I have used classroom debates about climate change in my higher education teaching for over a decade–with environmental science and geography students and with final year undergraduates and Master’s students. For a wicked problem like climate change, where there is no single correct position on how to deal with the challenge, nor why it should be dealt with this way, nor by whom, I have found that structured debates become effective learning devices for students.

Stylised debating positions allow the interweaving of both descriptive (‘this is known’) and prescriptive (‘this is right’) arguments. In other words, through debate students learn not only about the state of academic knowledge on a topic but also see how scientific knowledge is politically and ethically sterile unless it is interpreted using strong normative reasoning. To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, it is necessary to pass judgment on the facts to be able to act politically in the world. Furthermore, through debate students learn that such reasoning often leads to disagreement. But they also learn that disagreement, far from being innately destructive, can be an opportunity for self-reflection and personal learning

There is rising concern about the narrowness of students’ educational experiences and their lack of exposure to people and/or views with which they disagree. There is also growing evidence of online echo chambers and strong social sorting feeding the rise of identity politics and populism in many societies. We owe our students a learning experience which exposes and explains the reasons for answering in different ways the challenging questions posed by climate change.

It is for these reasons that I have developed a new student textbook – Contemporary Climate Change Debates: A Student Primer, published this month by Routledge – that will help students develop their own well-informed position without being told what to think. The 15 selected debates illustrate the range of cultural, economic, epistemic, ethical, legal, political, social and technological challenges raised by climate change. Each chapter addresses one of these debates, with invited leading and emerging scholars answering either ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to each question, laying out the evidential and normative grounds—the descriptive and prescriptive bases–for their competing positions.

The authors are selected from 12 different countries, drawing equally across gender and from a variety of disciplinary and value commitments. Questions of perspective, identity, value, judgment and prescription are central to many of the disagreements fostered by climate change. My approach leans more on the humanities tradition than on that of the natural or social sciences, but its appeal is to students of climate change across the sciences, social sciences and humanities.

Examining these questions, and understanding how and why different scholars analyse and answer them in different ways, is a crucial learning experience for any student of climate change whether at high school, college or university. Students should be able to arrive at answers to complex questions, giving credible and reasonable accounts of their reasoning, without mere appeal to the authority of others or to calling down your own social identity. To quote philosopher Richard Foley, scholars and students alike “… should minimise the reliance on the opinions of others ‘floating in their brains’ and should instead to the extent possible arrive at conclusions there are able to defend on their own”.

It is important in a democracy to learn to disagree well, to realise that people with whom you disagree are not necessarily misguided, malicious or out to harm you. Their own life experience, education, moral or value commitments, might just mean that they see and interpret the world differently. Being able to recognise this, being able to engage in respectful debate and to learn from your antagonist, is the essence of learning. It helps break a deepening and polarising partisanship which is anathema for democratic deliberation.

Using labels to denigrate one’s opponent without considering in detail the reasons for their views, is a tactic used to ‘win an argument’ without in fact winning the argument. Calling out your opponent as a climate ‘denier’ or ‘contrarian’—or indeed as a climate ‘alarmist’ or ‘zealot’–does nothing to encourage constructive dialogue. Rather what is needed is a clear articulation of the different values that are at stake in the dispute and then to engage in political processes to explore and reach decisions about what to do. Simply listening to “the science” provides no shortcut to this challenging and often messy task. Debating with people who see, think and feel differently about climate change is essential.

Trees help to mitigate climate change by taking carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it. The bigger the tree, the more carbon it stores. New research has discovered the tallest known tree in the Amazon, towering above the previous record holder at a height of 88.5 metres. This giant could store as much carbon as an entire hectare of rainforest elsewhere in the Amazon.

A group of giant trees was discovered by Professor Eric Gorgens, a researcher at the Federal University of the Jequitinhonha and Mucuri Valleys (UFVJM), Brazil using LIDAR – a method of remote sensing using a laser scanner on an aircraft. They are growing in a remote region of northern Brazil, far from human activity, and may be over 400 years old. Intriguingly, they are all the same species, called Dinizia excelsa, known in Portuguese as Angelim vermelho.

Toby Jackson, a plant scientist in the University of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute, joined Gorgens on an expedition to visit the giants. The team validated the tallest tree’s height, and collected samples from the understory to try to understand what makes this site so special.

Jackson wrote an account of his expedition for The Conversation

Reference: 
Gorgens, E.B. et al: ‘The giant trees of the Amazon basin. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment‘, Aug 2019. DOI: 10.1002/fee.2085

My PhD is on the impact of road traffic on bird populations in Great Britain. I first came to Cambridge as an undergraduate; where I studied Natural Sciences and specialised in Zoology. I then worked as a research assistant in Cambridge before going on to do a Master’s in Wildlife Conservation at the University of Reading. In 2015, I returned to Cambridge to start my PhD with the Zoology Department.

I divide my time between Cambridge and Galápagos. While my PhD is based largely in Cambridge and focuses on the impacts of roads, I also run a project in Galápagos. I visited the islands in 2015 after completing my Master’s degree and became interested in an introduced bird species, the Smooth-billed Ani. I decided to set up a project with them and have been running it ever since, in collaboration with the Charles Darwin Foundation and the Galápagos National Park. Our aims are to quantify the impact this bird is having on native fauna and ecosystems, to analyse whether control or eradication is needed; and to consider how either of these might best be achieved.

I feel particularly lucky to be part of the David Attenborough Building. For my PhD, I work with the University and several NGOs, all of which have an office in the same building. I am constantly running up and down the stairs to ask people questions. It is wonderful to be part of such a collaborative environment.

My work is incredibly varied. One big undertaking of mine in the past couple of years was to gather as much information as possible on the introduction and potential impacts of the Smooth-billed Ani in Galápagos for a review paper. As most of this was unpublished it involved visiting or contacting various libraries and universities and going through old archives. I found a lot of information that otherwise might have never surfaced, so it was very rewarding work. I have also undertaken fieldwork, designing and building traps to catch Anis and then analysing their diets. Meanwhile, my PhD research involves a huge amount of number-crunching and statistics, which I also really enjoy.

I think having confidence in yourself is really important. During my Master’s project, I spent two months in the Norfolk Broads, studying the impact of Marsh Harriers on Lapwings and other wading birds. This was the biggest research project I had done at that stage, and I knew I would have much less input from my supervisors than I did as an undergraduate. I remember arriving in the Norfolk Broads on the first day, unpacking in my little room with no wifi, knowing I would have hardly any contact with another person for the next two months. I knew the results I wanted to achieve and had a rough idea of how to do it but I felt quite out of my depth. I realised that I had to take control of my own work, trust my own abilities and not rely on supervisors as much as I was used to. Over those two months, I began to really build respect for my own ideas as well as those of others. I grew so much as a scientist and as a person and thoroughly enjoyed the whole project. If you can learn to have confidence in yourself and your abilities, everything becomes less intimidating.

Collaboration is key. I have really seen, over the last few years, how much of a difference good collaboration and communication can make. In research, there are usually many different ways of doing things, and being able to bounce ideas around and combine the knowledge and experience of multiple people can be hugely beneficial. I have learnt so much and met many brilliant scientists from collaborating on projects. The hardest part is preventing yourself from agreeing to the tens of new project ideas that come out of each existing one!

A team of researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, used atmospheric data from 19 exoplanets to obtain detailed measurements of their chemical and thermal properties. The exoplanets in the study span a large range in size – from ‘mini-Neptunes’ of nearly 10 Earth masses to ‘super-Jupiters’ of over 600 Earth masses – and temperature, from nearly 20°C to over 2000°C. Like the giant planets in our solar system, their atmospheres are rich in hydrogen, but they orbit different types of stars.

The researchers found that while water vapour is common in the atmospheres of many exoplanets, the amounts were surprisingly lower than expected, while the amounts of other elements found in some planets were consistent with expectations. The results, which are part of a five-year research programme on the chemical compositions of planetary atmospheres outside our solar system, are reported in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“We are seeing the first signs of chemical patterns in extra-terrestrial worlds, and we’re seeing just how diverse they can be in terms of their chemical compositions,” said project leader Dr Nikku Madhusudhan from the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge, who first measured low water vapour abundances in giant exoplanets five years ago.

In our solar system, the amount of carbon relative to hydrogen in the atmospheres of giant planets is significantly higher than that of the sun. This ‘super-solar’ abundance is thought to have originated when the planets were being formed, and large amounts of ice, rocks and other particles were brought into the planet in a process called accretion.

The abundances of other elements have been predicted to be similarly high in the atmospheres of giant exoplanets – especially oxygen, which is the most abundant element in the universe after hydrogen and helium. This means that water, a dominant carrier of oxygen, is also expected to be overabundant in such atmospheres.

The researchers used extensive spectroscopic data from space-based and ground-based telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Very Large Telescope in Chile and the Gran Telescopio Canarias in Spain. The range of available observations, along with detailed computational models, statistical methods, and atomic properties of sodium and potassium, allowed the researchers to obtain estimates of the chemical abundances in the exoplanet atmospheres across the sample.

The team reported the abundance of water vapour in 14 of the 19 planets, and the abundance of sodium and potassium in six planets each. Their results suggest a depletion of oxygen relative to other elements and provide chemical clues into how these exoplanets may have formed without substantial accretion of ice.

“It is incredible to see such low water abundances in the atmospheres of a broad range of planets orbiting a variety of stars,” said Madhusudhan.

“Measuring the abundances of these chemicals in exoplanetary atmospheres is something extraordinary, considering that we have not been able to do the same for giant planets in our solar system yet, including Jupiter, our nearest gas giant neighbour,” said Luis Welbanks, lead author of the study and PhD student at the Institute of Astronomy.

Various efforts to measure water in Jupiter’s atmosphere, including NASA’s current Juno mission, have proved challenging. “Since Jupiter is so cold, any water vapour in its atmosphere would be condensed, making it difficult to measure,” said Welbanks. “If the water abundance in Jupiter were found to be plentiful as predicted, it would imply that it formed in a different way to the exoplanets we looked at in the current study.”

“We look forward to increasing the size of our planet sample in future studies,” said Madhusudhan. “Inevitably, we expect to find outliers to the current trends as well as measurements of other chemicals.”

These results show that different chemical elements can no longer be assumed to be equally abundant in planetary atmospheres, challenging assumptions in several theoretical models.

“Given that water is a key ingredient to our notion of habitability on Earth, it is important to know how much water can be found in planetary systems beyond our own,” said Madhusudhan.

Reference:
L. Welbanks, N. Madhusudhan, N. Allard, et al. ‘Mass-Metallicity Trends in Transiting Exoplanets from Atmospheric Abundances of H₂O, Na, and K.’ The Astrophysical Journal Letters (2019). DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ab5a89

The University of Cambridge will provide essential contributions to the DUNE experiment, a global science project that brings the scientific community together to work on trying to answer some of the biggest questions in physics.

DUNE (the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment) is hosted by the United States Department of Energy’s Fermilab, and will be designed and operated by a collaboration of over 1,000 physicists from 32 countries.

The project aims to advance our understanding of the origin and structure of the universe. It will study the behaviour of particles called neutrinos and their antimatter counterparts, antineutrinos. This could provide insight as to why we live in a matter-dominated universe while anti-matter has largely disappeared.

“DUNE has the unique potential to answer fundamental questions that overlap particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology,” said Professor Stefan Söldner-Rembold of the University of Manchester, who leads the international DUNE collaboration as one of its spokespeople.

The investment, from UK Research and Innovation’s Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), is a four-year construction grant to 13 educational institutions, and to STFC’s Rutherford Appleton and Daresbury Laboratories. This grant, of £30m, represents the first of two stages to support the DUNE construction project in the UK which will run until 2026 and represent a total investment of £45m.

Various elements of the experiment are under construction across the world, with the UK taking a major role in contributing essential expertise and components to the experiment and facility. UK scientists and engineers will design and produce the principle detector components at the core of the DUNE detector, which will comprise four large tanks each containing 17,000 kg of liquid argon.

The UK groups are also developing a high-speed data acquisition system to record the signals from the detector, together with the sophisticated software needed to interpret the data and provide the answers to the scientific questions.

“DUNE could help to change the way we understand the universe,” said Dr Melissa Uchida, who leads the neutrino group at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory. “This announcement has allowed the UK to take a leading role in many aspects of the experiment, making the UK the biggest DUNE contributor outside the USA. Our group will deliver hardware and software, as well as calibration and analysis effort for DUNE and we are ready and excited to meet the challenges ahead.”

DUNE will also watch for supernova neutrinos produced when a star explodes, which will allow the scientists to observe the formation of neutron stars and black holes and will investigate whether protons live forever or eventually decay, bringing us closer to fulfilling Einstein’s dream of a grand unified theory.

The other UK universities involved in the project are Birmingham, Bristol, Edinburgh, Imperial College London, Lancaster, Liverpool, Manchester, Oxford, Sheffield, Sussex, UCL and Warwick.

Preventative medicine programmes such as the UK National Health Service’s Health Check and Healthier You programmes are aimed at improving our health and reducing our risk of developing diseases. While such strategies are inexpensive, cost effective and scalable, they could be made more effective using personalised information about an individual’s health and disease risk.

The rise and application of ‘big data’ in healthcare, assessing and analysing detailed, large-scale datasets makes it increasingly feasible to make predictions about health and disease outcomes and enable stratified approaches to prevention and clinical management.

Now, an international team of researchers from the UK and USA, working with biotech company SomaLogic, has shown that large-scale measurement of proteins in a single blood test can provide important information about our health and can help to predict a range of different diseases and risk factors.

Our bodies contain around 30,000 different proteins, which are coded for by our DNA and regulate biological processes. Some of these proteins enter the blood stream by purposeful secretion to orchestrate biological processes in health or in disease, for example hormones, cytokines and growth factors. Others enter the blood through leakage from cell damage and cell death. Both secreted and leaked proteins can inform health status and disease risk.

In a proof-of-concept study based on five observational cohorts in almost 17,000 participants, researchers scanned 5,000 proteins in a plasma sample taken from each participant. Plasma is the single largest component of blood and is the clear liquid that remains after the removal of red and white blood cells and platelets. The study resulted in around 85 million protein targets being measured.

The technique involves using fragments of DNA known as aptamers that bind to the target protein. In general, only specific fragments will bind to particular proteins – in the same way that only a specific key will fit in a particular lock. Using existing genetic sequencing technology, the researchers can then search for the aptamers and determine which proteins are present and in what concentrations.

The researchers analysed the results using statistical methods and machine learning techniques to develop predictive models – for example, that an individual whose blood contains a certain pattern of proteins is at increased risk of developing diabetes. The models covered a number of health states, including levels of liver fat, kidney function and visceral fat, alcohol consumption, physical activity and smoking behaviour, and for risk of developing type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

The accuracy of the models varied, with some showing high predictive powers, such as for percentage body fat, while others had only modest prognostic power, such as for cardiovascular risk. The researchers report that their protein-based models were all either better predictors than models based on traditional risk factors or would constitute more convenient and less expensive alternatives to traditional testing.

Many of the proteins are linked to a number of health states or conditions; for example, leptin, which modulates appetite and metabolism, was informative for predictive models of percentage body fat, visceral fat, physical activity and fitness.

One difference between genome sequencing and so-called ‘proteomics’ – studying an individual’s proteins in depth – is that whereas the genome is fixed, the proteome changes over time. It might change as an individual becomes more obese, less physically active or smokes, for example, so proteins will be able to track changes in an individual’s health status over a lifetime.

“Proteins circulating in our blood are a manifestation of our genetic make-up as well as many other factors, such as behaviours or the presence of disease, even if not yet diagnosed,” said Dr Claudia Langenberg, from the MRC Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge. “This is one of the reasons why proteins are such good indicators of our current and future health state and have the potential to improve clinical prediction across different and diverse diseases.”

“It’s remarkable that plasma protein patterns alone can faithfully represent such a wide variety of common and important health issues, and we think that this is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Dr Stephen Williams, Chief Medical Officer of SomaLogic, who led the study. “We have more than a hundred tests in our SomaSignal pipeline and believe that large-scale protein scanning has the potential to become a sole information source for individualised health assessments.”

While this study shows a proof-of-principle, the researchers say that as technology improves and becomes more affordable, it is feasible that a comprehensive health evaluation using a battery of protein models derived from a single blood sample could be offered as routine by health services.

“This proof of concept study demonstrates a new paradigm that measurement of blood proteins can accurately deliver health information that spans across numerous medical specialties and that should be actionable for patients and their healthcare providers,” said Peter Ganz, MD, co-leader of this study and the Maurice Eliaser Distinguished Professor of Medicine at the UCSF and Director of the Center of Excellence in Vascular Research at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center. “I expect that in the future we will look back at this Nature Medicine proteomic study as a critical milestone in personalising and thus improving the care of our patients.”

Reference
Williams, SA et al. Plasma protein patterns as comprehensive indicators of health; Nat Med; 2 Dec 2019; DOI: 10.1038/s41591-019-0665-2

Competing interests
The research was a collaboration with SomaLogic Inc, which has a commercial interest in the results. Several co-authors were or are employees of SomaLogic. The company has provided funding to the University of Cambridge. Dr Peter Ganz is a member of the SomaLogic Medical Advisory board, for which he receives no remuneration of any kind.

Funding
The research was supported by the UK Medical Research Council, US National Institutes on Aging, British Heart Foundation, National Institute for Health Research, the Norwegian Ministry of Health, Norwegian University of Science and Technology and Norwegian Research Council, Central Norway Regional Health Authority, Nord-Trondelag County Council, Norwegian Institute of Public Health, US National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. SomaScan assays and the Covance study were funded by SomaLogic, Inc.

We’re seeing a transformational change in the propulsion and power sectors. Aviation and power generation have brought huge benefits – connecting people across the world and providing safe, reliable electricity to billions – but reducing their carbon emissions is now urgently needed.

Electrification is one way to decarbonise, certainly for small and medium-sized aircraft. In fact, more than 70 companies are planning a first flight of electric air vehicles by 2024. For large aircraft, no alternative to the jet engine currently exists, but radical new aircraft architectures, such as those developed by the Cambridge-MIT Silent Aircraft Initiative and the NASA N+3 project, show the possibility of reducing CO₂ emissions by around 70%.

A common thread in these technologies and those needed for renewable power is their reliance on efficient, reliable turbomachinery – a technology that has been central to our work for the past 50 years. Currently we’re working on applications that include the development of electric and hybrid-electric aircraft, the generation of power from the tides and low-grade heat, like solar energy, and hydrogen-based engines.

We’re also working on existing technologies as a way of reducing the carbon emissions, like wind turbines, and developing the next generation of jet engines such as Rolls-Royce’s UltraFan engine, which will enable CO₂ emission reductions of 25% by 2025. A great example is Dr Chez Hall’s research on a potential replacement for the 737. This futuristic aircraft architecture involves an electrical propulsion system being embedded in the aircraft fuselage, allowing up to 15% reduction in fuel burn.

A key element of meeting the decarbonisation challenge is to accelerate technology development. And so, over the past five years, our primary focus has been the process itself – we’ve been asking ‘can we develop technology faster and cheaper?’ The answer is yes – at least 10 times faster and 10 times cheaper. Our solution is to merge the digital and physical systems involved. In 2017, we undertook a pioneering trial of a new method of technology development. A team of academic researchers and industrial designers were embedded in the Whittle and given four technologies to develop.

The results were astonishing. In 2005, a similar trial took the Whittle two years. In 2017, the agile testing methods took less than a week, demonstrating a hundred times faster technology development.

We describe it as ‘tightening the circle’ between design, manufacture and testing. Design times for new technologies have been reduced from around a month to one or two days using augmented and machine-learning-based design systems. These make use of in-house flow simulation software that is accelerated by graphics cards developed for the computer gaming industry.

Manufacturing times for new technologies have been cut from two or three months to two or three days by directly linking the design systems to rows of in-house 3D printing and rapid machining tools, rather than relying on external suppliers. Designers can now try out new concepts in physical form very soon after an idea is conceived.

Testing times have been reduced from around two months to a few days by undertaking a ‘value stream analysis’ of the experimental process. Each sequential operation was analysed, enabling us to remove over 95% of the tasks, producing a much leaner process of assembly and disassembly. Test results are automatically fed back to the augmented design system, allowing it to learn from both the digital and the physical data.

There’s a natural human timescale of about a week whereby if you go from idea to result then you have a virtuous circle between understanding and inspiration. We’ve found that when the technology development timescale approaches the human timescale – as it does in our leaner process – then innovation explodes.

The New Whittle Laboratory will house the National Centre for Propulsion and Power, due to open in 2022 with funding from the Aerospace Technology Institute. A national asset, the Centre is designed to combine a scaled-up version of the agile test capability with state-of-the-art manufacturing capability to cover around 80% of the UK’s future aerodynamic technology needs.

Key to the success of the Whittle Laboratory has been its strong industrial partnerships – with Rolls-Royce, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Siemens for over 50 years, and with Dyson for around five years. So another component of the new development will be a ‘Propulsion and Power Challenge Space’. Here, teams from across the University will co-locate with industry to develop the technologies necessary to decarbonise the propulsion and power sectors.

The length and depth of these partnerships have so many benefits. They’ve enabled technology strategy to be shared at the highest level, and new projects to be kicked off quickly, without the need for contract lawyers. Joint industry–academic technology transfer teams move seamlessly between industry and academia, ensuring that technologies are successfully transferred into product.

Most importantly, the partnerships provide a source of ‘real’ high-impact research projects. It’s these long-term industrial partnerships that have made the Whittle the world’s most academically successful propulsion and power research laboratory.

We are at a pivotal moment, in terms of both Cambridge’s history of leading technology development in propulsion and power, and humanity’s need to decarbonise these sectors. Just 50 years ago, at the opening of the original Whittle Laboratory, research and industry faced the challenge of making mass air travel a reality. Now the New Whittle Laboratory will enable us to lead the way in making it green.

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.

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

It was my mother who first got me interested in science. When I was very young, back when I was growing up China, she used to tell me bedtime stories about the origins of thunder and lightning, how radios work, or how eggs became chickens. This apparently had a profound effect on me. Eggs would regularly go missing from the kitchen and turn up buried snugly under some blankets in bed. Or the new radio would be found dismantled, presumably taken apart by someone who wanted a better look inside…

My PhD research was in medicinal chemistry. My aim was to design anti-cancer drugs that could penetrate deep into solid tumours. To achieve this, I synthesised a library of novel DNA intercalators and anti-cancer platinum complexes and studied their bio-distribution and metabolism within 3D-tumour models using a variety of chemical imaging techniques. My research was very much directed by the problem, which gave me opportunities to travel around the world to work in different labs and disciplines. I was able to arrive at new drug design strategies using this approach.

Environmental sustainability is important to me, so that’s why I moved into artificial photosynthesis. My PhD research was highly interdisciplinary and I developed a deep appreciation of how different approaches can breathe fresh ideas into old problems and can often catalyse breakthroughs. Artificial photosynthesis for sustainable fuel development is also a highly interdisciplinary field, and as a research area, it aligns with my personal values about the importance of environmental sustainability.

I came to the Department of Chemistry more than five years ago as a Marie Curie Incoming International Fellow to work on artificial photosynthesis in Professor Erwin Reisner’s group. I was excited by the notion that, coming from quite a different background, I would be able to bring unique perspectives into the field. I also liked the idea of being immersed in a new learning experience. It turned out to be more challenging – and at the same time more fulfilling – than I expected.

We’ve designed new catalytic systems to turn sunlight into ‘solar fuels’. In my postdoctoral research, I was interested in turning sunlight into chemical fuels we call ‘solar fuels’ – sustainable and green alternatives to our current unsustainable and polluting carbon-based fuels. Plants have been carrying out this for millions of years through the process of photosynthesis, enabled by a set of special proteins that make up the photosynthetic electron transport chain. I coordinated a team that studied these enzymes and the reactions that they carry out. We incorporated them into several prototype systems that can use sunlight to turn water into hydrogen. We hope this work will help make such fuels available to everyone in future.

We still need to understand the basic chemistry and physics behind many components of photosynthesis. There are many fundamental questions that remain to be answered both within biological and artificial photosynthetic systems. Mainly, these relate to the flow of electrons and how they can be more efficiently generated and used in catalysis. During my postdoctoral research, I wired photosystem II, nature’s water oxidation enzyme that kick-starts photosynthesis, to custom-made electrodes to study enzyme functionality and to perform light-driven fuel forming reactions. This allowed me to understand the ‘bottlenecks’ of different types of photosynthetic systems, and where improvements need to be made.

My BBSRC Fellowship allows me to drive my own research vision with my own research group. I started my own research group in 2018, and my focus is to develop new tools and approaches for studying photosynthesis (both biological and artificial) and utilising it in renewable energy generation and agricultural/sensor technologies. I’m supported by a generous grant that enables me to have postdocs and the necessary equipment – in particular, a sophisticated 3D printer that can print a large variety of materials, from living cells to metals.

The Fellowship will also help me build my leadership skills. It aims to get Fellows on the trajectory to leading our own research groups confidently and successfully. We have a BBSRC mentor that comes to visit our lab once a year. I’ve also attended workshops where I learned about the economy of science and leadership. I really like that this scheme offers not just money but the necessary support to help me become a well-rounded leader in science. I feel incredibly lucky to have this opportunity.

I hope my career will lead to the uncovering of many ‘unknown unknowns’. I want to drive innovative and high-value research that addresses important problems in our world today, and I want to achieve this while fostering a healthy and positive lab culture. Like any scientist, I hope my career will lead to the uncovering of many ‘unknown unknowns’ that will leave a positive impact on the world.

It’s important to me that we inspire more students – both girls and boys – to choose science. I still turn up to meetings and workshops where I am either the only woman or one of the few women present. However, this is happening less and less, and I feel that there is a real effort being made by our institutions to be inclusive and to lower barriers. The old barriers still exist, but I’m optimistic since I know how determined women can be.

In the meantime, I think we shouldn’t forget about positive action being needed to foster men to challenge their own status quo to become strong counterparts of the future.

Working in collaboration with the Italcementi HeidelbergCement Group and other partners, the Cambridge scientists developed a photocatalyst that degrades up to 70% more atmospheric nitrogen oxides (NO_x) than standard titania nanoparticles in tests on real pollutants.

Atmospheric pollution is a growing problem, particularly in urban areas and in developing countries. According to the World Health Organization, one out of every nine deaths worldwide can be attributed to diseases caused by air pollution. Organic pollutants, such as nitrogen oxides and volatile compounds, are the main cause of this, and they are mostly emitted by vehicle exhausts and industry.

While researchers are developing new technologies and energy sources that will drastically reduce the volume of pollutants emitted into the atmosphere in the first place, they are also on the hunt for new ways to remove more pollutants from the atmosphere. Photocatalysts such as titania are one way to do this. When titania is exposed to sunlight, it degrades harmful nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds present at the surface, oxidising them into inert or harmless products.

Now, in a study published in the journal Nanoscale, the researchers demonstrated that a composite of titania and graphene – a two-dimensional form of carbon – has significantly more powerful photodegradation properties than bare titania.

Researchers from the Cambridge Graphene Centre prepared and tested the composite, confirming its ability to photocatalytically degrade pollutant molecules, then researchers at Italcementi applied the coating to concrete to investigate its potential for environmental remediation.

“We decided to couple graphene to the most-used photocatalyst, titania, to boost the photocatalytic action,” said co-author Marco Goisis from Italcementi. “Photocatalysis is one of the most powerful ways we have to depollute the environment because the process does not consume the photocatalysts. It is a reaction activated by solar light.”

By performing liquid-phase exfoliation of graphite – a process that creates graphene – in the presence of titania nanoparticles, using only water and atmospheric pressure, the scientists created the new graphene-titania nanocomposite.

They found that it passively removes pollutants from the air when coated on the surface of materials. If applied to concrete on the street or the walls of buildings, the harmless photodegradation products could be washed away by rain or wind, or manually cleaned off.

To measure the photodegradation effects, the team tested the new photocatalyst against NO_x and recorded a 70% improvement in photocatalytic degradation of nitrogen oxides compared to standard titania. They also used rhodamine B as a model for volatile organic pollutants, as its molecular structure closely resembles those of pollutants emitted by vehicles, industry and agriculture. They found that 40% more rhodamine B was degraded by the graphene-titania composite than by titania alone, in water under UV irradiation.

“Coupling graphene to titania gave us excellent results in powder form – and it could be applied to different materials, of which concrete is a good example for the widespread use, helping us to achieve a healthier environment. It is low-maintenance and environmentally friendly, as it just requires the sun’s energy and no other input,” said Goisis.

But there are challenges to be addressed before this can be used on a commercial scale. Cheaper methods to mass-produce graphene are needed. Interactions between the catalyst and the host material need to be deepened as well as studies into the long-term stability of the photocatalyst in the outdoor environment.

Ultrafast transient absorption spectroscopy measurements revealed an electron transfer process from titania to the graphene flakes, decreasing the charge recombination rate and increasing the efficiency of reactive species photoproduction – meaning more pollutant molecules could be degraded.

Based on this concept, scientists are also working on another product – an electrically conductive graphene concrete composite, which was showcased at Mobile World Congress in February this year. When included as a layer in flooring, it releases heat when an electrical current is passed through it. This could be used to heat buildings or streets without using water from a tank or boiler. It could also be used to create self-sensing concrete, which could detect stress or strain in concrete structures and monitor for structural defects, providing warning signals if the structural integrity is close to failure.

“An ever-increasing number of companies recognise the potential for graphene in new and improved technologies,” said Professor Andrea Ferrari, Director of the Cambridge Graphene Centre and co-author on the current paper. “This work has demonstrated a clear application of graphene for the degradation of environmental pollutants. This can not only have commercial benefits but, more importantly, a cleaner and healthier environment.”

Reference:
Gloria Guidetti et al. ‘Photocatalytic activity of exfoliated graphite-TiO2 nanocomposites.’ Nanoscale (2019). DOI: 10.1039/c9nr06760d

Adapted from a story by the Cambridge Graphene Centre

I first developed an interest in astronomy at high school during a project run by the University of St Andrews. I grew up in a small town on the East coast of Scotland, not far from St Andrews and so my high school was involved in the University’s First Chances project. The project was for pupils from the local area who would be the first in their family to go to university. I chose to investigate the different methods used to detect planets outside our Solar System and by the end of the project, I had decided that I wanted to study astrophysics at St Andrews. After graduating from university in 2017, I moved down to Cambridge to start my PhD in Astronomy.

Choosing to study for my PhD at Cambridge was the best decision I could have made.  The Institute of Astronomy is an extremely friendly, welcoming and inspiring place to work, with an array of research taking place — on exoplanets, star formation and galaxy evolution to name just a few areas. This really helps me to explore different ideas when it comes to my work; because I can speak to so many passionate researchers who each have a fresh perspective and their own expertise. Through my supervisors, I have access to international collaborators which will hopefully help broaden my career prospects in the future. I’m still considering what career path I want to take, but through my PhD, I hope to develop the skills to successfully transition into a postdoctoral researcher position, or into industry.

In my research, I investigate the relationship between galaxies and the supermassive black holes that sit at their centres. Hot gas swirls around the black hole before it reaches the event horizon, and just as hot metal shines red or even white, and stars shine bright, this hot gas emits a lot of radiation. We call these objects active galactic nuclei (AGNs) and some of them are the brightest objects we see in the Universe — so bright that they can outshine the rest of the host galaxy. I want to explore how the brightest of these objects (quasars) affect their host galaxies and investigate their role in galaxy evolution throughout the history of the Universe.

I spend most of my time writing code to analyse observations of these bright AGNs. At the moment, I work mostly with quasar spectra which tell us how much of different wavelengths of light is emitted by the quasars. The spectra can tell us a lot about the quasar; for example, how massive the black hole is. I also read a lot of scientific papers and attend talks at the Institute of Astronomy to keep up to date with my field and to satisfy my interest in other areas. I’ve given talks at international conferences which are also important in astronomy for sharing our work and forming collaborations.

A key moment for me was completing a summer research project during my undergraduate degree. I was awarded funding from the Royal Society of Edinburgh to complete the Cormack Vacation Scholarship, which allowed me to undertake a six-week research project. This was my first experience of research, and the project really opened my eyes to the possibilities of a career in academia. My project won the Cormack Undergraduate Research Prize, and the whole experience helped me decide to do a research degree. Beforehand, I didn’t think that research was something that I wanted to do, but after thoroughly enjoying the project I decided that a PhD was my next step.

There shouldn’t be anything that prevents anyone from following their passion.  My advice to any woman thinking about pursuing a degree or career in a STEM discipline would be to go ahead and do it! I was lucky enough to have a lot of support at home and at school but I know this isn’t the case for everyone. Reach out to other women in your chosen field and don’t be afraid to ask about opportunities open to you.

Dr Martin Worthington’s new research analysing the word play in the story has uncovered the duplicitous language of a Babylonian god called Ea, who was motivated by self-interest.

Dr Worthington, a Fellow of St John’s College, University of Cambridge, said: “Ea tricks humanity by spreading fake news. He tells the Babylonian Noah, known as Uta–napishti, to promise his people that food will rain from the sky if they help him build the ark. What the people don’t realise is that Ea’s nine-line message is a trick: it is a sequence of sounds that can be understood in radically different ways, like English ‘ice cream’ and ‘I scream’.

“While Ea’s message seems to promise a rain of food, its hidden meaning warns of the Flood.  Once the ark is built, Uta–napishti and his family clamber aboard and survive with a menagerie of animals. Everyone else drowns.  With this early episode, set in mythological time, the manipulation of information and language has begun. It may be the earliest ever example of fake news.”

The Gilgamesh Flood story is known from clay tablets that date back around three thousand years.

Dr Worthington is an Assyriologist who specialises in Babylonian, Assyrian and Sumerian grammar, literature and medicine. In his new book launched today (November 26) titled Ea’s Duplicity in the Gilgamesh Flood story, he explores the tricks of ‘wily Ea’, who is also known as the ‘crafty god’ and the ‘trickster god’. This research focuses on nine lines in the 3000-year-old story which can be interpreted in contradictory ways.

Dr Worthington explains:  “Ea’s lines are a verbal trick which can be understood in different ways which are phonetically identical. Besides the obvious positive reading promising food, I found multiple negative ones which warn of the impending catastrophe. Ea is clearly a master wordsmith who is able to compress multiple simultaneous meanings into one duplicitous utterance.”

The Flood Tablet in the British Museum, which bears part of the Gilgamesh Flood story, is probably the world’s most famous clay tablet, and caused a global sensation when its significance was first discovered by Assyriologist George Smith in 1872.

Smith realised this tablet told the same story as Noah and the Ark in the Biblical book of Genesis. Although there were more gods involved than in Genesis, and the Babylonian hero had a different name, the two stories were recognisably the same, with animals taken aboard the ark before the flood and birds sent out at the end once the rain stopped.

Since Smith’s discovery many more clay tablets of the Babylonian flood story have come to light and academics are still analysing the meaning of stories in the ancient language that has not been spoken for 2000 years.

But why would a god lie in the Gilgamesh Flood story?

Dr Worthington explained: “Babylonian gods only survive because people feed them. If humanity had been wiped out, the gods would have starved.  The god Ea manipulates language and misleads people into doing his will because it serves his self-interest. Modern parallels are legion!”

Ea’s Duplicity in the Gilgamesh Flood story, published by Routledge, will be launched tonight (November 26) in London.

Depression is a major cause of disability around the world, and if left untreated, can lead to substance abuse, anxiety and suicide.

Major depressive disorder is a particular form of the condition which affects many people, potentially causing loss of pleasure in activities that once used to bring joy. It can also lead to feelings of worthlessness, imbalances such as oversleeping or insomnia, and trigger thoughts of suicide. This is the condition we examined during our new study, which showed that living in a deprived area can lead to major depressive disorder in men, but not in women.

Before explaining these findings, it is important to provide some further background on this condition. There are certain factors which can place you at increased risk for major depression. Being diagnosed with a serious chronic ailment, such as diabetes or cancer, now or in the past, can increase your risk for it. As can experiences of trauma, such as physical or sexual abuse, or being raised in a dysfunctional family in which there was a high degree of marital discord.

These, however, are all individual factors – or personal circumstances – which can negatively affect your mental health. And most of the research on depression has indeed focused on such personal factors. But there are characteristics beyond the level of the individual – such as attributes of the communities in which we live – that can also have a profound effect on our mental well-being.

Read more: People with depression use language differently – here’s how to spot it

Previous studies have shown that living in communities characterised as deprived can lead residents of those areas to rate their health as suboptimal and experience early death. Through our study, we wanted to know if living in a deprived area can also influence the mental health of men and women – even after accounting for personal circumstances. That is, even after you take people’s socioeconomic status into account (in our study’s case, education and social class), does a person’s residential environment still affect their mental health?

The findings

To answer this question, we used data from one of Britain’s longest-running studies on health, chronic diseases, and the way people live their lives: EPIC-Norfolk. This study was based on over 20,000 people who filled out detailed questionnaires on their mental health and medical history.

Respondents’ postal codes were linked to the census to determine whether they lived in deprived communities. Five years after deprivation levels were measured, participants filled out a psychosocial questionnaire to determine whether they suffered from major depressive disorder. Using statistical techniques, the association between area deprivation and depression was examined while accounting for medical history, education, social class, and other important factors.

Our study showed that living in a deprived area does affect mental health – at least in men. In fact, we found that men living in the most deprived areas were 51% more likely to experience depression than those living in areas that were not deprived. Interestingly, the results did not reach statistical significance in women.

Our study did not set out to determine why this might be the case – and further research is now needed to do this. Nevertheless, it is possible that many men in the UK and other parts of the world still feel a primary responsibility to provide for and support their families.

Read more: Men feel stressed if their female partners earn more than 40% of household income – new research

A recent study investigating depression risks for men and women indicated that men are more affected by “failures at key instrumental tasks, such as expected work achievements and failures to provide adequately for the family”.

Research shows that men seem to be more sensitive to certain stressors in their environment compared to women, such as those related to work and finances. Women’s depression levels, on the other hand, are more influenced by stressors stemming from relationships and the social networks they are embedded in. Factors such as low parental warmth and low marital satisfaction, for example, can really affect women’s mental health.

A great many factors may be behind this, but in the UK, men are three times more likely to die by suicide than women and so root causes as to why men are struggling should be investigated.

While women are at a lower risk of depression than men in deprived areas, other research shows that they are more likely to experience anxiety. Again, further work is needed on the effect of the residential environment on mental health from a gender perspective.

High numbers of people are living in deprivation around the world and depression is a leading cause of disability on a global scale. Knowing how men and women are affected by the hardship of living in deprivation can help focus mental health treatment, and this is a valuable step forward.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

I study mud. To tell the truth, this is something that has interested me since about the age of three, when I enjoyed making mud pies at nursery school. I’m a bit more particular now though, and work specifically on the sediments and soils at the bottom of the ponds found in salt marshes.

These ponds are super interesting. They’re full of life, ranging from crabs and worms to rare bacteria, and all of this life interacts with and affects the mud. I’m studying how the biology and chemistry interact, in particular looking at iron, sulfur and carbon cycling. This is really important, as salt marshes can sequester and store huge amounts of carbon, which would otherwise be in our atmosphere contributing to global warming. In order to look after our salt marshes and keep the carbon locked up in them we need to understand their biogeochemistry more fully, and that’s where my research comes in.

Outside of my research, I enjoy anything to do with the mountains – climbing, walking, running, skiing – and am also a Scout Leader in Cambridge. I grew up in south Cambridgeshire, where I went to my local primary and secondary schools. I always loved science, and was encouraged by my teachers to apply to Cambridge to read Natural Sciences, which is where I’ve been ever since!

The great thing about Cambridge is the community. There are so many great scientists here, and even if they’re not quite working in my field, they’re always keen to talk science and introduce you to their numerous contacts and collaborators.

My PhD involves a lot of travel, and I’m generally doing something different every day. This could be computational modelling, writing, lab work or fieldwork, depending on what I’m working on. My work is very interdisciplinary, so it’s good that I can visit other places to discuss my science with other experts!

The days I enjoy the most are when I go out to take sediment cores from the marsh ponds. I built corers out of a plastic tube, which is about 60cm long, and to take sediment samples I push it into the mud, before sliding my arm down the side to the bottom and pulling it up. It’s incredibly messy, and I usually get very wet!  In winter it can be really cold getting into a muddy pond on a salt marsh, but it’s an incredibly beautiful place to work, so it makes up for it.

Nothing in the environment can be considered in isolation. Everything impacts on everything else, the biology, the chemistry, the hydrology, the climate; everything interacts. Realising this was an important moment, and it made me see that to understand my mud I needed to go and learn more, and not be afraid to say ‘I don’t know’, and find someone who does. My advice to others is to talk to as many people as possible, make lots of contacts, and always smile, even if things don’t look promising.

My research takes me to a number of different places. In Cambridge, I do a lot of reading and writing in the Department of Earth Sciences, but I often travel to the salt marshes at Norfolk to take samples, which I bring back to analyse in the labs. I also do quite a lot of work in the geochemical labs at the University of Leeds, where they have specialist equipment to look at the iron mineralogy of the sediments. I’m also working with the British Geological Society to look at carbon in the sediments, and have in the past worked at the University of York doing microbiology.

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.

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

Both male and female fetuses do not grow as large in older mothers, but there are sex-specific differences in changes to placental development and function. These are likely to play a central role in the increased likelihood of later-life heart problems and high blood pressure in males.

In humans, women over 35 are considered to be of advanced maternal age. The study, published in Scientific Reports, looked at pregnant rats of a comparable age.  In aged mothers, the placenta of female fetuses showed beneficial changes in structure and function that would maximise the support of fetal growth. In some instances, the placenta even supported the female fetus better than the placenta of a younger mother.  In the case of male fetuses however, the placenta showed changes that would limit fetal growth in the aged pregnant rats.

“This new understanding of placental development and function could contribute to better management of human pregnancies, and development of targeted interventions to improve the longer-term health of children born to older mothers,” said Dr Tina Napso, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge and first author of the study.

Pregnancy in older mothers is associated with a heightened risk of complications for both the mother and her baby. These include preeclampsia – raised blood pressure in the mother during pregnancy, gestational diabetes, stillbirth and fetal growth restriction. Until now there has been limited understanding of how the placenta is altered by advanced maternal age.

“With the average age of first pregnancy in women becoming higher and higher, and especially so in developed countries, it is very important to understand how the age of the mother and the sex of the baby interact to determine pregnancy and later-life health of the child,” said Dr Amanda Sferruzzi-Perri, lead author of the study and a Royal Society Fellow in the Centre for Trophoblast Research at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience.

The placenta transports nutrients and oxygen from mother to fetus, secretes signalling factors into the mother so she supports fetal development, and is the main protective barrier for the fetus against toxins, bacteria, and hormones – such as stress hormones – in the mother’s blood. It is highly dynamic in nature, and its function can change to help protect the growing fetus when conditions become less favourable for its development, for example through a lack of nutrients or oxygen or when the mother is stressed.

The researchers analysed the placentas of young (3-4 months old) and aged rats (9.5-10 months old) that were pregnant with male and female offspring. The aged rats correspond to approximately 35 year-old humans. Rats are a useful model as their biology and physiology have a number of important characteristics in common with those of humans.

The study found that advanced maternal age reduced the efficiency of the placenta of both male and female fetuses. It affected the structure and function of the placenta more markedly for male fetuses, reducing its ability to support growth of the fetus.

“A pregnancy at an older age is a costly proposition for the mother, whose body has to decide how nutrients are shared with the fetus. That’s why, overall, fetuses do not grow sufficiently during pregnancy when the mother is older compared to when she is young,” said Dr Napso. “We now know that growth, as well as gene expression in the placenta is affected in older mothers in a manner that partially depends on sex: changes in the placentas of male fetuses are generally detrimental.”

The research involved a collaboration between scientists at the University of Cambridge, the University of Alberta in Canada, the Robinson Research Institute and the University of Adelaide, Australia.

An earlier study performed by the collaborators showed that offspring from mothers who enter pregnancy at an older age have poor heart function and high blood pressure as young adults, and particularly so if they are male. This new research was conducted to understand why, and whether this sex difference may be due to how the male and female fetuses are supported within the womb in an aged mother.

Although further studies in humans are required, the results suggest the importance of considering the sex of the fetus when giving advice to older pregnant women.  The researchers also hope to build on these results and find ways of improving the function of the placenta to optimise growth of the fetus.

Reference
Napso, T. et al: “Advanced maternal age compromises fetal growth and induces sex-specific changes in placental phenotype in rates.” Scientific Reports (2019). DOI:10.1038/s41598-019-53199-x

Small shallow lakes dominate the world’s freshwater area, and the sediments within them already produce at least one-quarter of all carbon-dioxide, and more than two-thirds of all methane that come from lakes. The new research, published in the journal PNAS, suggests that climate change may cause the levels of greenhouse gases emitted by freshwater northern lakes to increase by between 1.5 and 2.7 times.

“What we’ve traditionally called ‘carbon’ in freshwater turns out to be a super-diverse mixture of different carbon-based organic molecules,” said Dr Andrew Tanentzap in Cambridge’s Department of Plant Sciences, who led the research. “We’ve been measuring ‘carbon’ in freshwater as a proxy for everything from water quality to the productivity of freshwater ecosystems. Now we’ve realised that it’s the diversity of this invisible world of organic molecules that’s important.”

As the climate warms, vegetation cover is increasing in forests of the northern latitudes. By simulating this effect in two lakes in Ontario, Canada, the study found an increased diversity of organic molecules – molecules containing carbon within their structure – entering the water in the matter shed by nearby plants and trees.

Organic molecules are a food source for microbes in the lake sediments, which break them down and release carbon dioxide and methane as by-products. Increasing levels of organic molecules can therefore enhance microbial activity and produce more greenhouse gases.

Since the same microbes can make greenhouse gases from many different organic molecules, the diversity of organic molecules was shown to be more closely linked with levels of greenhouse gas concentrations than the diversity of the microbes. In addition, an elevated diversity of organic molecules may elevate greenhouse gas concentrations in waters because there are more molecules that can be broken down by sunlight penetrating the water.

To conduct the research, containers were filled with varying ratios of rocks and organic material – consisting of deciduous and coniferous litter from nearby forests – and submerged in the shallow waters of the two lakes. Analysis of the samples two months later, using the techniques of ultrahigh resolution mass spectrometry and next generation DNA sequencing, showed that the diversity of organic molecules was correlated with the diversity of microbial communities in the water, and that the diversity of both increased as the amount of organic matter increased.

Accurately predicting carbon emissions from natural systems is vital to the reliability of calculations used to understand the pace of climate change, and the effects of a warmer world.

“Climate change will increase forest cover and change species composition, resulting in a greater variety of leaves and plant litter falling into waterways. We found that the resulting increase in the diversity of organic molecules in the water leads to higher greenhouse gas concentrations,” said Tanentzap. “Understanding these connections means we could look at ways to reduce carbon emissions in the future, for example by changing land management practices.”

Changing the vegetation around freshwater areas could change the organic molecules that end up in the water. The team is now expanding their study by taking samples from 150 lakes across Europe, to understand the broader ecological consequences of organic molecule diversity in natural freshwater systems.

This research was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council.

Reference

Tanentzap, A. J. et al: ‘Chemical and microbial diversity covary in fresh water to influence ecosystem functioning.’ PNAS (2019). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1904896116 

As the extinction crisis escalates, and protest movements grow, some are calling for hugely ambitious conservation targets. Among the most prominent is sparing 50% of the Earth’s surface for nature.

‘Half-Earth’ and similar proposals have gained traction with conservationists and policy makers. However, little work has gone into identifying the social and economic implications for people.

Now, researchers have produced the first attempt to assess how many and who would be affected if half the planet was ‘saved’ in a way that secures the diversity of the world’s habitats.

A team of scientists analysed global datasets to determine where conservation status could be added to provide 50% protection to every “ecoregion”: large areas of distinct habitats such as Central African mangroves and Baltic mixed forests.

Even avoiding where possible “human footprints” such as cities and farmland, their findings suggest a “conservative” estimate for those directly affected by Half Earth would be over one billion people, primarily in middle-income countries.

Many wealthy and densely populated nations in the Global North would also need to see major expansions of land with conservation status to reach 50% – this could even include parts of London, for example.

The study’s authors, led by University of Cambridge researchers, say that while radical action is urgently required for the future of life on Earth, issues of environmental justice and human wellbeing should be at the forefront of the conservation movement.

“People are the cause of the extinction crisis, but they are also the solution,” said Dr Judith Schleicher, who led the new study, published today in the journal Nature Sustainability. “Social issues must play a more prominent role if we want to deliver effective conservation that works for both the biosphere and the people who inhabit it.”

Towards the end of next year, the leaders of most of the world’s nations will aim to agree global targets for the future of conservation at the Convention on Biological Diversity in Beijing.

“Goals that emerge from the Convention on Biological Diversity could define conservation for a generation,” said Schleicher, who conducted the research while at the University of Cambridge’s Conservation Research Institute and its Department of Geography.

“We need to be ambitious given the environmental crises. But it is vital that social and economic implications at local levels are considered if the drivers of biodiversity loss are to be tackled. The lives of many people and the existence of diverse species hang in the balance.”

The idea of a ‘Half-Earth’ for nature was popularised by famed biologist E.O. Wilson in his 2017 book of the same name. More recently, a ‘Global Deal for Nature’ – aiming for 30% protection by 2030 and 50% by 2050 – has been endorsed by a number of leading environmental organisations. However, these proposals have been ambiguous about “exact forms and location”, say Schleicher and colleagues.

Based on their analyses, researchers cautiously estimate that an additional 760 million people would find themselves living in areas with new conservation status: a fourfold increase of the 247 million who currently reside inside protected areas.

The team call for proponents of Half-Earth, and all supporters of area-based conservation, to “recognise and take seriously” the human consequences – both negative and positive – of their proposals.

“Living in areas rich in natural habitat can boost mental health and wellbeing. In some cases, protected areas can provide new jobs and income through ecotourism and sustainable production,” said Schleicher.

“However, at the other extreme, certain forms of ‘fortress’ conservation can see people displaced from their ancestral home and denied access to resources they rely on for their survival.”

While conservation coverage has been increasing, species numbers continue to plummet – suggesting a “disconnect” between international targets and implementation at local and regional levels, argue the team.

“Conservation needs strong action to protect life on earth, but this must be done in a way that takes account of people and their needs,” said co-author Dr Chris Sandbrook from Cambridge’s Department of Geography.

“Failing to consider social issues will lead to conservation policy that is harmful to human wellbeing and less likely to be implemented in the first place.”

Conservation is not just a problem for people of the Global South. Recent reports on UK wildlife revealed devastating declines in iconic species. Yet the study reveals that achieving 50% ecoregion coverage could even see parts of central London become protected. “It highlights the absurdity of hitting arbitrary targets,” Sandbrook said.

“It might seem like an obvious thing to say but we need to keep saying it: our planet is precious.

It provides the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink. You have only to take a walk through a forest and look up at its canopy to see the outstanding beauty and complexity of ecosystems. Pause in the stillness among the trees and contemplate what is surrounding you: it’s mind-blowing.

But, rather than cherish this planet – our home – we have too often treated it with contempt. Today, as a consequence, we face disaster on a global scale.

Everywhere we look, we see how ecosystems are threatened. The most striking illustration of climate change that I have seen is seared on my memory: the first time I saw a dead coral reef. It had actually bleached. Where once it had been full of hundreds of species, it was like a cemetery.

A few decades ago, the idea that humans could change the climate of our planet was unthinkable. Now this is incontrovertible and we are talking about the risk of irreparable damage. Rising temperatures mean parts of the planet are becoming uninhabitable. Species less able to adapt to rapid changes will be wiped out. Famine will lead to forced migrations. There will be major upsets in natural boundaries, leading to social unrest.

Fortunately, we are now better informed about the state of the world than ever before. We’ve seen a worldwide protest movement grow, led by young people afraid for their future and the future of their planet. We must listen to them. We must respond. We must act – and act now.

We’ve seen before what can be done. When scientists identified the cause of a catastrophic hole in the ozone layer, the world acted. We saw global leaders listening to scientific evidence and taking action.

The climate crisis is a much larger problem, but if we can all pull together, I believe we can solve it. What each one of us does in the next few years will determine what happens in the next few thousand years. There is hope if we all – every single one of us – take our share of responsibility for life on Earth.

Those in power can influence change. And those with knowledge and the ability to innovate can provide solutions to a great number of problems.

I have had the honour of being part of the Cambridge Conservation Initiative from its inception 12 years ago. I’ve seen what can be achieved when great talent is combined with great ambition: bringing together leaders in research, practice, policy and teaching gives us the greatest chance of developing the solutions required to save our planet.

In the same way, the new initiative Cambridge Zero will be vital. Combining expertise, from science and technology to law and policy to artificial intelligence and engineering, Cambridge Zero will help drive a vision for a carbon neutral future.

It’s a source of comfort to me that people are recognising that their world is at stake, that the ocean is not infinitely full of food, that the ground is not infinitely full of minerals, that life on Earth is not impervious to the damage we cause.

Our planet hangs in the balance. The only way to operate is to believe we can do something about it, and I truly believe we can.”

Broadcaster Sir David Attenborough’s documentaries have brought the wonders of the natural world to our screens – from the splendours of terrestrial life, to the otherworldly underwater kingdoms and the frozen ends of the Earth – but they also increasingly show our planet’s fragility in the face of habitat destruction and climate change. He is an alumnus of Clare College and has given his name to the campus of the Cambridge Conservation Initiative – the largest cluster of biodiversity conservation organisations on the planet.

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

I work in an interdisciplinary research group including biologists, physicists, mathematicians and engineers. I path to this stage of my career was a little off the beaten track. Before my academic career, I worked as a legal clerk. This provided me with life experience but, seeking more intellectual diversity, I decided at the age of 25 to leave the safety of my job and to study molecular cell biology at Bielefeld University in Germany.

My biology teacher inspired me by going beyond the curriculum and discussing recent discoveries in life sciences with me. I wanted to contribute to increasing our knowledge of the incredible microcosmos of cells and their countless functions in life.

I took a leap of faith at the start of my postdoctoral career. I joined a biophysics group at Cambridge and started engaging with scientific methods that were well outside of my comfort zone at first. The effort required on both sides to communicate across disciplines has been worth it, though. I am now combining mathematical analyses and computational simulations with advanced imaging techniques. This combination enables me to provide missing puzzle pieces to explain how cells manage to self-assemble into functional organs and tissues.

I think it’s important to keep an open mind and consider changes as opportunities. Whichever path you choose to pursue next, you can always change directions, add and combine different fields. Network with people with different backgrounds: discussing things from different angles can be very motivating.

An entirely new world of opportunities opened up to me when I learned how concepts from physics and mathematics can explain the development of living organisms. When observing a growing organism, one naturally wonders how each of the cells ‘knows’ where to go and what to do. It turns out that often very few parameters can lead to very complicated patterns, and it’s interesting looking for equations that explain how these parameters interact.

My work sets out to reveal how cells generate forces that shape developing tissues. When an embryo develops, its cells move and change their shape in an astoundingly coordinated way to form tissues and organs. Errors in this self-organisation can lead to severe birth defects. Many tissues, including our retina, are formed through the folding of cell sheets, like a sheet of paper can be folded into different shapes.

I am using a fascinating and beautiful model organism called Volvox to study how these folding events work. This aquatic micro-organism is almost entirely transparent which allows me to observe the development of its embryos microscopically. Amazingly, its spherical embryos fold in a way that literally turns them inside out. This peculiar process is a normal part of Volvox development and gives me the chance to study the fundamental mechanisms that can cause a cell sheet to fold.

I am using a custom-built microscope to observe this process through time-lapse recordings. I also measure the physical forces in different regions of the cell sheet to reveal which parts are being pulled or pushed into a new shape. I use computer-generated simulations to test my hypotheses on which cells are actively forming the tissue and which ones are just being pushed around by others. Determining the location and mechanical properties of cells that actively shape a tissue might help us in the future to diagnose and find remedies for associated birth defects.

Day-to-day, I could be doing any number of things. My work involves growing model organisms in little water tanks; staring at and recording time-lapse videos of developing organisms with different microscopy techniques and designing optical devices to improve imaging. I also write code for image processing and analysis, process microscopy images and videos with specialised software, and measure shape changes of cells and tissues. I run computer simulations of folding cell sheets and compare them to microscopic observations, measure physical forces in developing tissues, and supervise students.

One of the most exciting days for me was when I managed to visualise the three dimensional shape changes of living Volvox embryos for the first time with our self-built microscope. It was really great to have overcome all the challenges that led up to this. It was then that I realised the potential these under-studied organisms possess to help us understand our own development.

I can be the first person in the world to see so-far unknown microscopic worlds, every time I observe a new species, a new developmental stage or try a different microscopy technique. These are very special moments even before sharing my new findings with the scientific and non-scientific community. A key moment for me was when I started discussing my biological questions with physicists and mathematicians. It was a real eye-opener to see their different perspectives and approaches towards similar questions. It really made me aware of the power of interdisciplinary work.

There are supportive networks for women in STEM in Cambridge. These include, for example; CamAWiSE and the Emmy Noether Society for Women in Mathematics. There are also opportunities for outreach work, such as The Science Festival, the Plant Festival, Open Days and seminars that are open to the public. The University also provides ample opportunities to network with international scientists through local conferences and seminar series in inter-disciplinary fields relevant to my research (e.g. Physics of Living Matter Symposium, the Physics Meets Biology Conference, Building an Organisms Symposium, Evolution and Development seminar series). There are many imaging facilities and networks for imaging facilities (e.g. Cambridge Advanced Imaging Centre, CRUK and EPSRC Cancer Imaging Centre).

The building sector currently accounts for 30-40% of all carbon emissions, due to both the energy-intensive production of the materials (predominantly steel and concrete), and the energy used in heating and cooling the finished buildings. As the global population grows and becomes increasingly based in towns and cities, traditional building approaches are becoming unsustainable.

Renewable, plant-based materials such as bamboo have huge potential for sustainable and energy-efficient buildings. Their use would dramatically reduce emissions compared to traditional materials, helping to mitigate the human impact on climate change. This approach would also help keep carbon out of the atmosphere by diverting timber away from being burnt as fuel.

The study involved scanning cross-sections of bamboo vascular tissue, the tissue that transports fluid and nutrients within the plant. The resulting images revealed an intricate fibre structure with alternating layers of thick and thin cell walls. Peaks of thermal conductivity within the bamboo structure coincide with the thicker walls, where chains of cellulose – the basic structural component of plant cell walls – are laid down almost parallel to the plant stem. These thicker layers also give bamboo its strength and stiffness. In contrast, the thinner cell walls have lower thermal conductivity due to cellulose chains being almost at a right angle to the plant stem.

“Nature is an amazing architect. Bamboo is structured in a really clever way,” said Darshil Shah, a researcher in Cambridge University’s Department of Architecture, who led the study. “It grows by one millimetre every ninety seconds, making it one of the fastest growing plant materials. Through the images we collected, we can see that it does this by generating a naturally cross-laminated fibre structure.”

While much research has been done on the cell structure of bamboo in relation to its mechanical properties, almost none has looked at how cell structure affects the thermal properties of the material. The amount of heating and cooling required in buildings is fundamentally related to the properties of the materials they are made from, particularly how much heat they conduct and store.

A better understanding of the thermal properties of bamboo provides insights into how to reduce the energy consumption of bamboo buildings. It also enables modelling of the way bamboo building components behave when exposed to fire, so that measures can be incorporated to make bamboo buildings safer.

“People may worry about fire safety of bamboo buildings,” said Shah. “To address this properly we have to understand the thermal properties of the building material. Through our work we can see that heat travels along the structure-supporting thick cell wall fibres in bamboo, so if exposed to the heat of a fire the bamboo might soften more quickly in the direction of those fibres. This helps us work out how to reinforce the building appropriately.”

At present, products such as laminated bamboo are most commonly used as flooring materials due to their hardness and durability. However, their stiffness and strength is comparable to engineered wood products, making them suitable for structural uses as well. “Cross-laminated timber is a popular choice of timber construction material. It’s made by gluing together layers of sawn timber, each at a right angle to the layer below,” said Shah. “Seeing this as a natural structure in bamboo fibres is inspiration for the development of better building products.”

The team of researchers, from the University of Cambridge and the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna, also plans to look at what happens to heat flow in bamboo when its surface is burned and forms char. The use of scanning thermal microscopy to visualise the intricate make-up of plants could also be useful in other areas of research, such as understanding how micro-structural changes in crop stems may cause them to fall over in the fields resulting in lost harvests.

Shah is a member of the University of Cambridge’s interdisciplinary Centre for Natural Material Innovation, which aims to advance the use of timber in construction by modifying the tissue-scale properties of wood to make it more reliable under changing environmental conditions.

The research was funded by the Leverhulme Trust, the Austrian Science Fund and the Lower Austrian Research and Education Society.

Reference
Shah, D.et al: “Mapping thermal conductivity across bamboo cell walls with scanning thermal microscopy.” Scientific Reports (2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-019-53079-4

Scientists at the University of Cambridge studying perovskite materials for next-generation solar cells and flexible LEDs have discovered that they can be more efficient when their chemical compositions are less ordered, vastly simplifying production processes and lowering cost.

The surprising findings, published in Nature Photonics, are the result of a collaborative project, led by Dr Felix Deschler and Dr Sam Stranks.

The most commonly used material for producing solar panels is crystalline silicon, but to achieve efficient energy conversion requires an expensive and time-consuming production process. The silicon material needs to have a highly ordered wafer structure and is very sensitive to any impurities, such as dust, so has to be made in a cleanroom.

In the last decade, perovskite materials have emerged as promising alternatives.

The lead salts used to make them are much more abundant and cheaper to produce than crystalline silicon, and they can be prepared in a liquid ink that is simply printed to produce a film of the material.

The components used to make the perovskite can be changed to give the materials different colours and structural properties, for example, making the films emit different colours or collect sunlight more efficiently.

You only need a very thin film of this perovskite material – around one thousand times thinner than a human hair – to achieve similar efficiencies to the silicon wafers currently used, opening up the possibility of incorporating them into windows or flexible, ultra-lightweight smartphone screens.

“This is the new class of semiconductors that could actually revolutionise all these technologies,” said Sascha Feldmann, a PhD student at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory.

“These materials show very efficient emission when you excite them with energy sources like light or apply a voltage to run an LED.

“This is really useful but it remained unclear why these materials that we process in our labs so much more crudely than these clean-room, high-purity silicon wafers, are performing so well.”

Scientists had assumed that, like with silicon materials, the more ordered they could make the materials, the more efficient they would be. But Feldmann and his co-lead author Stuart MacPherson were surprised to find the opposite to be true.

“The discovery was a big surprise really,” said Deschler, who is now leading an Emmy-Noether research group at TU Munich. “We do a lot of spectroscopy to explore the working mechanisms of our materials, and were wondering why these really quite chemically messy films were performing so exceptionally well.”

“It was fascinating to see how much light we could get from these materials in a scenario where we’d expect them to be quite dark,” said MacPherson, a PhD student in the Cavendish Laboratory. “Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised considering that perovskites have re-written the rule book on performance in the presence of defects and disorder.”

The researchers discovered that their rough, multi-component alloyed preparations were actually improving the efficiency of the materials by creating lots of areas with different compositions that could trap the energised charge carriers, either from sunlight in a solar cell, or an electrical current in an LED.

“It is actually because of this crude processing and subsequent de-mixing of the chemical components that you create these valleys and mountains in energy that charges can funnel down and concentrate in,” said Feldmann. “This makes them easier to extract for your solar cell, and it’s more efficient to produce light from these hotspots in an LED.”

Their findings could have a huge impact on the manufacturing success of these materials.

“Companies looking to make bigger fabrication lines for perovskites have been trying to solve the problem of how to make the films more homogenous, but now we can show them that actually a simple inkjet printing process could do a better job,” said Feldmann. “The beauty of the study really lies in the counterintuitive discovery that easy to make does not mean the material will be worse, but can actually be better.”

“It is now an exciting challenge to find fabrication conditions which create the optimum disorder in the materials to achieve maximum efficiency, while still retaining the structural properties needed for specific applications,” said Deschler.

“If we can learn to control the disorder even more precisely, we could expect further LED or solar cell performance improvements – and even push well beyond silicon with tailored tandem solar cells comprising two different colour perovskite layers that together can harvest even more power from the sun than one layer alone,” said Dr Sam Stranks, University Lecturer in Energy at the Cambridge Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology and the Cavendish Laboratory.

Another limitation of perovskite materials is their sensitivity to moisture, so the groups are also investigating ways to improve their stability.

“There’s still work to do to make them last on rooftops the way silicon can – but I’m optimistic,” said Stranks.

Reference:
Sascha Feldmann et al. ‘Photodoping through local charge carrier accumulation in alloyed hybrid perovskites for highly efficient luminescence.’ Nature Photonics (2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41566-019-0546-8

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 £9.4m funding will support a collaboration of ten research institutes, museums and associated organisations to launch the first phase of sequencing all the species on the British Isles. This will see the teams collect and ‘barcode’ around 8,000 key British species of animal, plant and fungi, and deliver high-quality genomes of 2,000 species.

Exploring the genomes – the entire DNA – of these species will give an unprecedented insight into how life on Earth evolved. It will uncover new genes, proteins and metabolic pathways to help develop drugs for infectious and inherited diseases.

At a time when many species are under threat from climate change and human development, the data will also help characterise, catalogue and support conservation of global biodiversity for future generations.

“This project is the start of a transformation for biological research. It will change our relationship to the natural world by enabling us to understand life as never before,” said Professor Richard Durbin in Cambridge University’s Department of Genetics, who will lead the University’s involvement in the collaboration. “It will create a knowledge resource for others to build on, just as we’ve seen with the Human Genome Project for human health.”

From the small fraction of the Earth’s species that have been sequenced, enormous advances have been made in knowledge and biomedicine. From plants, a number of lifesaving drugs have been discovered and are now being created in the lab – such as artemisinin for malaria and taxol for cancer.

Assembling the full genetic barcode of each species from the millions of genetic fragments generated in the sequencing process will rely on the University of Cambridge’s expertise in computational analysis.

“Genome assembly is like doing a very complicated jigsaw puzzle. The genome revolution is all about information, and our ability to put the sequencing data together is based on cutting-edge computing techniques,” said Dr Shane McCarthy at the University of Cambridge, who will work on the project with Professor Durbin.

The project will identify and collect specimens that will include plants from the Cambridge University Botanic Garden. It will set up new pipelines and workflows to process large numbers of species through DNA preparation, sequencing, assembly, gene finding and annotation. New methods will be developed for high-throughput and high-quality assembly of genomes and their annotation, and data will be shared openly through existing data sharing archives and project specific portals.

The 10 institutes involved in the project are:

• University of Cambridge
• Earlham Institute (EI)
• University of Edinburgh
• EMBL’s-European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI)
• The Marine Biological Association (Plymouth)
• Natural History Museum
• Royal Botanic Gardens Kew
• Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
• University of Oxford
• Wellcome Sanger Institute

The consortium ultimately aims to sequence the genetic code of 60,000 species that live in the British Isles. Its work will act as a launchpad for a larger ambition to sequence all species on Earth, as part of the Earth Biogenome Project.

Dr Michael Dunn, Head of Genetics and Molecular Sciences at Wellcome, said, “The mission to sequence all life on the British Isles is ambitious, but by bringing together this diverse group of organisations we believe that we have the right team to achieve it. We’ll gain new insights into nature that will help develop new treatments for infectious diseases, identify drugs to slow ageing, generate new approaches to feeding the world and create new bio-materials.”

Adapted from a press release by Wellcome.

The research was based on a trial in Indonesia, where patients often do not get the treatment they need due to a shortage of practitioners. The team at the Cambridge Institute of Public Health say the findings are also relevant to the UK and any other country with a long waiting time for mental health appointments and a growing globalised clientele, as it opens up alternative pathways of care.

In many countries, there is a ‘treatment gap’ for mental health issues, caused in part by a confluence of the lack of mental health professionals and the social stigma attached to seeking help. While the median worldwide treatment gap for psychosis is 32% – meaning that almost in one three people with psychosis do not receive treatment – in low and middle-income countries it is estimated to be almost three times higher, above 90%.

Experts have argued that one way of bridging this gap would be to integrate mental health care into primary care, such as GP practices. Recent research confirmed that primary care clinics are the first port-of-call for most people with mental health problems. However, diagnosing mental health problems in primary care is difficult for several reasons, including time constraints during consultations, lack of mental health expertise and problems with referrals.

In 2008, the World Health Organization (WHO) launched the WHO Mental Health Gap Action Programme to support countries in scaling up services for mental, neurological, and substance use disorders, with a free online Intervention Guide and Training Manual. In 2015, the Indonesian Ministry of Health introduced the programme to selected pairs of GPs and nurses at its network of community health centres, with the aim to rolling it out nationally.

Researchers at the Cambridge Institute of Public Health carried out a study to evaluate the effectiveness of this programme in Indonesia. 153 patients completed treatment at 14 primary care clinics that had received the WHO training, while 141 patients at 14 other clinics received treatment from specialist clinical psychologists co-located in primary care. The findings are published today in PLOS ONE.

Dr Sabrina Anjara, a Gates Cambridge Scholar who carried out the research while at the University of Cambridge, said: “Mental health care provided by a GP proved to be just as effective for mild to moderate conditions as care by a specialist, such as a clinical psychologist. GPs also helped large proportions of participants go into remission.”

Both groups experienced a similar improvement in health and social functioning, quality of life, and disability reduction at the six-month follow-up. A large proportion of participants from both study arms were considered in remission (152 from GP clinics, 134 from the specialist arm of the trial). The improvement was quantified using the Health of Nations Outcome Scale, the European Quality of Life Scale and the WHO disability assessment schedule.

To directly inform policy decisions, the researchers conducted an economic analysis. Its results suggested that the cost of treatment from specialist services was lower on average, despite their patients experiencing similar improvements in symptoms as GP patients.

Dr Anjara added: “Not only were GPs able to manage mental health problems, but patients were more likely to return to see them for follow-up treatments. However, GP workload needs to be considered alongside the cost-effectiveness of various options. We found follow-up appointments with a clinical psychologist to cost the Indonesian health system less, so the co-location of specialist mental health professionals in primary care may be a more feasible option in the long run.”

The researchers say that the findings provide potential learning points for other countries, which may not be considered low and middle-income countries, but have similarly limited resources for mental health services due to a structural imbalance of supply and demand. In the UK, for example, the British Medical Association found in 2018 that the waiting time for a clinical psychology appointment surpassed two years in some NHS trusts.

“NHS England has committed to transform mental health services and also plans to recruit mental health therapists to be integrated into primary care settings such as GP practices,” said Dr Tine Van Bortel, senior author and supervisor from the Cambridge Institute of Public Health.

“This transformation aims to put mental health services on an equal footing with physical healthcare. Nine out of 10 adults with mental health problems seek help in primary care settings, and the transformation of mental health service delivery model will also strengthen the primary care and its workforce which will be able to offer a broader range of services for patients.”

“If GP practices provided mental health treatment for those with mild to moderate conditions, the waiting list for specialist services would reduce considerably,” said Dr Anjara, who is now based at University College Dublin. “In addition, getting treatment from their GP is less stigmatising, which will also lead to better continuity of care. Early intervention is key in reducing the economic and societal burden of mental health.”

In addition to fieldwork funding from the University of Cambridge School of Clinical Medicine, School of Biological Sciences, Department of Social Anthropology and the Cambridge Philosophical Society, this research was supported by crowdfunding.

Reference
Anjara, SG et al. Can General Practitioners manage mental disorders in primary care? A partially randomised, pragmatic, cluster trial. PLOS ONE; 7 Nov 2019; DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0224724

I was the first international doctoral student to be funded by the Turing Institute, the UK’s national institute for artificial intelligence and data science. I’m currently pursuing my PhD in probabilistic machine learning; my research interests include Gaussian processes and their applications to contemporary physical sciences like collider physics and astronomy. Before coming back to school in 2016, I was a quantitative high-frequency trader at Citadel LLC, a Chicago-based hedge fund.

I had a ‘tiger mother’ who believed mathematical proficiency was sine qua non for success in real life. Growing up in Madras, school was super competitive and you had to be really good to stand out. I remember being quite good at math and shying away from the humanities. It is interesting how some things don’t change!

I worked in the City for five years before coming back to school at Cambridge. While my job provided scope for mathematical work, it was an intellectual straitjacket. I missed the undercurrents and freedom of academia. Upon receiving my offer letter and to the astonishment of friends, family & my boss at the time, I reluctantly left the bourgeois trappings of London finance. Looking back I can connect the dots but it seemed like an abrupt transition then.

Machine learning is frequently confused with automation: it can be used to achieve automation but is not the same thing. It can be used for making predictions or decisions but that is the end result of the learning process, and should not be confused with the conceptual meaning of a learning algorithm. For instance, if the task is to cluster particle decay signatures into groups which share similar properties, you could either set out to do it by specifying in a computer program how exactly to look for them and how many to look for in an explicit instruction set – this would be classical programming, or, you could use a learning algorithm that encodes a certain belief about what constitutes a cluster and when it encounters data in a process called ‘training’, it develops the ability to identify them without an explicit instruction set. The former is deeply limited in its ability to discover complex structure encountered in real-world data and the latter is paradigm defying and powerful.

My research is specifically in Bayesian non-parametrics, a subfield of machine learning that allows a user to stipulate a prediction in terms of a probability distribution rather than a point estimate, providing a sense of confidence in the predictions. The model’s complexity is dynamically calibrated as it sees more data. For example, in the clustering task, new clusters would be created on the fly if more data comes in which does not fit any of the existing clusters.

Modern machine learning has the ability to transform the physical sciences. The intuitive and (often) deterministic models of systems are being replaced by abstract models of ‘data’. In high energy physics, for instance, the discovery of new and exotic particles is largely a statistical problem. Machine learning is often the chosen framework to parse large volumes of high dimensional data with the aim of capturing a hidden or latent structure that would evade classical analysis. Machine learning is becoming the lynchpin rather than something ancillary to the scientific process. I think scientists everywhere are waking up to this.

I feel completely at home in Cambridge, both the city and the institution. I’ve had a great experience as a graduate student; what I like most is there are very few rules. For the most part, you can define your own pace and own work sometimes crisscrossing different departments. The opportunities for learning are limitless, I frequently attend undergraduate lectures, sometimes just to relearn things. One can embrace College life as little and or as much as one wishes to. I have two supervisors: Dr Chris Lester is a high energy physicist who introduced me to the world of collider physics; a field prime for machine learning. Professor Carl Rasmussen is a world-leading expert on Gaussian processes, I sometimes forget how much of a privilege it is to be working with him.

Science isn’t formulaic like other professions, there is something more to it than sheer hard work. You have to really love it and embrace it without fear. Setbacks and failure are par for the course, but nothing is permanent. The point is to keep moving forward even if we are far from where we want to be.

I enjoy science because it refines how I think about everything else. When you are a researcher, some of the traits that come with performing research tend to permeate many other aspects of your life. On the whole, that is a positive thing. You also tend to get comfortable with complexity and abstraction, where most people would run away from it.

It’s true that women face an uphill battle: there are entrenched social norms and they have to resist the urge to quit because they believe they can’t compete or will never acquire the skills fast enough. That is a fallacy. Many people ask me if I face invisible or unconscious prejudice because of my gender or race. I do not know the answer to this and I choose not to carry that burden. I have embraced life in Britain because I believe in its meritocracy, but I know that we all have our struggles, and they can’t be conquered overnight. I won’t compromise on what I love to do because fewer women choose to do it or out of the fear that it is not an even playing field. I like the words of Indra Nooyi – “when you love something – throw your head, heart and hands into it. Be so brilliant that you cannot be ignored. There is no other way.”

You can follow her on Twitter @VRLalchand

The ‘weekend effect’ of increased hospital mortality has been well documented, including a 2015 study linking this to 11,000 extra UK deaths annually, which led to controversial contract changes for junior doctors as the UK government sought a ‘seven-day’ National Health Service.

But the underlying causes have been poorly understood: are hospitals really less safe on weekends or do other factors lead to a comparison-skewing weekday reduction of the risk of mortality?

A new study led by University of Cambridge researchers, based on nearly 425,000 emergency department attendances over seven years at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, confirms the weekend effect. This appears to be because junior doctors are more likely to admit patients with lower mortality risk during the week. The results are reported in the Emergency Medicine Journal.

The research found that junior doctors (qualified doctors still in training) based in the emergency department admitted less-sick patients at half the rate at weekends compared to weekdays, diluting the risk pool of weekday mortality and contributing to the weekend effect.

In contrast, the admitting patterns of senior doctors was the same on weekends and weekdays, and the data did not provide evidence of a weekend effect among patients admitted by senior doctors.

The researchers found that the weekend effect was associated with seniority of the physician working in the emergency department, that the case-mix of patients at the weekend was of a higher acuity and that junior doctors admitted fewer standard patients at the weekend than on weekdays.

“There has been previous research on how physician-level factors influence patient care, but our study instead focuses specifically on how seniority affects admitting patterns and in turn how this relates to the weekend effect,” said co-author Stefan Scholtes, Dennis Gillings Professor of Health Management at Cambridge Judge Business School. “It’s clear that the admitting patterns of junior doctors changes at the weekend.”

In a commentary about the new study, also published in Emergency Medicine Journal, the President of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, Dr Katherine Henderson, said the study had “given us a lot to think about” – describing as “surprising” the finding that junior doctors admitted more relatively well patients on weekdays.

“The NHS needs to use its resources as effectively as possible,” she wrote. “We should only admit patients who need to be admitted. This paper suggests it would be a good idea to make sure we are using our senior decision makers where they can be most valuable – seeing sick patients and actively evaluating all borderline admission/discharge decisions.”

The study is co-authored by Larry Han of Cambridge Judge Business School and Harvard University’s Department of Biostatistics; Jason Fine of the University of North Carolina; Susan M. Robinson and Adrian A. Boyle of the Emergency Department at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust; Michael Freeman of Cambridge Judge Business School and INSEAD Singapore; and Stefan Scholtes of Cambridge Judge Business School.

Reference: 
Larry Han et al. ‘Is seniority of emergency physician associated with the weekend mortality effect? An exploratory analysis of electronic health records in the UK.’ Emergency Medicine Journal (2019). DOI: 10.1136/emermed-2018-208114

Upcycling was chosen as the ‘Word of the Day’ which resonated most strongly with followers on the Dictionary’s Instagram account, @CambridgeWords. The noun – defined as the activity of making new furniture, objects, etc. out of old or used things or waste material – received more likes than any other ‘Word of the Day’ when shared on 4 July 2019.

The number of times upcycling has been looked up on the Cambridge Dictionary website has risen by 181% since December of 2011, when it was first added to the online dictionary, and searches have doubled in the last year alone.

“We think it’s the positive idea behind upcycling that appeals more than the word itself,” said Wendalyn Nichols, Publishing Manager of the Cambridge Dictionary. “Stopping the progression of climate change, let alone reversing it, can seem impossible at times. Upcycling is a concrete action a single human being can take to make a difference.

“Lookups of upcycling reflect the momentum around individual actions to combat climate change — the youth activism sparked by Greta Thunberg; the growing trends of vegan, flexitarian and plant-based diets; reading and following the handbook There is No Planet B; or fashion designers upcycling clothes to create their latest collections.”

Other words on the shortlist for Word of the Year 2019 reflect the same concern with the effects of climate change, for instance:

carbon sink noun

An area of forest that is large enough to absorb large amounts of carbon dioxide from the earth’s atmosphere and therefore to reduce the effect of global warming

compostable adjective

Something that is compostable can be used as compost when it decays

preservation noun

The act of keeping something the same or of preventing it from being damaged

The Cambridge Dictionary editors use data from the website, blogs, and social media to identify and prioritise new additions to the Dictionary. They identified upcycling as a word to include after noticing a spike in searches for the word in 2010.

A recent addition is the noun plastic footprint, defined as a measurement of the amount of plastic that someone uses and then discards, considered in terms of the resulting damage caused to the environment. This word, first identified by traditional citation gathering, received 1,048 votes in the New Words blog poll, with 61% of readers opting for the phrase to be added to Cambridge Dictionary.

Cambridge University Press has been publishing dictionaries for learners of English since 1995. Cambridge Dictionary began offering these dictionaries completely free of charge online in 1999. Celebrating its 20th birthday this year, Cambridge Dictionary is the top learner dictionary website on the planet, currently serving 394 million unique visitors a year.