Feed aggregator

In the battle against climate disinformation, native advertising is a fierce foe. A study published in the journal npj Climate Action by researchers from Boston University (BU) and the University of Cambridge, evaluates two promising tools to fight misleading native advertising campaigns put forth by big oil companies.

Many major news organisations now offer corporations the opportunity to pay for articles that mimic in tone and format the publication’s regular reported content. These ‘native advertisements’ are designed to camouflage seamlessly into their surroundings, containing only subtle disclosure messages often overlooked or misunderstood by readers. Fossil fuel companies are spending tens of millions of dollars to shape public perceptions of the climate crisis.

“Because these ads appear on reputable, trusted news platforms, and are formatted like reported pieces, they often come across to readers as genuine journalism,” said lead author Michelle Amazeen from BU’s College of Communication. “Research has shown native ads are really effective at swaying readers’ opinions.”

The study is the first to investigate how two mitigation strategies — disclosures and inoculations — may reduce climate misperceptions caused by exposure to native advertising from the fossil fuel industry. The authors found that when participants were shown a real native ad from ExxonMobil, disclosure messages helped them recognise advertising, while inoculations helped reduce their susceptibility to misleading claims.

“As fossil fuel companies invest in disguising their advertisements, this study furthers our understanding of how to help readers recognise when commercial content is masquerading as news and spreading climate misperceptions,” said co-author Benjamin Sovacool, also from BU.

“Our study showed that communication-led climate action is possible and scalable by countering covert greenwashing campaigns, such as native advertising, at the source,” said co-author Dr Ramit Debnath from Cambridge’s Department of Architecture. “The insights we’ve gained from this work will help us design better interventions for climate misinformation.”

The research builds on a growing body of work assessing how people recognise and respond to covert misinformation campaigns. By better understanding these processes, the researchers hope that they can prevent misinformation from taking root and changing people’s beliefs and actions on important issues like climate change.

‘The Future of Energy’ ad

Starting in 2018, readers of The New York Times website encountered what appeared to be an article, titled “The Future of Energy,” describing efforts by oil and gas giant ExxonMobil to invest in algae-based biofuels. Because it appeared beneath the Times’ masthead, in the outlet’s typical formatting and font, many readers likely missed the small banner at the top of the page mentioning that it was an ad sponsored by ExxonMobil.

The ad, part of a $5-million-dollar campaign, neglected to mention the company’s staggering carbon footprint. It also omitted key context, The Intercept reported, like that the stated goal for algae-based biofuel production would represent only 0.2% of the company’s overall refinery capacity. In a lawsuit against ExxonMobil, Massachusetts cited the ad as evidence of the company’s “false and misleading” communications, with several states pursuing similar cases.

Putting two interventions to the test

The researchers examined how more than a thousand participants responded to “The Future of Energy” ad in a simulated social media feed.

Before viewing the ad, participants saw one, both, or neither of the following intervention messages:

An inoculation message designed to psychologically ‘inoculate’ readers from future influence by broadly warning them of potential exposures to misleading paid content. In this study, the inoculation message was a fictitious social media post from United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres reminding people to be wary of online misinformation.

A disclosure message with a simple line of text appearing on a post. In this study, the text “Paid Post by ExxonMobil” accompanied the piece. Studies have shown that more often than not, when native ads are shared on social media, this disclosure disappears.

Bolstering psychological resilience to native ads

The team found that the ad improved opinions of ExxonMobil’s sustainability across the study’s many participants, regardless of which messages they saw, but that the interventions helped to reduce this effect. Some of the key findings include:

The presence of a disclosure more than doubled the likelihood that a participant recognised the content as an ad. However, the participants who had seen a disclosure and those who had not were equally likely to agree with the statement “companies like ExxonMobil are investing heavily in becoming more environmentally friendly.”

Inoculation messages were much more effective than disclosures at protecting people’s existing beliefs on climate change, decreasing the likelihood that participants would agree with misleading claims presented in the ad.

“Disclosures helped people recognise advertising. However, they didn’t help them recognise that the material was biased and misleading,” said Amazeen. “Inoculation messaging provides general education that can be used to fill in that gap and help people resist its persuasive effects. Increasing general awareness about misinformation strategies used by self-interested actors, combined with clearer labels on sponsored content, will help people distinguish native ads from reported content.”

Reference:
Michelle A. Amazeen et al. ‘The “Future of Energy”? Building resilience to ExxonMobil’s disinformation through disclosures and inoculation.’ npj climate action (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s44168-025-00209-6

Adapted from a Boston University story.

A sneaky form of advertising favoured by oil giants influences public opinion with climate action misperceptions, but researchers are studying potential solutions.

rob dobi vai Getty ImagesFueling the Fire of Misinformation - stock photo

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.

Yes

The pledge, made in February 2020 by the UK’s nine leading game shooting and rural organisations, aimed to benefit wildlife and the environment and ensure a market for the healthiest game meat food products. 

But a Cambridge team, working with the University of the Highlands and Islands, has consistently shown that lead shot was not being phased out quickly enough to achieve a complete voluntary transition to non-toxic ammunition by 2025. In a final study, published today in the journal Conservation Evidence, the team concludes that the intended transition has failed.

The team has closely monitored the impact of the pledge every year since its introduction, recruiting expert volunteers to buy whole pheasants from butchers, game dealers and supermarkets across Britain and recover embedded shotgun pellets for analysis. 

In 2025, the study - called SHOT-SWITCH - found that of 171 pheasants found to contain shot, 99% had been killed with lead ammunition. 

This year, for the first time, the team also analysed shotgun pellets found in red grouse carcasses shot in the 2024/25 shooting season and on sale through butchers’ shops and online retailers. In all 78 grouse carcasses from which any shot was recovered, the shot was lead. 

“Many members of the shooting community had hoped that the voluntary pledge away from lead ammunition would avert the need for regulation. But the voluntary route has now been tested - with efforts made by many people - and it has not been successful,” said Professor Rhys Green in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology and lead author of the report.

Eating game meat killed using lead shot will expose people unnecessarily to additional dietary lead. Lead is toxic to humans even in very small concentrations; the development of the nervous system in young and unborn children is especially sensitive to its effects. As a result, many food safety agencies now advise that young children and pregnant women should avoid, or minimise, eating game meat from animals killed using lead ammunition.

Discarded shot from hunting also poisons and kills many tens of thousands of the UK’s wild birds each year.

Despite proposing the voluntary change, many shooting organisations and some individual shooters do not support proposed regulatory restrictions on lead ammunition.

Green said: “Private individuals pay a lot of money to shoot pheasants on some private estates - and people don’t like to change their habits. It’s a bit like wearing car seatbelts, or not smoking in pubs. Despite the good reasons for doing these things, some people were strongly against using regulation to achieve those changes, which are now widely accepted as beneficial. The parallel with shooting game with lead shotgun ammunition is striking.” 

Danish shooters now say that the legal ban on lead introduced in Denmark around 30 years ago was justified. They say it has not reduced the practicality or popularity of their sport, and has increased its acceptability to wider society.

“Although a few large UK estates have managed to enforce non-lead ammunition on pheasant shoots, some have had to be quite draconian in order to do it, with the estate gamekeepers insisting on loading the guns for the shooters,” added Green.

In the 2020/21 and 2021/22 shooting seasons, over 99% of the pheasants studied were shot using lead ammunition. This figure dropped slightly to 94% in 2022/23 and 93% in 2023/24, with the remaining pheasants killed by ammunition made of steel or a metal called bismuth, before rising to 99% again in 2024/25.

Retail pressure

The researchers also checked up on a pledge made by Waitrose in 2019 to stop selling game killed with lead ammunition. 

They found that the retailer had been largely let down by suppliers, and that some of their shooters continued to shoot using lead despite making assurances to the contrary. As a result, Waitrose did not sell oven-ready pheasants at all between 2021 and 2023. It sold pheasants again in January 2024 and the 2024/25 season, but the researchers showed that the majority had been killed using lead shot.

In 2022 the National Game Dealers Association (NGDA), which buys game and sells it to the public and food retailers, also announced it would no longer sell game of any kind that had been shot using lead ammunition. But this pledge has since been withdrawn. The researchers bought 2024/25 season pheasants from three NGDA member businesses and found that all had been shot with lead ammunition.

Inside influence 

The researchers also analysed all articles relating to the voluntary transition published in the magazine of the UK’s largest shooting organisation, the British Association for Shooting and Conservation. They found that articles near the beginning of the five-year pledge communicated clear, frequent and positive messages about the effectiveness and practicality of non-lead shotgun ammunition.

But by 2023, mentions of the transition and encouragement to follow it had dropped dramatically. 

The upshot

At the request of the Defra Secretary of State, the UK Health & Safety Executive (HSE) has assessed the risks to the environment and human health posed by lead in shot and bullets. Its report, published in December 2024, proposes that the UK Government bans the use of lead shot and large calibre bullets for game shooting because of the risks they pose to the environment and health. This recommendation is currently under review by Defra ministers, with a response due in March 2025.

Steel shotgun pellets are a practical alternative to lead and can be used in the vast majority of shotguns, as can other safe lead-free alternatives. But the results of this study indicate UK hunters remain unwilling to make the switch voluntarily.

Since 2010, UK governments have preferred voluntary controls over regulation in many areas of environment and food policy and have suggested that regulation be used only as a last resort.

“Shooting organisations did a lot of questionnaire surveys when the pledge was introduced in 2020, and the results suggested many shooters thought the time had come to switch away from lead ammunition. Those responses stand in contrast to what we’ve actually measured for both pheasant and grouse,” said study co-author Dr Mark Taggart at the University of the Highlands and Islands.

Toxic lead

A previous study led by Green and colleagues found that pheasants killed by lead shot contained many fragments of lead too small to detect by eye or touch, and too distant from the shot to be removed without throwing away a large proportion of otherwise useable meat. This means that eating pheasant killed using lead shot is likely to expose consumers to raised levels of lead in their diet, even if the meat is carefully prepared to remove whole shotgun pellets and the most damaged tissue.

Lead has been banned from use in paint and petrol for decades. It is toxic to humans when absorbed by the body and there is no known safe level of exposure. Lead accumulates in the body over time and can cause long-term harm, including increased risk of cardiovascular disease and kidney disease in adults. Lead is known to lower IQ in young children and affect the neurological development of unborn babies.

The studies were part-funded by the RSPB, Waitrose & Partners, and an anonymous donor. They were supported by a group of unpaid volunteers, who are co-authors of the reports.
 

References

Green, R.E. et al: ‘The proportion of common pheasants shot using lead shotgun ammunition in Britain has barely changed despite five years of voluntary efforts to switch from lead to non-lead ammunition.’ March 2025, Conservation Evidence. DOI: 10.52201/CEJ22/EXYS6184

Green, R.E. et al.: ‘Sampling of red grouse carcasses in Britain indicates no progress during an intended five-year voluntary transition from lead to non-lead shotgun ammunition.’ February 2025, Conservation Evidence. DOI: 10.52201/CEJ22/YYWM1722
 

A voluntary pledge made by UK shooting organisations in 2020 to replace lead shot with non-toxic alternatives by 2025 has failed, analysis by Cambridge researchers finds.

The voluntary route has now been tested - with efforts made by many people - and it has not been successful.Rhys GreenAndy Hay, RSPBAdult pheasant

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.

YesLicence type: Attribution-Noncommerical

They say that discovering the mechanism will support ongoing clinical trials, and could lead to the targeted use of aspirin to prevent the spread of susceptible types of cancer, and to the development of more effective drugs to prevent cancer metastasis. 

The scientists caution that, in some people, aspirin can have serious side-effects and clinical trials are underway to determine how to use it safely and effectively to prevent cancer spread, so people should consult their doctor before starting to take it.

Studies of people with cancer have previously observed that those taking daily low-dose aspirin have a reduction in the spread of some cancers, such as breast, bowel, and prostate cancers, leading to ongoing clinical trials. However, until now it wasn’t known exactly how aspirin could prevent metastases.

Professor Rahul Roychoudhuri in the Department of Pathology at the University of Cambridge, who led the work, said: “Despite advances in cancer treatment, many patients with early stage cancers receive treatments, such as surgical removal of the tumour, which have the potential to be curative, but later relapse due to the eventual growth of micrometastases – cancer cells that have seeded other parts of the body but remain in a latent state. 

“Most immunotherapies are developed to treat patients with established metastatic cancer, but when cancer first spreads there’s a unique therapeutic window of opportunity when cancer cells are particularly vulnerable to immune attack. We hope that therapies that target this window of vulnerability will have tremendous scope in preventing recurrence in patients with early cancer at risk of recurrence.”

The study is published today in the journal 'Nature'.  

The scientists say their discovery of how aspirin reduces cancer metastasis was serendipitous. They were investigating the process of metastasis, because, while cancer starts out in one location, 90% of cancer deaths occur when cancer spreads to other parts of the body.

The scientists wanted to better understand how the immune system responds to metastasis, because when individual cancer cells break away from their originating tumour and spread to another part of the body they are particularly vulnerable to immune attack. The immune system can recognise and kill these lone cancer cells more effectively than cancer cells within larger originating tumours, which have often developed an environment that suppresses the immune system. 

The researchers previously screened 810 genes in mice and found 15 that had an effect on cancer metastasis. In particular, they found that mice lacking a gene which produces a protein called ARHGEF1 had less metastasis of various primary cancers to the lungs and liver. 

The researchers determined that ARHGEF1 suppresses a type of immune cell called a T cell, which can recognise and kill metastatic cancer cells. 

To develop treatments to take advantage of this discovery, they needed to find a way for drugs to target it. The scientists traced signals in the cell to determine that ARHGEF1 is switched on when T cells are exposed to a clotting factor called thromboxane A2 (TXA2).

This was an unexpected revelation for the scientists, because TXA2 is already well-known and linked to how aspirin works. 

TXA2 is produced by platelets - a cell in the blood stream that helps blood clot, preventing wounds from bleeding, but occasionally causing heart attacks and strokes. Aspirin reduces the production of TXA2, leading to the anti-clotting effects, which underlies its ability to prevent heart attacks and strokes. 

This new research found that aspirin prevents cancers from spreading by decreasing TXA2 and releasing T cells from suppression. They used a mouse model of melanoma to show that in mice given aspirin, the frequency of metastases was reduced compared to control mice, and this was dependent on releasing T cells from suppression by TXA2.

Dr Jie Yang in the Department of Pathology at the University of Cambridge, first author of the report, said: “It was a Eureka moment when we found TXA2 was the molecular signal that activates this suppressive effect on T cells. Before this, we had not been aware of the implication of our findings in understanding the anti-metastatic activity of aspirin. It was an entirely unexpected finding which sent us down quite a different path of enquiry than we had anticipated.” 

“Aspirin, or other drugs that could target this pathway, have the potential to be less expensive than antibody-based therapies, and therefore more accessible globally.”

In the future, the researchers plan to help the translation of their work into potential clinical practice by collaborating with Professor Ruth Langley, of the MRC Clinical Trials Unit at University College London, who is leading the Add-Aspirin clinical trial, to find out if aspirin can stop or delay early stage cancers from coming back. 

Professor Langley, who was not involved in this study, commented: “This is an important discovery. It will enable us to interpret the results of ongoing clinical trials and work out who is most likely to benefit from aspirin after a cancer diagnosis.” 

“In a small proportion of people, aspirin can cause serious side-effects, including bleeding or stomach ulcers. Therefore, it is important to understand which people with cancer are likely to benefit.”

The research was principally funded by the Medical Research Council, with additional funding from the Wellcome Trust and European Research Council. 

The Add-Aspirin clinical trial is funded by Cancer Research UK, the National Institute for Health and Care Research, the Medical Research Council and the Tata Memorial Foundation of India. 

Reference: J. Yang, et al: “Aspirin prevents metastasis by limiting platelet TXA2 suppression of T cell immunity.” Nature, March 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08626-7

Adapted from a press release by the Medical Research Council.

Scientists have uncovered the mechanism behind how aspirin could reduce the metastasis of some cancers by stimulating the immune system.

Aspirin has the potential to be less expensive than antibody-based therapies, and therefore more accessible globally.Jie YangTetra Images on Getty

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.

YesLicence type: Attribution-Noncommerical

More than 160 students from across the region met at the Hancock Museum in Newcastle-upon-Tyne to hear more about the application process and what it’s like to study for a degree at either Cambridge or Oxford.

Presentations focused on the unique elements of a Cambridge and Oxford education, the importance of super-curricular study to university applications, advice on writing personal statements, admissions tests and interview guidance.

Cambridge and Oxford Universities used to jointly host an annual regional conference for would-be applicants but these were disbanded during the Covid pandemic.

This latest roadshow was the brainchild of Elaine Effard, who is Corpus Christi’s North East Access and Outreach Coordinator (based in South Shields) and Richard Petty, Senior Access Officer for North-East England at Oxford.

“We are all passionate about working with students in the North-East of England to make sure that they’re best equipped to make competitive applications to Oxford, Cambridge and other higher education providers. We also strongly believe that increased North-East representation at Oxbridge is a fundamental good,” said Elaine. 

outreach1920.jpg

Students attending were full of appreciation for the event.

One said: “I enjoyed hearing the experiences of the students as it gave me a good insight as to what different aspects of the university are like, such as workload, finance and community.”

Another added: “It gave an in-depth view on super-curricular activities that I wouldn’t have accessed otherwise, and a range of options for super curricular activities.”

The other two Cambridge Colleges present were Jesus and King’s, both of whom, like Corpus, have connections with the North-East. Oxford was represented by the Oxford for North East team of colleges, which are Christ Church, Trinity, and St Anne’s. 

Corpus Christi is one of three Cambridge Colleges with school liaison officers based in the region they aim to attract more applications from. Both Queens' and Selwyn Colleges have staff based in Bradford.

Three Cambridge Colleges have teamed up to co-host an outreach event in the North-East of England with the aim of encouraging more applications from students in the area. They were joined by colleagues from Oxford. 

We are all passionate about working with students in the North-East of EnglandElaine EffardOutreach officers on steps of museum

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.

Yes

A study involving over 3,000 participants – both patients and clinicians – found that these misdiagnoses (sometimes termed “in your head” by patients) were often associated with long term impacts on patients’ physical health and wellbeing and damaged trust in healthcare services.

The researchers are calling for greater awareness among clinicians of the symptoms of such diseases, which they recognise can be difficult to diagnose, and for more support for patients.

Autoimmune rheumatic diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, lupus and vasculitis are chronic inflammatory disorders that affect the immune system and can damage organs and tissues throughout the body. They can be very difficult to diagnose as people report a wide range of different symptoms, many of which can be invisible, such as extreme fatigue and depression.

Dr Melanie Sloan from the University of Cambridge led a study exploring patient-reported experiences from two large groups, each of over 1,500 patients, and in-depth interviews with 67 patients and 50 clinicians. The results are published today in Rheumatology.

Patients who reported that their autoimmune disease was misdiagnosed as psychosomatic or a mental health condition were more likely to experience higher levels of depression and anxiety, and lower mental wellbeing. For example, one patient with multiple autoimmune diseases said: “One doctor told me I was making myself feel pain and I still can’t forget those words. Telling me I’m doing it to myself has made me very anxious and depressed.”

More than 80% said it had damaged their self-worth and 72% of patients reported that the misdiagnosis still upset them, often even decades later. Misdiagnosed patients also reported lower levels of satisfaction with every aspect of medical care and were more likely to distrust doctors, downplay their symptoms, and avoid healthcare services. As one patient reported, it “has damaged my trust and courage in telling doctors very much. I even stopped taking my immunosuppressive medicine because of those words”.

Following these types of misdiagnoses, patients often then blamed themselves for their condition, as one individual described: “I don’t deserve help because this is a disease I’ve brought on myself. You go back to those initial diagnosis, you’ve always got their voices in your head, saying you’re doing this to yourself. You just can’t ever shake that. I’ve tried so hard.”

One patient described the traumatising response their doctor’s judgement had on them: “When a rheumatologist dismissed me I was already suicidal, this just threw me over the edge. Thankfully I am terrible at killing myself, it’s so much more challenging than you think. But the dreadful dismissiveness of doctors when you have a bizarre collection of symptoms is traumatizing and you start to believe them, that it’s all in your head.”

Dr Melanie Sloan, from the Department of Public Health and Primary Care at the University of Cambridge, said: “Although many doctors were intending to be reassuring in suggesting a psychosomatic or psychiatric cause for initially unexplainable symptoms, these types of misdiagnoses can create a multitude of negative feelings and impacts on lives, self-worth and care. These appear to rarely be resolved even after the correct diagnoses. We must do better at helping these patients heal, and in educating clinicians to consider autoimmunity at an earlier stage.”      

Clinicians highlighted how hard it was to diagnose autoimmune rheumatic diseases and that there was a high risk of misdiagnosis. Some doctors said they hadn’t really thought about the long-term problems for patients, but others talked about the problems in regaining trust, as one GP from England highlighted: “They lose trust in anything that anyone says…you are trying to convince them that something is OK, and they will say yes but a doctor before said that and was wrong.”

However, there was evidence that this trust can be rebuilt. One patient described having been “badly gaslit by a clinician”, but that when they told the clinician this, “She was shocked and had no idea … She was great. Took it on the chin. Listened and heard. Apologised profusely…For me, the scar of the original encounter was transformed into something much more positive.”

Mike Bosley, autoimmune patient and co-author on the study, said: “We need more clinicians to understand how a misdiagnosis of this sort can result in long-standing mental and emotional harm and in a disastrous loss of trust in doctors. Everyone needs to appreciate that autoimmune conditions can present in these unusual ways, that listening carefully to patients is key to avoiding the long-lasting harm that a mental health or psychosomatic misdiagnosis can cause.”

The study authors recommend several measures for improving support for patients with autoimmune rheumatological diseases. These are likely to apply for many other groups of patients with chronic diseases that are often misunderstood and initially misdiagnosed.

They propose that clinicians should talk about previous misdiagnoses with patients, discuss and empathise with their patients as to the effects on them, and offer targeted support to reduce the long-term negative impacts. Health services should ensure greater access to psychologists and talking therapies for patients reporting previous misdiagnoses, which may reduce the long-term impact on wellbeing, healthcare behaviours, and patient-doctor relationships. Education may reduce misdiagnoses by encouraging clinicians to consider systemic autoimmunity when they assess patients with multiple, seemingly unconnected, physical and mental health symptoms.

Professor Felix Naughton, from the Lifespan Health Research Centre at the University of East Anglia, said: “Diagnosing autoimmune rheumatic diseases can be challenging, but with better awareness among clinicians of how they present, we can hopefully reduce the risk of misdiagnoses. And while there will unfortunately inevitably still be patients whose condition is not correctly diagnosed, with the correct support in place, we may be able to lessen the impact on them.”

The research was funded by LUPUS UK and The Lupus Trust.

Reference
Sloan, M, et al. “I still can’t forget those words”: mixed methods study of the persisting impacts of psychosomatic and psychiatric misdiagnoses. Rheumatology; 3 Mar 2025; DOI: 10.1093/rheumatology/keaf115

A ‘chasm of misunderstanding and miscommunication’ is often experienced between clinicians and patients, leading to autoimmune diseases such as lupus and vasculitis being wrongly diagnosed as psychiatric or psychosomatic conditions, with a profound and lasting impact on patients, researchers have found.

These types of misdiagnoses can create a multitude of negative feelings and impacts on lives, self-worth and careMel SloanAnnie SprattA person laying in a bed under a blanket

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.

YesLicence type: Public Domain

Rare earth elements are vital components in many everyday and high-tech devices, from smartphones and lightbulbs to clean energy solutions like wind turbines and electric vehicles.

With the global shift towards low-carbon energy sources, the demand for rare earths is soaring. While there are rare earth deposits around the world, China dominates the global supply chain, accounting for 70% of rare earth ore extraction and 90% of rare earth ore processing. The UK and EU currently have no domestic source or refining capabilities, leading to concerns over the security of supplies.

“These are critical raw materials; critical both because we need them in almost every gadget and technology, but also because the supply chain is so precarious,” said Professor Sally Gibson from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences.

US President Trump’s recent statements about accessing rare earth deposits in Greenland and Ukraine have once again highlighted the need for countries to find new ways to secure these vital minerals.

“We really need to identify rare earth deposits which have a security of supply,” said Gibson, who currently holds a £1-million project to investigate how rare earth element deposits form, research that could help guide efforts to pinpoint new, economically viable sources.

Rare earth deposits are typically associated with a type of igneous rock called carbonatite. Packed full of calcium, these rocks are unlike other magmas because their chemistry is rich in CO2 and rare earth elements.

Gibson has been studying carbonatites for around 30 years. “Carbonatites have long been seen as geological curiosities, things that no one was that interested in in terms of big-picture science,” she said.

But that outlook has changed in recent years, she added, as the need for rare earths has come to the fore. “How these rocks form is becoming an increasingly important question.”

It’s a question that many geoscientists are asking, but what makes Gibson’s project unique is that, rather than focusing on how individual localities or ‘provinces’ of rare earth deposits form, she is zooming out and examining their global distribution.

Gibson and her colleagues are also looking deeper into Earth’s interior for clues that might explain the surface expression of carbonatites. Project co-lead, Professor Sergei Lebedev, also from Cambridge Earth Sciences, is a geophysicist who uses earthquake waves to ‘see’ into the Earth’s interior, similar to how sonar pings can pick out features on the seabed.

“By combining the geophysical and geochemical evidence, we are learning more about both the deep dynamics and evolution of the Earth’s continents, and the generation of carbonatites and the associated mineral resources,” Lebedev said.

The REE-LITH project was inspired by Gibson and Lebedev’s hunch that differences in the properties of Earth’s lithosphere – the outermost layers of our planet’s structure – might play a guiding role in where carbonatites form, and perhaps their level of rare earth element enrichment.

“We know that lithospheric thickness matters for other special igneous rocks that host diamonds,” said Gibson. “Typically, diamond-hosting ‘kimberlite’ rocks only occur in areas where the lithosphere is particularly thick. I thought it was time we tested if there was a similar relationship for carbonatites.”

Mapping Rare Earths

Over the last year, the team, which includes postdoctoral researchers Siyuan Sui and Emilie Bowman from Cambridge, have been building their new map, drawing on a bank of data on carbonatites and related rare earth deposits and combining this with information about the lithosphere.

As part of this mission, Sui has been using new seismic data extracted from earthquakes to create computer-generated images of the lithosphere, its thickness and other properties. Alongside this, Bowman has been running statistical analyses of geochemical data on magmas to test their relationship to associated rare earth deposits. 

When the researchers started to plot occurrences of carbonatites on a map of lithosphere thickness, they quickly saw a pattern.

“We can already tell that carbonatites occur in specific areas, limited to the steep margins that border Earth’s thickest and oldest lithosphere,” said Gibson. “These regions are typically found in the cores of our planet’s major continents.”

Gibson said that while the resolution of their map is increasing, and they can narrow down the regions where carbonatites should occur, they now need to establish why only certain carbonatites generate economically important rare earths. “Having some kind of model that could predict the most likely locations for rare earth deposits is really the ultimate goal for many geologists,” she said.

Collaboration will be key to unlocking that mystery, Gibson said. Her project brings together researchers from across Cambridge Earth Sciences, drawing on the extensive bank of seismic data collected by geophysicists at the Bullard Laboratory and the Department’s expertise in igneous petrology and geochemistry. The team also includes collaborators at the Universities of St Andrews and Exeter.

“Without that multidisciplinary approach, we wouldn’t have been able to pick out these global-scaled patterns in carbonatite occurrence,” she said.

Cambridge geoscientists are developing an atlas that could lead to a more complete understanding of how viable rare earth element deposits form and help locate more secure sources, by mapping the global distribution of critical metals deposits within unusual igneous rocks.

These are critical raw materials; critical both because we need them in almost every gadget and technology, but also because the supply chain is so precariousSally GibsonCambridge Earth SciencesProfessor Sally Gibson (centre) and colleagues

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.

Yes

These are some of the questions being addressed by a new initiative launched today at the University of Cambridge, which seeks to address the urgent challenge of managing the risks of future engineered pandemics.

The Engineered Pandemics Risk Management Programme aims to understand the social and biological factors that might drive an engineered pandemic and to make a major contribution to building the UK’s capability for managing these risks. It will build a network of experts from academia, government, and industry to tackle the problem.

Increased security threats from state and non-state actors, combined with increased urbanisation and global mobility, means the threat of deliberate pathogen release must be taken seriously as must other intertwined aspects of pandemic risk such as mis- and disinformation, the erosion of trust in a number of institutions and an increasingly volatile geopolitical context. Further potential risks are posed by recent developments in gene-editing tools and artificial intelligence, which have rapidly advanced technological capability that may make it easier to engineer potential pandemic pathogens.

Professor Clare Bryant from the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge said: “There is a great opportunity to take a joined-up approach to managing the risks posed by engineered pandemics. We need experts and agencies across the spectrum to work together to develop a better understanding of who or what might drive such events and what their likely impact would be. And we need evidence-informed policies and networks in place that would help us respond to – or better still, prevent – such an eventuality.”

• The aims of the Engineered Pandemics Risk Management Programme are:
• To develop the conceptual underpinnings for the risk management of engineered pandemics based on interdisciplinary research
• To support the capability of the UK’s engineered pandemic risk policy and practice, including building and maintaining networks that connect government, academia and industry.
• To strengthen the international networks that will support this work globally

There are four main strands of work:

Social determinants of engineered pandemic threat

This strand will look at the actors who have the potential to engineer harmful pathogens, either deliberately or accidentally. It will ask questions such as: What could motivate bioterrorism in the coming decades? Who might the relevant actors be? What are the kinds of engineered pandemic that someone might want to create?

Dr Rob Doubleday, Executive Director of the Centre for Science and Policy at the University of Cambridge, said: “The common narrative is that there’s a wide range of potential actors out there who want to create bioweapons but don’t yet have the technical means. But in fact, there’s been very little work to really understand who these people might be, and their relationship to emerging technology. To explore these questions, we need a broad network including social scientists, biosecurity researchers, criminologists, experts in geopolitics and counterterrorism.”

The strand will also look at the governance of scientific research in areas that may facilitate an engineered pandemic, whether unwittingly or maliciously, aiming to deliver a policy framework that enables freedom of intellectual research while managing real and apparent risk in infectious disease research.

Professor Bryant said: “As scientists, we’re largely responsible for policing our own work and ensuring integrity, trustworthiness and transparency, and for considering the consequences of new knowledge and how it might be used. But with the rapid progress of genomic technologies and AI, self-regulation becomes more difficult to manage. We need to find governance frameworks that balance essential scientific progress with its potential misapplication.”

Biological determinants of engineered pandemic threat

Recognising that the most likely cause of an engineered pandemic would be the deliberate release of a naturally-occurring pathogen – viral or bacterial, for example – rather than a man-made pathogen, this strand aims to understand what might make a particular pathogen infectious and how our immune systems respond to infection. This knowledge will allow researchers to screen currently available drugs to prevent or treat infection and to design vaccines quickly should a pandemic occur.

Modelling threats and risk management of engineered pandemics

The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted practical problems of dealing with pandemic infections, from the provision of personal protective equipment (PPE) to ensuring a sufficient supply of vaccine doses and availability of key medications. Modelling the potential requirements of a pandemic, how they could be delivered, how ventilation systems could be modified, what biosafety measures could be taken, for example, are all key challenges for managing any form of pandemic. This strand will address how existing modelling approaches would need to be adapted for a range of plausible engineered pandemics.

Policy innovation challenges

Working with the policy community, the Cambridge team will co-create research that directly addresses policy needs and involves policy makers. It will support policy makers in experimenting with more joined-up approaches through testing, learning and adapting solutions developed in partnership.

The Engineered Pandemics Risk Management Programme is supported by a £5.25 million donation to the Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge. The team intends it to form a central component of a future Pandemic Risk Management Centre, for which it is now fundraising.

Professor Joanna Page, Director of CRASSH, said: “Cambridge has strengths across a broad range of disciplines – from genetics and immunology to mathematical modelling to existential risk and policy engagement – that can make a much-needed initiative such as this a success.”

To find out more, visit the Engineered Pandemic Risk Management website.

Covid-19 showed us how vulnerable the world is to pandemics – but what if the next pandemic were somehow engineered? How would the world respond – and could we stop it happening in the first place?

There is a great opportunity to take a joined-up approach to managing the risks posed by engineered pandemicsClare BryantMartin SanchezIllustration showing global pandemic spread

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.

YesLicence type: Public Domain

More fires, taking hold over more months of the year, are causing more carbon to be released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

Fires on peatlands, which are carbon-rich, can almost double global fire-driven carbon emissions. Researchers found that despite accounting for only a quarter of the total UK land area that burns each year, dwarfed by moor and heathland, wildfires that burn peat have caused up to 90% of annual UK fire-driven carbon emissions since 2001 – with emissions spikes in particularly dry years.

Peat only burns when it’s hot and dry enough - conditions that are occurring more often with climate change. The peatlands of Saddleworth Moor in the Peak District, and Flow Country in northern Scotland, have both been affected by huge wildfires in recent years.

Unlike heather moorland which takes up to twenty years to regrow after a fire, burnt peat can take centuries to reaccumulate. The loss of this valuable carbon store makes the increasing wildfire frequency on peatlands a real cause for concern. 

The researchers also calculated that carbon emissions from fires on UK peatland are likely to rise by at least 60% if the planet warms by 2oC. 

The findings, which are broadly relevant to peatlands in temperate climates, are published today in the journal 'Environmental Research Letters'.

“We found that peatland fires are responsible for a disproportionately large amount of the carbon emissions caused by UK wildfires, which we project will increase even more with climate change,” said Dr Adam Pellegrini in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Plant Sciences, senior author of the study.

He added: “Peatland reaccumulates lost carbon so slowly as it recovers after a wildfire that this process is limited for climate change mitigation. We need to focus on preventing that peat from burning in the first place, by re-wetting peatlands.”

"We found that in dry years, peatland wildfires were able to burn into the peat and release significant quantities of carbon into the atmosphere. In particularly dry years this contributed up to 90% of the total wildfire-driven carbon emissions from the UK," said Dr Sarah Baker, lead author of the study which she conducted while at the University of Cambridge. Baker is now based at the University of Exeter.

The researchers found that the UK’s ‘fire season’ - when fires occur on natural land - has lengthened dramatically since 2011, from between one and four months in the years 2011-2016 to between six and nine months in the years 2017-2021. The change is particularly marked in Scotland, where almost half of all UK fires occur.

Nine percent of the UK is covered by peatland, which in a healthy condition removes over three million tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere per year. 

The researchers estimate 800,000 tonnes of carbon were emitted from fires on UK peatlands between 2001 and 2021. The 2018 Saddleworth Moor fire emitted 24,000 tonnes of carbon, and the 2019 Flow Country fire emitted 96,000 tonnes of carbon from burning peat.

To get their results, the researchers mapped all UK wildfires over a period of 20 years – assessing where they burn, whether peat burned, how much carbon they emit, and how climate change is affecting fires. This involved combining data on fire locations, vegetation type and carbon content, soil moisture, and peat depth. Using UK Met Office model outputs, the team also used simulated climate conditions to project how wildfires in the UK could change in the future.

The study only considered land where wildfires have occurred in the past, and did not consider the future increases in burned area that are likely to occur with hotter, drier UK summers.

An average of 5,600 hectares of moor and heathland burns across the UK each year, compared to 2,500 hectares of peatland.

“Buffering the UK’s peatlands against really hot, dry summers is a great way to reduce carbon emissions as part of our goal to reach net zero. Humans are capable of incredible things when we’re incentivised to do them,” said Pellegrini.

The research was funded by Wellcome, the Isaac Newton Trust and UKRI.

Reference: Baker, S.J. et al: ‘Spikes in UK wildfire emissions driven by peatland fires in dry years.’ February 2025, Environmental Research Letters. DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/adafc6.
 

A new study led by the University of Cambridge has revealed that as our springs and summers get hotter and drier, the UK wildfire season is being stretched and intensified.

Peatland fires are responsible for a disproportionately large amount of the carbon emissions caused by UK wildfires, which we project will increase even more with climate changeAdam PellegriniSarah BakerFire on UK moorland

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.

YesLicence type: Attribution-Noncommerical

The UK government should resist allowing AI companies to scrape all copyrighted works unless the holder has actively “opted out”, as it puts an unfair burden on up-and-coming creative talents who lack the skills and resources to meet legal requirements.

This is according to a new report from University of Cambridge experts in economics, policy and machine learning, who also argue the UK government should clearly state that only a human author can hold copyright – even when AI has been heavily involved.

A collaboration between three Cambridge initiatives – the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, and ai@cam – the report argues that unregulated use of generative AI will not guarantee economic growth, and risks damaging the UK’s thriving creative sector. 

If the UK adopts the proposed ‘rights reservation’ for AI data mining, rather than maintaining the legal foundation that automatically safeguards copyright, it will compromise the livelihoods of many in the sector, particularly those just starting out, say researchers.

They argue that it risks allowing artistic content produced in the UK to be scraped for endless reuse by offshore companies.

“Going the way of an opt-out model is telling Britain’s artists, musicians, and writers that tech industry profitability is more valuable than their creations,” said Prof Gina Neff, Executive Director at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy.

“Ambitions to strengthen the creative sector, bolster the British economy and spark innovation using GenAI in the UK can be achieved – but we will only get results that benefit all of us if we put people’s needs before tech companies.”

'Ingested' by technologies

Creative industries contribute around £124.6 billion or 5.7% to the UK’s economy, and have a deep connection to the tech industry. For example, the UK video games industry is the largest in Europe, and contributed £5.12 billion to the UK economy in 2019.

While AI could lead to a new generation of creative companies and products, the researchers say that little is currently known about how AI is being adopted within these industries, and where the skills gaps lie.

“The Government ought to commission research that engages directly with creatives, understanding where and how AI is benefiting and harming them, and use it to inform policies for supporting the sector’s workforce,” said Neil Lawrence, DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning and Chair of ai@cam.

“Uncertainty about copyright infringement is hindering the development of Generative AI for public benefit in the UK. For AI to be trusted and widely deployed, it should not make creative work more difficult.”

In the UK, copyright is vested in the creator automatically if it meets the legal criteria. Some AI companies have tried to exploit “fair dealing” – a loophole based around use for research or reporting – but this is undermined by the commercial nature of most AI.

Now, some AI companies are brokering licensing agreements with publishers, and the report argues this is a potential way to ensure creative industries are compensated.

While rights of performers, from singers to actors, currently cover reproductions of live performances, AI uses composites harvested from across a performer’s oeuvre, so rights relating to specific performances are unlikely to apply, say researchers.

Further clauses in older contracts mean performers are having their work “ingested” by technologies that didn’t exist when they signed on the dotted line.

The researchers call on the government to fully adopt the Beijing Treaty on Audio Visual Performance, which the UK signed over a decade ago but is yet to implement, as it gives performers economic rights over all reproduction, distribution and rental.

"The current lack of clarity about the licensing and regulation of training data use is a lose-lose situation. Creative professionals aren't fairly compensated for their work being used to train AI models, while AI companies are hesitant to fully invest in the UK due to unclear legal frameworks,” said Prof Diane Coyle, the Bennett Professor of Public Policy.

“We propose mandatory transparency requirements for AI training data and standardised licensing agreements that properly value creative works. Without these guardrails, we risk undermining our valuable creative sector in the pursuit of uncertain benefits from AI."

'Spirit of copyright law'

The Cambridge experts also look at questions of copyright for AI-generated work, and the extent to which “prompting” AI can constitute ownership. They conclude that AI cannot itself hold copyright, and the UK government should develop guidelines on compensation for artists whose work and name feature in prompts instructing AI.

When it comes to the proposed ‘opt-out’ solution, the experts it is not “in the spirit of copyright law” and is difficult to enforce. Even if creators do opt out, it is not clear how that data will be identified, labelled, and compensated, or even erased.

It may be seen as giving “carte blanche” to foreign-owned and managed AI companies to benefit from British copyrighted works without a clear mechanism for creators to receive fair compensation.

“Asking copyright reform to solve structural problems with AI is not the solution,” said Dr Ann Kristin Glenster, Senior Policy Advisor at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and lead author of the report.

“Our research shows that the business case has yet to be made for an opt-out regime that will promote growth and innovation of the UK creative industries.

“Devising policies that enable the UK creative industries to benefit from AI should be the Government’s priority if it wants to see growth of both its creative and tech industries,” Glenster said.

The UK government’s proposed ‘rights reservation’ model for AI data mining tells British artists, musicians, and writers that “tech industry profitability is more valuable than their creations” say leading academics.

We will only get results that benefit all of us if we put people’s needs before tech companiesGina NeffKal Visuals - Unsplash

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.

YesLicence type: Attribution

The team, led by the University of Cambridge, developed printed fabric sensors that can monitor breathing by detecting tiny movements in the skin, even when the pyjamas are worn loosely around the neck and chest.

The sensors embedded in the smart pyjamas were trained using a ‘lightweight’ AI algorithm and can identify six different sleep states with 98.6% accuracy, while ignoring regular sleep movements such as tossing and turning. The energy-efficient sensors only require a handful of examples of sleep patterns to successfully identify the difference between regular and disordered sleep.

The researchers say that their smart pyjamas could be useful for the millions of people in the UK who struggle with disordered sleep to monitor their sleep, and how it might be affected by lifestyle changes. The results are reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Sleep is vital for human health, yet more than 60% of adults experience poor sleep quality, leading to the loss of between 44 and 54 annual working days, and an estimated one percent reduction in global GDP. Sleep behaviours such as mouth breathing, sleep apnoea and snoring are major contributors to poor sleep quality, and can lead to chronic conditions such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes and depression.

“Poor sleep has huge effects on our physical and mental health, which is why proper sleep monitoring is vital,” said Professor Luigi Occhipinti from the Cambridge Graphene Centre, who led the research. “However, the current gold standard for sleep monitoring, polysomnography or PSG, is expensive, complicated and isn’t suitable for long-term use at home.”

Home devices that are simpler than PSG, such as home sleep tests, typically focus on a single condition and are bulky or uncomfortable. Wearable devices such as smartwatches, while more comfortable to wear, can only infer sleep quality, and are not effective for accurately monitoring disordered sleep.

“We need something that is comfortable and easy to use every night, but is accurate enough to provide meaningful information about sleep quality,” said Occhipinti.

To develop the smart pyjamas, Occhipinti and his colleagues built on their earlier work on a smart choker for people with speech impairments. The team re-designed the graphene-based sensors for breath analysis during sleep, and made several design improvements to increase sensitivity.

“Thanks to the design changes we made, the sensors are able to detect different sleep states, while ignoring regular tossing and turning,” said Occhinpinti. “The improved sensitivity also means that the smart garment does not need to be worn tightly around the neck, which many people would find uncomfortable. As long as the sensors are in contact with the skin, they provide highly accurate readings.”

The researchers designed a machine learning model, called SleepNet, that uses the signals captured by the sensors to identify sleep states including nasal breathing, mouth breathing, snoring, teeth grinding, central sleep apnoea (CSA), and obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA). SleepNet is a ‘lightweight’ AI network, that reduces computational complexity to the point where it can be run on portable devices, without the need to connect to computers or servers.

“We pruned the AI model to the point where we could get the lowest computational cost with the highest degree of accuracy,” said Occhinpinti. “This way we are able to embed the main data processors in the sensors directly.”

The smart pyjamas were tested on healthy patients and those with sleep apnoea, and were able to detect a range of sleep states with an accuracy of 98.6%. By treating the smart pyjamas with a special starching step, they were able to improve the durability of the sensors so they can be run through a regular washing machine.

The most recent version of the smart pyjamas are also capable of wireless data transfer, meaning the sleep data can be securely transferred to a smartphone or computer.

“Sleep is so important to health, and reliable sleep monitoring can be key in preventative care,” said Occhipinti. “Since this garment can be used at home, rather than in a hospital or clinic, it can alert users to changes in their sleep that they can then discuss with their doctor. Sleep behaviours such as nasal versus mouth breathing are not typically picked up in an NHS sleep analysis, but it can be an indicator of disordered sleep.”

The researchers are hoping to adapt the sensors for a range of health conditions or home uses, such as baby monitoring, and have been in discussions with different patient groups. They are also working to improve the durability of the sensors for long-term use.

The research was supported in part by the EU Graphene Flagship, Haleon, and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).

Reference:
Chenyu Tang, Wentian Yi et al. ‘A deep learning-enabled smart garment for accurate and versatile monitoring of sleep conditions in daily life.’ PNAS (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2420498122

Researchers have developed comfortable, washable ‘smart pyjamas’ that can monitor sleep disorders such as sleep apnoea at home, without the need for sticky patches, cumbersome equipment or a visit to a specialist sleep clinic.

We need something that is comfortable and easy to use every night, but is accurate enough to provide meaningful information about sleep qualityLuigi OcchipintiLuigi OcchipintiIllustration and photograph of 'smart pyjamas'

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.

Yes

The long-running programme provides families with opportunities to explore local museums through a variety of illuminated and themed activities after regular closing times. 

This year’s events include nighttime nature hunts, torchlit trails, and space-themed science and storytelling sessions. Highlights include:  

- A night time explorer activity at the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, where visitors can search for dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals that once roamed Cambridgeshire.  

- An aquatic adventure at the Museum of Classical Archaeology, inspired by the mythical realm of Poseidon, God of the sea, and the journey of Greek hero Odysseus.  

- A nocturnal orchid hunt at the Cambridge University Botanic Garden, showcasing species from around the world and their unique adaptations.  

- A magic lantern display at the Museum of Cambridge, where visitors can create their own Victorian-style lanterns to guide them through the exhibits.  

The full programme for Twilight at the Museums is available on the University of Cambridge Museums website: http://www.museums.cam.ac.uk/theme/twilight.

All events are free or low-cost, with a mix of book-ahead and drop-in activities. Many venues are within walking distance of each other, allowing families to visit multiple locations in one evening.  

 

David Cahill Roots, Head of Collections’ Programmes and Collaborations at the University of Cambridge, said: “We’re delighted to bring back Twilight at the Museums this half term. Families will be able to experience the magic and excitement of exploring their local museums as the night falls, as well as enjoying hands-on activities, crafts, and performances. Remember to wrap up warm and bring your torch to see what you can discover!”  

In addition to the evening events, daytime activities will also be available across the museums during the half term. These include a chance to ‘meet’ fossil hunter Mary Anning at the Sedgwick Museum and a penguin-themed craft workshop at the Polar Museum, inspired by chalk drawings from Captain Scott and Sir Ernest Shackleton.  

The University of Cambridge Museums will also host one of their regular Disability Friendly Openings, providing a quieter environment and sensory activities tailored for children with special educational needs and disabilities, as well as their families.  

Participating organisations in Twilight at the Museums 2025 include:  

- The Centre for Computing History  

- Cambridge Museum of Technology  

- Cambridge Science Centre  

- Cambridge University Botanic Garden  

- The Fitzwilliam Museum  

- Great St Mary's Church

- Museum of Cambridge  

- Museum of Classical Archaeology  

- The Norris Museum (St Ives)  

- Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences  

- Whipple Museum of the History of Science  

- Museum of Zoology  

For further updates, follow the University of Cambridge Museums on social media (@camunivmuseums) and the hashtag #TwilightAtTheMuseums.

Read the full programme of events and plan your visit here: http://www.museums.cam.ac.uk/theme/twilight.

 

From Monday 17 to Sunday 23 February 2025, the University of Cambridge Museums will host their annual Twilight at the Museums event series, offering events and after-hours access at museums and galleries across Cambridge.

Families will be able to experience the magic and excitement of exploring their local museums as the night falls, as well as enjoying hands-on activities, crafts, and performances.David Cahill Roots, Head of Collections’ Programmes and Collaborations

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.

Yes

Some efforts to preserve or rewild natural habitats are shifting harmful land use to other parts of the world – and this could drive an even steeper decline in the planet’s species, according to a team of conservation scientists and economists led by the University of Cambridge.   

Researchers from over a dozen institutions worldwide have come together to call on the global community to acknowledge the “biodiversity leak”: the displacement of nature-damaging human activities caused by ringfencing certain areas for protection or restoration.

They argue that rewilding productive farmland or forestry in industrialised nations that have low levels of biodiversity may do more harm than good on a planetary scale.

Exploratory analysis by the team suggests that reclaiming typical UK cropland for nature may be five times more damaging for global biodiversity than the benefit it provides local species, due to the displacement of production to more biodiverse regions.   

While this “leakage” has been known about for decades, it is largely neglected in biodiversity conservation, say the researchers. They argue it undermines actions ranging from establishing new nature reserves to the EU’s environmental policies.

Writing in the journal Science, the experts point out that even the UN’s landmark Global Biodiversity Framework – aiming for 30% of the world’s land and seas to be conserved – makes no mention of the leakage problem.

“As nations in temperate regions such as Europe conserve more land, the resulting shortfalls in food and wood production will have to be made up somewhere,” said Prof Andrew Balmford, from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology. 

“Much of this is likely to happen in more biodiverse but often less well-regulated parts of the world, such as Africa and South America. Areas of much greater importance for nature are likely to pay the price for conservation efforts in wealthy nations unless we work to fix this leak.”

“The first thing we need to do is collectively acknowledge that these leaks exist,” said co-author Prof Brendan Fisher from the University of Vermont. “If protesting a logging concession in the US increases demand for pulp from the tropics, then we are unlikely to be helping biodiversity.”

Co-author Dr Ben Balmford of the University of Exeter said: “This issue demands far greater attention from a sector that seeks to shape how 30% of an ever hungrier and more connected planet is managed.”

‘Leakage’ is already a major issue for carbon credits tied to forest preservation, say researchers. But they argue it’s a real problem for biodiversity conservation efforts too.

While protected areas can slow deforestation inside their borders, there’s evidence it can simply shift to neighbouring areas. Production can also be displaced much further. Efforts to protect the Pacific Northwest’s old-growth forests resulted in increased logging in other North American regions, for example.

Yet a survey of site managers of tropical conservation projects conducted by the Cambridge team found that 37% had not come across the concept of leakage, and less than half of the projects were attempting to curb any displacement damage.*

The researchers explored how leakage caused by protected areas could affect global biodiversity by applying real-world food and biodiversity data to two hypothetical conservation projects.

They found that rewilding a sizeable area of Brazilian soybean farms would push production to nations such as Argentina and USA, but because Brazil is so important for biodiversity, the local conservation gains could be around five times greater than the displacement harms.

The opposite would be true if the equivalent area of UK arable farmland was reclaimed for nature. Here, production would be displaced to Australia, Germany, Italy and Ukraine.**

As the UK has fewer species than these other countries, damage from ‘leakage’ could be five times greater than the local benefit to British biodiversity. 

The experts offer a number of ways to help plug the biodiversity leak. They call on governments and the conservation sector to take leakage far more seriously when making environmental policy at national and global level.

They also point out that leakage could be reduced if conservation projects work with others to reduce demand – especially for high-footprint commodities such as red meat.

There’s scope to limit leakage by targeting conservation to areas high in biodiversity but where current or potential production of food or timber is limited, say researchers. One example is restoring abandoned tropical shrimp farms to mangroves.

However, we should also be much more cautious about restoring natural habitats on currently productive farmland in less biodiverse parts of the world, they argue.

Beyond planning where to conserve, major conservation initiatives should work with partners in other sectors to support local farmers, so that overall levels of production are maintained in the region despite protected areas. The team cite examples ranging from forest-friendly chocolate to herding practices that protect snow leopards.

Where local yield increases are difficult, larger-scale programmes could establish long-range partnerships with suppliers in the same markets to make up shortfalls in production.

“Without attention and action, there is a real risk that the biodiversity leak will undermine hard-won conservation victories,” said co-author Dr Fiona Sanderson of the Royal Society for Protection of Birds, who works on reducing the impacts of cocoa production in Sierra Leone.

Lead author from Cambridge, Prof Andrew Balmford, added: “At its worst, we could see some conservation actions cause net global harm by displacing production to regions which are much more significant for biodiversity.” 

*Survey of 100 practitioners involved in area-based tropical conservation projects, including directors, managers, coordinators, and researchers. Respondents came from 36 countries across all five continents. Further details: https://zenodo.org/records/14780198

** Two hypothetical habitat restoration programs covering 1000km2 of Brazilian soy-producing land, and restoring 1000km2 of arable farmland in the UK that produces wheat, barley and oilseed rape.

Researchers call on the international community to recognise and start tackling the “biodiversity leak”. 

Areas of much greater importance for nature are likely to pay the price for conservation efforts in wealthy nations unless we work to fix this leakAndrew BalmfordMichael Duff, © RSPB-images.comThe Gola Rainforest Project in Sierra Leone. This conservation project has limited leakage while slowing deforestation by supporting nearby farmers such as Mallo Samah to increase their yields and get higher prices for their cocoa.

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.

Yes

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, say their solar-powered reactor could be used to make fuel to power cars and planes, or the many chemicals and pharmaceuticals products we rely on. It could also be used to generate fuel in remote or off-grid locations.

Unlike most carbon capture technologies, the reactor developed by the Cambridge researchers does not require fossil-fuel-based power, or the transport and storage of carbon dioxide, but instead converts atmospheric CO2 into something useful using sunlight. The results are reported in the journal Nature Energy.

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) has been touted as a possible solution to the climate crisis, and has recently received £22bn in funding from the UK government. However, CCS is energy-intensive and there are concerns about the long-term safety of storing pressurised CO2 deep underground, although safety studies are currently being carried out.

“Aside from the expense and the energy intensity, CCS provides an excuse to carry on burning fossil fuels, which is what caused the climate crisis in the first place,” said Professor Erwin Reisner, who led the research. “CCS is also a non-circular process, since the pressurised CO2 is, at best, stored underground indefinitely, where it’s of no use to anyone.”

“What if instead of pumping the carbon dioxide underground, we made something useful from it?” said first author Dr Sayan Kar from Cambridge’s Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry. “CO2 is a harmful greenhouse gas, but it can also be turned into useful chemicals without contributing to global warming.”

The focus of Reisner’s research group is the development of devices that convert waste, water and air into practical fuels and chemicals. These devices take their inspiration from photosynthesis: the process by which plants convert sunlight into food. The devices don’t use any outside power: no cables, no batteries – all they need is the power of the sun.

The team’s newest system takes CO2 directly from the air and converts it into syngas: a key intermediate in the production of many chemicals and pharmaceuticals. The researchers say their approach, which does not require any transportation or storage, is much easier to scale up than earlier solar-powered devices.

The device, a solar-powered flow reactor, uses specialised filters to grab CO2 from the air at night, like how a sponge soaks up water. When the sun comes out, the sunlight heats up the captured CO2, absorbing infrared radiation and a semiconductor powder absorbs the ultraviolet radiation to start a chemical reaction that converts the captured CO2 into solar syngas. A mirror on the reactor concentrates the sunlight, making the process more efficient.

The researchers are currently working on converting the solar syngas into liquid fuels, which could be used to power cars, planes and more – without adding more CO2 to the atmosphere.

“If we made these devices at scale, they could solve two problems at once: removing CO2 from the atmosphere and creating a clean alternative to fossil fuels,” said Kar. “CO2 is seen as a harmful waste product, but it is also an opportunity.”

The researchers say that a particularly promising opportunity is in the chemical and pharmaceutical sector, where syngas can be converted into many of the products we rely on every day, without contributing to climate change. They are building a larger scale version of the reactor and hope to begin tests in the spring.

If scaled up, the researchers say their reactor could be used in a decentralised way, so that individuals could theoretically generate their own fuel, which would be useful in remote or off-grid locations.

“Instead of continuing to dig up and burn fossil fuels to produce the products we have come to rely on, we can get all the CO2 we need directly from the air and reuse it,” said Reisner. “We can build a circular, sustainable economy – if we have the political will to do it.”

The technology is being commercialised with the support of Cambridge Enterprise, the University’s commercialisation arm. The research was supported in part by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the European Research Council, the Royal Academy of Engineering, and the Cambridge Trust. Erwin Reisner is a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge.

Reference:
Sayan Kar et al. ‘Direct air capture of CO2 for solar fuels production in flow.’ Nature Energy (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41560-025-01714-y

For more information on energy-related research in Cambridge, please visit the Energy IRC, which brings together Cambridge’s research knowledge and expertise, in collaboration with global partners, to create solutions for a sustainable and resilient energy landscape for generations to come. 

Researchers have developed a reactor that pulls carbon dioxide directly from the air and converts it into sustainable fuel, using sunlight as the power source.

We can build a circular, sustainable economy – if we have the political will to do itErwin ReisnerSayan KarSolar-powered flow reactor

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.

Yes

The findings, published today in Science Advances, suggest that such individuals will need regular vaccine boosters to protect them and reduce the risk of infections that could be severe and also lead to new ‘variants of concern’ emerging.

Almost 16 million people worldwide are estimated to have died from Covid-19 during 2020 and 2021, though nearly 20 million deaths are thought to have been prevented as a result of the rapid rollout of vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused the pandemic.

During the pandemic, researchers discovered that immunocompromised individuals had difficulty clearing the virus, even when vaccinated. These are people whose immune systems are not functioning correctly, either as a direct result of disease or because they are on medication to dampen down their immune systems, for example to prevent organ transplant rejection. This meant that their infections lasted longer, giving the virus more opportunities to mutate.

Research from early in the pandemic showed that chronic infections can give rise to variants of concern that can then cause new waves of infection in the wider population.

When an individual is vaccinated, their immune systems produce antibodies that recognise and launch an attack on the virus. Such a process is known as seroconversion. Additional ‘booster’ vaccinations increase seroconversion and hence the likelihood of clearing infection.

However, although most immunocompromised individuals will have received three or more doses of the Covid-19 vaccine, they still account for more than a fifth of hospitalisations, admissions to intensive care units, and overall deaths associated with the disease.

To see why this is the case, scientists at the Cambridge Institute of Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Disease (CITIID) at the University of Cambridge examined immunocompromised individuals who had been vaccinated against Covid-19. These patients, recruited from Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, were living with vasculitis, a group of disorders that cause inflammation of blood vessels. Data from this group was compared against individuals who were not immunocompromised.

Treatments for vasculitis rely on immunosuppressant medicines. These include drugs such as rituximab, which depletes the number of B-cells in the body – but B-cells are the immune cells responsible for producing antibodies. As such, these individuals are a severely at-risk population.

When the researchers analysed bloods samples from the vasculitis patients, they found that even though vaccination induced seroconversion, this in itself was not always sufficient to neutralise the virus. Every immunocompromised individual required at least three doses of the vaccine to protect them across a range of variants up to and include Omicron (the variant that appeared towards the end of 2021 and caused a new wave of infections). In some cases, even four vaccinations were not sufficient to adequately protect them.

Kimia Kamelian, a Gates Cambridge Scholar at CITIID and St Edmund's College, Cambridge, said: “We know that immunocompromised individuals are particularly vulnerable to diseases such as Covid-19 because their immune systems struggle to clear infections. Vaccinations offer some protection, but our study shows that only repeated vaccinations – often four or more – offer the necessary protection.”

Professor Ravi Gupta, also from CITIID and a Fellow at Homerton College, Cambridge, added: “This of course has implications for the individual, who is more likely to have prolonged infection and a much greater risk of severe infection, but it also gives the virus multiple opportunities to mutate.

“We know from our previous work that at least some of the variants of concern probably emerged during chronic infections. That’s why these individuals must be given priority for updated vaccines against new variants.”

The research was funded by Wellcome, Gates Cambridge, Addenbrooke’s Charitable Trust and Vasculitis UK, with additional support by the National Institute for Health and Care Research Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre.

Reference
Kamelian, K et al. Humoral responses to SARS-CoV-2 vaccine in vasculitis-related immune suppression. Sci Adv; 12 Feb 2025; DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adq3342

Vaccinations alone may not be enough to protect people with compromised immune systems from infection, even if the vaccine has generated the production of antibodies, new research from the University of Cambridge has shown.

We know that immunocompromised individuals are particularly vulnerable to diseases such as Covid-19 because their immune systems struggle to clear infectionsKimia KamelianNoSystem imagesVaccination of an senior male

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.

Yes

Developed collaboratively by representatives from across the UK’s research and innovation sector, including universities, research institutes and funding organisations, the Concordat is a commitment and shared ambition to embed environmental sustainability in research practice, culture, and approach throughout the signed organisations, and collectively as a sector. 

"Not only is the Concordat a very welcome initiative to bring the sector together and address the environmental impacts of research and innovation activities, which otherwise detract from their net benefits," says Prof Judy Hirst, chair of the University's Sustainable Research Working Group, “it is also a clear signal from funders of their increasing expectations of both institutions and individuals to cut the environmental costs of the research they fund." 

By signing the Concordat (Nov 2024), the University commits to progressively embed environmental sustainability into its research and innovation practices through action in six priority areas: 

• Leadership and system change 
• Sustainable Infrastructure 
• Sustainable procurement 
• Emissions from business and academic travel 
• Collaborations and partnerships 
• Environmental impact and reporting data 

While the University is taking action on a number of fronts to improve its operational environmental sustainability performance, the Concordat helps us to go further by embedding environmental commitments into the design and delivery of our research, focused towards the six priority areas. This in turn will strengthen the University’s ability to respond to the increasing expectations of research funding bodies in relation to environmental sustainability. 

"The University’s efforts to enhance the sustainability of research practices are a key part of a wider commitment to operational environmental sustainability. Many funders, policymakers, and institutions across the Higher Education sector recognise that more must be done, and the Concordat provides an important foundation for ensuring our approaches are aligned and enabling researchers to take meaningful action," says Dr Andrew Jackson, Director of Research Services. "To effectively reduce environmental harm, we must learn from each other, establish best practice, and create the right conditions to implement it within our research community." 

Last year, the University announced plans to strengthen its leadership on environmental sustainability, across both its academic and operational activities. You can read about Cambridge’s approach to academic environmental sustainability on the Climate and Nature page, and operational environmental sustainability on the Environmental Sustainability website. Further information will be shared as the University develops its plans to deliver on the commitments of the Concordat for the Environmental Sustainability of Research and Innovation Practice. 

Professor Sir John Aston, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research, says "Signing the Concordat marks the beginning of a deeper focus on the environmental impact of doing research at the University of Cambridge. University leaders, departments, institutes, laboratories and individual researchers will all have a part to play, and I’m excited to see where bringing together the best minds in the world will lead us in enhancing the sustainability of the University’s research operations. I would very much like to thank Prof Judy Hirst and the whole Sustainable Research Working Group for their leadership in this area."

Lab-based staff and students can currently get tailored support to improve their environmental performance using the Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework (LEAF). 

The University of Cambridge has become a signatory to the ground-breaking Concordat for the Environmental Sustainability of Research and Innovation Practice, joining 70 signatories and supporting organisations at the time of writing. 

This is a very welcome initiative to bring the sector together and address the environmental impacts of research and innovation activities.Prof Judy Hirst, chair of the University's Sustainable Research Working Group

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.

Yes

Published today in Nature, this comprehensive resource, called HYPOMAP, provides an unparalleled view of the brain’s appetite centre and promises to accelerate the development of treatments for obesity and diabetes.

The hypothalamus is often described as the brain’s ‘control centre’, orchestrating many of the body’s most vital processes. While much of our knowledge of the hypothalamus comes from animal studies, especially in mice, translating these findings to humans has long been a challenge. HYPOMAP bridges this gap by providing an atlas of the individual cells within the human hypothalamus. This resource not only charts over 450 unique cell types but also highlights key differences between the human and mouse hypothalamus — differences that have major implications for drug development.

“This is a game-changer for understanding the human hypothalamus,” said Professor Giles Yeo, senior author of the study from the Institute of Metabolic Science-Metabolic Research Laboratories (IMS-MRL) and MRC Metabolic Diseases Unit, University of Cambridge.

“HYPOMAP confirms the critical role of the hypothalamus in body-weight regulation and has already allowed us to identify new genes linked to obesity. It gives us a roadmap to develop more effective, human-specific therapies.”

Together with researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Metabolism Research in Cologne, Professor Yeo and colleagues used cutting-edge technologies to analyse over 400,000 cells from 18 human donors. HYPOMAP allows researchers to pinpoint specific cell types, understand their genetic profiles, and explore how they interact with neighbouring cells. This detailed cellular resolution offers invaluable insights into the circuits that regulate appetite and energy balance, as well as other functions such as sleep and stress responses.

Comparison with a mouse hypothalamus atlas revealed both similarities and critical differences. Notably, some neurons in the mouse hypothalamus have receptors for GLP-1 — targets of popular weight-loss drugs like semaglutide — that are absent in humans.

"While drugs like semaglutide have shown success in treating obesity, newer therapies target multiple receptors such as GLP-1R and GIPR. Understanding how these receptors function specifically in the human hypothalamus is now crucial for designing safer and more effective treatments," said Dr Georgina Dowsett from the Max Planck Institute for Metabolism Research and formerly at the IMS-MRL.

“Our map of the human hypothalamus is an essential tool for basic and translational research,” added Professor Jens C. Brüning, Director at the Max Planck Institute. “It allows us to pinpoint which mouse nerve cells are most comparable to human cells, enabling more targeted preclinical studies.”

HYPOMAP’s open-access nature ensures that it will be an invaluable resource for scientists worldwide. By offering insights into the hypothalamus’s role in conditions ranging from obesity to cachexia (a wasting condition associated with several illness, which involves extreme loss of muscle and fat), it provides a foundation for tackling some of the most pressing health challenges of our time.

Dr John Tadross, Consultant Pathologist at Addenbrooke’s Hospital and lead author from IMS-MRL, said: “This is just the beginning. The atlas itself is a milestone, but what could really make a difference for patients is understanding how the hypothalamus changes in people who are overweight or underweight. This could fundamentally shift our approach to metabolic health and enable more personalised therapies.”

With HYPOMAP, researchers have a new tool to unlock the secrets of the human brain’s metabolic control centre. By better understanding the human hypothalamus, science takes a significant step toward combating obesity, diabetes, and related conditions.

Reference
Tadross, JA, Steuernagel, L & Dowsett, GKC et al. A comprehensive spatio-cellular map of the human hypothalamus. Nature; 5 Feb 2025; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08504-8

Adapted from a story by the Institute of Metabolic Science-Metabolic Research Laboratories and the Max Planck Institute for Metabolism Research

Scientists have created the most detailed map to date of the human hypothalamus, a crucial brain region that regulates body weight, appetite, sleep, and stress.

HYPOMAP confirms the critical role of the hypothalamus in body-weight regulation and has already allowed us to identify new genes linked to obesityGiles YeoSander DalhuisenPerson holding burger bun with vegetables and meat

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.

YesLicence type: Public Domain

Mr McFadden was welcomed by Vice-Chancellor, Professor Deborah Prentice, to DAWN, the fastest supercomputer in Europe, where he was given a tour of the cutting-edge facility by Dr Paul Calleja, Director of the University’s Research Computing Services. He also spoke with engineers who work on the supercomputer, with industry partners at Dell, and the UK's Atomic Energy Authority. 

Professor Prentice said: "I was very pleased to welcome the Minister to Cambridge to explore the rapidly-developing ways in which the University's research, and DAWN-powered AI, are driving improvements in everyday life. From improving diagnostics to speeding up planning applications, Cambridge AI research is producing positive impact in people's lives."

Following the tour of DAWN, the Minister visited Cambridge University Hospitals (CUH) to witness firsthand the practical applications of DAWN-powered AI. Mr McFadden was shown two use cases of this technology in healthcare. 

Professor Fleur Kilburn-Toppin discussed the potential for AI in breast cancer diagnosis through the EDITH trial, a multicentre mammography study assessing AI’s role in enhancing cancer detection. This discussion coincided with the Government’s launch of the EDITH trial to tackle breast cancer on World Cancer Day. 

The second case study was presented in the Radiography labs, by Dr Suthesh Sivapalaratnam and Professor Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb, who spoke to the Minister about the Blood Counts AI project which harnesses AI to revolutionise disease detection. The project provides an early warning system for infectious diseases, improving public health responses across the NHS. 

The day concluded with a roundtable conversation with academics and clinicians around how the UK can harness the potential of AI to improve public services across various areas, ranging from healthcare to productivity and local government services.  

This visit underscored the University's pivotal role in harnessing AI for societal benefit and the potential for University research in cutting-edge technology to help public service transformation. 

The University welcomed the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Rt Hon Pat McFadden MP, to tour the DAWN supercomputer and discuss the ways in which AI can transform public services and healthcare.  

From improving diagnostics to speeding up planning applications, Cambridge AI research is producing positive impact in people's lives.Vice-Chancellor, Professor Deborah PrenticeUniversity of CambridgeProfessor Deborah Prentice with Pat McFadden, centre, and Dr Paul Calleja

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.

Yes

The Cambridge Awards for Research Impact and Engagement, formerly the Vice-Chancellor's Award, are held annually to recognise exceptional achievement, innovation, and creativity in developing research engagement and impact plans with significant economic, social, and cultural potential. Awarded in three categories, the winners for 2024 are:

Established Academic

Winner: Professor Sander van der Linden (Department of Psychology, School of Biological Sciences and Churchill College) and his team at the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab (Team application)

Project: A Psychological Vaccine Against Misinformation

Professor Sander van der Linden and team have developed a novel approach to countering the spread of harmful misinformation. This ‘psychological vaccine’ resulted in award winning public impact tools that have shown millions of people how to spot fake news online. These games have been adopted by the World Health Organisation, United Nations, UK Government and Google and led to key policy changes in the EU Digital Services Act.

Early Career Researcher

Winner: Dr Gabriel Okello (Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, School of Technology)

Project: Applying multidisciplinary, collaborative approaches to tackle air pollution in rapidly urbanising African cities

The project catalysed Uganda’s first-ever Air Quality Standards, advancing policy and public health. It drove transformative growth in the e-mobility sector and battery-swapping stations. The Clean Air Network was established as a multi-regional community of practice for air quality management across Africa. The platform now provides real-time air quality data enabling evidence-based decision-making in Uganda and eight other African countries.

Collolaboration Award

Winner: 

Lead: Prof Paul Fletcher (Department of Psychiatry, School of Clinical Medicine, Clare College), Dr Dervila Glynn (Cambridge Neuroscience IRC), Dominic Matthews (Ninja Theory Ltd), Sharon Gilfoyle (Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust)

Project: Representing psychosis in video games: Communicating clinical science and tackling stigma

This work draws together expertise in video game design and clinical neuroscience, with lived experience of mental illness to co-produce two award-winning video games vividly conveying the nature of altered experience of reality in a character with psychosis. Within conversations around mental health, psychosis is neglected and highly stigmatised.

In creating a powerful character and telling her story through gameplay, the project has enabled sensitive and thoughtful conversations about psychosis, and mental illness in general. It has had a measurably positive impact on stigma.

Find out more about the winning projects and meet our runners-up here: www.cam.ac.uk/public-engagement/cambridge-awards-2024. 

From helping to inoculate the public against misinformation to tackling air pollution in rapidly urbanising African cities, researchers from across the University of Cambridge were honoured at the Cambridge Awards yesterday (Monday 3rd February) afternoon.

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.

Yes

Hitting the current national 2030 quotas for solar and wind energy could reduce the volatility of electricity markets by an average of 20% across 29 European countries, according to a new study from the University of Cambridge.  

The intensity of spikes in power prices are predicted to fall in every country by the end of the decade if commitments to green energy are met, as natural gas dependency is cut.   

The UK and Ireland would be the biggest beneficiaries, with 44% and 43% reductions in the severity of electricity price spikes by 2030, compared with last year.

Germany could experience a 31% decline in electricity price volatility, with the Netherlands and Belgium seeing price spikes ease by 38% and 33% respectively.

The simulations conducted for the new study show that scaling up renewable energy minimises the market impact of fluctuations in natural gas price – increasing stability even when considering the reliance of renewable technologies on weather.

Some EU leaders and energy ministers have called for renewables targets on grounds of energy security as well as decarbonisation, particularly since Putin’s war on Ukraine stemmed the flow of Russian gas.

The study, published in the journal Nature Energy, calculates in detail how such aims would affect the volatility of wholesale electricity prices in energy markets across Europe.

“The volatility of energy prices is a major cause of damage to national economies,” said Laura Diaz Anadon, the University of Cambridge’s Professor of Climate Change Policy.

“Consumers are still reeling from sharp increases in electricity prices brought about by natural gas shortages following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” said Anadon. “We show that hitting renewables targets reduce the likelihood of such price spikes in the future.”

Daniel Navia, a researcher with the University’s Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance (CEENRG), said: “Meeting renewable energy targets is not only good for carbon neutrality, but we can see it is a boost to economic resilience”

“We had probably underestimated how costly energy price shocks are to our societies, and the last crisis has been a stark reminder.”

The Cambridge researchers used the University’s high performance computing facilities to model a wide range of factors – from fluctuations in weather patterns and energy demands to fuel capacity – to map the current and future grids of all 27 EU nations plus the UK and Switzerland.

They assessed electricity markets in 2030 based on the commitments to renewables as stated in each nation’s national energy and climate plan.

“The UK in particular is projected to see major benefits to its energy market stability from renewables,” said Anadon.

“The UK has struggled with its exposure to gas prices due to a lack of energy storage and limited connections to the European grid. This has led to more hours where electricity prices are set by natural gas.”

The research also suggests that wholesale prices of electricity could fall by over a quarter on average across all countries in the study by decade’s end if they stick to current national renewables targets.

Again, populations in the UK and Ireland stand to gain significantly, with electricity prices predicted to fall by around 45% by 2030, compared with the current situation.

Several of the Nordic nations could see over 60% reductions in electricity costs by 2030, while in Germany the price is predicted to fall by 34%, with Belgium seeing a similar drop of 31%. The study suggests the Netherlands could see the price of electricity fall by 41%.

While the study’s authors caution that trends in electricity prices depend on factors that are “impossible to predict”, they say their results are in line with recent outputs by institutions such as the International Energy Agency.

In fact, Navia and Anadon say their modelling may even underestimate the potential for electricity price stability across Europe, as the projections were calculated using data from 1990-2021 – before the energy crisis created by Russia’s attack on Ukraine.

“It makes sense to think about renewables as a security investment, and if we lose the momentum towards green energy, we are clearly harming the climate, but we also exposing ourselves to unknowable risks down the line,” said Anadon.  

The new study also charts the effects on electricity prices if countries overshoot on renewables. If Europe exceeds its renewable energy goals by 30%, electricity prices could become 50% less sensitive to natural gas, compared to just meeting renewables targets.

However, the study suggests there are tipping points where renewables cause the price of power to fall so far that it stops providing sufficient return on investment, and the green energy industries may stall. 

Added Navia: “If we are to fully utilise solar and wind as a security tool, Europe might have to rethink how its energy markets are designed, and what incentives it can offer the private sector to maintain the societal insurance value it gets from renewable energy.”

National targets for solar and wind power will see reliance on natural gas plummet, reducing electricity price volatility across Europe, with major beneficiaries including the UK and Ireland, the Nordics, and the Netherlands.

The UK in particular is projected to see major benefits to its energy market stability from renewablesLaura Diaz AnadonAnton Petrus via Getty images High voltage electricity towers combined with economic charts

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.

Yes

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge and the University of California, Berkeley, developed a practical way to make hydrocarbons – molecules made of carbon and hydrogen – powered solely by the sun.

The device they developed combines a light absorbing ‘leaf’ made from a high-efficiency solar cell material called perovskite, with a copper nanoflower catalyst, to convert carbon dioxide into useful molecules. Unlike most metal catalysts, which can only convert CO₂ into single-carbon molecules, the copper flowers enable the formation of more complex hydrocarbons with two carbon atoms, such as ethane and ethylene — key building blocks for liquid fuels, chemicals and plastics.

Almost all hydrocarbons currently stem from fossil fuels, but the method developed by the Cambridge-Berkeley team results in clean chemicals and fuels made from CO2, water and glycerol – a common organic compound – without any additional carbon emissions. The results are reported in the journal Nature Catalysis.

The study builds on the team’s earlier work on artificial leaves, which take their inspiration from photosynthesis: the process by which plants convert sunlight into food. “We wanted to go beyond basic carbon dioxide reduction and produce more complex hydrocarbons, but that requires significantly more energy,” said Dr Virgil Andrei from Cambridge’s Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, the study’s lead author.

Andrei, a Research Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge, carried out the work as part of the Winton Cambridge-Kavli ENSI Exchange programme in the lab of Professor Peidong Yang at University of California, Berkeley.

By coupling a perovskite light absorber with the copper nanoflower catalyst, the team was able to produce more complex hydrocarbons. To further improve efficiency and overcome the energy limits of splitting water, the team added silicon nanowire electrodes that can oxidise glycerol instead. This new platform produces hydrocarbons much more effectively — 200 times better than earlier systems for splitting water and carbon dioxide.

The reaction not only boosts CO₂ reduction performance, but also produces high-value chemicals such as glycerate, lactate, and formate, which have applications in pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and chemical synthesis.

“Glycerol is typically considered waste, but here it plays a crucial role in improving the reaction rate,” said Andrei. “This demonstrates we can apply our platform to a wide range of chemical processes beyond just waste conversion. By carefully designing the catalyst’s surface area, we can influence what products we generate, making the process more selective.”

While current CO₂-to-hydrocarbon selectivity remains around 10%, the researchers are optimistic about improving catalyst design to increase efficiency. The team envisions applying their platform to even more complex organic reactions, opening doors for innovation in sustainable chemical production. With continued improvements, this research could accelerate the transition to a circular, carbon-neutral economy.

“This project is an excellent example of how global research partnerships can lead to impactful scientific advancements,” said Andrei. “By combining expertise from Cambridge and Berkeley, we’ve developed a system that may reshape the way we produce fuels and valuable chemicals sustainably.”

The research was supported in part by the Winton Programme for the Physics of Sustainability, St John’s College, the US Department of Energy, the European Research Council, and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).

Reference:
Virgil Andrei et al. ‘Perovskite-driven solar C2 hydrocarbon synthesis from CO2.’ Nature Catalysis (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41929-025-01292-y

Tiny copper ‘nano-flowers’ have been attached to an artificial leaf to produce clean fuels and chemicals that are the backbone of modern energy and manufacturing.

Virgil AndreiSolar fuel generator

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.

Yes