̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Cambridge Shorts

Dish Life: a Cambridge Shorts film

amb206 — Mon, 21 Nov 2016 08:00:00 +0000

Stem cells are the stuff of life – but what’s it like to work with them in the lab? To unlock the secrets of how stem cells diversify into the different parts of our body, and pave the way to medical advances, scientists need to culture dishes of living material.

This isn’t as easy as it sounds: stem cells flourish only when they are happy. They need lots of food for a start. Because they excrete waste matter, the medium they live in needs replenishing. As they multiply, cells need splitting up so that they have enough space. Before long they’re hungry (and grubby) all over again.

Caring for stem cells, day in, day out, is a bit like looking after a gang of growing children. Dish Life employs a conversational style and enlists a group of real kids to explain some basic science. ̽��ֱ��scientists are the endlessly-patient parents and the cells the sometimes-unpredictable kids.

̽��ֱ��film opens a window on to the life of a scientist working with stem cells: life has to be organised around the demands of the cells. If stem cells are round and shiny, rather like Christmas tree decorations, they are healthy. If they are flat or spiky, they might be dying.

In an engaging and light-hearted way, Dish Life illustrates the high level of commitment required to work successfully with living cells in research that contributes to the development of new treatments for degenerative diseases. Being a scientist is fulfilling – but it’s also a lot of hard work.

Dish Life has won third place in the Raw Science Festival in Los Angeles.

Dish Life is one of four films made by Cambridge researchers for the 2016 Cambridge Shorts series, funded by Wellcome Trust ISSF. ̽��ֱ��scheme supports early career researchers to make professional quality short films with local artists and filmmakers. Researchers Dr Loriana Vitillo (Stem Cell Institute) and Karen Jent (Department of Sociology) collaborated with filmmaker Chloe Thomas.

Science is demanding as well as exciting. Dish Life, the final of four Cambridge Shorts films, compares the task of raising stem cells in the lab to the challenge of looking after a gang of unruly kids. In conversation with real-life children, scientists show how tricky it is to work with these ‘super cells’.

Dish Life

Still from Dish Life, a Cambridge Shorts film

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

Yes

Talk with Your Hands: a Cambridge Shorts film

amb206 — Fri, 18 Nov 2016 09:10:00 +0000

Talk with Your Hands: Communicating across the Sensory Spectrum opens with Hayden Dahmm speaking to camera. He is studying engineering and he’s blind. One of the benefits of being blind, he suggests, is that he is not distracted by physical appearance. ̽��ֱ��words people use, and how they use them, gives him “a genuine impression of the speaker”.

Louise Stern is a writer and artist. She is deaf and explains that her native tongue is American Sign Language. Speaking with her hands, she says: “ ̽��ֱ��body is eloquent and conveys layers of emotion and meaning.” When she describes how eye contact is, for a deaf person, an especially beautiful thing, she hesitates – and then says “it makes me feel like they see me”.

In just ten minutes, Talk with Your Hands conveys the richness of verbal and non-verbal languages and explores how our senses overlap and merge. Through interviews with blind and deaf people, interwoven with insights from neuroscientists, the film demonstrates how we communicate with sounds and gestures – and how each mode of communication has its own characteristics.

Sign language is not a translation of, or substitute for, verbal language. While spoken language is linear (produced through the channels of our mouths one word at a time), sign language is flowing and simultaneous. Similarly, the spoken word is not just the written word spoken out loud. It’s much more than that, explains Hayden, rather as “poetry is the things that cannot be translated”.

̽��ֱ��capacity for language is what sets mankind apart from other animals. Years ago, scientists looking at brain damage identified the parts of the brain responsible for speaking and comprehension, for hearing and seeing. Now we know that this understanding of how the brain works is far too simplistic: language, and the different ways we use it, colonises most of the brain.

Talk with Your Hands is one of four films made by Cambridge researchers for the 2016 Cambridge Shorts series, funded by Wellcome Trust ISSF. ̽��ֱ��scheme supports early career researchers to make professional quality short films with local artists and filmmakers. Researchers Craig Pearson (Wellcome Trust-MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute) and Julio Chenchen Song (Department of Linguistics) collaborated with filmmaker Toby Smith.

̽��ֱ��capacity for language is what sets us apart from other animals. Talk with Your Hands, the third of four Cambridge Shorts films, explores the richness of sensory perception in interviews with blind and deaf people together with insights from neuroscientists.

Talk With Your Hands

Cambridge Shorts 2016 (Talk with Your Hands)

Actress Nadia Nadarajah recites a poem using British Sign Language

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

Yes

Believing is Seeing: a Cambridge Shorts film

amb206 — Wed, 09 Nov 2016 08:00:00 +0000

Where does science come from? It comes from inside our heads and our imagination. Science is the unknown, from the biggest scale to the tiniest, waiting to be discovered. It is the process of dreaming how the world works and having the courage to follow that dream. Light is a metaphor for conceiving ideas: letting the outside in and the inside out. Where the two meet is the point of vision: the ability to see what might be.

̽��ֱ��visual imagination isn’t simply frivolous. It is utterly vital to understanding the scientific and technological developments which have allowed our society to evolve, both historically, and in the present day.

This film is a “love letter to scientific daydreaming”; to the importance of creativity in science; to the old-school sci-fi classics, and the way they captured the imagination. This is about the art of being a scientist.

Believing is Seeing is one of four films made by Cambridge researchers for the 2016 Cambridge Shorts series, funded by Wellcome Trust ISSF. ̽��ֱ��scheme supports early career researchers to make professional quality short films with local artists and filmmakers. Dr Eleanor Chan (History of Art) and Dr Marcus Fantham (Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology) collaborated with filmmaker Alex Allen.

Imagination is where ideas start: in the mind’s eye. ̽��ֱ��ability to think creatively – to dream the impossible – is behind the technological developments that have transformed the world. Science, suggests the second of four Cambridge Shorts, is an art.

Believing is Seeing

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

Yes

Pain in the machine: a Cambridge Shorts film

amb206 — Wed, 02 Nov 2016 08:00:00 +0000

Pain is vital: it is the mechanism that protects us from harming ourselves. If you put your finger into a flame, a signal travels up your nervous system to your brain which tells you to snatch your finger away. This response isn’t as simple as it sounds: the nervous system is complex and involves many areas of the brain.

We’re developing increasingly sophisticated machines to work for us. In the future, robots might live alongside us as companions or carers. If pain is an important part of being human, and often keeps us safe, could we create a robot that feels pain? These ideas are explored by Cambridge researchers Dr Ewan St John Smith and Dr Beth Singler in their 12-minute film Pain in the Machine.

Already we have technologies that respond to distances and touch. A car, for example, can detect and avoid an object; lift doors won’t shut on your fingers. But although this could be seen as a step towards a mechanical nervous system, it isn’t the same as pain. Pain involves emotion. Could we make machines which feel and show emotion – and would we want to?

Unpleasant though it is, pain has sometimes been described as the pinnacle of human consciousness. ̽��ֱ��human capacity for empathy is so great that when a robotics company showed film clips of robots being pushed over and kicked, views responded as if the robots were being bullied and abused. Pain is both felt and perceived.

Movies have imagined robots with their own personalities – sometimes cute but often evil. Perhaps the future will bring robots capable of a full range of emotions. These machines might share not only our capacity for pain but also for joy and excitement.

But what about the ethical implications? A new generation of emotionally-literate robots will, surely, have rights of their own

Pain in the Machine is one of four films made by Cambridge researchers for the 2016 Cambridge Shorts series, funded by Wellcome Trust ISSF. ̽��ֱ��scheme supports early career researchers to make professional quality short films with local artists and filmmakers. Researchers Beth Singler (Faculty of Divinity) and Ewan St John Smith (Department of Pharmacology) collaborated with Colin Ramsay and James Uren of Little Dragon Films.

̽��ֱ��pain we experience as humans has physical and emotional components. Could we develop a machine that feels pain a similar way – and would we want to? ̽��ֱ��first of four Cambridge Shorts looks at the possibilities and challenges.

Pain in the machine

Researchers: Beth Singler and Ewan St John Smith

Still from Pain in the Machine

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

Yes