BlueSci Issue 38 - Lent 2017

Lent 2017 Issue 38 www.bluesci.org

Cambridge University science magazine

OCUS

Big Data in Psychology

Science Policy Special . Language Evolution Ancient Nanotechnology Science & Fiction

Lent 2017 Issue 38

Contents

Cambridge University science magazine

Regulars

Features 6

On The Cover News Reviews

Nanotech? That’s Ancient History!

Ramya Gurunathan puts Roman art under the microscope 8

Why Care about the Polar Bear?

Is the Evolution of Language All Talk?

Steve Samuel ponders whether it is worth tackling the central question of language evolution 12

Can Birds Read Minds?

Ageing on the Brain

18

26

Perspective

27

Science Policy Special

28

Big Bucks for Big Bugs

28

No Time for Hot Air

30

Bluesci explores the role of collaboration in solving global scientific problems

Physics Nobel

Mrittunjoy Majumdar explores doughnuts and topology

Art & Science

Kent Griffith and Alisha Kasam imagine the next-generation energy landscape

Antonina Koulis and Bart Nieuwenhuis examine what biological ageing means for our neurons 16

24

Hannah Thorne looks at the evolution of scientific concepts in literature

Rachel Crosby delves into the complex world of avian interpersonal skills 14

History

Martha Dillon argues that engineers need to learn from their predecessors

Rachael Beasley reveals the biomedical secrets of the polar bear genome 10

3 4 5

Zoë Carter considers pharma and antibiotic resistance

FOCUS

Lauren Broadfield calls for climate change action

Come Flu with Me

32 30

Weird and Wonderful

34

Pavilion: Macoto Murayama

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Holly Giles looks at flu vaccine development

Big Data Bluesci investigates what our digital footprints tell the world, and what it means for society

BlueSci was established in 2004 to provide a student forum for science communication. As the longest running science magazine in Cambridge, BlueSci publishes the best science writing from across the University each term. We combine high quality writing with stunning images to provide fascinating yet accessible science to everyone.

But BlueSci does not stop there. At www.bluesci.org, we have extra articles, regular news stories, podcasts and science films to inform and entertain between print issues. Produced entirely by members of the University, the diversity of expertise and talent combine to produce a unique science experience.

Falling Cats, Fig Wasps, and Floating Lizards Honor Pollard explores modern botanical art

President: Alexander Bates...................................................president@bluesci.co.uk Managing Editor: Amelia J. Thompson....................managing-editor@bluesci.co.uk Secretary: Sophie Protheroe................................................ enquiries@bluesci.co.uk Treasurer: Zoë Carter .................................................... membership@bluesci.co.uk Art Editor: Oran Maguire .................................................. arts-editor@bluesci.co.uk Radio: Rebecca Richmond-Smith................................................radio@bluesci.co.uk News Editor: Stephanie Norwood.............................................news@bluesci.co.uk Web Editor: Simon Hoyte.................................................web-editor@bluesci.co.uk Webmaster: Mrittunjoy Majumdar...................................webmaster@bluesci.co.uk Copyeditor: Janina Ander..................................................copy-editor@bluesci.co.uk

Contents

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Issue 38: Lent 2017 Issue Editor: Elsa Loissel Managing Editor: Amelia J. Thompson Second Editors: Janina Ander, Jacob Ashton, Srinjan Basu, Alex Bates, Ben Beresford-Jones, Shan Chong, Clare Collins, Sarah Foster,Victoria Honour, Claire King, Antonina Kouli, Elsa Loissel, Bart Nieuwenhuis,Yanna Raykov, Rachael Rhodes, Steve Samuel, Samiha Shaikh, Laura Shen, Amelia J. Thompson, Hannah Thorne, Suyi Zhang Copy Editor: Janina Ander Art Editor: Oran Maguire News Editor: Stephanie Norwood News Team: Josephine Gaynord, Stephanie Norwood, Arin Wongprommoon Reviews: Ramya Gurunathan, Simon Hoyte, Amelia J. Thompson Focus Team: Elsa Loissel, Sandra Matz, Sandrine Müller, Matthew Samson, Jessica Schallock Weird and Wonderful: Rachel Crosby, Mathew Harris, Bart Nieuwenhuis Production Team: Alex Bates, Elsa Loissel, Amelia J. Thompson Caption Writers: Alex Bates, Elsa Loissel, Amelia J. Thompson Illustrators: Rachel Crosby, Martha Dillon,Yasemin Gyford, Alex Hahn, Oran Maguire, Mrittunjoy Majumdar, Pamela Niem Cover Image: Pamela Niem Advertising: Julie Skeet ISSN 1748-6920

THIS WORK is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License (unless marked by a ©, in which case the copyright remains with the original rights holder). To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA. The use of the Facebook logo on the front cover is not intended to indicate support or endorsement from Facebook of any kind, and is used under Fair Use indicating that one of our FOCUS discusses research pertaining to the company.

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Editorial

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes Few of us interact with change as intimately as researchers. Scientists precariously ride its tumultuous wave, when they are not the ones setting it in motion. There is no more perfect example of that subtle balance than the recently emerging, quietly revolutionary field of Big Data. Internet, smartphones, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon: as discreetly as we think we explore our new digital worlds, we leave footprints of our passage. And within the millions of terabytes of data we generate, scientists can discern our silhouettes. As our FOCUS writers explain, psychologists can find in them answers to age-old questions: what defines us as individuals, what motivates us, even how to predict our behaviours. This knowledge is now infiltrating every corner of our societies, from businesses to political campaigns, possibly even our healthcare systems. What will trickle down from the changes scientists are both creating and studying has the potential to be equally exhilarating and worrying.

Not all revolutions are as swift nor dramatic as Big Data. Sometimes they meander on the bedrock of our certainties, gently eroding our deepest convictions, our little-questioned worldviews. As Rachel Crosby explains, we might one day have to relinquish our claim that we are the only species to read other’s minds, and as Mrittunjoy Majumdar shows, a better mathematical understanding of topology is slowly redefining the way we see our universe. We may even, as Steve Samuel wonders, come to the realisation that there is value in probing questions without hope of an answer.

And yet, no doubt there are also perfect storms, moments when the course of history accelerates, defining turning-points that fundamentally reshape the world we know. It might not be completely unreasonable to think we are tiptoeing again on the brink of such times. Between the lines of many articles in this issue, you will see the shadow of a golden-haired, small-handed man, pick up the pieces of a torn EU flag. Our Policy Special reminds us that research doesn’t operate in a vacuum, and its authors ponder the changes that may come in such an unstable political environment. While Holly Giles shines a beacon of hope by recalling how, only a few years after WWII, countries pulled together to tackle flu epidemics, Zoë Carter and Lauren Broadfield ring alarm bells and urge for collaborative action on antibiotic resistance and climate change. In fact, environmental concerns stretch all the way to the Arctic, where Rachael Beasley explains why we should care more about polar bears – for our sake as much theirs. Driven by the same issue, Kent Griffith and Alisha Kasam draw a new path towards our next generation energy landscape. Meanwhile, Hannah Thorne reminds us what happens when science crosses over to fiction and ends up supporting dubious racist rhetoric. Science is tightly woven into the fabric of society: one can only hope its values of truth, rigour and collaboration will show through in the final pattern.

When the changes that come to us feel overwhelming and unprecedented, it can be easy to discard the past. Both Martha Dillon and Ramya Gurunathan advise us not to be so quick: there is value in the buildings our ancestors engineered, the (nano)technologies they accidentally stumbled upon. And when it all becomes too much, remember to stop and smell the flowers – or in this case, to go check Macoto Murayama’s botanical artwork in our Pavilion piece.

“Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes, turn and face the strange” pleads David Bowie’s gentle voice. Strange times may indeed be ahead: the next generation of science enthusiasts, far from being locked in their Star Trek-decorated ivory towers, are ready to take their place and face them.

Elsa Loissel Issue 38 Editor

Lent 2017

YASEMIN GYFORD

On the Cover finding a way to illustrate the use of social media in behavioural science, the subject of this issue’s FOCUS, is not an easy thing to get ‘right’, as there is no tangible object that brings the subject to mind, apart from, perhaps, the branding found on a handful of websites. For an increasingly powerful force in our lives, the recording and interpretation of our social interactions does not sit easily in any visual summary.

This is why I was very happy to receive two such personal responses to the topic from Pamela Niem (front cover) and Yasemin Gyford (FOCUS title page). Pamela’s hints at the experience of a person being distilled into data, whereas Yasemin’s considers the blurring of distinctions between our digital and regular fleshy selves when we interact. Both pieces ask us to consider what aspects of ourselves are thrown into sharp relief by data, and which, if any, cannot be seen. In the context of resolving behaviour traits from large data sets, for good or for ill, the issues brought up in both pieces are worth considering.

PAMELA NIEM

Oran Maguire Art Editor

WIKIMEDIA

News

THETURDUCKEN

Check out www.bluesci.org or @BlueSci on Twitter for regular science news and updates

Bacterial Threat to CF Patients

Plants’ Molecular Thermometers

PATIENTS WITH CYSTIC FIBROSIS (CF) are susceptible to chronic lung infections, which can cause serious health problems for sufferers. The bacterium Mycobacterium abscessus (M. abscessus) can cause such infections and is fast becoming a global threat to CF patients. This multi-drug resistant bacterium causes decreased lung function, can complicate lung transplantation, and is extremely difficult to treat. Infections of M. abscessus were previously believed to be acquired through environmental exposure; more recent research has indicated that indirect transmission could be the cause. Now a paper published in Science has indicated a different method of infection. Responding to the increase in the incidence of M. abscessus infections, the authors undertook whole-genome sequencing of bacteria from CF patients at treatment centres across the world, and compared the different strains identified.

Whereas independent environmental exposure would result in genetically diverse strains of M. abscessus infecting patients from the same treatment centres, the evolutionary relationships indicated direct person-to-person transmission. This is backed up by a case in the USA where stricter cleaning and air-filtration measures halted an outbreak of M. abscessus. In addition to the new mode of transmission identified, the paper also noted the emergence of dominant, aggressive M. abscessus strains. This study has revealed not only a worrying mode of transmission, but also a grave new strain of pathogen associated with worse clinical outcomes; however, the authors are hopeful that their work will help combat the spread of the disease.

“Now that we know the extent of the problem and are beginning to understand how the infection spreads, we can start to respond. Our work has already helped inform infection control policies and provides the means to monitor the effectiveness of these,” said Professor Julian Parkhill from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. JG

EVERY YEAR, new buds growing and flowers blooming

signal the beginning of spring. With them come warmer temperatures and longer days. Plants rely on temperature and light, in varying degrees, to time their annual developments, such as flowering in spring. However, due to climate change, crops and other plants around the world have begun to change the distribution and timings of their activities, such as flowering and fruit development.

Learning more about how plants sense temperature change at the molecular level may help us to breed crops that can better cope with the changes that our current climate brings. Until now, the way plants respond to temperature changes has been unclear. Recently, an international group, led by researchers at the University of Cambridge, has proposed that plants do this using phytochrome proteins. Scientists have long known that plants use phytochromes to detect light and signal growth and development. According to the amount and type of light the plant receives, they are able to change their growth patterns, stimulating growth when there is abundant light, and inhibiting growth when the plant finds itself in the shade. The group studied how phytochromes and related proteins in the model plant species Arabidopsis thaliana respond to temperature. They found that Arabidopsis uses phytochromes to detect light during the day, but repurposes phytochromes in the dark to sense temperature changes. In both cases, phytochromes act as a switch, flipping between two states. At night, phytochromes gradually shift from their active state to their inactive state.

The rate at which this happens is directly proportional to temperature: the higher the temperature, the faster the rate of conversion. Fast conversion to the inactive state promotes growth, whilst slow conversion at lower temperatures inhibits growth. This may explain why many plants grow slower in winter. AW

Could You Wear Your Smartphone?

SEE-MING LEE

WEARABLE TECHNOLOGY HAS great potential for applications in health care, fashion, or even to store energy from our movements. However, some current technologies are still either too cumbersome, and therefore inflexible, or too expensive to produce on large scales. This could all change after scientists from the University of Cambridge’s Cambridge Graphene Centre and Jiangnan University in China developed a new, environmentally-friendly method for making electrically conductive cotton. In this study, published in the journal Carbon, the scientists impregnate cotton textiles with graphene oxide. Pure graphene is too unreactive to bond with the cotton, but the oxygen in graphene oxide allows

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News

it to bond to the cotton in a similar way to a dye. The graphene oxide is then treated using a hot press method to increase its conductivity. This eco-friendly method avoids the need for toxic chemicals. The authors then showed that the cotton produced is both conductive and flexible, and demonstrated its use as a strain sensor that could be attached to the skin. “This method will allow us to put electronic systems directly into clothes. It’s an incredible enabling technology for smart textiles,” said Professor Chaoxia Wang, one of the contributors. In the future, technologies such as this could lead to a new variety of wearable electronics that are useful, comfortable and cheap enough to be widely available. SN Lent 2017

Reviews MICROBE WORLD

Before the Wilderness - Kat Anderson & Thomas Blackburn

Malki/Ballena, 1993

The idea that people exist today who have never seen white skin and who rely on hunting and foraging for food is often considered pure fiction. Since we severed ourselves from the natural world, we have come to believe that natural environments are an ‘untrammelled wilderness’ at odds with human activity and in need of conservation. Through exploring anthropological and archaeological records of Native Californian groups, Before the Wilderness shows the first belief to be a misconception: “the extremely rich, diverse, and apparently ‘wild’ landscape that so impressed Europeans at the time of contact, was to some extent actually a product of deliberate human intervention”. The 14 contributors to the book reveal the surprising extent of this in California; techniques used by indigenous Californians to ‘domesticate’ their environments included landscape burning, transplantation of vegetation, and construction of dams. The book demonstrates that hunter-gatherers, despite not practicing agriculture, had such a huge impact on ecosystems and landscape make-up that their environments effectively ‘co-evolved’ with them. The authors’ seemingly inescapable conclusion is that governments and NGOs working for conservation must consider indigenous peoples as an important part of functioning environments, not as a threat to them. SH

RadioLab Podcast (WYNC Studios)

www.radiolab.org

After the sound of a buzzing Tesla coil, a dozen bubbles popping, and a fade into some cigar lounge jazz, hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich begin by telling you how excited they are about today’s episode of Radiolab, a show about “curiosity.” While Radiolab episodes are not always explicitly sciencecentric, they generally deal with the intersection between science, technology, and other aspects of the human experience including history, philosophy, art, and music. In fact, music and sound play an integral part in their shows. The background noises are almost a standalone form of entertainment, but always complement the episode’s topic. A great example of the prototypical Radiolab episode is ‘Bigger than Bacon’, which is all about bubbles and their surprising role in marine biology, World War II history, and a novel treatment for brain diseases. The hosts always bring in experts to explain technical details and the implications of research findings. Often, the show includes on-site interviews so that audience members can hear the sounds made in a genetics lab or excavation site. Anyone interested in how science shapes and is shaped by society, presented with the help of strange sound effects and keen hosts, will find Radiolab worth a listen. RG

Drawn from Paradise - David Attenborough & Errol Fuller

HarperCollins, 2012

Lent 2017

Drawn from Paradise is a tale of art and ornithology, told by two experts on natural history who also happen to share a lifelong fascination with the birds of paradise. Attenborough and Fuller describe how the strange beauty of these birds fired both the scientific and artistic imagination from when their plumes first reached Europe in the sixteenth century, and tell the story of their subsequent discovery in the mountainous rainforests of remote New Guinea. (This is a tale populated with characters at least as bizarre as the birds – even Errol Flynn makes an appearance!) In parallel, the book traces the progress of our scientific understanding of their behaviour and habitats through the paintings of natural history artists through the centuries. Drawn from Paradise is even an object of art in itself: from the oversized pages (giving the illustrations enough space to spread their wings) to the lavishly coloured and gilded cover, it follows the style of the exquisite natural history sketchbooks by artists like Maryjo Koch, author of The Nest. This is a must-read for anyone fascinated by the interplay between science and art or the mystique of the birds of paradise. AJT

Reviews

5

Nanotech? That’s Ancient History!

The Lycurgus Cup, currently housed in the British Museum, is made from a type of glass that owes its unusual colour effects to nanoparticles

PUBLIC DOMAIN

Ramya Gurunathan shines a light on nanoparticles in Ancient Roman art

NANOTECHNOLOGY, the science of the small, emerged as a hot-button topic around the 1990s. It now has farreaching impacts in multiple fields of technology, ranging from medicine to transportation, and has been particularly influential in electronics. It is an area of engineering focusing on the design of new materials and devices at the nanometre (nm) scale, one billionth of a metre, which is a size range difficult to conceptualise. One nanometre is the length of just seven carbon atoms in a row; 100,000 nm span the thickness of a human hair.

The first musing about nanotechnology as a field is said to come from Nobel Laureate Dr. Richard Feynman’s famous 1959 talk “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” Here, he forecasted the invention of “infinitesimal machines” with wires and gears invisible to the human eye, an idea which seemed visionary at the time.

Nanotechnology has just started to blossom in the last few decades because scientists have only recently acquired the tools to manipulate, and indeed visualise, matter at the atomic scale. The scanning tunnelling microscope (STM), invented in 1981, can be used to visualise individual atoms on a material’s surface, while the molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) deposition system, invented in the late

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Ancient Nanotech

1960’s, builds up new materials, which may have never before existed on earth, one atomic layer at a time.

The first evidence of nanoscale engineering, however, not only predated the invention of these research tools, but also came before many influential scientists including Feynman, Faraday, and Newton. In fact, the oldest recorded use of nanotechnology dates to a civilization known for famous ‘firsts’: the Ancient Romans.

Thousands of years ago, they used metal nanoparticles to create eye-catching colours and other optical effects in stained glass artefacts.

The definition of a nanoparticle can be somewhat nebulous, but it is typically considered a cluster of atoms in which at least one dimension is less than 100 nm.

At this infinitesimal scale, classical physical laws which govern the macroscopic world start to fall apart, and we enter the weird and wonderful world of the quantum. For instance, nanoparticles interact with light in unusual and remarkable ways, as the dimensions of the particle are on the same scale as the wavelength of visible light (200-800 nm). This phenomenon is something the Ancient Romans used, perhaps unknowingly, in their artwork.

The Lycurgus Cup is so named because its outer Lent 2017

Lent 2017

holograms by taking advantage of the plasmonic resonance effect in silver nanoparticles. The group fabricated arrays of nanoparticles with two different shapes (rods and spheres), spaced at distances less than the wavelength of visible light (<200 nm). The two types of nanoparticles scatter different frequencies of light. The scattered light can be reconstructed into a multicolour image, which is then projected. In the future, this effect could therefore be used for 3D display technology.

Moreover, each of the nanoparticles in the array essentially stores its own independent information in the form of the wavelength and polarization of the light it scatters. Utilising this knowledge, new technologies could be developed that dramatically improve the capacity of optical data storage devices like DVDs or Blu-ray discs.

Of course, it will take some time for this technology to become commercially viable. In a Cambridge Research press release, Montelongo told interviewers, “The potential of this technology will be realised when they are mass produced and integrated into the next generation of ultra-thin consumer electronics.”

It is always exciting to think about what the future holds in terms of technology development, but what happens when ‘the next big thing’ has really been around for centuries? Perhaps the story of the Lycurgus Cup is a gentle reminder that sometimes it is necessary to reach back 1,600 years in order to take the next step forward. It is both baffling and extremely humbling that the Romans were manufacturing using nanoparticles before there was even a word to describe them.

Ramya Gurunathan is an MPhil student at the Centre for Scientific Computing

Nanoparticles and plasmonics: the science behind both the Lycurgus Cup and cutting-edge holography

ORAN MAGUIRE

carvings depict the legend of King Lycurgus from the 6th book of Homer’s Iliad. The chalice currently sits in the British Museum and dates back to the 4th century AD. What is remarkable about the cup is that it exhibits a dual-colour optical effect known as dichroism: it is a jade colour when light is reflected from the surface (front-lit), but a ruby red colour when light is transmitted through the cup (back-lit). The optical effect began attracting scholarly attention in the 1950s, when a sample of the cup was sent to the General Electric Company in Wembley, yet the science underlying this effect was not pinned down until the 1990s. Scientists Barber and Freestone, from the University of Essex and the British Museum Research Laboratory respectively, studied a sample of the cup under a transmission electron microscope (TEM) and discovered the presence of metal nanoparticles with diameters ranging from 50-100 nm. Further X-ray analysis revealed that the composition of these nanoparticles was approximately 70% gold and 30% silver.

So, did the Romans discover nanoparticles and master nanotechnology several millennia ago, only to have it lost and rediscovered by modern-day scientists? This is unlikely.

The use of nanoparticles to colour Roman ceramics seems to have been short-lived: many pieces of recovered pottery appear to be failed attempts to recreate the dichroism, suggesting the Romans just got astonishingly lucky.

The metal nanoparticles in the Lycurgus Cup interact with light in unusual ways because of a phenomenon known as surface plasmon resonance. Light propagates as an electromagnetic wave, composed of orthogonal electric and magnetic fields. Metals, being conductors, have a large density of freely moving electrons on their surface.

When light hits the surface of a metal, like a chrome mirror or a piece of aluminium foil, its oscillating electric field causes electrons on the metal’s surface to oscillate at the same frequency. These oscillations are known as surface plasmons, and they block the light from entering the metal, causing it to reflect off of the surface instead.

This is what causes metals to be shiny and reflective.

As a result of the minuscule dimensions of metal nanoparticles, the electrons on the surface of the particle oscillate at specific frequencies, known as resonant frequencies. Only specific frequencies of light, those at the resonance frequency, are reflected, while light of other frequencies travels through and so is transmitted.

By changing the size, shape, and chemical composition of the metal nanoparticle, you can change the resonant frequencies and hence tune which wavelengths of light get reflected and which get transmitted. In the case of the Lycurgus cup, the gold-silver nanoparticles reflect bluegreen light but transmit red light, leading to the dichroism.

Over 1,600 years later, the same physical phenomena at work in the Lycurgus Cup is making a comeback in the research labs of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering. In a study published in the journal PNAS in 2014, a Cambridge research team, led by then PhD student Yunuen Montelongo, produced multi-colour

ORAN MAGUIRE

Ancient Nanotech

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Why Care About the Polar Bear?

Rachael Beasley reveals how there is more to polar bears than meets the eye

Female polar bears get pregnant in the summer, but actual implantation of the embryos happen a few months later, when the female has enough fat reserves to sustain a pregnancy. Birth takes place in the middle of the winter as the mother is staying in her den, relying only on the fat she accumulated earlier in the year to sustain herself and her nursing cubs

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CLIMATE CHANGE. Already in your mind are images of traffic jams hazy with pollution, melting icecaps, and most likely the polar bear. This year marked the fifth lowest Arctic sea ice extent since records began. The low amount of ice has a severe impact on the bears – in fact, they are increasingly becoming known as the ‘canary in the coal mine’ of climate change. But imagine a world without global warming; would you still care if these animals vanished from the cold, desolate Arctic? Admittedly, they are not as cute as pandas; you will not see them falling off tables and being dragged out of leaf barrels. If anything, news headlines of bears mauling students and besieging meteorologists may do little to inspire caring for this ambling nomad.

Yet, perhaps, a brief look into their physiology and behaviour may convince you otherwise: with the polar bear comes a genome that could revolutionise treatment of human conditions like cardiovascular disease and osteoporosis.

In the Arctic, the polar bear’s home, temperatures can reach an eyeball-freezing −40°C. Yet the bears are more at risk of overheating than freezing to death.

This is because healthy polar bears have up to eleven centimetres of fat underneath their skin. In fact, this can result in half of their weight being fat. In comparison, humans with this amount of adipose tissue would be considered obese and suffer from atherosclerosis, diabetes and heart disease. Yet the polar bear deals with no such consequences. A 2014 study by Liu and colleagues sheds light on this mystery.

They compared the coding regions of genes from polar bears with the ones from their closest relatives from a warmer climate, the brown bears. This allowed them to determine the genes that have allowed polar bears to survive in one of the toughest environments on earth.

Liu and colleagues found sixteen genes that had been strongly positively selected in polar bears; nine of them were involved in cardiovascular

Why Care About the Polar Bear?

TRASROID

function, including one known as APoB. This gene codes for an apolipoprotein that binds low-density lipoproteins (LDL), a form of cholesterol associated with increased risk of heart disease in humans. Once bound, this protein increases LDL transportation out of the blood and into somatic cells. There is therefore no build-up of LDL in the blood, which is thought to prevent heart disease and atherosclerosis.

Interestingly, humans also possess many of the sequences highlighted in the study. Deleterious mutations in these genes, including APoB, are being associated with atherosclerosis and heart disease.

Polar bears may therefore be an important study model to understand vascular diseases in humans.

The genome of the polar bear may also provide the solution for another condition, one that particularly plagues our older generation: osteoporosis. This is a disease where bones show reduced density, usually caused by insufficient exercise, reduced calcium intake, or food starvation. Bone tissue is dynamic and is constantly being remodelled, meaning that bone is added or removed depending on nutrient availability and the stress that the bone is under.

Female polar bears, however, undergo extreme conditions during every pregnancy. Once autumn comes around, these females will dig maternity dens and remain in them until spring to birth their cubs.

This results in around six months of fasting where the new mothers have to keep themselves and their newly born cubs alive, depleting their own calcium and calorie reserves. Despite all this, their bones remain strong and dense.

Physiologists Lennox and Goodship found an explanation for this paradox in 2008 by comparing biochemical markers in the blood of wild female polar bears before and after denning. After denning, markers associated with bone removal were not significantly increased. Prior to denning, markers associated with bone formation, for example osteocalcium, were double that of bears

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Understanding the polar bear's ability to survive in harsh environments could shed new light on biological regulation of cholesterol as well as bone density

ORAN MAGUIRE & RACHEL CROSBY

which were not pregnant. Thus, the scientists showed that female bears are able to increase the density of their bones prior to denning, and reduce bone removal during denning to retain a strong skeleton throughout. Hibernating brown bears do not have this capacity and must therefore resort to major bone reformation in the following spring. If the mechanism of bone remodelling in polar bears can be understood, many bedridden humans, and even astronauts, could potentially benefit.

The medical benefits of the polar bear for humanity certainly have their importance in our conservation efforts, but these should not be the only ones in the balance. We tend to want to protect animals we think are intelligent and possess emotions, such as elephants and primates. Bears on the other hand seem to be perceived as stupid and thoughtlessly violent. And yet, anecdotal evidence from the field challenges these assumptions, suggesting for example that polar bears have good problem solving abilities. A male bear called GoGo in Tennoji Zoo, Osaka, has even been observed manipulating his environment through tools. The bear used a tree branch on multiple occasions to knock off a piece of meat hung out of his reach.

Problem-solving ability has also been witnessed in wild polar bears (though not as obviously as GoGo): a calculated move by a male bear involved running and jumping onto barrels to brush the leg of a photographer on a platform four metres high.

Normally, even male bears at three metres tall would not be able to reach that height.

In other studies, such as one by Alison Ames in 2008, polar bears showed deliberate and focused object manipulation, like stacking objects and knocking them over as part of game-playing.

Although these more complex behaviours were only being exhibited 10.7% of the time by female bears, the study still demonstrates that bears are capable of agile and thought-out behaviours. These examples suggest bears have greater creativity and problem

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solving abilities than previously thought.

As for emotions, while the evidence is once again anecdotal, many bears have been seen to swat ice and snowâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;seemingly out of frustrationâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;when they have just missed out on a kill. Moreover, polar bears can form unusual relationships with other species, including playing with sled dogs. Remarkably, one hand-raised polar bear called Agee has formed a close relationship with her owner Mark Dumas to the point where they even swim together. This is seen as even more astonishing when it is known that polar bears do actively hunt humans in the wild. Thus, polar bears are not necessarily aggressive all the time, and may form strong attachments to other individuals.

So, climate change or not, perhaps spare a few more thoughts for the polar bear. Their extinction will mean the loss of not only potential breakthroughs in human medicine, but more importantly the disappearance of an intelligent, majestic animal.

Climate change chips away polar bears' natural habitat. Some experts predict that two-thirds of the population will go extinct by 2050

USGS

Rachael Beasley is a 2nd year undergraduate studying Natural Science at Homerton College

Why Care About the Polar Bear?

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Is The Evolution of Language All Talk?

ORAN MAGUIRE

Steve Samuel ponders whether it is worth tackling the central question of how language has come to be

SUSAN MURTAUGH

Language is, of course, still evolving. As communication becomes increasingly digital and global, short-hand ‘text-speak’ has become increasingly prolific and has evolved its own subtleties. For example ‘That’s okay.’ with a full stop and ‘That’s okay!’ relay different emotional information; the first can seem passive agressive or hassled, the second gracious or even enthusiastic

HOW IS IT that one species alone on this planet evolved language? Though we are not the only animal to have acquired a unique capability, language is so woven into the fabric of our species that it forms the defining element of our species-identity. For some, without language we would not even have concepts, and without concepts, we would not ‘think’ in the way that we understand thinking. It is part of our human condition. Undoubtedly, it qualifies as a ‘big question’ in science.

Even so, are some questions too big to ask? The emergence and evolution of language is a difficult nut to even begin to crack, at least for now. Words do not fossilise, so we have no idea what ‘primitive’ language looked (or sounded) like. When no-one can think of a reason why language is not beneficial to a species’ fitness, explanations of how it evolved

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Is The Evolution of Language All Talk?

are open to a free-for-all. Marc Hauser is the author of influential work on human and nonhuman communication; in a recent publication he discusses the evolution of language and points out that “often, perhaps too often, theoretical positions are staked out without considering the question of whether any evidence would really be able to support or refute the thesis.”

When asking such big questions, do we run the risk of getting carried away by possibilities rather than drawn in by the facts? On the other hand, is it overly pessimistic – defeatist even – to back down on something so obviously critical to our curiosity, not just about the world, but ourselves too?

What studies of language evolution need to explain is how the versatility and complexity of language came to be. Human speech (and sign language) as we know it is based on a huge store of thousands of abstract labels, or words. These are combined in meaningful ways, allowing the embedding of segments within other segments (recursivity) integrated with meaning-specific structural constraints (grammar). Together, these faculties enable us to communicate an essentially infinite variety of potential messages.

Investigating the evolution of a trait usually requires comparing across species and time, so as to look for continuities and contrasts and make inferences. Language, however, presents some specific problems.

Taking first comparisons across species, we find that there is no analogue for human language. Our close relatives the chimpanzees and bonobos can be taught to use ‘lexigrams’ – a sheet of abstract symbols to which the animal can point in order to communicate. While interesting, these one-to-one mappings of label and referent (thing in the world that the Lent 2017

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word refers to) do not come close to the versatility and complexity of human messages. More importantly, as Derek Bickerton notes in his book Adam’s Tongue, when the human experimenters were absent and the lexigram-trained bonobos were left only with other bonobos, the sheets quickly ended up on the floor of the lab, kicked around and disused. In other words, teaching apes ‘language’ did not make them ‘languageusers’, despite the obvious advantages of using their newly-acquired skills with each other. Humans, on the other hand, rarely shut up. According to Bickerton, the evolution of language is not only a question of language per se, but of the specific characteristics of our ancestors’ ecological niche that made language so fundamental to us in the first place. Other species, after all, do not seem to need to talk.

As for comparisons across time, we run into yet another problem. Except when written (and writing is a relatively modern invention), language leaves no traces. Richard Dawkins once argued, when offering an account of how something so complex as the eye non-human research and provide some clues as to could have occurred through evolution rather than what makes communication more or less common. by design, that a little sight is better than no sight For example, recent research points to corvid species at all. By the same token, one needs to prove why ‘a – crows, jays, and others – as exhibiting complex little language’ is better than ‘no language’, and why behaviours that were once thought to be restricted to a ‘little more language’ is better still. Herein lies the only our closest relatives, such as using tools to achieve essence of the problem of the scientific investigation otherwise unattainable goals, or appreciating the art into language evolution. How do you explain of deception. What ties the ecological niche of chimps something so complex when you can only see its and corvids may provide clues to what ignited the final state? For those who advocate the investigation breadth and complexity of cognitive abilities in our of the evolution of language, such as Jim Hurford, own species – possibly including language. linguist and author of numerous books on the topic, Owing to the sheer enormity of investigating a chronology is beyond the horizon: “I don’t think language evolution, perhaps we need to judge advances we can expect answers very soon about any timeline towards an answer by a more liberal metric, while at for language evolution, e.g. how many millennia ago the same time remaining acutely cognizant of our various features of modern language(s) appeared. For limitations. “I agree that big questions shouldn’t be example, I don’t think we can know how much of a ignored,” says Hauser, “But they should be assessed language faculty Neanderthals had, or didn’t have.” in light of what is currently possible with respect to The difficulties with studying the evolution of human empirical inquiry. When scholars use archaeological language in the same way as other traits may be evidence to talk about the computations and insurmountable – at least for the time being. representations of early hominids, this seems to me a Nevertheless, it is reasonable to conclude that massive over-interpretation, and it is hard to see how progress on the big question has indeed been made. such data could truly shed light on the syntax (for For example, while one would imagine intuitively that example) of our ancestors. But this doesn’t mean that language evolved as we got better at communicating, one should stop exploring the issue.” The worth of Robbins Burling argues in his 2005 book The Talking language evolution research may lie in the fact that Ape that at early stages the frontrunner of language there is scientific merit in the journey, as we collect was the ‘comprehender’ rather than the ‘speaker’. After little nuggets of information and meander our way all, what’s the point of being a language user if no-one perhaps closer, perhaps further, from a destination. else in the world can understand your message? At the As Hurford points out, “For me the value of a study same time, archaeological and physiological research of language evolution lies rather in making us think offer evidence-based constraints on theorising, such about what kind of thing language is.” as in regards to the vocal capacities of early hominids.

Comparative cognition also continues to shed Steve Samuel is a postdoctoral researcher in light on the abilities and limitations of non-human categorisation, social cognition, and communication. comparative psychology at the Department of Psychology These can certainly be examined in the light of other Lent 2017

Kanzi, a male Bonobo under the purview of Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, was the first great ape known to naturalistically learn how to use a lexigram through observing his mother interact with researchers, accompanying his pointing with high pitched vocalisations that may have been attempts to ape human speech

Is The Evolution of Language All Talk?

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Can Birds Read Minds?

Eurasian Jays have been observed to lie atop of anthills with their wings splayed out, allowing themselves to be sprayed with formic acid from its resident ant colony. They likely do this in order to prevent parasites colonising their plumage

RACHEL CROSBY

Rachel Crosby puts herself inside the mind of the Eurasian Jay

IF YOU WALK into the kitchen and see your friend jumping around holding onto their foot, you are likely to think that they have stood on something painful, not that they are performing a ritual rain dance. Humans have the ability to decode the thoughts, beliefs and emotions of others, allowing you to predict and understand peoples’ actions because we are able to hypothesise others’ thought processes. This ability to place ourselves in the position of others is an insight developed over millions of years of social and biological evolution.

However, there is growing evidence that non-human animals may have similar ‘mindreading’ abilities.

Members of the corvid family, including crows, rooks, ravens, jackdaws, magpies and jays, have a well-deserved reputation for being one of the most intelligent groups of animals, perhaps even on an equal footing with great apes and dolphins. Their skills range from intricate tool use to complex social interactions and extensive memory skills. Corvids are known for their food-caching strategies, burying seeds when they are abundant and recovering them in times of scarcity. These birds remember what, where and when they cached in potentially hundreds or thousands of locations.

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Can Birds Read Minds?

Ravens, California scrub jays and Eurasian jays all employ cache protection strategies to keep their cache locations disguised from potential pilferers. When a competitor is eyeing them up, scrub jays will choose to cache in shaded or out-of-view places to avoid their gaze. If the competitor is within earshot they will also choose quieter substrates to hide their food in. Scrub jays that are watched by a competitor while caching will often come back to hide the food somewhere else once the competitor is gone. However, cachers only do this if they have previous experience of being a thief and pilfering the food cached by others. Birds that have never been thieves do not re-cache after they have been watched. These findings suggest that caching birds may be able to perform a mindreading trick known as experience projection. The cacher uses their own experience to outwit the pilferer by imagining the other bird’s point of view and mentally placing themself in the thief ’s position.

In the opinion of Dr Ed Legg, “this is probably the best evidence that a non-human animal can predict another’s action by ‘putting itself in the shoes’ of that other individual.”

Dr Ljerka Ostojić, a postdoctoral researcher working with Professor Nicky Clayton in the Lent 2017

JULIA LEIJOLA

Comparative Cognition Lab at the University of Cambridge, studies another social behaviour that corvids perform: courtship food-sharing. In order for the male to keep his partner’s attention he must frequently bring her gifts of food throughout the breeding season. However, it pays for the male to be considerate of the female’s desires so that he can keep her attention and her loyalty. It would therefore be useful for the males to ‘read the mind’ of the female and predict what she desires most. Ljerka Ostojić believes that this may be just what male Eurasian jays are doing.

The best way to test whether males are tuned to their partner’s desires is to alter the female’s wish for different foods and see whether the male responds. In experimental conditions the desires of female jays can be manipulated using specific satiety.

This sensory phenomenon occurs when you eat a lot of one type of food, resulting in that food seeming less appealing. For example, after dinner you may be full of pasta but happy to eat a dessert! If a male jay sees his partner eat a whole bowl of mealworms, he should predict that her desire for more mealworms is reduced and she might prefer waxworms instead.

Considering the situation from the female’s point of view allows the male to respond to her desires–a skill known as perspective-taking.

In her first food sharing study Ljerka Ostojić showed that when the males watched the female being pre-fed, they altered their sharing by increasing the proportion of non-sated worms. However, when the males did not see what the female had been eating, they showed no change in sharing patterns.

This important control demonstrates that the males are not simply responding to differences in the female’s behaviour (e.g. begging) at the time of sharing, but instead infer her desires based on what she has previously eaten.

However, understanding what others want is not always that simple; even humans struggle to disentangle their own desires from those of others.

As we grow older (most) humans become better at this, but younger children will egocentrically select what they desire most. In a well-known study by psychologists Repacholi and Gopnik, one-year-old children watched adults making obvious “Eww!” and “Mmm” sounds indicating that they enjoyed raw broccoli rather than goldfish crackers. Despite these cues, the infants preferred to offer crackers to the adults no matter how emphatically the adult showed that they did not like them.

In a close comparison to this, the desires of male

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jays interfere with their ability to respond to the females’ desires. When the male jay is also pre-fed to satiety on one type of worms he will nearly always offer the female the worms he currently prefers.

However, crucially, when the female is pre-fed on the opposite worms, he will still give her some of the worms that she desires even though he does not want them himself. This suggests that the male’s sharing choices are influenced by a combination of his own desires and the desires of the female. This matching finding in jays and humans suggests that birds may use their own experience of internal states to judge others’ states in a way similar to humans.

In Ljerka Ostojić’s opinion, “testing what the birds cannot do is just as important as testing what they can do. Investigating limitations of their cognitive processes might bring us closer to understanding the nature of these processes.”

Research into the advanced cognition of corvids is ongoing, but as we learn more about what other animals can and cannot do we are better able to understand the mechanisms behind our own cognitive abilities. As the evidence grows that social interactions of humans and birds may be based on similar underlying rules, it could well be time to retire the pedestal on which we have placed human social intelligence.

Ljerka Ostojić with Caracas, one of the jays she works with at the Cambridge Cognition Lab

“...this is probably the best evidence that a non-human animal can predict another’s action by ‘putting itself in the shoes’ of that other individual.”

Rachel Crosby is a PhD student in the Department of Psychology

Can Birds Read Minds?

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The Ageing Brain

Since 1950, the number of people over 60 in the world has tripled.

In 2050, the combined senior and geriatric population is expected to reach 2.1 billion

JONEL HANOPOL

Antonina Kouli and Bart Nieuwenhuis put the future of our brains under the microscope

AGEING IS AN inevitable part of life - but what exactly makes us age? While researchers agree that there is no single cause of ageing – rather, it is a continuous multifactoral process – we are far from a complete understanding of the mechanisms at work. In particular, ageing of the brain remains a mystery. “Brain functions start to deteriorate from our early twenties; however, the impact on performance only appears after late middle age. This is because up until then we have ways to compensate”, explains Professor Michael Coleman, Chairman of the John van Geest Centre for Brain Repair at the University of Cambridge. He is convinced that there is no such thing as healthy ageing, reasoning that many processes slowly fail at every biological level.

Neurons, cells of the nervous system, undergo agerelated changes at the cellular level. There are many types of neurons and together they form a huge network. The typical structure of a neuron consists of a cell body with many dendrites and one axon. The cell body is the core of the neuron and contains a nucleus with DNA. The dendrites are the receivers of signals from other neurons, while the long axon is the transmitter of signals. Both dendrites and the axon have specialised structures, called synapses, which are responsible for the communication

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The Ageing Brain

between neurons. When we get older, there are several changes in the structure of neurons. Firstly, synapses are lost or become dysfunctional. Secondly, dendrites and the axon lose some of their branches that connect to other neurons, and thus the network begins to shrink. Finally, many of the neurons are lost due to cell death. All these contribute to phenomena like forgetfulness or slowness of movement, which are typical of old age.

Ageing also influences neurons at the molecular level. In fact, our DNA has a prominent role during ageing. Genetic material undergoes age-related changes in every cell. In the brain, only a small proportion of genes are modified when getting older. Most of these genes become less active when ageing, while the activity levels of others increases. For instance, the function of genes involved with memory and thinking are decreased and this could explain why we forget things when we get older, while the function of genes involved in the inflammatory and stress response are increased during ageing. Importantly, the changes in DNA are not equally distributed throughout the brain. The regions involved in memory and higher thinking processes appear to have more gene modifications. Thus, it is easy to understand why ageing is the major risk factor for brain diseases

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such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

Another culprit involved in ageing is a small organelle located inside all our cells, the mitochondrion.

Mitochondria are often referred to as the powerhouses of the cell: their primary function is to produce energy by metabolising nutrients and the oxygen we breathe.

Our brain requires more energy than any other organ to function properly and therefore mitochondria are especially essential for neurons. But how are these organelles linked to ageing? Mitochondria contain a small amount of DNA, which has a mutation rate approximately fifteen times higher than nuclear DNA. This phenomenon partly occurs because energy production generates reactive oxygen by-products, called free radicals, which can damage DNA and introduce mutations. Given their proximity to the main site of free radical production, mitochondria are constantly exposed to oxidative stress. In other words, as we grow older, randomly occurring mutations begin to accumulate in the mitochondrial DNA, causing mitochondria to malfunction. This leads to energy depletion and ultimately neuronal cell death. Having said that, there are several contradictory studies and therefore the precise mechanisms of how mitochondria are involved in ageing remain a topic of debate.

However, it is not only toxic oxygen radicals that accumulate when we get older; other types of waste products can also hinder the normal function of cells.

They are particularly detrimental for neurons because these cells do not have the capacity to replicate. From the beginning of our lives, waste products from metabolism such as damaged and misfolded proteins can accumulate inside neurons. Neurons can remove these unwanted molecules by different mechanisms; these processes start to decay and malfunction when we age. This can lead to the accumulation of pathological proteins, a major risk factor for neurological diseases common in older people. In these pathologies, the damaged proteins begin to stick to each other and form big aggregates. For example, Alzheimer’s disease, one of the most common neurological diseases of old age,

is associated with the abnormal accumulation of two proteins, amyloid-beta and tau. The formation of those aggregates is a multi-step, dynamic process and can lead to neuronal degeneration. Yet, Coleman says, “Protein aggregation also occurs in individuals that never manifest pathological symptoms”.

In addition, a process termed demyelination contributes to ageing in the brain. What does this mean?

One part of the neuron, the axon, is ensheathed by a white fatty layer called myelin. Neurons communicate with each other via electrical signals, and myelin acts as an essential insulation substance that improves the conduction of these electric pulses. When we age, neurons slowly start to lose this white matter. Coleman confirms that “MRI studies show massive loss of white matter in older brains and this could be due to the loss of the axons themselves or the loss of myelin”. Myelin gets shorter and thinner and this has consequences for the electric communication between neurons in the brain. Signals from one neuron to another are weakened, leading to characteristics associated with old age such as memory loss, weakness of limbs, and fatigue.

Is there any escape from our brain getting old? As Coleman remarks, “The solution to slow down ageing is already partly out there: we know that following a healthy lifestyle, i.e. good diet, exercise, no smoking or excessive alcohol use, has a big impact on human lifespan”. He also mentioned that the future of ageing research looks promising since new fields are emerging, tackling the many processes by which the brain changes over our lifetime. Finally, “Ageing is the major risk factor for almost all neurodegenerative diseases. It is hence crucial to characterise the ongoing changes of normal ageing to better understand the underlying causes of disease.”

Antonina Kouli and Bart Nieuwenhuis are PhD students in Clinical Neuroscience

The Ageing Brain

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Circles and ellipses are all topologically equivalent

Point removal can convert an object between topologies, here from circle to line

Some three-dimensional topological forms: (a) Sphere (b) Torus (c) Knotted Torus (d) 'Pretzel' shape

MRITTUNJOY MAJUMDAR

A Möbius Strip is a a surface with one continuous side formed by joining the ends of a rectangle after twisting one end through 180°

Triangulation of a tetrahedron and a sphere

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Mrittunjoy Guha Majumdar explains the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics and what it means for coffee and doughnuts WHOEVER KNEW that probing into the twodimensional physical world could open a Pandora's box? David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz. The eminent trio were recently awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics 2016 for their work on explaining strange phenomena in the states of matter in a flat world—a world that can be considered to be laminar and two-dimensional.

The realm of the single atomic particle, of electrons, protons, and quarks, is that of the quantum world. Many of you may have heard of the idiosyncratic characteristics of this realm, for example the probabilistic outcome of measuring its properties. However, when such entities come together in the two-dimensional world, they are found to display some very interesting collective features. Most importantly, it was found by Haldane, Thouless and Kosterlitz that topology plays a major role in the physical 'flatlands'.

Topology is a branch of mathematics that describes properties of a space that changes step-wise under continuous deformations, such as stretching and bending and twisting, but not tearing or glueing various sections of the space. With topology as the primary tool, this year's Laureates presented surprising results, which have opened up new avenues of research.

Because topology is the study of properties of spaces invariant under continuous deformation, topologically, a circle is equivalent to an ellipse (into which it can be deformed by stretching) and, going by a popular joke, topology is what makes you forget the difference between a coffee cup and a doughnut.

One can also change a small portion of a form to make it topologically equivalent to another, which it was not its topological equivalent initially. For example a point can be erased from a circle to make it topologically equivalent to a line segment. One can visualize this by imagining that one could pull the ends, so formed, around the erased portion down and make it into the linear form.

There are various other interesting threedimensional topological shapes and forms, as

A Topological Window into Exotic Matter

shown to the side. The sphere is technically called a 2-Sphere. This is because if a single point is removed from the surface of a hollow sphere, it can be mapped to a 2-dimensional plane by stretching out the hole this removal creates. We can similarly have an n-Sphere for n-dimensions, where n can take any value from 0 to infinity. A circle is a 1-sphere. Other interesting forms like the torus, the knotted torus and the 'pretzel' shape, can be thought of similarly.

The important point to note here is the presence of holes in the shapes. A hole in the shape, like in a torus, makes it topologically different from a sphere, since a torus cannot be deformed into a sphere (or vice versa) without tearing open the shape, restructuring it and glueing it back.

There are some important and interesting characteristics of such topological forms: 'connectedness' means that any two points of the surface can be joined by a path in the surface (such as in a torus), being 'closed' refers to those shapes that have no boundary or rim (a Möbius strip is one-sided since because an imaginary ant starting on one side and crawling round it would find itself on the other side of the Möbius strip) and being 'triangulable' refers to whether we can chop up the surface of shape into a finite number of triangles (effectively vertices, edges and faces).

The topological form that is most relevant to understanding the most recent Nobel Prize in Physics is the vortex. Many of us may have seen whirlpools in oceans or even the water in a basin moving into the sink-hole in a vortical manner. A vortex is defined as a physical quantity that has a rotational tendency about a point in or on the physical system.

Vorticity, the key defining property of a vortex, describes the local rotary motion at a point in a certain physical system. In physics, a quantum vortex is a topological defect exhibited in super fluids and superconductors. The existence of quantum vortices was predicted by Lars Onsager in 1947. Quantum vortices have been observed in systems such as superconductors and atomic gases. It was while working with such quantum vortices that Kosterlitz Lent 2017

JONATHAN GROSS

A Topological Window into Exotic Matter

JONATHAN GROSS

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that period. The answer was eventually found in topology.

Topologically, any form with one, two, three, four,...n holes in it belong to different categories, with objects in each category being capable of being converted to other objects in that category. So, for example, topologically a sphere and a bowl belong to the same category and a spherical lump of clay can be transformed into a bowl, while a doughnut with a hole in the middle and a coffee cup with a hole in the handle belong to a second category since they can be remodelled to form each others' shapes.

In the Quantum Hall effect, electrons move freely in the two-dimensional layer between semi-conductors and form what is known as a topological quantum fluid. It is not possible to determine whether electrons have formed a topological quantum fluid if one only observes what is happening to some of them. However, when seen as a collective entity, a shift in the theory is introduced where topology becomes important. Since the electrical conductance of a material describes the electrons' collective motion and as topological categories vary in integral steps (associated with the number of holes in a form), the topological variation introduces variation in collective properties of electrons such as conductance leading to quantised integral values of electrical conductance.

But what fruit can all this bear for the future? Building upon the inspirational work of this year's Physics Nobel laureates, various kinds of matter such as topological insulators and topological superconductors have become areas of interest and research, primarily with the hope that topological materials will be useful for new generations of electronics and superconductors, or even possibly for building quantum computers.

It should also be mentioned that the trio have been closely associated with the University of Cambridge.

Duncan Haldane studied at Christ's College, where he was awarded a BA degree followed by a PhD in 1978 for research supervised by Philip Warren Anderson. David Thouless earned a BA degree at Trinity Hall, while John Kosterlitz received his MA degree at Gonville and Caius College. Given the motivational achievement of the trio, the field envisions a plethora of possibilities for research in the world of physical 'flatlands' and the need for greater focus on applications of such material to electronics and computing.

Artist's impression of a vortex

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is a 1884 satrirical take on Victorian culture narrated by a square in a 2-dimensional world

SEELEY & CO.

and Thouless struck upon the Kosterlitz-Thouless (KT) Phase Transition.

Phases of matter, such as solid, liquid and gaseous states, transition between each other when the temperature changes. Close to absolute zero, matter assumes strange little-known phases and begins to behave in unexpected ways, with quantum physics that otherwise operate in the small-scale world suddenly becoming conspicuous. At very low temperatures, other strange properties emerge such as the cessation of the resistance otherwise encountered by all moving particles, for example the resistance encountered by electric currents.

It was a long-held view that thermal fluctuations destroy any and all order in matter, even at absolute zero.

Since the existence of ordered phases is a prerequisite for there to be transitions between them, the hypothesised absence of order preempted the possibility of such phase transitions altogether. In the 1970s David Thouless and Michael Kosterlitz challenged this concept. They began looking into the problem of phase transitions in the twodimensional world. This eventually led them to the KT Phase Transition, now considered to be one of the biggest discoveries in the theory of condensed matter physics.

In the matter 'flatlands', the topological phase transition is quite different from an ordinary phase transition, such as that between water and water-vapour (via evaporation and condensation). The primary fundamental unit in such transitions are small vortices of matter. At very low temperatures the vortices of matter in the two-dimensional world form pairs.

When the temperature rises, a phase transition takes place which makes the vortices suddenly move away from each other and sail off in the material themselves.

Over the years, the KT transition has been found to be universal and proven experimentally.

After around a decade of the formulation of the KT transition theory, in 1983, David Thouless proved that in the presence of strong magnetic fields and at low temperatures, topology was important in describing certain properties of matter, particularly in the mysterious phenomenon that came to be known as the quantum Hall effect (discovered in 1980 by Klaus von Klitzing).

Duncan Haldane also arrived at a similar result independently at around the same time while analysing magnetic atomic chains. The quantum Hall effect is the phenomenon of electrical conductance in a twodimensional layer assuming only particular integer values, a finding that could not be explained by the physics of

Mrittunjoy Guha Majumdar is a 2nd year PhD Student in Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory A Topological Window into Exotic Matter

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AMY DANSON

Big Data in Psychology

gnothi seauton – know thyself. Whether it is for us as a species, or for ourselves as individuals, the imperative echoes through the centuries and many academic fields.

Know thyself, perhaps, but how? Personality, passions, feelings, opinions, patterns of behaviour… all vague and complex concepts that often evade our understanding.

Yet, the answers to this question may lie at the tips of our fingers, on the keyboards of our computers, or the touchscreens of our smartphones. In fact, a recent study

by Youyou et al. showed that our Facebook ‘Likes’ predict our personalities better than our colleagues, our friends and even our family.

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Graduate School of Business, explains: “Usually, the psychological traits we are measuring are really behavioural constructs. Attitudes, thoughts and feelings are also behaviours, so we can simply talk about predicting behaviours.”

Every action that involves a computer generates some kind of data, from a text message to an Amazon order to a Facebook Like. In 2020, we are expected to produce over 44 zettabytes, equivalent to the storage on eleven trillion standard DVDs. These are our digital footprints, crumbs of behaviours we leave while making our way through cyberspace. And they are key to answering many of the questions that behavioural scientists have had for centuries.

Traditional behavioural science experiments often entail finding individuals willing to participate, bringing them to a lab to fill out questionnaires about themselves or perform cognitive tasks, and hoping they will be willing to return for regular follow up sessions. Most studies are limited to a small sample of undergraduate students – a group constantly shown not to be representative of the general human population. Even with a large and diverse participant base, it can be difficult to assess how much questionnaires reflect how people will really behave.

It is, unsurprisingly, difficult to reproduce natural behaviour in a laboratory environment. Humans are also extremely unpredictable. Even with the best of models and the most detailed personality profiles, there are numerous variables affecting how someone will act in any given situation. Only with a large enough sample do these apparently chaotic effects begin to resolve into visible patterns – yet how to obtain these gargantuan volumes of data?

Behavioural scientists seek to understand and predict human behaviour using the methods of the so-called ‘hard’ sciences, laying a quantitative grid over the fuzziness of real life. Most of the concepts, such as personality, are abstract, difficult to measure directly, and even to define. Instead, researchers focus on concrete, measurable traits that are accurate representations of the original abstract concept, weaving these variables into statistical models that aim to represent and predict our intimate lives with varying degrees of confidence. Michal Kosinski, Assistant Professor in Organisational Behaviour at Stanford Lent 2017

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Between 2007 and 2012, Cambridge’s David Stillwell (then at the University of Nottingham) was amassing a huge database of survey and Facebook profile information from his pioneering myPersonality Facebook App. It allowed users to take validated psychological surveys and receive immediate, customised feedback.

This went viral and gained around 7.5 million participants, two million of whom also volunteered their Facebook accounts.

After the application closed, Stillwell and colleagues sought a universal and quantifiable subset of their Facebook data that captured psychological information.

Page Likes proved the silver bullet: the researchers could put users into a matrix that assigned them a 1 if they liked a Page and a 0 if they did not.This matrix accurately predicted demographic data, from intelligence, personality and well-being, to sensitive information like sexual orientation and religiosity

Big Data, Big ResuLts | In a few short years, computers and smartphones have made their way into billions of homes around the world. In 1995, only 1% of the world population had access to the Internet.

Today that number is up to 90% in North America, 85% in Europe, and 50% worldwide. These devices have grown beyond a simple tool for calculations and are now an integral part of the way we live.

More importantly, though, they have also become a window into who we are. Kosinski clarifies: “The dominant thinking even a few years ago was that people put masks on when they go online. Our main question was, is it even worth looking at online behaviour? Maybe it’s so different from offline behaviour that they should be separate fields of study.” In a major breakthrough study published in 2013, Kosinski and colleagues analysed the Facebook Likes of over 58,000 volunteers, checking the results against the participants’ answers to very detailed questionnaires. The algorithms accurately predicted the subjects’ gender and ethnic origin in over 93% of cases. More strikingly, they also could identify sexual

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“Apps are a way of getting an intervention out in the community and into people’s everyday lives” - Dr Lucy Cheke

TIMOTHY WINN

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orientation, political affiliation, and religious beliefs with over 82% accuracy. Even more intimate behaviours such as drug use and relationship status could be inferred to a remarkably accurate extent, just based on which Facebook pages the participants favoured.

It is not just about our demographic data. Personality is a fascinating human component as it relates to our job performances, mental health, life satisfaction, successes in romantic relationships, even the music we prefer. The Big Five is one of the most commonly used and well supported models that defines this complex feature. It relies on five dimensions: openness (open to new ideas vs. conservative), conscientiousness (self-controlled vs. easygoing), extraversion (outgoing vs. reserved), agreeableness (compassionate vs. egotistic) and neuroticism (emotionally unstable vs. stable). Predictions can be made based on some of these traits, for example individuals with high scores of neuroticism are more likely to have mental health issues such as depression.

In 2010, Tal Yarkoni made an interesting discovery: using writing samples from 694 blogs he managed to replicate and extend previous associations between personality and language use. In his 2013 study, Kosinski went further by showing that participants’ Facebook Likes could reveal some of their personality profiles with as much accuracy as traditional questionnaires. “From the psychological point of view, what’s important is that we can actually use digital footprints to measure psychological constructs. Now we have accepted that online is an extension of offline,” says Kosinski.

Data collected through social media give us access to thousands, if not millions of users, allowing research to operate at a scale barely imaginable only a few years ago.

Yet, this is not just about sample size. Another type of Big Data provide an insight into people’s behaviour with better accuracy and detail. This stems from querying our closest digital companions, our smartphones.

Smartphones are ubiquitous, computationally powerful mobile sensors. They can record an array of psychologically relevant variables through specifically designed research apps. Accelerometers and GPS/ Wi-Fi record how physically active we are. Bluetooth, microphone, call & text logs, social media APIs and our contacts show the extent of our social lives. Light, temperature, pressure and photographs give a glimpse into the environments we visit. Browser history, media files, and running apps demonstrate what interests us.

Questionnaires that participants are prompted to answer several times a day to record their moods, stress levels or current activities lift the veil on day to day feelings with incredible detail and accuracy.

Overall, this unobtrusive and unbiased methodology offers the chance to detect subtle changes, to make much more accurate estimations of the frequency of events, and to obtain data points more often than with

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY

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traditional forms of punctual assessment. It gives insight into users’ feelings and spontaneous actions in the natural context where they occur, allowing the detection of low intensity behaviours and characterising processes in detail as they unfold over time.

For example, a group at the University of Dartmouth tracked a single class of 48 students across ten weeks.

They recorded stress, sleep, activity, mood, sociability, and mental well-being, all through sensory data or questionnaires logged on smartphones. Researchers identified a term cycle. Students start the year with positive emotions, high levels of social interaction and low stress levels as well as balanced sleep and physical activity patterns. With increased workload over the months, the undergraduates sleep, socialise, and work out less. They become more stressed and exhibit more negative emotions. Such detailed data give an insight into the strain of student life and how it correlates with academic performance and general well-being.

From Facebook Likes and your GPS data, scientists can reconstruct some aspects of your personality and behaviours, but what if they could actually see in great detail how we react, interact with others, and make our decisions in specific life situations? It may sound far-fetched, but this is already happening. In their quest to make games as life-like as possible, the gaming industry has incidentally built a scientist’s dream.

Complex behaviours and environments have been converted into digital representations, pre-populated by human gamers having virtual but still emotional and immersive experiences. Naturalistic observation, virtual laboratories, experiments and even psychometric assessments can be carried out in a virtual environment that is ready-made, pre-distributed to millions of people who comfortably and naturally interact in a quantified reality. For example, studying how online players interact with the Church of the Holy Light, the World of Warcraft in-game religion, gave researchers an insight into how young adults think and relate to off-line religious concepts.They re-enacted versions of their own selves at different times in their spiritual journeys of becoming an atheist, toyed with the guilty pleasure of playing a pagan character while they are themselves religious, or on the contrary experimented with religious worldviews through priest avatars while not believing in a deity.

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Minecraft is a now ubiquitous ‘virtual LEGO’ game, which has sold more than 100 million copies since its release in 2011. It is now used by pioneering researchers to study how personality and stress are related to gaming behaviour. Minecraft is unique in that it has no scripted storyline and no clear goals. Instead, players are dropped into a procedurally-generated natural environment where they are free to play however they choose, exploring, fighting, or building, alone, with friends, or on large servers where hundreds of players work together to build huge structures and even entire cities.

Every step that players take, every block they place or tree they cut down generates data which can be logged and analysed by researchers. Instead of a broad picture of the general characteristics of a group, we can observe the minutiae of behaviour such as the way in which two people with autism work together to build a house, map the wandering movements of a gamer with depression, or observe players of differing personalities and cognitive styles develop their own preferred mining systems.

What Big Data represent for scientists goes far beyond just an improvement of their methodologies and access to larger samples. Instead, it holds the key to a qualitative – not just quantitative – revolution in behavioural sciences. Indeed, most of the models at the core of the psychological studies powered by Big Data are based on theories designed when only a few hundred participants could be called to a lab. From the terabytes of data recording the minute behaviours of millions of people could arise the opportunity to validate or refine previous models. Even more excitingly, we could have the chance to detect completely new psychological and social phenomena, some until now invisible to the human eye, some that only emerge in an online environment.

Unlike scientists, algorithms do not need to have a preconception of how the human psyche could work, possibly revealing patterns no one would have thought to explore before.

Big Data, Big aPPLiCations | Is Big Data only a scientist’s tool, aiming to refine our understanding of the human psyche? Far from it. Real life applications are already appearing, bringing together academic, applied and commercial ventures.

Most of us are already aware of companies’ efforts to personalise their services and marketing efforts to

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the individual needs and preferences of consumers.

Amazon diligently offers recommendations based on their customers’ past purchases. In fact, a sophisticated personalisation mechanism can help to turn advertising into useful information rather than irrelevant spam (e.g.

Amazon’s “People who like X also like Y”).

Grasping people’s personality traits through their online behaviour can take this effort further and unlock a plethora of new opportunities. Individuals respond more positively to products and marketing messages aligned with their own personality characteristics – something well known to both researchers and your local shopkeeper. A highly open-minded person, as identified on a Big Five personality test, is expected to show a stronger interest in artistic and creative products. An individual low in openness may favour instead items that convey a sense of tradition and continuity. Combined with Big Data, this knowledge can transform how advertising is designed. For example, using personality predictions from Facebook Likes, researchers have been able to assess whether participants were extroverted or introverted. The same product was then advertised differently to appeal to introverts’ or extroverts’ core values: each audience significantly preferred the ads tailored to their personalities, leading to more purchases.

It is not just about advertising. Kosinski argues that inferring personality traits and aptitudes through online behaviours could one day underpin job recruitment.

The way new employees are hired is fraught with conscious or unconscious biases from recruiters that often prevent minorities from breaking glass ceilings. Instead, candidates’ aptitudes and relevant personality traits could be evaluated from their digital footprints, bypassing human preconceptions. Crucially, this also could unveil someone’s potential, even if life circumstances have not yet allowed them to fully develop it. However, the arrival of this new approach in our day-to-day lives would put the algorithms governing and actually computing the predictions under acute scrutiny. How these algorithms are created and what they learn from the real world must be carefully monitored so as to prevent the replication of the very biases we already observe. “Sometimes if you train algorithms in the wrong fashion they start replicating the biases in us humans - yet another proof that we are biased and unfair. The response is not to abandon algorithms but to train them with as little human input as possible and use objective criteria instead,” Kosinski explains.

In this blurring of the line between research and realworld applications, smartphones and apps hold a special place, particularly in relation to well-being and health monitoring. “It is all very well having something that works in the lab, but for it to be really useful we need to get it working with individuals in real life. Apps are a way of getting an intervention out in the community and into people’s everyday lives,” explains Dr Lucy Cheke, lecturer

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By 2015, there was incentive to increase the number of participants further than what Stillwell and colleagues had achieved. Inferential psychological research was widely distrusted because of its (relatively!) small sample sizes.Thus, far more profiles were necessary to yield the kinds of robust, segmented, and granular insights social science was lacking.The challenge was now to develop algorithms from smaller samples that could be exported to large publicly-accessible databases, which were characterised by the nearinfinite range of ways users could express the same preference. For example, where users might Like Jay Z’s official Page or a fan site on Facebook, they might Tweet any of the thousands of variants on phrases including “Jay Z”, “Brooklyn”, “Roc Nation”, etc. Raw preferences were unlikely to hold up

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“ Data predictions are being done, but no one is talking about it. Big companies will run predictions but they never tell anyone they do it.

For me, the role of scientists is to poke in different directions, see what could potentially be achieved, and this may also reveal what the industry has been doing for years now” - Dr Michal Kosinski

at the University of Cambridge. In the context of her research on how obesity interacts with cognition, she studies the connection between eating behaviours and episodic memory. The app she designed investigates how making the experience of eating a meal more vivid to a participant, both at the time and before they next consume food, helps to reduce their food intake.

The app collects the data needed to test the researcher’s theoretical framework while being beneficial for overweight subjects.

The intersection between research and Big Data can also empower participants themselves. Students taking part in smartphone studies reported in exit interviews how useful and motivational the feedback they got from the research app had been. Such feedback might, for example, display the time they spent on different activities and how it related to their emotional states.

This provides information that might not have been obvious to users at the time, for instance around which people they feel happiest or how their sleep patterns correlate with their well-being. As such, this resembles the ‘mood diaries’ commonly used as part of cognitive behavioural therapy. In fact, introspection has been linked to an increase in well-being and a decrease in symptoms of depression. This ability to reflect on one’s behaviour could be facilitated by smartphone feedback.

Research on the quantified-self or life logging movement (tracking one’s own fitness, sleep and diet) is still young, yet already hints at how this could support healthy lifestyle changes.

This new way to understand people’s behaviour can also redraw the way we conceive health monitoring and intervention at a larger scale. A recent study by Canzian and Musolesi demonstrated that participants’ mobility, recorded passively through their phone, was significantly correlated with their depression scores – people move less as they get more depressed. More importantly, this information was objective, passively sensed, and therefore obtained without requiring the participants’ input.

This could open the door to better support systems. A healthcare officer could for example get in touch with a patient whose activity patterns reveal a worsening of their symptoms. At a time when the leading cause of death for English and Welsh men between 20 and 34 is suicide, Big Data could represent a powerful agent of change.

ORAN MACGUIRE

Big Data, Big ConCeRns | In 2014, Facebook conducted a study aiming to understand how people’s emotions were affected by the contents of their newsfeeds - the flux of links, statuses and videos posted by their friends. To do so, the company hid certain elements from 689,003 people’s feeds over the course of a week, limiting their access to either positive or negative emotional content.

Individuals who saw less positive content in turn shared fewer positive posts themselves. The opposite happened for those exposed to less negative information. In effect,

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Facebook researchers demonstrated for the first time that emotional contagion takes place online. Unlike studies conducted by universities, Facebook did not inform users that the experiment was taking place and that they were enrolled in it.

Cambridge Analytica (which is not affiliated with the University of Cambridge) is a company that combines data mining and analysis with strategic communication.

Using online information such as demographics, consumer behaviour and social media presence, its data scientists infer the personality profile of millions of people, with a particular focus on predicting voting behaviour. Political campaigning materials were then tailored to answer people’s different personality styles, making sure the tone and the core messages resonate deeply with the recipients. Cambridge Analytica has worked for Ted Cruz’s, Donald Trump’s and Brexit’s ‘Leave’ campaigns. Its CEO claims the company has key psychological data on over 230 million Americans.

Life insurance company John Hancock has started a program whereby customers who have adopted healthy lifestyles can reduce their premiums on a sliding scale. How can users show that they are leaving behind their unhealthy habits? By wearing a FitBit provided by the company and giving the insurers access to some of the data.

Did these examples make you think? If so, you are not alone. There is no denying that Big Data has brought to the table crucial ethical concerns, especially privacy issues.

Theoretically, we do sign up for services like Twitter or Facebook knowing our information will be in the public domain. By agreeing to the terms and conditions of the host platform, we also surrender most of our data rights.

Yet very few (if any) of us have the time or impetus to actually read these terms and conditions. We may notice that the ads in our Facebook feed are uncannily targeting our demographics but few realise our data can also be subjected to the kinds of algorithms that infer the most Lent 2017

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A new fundamental assumption can then be added to the model. When someone does not explicitly show a preference for something, they still might if given the opportunity. This transformed many 0’s in the Facebook Likes matrix into probabilities using matrix algebra. Suddenly, data from a few thousand idiosyncratic survey takers sharing their online profiles could produce algorithms accurate enough for tens of millions of unseen user accounts.The method is not constrained to Facebook Likes and can theoretically be applied to more complex online ecosystems like Twitter, Amazon and Google.The method is currently being evaluated on Twitter

See a personality predicting algorithm in action at: applymagicsauce.com

ORAN MAGUIRE

intimate aspects of our character.

One promising way forward could be greater transparency. Including users in the process of personalisation (whether it is for research or actual marketing) gives them the opportunity to opt-in to better service rather than opt-out of a potential privacy breach.

This is crucial to maintain and build trust in innovative predictive technologies. Maybe there is also much to be drawn from the example of academic consent forms, which place a strong emphasis on the concept of informed consent – it is not enough for participants to sign the paperwork, they must have understood what the study entails.

Big Data also poses the challenge of redefining who should benefit from privacy rights. When it comes down to certain psychological traits, large scale, Big Data studies on online platforms allow very little prediction in terms of individuals. They are, however, extremely powerful at the scale of a group. For example, scientists might reasonably conclude that group X is happier than Y on average. Are groups entitled to the same or similar privacy rights as individuals? And, more importantly, should the privacy of minority groups have special protection to limit profiling? Put more concretely, are data analysts entitled to know whether a neighbourhood is relatively outgoing? Or, more controversially, are they allowed to study and report the propensity for homosexuality among British Muslim women?

A few months before the sequencing of the first human genome was even finished, on the 8th of February 2000, President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 13145, prohibiting the use of genetic information for hiring or promotional action in federal departments and agencies.

Big Data elicits many similar concerns around privacy rights as genomics does; as their influences grow in our societies, so too does the need to regulate and control them. Citizens have a strong role to play in this process, and it must be an informed one.

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The use of Big Data in psychological research is only just emerging within academia. And yet it is already fully present in companies such as Google, Facebook and even government agencies such as the NSA. “Academia cannot compete with industry in terms of access to datasets. We also have more stringent ethical norms than they have to follow. From my perspective science should try to answer more fundamental questions, trying to see what else we could learn about human psychology from these data,” reveals Kosinski. By empowering responsible research, scientists can have a positive impact on society, model good behaviour and advance conversations about how digital footprints ought to be used across the social sciences and beyond.

The public is very much still unaware of the recent advances in Big Data and how our information could be used and analysed. As companies have little incentive to reveal the work they are conducting, academics have an essential role to play in raising awareness within the community. Kosinski explains: “Big Data predictions are being done, but no one is talking about it. Big companies will run predictions but they never tell anyone they do it. For me, the role of scientists is to poke in different directions, see what could potentially be achieved, and this may also reveal what the industry has been doing for years now.”

Know thyself. Thanks to Big Data, it has never been easier to dig into our behaviours and shine a light on our thoughts and motivations. As the revolution silently unfolds, the question is now: Who will know us, and for what purpose?

Elsa Loissel is a research assistant in the Comparative Cognition Lab. Sandra Matz, Sandrine Müller, Matthew Samson and Jessica Schallock are PhD students in the Department of Psychology Focus 23

Engineering in Time Martha Dillon discusses why civil engineers should care about the past

MARTHA DILLON

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History

IN ARCHITECTURE, an understanding of ancient buildings and a working knowledge of their history is taken as a given. Norman Foster, master of the then-futuristic glass skyscraper, once commented that “as an architect you design for the present, with an awareness of the past, for a future which is essentially unknown”. This typifies the attitude of most designers: old and new are important, and each informs the other. So why is this opinion, which is so fundamental to most areas of modern design, absent from modern engineering and construction?

In 1916, the infamous Henry Ford announced that he believed “history is more or less bunk”, and went on to create one of the largest car manufacturing companies in the world. This is a classic view in an industry that exists almost completely without reference to history and context. Among engineers, a sense of the past can be seen as largely irrelevant to the progress of the future. Of course, it is an exaggeration to say that there is no discussion of historic engineering – the rather unusual name of the 19th century engineer extraordinaire Isambard Kingdom Brunel still carries a lot of weight today. And yet, the stereotype that engineers do the maths whilst architects deal with the context is uncomfortably strong. Engineering courses cover very little work before the industrial revolution, modern designs are rarely based on existing projects, and the inflexibility of construction codes constrains the lateral thinking that could draw on innovative solutions from the past. This attitude is a shame.

It further divorces engineers from the vital creative processes involved in infrastructure and design projects.

The detailed structural theories of today may be a better model for our skyscrapers than those used

by Imhotep, designer of the Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara and arguably the first civil engineer. Yet it is short-sighted to think that historic engineering solutions are inapplicable. The tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, has an innovative buttressed core that helps it achieve its height. Buttresses are structural ‘outstands’ that aid with the support of large structures, usually walls and towers. However, structural engineers have used them for centuries to achieve more stable shapes, from the flying buttresses of Notre Dame in Paris

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SERGEY YELISEEV

Buttresses are found in nature supporting tall, heavy trees and have inspired engineers and architects throughout the centuries

LARA EAKINS

technology – just take the example of foundation piles.

In 450 BC, Herodotus recounted that the marriage of a Paeonian man was traditionally followed by a ceremony where he drove three timber piles into a plot of land to provide the foundations of his new home. Since the tribe was largely polygamous, the settlements of those communities grew very large and complicated.

Something as simple as foundations thus neatly illustrates a significant amount about the society.

By contrast, the early mediaeval ‘dark ages’ are characterised by the lack of surviving design, piles or otherwise. These are the years 500-1000 AD, where many of the innovations and systems designed by the Romans (such as road networks, water supply lines and sewage systems) decayed, with a corresponding reduction in the quality of life. Nowadays, foundation piles are numerous, long, and densely packed to accommodate the increasingly tall buildings that make up our cities.

The ground under cities is riddled with tunnels, while seabeds are home to networks of pipelines and cables.

This is an enormous legacy to be responsible for. It is vital that engineers realise that history will judge their projects for so much more than just the technology behind them.

This idea of legacy is all the more important as we begin to appreciate importance of sustainability.

Thinking about how our projects will physically last is essential. We are beginning to understand the longerterm consequences of using up the precious metals in the ground or diverting a waterway: it is negligent to avoid responsibility for the social impact and context of our work. This is powerfully demonstrated by the sharp change in global CO2 emissions following the 18th century industrial revolution. It is an indicator of the immense progress it heralded, but also an example of the drastic social and environmental consequences that can follow a technological change. We cannot develop sustainably without looking at how both our contemporaries and predecessors managed. If we are to start building in a way that is sustainable and thoughtful, we need to understand what went before us – whether to help avoid the mistakes of the past or simply to inform how projects may age.

Civil engineers thus have many incentives to appreciate the history of their predecessors. We can learn from the past, be inspired by the past, and act more effectively if we understand the past. Instead of treating design as a series of fresh equations, engineers can draw on a range of innovations and stories. We are responsible for implementing human ideas: that is so much bigger, and more complex than a mere mathematical problem.

Buttresses stabilising the Washington National Cathedral

Modern-day buttresses: the Burj THOMAS

(1163) to the earthquake-resisting buttresses of Baroque Guatemalan churches (in the 1600s).

There are even examples of ancient civil engineering projects more successful than the works that have replaced them. In the first millennium BC, the one million residents of the city of Merv (in what is now Turkmenistan) were serviced by 700 square kilometres of cultivated land, in a staggering centralised irrigation system. Hourly readings were taken of canal levels, trees were planted to prevent stagnant water pooling, and engineers built networks of salt accumulators that prevented desalination. These structures were largely destroyed in the early 13th century Mongol invasion of the area, and replaced by engineers as part of the 19th century Russian annexation. Subsequent dam and canal systems have led to near-complete disappearance of the sea and loss of most surrounding agricultural land. We appear not to have learnt from this event: from the Great Salt Lake in Utah to Lake Titicaca in South America, lakes across the planet are drying up due to human activity, compounded by climate change. Reinventing the wheel for every new project is both inefficient and unimaginative, but most importantly, it is short-sighted.

Historic engineering traditions are also a rich source of inspiration for tapping into natural and traditional systems. The designers of the ‘Better Shelter’, a refugee shelter produced by the UNHCR, learnt a huge amount about dealing with unusual conditions from observing traditional methods of heating and cooling. They found that Ethiopian families would retain uncovered portions of ground in their shelters on which they would pour water. When this water evaporated, it had a cooling effect on the interior of the shelter that did not rely on shading or ventilation systems.

Similarly, biomimicry has been a historically influential field that is only recently being fully explored by modern designers. This is a discipline that “seeks sustainable solutions to human challenges by emulating nature’s time-tested patterns and strategies.” Engineers throughout history have used biomimicry to innovate in ways that remain applicable today. The original 18th century Marc Brunel tunnel boring designs were purportedly inspired by shipworms, bivalve molluscs which ‘drill’ into wood using two small shells at their heads. The Wright brothers famously looked to pigeons when trying to achieve powered flight at the beginning of the 20th century. If engineering is about solving physical problems, then the imagination to tap into a wide variety of processes and concepts is always important.

Clearly there is a lot to be learnt from the past to inspire the future, and there are lessons to be learnt from past mistakes. However, an understanding of the legacy of past designers and the comparative state of our own technologies is crucial if modern engineers are to be in control of their impact and visions for the future.

After all, the status of a society is firmly rooted in its

Modern-day buttresses: the Burj Khalifa in Dubai is supported by a buttressed core

Martha Dillon is a 4th year student in Civil and Environmental Engineering

History

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Science, Fiction Hannah Thorne reveals the alchemy between science and literature

PUBLIC DOMAIN, MODIFIED BY ORAN MACGUIRE

Cesare Lombroso, the father of criminology, gave rise to the concept of “criminal atavism”, the notion that characteristic physical features could set apart criminals from the rest of society

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Art & Science

PEOPLE FALLING IN love have ‘chemistry’ or ‘a spark’. A spur-of-the-moment idea is a ‘quantum leap’. Strong personalities are ‘magnetic’. It is easy to find examples of the way in which the language of science permeates the way we write today – but literature has also reflected scientific progress for centuries. Alchemical metaphors abound in 16th and 17th century works: John Donne wrote of “love’s alchemy” and some critics have even suggested that the transformations of the eponymous hero of Shakespeare’s King Lear represent the alchemical transmutation used to produce the ‘Red King’, believed to be a precursor to the Philosopher’s Stone.

For the 19th century writer, science was even more integral to their work. According to the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, chemistry itself in its “striving after unity of principle” was “poetry realised.” 19th century novelists also strove to be “both observer and experimentalist”, as much a scientist as any chemist at the laboratory bench.

Industrialisation meant science was advancing quickly, changing lives, and taking on fresh importance in the literary sphere. By the mid-19th century, one scientific theory in particular was ready to cause more controversy than any before it.

In 1859, Darwin published On the Origin of Species, outlining his theory of evolution by natural selection. By the standards of the time, Origin was a bestseller—the first edition sold out within a day, an unprecedented popular success for a scientific work. Among the vast reading public were the outraged, the curious, and perhaps for the first time, a literary fan-club of a scientific theory: the ‘Naturalist’ movement.

For writers of this fast-growing school, these new theories of heredity proved useful. Some, like Émile Zola, used complex genealogical trees to calculate how ancestral mental illness would express itself in his characters’ physical features. Zola was influenced by the historian Hippolyte Taine, who famously developed a style of literary criticism based on the scientific method, stressing the importance of verifying academic hypotheses with data on the author’s environment and social standing. Most crucially, for ‘Naturalist’ writers the novels they wrote were themselves experiments; characters were subjected to different stimuli and their responses documented in books that served as lab journals of social phenomena. Many agreed with Taine that

“virtue and vice are products like vitriol [sulphuric acid] and sugar”, merely scientific problems to be analysed.

Sadly, public enthusiasm for the theory of natural selection had a darker side. In 1876, seventeen years after Origin was released, early criminologist Cesare Lombroso published The Criminal Man. Lombroso’s research argued that criminals, women, people of colour and the mentally ill all suffered from the same problem; their physical ‘defects’ made them closer to humanity’s biological ancestors than to white men, and therefore inferior. There was wide demand for books providing practical advice on using the ‘science’ to select employees and spouses (often in handy, pocket-size editions for the keen physiognomist on the move). Different bodily features signalled particular issues— ‘small wandering eyes’ pointed to a thief, serial killers were identifiable by their large noses, and anything from wrinkles to short stature could mark a woman out as a criminal.

The use of physical deformity to depict fictional characters as villainous stretches back long before the 19th century – for instance, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, published in 1478, uses it extensively.

However, Lombroso’s conception of criminals as completely at the mercy of their ‘un-evolved’ state was new, and many writers of fiction (among them Dickens, Austen and Charlotte Brontë) seized upon this concept of ‘physiognomy’ to make their antagonists all the more sinister.

With only 7% of UK adults rejecting the theory of natural selection, evolution is no longer as controversial as it once was, and Lombroso’s supposed methods of criminal identification have been recognised as deeply flawed. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that science in fiction today is often relegated to metaphor or minor plot point; though many continue to write about science, the science of writing has aged less well. Still, if you find yourself rolling your eyes at the umpteenth heavybrowed, beady-eyed villain in a costume drama, you might have Charles Darwin to blame.

Hannah Thorne is a 3rd year undergraduate studying physics

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From Lithium to Uranium Kent Griffith and Alisha Kasam highlight the way towards a new energy landscape EL HIERRO, CANARY ISLANDS, SPAIN;

Burlington, Vermont, US; Iceland; Wildpoldsried, Germany. Places scattered across the globe that share one common feature: they meet 90% or more of their average yearly electricity demand with renewable energy. However, even though these places may be successfully securing a green future for themselves, their path will not create a green new world. Not every country has the geothermal activity of Iceland.

In many ways fossil fuels remain the ideal energy source. Oil, coal, and gas are inexpensive and readily available to satisfy the high and dynamic energy demands of modern societies. As electric devices replace fuel for heating and transportation, electricity demand is sure to grow. To balance grid supply and demand at all times, the next-generation energy landscape must encompass a diverse array of technologies tailored to the resources and requirements of each region.

Renewables will have a key role in that future. In fact, they are already becoming common as research and production advances drive down costs. New technologies such as perovskite solar cells are rapidly becoming competitive and might offer a cheaper alternative to the ultra-high purity silicon that is most common in solar panels today. One persistent problem is that while wind and sunlight are intermittent, the expectation of a lit home and a hot kettle is not.

Supply fluctuations present a huge issue for national stability and security.

As a result, the fate of renewables is inherently tied to large-scale energy storage, which is currently quite limited. Energy density, the energy generated per unit land area, is another limitation of renewables. For example, vast land areas are required for solar and wind power generation. Offshore wind power also offers a solution for countries like the UK that have windy coastlines.

But if we want to go carbon-free, the largest source of on-demand electricity is currently nuclear power.

Due to its huge energy density it has a very small environmental footprint and can act as a reserve electricity capacity for intermittent renewables.

Current nuclear technology is already being adapted for closer integration with renewables to meet variable grid demand. In next-generation nuclear plants, the concentrated heat produced on site can also be stored in inexpensive materials such as underground bricks

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or salt and converted into electricity during peak demand periods.

Efficiency is becoming another key aspect of energy production and consumption. Many energy conversion processes lose a significant proportion of their energy as heat. What if we could capture and reuse even a portion of this? Thermoelectric materials can convert heat directly into electricity, effectively capturing and converting energy that would otherwise be lost to the environment. Other technologies such as heat pumps and solar thermal systems can be remarkably inexpensive and efficient at capturing small amounts of heat from their surroundings. Even in relatively cool and cloudy climates, these can generate a significant portion of a building’s heat, helping to smooth demand peaks and reduce load on the grid.

In contrast, sending excess renewable energy from homes back to the grid can burden aging infrastructure.

One option is to store this energy in home battery systems. Presently, commercial products such as Tesla’s Powerwall use the same underlying chemistry as the lithium-ion battery in your cell phone, but can power the average American two bedroom home for a day.

However, they are not the best option for large scale storage. Alternatives are emerging that offer greater storage density, such as sulphur or oxygen-based designs, or cheaper and greener elements, for example using sodium ions instead of lithium.

For large scale storage of renewable electricity, redox flow batteries offer great prospects. Instead of using any solid electrodes, the chemical reactions occur at an interface between two large tanks of liquid. This means that the active solution could be exchanged or augmented for long lived and upgradeable storage of energy.

There is no carbon-free ‘silver bullet’ that can replace fossil fuels for all applications. The way we power our businesses and homes is going to change.

Successful phasing out of carbon-intensive energy will require a diverse landscape of technologies, including renewables, nuclear, and many new, specialised, complementary approaches. With a little lithium here, and a little uranium there, we can meet the needs for sustainable global energy.

As of January 2017, nuclear power supplies 11% of world electricity demand without carbon emissions, and almost 20% of UK domestic demand.

440 commercial reactors are currently active in 31 different countries

ORAN MAGUIRE

Kent Griffith and Alisha Kasam are PhD students in the departments of Chemistry and Engineering

Perspectives

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Big Bucks for Big Bugs ORAN MAGUIRE

Zoë Carter considers the role of commercial research in the global fight against antibiotic resistance

“WITHOUT URGENT, co-ordinated action by many stakeholders, the world is headed for a post-antibiotic era, in which common infections and minor injuries which have been treatable for decades can once again kill.” This warning was given in 2014 by Dr. Keiji Fukuda, the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) Assistant DirectorGeneral for Health Security. Antibiotic resistance occurs when bacteria develop mechanisms to survive even when threatened with antibiotics; this is not only a medical threat but also an economic one. Indeed, the World Economic Forum has identified the emergence of antibiotic resistance as a global risk beyond the capacity of any organisation or nation to mitigate alone, prompting the need for collaborative strategies.

Our society relies heavily on the use of antibiotics for the treatment of common bacterial infections and for prevention of infection during routine operations.

However, bacteria can evolve multiple methods of eliminating or inactivating antibiotics such as preventing antibiotic uptake, breaking down the drug, or speeding up its extrusion – to name just a few. Alarmingly, resistance is emerging even to drugs that are used as the ‘last resort’ against infections for which other antibiotics have not worked. A good example is methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (also known as MRSA). In the late 1950s, methicillin was used to treat penicillin-resistant strains of S. aureus. Within ten years the bacterium

Bacteria have many mechanisms that are essential to their life processes.

Each mechanism is a potential target for new drugs. However, drug developers need funding incentives to bring even a few to market

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Science and Policy Special

developed resistance to methicillin as well. Since then, MRSA has become one of the most common hospitalacquired infections around the world, and has even spread throughout intensive animal farming operations and within the wider community.

Many factors contribute to the emergence of antibiotic resistance worldwide. These include misuse of antibiotics, patients not completing their course of treatment, and the overuse of antibiotics in animal feed as a growth supplement. Crucially, with the rise in international air travel and increased human mobility, resistant bacteria can travel faster and further than ever before, with no respect for national borders. This means that one country’s ‘superbug’ is everyone’s problem, and therefore global concerted efforts are needed to contain and combat the spread of antibiotic resistance.

The costs of inaction would be enormous. It is estimated that if we fail to solve the problem of antibiotic resistance, drug-resistant strains of malaria, HIV, TB and certain bacterial infections will claim an extra 10 million lives per year after 2050. Today in the US, antibiotic resistance already costs the healthcare system an additional $20 billion a year. Should the issue not be resolved, the cost to the world economy is predicted to be $100 trillion by 2050, far more than would need to be invested in the development of new antibiotics.

In a response to the need for concerted global action,

ORAN MAGUIRE

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Non-compliance with or failing to complete a full course of antibiotics favours growth of resistant bacteria

WELLCOME IMAGES

approval processes globally to abolish the requirement for pharma companies to register new products in individual countries would considerably lower costs of pharmaceutical development. This is because often subtly different requirements must be met in each country, leading to the need for additional file submissions and negotiations, which both costs more and takes time.

Speeding up approval processes would allow an effective increase in the period of time a company has exclusive rights to selling a new product before patent expiration, whereupon cheap alternatives can be released by competitors. Therefore, a new drug would have greater earning potential, making antibiotic development more financially attractive.

Funding for clinical trials, the most expensive part of drug development, by public bodies and regulators such as the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) and EMA (European Medicines Agency) is another potential option, and has been put into effect to target other key or rare diseases for which there is a lack of effective drugs.

The FDA and EMA are becoming progressively better at recognising each other’s good manufacturing practice guidelines, a positive step that means drugs may not have to go through multiple rounds of inspection to satisfy each agency separately.

O’Neill’s 2015 review suggests a solution for streamlining the path for new antibiotics that also addresses antibiotic resistance: the creation of a designated ‘global buyer’ organisation, responsible for purchasing sales rights to antibiotics and distributing their supply internationally. This would help reduce costs to the pharmaceutical companies as well as ensure that drugs are used according to where the greatest need is, and therefore help strategically tackle global patterns of emerging resistance by supplying the most suitable drugs to each location. However, giving one organisation so much responsibility would require effective management to ensure that no companies or countries are able to exploit it.

Evidently, solving the issue of antibiotic resistance will be challenging and requires integrated global political leadership. Although the WHO’s 2015 Global Action Plan was a step in the right direction, there is more that should and can be done. In 2017, a year in which large political changes are imminent, it is more important than ever that the issue of antibiotic resistance is not forgotten. Worldwide collaborative effort will be the only way to devise innovative solutions to tackle this global health threat.

MATT GIBSON

the WHO published their Global Action Plan on antibiotic resistance in 2015. They outlined key strategic objectives necessary to ensure that treatment and prevention of infectious diseases with effective and safe medicines can continue. These range from simply raising awareness and improving sanitation and hygiene practices worldwide, to optimising use of current medicines in human and animal health and encouraging sustainable investment in research and development of new therapies. Despite these advances, however, no new classes of antibiotics able to treat systemic infections have been discovered since 1987.

Recently approved drugs simply build on well-known previous classes of antibiotics, and are thus often quite susceptible to the resistance mechanisms that bacteria have already developed.

Research into new antibiotics is very challenging and expensive. A major problem is that pharmaceutical companies do not have incentives to invest in new research, despite the fact that there is immense unmet need and potential affluent markets. This is due to fears that resistance would soon emerge to any new therapy, meaning that the time for return on investment would be cut short. In addition, there is worry that new therapies, for which no resistance has yet emerged, could have their use restricted to only the most severe cases in an attempt to prevent resistance emerging, effectively reducing the patient population and market size for the new drug.

These hurdles just add to the other normal challenges in pharmaceutical research. From the start of research, it currently takes 15 years for a marketable product to be produced, and failure rates are high, with only 1.5-3.5% of compounds making the distance.

With so little certainty of financial return, it is easy to understand why pharma companies are unwilling to make the investment. In 2014 the UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, commissioned economist Jim O’Neill to analyse the problem of rising drug resistance and propose concrete actions to tackle it internationally.

Subsequently, in 2015, O’Neill published the review on antibiotic resistance, which was jointly supported by the UK government and the Wellcome Trust. Within it he details a model that emphasizes the importance of implementing measures rewarding drug developers based on the long-term benefit a drug can offer to society, rather than simply during the short time they are on patent. This would provide a more predictable market for those that develop drugs against critical pathogens, whilst getting rid of the notion that the sole way to make money in this market is to maximise the volume of sales.

Whilst global regulatory standards are important, there are ways in which they could be optimised to reduce costs for pharmaceutical companies without compromising patient safety. Harmonising drug

False colour electron microscope image of Staphlycoccus aureus, the organism behind many cases of antibiotic resistant infection

Zoë Carter is a 3rd year undergraduate studying pharmacology at Robinson college

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No Time for Hot Air ORAN MAGUIRE

Lauren Broadfield reflects on the state of climate change policies in an increasingly hostile political environment

IN A RECENT interview with fellow naturalist Chris Packham, Sir David Attenborough proclaimed that “humanity must come to its senses or face environmental disaster”. We are never short of reminders that climate change is a pressing global problem: we see climate refugees forced to flee their homes, changes in the distribution of some water-borne illnesses and disease vectors, increases in extreme weather events. People from all corners of the world have been, and will be, affected by climate change. Despite the threat of this worldwide issue, political and economic interests of individual countries can often threaten the global collaboration necessary to tackle the problem.

Attempts to ignite collaborative environmental initiatives are abundant in recent history. The Montreal Protocol of 1987 has 197 ratifying countries, including all United Nations members.

It aims to protect the ozone layer by phasing out ozone-depleting substances, including chlorofluorocarbons. Due to their long lifetimes, these chemicals often end up in the stratosphere.

The predicted rise in sea levels could wreak havoc on coastal cities by as early as 2050

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Science and Policy Special

There they destroy the protective ozone layer, increasing penetration of the atmosphere by the sun’s UV rays. Since its beginnings, the Montreal Protocol has succeeded, with atmospheric concentrations of chlorofluorocarbons having levelled off or decreased.

However, less than one percent of the total solar energy reaching our atmosphere, and consequently heating the earth, is in the form of UV rays.

Reducing chlorofluorocarbon levels is not the most effective way to combat planetary warming.

Averaged over all land and ocean surfaces, temperatures have increased approximately 0.74°C over the last century. This correlates with a rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels from 300 to 370 parts per million. Despite trapping less heat than all other greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide’s long atmospheric lifetime and high concentration in the troposphere make it the most significant greenhouse gas. Humans produce more carbon dioxide than any other greenhouse gas, and as a result, it is responsible for most of the warming.

The Kyoto Protocol was initiated in 1997, aiming to reduce these instrumental carbon emissions.

Whilst it succeeded in recognising and acting upon a major climate change contributor, it faced a hurdle when the United States failed to ratify. In 1990, the United States accounted for 36% of global carbon emissions. This was overlooked by American political powers in favour of George Bush’s concerns that signing the protocol “would cause serious harm to the US economy”. The solitary political and economic decision of Bush and his colleagues hugely reduced the extent to which the Kyoto Protocol could succeed as a global collaborative effort.

In today’s world, politicians have a whole spectrum of attitudes towards climate change. Within days of becoming Prime Minister, Theresa May abolished the Department of Energy and Climate Change. She transferred responsibility for environmental change to a new body – the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. This bold move attracted a range of responses. For many politicians, campaigners and experts this was a deeply worrying act. The executive director of Greenpeace, John Sauven,

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expressed concern that the new Government did not view climate change as a serious threat. Green Party MP Caroline Lucas also voiced her apprehension, declaring that “dealing with climate change requires a dedicated Minister at the Cabinet table. To throw it into the basement of another Whitehall department looks like a serious backwards step”.

Climate is not given a mention in the name of the new department, promoting the notion that the issue is slipping down May’s political agenda, at a time when it should be rising. Furthermore, the number of cabinet voices with a departmental responsibility for the environment and climate change has been halved.

The consequences of May’s departmental shake-up depend on whether climate change can be at the forefront of the new entity. The WWF stated that this new department could be a “real powerhouse for change” if climate change “was hardwired” into it. If the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy can successfully accommodate a closer link between economic and environmental interests, it may be the key to initiating more effective climate change policies.

But climate change is not only a national issue.

Progress can only be made if all countries work together. Unfortunately, the newly elected leader of the premier global superpower does not have the most desirable attitude towards climate change.

President Donald Trump famously tweeted:

As ridiculous as this claim is, the fears it raises are real. Many politicians believe that investing in climate change measures will come at a large cost to business, industry and economy. The claim of Trump’s tweet is, nonetheless, false and farfetched. Climate change is real. Yet he has, on many occasions, denied this fact. President Trump has previously vowed to “cancel” December 2015’s Paris Agreement, which sets targets for nearly 200 countries to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions.

This would be a step backwards in global climate change collaboration. Even more worryingly, this attitude towards climate change is shared amongst the population. According to a 2014 survey, 87% of American scientists said that human activity is

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driving global warming, and yet only half of the American public held this view. In addition, 77% of these same scientists said that climate change is a very serious problem whereas only 33% of the public shared this opinion.

It does not have to be this difficult. Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany since 2005, has proved otherwise. She has demonstrated a long-standing dedication to cutting emissions, giving her the nickname “The Climate Chancellor”. Most notably, she persuaded G8 leaders to accept the science of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and convinced them to agree to carbon dioxide reduction targets. Similarly, Merkel has also led the EU to adopt emission reduction targets. However, in 2013, she intervened in EU negotiations about carbon dioxide emission standards, asking the Irish EU Council President to take the subject off the agenda. This was a complete U-turn, considering her commitment to campaigning for these standards. It became apparent that Merkel wished to protect the “particulars of the German automobile industry”.

Amongst politicians, there is a worry that activating certain protocols may inhibit the growth of certain industries, and a fear that climate change measures will lead to the loss of business. Whilst this may be the case in some sectors, switching to green energies can create new business and employment. In the US alone the Ecotech Institute found a 13 percent increase in green job openings from 2013 to 2014, from 3.6 million in 2013 to 3.8 million in 2014. The institute estimates that there were 1.2 million clean job openings in the first three months of 2015. In the past, companies with high energy demands have avoided solar, wind, and biomass due to the cost of these technologies.

Now, however, renewables can be cheaper than traditional alternatives in the long run. Despite being more expensive initially, money can eventually be saved compared with what would have been spent on non-renewable forms of energy. Green energy is worth investing in.

Amongst those political decisions, what can we, as individuals, do? Personal efforts can be a constructive way to ‘do our bit’, and the importance of these efforts should not be underestimated. Everyone should strive to recycle as much as possible, avoid wasting energy and reduce their meat consumption. But the bigger political picture must also be considered. Our voting decisions will decide who holds the power to determine the status we give to tackling climate change.

PRESS SERVICE OF THE PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA

Rex Tillerson, ExxonMobil CEO, is the new secretary of state of the Trump administation.

This decision has been denounced as a “epic mistake” by environmental groups. This move takes place after the appointment of Scott Pruitt, a climate change denier, at the head of the United States Environmental Protection Agency

Lauren Broadfield is a 3rd year undergraduate studying Earth Sciences at Sidney Sussex College

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Come Flu with Me

ORAN MAGUIRE

Influenza viruses are RNA viruses that make up three of the five genera of the family Orthomyxoviridae. Type A influenza viruses are the most virulent among the different influenza types and cause the severest disease. Wild aquatic birds are their natural hosts

IN 1947, in a post-war world divided by intense political tensions, scientists from countries all over the planet joined their effort to tackle together one of the most serious threats to human health: influenza.

Every year, flu epidemics are responsible for approximately 250,000 to 500,000 deaths around the world. Whilst it is commonly believed that the disease is restricted to cold climates, it in fact circulates internationally, including through the tropics. Increased globalisation and the extensive use of air travel has heightened the potential for the virus to spread between countries and continents, particularly during the early stages of an epidemic. The recent swine flu H1N1 pandemic in 2009 reminds us that another outbreak on the scale of the 1918 ‘Spanish flu’, which killed 50 million people worldwide, is still possible today.

Today, the production of an annual flu vaccine that keeps pace with an evolving and sophisticated virus, preventing thousands of deaths each year, poses an enormous challenge to science.

Each winter, a significant proportion of individuals are vaccinated or infected with flu. They develop immunity through the production of antibodies that bind to the haemagglutinin (HA) protein on the surface of the virus. Individuals retain the capacity to produce these specific antibodies for many years. Thus, in theory, the next winter there should be fewer individuals who are susceptible to infection – but alas, this is not the case.

Between winters, the virus HA gene mutates, giving rise to amino acid changes that alter aspects of the HA molecule structure. The next winter, the virus is once

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again unrecognisable to the immune system: a new flu outbreak emerges. Science must monitor the changing antigenicity of the virus and aim to accurately predict the likely amino acid changes that will be seen in the virus the following year.

To add to the complexity, there is not just one, but four strains of influenza virus currently circulating in significant proportions: the Influenza A H3N2 and H1N1 strains and the Influenza B Yamagata and Victoria strains. Almost a year ahead of time, scientists must accurately predict the future antigenic behaviour of the virus, and it has to be right. This is a challenge that requires extensive collaboration from laboratories all over the world to be solved.

In essence, the process of influenza surveillance involves monitoring influenza samples globally, analysing their DNA sequences and antigenicity and pooling this global data to decide the three virus strains (one H3N2, one H1N1 and one influenza B) that will be propagated and packaged into vaccines.

At the front line, doctors’ surgeries around the world collect samples from patients with flu-like symptoms. In fact, Trumpington Street Medical Practice is the assigned surgery for Cambridge. These surgeries send their samples to National Influenza Centres, where scientists perform preliminary analyses of the influenza samples.

They then send a representative selection of these to one of six Global Influenza Collaboration Centres.

These six centres are found across the world, in London, Atlanta, Beijing, Melbourne, Tokyo, and Memphis. There, scientists work intensely to perform more detailed analyses, sequencing large numbers of virus samples. From these sequences they then produce phylogenetic trees that allow researchers to establish the antigenic relatedness of last year’s virus samples compared to current virus strains. Through examining these data, each centre has to identify the emerging genetic groups and determine which are likely to dominate in the coming winter.

As well as sequencing data, gathering information on the antigenicity and structure of the HA molecule is crucial. A set of standard protocols is followed at the six Global Influenza Collaboration Centres to determine

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ORAN MAGUIRE

ORAN MAGUIRE

Holly Giles tracks the spread of post-World War II collaborations within international research communities

ORAN MAGUIRE

the extent to which the influenza viruses have changed antigenically since the previous winter. Practically, this involves using post-immunisation ferret antisera (serum from ferrets that have been infected with influenza, containing anti-flu antibodies) in a procedure known as a haemagglutination inhibition assay to reveal how well the antibodies in the serum can recognise the new viruses.

These data, from thousands of viruses collected around the world, are compiled and sent to the World Health Organisation (WHO) headquarters in Geneva. In February and September of each year (for the Northern and Southern Hemisphere vaccines respectively) global influenza experts meet for three days to comb through the data and vote on the three vaccine candidates they believe will be the most effective vaccine strains.

Get it right, and the vaccine offers 60% effectiveness.

Get it wrong, and the vaccine has very little to no efficiency – this was for example the case during the winter of 2014/2015. Yet the success of global influenza surveillance as a feat for science, globalization and medicine cannot be ignored.

Strikingly, global influenza surveillance began in 1947 just after the end of World War II. Scientists at the National Institute of Medical Research in Mill Hill, London, realised they needed to begin monitoring the virus in order to make effective vaccines. Christopher Andrewes, one of the scientists who first isolated the influenza virus, set up a network of laboratories for the WHO, with the Worldwide Influenza Centre at Mill Hill at the centre of the project. Since then, the surveillance process has evolved to the highly sophisticated, global network we now know as GISRS (Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System).

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Science is often collaborative, but rarely on this scale.

The influenza surveillance program is a compelling example of what science, and the world, can achieve when truly globalised. We owe a great deal to the forward-thinking scientists of the 1940s who established the global structures to monitor influenza and enabled us to manage this challenging disease so successfully over the past 70 years. Indeed, we are indebted to the thinking of the late 1940s in general, where, in a post-war world, people began to appreciate the benefits of collaboration and cooperation and a number of important global institutions, including the UN and the building blocks of what is now the EU were established.

The success of the influenza vaccine and the cooperative efforts that go into its production serve as a reminder that great things can be achieved when we work together. The establishment of collaborative structures and distribution of resources provides an efficient network in which an effective influenza vaccine is produced every six months. There are important lessons to be learned here for managing similar such global outbreaks, including Zika, Ebola and HIV. Beyond science, in a world where globalisation is being rejected by electorates worldwide and nationalism is the word of the day, global influenza surveillance assumes a new significance. In the coming years, in an increasingly fractured and defiant political landscape, it may be the duty of science to lead the way in promoting international collaboration and cooperation.

“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much” - Helen Keller

Holly Giles is a 3rd year student in Genetics at Christ’s College

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Weird and Wonderful A selection of the wackiest research in the world of science Walking on Water BASILISK LIZARDS

(Basiliscus), also known as Jesus lizards, have a unique skill. When fleeing from predators, these reptiles run straight for the water’s edge, but do not dive in.

Instead, if a basilisk builds up enough speed on land it can continue to sprint on its ALEX HAHN www.alexhahnillustrator.com rear legs across the surface of the water for up to four and a half metres. It possesses this remarkable ability because its long toes have fringes of skin that can unfurl and increase their surface area. When each foot slaps the water, a bubble of air is trapped beneath it. As long as the lizard is moving fast enough, the bubble provides enough resistance for it to push off. When it finally breaks the water’s surface, the basilisk sinks and continues its escape by swimming away. Unfortunately, you will not see one of these amazing lizards making a break for it down the river Cam, as they are found only in the tropical rainforests of Central and South America. RC

Giving a Fig about Wasps WHILE MANY PLANTS entice pollinators with nectar,

fig trees do so with the promise of safety and food for the pollinators’ offspring. For the last 50 million years, fig trees have been exclusively pollinated by symbiotic wasps. The insects are born in the little flowers that make up the inside of the fig fruit and are thus provided with a ready food supply. The winged females and wingless males mate inside the fruit and the fertilized females escape through holes bored in the fig wall. To lay their eggs, females crawl through the bottom of new figs . While entering the fig, they lose their wings and so die encompassed by a flowery tomb. But never fear, this does not mean that you are eating the corpses of a few hundred baby wasps and their mother with every fig! Cultivation of figs dates back to Roman times, making figs one of the oldest cultivated

fruit. Millennia of breeding ensure that commercially available figs cannot be used as nurseries by wasps.

Studying the ancient mutualistic relationship of wild figs and wasps sheds valuable light on how two species first come together as symbionts and then coevolve. MH

Why Cats have Nine Lives WHY DO CATS have nine lives? In his 1988 Nature

publication, veterinarian Jared Diamond set out to answer this question by analysing the injuries of over 100 cats that had fallen from open windows, including from skyscrapers. He correlated the number of deaths and injuries with the height that the animal had fallen.

Surprisingly, most deaths and injuries occurred due to falls from twenty-one metres (seven stories), but were less frequent or severe at greater heights. In one extreme case, a cat fell 100 metres and only sustained a tooth and slight chest injury. For humans, on the other hand, a 100 metre fall was universally lethal, and even a twenty-one metre fall was lethal half the time. Why the marked difference between cats and humans? Diamond suggested the following factors: (1) cats have a lower surface-to-mass ratio and therefore reach a lower velocity during freefall; (2) cats have excellent spatial awareness and therefore always land on their feet; (3) cats may position their legs in a ‘flying-squirrel’ fashion during the descent and land with their legs in a flexed position to reduce the speed and impact of their fall. One might conclude that cats have only one life, but outstanding falling skills. BN

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Weird and Wonderful

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Botanical Blueprints Honor Pollard explores a new age of scientific illustration DURING THE ‘AGE OF DISCOVERY’

from the 15th to the 18th century, botanical illustrations were a crucial resource for scientists. Early plant scientists collected specimens during research expeditions and dissected them en route, then had watercolours produced of their distinguishing features.

The artist Macoto Murayama, who studied at the Institute of Advanced Media Art and Sciences, brings the practice of botanical illustration into the twenty-first century with his computergenerated renderings of intricate flowers.

Murayama celebrates the precise beauty of flower morphology by focusing, not on colour or texture, but on the intricate contours of the petals. To create his X-ray-like digital prints, Murayama takes on a similar role to a voyage botanist on board a ship: he dissects flowers and observes them under a magnifying glass.

Then, like an architect in reverse, he uses computer modelling software to create a 3D blueprint of the specimen. The piece is finished with the addition of detailed measurements, which hints at the need to quantify the universe and reminds us that this is after all a scientific work.

Honor Pollard is a 2nd year undergraduate studying Biological Natural Sciences at Christ’s College

Macoto Murayama (2013) Narcissus tazetta L. var. chinensis (M.Roem) - front view - ow, digital c-print, 150x100 cm Courtesy of Frantic Gallery More information about the artist: www.frantic.jp

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