̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - ̽��ֱ�� of York

̽��ֱ��lab making food healthier and medicine cheaper

lkm37 — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 10:05:48 +0000

Dr Nicola Patron is cultivating a new kind of biotechnology, where we can read nature’s blueprints and direct its energy to more potent ends.

“Get back to school” headlines eroded teacher wellbeing during the pandemic

tdk25 — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 14:53:26 +0000

̽��ֱ��finding comes from newly published research, following on from an earlier study with a small group of primary and secondary teachers during lockdown. Researchers from the Universities of Cambridge and York monitored the group for almost two years from March 2020, charting an overall decline in their wellbeing and mental health. In the new report, they show how this was linked to the portrayal of teachers amid wider debates about whether schools should lock down, and for how long.

While other frontline workers were lauded as ‘heroes’, teachers felt they were being left out of this narrative and even perceived as ‘lazy’, despite their key worker status, the study shows. In particular, continual news stories during mid-2020 clamouring for schools to reopen led some teachers to believe that parents, and wider society, thought they were neglecting their duties.

In reality, teachers were shouldering higher workloads as they adjusted to ever-changing government guidance. ̽��ֱ��researchers describe the aggregate effects of their public portrayal as “psychologically costly” and suggest it may have worsened a well-documented retention crisis in the profession.

Dr Laura Oxley, from the Faculty of Education, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, said: “Although lots of parents may not have actually thought teachers were lazy, the nature of public discussion meant that teachers started to feel that was the case.”

“At the time, there was lots of praise for the NHS, delivery drivers, retail workers. Teachers were frontline workers too, but were often not part of the narrative. Constant headlines about getting them back to school made many teachers believe that people thought they were sitting at home doing nothing. This didn’t cause the decline in teacher mental health, but it appears to have contributed to it.”

̽��ֱ��study arose from an earlier research project, ‘Being a teacher in England during the COVID-19 pandemic’ led by Dr Lisa Kim from the ̽��ֱ�� of York. In it, researchers monitored a sample of 24 teachers, who were interviewed seven times between April 2020 – just after schools first closed – and July 2022. ̽��ֱ��mental health of the participants was found to have declined in that time. Alongside heavy workloads and ongoing uncertainty, teachers cited a creeping sense of “negative public perceptions” as a contributing factor.

In the new study, the team assessed whether this belief about perceptions was grounded in objective reality. They surveyed eight leading national newspapers, identifying 156 cases in which stories about COVID-19 and pre-16 education made front page news between March 2020 and January 2022.

These often either explicitly or implicitly suggested that teachers bore direct responsibility for school closures and other key developments in the education sector. Spikes in the coverage coincided almost exactly with when teachers reported sharp falls in their own mental health. While the decline was driven by the impact of events, the researchers suggest it was exacerbated by the news coverage.

̽��ֱ��analysis focused on front page headlines because they reach a large audience, comprising both newspaper buyers and a ‘passing’ readership. Aside from stories about the handling of A-Levels, education made big headlines during the build-up to schools reopening in spring 2020, and the partial closures of January 2021.

Some explicitly criticised teachers for “demanding” that schools stay closed. More broadly, much-criticised national headlines called for teachers to be “heroes” by returning to schools while the health risks remained high, or reported the guidance of unions and doctors about whether they should do so.

̽��ֱ��research suggests this constant discussion made teachers feel as though the public was waiting for them to make a decision about returning to the classroom, and that the longer they stayed away, the more they were seen to be ‘failing’ children.

Dr Lisa Kim, from the ̽��ֱ�� of York’s Department of Education, said: “There seems to be a relationship between the frequency of these headlines and teachers’ own mental health. Though we cannot determine whether there is a causal relationship, it seems that it added to the pressure, particularly because some commentary seemed to be encouraging a blame culture.”

This was confirmed by evidence gathered from the project participants and published in the preceding study. In interviews conducted in April and May 2020, for example, one told the researchers: “People think we’re at home on full pay doing nothing, which is not great for your mental health.” Later that summer, one teacher confessed: “There were times when I felt, and feel, that I’ve had enough. I don’t want to do this anymore, because you can’t see a light at the end of the tunnel.”

Teachers emerged from the experience feeling underappreciated. In November 2020, after schools reopened, one told the team: “I was working really hard and it almost feels like what we’ve been doing hasn’t really meant anything.” They reported avoiding looking at social media because it was full of what one described as “teacher-bashing”.

̽��ֱ��researchers say these outcomes are a concern given the present teacher recruitment and retention crisis. Many teachers identify strongly with their job because they see it as rewarding and worthwhile, despite the modest pay. This was eroded during the pandemic, the researchers suggest, because of a deepening sense of being undervalued.

“It’s striking that so little was said about the extraordinary efforts teachers were making,” Oxley added. “ ̽��ֱ��narratives we create matter, and we need to think carefully about this if we want to encourage more high-quality professionals into education.”

̽��ֱ��report is published in Psychology of Education Review.

Intense public pressure on teachers to “get back to school” during the COVID-19 lockdowns deepened an already widespread sense that they were undervalued, and left some actively rethinking their careers, research shows.

Getty/Sean Gladwell

Coronavirus newspaper headline montage

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

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Cost to protect globally important forests falls disproportionately on those living closest

jg533 — Thu, 17 Aug 2023 08:52:53 +0000

Local communities are not incentivised to protect tropical forests that are hugely valuable for global climate regulation, a new study has found. International funding could help smallholder farmers to boost yields on their existing land to incentivise long-term forest protection.

‘ ̽��ֱ��Next Leap Forward’ – four quantum technologies hubs to lead UK’s research drive

Anonymous — Fri, 12 Jul 2019 11:57:52 +0000

̽��ֱ��National Quantum Technologies Programme, which began in 2013, has now entered its second phase of funding, part of which will be a £94 million investment by the UK government, via UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), in four Quantum Technologies Research Hubs.

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge is a partner in the Quantum Communications Hub, led by the ̽��ֱ�� of York, which is pursuing quantum communications at all distance scales, to offer a range of applications and services and the potential for integration with existing infrastructure.

Through these Hubs, the UK’s world-leading quantum technologies research base will continue to drive the development of new technologies through their networks of academic and business partnerships.

“Harnessing the full potential of emerging technologies is vital as we strive to meet our Industrial Strategy ambition to be the most innovative economy in the world,” said Science Minister Chris Skidmore. “Our world-leading universities are pioneering ways to apply quantum technologies that could have serious commercial benefits for UK businesses. That’s why I am delighted to be announcing further investment in Quantum Technology Hubs that will bring academics and innovators together and make this once-futuristic technology applicable to our everyday lives.”

“ ̽��ֱ��UK is leading the field in developing Quantum Technologies and this new investment will help us make the next leap forward in the drive to link discoveries to innovative applications. UKRI is committed to ensuring the best research and researchers are supported in this area,” said Professor Sir Mark Walport, Chief Executive of UKRI.

̽��ֱ��Quantum Communications Hub has already established the UK's first quantum network, the UKQN. They will be extending and enhancing the UKQN, adding function and capability, and introducing new Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) technologies - using quantum light analogous to that used in conventional communications, or using entanglement working towards even longer distance fibre communications.

“We will be extending the UKQN to a national scale, with links over the EPSRC National Dark Fibre Facility to London and Bristol, as well as a link to our industrial partner BT in Adastral Park in Ipswich,” said Professor Richard Penty from the Department of Engineering. “We will be using this network to trial more advanced quantum communications technologies, including quantum repeaters, quantum entanglement, continuous variable QKD and new algorithms.”

Although widely applicable, key-sharing does not provide a solution for all secure communication scenarios. ̽��ֱ��Hub will research other new quantum protocols and the incorporation of QKD into wider security solutions. Professor Adrian Kent from the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics is co-leading this work with other theorists in the Hub.

“We have been devising new applications of quantum communication which allow new secure cryptographic schemes, often also making use of the impossibility of faster-than-light signalling,” said Kent. “We have also been working with experimentalist colleagues in the Hub on the practical implementation of some of these schemes, for example over the UK Quantum Network.

“ ̽��ֱ��next phase of the Hub will allow us to extend our theoretical work and experimental collaborations, including work on space-based implementations via satellite links.”

̽��ֱ��Cambridge researchers will also be working on quantum communications on a chip, particularly for the networking aspects. “One of the barriers for take-up of quantum communications is that the transmitters and receivers are bespoke and made from discrete components,” said Penty. “Integrating many of the functions on the same chip will reduce the costs and speed up commercialisation.”

Given the changing landscape worldwide, it is becoming increasingly important for the UK to establish national capability, both in quantum communication technologies and their key components such as light sources and detectors. ̽��ֱ��Hub has assembled an excellent team to deliver this capability.

Adapted from a UKRI press release.

Technologies that will allow fire crews to see through smoke and dust, computers to solve previously unsolvable computational problems, construction projects to image unmapped voids like old mine workings, and cameras that will let vehicles ‘see’ around corners are just some of the developments already taking place in the UK.

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

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Let’s go wild: how ancient communities resisted new farming practices

amb206 — Wed, 06 Jan 2016 11:01:15 +0000

A box of seemingly unremarkable stones sits in the corner of Dr Giulio Lucarini’s office at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research where it competes for space with piles of academic journals, microscopes and cartons of equipment used for excavations. These palm-sized pebbles were used as grinding tools by people living in North Africa around 7,000 years ago. Tiny specks of plant matter recently found on their surfaces shine light on a fascinating period of human development and confirm theories that the transition between nomadic and settled lifestyles was gradual.

̽��ֱ��artefacts in Lucarini’s office come from a collection held in the store of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) just a couple of minutes’ walk away. In the 1950s the well-known Cambridge archaeologist Sir Charles McBurney undertook an excavation of a cave called Haua Fteah located in northern Libya. He showed that its stratigraphy (layers of sediment) is evidence of continuous human habitation from at least 80,000 years ago right up to the present day. Finds from McBurney’s excavation were deposited at MAA.

In 2007, Professor Graeme Barker, also from Cambridge, started to re-excavate Haua Fteah with support from the ERC-funded TRANS-NAP Project. Until 2014, Barker and his team had the chance to spend more than one month each year excavating the site and surveying the surrounding Jebel Akhdar region, in order to investigate the relationships between cultural and environmental change in North Africa over the past 200,000 years.

Now an analysis of stone grinders from the Neolithic layers of Haua Fteah (dating from 8,000-5,500 years ago), carried out by Lucarini as his Marie Skłodowska-Curie Project ‘AGRINA’, in collaboration with Anita Radini ( ̽��ֱ�� of York) and Huw Barton ( ̽��ֱ�� of Leicester), yields new evidence about people living at a time seen as a turning point in human exploitation of the environment, paving the way for rapid expansion in population.

Around 11,000 years ago, during the early phase of the geological period known as Holocene, nomadic communities of Near Eastern regions made the transition from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a more settled farming existence as they began to exploit domesticated crops and animals developed locally. ̽��ֱ��research Lucarini is carrying out in Northern Libya and Western Egypt is increasingly revealing a contrasting scenario for the North African regions.

In a paper published today, Lucarini and colleagues explain that the surfaces of the grinders show plant use-wear and contain tiny residues of wild plants that date from a time when, in all likelihood, domesticated grains would have been available to them. These data are consistent with other evidence from the site, notably those from the analysis of the plant macro-remains carried out by Jacob Morales ( ̽��ֱ�� of the Basque Country), which confirmed the presence of wild plants alone in the site during the Neolithic. Together, this evidence suggests that domesticated varieties of grain were adopted late, spasmodically, and not before classical times, by people who lived in tune with their surroundings as they moved seasonally between naturally-available resources.

Lucarini is an expert in the study of stone tools and has a particular interest in the beginning of food production economies in North Africa. Using an integrated approach of low and high-power microscopy in the George Pitt-Rivers Lab at the McDonald Institute, and in the BioArCh Lab at the ̽��ֱ�� of York, he and his colleagues were able to spot plant residues, too small to be visible to the naked eye, caught in the pitted surface of several of the stones from Haua Fteah. Some of the grinders themselves exhibit clear ‘use-wear’ with their surfaces carrying the characteristic polish of having been used for grinding over long periods.

“It was thrilling to discover that microscopic traces of the plants ground by these stones have survived for so long, especially now that we’re able to use powerful high-power microscopes to look at the distinctive shape of the starch granules that offer us valuable clues to the identities of the plant varieties they come from,” says Lucarini.

By comparing the characteristic shape and size of the starch found in the grinders’ crevices to those in a reference collection of wild and domestic plant varieties collected in different North African and Southern European countries, Lucarini and Radini were able to determine that the residues most probably came from one of the species belonging to the Cenchrinae grasses. Various species of the genus Cenchrus are still gathered today by several African groups when other resources are scarce. Cenchrus is prickly and its seed is laborious to extract. But it is highly nutritious and, especially in times of severe food shortage, a highly valuable resource.

“Haua Fteah is only a kilometre from the Mediterranean and close to well-established coastal routes, giving communities there access to commodities such as domesticated grain, or at least the possibility to cultivate them. Yet it seems that people living in the Jebel Akhdar region may well have made a strategic and deliberate choice not to adopt the new farming practices available to them, despite the promise of higher yields but, instead, to integrate them into their existing practices,” says Lucarini.

“It’s interesting that today, even in relatively affluent European countries, the use of wild plants is becoming more commonplace, complementing the trend to use organically farmed food. Not only do wild plants contribute to a healthier diet, but they also more sustainable for the environment.”

Lucarini suggests that North African communities delayed their move to domesticated grains because it suited their highly mobile style of life. “Opting to exploit wild crops was a successful and low-risk strategy not to rely too heavily on a single resource, which might fail. It’s an example of the English idiom of not putting all your eggs in one basket. Rather than being ‘backward’ in their thinking, these nomadic people were highly sophisticated in their pragmatism and deep understanding of plants, animals and climatic conditions,” he says.

Evidence of the processing of wild plants at Haua Fteah challenges the notion that there was a sharp and final divide between nomadic lifestyles and more settled farming practices – and confirms recent theories that the adoption of domesticated species in North Africa was an addition to, rather than a replacement of, the exploitation of wild resources such as the native grasses that still grow wild at the site.

“Archaeologists talk about a ‘Neolithic package’ – made up of domestic plants and animals, tools and techniques – that transformed lifestyles. Our research suggests that what happened at Haua Fteah was that people opted for a mixed bag of old and new. ̽��ֱ��gathering of wild plants as well as the keeping of domestic sheep and goats chime with continued exploitation of other wild resources – such as land and sea snails – which were available on a seasonal basis with levels depending on shifts in climatic conditions,” says Lucarini.

“People had an intimate relationship with the environment they were so closely tuned to and, of course, entirely dependent on. This knowledge may have made them wary of abandoning strategies that enabled them to balance their use of resources – in a multi-spectrum exploitation of the environment.”

Haua Fteah continues to pose puzzles for archaeologists. ̽��ֱ��process of grinding requires two surfaces – a hand-held upper grinding tool and a base grinding surface. Excavation has yielded no lower grinders which made have been as simple as shallow dish-shaped declivities in local rock surfaces. “Only a fraction of the extensive site has been excavated so it may be that lower grinders do exist but they simply haven’t been found yet,” says Lucarini.

̽��ֱ��uncertain political situation in Libya has resulted in the suspension of fieldwork in Haua Fteah, in particular the excavation of the Neolithic and classical layers of the cave. Lucarini hopes that a resolution to the current crisis will allow work to resume within the next few years. He says: “Haua Fteah, with its 100,000 years of history and continuous occupation by different peoples, is a symbol of how Libya can be hospitable and welcoming. We trust in this future for the country.”

Inset images: Giulio Lucarini analysing the artefacts at the microscope, George Pitt-Rivers Laboratory, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research (Aude Gräzer Ohara); Upper grinder found in the Neolithic layers of the cave, with plant residues stuck inside a crevice (Giulio Lucarini); Anita Radini collecting plants and algae for reference collection in Fezzan, Libya (Muftah Haddad); Cenchrinae starch granules from the Haua Fteah archaeological tools (a-c) and modern starch granules of Cenchrus biflorus (d) scale 20 µm (Anita Radini); Cenchrus ciliaris L., Burkina Faso (Arne Erpenbach, African plants - A Photo Guide www.africanplants.senckenberg.de).

Analysis of grinding stones reveals that North African communities may have moved slowly and cautiously from hunter-gatherer lifestyles to more settled farming practices. Newly published research by Cambridge archaeologist Dr Giulio Lucarini suggests that a preference for wild crops was a strategic decision.

Rather than being ‘backward’ in their thinking, these nomadic people were highly sophisticated in their pragmatism and deep understanding of plants, animals and climatic conditions

Giulio Lucarini

Haua Fteah, Cyrenaica, Libya. ̽��ֱ��cave’s entrance.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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From Mexican wave to retinal wave: why sharing data is good for science

jfp40 — Mon, 07 Apr 2014 10:40:34 +0000

Now, researchers at Cambridge, York, Newcastle and Imperial College London have developed a system allowing neurophysiologists to share raw data with each other, something they hope will generate new discoveries in the field. ̽��ֱ��results are published in the journal GigaScience.

̽��ֱ��first type of data they collected and standardised are recordings of so called ‘retinal waves’. During early development, retinal neurons generate signals that rapidly spread across from one cell to another, much like a Mexican wave in a football stadium. These patterns of activity are thought to help forge the neural connections from the eye to the brain.

To record retinal waves, scientists use multielectrode arrays (tiny electrical devices). In this research, the team took 366 recordings from 12 different studies published between 1993 and 2014, converted them all to HDF5 – a standard open source format – and published them in a web-based ‘virtual laboratory’ called CARMEN.

According to lead author Dr Stephen Eglen from the Cambridge Computational Biology Institute: “Unlike other fields such as genomics, there hasn’t been much public data sharing in neuroscience, which could be because the data are heterogeneous and hard to annotate, or because researchers are reluctant to share data with a competitor.”

But Eglen believes there is much to be gained by a more cooperative approach. “There are two main benefits to sharing,” he said. “As well as leading to other collaborations and more interesting research, it also means that other people can check what you’ve done, which leads to more robust research. And if the taxpayer funds research, then I think it’s important for those results to be publicly available.”

CARMEN was a pilot project funded by the EPSRC, and is now supported by the BBSRC.

From the way we learn, to how our memories are made and stored, the workings of our brains depend on connections forged between billions of neurons, yet much about how our nervous system develops remains a mystery.

There are two main benefits to sharing. As well as leading to other collaborations and more interesting research, it also means that other people can check what you’ve done, which leads to more robust research.

Dr Stephen Eglen

Oyvind Solstad

Eye 9

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