The case report, carried out by researchers at UCL and Imperial College London, together with teams at the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford, comes ten years after the first such case, known as the ‘Berlin Patient.’

Both patients were treated with stem cell transplants from donors carrying a genetic mutation that prevents expression of an HIV receptor CCR5.

The subject of the new study has been in remission for 18 months after his antiretroviral therapy (ARV) was discontinued. The authors say it is too early to say with certainty that he has been cured of HIV, and that they will continue to monitor his condition.

“At the moment the only way to treat HIV is with medications that suppress the virus, which people need to take for their entire lives, posing a particular challenge in developing countries,” said the study’s lead author, Professor Ravindra Gupta from the University of Cambridge, who led the study while at UCL.

“Finding a way to eliminate the virus entirely is an urgent global priority, but is particularly difficult because the virus integrates into the white blood cells of its host.”

According to the World Health Organization, there were approximately 36.9 million people worldwide living with HIV/AIDS in 2017 and only 59% of these are receiving ARV. Drug-resistant HIV is a growing concern. Almost one million people die annually from HIV-related causes.

The report describes a male patient in the UK, who prefers to remain anonymous, and was diagnosed with HIV infection in 2003 and on antiretroviral therapy since 2012.

Later in 2012, he was diagnosed with advanced Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. In addition to chemotherapy, in 2016 he underwent a haematopoietic stem cell transplant from a donor with two copies of the genetic mutation (or ‘allele’) that prevents expression of CCR5.

CCR5 is the most commonly used receptor by HIV-1, the most common and most harmful type of HIV. People who have two mutated copies of the CCR5 allele are resistant to the HIV-1 virus strain that uses this receptor, as the virus cannot enter host cells.

Chemotherapy can be effective against HIV as it kills cells that are dividing. Replacing immune cells with those that don’t have the CCR5 receptor appears to be key in preventing HIV from rebounding after the treatment.

The transplant was relatively uncomplicated, but with some side effects including mild graft-versus-host disease, a complication of transplants wherein the donor immune cells attack the recipient’s immune cells.

The patient remained on ARV for 16 months after the transplant, at which point the clinical team and the patient decided to interrupt ARV therapy to test if the patient was truly in HIV-1 remission.

Regular testing confirmed that the patient’s viral load remained undetectable, and he has been in remission for 18 months since ceasing ARV therapy (35 months post-transplant). The patient’s immune cells remain unable to express the CCR5 receptor.

Dr Hoi Ping Mok, and Dr Fanny Salasc from the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge tested for virus that is ‘latent’ and may not be found by conventional lab assays. The researchers are part of Professor Andrew Lever’s lab, which has developed a highly sensitive assay for latent virus.

“This is the most reliable assay there is to demonstrate that there really are no hidden reservoirs of HIV that might be temporarily ‘sleeping’ and might reactivate at a later date,” said Professor Lever. “Our Cambridge lab is unique in the UK in being able to carry out this assay.”

The patient is only the second person documented to be in sustained remission without ARV. The first, the Berlin Patient, also received a stem cell transplant from a donor with two of the CCR5 alleles, but to treat leukaemia. Notable differences were that the Berlin Patient was given two transplants and underwent total body irradiation, while the UK patient received just one transplant and less intensive chemotherapy.

Both patients experienced mild graft-versus-host disease, which may also have played a role in the loss of HIV-infected cells.

“By achieving remission in a second patient using a similar approach, we have shown that the Berlin Patient was not an anomaly, and that it really was the treatment approaches that eliminated HIV in these two people,” said Professor Gupta.

The researchers caution that the approach is not appropriate as a standard HIV treatment due to the toxicity of chemotherapy, but it offers hope for new treatment strategies that might eliminate HIV altogether.

“We need to understand if we could knock out this receptor in people with HIV, which may be possible with gene therapy,” said Professor Gupta.

“While it is too early to say with certainty that our patient is now cured of HIV, and doctors will continue to monitor his condition, the apparent success of haematopoietic stem cell transplantation offers hope in the search for a long-awaited cure for HIV/AIDS,” said Professor Eduardo Olavarria from Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and Imperial College London.

The research was funded by Wellcome, the Medical Research Council, the Foundation for AIDS Research, and National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Biomedical Research Centres at University College London Hospitals, Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial.

The research team is presenting the findings today at the annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) in Seattle.

Reference
Gupta, R et al. HIV-1 remission following CCR5Δ32/Δ32 haematopoietic stem cell transplantation. Nature; 5 March 2019; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1027-4

Adapted from a press release from UCL

An international study involving researchers from the UK, Norway, Germany Australia, South Korea and the US has confirmed that changes in sea ice cover in the Norwegian Sea played a key role in driving abrupt climate change events between 32,000 and 40,000 years ago, where global temperatures shifted as much as 15 degrees Celsius.

The results, reported in the journal Science Advances, indicate that initial sea ice reduction started before the abrupt warming over Greenland, and that sea ice expansion started before the end of the warm periods in Greenland.

The Arctic sea ice is a key element of the global climate system and the strong ongoing warming of the Arctic Ocean can have major impacts on the stability of the Greenland Ice Sheet, first and foremost accelerated sea level rise.

The Nordic Sea system and its water column structure during the last glacial cycle is the closest analogue to the present-day Arctic Ocean, which makes it a perfect natural laboratory to understand the role of rapid disappearance of regional sea ice on abrupt warming on the Greenland Ice Sheet.

The last glacial period, 10,000–100,000 years ago, was marked by repeated abrupt climate changes with global implications. Within a matter of decades, temperature shifts of as much as 15 degrees Celsius occurred around Greenland, but the mechanisms driving these changes –known as Dansgaard-Oeschger events – are not fully understood.

“One of the most challenging aspects of palaeoclimatology is to precisely resolve and reconstruct the exact timing of the events that took place across the major climate transitions of the last glacial cycle,” said co-author Dr Francesco Muschitiello, from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Geography. “As a result, a detailed account of the temporal relationship between changes in sea-ice extent in the Nordic Seas, and North Atlantic ocean circulation and climate across Dansgaard-Oeschger events has been so far elusive.”

The researchers investigated specific organic molecules in a sediment core from the southern Norwegian Sea, one of which was produced by algae that live in sea ice and others that were produced by organisms living in open, ice-free waters thousands of years ago.

The new sea ice reconstruction based on organic molecules in marine sediments was also evaluated by means of results from a model simulation of past sea ice conditions.

“Our data suggest that there were substantial changes in the sea ice cover in the southern Norwegian Sea between 32,000 and 40,000 years ago,” said Henrik Sadatzki from the University of Bergen and the paper’s first author. “Most extensive sea ice conditions occurred at the onsets and early parts of cold periods over Greenland and the most pronounced open-ocean conditions occurred at the onsets of the abrupt changes to warm periods over Greenland.”

The results support that an enhanced sea ice cover contributed to insulation of the cold, high-latitude atmosphere from relatively warmer waters that were present in the Norwegian Sea beneath the sea ice lid.

In turn, sea ice reduction allowed for heat release from the exposed Norwegian Sea waters to the atmosphere, which was a prime ingredient in shaping the abrupt warming of the Dansgaard-Oeschger climate events in Greenland.

The Dansgaard–Oeschger climate events have stirred interest in documenting that the climate system contains mechanisms that may lead to abrupt and surprising climate changes.

These findings clarify the series of events taking place in the high-latitude North Atlantic across the abrupt Dansgaard–Oeschger cycles of the last glacial period. However, further work is needed to ultimately identify the physical mechanisms linking the current sudden demise of Arctic sea ice to abrupt Greenland Ice Sheet changes.

The research was funded in part by the European Research Council.

Reference:
Henrik Sadatzki et al. ‘Sea ice variability in the southern Norwegian Sea during glacial Dansgaard-Oeschger climate cycles.’ Science Advances (2019). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aau6174

Adapted from a University of Bergen press release. 

In a study featuring a miniature ‘gym’ for beetles (complete with beetle treadmills), researchers from the University of Cambridge found that beetles who consistently lose out to members of their own species have the most to gain by forming a mutually-beneficial cross-species partnership.

The researchers studied the relationship between the burying beetle and the tiny mites that hitch a ride on their backs. The researchers found that mites function like a warm jacket on smaller beetles, and cause them to heat up when the beetles exercise. This made them more successful in face-offs with larger opponents.

For larger beetles, the mites actually reduced their level of fitness. They needed no help from mites to win ownership of a dead body and then lost out because the beetle larvae had to compete with mites for food. The results are reported in the journal Evolution Letters.

Relationships between two species where both benefit – such as flowering plants pollinated by insects – is known as mutualism. These relationships are widespread and are key to maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem function, but they are highly variable.

“When the costs of a mutualistic relationship start to outweigh the benefits, it will break down,” said Syuan-Jyun Sun, a PhD candidate in Cambridge’s Department of Zoology and the paper’s first author. “We wanted to find out if competition within species might be one of the reasons why we see such variety in mutualistic relationships.”

In competitions for food or a mate, there will inevitably be winners and losers. The Cambridge researchers wanted to test whether ‘losers’ might be more likely to have a mutualistic relationship with another species in order to gain an advantage over their stronger rivals. At the same time, ‘winners’ may not need any help to win battles, so a mutualistic relationship wouldn’t bring any advantage and might even break down into a form of parasitism.

The researchers tested this idea with experiments on burying beetles and their mites. The mites Poecilochirus carabi are benign passengers on their host burying beetles Nicrophorus vespilloides. The beetle flies around, seeking out the bodies of freshly dead small animals like mice and birds. Both the beetle and the mites onboard use the dead body as food for their young.

However, beetles face fierce competition for the ownership of a carcass, such as a dead mouse, and smaller beetles often lose the territory to larger rivals. Since the beetles need the carcass to breed, how do smaller beetles manage to reproduce?

“We wondered whether mites could give these ‘losers’ a helping hand in fights over a carcass,” said Sun. In the lab of Professor Rebecca Kilner in Cambridge, the researchers staged contests over a dead mouse between two beetles that were matched in size. One carried mites, while the other did not. They filmed the fights with infrared thermography, and found that beetles with mites were hotter and more aggressive, and therefore more likely to win.

To investigate how such thermal benefits arose, the researchers built a ‘gym’ for beetles and exercised them on custom treadmills. Beetles either carried mites, or a weight that was equivalent to the mites, or they carried nothing.

“We found that carrying extra weight caused beetles to generate extra heat as they exercised,” said Sun. “We also discovered that this heat was trapped by the mites because the mites form an insulating layer when travelling on beetles.”

These effects were most pronounced for smaller beetles because mites covered a relatively larger surface area than on large beetles, suggesting that mites are likely to be disproportionally beneficial to smaller beetles.

To test this idea directly, the researchers again staged fights between two beetles over a dead mouse. This time, the two rivals differed in body size. They also let beetles lay their eggs on a mouse, with and without mites.

The researchers found that small beetles were much more likely to win a fight for a carcass when they were carrying mites. However, the mites slightly reduced the beetles’ reproductive success, because they competed with beetle larvae for carrion. Nevertheless, the huge benefits of acquiring a carcass for reproduction outweighed these small costs. For smaller ‘loser’ beetles, mites are mutualists because they increase beetle fitness.

The findings were different for larger beetles. They needed no help to win a carcass, so they gained nothing from associating with mites. To make matters worse, they then lost fitness to the mites when they bred alongside each together on the carcass. For larger ‘winner’ beetles, mites are antagonistic rather than mutualistic because they reduce beetle fitness.

The research was funded in part by the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust, the Royal Society and the European Research Council.

Reference:
Syuan-Jyun Sun et al. ‘Conflict within species determines the value of a mutualism between species.’ Evolution Letters (2019). DOI:10.1002/evl3.109

OCD is characterised by unwanted intrusive thoughts and repetitive rituals and causes pronounced impairment in everyday life. In very severe cases, OCD patients are unable to leave their house or flat due to fears of contamination. This repetitive and compulsive behavior is associated with cognitive rigidity or an impairment in cognitive flexibility – an inability to adapt to new situations or new rules.

One treatment for this type of OCD is a form of cognitive behavior therapy called “exposure and response prevention”, which involves instructing OCD patients to touch contaminated surfaces, such as a toilet, but to refrain from then washing their hands. OCD is also treated with medicines known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, such as Prozac. But as many as 40% of OCD patients fail to respond to treatment.

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is an emerging treatment for severe OCD when all other treatments fail. In a study by researchers at University College London and the University of Cambridge, together with several other UK-based centres, six patients with treatment-resistant OCD entered a controlled double-blind trial of DBS.

The study directly compared effects at two different brain locations – the subthalamic nucleus (STN) and ventral capsule (VC) – in the same patients. The two sites had both previously been identified as being important in OCD, but it had been unclear whether they were simply parts of the same brain network and if they worked on the same type of symptoms.

In an article published today in Biological Psychiatry, the researchers show that both sites were remarkably effective in reducing OCD symptoms, but on different aspects: VC stimulation improved mood, while STN stimulation improved cognitive flexibility.

These findings suggest that DBS at these two sites works on different brain circuits, one involving the medial prefrontal cortex and the other the lateral prefrontal cortex. This was also confirmed using brain imaging.

Lead author Professor Eileen Joyce from the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology says: “This is the first study to compare directly the effects of deep brain stimulation at two brain sites and has discovered important information about how the brain changes in severe OCD responsible for obsessions and compulsions, depressed mood and cognitive inflexibility might be alleviated.”

The researchers assessed OCD symptoms and mood using standardised scales. Cognitive flexibility was assessed with the CANTAB IED test, invented by Professors Barbara Sahakian and Trevor Robbins from the University of Cambridge. This test has been used previously by the Cambridge team to show that cognitive flexibility is a major deficit in patients with OCD and is related to the the lateral prefrontal cortex. The new research shows that OCD is also linked to medial prefrontal cortex abnormality.

“To our knowledge this is the first study with two sites which demonstrates that one site improves mood, while the other site improves cognitive flexibility, and that both sites reduce OCD symptoms,” says Professor Robbins.

“While DBS is only used when medication and specific psychological treatments have been tried and failed, for some patients it may provide them with the opportunity to regain well-being and quality of life,” adds Professor Sahakian.

One of the trial participants was first diagnosed at the age of 26 years with OCD but had symptoms since the age of seven. Prior to the trial, the participant had been ‘profoundly debilitated’ by OCD for 10 years and had been living continuously in psychiatric units for 6 years, receiving treatment from numerous specialist OCD services and specialists.

Following surgery, the patient said: “I didn’t feel anything for a few days but then… I felt inexplicably excited and happy with the great sense of looking forward to life. I recognised the feeling from 20 years before when I had been completely well.

“The surgery has transformed my life. I am living completely independently and doing volunteer work.”

The study was funded by the Medical Research Council, Wellcome and the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre.

Reference
Tyagi, H et al. A randomised trial directly comparing ventral capsule and anteromedial sub thalamic nucleus stimulation in obsessive compulsive disorder: Clinical and Imaging evidence for dissociable effects.Biological Psychiatry; 7 March 2019; DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2019.01.017

The study adds further evidence to support the idea that an individual’s biological makeup plays a significant role in whether or not they develop an addictive disorder.

Adolescence and young adulthood is an important time in a person’s development. It is during this time that individuals begin to demonstrate behaviours that are associated with addiction and which suggest that they may be at risk.

One of these behaviours is impulsivity. Sometimes, we need to make quick decisions, for example in response to a danger or a threat. At other times, it is better to hesitate and decide only after careful deliberation. Impulsivity refers to where we respond and act prematurely, without considering the consequences of our actions. While most people occasionally act impulsively, people affected by disorders including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), substance and behavioural addictions, and mental health problems such as depression and anxiety, show much greater levels of impulsivity.

In a study published today in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, a team of researchers at Cambridge’s Department of Psychiatry, in collaboration with a group at Aarhus University in Denmark, has shown a strong association between increased behavioural impulsivity in young adults and abnormalities in nerve cells in the putamen, a key brain region involved in addictive disorders.

As part of the study, 99 young adults aged 16 to 26 carried out a computer-based measure of impulsivity. The researchers also scanned the volunteers’ brains using a sequence that is sensitive to myelin content. Myelin is a protein-rich sheath that coats the axis of a nerve cell, analogous to the plastic coating that surrounds electrical wiring, and is essential to fast nerve conduction in the brain and body.

The team found that those young adults who displayed higher measures of behavioural impulsivity also had lower levels of myelin in the putamen. This work builds on similar findings in rodent models of impulsivity from scientists at Cambridge and elsewhere.

“People who show heightened impulsivity are more likely to experience a number of mental health issues, including substance and behavioural addictions, eating disorders, and ADHD,” says Dr Camilla Nord of the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, lead author on the study.

This suggests that impulsivity is an ‘endophenotype’, say the researchers; in other words, a set of behavioural and brain changes that increases people’s general risk for developing a group of psychiatric and neurological disorders.

“We know that most mental health symptoms are not specific to particular disorders,” says Dr Nord. “This work provides an important piece of the puzzle in establishing brain signatures that are general across a number of mental health disorders, rather than specific to any single one.”

The putamen is a key brain hub in addiction, sending dopamine signals elsewhere in the brain, and helping mediate how impulsively we behave. “The significance of decreased myelination implies there are tiny microstructural changes in this part of the brain affecting its function, and thereby affecting impulsivity,” says senior author Dr Valerie Voon, also from Cambridge.

“The degree of myelination alters the speed and efficiency of neuronal communication, meaning that if a population has decreased myelination only in one particular region, as we show, there is something highly local about any changes in neural speed and efficiency,” add co-author Dr Seung-Goo Kim.

Although it is not possible to say definitely whether the decreased myelination causes individuals to behave impulsively, the fact that all participants were healthy and had not been diagnosed with addiction or any other psychiatric diagnosis suggests a more causal link than has been demonstrated in previous studies.

In future, the finding may help in predicting an individual’s risk of developing a problem with addiction, say the researchers, but they caution that this would require further research and testing.

The research was funded by the Aarhus University Research Foundation, the Danish Ministry for Social Affairs and the Interior and the UK Medical Research Council. The work was also supported by NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre.

Reference
Nord CL, Kim S, Rømer Thomsen,K, Callesen MB, Kvamme TL, Jensen M, Pedersen MU, Voon V. The myeloarchictecture of impulsivity: premature responding in youth is associated with decreased myelination of ventral putamen. Neuropsychopharmacology; 15 Feb 2019; DOI: 10.1038/s41386-019-0343-6

The University of Cambridge is a global institution. Our students and staff come from all over the world; our researchers conduct their work on every continent. Notwithstanding this international outlook and impact, our University is firmly and proudly planted in the East of England. Our roots in the region run deep because of our longevity.

In fulfilling our mission – to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research – we are fundamentally committed to engaging with communities and partners close to home.

Over the coming month, we will feature a selection of the research and outreach activities carried out by Cambridge academics across the East of England, an area that includes the counties of Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk and Suffolk. (See also a special issue of our magazine, Research Horizons, focused on the East of England: download a pdf; view on Issuu)

The region has many assets – innovative and entrepreneurial people, hugely successful clusters of knowledge-intensive industries, vast tracts of high-quality agricultural land and outstanding academic institutions.

But the region also faces multiple challenges. In some areas, acute economic inequalities are linked to low educational outcomes, poor health, skills deficits and reduced connectivity.

At the University of Cambridge, we take seriously our responsibility to be a champion for the region and to help address some of its more pressing challenges. In collaboration with local partners, researchers are offering innovative approaches to areas ranging from understanding coastal erosion to ensuring healthy ageing and from tackling inequality to enhancing agriculture.

Whether it is helping to improve skills and education, supporting innovation and better infrastructure, bringing an evidence-based approach to criminal justice or assisting the management of national heritage, Cambridge research is having a real impact on some of the biggest problems facing the UK today.

Collaboration allows our researchers to draw on, and learn from, our partners’ expertise, while amplifying the impact and reach of our own knowledge. Lessons learned locally are transferable far beyond the eastern counties.

This is a good time to share these stories of local engagement. Some have direct relevance to the UK government’s Industrial Strategy, which aims “to boost productivity… to create good jobs and increase the earning power of people throughout the UK with investment in skills, industries and infrastructure.”

Many of the themes we will cover reflect that aspiration.

I hope this Spotlight will achieve two things. First, that it will be of value to policymakers – in the eastern region and beyond – who are grappling with the local issues we explore.

Second, that it will demonstrate the many intricate ways in which a global institution like ours discharges its duty to serve and support local communities.

The University of Cambridge must be a good local citizen, an advocate for the region, a national asset and a truly global actor. Balancing these distinct roles is not easy. Beyond the expertise we bring to our partnerships, it requires openness, and the humility to listen and learn what our communities expect from us. This is the only way an institution such as ours can offer the greatest and widest possible value to society, at home and abroad.

In the region, as elsewhere, there is always more to do. But the breadth and longevity of our mutually beneficial partnerships with local authorities and policymakers, schools, healthcare providers, businesses, employers and research institutions underscore the importance that these relationships have for us.

Our engagement takes many shapes and serves many purposes. Our academic community remains open to new and creative forms of working with partners in the East of England.

Professor Stephen J. Toope​
Vice-Chancellor

Image credit: Windy Autumn evening, Corkway Drove, painted by Norfolk-based artist Fred Ingrams. Reclaimed from the sea and drained by ditches and rivers, Fenland is one of the most distinctive rural landscapes in the East of England.

The research, presented at the Network and Distributed Systems Security Symposium in San Diego, USA, shows that attackers can compromise an unattended machine in a matter of seconds through devices such as chargers and docking stations.

Vulnerabilities were found in computers with Thunderbolt ports running Windows, macOS, Linux and FreeBSD. Many modern laptops and an increasing number of desktops are susceptible.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge and Rice University, exposed the vulnerabilities through Thunderclap, an open-source platform they have created to study the security of computer peripherals and their interactions with operating systems. It can be plugged into computers using a USB-C port that supports the Thunderbolt interface and allows the researchers to investigate techniques available to attackers. They found that potential attacks could take complete control of the target computer.

The researchers, led by Dr Theodore Markettos from Cambridge’s Department of Computer Science and Technology, say that in addition to plug-in devices like network and graphics cards, attacks can also be carried out by seemingly innocuous peripherals like chargers and projectors that correctly charge or project video but simultaneously compromise the host machine.

Computer peripherals such as network cards and graphics processing units have direct memory access (DMA), which allows them to bypass operating system security policies. DMA attacks abusing this access have been widely employed to take control of and extract sensitive data from target machines.

Current systems feature input-output memory management units (IOMMUs) which can protect against DMA attacks by restricting memory access to peripherals that perform legitimate functions and only allowing access to non-sensitive regions of memory. However, IOMMU protection is frequently turned off in many systems and the new research shows that, even when the protection is enabled, it can be compromised.

“We have demonstrated that current IOMMU usage does not offer full protection and that there is still the potential for sophisticated attackers to do serious harm,” said Brett Gutstein, a Gates Cambridge Scholar, who is one of the research team.

The vulnerabilities were discovered in 2016 and the researchers have been working with technology companies such as Apple, Intel and Microsoft to address the security risks. Companies have begun to implement fixes that address some of the vulnerabilities that the researchers uncovered; several vendors have released security updates in the last two years.

However, the Cambridge research shows that solving the general problem remains elusive and that recent developments, such as the rise of hardware interconnects like Thunderbolt 3 that combine power input, video output and peripheral device DMA over the same port, have greatly increased the threat from malicious devices, charging stations and projectors that take control of connected machines. The researchers want to see technology companies taking further action, but also stress the need for individuals to be aware of the risks.

“It is essential that users install security updates provided by Apple, Microsoft and others to be protected against the specific vulnerabilities we have reported,” said Markettos. “However, platforms remain insufficiently defended from malicious peripheral devices over Thunderbolt and users should not connect devices they do not know the origin of or do not trust.”

More information is available at thunderclap.io.

Reference:
A. Theodore Markettos , Colin Rothwell, Brett F. Gutstein, Allison Pearce, Peter G. Neumann, Simon W. Moore, Robert N. M. Watson. ‘Thunderclap: Exploring Vulnerabilities in Operating System IOMMU Protection via DMA from Untrustworthy Peripherals.’ Paper presented at Network and Distributed Systems Security Symposium 2019. San Diego, California.

We are said to be standing on the brink of a fourth industrial revolution – one that will see new forms of artificial intelligence (AI) underpinning almost every aspect of our lives. The new technologies will help us to tackle some of the greatest challenges that face our world.

In fact AI is already very much part of our daily lives, says Dr Mateja Jamnik, one of the experts who appear in the film. “Clever algorithms are being executed in clever ways all around us… and we are only a decade away from a future where we are able to converse across multiple languages, where doctors will be able to diagnose better, where drivers will be able to drive more safely.”

Ideas around AI “are being dreamt up by thousands of people all over the world – imaginative young people who see a problem and think about how they can solve it using AI… whether it’s recommending a song you’ll like or curing us of cancer,” says Professor Stephen Cave.

Much of the excitement relates to being able to leverage the power of Big Data, says Professor Zoubin Ghahramani. Without AI, how else could we make sense of the vastly complex interconnected systems we now have at our fingertips?

But what do we think about AI and the future it promises? Our perceptions are shaped by our cultural prehistory, stretching right back to Homer, says Dr Sarah Dillon. How we feel about the dawning of a new technology is linked to centuries-old thinking about robotics, automatons and intelligence beyond our own.

And what happens when we come to rely on the tools we are empowering to do these amazing things? Professor Lord Martin Rees reflects on the transition to a future of AI-aided jobs: what will this look like? How will we ensure that the wealth created by AI will benefit wider society and avoid worsening inequality?

Our researchers are asking fundamental questions about the ethics, trust and humanity of AI system design. “It can’t simply be enough for the leading scientists as brilliant as they are to be pushing ahead as quickly as possible,” says Dr Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh. “We also need there to be ongoing conversations and collaborations with the people who are thinking about the ethical impacts of the technology.

“The idea that AI can help us understand ourselves and the universe at a much deeper level is about as far reaching a goal for AI as could be.”

Inset image: read more about our AI research in the University’s research magazine; download a pdf; viewon Issuu.

Quantum dots are crystals made up of thousands of atoms, and each of these atoms interacts magnetically with the trapped electron.  If left alone to its own devices, this interaction of the electron with the nuclear spins, limits the usefulness of the electron as a quantum bit – a qubit.

Led by Professor Mete Atatüre from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, the researchers are exploiting the laws of quantum physics and optics to investigate computing, sensing or communication applications.

“Quantum dots offer an ideal interface, as mediated by light, to a system where the dynamics of individual interacting spins could be controlled and exploited,” said Atatüre, who is a Fellow of St John’s College. “Because the nuclei randomly ‘steal’ information from the electron they have traditionally been an annoyance, but we have shown we can harness them as a resource.”

The Cambridge team found a way to exploit the interaction between the electron and the thousands of nuclei using lasers to ‘cool’ the nuclei to less than 1 milliKelvin, or a thousandth of a degree above the absolute zero temperature. They then showed they can control and manipulate the thousands of nuclei as if they form a single body in unison, like a second qubit. This proves the nuclei in the quantum dot can exchange information with the electron qubit and can be used to store quantum information as a memory device. The results are reported in the journal Science.

Quantum computing aims to harness fundamental concepts of quantum physics, such as entanglement and superposition principle, to outperform current approaches to computing and could revolutionise technology, business and research.  Just like classical computers, quantum computers need a processor, memory, and a bus to transport the information backwards and forwards. The processor is a qubit which can be an electron trapped in a quantum dot, the bus is a single photon that these quantum dots generate and are ideal for exchanging information. But the missing link for quantum dots is quantum memory.

Atatüre said: “Instead of talking to individual nuclear spins, we worked on accessing collective spin waves by lasers. This is like a stadium where you don’t need to worry about who raises their hands in the Mexican wave going round, as long as there is one collective wave because they all dance in unison.

“We then went on to show that these spin waves have quantum coherence. This was the missing piece of the jigsaw and we now have everything needed to build a dedicated quantum memory for every qubit.”

In quantum technologies, the photon, the qubit and the memory need to interact with each other in a controlled way.  This is mostly realised by interfacing different physical systems to form a single hybrid unit which can be inefficient.  The researchers have been able to show that in quantum dots, the memory element is automatically there with every single qubit.

Dr Dorian Gangloff, one of the first authors of the paper and a Fellow at St John’s, said the discovery will renew interest in these types of semiconductor quantum dots. Dr Gangloff explained: “This is a Holy Grail breakthrough for quantum dot research – both for quantum memory and fundamental research; we now have the tools to study dynamics of complex systems in the spirit of quantum simulation.”

The long term opportunities of this work could be seen in the field of quantum computing. Last month, IBM launched the world’s first commercial quantum computer, and the Chief Executive of Microsoft has said quantum computing has the potential to ‘radically reshape the world’.

Gangloff said: “The impact of the qubit could be half a century away but the power of disruptive technology is that it is hard to conceive of the problems we might open up – you can try to think of it as known unknowns but at some point you get into new territory. We don’t yet know the kind of problems it will help to solve which is very exciting.”

Reference:
D. A. Gangloff et al. ‘Quantum interface of an electron and a nuclear ensemble.’ Science (2019). DOI: 10.1126/science.aaw2906

Originally published on the St John’s College website.

Funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the Centre for Doctoral Training in Application of Artificial Intelligence to the study of Environmental Risks (AI4ER) is one of 16 new Centres for Doctoral Training (CDTs) announced today. The Cambridge Centre will be led by Professor Simon Redfern, Head of the Department of Earth Sciences.

Climate risk, environmental change and environmental hazards pose some of the most significant threats we face in the 21^st century. At the same time, we have increasingly larger datasets available to observe the planet, from the atomic scale all the way through to global satellite observations.

“These datasets represent a transformation in the way we can study and understand the Earth and environment, as we assess and find solutions to environmental risk,” said Redfern. “Such huge datasets pose their own challenges, however, and new methods need to be developed to tap their potential and to use this information to guide our path away from environmental catastrophe.”

The new Centre brings computer scientists, mathematicians and engineers together with environmental and geoscientists to train the next generation of thought leaders in environmental data science. They will be equipped to apply AI to ever-increasing environmental data and understand and address the risks we face.

At the same time as human-induced climate change becomes increasingly apparent, urbanisation and the growth of megacities generate other risks, as society becomes potentially more fragile and vulnerable to geohazards such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods and tsunamis. Alongside satellite data, autonomous sensors, drones, and networks of instruments provide increasingly detailed information about such risks and their potential impacts.

Examples of the projects we are already engaged in that apply AI methods to exploring environmental risk include the use of satellite observations to chart the distribution and pathways of whales through the oceans, large datasets to understand biodiversity changes in woodland habitats, machine learning to understand earthquake risk and the use of drones to monitor hazards at active volcanos.

Cambridge is a world leader in artificial intelligence and machine learning research, and many of our AI researchers work alongside world leaders in environmental monitoring and modelling, including from the British Antarctic Survey and elsewhere at the University.

The new centre combines this work with the interests of dozens of external partners including Microsoft, DeepMind, The European Development Bank, Friends of the Earth, the European Space Agency, the Environment Agency, resource industry leaders and policy partners, to form an outstanding alliance focused on leading the next generation of environmental data science forward.

The first cohort of PhD students will start their studies in October 2019.

The new Centre is part of an overall £200 million funding announcement, which will support more than 1000 new research and business leaders in AI across the UK.

“Artificial intelligence has great potential to drive up productivity and enhance every industry throughout our economy, from more effective disease diagnosis to building smart homes,” said Business Secretary Greg Clark. “Today’s announcement is our modern Industrial Strategy in action, investing in skills and talent to drive high skilled jobs, growth and productivity across the UK.”

“The UK is not only the birthplace to the father of artificial intelligence, Alan Turing, but we are leading the way on work to ensure AI innovation has ethics at its core,” said Digital Secretary Jeremy Wright. “We want to keep up this momentum and cement our reputation as pioneers in AI.  Working with world-class academic institutions and industry we will be able to train the next generation of top-tier AI talent and maintain the UK’s reputation as a trailblazer in emerging technologies.”

The RESCUE-RACER study, announced this week, is a two-year study of motorsport concussion, in partnership with world motorsport’s governing body Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA). It will incorporate the most promising and technologically advanced concussion assessment tools currently available to establish and assess the progression of concussion symptoms in motorsports.

The study consists of two parts. The first investigates 40 UK-based racing drivers at baseline, recruiting mainly from the British Touring Car Championship and its associated series. Post-injury tests are open to international motorsport competitors, to be carried out during the 2019 race season. The second part assesses a minimum of 20 drivers in the acute post-injury period (up to three weeks after injury).

The tests will involve measures such as eye tracking, balance, and reaction time, with data collected using technology developed by Neuro Kinetics, Inc, with whom the researchers are collaborating. The team will also collect data using the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery (CANTAB) as well as salivary biomarkers. They will use the latest, powerful 7T functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scanners, which assess brain activity by measuring changes in blood flow.

The Principal Investigator for RESCUE-RACER is Professor Peter Hutchinson from Cambridge’s Department of Clinical Neurosciences, and a neurosurgeon at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

“The project represents a significant step for motorsport medicine,” says Professor Hutchinson. “RESCUE-RACER will follow drivers through a racing season and uses state-of-the-art assessment tools and imaging. This represents a tremendous opportunity to improve the management of drivers with concussion and traumatic brain injury in terms of assisting recovery and enabling return to safe driving.”

Primary study support is provided by the FIA’s 2018 Sid Watkins Scholar and RESCUE-RACER Study Coordinator Dr Naomi Deakin. Dr Deakin is a PhD student at Robinson College, where Professor Hutchinson is a fellow and Director of Studies for Clinical Medicine.

The goal of the study is to establish the progression of symptoms and signs of concussion sustained in motorsport activity using a comprehensive battery of scientific tests by exploring emerging technologies for objective assessments that can assist with concussion diagnosis and prognosis. Improved care for head-injured racers could translate into enhanced care for road-traffic accident victims from the general population.

“After an accident there is obvious concern for the individual racer, but a concussed driver also presents a potentially lethal risk to other competitors as well as spectators and crew,” says Dr Deakin.

“We hope that our study will lead to evidenced-based, medical decision-making protocols for track-side evaluation after potentially concussive incidents, as well as enabling a plan for clinical management of motorsports concussion, including the important ‘return-to-race’ decision.”

The RESCUE-RACER (Research Evaluating Sports ConcUssion Events – Rapid Assessment of Concussion and Evidence for Return) programme is funded by the FIA Foundation and supported by Neuro Kinetics. It is jointly sponsored by the University of Cambridge and Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which comprises Addenbrooke’s Hospital and the Rosie Maternity Hospital.

Adapted from a press release by Neuro Kinetics.

A team of British and American researchers, co-led by the University of Cambridge, has measured how much the McMurdo ice shelf in Antarctica flexes in response to the filling and draining of meltwater lakes on its surface. This type of flexing had been hypothesised before and simulated by computer models, but this is the first time the phenomenon has been measured in the field. The results are reported in the journal Nature Communications.

The results demonstrate a link between surface melting and the weakening of Antarctic ice shelves and support the idea that recent ice shelf breakup around the Antarctic Peninsula may have been triggered, at least in part, by large amounts of surface meltwater produced in response to atmospheric warming.

As the climate continues to warm, more and more ice shelves may become susceptible to flex, fracture and break up over the coming century.

Most of the Antarctic continent is covered by the Antarctic Ice Sheet, which is up to four kilometres thick and contains enough ice to raise global sea levels by about 58 metres. Over most of the continent and for most of the year, air temperatures are well below zero and the ice surface remains frozen. But around 75% of the ice sheet is fringed by floating ice shelves, which are up to a kilometre thick, mostly below sea level, but with tens of metres of their total height protruding above the water. In the summer months, when air temperatures rise above freezing, the surfaces of these ice shelves are susceptible to melting.

“Surface water on ice shelves has been known about for a long time,” said co-author Dr Ian Willis from Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Institute. “Over 100 years ago, members of both Shackleton’s Nimrod team and the Northern Party team of Scott’s British Antarctic Expedition mapped and recorded water on the Nansen Ice Shelf, around 300 kilometres from where we did our study on the McMurdo Ice Shelf. For the last few decades, it has also been possible to see widespread surface meltwater forming on many ice shelves each summer from satellite imagery.”

What is not fully known is the extent to which surface water might destabilise an ice shelf, especially in warmer summers when more meltwater is produced. If the slope of the ice shelf is sufficiently steep, the water may flow off the ice shelf to the ocean in large surface rivers, mitigating against any potential instability.

The danger comes if water pools up in surface depressions on the ice shelf to form large lakes. The extra weight of the water will push down on the floating ice, causing it to sink a bit further into the sea. Around the edge of the lake, the ice will flex upwards to compensate. “If the lake then drains, the ice shelf will now flex back, rising up where the lake used to be, sinking down around the edge,” said lead author Dr Alison Banwell, also from SPRI. “It is this filling and draining of lakes that causes the ice shelf to flex, and if the stresses are large enough, fractures might also develop.”

Banwell and co-author Professor Doug MacAyeal from the University of Chicago had previously suggestedthat the filling and draining of hundreds of lakes might have led to the catastrophic breakup of the Larsen B Ice Shelf 2002 when 3,250 square kilometres of ice was lost in just a few days.

“We had been able to model the rapid disintegration of that ice shelf via our meltwater loading-induced fracture mechanism,” said Banwell. “However, the problem was that no one had actually measured ice shelf flex and fracture in the field, and so we were unable to fully constrain the parameters in our model. That’s partly why we set out to try to measure the process on the McMurdo ice shelf.”

Using helicopters, snow machines and their own two feet, the researchers set up a series of pressure sensors to monitor the rise and fall of water levels in depressions which filled to become lakes, and GPS receivers to measure small vertical movements of the ice shelf.

“It was a lot of work to obtain the data, but they reveal a fascinating story,” said MacAyeal. “Most of the GPS signal is due to the ocean tides, which move the floating ice shelf up and down by several metres twice a day. But when we removed this tidal signal we found some GPS receivers moved down, then up by around one metre over a few weeks whereas others, just a few hundred metres away, hardly moved at all. The ones that moved down then up the most were situated where lakes were filling and draining, and there was relatively little movement away from the lakes. It is this differential vertical motion that shows the ice shelf is flexing. We’d anticipated this result, but it was very nice when we found it.”

The team hope that their work will inspire others to look for evidence of flex and fracture on other ice shelves around Antarctica. Their work will also help in developing ice sheet scale models that could be used to predict the stability of ice shelves in the future and to understand the controls on ice shelf size since they act as buffers against fast-moving ice from the continent. As ice shelves shrink, glaciers and ice streams behind them flow more rapidly to the ocean, contributing to global sea level rise.

The work was funded by the US National Science Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust, NASA, and CIRES, University of Colorado, Boulder.

Reference:
Alison F. Banwell et al. ‘Direct Measurements of Ice-Shelf Flexure caused by Surface Meltwater Ponding and Drainage.’ Nature Communications (2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-08522-5

The researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, used their algorithm to identify four new molecules that activate a protein which is thought to be relevant for symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia. The results are reported in the journal PNAS.

A key problem in drug discovery is predicting whether a molecule will activate a particular physiological process. It’s possible to build a statistical model by searching for chemical patterns shared among molecules known to activate that process, but the data to build these models is limited because experiments are costly and it is unclear which chemical patterns are statistically significant.

“Machine learning has made significant progress in areas such as computer vision where data is abundant,” said Dr Alpha Lee from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, and the study’s lead author. “The next frontier is scientific applications such as drug discovery, where the amount of data is relatively limited but we do have physical insights about the problem, and the question becomes how to marry data with fundamental chemistry and physics.”

The algorithm developed by Lee and his colleagues, in collaboration with biopharmaceutical company Pfizer, uses mathematics to separate pharmacologically relevant chemical patterns from irrelevant ones.

Importantly, the algorithm looks at both molecules known to be active and molecules known to be inactive and learns to recognise which parts of the molecules are important for drug action and which parts are not. A mathematical principle known as random matrix theory gives predictions about the statistical properties of a random and noisy dataset, which is then compared against the statistics of chemical features of active/inactive molecules to distil which chemical patterns are truly important for binding as opposed to arising simply by chance.

This methodology allows the researchers to fish out important chemical patterns not only from molecules that are active but also from molecules that are inactive – in other words, failed experiments can now be exploited with this technique.

The researchers built a model starting with 222 active molecules and were able to computationally screen an additional six million molecules. From this, the researchers purchased and screened the 100 most relevant molecules. From these, they identified four new molecules that activate the CHRM1 receptor, a protein that may be relevant for Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia.

“The ability to fish out four active molecules from six million is like finding a needle in a haystack,” said Lee. “A head-to-head comparison shows that our algorithm is twice as efficient as the industry standard.”

Making complex organic molecules is a significant challenge in chemistry, and potential drugs abound in the space of yet-unmakeable molecules. The Cambridge researchers are currently developing algorithms that predict ways to synthesise complex organic molecules, as well as extending the machine learning methodology to materials discovery.

The research was supported by the Winton Programme for the Physics of Sustainability.

Reference:
Alpha A. Lee et al. ‘Ligand biological activity predicted by cleaning positive and negative chemical correlations.’ PNAS (2019). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1810847116

Most people will at some point in their life experience one of many the downsides of excess drinking: the hangover. Importantly, hangovers can lead to reduced productivity, impaired performance (including missing work or academic underperformance) and even risk to daily tasks such driving or operating heavy machinery.

Hangover symptoms occur when higher-than-normal blood alcohol concentrations drop back to zero. Surprisingly, the phenomenon is not particularly understood, though it is thought that their underlying causes include dehydration, our immune response, and disturbances of our metabolism and hormone. Hangovers are likely to be influenced by ingredients other than the pure alcohol content. Colourings and flavourings have been suggested as making hangovers worse, which might explain why, at the same alcohol concentration, Bourbon causes a more severe hangover than vodka.

There are no effective hangover remedies – instead, societies appear to rely on folk remedies (such as ‘hair of the dog’) and old folk sayings. Such sayings exist in numerous languages: other examples in English include “Grape or grain, but never the twain”, while Germans claim “Wein auf Bier, das rat’ ich Dir—Bier auf Wein, das lass’ sein” and the French say “Bière sur vin est venin, vin sur bière est belle manière”.

There is little evidence available to support or refute these sayings, so, to put an end to this uncertainty, researchers at Witten/Herdecke University in Germany and the University of Cambridge in the UK evaluated scientifically whether or not this time-honoured wisdom truly reduces a hangover burden. The results of their study are published today in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Ninety volunteers, aged between 19 and 40 years old, were recruited and split into three groups. The first group consumed around two and a half pints of beer followed by four large glasses of wine. The second group consumed the same amounts of alcohol, but in reverse order. Subjects in the third, control group consumed either only beer or only wine.

The big strength of this study was its crossover design: a week later, participants in study groups one and two were switched to the opposite drinking order. Control group subjects who drank only beer the first time around received only wine on the second study day (and vice versa). This way, the groups were not only compared to each other, but each participant was their own control, too.

Participants were asked about their wellbeing at regular intervals and were asked to judge their perceived level of drunkenness on a scale between 0 and 10 at the end of each study day. Before going to bed at the study site, all participants received an individualised amount of refrigerated drinking-water tailored to their body weight. All volunteers were kept under medical supervision overnight.

The following day, participants were asked about their hangover and given a score from 0-56 (the so-called Acute Hangover Scale) based on factors including thirst, fatigue, headache, dizziness, nausea, stomach ache, increased heart rate and loss of appetite.

The researchers found that none of the three groups had a significantly different hangover score with different orders of alcoholic drinks. Women tended to have slightly worse hangovers than men. While neither blood and urine tests, nor factors such as age, sex, body weight, drinking habits and hangover frequency, helped to predict hangover intensity, vomiting and perceived drunkenness were associated with heavier hangover.

“Using white wine and lager beer, we didn’t find any truth in the idea that drinking beer before wine gives you a milder hangover than the other way around,” says first author Jöran Köchling from Witten/Herdecke University.

“The truth is that drinking too much of any alcoholic drink is likely to result in a hangover. The only reliable way of predicting how miserable you’ll feel the next day is by how drunk you feel and whether you are sick. We should all pay attention to these red flags when drinking.”

Dr Kai Hensel, a senior clinical fellow at the University of Cambridge and senior author of the study, adds: “Unpleasant as hangovers are, we should remember that they do have one important benefit, at least: they are a protective warning sign that will certainly have aided humans over the ages to change their future behaviour. In other words, they can help us learn from our mistakes.”

Dr Hensel says that there were two main reasons for carrying you the study. “Firstly,” he says, “a clear result in favour of one particular order could help to reduce hangovers and help many people have a better day after a long night out – though we encourage people to drink responsibly. Unfortunately, we found that there was no way to avoid the inevitable hangover just by favouring one order over another.

“But this study was also about showing, in a public-friendly manner, how a rigorously-conducted study can provide a solid answer to a specific question and be engaging at the same time. We hope it will help inspire next generation of young doctors and researchers to be engaged in a research-driven environment.”

Reference
Köchling, J et al. Grape or grain but never the twain? A randomized controlled multiarm matched-triplet crossover trial of beer and wine. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition; 8 Feb 2019; DOI: 10.1093/ajcn/nqy309

Some corners of the world teem with an extraordinary variety of life. Charles Darwin noted that: “The same spot will support more life if occupied by very diverse forms.”

The question of how these ‘hotspots’ of biodiversity – from California to the Galapagos – acquired such a wealth of species has long puzzled naturalists.

Now, scientists at the University of Cambridge have conducted a ‘big data’ study of almost all the world’s mammal and bird species to reveal the answer – and it’s very different depending on climate.

According to the study, tropical hotspots close to the equator have generated new species at a much faster rate than their surrounding areas during the last 25 million years of evolution.

However, biodiversity hotspots in more temperate northerly regions, such as the Mediterranean basin and Caucasus Mountains, are mainly populated with immigrant species that originated elsewhere.

Scientists say these migrants may have been escaping the effects of long-term “geological processes” such as vast encroaching glaciers. Warmer climes, as well as peninsulas and mountain ranges, could have offered shelter.

The researchers say that their new study, published today in the journal Science Advances, shows how these “contrasting macroevolutionary routes” have shaped the uneven distribution of species across the planet.

“We’ve known for decades that just a subset of places on Earth, no more than 20%, contain about half of all vertebrate species. However, we lacked the tools and data to understand why these patterns exist,” said senior author Dr Andrew Tanentzap, from Cambridge’s Department of Plant Sciences.

“Large-scale initiatives to map species across the planet and in the Tree of Life, as well as advances in computing, are expanding our understanding of evolution in exciting ways. This study can now provide an answer to the old question of why diversity varies so much across the world.”

Cambridge scientists used new computational techniques to combine several giant datasets. These included the global distribution of 11,093 bird species and 5,302 mammals, and detailed evolutionary trees that track the origin of thousands of organisms through deep time.

In this way, the researchers were able to analyse the development of particularly species-rich areas within each of the Earth’s great “biogeographical regions” – from Australasia to the Nearctic.

They found that biodiversity hotspots in the tropics, such as South American forests and Indonesian islands, had higher rates of “speciation” – the formation of new and distinct species – over the last 25 million years.

For example, speciation rates for birds in hotspots of the Indo-Malay region were, on average, 36% higher than that region’s non-hotspot areas. Hotspots in the Neotropics had almost 28% greater bird speciation compared to non-hotspots.

“Species generation is faster in the tropics, but we can now see it is extra-quick in these hotspots of biodiversity,” said study lead author Dr Javier Igea, also from Cambridge’s Department of Plant Sciences.

“More rainfall and hotter temperatures bolster the ecosystems of tropical hotspots, producing more plants, more animals that feed on those plants, and so on,” he said.

“The greater available energy and range of habitats within these hotspots supported the acceleration of species diversification.”

The tropical hotspot of Madagascar, for example, holds 12 species of true lemur that diversified in the last ten million years. All of the 17 species of earthworm mice endemic to the Philippines were generated in the last six million years.

The famously diverse finches Darwin found in the Galapagos Islands, as featured in his revolutionary book On the Origin of Species, are an iconic example of rapid speciation in a tropical hotspot.

However, when it came to the more temperate regions of the Nearctic (North America) and Palearctic (Eurasia and North Africa), the researchers discovered a different story.

While the hotspots of these regions also had a wider range of resource and habitat than neighbouring areas, the data from the evolutionary – or phylogenetic – trees revealed that most of their animals “speciated” somewhere else.

“Biodiversity hotspots in temperate zones have been shaped mainly by migration that occurred during the last 25 million years,” said Igea.

“We suspect that this influx of immigrant species resulted from climate fluctuations across millions of years, particularly cooling. Biodiversity hotspots may have acted as a refuge where more species could survive in harsh climatic conditions,” he said.

Igea points to species such as the Iberian lynx, now a native of the Mediterranean Basin hotspot, but found in central Europe during the Pleistocene – prior to the last Ice Age.

Or the yellow-billed magpie, which became isolated in California after becoming separated from its ancestral species – most likely due to glaciations – over three million years ago.

“We found that hotspots across the world all have a greater complexity of habitats and more environmental energy, but the processes that drive the biodiversity are very different for tropical and temperate zones,” Igea said.

For Tanentzap, the importance of species migration in temperate regions suggests that maintaining connectivity between hotspots should be a priority for future conservation efforts.

“Many of these hotspot regions have species found nowhere else on Earth, yet face devastating levels of habitat loss. Protecting these areas is vital to conserving the natural world’s diversity,” he said.

Reference
Igea, J et al. Multiple macroevolutionary routes to becoming a biodiversity hotspot. Science Advances; 6 Feb 2019; DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aau8067​

The funding, from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and industrial and institutional partners, will support the establishment of five new CDTs at Cambridge. The University will be a partner institution in an additional four new CDTs. The results of the latest CDT funding round were announced today by EPSRC at an event in London.

In total, EPSRC is supporting 75 new CDTs across the UK, representing a total investment of £446 million. The Centres’ 1,400 project partners have contributed £386 million in cash and in-kind support, and include companies such as Tata Steel and Procter and Gamble and charities such as Cancer Research UK. The funding represents one of the UK’s most significant investments in research skills.

Science and Innovation Minister Chris Skidmore said: “As we explore new research to boost our economy with an increase of over £7 billion invested in R&D over five years to 2021/22 – the highest increase for over 40 years – we will need skilled people to turn ideas into inventions that can have a positive impact on our daily lives.

“The Centres for Doctoral Training at universities across the country will offer the next generation of PhD students the ability to get ahead of the curve. In addition, this has resulted in nearly £400 million being leveraged from industry partners. This is our modern Industrial Strategy in action, ensuring all corners of the UK thrive with the skills they need for the jobs of tomorrow.

“As Science Minister, I’m delighted we’re making this massive investment in postgraduate students as part of our increased investment in R&D.”

CDT students are funded for four years and the programme includes technical and transferrable skills training as well as a research element. The centres bring together diverse areas of expertise to provide engineers and scientists with the skills, knowledge and confidence to tackle today’s evolving issues and future challenges.

The importance of developing STEM skills is a key part of the Government’s Industrial Strategy, ensuring that all areas of the UK embrace innovation and build the skills the economy needs to thrive.

The five Cambridge-led CDTs are:

• CDT in Future Propulsion and Power, led by Dr Graham Pullan (Department of Engineering)
• CDT in Integrated Functional Nano (i4Nano), led by Professor Jeremy Baumberg (Department of Physics)
• CDT in Future Infrastructure and Built Environment: Resilience in a Changing World (FIBE2), led by Professor Abir Al-Tabbaa (Department of Engineering)
• CDT in Sensor Technologies for a Healthy and Sustainable Future, led by Professor Clemens Kaminski (Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology)
• CDT in Automated Chemical Synthesis Enabled by Digital Molecular Technologies, led by Professor Matthew Gaunt (Department of Chemistry)

The first cohort of students in the new CDTs will begin their studies in October.

Professor Lynn Gladden, EPSRC’s Executive Chair, said: “The UK’s research base makes the discoveries that lead to innovations and these can improve lives and generate income for the UK. Centres for Doctoral Training have already proven to be successful in attracting the world’s brightest minds and industry support to address the scientific and engineering challenges we face. This new cadre will continue to build on previous investment.”

The international team of researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, say that their results, reported in the journal Physical Review Letters, will aid in understanding the dynamic relationship between the electronic and structural properties of the material, sometimes referred to as ‘magnetic graphene’, and may represent a new way to produce two-dimensional materials.

Magnetic graphene, or iron trithiohypophosphate (FePS₃), is from a family of materials known as van der Waals materials, and was first synthesised in the 1960s. In the past decade however, researchers have started looking at FePS₃ with fresh eyes. Similar to graphene – a two-dimensional form of carbon – FePS₃ can be ‘exfoliated’ into ultra-thin layers. Unlike graphene however, FePS₃ is magnetic.

The expression for electrons’ intrinsic source of magnetism is known as ‘spin’. Spin makes electrons behave a bit like tiny bar magnets and point a certain way. Magnetism from the arrangement of electron spins is used in most memory devices, and is important for developing new technologies such as spintronics, which could transform the way in which computers process information.

Despite graphene’s extraordinary strength and conductivity, the fact that it is not magnetic limits its application in areas such as magnetic storage and spintronics, and so researchers have been searching for magnetic materials which could be incorporated with graphene-based devices.

For their study, the Cambridge researchers squashed layers of FePS₃ together under high pressure (about 10 Gigapascals), they found that it switched between an insulator and conductor, a phenomenon known as a Mott transition. The conductivity could also be tuned by changing the pressure.

These materials are characterised by weak mechanical forces between the planes of their crystal structure. Under pressure, the planes are pressed together, gradually and controllable pushing the system from three to two dimensions, and from insulator to metal.

The researchers also found that even in two dimensions, the material retained its magnetism. “Magnetism in two dimensions is almost against the laws of physics due to the destabilising effect of fluctuations, but in this material, it seems to be true,” said Dr Sebastian Haines from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences and Department of Physics, and the paper’s first author.

The materials are inexpensive, non-toxic and easy to synthesise, and with further research, could be incorporated into graphene-based devices.

“We are continuing to study these materials in order to build a solid theoretical understanding of their properties,” said Haines. “This understanding will eventually underpin the engineering of devices, but we need good experimental clues in order to give the theory a good starting point. Our work points to an exciting direction for producing two-dimensional materials with tuneable and conjoined electrical, magnetic and electronic properties.”

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

Reference:
C.R.S. Haines et al. ‘Pressure-Induced Electronic and Structural Phase Evolution in the van der Waals Compound FePS₃.’ Physical Review Letters (2018). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.266801