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It might sound alarmingly similar to the prehistoric procedure of trepanning, but decompressive craniectomy – the removal of a large part of the skull to reduce swelling in the brain – is still used as a last-resort treatment for traumatic brain injury or stroke by surgeons around the world.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the complication rate of this major operation is high. As the brain 'mushrooms' out of the skull following the removal of bone from the skull, stresses and stretches placed on other parts of the brain can lead to neuronal damage and potential long-term disability.

But this is no longer just a challenge for neurosurgeons. Mathematicians are now able to study and model the impact of surgery at organ level, developing a more specific picture across the whole brain. Professor Alain Goriely of Oxford Mathematics and Stanford colleagues Professor Ellen Kuhl and Dr Johannes Weickenmeier have looked at the issue by studying a standard physical problem: the problem of bulging in soft solids.

Bulging takes place when a material swells while constrained – except at an opening, as seen when the skull is opened during decompressive craniectomy and the brain bulges out of the newly created hole. This can create deformations in another part of the brain, away from the immediate incision.

Researchers used high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging to create craniectomy models.

Image credit: Alain Goriely

To quantify possible deformations inside the brain, the team created a personalised craniectomy model from high-resolution medical resonance imaging. Their study reveals three mechanisms of failure that could denote damage beyond the initial incision point: axonal stretch in the centre of the bulge (axons are nerve fibres that carry impulses away from nerve cells), axonal compression at the edge of the craniectomy, and axonal shear around the opening. Strikingly, even small amounts of swelling can induce axonal strain in excess of 30% above reported damage thresholds in patients.

Professor Goriely said: 'This research points towards a possible way of proving and identifying long-term damage to the brain following decompressive craniectomy. Indeed, this theoretical study is a first step towards gaining better insight into the complex mechanisms underlying craniectomy and opens the door for systematic personalised studies of craniectomy in patients. The next step is to combine this theoretical work with experimental and clinical work to enable surgeons to provide better-informed and more successful treatments.'

Today is international languages day. But in the UK, modern languages is “at a crossroads”, according to an Oxford University professor. Katrin Kohl, professor of German Literature, says the perception of languages in schools and society is suffering.

Today, she and her fellow researchers have launched a major four-year research programme to investigate the interconnection between linguistic diversity and creativity. The project, called Creative Multilingualism, will explore how being able to speak more than one language can make us more creative. There is much more information about the planned research on the project’s website.

Professor Kohl tells Arts Blog a bit more about the project:

"Modern Languages is at a crossroads, and an ambitious research project will seek to give new impetus to the subject by putting creativity at the heart of it. This runs counter to the way languages are currently perceived, both in schools and in society – as a subject that consists merely of a bundle of practical skills. Research on Creative Multilingualism is designed to open up and showcase the cultural and cognitive riches associated with linguistic diversity, in order to reinvigorate the subject across the educational and academic spectrum and in society.

The researchers will be working on projects that are designed to investigate the creative roots of Modern Languages in the humanities, and explore the role of creativity in the interdisciplinary reach of languages as the communicative medium that characterises us as human beings.

In schools, Modern Foreign Languages has been suffering attrition for years, with the Government’s decision in 2004 to make inclusion of a language at GCSE optional leading to a significant and ongoing drop in take-up and in progression to A level. Together with league table pressures and the complexity and teaching-intensive nature of the subject, this has impacted negatively on Modern Foreign Languages departments in schools, and in turn caused some fifty university departments to close.

The falling number of Modern Languages graduates has contributed to an intensifying teacher shortage, with Brexit uncertainties now impeding recruitment from France, Spain and Germany. These factors have contributed to an unprecedented crisis in the subject, with a danger of meltdown especially in the state sector.

But we also need to ask ourselves why children and young people have been voting with their feet, and what’s been happening with the subject itself. We need go no further than the A level syllabus in force until this summer to find that the subject has been drained of academic substance. It restricts assessment to the ‘four skills’ of speaking, listening, reading and writing while reducing cultural content to a ‘carrier’ of language that is not assessed. This is like calling an A level subject “Maths” when actually it only consists of Applied Maths.

Moreover, at a time when the rise of global English has reduced the incentive to learn languages for native speakers of English, it has restricted the subject to its driest parts, with too few lessons per week to ensure sufficiently swift progress to sustain motivation. This reductive development has also opened up a gulf between Modern Foreign Languages in schools, and Modern Languages as they’re taught and researched in the humanities sections of Russell Group universities.

The Arts and Humanities Research Council is now investing an unprecedented £20 million into multi-institutional and interdisciplinary research as part of its Open World Research Initiative. This is designed to transform and invigorate Modern Languages research, and incentivise academics to work with partners that can help to raise the status of languages across UK society.

Four major collaborative research programmes led by Cambridge, King’s College London, Manchester and Oxford are being funded over the next four years to build a stronger and more vibrant identity for the subject, and to open up Languages to include ‘lesser taught’ ones in schools such as Mandarin and Arabic, and encourage cooperation between university departments in (European) Modern Languages and departments that teach Asian and African languages.

The Oxford-led programme entitled Creative Multilingualism includes researchers from Birmingham City University, Cambridge, Reading, SOAS, Pittsburgh, and the University of California, Santa Barbara. Together they have expertise in over 40 languages, which they will draw on as they conduct their research on the interaction and interdependence of linguistic diversity and creativity. They will be focusing on different aspects of language, ranging from the relationship between language and thought through to the interaction between languages in literary texts and theatrical performances.

A project on translation will investigate how moving from one language to another not only results in a transposed text, but also opens up new dimensions of meaning that lay hidden in the original. An empirical study conducted in UK classrooms will compare learning outcomes between functionally oriented tasks and tasks involving linguistic creativity.

A vital part of Creative Multilingualism is its work with partners including the British Council, the Association for Language Learning, English PEN, GCHQ, Business in the Community and a wide range of schools. In conferences, workshops, a Multilingual Music Fest, after-school clubs, a Linguamania event in January 2017 and a Road Show planned for 2019, participants of the programme will collaborate to showcase and explore linguistic creativity, make the value of community languages more visible, and give a more imaginative dimension to career choices involving languages.

Above all, they will seek to generate enthusiasm for the value of languages as a fascinatingly diverse medium of communication that allows us to express our cultural identities creatively, individually, and in original ways."

Philosophers take on the world. This isn’t a doomsday news story, but the title of a new book which has been published by Oxford University Press today.

The chapters have been adapted from pieces written for the popular Practical Ethics blog, run by the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics in Oxford University’s Philosophy Faculty.

The authors are experts in ethics, medicine, politics and current affairs – and many are academics at Oxford University.

To mark the launch of the book, its editor Dr David Edmonds has written a guest post for the Arts Blog.

Dr Edmonds is a Senior Research Associate at Oxford’s Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, as well as a BBC documentary-maker, podcast producer and author. Here is his post, which is titled 'In defence of moral experts':

I’m no expert. Still, I reckon the notorious claim made by Michael Gove, a leading campaigner for Britain to leave the European Union, that the nation had had enough of experts, will dog him for the rest of his career. In fact, he wasn’t alone.  Other Brexit leaders also sneered at the pretensions of experts, the majority of whom warned about the risks – political, economic, social - of a Britain outside the EU.

Those who dismiss experts have a habit of using the prefix “so-called”. Time will tell (probably not much time) whether Gove was right to dismiss the anxieties of “so-called experts”. Still, despite the beating he received in sections of the press, his was on politically safe ground. There is a suspicion of experts in Britain, part of a more general suspicion of elites and of the establishment.

The world of philosophy suffers from a similar malaise. There are few philosophers who can claim to be public intellectuals, at least in the Anglo-American world. As we know, the French are willing to embrace and celebrate their philosophers in a way that the British find uncomfortable. We have one or two philosophers with the flowing locks of Bernard-Henri Lévy but none with his profile or standing.

It’s not just that the British public has a strain of anti-intellectualism, and a weaker appetite than the French for philosophical input to the national debate. It’s also that the few philosophers who do attempt to contribute to the world beyond the Academy risk ridicule within the profession. No doubt this is driven in part by an unworthy, if natural, envy.  “They’re not serious” is the sotto voce (and sometime not so sotto voce) verdict of colleagues who appear in print or on TV or radio.

Within my sub-genre of philosophy – practical ethics – the suspicion of public engagement has a more specific cause.  It’s often asserted that moral philosophers can’t claim expertize in ethics in the same way a chemist, for example, can be an expert on a molecule.

That’s a concern that puzzles me.  Certainly there’s some evidence – from the UC Riverside philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel - that those who write about and teach courses in ethics are no more ethical than anybody else.  And it’s true that specializing and so commanding authority in trichloro-2-methyl-2-propanol is disanalogous in various ways to being an authority in some corner of practical ethics – not least in how this expertize can be tested.

Still, I want to defend the expertize of moral philosophers, to maintain that their views in their chosen field merit respect and at least a degree of deference.  We should heed attention because they have mastered the relevant information on their topic and brought to bear the philosopher’s chief tools, depth and clarity of thought. They have marshalled arguments and ironed out inconsistencies.  And practical ethics is tough.  To take just one example – trying to work through the metaphysics of what gives human beings moral status, and the implications of this for a variety of non-standard cases, is hugely complex. 

I endorse what the White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford, Jeff McMahan, says: “Questions about abortion and termination of life support, and euthanasia, and so on, are really very difficult. We are right to be puzzled about these issues, and people who think that they know the answers and have very strong views about these matters, without having addressed these issues in metaphysics and moral theory are making a mistake. They should be much more sceptical about their own beliefs.”

Sometimes the philosopher’s arguments about an issue merely shores up common-sense. But the role of the philosopher cannot merely be to describe the standard position. That would reduce philosophy to a branch of psychology, or anthropology, or sociology. The moral philosopher does not just ask how much people give to charity, or want to give to charity, relevant though these questions are, but how much should they give to charity.

But whether it be John Stuart Mill on women’s rights, or Peter Singer on animal rights, philosophical reasoning can produce results that the then majority find objectionable, even repugnant. My appeal is that in such cases we should pay close attention to the philosophy, to how conclusions are reached. Our prima facie position should be that the philosopher has a good case.

There is some evidence that in their quiet way, British philosophers are beginning to assert themselves. I was delighted to see that in a recent week of five BBC essays devoted to post-Brexit Britain - three of the authors, John Gray, Onora O’Neill and Roger Scruton - were philosophers. In the book I’ve just edited, Philosophers Take On the World, over forty philosophers address stories in the news and argue for often counter-intuitive positions.

Counter-intuitive perhaps, but my starting position is that we should take ethics experts seriously. Who knows, Mr Gove, they may even be right.

On World Alzheimer's Day (21 September), Oxford scientists are beginning a new study in the battle to beat the increasing issue of dementia.

Dementia is a truly global issue and to tackle it, we need a joined-up approach. Oxford is leading the way in dementia research and this funding will help us to continue to make progress for all those affected.

Professor Richard Wade-Martins, Coordinator, Oxford Alzheimer's Research UK Network Centre 

Charity Alzheimer's Research UK, the UK’s leading dementia research charity, have increased their support for Oxford dementia research with two awards. One will support the community of dementia researchers in Oxford to work together towards the goal of defeating dementia. The second award will allow a team to study whether taking aspirin and omega-3 fish oils can improve people's memory and thinking skills.

Dementia is one of the greatest challenges facing modern medicine and there are currently 850,000 people in the UK living with dementia. For example, Oxfordshire alone has more than 8,000 people with dementia.

In the first ever project awarded by Alzheimer's Research UK's Global Clinical Trials Fund, Professor Jane Armitage at the University of Oxford will study whether aspirin or omega-3 fish oils have an effect on memory and thinking skills in people with diabetes. As an add-on to an existing clinical trial called ASCEND, funded by the British Heart Foundation, Prof Armitage and her team will test the memory and thinking skills in around 10,000 people who have taken aspirin, omega-3 fish oils or a placebo for 6.5 years.

Having poor heart health is associated with an increased risk of dementia, and diabetes is a risk factor for both heart health and dementia. Both aspirin and omega-3 fish oils are thought to reduce complications resulting from poor heart health, such as heart attacks and stroke, but previous studies looking at their effects on memory and thinking have been too small to detect what may be small but worthwhile benefits.

We are beginning to unravel the links between cardiovascular health, diabetes and dementia, and this trial will provide important insight into this relationship.

Professor Jane Armitage, Nuffield Department of Population Health

Prof Jane Armitage explains: 'We are beginning to unravel the links between cardiovascular health, diabetes and dementia, and this trial will provide important insight into this relationship. This is an excellent opportunity to study an existing group of around 10,000 people who have been taking aspirin or omega-3 fish oils for 6.5 years and examine the effects on their memory and thinking skills. Although these drugs are not being investigated for their potential to treat dementia, if they are found to reduce the risk of developing the condition then this could be of significant benefit in supporting healthy ageing.'

Oxford is home to the Alzheimer's Research UK Oxford Research Network Centre. The charity’s Research Network is the largest community of dementia researchers in the UK, with over 1,000 members across 15 virtual Research Centres. Being part of the Network provides researchers with unique access to funding for small grants to support travel, equipment and networking.

Prof Richard Wade-Martins, Coordinator of the Oxford Network Centre, welcomed the new funding. He said: 'We are delighted that Alzheimer's Research UK has continued to support pioneering research in the city. Being part of a UK-wide Network of dementia researchers is a real boost to us, enabling us to collaborate with other scientists and explore new avenues of research. Dementia is a truly global issue and to tackle it, we need a joined-up approach. Oxford is leading the way in dementia research and this funding will help us to continue to make progress for all those affected.'

Dr Rosa Sancho, Head of Research at Alzheimer's Research UK, said: 'We are dedicated to funding the best minds and forging the most effective partnerships, and so are very glad to be supporting the vital work of scientists in Oxford. There is currently no way to prevent dementia, and so research into the factors that affect a person’s risk of the condition is crucial if we are to help people achieve a better quality of life for longer. Dr Armitage has a wealth of experience of clinical trials relating to diabetes and cardiovascular disease, and it’s fantastic that she is now applying her skills to addressing important questions in dementia research.

'We know that we will not defeat dementia in isolation, which is why initiatives such as the Research Network are crucial to support researchers at a grass-roots level. Sharing of ideas and resources will spur scientists on to think more ambitiously and help us progress faster towards our goal.'

An Oxford University professor will be taking Radio 4 listeners on a journey through the history of the concept of infinity for the next fortnight.

Philosopher Professor Adrian Moore will present a 15-minute programme at 1.45pm from Monday to Friday this week and Monday to Friday next week.

In today’s episode of A History of the Infinite, Professor Moore explores why the idea of infinity made the Ancient Greeks so uncomfortable.

Oxford University academics contributing to the programmes include Ursula Coope, Professor of Ancient Philosophy, Cecilia Trifogli, Lecturer in Medieval Philosophy, and Professor Richard Sorabji, Honorary Fellow of Wolfson College.

Professor Moore says: 'This series is based on my book The Infinite (Routledge, 2nd edn 2001).  The first four programmes are concerned with the remarkable turnaround between the time of the early Greeks, when various puzzles and paradoxes associated with the infinite had made it an object of abhorrence and distrust, to the early modern period, by which time it had come to be associated with the divine and had become an object of veneration and awe. 

'In the next three programmes listeners are introduced to some of the extraordinary mathematical results concerning the infinite, including the discovery that some infinities are bigger than others. 

'In the final three programmes attention shifts to the cosmos and our place in it. I consider questions about the age and size of the universe, about death and immortality, and about our basic urge to seek meaning for our lives in something infinitely greater than us.'

All programmes will be available to listen to or download from the BBC website over the next month.