As many as one in four people will have a stroke during their lifetime. This is when a blood clot prevents oxygen from reaching a part of the brain. The first few hours following a stroke are crucial – the blood clot needs to be removed quickly so that the oxygen supply to the brain can be restored; otherwise, the brain tissue begins to die.

Currently, the outcome for stroke patients receiving even the best available treatment, known as mechanical thrombectomy, is still poor, with fewer than one in 10 patients leaving hospital with no neurological impairment.

Professor Thomas Krieg from the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge said: “Stroke is a devastating disease. Even for those who survive, there is a significant risk of damage to the brain that can lead to disabilities and a huge impact on an individual’s life. But in terms of treatment, once the stroke is happening, we have only limited options.”

Mechanical thrombectomy is a minimally invasive medical procedure involving the insertion of a thin tube, known as a catheter, into a blood vessel, often through the groin or arm. This is guided to the blood clot, where it is removed by a tiny device, restoring normal blood flow.

Restoring blood flow too suddenly can make things worse, however. This is called ischaemia-reperfusion injury. When blood rushes back into the oxygen-starved tissue (a process known as reperfusion), the damaged cells struggle to cope, leading to the production of harmful molecules called free radicals that can damage cells, proteins, and DNA. This triggers further damage and can cause an inflammatory response.

The Cambridge team has previously shown that when the brain is starved of oxygen, a build-up occurs of a chemical called succinate. When blood flow is restored, the succinate is rapidly oxidised to drive free radical production within mitochondria, the ‘batteries’ that power our cells, initiating the extra damage. This occurs within the first few minutes of reperfusion, but the researchers showed that the oxidation of succinate can be blocked by the molecule malonate.

Professor Mike Murphy from the Medical Research Council Mitochondrial Biology Unit said: “All of this happens very rapidly, but if we can get malonate in quickly at the start of reperfusion, we can prevent this oxidation and burst of free radicals.

“We discovered in our labs that we can get malonate into cells very quickly by lowering the pH a little, making it a bit more acidic, so that it can cross the blood-brain barrier better. If we inject it into the brain just as we’re ready to reperfuse, then we can potentially prevent further damage.”

In a study published in Cardiovascular Research, the team has shown that treating the brain with a form of the chemical known as acidified disodium malonate (aDSM) alongside mechanical thrombectomy greatly decreased the amount of brain damage that occurs from ischaemia-reperfusion injury by as much as 60%.

Dr Jordan Lee, a postdoctoral researcher in the group, developed a mouse model that mimics mechanical thrombectomy, allowing the team to test the effectiveness of aDSM against ischaemia-reperfusion injury.

Dr Lee said: “This approach reduces the amount of dead brain tissue resulting from a stroke. This is incredibly important because the amount of dead brain tissue is directly correlated to the patient’s recovery – to their disability, whether they can still use all their limbs, speak and understand language, for example.”

Mechanical thrombectomy is increasingly used in the NHS, and the researchers hope that with the addition of aDSM as a treatment alongside this intervention, they will be able to improve outcomes significantly when the procedure is more widely adopted.

The team has launched Camoxis Therapeutics, a spin-out company, with support from Cambridge Enterprise, the innovation arm of the University of Cambridge. It is now seeking seed funding to develop the drug further and take it to early-stage clinical trials.

Professor Murphy added: “If it’s successful, this same drug could have much wider applications for other instances of ischemia-reperfusion injuries, such as heart attack, resuscitation, organ transplantation, and so on, which have similar underlying mechanisms.”

The research was supported by the British Heart Foundation, Medical Research Council, Wellcome Trust and the National Institute for Health and Care Research Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre.

Reference

Lee, JJ et al. Local arterial administration of acidified malonate as an adjunct therapy to mechanical thrombectomy in ischemic stroke. Cardiovascular Research; 27 Jun 2025; DOI: 10.1093/cvr/cvaf118

Cambridge scientists have developed and tested a new drug in mice that has the potential to reduce damage to the brain when blood flow is restored following a stroke.

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The Girls Enjoy Maths Summer School – a partnership between Cambridge Maths School, the University of Cambridge, and Raspberry Pi – saw 45 students get hands-on learning and real-world insight into the mathematical sciences.

Over three days, the students were offered a unique blend of academic exploration, including interactive workshops on maths in biology, chemistry, and physics at Cambridge Maths School, where they also had the opportunity to speak with current students and staff about A-level maths and further maths.

They also spent a day at the University, including sessions at St John’s and Queens’ Colleges, a punting trip along the River Cam, and a walk across the iconic Mathematical Bridge. They heard from the University’s Dr Zoe Wyatt and Professor Julia Gog OBE, who shared their experiences as female mathematicians and discussed the impact of mathematics in research and society.

During a visit to Raspberry Pi, the students also explored the creative side of coding and artificial intelligence.

Founded in association with the University of Cambridge, the new Cambridge Maths School welcomed its first-ever students in 2023. The specialist sixth form, led by multi-academy trust the Eastern Learning Alliance, focuses on pioneering learning and increasing diversity in the field of maths. It works to encourage more students from underrepresented groups, including girls, to study maths post-16. 

“The GEM Summer School was a celebration of curiosity, creativity, and community,” said a spokesperson from Cambridge Maths School. “Thanks to the dedication of our inspiring staff and the invaluable support of our partners, we were able to create a truly empowering experience that sparked curiosity, built confidence, and celebrated the joy of mathematics.”

The programme was free to attend, with lunch provided and financial support available for travel. Priority was given to students from backgrounds traditionally underrepresented in the mathematical sciences.

Year 10 students from around the Cambridge region took part in a special programme designed to inspire the next generation of female mathematicians.

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The research, published in the journal Gut, could help in the development of a blood test and points towards a potential new treatment.

When we eat, the liver releases bile acid to break down fats so that they can be absorbed into the body. Bile acid is released into the top end of the small intestine and then absorbed back into the body at the lower end.

However, around one person in every 100 is affected by a condition known as bile acid diarrhoea (also known as bile acid malabsorption), whereby the bile acid is not properly re-absorbed and makes its way into the large intestine (colon). It can trigger urgent and watery diarrhoea, and patients can risk episodes of incontinence.

Bile acid diarrhoea can be difficult to diagnose as there are currently no routine clinical blood tests. Many individuals are given a diagnosis of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), an umbrella term for a range of conditions. As many as one in 20 people is thought to have IBS, of which an estimated one in three patients with diarrhoea as their main symptom have undiagnosed bile acid diarrhoea.

Studies in mice have previously suggested that the gut hormone known as Insulin-Like Peptide 5 (INSL5) – present in cells at the far end of the colon and rectum – may play a role in chronic diarrhoea. INSL5 is released by these cells when irritated by bile acid.

Researchers at the Institute of Metabolic Science, University of Cambridge, have been exploring whether this hormone might also underlie chronic diarrhoea in humans. This has been possible thanks to a new antibody test developed by pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, with whom the team is collaborating, which allows them to measure tiny amounts of INSL5.

A study at the University of Adelaide looking at ways to trigger release of the gut hormone GLP-1 – the hormone upon which weight-loss drugs are based – previously found that giving a bile acid enema to healthy volunteers triggered release of GLP-1, but had the unintended consequence of causing diarrhoea. When the Cambridge team analysed samples from this study, they found that the bile acid enema caused levels of INSL5 to shoot up temporarily – and the higher the INSL5 levels, the faster the volunteers needed to use the toilet. This confirmed that INSL5 is likely to play a role in chronic cases of diarrhoea.

When the team analysed samples obtained from Professor Julian Walters at Imperial College London, which include samples from patients with bile acid diarrhoea, they found that while levels of INSL5 were almost undetectable in healthy volunteers, they were much higher in patients with bile acid diarrhoea. In addition, the higher the INSL5 level, the more watery their stool samples.

Dr Chris Bannon from the University of Cambridge, the study’s first author, said: “This was a very exciting finding because it showed us that this hormone could be playing a big part in symptoms of this misunderstood condition. It also meant it might allow us to develop a blood test to help diagnose bile acid diarrhoea if INSL5 levels are only high in these individuals.

“When you go to the doctor with chronic diarrhoea, it’s likely they’ll test for food intolerances, rule out an infection or look for signs of inflammation. There has been significant research interest in the microbiome, but gut hormones have been neglected. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that gut hormones play an important role in things like gut health and weight management.”

INSL5 also provides a potential target for treatment. Dr Bannon and colleagues obtained further samples from Professor Robin Spiller at the University of Nottingham, who had given the anti-sickness medication ondansetron – known to block the action of INSL5 in mice – to patients with IBS. Analysis of these samples by the Cambridge team showed that around 40% of these patients had raised levels of INSL5, even though they had had bile acid malabsorption ruled out, and these patients responded best to ondansetron.

Exactly why ondansetron is effective is currently unclear, though a known side effect of the drug is constipation. The team will now be investigating this further, hopeful that it will allow them either to repurpose the drug or to develop even better treatments. Bile acid diarrhoea is usually treated with so-called bile acid sequestrants, but these are only effective in around two-thirds of patients.

Dr Bannon added: “I often get asked why we would have a hormone that gives you diarrhoea. I think of it as a kind of poison sensor. Bile acids aren't meant to be in the colon – they're an irritant to the colon and they're toxic to the microbiome. It makes sense that you would have something that detects toxins and helps the body rid itself of them. But a problem develops if it’s always being triggered by bile acid, causing very dramatic symptoms.”

Dr Bannon is a clinical fellow in the group led by Professors Fiona Gribble and Frank Reimann at the Institute of Metabolic Science, University of Cambridge.

The research was supported by the Medical Research Council and Wellcome, with additional support from the National Institute for Health and Care Research Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre.

Reference

Bannon, CA et al. Insulin like peptide 5 is released in response to bile acid in the rectum and is associated with diarrhoea severity in patients with bile acid diarrhoea. Gut; 23 July 2025; DOI: 10.1136/gutjnl-2025-335393

High levels of a hormone found in cells in the gut could underlie many cases of chronic diarrhoea and help explain up to 40% of cases of patients with irritable bowel syndrome with diarrhoea, according to a new study led by scientists at the University of Cambridge.

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Dementias such as Alzheimer's disease are estimated to affect more than 57.4 million people worldwide, a number that is expected to almost triple to 152.8 million cases by 2050. The impacts on the individuals, families and caregivers and society at large are immense.

While there are some indications that the prevalence of dementia is decreasing in Europe and North America, suggesting that it may be possible to reduce the risk of the disease at a population level, elsewhere the picture is less promising.

Air pollution has recently been identified as a risk factor for dementia, with several studies pointing the finger at a number of pollutants. However, the strength of evidence and ability to determine a causal effect has been varied.

In a paper published in The Lancet Planetary Health, a team led by researchers at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Epidemiology Unit, University of Cambridge, carried out a systematic review and meta-analysis of existing scientific literature to examine this link further. This approach allowed them to bring together studies that on their own may not provide sufficient evidence, and which sometimes disagree with each other, to provide more robust overarching conclusions.

In total, the researchers included 51 studies, including data from more than 29 million participants who had been exposed to air pollutants for at least one year, mostly from high-income countries. Of these, 34 papers were included in the meta-analysis: 15 originated in North America, 10 in Europe, seven in Asia, and two in Australia.

The researchers found a positive and statistically-significant association between 3 types of air pollutant and dementia. These were:

• Particulate matter with a diameter of 2.5 microns or less (PM_2.5), a pollutant made up of tiny particles small enough that they can be inhaled deep into the lungs. These particles come from several sources, including vehicle emissions, power plants, industrial processes, wood burning stoves and fireplaces, and construction dust. They also form in the atmosphere because of complex chemical reactions involving other pollutants such as sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. The particles can stay in the air for a long time and travel a long way from where they were produced.
• Nitrogen dioxide (NO₂), one of the key pollutants that arise from burning fossil fuels. It is found in vehicle exhaust, especially diesel exhaust, and industrial emissions, as well as those from gas stoves and heaters. Exposure to high concentrations of nitrogen dioxide can irritate the respiratory system, worsening and inducing conditions like asthma and reducing lung function.
• Soot from sources such as vehicle exhaust emissions and burning wood. It can trap heat and affect the climate. When inhaled, it can penetrate deep into the lungs, aggravating respiratory diseases and increasing the risk of heart problems.

According to the researchers, for every 10 micrograms per cubic metre (μg/m³) of PM_2.5, an individual’s relative risk of dementia would increase by 17%. The average roadside measurement for PM_2.5 in Central London in 2023 was 10 μg/m³.

For every 10 μg/m3 of NO2, the relative risk increased by 3%. The average roadside measurement for NO₂ in Central London in 2023 was 33 µg/m³.

For each 1 μg/m³ of soot as found in PM_2.5, the relative risk increased by 13%. Across the UK, annual mean soot concentrations measured at select roadside locations in 2023 were 0.93 μg/m³ in London, 1.51 μg/m³ in Birmingham and 0.65 μg/m³ in Glasgow.

Senior author Dr Haneen Khreis from the MRC Epidemiology Unit said: “Epidemiological evidence plays a crucial role in allowing us to determine whether or not air pollution increases the risk of dementia and by how much. Our work provides further evidence to support the observation that long-term exposure to outdoor air pollution is a risk factor for the onset of dementia in previously healthy adults.

“Tackling air pollution can deliver long-term health, social, climate, and economic benefits. It can reduce the immense burden on patients, families, and caregivers, while easing pressure on overstretched healthcare systems.”

Several mechanisms have been proposed to explain how air pollution may cause dementia, primarily involving inflammation in the brain and oxidative stress (a chemical process in the body that can cause damage to cells, proteins, and DNA). Both oxidative stress and inflammation play a well-established role in the onset and progression of dementia. Air pollution is thought to trigger these processes through direct entry to the brain or via the same mechanisms underlying lung and cardiovascular diseases. Air pollution can also enter circulation from the lungs and travel to solid organs, initiating local and wide-spread inflammation.

The researchers point out that the majority of people included in the published studies were white and living in high-income countries, even though marginalised groups tend to have a higher exposure to air pollution. Given that studies have suggested that reducing air pollution exposure appears to be more beneficial at reducing the risk of early death for marginalised groups, they call for future work to urgently ensure better and more adequate representation across ethnicities and low- and middle-income countries and communities.

Joint first author Clare Rogowski, also from the MRC Epidemiology Unit, said: “Efforts to reduce exposure to these key pollutants are likely to help reduce the burden of dementia on society. Stricter limits for several pollutants are likely to be necessary targeting major contributors such as the transport and industry sectors. Given the extent of air pollution, there is an urgent need for regional, national, and international policy interventions to combat air pollution equitably.”

Further analysis revealed that while exposure to these pollutants increased the risk of Alzheimer's disease, the effect seemed stronger for vascular dementia, a type of dementia caused by reduced blood flow to the brain. Around 180,000 people in the UK are thought to be affected by this type of dementia. However, as there were only a small number of studies that examined this difference, the researchers did not class it as statistically significant.

Joint first author Dr Christiaan Bredell from the University of Cambridge and North West Anglia NHS Foundation Trust said: “These findings underscore the need for an interdisciplinary approach to dementia prevention. Preventing dementia is not just the responsibility of healthcare: this study strengthens the case that urban planning, transport policy, and environmental regulation all have a significant role to play.”

The research was funded by the European Research Council under the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Framework Programme.

Reference

Best Rogowski, CB, & Bredell, C et al. Long-term Air Pollution Exposure and Incident Dementia: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Lancet Planetary Health; 24 July 2025; DOI: 10.1016/S2542-5196(25)00118-4

An analysis of studies incorporating data from almost 30 million people has highlighted the role that air pollution – including that coming from car exhaust emissions – plays in increased risk of dementia.

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Lord Smith, the outgoing Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge, becomes the 109th Chancellor and will hold the office for ten years.

He said: “To be elected as Chancellor of the University I love is a huge honour. I’m thrilled. I look forward to being the best possible ambassador for Cambridge, to being a strong voice for higher education more generally, and to working closely together with the Vice-Chancellor and her team.”

Lord Smith’s election follows a process which attracted ten candidates. For the first time the election was opened to online voting and more than 23,000 alumni and staff participated. In addition, almost 2,000 chose to vote in person at the University's Senate House.

Professor Deborah Prentice, the Vice-Chancellor, said: "On behalf of everyone at the University, I offer my warm congratulations to Chris on his election. I very much look forward to working with him and building on the strong relationship that we have developed since I became Vice-Chancellor. Chris has had a long involvement with the University and brings a wealth of relevant experience to this important role.”

“I would like to thank the other nine candidates for standing for the role and their willingness to serve Cambridge.”

Lord Smith has been the Master of Pembroke since 2015 and steps down at the end of July. He is a former Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, and later Chairman of the Environment Agency.

Born in 1951, Lord Smith was educated in Edinburgh and then Pembroke College, Cambridge, achieving a double first in English (and later a PhD on Wordsworth and Coleridge) and was also a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard.

He began his political career as a Labour Councillor for the London Borough of Islington, becoming MP for Islington South and Finsbury in 1983. In 1992 he joined the Shadow Cabinet and held a number of front bench posts before Labour came to power in 1997. He served as Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport until 2001 when he returned to the back benches, standing down from the Commons in 2005.  Immediately afterwards he was made a life peer.

In July 2008 he became Chairman of the Environment Agency. He chaired the Environment Agency from 2008 to 2014; from 2007 to 2017 he was also Chairman of the Advertising Standards Authority.

The position of Chancellor stretches back more than 800 years to the foundation of the University. Although the role is primarily ceremonial and without executive responsibilities, the Chancellor has an important part to play in acting as a sounding board for senior figures within the University, in supporting fundraising and in acting as an ambassador for Cambridge. The most significant commitment for the Chancellor is to advocate and support the University’s aims and strategic interests.

The election was held between 9 and 18 July. It was conducted under the single transferable vote system and administered on behalf of the University by Civica Election Services. The results, based on the final numbers of votes allocated to each candidate, were as follows:  

1. Chris Smith, Baron Smith of Finsbury
2. Dr Mohamed El-Erian
3. Ms Sandi Toksvig
4. John Browne, Baron Browne of Madingley
5. Professor Wyn Evans
6. Mrs Gina Miller
7. Mr Tony Booth
8. Dr Mark Mann
9. Dr Ayham Ammora
10. Mr Ali Azeem

Read the full results

Lord Chris Smith has been elected as the new Chancellor of the University of Cambridge.

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On 3 April 2024, a magnitude 7.4 quake—Taiwan’s strongest in 25 years—shook the country's eastern coast. Stringent building codes spared most structures, but mountainous and remote villages were devastated by landslides.

When disasters affect large and inaccessible areas, responders often turn to satellite images to pinpoint affected areas and prioritise relief efforts.

But mapping landslides from satellite imagery by eye can be time-intensive, said Lorenzo Nava, who is jointly based at Cambridge’s Departments of Earth Sciences and Geography. “In the aftermath of a disaster, time really matters,” he said. Using AI, he identified 7,000 landslides after the Taiwan earthquake, and within three hours of the satellite imagery being acquired.

Since the Taiwan earthquake, Nava has been developing his AI method alongside an international team. By employing a suite of satellite technologies—including satellites that can see through clouds and at night—the researchers hope to enhance AI’s landslide detection capabilities.

Multiplying hazards

Triggered by major earthquakes or intense rainfall, landslides are often worsened by human activities such as deforestation and construction on unstable slopes. In certain environments, they can trigger additional hazards such as fast-moving debris flows or severe flooding, compounding their destructive impact.

Nava’s work fits into a larger effort at Cambridge to understand how landslides and other hazards can set off cascading ‘multihazard’ chains. The CoMHaz group, led by Maximillian Van Wyk de Vries, Professor of Natural Hazards in the Departments of Geography and Earth Sciences, draws on information from satellite imagery, computer modelling and fieldwork to locate landslides, understand why they happen and ultimately predict their occurrence.

They’re also working with communities to raise landslide awareness. In Nepal, Nava and Van Wyk de Vries teamed up with local scientists and the Climate and Disaster Resilience in Nepal (CDRIN) consortium to pilot an early warning system for Butwal, which sits beneath a massive unstable slope.

Improved AI-detection

Nava is training AI to identify landslides in two types of satellite images—optical images of the ground surface and radar data, the latter of which can penetrate cloud cover and even acquire images at night.

Radar images can, however, be difficult to interpret, as they use greyscale to depict contrasting surface properties and landscape features can also appear distorted. These challenges make radar data well-suited for AI-assisted analysis, helping extract features that may otherwise go unnoticed.

By combining the cloud-penetrating capabilities of radar with the fidelity of optical images, Nava hopes to build an AI-powered model that can accurately spot landslides even in poor weather conditions.

His trial following the 2024 Taiwan earthquake showed promise, detecting thousands of landslides that would otherwise go unnoticed beneath cloud cover. But Nava acknowledges that there is still more work needed, both to improve the model’s accuracy and its transparency.

He wants to build trust in the model and ensure its outputs are interpretable and actionable by decision-makers. “Very often, the decision-makers are not the ones who developed the algorithm,” said Nava. “AI can feel like a black box. Its internal logic is not always transparent, and that can make people hesitant to act on its outputs.

“It’s important to make it easier for end users to evaluate the quality of AI-generated information before incorporating it into important decisions.” 

This is something he is now addressing as part of a broader partnership with the European Space Agency (ESA), the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the International Telecommunication Union’s AI for Good Foundation and Global Initiative on Resilience to Natural Hazards through AI Solutions.

At a recent working group meeting at the ESA Centre for Earth Observation in Italy, the researchers launched a data-science challenge to crowdsource efforts to improve the model. “We’re opening this up and looking for help from the wider coding community,” said Nava.

Beyond improving the model’s functionality, Nava says the goal is to incorporate features that explain its reasoning—potentially using visualisations such as maps that show the likelihood of an image containing landslides to help end users understand the outputs.

“In high-stakes scenarios like disaster response, trust in AI-generated results is crucial. Through this challenge, we aim to bring transparency to the model’s decision-making process, empowering decision-makers on the ground to act with confidence and speed.”

Reference: 
Lorenzo Nava, Alessandro Novellino et al. 'Brief Communication: AI-driven rapid landslides mapping following the 2024 Hualien City Earthquake in Taiwan.' Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.5194/nhess-25-2371-2025

Researchers from the University of Cambridge are using AI to speed up landslide detection following major earthquakes and extreme rainfall events—buying valuable time to coordinate relief efforts and reduce humanitarian impacts.

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Researchers have conducted the world’s biggest ever bird survey, recording 971 different species living in forests and cattle pastures across the South American country of Colombia. This represents almost 10% of the world’s birds.

They combined the results, gathered over a decade, with information on each species’ sensitivity to habitat conversion to find that the biodiversity loss caused by clearing rainforest for cattle pasture is on average 60% worse than previously thought.

Until now, understanding the biodiversity impact of land-use change has generally involved small-scale, local surveys. The researchers say that this approach does not represent the larger-scale damage caused to nature.

When forests are converted to pasture, some species win and others lose. Measuring the biodiversity loss at local scale does not capture the larger-scale effect of forest conversion, which is occurring across the ranges of many different species. While the same species usually survive on pastureland, a wide range of other species don’t, so overall biodiversity is more severely reduced at large scale.

The results are published today in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.

Professor David Edwards in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Plant Sciences and Conservation Research Institute, senior author of the report, said: “This is a really surprising result. We found that the biodiversity loss caused by clearing rainforest for pastureland is being massively underestimated.”

He added: “When people want to understand the wider impact of deforestation on biodiversity, they tend to do a local survey and extrapolate the results. But the problem is that tree clearance is occurring at massive spatial scales, across all sorts of different habitats and elevations.

“When we looked the biodiversity impact of deforestation across thirteen different eco-regions in Colombia, we found a 62% greater biodiversity loss than local survey results would indicate.”

The study also showed that at least six different eco-regions – that is, regions containing distinct types of plants and animals - must be considered for an accurate assessment of overall biodiversity impact. This is because the species in different eco-regions have different sensitivities to habitat conversion.

Biodiversity offsetting schemes, which aim to compensate for species losses caused by developments in one place by boosting biodiversity in another, rely on accurate measures of biodiversity.

Trees are also being cleared at huge scales in Colombia and other tropical regions to create growing space for major agricultural crops including rubber, oil palm, sugar cane and coffee.

Edwards said: “The food we eat comes with a much great environmental cost than we thought. We need policy makers to think much more about the larger scale biodiversity impact of deforestation.”

Tropical birdsong recordings

The team studied Columbia’s birdlife across its diverse landscapes for over seven years, recording the song of hundreds of bird species to help them identify the species present in landscapes across the country, from pasture to mountain forest. In about 80% of cases the birds were heard but not seen, requiring the team to make identifications from the sounds alone.

With information about the birds, including their size and diet, the team could predict which other species were likely to be living in the same regions and how they too would respond to deforestation.

A highly biodiverse country

Colombia is home to some of the most beautiful and exotic animal and plant life in the world, with almost one third made up of rainforest.

Particularly biodiverse areas, including the Caqueta moist forests and the Napo moist forests, can have 500-600 different bird species within an area of ten square kilometres – but many of these species have very specific habitat requirements. The study showed that if trees are cleared across their range these species are likely to die out.

Land-use change, particularly in the highly biodiverse tropics, is one of the main causes of the global biodiversity crisis.

This research was funded by the Research Council of Norway and the Natural Environment Research Council.

Reference

Socolar, J B et al: ‘Tropical biodiversity loss from land-use change is severely underestimated by local-scale assessments.’ Nature Ecology and Evolution, July 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41559-025-02779-4

In the largest ever survey of rainforest birdlife, scientists have discovered that deforestation to create pastureland in Colombia is causing around 60% more damage to biodiversity than previously estimated.

The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright ©University of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – 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.

They are among 92 distinguished scholars to be elected to the fellowship in recognition of their work in fields ranging from medieval history to international relations.

The Cambridge academics made Fellows of the Academy this year are:

Professor Jeremy Adelman (Faculty of History; Global History Lab; Darwin College)

Professor Anthony Bale (Faculty of English; Girton College)

Professor Annabel Brett (Faculty of History; Gonville and Caius College)

Professor Hasok Chang (Dept. of History and Philosophy of Science; Clare Hall)

Professor Jennifer Howard-Grenville (Cambridge Judge Business School; Trinity Hall)

Professor Barak Kushner (Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies; Corpus Christi College)

Professor Marta Mirazón Lahr (Dept. of Archaeology, Clare College)

Professor Yael Navaro (Dept. of Social Anthropology; Newnham College)

Professor Joanna Page (Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics; Centre of Latin American Studies; Robinson College)

Professor Clare Pettitt (Faculty of English; Emmanuel College)

Professor Diane Reay (Faculty of Education)

Professor John Robb (Dept. of Archaeology; Peterhouse)

Founded in 1902, the British Academy is the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences. It is a Fellowship consisting of over 1700 of the leading minds in these subjects from the UK and overseas.

Current Fellows include the classicist Professor Dame Mary Beard, the historian Professor Sir Simon Schama and philosopher Professor Baroness Onora O’Neill, while previous Fellows include Dame Frances Yates, Sir Winston Churchill, Seamus Heaney and Beatrice Webb. The Academy is also a funder of both national and international research, as well as a forum for debate and public engagement.

In 2025, a total of 58 UK Fellows, 30 International Fellows and four Honorary Fellows have been elected to the British Academy Fellowship.

Professor Marta Mirazón Lahr said: “I am honoured and delighted to be elected a Fellow of the British Academy. As a native of South America who has been welcomed and encouraged throughout my career in the UK, I feel particularly privileged to join the academy. My work spans anthropology and archaeology and it is pleasing to see inter-disciplinarity recognised. Research in human origins is very dependent upon official and community support across many countries, and I am deeply grateful to the people of Brazil, India, Libya, Melanesia and specially Kenya who have made my work possible (and so enjoyable!), and I look forward to contributing to the Academy’s global mission.”

Professor Joanna Page said: “I am deeply honoured to be elected a Fellow of the British Academy, and I look forward to supporting its mission. It is more important than ever to uphold the value of the humanities and interdisciplinary approaches in forging more just and sustainable futures. Learning from the perspectives and experiences of other regions, including Latin America, is essential to that work. I would particularly like to thank the vibrant community of Latin Americanists at Cambridge – staff and students, past and present – who have made this such a stimulating place to do research.”

Professor Barak Kushner said: “It is an honour to be recognised by the British Academy, though also a bit daunting to be put on par with scholars I have looked up to for years. Recognition of this kind brings more attention to the importance of transnational history when researching East Asia and the need to look beyond national borders.”

Professor Yael Navaro said: “I feel truly honoured to be elected a Fellow of the British Academy. It couldn't be a more important time to mobilise the social sciences and humanities to address some of the most critical issues of our era."

Welcoming the Fellows, Professor Susan J. Smith PBA, new President of the British Academy, said: “One of my first acts as the incoming President of the British Academy is to welcome this year’s newly elected Fellows. What a line-up! With specialisms ranging from the neuroscience of memory to the power of music and the structural causes of poverty, they represent the very best of the humanities and social sciences. They bring years of experience, evidence-based arguments and innovative thinking to the profound challenges of our age: managing the economy, enabling democracy, and securing the quality of human life.

“This year, we have increased the number of new Fellows by nearly ten per cent to cover some spaces between disciplines. Champions of research excellence, every new Fellow enlarges our capacity to interpret the past, understand the present, and shape resilient, sustainable futures. It is a privilege to extend my warmest congratulations to them all.”

Twelve academics from the University of Cambridge have been made Fellows of the prestigious British Academy for the humanities and social science

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Because of its track record in recruiting and supporting top international researchers, the University will get a share of the new £54 million Global Talent Fund, along with 12 of the UK’s leading universities and research institutions.

From AI to medicine, the Fund is designed to attract a total of 60-80 top researchers (both lead researchers and their teams) to the UK, working in the eight high priority sectors critical to the Government’s modern Industrial Strategy.

By bringing the very best minds in fields that will be critical to the future of life and work to the UK, the Government aims to pave the way for the products, jobs and even industries that define tomorrow’s economy, to be made and grow in Britain.

Professor Deborah Prentice, Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, said: "The University is grateful for this award of funding. It will bolster emerging and accelerating research areas, in line with the goals of the Government's Industrial Strategy. This investment will be pivotal in securing and supporting international academic expertise and strengthening the strategic opportunities the University is seeking to catalyse for both the University and the UK more widely.  We look forward to the opportunities this will unlock."

From Argentine – and former Cambridge scientist – César Milstein’s work on antibodies, to Hong Kong-born Sir Charles Kao who led the development of fibre optics, through to the efforts of German Ernst Chain – another former Cambridge scientist – to make penicillin usable in medicine, there is a long pedigree of overseas researchers making great breakthroughs whilst working in the UK.

The Government says that driving new tech innovations and scientific breakthroughs will fire up the UK economy and put rocket boosters on the Government’s Plan for Change. The IMF estimates that breakthroughs in AI alone could boost productivity by as much as 1.5 percentage points a year, which could be worth up to an average £47 billion to the UK each year over a decade. Other technologies could be gamechangers too: quantum computing could add over £11 billion to the UK’s GDP by 2045, while engineering biology could drive anywhere between £1.6-£3.1 trillion in global impact by 2040. 

The Global Talent Fund, administered by UKRI, is just one part of over £115 million funding that is being dedicated to attracting the very best scientific and research talent to the UK. Work to cultivate top AI research talent in the UK is further bolstered through the Spärck AI scholarships, founded in partnership with Cambridge, which will provide full funding for master’s degrees at nine leading UK universities specialising in artificial intelligence and STEM subjects. 

Science Minister Lord Vallance said: "Genius is not bound by geography. But the UK is one of the few places blessed with the infrastructure, skills base, world-class institutions and international ties needed to incubate brilliant ideas, and turn them into new medicines that save lives, new products that make our lives easier, and even entirely new jobs and industries. Bringing these innovations to life, here in Britain, will be critical to delivering this Government’s Plan for Change.

"My message to the bold and the brave who are advancing new ideas, wherever they are, is: our doors are open to you. We want to work with you, support you, and give you a home where you can make your ideas a reality we all benefit from."   

Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves said: "The UK is home to some of the world’s best universities which are vital for attracting international top talent. Supported by our new Global Talent Taskforce, the Global Talent Fund will cement our position as a leading choice for the world’s top researchers to make their home here, supercharging growth and delivering on our Plan for Change."

Cambridge University has been selected as a partner in a key Government initiative to attract more of the world’s best research talent to the UK.

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Scientists have used an AI model to reassess the results of a completed clinical trial for an Alzheimer’s disease drug. They found the drug slowed cognitive decline by 46% in a group of patients with early stage, slow-progressing mild cognitive impairment – a condition that can progress to Alzheimer’s.

Using AI allowed the team to split trial participants into two groups: either slowly or rapidly progressing towards Alzheimer’s disease. They could then look at the effects of the drug on each group.

More precise selection of trial participants in this way could help select patients most likely to benefit from treatment, with the potential to reduce the cost of developing new medicines by streamlining clinical trials.

The AI model developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge predicts whether, and how quickly, people at early stages of cognitive decline will progress to full-blown Alzheimer’s. It gives predictions for patients that are three times more accurate than standard clinical assessments based on memory tests, MRI scans and blood tests.  

Using this patient stratification model, data from a completed clinical trial - which did not demonstrate efficacy in the total population studied - was re-analysed. The researchers found that the drug cleared a protein called beta amyloid in both patient groups as intended - but only the early stage, slow-progressing patients showed changes in symptoms. Beta amyloid is one of the first disease markers to appear in the brain in Alzheimer’s disease.

The new findings have significant implications: using AI to separate patients into different groups, such as slow versus rapidly progressing towards Alzheimer’s disease, allows scientists to better identify those who could benefit from a treatment approach - potentially accelerating the discovery of much-needed new Alzheimer’s drugs.

The results are published today in the journal Nature Communications.

Professor Zoe Kourtzi in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Psychology, senior author of the report, said: “Promising new drugs fail when given to people too late, when they have no chance of benefiting from them. With our AI model we can finally identify patients precisely, and match the right patients to the right drugs. This makes trials more precise, so they can progress faster and cost less, turbocharging the search for a desperately-need precision medicine approach for dementia treatment.”  

She added: “Our AI model gives us a score to show how quickly each patient will progress towards Alzheimer’s disease. This allowed us to precisely split the patients on the clinical trial into two groups – slow, and fast progressing, so we could look at the effects of the drug on each group.”

Health Innovation East England, the innovation arm of the NHS in the East of England, is now supporting Kourtzi to translate this AI-enabled approach into clinical care for the benefit of future patients.

Joanna Dempsey, Principal Advisor at Health Innovation East England, said: “This AI-enabled approach could have a significant impact on easing NHS pressure and costs in dementia care by enabling more personalised drug development - identifying which patients are most likely to benefit from treatment, resulting in faster access to effective medicines and targeted support for people living with dementia.”

Drugs like this are not intended as cures for Alzheimer’s disease. The aim is to reduce cognitive decline so that patients don’t get worse.

Dementia is the UK’s leading cause of death, and a major cause of mortality globally. It costs $1.3 tr per year, and the number of cases are expected to treble by 2050. There is no cure, and patients and families face high uncertainty.

Despite decades of research and development, clinical trials of treatments for dementia have been largely unsuccessful. The failure rate for new treatments is unreasonably high at over 95%, despite $43 bn having been spent on research and development. Progress has been hampered by the wide variation in symptoms, disease progression and responses to treatment among patients.

Although new dementia drugs have recently been approved for use in the US, their risk of side effects and insufficient cost effectiveness have prevented healthcare adoption in the NHS.

Understanding and accounting for the natural differences among individuals with a disease is crucial, so that treatments can be tailored to be most effective for each patient. Alzheimer’s disease is complex, and although some drugs are available to treat it they don’t work for everybody.

“AI can guide us to the patients who will benefit from dementia medicines, by treating them at the stage when the drugs will make a difference, so we can finally start fighting back against these cruel diseases. Making clinical trials faster, cheaper and better, guided by AI has strong potential to accelerate discovery of new precise treatments for individual patients, reducing side effects and costs for healthcare services,” said Kourtzi.

She added: “Like many people, I have watched hopelessly as dementia stole a loved one from me.  We’ve got to accelerate the development of dementia medicines. Over £40 billion has already been spent over thirty years of research and development - we can’t wait another thirty years.”

This research was funded by the Royal Society, Alan Turing Institute and Wellcome.

Reference 

Vaghari, D. V. et al: ‘AI-guided patient stratification improves outcomes and efficiency in the AMARANTH Alzheimer’s Disease clinical trial.’ Nature Communications, July 2025.  DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-61355-3

Scientists have used AI to re-analyse a clinical trial for an Alzheimer’s medicine, and identified a group of patients who responded to treatment. The work demonstrates that AI can inform the design of future clinical trials to make them more effective and efficient, accelerating the search for new medicines.

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Originally founded with funding from the Department of Education and philanthropy, the Isaac Physics platform and STEM SMART programme run by the University of Cambridge have proven results in improving A-level students’ grades and boosting their success in securing a place to study STEM subjects at research-intensive universities. The future of this pioneering STEM provision, which is freely available to anyone, wherever they are in the world, has now been made significantly more secure with an anonymous donation of £6.25 million that is mirrored with a similar gift to the University of Oxford.

The Isaac Physics online platform was founded in 2013 by Professor Lisa Jardine-Wright and Professor Mark Warner at Cambridge’s Department of Physics, specifically to support physics teaching at A-level in response to the challenges facing many state schools that teach physical sciences. Teachers use the unique platform to set homework, which is marked automatically. Pupils develop essential problem-solving skills as they are guided through questions rather than being supplied with answers. Resources have since been expanded to cover maths, further maths, chemistry, and biology, and to support students in physics from age 11 through to university. It can be used in the classroom and beyond—anyone can sign up for a free account and use the available resources.

Professor Lisa Jardine-Wright, Director of Isaac Physics and Co-Director of STEM SMART, said “We are absolutely thrilled that thanks to this generous gift, Isaac Physics and STEM SMART are now on a much more secure footing until 2031, enabling us to support hundreds of thousands more pupils to gain essential problem-solving skills and pursue STEM degrees”.

Dr Michael Sutherland, Co-Director of STEM SMART, added, “This transformational gift will have long-term impact, not only for those students who gain the confidence and skills to study STEM subjects at university but also for wider society, because when these young people graduate they can provide a critical boost to the country’s STEM workforce”.

Second year student Rebecca Millar believes the STEM SMART programme played a pivotal role in her applying to study Natural Sciences at Cambridge: “Being here has changed a lot about my life—the people I know and the subjects I am doing. I didn’t realise there were courses like NatSci.”

The STEM SMART widening participation programme leverages the scalability of the Isaac Physics platform to engage thousands of sixth-form students from disadvantaged backgrounds when they are planning their university applications, raising their aspirations and confidence to apply to study STEM degrees at research-intensive universities. Independent analysis of pupils’ A-levels and UCAS applications shows that STEM SMART students achieved higher A-level grades and secured more places at top universities compared with matched cohorts not on the programme.

Amira Yonis Sheikmohamud, a second-year Mechanical Engineering student at Imperial College London, who took part in STEM SMART, said it "gives people access to materials they wouldn’t otherwise have, unless they were in a fee-paying school, so the programme helps bridge that gap.”

Since its inception, more than 700,000 Isaac Physics accounts have been created with users from over 100 countries.

Professor Bhaskar Vira, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education and Environmental Sustainability, University of Cambridge, said, “The University is very grateful for this exceptional gift that will benefit significant numbers of school pupils and teachers, and bring more talented young people to study STEM degrees at Cambridge and other research-intensive universities. Closing the attainment gap in science and maths A-levels is crucial for developing society’s ability to solve the technological challenges of the future”.

Joint major gift to Cambridge and Oxford Universities helps boost initiatives to address challenges in science education and increase the number of pupils progressing to STEM degrees

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Findings of the IMPORT LOW trial, led by researchers at the University of Cambridge and The Institute of Cancer Research, London, showed that limiting radiation to only the tumour area is just as effective as treating the whole breast, therefore reducing radiation exposure.

At the 10-year follow-up mark, the team showed that recurrence rates for the less aggressive technique – known as partial breast radiotherapy – were 3%, the same as for whole breast radiotherapy, according to findings published in The Lancet Oncology.

Partial breast radiotherapy, which has been shown to reduce long-term changes in breast appearance, has now been adopted widely across the NHS and internationally.

It is hoped that more than 9,000 women a year in the UK – one in four patients who require radiotherapy for breast cancer – will benefit from the more personalised treatment, along with many tens of thousands of patients around the world.

More than 37,000 women have radiotherapy for breast cancer in the UK each year. The procedure is given after a tumour is surgically removed and is aimed at eradicating all remaining cancer cells.

Side effects of radiotherapy include changes in breast size or shape, swelling in the arm or breast due to fluid build-up, as well as pain or breast hardness.

IMPORT LOW was co-led by Professor Charlotte Coles from the University of Cambridge and Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, and Professor Judith Bliss, Founding Director of The Institute of Cancer Research Clinical Trials and Statistics Unit (ICR-CTSU).

Professor Coles, Chief Investigator of the study, said: "The IMPORT LOW trial has transformed how we treat early breast cancer, offering women a safer and effective option while significantly reducing some side effects. By targeting the area around the tumour, rather than the whole breast, we have demonstrated that patients can achieve the same outstanding long-term outcomes with fewer complications.

“This approach is now widely adopted across the NHS, sparing thousands of women from unnecessary radiation exposure. The results of this study have not only shaped UK clinical practice but also informed international guidelines, ensuring that women worldwide benefit from this personalised, evidence-based treatment.”

The IMPORT LOW trial, which was managed by the ICR-CTSU and funded by Cancer Research UK, compared three radiotherapy approaches: whole-breast radiotherapy, partial-breast radiotherapy and partial-breast radiotherapy with reduced-dose to the part of the breast that was distant from the primary cancer. It involved more than 2,000 women at 30 radiotherapy centres in the UK who were monitored for 10 years after treatment.

The researchers found no difference in rates of cancer recurrence with either of the less aggressive approaches, and patients reported significantly lower side-effects.

Patients who received partial-breast radiotherapy were significantly less likely to experience long-term changes in breast appearance. Only 15% of patients reported noticeable changes at 5 years, compared to 27% in the whole-breast group.

Experts estimate that between 25% and 30% of patients who have radiotherapy treatment for breast cancer are eligible for partial breast radiotherapy, due to their cancer being low risk and, to date, around 74,000 women have benefitted from the gentler technique.

Following the trial's success, partial-breast radiotherapy has been integrated into NHS treatment guidelines and endorsed by the Royal College of Radiologists and Association of Breast Surgery. The IMPORT LOW trial has also changed clinical practice worldwide, informing the 2022 European Society of Radiation Oncology guidelines, and the 2023 American Society of Radiotherapy and Oncology (ASTRO) partial breast irradiation guidelines.

Since 2020, partial breast radiotherapy has been carried out in 5 sessions of radiotherapy instead of 15 – making it cheaper for the NHS and less burdensome for patients.

First author Dr Anna Kirby from The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust and The Institute of Cancer Research said: "The long-term results of this study confirm that a less aggressive approach – limiting radiotherapy to the part of the breast where the tumour was – is just as effective as traditional whole-breast radiotherapy. Patients receiving partial breast radiotherapy experience fewer side effects while maintaining excellent cancer control.”

Dr Fay Cafferty, also from The Institute of Cancer Research, said: “This latest analysis confirms that partial breast radiotherapy remains a safe and effective treatment option, supporting its continued adoption as the standard of care in the UK and globally. Along with the parallel reduction in the number of radiotherapy sessions now required, the approach provides significant advantages both for patients and healthcare systems, helping to optimise resources while ensuring excellent long-term cancer control."

The study was supported by the National Institute for Health and Care Research's Biomedical Research Centres in Cambridge and at the Royal Marsden and The Institute of Cancer Research.

Dr Dani Edmunds, Research Information Manager at Cancer Research UK, said: “This study shows that we can safely reduce the amount of radiotherapy we give to many women with early breast cancer without increasing the risk of the disease coming back.

“This means people experience fewer long-term side effects, like changes in how their breasts look or feel, making the treatment kinder.”

Reference

Kirby, AM et al. Partial-breast radiotherapy after breast conservation surgery for women with early breast cancer (UK IMPORT LOW): 10-year outcomes from a multicentre, open-label, randomised, controlled, phase 3, non-inferiority trial. Lancet Oncology; July 2025; DOI: 10.1016/S1470-2045(25)00194-9

Thousands of women who undergo radiotherapy for low-risk breast cancer could be spared some of the side effects of treatment after a study confirmed that more targeted treatments are just as effective at controlling the disease in the long term.

Hilary Stobart, now 70, was diagnosed with ER-Positive breast cancer in December 2008 which revealed a two-centimetre tumour in her left breast.

Hilary, then aged 54, underwent wide local excision surgery and was then offered the chance to take part in the IMPORT-LOW trial. She was treated with partial breast radiotherapy as part of the trial. She says:

“I had three weeks of radiotherapy, but suffered no side effects, other than some soreness in my breast and nipple in the first few weeks.

“Ten years on, I am doing fine. I have no side effects and no recurrence of disease. For me personally, I am very thankful to have received the lowest dose of radiotherapy. Whilst I may have had some niggling worries in the early days, having seen the results of the trial, I feel positive and optimistic now. I know that I was lucky enough back then to have had the best treatment, a treatment that other women will be routinely offered now.

“I am excited to have been part of a trial that has made a noticeable difference to the way in which breast cancer patients are treated now and in the future.”

Adapted from a press release from The Institute of Cancer Research

Find out how Cambridge is changing the story of cancer

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Earlier observations of this star, called MP Mus, suggested that it was all alone without any planets in orbit around it, surrounded by a featureless cloud of gas and dust.

However, a second look at MP Mus, using a combination of results from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission, suggests that the star is not alone after all.

The international team of astronomers, led by the University of Cambridge, detected a large gas giant in the star’s protoplanetary disc: the pancake-like cloud of gases, dust and ice where the process of planet formation begins. This is the first time that Gaia has detected an exoplanet within a protoplanetary disc. The results, reported in the journal Nature Astronomy, suggest that similar methods could be useful in the hunt for young planets around other stars.

By studying how planets form in the protoplanetary discs around young stars, researchers can learn more about how our own Solar System evolved. Through a process known as core accretion, gravity causes particles in the disc to stick to each other, eventually forming larger solid bodies like asteroids or planets. As young planets form, they start to carve gaps in the disc, like grooves on a vinyl record.

However, observing these young planets is extremely challenging, due to the interference from the gas and dust in the disc. To date, only three robust detections of young planets in a protoplanetary disc have been made.

Dr Álvaro Ribas from Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, who led the research, specialises in studying protoplanetary discs. “We first observed this star at the time when we learned that most discs have rings and gaps, and I was hoping to find features around MP Mus that could hint at the presence of a planet or planets,” he said.

Using ALMA, Ribas observed the protoplanetary disc around MP Mus (PDS 66) in 2023. The results showed a young star seemingly all alone in the universe. Its surrounding disc showed none of the gaps where planets might be forming, and was completely flat and featureless.

“Our earlier observations showed a boring, flat disc,” said Ribas. “But this seemed odd to us, since the disc is between seven and ten million years old. In a disc of that age, we would expect to see some evidence of planet formation.”

Now, Ribas and his colleagues from Germany, Chile, and France have given MP Mus another chance. Once again using ALMA, they observed the star at the 3mm range, a longer wavelength than the earlier observations, allowing them to probe deeper into the disc.

The new observations turned up a cavity close to the star and two gaps further out, which were obscured in the earlier observations, suggesting that MP Mus may not be alone after all.

At the same time, Miguel Vioque, a researcher at the European Southern Observatory, was uncovering another piece of the puzzle. Using data from Gaia, he found MP Mus was ‘wobbling’.

“My first reaction was that I must have made a mistake in my calculations, because MP Mus was known to have a featureless disc,” said Vioque. “I was revising my calculations when I saw Álvaro give a talk presenting preliminary results of a newly-discovered inner cavity in the disc, which meant the wobbling I was detecting was real and had a good chance of being caused by a forming planet.”

Using a combination of the Gaia and ALMA observations, along with some computer modelling, the researchers say the wobbling is likely caused by a gas giant – less than ten times the mass of Jupiter – orbiting the star at a distance between one and three times the distance of the Earth to the Sun.

“Our modelling work showed that if you put a giant planet inside the new-found cavity, you can also explain the Gaia signal,” said Ribas. “And using the longer ALMA wavelengths allowed us to see structures we couldn’t see before.”

This is the first time an exoplanet embedded in a protoplanetary disc has been indirectly discovered in this way – by combining precise star movement data from the Gaia with deep observations of the disc. It also means that many more hidden planets might exist in other discs, just waiting to be found.

“We think this might be one of the reasons why it’s hard to detect young planets in protoplanetary discs, because in this case, we needed the ALMA and Gaia data together,” said Ribas. “The longer ALMA wavelength is incredibly useful, but to observe at this wavelength requires more time on the telescope.”

Ribas says that upcoming upgrades to ALMA, as well as future telescopes such as the next generation Very Large Array (ngVLA), may be used to look deeper into more discs and better understand the hidden population of young planets, which could in turn help us learn how our own planet may have formed.

The research was supported in part by the European Union’s Horizon Programme, the European Research Council, and the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).

Reference:
Álvaro Ribas et al. ‘A young gas giant and hidden substructures in a protoplanetary disc.’ Nature Astronomy (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41550-025-02576-w 

Astronomers have detected a giant exoplanet – between three and ten times the size of Jupiter – hiding in the swirling disc of gas and dust surrounding a young star.

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Using carbon capture to create a cleaner chemical supply chain

A collaboration on carbon capture between Cambridge and Hitachi Europe Ltd has been awarded Prosperity Partnership funding to develop a new way of converting green methanol – made from captured CO₂ – into high-value chemicals used in pharmaceuticals, cosmetics and materials manufacturing.

While many technologies focus on capturing and storing surplus CO₂, the researchers, led by Professor Ljiljana Fruk, aim to turn it into something genuinely useful.

The approach uses compact, continuous‑flow reactors – systems that enable chemical reactions to run more efficiently – with lower energy demand, less waste, and better control at scale. The catalysts themselves are being designed to work under mild, sustainable conditions, helping reduce reliance on fossil fuels.

Professor Fruk said: “It’s exciting to be part of something that is working towards a future where science helps build a cleaner, healthier world.”

Read the full story here

Low-emission steel-making

With Prosperity Partnership funding from UKRI and Tata Steel, Cambridge University, Imperial College and the Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG) at the University of Warwick will work in partnership to drive innovation in low-emission steel production.

As the UK steel industry transitions towards electric arc furnace (EAF) technology, the programme will address one of the key challenges of using high-recycled-content steel: how to ensure its performance in demanding applications such as some automotive components and packaging.

The five-year programme will also fund 13 PhD studentships across the three universities to conduct leading research into the advanced manufacturing of steels and steel products suited to EAF steelmaking.

Professor Howard Stone, lead academic for the project, said: “This partnership will enable us to unlock the full potential of electric arc furnace steelmaking, combining advanced data science with metallurgical expertise. By working closely with Tata Steel, we aim to deliver practical solutions that support a more sustainable future for the UK steel industry and beyond.”

The University of Cambridge has been awarded two Prosperity Partnerships by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). The awards are designed to support partnerships between universities and business which are focused on fundamental research addressing key industry challenges.

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Engineering Professor Julian Allwood (St Catharine's), Cambridge Zero Director Professor Emily Shuckburgh (Darwin) and Cambridge Energy Policy Research Group Director Emeritus Professor David Newbery (Churchill) join a panel of 17 expert advisors on STAC, which has been created to provide robust, scientific, evidence-based information to support key decisions as the UK overhauls its energy system to reach clean power by 2030.

The Council is expected to also offer independent viewpoints and cutting-edge research on topics from climate science, energy networks and engineering, to the latest technologies and artificial intelligence.

“Evidence-based decision-making is fundamental to the drive for clean power and tackling the climate crisis, with informed policymaking the key to securing a better, fairer world for current and future generations,” UK Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said in the Government’s announcement.

Professor Allwood is Professor of Engineering and the Environment at the University of Cambridge and directs the Use Less Group. Uniquely, his research aims to articulate a pathway to zero emissions based on technologies that already exist at scale. His projects include ground-breaking innovations such as electric cement.

Professor Shuckburgh is Director of Cambridge Zero, the University’s major climate change initiative. A mathematician and data scientist, Emily Shuckburgh is also Professor of Environmental Data Science at the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Academic Director of the Institute of Computing for Climate Science, and co-Director of the Centre for Landscape Regeneration and the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training on the Application of AI to the study of Environmental Risks (AI4ER). 

As a climate scientist, Professor Shuckburgh worked for more than a decade at the British Antarctic Survey where her work included leading a UK national research programme on the Southern Ocean and its role in climate.

Professor Newbery is the Director of the Cambridge Energy Policy Research Group, an Emeritus Professor of Economics at the Faculty of Economics and a Professorial Research Associate in the UCL Bartlett School of Environment, Energy and Resources at University College London.

STAC’s expert advice is expected to allow ministers to access the most up-to-date and well-informed scientific evidence, improving decision-making and effectiveness of policy implementation. 

STAC is led by Professor Paul Monks, STAC Co-Chair and Chief Scientific Adviser and Director General, Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ); and Professor David Greenwood FREng, STAC Co-Chair and CEO of Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG) High Value Manufacturing Catapult Centre.

Read the UK Government announcement

Three Cambridge academics have been appointed to the UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero’s new Science and Technology Advisory Council (STAC), which met for the first time on Wednesday 9 July 2025. 

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By 2040, the energy demands of the tech industry could be up to 25 times higher than today, with unchecked growth of data centres driven by AI expected to create surges in electricity consumption that will strain power grids and accelerate carbon emissions.  

This is according to a new report from the University of Cambridge’s Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, which suggests that even the most conservative estimate for big tech’s energy needs will see a five-fold increase over the next 15 years.

The idea that governments such as the UK can become leaders in AI while simultaneously meeting their net zero targets amounts to “magical thinking at the highest levels,” according to the report’s authors. The UK is committed to net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Researchers call for global standards in reporting AI’s environmental cost through forums such as COP, the UN climate summit, and argue that the UK should advocate for this on the international stage while ensuring democratic oversight at home.

The report, published today, synthesises projections from leading consultancies to forecast the energy demands of the global tech industry. The researchers note that these projections are based on claims by tech firms themselves. 

At the moment, data centres – the facilities that house servers for processing and storing data, along with cooling systems preventing this hardware from overheating – account for nearly 1.5% of global emissions.

This figure is expected to grow by 15-30% each year to reach 8% of total global greenhouse gas emissions by 2040, write the report’s authors. They point out that this would far exceed current emissions from air travel. 

The report highlights that in the US, China, and Europe, data centres already consume around 2-4% of national electricity, with regional concentrations becoming extreme. For example, up to 20% of all power in Ireland now goes to data centres in Dublin’s cluster.

“We know the environmental impact of AI will be formidable, but tech giants are deliberately vague about the energy requirements implicit in their aims,” said Bhargav Srinivasa Desikan, the report’s lead author from Cambridge’s Minderoo Centre.

“The lack of hard data on electricity and water consumption as well as associated carbon emissions of digital technology leaves policymakers and researchers in the dark about the climate harms AI might cause.”

“We need to see urgent action from governments to prevent AI from derailing climate goals, not just deferring to tech companies on the promise of economic growth,” said Desikan.

The researchers also use data from corporate press releases and ESG reports of some of the world’s tech giants to show the alarming trajectory of energy use before the AI race had fully kicked into gear.

Google’s reported greenhouse gas emissions rose by 48% between 2019 and 2023, while Microsoft’s reported emissions increased by nearly 30% from 2020 to 2023. Amazon’s carbon footprint grew around 40% between 2019 and 2021, and – while it has begun to fall – remains well above 2019 levels.

This self-reported data is contested, note the researchers, and some independent reporting suggests that actual emissions from tech companies are much higher.

Several tech giants are looking to nuclear power to defuse the energy timebomb at the heart of their ambitions. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has argued that fusion is needed to meet AI’s potential, while Meta have said that nuclear energy can ‘provide firm, baseload power’ to supply their data centres.

Microsoft have even signed a 20-year agreement to reactivate the Three Mile Island plant – site of the worst nuclear accident in US history.

Some tech leaders, such as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, argue that environmental costs of AI will be offset by its benefits for the climate crisis – from contributing to scientific breakthroughs in green energy to enhanced climate change modelling.

“Despite the rapacious energy demands of AI, tech companies encourage governments to see these technologies as accelerators for the green transition,” said Professor Gina Neff, Executive Director of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy.

“These claims appeal to governments banking on AI to grow the economy, but they may compromise society's climate commitments.”

“Big Tech is blowing past their own climate goals, while they rely heavily on renewable energy certificates and carbon offsets rather than reducing their emissions,” said Prof Neff.

“Generative AI may be helpful for designing climate solutions, but there is a real risk that emissions from the AI build-out will outstrip any climate gains as tech companies abandon net zero goals and pursue huge AI-driven profits.”

The report calls for the UK’s environmental policies to be updated for the ‘AI era’. Recommendations include adding AI’s energy footprint into national decarbonisation plans, with specific carbon reduction targets for data centres and AI services, and requirements for detailed reporting of energy and water consumption.  

Ofgem should set strict energy efficiency targets for data centres, write the report’s authors, while the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology should tie AI research funding and data centre operations to clean power adoption.

The report’s authors note that that UK’s new AI Energy Council currently consists entirely of energy bodies and tech companies – with no representation for communities, climate groups or civil society.  

“Energy grids are already stretched,” said Professor John Naughton, Chair of the Advisory Board at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy.

“Every megawatt allocated to AI data centres will be a megawatt unavailable for housing or manufacturing. Governments need to be straight with the public about the inevitable energy trade-offs that will come with doubling down on AI as an engine of economic growth.”

With countries such as the UK declaring ambitious goals for both AI leadership and decarbonisation, a new report suggests that AI could drive a 25-fold increase in the global tech sector’s energy use.

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A new study suggests that our ancestors’ close cohabitation with domesticated animals and large-scale migrations played a key role in the spread of infectious diseases.

The team, led by Professor Eske Willerslev at the Universities of Cambridge and Copenhagen, recovered ancient DNA from 214 known human pathogens in prehistoric humans from Eurasia.

They found that the earliest evidence of zoonotic diseases – illnesses transmitted from animals to humans, like COVID in recent times – dates back to around 6,500 years ago, with these diseases becoming more widespread approximately 5,000 years ago.

The study detected the world’s oldest genetic trace of the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, in a 5,500-year-old sample. The plague is estimated to have killed between one-quarter and one-half of Europe’s population during the Middle Ages.

In addition, the researchers found traces of many other diseases including:

Malaria (Plasmodium vivax) – 4,200 years ago

Leprosy (Mycobacterium leprae) – 1,400 years ago

Hepatitis B virus – 9,800 years ago

Diphtheria (Corynebacterium diphtheriae) – 11,100 years ago

This is the largest study to date on the history of infectious diseases and is published today in the journal Nature.

The researchers analysed DNA from over 1,300 prehistoric humans, some up to 37,000 years old. The ancient bones and teeth have provided a unique insight into the development of diseases caused by bacteria, viruses, and parasites.

“We’ve long suspected that the transition to farming and animal husbandry opened the door to a new era of disease – now DNA shows us that it happened at least 6,500 years ago,” said Willerslev.

He added: “These infections didn’t just cause illness – they may have contributed to population collapse, migration, and genetic adaptation.”

The significant increase in the incidence of zoonoses around 5,000 years ago coincides with a migration to north-western Europe from the Pontic Steppe – that is from parts of present-day Ukraine, south-western Russia and western Kazakhstan. The people embarking on this migration – and who to a large extent passed on the genetic profile found among people in north-western Europe today – belonged to the Yamnaya herders.

The findings could be significant for the development of vaccines and for understanding how diseases arise and mutate over time.

“If we understand what happened in the past, it can help us prepare for the future. Many of the newly emerging infectious diseases are predicted to originate from animals,” said Associate Professor Martin Sikora at the University of Copenhagen, and first author of the report.

Willerslev added: “Mutations that were successful in the past are likely to reappear. This knowledge is important for future vaccines, as it allows us to test whether current vaccines provide sufficient coverage or whether new ones need to be developed due to mutations.”

The sample material was primarily provided by museums in Europe and Asia. The samples were partly extracted from teeth, where the enamel acts as a lid that can protect the DNA against degradation as a result of the ravages of time. The rest of the DNA was primarily extracted from petrosa bones - the hardest bone in humans - located on the inside of the skull.

The research was funded by the Lundbeck Foundation.

Reference

Sikora, M et al: ‘The spatiotemporal distribution of human pathogens in ancient Eurasia.’ Nature, July 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09192-8

Adapted from a press release by the University of Copenhagen.

Researchers have mapped the spread of infectious diseases in humans across millennia, to reveal how human-animal interactions permanently transformed our health today.

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During the French President's state visit to the United Kingdom, Institut Polytechnique de Paris (IP Paris), HEC Paris, Université Paris-Saclay, Oxford University and Cambridge University formalised a joint commitment to create a strategic partnership in the field of artificial intelligence.

Named the Entente CordIAle Paris-Saclay – Oxford-Cambridge AI Initiative, this partnership brings together two leading centres of scientific and technological excellence: the Saclay Cluster and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. They share a common ambition - to foster the emergence of excellent, ethical and sovereign artificial intelligence on a European scale.

The aim of the partnership is to structure long-term cooperation in AI research, training and innovation, in order to meet the major challenges of our time. It is organised around five key areas:

• Encouraging academic mobility between students, doctoral students, researchers and teachers to enhance expertise and training.
• Organising joint scientific events (seminars, workshops, symposia) on the major scientific and ethical challenges of AI.
• Launching collaborative research projects: co-direction of theses, interdisciplinary programmes, joint applications for funding.
• Involving industrial and innovation players, to accelerate technology transfer and support AI entrepreneurship.
• Strengthen bilateral cooperation, in line with national and European strategic priorities.

The 'Entente CordIAle Paris-Saclay – Oxford-Cambridge AI Initiative' extends the shared vision of Institut Polytechnique de Paris and HEC Paris to establish a leading European hub in artificial intelligence, at the intersection of cutting-edge research, innovation, and the major challenges of our time.

A firmly solution-oriented ambition realised through Hi! PARIS, a key actor in the France 2030 strategy, integrating cutting-edge research, excellence in education, and concrete technological innovations to enhance European competitiveness, this interdisciplinary centre was co-founded by IP Paris and HEC Paris in 2020, joined by Inria in 2021, and benefits from €70 million in funding over 5 years.

In a joint statement, Thierry Coulhon, President of Institut Polytechnique de Paris and Eloïc Peyrache, Dean of HEC Paris, said:

"With the Entente CordIAle Paris-Saclay – Oxford-Cambridge AI Initiative, we are taking a decisive step forward in European scientific and academic cooperation. By bringing together the excellence of our institutions, through the interdisciplinary centre Hi! PARIS, with that of Oxford and Cambridge, we are laying the foundation for an unparalleled axis of research and innovation in artificial intelligence."

Professor Deborah Prentice, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, agreed:

"The University of Cambridge is proud to be part of this collaboration, which reflects our deep commitment to shaping the future of AI through rigorous research, inclusive education, and responsible innovation. Combining our strengths and sharing knowledge will help us to address the most pressing challenges of our time and ensure AI serves the common good."

The Saclay Cluster, which includes Institut Polytechnique de Paris, HEC Paris and Université Paris-Saclay, the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge are joining forces to build AI excellence.

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PFAS have been linked with a range of health issues including decreased fertility, developmental delays in children, and a higher risk of certain cancers and cardiovascular diseases.

Scientists at the University of Cambridge have identified a family of bacterial species, found naturally in the human gut, that absorb various PFAS molecules from their surroundings.  When nine of these bacterial species were introduced into the guts of mice to ‘humanise’ the mouse microbiome, the bacteria rapidly accumulated PFAS eaten by the mice - which were then excreted in faeces.

The researchers also found that as the mice were exposed to increasing levels of PFAS, the microbes worked harder, consistently removing the same percentage of the toxic chemicals. Within minutes of exposure, the bacterial species tested soaked up between 25% and 74% of the PFAS.

The results are the first evidence that our gut microbiome could play a helpful role in removing toxic PFAS chemicals from our body - although this has not yet been directly tested in humans.

The researchers plan to use their discovery to create probiotic dietary supplements that boost the levels of these helpful microbes in our gut, to protect against the toxic effects of PFAS.

The results are published in the journal Nature Microbiology.

PFAS (Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances) can’t be avoided in our modern world. These man-made chemicals are in many everyday items including waterproof clothing, non-stick pans, lipsticks and food packaging, used for their resistance to heat, water, oil and grease. But because they take thousands of years to break down, they are accumulating in large quantities in the environment – and in our bodies.

Dr Kiran Patil, in the University of Cambridge’s MRC Toxicology Unit and senior author of the report, said: “Given the scale of the problem of PFAS ‘forever chemicals’, particularly their effects on human health, it’s concerning that so little is being done about removing these from our bodies.”

“We found that certain species of human gut bacteria have a remarkably high capacity to soak up PFAS from their environment at a range of concentrations, and store these in clumps inside their cells. Due to aggregation of PFAS in these clumps, the bacteria themselves seem protected from the toxic effects.”

Dr Indra Roux, a researcher at the University of Cambridge’s MRC Toxicology Unit and a co-author of the study said: “The reality is that PFAS are already in the environment and in our bodies, and we need to try and mitigate their impact on our health now. We haven’t found a way to destroy PFAS, but our findings open the possibility of developing ways to get them out of our bodies where they do the most harm.”

There is increasing concern about the environmental and health impacts of PFAS, and in April 2025 the UK launched a parliamentary inquiry into their risks and regulation.

There are over 4,700 PFAS chemicals in widespread use. Some get cleared out of the body in our urine in a matter of days, but others with a longer molecular structure can hang around in the body for years.

Dr Anna Lindell, a researcher at the University of Cambridge’s MRC Toxicology Unit and first author of the study said: “We’re all being exposed to PFAS through our water and food – these chemicals are so widespread that they’re in all of us.

“PFAS were once considered safe, but it’s now clear that they’re not. It’s taken a long time for PFAS to become noticed because at low levels they’re not acutely toxic. But they’re like a slow poison.”

Lindell and Patil have co-founded a startup, Cambiotics, with serial entrepreneur Peter Holme Jensen to develop probiotics that remove PFAS from the body, and they are investigating various ways of turbo-charging the microbes’ performance. Cambiotics is supported by Cambridge Enterprise, the innovation arm of the University of Cambridge, which helps researchers translate their work into globally-leading economic and social impact.

While we wait for new probiotics to become available, the researchers say the best things we can do to help protect ourselves against PFAS are to avoid PFAS-coated cooking pans, and use a good water filter.

The research was funded primarily by the Medical Research Council, National Institute for Health Research, and Wellcome.

Reference

Lindell, AE: ‘Human gut bacteria bioaccumulate per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances.’ Nature Microbiology, July 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41564-025-02032-5

Scientists have discovered that certain species of microbe found in the human gut can absorb PFAS - the toxic and long-lasting ‘forever chemicals.’ They say boosting these species in our gut microbiome could help protect us from the harmful effects of PFAS.

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Organised by the University Sports service, the annual ceremony brought together students, staff, alumni, and guests to recognise the exceptional contributions and successes of sports clubs, teams, and individuals across the University.

Hosted by Director of Sport Mark Brian, the awards were presented by a distinguished line-up of guests including Professor Bhaskar Vira (Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education and Chair of the Sports Committee), Deborah Griffin (incoming RFU President), Scott Annett (CURUFC Director of Rugby), and Senior Tutors and Committee Members Victoria Harvey and Dr Jane Greatorex. Former Sports Personality of the Year Jack Murphy returned to present one of the evening’s headline awards.

The awards shine a light on the importance of sport as part of the Cambridge experience - enhancing student wellbeing, building community, and nurturing excellence both on and off the field. The winners were selected by a panel of senior University staff, with the exception of the Sporting Moment of the Year, which was decided by public vote.

This year’s winners:

Club of the Year: Association Football Club

Team of the Year: Women’s Cross Country A Team, Hare & Hounds

Sports Person of the Year: Jan Helmich (Trinity Hall), Rowing

Unsung Hero: Emma Paterson (Gonville and Caius), Mixed Lacrosse

Sports Club Personality of the Year: Tads Ciecieski-Holmes (Wolfson), Modern Pentathlon

Sporting Moment of the Year: Men’s Volleyball Blues Varsity Set Point

Newcomer of the Year: Lauren Airey (Emmanuel), Modern Pentathlon

College Team of the Year: Downing Table Tennis

Outstanding Contribution Awards were presented to:

• Lucy Xu (Pembroke), Taekwondo
• Sam Grimshaw (Girton), Hockey
• Georgina Quayle (Homerton), Modern Pentathlon and Swimming & Water Polo
• Ben Rhodes (Jesus), Touch Rugby
• Izzy Howse (Robinson), Netball
• Ksenija Belada (Peterhouse), Volleyball
• Izzy Winter and Jess Reeve, Clarissa’s Campaign for Cambridge Hearts

A particularly moving moment came during the presentation of an Outstanding Contribution Award to Clarissa’s Campaign for Cambridge Hearts, recognising efforts by Izzy Winter and Jess Reeve to raise funds and awareness for student heart screenings. For more information on the October 2025 screenings, visit www.sport.cam.ac.uk/heart-screening.

The University extends its congratulations to all nominees and winners, and its thanks to everyone who participated in and supported the 2025 Sports Awards. The event was a testament to the passion, resilience, and camaraderie that sport brings to the Cambridge community.

To read more about all the nominees, please visit the Sports Awards page: https://www.sport.cam.ac.uk/sportsawards/sports-awards-2025

Story by: Will Galpin

Crowds cheer on the Sports Awards 2025

Crowds cheer on the nominees and winners at the 2025 Sports Awards.

The University of Cambridge recently celebrated a remarkable year of student sporting achievement at the 2025 Cambridge University Sports Awards.

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As the world’s most intensive science and technology cluster, Cambridge is driving breakthrough research and attracting global investment across quantum, life sciences, and biotech.

During his visit, hosted by Founders at University of Cambridge and Innovate Cambridge, the Ambassador heard about the University’s success in securing funding for these critical areas and its bold plans to fuel national economic growth—most notably through the National Innovation Hub and the West Cambridge Innovation District, set to become Europe’s leading centre for AI, quantum, and climate research.

At the heart of the visit was a tour of the new Ray Dolby Centre, home to the historic Cavendish Laboratory. Hosted by Professor Mete Atatüre, Head of the Department of Physics, Lord Mandelson learned about Cambridge’s leadership in quantum technologies and the rapidly growing portfolio of real-world applications emerging from this research.

Vice-Chancellor Professor Deborah Prentice then hosted a roundtable lunch at Cambridge Enterprise, the University’s commercialisation arm, where leaders from high-growth companies in quantum, AI, and life sciences joined to discuss opportunities for deepening UK-US tech collaboration.

The visit follows the recent signing of the UK-US trade agreement, which lays the groundwork for a future technology partnership between the two countries. As both nations turn to innovation as a key driver of economic growth and global problem-solving, Cambridge stands ready to play a pivotal role.

Recent Dealroom research for Founders at the University of Cambridge highlights Cambridge’s momentum: the area now attracts more venture capital investment in deep tech per capita than anywhere else globally. The region’s tech ecosystem is valued at $222 billion—18% of the UK’s total tech value, second only to London.

Prof Deborah Prentice said: "It was a pleasure to join the Ambassador and colleagues to showcase the full depth and breadth of Cambridge’s research and business strengths - from personalised vaccines and genomics to qubits and semiconductors. Cambridge has unique capabilities to help drive the UK-US tech partnership forward, and we’re excited to build on this momentum."

This week, UK Ambassador to the United States of America Lord Mandelson visited the University of Cambridge to explore its world-leading strengths in innovation and its deepening academic and industrial partnerships with the USA.

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Mary Catchpole, 19, was given a newly licensed drug called leniolisib (or Joenja) at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge. It is the first ever targeted treatment for a rare, inherited immunodeficiency called Activated PI3-Kinase delta syndrome (APDS).

People with APDS have a weakened immune system, making them vulnerable to repeated infections and autoimmune or inflammatory conditions. Discovered just over a decade ago by a team of Cambridge researchers, it is a debilitating and life-threatening condition, with patients more likely to develop blood cancers like lymphoma.

APDS is a relatively new immuno-deficiency, with Mary’s family playing a key role in its discovery in 2013. Mary’s mother and uncle, who were Addenbrooke’s patients, were offered DNA sequencing (whole exome sequencing) to see if there was a genetic cause for their immuno-deficiency.

Cambridge researchers identified a change in their genes that increased activity of an enzyme called PI3-Kinase delta, resulting in the illness being named Activated PI3-Kinase delta syndrome (APDS).

The team, which involved researchers from the University of Cambridge, Babraham Institute, MRC Laboratory for Molecular Biology, and clinicians from Addenbrooke’s, was primarily funded by Wellcome and the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR).

With APDS, the enzyme PI3-Kinase delta is ‘switched on’ all the time, preventing immune cells from fighting infection and leads to abnormal or dysregulated immune function.

The new treatment – with one tablet taken twice a day – aims to inhibit the enzyme, effectively normalising the immune system.

Dr Anita Chandra, consultant immunologist at Addenbrooke’s and Affiliated Assistant Professor at the University of Cambridge, said: “It is incredible to go from the discovery of a new disease in Cambridge to a treatment being approved and offered on the NHS, within the space of 12 years.

“This new drug will make a huge difference to people living with APDS, hopefully allowing patients to avoid antibiotics, immunoglobulin replacement and potentially even a stem cell transplant in the future.”

Professor Sergey Nejentsev from the University of Cambridge who led the research that discovered APDS said: “As soon as we understood the cause of APDS, we immediately realised that certain drugs could be used to inhibit the enzyme that is activated in these patients. Leniolisib does precisely that. I am delighted that we finally have a treatment which will change the lives of APDS patients.”

The disorder has significantly impacted Mary’s family on her mother’s side. Her aunt died aged 12, while her mother, uncle and grandmother all died in their 30s and 40s.

Mary works as a teaching assistant and lives in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk with her father Jimmy and older brother Joe, who does not have the condition.

Prior to leniolisib, the only treatments available to APDS patients include antibiotics for infections, immunoglobulin replacement therapy (to prevent infections and damage to organs) or a bone marrow or stem cell transplant, which can be a potential cure but carries significant risks.

Mary said: “Having APDS means I’ve got a higher chance of infections and getting unwell, which is hard when all I want to do is work and dance and have adventures. All my life I’ve had to have weekly infusions which make me feel like a pin cushion, and I’ve had to take lots of medication which has been tough.

“Now that I have this new treatment, it does feel bitter-sweet as my late mum and other affected members of my family never got the chance to have this new lease of life, but it is a gift. I feel blessed.”

Leniolisib was licensed for use in the USA in 2023, following clinical trials. After assessment and approval by the UK medicines regulator, the MHRA, it is now approved by NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) for NHS use - the first health system in Europe to use it to treat patients with APDS.

Professor James Palmer, NHS England’s Medical Director for Specialised Commissioning, said: “We’re delighted to see Mary become the first patient in Europe to receive this first-ever targeted and approved therapy for a rare condition identified just over a decade ago – in Cambridge no less.

“This treatment could be life-changing for those affected by this debilitating genetic disorder, and this important step forward is another example of the NHS’s commitment to offering access to innovative medicines for those living with rare conditions.”

As a tertiary centre for immune-deficiencies, patients eligible for leniolisib can be referred to Addenbrooke’s, part of Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, for specialist review and care and ongoing research in this rare condition.

Dr Susan Walsh, Chief Executive Officer at Immunodeficiency UK, said: “With leniolisib, we now have a targeted treatment available that addresses the fundamental cause of the immune system problems experienced in APDS. This demonstrates the power of research and is a huge leap forward. The new treatment will help improve the quality of life for those families living with APDS.”

By looking at the role of the enzyme linked to APDS and the impact of the new targeted drug on the patient’s immune system, it is hoped there is potential for leniolisib to be applied to other more common immune related conditions in the future.

Adapted from a press release from Cambridge University Hospitals.

A teenager who has lost family members including her mother because of a rare genetic hereditary illness has become the first patient in the UK and Europe to have a new treatment developed by Cambridge researchers and approved for use on the NHS.

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Wayve is one of the UK’s most valuable deep-tech startups, backed by more than $1 billion (about £730 million) in funding. Alex Kendall co-founded the company in 2017 following his PhD at the University of Cambridge, where he pioneered a contrarian approach to self-driving cars.

At a time when the industry relied heavily on rule-based systems, maps and multiple sensors, he proposed a different vision powered by deep learning – where a single neural network could learn to drive from raw data without human intervention.

Wayve’s approach creates a general-purpose driving intelligence that can adapt to new environments. Its models are trained on tens of petabytes of real-world data from its team of safety drivers. Wayve tests its models in both real-world driving settings and in simulation. Real-world testing exposes AI to diverse conditions, while simulation enables efficient, large-scale validation.

Synthetic data on rare or unseen scenarios are used to train their technology to safely navigate the real world. Wayve tests these safety-critical scenarios, such as near collisions or unpredictable pedestrian behaviour, using a cutting-edge generative world model.

Wayve’s autonomous cars have been navigating the complex streets of London since 2019, overseen by legally required safety drivers. Last year they expanded to San Francisco and have also been testing these cars in Stuttgart, and Japan. The company plans to license its technology to car manufacturers, with Nissan set to integrate Wayve’s AI to support driver assistance into its vehicles by 2027.

The engineering team have also built the first language-driving model tested on public roads. LINGO opens up communication with the robot and can narrate its driving and answer questions. That means Wayve’s engineers (and eventually passengers) can communicate with the AI and ask it to explain decisions or drive in a certain way.  

He sees autonomous driving as a launchpad for a broader revolution in embodied AI, with applications in robotics, manufacturing, and healthcare. “Bringing AI into the physical world in a way that it can interact with us, is real – is tangible,” explains Kendall, “I think it’s going to be the biggest transformation we go through in our lifetimes.”

Adapted from a Royal Academy of Engineering press release.

Alex Kendall, CEO and Co-Founder of Wayve, a billion-dollar UK company that uses deep learning to solve the challenges of self-driving cars, has been presented with the Princess Royal Silver Medal, one of the Royal Academy of Engineering’s most prestigious individual awards. 

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At a reception at the Vice-Chancellor’s Lodge this week, which celebrated his service to the University, Lord Sainsbury talked fondly about his own time as a student at Cambridge, and said: “It has been a great honour and pleasure to be Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, one of the world’s greatest universities.

“Over the years, I have watched with awe how the University has produced an endless stream of brilliant research and an enlightened education for its undergraduates and postgraduates, and I hope that by being Chancellor, and in a number of other ways, I have to some extent repaid my debt to the University. I will always look back at my time as Chancellor with the greatest pleasure.”

The Vice-Chancellor, Professor Deborah Prentice, paid a warm tribute to the Chancellor and thanked him for his service and contribution to the life of the University, and his support for her.

In a recent edition of CAM – the University's alumni magazine – other friends and former colleagues recounted the unique qualities Lord Sainsbury has brought to the post during almost a decade and a half of unwavering commitment.

With high-level experience in government and industry alike, Lord Sainsbury has been a highly effective advocate for the best interests of the University on both the national and global stage. “He’s a man of great ability and thoughtfulness,” says Professor Mike Proctor, 2013-2023 Provost of King’s College, Lord Sainsbury’s alma mater. “He’s very well connected in both the public and private sectors. And that’s been very helpful to the University at large.” 

Professor Stephen Toope, the 346th Vice-Chancellor, says that although the role is technically ceremonial, Lord Sainsbury was always willing to go above and beyond. “If I asked him to do something for the University – connect me with the right person, give me a piece of advice – he always did it. He was very generous in making introductions, and saw his role as trying to strengthen the University where he could. And that was largely by supporting the people who’d been asked to do the big jobs – on the Council and in the leadership of Cambridge.”

As a former Minister of Science and Innovation, Lord Sainsbury has brought a wealth of experience to the University. But he has also brought his own love of research and innovation to bear, as Rebecca Simmons, the VC’s former Chief of Staff and now COO of quantum computing company Riverlane, saw first-hand. “He liked to get into the detail beforehand, so he could make good connections with people,” she remembers. “And sometimes, he would come back to see the same people over several years. For example, he stayed in touch with the CEO of Endomag, a cancer diagnostics spinout, and made a point of going back to meet them at key moments. In fact, accompanying him on visits was one of the most fun parts of my job.” 

Dr Regina Sachers, former Head of the Vice-Chancellor’s Office and now Director of Governance and Compliance, agrees. “He found it easy to connect with academics because he was genuinely interested in the work. He would always ask very informed questions, and would frequently offer his card and put people in touch with his own connections. It felt like a very genuine and low-key approach.”

The role of Vice-Chancellor can be lonely, says Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, Vice-Chancellor 2010-17: often, the only person you can talk to is the Chancellor. “And Lord Sainsbury always made himself available. He was a friend, a mentor, an adviser. We had differences of opinion, but we could always talk. Having that open debate meant you could road-test the strength of an argument – and, sometimes, backpedal, because he’d made some very valid points that were critical for the University. And I can attest that during my time as Vice-Chancellor, he was always there for the difficult issues. He was quiet and understated, but very thoughtful and very wise – and never interfered with the executive functions that the Vice-Chancellor has to exercise.”

“Lord Sainsbury does not have an agenda of his own: he seeks to do what the University needs, and always has its best interests at heart,” says current Vice-Chancellor Professor Deborah Prentice. “He approaches the job with selflessness and the mentality of a public servant. I like the fact that sometimes he just turns up to things; he’s such a curious and interested person. I think he very much embodies the values of the University.” 

Professor Toope says that he has always been struck by Lord Sainsbury’s “complete lack of pomposity. Some people think they are the role. He always understood that the role is the role: he just happened to be occupying it for a period. And he brought a personal and political integrity to it.”

The election for Lord Sainsbury’s successor as Chancellor takes place next month.

Read about the election of a Chancellor at the University.

After 14 years as Chancellor of the University, Lord Sainsbury of Turville has formally stood down from the role.

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So say a team of researchers who have uncovered significant weaknesses in two of the art protection tools most used by artists to safeguard their work.

According to their creators, Glaze and NightShade were both developed to protect human creatives against the invasive uses of generative artificial intelligence.

The tools are popular with digital artists who want to stop artificial intelligence models (like the AI art generator Stable Diffusion) from copying their unique styles without consent. Together, Glaze and NightShade have been downloaded almost nine million times.

But according to an international group of researchers, these tools have critical weaknesses that mean they cannot reliably stop AI models from training on artists’ work.

The tools add subtle, invisible distortions (known as poisoning perturbations) to digital images. These ‘poisons’ are designed to confuse AI models during training. Glaze takes a passive approach, hindering the AI model’s ability to extract key stylistic features. NightShade goes further, actively corrupting the learning process by causing the AI model to associate an artist’s style with unrelated concepts.

But the researchers have created a method – called LightShed – that can bypass these protections. LightShed can detect, reverse-engineer and remove these distortions, effectively stripping away the poisons and rendering the images usable again for Generative AI model training.

It was developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge along with colleagues at the Technical University Darmstadt and the University of Texas at San Antonio. The researchers hope that by publicising their work – which will be presented at the USENIX Security Symposium, a major security conference, in August – they can let creatives know that there are major issues with art protection tools.

LightShed works through a three-step process. It first identifies whether an image has been altered with known poisoning techniques.

In a second, reverse engineering step, it learns the characteristics of the perturbations using publicly available poisoned examples. Finally, it eliminates the poison to restore the image to its original, unprotected form.

In experimental evaluations, LightShed detected NightShade-protected images with 99.98% accuracy and effectively removed the embedded protections from those images.

“This shows that even when using tools like NightShade, artists are still at risk of their work being used for training AI models without their consent,” said first author Hanna Foerster from Cambridge’s Department of Computer Science and Technology, who conducted the work during an internship at TU Darmstadt.

Although LightShed reveals serious vulnerabilities in art protection tools, the researchers stress that it was developed not as an attack on them – but rather an urgent call to action to produce better, more adaptive ones.

“We see this as a chance to co-evolve defenses,” said co-author Professor Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi from the Technical University of Darmstadt. “Our goal is to collaborate with other scientists in this field and support the artistic community in developing tools that can withstand advanced adversaries.”

The landscape of AI and digital creativity is rapidly evolving. In March this year, OpenAI rolled out a ChatGPT image model that could instantly produce artwork in the style of Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation studio.

This sparked a wide range of viral memes – and equally wide discussions about image copyright, in which legal analysts noted that Studio Ghibli would be limited in how it could respond to this since copyright law protects specific expression, not a specific artistic ‘style’.  

Following these discussions, OpenAI announced prompt safeguards to block some user requests to generate images in the styles of living artists.  

But issues over generative AI and copyright are ongoing, as highlighted by the copyright and trademark infringement case currently being heard in London’s high court.

Global photography agency Getty Images is alleging that London-based AI company Stability AI trained its image generation model on the agency’s huge archive of copyrighted pictures. Stability AI is fighting Getty’s claim and arguing that the case represents an “overt threat” to the generative AI industry.

And earlier this month, Disney and Universal announced they are suing AI firm Midjourney over its image generator, which the two companies said is a “bottomless pit of plagiarism.”

“What we hope to do with our work is to highlight the urgent need for a roadmap towards more resilient, artist-centred protection strategies,” said Foerster. “We must let creatives know that they are still at risk and collaborate with others to develop better art protection tools in future.”

Hanna Foerster is a member of Downing College, Cambridge. 

Reference:
Hanna Foerster et al. ‘LightShed: Defeating Perturbation-based Image Copyright Protections.’ Paper presented at the 34th USENIX Security Symposium. https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity25/presentation/foerster

Artists urgently need stronger defences to protect their work from being used to train AI models without their consent.  

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A 15-seater autonomous bus will operate between Madingley Road Park & Ride, and around the University's Eddington neighbourhood and Cambridge West Innovation District. 

The early phase of the trial, following extensive virtual and on-road testing, starts on Tuesday 24 June with a limited number of morning and afternoon runs each Monday-Friday.

The trial passenger service is free and will enhance local connections, improving access to places of work and study, as well as community and sports facilities for those living and working in the area.

Dan Clarke, Head of Innovation and Technology at the Greater Cambridge Partnership, said: "This is an exciting milestone, but it’s just the beginning. People may have already seen the bus going around Eddington and Cambridge West from Madingley Park & Ride recently, as, after the extensive on-track training with the drivers, we’ve been running the bus on the road without passengers to learn more about how other road-users interact with the technology. We’re now moving gradually to the next stage of this trial by inviting passengers to use Connector.

"As with all new things, our aim is to introduce this new technology in a phased way that balances the trialling of these new systems with safety and the passenger experience. This will ensure we can learn more about this technology and showcase the potential for self-driving vehicles to support sustainable, reliable public transport across Cambridge."

The vehicle is operated by Whippet Coaches using autonomous technology from Fusion Processing. 

Professor Anna Philpott, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Resources and Operations at the University of Cambridge, said "Innovation and research that contributes to society is at the heart of the University’s mission, and this trial aligns with our vision for sustainable and pioneering transport solutions for everyone travelling to and from our sites. Cambridge West Innovation District and Eddington are fitting locations for such an ambitious and forward-thinking project."

A full-scale launch of two full-size autonomous buses on a second route to the Cambridge Biomedical Campus will begin later this year.

The Connector trial is part of a national Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV) programme backed by the UK Government to explore how autonomous buses can be safely and effectively integrated into public transport systems.

All vehicles are supported by trained safety drivers at all times and have already undergone digital simulation and rigorous on-road testing.

Find out more about Connector and check the timetable to see when you can take a ride on the bus

The Greater Cambridge Partnership’s Connector project is bringing self-driving passenger transport to the city.

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The Rubin Observatory, jointly funded by the US National Science Foundation and the US Department of Energy’s Office of Science, has released its first imagery, showing cosmic phenomena at an unprecedented scale.

In just over 10 hours of test observations, the NSF-DOE Rubin Observatory has already captured millions of galaxies and Milky Way stars and thousands of asteroids. The imagery is a small preview of the Rubin Observatory’s upcoming 10-year scientific mission to explore and understand some of the universe's biggest mysteries.

Located on a mountaintop in Chile, the Rubin Observatory will repeatedly scan the sky for 10 years and create an ultra-wide, ultra-high-definition time-lapse record of our universe. The region in central Chile is favoured for astronomical observations because of its dry air and dark skies, and allows for an ideal view of the Milky Way’s centre.

The facility is set to achieve ‘first light,’ or make the first scientific observations of the Southern Hemisphere’s sky using its 8.4-meter Simonyi Survey Telescope, on 4 July.

UK astronomers, including from the University of Cambridge, are celebrating their role in the most ambitious sky survey to date.

“We will be looking at the universe in a way that we have never done before, and this exploration is bound to throw up surprises that we never imagined,” said Professor Hiranya Peiris from Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, and a builder of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Dark Energy Science Collaboration. 

Enabled by an investment of £23 million from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), UK astronomers and software developers have been preparing the hardware and software needed to analyse the petabytes of data that the survey will produce to enable groundbreaking science that will enhance our understanding of the universe.

The UK is the second largest international contributor to the multinational project, putting UK astronomers at the forefront when it comes to exploiting this unique window on the Universe.

The UK is also playing a significant role in the management and processing of the unprecedented amounts of data. The UK will host one of three international data facilities and process around 1.5 million images, capturing around 10 billion stars and galaxies. When complete, the full 10-year survey is expected to rack up 500 petabytes of date – the same storage as half-a-million 4K Hollywood movies.

The UK’s science portal for the international community is capable of connecting around 1,500 astronomers with UK Digital Research Infrastructure to support the exploitation of this uniquely rich and detailed view of the Universe.

More than two decades in the making, Rubin is the first of its kind: its mirror design, camera size and sensitivity, telescope speed, and computing infrastructure are each in an entirely new category. Over the next 10 years, Rubin will perform the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) using the LSST Camera and the Simonyi Survey Telescope.

By repeatedly scanning the sky for 10 years, the observatory will deliver a treasure trove of discoveries: asteroids and comets, pulsating stars, and supernova explosions. Science operations are expected to start towards the end of 2025.

"I can’t wait to explore the first LSST catalogues - revealing the faintest dwarf galaxies and stellar streams swarming through the Milky Way’s halo," said Professor Vasily Belokurov from Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy, member of LSST:UK. "A new era of galactic archaeology is beginning!”

“UK researchers have been contributing to the scientific and technical preparation for the Rubin LSST for more than ten years,” said Professor Bob Mann from the University of Edinburgh, LSST:UK Project Leader. “These exciting first look images show that everything is working well and reassure us that we have a decade’s worth of wonderful data coming our way, with which UK astronomers will do great science.”

Hiranya Peiris is a Fellow of Murray Edwards College, Cambridge. 

The Vera C Rubin Observatory, a new scientific facility that will bring the night sky to life like never before using the largest camera ever built, has revealed its ‘first look’ images at the start of its 10-year survey of the cosmos.

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Now, an international group of astronomers led by the University of Cambridge have shown that we will be able to learn about the masses of the earliest stars by studying a specific radio signal – created by hydrogen atoms filling the gaps between star-forming regions – originating just a hundred million years after the Big Bang.

By studying how the first stars and their remnants affected this signal, called the 21-centimetre signal, the researchers have shown that future radio telescopes will help us understand the very early universe, and how it transformed from a nearly homogeneous mass of mostly hydrogen to the incredible complexity we see today. Their results are reported in the journal Nature Astronomy.

“This is a unique opportunity to learn how the universe’s first light emerged from the darkness,” said co-author Professor Anastasia Fialkov from Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy. “The transition from a cold, dark universe to one filled with stars is a story we’re only beginning to understand.”

The study of the universe’s most ancient stars hinges on the faint glow of the 21-centimetre signal, a subtle energy signal from over 13 billion years ago. This signal, influenced by the radiation from early stars and black holes, provides a rare window into the universe’s infancy.

Fialkov leads the theory group of REACH (the Radio Experiment for the Analysis of Cosmic Hydrogen). REACH is a radio antenna and is one of two major projects that could help us learn about the Cosmic Dawn and the Epoch of Reionisation, when the first stars reionised neutral hydrogen atoms in the universe.

Although REACH, which captures radio signals, is still in its calibration stage, it promises to reveal data about the early universe. Meanwhile, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA)—a massive array of antennas under construction—will map fluctuations in cosmic signals across vast regions of the sky.

Both projects are vital in probing the masses, luminosities, and distribution of the universe's earliest stars. In the current study, Fialkov – who is also a member of the SKA – and her collaborators developed a model that makes predictions for the 21-centimetre signal for both REACH and SKA, and found that the signal is sensitive to the masses of first stars.

“We are the first group to consistently model the dependence of the 21-centimetre signal of the masses of the first stars, including the impact of ultraviolet starlight and X-ray emissions from X-ray binaries produced when the first stars die,” said Fialkov, who is also a member of Cambridge’s Kavli Institute for Cosmology. “These insights are derived from simulations that integrate the primordial conditions of the universe, such as the hydrogen-helium composition produced by the Big Bang.”

In developing their theoretical model, the researchers studied how the 21-centimetre signal reacts to the mass distribution of the first stars, known as Population III stars. They found that previous studies have underestimated this connection as they did not account for the number and brightness of X-ray binaries – binary systems made of a normal star and a collapsed star – among Population III stars, and how they affect the 21-centimetre signal.

Unlike optical telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope, which capture vivid images, radio astronomy relies on statistical analysis of faint signals. REACH and SKA will not be able to image individual stars, but will instead provide information about entire populations of stars, X-ray binary systems and galaxies.

“It takes a bit of imagination to connect radio data to the story of the first stars, but the implications are profound,” said Fialkov.

“The predictions we are reporting have huge implications for our understanding of the nature of the very first stars in the Universe,” said co-author Dr Eloy de Lera Acedo, Principal Investigator of the REACH telescope and PI at Cambridge of the SKA development activities. “We show evidence that our radio telescopes can tell us details about the mass of those first stars and how these early lights may have been very different from today’s stars.

“Radio telescopes like REACH are promising to unlock the mysteries of the infant Universe, and these predictions are essential to guide the radio observations we are doing from the Karoo, in South Africa.”

The research was supported in part by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). Anastasia Fialkov is a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge. Eloy de Lera Acedo is an STFC Ernest Rutherford Fellow and a Fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge.

Reference:
T. Gessey-Jones et al. ‘Determination of the mass distribution of the first stars from the 21-cm signal.’ Nature Astronomy (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41550-025-02575-x

Understanding how the universe transitioned from darkness to light with the formation of the first stars and galaxies is a key turning point in the universe’s development, known as the Cosmic Dawn. However, even with the most powerful telescopes, we can’t directly observe these earliest stars, so determining their properties is one of the biggest challenges in astronomy.

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Dr Alex Tsompanidis, senior researcher at the Autism Research Centre in the University of Cambridge, and the lead author of this new study, said: “Small variations in the prenatal levels of steroid hormones, like testosterone and oestrogen, can predict the rate of social and cognitive learning in infants and even the likelihood of conditions such as autism. This prompted us to consider their relevance for human evolution.”

One explanation for the evolution of the human brain may be in the way humans adapted to be social. Professor Robin Dunbar, an Evolutionary Biologist at the University of Oxford and joint senior author of this new study said: “We’ve known for a long time that living in larger, more complex social groups is associated with increases in the size of the brain. But we still don’t know what mechanisms may link these behavioural and physical adaptations in humans.”

In this new paper, published today in Evolutionary Anthropology, the researchers now propose that the mechanism may be found in prenatal sex steroid hormones, such as testosterone or oestrogens, and the way these affect the developing brain and behaviour in humans.

Using ‘mini-brains’ – clusters of human neuronal cells that are grown in a petri dish from donors’ stem cells – other scientists have been able to study, for the first time, the effects of these hormones on the human brain. Recent discoveries have shown that testosterone can increase the size of the brain, while oestrogens can improve the connectivity between neurons.

In both humans and other primates such as chimpanzees and gorillas, the placenta can link the mother’s and baby’s endocrine systems to produce these hormones in varying amounts.

Professor Graham Burton, Founding Director of the Loke Centre of Trophoblast Research at the University of Cambridge and coauthor of the new paper, said: “The placenta regulates the duration of the pregnancy and the supply of nutrients to the fetus, both of which are crucial for the development of our species’ characteristically large brains. But the advantage of human placentas over those of other primates has been less clear.”

Two previous studies show that levels of oestrogen during pregnancy are higher in human pregnancies than in other primate species.

Another characteristic of humans as a species is our ability to form and maintain large social groups, larger than other primates and other extinct species, such as Neanderthals. But to be able to do this, humans must have adapted in ways that maintain high levels of fertility, while also reducing competition in large groups for mates and resources.

Prenatal sex steroid hormones, such as testosterone and oestrogen, are also important for regulating the way males and females interact and develop, a process known as sex differentiation. For example, having higher testosterone relative to oestrogen leads to more male-like features in anatomy (e.g., in physical size and strength) and in behaviour (e.g., in competition).

But in humans, while these on-average sex differences exist, they are reduced, compared to our closest primate relatives and relative to other extinct human species (such as the Neanderthals). Instead, anatomical features that are specific to humans appear to be related more to aspects of female rather than male biology, and to the effects of oestrogens (e.g., reduced body hair, and a large ratio between the second and fourth digit).

The researchers propose that the key to explain this may lie again with the placenta, which rapidly turns testosterone to oestrogens, using an enzyme called aromatase. Recent discoveries show that humans have higher levels of aromatase compared to macaques, and that males may have slightly higher levels compared to females.

Bringing all these lines of evidence together, the authors propose that high levels of prenatal sex steroid hormones in the womb, combined with increased placental function, may have made human brains larger and more interconnected. At the same time, a lower ratio of androgens (like testosterone) to oestrogens may have led to reductions in competition between males, while also improving fertility in females, allowing humans to form larger, more cohesive social groups.

Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, Director of the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge and joint senior author on the paper, said: “We have been studying the effects of prenatal sex steroids on neurodevelopment for the past 20 years. This has led to the discovery that prenatal sex steroids are important for neurodiversity in human populations. This new hypothesis takes this further in arguing that these hormones may have also shaped the evolution of the human brain.”

Dr Tsompanidis added: “Our hypothesis puts pregnancy at the heart of our story as a species. The human brain is remarkable and unique, but it does not develop in a vacuum. Adaptations in the placenta and the way it produces sex steroid hormones may have been crucial for our brain’s evolution, and for the emergence of the cognitive and social traits that make us human.”

Reference

Tsompanidis, A et al. The placental steroid hypothesis of human brain evolution. Evolutionary Anthropology; 20 June 2025; DOI: 10.1002/evan.70003

The placenta and the hormones it produces may have played a crucial role in the evolution of the human brain, while also leading to the behavioural traits that have made human societies able to thrive and expand, according to a new hypothesis proposed by researchers from the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford.

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Representatives from Cambridge University Press & Assessment, Cambridge Zero, Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership and Cambridge Judge Business School convened the session and were joined by a range of experts working on climate change-related research and education. Every speaker from across higher education highlighted the importance of identifying misinformation and disinformation in tackling climate action. Read more about the workshop.

University of Cambridge experts highlighted the key role of education in combatting climate misinformation at a Global Sustainable Development Congress (GDSC) workshop in Turkey.

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Today, all non-Africans are known to have descended from a small group of people that ventured into Eurasia around 50,000 years ago. However, fossil evidence shows that there were numerous failed dispersals before this time that left no detectable traces in living people.

In a new study published today in the journal in Nature, scientists say that from around 70,000 years ago, early humans began to exploit different habitat types in Africa in ways not seen before.

At this time, our ancestors started to live in the equatorial forests of West and Central Africa, and in the Sahara and Sahel desert regions of North Africa, where they encountered a range of new environmental conditions.

As they adapted to life in these diverse habitats, early humans gained the flexibility to tackle the range of novel environmental conditions they would encounter during their expansion out of Africa.

This increase in the human niche may have been the result of social adaptations, such as long-distance social networks, which allowed for an increase in cultural exchange. The process would have been self-reinforcing: as people started to inhabit a wider proportion of the African continent, regions previously disconnected would have come into contact, leading to further exchanges and possibly even greater flexibility. The final outcome was that our species became the ultimate generalist, able to tackle a wider range of environments.

Andrea Manica, Professor of Evolutionary Ecology in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology, who co-led the study with Professor Eleanor Scerri from the Max Plank Institute of Bioanthropology in Germany, said: “Around 70,000-50,000 years ago, the easiest route out of Africa would have been more challenging than during previous periods, and yet this expansion was big - and ultimately successful.”

Manica added: “It’s incredibly exciting that we were able to look back in time and pinpoint the changes that enabled our ancestors to successfully migrate out of Africa.”

Dr Emily Hallett of Loyola University Chicago, co-lead author of the study, said: “We assembled a dataset of archaeological sites and environmental information covering the last 120,000 years in Africa. We used methods developed in ecology to understand changes in human environmental niches - the habitats humans can use and thrive in - during this time.” 

Dr Michela Leonardi at the University of Cambridge and London’s Natural History Museum, the study’s other lead author, said: “Our results showed that the human niche began to expand significantly from 70,000 years ago, and that this expansion was driven by humans increasing their use of diverse habitat types, from forests to arid deserts.” 

Many explanations for the uniquely successful dispersal out of Africa have previously been made, from technological innovations, to immunities granted by interbreeding with Eurasian hominins. But there is no evidence of technological innovation, and previous interbreeding does not appear to have helped the long-term success of previous attempts to spread out of Africa.

“Unlike previous humans dispersing out of Africa, those human groups moving into Eurasia after around 60-50,000 years ago were equipped with a distinctive ecological flexibility as a result of coping with climatically challenging habitats,” said Scerri. “This likely provided a key mechanism for the adaptive success of our species beyond their African homeland.”

Previous human dispersals out of Africa - which were not successful in the long term - seem to have happened during particularly favourable windows of increased rainfall in the Saharo-Arabian desert belt, which created ‘green corridors’ for people to move into Eurasia.

The environmental flexibility developed in Africa from around 70,000 years ago ultimately resulted in modern humans’ unique ability to adapt and thrive in diverse environments, and to cope with varying environmental conditions throughout life.

This research was supported by funding from the Max Planck Society, European Research Council and Leverhulme Trust.

Adapted from a press release by the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, Germany

Reference: Hallett, E. Y. et al: ‘Major expansion in the human niche preceded out of Africa dispersal.’ Nature, June 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09154-0.

Before the ‘Out of Africa’ migration that led our ancestors into Eurasia and beyond, human populations learned to adapt to new and challenging habitats including African forests and deserts, which was key to the long-term success of our species’ dispersal.

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The successful Cambridge grantees’ work covers a range of research areas, including the development of next-generation semiconductors, new methods to identify dyslexia in young children, how diseases spread between humans and animals, and the early changes that happen in cells before breast cancer develops, with the goal of finding ways to stop the disease before it starts.

The funding, worth €721 million in total, will go to 281 leading researchers across Europe. The Advanced Grant competition is one of the most prestigious and competitive funding schemes in the EU and associated countries, including the UK. It gives senior researchers the opportunity to pursue ambitious, curiosity-driven projects that could lead to major scientific breakthroughs. Advanced Grants may be awarded up to € 2.5 million for a period of five years. The grants are part of the EU’s Horizon Europe programme. The UK agreed a deal to associate to Horizon Europe in September 2023.

This competition attracted 2,534 proposals, which were reviewed by panels of internationally renowned researchers. Over 11% of proposals were selected for funding. Estimates show that the grants will create approximately 2,700 jobs in the teams of new grantees. The new grantees will be based at universities and research centres in 23 EU Member States and associated countries, notably in the UK (56 grants), Germany (35), Italy (25), the Netherlands (24), and France (23).

“Many congratulations to our Cambridge colleagues on these prestigious ERC funding awards,” said Professor Sir John Aston, Cambridge’s Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research. “This type of long-term funding is invaluable, allowing senior researchers the time and space to develop potential solutions for some of biggest challenges we face. We are so fortunate at Cambridge to have so many world-leading researchers across a range of disciplines, and I look forward to seeing the outcomes of their work.”

The Cambridge recipients of 2025 Advanced Grants are:

Professor Clare Bryant (Department of Veterinary Medicine) for investigating human and avian pattern recognition receptor activation of cell death pathways, and the impact on the host inflammatory response to zoonotic infections.

Professor Sir Richard Friend (Cavendish Laboratory/St John’s College) for bright high-spin molecular semiconductors.

Professor Usha Goswami (Department of Psychology/St John’s College) for a cross-language approach to the early identification of dyslexia and developmental language disorder using speech production measures with children.

Professor Regina Grafe (Faculty of History) for colonial credit and financial diversity in the Global South: Spanish America 1600-1820.

Professor Judy Hirst (MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit/Corpus Christi College) for the energy-converting mechanism of a modular biomachine: Uniting structure and function to establish the engineering principles of respiratory complex I.

Professor Matthew Juniper (Department of Engineering/Trinity College) for adjoint-accelerated inference and optimisation methods.

Professor Walid Khaled (Department of Pharmacology/Magdalene College) for understanding precancerous changes in breast cancer for the development of therapeutic interceptions.

Professor Adrian Liston (Department of Pathology/St Catharine’s College) for dissecting the code for regulatory T cell entry into the tissues and differentiation into tissue-resident cells.

Professor Róisín Owens (Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology/Newnham College) for conformal organic devices for electronic brain-gut readout and characterisation.

Professor Emma Rawlins (Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience/Gurdon Institute) for reprogramming lung epithelial cell lineages for regeneration.

Dr Marta Zlatic (Department of Zoology/Trinity College) for discovering the circuit and molecular basis of inter-strain and inter-species differences in learning

“These ERC grants are our commitment to making Europe the world’s hub for excellent research,” said Ekaterina Zaharieva, European Commissioner for Startups, Research, and Innovation. “By supporting projects that have the potential to redefine whole fields, we are not just investing in science but in the future prosperity and resilience of our continent. In the next competition rounds, scientists moving to Europe will receive even greater support in setting up their labs and research teams here. This is part of our “Choose Europe for Science” initiative, designed to attract and retain the world’s top scientists.”

“Much of this pioneering research will contribute to solving some of the most pressing challenges we face - social, economic and environmental,” said Professor Maria Leptin, President of the European Research Council. “Yet again, many scientists - around 260 - with ground-breaking ideas were rated as excellent, but remained unfunded due to a lack of funds at the ERC. We hope that more funding will be available in the future to support even more creative researchers in pursuing their scientific curiosity.”

Eleven senior researchers at the University of Cambridge have been awarded Advanced Grants from the European Research Council – the highest number of grants awarded to any institution in this latest funding round.

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In Invisible Rivals, published by Yale University Press on 17 June, Dr Goodman argues that throughout human history we have tried to rid our social groups of free-riders, people who take from others without giving anything back. But instead of eliminating free-riders, human evolution has just made them better at hiding their deception.

Goodman explains that humans have evolved to use language to disguise selfish acts and exploit our cooperative systems. He links this ‘invisible rivalry’ to the collapse of trust and consequent success of political strongmen today.

Goodman says: “We see this happening today, as evidenced by the rise of the Julius Caesar of our time—Donald Trump— but it is a situation that evolution has predicted since the origins of life and later, language, and which will only change form again even if the current crises are overcome.”

Goodman argues that over the course of human evolution “When we rid ourselves of ancient, dominant alphas, we traded overt selfishness for something perhaps even darker: the ability to move through society while planning and coordinating.”

“As much as we evolved to use language effectively to work together, to overthrow those brutish and nasty dominants that pervaded ancient society, we also (and do) use language to create opportunities that benefit us … We use language to keep our plans invisible. Humans, more than other known organisms, can cooperate until we imagine a way to compete, exploit, or coerce, and almost always rely on language to do so.”

Goodman, an expert on human social evolution at the University of Cambridge, identifies free-riding behaviour in everything from benefits cheating and tax evasion, to countries dodging action on climate change, and the actions of business leaders and politicians.

Goodman warns that “We can’t stop people free-riding, it’s part of our nature, the incurable syndrome… Free riders are among us at every level of society and pretending otherwise can make our own goals unrealistic, and worse, appear hopeless. But if we accept that we all have this ancient flaw, this ability to deceive ourselves and others, we can design policies around that and change our societies for the better.”

Lessons from our ancestors

Goodman points out that humans evolved in small groups meaning that over many generations we managed to design social norms to govern the distribution of food, water and other vital resources.

“People vied for power but these social norms helped to maintain a trend toward equality, balancing out our more selfish dispositions. Nevertheless, the free-rider problem persisted and using language we got better at hiding our cheating.”

One academic camp has argued that ancient humans used language to work together to overthrow and eject “brutish dominants”. The opposing view claims that this never happened and that humans are inherently selfish and tribal. Goodman rejects both extremes.

“If we accept the view that humans are fundamentally cooperative, we risk trusting blindly. If we believe everyone is selfish, we won’t trust anyone. We need to be realistic about human nature. We’re a bit of both so we need to learn how to place our trust discerningly.”

Goodman points out that our distant ancestors benefitted from risk-pooling systems, whereby all group members contributed labour and shared resources, but this only worked because it is difficult to hide tangible assets such as tools and food. While some hunter-gatherer societies continue to rely on these systems, they are ineffective in most modern societies in our globalized economy.

“Today most of us rely largely on intangible assets for monetary exchange so people can easily hide resources, misrepresent their means and invalidate the effectiveness of social norms around risk pooling,” Goodman says.

“We are flawed animals capable of deception, cruelty, and selfishness. The truth is hard to live with but confronting it through honest reflection about our evolutionary past gives us the tools to teach ourselves and others about how we can improve the future.”

Taking action: self-knowledge, education and policy

Goodman, who teaches students at Cambridge about the evolution of cooperation, argues that we reward liars from a young age and that this reinforces bad behaviour into adulthood.

“People tell children that cheaters don’t prosper, but in fact cheats who don’t get caught can do very well for themselves.”

“Evolutionarily speaking, appearing trustworthy but being selfish can be more beneficial to the individual. We need to recognise that and make a moral choice about whether we try to use people or to work with them.”

At the same time, Goodman thinks we need to arm ourselves intellectually with the power to tell who is credible and who is not. “Our most important tool for doing this is education,” he says. “We must teach people to think ethically for themselves, and to give them the tools to do so.”

But Goodman cautions that even the tools we use to expose exploiters are open to exploitation: “Think about how people across the political sphere accuse others of virtue signalling or abusing a well-intentioned political movement for their own gain.”

Goodman believes that exposing free-riders is more beneficial than punishment. “Loss of social capital through reputation is an important motivator for anyone,” he argues, suggesting that journalistic work exposing exploitation can be as effective at driving behaviour change as criminal punishment.

“The dilemma each of us faces now is whether to confront invisible rivalry or to let exploiters undermine society until democracy in the free world unravels—and the freedom of dissent is gone.”

Dr Jonathan R Goodman is a research associate at Cambridge Public Health and a social scientist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute.

Invisible Rivals: How We Evolved to Compete in a Cooperative World was published by Yale University Press on 17 June 2025 (ISBN: 9780300274356)

To save democracy and solve the world's biggest challenges, we need to get better at spotting and exposing people who exploit human cooperation for personal gain, argues Cambridge social scientist Dr Jonathan Goodman.

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After winning a nail-biting East of England final, which was held as part of the Cambridge Festival in April 2025, Spatika went on to represent the East of England in the UK final with her presentation on Time Travel with Your Brain. She will now go on to represent the UK in the International Final taking place live at CERN Science Gateway in Switzerland to mark the 20 year anniversary of the competition. 

“I was so surprised I won!”, said Spatika. “The other communicators were fantastic and we travelled through so many topics from planets to parasites and more!”. 

Spatika took part in FameLab because she enjoyed talking about science to non-scientists and bringing some meaning to the complex work taking place in the labs. “I wanted a chance to bring humour into the science, because most of the times science is presented in professional environments, it’s all very serious”, added Spatika.  

“I would recommend FameLab for anyone who’s even a tiny bit interested in knowing what happens to science when it’s let out in the wild!” 

Claudia Antolini, Public Engagement Manager at the University of Cambridge said, “We are delighted for Spatika to represent the UK at the International FameLab final. Both at the East of England regional competition and the UK final Spatika gave outstanding performances, scientifically accurate but also extremely engaging with wise-cracking humour. We wish her the best of luck and we look forward to cheering her on for the International Final.” 

The FameLab final will be streamed live from CERN on YouTube. 

Spatika Jayaram is a PhD student and Gates Cambridge Scholar in the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience and Magdalene College. In her research, she looks at social and emotional behaviours emerging across development, and how regions within the prefrontal cortex contribute to their regulation. Her supervisor is Professor Angela Roberts.

FameLab was created by Cheltenham Festivals in 2005 and is the largest science communication competition and training programme in the world. Participants have just three minutes to convey a scientific concept of their choice to an audience and expert panel of judges with no presentations and limited props. 

Earlier this month, Cambridge PhD student Spatika Jayaram was crowned the winner of the FameLab 2025 UK final at this year’s Cheltenham Science Festival.  

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This year's prize winners are;

Dr Tore Butlin - Department of Engineering/Queens' College: 

Tore has played a key role in reshaping the engineering course content and led the design of the new IA mechanics syllabus.

Dr Alexander Carter - Institute of Continuing Education/Fitzwilliam College:

As Academic Director for Philosophy & Interdisciplinary Studies, Alexander leads a broad-ranging portfolio of undergraduate and postgraduate courses in philosophy, creativity theory and research skills.

Dr Nicholas Evans - Department of Clinical Neurosciences/Wolfson College: 

Nicholas has demonstrated an impressive commitment to medical education at the Clinical School for over a decade. As a mentor he has also shown a keen interest in student welfare.

Dr James Fergusson - Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics:

James is an outstanding lecturer who brings outstanding passion to everything he does. He has been heavily involved in establishing and supporting the new MPhil in Data Intensive Science. 

Dr Marta Halina - Department of History and Philosophy of Science/Selwyn College:

Marta has almost single-handedly overhauled the History and Philosophy of Science Tripos making it a more sought after course. She has led a major restructuring of the MPhil course and has introduced the increasingly popular module, AI in healthcare.

Paul Hoegger - University Language Centre/Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics/Fitzwilliam College: 

Paul is a teacher of German much respected by generations of students. Over the years he has created several new courses including one on German literature through the ages and one on the poetry of Schubert.

Dr Kate Hughes - Department of Veterinary Medicine/Girton College:

Kate makes a valued contribution to Years 4 - 6 of the veterinary programme. She led the design of a new final year rotation in anatomic pathology for which she is educational lead.

Dr Mairi Kilkenny - Department of Biochemistry/Queen's College:

Mairi delivers innovative and creative teaching with the Department of Biochemistry often incorporating digital media to stimulate the interest of her students. She's also a supervisor for several Colleges. 

Dr Ewa Marek - Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology/Jesus College:

Ewa is a valued lecturer, supervisor and Director of Studies. Passionate about sustainability, Ewa developed a new Part 1A course which introduces the topic in the context of chemical and biochemical engineering.

Dr Isabelle McNeill - Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics/Trinity Hall:

Isabelle was a passionate and outstanding teacher who made vibrant contributions to French and to Film and Screen within the Faculty. A co-founder and trustee of the Cambridge Film Trust, Isabelle was made aware of her prize two days before she sadly passed away in February. She will be much missed by colleagues and students alike.

Dr Ali Meghji - Department of Sociology/Sidney Sussex College:

Ali has been instrumental in creating a whole new Tripos paper in the Department (Empire, Colonialism, Imperialism). As a teacher, he repeatedly receives glowing comments from students on the clarity of his exposition, the contemporary relevance of his topics, and his effective use of technology. 

Dr Liam Saddington - Department of Geography/Lucy Cavendish College:

Liam was recruited as Training and Skills Director for the Tripos with a remit to oversee the quantitative and qualitative research training across the degree. He has led new innovations, such as creating a museum field trip for first-year students, organising a 'COP Cambridge' simulation for second-year students, and developing the dissertation 'research carousel'. 

Dr Christopher Tilmouth - Faculty of English:

Chris' visionary leadership has reshaped both undergraduate and postgraduate education at Cambridge. As Director of Undergraduate Studies, Chris introduced critical reforms to enhance student progression.

Dr Juliet Usher-Smith - Department of Public Health and Primary Care/Emmanuel College:

Juliet has made important contributions to the Department through direct teaching, supervision and mentoring and goes the extra mile to foster a culture in which teaching and learning is valued by all. 

The winners were presented with their awards by the University's Vice-Chancellor, Professor Deborah Prentice, at a ceremony also attended by Senior Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Education and Environmental Sustainability), Professor Bhaskar Vira. He said “The Pilkington Prize Award ceremony is one of my favourite events in the University calendar. It’s always deeply satisfying to see hard-working staff recognised for their commitment and dedication to teaching and learning. We all know that behind every great student is a great teacher and I feel privileged to work alongside such excellent colleagues.”

A total of fourteen dedicated and talented staff have been awarded the Pilkington Prize this year. The annual prizes are awarded in the name of Sir Alastair Pilkington to acknowledge excellence in teaching and to recognise the contribution each individual makes to a Department or Faculty. 

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Cambridge Zero Director Professor Emily Shuckburgh (Fellow of Darwin, Trinity alumna) has received a CBE for services to Climate Science and to the Public Communication of Climate Science.

"I am deeply honoured to accept this recognition, which is a reflection of the collective efforts of many scientists, communicators, educators, and advocates who strive every day to make climate science accurate, accessible and actionable at a time when honesty, clarity and urgency are more important than ever,” Professor Shuckburgh said.

Alongside leading the University of Cambridge’s major climate change initiative, Cambridge Zero, Emily is also Professor of Environmental Data Science at the Department of Computer Science and Technology. Her primary research is focused on the application of artificial intelligence to climate science and in this context she is Academic Director of the Institute of Computing for Climate Science, and co-Director of the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training on the Application of AI to the study of Environmental Risks (AI4ER).

Professor Gordon Dougan (Fellow of Wolfson College), an Emeritus Professor who continues to work in the University’s Department of Medicine, and former Director of the Infection Health Challenge area at Wellcome, UK, has been awarded a CBE for services to Vaccines and to Global Health.

Professor Dougan is an internationally recognised expert in vaccinology, global health and infections. He was Head of Pathogens at the Wellcome Sanger Institute (WTSI) for over a decade and worked in the pharmaceutical industry (Wellcome Foundation/GSK) for part of his career, developing novel vaccines and other medicines. He has worked as an advisor to health agencies, industry, academia and regulatory agencies. He is an expert on the molecular basis of infection with a strong emphasis on pathogenic mechanisms/immunity, genomics, disease tracking and antibiotic resistance. He is currently President of the Microbiology Society of the UK.

He said: “I am delighted to receive this important recognition for my work and the people I have worked with and for. Applying science to the benefit of people and health is what I have been working toward throughout my career. I can recommend this path to anyone.”

Details of University alumni who are recognised in the King's Birthday Honours will be published on the University's alumni website.

The University extends its congratulations to all academics, staff and alumni who have received an honour.

Academics at the University of Cambridge are among those featured in the King's Birthday Honours 2025, which recognises the achievements and contributions of people across the UK.

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Why are there so many different kinds of animals and plants on Earth? One of biology’s big questions is how new species arise and how nature’s incredible diversity came to be.

Cichlid fish from Lake Malawi in East Africa offer a clue. In this single lake, over 800 different species have evolved from a common ancestor in a fraction of the time it took for humans and chimpanzees to evolve from their common ancestor.

What’s even more remarkable is that the diversification of cichlids happened all in the same body of water. Some of these fish became large predators, others adapted to eat algae, sift through sand, or feed on plankton. Each species found its own ecological niche.

Now, researchers from the Universities of Cambridge and Antwerp have determined how this evolution may have happened so quickly. Their results are reported in the journal Science.

The researchers looked at the DNA of over 1,300 cichlids to see if there’s something special about their genes that might explain this rapid evolution. “We discovered that, in some species, large chunks of DNA on five chromosomes are flipped – a type of mutation called a chromosomal inversion,” said senior author Hennes Svardal from the University of Antwerp.

Normally, when animals reproduce, their DNA gets reshuffled in a process called recombination – mixing the genetic material from both parents. But this mixing is blocked within a chromosomal inversion. This means that gene combinations within the inversion are passed down intact without mixing, generation after generation, keeping useful adaptations together and speeding up evolution.

“It’s sort of like a toolbox where all the most useful tools are stuck together, preserving winning genetic combinations that help fish adapt to different environments,” said first author Moritz Blumer from Cambridge’s Department of Genetics.

These preserved sets of genes are sometimes called ‘supergenes. In Malawi cichlids, the supergenes seem to play several important roles. Although cichlid species can still interbreed, the inversions help keep species separate by preventing their genes from blending too much. This is especially useful in parts of the lake where fish live side by side – like in open sandy areas where there’s no physical separation between habitats.

The genes inside these supergenes often control traits that are key for survival and reproduction – such as vision, hearing, and behaviour. For example, fish living deep in the lake (down to 200 meters) need different visual abilities than those near the surface, require different food, and need to survive at higher pressures. Their supergenes help maintain those special adaptations.

“When different cichlid species interbred, entire inversions can be passed between them – bringing along key survival traits, like adaptations to specific environments, speeding up the process of evolution,” said Blumer.

The inversions also frequently act as sex chromosomes, helping determine whether a fish becomes male or female. Since sex chromosomes can influence how new species form, this opens new questions about how evolution works.

“While our study focused on cichlids, chromosomal inversions aren’t unique to them,” said co-senior author Professor Richard Durbin, from Cambridge’s Department of Genetics. “They’re also found in many other animals — including humans — and are increasingly seen as a key factor in evolution and biodiversity.”

“We have been studying the process of speciation for a long time,” said Svardal. “Now, by understanding how these supergenes evolve and spread, we’re getting closer to answering one of science’s big questions: how life on Earth becomes so rich and varied.”

Reference:
L. M. Blumer, V. Burskaia, I. Artiushin, J. Saha et al. ‘Introgression dynamics of sex- linked chromosomal inversions shape the Malawi cichlid radiation.’ Science (2025). DOI: 10.1126/science.adr9961

Researchers have found that chunks of ‘flipped’ DNA can help fish quickly adapt to new habitats and evolve into new species, acting as evolutionary ‘superchargers’.

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The Guardian calls it ‘shattering’. The Stage heralds it as a ‘challenging, artfully constructed indictment of Russian war crimes in Ukraine.’

Written by Anastasiia Kosodii and Josephine Burton, and directed by Burton, The Reckoning channels voices of Ukrainians across the country – a priest, a volunteer, a dentist, a security guard, a journalist – who are forced to confront the sudden horrors of invasion and occupation and to repair bonds of trust amid violence and fear. These voices are real, drawn from witness statements collected and conserved by the journalists and lawyers behind The Reckoning Project.

Rory Finnin, Professor of Ukrainian Studies and a Fellow of Robinson College at Cambridge, collaborated with Burton to help shape the play. His decades of research into Ukraine’s culture and society formed the basis for a grant in support of The Reckoning from the University of Cambridge’s AHRC Impact Starter Fund account.

“Our collaboration with Rory Finnin has been invaluable throughout the making of The Reckoning,” said Burton, who is also Artistic Director and Chief Executive of Dash Arts. “Rory’s insights into Ukraine’s past and present gave me deeper grounding as a director and co-writer and helped sharpen the questions the play asks of its audience.”

The Reckoning blends dynamic storytelling with movement, music, and food to forge new routes of solidarity and understanding with the audience. As Everything Theatre notes in a glowing review, “We leave not as passive spectators but as an active part of the struggle.”

Attendees share in a summer salad made over the course of the play by the Ukrainian and British cast – Tom Godwin, Simeon Kyslyi, Marianne Oldham, and Olga Safronova – who bring empathy, humour, and integrity to each scene. The conclusion of each performance features an invited speaker from the audience who comes to the stage to reckon with their own experience of the play from different ethical and intellectual perspectives.

Professor Finnin spoke on the play’s first night at the Arcola Theatre.

“Over three years into Russia’s full-scale invasion, we are too often tempted to turn our eyes away from Ukraine,” said Finnin. “But The Reckoning empowers us to look closely and to see with new purpose. It has been an incredible privilege to support a dynamic work of art that brings Ukrainian voices to the fore and challenges us to listen and respond to them, with urgency and moral clarity.”

The Reckoning runs through 28 June at London’s Arcola Theatre.

The Reckoning is an intimate work of documentary theatre composed from a verified archive of witness testimonies chronicling Russia’s war of aggression. It is now playing at London’s Arcola Theatre to universal acclaim.

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Smartphone apps that track menstrual cycles are a ‘gold mine’ for consumer profiling, collecting information on everything from exercise, diet and medication to sexual preferences, hormone levels and contraception use.

This is according to a new report from the University of Cambridge’s Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, which argues that the financial worth of this data is ‘vastly underestimated’ by users who supply profit-driven companies with highly intimate details in a market lacking in regulation.

The report’s authors caution that cycle tracking app (CTA) data in the wrong hands could result in risks to job prospects, workplace monitoring, health insurance discrimination and cyberstalking – and limit access to abortion.

They call for better governance of the booming ‘femtech’ industry to protect users when their data is sold at scale, arguing that apps must provide clear consent options rather than all-or-nothing data collection, and urge public health bodies to launch alternatives to commercial CTAs.

“Menstrual cycle tracking apps are presented as empowering women and addressing the gender health gap,” said Dr Stefanie Felsberger, lead author of the report from Cambridge’s Minderoo Centre. “Yet the business model behind their services rests on commercial use, selling user data and insights to third parties for profit.”

“There are real and frightening privacy and safety risks to women as a result of the commodification of the data collected by cycle tracking app companies.”

As most cycle tracking apps are targeted at women aiming to get pregnant, the download data alone is of huge commercial value, say researchers, as – other than home buying – no life event is linked to such dramatic shifts in consumer behaviour.

In fact, data on pregnancy is believed to be over two hundred times more valuable than data on age, gender or location for targeted advertising. The report points out that period tracking could also be used to target women at different points in their cycle. For example, the oestrogen or ‘mating’ phase could see an increase in cosmetics adverts.

Just the three most popular apps had estimated global download figures of a quarter of a billion in 2024. So-called femtech – digital products focused on women’s health and wellbeing – is estimated to reach over US$60 billion (£45 billion) by 2027, with cycle tracking apps making up half of this market.

With such intense demand for period tracking, the report argues that the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) should develop its own transparent and trustworthy app to rival those from private companies, with apps allowing permission for data to be used in valid medical research.

“The UK is ideally positioned to solve the question of access to menstrual data for researchers, as well as privacy and data commodification concerns, by developing an NHS app to track menstrual cycles,” said Felsberger, who points out that Planned Parenthood in the US already has its own app, but the UK lacks an equivalent.

“Apps that are situated within public healthcare systems, and not driven primarily by profit, will mitigate privacy violations, provide much-needed data on reproductive health, and give people more agency over how their menstrual data is used.”

“The use of cycle tracking apps is at an all-time high,” said Prof Gina Neff, Executive Director of Cambridge’s Minderoo Centre. “Women deserve better than to have their menstrual tracking data treated as consumer data, but there is a different possible future.”

“Researchers could use this data to help answer questions about women’s health. Care providers could use this data for important information about their patients’ health. Women could get meaningful insights that they are searching for,” Neff said.

In the UK and EU, period tracking data is considered ‘special category’, as with that on genetics or ethnicity, and has more legal safeguarding. However, the report highlights how in the UK, apps designed for women's health have been used to charge women for illegally accessing abortion services

In the US, data about menstrual cycles has been collected by officials in an attempt to undermine abortion access. Despite this, data from CTAs are regulated simply as ‘general wellness’ and granted no special protections.

“Menstrual tracking data is being used to control people’s reproductive lives,” said Felsberger. “It should not be left in the hands of private companies.”

Investigations by media, non-profit, and consumer groups have revealed CTAs sharing data with third parties ranging from advertisers and data brokers to tech giants such as Facebook and Google.

The report cites work published earlier this year from Privacy International showing that, while the major CTA companies have updated their approach to data sharing, device information is still collected in the UK and US with “no meaningful consent”.

Despite data protection improvements, the report suggests that user information is still shared with third parties such as cloud-based delivery networks that move the data around, and outside developers contracted to handle app functionalities.

At the very least, commercial apps could include delete buttons, says Felsberger, allowing users to erase data in the app as well as the company servers, helping protect against situations – from legal to medical – where data could be used against them. 

“Menstrual tracking in the US should be classed as medical data,” said Felsberger. “In the UK and EU, where this data is already afforded special category status, more focus needs to be placed on enforcing existing regulation.”

The report stresses the need to improve public awareness and digital literacy around period tracking. The researchers argue that schools should educate students on medical data apps and privacy, so young people are less vulnerable to health hoaxes.

The report ‘The High Stakes of Tracking Menstruation’ is authored by Dr Stefanie Felsberger with a foreword by Professor Gina Neff and published by the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy (MCTD).

Cambridge researchers urge public health bodies like the NHS to provide trustworthy, research-driven alternatives to platforms driven by profit.

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The Edison Histotripsy System was purchased thanks to a generous donation to the University of Cambridge from Hong Kong-based philanthropist Sir Ka-shing Li, a longstanding supporter of cancer research at the University.

Histotripsy uses pulsed sound waves to create ‘bubble clouds’ from gases present in targeted tissue. These bubble clouds form and collapse in microseconds, creating mechanical forces able to destroy tissue at cellular and sub-cellular levels while avoiding ionising energy of radiation, heat damage from thermal treatments, or the need for surgery.

Treatment is delivered via a single short session – potentially taking no longer than 30 minutes – with limited or no pain, a quick recovery, and can be performed as a day case. The speed of delivery has the potential to reduce cancer treatment times, avoid disease progression and improve cancer survival.

The system will be demonstrated today by Dr Teik Choon See, Consultant Interventional Radiologist at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (CUH). Guests will include Solina Chau, Director of the Li Ka Shing Foundation, and Baroness Merron, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC).

The machine, manufactured by HistoSonics, is expected to be fully installed at CUH later this year, where it will be used initially to treat patients with primary and secondary liver tumours before being expanded to treat tumours in other organs.

Previously, 23 patients from Europe were recruited in a histotripsy clinical trial that was completed in 2022. So far, over 1,500 patients worldwide have received treatment using histotripsy, mainly in the United States following approval by the US Food and Drug Administration in late 2023. The machine at Cambridge will be the first in the UK and Europe to treat patients as part of their clinical care pathway, outside the trial setting

Professor Deborah Prentice, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, said: “Through his longstanding support of cancer research at Cambridge, Sir Ka-shing Li continues to make a significant impact on outcomes for cancer patients. Cutting-edge technology such as this histotripsy machine allows Cambridge to remain at the forefront of understanding and treating cancer, a position we aim to strengthen further with Cambridge Cancer Research Hospital.”

Roland Sinker, Chief Executive of CUH said: “Histotripsy is an exciting new technology that will make a huge difference to patients. By offering this non-invasive, more targeted treatment we can care for more people as outpatients and free up time for surgeons to treat more complex cases. The faster recovery times mean patients will be able to return to their normal lives more quickly, which will also reduce pressure on hospital beds, helping us ensure that patients are able to receive the right treatment at the right time. We are delighted to be receiving this new state of the art machine.”

Fiona, who has lived with cancer for over two decades, is Co-Chair of the Patient Advisory Group for Cambridge Cancer Research Hospital, and has been involved in planning and designing the new hospital, said: “This is seriously good news. A new, non-invasive option to treat these cancers is very welcome indeed. For patients for whom ordinary surgery is no longer an option, this could make all the difference.”

Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting granted authorisation for controlled early access to the device via an unmet clinical need authorisation. Available through the UK’s Innovative Devices Access Pathway programme, this bypasses red tape to accelerate lengthy authorisation stages, so NHS patients benefit from it years earlier than planned.

Wes Streeting said: “Bureaucracy has become a handbrake on ambition, stopping innovation in its tracks and holding our health service back. But through our Plan for Change, we are slashing red tape, so game-changing new treatments reach the NHS front line quicker – transforming healthcare.  

“Regulation is vital to protect patients. However, as the pace of innovation ramps up, our processes must be more agile to help speed the shift from analogue to digital. Our common-sense approach to regulation will streamline approval processes so countless more patients are liberated from life-limiting conditions.”

Last year, an £11million donation was made in honour of Sir Ka-shing Li to support the now-renamed Li Ka Shing Early Cancer Institute. Sir Ka-shing Li has previously made generous donations to support cancer research at the University, including in 2007 to the Li Ka Shing Centre, which houses the CRUK Cambridge Institute.

Cutting-edge technology such as the histotripsy machine will enable Cambridge Cancer Research Hospital, a partnership with Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and the University of Cambridge, to change the story of cancer. The University and Addenbrooke's Charitable Trust (ACT) are fundraising for the new hospital, which will transform how we diagnose and treat cancer. The hospital will treat patients across the East of England, but the research that takes place there promises to change the lives of cancer patients across the UK and beyond. Find out more here.

NHS patients at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, will become the first in the UK and Europe to undergo incisionless ultrasound surgery using a cutting-edge ‘histotripsy machine’ as part of their cancer care.

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The scholarships, aimed at exceptionally high-potential domestic and international students, will support study towards AI-related Masters degrees and provide an unparalleled package of benefits. Students will receive full tuition fees, a living stipend, and access to priority work placements with leading UK artificial intelligence companies and government institutions.

The programme, which will open to its first cohort in the 2026–27 academic year, intends to enrol 100 scholars over its first 4 years. Scholars will be selected from the top 1% of AI talent worldwide, with applicants required to demonstrate academic excellence, leadership, and ambassadorial potential, alongside a STEM background.

Uniquely, the Spärck AI Scholarships will provide its students with priority access to work placements within UK-based AI companies and organisations, including the UK government’s AI Security Institute (AISI) and i.AI, their in-house AI incubator.

The scholarships are named in honour of Professor Karen Spärck Jones (1935–2007), pictured, a pioneering British computer scientist whose ground breaking work at Cambridge laid the foundations for modern search engines and natural language processing. One of the most remarkable women in computer science, her seminal 1972 paper introduced the concept of inverse document frequency, a fundamental principle still central to information retrieval today.

karen_sparck.jpg

Professor Deborah Prentice, University of Cambridge Vice-Chancellor, said: “Cambridge combines academic excellence with a dynamic, interdisciplinary AI community, from foundational research to real-world impact. We are delighted to be a founding partner in this ambitious initiative, which reflects a shared commitment to attracting exceptional talent and reinforcing the UK’s position as a home for world-class AI. We are especially proud that these scholarships are named after Karen Spärck Jones, a brilliant Cambridge computer scientist.”

A long-time member of the Cambridge community, Professor Spärck Jones was an undergraduate at Girton College (1953 to 1956), a Research Fellow at Newnham College (1965 to 1968), an Official Fellow of Darwin College (1968 to 1980) and a Fellow of Wolfson College (2000 to 2007).

She began her research career at the Cambridge Language Research Unit in the late 1950s and later taught for the MPhil in Computer Speech and Language Processing, on language systems, and for the Computer Science Tripos on information retrieval. She supervised many Cambridge PhD students across a wide range of topics and was a tireless advocate for women in computing, famously declaring: “I think it's very important to get more women into computing. My slogan is: computing is too important to be left to men.”

Her international influence was recognised by numerous awards, including the ACM SIGIR Salton Award, the BCS Lovelace Medal, and election as a Fellow of the British Academy (of which she was also Vice-President from 2000 to 2002) and the American Association for Artificial Intelligence.

The University of Cambridge is delighted to honour her legacy by co-founding this exciting new programme, which was formally announced at London Tech Week.

On 9 June, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) announced the launch of the Spärck AI Scholarships, a major new initiative to nurture the next generation of AI leaders, with Cambridge proud to join as a founding partner.

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The Cambridge x Manchester Innovation Partnership – the first trans-UK innovation collaboration of its kind – will receive £4.8m of funding from Research England over 3 years, it has been announced. With further investment from the 2 universities, the total funding for the partnership will be £6m. The initiative aims to strengthen research networks, accelerate scale-up growth, drive private sector investment into research and development, and attract new foreign direct investment.

Led by the universities of Cambridge and Manchester, ‘CBG×MCR’ is supported by 2 mayoral combined authorities, city councils, key businesses (such as AstraZeneca, ARM, ROKU, and Microsoft), venture capitalists (Northern Gritstone and CIC), and angel investors (Cambridge and Manchester Angels).

As well as strengthening relations within and between the 2 cities, the partnership – fronted by Innovate Cambridge and Unit M – will pilot new approaches for delivering inclusive growth, providing insights to other cities, the wider higher education sector community, and local and national governments in the UK and internationally.

In the UK, collaboration has traditionally been focused on geographically proximate areas, such as Manchester-Liverpool, or Edinburgh-Glasgow. This new model of hyper-connected, place-to-place partnering – similar to those developed in the USA’s Northeast Corridor, Coastal California, and China’s Greater Bay Area – combines complementary innovation capabilities to create globally competitive connected ecosystems.

Amplifying what each city can achieve independently, the model aims to drive national economic growth, responding directly to the UK government’s national industrial strategy.

Professor Deborah Prentice, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, said: “This pioneering initiative brings together the combined strengths of Cambridge and Manchester to create something that is truly groundbreaking. By connecting our cities, we’re helping to build a more collaborative and dynamic environment in which innovative research can connect with industry, venture capital, and entrepreneurs, to drive economic growth and deliver real benefits for people and places across the UK.”

Paul Bristow, Mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, said: "This is exactly the kind of partnership working we need to fire up innovation-led growth in both our regions. I’m delighted to see it backed with new funding. By joining forces to drive the discoveries of tomorrow, we can bring in investment, support exciting new businesses, and deliver real jobs and opportunity for our communities."

Professor Duncan Ivison, President and Vice-Chancellor at the University of Manchester, said: "Our partnership with Cambridge marks a new model of collaboration between UK universities. It brings together the distinctive strengths of each of our universities and cities, connecting 2 of the great innovation ecosystems to scale up what we can achieve. This new approach to innovation accelerates the time between discovery and impact, getting ideas into the real economy and our communities even more quickly to drive inclusive growth.”

Jessica Corner, Executive Chair of Research England, said: “This investment underscores our commitment to fostering innovation and collaboration across England. By connecting the vibrant ecosystems of Cambridge and Manchester, we aim to drive significant economic growth and create a model for place-based innovation that can be replicated nationwide."

Cambridge will join forces with Manchester as part of a pioneering collaboration to harness the combined strengths of both universities and cities – and boost innovation and growth for the whole of the UK

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The Guardian has launched Secure Messaging as a module within its mobile news app to provide a secure and usable method of establishing initial contact between journalists and sources.

It builds on a technology - CoverDrop –developed by Cambridge researchers and includes a wide range of security features. The code is available online and is open source, to encourage adoption by other news organisations.

The app automatically generates regular decoy messages to the Guardian to create ‘air cover’ for genuine messages, even when they are passing through the cloud, preventing an adversary from finding out if any communication between a whistleblower and a journalist is taking place.

“This provides whistleblowers with plausible deniability,” said Professor Alastair Beresford from Cambridge’s Department of Computer Science and Technology.

“That’s important in a world of pervasive surveillance where it has become increasingly hazardous to be a whistleblower,” said Cambridge’s Dr Daniel Hugenroth, who co-led the development of CoverDrop with Beresford.

The technology also provides digital ‘dead drops’ – like virtual bins or park benches – where messages are left for journalists to retrieve. These are just two of a suite of functions that protect a source from discovery even if their smartphone is seized or stolen.

CoverDrop encrypts outgoing messages between the source and their named contact at the news organisation to ensure no other party can read their content. For this, it relies on cryptography using digital security key pairs consisting of a public and a secret key.

The source is given the public key that instructs the existing encryption technology on their smartphone to encrypt their messages to the Guardian. This key only works one way, so it can lock – but not unlock – their messages. The only person able to decode them is the whistleblower’s named contact at the Guardian, who uses their secret key to retrieve and decode the messages left in the dead drop.

CoverDrop also pads all messages to the same length, making it harder for adversaries – whether acting on their own behalf or for an organisation or state – to distinguish real messages from decoy ones. 

The system fulfils a need long identified by media organisations: providing a highly secure, yet easy-to-use, system for potential sources who want to contact them with sensitive information.

“The Guardian is committed to public-interest journalism,” said Luke Hoyland, product manager for investigations and reporting at The Guardian. “Much of this is possible thanks to first-hand accounts from witnesses to wrongdoing. We believe whistleblowing is an important part of a functioning democracy and will always do our utmost to avoid putting sources at risk. So we're delighted to have worked with the University of Cambridge on turning their groundbreaking CoverDrop research into a reality.”

The research began with workshops with UK news organisations to find out how potential sources first contacted them. The researchers learned that whistleblowers often reach out to them via platforms that are either insecure or hard to use.

Beresford said that when they started looking for a practical solution to this problem, “we realised that news organisations already run a widely available platform from which they can offer a secure, usable method of initial contact – their mobile news app.”

“When sources send messages, their confidentiality and integrity can be assured through the secure messaging protocols on their smartphone,” said Hugenroth. “CoverDrop goes one step further and also protects the communication patterns between sources and journalists by using decoy messages to provide cover and padding all messages to the same length.”

Importantly, the researchers say, users of the new CoverDrop system won’t need to install any specialist software that chews up large amounts of battery power or slows down their phones.

Its simple interface looks and works just like a typical messaging app. And there are no traces left on the device that the CoverDrop system has ever been used on that phone before.

“When you open the app,” said Beresford, “even if you’ve already set up an account on it, the CoverDrop feature will look as though you haven’t used it. Its home screen will only offer two prompts – ‘Get started’ or ‘Check your message vault’. This is because if it’s stolen, or a user is under duress, we don’t want your phone to reveal to anyone that you’ve already used it.”

The development of CoverDrop began in the years after the whistleblower Edward Snowden, a former US intelligence contractor, leaked classified documents revealing the existence of global surveillance programmes.

This showed, the researchers said, the mass surveillance infrastructure available to nation states, which has profound implications for those who wish to expose wrongdoing within companies, organisations, and government.

Work on CoverDrop was first unveiled at an international Symposium on Privacy-Enhancing Technologies in 2022 by the Cambridge researchers (who originally included the late Professor Ross Anderson, a leader in security engineering and privacy).

When they published their peer-reviewed paper on the research at the conference, it attracted interest from the Guardian which, in collaboration with the researchers, subsequently helped develop CoverDrop from an academic prototype into a fully usable technology.

“The free press fulfils an important function in a democracy,” said Beresford. “It can provide individuals with a mechanism through which they can hold powerful people and organisations to account. We’re delighted that the Guardian is the first media organisation to adopt CoverDrop and will use it to help protect their sources.”

“All the CoverDrop code will be available online and open source,” said Hugenroth. “This transparency is essential for security-critical software and allows others to audit and improve it. Open-sourcing the code also means that other news organisations, particularly those with expertise in investigative journalism, could also use it. We would be excited to see them do so.”

References:
Mansoor Ahmed-Rengers et al. ‘CoverDrop: Blowing the Whistle Through A News App.’ Paper presented at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium. 12 July 2022, Sydney, Australia. DOI: 10.2478/popets-2022-0035

A new technical report on CoverDrop, describing its architecture and explaining how it works, is available at: www.coverdrop.org/coverdrop_guardian_implementation_june_2025.pdf

Whistleblowers can contact journalists more securely thanks to a new confidential and anonymous messaging technology co-developed by University of Cambridge researchers and software engineers at the Guardian.

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Efstathiou, Emeritus Professor of Astrophysics (1909) at Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, shares the prize with Professor John Richard Bond from the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics and the University of Toronto.

They were recognised for their pioneering research in cosmology, in particular for their studies of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background. Their predictions have been verified by an armada of ground-, balloon- and space-based instruments, leading to precise determinations of the age, geometry, and mass-energy content of the universe.

Cosmology has undergone a revolution in the past two decades, driven mainly by increasingly precise measurements of the angular power spectrum of fluctuations in the temperature and polarisation fields of the cosmic microwave background, a relic of the early universe, most notably by NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe spacecraft (2001–2010) and the European Space Agency’s Planck spacecraft (2009–2013).

These fluctuations are small — the strength of the background radiation is the same in all directions to better than 0.01% and it is only slightly polarised — but they offer a glimpse of the universe when it was very young, a test of many aspects of fundamental physics, insights into the nature of dark matter and dark energy, and measurements of many fundamental cosmological parameters with accuracies unimaginable to cosmologists a few decades ago.

Although many researchers contributed to the development of the theoretical framework that governs the behaviour of the cosmic microwave background, Bond and Efstathiou emphasised the importance of the background as a cosmological probe and took the crucial step of making precise predictions for what can be learned from specific models of the history and the composition of the mass and energy in the universe.

Modern numerical codes used to interpret the experimental results are based almost entirely on the physics developed by Bond and Efstathiou. Their work exemplifies one of the rare cases in astrophysics where later experimental studies accurately confirmed unambiguous, powerful theoretical predictions.

The interpretation of these experiments through Bond and Efstathiou’s theoretical models shows that the spatial geometry of the observable universe is nearly flat, and yields the age of the universe with a precision of 0.15%, the rate of expansion of the universe with a precision of 0.5%, the fraction of the critical density arising from dark energy to better than 1%, and so on. The measurements also strongly constrain theories of the early universe that might have provided the initial “seed” for all the cosmic structure we see today, and the nature of the dark matter and dark energy that dominate the mass-energy content of the universe.

Both Bond and Efstathiou have worked closely with experimentalists to bring their predictions to the test: they have been heavily involved in the analysis of cosmic microwave background data arising from a wide variety of experiments of growing sophistication and accuracy.

George Efstathiou received his BA in Physics from the University of Oxford and PhD in Astronomy from Durham University. He has held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of California, Berkeley, USA and the University of Cambridge. He was Savilian Professor of Astrophysics at Oxford, where he served as Head of Astrophysics until 1994. He returned to Cambridge in 1997 as Professor of Astrophysics, where he also served as Director of the Institute of Astronomy and the first Director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology. He received the 2022 Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London and the Royal Astronomical Society, UK. He is a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge.

Originally published on the Shaw Prize website. 

Professor George Efstathiou has been awarded the Shaw Prize in Astronomy, one of the biggest prizes in the field.

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First held in 1864, Varsity Athletics remains an enduring symbol of sporting excellence and tradition. This year’s event, hosted at Wilberforce Road Sports Ground in Cambridge, was made even more special by a prestigious recognition from World Athletics: the awarding of two Heritage Plaques to Cambridge University Athletic Club (CUAC) and the Varsity Match itself.

World Athletics Heritage Plaque

Founded in 1857, CUAC is one of the oldest athletics clubs in the world. It played a pivotal role in the development of modern athletics, contributing to the rules and formats that govern the sport today. "Cambridge University Athletic Club is among a small group of pioneering organisations that helped shape modern athletics," World Athletics noted in its announcement.

In honour of this distinguished history, World Athletics CEO and Cambridge alumnus Jon Ridgeon (Magdalene College) returned to his alma mater to present the plaques during the Varsity weekend. 

Athletics Varsity 2025

Living up to the historic occasion, fierce but friendly rivalry was on display, with Cambridge securing victories in:

• Men’s Blues
• Para Team
• Men's 2nds
• Women’s 2nds

In an interview with Varsity newspaper ahead of the Athletics Varsity, CUAC President Jess Poon reflected on the club’s evolution and the importance of the Varsity Matches. She highlighted the club’s embrace of inclusivity, particularly with the expansion of women's and para-athletics matches, and celebrated the sense of tradition and camaraderie that continues to define the event.

Athletics Varsity plaque giving

This milestone celebration aligns closely with the University’s priority to encourage participation in sport and physical activity at all levels. Sport plays a critical role in supporting mental wellbeing, fostering leadership and communication skills, and enhancing employability among students.

Across the University, activity priorities include:

• Club Support Programme: Aimed at helping sports clubs like CUAC deliver high-quality training and competition experiences, ensuring sustainability and growth.
• University of Cambridge Athlete Performance Programme (UCAPP): Providing specialist support for high-performing athletes, enabling them to excel both in their sport and academically.
• Active Students Initiative: Promoting sport and physical activity for all students, regardless of ability or experience level, through programmes like 'Give it a Go', designed to remove barriers and encourage lifelong engagement with physical activity.

Bhaskar Vira, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education and Chair of the Sports Committee, has expressed the University’s enthusiasm for supporting sport: "Involvement in physical activity and sports provides a much-needed release from the intense pressures that are associated with life at Cambridge. I firmly believe that these are inherently complementary pursuits, allowing participants to achieve a balance between their work commitments and their own personal wellbeing."

The 150th Men's, 50th Women's, and 2nd Para Athletics Varsity Matches not only celebrated a rich and trailblazing past but also pointed towards a vibrant future, powered by a University-wide commitment to excellence, inclusion, and wellbeing in sport.

As Cambridge looks to build on this legacy, the University invites alumni and supporters to help sustain and grow these opportunities - ensuring that generations of Cambridge students continue to benefit from the profound personal, academic, and societal advantages that sport and physical activity bring.

Find out more information on how to support sport at Cambridge.

Varsity Athletics team

The world’s oldest athletics competition — the annual contest between Cambridge and Oxford — reached a landmark celebration this year, commemorating 150 years of men's competition, 50 years of women's competition, and the second year of the para-athletics Varsity. 

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The research team, led by the University of Cambridge, used the GPT-4 large language model (LLM) to identify hidden patterns buried in the mountains of scientific literature to identify potential new cancer drugs.

To test their approach, the researchers prompted GPT-4 to identify potential new drug combinations that could have a significant impact on a breast cancer cell line commonly used in medical research. They instructed it to avoid standard cancer drugs, identify drugs that would attack cancer cells while not harming healthy cells, and prioritise drugs that were affordable and approved by regulators.

The drug combinations suggested by GPT-4 were then tested by human scientists, both in combination and individually, to measure their effectiveness against breast cancer cells.

In the first lab-based test, three of the 12 drug combinations suggested by GPT-4 worked better than current breast cancer drugs. The LLM then learned from these tests and suggested a further four combinations, three of which also showed promising results.

The results, reported in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, represent the first instance of a closed-loop system where experimental results guided an LLM, and LLM outputs – interpreted by human scientists – guided further experiments. The researchers say that tools such as LLMs are not a replacement for scientists, but could instead be supervised AI researchers, with the ability to originate, adapt and accelerate discovery in areas like cancer research.

Often, LLMs such as GPT-4 return results that aren’t true, known as hallucinations. However, in scientific research, hallucinations can sometimes be beneficial if they lead to new ideas that are worth testing.

“Supervised LLMs offer a scalable, imaginative layer of scientific exploration, and can help us as human scientists explore new paths that we hadn’t thought of before,” said Professor Ross King from Cambridge’s Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, who led the research. “This can be useful in areas such as drug discovery, where there are many thousands of compounds to search through.”

Based on the prompts provided by the human scientists, GPT-4 selected drugs based on the interplay between biological reasoning and hidden patterns in the scientific literature.

“This is not automation replacing scientists, but a new kind of collaboration,” said co-author Dr Hector Zenil from King’s College London. “Guided by expert prompts and experimental feedback, the AI functioned like a tireless research partner—rapidly navigating an immense hypothesis space and proposing ideas that would take humans alone far longer to reach.”

The hallucinations – normally viewed as flaws – became a feature, generating unconventional combinations worth testing and validating in the lab. The human scientists inspected the mechanistic reasons the LLM found to suggest these combinations in the first place, feeding the system back and forth in multiple iterations.

By exploring subtle synergies and overlooked pathways, GPT-4 helped identify six promising drug pairs, all tested through lab experiments. Among the combinations, simvastatin (commonly used to lower cholesterol) and disulfiram (used in alcohol dependence) stood out against breast cancer cells. Some of these combinations show potential for further research in therapeutic repurposing.

These drugs, while not traditionally associated with cancer care, could be potential cancer treatments, although they would first have to go through extensive clinical trials.

“This study demonstrates how AI can be woven directly into the iterative loop of scientific discovery, enabling adaptive, data-informed hypothesis generation and validation in real time,” said Zenil.

“The capacity of supervised LLMs to propose hypotheses across disciplines, incorporate prior results, and collaborate across iterations marks a new frontier in scientific research,” said King. “An AI scientist is no longer a metaphor without experimental validation: it can now be a collaborator in the scientific process.”

The research was supported in part by the Alice Wallenberg Foundation and the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

Find out more about how Cambridge is changing the story of cancer.

Reference:
Abbi Abdel-Rehim et al. ‘Scientific Hypothesis Generation by Large Language Models: Laboratory Validation in Breast Cancer Treatment.’ Journal of the Royal Society Interface (2025). DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2024.0674

An ‘AI scientist’, working in collaboration with human scientists, has found that combinations of cheap and safe drugs – used to treat conditions such as high cholesterol and alcohol dependence – could also be effective at treating cancer, a promising new approach to drug discovery.

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Imagine a plant with entirely new abilities – more nutritious food, crops that survive heatwaves, or leaves that grow useful materials. With new ARIA funding Cambridge researchers hope to unlock the technology to fast-track crop development and enhance plants with new qualities, like drought-tolerance to reduce the amount of water they need, or the ability to withstand pests and diseases.

Their research has the potential to revolutionise the future of agriculture and offer a radical new approach to securing food supply in the face of climate change.

Programmable plants – a major leap in plant biology

“We’re building the tools to make plants programmable, just like software. This isn’t science fiction – it’s the future of agriculture,” said Professor Jake Harris, Head of the Chromatin and Memory group, and project lead for one of the ARIA-funded projects.

Harris’ team is awarded £6.5 million to build the world’s first artificial plant chromosome.

The ambitious aim of the Synthetic Plants programme is to develop artificial chromosomes and chloroplasts that can survive in a living plant. If the teams achieve this, it will be one the most significant advances in plant synthetic biology.

The international team involves collaborators from The University of Western Australia, biotech company Phytoform Labs and the Australian Genome Foundry at Macquarie University.

“Our idea is that instead of modifying an existing chromosome, we design it from the ground up,” Professor Harris said.

He added: “We’re rethinking what plants can do for us. This synthetic chromosome could one day help grow crops that are more productive, more resilient, and better for the planet.”

While synthetic chromosomes have been achieved in simpler organisms, such as bacteria and yeast, this will be the first attempt to create and deploy one entirely from scratch in a plant.

The project will use the moss Physcomitrium patens – a unique, highly engineerable plant – as a development platform to build and test a bottom-up synthetic chromosome, before transferring it into potato plants.

It also opens new possibilities for growing food and medicines in space, and for indoor agriculture. It could allow scientists to give elite crop varieties disease resistance, or to grow productively in new climates and environments.

Unlocking powerful applications in agriculture

The second funded project, led by Professor Alison Smith and Dr Paweł Mordaka in the Plant Metabolism group, aims to use the synthetic chloroplasts to enable plants to fix nitrogen, and produce vitamin B12. The use of fertilisers to supply nitrogen and promote good crop yields is the greatest cause of pollution from agriculture; reducing the need for these would promote more sustainable food production systems.

This builds on their previous work to design and build the entire chloroplast genome for the simple single-cell alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii.

The Cambridge researchers are awarded almost £1 million, as part of a £9 million grant to this project. They are working with an international team of researchers from the UK, USA and Germany to transfer this technology to build synthetic chloroplasts in potato plants.

Professor Smith said: “Our success would unlock powerful applications in agriculture, like plants capable of nitrogen fixation or producing essential nutrients like vitamin B12, potentially reducing fertiliser dependence and addressing malnutrition. These traits have tremendous potential should they be engineered into plants.”

She added: “It will enable scientists to surpass what can be accomplished with gene editing and equip plants with new functions, from reducing agricultural water use to protecting crop yields in uncertain conditions.”

A unique opportunity

The ambitiousness of this project is outside the scope of most other UK funding schemes. Professor Harris believes this stems from ARIA’s unique approach to developing the research opportunity and goal along with the research community.

Harris said: “ARIA had a couple of events with synthetic biologists to look at what’s on the edge of possible, what could be useful as a moonshot approach that could really change things.”

He added: “It’s a totally different way of seeing things. We went from ‘here’s what we want to see in the world’ to ‘how are we going to get there?’ It catalysed a different team and a different way of thinking.”

“This work moves us beyond the limitations of natural genomes. It’s about designing entirely new capabilities in plants – from the molecular level up.”

Currently, it typically takes eight years to develop a new crop variety in the UK, but with this new technology it could be a matter of one year or even less. The speed of development would be dramatically increased, much in the way that revolutionary protein-folding technology like AlphaFold has massively accelerated the process of drug discovery.

Synthetic biology is already revolutionising the world of healthcare and could transform agriculture if applied to tailoring plant traits.

Two groups involving researchers from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Plant Sciences are among nine teams to have been awarded funding today from the UK’s Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA)’s Synthetic Plants programme.

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Dealroom’s Global Tech Ecosystem Index analyses and compares start-up ecosystems in 288 cities across 69 countries. To measure innovation intensity, it looks for ecosystems that are performing well relative to their population size. These hubs typically have high start-up activity, research intensity and strong links with local universities.

Diarmuid O’Brien, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Innovation at the University of Cambridge, said: “It’s great to see that, as a relatively small city, Cambridge continues to lead the UK in innovation intensity but it’s no accident that we punch above our weight. In recent years, the University and the wider ecosystem have put in place a range of initiatives to ensure that we realise our potential and are able to bring transformative science and technologies out of the lab and into the real world.”

Gerard Grech, Head of Founders at the University of Cambridge, which supports new ventures emerging from the University, added: “Cambridge is proof of what happens when world-class research meets relentless ambition. While global venture capital funding in 2024 pulled back, Cambridge doubled investment – a powerful signal that deep tech innovation is increasingly leading the way in shaping our future economies.

“What makes Cambridge unique is its cutting-edge science, an increasing flywheel of people who have successfully scaled ventures, and a culture built to turn ground-breaking ideas into transformative companies.”

A new report by Dealroom shows that Cambridge is, for its size, the most innovative city in the UK. Globally, it ranks fourth behind US innovation powerhouses San Francisco, Boston and New York. 

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The new Fellows have been recognised for their remarkable contributions to advancing medical science, groundbreaking research discoveries and translating developments into benefits for patients and the wider public. Their work exemplifies the Academy’s mission to create an open and progressive research sector that improves health for everyone.

They join an esteemed Fellowship of 1,450 researchers who are at the heart of the Academy’s work, which includes nurturing the next generation of scientists and shaping research and health policy in the UK and worldwide.

One of Cambridge’s new Fellows, Professor Sam Behjati, is a former recipient of the Academy’s prestigious Foulkes Foundation medal, which recognises rising stars within biomedical research. Sam is Clinical Professor of Paediatric Oncology at the University and an Honorary Consultant Paediatric Oncologist at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, as well as Group Leader at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. His research is rooted in cancer genomics, phylogenetics, and single cell transcriptomics and spans a wide range of diseases and biological problems. More recently, his work has focused on the origin of cancers, in particular of childhood cancer. In addition, he explores how to use genomic data to improve the treatment of children. Sam is a Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

Also elected to the Academy of Medical Sciences Fellowship are:

Professor Clare Bryant, Departments of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine

Clare Bryant is Professor of Innate Immunity. She studies innate immune cell signalling during bacterial infection to answer fundamental questions about host-pathogen interactions and to search for new drugs to modify them. She also applies these approaches to study inflammatory signalling in chronic diseases of humans and animals.  Clare has extensive collaborations with many pharmaceutical companies, is on the scientific advisory board of several biotech companies, and helped found the natural product company Polypharmakos. Clare is a Fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge.

Professor Frank Reimann, Institute of Metabolic Science-Metabolic Research Laboratories

Frank Reimann is Professor of Endocrine Signaling. The main focus of his group, run in close partnership with Fiona Gribble, is the enteroendocrine system within the gut, which helps regulate digestion, metabolism, and how full we feel. Their work has included the use of animal models and human cellular models to understand how cells function. One of these cells, glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) is the target of therapies now widely used in the treatment of diabetes mellitus and obesity. How cells shape feeding behaviour has become a major focus of the lab in recent years.

Professor Mina Ryten, UK Dementia Research Institute

Mina Ryten is a clinical geneticist and neuroscientist, and Director of the UK Dementia Research Institute at Cambridge since January 2024. She also holds the Van Geest Professorship and leads a lab focused on understanding molecular mechanisms driving neurodegeneration. Mina’s research looks at how genetic variation influences neurological diseases, particularly Lewy body disorders. Her work has advanced the use of single cell and long-read RNA sequencing to map disease pathways and identify potential targets for new treatments. Her expertise in clinical care and functional genomics has enabled her to bridge the gap between patient experience and scientific discovery.

Professor Andrew Morris CBE FRSE PMedSci, President of the Academy of Medical Sciences, said: “The breadth of disciplines represented in this year’s cohort – from mental health and infectious disease to cancer biology and respiratory medicine – reflects the rich diversity of medical science today. Their election comes at a crucial time when scientific excellence and collaboration across disciplines are essential for addressing global health challenges both now and in the future. We look forward to working with them to advance biomedical research and create an environment where the best science can flourish for the benefit of people everywhere.”

The new Fellows will be formally admitted to the Academy at a ceremony on Wednesday 9 July 2025.

Four Cambridge biomedical and health researchers are among those announced today as newly-elected Fellows of the Academy of Medical Sciences.

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Around 10% of women have very dense breasts. Between the ages of 50 and 70, these women are up to four-times more likely to develop breast cancer compared to women with low breast density.

Over 2.2 million women receive breast screening in the UK each year. For women with very dense breasts, mammograms (breast X-rays), which are used for breast screening, can be less effective at detecting cancer. This is because denser breasts look whiter on mammograms, which makes it harder to spot small early-stage cancers which also appear white.

Published today in The Lancet, a trial of over 9000 women across the UK who have dense breasts and had a negative (no cancer) mammogram result, found 85 cancers.

The trial, called BRAID, tested different scanning methods that could be used in addition to mammograms to detect cancers in dense breasts. Per 1000 women screened, two of the methods detected 17-19 cancers that were not seen in mammograms.

The two methods are known as CEM (contrast enhanced mammography) and AB-MRI (abbreviated magnetic resonance imaging).

The researchers that ran the trial recommend that adding either of these methods to existing breast screening could detect 3,500 more cancers per year in the UK. Estimates suggest that screening reduces mortality for about 20% of cancers detected, so this could mean an extra 700 lives saved each year.

BRAID also included a third scanning method, ABUS (automated whole breast ultrasound), which also detected cancers not seen in mammograms but was three times less effective than CEM and AB-MRI.

Each of the three methods was used to scan around 2000 women. Per 1000 women scanned, CEM detected 19 cancers, AB-MRI found 17 cancers, and ABUS found 4.

Mammograms already detect approximately 8 cancers per 1000 women with dense breasts. This means additional scans could more than treble breast cancer detection in this group of women.

BRAID is the first trial to directly compare supplemental imaging methods and to demonstrate their value for early cancer detection as part of widespread screening. The team hope their results will be used to enhance screening programmes in the UK and globally to diagnose more cancers early.

More work is needed to confirm whether additional scans will reduce the number of deaths as cancers detected through screening are not always life-threatening.

The trial was led from Cambridge. It recruited across 10 UK sites, including over 2000 women at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge.

The research was led by Professor Fiona Gilbert, Department of Radiology, University of Cambridge and honorary consultant radiologist at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, part of Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (CUH). The trial was funded by Cancer Research UK with support from the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre (BRC).

Professor Gilbert said: “Getting a cancer diagnosis early makes a huge difference for patients in terms of their treatment and outlook. We need to change our national screening programme so we can make sure more cancers are diagnosed early, giving many more women a much better chance of survival.”

Professor Stephen Duffy, Emeritus Professor, Queen Mary University, London, trial statistician and screening programme expert said: “The NHS Breast Screening Programme has made a huge difference to many lives. Thanks to these results we can see that the technology exists to make screening even better, particularly for the 10% of women with dense breast tissue."

Dr David Crosby, head of prevention and early detection at Cancer Research UK, said: “Breast cancer screening is for people without symptoms and helps to spot the disease at an early stage, when treatment is more likely to be successful. But having dense breasts can make it harder to detect cancer.

“This study shows that making blood vessels more visible during mammograms could make it much easier for doctors to spot signs of cancer in women with dense breasts. More research is needed to fully understand the effectiveness of these techniques, but these results are encouraging.

“Remember, having dense breasts is not something you can check for yourself or change, but if you’re concerned at all, you can speak to your GP.”

Reference
Gilbert, FJ et al. Comparison of supplemental imaging techniques – interim results of BRAID (Breast Screening: risk adapted imaging for density) randomized controlled trial. Lancet; 22 May 2025; DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(25)00582-3 

Press release from Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Researchers in Cambridge are calling for additional scans to be added to breast screening for women with very dense breasts. This follows a large-scale trial, which shows that extra scans could treble cancer detection for these women, potentially saving up to 700 lives a year in the UK.

Louise Duffield, age 60, a grandmother of four from Ely was diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer as a result of the BRAID trial.

Louise works in local government. She spends her free time knitting, and visiting 1940s events around the UK with her husband, Fred, and their two restored wartime Jeep. She is enthusiastic about clinical research and has previously participated as a healthy participant in several studies.

In 2023, Louise was invited to participate in the BRAID trial following her regular mammogram screening, which showed that she had very dense breasts. As part of the trial, Louise had an AB-MRI scan which identified a small lump deep inside one of her breasts.

“When they rang to say they’d found something, it was a big shock. You start thinking all sorts of things but, in the end, I just thought, at least if they’ve found something, they’ve found it early. The staff were brilliant, and so supportive.”

Soon after the MRI, Louise had a biopsy that confirmed she had stage 0 (very early) breast cancer within the ducts of one of her breasts. Six weeks later Louise underwent surgery to remove the tumour, during that time the tumour had already grown larger than it appeared on the scans.

“It’s been a stressful time and it’s a huge relief to have it gone. The team have been fantastic throughout. The tumour was deep in the breast so, if I hadn’t been on the trial, it could have gone unnoticed for years.

“I feel very lucky, it almost doesn’t feel like I’ve really had cancer. Without this research I could have had a very different experience.”

The location of Louise’s tumour meant it would have been difficult for her to find it through self-examination, and since it was not detected during her regular mammogram it would have been at least three years before she was invited for another.

Following a short course of radiotherapy, Louise is now cancer free. She will continue to be monitored for several years and will continue to be attending her regular mammograms every three years as part of the national breast cancer screening programme.

“This experience has highlighted to me how important screening is. If I hadn’t had the mammogram, I wouldn’t have been invited to the trial. Getting treated was so quick because they found the cancer early.”

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Presented by The Sainsbury Laboratory Cambridge University, the exhibit is part of a brand-new GreenSTEM section that celebrates cutting-edge research and innovation in the world of plant science.

Blooming Numbers takes visitors on an immersive journey through the latest discoveries in quantitative plant biology—starting with the humble flower and diving deep into molecular biology, genetics, imaging technologies, computational modelling, and the often-overlooked mathematical patterns that govern plant development.

“This award is just so exciting,” said Kathy Grube from the Sainsbury Laboratory.

“We came in in the morning to water the plants and turn on the microscopes, and the medal had been laid out by the judges. We were jumping up and down when we found it.”

The eye-catching exhibit was a collaborative effort across multiple Cambridge institutions and partners. The University’s Department of Engineering co-designed the infrastructure, drawing inspiration from the Fibonacci sequence—an iconic numerical pattern found throughout nature. The Pollinator Patch, a lush highlight of the exhibit, was designed and cultivated by Oakington Garden Centre to demonstrate pollinator-friendly planting. Darwin Nurseries added wildlife-friendly hanging baskets that captivated visitors and judges alike.

“One of our fellow exhibitors, who have been coming to Chelsea for years, told us that getting a silver-gilt on your first try is a real achievement,” said Kathy.

“The judges came over and said the design of the stand was fantastic, and they loved the interactive exhibits. We’re just so honoured.”

The RHS Chelsea Flower Show, the world’s most famous horticultural show, runs until the end of the week and attracts horticultural experts, designers, and plant lovers from across the globe.
 

The University of Cambridge has made a dazzling debut at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, winning a prestigious silver-gilt medal for its interactive plant science exhibit, Blooming Numbers.

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“It is with great pleasure that I welcome the latest cohort of outstanding researchers into the Fellowship of the Royal Society,” said Sir Adrian Smith, President of the Royal Society. “Their achievements represent the very best of scientific endeavour, from basic discovery to research with real-world impact across health, technology and policy. From tackling global health challenges to reimagining what AI can do for humanity, their work is a testament to the power of curiosity-driven research and innovation.

“The strength of the Fellowship lies not only in individual excellence, but in the diversity of backgrounds, perspectives and experiences each new member brings. This cohort represents the truly global nature of modern science and the importance of collaboration in driving scientific breakthroughs.”

The Fellows and Foreign Members join the ranks of Stephen Hawking, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Lise Meitner, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and Dorothy Hodgkin.

The new Cambridge fellows are:

Professor Edward Bullmore FMedSci FRS

Professor Ed Bullmore is Professor of Psychiatry and former Head of the Department of Psychiatry. His research mainly involves the application of brain imaging to psychiatry. He has introduced an entirely original approach to the analysis of human brain anatomy, involving graph theory and its application to small-world networks. This has had an enormous impact on the field, especially in relation to understanding the biological basis of schizophrenia and depression. His work has been key to the understanding of the 'wiring' of the human brain.

Professor Gábor Csányi FRS

Professor Gábor Csányi is Professor of Molecular Modelling in the Department of Engineering, and a Fellow of Pembroke College. His work is in the field of computational chemistry, and is focused on developing algorithms to predict the properties of materials and molecules from first principles. He pioneered the application of machine learning to molecular modelling which lead to enormous gains in the efficiency of molecular dynamics simulation.

Professor Judith Driscoll FRS

Professor Judith Driscoll is Professor of Materials Science in the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy, and a Fellow of Trinity College. Her research is concerned with the nanoscale design and tuning of functional oxide thin film materials for energy-efficient electronic applications. A particular focus of her research group is oxide thin films, owing to their wide range of functionalities and their stability. However, their compositions tend to be complex, defects are prevalent, and interface effects play a strong role. Also, for many applications device structural dimensions are required down to nanometre length-scales. Together, all these factors produce exciting challenges for the materials scientist.

Professor Marie Edmonds FRS

Professor Marie Edmonds is Head of Department and Professor of Volcanology and Petrology in the Department of Earth Sciences. She is also a Fellow of Queens’ College. Her research focuses on understanding the impact of volcanoes on our environment and on the habitability of our planet. Her research spans the boundaries between traditional disciplines, from deciphering the nature of the interior of the Earth, to magma transport and storage in the crust, to volcano monitoring, understanding ore deposits and the dynamic chemistry of volcanic gases in the atmosphere and climate.

Professor Julian Hibberd FRS

Professor Julian Hibberd is Head of the Department of Plant Sciences and a Fellow of Emmanuel College. His research focuses on guiding optimisation of photosynthesis to improve crop yields. The C4 pathway is a complex form of photosynthesis that evolved around 30 million years ago and is now used by the most productive plants on the planet. Professor Hibberd has provided key insights into the evolution of C4 photosynthesis through analysis of plant physiology, cell specialisation, organelle development, and the control of gene expression.

Dr Gregory Jefferis FRS

Dr Gregory Jefferis is Joint Head of the Neurobiology Division at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and Director of Research of the Department of Zoology. The broad goal of his research is to understand how smell turns into behaviour in the fruit fly brain. His group is particularly interested in how odour information is processed by the higher olfactory centres that mediate innate and learned behaviour.

Professor Jason Miller FRS

Professor Jason Miller is a Professor in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics and a Fellow of Trinity College. His research interests are in probability, in particular stochastic interface models, random walk, mixing times for Markov chains, and interacting particle systems.

Professor Andrew Pitts FRS

Professor Andrew Pitts is Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science and Technology and an Emeritus Fellow of Darwin College. His research makes use of techniques from category theory, mathematical logic and type theory to advance the foundations of programming language semantics and theorem proving systems. His aim is to develop mathematical models and methods that aid language design and the development of formal logics for specifying and reasoning about programs. He is particularly interested in higher-order typed programming languages and in dependently typed logics.

Dr Marta Zlatic FRS

Dr Marta Zlatic is Programme Leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, and Director of Research in the Department of Zoology. She is also a Fellow of Trinity College. Her research aims to understand the relationship between the structure of the nervous system and its function and to discover the basic principles by which neural circuits implement fundamental computations. A major focus of her research is the circuit implementation of learning and decision-making.

Nine outstanding Cambridge scientists have been elected as Fellows of the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of sciences and the oldest science academy in continuous existence.

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What is a memory?

Is it a distinct pattern of brain activity, a blueprint for future behaviour, or a skill that we can improve with a little training? Probably all these things and more, argues Jon Simons, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Psychology and Head of the School of the Biological Sciences.

Jon’s Memory Lab studies all aspects of memory. They invite volunteers to complete memory tasks online, in the laboratory, or sometimes while lying in an MRI machine while the team scans their brains. 

If memory serves

The biochemical changes that represent memories range across the brain’s real estate. A long list of factors determine which brain areas light up during the experience: whether a memory is being encoded or reconstructed, whether it's an old or a new pattern, and what kind of information it deals with.

“We know that the hippocampus is crucial for forming new memories, but it’s not necessarily the permanent storage site," Jon says. "For long-term storage, we also recruit cortical areas – the frontal lobes, temporal lobes, parietal lobes and more.”

To plot a route through tangled terrain, researchers divide memory into different types. Short-term memory lasts a minute at most and has a limited capacity – around 7 items give-or-take, according to Harvard’s George Miller in the 1950s. Think of repeating numbers to yourself while jotting down someone’s phone number. If we don’t record those numbers fast enough, they’ll fade quickly. 

But even short-term memory isn’t unitary. Alan Baddeley (Churchill 1959), former director of Cambridge’s Medical Research Council (MRC) Applied Psychology Unit (now called the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit), coined a new way of understanding how short-term memories are stored and manipulated. His 'working memory' model proposes that separate brain systems deal with different kinds of inputs. One part rehearses and replays sounds, for instance, while another holds visual information like a ‘mental canvas’. 

the_working_memory_model.svg_.png

This is different yet again from our long-term memories. These deeper experiences can stay with us for a lifetime. Recalling them can be thought of as a kind of ‘mental time-travel’, allowing us to subjectively relive past events complete with the sights, smells and sounds of cherished scenes.

Researchers now believe that we reconstruct our memories each time we experience them. From scant traces, we extrapolate the narrative of what happened. In this way, memory is a creative act, not a simple recap. One classic Cambridge study revealed how our memories are morphed by bias, beliefs, feelings and expectations.
 

Cambridge’s long memory

Enter the elegant study of Sir Frederic Bartlett, Cambridge’s first Psychology professor. 

Bartlett’s book ‘Remembering’ (1932) made use of a now famous story: the war of the ghosts. 

In this Native American folk tale, a man meets warriors paddling their canoes downriver, who invite him to join a war party. He later realises the men are ghosts, waging war on the living. 

Bartlett taught his Edwardian undergraduates this tale, then asked them to retell it in their own words. Over several retellings, his students altered key elements of the story so that it sounded more like the world they knew. ‘Canoes’ became ‘boats’, while mentions of ‘spirits’ were dropped altogether.

canoe.jpg

Bartlett's study showed the effects of culture on recall, and how the changes we make to our memories aren’t random. Even if we’re not conscious of doing so, we prefer to change story elements so that they align with our expectations, biases and cultural norms.

This feature of memory has massive implications for how we remember the past. Eye-witness testimony will be prey to the same biases. Unintentional errors, made in favour of what is familiar to us, are very difficult to avoid.

Another titan of memory research was an undergraduate while Bartlett was teaching. During World War II, Brenda Milner (Newnham 1936) helped the Psychology department repurpose itself for the war effort. After this, Milner moved to Canada to analyse patient Henry Molaison (formerly known as H M). Molaison would become one of the most famous patients in all of psychology. 

Molaison had profound amnesia. This was due to experimental surgery, where doctors removed his hippocampus to try and improve his epilepsy. Milner meticulously documented how Molaison’s memory functioned after surgery. She showed how he was unable to form new memories or remember events from the years leading up to his surgery, but that his memories from earlier in life remained intact. This work transformed our understanding of the hippocampus’ role in memory.

Psychologists like Milner and Bartlett showed us the primacy of the hippocampus and highlighted the creative nature of memory. Modern Cambridge researchers can take our investigations even further.
 

Peak performance

With all we now know about memory, can we understand what makes for better performance?

Together with Professor Simon Baron-Cohen and his team at the Autism Research Centre, Jon is currently studying thousands of the UK’s best memorisers to find the keys to their prowess. Volunteers completed a battery of memory tests online – the best performers then came for brain scans and further testing in the lab.

Their early results suggest some interesting traits, as well as the strategies people use to enhance their abilities. 

“There's a psychological trait called ‘systemising’,” says Jon. “It's found in people who have a drive to analyse and construct rule-based ways of thinking. Those kinds of people seem to be more likely to have exceptional memories.”

Simon Baron-Cohen was the first to define this trait. He did so in relation to people on the autism spectrum, for whom ‘systemising’ is set very high. 

So if you happen to think like a ‘systemiser’, you may have a better memory. If you don’t, there are also concrete strategies to boost your memory capacities.

“Mnemonics are an evidence-based technique that can improve our memories,” Jon explains. “They often involve thinking spatially. Start by visualising somewhere you know well, then mentally ‘place’ important information in that map. You can then 'travel through' that map when recalling.”

Think Sherlock’s ‘mind palace’ from the BBC adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s books. Jon points out that pre-BBC, this strategy was familiar to ancient Greek and Roman orators. They called it the method of loci, using it as a way to remember extremely long speeches. It can also be helpful for everyday tasks, like remembering a shopping list.

gettyimages-1270935214.jpg

Jon’s tip for this method is to make the memory triggers striking. Associate the eggs on your shopping list with a fire-breathing dragon guarding its young, for example, and the sensory impression might be distinct enough to stand out from the background noise. 

“The more bizarre the better! Our memories have a big job in trying to differentiate one memory from another. We can help it out by making key information more distinctive. This helps our brains to distinguish memories from one another, and stop irrelevant ones from overlapping or interfering.”

Indeed, one of the functions of the hippocampus is to perform pattern separation – trying to make our memories distinct. If memories are too similar, we find it harder to recall specific experiences. 

This might go some way to explaining the ‘brain fog’ many experienced during COVID-19 lockdowns. With days inside tending to repeat familiar routines, we had less distinct and varied experiences. Our brains were less able to create rich, meaningful memories. Looking back on 2020 and 2021, people find it hard to separate what happened when.

There’s a lesson for non-lockdown living here too. If we want a rich life that feels like it lasts longer and is full of accessible, interesting memories, we should prioritise variety in our experience.

To further improve memory function, we should strive to decrease stress, fear and anxiety (where possible). These emotional states increase our cognitive load and reduce our memory abilities.

“When anxious thoughts flood our minds, they compete for space in our working memory and impair our ability to recall long-term memories. They pull attention and resources away from the things we’d like to focus on. If we can find ways to reduce stress and anxiety, our memory can often bounce back.”

While this might be easier said than done, science has concrete recommendations for reducing stress and anxiety. Done consistently, a healthy diet, regular exercise and a good sleep schedule, as well as techniques like mindfulness practice, can have transformative effects. 

Researchers like Jon are deepening our understanding of what memories are. The Memory Lab follows an illustrious line of Cambridge psychologists who identified key pieces of memory’s endless puzzle. Wherever the next steps lead, they will affirm a wonder of nature: the intricate patterns our mind weaves to make sense of the world outside.

For a handy guide to building mental resilience, check out Brain Boost by Dr Barbara Sahakian and Dr Christelle Langley. To focus on fighting anxiety with scientific techniques, try Dr Olivia Remes.

To find out how you can participate in Memory Lab studies, get in touch.

By tying together more than a century of memory research at Cambridge, the Memory Lab gives us tangible ways to improve, preserve and understand our memory.

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Dr O’Brien, who is an Irish citizen, will leave his role in Cambridge in September.

Vice-Chancellor Professor Deborah Prentice said: “Diarmuid has helped deliver genuine progress in ensuring that Cambridge continues to be recognised globally as a centre of innovation and technology, building partnerships, working with Government, and driving UK economic growth.

"We have great plans and ambitions, including for a new Innovation Hub in the heart of this city. We wish Diarmuid well in his exciting new role in Ireland.”

Dr O’Brien, who was previously Chief Executive of Cambridge Enterprise, said: “I have hugely enjoyed my time in Cambridge, which is a thriving world leader in innovation.

"The brilliant people and dynamic ecosystem here will continue to generate the startups and success stories of the future. I look forward to watching Cambridge flourish.”

He will remain in the role until September, with Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research, Professor Sir John Aston, providing continuing leadership through the transition from Diarmuid to his successor. Recruitment will begin in due course.
 

The University’s Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Innovation, Dr Diarmuid O’Brien, has been appointed as the first Chief Executive Officer of Research Ireland, Ireland’s new research and innovation funding agency, based in Dublin. 

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In a trial where cancers were treated with chemotherapy followed by a targeted cancer drug before surgery, 100% of patients survived the critical three-year period post-surgery.

The discovery, published today in Nature Communications, could become the most effective treatment to date for patients with early-stage breast cancer with inherited BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene mutations.

Breast cancers with faulty copies of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes are challenging to treat, and came to public attention when actress Angelina Jolie, a BRCA1 carrier, underwent a preventative double mastectomy in 2013.

Current standard treatment aims to shrink the tumour using chemotherapy and immunotherapy, before removing it through surgery. The first three years after surgery is a critical period, when there is the greatest risk of relapse or death.

The Partner trial took a different approach and demonstrates two innovations: the addition of olaparib and chemotherapy pre-surgery, and the benefits of careful timing of when the treatments are given to patients. Taken as tablets, olaparib is a targeted cancer drug already available on the NHS.

Led by Addenbrooke’s Hospital, part of Cambridge University Hospitals (CUH) NHS Foundation Trust and the University of Cambridge, the trial saw patients recruited from 23 NHS sites across the UK.

Results show that leaving a 48-hour “gap” between chemotherapy and olaparib, leads to better outcomes, possibly because a patient’s bone marrow has time to recover from chemotherapy, while leaving the tumour cells susceptible to the targeted drug.

Of the 39 patients who received chemotherapy followed by olaparib, only one patient relapsed three years after surgery and 100% of patients survived.

In comparison, the survival rate for the control arm was 88% three years after surgery. Of the 45 patients on the control arm who received chemotherapy only, nine patients relapsed, of whom six died.

Jackie Van Bochoven, 59, from South Cambridgeshire, was diagnosed in February 2019 with a small but aggressive tumour. She said: “When I had the diagnosis, I was completely shocked and numb, I thought about my children, and my mum and sister who were diagnosed with breast cancer. I was pretty worried.

“Six years on, I’m well and cancer free. I’m back at work, enjoying life and spending time with my family. When you’ve had cancer, I think you look at life differently and every day is a bonus.”

The findings have the potential to be applied to other cancers caused by faulty copies of BRCA genes, such as some ovarian, prostate and pancreatic cancers.

It may also have cost-saving benefits for the NHS, as patients currently offered olaparib take the drug post-surgery for 12 months, whereas patients on the trial took the tablets pre-surgery for 12 weeks.

Addenbrooke’s consultant and trial lead, Professor Jean Abraham said: “It is rare to have a 100% survival rate in a study like this and for these aggressive types of cancer. We’re incredibly excited about the potential of this new approach, as it’s crucial that we find a way to treat and hopefully cure patients who are diagnosed with BRCA1 and BRCA2 related cancers.”

Professor Abraham, who is also Professor of Precision Breast Cancer Medicine at the University of Cambridge and Fellow at St John's College, said trialling the 48-hour gap approach followed a “chance conversation” with Mark O’Connor, chief scientist in Early Oncology R&D at nearby AstraZeneca.

Mark O’Connor added: “The Partner trial highlights the importance of detecting and treating cancer early, and the value of innovative science in informing clinical trial design, in this case using bone marrow stem cells to identify the combination gap schedule. While the findings need to be validated in a larger study, they’re incredibly exciting, and have the potential to transform outcomes for patient populations who have unmet clinical need.”

This type of collaboration between NHS, academia and industry reflects the vision of Cambridge Cancer Research Hospital, a specialist cancer research hospital due to be built on Europe’s leading life sciences campus, the Cambridge Biomedical Campus. It will bring clinical expertise from Addenbrooke’s Hospital with world-class scientists from the University of Cambridge, Cancer Research UK Cambridge Centre, and industry partners together in one location to create new diagnostics and treatments to detect the earliest signs of cancer and deliver personalised, precision medicine. Find out how the hospital and the research that takes place there promises to change the lives of cancer patients across the UK and beyond. 

Chief Executive of Cancer Research UK, Michelle Mitchell, said: “One of the best ways that we can beat cancer sooner is by making more effective use of treatments that are already available to us.

"While this research is still in its infancy, it is an exciting discovery that adding olaparib at a carefully-timed stage of treatment can potentially give patients with this specific type of breast cancer more time with their loved ones.

“Research like this can help find safer and kinder ways to treat certain types of cancer. Further studies in more patients are needed to confirm whether this new technique is safe and effective enough to be used by the NHS."

Professor Abraham and team are now planning the next phase of the research, which will look to replicate the results in a larger study and confirm that the Partner approach offers a less toxic treatment for patients as well as being more cost effective, compared to the current standard of care.

The Partner trial was sponsored by Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and the University of Cambridge, funded by Cancer Research UK and AstraZeneca, and supported by the NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre, the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Centre and Addenbrooke’s Charitable Trust (ACT).

Reference

Abraham, JE et al. Neoadjuvant PARP inhibitor scheduling in BRCA1 and BRCA2 related breast cancer: PARTNER, a randomized phase II/III trial. Nat Comms; 13 May 2025; DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-59151-0

Press release from Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

A new treatment approach significantly improves survival rates for patients with aggressive, inherited breast cancers, according to Cambridge researchers.

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The Minister joined dignitaries including Vice-Chancellor Professor Deborah Prentice, Dagmar Dolby, and Head of the Cavendish Laboratory, Professor Mete Atatüre, for the opening ceremony, which celebrated the transformative potential of the Centre for both the University and the nation.

The Ray Dolby Centre now serves as the new home of the Cavendish Laboratory, one of the world’s most renowned centres for physics. More than just a University asset, the Centre – in the Department of Physics – is a national resource: its cutting-edge research capabilities will be made available to academic and industrial researchers from institutions across the UK.

Designed to accelerate breakthroughs in quantum technologies, semiconductors, disease detection, and sustainable energy, the Centre is set to play a critical role in driving UK innovation. It anchors the new Cambridge West Innovation District, which will bring industry and academia together on an unprecedented scale. When complete, the District is expected to support 14,000 jobs and position Cambridge as Europe’s foremost hub for AI, quantum research, and climate solutions.

Ahead of the opening, Lord Livermore toured the proposed city-centre site for Cambridge’s flagship Innovation Hub, a project recently endorsed by Chancellor Rachel Reeves. This Hub will act as the UK’s answer to Boston’s Lab Central and Paris’s Station F – connecting entrepreneurs, investors, and corporate partners to catalyse high-growth innovation. 

The Hub is projected to double Cambridge’s rate of unicorn company creation, increase venture investment, and significantly grow the number of startups. It is expected to attract global R&D-intensive businesses, reinforcing the UK’s position as a science and innovation superpower.

Lord Livermore also visited the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, where he received a rooftop tour of Europe’s leading life sciences cluster at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology. There, he met with leaders from Cambridge University Health Partners (CUHP) to discuss the region’s role in advancing healthcare innovation and economic growth.

Lord Spencer Livermore, Financial Secretary to the Treasury and Minister for Growth, visited Cambridge to officially open the Ray Dolby Centre – a state-of-the-art facility that will redefine the future of physics research and innovation in the UK.

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Women with certain variants of the genes BRCA1 and BRCA2 have a high risk of developing ovarian and breast cancer. These women are recommended to have their ovaries and fallopian tubes removed at a relatively early age – between the ages 35 and 40 years for BRCA1 carriers, and between the ages 40 and 45 for BRCA2 carriers.

Previously, BSO has been shown to lead to an 80% reduction in the risk of developing ovarian cancer among these women, but there is concern that there may be unintended consequences as a result of the body’s main source of oestrogen being removed, which brings on early menopause. This can be especially challenging for BRCA1 and BRCA2 carriers with a history of breast cancer, as they may not typically receive hormone replacement therapy to manage symptoms. The overall impact of BSO in BRCA1 and BRCA2 carriers with a prior history of breast cancer remains uncertain. 

Ordinarily, researchers would assess the benefits and risks associated with BSO through randomised controlled trials, the ‘gold standard’ for testing how well treatments work. However, to do so in women who carry the BRCA1 and BRCA2 variants would be unethical as it would put them at substantially greater risk of developing ovarian cancer.

To work around this problem, a team at the University of Cambridge, in collaboration with the National Disease Registration Service (NDRS) in NHS England, turned to electronic health records and data from NHS genetic testing laboratories collected and curated by NDRS to examine the long-term outcomes of BSO among BRCA1 and BRCA2 PV carriers diagnosed with breast cancer. The results of their study, the first large-scale study of its kind, are published today in The Lancet Oncology.

The team identified a total of 3,400 women carrying one of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 cancer-causing variants (around 1,700 women for each variant). Around 850 of the BRCA1 carriers and 1,000 of the BRCA2 carriers had undergone BSO surgery.

Women who underwent BSO were around half as likely to die from cancer or any other cause over the follow-up period (a median follow-up time of 5.5 years). This reduction was more pronounced in BRCA2 carriers compared to BRCA1 carriers (a 56% reduction compared to 38% respectively). These women were also at around a 40% lower risk of developing a second cancer.

Although the team say it is impossible to say with 100% certainty that BSO causes this reduction in risk, they argue that the evidence points strongly towards this conclusion.

Importantly, the researchers found no link between BSO and increased risk of other long-term outcomes such as heart disease and stroke, or with depression. This is in contrast to previous studies that found evidence in the general population of an association between BSO and increased risk of these conditions.

First author Hend Hassan, a PhD student at the Centre for Cancer Genetic Epidemiology, Department of Public Health and Primary Care, and Wolfson College, Cambridge, said: “We know that removing the ovaries and fallopian tubes dramatically reduces the risk of ovarian cancer, but there’s been a question mark over the potential unintended consequences that might arise from the sudden onset of menopause that this causes.

“Reassuringly, our research has shown that for women with a personal history of breast cancer, this procedure brings clear benefits in terms of survival and a lower risk of other cancers without the adverse side effects such as heart conditions or depression.”

Most women undergoing BSO were white. Black and Asian women were around half as likely to have BSO compared to white women. Women who lived in less deprived areas were more likely to have BSO compared to those in the most-deprived category.

Hassan added: “Given the clear benefits that this procedure provides for at-risk women, it’s concerning that some groups of women are less likely to undergo it. We need to understand why this is and encourage uptake among these women.”

Professor Antonis Antoniou, from the Department of Public Health and Primary Care, the study’s senior author, said: “Our findings will be crucial for counselling women with cancer linked to one of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 variants, allowing them to make informed decisions about whether or not to opt for this operation.”

Professor Antoniou, who is also Director of the Cancer Data-Driven Detection programme, added: “The study also highlights the power of exceptional NHS datasets in driving impactful, clinically relevant research.”

The research was funded by Cancer Research UK, with additional support from the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre.

The University of Cambridge is fundraising for a new hospital that will transform how we diagnose and treat cancer. Cambridge Cancer Research Hospital, a partnership with Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, will treat patients across the East of England, but the research that takes place there promises to change the lives of cancer patients across the UK and beyond. Find out more here.

Reference

Hassan, H et al. Long-term health outcomes of bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy in BRCA1 and BRCA2 pathogenic variant carriers with personal history of breast cancer: a retrospective cohort study using linked electronic health records. Lancet Oncology; 7 May 2025; DOI: 10.1016/S1470-2045(25)00156-1

Women diagnosed with breast cancer who carry particular BRCA1 and BRCA2 genetic variants are offered surgery to remove the ovaries and fallopian tubes as this dramatically reduces their risk of ovarian cancer. Now, Cambridge researchers have shown that this procedure – known as bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy (BSO) – is associated with a substantial reduction in the risk of early death among these women, without any serious side-effects.

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A team of patients, clinicians, researchers and charity representatives, led by the University of Cambridge and the British Society of Audiology, surveyed over 550 people who are deaf or have hearing loss about their experiences with the NHS – making it the largest study of its kind. Their findings, reported in the journal PLOS One, highlight systemic failures and suggest changes and recommendations for improving deaf-aware communication in the NHS.

• View a version of this story in British Sign Language (BSL). 

“The real power of this study lies in the stories people shared,” said lead author Dr Bhavisha Parmar from Cambridge’s Department of Clinical Neurosciences (Sound Lab) and UCL Ear Institute. “Patients weren’t just rating their experiences – they were telling us how these barriers affect every part of their healthcare journey, and in many cases, why they avoid healthcare altogether.”

The study found that despite being a legal requirement under the Accessible Information Standards, NHS patients have inadequate and inconsistent access to British Sign Language (BSL) interpreters and other accessibility accommodations such as hearing loop systems.

Nearly two-thirds (64.4%) of respondents reported missing at least half of the important information during appointments, and only a third (32%) expressed satisfaction with NHS staff communication skills. Respondents said they had to rely on family members or advocates to communicate with healthcare workers, raising privacy and consent concerns.

The research found that communication barriers extend across the entire patient journey – from booking appointments to receiving results. Simple actions, like calling a patient’s name in a waiting room or giving instructions during a scan, become anxiety-inducing when basic accommodations are lacking. Respondents noted that hearing aids often must be removed for X-rays or MRI scans, leaving them struggling or unable to follow verbal instructions.

“We heard over and over that patients fear missing their name being called, or avoid making appointments altogether,” said Parmar. “These aren’t isolated experiences – this is a systemic issue.”

The idea for the study was sparked by real-life experiences shared online by NHS patients, particularly audiology patients– a field Parmar believes should lead by example. “We’re audiologists: we see more patients with hearing loss than anyone else in the NHS,” she said. “If we’re not deaf-aware, then how can we expect other parts of the NHS to be?”

The research team included NHS patients with deafness or hearing loss, who contributed to study design, data analysis, and report writing. As part of the study, they received training in research methods, ensuring the work was grounded in and reflective of lived experiences.

Co-author Zara Musker, current England Deaf Women’s futsal captain and winner of deaf sports personality of the year 2023 said her disappointing experiences with the NHS in part motivated her to qualify as an audiologist.

“The research is extremely important as I have faced my own experiences of inadequate access, and lack of deaf awareness in NHS healthcare not just in the appointment room but the whole process of booking appointments, being in the waiting room, interacting with clinicians and receiving important healthcare information,” said Musker. “I really hope that the results will really highlight that NHS services are still not meeting the needs of patients. Despite this, the study also highlights ways that the NHS can improve, and recommendations are suggested by those who face these barriers within healthcare.”

The researchers have also released a set of recommendations that could improve accessibility in the NHS, such as:

• Mandatory deaf awareness and communication training for NHS staff
• Consistent provision of interpreters and alert systems across all NHS sites
• Infrastructure improvements, such as text-based appointment systems and visual waiting room alerts
• The creation of walk-through assessments at hospitals to ensure accessibility across the full patient journey

“This is a legal obligation, not a luxury,” said Parmar. “No one should have to write down their symptoms in a GP appointment or worry they’ll miss their name being called in a waiting room. These are simple, solvable issues.”

A practice guidance resource – developed in consultation with patients and driven by this research – is open for feedback until 15 June and will be made publicly available as a free tool to help clinicians and NHS services improve deaf awareness. People can submit feedback at the British Society of Audiology website.

“Ultimately, better communication for deaf patients benefits everyone,” Parmar said. “We’re not just pointing out problems – we’re providing practical solutions.”

Reference:
Bhavisha Parmar et al. ‘“I always feel like I’m the first deaf person they have ever met.” Deaf Awareness, Accessibility and Communication in the United Kingdom's National Health Service (NHS): How can we do better?’ PLOS One (2025). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0322850

A majority of individuals who are deaf or have hearing loss face significant communication barriers when accessing care through the National Health Service (NHS), with nearly two-thirds of patients missing half or more of vital information shared during appointments.

The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright ©University of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – 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.

Young people with a diagnosable mental health condition report differences in their experiences of social media compared to those without a condition, including greater dissatisfaction with online friend counts and more time spent on social media sites.

This is according to a new study led by the University of Cambridge, which suggests that adolescents with ‘internalising’ conditions such as anxiety and depression report feeling particularly affected by social media.

Young people with these conditions are more likely to report comparing themselves to others on social media, feeling a lack of self-control over time spent on the platforms, as well as changes in mood due to the likes and comments received.

Researchers found that adolescents with any mental health condition report spending more time on social media than those without a mental health condition, amounting to an average of roughly 50 minutes extra on a typical day.*

The study, led by Cambridge’s Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (MRC CBU), analysed data from a survey of 3,340 adolescents in the UK aged between 11 and 19 years old, conducted by NHS Digital in 2017.**

It is one of the first studies on social media use among adolescents to utilise multi-informant clinical assessments of mental health. These were produced by professional clinical raters interviewing young people, along with their parents and teachers in some cases.***

“The link between social media use and youth mental health is hotly debated, but hardly any studies look at young people already struggling with clinical-level mental health symptoms,” said Luisa Fassi, a researcher at Cambridge’s MRC CBU and lead author of the study, published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

“Our study doesn’t establish a causal link, but it does show that young people with mental health conditions use social media differently than young people without a condition.

“This could be because mental health conditions shape the way adolescents interact with online platforms, or perhaps social media use contributes to their symptoms. At this stage, we can’t say which comes first – only that these differences exist,” Fassi said.

The researchers developed high benchmarks for the study based on existing research into sleep, physical activity and mental health. Only findings with comparable levels of association to how sleep and exercise differ between people with and without mental health conditions were deemed significant.

While mental health was measured with clinical-level assessments, social media use came from questionnaires completed by study participants, who were not asked about specific platforms.****

As well as time spent on social media, all mental health conditions were linked to greater dissatisfaction with the number of online friends. “Friendships are crucial during adolescence as they shape identity development,” said Fassi.

“Social media platforms assign a concrete number to friendships, making social comparisons more conspicuous. For young people struggling with mental health conditions, this may increase existing feelings of rejection or inadequacy.”

Researchers looked at differences in social media use between young people with internalising conditions, such as anxiety, depression and PTSD, and externalising conditions, such as ADHD or conduct disorders.

The majority of differences in social media use were reported by young people with internalising conditions. For example, ‘social comparison’ – comparing themselves to others online – was twice as high in adolescents with internalising conditions (48%, around one in two) than for those without a mental health condition (24%, around one in four).

Adolescents with internalising conditions were also more likely to report mood changes in response to social media feedback (28%, around 1 in 4) compared to those without a mental health condition (13%, around 1 in 8). They also reported lower levels of self-control over time spent on social media and a reduced willingness to be honest about their emotional state when online.*****

“Some of the differences in how young people with anxiety and depression use social media reflect what we already know about their offline experiences. Social comparison is a well-documented part of everyday life for these young people, and our study shows that this pattern extends to their online world as well,” Fassi said.

By contrast, other than time spent on social media, researchers found few differences between young people with externalising conditions and those without a condition.

“Our findings provide important insights for clinical practice, and could help to inform future guidelines for early intervention,” said Cambridge’s Dr Amy Orben, senior author of the study.

“However, this study has only scratched the surface of the complex interplay between social media use and mental health. The fact that this is one of the first large-scale and high-quality studies of its kind shows the lack of systemic investment in this space.”

Added Fassi: “So many factors can be behind why someone develops a mental health condition, and it's very hard to get at whether social media use is one of them.”

“A huge question like this needs lots of research that combines experimental designs with objective social media data on what young people are actually seeing and doing online.”

“We need to understand how different types of social media content and activities affect young people with a range of mental health conditions such as those living with eating disorders, ADHD, or depression. Without including these understudied groups, we risk missing the full picture.”

Notes:

*Study participants were asked to rate their social media use on a typical school day and a typical weekend or holiday day. This was given as a nine-point scale, ranging from less than 30 minutes to over seven hours. Responses from adolescents with any mental health condition approached on average ‘three to four hours’, compared to adolescents without a condition, who averaged between ‘one to two hours’ and ‘two to three hours’.

The category of all mental health conditions in the study includes several conditions that are classed as neither internalising or externalising, such as sleep disorders and psychosis. However, the numbers of adolescents suffering from these are comparatively small.

**The survey was conducted as part of NHS Digital’s Mental Health of Children and Young People Survey (MHCYP) and is nationally representative of this age group in the UK. The researchers only used data from those who provided answers on social media use (50% male, 50% female).

*** Previous studies have mainly used self-reported questionnaires (e.g. a depression severity questionnaire) to capture mental health symptoms and conditions in participants.

**** The researchers point out that, as responses on social media use were self-reported, those with mental health conditions may be perceiving they spend more time on social media rather than actually doing so. They say that further research with objective data is required to provide definitive answers.

***** For data on social media use, study participants were asked to rate the extent to which they agree with a series of statements on a five-point Likert scale. The statements ranged from ‘I compare myself to others on social media’ to ‘I am happy with the number of friends I have on social media’.

Researchers divided responses into 'disagree' (responses 1 to 3) and 'agree' (responses 4 and 5) and then calculated the proportion of adolescents agreeing separately for each diagnostic group to aid with public communication of the findings.

One of the first studies in this area to use clinical-level diagnoses reveals a range of differences between young people with and without mental health conditions when it comes to social media – from changes in mood to time spent on sites.

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But the study of adolescents in the US also showed that even those with better sleeping habits were not reaching the amount of sleep recommended for their age group.

Sleep plays an important role in helping our bodies function. It is thought that while we are asleep, toxins that have built up in our brains are cleared out, and brain connections are consolidated and pruned, enhancing memory, learning, and problem-solving skills. Sleep has also been shown to boost our immune systems and improve our mental health.

During adolescence, our sleep patterns change. We tend to start going to bed later and sleeping less, which affects our body clocks. All of this coincides with a period of important development in our brain function and cognitive development. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine says that the ideal amount of sleep during this period is between eight- and 10-hours’ sleep.

Professor Barbara Sahakian from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge said: “Regularly getting a good night’s sleep is important in helping us function properly, but while we know a lot about sleep in adulthood and later life, we know surprisingly little about sleep in adolescence, even though this is a crucial time in our development. How long do young people sleep for, for example, and what impact does this have on their brain function and cognitive performance?”

Studies looking at how much sleep adolescents get usually rely on self-reporting, which can be inaccurate. To get around this, a team led by researchers at Fudan University, Shanghai, and the University of Cambridge turned to data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, the largest long-term study of brain development and child health in the United States.

As part of the ABCD Study, more than 3,200 adolescents aged 11-12 years old had been given FitBits, allowing the researchers to look at objective data on their sleep patterns and to compare it against brain scans and results from cognitive tests. The team double-checked their results against two additional groups of 13-14 years old, totalling around 1,190 participants. The results are published today in Cell Reports.

The team found that the adolescents could be divided broadly into one of three groups:

Group One, accounting for around 39% of participants, slept an average (mean) of 7 hours 10 mins. They tended to go to bed and fall asleep the latest and wake up the earliest.

Group Two, accounting for 24% of participants, slept an average of 7 hours 21 mins. They had average levels across all sleep characteristics.

Group Three, accounting for 37% of participants, slept an average of 7 hours 25 mins. They tended to go to bed and fall asleep the earliest and had lower heart rates during sleep.

Although the researchers found no significant differences in school achievement between the groups, when it came to cognitive tests looking at aspects such as vocabulary, reading, problem solving and focus, Group Three performed better than Group Two, which in turn performed better than Group One.

Group Three also had the largest brain volume and best brain functions, with Group One the smallest volume and poorest brain functions.

Professor Sahakian said: “Even though the differences in the amount of sleep that each group got was relatively small, at just over a quarter-of-an-hour between the best and worst sleepers, we could still see differences in brain structure and activity and in how well they did at tasks. This drives home to us just how important it is to have a good night’s sleep at this important time in life.”

First author Dr Qing Ma from Fudan University said: “Although our study can’t answer conclusively whether young people have better brain function and perform better at tests because they sleep better, there are a number of studies that would support this idea. For example, research has shown the benefits of sleep on memory, especially on memory consolidation, which is important for learning.”

The researchers also assessed the participants’ heart rates, finding that Group Three had the lowest heart rates across the sleep states and Group One the highest. Lower heart rates are usually a sign of better health, whereas higher rates often accompany poor sleep quality like restless sleep, frequent awakenings and excessive daytime sleepiness.

Because the ABCD Study is a longitudinal study – that is, one that follows its participants over time – the team was able to show that the differences in sleep patterns, brain structure and function, and cognitive performance, tended be present two years before and two years after the snapshot that they looked at.

Senior author Dr Wei Cheng from Fudan University added: “Given the importance of sleep, we now need to look at why some children go to bed later and sleep less than others. Is it because of playing videogames or smartphones, for example, or is it just that their body clocks do not tell them it’s time to sleep until later?”

The research was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China, National Natural Science Foundation of China, National Postdoctoral Foundation of China and Shanghai Postdoctoral Excellence Program. The ABCD Study is supported by the National Institutes of Health.

Reference

Ma, Q et al. Neural correlates of device-based sleep characteristics in adolescents. Cell Reports; 22 Apr 2025; DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2025.115565

Adolescents who sleep for longer – and from an earlier bedtime – than their peers tend to have improved brain function and perform better at cognitive tests, researchers from the UK and China have shown.

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The UNESCO Memory of the World Programme serves as the documentary heritage equivalent of UNESCO World Heritage Sites, protecting invaluable records that tell the story of human civilisation.

A collaboration between Cambridge University Library, the Natural History Museum, the Linnean Society of London, English Heritage’s Down House, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the National Library of Scotland, the Charles Darwin documentary heritage archive provides a unique window into the life and work of one of the world’s most influential natural scientists.

The complete archive, comprising over 20,000 items across the six major institutions, includes Darwin’s records illustrating the development of his ground-breaking theory of evolution and extensive global travels.

At Cambridge University Library, the Darwin Archive is a significant collection of Darwin’s books, experimental notes, correspondence, and photographs, representing his scientific and personal activities throughout his life.

The collection in Cambridge includes Darwin’s pocket notebooks recording early statements of key ideas contributing to his theory of evolution, notably that species are not stable. These provide important insights into the development of his thought and feature the iconic ‘Tree of Life’ diagram which he drew on his return from the voyage of the HMS Beagle.

The Linnean Society of London holds several of Darwin's letters, manuscripts and books. Here is also home to John Collier’s original iconic portrait of Charles Darwin, commissioned by the Society and painted in 1883 to commemorate the first reading of the theory of evolution by natural selection at a Linnean Society meeting in 1858.

At the Natural History Museum, a letter written to his wife Emma in 1844, provides insight into Darwin’s perceived significance of his species theory research and holds instructions on what she should do in the case of his sudden death. This is alongside other letters to Museum staff and other family members which demonstrate the broad scope of his scientific thinking, research and communication ranging from caterpillars to volcanoes, dahlias to ants and the taking of photographs for his third publication Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

Correspondence with Darwin’s publisher John Murray, held at the National Library of Scotland document the transformation of his research into print, including the ground-breaking On the Origin of Species publication.

At the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, documents include a highly significant collection of 44 letters sent around the HMS Beagle expedition from Darwin to Professor John Stevens Henslow, detailing his travels and the genesis of his theory of evolution as he comes in contact with new plants, wildlife and fossils; as well as a rare sketch of the orchid Gavilea patagonica made by Darwin. Other items include a letter from Darwin to his dear friend Joseph Hooker, Director of Kew in which he requests cotton seeds from Kew's collections for his research.

Down House (English Heritage) in Kent was both a family home and a place of work where Darwin pursued his scientific interests, carried out experiments, and researched and wrote his many ground-breaking publications until his death in 1882.

The extensive collection amassed by Darwin during his 40 years at Down paint a picture of Darwin’s professional and personal life and the intersection of the two. The archive here includes over 200 books from Darwin’s personal collection, account books, diaries, the Journal of the Voyage of the Beagle MSS, and Beagle notebooks and letters. More personal items include scrapbooks, Emma Darwin’s photograph album and Charles Darwin’s will. The collection at Down House has been mainly assembled through the generous donations of Darwin’s descendants.

This inscription marks a significant milestone in recognising Darwin’s legacy, as it brings together materials held by multiple institutions across the UK for the first time, ensuring that his work's scientific, cultural, and historical value is preserved for future generations.

In line with the ideals of the UNESCO Memory of the World Programme, much of the Darwin archive can be viewed by the public at the partner institutions and locations.

The UNESCO International Memory of the World Register includes some of the UK’s most treasured documentary heritage, such as the Domesday Book, the Shakespeare Documents, alongside more contemporary materials, including the personal archive of Sir Winston Churchill. The Charles Darwin archive now joins this esteemed list, underscoring its historical, scientific, and cultural significance.

The inscription of the Charles Darwin archive comes as part of UNESCO’s latest recognition of 75 archives worldwide onto the International Memory of the World Register.

These newly inscribed collections include a diverse range of documents, such as the Draft of the International Bill of Human Rights, the papers of Friedrich Nietzche, and the Steles of Shaolin Temple (566-1990) in China.

Baroness Chapman of Darlington, Minister of State for International Development, Latin America and Caribbean, Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) said: "The recognition of the Charles Darwin archive on UNESCO's International Memory of the World Register is a proud moment for British science and heritage.

"Darwin's work fundamentally changed our understanding of the natural world and continues to inspire scientific exploration to this day. By bringing together extraordinary material from our world class British institutions, this archive ensures that Darwin's groundbreaking work remains accessible to researchers, students, and curious minds across the globe."

Ruth Padel, FRSL, FZS, poet, conservationist, great-great-grand-daughter of Charles Darwin and King’s College London Professor of Poetry Emerita, said: "How wonderful to see Darwin’s connections to so many outstanding scientific and cultural institutions in the UK reflected in the recognition of his archive on the UNESCO Memory of the World International Register. All these institutions are open to the public so everyone will have access to his documentary heritage."

Dr Jessica Gardner, University Librarian and Director of Library Services at Cambridge University Libraries (CUL) said: "For all Charles Darwin gave the world, we are delighted by the UNESCO recognition in the Memory of the World of the exceptional scientific and heritage significance of his remarkable archive held within eminent UK institutions.

"Cambridge University Library is home to over 9,000 letters to and from Darwin, as well as his handwritten experimental notebooks, publications, and photographs which have together fostered decades of scholarship and public enjoyment through exhibition, education for schools, and online access.

"We could not be prouder of UNESCO’s recognition of this remarkable documentary heritage at the University of Cambridge, where Darwin was a student at Christ’s College and where his family connections run deep across the city, and are reflected in his namesake, Darwin College."

Read the full, illustrated version of this story on the University Library's site.

Documentary heritage relating to the life and work of Charles Darwin has been recognised on the prestigious UNESCO International Memory of the World Register, highlighting its critical importance to global science and the necessity of its long-term preservation and accessibility.

The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright ©University of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – 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.

Scientists at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Mitochondrial Biology Unit, University of Cambridge, have worked out the structure of this machine and shown how it operates like the lock on a canal to transport pyruvate – a molecule generated in the body from the breakdown of sugars – into our mitochondria.

Known as the mitochondrial pyruvate carrier, this molecular machine was first proposed to exist in 1971, but it has taken until now for scientists to visualise its structure at the atomic scale using cryo-electron microscopy, a technique used to magnify an image of an object to around 165,000 times its real size. Details are published today in Science Advances.

Dr Sotiria Tavoulari, a Senior Research Associate from the University of Cambridge, who first determined the composition of this molecular machine, said: “Sugars in our diet provide energy for our bodies to function. When they are broken down inside our cells they produce pyruvate, but to get the most out of this molecule it needs to be transferred inside the cell’s powerhouses, the mitochondria. There, it helps increase 15-fold the energy produced in the form of the cellular fuel ATP.”

Maximilian Sichrovsky, a PhD student at Hughes Hall and joint first author of the study, said: “Getting pyruvate into our mitochondria sounds straightforward, but until now we haven’t been able to understand the mechanism of how this process occurs. Using state-of-the-art cryo-electron microscopy, we’ve been able to show not only what this transporter looks like, but exactly how it works. It’s an extremely important process, and understanding it could lead to new treatments for a range of different conditions.”

Mitochondria are surrounded by two membranes. The outer one is porous, and pyruvate can easily pass through, but the inner membrane is impermeable to pyruvate. To transport pyruvate into the mitochondrion, first an outer ‘gate’ of the carrier opens, allowing pyruvate to enter the carrier. This gate then closes, and the inner gate opens, allowing the molecule to pass through into the mitochondrion.

“It works like the locks on a canal but on the molecular scale,” said Professor Edmund Kunji from the MRC Mitochondrial Biology Unit, and a Fellow at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. “There, a gate opens at one end, allowing the boat to enter. It then closes and the gate at the opposite end opens to allow the boat smooth transit through.”

Because of its central role in controlling the way mitochondria operate to produce energy, this carrier is now recognised as a promising drug target for a range of conditions, including diabetes, fatty liver disease, Parkinson’s disease, specific cancers, and even hair loss.

Pyruvate is not the only energy source available to us. Our cells can also take their energy from fats stored in the body or from amino acids in proteins. Blocking the pyruvate carrier would force the body to look elsewhere for its fuel – creating opportunities to treat a number of diseases. In fatty liver disease, for example, blocking access to pyruvate entry into mitochondria could encourage the body to use potentially dangerous fat that has been stored in liver cells.

Likewise, there are certain tumour cells that rely on pyruvate metabolism, such as in some types of prostate cancer. These cancers tend to be very ‘hungry’, producing excess pyruvate transport carriers to ensure they can feed more. Blocking the carrier could then starve these cancer cells of the energy they need to survive, killing them.

Previous studies have also suggested that inhibiting the mitochondrial pyruvate carrier may reverse hair loss. Activation of human follicle cells, which are responsible for hair growth, relies on metabolism and, in particular, the generation of lactate. When the mitochondrial pyruvate carrier is blocked from entering the mitochondria in these cells, it is instead converted to lactate.

Professor Kunji said: “Drugs inhibiting the function of the carrier can remodel how mitochondria work, which can be beneficial in certain conditions. Electron microscopy allows us to visualise exactly how these drugs bind inside the carrier to jam it – a spanner in the works, you could say. This creates new opportunities for structure-based drug design in order to develop better, more targeted drugs. This will be a real game changer.”

The research was supported by the Medical Research Council and was a collaboration with the groups of Professors Vanessa Leone at the Medical College of Wisconsin, Lucy Forrest at the National Institutes of Health, and Jan Steyaert at the Free University of Brussels.

Reference

Sichrovsky, M, Lacabanne, D, Ruprecht, JJ & Rana, JJ et al. Molecular basis of pyruvate transport and inhibition of the human mitochondrial pyruvate carrier. Sci Adv; 18 Apr 2025; DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adw1489

Fifty years since its discovery, scientists have finally worked out how a molecular machine found in mitochondria, the ‘powerhouses’ of our cells, allows us to make the fuel we need from sugars, a process vital to all life on Earth.

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Around 3,100 people are diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) each year in the UK. It is an aggressive form of blood cancer that is very difficult to treat. Thanks to recent advances, individuals at high risk of AML can be identified years in advance using blood tests and blood DNA analysis, but there’s no suitable treatment that can prevent them from developing the disease.

In this study, Professor George Vassiliou and colleagues at the University of Cambridge investigated how to prevent abnormal blood stem cells with genetic changes from progressing to become AML. The work focused on the most common genetic change, which affects a gene called DNMT3A and is responsible for starting 10-15% of AML cases.

Professor Vassiliou, from the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute at the University of Cambridge and Honorary Consultant Haematologist at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (CUH) co-led the study. He said: “Blood cancer poses unique challenges compared to solid cancers like breast or prostate, which can be surgically removed if identified early. With blood cancers, we need to identify people at risk and then use medical treatments to stop cancer progression throughout the body.”

The research team examined blood stem cells from mice with the same changes in DNMT3A as seen in the pre-cancerous cells in humans. Using a genome-wide screening technique, they showed that these cells depend more on mitochondrial metabolism than healthy cells, making this a potential weak spot. The researchers went on to confirm that metformin, and other mitochondria-targeting drugs, substantially slowed the growth of mutation-bearing blood cells in mice. Further experiments also showed that metformin could have the same effect on human blood cells with the DNMT3A mutation.

Dr Malgorzata Gozdecka, Senior Research Associate at the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute and first author of the research said: “Metformin is a drug that impacts mitochondrial metabolism, and these pre-cancerous cells need this energy to keep growing. By blocking this process, we stop the cells from expanding and progressing towards AML, whilst also reversing other effects of the mutated DNMT3A gene.”

In addition, the study looked at data from over 412,000 UK Biobank volunteers and found that people taking metformin were less likely to have changes in the DNMT3A gene. This link remained even after accounting for factors that could have confounded the results such as diabetes status and BMI.

Professor Brian Huntly, Head of the Department of Haematology at the University of Cambridge, Honorary Consultant Haematologist at CUH, and joint lead author of the research, added: “Metformin appears highly specific to this mutation rather than being a generic treatment. That specificity makes it especially compelling as a targeted prevention strategy.

“We’ve done the extensive research all the way from cell-based studies to human data, so we’re now at the point where we have a made a strong case for moving ahead with clinical trials. Importantly, metformin’s lack of toxicity will be a major advantage as it is already used by millions of people worldwide with a well-established safety profile.”

The results of the study, funded by Blood Cancer UK with additional support from Cancer Research UK, the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (USA) and the Wellcome Trust, are published in Nature.

Dr Rubina Ahmed, Director of Research at Blood Cancer UK, said: “Blood cancer is the third biggest cancer killer in the UK, with over 280,000 people currently living with the disease. Our Blood Cancer Action plan shed light on the shockingly low survival for acute myeloid leukaemia, with only around 2 in 10 surviving for 5 years, and we urgently need better strategies to save lives. Repurposing safe, widely available drugs like metformin means we could potentially get new treatments to people faster, without the need for lengthy drug development pipelines.”

The next phase of this research will focus on clinical trials to test metformin’s effectiveness in people with changes in DNMT3A at increased risk of developing AML.  With metformin already approved and widely used for diabetes, this repurposing strategy could dramatically reduce the time it takes to bring a new preventive therapy to patients.

Tanya Hollands, Research Information Manager at Cancer Research UK, who contributed funding for the lab-based screening in mice, said: “It's important that we work to find new ways to slow down or prevent AML in people at high risk. Therefore, it’s positive that the findings of this study suggest a possible link between a commonly-used diabetes drug and prevention of AML progression in some people. While this early-stage research is promising, clinical trials are now needed to find out if this drug could benefit people. We look forward to seeing how this work progresses.”

Reference
Gozdecka, M et al. Mitochondrial metabolism sustains DNMT3A-R882-mutant clonal haematopoiesis. Nature; 16 Apr 2025; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08980-6

Adapted from a press release from Blood Cancer UK

Metformin, a widely used and affordable diabetes drug, could prevent a form of acute myeloid leukaemia in people at high risk of the disease, a study in mice has suggested. Further research in clinical trials will be needed to confirm this works for patients.

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The ‘Barbarian Conspiracy’ of 367 CE was one of the most severe threats to Rome’s hold on Britain since the Boudiccan revolt three centuries earlier. Contemporary sources indicate that components of the garrison on Hadrian’s wall rebelled and allowed the Picts to attack the Roman province by land and sea. Simultaneously, the Scotti from modern-day Ireland invaded broadly in the west, and Saxons from the continent landed in the south.

Senior Roman commanders were captured or killed, and some soldiers reportedly deserted and joined the invaders. Throughout the spring and summer, small groups roamed and plundered the countryside. Britain’s descent into anarchy was disastrous for Rome and it took two years for generals dispatched by Valentian I, Emperor of the Western Roman Empire, to restore order. The final remnants of official Roman administration left Britain some 40 years later around 410 CE.

The University of Cambridge-led study, published today in Climatic Change, used oak tree-ring records to reconstruct temperature and precipitation levels in southern Britain during and after the ‘Barbarian Conspiracy’ in 367 CE. Combining this data with surviving Roman accounts, the researchers argue that severe summer droughts in 364, 365 and 366 CE were a driving force in these pivotal events.

First author Charles Norman, from Cambridge’s Department of Geography, said: “We don’t have much archaeological evidence for the ‘Barbarian Conspiracy’. Written accounts from the period give some background, but our findings provide an explanation for the catalyst of this major event.”

The researchers found that southern Britain experienced an exceptional sequence of remarkably dry summers from 364 to 366 CE. In the period 350 to 500 CE, average monthly reconstructed rainfall in the main growing season (April–July) was 51 mm. But in 364 CE, it fell to just 29mm. 365 CE was even worse with 28mm, and 37mm the following year kept the area in crisis.

Professor Ulf Büntgen, from Cambridge’s Department of Geography, said: “Three consecutive droughts would have had a devastating impact on the productivity of Roman Britain’s most important agricultural region. As Roman writers tell us, this resulted in food shortages with all of the destabilising societal effects this brings.”

Between 1836 and 2024 CE, southern Britain only experienced droughts of a similar magnitude seven times – mostly in recent decades, and none of these were consecutive, emphasising how exceptional these droughts were in Roman times. The researchers identified no other major droughts in southern Britain in the period 350–500 CE and found that other parts of northwestern Europe escaped these conditions.

Roman Britain’s main produce were crops like spelt wheat and six-row barley. Because the province had a wet climate, sowing these crops in spring was more viable than in winter, but this made them vulnerable to late spring and early summer moisture deficits, and early summer droughts could lead to total crop failure.

The researchers point to surviving accounts written by Roman chroniclers to corroborate these drought-driven grain deficits. By 367 CE, Ammianus Marcellinus described the population of Britain as in the ‘utmost conditions of famine’.

“Drought from 364 to 366 CE would have impacted spring-sown crop growth substantially, triggering poor harvests,” Charles Norman said. “This would have reduced the grain supply to Hadrian’s Wall, providing a plausible motive for the rebellion there which allowed the Picts into northern Britain.”

The study suggests that given the crucial role of grain in the contract between soldiers and the army, grain deficits may have contributed to other desertions in this period, and therefore a general weakening of the Roman army in Britain. In addition, the geographic isolation of Roman Britain likely combined with the severity of the prolonged drought to reduce the ability of Rome to alleviate the deficits.

Ultimately the researchers argue that military and societal breakdown in Roman Britain provided an ideal opportunity for peripheral tribes, including the Picts, Scotti and Saxons, to invade the province en masse with the intention of raiding rather than conquest. Their finding that the most severe conditions were restricted to southern Britain undermines the idea that famines in other provinces might have forced these tribes to invade.

Andreas Rzepecki, from the Generaldirektion Kulturelles Erbe Rheinland-Pfalz, said: “Our findings align with the accounts of Roman chroniclers and the seemingly coordinated nature of the ‘Conspiracy’ suggests an organised movement of strong onto weak, rather than a more chaotic assault had the invaders been in a state of desperation.”

“The prolonged and extreme drought seems to have occurred during a particularly poor period for Roman Britain, in which food and military resources were being stripped for the Rhine frontier, while immigratory pressures increased.”

“These factors limited resilience, and meant a drought induced, partial-military rebellion and subsequent external invasion were able to overwhelm the weakened defences.”

The researchers expanded their climate-conflict analysis to the entire Roman Empire for the period 350–476 CE. They reconstructed the climate conditions immediately before and after 106 battles and found that a statistically significant number of battles were fought following dry years.

Tatiana Bebchuk, from Cambridge’s Department of Geography, said: “The relationship between climate and conflict is becoming increasingly clear in our own time so these findings aren’t just important for historians. Extreme climate conditions lead to hunger, which can lead to societal challenges, which eventually lead to outright conflict.”

Charles Norman, Ulf Büntgen, Paul Krusic and Tatiana Bebchuk are based at the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge; Lothar Schwinden and Andreas Rzepecki are from the Generaldirektion Kulturelles Erbe Rheinland-Pfalz in Trier. Ulf Büntgen is also affiliated with the Global Change Research Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences and the Department of Geography, Masaryk University in Brno.

Reference

C Norman, L Schwinden, P Krusic, A Rzepecki, T Bebchuk, U Büntgen, ‘Droughts and conflicts during the late Roman period’, Climatic Change (2025). DOI: 10.1007/s10584-025-03925-4

Funding

Charles Norman was supported by Wolfson College, University of Cambridge (John Hughes PhD Studentship). Ulf Büntgen received funding from the Czech Science Foundation (# 23-08049S; Hydro8), the ERC Advanced Grant (# 882727; Monostar), and the ERC Synergy Grant (# 101118880; Synergy-Plague).

Three consecutive years of drought contributed to the ‘Barbarian Conspiracy’, a pivotal moment in the history of Roman Britain, a new Cambridge-led study reveals. Researchers argue that Picts, Scotti and Saxons took advantage of famine and societal breakdown caused by an extreme period of drought to inflict crushing blows on weakened Roman defences in 367 CE. While Rome eventually restored order, some historians argue that the province never fully recovered.

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The metals have previously been shown to damage the health of pollinators, which ingest them in nectar as they feed, leading to reduced population sizes and death. Even low nectar metal levels can have long-term effects, by affecting bees’ learning and memory - which impacts their foraging ability.

Researchers have found that common plants including white clover and bindweed, which are vital forage for pollinators in cities, can accumulate arsenic, cadmium, chromium and lead from contaminated soils.

Metal contamination is an issue in the soils of cities worldwide, with the level of contamination usually increasing with the age of a city. The metals come from a huge range of sources including cement dust and mining.

The researchers say soils in cities should be tested for metals before sowing wildflowers and if necessary, polluted areas should be cleaned up before new wildflower habitats are established.

The study highlights the importance of growing the right species of wildflowers to suit the soil conditions.

Reducing the risk of metal exposure is critical for the success of urban pollinator conservation schemes. The researchers say it is important to manage wildflower species that self-seed on contaminated urban land, for example by frequent mowing to limit flowering - which reduces the transfer of metals from the soil to the bees.

The results are published today in the journal Ecology and Evolution.

Dr Sarah Scott in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology and first author of the report, said: “It’s really important to have wildflowers as a food source for the bees, and our results should not discourage people from planting wildflowers in towns and cities.

“We hope this study will raise awareness that soil health is also important for bee health. Before planting wildflowers in urban areas to attract bees and other pollinators, it’s important to consider the history of the land and what might be in the soil – and if necessary find out whether there’s a local soil testing and cleanup service available first.”

The study was carried out in the post-industrial US city of Cleveland, Ohio, which has over 33,700 vacant lots left as people have moved away from the area. In the past, iron and steel production, oil refining and car manufacturing went on there. But any land that was previously the site of human activity may be contaminated with traces of metals.

To get their results, the researchers extracted nectar from a range of self-seeded flowering plants that commonly attract pollinating insects, found growing on disused land across the city. They tested this for the presence of arsenic, cadmium, chromium and lead. Lead was consistently found at the highest concentrations, reflecting the state of the soils in the city.

The researchers found that different species of plant accumulate different amounts, and types, of the metals. Overall, the bright blue-flowered chicory plant (Cichorium intybus) accumulated the largest total metal concentration, followed by white clover (Trifolium repens), wild carrot (Daucus carota) and bindweed (Convolvulus arvensis). These plants are all vital forage for pollinators in cities - including cities in the UK - providing a consistent supply of nectar across locations and seasons.

There is growing evidence that wild pollinator populations have dropped by over 50% in the last 50 years, caused primarily by changes in land use and management across the globe. Climate change and pesticide use also play a role; overall the primary cause of decline is the loss of flower-rich habitat.

Pollinators play a vital role in food production: many plants, including apple and tomato, require pollination in order to develop fruit. Natural ‘pollination services’ are estimated to add billions of dollars to global crop productivity.

Scott said: “Climate change feels so overwhelming, but simply planting flowers in certain areas can help towards conserving pollinators, which is a realistic way for people to make a positive impact on the environment.”

The research was funded primarily by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

Reference
Scott, SB and Gardiner, MM: ‘Trace metals in nectar of important urban pollinator forage plants: A direct exposure risk to pollinators and nectar-feeding animals in cities.’ Ecology and Evolution, April 2025. DOI: 10.1002/ece3.71238

Wildflowers growing on land previously used for buildings and factories can accumulate lead, arsenic and other metal contaminants from the soil, which are consumed by pollinators as they feed, a new study has found.

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Thousands of spectators lined the banks of the River Thames on 13 April to witness a dramatic afternoon of action, with millions more following live on the BBC.

Cambridge Women secured their eighth consecutive win in the 79th Women’s Boat Race, extending their overall record to 49 victories to Oxford’s 30. The Men’s crew, too, were victorious in defending their title in the 170th edition of the event, notching up their 88th win, with Oxford sitting on 81.

Goldie, the Cambridge Men’s Reserve Crew, won the Men’s Reserve Race, while Blondie, the Cambridge Women’s Reserve Crew, won the Women’s Reserve Race. And the day before, the 2025 Lightweight Boat Race also saw two wins for Cambridge.

Cambridge’s Claire Collins said it was an incredible feeling to win the race. 

“This is so cool, it’s really an incredible honour to share this with the whole club,” she said.

The Women’s Race was stopped initially after an oar clash, but Umpire Sir Matthew Pinsent allowed the race to resume after a restart. Claire said that the crew had prepared for eventualities such as a restart and so were able to lean on their training when it happened.

“I had total confidence in the crew to regroup. Our focus was to get back on pace and get going as soon as possible and that’s what we did.”

For Cambridge Men’s President Luca Ferraro, it was his final Boat Roat campaign, having raced in the Blue Boat for the last three years, winning the last two.

He said: “It was a great race. The guys really stepped up. That’s something that our Coach Rob Baker said to us before we went out there, that each of us had to step up individually and come together and play our part in what we were about to do. I couldn’t be prouder of the guys, they really delivered today.”

Professor Deborah Prentice, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, congratulated all the crews following the wins.

“I am in awe of these students and what they have achieved, and what Cambridge University Boat Club has been able to create,” she said.

“These students are out in the early hours of the morning training and then trying to make it to 9am lectures. It’s so inspiring. And a complete clean sweep – this was an incredibly impressive showing by Cambridge, I am so proud of them.”

The Cambridge Blue Boats featured student athletes drawn from Christ’s College, Downing College, Emmanuel College, Gonville & Caius, Hughes Hall, Jesus College, Pembroke College, Peterhouse, St Edmund’s, and St John’s.

Cambridge is celebrating a complete clean sweep at The Boat Race 2025, with victories in all 4 openweight races and also both lightweight races.

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This is a critical – and hugely challenging – moment for climate action. Legal and political pressures have paralysed asset managers and other financial service providers, leading to a recent wave of actors leaving investor climate coalitions. However, asset owners are increasingly seeing the need to take a leadership role in addressing climate change, which threatens the long-term future of their portfolios and the wider economy.

That’s why we are delighted to announce that Cambridge researchers based at the Department for Land Economy have selected index provider Bloomberg Index Services Limited to launch the first global corporate bond index to cover fossil fuel producers, utilities, insurance, and financing, with the aim of driving investment to reduce real-economy emissions.

You can read the University press release here.

“We are delighted that this project has reached such a key milestone," said Professor Martin Dixon, Head of the Department of Land Economy. "As a multidisciplinary department with a focus on outstanding academic publication and teaching, this project has the potential to serve as a ‘systems demonstrator’ for ongoing research in this important area.”

Why a bond index?

The launch of the bond index by an 816-year-old institution is an unusual process and a tale worth telling. It began with a peer-reviewed paper by Dr Ellen Quigley, Principal Research Associate at Land Economy, exploring the case for evidence-based climate impact by institutional investors. This was followed by an internal feasibility study based at Jesus College, Cambridge (which continues to co-host the project), and supported by several other parts of the University.

With feasibility assessed, the team went out to global index providers to explore their interest. All of the leading players were interested in building this index, yet all grappled with a lack of access to data and the complexity of assessing companies based on their activities (e.g., whether they were building new fossil fuel infrastructure), not their business classification. An extensive Request for Proposals process resulted in naming Bloomberg Index Services Limited as our provider. The project aims to provide a genuine solution for asset owners looking to align their corporate debt instruments with their climate targets and to avoid both ineffective blanket interventions and greenwashing.

The central problem, on which the industry has faltered for decades, is how to manage the risk presented by a fossil fuel industry that continues to grow. Leading climate scenarios such as the International Energy Agency’s Net Zero by 2050 scenario are clear that fossil fuel expansion is inconsistent with the transition to a decarbonised economy.  With approximately 90% of new financing for fossil fuel expansion coming from bonds and bank loans, debt markets must be the focus of investor efforts to transition away from fossil fuel expansionism. Bonds offer a larger pool of capital than equities, and a greater proportion are purchased in the primary market, where companies gain access to new capital.

The past decade has seen a significant rise in passive investment strategies and therefore an increase in financial flows into index funds, which have as a consequence become significant ‘auto-allocators’ of capital. This research project aims to study the extent to which the new bond index influences cost, volume, and access to capital among companies who are seeking to build new fossil fuel infrastructure and delaying the phase-down of their operations. Bond markets are not just a key part of investor action on climate change: they are the very coalface of fossil fuel expansion, i.e. new gas, oil, and coal extraction and infrastructure.

“This is an enormously impactful project which showcases the high-quality research undertaken at Cambridge," University of Cambridge Chief Financial Officer Anthony Odgers said.  "The index is a game-changer for the growing number of asset owners who invest in corporate debt and understand its impact on fossil fuel expansion, particularly the construction of new fossil fuel infrastructure such as coal- and gas-fired power plants which risk locking in fossil fuel usage for decades."

“Once the index launches, Cambridge expects to invest some of its own money against financial products referencing it. This will enable us to align our fixed income holdings with our institution-wide objectives,” Odgers said.

There are currently no off-the-shelf products that allow for passive investments in global corporate bond markets without financing fossil fuel expansion, through fossil fuel production, utilities building new coal- and gas-fired power plants, and through the banks and insurers that continue to finance and underwrite these activities. By supporting the development of this ‘systems demonstrator’, we will be able to conduct essential research on the efficacy of such a lever.

“Instead of linear year-on-year reductions or blanket bans by business classification, the index methodology identifies companies that present the greatest systemic risks to investors, while ensuring that those companies that meet the criteria can rejoin the bond index,” said project leader Lily Tomson, a Senior Research Associate at Jesus College, Cambridge. 

Several years of close collaboration with leading global asset owners such as California State Teachers Retirement System (CalSTRS), Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS), Swiss Federal Pension Fund PUBLICA and the United Nations Joint Staff Pension Fund (UNJSPF) provided input and technical market expertise that underpins the index. Alongside the University of Cambridge, the index will be used at launch by investments from the United Nations Joint Staff Pension Fund.

“Finally, large asset owners around the world have an index for this market that aims to discourage the expansion of fossil fuels,” said Pedro Guazo, Representative of the Secretary-General (RSG) for the investment of the UNJSPF assets.

Rules-based engagement: a lever for behaviour change

Debt benchmarks have a key role to play in any real efforts to tackle the expansion of fossil fuels. This project is innovative because it focuses on exclusions and weightings of companies based on their current corporate activity, instead of using an approach that relies on blanket exclusions by business classification (which does not generate incentives to change behaviour). For example, a company might be classed as a fossil fuel company, but if it stops expanding new fossil fuel operations and aligns to an appropriate phase-down pathway, the company has an opportunity to be included in the index and gain access to capital via funds which use the index, as a result.

Across the project, we are using data sources that have never previously been used to build an index – for example, the Global Coal Exit List (GCEL) and Global Oil and Gas Exit List (GOGEL) from Urgewald. We are taking a novel approach that focuses investor attention on those actors that our framework considers ‘edge cases’: companies close to reaching, or moving away from, alignment with the index. Companies have the option of being (re-)included in the index if they change their behaviour to align with the rules of the index. Academic literature suggests this is a lever for behaviour change in equities, but as an approach it is new to debt market indices. This is one of many key hypotheses that this project tests. We are convening a community of leading global academics who will support the creation of this new form of rules-based bondholder engagement.

This bond index project is one of a suite of actions rooted in academic research and collaboration that have been developed by the collegiate University. Alongside 74 other higher education institutions, Cambridge is delivering a parallel project focused on cash deposits and money market funds. We will continue to conduct research as the associated new products begin to operate through 2025.

At a time when climate damage is growing rapidly and is visible in news stories around the world, many actors across investment markets are looking for a clear path to take necessary action. As an academic institution and a long-term investor, the University of Cambridge is committed to supporting evidence-based research and action on climate change.

The bond index will be launched later this year. If you are interested in finding out more about the project or the team’s research, contact us here: bondindex@landecon.cam.ac.uk.

University of Cambridge researchers based at the Department for Land Economy have selected index provider Bloomberg Index Services Limited to launch the first global corporate bond index to cover fossil fuel producers, utilities, insurance, and financing, with the aim of driving investment to reduce real-economy emissions.

The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright ©University of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – 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.

Scientific research on the harms of digital technology is stuck in a ‘failing cycle’ that moves too slowly to allow governments and society to hold tech companies to account, according to two leading researchers in a new report published in the journal Science.

Dr Amy Orben from the University of Cambridge and Dr J Nathan Matias from Cornell University say the pace at which new technology is deployed to billions of people has put unbearable strain on the scientific systems trying to evaluate its effects.

They argue that big tech companies effectively outsource research on the safety of their products to independent scientists at universities and charities who work with a fraction of the resources – while firms also obstruct access to essential data and information. This is in contrast to other industries where safety testing is largely done ‘in house’.

Orben and Matias call for an overhaul of ‘evidence production’ assessing the impact of technology on everything from mental health to discrimination.

Their recommendations include accelerating the research process, so that policy interventions and safer designs are tested in parallel with initial evidence gathering, and creating registries of tech-related harms informed by the public.

“Big technology companies increasingly act with perceived impunity, while trust in their regard for public safety is fading,” said Orben, of Cambridge’s MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit. “Policymakers and the public are turning to independent scientists as arbiters of technology safety.”

“Scientists like ourselves are committed to the public good, but we are asked to hold to account a billion-dollar industry without appropriate support for our research or the basic tools to produce good quality evidence quickly.”

“We must urgently fix this science and policy ecosystem so we can better understand and manage the potential risks posed by our evolving digital society,” said Orben.

'Negative feedback cycle'

In the latest Science paper, the researchers point out that technology companies often follow policies of rapidly deploying products first and then looking to ‘debug’ potential harms afterwards. This includes distributing generative AI products to millions before completing basic safety tests, for example.

When tasked with understanding potential harms of new technologies, researchers rely on ‘routine science’ which – having driven societal progress for decades – now lags the rate of technological change to the extent that it is becoming at times ‘unusable’.

With many citizens pressuring politicians to act on digital safety, Orben and Matias argue that technology companies use the slow pace of science and lack of hard evidence to resist policy interventions and “minimize their own responsibility”.

Even if research gets appropriately resourced, they note that researchers will be faced with understanding products that evolve at an unprecedented rate.

“Technology products change on a daily or weekly basis, and adapt to individuals. Even company staff may not fully understand the product at any one time, and scientific research can be out of date by the time it is completed, let alone published,” said Matias, who leads Cornell’s Citizens and Technology (CAT) Lab.

“At the same time, claims about the inadequacy of science can become a source of delay in technology safety when science plays the role of gatekeeper to policy interventions,” Matias said.

“Just as oil and chemical industries have leveraged the slow pace of science to deflect the evidence that informs responsibility, executives in technology companies have followed a similar pattern. Some have even allegedly refused to commit substantial resources to safety research without certain kinds of causal evidence, which they also decline to fund.”

The researchers lay out the current ‘negative feedback cycle’:

Tech companies do not adequately resource safety research, shifting the burden to independent scientists who lack data and funding. This means high-quality causal evidence is not produced in required timeframes, which weakens government’s ability to regulate – further disincentivising safety research, as companies are let off the hook.

Orben and Matias argue that this cycle must be redesigned, and offer ways to do it.

Reporting digital harms

To speed up the identification of harms caused by online technologies, policymakers or civil society could construct registries for incident reporting, and encourage the public to contribute evidence when they experience harms.

Similar methods are already used in fields such as environmental toxicology where the public reports on polluted waterways, or vehicle crash reporting programs that inform automotive safety, for example.

“We gain nothing when people are told to mistrust their lived experience due to an absence of evidence when that evidence is not being compiled,” said Matias.

Existing registries, from mortality records to domestic violence databases, could also be augmented to include information on the involvement of digital technologies such as AI.

The paper’s authors also outline a ‘minimum viable evidence’ system, in which policymakers and researchers adjust the ‘evidence threshold’ required to show potential technological harms before starting to test interventions.

These evidence thresholds could be set by panels made up of affected communities, the public, or ‘science courts’: expert groups assembled to make rapid assessments.

“Causal evidence of technological harms is often required before designers and scientists are allowed to test interventions to build a safer digital society,” said Orben.

“Yet intervention testing can be used to scope ways to help individuals and society, and pinpoint potential harms in the process. We need to move from a sequential system to an agile, parallelised one.”

Under a minimum viable evidence system, if a company obstructs or fails to support independent research, and is not transparent about their own internal safety testing, the amount of evidence needed to start testing potential interventions would be decreased.

Orben and Matias also suggest learning from the success of ‘Green Chemistry’, which sees an independent body hold lists of chemical products ranked by potential for harm, to help incentivise markets to develop safer alternatives.

“The scientific methods and resources we have for evidence creation at the moment simply cannot deal with the pace of digital technology development,” Orben said.

“Scientists and policymakers must acknowledge the failures of this system and help craft a better one before the age of AI further exposes society to the risks of unchecked technological change.”

Added Matias: “When science about the impacts of new technologies is too slow, everyone loses.”

From social media to AI, online technologies are changing too fast for the scientific infrastructure used to gauge their public health harms, say two leaders in the field.

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In a paper published today in Nature Genetics, scientists at the University of Cambridge and NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre analysed the full DNA sequence of 4,775 tumours from seven types of cancer. They used that data from Genomics England’s 100,000 Genomes Project to create an algorithm capable of identifying tumours with faults in their DNA that makes them easier to treat.

The algorithm, called PRRDetect, could one day help doctors work out which patients are more likely to have successful treatment. That could pave the way for more personalised treatment plans that increase people’s chances of survival.

The research was funded by Cancer Research UK and the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR).

Professor Serena Nik-Zainal  from the Early Cancer Institute at the University of Cambridge, lead author of the study, said: “Genomic sequencing is now far faster and cheaper than ever before. We are getting closer to the point where getting your tumour sequenced will be as routine as a scan or blood test.

“To use genomics most effectively in the clinic, we need tools which give us meaningful information about how a person’s tumour might respond to treatment. This is especially important in cancers where survival is poorer, like lung cancer and brain tumours.

“Cancers with faulty DNA repair are more likely to be treated successfully. PRRDetect helps us better identify those cancers and, as we sequence more and more cancers routinely in the clinic, it could ultimately help doctors better tailor treatments to individual patients.”

The research team looked for patterns in DNA created by so-called ‘indel’ mutations, in which letters are inserted or deleted from the normal DNA sequence.  

They found unusual patterns of indel mutations in cancers that had faulty DNA repair mechanisms – known as ‘post-replicative repair dysfunction’ or PRRd. Using this information, the scientists developed PRRDetect to allow them to identify tumours with this fault from a full DNA sequence.

PRRd tumours are more sensitive to immunotherapy, a type of cancer treatment that uses the body’s own immune system to attack cancer cells. The scientists hope that the PRRd algorithm could act like a ‘metal detector’ to allow them to identify patients who are more likely to have successful treatment with immunotherapy.

The study follows from a previous ‘archaeological dig’ of cancer genomes carried out by Professor Nik-Zainal, which examined the genomes of tens of thousands of people and revealed previously unseen patterns of mutations which are linked to cancer.

This time, Professor Nik-Zainal and her team looked at cancers which have a higher proportion of tumours with PRRd. These include bowel, brain, endometrial, skin, lung, bladder and stomach cancers. Whole genome sequences of these cancers were provided by the 100,000 Genomes Project - a pioneering study led by Genomics England and NHS England which sequenced 100,000 genomes from around 85,000 NHS patients affected by rare diseases or cancer.

The study identified 37 different patterns of indel mutations across the seven cancer types included in this study. Ten of these patterns were already linked to known causes of cancer, such as smoking and exposure to UV light. Eight of these patterns were linked to PRRd. The remaining 19 patterns were new and could be linked to causes of cancer that are not fully understood yet or mechanisms within cells that can go wrong when a cell becomes cancerous.

Executive Director of Research and Innovation at Cancer Research UK, Dr Iain Foulkes, said: “Genomic medicine will revolutionise how we approach cancer treatment. We can now get full readouts of tumour DNA much more easily, and with that comes a wealth of information about how an individual’s cancer can start, grow and spread.

“Tools like PRRDetect are going to make personalised treatment for cancer a reality for many more patients in the future. Personalising treatment is much more likely to be successful, ensuring more people can live longer, better lives free from the fear of cancer.”

NIHR Scientific Director, Mike Lewis, said: “Cancer is a leading cause of death in the UK so it's impressive to see our research lead to the creation of a tool to determine which therapy will lead to a higher likelihood of successful cancer treatment.”

Chief Scientific Officer at Genomics England, Professor Matt Brown, said: “Genomics is playing an increasingly important role in healthcare and these findings show how genomic data can be used to drive more predictive, preventative care leading to better outcomes for patients with cancer.

“The creation of this algorithm showcases the immense value of whole genome sequencing not only in research but also in the clinic across multiple diverse cancer types in advancing cancer care.”

The University of Cambridge is fundraising for a new hospital that will transform how we diagnose and treat cancer. Cambridge Cancer Research Hospital, a partnership with Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, will treat patients across the East of England, but the research that takes place there promises to change the lives of cancer patients across the UK and beyond. Find out more here.

Reference

Koh, GCC et al. Redefined indel taxonomy reveals insights into mutational signatures. Nat Gen; 10 Apr 2025; DOI:

Adapted from a press release from Cancer Research UK

Cambridge researchers have created a ‘metal detector’ algorithm that can hunt down vulnerable tumours, in a development that could one day revolutionise the treatment of cancer.

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The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, developed a device that makes it easy for people with or without medical training to record heart sounds accurately. Unlike a stethoscope, the device works well even if it’s not placed precisely on the chest: its larger, flexible sensing area helps capture clearer heart sounds than traditional stethoscopes.

The device can also be used over clothing, making it more comfortable for patients – especially women – during routine check-ups or community heart health screening programmes.

The heart sound recordings can be saved on the device, which can then be used to detect signs of heart valve disease. The researchers are also developing a machine learning algorithm which can detect signs of valve disease automatically. The results are reported in the IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics.

Heart valve disease (valvular heart disease or VHD) has been called the ‘next cardiac epidemic,’ with a prognosis worse than many forms of cancer. Up to 50% of patients with significant VHD remain undiagnosed, and many patients only see their doctor when the disease has advanced and they are experiencing significant complications.

In the UK, the NHS and NICE have identified early detection of heart valve disease as a key goal, both to improve quality of life for patients, and to decrease costs.

An examination with a stethoscope, or auscultation, is the way that most diagnoses of heart valve disease are made. However, just 38% of patients who present to their GP with symptoms of valve disease receive an examination with a stethoscope.

“The symptoms of VHD can be easily confused with certain respiratory conditions, which is why so many patients don’t receive a stethoscope examination,” said Professor Anurag Agarwal from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, who led the research. “However, the accuracy of stethoscope examination for diagnosing heart valve disease is fairly poor, and it requires a GP to conduct the examination.”

In addition, a stethoscope examination requires patients to partially undress, which is both time consuming in short GP appointments, and can be uncomfortable for patients, particularly for female patients in routine screening programmes.

The ‘gold standard’ for diagnosing heart valve disease is an echocardiogram, but this can only be done in a hospital and NHS waiting lists are extremely long – between six to nine months at many hospitals.

“To help get waiting lists down, and to make sure we’re diagnosing heart valve disease early enough that simple interventions can improve quality of life, we wanted to develop an alternative to a stethoscope that is easy to use as a screening tool,” said Agarwal.

Agarwal and his colleagues have developed a handheld device, about the diameter of a drinks coaster, that could be a solution. Their device can be used by any health professional to accurately record heart sounds, and can be used over clothes.

While a regular or electronic stethoscope has a single sensor, the Cambridge-developed device has six, meaning it is easier for the doctor or nurse – or even someone without any medical training – to get an accurate reading, simply because the surface area is so much bigger.

The device contains materials that can transmit vibration so that it can be used over clothes, which is particularly important when conducting community screening programmes to protect patient privacy. Between each of the six sensors is a gel that absorbs vibration, so the sensors don’t interfere with each other.

The researchers tested the device on healthy participants with different body shapes and sizes and recorded their heart sounds. Their next steps will be to test the device in a clinical setting on a variety of patients, against results from an echocardiogram.

In parallel with the development of the device, the researchers have developed a machine learning algorithm that can use the recorded heart sounds to detect signs of valve disease automatically. Early tests of the algorithm suggest that it outperforms GPs in detecting heart valve disease.  

“If successful, this device could become an affordable and scalable solution for heart health screening, especially in areas with limited medical resources,” said Agarwal.

The researchers say that the device could be a useful tool to triage patients who are waiting for an echocardiogram, so that those with signs of valve disease can be seen in a hospital sooner.

A patent has been filed on the device by Cambridge Enterprise, the University’s commercialisation arm. Anurag Agarwal is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

Reference:
Andrew McDonald et al. ‘A flexible multi-sensor device enabling handheld sensing of heart sounds by untrained users.’ IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics (2025). DOI: 10.1109/JBHI.2025.3551882

Researchers have developed a handheld device that could potentially replace stethoscopes as a tool for detecting certain types of heart disease.

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The team, from the Universities of Bristol and Cambridge, created the network, which uses standard fibreoptic infrastructure, but relies on a variety of quantum phenomena to enable ultra-secure data transfer.

The network uses two types of quantum key distribution (QKD) schemes: ‘unhackable’ encryption keys hidden inside particles of light; and distributed entanglement: a phenomenon that causes quantum particles to be intrinsically linked.

The researchers demonstrated the capabilities of the network via a live, quantum-secure video conference link, the transfer of encrypted medical data, and secure remote access to a distributed data centre. The data was successfully transmitted between Bristol and Cambridge – a fibre distance of over 410 kilometres.

This is the first time that a long-distance network, encompassing different quantum-secure technologies such as entanglement distribution, has been successfully demonstrated. The researchers presented their results at the 2025 Optical Fiber Communications Conference (OFC) in San Francisco.

Quantum communications offer unparalleled security advantages compared to classical telecommunications solutions. These technologies are immune against future cyber-attacks, even with quantum computers, which – once fully developed – will have the potential to break through even the strongest cryptographic methods currently in use.

In the past few years, researchers have been working to build and use quantum communication networks. China recently set up a massive network that covers 4,600 kilometres by connecting five cities using both fibreoptics and satellites. In Madrid, researchers created a smaller network with nine connection points that use different types of QKD to securely share information.

In 2019, researchers at Cambridge and Toshiba demonstrated a metro-scale quantum network operating at record key rates of millions of key bits per second. And in 2020, researchers in Bristol built a network that could share entanglement between multiple users. Similar quantum network trials have been demonstrated in Singapore, Italy and the USA.

Despite this progress, no one has built a large, long-distance network that can handle both types of QKD, entanglement distribution, and regular data transmission all at once, until now.

The experiment demonstrates the potential of quantum networks to accommodate different quantum-secure approaches simultaneously with classical communications infrastructure. It was carried out using the UK’s Quantum Network (UKQN), established over the last decade by the same team, supported by funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), and as part of the Quantum Communications Hub project.

“This is a crucial step toward building a quantum-secured future for our communities and society,” said co-author Dr Rui Wang, Lecturer for Future Optical Networks in the Smart Internet Lab's High Performance Network Research Group at the University of Bristol. “More importantly, it lays the foundation for a large-scale quantum internet—connecting quantum nodes and devices through entanglement and teleportation on a global scale.”

“This marks the culmination of more than ten years of work to design and build the UK Quantum Network,” said co-author Adrian Wonfor from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering. “Not only does it demonstrate the use of multiple quantum communications technologies, but also the secure key management systems required to allow seamless end-to-end encryption between us.”

“This is a significant step in delivering quantum security for the communications we all rely upon in our daily lives at a national scale,” said co-author Professor Richard Penty, also from Cambridge and who headed the Quantum Networks work package in the Quantum Communications Hub. “It would not have been possible without the close collaboration of the two teams at Cambridge and Bristol, the support of our industrial partners Toshiba, BT, Adtran and Cisco, and our funders at UKRI.”

“This is an extraordinary achievement which highlights the UK’s world-class strengths in quantum networking technology,” said Gerald Buller, Director of the IQN Hub, based at Heriot-Watt University. “This exciting demonstration is precisely the kind of work the Integrated Quantum Networks Hub will support over the coming years, developing the technologies, protocols and standards which will establish a resilient, future-proof, national quantum communications infrastructure.”

The current UKQN covers two metropolitan quantum networks around Bristol and Cambridge, which are connected via a ‘backbone’ of four long-distance optical fibre links spanning 410 kilometres with three intermediate nodes.

The network uses single-mode fibre over the EPSRC National Dark Fibre Facility (which provides dedicated fibre for research purposes), and low-loss optical switches allowing network reconfiguration of both classical and quantum signal traffic.

The team will pursue this work further through a newly funded EPSRC project, the Integrated Quantum Networks Hub, whose vision is to establish quantum networks at all distance scales, from local networking of quantum processors to national-scale entanglement networks for quantum-safe communication, distributed computing and sensing, all the way to intercontinental networking via low-earth orbit satellites.

Reference:
R. Yang et al. ‘A UK Nationwide Heterogeneous Quantum Network.’ Paper presented at the 2025 Optical Fiber Communications Conference and Exhibition (OFC): https://www.ofcconference.org/en-us/home/schedule/

Researchers have successfully demonstrated the UK’s first long-distance ultra-secure transfer of data over a quantum communications network, including the UK’s first long-distance quantum-secured video call.

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The gene in question, FLCN, is linked to a condition known as Birt-Hogg-Dubé syndrome, symptoms of which include benign skin tumours, lung cysts, and an increased risk of kidney cancer.

In a study published today in the journal Thorax, a team from the University of Cambridge examined data from UK Biobank, the 100,000 Genomes Project, and East London Genes & Health – three large genomic datasets encompassing more than 550,000 people.

They discovered that between one in 2,710 and one in 4,190 individuals carries the particular variant of FLCN that underlies Birt-Hogg-Dubé syndrome. But curiously, whereas patients with a diagnosis of Birt-Hogg-Dubé syndrome have a lifetime risk of punctured lung of 37%, in the wider cohort of carriers of the genetic mutation this was lower at 28%. Even more striking, while patients with Birt-Hogg-Dubé syndrome have a 32% of developing kidney cancer, in the wider cohort this was only 1%.

Punctured lung – known as pneumothorax – is caused by an air leak in the lung, resulting in painful lung deflation and shortness of breath. Not every case of punctured lung is caused by a fault in the FLCN gene, however. Around one in 200 tall, thin young men in their teens or early twenties will experience a punctured lung, and for many of them the condition will resolve itself, or doctors will remove air or fluid from their lungs while treating the individual as an outpatient; many will not even know they have the condition.

If an individual experiences a punctured lung and doesn’t fit the common characteristics – for example, if they are in their forties – doctors will look for tell-tale cysts in the lower lungs, visible on an MRI scan. If these are present, then the individual is likely to have Birt-Hogg-Dubé syndrome.

Professor Marciniak is a researcher at the University of Cambridge and an honorary consultant at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Royal Papworth Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. He co-leads the UK’s first Familial Pneumothorax Rare Disease Collaborative Network, together with Professor Kevin Blyth at Queen Elizabeth University Hospital and University of Glasgow. The aim of the Network is to optimise the care and treatment of patients with rare, inherited forms of familial pneumothorax, and to support research into this condition. 

Professor Marciniak said: “If an individual has Birt-Hogg-Dubé syndrome, then it’s very important that we’re able to diagnose it, because they and their family members may also be at risk of kidney cancer.

“The good news is that the punctured lung usually happens 10 to 20 years before the individual shows symptoms of kidney cancer, so we can keep an eye on them, screen them every year, and if we see the tumour it should still be early enough to cure it.”

Professor Marciniak says he was surprised to discover that the risk of kidney cancer was so much lower in carriers of the faulty FLCN gene who have not been diagnosed with Birt-Hogg-Dubé syndrome.

“Even though we’ve always thought of Birt-Hogg-Dubé syndrome as being caused by a single faulty gene, there’s clearly something else going on,” Professor Marciniak said. “The Birt-Hogg-Dubé patients that we've been caring for and studying for the past couple of decades are not representative of when this gene is broken in the wider population. There must be something else about their genetic background that’s interacting with the gene to cause the additional symptoms.”

The finding raises the question of whether, if an individual is found to have a fault FLCN gene, they should be offered screening for kidney cancer. However, Professor Marciniak does not believe this will be necessary.

“With increasing use of genetic testing, we will undoubtedly find more people with these mutations,” he said, “but unless we see the other tell-tale signs of Birt-Hogg-Dubé syndrome, our study shows there's no reason to believe they’ll have the same elevated cancer risk.”

The research was funded by the Myrovlytis Trust, with additional support from the National Institute for Health and Care Research Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre.

Katie Honeywood, CEO of the Myrovlytis Trust, said: "The Myrovlytis Trust are delighted to have funded such an important project. We have long believed that the prevalence of Birt-Hogg-Dubé syndrome is far higher than previously reported. It highlights the importance of genetic testing for anyone who has any of the main symptoms associated with BHD including a collapsed lung. And even more so the importance of the medical world being aware of this condition for anyone who presents at an emergency department or clinic with these symptoms. We look forward to seeing the impact this projects outcome has on the Birt-Hogg-Dubé and wider community."

Reference
Yngvadottir, B et al. Inherited predisposition to pneumothorax: Estimating the frequency of Birt-Hogg-Dubé syndrome from genomics and population cohorts. Thorax; 8 April 2025; DOI: 10.1136/thorax-2024-221738

As many as one in 3,000 people could be carrying a faulty gene that significantly increases their risk of a punctured lung, according to new estimates from Cambridge researchers. Previous estimates had put this risk closer to one in 200,000 people.

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Now in its eighth year, the Fellowship provides financial support for a postdoctoral placement of one to two years at a world-class research institution.

The funding equips scientists to apply their knowledge to a new field of study with the goal of accelerating discoveries, and to develop their leadership potential.

Dr Poppy Oldroyd, a 2025 Schmidt Science Fellow from the Department of Engineering, plans to pioneer a new frontier in understanding brain communication through optical measurements, ultimately advancing treatments for memory-related diseases.

The human brain communicates through intricate networks of neurons, crucial for learning and memory. However, how these neural conversations translate into memory formation remains a mystery in neuroscience. Oldroyd’s research aims to use light-based tools, like advanced optogenetics, to explore these pathways in detail. By uncovering how specific brain circuits contribute to learning and memory, this research could revolutionise our understanding of these essential brain functions. 

Ultimately, this knowledge may enhance our comprehension of memory-related disorders like Alzheimer’s disease and epilepsy.

Dr Matthew McLouglin, a 2025 Schmidt Science Fellow from the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, plans to develop tools to study how our cells age in real time. This will help us understand why we age and how we might promote healthy aging to improve quality of life in the elderly.

Our DNA is organised into structures called chromosomes. Each chromosome has a protective cap, the ‘telomere’, which is partially lost with each cell division. In old age, cells cannot function properly due to the loss of telomeres, increasing the risk of age-related diseases such as cancer and dementia. McLoughlin will use cutting-edge imaging technology to track the loss of telomeres over time, understanding how telomeres are lost and why this stops cells from functioning.

Oldroyd and McLoughlin join a community of 209 Schmidt Science Fellows from nearly 40 countries who are leaders in interdisciplinary science.

“Philanthropic funding of scientific research, and especially support of early-career researchers, has never been more important,” said Wendy Schmidt, who co-founded Schmidt Science Fellows with her husband, Eric.

“By providing Schmidt Science Fellows with support, community, and freedom to work across disciplines and gain new insights, we hope they’ll tackle some of the world’s most vexing challenges, achieve breakthroughs and help create a healthier, more resilient world for all.”

Established in 2017, Schmidt Science Fellows is a programme of Schmidt Sciences delivered in partnership with the Rhodes Trust.

The 2025 Fellows represent 15 nationalities, including researchers from Jordan and the United Arab Emirates for the first time in the programme’s history.

This year’s cohort will work on a range of problems from cancer treatment to quantum technologies to sustainability.

Alongside their research Placement, Fellows participate in a 12-month interdisciplinary Science Leadership Programme.

Each year, Schmidt Science Fellows works in partnership with more than 100 universities to identify candidates for the Fellowship.

Nominees are selected via an application process that includes an academic review with panels of experts in their original disciplines and final interviews with a multidisciplinary panel of scientists and private sector leaders.

“The Schmidt Science Fellows Program is cultivating a dynamic global community of remarkable scientists and champions of interdisciplinary research,” said Stu Feldman, Chief Scientist at Schmidt Sciences.

“Their work exemplifies Schmidt Sciences’ commitment to support pioneering approaches that will drive the next era of discovery and innovation.”

The 2025 Schmidt Science Fellows represent 27 nominating universities, including, for the first time, McGill University in Canada, RWTH Aachen University in Germany, Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico, University of California, Los Angeles in the US, and University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

Two University of Cambridge researchers are among the thirty-two early career researchers, tackling issues from improving food security to developing better medical implants, who have been announced as the 2025 Schmidt Science Fellows.

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The UK government is taking steps to research potential interventions that could reduce global warming by reflecting sunlight into space.

New research will model the risks and impacts of using solar radiation modification (SRM) to guide informed decision-making on climate interventions.

Read more at the Centre for Climate Repair

Cambridge is leading one of four projects receiving new funding from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) to model the risks and impacts of solar radiation modification (SRM).

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Play should be a core feature of children’s healthcare in forthcoming plans for the future of the NHS, according to a new report which argues that play ‘humanises’ the experiences of child patients.

The report, by University of Cambridge academics for the charity Starlight, calls for play, games and playful approaches to be integrated into a ‘holistic’ model of children’s healthcare – one that acknowledges the emotional and psychological dimensions of good health, alongside its physical aspects.

Both internationally and in the UK, health systems have, in recent decades, increasingly promoted play in paediatric healthcare. There is a growing understanding that making healthcare more child-friendly can reduce stress and positively improve younger patients’ experiences.

Despite this recognition, play often remains undervalued and inconsistently integrated across healthcare contexts. For the first time, the report compiles evidence from over 120 studies to make the case for its more systematic incorporation.

In the case of the UK, the authors argue that the Government’s forthcoming 10-year health plan for the NHS offers an important opportunity to embed play within a more holistic vision for childhood health.

The report was produced by academics at the Centre for Play in Education, Development and Learning (PEDAL) at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. Starlight, which commissioned the review, is a national charity advocating to reduce trauma through play in children’s healthcare.

Dr Kelsey Graber, the report’s lead author, said: “Play and child-centred activities have a unique capacity to support the emotional and mental aspects of children’s healthcare experiences, whether in hospital or during a routine treatment at the GP. It won’t directly change the course of an illness, but it can humanise the experience by reducing stress and anxiety and enhancing understanding and comfort. Hospital-based play opens up a far more complete understanding of what it means for a child to be a healthy or well.”

Adrian Voce, Head of Policy and Public Affairs at Starlight, said: “With the government promising to create the healthiest generation of children ever as part of its new long term health plan, this compelling evidence of the benefits of play to children’s healthcare is very timely. We encourage ministers and NHS leaders to make health play teams an integral part of paediatric care.”

The report synthesised evidence from 127 studies in 29 countries. Most were published after 2020, reflecting intensified interest in children’s healthcare interventions following the COVID-19 outbreak.

Some studies focused on medically-relevant play. For example, hospital staff sometimes use role-play, or games and toys like Playmobil Hospital to familiarise children with medical procedures and ease anxiety. Other studies focused on non-medical play: the use of activities like social games, video games, arts and crafts, music therapy and storytelling to help make patients more comfortable. Some hospitals and surgeries even provide “distraction kits” to help children relax.

In its survey of all these studies, the report finds strong evidence that play benefits children’s psychological health and wellbeing. Play is also sometimes associated with positive physical health; one study, for example, found that children who played an online game about dentistry had lower heart rates during a subsequent dental procedure, probably because they felt more prepared.

The authors identify five main ways in which play enhances children’s healthcare based on the available body of evidence:

Reducing stress and discomfort during medical procedures. Play is sometimes associated with physiological markers of reduced distress, such as lower heart rates and blood pressure. Therapeutic play can also ease pain and anxiety.

Helping children express and manage emotions. Play can help to alleviate fear, anxiety, boredom and loneliness in healthcare settings. It also provides an outlet for emotional expression among all age groups.

Fostering dignity and agency. In an environment where children often feel powerless and a lack of personal choice, play provides a sense of control which supports mental and emotional wellbeing.

Building connection and belonging. Play can strengthen children’s relationships with other patients, family members and healthcare staff, easing their experiences in a potentially overwhelming environment. This may be particularly important for children in longer term or palliative care.

Preserving a sense of childhood. Play helps children feel like children, and not just patients, the report suggests, by providing “essential moments of happiness, respite and emotional release”.

While play is widely beneficial, the report stresses that its impact will vary from child to child. This variability highlights a need, the authors note, for informed, child-centred approaches to play in healthcare settings. Unfortunately, play expertise in these settings may often be lacking: only 13% of the studies reviewed covered the work of health play specialists, and most of the reported activities were directed and defined by adults, rather than by children themselves.

The report also highlights a major gap in research on the use of play in mental healthcare. Just three of the 127 studies focused on this area, even though 86% emphasised play’s psychological benefits. The report calls for greater professional and academic attention to the use of play in mental health support, particularly in light of escalating rates of mental health challenges among children and young people. More work is also needed, it adds, to understand the benefits of play-based activities in healthcare for infants and adolescents, both of which groups were under-represented in the research literature.

Embedding play more fully in healthcare as part of wider Government reforms, the authors suggest, could reduce healthcare-related trauma and improve long-term outcomes for children. “It is not just healthcare professionals, but also policy leaders who need to recognise the value of play,” Graber said. “That recognition is foundational to ensuring that children’s developmental, psychological, and emotional health needs are met, alongside their physical health.”

The Cambridge report argues that play should be a recognised component of children’s healthcare in the Government’s forthcoming 10-year plan for the NHS.

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With just over 2 weeks to go until the showdown on the River Thames, the Light Blues are gearing up to defend their titles. Cambridge leads the historic tally in both the men’s and women’s events and will be looking to extend their dominance when they take on Oxford on Sunday 13 April 2025.

Cambridge Crews for The Boat Race 2025

Women’s Blue Boat:
•    Cox: Jack Nicholas (Pembroke College)
•    Stroke: Samy Morton (Hughes Hall)
•    Tash Morrice (Jesus College)
•    Claire Collins (Peterhouse)
•    Carys Earl (Gonville & Caius)
•    Annie Wertheimer (St Edmund’s College)
•    Sophia Hahn (Hughes Hall)
•    Gemma King (St John’s College)
•    Bow: Katy Hempson (Christ’s College)

Men’s Blue Boat:
•    Cox: Ollie Boyne (Downing College)
•    Stroke: Douwe de Graaf (St Edmund’s)
•    Luca Ferraro (Peterhouse)
•    James Robson (Peterhouse)
•    George Bourne (Peterhouse)
•    Gabriel Mahler (Peterhouse)
•    Tom Macky (St Edmund’s)
•    Noam Mouelle (Hughes Hall)
•    Bow: Simon Hatcher (Peterhouse)

Countdown to The Boat Race 2025
The prestigious race, one of the oldest amateur sporting events in the world, will take place along the 6.8 km Championship Course from Putney to Mortlake. The Women's Boat Race will commence at 1:21pm British Summer Time (BST), followed by the Men's Boat Race at 2:21pm BST.

Cambridge’s women’s crew enters the race as the defending champions and currently leads the overall tally at 48-30. Meanwhile, Cambridge’s men’s crew also holds the advantage, leading Oxford 87-81, with one historic dead heat in 1877.

Praise for the athletes

Siobhan Cassidy, Chair of The Boat Race Company, congratulated the athletes on their selection for one of the Blue Boats. “I am not sure that everyone appreciates just what it takes to compete at this level,” she told the event.

“Having witnessed the intense training over a number of years, I can tell you these guys are no ordinary students; they combine their academic courses with a high-performance rowing programme. Their commitment to excellence on and off the water is truly extraordinary. It is nothing short of superhuman.”

Renowned BBC Sport commentator Andrew Cotter, who hosted the event, emphasised the purity of The Boat Race in today’s sporting landscape. “In the modern era of sport, when so much is inflated by money and professionalism, this is sport stripped back to its essence,” he said. 

“It is pure competition, it is about winning and losing. And I know that’s how the athletes feel about it, but they also feel that this is where they will make friendships that will last a lifetime.”

Historic firsts and environmental commitments

This year’s event will also see a landmark moment in Boat Race history. Sarah Winckless MBE will become the first woman to umpire the Men’s Boat Race on the Championship Course. Sir Matthew Pinsent CBE will oversee the Women’s Boat Race.

Additionally, The Boat Race Company, alongside the Cambridge and Oxford University Boat Clubs, have given their support to the London Rivers’ Pledge, a 10-year environmental initiative focused on improving water quality and sustainability on the Thames and beyond.

With the crews now announced and excitement continuing to build, all eyes will be on the Thames this April as Cambridge and Oxford prepare to write the next chapter in their historic rivalry.
 

The stage has been set for The Boat Race 2025, with Cambridge University Boat Club announcing its Women’s and Men’s Blue Boats at the historic Battersea Power Station in London.

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On 27 March 2025, Gaia’s control team at ESA’s European Space Operations Centre switched off the spacecraft’s subsystems and sent it into a ‘retirement orbit’ around the Sun.

Though the spacecraft’s operations are now over, the scientific exploitation of Gaia’s data has just begun.

Launched in 2013, Gaia has transformed our understanding of the cosmos by mapping the positions, distances, motions, and properties of nearly two billion stars and other celestial objects. It has provided the largest, most precise multi-dimensional map of our galaxy ever created, revealing its structure and evolution in unprecedented detail.

The mission uncovered evidence of past galactic mergers, identified new star clusters, contributed to the discovery of exoplanets and black holes, mapped millions of quasars and galaxies, and tracked hundreds of thousands of asteroids and comets. The mission has also enabled the creation of the best visualisation of how our galaxy might look to an outside observer.

“The data from the Gaia satellite has and is transforming our understanding of the Milky Way, how it formed, how it has evolved and how it will evolve,” said Dr Nicholas Walton from Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, lead of the Gaia UK project team. “Gaia has been in continuous operation for over 10 years, faultless, without interruption, reflecting the quality of the engineering, with significant elements of Gaia designed and built in the UK. But now it is time for its retirement. Gaia has finished its observations of the night sky. But the analysis of the Gaia mission data continues. Later in 2026 sees the next Gaia Data Release 4, to further underpin new discovery unravelling the beauty and mystery of the cosmos.”

Gaia far exceeded its planned lifetime of five years, and its fuel reserves are dwindling. The Gaia team considered how best to dispose of the spacecraft in line with ESA’s efforts to responsibly dispose of its missions.

They wanted to find a way to prevent Gaia from drifting back towards its former home near the scientifically valuable second Lagrange point (L2) of the Sun-Earth system and minimise any potential interference with other missions in the region.

“Switching off a spacecraft at the end of its mission sounds like a simple enough job,” said Gaia Spacecraft Operator Tiago Nogueira. “But spacecraft really don’t want to be switched off.

“We had to design a decommissioning strategy that involved systematically picking apart and disabling the layers of redundancy that have safeguarded Gaia for so long, because we don’t want it to reactivate in the future and begin transmitting again if its solar panels find sunlight.”

On 27 March, the Gaia control team ran through this series of passivation activities. One final use of Gaia’s thrusters moved the spacecraft away from L2 and into a stable retirement orbit around the Sun that will minimise the chance that it comes within 10 million kilometres of Earth for at least the next century.

The team then deactivated and switched off the spacecraft’s instruments and subsystems one by one, before deliberately corrupting its onboard software. The communication subsystem and the central computer were the last to be deactivated.

Gaia’s final transmission to ESOC mission control marked the conclusion of an intentional and carefully orchestrated farewell to a spacecraft that has tirelessly mapped the sky for over a decade.

Though Gaia itself has now gone silent, its contributions to astronomy will continue to shape research for decades. Its vast and expanding data archive remains a treasure trove for scientists, refining knowledge of galactic archaeology, stellar evolution, exoplanets and much more.

“No other mission has had such an impact over such a broad range of astrophysics. It continues to be the source of over 2,000 peer-reviewed papers per year, more than any other space mission,” said Gaia UK team member Dr Dafydd Wyn Evans, also from the Institute of Astronomy. “It is sad that its observing days are over, but work is continuing in Cambridge, and across Europe, to process and calibrate the final data so that Gaia will still be making its impact felt for many years in the future.”

A workhorse of galactic exploration, Gaia has charted the maps that future explorers will rely on to make new discoveries. The star trackers on ESA’s Euclid spacecraft use Gaia data to precisely orient the spacecraft. ESA’s upcoming Plato mission will explore exoplanets around stars characterised by Gaia and may follow up on new exoplanetary systems discovered by Gaia.

The Gaia control team also used the spacecraft’s final weeks to run through a series of technology tests. The team tested Gaia’s micro propulsion system under different challenging conditions to examine how it had aged over more than ten years in the harsh environment of space. The results may benefit the development of future ESA missions relying on similar propulsion systems, such as the LISA mission.

The Gaia spacecraft holds a deep emotional significance for those who worked on it. As part of its decommissioning, the names of around 1500 team members who contributed to its mission were used to overwrite some of the back-up software stored in Gaia’s onboard memory.

Personal farewell messages were also written into the spacecraft’s memory, ensuring that Gaia will forever carry a piece of its team with it as it drifts through space.

As Gaia Mission Manager Uwe Lammers put it: “We will never forget Gaia, and Gaia will never forget us.”

The Cambridge Gaia DPAC team is responsible for the analysis and generation of the Gaia photometric and spectro-photometric data products, and it also generated the Gaia photometric science alert stream for the duration of the satellite's in-flight operations.

Adapted from a media release by the European Space Agency. 

The European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft has been powered down, after more than a decade spent gathering data that are now being used to unravel the secrets of our home galaxy.

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We were delighted to welcome pupils from Warrington’s Lymm High School, Ipswich High School, The Charter School in North Dulwich, Rickmansworth School, Sutton Valance School in Maidstone as well as schools closer to home such as St Peter’s Huntingdon, Fenstanton Primary School, Barton Primary School, Impington Village College and St Andrews School in Soham. 

Running over two days (25/26 March 2025) and held in the Cambridge Sports Centre, students went on a great alien hunt with Dr Matt Bothwell from the Institute of Astronomy, stepped back in time to explore Must Farm with Department of Archaeology and the Cambridge Archaeological Unit as well as learning to disagree well with Dr Elizabeth Phillips from The Woolf Institute. 

Schools had a choice of workshops from a range of departments including, how to think like an engineer and making sustainable food with biotechnology with researchers from the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, as well as the chance to get hands-on experience in the world of materials science and explore how properties of materials can be influenced by temperature at the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy. 

The Department of Veterinary Medicine offered students the opportunity to find out what a career in veterinary medicine may look like with workshops on animal x-rays, how different professionals work together to treat animals in a veterinary hospital as well as meeting the departments horses and cows and learn how veterinarians diagnose and treat these large animals. 

Students also had the opportunity to learn about antibodies and our immune system with the MRC Toxicology Unit. The students learnt about the incredible job antibodies do defending our bodies against harmful invaders like bacteria and viruses. 

Alongside this, a maths trail, developed by Cambridgeshire County Council, guided students around the West Cambridge site whilst testing their maths skills with a number of problems to solve. 

Now in their third year, the Cambridge Festival schools days are offering students the opportunity to experience studying at Cambridge with a series of curriculum linked talks and hands on workshops.   

The Cambridge Festival runs from 19 March – 4 April and is a mixture of online, on-demand and in-person events covering all aspects of the world-leading research happening at Cambridge. The public have the chance to meet some of the researchers and thought-leaders working in some of the pioneering fields that will impact us all.

Over 500 KS2 and KS3 students from as far away as Warrington got the chance to experience studying at the University of Cambridge with a selection of lectures and workshops held as part of the Cambridge Festival. 

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The memorable evening, witnessed by over 2,000 spectators, set the perfect stage for the announcement of a new formal partnership between Cambridge University Association Football Club (CUAFC) and Cambridge United FC, strengthening the bond between the historic footballing institutions of the city.

The women’s match opened the night in dramatic fashion, with Cambridge securing a thrilling 3-2 comeback victory. Despite trailing 1-0 at halftime, the Light Blues displayed resilience and attacking intent in the second half. Johanna Niggemann (Gonville & Caius) equalised before Sakina Dhirani (Newnham) put Cambridge ahead. Oxford responded with a goal to level the score, but Alissa Sattentau (King’s) struck late to seal a hard-fought win, sending the home fans into jubilation.

Buoyed by the women’s success, the men’s team delivered a commanding performance, clinching a dominant 4-1 victory to secure their first Varsity triumph since 2019. Cambridge's attacking pressure paid off in the 38th minute when Cai La-Trobe Roberts (Jesus) broke the deadlock with a composed finish. Moments before halftime, he doubled his tally from the penalty spot. Asa Campbell (Fitzwilliam) extended the lead early in the second half, before La-Trobe Roberts completed his hat-trick with another spot-kick, sealing a comprehensive win. Although Oxford’s Captain, Noah Fletcher, converted a penalty late on, Cambridge’s dominance was never in doubt, with midfielders Captain Reece Linney (Girton) and Jesse Tapnack (Trinity) controlling the game throughout.

Following the Light Blues’ sensational Varsity double, Cambridge United FC and CUAFC announced a groundbreaking new partnership intended to deepen and develop collaboration between the two clubs to benefit the wider City of Cambridge community.

Professor David Cardwell, President Elect of CUAFC, highlighted the significance of the partnership, stating:“Cambridge can rightly lay claim to being the global birthplace of football, and CUAFC is proud to be unofficially ‘the oldest football club in the world’. The DNA of the game was discovered here in the city in 1848 when the first game took place on Parker’s Piece under what are now the modern rules.

“Over the last two years, Cambridge United and the University have developed a strong partnership in a number of different areas. We were very grateful that the Varsity matches were once again hosted so well at the Cledara Abbey Stadium. We agree that now is the right time to build on this and seek to deepen the relationship between our two football clubs. There is much we can potentially do together to help each other as clubs, and we share a desire to do more to help the City of Cambridge celebrate its status as the birthplace of the global game.”

Godric Smith CBE, Chair of the Cambridge United Foundation and Director at the Club, echoed these sentiments, emphasising the potential benefits of the collaboration: “Cambridge United is proud to be the professional football club from the university city that gave football to the world, so it is logical and long overdue to have a formal partnership between our two football clubs on both the men’s and women’s side.

“We are at the beginning and will work out the detail of the first steps over the coming months, but there is a united desire to explore how we can best help each other and, most importantly, the City of Cambridge. Areas of collaboration could include merchandising, facilities, sports science and coaching, data, community work and mentoring. We have a lot of resources and expertise between us, and it will be exciting to see how we can potentially make best use of them together over the months and years ahead.”

The announcement of the partnership capped off a remarkable night of football at the Cledara Abbey Stadium. With both the men’s and women’s teams showcasing their talent and determination on the pitch, and a new era of cooperation between Cambridge United and CUAFC beginning, the city’s footballing future looks brighter than ever.

Cambridge University football teams enjoyed a historic night on Friday 21 March, as both the men’s and women’s squads claimed stunning victories over Oxford in the football Varsity matches at Cambridge United FC’s Cledara Abbey Stadium.

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A key goal of the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has been to see further than ever before into the distant past of our Universe, when the first galaxies were forming after the Big Bang, a period know as cosmic dawn.

Researchers studying one of those very early galaxies have now made a discovery in the spectrum of its light, that challenges our established understanding of the Universe’s early history. Their results are reported in the journal Nature.

Webb discovered the incredibly distant galaxy JADES-GS-z13-1, observed at just 330 million years after the Big Bang. Researchers used the galaxy’s brightness in different infrared filters to estimate its redshift, which measures a galaxy’s distance from Earth based on how its light has been stretched out during its journey through expanding space.

The NIRCam imaging yielded an initial redshift estimate of 12.9. To confirm its extreme redshift, an international team led by Dr Joris Witstok, previously of the University of Cambridge’s Kavli Institute for Cosmology, observed the galaxy using Webb’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) instrument.

The resulting spectrum confirmed the redshift to be 13.0. This equates to a galaxy seen just 330 million years after the Big Bang, a small fraction of the Universe’s present age of 13.8 billion years.

But an unexpected feature also stood out: one specific, distinctly bright wavelength of light, identified as the Lyman-α emission radiated by hydrogen atoms. This emission was far stronger than astronomers thought possible at this early stage in the Universe’s development.

“The early Universe was bathed in a thick fog of neutral hydrogen,” said co-author Professor Roberto Maiolino from Cambridge’s Kavli Institute for Cosmology. “Most of this haze was lifted in a process called reionisation, which was completed about one billion years after the Big Bang.

“GS-z13-1 is seen when the Universe was only 330 million years old, yet it shows a surprisingly clear, telltale signature of Lyman-α emission that can only be seen once the surrounding fog has fully lifted. This result was totally unexpected by theories of early galaxy formation and has caught astronomers by surprise.”

Before and during the epoch of reionisation, neutral hydrogen fog surrounding galaxies blocked any energetic ultraviolet light they emitted, much like the filtering effect of coloured glass. Until enough stars had formed and were able to ionise the hydrogen gas, no such light — including Lyman-α emission — could escape from these fledgling galaxies to reach Earth.

The confirmation of Lyman-α radiation from this galaxy has great implications for our understanding of the early Universe. “We really shouldn’t have found a galaxy like this, given our understanding of the way the Universe has evolved,” said co-author Kevin Hainline from the University of Arizona. “We could think of the early Universe as shrouded with a thick fog that would make it exceedingly difficult to find even powerful lighthouses peeking through, yet here we see the beam of light from this galaxy piercing the veil.”

The source of the Lyman-α radiation from this galaxy is not yet known, but it may include the first light from the earliest generation of stars to form in the Universe. “The large bubble of ionised hydrogen surrounding this galaxy might have been created by a peculiar population of stars — much more massive, hotter and more luminous than stars formed at later epochs, and possibly representative of the first generation of stars,” said Witstok, who is now based at the Cosmic Dawn Center at the University of Copenhagen. A powerful active galactic nucleus, driven by one of the first supermassive black holes, is another possibility identified by the team.

The team plans further follow-up observations of GS-z13-1, aiming to obtain more information about the nature of this galaxy and origin of its strong Lyman-α radiation. Whatever the galaxy is concealing, it is certain to illuminate a new frontier in cosmology.

JWST is an international partnership between NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). The data for this result were captured as part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES).

Reference:
Joris Witstok et al. ‘Witnessing the onset of reionization through Lyman-α emission at redshift 13.’ Nature (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08779-5

Adapted from an ESA media release.

Astronomers have identified a bright hydrogen emission from a galaxy in the very early Universe. The surprise finding is challenging researchers to explain how this light could have pierced the thick fog of neutral hydrogen that filled space at that time.

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An international team of scientists have uncovered a thriving underwater ecosystem off the coast of Antarctica that had never before been accessible to humans.

The team, including researchers from the University of Cambridge, were working in the Bellingshausen Sea off the coast of Antarctica when a massive iceberg broke away from the George VI Ice Shelf in January of this year.

The team, on board Schmidt Ocean Institute’s R/V Falkor (too), changed their plans and reached the newly exposed seafloor 12 days later, becoming the first to investigate the area.

Their expedition was the first detailed study of the geology, physical oceanography, and biology beneath such a large area once covered by a floating ice shelf. The A-84 iceberg was approximately 510 square kilometres (209 square miles) in size, and revealed an equivalent area of seafloor when it broke away from the ice shelf.

"We seized upon the moment, changed our expedition plan, and went for it so we could look at what was happening in the depths below," said expedition co-chief scientist Dr Patricia Esquete from the University of Aveiro, Portugal. "We didn't expect to find such a beautiful, thriving ecosystem. Based on the size of the animals, the communities we observed have been there for decades, maybe even hundreds of years.”

Using Schmidt Ocean Institute’s remotely operated vehicle, ROV SuBastian, the team observed the deep seafloor for eight days and found flourishing ecosystems at depths as great as 1300 meters.

Their observations include large corals and sponges supporting an array of animal life, including icefish, giant sea spiders, and octopus. The discovery offers new insights into how ecosystems function beneath floating sections of the Antarctic ice sheet.

Little is known about what lies beneath Antarctica’s floating ice shelves. In 2021, British Antarctic Survey researchers first reported signs of bottom-dwelling life beneath the Filchner-Ronne ice shelf in the Southern Weddell Sea. The current expedition was the first to use an ROV to explore this remote environment.

The team was surprised by the significant biomass and biodiversity of the ecosystems and suspect they have discovered several new species.

Deep-sea ecosystems typically rely on nutrients from the surface slowly raining down to the seafloor. For centuries, the ecosystems under the ice shelf have been covered by ice almost 150 metres thick, completely cutting them off from surface nutrients. "The fact that we found long-living species suggests that the lateral transport, which mostly consists of glacial meltwater from the ice shelf, could be the source of the nutrients to sustain the life we found," said team member Dr Laura Cimoli, from Cambridge’s Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics.

The newly exposed Antarctic seafloor also allowed the team, with scientists from Portugal, the United Kingdom, Chile, Germany, Norway, New Zealand, and the United States, to gather critical data on the past behaviour of the larger Antarctic ice sheet. The ice sheet has been shrinking and losing mass over the last few decades due to climate change.

“The ice loss from the Antarctic Ice Sheet is a major contributor to sea level rise worldwide,” said expedition co-chief scientist Sasha Montelli of University College London (UCL). “Our work is critical for providing longer-term context of these recent changes, improving our ability to make projections of future change — projections that can inform actionable policies. We will undoubtedly make new discoveries as we continue to analyse this data.”

“We were thrilled by the opportunity to explore the newly exposed seafloor,” said team member Dr Svetlana Radionovskaya from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences. “The research will provide key insights into ice sheet dynamics, oceanography and sub-ice shelf ecosystems. At a time when the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is melting at an alarming rate, understanding these dynamics and their impacts is crucial.”

photo1_fkt250110-20250117-gliderdeploymentzodiac-ingle-2717.jpg

The oceanography team, led by Cimoli in collaboration with the University of East Anglia and the British Antarctic Survey, used autonomous underwater vehicles to characterise the ocean circulation of the region and study the impacts of glacial meltwater on the physical and chemical seawater properties. "Antarctica and the Southern Ocean are a nexus point for ocean circulation, so changes that happen around Antarctica can affect global ocean circulation and global climate," said Cimoli.

The researchers are also investigating how the iceberg calving event has contributed to mix the upper ocean, not just in the recently exposed area, but also further downstream as the iceberg floats away. As the giant iceberg drifts, it can generate turbulence that mixes water properties and could potentially mix the deep nutrient-rich water with the surface waters, fuelling biological productivity. 

The expedition was part of Challenger 150, a global cooperative focused on deep-sea biological research and endorsed by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO (IOC/UNESCO) as an Ocean Decade Action.

“The science team was originally in this remote region to study the seafloor and ecosystem at the interface between ice and sea,” said Schmidt Ocean Institute Executive Director, Dr Jyotika Virmani. “Being right there when this iceberg calved from the ice shelf presented a rare scientific opportunity. Serendipitous moments are part of the excitement of research at sea – they offer the chance to be the first to witness the untouched beauty of our world.” 

Svetlana Radionovskaya is a Junior Research Fellow at Queens’ College, Cambridge. Laura Cimoli is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Computing for Climate Science, Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge.

Adapted from a media release by the Schmidt Ocean Institute.

Inset image: Dr Cimoli (right) and Dr Meyer (UEA, left) prepare an underwater glider for deployment. Credit: Alex Ingle/Schmidt Ocean Institute.

Scientists explore a seafloor area newly exposed by iceberg A-84; discover vibrant communities of ancient sponges and corals. 

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The Spotlight on Spinouts 2025 report, produced by the Royal Academy of Engineering in collaboration with Beauhurst, analyses annual trends in UK spinouts. The University of Cambridge ranks second to Oxford for the number of spinouts created since 2011, with Imperial in third. However, in the last year, Cambridge has spun out 26 new companies, showing the largest increase in the number of spinouts among the top three.

According to the report, East of England spinouts secured 35.0% of total investment, leading all regions. The area hosted two of the top five spinout fundraisings in 2024, including a £450 million raise by Cambridge spinout, Bicycle Therapeutics. The South Cambridgeshire-based company develops cancer treatments, with the investment aimed at supporting its R&D efforts.

Dr Jim Glasheen, Chief Executive of Cambridge Enterprise, the University’s innovation arm, said: “This rapid increase in the number of spinouts coming out of Cambridge reflects our continued focus on accelerating Cambridge innovations as well as the impact of our newer initiatives, such as the Founders at the University of Cambridge programme and the Technology Investment Fund.”

Dr Diarmuid O’Brien, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Innovation at the University of Cambridge added: “It’s heartening to see the growth in spinouts from Cambridge and across the sector as a whole. University entrepreneurship has an increasingly vital role to play in driving UK economic growth and addressing some of our most pressing societal challenges. As one of the world’s top science and tech clusters, Cambridge has a responsibility to deliver innovation-led economic growth for the UK and we have ambitious plans to further strengthen our capabilities in this regard.”

Read more about Cambridge spinouts in Cambridge Enterprise's Annual Review 2025

Of the UK’s top three universities for spinouts – Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial - Cambridge saw the most growth in 2024, according to a new report on trends in UK academic spinouts.

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During his visit he saw the proposed city-centre site of Cambridge’s new flagship innovation hub, which was endorsed by the Chancellor Rachel Reeves earlier this year, and heard about plans for the space to support venture-backed, rapidly scaling companies. The hub will connect entrepreneurs, investors, and corporates, serving as the UK’s equivalent to Lab Central in Boston or Station F in Paris – a beacon for global talent and capital.

While he was in the city, the Minister unveiled Innovate Cambridge’s new Advisory Council. Featuring global tech and science pioneers, the Council will catalyse the Cambridge cluster’s potential to deliver substantial societal, environmental and economic benefits, and empower the city to become a global centre for responsible innovation.

He also spoke on BBC Radio 4’s PM programme about Cambridge’s role in the development of the Oxford-Cambridge Growth Corridor. In a special edition, the programme focused on government plans to boost UK science and technology growth by linking up the two cities to create new homes, infrastructure, leisure facilities, office and laboratory space.

As part of his visit, the Minister toured the Cambridge West Innovation District, the transformative project that will allow industry to co-locate at scale with the University’s world-leading academic community. Once complete, the campus is expected to employ 14,000 people and will be the leading location in Europe for AI, quantum and climate research.

At the West Hub, a publicly accessible multi-purpose facility, Lord Vallance met with local authority leaders from across the region. He then toured the site and saw key research locations including the Whittle Laboratory, home to the UK’s Integrated Technology Accelerator for zero-carbon flight, and the Computer Lab, a long-standing driver of tech spinouts.

Visiting the Cavendish Laboratory (Department of Physics), he heard about the impact of industry collaboration with major companies like Hitachi and ARM, and the role that the Department’s new state-of-the-art facilities will play in setting the stage for a new era of scientific discovery in areas such as ‘green tech’ – including long-lasting batteries – next-generation ICT devices, and quantum healthcare technology.”

The visit concluded with a roundtable discussion, where senior representatives from across Cambridge’s innovation ecosystem discussed ways to accelerate company growth, attract global talent, and secure new foreign direct investment – delivering growth which will benefit the whole UK.

Lord Vallance said: "The Oxford and Cambridge Corridor is a world-leading, high-growth, innovation cluster and we need to harness the opportunities that innovators are coming up with here. By backing our strengths in the Corridor, we can boost economic growth across the country, unlocking up to £78 billion for our economy, and deliver on our Plan for Change."

Professor Deborah Prentice, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, said: "Cambridge is a mature innovation ecosystem spanning many high-growth sectors, including AI, technology, and life sciences. By working with the government and other partners, we can accelerate our impact even further, unlock the amazing potential of University research and innovation, and help drive UK growth."

Science Minister and Oxford-Cambridge Innovation Champion, Lord Patrick Vallance, visited Cambridge to see how the world’s most intensive science and technology cluster can drive economic growth.

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The system, Aardvark Weather, has been supported by the Alan Turing Institute, Microsoft Research and the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts. It provides a blueprint for a new approach to weather forecasting with the potential to transform current practices. The results are reported in the journal Nature.

“Aardvark reimagines current weather prediction methods offering the potential to make weather forecasts faster, cheaper, more flexible and more accurate than ever before, helping to transform weather prediction in both developed and developing countries,” said Professor Richard Turner from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, who led the research. “Aardvark is thousands of times faster than all previous weather forecasting methods.”

Current weather forecasts are generated through a complex set of stages, each taking several hours to run on powerful supercomputers. Aside from daily usage, the development, maintenance and use of these systems require significant time and large teams of experts.

More recently, research by Huawei, Google, and Microsoft has shown that one component of the weather forecasting pipeline, the numerical solver (which calculates how weather evolves over time), can be replaced with AI, resulting in faster and more accurate predictions. This combination of AI and traditional approaches is now being used by the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).

But with Aardvark, researchers have replaced the entire weather prediction pipeline with a single, simple machine learning model. The new model takes in observations from satellites, weather stations and other sensors and outputs both global and local forecasts.

This fully AI driven approach means predictions that were once produced using many models – each requiring a supercomputer and a large support team to run – can now be produced in minutes on a desktop computer.

When using just 10% of the input data of existing systems, Aardvark already outperforms the United States national GFS forecasting system on many variables. It is also competitive with United States Weather Service forecasts that use input from dozens of weather models and analysis by expert human forecasters.

“These results are just the beginning of what Aardvark can achieve,” said first author Anna Allen, from Cambridge’s Department of Computer Science and Technology. “This end-to-end learning approach can be easily applied to other weather forecasting problems, for example hurricanes, wildfires, and tornadoes. Beyond weather, its applications extend to broader Earth system forecasting, including air quality, ocean dynamics, and sea ice prediction.”

The researchers say that one of the most exciting aspects of Aardvark is its flexibility and simple design. Because it learns directly from data it can be quickly adapted to produce bespoke forecasts for specific industries or locations, whether that's predicting temperatures for African agriculture or wind speeds for a renewable energy company in Europe.

This contrasts to traditional weather prediction systems where creating a customised system takes years of work by large teams of researchers.

“The weather forecasting systems we all rely on have been developed over decades, but in just 18 months, we’ve been able to build something that’s competitive with the best of these systems, using just a tenth of the data on a desktop computer,” said Turner, who is also Lead Researcher for Weather Prediction at the Alan Turing Institute.

This capability has the potential to transform weather prediction in developing countries where access to the expertise and computational resources required to develop conventional systems is not typically available.

“Unleashing AI’s potential will transform decision-making for everyone from policymakers and emergency planners to industries that rely on accurate weather forecasts,” said Dr Scott Hosking from The Alan Turing Institute. “Aardvark’s breakthrough is not just about speed, it’s about access. By shifting weather prediction from supercomputers to desktop computers, we can democratise forecasting, making these powerful technologies available to developing nations and data-sparse regions around the world.”

“Aardvark would not have been possible without decades of physical-model development by the community, and we are particularly indebted to ECMWF for their ERA5 dataset which is essential for training Aardvark,” said Turner.

“It is essential that academia and industry work together to address technological challenges and leverage new opportunities that AI offers,” said Matthew Chantry from ECMWF. “Aardvark’s approach combines both modularity with end-to-end forecasting optimisation, ensuring effective use of the available datasets."

“Aardvark represents not only an important achievement in AI weather prediction but it also reflects the power of collaboration and bringing the research community together to improve and apply AI technology in meaningful ways,” said Dr Chris Bishop, from Microsoft Research.

The next steps for Aardvark include developing a new team within the Alan Turing Institute led by Turner, who will explore the potential to deploy Aardvark in the global south and integrate the technology into the Institute’s wider work to develop high-precision environmental forecasting for weather, oceans and sea ice.

Reference:
Anna Allen, Stratis Markou et al. ‘End-to-end data-driven weather prediction.’ Nature (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08897-0

Adapted from a media release by The Alan Turing Institute

A new AI weather prediction system, developed by researchers from the University of Cambridge, can deliver accurate forecasts tens of times faster and using thousands of times less computing power than current AI and physics-based forecasting systems.

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This year’s report analyses the UK’s innovation landscape, by benchmarking industrial sectors against global competitors and delivering key insights into the country’s strengths, challenges, and opportunities. 

The report arrives at a particularly significant moment, with the UK Government placing industrial strategy at the core of its plans to deliver growth, emphasising investment, technology adoption, and high-growth sectors. 

Recent national consultations on scale-up financing, technology adoption, and industrial strategy have highlighted the demand for stronger data and analysis to guide decision making. 

The UK Innovation Report 2025 addresses this call by providing fresh data, deep insights, and expert perspectives to support informed policy making and strategic investment, which have significant implications for the UK's industrial strategy.

 Key findings from this year’s report include:

• There has been a significant decline in the UK’s share of global manufacturing value-added, from 3.1% in 2000 to 1.9% in 2022 
• The UK remains a global leader in government financial support for business research and development but lags in direct funding
• Skills mismatches persist, with 37% of UK workers feeling overqualified for their jobs
• The UK is a leading innovator in renewable energy technologies, ranking fourth in public R&D spending on low-carbon energy
• Compiled by policy experts from the University of Cambridge, the report provides an easy-to-navigate overview of key trends across UK industry.  

Read the full report.

As the UK Government continues to develop its national industrial strategy, the Cambridge Industrial Innovation Policy group at Cambridge’s Institute for Manufacturing has unveiled the UK Innovation Report 2025. 

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