Prevailing economic research anticipates the burden of climate change falling on hot or poor nations. Some predict that cooler or wealthier economies will be unaffected or even see benefits from higher temperatures.

However, a new study co-authored by researchers from the University of Cambridge suggests that virtually all countries – whether rich or poor, hot or cold – will suffer economically by 2100 if the current trajectory of carbon emissions is maintained.

In fact, the research published on Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that – on average – richer, colder countries would lose as much income to climate change as poorer, hotter nations.

Under a “business as usual” emissions scenario, average global temperatures are projected to rise over four degrees Celsius by the end of the century. This would cause the United States to lose 10.5% of its GDP by 2100 – a substantial economic hit, say researchers.

Canada, which some claim will benefit economically from temperature increase, would lose over 13% of its income by 2100. The research shows that keeping to the Paris Agreement limits the losses of both North American nations to under 2% of GDP.

Researchers say that 7% of global GDP is likely to vanish by the end of the century unless “action is taken”. Japan, India and New Zealand lose 10% of their income. Switzerland is likely to have an economy that is 12% smaller by 2100. Russia would be shorn of 9% of its GDP, with the UK down by 4%.

The team behind the study argue that it isn’t just about the number on the thermometer, but the deviation of temperature from its “historical norm” – the climate conditions to which countries are accustomed – that determines the size of income loss.

“Whether cold snaps or heat waves, droughts, floods or natural disasters, all deviations of climate conditions from their historical norms have adverse economic effects,” said Dr Kamiar Mohaddes, a co-author of the study from Cambridge’s Faculty of Economics.

“Without mitigation and adaptation policies, many countries are likely to experience sustained temperature increases relative to historical norms and suffer major income losses as a result. This holds for both rich and poor countries as well as hot and cold regions.”

“Canada is warming up twice as fast as rest of the world. There are risks to its physical infrastructure, coastal and northern communities, human health and wellness, ecosystems and fisheries – all of which has a cost,” he said.

“The UK recently had its hottest day on record. Train tracks buckled, roads melted, and thousands were stranded because it was out of the norm. Such events take an economic toll, and will only become more frequent and severe without policies to address the threats of climate change.”

Mohaddes worked on the study with Cambridge PhD candidate Ryan Ng, as well as colleagues from the University of Southern California, USA, Johns Hopkins University, USA, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, and the International Monetary Fund.

Using data from 174 countries dating back to 1960, the research team estimated the link between above-the-norm temperatures and income levels. They then modelled the income effects under a continuation of business-as-usual emissions as well as a scenario in which the world “gets its act together” and holds to the Paris Agreement.

Researchers acknowledge that economies will adapt to changing climates, but argue that their modelling work shows adaptation alone will not be enough.

The scientific consensus suggests that adapting to climate change takes an average of 30 years, as everything from infrastructure to cultural practice slowly adjusts. But even if this adjustment speeds up to just 20 years, the United States still loses almost 7% of its economy, with over 4% of global GDP gone by the century’s end.

The team also undertook a more focused approach to the U.S. to gauge the strength of their results. “Cross-country studies are important for the big picture, but averaging data at national levels leads to loss of information in geographically-diverse nations, such as Brazil, China or the United States,” said Mohaddes.

“By concentrating on the U.S., we were able to compare whether economic activity in hot or wet areas responds to temperature fluctuations around historical norms in the same way as that in cold or dry areas within a single large nation.”

They looked at ten sectors ranging from manufacturing and services to retail and wholesale trade across 48 U.S. states, and found each sector in every state suffered economically from at least one aspect of climate change – whether heat, flood, drought or freeze.

When scaled up, these are the effects that will create economic losses at the national and global levels, even in advanced and allegedly resilient economies, say the researchers.

“The economics of climate change stretch far beyond the impact on growing crops,” said Mohaddes. “Heavy rainfall prevents mountain access for mining and affects commodity prices. Cold snaps raise heating bills and high street spending drops. Heatwaves cause transport networks to shut down. All these things add up.”

“The idea that rich, temperate nations are economically immune to climate change, or could even double and triple their wealth as a result, just seems implausible.”

Mohaddes is from Sweden, which some predict will benefit from higher temperatures. “But what about the winter sports depended upon by the Swedish tourism industry?”

“If advanced nations want to avoid major economic damage in the coming decades, the Paris Agreement is a good start.”

New research published today in the journal Parasitology shows how the prehistoric inhabitants of a settlement in the freshwater marshes of eastern England were infected by intestinal worms caught from foraging for food in the lakes and waterways around their homes.

The Bronze Age settlement at Must Farm, located near what is now the fenland city of Peterborough, consisted of wooden houses built on stilts above the water. Wooden causeways connected islands in the marsh, and dugout canoes were used to travel along water channels.

The village burnt down in a catastrophic fire around 3,000 years ago, with artefacts from the houses preserved in mud below the waterline, including food, cloth, and jewellery. The site has been called “Britain’s Pompeii”.

Also preserved in the surrounding mud were waterlogged coprolites – pieces of human and animal faeces – that have now been collected and analysed by archaeologists at the University of Cambridge. They used microscopy techniques to detect ancient parasite eggs within the faeces and surrounding sediment.

Very little is known about the intestinal diseases of Bronze Age Britain. The one previous study, of a farming village in Somerset, found evidence of roundworm and whipworm: parasites spread through contamination of food by human faeces.

The ancient excrement of the Anglian marshes tells a different story. “We have found the earliest evidence for fish tapeworm, Echinostoma worm, and giant kidney worm in Britain,” said study lead author Dr Piers Mitchell of Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology.

“These parasites are spread by eating raw aquatic animals such as fish, amphibians and molluscs. Living over slow-moving water may have protected the inhabitants from some parasites, but put them at risk of others if they ate fish or frogs.”

Disposal of human and animal waste into the water around the settlement likely prevented direct faecal pollution of the fenlanders’ food, and so prevented infection from roundworm – the eggs of which have been found at Bronze Age sites across Europe.

However, water in the fens would have been quite stagnant, due in part to thick reed beds, leaving waste accumulating in the surrounding channels. Researchers say this likely provided fertile ground for other parasites to infect local wildlife, which – if eaten raw or poorly cooked – then spread to village residents.

“The dumping of excrement into the freshwater channel in which the settlement was built, and consumption of aquatic organisms from the surrounding area, created an ideal nexus for infection with various species of intestinal parasite,” said study first author Marissa Ledger, also from Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology.

Fish tapeworms can reach 10m in length, and live coiled up in the intestines. Heavy infection can lead to anaemia. Giant kidney worms can reach up to a metre in length. They gradually destroy the organ as they become larger, leading to kidney failure. Echinostoma worms are much smaller, up to 1cm in length. Heavy infection can lead to inflammation of the intestinal lining.

“As writing was only introduced to Britain centuries later with the Romans, these people were unable to record what happened to them during their lives. This research enables us for the first time to clearly understand the infectious diseases experienced by prehistoric people living in the Fens,” said Ledger.

The Cambridge team worked with colleagues at the University of Bristol’s Organic Chemistry Unit to determine whether coprolites excavated from around the houses were human or animal. While some were human, others were from dogs.

“Both humans and dogs were infected by similar parasitic worms, which suggests the humans were sharing their food or leftovers with their dogs,” said Ledger.

Other parasites that infect animals were also found at the site, including pig whipworm and Capillaria worm. It is thought that they originated from the butchery and consumption of the intestines of farmed or hunted animals, but probably did not cause humans any harm.

The researchers compared their latest data with previous studies on ancient parasites from both the Bronze Age and Neolithic. Must Farm tallies with the trend of fewer parasite species found at Bronze Age compared with Neolithic sites.

“Our study fits with the broader pattern of a shrinking of the parasite ecosystem through time,” said Mitchell. “Changes in diet, sanitation and human-animal relationships over millennia have affected rates of parasitic infection.” Although he points out that infections from the fish tapeworm found at Must Farm have seen a recent resurgence due to the popularity of sushi, smoked salmon and ceviche.

“We now need to study other sites in prehistoric Britain where people lived different lifestyles, to help us understand how our ancestors’ way of life affected their risk of developing infectious diseases,” added Mitchell.

The Must Farm site is an exceptionally well-preserved settlement dating to 900-800 BC (the Late Bronze Age). The site was first discovered in 1999. The Cambridge Archaeological Unit carried out a major excavation between 2015 and 2016, funded by Historic England and Forterra Building Products Ltd.

My sisters and I were the first in our family to go to university so I was very excited to get the chance to study Geological Sciences at Leeds. I’ve always had an interest in the natural world, I loved physical Geography at school and everything just clicked when I studied Geology for A level. It’s such a broad subject, there is always something new to learn and explore, and the fieldwork in amazing, even if the weather is slightly damp!

Volcanology is definitely the coolest bit of geology. Volcanoes are such powerful natural phenomena and there is so much we still don’t know about them. The more we understand about them the better we can be prepared for future eruptions, and we can also help people harness their energy through geothermal exploration.

My fieldwork on the Main Ethiopian Rift was incredibly exciting. I went there several times to collect rock samples and make field observations. It’s such an amazing country. The landscape is awe-inspiring, the food is interesting, and the people so warm and friendly.

There is a strong volcanology community here, despite the clear lack of volcanoes in Cambridgeshire! This has allowed me to learn from lots of different people, experts in their own fields. The knowledge pool here is so diverse, from analogue experiments to gas geochemistry and volcano seismology. The name also carries weight in the international community, increasing interest in my work at conferences and fostering collaborations. Day to day I’m usually at my desk, crunching numbers and stressing over spreadsheets. As a volcanic geochemist, it is really important to collect high-quality chemical data and find interesting patterns. My thesis aims to improve understanding of where magma chambers are and how they behave in continental rifts.

My area of research is a great field to be part of. The Main Ethiopian Rift is part of the larger East African Rift, which is causing the horn of Africa to split away from the rest of the continent. This type of volcanism has not received much research attention, and a lack of literature can be challenging but new discoveries are so exciting. There are well over 50 volcanoes in Ethiopia, some of which have erupted in dramatic fashion and formed vast calderas in the past, and with the second-fastest growing economy in the world, the number of people and infrastructure near to them will increase. I have integrated my work with geophysics to improve volcanic monitoring efforts in the region and aid in geothermal exploration, an increasingly important energy source for Ethiopia.

The best day I’ve had so far was when I learned how to install geophysical equipment in Ethiopia.I’m a complete novice when it comes to geophysics so it was great to learn from an expert. The equipment is used for measuring the electrical conductivity of the Earth. The measurements we carried out can indicate the presence of magma in the Earth and have produced intriguing results that, along with my geochemical knowledge, I’m helping to interpret. It took a whole team of scientists and local people all morning to dig the holes and bury the equipment; there was a real sense of teamwork, even with the language barriers!

I’ve developed a real passion for making science accessible. This was prompted by my experiences as the assistant editor of a history of science book produced by Cambridge University Press. It showed me that there are viable and exciting careers outside of academia, and I am due to start a career in publishing this fall.

A friendly collaborative attitude goes a long way.  So many female scientists I have encountered feel the need to be tough and uber-competitive to survive in what they perceive as a ‘man’s world’.  Be kind and stay true to yourself.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, the University of Essex, the Tokyo Institute of Technology and the Natural History Museum London used their machine learning algorithm to test whether butterfly species can co-evolve similar wing patterns for mutual benefit. This phenomenon, known as Müllerian mimicry, is considered evolutionary biology’s oldest mathematical model and was put forward less than two decades after Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.

The algorithm was trained to quantify variation between different subspecies of Heliconius butterflies, from subtle differences in the size, shape, number, position and colour of wing pattern features, to broad differences in major pattern groups.

This is the first fully automated, objective method to successfully measure overall visual similarity, which by extension can be used to test how species use wing pattern evolution as a means of protection. The resultsare reported in the journal Science Advances.

The researchers found that different butterfly species act both as model and as mimic, ‘borrowing’ features from each other and even generating new patterns.

“We can now apply AI in new fields to make discoveries which simply weren’t possible before,” said lead author Dr Jennifer Hoyal Cuthill from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences. “We wanted to test Müller’s theory in the real world: did these species converge on each other’s wing patterns and if so how much? We haven’t been able to test mimicry across this evolutionary system before because of the difficulty in quantifying how similar two butterflies are.”

Müllerian mimicry theory is named after German naturalist Fritz Müller, who first proposed the concept in 1878, less than two decades after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. Müller’s theory proposed that species mimic each other for mutual benefit. This is also an important case study for the phenomenon of evolutionary convergence, in which the same features evolve again and again in different species.

For example, Müller’s theory predicts that two equally bad-tasting or toxic butterfly populations in the same location will come to resemble each other because both will benefit by ‘sharing’ the loss of some individuals to predators learning how bad they taste. This provides protection through cooperation and mutualism. It contrasts with Batesian mimicry, which proposes that harmless species mimic harmful ones to protect themselves.

Heliconius butterflies are well-known mimics, and are considered a classic example of Müllerian mimicry. They are widespread across tropical and sub-tropical areas in the Americas. There are more than 30 different recognisable pattern types within the two species that the study focused on, and each pattern type contains a pair of mimic subspecies.

However, since previous studies of wing patterns had to be done manually, it hadn’t been possible to do large-scale or in-depth analysis of how these butterflies are mimicking each other.

“Machine learning is allowing us to enter a new phenomic age, in which we are able to analyse biological phenotypes – what species actually look like – at a scale comparable to genomic data,” said Hoyal Cuthill, who also holds positions at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and University of Essex.

The researchers used more than 2,400 photographs of Heliconius butterflies from the collections of the Natural History Museum, representing 38 subspecies, to train their algorithm, called ‘ButterflyNet’.

ButterflyNet was trained to classify the photographs, first by subspecies, and then to quantify similarity between the various wing patterns and colours. It plotted the different images in a multidimensional space, with more similar butterflies closer together and less similar butterflies further apart.

“We found that these butterfly species borrow from each other, which validates Müller’s hypothesis of mutual co-evolution,” said Hoyal Cuthill. “In fact, the convergence is so strong that mimics from different species are more similar than members of the same species.”

The researchers also found that Müllerian mimicry can generate entirely new patterns by combining features from different lineages.

“Intuitively, you would expect that there would be fewer wing patterns where species are mimicking each other, but we see exactly the opposite, which has been an evolutionary mystery,” said Hoyal Cuthill. “Our analysis has shown that mutual co-evolution can actually increase the diversity of patterns that we see, explaining how evolutionary convergence can create new pattern feature combinations and add to biological diversity.

“By harnessing AI, we discovered a new mechanism by which mimicry can produce evolutionary novelty. Counterintuitively, mimicry itself can generate new patterns through the exchange of features between species which mimic each other. Thanks to AI, we are now able to quantify the remarkable diversity of life to make new scientific discoveries like this: it might open up whole new avenues of research in the natural world.”

Reference:
Jennifer F. Hoyal Cuthill et al. ‘Deep learning on butterfly phenotypes tests evolution’s oldest mathematical model.’ Science Advances (2019). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aaw4967

The results, published today in Nature, have far-reaching implications for how we understand the ageing process, and how we might develop much-needed treatments for age-related brain diseases.

As our bodies age, our muscles and joints can become stiff, making everyday movements more difficult. This study shows the same is true in our brains, and that age-related brain stiffening has a significant impact on the function of brain stem cells.

A multi-disciplinary research team, based at the Wellcome-MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute at the University of Cambridge, studied young and old rat brains to understand the impact of age-related brain stiffening on the function of oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPCs). These cells are a type of brain stem cell important for maintaining normal brain function, and for the regeneration of myelin – the fatty sheath that surrounds our nerves, which is damaged in multiple sclerosis (MS). The effects of age on these cells contributes to MS, but their function also declines with age in healthy people.

To determine whether the loss of function in aged OPCs was reversible, the researchers transplanted older OPCs from aged rats into the soft, spongy brains of younger animals. Remarkably, the older brain cells were rejuvenated, and began to behave like the younger, more vigorous cells.

To study this further, the researchers developed new materials in the lab with varying degrees of stiffness, and used these to grow and study the rat brain stem cells in a controlled environment. The materials were engineered to have a similar softness to either young or old brains.

To fully understand how brain softness and stiffness influences cell behavior, the researchers investigated Piezo1 – a protein found on the cell surface, which informs the cell whether the surrounding environment is soft or stiff.

Dr Kevin Chalut, who co-led the research, said: “We were fascinated to see that when we grew young, functioning rat brain stem cells on the stiff material, the cells became dysfunctional and lost their ability to regenerate, and in fact began to function like aged cells. What was especially interesting, however, was that when the old brain cells were grown on the soft material, they began to function like young cells – in other words, they were rejuvenated.”

“When we removed Piezo1 from the surface of aged brain stem cells, we were able to trick the cells into perceiving a soft surrounding environment, even when they were growing on the stiff material,” explained Professor Robin Franklin, who co-led the research with Dr Chalut. “What’s more, we were able to delete Piezo1 in the OPCs within the aged rat brains, which lead to the cells becoming rejuvenated and once again able to assume their normal regenerative function.”

Dr Susan Kohlhaas, Director of Research at the MS Society, who part funded the research, said: “MS is relentless, painful, and disabling, and treatments that can slow and prevent the accumulation of disability over time are desperately needed. The Cambridge team’s discoveries on how brain stem cells age and how this process might be reversed have important implications for future treatment, because it gives us a new target to address issues associated with aging and MS, including how to potentially regain lost function in the brain.”

This research was supported by the European Research Council, MS Society, Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, The Adelson Medical Research Foundation, Medical Research Council and Wellcome.

Niche stiffness underlies the ageing of central nervous system progenitor cells, M. Segel, B. Neumann, M. Hill, I. Weber, C. Viscomi, C. Zhao, A. Young, C. Agley, A. Thompson, G. Gonzalez, A. Sharma, S. Holmqvist, D. Rowitch, K. Franze, R. Franklin and K. Chalut is published in Nature.

The plausible global catastrophic risks include: tipping points in environmental systems due to climate change or mass biodiversity loss; malicious or accidentally harmful use of artificial intelligence; malicious use of, or unintended consequences, from advanced biotechnologies; a natural or engineered global pandemic; and intentional, miscalculated, accidental, or terrorist-related use of nuclear weapons.

Researchers from Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) today release a new report on what governments can do to understand and inform policy around these risks, which could threaten the global population.

The likelihood that a global catastrophe will occur in the next 20 years is uncertain, say the researchers, but the potential severity means that national governments have a responsibility to their citizens to manage these types of risks.

Des Browne, former UK Secretary of State for Defence, said: “National governments struggle with understanding and developing policy for the elimination or mitigation of extreme risks, including global catastrophic risks. Effective policies may compel fundamental structural reform of political systems, but we do not need, nor do we have the time, to wait for such change.

“Our leaders can, and must, act now to better understand the global catastrophic risks that are present and developing. This report offers a practical framework for the necessary action.”

Governments must sufficiently understand the risks to design mitigation, preparation and response measures. But political systems often do not provide sufficient incentives for policy-makers to think about emerging or long-term issues, especially where vested interests and tough trade-offs are at play.

Additionally, the bureaucracies that support government can be ill-equipped to understand these risks. Depending on the issue or the country, public administrations tend to suffer from one or more of the following problems: poor agility to new or emerging issues, poor risk management culture and practice, lack of technical expertise and failure of imagination.

The report provides 59 practical options for how governments can better understand the risks. Ranging from improving risk management practices to developing better futures analysis, to increasing science and research capability, most national governments must take major policy efforts to match the scale and complexity of the problem, say the researchers.

Catherine Rhodes, CSER’s Executive Director, said: “This report gives policy-makers a set of clear, achievable and effective options. Few countries are making efforts to understand these risks, so most governments will be able to draw policy ideas from the report.

“In the UK, the government is ahead of its peers when it comes to conducting national risk assessments, delivering foresight and horizon-scanning and engaging with the academic community. But even it needs new approaches to understand and deal with global catastrophic risks.”

Professor Lord Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and co-founder of CSER, said: “Global problems require global solutions. But countries must also act individually. Without action, these catastrophic risks will only grow over time, whether it be on climate change, ecothreats, synthetic biology or cyber.

“Governments have a responsibility to act, both to minimise the risk of such events, and to make plans to cope with a catastrophe if it occurred. And those that take the initiative will set a positive example for the rest of the world. Protect your citizens and be a world leader – that decision is available to every country.”

I think the most fun I’ve probably had at work was when I programmed a movable camera to follow me around the room. I’m a mathematician by training and now work as a Teaching Associate in Scientific Computing, specialising in algorithms. I will soon be starting at the British Antarctic Survey as a Data Scientist, to which I am immensely looking forward to.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are very popular now. These are also algorithms, with the difference that often the numbers are interpreted as probabilities. So computers do not necessarily give an exact answer, but the answer that is the most probable in some setting.  Computer vision has developed a lot in recent years. I’ve also worked in industry on various applications and particularly enjoy making connections between different fields. The challenge is to express the problem in mathematical terms. Then it can be tackled by algorithms.

With human learning, experiences change how we interpret our world. A levitation act will not fascinate a small child if it has not learned about gravity yet. Once it knows about gravity, it does seem to like throwing things down again and again, as any frustrated parent will tell you!  Similarly, machine learning lets the computer have experiences in the form of data – lots and lots of data. While a human child can distinguish between a cat and a dog after seeing a few examples, a computer needs far more.

The most important question is not how a computer arrives at a result, but why. Deep neural networks have had great success lately. However, their structure is so complex that a human cannot understand how they arrived at their answer. How can we then trust the answer? This can also lead to computers being easily fooled where a human would not be. This is something else that we don’t yet understand why. I’m interested in developing algorithms which are self-improving, learning from new data.

The students are my teachers. They ask interesting, challenging questions. It is best to be open, if I do not know the answer, and go on a journey of discovery together. I might not know it, but I surely will find out. Students learn in different ways and I enjoy the challenge to find ways to make a topic accessible. Artificial intelligence makes the headlines often enough to be able to remain topical.

Collaborations are easy if one is willing. A lot of high tech companies working in this field have settled in Cambridge or have opened offices here. Additionally, exciting research is conducted in many departments across Cambridge using machine learning techniques. I enjoy pointing these out to the students who can then see what they have learned in action.

Have a go, you never know what you might achieve. When I was 15, I took part in a maths competition aimed at pupils two years above me at school, since my brother took part. I placed higher than him. He bore it gracefully. For me, it was a start to more and more opportunities opening up. If you do not try, you cannot succeed. Yes, there is failure, but then one readjusts and carries on. Lately, I have become more interested in post-graduate education in general, policies and procedures, funding and finances. The information is too dispersed, especially for those considering a post-graduate degree. I’m working on linking different sources of information.

The goal of the €3 million Self-healing soft robot (SHERO) project, funded by the European Commission, is to create a next-generation robot made from self-healing materials (flexible plastics) that can detect damage, take the necessary steps to temporarily heal itself and then resume its work – all without the need for human interaction.

Led by the University of Brussels (VUB), the research consortium includes the Department of Engineering (University of Cambridge), École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles de la ville de Paris (ESPCI), Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa), and the Dutch Polymer manufacturer SupraPolix.

As part of the SHERO project, the Cambridge team, led by Dr Fumiya Iida from the Department of Engineering are looking at integrating self-healing materials into soft robotic arms.

Dr Thomas George Thuruthel, also from the Department of Engineering, said self-healing materials could have future applications in modular robotics, educational robotics and evolutionary robotics where a single robot can be ‘recycled’ to generate a fresh prototype.

“We will be using machine learning to work on the modelling and integration of these self-healing materials, to include self-healing actuators and sensors, damage detection, localisation and controlled healing,” he said. “The adaptation of models after the loss of sensory data and during the healing process is another area we are looking to address. The end goal is to integrate the self-healing sensors and actuators into demonstration platforms in order to perform specific tasks.”

Professor Bram Vanderborght, from VUB, who is leading the project with scientists from the robotics research centre Brubotics and the polymer research lab FYSC, said: “We are obviously very pleased to be working on the next generation of robots. Over the past few years, we have already taken the first steps in creating self-healing materials for robots. With this research we want to continue and, above all, ensure that robots that are used in our working environment are safer, but also more sustainable. Due to the self-repair mechanism of this new kind of robot, complex, costly repairs may be a thing of the past.”

The team of researchers – from the Universities of Cambridge, Birmingham, New York and Leiden – say their findings highlight a pressing need for greater support for couples before, during and after pregnancy to improve outcomes for children. The study is the first to examine the influence of both mothers’ and fathers’ wellbeing before and after birth on children’s adjustment at 14 and 24 months of age.

Lead author, Professor Claire Hughes from Cambridge’s Centre for Family Research, said: “For too long, the experiences of first-time dads has either been side-lined or treated in isolation from that of mums. This needs to change because difficulties in children’s early relationships with both mothers and fathers can have long-term effects.

“We have already shared our findings with the NCT (National Childbirth Trust) and we encourage the NHS and other organisations to reconsider the support they offer.”

The study, published today in Development & Psychopathology, drew on the experiences of 438 first-time expectant mothers and fathers who were followed up at 4, 14 and 24 months after birth. These parents were recruited in the East of England, New York State (USA) and the Netherlands.

The researchers found that the prenatal wellbeing of first-time mothers had a direct impact on the behaviour of their children by the time they were two years old. Mothers who suffered from stress and anxiety in the prenatal period were more likely to see their child display behavioural problems such as temper tantrums, restlessness and spitefulness.

The researchers also found that two-year-olds were more likely to exhibit emotional problems – including being worried, unhappy and tearful; scaring easily; or being clingy in new situations – if their parents had been having early postnatal relationship problems. These ranged from a general lack of happiness in the relationship to rows and other kinds of conflict.

Hughes says: “Our findings highlight the need for earlier and more effective support for couples to prepare them better for the transition to parenthood.”

Links between child outcomes and parental wellbeing have been shown in other studies, but this is the first to involve couples, track parental wellbeing in both parents over an extended period of time, and focus on child behaviour in the first two years of life. While there is growing evidence for the importance of mental health support for expectant and new mothers, this study highlights the need to extend this support to expectant fathers and to go beyond individual well-being to consider the quality of new mothers’ and fathers’ couple relationships.

The researchers acknowledge that genetic factors are likely to play a role but they accounted for parents’ mental health difficulties prior to their first pregnancy and after their child’s birth. Co-author Dr Rory Devine, a developmental psychologist at the University of Birmingham, says “Our data demonstrate that mental health problems during pregnancy have a unique impact on children’s behavioural problems.”

Using standardized questionnaires and in-person interviews, participating mothers and fathers reported on their symptoms of anxiety and depression in the third trimester of pregnancy and when their child was 4, 14 and 24 months old. At each of these visits, parents also completed standardized questionnaire measures of couple relationship quality and children’s emotions and behaviour.

Hughes says: “There has been an assumption that it’s really difficult to get dads involved in research like this. But our study draws on a relatively large sample and is unique because both parents answered the same questions at every stage, which enabled us to make direct comparisons.”

The research is part of an ongoing project examining the wellbeing and influence of new mothers and fathers. In a closely linked study, published in Archives of Women’s Mental Health in July 2019, the team found that fathers share in traumatic memories of birth with their partners far more than has previously been recognised. This study compared the wellbeing of parents in the third trimester of pregnancy with that when their child was four months old.

Co-author, Dr Sarah Foley, also from Cambridge’s Centre for Family Research said: “If mum has a difficult birth, that can be a potentially traumatic experience for dads.”

“What both studies show is that we need to make antenatal support much more inclusive and give first-time mums and dads the tools they need to communicate with each other and better prepare them for this major transition. With resources stretched, parents are missing out on the support they need.”

This research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, the National Science Foundation, and the Dutch Research Council.

References
Hughes, C., Devine, R.T., Mesman, J., & Blair, C. ‘Parental wellbeing, couple relationship quality and children’s behavior problems in the first two years of life.’ Development & Psychopathology; 6 August 2019; DOI: 10.1017/S0954579419000804  

Researchers have found that, by transplanting an area of damaged tissue with a combination of both heart muscle cells and supportive cells taken from the outer layer of the heart wall, they may be able to help the organs recover from the damage caused by a heart attack.

Scientists have been trying to use stem cells to repair damaged hearts for a number of years. Efforts have been unsuccessful so far, mainly because the vast majority of transplanted cells die within a few days.

Now, Dr Sanjay Sinha and his team at the University of Cambridge, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Washington, have used supportive epicardial cells developed from human stem cells to help transplanted heart cells live longer.

The researchers used 3D human heart tissue grown in the lab from human stem cells to test the cell combination, finding that the supportive epicardial cells helped heart muscle cells to grow and mature. They also improved the heart muscle cell’s ability to contract and relax.

In rats with damaged hearts, the combination also allowed the transplanted cells to survive and restore lost heart muscle and blood vessel cells.

Researchers now hope to understand how the supportive epicardial cells help to drive heart regeneration. Understanding these key details will bring them one step closer to testing heart regenerative therapies in clinical trials.

Hundreds of thousands of people in the UK are living with debilitating heart failure, often as a result of a heart attack. During a heart attack, part of the heart is deprived of oxygen leading to death of heart muscle. This permanent loss of heart muscle as well as subsequent scarring combines to reduce the heart’s ability to pump blood around the body.

People suffering from heart failure can’t regenerate their damaged hearts and the only cure is a heart transplant. Ultimately, these researchers hope that, by harnessing the regenerative power of stem cells, they will one day be able to heal human hearts using a patient’s own cells.

The study was funded by the British Heart Foundation (BHF), Medical Research Council and the National Institute for Health Research.

Dr Sanjay Sinha, BHF-funded researcher and leader of the study at the University of Cambridge, said: “There are hundreds of thousands of people in the UK living with heart failure – many are in a race against time for a life-saving heart transplant. But with only around 200 heart transplants performed each year in the UK, it’s absolutely essential that we start finding alternative treatments.

Dr Johannes Bargehr, first author of the study at the University of Cambridge said: “Our research shows the huge potential of stem cells for one day becoming the first therapy for heart failure. Although we still have some way to go, we believe we’re one giant step closer, and that’s incredibly exciting.”

Professor Sir Nilesh Samani, Medical Director at the British Heart Foundation which part-funded the research said: “Despite advances in medical treatments, survival rates for heart failure remain poor and life expectancy is worse than for many cancers. Breakthroughs are desperately needed to ease the devastation caused by this dreadful condition.

“When it comes to mending broken hearts, stem cells haven’t yet really lived up to their early promise. We hope that this latest research represents the turning of the tide in the use of these remarkable cells.”

Reference
Bargehr, J et al. Epicardial cells derived from human embryonic stem cells augment cardiomyocyte-driven heart regeneration. Nature Biotechnology; 2 Aug 2019; DOI: 10.1038/s41587-019-0197-9

Adapted from a press release by the British Heart Foundation.

I hope my research will lead to the accelerated control, elimination, and hopefully, eradication of anthrax in Uganda as well as other countries in Africa and worldwide. I use mathematical modelling to identify areas of Uganda that are most at risk of anthrax, which can infect both animals and humans. It is caused by B. anthracis, a bacterium that lives in the soil. By mapping areas where anthrax cases have occurred in the past and studying the environmental conditions of those areas, I hope to be able to predict other locations with conditions that are suitable for the bacteria. By building ‘risk maps’ from this data, we can help policymakers pinpoint particular areas across Uganda with the highest anthrax occurrence risk. This way, they can target prevention strategies such as vaccination and health promotion campaigns to the areas with the most need.

I am particularly interested in mapping areas where past cases of anthrax have occurred in Uganda. I’m currently doing a literature review to identify relevant sources of information related to my study and collecting secondary data on past anthrax case occurrences. I’m also gathering information on environmental conditions from remotely-sensed satellite data and public databases to understand the characteristics of locations which have had past outbreaks. Although my study setting is in Uganda, I do most of my research work, including data analysis, at the Department of Veterinary Medicine in Cambridge.

The most interesting day I’ve had so far was during the orientation for the Gates Cambridge scholars. I met so many people in one day. I also learned about the incredible research being done by other students at the University. It was amazing!

Cambridge is a place of limitless possibilities. It encourages students to think outside the box, to seek solutions to problems that seem insurmountable, to go the extra mile while giving them unlimited support to achieve their goals. The University has top-notch facilities for both academic and social life. The supervisors here are leading experts in their respective fields and are also well connected, ensuring students have the best possible guidance for their research. The rich history of Cambridge, as well as its excellent reputation, helps to attract a wide array of funding available to the students, researchers, and teaching staff. Also, the numerous societies and clubs within the university help students to thrive, not only academically, but also socially and spiritually, leading to a well-balanced educational experience.

I have had an incredible opportunity to mentor several very talented young female scientists since I founded the STEMing Africa Initiative. This experience has opened my eyes to the unique challenges faced by women in STEM. Humanity has come a long way, and we still have a long way to go. Women form about half of the world’s population. If we want to fly to Jupiter someday, discover the secret to longevity, perfect organ regeneration, cure cancer, or even travel across time, we must work at full capacity. Men and women. If no one has created space for you, create it yourself. But under no circumstance must you give up. Science needs you. The world needs you.

Being part of a world-renowned research institute is a great privilege, and it is exciting to be part of a team carrying out cutting-edge science. I have been in my current role of Information Specialist for over 15 years. My work involves facilitating the scientific management of research projects in a large lab whose focus is cancer research. I enjoy the varied nature of my job, everything from costing grant applications to tweeting about our latest research findings. I also enjoy working in an academic environment with a fantastic group of extremely talented and highly motivated scientists.

I have been very fortunate that my post has allowed me to work part-time. This is something that is much harder for bench-based scientists, and I have been able to continue to work while raising my family. I have a BSc (London) and PhD (Edinburgh) in Biochemistry. I have nine years’ postdoctoral experience in human molecular genetics and several years’ experience working in small start-up drug discovery companies doing computer-based biological research.

There have been a number of important turning points in my career. I reached a point in my postdoc career when I realised I could not continue bench research and was forced to re-evaluate my skills and explore alternative career options. Another came when I was made redundant while working for a small start-up business. Having a job in the morning, but finding myself unemployed a few hours later was quite traumatic. I had to act very quickly to find a new post, all while juggling a young family.

I think it’s important to remember that careers change, and the path you set out on might not lead to where you thought you’d end up. Think laterally – academic, bench-based research trains you in many skills that are applicable to other alternative careers.

On a daily basis, I can be doing any number of things. These might involve monitoring the scientific literature, writing reports and grant applications, or editing Wikipedia pages. I also oversee lab funding and staff recruitment, assist with research publications from first drafts through to the final proof-reading stage, write press releases and other publicity materials, and deal with anything else that crosses my desk!

There is so much fascinating science happening in Cambridge. Recently I’ve been working with Professor Jackson on a European Research Council Synergy Grant application. This is a multi-disciplinary, multi-centred proposal whose aim is to use the latest technologies in gene editing and chemical biology to study DNA-damage response pathways. We aim to identify new therapeutic agents for diseases such as cancer and neurodegeneration. Preparing such a large application has been a challenging task, requiring coordinating with multiple partners. We will hear later in the year whether this application has been accepted, which could lead to some very exciting research.

The discovery adds further evidence to support the prenatal sex steroid theory of autism first proposed 20 years ago.

In 2015, a team of scientists at the University of Cambridge and the State Serum Institute in Denmark measured the levels of four prenatal steroid hormones, including two known as androgens, in the amniotic fluid in the womb and discovered that they were higher in male foetuses who later developed autism. These androgens are produced in higher quantities in male than in female foetuses on average, so might also explain why autism occurs more often in boys. They are also known to masculinise parts of the brain, and to have effects on the number of connections between brain cells.

Today, the same scientists have built on their previous findings by testing the amniotic fluid samples from the same 98 individuals sampled from the Danish Biobank, which has collected amniotic samples from over 100,000 pregnancies, but this time looking at another set of prenatal sex steroid hormones called oestrogens. This is an important next step because some of the hormones previously studied are directly converted into oestrogens.

All four oestrogens were significantly elevated, on average, in the 98 foetuses who later developed autism, compared to the 177 foetuses who did not. High levels of prenatal oestrogens were even more predictive of likelihood of autism than were high levels of prenatal androgens (such as testosterone). Contrary to popular belief that associates oestrogens with feminisation, prenatal oestrogens have effects on brain growth and also masculinise the brain in many mammals.

Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, Director of the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge, who led this study and who first proposed the prenatal sex steroid theory of autism, said: “This new finding supports the idea that increased prenatal sex steroid hormones are one of the potential causes for the condition. Genetics is well established as another, and these hormones likely interact with genetic factors to affect the developing foetal brain.”

Alex Tsompanidis, a PhD student in Cambridge who worked on the study, said: “These elevated hormones could be coming from the mother, the baby or the placenta. Our next step should be to study all these possible sources and how they interact during pregnancy.”

Dr Alexa Pohl, part of the Cambridge team, said: “This finding is exciting because the role of oestrogens in autism has hardly been studied, and we hope that we can learn more about how they contribute to foetal brain development in further experiments. We still need to see whether the same result holds true in autistic females.”

However, the team cautioned that these findings cannot and should not be used to screen for autism. “We are interested in understanding autism, not preventing it,” added Professor Baron- Cohen.

Dr Arieh Cohen, the biochemist on the team, based at the State Serum Institute in Copenhagen, said: “This is a terrific example of how a unique biobank set up 40 years ago is still reaping scientific fruit today in unimagined ways, through international collaboration.”

The research was supported by the Autism Research Trust, the Medical Research Council, and Wellcome.

Reference
Baron-Cohen, S et al. Foetal oestrogens and autism. Molecular Psychiatry; 29 July 2019; DOI: 10.1038/s41380-019-0454-9

The U7+ summit brought together 47 universities from G7 countries and beyond, who are committed to academic freedom and scholarly values and convinced of the key role of universities as global actors, to engage in discussions leading to concrete action to address pressing global challenges.

Professor Ferran was invited by U7+ Alliance organisers Sciences Po to be one of five University presidents and representatives to carry conclusions from their discussion groups to a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron, who sponsored the summit as part of his preparations for the G7 summit in Paris later this year.

“It was a great honour for Cambridge to be invited to summarise some very stimulating discussions on how universities can help to confront the global challenges facing us all for a leader with an important voice at the G7,” Ferran said.

The summit provided a unique opportunity to discuss a common agenda and establish a framework for action in today’s global landscape, resulting in a 2019 Presidential Declaration, which included a mission statement and the adoption of six agreed principles.

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The principles included commitments to pursue joint action through the U7+, recognition of the responsibility to train and nurture responsible and active citizens, to address environmental challenges, to combat polarisation in society, to promote interdisciplinary research, and to consolidate and share best practices worldwide.

“It was inspiring to hear from so many other University leaders who share Cambridge’s determination to tackle the great challenges that lie before us in the 21st century,” Ferran said. “We can all clearly see that collaboration is vital if we are to mitigate threats to humanity such as climate change and to ensure that rapid technological change works for the benefit of society.”

Researchers from the University of Cambridge used volcanic minerals known as ‘crystal clocks’ to calculate how long magma can be stored in the deepest parts of volcanic systems. This is the first estimate of magma storage times near the boundary of the Earth’s crust and the mantle, called the Moho. The results are reported in the journal Science.

“This is like geological detective work,” said Dr Euan Mutch from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences, and the paper’s first author. “By studying what we see in the rocks to reconstruct what the eruption was like, we can also know what kind of conditions the magma is stored in, but it’s difficult to understand what’s happening in the deeper parts of volcanic systems.”

“Determining how long magma can be stored in the Earth’s crust can help improve models of the processes that trigger volcanic eruptions,” said co-author Dr John Maclennan, also from the Department of Earth Sciences. “The speed of magma rise and storage is tightly linked to the transfer of heat and chemicals in the crust of volcanic regions, which is important for geothermal power and the release of volcanic gases to the atmosphere.”

The researchers studied the Borgarhraun eruption of the Theistareykir volcano in northern Iceland, which occurred roughly 10,000 years ago, and was fed directly from the Moho. This boundary area plays an important role in the processing of melts as they travel from their source regions in the mantle towards the Earth’s surface. To calculate how long the magma was stored at this boundary area, the researchers used a volcanic mineral known as spinel like a tiny stopwatch or crystal clock.

Using the crystal clock method, the researchers were able to model how the composition of the spinel crystals changed over time while the magma was being stored. Specifically, they looked at the rates of diffusion of aluminium and chromium within the crystals and how these elements are ‘zoned’.

“Diffusion of elements works to get the crystal into chemical equilibrium with its surroundings,” said Maclennan. “If we know how fast they diffuse we can figure out how long the minerals were stored in the magma.”

The researchers looked at how aluminium and chromium were zoned in the crystals and realised that this pattern was telling them something exciting and new about magma storage time. The diffusion rates were estimated using the results of previous lab experiments. The researchers then used a new method, combining finite element modelling and Bayesian nested sampling to estimate the storage timescales.

“We now have really good estimates in terms of where the magma comes from in terms of depth,” said Mutch. “No one’s ever gotten this kind of timescale information from the deeper crust.”

Calculating the magma storage time also helped the researchers determine how magma can be transferred to the surface. Instead of the classical model of a volcano with a large magma chamber beneath, the researchers say that instead, it’s more like a volcanic ‘plumbing system’ extending through the crust with lots of small ‘spouts’ where magma can be quickly transferred to the surface.

A second paper by the same team, recently published in Nature Geoscience, found that that there is a link between the rate of ascent of the magma and the release of CO2, which has implications for volcano monitoring.

The researchers observed that enough CO2 was transferred from the magma into gas over the days before eruption to indicate that CO2 monitoring could be a useful way of spotting the precursors to eruptions in Iceland. Based on the same set of crystals from Borgarhraun, the researchers found that magma can rise from a chamber 20 kilometres deep to the surface in as little as four days.

The research was supported by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).

References:
Euan J.F. Mutch et al. ‘Millennial storage of near-Moho magma.’ Science (2019). DOI: 10.1126/science.aax4092

Euan J.F. Mutch et al. ‘Rapid transcrustal magma movement under Iceland.’ Nature Geoscience (2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41561-019-0376-9

The opening of the Oscar-winning film The Big Short, a comedy-drama on the global financial crisis of 2007-2008, begins with a famous quote: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

This phrase captures one of the main reasons why the US housing bubble popped in 2008, triggering the worst economic recession since the 1930s. The movie portrays an eccentric hedge fund manager discussing the idea of betting against subprime mortgage bonds. The investment bankers, at first, reply politely: “Those bonds only fail if millions of Americans don’t pay mortgages. That’s never happened in history.”

But it happened. And as a consequence, many people worldwide have suffered severely, and the enduring effects still haunt us, politically and economically, even a decade later.

In a new paper published in Climate Policy, we argue that a similar tragic “debt crisis” could unfold for climate change. The “debt” would be measured in excess carbon emissions, which will keep accumulating until we reach net-zero. In this scenario, the bankers are those who assume that the debt will be paid back by removing carbon from the atmosphere.

But such a bet will be necessary if we recklessly embark on the strategy of reducing emissions slowly and removing carbon later, while in the meantime using speculative technology to block out heat from the sun. Among climate scientists and policy analysts, this is the so-called temperature “overshoot and peak-shaving” scenario.

‘Overshoot and peak-shaving’

In December 2015, the world adopted the Paris Agreement and pledged to limit global temperature rise well below 2℃ – if not 1.5℃ – above pre-industrial levels. Despite that, global CO₂ emissions continue to rise.

The slow and uneven pace of global emissions reductions is increasing the likelihood of “overshoot” scenarios, in which warming will temporarily exceed 1.5 or 2°C, but will later fall to the target temperature through the large-scale deployment of negative emissions technologies. These remove CO₂ from the atmosphere by, for example, planting trees or scrubbing it through chemical filters and burying it deep underground.

But the world would still need to adapt to the impacts of increased warming during the overshooting period. Because of this concern, the idea of so-called “peak-shaving” has also emerged among some scientists who want to avoid such an overshoot by temporarily using solar geoengineering.

Solar geoengineering means dimming sunlight itself. In theory, the Earth could be cooled very quickly by, for example, spraying sulphate aerosols in the upper atmosphere.

The concept of an “overshoot and peak-shaving” scenario is therefore based on the temporary use of solar geoengineering, combined with large-scale deployment of negative emissions technologies.

In this scenario, the two technologies are in a mutually dependent relationship – solar geoengineering is used to keep the temperature down for the time being, while negative emissions technologies are used to reduce atmospheric CO₂ to the point where solar geoengineering is no longer needed.

Emissions debt and temperature debt

But this assumed reciprocity may not work as intended. Here, the notion of debt is useful. As the sociologist Lisa Adkins suggests, the logic of debt rests on a promise to pay (back) in the future. In this sense, both overshooting and peak-shaving can be seen as acts of “borrowing” or “creating debt”.

Overshooting avoids reducing carbon emissions today by effectively borrowing emissions from the future (creating “emissions debt”), with a promise to pay back that debt later through negative emissions technologies.

Peak-shaving is borrowing global temperature (creating “temperature debt”) through the temporary use of solar geoengineering to cancel excess warming until the point when no further borrowing, of either sort, is needed.

In such an outcome the world will take on a double debt: “emissions debt” and “temperature debt”.

The analogy with housing loans

The fact of being indebted may not sound so bad. (Almost everyone has a debt of some kind in their everyday life, right?) But the key question is: can we duly pay off this “climate debt”? How credible is the promise?

Here, the analogy with housing loans is most useful for properly rating the riskiness of such debt repayment.

Given that overshoot allows slow rates of emissions reductions by “promising” that delays can be compensated later through carbon removal, this looks a bit like borrowing an adjustable-rate subprime mortgage loan. Peak-shaving, on the other hand, is more like borrowing additional loans for “home improvement”, which maintains house values – (keeps global temperature constant during the overshooting period).

Since most negative emissions technologies are still speculative or under development, overshoot should be rated like a subprime loan with a high risk of default. Just as American homeowners weren’t able to keep paying their mortgages after all, so negative emissions technologies may never be an effective enough way to take carbon out of the atmosphere.

This doesn’t sound like a secure, feasible investment. The failure to keep the overshoot promise of later repayment would lead to endless peak-shaving. Solar geoengineering would become an ongoing necessity – an unpayable massive “climate debt” accumulating year-by-year.

Framing matters — let’s not blind ourselves

Concerns over crossing so-called “tipping points” – paving the way toward a “hothouse Earth” – may push some people towards accepting overshooting and peak-shaving. But because this is a speculative scenario, it matters how we frame it.

Some scientists say that solar geoengineering is like a drug to lower high-blood pressure – an overdose is harmful, but a “well-chosen” and limited dose can lower your risks, helping you have a healthier life.

They suggest that solar geoengineering is not a substitute for cutting emissions but a supplement for containing global temperature increases. But this works only if negative emissions technologies are rolled out very swiftly on a massive scale.

Read more: Blocking out the sun won’t fix climate change – but it could buy us time

The housing loans analogy sheds light on an important assumption that is implicitly built into such a scenario, namely that overshooting is simply like borrowing money (for example, a mortgage) and that people pay back mortgages. This was also the unquestioned assumption in the run up to the US housing market crisis and it created the systemic failure to notice the growing risk of the bubble bursting.

We shouldn’t fool ourselves into believing that a similar “debt crisis” will not happen for managing the risk of climate change. Beware the dubious promises of “overshoot and peak-shaving” technologies – they may well turn out to be risky subprime loans.

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

These statistics are freely available on the institutions’ websites as part of their ongoing commitment to transparency and openness. The figures show that the ten institutions collectively conducted nearly a half of all UK animal research in 2018.

These ten organisations carried out 1.69 million procedures, 48% of the 3.52 million procedures carried out in Great Britain in 2018. More than 99% of these procedures were carried out on rodents or fish.

The ten organisations are listed below alongside the total number of procedures that they carried out in 2018.

A further breakdown of Cambridge’s numbers, including the number of procedures by species and detail of the levels of severity, can be found on its animal research pages.

All universities are committed to the ‘3Rs’ of replacement, reduction and refinement. This means avoiding or replacing the use of animals where possible, minimising the number of animals used per experiment, and improving welfare.

All ten organisations are signatories to the Concordat on Openness on Animal Research in the UK, a commitment to be open about the use of animals in scientific, medical and veterinary research in the UK. Over 120 organisations have signed the concordat including UK universities, charities, research funders, and commercial research organisations. Earlier this year, the University of Cambridge was named a Leader in Openness in recognition of its work.

Dr Martin Vinnell, the University of Cambridge’s Establishment Licence Holder, who is responsible for overseeing its animal research, said: “While the use of animals plays an important role in biomedical research, we should always be looking at ways to refine this work, find replacements and ultimately reduce the number of animals used.

“Nor should we see this kind of research as a right – it’s essential that we are open about our work and ensure the public is well informed of both what we do, and why we do it, whether or not they support this type of research. This is why it is important that institutions such as Cambridge and its peers release information about their animal research.”

Wendy Jarrett, Chief Executive of Understanding Animal Research, which helped develop the Concordat on Openness, said: “Since the publication of the Concordat on Openness on Animal Research in the UK in 2014, organisations that carry out research using animals have been increasingly transparent. These organisations are providing an unprecedented level of information about how and why they conduct medical, veterinary and scientific research using animals. Facts, figures, case studies, and photos about the use of animals in research are now provided directly by the organisations that carry out the research, so that it has never been easier for members of the public to find out why those animals were used in research.”

Empathy is an important concept within healthcare and as such is emphasised in policy, codes of practice, national clinical guidance and medical training. It is also a high priority for patients. In a healthcare context, empathy refers to care that incorporates understanding of the patient perspective, shared decision making between patient and practitioner, and consideration of the broader context in which illness is experienced.

Optimising management of diabetes is a public health priority given the growing prevalence of the disease. Type 2 diabetes affects around 4 million people in the UK, and is associated with significant risk of death from heart disease and stroke and with early death. Type 2 diabetes is estimated to cost the UK over £9billion annually, 10% of the UK NHS budget.

Researchers at Cambridge followed up 867 individuals across 49 general practices in the UK as part of the ADDITION-Cambridge study to examine the association between primary care practitioner (GP and nurse) empathy and incidence of cardiovascular disease events (such as heart attack and stroke) or death.

Twelve months after diagnosis, patients assessed their GP’s empathy and their experiences of diabetes care over the preceding year using the consultation and relational empathy (CARE) questionnaire. The researchers then divided their CARE scores into three groups.

The results of the study are published today in the Annals of Family Medicine.

Of the 628 participants who completed the questionnaire, just under one in five (19%) experienced a cardiovascular disease event and a similar number (21%) died during follow up from causes including cancer and heart attack.

Those patients reporting better experiences of empathy in the first 12 months after diagnosis had a significantly lower risk (40-50%) of death over the subsequent 10 years compared to those who experienced low practitioner empathy. Participants experiencing better empathy also tended to have a lower risk of cardiovascular disease events, although this was not statistically significant.

“In trying to manage the growing burden of chronic preventable disease, we’re increasingly moving towards precision healthcare, target-driven care and technology-based assessment, while at the same time focusing less on the human, interpersonal empathic aspects of care,” says Dr Hajira Dambha-Miller, a GP and researcher at the Department of Public Health and Primary Care, University of Cambridge.

“Our findings suggest that these more human elements of healthcare early in the course of diabetes, may be important in their long-term health outcomes. The potential impact is considerable and is comparable to prescribing medicines but without the associated problems of side effects or non-adherence.”

The researchers say there are several possible explanations for the association between greater empathy and better health outcomes. Previous studies have suggested that patients with lower levels of anxiety or those with an optimistic outlook (and who are more likely to report better perceptions of care), are also likely to live for longer.

They say it is also possible that GPs with empathic, patient-centred skills may be more likely to succeed in promoting positive behavioural change such as medication adherence or physical activity. Previous studies have also reported that greater practitioner empathy is associated with higher patient motivation towards activation, enablement and self-management of disease. Practitioner empathy may also reflect the doctor’s listening ability and the trust of the patient in disclosing what is really wrong so that it can be addressed.

The research was largely funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), the Medical Research Council and Wellcome.

Reference
Dambha-Miller, H et al. Association between primary care practitioner empathy, and risk of cardiovascular events and all-cause mortality amongst patients with type 2 diabetes: a population based prospective cohort study. Annals of Family Medicine; 8 July 2019

The inaugural IPPR prize was introduced to reward innovative ideas to reinvigorate the UK economy that force a ‘step change in the quality and quantity of the UK’s economic growth’.

Simon Szreter, Professor of History and Public Policy at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St John’s College, Hilary Cooper, economics consultant, who is married to Professor Szreter, and their son Ben Szreter, chief executive of Cambridge United Community Trust, worked together on a detailed plan to enable faster UK growth by investing in generous and universal welfare provision.

Professor Szreter said: “The key proposal, emanating directly from history, is that generous and inclusive universal welfare provision should be reconceptualised as an absolutely crucial economic growth promoter, not as merely a ‘tax burden’ on the productive economy.

“It has been proven to perform this function twice before in our history and its abandonment has twice led to faltering and then disastrous declines in national productivity, as is being currently experienced with the much-vaunted ‘productivity puzzle’.”

The trio shared the first prize with the other joint winner – seven co-workers at the London Economics consultancy who argued that a ‘big push’ towards decentralisation would unlock prosperity around the UK.

Stephanie Flanders, head of Bloombery Economics, chaired the panel of judges as they looked for the best answers to the question, “What would be your radical plan to force a step change in the quality and quantity of the UK’s economic growth?”

Following the financial crisis, the UK economy experienced the slowest recovery in the post-war era. In common with other advanced economies, the UK has had sluggish economic growth over the past decade. In the period since the crash, the UK growth rate has averaged 1.1 per cent compared to the long-run world average of 3.5 per cent: even if the growth rate doubled, it would still be nearly 40 per cent behind the world average.

The judges praised Szreter, Cooper and Szreter’s ‘radical’ historical, economic and community led policy solutions to the economic challenges faced by the UK.

They said: “The authors draw on a historical analysis of the economy, looking at previous periods of British economic history to identify the enabling conditions for our most successful episodes of economic growth. Prescriptions include a new, equitable social contract alongside an intergenerational contract, incentivised and funded through tax changes, to re-establish the ethical principles on which the economic success of the Golden Age was built.

“They each brought their different perspectives to bear on their core idea, that economic growth has been historically highest when collective welfare security is greatest – and their radical plan to incentivise altruistic economic behaviour today.”

The proposals had to ensure fair and sustainable outcomes, including protecting the environment and reducing inequalities. The judges wanted creative thinking on whether the downward trend in the rate of UK economic growth could be reversed, whether it was realistic, desirable and achievable for the UK economy to grow at 3 or 4 per cent in the 2020s.

The family said: “We’re really pleased that, in a world where economics seems to have increasingly veered towards models and mathematical abstractions, this prize has recognised the value of a different approach. Ours looks at history and how it can be applied to today’s practical challenges and brings the insights of political economy to propose a solution to the problems we face, especially the inequalities that threaten our productivity, our well-being and our democracy.”

Two further prizes of £25,000 were also awarded. One went to the best under-25 entry, which was won by a Masters degree student who proposed a new way to use the fruits of the digital economy to reduce working time. The other went to the overall runner-up entry, which was authored by two investment professionals who argued for a rebalancing of the UK economy to reverse low investment and productivity.

All four prizes will be awarded at an event in London today, where each winning entrant or team will present their ideas and discuss them further with judges. Each paper is published in full by IPPR today.

The Institute will draw together the highest concentration of heart and lung researchers from academia, healthcare and industry in Europe. It has set an ambitious five-year target to demonstrate proof-of-concept for at least ten new drugs or diagnostic approaches in heart and lung diseases.

The HLRI will be situated next to Royal Papworth Hospital, which was officially opened by HM the Queen on 9 July, and forms part of the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, the centrepiece of the largest biotech cluster outside the United States of America. It will be home to over 380 scientists and state-of-the-art laboratories in genomics, population sciences, research into cellular mechanisms of disease and translational science. It will also include a special ten bed facility where the first-in-patient studies of new treatments can be conducted.

“This is an incredibly exciting project bringing together world-renowned expertise in cardiovascular and respiratory science at Cambridge University and clinical excellence at Royal Papworth Hospital,” says Professor Nick Morrell from the University of Cambridge, Interim Director of the institute and a non-Executive Director of Royal Papworth Hospital.

“Heart and lung diseases affect many millions of people of people worldwide and the numbers are growing. Institutes such as ours, focussed on these big health challenges, are urgently needed. The discoveries made by our researchers will deliver major benefits to the public through improvements in public health, new approaches to diagnosing and treating disease, and new medicines.”

Professor John Wallwork, Chairman of Royal Papworth Hospital, said: “The Heart and Lung Research Institute will mean new treatments will be created, tested and delivered to tackle the biggest causes of premature death in the world all on one site. This will be a huge step forward and demonstrates one of the reasons Royal Papworth Hospital moved to the Cambridge Biomedical Campus – to collaborate with the best researchers in the world to help to save lives. The importance of this building cannot be underestimated and I can’t wait to see how it will transform healthcare in the years to come.”

Image: Cambridge Heart and Lung Research Institute (artist’s impression)

The award is one of 11 announced from flagship capital investment scheme the UK Research Partnership Investment Fund, totalling over £670m of new investment into UK research and innovation. It complements £10 million of funding committed to the institute by the British Heart Foundation (BHF). Further funding will be provided by the University and Royal Papworth Hospital, and the Wolfson Foundation.

The BHF award, which contributes to the capital cost of the building, is one of the charity’s largest ever strategic award. The charity has also committed an additional £6m in funding for the BHF Cambridge Centre for Cardiovascular Research Excellence, which will be housed in the institute.

Professor Sir Nilesh Samani, Medical Director at the British Heart Foundation, said: “Through this funding we will help create a fantastic centre that will have a key role in driving forward our ambitious programme of heart and circulatory research. By bringing together world-leading scientists it will enable exciting opportunities for collaboration between researchers from different disciplines. And it will also accelerate the transformation of discoveries in the laboratory to treatments available at patients’ bedside.

“This grant is one of the largest the BHF has ever made and we have only been able to make this investment because of the incredible generosity of the public.”

The Cystic Fibrosis Trust has also committed to raise up to £5 million to fund the Cystic Fibrosis Innovation Hub, which launched last year and will transfer to the new building once it has been completed. Both AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline will also embed integrated research hubs in the Institute to maximise translational impact.

Work on the HLRI will begin almost immediately, with ground-breaking taking place in November 2019 and construction starting in early 2020.

Without further medical advances, an estimated one in four people in the UK will die from heart or circulatory disease, while one in five will die from lung disease. Combined, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases cost over £840 billion worldwide every year.

My ambition to have a career in physics research began when I was at school. I grew up in Nottingham, where my Dad was the main homemaker and worked from home; and my Mum worked in a hospital pharmacy. I attended my local comprehensive and sixth form before moving to Cambridge to study Natural Sciences at King’s College.

I spent two summers working in the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy, and this sparked a desire to work in particle physics. After graduating with my MSc, I began working towards a PhD in high energy physics with the ATLAS experiment. What strikes me most about the environment in Cambridge, compared to other institutions, is the atmosphere of collaboration. Improving your understanding of your subject and exploring new and creative research ideas with everyone in the group is always prioritised above rank – there is no such thing as a stupid question here.

Having the opportunity to work with CERN is incredible. The diversity of people, with a huge range of ideas, all working towards a common goal is very inspiring. The calibre of research at both institutions motivates you to become the best researcher you can, but with enough support that you aren’t overwhelmed.

On a grand scale, my field is trying to understand what the universe is made of at a fundamental level. We are looking at how the constituent parts – called particles – can interact and combine to take us from the high energy Big Bang to the universe we see today. My research aims to find evidence for new particles in the data taken with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider, which would allow our current Standard Model of particle physics to be extended. For example, I have focused on searches for new particles predicted by a model called Supersymmetry, currently the most popular extension to the standard model that could explain phenomena such as dark matter.

A key moment for me was attending my first ATLAS conference focusing on the collaboration of the different new-physics groups. The many innovative analysis techniques being presented were very interesting and I learned a lot in the plentiful discussions, both about the work I had contributed to the conference and that of others. In the long term, I hope my research will contribute to our understanding of the universe, and lead to an exciting career in academia.

Part of my research involves reconstructing ‘missing’ particles that ATLAS isn’t designed to detect.These are either neutrinos or new physics particles and measuring them well involves carefully balancing all aspects of the detector. Generally, I spend my days doing data analysis. This can involve using computer simulations of background and signal events, using statistics and techniques like machine learning techniques to optimise where to look in the data to find new physics.

My most interesting project so far is a new project looking for signs of new physics or behaviour in a data-data comparison of oppositely charged electron-muon events. This idea is very exciting, as a deviation from the Standard Model expectation could be explained by many different new models. It also doesn’t rely on simulated data, which is getting more important now that ATLAS has taken such vast amounts of data that simulation is struggling to keep up computationally.

If you are passionate about a subject and have the drive to work hard on it then that should speak for itself. There will be challenges in your career whatever you choose to do, but the more women that follow their ambitions into STEM now, the easier it will be for the next generation of aspiring scientists.