This is the first time researchers have demonstrated that this scanning technique, called carbon-13 hyperpolarised imaging, can be used to monitor breast cancer.

The team based at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute and the Department of Radiology, University of Cambridge, tested the technique in seven patients with various types and grades of breast cancer before they had received any treatment.

They used the scan to measure how fast the patients’ tumours were metabolising a naturally occurring molecule called pyruvate, and were able to detect differences in the size, type and grade of tumours – a measure of how fast growing, or aggressive the cancer is.

The scan also revealed in more detail the ‘topography’ of the tumour, detecting variations in metabolism between different regions of the same tumour.

Professor Kevin Brindle, lead researcher from the institute, said: “This is one of the most detailed pictures of the metabolism of a patient’s breast cancer that we’ve ever been able to achieve. It’s like we can see the tumour ‘breathing’.

“Combining this with advances in genetic testing, this scan could in the future allow doctors to better tailor treatments to each individual, and detect whether patients are responding to treatments, like chemotherapy, earlier than is currently possible”.

Hyperpolarised carbon-13 pyruvate is an isotope-labelled form of the molecule that is slightly heavier than the naturally occurring pyruvate which is formed in our bodies from the breakdown of glucose and other sugars.

In the study, the scientists ‘hyperpolarised’, or magnetised, carbon-13 pyruvate by cooling it to about one degree above absolute zero (-272°C) and exposing it to extremely strong magnetic fields and microwave radiation. The frozen material was then thawed and dissolved into an injectable solution.

Patients were injected with the solution and then received an MRI scan at Addenbrookes Hospital. Magnetising the carbon-13 pyruvate molecules increases the signal strength by 10,000 times so that they are visible on the scan.

The researchers used the scan to measure how fast pyruvate was being converted into a substance called lactate.

Our cells convert pyruvate into lactate as part of the metabolic processes that produce energy and the building blocks for making new cells. Tumours have a different metabolism to healthy cells, and so produce lactate more quickly. This rate also varies between tumours, and between different regions of the same tumour.

The researchers showed that monitoring this conversion in real-time could be used to infer the type and aggressiveness of the breast cancer.

The team now hopes to trial this scan in larger groups of patients, to see if it can be reliably used to inform treatment decisions in hospitals.

Breast cancer is the most common type of cancer in the UK, with around 55,000 new cases each year. 80% of people with breast cancer survive for 10 years or more, however for some subtypes, survival is much lower.

Professor Charles Swanton, Cancer Research UK’s chief clinician, said: “This exciting advance in scanning technology could provide new information about the metabolic status of each patient’s tumour upon diagnosis, which could help doctors to identify the best course of treatment.

“And the simple, non-invasive scan could be repeated periodically during treatment, providing an indication of whether the treatment is working. Ultimately, the hope is that scans like this could help doctors decide to switch to a more intensive treatment if needed, or even reduce the treatment dose, sparing people unnecessary side effects.”

The research was supported by Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute and The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research.

Reference
Gallagher, FA et al. Imaging breast cancer using hyperpolarized carbon-13 MRI. PNAS; 21 Jan 2020; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1913841117

Bumblebees drink nectar from flowers, then offload it in their nest – by vomiting –  for use by other bees in the colony. The sugar within nectar makes it appealing, and the more sugar within the nectar, the more energy it contains. But nectar also gets more thick and sticky as the sugar content rises, and this makes it more difficult for bees to drink and regurgitate –  requiring more time and energy.

Published today in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, the study looked at the mechanics of both nectar drinking and regurgitation in one of the most common bumblebees in the UK, Bombus terrestris. It found that the best concentration of nectar for bumblebees in terms of overall energy gain is lower than might be expected. Nectar that is low in sugar is easy for bees to drink and very easy to vomit back up. As nectar gets more sugary, it gradually takes bees longer to drink, but swiftly becomes much more difficult to vomit.

“Bumblebees must strike a balance between choosing a nectar that is energy-rich, but isn’t too time-consuming to drink and offload. Nectar sugar concentration affects the speed of the bees’ foraging trips, so it influences their foraging decisions,” said Dr Jonathan Pattrick, first author of this study, formerly a PhD student based jointly in the University of Cambridge’s departments of Plant Sciences and Zoology and now a post-doctoral researcher in the University of Oxford’s Department of Zoology.

While it has long been known that nectar with a higher sugar concentration takes bees longer to drink, its effect on nectar regurgitation has not previously received much attention. This new information will help scientists make better predictions about which types of nectar bumblebees and other pollinators should like best, and consequently the kinds of flowers and plants they are most likely to visit. This will inform crop breeders in producing the most appealing flowers for better crop pollination and higher yields.

To conduct the research, bees were allowed to forage on sugar solutions of three different concentrations in the Department of Plant Science’s Bee Lab. While doing this, the bees were also timed and weighed. When the bees returned to their ‘nest’, the researchers watched them through a Perspex lid, timing how long it took for the bees to vomit up the nectar they had collected.

“For low strength nectar, bees had a quick vomit that only lasted a few seconds, then were back out and foraging again,” said Pattrick, “but for really thick nectar they took ages to vomit, sometimes straining for nearly a minute.”

For any given nectar concentration, bees regurgitate the nectar quicker than they initially drink it. But as nectar sugar concentration –  and therefore stickiness –  goes up, the rate of regurgitation decreases faster than the rate of drinking. “It’s hard to drink a thick, sticky liquid, but imagine trying to spit it out again through a straw – that would be even harder,” said Pattrick. “At a certain sugar concentration, the energy gain versus energy loss is optimised for nectar feeders.”

The perfect nectar sugar concentration for the highest energy intake depends on the species drinking it, because different species feed in different ways. Bumblebees and honeybees feed by dipping their tongue repeatedly into the nectar, but regurgitate by forcing the nectar back up through a tube – just like when humans are sick. Other species such as Orchid Bees suck nectar up instead of lapping it, so struggle even more when nectar is highly concentrated. This influences nectar preference and the plants visited by different species.

Current crop breeding is focused on enhancing traits like yield and disease resistance, rather than considering pollinator preference. The new results improve predictions of the perfect nectar concentration for making the most efficient use of pollinating bumblebees.

Nectar is produced by flowers to attract pollinators, and a source of food for many species of insect, bird and mammal. The levels of the sugars sucrose, glucose and fructose within the nectar vary depending on the plant producing it.

“Studies have shown that numbers of some pollinators are going down, but there are more and more people in the world to feed. We need to make better use of the pollinators we have,” said Professor Beverley Glover in Cambridge’s Department of Plant Sciences and Director of Cambridge University Botanic Garden, who led the study. “This research will help us understand the types of flowers and plants the bees are most likely to visit, which will inform crop breeding to make the best use of the available pollinators.”

This research was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).

Reference
Pattrick, J.G. et al. ‘The mechanics of nectar offloading in the bumblebee Bombus terrestris and implications for optimal concentrations during nectar foraging.’ Interface, Jan 2020. DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2019.0632

Most black holes are too small on the sky for us to determine their immediate environment, but we can still explore these mysterious objects by watching how matter behaves as it nears, and falls into, them.

As material spirals towards a black hole, it is heated up and emits X-rays that, in turn, echo and reverberate as they interact with nearby gas. These regions of space are highly distorted and warped due to the extreme nature and crushingly strong gravity of the black hole.

Now, researchers have used the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton X-ray observatory to track these light echoes and map the surroundings of the black hole at the core of an active galaxy. Their results are reported in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Named IRAS 13224–3809, the black hole’s host galaxy is one of the most variable X-ray sources in the sky, undergoing very large and rapid fluctuations in brightness of a factor of 50 in mere hours.

“Everyone is familiar with how the echo of their voice sounds different when speaking in a classroom compared to a cathedral – this is simply due to the geometry and materials of the rooms, which causes sound to behave and bounce around differently,” said Dr William Alston from Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, lead author of the new study.

“In a similar manner, we can watch how echoes of X-ray radiation propagate in the vicinity of a black hole in order to map out the geometry of a region and the state of a clump of matter before it disappears into the singularity. It’s a bit like cosmic echo-location.”

As the dynamics of infalling gas are strongly linked to the properties of the consuming black hole, Alston and his colleagues were also able to determine the mass and spin of the galaxy’s central black hole by observing the properties of matter as it spiralled inwards.

The material forms a disc as it falls into the black hole. Above this disc lies a region of hot electrons – with temperatures of around a billion degrees – called the corona. While the scientists expected to see the reverberation echoes they used to map the region’s geometry, they also spotted something unexpected: the corona itself changed in size quickly, over a matter of days.

“As the corona’s size changes, so does the light echo – a bit like if the cathedral ceiling is moving up and down, changing how the echo of your voice sounds,” said Alston.

“By tracking the light echoes, we were able to track this changing corona, and – what’s even more exciting – get much better values for the black hole’s mass and spin than we could have determined if the corona was not changing in size. We know the black hole’s mass cannot be fluctuating, so any changes in the echo must be down to the gaseous environment.”

The study used the longest observation of an accreting black hole ever taken with XMM- Newton, collected over 16 spacecraft orbits in 2011 and 2016 and totalling 2 million seconds – just over 23 days. This, combined with the strong and short-term variability of the black hole itself, allowed Alston and collaborators to model the echoes comprehensively over day-long timescales.

The region explored in this study is not accessible to observatories such as the Event Horizon Telescope, which managed to take the first ever picture of gas in the immediate vicinity of a black hole – the one sitting at the centre of the nearby massive galaxy M87. The result, based on observations performed with radio telescopes across the world in 2017 and published last year, became a global sensation.

“The Event Horizon Telescope image was obtained using a method known as interferometry – a technique that can only work on the few nearest supermassive black holes to Earth, such as those in M87 and in our home galaxy, the Milky Way, because their apparent size on the sky is large enough for the method to work,” said co-author Michael Parker, who is an ESA research fellow at the European Space Astronomy Centre near Madrid.

“By contrast, our approach is able to probe the nearest few hundred supermassive black holes that are actively consuming matter – and this number will increase significantly with the launch of ESA’s Athena satellite.”

Characterising the environments closely surrounding black holes is a core science goal for ESA’s Athena mission, which is scheduled for launch in the early 2030s and will unveil the secrets of the hot and energetic Universe.

Measuring the mass, spin and accretion rates of a large sample of black holes is key to understanding gravity throughout the cosmos. Additionally, since supermassive black holes are strongly linked to their host galaxy’s properties, these studies are also key to furthering our knowledge of how galaxies form and evolve over time.

“The large dataset provided by XMM-Newton was essential for this result,” said Norbert Schartel, ESA XMM-Newton Project Scientist. “Reverberation mapping is a technique that promises to reveal much about both black holes and the wider Universe in coming years. I hope that XMM-Newton will perform similar observing campaigns for several more active galaxies in coming years, so that the method is fully established when Athena launches.”

Reference:
William N. Alston et al. ‘A dynamic black hole corona in an active galaxy through X-ray reverberation mapping.’ Nature Astronomy (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41550-019-1002-x

Adapted from an ESA press release.

“Reforestation is an important part of tackling climate change, but we need to carefully consider the best places for it. In some places, changes to water availability will completely change the local cost-benefits of tree-planting programmes,” said Laura Bentley, a plant scientist in the University of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute, and first author of the report.

Planting large areas of trees has been suggested as one of the best ways of reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, since trees absorb and store this greenhouse gas as they grow. While it has long been known that planting trees reduces the amount of water flowing into nearby rivers, there has previously been no understanding of how this effect changes as forests age.

The study looked at 43 sites across the world where forests have been established, and used river flow as a measure of water availability in the region. It found that within five years of planting trees, river flow had reduced by an average of 25%. By 25 years, rivers had gone down by an average of 40% and in a few cases had dried up entirely. The biggest percentage reductions in water availability were in regions in Australia and South Africa.

“River flow does not recover after planting trees, even after many years, once disturbances in the catchment and the effects of climate are accounted for,” said Professor David Coomes, Director of the University of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute, who led the study.

Published in the journal Global Change Biology, the research showed that the type of land where trees are planted determines the degree of impact they have on local water availability. Trees planted on natural grassland where the soil is healthy decrease river flow significantly. On land previously degraded by agriculture, establishing forest helps to repair the soil so it can hold more water and decreases nearby river flow by a lesser amount.

Counterintuitively, the effect of trees on river flow is smaller in drier years than wetter ones. When trees are drought-stressed they close the pores on their leaves to conserve water, and as a result draw up less water from the soil. In wet weather the trees use more water from the soil, and also catch the rainwater in their leaves.

“Climate change will affect water availability around the world,” said Bentley. “By studying how forestation affects water availability, we can work to minimise any local consequences for people and the environment.”

This research was funded by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and the Natural Environment Research Council.

Reference 

Bentley, L. et al: ‘Partial river flow recovery with forest age is rare in the decades following establishment.’ Global Change Biology, Jan 2020. DOI: 10.1111/gcb.14954

Many people tend to put on weight as they leave adolescence and move into adulthood, and this is the age when the levels of obesity increase the fastest. This weight gain is related to changes in diet and physical activity behaviour across the life events of early adulthood, including the move from school to further education and employment, starting new relationships and having children.

Writing in Obesity Reviews, researchers from the Centre for Diet and Activity Research (CEDAR) at Cambridge looked at changes in physical activity, diet and body weight as young adults move from education into employment and to becoming a parent. To do this, they carried out systematic reviews and meta-analyses of existing scientific literature – these approaches allow them to compare and consolidate results from a number of often-contradictory studies to reach more robust conclusions.

Leaving school

In the first of the two studies, the team looked at the evidence relating to the transition from high school into higher education or employment and how this affects body weight, diet and physical activity. In total, they found 19 studies covering ages 15-35 years, of which 17 assessed changes in physical activity, three body weight, and five diet or eating behaviours.

The team found that leaving high school was associated with a decrease of seven minutes per day of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity. The decrease was larger for males than it was for females (a decrease of 16.4 minutes per day for men compared to 6.7 minutes per day for women). More detailed analysis revealed that the change is largest when people go to university, with overall levels of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity falling by 11.4 minutes per day.

Three studies reported increases in body weight on leaving high school, though there were not enough studies to provide a mean weight increase. Two studies suggested that diets decrease in quality on leaving high school and one suggested the same on leaving university.

“Children have a relatively protected environment, with healthy food and exercise encouraged within schools, but this evidence suggests that the pressures of university, employment and childcare drive changes in behaviour which are likely to be bad for long-term health,” said Dr Eleanor Winpenny from CEDAR and the MRC Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge.

“This is a really important time when people are forming healthy or unhealthy habits that will continue through adult life. If we can pinpoint the factors in our adult lives which are driving unhealthy behaviours, we can then work to change them.”

Becoming a parent

In the second study, the team looked at the impact of becoming a parent on weight, diet and physical activity.

A meta-analysis of six studies found the difference in change in body mass index (BMI) between remaining without children and becoming a parent was 17%: a woman of average height (164cm) who had no children gained around 7.5kg over five to six years, while a mother of the same height would gain an additional 1.3kg. These equate to increases in BMI of 2.8 versus 3.3.

Only one study looked at the impact of becoming a father and found no difference in change.

There was little evidence looking at physical activity and diet. Most studies including physical activity showed a greater decline in parents versus non-parents. The team found limited evidence for diet, which did not seem to differ between parents and non-parents.

“BMI increases for women over young adulthood, particularly among those becoming a mother. However, new parents could also be particularly willing to change their behaviour as it may also positively influence their children, rather than solely improve their own health,” said Dr Kirsten Corder, also from CEDAR and the MRC Epidemiology Unit.

“Interventions aimed at increasing parents’ activity levels and improving diet could have benefits all round. We need to take a look at the messages given to new parents by health practitioners as previous studies have suggested widespread confusion among new mothers about acceptable pregnancy-related weight gain.”

Reference
Winpenny, E. et al. Changes in physical activity, diet and body weight across the education and employment transitions of early adulthood: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Obesity Reviews; 20 Jan 2020

Corder, K. et al. Becoming a parent: a systematic review and meta-analysis of changes in BMI, diet and physical activity. Obesity Reviews; 20 Jan 2020

‘Pani Pahar – the Water Curriculum’ was jointly developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge and the Hearth Education Advisors, a division of Canta Consultants LLP. It is designed for students between the ages of 9 and 15, and is now freely available to students, teachers and schools. The aim of the curriculum is to engage students in experiential learning and to instil in them a sense of responsibility towards water conservation.

The curriculum has grown out of ‘Pani, Pahar – Waters of the Himalayas’, a collaborative research project between the University of Cambridge, The Centre for Ecology Development and Research in India (CEDAR) and Southasia Institute for Advanced Studies in Nepal (SIAS). The project explores the changing landscapes and escalating water crises of the Indian Himalayas. It combines academic research led by Professor Bhaskar Vira and Dr Eszter Kovacs from Cambridge’s Department of Geography with contemporary imagery by photojournalist Toby Smith, which has been exhibited in the UK and India.

The curriculum aims to help students understand water resources and sustainability and how these are impacted by climate change. The detailed lesson plans encourage reflection and research on the human causes of water scarcity, and some of the effects of environmental change on humans and our shared resources. It also helps students understand the meaning of activism, recognise some of the challenges associated with activism, and begin to associate activism with the needs and issues of their school.

“These school materials are designed to allow young people, who are highly mobilised through the school strikes for climate, to develop a critical engagement with these issues, with learning resources and educational materials that are targeted at different stages of the secondary school curriculum,” said Vira. “We wanted to show the links between our research on water scarcity and broader concerns about environmental change and crises.”

The curriculum has three sets, one for each level, each involving a 10-hours contact time with the students. The curriculum is targeted at students of junior, middle and senior level.

The curriculum was launched in India earlier this week, although Vira says it could easily be incorporated into the school systems of other countries, including the UK.

Funding for the research project and exhibition was provided by the UK’s Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation (ESPA) programme, which was a joint initiative of the UK Department for International Development (DFID), Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Funding was also provided by the University of Cambridge’s Economic and Social Research Council Impact Acceleration Account. The Oxonian India Foundation funded the graphic design of the curriculum materials.

A massive experiment that deployed regular police patrols on platforms has shown that four 15-minute patrols a day in some of the capital’s most crime-ridden Underground platforms reduced reported crime by 28% in patrolled locations, while it rose 16% on platforms without patrols.

Researchers from Cambridge University’s Institute of Criminology worked with the British Transport Police (BTP) to conduct the experiment across six months in 2011-2012. The findings have been published in the journal Criminology.

The team identified the 115 London platforms where reported crime was highest. They randomly allocated 57 of these platforms to four daily ‘doses’ of patrols – two officers on foot for quarter of an hour – four days a week, and compared the effects to the remaining ‘untreated’ platforms.

Patrolled platforms dropped from 88 crimes in the preceding six months to 63 crimes on the same platforms during the six months of the experiment. In the same time periods, crimes on platforms without regular patrols increased from 64 to 74.

A total of 3,549 calls to police from the platform came from stations without patrols, compared to 2,817 in the stations receiving a policing ‘dosage’ – a relative difference of 21%.

Researchers also found that patrols on platforms did not simply ‘displace’ the crimes. Instead, the overall pattern showed crime going down in all parts of the stations – not just on platforms – relative to ‘control’ stations.

Strikingly, they discovered that the vast majority of reduction in both crime and calls for assistance occurred when these police patrols were absent – some 97% of the measured effect. The criminologists have dubbed this the “London Underground paradox”.

“The total crime prevention benefit of police patrols may be greater when they are absent than when they are present,” said study co-author Prof Lawrence Sherman. “In the London Underground experiment we see a huge residual effect of brief appearances by patrolling officers after they leave”

“This phantom effect suggests that crime declines when potential offenders are apprehensive about a possible police presence based on recent patrolling patterns – even when there are no police in the vicinity,” he said.

“In London stations, it may be that more professional kinds of offenders are particularly sensitive to changes in police presence, such as pickpockets and distraction thieves.”

“The London Underground paradox could have implications for debates on police priorities in an age of austerity, such as the benefits of investigating past crimes compared with the benefits of preventing future crimes,” Sherman said.

London’s Underground opened in 1863, the first underground railway in the world, and provides more than 1.3 billion passenger rides per year.

The majority of crime in the transport network occurs on the trains and in concourse areas. Crime on platforms constitute 11% of the total, and historically platforms have had no regular police patrols.

As such, platforms offered an opportunity to conduct an experiment on spaces within a major metropolis that had never seen proactive police presence – ideal for gauging patrol effectiveness without previous ‘contamination’, say researchers.

“Platforms are small, stable and confined places with finite entry and exit points. These characteristics make them optimal for measuring the localised deterrence effects of police patrols,” said first author Dr Barak Ariel.

“We wanted to measure what happens when police patrols are introduced into an urban environment for the first time in over 150 years.”

The team targeted ‘hot spots’ – areas where crime is more concentrated, and preventative patrols can have greatest effect – by ranking stations based on the previous year’s crime rates, and including the top 115 of Greater London’s 270 stations in the experiment.

Researchers also narrowed the experiment’s focus based on ‘hot hours’ and ‘hot days’. Previous data showed the sample platforms experienced more crime and calls to police from Wednesday to Saturday between 3pm and 10pm.

Twenty uniformed BTP officers were selected and trained to work exclusively on patrolling the platforms of the ‘treatment’ stations during ‘hot’ days and hours. Each two-person unit was allocated between three and five stations, with platforms patrolled for 15 minutes four times a day.

Officers were asked to conduct these patrols in a random or unpredictable order within the ‘hot hours’, and encouraged to engage with the public while patrolling.

Police were most effective at preventing platform crime during periods and days when patrols were scheduled – but just 3% of that reduction came when officers were actually scheduled to patrol.

The researchers also found ‘regional’ effects: crime in the rest of the station fell almost as much as crime on platforms during the four days when regular patrols were deployed.

“Our findings indicate that consistent patrols can cause large reductions in both crime and emergency calls in areas that have never before been proactively patrolled by police in this way,” added Sherman.

“The more that uniformed police have been there, and the more recently, the less likely future crimes may be to occur.”

This story was amended on 17/01/20 to include additional details from the paper on reductions in crime.  

Broadly, my research explores the reasoning capacity of neural networks. You might have seen these algorithms in action when using automatic face recognition on social media or issuing voice commands to your phone. Neural networks, also hidden behind media-friendly terms such as deep learning, are nowadays a go-to research direction if one is interested in attaining the state-of-the-art accuracy on a classification task associated with a large amount of data.

Despite their impressive practical performance, these models are limited in their ability to combine familiar ideas to arrive at new conclusions as they tend to simply memorise the data. Having learned from the examples of red squares and blue circles, a truly intelligent system surely shouldn’t be confused by a red circle. This is a core challenge in learning algorithms and I hope my research will contribute to the international efforts of the machine learning community to induce reasoning and generalisation in neural networks.

During my current internship at Mila Quebec AI Institute, I’m investigating how agents based on neural networks communicate with each other in order to solve simple games. These games draw inspiration from the studies on language evolution in humans. The communication aspect is particularly cool and exciting because by analysing the messages sent between the agents I can see how closely these algorithms mimic the reasoning process of a biological intelligent system.

I have been extremely fortunate with my supervisors (Mateja Jamnik and Sean Holden) as well as the welcoming and friendly nature of the Department of Computer Science and Technology. Cambridge provides students with a unique degree of freedom, independence and intellectual stimulation. What I particularly appreciate after my experience with competitive institutions in Poland and France is that Cambridge provides the best resources for obtaining a well-rounded education alongside the ‘hard skills’ in a student’s chosen field.

I’ve always liked the quote “the areas in which you struggle the most are the ones in which you have the most to give.” If you put a lot of effort into grasping a subject or solving a task that seems daunting to begin with, you are well-equipped to support others who struggle with the same task. I believe this also applies to challenges outside of research.

Embrace stepping out of the ‘good student’ role. The skills required in a research career, especially in science and technology, frequently won’t fully overlap with what led you to have the top grades in your previous education. Firstly, there won’t be nearly as much of the immediate positive feedback so it is crucial to enjoy the process apart from the results. Secondly, the work will never seem finished so it is more important to follow a healthy routine. Reach out to friendly experienced colleagues to find out how they cope with these challenges.

Work with a light and kind attitude to yourself and others. The trap of oscillating between imposter syndrome and ‘I’m like, a genius’ is real in research. At the end of the day you are learning, trying new things and having lots of fun, together with like-minded people.

The team recruited an advisory panel of autistic mothers with whom they co-developed an anonymous, online survey. After matching, this was completed by 355 autistic and 132 non-autistic mothers, each of whom had at least one autistic child.

Sixty percent of autistic mothers in the study reported they had experienced post-natal depression.  By comparison, only 12% of women in the general population experience post-natal depression. In addition, autistic mothers had more difficulties in multi-tasking, coping with domestic responsibilities, and creating social opportunities for their child.

The study also found that when autistic mothers disclosed their autism diagnosis to a professional, they were not believed the majority of the time. Autistic women felt misunderstood by professionals more frequently during pre- and post-natal appointments and found motherhood an isolating experience. Despite these challenges, autistic mothers reported they were able to act in the best interest of their child, putting their child’s needs first and seeking opportunities to boost their child’s self-confidence.

Dr Alexa Pohl, who led the study, said: “Autistic mothers face unique challenges during the perinatal period and parenthood. Despite these challenges, an overwhelming majority of autistic mothers reported that parenting overall was a rewarding experience. This research highlights the need for increased awareness of the experiences of motherhood for autistic women and the need for more tailored support.”

Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, Director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge, and part of the team, said: “This worryingly high number of autistic mothers who experience post-natal depression means we are failing them and their infants at a critical point in their lives. We now need more research into why the rates are so much higher, whether they are seeking help and not getting it, or if they are not seeking help and for what reasons. A new research priority is to develop autism-relevant screening tools and interventions for post-natal depression in these mothers.”

Monique Blakemore, an autistic advocate and member of the team, said: “This vital study was initiated by the autistic community, who collaborated as equal partners with researchers in the design, dissemination and interpretation of the survey.  This is an excellent example of what can be achieved through such partnership.”

The study was supported by the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRC), East of England, at Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust, the Autism Research Trust, the MRC, the NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre, and Autistica.

Reference
A comparative study of autistic and nonautistic women’s experience of motherhood by Alexa Pohl, Sarah Crockford, Monique Blakemore, Carrie Allison and Simon Baron-Cohen. Molecular Autism. DOI: 10.1186/s13229-019-0304-2

At the age of 26, Jane Goodall travelled from England to what is now Tanzania, Africa, and ventured into the little-known world of wild chimpanzees. Among her many discoveries, perhaps the greatest was that chimpanzees make and use tools. She completed a PhD at Newnham College in Cambridge in 1966, and subsequently founded the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977 to continue her conservation work and the youth service programme Roots & Shoots in 1991. She is an Honorary Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge. Dr Goodall now travels the world as a UN Messenger of Peace.

Her words below (from the latest issue of Horizons magazine) continue our focus on Sustainable Earth, looking at how we transition to a carbon zero future, protect the planet’s resources, reduce waste and build resilience. See also the newly released film here. 

“In 1986, I helped organise a conference on how chimpanzee behaviour differed according to the environment. There was a session on conservation and one on conditions in captivity – in both cases, it was utterly shocking. I went to the conference as a scientist, and I left as an activist.

Since then, I’ve been travelling the world raising awareness not only of chimpanzee conservation and welfare, but also of wider environmental issues.

We have just one home, one planet, and we’re destroying it very, very fast. The human population is growing, but on a planet with finite natural resources, and we’re using up these resources faster than nature can replenish them. We’re polluting the air, the water and the land. We’re recklessly pumping out CO₂ into the atmosphere and, at the same time, we’re destroying our forests and oceans – the two great lungs of the world. If we carry on with business as usual, in 20 years’ time, we may have a planet that’s virtually unliveable.

We must not give up hope. Every single day that we live, we make some impact on the planet. We have a choice as to what kind of impact that is.

I see reasons to be optimistic. Nature is resilient. If we work to restore those places that we have destroyed, if we give them time, they will recover. A bleak, destroyed area can become beautiful again as the insects and
birds and other animals come back. Animals on the very brink of extinction can be given another chance.

I truly believe we have a window of time during which we can begin to heal some of the damage we’ve inflicted and at least slow down the climate crisis. But we have to act now.

My greatest hope is our young people. There’s a saying, ‘We haven’t inherited this planet from our parents, we’ve borrowed it from our children’. But we haven’t borrowed our children’s future – we’ve stolen it. In my travels, I have met so many young people who seemed depressed, angry or just apathetic, feeling that their future has been compromised and that there’s nothing they can do about it. That was why we started our Roots & Shoots education programme in 1991, to empower young people to make the world a better place.

Cambridge, like all universities and schools, can play a role in shaping the attitudes of young people. We need to educate and inspire them, to teach them to respect each other and to respect other living organisms. We need environmental concerns to be taught not just in science, but in every discipline.

We are finally beginning to use our intellect to come up with technological solutions that will enable us to live in greater harmony with our planet – electric cars and renewable energy, for instance – and to think about our own ecological footprints. We need the scientific endeavour for which institutions such as Cambridge are famous to be directed towards doing something about the mess that we’ve made of our planet.

The human spirit is indomitable. Throughout my life, I’ve met so many incredible people – men and women who tackle what seems impossible and won’t give up until they succeed. With our intellect and our determined spirit, and with the tools that we have now, we can find a way to a better future.

But do we have time? I don’t know.”

Read more about our research linked with Sustainable Earth in the University’s research magazine; download a pdf; view on Issuu.

The results, published today in the journal Nature Genetics, provide the most comprehensive map of breast cancer risk variants to date. The researchers involved, from over 450 departments and institutions worldwide, say the findings will help provide the most detailed picture yet of how differences in our DNA put some women at greater risk than others of developing the disease.

The majority of the DNA is identical between individuals, but there are some differences, known as genetic variants, and these changes can have a profound effect, increasing an individual’s susceptibility to disease.

Our DNA – the blueprint for the human body – contains between 20,000-25,000 genes. Many of these code for proteins, the building blocks that make up the human body. Genetic variants can be located within genes, altering the protein. However, most of genetic variants are located outside genes, sometimes regulating the function of genes, turning their ‘volume’ up or down or even off. Finding which gene is targeted by these variants is not straightforward.

Most diseases are complex, polygenetic diseases – in other words, no single genetic variant or gene causes the disease, but rather the combination of a number of them act together to increase the likelihood that an individual will develop a particular disease. Breast cancer is one such disease.

Previous genome-wide association studies (GWAS), which involve comparing the DNA of patients against that of healthy controls, have found around 150 regions of the genome that clearly affect breast cancer risk. Within these regions, researchers know there are one or more genetic changes that affect the risk of developing cancer, but rarely are they able to pinpoint the specific variants or genes involved. Fine-mapping studies, such as this one, allow scientists to narrow down which variants contributing to the disease, how they might work and predict which are the genes involved.

“We know from previous studies that variants across our DNA contribute towards breast cancer risk, but only rarely have scientists have been able to identify exactly which genes are involved,” said Dr Laura Fachal from the Wellcome Sanger Institute. “We need this information as it gives us a better clue to what is driving the disease and hence how we might treat or even prevent it.”

In this new study, researchers from hundreds of institutions worldwide collaborated to compare the DNA of 110,000 breast cancer patients against that of some 90,000 healthy controls. By looking in much closer detail than was previously possibly, they identified 352 risk variants. It is not yet clear exactly how many genes these target, but the researchers have identified 191 genes with reasonable confidence; less than one in five of these had been previously recognised.

“This incredible haul of newly-discovered breast cancer genes provides us with many more genes to work on, most of which have not been studied before,” said Dr Alison Dunning from the University of Cambridge. “It will help us build up a much more detailed picture of how breast cancer arises and develops. But the sheer number of genes now known to play a role emphasises how complex the disease is.”

Of the newly-discovered genetic variants, a third predispose women towards developing hormone-responsive breast cancer, the type of disease found in four out of five breast cancer patients, which respond to hormonal treatments such as tamoxifen. 15% of the genetic variants predispose women to the rarer type, estrogen-receptor-negative breast cancer. The remaining genetic variants play a role in both types of breast cancer.

In the majority of cases, the genetic change affected gene expression – in other words, how active a particular gene was and how much of a particular protein it created – rather than altering the type of protein itself. For instance, nine different variants regulate the same gene, the Estrogen Receptor (ESR1) gene. Many other variants affect places in the DNA where the Estrogen Receptor protein binds, and, in turn regulates other genes. This highlights the importance of the ESR1 gene and its protein product, the Estrogen Receptor, in breast cancer development.

While each genetic variant only increases the risk of developing breast cancer by a very small amount, the researchers say that added together, these will allow them to ‘fine tune’ genetic testing and give women a much clearer picture of their genetic risk. This will then allow doctors and clinicians to provide advice on the best strategy for reducing their risk and preventing onset of the disease.

Professor Doug Easton, also from the University of Cambridge, said: “Our work would not have been possible without the help of the 200,000 volunteers who allowed us to study their DNA. It is also testament to the work of hundreds of researchers from all over the world who collaborated on this study.”

Reference
Fine-mapping of 150 breast cancer risk regions identifies 191 likely target genes. Nature Genetics; 7 Jan 2020; DOI: 10.1038/s41588-019-0537-1

The widespread applicability of my research is very appealing to me. Most people will be directly or indirectly affected by mental ill-health at some point in their lives. My research aims to understand the association between depression and cardiovascular health in young people.

My background is quite varied. I have a BSc in Biomedical Science and a Master’s in Biological Science (Pharmacology). I also have training in epidemiology and medical statistics. The start of the PhD was still a bit of a challenge as I had to teach myself how to code!

Cambridge is a scientific hub so there are always interesting talks or conferences to attend nearby. It’s a great place to carry out research because there are so many ongoing opportunities throughout the year. My department is particularly good at organising events as well as supporting its students during their studies.

I work on the Addenbrooke’s site and I spent most of my time analysing big data. I am working with two major UK datasets that contain long-term information of people’s health. A usual day for me consists of statistical analysis using these datasets to try and understand early life risk factors for depression. The analysis can get very complicated sometimes so I often spend time trying to create diagrams to represent what I have discovered in a clear way. Some of the most interesting days are when I present my work at meetings and get to discuss what I have found with lots of different people. The conversation often leads to exciting new ideas!

My advice to others is to trust in yourself. Be confident in your decision-making, be patient when learning new skills, and always put your mental health first.

Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) affects as many as one in 50 people worldwide. One of the most common types of the condition, affecting almost a half of OCD patients, is characterised by severe contamination fears – even from touching something as commonplace as a door knob – leading to excessive washing behaviour. The condition can have a serious impact on people’s lives, their mental health, their relationships and their ability to hold down jobs.

OCD is treated using a combination of medication such as Prozac and a form of cognitive behavioural therapy (‘talking therapy’) termed ‘exposure and response prevention’. This exposure therapy often involves instructing OCD patients to touch contaminated surfaces, such as a toilet, but to refrain from then washing their hands; however, this experience can be so stressful that many patients cannot take part.

“OCD can be an extremely debilitating condition for many people, but the treatments are not always straightforward,” explained Baland Jalal, a neuroscientist based in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge. “In fact, exposure therapy can be very stressful and so is not always effective or even feasible for many patients.”

To overcome this challenge, a team of researchers from the UK and USA tested whether, rather than asking patients to contaminate their own hands, it might be possible to help them overcome their fears by contaminating a fake hand instead – a procedure they call ‘multisensory stimulation therapy’.

The technique builds on a famous trick known as the ‘rubber hand illusion’. In this illusion, an individual places both hands in front of them on a table, either side of a partition such that they cannot see their right hand. Instead, to the left of the partition they see a fake right hand. The illusionist – in this case, the experimenter – strokes both the fake hand and hidden right hand using a paintbrush. After several minutes of stroking the individual often reports ‘feeling’ touch arising from the fake hand as though it was their own.

In the majority of cases, the rubber hand illusion only works if both hands are stroked in synchrony; if they are stroked asynchronously, the illusion is diminished or disappears entirely. However, in a number of psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia and body dysmorphic disorder, the illusion appears to work in both cases, suggesting that the body image held in the minds of these patients is more malleable than in healthy individuals.

In a previous study, carried out by Jalal and neuroscientist VS Ramachandran using healthy volunteers, once the illusion had begun to work, the researchers contaminated the dummy hand with fake faeces. The participants reported disgust sensations as if it were their own hand that had been contaminated.

In a new study published today in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, Jalal and Ramachandran teamed up with researchers at Harvard University – Richard J McNally, Director of Clinical Training in Department Psychology and Jason A Elias and Sriramya Potluri in the Department Psychiatry.

The team recruited 29 OCD patients from the McLean Hospital Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Institute, an intensive residential treatment programme affiliated with Harvard Medical School. Sixteen of these patients had their hidden and dummy hands stroked at the same time, while the remaining 13 patients (the control group) had their hands stroked out of synch.

After 5 minutes of stroking, the participant was asked to rate how much the rubber hand felt like their own. The experimenter then used a tissue to smear the fake faeces on the rubber hand while simultaneously dabbing a damp paper towel on the participant’s real right hand (to create the sensation of having the contaminant smeared on their real hand). The participant was then asked to rate their disgust, anxiety and handwashing urge levels, and the experimenter rated the participant’s facial expression of disgust.

The researchers found that patients in both the experimental and control groups felt an equally strong rubber hand illusion. In other words, even when their real and fake hands were being stroked asynchronously, they had still begun to sense the fake hand as their own. Unsurprisingly, therefore, patients in both groups initially reported similar levels of contamination.

The experimenter then removed the clean paper towel and the tissue that had been used to contaminate the rubber hand, leaving fake faeces on the rubber hand. The experimenter continued to stroke the rubber hand and the participant’s real hand for an additional 5 minutes, after which the participant again provided contamination ratings and the experimenter rated their facial expression.

Now, the patients in the experimental condition were more disgusted: 65% of participants in the experimental condition had a disgust facial expression compared to 35% in the control. This supports previous studies that show that the rubber hand illusion becomes stronger the longer the hand is stroked.

Next, the experimenter stopped the stroking and placed the fake faeces on the patient’s real, right hand and asked the participant once again to provide contamination ratings. Now the differences were much more pronounced in the experimental condition. While those in the control group had average disgust, anxiety and washing urge levels at nearly 7, the experimental group had levels of nearly 9 – that is, an overall 23% difference in contamination ratings.

“Over time, stroking the real and fake hands in synchrony appears to create a stronger and stronger and stronger illusion to the extent that it eventually felt very much like their own hand,” said Jalal. “This meant that after ten minutes, the reaction to contamination was more extreme. Although this was the point our experiment ended, research has shown that continued exposure leads to a decline in contamination feelings – which is the basis of traditional exposure therapy.”

Jalal says it can be safely assumed that the fake hand contamination procedure would lead to similar fall in levels of disgust and contamination ratings, possibly after 30 minutes.

Jalal says the rubber hand illusion may offer a way of treating OCD patients without the high stress levels that exposure therapy can cause. “If you can provide an indirect treatment that is reasonably realistic, where you contaminate a rubber hand instead of a real hand, this might provide a bridge that will allow more people to tolerate exposure therapy or even to replace exposure therapy altogether.”

Jalal has previously worked on other indirect treatments for treating patients with OCD, including a smartphone app. He says that unlike other indirect treatments, this new approach creates a compelling illusion that a part of the patient’s body is being exposed to contamination and so could be even more immersive. It also has additional benefits: “Whereas traditional exposure therapy can be stressful, the rubber hand illusion often makes people laugh at first, helping put them at ease. It is also straightforward and cheap compared to virtual reality, and so can easily reach patients in distress no matter where they are, such as poorly resourced and emergency settings.”

Jalal says the next step is to do randomised clinical trials and compare this technique to existing treatments. Ramachandran agrees, adding: “These results are compelling but not conclusive. We need larger samples and to iron out some methodological wrinkles.”

Other applications of multisensory stimulation therapy might include therapy for people afraid of needles. Exposure therapy would mean repeated needle injections into a real arm and could result in punctured veins. Using a fake hand could provide a clever and convenient alternative.

Reference
“Fake it till You Make it”! Contaminating Rubber Hands (“Multisensory Stimulation Therapy”) to Treat Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Frontiers in Neuroscience; 9 Jan 2020; DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2019.00414

I would like to see the future renewable energy frontiers led by women. I hope I will be one of these women, along with the many other female scientists who are paving the way towards a greener future. It is hard to ignore the global need for better renewable energy sources and storage as soon as possible, and I hope my research will lead to better energy storage alternatives sooner rather than later.

Determination will take you far in life. Any time someone tells you that you aren’t good enough to pursue a career in science, or perhaps you should “do something more suited for your skills” take that as a challenge to prove that person wrong. My advice to other women is to be confident that you ARE smart enough, you ARE brilliant, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

It never seemed odd to me that a woman would want to pursue physics. I grew up in Clifton Park, New York, and went to a large public high school with almost 1000 students per year. I was fortunate enough to have female science teachers throughout high school, and it was partly their influence that led me to major in physics at university.

At university, I helped to set up a Women in STEM programme. I attended Wake Forest University, a liberal arts college in North Carolina. With this programme, we created an after-school project with a local middle school called ‘Girls in STEM’ which helped girls age 12-15 start thinking about STEM careers.

Choosing my Master’s project was one of the hardest moments of my research career. I finally had the chance to create my own project, and I found this incredibly challenging but also so rewarding to know that all the work I do on this project is wholly my own. My research sets out to address our global need for storing renewable energy. I currently design lithium-ion battery materials using computational techniques, with the aim of developing a battery with long life and high capacity. This would mean that we are able to use solar, wind, and renewable energy, and store this energy effectively in Li-ion batteries.

I am a theoretical physicist, so each day I come in and work on the computer. My work involves creating models of new materials, calculating energies of different battery material structures, and developing code to better understand these materials. I work in the Theory of Condensed Matter group, located in West Cambridge at the Cavendish site. In chemistry, we learn about different orbitals, energy states, and phases of materials. But actually visualising and creating a material with these chemical properties was something new for me. The first day I was able to actually visualise, on my computer screen, the orbitals in a material I had computationally identified was a fantastic moment.

In Cambridge, every academic I talk to at all levels is concerned about improving renewable energy sources. For this reason, I have found Cambridge an incredible place to conduct research on energy materials. Furthermore, the international nature of Cambridge has helped me build collaborations in countries I would not have had access to from the United States.

It is impossible to walk into a pub, coffee shop, or grocery store without hearing incredibly academic conversations, and I have found that academically driven environment to be extremely rewarding.

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.

I grew up in the Scottish Highlands, where the environment informs everything that we do. It’s in our songs and our poetry, and sometimes it’s a daily battle just to get to work because of the elements. I didn’t appreciate that was special until I left for university, and realised that, actually, it’s quite unusual to grow up in that environment and be so connected to your landscape.

I’ve always been interested in plants because my parents are both professional gardeners. My Mum runs a daffodil nursery and my Dad worked for the National Trust for Scotland managing gardens, but I think growing up where I did and the natural environment was my real inspiration. I went to Aberdeen University and did a Bachelor of Science degree in Plant Sciences.

I knew I wanted to do something with plants, but I wasn’t exactly sure what. My degree allowed me to learn about a whole range of subtopics from ecology to microbiology to physiology and everything in between. I graduated with first-class honours, then I went to the Royal Botanical Garden in Edinburgh and did a Master’s degree in taxonomy. I love going out into the wilds to identify and make an inventory of all the species I can see but all my knowledge was self-taught or passed on from other enthusiasts. The Master’s degree gave me a formal understanding of the theory behind species concepts and the skills to identify plants anywhere in the world. I’ve always particularly liked rhododendrons and was lucky enough to work on them for my summer project. It allowed me to work in the herbarium, run DNA analyses and visit living collections across Scotland. It was hard work but so rewarding.

My PhD is modelling the impacts of a plant pathogen, Phytophthora austrocedri, on native UK juniper. I split my time between Cambridge and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Wallingford. Juniper is a great species to work on because it grows in beautiful places across the UK and people really care about it. I collected all my own field data. I taught myself the skills to process the data and write statistical models to understand factors contributing to disease persistence and spread. It’s a challenging PhD because my background is purely ecological rather than mathematical, so there are a lot of things I need to learn, but it also means I approach the work with a different perspective.

Juniper is now a red-listed species in the UK. We only have three conifers native to the UK: Scots pine, yew and juniper. This means juniper has evolved lots of relationships with other species, some of which depend on it solely for their habitat or their food source. Juniper is a keystone species for biodiversity, so if you protect it you’re also protecting all these other species and interactions too. However, juniper populations are declining nationally both in terms of extent and quality – and that’s before the pathogen that can kill populations very quickly was introduced – so juniper is a priority species for conservation action.

I’m helping conservationists and public bodies decide where action should be targeted. These organisations have a limited budget, so want to limit infection between different populations and target restorative action to populations at lower risk from being wiped out by the pathogen. I’m researching why some populations are dying very quickly when others are not showing such severe symptoms even though the pathogen is present. Can environmental difference such as a soil type or rainfall explain that or is it related to characteristics of the juniper populations themselves such as age or density? I want my research to be used directly to improve the health of juniper populations and make sure we retain this important species in our landscape.

I have five supervisors, three women and two men. I’m funded primarily by the Scottish Forestry Trust with additional contributions from the Forestry Commission, Forest Research, the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and my former employer Scottish Natural Heritage. My project is a collaboration between Cambridge University, the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, and Forest Research so I get to meet so many passionate people with really different specialisms and experience: brilliant for generating fascinating ideas.

The best day I’ve had so far was out at one of my study sites in the Lake District. The site has really challenging terrain with lots of steep scree slopes that I had to run up and down every couple of months in rain, gales and blizzards. But the last time I visited it was under a blue sky, the bird song in the woodland was deafening and I took a deliberate detour to get to the highest point and look across the whole juniper population. It was a really special and reinvigorated my determination to generate research that can help save juniper.

We spend a lot of time thinking ‘I’m not 100% confident about that so I won’t go for it’ when we should just try it. Be curious. Don’t limit yourself by thinking that’s not for me or ‘I don’t think I’d be very good at it’. “Yes” gets easier with practice – just go for it! I don’t know what the future holds for me but I want to continue working in ecosystem conservation, ideally back in Scotland among the landscapes I love.

Despite increases in overall life expectancy there is still an inequality, with lower life expectancy observed more often in disadvantaged groups. It is well known that those in higher social classes have a typical life expectancy several years longer than those with the lowest. Similarly, life expectancy and levels of good health vary between UK cities and regions, with large variations in expected years of life in good health.

In research published in BMJ Open, a team led by researchers at the Cambridge Institute of Public Health examined whether there was a link between living in an area of deprivation and subsequent hospital use. To do so, they examined data from almost 25,000 individuals (11,000 men and 14,000 women) from the EPIC-Norfolk cohort across almost two decades, between 1999 and 2018.

The researchers used the Townsend Index to measure the deprivation of individuals’ residential areas, stratifying people into five levels. The Index looks at levels of unemployment, number of households without a car, the percentage of households not owner-occupied, and the percentage of households with more than one person per room.

Participants completed a lifestyle questionnaire that included questions about their own and their partner’s current and past employment and a list of qualifications. The researchers used the employment information to assign each participant to either non-manual or manual social classes. Non-manual social class included those individuals who worked in professional, managerial, technical and non-manual skilled occupations; manual social class included those who worked in skilled, partly skilled and unskilled manual occupations. The qualifications marked were used to assign participants to lower or higher educational attainment categories.

The researchers found that people who lived in areas of highest deprivation spent the most time in hospital, but the risk of a long hospital stay is seen disproportionately in people who also had low educational attainment or were in manual social class. While the average amount of time spent in hospital over the two decade period was around 28 days for people with high educational attainment, for those with low educational attainment, the average was around 37 days, rising steeply to 43 days in the group living in areas of highest deprivation.

The picture relating to social class was similar, though the differences between social classes was not as pronounced as those between educational attainments. Those individuals in non-manual social classes spent between 29 and 31.5 days in hospital; in manual social classes, people in areas of less deprivation spent around 32 days in hospital, rising to 39.5 days in areas of highest deprivation.

“Regardless of your age and gender, or even lifestyle factors such as smoking and obesity, living in an area of high deprivation is a significant risk factor for spending time in hospital,” said Dr Robert Luben from the Department of Public Health and Primary Care at the University of Cambridge, the study’s first author. “People living in areas at or below the national average for deprivation were more likely to spend more than 20 days in hospital or be admitted to hospital on more than seven occasions during the two decades that we examined.”

Senior author Professor Kay-Tee Khaw, also from the Department of Public Health and Primary Care, said: “People working in a manual occupation or with lower education level and living in more deprived areas had the greatest risk of hospitalisation. This suggests that hospitalisation is greatest when poorer individual socioeconomic factors are combined with residential deprivation.

“It isn’t clear why this should be the case, though we can speculate that it could in part be down to better education improving an individual’s ability to live a healthier life.”

Previous research from the group has examined the link between lifestyle factors, education and hospitalisation. This is the first to look at the link between deprivation at an area level and hospitalisation.

“It clearly is not enough just to focus on educating people and improving lifestyle factors at an individual level,” added Dr Luben. “A poor environment affects those least able to cope. Effective NHS and government policy also needs to address deprivation infrastructural levels – improving housing, transport, access to recreation and green space, for example.”

The research was funded by the Medical Research Council and Cancer Research UK.

Reference
Luben, R et al. Residential area deprivation and risk of subsequent hospital admission in a British population: the EPIC-Norfolk cohort. BMJ Open; 16 Dec 2019; DOI: 10.1136/bmjopen-2019-031251

The spread of hate speech via social media could be tackled using the same ‘quarantine’ approach deployed to combat malicious software, according to University of Cambridge researchers.

Definitions of hate speech vary depending on nation, law and platform, and just blocking keywords is ineffectual: graphic descriptions of violence need not contain obvious ethnic slurs to constitute racist death threats, for example.

As such, hate speech is difficult to detect automatically. It has to be reported by those exposed to it, after the intended “psychological harm” is inflicted, with armies of moderators required to judge every case.

This is the new front line of an ancient debate: freedom of speech versus poisonous language.

Now, an engineer and a linguist have published a proposal in the journal Ethics and Information Technology that harnesses cyber security techniques to give control to those targeted, without resorting to censorship.

Cambridge language and machine learning experts are using databases of threats and violent insults to build algorithms that can provide a score for the likelihood of an online message containing forms of hate speech.

As these algorithms get refined, potential hate speech could be identified and “quarantined”. Users would receive a warning alert with a “Hate O’Meter” – the hate speech severity score – the sender’s name, and an option to view the content or delete unseen.

This approach is akin to spam and malware filters, and researchers from the ‘Giving Voice to Digital Democracies’ project believe it could dramatically reduce the amount of hate speech people are forced to experience. They are aiming to have a prototype ready in early 2020.

“Hate speech is a form of intentional online harm, like malware, and can therefore be handled by means of quarantining,” said co-author and linguist Dr Stefanie Ullman. “In fact, a lot of hate speech is actually generated by software such as Twitter bots.”

“Companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google generally respond reactively to hate speech,” said co-author and engineer Dr Marcus Tomalin. “This may be okay for those who don’t encounter it often. For others it’s too little, too late.”

“Many women and people from minority groups in the public eye receive anonymous hate speech for daring to have an online presence. We are seeing this deter people from entering or continuing in public life, often those from groups in need of greater representation,” he said.

Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently told a UK audience that hate speech posed a “threat to democracies”, in the wake of many women MPs citing online abuse as part of the reason they will no longer stand for election.

While in a Georgetown University address, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke of “broad disagreements over what qualifies as hate” and argued: “we should err on the side of greater expression”.

The researchers say their proposal is not a magic bullet, but it does sit between the “extreme libertarian and authoritarian approaches” of either entirely permitting or prohibiting certain language online.

Importantly, the user becomes the arbiter. “Many people don’t like the idea of an unelected corporation or micromanaging government deciding what we can and can’t say to each other,” said Tomalin.

“Our system will flag when you should be careful, but it’s always your call. It doesn’t stop people posting or viewing what they like, but it gives much needed control to those being inundated with hate.”

In the paper, the researchers refer to detection algorithms achieving 60% accuracy – not much better than chance. Tomalin’s machine learning lab has now got this up to 80%, and he anticipates continued improvement of the mathematical modeling.

Meanwhile, Ullman gathers more ‘training data’: verified hate speech from which the algorithms can learn. This helps refine the ‘confidence scores’ that determine a quarantine and subsequent Hate O’Meter read-out, which could be set like a sensitivity dial depending on user preference.

A basic example might involve a word like ‘bitch’: a misogynistic slur, but also a legitimate term in contexts such as dog breeding. It’s the algorithmic analysis of where such a word sits syntactically – the types of surrounding words and semantic relations between them – that informs the hate speech score.

“Identifying individual keywords isn’t enough, we are looking at entire sentence structures and far beyond. Sociolinguistic information in user profiles and posting histories can all help improve the classification process,” said Ullman.

Added Tomalin: “Through automated quarantines that provide guidance on the strength of hateful content, we can empower those at the receiving end of the hate speech poisoning our online discourses.”

However, the researchers, who work in Cambridge’s Centre for Research into Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH), say that – as with computer viruses – there will always be an arms race between hate speech and systems for limiting it.

The project has also begun to look at “counter-speech”: the ways people respond to hate speech. The researchers intend to feed into debates around how virtual assistants such as ‘Siri’ should respond to threats and intimidation.

The work has been funded by the International Foundation for the Humanities and Social Change.

The research, published in the journal NeuroImage, used a method called dual electroencephalograhy (EEG) to look at brain signals in both mums and babies while they were interacting with each other. They found that mums and babies tend to synchronise their brain waves – an effect known as interpersonal neural connectivity – particularly in the frequency of 6-9 hertz, the infant alpha range.

By looking at the qualities and structure of the interpersonal neural connectivity using a mathematical method of network analysis, the researchers could see how information flowed within each separate brain, and also how the two brains operated together as a network.

Mothers and babies tend to spend a lot of time together in a positive emotional state, in which their brains are very connected. The study found that positive interaction, with lots of eye contact, enhances the ability of mother and infant brains to operate as a single system. This promotes efficient sharing and flow of information between mother and infant.

“From our previous work, we know that when the neural connection between mothers and babies is strong, babies are more receptive and ready to learn from their mothers,” said Dr Vicky Leong in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Psychology, who led the study. “At this stage of life, the baby brain has the ability to change significantly, and these changes are driven by the baby’s experiences. By using a positive emotional tone during social interactions, parents can connect better with their infants, and stimulate development of their baby’s mental capacity.”

The results also suggest that babies of depressed mothers may show less evidence of learning because of a weakened neural connection between mother and infant. Mothers who experience a persistently low or negative mental state due to clinical depression tend to have less interaction with their baby. Their speech is often flatter in tone, they make much less eye contact, and they are less likely to respond when their baby tries to get their attention.

“Our emotions literally change the way that our brains share information with others – positive emotions help us to communicate in a much more efficient way,” said Dr Leong. “Depression can have a powerfully negative effect on a parent’s ability to establish connections with their baby. All the social cues that normally foster connection are less readily available to the child, so the child doesn’t receive the optimal emotional input it needs to thrive.”

Emotional communication between parents and their children is crucial during early life, yet little is known about its neural underpinnings. This is the first brain imaging study of two related individuals to investigate if and how babies’ interpersonal neural connectivity with their mothers is affected by the emotional quality of their social interaction.

As a social species, humans share emotional states with others. This work shows how emotions change the connection between two individuals at a neural level. The researchers say that their findings apply to many other types of affiliative bond, including between couples, close friends, and siblings, where each person is highly attuned to the other. The strength of the effect is likely to depend on how well the two people know each other and the level of trust between them.

Reference
Santamaria, L. et al: Emotional valence modulates the topology of the parent-infant inter-brain network. Neuroimage (2019). DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2019.116341

Trees of recovering tropical forests were found to have tougher leaves, with lower concentrations of the nutrients phosphorus and nitrogen – both essential for plant and tree growth – than trees of old-growth forests. This suggests that multiple cycles of logging and recovery irreversibly remove phosphorus from the forest system, and are pushing the nutrient content towards ecological limits.

“Old-growth tropical forests that have been the same for millions of years are now changing irreversibly due to repeated logging,” said Dr Tom Swinfield, a plant scientist in the University of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute, and first author of the paper published in the journal Global Change Biology.

Soil nutrients including phosphorus come from rocks, and are taken up by trees through their roots. Cutting down the trees causes these nutrients to be lost through soil erosion, gas emissions, and removal of nutrients in the extracted timber. The researchers estimate that as much as 30% of the available phosphorus in the soil is being removed from tropical forest systems by repeated logging.

“We see that as the logged forests start recovering, they’re actually diverging from the old growth forests in terms of their leaf chemistry and possibly also species composition, as the amount of available nutrients goes down,” said Swinfield. “At the moment the trees can cope, but the fact that they’re changing indicates phosphorus levels in the soil are dropping. This could affect the speed at which forests recover from future disturbances.”

The researchers created high definition images of a forest landscape in north-eastern Borneo using LIDAR-guided imaging spectroscopy from an aircraft. This is a method of remote sensing, using a laser scanner and high fidelity camera, which takes hundreds of measurements across the light spectrum. They combined this information with nutrient measurements from 700 individual trees in the forest. This allowed them to map the concentrations of nutrients in the trees’ leaves over an area containing repeatedly logged forest and old-growth forest, and compare the two.

This is the first landscape-scale study of how leaf function changes in response to logging. Selective logging is carried out extensively across millions of hectares of forest in the tropics, so that degraded forests are now more widespread than old-growth forests. The study suggests that each consecutive harvest reduces the level of nutrients in the system, and newly established trees have to adapt to conserve the scarce resources available to them.

“Phosphorus limitation is a really serious global issue: it’s one of the areas where humans are using a vital resource beyond sustainable levels,” said Professor David Coomes, Director of the University of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute, who led the project. The researchers found that differences from old-growth forest become more pronounced as logged forests grow larger over time, suggesting exacerbated phosphorus limitation as forests recover.

This research was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council.

Reference
Swinfield, T. et al: ‘Imaging spectroscopy reveals the effects of topography and logging on the leaf chemistry of tropical forest canopy trees.’ Global Change Biology, Dec 2019. DOI: 10.1111/GCB.14903.