Features

Ecologists and scientists will gather in Wytham Woods today to celebrate the 60th anniversary of its designation as a Site of Special Scientific Interest [SSSI].

Wytham was made an SSSI in 1950 and for the last 60 years has hosted an enormous variety of long-running ecological studies of mammal, bird and insect populations by Oxford University researchers including such important figures as Charles Elton, EB Ford, and Sir Richard Southwood.

The history of ecological science at Wytham is celebrated in a new OUP book, Wytham Woods: Oxford’s Ecological Laboratory, which is co-edited by Peter Savill of the Department of Plant Sciences and includes contributions from a large number of Oxford University researchers.

The book will be launched at today’s special meeting of the British Ecological Society [BES] at Wytham Village Hall and showcases the amazing variety of research from studies of the diet and lifestyle of foxes and badgers, to charting the impact of climate change on the nesting behaviour of birds such as great tits, and assessing how invertebrates, from spiders and earthworms to moths and caterpillars, interact with plants and provide food for other animals.

An Oxford-led review published last week in the Cochrane Library  - that gold-standard source for the best evidence-based medical care - showed how empowering people at risk of blood clots to determine their own dose of anti-clotting drugs leads to a large drop in adverse events and deaths.

Carl Heneghan from the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine [CEBM] at the University of Oxford and colleagues found a 50 per cent drop in the number of blood clots and a 36 per cent reduction in deaths among those patients who were able to monitor their own anti-clotting therapy.

Warfarin (Coumadin) is used in a number of conditions where there is a risk of dangerous blood clots, such as deep-vein thrombosis, abnormal heart rhythms, pulmonary embolism, and in patients with mechanical heart valves. In those at increased risk of stroke, warfarin reduces the likelihood of a stroke but also its severity.

The number of people taking anti-clotting drugs is on the up as they are increasingly used for more diseases and the population ages. But it is important to get the dose absolutely right, as while the drugs can prevent clots they can also go too far and cause major bleeds.

Typically, people have to have blood samples taken at a GP surgery or specialist clinic to determine the correct warfarin dose. Once the right dose has been established initially, patients still need to have blood tests on average around once a month.

But a simple device – like those used by diabetics to monitor their blood sugar level – can be used by people on the anti-clotting drug warfarin to help them determine the correct dose. Patients using the device can then either adjust their own medication using pre-determined guidelines (self-management) or they can call a clinic to be told the appropriate dose adjustment (self-monitoring).

Carl Heneghan and colleagues assembled all the best evidence there is to compare outcomes for patients using these different ways of monitoring warfarin levels. They combined data from 18 trials involving a total of almost 5,000 patients. In a podcast on the website of the Cochrane Collaboration, Carl Heneghan says the conclusion was clear: ‘Compared to standard monitoring, patients who self-monitor or self-manage can improve the quality of their oral anticoagulation therapy.’

However, it is worth pointing out that self-monitoring or self-management of warfarin wasn’t possible for up to half of patients for a variety of reasons. These included inability to complete the necessary training, simple refusal by the patient, or exclusion by their GP.

So there is a need for doctors to be able to identify those patients that would benefit. Still, most would agree that giving patients power over their own treatment where possible is a good thing.

‘Self monitoring has impact beyond just the reduction in adverse events,’ says Carl Heneghan. ‘Issues like freedom to travel and time off work for blood tests are important factors for individuals in determining whether to self-test.’

Another Cochrane review published at the same time may also offer significant relief for a different set of patients. As reported in The Times, Sheena Derry of the Nuffield Department of Anaesthetics at Oxford University and colleagues found that migraine sufferers might get pain relief by taking slightly more aspirin than the recommended dose.

David Rose reports that: ‘Taking up to three tablets – up to 1,000mg – in one go could leave one in four (25 per cent) sufferers pain-free within two hours.’ More than half of patients experienced some relief from their debilitating headaches at this dose. Adults are normally advised to take no more than two aspirin tablets in one go.

The researchers also found that aspirin also helped to prevent nausea, vomiting and sensitivity to light commonly caused by migraines – but sachet formulations combining another anti-sickness drug, metoclopramide, worked best at this.

As part of efforts to understand the impact of the ash cloud from Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano an Oxford team have been using LIDAR to search for airborne ash over southern England.

LIDAR sends pulses of coherent light up into the sky and measures scattered and reflected light from any particles or debris floating in the air. From timing the 'echoes' it can determine not only the presence of material but also measure its height and thickness.

Last week Adam Povey, of Oxford University's Department of Physics, was scrambled to STFC's Chilbolton Observatory in Hampshire to use a system, jointly operated by both Oxford University and Hovemere Ltd, to see if any sign could be detected of the ash cloud passing over southern England.

By last Friday his measurements could detect a thin layer of material at around 3km altitude (c10,000 feet up), part of which slowly descended over the following couple of hours before merging with echoes from other debris at the top of a convection layer (the Planetary Boundary Layer) around 3,000 feet up. Below that height, the air is full of all sorts of other debris, including human-generated pollution, so is difficult to untangle from the volcanic ash.

Since then Adam, part of Don Grainger's group at Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics, and the team have continued to monitor the cloud and are publishing updates of the latest information and images online.

Andy Sayer, another member of the Oxford team, told me: 'From the satellites we're getting the 'big picture' of what's happened over Europe over the course of the past week or so, although because of the way the satellites sample the revisit time for any one location can be a couple of days.'

'From this we can estimate the light extinguished by the ash, and learn about the size of the particles, as well as measuring the amount of sulphur dioxide released during the eruption and where that's going.

'The lidar, on the other hand, is giving us a continuous profile of any ash at one site (Chilbolton) and we can see how distinct any layers are and how they're mixing with the rest of the atmosphere.'

Tomorrow at 2pm Susan Cheyne will be updating listeners to Radio Oxford on the progress of her conservation work in Borneo.

Susan, of Oxford University's WildCRU, is leading research into the agile gibbon and wild cat species for the OuTrop project.

We've blogged about her work before, including the amazing images and sounds of gibbons swinging through the trees and how camera traps set up in the forest have snapped photos of elusive species, such as the clouded leopard.

Above are a selection of the latest photos from her work: this year, the 8th they have been studying orangutans and the 7th agile gibbons, has seen the birth of 2 orangutans and 3 gibbons in the groups studied.

The project is hoping to make a real difference, not just to the forest apes but to the overall ecology of the rainforest: Susan has already raised over £7,000 to provide equipment to help combat forest fires and this year the team have started the first ever long-term regeneration project to re-forest the degraded peatland.

They are also offering a new training programme for the project's Indonesian staff to help pass on the skills needed to continue and expand the scientific and conservation work.

On Thursday she'll be explaining more about her research, and how members of the public can help, at an event at Science Oxford.

Dr Susan Cheyne is a member of the WildCRU, part of Oxford University's Department of Zoology.

Oxford start-up Plink Search Ltd has become the first UK company to be purchased by Google Inc.

The firm was founded in 2009 by Mark Cummins and James Philbin, two graduate students from Oxford University’s Department of Engineering Science, to commercialise technology stemming from their doctoral research.

‘Mark and I were both involved in developing visual search during our DPhils,’ James tells me. ‘Mark's research focused on visual place recognition for robot navigation, which culminated in the FabMap software. My own research looked at how visual search could be scaled robustly and efficiently to handle millions of consumer images crawled from sites such as Flickr.’

During their doctoral research, with supervisors Paul Newman and Andrew Zisserman, they realised that, although they were approaching visual search from different angles, their combined skills could reap dividends: making it possible to build a visual, rather than text, search engine that could power a mobile phone application.

James comments: ‘Our research really showed that large scale, accurate visual search was possible even with the poor imaging conditions of mobile phone cameras.’

‘By the end of our DPhils it was clear there was a great commercial opportunity,’ Mark explains. ‘The fact that there were two of us in the same lab with matching expertise and an interest in starting a company was pretty ideal.’

They decided to form a company to develop an application that could recognise art work from photos taken by mobile phones, using the FabMap code licensed from Isis Innovation as a starting point. Mark tells me: ‘It was a good baseline to start building Plink. The technology that a robot uses to recognise places versus how we do painting recognition on a mobile phone is really very similar.’

The start-up went from strength to strength with the PlinkArt application winning first prize in Google's Android Developer Competition, which identified the best applications for the Android phone operating system. It was announced today on the company blog that Plink Search is the first UK firm to be bought by Google.

‘We're both delighted with the acquisition and very pleased to be moving to Google,’ James reveals. ‘Being engineers at heart, working at Google will allow us to tackle some really interesting large scale vision problems with the computing power to back up our ambition!’

So how did their DPhil at the Department of Engineering Science prepare them for life as high-tech entrepreneurs?

Mark tells me: ‘I think doing a DPhil is actually a great route into starting a company. You get very deeply into some interesting technology, but at the same time you have the space to keep an eye on what's happening in the market.’

‘At heart we're engineers and absolutely did our DPhils for the love of it, but we were always aware of the commercial possibilities too. I think starting a company feels much more like a natural continuation of doing a DPhil than taking a job would be.’