Tiny copper ‘nano-flowers’ have been attached to an artificial leaf to produce clean fuels and chemicals that are the backbone of modern energy and manufacturing.
The researchers, from the University of Cambridge and the University of California, Berkeley, developed a practical way to make hydrocarbons – molecules made of carbon and hydrogen – powered solely by the sun.
The device they developed combines a light absorbing ‘leaf’ made from a high-efficiency solar cell material called perovskite, with a copper nanoflower catalyst, to convert carbon dioxide into useful molecules. Unlike most metal catalysts, which can only convert CO₂ into single-carbon molecules, the copper flowers enable the formation of more complex hydrocarbons with two carbon atoms, such as ethane and ethylene — key building blocks for liquid fuels, chemicals and plastics.
Almost all hydrocarbons currently stem from fossil fuels, but the method developed by the Cambridge-Berkeley team results in clean chemicals and fuels made from CO2, water and glycerol – a common organic compound – without any additional carbon emissions. The results are reported in the journal Nature Catalysis.
The study builds on the team’s earlier work on artificial leaves, which take their inspiration from photosynthesis: the process by which plants convert sunlight into food. “We wanted to go beyond basic carbon dioxide reduction and produce more complex hydrocarbons, but that requires significantly more energy,” said Dr Virgil Andrei from Cambridge’s Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, the study’s lead author.
Andrei, a Research Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge, carried out the work as part of the Winton Cambridge-Kavli ENSI Exchange programme in the lab of Professor Peidong Yang at University of California, Berkeley.
By coupling a perovskite light absorber with the copper nanoflower catalyst, the team was able to produce more complex hydrocarbons. To further improve efficiency and overcome the energy limits of splitting water, the team added silicon nanowire electrodes that can oxidise glycerol instead. This new platform produces hydrocarbons much more effectively — 200 times better than earlier systems for splitting water and carbon dioxide.
The reaction not only boosts CO₂ reduction performance, but also produces high-value chemicals such as glycerate, lactate, and formate, which have applications in pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and chemical synthesis.
“Glycerol is typically considered waste, but here it plays a crucial role in improving the reaction rate,” said Andrei. “This demonstrates we can apply our platform to a wide range of chemical processes beyond just waste conversion. By carefully designing the catalyst’s surface area, we can influence what products we generate, making the process more selective.”
While current CO₂-to-hydrocarbon selectivity remains around 10%, the researchers are optimistic about improving catalyst design to increase efficiency. The team envisions applying their platform to even more complex organic reactions, opening doors for innovation in sustainable chemical production. With continued improvements, this research could accelerate the transition to a circular, carbon-neutral economy.
“This project is an excellent example of how global research partnerships can lead to impactful scientific advancements,” said Andrei. “By combining expertise from Cambridge and Berkeley, we’ve developed a system that may reshape the way we produce fuels and valuable chemicals sustainably.”
The research was supported in part by the Winton Programme for the Physics of Sustainability, St John’s College, the US Department of Energy, the European Research Council, and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).
A 13th-century fresco rediscovered in Ferrara, Italy, puts Islamic art at the heart of medieval Christianity
The 700-year-old fresco is thought to bethe only surviving image of its kind, offering precious evidence of a little-known Christian practice.
Right wall of the apse
The partially-visible fresco, identified by Cambridge historian Dr Federica Gigante, almost certainly depicts a real tent, now lost, which the artist may have seen in the same church.
The brightly coloured original tent, covered in jewels, could have been a diplomatic gift from a Muslim leader or a trophy seized from the battlefield.
Gigante’s research, published in The Burlington Magazine, also suggests that a high-profile figure such as Pope Innocent IV – who gifted several precious textiles to the Benedictine convent church of S. Antonio in Polesine, Ferrara, where the fresco was painted – may have given such a tent.
“At first, it seemed unbelievable and just too exciting that this could be an Islamic tent,” said Dr Gigante.
“I quickly dismissed the idea and only went back to it years later with more experience and a braver attitude to research. We probably won’t find another such surviving image. I haven’t stopped looking but my guess is that it is fairly unique.”
The fresco provides crucial evidence of a medieval church using Islamic tents in key Christian practices, including mass, the study suggests.
“Islamic textiles were associated with the Holy Land from where pilgrims and crusaders brought back the most precious such Islamic textiles,” Gigante said.
“They thought there existed artistic continuity from the time of Christ so their use in a Christian context was more than justified. Christians in medieval Europe admired Islamic art without fully realising it.”
While it is well known that Islamic textiles were present in late medieval European churches, surviving fragments are usually found wrapped around relics or in the burials of important people.
Depictions of Islamic textiles survive, in traces, on some church walls in Italy as well as in Italian paintings of the late medieval period. But images of Islamic tents from the Western Islamic world, such as Spain, are extremely rare and this might be the only detailed, full-size depiction to be identified.
The fresco was painted between the late 13th and early 14th centuries to represent a canopy placed over the high altar. The artist transformed the apse into a tent comprising a blue and golden drapery wrapped around the three walls and topped by a double-tier bejewelled conical canopy of the type found throughout the Islamic world.
“The artist put a lot of effort into making the textile appear life-like,” Gigante said.
The background was a blue sky covered in starsand birds, giving the impression of a tent erected out in the open.
In the early 15th century, the fresco was partly painted over with scenes from the lives of the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ. This later fresco has captured the attention of art historians who have overlooked the sections of older fresco.
Gigante identified the depiction of Islamic textiles when she visited the church ten years ago but ittook further research to prove that the fresco represents an Islamic tent.
Dr Federica Gigante examining part of the fresco
A real altar-tent
Gigante argues that the fresco depicts an Islamic tent which actually existed and that at some point in the 13th century, may even have been physically present in the convent church, providing a direct reference point for the artist.
It is already known that medieval churches used precious textile hangings to conceal the altar from view either permanently, during Mass or for specific liturgical periods. And when studying the fresco, Gigante noticed that it depicts the corner of a veil, painted as if drawn in front of the altar. Gigante, therefore, believes that the real tent was adapted to serve as a ‘tetravela’, altar-curtains.
“If the real tent was only erected in the church on certain occasions, the fresco could have served as a visual reminder of its splendour when it was not in place,” Gigante said.
“The interplay between painted and actual textiles can be found throughout Europe and the Islamic world in the late medieval period.”
Gigante’s study notes that the walls of the apse are studded with nails and brackets, and that they could have served as structural supports for a hanging textile.
Gigante points to the fresco’s ‘extraordinarily precise details’ as further evidence that it depicts a real tent. The fabric shown in the fresco features blue eight-pointed star motifs inscribed in roundels, the centre of which was originally picked out in gold leaf, exactly like the golden fabrics used for such precious Islamic tents.
A band with pseudo-Arabic inscriptions runs along the edge of both the top and bottom border. The textile also features white contours to emphasise contrasting colours reflecting a trend in 13th-century Andalusi silk design.
The structure, design and colour scheme of the tent closely resemble the few surviving depictions of Andalusi tents, including in the 13th-century manuscript, the Cantigas de Santa Maria. They also match one of the few potential surviving Andalusi tent fragments, the ‘Fermo chasuble’, which is said to have belonged to St Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury.
Gigante also compares the jewels depicted in the fresco with a rare surviving jewelled textile made by Arab craftsmen, the mantle of the Norman King Roger II of Sicily (1095–1154), which was embroidered with gold and applied with pearls, gemstones and cloisonné enamel.
Star motifs with pseudo-Arabic inscriptions above
Spoils of war
In the 13th century, it was common for banners and other spoils of war to be displayed around church altars in Europe.
“Tents, especially Islamic royal tents were among the most prized gifts in diplomatic exchanges, the most prominent royal insignia on campsites and the most sought-after spoils on battlefields,” Gigante said.
“Tents made their way into Europe as booty. During anti-Muslim expeditions, it was common to pay mercenaries in textiles and a tent was the ultimate prize.
“The fresco matches descriptions of royal Islamic tents which were seized during the wars of Christian expansion into al-Andalus in the 13th century.”
The Persian ambassador presenting Sultan Murad III a tent as a gift (16thC).
Gift from a Pope?
From the 9th century, Popesoften donated Tetravela (altar-curtains) to churches and papal records reveal that by 1255, Pope Innocent IV had sent ‘draperies of the finest silk and gold fabrics’ to the convent of S. Antonio in Polesine.
“We can’t be certain but it is possible that a person of high-profile such as Pope Innocent IV gifted the tent,” Gigante says.
An Andalusi tent taken from the campsite of the Almohad caliph Muhammad al-Nāsir was sent to Pope Innocent III after 1212 meaning that there was an Islamic tent in St Peter’s Basilica at some point prior to the painting of the fresco.
Gigante suggests that the tent could also have been part of a diplomatic gift made to the powerful Este family which brokered alliances between the Guelfs and Ghibellins, factions supporting the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor respectively. The convent was founded in 1249 by Beatrice II d’Este.
“Many people don’t realize how extraordinarily advanced and admired Islamic culture was in the medieval period,” Gigante said.
Last year Dr Gigante identified the Verona Astrolabe, an eleventh-century Islamic astrolabe bearing both Arabic and Hebrew inscriptions.
Federica Gigante: Fresco images Yale University Art Gallery: Pope Innocent IV Istanbul University Library: Persian ambassador presenting tent, from MS FY 1404 Istanbul, fol.43b Geobia: Church of S. Antonio exterior (under a CC license via Wikipedia)
The University of Cambridge has been named as the leading UK university in a new report on the top 50 universities powering global innovation.
Cambridge has a thriving community of spin-outs, start-ups and partnerships that demonstrates how academia and industry can work together to transform ideas into real-world impactDeborah Prentice
The report, carried out by analytics firm Clarivate, looks at the critical role of research in shaping global industrial innovation and societal impact, using data and expert insights derived from academic research and patent citations.
The report highlights how knowledge flows between academia and industry across countries and regions, underscoring the global nature of innovation. It identifies the top 50 universities named on the academic papers that received the highest number of citations from patents granted to the companies and organisations on the Top 100 Global Innovators 2024 list.
Professor Deborah Prentice, Vice-Chancellor, University of Cambridge, said: “Cambridge has a thriving community of spin-outs, start-ups and partnerships that demonstrates how academia and industry can work together to transform ideas into real-world impact. The University is key to this, and we are developing hugely ambitious plans that will transform the UK economy and reinforce the UK’s status as a leader in global innovation.”
The report comes the day after Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves unveiled her strategy to unleash the potential of the Oxford-Cambridge Growth Corridor by catalysing the growth of UK science and technology. The plan recognises the University of Cambridge as the world’s leading science and technological cluster by intensity, and its potential to rapidly build on the £30bn contribution it already makes to the UK economy.
According to the report, the top 10 universities influencing patented inventions are:
Harvard University (US)
Stanford University (US)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology – MIT (US)
University of California, Berkeley (US)
Université Paris Cité (France)
University of Cambridge (UK)
University of Washington, Seattle (US)
University of California, San Diego (US)
University of Michigan (US)
University of Toronto (Canada)
Among the report’s key findings was that the UK demonstrates particularly diverse international influence, with its research often serving as a bridge across regions.
Gordon Rogers, report author and Senior Manager, Data Science at the Institute for Scientific Information at Clarivate, said: “Groundbreaking ideas driving the world’s most innovative companies often originate from academic research. Our report demonstrates that by fostering collaboration between academia and industry, we can fuel technological advancements, providing solutions to societal challenges in healthcare, sustainability, and economic development.”
When young adults start working, the amount of daily physical activity they do increases sharply, only to fall away again over the next few years, while the amount of sleep they get falls slightly, according to new research led by scientists at the University of Cambridge.
If we want to stay healthy throughout our lives, we need to remember that keeping active is an important way of helping us achieve this goalAlena Oxenham
The increase in physical activity was mainly seen in those doing semi-routine occupations such as bus driving or hairdressing, and routine occupations such as cleaning or waiting, or technical jobs. There was little change seen among people entering managerial or professional occupations.
People who work from home saw a decrease in levels of physical activity – though their sleep levels did not change when they started work.
Young adulthood – ages 16 to 30 years – is an important time in terms of health. Although we are typically at our peak physical health, it is also a time when many risk factors for long term diseases such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes and cancer begin to develop.
Health guidelines recommend young adults get between seven and nine hours of sleep a night, engage in 150 minutes or more of moderate physical activity per week, and consume at least five portions of fruit and vegetables per day.
Young adulthood is also the time when most people start work, which changes their daily routines and activities, resources such as time and money, and social and physical environments – all of which affect health behaviours and health in later life.
To quantify the impact that starting work has on health-related behaviours, a team led by researchers at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge examined repeated data taken over time from more than 3,000 participants in the UK Household Longitudinal Study. All the participants were aged 16–30 years and started work for the first time between 2015 and 2023.
The results are published today in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity.
Dr Eleanor Winpenny, who was based at the University of Cambridge when she carried out the work, but is now at Imperial College London, said: “We know about physical activity and sleep patterns among young people while they’re at school, but very little about what happens when they start work. Given the impact that work can have on our lives – and the lasting impacts this can have on our health – it’s important to try and understand what happens at this transition.”
The analysis showed that when people started work, their physical activity increased by an amount equivalent to around 28 min of moderate activity (such as cycling) per day on average – but then decreased each year after starting work by around 7 min per day.
The biggest increase was among males – up by an equivalent of around 45 min of moderate activity per day compared to an increase of around 16 min for females. People who did not have a university degree also showed a greater increase in physical activity compared to those with a university degree – equivalent to around a 42 min increase of moderate physical activity per day compared to 15 min per day.
Working from home, however, appeared to be associated with an initial decrease in physical activity, equivalent to around 32 min of moderate activity per day.
When young adults started work, the amount of time they slept per night dropped immediately by almost 10 minutes and remained stable at this level over time; however, people without a degree showed a continuing decrease of about 3 minutes of sleep per night each year after starting work, while those with a degree slowly increased back to their pre-work sleep levels.
There was little change in the amount of fruit and vegetables consumed after starting work.
Alena Oxenham, from the MRC Epidemiology Unit, said: “Beginning work can have a profound impact on our lifestyles and on behaviours that might make a difference to our health, if not immediately then later in life.
“Although we found that people tend to do more physical activity when they begin work, which is good news, these are averages, and some people – particularly those who work from home and, to a lesser degree, those with office-based jobs – may do less.
“If we want to stay healthy throughout our lives, we need to remember that keeping active is an important way of helping us achieve this goal. Those working at home might want to consider incorporating physical activity into their day, for example by going for a walk before or after work, or during a lunch break.”
Dr Winpenny added: “Workplaces provide an opportunity to create environments and cultures that support healthier diets, more physical activity and better sleep for young adults. This could result in healthier employees and fewer sick days in the immediate term, but also have long term benefits, helping prevent health issues in later life.”
The research was funded by the MRC and the National Institute for Health and Care Research.
Antibiotics, antivirals, vaccinations and anti-inflammatory medication are associated with reduced risk of dementia, according to new research that looked at health data from over 130 million individuals.
We urgently need new treatments to slow the progress of dementia, if not to prevent it. If we can find drugs that are already licensed for other conditions, then we can get them into trials much faster than we could do for an entirely new drugBen Underwood
The study, led by researchers from the universities of Cambridge and Exeter, identified several drugs already licensed and in use that have the potential to be repurposed to treat dementia.
Dementia is a leading cause of death in the UK and can lead to profound distress in the individual and among those caring for them. It has been estimated to have a worldwide economic cost in excess of US$1 trillion dollars.
Despite intensive efforts, progress in identifying drugs that can slow or even prevent dementia has been disappointing. Until recently, dementia drugs were effective only for symptoms and have a modest effect. Recently, lecanemab and donanemab have been shown to reduce the build-up in the brain of amyloid plaques – a key characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease – and to slow down progression of the disease, but the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) concluded that the benefits were insufficient to justify approval for use within the NHS.
Scientists are increasingly turning to existing drugs to see if they may be repurposed to treat dementia. As the safety profile of these drugs is already known, the move to clinical trials can be accelerated significantly.
Dr Ben Underwood, from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge and Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust, said: “We urgently need new treatments to slow the progress of dementia, if not to prevent it. If we can find drugs that are already licensed for other conditions, then we can get them into trials and – crucially – may be able to make them available to patients much, much faster than we could do for an entirely new drug. The fact they are already available is likely to reduce cost and therefore make them more likely to be approved for use in the NHS.”
In a study published today in Alzheimer’s and Dementia: Translational Research & Clinical Interventions, Dr Underwood, together with Dr Ilianna Lourida from the University of Exeter, led a systematic review of existing scientific literature to look for evidence of prescription drugs that altered the risk of dementia. Systematic reviews allow researchers to pool several studies where evidence may be weak, or even contradictory, to arrive at more robust conclusions.
In total, the team examined 14 studies that used large clinical datasets and medical records, capturing data from more than 130 million individuals and 1 million dementia cases. Although they found a lack of consistency between studies in identifying individual drugs that affect the risk of dementia, they identified several drug classes associated with altered risk.
One unexpected finding was an association between antibiotics, antivirals and vaccines, and a reduced risk of dementia. This finding supports the hypothesis that common dementias may be triggered by viral or bacterial infections, and supports recent interest in vaccines, such as the BCG vaccine for tuberculosis, and decreased risk of dementia.
Anti-inflammatory drugs such as ibuprofen were also found to be associated with reduced risk. Inflammation is increasingly being seen to be a significant contributor to a wide range of diseases, and its role in dementia is supported by the fact that some genes that increase the risk of dementia are part of inflammatory pathways.
The team found conflicting evidence for several classes of drugs, with some blood pressure medications and anti-depressants and, to a lesser extent, diabetes medication associated with a decreased risk of dementia and others associated with increased risk.
Dr Ilianna Lourida from the National Institute for Health and Care Research Applied Research Collaboration South West Peninsula (PenARC), University of Exeter, said: “Because a particular drug is associated with an altered risk of dementia, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it causes or indeed helps in dementia. We know that diabetes increases your risk of dementia, for example, so anyone on medication to manage their glucose levels would naturally also be at a higher risk of dementia – but that doesn’t mean the drug increases your risk.
“It’s important to remember that all drugs have benefits and risks. You should never change your medicine without discussing this first with your doctor, and you should speak to them if you have any concerns.”
The conflicting evidence may also reflect differences in how particular studies were conducted and how data was collected, as well as the fact that different medications even within the same class often target different biological mechanisms.
The UK government is supporting the development of an Alzheimer’s trial platform to evaluate drugs rapidly and efficiently, including repurposed drugs currently used for other conditions.
“Pooling these massive health data sets provides one source of evidence which we can use to help us focus on which drugs we should try first,” said Dr Underwood. “We’re hopeful this will mean we can find some much-needed new treatments for dementia and speed up the process of getting them to patients.”
Cambridge University Botanic Garden Credit: Howard Rice
The world’s botanic gardens must pull together to protect global plant biodiversity in the face of the extinction crisis, amid restrictions on wild-collecting, say researchers.
A concerted, collaborative effort across the world’s botanic gardens is now needed to conserve a genetically diverse range of plants.Samuel Brockington
A major study of botanic gardens around the world has revealed their struggles with one fundamental aim: to safeguard the world’s most threatened plants from extinction.
Researchers analysed a century’s worth of records – from 1921 to 2021 – from fifty botanic gardens and arboreta currently growing half a million plants, to see how the world’s living plant collections have changed over time.
The results suggest that the world’s living collections have collectively reached peak capacity, and that restrictions on wild plant collecting around the world are hampering efforts to gather plant diversity on the scale needed to study and protect it.
There is little evidence that institutions are managing to conserve threatened plants within collections, on a global scale, despite accelerating rates of elevated extinction risk.
The findings imply that tackling the loss of biodiversity has not been prioritised across the world’s botanic gardens as a collective – a fact the researchers say must be urgently addressed.
Curator of Cambridge University Botanic Garden Professor Samuel Brockington, who led the work, said: “A concerted, collaborative effort across the world’s botanic gardens is now needed to conserve a genetically diverse range of plants, and to make them available for research and future reintroduction into the wild.”
In their report, published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, the researchers say the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) has effectively halved the level at which plants are being collected from the wild, and also created obstacles to the international exchange of plants.
Brockington, who is also Professor of Evolution in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Plant Sciences, said: “The impact of the Convention on Biological Diversity is a remarkable demonstration of the power and value of international agreements. But it seems to be preventing individual botanic gardens from working with many globally threatened plant species that we could help save from extinction.”
Collective thinking
As much as 40% of the world’s plant diversity is at elevated risk of extinction. Acceptance that individual collections have limited capacity to single-handedly prevent species extinction demands a rethink as to how they collaborate to store and safeguard diversity in living collections.
The researchers say it will be vital for the living collections to be considered as a ‘meta-collection’ in future: only by working closely together will the world’s botanic gardens be able to hold the range of plants needed to make a meaningful contribution to conservation efforts. This will include sharing data and expertise and supporting the development of new collections in the global south, where much of the world’s biodiversity is located.
The researchers point out that some individual institutions, like the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh, have successfully targeted and measurably conserved threatened conifer species. Similarly, Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI) has established numerous global conservation consortia. However, these initiatives are the exception.
Wild decline
Plants must be regularly replaced or propagated within living collections: the average lifetime of a specimen is just 15 years. But the team’s analysis found that the number of wild-origin plants – those collected in the wild – in the collections peaked in 1993 and has been in decline ever since.
“It is certainly not getting any easier to sustain the diversity of our collections. This is especially true for wild-collected plants, and they’re the most valuable for us in terms for supporting research, and in finding solutions to the twin challenges of climate change and global biodiversity loss,” said Brockington.
Weather worries
As climate change alters growing conditions in different regions of the world, it will become more challenging for individual botanic gardens to continue to grow such a diverse range of species.
Brockington said: “Climate change affects our work directly by altering local weather conditions – we’ve already seen record-breaking temperatures in Cambridge in recent years. That’s going to affect how well our plants survive, so we need to think rationally and collectively about the best locations to hold different species across the global network of living collections.”
On 25 July 2019, Cambridge University Botanic Garden reached 38.70C – the highest temperature ever recorded in the UK at that time.
Diversity is key
Genetic diversity is important when it comes to protecting plants at risk of extinction, because it allows for breeding populations of species that can adapt to future challenges.
The more individual plants of a particular species in a collection, the greater the genetic diversity is likely to be.
The team says data from the International Conifer Conservation Programme, run by the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, shows that living collections can make a valuable contribution to conservation efforts – given the right resource and focus. By distributing threatened species across a network of safe sites, the trees are grown where they grow best, and as a whole they represent a strong sample of the genetic diversity of this important group. Ethical collecting
Last year, Cambridge University Botanic Garden advertised for a new ‘Expedition Botanist’ to lead global plant-collection expeditions and contribute to vital conservation efforts.
Brockington says these expeditions remain vital to work to safeguard and study the world’s plant species. He suggests that collaborative collecting work is possible, in a fair and ethical way, that builds equitable international partnerships.
The CBD is a global agreement, signed by 150 government leaders in 1992, dedicated to promoting sustainable development. It makes each country responsible for protecting its own biodiversity, and supports fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the use of that biodiversity.
There are 3,500 botanic gardens and arboreta worldwide. They exist so that scientists can study, conserve and provide access to the world’s plants, as well as showcasing them to the public.
Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI) is a charity whose purpose is to mobilise botanic gardens and engage partners in securing plant diversity for the wellbeing of people and the planet.
Cambridge researchers are developing implants that could help repair the brain pathways damaged by Parkinson’s disease.
Our ultimate goal is to create precise brain therapies that can restore normal brain function in people with Parkinson’sGeorge Malliaras
As part of a £69 million funding programme supported by the Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA), Professor George Malliaras from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering will co-lead a project that uses small clusters of brain cells called midbrain organoids to develop a new type of brain implant, which will be tested in animal models of Parkinson’s disease.
The project led by Malliaras and Professor Roger Barker from the Department of Clinical Neurosciences, which involves colleagues from the University of Oxford, the University of Lund and BIOS Health, is one of 18 projects funded by ARIA as part of its Precision Neurotechnologies programme, which is supporting research teams across academia, non-profit R&D organisations, and startups dedicated to advancing brain-computer interface technologies.
The programme will direct £69 million over four years to unlock new methods for interfacing with the human brain at the neural circuit level, to treat many of the most complex neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders, from Alzheimer’s to epilepsy to depression.
By addressing bottlenecks in funding and the lack of precision offered by current approaches, the outputs of this programme will pave the way for addressing a much broader range of conditions than ever before, significantly reducing the social and economic impact of brain disorders across the UK.
Parkinson’s disease occurs when the brain cells that make dopamine (a chemical that helps control movement) die off, causing movement problems and other symptoms. Current treatments, like dopamine-based drugs, work well early on, but can cause serious side effects over time.
In the UK, 130,000 people have Parkinson’s disease, and it costs affected families about £16,000 per year on average – more than £2 billion in the UK annually. As more people age, the number of cases will grow, and new treatments are urgently needed.
One idea is to replace the lost dopamine cells by transplanting new ones into the brain. But these cells need to connect properly to the brain’s network to fix the problem, and current methods don’t fully achieve that.
In the ARIA-funded project, Malliaras and his colleagues are working on a new approach using small clusters of brain cells called midbrain organoids. These will be placed in the right part of the brain in an animal model of Parkinson’s disease. They’ll also use advanced materials and electrical stimulation to help the new cells connect and rebuild the damaged pathways.
“Our ultimate goal is to create precise brain therapies that can restore normal brain function in people with Parkinson’s,” said Malliaras.
“To date, there’s been little serious investment into methodologies that interface precisely with the human brain, beyond ‘brute force’ approaches or highly invasive implants,” said ARIA Programme Director Jacques Carolan. “We’re showing that it’s possible to develop elegant means of understanding, identifying, and treating many of the most complex and devastating brain disorders. Ultimately, this could deliver transformative impact for people with lived experiences of brain disorders.”
Other teams funded by the programme include one at Imperial College London who is developing an entirely new class of biohybridised technology focused on engineering transplanted neurons with bioelectric components. A Glasgow-led team will build advanced neural robots for closed-loop neuromodulation, specifically targeting epilepsy treatment, while London-based Navira will develop a technology for delivering gene therapies across the blood-brain barrier, a crucial step towards developing safer and more effective treatments.
Autistic people in the UK are being invited to participate in a University of Cambridge-led project exploring the uniquely powerful connection between autism and comics.
Too often the question of how to support autistic people is addressed from a deficit perspectiveProf Jenny Gibson
The study will lead to new guidance encouraging both the comics industry and enthusiasts to make comics communities better places for neurodivergent fans and artists. It is being led by academics at the University’s Faculty of Education and will begin this month with an open, online survey aimed at autistic comics fans.
Research by the Comics Cultural Impact Collective (CCIC) – which will also be part of the collaboration – indicates that hundreds of young people self-identifying as neurodivergent are involved in Britain’s comics community, either as fans or creators.
The CCIC also suggests, however, that neurodivergent enthusiasts often find spaces like fan conventions, comic book stores, online communities and the comics industry less than welcoming, and frequently feel ‘siloed’. How to address that – and what it is about comics that attracts so many autistic people in the first place – have never been fully explored.
The online survey will begin to answer these questions by collecting information from autistic comics fans and creators. Professor Jenny Gibson, an expert in neurodiversity and autism and one of the project’s academic leads, described it as “kick-starting a wider conversation about comics and autism”.
“Comics seem to have massive appeal for a surprising number of autistic people, and many of them are not just fans but enormously talented cartoonists, artists and illustrators,” Gibson said.
“This is something the comics community is increasingly aware of, and there is a lot of enthusiasm for becoming better allies for autistic people. What we lack is information about how we can best do that, partly because we don’t know enough about the perspectives and experiences of autistic comics enthusiasts.”
The project is called “The Collaboration for Comics and Autism”. As well as the CCIC, Gibson and co-lead Dr Joe Sutliff Sanders will be working with the Lakes International Comic Art Festival, Dekko Comics (a specialist publisher supporting neurodivergent learners), the Association of Illustrators, the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration and autistic cartoonists Bex Ollerton and Eliza Fricker.
Beyond this, they want to involve as many autistic artists and fans as possible by gathering their experiences of engaging with comics culture and of the opportunities and barriers they have encountered.
Various explanations have been proposed for why comics seem to have such appeal for autistic people. Dekko Comics argues on its website that many autistic young people, who may often find verbal communication challenging, respond positively to the clear and accessible sensory material in comics, which may be an important bridge between their inner and outer worlds. Research by Dr Neil Cohn suggests that over 90% of children with autism spectrum disorder and language disorders enjoy comics, compared with about 60% of neurotypical children.
Comics and art also provide many autistic people with a valuable outlet for self-expression. The Cambridge project, for example, originated from a workshop at the People’s History Museum in Manchester for autistic comics artists, which Gibson and Sanders co-led with the editor of Sensory: Life on the Spectrum, an anthology by dozens of autistic creators.
Sanders, a leading comics scholar, also highlights the richly detailed imaginative world of comics in which fans immerse themselves, often becoming aficionados in the process. This may mean comics are particularly well suited to helping autistic people satisfy psychological needs that we all share, such as the need for a sense of belonging, competence, and having control over our own lives.
“Comics have the power to spark a particular kind of obsession and passion among fans,” Sanders said. “They enable a sort of flow state; that pure joy that comes from losing yourself in something that you find interesting and engaging. They are almost ready-made for accumulating knowledge and sharing it with like-minded people who will really value what you have to say.”
“The problem is that, like so many other parts of society, fan conventions and communities – and the comics industry as a whole – can sometimes inadvertently brush aside neurodivergent people. We need to understand what we can do differently in order to make this world as inclusive and accessible as possible.”
The results of the online survey will provide the basis for a series of workshops in Cambridge later this year, during which artists, fans and people involved in the industry will begin to develop a best-practice guide for autistic inclusion.
Gibson and Sanders plan to launch it at the Lakes International Festival in September. The guide will also be distributed to a wider network including fan groups, publishers, galleries and professional bodies. It will be released as a comic book, and its impact will be tested through a follow-up survey so that it can be refined as necessary in future editions.
“Too often the question of how to support autistic people is addressed from a deficit perspective, as if the problem is that they lack neurotypical skills,” Gibson said. “This project will flip that perspective. By learning more about how autistic fans connect with comics, we will begin to understand what we can do differently to make the most of their knowledge, talents and enthusiasm.”
Cambridge researchers are to lead a £10 million project that could result in doctors being able to predict your individual chances of getting cancer and offer personalised detection and prevention.
The UK’s strengths in population-scale data resources, combined with advanced analytical tools like AI, offer tremendous opportunities to link disparate datasets and uncover clues that could lead to earlier detection, diagnosis, and prevention of more cancersAntonis Antoniou
The Cancer Data-Driven Detection programme will be led by Antonis Antoniou, Professor of Cancer Risk Prediction at the University of Cambridge. It is funded by Cancer Research UK, the National Institute for Health and Care Research, and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
The programme aims to access and link data from different sources – including health records, genomics, family history, demographics, and behavioural data – to develop statistical models that help scientists accurately predict who is most likely to get cancer. Alongside this, the programme will develop powerful new tools that use AI to analyse the data and calculate an individual’s risk of cancer throughout their lifetime.
Professor Antoniou said: “Finding people at the highest risk of developing cancer, including those with vague symptoms, is a major challenge. The UK’s strengths in population-scale data resources, combined with advanced analytical tools like AI, offer tremendous opportunities to link disparate datasets and uncover clues that could lead to earlier detection, diagnosis, and prevention of more cancers.”
Over the next five years, the funding will build the infrastructure required to access and link these datasets, train new data scientists, create the algorithms behind the risk models and evaluate the algorithms and AI tools to ensure that they are giving accurate and clinically useful information about cancer risk. The scientific programme will be guided by partnerships with cancer patients, the public, clinical experts and industry, while addressing ethical and legal considerations to ensure that the models and tools work well in practice.
Professor Antoniou added: “Ultimately, [the Cancer Data Driven Detection programme] could inform public health policy and empower individuals and their healthcare providers to make shared decisions. By understanding individual cancer risks, people can take proactive steps to stop cancer before it gets worse or even begins in the first place.”
The models generated from this research could be used to help people at higher risk of cancer in different ways. For example, the NHS could offer more frequent cancer screening sessions or screening at a younger age to those at higher risk, whilst those at lower risk could be spared unnecessary tests. People identified as higher risk could also be sent for cancer testing faster when they go to their GP with possible cancer signs or symptoms. Individuals at higher risk could also access different ways to prevent cancer.
Earlier diagnosis of cancer saves lives, yet according to analysis of NHS figures by Cancer Research UK, only 54% of cancers in England are diagnosed at stages one and two, where treatment is more likely to be successful. NHS England has set a target to diagnose 75% of cancers at stages one and two by 2028, and this will only be achieved with research and embracing new technologies to catch cancer earlier.
Last week, the Prime Minister announced backing for the power of big data and AI, which has the potential to help even more patients, including those with cancer.
Science Minister Lord Vallance said: “There are huge opportunities in AI to improve UK healthcare, from scans detecting illnesses earlier to bringing NHS waiting lists down by planning appointments more efficiently, and these will continue to develop.
“This investment in harnessing the potential of data to spot those at risk of cancer represents the sort of innovation the Government’s new AI Opportunities Action Plan sets out to realise, so this technology improves lives, while transforming public services and boosting growth.”
Minister for Public Health and Prevention, Andrew Gwynne said: “Using the latest technology could revolutionise how the NHS diagnoses and treats patients. As part of this government’s Plan for Change, we will transform our health service from analogue to digital, and innovative projects like this show exactly how we will achieve it.”
The Cancer Data Driven Detection programme is jointly supported by Cancer Research UK, the National Institute for Health & Care Research, the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council, Health Data Research UK, and Administrative Data Research UK.
Head of Prevention and Early Detection Research at Cancer Research UK, Dr David Crosby, said: “The single most important thing we can do to beat cancer is to find it earlier, when treatment is more likely to be successful. With half a million cancer cases per year expected in the UK by 2040, we need a major shift towards more accurate diagnosis and detection of early cancer.”
A new study has found that the composition of your gut microbiome helps predict how likely you are to succumb to potentially life-threatening infection with Klebsiella pneumoniae, E.coli and other bugs – and it may be altered by changing your diet.
Our results suggest that what we eat is potentially very important in controlling the likelihood of infection with a range of bacteria.Alexandre Almeida
The group of bacteria called Enterobacteriaceae, including Klebsiella pneumoniae, Shigella, E.coli and others, is present at low levels as part of a healthy human gut microbiome. But at high levels – caused for example by increased inflammation in the body, or by eating contaminated food – these bugs can cause illness and disease. In extreme cases, too much Enterobacteriaceae in the gut can be life-threatening.
Researchers have used computational approaches including AI to analyse the gut microbiome composition of over 12,000 people across 45 countries from their stool samples. They found that a person’s microbiome ‘signature’ can predict whether a person’s gut is likely to be colonised by Enterobacteriaceae. The results are consistent across different states of health and geographic locations.
The researchers identified 135 gut microbe species that are commonly found in the absence of Enterobacteriaceae, likely protecting against infection.
Notable amongst the protective gut species are a group of bacteria called Faecalibacterium, which produce beneficial compounds called short-chain fatty acids by breaking down fibre in the foods we eat. This seems to protect against infection by a range of disease-causing Enterobacteriaceae bugs.
The researchers suggest that eating more fibre in our diet will support the growth of good bacteria – and crowd out the bad ones to significantly reduce the risk of illness.
In contrast, taking probiotics – which don’t directly change the environment in the gut – is less likely to affect the likelihood of Enterobacteriaceae infection.
“Our results suggest that what we eat is potentially very important in controlling the likelihood of infection with a range of bacteria, including E.coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae, because this changes our gut environment to make it more hostile to invaders,” said Dr Alexandre Almeida, a researcher at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Veterinary Medicine and senior author of the paper.
He added: “By eating fibre in foods like vegetables, beans and whole grains, we can provide the raw material for our gut bacteria to produce short chain fatty acids – compounds that can protect us from these pathogenic bugs.”
Klebsiella pneumonia can cause pneumonia, meningitis and other infections. The alarming global rise in antibiotic resistance to this bacterial pathogen has led scientists to look for new ways of keeping it, and other similar infectious bacteria, under control.
“With higher rates of antibiotic resistance there are fewer treatment options available to us. The best approach now is to prevent infections occurring in the first place, and we can do this by reducing the opportunities for these disease-causing bacteria to thrive in our gut,” said Almeida.
A new understanding of gut microbe interactions
Earlier research to understand interactions between the different bacteria in our gut has used mouse models. But some of these new results are at odds with previous findings.
The new study revealed that 172 species of gut microbe can coexist with disease-causing Enterobacteriaceae bugs. Many of these species are functionally similar to the bugs: they need the same nutrients to survive. Previously it was thought that competition for resources would stop the disease-causing bacteria from getting established in the gut.
This has important implications for treatment: taking probiotics that compete for the same nutrients with the bad bacteria to try and starve them out isn’t going to work. The researchers say that it will be more beneficial to change the environment in the gut, for instance through diet, to reduce the risk of infection with Enterobacteriaceae.
“This study highlights the importance of studying pathogens not as isolated entities, but in the context of their surrounding gut microbiome,” said Dr Qi Yin, a visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Veterinary Medicine and first author of the report.
The research was funded by the Medical Research Council.
Ahead of the Spending Review, an open letter to government from leaders across Cambridge, including the University’s Vice-Chancellor, sets out the clear case for renewed support for a region with a proven track record and which stands ready to deliver economic growth.
The letter highlights the role that the Greater Cambridge region – which generates over £50bn of turnover per year for the UK – can play in driving national economic growth. The signatories set out the ambitions and opportunities which the region offers, and a sense of unity of purpose.
Open New Year Letter 2025
If science were a country then Cambridge would likely be its capital, and if discovery were a global competition the city and region would regularly be winning for Britain. That’s because Greater Cambridge is where innovation makes history and where the future comes first.
The ‘can-do’ spirit and ingenuity is hardwired, running from Newton’s law of gravity, through the rules of football codified here 175 years ago, the discovery of the structure of DNA, the medical and technological breakthroughs of IVF and microprocessor design. All of them discoveries that have changed how we think and how we live. The number of Nobel Prizes awarded to members of the University of Cambridge for significant advances recently reached an extraordinary 125. We believe that innovation not only makes history – it also makes a better world.
So, we are rightly proud of our city, its region and its people – past and present. But as we enter a new year the question before us is how we can collectively do more for the country now and in the future. Our future success must seek to include everyone, be shareable and sustainable.
Britain is at a critical fork in the road. There are important choices for the summer Spending Review which will help chart the course we take as a country for years to come. The tough economic environment puts a premium on investing in growth sectors for the long term and prioritising delivery, working together as never before.
We know that the Greater Cambridge region can be the beating heart of this national renewal. It is home to world-class clusters in strategically valuable emerging sectors including AI, Genomics, Life Sciences, Cybersecurity, Advanced Therapies and Semiconductor Design. It is home to two Universities where world leading research sits at the heart of this innovation community. It is incubating the technologies and unicorns of the future with an economy that generates over £50bn of turnover per year and is a net contributor of around £1bn to the Treasury annually.
The success of the Cambridge economy has a direct positive impact across the country, creating jobs elsewhere in priority sectors and supporting the emergence of other innovation clusters. We know we need to move faster together to help support the UK economy even more which is why Innovate Cambridge has brought people together to accelerate the pace of innovation across sectors and the wider ecosystem, working with the NHS as a key partner to develop the life sciences strategy
But if we are to maximise the potential benefits of those future Cambridge innovations – the ‘software’ breakthroughs – it will mean investing in the ‘hardware’ of the city. Lack of investment in housing, water and transport needs has meant we have not been able to maximise growth for Cambridge, the region and Britain.
We trust that the new Government recognises that any change cannot simply be done to the City and South Cambridgeshire but must be done with us in partnership, and we welcome the reappointment of Peter Freeman to the Cambridge Growth Company. The Government have renewed their commitment to Greater Cambridge which is why today we are renewing our commitment to Britain. As business and elected leaders across the city and region, we know that we must always balance long term strategic planning with delivery in the short term so we are facing into this important moment with a collective mindset – ‘Cambridge Can 2030’ – with three core priorities; purpose, partnership and pace. All united in endeavour by the power of possibility.
First, we are aligned on our collective purpose and what we believe Greater Cambridge can do for Britain, what it will require from all of us and what we need as a city and region to make it happen. To invest in homes with a new Development Corporation, to build new hospitals, to find creative ways to unlock lab and clinical space, to accelerate East West Rail and develop better transport links across the city and region and to build new reservoirs to fix the water crisis. And it must first and foremost be about people – their jobs, skills and community as well as their cultural, sport and leisure opportunities. New houses do not necessarily equate to good homes. What fits around them is equally important. Invest here and, in return, you will find an aligned and committed leadership group who will help drive delivery and make change happen.
We know progress depends on working with others right across the country. To that end we are excited by our developing partnerships with Manchester. City leaders have met at a senior level in recent months to map the future – with Mayors Andy Burnham and Dr Nik Johnson and the two Combined Authorities working closely together. We all believe there is a real opportunity to be seized through this regional first and are always looking to learn from others.
It is encouraging that increasing numbers of entrepreneurs and institutions are signing up to the Cambridge Pledge – committing a percentage of their future wealth to drive transformative change through social impact investment in the community. This is another example of how Cambridge does development differently and is an exemplar of inclusive change.
And finally pace. We have got to move at speed as there is not a moment to waste. Britain is in a global race for talent and ideas. The competition and the offer from international centres of innovation is growing, and it is increasingly being felt by firms in Cambridge.
Our past success has been hard earned and should give confidence that Greater Cambridge can be a beacon for Britain in the future. Backing Cambridge means backing regional job creation right across the country. and creating the path for the £10 billion life science and tech companies of the future. It is not a gamble. It can happen. Equally it can’t be taken for granted.
So it is time to embrace the possibility of now. Whilst no one is underestimating the challenges ahead of us we fervently believe we need to face into them with realism about what it will take to succeed but also with optimism and ambition about what we can deliver and the prize to be seized.
Britain’s best days can lie ahead. Our potential as a country is huge because the ingenuity, talents and spirit of its people are limitless. We have a shining past and the next chapter can be brighter still – and Cambridge can and will help write it.
Gravitational waves data held clues for high-mass black holes’ violent beginnings
The size and spin of black holes can reveal important information about how and where they formed, according to new research. The study tests the idea that many of the black holes observed by astronomers have merged multiple times within densely populated environments containing millions of stars.
The team, involving researchers from the University of Cambridge, examined the public catalogue of 69 gravitational wave events involving binary black holes detected by The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and Virgo Observatory for clues about these successive mergers, which they believe create black holes with distinctive spin patterns.
They discovered that a black hole’s spin changes when it reaches a certain mass, suggesting it may have been produced through a series of multiple previous mergers.
Their study, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, shows how spin measurements can reveal the formation history of a black hole and offers a step forward in understanding the diverse origins of these astrophysical phenomena.
“As we observe more black hole mergers with gravitational wave detectors like LIGO and Virgo, it becomes ever clearer that black holes exhibit diverse masses and spins, suggesting they may have formed in different ways,” said lead author Dr Fabio Antonini from Cardiff University. “However, identifying which of these formation scenarios is most common has been challenging.”
The team pinpointed a clear mass threshold in the gravitational waves data where black hole spins consistently change.
They say this pattern aligns with existing models which assume black holes are produced through repeat collisions in clusters, rather than other environments where spin distributions are different.
This result supports a robust and relatively model-independent signature for identifying these kinds of black holes, something that has been challenging to confirm until now, according to the team.
“Our study gives us a powerful, data-driven way to identify the origins of a black hole’s formation history, showing that the way it spins is a strong indicator of it belonging to a group of high-mass black holes, which form in densely populated star clusters where small black holes repeatedly collide and merge with one another,” said co-author Dr Isobel Romero-Shaw, from Cambridge’s Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics.
Their study will now help astrophysicists further refine computer models which simulate the formation of black holes, helping to shape how future gravitational wave detections are interpreted.
“Collaborating with other researchers and using advanced statistical methods will help to confirm and expand our findings, especially as we move toward next-generation detectors,” said co-author Dr Thomas Callister from the University of Chicago. “The Einstein Telescope, for example, could detect even more massive black holes and provide unprecedented insights into their origins.”
Photograph of a young girl hugging a baby boy Credit: Chayene Rafaela
Sex differences in brain structure are present from birth, research from the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge has shown.
We know there are differences in the brains of older children and adults, but our findings show that they are already present in the earliest days of lifeYumnah Khan
While male brains tended to be greater in volume than female brains, when adjusted for total brain volume, female infants on average had significantly more grey matter, while male infants on average had significantly more white matter in their brains.
Grey matter is made up of neuron cell bodies and dendrites and is responsible for processing and interpreting information, such as sensation, perception, learning, speech, and cognition. White matter is made up of axons, which are long nerve fibres that connect neurons together from different parts of the brain.
Yumnah Khan, a PhD student at the Autism Research Centre, who led the study, said: “Our study settles an age-old question of whether male and female brains differ at birth. We know there are differences in the brains of older children and adults, but our findings show that they are already present in the earliest days of life.
“Because these sex differences are evident so soon after birth, they might in part reflect biological sex differences during prenatal brain development, which then interact with environmental experiences over time to shape further sex differences in the brain.”
One problem that has plagued past research in this area is sample size. The Cambridge team tackled this by analysing data from the Developing Human Connectome Project, where infants receive an MRI brain scan soon after birth. Having over 500 newborn babies in the study means that, statistically, the sample is ideal for detecting sex differences if they are present.
A second problem is whether any observed sex differences could be due to other factors, such as differences in body size. The Cambridge team found that, on average, male infants had significantly larger brain volumes than did females, and this was true even after sex differences in birth weight were taken into account.
After taking this difference in total brain volume into account, at a regional level, females on average showed larger volumes in grey matter areas related to memory and emotional regulation, while males on average had larger volumes in grey matter areas involved in sensory processing and motor control.
The findings of the study, the largest to date to investigate this question, are published in the journal Biology of Sex Differences.
Dr Alex Tsompanidis who supervised the study, said: “This is the largest such study to date, and we took additional factors into account, such as birth weight, to ensure that these differences are specific to the brain and not due to general size differences between the sexes.
“To understand why males and females show differences in their relative grey and white matter volume, we are now studying the conditions of the prenatal environment, using population birth records, as well as in vitro cellular models of the developing brain. This will help us compare the progression of male and female pregnancies and determine if specific biological factors, such as hormones or the placenta, contribute to the differences we see in the brain.”
The researchers stress that the differences between males and females are average differences.
Dr Carrie Allison, Deputy Director of the Autism Research Centre, said: “The differences we see do not apply to all males or all females, but are only seen when you compare groups of males and females together. There is a lot a variation within, and a lot of overlap between, each group.”
Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, Director of the Autism Research Centre, added: “These differences do not imply the brains of males and females are better or worse. It’s just one example of neurodiversity. This research may be helpful in understanding other kinds of neurodiversity, such as the brain in children who are later diagnosed as autistic, since this is diagnosed more often in males.”
The research was funded by Cambridge University Development and Research, Trinity College, Cambridge, the Cambridge Trust, and the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative.
A team of astronomers has found that Venus has never been habitable, despite decades of speculation that our closest planetary neighbour was once much more like Earth than it is today.
The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, studied the chemical composition of the Venusian atmosphere and inferred that its interior is too dry today for there ever to have been enough water for oceans to exist at its surface. Instead, the planet has likely been a scorching, inhospitable world for its entire history.
The results, reported in the journal Nature Astronomy, have implications for understanding Earth’s uniqueness, and for the search for life on planets outside our Solar System. While many exoplanets are Venus-like, the study suggests that astronomers should narrow their focus to exoplanets which are more like Earth.
From a distance, Venus and Earth look like siblings: it is almost identical in size and is a rocky planet like Earth. But up close, Venus is more like an evil twin: it is covered with thick clouds of sulfuric acid, and its surface has a mean temperature close to 500°C.
Despite these extreme conditions, for decades, astronomers have been investigating whether Venus once had liquid oceans capable of supporting life, or whether some mysterious form of ‘aerial’ life exists in its thick clouds now.
“We won’t know for sure whether Venus can or did support life until we send probes at the end of this decade,” said first author Tereza Constantinou, a PhD student at Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy. “But given it likely never had oceans, it is hard to imagine Venus ever having supported Earth-like life, which requires liquid water.”
When searching for life elsewhere in our galaxy, astronomers focus on planets orbiting their host stars in the habitable zone, where temperatures are such that liquid water can exist on the planet’s surface. Venus provides a powerful limit on where this habitable zone lies around a star.
“Even though it’s the closest planet to us, Venus is important for exoplanet science, because it gives us a unique opportunity to explore a planet that evolved very differently to ours, right at the edge of the habitable zone,” said Constantinou.
There are two primary theories on how conditions on Venus may have evolved since its formation 4.6 billion years ago. The first is that conditions on the surface of Venus were once temperate enough to support liquid water, but a runaway greenhouse effect caused by widespread volcanic activity caused the planet to get hotter and hotter. The second theory is that Venus was born hot, and liquid water has never been able to condense at the surface.
“Both of those theories are based on climate models, but we wanted to take a different approach based on observations of Venus’ current atmospheric chemistry,” said Constantinou. “To keep the Venusian atmosphere stable, then any chemicals being removed from the atmosphere should also be getting restored to it, since the planet’s interior and exterior are in constant chemical communication with one another.”
The researchers calculated the present destruction rate of water, carbon dioxide and carbonyl sulphide molecules in Venus’ atmosphere, which must be restored by volcanic gases to keep the atmosphere stable.
Volcanism, through its supply of gases to the atmosphere, provides a window into the interior of rocky planets like Venus. As magma rises from the mantle to the surface, it releases gases from the deeper portions of the planet.
On Earth, volcanic eruptions are mostly steam, due to our planet’s water-rich interior. But, based on the composition of the volcanic gases necessary to sustain the Venusian atmosphere, the researchers found that volcanic gases on Venus are at most six percent water. These dry eruptions suggest that Venus’s interior, the source of the magma that releases volcanic gases, is also dehydrated.
At the end of this decade, NASA’s DAVINCI mission will be able to test and confirm whether Venus has always been a dry, inhospitable planet, with a series of flybys and a probe sent to the surface. The results could help astronomers narrow their focus when searching for planets that can support life in orbit around other stars in the galaxy.
“If Venus was habitable in the past, it would mean other planets we have already found might also be habitable,” said Constantinou. “Instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope are best at studying the atmospheres of planets close to their host star, like Venus. But if Venus was never habitable, then it makes Venus-like planets elsewhere less likely candidates for habitable conditions or life.
“We would have loved to find that Venus was once a planet much closer to our own, so it’s kind of sad in a way to find out that it wasn’t, but ultimately it’s more useful to focus the search on planets that are mostly likely to be able to support life – at least life as we know it.”
The research was supported in part by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).
Professor Rebecca Fitzgerald demonstrates the capsule sponge (Credit: StillVision)
A pivotal clinical trial of a ‘pill-on-a-thread’ test, which will decide if it becomes a new screening programme for oesophageal cancer, has welcomed its first participants.
The BEST4 Screening trial will find out if the capsule sponge test could be used to screen people with heartburn for Barrett’s oesophagus – a condition that can lead to oesophageal cancer.
The capsule sponge test takes ten minutes to do and can be done by a nurse – making it much faster and less expensive than endoscopy. The trial will find out if the capsule sponge test can reduce the need for cancer treatments and prevent deaths from oesophageal cancer. The trial showcases UK science and innovation and is the last step in a series of clinical trials to see if the capsule sponge test could be offered in the cancer screening programmes of the four UK nations.
Over the next three years, the trial will recruit 120,000 people who regularly take medication for heartburn – the most common symptom for Barrett’s oesophagus. Barrett’s oesophagus is a precursor condition to oesophageal cancer, where cells in the food pipe start to grow abnormally.
Invitations to join the trial will be sent by text message from NHSresearch to encourage as many eligible people as possible to take part in England. Participants will be asked to join Heartburn Health, a new platform to take part in clinical trials in heartburn-linked cancers like BEST4 Screening. Mobile screening vans will be rolled out across England to deliver the tests as part of the trial.
The trial follows decades of research by Professor Rebecca Fitzgerald and a team of scientists, clinicians and nurses at the Early Cancer Institute, University of Cambridge and Cancer Research UK Cambridge Centre, who invented and refined the capsule sponge test.
Professor Rebecca Fitzgerald, Director of the Early Cancer Institute and co-principal investigator of the BEST4 trials, said: “The capsule sponge is changing how we detect Barrett’s oesophagus and oesophageal cancer. Catching it earlier can save lives by reducing the need for chemotherapy and surgery to remove the oesophagus.
“The BEST4 Screening trial is the pinnacle of many years of painstaking research, which has demonstrated that the capsule sponge can reliably identify Barrett’s oesophagus. Thousands of people have already benefited in trials and pilot programmes, and now we’re taking the test to the next level to see if we could offer this to everyone with heartburn.
“The BEST4 Screening trial could fundamentally transform the lives of people affected by oesophageal cancer by providing the crucial evidence needed to make it a viable screening programme, rolled out to every part of the UK.”
There are around 9,300 new cases of oesophageal cancer in the UK every year, according to analysis from Cancer Research UK. Oesophageal cancer is the seventh most common cause of cancer death in the UK, with around 22 deaths a day from the disease.
The capsule sponge starts off as a small, coated pill attached to a thread. When a patient swallows the pill and it reaches the stomach, the coating dissolves and the sponge inside expands to the size of a 50p coin. The sponge collects cells from the oesophagus as it is gently pulled out from the stomach by a nurse or GP. The cells are sent for testing for two proteins called Trefoil Factor 3 (TFF3), which is only found in Barrett’s oesophagus, and altered p53 protein, which identifies cells which are starting to grow out of control and become oesophageal cancer.
The trial is backed by £6.4 million of funding from Cancer Research UK and the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR). It will be led from Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and the University of Cambridge, with the Cancer Research UK Cancer Prevention Trials Unit at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) designing the trial and analysing results from it.
Professor Peter Sasieni, Director of the Cancer Research UK Cancer Prevention Trials Unit at QMUL and co-principal investigator of the BEST4 trials, said: “Most people with Barrett’s oesophagus have heartburn, but most people with heartburn don’t have Barrett’s oesophagus. We have already shown that the capsule sponge can reliably identify people with Barrett’s oesophagus. Now we need to show that using it in a targeted screening programme can help prevent oesophageal cancer and reduce deaths from this disease.”
The test is faster, less invasive and far less expensive than endoscopy, which is currently used to diagnose Barrett’s oesophagus and oesophageal cancer. It has been piloted in health services in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland for patients who are currently on waiting lists for endoscopy, because they have long-term heartburn or have already been diagnosed with Barrett’s oesophagus. To date, over 24,000 capsule sponge tests have been performed in pilot programmes, helping to reduce diagnostic backlogs in endoscopy and NHS pathology.
A previous clinical trial, BEST3, showed that the capsule sponge test picks up 10 times more cases of Barrett’s oesophagus in people with chronic heartburn, compared to routine GP care.
Paul Anderson (59), a stock controller from St Neots, is one of the first participants to join the BEST4 Screening trial in Cambridgeshire. He said: “I first experienced acid reflux 10 years ago and I was referred for endoscopy to get it checked out. I’ve been on medication for heartburn ever since to manage it.
“I’d never been on a clinical trial before, but when the invitation came for this one, I felt I had to sign up as the acid reflux had flared back up again. I’m hoping that it may give me some more insight into my chronic heartburn, as well as helping people who may have similar concerns about their health.
“I’m hopeful that playing my small part in this worthy cause will help others to get checked out earlier.”
Chief Executive of Cancer Research UK, Michelle Mitchell: “Around 59% of all oesophageal cancer cases are preventable. Yet endoscopy, the gold standard for diagnosing and treating this cancer, is labour-intensive and not practical for a population screening programme.
“Backed by funding from Cancer Research UK, the capsule sponge has become one of the most exciting early detection tools to emerge in recent years. After many decades of research, we’re on the cusp of transforming oesophageal cancer diagnosis forever.”
Minister for Public Health and Prevention, Andrew Gwynne: “This trial is a shining example of how we can harness the power of technology to improve patient experience and speed up diagnosis.
“This innovation has the potential to allow us to perform lifesaving screenings quicker and cheaper, freeing up vital NHS resources.”
Scientific Director for NIHR Programmes, Professor Danny McAuley: “Thousands of people are needed to join this trial, and we encourage people to sign up as participants. This important research will help benefit patients, and inform those who plan and deliver NHS services of how best to test for the disease.”
The future Cambridge Cancer Research Hospital, planned for the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, will bring together clinical and research expertise, including Professor Fitzgerald’s work, under one roof. It will enable the development and discovery of more non-invasive devices like the capsule sponge, to detect cancer earlier, and save more lives.
More information about how to join the trial can be found at the BEST4 website or by emailing the BEST4 team. You can also sign up to the NIHR’s Be Part of Research service at bepartofresearch.uk to take part in clinical research. Simply answer a few questions about yourself and the conditions you’re interested in to be matched to studies happening in locations near you.
Adapted from a press release from Cancer Research UK
As the UN meets this week to finalise the Global Plastics Treaty, researchers warn that the agreement could fail to address one of the biggest threats to marine environments—microplastics.
Even if global production and pollution of new plastic is drastically reduced, scientists, writing in the journal Nature Communications, say that legacy plastics, the billions of tonnes of waste already in the environment, will continue to break down into tiny particles called microplastics for decades or centuries.
These fragments contaminate oceans, land, and the air we breathe, posing risks to marine life, food production and human health.
The researchers – from the University of Cambridge, GNS Science in New Zealand and The Ocean Cleanup in The Netherlands – say the problem lies in a gap between ambition and action, called the fragmentation gap.
At a meeting this week in Busan, South Korea, the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution is meeting to finalise the Global Plastics Treaty, the first legally binding treaty to tackle plastic pollution.
While the treaty’s initial discussions highlight prevention of plastic pollution, the researchers say it largely overlooks the need to remove existing waste. This omission means microplastics will continue to accumulate, even if plastic pollution slows.
“The treaty is aiming to eliminate plastic pollution by 2040, but this goal is unlikely without stronger action,” said co-author Zhenna Azimrayat-Andrews, a PhD student at Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences. “Even with a sharp reduction in plastic entering the ocean, existing debris will split into smaller pieces and persist for centuries.”
These microplastics have already infiltrated marine ecosystems and are harming marine ecosystems, degrading commercial seafood quality, and disrupting critical ocean processes.
The researchers argue that plastic clean-up efforts must be prioritised alongside reduction targets. Strategies to remove plastics from terrestrial and marine environments, such as those targeting pollution in beaches and rivers, could help prevent microplastics from forming. In fact, a 3% annual removal of legacy plastic, combined with aggressive reduction measures, could significantly curb future contamination, they say.
Without action to address legacy plastic, the treaty risks leaving behind a long-lasting problem for marine life and future generations. Experts are calling for clean-up efforts to become an equal pillar of the treaty, alongside prevention and recycling.
As world leaders gather to negotiate the treaty this week, the spotlight is on their ability to craft a comprehensive plan that doesn’t just slow pollution but also begins to reverse the damage that has already been done.
Reference: Karin Kvale, Zhenna Azimrayat Andrews & Matthias Egger. ‘Mind the fragmentation gap.’ Nature Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-53962-3
Camera traps and drones deployed by government authorities to monitor a forest in India are infringing on the privacy and rights of local women.
Nobody could have realised that camera traps put in the Indian forest to monitor mammals actually have a profoundly negative impact on the mental health of local women who use these spaces.Trishant Simlai
Remotely operated camera traps, sound recorders and drones are increasingly being used in conservation science to monitor wildlife and natural habitats, and to keep watch on protected natural areas.
But Cambridge researchers studying a forest in northern India have found that the technologies are being deliberately misused by local government and male villagers to keep watch on women without their consent.
Cambridge researcher Dr Trishant Simlai spent 14 months interviewing 270 locals living around the Corbett Tiger Reserve, a national park in northern India, including many women from nearby villages.
His report, published today in the journal Environment and Planning F, reveals how forest rangers in the national park deliberately fly drones over local women to frighten them out of the forest, and stop them collecting natural resources despite it being their legal right to do so.
The women, who previously found sanctuary in the forest away from their male-dominated villages, told Simlai they feel watched and inhibited by camera traps, so talk and sing much more quietly. This increases the chance of surprise encounters with potentially dangerous wildlife like elephants and tigers. One woman he interviewed has since been killed in a tiger attack.
The study reveals a worst-case scenario of deliberate human monitoring and intimidation. But the researchers say people are being unintentionally recorded by wildlife monitoring devices without their knowledge in many other places – even national parks in the UK.
“Nobody could have realised that camera traps put in the Indian forest to monitor mammals actually have a profoundly negative impact on the mental health of local women who use these spaces,” said Dr Trishant Simlai, a researcher in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Sociology and lead author of the report.
“These findings have caused quite a stir amongst the conservation community. It’s very common for projects to use these technologies to monitor wildlife, but this highlights that we really need to be sure they’re not causing unintended harm,” said Professor Chris Sandbrook, Director of the University of Cambridge’s Masters in Conservation Leadership programme, who was also involved in the report.
He added: “Surveillance technologies that are supposed to be tracking animals can easily be used to watch people instead – invading their privacy and altering the way they behave.”
Many areas of conservation importance overlap with areas of human use. The researchers call for conservationists to think carefully about the social implications of using remote monitoring technologies – and whether less invasive methods like surveys could provide the information they need instead.
Intimidation and deliberate humiliation
The women living near India’s Corbett Tiger Reserve use the forest daily in ways that are central to their lives: from gathering firewood and herbs to sharing life’s difficulties through traditional songs.
Domestic violence and alcoholism are widespread problems in this rural region and many women spend long hours in forest spaces to escape difficult home situations.
The women told Simlai that new technologies, deployed under the guise of wildlife monitoring projects, are being used to intimidate and exert power over them – by monitoring them too.
“A photograph of a woman going to the toilet in the forest – captured on a camera trap supposedly for wildlife monitoring – was circulated on local Facebook and WhatsApp groups as a means of deliberate harassment,” said Simlai.
He added: “I discovered that local women form strong bonds while working together in the forest, and they sing while collecting firewood to deter attacks by elephants and tigers. When they see camera traps they feel inhibited because they don’t know who’s watching or listening to them – and as a result they behave differently – often being much quieter, which puts them in danger.”
In places like northern India, the identity of local women is closely linked to their daily activities and social roles within the forest. The researchers say that understanding the various ways local women use forests is vital for effective forest management strategies.
What can exploding stars teach us about how blood flows through an artery? Or swimming bacteria about how the ocean’s layers mix? A collaboration of researchers, including from the University of Cambridge, has reached a milestone toward training artificial intelligence models to find and use transferable knowledge between fields to drive scientific discovery.
The initiative, called Polymathic AI, uses technology like that powering large language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini. But instead of ingesting text, the project’s models learn using scientific datasets from across astrophysics, biology, acoustics, chemistry, fluid dynamics and more, essentially giving the models cross-disciplinary scientific knowledge.
“These datasets are by far the most diverse large-scale collections of high-quality data for machine learning training ever assembled for these fields,” said team member Michael McCabe from the Flatiron Institute in New York City. “Curating these datasets is a critical step in creating multidisciplinary AI models that will enable new discoveries about our universe.”
Today (2 December), the Polymathic AI team has released two of its open-source training dataset collections to the public — a colossal 115 terabytes, from dozens of sources — for the scientific community to use to train AI models and enable new scientific discoveries. For comparison, GPT-3 used 45 terabytes of uncompressed, unformatted text for training, which ended up being around 0.5 terabytes after filtering.
The full datasets are available to download for free on HuggingFace, a platform hosting AI models and datasets. The Polymathic AI team provides further information about the datasets in twopapers accepted for presentation at the NeurIPS machine learning conference, to be held later this month in Vancouver, Canada.
“Just as LLMs such as ChatGPT learn to use common grammatical structure across languages, these new scientific foundation models might reveal deep connections across disciplines that we’ve never noticed before,” said Cambridge team lead Dr Miles Cranmer from Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy. “We might uncover patterns that no human can see, simply because no one has ever had both this breadth of scientific knowledge and the ability to compress it into a single framework.”
AI tools such as machine learning are increasingly common in scientific research, and were recognised in two of this year’s NobelPrizes. Still, such tools are typically purpose-built for a specific application and trained using data from that field. The Polymathic AI project instead aims to develop models that are truly polymathic, like people whose expert knowledge spans multiple areas. The project’s team reflects intellectual diversity, with physicists, astrophysicists, mathematicians, computer scientists and neuroscientists.
The first of the two new training dataset collections focuses on astrophysics. Dubbed the Multimodal Universe, the dataset contains hundreds of millions of astronomical observations and measurements, such as portraits of galaxies taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and measurements of our galaxy’s stars made by the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft.
The other collection — called the Well — comprises over 15 terabytes of data from 16 diverse datasets. These datasets contain numerical simulations of biological systems, fluid dynamics, acoustic scattering, supernova explosions and other complicated processes. Cambridge researchers played a major role in developing both dataset collections, working alongside PolymathicAI and other international collaborators.
While these diverse datasets may seem disconnected at first, they all require the modelling of mathematical equations called partial differential equations. Such equations pop up in problems related to everything from quantum mechanics to embryo development and can be incredibly difficult to solve, even for supercomputers. One of the goals of the Well is to enable AI models to churn out approximate solutions to these equations quickly and accurately.
“By uniting these rich datasets, we can drive advancements in artificial intelligence not only for scientific discovery, but also for addressing similar problems in everyday life,” said Ben Boyd, PhD student in the Institute of Astronomy.
Gathering the data for those datasets posed a challenge, said team member Ruben Ohana from the Flatiron Institute. The team collaborated with scientists to gather and create data for the project. “The creators of numerical simulations are sometimes sceptical of machine learning because of all the hype, but they’re curious about it and how it can benefit their research and accelerate scientific discovery,” he said.
The Polymathic AI team is now using the datasets to train AI models. In the coming months, they will deploy these models on various tasks to see how successful these well-rounded, well-trained AIs are at tackling complex scientific problems.
“It will be exciting to see if the complexity of these datasets can push AI models to go beyond merely recognising patterns, encouraging them to reason and generalise across scientific domains,” said Dr Payel Mukhopadhyay from the Institute of Astronomy. “Such generalisation is essential if we ever want to build AI models that can truly assist in conducting meaningful science.”
“Until now, haven’t had a curated scientific-quality dataset cover such a wide variety of fields,” said Cranmer, who is also a member of Cambridge’s Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. “These datasets are opening the door to true generalist scientific foundation models for the first time. What new scientific principles might we discover? We’re about to find out, and that’s incredibly exciting.”
The Polymathic AI project is run by researchers from the Simons Foundation and its Flatiron Institute, New York University, the University of Cambridge, Princeton University, the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Members of the Polymathic AI team from the University of Cambridge include PhD students, postdoctoral researchers and faculty across four departments: the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, the Institute of Astronomy and the Kavli Institute for Cosmology.
Some of the first human beings to arrive in Tasmania, over 41,000 years ago, used fire to shape and manage the landscape, about 2,000 years earlier than previously thought.
A team of researchers from the UK and Australia analysed charcoal and pollen contained in ancient mud to determine how Aboriginal Tasmanians shaped their surroundings. This is the earliest record of humans using fire to shape the Tasmanian environment.
Early human migrations from Africa to the southern part of the globe were well underway during the early part of the last ice age – humans reached northern Australia by around 65,000 years ago. When the first Palawa/Pakana (Tasmanian Indigenous) communities eventually reached Tasmania (known to the Palawa people as Lutruwita), it was the furthest south humans had ever settled.
These early Aboriginal communities used fire to penetrate and modify dense, wet forest for their own use – as indicated by a sudden increase in charcoal accumulated in ancient mud 41,600 years ago.
The researchers say their results, reported in the journal Science Advances, could not only help us understand how humans have been shaping the Earth’s environment for tens of thousands of years, but also help understand the long-term Aboriginal-landscape connection, which is vital for landscape management in Australia today.
Tasmania currently lies about 240 kilometres off the southeast Australian coast, separated from the Australian mainland by the Bass Strait. However, during the last ice age, Australia and Tasmania were connected by a huge land bridge, allowing people to reach Tasmania on foot. The land bridge remained until about 8,000 years ago, after the end of the last ice age, when rising sea levels eventually cut Tasmania off from the Australian mainland.
“Australia is home to the world’s oldest Indigenous culture, which has endured for over 50,000 years,” said Dr Matthew Adeleye from Cambridge’s Department of Geography, the study’s lead author. “Earlier studies have shown that Aboriginal communities on the Australian mainland used fire to shape their habitats, but we haven’t had similarly detailed environmental records for Tasmania.”
The researchers studied ancient mud taken from islands in the Bass Strait, which is part of Tasmania today, but would have been part of the land bridge connecting Australia and Tasmania during the last ice age. Due to low sea levels at the time, Palawa/Pakana communities were able to migrate from the Australian mainland.
Analysis of the ancient mud showed a sudden increase in charcoal around 41,600 years ago, followed by a major change in vegetation about 40,000 years ago, as indicated by different types of pollen in the mud.
“This suggests these early inhabitants were clearing forests by burning them, in order to create open spaces for subsistence and perhaps cultural activities,” said Adeleye. “Fire is an important tool, and it would have been used to promote the type of vegetation or landscape that was important to them.”
The researchers say that humans likely learned to use fire to clear and manage forests during their migration across the glacial landscape of Sahul – a palaeocontinent that encompassed modern-day Australia, Tasmania, New Guinea and eastern Indonesia – as part of the extensive migration out of Africa.
“As natural habitats adapted to these controlled burnings, we see the expansion of fire-adapted species such as Eucalyptus, primarily on the wetter, eastern side of the Bass Strait islands,” said Adeleye.
Burning practices are still practiced today by Aboriginal communities in Australia, including for landscape management and cultural activities. However, using this type of burning, known as cultural burning, for managing severe wildfires in Australia remains contentious. The researchers say understanding this ancient land management practice could help define and restore pre-colonial landscapes.
“These early Tasmanian communities were the island’s first land managers,” said Adeleye. “If we’re going to protect Tasmanian and Australian landscapes for future generations, it’s important that we listen to and learn from Indigenous communities who are calling for a greater role in helping to manage Australian landscapes into the future.”
The research was supported in part by the Australian Research Council.
Green forests stretch out to the horizon Credit: Suzano
Suzano, one the world’s largest producers of bio-based raw materials, based in São Paulo, Brazil, establishes a long-term initiative with Jesus College and the University of Cambridge.
This visionary initiative will help to build strong links between the University of Cambridge and BrazilProfessor Bhaskar Vira
An initial £10 million donation will be used to support education and research into areas including the conservation of biodiversity, enhancing business sustainability, and the restoration of natural habitats in Brazil and beyond. The agreement will establish the Suzano Scholars Fund, a perpetual endowment at Jesus College to fund Brazilian nationals studying for a postgraduate degree at the University of Cambridge connected to the environment, ecology and conservation, educating the next generation of sustainability experts and leaders. Funding will also be provided to academics based at the Conservation Research Institute to undertake research projects exploring the interaction between human and natural systems in areas such as biodiversity, climate change, water resource management, and ecosystem restoration. Read more about this new initiative here
Surviving the flood at Ahoada in Rivers state Nigeria Credit: Hansel ohioma
Climate governance is dominated by men, yet the health impacts of the climate crisis often affect women, girls, and gender-diverse people disproportionately, argue researchers ahead of the upcoming 29th United Nations Climate Summit (COP29) in Azerbaijan.
Given how disproportionately climate change affects women, girls and gender minorities, we need to ensure that their voices are heard and meaningfully included in discussions of how we respond to this urgent climate crisisKim van Daalen
In an article published today in Lancet Planetary Health, a team of researchers – including several from the University of Cambridge – argue that much more needs to be done to mitigate the impacts of climate change on women, girls and gender-diverse individuals.
Focusing specifically on the intersection between climate change, gender, and human health, the researchers call on countries to work harder to ensure there is gender equity within their delegations to climate conferences and to ensure climate strategies identify gender-specific risks and vulnerabilities and address their root causes.
As the world prepares for COP29, concerns about gender representation and equality have reignited following the initial appointment of 28 men and no women to the COP29 organising committee in January 2024.
The effects of climate change – from heavy rains, rising temperatures, storms and floods through to sea level rises and droughts – exacerbate systemic inequalities and disproportionately affect marginalised populations, particularly those living in low-income areas.
While the specific situation may be different depending on where people live or their social background (like their class, race, ability, sexuality, age, or location), women, girls, and gender minorities are often at greater risk from the impacts of climate change. For example, in many countries, women are less likely to own land and resources to protect them in post-disaster situations, and have less control over income and less access to information, resulting in increased vulnerability to acute and long-term climate change impacts.
They are also particularly at risk from climate-related threats to their health, say the researchers. For example, studies have linked high temperatures to adverse birth outcomes such as spontaneous preterm births, pre-eclampsia and birth defects. Extreme events, which are expected to become more likely and intense due to climate change, also take a severe toll on women’s social, physical, and mental well-being. Numerous studies highlight that gender-based violence is reported to increase during or after extreme events, often due to factors related to economic instability, food insecurity, disrupted infrastructure and mental stress.
Dr Kim Robin van Daalen, a former Gates Cambridge Scholar at the University of Cambridge, and researcher at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), said: “Given how disproportionately climate change affects women, girls and gender minorities – a situation that is only likely to get worse – we need to ensure that their voices are heard and meaningfully included in discussions of how we respond to this urgent climate crisis. This is not currently happening at anywhere near the level it needs to.”
The team summarised the inclusion of gender, health and their intersection in key decisions and initiatives under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and analysed gender representation among representatives of Party and Observer State delegations at COPs between 1995-2023. Progress has been slow, they say.
They highlight how previous scholars have consistently noted that emphasis remains mainly on achieving a gender ‘number-based balance’ in climate governance, over exploring gender-specific risks and vulnerabilities and addressing their root causes. They also discuss how there remains limited recognition of the role climate change has in worsening gendered impacts on health, including gender-based violence and the lack of safeguarding reproductive health in the face of climate change.
Although the situation is slowly improving, at COP28, almost three-quarters (73%) of Party delegations were still majority men, and only just over one in six (16%) showed gender parity (that is, 45-55% women). In fact, gender parity has only been achieved in the ‘Western European and Other’ UN grouping (which also includes North America, Australia and New Zealand). Based on current trends, several countries – particularly those in the Asia-Pacific and Africa regions – are expected to take at least a decade from COP28 before reaching gender parity in their delegations.
Dr Ramit Debnath, former Gates Cambridge Scholar and now an Assistant Professor at Cambridge, said: “The urgency of climate action, as well as the slow understanding of climate, gender, and health connections, is cause for concern. Institutions like the UNFCCC must recognize these disparities, design appropriate methods to improve gender parity in climate governance, and keep these representation gaps from growing into societal and health injustices.”
Beyond ensuring that their voices are heard, more equitable inclusion of women has consistently been suggested to transform policymaking across political and social systems, including the generation of policies that better represent women’s interests. Previous recent analyses of 49 European countries revealed that greater women’s political representation correlates with reduced inequalities in self-reported health, lower geographical inequalities in infant mortality and fewer disability-adjusted life-years lost across genders.
Similar positive findings have been reported related to environmental policies, with women’s representation in national parliaments being associated with increased ratification of environmental treaties and more stringent climate change policies. For example, women legislators in the European parliament and US House of Representatives have been found to be more inclined to support environmental legislation than men.
Dr Ronita Bardhan, Associate Professor at the University of Cambridge, said: “Achieving equitable gender representation in climate action is not just about fairness – it’s a strategic necessity with significant co-benefits. We can shape climate policies and infrastructure that address a broader spectrum of societal needs, leading to more inclusive solutions enhancing public health, social equity, and environmental resilience.”
While the researchers’ analyses focused on achieving gender balance, studies on women’s involvement in climate governance suggest that increased representation does not by itself always lead to meaningful policy changes. Even when formally included, women’s active participation in male-dominated institutions is often constrained by existing social and cultural norms, implicit biases and structural barriers.
Dr van Daalen added: “If we’re to meaningfully incorporate gender into climate policy and practice, we need to understand the risks and vulnerabilities that are gender-specific and look at how we can address them and their root causes at all phases of programme and policy development.
“But we also need to resist reducing women to a single, homogenous group, which risks deepening existing inequalities and overlooks opportunities to address the needs of all individuals. It is crucial to recognise the diversity of women and their embodiment of multiple, intersecting identities that shape their climate experiences as well as their mitigation and adaptation needs.”
The team also highlights that gender-diverse people face unique health and climate-related risks due to their increased vulnerability, stigma, and discrimination. For example, during and after extreme events, transgender people in the United States report being threatened or prohibited access to shelters. Similarly, in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Samoa, gender-diverse individuals often face discrimination, mockery, and exclusion from evacuation centres or access to food. Yet, say the researchers, there are major gaps in knowledge about the health implications of climate change for such groups.
Find out how Cambridge’s pioneering research in climate and nature is regenerating nature, rewiring energy, rethinking transport and redefining economics – forging a future for our planet.
Tree planting has been widely touted as a cost-effective way of reducing global warming, due to trees’ ability to store large quantities of carbon from the atmosphere.
But, writing in the journal Nature Geoscience, an international group of scientists, led by the University of Cambridge and the University of Århus, argue that tree planting at high latitudes will accelerate, rather than decelerate, global warming.
As the climate continues to warm, trees can be planted further and further north, and large-scale tree-planting projects in the Arctic have been championed by governments and corporations as a way to mitigate the worst effects of climate change.
However, when trees are planted in the wrong places – such as normally treeless tundra and mires, as well as large areas of the boreal forest with relatively open tree canopies – they can make global warming worse.
According to lead author Assistant Professor Jeppe Kristensen from Aarhus University in Denmark, the unique characteristics of Arctic and sub-Arctic ecosystems make them poorly suited for tree planting for climate mitigation.
“Soils in the Arctic store more carbon than all vegetation on Earth,” said Kristensen. “These soils are vulnerable to disturbances, such as cultivation for forestry or agriculture, but also the penetration of tree roots. The semi-continuous daylight during the spring and early summer, when snow is still on the ground, also makes the energy balance in this region extremely sensitive to surface darkening, since green and brown trees will soak up more heat from the sun than white snow.”
In addition, the regions surrounding the North Pole in North America, Asia and Scandinavia are prone to natural disturbances – such as wildfires and droughts – that kill off vegetation. Climate change makes these disturbances both more frequent and more severe.
“This is a risky place to be a tree, particularly as part of a homogeneous plantation that is more vulnerable to such disturbances,” said Kristensen. “The carbon stored in these trees risks fuelling disturbances and getting released back to the atmosphere within a few decades.”
The researchers say that tree planting at high latitudes is a prime example of a climate solution with a desired effect in one context but the opposite effect in another.
“The climate debate is very carbon-focused because the main way humans have modified the Earth’s climate in the last century is through emitting greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels,” said Kristensen. “But at the core, climate change is the result of how much solar energy entering the atmosphere stays, and how much leaves again – Earth’s so-called energy balance.”
Greenhouse gases are one important determinant of how much heat can escape our planet’s atmosphere. However, the researchers say that at high latitudes, how much sunlight is reflected back into space, without being converted into heat (known as the albedo effect), is more important than carbon storage for the total energy balance.
The researchers are calling for a more holistic view of ecosystems to identify truly meaningful nature-based solutions that do not compromise the overall goal: slowing down climate change.
“A holistic approach is not just a richer way of looking at the climate effects of nature-based solutions, but it’s imperative if we’re going to make a difference in the real world,” said senior author Professor Marc Macias-Fauria, from the University of Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Institute.
However, the researchers recognise that there can be other reasons for planting trees, such as timber self-sufficiency, but these cases do not come with bonuses for climate mitigation.
“Forestry in the far North should be viewed like any other production system and compensate for its negative impact on the climate and biodiversity,” said Macias-Fauria. “You can’t have your cake and eat it, and you can’t deceive the Earth. By selling northern afforestation as a climate solution, we’re only fooling ourselves.”
So how can we moderate global warming at high latitudes? The researchers suggest that working with local communities to support sustainable populations of large herbivores, such as caribou, could be a more viable nature-based solution to climate change in Arctic and subarctic regions than planting millions of trees.
“There is ample evidence that large herbivores affect plant communities and snow conditions in ways that result in net cooling,” said Macias-Fauria. “This happens both directly, by keeping tundra landscapes open, and indirectly, through the effects of herbivore winter foraging, where they modify the snow and decrease its insulation capacity, reducing soil temperatures and permafrost thaw.”
The researchers say it’s vital to consider biodiversity and the livelihoods of local communities in the pursuit of nature-based climate solutions.
“Large herbivores can reduce climate-driven biodiversity loss in Arctic ecosystems and remain a fundamental food resource for local communities,” said Macias-Fauria. “Biodiversity and local communities are not an added benefit to nature-based solutions: they are fundamental. Any nature-based solutions must be led by the communities who live at the front line of climate change.”
After two weeks of negotiations last week in Cali, Colombia, the COP16 biodiversity summit was suspended with no overall agreement on a path forward on “resource mobilisation.”
4 November 2024 – After two weeks of negotiations last week in Cali, Colombia, the meeting was suspended with no overall agreement on a path forward on “resource mobilisation.” CISL’s Chief Innovation Officer, James Cole, looks back at happened at COP16, and asks what comes next.
The extended talks were suspended after it became apparent there were no longer enough parties involved to take decisions, leaving some of the hardest areas of discussion unresolved, including the establishment of a new biodiversity fund to help poorer nations restore their depleted natural environments, which was blocked by developed countries including the EU, Japan and Canada.
During COP16 there was no argument about the dire state of nature on our planet, our critical reliance on it for our prosperity, resilience and wellbeing; nor the overarching global goal under the GBF agreed two years ago in Montreal to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030.
The progress and path towards that goal, however, neither reflects the urgency nor the seriousness of the crisis we find ourselves in – with only 44 countries having submitted their National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plans (NBSAPs). This is perhaps not surprising given the lack of resources provided to emerging and developing countries to write such strategies.
Our material prosperity has been built on a linear model of extracting natural resources which are consumed, used and disposed at a rate beyond which they can replenish; our food and industrial production and consumption systems drive deforestation and soil degradation; and our seas, forests and soils cannot absorb all the climate changing greenhouse gas emissions we produce. And yet this system is not even successfully meeting basic needs for everyone.
Negotiations in Cali centred on the ($700bn) financing needed to achieve the GBF; ‘resource mobilisation’; the role and rights of indigenous people; and how biodiverse countries share in the financial and other benefits of scientific discoveries made in their countries, amongst other things. However, the meeting was suspended in extra time with agreement only on the role indigenous peoples and communities; and a benefits sharing mechanism on digital sequencing information of genetic resources (DSI) – both groundbreaking in their own right, but not the full solution.
Issues around who pays, who has a say, who benefits and how effort is shared underlie the disagreement – playing into tensions between global north countries perceived to have driven much of the damage through colonial models of industrialisation, and biodiversity-rich countries in the global south who being asked to constrain their economies to conserve nature.
A team of Cambridge-based professionals, academics, researchers and conservationists from the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL), the Conservation Research Institute, the Cambridge Conservation Initiative, and many of its charity members – TRAFFIC, BirdLife International and Fauna and Flora International – amongst others, attended the Convention as expert advisors and as observers.
Representatives from business, finance and civil society showed up in force to support the negotiations, willing to be part of the solution, and reflecting the ‘whole of society’ effort that will be needed to turn the tide on nature destruction.
Whilst negotiations under the treaty stalled, there was heart to be taken in the level of engagement, alongside an acknowledgement of our collective failure to truly take to heart the scale and structural nature of the changes needed to our economies and societies.
In terms of the private sector, over 500 companies are now committed to assessing, disclosing and managing their impacts on nature in line with the Taskforce of Nature Related Financial Disclosure (TNFD) with many more preparing to submit their ‘nature strategy’ for public record and scrutiny. Business-led conversations centred on biodiversity restoration projects inside or outside their supply chains, the need for better and more aligned metrics applicable at the level of country and company disclosures, and the uncertain pathway towards company ‘transformation’ to be ‘nature-positive’.
Global banks and asset managers participated in discussions centring on the role of private finance to help plug the estimated $700bn ‘nature-finance gap’ and the role of the private sector in filling it. There are now over 10 nature-related equity funds, which promise financial and nature benefits. Nation state debt-for-nature swaps were celebrated as mechanisms to solve emerging economy debt problems whilst restoring nature – such as Belize’s 2021 blue bond, which reduced debt by 12% of GDP and unlocked funding for conservation in line with the 30% GBF goal. The multilateral Asian Development Bank (ADB) issued $100m biodiversity and nature bond, and the IFC, part of the World Bank, announced a $50m investment into a Colombian nature bond set up by Banco Davivienda. Overall a drop in the ocean, so to speak, but perhaps a proof of concept?
Despite the disappointing end to these international negotiations, there were signals that national nature laws aligning with the treaty were creating new markets for nature restoration. The EU Nature Restoration Law (which aims to 20% of the EU’s land and sea areas by 2030) and the UK’s Biodiversity Net Gain Law (where developers must pay for nature improvements to offset site-level impacts) are examples. The latter is a blunt and imperfect instrument, but another step forward in tying nature into our markets and economics.
To activate leadership on sustainability in business, government and finance, we at CISL we have been working with the finance sector members of our Investment Leaders Group and Banking Environment Initiative to reframe nature finance and channel more private capital into nature protection and restoration within the EU Horizon funded project A-track. The report was launched at COP16, with leaders in finance such as Standard Chartered Bank recognising its potential to “mobilise finance to where it’s needed to make a material impact towards both halting and reversing nature loss”.
CISL has been working in partnership with the Capitals Coalition and the World Business Council on Sustainable Development, with funding from the EU Horizon project, to develop and launch a playbook of nature-positive business model archetypes with potential to restore and protect nature by design. In 2025 we will pilot these models with leading corporates in our network and the nature-positive startups in CISL’s Canopy startup accelerator to test the theory in practice. The three Canopy members and startups participating in COP16 – Earthblox, SPUN and Think-Nature – provided everyone with the feeling solutions are possible.
But at the whole systems-level, despite these signs of enlightened self-interest from progressive businesses and banks, and the efforts of sustainability-led startups, these shifts will not become mainstream nor be able to protect and restore nature at the scale needed unless we collectively redesign our economic systems and markets to do so. Whilst there is profit to be made in liquidating natural capital for shareholder returns, no matter what the long term cost, the short-term market logic will win out.
What we need now is the political will to write a new narrative around human development, and dispel the false dichotomy between social and ecological or economic health. We need to embrace more rounded progress indicators to guide our economies and build new markets. We need to properly integrate and value nature-positive activities and discourage and disincentivise those activities which degrade and impoverish our planet and our societies.
How we achieve this is the new leadership agenda. In less than two weeks another set of international negotiators will meet in Baku, Azerbaijan, for the COP29 UN-led climate negotiations – and our collective future depends on global agreements commensurate with our global challenges.
To tackle the interconnected climate and biodiversity crises, in fair and just ways, we need all those leaders in governments, business, finance and civil society to look to the future beyond their commitments, targets and pioneering projects within the bounds of today’s economy, to do the hard work to build consensus among countries in the global north and global south, and to build the new economic system we all know is needed, for the future we want.
A drug commonly used to treat glaucoma has been shown in zebrafish and mice to protect against the build-up in the brain of the protein tau, which causes various forms of dementia and is implicated in Alzheimer’s disease.
Zebrafish provide a much more effective and realistic way of screening drug compounds than using cell cultures, which function quite differently to living organismsAna Lopez Ramirez
Researchers in the UK Dementia Research Institute at the University of Cambridge screened more than 1,400 clinically-approved drug compounds using zebrafish genetically engineered to make them mimic so-called tauopathies. They discovered that drugs known as carbonic anhydrase inhibitors – of which the glaucoma drug methazolamide is one – clear tau build-up and reduce signs of the disease in zebrafish and mice carrying the mutant forms of tau that cause human dementias.
Tauopathies are neurodegenerative diseases characterised by the build-up in the brain of tau protein ‘aggregates’ within nerve cells. These include forms of dementia, Pick’s disease and progressive supranuclear palsy, where tau is believed to be the primary disease driver, and Alzheimer’s disease and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (neurodegeneration caused by repeated head trauma, as has been reported in football and rugby players), where tau build-up is one consequence of disease but results in degeneration of brain tissue.
There has been little progress in finding effective drugs to treat these conditions. One option is to repurpose existing drugs. However, drug screening – where compounds are tested against disease models – usually takes place in cell cultures, but these do not capture many of the characteristics of tau build-up in a living organism.
To work around this, the Cambridge team turned to zebrafish models they had previously developed. Zebrafish grow to maturity and are able to breed within two to three months and produce large numbers of offspring. Using genetic manipulation, it is possible to mimic human diseases as many genes responsible for human diseases often have equivalents in the zebrafish.
In a study published today in Nature Chemical Biology, Professor David Rubinsztein, Dr Angeleen Fleming and colleagues modelled tauopathy in zebrafish and screened 1,437 drug compounds. Each of these compounds has been clinically approved for other diseases.
Dr Ana Lopez Ramirez from the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience and the UK Dementia Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, joint first author, said: “Zebrafish provide a much more effective and realistic way of screening drug compounds than using cell cultures, which function quite differently to living organisms. They also enable us to do so at scale, something that it not feasible or ethical in larger animals such as mice.”
Using this approach, the team showed that inhibiting an enzyme known as carbonic anhydrase – which is important for regulating acidity levels in cells – helped the cell rid itself of the tau protein build-up. It did this by causing the lysosomes – the ‘cell’s incinerators’ – to move to the surface of the cell, where they fused with the cell membrane and ‘spat out’ the tau.
When the team tested methazolamide on mice that had been genetically engineered to carry the P301S human disease-causing mutation in tau, which leads to the progressive accumulation of tau aggregates in the brain, they found that those treated with the drug performed better at memory tasks and showed improved cognitive performance compared with untreated mice.
Analysis of the mouse brains showed that they indeed had fewer tau aggregates, and consequently a lesser reduction in brain cells, compared with the untreated mice.
Fellow joint author Dr Farah Siddiqi, also from the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research and the UK Dementia Research Institute, said: “We were excited to see in our mouse studies that methazolamide reduces levels of tau in the brain and protects against its further build-up. This confirms what we had shown when screening carbonic anhydrase inhibitors using zebrafish models of tauopathies.”
Professor Rubinsztein from the UK Dementia Research Institute and Cambridge Institute for Medical Research at the University of Cambridge, said: “Methazolamide shows promise as a much-needed drug to help prevent the build-up of dangerous tau proteins in the brain. Although we’ve only looked at its effects in zebrafish and mice, so it is still early days, we at least know about this drug’s safety profile in patients. This will enable us to move to clinical trials much faster than we might normally expect if we were starting from scratch with an unknown drug compound.
“This shows how we can use zebrafish to test whether existing drugs might be repurposed to tackle different diseases, potentially speeding up significantly the drug discovery process.”
The team hopes to test methazolamide on different disease models, including more common diseases characterised by the build-up of aggregate-prone proteins, such as Huntington’s and Parkinson’s diseases.
The research was supported by the UK Dementia Research Institute (through UK DRI Ltd, principally funded through the Medical Research Council), Tau Consortium and Wellcome.
It is widely believed that brass bands originated with coal miners and other industrial communities in northern England and Wales between the 1830s and the 1850s. New evidence rewrites this history.
Cambridge historian, Dr Eamonn O’Keeffe, has found compelling evidence to show that Britain’s earliest brass bands were founded by military musicians in the 1810s.
In a study published in The Historical Journal, O’Keeffe argues that regimental bands first experimented with all-brass formats in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars.
Yorkshire’s Haworth Brass Band performing in 2013
While wartime bands included woodwind instruments such as clarinets and bassoons, O’Keeffe points out that the 15th Regiment of Foot had already organized a bugles-only band by 1818 and that numerous regiments had established all-brass bands by 1830, taking advantage of new instrument designs developed at home and in Continental Europe. The Life Guards, for example, performed on valved trumpets gifted by the Russian Czar. Local defence units also mustered brass bands, including a volunteer rifle corps in Paisley (1819) and yeomanry troops in Devon (1827) and Somerset (1829).
O’Keeffe also shows that veterans of the Napoleonic wars founded many of Britain’s earliest non-military brass bands from the 1820s onwards. These ensembles often emerged far beyond the northern English and Welsh industrial communities with which they later became associated.
The first named civilian band which O’Keeffe has identified, the Colyton Brass Band, played God Save the King in a village in Devon in November 1828 as part of birthday festivities for a baronet’s son. O’Keeffe found slightly later examples in Chester and Sunderland (both 1829), Derby and Sidmouth (1831), and Poole (1832).
In 1834, Lincoln’s brass band was being trained by William Shaw, ‘formerly trumpeter and bugleman’ in the 33rd Regiment of Foot.
“These findings illustrate just how deeply brass bands are embedded in British history and culture,” said Dr O’Keeffe, who is the National Army Museum Junior Research Fellow at Queens’ College, Cambridge and part of the University’s Centre for Geopolitics.
“We already knew about their relationship with industrialization. Now we know that brass bands emerged from Britain’s wars against Napoleon.”
O’Keeffe discovered most about a band founded by James Sanderson, a Waterloo veteran, in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire. Sanderson, a former trumpet-major, publicized his ‘military brass band’ in the Leamington Spa Courier in February 1829.
Surviving newspaper reports from that summer reveal that the outfit, equipped with keyed bugles, trumpets, French horns, and trombones, performed at several well-attended fetes and other events in the area.
Sanderson’s military pension describes him as a labourer born in Thrapston, Northamptonshire. He joined the 23rd Light Dragoons, a cavalry regiment, in 1809, fought at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and went on to become the trumpet-major of the 13th Light Dragoons. He left the army due to epileptic fits in the 1820s.
On 29th June 1829, the Leamington Spa Courier reportedthat ‘Sanderson’s Warwick and Leamington Military Brass Band’ performed at a Waterloo anniversary parade in Warwick. Wearing his Waterloo medal, Sanderson mustered his fellow veterans to the tune of ‘See the conquering hero comes’.
On 1st July, the Leicester Herald reported that Sanderson’s band played for up to 300 people at a village feast in Stoneleigh, Warwickshire, inspiring a ‘merry dance’.
Advertisement for Sanderson’s brass band in the Leamington Spa Courier (28 Feb 1829)
James Sanderson’s military discharge papers
War and peace
O’Keeffe points out that the Napoleonic Wars (1793 – 1815) led to a dramatic proliferation of British military bands. By 1814, more than twenty thousand instrumentalists were serving in uniform, in the regular army and militia, as well as a host of part-time home defence formations.
Most of those in full-time service received higher pay than regular soldiers but were still subject to military discipline. The majority were fifers, drummers, trumpeters and buglers, whose music conveyed commands while enhancing parade-ground pageantry and morale. The remainder served in regimental bands of music, which not only enlivened military ceremonies but performed at a wide variety of public occasions, including balls, concerts, and civic processions.
By studying previously overlooked press reports, memoirs and regimental records, O’Keeffe reveals that once demobilized, men and boys who honed their instrumental skills in uniform embarked on a variety of civilian musical careers, becoming instructors, wind performers, composers, and even opera singers.
Many performed in an array of militia and volunteer bands that remained active long after demobilization. Others instructed or participated in a growing assortment of amateur wind and all-brass bands, which often sported uniforms and consciously emulated their regimental equivalents.
O’Keeffe said: “It is widely assumed that brass bands were a new musical species, distinct from their military counterparts. They are primarily seen as a product of industrialization pioneered by a combination of working-class performers and middle-class sponsors.
“But all-brass bands first appeared in Britain and Ireland in a regimental guise. As well as producing a large cohort of band trainers, the military provided a familiar and attractive template for amateur musicians and audiences. This coincided with expanding commercial opportunities and a growing belief in the moralising power of music.”
O’Keeffe argues that these quasi-martial troupes enjoyed cross-class appeal, becoming fixtures of seaside resorts, pitheads, and political demonstrations in the decades after Waterloo, and were not confined to northern English industrial towns.
“Soldiers returned from the Napoleonic wars amidst a severe economic recession and many suffered a great deal,” O’Keeffe said. “But here we see musicians using the skills they developed in the military to survive and often thrive.”
Dr Eamonn O’Keeffe
Detail of ‘Band in front of the King’s Statue, Weymouth, Dorset’, by A. Beattie, 1844
Band of the second regiment of Life Guards, leaving Windsor, 1830 (Oil on canvas, 1830) by John Frederick Tayler
Instruments
The Napoleonic wars created unprecedented demand for brass and other musical instruments. As well as tracking down individual musicians and bands, O’Keeffe investigated the circulation of regimental instruments after the Battle of Waterloo.
Government-issued drums and bugles were supposed to return to public stores on demobilization and band instruments generally belonged to regimental officers. But drummers and bandsmen were often unwilling to relinquish the tools of their trade.
Seven Herefordshire local militia musicians petitioned their colonel in 1816 ‘to make us a present’ of their regimental instruments, noting that performers in other disbanded units had been permitted to keep their instruments ‘as a perquisite’. The men promised to continue their weekly practices if the request was granted, pledging that ‘a band will be always ready in the town of Leominster for any occasion’.
Some officers auctioned off the instruments of their disbanded corps, making large volumes of affordable second-hand instruments available to amateur players and civilian bands in the post-war decades.
Early brass bands also embraced new instrument designs adopted by their military counterparts or introduced by regimental and ex-regimental performers. The keyed bugle, patented by an Irish militia bandmaster in 1810, was widely used by the first generation of all-brass ensembles.
The popularization of affordable and uncomplicated saxhorns by the Distin family further aided the spread of brass bands from the 1840s. The family’s patriarch, John Distin, had begun his musical career in the wartime militia.
The instrumentation of the ‘full’ and ‘brass’ bands of the 4th Dragoon Guards, c.1828
A keyed bugle, c.1830
Enduring tunes
O’Keeffe identifies a number of tunes originating in the military that remained popular with the broader public long after Waterloo.
Theatre critics in the 1820s decried the nation’s love of ‘Battle Sinfonias’ and the ‘modern mania for introducing military bands on the stage’. ‘The Downfall of Paris’, a favourite regimental quick march, became a mainstay of buskers in post-war London. A music critic writing in 1827 lamented the neglect of Bach and Mozart in favour of this tune, which he said every piano instructor ‘must be able to play, and moreover to teach’.
But recalling his youth in Richmond, North Yorkshire in the 1820s and 1830s, Matthew Bell described the expert militia band as a ‘very popular’ source of free entertainment for poorer townspeople and claimed it aroused ‘a slumbering talent for music in some of those who heard its martial and inspiring strains.’
Writing in 1827, the Newcastle historian Eneas Mackenzie was clear that ‘The bands attached to the numerous military corps embodied during the late war have tended greatly to extend the knowledge of music. At present, there is a band belonging to almost every extensive colliery upon the Tyne and the Wear’.
O’Keeffe said: “Brass bands enabled aspiring musicians of all ages to develop new skills and allowed people to make music as a community, learning from each other. That was the case in the nineteenth century and it’s still the case today.”
Dr O’Keeffe is writing a book about British military music during the Napoleonic Wars.
