The device, developed by a team from the University of Cambridge, is a significant step toward achieving artificial photosynthesis – a process mimicking the ability of plants to convert sunlight into energy. It is based on an advanced ‘photosheet’ technology and converts sunlight, carbon dioxide and water into oxygen and formic acid – a storable fuel that can be either be used directly or be converted into hydrogen.

The results, reported in the journal Nature Energy, represent a new method for the conversion of carbon dioxide into clean fuels. The wireless device could be scaled up and used on energy ‘farms’ similar to solar farms, producing clean fuel using sunlight and water.

Harvesting solar energy to convert carbon dioxide into fuel is a promising way to reduce carbon emissions and transition away from fossil fuels. However, it is challenging to produce these clean fuels without unwanted by-products.

“It’s been difficult to achieve artificial photosynthesis with a high degree of selectivity, so that you’re converting as much of the sunlight as possible into the fuel you want, rather than be left with a lot of waste,” said first author Dr Qian Wang from Cambridge’s Department of Chemistry.

“In addition, storage of gaseous fuels and separation of by-products can be complicated – we want to get to the point where we can cleanly produce a liquid fuel that can also be easily stored and transported,” said Professor Erwin Reisner, the paper’s senior author.

In 2019, researchers from Reisner’s group developed a solar reactor based on an ‘artificial leaf’ design, which also uses sunlight, carbon dioxide and water to produce a fuel, known as syngas. The new technology looks and behaves quite similarly to the artificial leaf but works in a different way and produces formic acid.

While the artificial leaf used components from solar cells, the new device doesn’t require these components and relies solely on photocatalysts embedded on a sheet to produce a so-called photocatalyst sheet. The sheets are made up of semiconductor powders, which can be prepared in large quantities easily and cost-effectively.

In addition, this new technology is more robust and produces clean fuel that is easier to store and shows potential for producing fuel products at scale. The test unit is 20 square centimetres in size, but the researchers say that it should be relatively straightforward to scale it up to several square metres. In addition, the formic acid can be accumulated in solution, and be chemically converted into different types of fuel.

“We were surprised how well it worked in terms of its selectivity – it produced almost no by-products,” said Wang. “Sometimes things don’t work as well as you expected, but this was a rare case where it actually worked better.”

The carbon-dioxide converting cobalt-based catalyst is easy to make and relatively stable. While this technology will be easier to scale up than the artificial leaf, the efficiencies still need to be improved before any commercial deployment can be considered. The researchers are experimenting with a range of different catalysts to improve both stability and efficiency.

The current results were obtained in collaboration with the team of Professor Kazunari Domen from the University of Tokyo, a co-author of the study.

The researchers are now working to further optimise the system and improve efficiency. Additionally, they are exploring other catalysts for using on the device to get different solar fuels.

“We hope this technology will pave the way toward sustainable and practical solar fuel production,” said Reisner.

Reference:
Qian Wang et al. ‘Molecularly engineered photocatalyst sheet for scalable solar formate production from carbon dioxide and water.’ Nature Energy (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41560-020-0678-6

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

The researchers, from the Universities of Cambridge and Liverpool, and the Diamond Light Source, have identified one of the reasons why state-of-the-art ‘nickel-rich’ battery materials become fatigued, and can no longer be fully charged after prolonged use.

Their results, reported in the journal Nature Materials, open the door to the development of new strategies to improve battery lifespans.

As part of efforts to combat climate change, many countries have announced ambitious plans to replace petrol or diesel vehicles with electric vehicles (EVs) by 2050 or earlier.

The lithium-ion batteries used by EVs are likely to dominate the EV market for the foreseeable future, and nickel-rich lithium transition-metal oxides are the state-of-the-art choice for the positive electrode, or cathode, in these batteries.

Currently, most EV batteries contain significant amounts of cobalt in their cathode materials. However, cobalt can cause severe environmental damage, so researchers have been looking to replace it with nickel, which also offers higher practical capacities than cobalt. However, nickel-rich materials degrade much faster than existing technology and require additional study to be commercially viable for applications such as EVs.

“Unlike consumable electronics which typically have lifetimes of only a few years, vehicles are expected to last much longer and therefore it is essential to increase the lifetime of an EV battery,” said Dr Chao Xu from Cambridge’s Department of Chemistry, and the first author of the article. “That’s why a comprehensive, in-depth understanding of how they work and why they fail over a long time is crucial to improving their performance.”

To monitor the changes of the battery materials in real time over several months of battery testing, the researchers used laser technology to design a new coin cell, also known as button cell. “This design offers a new possibility of studying degradation mechanisms over a long period of cycling for many battery chemistries,” said Xu. During the study, the researchers found that a proportion of the cathode material becomes fatigued after repetitive charging and discharging of the cell, and the amount of the fatigued material increases as the cycling continues.

Xu and his colleagues dived deep into the structure of the material at the atomic scale to seek answers as to why such fatigue process occurs. “In order to fully function, battery materials need to expand and shrink as the lithium ions move in and out,” said Xu. “However, after prolonged use, we found that the atoms at the surface of the material had rearranged to form new structures that are no longer able to store energy.”

What’s worse is that these areas of reconstructed surface apparently act as stakes that pin the rest of the material in place and prevent it from the contraction which is required to reach the fully charged state. As a result, the lithium remains stuck in the lattice and this fatigued material can hold less charge.

With this knowledge, the researchers are now seeking effective countermeasures, such as protective coatings and functional electrolyte additives, to mitigate this degradation process and extend the lifetime of such batteries.

The research, led by Professor Clare P Grey from the Chemistry Department at Cambridge, has been supported by the Faraday Institution Degradation Project.

Reference:
Chao Xu et al. ‘Bulk fatigue induced by surface reconstruction in layered Ni-rich cathodes for Li-ion batteries.’ Nature Materials (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41563-020-0767-8

The ‘Stay Safe Cambridge Uni’ campaign has been developed by University, College and student representatives, and is based on the latest public health guidance. Additionally, Dr Simone Schnall from the Department of Psychology surveyed students and staff from across the University and Colleges to determine which messages were most effective.

A variety of resources, including University-specific guidance, and videos, are being made available to new and returning students and staff, to support them in keeping themselves, the University and the city as safe as possible during the pandemic.

Most of the measures being put in place by the University and Colleges will be familiar as part of a plan to reduce the risk of community spread of the coronavirus. Face coverings will be required in most buildings, and social distancing for people from different households will be encouraged. For most Colleges, a household will be classified as students living together and sharing communal facilities, such as toilets and showers. The University and Colleges will also advise students of their responsibilities while out and about in Cambridge and keep them up to date on the latest public health guidance.

The University has its own dedicated COVID-19 testing capacity, which is free to any member of the University displaying symptoms, along with members of their household. Testing is currently available at either Addenbrooke’s Hospital or the Department of Engineering.

“This year’s group of students – whether they are coming to Cambridge for the first time or returning to continue their studies – have been through an incredibly stressful few months, both because of the disruption caused by the pandemic and the confusion around exam results,” said Vice-Chancellor Professor Stephen Toope. “This academic year will be unlike any other, and it will be challenging for all of us, but we will do everything we can to make sure our students feel safe and supported while they are here.”

“We don’t yet know how long we will all be living with COVID-19, but we do know that our success in controlling the virus will depend on everyone playing their part,” said Professor Graham Virgo, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education. “We all have a responsibility to minimise the spread of COVID-19. We are members of a wider community and take our responsibility to others in Cambridge and beyond very seriously.”

The ‘Stay Safe Cambridge Uni’ campaign has been developed to complement Cambridge City Council’s ‘Stay Safe Cambridge’ campaign, which was introduced following the relaxation of lockdown in early July.

Cllr Lewis Herbert, Leader of Cambridge City Council, said: “The successful and safe return of students and university staff to Cambridge this autumn is vital for them and for our whole city. We have, as councils, been working in close partnership with our universities, so that everything is in place to protect people and to share sound advice to newcomers.

“Ensuring younger people keep safe as well as have fun and make the most of their time in Cambridge will boost our local fight to beat coronavirus and avoid the ongoing risks of both a fresh surge and the need for a lockdown in Cambridge. This is why we unequivocally endorse the efforts of our two University #StaySafe campaigns and the considerable thought and planning taking place, so that we and everyone in Cambridge can successfully deliver our #StaySafeCambridge campaign.”

Many postgraduate students, especially those whose research is lab-based, have already returned to Cambridge. Most undergraduate students will return at the start of Michaelmas term, which begins on 8 October. Many Colleges will be staggering student arrivals, so that social distancing can be maintained, especially for Colleges based in the city centre.

The Stay Safe Cambridge Uni webpages can be found at: www.cam.ac.uk/staysafecambridgeuni.

The University of Cambridge is one of the partners in a major new £32.4m Productivity Institute, announced today by the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. It is the largest economic and social research investment ever in the UK.

Productivity – the way ideas and labour are transformed into products and services that benefit society – has been lacklustre in the UK over recent decades, with limited growth stalled further by the global financial crisis of 2008-9 and the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

To address the urgent challenge, the new Institute will bring together institutions and researchers from across the country to tackle questions of job creation, sustainability and wellbeing, as the UK looks to a post-pandemic future full of technological and environmental upheaval.

Professor Diane Coyle, co-director of the University’s Bennett Institute for Public Policy will be one of the new Institute’s Directors and leading one of its eight major research themes. She will be heading up the strand on Knowledge Capital: the ideas that drive productivity and progress.

Professor Anna Vignoles from Cambridge’s Faculty of Education will helm another of the main research strands, on Human Capital: the cultivation of people’s skills and abilities. Both lead academics will be supported by a host of other Cambridge researchers from a variety of departments, including POLIS, Psychology, Economics, and the Institute for Manufacturing.

The Productivity Institute will be headquartered at the University of Manchester, and, along with Cambridge, other members of the leading consortium include the National Institute of Economic and Social Research and the universities of Glasgow, Sheffield, Cardiff and Warwick. The new Institute is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (part of UK Research and Innovation).

“Productivity is economic jargon for something fundamentally important,” said Professor Coyle. “This is the question of what will enable people’s lives everywhere to improve sustainably over time, ensuring new technologies, along with business and policy choices, bring widespread benefits.”

“Productivity is key to the creation of decent work and the provision of high quality education and healthcare. Its growth offers people sustainable improvements in their standard of living,” she said.

The Knowledge Capital theme, led by Coyle, will investigate the way that ideas and know-how – “intangible assets” not easily defined or measured – permeate our society and the economy.

“We want to understand better the links between productivity and things that are important but hard to pin down, whether that’s how businesses adopt new technologies and ideas or the role of social networks in determining how well different areas perform,” said Coyle.

Professor Vignoles will lead a team considering the importance of individuals’ wellbeing and productivity, which will include Cambridge psychologist Dr Simone Schnall. It remains an open question as to whether greater wellbeing can increase the productivity of individuals, and what the implications of this might be for both national policy and firms’ strategies.

“Increasing productivity is a pressing priority for the UK and understanding whether policies to improve individuals’ wellbeing are also likely to improve their productivity is crucial,” Professor Vignoles said.

The fulcrum for Cambridge’s involvement in the new Productivity Institute will be the University’s recently established Bennett Institute for Public Policy, where Professor Coyle is based.

Since its launch in 2018, the Bennett Institute has been concentrating on the “challenges posed by the productivity puzzle” in the UK, says the Institute’s Director Professor Michael Kenny, with a focus on ensuring notions of “place” are brought to the fore.

“We are delighted to be contributing to this major new initiative,” said Kenny. “Under the leadership of Professor Coyle, we have been working to understand the many different factors and dynamics which explain the well-springs of, and obstacles to, productivity growth.”

Professor Stephen Toope, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, said: “I am thrilled that the University will be playing a pivotal role in the new Productivity Institute.”

“The knowledge generated by universities such as ours is a fuel for productivity, and will be fundamental to the resilience of the United Kingdom, and the opportunities afforded its citizens, in a post-pandemic world.”

Science Minister Amanda Solloway said: “Improving productivity is central to driving forward our long-term economic recovery and ensuring that we level up wages and living standards across every part of the UK.”

Ice cores from Antarctica show that, in the span of less than two centuries, atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide jumped repeatedly at the end of the last ice age, when the Atlantic was continuously disturbed by melting ice sheets.

Whether these CO₂ jumps might occur in today’s conditions, when we are already seeing the impact of human-driven CO₂ emissions and rapidly melting polar ice sheets, has remained unknown.

The study, published in the journal Science and by researchers from the Universities of Cambridge, Bern and Grenoble Alpes, reveals that rapid CO₂ jumps also occurred during a period from 450,000 to 330,000 years ago, a key time in Earth’s history covering more than a full glacial cycle.

“By looking back further in time, to previous glacial and interglacial conditions, we find the same CO₂ jumps – irrespective of whether the climate was cold or warm,” said first author Dr Christoph Nehrbass-Ahles from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences, who conducted the research while based at the University of Bern.

These rapid CO₂ rises seem to be a common feature of the carbon cycle in the past. But, said Nehrbass-Ahles, human activities are releasing carbon a rate ten times faster than during CO₂ increases in the past. “What is unclear is how a future jump in carbon may interact with or exacerbate anthropogenic carbon emissions,” he said.

Central to the team’s finding was their detailed analysis of Antarctic ice from the EPICA (The European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica) Dome C ice core.

“Our previous understanding of rapid CO₂ changes has been hampered by a lack of detailed data over this interval – so these events were often missed,” said Nehrbass-Ahles. Thanks to a new gas extraction method and detailed sampling campaign, the team was able to identify subtle changes occurring at centennial timescales.

The study marks an important step in understanding what causes such abrupt increases and possible feedbacks in the Earth’s climate system. “Scientists are uncertain as to the mechanism behind the CO₂ jumps, but think a combination of factors, including ocean circulation, changing wind patterns, and terrestrial processes, are likely responsible,” said co-author Professor David Hodell, also from the Department of Earth Sciences.

The researchers combined the new ice core data with detailed information on ocean circulation from marine sediments collected off the coast of Portugal. The site, which was drilled as part of the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP), is unique for its high accumulation of sediments and is ideally situated for monitoring the changes in ocean circulation triggered when ice sheets collapsed.

The isotopic signal of the marine sediments showed the same pattern as the ice cores. “The abrupt changes are clearly represented in both the marine and ice records, telling us that they must be connected to major changes in the surface and deep circulation of the Atlantic Ocean,” said Hodell.

According to Nehrbass-Ahles, the key is the high resolution of the ice and marine sediments records, making observations of these rapid changes in both records possible. “Understanding these centennial-scale changes is crucial because they operate at a similar pace to the anthropogenic changes altering our planet,” he said.

Reference:
C. Nehrbass-Ahles et al. ‘Abrupt CO2 release to the atmosphere under glacial and early interglacial climate conditions.’ Science (2020). DOI: 10.1126/science.aay8178

The Last Glacial Period, between 115,000 and 11,700 years ago, was punctuated by a series of severe climate changes: warm periods where temperatures in Greenland spiked by 8-16°C over the course of a decade.

Data from the Greenland and Antarctic ice cores suggests that these warming events, known as Greenland Interstadials, occurred at least 25 times over this period. Their imprint has also been observed in climate records collected from mid to low latitudes, leading scientists to question whether these widespread changes were simultaneous, or whether warming in some regions lagged behind others.

But resolving this question has proved challenging because precisely dated records of past climate are relatively rare. And dating is key. If scientists could exactly pinpoint the relative timing of warming in different regions, they could answer whether the climate changed synchronously.

The study, published in the journal Science and led by University of Melbourne PhD student Ellen Corrick, uses detailed climate data from stalagmites (speleothems) to compare the timing of climate changes between regions. Stalagmites take in detailed information on regional temperature and rainfall as they grow, and they can also be dated accurately, often to decadal resolution, using the uranium-thorium technique.

Corrick compiled climate data from 63 speleothem records collected from caves across Asia, Europe and South America – a dataset amounting to 20 years’ of published research from scientific teams around the world. The onset of many Greenland Interstadials was clearly recognisable in the speleothem data, each event marked by a shift in the contents of stable oxygen isotope, δ18O.

To test if the changes were synchronous, the team used statistical methods to compare the age of onset for the interstadials. Once they were sure that intraregional changes were simultaneous, the team looked at the relative timing of interstadials between Asia, Europe and South America. The wider comparison showed that, out of the 25 interstadials studied, 23 were synchronous.

According to co-author Professor Eric Wolff from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences, the findings “provide confirmation of a persistent but, until now, unsubstantiated assumption that climate changes between the tropics and the Arctic were synchronous.”

The team went on to compare their speleothem data with model simulations of future abrupt climate changes. “An interesting feature of this study is how well the climate model outputs agree with the stalagmite data. This gives us increased confidence in the climate models we’ve built,” said co-authro Professor Xu Zhang from Lanzhou University China, who conducted model experiments at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany.

The findings shed light on the patterns and timing of these warming phases, also known as Dansgaard-Oeschger events. But their cause, whether external factors, such the ice sheet height, greenhouse gases, meltwater and volcanism, or internal oscillations in Atlantic Ocean circulation, remains, as yet, an open question.

Reference:
E. Corrick et al. ‘Synchronous timing of abrupt climate changes during the last glacial period.’ Science (2020). DOI: 10.1126/science.aay5538

Adapted from a press release by The University of Melbourne

Sleep paralysis is a state involving paralysis of the skeletal muscles that occurs at the onset of sleep or just before waking. While temporarily immobilised, the individual is acutely aware of their surroundings. People who experience the phenomenon often report being terrorised by dangerous bedroom intruders, often reaching for supernatural explanations such as ghosts, demons and even alien abduction. Unsurprisingly, it can be a terrifying experience.

As many as one in five people experiences sleep paralysis, which may be triggered by sleep deprivation, and is more frequent in psychiatric conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder. It is also common in narcolepsy, a sleep disorder involving excessive daytime sleepiness and sudden loss of muscle control.

Despite the condition being known about for some time, to date there are no empirically-based treatments or published clinical trials for the condition.

Today, in the journal Frontiers in Neurology, a team of researchers report a pilot study of meditation-relaxation therapy involving 10 patients with narcolepsy, all of whom experience sleep paralysis.

The therapy was originally developed by Dr Baland Jalal from the Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge. The current study was led by Dr Jalal and conducted in collaboration with Dr Giuseppe Plazzi’s group at the Department of Biomedical and Neuromotor Sciences, University of Bologna/IRCCS Istituto delle Scienze Neurologiche di Bologna, Italy.

The therapy teaches patients to follow four steps during an episode:

1. Reappraisal of the meaning of the attack – reminding themselves that the experience is common, benign, and temporary, and that the hallucinations are a typical by-product of dreaming
2. Psychological and emotional distancing – reminding themselves that there is no reason to be afraid or worried and that fear and worry will only make the episode worse
3. Inward focused-attention meditation – focusing their attention inward on an emotionally-involving, positive object (such as a memory of a loved one or event, a hymn/prayer, God)
4. Muscle relaxation – relaxing their muscles, avoiding controlling their breathing and under no circumstances attempting to move

Participants were instructed to keep a daily journal for four weeks to assess sleep paralysis occurrence, duration and emotions. Overall, among the 10 patients, two-thirds of cases (66%) reported hallucinations, often upon awakening from sleep (51%), and less frequently upon falling asleep (14%) as rated during the first four weeks.

After the four weeks, six participants completed mood/anxiety questionnaires and were taught the therapy techniques and instructed to rehearse these during ordinary wakefulness, twice a week for 15 min. The treatment lasted eight weeks.

In the first four weeks of the study, participants in the meditation-relaxation group experienced sleep paralysis on average 14 times over 11 days. The reported disturbance caused by their sleep paralysis hallucinations was 7.3 (rated on a ten-point scale with higher scores indicating greater severity).

In the final month of the therapy, the number of days with sleep paralysis fell to 5.5 (down 50%) and the total number of episodes fell to 6.5 (down 54%). There was also a notable tendency towards reductions in the disturbance caused by hallucinations with ratings dropping from 7.3 to 4.8.

A control group of four participants followed the same procedure, except participants engaged in deep breathing instead of the therapy – taking slow deep breaths, while repeatedly counting from one to ten.

In the control group, the number of days with sleep paralysis (4.3 per month at the start) was unchanged, as well as their total number of episodes (4.5 per month initially). The disturbance caused by hallucinations was likewise unchanged (rated 4 during the first four weeks).

“Although our study only involved a small number of patients, we can be cautiously optimistic of its success,” said Dr Jalal. “Meditation-relaxation therapy led to a dramatic fall in the number of times patients experienced sleep paralysis, and when they did, they tended to find the notoriously terrorising hallucinations less disturbing. Experiencing less of something as disturbing as sleep paralysis is a step in the right direction.”

If the researchers are able to replicate their findings in a larger number of people – including those from the general population, not affected by narcolepsy – then this could offer a relatively simple treatment that could be delivered online or via a smartphone to help patients cope with the condition.

“I know first-hand how terrifying sleep paralysis can be, having experienced it many times myself,” said Dr Jalal. “But for some people, the fear that it can instil in them can be extremely unpleasant, and going to bed, which should be a relaxing experience, can become fraught with terror. This is what motivated me to devise this intervention.”

Reference
Jalal, B et al. Meditation-Relaxation (MR Therapy) for Sleep Paralysis:  A Pilot Study in Patients with Narcolepsy. Frontiers in Neurology; 12 Aug 2020; DOI: 10.3389/fneur.2020.00922

Have you ever spilled your coffee on your desk? You may then have observed one of the most puzzling phenomena of fluid mechanics – the coffee ring effect. This effect has hindered the industrial deployment of functional inks with graphene, 2D materials, and nanoparticles because it makes printed electronic devices behave irregularly.

Now, after studying this process for years, a team of researchers have created a new family of inks that overcomes this problem, enabling the fabrication of new electronics such as sensors, light detectors, batteries and solar cells.

Coffee rings form because the liquid evaporates quicker at the edges, causing an accumulation of solid particles that results in the characteristic dark ring. Inks behave like coffee – particles in the ink accumulate around the edges creating irregular shapes and uneven surfaces, especially when printing on hard surfaces like silicon wafers or plastics.

Researchers, led by Tawfique Hasan from the Cambridge Graphene Centre of the University of Cambridge, with Colin Bain from the Department of Chemistry of Durham University, and Meng Zhang from School of Electronic and Information Engineering of Beihang University, studied the physics of ink droplets combining particle tracking in high-speed micro-photography, fluid mechanics, and different combinations of solvents.

Their solution: alcohol, specifically a mixture of isopropyl alcohol and 2-butanol. Using these, ink particles tend to distribute evenly across the droplet, generating shapes with uniform thickness and properties. Their results are reported in the journal Science Advances.

“The natural form of ink droplets is spherical – however, because of their composition, our ink droplets adopt pancake shapes,” said Hasan.

While drying, the new ink droplets deform smoothly across the surface, spreading particles consistently. Using this universal formulation, manufacturers could adopt inkjet printing as a cheap, easy-to-access strategy for the fabrication of electronic devices and sensors. The new inks also avoid the use of polymers or surfactants – commercial additives used to tackle the coffee ring effect, but at the same time thwart the electronic properties of graphene and other 2D materials.

Most importantly, the new methodology enables reproducibility and scalability – researchers managed to print 4500 nearly identical devices on a silicon wafer and plastic substrate. In particular, they printed gas sensors and photodetectors, both displaying very little variations in performance. Previously, printing a few hundred such devices was considered a success, even if they showed uneven behaviour.

“Understanding this fundamental behaviour of ink droplets has allowed us to find this ideal solution for inkjet printing all kinds of two-dimensional crystals,” said first author Guohua Hu. “Our formulation can be easily scaled up to print new electronic devices on silicon wafers, or plastics, and even in spray painting and wearables, already matching or exceeding the manufacturability requirements for printed devices.”

Beyond graphene, the team has optimised over a dozen ink formulations containing different materials. Some of them are graphene two-dimensional ‘cousins’ such as black phosphorus and boron nitride, others are more complex structures like heterostructures – ‘sandwiches’ of different 2D materials – and nanostructured materials. Researchers say their ink formulations can also print pure nanoparticles and organic molecules.This variety of materials could boost the manufacturing of electronic and photonic devices, as well as more efficient catalysts, solar cells, batteries and functional coatings.

The team expects to see industrial applications of this technology very soon. Their first proofs of concept – printed sensors and photodetectors – have shown promising results in terms of sensitivity and consistency, exceeding the usual industry requirements. This should attract investors interested in printed and flexible electronics.

“Our technology could speed up the adoption of inexpensive, low-power, ultra-connected sensors for the internet of things,” said Hasan. “The dream of smart cities will come true.”

The research was funded by the EPSRC, InnovateUK and the Royal Society.

Reference:
G. Hu et al. ‘A general ink formulation of 2D crystals for wafer-scale inkjet printing.’ Science Advances (2020). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aba5029.

Meat-heavy diets not only risk our health but that of the planet, as livestock farming on a massive scale destroys habitats and generates greenhouse gases.

Conservationists at the University of Cambridge are investigating ways of “nudging” people towards eating more plants and less meat, to help curb the environmental damage caused by excessive consumption of animal products.

The researchers experimented on customers in the cafeterias of two Cambridge colleges to find out whether the position of vegetarian options influences the uptake of plant-based dining.

They collected and analysed data from 105,143 meal selections over a two-year period, alternating the placement of meat and veg dishes every week, and then changing the pattern to every month.

The size of the study is unprecedented. A previous review of various studies using “choice architecture” to reduce meat intake only reached a combined total of 11,290 observations.

The researchers found that simply placing veggie before meat in the order of meal options as people entered the serving area did little to boost green eating in one of the colleges.

In the other college, however, the sales of plant-based dishes shot up by a quarter (25.2%) in the weekly analysis, and by almost 40% (39.6) in the monthly comparison.

The difference: almost a metre of added distance between the vegetarian and meat options, with an 85cm gap in the first college compared to a 181cm gap in the second. The findings are published today in the journal Nature Food.

“Reducing meat and dairy consumption is one of the simplest and most impactful choices we can make to protect the climate, environment and other species,” said study lead author Emma Garnett, a conservationist from Cambridge’s Department of Zoology.

“We’ve got to make better choices easier for people. We hope to see these findings used by catering managers and indeed anyone interested in cafeteria and menu design that promotes more climate friendly diets.”

The latest research follows on from work by Garnett and colleagues published last autumn, which showed that adding an extra veggie option in cafeterias cuts meat consumption without denting overall sales.

Livestock and aquacultures behind meat, fish, dairy and eggs are responsible for some 58% of the greenhouse gas created by global food, and take up 83% of farmland despite contributing to just 18% of the world’s calorie intake.

Recently, Cambridge researchers recommended eating less meat to reduce the risk of future pandemics, and the UK’s public sector caterers pledged to cut the amount of meat used in schools and hospitals by 20%.

The experiments were conducted across two colleges – one with 600 students and one with 900 students – where cafeteria customers were presented with vegetarian and meat options in differing orders for weekday lunch and dinner.

College members take a tray, view the meals on offer, and then ask serving staff to dish up their preferred options. Food is purchased by swiping a university card, and the researchers gathered anonymised data on main meal selections only (sandwiches and salads went uncounted).

While the catering managers helped to set the experiments up, the diners remained unaware.

The researchers had expected to see a difference in vegetarian sales through order alone, but it was only in the college with the extra metre – the 181cm gap – between food options that recorded an uptick when arranged “Veg First”.

To confirm the findings, researchers reduced the gap in this cafeteria to just 67cm, and vegetarian sales fell sharply. In fact, with such a small gap, vegetarian dishes fared even worse when put first in line (falling almost 30% compared to “Meat First” days).

“We think the effect of the metre may be down to the additional effort required to seek out meat. If the first bite is with the eye, then many people seem perfectly happy with an appetising veggie option when meat is harder to spot,” said Garnett.

“All cafeterias and restaurants have a design that ‘nudges’ people towards something. So it is sensible to use designs that make the healthiest and most sustainable food options the easiest to pick without thinking about it,” she said.

“We know that information alone is generally not enough to get us to change damaging habits. More research is needed on how to set up our society so that the self-interested default decision is the best one for the climate.”

Garnett’s research has contributed to food policy at the University of Cambridge, where the catering service has worked to reduce the amount of meat it uses.

Last year, University cafeterias (separate from the colleges) announced a 33% reduction in carbon emissions per kilogram of food purchased, and a 28% reduction in land use per kilogram of food purchased.

The engineers, from the Institute of Manufacturing and the Whittle Laboratory, are among the 19 winners announced today for exceptional engineering achievements in tackling COVID-19 in the UK. In addition, two Cambridge alumni, Dr Ravi Solanki and Raymond Siems, were recognised for their work with the HEROES charity. In less than two days, their team turned an idea into a platform with genuine impact: a secure website through which more than 543,000 items of much-needed support have been provided to NHS workers, from sustainable PPE to counselling services and child care.

The awards have been made to teams, organisations, individuals, collaborations and projects across all technical specialities, disciplines and career stages within the UK engineering community who have contributed to addressing the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Open Ventilator System Initiative

The team behind the Open Ventilator System Initiative was recognised for their development of a high-performance ventilator for manufacture in low and middle-income countries that became the first intensive care quality ventilator to be manufactured in Africa.

In March 2020, as Covid-19 infection rates were rising dramatically in Europe, the number of infections in many low- and medium-income countries remained low. However, it was predicted that towards the summer these rates would start to increase. This was especially worrying due to the low number of ventilators available in the developing world.

In response to these fears, a team at the University of Cambridge and a number of companies within the Cambridge cluster designed a high-performance intensive care ventilator for manufacture in low and middle-income countries. The aim was to develop a ventilator with a price point that was a factor of 10 lower than what was currently available, which could be manufactured from readily available components and which could be manufactured in-country. The result was the first clinical grade ventilator to be manufactured in Africa.

An engineering team led by Dr Tashiv Ramsander at Cambridge Aerothermal Ltd was quickly assembled at the Whittle Laboratory, and comprised people from several departments at the University of Cambridge and a range of local companies including Cambridge Aerothermal, Beko R&D, Cambridge Instrumentation and Interneuron.

Together, this multidisciplinary team was able to solve problems such as the design of a pressure relief valve, inspired by the mixing nozzles on the Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 aircraft engine. The design removed flow instabilities, resulting in a more stable operation than any commercially available valve.

The clinically driven design was developed with the help of two senior intensive care clinicians with experience of treating COVID-19. They argued that a design for developing countries needed to be more versatile than the UK government specification and the final design can operate in non-invasive, mandatory or patient-triggered ventilation modes.

For more than eight years the Whittle Laboratory has been developing a rapid technology development process for the aerospace and power generation sectors. During the pandemic this process was switched to develop a clinical grade ventilator within a week and allowing a rapid response to design changes driven by the pandemic, cost reduction and clinical demand.

The final Open Ventilator design can be manufactured mostly from standard parts, anywhere in the world that it is needed.

The reach and impact of COVID-19 in developing countries is not yet known, but this new design – the first intensive care quality ventilator to be manufactured in Africa – could prove to be a gamechanger when it comes to a host of conditions including pneumonia, as well as COVID-19. Childhood pneumonia killed 162,000 children in Nigeria alone in 2018.

There are very few ventilators in Africa, due to their high cost, inability to operate in harsh environments and a lack of local maintenance expertise. The team realised these problems could be solved by manufacturing the equipment in Africa. The Cambridge engineering team assembled a wider manufacturing team that includes Defy and Denel Land Systems in South Africa, Beko R&D and Prodrive in the UK and Arçelik in Turkey. This team delivered the first 20 preproduction ventilators in South Africa in June.

“The result is a design that will save countless lives in the developing world where ventilators are scarce and many that exist cannot achieve the quality of performance that the Open Ventilator offers,” said Professor Richard Prager, head of the Department of Engineering. “It is a scalable solution. The high-performance open-source design will enable companies across the world to make systems wherever they are needed, and at a price that is compatible with the local healthcare systems.”

Institute for Manufacturing

The IfM team helped local hospitals to make the best use of their resources, streamlining logistics for sourcing and storing vital PPE, informing decision-making on emergency demand, and developing a ventilator sharing system to be used in emergencies.

As hospitals scrambled to make the necessary operational changes needed to accommodate COVID-19 patients, a team of staff and students from the Institute for Manufacturing (IfM) at the University of Cambridge was there to help. Working with clinicians and senior healthcare managers to assess the immediate and emerging operational challenges facing local hospitals, they identified where these could be addressed through the application of engineering capabilities and coordinated the roll-out of solutions.

The IfM team addressed three groups of tasks between March and May in the areas of hospital logistics, personal protective equipment (PPE) delivery and intensive care unit (ICU) equipment development.

In the hospital logistics area, the team applied industrial engineering approaches to COVID-related challenges including modelling in-hospital patient flows, redesigning COVID-19 testing procedures and managing oxygen supplies to the wards.

Understanding oxygen flow through the local hospital involved examining pipes and their layout, then analysing usage by ventilator type and patient need, as well as modelling supply and demand. The in-depth work of the IfM team enabled the hospital’s clinical and estates teams to identify and address various bottlenecks and improve operational efficiency.

The team also looked at the design, setup and management of a temporary logistics hub for coordinating the delivery of millions of items of donated PPE and assessed the production capabilities of local manufacturers to increase flexibility of PPE supplies for local hospitals.

In conjunction with anaesthetists at Royal Papworth Hospital, they also devised an active ventilator sharing system in case there were not enough ventilators available during the COVID-19 outbreak. This involved the accelerated design, prototyping and in-hospital testing of an active ventilator sharing system in just four weeks.

Duncan McFarlane, Professor of Industrial Information Engineering at the IfM, led the team as they engaged with senior clinical and management teams within local hospitals to understand their needs and implement effective and collaborative ways of working. This involved joining the hospital’s regular operations planning meetings and running daily project reviews with key hospital personnel during the peak COVID-19 surge, as well as working directly with clinicians in areas such as COVID-19 test processes, ward oxygen supply, and equipment design.

The IfM team helped local hospitals make the best use of their resources and streamlined logistics for sourcing and storing vital PPE and other issues, enabling healthcare providers who were already feeling the strain to address pressing operational challenges.

In addition, the IfM provided analytical approaches for informing decision making at Cambridge University Hospital (CUH) on emergency demand. The Trust is also using the team’s findings to forecast changes to demand for beds, equipment and staff when social distancing measures are relaxed or modified further. The hospital said the engineers brought diversity of perspective and a joint CUH–IfM panel has been initiated so that the hospitals and the IfM can continue working together for mutual benefit after the pandemic.

“The team gave key support efficiently and skilfully when it was most needed, with no fuss and maximum impact: engineering at its best,” said Professor Prager. “The team found a way to work with the clinicians without taking up too much clinical time. They found the problems that needed solving and got on with solving them. They stepped up when they were needed and made a real difference. For this, we should be proud of them.”

Professor Tim Minshall, Dr John C Taylor Professor of Innovation and Head of the Institute for Manufacturing, said: “It makes me so proud to see the way in which our students and staff – academic, research and administrative – were able to rapidly understand and help address the operational challenges facing the amazing teams at Addenbrooke’s and Royal Papworth during this crisis.

“We are also delighted that there is such enthusiasm from both CUH and the IfM to build upon this experience and to develop ongoing collaboration in applying industrial engineering capabilities to healthcare system needs.”

The second phase of the Get In Cambridge campaign – created to help widen the University’s pool of applicants by giving Year 11 and 12 pupils the facts about studying at Cambridge – launches this week, featuring Cambridge undergraduates from the same communities the new videos are aimed at, and including footage shot by the students themselves.

Despite the progress the University has made in attracting more students from diverse backgrounds – with the number of British Black and Minority Ethnic undergraduate students admitted reaching a record 26.8% this year – students from UK Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities make up the most under-represented groups at the University. UK Pakistani students represented 1.3% of new undergraduates in 2019, and UK Bangladeshi students, 1.1%.

In the new films, 10 Cambridge students, who went to state schools in London, Manchester and Bradford before arriving at Cambridge to study subjects including English, History and Classics, compare the perceptions they had of the University as sixth formers with the reality of their lived experience. The films follow them in lectures, prayer spaces and at University cultural and religious society events, as they make it clear that concerns over cultural barriers can be overcome at Cambridge, religious practices can be observed, and people don’t have to change who they are to fit in.

The series – funded philanthropically by alumni – also includes six ‘Myth vs Reality’ videos which, among others, challenge the myth that Cambridge is more expensive to study at than other universities, and highlight the opportunity to choose a women-only college.

Psychological and Behavioural Sciences student Zainab, one of the students featured in the videos, said: “My perception of Cambridge was that it was all middle-class and white, that it wasn’t somewhere for a little brown girl from Bradford. Your parents have fears too – they think you’re going to lose your identity if you come here, that the person you are will disappear.

“But I feel like my faith and my cultural identity has actually been strengthened because of the spaces at Cambridge – the Cambridge Islamic Society and the cultural societies like the Pakistan Society and the Bangla Society. You meet so many different people, and you’re not on your own; there are people who look like you, who talk like you, and you do find them.”

The videos – filmed this year before the COVID-19 lockdown – encourage sixth formers to find out more about Cambridge during virtual Open Days being hosted by the University and Colleges on 17 and 18 September.

Director of the Cambridge Admissions Office Jon Beard said: “We are taking a new approach with the second phase of the Get In Cambridge films, using different social media channels to reach prospective students in a more targeted way – teenagers who up until now might never have considered Cambridge as an option.

“At a recent Open Day event, a Muslim sixth former asked whether Cambridge students can wear headscarves. The answer is of course ‘yes’, but the question made us realise there are a lot of myths that persist about studying at Cambridge and we need to continue to work hard to dispel them.

“In the new films, current undergraduates discuss issues we know are important to a lot of sixth formers thinking of applying, such as what kinds of food are available in colleges, what living arrangements are like, and the key question: ‘Will there be anyone else like me at Cambridge?’ Again, the answer is ‘yes’ – and we hope these films will help get that message across.”

Despite the challenges presented by the COVID-9 pandemic, the University remains committed to continuing its work to widen access.

An extensive programme of outreach activities aims to inspire young students who may have previously been put off applying, and the University works closely with partner organisations such as The Sutton Trust and Target Oxbridge. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, these activities have this year been moved online. The virtual Open Days taking place in September – along with those that took place in July – are part of this approach.

Get In Cambridge

Cambridge launched social media campaign Get In Cambridge last year to help increase diversity in the undergraduate body. The target audience are those from backgrounds underrepresented at Cambridge, plus their influencers, which range from students at schools with low numbers of pupils going on to university, to the UK’s black, Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities.

Cambridge alumna and YouTube vlogger Courtney Daniella fronted the launch last summer, and in five films described her journey to Cambridge from her single-parent family on a North London council estate.

This research, conducted using data from over 600,000 adult individuals, confirms previous smaller scale studies from clinics. The results are published today in Nature Communications.

A better understanding of gender diversity in autistic individuals will help provide better access to health care and post-diagnostic support for autistic transgender and gender-diverse individuals.

The team used five different datasets, including a dataset of over 500,000 individuals collected as a part of the Channel 4 documentary “Are you autistic?”. In these datasets, participants had provided information about their gender identity, and if they received a diagnosis of autism or other psychiatric conditions such as depression or schizophrenia. Participants also completed a measure of autistic traits.

Strikingly, across all five datasets, the team found that transgender and gender-diverse adult individuals were between three and six times more likely to indicate that they were diagnosed as autistic compared to cisgender individuals. While the study used data from adults who indicated that they had received an autism diagnosis, it is likely that many individuals on the autistic spectrum may be undiagnosed. As around 1.1% of the UK population is estimated to be on the autistic spectrum, this result would suggest that somewhere between 3.5.-6.5% of transgender and gender-diverse adults is on the autistic spectrum.

Dr Meng-Chuan Lai, a collaborator on the study at the University of Toronto, said: “We are beginning to learn more about how the presentation of autism differs in cisgender men and women. Understanding how autism manifests in transgender and gender-diverse people will enrich our knowledge about autism in relation to gender and sex. This enables clinicians to better recognize autism and provide personalised support and health care.”

Transgender and gender-diverse individuals were also more likely to indicate that they had received diagnoses of mental health conditions, particularly depression, which they were more than twice as likely as their cisgender counterparts to have experienced. Transgender and gender-diverse individuals also, on average, scored higher on measures of autistic traits compared to cisgender individuals, regardless of whether they had an autism diagnosis.

Dr Varun Warrier, who led the study, said: “This finding, using large datasets, confirms that the co-occurrence between being autistic and being transgender and gender-diverse is robust. We now need to understand the significance of this co-occurrence, and identify and address the factors that contribute to well-being of this group of people.”

The study investigates the co-occurrence between gender identity and autism. The team did not investigate if one causes the other.

Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, Director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge, and a member of the team, said: “Both autistic individuals and transgender and gender-diverse individuals are marginalized and experience multiple vulnerabilities. It is important that we safe-guard the rights of these individuals to be themselves, receive the requisite support, and enjoy equality and celebration of their differences, free of societal stigma or discrimination.”

Dr Warrier is a Research Fellow at St Catharine’s College and Professor Baron Cohen is a Fellow at Trinity College.

This study was supported by the Autism Research Trust, the Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, and the Templeton World Charity Foundation., Inc. It was conducted in association with the NIHR CLAHRC for Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust, and the NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre.

Reference
Warrier, V et al. Elevated rates of autism, other neurodevelopmental and psychiatric diagnoses and autistic traits in transgender and gender-diverse individuals. Nat Comms; 7 Aug 2020; DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-17794-1

This is according to experts at the University of Cambridge, who suggest that current portrayals and stereotypes about AI risk creating a “racially homogenous” workforce of aspiring technologists, building machines with bias baked into their algorithms.

They say that cultural depictions of AI as White need to be challenged, as they do not offer a “post-racial” future but rather one from which people of colour are simply erased.

The researchers, from Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI), say that AI, like other science fiction tropes, has always reflected the racial thinking in our society.

They argue that there is a long tradition of crude racial stereotypes when it comes to extraterrestrials – from the “orientalised” alien of Ming the Merciless to the Caribbean caricature of Jar Jar Binks.

But artificial intelligence is portrayed as White because, unlike species from other planets, AI has attributes used to “justify colonialism and segregation” in the past: superior intelligence, professionalism and power.

“Given that society has, for centuries, promoted the association of intelligence with White Europeans, it is to be expected that when this culture is asked to imagine an intelligent machine it imagines a White machine,” said Dr Kanta Dihal, who leads CFI’s ‘Decolonising AI’ initiative.

“People trust AI to make decisions. Cultural depictions foster the idea that AI is less fallible than humans. In cases where these systems are racialised as White that could have dangerous consequences for humans that are not,” she said.

Together with her colleague Dr Stephen Cave, Dihal is the author of a new paper on the case for decolonising AI, published today in the journal Philosophy and Technology.

The paper brings together recent research from a range of fields, including Human-Computer Interaction and Critical Race Theory, to demonstrate that machines can be racialised, and that this perpetuates “real world” racial biases.

This includes work on how robots are seen to have distinct racial identities, with Black robots receiving more online abuse, and a study showing that people feel closer to virtual agents when they perceive shared racial identity.

“One of the most common interactions with AI technology is through virtual assistants in devices such as smartphones, which talk in standard White middle-class English,” said Dihal. “Ideas of adding Black dialects have been dismissed as too controversial or outside the target market.”

The researchers conducted their own investigation into search engines, and found that all non-abstract results for AI had either Caucasian features or were literally the colour white.

A typical example of AI imagery adorning book covers and mainstream media articles is Sophia: the hyper-Caucasian humanoid declared an “innovation champion” by the UN development programme. But this is just a recent iteration say researchers.

“Stock imagery for AI distills the visualizations of intelligent machines in western popular culture as it has developed over decades,” said Cave, Executive Director of CFI.

“From Terminator to Blade Runner, Metropolis to Ex Machina, all are played by White actors or are visibly White onscreen. Androids of metal or plastic are given white features, such as in I, Robot. Even disembodied AI – from HAL-9000 to Samantha in Her – have White voices. Only very recently have a few TV shows, such as Westworld, used AI characters with a mix of skin tones.”

Cave and Dihal point out that even works clearly based on slave rebellion, such as Blade Runner, depict their AIs as White. “AI is often depicted as outsmarting and surpassing humanity,” said Dihal. “White culture can’t imagine being taken over by superior beings resembling races it has historically framed as inferior.”

“Images of AI are not generic representations of human-like machines: their Whiteness is a proxy for their status and potential,” added Dihal.

“Portrayals of AI as White situate machines in a power hierarchy above currently marginalized groups, and relegate people of colour to positions below that of machines. As machines become increasingly central to automated decision-making in areas such as employment and criminal justice, this could be highly consequential.”

“The perceived Whiteness of AI will make it more difficult for people of colour to advance in the field. If the developer demographic does not diversify, AI stands to exacerbate racial inequality.”

By allowing farmers to diversify their portfolio, this novel system could offer financial protection from fluctuations in market prices or changes in demand, and mitigate risks associated with an unreliable climate. On a larger scale it could vastly increase capacity for solar-powered electricity generation without compromising agricultural production.

This is not the first time that crops and electricity have been produced simultaneously using semi-transparent solar panels – a technique called ‘agrivoltaics’. But in a novel adaptation, the researchers used orange-tinted panels to make best use of the wavelengths – or colours – of light that could pass through them.

The tinted solar panels absorb blue and green wavelengths to generate electricity. Orange and red wavelengths pass through, allowing plants underneath to grow. While the crop receives less than half the total amount of light it would get if grown in a standard agricultural system, the colours passing through the panels are the ones most suitable for its growth.

“For high value crops like basil, the value of the electricity generated just compensates for the loss in biomass production caused by the tinted solar panels. But when the value of the crop was lower, like spinach, there was a significant financial advantage to this novel agrivoltaic technique,” said Dr Paolo Bombelli, a researcher in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Biochemistry, who led the study.

The combined value of the spinach and electricity produced using the tinted agrivoltaic system was 35% higher than growing spinach alone under normal growing conditions. By contrast, the gross financial gain for basil grown in this way was only 2.5%. The calculations used current market prices: basil sells for around five times more than spinach. The value of the electricity produced was calculated by assuming it would be sold to the Italian national grid, where the study was conducted.

“Our calculations are a fairly conservative estimate of the overall financial value of this system. In reality if a farmer were buying electricity from the national grid to run their premises then the benefit would be much greater,” said Professor Christopher Howe in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Biochemistry, who was also involved in the research.

The study found the saleable yield of basil grown under the tinted solar panels reduced by 15%, and spinach reduced by around 26%, compared to under normal growing conditions. However, the spinach roots grew far less than their stems and leaves: with less light available, the plants were putting their energy into growing their ‘biological solar panels’ to capture the light.

Laboratory analysis of the spinach and basil leaves grown under the panels revealed both had a higher concentration of protein. The researchers think the plants could be producing extra protein to boost their ability to photosynthesise under reduced light conditions. In an additional adaptation to the reduced light, longer stems produced by spinach could make harvesting easier by lifting the leaves further from the soil.

“From a farmer’s perspective, it’s beneficial if your leafy greens grow larger leaves – this is the edible part of the plant that can be sold. And as global demand for protein continues to grow, techniques that can increase the amount of protein from plant crops will also be very beneficial,” said Bombelli.

“With so many crops currently grown under transparent covers of some sort, there is no loss of land to the extra energy production using tinted solar panels,” said Dr Elinor Thompson at the University of Greenwich, and lead author of the study.

All green plants use the process of photosynthesis to convert light from the sun into chemical energy that fuels their growth. The experiments were carried out in Italy using two trial crops. Spinach (Spinacia oleracea) represented a winter season crop: it can grow with fewer daylight hours and can tolerate colder weather. Basil (Ocimum basilicum) represented a summer season crop, requiring lots of light and higher temperatures.

The researchers are currently discussing further trials of the system to understand how well it would work for other crops, and how growth under predominantly red and orange light affects the crops at the molecular level.

This research was conducted in partnership with Polysolar Ltd. It was funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the Italian Ministry of University and Research.

Reference
Thompson, E. et al: Tinted Semi-Transparent Solar Panels allow Concurrent Production of Crops and Electricity on the Same Cropland. Advanced Energy Materials, 2 Aug 2020. DOI: 10.1002/aenm.202001189

The tool, called a Polygenic Risk Score (PRS), separates people into different risk groups based on their genetic sequence to predict their future risk of developing breast cancer. The results can empower women to decide which screening and prevention is right for them, and help reduce inefficiency, unnecessary cost, and even possible harm caused by over-diagnosis.

This is the first large study of the PRS in an Asian population. Previously, Asian studies were nearly six times smaller than studies in European women, and due to lack of data in Asians it was unclear if PRSs are effective in predicting breast cancer risk in non-European women.

“We have been developing a model for predicting breast cancer risk in European women that includes the PRS and this is now approved for clinical use. This study is the first big step towards enabling the use of such tools in the clinical management of women of Asian ancestry,” said Professor Antonis Antoniou at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Public Health and Primary Care, and co-lead of the study.

Through the significant increase in data from Malaysia and Singapore, PRSs have been shown to help identify more accurately who is at high risk of breast cancer. The results suggest that only 30% of Malaysian and Singaporean women have a predicted risk similar to that of European women, and that using the PRS accurately identifies these high-risk women. The study is published today in the journal Nature Communications.

“Combining genetic factors into one comprehensive model is critical to move from the research to a tool for women to use. We evaluated the PRS in 45,212 Asian women, from Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, Korea, China, Hong Kong, Thailand, Taiwan, USA, and Canada. Studies such as these require large sample sizes, and so, bringing together patients from University Malaya, Subang Jaya Medical Centre, National University Hospital, Singapore, and six other major treatment centres in Singapore really gave us the sample size to be able to evaluate the tool in Asians,” said Associate Professor Ho Weang Kee at the University of Nottingham in Malaysia, and first author of the study.

Women are generally recommended to start screening at age 50. However, in most Asian countries, many women who could be at risk of breast cancer do not go for screening. This leads to late detection and a lower survival rate.

“Our study is a critical piece of the puzzle that helps us better understand breast cancer risks in different women around the world. There are differences in the genetic make-up of Asian women compared to women of European descent, which means their propensity to develop breast cancer may be different. Understanding this can help us to work out why some women are at higher risk of the disease, which in turn should help us to improve screening, prevention and ultimately treatment of the disease,” said Professor Douglas Easton, Director of the Centre for Cancer Genetic Epidemiology at the University of Cambridge, and co-lead of the study.

There is an urgent need to develop an appropriate screening strategy for Asian women. Malaysia anticipates a 49% increase in breast cancer cases from 2012 to 2025. Malaysia has a much lower five-year survival rate compared to other Asian countries at only 63%, whereas South Korea is at 92% and Singapore is at 80%.

“Risk-based screening may be particularly important in low- and middle-resource countries that do not have population-based screening, such as Malaysia. Without the funding for population-based screening, identifying individuals with higher risk may be an important strategy for early detection,” said Professor Nur Aishah Mohd Taib, Universiti Malaya Cancer Research Institute, Malaysia.

The study involved a collaboration between Cancer Research Malaysia, the University of Nottingham, the University of Cambridge, the Universiti Malaya, Subang Jaya Medical Centre, National University Health System, Genome Institute of Singapore, six hospitals in Singapore, and a large population-based prospective cohort from Singapore.

The work was funded by the Medical Research Council and Academy of Sciences Malaysia via the Newton-Ungku Omar Fund, the Wellcome Trust Collaborative Science Award, Yayasan Sime Darby, Yayasan PETRONAS, and Estee Lauder Group of Companies.

Adapted from a press release by Cancer Research Malaysia.

The test, which can be carried out by a nurse in a GP surgery, is also better at picking up abnormal cells and potentially early-stage cancer.

Barrett’s oesophagus is a condition that can lead to oesophageal cancer in a small number of people. It’s usually diagnosed in hospital by endoscopy – passing a camera down into the stomach – following a GP referral for longstanding heartburn symptoms.

The Cytosponge test, developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge, is a small pill with a thread attached that the patient swallows, which expands into a small sponge when it reaches the stomach. This is quickly pulled back up the throat by a nurse, collecting cells from the oesophagus for analysis using a laboratory marker called TFF3.

The pill is a quick, simple and well tolerated test that can be performed in a GP surgery and helps tell doctors who needs an endoscopy. This can spare many people from having potentially unnecessary endoscopies.

In a study funded by Cancer Research UK, the researchers studied 13,222 participants who were randomly allocated to the sponge test or were looked after by a GP in the usual way. Over the course of a year, the odds of detecting Barrett’s were ten times higher in those offered the Cytosponge with 140 cases diagnosed compared to 13 in usual care. In addition, the Cytosponge diagnosed five cases of early cancer (stage 1 and 2), whereas only one case of early cancer was detected in the GP group.

Alongside better detection, the test means cancer patients can benefit from less severe treatment options if their cancer is caught at a much earlier stage.

“It’s taken almost a decade of research and testing thousands of patients to show that we’ve developed a better route to diagnosing Barrett’s oesophagus,” said Professor Rebecca Fitzgerald from the Medical Research Council Cancer Unit at the University of Cambridge, who led the research. “And the sponge could also be a game-changer in how we diagnose and ensure more people survive oesophageal cancer. Compared with endoscopies performed in hospital, the Cytosponge causes minimal discomfort and is a quick, simple test that can be done by a GP. Our test is already being piloted around the country, so we hope more people across the UK could benefit from it.”

Because COVID-19 has reduced the number of endoscopies that can be carried out by the NHS, Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge has already fast-tracked the Cytosponge into use in order to help identify priority cases with suspected cancer who need further tests urgently.

The researchers are currently putting the Cytosponge test through an economic evaluation and hope that it will be rolled out within GP practices within three to five years. It’s expected that the Cytosponge will be offered by GPs to patients on medication for acid reflux symptoms.

Professor Peter Sasieni, whose King’s College London team have been leading the clinical evaluation of the Cytosponge over the last decade, said: “The results of this trial exceeded my most optimistic expectations. Use of Professor Fitzgerald’s simple invention will hopefully lead to a significant reduction in the number of people dying from oesophageal cancer over the next 20 years. This trial found that both patients and staff were happy with the Cytosponge test and it is practical to consider rolling it out within the NHS.”

“It’s great news for patients that there’s proven benefit to taking the Cytosponge test, and they won’t have to undergo a potentially uncomfortable endoscopy unless it’s needed,” said Dr Julie Sharp, Cancer Research UK’s head of health and patient information. “We hope that people will be able to access the Cytosponge from their GP as soon as possible. It will also help doctors enormously, as it will allow them to more accurately predict if someone is at risk of oesophageal cancer.

Around 9,200 people are diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in the UK each year and around 7,900 sadly die. Early diagnosis is crucial to patients’ survival and a shift in stage can have a large impact on outcomes. 85% of people diagnosed with the earliest stage of oesophageal cancer in England survive their cancer for 1 year or more. This figure drops to 21% if the cancer is diagnosed at the most advanced stage.

Liz Chipchase, a retired scientist from Cambridge, was one of the people who took part in the Cytosponge clinical trial. She felt in good health, but abnormalities were discovered and she was referred for further tests. Not only did she have Barrett’s oesophagus, she also had cancer.

“If I hadn’t been invited and gone on the trial, I would’ve had no idea that I needed treatment for an early stage cancer. And I’m also aware that the survival rate for oesophageal cancer isn’t good, so the fact I am clear of cancer is wonderful.

“I feel so lucky thinking about the chain of events that led to the cancer being caught when it was. To me, this trial saved my life.”

The BEST3 study was primarily funded by Cancer Research UK (CRUK). The National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) covered service support costs and National Health Service commissioners funded excess treatment costs.

Reference:
Fitzgerald RC, et al. ‘A pragmatic randomised, controlled trial of an offer of Cytosponge-TFF3 test compared with usual care to identify Barrett’s oesophagus in primary care.’ The Lancet (2020). DOI:

Adapted from a Cancer Research UK press release. 

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, Harvard and MIT, have shown that quantum particles can carry an unlimited amount of information about things they have interacted with. The results, reported in the journal Nature Communications, could enable far more precise measurements and power new technologies, such as super-precise microscopes and quantum computers.

Metrology is the science of estimations and measurements. If you weighed yourself this morning, you’ve done metrology. In the same way as quantum computing is expected to revolutionise the way complicated calculations are done, quantum metrology, using the strange behaviour of subatomic particles, may revolutionise the way we measure things.

We are used to dealing with probabilities that range from 0% (never happens) to 100% (always happens). To explain results from the quantum world however, the concept of probability needs to be expanded to include a so-called quasi-probability, which can be negative. This quasi-probability allows quantum concepts such as Einstein’s ‘spooky action at a distance’ and wave-particle duality to be explained in an intuitive mathematical language. For example, the probability of an atom being at a certain position and travelling with a specific speed might be a negative number, such as –5%.

An experiment whose explanation requires negative probabilities is said to possess ‘quantum negativity.’ The scientists have now shown that this quantum negativity can help take more precise measurements.

All metrology needs probes, which can be simple scales or thermometers. In state-of-the-art metrology however, the probes are quantum particles, which can be controlled at the sub-atomic level. These quantum particles are made to interact with the thing being measured. Then the particles are analysed by a detection device.

In theory, the greater number of probing particles there are, the more information will be available to the detection device. But in practice, there is a cap on the rate at which detection devices can analyse particles. The same is true in everyday life: putting on sunglasses can filter out excess light and improve vision. But there is a limit to how much filtering can improve our vision — having sunglasses which are too dark is detrimental.

“We’ve adapted tools from standard information theory to quasi-probabilities and shown that filtering quantum particles can condense the information of a million particles into one,” said lead author Dr David Arvidsson-Shukur from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory and Sarah Woodhead Fellow at Girton College. “That means that detection devices can operate at their ideal influx rate while receiving information corresponding to much higher rates. This is forbidden according to normal probability theory, but quantum negativity makes it possible.”

An experimental group at the University of Toronto has already started building technology to use these new theoretical results. Their goal is to create a quantum device that uses single-photon laser light to provide incredibly precise measurements of optical components. Such measurements are crucial for creating advanced new technologies, such as photonic quantum computers.

“Our discovery opens up exciting new ways to use fundamental quantum phenomena in real-world applications,” said Arvidsson-Shukur.

Quantum metrology can improve measurements of things including distances, angles, temperatures and magnetic fields. These more precise measurements can lead to better and faster technologies, but also better resources to probe fundamental physics and improve our understanding of the universe. For example, many technologies rely on the precise alignment of components or the ability to sense small changes in electric or magnetic fields. Higher precision in aligning mirrors can allow for more precise microscopes or telescopes, and better ways of measuring the earth’s magnetic field can lead to better navigation tools.

Quantum metrology is currently used to enhance the precision of gravitational wave detection in the Nobel Prize-winning LIGO Hanford Observatory. But for the majority of applications, quantum metrology has been overly expensive and unachievable with current technology. The newly-published results offer a cheaper way of doing quantum metrology.

“Scientists often say that ‘there is no such thing as a free lunch’, meaning that you cannot gain anything if you are unwilling to pay the computational price,” said co-author Aleksander Lasek, a PhD candidate at the Cavendish Laboratory. “However, in quantum metrology this price can be made arbitrarily low. That’s highly counterintuitive, and truly amazing!”

Dr Nicole Yunger Halpern, co-author and ITAMP Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University, said: “Everyday multiplication commutes: Six times seven equals seven times six. Quantum theory involves multiplication that doesn’t commute. The lack of commutation lets us improve metrology using quantum physics.

“Quantum physics enhances metrology, computation, cryptography, and more; but proving rigorously that it does is difficult. We showed that quantum physics enables us to extract more information from experiments than we could with only classical physics. The key to the proof is a quantum version of probabilities — mathematical objects that resemble probabilities but can assume negative and non-real values.”

Reference:
David R. M. Arvidsson-Shukur et al. ‘Quantum advantage in postselected metrology.’ Nature Communications (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-17559-w

They are among 86 distinguished scholars to be elected to the fellowship in recognition of their work in the fields of law, economics, Middle Eastern studies, geography, history of science, art and architecture, classics, and English literature.

The Cambridge academics made Fellows of the Academy this year are:

• Professor Catherine Barnard (Faculty of Law; Trinity College) has been elected to the fellowship in recognition of her work on European Union law, especially the single market; Brexit and the UK-EU future relationship; employment law, especially equality law, and its European dimension.
• Professor Giancarlo Corsetti (Faculty of Economics; Clare College) has been elected to the fellowship in recognition of his work in the field of economic policy and international economics, with focus on currency, financial and debt crises, European monetary union and open economy macroeconomics.
• Professor Khaled Fahmy (Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies; King’s College) has been elected to the fellowship in recognition of his work on modern Middle Eastern history, history of Islamic law, the Arab-Israeli conflict.
• Professor Sarah Radcliffe (Department of Geography; Christ’s College) has been elected to the fellowship in recognition of her work on critical development and political geography; postcolonial and decolonial geography; indigeneity; intersectionality in socio-spatial inequalities; these themes in relation to Andean lives, contestations and knowledges.
• Professor James Secord (Department of History and Philosophy of Science; Christ’s College) has been elected to the fellowship in recognition of his work on history of science; science communication; natural history, evolution and geology in the 18th and 19th centuries.
• Professor Caroline van Eck (Department of History of Art; King’s College) has been elected to the fellowship in recognition of her work on the history of European art and architecture c. 1800 in a globalising world.
• Professor Timothy Whitmarsh (Faculty of Classics; St John’s College) has been elected to the fellowship in recognition of his work on ancient Mediterranean literature, culture and thought; Greek literature, especially of the Roman Empire; cultural contacts in the ancient world; ancient religion and scepticism; literary and cultural theory.
• Professor Clair Wills (Faculty of English; Murray Edwards College) has been elected to the fellowship in recognition of her work on 20th-century British and Irish cultural history; contemporary writing; the literature and social history of migration.

The British Academy has also welcomed four new honorary Fellows, among them Bridget Kendall MBE, Master of Peterhouse Cambridge. Kendall is a broadcaster and writer with a particular interest in Russia, international diplomacy and security and promotion of language learning.

The new Fellows join a community of over 1,400 leading minds that make up the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences. Current Fellows include the classicist Professor Dame Mary Beard, the historian Professor Sir Simon Schama and philosopher Professor Baroness Onora O’Neill, while current honorary Fellows include Dame Joan Bakewell, Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Baroness Brenda Hale.

Professor Whitmarsh said: “I have owed much, along the way, to the British Academy, who funded my postgraduate studies and awarded me a Mid-Career Fellowship in 2012-2013, which allowed me to write my book Battling the Gods. I am now greatly honoured, and genuinely humbled, to have been elected a Fellow.”

Professor Sir David Cannadine, President of the British Academy, said: “I would like to extend a warm welcome and hearty congratulations to the individuals who have joined the British Academy Fellowship. This is a time to reflect on the many invaluable contributions these academics have made to their disciplines. It is also a time for celebration, and I hope that, social distancing measures notwithstanding, each of our new Fellows is able to do so in ways great or small.”

As well as a fellowship, the British Academy is a funding body for research, nationally and internationally, and a forum for debate and engagement.

The coronavirus outbreak caused life satisfaction to fall sharply, but lockdown went a long way to restoring contentment – even reducing the “wellbeing inequality” between well-off professionals and the unemployed, according to a new study.

Researchers from Cambridge’s Bennett Institute for Public Policy used a year’s worth of data taken from weekly YouGov surveys and Google searches to track wellbeing in the British population before and during the pandemic.

They say it is one of the first studies to distinguish the effects of the pandemic from those of lockdown on psychological welfare, as it uses week-by-week data, rather than monthly or annual comparisons.

The proportion of Britons self-reporting as “happy” halved in just three weeks: from 51% just before the UK’s first COVID-19 fatality, to 25% by the time national lockdown began.

This reversed under lockdown, with happiness climbing back to almost pre-pandemic levels of 47% by the end of May. Overall life satisfaction saw a similar drop when the pandemic took hold and a rebound during lockdown.

The study also suggests that while the “wellbeing inequality” gap remained wide, lockdown started to shrink it: some of the most deprived social groups saw a relative rise in life satisfaction, while the wealthy experienced declines.

“It was the pandemic, not the lockdown, that depressed people’s wellbeing,” said Dr Roberto Foa, from Cambridge’s Department of Politics and International Studies, and Director of the YouGov-Cambridge Centre for Public Opinion Research.

“Mental health concerns are often cited as a reason to avoid lockdown. In fact, when combined with employment and income support, lockdown may be the single most effective action a government can take during a pandemic to maintain psychological welfare.”

Foa had exclusive access to results from the YouGov Weekly Mood Tracker survey, and conducted the study with Bennett Institute colleagues Sam Gilbert and Dr Mark Fabian. The findings are published today on the Institute’s website.

In addition to YouGov data from England, Scotland and Wales, the researchers expanded their study to cover seven other nations – Ireland, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and South Africa – using the ‘Google Trends’ tool.

“By matching survey data with internet searches for mental health topics such as anxiety, depression, boredom and apathy, we were able to compare the UK to a wider set of countries,” said Sam Gilbert.

“In country after country we saw a sharp rise in negative mood during initial outbreaks of the novel coronavirus, but then a rapid recovery once lockdowns were introduced,” Gilbert said.

The team also used Google Trends to investigate suicide-related search terms. They discovered a significant fall during lockdown months in several countries, including the UK and Ireland, but a rise in nations that implemented lockdowns without extensive income support, such as India and South Africa.

Foa and colleagues suggest that this change in web searches around suicidal ideation may relate to the effect of lockdowns on “underemployed” men: those of working age who are unemployed or clocking very few hours.

This is one of the highest risk groups for suicide, but also the social group that saw the largest relative increase in life satisfaction during lockdown – in Britain, at least – according to YouGov data.

Just before lockdown, 47% of underemployed men reported feeling stressed. After two months, this had fallen to 30% – the lowest level for a year.

By late May, 40% of underemployed men self-reporting as “happy”, above the pre-pandemic average of 36% (June 2019-February 2020), with 15% describing themselves as “inspired” compared to 4% at the start of the year.

In fact, underemployed men saw a relative gain in life satisfaction during lockdown that was higher than their previous peak of Christmas 2019.

“During lockdown, welfare schemes were expanded and hardship funds introduced, along with amnesties on overdue rent and bills. This probably reduced stress for people living precariously,” said Roberto Foa.

“In addition, people with little money don’t consume or travel as much, so may have had less to lose and more to gain from lockdown.”

This is in contrast to high social status groups, the managers and top professionals, who saw a small but persistent slump in life satisfaction that lockdown only slightly alleviated.

“Well-paid professionals may have experienced stress through combined work and domestic duties, and an inability to engage in consumption habits that have a social basis, from holidays to dining out,” said Dr Foa.

The over-65s also saw a fall in life satisfaction that lingered into lockdown, which the study’s authors suggest may result from increased COVID-19 fatality fears.

In general, women experienced a steeper decline in wellbeing than men at the pandemic’s onset. For women co-habiting with partners, family or friends, however, life satisfaction then recovered during lockdown.

For women living alone there was very little rebound. The isolation of single occupancy in lockdown appears to have negatively affected women in particular, say the researchers.

Overall, however, they say that lockdown may have gone a surprisingly long way in ameliorating severe mental health effects of the early pandemic.

Dr Mark Fabian added: “Contrary to widespread concerns, lockdowns seem to improve wellbeing rather than detract from it during a pandemic, not least because they reduce the risk of infection.”

“However, as the initial shock of the pandemic fades into a likely recession, and worries about jobs and income return, the real mental health challenge may just be beginning.”

Furloughing workers, as well as reducing worker hours, has helped to stem the tide of mental health problems expected to result from the coronavirus crisis, according to a team of sociologists led by the University of Cambridge.

A new study suggests that UK workers who were furloughed or moved from full- to part-time hours during April and May had around the same risk for poor mental health as those who kept working full-time.

However, people who lost all paid work were twice as likely to fall into an “at risk” category for poor mental health, compared to those furloughed or still working any number of hours.

In fact, data from May suggests that well over half of those who lost all work during the Covid-19 crisis are at risk of mental health problems.

Researchers led by the Cambridge-based Employment Dosage Project say the UK government must encourage employers to “cut hours not people” as furlough schemes wrap up, or face significantly worse levels of mental health across the population as unemployment soars.

They argue that the UK should emulate ‘short-time working’ schemes used by many European nations. These schemes reduce and share out working hours to keep far more people in some kind of employment during a crisis.

“Holding on to some paid work is vital to wellbeing during the pandemic,” said Prof Brendan Burchell from Cambridge’s Department of Sociology. “We can see that both short working hours and furlough job retention schemes have helped protect against the deterioration of mental health.”

“Labour market interventions such as short-time working are more affordable than furloughing, and much less likely to cause lasting damage to the UK’s mental health than the all-or-nothing job shedding currently taking place,” Burchell said.

“As well as the individual misery caused, the costs of poor mental health to the UK’s productivity and health service are vast, and cannot be afforded at this critical time. We urge the Chancellor to tell employers to cut hours not people.”

The latest research involved academics from the universities of Cambridge, Salford, Leeds and Manchester, and is now online as a working paper from Cambridge’s Centre for Business Research.

The team analysed data from the Understanding Society COVID-19 Study, looking at the relation between changes in employment status and work hours, furlough scheme involvement, and the likelihood of mental health problems as measured by a 12-item questionnaire.

The study questions covered symptoms of depression and anxiety, such as sleeping problems, and used a point-based scale that enabled researchers to create a “score” for the risk of suffering with mental health problems. A sample of 7,149 people from across the UK featured in the research.

The researchers used statistical models to take into account factors such as household income, allowing them to see just the effects of employment and work on mental health during lockdown, regardless of wealth or status.

Using the latest data covering May 2020, the team found that 28% of those who remained in fulltime employment returned scores suggesting they might be at risk of poor mental health. Equally, 27% of those on furlough returned “at risk” scores, and 30% of those whose hours had been reduced from full to part time.

But for those who lost their jobs during the coronavirus crisis some 58% returned scores suggesting they were in the “at risk” category for mental health problems. The May data has now been added to the working paper along with an initial analysis of data from April, which showed a similar effect.

“The furlough schemes are largely aimed at the financial fallout of the pandemic, but they also appear to have stemmed the tide of mental health problems many experts are anticipating,” said Burchell.

Loss of earnings only explains a small part of the large mental health deficit associated with unemployment, say the researchers. They argue that “incidental” aspects of employment – social connection, structure, shared goals, and so on – are just as important for wellbeing.

Last year, the Employment Dosage Project published a study showing that just one day of paid work a week is all people need to get a major boost to their mental health (with little psychological benefit to working further hours).

“The lesson for government strategy is clear,” added Burchell. “Keep everyone in some paid work where possible, with population health as the priority. Even one day a week will keep more of us psychologically healthier in these volatile times.”

The report, Balancing the risks of pupils returning to school, highlights the potential impact on the 13 year-groups of students affected by lockdown. It estimates that, without action, from the mid-2030s and for the 50 years thereafter, around a quarter of the entire workforce will have lower skills.

This could reduce their earning potential by 3% a year and consequently lower the overall economic growth rate. The long-term economic consequences aside, the immediate negative impact on children’s mental and physical health, as well as their safety, will be considerable.

The report has been produced by the Royal Society’s multi-disciplinary Data Evaluation and Learning for Viral Epidemics (DELVE) group. The lead authors are Professor Anna Vignoles, University of Cambridge, and Professor Simon Burgess, University of Bristol.

Their assessment looks at the difficulties of balancing the significant costs to pupils and parents of school closures against the need to minimise the risks of COVID-19 infection to children, teachers and the wider community.

It concludes that the risk of infection from restarting schools is not high, relative to many other activities, although the authors recognise that the evidence on this still limited. The experience of most other countries which have already taken this step supports this view, the authors say, and by contrast the evidence for the negative impact of closing schools is considerable and robust.

The report also observes that when infection rates rise in some locations, schools may need to close, but such decisions should be determined by objective criteria and made on a school-by-school, or local area basis.

The report calls on the Government to:

• Suppress the virus in the wider community, as a priority, to reduce the risk of transmission in schools once at full capacity, and to minimise future disruption to learning.
• Have objective, transparent, criteria for local decision-making about closing and reopening schools, with clear leadership for that decision-making process.
• Provide realistic guidance and substantial extra resources to ensure that schools can minimise chains of transmission (parental guidance on when to keep their child at home applying the precautionary principle; rigorous hygiene; physical distancing and reduced mixing; extra teachers; PPE – including face coverings for teachers, older children and those with underlying health issues; management of staff rooms; regular testing; and prioritisation for vaccines for teachers).
• Implement effective surveillance, with a test-trace-isolate system that enables a rapid response to outbreaks, and which allows schools to re-open quickly if they have to close.
• Establish effective, clear and unified communication with school leaders, teachers and parents to manage opening and closing of schools in response to local conditions.

The report also explores the impact on inequality. Anna Vignoles, Professor of Education at the Faculty of Education and a Fellow of Jesus College, University of Cambridge, said: “Shutting down schools has impacted all children but the worst effects will be felt by those from lower socio-economic groups and with other vulnerabilities, such as a pre-existing mental health condition. Children from low-income households in particular are more likely to lack the resources – space, equipment, home support – to engage fully with remote schooling. Those with pre-existing conditions are more likely to experience a worsening of their mental health. This has to be taken into account in how we come out of this pandemic.”

Simon Burgess, Professor of Economics, University of Bristol, said: “We know how damaging it is for children to miss out on school. The amount of school already missed due to the pandemic could impact on their earning potential by around 3% a year throughout their lives and impact on productivity in the UK for decades. While it is still early days, there has been little evidence of surges in infection rates in countries that have opened up schools, including countries where they have fully reopened. While we have to do all that we can to reduce the risk of transmission, we need to get our children back to school.”

One of the challenges highlighted in the report is the lack of data. It calls for a system, including surveillance studies, to be put in place to increase understanding of the risks and provide decision-makers with the local and timely data they need to monitor neighbourhood and school infection rates and to respond accordingly. There is also a call for a programme of anonymous assessment of education achievement and pupil mental health across all age ranges in a sample of schools in mid-September, to gauge the extent and nature of the learning loss and the impact on pupil wellbeing.

Smallpox spread from person to person via infectious droplets, killed around a third of sufferers and left another third permanently scarred or blind. Around 300 million people died from it in the 20th century alone before it was officially eradicated in 1980 through a global vaccination effort – the first human disease to be wiped out.

Now an international team of scientists have sequenced the genomes of newly discovered strains of the killer virus after it was extracted from the teeth of Viking skeletons from sites across northern Europe. The findings are published today in the journal Science.

“We already knew Vikings were moving around Europe and beyond, and we now know they had smallpox. Just as people travelling around the world today quickly spread COVID-19, it is likely Vikings spread smallpox. Only back then, they travelled by ship rather than plane,” said Professor Eske Willerslev in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology and St. John’s College, and Director of The Lundbeck Foundation GeoGenetics Centre at the University of Copenhagen, who led the study.

The team found smallpox – caused by the variola virus – in 11 Viking-era burial sites in Denmark, Norway, Russia, and the UK. They also found it in multiple human remains from Öland, an island off the east coast of Sweden with a long history of trade.

They were able to reconstruct near-complete variola virus genomes for four of the samples. The genetic structure of this earliest-known smallpox strain is different to the modern smallpox virus eradicated in the 20th century.

“There are multiple ways viruses may diverge and mutate into milder or more dangerous strains. This is a significant insight into the steps the variola virus took in the course of its evolution,” said Dr Barbara Mühlemann, formerly at the Centre for Pathogen Evolution at the University of Cambridge, now based at the Institute of Virology at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, and one of the first authors of the report.

Historians believe smallpox may have existed since 10,000 BC but until now there was no scientific proof that the virus was present before the 17th century. It is not known how it first infected humans but, like COVID-19, it is believed to be a zoonotic disease – one that originated in an animal.

Smallpox was eradicated throughout most of Europe and the United States by the beginning of the 20th century but remained endemic throughout Africa, Asia, and South America. The World Health Organisation launched an eradication programme in 1967 that included contact tracing and mass communication campaigns – all public health techniques that countries have been using to control today’s coronavirus pandemic. But it was the global roll-out of a vaccine that ultimately enabled scientists to stop smallpox in its tracks.

While it is not clear whether these ancient strains of smallpox were fatal, the Vikings must have died with smallpox in their bloodstream for the scientists to detect it up to 1400 years later. It is also highly probable there were epidemics earlier than these findings.

“While written accounts of disease are often ambiguous, our findings push the date of the confirmed existence of smallpox back by a thousand years,” said Dr Terry Jones at the Centre for Pathogen Evolution at the University of Cambridge and the Institute of Virology at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, and one of the senior authors who led the study.

He added: “To find smallpox so genetically different in Vikings is truly remarkable. No one expected that these smallpox strains existed. It has long been believed that smallpox was in Western and Southern Europe regularly by 600 AD, around the beginning of our samples. We have proved that smallpox was also widespread in Northern Europe. Returning crusaders or other later events have been thought to have first brought smallpox to Europe, but such theories cannot be correct.”

“Smallpox was eradicated, but another strain could spill over from the animal reservoir tomorrow. What we know in 2020 about viruses and pathogens that affect humans today is just a small snapshot of what has plagued humans historically,” said Willerslev.

This research is part of a long-term project sequencing 5000 ancient human genomes and their associated pathogens. It was made possible thanks to a scientific collaboration between The Lundbeck Foundation, The Wellcome Trust, The Nordic Foundation, and Illumina Inc.

Reference

Muhlemann, B. et al. ‘Diverse variola virus (smallpox) strains were widespread in northern Europe in the Viking Age. Science, July 2020. DOI: 10.1126/science.aaw8977

Adapted from a press release by St John’s College, Cambridge.

The patented technology, known as ‘predictive touch’, was developed by engineers at the University of Cambridge as part of a research collaboration with Jaguar Land Rover. It uses a combination of artificial intelligence and sensor technology to predict a user’s intended target on touchscreens and other interactive displays or control panels, selecting the correct item before the user’s hand reaches the display.

More and more passenger cars have touchscreen technology to control entertainment, navigation or temperature control systems. However, users can often miss the correct item – for example due to acceleration or vibrations from road conditions – and have to reselect, meaning that their attention is taken off the road, increasing the risk of an accident.

In lab-based tests, driving simulators and road-based trials, the predictive touch technology was able to reduce interaction effort and time by up to 50% due to its ability to predict the user’s intended target with high accuracy early in the pointing task.

As lockdown restrictions around the world continue to ease, the researchers say the technology could also be useful in a post-COVID-19 world. Many everyday consumer transactions are conducted using touchscreens: ticketing at rail stations or cinemas, ATMs, check-in kiosks at airports, self-service checkouts in supermarkets, as well as many industrial and manufacturing applications. Eliminating the need to actually touch a touchscreen or other interactive display could reduce the risk of spreading pathogens – such as the common cold, influenza or even coronavirus – from surfaces.

In addition, the technology could also be incorporated into smartphones, and could be useful while walking or jogging, allowing users to easily and accurately select items without the need for any physical contact. It even works in situations such as a moving car on a bumpy road, or if the user has a motor disability which causes a tremor or sudden hand jerks, such as Parkinson’s disease or cerebral palsy.

“Touchscreens and other interactive displays are something most people use multiple times per day, but they can be difficult to use while in motion, whether that’s driving a car or changing the music on your phone while you’re running,” said Professor Simon Godsill from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, who led the project. “We also know that certain pathogens can be transmitted via surfaces, so this technology could help reduce the risk for that type of transmission.”

The technology uses machine intelligence to determine the item the user intends to select on the screen early in the pointing task, speeding up the interaction. It uses a gesture tracker, including vision-based or RF-based sensors, which are increasingly common in consumer electronics; contextual information such as user profile, interface design, environmental conditions; and data available from other sensors, such as an eye-gaze tracker, to infer the user’s intent in real time.

“This technology also offers us the chance to make vehicles safer by reducing the cognitive load on drivers and increasing the amount of time they can spend focused on the road ahead. This is a key part of our Destination Zero journey,” said Lee Skrypchuk, Human Machine Interface Technical Specialist at Jaguar Land Rover.

It could also be used for displays that do not have a physical surface such as 2D or 3D projections or holograms. Additionally, it promotes inclusive design practices and offers additional design flexibilities, since the interface functionality can be seamlessly personalised for given users and the display size or location is no longer constrained by the user ability to reach-touch.

“Our technology has numerous advantages over more basic mid-air interaction techniques or conventional gesture recognition, because it supports intuitive interactions with legacy interface designs and doesn’t require any learning on the part of the user,” said Dr Bashar Ahmad, who led the development of the technology and the underlying algorithms with Professor Godsill. “It fundamentally relies on the system to predict what the user intends and can be incorporated into both new and existing touchscreens and other interactive display technologies.”

This software-based solution for contactless interactions has reached high technology readiness levels and can be seamlessly integrated into existing touchscreens and interactive displays, so long as the correct sensory data is available to support the machine learning algorithm.

People entering Uganda have been required to quarantine for 14 days as part of the country’s lockdown measures, during which time they are monitored by the Ugandan Ministry of Health for development of COVID-19 symptoms.

Cambridge researcher Dr Rosalind Parkes-Ratanshi and her team have been helping the Ministry monitor and support quarantined individuals using a voice and SMS messaging system, Call for Life Uganda (C4LU). The tool was rapidly adapted for COVID-19 by Parkes-Ratanshi, who is based jointly at Cambridge’s Institute of Public Health and leads the Academy for Health Innovation at Infectious Diseases Institute, Makerere University, Uganda.

The C4LU system regularly phones quarantined individuals to request they report any symptoms. The automated system then generates symptom reports and anything of potential concern is flagged to healthcare professionals for triaging. This eases the burden on healthcare workers of widespread check-ups in person or by phone.

Parkes-Ratanshi and colleagues at the Infectious Diseases Institute have been using the tool for the past four years to monitor HIV patients, in collaboration with Janssen: Pharmaceutical companies of Johnson & Johnson. When the coronavirus pandemic reached Uganda, the team rapidly repurposed the system they had developed, re-scripting for COVID-19 and recording the messages in 11 of the languages spoken in Uganda.

“The total number of COVID-19 cases in Uganda has been low so far, with just over 1,000 cases across the whole country,” says Parkes-Ratanshi, who is currently based in Uganda. “Almost all cases seem to be linked to returning travellers and so the quarantine system and lockdown have been vital to slow the spread of the pandemic.”

Currently, the team are monitoring around 250 people using C4LU, with a total of 599 having participated so far. “Only a very small number of people have then needed to be tested for COVID-19, which shows the benefits of having a tool that can take pressure off the health system by reducing unnecessary visits,” she says.

Although Uganda has been fortunate in not suffering the scale of cases seen in some countries, Parkes-Ratanshi is mindful that there could be a future surge in infection. “We could see a time when regular monitoring on a wider scale would be beneficial. A system like this could reduce the number of individual calls coming in to the Ministry of Health – it could take some of the burden.”

So far, the team has focused on implementation – getting the system up and running, and triaging for possible COVID-19 cases that require confirmatory tests. They are now adding a research component, so that they can learn more about the impact of the technology, with funding from Cambridge University’s Global Challenges Research Fund QR.

The team has been asked by the Ugandan Ministry of Health to add a layer of mental health support to the tool, adds Parkes-Ratanshi. “Once you’ve gone through your symptom reporting, you might then be asked a couple of screening questions about anxiety or mental health issues. Depending on the answer, we could then offer mental health support for those people who may not need active care or active testing, but have got anxiety or mental health issues related to COVID. We think that this will also be exceedingly important to help in a situation where the health care system is very stretched.”

Crucially, the technology is appropriate to the context, says Parkes-Ratanshi: “Around 75% of people have phones in Uganda, so phone-based technology seems to be a very good way of doing this kind of public health monitoring. But it would be no good taking say a smartphone app developed in the UK and thinking it would work for Africa. Even those people who’ve got smartphones may not have access to the internet on the day they need it. So our technology is developed to work on low-cost mobile and analogue phones.”

C4LU itself is based on an open source digital system developed originally for tuberculosis patients by Janssen. “Time and resources are limited in sub-Saharan Africa. We don’t really want to be experimenting with new stuff in a pandemic, which is why we’re glad to apply our experience using this tool for HIV to COVID-19.”

Rosalind Parkes-Ratanshi is supported by several of Cambridge’s interdisciplinary networks and initiatives – Public Health, Cambridge-Africa, Infectious Diseases and Global Challenges.

How you can support Cambridge’s COVID-19 research

Childbirth is widely recognised as a painful experience. However, every woman’s experience of labour and birth is unique, and the level of discomfort and pain experienced during labour varies substantially between women.

A collaboration between clinicians and scientists based at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, part of Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (CUH), and the University of Cambridge sought to investigate why some mothers report less pain during labour.

A group of women was recruited and characterised by the team led by Dr Michael Lee from the University’s Division of Anaesthesia. All the women had carried their first-born to full term and did not request any pain relief during an uncomplicated vaginal delivery. Dr Lee and colleagues carried out a number of tests on the women, including applying heat and pressure to their arms and getting them to plunge their hands into icy water.

Compared to a control group of women that experienced similar births, but were given pain relief, the test group showed higher pain thresholds for heat, cold and mechanical pressure, consistent with them not requesting pain relief during childbirth. The researchers found no differences in the emotional and cognitive abilities of either group, suggesting an intrinsic difference in their ability to detect pain.

“It is unusual for women to not request gas and air, or epidural for pain relief during labour, particularly when delivering for the first time,” said Dr Lee, joint first author. “When we tested these women, it was clear their pain threshold was generally much higher than it was for other women.”

Next, senior co-author, Professor Geoff Woods, and his colleagues at the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research sequenced the genetic code of both groups of women and found that those in the test group had a higher-than-expected prevalence of a rare variant of the gene KCNG4. It’s estimated that one approximately 1 in 100 women carry this variant.

KCNG4 provides the code for the production of a protein that forms part of a ‘gate’, controlling the electric signal that flows along our nerve cells. As the joint first author Dr Van Lu showed, sensitivity of this gatekeeper to electric signals that had the ability to open the gate and turn nerves on was reduced by the rare variant.

This was confirmed in a study involving mice led by Dr Ewan St. John Smith from the Department of Pharmacology, who showed that the threshold at which the ‘defective’ gates open, and hence the nerve cell switches ‘on’, is higher – which may explain why women with this rare gene variant experience less pain during childbirth.

Dr St. John Smith, senior co-author, explained: “The genetic variant that we found in women who feel less pain during childbirth leads to a ‘defect’ in the formation of the switch on the nerve cells. In fact, this defect acts like a natural epidural. It means it takes a much greater signal – in other words, stronger contractions during labour – to switch it on. This makes it less likely that pain signals can reach the brain.”

“Not only have we identified a genetic variant in a new player underlying different pain sensitivities,” added senior co-author Professor Frank Reimann, “but we hope this can open avenues to the development of new drugs to manage pain.”

“This approach of studying individuals who show unexpected extremes of pain experience also may find wider application in other contexts, helping us understand how we experience pain and develop new drugs to treat it,” said Professor David Menon, senior co-author.

The research was support by the Addenbrooke’s Charitable Trust, the National Institute for Health Research Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre, Wellcome, Rosetrees Trust and the BBSRC.

Reference
Lee, M.C. et al (2020). Human labour pain is influenced by the voltage-gated potassium channel Kv6.4 subunit. Cell Reports; 21 July 2020; DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2020.107941