Published by Cambridge Industrial Innovation Policy, based at the Institute for Manufacturing (IfM), the UK Innovation Report offers a detailed analysis of the UK’s innovation landscape, assessing the performance of key industrial sectors compared to global competitors. The UK is one of the world’s leading innovation economies. It ranks fourth globally for scientific publications (behind only China, the USA, and India) and sits among the top countries for high-impact research and patents in critical technologies. It has also built one of the strongest startup ecosystems outside the United States. The latest UK Innovation Report finds that while the UK excels in research and early-stage innovation, it underperforms on innovation outcomes such as high-technology exports, technology scale-up, and global industrial market share. As the UK Government implements its national Industrial Strategy, the report provides new evidence on the UK’s innovation and industrial performance. The report highlights that competitiveness – measured at sector level through value-added, export performance, employment and global position – should become the central benchmark for success. A central feature of this year’s report is a deep-dive sectoral analysis of the Electronics and Electrical Equipment sectors. Recognised as Advanced Manufacturing sectors under the UK’s Modern Industrial Strategy, these sectors sit at the heart of electrification and the net-zero transition. On Thursday, 19 March, policymakers, industry leaders, and experts gathered at the Institute for Government for the official launch of the Innovation Report 2026. As the demand for stronger evidence in industrial and innovation policymaking increases, the UK Innovation Report 2026 makes a timely contribution by offering new data, analyses, and perspectives to support evidence-based policy development. Read the report here. The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright ©University of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Researchers have developed a new kind of nanoelectronic device that could dramatically cut the energy consumed by artificial intelligence hardware by mimicking the human brain. The researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, developed a form of hafnium oxide that acts as a highly stable, low‑energy ‘memristor’ — a component designed to mimic the efficient way neurons are connected in the brain. The results are reported in the journal Science Advances. Current AI systems rely on conventional computer chips that shuttle data back and forth between memory and processing units. This constant movement consumes large amounts of electricity, and global demand is exploding as AI adoption expands across industries. Brain-inspired, or neuromorphic, computing is an alternative way to process information that could reduce energy use by as much as 70% by storing and processing information in the same place, and doing so with extremely low power. Such a system would also be far more adaptable, in the same way our own brains are able to learn and adapt. “Energy consumption is one of the key challenges in current AI hardware,” said lead author Dr Babak Bakhit, from Cambridge’s Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy. “To address that, you need devices with extremely low currents, excellent stability, outstanding uniformity across switching cycles and devices, and the ability to switch between many distinct states.” Most existing memristors rely on the formation of tiny conductive filaments inside metal oxide material. But these filaments behave unpredictably and typically require high forming and operating voltages, limiting their usefulness in large-scale data storage and computing systems. The Cambridge team instead created a new type of hafnium-based thin film that switches states in a completely different way. By adding strontium and titanium and growing the film using a two‑step method, the researchers were able to form tiny electronic gates, or ‘p-n junctions’, inside the oxide where the layers meet. This allows the device to change its resistance smoothly by shifting the height of an energy barrier at the interface, rather than by growing or rupturing the filaments. Bakhit, who is also affiliated with Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, said this mechanism overcomes one of the biggest challenges in developing memristor technology. “Filamentary devices suffer from random behaviour,” he said. “But because our devices switch at the interface, they show outstanding uniformity from cycle to cycle and from device to device.” Using the hafnium-based devices, the researchers achieved switching currents about a million times lower than those of some conventional oxide-based devices. The memristors also produced hundreds of distinct, stable conductance levels, a key requirement for analogue ‘in-memory’ computing. Laboratory tests showed the devices could reliably endure tens of thousands of switching cycles and store their programmed states for around a day. They also reproduced fundamental learning rules observed in biology, such as spike-timing dependent plasticity: the mechanism by which neurons strengthen or weaken their connections depending on when signals arrive. “These are the properties you need if you want hardware that can learn and adapt, rather than just store bits,” said Bakhit. However, there are still some challenges to overcome. The current fabrication process requires temperatures of around 700°C — higher than standard semiconductor manufacturing tolerances. “This is currently the main challenge in our device fabrication process,” said Bakhit. “But we’re now working on ways to bring the temperature down to make it more compatible with standard industry processes.” Despite this, he believes the technology could ultimately be integrated into chip-scale systems. “If we can reduce the temperature and put these devices onto a chip, it would be a major step forward,” he said. Bakhit, a materials physicist, said the breakthrough followed several years of unsuccessful experiments. The turning point came late last year when he tried a twist on the two‑stage deposition method, adding oxygen only after the first layer had been grown. “I spent almost three years on this,” he said. “There were a huge number of failures. But at the end of November, we saw the first really good results. It’s still early days of course, but if we can solve the temperature issue, this technology could be game-changing because the energy consumption is so much lower and at the same time, the device performance is highly promising.” The research was supported in part by the Swedish Research Council (VR), the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Royal Society, and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). A patent application has been filed by Cambridge Enterprise, the University’s innovation arm. Reference: Babak Bakhit et al. ‘HfO2-based memristive synapses with asymmetrically extended p-n heterointerfaces for highly energy-efficient neuromorphic hardware.’ Science Advances (2026). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aec2324 The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright ©University of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. 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Professor Grant Stewart has led the development of the first national guideline on improving the diagnosis and management of kidney cancer. By offering more patients with a kidney lump a biopsy, clinicians can tell patients if the lesion is cancer or benign and if they need to consider a treatment like surgery, or if they can avoid these treatments Grant Stewart The guideline, published today by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), promotes the gold standard approach to the management of kidney cancer across all stages of the disease. The new recommendations aim to improve kidney cancer care across the NHS by helping healthcare professionals offer people the right treatments and support, while considering individual preferences. Professor Grant Stewart, who co-directs the Urological Malignancies Virtual Institute at the University of Cambridge and is Director of Studies in Clinical Medicine at Selwyn College has been the clinical lead for developing the guideline on kidney cancer. The guideline covers all stages of diagnosing and managing patients with renal cell carcinoma, the most common type of kidney cancer. It includes recommendations on imaging, biopsy, active surveillance, risk prediction, surgical and non-surgical treatments, and drug therapy. One of the key recommendations in the guideline is to offer biopsies to more people with suspected kidney cancer. This would mean more people with a small kidney lump – which is a mass measuring 4 centimetres or less – are offered a biopsy to confirm their diagnosis. A biopsy is when a sample of abnormal cells is collected using a needle through the skin into the tumour in the kidney during a CT or ultrasound scan. The cells are then tested to confirm whether or not the lump is cancer, or in fact benign. The results help clinicians offer the best treatment options, possibly avoiding unnecessary surgery in people with benign or low-risk tumours. This recommendation could double the number of biopsies undertaken on suspected kidney cancer patients. The committee acknowledged that some hospitals would need to adapt their clinical pathways to offer biopsies to more patients, but that reducing unnecessary surgeries would benefit patients and save surgical costs. Professor Stewart, who is also Consultant Urological Surgeon at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, said: “By offering more patients with a kidney lump a biopsy, clinicians can tell patients if the lesion is cancer or benign and if they need to consider a treatment like surgery, or if they can avoid these treatments which do have some risks associated with them.” Another important recommendation is that patients should have access to a clinical nurse specialist with training and experience in kidney cancer to provide support and information, from their initial diagnosis through their treatment and follow-up. The committee acknowledged that more clinical nurse specialists may need to be recruited, and specialist training provided, to be able to offer this support to all kidney cancer patients. Professor Stewart added: “Access to a clinical nurse specialist, with training and experience in kidney cancer care, will ensure that patients have a single point of contact for all the questions at any time that arise during their care journey.” Professor Stewart has long been championing practice-changing initiatives to improve the management and outcomes of kidney cancer patients. He has already introduced a new kidney clinic at Addenbrooke’s Hospital where patients with suspected kidney cancer receive their diagnosis on the same day, reducing the anxiety of waiting days or weeks for test results. Professor Stewart explained: “In Cambridge, we have developed a one-stop biopsy clinic for kidney cancer, so we can biopsy more patients while reducing the time patients wait between presentation and diagnosis to half the time for the traditional multi-appointment route.” Adapted from a story from the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Centre The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright ©University of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Small changes to aircraft flight paths to avoid the atmospheric conditions that create condensation trails – known as contrails – could reduce aviation’s global warming impact by nearly half, a new study suggests. The study, led by researchers at the University of Cambridge, suggests that changing cruising altitude by a few thousand feet, either up or down, could prevent contrails from forming. Reducing or avoiding contrail formation in this way would also be faster and cheaper than other climate mitigation measures for the aviation industry, since the practice can be adopted with existing aircraft and fuel. However, the researchers say that time is of the essence and that the sooner airlines adopt contrail avoidance policies, the bigger the positive climate impact will be. Their results are reported in the journal Nature Communications. Contrails are the thin white streaks seen behind aircraft flying at high altitude, and form when hot exhaust gases mix with cold, humid air at cruising altitude. Under the right conditions, the water vapour freezes into ice crystals, forming clouds that can persist for hours. Contrails also trap heat in the atmosphere. Aviation contributes around 2–3% of global carbon dioxide emissions, but its total climate impact is larger because of non-CO₂ effects such as contrails. Interest in contrail avoidance has grown rapidly in recent years as governments and airlines search for ways to reduce aviation’s climate impact while the sector transitions to lower-carbon fuels. “Contrail avoidance can often be as simple as changing the flight paths,” said lead author Dr Jessie Smith, from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering. “Often it’s even simpler than that – just moving slightly to a higher or lower altitude to avoid the areas of the atmosphere where contrails form.” Smith and her colleagues modelled how altitude adjustments for contrail avoidance could affect aviation’s overall climate footprint. They found that such a programme, phased in between 2035 and 2045, could recover around 9% of the temperature budget the world has left before breaching the Paris Agreement’s 2°C limit. However, they also found that if no action is taken, by 2050 aviation contrails will have added around 0.054°C of warming — 36% more than the warming attributable to aviation CO₂ over the same period. “What surprised me was how quickly the temperature saving could be made,” said Smith. “Over a decade, you can take a really big chunk of aviation’s warming impact out very rapidly. That's unusual in climate science, where most changes take a very long time.” The researchers also found that while rerouting aircraft can increase fuel use slightly, the reduction in warming from fewer contrails would more than offset the extra carbon dioxide emissions. Implementing contrail avoidance would require airlines and air traffic controllers to adjust routes dynamically based on atmospheric conditions. Some aviation experts have raised concerns about whether such changes could increase workload for air traffic management systems, but the researchers say the adjustments required may be relatively modest. Flights already alter their routes or altitude to avoid turbulence or bad weather, meaning similar systems could potentially be used to avoid contrail-forming regions. “It's an operational change, not a technological one,” said Smith. “You don't need to modify aircraft. You just need to work out how it will operate, and then the system is already built for it — pilots do these manoeuvres all the time. That’s why we have more hope for this than for other interventions like sustainable aviation fuels, which face enormous infrastructure and supply-chain hurdles.” Using a climate model that tracks temperature responses across 10,000 simulated scenarios, the researchers found that beginning contrail avoidance in 2035 rather than 2045 produces a temperature reduction at 2050 that is equivalent to roughly a 78% improvement in effectiveness. “In other words, waiting a decade has roughly the same effect as making the programme almost five times less efficient,” said Smith. While more work is needed to improve forecasts of the atmospheric conditions that cause contrails and to better understand their climate effects, the researchers say that imperfect avoidance — even at 25% effectiveness — still delivers a meaningful climate benefit, and that starting early matters more than waiting for the technology to be perfected. Scaling up contrail avoidance will require coordination from pilots, air traffic controllers, weather forecasters and policymakers, however. “The first step is demonstrating this works on a large scale through testing,” said Smith. “Once that's done, the policy can follow. But the modelling shows clearly that you do not want to wait for perfect conditions before you begin.” Smith said the findings show the approach could play a major role in aviation’s climate strategy. “We’re not saying it solves everything,” she said. “But it could make a very big difference.” Reference: Jessie R. Smith et al. ‘The climate opportunities and risks of contrail avoidance.’ Nature Communications (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-68784-8 The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright ©University of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. 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UK ministers have appointed University of Cambridge Professor Laura Díaz Anadón to the independent statutory body which advises their governments on greenhouse gas emissions targets and reports to parliament on climate progress. The CCC has been a pioneering institution globally and I look forward to contributing Prof Laura Díaz Anadón Professor Anadón was appointed to the Climate Change Committee (CCC) for five years by ministers of the UK and Devolved governments. Anadón is the Chaired Professor of Climate Change Policy at Cambridge and a leading global expert on climate and energy policy. The CCC is an independent, statutory body established under the Climate Change Act 2008. Its purpose is to advise the UK and devolved governments on emissions targets and to report to Parliament on progress made in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and preparing for and adapting to the impacts of climate change. “I am honoured to join the Climate Change Committee at this important moment for climate change mitigation,” Anadón said. “The CCC has been a pioneering institution globally and I look forward to contributing to further its role as a key provider of independent, evidence-based advice to the UK and devolved governments.” Professor Anadón is also Director of the Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance (CEENRG) in the Department of Land Economy and a Fellow of St. John's College. She is a founding member of the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate and a lead author for both the 6th and 7th IPCC Assessment Reports prepared by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN body for assessing the science related to climate change. The CCC is made up of two separate committees: one on mitigation (the Committee) and one on adaptation (the Adaptation Committee). The Act requires that the Committee comprises a Chair and not fewer than five but not more than eight other Members appointed by the national authorities (UK Government and the Devolved Governments). The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright ©University of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

An international project has uncovered millions of ancient DNA ‘switches’ that have been regulating plant genes for up to 300 million years – a discovery that could pave the way for more precise engineering of crop traits. By identifying regulatory sequences that have been conserved for hundreds of millions of years, we can begin to pinpoint the most important switches controlling plant traits. Madelaine Bartlett The study, published in the journal Science, reveals that the power of plant genomes lies not only in their protein-coding genes, but also in ancient regulatory DNA sequences that control where, when and how strongly to turn on gene expression. In animals, many of these regulatory DNA sequences, called cis-regulatory elements, persist across deep evolutionary time as conserved non-coding sequences (CNSs). These sequences are central to evolution. For example, humans and chimpanzees share about 98% of the same protein-coding genes. The differences between humans and chimps lies not in their genes, but in the regulatory DNA that controls when and where these genes are switched on. Scientists have long searched for similar ancient regulatory sequences in plants, but with limited success. Now, The Conservatory Project team has revealed the hidden ancient regulatory sequences that have been hiding in plain sight. Professor Madelaine Bartlett, who co-led the study and is a group leader at the Sainsbury Laboratory Cambridge University, explained: “Plant genes are continually shuffling themselves around, which makes the links between genes and their master switches extremely hard to spot. “Repeated duplication of entire genomes, followed by gene loss and rearrangement, hide relationships between genes and their master switches from us. As a result, it was thought CNSs were rare in plants and those we knew about were thought to be young, in evolutionary terms.” The missing manual of plant evolution The team designed a new gene-centric computational platform that used genetic data from 284 plant species, generated by the global plant research community, to detect conserved regulatory DNA across deep time while accounting for gene duplication and rapid divergence. They identified over two million ancient gene master switches, which control gene expression across 284 plant species from 73 plant families. This includes DNA switches that pre-date the emergence of flowering plants over 300 million years ago. The vast and previously hidden trove of ancient regulatory DNA sequences has stood the test of evolutionary time, remaining stable and controlling plant development despite millions of years of genetic shuffling. “The power in plant genomes isn’t just in their genes – it’s also in the DNA switches that control them,” said Bartlett. “By identifying regulatory sequences that have been conserved for hundreds of millions of years, we can begin to pinpoint the most important switches controlling plant traits.” A new tool to inform crop engineering The ability to engineer crop traits with speed and precision is crucial as agriculture grapples with the triple threat of climate change, increasing levels of crop disease and rising food demands. However, the challenge is no longer whether plants can be engineered, but which exact DNA sequences should be targeted to produce predictable and beneficial traits – such as drought tolerance or pest resistance. In crop gene editing, the focus has moved on from simply ‘knocking out’ or duplicating genes to a more sophisticated approach targeting the DNA sequences that regulate these genes. Editing coding sequences is a heavy-handed approach. If a gene is knocked entirely, it often results in drastic changes that are too abnormal for agricultural use. What plant breeders want is the ability to ‘fine-tune’ traits - that’s the job of cis-regulatory elements. For example, the CLAVATA3 gene in tomatoes plays a crucial role in regulating fruit size. If the CLAVATA3 gene itself is mutated, it results in big, ugly, misshapen tomatoes, but if the regulatory sequences are mutated, the result is something more intermediate and useful. CLAVATA3 genes act similarly in maize. Mutations in non-coding, regulatory DNA nudge a gene’s expression and function, causing, for example, a fruit to be slightly larger. These subtle shifts are often exactly what agriculture needs. Once dismissed as ‘junk’, identifying these ancient non-coding DNA sequences will be key for the future of crop trait editing. “For my lab, and others, this dataset is a treasure trove,” said Bartlett. “We now have thousands of regulatory elements to explore, both to understand plant evolution, and to manipulate in agriculture. We haven’t found all the CNSs yet, but now we have the tools to look.” The project was led by the labs of Madelaine Bartlett (Sainsbury Laboratory Cambridge University), Idan Efroni (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem), and Zachary Lippman (Cold Spring Harbor), together with joint first co-authors Kirk R. Amundson from University of Massachusetts Amherst and Anat Hendelman from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. The Conservatory data set for 284 plant species is available here. This research was supported by the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation, Israel Science Foundation, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, U.S. National Science Foundation, USDA AFRI and The Gatsby Charitable Foundation. Reference Kirk R. Amundson, Anat Hendelman, Danielle Ciren, Hailong Yang, Amber E. de Neve, Shai Tal, Adar Sulema, David Jackson, Madelaine E. Bartlett, Zachary B. Lippman, Idan Efroni (Science, 2025). 'A deep-time landscape of plant cis-regulatory sequence evolution'. DOI: 10.1126/science.adt8983 The text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright ©University of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.