̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Isaac Newton Trust

Spanish butterflies better at regulating their body temperature than their British cousins

sc604 — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 04:32:22 +0000

Butterfly populations in northern Spain are better than their UK counterparts at regulating their body temperature, but rising global temperatures may put Spanish butterflies at greater risk of extinction.

Tiny ‘skyscrapers’ help bacteria convert sunlight into electricity

sc604 — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 16:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��researchers, from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, used 3D printing to create grids of high-rise ‘nano-housing’ where sun-loving bacteria can grow quickly. ̽��ֱ��researchers were then able to extract the bacteria’s waste electrons, left over from photosynthesis, which could be used to power small electronics.

Other research teams have extracted energy from photosynthetic bacteria, but the Cambridge researchers have found that providing them with the right kind of home increases the amount of energy they can extract by over an order of magnitude. ̽��ֱ��approach is competitive against traditional methods of renewable bioenergy generation and has already reached solar conversion efficiencies that can outcompete many current methods of biofuel generation.

Their results, reported in the journal Nature Materials, open new avenues in bioenergy generation and suggest that ‘biohybrid’ sources of solar energy could be an important component in the zero-carbon energy mix.

Current renewable technologies, such as silicon-based solar cells and biofuels, are far superior to fossil fuels in terms of carbon emissions, but they also have limitations, such as a reliance on mining, challenges in recycling, and a reliance on farming and land use, which results in biodiversity loss.

“Our approach is a step towards making even more sustainable renewable energy devices for the future,” said Dr Jenny Zhang from the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, who led the research.

Zhang and her colleagues from the Department of Biochemistry and the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy are working to rethink bioenergy into something that is sustainable and scalable.

Photosynthetic bacteria, or cyanobacteria, are the most abundant life from on Earth. For several years, researchers have been attempting to ‘re-wire’ the photosynthesis mechanisms of cyanobacteria in order to extract energy from them.

“There’s been a bottleneck in terms of how much energy you can actually extract from photosynthetic systems, but no one understood where the bottleneck was,” said Zhang. “Most scientists assumed that the bottleneck was on the biological side, in the bacteria, but we’ve found that a substantial bottleneck is actually on the material side.”

In order to grow, cyanobacteria need lots of sunlight – like the surface of a lake in summertime. And in order to extract the energy they produce through photosynthesis, the bacteria need to be attached to electrodes.

̽��ֱ��Cambridge team 3D-printed custom electrodes out of metal oxide nanoparticles that are tailored to work with the cyanobacteria as they perform photosynthesis. ̽��ֱ��electrodes were printed as highly branched, densely packed pillar structures, like a tiny city.

Zhang’s team developed a printing technique that allows control over multiple length scales, making the structures highly customisable, which could benefit a wide range of fields.

“ ̽��ֱ��electrodes have excellent light-handling properties, like a high-rise apartment with lots of windows,” said Zhang. “Cyanobacteria need something they can attach to and form a community with their neighbours. Our electrodes allow for a balance between lots of surface area and lots of light – like a glass skyscraper.”

Once the self-assembling cyanobacteria were in their new ‘wired’ home, the researchers found that they were more efficient than other current bioenergy technologies, such as biofuels. ̽��ֱ��technique increased the amount of energy extracted by over an order of magnitude over other methods for producing bioenergy from photosynthesis.

“I was surprised we were able to achieve the numbers we did – similar numbers have been predicted for many years, but this is the first time that these numbers have been shown experimentally,” said Zhang. “Cyanobacteria are versatile chemical factories. Our approach allows us to tap into their energy conversion pathway at an early point, which helps us understand how they carry out energy conversion so we can use their natural pathways for renewable fuel or chemical generation.”

̽��ֱ��research was supported in part by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, the Cambridge Trust, the Isaac Newton Trust and the European Research Council. Jenny Zhang is BBSRC David Phillips Fellow in the Department of Chemistry, and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

Reference:
Xiaolong Chen et al. ‘3D-printed hierarchical pillar array electrodes for high performance semi-artificial photosynthesis.’ Nature Materials (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41563-022-01205-5

Researchers have made tiny ‘skyscrapers’ for communities of bacteria, helping them to generate electricity from just sunlight and water.

Our approach is a step towards making even more sustainable renewable energy devices for the future

Jenny Zhang

Gabriella Bocchetti

3D-printed custom electrodes

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

Yes

Study clears important hurdle towards developing an HIV vaccine

cjb250 — Wed, 13 Sep 2017 07:03:22 +0000

In a study published in 2009, results from a clinical trial carried out in Thailand found that an experimental vaccine against HIV lowered the rate of human infection by 31%. This gave cautious optimism that a vaccine against the virus might be a feasible prospect. A vaccine has obvious advantages over treatment with anti-retroviral drugs in that prevention could lead to eradication.

However, one of the major problems that prevented the vaccine from generating long-lasting protection was that the key immune response it needed to generate was very short-lived. ̽��ֱ��reason has now become clear and researchers have found a potential solution.

When a virus enters the body, its aim is to get into our cells and replicate itself again and again, spreading throughout the body. HIV is especially notorious because a protein on its outer coat specifically targets CD4 T-helper cells, the master regulators of the immune system. These cells produce important signals for other types of immune cell: B-cells, which make antibodies; and T-killer cells, which kill virus-infected cells.

By specifically targeting the CD4 T-helper cells, HIV cripples the command and control centre of the immune system and prevents immune defences from working effectively. HIV does not even need to enter and kill the CD4 T-cells – it can cause a functional paralysis of these cells simply by binding its gp140 with the CD4 receptor, an important molecule on the surface of T-helper cells.

HIV’s envelope proteins are a key component of vaccines to protect against HIV infection. ̽��ֱ��body’s immune system targets this protein and generates antibodies directed at HIV’s outer coat to prevent the virus from entering the cells. If the effects of the vaccine last long enough, then with the assistance of robust helper T-cells, the human body should be able to develop antibodies that neutralise a large variety of HIV strains and protect people from infection.

Previous studies showed that vaccinating using a form of the outer coat protein called gp140 leads to the triggering of B-cells which produce antibodies to the virus, but only for a brief period and insufficient to generate sufficient antibodies that are protective from HIV infection over a long period.

Working with scientists in the UK, France, the USA, and the Netherlands, Professor Jonathan Heeney from the Laboratory of Viral Zoonotics at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge recognised that the binding of gp140 to the CD4 receptor on T-helper cells was probably causing this block, and that by preventing gp140 attaching to the CD4 receptor, the short-term block in antibody producing B-cells could be overcome.

In two back-to-back studies published in the print edition of Journal of Virology, the research team has demonstrated for the first time that this approach works, providing the desired responses that were capable of lasting over a year.

“For a vaccine to work, its effects need to be long lasting,” says Professor Heeney. “It isn’t practical to require people to come back every 6-12 months to be vaccinated. We wanted to develop a vaccine to overcome this block and generate these long-lived antibody producing cells. We have now found a way to do this.”

̽��ֱ��study showed that the addition of a tiny specific protein patch to the gp140 protein dramatically improved B-cell responses by blocking binding to the CD4 receptor and hence preventing the paralysis of T-helper cells early in the key stages of the immune response – like preventing a key from getting stuck in a lock. This small patch was one of several strategies to improve gp140 for an HIV vaccine by a team led by Susan Barnett (now at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation).

This modified vaccine approach now better stimulates long-lasting B-cell responses, boosting the ability of B-cells to recognise different contours of the virus coat and to make better antibodies against it. This new finding will allow HIV vaccines to be developed that give the immune system enough time to develop the essential B-cell responses to make protective antibodies.

“B-cells need time to make highly effective neutralising antibodies, but in previous studies B-cell responses were so short lived they disappeared before they have the time to make all the changes necessary to create the ‘silver bullets’ to stop HIV,” adds Professor Heeney.

“What we have found is a way to greatly improve B-cell responses to an HIV vaccine. We hope our discovery will unlock the paralysis in the field of HIV vaccine research and enable us to move forward.”

̽��ֱ��team now hopes to secure funding to test their vaccine candidate in humans in the near future.

̽��ֱ��studies were funded by the National Institutes of Health, USA, and the Isaac Newton Trust Cambridge.

Reference

Bogers, WMJM, et al. Increased, Durable B-Cell and ADCC Responses Associated with T-Helper Cell Responses to HIV-1 Envelope in Macaques Vaccinated with gp140 Occluded at the CD4 Receptor Binding Site. Journal of Virology; DOI: 10.1128/JVI.00811-17.

Shen, X et al. Cross-Linking of a CD4-Mimetic Miniprotein with HIV-1 Env gp140 Alters Kinetics and Specificities of Antibody Responses against HIV-1 Env in Macaques. Journal of Virology; DOI: 10.1128/JVI.00401-17.

An international team of researchers has demonstrated a way of overcoming one of the major stumbling blocks that has prevented the development of a vaccine against HIV: the ability to generate immune cells that stay in circulation long enough to respond to and stop virus infection.

For a vaccine to work, its effects need to be long lasting. It isn’t practical to require people to come back every 6-12 months to be vaccinated

Jonathan Heeney

NIAID

3D print of HIV (edited)

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

Yes

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Cambridge-Africa Programme: 58 institutions, 26 countries, and growing

lw355 — Mon, 06 Feb 2017 11:31:08 +0000

Having the chance to contribute to the pool of human knowledge depends a great deal on where you live in the world. Opportunities are skewed in favour of those who are better resourced and in favour of those who receive, and give, world-class training.

Knowledge lies at the heart of social and economic development, so countries with a thriving knowledge economy and good research infrastructure develop quicker; and the gap between those that don’t have these advantages grows ever wider. Among those lagging behind are many of the African countries.

And yet, explains Professor David Dunne, Africa has excellent researchers. He knows because for 30 years he’s been working in Africa with African colleagues on neglected tropical diseases: “I realised that they were brilliant but they didn’t have the opportunities they deserved to make their unique contribution both to solving Africa’s challenges and to adding to the sum of global knowledge.

“Even in the best African universities, there is a chronic shortage of researchers with access to the resources they need to be internationally competitive and to mentor future researchers,” he explains. “There just aren’t enough of them.”

“In parts of Africa, sometimes the choice seems to be between prioritising universal access to a basic education or investing in tertiary education and research scholarship. In reality, there is no choice,” says Dunne. “Both are absolutely essential.”

Eight years ago, he realised that universities like Cambridge could help bridge this resource and mentorship gap in Africa in ways that would build research capacity “while avoiding the loss of indigenous talent that so often occurs when better opportunities are available outside of Africa.”

Cambridge-Africa is the result. This ̽��ֱ��-wide institutional structure is designed to make expertise and resources available to support African researchers working in Africa on African priorities.

Today, the Programme supports African researchers in 58 different institutions in 26 countries across the continent. Its various schemes link PhD, postdoctoral and group leaders with a network of over 200 Cambridge-based researchers.

Key to its success is a ‘matchmaking’ model of partnership, as Dr Pauline Essah explains: “We carefully match the research interests of African and Cambridge researchers. It means there are benefits for both parties, and the potential for equitable and sustainable long-term collaboration after the mentorship has finished.”

She adds: “Being an African myself, and having studied in an African university before studying and working in Cambridge, I know that it wouldn’t work if we were just trying to take what Cambridge has and plant it in Africa. Instead we are modifying and adapting it in response to the needs identified by our African colleagues.”

Dunne and Essah began with targeting research in health: “We saw this as an easy win on both sides – it meets one of Africa’s greatest challenges, and it gives wider geographic scope to Cambridge researchers.”

They were surprised however by the scale of the response: “We were pushing against an open door,” says Dunne. Soon, scholars from archaeology to zoology, engineering to English, politics to plant sciences were joining the scheme. In 2015, the Programme was adopted as the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s official international strategy to support African academia across all subject areas.

“And of course this is good for Cambridge too,” says Dunne. “It means our researchers have greater opportunities to collaborate globally and our students can experience working in Africa. It has helped make Cambridge a truly international ̽��ֱ��.”

Speaking at the annual Cambridge-Africa Day symposium, Cambridge’s Vice-Chancellor Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz said: “ ̽��ֱ��speed with which the Cambridge-Africa Programme has developed is phenomenal. We are trusted by our partners, and the Programme has buy-in from our academic community. This has been essential to the programme’s success. Today, it is no longer something done by a handful of enthusiasts. It is now something embedded in the ̽��ֱ��’s DNA.”

Adds Dunne: “ ̽��ֱ��first of the Cambridge-Africa fellows are now starting to fulfil their outstanding potential as researchers and leaders, providing mentorship to the next generation of young African researchers.” To date, all 54 of the African PhD and postdoctoral researchers who have completed their fellowships are still working in sub-Saharan universities or research institutions.

“Universities are not just luxury items for wealthy societies,” he says. “They are equally vital to the futures of low- and middle-income countries if those countries are to share in the advantages of knowledge creation.”

Cambridge-Africa fellowship schemes are funded by the Wellcome Trust, the ALBORADA Trust, the Isaac Newton Trust and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

To keep up to date with the latest stories about Cambridge’s engagement with Africa, follow #CamAfrica on Twitter.

Inset picture: Professor David Dunne and Dr Pauline Essah. Credit: Mark Miniszko.

We ask how a 'matchmaking' programme that teams up Cambridge and African researchers is making expertise and resources available to support Africans working in Africa.

Universities are not just luxury items for wealthy societies. They are equally vital to the futures of low- and middle-income countries if those countries are to share in the advantages of knowledge creation

David Dunne

Mark Miniszko

Dr Vincent Owino, now conducting research in Kenya, was awarded a seed grant from the Cambridge-Africa ALBORADA Research Fund

Fellowship schemes

ALBORADA Research Fund

Cambridge-Africa Partnership for Research Excellence (CAPREx)

Cambridge-Africa PhD Scholarship Scheme

Makerere ̽��ֱ��/Uganda Virus Research Institute Infection and Immunity Research (MUII)

Training Health Researchers into Vocational Excellence (THRiVE)

Wellcome Trust-Cambridge Centre for Global Health Research

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

Yes

Super-slow circulation allowed world’s oceans to store huge amounts of carbon during the last ice age

sc604 — Mon, 27 Jun 2016 09:00:00 +0000

Using the information contained within the shells of tiny animals known as foraminifera, the researchers, led by the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, looked at the characteristics of the seawater in the Atlantic Ocean during the last ice age, including its ability to store carbon. Since atmospheric CO₂ levels during the period were about a third lower than those of the pre-industrial atmosphere, the researchers were attempting to find if the extra carbon not present in the atmosphere was stored in the deep ocean instead.

They found that the deep ocean circulated at a much slower rate at the peak of the last ice age than had previously been suggested, which is one of the reasons why it was able to store much more carbon for much longer periods. That carbon was accumulated as organisms from the surface ocean died and sank into the deep ocean where their bodies dissolved, releasing carbon that was in effect ‘trapped’ there for thousands of years. Their results are reported in two separate papers in Nature Communications.

̽��ֱ��ability to reconstruct past climate change is an important part of understanding why the climate of today behaves the way it does. It also helps to predict how the planet might respond to changes made by humans, such as the continuing emission of large quantities of CO₂ into the atmosphere.

̽��ֱ��world’s oceans work like a giant conveyer belt, transporting heat, nutrients and gases around the globe. In today’s oceans, warmer waters travel northwards along currents such as the Gulf Stream from the equatorial regions towards the pole, becoming saltier, colder and denser as they go, causing them to sink to the bottom. These deep waters flow into the ocean basins, eventually ending up in the Southern Ocean or the North Pacific Ocean. A complete loop can take as long as 1000 years.

“During the period we’re looking at, large amounts of carbon were likely transported from the surface ocean to the deep ocean by organisms as they died, sunk and dissolved,” said Emma Freeman, the lead author of one of the papers. “This process released the carbon the organisms contained into the deep ocean waters, where it was trapped for thousands of years, due to the very slow circulation.”

Freeman and her co-authors used radiocarbon dating, a technique that is more commonly used by archaeologists, in order to determine how old the water was in different parts of the ocean. Using the radiocarbon information from tiny shells of foraminifera, they found that carbon was stored in the slowly-circulating deep ocean.

In a separate study led by Jake Howe, also from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences, researchers studied the neodymium isotopes contained in the foraminifera shells, a method which works like a dye tracer, and came to a similar conclusion about the amount of carbon the ocean was able to store.

“We found that during the peak of the last ice age, the deep Atlantic Ocean was filled not just with southern-sourced waters as previously thought, but with northern-sourced waters as well,” said Howe.

What was previously interpreted to be a layer of southern-sourced water in the deep Atlantic during the last ice age was in fact shown to be a mixture of slowly circulating northern- and southern-sourced waters with a large amount of carbon stored in it.

“Our research looks at a time when the world was much colder than it is now, but it’s still important for understanding the effects of changing ocean circulation,” said Freeman. “We need to understand the dynamics of the ocean in order to know how it can be affected by a changing climate.”

̽��ֱ��research was funded in part by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), the Royal Society and the Isaac Newton Trust.

Reference:
Jacob Howe et al. ‘North Atlantic Deep Water Production during the Last Glacial Maximum.’ Nature Communications (2016): DOI: 10.1038/ncomms11765

Emma Freeman et al. ‘Radiocarbon evidence for enhanced respired carbon storage in the Atlantic at the Last Glacial Maximum.’ Nature Communications (2016). DOI: 10.1038/ncomms11998

̽��ֱ��way the ocean transported heat, nutrients and carbon dioxide at the peak of the last ice age, about 20,000 years ago, is significantly different than what has previously been suggested, according to two new studies. ̽��ֱ��findings suggest that the colder ocean circulated at a very slow rate, which enabled it to store much more carbon for much longer than the modern ocean.

We need to understand the dynamics of the ocean in order to know how it can be affected by a changing climate.

Emma Freeman

Psammophile

Foraminifera "Star sand" Hatoma Island - Japan

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

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution-ShareAlike

A real piece of work

tdk25 — Tue, 16 Jun 2015 13:06:53 +0000

There comes a point when talking with Dr Leigh Shaw-Taylor at which it seems necessary to go over the facts again, if only to establish that he really does mean what he appears to have just said.

While many historians will spend their careers chipping away at the past with gentle care, 12 years into his research project, ̽��ֱ��Occupational Structure of Britain, 1379–1911, Shaw-Taylor seems to be calling for a wholesale rewrite. If his emerging results are correct, then they have the potential to transform not only the most important chapter in our social and economic history – the industrial revolution (so-called) – but with it the wellspring of much of our local and national identity.

So isn’t this a little drastic? “We’re talking about a fundamental change in what we understand about the past,” he says. “That is a fairly widespread view of our work. I’ve always felt that you can do more with historical research than people think, but I never thought that we could do this much. And it’s nothing compared with what we could achieve if we can keep the project going.”

̽��ֱ��project, as its name suggests, is a hugely ambitious, wide-scale attempt to reconstruct the picture of how working life changed and developed in Britain from the late Middle Ages through to the early 20th century. Co-directed by Shaw-Taylor and his Cambridge colleague Professor Sir Tony Wrigley, the research team has spent years assembling information about matters such as population size, transport infrastructure and sector-by-sector employment, at different points in time.

It’s a complex job and, before this, nobody had really tried it. Much of what we know about social and economic history is based on records such as wills and parish registers, which are patchy, inconsistent or highly selective. As well as collating information, the team therefore had to develop a method of controlling for this lack of coherence, to avoid distorting the resulting picture of the past. “We had to develop a system of weighting the importance of the data when analysing it,” Shaw-Taylor explains. “We still can’t be sure that it’s right, but it puts a limit on the extent to which we can be wrong.”

Textbook orthodoxy says that, before the industrial revolution, most people in Britain worked in primary sector employment, overwhelmingly in agriculture. During the ‘revolutionary’ 80-year period starting in about 1760, this landscape was transformed as secondary industries – like processing and manufacturing – took off. Only in the 1950s did Britain supposedly begin to evolve into the tertiary, service-based economy that we have today.

On such things are national and local myths founded – tales of a green and pleasant land that rapidly became black with the smog of industry, for example, or of a country that used to make things, but doesn’t any more.

When Shaw-Taylor and colleagues looked at the data that they had assembled, however, they found that it didn’t fit the existing picture. Nationally, for example, secondary sector employment seems to have grown more between 1500 and 1750 than between 1750 and 1850. “We’ve always presumed that the major structural shift in employment from the primary to the secondary sector took place between 1750 and 1850,” he says. “Well, according to what we’ve found, that change took place about 100 years earlier than we thought.”

Similarly, the data transforms our picture of the evolution of tertiary, service-based industries in Britain. Rather than taking off in the mid-20th century, these seem to have been growing all the way through the 18th and 19th. By 1911, one man in 10 was, for example, working in transport – others were shopkeepers, merchants, clerks or professionals.

If this is true, it means an adjustment to our ‘island story’ that has some radical implications for the history of places far beyond these shores as well. For instance, it is often argued that Britain’s industrialisation was made possible thanks to the raw materials gathered by the slaves of Empire. If industrialisation began before the Empire existed, however, as these findings suggest, the story changes. “Moreover, for a small island off the coast of north-west Europe to start projecting its power around the world, something unusual must have happened internally before that, not after,” Shaw-Taylor points out.

Equally, if the shift to secondary sector employment happened before the dark, Satanic mills that populate the nation’s consciousness as temples of the industrial revolution even existed, then we need to modify our picture of what people were actually doing. If not farming, then what?

It seems likely that more early-modern Brits than we thought were carpenters, shoemakers, bakers, butchers, tailors and masons. This, in turn, raises puzzles about when and why agricultural and primary labour ceased to be dominant. ̽��ֱ��likelihood is that the evolution of more productive, less labour-intensive farming led to a decline in the relative importance of primary work. Over time, the children and grandchildren of agriculturalists would have been drawn to new opportunities in the secondary sector, or even tertiary, service industries.

Much remains to be done and there are still significant gaps in the research, most notably around the role of women in British employment history. Many historians associate the industrial revolution with new opportunities for female employment; others believe, just as fervently, that female employment collapsed. Only with more work and more funding will the team be able to establish exactly how women’s lives, and the family, changed during this period, and the consequences that this had for women’s social status.

What exists at the moment is, nevertheless, a compelling case for a data-led approach to writing the story of the past. “Methodologically, explaining why things happened in history is very difficult because it only happens once and you can’t run it under controlled conditions,” Shaw-Taylor observes. “Yet the processes historians are trying to describe are often vastly more complex than those described by science. Our approach has been to eschew questions of why until we have the data at our disposal. Until you have those patterns, you’re just trying to explain things that may or may not have happened, and that’s a waste of time.”

In 2003, researchers embarked on a project to piece together a picture of changes in British working life over the course of 600 years. ̽��ֱ��emerging results seem to demand a rewrite of the most important chapter in our social and economic history.

We're talking about a fundamental change in what we understand about the past

Leigh Shaw-Taylor

Science Museum

Coalbrookdale, Shropshire, by Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg in 1801

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

Yes

" ̽��ֱ��Professor is World Cup": understanding ‘secret’ urban languages

pbh25 — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 12:56:30 +0000

Uganda has one of the world’s largest percentages of people under 30 – more than 78% of its 37 million citizens, according to a report by the United Nations Population Fund. Many do not use the commonly spoken languages of Uganda (Kiswahili, English and Luganda) in everyday speech but instead express themselves in an ever-evolving street language called Luyaaye.

Originally a ‘secret language’ spoken by criminals, Luyaaye has grown in popularity because it’s seen as more playful and less traditional by many of its speakers, with its “joyful” use of English, Luganda and other languages.

Many of those who use Luyaaye are concentrated within Kampala, the capital city of a country that faces many challenges, including serious health problems. To combat these threats to health – and to get other social messages across – the government must communicate with its population effectively. This means using Luyaaye alongside the official languages, argue researchers from Africa and Cambridge who are working collaboratively as part of the Cambridge-Africa Partnership for Research Excellence (CAPREx).

Dr Saudah Namyalo from Makerere ̽��ֱ�� and Dr Jenneke van der Wal from Cambridge’s Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics have joined forces to understand how this increasingly popular, yet currently undocumented, urban language is built. ̽��ֱ��need is increasing, said Namyalo, as more people come to use forms of Luyaaye to communicate. “It is currently classified as an Urban Youth Language but it is becoming more widespread and used by some older people.”

Such languages are not unique to Uganda – elsewhere, forms of multicultural British English, the Dutch street language ‘straattaal’ and the ‘Camfranglais’ of the Cameroon are all examples of languages that have evolved out of, and usurped, the country’s mother tongue in certain communities, explained Namyalo.

These languages are fast-moving in their appropriation of new words, often borrowing them from TV, films and music. “I love the speed at which Luyaaye changes,” she said. “For instance, the World Cup was seen as a very positive thing. So world cup quickly became a shorthand for ‘a good thing’ or ‘excellent’.

“For a lot of people, Luyaaye is for fun – it is just for laughs! It often uses metonymy [calling something not by its own name but by a name linked to it] with surprising and comic results. So a Professor is someone with ‘street smarts’ who has learned to beat the authorities, to get away with anything.”

However, the language also has its darker side. ̽��ֱ��growth of Luyaaye began in the 1970s during the Idi Amin reign. “Illegal trade grew and it is thought that the language provided a code to serve those people who were involved in trade between Nairobi and Kampala. It was mostly spoken by the illiterate, young business community,” Namyalo explained.

Even today its past continues to influence its development as Luyaaye helps criminals conduct business and exclude the uninitiated from their ranks, said Namyalo. “Kampala is divided into five divisions and they are Luyaaye territories. If you are a criminal you are not supposed to cross into another territory – or you risk being burnt alive. ̽��ֱ��Luyaaye you use can show which division you are from or it can be used to uncover if you do not belong.”

Namyalo points to these past links with criminality as a factor in the reticence of the establishment in accepting Luyaaye: “Higher society does not take the language, or those who use it, seriously. When you use Luyaaye you are thought of as uncultured, and yet it is the more meaningful language for the youth than Luganda or other formal languages used in Uganda.”

She has begun the process of documenting this little-studied and evolving language, and would like to produce a dictionary. From her research, she now thinks of the language in terms of ‘layers’, each layer representing a slightly different set of vocabulary. ̽��ֱ��secret language used by criminals is what she calls ‘core’ Luyaaye, while the second layer is spoken by the youth, and the outer layer is the ‘ordinary’ Luyaaye, easiest to understand and popular with the general public.

Her work has so far concentrated on the lexical (word meaning) aspects of the language, but her collaboration with Van der Wal will allow them to examine the syntax (how sentences are constructed) of Luyaaye as compared with Luganda.

An expert in Bantu languages like Luganda, Van der Wal is also a member of a large-scale project to investigate the basic building blocks that underpin how languages of the world are structured – the Rethinking Comparative Syntax (ReCoS) project funded by the European Research Council and led by Professor Ian Roberts, also in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics.

“ ̽��ֱ��ability to speak a language is something very special – it is unique and part of what makes us human beings,” explained Van der Wal. “I want to find out what allows us to make grammatical sentences and how this varies between languages. For instance, unlike in some neighbouring languages, in Luganda you can say a word in two different ways: you can talk about eating rice (omuceere), but leave off the first vowel (mucheere) and it suggests you are only eating rice – it gives an exclusive focus on the rice.”

Namyalo’s visit to Cambridge and Van der Wal’s recent visit to Uganda were funded by CAPREx and the Alborada Research Fund, both of which are initiatives within the umbrella Cambridge-Africa Programme at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. ̽��ֱ��Programme aims to strengthen Africa’s capacity for research by equipping African researchers with skills and resources, and to promote mutually beneficial, long-term collaborations with African researchers across a wide range of disciplines.

For Van der Wal, research in Africa with African academics has been vital for enabling her to carry out meaningful research: “I loved working with Saudah in Uganda and listening to the languages as spoken. It was great to do field work together and get my hands dirty – well, get my ears dirty – and learn about yet another Bantu language.”

Namyalo sees the project as vital for helping her country combat some of its most challenging difficulties. “Programmes have been carried out to spread information about AIDS but even with increased dissemination there was a decrease in the take-up of that information. When asked what would help, people said ‘speak our language’.”

CAPREx is funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Alborada Trust and the Isaac Newton Trust

Inset image: Dr Jenneke van der Wal and Dr Saudah Namyalo

Research into a ‘playful’ and increasingly popular urban language that grew out of the necessity for criminals to hide their true intent could help organisations in Uganda communicate better with the country’s huge young population.

When you use Luyaaye you are thought of as uncultured, and yet it is the more meaningful language for the youth than Luganda or other formal languages used in Uganda

Saudah Namyalo

Understanding ‘secret’ urban language

Rod Waddington

Strolling, Uganda

Luyaaye

While the basic syntactic framework for Luyaaye is Luganda, it borrows words from English, with dashes of Sheng, Kiswahili and Sudanese.

As well as borrowing whole words it also borrows suffixes and affixes such as the English –ing which becomes –inga in Luyaaye.

Quite often when speakers use English words they do not alter the spelling, so that front page is used to mean 'forehead' and blood used to mean 'brother' or 'sister'.

̽��ֱ��language also uses metaphor, thus okusunagitta literally means 'to play a guitar' but actually means 'to scratch', and I would like to kill a chimpanzee means 'I would like to go to the toilet'.

It also uses tricks like antonym – making the meaning the opposite of what is said, so okwesalaobuwero means 'dressed in old cloth' but actually means to be smartly dressed.

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

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Galactic ‘hailstorm’ in the early Universe

sc604 — Fri, 16 Jan 2015 06:00:53 +0000

Two teams of astronomers led by researchers at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge have looked back nearly 13 billion years, when the Universe was less than 10 percent its present age, to determine how quasars – extremely luminous objects powered by supermassive black holes with the mass of a billion suns – regulate the formation of stars and the build-up of the most massive galaxies.

Using a combination of data gathered from powerful radio telescopes and supercomputer simulations, the teams found that a quasar spits out cold gas at speeds up to 2000 kilometres per second, and across distances of nearly 200,000 light years – much farther than has been observed before.

How this cold gas - the raw material for star formation in galaxies - can be accelerated to such high speeds had remained a mystery. Detailed comparison of new observations and supercomputer simulations has only now allowed researchers to understand how this can happen: the gas is first heated to temperatures of tens of millions of degrees by the energy released by the supermassive black hole powering the quasar. This enormous build-up of pressure accelerates the hot gas and pushes it to the outskirts of the galaxy.

̽��ֱ��supercomputer simulations show that on its way out of the parent galaxy, there is just enough time for some of the hot gas to cool to temperatures low enough to be observable with radio telescopes. ̽��ֱ��results are presented in two separate papers published today (16 January) in the journals Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Quasars are amongst the most luminous objects in the Universe, and the most distant quasars are so far away that they allow us to peer back billions of years in time. They are powered by supermassive black holes at the centre of galaxies, surrounded by a rapidly spinning disk-like region of gas. As the black hole pulls in matter from its surroundings, huge amounts of energy are released.

“It is the first time that we have seen outflowing cold gas moving at these large speeds at such large distances from the supermassive black hole,” said Claudia Cicone, a PhD student at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory and Kavli Institute for Cosmology, and lead author on the first of the two papers. “It is very difficult to have matter with temperatures this low move as fast as we observed.”

Cicone’s observations allowed the second team of researchers specialising in supercomputer simulations to develop a detailed theoretical model of the outflowing gas around a bright quasar.

“We found that while gas is launched out of the quasar at very high temperatures, there is enough time for some of it to cool through radiative cooling – similar to how the Earth cools down on a cloudless night,” said Tiago Costa, a PhD student at the Institute of Astronomy and the Kavli Institute for Cosmology, and lead author on the second paper. “ ̽��ֱ��amazing thing is that in this distant galaxy in the young Universe the conditions are just right for enough of the fast moving hot gas to cool to the low temperatures that Claudia and her team have found.”

Working at the IRAM Plateau De Bure interferometer in the French Alps, the researchers gathered data in the millimetre band, which allows observation of the emission from the cold gas which is the primary fuel for star formation and main ingredient of galaxies, but is almost invisible at other wavelengths.

̽��ֱ��research was supported by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), the Isaac Newton Trust and the European Research Council (ERC). ̽��ֱ��computer simulations were run using the Computer Cluster DARWIN, operated by the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge High Performance Computing Service, as part of STFCs DiRAC supercomputer facility.

Inset image: Comparison of observation and simulations. Credit: Tiago Costa

Astronomers have been able to peer back to the young Universe to determine how quasars – powered by supermassive black holes with the mass of a billion suns – form and shape the evolution of galaxies.

While gas is launched out of the quasar at very high temperatures, there is enough time for some of it to cool through radiative cooling – similar to how the Earth cools down on a cloudless night

Tiago Costa

Illustration of the outflow (red) and gas flowing in to the quasar in the centre (blue). ̽��ֱ��cold clumps shown in the inset image are expelled out of the galaxy in a 'galactic hailstorm'

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