Features

An Oxford research project mapping all the hillforts across England and Ireland, has been lauded by industry leaders at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) conference, Austin, Texas, as one of the best examples of multidisciplinary research in the UK.

Selected as the only Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project to be presented at the AAAS Conference, the atlas was built in collaboration with the University of Edinburgh and the support of citizen scientists across the country. The survey was five years in the making and includes information on all of the hillforts in Britain and Ireland – 4,147 in total, collated into a publicly accessible website. 

The AAAS Conference attracts more than 8000 delegates from broad ranging fields including academic science, government policy and more general interests.

Professor Gary Lock, co-principal investigator on the project and Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at Oxford University and John Pouncett, also of The School of Archaeology, Oxford University, attended the event alongside Professor Ian Ralston co-principal investigator and Professor of Archaeology at Edinburgh University, to demonstrate the atlas to attendees who also included school age children and their parents.

Professor Lock said, ‘To be chosen as the single project to represent the AHRC at the AAAS is an incredible honour that verifies the importance of our work and shows the leading position of archaeology within international humanities and scientific research.'

The unique resource provides free access to information about world-famous sites as well as many previously little-known hillforts, helping ramblers, cyclists, naturalists, and history enthusiasts discover them and the landscapes around them.

Mostly built during the Iron Age, the oldest hillforts date back to around 1,500BC and the most recent to around 700AD. Hillforts played a pivotal role in more than 2,000 years of ancient living and served various functions, such as defence and communal gathering spaces, while other uses have yet to be fully understood.

Terry O’Connor, Communications Director at the Science and Technology Facilities Council and lead for the UKRI AAAS campaign said: ‘We selected the Hillforts Atlas exhibit as an excellent example of the best of UK multidisciplinary research – combining archaeology, remote sensing, citizen science and other techniques to provide not only a new research tool but an exciting way of engaging the public with research. The team of Gary, Ian and John were fabulous ambassadors for the project, their science and their universities.’

Mike Collins, Head of Communications at the Arts and Humanities Research Council, said: 'The Hillfort Atlas project was the ideal fit for the AAAS conference in Texas as it showcases brilliantly the use of technology to tell the story of hillforts across the UK and Ireland. The Atlas was one of the public engagement hits of 2017 with hundreds of thousands of people visiting the website and an amazing reaction in the media and through social media. It's been a great example of how years of hard research work can pay dividends and get the public excited about the history of where they live or a place that they love to go on holiday too.'

Since its launch in June 2017 the Atlas website has been a tremendous success with the general public, students, academics and a range of environmental specialists. The site is still being developed with new functionality and analytical capabilities to be added.

Fort finder: An atlas of the hillforts of Britain and Ireland:

If you were asked to name a weapon used in World War I, you’d probably think of gas attacks, or artillery, or tanks.

But another unusual weapon was battering people across the world, and caused suffering long after the bell tolled on the 11th November 1918. It wasn’t a new invention: it was hunger.

Dr Mary Cox and Dr Clare Morelon, early career researchers in the History Faculty, and Principal Investigator Professor Sir Hew Strachan, are leading a groundbreaking international research project that is exploring how one of our most basic requirements—food—shaped World War I and its aftermath.

The Hunger Draws the Map project is revealing how the Great War, including a British and French blockade that prevented ships carrying food and weapons from getting to Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey until 1919, caused malnutrition and starvation across Europe and the Ottoman Empire - for years after the war ended.

“There was so much suffering in the world after the war was over,” says Dr Cox. “Yes, there’s the terrible stuff you hear about—injured soldiers, people who were maimed—but during and after the war, people were hungry.”

And debates have been raging for a hundred years about just how hungry people were. “We’re actually plugging into a debate that goes back a hundred years,” Dr. Cox says. “Some call it a myth; others say people were dying on the streets.”

By using innovative new methods and making thematic comparisons, Dr Cox and the team, working with an international group of researchers, are working on a book that will try to trace just how hungry populations were, and what effect this had on the post-war world.

The project is trying to understand hunger in lots of different ways. This involves looking at how much food was available and measuring the growth curves and weights of people at the time. But it also means thinking about hunger in other ways.

“How did states understand food security? What were the political responses to hunger? Who did everyone blame?” Dr Cox asks.

In Germany, farmers often got the blame. “People in the cities accused farmers of keeping their food for themselves, rather than giving it to people in towns and cities.”

And how did being hungry change the way people lived their lives? “The black market was huge, and people smuggled food when they could,” Dr Cox explains.

“But hunger also changed how people behaved. If you had an occupation where you physically needed to work a lot--swing a hammer, wash laundry, walk miles to get to a factory—that burned calories. People limited their physical activity in order to survive.”

And, with so little food, people had to resort to survival strategies. “People tried to grow gardens, or share what they had with their loved ones. In Germany, women sacrificed themselves for their children.”

Not many people know about how hunger was used as a weapon in this way, but Dr Cox says the impact was vast.

“This story really needs to be told and understood,” she says. “This war affected the rest of the twentieth century.

"Hunger is such a horrible, horrible thing to experience, people don’t forget very easily. People lost trust in their governments, sometimes their neighbours, and social divisions were often amplified.”

And, at root, this is a story about everyday people.

“Hunger is experienced on an individual level, so even though there were millions of people, we’re trying to put individual faces to their suffering,” Dr Cox says.

Together, the Hunger Draws the Map team are working on a thematic book that explores all of these issues from a comparative, international perspective, from Finland to the Netherlands to Bohemia. By doing so, they encourage us to remember, as we celebrate the centenary of the end of the war in 2018, how hunger drew the post-war map.

Proteins in cells underpin many of our most important functions, from muscle contraction to breaking down food. In a new study published in the journal Science, researchers from the universities of Oxford and Massachusetts explore how these proteins assemble into the 'complexes' that allow them to perform their specific tasks. Two of the paper's authors, Professor Justin Benesch from Oxford's Department of Chemistry and Dr Georg Hochberg, formerly of Oxford and now of the University of Chicago, discuss the study's findings. 

What are proteins, and what role do they play within organisms?

Proteins are the biochemical workhorses of cells. They make muscles contract, break down food, replicate genetic material, and underlie our senses. To perform these important functions, most proteins assemble into so-called complexes. A complex consists of several individual proteins chains that associate in a precise and stable geometrical arrangement.

What did we previously know about how proteins assemble and interact? What didn't we know?

Protein complexes are incredibly specific. Each cell contains thousands of different proteins, each of which is only part of a small number of complexes. So proteins have to be able to recognise their assembly partners with incredible fidelity, excluding from their assemblies the vast majority of other proteins. In general, proteins that interact to form a complex have three-dimensional structures that fit together tightly, with surfaces that display a high degree of shape and charge complementarity – that is, they fit together in both shape and with charges attracting rather than repelling each other.

But somehow many proteins also exclude other proteins from their complexes that have very similar shapes compared to their proper interaction partners. This happens because new protein complexes are often created by evolution through gene duplication, a kind of copy-paste mechanism in which two initially identical copies of a single ancestral complex are produced. Because their three-dimensional structures will be identical at first, the two copies initially always co-assemble into a complex together. But in many cases, they gradually 'forget' how to do this, and eventually only form two separate complexes – one containing only protein chains from the first copy, the other only chains from the second copy. Why proteins become selective in their assembly like this, as well as how they achieve it structurally, was completely unknown.

What did this research find?

We first found, by looking at many proteins from a variety of organisms, that proteins avoid co-assembling with the majority of their gene duplication copies and that this allows the two copies to carry out different biochemical functions. This means that 'forgetting' how to co-assemble with their gene duplication relatives is a key step in the evolution of novel biochemical functions.

We then worked out exactly how selective assembly is achieved structurally between two small heat-shock plant proteins that were created by gene duplication. Small heat-shock proteins protect other proteins from the dangerous effects of heat stress. Both proteins we studied assemble into complexes with only their own protein chains, but do co-assemble into complexes containing both kinds of chains.

To our great surprise, the two proteins had near-identical structures, with no clear sign of an absence of shape or charge complementarity that would prevent them from co-assembling. Instead, we found that evolution achieved selectivity in the most economical fashion, modifying only a minimal number contacts between the proteins, and exploiting very subtle differences in the way the two proteins deform as they assemble into their specific complexes. We could also show theoretically that such selectivity should be easier to achieve for complexes containing fewer protein chains, and that this has left a measurable imprint in the number of chains selective complexes actually contain in nature.

This was a highly collaborative piece of work, between biophysical chemists in Oxford and plant scientists at the University of Massachusetts, and required us to use a broad range of methods, from theoretical statistical mechanics, to computer simulations and experiments to determine the molecular structure of the proteins, to functional investigations on pea leaves.

What are the implications of this research?

Our results imply that a major rethink of the determinants of molecular selectivity in proteins is required, away from simple shape and charge complementarity. In addition, our data has demonstrated the selectivity in assembly of small heat-shock proteins is an important part of their function, and may give us new opportunities in developing more thermally resistant plants.

Dr Kamal R. Mahtani, an Oxfordshire based GP and deputy director of the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine, Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford, discusses the pressures on GPs and the factors affecting patient waiting times.

Over 50 million people in England are cared for by the NHS and at least 90% have their first NHS contact with a GP. However, getting to see a GP is increasingly becoming more of a challenge. The latest NHS patient survey showed that about one in five patients had to wait one week or more before they could see or speak to someone at their GP surgery. Ominously, the British Medical Association have added that patients should expect current waiting times to “rocket”. The Royal College of General Practitioners now estimate that by 2022 there will be over 100 million incidents of a patient waiting a week or more to see a GP or practice nurse. 

This is bad news for patients. Longer waiting times mean that fewer patients will be seen and - for those that do get an appointment - severe constraints on the time that a GP can devote to each appointment.

So what is driving these pressures? One obvious reason is that patient demand has increased substantially. A recent analysis, published in The Lancet, and led by a team at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, examined over 100 million NHS primary care consultations. The analysis showed that between 2007 and 2014 there were significant increases in both the numbers of consultations being requested by patients and the lengths of the consultations; the system, the researchers suggested, was reaching a “saturation point”.

Along with increasing demands to see GPs, the complexity of patients’ problems has also increased. A 10-year study of more than 15,000 people in England, aged over 50, showed a 10% rise in the number of patients who have two or more long-term conditions, so-called “multimorbidity”. NHS England has suggested that this is currently the greatest challenge facing the NHS, a challenge largely being managed by GPs. Patients who live longer, but with more health problems, also face the potential problem of polypharmacy, the use of multiple medications, sometimes justifiably, sometimes not. A 15-year study of over 300,000 patients in Scotland showed a doubling in the number of individuals who were taking five or more medicines. Avoiding the harms that medicines can cause, while maintaining their potential benefits by optimising their use, is a challenge faced by every GP every day, and one that can rarely be managed during a typical 10-minute consultation.

With rising demands and clinical complexity, the number of UK GPs continues to fall, a trend that, unless adequately addressed, appears likely to continue. A 2015 survey of over 1000 GPs showed that 82% intended to reduce direct clinical work within the next five years, citing work-related pressures, the changing nature of the job, and stress as contributing factors. A King’s Fund report has emphasised other problems contributing to the current pressures facing GPs: high levels of deprivation, a decline in self-management of minor illnesses, higher expectations, particularly of new services, and a fall in general practice funding.

If these pressures continue to mount, patients will suffer more than just longer waiting times. The Royal College of General Practitioners has suggested that the growing GP workload may affect patient safety. Empirical evidence suggests that this may already be happening. In a survey conducted by the British Medical Association, 93% of GP respondents reported that their workload had had negative effects on patient care.

Depending on what you read, the UK National Health Service is either one of the best health care systems in the world or one of the worst. Nevertheless, when the NHS was founded in 1948, “the most civilised achievement of modern Government” according to Nye Bevan, egalitarian implementation of the best standards of health care was expected to lead to reduced demands. The opposite has happened. The NHS has been hugely successful and is widely admired, but few will deny that it is suffering from its own success. For that success to be maintained, the factors that are harming it must be recognised and remedied. Given the number of patients served by general practice, this should be an obvious priority.

Luke Jackson from the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School explains how achieving the Paris Agreement could help to slow sea-level rises.

Achieving the aim of the Paris Agreement, to hold the rise in global average temperatures to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, by the end of this century could dramatically reduce potential sea-level rise compared to projections based upon business-as-usual scenarios.

A lot of research on sea-level change had previously focused upon high future Global Warming. Since the Paris Agreement was signed in late 2015, there has been a switch in focus to think carefully about how the climate (including sea level change) will respond if we succeed in achieving Paris’s aims.

Future sea-level rise has the potential to affect millions of people and billions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure world-wide by increasing the vulnerability of coastlines to flooding from tides, wind-driven waves and storm surges.

In our own study published this month - 21st century sea-level rise in line with the Paris accord - we apply a novel method to project future sea-level rise at a global and a regional level for the two temperature levels stated in the Paris Agreement.

The new research shows that achieving a 1.5 °C or 2 °C temperature rise by 2100 could result in a global sea-level rise of 44 cm and 50 cm respectively. This is in contrast to a rise of 84 cm for a business-as-usual scenario if temperature rises around 4 °C by 2100. The difference between achieving Paris and a business-as-usual scenario is even more marked when comparing low-chance (1-in-20), high impact projections. In this case, the global projections are 67 cm versus 180 cm for 1.5 °C and business-as-usual respectively, a difference of more than 1 metre.

Differences of this size are significant for decision makers regarding Climate Change mitigation (achieving the Paris Agreement will require rapid, deep emissions reductions) and coastal adaptation strategies.

The full paper, ‘21st Century Sea-Level Rise in Line with the Paris Accord’, by Luke Jackson, Aslak Grinsted and Svetlana Jevrejeva, can be read in Earth’s Future.