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Gendered Play In Hunter-Gatherer Children Strongly Influenced By Community Demographics

Hadza children engaged in cooking play
source: www.cam.ac.uk

The gendered play of children from two hunter-gatherer societies is strongly influenced by the demographics of their communities and the gender roles modelled by the adults around them, a new study finds.

We all tend to make a lot of assumptions about the development of gender roles, mostly through a Western lens

Sheina Lew-Levy

Based on observations of more than one hundred children in two different hunter-gatherer communities in sub-Saharan Africa, an international team, led by researchers from the University of Cambridge, found that younger children were generally more likely to play in mixed-gender groups. In small communities, however, boys and girls were more likely to play together, likely due to a lack of playmates of the same gender.

As children get older, they begin to imitate the adults around them and learn culturally-specific gender roles through play. The results, reported in the journal Child Development, demonstrate the similarities with and differences from Western societies, and the importance of context when studying how children acquire various gendered behaviours.

Play is a universal feature of human childhood, and contributes to children’s cultural learning, including gender roles. Studies have shown that children are more likely to play in same-gender groups, with boys more likely to participate in vigorous ‘rough-and-tumble’ play, and girls more likely to pretend in pretense, or imaginary, play such as doll play.

However, as most studies on the development of gender focus on children from Western societies, it is difficult to determine whether observed gender differences are culturally-specific or represent broader developmental trends.

“We all tend to make a lot of assumptions about the development of gender roles, mostly through a Western lens,” said the paper’s first author Sheina Lew-Levy, who recently completed her PhD in Cambridge’s Department of Psychology. “However, very few studies have been done on gender roles in hunter-gatherer communities, whose organisation is distinct from other societies.”

The two hunter-gatherer communities in the study, the Hadza of Tanzania and the BaYaka of Congo, typically live in mobile groups averaging 25-45 individuals and have multiple residences. Labour is generally divided along gender lines, with men responsible for animal products and women responsible for plant products, although they are relatively egalitarian.

Earlier studies of play in hunter-gatherer children have found that children overwhelmingly play in mixed-gender groups, which is less common in Western children over the age of three. The team in the current study, which included researchers from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Washington State University and Duke University, found that children in smaller hunter-gatherer camps were more likely to play in mixed-gender groups than those in larger camps, most likely due to a lack of playmates of the same gender.

Younger boys and girls spend similar amounts of time engaged in play, and they both spent times in games, exercise and object play. Typically, girls and boys engage in gender roles through play. In the BaYaka community, for example, fathers are highly involved in childcare. The researchers found that BaYaka children’s doll play reflected adult child caretaking, with no strong differences in BaYaka boys’ and girls’ play with dolls.

“Context explains many, although not all, gender differences in play,” said Lew-Levy. “We need a more inclusive understanding of child development, including children’s gendered play, across the world’s diverse societies.”

Reference:
Sheina Lew-Levy et al. ‘Gender-typed and gender-segregated play among Tanzanian Hadza and Congolese BaYaka hunter-gatherer children and adolescents.’ Child Development (2019). DOI: 10.1111/cdev.13306


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New Augmented Reality Head-Mounted Display Offers Unrivalled Viewing Experience

source: www.cam.ac.uk

Cambridge engineers have developed a new augmented reality (AR) head-mounted display (HMD) that delivers a realistic 3D viewing experience, without the commonly associated side effects of nausea or eyestrain.

The device has an enlarged eye-box that is scalable and an increased field of view of 36º that is designed for a comfortable viewing experience. It displays images on the retina using pixel beam scanning which ensures the image stays in focus regardless of the distance that the user is fixating on. Details are reported in the journal Research.

Developed by researchers at the Centre for Advanced Photonics and Electronics (CAPE) in collaboration with Huawei European Research Centre, in Munich, the HMD uses partially reflective beam splitters to form an additional ‘exit pupil’ (a virtual opening through which light travels). This, together with narrow pixel beams that travel parallel to each other, and which do not disperse in other directions, produces a high-quality image that remains unaffected by changes in eye focus.

The results of a subjective user study conducted with more than 50 participants aged between 16 and 601 showed the 3D effect to be ‘very convincing’ for objects from 20 cm to 10 m; the images and videos to be of ‘vivid colour’ and high contrast with no observable pixels; and crucially, none of the participants reported any eyestrain or nausea, even after prolonged periods of usage over a few hours or even all day.

The HMD is of high brightness and suited to a wide range of indoor and outdoor uses. Further research is progressing on exploring its potential use in areas of different applications such as training, CAD (computer-aided design) development, hospitality, data manipulation, outdoor sport, defence applications and construction, as well as miniaturising the current head-mounted prototype to a glasses-based format.

Professor Daping Chu, Director of the Centre for Photonic Devices and Sensors and Director of CAPE, who led the study, said: “Our research offers up a wearable AR experience that rivals the market leaders thanks to its comfortable 3D viewing which causes no nausea or eyestrain to the user. It can deliver high-quality clear images directly on the retina, even if the user is wearing glasses. This can help the user to see displayed real-world and virtual objects clearly in an immersive environment, regardless of the quality of the user’s vision.”

Reference: 
Pawan K. Shrestha, Matt J. Pryn, Jia Jia, et al. ‘Accommodation-Free Head Mounted Display with Comfortable 3D Perception and an Enlarged Eye-box.’ Research (2019). DOI: 10.34133/2019/9273723

1Participants comprised of industrial representatives and academic researchers familiar with 3D display technology.

Originally published on the Department of Engineering website.


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University Enterprise Zone Aims To Drive Innovation Across Cambridge

Aerial view of Cambridge Biomedical Campus
source: www.cam.ac.uk

Cambridge is to establish a University Enterprise Zone as part of a new government initiative announced today by Universities Minister Chris Skidmore.

Cambridge has a rich history of scientific discovery and innovation, and its innovation ecosystem is recognised as world leading. This new government funding will help us build and strengthen connections across often very different disciplines, further accelerating innovation across the city and beyond

Andy Neely

Research England, part of UK Research and Innovation, today announced 20 new University Enterprise Zones (UEZs) aimed at helping universities stimulate growth in their local economies, providing vital support for innovative new companies and creating jobs in emerging industries. The £20 million investment will strengthen collaborative ties between universities and businesses.

Cambridge’s UEZ, Greater Cambridge Health Tech Connect, will look at testing and integrating inter-disciplinary models of incubation across West Cambridge, where many of the University’s physical sciences and engineering departments, including the Maxwell Centre and the Institute for Manufacturing, are based, and the Cambridge Biomedical Campus in the South. It will address real world challenges, including unmet medical needs, using innovative thinking across disciplines.

“Our aim is to create new ways of collaborating across physics, technology, engineering, biology and medicine and use this to drive innovation in healthcare, manufacturing and engineering,” explains Dr Kathryn Chapman, Deputy Director at the Milner Therapeutics Institute.

“This Enterprise Zone will explore and scale up new and existing models of business incubation, strengthening the interdisciplinary bridge between two major Cambridge research hubs. This will drive new research and development, and deliver a model that can be applied more widely to support company incubation.”

The announcement has been welcomed by Professor Andy Neely, Pro-Vice Chancellor for Enterprise and Business Relations at the University of Cambridge, who led the application. “Cambridge has a rich history of scientific discovery and innovation, and its innovation ecosystem is recognised as world leading. This new government funding will help us build and strengthen connections across often very different disciplines, further accelerating innovation across the city and beyond.”

Funding for the UEZs has been announced alongside an investment of £78 million in the second wave of UK Research and Innovation’s Future Leaders Fellowships. Dr Daniel Field from the Department of Earth Sciences and Dr Jamie Blundell from the Department of Oncology have both been named as recipients of new funding.

Universities Minister Chris Skidmore said: “Delivering on our research and innovation ambitions means putting people first, whether they are just starting out in their career or are leading major projects in academia or industry.

“These inspirational Future Leaders Fellows will generate the ideas of the future, helping to shape science and research for the 21st century. But to realise the full potential of these discoveries, their ideas need to be taken out of the lab and turned into real products and services, where they can actually change people’s lives for the better.

“That’s why we are creating 20 new University Enterprise Zones, helping local start-ups to co-locate in universities to build the businesses of the future – all inspired by university research.”

Illustrated statistics showing the success of the Cambridge Cluster and the University’s role within it


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Women in STEM: Sheen Gurrib

source: www.cam.ac.uk

Sheen Gurrib is a PhD candidate in the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy, where she is researching ways to improve chronic lower back pain. Here, she tells us about working with refugees to help them get into Cambridge, the importance of collaboration, and why her research has involved searching through butcher shops.

I am originally from Mauritius and I completed my undergraduate degree with an MEng in Materials Science from Oxford. I’m now finishing my third year of my PhD in the Cambridge Centre for Medical Materials, where I’m aiming to improve diagnosis and treatment of chronic low back pain.

My project started with me going around butcher shops looking for sheep spines to dissect and image. My main focus is the vertebral end plates, a section of the spine that is responsible for the nutrition of intervertebral discs but highly overlooked when it comes to disorders of the spine, so I’m looking into imaging and quantifying the vascular network in the end plates. My study also involves samples from patients undergoing spinal surgeries and their MRI scans which is the new aspect of this research, enabling the correlation between lab-based observation and clinical observations.

I spend most days dissecting spines which sometimes requires visits to the Vet School. The main technique I use is micro-CT, a non-invasive imaging technique which gives me beautiful scans of bone samples which I then analyse using different software. I also use finite element modelling to simulate blood flow in the vascular network seen in the scans. My collaborators are based in Exeter and I had to make a few trips there to inject dyes in cow tails to image the vascular network in the spine of cows. I also observed one of the surgeries in Ipswich Hospital to collect my samples.

I had a Eureka moment earlier this year when I realised that an experiment I discarded in my first year because it did not fulfil its purpose turned out to solve the biggest question of my PhD! I have been trying to image how the blood vessels end near the disc and an experiment I did in first year trying to image the disc itself was not successful but it did dye the ending of the vessels!

The aim of my research is to equip surgeons with a better understanding of what can be seen on an MRI scan when a patient suffers from back pain, so that diagnosis and treatment are targeted, improving quality of life of patients.

Cambridge has a great science community with lots of inter-departmental collaboration. Help is readily available, for example the Vet School just across the road from my lab trained me to use their bone saw to prepare my samples. Researchers from different labs will happily respond to questions via email, and expertise on different subjects is always available: surgeons have helped me understand the spine better, for instance. Additionally our own lab is well-equipped with three functioning micro-CT scanners, freeze-driers, blade saws as well as our own Tissue Culture Lab. I’ve also had the opportunity to present my work at conferences in Belgium, Netherlands, Germany and Japan with the support of my College, Hughes Hall.

Cambridge has equipped me with all the necessary skills as a leader and a scientist but also with a sense of fulfilment from playing my part in the betterment of society. I have been involved in outreach events including Making Materials Matter organised by Oxbridge and The Ironmongers Association, the Cambridge Science Festival, Women in Physics and school visits by Hughes Hall. I’ve also been involved in an i-teams project organised by the Cambridge Centre for Global Equality where I was part of a team working on the commercialisation of biodegradable wound dressings, developed by researchers in Chemical Engineering, for use in the Gambia and India. I was the editor of a global health think tank managed by Polyegia which resulted in the publication of a policy brief addressing the mental health of refugees in the UK. Together with Project Access, I founded Project Access for Refugees, offering free mentoring to students of a refugee background apply and get into Cambridge and Oxford. I was humbled to be in the finalists for the Vice-Chancellor’s Social Impact award and for being awarded Global Shaper by the World Economic Forum.

My advice to other young women considering a career in STEM is to never be afraid to take a leadership position. Apply for things, shoot high and do not underestimate yourself. It is often hard, but if you work hard and do the best you can, it will work out. Your path might not be the same as you expected or hoped, but keep going! We need to keep on inspiring the next generation of aspiring female scientists.


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Cambridge Appoints First DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning

source: www.cam.ac.uk

Following an international search, Professor Neil Lawrence has been appointed as the inaugural DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at Cambridge, supported by a benefaction from the world-leading British AI company.

There’s so much expertise at Cambridge, in all aspects of systems and data: that’s why I’m so excited about joining

Neil Lawrence

Professor Lawrence joins the University’s Department of Computer Science and Technology from Amazon Cambridge, where he has been Director of Machine Learning for the past three years. He is also Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Sheffield, where he will retain a visiting position.

Professor Lawrence’s research interests are in probabilistic models with applications in computational biology, personalised health and developing economies. At Sheffield, he led the ML@SITraN group, and helped to develop an Open Data Science Initiative an approach to data science designed to address societal needs.

“There’s so much expertise at Cambridge, in all aspects of systems and data: that’s why I’m so excited about joining,” Lawrence said. “AI and machine learning have the potential to reshape almost every aspect of our lives, but we desperately need more machine learning specialists, or else the promise of AI will not be realised.”

Professor Lawrence completed his PhD at Cambridge’s Department of Computer Science and Technology in 2000. He has previously held positions at Microsoft Research Cambridge and the University of Manchester. In addition to his academic research, he hosts the Talking Machines podcast and is a contributor to the Guardian.

For the past five years, Professor Lawrence has been working with Data Science Africa, an organisation looking to connect machine learning researchers in Africa in order to solve problems on the ground. Professor Lawrence has an advisory role with the group, and says that many of the machine learning approaches used in Africa can have benefits in the developed world as well.

“With data and machine learning, you can have a more advanced data infrastructure in Africa than in some developed countries,” he said. “It’s rare in the UK or Europe that you’re asked to look at a machine learning problem from end to end, but you can do that in Africa, and it leads to better solutions. That’s the kind of approach I want to take to machine learning in my work at Cambridge.”

Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO, DeepMind, said: “I’m delighted to see Cambridge announce its first DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning. Professor Lawrence’s work in computational biology and his thoughtful advocacy for advancing technology in the developing world have been commendable. It’s an honour for DeepMind to be able to support the Department of Computer Science and Technology – from which I gained so much – in this way, and I look forward to seeing machine learning and AI flourish at Cambridge.”

“Neil will have a transformative effect on machine learning and artificial intelligence research at Cambridge,” said Professor Ann Copestake, Head of the Department of Computer Science and Technology. “He will build on our existing strengths in this area, and work with colleagues from across the University to develop new solutions in ethical and sustainable ways.”

“It is vital we have a deep pool of talented scientists in universities and industry so the UK can continue to be a world leader in artificial intelligence,” said Minister for Digital Mark Warman. “This Government is investing millions into skills and talent training, including a number of Turing AI Fellowships in partnership with The Alan Turing Institute, and I welcome the appointment of Professor Neil Lawrence as the inaugural DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at Cambridge. This is one of a range of moves demonstrating the enormous strength of the UK’s research base.”

In addition to the gift to support the DeepMind Professorship, the company are also supporting four Master’s students from underrepresented groups wishing to study machine learning and computer science at Cambridge. The first students supported through this programme will be starting their studies this coming term.


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Shakespeare’s Mystery Annotator Identified As John Milton

The prologue to Romeo and Juliet, transcribed on the last page of Titus Andronicus because it was omitted from the First Folio. Courtesy of the Free Library of Philadephia
source: www.cam.ac.uk

A Cambridge literary scholar suggests that the handwriting on a Shakespeare First Folio in Philadelphia matches that of the Paradise Lost poet, John Milton.

It shows you the first-hand encounter between two great writers, which you don’t often get to see

Jason Scott-Warren

It is well known that Shakespeare was a huge influence on Milton. From learning how to write nature poetry to creating charismatic villains, Milton’s debt to his forebear continues to fascinate experts. The younger poet once praised the ‘wonder and astonishment’ that this ‘great heir of fame’ conjured up in his readers.

But now, Jason Scott-Warren from Cambridge’s English Faculty believes he has identified even more tangible evidence of this connection. The realisation began when Scott-Warren read an article by Professor Claire Bourne about an anonymous annotator of a Shakespeare First Folio housed in the Free Library of Philadelphia’s Rare Book Department.

Bourne dated the annotator to the mid-17th century and shared images of the handwritten notes. These include suggested corrections, cross-references to other works and the addition of material such as the prologue to Romeo and Juliet. Studying these, Scott-Warren was struck by how closely they resembled known examples of Milton’s handwriting and after identifying numerous compelling similarities, he decided to share his theory in a blog post for Cambridge’s Centre for Material Texts, of which he is Director.

Milton is known to have made similarly intelligent and assiduous annotations in other books that survive from his library, but the evidence that Scott-Warren presents is strictly palaeographical. It includes the observation that in both the First Folio and in Milton’s handwriting, the right foot of an ‘h’ misses the ground before it heads up into an ‘e’.

Even more convincingly, Scott-Warren points out that “Milton has an enlarged italic hand, sometimes rather scratchy, sometimes quite elegant, that he uses for headings and suchlike.” The researcher compares, for example, the ‘R’ in the speech-heading for ‘Romeo’ in the Folio to a remarkably similar and distinctive ‘R’ from Milton’s ‘commonplace book’, a handwritten compilation of quotes and notes from the books that he was reading between the 1630s and 1660s.

Scott-Warren offered up his theory tentatively, admitting that further work would be needed to prove it beyond doubt. But several Milton experts from around the world have already expressed their enthusiastic support and offered further evidence.

Dr William Poole from New College Oxford says: “Not only does this hand look like Milton’s, but it behaves like Milton’s writing elsewhere does, doing exactly the things Milton does when he annotates books, and using exactly the same marks.”

“I was gathering evidence with my heart in my mouth,” Scott-Warren says. “Now, every day someone is suggesting a new similarity. I feel 100% sure, but there are still people out there who remain to be convinced.”

As well as displaying many textual annotations, the folio contains line markings which record the annotator’s lively engagement with plays including HamletRomeo and JulietMacbethThe Tempest and King Lear. Scott-Warren says: “You don’t know why he’s singled out a passage for attention, but it forces you to think your way into Milton’s head and it chimes with a lot of what goes on in his poetry. You can really see him constructing himself through Shakespeare.”

In The Tempest, the annotator highlighted the song: ‘Come unto these yellow sands, / And then take hands: / Courtsied when you have and kiss’d / The wild waves whist.’ The unusual rhyme, of ‘kiss’d’ and ‘whist’, is echoed in Milton’s On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity: ‘The winds with wonder whist, / Smoothly the waters kist.’

Scott-Warren says: “To see him marking it in the text and responding to it gives you a sense of his sensitivity and alertness to Shakespeare.”

The First Folio, the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, was published in 1623, seven years after his death, when Milton himself was fifteen. Around 750 were printed but only 233 are known to survive. Scott-Warren is now intending to collaborate with Professor Bourne on a series of articles about the findings.

John Milton was admitted to Christ’s College Cambridge in 1624, gaining his BA in 1628 and his MA in 1632.


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The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright ©University of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified.  All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Nanoparticles Used To Transport Anti-Cancer Agent To Cells

Cells with metal-organic frameworks carrying siRNA
source: www.cam.ac.uk

Scientists from the University of Cambridge have developed a platform that uses nanoparticles known as metal-organic frameworks to deliver a promising anti-cancer agent to cells.

We focus on difficult diseases such as hard-to-treat cancers for which there has been no improvement in treatment in the last 20 years

David Fairen-Jimenez

Research led by Dr David Fairen-Jimenez, from the Cambridge Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, indicates metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) could present a viable platform for delivering a potent anti-cancer agent, known as siRNA, to cells.

Small interfering ribonucleic acid (siRNA), has the potential to inhibit overexpressed cancer-causing genes, and has become an increasing focus for scientists on the hunt for new cancer treatments.

Fairen-Jimenez’s group used computational simulations to find a MOF with the perfect pore size to carry an siRNA molecule, and that would breakdown once inside a cell, releasing the siRNA to its target. Their results were published today in Cell Press journal Chem.

Some cancers can occur when specific genes inside cells cause over-production of particular proteins. One way to tackle this is to block the gene expression pathway, limiting the production of these proteins.

SiRNA molecules can do just that – binding to specific gene messenger molecules and destroying them before they can tell the cell to produce a particular protein. This process is known as ‘gene knockdown’. Scientists have begun to focus more on siRNAs as potential cancer therapies in the last decade, as they offer a versatile solution to disease treatment – all you need to know is the sequence of the gene you want to inhibit and you can make the corresponding siRNA that will break it down. Instead of designing, synthesising and testing new drugs – an incredibly costly and lengthy process – you can make a few simple changes to the siRNA molecule and treat an entirely different disease.

One of the problems with using siRNAs to treat disease is that the molecules are very unstable and are often broken down by the cell’s natural defence mechanisms before they can reach their targets. SiRNA molecules can be modified to make them more stable, but this compromises their ability to knock down the target genes. It’s also difficult to get the molecules into cells – they need to be transported by another vehicle acting as a delivery agent.

The Cambridge researchers have used a special nanoparticle to protect and deliver siRNA to cells, where they show its ability to inhibit a specific target gene.

Fairen-Jimenez leads research into advanced materials, with a particular focus on MOFs: self-assembling 3D compounds made of metallic and organic building blocks connected together.

There are thousands of different types of MOFs that researchers can make – there are currently more than 84,000 MOF structures in the Cambridge Structural Database with 1000 new structures published each month – and their properties can be tuned for specific purposes. By changing different components of the MOF structure, researchers can create MOFs with different pore sizes, stabilities and toxicities, enabling them to design structures that can carry molecules such as siRNAs into cells without harmful side effects.

“With traditional cancer therapy if you’re designing new drugs to treat the system, these can have different behaviours, geometries, sizes, and so you’d need a MOF that is optimal for each of these individual drugs,” says Fairen-Jimenez. “But for siRNA, once you develop one MOF that is useful, you can in principle use this for a range of different siRNA sequences, treating different diseases.”

“People that have done this before have used MOFs that don’t have a porosity that’s big enough to encapsulate the siRNA, so a lot of it is likely just stuck on the outside,” says Michelle Teplensky, former PhD student in Fairen-Jimenez’s group, who carried out the research. “We used a MOF that could encapsulate the siRNA and when it’s encapsulated you offer more protection. The MOF we chose is made of a zirconium based metal node and we’ve done a lot of studies that show zirconium is quite inert and it doesn’t cause any toxicity issues.”

Using a biodegradable MOF for siRNA delivery is important to avoid unwanted build-up of the structures once they’ve done their job. The MOF that Teplensky and team selected breaks down into harmless components that are easily recycled by the cell without harmful side effects. The large pore size also means the team can load a significant amount of siRNA into a single MOF molecule, keeping the dosage needed to knock down the genes very low.

“One of the benefits of using a MOF with such large pores is that we can get a much more localised, higher dose than other systems would require,” says Teplensky. “SiRNA is very powerful, you don’t need a huge amount of it to get good functionality. The dose needed is less than 5% of the porosity of the MOF.”

A problem with using MOFs or other vehicles to carry small molecules into cells is that they are often stopped by the cells on the way to their target. This process is known as endosomal entrapment and is essentially a defence mechanism against unwanted components entering the cell. Fairen-Jimenez’s team added extra components to their MOF to stop them being trapped on their way into the cell, and with this, could ensure the siRNA reached its target.

The team used their system to knock down a gene that produces fluorescent proteins in the cell, so they were able to use microscopy imaging methods to measure how the fluorescence emitted by the proteins compared between cells not treated with the MOF and those that were. The group made use of in-house expertise, collaborating with super-resolution microscopy specialists Professors Clemens Kaminski and Gabi Kaminski-Schierle, who also lead research in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology.

Using the MOF platform, the team were consistently able to prevent gene expression by 27%, a level that shows promise for using the technique to knock down cancer genes.

Fairen-Jimenez believes they will be able to increase the efficacy of the system and the next steps will be to apply the platform to genes involved in causing so-called hard-to-treat cancers.

“One of the questions we get asked a lot is ‘why do you want to use a metal-organic framework for healthcare?’, because there are metals involved that might sound harmful to the body,” says Fairen-Jimenez. “But we focus on difficult diseases such as hard-to-treat cancers for which there has been no improvement in treatment in the last 20 years. We need to have something that can offer a solution; just extra years of life will be very welcome.”

The versatility of the system will enable the team to use the same adapted MOF to deliver different siRNA sequences and target different genes. Because of its large pore size, the MOF also has the potential to deliver multiple drugs at once, opening up the option of combination therapy.

The research is part of a wider project, funded by the EPRSC and European Commission, into treatments for hard-to-treat cancers.

Read the full paper, published in Cell Press journal Chem.

Reference:
Teplensky et al., Chem 5, 1–16 November 14, 2019 ª 2019 Elsevier Inc. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chempr.2019.08.015


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The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright ©University of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified.  All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Harnessing Tomato Jumping Genes Could Help Speed-Breed Drought-Resistant Crops

Cherry and baby plum tomatoes
source: www.cam.ac.uk

Once dismissed as ‘junk DNA’ that served no purpose, a family of ‘jumping genes’ found in tomatoes has the potential to accelerate crop breeding for traits such as improved drought resistance.

We could harness Rider to breed crops that are better adapted to drought stress. This is particularly significant in times of global warming, where there is an urgent need to breed more resilient crops.

Matthias Benoit

Researchers from the University of Cambridge’s Sainsbury Laboratory (SLCU) and Department of Plant Sciences have discovered that drought stress triggers the activity of a family of jumping genes (Rider retrotransposons) previously known to contribute to fruit shape and colour in tomatoes. Their characterisation of Rider, published today in the journal PLOS Genetics, revealed that the Rider family is also present and potentially active in other plants, including economically important crops such as rapeseed, beetroot and quinoa. This highlights its potential as a source of new trait variations that could help plants better cope with more extreme conditions driven by our changing climate.

This wide abundance encourages further investigations into how it can be activated in a controlled way, or reactivated or re-introduced into plants that currently have inactive Rider elements so that their trait diversification potential can be regained. Such an approach has the potential to significantly reduce breeding time compared to traditional methods.

“Transposons carry potential for crop improvement. They are powerful drivers of trait diversity, and while we have been harnessing these traits to improve our crops for generations, we are now starting to understand the molecular mechanisms involved,” said Dr Matthias Benoit, the paper’s first author, formerly at SLCU.

Transposons, more commonly called jumping genes, are mobile snippets of DNA code that can copy themselves into new positions within the genome – the genetic code of an organism. They can change, disrupt or amplify genes, or have no effect at all. Discovered in corn kernels by Nobel prize-winning scientist Barbara McClintock in the 1940s, only now are scientists realising that transposons are not junk at all but actually play an important role in the evolutionary process, and in altering gene expression and the physical characteristics of plants.

Using the jumping genes already present in plants to generate new characteristics would be a significant step forward from traditional breeding techniques, making it possible to generate new traits in crops that have traditionally been bred to produce uniform shapes, colours and sizes to make harvesting more efficient and maximise yield.

“In a large population size, such as a tomato field, in which transposons are activated in each individual we would expect to see diverse new traits. By controlling this ‘random mutation’ process within the plant we can accelerate this process to generate new phenotypes that we could not even imagine,” said Dr Hajk Drost at SLCU, a co-author of the paper.

Today’s gene targeting technologies are very powerful, but often require some functional understanding of the underlying gene to yield useful results and usually only target one or a few genes. Transposon activity is a native tool already present within the plant, which can be harnessed to generate new phenotypes or resistances and complement gene targeting efforts. Using transposons to generate new mutations offers a transgene-free method of breeding that acknowledges the current EU legislation on Genetically Modified Organisms.

“Identifying that Rider activity is triggered by drought suggests that it can create new gene regulatory networks that would help a plant respond to drought,” said Benoit. “This means we could harness Rider to breed crops that are better adapted to drought stress by providing drought responsiveness to genes already present in crops. This is particularly significant in times of global warming, where there is an urgent need to breed more resilient crops.”

This work was supported by the European Research Council and the Gatsby Charitable Foundation.

 

Reference
Matthias Benoit et al. Environmental and epigenetic regulation of Rider retrotransposons in tomato. PLOS Genetics (2019). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1008370

 


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Women in STEM: Dr Cohl Furey

source: www.cam.ac.uk
Cohl Furey is a Walter Grant Scott Fellow in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, and a member of Trinity Hall. Here, she tells us about the elegance of mathematical physics, which ‘gets better and better the further you go.’

I first became interested in fundamental physics in secondary school, when a teacher described the basic idea behind a grand unified theory.

Currently, physicists are able to describe the behaviour of the known particles using just four forces. These are called the strong force, the weak force, the electromagnetic force, and the gravitational force. A grand unified theory tries to combine the first three forces together into a single force. (A theory which attempts to also include gravity is known as a theory of everything.)

My current research focuses on how certain special number systems in mathematics might ultimately underlie the behaviour of elementary particles. This can be thought of as a form of unification, but not in the traditional sense.

Mathematical physics is a beautiful subject, which gets better and better the further you go. It is elegant, much unlike the sorts of things that you will learn in first- and second-year physics. If you are interested in physics and are mathematically inclined, then know that the abstract, beautiful material starts appearing more around your third year.

This area of research has not progressed in terms of gender diversity, as most other fields have. This means that if you would like to pursue this line of study, then you will need to develop a very strong sense of self. Sometimes even your own friends and teachers will unintentionally fix ridiculous stereotypes to you. Just do your work, and prove them wrong.


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‘Game-Changing’ Research Could Solve Evolution Mysteries

source: www.cam.ac.uk

An evolution revolution has begun after scientists extracted genetic information from a 1.7 million-year-old rhino tooth – the largest and oldest genetic data to ever be recorded.

This new analysis of ancient proteins from dental enamel will start an exciting new chapter in the study of molecular evolution.

Enrico Cappellini

Researchers identified an almost complete set of proteins, a proteome, in the dental enamel of the rhino and the genetic information discovered is one million years older than the oldest DNA sequenced from a 700,000-year-old horse.

The findings by scientists from the University of Copenhagen and St John’s College, University of Cambridge, are published in Nature. They mark a breakthrough in the field of ancient biomolecular studies and could solve some of the biggest mysteries of animal and human biology by allowing scientists to accurately reconstruct evolution from further back in time than ever before.

Professor Enrico Cappellini, a specialist in Palaeoproteomics at the Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen, and first author on the paper, said: “For 20 years ancient DNA has been used to address questions about the evolution of extinct species, adaptation and human migration but it has limitations. Now for the first time we have retrieved ancient genetic information which allows us to reconstruct molecular evolution way beyond the usual time limit of DNA preservation.

DNA data that genetically tracks human evolution only covers the last 400,000 years. But the lineages that led to modern humans and to the chimp – the living species genetically closest to humans – branched apart around six to seven million years ago which means scientists currently have no genetic information for more than 90 per cent of the evolutionary path that led to modern humans.

Scientists also don’t know what the genetic links are between us and extinct species such as Homo erectus – the oldest known species of human to have had modern human-like body proportions – because everything that is currently known is almost exclusively based on anatomical information, not genetic information.

Researchers have now used ancient protein sequencing – based on ground-breaking technology called mass spectrometry – to retrieve genetic information from the tooth of a 1.77 million year old Stephanorhinus – an extinct rhinoceros which lived in Eurasia during the Pleistocene. Researchers took samples of dental enamel from the ancient fossil which was discovered in Dmanisi, Georgia, and used mass spectrometry to sequence the ancient protein and retrieved genetic information previously unobtainable using DNA testing.
Tooth enamel is the hardest material present in mammals. In this study researchers discovered the set of proteins it contains lasts longer than DNA and is more genetically informative than collagen, the only other protein so far retrieved from fossils older than one million years.

Professor Jesper V. Olsen, head of the Mass Spectrometry for Quantitative Proteomics Group at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research, University of Copenhagen, and co-corresponding author on the paper, said: “Mass spectrometry-based protein sequencing will enable us to retrieve reliable and rich genetic information from mammal fossils that are millions of years old, rather than just thousands of years old. It is the only technology able to provide the robustness and accuracy needed to sequence tiny amounts of protein this old.”

Professor Cappellini added: “Dental enamel is extremely abundant and it is incredibly durable, which is why a high proportion of fossil records are teeth.

“We have been able to find a way to retrieve genetic information that is more informative and older than any other source before, and it’s from a source that is abundant in the fossil records so the potential of the application of this approach is extensive.”

Lead author Professor Eske Willerslev, who holds positions at St John’s College, University of Cambridge, and is director of The Lundbeck Foundation Centre for GeoGenetics, Globe Institute, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, at the University of Copenhagen, said: “This research is a game-changer that opens up a lot of options for further evolutionary study in terms of humans as well as mammals. It will revolutionise the methods of investigating evolution based on molecular markers and it will open a complete new field of ancient biomolecular studies.”

This rearranging of the evolutionary lineage of a single species may seem like a small adjustment but identifying changes in numerous extinct mammals and humans could lead to massive shifts in our understanding of the way the world has evolved.

The team of scientists is already implementing the findings in their current research. The discovery could enable scientists across the globe to collect the genetic data of ancient fossils and to build a bigger, more accurate picture of the evolution of hundreds of species including our own.

 

Reference: 
Enrico Cappellini et al. ‘Early Pleistocene enamel proteome from Dmanisi resolves Stephanorhinus phylogeny.’ Nature (2019). DOI: ​10.1038/s41586-019-1555-y

 

Originally published by St John’s College, Cambridge

 


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Nanowires Replace Newton’s Famous Glass Prism

source: www.cam.ac.uk

Scientists have designed an ultra-miniaturised device that could image single cells without the need for a microscope or make chemical fingerprint analysis possible from within a smartphone camera.

Our approach could bring powerful analytical technologies from the lab to the palm of our hands

Tawfique Hasan

The device, made from a single nanowire 1000 times thinner than a human hair, is the smallest spectrometer ever designed. It could be used in potential applications such as assessing the freshness of foods, the quality of drugs, or even identifying counterfeit objects, all from a smartphone camera. Details are reported in the journal Science.

In the 17th century, Isaac Newton, through his observations on the splitting of light by a prism, sowed the seeds for a new field of science studying the interactions between light and matter – spectroscopy. Today, optical spectrometers are essential tools in industry and almost all fields of scientific research. Through analysing the characteristics of light, spectrometers can tell us about the processes within galactic nebulae, millions of light years away, down to the characteristics of protein molecules.

However, even now, the majority of spectrometers are based around principles similar to what Newton demonstrated with his prism: the spatial separation of light into different spectral components. Such a basis fundamentally limits the size of spectrometers in respect: they are usually bulky and complex, and challenging to shrink to sizes much smaller than a coin. Four hundred years after Newton, University of Cambridge researchers have overcome this challenge to produce a system up to a thousand times smaller than those previously reported.

The Cambridge team, working with colleagues from the UK, China and Finland, used a nanowire whose material composition is varied along its length, enabling it to be responsive to different colours of light across the visible spectrum. Using techniques similar to those used for the manufacture of computer chips, they then created a series of light-responsive sections on this nanowire.

“We engineered a nanowire that allows us to get rid of the dispersive elements, like a prism, producing a far simpler, ultra-miniaturised system than conventional spectrometers can allow,” said first author Zongyin Yang from the Cambridge Graphene Centre. “The individual responses we get from the nanowire sections can then be directly fed into a computer algorithm to reconstruct the incident light spectrum.”

“When you take a photograph, the information stored in pixels is generally limited to just three components – red, green, and blue,” said co-first author Tom Albrow-Owen. “With our device, every pixel contains data points from across the visible spectrum, so we can acquire detailed information far beyond the colours which our eyes can perceive. This can tell us, for instance, about chemical processes occurring in the frame of the image.”

“Our approach could allow unprecedented miniaturisation of spectroscopic devices, to an extent that could see them incorporated directly into smartphones, bringing powerful analytical technologies from the lab to the palm of our hands,” said Dr Tawfique Hasan, who led the study.

One of the most promising potential uses of the nanowire could be in biology. Since the device is so tiny, it can directly image single cells without the need for a microscope. And unlike other bioimaging techniques, the information obtained by the nanowire spectrometer contains a detailed analysis of the chemical fingerprint of each pixel.

The researchers hope that the platform they have created could lead to an entirely new generation of ultra-compact spectrometers working from the ultraviolet to the infrared range. Such technologies could be used for a wide range of consumer, research and industrial applications, including in lab-on-a-chip systems, biological implants, and smart wearable devices.

The Cambridge team has filed a patent on the technology, and hopes to see real-life applications within the next five years.

Reference:
Zongyin Yang et al. ‘Single nanowire spectrometers.’ Science (2019). DOI: 10.1126/science.aax8814


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Cambridge University Library Unveils the Rich Histories, Struggles and Hidden Labours of Women at Cambridge

source: www.cam.ac.uk

One hundred and fifty years since the first women were allowed to study at the University of Cambridge, Cambridge University Library will be sharing the unique stories of women who have studied, taught, worked and lived at the University, in its new exhibition The Rising Tide: Women at Cambridge.

From the founding of the first women’s college to the present day, the experience of women at Cambridge has differed greatly from their male counterparts.

Lucy Delap

Opening to the public on Monday 14 October, and curated by Dr Lucy Delap and Dr Ben Griffin, the exhibition will focus on the lived experiences of women at the University, the ongoing fight for equal educational rights, recognition, and inclusion in university activities, and the careers of some of the women who shaped the institution – from leading academics to extraordinary domestic staff and influential fellows’ wives.

The exhibition will showcase the history of women at the University, the persistent marginalisation they were subject to, and the ongoing campaigns for gender justice and change since the establishment of Girton College in Cambridge in 1869, the first residential university establishment for women in the UK. Visitors will have the opportunity to explore rarely seen collections from across the University and colleges. Through a mix of costume, letters and audio-visual material, the fascinating and little-known stories of individual women will be illustrated.

Dr Lucy Delap, exhibition co-curator and Fellow of Murray Edwards College, said: “From the founding of the first women’s college to the present day, the experience of women at Cambridge has differed greatly from their male counterparts.

“Though Girton College was established especially to give women the opportunity to study at the University, there were still many barriers that women faced – the first female students were required to ask permission to attend lectures, were not allowed to take exams without special permission, and usually had to be accompanied by chaperones in public until after the First World War. It was still not until 1948 that Cambridge began to offer degrees to women – the last of the big institutions in the UK to do so.

“Through The Rising Tide we hope to illustrate an all-encompassing picture of the incredible fight for gender equality within the University, while portraying the fascinating journeys of some of the militant, cussed and determined women of our institution too.”

Visitors to the exhibition will learn of the deep opposition and oppression women faced, including the efforts made to keep women out of student societies, the organised campaigns to stop women getting degrees, and the hostility faced by women trying to establish careers as academics. Surviving fragments of eggshells and fireworks illustrate the violent opposition to giving women degrees during the vote on the subject in 1897, as does the note written by undergraduates apologising for the damage that had been done to Newnham College during the riot of 1921.

The exhibition will also reveal the creativity and courage of the women who defiantly resisted such opposition to establish lives and careers within the University. Resistance included: the signing of the 400 page petition demanding women’s degrees in 1880, which will be displayed over the walls of the exhibition; setting up new student societies for women; and finding opportunities for women to lecture.

Sometimes, resistance meant finding ways of avoiding the rules that discriminated against women – between 1904 and 1907, Trinity College Dublin offered women from Newnham and Girton the opportunity to travel to Dublin to graduate officially and receive a full degree. The robes of one of the graduates, which have been stored for many decades, will be displayed in the Women at Cambridge exhibition.

Dr Ben Griffin, exhibition co-curator and Lecturer in Modern British History at Girton College, added: “By telling the story of women at Cambridge, this exhibition also tells the story of how a nineteenth-century institution, which served mainly to educate young men for careers in the church, transformed itself into a recognisably modern university devoted to teaching and research.”

The Rising Tide is a culmination of exhibitions, events and displays exploring the past, present and future of women at the University of Cambridge. Curated by Cambridge University Library in collaboration with students and staff, the events programme, pop-up exhibitions and displays will run at the Library and across the city. Women at Cambridge is the centre-piece of the programme and will launch on Monday 14 October, and run until March 2020. Entry is free.


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Women in STEM: Dr Anna-Maria Pappa

source: www.cam.ac.uk

Dr Anna-Maria Pappa is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology and holds the Oppenheimer Research Fellowship and Maudslay-Butler Research Fellowship from Pembroke College. Her research is focused on the global challenge of antimicrobial resistance.

I strongly believe that through diversity comes creativity, comes progress. I qualified as an engineer in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, and went on to earn a Master’s Degree in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology from the same university. My PhD is in Bioelectronics from École des Mines de Saint-Étienne in France, and a key moment for me was when I left home to study abroad. Leaving my comfort zone for something unknown was very difficult in the beginning, but proved to be an invaluable experience. I met people from all over the world with different cultures and mind-sets, stretched my mind and expanded my horizons.

I find it very difficult to be around like-minded people; I always look for those with different views. I’m working on a drug discovery platform using bioelectronics, and my work sets out to improve and accelerate drug discovery by providing novel technological solutions for drug screening and disease management. My research focuses on the application of a new class of electronic materials and devices that could replace the in-vitro drug screening assays currently used in medical diagnoses with electronic arrays similar to the electronic chips found in mobile phones.  These could quickly assess the health of our cells, outside of our bodies.

As an engineer, creating solutions to important yet unresolved issues for healthcare is what truly motivates me. I hope my research will lead to a product that will impact healthcare. The convergence of new technologies with life sciences will revolutionise both diagnosis and therapy. I imagine a healthcare system where the standard one-size-fits-all approach shifts to a more personalised and tailored model.

My most interesting project is one that is working to tackle the global challenge of antimicrobial resistance from a technological standpoint. We are developing biomimetic bacterial membranes on top of our devices and screening newly synthesised antibiotics. Investigating drug-bacterial membrane interactions allows us to directly test the efficacy of known drugs on bacterial resistant strains, as well as allowing us to better understand the action of novel drugs on the membrane properties, and ultimately aid the design and synthesis of target-specific antibiotics.

I joined Cambridge as a postdoctoral researcher in 2017. My daily routine involves some lab work in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, a lot of reading and writing, and some project management. I spend time in the Maxwell Centre too, where I participate in an entrepreneurship program called Impulse, exploring all the aspects of technology transfer.

Being part of a University where some of the world’s most brilliant scientists studied and worked is invaluable. Cambridge combines a historic and traditional atmosphere with cutting edge technological and scientific research in an open, multicultural society. The state-of-the-art facilities, and the openness in innovation and collaborations, along with great science, provide a unique combination that can only lead to excellence.  I also travel frequently for conferences, as well as visiting other laboratories across Europe, the United States and Saudi Arabia. When you work in a multidisciplinary field it is essential to establish and keep good collaborations; since this is the only way to achieve the desirable outcome.

To be successful in a postdoctoral role requires management, teaching, networking, proposal writing and travelling. The amount of time you get to spend in the lab drops significantly compared to the PhD research period. This is in part due to the fact that you are more experienced, thus more efficient, and since you are more independent in research you need to be on top of things.

I think it’s absolutely vital, in every opportunity, for all of us to honour and promote girls and women in science. In October 2017 I was delighted to be awarded a L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Fellowship, an award that honours the contributions of women in science. For me, the award not only represents a scientific distinction but also gives me the unique opportunity, as an ambassador of science, to inspire and motivate young girls to follow the career they desire. Unfortunately, women still struggle when it comes to joining male-dominated fields, and even to establish themselves later at senior roles. We still face stereotypes and social restrictions, even if it is not as obvious today as it was in the past. This is in part due to the fact that still, the key senior roles are predominantly male-occupied, and so there is a lack of female role models as well as female mentality. This makes it harder for women to believe in themselves and achieve their goals.

A question I always ask during my outreach activities at schools is ‘do look like a scientist?’  The answer I get most times is ‘no’! I think this misperception of how professionals in STEMM look, or about what they actually do on a daily basis is what discourages girls early on to follow STEMM careers. This needs to change. On top of that, my advice to women would be to be open, never underestimate themselves and never be put off by stereotypes especially in male-dominated industries. There are excellent examples of highly successful women – leaders in their fields – who managed to excel despite the difficulties. Importantly, many of them successfully combined career and family.

 

 


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Eight Cambridge Researchers Awarded Major European Starter Grants

Naturally-occurring perovskite
source: www.cam.ac.uk

Eight Cambridge researchers are among the latest recipients of European Union awards given to early-career researchers from over 50 countries.

Six of our successful researchers are non-UK nationals, showing once again that Cambridge has the ability to attract the very best talent from around the world to carry out research at its world class facilities

Peter Hedges

The European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grants have been awarded to 408 researchers from across Europe. The awards will help individual researchers to build their own teams and conduct world-leading research across all disciplines, creating an estimated 2,500 jobs for postdoctoral fellows, PhD students and other staff at the host institutions.

The successful Cambridge researchers are:

  • Roland Bauerschmidt – Renormalisation, dynamics, and hyperbolic symmetry
  • Quentin Berthet – Computational Trade-offs and Algorithms in Statistics
  • Felix Deschler – Twisted Perovskites: Control of Spin and Chirality in Highly-luminescent Metal-halide Perovskites
  • Lorenzo Di Michele – A DNA NANOtechology toolkit for artificial CELL design
  • Louise Hirst – Gliding epitaxy for inorganic space-power sheets
  • Sertac Sehlikoglu – Imaginative Landscapes of Islamist Politics Across the Balkan-to-Bengal Complex
  • Blake Sherwin – CMB Lensing at Sub-Percent Precision: A New Probe of Cosmology and Fundamental Physics
  • Margherita Turco – Human Placental Development and the Uterine Microenvironment

Commenting on the awards, Dr Peter Hedges, Head of the University Research Office at the University of Cambridge, said: “The success of UK researchers, and in particular Cambridge researchers, demonstrates the world-leading position that our country holds in research and innovation. This is a position we have will have to fight hard to maintain in the face of competition from other nations across Europe, the USA and China.

“Six of our successful researchers are non-UK nationals, showing once again that Cambridge has the ability to attract the very best talent from around the world to carry out research at its world class facilities.”

The ERC-funded research will be carried out in 24 countries, with institutions from Germany (73), the UK (64) and the Netherlands (53) to host the highest number of projects. The grants, worth in total €621 million (£560 million), are part of the EU Research and Innovation programme, Horizon 2020.

Carlos Moedas, European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation, said: “Researchers need freedom and support to follow their scientific curiosity if we are to find answers to the most difficult challenges of our age and our future. This is the strength of the grants that the EU provides through the European Research Council: an opportunity for outstanding scientists to pursue their most daring ideas.”

President of the ERC, Professor Jean-Pierre Bourguignon, added: “In this year’s ERC Starting Grant competition, early-career researchers of 51 nationalities are among the winners – a record. It reminds us that science knows no borders and that talent is to be found everywhere. It is essential that, for its future successful development, the European Union keeps attracting and supporting outstanding researchers from around the world. At the ERC we are proud to contribute to this goal by supporting some of the most daring creative scientific talent.”


Researcher profile: Dr Margherita Turco

 Among this year’s successful awardees is Dr Margherita Turco from Cambridge’s Centre for Trophoblast Research (CTR).

Margherita began her career studying the development of embryos in domestic animals during her studies for Veterinary Biotechnology at the University of Bologna, in Italy. During her PhD in Molecular Medicine at the European Institute of Oncology in Milano, she became interested in how early cell lineage decisions are made and began using various stem cells models to address this question.

This led Margherita to come to Cambridge in 2012 to carry out her postdoctoral work on human trophoblast stem cells at the CTR. Her goal is to understand how the human placenta grows and develops during pregnancy.

“The placenta is a remarkable organ that is formed early in pregnancy. It plays the crucial role of nourishing and protecting the baby throughout its development before birth,” she says. However, there is a lot that can go wrong during this period.

“Complications occurring during pregnancy, such as pre-eclampsia, fetal growth restriction, stillbirth, miscarriage and premature birth, are principally due to defective placental function. These conditions, which collectively affect around one in five pregnancies, can pose a risk to both the baby and mother’s health. Understanding early placental development is the key to understanding successful pregnancy.”


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Vintage Film Reveals Antarctic Glacier Melting

source: www.cam.ac.uk

Newly available archival film has revealed the eastern ice shelf of Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica is melting faster than previous estimates, suggesting the shelf may collapse sooner than expected.

The high-resolution digitization of these records crucially makes them available for a series of important investigations on aspects of Antarctic environmental change

Julian Dowdeswell

Newly digitized vintage film has doubled how far back scientists can peer into the history of underground ice in Antarctica, and revealed that an ice shelf on Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica is being thawed by a warming ocean more quickly than previously thought. This finding contributes to predictions for sea-level rise that would impact coastal communities around the world.

The researchers made their findings by comparing ice-penetrating radar records of Thwaites Glacier with modern data. Their results are reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“By having this record, we can now see these areas where the ice shelf is getting thinnest and could break through,” said lead author Dustin Schroeder from Stanford University, who led efforts to digitize the historical data from airborne surveys conducted in the 1970s. “This is a pretty hard-to-get-to area and we’re really lucky that they happened to fly across this ice shelf.”

Researchers digitized about 250,000 flight miles of Antarctic radar data originally captured on 35mm optical film between 1971 and 1979 as part of a collaboration between Stanford and the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) at the University of Cambridge. The data has been released to an online public archivethrough Stanford Libraries, enabling other scientists to compare it with modern radar data in order to understand long-term changes in ice thickness, features within glaciers and baseline conditions over 40 years.

Professor Julian Dowdeswell, Director of the Scott Polar Research Institute, a co-author of the paper, commented: “These early records of ice thickness provide an important baseline against which we can measure the rate of change of the Antarctic Ice Sheet over the past 40 or so years. The high-resolution digitization of these records crucially makes them available for a series of important investigations on aspects of Antarctic environmental change.”

The information provided by historic records will help efforts like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its goal of projecting climate and sea-level rise for the next 100 years. By being able to look back 40 to 50 years at subsurface conditions rather than just the 10 to 20 years provided by modern data, scientists can better understand what has happened in the past and make more accurate projections about the future, Schroeder said.

“You can really see the geometry over this long period of time, how these ocean currents have melted the ice shelf – not just in general, but exactly where and how,” said Schroeder. “When we model ice sheet behaviour and sea-level projections into the future, we need to understand the processes at the base of the ice sheet that made the changes we’re seeing.”

The film was originally recorded in an exploratory survey using ice-penetrating radar, a technique still used today to capture information from the surface through the bottom of the ice sheet. The radar shows mountains, volcanoes and lakes beneath the surface of Antarctica, as well as layers inside the ice sheet that reveal the history of climate and flow.

The researchers identified several features beneath the ice sheet that had previously only been observed in modern data, including ash layers from past volcanic eruptions captured inside the ice and channels where water from beneath the ice sheet is eroding the bottom of ice shelves. They also found that one of these channels had a stable geometry for over 40 years, information that contrasts their findings about the Thwaites Glacier ice shelf, which has thinned from 10 to 33 percent between 1978 and 2009.

“The fact that we were able to have one ice shelf where we can say, ‘Look, it’s pretty much stable. And here, there’s significant change’ – that gives us more confidence in the results about Thwaites,” Schroeder said.

The scientists hope their findings demonstrate the value of comparing this historical information to modern data to analyse different aspects of Antarctica at a finer scale. In addition to the radar data, the Stanford Digital Repository includes photographs of the notebooks from the flight operators, an international consortium of American, British and Danish geoscientists.

“It was surprising how good the old data is,” Schroeder said. “They were very careful and thoughtful engineers and it’s much richer, more modern looking, than you would think.”

Reference:
Dustin M. Schroeder et al. ‘Multidecadal observations of the Antarctic ice sheet from restored analog radar records.’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2019). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1821646116

Adapted from a Stanford press release.


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AI Learns The Language of Chemistry To Predict How To Make Medicines

source: www.cam.ac.uk

Researchers have designed a machine learning algorithm that predicts the outcome of chemical reactions with much higher accuracy than trained chemists and suggests ways to make complex molecules, removing a significant hurdle in drug discovery.

Our platform is like a GPS for chemistry

Alpha Lee

University of Cambridge researchers have shown that an algorithm can predict the outcomes of complex chemical reactions with over 90% accuracy, outperforming trained chemists. The algorithm also shows chemists how to make target compounds, providing the chemical ‘map’ to the desired destination. The results are reported in two studies in the journals ACS Central Science and Chemical Communications.

A central challenge in drug discovery and materials science is finding ways to make complicated organic molecules by chemically joining together simpler building blocks. The problem is that those building blocks often react in unexpected ways.

“Making molecules is often described as an art realised with trial-and-error experimentation because our understanding of chemical reactivity is far from complete,” said Dr Alpha Lee from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, who led the studies. “Machine learning algorithms can have a better understanding of chemistry because they distil patterns of reactivity from millions of published chemical reactions, something that a chemist cannot do.”

The algorithm developed by Lee and his group uses tools in pattern recognition to recognise how chemical groups in molecules react, by training the model on millions of reactions published in patents.

The researchers looked at chemical reaction prediction as a machine translation problem. The reacting molecules are considered as one ‘language,’ while the product is considered as a different language. The model then uses the patterns in the text to learn how to ‘translate’ between the two languages.

Using this approach, the model achieves 90% accuracy in predicting the correct product of unseen chemical reactions, whereas the accuracy of trained human chemists is around 80%. The researchers say that the model is accurate enough to detect errors in the data and correctly predict a plethora of difficult reactions.

The model also knows what it doesn’t know. It produces an uncertainty score, which eliminates incorrect predictions with 89% accuracy. As experiments are time-consuming, accurate prediction is crucial to avoid pursuing expensive experimental pathways that eventually end in failure.

In the second study, Lee and his group, collaborating with the biopharmaceutical company Pfizer, demonstrated the practical potential of the method in drug discovery.

The researchers showed that when trained on published chemistry research, the model can make accurate predictions of reactions based on lab notebooks, showing that the model has learned the rules of chemistry and can apply it to drug discovery settings.

The team also showed that the model can predict sequences of reactions that would lead to a desired product. They applied this methodology to diverse drug-like molecules, showing that the steps that it predicts are chemically reasonable. This technology can significantly reduce the time of preclinical drug discovery because it provides medicinal chemists with a blueprint of where to begin.

“Our platform is like a GPS for chemistry,” said Lee, who is also a Research Fellow at St Catharine’s College. “It informs chemists whether a reaction is a go or a no-go, and how to navigate reaction routes to make a new molecule.”

The Cambridge researchers are currently using this reaction prediction technology to develop a complete platform that bridges the design-make-test cycle in drug discovery and materials discovery: predicting promising bioactive molecules, ways to make those complex organic molecules, and selecting the experiments that are the most informative. The researchers are now working on extracting chemical insights from the model, attempting to understand what it has learned that humans have not.

“We can potentially make a lot of progress in chemistry if we learn what kinds of patterns the model is looking at to make a prediction,” said Peter Bolgar, a PhD student in synthetic organic chemistry involved in both studies. “The model and human chemists together would become extremely powerful in designing experiments, more than each would be without the other.”

The research was supported by the Winton Programme for the Physics of Sustainability and the Herchel Smith Fund.

References: 
Philippe Schwaller et al. ‘Molecular Transformer: A Model for Uncertainty-Calibrated Chemical Reaction Prediction.’ ACS Central Science (2019). DOI: 10.1021/acscentsci.9b00576

Alpha Lee et al. ‘Molecular Transformer unifies reaction prediction and retrosynthesis across pharma chemical space.’ Chemical Communications (2019). DOI: 10.1039/C9CC05122H

 


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Unhappy Mothers Talk More To Their Baby Boys, Study Finds

source: www.cam.ac.uk

Mothers who are dissatisfied with their male partners spend more time talking to their infants – but only if the child is a boy, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Cambridge.

It’s possible that the mum is trying to compensate for the poor relationship she has with her partner by putting more time and effort into her relationship with her other close male social partner, her son

Elian Fink

It is well known that having a child can put a strain on the parents’ relationship, but whether this then has an impact on the child’s own development in its first few years is not known. The quality of a couple’s relationship is known to be related to developmental outcomes such as their behaviour and educational attainment in school-aged children, but has been little studied in relation to parent-infant talk, despite parent-infant talk being important for the child’s development.

To examine the relationship between the quality of a couple’s relationship and parent-infant talk, researchers from the Centre for Family Research at the University of Cambridge studied 93 first-time, heterosexual parents and their interactions with their infants. The team asked parents about the quality of their couple relationship and how satisfied they were and then gave the infants at age seven months a wearable ‘talk pedometer’ that recorded naturalistic parent-infant talk for a full day in which both parents were at home.

The researchers used software to provide an automated analysis of the frequency of adult spoken words to their infant and of parent-infant ‘conversations’.

The findings of the research, which was supported by Wellcome and the Economic and Social Research Council, are published in the Journal of Family Psychology.

After taking depression into account (because of its links with both couple relationship quality and parent-infant talk), the researchers found that the more dissatisfied a couple reported their relationship to be, the more the mother spoke to her infant. Mothers who reported the quality of their relationship to be ‘low’ used around 35% more words than a mother whose relationship was ‘average’ and started around 20% more conversations. However, these effects were only found with infant sons, not daughters.

The researchers did not analyse the content of the mother-infant talk, so it is not possible to say whether the mother was complaining to her infant or talking positively.

“It’s possible that the mum is trying to compensate for the poor relationship she has with her partner by putting more time and effort into her relationship with her other close male social partner, her son,” says Dr Elian Fink from the Centre for Family Research and the Faculty of Education.

“What is particularly interesting is that mums only seem to compensate when they have infant sons, not daughters. It could be that mothers view their daughters as mini versions of themselves rather than of their partners.”

Regardless of infant gender, fathers showed significantly less overall talk and initiated fewer conversations than did mothers, even though the fathers are increasingly becoming involved in parenting and the recordings were taken specifically on a day when both parents were at home. However, the amount that they spoke to their infants was unrelated to the quality of the couple’s relationship.

“Even when dads spend more time around their infants, this doesn’t necessarily mean they are interacting with them more,” adds Dr Fink. “One possible reason may be that there’s still an imbalance in who responds to the basic care needs of their infant. So, for example, if it’s the mother who still shoulders the burden of changing the nappy, this at least offers an opportune time to engage in direct communication with her infant.”

Dr Fink hopes the findings will encourage parents to make a conscious effort to talk more to their infants, whether they are boys or girls.

“Parent-child interaction is important for a child’s development, with conversation playing a particular role for the child’s language development,” she says. “Finding time to talk to children is very important. Using opportunities within the daily routine, such as mealtimes and bedtime, to have conversations with your child may help foster later child talk.”

Reference
Fink, E et al. Couple relationship quality and the infant home language environment: Gender-specific findings. Journal of Family Psychology; 22 Aug 2019; DOI: 10.1037/fam0000590


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Lost Irish Words Rediscovered, Including The Word For ‘Oozes Pus’

National Library of Ireland, Manuscript G11 403a10. Image, Irish Scripts on Screen www.isos.dias.ie

source: www.cam.ac.uk

Researchers from Cambridge and Queen’s University Belfast have identified and defined 500 Irish words, many of which had been lost, and unlocked the secrets of many other misunderstood terms. Their findings can now be freely accessed in the revised version of the online dictionary of Medieval Irish (www.dil.ie).

The Dictionary offers a window onto a fascinating and important past world

Máire Ní Mhaonaigh

If you were choosing where to live in medieval Ireland you might insist on somewhere ogach which meant ‘eggy’ or ‘abounding in eggs’, but in reference to a particularly fertile region. By contrast, you would never want to hear your cook complaining brachaid, ‘it oozes pus’. And if you were too boisterous at the dining table, you might be accused of briscugad (making something easily broken).

All three words have been brought back to life thanks to a painstaking five-year research project involving a collaboration between Queen’s University Belfast and the University of Cambridge. The team has scoured medieval manuscripts and published texts for words which have either been overlooked by earlier dictionary-makers or which have been erroneously defined.

Máire Ní Mhaonaigh, Professor of Celtic and Medieval Studies at Cambridge says: “The Dictionary offers a window onto a fascinating and important past world. The project extends our understanding of the vocabulary of the time but also offers unique insights into the people who used these words. They reveal extraordinary details about everyday lives, activities, beliefs and relationships, as well as contact with speakers of other languages.”

The revised dictionary spans the development of the Irish language over a thousand years from the sixth century to the sixteenth, from the time just after the arrival of St Patrick all the way down to the era of Elizabeth I. The team has amended definitions, presented evidence to show that some words were in use much earlier than previously thought, and even deleted a few fake words. One of these is tapairis which had been taken to be some kind of medicinal substance but in effect is not a word at all, since it arose from an incorrect division of two other words literally meaning ‘grains of paradise’, the term for Guinea grains.

Lost words

The rediscovered lost words include a term for ‘becomes ignorant’ – ainfisigid, based on the word for knowledge: fis. Other words have been shown to have been attested hundreds of years earlier than was previously thought, such as foclóracht meaning vocabulary. Yet, other examples emphasise that the medieval world continues to resonate. One of these is rímaire, which is used as the modern Irish word for computer (in its later form ríomhaire).

Professor Ní Mhaonaigh explains: “In the medieval period, rímaire referred not to a machine but to a person engaged in the medieval science of computistics who performed various kinds of calculations concerning time and date, most importantly the date of Easter. So it’s a word with a long pedigree whose meaning was adapted and applied to a modern invention.”

The historical dictionary on which the electronic one is based was originally published by the Royal Irish Academy in 23 volumes between 1913 and 1976. “Advances in scholarship since the publication of the first volume had rendered parts of the dictionary obsolete or out of date,” says Greg Toner, leader of the project and Professor of Irish at Queen’s University Belfast. “Our work has enabled us to resolve many puzzles and errors and to uncover hundreds of previously unknown words.”

The online Dictionary serves up a feast of information on subjects as diverse as food, festivals, medicine, superstition, law and wildlife. One of the newly added phrases is galar na rig, literally the king’s disease, a term for scrofula which is known in English as king’s evil.

Leprechauns, outlaws and turkeys

One of the most globally recognisable words in the Dictionary is perhaps leipreachán. This character is now regarded as quintessentially Irish but scholars now think that leipreachán, and its earlier form lupracán, is not even a native Irish word but one derived from the Luperci, a group associated with the Roman festival of Lupercalia. This included a purification ritual involving swimming and like the Luperci, leprechauns are associated with water in what may be their first appearance in early Irish literature. According to an Old Irish tale known as ‘The Adventure of Fergus son of Léti’, leprechauns carried the sleeping Fergus out to sea. On route, he managed to capture three of them and, in return for sparing their lives, they granted him the ability to breathe underwater.

The project sheds new light on Ireland’s interactions with foreign languages, cultures and goods in the medieval period. The Dictionary points out that útluighe, meaning an outlaw, ultimately goes back to the Old Norse word útlagi, though the term was perhaps borrowed into Irish through English or Anglo-Norman. Its use appears to have been limited – the researchers have only found it once, in a thirteenth-century poem by Giolla Brighde Mac Con Midhe.

Another loanword in Modern Irish is turcaí (turkey) but before this was borrowed from English, this bird was known as cearc fhrancach (turkey hen) or coilech francach (turkey cock). Strictly speaking, the adjective Francach means ‘French’ or ‘of French origin’. This usage to denote a bird native to the Americas may seem odd but in other languages, it is associated with various countries including France, for reasons which remain unclear.

Spreading the word

Professor Toner says: “A key aim of our work has been to open the Dictionary up, not only to students of the language but to researchers working in other areas such as history and archaeology, as well as to those with a general interest in medieval life.”

In a related project, the researchers have been developing educational resources for schools in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland.

The Dictionary launched on 30 August 2019 at the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin. A History of Ireland in 100 Words, drawing on 100 of the Dictionary’s words and tracing how they illuminate historical changes will be published in October 2019 by the Royal Irish Academy.

For more on the newly discovered words, see a piece by Dr Sharon Arbuthnot, a researcher on the project, in the Brainstorm series on National Irish Television (RTÉ).


Funding

Work on the Dictionary has been supported by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. The related project developing schools’ resources is funded by a grant from the University of Cambridge, School of Arts and Humanities Impact Fund.


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Exercise in Pregnancy Improves Health of Obese Mothers By Restoring Their Tissues, Mouse Study Finds

source: www.cam.ac.uk

Exercise immediately prior to and during pregnancy restores key tissues in the body, making them better able to manage blood sugar levels and lowering the risk of long term health problems, suggests new research carried out in mice.

A moderate level of exercise immediately before and then during pregnancy leads to important changes in different tissues of the obese mother, effectively making the tissues more like those seen in non-obese mothers

Amanda Sferruzzi-Perri

Researchers at the University of Cambridge, who led the study published today in the journal Physiological Reports, say the findings reinforce the importance of an active lifestyle when planning pregnancy.

In the UK, more than a half of all women of reproductive age and almost a third of pregnant women are overweight or obese. This is particularly concerning, as being overweight or obese during pregnancy increases the risk of complications in the mother, such as gestational diabetes, and predisposes both her and her infant to develop metabolic diseases such as type 2 diabetes in the years after pregnancy.

Exercise is known to improve how the body manages blood sugar levels and thereby reduce the risk of type-2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome in non-pregnant women. It also has positive effects prior to and during pregnancy, with beneficial outcomes for both mother and her child, preventing excessive gestational weight gain and the development of gestational diabetes, and the need for insulin use in women who have already developed gestational diabetes. However, little is known about the changes that exercise causes to the tissues of obese pregnant mother.

To answer this questions, researchers at the University of Cambridge fed mice a sugary, high fat diet such that they become obese and then the obese mice were exercised. The mice exercised on a treadmill for 20 minutes a day for at least a week before their pregnancy and then for 12.5 minutes a day until day 17 of the pregnancy (pregnancy lasts for around 20 days in mice).

Mice are a useful model for studying human disease as their biology and physiology have a number of important characteristics in common with those of humans, including showing metabolic changes with obesity/obesity-causing diets and in the female body during pregnancy.

The researchers found that the beneficial effects on metabolic health in obese mothers related to changes in how molecules and cells communicate in maternal tissues during pregnancy.

“A moderate level of exercise immediately before and then during pregnancy leads to important changes in different tissues of the obese mother, effectively making the tissues more like those seen in non-obese mothers,” says Dr Amanda Sferruzzi-Perri, a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellow from the Centre for Trophoblast Research in the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, who co-led the study.

“We believe these changes may explain how exercise improves the metabolism of the obese mother during pregnancy and, in turn, may prevent her babies from developing early signs of type 2 diabetes after birth.”

The key organs of the mother that were affected by exercise were:

  • white adipose tissue – the fatty tissue that stores lipids and can be found in different parts around the body, including beneath the skin and around internal organs;
  • skeletal muscle – muscle tissue that uses glucose and fats for contraction and movement;
  • the liver – the organ that stores, as well as syntheses lipids and glucose.

Exercise affected key signalling pathways – the ways that molecules and cells within tissue communicate – involved in responding to insulin (the hormone that stimulates glucose uptake by white adipose tissue and skeletal muscle), in storage and breakdown of lipids (fats found in the blood and tissue) and in growth and the synthesis of proteins.

White adipose tissue showed the greatest number of changes in response to exercise in the obese pregnant mouse, being restored to a state similar to that seen in the tissue of non-obese mothers. This suggests that insulin resistance of the mother’s white adipose tissue may be the cause of poor glucose-insulin handling in obese pregnancies. The findings are different to that seen in non-pregnant animals, whereby exercise typically affects insulin signalling in the skeletal muscle.

In addition, the team’s previous work showed that exercise improves sensitivity to insulin and glucose handling throughout the whole body in the obese mother. It also prevents the development of insulin resistance in the offspring of obese mothers after birth. Low insulin sensitivity/insulin resistance requires larger amounts of insulin to control blood glucose levels.

“Our findings reinforce the importance of having an active lifestyle and eating a healthy balanced diet when planning pregnancy and throughout for both the mother and her developing child,” says co-lead Professor Susan Ozanne from the Wellcome Trust-Medical Research Council Institute of Metabolic Science at the University of Cambridge.

“This can be important in helping to reduce the risk of adverse health problems in the mother and of later health problems for her child.”

This work received funding from the European Union, Medical Research Council, Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, British Heart Foundation, São Paulo Research Foundation, Centre for Trophoblast Research, and the Royal Society.

Reference
Musial, B et al. Exercise alters the molecular pathways of insulin signalling and lipid handling in maternal tissues of obese pregnant mice. Physiological Reports; 28 August 2019; DOI: 10.14814/phy2.14202

 


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‘Mental Rigidity’ At The Root of Intense Political Partisanship On Both Left and Right – Study

source: www.cam.ac.uk

Latest research shows that reduced cognitive flexibility is associated with more “extreme” beliefs and identities at both ends of the political spectrum. Researchers say that “heightening our cognitive flexibility might help build more tolerant societies”.

We want to highlight the common psychological factors that shape how people come to hold extreme views and identities

Leor Zmigrod

People who identify more intensely with a political tribe or ideology share an underlying psychological trait: low levels of cognitive flexibility, according to a new study.

This “mental rigidity” makes it harder for people to change their ways of thinking or adapt to new environments, say researchers. Importantly, mental rigidity was found in those with the most fervent beliefs and affiliations on both the left and right of the political divide.

The study of over 700 US citizens, conducted by scientists from the University of Cambridge, is the largest – and first for over 20 years – to investigate whether the more politically “extreme” have a certain “type of mind” through the use of objective psychological testing.

The findings suggest that the basic mental processes governing our ability to switch between different concepts and tasks are linked to the intensity with which we attach ourselves to political doctrines – regardless of the ideology.

“Relative to political moderates, participants who indicated extreme attachment to either the Democratic or Republican Party exhibited mental rigidity on multiple objective neuropsychological tests,” said Dr Leor Zmigrod, a Cambridge Gates Scholar and lead author of the study, now published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.

“While political animosity often appears to be driven by emotion, we find that the way people unconsciously process neutral stimuli seems to play an important role in how they process ideological arguments.”

“Those with lower cognitive flexibility see the world in more black-and-white terms, and struggle with new and different perspectives. The more inflexible mind may be especially susceptible to the clarity, certainty, and safety frequently offered by strong loyalty to collective ideologies,” she said.

The research is the latest in a series of studies from Zmigrod and her Cambridge colleagues, Dr Jason Rentfrow and Professor Trevor Robbins, on the relationship between ideology and cognitive flexibility.

Their previous work over the last 18 months has suggested that mental rigidity is linked to more extreme attitudes with regards to religiosity, nationalism, and a willingness to endorse violence and sacrifice one’s life for an ideological group.

For the latest study, the Cambridge team recruited 743 men and women of various ages and educational backgrounds from across the political spectrum through the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform.

Participants completed three psychological tests online: a word association game, a card-sorting test – where colours, shapes and numbers are matched according to shifting rules – and an exercise in which participants have a two-minute window to imagine possible uses for everyday objects.

“These are established and standardized cognitive tests which quantify how well individuals adapt to changing environments and how flexibly their minds process words and concepts,” said Zmigrod.

The participants were also asked to score their feelings towards various divisive social and economic issues – from abortion and marriage to welfare – and the extent of “overlap” between their personal identity and the US Republican and Democrat parties.

Zmigrod and colleagues found that “partisan extremity” – the intensity of participants’ attachment to their favoured political party – was a strong predictor of rigidity in all three cognitive tests. They also found that self-described Independents displayed greater cognitive flexibility compared to both Democrats and Republicans.

Other cognitive traits, such as originality or fluency of thought, were not related to heightened political partisanship, which researchers argue suggests the unique contribution of cognitive inflexibility.

“In the context of today’s highly divided politics, it is important we work to understand the psychological underpinnings of dogmatism and strict ideological adherence,” said Zmigrod.

“The aim of this research is not to draw false equivalences between different, and sometimes opposing, ideologies. We want to highlight the common psychological factors that shape how people come to hold extreme views and identities,” said Zmigrod.

“Past studies have shown that it is possible to cultivate cognitive flexibility through training and education. Our findings raise the question of whether heightening our cognitive flexibility might help build more tolerant societies, and even develop antidotes to radicalization.”

“While the conservatism and liberalism of our beliefs may at times divide us, our capacity to think about the world flexibly and adaptively can unite us,” she added.


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Women in STEM: Verity Allan

source: www.cam.ac.uk

Verity Allan is a graduate of Cambridge, Oxford, and The Open University. She is a PhD candidate at the Cavendish Laboratory and works as a project manager and programmer on the software for the Square Kilometre Array, the world’s largest radio telescope.

I came to Cambridge from a town in the Midlands to study Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic. My parents were the first in their families to go to university, and I was the first in my extended family to get an Oxbridge degree. I then tried to get a doctorate from Oxford, but this didn’t go to plan – I eventually left with an MLitt and an urgent need to get a job.

While job hunting I realised that the really interesting jobs required a numerate degree. So, I enrolled at The Open University to study Computing and Mathematical Sciences. I graduated with a First Class Honours degree five years later. While I was studying I got my first job in tech, doing tech support and technical writing for CARET, a technology innovation unit within Cambridge University. I then expanded my range and starting to do technical management work and software testing, before I moved on to my current job.

Retraining is totally a thing. It’s not as easy to do as it was when I did it as a result of the changes to funding and costs for part-time degrees. However, there are now a whole bunch of MOOCs out there, some of which offer qualifications at a more reasonable fee. But retraining opens a whole lot of opportunities in fields where you’re likely to find some really interesting questions to work on or interesting projects to support. There are a lot of jobs in science that need project management and communications experience but that don’t require you to do top-level research.

I’m now part of the group writing software for Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project. This will be the world’s largest radio telescope, and I’m part of the team that is designing the supercomputer to do data processing for it. We are producing an architecture for this computer, and testing whether this architecture will work by writing and running prototype code. I get to work with people all over the world.

This is a very interesting project to work on – it is stretching the limits of what a radio telescope can do. It’s also exploring the limits of what can be done computationally; it requires a completely new way of dealing with astronomy data because there’s just so much of it. I also do research as part of my PhD, which is aimed at providing astronomy researchers with a tool-kit for interacting with the ridiculous amounts of data that will be produced by the SKA and other next-generation telescopes.

My work is pretty varied. It involves some research, some programming, some technical project management; and maintaining the collaborative tools used by the project I work on. I also maintain the wiki, the ticket tracking system (we use this so we have some way of recording what work needs to be done), and manage the code repositories for the project. (These days, I delegate a lot of this.) I also managed the formal documentation for the Science Data Processor (SDP) project. As I’ve learned more, I started chairing technical meetings – I did the project management for the SDP architecture work, and for one of the key software components of the SDP. This involves tracking work, helping people fix problems, note-taking, and helping people work out what’s going well and what’s not. As part of the architecture team, I also read our documentation, to ensure it makes sense and check that it says what we think it says. As the project has developed, I’ve done more programming and policy development. I go fairly often to the headquarters of the SKA at Jodrell Bank in Cheshire. I’ve also travelled to South Africa (where one of the SKA telescopes will be built), and to the Netherlands and Malta for SDP Conferences.

I have an ‘academic-related’ support position, but I’m also doing a PhD as part of my job. This involves a lot of meetings, usually teleconferences, a lot of email, and a lot of writing (because if you don’t write something down in an international project, it doesn’t exist). Cambridge is a great place to be doing my PhD work, because I’m part of an active community of scholars working in my field, and in adjacent areas. The University leads the work on the supercomputer for the SKA, so we are a hub for a lot of international activity. The University also has a Top 100 supercomputer, so I have access to world-leading infrastructure for my work, as well as a specialist platform developed for the SKA, P3-Alaska.

At the start of my PhD I visited Lord’s Bridge, the location of the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory, with other first year PhD students. This is a fascinating site – there are traces all around of how the site was used as an ammunition store during the Second World War. Since the war, it’s been used as a radio astronomy observatory, and you can see parts of several radio telescopes that had key roles in understanding the radio sky, winning Nobel Prizes in the process. (You can see the remains of the array that Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell used to discover pulsars.) Now the site is used primarily as a testbed for new technology for radio telescopes – there are test antennas there for the HERA project, and for the SKA. But you can see dishes and equipment that describe the history of radio astronomy and interferometry. As a personal project, I’m also finding out about the women who were “computers” in the Cavendish Laboratory, and the programming techniques they used.

Being diagnosed with a serious stress-related health condition meant I had to learn how to refactor my life to allow me to do what I want to do. This is a big part of my life that required major work to come to terms with. There are many compromises I have had to make in order to recover and be able to work full time. This includes discovering new things that can make my condition worse, and finding new ways to manage that. I rely on the support of my line manager to help keep things ticking over OK.

It’s important to be aware that in physics, computing, and mathematics, at the moment, women will have to get used to being in a minority. I am quite often the only woman or non-binary person in the room – this is something that’s changing, but it is currently the case. This is compounded if you’re also a member of another marginalised group. However, there are lots of networks you can join in order to deal with the sensation of being outnumbered. Finally, just because you’re finding the maths or science difficult doesn’t mean that you’re no good at it. Often, it will be hard, but as you work further, stuff that was previously hard will become quite easy to use. You don’t have to understand this stuff instantly to be able to make a useful contribution.

 

 


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Women in STEM: Dr Cecilia Brassett

source: www.cam.ac.uk

Dr Cecilia Brassett is the University Clinical Anatomist and a Fellow of Magdalene College. Here, she tells us about teaching anatomy, which has been taking place at Cambridge for more than 300 years.

Cambridge is one of a small number of medical schools where anatomy is taught via hands-on cadaveric dissection. As the University Clinical Anatomist, I am responsible for organising the anatomy teaching programme. This involves running the Human Dissection Room and the body donation programme. My goal is to ensure optimal use of our generous donors in both teaching and research, with a view to improving patient safety and helping students to develop into scholars, scientists and professionals.

After completing my medical training and working in general surgery, I studied field linguistics and worked among an ethnic minority group in China for a few years. I read medicine at Downing College as an undergraduate and later qualified as a general surgeon. During my surgical training, I also worked as an anatomy demonstrator in the Dissection Room in what was then the Department of Anatomy.

Dissection has been taking place in some of the Colleges since 1565. Our Anatomy School celebrated its 300th anniversary in 2016, and, following a successful bid for funding, we have installed state-of-the-art touchscreens and 3D imaging facilities in the Dissection Room, providing our students with a variety of different ways of learning. Our Human Anatomy Teaching Group has a close relationship with clinicians from Addenbrooke’s Hospital, and this has been key to the continuing success of our junior anatomy demonstrating programme, as well as providing fertile ground for relevant anatomical research.

I am responsible for ensuring that there is a good demonstrator-to-student ratio and that the teaching resources for both lectures and practical sessions are up to date and clinically relevant.My role also involves meeting with clinicians to discuss future research projects on topographical anatomy; and there are always papers and dissertations to review at various times of the year. I spend time discussing potential research topics with our demonstrators and encourage them to give conference presentations on their research. As a Councillor of both the Anatomical Society and British Association of Clinical Anatomists, and an external examiner for two other universities, I attend a number of regular meetings outside of Cambridge. I also supervise a number of Part II projects, collaborating with clinicians at Addenbrooke’s and other hospitals.

A key moment for me was reviving Part II projects in topographical anatomy for third-year medical students. This was one of my goals when I was appointed, and it has been very fulfilling to see how much students have enjoyed the projects, how they have learned research methods and been excited by novel discoveries, and especially to see how their work may have a significant impact on future clinical practice.

In 2017, The Secret Language of Anatomy was officially launched. This is an illustrated guide to the etymology of anatomical terms that I co-authored with two very able colleagues, a medical artist and a historian. This was an idea I have had for several years and it was very satisfying to see its fruition.

Scientific discovery in any field is immensely exciting. Never stop asking questions, and pursue higher degrees, especially those courses with a significant research component, to enable you to develop the ability to think and solve problems independently. Most of all, be humble and know that there is always something you can learn from everyone around you.


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Colour-Changing Artificial ‘Chameleon Skin’ Powered By Nanomachines

source: www.cam.ac.uk

Researchers have developed artificial ‘chameleon skin’ that changes colour when exposed to light and could be used in applications such as active camouflage and large-scale dynamic displays.

This work is a big advance in using nanoscale technology to do biomimicry

Sean Cormier

The material, developed by researchers from the University of Cambridge, is made of tiny particles of gold coated in a polymer shell, and then squeezed into microdroplets of water in oil. When exposed to heat or light, the particles stick together, changing the colour of the material. The results are reported in the journal Advanced Optical Materials.

In nature, animals such as chameleons and cuttlefish are able to change colour thanks to chromatophores: skin cells with contractile fibres that move pigments around. The pigments are spread out to show their colour, or squeezed together to make the cell clear.

The artificial chromatophores developed by the Cambridge researchers are built on the same principle, but instead of contractile fibres, their colour-changing abilities rely on light-powered nano-mechanisms, and the ‘cells’ are microscopic drops of water.

When the material is heated above 32C, the nanoparticles store large amounts of elastic energy in a fraction of a second, as the polymer coatings expel all the water and collapse. This has the effect of forcing the nanoparticles to bind together into tight clusters. When the material is cooled, the polymers take on water and expand, and the gold nanoparticles are strongly and quickly pushed apart, like a spring.

“Loading the nanoparticles into the microdroplets allows us to control the shape and size of the clusters, giving us dramatic colour changes,” said Dr Andrew Salmon from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, the study’s co-first author.

The geometry of the nanoparticles when they bind into clusters determines which colour they appear as: when the nanoparticles are spread apart they are red and when they cluster together they are dark blue. However, the droplets of water also compress the particle clusters, causing them to shadow each other and make the clustered state nearly transparent.

At the moment, the material developed by the Cambridge researchers is in a single layer, so is only able to change to a single colour. However, different nanoparticle materials and shapes could be used in extra layers to make a fully dynamic material, like real chameleon skin.

The researchers also observed that the artificial cells can ‘swim’ in simple ways, similar to the algae Volvox. Shining a light on one edge of the droplets causes the surface to peel towards the light, pushing it forward. Under stronger illumination, high pressure bubbles briefly form to push the droplets along a surface.

“This work is a big advance in using nanoscale technology to do biomimicry,” said co-author Sean Cormier. “We’re now working to replicate this on roll-to-roll films so that we can make metres of colour changing sheets. Using structured light we also plan to use the light-triggered swimming to ‘herd’ droplets. It will be really exciting to see what collective behaviours are generated.”

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

Reference:
Andrew R Salmon et al. ‘Motile Artificial Chromatophores: Light-Triggered Nanoparticles for Microdroplet Locomotion and Color Change.’ Advanced Optical Materials (2019). DOI: 10.1002/adom.201900951


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Opinion: Plants Can Tell Time Even Without a Brain

source: www.cam.ac.uk

Mark Greenwood and James Locke from the University’s Sainsbury Laboratory reveal how plants tell the time and coordinate their cellular rhythms. This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Understanding how plants make decisions isn’t just interesting, it will help scientists breed new plant varieties

Mark Greenwood & James Locke

Anyone who has travelled across multiple time zones and suffered jet lagwill understand just how powerful our biological clocks are. In fact, every cell in the human body has its own molecular clock, which is capable of generating a daily rise and fall in the number of many proteins the body produces over a 24-hour cycle. The brain contains a master clock that keeps the rest of the body in sync, using light signals from the eyes to keep in time with environment.

Plants have similar circadian rhythms that help them tell the time of day, preparing plants for photosynthesis prior to dawn, turning on heat-protection mechanisms before the hottest part of the day, and producing nectar when pollinators are most likely to visit. And just like in humans, every cell in the plant appears to have its own clock.

Our eyes and brain rely on sunlight to coordinate activity in the body according to the time of day. Yomogi1/Shutterstock

Read more: Can plants think? They could one day force us to change our definition of intelligence


But unlike humans, plants don’t have a brain to keep their clocks synchronised. So how do plants coordinate their cellular rhythms? Our new research shows that all the cells in the plant coordinate partly through something called local self-organisation. This is effectively the plant cells communicating their timing with neighbouring cells, in a similar way to how schools of fish and flocks of birds coordinate their movements by interacting with their neighbours.

Previous research found that the time of the clock is different in different parts of a plant. These differences can be detected by measuring the timing of the daily peaks in clock protein production in the different organs. These clock proteins generate the 24-hour oscillations in biological processes.

For instance, clock proteins activate the production of other proteins that are responsible for photosynthesis in leaves just before dawn. We decided to examine the clock across all the major organs of the plant to help us understand how plants coordinate their timing to keep the entire plant ticking in harmony.

What makes plants tick

We found that in thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana) seedlings, the number of clock proteins peaks at different times in each organ. Organs, such as leaves, roots and stems, receive different signals from their local micro-environment, such as light and temperature, and use this information to independently set their own pace.

If rhythms in different organs are out of sync, do plants suffer from a kind of internal jet lag? While the individual clocks in different organs peak at different times, this didn’t result in complete chaos. Surprisingly, cells began to form spatial wave patterns, where neighbour cells lag in time slightly behind one another. It’s a bit like a stadium or “Mexican” wave of sports fans standing up after the people next to them to create a wave-like motion through the crowd.

Plant cells communicate between their neighbours to coordinate the time. James Locke, Author provided

 

Our work shows that these waves arise from the differences between organs as cells begin to communicate. When the number of clock proteins in one cell peaks, the cell communicates this to its slower neighbours, which follow the first cell’s lead and produce more clock proteins too. These cells then do the same to their neighbours, and so on. Such patterns can be observed elsewhere in nature. Some firefly species form spatial wave patterns as they synchronise their flashes with their neighbours.

Local decision-making by cells, combined with signalling between them, might be how plants make decisions without a brain. It allows cells in different parts of the plant to make different decisions about how to grow. Cells in the shoot and root can separately optimise growth to their local conditions. The shoot can bend towards where light is unobstructed and the roots can grow towards water or more nutrient-rich soil. It could also allow plants to survive the loss of organs through damage or being eaten by a herbivore.

This might explain how plants are able to continuously adapt their growth and development to cope with changes in their environment, which scientists call “plasticity”. Understanding how plants make decisions isn’t just interesting, it will help scientists breed new plant varieties that can respond to their increasingly changeable environment with climate change.The Conversation

 

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

 


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The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright ©University of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified.  All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.