium is a bacterium commonly found in the gastrointestinal tract, where it usually resides without causing the host problems. However, in immunocompromised patients, it can lead to potentially life-threatening infection.

Over the last three decades, strains have emerged that are resistant to frontline antibiotics including ampicillin and vancomycin, limiting treatment options – and particularly worrying, these strains are often those found in hospital-acquired E. faecium infections.

A team of scientists at the University of Cambridge and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine has pioneered an approach combining epidemiological and genomic information to chart the spread of bacteria within healthcare settings. This has helped hospitals identify sources of infection and inform infection control measures.

In a study published today in Nature Microbiology, the team has applied this technique to the spread of drug-resistant E. faecium in a hospital setting.

Dr Theodore Gouliouris from the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge, and joint first author on the study, said: “We’ve known for over two decades that patients in hospital can catch and spread drug-resistant E. faecium. Preventing its spread requires us to understand where the bacteria lives – its ‘reservoirs’ – and how it is transmitted.

“Most studies to date have relied on culturing the bacteria from samples. But as we’ve shown, whole genome sequencing – looking at the DNA of the bacteria – combined with detailed patient and environmental sampling can be a powerful tool to help us chart its spread and inform ways to prevent further outbreaks.”

The team followed 149 haematology patients admitted to Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, over a six-month period. They took stool samples from the patients and swabs from the hospital environment and cultured them for E. faecium.

Genomic analysis of the bacteria was much more effective at identifying hospital-acquired E. faecium: out of 101 patients who could be followed up, genomic analysis identified that two thirds of patients acquired E. faecium, compared to less than half using culture methods alone.

Just under half (48%) of the swabs taken from the hospital environment were positive for vancomycin-resistant E. faecium. This included 36% of medical devices, 76% of non-touch areas such as air vents, 41% of bed spaces and 68% of communal bathrooms tested.

The researchers showed that even deep cleaning could not eradicate the bacteria. The hospital undertook deep cleaning on one ward over a three-day period during the study, when patients were moved elsewhere; however, when the team sampled locations prior to patients returning to the ward, they found that 9% of samples still tested positive for the bacteria. Within three days of patients returning to the ward, around half of the sampled sites tested positive.

Three-quarters (74%) of the patients (111/149) were carriers of the A1 clade – a multi-drug resistant strain of E. faecium commonly seen in hospitals that is resistant to the antibiotic ampicillin and which frequently acquires resistance to vancomycin. Of these 111 patients, 67 had strong epidemiological and genomic links with at least one other patient and/or their direct environment.

“The fact that these cases were all linked to another patient or their environment suggests strongly that they had picked up the multi-drug resistant bacteria while in the hospital,” said Dr Francesc Coll from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, joint first author.

Further genomic analysis showed that within this multi-drug resistant strain were several subtypes (defined by how genetically-similar they were). However, it was not uncommon for a patient to be carrying more than one subtype, which – without detailed genomic analysis – could confound attempts to identify the route of transmission of an infection. Notably, despite the circulation of as many as 115 subtypes, 28% of E. faecium acquisitions were caused by just two superspreading subtypes. The authors found no evidence of resistance or tolerance to common disinfectants to explain the success of these subtypes.

Six study patients contracted an ‘invasive infection’, meaning that they had been carrying E. faecium asymptomatically in their gut, but subsequently developed a symptomatic infection. Comparing the genomes of the infecting and gut strains the authors determined that invasive E. faecium infections originated from the patients’ own gut.

“Our study builds on previous observations that drug-resistant strains of E. faecium can persist in the hospital environment despite standard cleaning – we were still surprised to find how short-lasting was the effect of deep cleaning,” added Dr Gouliouris.

“We found high levels of hospital-adapted E. faecium despite the use of cleaning products and procedures that have proven effective against the bug. It highlights how challenging it can be to tackle outbreaks in hospitals.”

Senior author Professor Sharon Peacock from the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge added: “The high rates of infection with drug-resistant E. faecium in specific vulnerable patient groups and its ability to evade cleaning measures pose an important challenge to infection control. Patient screening, adequate provision of isolation and ensuite toilet facilities, improved and more frequent cleaning procedures, and stricter health-care worker hygiene practices will all be needed to curtail this global epidemic.

“But this is also a sign of how urgently we need to tackle inappropriate use of antibiotics worldwide, which is widely recognised as posing a catastrophic threat to our health and our ability to control infections.”

The research was funded by the Department of Health and Wellcome.

Reference
Gouliouris, T, Coll, F et al. Quantifying acquisition and transmission of Enterococcus faecium using genomic surveillance. Nature Microbiology; 26 Oct 2020; DOI: 10.1038/s41564-020-00806-7

A new study, published today in the journal Nature Communications, suggests that sgACC is a crucial region in depression and anxiety, and targeted treatment based on a patient’s symptoms could lead to better outcomes.

Depression is a debilitating disorder affecting hundreds of millions of people worldwide, but people experience it differently. Some mainly have symptoms of elevated negative emotion like guilt and anxiety; some have a loss of ability to experience pleasure (called anhedonia); and others a mix of the two.

Research at the University of Cambridge has found that increased activity in sgACC – a key part of the emotional brain– could underlie increased negative emotion, reduced pleasure and a higher risk of heart disease in depressed and anxious people. More revealing still is the discovery that these symptoms differ in their sensitivity to treatment with an antidepressant, despite being caused by the same change in brain activity.

Using marmosets, a type of non-human primate, the team of researchers infused tiny concentrations of an excitatory drug into sgACC to over-activate it. Marmosets are used because their brains share important similarities with those of humans and it is possible to manipulate brain regions to understand causal effects.

The researchers found that sgACC over-activity increases heart rate, elevates cortisol levels and exaggerates animals’ responsiveness to threat, mirroring the stress-related symptoms of depression and anxiety.

“We found that over-activity in sgACC promotes the body’s ‘fight-or-flight’ rather than ‘rest-and-digest’ response, by activating the cardiovascular system and elevating threat responses,” said Dr Laith Alexander, one of the study’s first authors from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience.

“This builds on our earlier work showing that over-activity also reduces anticipation and motivation for rewards, mirroring the loss of ability to experience pleasure seen in depression.”

To explore threat and anxiety processing, the researchers trained marmosets to associate a tone with the presence of a rubber snake, an imminent threat which marmosets find innately stressful. Once marmosets learnt this, the researchers ‘extinguished’ the association by presenting the tone without the snake. They wanted to measure how quickly the marmosets could dampen down and ‘regulate’ their fear response.

“By over-activating sgACC, marmosets stayed fearful for longer as measured by both their behaviour and blood pressure, showing that in stressful situations their emotion regulation was disrupted,” said Alexander.

Similarly, when the marmosets were confronted with a more uncertain threat in the form of an unfamiliar human, they appeared more anxious following over-activation of sgACC.

“The marmosets were much more wary of an unfamiliar person following over-activation of this key brain region – keeping their distance and displaying vigilance behaviours,” said Dr Christian Wood, one of the lead authors of the study and senior postdoctoral scientist in Cambridge’s Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience.

The researchers used brain imaging to explore other brain regions affected by sgACC over-activity during threat. Over-activation of sgACC increased activity within the amygdala and hypothalamus, two key parts of the brain’s stress network. By contrast, it reduced activity in parts of the lateral prefrontal cortex – a region important in regulating emotional responses and shown to be underactive in depression.

“The brain regions we identified as being affected during threat processing differed from those we’ve previously shown are affected during reward processing,” said Professor Angela Roberts in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience, who led the study.

“This is key, because the distinct brain networks might explain the differential sensitivity of threat-related and reward-related symptoms to treatment.”

The researchers have previously shown that ketamine – which has rapidly acting antidepressant properties – can ameliorate anhedonia-like symptoms. But they found that it could not improve the elevated anxiety-like responses the marmosets displayed towards the human intruder following sgACC over-activation.

“We have definitive evidence for the differential sensitivity of different symptom clusters to treatment – on the one hand, anhedonia-like behaviour was reversed by ketamine; on the other, anxiety-like behaviours were not,” Professor Roberts explained.

“Our research shows that the sgACC may sit at the head and the heart of the matter when it comes to symptoms and treatment of depression and anxiety.”

This research was funded by Wellcome.

Reference
Alexander, L. et al; ‘Over-activation of primate subgenual cingulate cortex enhances the cardiovascular, behavioural and neural responses to threat.’ Nature Communications, October 2020. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-19167-0

Countries meet their needs for goods and services through domestic production and international trade. As a result, countries place pressures on natural resources both within and beyond their borders.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge used macroeconomic data to quantify these pressures. They found that the vast majority of countries and industrial sectors are highly exposed both directly, via domestic production, and indirectly, via imports, to over-exploited and insecure water, energy and land resources. However, the researchers found that the greatest resource risk is due to international trade, mainly from remote countries.

The researchers are calling for an urgent enquiry into the scale and source of consumed goods and services, both in individual countries and globally, as economies seek to rebuild in the wake of COVID-19. Their study, published in the journal Global Environmental Change, also invites critical reflection on whether globalisation is compatible with achieving sustainable and resilient supply chains.

Over the past several decades, the worldwide economy has become highly interconnected through globalisation: it is now not uncommon for each component of a particular product to originate from a different country. Globalisation allows companies to make their products almost anywhere in the world in order to keep costs down.

Many mainstream economists argue this offers countries a source of competitive advantage and growth potential. However, many nations impose demands on already stressed resources in other countries in order to satisfy their own high levels of consumption.

This interconnectedness also increases the amount of risk at each step of a global supply chain. For example, the UK imports 50% of its food. A drought, flood or other severe weather event in another country puts these food imports at risk.

Now, the researchers have quantified the global water, land and energy use of 189 countries and shown that countries which are highly dependent on trade are potentially more at risk from resource insecurity, especially as climate change continues to accelerate and severe weather events such as droughts and floods become more common.

“There has been plenty of research comparing countries in terms of their water, energy and land footprints, but what hasn’t been studied is the scale and source of their risks,” said Dr Oliver Taherzadeh, who led the research while a PhD student in Cambridge’s Department of Geography. “We found that the role of trade has been massively underplayed as a source of resource insecurity – it’s actually a bigger source of risk than domestic production.”

To date, resource use studies have been limited to certain regions or sectors, which prevents a systematic overview of resource pressures and their source. This study offers a flexible approach to examining pressures across the system at various geographical and sectoral scales.

“This type of analysis hasn’t been carried out for a large number of countries before,” said Taherzadeh. “By quantifying the pressures that our consumption places on water, energy and land resources in far-off corners of the world, we can also determine how much risk is built into our interconnected world.”

The authors of the study linked indices designed to capture insecure water, energy, and land resource use, to a global trade model in order to examine the scale and sources of national resource insecurity from domestic production and imports.

Countries with large economies, such as the US, China and Japan, are highly exposed to water shortages outside their borders due to their volume of international trade. However, many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, such as Kenya, actually face far less risk as they are not as heavily networked in the global economy and are relatively self-sufficient in food production.

In addition to country-level data, the researchers also examined the risks associated with specific sectors. Surprisingly, one of the sectors identified in Taherzadeh’s wider research that had the most high risk water and land use – among the top 1% of nearly 15,000 sectors analysed – was dog and cat food manufacturing in the USA, due to its high demand for animal products.

“COVID-19 has shown just how poorly-prepared governments and businesses are for a global crisis,” said Taherzadeh. “But however bad the direct and indirect consequences of COVID-19 have been, climate breakdown, biodiversity collapse and resource insecurity are far less predictable problems to manage – and the potential consequences are far more severe. If the ‘green economic recovery’ is to respond to these challenges, we need radically rethink the scale and source of consumption.”

Reference:
Oliver Taherzadeh et al. ‘Water, energy and land insecurity in global supply chains.’ Global Environmental Change (2020). DOI: 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2020.102158

The rate has risen in boys aged five to 16 from 11.4% in 2017 to 16.7% in July 2020 and in girls from 10.3% to 15.2%3 over the same time period, according to The Mental Health of Children and Young People in England 2020 report.

The likelihood of a probable mental disorder increases with age, with a noticeable difference in gender for the older age group (17 to 22 year olds). 27.2% of young women and 13.3% of young men in this age group were identified as having a probable mental disorder in 2020.

This report looks at the mental health of children and young people in England in July 2020, and how this has changed since 2017. Experiences of family life, education and services, and worries and anxieties during the COVID-19 pandemic are also examined. The findings draw on a sample of 3,570 children and young people aged between 5 to 22 years old, surveyed in both 2017 and July 20204.

The report revealed that among girls aged 11 to 16, nearly two-thirds (63.8%) with a probable mental disorder had seen or heard an argument among adults in their household, compared to 46.8% of girls unlikely to have a mental disorder.

Professor Tamsin Ford from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge said: “These findings suggest that more children are struggling with poor mental health than in 2017, particularly those reporting having a difficult time during lockdown – this deterioration in mental health was evident for boys and girls and in all ages from 5 years old to 22.

“The figures of older teenagers and emerging adults, particularly for young women are especially alarming, particularly as they replicate others findings from the UK Longitudinal Survey, which also had pre-pandemic data on the same people.

“All who work with children and families need to be working hard to mitigate the impact of the pandemic, as mental health conditions in childhood predict worse adult health and reduce the ability to learn and achieve at school.”

Sleep problems seemed to be a factor during the pandemic with more than a quarter (28.5%) of 5 to 22 year olds having problems sleeping. Again, those with a probable mental disorder reported experiencing sleep problems (58.9%) more than those unlikely to have a mental disorder (19.0%).

This was more common in girls, with 32.4% reporting sleep problems compared with 24.7% of boys. Issues with sleep affected 17 to 22 year olds (41.0%), more than any other age group.

One in ten (10.1%) children and young people aged 11 to 22 years said that they often or always felt lonely. This was more common in girls (13.8%) than boys (6.5%). Children and young people with a probable mental disorder were about eight times more likely to report feeling lonely often or always (29.4%) than those unlikely to have a mental disorder (3.7%).

When it came to receiving help for mental health problems during the pandemic, 7.4% of all 17 to 22 year olds reported they tried to seek help for mental health problems but didn’t receive the help they needed. This rose to 21.7% of those with a probable mental disorder.

The report also covers changes in household circumstances during the pandemic. It was revealed that children with a probable mental disorder were more likely to live in a household that had fallen behind with payments (16.3%) during lockdown, than those unlikely to have a mental health disorder (6.4%).

Overall 37.0% of 11 to 16 year olds and 36.4% of 17 to 22 year olds reported that lockdown had made their life a little worse, while 5.9% of 11 to 16 year olds and 6.7% of 17 to 22 year olds said it had made it much worse.

The report is published by NHS Digital, in collaboration with the Office for National Statistics, the National Centre for Social Research, the University of Cambridge and the University of Exeter.

Adapted from a press release by NHS Digital

Accurately predicting how an individual’s chronic illness is going to progress is critical to delivering better-personalised, precision medicine. Only with such insight can a clinician and patient plan optimal treatment strategies for intervention and mitigation. Yet there is an enormous challenge in accurately predicting the clinical trajectories of people for chronic health conditions such as cystic fibrosis (CF), cancer, cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer’s disease.

“Prediction problems in healthcare are fiendishly complex,” said Professor Mihaela van der Schaar, Director of the Cambridge Centre for AI in Medicine (CCAIM). “Even machine learning approaches, which deal in complexity, struggle to deliver meaningful benefits to patients and clinicians, and to medical science more broadly. Off-the-shelf machine learning solutions, so useful in many areas, simply do not cut it in predictive medicine.”

Unlock this complexity, however, and enormous healthcare gains await. That is why several teams led by Professor van der Schaar and CCAIM Co-Director Andres Floto, Professor of Respiratory Biology at the University of Cambridge and Research Director of the Cambridge Centre for Lung Infection at Royal Papworth Hospital, have developed a rapidly evolving suite of world-class machine learning (ML) approaches and tools that have successfully overcome many of the challenges.

In just two years, the researchers have developed technology that has moved from producing ML-based predictions of lung failure in CF patients using a snapshot of patient data – itself a remarkable improvement on the previous state of the art – to dynamic predictions of individual disease trajectories, predictions of competing health risks and comorbidities, ‘temporal clustering’ with past patients, and much more.

The researchers are presenting three of their new ML technologies this week at the North American Cystic Fibrosis Conference 2020. In-depth details of the technologies and their potential implications are available on the CCAIM website.

The tools developed by the Cambridge researchers represent astonishing progress in a very short time, and reveal the power of ML methods to tackle the remaining mysteries of common chronic illnesses and provide highly precise predictions of patient-specific health outcomes of unprecedented accuracy. What’s more, such techniques can be readily applied to other chronic diseases.

Applying new ML techniques in cystic fibrosis

“Cystic fibrosis is an excellent example of a hard-to-treat, chronic condition,” said Floto. “It is often unclear how the disease will progress in a given individual over time, and there are multiple, competing complications that need preventative or mitigating interventions.”

CF is a genetic condition that affects a number of organs, but primarily the lungs, where it leads to progressive respiratory failure and premature death. In 2019, the median age of the 114 people with CF who died in the UK was 31. Only about half of the people born in the UK with CF in 2019 are likely to live to the age of 50.

Cystic fibrosis is also a fertile ground to explore ML methods, in part because of the UK Cystic Fibrosis Registry, an extensive database that covers 99% of the UK’s CF population which is managed by the UK Cystic Fibrosis Trust. The Registry holds both static and time-series data for each CF patient, including demographic information, CFTR genotype, disease-related measures including infection data, comorbidities and complications, lung function, weight, intravenous antibiotics usage, medications, transplantations and deaths.

“Almost everyone with cystic fibrosis in the UK entrusts the Registry to hold their patient data, which is then used to ensure the best care for all people with the condition,” said Dr Janet Allen, Director of Strategic Innovation at the Cystic Fibrosis Trust. “What’s exciting is that the approaches developed by Professor van der Schaar take this to a completely new level, developing tools to harness the complexity of the CF data. Turning such data into medical understanding is a key priority for the future of personalised healthcare.”

Looking to the future

The suite of new tools offers tremendous potential benefit to everyone in the CF ecosystem, from patients to clinicians and medical researchers. “Our medical ML technology has matured rapidly, and it is ready to be deployed,” said van der Schaar. “The time has come to bring its clear benefits to the individuals who need it most – in this case, the people living with cystic fibrosis. This means collaborating further with clinicians and increasing our engagement with wider healthcare systems and with data guardians beyond the UK.”

Machine learning technologies have proven to be adept at predicting the clinical trajectories of people with long-term health conditions, and innovation will continue at pace. The patient-centred revolution in precision healthcare will enable and empower both clinicians and researchers to extract greater value from the growing availability of healthcare data.

The challenge ahead is to realise the potential of these tools by making them available to clinicians and hospitals around the world, where they can help improve and save the lives of people living with chronic illness. This is one of the goals of the Cambridge Centre for AI in Medicine.

To date, there have been more than 40 million cases of COVID-19 and almost 1.13 million deaths worldwide. The main target tissues of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, especially in patients that develop pneumonia, appear to be alveoli – tiny air sacs in the lungs that take up the oxygen we breathe and exchange it with carbon dioxide to exhale.

To better understand how SARS-CoV-2 infects the lungs and causes disease, a team of scientists from the UK and South Korea turned to organoids – ‘mini-organs’ grown in three dimensions to mimic the behaviour of tissue and organs.

The team used tissue donated to tissue banks at the Royal Papworth Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge University NHS Foundations Trust, UK, and Seoul National University Hospital to extract a type of lung cell known as human lung alveolar type 2 cells. By reprogramming these cells back to their earlier ‘stem cell’ stage, they were able to grow self-organising alveolar-like 3D structures that mimic the behaviour of key lung tissue.

Dr Joo-Hyeon Lee, co-senior author, and a Group Leader at the Wellcome-MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, University of Cambridge, said: “We still know surprisingly little about how SARS-CoV-2 infects the lungs and causes disease. Our approach has allowed us to grow 3D models of key lung tissue – in a sense, ‘mini-lungs’ – in the lab and study what happens when they become infected.”

The team infected the organoids with a strain of SARS-CoV-2 taken from a patient in South Korea who was diagnosed with COVID-19 on 26 January 26 2020 after traveling to Wuhan, China. Using a combination of fluorescence imaging and single cell genetic analysis, they were able to study how the cells responded to the virus.

When the 3D models were exposed to SARS-CoV-2, the virus began to replicate rapidly, reaching full cellular infection just six hours after infection. Replication enables the virus to spread throughout the body, infecting other cells and tissue.

Around the same time, the cells began to produce interferons – proteins that act as warning signals to neighbouring cells, telling them to activate their antiviral defences. After 48 hours, the interferons triggered the innate immune response – its first line of defence – and the cells started fighting back against infection.

Sixty hours after infection, a subset of alveolar cells began to disintegrate, leading to cell death and damage to the lung tissue.

Although the researchers observed changes to the lung cells within three days of infection, clinical symptoms of COVID-19 rarely occur so quickly and can sometimes take more than ten days after exposure to appear. The team say there are several possible reasons for this. It may take several days from the virus first infiltrating the upper respiratory tract to it reaching the alveoli. It may also require a substantial proportion of alveolar cells to be infected or for further interactions with immune cells resulting in inflammation before a patient displays symptoms.

“Based on our model we can tackle many unanswered key questions, such as understanding genetic susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2, assessing relative infectivity of viral mutants, and revealing the damage processes of the virus in human alveolar cells,” said Dr Young Seok Ju, co-senior author, and an Associate Professor at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. “Most importantly, it provides the opportunity to develop and screen potential therapeutic agents against SARS-CoV-2 infection.”

“We hope to use our technique to grow these 3D models from cells of patients who are particularly vulnerable to infection, such as the elderly or people with diseased lungs, and find out what happens to their tissue,” added Dr Lee.

The research was a collaboration involving scientists from the University of Cambridge, UK, and the Korea Advanced Institute Science and Technology (KAIST), Korea National Institute of Health, Institute for Basic Science (IBS), Seoul National University Hospital and GENOME INSIGHT Inc. in South Korea.

Reference
Jeonghwan Youk et al. Three-dimensional human alveolar stem cell culture models reveal infection response to SARS-CoV-2. Cell Stem Cell; 21 Oct 2020; DOI: 10.1016/j.stem.2020.10.004

Funding
The research was supported by: the National Research Foundation of Korea; Research of Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Ministry of Science and ICT of Korea; Ministry of Health & Welfare, Republic of Korea; Seoul National University College of Medicine Research Foundation; European Research Council; Wellcome; the Royal Society; Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research; Suh Kyungbae Foundation; and the Human Frontier Science Program.

Image caption
Representative image of three-dimensional human lung alveolar organoid showing alveolar stem cell marker, HTII-280 (red) and SARS-CoV-2 entry protein, ACE2 (green). (Credit: Jeonghwan Youk, Taewoo Kim, and Seon Pyo Hong)

I usually work in the University’s Department of Psychology on the Downing Site. Currently I work from home most of the week, and go into the department one day each week to have socially distanced face-to-face meetings with students and lab members.

My group’s research focuses on brain and social development and mental health in adolescence. We run large-scale behavioural studies in schools and in the lab, as well as neuroimaging studies. Humans are inherently social. Our research has shown that the network of brain regions that enable us to recognise the mental states, feelings and actions of others develops throughout adolescence, and that adolescence is a period of increased social interaction and peer affiliation.

It is important to consider the developmental needs and wellbeing of children and adolescents in this pandemic. Young people around the world now have fewer opportunities to interact face-to-face with peers at a time in their lives when this is crucial for their development. Waves of social distancing and restrictions, even if only temporary, represent a large portion of a young person’s life. At the beginning of lockdown I wrote a paper with my colleagues, Dr Amy Orben and Dr Livia Tomova, on the effects of social distancing on adolescent development and mental health.*

Right now, young people around the world are being blamed and shamed for their role in the spread of coronavirus. In my view, this is not fair and might be counterproductive. Young people are naturally driven to socialise, and meet new people and romantic partners. There is evidence that empowering young people to influence each other to make positive and healthy decisions works better than adult-led campaigns. In the case of COVID-19, educating young people about the importance of social distancing and reducing social contact in order to reduce infection rates, and then incentivising them to run their own campaigns amongst their social networks, might have more of an impact than adults lecturing and blaming them. I recently wrote a short paper on this with my PhD student Jack Andrews and our colleague Dr Lucy Foulkes.**

It’s crucial to take into account the social needs of young people when making policy decisions, and to allow the voices of young people to be heard. I was recently involved in setting up an organisation called Reachwell, to highlight the importance of considering the needs of children and adolescents when making policy decisions around the pandemic. It draws on the expertise of a group of developmental psychologists and psychiatrists.

Education is a basic human right. Schools shutting for long periods will be detrimental to the development and learning of the younger generation. The pandemic has thrown up many challenges and nothing is simple. From my point of view, one of the biggest challenges is reducing the spread of the virus so that schools are safe for teachers, children and adolescents and can stay open.

Cambridge provided written evidence to the Education Select Committee reviewing the impact of COVID-19 on education and children’s services. This was a fantastic example of Cambridge experts from different areas coming together in a time of crisis, and prioritising this vitally important issue. We formed the Cambridge University Cross-Disciplinary Special Interest Group for Policy related to children and young people (CUSP), galvanised and brilliantly chaired by Professor Tamsin Ford in the Department of Psychiatry.

My group has been planning a study on the effects of social isolation in adolescence since early 2019. The pandemic has made this a much larger part of our research plans. We recently embarked on a large-scale study to investigate the effects of social isolation on adolescent cognition and emotion processing, led by Dr Tomova, a research fellow at Hughes Hall who is based in my lab. It involves participants having a brain scan, and experiencing short periods of social isolation followed by behavioural tasks and questionnaires.

When the pandemic is over I’m looking forward to enormous amounts of face-to-face social interaction with friends and family, with lots of hugs.

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore is Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge.

*Orben, A, Tomova, L & Blakemore, S-J. (2020). The effects of social deprivation on adolescent development and mental health. The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, 4(8), 634-640. 

**Andrews, J.L., Foulkes, L. & Blakemore, S-J. (2020). Peer influence in adolescence: Public-health implications for COVID-19. Trends in Cognitive Science, 24(8), 585-587. 

Listen to Sarah-Jayne talking more about these topics on We are the University! – a podcast from the University of Cambridge:

How you can support Cambridge’s COVID-19 research

The software, called vLUME, was created by scientists at the University of Cambridge and 3D image analysis software company Lume VR Ltd. It allows super-resolution microscopy data to be visualised and analysed in virtual reality, and can be used to study everything from individual proteins to entire cells. Details are published in the journal Nature Methods.

Super-resolution microscopy, which was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2014, makes it possible to obtain images at the nanoscale by using clever tricks of physics to get around the limits imposed by light diffraction. This has allowed researchers to observe molecular processes as they happen. However, a problem has been the lack of ways to visualise and analyse this data in three dimensions.

“Biology occurs in 3D, but up until now it has been difficult to interact with the data on a 2D computer screen in an intuitive and immersive way,” said Dr Steven F Lee from Cambridge’s Department of Chemistry, who led the research. “It wasn’t until we started seeing our data in virtual reality that everything clicked into place.”

The vLUME project started when Lee and his group met with the Lume VR founders at a public engagement event at the Science Museum in London. While Lee’s group had expertise in super-resolution microscopy, the team from Lume specialised in spatial computing and data analysis, and together they were able to develop vLUME into a powerful new tool for exploring complex datasets in virtual reality.

“vLUME is revolutionary imaging software that brings humans into the nanoscale,” said Alexandre Kitching, CEO of Lume. “It allows scientists to visualise, question and interact with 3D biological data, in real time all within a virtual reality environment, to find answers to biological questions faster. It’s a new tool for new discoveries.”

Viewing data in this way can stimulate new initiatives and ideas. For example, Anoushka Handa – a PhD student from Lee’s group – used the software to image an immune cell taken from her own blood, and then stood inside her own cell in virtual reality. “It’s incredible – it gives you an entirely different perspective on your work,” she said.

The software allows multiple datasets with millions of data points to be loaded in and finds patterns in the complex data using in-built clustering algorithms. These findings can then be shared with collaborators worldwide using image and video features in the software.

“Data generated from super-resolution microscopy is extremely complex,” said Kitching. “For scientists, running analysis on this data can be very time-consuming. With vLUME, we have managed to vastly reduce that wait time allowing for more rapid testing and analysis.”

The team is mostly using vLUME with biological datasets, such as neurons, immune cells or cancer cells. For example, Lee’s group has been studying how antigen cells trigger an immune response in the body. “Through segmenting and viewing the data in vLUME, we’ve quickly been able to rule out certain hypotheses and propose new ones,” said Lee. This software allows researchers to explore, analyse, segment and share their data in new ways. All you need is a VR headset.”

Reference:
Alexander Spark et al. ‘vLUME: 3D Virtual Reality for Single-molecule Localization Microscopy.’ Nature Methods (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41592-020-0962-1

Electronics that consume tiny amounts of power are key for the development of the Internet of Things, in which everyday objects are connected to the internet. Many emerging technologies, from wearables to healthcare devices to smart homes and smart cities, need cost-effective transistors and electronic circuits that can function with minimal energy use.

Printed electronics are a simple and inexpensive way to manufacture electronics that could pave the way for low-cost electronic devices on unconventional substrates – such as clothes, plastic wrap or paper – and provide everyday objects with ‘intelligence’.

However, these devices need to operate with low energy and power consumption to be useful for real-world applications. Although printing techniques have advanced considerably, power consumption has remained a challenge – the different solutions available were too complex for commercial production.

Now, researchers from the University of Cambridge, working with collaborators from China and Saudi Arabia, have developed an approach for printed electronics that could be used to make low-cost devices that recharge out of thin air. Even the ambient radio signals that surround us would be enough to power them. Their results are published in the journal ACS Nano.

Since the commercial batteries which power many devices have limited lifetimes and negative environmental impacts, researchers are developing electronics that can operate autonomously with ultra-low levels of energy.

The technology developed by the researchers delivers high-performance electronic circuits based on thin-film transistors which are ‘ambipolar’ as they use only one semiconducting material to transport both negative and positive electric charges in their channels, in a region of operation called ‘deep subthreshold’ – a phrase that essentially means that the transistors are operated in a region that is conventionally regarded as their ‘off’ state. The team coined the phrase ‘deep-subthreshold ambipolar’ to refer to unprecedented ultra-low operating voltages and power consumption levels.

If electronic circuits made of these devices were to be powered by a standard AA battery, the researchers say it would be possible that they could run for millions of years uninterrupted.

The team, which included researchers from Soochow University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, ShanghaiTech University, and King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), used printed carbon nanotubes – ultra-thin cylinders of carbon – as an ambipolar semiconductor to achieve the result.

“Thanks to deep-subthreshold ambipolar approach, we created printed electronics that meet the power and voltage requirements of real-world applications, and opened up opportunities for remote sensing and ‘place-and-forget’ devices that can operate without batteries for their entire lifetime,” said co-lead author Luigi Occhipinti from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering. “Crucially, our ultra-low-power printed electronics are simple and cost-effective to manufacture and overcome long-standing hurdles in the field.”

“Our approach to printed electronics could be scaled up to make inexpensive battery-less devices that could harvest energy from the environment, such as sunlight or omnipresent ambient electromagnetic waves, like those created by our mobile phones and wifi stations,” said co-lead author Professor Vincenzo Pecunia from Soochow University. Pecunia is a former PhD student and postdoctoral researcher at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory.

The work paves the way for a new generation of self-powered electronics for biomedical applications, smart homes, infrastructure monitoring, and the exponentially-growing Internet of Things device ecosystem.

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

Reference:
L. Portilla et al. ‘Ambipolar Deep-Subthreshold Printed-Carbon-Nanotube Transistors for Ultralow-Voltage and Ultralow-Power Electronics.’ ACS Nano (2020). DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.0c06619

A team of psychology researchers from Cambridge, Columbia and Harvard Universities surveyed over 101,000 people in 55 countries to find out whether they were staying at home because of coronavirus between late March and early April 2020. The results are published today in the journal American Psychologist.

The researchers found that extroverts are least likely to follow official guidance to stay at home. The team suggest that tailoring public health messages towards the more extroverted in society could encourage greater overall compliance in populations and help prevent the spread of coronavirus.

“Extroverts are gregarious and sociable, and they found it especially hard to stay cooped up at home and not see other people. They were most likely to break lockdown rules, and stayed at home less than people of any other personality type during March and April,” said Friedrich Götz, a PhD researcher in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Psychology, and first author of the report.

Late March and early April 2020 coincided with the early, accelerating stage of the COVID-19 pandemic. This was also when government policies on staying at home varied between countries and were changing rapidly over time. Halting the spread of coronavirus relied on people following official guidance.

The survey explored the five key traits commonly used by psychologists to characterise personality: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, neuroticism, and openness. Agreeable people tend to be more compliant and trusting, and conscientious ones are diligent and law-abiding. People scoring highly for these personality traits tend to stay at home when advised to do so.

People who scored as highly neurotic, and those with very open-minded personalities decided to stay at home more even before lockdowns were put into place – they were already concerned about catching coronavirus. The researchers think that as restrictions on movements lift, these groups are more likely to maintain social distancing than other personality types.

“Highly neurotic people had decided early on that this virus wasn’t something to mess with, and they were staying at home,” said Götz.

“Open-minded people tend to be very well-connected and interested in the wider world, so we think they realised the potential impact of coronavirus earlier than others and acted accordingly,” added Andrés Gvirtz, a PhD researcher in Cambridge’s Department of Psychology and second author of the study.

He added: “Watching TV reports of the COVID-19 situation in Italy for instance, which was ahead of the UK in terms of the impact of the virus, was informing the behaviour of open-minded people at the beginning of the pandemic.”

As governments tightened lockdown rules in late March and early April, a greater number of people started following them, regardless of their personality. The study recorded high compliance by this time, with over 80% of people surveyed across the world reporting they were staying at home.

Survey participants’ personalities were scored on the ‘strength’ of each of the five key personality traits on a seven point scale. A single point change in a person’s tendency towards any of the five traits was found to alter their likelihood of staying at home by around 1%. The researchers stress that even this small percentage has important consequences, given the global scale of the pandemic and the contagiousness of coronavirus.

The researchers suggest that public health messages could be tailored towards extroverts, to encourage greater compliance with lockdown rules in the population as a whole. They suggest that such messages could try to convey an understanding of how hard it is to stay at home – particularly for people who really enjoy being with their friends and family – and point out that the guidance is in place to protect those people.

“Government regulations do very much influence the behaviour of the population at large,” said Götz, “but we need to recognise that not all of the people will follow all of the rules. Extroverts pose a particular challenge during the pandemic, because they are least likely to stay at home when governments advise it.”

Governments around the world have tried to prevent the spread of coronavirus by encouraging or enforcing social distancing behaviours, with periods of lockdown in which people are asked not to leave home except for specific purposes.

This research was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (part of UK Research and Innovation), the Cambridge Trust and Peterhouse Cambridge.

Reference
Götz, F.M. et al: ‘How Personality and Policy Predict Pandemic Behaviour: Understanding Sheltering-in-Place in 55 Countries at the Onset of COVID-19.’ American Psychologist, 2020. DOI: 10.1037/amp0000740

How you can support Cambridge’s COVID-19 research

Humans are hard-wired to prefer experiences that end well, and the influence of previous experience declines the longer ago it happened. This means we can’t always trust that choices we make based on previous experience will serve our best interests in the future.

New research, published today in the Journal of Neuroscience, has revealed that two different parts of the brain are activated, and compete with each other, when we make decisions based on past experience. They can cause us to overvalue experiences that end well despite starting badly, and undervalue experiences that end badly despite starting well – even if both are equally valuable overall.

“When you’re deciding where to go for dinner, for example, you think about where you’ve had a good meal in the past. But your memory of whether that meal was good isn’t always reliable – our brain values the final few moments of the experience more highly than the rest of it,” said Dr Martin Vestergaard, a researcher in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience, who led the study.

“If we can’t control our in-built attraction to happy endings, then we can’t trust our choices to serve our best interests.”

The part of the brain called the amygdala works out the ‘objective value’ of an experience – the overall tastiness of a three-course meal, for example. Meanwhile a brain region called the anterior insula was shown to ‘mark down’ our valuation of an experience if it gets gradually worse over time.

The further back in time an experience was, even if still quite recent, the less weight it carries in making the next decision. The researchers call it the ‘happy ending effect’: we tend to make decisions based on previous experiences that ended well, irrespective of how good the experiences were overall.

In the study, twenty-seven healthy male volunteers were asked to choose which of two pots of coins, viewed on-screen one at a time, had the greatest total value. They watched as coins of varying sizes – representing their value – fell from the pots in quick succession, while a brain scanner revealed what was happening in their brain using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The task was repeated several times with different sequences of coins.

The volunteers systematically chose the wrong pot when the coins decreased in size towards the end of the sequence. This reveals that the brain was imposing a penalty on the whole sequence, irrespective of its total value, when the ending was not good. The effect varied from person to person, but only a few were able to ignore it entirely and make a completely rational decision.

The results verify theoretical models of decision-making, and challenge the popular belief that sub-optimal decision-making is routed in the amygdala – the primitive part of our brain – whereas more astute reasoning happens in the more evolved part. They show that our evaluation of an extended experience is encoded robustly in the amygdala.

The attraction to the final moments of an experience is a fundamental mechanism in the human brain and important to be aware of, say the researchers. While there are clear advantages to paying attention to whether things are on an upward or downward trajectory, our judgements can fail us when we try to evaluate an overall experience afterwards.

While bad decision-making in the context of eating out might not be disastrous, this inaccurate valuation in summarising past events could lead to bad choices when using the information to make decisions for the longer-term – for example, deciding which politician to vote for.

“Our attraction to the quality of the final moment of an experience is exploited by politicians seeking re-election; they will always try to appear strong and successful towards the end of their time in office,” said Vestergaard. “If you fall for this trick, and disregard historical incompetence and failure, then you might end up re-electing an unfit politician.

“Sometimes it’s worth taking the time to stop and think. Taking a more analytical approach to complement your intuitive judgement can help ensure you’re making a rational decision.”

This research was funded by Wellcome.

Reference
Vestergaard & Schultz: ‘Retrospective valuation of experienced outcome encoded in distinct reward representations in the anterior insula and amygdala.’ Journal of Neuroscience, October 2020. DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2130-19.2020.

Penrose is an emeritus professor at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford. He becomes the 110th affiliate of the University of Cambridge to be awarded a Nobel Prize.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences made the announcement this morning (6th October).

According to the Nobel Prize website: “Penrose used ingenious mathematical methods in his proof that black holes are a direct consequence of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.”

Einstein himself did not believe that black holes really existed. But in January 1965, ten years after Einstein’s death, Penrose proved that black holes really can form and described them in detail. His ground-breaking article, published in January 1965, continues to be viewed as the most important contribution to the general theory of relativity since Einstein.

David Haviland, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, said: “The discoveries of this year’s Laureates have broken new ground in the study of compact and supermassive objects. But these exotic objects still pose many questions that beg for answers and motivate future research. Not only questions about their inner structure, but also questions about how to test our theory of gravity under the extreme conditions in the immediate vicinity of a black hole”.

Penrose arrived at St John’s in 1952 as a graduate student and completed his PhD thesis on tensor methods in algebraic geometry in 1957. He remained at the College as a Research Fellow until 1960 and was elected as an Honorary Fellow in 1987. Penrose is the College’s sixth Nobel prize-winner in Physics and tenth Nobel laureate overall. Heather Hancock, current Master of St John’s, said: “We are delighted to see Sir Roger Penrose receive the recognition and accolade of the Nobel Prize for his outstanding contribution to physics. His ground-breaking proof of the formation of black holes is a landmark contribution to the application of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. We offer our warmest congratulations to Roger.”

In the 1970s, Penrose collaborated with Cambridge’s Stephen Hawking and in 1988, they shared the Wolf Foundation Prize for Physics for the Penrose–Hawking singularity theorems.

Prof Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and Fellow of Trinity College, University of Cambridge, said: “Penrose is amazingly original and inventive, and has contributed creative insights for more than 60 years. There would, I think, be a consensus that Penrose and Hawking are the two individuals who have done more than anyone else since Einstein to deepen our knowledge of gravity. (Other key figures would include Israel, Carter, Kerr, and numerous others.) Sadly, this award was too much delayed to allow Hawking to share the credit with Penrose.

“It was Penrose, more than anyone else, who triggered the renaissance in relativity in the 1960s through his introduction of new mathematical techniques. He introduced the concept of a ‘trapped surface’. On the basis of this concept, he and Hawking (more than a decade younger) together showed that the development of a singularity – where the density ‘goes infinite’ – was inevitable once a threshold of compactness had been crossed (even in a generic situation with no special symmetry). This crucial discovery firmed up the evidence for a big bang, and led to a quantitative description of black holes.”

Penrose shares the 2020 Physics Nobel with Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez who developed methods to see through the huge clouds of interstellar gas and dust to the centre of the Milky Way. Stretching the limits of technology, they refined new techniques to compensate for distortions caused by the Earth’s atmosphere, building unique instruments and committing themselves to long-term research. Their work has provided the most convincing evidence yet of a supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.

Professor Penrose was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Cambridge in 2020.

Cambridge Assessment and Cambridge University Press have launched a new unit, the Cambridge Partnership for Education, that will draw on the collective knowledge and global network of the University of Cambridge to support governments, schools, teachers and learners in creating quality public education systems.

Jane Mann, Managing Director of Cambridge Partnership for Education said: “Education underpins our economies and societies. It’s the single most effective solution for many of the problems we face including poverty, health, climate change and conflict. As the global pandemic intensifies these challenges, revitalising education systems will fuel individual, national and international recovery. Our new team is uniquely placed to achieve that mission with partners around the world.”

As the recent Cambridge report ‘What have we learned about the COVID-19 impact on education so far?‘ showed, education systems in all countries were ill-equipped to adapt to a global pandemic, and existing inequalities in public education systems were exposed and increased. This year saw schools closed in over 190 countries, affecting over 1.5 billion learners. 24 million children may never return to the classroom.

Countries now need to evaluate whether the solutions put in place during the lockdown have had an impact, assessing what’s worked and what hasn’t, in order to start planning more effectively for medium and longer-term solutions.

The pandemic has also caused economic downturns around the world, widening existing inequalities. Half of the global workforce is at risk, leaving many without the skills they will need to return to new jobs.  Countries will need to invest in education and skills to rebuild their economies at a time when government spending will be under intense pressure.

The new and expanded offer from the Cambridge Partnership for Education will help governments and non-governmental organisations reimagine and rebuild education systems, from research and planning to implementation and impact evaluation. The team brings decades of trusted experience working on education from every angle – curriculum, assessment, learning materials and teacher training – to help partners reach their goals, speed up progress and achieve value for money.

Peter Phillips, Chief Executive of Cambridge University Press, said: “For the first time, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Assessment and our University will combine the full depth and breadth of our education expertise to partner with governments and non-governmental organisations. The creation of an integrated team and one single point of contact to access all of our capabilities and services meets our partners’ needs and means together we can improve education systems more effectively.”

Although the disruption caused by COVID has brought challenges in education into sharp focus in many areas, Cambridge was already supporting governments to develop their education systems well before the pandemic hit. The move towards competency-based education, new forms of assessment, digital literacy and initiatives to tackle the shortage of trained teachers, among other developments, have seen Cambridge partner with ministries around the world, reaching over 20 million learners worldwide in 2019 alone.

The individual teams who will form the new unit have developed strong reputations for delivering excellence for clients across a variety of issues and local contexts. Recent achievements include an in-depth analysis of the national curriculum of Ethiopia, supporting improvements in English teaching with the Malaysia Ministry of Education, supporting the goal of a bilingual population in Panama, and pioneering a new Learning Passport with Microsoft and UNICEF which harnesses the latest technological capabilities to support education for displaced children.

The Partnership will draw on the knowledge and expertise of more than 6,000 employees in 50 offices worldwide, from Cambridge to New Delhi, from Oman to Kenya.

Saul Nassé, Chief Executive of Cambridge Assessment, said: “This is a challenging time for the world and a vital moment for education. We could not have predicted the stress education systems, governments and people around the globe would face in 2020. Our new unit brings together our collective strength and expertise in education at a moment when we can make a significant contribution to the world’s learning recovery.”

Academics from the University of Cambridge believe that the tendency for children to introduce aggressive themes in these situations – which seems to happen whether or not they are personally easy to anger – may be because they are ‘rehearsing’ strategies to cope with hot-headed friends.

The finding comes from an observational study of more than 100 children at a school in China, who were asked to play with toys in pairs. Children whose play partners were considered bad-tempered by their peers were 45% more likely to introduce aggressive themes into their pretend play than those whose partners were reckoned to be better at controlling their temper.

Importantly, however, a child’s own temperament did not predict the level of make-believe aggression. Instead, children often appeared to introduce these themes specifically in response to having an irritable playmate.

This may mean that, while many adults understandably discourage children from pretend play that seems aggressive, in certain cases it may actually help their social and emotional development. The paper’s authors stress, however, that further research will be needed before they can provide definitive guidance for parents or practitioners.

Dr Zhen Rao, from the Centre for Research on Play in Education, Development and Learning (PEDAL), at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, said: “If children have a friend who is easily angered, and particularly if they haven’t coped well with that behaviour, it’s possible that they will look for ways to explore it through pretend play. This gives them a safe context in which to try out different ways of handling difficult situations next time they crop up in real life.”

Aggressive pretend play has been the subject of considerable wider research, much of which aims to understand whether it predicts similarly aggressive real-life behaviours. Most of these studies, however, tend to focus on whether these associations are linked to the child’s own temperament, rather than that of the children they are playing with.

The Cambridge study aimed to understand how far aggressive pretend play is associated with not only children’s own, but also their play partner’s anger expression. It also distinguished between aggressive pretend play and its ‘non-aggressive, negative’ variant: for example, pretend play that involves imagining someone who is sick or unhappy.

The research was carried out with 104 children, aged seven to 10, at a school in Guangzhou in China, as part of a wider project that the team were undertaking in that region.

Participants were asked to organise themselves into pairs – many of them therefore picking friends – and were then filmed playing for 20 minutes. The toys they were given was deliberately neutral in character (for example, there were no toy weapons), and the children could play however they wanted.

The researchers then coded 10-minute samples of each pair in 120 five-second segments, earmarking instances of pretend play, aggressive themes, and non-aggressive negative themes.

Separately, they also asked peers to rate the children’s tendency to become angry. Each of the 104 children in the study was rated by, on average, 10 others, who were asked to decide whether they were good at keeping their temper, easily angered, or ‘somewhere in between’.

The researchers then analysed the data using a statistical model called an Actor-Partner Interdependence Model, which is a means of measuring and testing the influence that two individuals have on one another. This allowed them to work out how far children were playing a certain way of their own volition, and how far they were being influenced by their partner.

On average, the children spent only about a fifth of the recorded session participating in pretend play, of which around 10% involved aggressive themes and 8% involved non-aggressive negative themes. Pretend play was observed in all children. More than half (53.5%) showed at least one instance of aggressive pretend play, and 43% of the children showed at least one instance of negative pretend play.

The children’s own ability to control their temper, as reported by their peers, did not significantly predict the amount of their pretend play involved aggressive themes. If they had a play partner who was considered quick to anger, however, they were 45% more likely to create pretend situations that involved some sort of aggressive element. This percentage is to some extent shaped by how the data was segmented, but nonetheless indicates a greater likelihood that children will do this if they are playing with someone peers regard as easy to anger.

There was no evidence to suggest that either child’s temperament influenced the frequency of non-aggressive, negative pretend play. The researchers also found that boys were 6.11 times likelier to engage in aggressive pretend play than girls.

The theory that children may introduce these themes to rehearse ways of handling bad-tempered peers is only one possible explanation. For example, it may also represent an attempt to stop playmates becoming angry by giving them a pretend situation in which to ‘let off steam’, or simply to keep them playing by appealing to their nature.

“Our study highlights the importance of taking into account a social partner’s emotional expression when understanding aggressive pretend play,” Rao added. “Further research is clearly needed to help us better understand this in different social contexts. The possibility that children might be working out how to handle tricky situations through pretend play suggests that for some children, this could actually be a way of developing their social and emotional skills.”

The research is published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology. Dr Rao’s research is funded by an ESRC postdoctoral Fellowship.

The team, led by the University of Cambridge, used the technique to investigate the materials used in random access memories, while in operation. The results, reported in the journal Nature Electronics, will allow detailed study of these materials, which are used in memory devices.

The ability to understand how structural changes characterise the function of these materials, which are used for low-power, ultra-responsive devices called memristors, is important to improve their performance. However, looking inside the 3D nanoscale devices is difficult using traditional techniques.

To solve this issue, the researchers had to reliably construct cavities only a few billionths of a metre across – small enough to trap light within the device. They used the tiny gap between a gold nanoparticle and a mirror and observed how the light was modified when the device was functioning correctly or breaking down.

Using this technique, the researchers were able to observe changes in the colour of the light scattered from the device inner regions when few atomic defects and tiny oxygen bubbles were forming. This enabled them to identify the device breaking mechanism over multiple cycles.

“This work is a big advance in using light to show how materials behave when inside active devices,” said Dr Giuliana Di Martino from Cambridge’s Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy, who led the research. “The strange physics of light interacting with matter on the nanoscale allows us to characterise these devices in real time, where their functioning depends on how the material behaves in a space just a few atoms across. This way, we can reveal the breakdown mechanisms upon cycling and open up new routes for device optimisation towards large-scale technology applications.”

Gaining understanding into the factors determining device failure mechanisms is a fundamental prerequisite for developing energy-efficient and better-performing memory devices, an essential goal for enabling a competitive, data driven economy and driving business innovation through digital transformation and the Internet of Things.

The research is funded as part of a UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the Winton Programme for the Physics of Sustainability and the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Reference:
Di Martino et al. ‘Real-Time In-Situ Optical Tracking of Oxygen Vacancy Migration in Memristors.’ Nature Electronics (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41928-020-00478-5

Now in their fifth year, the awards were made in five categories: collaboration, early career, established academic, professional service, online and remote.

The winners of the collaboration category are Dr Michael Weekes from Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, and Dr Steven Baker from Cambridge Institute for Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Disease. They collaborated to establish a comprehensive rapid turn-around COVID-19 testing platform for Cambridge University Hospitals healthcare workers, University staff and students.

The newly-established ‘online and remote engagement’ award goes to Dr Michael Ramage and team from the Department of Architecture for their HappyShield project. This involved developing, testing, and disseminating a novel open-source medical face shield to help tackle severe PPE shortages caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, focussing in particular on production in Low and Middle Income Countries.

The winner of the early career researcher award is Chioma Achi from the Department of Veterinary Medicine. Achi organised an engagement programme across Nigeria to strengthen the participation of poultry farmers in the fight against antimicrobial resistance.

The winner of the established researcher award is Dr Duncan Astle from the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit. Working in partnership with children’s charities, local education authorities, academy chains and local schools, Astle led an engagement programme providing teachers with robust evidence to help young people overcome cognitive and behavioural barriers to learning.

The winner of the professional services award is Dr Rosalyn Wade from the Museum of Zoology. Wade reimagined the Museum’s learning and public programme following COVID-19 lockdown and the venue’s temporary closure. She designed and released a new blog and developed an innovative online festival (Zoology Live!).

The awards were announced on 5th October by the University’s Public Engagement team on Twitter.

Professor Stephen Toope, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, says:

“The University’s mission is to contribute to society. One of the ways we do it is by undertaking research with real social, cultural and economic impact.

“These awards celebrate research that best demonstrates social, cultural and economic impact through engagement. From advances in healthcare and industrial processes, to rapid responses to the global pandemic; from cultural activities that recognise diversity in our societies, to new knowledge that improves teaching and increases social mobility. This year’s panel of judges was inspired and uplifted by the quality of applications.”

The Vice-Chancellor’s Research Impact and Engagement Awards were established to recognise and reward outstanding achievement, innovation and creativity in devising and implementing ambitious engagement and impact plans that have the potential to create significant economic, social and cultural impact from and engagement with and for research. Each winner is offered a bursary to support their project.

This year’s winners and runners up are:

Established Academic Award

Winner: Dr Duncan Astle (MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, School of Clinical Medicine) – Breaking barriers to learning in the classroom

Runners up: Dr Joseph Webster (Faculty of Divinity, School of Arts and Humanities) – Sectarianism in Scotland and the repeal of the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act

Professor Peter Hutchinson (with Professor David Menon) (Clinical Neurosciences / Medicine, School of Clinical Medicine) – Reshaping the treatment of traumatic brain injury

Early Career Researcher Award

Winner: Chioma Achi (Department of Veterinary Medicine, School of Biological Sciences) – Strengthening participation of poultry farmers in the fight against antimicrobial resistance

Runners up: Emma Soneson (Department of Psychiatry, School of Clinical Medicine) – Public health approaches to identifying and responding to mental health difficulties in children and young people

Dr Naures Atto (Asian and Middle Eastern Studies/Middle Eastern Studies, School of Arts and Humanities) – Endangered Middle Eastern Cultures and their Vulnerability in Migration Contexts

Dr Nicki Kindersley (Faculty of History, School of Humanities and Social Sciences) – Militarised political economies in South Sudan

Professional Services Award

Winner: Dr Rosalyn Wade (Museum of Zoology, School of Biological Sciences) – Learning and Public Programme of the Museum of Zoology: blending contemporary zoological research with active and online learning experiences for public audiences

Collaboration Award

Winner: Dr Michael Weekes and Dr Steven Baker (Cambridge Institute for Medical Research / Cambridge Institute for Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Disease, School of Clinical Medicine) – A comprehensive COVID-19 screening programme for Cambridge University Hospitals healthcare workers, Cambridge University staff and students

Runners up: Dr Victoria Avery, Dr Melissa Calaresu and Dr Miranda Stearn (Fitzwilliam Museum / Faculty of History / Fitzwilliam Museum) – Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe, 1500–1800 Research Project

Online and Remote Engagement Award

Winner: Dr Michael Ramage and team (Department of Architecture, School of Arts and Humanities) – The HappyShield

Runners up: Centre for Geopolitics (Department of Politics and International Studies, School of Humanities and Social Sciences) – Centre for Geopolitics Coronavirus Response

The new exhibition showcases the work of Black scientists from all over the world who have made – and are making – significant contributions to the field of science, technology, engineering and medicine (STEM).

Profiles, posters and pictures will be featured on a publically available website (africansinstem.co.uk) and linked social media platforms, as well as on physical posters displayed in selected departments* across the University throughout the month of October.

The materials in the exhibition include a mix of historic and present figures, such as Patricia Bath (left in the image above), the late American ophthalmologist who developed the ‘Laserphaco Probe’ to vapourise cataracts, and Kenyan immunologist Faith Osier (right in the image above) who developed ‘KILchip’, a system to detect complex antibodies from individual samples.

Also featured are Black students currently at Cambridge conducting research in novel chemotherapies for a rare paediatric brain tumour, fabrication of devices for advanced information processing and generation of low-carbon electricity from photosynthetic bacteria.

The exhibition is the work of two Black researchers – PhD students Sandile Mtetwa and Cynthia Okoye who together lead Africans in STEM, a group that helps Africans involved in STEM research connect, share ideas and create collaborations.

“Stories of Black achievements in science are rarely told or often buried,” says Sandile Mtetwa, whose own research in the Department of Chemistry is on discovering new energy and sensing materials. “We wish to uncover these STEM legacies to combat the stark underrepresentation of Black people in the sciences – a phenomenon that is still characteristic of academia and enterprise.”

She adds: “Advocacy through celebration and promotion of achievements of Black people in STEM is a very good way to tackle the racial injustice that sadly prevails in the world. We see activities like ours as providing a positive ripple effect for better representation.”

The team feels they have gained much themselves from the experience of curating the exhibition, as pharmacologist Cynthia Okoye explains: “Learning about the stories and contributions of Black scientists through this project has been nothing short of enlightening and empowering and I hope it will be the same for others, especially for the young and aspiring scientists out there.”

For more information, please visit africansinstem.co.uk

*Posters will be displayed in the Departments of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering & Biotechnology, Materials Science & Metallurgy, Veterinary Science and Pharmacology throughout October. Please note that access to physical posters is restricted to departmental members as a result of COVID safety measures. All posters can also be viewed online.

Image sources:

Patricia Bath

Faith Osier

Working in the savannahs of Zambia, a team of international researchers collected images, sounds and videos over four years to reveal a striking and highly specialised form of mimicry. They focused on a group of finches occurring across much of Africa called the indigobirds and whydahs, of the genus Vidua.

Like cuckoos, the 19 different species within this group of finches forego their parental duties and instead lay their eggs in the nests of other birds. Each species of indigobird and whydah chooses to lay its eggs in the nests of a particular species of grassfinch. Their hosts then incubate the foreign eggs, and feed the young alongside their own when they hatch.

Grassfinches are unusual in having brightly coloured and distinctively patterned nestlings, and nestlings of different grassfinch species have their own unique appearance, begging calls and begging movements. Vidua finches are extremely specialised parasites, with each species mostly exploiting a single host species.

Nestlings of these ‘brood-parasitic’ Vidua finches were found to mimic the appearance, sounds and movements of their grassfinch host’s chicks, right down to the same elaborately colourful patterns on the inside of their mouths. The study is published in the journal Evolution.

“The mimicry is astounding in its intricacy and is highly species-specific,” said Dr Gabriel Jamie, lead author on the paper and a research scientist in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology, and at the FitzPatrick Institute of African Ornithology, University of Cape Town.

He added: “We were able to test for mimicry using statistical models that approximate the vision of birds. Birds process colour and pattern differently to humans so it is important to analyse the mimicry from their perspective rather than just relying on human assessments.”

While the mimicry is very precise, the researchers did find some minor imperfections. These may exist due to insufficient time for more precise mimicry to evolve, or because current levels of mimicry are already good enough to fool the host parents. The researchers think that some imperfections might actually be enhanced versions of the hosts’ signal, forcing it to feed the parasite chick even more than it would its own.

The mimetic adaptations to different hosts identified in the study may also be critical in the formation of new species, and in preventing species collapse through hybridisation.

“The mimicry is not only amazing in its own right but may also have important implications for how new species of parasitic finches evolve,” added Professor Claire Spottiswoode, an author of the paper and a research scientist at both the University of Cambridge and Cape Town.

Vidua nestlings imprint on their hosts, altering their mating and host preferences based on early life experiences. These preferences strongly influence the host environment in which their offspring grow up, and therefore the evolutionary selection pressures they experience from foster parents. When maintained over multiple generations, these selection pressures generate the astounding host-specific mimetic adaptations observed in the study.

Reference
Jamie, G. A, et al: ‘Multimodal mimicry of hosts in a radiation of parasitic finches.’ Evolution, July 2020. DOI:10.1111/evo.14057

The Crop Science Centre is an alliance between the University of Cambridge’s Department of Plant Sciences and the crop research organisation NIAB, an internationally recognised centre for crop innovation.

The Centre will serve as a global hub for crop science research and a base for collaborations with research partners around the world, to ensure global agricultural impact from the ground-breaking science happening in Cambridge. It includes a state-of-the-art facility to maximise the pace of research and accelerate crop improvements.

The Centre will focus on improving the sustainability and equity of global food production. It will use an understanding of how plants work at the most fundamental level to drive transformative change in how we grow our food. Research will be aimed at reducing agricultural reliance on chemical inputs such as inorganic fertilisers, while maximising crop productivity, especially for the world’s poorest farmers.

Professor Giles Oldroyd FRS, Russell R. Geiger Professor of Crop Science at the University of Cambridge and Inaugural Director of the Crop Science Centre said: “This year we have seen how fragile our global systems are. The COVID-19 crisis is exposing another 120 million people to starvation worldwide, while crop yields here in the UK are suffering from changes in our climate.”

Oldroyd, who leads an international programme to replace inorganic fertilisers, added: “We need lasting solutions for stable and secure food production, but also need to improve sustainability in agriculture. We are excited to be opening this new Centre, which can drive the transformative change we so desperately need.”

Professor Stephen Toope, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, said: “Urgent action is required to sustainably provide enough quality food for the world’s growing population. By combining our expertise in fundamental plant science with NIAB’s long experience in crop improvement, I am confident that we will make progress towards this vital goal.”

Dr Tina Barsby, CEO of NIAB, said: “Through transformative crop science technologies, research at the new Centre aims to ensure even the world’s poorest farmers can grow enough food. This work is at the top of the international agenda.”

Private donations from the late Russell R. Geiger and Robert and Susan Cawthorn helped to establish the Centre, alongside donations from NIAB and the Cambridge University Potato Growers Research Association (CUPGRA), and capital funding from the Research England-managed UK Research Partnership Investment Fund. Professor Oldroyd’s research programme is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

Further information about the Crop Science Centre is available at www.cropsciencecentre.org

Researchers from the University of Cambridge used 3D printing, also known as additive manufacturing, techniques to make electronic fibres, each 100 times thinner than a human hair, creating sensors beyond the capabilities of conventional film-based devices.

The fibre printing technique, reported in the journal Science Advances, can be used to make non-contact, wearable, portable respiratory sensors. These printed sensors are high-sensitivity, low-cost and can be attached to a mobile phone to collect breath pattern information, sound and images at the same time.

First author Andy Wang, a PhD student from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, used the fibre sensor to test the amount of breath moisture leaked through his face covering, for respiratory conditions such as normal breathing, rapid breathing, and simulated coughing. The fibre sensors significantly outperformed comparable commercial sensors, especially in monitoring rapid breathing, which replicates shortness of breath.

While the fibre sensor has not been designed to detect viral particles, since scientific evidence increasingly points to the fact that viral particles such as coronavirus can be transmitted through respiratory droplets and aerosols, measuring the amount and direction of breath moisture that leaks through different types of face coverings could act an indicator in the protection ‘weak’ points.

The team found that most leakage from fabric or surgical masks comes from the front, especially during coughing, while most leakage from N95 masks comes from the top and sides with tight fittings. Nonetheless, both types of face masks, when worn properly, help to weaken the flow of exhaled breath.

“Sensors made from small conducting fibres are especially useful for volumetric sensing of fluid and gas in 3D, compared to conventional thin-film techniques, but so far, it has been challenging to print and incorporate them into devices, and to manufacture them at scale,” said Dr Yan Yan Shery Huang from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, who led the research.

Huang and her colleagues 3D printed the composite fibres, which are made from silver and/or semiconducting polymers. This fibre printing technique creates a core-shell fibre structure, with a high-purity conducting fibre core wrapped by a thin protective polymer sheath, similar to the structure of common electrical wires, but at a scale of a few micrometres in diameter.

In addition to the respiratory sensors, the printing technique can also be used to make biocompatible fibres of a similar dimension to biological cells, which enables them to guide cell movements and ‘feel’ this dynamic process as electrical signals. Also, the fibres are so tiny that they are invisible to the naked eye, so when they are used to connect small electronic elements in 3D, it would seem that the electronics are ‘floating’ in mid-air.

“Our fibre sensors are lightweight, cheap, small and easy to use, so they could potentially be turned into home-test devices to allow the general public to perform self-administered tests to get information about their environments,” said Huang.

The team looks to develop this fibre-printing technique for a number of multi-functional sensors, which could potentially detect more breath species for mobile health monitoring, or for bio-machine interface applications.

Reference:
Wenyu Wang et al. ‘Inflight fiber printing toward array and 3D optoelectronic and sensing architectures.’ Science Advances (2020). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aba0931