EU Research Summer 2020

EU Research Summer 2020

BLACK LIVES MATTER

Follow EU Research on www.twitter.com/EU_RESEARCH Disseminating the latest research from around Europe and Horizon 2020

Editor’s N I

t is possibly the strangest of all times, living through a pandemic. As the press illustrated, it is like a war, where everything has to be second to it, including financial security, seeing family, travel, work and freedom.

For science it presents on the one hand, an opportunity for specialists to work together on solutions to thwart it and learn from it but on the other, it stops most scientific studies unrelated to the virus, cold in their tracks.

Interviewing scientists for this issue, I discovered a real sense of frustration as they were not allowed back into their laboratories because of social distancing measures and institutions being shut down. It’s simply impossible for many scientific teams to work on projects from home.

Obviously, the human cost is devastating but so too is the economic damage.

Industry is suffering and it is industry that takes up innovation and innovation that demands science. These maybe tough times ahead, beyond lockdown.

It’s too early to comprehend the long-term impacts of many of the things we have had to do to avoid higher death rates in populations.

As a seasoned editor and journalist, Richard Forsyth has been reporting on numerous aspects of European scientific research for over 10 years.

He has written for many titles including ERCIM’s publication, CSP Today, Sustainable Development magazine, eStrategies magazine and remains a prevalent contributor to the UK business press. He also works in Public Relations for businesses to help them communicate their services effectively to industry and consumers.

www.euresearcher.com

One thing we can probably take for granted in all of this, is what we do know about our own behaviour, we are adaptable and we are resilient and we fight through challenges, however overwhelming.

It will be interesting to see how our lives, cultures and work change or pivot because of the experience we have collectively endured.

Undoubtedly, as we get back to something that looks like a new normal, we will notice changes, adaptations and ways of doing things that have altered since before Covid 19 spread from country to country.

Let us hope we one day look back at this time with a sense of pride for how we handled it and also how we came out of it.

Hope you enjoy the issue.

Richard Forsyth Editor

1

Contents

4

Research News

EU Research takes a closer look at the latest news and technical breakthroughs from across the European research landscape

10

ROBOCHIP We spoke to Mahmut Selman Sakar about the work of the ROBOCHIP project in developing microrobotic technologies, research which could open up new perspectives on human physiology and pathology

14

SOUNDSCENE Our brains are able to pick out a single voice from the multitude of sounds that surround us, a process called auditory scene analysis. Professor Jennifer Bizley aims to build a deeper understanding of this process

15

DiSCo MRI SFN We spoke to Dr Karin Shmueli about her work in developing a new MRI method that will provide a deeper picture of tissue electromagnetic properties and may help diagnose Alzheimer’s disease at an earlier stage than currently possible

16

DiSect Much of a pancreatic tumour is comprised of stromal cells, which protect the tumour. The DiSect project is investigating communication between the tumour cells and the surrounding microenvironment, as Dr Claus Jorgensen explains

2

18

ROSALIND We spoke to Dr Nabila BouatiaNaji about her research into the genetic causes of conditions associated with cardiovascular diseases, and its wider importance to diagnosis and treatment

Living Bionics Bionic devices like cochlear implants and bionic eyes are currently made using relatively stiff metals. We spoke to Dr Rylie Green about the work of the Living Bionics project in developing new, softer materials

12

34 CoQuake

21

CellFateTech Dr Kevin Chalut is developing a substrate that enables stem cells and progenitor cells to proliferate in cultures outside of the body. The research could have profound implications for cellular programming

24 VARIAMOLS Researchers in the VARIAMOLS project are developing in silico approaches to model and study large molecular assemblies, which could open up new avenues in medical research, as Professor Raffaello Potestio explains

27 DD-DeCaf The DD-DeCaF project is developing computational tools that will help biotechnology companies understand the impact of changes in biological networks and develop better, more effficient cell factories, as Dr Nikolaus Sonnenschein explains

30 COVID 19 Climate Stopping runaway carbon emissions and ascending temperatures is seen as our biggest challenge as a global society. Has the carbon crash from lockdown during the Covid 19 pandemic shown us all that a carbon free world is at least possible? Richard Forsyth reports

Researchers in the CoQuake project are investigating whether it is possible to control earthquakes, which could help prevent instabilities arising from geo-thermal projects, as Professor Ioannis Stefanou explains

35 CO2LIFE Reducing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 is a major priority, yet researchers are also keen to use this molecule effectively, a topic at the heart of Professor Patricia Luis’ research in the CO2Life project

36 Semantics of Agricultural and Industrial Work

The 19th and 20th centuries saw dramatic social change, as industrialisation changed the way people lived and worked. How was agricultural work conceptualised in the new industrial context?

Dr Peter Moser is looking into it

37 WeThaw The WeThaw project aims to build a deeper picture of how permafrost responds to thawing, which will also help improve climate models, as Professor Sophie Opfergelt explains

38 Investigation of the

Earth’s deep water cycle Alpine rocks provide evidence of how the deep water cycle works and how minerals are transformed as they are transported deeper into the Earth’s interior, topics that Professor Jörg Hermann is addressing in his research

40 FUTURE-SAHEL A deeper understanding of the social and ecological systems along the Great Green Wall path is essential if it is to stop desertification in the Sahel, as Dr Deborah Goffner of the Future-Sahel project explains

EU Research

42 Novel monolithic Si NEMS Silicon nanowires are an important component of nanoelectromechanical systems, and a deeper understanding of their crystalline structure is crucial to further developments, as Professor Antonia Neels explains

EU Research Summer 2020

62 PROMOFS We spoke to Professor JinChong Tan about the work of the PROMOFS project in discovering and characterising new Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), research which holds wider relevance to several areas of industry

44 ONEDEGGAM Researchers in the ONEDEGGAM project are exploring the asymmetry between matter and anti-matter, which could open up a window to new physics, as Dr Sneha Malde explains

64 MAEROSTRUC Colloidally synthesised nanoparticles may have interesting properties. We spoke to Professor Nadja Bigall about the work of the MAEROSTRUC project in using nanocrystals to develop multicomponent aerogels

46 QUSCO We spoke to Dr Eleni Diamanti about the QuSCo project’s work in proving the advantages of quantum technologies and bringing them closer to practical application

48 Exploring the Zooniverse

68 The Impact of

Social Pretend Play

Zooniverse.org is the largest and most popular online citizen science portal.

Richard Forsyth interviews Chris Lintott, Professor of Astrophysics, University of Oxford and Principal Investigator at Zooniverse.

52 FALCONER

Should adults get involved with children’s play? Professor Sonja Perren and Ann- Kathrin Jaggy tell us about their work in evaluating the impact of specific interventions on the quality of play

70 PACIC

Frans Snik of the FALCONER project describes how his research findings will help the world’s biggest telescopes find signs of life on distant exoplanets, which could also lead to spin-off innovations

56 MAGALOPS

We spoke to Professor Pascal Antoine about the work of the PACIC project in developing webbased interventions designed to support caregivers, alleviate their distress and enhance their wellbeing

72 The Economic Value of

Charismatic Leadership

We spoke to Professor Marijke Haverkorn about the work of the MAGALOPS project in developing a next generation model of the Galactic magnetic field

Charisma can be a powerful motivational tool. We spoke to Professor Christian Zehnder and Professor John Antonakis about their work in studying charisma scientifically and investigating its economic value

59 ALUFIX We spoke to Professor Aude Simar about the ALUFIX project’s work in enhancing the properties of aluminium alloys, work which could be extended to other materials in future

60 PURPOSE The Purpose project seeks to challenge the framework by which material fragmentation is understood, work which holds important implications for material design and development, as Professor José A. Rodríguez-Martínez explains

www.euresearcher.com

74

Hamiltonian systems of infinite dimension Integrable systems of infinite dimension like the non-linear Schrödinger equation play a prominent role in the nonlinear applied sciences and are connected to many other subfields of mathematics, as Professor Thomas Kappeler explains

BLACK LIVES MATTER

Follow EU Research on www.twitter.com/EU_RESEARCH Disseminating the latest research from around Europe and Horizon 2020

EDITORIAL Managing Editor Richard Forsyth info@euresearcher.com Deputy Editor Patrick Truss patrick@euresearcher.com Deputy Editor Richard Davey rich@euresearcher.com Science Writer Holly Cave www.hollycave.co.uk Acquisitions Editor Elizabeth Sparks info@euresearcher.com PRODUCTION Production Manager Jenny O’Neill jenny@euresearcher.com Production Assistant Tim Smith info@euresearcher.com Art Director Daniel Hall design@euresearcher.com Design Manager David Patten design@euresearcher.com Illustrator Martin Carr mary@twocatsintheyard.co.uk PUBLISHING Managing Director Edward Taberner etaberner@euresearcher.com Scientific Director Dr Peter Taberner info@euresearcher.com Office Manager Janis Beazley info@euresearcher.com Finance Manager Adrian Hawthorne info@euresearcher.com Account Manager Jane Tareen jane@euresearcher.com

EU Research Blazon Publishing and Media Ltd 131 Lydney Road, Bristol, BS10 5JR, United Kingdom T: +44 (0)207 193 9820 F: +44 (0)117 9244 022 E: info@euresearcher.com www.euresearcher.com © Blazon Publishing June 2010

Cert o n.TT-COC-2200

3

RESEARCH

NEWS

The EU Research team take a look at current events in the scientific news

Covid 19: Coronavirus

AstraZeneca to start making potential vaccine AstraZeneca is aiming to produce 2 billion doses of a coronavirus vaccine — and it could be ready by September!

4

EU Research

Cambridge-based pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca this week signed two deals that will allow it to double the supply of a potential coronavirus vaccine to 2 billion doses. A $750m (£609m) deal with two charities backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation — the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and the GAVI vaccines alliance — will see it manufacture, procure, and distribute 300 million doses. The second partnership, with the Serum Institute of India (SII), will see it provide 1 billion doses to low-and-middle-income countries, including 400 million before the end of 2020.

AstraZeneca chief executive Pascal Soriot said that the company should know by August if the mooted AZD1222 coronavirus vaccine is effective, while CEPI chief executive Richard Hatchett has warned that there is still a chance it may not work. He said AstraZeneca would make no profit from the supply of the vaccine, adding: ‘We felt that there are times in life that corporations need to step up and contribute to resolving a big problem like this one, so decided to do it at no profit.’ However this will only last until the World Health Organization (WHO) officially brings the crisis down from the level of ‘global pandemic’.

Estimates suggests the world will need around 4.5billion vaccine doses to put an end to the pandemic. The virus is so hard to track and spreads so easily that experts believe it will continue to spread through the human population indefinitely, if a vaccine cannot be found. AstraZeneca announced a deal last week with Oxford BioMedica to manufacture the Covid vaccine at its manufacturing centre in Oxford. AstraZeneca will have access to the company’s 84,000-square-foot factory and will turn out most of the clinical and commercial supply of the vaccine this year.

Mr Soriot also announced a licensing deal with the Serum Institute of India to provide 1billion doses of the vaccine to low- and middle-income countries by 2021. The goal will be to

manufacture 400 million doses in its factory by the end of 2020.

And today AstraZeneca signed a deal with the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (Cepi) in Norway and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, in Switzerland.

The companies will help manufacture 300million globally accessible doses of the coronavirus vaccine this year. But a leading member of the Oxford University trial of AZD1222 has warned the study has only a 50 per cent chance of being successfully completed.

Lower transmission of the coronavirus in the community means it will be harder for trial participants to catch the virus, and for scientists to see if the vaccine is protective.

Oxford University’s Jenner Institute and the Oxford Vaccine Group began development on a vaccine in January, using a virus taken from chimpanzees. Professor Adrian Hill, director of Oxford University’s Jenner Institute, said he expected fewer than 50 of those to catch the virus. The results could be deemed useless if fewer than 20 test positive.

‘We said earlier in the year that there was an 80 per cent chance of developing an effective vaccine by September’. ‘But at the moment, there’s a 50 per cent chance that we get no result at all. ‘We’re in the bizarre position of wanting Covid to stay, at least for a little while.

But cases are declining.’ If SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease COVID-19, is not spreading in the community, volunteers will find it difficult to catch, meaning scientists can’t prove whether the vaccine actually makes any difference.

Governments around the world have pledged billions of dollars for a Covid-19 vaccine and a number of pharmaceutical firms are in a race to develop and test potential drugs. United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres said “A vaccine must be seen as a global public good - a people’s vaccine, which a growing number of world leaders are calling for”.

Bald men ‘at greater risk’ of having serious coronavirus symptoms study claims Carlos Wambier, a researcher at Brown University, told EU Research he thinks “baldness is a perfect predictor of severity” of coronavirus.

Of the 41 virus patients examined in Spanish hospitals, 71 per cent were bald, the first study found. This compares to the average baldness rate for white men of a similar age to the patients – which is between 31 and 53 per cent.

The second study, which was published in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, found that 79 per cent of the 122 male coronavirus patients in Madrid hospitals were bald. Adrogens – male sex hormones – may contribute to hair loss and increase the ability of the virus to attack cells, some scientists have argued. This means hormone-suppressing drugs could potentially be used to slow its progress and allow sufferers time to recover.

www.euresearcher.com

This research comes after evidence suggests that men are more likely to die from Covid-19 than women. Scientists believe that androgens, male sex hormones that can cause hair loss, could also increase the ability of the virus to attack cells. Some researchers have therefore started to investigate whether treatments which suppress these hormones could help patients with Covid-19. Some of these therapies are used to treat diseases like prostate cancer.

But Karen Stalbow, head of policy at Prostate Cancer UK, urged caution over findings like Prof Wambier’s. Ms Stalbow said: “There are now several clinical studies starting which hope to address these issues, but much more evidence is needed before we can know whether these hormone therapies would be an effective treatment for Covid-19.”

5

https://taxonexpeditions.com

New species of beetle named after ‘The Beatles’ A beetle species new to science has been discovered by citizen scientists – and named after the legendary music group The Beatles.

A group of entomologists and citizen sciences surveyed Vondelpark, the busiest city park in Amsterdam, and discovered a beetle species that was new to science. Found only a stone’s throw away from the Amsterdam Hilton, where 50 years previously John Lennon and Yoko Ono held their BedIn For Peace, the beetle was named in honour of The Beatles.

Ptomaphagus thebeatles, a bottom-dweller just 2mm long, has now found his place in the limelight thanks to Dutch scientists and citizen researchers with a sense of humour ‘Insects are often named after famous musicians,’ said Amsterdam’s Vrije Universiteit, where one of the biologists Joris Koene works. ‘A treehopper has been named after Lady Gaga, a fly after Beyoncé and four types of damselfly have been named after all Queen band members. Strangely, a beetle has never been

Ptomaphagus thebeatles. © M. Schilthuizen/Taxon Expeditions named after the Beatles. This has now been rectified in a new publication in the scientific journal, Contributions to Zoology.’

Biologist Iva Njunjić, co-founder of Taxon Expeditions, said that there are specimens of this beetle in various collections, from countrias such as Bulgaria and the Czech Republic, but that it had never previously be named. ‘It’s really cute,’ said Njunjić, who is an expert on cave beetles.

‘It lives in leaf litter, feeds on fungi and is a brown reddish colour. We just found one so it could even be a bit rare in the Vondelpark. We just thought “thebeatles” was kind of a cool name.’ The organisation normally organises expeditions to remote areas for people who want to study science and biology and help discover new features, but has been working more locally during the coronavirus. Its next magical mystery tour is set to be to Borneo in September, travel regulations allowing. And if Njunjić were asked to think of a Beatles song for the newly-named beetle? ‘”Let it be” is a good one,’ she said.

Earth has hottest May on record 2020 is on track to be one of, if not the hottest year on record.

Temperatures soared 10 degrees Celsius (18˚F) above average last month in Siberia, home to much of Earth’s permafrost, as the world experienced its hottest May on record, the European Union’s climate monitoring network said Friday.

The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said May 2020 was 0.68C (1.2˚F) warmer than the average May from 1981 to 2010, with above-average temperatures across parts of Alaska, Europe, North America, South America, swathes of Africa and Antarctica.

Globally, “the average temperature for the twelve months to May 2020 is close to 1.3C (2.3 ˚F) above the (pre-industrial) level,” Copernicus said referring to the benchmark by which global warming is often measured. Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, nearly 200 countries have pledged to cap the rise in Earth average surface temperature to “well below” 2C (3.6˚F), and to 1.5C if possible. (One degree Celsius, or Centigrade, equals 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit.) The heatwave across parts of Siberia and Alaska will cause particular alarm in regions that were engulfed by huge forest fires last year fueled by record heat, and where Copernicus has warned that “zombie” blazes smoldering underground may be reigniting.

The monitoring network said that there were “highly anomalous” temperatures throughout Siberia throughout the March to May period. These reached close to 10C above the 1981 to 2010 average over parts of the Ob and Yenisei rivers, where “recordearly breakup of river ice has been reported.” Copernicus recorded

6

above-average temperatures around much of the Arctic from March to May, although the spring was colder in northern Canada.

Parts of Europe — from the Balkans to Scandinavia — also saw cooler than average temperatures in May, as did Australia, southern Asia and eastern United States. The 12 months to May were 0.7C hotter than the 1981 to 2010 average, matching the warmest equivalent period on record, between October 2015 and September 2016. Overall, global temperatures have risen more than 1 degree Celsius since mid-19th century levels, driven mostly by the burning fossil fuels.

There has been a sustained period of above-average temperatures since 2002, while the past five years have been the hottest on record, as was the past decade. In the Arctic region, average temperatures have risen by 2 degrees Celsius since the mid-19th century, almost twice the global average. This has accelerated melting of Greenland’s miles-thick ice sheet, resulting in a net loss of 600 billion tons of ice mass for the year — accounting for about 40% of total sea level rise in 2019.

The permafrost in Russian and Canadian forests contains as much as 1.5 trillion tons of carbon dioxide — around 40 times current annual emissions. The United Nations said last year that manmade greenhouse gas emissions needed to tumble by 7.6% annually over the next decade to cap global warming at 1.5C. Current pledges to cut emissions put Earth on a path of several degrees warming by the end of the century.

EU Research

Mauro Ferrari, Former president of the European Research Council (ERC), on the left, and Carlos Moedas. (Photo: EC - Audiovisual Service)

Mauro Ferrari resigns as ERC president after just 3 months in the role “I have lost faith in the system itself” said Ferrari citing EU inaction on COVID-19 the reason for his departure.

On April 7, distinguished nanomedicine researcher Mauro Ferrari was forced to resign as European Research Council (ERC) president. The ERC’s Scientific Council opposed his efforts to mobilize scientists across the European Union (EU) in a coordinated fight against COVID-19.

In his resignation letter, Ferrari denounced the EU’s calculated inaction in the pandemic, which is still surging with nearly one million cases and over 80,000 deaths in Europe, long after coordinated public health measures contained outbreaks in China and South Korea. Worldwide, there are already over 1.8 million COVID-19 cases and 113,000 deaths.

Ferrari began his letter, “Please forgive me, but I believe that the priority now is to stop the pandemic. The priority is to save millions of lives. ... I believe in science at the service of society, especially when it counts the most. And now it does count the most, since it is only through science that COVID-19, and its successor pandemics, will ever be defeated.”

He became ERC president in January 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic began. Hailing from a working class area of Udine in Italy, Ferrari earned his doctorate in mechanical engineering and did research in America, moving into biomedical science after his first wife Mariluisa suddenly died of cancer in 1995. Last year, the ERC said it “wholeheartedly” supported his nomination as president, praising Ferrari’s “career as an accomplished scientist and leader in the USA, with a rich and diverse background in the field of research and its applications.”

Ferrari returned to Europe to lead the ERC, he writes in his resignation, based on a “commitment to the idealistic dream of a

www.euresearcher.com

United Europe and my belief in serving the needs of the world.”

However, he adds, “Those idealistic motivations were crushed by a very different reality, in the brief three months since I took office.

Disquieting early warning signs gave way to the painfully icy, cold recognitions of a world entirely different from what I had envisioned.

The COVID-19 pandemic shone a merciless light on how mistaken I had been. In time of emergencies people, and institutions, revert to their deepest nature and reveal their true character.”

Now, however, the focus turns to who will succeed Ferrari at the European Commission’s most respected research agency. In an open declaration, six of Europe’s top research chiefs called for a “transparent procedure” in selecting Ferrari’s replacement, and one that includes the views of the scientific council. One of the research chiefs, Martin Stratmann, president of Germany’s Max Planck Society, issued a separate statement faulting the commission’s selection procedure as “inadequate.”

“Everybody can see that the process was flawed” by which the commission chose Ferrari in May 2019, agreed Antoine Petit, president of France’s state research agency, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. “Clearly Ferrari had an outstanding CV; he is clearly a good scientist. But clearly also it appears he was not the appropriate man for the job. It’s important that we understand what happened, so that such an error does not occur again.”

The commission has not yet said how or when it will choose Ferrari’s successor. “Work is ongoing to select the next ERC president. I am afraid I have no details to share with you at this stage,” a spokesman said.

7

www.spacex.com

SpaceX becomes first private company to launch humans into orbit NASA’s partnership with SpaceX and its founder Elon Musk should recognize the global nature of space exploration and research.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has become the first private company to launch humans into orbit, after unsettled weather over the Kennedy Space Center in Florida cleared for long enough on Saturday afternoon to allow a second launch attempt to go ahead. Nasa astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley became the first to fly in SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, carried on top of one of the company’s Falcon 9 rockets towards a planned rendezvous with the International Space Station.

The launch, at 3.22pm local time, also marked the first time astronauts had been launched into orbit from US soil since the Space Shuttle programme ended in 2011. An earlier attempt on Wednesday was called off because of stormy conditions at launch time. President Donald Trump and vice-president Mike Pence made the trip to Florida for a second time in three days to witness the launch. The mission unfolded amid the gloom of the coronavirus outbreak, which has killed more than 100,000 Americans, and racial unrest across the U.S. over the case of George Floyd, the handcuffed black man who died at the hands of Minneapolis police.

Boeing’s spaceship, the Starliner capsule, is not expected to fly astronauts until early 2021.

The SpaceX launch is seen in the private space industry as an important step in the commercialisation of low earth orbit, the region up to 1,200 kms above the earth where the ISS and most satellites are located. The first customers for private space flight are expected to be other national governments looking to create their own manned space programmes. Space tourism is also expected to become far more common if prices fall as much as some predict.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic both hope to begin their own flights for space tourists soon, though for now their companies are only planning brief trips into zero gravity, rather than sending passengers high enough to reach orbit.

Mr Musk and Mr Bezos also play a key role in the White House’s hopes of putting Americans back on the moon. Their private space companies are among those that have been commissioned to look into building a moon lander as part of the proposed mission.

NASA officials and others expressed hope the flight would lift American spirits and show the world what the U.S. can do.

SpaceX becomes the first private company to launch people into orbit, a feat achieved previously by only three governments: the U.S., Russia and China.

“This is something that should really get people right in the heart of anyone who has any spirit of exploration,” Musk, the visionary also behind the Tesla electric car company, said after lift-off, pounding his chest with his fist. The flight also ended a nine-year launch drought for NASA. Ever since it retired the space shuttle in 2011, NASA has relied on Russian spaceships launched from Kazakhstan to take U.S. astronauts to and from the space station.

Over the past few years, NASA outsourced the job of designing and building its next generation of spaceships to SpaceX and Boeing, awarding them $7 billion in contracts in a public-private partnership aimed at driving down costs and spurring innovation.

8

NASA Astronauts Launch from America in Historic Test Flight of SpaceX Crew Dragon. Credits: NASA/Bill Ingalls

EU Research

Joël Mesot, president of ETH Zurich

Coming out of lockdown will be harder than going in Joël Mesot, president of ETH Zurich tells EU Research how the university is slowly getting back to speed, and why Brussels and Bern ‘may understand each other better’ after the pandemic.

The president of Switzerland’s top-ranked university says his institution is tentatively getting back to speed after the coronavirus lockdown - but that this is harder than anticipated.

“Going into lockdown was hard, coming back out even more so, we’ve discovered,” said Joël Mesot, president of ETH Zurich. “We have to move back slowly and make sure that all our people are on board with the process.”

In the month or so since Switzerland and other European countries began to ease their lockdown measures, the university has resumed full research operations, and more than half of all staff have returned on a rotating timetable. In a recent virtual meeting with ETH employees, Mesot told them from now on, he will continue to do some work from home. “I will stay at home one day per week in the future. I wanted to give a sign to everyone, from the top,” While Switzerland’s lockdown to block the spread of COVID-19 was less strict than in other countries, one third of the workforce, 1.5 million people, are furloughed. “We have never seen anything like this. Some of these will likely face real joblessness,” Mesot said.

Mesot expects the economic downturn in Europe to last for some time, but thinks Switzerland will recover a bit sooner than many of its neighbours. “It doesn’t help if you have recovered and the rest of the world is still recovering though,” he said. Inevitably, the economic pain will leave its mark on ETH Zurich. “In the long turn, there will be pressure on financing. If the [national] debt increases above a certain level, expenditure has to automatically fall. So we will be hit for this in the future,” Mesot said. The university system receives almost 70 per cent of its budget from the central Swiss government.

The pandemic has led Brussels to delay the delicate negotiation with Switzerland over its place in the Horizon Europe R&D programme, which is due to start in January. That means there’s now little time to resolve any problems and avoid a repeat of 2014, when Brussels cut off full Swiss membership to Horizon 2020, the current EU research programme.

The threat of being blocked from the full €94.4 billion Horizon Europe programme is a source of major disquiet for Swiss academics.

Mesot says the experience of the pandemic may give fresh momentum

www.euresearcher.com

to talks, which have been bogged down by a row over immigration and a new EU-Swiss treaty.

“The interaction during the crisis was very strong. Swiss hospitals have taken patients from France and Italy. Maybe we will both understand each other better now, and come to a good solution,” said Mesot.

“It’s essential to be a part of this programme, which is very important for us. Switzerland is such a strong partner too. Close ties in research are in the interest of both sides. We have some of the strongest research, like our quantum computing groups, for example,” he said.

For ETH, the annual cost of being cut out of Horizon Europe would be in the order of CHF64 million (€60 million), the amount the university drew from the Horizon 2020 programme in 2018. This represents about 3.5 per cent of its CHF1.8 billion annual budget.

While most ETH research was on hold during the crisis, work around fighting the virus continued, and has already led to some breakthroughs.

“Everything around the virus was allowed. Everything related to industry collaboration was also allowed, once hygiene and social distancing rules were respected,” Mesot said. “The use of our supercomputers was 100 per cent; I’m expecting a record number of publications for 2020.”

ETH Zurich researchers and their counterparts at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne devised a COVID-19 tracing app, dubbed SwissCovid, built on the back of a model jointly put forward

by Apple and Google. As a further consequence of the pandemic, the president anticipates a fall in demand from outside Switzerland for university places, at least for the next year.

University staff are still figuring out how to satisfy the Swiss requirement to ensure social distancing of at least two metres. For new students, “it would be a disaster if they had to stay in their apartments, and couldn’t move freely on campus and network. We still have to figure out ways to combine safety and onsite classes,” he said. But there have been unexpected advantages in having classes online. “Because it’s a bit more anonymous, students are asking more questions, including the shy ones who might not have [done so] in lecture halls,” said Mesot.

9

Biologically based materials that leave no scar Bionic devices like cochlear implants and bionic eyes are currently made using relatively stiff metals that the body recognises as foreign, which limits the effectiveness of these devices when they are implanted. We spoke to Dr Rylie Green about the work of the Living Bionics project in developing new, softer materials that can be integrated into the body more effectively.

The vast majority of bionic devices like cochlear implants, pacemakers and bionic eyes currently include metallic electrodes, with a non-conductive polymer as the insulating component. These types of devices are not naturally compatible with the tissue with which they interface when they are introduced into the body, as Dr Rylie Green explains. “When these devices are introduced, the body recognises them as foreign. It responds by essentially putting up a wall of scar tissue over time, to stop what it sees as a threat from causing damage to the rest of the body,” she outlines. This leads to the formation of a scar tissue capsule, which impedes communication between a bionic device and the rest of the body. “Where you want to be communicating very efficiently with the nerve cells within a system, instead you’re communicating through a big wall of scar tissue, to try and stimulate cells - or record from cells - that have moved further away from the interface,” says Dr Green.

Image credit: Dr Aaron Gilmour, postdoctoral researcher.

Living bionics project An alternative option is to use biologically based materials in a bionic device that the body will respond to in a more natural way, a topic central to the work of the Living Bionics project, an ERC-backed initiative based at Imperial College in London. As the project’s Principal Investigator, Dr Green is working to develop biomaterials that can be integrated with tissue without the formation of scar tissue. “We are trying to make biosynthetic materials that can essentially trick the body into thinking that they are natural,” she explains. This can be done in a variety of different ways; one of the simplest is to make something that is softer than the metals currently used.

“Nervous tissue is very soft, somewhere in the region of very low kilopascals down to pascals in terms of stiffness. Whereas the metals usually used in electrodes are over the gigapascal range,” says Dr Green. “So there’s a huge difference in stiffness between the metals that are used conventionally, and the actual tissue in which they implant devices.”

10

The Bionic Man. © Control Publishing

Image credit: Dr Ulises Aregueta-Robles.

A lot of energy in research has been devoted to essentially softening up that interface by using materials that are also in the kilopascals range, so that the neighbouring cells feel something soft when a device is introduced. While the body still recognises that a device has been

made with synthetic materials, the mechanical properties do not cause physical damage.

“There is a better response at the interface,” stresses Dr Green. Biological elements that are normally present in the environment around the cells, such as protein-type components, can also be added to these materials, making them ‘biosynthetic’. “The body then starts to interact with these components, and we see some positive interactions,” says Dr Green.

“However, when we implant these softer, more biological devices, the body can still recognise that they’re foreign in some respects. Critically, there is still implant damage when you actually introduce the device. In Living Bionics, we see this as a window of opportunity to create a better connection between the device and the surrounding tissue.”

The aim here is to add in some stem cells or progenitor cells that will grow out from the device to interact with the tissue. By essentially pushing the stem cells down a particular developmental line, Dr Green hopes to ensure that they develop into neural cell networks that are more compatible with the local environment. “We provide, within the device, the ingredients the stem cells need to become neural cells that will then target the tissue that we’re looking to interface with,” she explains. However, stem cells do not always differentiate into neural cell networks, which is one of the major challenges facing the project.

“No matter what cues you provide stem cells with, you never get 100 percent of one particular cell type. We’re working to develop not just one cell type, but a ratio of different cells that are present within the brain, to make functional neural tissue,” continues Dr Green.

“We don’t just want nerve cells on their own, that’s not sufficient. We need to also think about their supporting cells.”

Cell networks Researchers have developed a method that enables the introduction of cells that have already been differentiated, called astrocytes.

These act as support cells to the nerve cells, and form part of a wider network. “Nerve cells don’t contact each other and create a conduit on their own, they need these other

EU Research

LIVING BIONICS Living bioelectronics: Bridging the interface between devices and tissues Project Objectives

Living Bionics brings together concepts from tissue engineering with bionic device design to provide connections at the device-tissue interface on the cellular level, enabling natural modes of nerve tissue activation. Living Bionics will use stem cells embedded within neural implant devices to create a paradigm shift in medical electrode design, to improve implant integration with the body and ultimately patient benefit from devices.

Project Funding

The Living Bionics project is funded by an ERC Consolidator grant.

Contact Details

cells to guide them. We’re finding that you need to really address the immune cells first.

Mature astrocytes provide the nerve cells with the nutrients they need and show them where to go,” explains Dr Green. These other cells are critical in establishing a functional contact between a device and the tissue that is being targeted; Dr Green and her colleagues in the project are focusing largely on the brain and the central nervous system.

“We’re starting with the cortex level rather than the hindbrain or the hypothalamus, which have different ratios of different types of cells,” she says. “We want to start with just one tissue type, and show a proof-ofconcept. There’s a balance here, in the sense that you have to provide the right sorts of ingredients and cues.”

look towards applying new bionic devices to treat disease by effectively slowing their progression. “Some diseases have a degenerative state, and the natural environment within the brain continually causes cells to die,” continues Dr Green. “It has been theorised that controlling those cells, or stimulating them in some way, will help to slow down or halt a disease.”

It is unclear whether those cells that are introduced as part of the device will still be subject to the factors that caused the original damage and if they will then become degenerate. However, even if the cells do degenerate, Dr Green says such a device would provide a solid basis for treatment.

“We still have a soft device there that hasn’t formed scar tissue, so you should still have

When these devices are introduced, the body recognises them as foreign. It responds by essentially putting up a wall of scar tissue over time, to stop what it sees as a threat from causing damage to the rest of the body.

This research is very much exploratory at this stage, so at the moment Dr Green is essentially putting all the building blocks together and building a deeper understanding of cell populations. The next stage would be to trial these devices within rodent brains, and assess their effectiveness in terms of communicating with the rest of the brain. “Success for us in a murine model would basically mean cell survival. For example, where we can visualise some of the cells that have been incorporated in our devices, and see that they are communicating with the cells in the animal’s brain,” outlines Dr Green.

Beyond that, researchers could eventually

www.euresearcher.com

Project Coordinator, Dr Rylie Green Faculty of Engineering, Imperial College London, South Kensington Campus, London SW7 2AZ T: +44 (0)20 7594 0943 E: rylie.green@imperial.ac.uk W: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/rylie.green

Dr Rylie Green

Dr Rylie Green joined Bioengineering, Imperial College London in 2016. Dr Green’s research has been broadly focused on developing medical electrodes, with a specific focus on neuroprostheses. She seeks to bring together approaches from biomaterials and tissue engineering, with technology development in bionics and device design to provide disruptive solutions to the bioelectronics field.

a more effective interface for long-term electrical treatment,” she explains. This research is still at a very early stage however, and researchers are currently focused more on gaining fundamental knowledge than translational activity. “We’ve learnt a lot about what we need to provide our cells with, such that they not only survive within a device, but they also have the components to turn into the right sorts of cells to develop neural networks,” says Dr Green. “What cells need is more space, and topographical cues in that space that they can cling onto and create sort of mechanical connections, which allow them to change their shape and become part of wider networks.”

11

Controlling cell sociology with microrobotics The mechanobiology of cells is an important aspect of medicine. We spoke to Mahmut Selman Sakar, Tenure Track Assistant Professor at EPFL in Lausanne, about the work of the ROBOCHIP project in developing microrobotic technologies, research which could open up new perspectives on human physiology and pathology.

The human body is made up of trillions of cells, and the ways that these cells are structurally organised inside various tissues exerts a major influence on the designated function of our organs. Cells are exquisitely sensitive and responsive to their dynamic mechanical environment. Both externally applied forces and the mechanical properties of the extracellular matrix (ECM) have been shown to modulate cell behaviour. As the Principal Investigator of the ROBOCHIP project, Professor Sakar aims to develop a robotic toolkit that could facilitate the investigation of how cells communicate with each other and organize through the ECM. This work centres around developing untethered microscopic machines that can be placed inside engineered three-dimensional (3D) microtissues, where they generate spatiotemporally resolved signals. “We can precisely control the magnitude and duration of the deformation applied by the synthetic microactuators.

Using this novel technology, we are studying how mechanical signals propagate within the tissues, how they are sensed and processed by the resident cells, and finally how cells collectively respond to mechanical loading,” outlines Professor Sakar.

ROBOCHIP project The results of this work are expected to provide fundamental new information about the mechanobiology of cells, such as the

12

quantification of cell behaviour under welldefined static and dynamic loading conditions.

“Our group has developed a number of different techniques for powering microactuators wirelessly. They can be powered by magnetic fields, near infrared light, and ultrasound,” says Professor Sakar. The methodology also involves engineering the ECM from mechanically characterized fibrous materials and time-lapse imaging. “We track where the cells are and

architecture of the ECM in these processes?” asks Professor Sakar. As of yet these questions have not been answered.

Cellular communication The aim here is to essentially uncover the physical rules behind multicellular organization, research that holds wider relevance to our understanding of disease. For example, certain conditions drive the formation of cysts, tumours,

The microrobotic toolkit that we are developing will perfectly complement modern imaging modalities and biochemical manipulation techniques. Together, they will provide a more complete picture on how the resident cells of a particular tissue interrogate and remodel their microenvironment as a community. what they do in real-time using fluorescent markers so that we can correlate the action of the robotic tools with the biological output,” continues Professor Sakar.

The mechanical loading conditions mimic the types of signals that cells are exposed to within the body. The goal then for researchers is to identify what specific factors disrupt homeostasis and what kind of stimulation may facilitate healing. “Do the cells identify the magnitude or the frequency of the mechanical signal? When do they start changing their phenotype and moving beyond physiological limits? What is the contribution of the

or fibrotic scarring in almost every tissue within the body, and the situation may become much more serious if these masses are allowed to grow and spread unchecked. “The abnormal cell clusters are made of our cells. What are the signals that convince healthy cells to abandon their physiological roles and form nonfunctional and even destructive tissues? Recent work has shown that fibroblasts and immune cells residing around a tumour may apply forces, which stimulate the cancer cells to spread. This is only one example of how mechanical factors play a key role in the initiation and progression of certain diseases,” outlines Professor Sakar.

EU Research

ROBOCHIP MicroRobotic toolkit to deliver spatiotemporally resolved physicochemical signals and control cell sociology Project Objectives

The technological objective of this project is the development of a microrobotic toolkit that can apply physiologically relevant mechanochemical signals within three-dimensional multicellular constructs in an automated fashion. The primary scientific objective is the discovery of mesoscale physical principles behind multicellular organization that take place during morphogenesis and regeneration.

Project Funding

The project is funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 714609).

Project Team Members

A deeper understanding of cellular communication could help researchers identify what is wrong with the mechanics of the microenvironment, opening up the possibility of intervening in certain cases to modify cellular behaviour. “For example, with the acquired knowledge, we may be able to design active microscopic implants that can then be mechanically actuated to perform cellular physiotherapy,” says Professor Sakar.

The successful execution of the project depends on interdisciplinary efforts, blending techniques from mechanical engineering, nanotechnology, materials science, robotics, and tissue engineering. In the first stage of the project, Professor Sakar and his students designed, manufactured, and calibrated microactuators that could be integrated into engineered tissues. “We are now at the stage where we can deploy untethered microactuators much like cells into fibrous materials, and instruct them to bind to specific moieties on the ECM or membrane proteins,” he says. The technology has already enabled collaboration with experts from various domains of the life sciences. “We have teamed up with colleagues from immunology and oncology to develop more comprehensive theories on the mechanobiology of diseases, taking molecular biology and genetics into account,” adds Professor Sakar.

The project also holds clear relevance to understanding morphogenesis, the process by which an organism takes its form. In the developing organism, coordinated cell movements and tissue forces crucial for morphogenesis may rely on the same type of mechanical signals that maintain tissue homeostasis or drive the progression of cancer.

A deeper understanding of how active and passive mechanics influence cell movement

www.euresearcher.com

during morphogenesis could help researchers discover the root causes of developmental disorders. Recent work has shown the feasibility of engineering biomimetic environments that guide stem cells to form microscale organ-like 3D constructs, organoids, through self-assembly. Studying the dynamics of multicellular interactions in their social context at the tissue level may provide detailed instructions of how to control organoid development and close the gap between natural and engineered tissues.

A number of tools are being developed over the course of the project, which will help researchers make quantitative measurements and collect large datasets of cell and ECM mechanics. Considering the complexity of the problem, it is essential to develop a mechanical modelling framework to interpret and suggest experiments. “The continuum models that we have been building provide physical interpretation of empirical data across a range of length and time scales. We are recapitulating the effects of cellular contractility, bulk and surface stresses, ECM plasticity, cell migration and tissue flows, and phase transitions in our models,” says Professor Sakar. This is part of the wider objective of essentially hacking cellular communication, and providing a means of controlling multicellular organization. “The final demonstration will involve on-demand construction of layered and compartmentalized tissues from distributed cells with only spatiotemporally controlled mechanical loading. We will also show direct evidence of mechanicallyinduced transitions on cell states such as migration, proliferation, and contractility, and report quantitative values on thresholds,” continues Professor Sakar.

The ROBOCHIP team consists of four PhD candidates with expertise in different disciplines; Erik Mailand, Raquel Parreira, Fazil Uslu, and Lucio Pancaldi.

Contact Details

Project Coordinator, Professor Mahmut Selman Sakar Tenure Track Assistant Professor Institute of Mechanical Engineering Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) Switzerland T: +41 21 693 10 95 E: selman.sakar@epfl.ch W: https://www.epfl.ch/labs/microbs/ Professor Mahmut Selman Sakar

Mahmut Selman Sakar is an Assistant Professor in the Institutes of Mechanical Engineering and Bioengineering, and the head of the MICROBS Laboratory at EPFL. His work focuses on developing novel microrobotic manipulation tools and computational multiphysics models for minimally invasive medicine and mechanobiology research. He has received ERC Starting (2016) and Proof of Concept (2020) grants.

13

Sounds of clarity in a world of noise Many of us are surrounded by sound in our daily lives, yet somehow our brains are still able to pick out a single voice or particular source of sound, a process called auditory scene analysis. Researchers in the Soundscene project aim to build a deeper understanding of this process, as Professor Jennifer Bizley explains.

There are often

multiple sources of sound around us in our daily lives, whether it’s colleagues chatting in the office, traffic noise, or the sort of background hum that you often hear in a busy pub.

Different sounds arrive at the ear as a mixture, yet somehow the brain can still pick out a single voice or a particular source of sound, a topic of great interest to Jennifer Bizley, Professor of Auditory Neuroscience at University College London. “We don’t really know how the brain

SOUNDSCENE How does the brain organize sounds into auditory scenes?

Real-world listening involves making sense of the numerous competing sound sources that exist around us and involves multiple brain regions.

We seek to understand how neural processing within auditory cortex, prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, and the interactions between these areas, enable listeners to make sense of sound.

Project Coordinator, Jennifer Bizley, D.Phil Professor of Auditory Neuroscience.

UCL Ear Institute 332 Gray’s Inn Road London WC1X 8EE T: +0207 679 8934 E: j.bizley@ucl.ac.uk W: www.dBSPL.co.uk

Jennifer Bizley is Professor of Auditory Neuroscience and a Wellcome Trust and Royal Society Sir Henry Dale Fellow at the UCL Ear Institute.

14

does this. We know that older listeners, and people suffering from hearing loss or certain neurological problems find this process quite challenging,” she says. This is an issue central to Professor Bizley’s work as the Principal Investigator of the Soundscene project. “We want to improve our understanding of this process. If we can work out how the brain does this, then maybe use this to develop a machine listening device that can successfully pick a voice out of a mixture,” she outlines.

Soundscene project This research builds on earlier behavioural and brain scanning experiments in humans which have shown which areas of the brain are active while the brain interprets sound scenes. “Some of these are areas that you would expect, like the auditory cortex. But then there are other areas, like the hippocampus and the frontal cortex, that imaging studies have shown are also involved,” says Professor Bizley. While functional imaging can show which parts of the brain are involved, it doesn’t really tell researchers how they’re solving a task, so Professor Bizley and her colleagues are using an animal model to gain deeper insights. “We are using start-of-the-art systems neuroscience methods in ferrets, which are really effective as an animal model because they are able to learn behavioural tasks involving auditory scene analysis. We want to understand what role these areas beyond the auditory cortex play in listening,” she explains.

The development of more sophisticated electrodes, capable of recording signals from hundreds of sites in the brain simultaneously, has opened up new possibilities in this respect. Researchers today have access to a

lot more data than their predecessors, while Professor Bizley says this data can also be used in interesting ways. “We can begin to understand how neurons interact with one another, and how information is processed and transmitted between different brain regions,” she continues. The ear projects to a region called the cochlear nucleus, which sits in the brain stem, and a series of brain stem nuclei extract different features of sound. “Eventually information ends up in the auditory cortex where neurons can integrate information across time and frequency. We think this is where the brain effectively un-mixes the sound that arrived at the ear back into the separate sources that existed in the world – and from there you can choose a source to listen to.”

This research holds important implications for our understanding of hearing difficulties.

Typical old-age hearing loss involves the loss of cells responsible for detecting sound, which compromises a listeners ability to perform scene analysis effectively. Another group of people have what are loosely called central auditory processing disorders. “If you sit them in an audiology booth, and you measure their ability to detect pure tones, they’re completely normal. Yet, if you put them in a situation where there is a lot of background noise, they really struggle to pick a voice out,” says Professor Bizley. A deeper understanding of how the brain separates different sources of sound could eventually lead to improved treatment of these disorders, while Professor Bizley says the project’s research also holds relevance in other areas. “For example the machine listening devices that sit behind things like Siri and Alexa need to pick out a voice from background noise,” she points out.

EU Research

Next Generation Structural and Functional MRI for Faster Diagnosis MRI scans provide a detailed picture of the brain, enabling doctors to both diagnose disease and monitor the effectiveness of therapies. We spoke to Dr Karin Shmueli about her work in developing a new MRI method that will provide a deeper picture of tissue electromagnetic properties and may help diagnose Alzheimer’s disease at an earlier stage than currently possible.

A technique developed

in the ‘70s, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has become an important diagnostic tool across many areas of medicine, including neurodegenerative disease. An MRI scanner is typically used for around 30 minutes, during which different images are collected.

“Those images are acquired in different ways to emphasise different types of tissue. One image might highlight fluid, and another might show lesions in white matter in the brain,” explains Dr Karin Shmueli, Principal Investigator of the DiSCo MRI SFN project.

These images provide a very rich picture of the condition of soft tissue in the brain, while functional MRI scans are also an extremely valuable diagnostic and neuroscientific tool.

“With functional MRI scans we can look at the way the brain works, and how brain activity varies over time,” says Dr Shmueli.

MRI brain images illustrating the stages in quantitative susceptibility mapping: raw phase images (left) are unwrapped, then background fields are removed so the final susceptibility map (right) can be calculated.

In functional MRI (fMRI), information on patterns and networks of brain neural activity is obtained by assessing variations in the magnitude signal over time. Measuring changes in the phase signals over time should allow extraction of functional susceptibility and conductivity changes. However, this is a demanding task and sophisticated image processing will be required.

“A lot of things change over time; we’re breathing, our hearts are beating and blood is flowing. We want to remove those physiological fluctuations from the phase signals, to detect the fluctuations

MRI maps of the magnetic susceptibility and electrical conductivity provide new information about the chemical makeup of tissue and how it changes in a variety of neurodegenerative diseases.

DiSCo MRI SFN project An image is acquired in MRI through what is called a pulse sequence (literally a sequence of pulses of radiofrequency energy and magnetic field gradients), which can be varied to highlight particular features of the brain.

Now Dr Shmueli and her colleagues in the project are designing a rapid pulse sequence lasting between 5-10 minutes which will provide images containing several different pieces of information. “We can get some of this information using current scans, while some of it is totally new information that hasn’t been collected before,” she outlines. The signals acquired in MRI are numerically complex in nature, with both a magnitude and a phase; the latter is often discarded, but Dr Shmueli makes use of both. “We use these signal components to give us different pieces of information. We can use the phase to give us both a susceptibility map and a conductivity map,” she explains.

These maps of the magnetic susceptibility and electrical conductivity have been found to provide new and useful information about the chemical makeup of tissue and how it changes in a variety of neurodegenerative diseases.

www.euresearcher.com

in susceptibility and conductivity that reflect neural activity,” says Dr Shmueli.

The aim is to remove the physiological noise, leaving only small signals from which researchers can gain deeper insights into brain activity patterns. “The brain has a mechanism called functional hyperaemia, which means that lots of oxygenated blood is sent to active regions of tissue. This blood oxygenation is measured indirectly in standard fMRI and we aim to quantify it much more directly by looking at blood susceptibility changes over time,” continues Dr Shmueli.

This research holds wider relevance to the diagnosis of neurodegenerative disease. The priority at this stage in the project is to improve the pulse sequence, before testing it on healthy volunteers and eventually a group of patients with early stage Alzheimer’s disease. “That will be in the last year of the project, once we’ve developed the acquisition and processing techniques,” explains Dr Shmueli. Her team aims to reduce the amount of time these patients have to spend inside a scanner, while still gathering detailed information.

“We want to assess the structural, compositional, and functional changes that happen in the brain

at an earlier stage than is currently possible,” says Dr Shmueli. “We are now working on optimising these techniques in healthy volunteers.”

The next step would be to apply these techniques to diagnose different diseases, including not just Alzheimer’s, but also potentially several other conditions. Dr Shmueli’s team and collaborators are looking at brain susceptibility changes in individuals with sicklecell anaemia, and are also studying arteriovenous malformations in the brain. “With arterio-venous malformations you get shunting of oxygenated arterial blood straight into the veins, which would normally contain a lot of deoxygenated blood,” she outlines. “We have been able to detect that non-invasively for the first time, using quantitative susceptibility mapping.”

DiSCo MRI SFN

Developing Integrated Susceptibility and Conductivity MRI for Next Generation Structural and Functional Neuroimaging Dr Karin Shmueli Department of Medical Physics & Biomedical Engineering, University College London Malet Place Engineering Building, Rm 2.02 T: +44 (0)207 679 0256 E: k.shmueli@ucl.ac.uk W: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ medical-physics-biomedicalengineering/research/ research-groups/magneticresonance-imaging-group

Dr Karin Shmueli is an Associate Professor in Magnetic Resonance Imaging in the UCL Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering. Karin pioneered MRI susceptibility mapping (QSM) techniques as a Postdoctoral Visiting Fellow at the USA National Institutes of Health. She leads a group of researchers optimising QSM techniques for several applications from neurodegenerative diseases to cancer.

15

PDA development: Pancreatic cancer typically progress through several stages, with increased stromal infiltrate developing alongside. Credit Joanna Kelly.

Behind the building blocks of pancreatic cancer A large proportion of a pancreatic tumour is comprised of stromal cells, which effectively protect the tumour and help it to grow. We spoke to Dr Claus Jorgensen about the work of the DiSect project in investigating communication between the tumour cells and the surrounding microenvironment, and its relevance to the wider goal of improving cancer treatment.

The nature of pancreatic cancer means it is difficult to diagnose the disease in its early stages, as the symptoms are not always easy to distinguish from other conditions.

This means that most patients are diagnosed when the disease has advanced to a point where tumour cells have invaded the surrounding vessels or metastasised. “About 80 percent of pancreatic cancer patients are diagnosed at that stage. Only about 20 percent are diagnosed when the cancer looks like it’s been contained within the pancreas, where it hasn’t invaded structures and it hasn’t metastasized,” explains Dr Claus Jorgensen, a researcher at the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute, the University of Manchester. Those patients who are diagnosed at a relatively early stage are often treated with surgery, and have a better long-term prognosis than patients with more advanced disease, who may need to be treated solely with chemotherapy.

“Patients that get surgery have much better 5-year survival rates,” stresses Dr Jorgensen.

DiSect project A deeper understanding of the structure and composition of a pancreatic tumour is central to improving this picture, a topic at the core of Dr Jorgensen’s work in the DiSect project. A pancreatic tumour is surrounded by a thick protective coating called the stroma, which accounts for a significant proportion of its overall composition. “When it’s fully developed as an adenocarcinoma, pancreatic cancer is a very stroma-rich tumour. It’s estimated that around 85 percent of a solid tumour

16

is actually not tumour cells,” outlines Dr Jorgensen. In a healthy individual stromal cells play a supporting role to other cells, but Dr Jorgensen says that in patients with pancreatic cancer they are essentially hijacked. “Tumour cells start sending out signals that make the stromal cells behave in a manner that supports the tumour,” he says. “They hack normal developmental programmes, and try and utilise them to support tumour growth.”

Credit Christopher Below

This means in pancreatic cancer that there is an expansion of stromal fibroblasts, which create an extra-cellular matrix resembling scar tissue, to support the tumour. There is also a regenerative response, where new cells come into the pancreas. “A lot of the population of new cells which you see in pancreatic cancer are part of the first response, where these cells come in and act in an immune suppressive way,” explains Dr Jorgensen. The stromal responses develop as

the tumour evolves, although it’s not clear if the stroma develops in parallel with the tumour. “Are there any differences between the earlier and later stages of the stroma?

In the DiSect project, we aim to better understand some of these mechanisms,” continues Dr Jorgensen. “We have a pretty good idea of the individual mutations acquired by the tumour cells. For example, the starting mutation that you see in pretty much all early lesions involves activating the oncogene called KRAS.” Researchers have also identified a number of other important factors in tumour development, such as the loss of a tumour suppressor called p53, which plays an important role in preventing cancer formation. This information is being used in the project to replicate various stages of tumour development, from which Dr Jorgensen and his colleagues hope to gain deeper insights into how tumour cells engage with the stroma. “Does a tumour cell that has mutated KRAS and has lost its p53 function interact differently with the tumour microenvironment than a tumour cell at an earlier stage? How will the nature of these interactions shape the composition and function of the tumour microenvironment?” he outlines.

Researchers are also investigating PanINs (Pancreatic Intraepithelial Neoplasia), a potentially malignant precursor to pancreatic cancer, but which often doesn’t develop into a tumour, which raises important questions.

“Is that because the stroma, at that stage, restricts rather than promotes growth?” asks Dr Jorgensen.

EU Research

Pancreatic Cancer Organoids: Pancreatic Cancer Cells can be grown in the laboratory as organoids such that their interaction with isolated stromal cells can be analysed.

DiSect The Tumour Stroma as a Driver of Clonal Selection Project Objectives

Background image courtesy of The National Cancer Institute.

Microenvironment The aim here is to understand the nature of the relationship between tumour cells and the surrounding microenvironment. One part of this work involves investigating a heterogenous population of tumour cells and looking at how they interact with cells in the microenvironment. ”We isolate individual tumour cells from a tumour, then grow out clones. Then we study how those clones interact with the microenvironment,” explains Dr Jorgensen. Researchers have found that different tumour cells engage the microenvironment in different ways. “We’ve

another study within the project, Dr Jorgensen and his colleagues aim to take a very big-picture view of these tumours. “We’ve essentially mapped out all the individual cell populations that are in the tumour microenvironment, to really get a very detailed view of which cells are there,” he outlines. “We can study individual cells, but until we have an idea of what cells are in the microenvironment, their relative abundance and how they interact, it’s very difficult to develop better models.”

The wider objective in this research is to build a deeper understanding of pancreatic cancer and contribute to the development of

When it’s fully developed as an adenocarcinoma, pancreatic cancer is a very stroma-rich tumour. It’s estimated that around 85 percent of a solid tumour is actually not tumour cells. found that there are three general types of interaction with the microenvironment.

That drives a different phenotype of the microenvironment, and that then engages the tumour cells differently,” continues Dr Jorgensen. “So essentially, you cannot assume that the microenvironment always engages tumour cells in a similar manner.”

Evidence suggests that the way the microenvironment engages tumour cells is tailored to the nature of those cells. This is an important observation in terms of the wider goal of moving towards more personalised treatment of pancreatic cancer. “Perhaps in future we need to think about profiling not just tumour cells, but also profiling the microenvironment, so that we have a more refined view of a tumour,” says Dr Jorgensen. In

www.euresearcher.com

more effective therapies. Current treatment is based largely on chemotherapy, but there’s not been a lot of progress over recent years in terms of improving treatment; one factor behind this has been the relative lack of attention paid to the microenvironment.

“One of the missing factors so far has been trying to modulate the microenvironment,” says Dr Jorgensen. Perturbing the cells in the microenvironment could make tumour cells more vulnerable to therapies, opening up new possibilities. “If we can understand the rules by which tumour cells depend on the microenvironment, then maybe we can change those rules and make them miss a growth signal. Will that then open up avenues for providing new therapies to target the tumour cells?” continues Dr Jorgensen.

Tumors are complex organs that, in addition to the transformed cancer cells, contain infiltrating host cells. It is widely accepted that infiltrating cells such as fibroblasts and immune cells influence the malignant behaviour of cancer cells. In this ERC funded project I am investigating how stromal cells support cancer cells and how specific mutations in the cancer cells modify these interactions.

Project Funding

This project is funded by the European Research Council. Total funding € 1 969 768.

Contact Details

Dr Claus Jorgensen Group leader Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute The University of Manchester Alderley Park Manchester SK10 4TG United Kingdom E: claus.jorgensen@cruk.manchester.ac.uk W: www.cruk.manchester.ac.uk

Dr Claus Jorgensen

Dr Claus Jorgensen obtained his PhD at the University of Southern Denmark in 2005.

Following that, he moved to Toronto to train with Dr Tony Pawson, which is where he developed his fundamental interest in heterocellular signalling. He started his laboratory at The Institute of Cancer Research in 2010 and relocated to the CRUK Manchester Institute in 2014, where he is now a senior group leader.

17

Getting to the heart of cardiovascular diseases Vast amounts of genomic data are available today, and analysing it can help researchers pinpoint the genetic factors involved in the development of disease. We spoke to Dr Nabila Bouatia-Naji about her research into the genetic causes of conditions associated with cardiovascular diseases, and its wider importance to diagnosis and treatment.

There is a

relatively small degree of variability in genetic profile across the human population, and any two individuals have very similar DNA sequences in their genomes.

However, there are variations, and analysing minor differences across the population could help researchers identify which are associated with cardiovascular diseases, a topic central to the ROSALIND project. “We look at the specific differences in the genomes of different individuals, and compare patients with certain cardiovascular diseases with people who don’t have these conditions. By comparing them we can then identify, in the genome, the important differences,” explains Dr Nabila Bouatia-Naji, the project’s Principal Investigator. Based at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm) in Paris, Dr BouatiaNaji is working to identify differences in the genome that are associated with certain types of cardiovascular disease. “It could be that because there is a little bit less of a protein, certain cells are more likely to be unstable, and then this will affect the structure of the arteries,” she outlines.

Cardiovascular diseases The coronary arteries play an important role in the transport of oxygenated blood to the heart, so they need to function correctly.

The function of the coronary arteries is underpinned by many different biological events and processes, and problems here can have serious consequences, even a myocardial infarction. “A myocardial infarction can be due to many different reasons, not just the accumulation of cholesterol. When we look at

the genetic causes of cardiovascular diseases, we may find different genetic causes, many different events happening at the cellular level that in the long-term may leave individuals more prone to arterial disease,” says Dr Bouatia-Naji. The aim now is to build a deeper picture of the genetic factors associated with cardiovascular diseases such as fibromuscular dysplasia, and spontaneous coronary artery dissection, two conditions that affect blood vessels “We have data on around 3,000

one of our projects we’re studying the genetic determinants in the genome, that influence an individual’s levels of testosterone or oestrogen in order to identify if patients with naturally higher or lower levels of these hormones are more prone to these diseases” says Dr Bouatia-Naji. “The strength of a genetics-based approach is that genetic information doesn’t change over time, while hormone levels in women change almost from day-to-day during an individual’s lifetime.”

We look at the specific differences in the genomes of different individuals, and compare patients with certain cardiovascular diseases with people who don’t have these conditions. By comparing them we can then identify, in the genome, the important differences. patients with one or both of these diseases, as well as data on more than 6,000 individuals who don’t,” continues Dr Bouatia-Naji.

This provides solid foundations for researchers to investigate the underlying genetic factors behind the diseases, which affects the structure of arteries. One striking point is that the vast majority of patients affected are women, an issue Dr Bouatia-Naji is exploring in the project.

“Maybe it’s because women’s hormone levels fluctuate every month. So, these repeated increases and decreases in hormone levels may affect the stability of the arteries,” she suggests.

Researchers in the project are able to look at the genetic determinants of these fluctuating hormone levels, from which deeper insights into cardiovascular diseases can then be drawn. “In

The samples from both healthy controls and patients with specific cardiovascular diseases are sent to specific genomic centres, which house specialist machines to analyse DNA. The results are then sent back to Dr Bouatia-Naji and her colleagues for further investigation.

“We use computational biology and statistical methods to analyse this data. We try to compare, for instance, all the differences that were categorised in our cases and in the controls. Then we apply statistical tests, to see if these differences are meaningful, and where they are localised in the genome,” she outlines. This approach has already yielded results; a variant of interest on the gene called PHACTR1 has been incriminated. “We found an allele, a version of this specific position in

Names of members of my team are from left to right: Delia Dupré, Nabila Bouatia-Naji, Adrien Georges, Mengyao YU, Romain Glandier, Sergiy Kyryachenko, Lu LIU, Dana Federici, and Takiy Berrandou.

18

EU Research

ROSALIND Investigating fibROmuscular dysplasia and spontaneous coronary Artery dissection using genetic and functionaL genomics to decipher the origIN of two female specific cardiovascular Diseases

Project Objectives

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is under-diagnosed and under-investigated in women. The main aim in the project is to understand the genetic basis and the initial molecular regulation of genes involved in atypical cardiovascular diseases, specifically fibromuscular dysplasia (FMD) and spontaneous coronary artery dissection (SCAD), which mostly affect women. By using genomewide association in case control cohorts, researchers hope to decipher the genetic basis of FMD and SCAD.

Project Funding

Image courtesy of Pr. Pascal Motreff, CHU Clermont-Ferrand.

the genome, in greater frequency among the cases, compared to the controls. This is how we realised that this gene plays a role in the diseases, but we still ignore how it works at the cellular level,” continues Dr Bouatia-Naji.

This specific result has been found to hold clear relevance in terms of association with cardiovascular diseases studied by the team, now they are looking to identify more genetic variations in genes like PHACTR1. “We are studying how these variants affect the genes that are the target of these regulations. These genetic differences could affect the amount or the distribution of proteins involved in maintaining the solidity of the artery for instance,” outlines Dr Bouatia-Naji. “The strength and flexibility of the arteries are very important. Genetic factors may cause the loss of well balanced ability of the artery to be at the same time flexible and stiff enough to supply the heart.”

These types of structural problems in arteries can lead to a myocardial infarction, as blood circulation is blocked. In the case of the diseases studied in the ROSALIND project, there is often no prior warning or heightened awareness that an individual is at higher risk of suffering a myocardial infarction, in contrast to somebody who has high cholesterol levels for example and been advised to modify their lifestyle. “We know that if you have high cholesterol, you are at high risk of having a myocardial infarction,” says Dr Bouatia-Naji.

People with fibromuscular dysplasia often have normal cholesterol levels however, and may not have any of the other symptoms commonly associated with cardiovascular disease, so Dr Bouatia-Naji is looking more at the genetic causes. “Our aim here is to understand the maintenance of certain arteries, like the coronary artery and the renal artery,” she continues. “We want to know what genes are important and involved in the development and maintenance of the flexibility and stiffness of these specific arteries.”

www.euresearcher.com

Diagnosis and treatment The wider aim in this research is to help improve the diagnosis and treatment of these particular cardiovascular diseases. While it is difficult to anticipate when a myocardial infarction is going to occur, a better understanding of how diseases like fibromuscular dysplasia develop could open up the possibility of identifying people at risk of suffering repeat events. “If we can understand the genetic factors that may leave an individual more prone to repeat events, then maybe we can propose appropriate clinical management and try to help prevent them,” outlines Dr Bouatia-Naji.

A more detailed understanding of fibromuscular dysplasia also holds relevance in terms of developing tailored treatments for cardiovascular diseases. “Currently there is a tendency to prescribe drugs to everybody, without taking into account an individual’s background,” says Dr Bouatia-Naji. “A person recovering from a myocardial infarction will be prescribed statins to reduce their cholesterol level.”

This may not be relevant in cases where the myocardial infarction was caused more by the structure of the arteries than cholesterol level, one of the issues that Dr Bouatia-Naji plans to explore further in future. A large amount of data has been generated over the course of the project, and Dr Bouatia-Naji says there is still work to do in terms of understanding how genetic background affects the development of cardiovascular disease. “We use a lot of publicly available data alongside the data that we’ve generated. Then we combine them and try to interpret them in the light of what we know about the diseases of interest to us and how they differ from other cardiovascular diseases,” she continues. One major area of interest is investigating why men and women are more prone to different forms of cardiovascular diseases, a topic explored in a recent paper. “Males are more prone to one kind of disease, while females are more prone to another, and this is reflected in the genetic variations too,” outlines Dr Bouatia-Naji.

Funded by the European Reserarch Council ERC-2016-STG, LS4 Max ERC Funding 1 500 000 €

Contact Details

Project Coordinator, Dr Nabila Bouatia-Naji, MSc, PhD Paris Cardiovascular research Centre (PARCC) Inserm - UMR970 Team 3 56 Rue Leblanc 75015 Paris FRANCE T: +33 1 53 98 79 95 E: nabila.bouatia-naji@inserm.fr W: parcc.inserm.fr W: nabilabouatianaji.fr : @n_bouatianaji : @parcc_inserm

Dr Bouatia-Naji Dr Bouatia-Naji is a geneticist and an INSERM laboratory director at the Paris Cardiovascular research center (PARCC), Université de Paris, France. She managed a multidisciplinary team including statisticians, molecular biologists and clinicians who use genetics and functional genomics to understand vascular disease, with high prevalence in women, mainly fibromuscular dysplasia and SCAD. She is an active advocate for more leadership opportunities for women in health sciences, and generally in STEM.

19

Understanding stem and progenitor cell fate

Dr Kevin Chalut at Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, working on the CellFateTech project, is developing pioneering tools, including a substrate that enables stem cells and progenitor cells to proliferate in cultures outside of the body. The research could have profound implications for cellular programming.

The

regenerative qualities of stem cells and progenitor cells harbour the potential to create new healthy tissues and even de-age cells.

Research by CellFateTech is attempting to understand the dynamics of stem cells and progenitor cells, which possess the ability to ‘decide’ how they develop. The ‘decisions’ are made from responding to chemical signals and mechanical signals from their environment.

CellFateTech approached the problem in two ways by investigating the signals cells make and by trying to replicate the most suitable micro-environment for the cells to influence their decision making process.

“Knowing what the cells are doing in an embryo is important because they are making choices between maintaining a pool of progenitor cells and giving rise to new tissue for embryonic development. It is a very coordinated process and we don’t understand how it works. We would like to understand because some of the same mechanisms that give rise to a developing fetus also help us maintain healthy tissue,” said Dr Kevin Chalut. www.euresearcher.com

The secrets of fate choice The processes by which the dynamics of cells choose their eventual form and fate are complex and coordinated, yet remain largely a mystery, to the intrigue of scientists around the world. Unlocking those secrets of how a cell makes the choice can lead to enormous benefits for a great many healthcare applications; for repairing damaged tissue, curing life threatening diseases and regrowing organs. Dr Kevin Chalut and the CellFateTech team are working the problem and have published papers on their findings in journals like Nature.

Stem and Progenitor cells coordinate their development continuously through our lifespans all around our bodies as the driver for our survival and growth, which is why cell fate decision making has sustained as such an important, fundamental scientific mystery to crack.

“Progenitor cells in our body have a purpose to maintain themselves whilst having the capacity to give rise to more specialised cells or differentiating cells,” explains Chalut. “For example, stem cells in your skin divide and replenish themselves

but they also give rise to new skin. Our skin turns over approximately every 30 days. This process is supported by the stem cells that are there. There is this choice that has to be made by these cells. They need to ensure that they maintain, for your entire lifespan, a stem cell population. However, at the same time they need to make sure they produce the cells needed for your organs and tissues.

There is a sequence of decisions they make and we are developing ways to probe at the exact time they are making one of these decisions, at the level of the genetic network, to ask what these cells are doing.”

The process of monitoring how cells choose their fate is very challenging. To assess the decisions a population of cells will make, next generation sequencing (NGS) determines what genes are being expressed, and that informs about the decisions being made. However, in a petri-dish they do not do this in a synchronised fashion. One cell might make a choice hours ahead of another cell and it becomes apparent there is not a consistent pattern in the way they make these decisions. At a population-level the dynamics are ‘washed out’, as Chalut puts it.

21

The research team looked into single cells but there are problems in monitoring for results here, too.

“If you do next generation single cell sequencing, there is a lot of noise involved in that process and trying to pick out the interesting noise that we care about is an immense challenge. You can put a fluorescent reporter on the cell to show how a cell did one thing to another thing, but to do that you make a choice about what decision you care about, so you are not looking holistically at the process. Instead, you are choosing to follow the one aspect you put that reporter on. In a sense you are saying you have chosen the decision you care about.”

Shifting focus to the microenvironment Not a great deal is known about mechanical signalling in stem cells. However, using substrates with a mechanical environment that can be manipulated makes it possible to create

different levels of stiffness to influence cell behaviour – this is essentially tricking the cell so it responds and adapts to the substrate in ways it would in natural environments. The stiffness of the substrate is an important factor, and we will reveal why, further in this article.

A useful innovation created by the CellFateTech project was the cell stretching device. Using CAD software, the team at CellFateTech designed this specialist ‘cell stretcher’ that could be printed from fully biocompatible plastic on 3D printers. It has the ability to stretch cell substrates to create specific, reproducible forces on cells and tissues. Different versions were optimised for various purposes such as live cell imaging, immunofluorescence stainings and molecular biology assays.

Indeed, CellFateTech gained traction in their results when they scrutinised the microenvironment of most stem cells, the extra cellular matrix (ECM), its mechanics, and how that coordinates cell fate choices. The

ECM is essentially what is called a hydrogel – a polymerised network, that is mostly made up of water. There are many hydrogels already in existence to culture stem cells, so this was not a standing start in terms of innovating a solution, but the team needed something more appropriate and unique in design.

“The most gains for our research were in getting the mechanical microenvironment right because putting these cells onto plastic or a glass dish is physiologically illsuited. When we initially tried with existing hydrogels, they did not work well for stem cells for soft tissues like brain and liver cells.

That seemed to be because the cells would not stay attached, over the long term, to these hydrogels. Hydrogels are functionally inert, so you have to functionalise them and that functionalisation just didn’t seem to be robust enough from what was available. So, we invented this different kind of hydrogel called StemBond. It is a different chemistry and with this different

One of the goals of CellFateTech was to deliver a system that could apply controlled mechanical cues to cells. Thus, they developed a 3D-printed cell stretcher, which can controllably and precisely stretch an elastic substrate functionalized especially for stem cells. With this stretcher, cells can be stretched over any time programme, and biological assays can be performed subsequently to see how the cells changed.

22

EU Research

CellFateTech Biotechnology for investigating cell fate choice

Project Objectives

The project laboratory primarily investigates how the mechanical microenvironment regulates fate decisions, and exactly how cells process information during that fate choice.

The ultimate goal of his laboratory is to apply their physics-based techniques to understand how organisms develop, and also how to use stem cells for therapeutic use.

Project Funding

ERC H2020-EU.1.1. - EXCELLENT SCIENCE European Research Council (ERC) € 1 876 618

Contact Details

chemistry we can give robust attachments with the stem cells for the long term. And this has been quite transformative. Now we can really study the effects that the mechanical microenvironment has on culturing stem cells.”

The mechanics of aging Tissue regeneration deteriorates when you age. A clear example of this is when the population of central nervous system multipotent stem cells, also known as oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPC), are less able to regenerate. The OPC environment stiffens with age and this mechanical change causes loss of function of OPCs. By creating synthetic scaffolds to appear like

in a soft environment even though it was stiff.

“This is the kind of result we can achieve for getting the mechanics right for stem cells.

Another example of working with these gels, is for liver regeneration. One of the aspects of liver regeneration that is problematic, is that if you want to do stem cell transplants or stem cell therapy then it’s difficult to get the regenerative cells of the liver to be cultured outside of the body – proliferating, able to differentiate etc.

It is hard to get proper function. With the test subject of a mouse, we have been able to take those regenerative liver cells and culture them on our hydrogels outside of the body, maintaining a pool of healthy functioning regenerative cells over several passages. It’s exciting because to my knowledge no one had

We took the oligodendrocyte progenitor cells (OPCs) and put them on our soft hydrogels and they were able to function just like in a neonatal animal. That was a striking result because we didn’t need anything else, we just needed to put them in the right mechanical microenvironment and they essentially de-aged. the stiffness and environment of young tissue, the mechanical signalling changes and the differentiation rates of OPCs increase.

Tissue stiffness, the researchers revealed, is a regulator of aging in OPCs – showing how progenitor cells change with age.

“We took the OPCs and put them on our soft hydrogels and they were able to function just like in a neonatal animal. That was a striking result because we didn’t need anything else. We just needed to put them in the right mechanical microenvironment and they essentially de-aged. In a sense, we were able to fool these cells with genetic intervention. We depleted a gene called Piezo1 and fooled cells to act as if they were

www.euresearcher.com

ever done that before on such simple substrates, only controlling the mechanics, and this is what I would consider a next important frontier for our work. I should add we have not done this with a human yet, so that is one of the first things we will be doing next in the laboratory.

The brain and liver are two examples of tissues where we have been able to produce healthy functioning progenitor cell populations outside the body and maintain them, which could have huge implications for cell therapy.”

It is not an understatement to say that the research from the CellFateTech project could have a significant influence on regenerative therapies, as well as for understanding the aging process at a cellular level.

Dr Kevin Chalut, Project Coordinator Principal Investigator in the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute Cavendish Laboratory University of Cambridge JJ Thomson Avenue Cambridge CB3 0HE T: +44 (0)1223 337256 E: kc370@cam.ac.uk W: https://www.phy.cam.ac.uk/directory/chalutk

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1484-9

Dr Kevin Chalut

Dr Kevin Chalut is a biophysicist with a PhD in Physics from Duke University. He is currently a group leader at the Wellcome Trust-Medical Research Council Stem Cell Institute in Cambridge. His work focuses on using the tools and concepts of physics to study cell fate choice in stem cells and developing organisms.

23

Models to find the key to molecular behaviour Computer-aided methods of investigation play a role of steadily increasing importance in biological research, with sophisticated simulations enabling scientists to understand molecular systems in great detail. Researchers in the VARIAMOLS project are developing in silico approaches to model and study large molecular assemblies, which could open up new avenues in medical research, as Professor Raffaello Potestio explains.

The

investigation of biological systems increasingly relies on the use of sophisticated technologies, with researchers applying computer-aided techniques to build a detailed picture of the structure, dynamics, and function of macromolecules and molecular assemblies. As the Principal Investigator of the VARIAMOLS project, Professor Raffaello Potestio is developing new methods to model and study biological molecules, in particular proteins, which could play an important role in medical research.

“We mainly focus on single molecules, however this definition encompasses singlechain proteins as well as assemblies of several proteins, as molecular machines are often composed of several distinct units, which are more or less strongly bound together and work cooperatively,” he explains. For example, the capsid of a virus – which is the shell that contains the viral genome – is not a single protein, but rather an assembly of different proteins, like a LEGO toy. “Our aim is to understand how these systems work, that is, what relations exist between their structure, their movements, and their biological function,” says Professor Potestio.

VARIAMOLS project A class of methods, called coarse-graining, is being used within the project to represent these molecular structures, a way to describe complex systems in a simplified manner that allows researchers to look at large biomolecules. In the most detailed computer

Workflow of one of the methods to identify optimal coarse-grained representations developed in the VARIAMOLS group.

From “An information theory-based approach for optimal model reduction of biomolecules”, https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.03988

models of molecules, that is, all-atom ones, an atom is treated as a single, point-like particle; usually, these representations employ classical physics to describe the relationship between them. “Each atom has certain attributes, such as mass, electric charge and atomic radius, which allow the definition of interactions with other atoms,” Professor Potestio outlines.

This approach is numerically expensive, as the interaction of each individual atom with the others needs to be accounted for. “At each step of the simulation, forces have to be computed among almost all atoms, and this requires substantial computational effort,” says Professor Potestio. “Nowadays, it is possible to simulate systems up to the tens of millions of atoms, but large computational resources are required, and not everybody has access to these kinds of facilities.”

This is an issue that researchers are addressing by using these relatively complex simulations as a starting point to devise methods through which simpler representations of the system can be constructed. Professor Potestio and his colleagues in the project develop and employ coarse-grained models in which a single particle does not represent just an atom, but rather several atoms together. “There are fewer interactions, so they are easier to compute. This improves the efficiency of the simulation,” he explains. This means efficiency in terms of time scale attained as well as number of calculations that need to be performed. “It could be that I would need a week rather than two months in order to observe the same process, if the coarsegrained model is sufficiently accurate,”

A view from the Physics department of the University of Trento.

The city hosting the VARIAMOLS group offers the perfect environment for both thrilling academic work and relaxing walks in alpine landscapes.

24

EU Research

Distal parts of the protein communicate via allosteric pathways. Researchers in the VARIAMOLS group employ coarse-grained models to identify them.

continues Professor Potestio. “However, our main aim is to understand the system better in the process of constructing the coarsegrained model.”

By definition, a coarse-grained model is a simplified representation of a molecular system, so a lot of detail is not included in the description. Yet, important insights can still be gained: if a lower-resolution model reproduces a particular property of the molecular system under examination, e.g. a specific pattern of fluctuations or a global change of its structural arrangement, then this itself is highly informative. “This means that the particular features that the model entails are those that determine the process of interest,” explains Professor Potestio. Coarse-graining can be thought of as a process of selection, of identifying those pieces of information that need to be retained in a model and those that can be treated differently – incorporated in the effective interactions or just discarded.

“If this process is performed correctly, then the expected system behaviour emerges from the model as it does from the more accurate description. This means that you have retained the appropriate detail and made the right choices in assuming certain features to be important,” says Professor Potestio.

“We try to identify what is determinant in a system with respect to a certain interaction, property, or behaviour – more importantly, we try to perform this identification in an automated manner.”

However, the model still has to retain sufficient detail for it to be a realistic representation of the reference system. By providing different levels of resolution within the same system, Professor Potestio aims to strike the right balance between accuracy

www.euresearcher.com

and efficiency. “Our strategy is to employ different degrees of detail, or resolution, in different regions of the system. Where it is possible, we simplify the structure, but where it is necessary, we retain the high-level detail,” he outlines. Researchers work from the bottom-up, in the sense that the starting point is a more detailed, all-atom simulation, from which the important regions of a protein

with the same ‘flavour’ of effective sites.

“For example, in many models proteins are described as chains of beads; each amino acid is represented as one of these beads, and a given amino acid type is associated with a specific type of bead and effective interactions,” outlines Professor Potestio.

Two chemically identical amino acids, however, may experience very different forces

If we can efficiently figure out how these molecular systems behave, then we can also potentially uncover the flanks that can be attacked from the pharmaceutical point of view. We can then develop new strategies to deal with various diseases at the molecular level. can then be identified. “We try to infer from a high-resolution model which regions can be coarse-grained and which cannot,” explains Professor Potestio.

It is also important to consider the local properties of the molecule when developing a coarse-grained model. In conventional coarse-graining approaches, the same groups of atoms are typically associated

and fluctuations depending on their location and environment, and hence describing them as the same effective interaction unit might not be the right choice, an issue Professor Potestio is addressing. “We aim to provide different representations, even for the same group of atoms, according to the particular environment that these find themselves in,” he says.

As in a tailor shop for proteins. Different representations of the same system provide different levels of insight.

25

VARIAMOLS VAriable ResolutIon Algorithms for macroMOLecular Simulations

Project Objectives

The main goal of the VARIAMOLS project is to develop and apply novel computer-aided methods for the study of large molecular assemblies and their dynamics. The research will unfold along two intertwined lines: 1.) The development of non-uniform resolution models of the system, which optimize the balance between detail and efficiency 2.) The study of dynamics-mediated properties of protein assemblies.

Project Funding

ERC Starting Grant project € 1 339 351

Project Collaborators

• M. Scott Shell, Chemical Engineering, University of California Santa Barbara (USA) • Robinson Cortes Huerto, Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (Germany) • Flavio Vella, Lab for Advanced Computing and Systems, Free University of Bozen (Italy) • Markus Deserno, Department of Physics, Carnegie Mellon University (USA)

Contact Details

Project Coordinator, Raffaello Potestio Assistant professor Physics Department University of Trento via Sommarive, 14 - 38123 Trento (Italy) T: +39 0461 282912 E: variamols@unitn.it W: http://variamols.physics.unitn.eu/ W: sites.google.com/g.unitn.it/sbp W: https://eutopia.unitn.eu Raffaello Potestio

Raffaello Potestio is tenure track Assistant Professor in the physics department at the University of Trento. His main research interests are the development and application of coarse-grained models and coarse-graining strategies for soft matter, in particular biologically relevant systems.

26

The VARIAMOLS group in January 2020. From left to right: Roberto Menichetti, Raffaello Potestio, Marta Rigoli, Thomas Tarenzi, Marco Giulini.

Machine learning The methods that Professor Potestio and his colleagues are developing to identify the appropriate level of resolution for the different parts of a system and to parameterise the interactions are algorithmic procedures.

Overall, the process of constructing a model can be time-consuming, so researchers are keen to harness the power of artificial intelligence to try and reduce the amount of time required. “Our aim is to exploit the advantages that machine learning offers as a method in order to speed up the process of constructing these models,” outlines Professor Potestio. Researchers in the VARIAMOLS group are developing these algorithms and producing training sets for a deep neural network-based approach, so that it is capable of then performing the same task without having to run a reference, all-atom molecular dynamics simulation beforehand.

“We aim to use deep learning approaches as a kind of trick to accelerate the process, but only at the end of a pipeline of which we understand each step. We tend to avoid black boxes,” explains Professor Potestio.

These tools are designed primarily for simulating macromolecules, and Professor Potestio is keen to make them available to the wider biocomputing research community, where they could prove to be a valuable instrument. The methods have been developed in such a way that they can be distributed as free software, and Professor Potestio is looking towards their practical application. “As soon as we have tested and aptly documented our codes, we will provide them for other researchers to use,” he says.

The programs developed in the project will be of interest to a broad audience, believes Professor Potestio. “On the one hand we have the physics-oriented community, which might be interested in the computational

Photo credit: Lorenzo Petrolli.

statistical mechanical aspects of our work.

On the other hand, researchers from different fields may be interested in employing our tools for biochemical and pharmaceutical applications,” he outlines.

A researcher in biochemistry may not necessarily have deep knowledge of statistical mechanics or how these codes work, so accessibility is an important issue in terms of the wider application of these tools. “Our ideal is to provide programs that are accessible also to people who are not in the modelling field, or the statistical mechanics field, but would like to make use of our research in order to better understand their proteins of interest for example, and possibly devise better ways to interface with them,” says Professor Potestio. An improved understanding of the physics of biological macromolecules could open up exciting new possibilities in research.

“If we can efficiently figure out how these systems behave, then we can also potentially uncover the flanks that can be attacked from the pharmaceutical point of view,” explains Professor Potestio. “We can then develop new strategies to deal with various diseases at the molecular level, for example testing several possible drugs at a higher speed and lower computational cost.”

The main focus for Professor Potestio and his group is on fundamental research at this stage, and on developing a deeper understanding of the physics of biomolecules.

However, once researchers have a clearer picture of a molecular system, e.g. the relationship between its structure, dynamics and thermodynamics, that then holds wider relevance. “We can go to a biochemist and say: ‘this is what we see. Do you think you can make use of that in order to prevent the functioning of this protein? Might this be beneficial in terms of inhibiting a pathogenic process?’ This is the ultimate objective,” says Professor Potestio.

EU Research

The Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability/ Christian Als

A vehicle for a sustainable future Metabolic engineering holds a lot of promise as a means of sustainably producing foods, chemicals, proteins and other important products. The DD-DeCaF project is developing computational tools that will help biotechnology companies understand the impact of changes in biological networks and develop better, more effficient cell factories, as Dr Nikolaus Sonnenschein explains.

A large amount

of biological data is available nowadays which could help inform the design of cells and microbial communities, including proteomics and transcriptomics data for example. However, this data is not currently being utilised to its full potential, believes Nikolaus Sonnenschein, Associate Professor in the Department of Biotechnology and Biomedicine at the Technical University of Denmark. “There is data out there but we’re not really taking advantage of it, in the sense that we lack the required analytical approaches and bioinformatics pipelines,” he explains. This is an issue at core of DD-DeCaF, an EC-backed project co-ordinated by Professor Markus Herrgård which brings together scientific and industrial partners to develop new cell design tools. “We are trying to speed up the design of cell factories and microbial communities for biotechnology applications,” outlines Professor Sonnenschein.

www.euresearcher.com

Cell factories This is an increasingly important area of the commercial sector, with cell factories used for the sustainable production of chemicals, proteins, and many other valuable substances.

While biochemists and cell engineers hold deep expertise in their own field, they may not necessarily be experts in mathematical modelling, so Professor Sonnenschein says accessibility is an important consideration.

“The DD-DeCaF software platform called Caffeine is for people that work in the lab. They might have generated some data, but they need some insights into what they should do next in terms of engineering targets, or achieving a production goal,” he says. The main interface on the platform is a representation of a cell’s metabolic pathways, which is familiar to bioengineers and cell biologists. “It’s a network depiction of metabolism, which is essentially the chemical reactions that can happen inside those cells,” continues Professor Sonnenschein.

This platform enables engineers to assess the impact of a specific change within a cell, such as removing or adding a gene. It is also possible to integrate further data and so gain a deeper picture of biological networks.

“In order to do that you need to log in to the platform, then you get access to data in the public domain, and can also upload your own data,” says Professor Sonnenschein.

Users of the platform can select a specific dataset of interest, for example on how a microbial community uses sugar, then both look at reactions that have occurred and also forecast future developments. “You can actually gain more insights beyond the measurements than you’ve done, essentially extrapolating beyond the existing data,” outlines Professor Sonnenschein. “Using our knowledge of the organisms, and some sophisticated mathematical approaches and models, we can draw further insights beyond the existing data points alone.”

27

There is also a kind of design pipeline in the platform which will help engineers identify how to produce a particular chemical. If the aim is to produce a specific chemical compound, then the pipeline can be used to identify how that compound can be produced and what is required. “If it’s not a chemical that the cell can natively produce, then what other genes from other organisms would you have to borrow in order to make a full production pathway possible?” explains Professor Sonnenschein.

It may also be necessary to remove genes in order to produce a certain compound.

“How might a microbe react to the removal of certain parts of its metabolic system, for example the deletion of certain genes?” continues Professor Sonnenschein. “Some of the sugar that microbes eat could be redirected to production. That can be achieved by manipulating cells and removing genes, and therefore removing reactions.”

The platform enables engineers to work through these different scenarios and understand their likely effects. A very large number of genes can potentially be removed from a cell or added to it, so Professor Sonnenschein says the platform can play an important role here in helping cell engineers.

“The methods that we have implemented are very useful, because they come up with

designs that are not necessarily intuitive.

That’s also interesting from a commercial perspective,” he says. Many of the more intuitive cell designs have been patented, so it’s difficult for a new company to enter the market without paying expensive licensing fees; the DD-DeCaF platform opens up new possibilities in this respect. “It could allow companies to find more efficient approaches to produce existing chemicals. They could

chemicals, they may be in competition with the conventional chemical industry for example, so efficiency would be a priority. “They would be very keen to reach the theoretical maximum yield,” says Professor Sonnenschein. The DD-DeCaF platform is an important asset in this respect, enabling biotechnology companies to identify efficient pathways and also avoid unproductive investments. “It helps

The DD-DeCaF software platform could allow companies to find more efficient approaches to produce existing chemicals. They could potentially identify alternative designs and pathways that have not yet been patented by their competitors. potentially identify alternative designs and pathways that have not yet been patented by their competitors,” explains Professor Sonnenschein.

Production efficiency A particular production pathway might be more efficient than another, resulting in a higher yield, which is an important issue for biotechnology companies. Where a cell factory is being used to produce bulk

companies to identify projects that would not succeed commercially, because they would not be able to get the yield necessary to compete with a purely chemical industrybased process,” continues Professor Sonnenschein. “The models that we have on this platform allow you to make these kinds of calculations.”

The biotechnology industry evolves rapidly, and the way in which software tools and innovative new technologies will

https://youtu.be/RXAfxYxnpoc The DD-DeCaF software platform available at https://caffeine.dd-decaf.eu/

28

EU Research

DD-DeCaF Bioinformatics Services for Data-Driven Design of Cell Factories and Communities

Project Objectives

The DD-DeCaF project aims to make a broad spectrum of omics data useful to the biotechnology industry by integrating data analysis with design within the same platform.

This platform can be used in a wide range of application areas, ranging from industrial biotechnology to agriculture and human health.

Project Funding

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 686070.

Scientific Partners

• Technical University of Denmark • European Molecular Biology Laboratory • Chalmers University of Technology • École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne • Centre of Biological Engineering, University of Minho

Industrial Partners

• SilicoLife • Genialis d.o.o. • biobyte solutions GmbH • Biosyntia ApS • DSM Full partner details at: http://dd-decaf.eu

Contact Details

The Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability/ Christian Als

be used is by nature difficult to foresee.

The project’s platform is intended to be used not just by experts in computational biology, but by the staff of companies involved in cell engineering, widening the user base considerably. “Cutting-edge tools, programming and data analysis, are all accessible to a minority of people that know how to use them, but they have not really been used very much in the rest of industry.

That’s what we are trying to address with this web-based interface,” outlines Professor Sonnenschein. This brings new challenges however, as the software tools themselves are not completely infallible, so Professor Sonnenschein believes it’s important that users are aware of their limitations and how to use them effectively. “The methods that we use for predicting the cellular state are not perfect, but they’re definitely useful,” he says.

A lot of effort has gone into demonstrating this to the biotechnology sector, through frequent interactions with industrial partners.

The wider aim here is to develop a platform that is useful for scientists and will help them solve some of the problems that they face. “We did tests with end-users within the consortium, as well as others from outside the project. It was definitely an iterative process towards ending up with something that is intuitive and easy to use,” continues Professor Sonnenschein. This research has generated a

www.euresearcher.com

lot of interest, and Professor Sonnenschein is keen to build on the foundations that are already in place. “I’m working towards establishing an industrial consortium based here at the university. The idea would basically be for companies to financially support the continuous maintenance and development of this platform,” he outlines.

The vast majority of biotechnology companies are of course very careful with commercially-sensitive data, yet installing and running this type of software is quite a complex and labour-intensive task.

One possibility could be establishing a non-commercial business model, where companies can get support for deploying the DD-DeCaF tool on companies’ premises in exchange for financial support. “It could run through a kind of contributory system,” says Professor Sonnenschein. A number of trial set-ups have been established, where companies have installed the software and tested it on their own data, models and maps, and the feedback so far has been extremely positive, which could encourage further development. “The hope would be that if this stays as a non-commercial activity then other parties will also contribute in future, including companies. They may decide that this is an essential piece of IT infrastructure, and they are willing to support it,” says Professor Sonnenschein.

Nikolaus Sonnenschein Department of Biotechnology and Biomedicine SB-Computer-Aided-Biotechnology Technical University of Denmark Søltofts Plads Building 223, room 224 2800 Kgs. Lyngby T: +45 2 1798922 E: niso@dtu.dk W: http://dd-decaf.eu https://youtu.be/RXAfxYxnpoc

Nikolaus Sonnenschein

Nikolaus Sonnenschein, now an Associate Professor at the Department of Biotechnology and Biomedicine at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), has coordinated the technical development of the Caffeine platform at The Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability at DTU in his role of Scientific Deputy of the DD-DeCaF project.

29

Photo by Edwin Hooper on Unsplash

Is the lockdown helping us comprehend climate goals?

Stopping runaway carbon emissions and ascending temperatures is seen as our biggest challenge as a global society. Has the carbon crash from lockdown during the Covid 19 pandemic shown us all that a carbon free world is at least possible?

By Richard Forsyth.

F

irst, let us recap on climate change for a moment. Climate change goals can vary in different countries, but the European Union wishes to be the first major economy to be climate neutral by 2050. This would perhaps give the world a chance to keep global temperatures under the 1.5 degrees Celsius aim, this century.

The problem is real and here now. In 2019, the global surface temperature of the Earth was the second warmest it has been since modern record keeping began in 1880. It was also recorded as 0.98 degrees Celsius warmer than the 1951 to 1980 mean, according to NASA. In 2019, there were many records set, in fact almost 400 alltime high temperatures were seen in the northern hemisphere.

If the trend continues as it is, it is estimated that temperatures may rise by 3-5 degrees Celsius by 2100, which would be a major catastrophe and perhaps even lead a path to our demise.

It is a climate emergency, but for some people it doesn’t really feel like an emergency, which could be the biggest problem of all. For those who do ‘get it’ and feel the fear, the onslaught of negative media messages about impending doom from climate change makes the challenge seem unsurmountable, like the changes needed are simply an impossible ask.

30

Since the Covid 19 crisis, however, a lot has changed, including just maybe, us too.

Reality shock There are big lessons that the Covid 19 pandemic has taught us in relation to our climate emergency.

One of them, and perhaps the most important one, is that there are large scale scientific inevitabilities for our future on the course we have set, and we should no longer sideline them.

Covid 19 may have surprised us, but as a social, intercontinental, rapidly expanding species and one prone throughout history to be attacked by new deadly viruses, arguably, we could have been better prepared.

Around a hundred years ago, in 1918 the world faced Spanish influenza which took 50100 million people’s lives and since then we have had several less severe pandemics, as recently as 2009, facing the H1N1 virus. H1N1’s death toll was estimated as somewhere between 151,000-579,000, with an infection rate in the region of 11-21% of the global population. Pandemics are something humans have regularly had to endure through history.

Yet, Covid 19 has truly shocked the majority of us. Why? Spanish flu, which was a horror story of enormous magnitude for humanity, was in another era, and people will not be alive to remember it. Today, we

EU Research

Photo by Andrew Gook on Unsplash

also perhaps have a disproportionate faith in technology to solve every human problem.

It is the massive personal impact on all of our lives that has shaken us with Covid 19. It is the shock of isolating, of witnessing a killer virus in our midst, in our city, town or village and sometimes in our home. This pandemic has given us more than fear and isolation but a heightened sense that we should not ignore science, especially warnings by science. As a species we have been served a lesson by nature in cause and effect that no textbook could convey in the same way. For a supposedly unstoppable, economy driven world, it has done the unimaginable and stopped us all in our tracks.

A pandemic was always expected in scientific circles and with equal certainty, escalating, destructive climate change will happen too, if we are unable to collectively make significant changes in our way of life.

Of course, some climate scientists believe we are already teetering on or even past the tipping point of no return. Several years ago it was presumed a rise in average global temperature of 5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels was the tipping point, but more recent reports by the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) suggest that the point of no return may be between 1 and 2 degrees Celsius – which we are currently heading for.

For some reason, the science does not scare populations enough into radical action and that maybe because we are not shocked into reaction. Climate change is literally a slow burner, like watching a clock ticking down. For now, putting aside incidents of weather phenomena, for most people it’s not possible to directly experience its threat by stepping outside the front door. Covid 19, in contrast is a deadly virus, potentially in every human being you encounter.

Covid 19 presents us with an arresting event we cannot look away from. What’s new, is that this generation now has the shared experience of a world emergency first hand that should remind all of us and especially our leaders that in a similar way, climate change is both real and will - if we return to the ‘old normal’ - impact on everything.

We can also see how viruses cannot be swept away with dismissive political remarks and reassurance, and nor can science. There are those who are using Covid 19 as a comparative example of the level of impact that climate change could have on all of us.

Former US President Barrack Obama warned the world via Twitter: “We’ve all had to adapt to cope with a pandemic. Climate change will force far harsher changes on our kids. All of us should follow the young people who’ve led the efforts to protect our planet for generations, and demand more of our leaders at every level.”

The great carbon crash You could argue, all the things that our young climate change protesters have demanded in rallies, on podiums and in broadcasts, have inadvertently been implemented via this human disaster, in lockdown – if only temporarily. In an unprecedented way we have stopped using our vehicles, we have worked from home, we have stopped air traffic, abandoned the highstreets and halted production in manufacturing. In essence, we have put our everyday human activity on pause. These collective actions dramatically reduced our impact on climate change.

Whilst for many this collective stopping has been unpleasant or depressing, there is no question that the environment has benefited tremendously.

In the last few months analysts tracked what is described as a huge ‘carbon crash’, the biggest ever in recorded history.

Photo by Erik McLean on Unsplash

The hardest truth however, is that to reach that ambitious target of zero emissions by 2050, we need to repeat this year’s emissions drop, to around 5%, every year toward that date. www.euresearcher.com

31

The journal Nature Climate Change claimed that carbon emissions dropped by a sixth, by about 17 percent at the peak of confinement measures in early April, around the world, compared to levels in 2019.

There have been large falls in carbon output before, such as the fall in CO2 in the wake of World War II that dropped by around 800 million tonnes and a worldwide recession in the early 1980s saw C02 fall by a billion tonnes. These crashes don’t come close to what occurred around the world in lockdown, where emissions dropped by as much as 3 billion tonnes. This follows a decline in energy use equivalent to the entire energy demand in India, the world’s third largest consumer, in a year.

The world’s energy watchdog, International Energy Agency (IEA) claims that the coronavirus pandemic has caused the biggest global energy shock in 70 years. The demand for fossil fuels has collapsed to a greater degree than in the global financial crisis. A report by the IEA stated we have experienced the most severe fall in energy demand since the second world war which could trigger a multi-decade low for global consumption of oil, gas and coal. Global electricity demand is also down by around 20%. Interestingly, renewable energy will continue to grow. It is clear a different kind of energy industry will emerge from the crisis and there are calls for stimulus packages to focus on a green recovery.

Nature returns When you halt industry in such an abrupt way, and take people off the streets and roads, wildlife and nature returns, to find a foothold for a moment without human interruption. We have all seen what it looks like now, to have a glimpse of a natural world free from fossil fuels.

If not on our daily walks, we have seen those images on the internet of ‘people-free’ landmark locations now being explored by animals.

Venice has the clearest canals in 60 years because of tourism drops and less boat traffic. Seabirds and fish are now visible at the canals.

Orcas have been seen in new places in Vancouver’s Burrell Inlet, the bear population of Yosemite Park in California in the US has quadrupled and the waves light up with blue bioluminescent plankton for the first time in 60 years at Mexico’s Acapulco beach.

Without cars on the road, animals are not killed and without people around, cities are explored by animals more used to hiding in the recesses. Wild animals are waking up, without the pressures from people for the first time in a long time and they like it. And for us, under strict lockdown rules of exercising close to home, without traffic noise and places to go to, we have noticed and appreciated nearby birds, trees and natural things that have always been barely visible to us, in plain sight.

When you halt industry in such an abrupt way, and take people off the streets and roads, wildlife and nature returns, to find a foothold for a moment without human interruption. We have all seen what it looks like now, to have a glimpse of a natural world free from fossil fuels.

Photo by Karsten Wurth on Unsplash

32

EU Research

Lives saved by default

Will anything really change?

Reducing traffic, industry and carbon output is not just about saving nature around us either, it is directly saving human lives in only a short time of reduction. Orbiting satellites have proven that nitrogen dioxide levels have fallen in China. Indeed, China had a significant reduction in air pollution because of the lockdown. One analysis by Stanford University scientist Marshall Burke, who used data from sensors in four Chinese cities estimated that two months of pollution reduction “likely saved the lives of 4,000 kids under 5 and 73,000 adults over 70 in China”.

Closer to home in Europe, a study at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) stated that there were 11,000 fewer deaths in European countries under coronavirus lockdown due to a sharp drop in fossil fuel pollution during April.

In the UK it was found that in some cities the nitrogen dioxide levels fell by up to 60% compared to the same time last year. In India, where air pollution can be stifling, lockdown improved air quality to satisfactory levels in nearly 90% of the 103 cities, it was claimed by Bloomberg Green.

Even the sky is bluer and that’s official. William Collins, a climate professor at the University of Reading in the UK indicated in a recent media interview that the layer of haze that pollution brings to the air is missing in the usual locations, making the sky look a richer, deeper blue than before.

We have for the first time in the Industrial era, been shown what life is like without a fully-fledged carbon economy and although we miss our daily rituals, many would agree, that a truly natural world is a beautiful world.

There is a hope that leaders will see possibilities of transformation within this global disaster, in as much as green aims are not a lost cause and possible, if hard. As leaders are already talking about ‘bounce back’ and stimulus packages to kickstart economies to avoid a Great Depression, we should ask, ‘is there more leverage to restart with greener aims?’ Targets are already set on more reliance on green solutions across the world, so shifting that bounce back with greener focus is something that could be attractive and a ‘reset’ starting place.

Many industries will be thinned out from the lockdown, including ‘carbon-heavy’ industries such as events, airlines and fashion (fashion’s carbon footprint is bigger than the airline industry) and with that comes an opportunity to re-invent and re-point these sectors with innovations that are environmentally sensitive. Indeed, some of the fallout in terms of work culture changes from lockdown may include more home-working and less travel, as these have now been trialed over long periods and would have saved money for businesses.

Shopping online will now be second nature to lot more people, who may not miss their car trips.

Covid 19 will give many of us a new mindset, new feelings and perhaps a new respect for nature and science too.

The hardest truth however, is that to reach that ambitious target of zero emissions by 2050, we need to repeat this year’s emissions drop, to around 5%, every year toward that date. When you put it in those terms, the challenge obviously remains as enormous as it was before 2020, a year that will be permanently marked as the time we all had to change everything about our daily routines.

Photo by USGS on Unsplash

Photo by Aleksandr Mansurov on Unsplash

Photo by Philipp Lublasser on Unsplash

You could argue, all the things that our young climate change protesters have demanded in rallies, on podiums and in broadcasts, have inadvertently been implemented via this human disaster, in lockdown. In an unprecedented way we have stopped using our vehicles, we have worked from home, we have stopped air traffic, abandoned the highstreets and halted production in manufacturing. www.euresearcher.com

33

©NASA

A seismic shift to earthquake control?

Earthquakes are among the most devastating of natural disasters, in severe cases causing fatalities and enormous damage to human infrastructure. Researchers in the CoQuake project are investigating whether it is possible to control earthquakes, which could also help prevent instabilities arising from geo-thermal projects, as Professor Ioannis Stefanou explains.

An earthquake leads

to the sudden release of energy from the earth’s crust, which in serious cases causes fatalities and significant infrastructure damage. If this energy could be released over a longer period of time then the impact would be greatly reduced, a topic central to the work of the CoQuake project. “We want to explore if it is possible to avoid this abrupt slip, this sudden sliding in the level of a fault, and instead make it slide more slowly,” explains Professor Ioannis Stefanou, the project’s Principal Investigator. This research centres on developing mathematical and numerical models, based on the mathematical theory of control. “The inverse pendulum is a classical example, it is always in a state of high instability,” outlines Professor Stefanou. “With control theory, you can find a way to move the base of the pendulum in order to stabilise the system.”

CoQuake project

COQUAKE

We want to explore if it is possible to avoid this abrupt slip, this sudden sliding in the level of a fault, and instead make it slide more slowly.

Controlling earthQuakes This research project focuses on a novel approach for avoiding catastrophic earthquakes by inducing them at a lower energetic level.

Earthquakes is a natural phenomenon that we cannot avoid. CoQuake aims at controlling it.

Project Funding

This project is funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Grant agreement 757848 CoQuake).

Professor Ioannis Stefanou Ecole Centrale de Nantes (ECN) 1 Rue de la Noë, 44300, Nantes, France T: +33 (0) 2 40 37 25 67 E: ioannis.stefanou@ec-nantes.fr W: http://coquake.eu Ioannis Stefanou is Professor at Ecole Centrale de Nantes, before which he held positions at institutions in both France and Greece. His main research interests lie in geo-mechanics, bifurcation theory and instabilities, and multi-scale modelling.

He has played a major role in several international research projects.

34

The same theory is now being applied in the CoQuake project to investigate the possibility of effectively controlling earthquakes. Professor Stefanou and his team are using analogues of an earthquake to gain deeper insights. “The simplest analogue for an earthquake is a spring and a block, which you slide on a frictional surface. We change the frictional properties, and so instead of having this abrupt sliding, we ensure that the block slides at a constant velocity,” he says. Another analogue that is currently being investigated involves using printed rocks with specific properties. “We have a triplet test, where we push the part in the middle. Then we inject fluids, and try to adjust the pressure of the fluids in order to make the middle block slide at a constant velocity,” continues Professor Stefanou.

A seismic fault behaving in a similar way would cause less damage than if it were to slip abruptly, as the seismic energy would be released in a more gradual manner. The amount of seismic energy released by an earthquake is proportional to the amount of sudden slip that occurs at the level of a fault, another important consideration in Professor Stefanou’s research. “Seismologists use a measure called the seismic moment to calculate the size of an earthquake. This is equal to the shear modulus – the elasticity of the surrounding rocks – times the area of the fault, times the amount of slip,” he outlines.

Part of the project’s research is focused on the frictional properties of the faults. “We are building micro-mechanical models that take into account the thermo-hydro-chemomechanical couplings that happen at the level of the fault when sliding occurs,” says Professor Stefanou.

The second key outcome from the project relates to the question of whether earthquake instability can be controlled by different stimulation methods. One method involves injecting fluids, while Professor Stefanou also

plans to investigate some other ideas. “We will explore stimulating techniques that can allow us to change the local equilibrium in a controlled manner,” he says. This research is primarily concerned with natural earthquakes, yet some human activities can also cause disruption below the earth’s surface, and there is a lot of interest in controlling this more effectively.

“For example, in a geo-thermal project at a depth of 4-5 kilometres, you may inject fluid from one side to get hot water from another.

So we benefit from the temperature potential of the earth, to create energy,” explains Professor Stefanou.

This however can lead to what is called induced or triggered seismicity. The project’s research could help those running geothermal or CO2 sequestration projects to

avoid this in future, while the oil industry could also benefit from their results. “The outcome will be to see if we can inject fluids in a controlled manner, in order to avoid these earthquake instabilities,” says Professor Stefanou.

In CoQuake, fluid injections are seen from another perspective. Instead of triggering earthquakes, we use them as a backdoor for slowing down the earthquake phenomenon.

EU Research

Harnessing the value of CO2 While reducing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide is a major priority across much of the world, researchers are also keen to use this molecule effectively. Researchers in the CO2 Life project are drawing inspiration from the natural world to develop a chemical process that converts CO2 into valuable products, as Professor Patricia Luis explains.

The idea of capturing carbon dioxide (CO2

Products obtained with the technology developed in the CO2Life project.

) and storing it has attracted a lot of attention as a means of reducing the impact of emissions on the global climate, yet CO2 is also an important source of carbon. Researchers in the CO2 Life project are developing a process to not only capture CO2, but also use it in the production of specific components. “We are using biocatalysts to convert the CO2 into valuable products, such as bicarbonates, ” explains Professor Patricia Luis, the project’s Principal Investigator. The project’s focus is on post-combustion emissions, when CO2 is extracted from flue gases in a factory chimney for example. Now Professor Luis and her colleagues are looking to develop a process to capture CO2 and convert it: “We are using last generation technology to do the conversion and purification,” she says.

CO2 Life project

Researchers in the project are using novel technology, with the goal of optimising the conversion of CO2 into bicarbonates.

When using biocatalysts, the economic cost of the conversion path is an important consideration, so Professor Luis is also drawing on the knowledge of researchers in other disciplines. “We are collaborating with colleagues who are specialists on biocatalysed reactions. We are looking for systems in which the conversion is economically feasible. This is not easy to achieve,” she outlines. “My group is evaluating the efficiency of the overall process, and assessing the importance of different parameters in order to be able to scale up the process”, continues Professor Luis.

This is a major factor in terms of the possible industrial application of this process, which could play an important role in mitigating the impact of climate change.

At this stage Professor Luis is working with relatively small devices, yet she is very much aware of the wider relevance of this research. “We’re looking at things like the effect of operation conditions, then we can look to investigate how the equipment would work at larger scales,” she says.

While this research could hold important implications for industry, there are also

www.euresearcher.com

We are using

biocatalysts to enhance CO2 capture. We try to convert the CO2 into valuable products. elements of the project’s work that are more fundamental in nature. “We are trying to produce something that is inherently applicable in industry. However, we’re also addressing more fundamental problems,” says Professor Luis.

The ultimate goal is to help remove CO2 from the atmosphere and enable its reuse in a different form, so alongside the development work, Professor Luis also plans to assess the overall effectiveness of the process. “We’re not just developing a process, we also need to evaluate if we are not producing more CO2 than that that is captured. Are we doing something useful against climate change?” she asks. This means taking a holistic perspective, and considering all the energy costs associated with the development, operation and maintenance of the process itself. “It’s very important to analyse our work in detail and to perform a deep environmental and economic evaluation, in addition to assessing the technical viability of the process,” stresses Professor Luis.

CO LIFE 2 Biomimetic Fixation of CO Salts and Glucose

2

as source of

Patricia Luis Materials & Process Engineering (iMMC-IMAP) Place Sainte Barbe 2, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium UCLouvain T: +32 (0)10 47 24 87 E: patricia.luis@uclouvain.be W: https://uclouvain.be/fr/ repertoires/patricia.luis

Patricia Luis is professor at the University of Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. Her research is focused on the development of last generation technology. She authored more than 100 publications with more than 2000 citations.

35

A closer look at agriculture in the industrial age The 19th and 20th centuries saw dramatic social change, as industrialisation changed the way people lived and worked. How was agricultural work conceptualised in the new industrial context? How did the practices and languages of agricultural work change? These questions are at the heart of a research project at the Archives of Rural History (ARH) in Berne.

The agricultural sector

has changed significantly since the industrial revolution, as the emergence of new technologies and methods has altered the nature of work on the land. Based at the Archives of Rural History in Berne, Peter Moser and Juri Auderset are conducting a research project investigating how agricultural work was re-conceptualised against a backdrop of rapid industrial development.

“We are interested in how industrial societies conceptualise agricultural work. As historians we are also interested in the agricultural work itself.”

Industrial manufacturing prioritises maximising output, but this goal isn’t necessarily directly applicable in the agricultural sector, where farmers and land-workers are dealing with living animals and plants that are embedded in complex and dynamic ecological systems that are subject to re-productive processes and growth-cycles. “How did people talk about work in the agricultural sector in industrializing societies and how did this language impact the way they worked?” they ask.

Semantics of Agricultural and Industrial Work. Knowledge, Metaphors of Production and the Transformation of Work in the 19th and 20th Centuries Archives of Rural History (ARH) Villettemattstrasse 9 CH-3007 Bern T: +41 31 911 72 55 E: info@agrararchiv.ch W: www.agrararchiv.ch

Dr Peter Moser (left) is director of the Archives of Rural History (AHR) in Bern. He is a member of the Management Committee of the European Rural History Organisation (EURHO) and president of the European Rural History Film Association.

Dr Juri Auderset (right) is researcher at the Archives of Rural History (AHR) in Bern and reader in contemporary history at the University of Fribourg. He has received his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D from the University of Fribourg.

36

Semantics of agricultural work These types of questions are at the heart of the project, with Dr Moser and his colleagues looking at archival sources from farmers and labourers in the 19th and 20th centuries.

While they focus primarily on Switzerland, they embed the Swiss experiences in the transnational contexts of these ventures, tracing the circulation of knowledge about agricultural and industrial work that was produced in the networks of 19th and 20th century American and European observers.

There is a tension between the desire to modernise agriculture and the nature of agricultural work itself. Alongside their attempts to improve efficiency and output, farmers simultaneously had to consider the re-production cycles of plants and animals.

Therefore, ‘one-dimensional perceptions of change and growth seldom worked out in agriculture’, says Juri Auderset who also reminds us that in some respects agricultural work – and those who accomplished it – were very open to new technology. That there was nonetheless a perception of it as somehow backward in industrial societies is only comprehensible when one considers the difference between agricultural production and industrial manufacturing. That is an area of great interest to the authors. “Many people wanted to make agriculture as modern as possible, but when it was modernised along industrial lines, new concerns were raised. That’s what we are looking at, mainly from the middle of

We are interested in how

industrial societies conceptualise agricultural work. As historians we are also interested in the agricultural work itself.

The merits and possible applications of new technologies like steam engines were the subject of debate during this period, while Dr Auderset says there was also a lot of discussion about the treatment of working animals. “What is the relationship between human beings and working animals? How did the rise of the socalled machine age change the perception of working animals?” he continues. Up to the middle of the 20th century a lot of agricultural work was jointly done by human beings and animals, something which advocates of new technologies were keen to change. “We are looking at discourses on how modernisation and change can be implemented. That’s not only by replacing one thing with another, but by a process of adjusting,” explains Dr Auderset.

the 19th to the middle of the 20th century,” they outline. One major area of interest in this respect is Taylorism, a type of management theory that prioritises economic efficiency in the sense of industrial manufacturing. “We are trying to explain why Taylorism was such an inspiring force for agricultural modernisation, despite the many obstacles that stood in the way for those who were interested in applying it to farming” says Dr Auderset. “Some heralds of industrial agriculture might have dreamed of farms modelled along the line of a factory governed by Taylor’s principles,” he adds, “but the farming population had to adapt and adjust such ideas to the living nature they worked with.”

Working processes in agriculture are often characterised by a complex interaction of men, animals and machines.

EU Research

Digging deeper into the permafrost-carbon feedback The earth’s permafrost is thawing at an unprecedented rate, leading to the exposure of previously inert soil organic carbon, which may then be released into the atmosphere as either carbon dioxide or methane. The WeThaw project aims to build a deeper picture of how permafrost responds to thawing, which will also help improve climate models, as Professor Sophie Opfergelt explains.

The rate at which permafrost has thawed over the last 30 years or so is unprecedented in the geological history of the earth. As more and more previously inert soil organic carbon is exposed to microbial decomposition, it is being released into the atmosphere as either carbon dioxide (CO2) or methane. “As deeper parts of the permafrost thaw every year more and more of the carbon becomes dynamically active, rather than inert,” explains Sophie Opfergelt, Professor of Geochemistry at UCLouvain. This thawing leads to increased release of carbon, which in turn causes temperatures to rise, creating a feedback loop which intensifies over time. “There is an enhancement of the process each time, it is called the permafrost-carbon feedback,” says Professor Opfergelt.

WeThaw project A lot of attention is currently focused on the extent of this thawing and on quantifying the amount of carbon that is emitted into the atmosphere. As leader of the WeThaw project, Professor Opfergelt is looking more at other mineral constituents in the soil, which she believes also play a role in the permafrostcarbon feedback. “Our hypothesis is that the exposure of these other constituents will affect the fate of organic carbon upon thawing,” she

Permafrost Thaw Organic Carbon

Organic Carbon

Minerals

Minerals

With permafrost thaw, previously frozen organic carbon is exposed. The project WeThaw investigates the influence of permafrost mineral constituents on the fate of soil organic carbon upon thawing.

the permafrost. “We travelled there at the transition between Winter and Spring, when the ground is frozen to the top. We also went at the very end of Summer, when the surface of the soil is unfrozen, so the soil has thawed to its greatest extent,” continues Professor Opfergelt.

At the end of Summer Professor Opfergelt and her colleagues are able to capture the maximum thaw depth. “Below this level the soil is still frozen. This permafrost has not thawed, for at least 10,000 years,” she says.

As deeper parts of the permafrost thaw every year more and more of the carbon becomes dynamically active, rather than inert. outlines. A certain proportion of carbon in the soil will become free upon thawing, while a certain proportion will bind to minerals, a topic central to the project’s work. “We aim to quantify the balance between the proportion of carbon that will become free upon thawing and the proportion of carbon that will bind with minerals,” says Professor Opfergelt.

This research holds important implications, as it will help scientists assess how much free carbon is released into the atmosphere, which can then contribute to the permafrost-carbon feedback. Researchers in the project have been working at a field site in Alaska, aiming to gain deeper insights into the thawing of

www.euresearcher.com

The wider context here is ongoing concern about the impact of climate change and its likely trajectory in future. Interactions in the permafrost are not accurately represented in the climate models currently used by the IPCC, believes Professor Opfergelt, who hopes the project will make an important contribution in this respect. “By collecting more data, we will help to parameterise the next generation of climate models, to more precisely forecast the evolution of the climate system,” she outlines. While the project’s work is based on data from Alaska, collaborations have been established with other institutions pursuing similar work in other areas, from

which researchers can then look at the global picture. “We also want to go to a larger scale, and to identify how this mineral weathering would affect Arctic regions on the global level,” says Professor Opfergelt.

WeThaw Mineral Weathering in Thawing Permafrost: Causes and Consequences Professor Sophie Opfergelt UCLouvain, Earth & Life Institute Croix du Sud 1, L7.05.10 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve Belgium T: +32 10 47 36 42 E: sophie.opfergelt@uclouvain.be W: https://sites.uclouvain.be/wethaw/

Professor Sophie Opfergelt is a FNRS Research Associate in geosciences at UCLouvain. Her research is devoted to Arctic soils facing changes. Her focus is on the response of internal permafrost processes upon thawing.

37

Behind the deep water cycle Water is essential to life, yet we still don’t know how much of it there is on our planet, in particular how much water is stored in the Earth’s mantle. Alpine rocks provide evidence of how the deep water cycle works and how minerals are transformed as they are transported deeper into the Earth’s interior, topics that Professor Jörg Hermann is addressing in his research.

The oceans cover

approximately 70 percent of the Earth’s surface, and it is possible to calculate how much water is stored in the world’s oceans, lakes, glaciers and other water sources. However, it’s less clear how much water is stored in the Earth’s mantle, below the ocean floor. “Estimates of how much water could be stored in the mantle vary between half an ocean mass up to nine times an ocean mass,” says Jörg Hermann, Professor of Petrology at Bern University, Switzerland. This is not liquid water in the mantle, but rather hydrogen coupled to oxygen in a mineral structure, which changes as minerals are transported through the Earth’s interior. “The capacity of these minerals to store H2O changes with pressures and temperatures as they move deeper into the Earth, and undergo what we call dehydration reactions. So they are transformed into more stable minerals for these temperatures and pressure conditions,” explains Professor Hermann. “The deeper they go, the less H2O the new minerals can incorporate.”

Deep water cycle This topic holds deep interest to Professor Hermann, who is the Principal Investigator of a research project investigating the Earth’s deep water cycle, looking at how water is transported into the Earth’s interior. Close to the Earth’s surface, weathering and hydrothermal alteration leads to the formation of hydrous minerals that can incorporate up to 12 weight percent of H2O. As these minerals are dragged down in subduction zones towards the interior of the earth by the movement of tectonic plates, water is liberated from them.

That water returns to the Earth’s surface, either via hydrothermal activity or through volcanic activity above these subduction zones. “These are important means of returning water back to the surface. As dehydration reactions take place, small amounts of H2O are incorporated into newly formed minerals as a trace compound,” outlines Professor Hermann. By analysing Alpine rocks, Professor Hermann aims to shed new light on these processes.

“With Alpine rocks that derive from former subduction zones we can see evidence of these different processes, from the uptake of water at the ocean floor, to their burial in different conditions,” he continues.

38

The deep water cycle. H2O is incorporated into hydrous minerals during seafloor alteration (1). The hydrous minerals are transported to mantle depth in subduction zones. Aqueous fluids are liberated during three main dehydration reactions of the hydrous minerals (2-4). H2O is transported back to the Earth’s surface with hydrous melts. Small amounts of H2O are retained in minerals such as garnet and olivine and are transported to the deeper mantle.

A variety of different types of rocks are being analysed within the project, including some that have been altered at the ocean floor, as well as others that have been buried to a depth of 100 km before eventually returning to the surface. Previous research has shown which rock samples have been at what depth, now Professor Hermann and his colleagues are looking to build further on these foundations.

“Once we have a sequence of rocks we can then look to study the dehydration reactions and see how the water is liberated,” he says. One of the main goals of the project is to investigate how much water is retained in the minerals that are formed as a result of these dehydration reactions. “The retained water can then be transported much deeper, into the deep mantle, to be stored away for hundreds of million years,” explains Professor Hermann.

For serpentinites, an especially water-rich rock type found in oceanic crust, there are several different reactions to consider in this respect. A first important dehydration reaction is thought to occur at a depth of about 70 kilometres, where the atmospheric pressure is

around 20 kilobars. “That is 20,000 times the typical atmospheric pressure at the surface of the earth, and the temperature would be in the region of about 500 degrees,” outlines Professor Hermann. A second important dehydration reaction occurs at a pressure of between 25-30 kilobars and a temperature of around 680 degrees, which causes hydrous minerals to break down, while Professor Hermann says there is also a third reaction to take into account. “The last of these reactions takes place at a pressure of about 35 kilobars, corresponding to a depth of around 100 kilometres, where the temperature would be about 750 degrees,” he says.

A rock subjected to these kinds of temperatures and pressure conditions will change over time. The serpentine minerals, found relatively close to the earth’s surface, contain about 10 weight percent H2O, while olivine, pyroxene and garnet found further down towards the interior contain only 0.010.05 weight percent H2O. “We have used garnet to investigate these dehydration reactions and evaluate how much water can be incorporated

EU Research

H2O concentration maps (in ppm; 2000 ppm = 0.2 wt % H2O) produced by infra-red spectroscopy of a mm-seized garnet that formed in a metamorphosed basaltic dyke found in Zermatt. The map was produced by PhD student J. Reynes.

in the oceanic crust. We have developed new techniques to map the H2O contents in garnet grains with a resolution of 1/100 mm. We have also looked at olivine – which is a reaction product formed when serpentine breaks

can be effectively mimicked in the laboratory, yet it’s clearly unrealistic to work on the same timescale on which these reactions occur in the earth’s interior. “In nature these reactions progress and reach completion over a timescale of hundreds of thousands of years, or even millions. Whereas in an experiment, we don’t really want to have to wait longer than a week,” points out Professor Hermann. By compromising on the size of the minerals, Professor Hermann and his colleagues have been able to save time in this respect. “We grow very small minerals, between 10-20 microns in length. We can then use powerful electron microscopes to analyse these tiny materials,” he says.

This research will help scientists build a more detailed understanding of the deep water cycle today, while Professor Hermann is also keen to put this work into a wider context by looking at how it operated millions, or

The deep water cycle is fundamental to understanding how Earth was able to maintain a hydrosphere over billions of years, thus creating conditions for a habitable planet. The aim is to find out how much H2O leaves subduction zones at depth of 20-200 km and how much is retained and transported to the deeper mantle. down – to assess how much water is retained,” outlines Professor Hermann. Another important part of Professor Hermann’s work is laboratory-based experiments. “We simulate the pressure and temperature conditions found in the earth’s interior. We grow the minerals in the presence of a water-rich fluid phase under controlled laboratory conditions, and then we can measure their water content,” he explains.

A habitable planet The aim then is to investigate how much H2O can be incorporated into garnet, olivine and pyroxene and relate this to pressure and temperature changes. The pressure and temperature conditions in the earth’s interior

even billions of years ago. This research holds fundamental interest in terms of understanding the availability of water throughout the history of the earth, which is of course essential to life. “The evolution of complex life forms depends on the availability of liquid water at the earth’s surface,” says Professor Hermann.

Another topic of interest to Professor Hermann is whether a stable equilibrium has been maintained over the earth’s history with respect to the deep water cycle. “There could be an equal amount of water going in to the earth’s mantle as coming out, or there could be a disequilibrium. So if more water goes in than comes out, then that could have had an impact on sea level over time,” he says.

PhD student E. Kempf is sampling olivine veins that formed during the first serpentine dehydration reaction at a glacier-polished outcrop in Zermatt, Switzerland.

www.euresearcher.com

INVESTIGATION OF THE EARTHS DEEP WATER CYCLE Investigation of the Earths deep water cycle Project Objectives

This study investigates how water is transferred in subduction zones from hydrous minerals, which are generally stable only to a depth of about 100 km, to nominally anhydrous minerals that are able to carry water to the deeper mantle. A variety of mafic and ultramafic rocks from well-characterised Alpine areas will be used as a natural laboratory to study this process.

Project Funding

Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation; the University of Bern and Federal Department of Economic Affairs, Education and Research (EAER)

Project Partners

1) Research School of Earth Sciences, The Australian National University 2) Institut des sciences de la Terre, University of Lausanne

Contact Details

Jörg Hermann Professor of Petrology Institute of Geological Sciences Universität Bern Baltzerstrasse 1+3 CH-3012 Bern Switzerland T: +41 (0)31 631 8493 E: joerg.hermann@geo.unibe.ch W: https://www.geo.unibe.ch/research/ petrology/research_projects/deep_water_ cycle/index_eng.html W: https://www.geo.unibe.ch/research/ petrology/index_eng.html Professor Jörg Hermann

Jörg Hermann is the professor for Petrology at the University of Bern, a position he has held since 2015. His main research interests are the investigation of subduction processes using a combination of experimental petrology, in-situ trace element geochemistry, and petrology.

39

The seeds of a resilient future for the Sahel The Great Green Wall initiative was established to stop desertification of the Sahel, a zone of Northern Africa south of the Sahara. A deeper understanding of the complex social and ecological systems along the Great Green Wall path is a prerequisite to inform effective actions, a topic central to the work of the Future-Sahel project, as Dr Deborah Goffner explains.

The Sahel region marks the transition between the Sahara desert and Sudanian Savanna and spans the width of Northern Africa, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea. The Sahel is increasingly vulnerable to desertification, with human activities and climate change contributing to land degradation. “The Sahel is undergoing major transitions. There are more people and livestock, so there is increasing pressure on natural resources,” says Dr Deborah Goffner.

The Great Green Wall (GGW) initiative was established in 2007 to address concern about desertification through reforestation and other interventions, yet these must reflect the diversity of the Sahel if they are to be effective, a topic central to Dr Goffner’s work as Principal Investigator of the FutureSahel project. “There’s no one-size-fits-all solution,” she acknowledges.

Future-Sahel project By building a deeper understanding of the social and ecological systems along the GGW, Dr Goffner and her colleagues in the project, including researchers from different disciplines and GGW decision makers, aim to help improve natural resource management in the Sahel. Historically the region was sparsely populated, with nomadic populations migrating in and out as a function of resource availability, but this began to change towards the end of the colonial

period as authorities aimed to sedentarise herders by providing year-round water access.

“This was a game-changer,” says Dr Goffner.

Previously nomadic populations started to settle permanently into certain areas, heightening pressure on resources, which was intensified by subsequent droughts. “The drought of 1973 caused many fatalities and a lot of international aid was pumped in. We’ve

ecosystem sevices. “These can be thought of as the the benefits provided to humans by natural products,” says Dr Goffner. Dr Goffner has travelled across the Sahel, gathering data from different areas along the GGW. “What ecosystem services are available in different areas? What services are important?” she continues. “The main goal is to ensure that we can nudge the Wall actions in a way

We created a social-ecological database in which we have centralized geographically explicit ecological and social data for the GGW path. So now we can build layered maps, and bring together information on things like population density, land use, vegetation, and soil type in a specific area. traced the history of the region and looked into how Senegal dealt with these shocks.

This gives invaluable insight into the region’s resilience in the past,” outlines Dr Goffner.

The primary focus is on understanding the current situation however, which will help researchers identify how resilience can be enhanced across the region. Populations in some areas may still depend on the forests for food, energy, construction, fodder and medicine, what researchers call ‘provisioning’

that ensures abundant, durable delivery of ecosystem services.” . A wealth of relevant geo-spatialized data concerning the GGW path is also available from national archives, from which researchers have characterised the historical and current situation in different parts of the Sahel.

“We created a social-ecological database in

Social-ecological system diversity along the GGW path as depicted by a group of multidisciplinary Future Sahel researchers

Composite diagram recreated from original hand drawn maps made

by Margaux Mauclaire

40

EU Research

©NASA

which we centralized geographically explicit ecological and social data for the GGW path.

So now we can build layered maps, and bring together information on things like population density, land use, vegetation, and soil type in a specific area,” says Dr Goffner. This enables Dr Goffner to gain deeper insights into these different social-ecological systems and how different social and ecological parameters are interconnected. “Now we can characterise the current situation so areas can be restored in meaningful ways,” she says.

This social-ecological database provides the basis on which researchers can then look to assess what actions are suitable in which areas . One part of this work involves investigating how biodiversity can be maximised along the GGW. “We have been doing ethno-botanical research. We try to understand how people interact with plants, what they use them for and how they use them, what their daily routines are, and how dependent they are on different resources. We have focused on indigenous tree species. From this data, we have identified a shortlist of trees that we tested in reforestation trials, to determine which species can reasonably be planted at a large scale in different areas along the GGW path,” explains Dr Goffner. A number of field trials have been held, while researchers are also studying the impact of deferred grazing on woody regeneration. “We study the reforested trees, but also natural regeneration occurring in the enclosed plots. In some areas, natural regeneration produces greater amounts of biomass than the planted trees, which have low survival rates,”says Dr Goffner.

Wayfinder platform The wider aim here is to help enhance the resilience of the region overall and provide a basis for more effective management of natural resources. The Wayfinder platform, a tool developed by the Stockholm Resilience

www.euresearcher.com

Centre together with the Resilience Alliance and the Australian Resilience Centre, plays a central role in this work.

“We piloted the Wayfinder process in the project in the heart of the Ferlo UNESCO Man and Biosphere Reserve,” says Dr Goffner.

The platform is designed to reflect the complexity of social-ecological systems in a multi-stakeholder, participatory manner.

“The Wayfinder platform is essentially a process that facilitates the navigation towards a desirable future,” outlines Dr Goffner. “For example, actions like apiculture, natural regeneration and tree planting are all embedded in the social context, and it’s absolutely essential to take that into account. Throughout the process, we need to constantly examine whether an action is taking us closer to a desired future.”

The trans-disciplinary nature of the project is an important attribute, as it brings together researchers from different disciplines to develop a broader perspective, including biologists, ecologists, geographers and social scientists.

Dr Goffner and her colleagues also work with local people, such as high-level administrators, foresters, youth groups and herders, who all play an important role. “We essentially coreflect upon, co-produce and co-construct the project,” she says. By working together with local stakeholders , Dr Goffner hopes to help point the way towards a more sustainable future for the Sahel. “Instead of starting out by talking about the problems, we spoke about aspirations. What does a positive future look like? What are the obstacles? What actions can we take to address them?” she outlines.

International cooperation is essential to address the major issues around climate change in vulnerable regions like the Sahel, yet individual actions can have a positive impact on the local level. Local stakeholders of course have diverse viewpoints when it comes to the future, yet Dr Goffner is clear that equitable access to ecosystem services should be at the heart of any future natural resource management strategy. “No matter what vision of the future we decide upon and navigate towards, ensuring equitable access to ecosystem services will be central to it,” she stresses.

FUTURE-SAHEL Multi-scale approaches for best resource management practices of Sahelian landscapes in the Great Green Wall for the Sahara and the Sahel Initiative context Project Objectives

Our aim is to produce scientific data to “nudge” the African Great Green Wall (GGW) along a positive trajectory. We gather, generate, and integrate knowledge from a wide range of disciplines, while taking into account the complexity of diversity of the socio-ecological systems along the GGW path.

We then use this knowledge to inform GGW natural resource management in Senegal. The latter is made possible by the transdisciplinary nature of the project, i.e. incorporating the Senegalese National GGW agency in charge of GGW decision- making and implementation as partners of Future Sahel.

Project Funding

Agence National de la Recherche France (Future-Sahel ANR15-CE03-0001)

Project Partners

• International CNRS Research Unit n° 3189 “Environment, Health and Societies” (Senegal/France) -Deborah Goffner (coordinator), Jean-Luc Peiry, Aliou Guissé • Stockholm University, Stockholm Resilience Centre (Sweden) -Line Gordon • Senegalese National Great Green Wall Agency (Senegal) - Papa Sarr

Contact Details

Project Coordinator, Deborah Goffner International CNRS Research Unit n° 3189 “Environment, Health and Societies” 51, Bd Pierre Dramard - 13344 Marseille cedex 15, France T: +33 6889 69544 E: deborah.goffner@cnrs.fr W: http://future-sahel.blogspot.com Deborah Goffner

Deborah Goffner is a plant biologist and research director for the CNRS (Centre National de Recherche Scientifique), France. Currently based half-time in Dakar, Senegal and half-time as a visiting senior scientist at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Sweden, she heads a research group at the UMI (International Research Unit) 3189 “Environment, Health, and Societies”. She coordinated the Future Sahel program funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR) from 2016-2019.

41

The bigger picture of miniaturisation

©ESA

Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) are an important part of many technologies, now researchers are looking towards the development of even smaller systems, nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS). Silicon nanowires are an important component of such NEMS, and a deeper understanding of their crystalline structure is crucial to further developments, as Professor Antonia Neels explains.

The ongoing miniaturisation

of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) in the digital age has opened up new commercial possibilities, and MEMS today are applied in a wide range of devices, including sensors and actuators with both electrical and mechanical functions and characteristics. The structure of the materials used in these systems helps to define their overall properties, and a deeper understanding could point the way towards the development of even smaller nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS) in future, a topic at the heart of Professor Antonia Neels’ research. “Silicon may behave very differently in nano-structures than in micro-systems, because a lot of physical properties change when you go to the nanolevel,” she outlines. Based at Switzerland’s Federal Laboratories (Empa), Professor Neels is the Principal Investigator of a research project seeking to link the structure and physical properties of silicon NEMS.

Silicon nanowires A major priority in the project is the characterisation of silicon nanowires, a relatively new type of 1-dimensional nanostructure which can act as a core component of NEMS. Researchers in the project are looking at nanowires which are about 80 nanometres wide and a few microns long. “They are small and difficult to handle, and their structural and physical behaviour is very different compared to micrometer-sized device parts,” says Professor Neels. Two of the most

42

notable characteristics of silicon nanowires are their strength and flexibility, which makes them well-suited for use in NEMS. A significant degree of progress has been made over the last decade in combining silicon nanowires in devices, yet challenges still remain in terms of their application in novel monolithic NEMS. The architecture of these systems is often extremely complex and crystalline defects enter into nanowires and alter their properties, so sophisticated techniques are required to characterise them. “New technologies need new

introduced into the silicon crystal which may influence physical properties such as electrical or mechanical functioning. Some of these effects may be desirable, for example because they improve the electromechanical properties of the nanowire system, while others may be undesirable; Professor Neels aims to help build a deeper understanding in this respect.

This research involves investigating defects and the defect mobility, from which more can be learned about the expected lifetime of such devices. An important part of the project’s

With nanoelectromechanical systems, new applications become possible that can’t really be approached with micro-systems, because we can sense really very small quantities, for example of radiation or molecules. analytical tools,” says Professor Neels. Researchers in the project are using high-resolution X-ray diffraction (HRXRD) and other techniques to gain deeper insights into the structure of silicon nanowires. “HRXRD is dedicated to the analysis of semi-conductor materials, high-purity crystals, like single crystal silicon,” explains Professor Neels.

The primary aim here is to relate the structure of a material to its performance and physical properties. Professor Neels and her colleagues develop X-ray based analytical methods suitable for the new materials structures that are emerging. During the fabrication of NEMS / MEMS, and also later on during their operation, strain, deformation and additional defects are

research centres therefore around monitoring any changes in the structure over time, a topic Professor Neels plans to address in the second half of the project’s funding term. “We plan to monitor the effects of electrical actuation of the nanowire structure, and investigate any structural changes,” she says. This will also have an impact on the durability and reliability of nanowires, both of which are important considerations in terms of the possible applications of these systems. “Reliability is very important in any application but especially in biomedicine and space,” stresses Professor Neels. “We can address accelerated aging processes, and see how things like

EU Research

Novel monolithic Si NEMS Novel monolithic Si NEMS: Study and correlation of structural and physical behaviour

Project Objectives

This study brings forward the understanding of the Si-nanowires structures in the field of nano and microelectromechanical systems (NEMS & MEMS) for potential sensing application in space, biomedical, earth and environmental sectors. This will enable us to understand the relationship between the physical properties and the silicon crystal lattice, and do correlations with the fabrication process and mechanical behavior of silicon nanowires under service condition.

Project Funding

HRXRD on the Si nanowire system (a): determination of silicon strain gradients and lattice tilts trough Reciprocal Space Mapping (RSM) relative to the scan point on the Si nanowire (a) (white point). RSMs in one, two (b) and three (c) dimensions.

temperature changes will affect the structure, and consequently its physical properties.”

Applications MEMS currently available on the market are pretty stable in terms of performance, and are applied in a wide variety of sectors. However, researchers are still working to further miniaturise these systems, which Professor Neels says will bring some important benefits. “The important thing is that we can monitor smaller effects, so we can be much more precise with these nano-systems than we can with micro-systems,” she explains. The nanosystems could be used to improve performance in established applications, while their heightened sensitivity could also open up new possibilities.

“With NEMS, new applications become possible that can’t really be approached with microsystems, because we can sense really very small quantities, for example of radiation or molecules,” continues Professor Neels. “Important possible application domains of NEMS include space applications and biomedicine.”

At this stage however Professor Neels’ priority is more to investigate the structure of silicon nanowires, and look at how they are affected by the fabrication process. This includes not just analysing defects and strains introduced during the manufacturing process, but also defects related to the overall environmental conditions and operations. “There is a degradation over time, as defects will also be introduced into a system from the environment. We are working on

defect analysis,” says Professor Neels. A deeper understanding of the fundamental structure of nanowires and the defects within them is essential to their wider application, which is an important motivation behind Professor Neels’ research.

The project’s research could hold important implications for the commercial sector, enabling the development of more effective, sensitive NEMS in future. Professor Neels’ group is very active in the biomedical domain in particular, while she says there are also many other possible application domains.

“The space domain would be very interesting, while the domestic domain is also highly relevant, as silicon is very robust,” she says.

Single structure like-NEMS based Si NWs obtained from a silicon wafer. The NW has a width of 80 nm and a length of 12 μm, and 5.5 μm suspended from the beneath substrate.

Sketch of the experimental setup for a horizontal Bragg diffraction configuration. Scans were performed by moving the sample along the y and z-axis directions. Ki is the incident wave vector, Kt is the transmitted vector and Ks is the scattered vector. Qx, Qy and Qz are the coordinates in reciprocal space.

The project is granted by the Swiss National Science Foundation, Grant No. 169257, and includes the funding of the doctoral thesis of Simone Dolabella who contributes with a great success to this topic. https://doi.org/10.1107/S1600576719015504

Project Partners

We collaborate with scientists from the beamline ID01 at the ESRF in Grenoble, France and the Koc University in Istanbul, Turkey.

Contact Details

Prof. Dr. Antonia Neels, Titular Professor Head Center for X-ray Analytics Empa - Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology Überlandstrasse 129, 8600 Dübendorf, Switzerland T: +41 58 765 45 07 E: antonia.neels@empa.ch W: http://www.empa.ch/x-ray W: https://www.empa.ch/ documents/56073/9770737/Simone_ Poster+website_final.pdf/ de895c94-a51f-4dbb-bdb88d9d533a2f94 W: www.empa.ch Professor Antonia Neels

Professor Antonia Neels obtained her PhD in Science from the University of Neuchâtel (CH), has been leading the XRD laboratory at CSEM (CH) and received an Executive MBA in Management of Technology (MoT) from the EPFL. Since 2014, she heads the Center for X-ray Analytics at Empa. Since 2018, Antonia Neels is appointed Titular Professor at the University of Fribourg. She is experienced in the development of X-ray based analytical methods.

Array of suspended Silicon-nanowires. The total size of the microchip is 500 x 500 μm. It includes 450 Si-NWs of 160 nm width and 10 μm long, and 10 μm suspended from the beneath substrate.

www.euresearcher.com

43

LHCb detector. © 2008-2020 CERN

Discovering the next era of particle physics The standard model describes the properties of known particles, yet there are plenty of reasons to believe that it does not tell the full story of how fundamental particles interact.

Researchers in the ONEDEGGAM project are exploring the asymmetry between matter and anti-matter, which could open up a window to new physics, as Dr Sneha Malde explains.

44

The standard model of particle physics

ONEDEGGAM project

describes the particles that are known to exist within the universe and accurately predicts their properties, yet it leaves questions unanswered which suggests that it doesn’t tell the full story of how fundamental particles interact. One interesting example is a set of particles called quarks, which make up protons and neutrons. “Protons and neutrons are composite particles made up of quarks, but they’re composed of the first generation of quarks only. There are three generations of quarks,” explains Dr Sneha Malde, a researcher in particle physics at Oxford University in the UK. The interactions of quarks are described using the Cabibbo-Maskawa-Kobayashi (CKM) matrix. “There are also heavier versions of the up and down quarks inside protons and neutrons. In total there are six quarks, and the CKM matrix describes how they interact with each other,” outlines Dr Malde.

These quarks all have corresponding antiquarks, which might be expected to decay in the same way. However, certain asymmetries have been observed in this respect. “You would expect a particle and an anti-particle to decay in the same way, with the same rate or distribution, just with the opposite charge configuration. However, there are places where that seems to break,” says Dr Malde.

This topic is central to the ONEDEGGAM project, in which Dr Malde is studying differences between how certain types of hadron – a composite particle comprised of quarks – decay, bringing together data from the LHC and the BES III experiment in China.

“Most particle physics measurements are done using data from one place. However, in order to measure the angle γ, which describes some of this asymmetry between matter and anti-matter, I need two sets of inputs,” she

explains. “We record a very high rate of beauty hadron decays from the LHCb experiment.”

Researchers from Dr Malde’s team have been able to measure the decays of these beauty hadrons very precisely. A beauty hadron can decay to a charm hadron alongside a strange hadron. “Data from LHCb shows us that the distributions from positive and negative beauty hadrons are different. But in order to interpret that within the standard model, we need more information about exactly what’s going on in the subsequent decay of the charm particle,” continues Dr Malde. This information is quite obscure and can be accessed via the process of quantum correlation, through which Dr Malde aims to gain deeper insights into the phase of the particles. “In physics, every process has an amplitude and a phase, and in general we don’t have access to the phase,” she outlines.

“There are systems however where you can

EU Research

introduce interference, and by doing that you can then gain access to the phase.”

One way of producing interference is via quantum correlation which is exactly how the data at the BESIII experiment is generated. Part of the ONEDEGGAM project’s work involves analysing this data. While relatively small numbers of particles have been generated at BESIII, they nevertheless hold great interest to Dr Malde. “They’re created in a quantum-entangled way. It is amazing to see this microscopic phenomenon materialise in a macroscopic way that you can even see,” she says. The predecessor of BESIII was an experiment called CLEO, and both have produced measurements for analysis at the LHC. “The numbers come with a level of uncertainty, and that uncertainty propagates through,” continues Dr Malde. “We’re trying to measure this angle γ at LHCb. We want to reach a precision of 1º, and if we can get there, then maybe we can start to see something break down in the standard model. However, if you want to have a precision of 1º, then you can’t have large sources of uncertainty coming from CLEO. The CLEO data gives us large uncertainties, because the data set is very small.”

from one quark to another quark,” explains Dr Malde. This matrix can be represented as a triangle, where the three angles – ά, ß, and γ – should add up to 180º. “One of the key goals of the LHCb experiment is to try and measure these angles very accurately, and to measure the lengths of the sides very accurately,” continues Dr Malde.

Evidence that the angles don’t add up to 180º, or that the sides of the triangle are too long or short for example, would point towards the existence of physics beyond the standard model.

While this is an exciting prospect, at this stage Dr Malde’s focus is primarily on measuring γ more precisely. “In general, measurements become more precise with time, and as scientists we of course want to make progress as fast as possible. I’m trying to accelerate that by bringing the BESIII and LHCb experiments together,” she outlines. The sub-detectors at the LHCb experiment are currently being upgraded, and Dr Malde hopes to make further progress when it returns to operation. “We will start taking data next year, and my project will analyse the data that comes out in the first two years. I would hope that with that data we would be able to

We’re trying to measure this angle γ at LHCb. We want to reach a precision of one degree, and if we can get there, then maybe we can start to see something break

down in the standard model.

ERC funding

achieve greater precision than we have now, and move from 5º down to 1º. That would be outstanding,” she says.

A precise measurement of γ could then open up new avenues of research. If a standard model parameter is precisely measured, and found to be different to what was expected, then that suggests the existence of new physics, while confirmation that predictions are actually correct would also be interesting. “If we were to find that this angle γ is exactly where we expect it to be, then it tells us something about this new physics.

It means that it has to respect the standard model in this area,” explains Dr Malde.

The search for new physics through precision measurements of the CKM angle γ Project Objectives

To explore the phenomenon of CP violation, the difference between the properties of matter and anti-matter, through measurements of the CKM angle γ, with the hope of achieving the precision of one degree. The measurements are performed using both the large exquisite dataset from the LHCb experiment and the unique quantum-entangled dataset of the BESIII experiment.

Project Funding

European Research Council Starting grant.

Funded under: H2020-EU.1.1.

• Overall budget: € 1 499 955

Contact Details

Project Coordinator, Sneha Malde University of Oxford Department of Physics Denys Wilkinson Building Keble Road Oxford OX1 3RH T: + 01865 (2)73357 E: sneha.malde@physics.ox.ac.uk W: https://www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/contacts/ people/malde

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2 FJHEP07%282019%29106 https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.01129J. High Energy Phys. (2019) 2019: 106 https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.00091 Sneha Malde

Sneha Malde is a researcher in particle physics at the University of Oxford. She holds a Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship with the Royal Society, which enables her to pursue her research interests. Her main interests are in high-energy frontier physics, using data from the LHCb experiment.

Photograph by Drew Gardner

This was a major motivating factor behind Dr Malde’s decision to apply for ERC funding, as it has essentially enabled her to join the BESIII experiment and gain direct access to the data it generates. The wider aim here is to make a more precise measurement of γ, which could help researchers uncover evidence of new physics beyond the standard model. “One of the key ideas about the CKM matrix is that if you’ve only got these three generations of quarks, and they all interact with each other, then the overall probability of something happening has to be one. So they can essentially only turn

ONEDEGGAM

The notable differences between these two diagrams of simulated data show how quantum-entanglement, or Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance”, would manifest in BESIII data. The data can be used to determine critical parameters related to the decay of the charm meson.

www.euresearcher.com

45

Demonstrating the quantum advantage The development of quantum technologies has generated a lot of interest, with the commercial sector keen to harness their potential, for example in communication and computing. We spoke to Dr Eleni Diamanti about the QuSCo project’s work in proving the advantages of quantum technologies and bringing them closer to practical application.

The difference between a classical bit and a quantum bit can be expressed through the notion of quantum superposition. While information in a classical bit is represented as either 0 or 1, a quantum bit (qubit) can exist in a space between 0 and 1. “This is the notion of superposition,” says Doctor Eleni Diamanti, CNRS Research Director in the Quantum Information team at Sorbonne University in Paris. This superposition is typically expressed in mathematical terms as a combination of 0 and 1. “We express it as a function of 0 and 1. These are quantum states, not classical bits; these are states corresponding to specific physical properties of the quantum particle,” explains Dr Diamanti. “We can express qubits using coefficients that allow to calculate the probability of finding the quantum state in either 0 or 1. This is what we mean when we say that the qubit exists in states in-between.”

Researchers nowadays have a fairly thorough understanding of how to generate and manipulate these qubits, which is central to the development of quantum technologies. The properties of qubits are used in quantum technologies to propagate and manipulate information. “These 0s and 1s correspond to information. The goal of quantum technologies is to use this particular way of using and encoding information to perform tasks that – because of the properties of these qubits – cannot be done in the classical world,” continues Dr Diamanti. Research into quantum technologies has been broken down into several main categories. “One large category is quantum communication, which is necessary to connect distant quantum systems, and whose major goal is to show that you can use quantum technologies to improve security or communication efficiency, to show an advantage in the security or the necessary amount of information transmission,” says Dr Diamanti. “A second major theme is quantum computing, where quantum technology could be used to improve computation time.”

QuSCo project

Illustration by Kevin Hong

This is a topic at the core of the QuSCo project, an initiative funded by the European Research

Council which aims at demonstrating the benefits of quantum technologies for certain applications. While these technologies hold rich potential across a range of different areas, Dr Diamanti’s primary focus is on quantum communication and quantum computing.

“I have worked for many years on quantum communication, in particular quantum cryptography. This involves looking at how to use quantum states of light, in particular, to improve security in communications,” she explains. “In QuSCo, we have done some work on cryptography, and are also looking towards quantum computing as well. We aim to demonstrate a quantum advantage in certain applications, essentially to identify and implement tasks that can be done better with quantum systems than classical systems with current or near-term photonic technology.”

The nature of the comparison between quantum and classical resources is an important consideration in the project, with Dr Diamanti and her colleagues striving to ensure that it is fair and balanced. While there is a lot of interest in the potential of new technologies, the aim in the project is to demonstrate the potential of existing quantum technologies in certain applications, for example in the verification of the solutions of difficult computational problems. For this, Dr Diamanti needs sequences of very

We aim to demonstrate a quantum advantage in certain applications, essentially to identify and implement tasks that can be done better with quantum systems than classical systems with current or near-

term photonic technology.

46

EU Research

weak light signals that are detected by single-photon detectors that can perform measurements at the level of a single photon.

A high degree of care must be taken when working with these types of systems, as they are characterised by many different properties.

For example a photon has several properties; it is situated in time, in space, and its energy is characterised by a specific frequency. “All of these properties are attached to the photon. So when you work with specific quantum particles, and you choose which properties you are going to use for observing your quantum effects, you need to also be aware of what’s happening to the other properties,” explains Dr Diamanti.

While Dr Diamanti uses sophisticated photonic techniques in her research, her primary interest in terms of the QuSCo project is more in the application level. “These techniques are tools through which I aim to demonstrate a quantum advantage at a systems level,” she says. “I work at the protocol level, and collaborate with computer scientists and mathematicians to make these protocols implementable.”

Training This can be thought of almost as a step towards a proof-of-concept, with Dr Diamanti aiming to show that this quantum advantage can bring practical benefits. Alongside the technical work, the project also brings together a team, helping the next generation of researchers gain the skills they need to push forward the development of quantum technologies. “It’s very important to train new researchers that have global knowledge in all of the fields that

www.euresearcher.com

are associated with quantum technology,” stresses Dr Diamanti. Continued research can help reinforce the wider relevance of quantum technologies, and encourage further investment. “This encourages us that quantum technologies do have this transformational capacity and can be used in practical, realworld applications,” says Dr Diamanti.

There are many challenges to deal with before quantum technologies are more widely applied however, including not just technical issues but also around areas like standards and patents for example. For her part, Dr Diamanti plans to continue her research into quantum communication networks, with the wider aim of demonstrating the applicability of quantum technologies. “I aim to show that existing quantum technologies can bring real benefits in the near term,” she says.

This is not yet widely understood, as it is commonly thought that technologies like quantum computers and a full quantum internet are still several years away, which maybe leads us to overlook recent advances.

“Many people have worked on questions around quantum photonic technologies, but more needs to be done at the application level to show what this can be useful for,” continues Dr Diamanti. “My target is to show that this can be achieved with current technology, or technology that will be available in the near future, without having to wait decades for the arrival of the quantum computer.”

QUSCO Quantum superiority with coherent states Project Objectives

In this project we aim at developing a theoretical framework where quantum resources can be used to outperform their classical counterparts for a large range of problems with applications in cryptography and communication, and its implementation using a photonic experimental platform exploiting state-of-the-art, practical technologies.

Project Funding

European Research Council Starting Grant Total funding € 1 494 738.

Contact Details

Dr Eleni Diamanti Research Director at CNRS, LIP6 Sorbonne Université, 4 place Jussieu, 75252 Paris Cedex 05, France Vice Director, Paris Centre for Quantum Computing T: +33 (0)1 44 27 83 12 E: eleni.diamanti@lip6.fr W: https://www.quantuminfolip6.fr W: http://www.pcqc.fr

Dr Eleni Diamanti

Photograph by Olivier Ezratty for www.qfdn.net

Dr Eleni Diamanti is a CNRS researcher director at the LIP6 laboratory of Sorbonne University in Paris. She received her Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens in 2000 and her PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2006. She then worked as a Marie Curie post-doc at the Institute of Optics Graduate School in Palaiseau before joining the CNRS in 2009. She is vice director of the Paris Centre for Quantum Computing, steering committee member of the French regional and national networks on Quantum Technologies, and elected member of the Board of Stakeholders of the European Public Private Partnership in Photonics.

47

Exploring the Zooniverse Zooniverse.org is the largest and most popular online citizen science portal where anyone can help with research projects from the comfort of their home. Volunteers simply sign up and look over image or data sets to classify what they see. Those image sets can be anything from new galaxies to penguin populations, taken from devices like telescopes, satellites and camera traps.

The images from these projects can be awe inspiring and classification can be addictive, so it is little wonder people are flocking to the site in growing numbers. Zooniverse is making scientific discovery more accessible and more personal for everyone.

Richard Forsyth interviews Chris Lintott, Professor of Astrophysics, University of Oxford and Principal Investigator at Zooniverse.

EU Researcher: Can you explain some of the projects you have live, as there is quite a wide variety in terms of subject matter?

Professor Chris Lintott: What unites the projects on the platform is that, in each case, researchers need help from everyone to sort through their data. That might mean sorting through images of distant galaxies, looking at images of penguins from a camera trap project in Antarctica, or transcribing an old manuscript from a museum archive. In each case, the contributions of thousands or tens of thousands of people add up to something much greater than the sum of its parts, and Zooniverse volunteers have gone on to make remarkable discoveries along the way. Though originally my team and I built the Zooniverse to help with our own research, the variety of the projects goes way beyond that and is astounding.

EUR: Can you take us through a typical process or workflow of a

EUR: Well over a million people are involved in your research – from all kinds of backgrounds. The projects have really captured imaginations. What is it about this kind of research that really attracts people to get involved and do they stay loyal as researchers?

citizen science project?

Prof. CL: More than two million people registered now, in fact,

Prof. CL: Our projects almost all involve pattern recognition,

and you’re right that it’s not just people who are already interested in science. That’s been the most surprising thing, I think – that an enormous range of people, many of whom have never before

something we have conveniently evolved to be very good at.

48

Volunteers joining a site are presented with an image or video, and complete a series of tasks. We show each image to multiple people, and sometimes to a machine learning algorithm or two too, and combine the results so that we can be confident that they’re accurate (or that we understand the inevitable uncertainty). It sounds simple, but the key is designing the project so the right questions are asked, and that the data the volunteers produce is worth having.

EU Research

considered thinking about, for example, astrophysics, are willing to jump in. The key motivation for most of our volunteers is that they want to help, something that’s meant that we’ve had record levels of contributions during the pandemic, from those who are lucky enough to have spare time. For the researchers, the important thing is to keep their end of the bargain – to be present in the project and to use the contributions of the volunteers to best effect. It can be a virtuous circle in this way – the more a project is able to achieve, the more attractive continued participation is. As for whether people stay loyal, people tend to work hard in a project for a few days, or a few weeks, and then put it down for a while, but they do come back.

EUR: How do you verify your results when so many people are not scientists and may make a lot of mistakes?

Prof. CL: Well, science isn’t all that hard! More seriously, as I said earlier, we have several people look at each image and so mistakes don’t happen. We also often use gold standard data, where we know

www.euresearcher.com

what the right answer is, to make sure all is well, and all projects are tested before they end up on the platform.

EUR: Some of your research is incredibly moving.

For instance, finding evidence of slavery from space is a powerful project. Studies like this clearly provide a social function, like policing and detective work against injustice, which is different to say studying galaxies. Has citizen science become more than science alone?

Prof. CL: The techniques of citizen science have certainly proved very useful in all sorts of areas. I’m very proud of our Planetary Response Network project, led by Brooke Simmons at Lancaster, which has built projects that have had the crowd assessing the terrible damage from hurricanes in the Caribbean and earthquakes in Nepal, and feeding the results to first responders on the ground. It’s not surprising that people want to help when disaster strikes but what has been interesting is finding that all the work we’ve done for our other scientific projects is of use in these circumstances.

49

EUR: How much raw data do you think is available these days that has just not been processed? We have so many ways of capturing information – but can a lot of it be in danger of not being processed?

Prof. CL: This is exactly why the form of citizen science that I’m talking about has emerged; you can even say that in some fields, our ability to discover new knowledge is no longer primarily limited by gathering data, but rather by what we choose to do with it. This is especially true if you want to find the interesting and unusual things – the unexpected – that are buried in large datasets. For that, there really is no substitute for a curious crowd of people.

EUR: I remember classifying galaxies many years ago on

EUR: Are people really the best ‘computers’ of all and if so why?

you might well be the first person ever to see a galaxy. The telescope, camera and software pipeline are all automatic, so it’s only when it pops up on your screen that humanity encounters it! This is why the projects are so good at identifying the unusual.

Prof. CL: We’re very good at particular tasks, and I think the future is in combining our very human abilities to react to the unexpected with machine learning which can do most of the mundane work for us. In work with my own Galaxy Zoo project, we’ve shown how to combine human and machine classifications in a subtle way to provide a result that’s better than either approach alone. In some of the projects – our Gravity Spy project, for example, which we’re expanding thanks to our REINFORCE project, looks at data from Gravitational wave observatories like VIRGO in Italy – it seems surprising that people could help, but the results are really valuable.

EUR: How much time and money does this method save?

And would the lofty aims of many of these data or image heavy projects be possible without this kind of crowd science. Saving money must especially appeal to researchers with strict budgets?

Prof. CL: I don’t think saving money is the right way to think about this – in almost all cases, Zooniverse volunteers make possible work you simply couldn’t do any other way. If you want to put a value on it, I think the Zooniverse effort in a typical year is equivalent to a building of 400 people processing data round the clock, but really it’s a completely new way of working.

EUR: Is there something that a project discovered that really ‘wowed’ the Zooniverse team?

Prof. CL: Many things – especially spectacular photos from our

50

ecological camera trap projects which are a favourite of the team.

But my favourite discovery is the planet Planet Hunters 1b, the only planet known in a four-star system. I’d love to stand on it (or on a moon – the planet itself is a gas giant) and look up at four suns in the sky.

Zooniverse, simply to look at what amazing images were out there. I remember thinking, would I be the first pair of eyes on some of those galaxies? Would that be the case? It would be quite a thing to find a new galaxy from your armchair.

Prof. CL: Absolutely. If you time participation in Galaxy Zoo right,

EUR: You have a Zooniverse Project Builder on your site. This takes it to yet another level, where even the projects can be built by anyone with the right components. What do you need to build a project? Have you had much uptake?

Prof. CL: Yes, we’ve now run more than two hundred projects, most of them built by researchers using the project builder tool. We got to the point a few years ago where we thought we understood how to design certain types of project, and so could turn that knowledge into the design for a tool. Of course, we still build novel and experimental projects, but most researchers with data and questions to ask can go from logging on to having a project ready for testing in an hour or two.

EUR: Zooniverse seems the most accessible public facing portal for citizen science but do you think with its potential, this could really take off wider as a way for everyone to be involved in valuable scientific research?

Prof. CL: I hope so! We’re growing faster than ever, so I think the future is bright.

www.zooniverse.org

EU Research

Professor Chris Lintott Principal Investigator and Co-founder of Zooniverse

www.euresearcher.com

51

Searching for the Light of Life Frans Snik of the FALCONER project describes how his research findings will help the world’s biggest telescopes, including the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), find signs of life on far off exoplanets, with the bonus of creating spin-off innovations that will have profound implications for research.

In 1991 we only knew the planets in our own solar system. Today, in contrast, we have evidence of over 4,200 worlds orbiting stars light years away. With advances in telescopic technology and with the largest telescope in history, the aptly named Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), now only five years from completion, we can expect vastly improved imaging of exoplanets. Within 20 years, aided with the next generation of space telescopes launched after 2035, it’s expected we’ll be able to detect life on worlds that appear Earth-like.

The FALCONER project is pioneering direct imaging of exoplanets, with an aim to suppress the bright glare from far off stars that make it impossible to see the smaller planets that would orbit the habitable zones around them. In addition, the researchers are looking into novel ways to detect definitive signs of life from observing planet-light.

“We now know that there are more planets than stars, so every star you see and every star you don’t see, statistically has at least one planet. Take five stars and one will have a planet that looks like Earth. It will be rocky and if it’s the right distance from the star, if there is water, it will be liquid, and life as we know it could emerge. We have not yet seen any of them! We know they are there from indirect observations. A few that pass in front of their star we can start to characterise, but the vast majority of them will not be accessible to this transit method. The effects from the light of the parent star to these planets blocks our view of them. The challenge is to remove most of this starlight and see planets that are orbiting the star, so we can analyse their light, and thus characterise their atmospheres and potential surfaces, and, ultimately, find signs of life ,” said Frans Snik.

The art of planet hunting and planet viewing is fraught with difficulty. Snik adds: “To see older planets and to see planets that may have life, you need to get a lot closer to the star than current techniques allow. Most of all, you require a much higher contrast than currently possible. We can now see young gas giants in the infrared at a contrast of 1:100,000. For Proxima b we need 1 in

52

Image of the star eta Crux, as observed with one of our liquid-crystal vAPP coronagraphs at the MagAO instrument. The light is mostly split into the two images on the left and right, where dark holes are created very close to the image of the star, on either side. Otten et al. ApJ 834(2) id.175 (2017)

ten million, down to 1 in ten billion for an Earth around a solar-type star. To put this in perspective, if the halo of the star was Mount Everest, if you want to detect a Jupiter sized planet then that would be a red blood cell in comparison – and the Earth would be a bacteria. So, you could say that bulldozing down Mount Everest is our challenge and that’s what we call coronagraphy.”

ET is in the Dark The simple version of a coronagraph is trying to block starlight but this does not always work well, for example if your telescope vibrates, starlight leaks around it and blurs the view.

“Instead of blocking it, we redistribute starlight,” continued Snik. “In the FALCONER

project we accomplish this with liquid crystals.

This is the same stuff you are looking at in most smartphone screens but we are using it in a different way. We are literally painting liquid crystals on pieces of glass. When you put this glass between polarisers, just like polarised sunglasses, you see this pattern that corresponds to the phase pattern that we want to impose. With a flat piece of this glass stuck into a telescope at the right location, it manipulates the light from the star that comes into the telescope, such that the halo of starlight is suppressed, while both the core of the image of the planet and also the star make it through.

The cool thing is that with these liquid crystals we can apply phase patterns that do not depend on wavelength, unlike classical techniques. This

Photos of vAPP coronagraphs with different liquid-crystal patterns between crossed polarizers.

EU Research

a different refractive index than freshwater rain, so the angle of the rainbow tells you what it is you are looking at. This is similar to how colleagues of mine in the 70s, worked out that on Venus the clouds were sulphuric acid, as it creates a rainbow under a different angle. To find liquid water we want to see water clouds.”

Moonlighting FALCONER PhD students David Doelman and Steven Bos (standing) with collaborators Zane Warriner and Julien Lozi (sitting) at the Subaru telescope during first light for the vAPP coronagraph installed inside the SCExAO instrument.

allows us to achieve contrast performance over a broad range of wavelengths, enabling spectroscopy of our targets.”

Snik and his team carried out this technique with several telescopes and it removes starlight right next to the star down to 1:100,000, close to the fundamental limit for ground-based telescopes. They are integrating additional optical methods to distinguish exoplanets from residual starlight, and thus enhance the contrast further by orders of magnitude. With the ELT and other proposed ground-based telescopes, exciting opportunities for imaging known exoplanets open up.

“With the ELT, we’ll focus on nearby stars and known targets and use the observing time to characterise them. We know that small planets in the habitable zone are ubiquitous – we just have to learn how to see them and that is what we are doing here. With the ELT, we will have a thirty nine metre telescope. Just in terms of mirror surface, this is larger than every telescope that’s ever been built. For the first time we will make sharp enough images to enable us to look next to nearby red dwarf stars, to see if there are rocky planets that can support life. If there is one and if there is life, we will pick it up. If they are not there, the next generation of space telescopes, that we aim to have equipped with our technology, will fly twenty years from now and they will do it for us, specifically for Earth analogs orbiting Sun-like stars. So at least within our lifetimes, generally speaking – we will see the first signs of extraterrestrial life if it is present anywhere in our cosmic neighbourhood.”

Another indicator to chase, to confirm life on a planet, is molecular oxygen in the atmosphere.

For a long time, there was just algae on Earth and all it produced was oxygen. All the oxygen we breathe should not chemically be here on planet Earth by rights. It is the algae, forests and plants that produce the oxygen that we breathe – they are solely responsible for it.

“If you see a planet with oxygen, and, or, other particular molecules in its atmosphere, then you know stuff that chemically should not be there is, and that means we may have a strong indicator for life. We’re collaborating with scientists who are building models to show how oxygen shows up in spectra and in polarisation of reflected light.

We need to validate these models, so colleagues of mine have already done one bit of validation by looking at the dark side of the moon. If you look carefully at the dark side of the moon it is not totally dark, there is a little bit of light and that light comes from us, like looking into the mirror – it’s the Earthshine. By taking a large telescope and pointing it at the moon they did detect life on Earth by detecting oxygen and the green and infrared light originating from vegetation.”

The moon is an ideal test platform, for continuously observing a world, namely Earth, for signs of life and we plan to send an instrument to the moon and point it toward Earth. As Earth will always be visible in the sky, it would only take a month to observe Earth illuminated by Artificial Turf

our sun from all the different angles, the same way it will be possible to observe exoplanets.

Snik elaborates: “We are building this instrument that will hitch a ride to the moon and we are working with companies and countries that are landing on the moon in the next couple of years. Our instrument is called LOUPE; Lunar Observatory for Unresolved Polarimetry of Earth. The instrument will be only slightly larger than a Euro coin. It will measure Earth as a whole lot of dots, as a function of wavelength, as a function of polarisation. This will be a training run on our own Earth while we wait for these big telescopes to come online.”

Single-handed Detection Whilst detecting signs of water and oxygen are encouraging as signs for life, they are not 100% definitive, so what is? There is one remarkable signature of life that might provide the conclusive proof astronomers and biologists are looking for. Life’s molecular building blocks are amino acids and sugars. They each have a ‘twin’ but not identical, like your right and left hand will mirror each other but are not the same, for example you could not put your right hand in a left-handed glove. This is known as ‘chirality’. Amino acids linked with life on Earth are all ‘left-handed’ in their formation and all sugars characterising life on Earth are ‘right-handed’. Frans Snik is working with biologists to see if this could be used as the best way to detect life signs in the cosmos, as the molecular handedness leaves an imprint on the handedness of light in the form of circular polarisation. After large-scale testing with beetles and vegetation, a machine was devised to detect life, on the basis of this signal.

“We built this machine which worked in the lab and then we put it on the roof of a building in Amsterdam, so we started looking around for Distant Trees

Finding Signs of Life So how do you find signs of planetary life, simply by observing light? There are basic ingredients that you need for life to exist on a planet. You need a stable environment, six elements from the periodic table, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur to build biomolecules, heat from the parent star, or from the planet itself, and liquid water.

Starting with how to find water. Any liquid has a special relationship with how it interacts with light. “For example, sea water splash has

www.euresearcher.com

Circular spectropolarimetric observations of artificial grass (left) and a living forest (right). Patty et al. Astrobiology 19(10) 2019

53

FALCONER Forging Advanced Liquid-Crystal Coronagraphs Optimized for Novel Exoplanet Research

Project Objectives

The FALCONER ERC StG team at Leiden University develops advanced liquid-crystal optics for telescopes around the world and in space to manipulate light from stars and planets.

The main goal is to suppress starlight, and analyse light from exoplanets to characterise them. They also use the Earth for “target practice” to learn how to detect signs of life.

Project Funding

FALCONER ERC StG 678194 MONOCLE H2020 776480 EU-citizen.science H2020 824580

Project Partners

All telescope/instrument teams are indicated on the world map to the right.

• NCSU Geometric Phase Photonics Laboratory • ImagineOptix for liquid-crystal optics production • TU Delft + Cosine for LOUPE

Contact Details

Project Coordinator, Frans Snik Assistant Professor Leiden University 2333 CA Leiden Room number 1116c E: snik@strw.leidenuniv.nl General introduction to coronagraph technologies: Snik et al. Proc. SPIE id.107062L (2018) The vAPP coronagraph: Snik et al. Proc. SPIE id.84500M (2012) Otten et al. ApJ 834(2) id.175 (2017) Doelman et al. Proc. SPIE id.104000U (2017) Bos et al. A&A 632, id.A48 (2019) Other liquid-crystal optics: Doelman et al. Proc SPIE id.107010T (2018) Doelman et al. Opt. Lett. 44(1) (2019) Snik et al. Opt. Mat. Expr. 9(4) (2019) Doelman et al. PASP 132(1010) (2020) LOUPE: Klindžić et al. Philosophical Transactions A (submitted) Circular polarization and homochirality: Patty et al. Astrobiology 19(10) 2019 LSDpol instrument for the ISS: Snik et al. Proc. SPIE id.111320A (2019) SPEX: Snik et al. Proc. SPIE id.77311B (2010) Van Harten et al. Atm. Meas. Tech. 7(12) (2014) iSPEX: Snik et al. Geophys. Res. Lett. 41(20) (2014)

Dr Frans Snik

Dr Frans Snik is assistant professor at Leiden Observatory, Leiden University, the Netherlands, and member of the Dutch Young Academy. His group develops advanced optical technology for astronomy (specifically exoplanet observations) and Earth observation (climate science, pollution and vegetation monitoring). In addition, he pursues citizen science and collaborations with artists.

Telescopes and instruments where vAPP coronagraphs and other advanced liquid-crystal optics have been, or will be installed.

life and we pointed it at sports fields and didn’t get any signal at all. We thought our instrument wasn’t working or our hypothesis was flawed but then it turns out this is artificial grass! We pointed it at a forest 3 km away and we got this very nice, positive detection of life. The preferred handedness of molecules leaves an imprint in the form of preferred handedness of light: circular polarisation. We are now building a version to plug into the International Space Station to map our entire planet in circular polarisation from orbit.”

Spin-offs and Innovations Fundamental sciences like astronomy can have spin-offs on Earth that are of immediate relevance. With astronomical techniques it’s possible to work out what’s inside atmospheres of planets far away and of course this is also useful to figure out what is in Earth’s own atmosphere.

This holds real value in the era where climate change is a serious threat for us all.

One application is, for example, measuring dust pollution and other anthropogenic aerosols.

Astronomers know how to measure dust and there is a lot of it in our atmosphere that we are ingesting and it can reduce life expectancy, as well as have significant implications for affecting climate. There is a lot of information we don’t really have that would be useful. Some dust particles scatter sunlight back into space, while others retain heat. The size of aerosol particles can have implications for how deeply it impacts on our health or say, the jet engines of a plane in case of volcanic ash clouds. Whilst we can measure how much dust pollution is in the atmosphere by weight, these measurements are also quite limited and very local.

“We need to measure the properties of all aerosols on a global scale to measure the effects on climate change and on our health,” said

Snik. “With measurement techniques derived from astronomy, we can infer the amounts of dust in the atmosphere and the sizes and compositions of the particles. To achieve this, we invented a new technique to accurately measure polarisation spectra of sunlight scattered by aerosols. We now have an instrument suite called SPEX to measure dust and aerosols in our own atmosphere. One of them is now flying on what used to be a U2 spy plane and this technology has been selected to fly on the next NASA climate mission PACE, where we will measure the effects on climate change from a satellite.”

This technology, a spin-off itself, spawned a further spin-off innovation. A device with this functionality was adapted to attach to smartphones (iSPEX), so anyone could measure air pollution and have it recorded on a map in a large-scale ‘citizen science’ project.

“We produced twenty thousand of these add-ons to smartphones so people across the Netherlands were performing measurements on air pollution. This added valuable information.

The air pollution pilot project gained momentum covering cities like Barcelona, Rome and London during 2015. We are now developing iSPEX2.0 for most modern smartphones to measure both air pollution and water quality. This is for the MONOCLE project, which is a current EU project.

In fact, we are very active in the EU, promoting citizen science as a method of research.”

As with any experimenting, innovation and scientific curiosity, what started with looking at ways to understand exoplanets, has spawned technologies that are now assessing our own world.

The FALCONER project will await the largest telescopes to come online to detect life elsewhere in the universe, whilst simultaneously making life on Earth better for us all. © ESO

54

EU Research

EU Research

For more information, please visit: www.euresearcher.com Follow EU Research on www.twitter.com/EU_RESEARCH

EU

The magnetism of the Milky Way The Galactic magnetic field exerts a strong influence on the formation of stars, motions of gas clouds, and the way cosmic rays travel through the Milky Way, yet much remains to be learned about its nature and extent. We spoke to Professor Marijke Haverkorn about the work of the MAGALOPS project in developing a next generation model of the Galactic magnetic field.

The Galactic magnetic field

is by nature very difficult to observe, and the information that has been gathered is typically partial, relating just to specific components. While it has been established that the Galactic magnetic field has a largescale uniform component and a smallscale turbulence component, there are still many unanswered questions in this area.

“We lack details on the characteristics of the components. What is the situation nearer to the Galactic centre? What does the Galactic magnetic field look like in the Milky Way’s halo?” asks Marijke Haverkorn, Associate Professor of Astrophysics at Radboud University in the Netherlands. This is a complex area of research, as magnetic fields don’t radiate light like stars, but rather influence whatever light comes through.

“If a star emits light, then under certain circumstances that light is altered a little bit as it propagates by the Milky Way’s magnetic field,” explains Professor Haverkorn. “By studying changes in the polarisation of that light, we can gain new insights into how the magnetic field has influenced it.”

MAGALOPS project This is a topic central to Professor Haverkorn’s work as the Principal Investigator of the MAGALOPS project, an ERC-backed initiative in which researchers aim to develop a next-

56

generation model of the Galactic magnetic field. This involves the analysis of data from several sources. “We need very different types of measurements and different kinds of instruments to study the magnetic field of the Milky Way. The Milky Way is all around us, so ideally we would want observations over the whole sky,” outlines Professor Haverkorn. A survey of selected regions of the sky has already been conducted and the data is being analyzed, with plans for a survey of

us on earth. By measuring the polarisation of relatively nearby stars, and comparing that to the polarisation of more distant stars, Professor Haverkorn hopes to gain new insights into the magnetic field in the space inbetween. “This is the innovative thing about this large data set. Traditionally, galactic magnetic fields are measured with radio polarisation,” she says. This meant that the observed polarised radiation represented an integration of all the gas along the line-of-

If a star emits light, then under certain circumstances that light is altered a little bit as it propagates by the Milky Way’s magnetic field. By studying changes in the polarisation of that light, we can gain new insights into how the magnetic field has influenced it. the whole sky, while Professor Haverkorn and her colleagues are also using distance data gathered from the Gaia satellite. “With the release of data from the Gaia satellite, we now know the distances to over a billion stars,” she explains. “By combining our polarimetry data with the distance data that the Gaia satellite gives us, we can learn more about the location of these stars and the interstellar medium between these stars and earth.”

From this point, it’s possible to identify which specific parts of the Milky Way that light has travelled through before it reaches

sight. “You would see polarisation and gas, but you wouldn’t know where along the line of sight it came from,” explains Professor Haverkorn. “This has always been a problem, but I think this data set will change that, in the sense that we now know the distances to the sources of this polarisation. So we will get a kind of 3-d image of the Galactic magnetic field for the first time.”

The polarisation evident from these data is largely inter-stellar, so caused by the Galactic magnetic field, yet there are also cases where polarisation is due to a star itself. Some

EU Research

The MAGALOPS project team.

massive stars do have intrinsic polarisation, something which researchers are taking into account. “We expect a few of those stars in our data-set, and we have to be careful to distinguish them,” acknowledges Professor Haverkorn. The presence of dust grains in the Milky Way is another important consideration in the project’s research. “These dust grains are elongated and they spin. Their spin will automatically align with the magnetic field, so they will mostly spin in the same direction,” explains Professor Haverkorn. “If they all spin in the same direction, they will absorb more light polarised in one direction than light polarised in the other. This effect causes the polarisation from which we can measure the magnetic field. However, it means that the distribution and properties of the dust also influence the polarisation. Therefore, in order to measure the magnetic field, we also need to know how the dust is distributed. ” A more detailed picture of dust distribution is correspondingly important to the wider goal of building a new model of the Galactic magnetic field. Data from the Gaia satellite is again invaluable in this respect, says Professor Haverkorn. “Much better models are available nowadays. The presence of dust leads to stars appearing much redder than they would intrinsically be, which can be observed. By combining these observations together with distance data

www.euresearcher.com

from Gaia, people have tried to trace the 3-d dust distribution in the galaxy,” she explains.

This approach gives a much more detailed picture of dust distributions than previously possible. “Dust distribution is fairly clumpy.

Hot gas has been spewed out by supernovae explosions in some parts of the Milky Way for instance, and in that hot gas almost all the dust is destroyed. We cannot really see what is going on in the hot gas, because there is no dust,” continues Professor Haverkorn.

“There’s also colder gas in the Milky Way. The very coldest bits of gas are the molecular clouds, where stars form.”

The Galactic magnetic field is of course enormously complex, and so it’s not realistic to expect that the available data can accurately determine every specific parameter in a model. Researchers in this project are using Bayesian methods to build

models, assess their quality and identify the most relevant parameters. “We can make a model of the Galactic magnetic field, and a model of a certain dust distribution, then calculate what kind of observables that would produce. If we had a star at a certain location in a model, what kind of polarisation would that star have? We can then re-tune the model,” outlines Professor Haverkorn. There are many different parameters to consider here; Professor Haverkorn says Bayesian methods play an important role in this respect. “Bayesian methods give you a kind of quantitative measure of not only what are the best-fit parameters, but also the uncertainty ranges involved,” she says. “For instance, if I put a Galactic magnetic field strength of say 3 μG (microGauss) into a model, then Bayesian methods will also tell you the impact if you change that to 3.5 μG.”

Interstellar dust (Image credit: ESA/Planck Collaboration; M.-A. Miville-Deschêne).

57

MAGALOPS The magnetic field of the Galaxy, from optical starlight polarization

Project Objectives

This research will result in a next-generation Galactic magnetic field model that includes all observational tracers and can include current knowledge on this magnetic field as prior information. It will allow mapping out interstellar magnetized turbulence in the Galaxy, instead of providing averaged parameters only, and understanding the interplay between the local interstellar magnetic field, gas and dust. Its legacy is a 1000x increased stellar polarization catalog, an all-sky 3D dust model, a bayesian sampler for Galactic magnetic field models, and a preferred Galactic magnetic field model for use in cosmic ray modeling or foreground subtraction.

Project Funding

Funded under an ERC Consolidator Grant (ERC-2017-COG nr 772663) H2020-EU.1.1. - EXCELLENT SCIENCE European Research Council (ERC)

Project Partners

* IAG/University of Saõ Paulo, Prof. Dr. Antonio-Mario Magalhães * Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais, Dr. Claudia Vilega Rodrigues * IMAGINE collaboration

Contact Details

Marijke Haverkorn Department of Astrophysics Institute for Mathematics, Astrophysics and Particle Physics Radboud University PO Box 9010 6500 GL Nijmegen The Netherlands T: +31 24 365 2809 E: m.haverkorn@astro.ru.nl W: http://www.astro.ru.nl/~haverkorn/magalops/ Professor Marijke Haverkorn

Marijke Haverkorn is an Associate Professor in the Department of Astrophysics at Radboud University, Nijmegen, a position she has held since July 2017. She is Chair of the Netherlands LOFAR For Astronomy Consortium, and has been a board member of the internetional LOFAR telescope since October 2016.

58

Distribution of known stellar polarizations over the sky (Heiles 2000). The circles show the fields in the conducted observations of selected regions, with each circle representing hundreds of polarized stars. Image credit José Versteeg-Veltkamp.

Stellar polarization orientations in one selected region, where every line segment represents a polarized star. The background color indicates magnetic field orientation as measured by the Planck satellite. Image credit: Marijke Haverkorn; data credit Antonio-Mario Magalhães/José Versteeg-Veltkamp; background credit ESA/Planck Collaboration.

IMAGINE consortium This research is closely related to Professor Haverkorn’s work in the IMAGINE consortium, which brings together collaborators from several different fields to build a deeper understanding of interstellar magnetic fields.

While there have been many studies on the Galactic magnetic field, Professor Haverkorn says these research efforts have historically been separate from each other. “The new thing about the IMAGINE consortium is that we want to combine all these efforts together,” she explains. Bayesian modelling is at the core of the consortium’s work. “We are developing a big software package, where you can essentially input any module that you want,” continues Professor Haverkorn. “For instance, I could input a module that includes radio polarisation or optical polarisation data, or maybe a dust distribution model. Groups around the world are working on different parts, and we want to bring them together.”

The wider aim in this research is to build a deeper understanding of the Galactic magnetic field, a topic which holds intrinsic interest for Professor Haverkorn, while it’s also essential to several other areas of study.

For instance, researchers who study the propagation of cosmic rays need to take the Galactic magnetic field into account. “Cosmic rays are very high velocity particles, they move at close to the speed of light. The fastest cosmic rays are very rare particles, they’re the most energetic particles in the universe.

This means they can only be produced in very energetic sources, close to supermassive black holes,” outlines Professor Haverkorn.

It’s very difficult to identify the source of these cosmic rays, as they are deflected during their journey. “You need to know about the Galactic magnetic field to calculate that deflection,” says Professor Haverkorn.

“Another area in which the Galactic magnetic field is important is in investigating cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarisation.”

This provides evidence of the early history of the universe, so is of great interest to cosmologists, however it’s again important to consider the Galactic magnetic field.

The CMB signal is very weakly polarised, and Professor Haverkorn says the Galactic magnetic field effectively gets in the way.

“The Galactic magnetic field also produces a polarisation foreground which is much stronger than the CMB signal. So if you’re looking for the polarised signal of the CMB you have to know the Galactic foreground,” she explains. This underlines the wider relevance of the project’s research. “It is imperative to know about the Galactic magnetic field when you’re looking to make these very sensitive measurements and detect evidence of the early universe.

A number of research communities are interested in the magnetic field, so that they can draw the correct insights from their own measurements,” says Professor Haverkorn.

EU Research

Lightening the load of aluminium alloys The friction stir processing (FSP) method offers a means to modify the properties of materials, such as their ductility and resistance to crack propagation. We spoke to Professor Aude Simar about the ALUFIX project’s work in enhancing the properties of aluminium alloys, work which could be extended to other materials in future.

The development of materials with self-

NiTi particles in aluminium alloys

healing properties holds broad relevance to the commercial sector, with many companies across industry looking for materials that combine strength, toughness and durability.

As the Principal Investigator of the ALUFIX project, Professor Aude Simar aims to enhance the properties of commercial aluminium alloys.

“The project has three branches. One involves the modification of existing aluminium alloys, and their improvement by friction stir processing

This work involves inserting NiTi particles, a shape memory alloy, to introduce local residual stresses. This has been shown to improve the toughness of the material, specifically its resistance to crack propagation. “Some materials will have cracks. If you can stop these cracks from propagating, or delay their propagation, then you have a tougher material. This can be done by forcing the crack to continually change direction,” explains Professor Simar.

7000 series aluminium alloys are the highest strength aluminium alloys, used for aerospace applications.

We have improved the ductility by 150 percent.

(FSP),” she outlines. This (FSP) is a method of modifying the properties of metals, with researchers in the project using it to improve the ductility of 7000 series aluminium alloys, essentially the capacity to deform the material without leading to failure. “These are the highest strength aluminium alloys, used for aerospace applications. We have improved the ductility by 150 percent,” says Professor Simar. “A second part of ALUFIX is about using FSP to manufacture materials capable of making cracks deviate, thanks to the insertion of local residual stresses.”

3D distribution of NiTi particle in an aluminium alloy observed by CT scanner and colored by size class (red <40µm, blue 40 to 80 µm, green >80 µm), courtesy of Grzegorz Pyka and Nelson Netto.

www.euresearcher.com

Healable aluminium alloys The third part of the project centres around producing materials with the capacity to heal any damage that they may incur. Professor Simar says that some parts of an aluminium alloy are relatively vulnerable in this respect.

“These weak parts of the aluminium may break during loading, and currently they don’t heal,” she says. “However, within our alloys we have added healing particles. With the use of thermal treatment, we can activate these healing particles and repair damage, so that the material can bear load again near its full potential.”

These different options are all analysed and assessed within the project, with the ultimate goal of producing materials that are more effective than those currently available.

One new area of interest is in applying these techniques to additive manufacturing (3-D printing), although Professor Simar says this is a complex task. “With FSP, the materials are not melted, it’s a solid state process. While in additive manufacturing, the metal is melted then the material is built layer-by-layer. So it makes it a bit more challenging to make this material by additive manufacturing” she explains. This is something that researchers in the project are still working on, alongside trying to extend these principles to the development of other alloys. “In particular, we think that it could be interesting to look at magnesium alloys,” continues Professor Simar. “The major interest with magnesium alloys is that they are even lighter than aluminium alloys.”

This is a major concern for the aerospace sector in particular, where companies are keen to reduce mass without affecting performance.

It’s estimated that sending a 1kg package to space costs about 10,000 euros, so if the mass of the materials can be reduced without compromising strength, then costs can be saved. “There is a fuel saving over the lifetime of the component. In addition, the advantage of self-healing materials for aerospace applications is in-space repair - no replacement parts are required, only heat,” points out Professor Simar. Researchers are collaborating with aerospace companies, with a view to investigating how to implement this approach in this sector. Professor Simar says the project’s work could also hold important implications for the transport industry, although research is still at a relatively early stage. “Weight is an important consideration for the transportation industry, but at this point we’re more at the proof-of-concept stage than considering direct applications,” she continues.

ALUFIX Friction stir processing based local damage mitigation and healing in aluminium alloys Professor Aude SIMAR Associate editor “Materials Characterization” IMAP - Materials and Process Engineering iMMC - Institute of Mechanics, Materials and Civil Engineering Bat. Réaumur - b.116, L5.02.02 Place Sainte Barbe 2 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve Belgium T: +32 (010)47 35 65 E: aude.simar@uclouvain.be W: www.uclouvain.be/fr/ repertoires/aude.simar Professor Aude Simar is appointed at UCLouvain (Belgium). She is an engineer and attained a PhD from the same university and performed a post-doctorate at UCBerkeley (USA) in 2006-2007.

59

Behind the dynamics of material fragmentation Is the importance of inertia in the process of material fragmentation currently understated?

The Purpose project seeks to challenge the established framework by which material fragmentation is understood, work which holds important implications for material design and development, as Professor José A. Rodríguez-Martínez explains.

The process of dynamic fragmentation is currently understood largely as a statistical phenomenon, in which defects play a fundamental role in the fracturing of a material and therefore limit its capacity to absorb energy. While this approach to understanding dynamic fragmentation is fairly well established, Professor Jose Rodríguez-Martínez and his colleagues in the Purpose project are now exploring an alternative framework. “We think that the effects of inertia are important. Inertia could reduce the effect of defects – either material or geometric – on the final fragmentation of a structure,” he explains. This suggests that defects could play a secondary role in dynamic fragmentation, with inertia controlling the process to some degree.

“There is a kind of competition, but when inertia becomes dominant the role of defects may turn to be secondary,” says Professor Rodríguez-Martínez. “It is inertia, together with other properties, that controls dynamic fragmentation, and therefore the energy absorption capacity of a structure when it is subjected to impact loading.”

Purpose project This theory is the focus of interest in the Purpose project, with researchers looking to test it on both traditionally manufactured and printed metals supplied by a manufacturer.

Professor Rodríguez-Martínez and his team are taking a three-pronged approach to this work, involving numerical calculations, analytical models and experiments. “We are developing numerical calculations, based on computational mechanics, while we are also developing analytical models.

These analytical models are simple, but they capture the basic physics behind the fragmentation process,” he outlines. In the experimental work, Professor RodríguezMartínez is essentially investigating four different configurations. “First, we are analysing the fragmentation of expanding rings. We are manufacturing extremely thin rings, with a thickness of let’s say 1 millimetre.

In collaboration with a university in the US, we are then performing experiments in which these rings are expanded at very high

60

velocities, at rates of up to 250 metres per second,” he explains.

The rings are placed under great strain by this expansion and eventually they fragment into several pieces, with researchers in the project investigating the mechanisms which control the number of fragments and their size, as well as a variety of other topics.

Metallic materials behave in a non-linear manner, so identifying the factors which affect how they fragment is a complex and demanding task. “From an experimental point of view, it’s much more complicated to interpret the data,” says Professor Rodríguez-Martínez. The second type of experiment that is being performed in the project involves expanding thin wall tubes, which Professor Rodriguez-Martinez says is subtly different to the first experiment with the rings. “The stress state in the structure is different, and this changes the fragmentation pattern,” he explains. “We will analyse, by the comparison between the ring expansion experiments and the tube expansion experiments, the effect of the stress state on the fragmentation process.”

A third experimental arrangement involves the axial penetration of thinwall tubes. Instead of expanding the tube

radially, the experiment here centres on penetrating the tubes axially in a certain manner, leading to the formation of what are regularly called petals, a specific type of material fragment. “We are analysing the number of petals that are formed,” outlines Professor Rodríguez-Martínez. The fourth experimental arrangement centres around the dynamic collapse of thick-wall tubes. “In collaboration with a high-tech Israeli company, we are using an electromagnetic field to collapse quite a thick cylinder, in such a way that the cylinder will fragment by the formation and development of multiple shear cracks,” continues

EU Research

The ability to manufacture protective structures with additive manufacturing will lead to a drastic reduction in costs for manufacturers, as it will help reduce energy consumption and improve productivity. There are

many potential benefits.

Professor Rodríguez-Martínez. “These four different canonical configurations will lead to different fragmentation patterns.

We aim to understand the mechanisms which control the fragmentation of these metallic materials, and will obtain results from both printed metals and traditionally manufactured metals.”

Metallic materials Researchers are studying a number of different metallic materials in the project, one of which is a titanium alloy used extensively in the aerospace industry. Alongside the titanium alloy, researchers are also looking at three other industrially important materials.

“We are testing high-strength steel, which for years has been used in the automotive industry, as well as an aluminium alloy, which is also widely used in the automotive industry because of its high strength-to-weight ratio.

Then we are also testing Inconel, a superalloy that has been used for manufacturing aircraft engines,” says Professor Rodríguez-Martínez.

www.euresearcher.com

The aim is to investigate the influence of the mechanical properties of these four materials on their fragmentation behaviour, information which Professor Rodríguez-Martínez says is highly valuable to manufacturers. “We believe that in developing basic science and understanding the basic mechanisms that control fragmentation, we will help to design or tailor structures and materials with an improved energy absorption capacity,” he explains.

The current priority in the project is to investigate the basic mechanisms which control the fragmentation of a material, yet Professor Rodríguez-Martínez is very much aware of the wider commercial relevance of this research. Once the fragmentation of these materials is understood in greater depth, the next step could be to look towards technology transfer. “We could work with manufacturers for example, and help identify which type of materials should be used for applications where energy absorption capacity is particularly important,” outlines Professor Rodríguez-Martínez. The project’s research will yield important results for the commercial sector, believes Professor Rodríguez-Martínez. “We are in close contact with industry, and I think that this work will be very fruitful,” he enthuses. “It will take time of course for the results to filter through, due to the intricacy of the research involved, but certainly we are in touch with industry.”

This will be combined with continued research into the fundamental behaviour of materials. The focus of attention in the project is on the four different metals that have been described, but in future Professor RodríguezMartínez says they could look to analyse even more complex materials. “This is not only on the material basis, but also the structural basis,” he says. The advent of 3-D printed metals is having a dramatic impact on the materials sector, and the project’s research will help to further reduce costs and enable the wider use of the technology. “The ability to manufacture protective structures with additive manufacturing will lead to a drastic reduction in costs for manufacturers, as it will help reduce energy consumption and improve productivity. There are many potential benefits,” says Professor Rodríguez-Martínez.

PURPOSE Opening a new route in solid mechanics: Printed protective structures Project Objectives

The ERC grant PURPOSE is the first attempt to address the fragmentation of printed metallic materials using experimental, analytical and numerical procedures simultaneously. This project aims at providing a definite identification to the mechanisms which control dynamic fragmentation, a fundamental problem in the leading edge of knowledge that has remained unsolved for the last 70 years.

Project Funding

European Research Council (ERC) Starting grant PURPOSE (Grant agreement 758056).

Project Collaborators

• Laboratoire d’Etudes des Microstructures et de Mécanique des Matériaux LEM3, Université de Lorraine • Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Technion • IMDEA Materials Institute • Rafael Advanced Defense Systems • Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University • Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, University of Texas at Austin • Departamento de Engenharia Mecanica Universidade Federal de Santa Maria • Materialise

Contact Details

José A. Rodríguez-Martínez Associate Professor Head of the research group: Nonlinear Solid Mechanics Department of Continuum Mechanics and Structural Analysis University Carlos III of Madrid T: +34 91 624 9904 E: jarmarti@ing.uc3m.es W: https://www.nonsolmecgroup.com/ Professor Rodriguez-Martinez

Dr Rodriguez-Martinez is Associate Professor at the University Carlos III of Madrid and head of the Nonlinear Solid Mechanics research group. His research on the mechanical response of materials and structures subjected to extreme loading conditions has been funded with three European Grants over the last five years: the ERC grant PURPOSE, and the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions OUTCOME and QUANTIFY.

61

Materials for smarter sensing technologies

Multifunctional photonic sensing capabilities of the luminescent Guest@MOF material engineered for detection of different physical and chemical stimuli. (Graphics by Dr Abhijeet Chaudhari)

Metal-organic framework (MOF) materials hold rich potential with respect to the development of smart sensing technologies, as they can be tuned and adapted to detect different stimuli. We spoke to Professor Jin-Chong Tan about the work of the PROMOFS project in discovering and characterising new MOFs, research which holds wider relevance to several areas of industry.

The

materials currently used to develop photonic sensors have some significant limitations, because they cannot offer high selectivity, low detection limit, fast response time, and low-cost fabrication all at once. Based at the University of Oxford in the UK, Professor Jin-Chong Tan is the Principal Investigator of the PROMOFS project, an ERC-funded initiative which aims to overcome these shortcomings. “We are developing noninvasive sensors based on luminescence, so they can be used to detect physical and chemical perturbations,” he outlines. This could be small changes in temperature or pressure for example, with researchers looking at materials capable of detecting very low concentration of chemicals especially volatile organic compounds (VOCs). “This is at the level of parts per million (ppm), or even parts per billion (ppb). There are highend techniques which can do that, but they are expensive and they are not portable,” continues Professor Tan. 62

Metal-organic frameworks This forms the wider backdrop to the PROMOFS project’s research, with Professor Tan and his team working with metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), inspired to a degree by a class of naturally-occurring materials called zeolites. While these materials have a similar crystallinity and porosity structure as MOFs, they are not as tunable, so researchers in the project are designing new MOFs. “We are designing new materials. We have a novel family of ‘OX’-type MOF materials here at Oxford that we are developing, and we are targeting certain sensing applications,” says Professor Tan. These materials are engineered to overcome the limitations associated with traditional sensing materials. “The materials we are developing have high sensitivity combined with improved selectivity. Unlike the conventional resistive sensors, our sensing materials exhibit a significantly faster response time under ambient conditions,” explains Professor Tan.

Researchers are working to develop composites of these MOFs, with a view to using their porosity to confine a functional guest molecule, which is encapsulated within the cavity of the MOF. “This typically is a luminescent complex, a molecule that emits light. So, if you shine UV light at it, it can convert that particular wavelength into visible light, a colour. We can then use the variation in emission colour or intensity as a means of detecting physical or chemical stimuli,” explains Professor Tan. “We are building prototype sensors out of these MOF composites, in the form of low cost thin-film devices for example.”

The MOF effectively acts as a host, housing the luminescent guest, with Professor Tan and his team investigating different combinations and the unique photophysical properties that host-guest interactions lead to. There are two main components to MOFs; the metal nodes, which act like joints, and the organic linkers which act as bridges, and together they form the periodic framework. “We can design different combinations of the host and guest in a composite

EU Research

assembly to enable different types of sensing.

Furthermore we are developing new ways for shaping these sensing materials to create different morphologies, such as 1D fibres, 2D coatings, and 3D printed objects, so that they can be deployed in different ways,” outlines Professor Tan. This opens up a wide range of possible applications, including many in chemical sensing, yet a deeper characterisation of these materials is essential before they can be widely applied. This is an issue that Professor Tan is addressing in the project. “A range of techniques are available to characterise crystalline materials, to verify that they have the right kind of crystal structure and functional properties. We use X-ray diffraction, infrared spectroscopy, nanoindentation, and fluorescence spectroscopy for example,” he

or even less than that, making it hard to detect,” outlines Professor Tan. Another application is in force sensing, for enabling the detection of a mechanical response. “Strain or deformation of the MOF framework can cause changes in the light emission behaviour of the material. So we can calibrate this response to give a read-out of the stress distribution experienced by the sensor,” says Professor Tan. A wide variety of other possibilities have been identified beyond these specific examples, and Professor Tan is keen to explore the potential of this technology in terms of real-world applications. This could be a type of portable, low-cost sensor, capable of detecting toxic VOCs or for monitoring changes in temperature, pressure or pH for example, which could play an

If you shine UV light at a luminescent MOF with sensing capabilities, it can convert that particular wavelength into visible light, a colour. We can then use the variation in emission colour or intensity as a means of detecting physical or chemical stimuli. explains. Sophisticated techniques are also applied to look at the vibrational behaviour of these systems using high-resolution synchrotron and neutron sources. “So we can study how the host framework – the MOF – interacts with the luminescent guest, that is encapsulated in the cavity,” says Professor Tan. “That helps us to understand how these systems behave when they are empty, and when they are subject to different analytes.”

Applications The wider aim of the project is to apply these MOFs, with researchers seeking to harness their advantages over traditional materials in the development of photonics sensors for practical applications. A number of applications have been identified, including in the biomedical sector, for example to diagnose and monitor patients with diabetes. “A major challenge here is to detect small quantities of acetone in the human breath, which is a non-invasive biomarker for diabetes. We are really looking at parts per million concentration,

important role in many different areas. “There is huge scope out there. There are potential applications in the medical healthcare sector, environmental monitoring, food safety, civil security, just to give a few examples,” says Professor Tan. Together with his team at the University, Professor Tan has developed a series of new materials and composite systems targeting these sensing applications, and several patents have been filed. “We are looking at how to exploit these materials,” he continues.

This will run alongside continued investigations into new MOFs, with researchers seeking to discover further examples with intriguing new properties. While the first stage in the project involves looking at MOFs for single functions, Professor Tan says the next step is to build multi-functional sensors. “It may be that a particular MOF may be good at detecting acetone, while another might be good for detecting humidity. Thus it will be exciting to combine different MOFs in tandem, to achieve multi-functional devices,” he outlines.

PROMOFS Nanoengineering and Processing of Metal-Organic Framework Composites for Photonic Sensors Project Objectives

The PROMOFS project lies in the field of nanoporous materials engineering, focusing on the discovery, characterisation and application of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) as an innovative platform for disruptive photonics sensing technology.

The nanoscale pores of MOFs enable confinement of light-emitting molecules, to accomplish unconventional Guest@MOF photoluminescent composite systems.

Project Funding

ERC Consolidator Grant (Project ID: 771575) EU contribution: € 2 431 911 (2018-2023)

Contact Details

Professor Jin-Chong Tan Multifunctional Materials & Composites (MMC) Laboratory, Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PJ, United Kingdom.

T: +44 1865 273925 E: jin-chong.tan@eng.ox.ac.uk W: www2.eng.ox.ac.uk/tan A.K. Chaudhari and J.C. Tan, “Dual-Guest Functionalised ZIF-8 Framework for 3D Printing White Light-Emitting Composites”, Advanced Optical Materials, 8, 1901912 (2020) -https://doi.org/10.1002/adom.201901912 M. Gutiérrez, C. Martín, M. Van der Auweraer, J. Hofkens, and J.C. Tan, “Optoelectronic Materials Based on Gaq3@ ZIF-8 Metal-Organic Framework Composites for SolidState Lighting”, Advanced Optical Materials, 2000670 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1002/adom.202000670 A.K. Chaudhari, B.E. Souza, and J.C. Tan, “Electrochromic Thin Films of Zn-based MOF-74 Nanocrystals Facilely Grown on Flexible Conducting Substrates at Room Temperature”, APL Materials, 7, 081101 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5108948

Professor Jin-Chong Tan

Professor Jin-Chong Tan heads the Multifunctional Materials & Composites Laboratory (MMC Lab) in the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford. His research group focuses on porous framework materials, polymer composites, and hybrid thin films for advanced functional and structural applications.

Systematic changes in the optical response of a novel Guest@MOF material, allowing the accurate discrimination of a vast range of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). (Image by Dr Mario Gutierrez)

www.euresearcher.com

63

Building aerogels from nanocrystal foundations

Extremely lightweight, porous aerogel structures prepared from semiconductor nanorods under UV (left), white light (middle) and daylight (right) illumination.

Colloidally synthesised nanoparticles may have interesting properties, such as photoluminescence or superparamagnetism, and interactions between them may lead to the emergence of other properties. We spoke to Professor Nadja Bigall about the work of the MAEROSTRUC project in using these nanocrystals to develop multi-component aerogels.

There are several methods of producing aerogels and hydrogels, synthetic materials that are widely used in the commercial sector. While the majority of aerogels are still produced using relatively well-established methods, around 15 years ago a new approach was developed that involves the use of colloidally synthesised nanoparticles. “First you make a stable colloidal nanoparticle solution, and the colloidal nanocrystals in there may have some very interesting properties. They might be photoluminescent for example, or have superparamagnetism,” explains Nadja Bigall, Professor for Functional Nanostructures at Hannover University.

“Now you have these nanoparticles with interesting properties, and you can look to gelate them, to make them into a gel.”

MAEROSTRUC project This is a topic which lies at the heart of Professor Bigall’s work in the MAEROSTRUC project, an ERC-backed initiative in which the overall aim is to make multi-component aerogels from nanocrystal building blocks.

Researchers are able to develop the nanoparticles in a controlled way, which provides a solid foundation to then develop multi-component aerogels which combine the properties of their building blocks with new properties. “First we make these particles using state-of-the-art colloidal synthesis - we

64

Core-shell structured aerogel networks based on elongated semiconductor (top, middle) and spherical noble metal nanocrystals (bottom).

can achieve a high degree of precision over their shape, size and composition. Then we use these particles and look to find ways to make networks out of them,” outlines Professor Bigall. “We compare the properties of the building blocks to those of the assembled system, and investigate whether any new properties have emerged.”

A number of sophisticated techniques are being used in the project to first characterise the properties of the different nanocrystals that have been developed, including absorption spectroscopy, emission spectroscopy and spectroelectrochemistry.

This will enable researchers to build a deeper understanding of the optical and electronic properties of the different nanocrystals, such as how they absorb light, emit it, and how they conduct charge carriers, then new properties may emerge when they come together to form part of a bigger structure. “If the nanoparticles come close to each other, they can interact in certain ways, and this can lead to the emergence of new physico-chemical properties,” says Professor Bigall. “We want to find out how this happens through analysis of the structure-property relationship. Can we somehow conduct and control this?”

The nanoparticles themselves can be designed in such a way that they have certain optical properties, which can then be tuned and modified when they are inter-linked with

EU Research

each other through defined contact points, which Professor Bigall describes as microstructuring. Professor Bigall and her colleagues in the project are also investigating how they can make objects with certain shapes in the macroscopic domain. “We are really working on these three levels – on nanostructuring, microstructuring, and macrostructuring,” she explains. The nanoparticles themselves are typically around 10 nanometres in length, and there might be different domains in each crystal. “For example, you might have one metal domain and one semi-conductor domain. That is the nanostructuring level,” outlines Professor Bigall.

researchers seeking to gain deeper insights into the relationship between the nano- and microstructure of the material, and its overall macroscopic properties. A clear relationship between the nano/micro structure of the material and its optical properties was identified in a recent research paper, while further investigation could point the way towards some interesting developments in future. “One aspect of the project is about how you can make very electrically conductive networks of nanoparticles, so this could be interesting for the development of supercapacitors for example.

It could also be interesting for solar cells and areas like photocatalysis,” says Professor Bigall.

If nanoparticles come close to each other, they can interact in certain ways, and this can lead to the creation of new properties. We want to find out how this is happening through analysis of the structure-property relationship.

MAEROSTRUC Multicomponent Aerogels with Tailored Nano-, Micro-, and Macrostructure Project Objectives

Synthetic routes for nanostructuring, microstructuring and macrostructuring nanocrystal hydrogels and aerogels will be developed in the MAEROSTRUC project.

Nanostructuring involves advancement of colloidal nanocrystal synthesis as well as postsynthetic gel modifications.

Microstructuring involves synthesizing multicomponent gels with defined contact points of the materials and intercalating multicomponent gels. Macrostructuring involves implementation of the gelation techniques into 3D printing, and gel deformation by external triggers and will enhance the applicability of gels.

Project Funding

ERC Starting Grant (MAEROSTRUC): Grant agreement 714429 • Overall budget:€ 1 499 769

Acknowledgment

Can we somehow conduct this?

Thank you to Dr. Daniel Zambo and Pascal Rusch for providing the images contained within this article.

Aerogel synthesis

Contact Details

Researchers in the project aim to develop effective routes to synthesise aerogels and hydrogels, and to effectively tailor and control their properties. The project is only around halfway through its funding term, yet significant progress has already been made towards these wider objectives.

“We were able to synthesise a gel that was mechanically more stable. We achieved this by growing a very thin silica shell, just a few nanometres thick, around these networks of nanocrystals,” says Profess Bigall. This shell essentially insulates the nanoparticles and improves mechanical stability, providing the conditions for Professor Bigall and her colleagues to investigate the effect of contact between nanoparticles. “We can either couple or decouple the building blocks within the network, by growing this shell before or after synthesis,” she explains.

The next step beyond this is to then examine the resulting structures, with

“However it will take a lot of time to move towards any commercial applications.”

Research is largely fundamental in nature at this stage, with Professor Bigall and her colleagues investigating how these nanocrystals can be inter-linked to form macroscopic objects with specific, wellcontrolled properties. While commercial, practical applications arising from the project’s research are still a fair way off, Professor Bigall believes their results will open up new avenues of investigation. “The results will have an impact in certain areas of materials research. However, we’re engaged in fundamental research at this point,” she says. There is enormous scope for further investigation, and Professor Bigall is keen to continue her research in this direction in future. “There is much more work to do before we understand how to synthesise these new materials and control their properties. We have only scratched the surface so far,” she stresses.

Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Nadja C. Bigall Professur für Funktionale Nanostrukturen Insitut für Physikalische Chemie und Elektrochemie Leibniz Universität Hannover Callinstr. 3A 30167 Hannover T: +49 511 762 14439 E: nadja.bigall@pci.uni-hannover.de W: https://www.pci.uni-hannover.de/de/ forschung/arbeitsgruppen/

Professor Nadja Bigall

Nadja Bigall is Full Professor for Functional Nanostructures at Leibniz University in Hannover. She previously held post-doctoral positions at several different institutes across Germany and Italy before taking on her current role.

Concept of nanocrystal aerogel formation: from the synthesis of the nanosized building blocks to the dried gel structures.

www.euresearcher.com

65

It’s not all childsplay Playing with their peers helps children develop their social and cognitive skills, but should adults get involved? And if so then how? We spoke to Professor Sonja Perren and AnnKathrin Jaggy about their work in evaluating the impact of specific interventions on the quality of play, and whether these interventions could be more widely adopted in future.

Many important developmental steps take place between the ages of 3-4, as children start to spend more time with peers and experience longer separations from their parents. A lot of this time is spent playing with peers and developing imaginary scenarios, yet there are big differences in the quality of children’s pretend play, a topic at the core of Professor Sonja Perren and Ann-Kathrin Jaggy’s research. “We recently published a paper about how to assess social pretend play competence in young children. We identified five important features of pretend play,” says Jaggy, a researcher at Thurgau University of Teacher Education. These five features are decentration, decontextualization, roletaking, planning and sequencing.

Social pretend play “Children typically start playing on their own, then progress to engaging in pretend play with others, which characterises the decentration of the play. Decontextualization describes the point when children start pretending with real objects, then bring in more fantasy and use their imaginations.” explains Jaggy.

68

The role-taking feature relates to children’s ability to project themselves into a particular role that might be involved in an imaginary scenario, like a firefighter for example. Children may start with simple actions, then Jaggy says they often move on to do more complex planning. “They negotiate about the roles, who will be the firefighter, who will be the doctor and so on - it’s a higher level of pretend play. The last feature is the sequencing. High levels of sequencing mean that the children know that when there is a fire there is an alarm, they have to start at the fire station, then they have to drive to the fire, and so on,” she outlines.

One aim in the study is to investigate the impact of providing play material and adult support on the quality of social pretend play, with researchers evaluating the effectiveness of different interventions. “We have three different groups, and one group has an intervention where a research assistant goes into the group, plays with them and tutors them,” says Professor Perren, who is based at the University of Konstanz.

In the first group a research assistant provides role-play material, models the play and suggests ideas, so provides a fairly high level of support to the children. In the second group, children were given the roleplay material, but were not supported by the involvement of an external research assistant, while there was no intervention at all with the third group. “They participated in their normal pre-school activities, which mostly involved play,” outlines Professor Perren. These different approaches to promoting children’s quality of social pretend play will then be evaluated regarding their impact on children’s social competence. “We test how well they can play, their pretend-play competence,” continues Professor Perren. “We also test them regarding their social-cognitive skills, so their emotional understanding, perspectivetaking ability, and also their language. Then we also ask the educators and the parents about children’s social skills.”

A large part of the project’s research centres around testing causal mechanisms, and looking at whether it is possible to promote the quality of pretend play. While an outside

EU Research

observer might think that children’s play activities are extremely chaotic, Professor Perren says that high-quality pretend play is actually very structured, where everybody knows their role and there is a plan. “The question is; who is structuring it?” she asks.

While some people in education take the view that adults should not intervene at all in children’s play, Professor Perren believes that they actually have an important role to play.

“We believe that play should be initiated by children, as it’s highly motivating. But that does not mean that adults cannot support them,” she says. “It’s more of a supporting role that we envisage. One of our aims is to influence pre-school education and help improve practice.”

so that you are able to initiate social interactions for example and have a certain kind of assertiveness.”

A child who is socially competent has high levels of both, and social play is thought to be important to helping children develop these skills. The project’s research could contribute to a deeper understanding of whether adults can play a role in this respect, and Professor Perren is in the process of writing a number of papers on different questions around play tutoring. “Can we find differences between children? Does this play tutoring have any effect on children? Also, what is the role of the material in children’s play? We want to generate very strong scientific papers on that,” she says. A second major goal of the

THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL PRETEND PLAY The Impact of Social Pretend Play Tutoring on Preschool Children’s Social Development Project Objectives

Social pretend play is an activity through which children may train social, emotional and social-cognitive skills. Using an intervention design we specifically investigate whether play support (play tutoring or the provision of play materials) can effectively promote children’s social pretend play quality and subsequently their social competence. The current study adds knowledge on the causal role of play in children’s social development.

Project Funding

This project is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

We believe that play should be initiated by children,

Project Team

as it’s highly motivating. But that does not mean that adults cannot support them. One of our aims is to influence pre-school education and help improve practice.

Contact Details

Play tutoring Evidence on the impact of adult tutoring in social play, and the importance of play to the development of social and socialcognitive skills, is central to this wider aim. A lot of data has been gathered over the course of the study, which will help researchers build a more detailed evidence base. “We aim to generate scientific results about the relationship between pretend play and the social development of children,” outlines Professor Perren. Researchers are particularly interested in children’s social skills in peer relationships. “We define social competence as having two dimensions. One is about being cooperative and sharing, these are the other-oriented competences,” says Professor Perren. “The second part is about the self-oriented social competences,

study is to influence practice among teachers and educational professionals. “We are holding workshops for the educators who participated in the study, where we teach them about this active play support. If people are interested in play support then we provide a course and we are also working on an online module,” continues Professor Perren.

This will be ready within a few months, while Professor Perren and Jaggy plan to continue their research in this area and build a deeper understanding of how adults can effectively support children in play. The emphasis here is on providing support rather than guidance, allowing children to take the initiative and develop their skills while at the same time enhancing the quality of play. “High-quality education is about being supportive,” stresses Professor Perren.

Researcher Isabelle Kalkusch acting as play tutor.

www.euresearcher.com

Isabelle Kalkusch, Ann-Kathrin Jaggy, Barbara Weiss, Carine Burkhardt Bossi, and Fabio Sticca.

Project Coordinator, Prof. Dr. Sonja Perren Lehrstuhl Entwicklung und Bildung in der frühen Kindheit Fachgruppe Empirische Bildungsforschung Universität Konstanz Pädagogische Hochschule Thurgau T: +41 71 678 57 44 E: sonja.perren@uni-konstanz.de W: https://www.bildungsforschung.unikonstanz.de/fach/personen/arbeitsgruppeentwicklung-und-bildung-in-der-fruehenkindheit-perren/prof-dr-sonja-perren/

Professor Sonja Perren

Sonja Perren is Professor for Development and Education in Early Childhood at the University of Konstanz and Thurgau University of Teacher Education since 2012. She has a Phd in Developmental Psychology from the University of Berne. Her research and teaching focus on the quality of early childhood education (caregiver-child interactions) and children’s social-emotional development.

69

Caring for the carers Caring for a relative with dementia can be both emotionally and psychologically draining, and the burden tends to increase as the disease progresses. We spoke to Professor Pascal Antoine about the work of the PACIC project in developing web-based interventions designed to support caregivers, alleviate their distress and enhance their wellbeing.

A lot of

attention in research is focused on developing improved treatment for Alzheimer’s disease (AD), a neurodegenerative condition for which there is currently no cure. While this is of course a major research priority, it’s also important to consider the needs of those who provide care for people with AD, who are often close family members.

“Most of the time it’s one of the children of the person living with the disease, or their spouse,” says Pascal Antoine, Professor of Psychology at the University of Lille. Caring for a person with AD is a demanding and time-consuming task, as the caregiver often has to perform more and more routine tasks as the disease gradually robs them of their abilities. “The caregiver has to perform more and more daily tasks for the person affected by the disease, and to be highly vigilant, to protect them from danger,” outlines Professor Antoine.

PACIC project This imposes a heavy emotional burden on the caregivers themselves, who alongside observing the disease progress, also have to adopt a more controlling attitude towards someone they love, which can cause conflict.

As the Principal Investigator of the PACIC project, Professor Antoine is developing three new intervention strategies designed to lessen this psychological burden on caregivers and help them adopt a more positive approach. “We see that there are positive aspects to caregiving. However, when we hold interviews with caregivers, we find that they are often unable to perceive them,” he explains. This issue is addressed in the web-based interventions, each of which focuses on different goals within the wider objective of supporting caregivers. “One strategy is about

70

decreasing rumination and anxiety, while another is about helping caregivers to find enjoyment in their daily lives,” continues Professor Antoine. “Another is to gain in psychological flexibility.”

A caregiver may be able to deal with daily problems fairly effectively in the early stages of the disease for example, but

positive psychology and acceptance and commitment approaches, have been designed with the needs of caregivers in mind. “We are looking at the effectiveness of these three intervention strategies. We want to compare the benefits that are specific to each intervention and also to identify the common benefits,” outlines

One strategy is about decreasing rumination and anxiety, while another is about helping caregivers

find enjoyment in their daily lives.

Another is to gain in psychological flexibility. they may find that these strategies are less effective as the condition progresses and the symptoms become more severe. As a caregiver becomes increasingly exhausted and psychologically distressed, it becomes ever more difficult to cope with the evolution of the disease and its impact on the person living with the disease. “They often stick with their initial solution, even if those solutions are not effective any more as the disease evolves,” says Professor Antoine. The accumulated impact of this on a caregiver, who may themselves be feeling isolated and lonely, can be serious, and affect their daily motivation and overall state of mind. “The sum of events and daily challenges can lead to a kind of burn-out, as there is a lot of work to do,” explains Professor Antoine. “Dealing with this psychological burden can be very draining.”

The aim in the project is to develop strategies which will support caregivers in this respect, with researchers assessing three web-based psychological interventions in a randomized clinical trial. These interventions, centred on mindfulness,

to

Professor Antoine. The interventions include various activities and exercises, which researchers will evaluate over an eightweek period. “We ask caregivers to record the different exercises they did during a day, then to report on how they felt about them and what benefits they bring,” says Professor Antoine.

EU Research

Intervention strategies This will provide the basis for researchers to build a deeper understanding of the impact of mindfulness, positive psychology and acceptance and commitment approaches in terms of lessening the burden on caregivers.

The most effective exercises and activities within these three interventions could eventually be combined, to provide even more effective support. “We want to identify the best activities and exercises that have been proposed in each of the three strategies in order to build a unique intervention strategy,” outlines Professor Antoine. This research is very much focused on practical outcomes, and Professor Antoine is keen to translate his work into tangible benefits for caregivers.

“I hope that lots of caregivers could benefit from these kinds of intervention and that they could have a positive impact. I would like to move eventually towards wider utilisation of this kind of intervention,” he outlines.

The main focus at the moment is on interventions for people caring for individuals with AD, the numbers of which are rising in Europe. However, Professor Antoine believes that these interventions could in future be applied to people caring for individuals with other neurodegenerative diseases. “We are also working with people caring for individuals with Parkinson’s disease, then there are also other neurological conditions, such as Huntington’s disease. These types of web-based interventions could also be relevant beyond neurodegenerative disease,” he continues. With the elderly accounting for a sizeable proportion of the European population, it’s important to consider the needs of those who will provide care to people with chronic conditions in future, reinforcing the wider relevance of the project’s research. “It’s a public health issue.

These kinds of intervention could be relevant to any caregiver who is caring for their parents or their spouse,” says Professor Antoine.

PACIC Positive Acceptance and Commitment Interventions for Caregivers Project Objectives

PACIC aims to first test the feasibility and then the comparative effectiveness of 3 web-based psychological interventions for caregivers of patients with AD. PACIC proposes (1) an innovative caregiving supports centred on wellbeing and acceptance combined with (2) a web-based and self-training approach.

Project Funding

• MEL (Métropole Européenne de Lille) • CNSA (Caisse Nationale de Solidarité pour l’autonomie) • ANR (Agence Nationale de la Recherche) • Fondation Alzheimer • Fondation Médéric Alzheimer

Project Institutions • Université de Lille • CNRS

Project Labs/Ecosystem

SCALAB - https://www.scalab.cnrs.fr DISTALZ - http://distalz.univ-lille2.fr/ LICEND - http://licend.fr/

Contact Details

Project Coordinator, Professor Pascal Antoine Psychopathologie et Psychologie de la santé Université de Lille Site Pont de Bois, rue du barreau 59650 Villeneuve d’Ascq - France T: +33 6 85 06 52 82 E: pascal.antoine@univ-lille.fr W: www.opulse.fr Professor Pascal Antoine

Pascal Antoine is Professor of Psychopathology and Clinical Health Psychology at the University of Lille. His main fields of interest are the emotional and psychological issues involved in early diagnosis, disorder awareness deficits and their consequences on access to care, and the assessment of caregivers’ needs and difficulties.

www.euresearcher.com

71

Behind the economic impact of charisma Charisma seems like a mystical concept. However, social scientists now know how to model it and show how it can be a powerful motivational tool, encouraging staff to work in a more engaged manner. We spoke to Professor Christian Zehnder and Professor John Antonakis about their work in studying charisma scientifically and investigating its economic value.

An

organisation’s

commercial

prospects depends on its staff, and financial incentives are an important motivational tool in encouraging people to work efficiently and effectively. However, charismatic leadership, a ‘softer’ means, can also help motivate people to work hard, a topic that Professor Christian Zehnder and Professor John Antonakis are addressing. “We thought it would be very interesting to combine my background in economics with John’s knowledge of leadership to examine the topic of charisma,” says Professor Zehnder. The aim here is to study charisma scientifically, although the concept itself is not easy to define. “Individuals are seen as charismatic for many reasons – disentangling these reasons, and finding specific verbal and non-verbal behavioural strategies used by charismatic leaders is what we are after,” outlines Professor Antonakis.

What is charisma?

Professor Zehnder and Professor Antonakis conceptualise charisma as signalling information, as operationalized in 12 charismatic leadership tactics. “There are 9 verbal and 3 non-verbal tactics, that were clearly defined. With this definition, we can then scientifically study charisma by exogenously manipulating these tactics,” says Professor Zehnder. In a previous experiment, the two researchers together with their colleagues Roberto Weber (University of Zurich) and Giovanna d’Adda (University of Milan) investigated the impact of these 12 tactics on the behaviour of a group of temporary workers recruited to stuff donation envelopes for a hospital fundraiser.

The workers were split into groups. “We had two treatments where we paid fixed wages.

The key difference between these two groups was that one listened to only a standard motivational speech beforehand, while the other listened to a speech where the speaker employed charismatic tactics, such as using anecdotes, metaphors, and rhetorical questions. An additional, third treatment was that on top of the fixed payment, we also put incentive pay,” explains Professor Zehnder.

72

This use of financial incentives is known to motivate people doing routine tasks to work harder, which provides an effective benchmark against which to investigate the impact of charisma. “We wanted to look at the impact of charisma, relative to a motivator that we know well, like incentives,” says Professor Zehnder. The two versions of the speech were delivered by the same actor, with the same content, but with differences in terms of style. “In one version, the speaker acted in a charismatic way according to the definition, while in the other he acted in a non-charismatic, though still reasonably effective way. We wanted to see whether this had an impact on the workers,” continues Professor Zehnder.

on practical outcomes, yet it is not clear whether the effects of charismatic tactics can be sustained over a long period in motivating workers. Although financial incentives tend to retain their power, a charismatic speech may not have the same impact if repeated to the same group, so a speaker may have to come up with entirely new material. “For some people that might be quite easy, but for others it might be much more difficult,” points out Professor Zehnder. Professor Antonakis adds that “the information content of the speech, and what it signals is costly; not just anyone can signal charisma well.”

This is an area researchers plan to explore in future, while Professor Zehnder is also working on an experiment investigating

In one version of the speech, the speaker acted in a charismatic way according to the definition, while in the other they acted in a non-charismatic way. We wanted to see whether

this had an impact on the workers.

The results of this experiment were striking, with the researchers finding that the group who listened to the charismatic speech were significantly more productive than those that didn’t. Moreover, the motivating effect of charisma was comparable in size to that of financial incentives. Effective use of charismatic tactics can also have an impact in other arenas, for example politics, a topic of great interest to Professor Antonakis. “We have developed a model to predict who’s going to win the US presidency. We previously looked at the nomination speeches to the Republican and Democratic conventions in the US, and we have data on speeches of all the US presidential candidates, from 1916 to 2008,” he says. Whereas incumbency and the state of the economy are the most important factors in determining the outcome of the US presidential election, Professor Antonakis says that the charisma of a candidate can make the difference if economic signals are fuzzy. “Our model is pretty effective in explaining who wins,” he continues.

The team’s findings provide further evidence that charisma can have a real impact

the impact of charisma in a different type of working environment. “We want to look at an environment in which incentives don’t work,” he says. “In the first experiment the working environment was very simple, and we didn’t find evidence for a quality/ quantity trade-off. It is well established that in those types of environments incentives are very powerful.”

Quality/quantity trade-off The aim now is to look at situations in which incentives actually backfire, where incentivising workers to increase production has a negative impact on the quality of the product for example. One idea involves again stuffing envelopes addressed to potential donors for a fundraiser, but this time the task would be more complicated. “Workers will need to make sure the letter matches an address they’re given from a list, and they will also need to include some additional materials,” continues Professor Zehnder.

In this setup the researchers are exploring how to make the task more difficult, for

EU Research

example by folding and inserting a small origami heart, which takes time and attention. Although workers can save time by not doing the origami properly to earn a higher piecerate, doing so will reduce the quality of the materials and perhaps lead to reduced donations. Professor Zehnder plans to explore whether charismatic tactics are an effective motivator in this context. “If you use charisma to motivate people, you may be able to both increase the number of letters and also maintain quality,” he says.

There are many situations where pure economic incentives are ineffective in motivating people to perform a particular task, but charisma can be used to make people feel good about what they’re doing and stimulate their intrinsic motivation. It will also be interesting to investigate the combination of financial incentives and charismatic tactics in those more complex environments. “It is important to know if charisma allows us to retain the motivating power of performance pay without creating negative side effects. If people do their work because it makes them feel good about who they are or who they wish to be, it helps reinforce their identity; thus, it is key to align the charismatic vision with the values and identity of followers so that they focus on the strategic goal of the leader, instead of lining their pockets by cheating,” explains Professor Antonakis.

The wider context around Professor Zehnder and Professor Antonakis’s experiment involves helping children in a hospital, and although envelope-stuffing is by nature a mundane task, it can be made more meaningful by the use of charismatic tactics. In a speech to workers, the speaker uses charisma to

emphasise that doing this task well will help children have a better Christmas in hospital.

“The point is that charisma can be harnessed by leaders to make workers incur a cost – to work harder, to work longer, expose oneself to more risk,” explains Professor Antonakis.

Through this work, researchers hope to help explain the mechanisms behind the impact of charisma, while further experiments are planned. “Charisma not only affects an individual’s motivation to incur cost, but it can also affect what they believe others will do,” continues Professor Antonakis. “If a speaker is uninspiring, it’s unlikely to induce followers to coordinate their actions and likely make some followers free ride.”

Take the military as an example where a battle cry is given to charge. A charismatic speech by an officer could inspire soldiers to move forward together, even though they may be putting themselves individually at greater risk. Why? Because the soldiers know they can count on others to charge at the same time. However, a placid speech would have no such effect; “nobody, or certainly fewer soliders, would charge, because they know that others may not charge either,” says Professor Antonakis. Researchers aim to explore the underlying basis of how to solve such coordination problems using a game theoretic experimental setup. The idea is to get players to entrust their endowment in a public fund; but doing so exposes the investors to a risk if others do not contribute too. “People will only contribute if everybody else puts money in too – they don’t want to be the only person putting in and everyone else free-riding,” points out Professor Antonakis. “Initial evidence shows that charismatic leaders can help solve such coordination problems.”

THE ECONOMIC VALUE OF CHARISMATIC LEADERSHIP The Economic Value of Charismatic Leadership Project Objectives

Novel experimental research combines methods from economics and psychology to explore how leaders can use charisma to engage and motivate their followers. Initial results show that, in some settings, a charismatic speech can induce the same motivational boost as highpowered financial incentives.

Project Funding

Swiss National Science Foundation (Grant No. 100018_169793): “The Economic Value of Charismatic Leadership”.

Project Partners

• Giovanna d’Adda (Università degli Studi di Milano) • Roberto Weber (University of Zurich)

Contact Details

Project Coordinator, Professor Christian Zehnder Department of Organizational Behavior Université de Lausanne Quartier UNIL-Chamberonne Bâtiment Internef 1015 Lausanne T: +41 21 692 36 81 E: Christian.Zehnder@unil.ch W: http://www.hec.unil.ch/jantonakis/ charisma.htm Prof Christian Zehnder Prof. John Antonakis

Christian Zehnder (left) is Professor of Organizational Decision Making and Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Business and Economics (HEC) at the University of Lausanne. His research combines insights from Economics, Psychology and Management and builds on various methodological approaches, including laboratory experiments, field experiments and game theoretic models.

John Antonakis (right) is Professor of Organizational Behavior in HEC at the University of Lausanne. John’s research is currently focused on charisma, predictors of leadership, social cognition, and research methods. He frequently consults and provides talks, training and workshops to private and public organizations on leadership and human resources issues.

Photo by History in HD on Unsplash

www.euresearcher.com

73

Perspectives on integrable systems of infinite dimension Integrable systems of infinite dimension like the non-linear Schrödinger equation play a prominent role in the nonlinear applied sciences and are connected to many other subfields of mathematics. We spoke to Professor Thomas Kappeler about his research into solving these equations and analyzing the stability of solutions, which could open up new avenues of investigation.

The concept of

an integrable system arose in the 19th century in the context of finite dimensional classical mechanics. Over the last 50 years or so researchers have started applying it to study systems with an infinite number of dimensions such as partial differential equations. Based at the University of Zurich, Professor Thomas Kappeler, together with his colleagues, is investigating a number of such equations, including the Korteweg-de Vries equation, the non-linear Schrödinger equation, the sine-Gordon equation, and the Benjamin-Ono equation. “These evolution equations in one space variable not only model a wide variety of wave phenomena, but astonishingly turn out to be useful in many other areas of the applied sciences such as fiber optics, crystallography or molecular biology,” he outlines. The common characteristics of these equations are that they are nonlinear and have infinitely many conservation laws. “Most strikingly,” explains Professor Kappeler “they admit solutions with specific features, relevant in applications, which cannot be observed in solutions of linear equations.”

Method of solving integrable systems A powerful method of solving finite dimensional integrable systems consists in constructing special coordinates so that when expressed in these coordinates, the equation takes a particularly simple form.

74

This method is referred to as the method of normal forms. It allows researchers to solve the considered equation explicitly and to study the properties of its solutions, such as being periodic or quasi-periodic in time. It also allows researchers to answer questions concerning the confinement of the orbits of its solutions. Similarly, for infinite dimensional

In the cases considered, it can be shown that the transformations found share many properties with the Fourier transform and are in fact perturbations of the latter.

Surprisingly, they allow us also to obtain solutions of very low regularity by providing a means of extending nonlinear expressions which come up in these equations.”

Integrable systems of infinite dimension not only model a wide variety of wave phenomena, but turn out to be useful in many other areas of the applied sciences such as fiber optics, crystallography or molecular biology. linear systems, given by partial differential equations with constant coefficients, the renowned Fourier transform is such a change of coordinates. Very early on, the question arose whether the method of normal forms can also be developed for nonlinear integrable systems of infinite dimension. It turns out that for many of these equations, this is indeed the case, but that the transformation depends in a significant way on the equation considered.

“One of the goals of my research,” says Professor Kappeler, “is to further develop the method of normal forms for solving nonlinear integral systems of infinite dimension in a setup where the space variable is periodic and to apply it to study properties of their solutions, such as their long time behaviour.

Stability The second part of the research centres on investigating the stability of the solutions of infinite dimensional integrable systems. “The two parts of this research are actually closely related,” says Professor Kappeler, ”since the normal form method is of great use for studying questions of stability. There are two types of stability issues. Both are relevant for applications when solutions of such equations are used to make predictions.”

The first concerns the stability with respect to initial conditions. “If you change the initial conditions a little bit, do you get a solution which stays nearby? And if so, for how long?

It turns out that the normal form method can help answer such questions,” explains

EU Research

Professor Kappeler. “For the equations studied, it can be shown that the orbits of two solutions, starting near each other, stay close at all times.”

The second stability issue concerns the stability of the structure of the equation: “If you perturb the equation considered, does the perturbed system have similar properties as the unperturbed one?” outlines Professor Kappeler. “For example, we have detailed knowledge about the solutions to the twobody problem in celestial mechanics, say the motions of the sun and the earth. In this model, which is an integrable system of six dimensions, we know the earth moves around the sun in an elliptical orbit. If you add a small planet to this system, what can you then say about the perturbed system?

Is it possible that the orbits of sun and earth are significantly altered? If so, the system would be termed unstable. This is because even a little perturbation can change the whole system,” explains Professor Kappeler.

The issue of structural stability of finite dimensional integrable systems turned out to be daunting and it took generations of researchers to make significant progress.

Astonishingly, the answer, given by the celebrated theorem of Kolmogorov-ArnoldMoser (KAM), is of a probabilistic nature: for a typical integrable systems, the orbits of many, but possibly not all solutions of a slightly perturbed system remain almost unchanged at all times. “Typically, instability is related to resonances of the unperturbed system, since resonances channel the energy in different ways,” says Professor Kappeler.

In the last thirty years or so significant progress has been made in extending the KAM theorem to integrable systems of infinite dimension: many of these systems admit integrable subsystems of finite dimension.

Elements in these subsystems are sometimes referred to as periodic multi-solitons and might be large in size. Typically, these subsystems are

not invariant even under small perturbations, but for many of them one can show a KAM type theorem. Often, solutions of these integrable subsystems have specific properties, e.g., being a travelling wave solution. Hence a very natural question is, whether the corresponding solutions of the perturbed equation continue to have the same properties. “KAM type theorems can be used to answer such questions,” says Professor Kappeler.

Future research While significant progress has been made in research into integrable systems of infinite dimension, there is still vast scope for further investigation.

A result for a class of finite dimensional integrable systems, which is complementary to the KAM theorem, has been obtained

by Nekhoroshev. His theorem says that all solutions of a small perturbation of an integrable system in this class stay close to the orbits of the corresponding solutions of the unperturbed system. Up till now, corresponding theorems for integrable systems of infinite dimension have not been available.

However, partial results have recently been obtained. “We are currently in the process of proving that solutions of small perturbations of the KdV equation, starting close to a large class of periodic multi-solitons, stay close to the orbit of the latter for a long period of time,” outlines Professor Kappeler.

The wider aim in this research is to develop ever more sophisticated mathematical tools, in order to deal with stronger perturbations and integrable subsystems of possibly infinite dimension of the above mentioned integrable systems. “Maybe the most challenging goal is to develop the normal form method and perturbation theory for integrable partial differential equations in two space dimensions such as the Kadomtsev-Petviashvili (KP) equation, which models a certain type of waves on the ocean,” explains Professor Kappeler.

HAMILTONIAN SYSTEMS OF INFINITE DIMENSION Hamiltonian systems of infinite dimension Project Objectives

The concept of integrable system arose in the 19th century in the context of finite dimensional classical mechanics. In the aftermath of groundbreaking numerical experiments on nonlinear systems by E. Fermi, J. Pasta, and S. Ulam, researchers have started applying it to infinite dimensional systems.

The aim in the project is to advance the concept of integrable systems to evolution equations, relevant to the applied sciences, including the Korteweg-de Vries equation, the nonlinear Schrödinger equation, and the Benjamin-Ono equation.

Project Funding

The project is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation

Contact Details

Project Coordinator, Professor Thomas Kappeler Institut für Mathematik Universität Zürich Winterthurerstrasse 190 CH-8057 Zürich E: thomas.kappeler@math.uzh.ch W: https://www.math.uzh.ch/index. php?id=people&semId=36&key1=113 References (1) Kappeler, Thomas; Pöschel, Jürgen KdV & KAM. Ergebnisse der Mathematik und ihrer Grenzgebiete.

3. Folge, 45. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2003.

(2) Inci, Hasan; Kappeler, Thomas; Topalov, Peter , On the regularity of the composition of diffeomorphisms. Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society, 226 (2013) (3) Grébert, Benoît; Kappeler, Thomas The defocusing NLS equation and its normal form.

EMS Series of Lectures in Mathematics. European Mathematical Society (EMS), Zürich, 2014.

(4) Berti, Massimiliano; Kappeler, Thomas; Montalto, Riccardo. Large KAM tori for perturbations of the defocusing NLS equation. Astérisque 2018, no. 403.

Professor Thomas Kappeler

Thomas Kappeler is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Zurich.

He holds visiting positions at Universities in the US and also serves as an editor for the European Mathematical Society. His main research interests lie in global analysis and dynamical systems of infinite dimension.

www.euresearcher.com

75