How oversized atoms could help shrink "lab-on-a-chip" devices

Lab-on-a-chip microfluidic devices can manipulate liquids at ever smaller scales. Atdr gs/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

“Lab-on-a-chip” devices – which can carry out several laboratory functions on a single, micro-sized chip – are the result of a quiet scientific revolution over the past few years. For example, they enable doctors to make complex diagnoses instantly from a single drop of blood.

In the future, shrinking such devices to extremely small sizes, comparable to the liquid molecules themselves, will be a huge challenge; success will depend on our ability to understand how fluids behave under extreme confinement. In a recent study published in the journal Nature Communications, we came up with a new way of unveiling how fluids behave in such “superconfinement” using lumpy particles known as colloids to act as oversized atoms.

Milky rainbows

Atoms are tiny, tiny things. So small, you would not be able to see them under an optical microscope. But what if you could blow up the atoms in size? This is precisely what colloids do, they act as grossly oversized atoms. The technique can replicate many processes in liquids at atomic scales – something that is key for further developing lab-on-a-chip devices.

Colloids are all over the place, even in the milk you probably just poured in your tea. Milk is a water-based mixture, containing sugars, fats and proteins among other stuff. Many of these components aggregate into small lumps of about a thousand times smaller than a millimetre in size. Such lumps are what we call colloidal particles.

Would you like some colloidal solution with that? Laura D'Alessandro/Flickr, CC BY-SA

In fact, milk is a very good example of the power that colloids can have in science. By mixing milk and water in a tray and shining light through with a flashlight one can recreate the effect behind the amazing colours you see in sunsets. In both cases, the sunset effect boils down to how light interacts with particles in a fluid.

In the atmosphere, light is scattered by the atoms and molecules, giving the sky its striking colours. However, the small size of the atoms means that you can only see the effect over relatively long distances of many kilometres. With milk, however, this effect is blown-up by the size of the colloidal particles, so you can see a glorious miniature sunset using just a torch and a tray!

Sunset in a jar – T Mantilla

But what exactly are colloids? Colloids are any kind of particles that are small and light enough not to settle immediately if you disperse them in a fluid – such as air or water – but not too small so that they dissolve in that fluid. Colloidal particles can range from 1 nanometre (that’s a millionth of a millimetre) to 1 micrometre in size (1,000th of a millimetre) and can be made of many different components.

Clever colloids

Back in the laboratory, we used a colloidal mix of spherical particles and polymer strands to understand how fluids behave in extremely small channels, such as a drop of water in a nano-fluidic chip device. The size of the particles in our mix is about 200 nanometres, so they fit nicely into our colloidal particle classification.

To give you an idea of how blown-up these atoms are, a water molecule, which is about 0.25 nanometres in diameter, is as a mere spec in front of the gigantic 200-nanometre colloid. The smart thing about this colloidal mix is that the polymer strands are able to squeeze between the spherical particles, sort of elbowing them out. This effect eventually results in the creation of a two-phase mixture, very similar to having oil separated from water. Crucially, the size of the colloidal “molecules” in our “liquids” is not too small compared to the size of a micro-channel, so we are able to use them as blown-up atoms to study a variety of phenomena in extreme confinement in micro-channels.

These microscopy images show a time sequence of jets and drops forming in superconfined colloidal fluids. Author provided

By changing the size of the channels, we were able to reveal in detail how a fluid interacts with the boundaries encasing it. We then used this understanding to control the formation of drops and jets only a few hundred times larger than the size of a colloidal particle. Crucially, the size of the colloidal particles made it possible to observe the fluid dynamics under such an extreme confinement in all its glory using nothing but direct optical techniques using confocal microscopy, – something that would have been impossible to do with a common liquid such as water.

So where to now?

The fluid structures that we have identified in the lab can be very useful in applications that go beyond our colloidal mixtures. For example, simple changes in the channel size can be used to create very small liquid droplets, which in turn can be used for lab-on-a-chip applications acting as drug carriers or miniature beakers for chemical reactions.

But the ability to control drops can also be potentially used to guide the self-assembly of specifically shaped particles, some sort of “colloidal bricks”, that could be used to produce more complex structures such as micro robots, which could for instance be used in large swarms to explore environments that are too small for larger robots. It could also help develop micro-based materials, such as high-grade micro-emulsions, which can be used, for example, cleaning products.

Such applications are not restricted to using our colloidal liquids, but are open to using many types of liquids, including water and oils, as long as they are contained in very small channels. Using knowledge from one system to understand another is not particular to colloids, it is an underpinning principle of how physics works to make sense of the world around us – and unveiling such generality is perhaps one of the most beautiful aspects of it.

NHS care.data still leaks like a sinking ship, but ministers set sail regardless

'We're not sinking, we're just naturally low in the water.' boat by Roberto Castillo/shutterstock.com

NHS chiefs are pressing ahead with an IT programme that will share identifiable patient records and GP data for uses including medical research, despite it being red-flagged as “unachievable” by a watchdog.

The NHS England care.data programme is among the major projects given the worst rating by the Cabinet Office’s Major Projects Authority review, alongside other NHS projects including the Health and Social Care Network (HSCIC) and NHS Choices.

The care.data programme was put on hold in February 2014 following a torrent of criticism which prompted a House of Commons select committee inquiry. Concerns included security and informed consent, the sale of data to commercial companies including insurers and “information intermediaries”, false claims that anonymity could be guaranteed and a complete lack of clarity on the scope and purpose of the project.

In fact the programme resembles a textbook example of the failures and problems that have bedevilled many government IT infrastructure projects. It was flagged red in the previous review and even now – years after the project began – the report remarks that the business case is still “in the progress of being developed”.

However, ministers are pressing ahead. Communications with patients from Blackburn with Derwen, the first care commissioning group to be selected for a trial, recently announced that care.data would be starting “at the end of June”. Three more areas are due to join this year, with the rest of England to follow after a satisfactory evaluation.

Re-arranging deckchairs

All of this would suggest that the many problems with care.data have been addressed – unfortunately not. Much has happened, very little of substance has changed, and most problems remain. The programme’s leader, Tim Kelsey, still thinks it was all just a communication problem, and that the benefits have been undersold.

One of the more visible changes is the creation of the National Information Board (NIB) within the Department of Health, focused on applying the benefits of data and information technology to the NHS. The somewhat overreaching sound to its name suggests that perhaps health minister Jeremy Hunt and Kelsey, chair of the NIB and the care.data Programme Board, and the NHS England’s national director of patients and information, know something we don’t about the government’s data sharing agenda. Yet the NIB data plan for the next five years barely acknowledge the many failures of the programme’s original plan.

Medical data might be safer strung on a lanyard than in a database. comedynose, CC BY

Transparency and oversight

The most promising step forward was the appointment of Dame Fiona Caldicott as the national data guardian in November 2014. Highly respected in the field of medical data ethics, her report in December raised 52 questions on care.data that needing answering.

We don’t know if they’ve been answered satisfactorily, because answers were drafted for a programme board meeting earlier this year and have not been made public – nor even shared with the care.data Advisory Group. This complete failure of transparency (never mind its promise to share papers and minutes) is one reason to hold little confidence in care.data or those running it.

Consent and information

The lack of informed consent for patients about what would be done with their data was the main reason given for putting the programme on hold. But this still hasn’t been fixed.

Some 700,000 people thought they had opted out of any sharing of their data for any non-clinical purposes. But the Health and Social Care Information Centre, which provides data and statistics on the NHS and under whose remit care.data falls, told parliament that these people would therefore miss out on some preventative, clinical screenings – contrary to assurances. And while this opt-out was promised by Hunt in 2013, HSCIC have indicated that they still don’t know how to enact it, and it has yet to be given any legal basis.

The same lack of legal basis applies to Caldicott’s role as national data guardian (now expected to begin in 2016 by NIB), the promised sanctions for abuse or misuse of health data, and the legal safeguards on data sharing promised following the 2014 public consultation.

Security and privacy

It looked as if, following the response to the Partridge Report of HSCIC data sharing, the approach to privacy and security issues relating to sharing with commercial organisations would improve. In practice, however, medical data is still shared with analytics firms, intermediaries and data brokers like Experian. Even proposals to restrict third parties' access to data to secure data facilities (similar to those for census data), which would alleviate many privacy concerns about misuse of highly sensitive individual-level personal data, are being watered down.

The debate on responsible use of medical data has evolved over the last few years, leading to the Nuffield Bioethics report on the use of healthcare data. Yet despite all the greater understanding we’ve gained, those cheerleading for large-scale commercial exploitation, including Kelsey and minister for life sciences George Freeman, haven’t changed their tune in the slightest. For example, they still advocate sharing genome data without acknowledging the privacy risks.

It’s the complete absence of any political will to divert the ship from this dangerous course that’s perhaps the biggest worry of all. Organisations well-versed in the issues such as medConfidential have suggested constructive solutions to salvage something from the care.data debacle; it seems no one in the Department of Health or NHS England is listening.

Men and women could use different cells to process pain

If only I could shut off my my microglia right now Todd/Flickr

We have known for some time that there are sex differences when it comes to experiencing pain, with women showing a higher sensitivity to painful events compared to men. While we don’t really understand why this is, it seems likely that both biological and psycho-social factors are involved. However, a new study published in Nature Neuroscience suggests that there may be a sex difference in the immune cells involved in the processing of pain signals. The results show that it is time to stop ignoring sex differences in research.

The researchers looked at the immune responses of male and female mice, and found that different immune cells seemed to signal pain. They found that for male mice, microglia, which serve to defend the brain and spinal cord, were important in signalling pain. However, this did not seem to be the case for female mice. Instead white blood cells known as T cells seemed to signal pain.

While we need to be cautious about translating these results to humans, the authors conclude by asking whether we should start thinking about different ways of managing chronic pain in men and women. For example, could drugs be developed that target these different pain pathways, and used in a sex-specific way.

Stop ignoring sex in research

The study adds to a growing body of evidence showing that sex differences are relevant for health. We know that there are important differences in how males and females respond across a range of health conditions. In an era of personalised pain medicine, this raises general questions as to what works best, and for whom.

There is a lot at stake. If a pain response is found in males, it does not automatically mean it will be found in females, and vice versa. Similarly, if a treatment is found to be less effective in one sex, it does not mean it is ineffective for all. Looking at it in this context, have some approaches that might have worked for females, been dismissed too early if just tested on males?

Researchers are underestimating the need to look at sex differences in animal research. Rama/wikimedia commons, CC BY-SA

Part of the problem is how we do clinical-health research. Historically, women were systematically excluded from clinical trials. Although researchers are getting better at recruiting both men and women, progress is slow. Sometimes these differences are actually viewed as “nuisance variables” to be statistically controlled for.

Unless you go looking for sex differences, how will you know whether they exist and are important? We need to encourage a change in research practice, which means designing studies to allow this to happen. In the US, the main health funding agency, the NIH, now requires researchers to consider the potential effect of sex/gender within their studies. Some medical journals, such as The Lancet and The Journal of the American College of Cardiology, include instructions to authors to consider, and report, sex differences. Interestingly, it is not yet standard practice to see sex differences considered in systematic reviews of treatment efficacy studies for pain.

Since there may be differences in male and female health, we can no longer generalise or ignore sex. Unless there is a good reason not to, then males and females should be recruited into research, and sex differences considered.

The study is an important wake-up call as we are still some way to go before we see such comparisons become a mainstream part of clinical-health research investigation and reporting practice.

Scientists discover fundamental property of light – 150 years after Maxwell

Scientists have shed light on light. Taras Mykytyuk/Flickr, CC BY-SA

Light plays a vital role in our everyday lives and technologies based on light are all around us. So we might expect that our understanding of light is pretty settled. But scientists have just uncovered a new fundamental property of light that gives new insight into the 150-year-old classical theory of electromagnetism and which could lead to applications manipulating light at the nanoscale.

It is unusual for a pure-theory physics paper to make it into the journal Science. So when one does, it’s worth a closer look. In the new study, researchers bring together one of physics' most venerable set of equations – those of James Clerk’s Maxwell’s famous theory of light – with one of the hot topics in modern solid-state physics: the quantum spin Hall effect and topological insulators.

To understand what the fuss is about, let’s first consider the behaviour of electrons in the quantum spin Hall effect. Electrons possess an intrinsic spin as if they were tiny spinning-tops, constantly rotating about their axis. This spin is a quantum-mechanical property, however, and special rules apply – the electron has only two options open to it: it can either spin clockwise or anticlockwise (conventionally called spin-up or spin-down), but the magnitude of the spin is always fixed.

In certain materials, the spin of the electron can have a big effect on the way electrons move. This effect is called “spin-orbit coupling” and we can get an idea of how it works with a footballing analogy. By hitting a freekick with spin, a footballer can make the ball deviate to the left or the right as it travels through the air. The direction of the movement depends on which way the ball is spinning.

Bend it like Beckham. Ronnie Macdonald/Flickr, CC BY-SA

Spin-orbit coupling causes electrons to experience an analogous spin-dependent deflection as they travel, although the effect arises not from the Magnus effect as in the case for the football, but from electric fields within the material.

A normal electrical current consists of an equal mixture of moving spin-up and spin-down electrons. Due to the spin-orbit effect, spin-up electrons will be deflected one way, while spin-down electrons will be deflected the other. Eventually the deflected electrons will reach the edges of the material and be able to travel no further. The spin-orbit coupling thus leads to an accumulation of electrons with different spins on opposite sides of the sample.

This effect is known as the classical spin Hall effect, and quantum mechanics adds a dramatic twist on top. The quantum-mechanical wave nature of the travelling electrons organises them into neat channels along the edges of the sample. In the bulk of the material, there is no net spin. But at each edge, there form exactly two electron-carrying channels, one for spin-up electrons and one for spin-down. These edge channels possess a further remarkable property: the electrons that move in them are impervious to the disorder and imperfections that usually cause resistance and energy loss.

This precise ordering of the electrons into spin-separated, perfectly conducting channels is known as the quantum spin Hall effect, which is a classic example of a “topological insulator”– a material that is an electrical insulator on the inside but that can conduct electricity on its surface. Such materials represent a fundamentally distinct organisation of matter and promise much in the way of spintronic applications. Read heads of hard drives based on this technology are currently used in industry.

Beginning to see the light

Now, the new study suggests that the seeds of this seemingly exotic quantum spin Hall effect are actually all around us. And it is not to electrons that we should look to find them, but rather to light itself.

In modern physics, matter can described either as a wave or a particle. In Maxwell’s theory, light is an electromagnetic wave. This means it travels as a synchronised oscillation of electric and magnetic fields. By considering the way in which these fields rotate as the wave propagates, the researchers were able to define a property of the wave, the “transverse spin”, that plays the role of the electron spin in the quantum spin Hall effect.

In a homogeneous medium, like air, this spin is exactly zero. However, at the interface between two media (air and gold, for example), the character of the waves change dramatically and a transverse spin develops. Furthermore, the direction of this spin is precisely locked to the direction of travel of the light wave at the interface. Thus, when viewed in the correct way, we see that the basic topological ingredients of the quantum spin Hall effect that we know for electrons are shared by light waves.

This is important because there has been an array of high-profile experiments demonstrating coupling between the spin of light and its direction of propagation at surfaces. This new work gives a integrative interpretation of these experiments as revealing light’s intrinsic quantum spin Hall effect. It also points to a certain universality in the behaviour of waves at surfaces, be they quantum-mechanical electron waves or Maxwell’s classical waves of light.

Harnessing the spin-orbit effect will open new possibilities for controlling light at the nanoscale. Optical connections, for example, are seen as a way of increasing computer performance, and in this context, the spin-orbit effect could be used to rapidly reroute optical signals based on their spin. With applications proposed in optical communications, metrology, and quantum information processing, it will be interesting to see how the impact of this new twist on an old theory unfolds.

We've just started work on the technology to power a Star-Trek style replicator

Machine to make anything Shutterstock

Who has never dreamt of having a machine that can materialise any object we need out of thin air at the push of a button? Such machines only exist in the minds of science fiction enthusiasts and the film industry. The most obvious example is the “replicator” that Star Trek characters routinely use to generate a diverse range of objects, helping them escape from even the most impossible of plotlines.

However, scientists might have found a way to build such a dream-like machine. The trick will be to exploit the ever-famous E=mc² equation, known as Einstein’s energy-matter equivalence principle. This equation tells us that mass (the amount of matter a body is made of) is just another form of energy. This means it should be possible to take some mass and directly convert it into pure energy.

This phenomenon is supported by uncountable experimental evidence. For instance, it provides the energy that keeps atomic nuclei together. If you “weigh” the nucleus of an atom, you will find that it is slightly lighter than the sum of its components. The missing mass is converted into energy, which holds everything together. So far so good, but the equals sign in the equation tells us something even more exciting. We can, in principle, take pure energy and materialise it into mass.

Vacuum – not so empty

How might that be possible? In order to grasp this idea, we need to change our concept of pure vacuum. Classically, vacuum is nothing but a completely empty (and rather boring) region of space. Quantum mechanics instead tells us that vacuum is an extremely busy region of space, where ultra-tiny particles come into existence for extremely short periods of time (shorter than 10^-21 s, or a thousandth of a billionth of a billionth of a second).

The particles are quickly annihilated when they collide with a corresponding (anti)particle made from antimatter. Together, these particles and antiparticles, usually referred to as “virtual particles” because they exist for such short periods of time, are a direct consequence of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.

Now, imagine sending a super-intense laser beam (which is pure electromagnetic energy) into a vacuum. If the laser is intense enough, it could rip these virtual particles away from their antiparticles to such a distance that they will not collide and annihilate. This means you have sent energy into a void region and end up with some real particles with mass.

From the void Shutterstock

There’s only one drawback: you would need to send enough energy to separate the virtual particle-antiparticle pair before they would naturally annihilate each other (remember the 10^-21 s?). This appears to be a Herculean task, but recent developments in laser technology are now giving us the opportunity to do so.

Lasers are now able to produce bursts of light that last for tiny periods of time, periods comparable to the time it takes an electron to perform one revolution around the nucleus in the atom. They can also be focused on a region of space smaller than the width of a human hair. To bring things into a bit more perspective, these laser bursts are thousands and thousands of times more powerful than the whole UK electrical grid (although they require relatively small amounts of energy) and billions and billions of times more intense than solar irradiation on Earth.

Ramping up the power

Scientists are notoriously never satisfied, however, and are pushing this limit even further. A major European project is now building the most powerful laser ever generated, the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI). This unprecedented project will result, in the next few years, in the creation of a laser system that provides beams with a power of 10 PW (10,000,000,000,000,000 watts). That’s 10 times more powerful than existing state-of-the-art laser facilities.

Theoretical calculations indicate that such a laser is able to “produce” a handful of particles out of a pure vacuum and provide the first experimental evidence that energy can be directly transformed into tangible matter.

We might still be a long way from producing a polished finished object from vacuum but the first step is now being taken. Once the wheel is set in motion, it will only be a matter of time before a replicator will be an essential appliance in every household. The only problem remaining then will be what to do with the anti-objects that will unavoidably be generated beside the requested objects?

Galaxy survey to probe why the universe is accelerating

Understanding how galaxies are arranged could be the key to figuring what causes the expansion of the universe. ESA/Hubble, NASA and S. Smartt (Queen's University Belfast), CC BY

We know that our universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, but what causes this growth remains a mystery. The most likely explanation is that a strange force dubbed “dark energy” is driving it. Now a new astronomical instrument, called the Physics of the Accelerating Universe Camera (PAUCam), will look for answers by mapping the universe in an innovative way.

The camera, which will record the positions of around 50,000 galaxies at once, could also shed light on what dark matter is and how the cosmos evolved.

In the 1990s, astronomers studying exploding stars – supernovae – in galaxies far away discovered that the universe’s expansion was accelerating. This came as surprise, as scientists at the time thought it was slowing down. With no obvious solution at hand, scientists argued that there must be some sort of mysterious force – dark energy – pulling the universe apart.

Timeline of the universe, assuming a cosmological constant. Coldcreation/wikimedia, CC BY-SA

Fast forward about two decades and we still don’t know what dark energy is, thought to make up 71% of all the energy in the universe. One theory says it can be explained by an abandoned version of Einstein’s theory of gravity – known as the “cosmological constant” – which is a measure of the energy density of the vacuum of space. Another argues that it is caused by enigmatic scalar fields, which can vary in time and space. Some scientists even believe that a weird “energy fluid” that fills space could be driving the expansion.

Mapping the sky

Of course, the only way to find out is through observation. After spending six years under design and construction by a consortium of Spanish research institutions, PAUCam was successfully tested out for the first time this month – seeing “first light” on the 4.2 metre William Herschel Telescope on La Palma in the Canary Islands.

Using the information captured by PAUCam, an international team, including researchers from Durham University’s Institute for Computational Cosmology, is being set up to build a unique map of how galaxies are arranged in the universe.

Such a map will contain detailed new information about the basic numbers which govern the fate of the universe; its expansion and about how the galaxies themselves were made. The map will reveal the extent of structures in the distribution of galaxies. These structures grow due to gravity – if the expansion of the universe is speeding up, then it is harder for gravity to pull matter together in order build these structures. Knowing the strength of gravity and measuring the size of structures in the galaxy distribution can therefore help us deduce the expansion history of the universe.

Astronomers can map the positions of galaxies on the sky by taking images or photographs. These are projected positions and so do not tell us the distance to a galaxy from the Earth. A galaxy could appear to be very faint because it is at a large distance from us or simply because it is nearby, but is intrinsically faint with few bright stars.

Traditionally, astronomers have used spectroscopy to measure the distance to a galaxy. This technique works by capturing the light from the galaxy and spreading it out into a spectrum according to its wavelengths. In this way, they can investigate the pattern of lines emitted by the different elements in the stars that make up the galaxy. The further away the galaxy is, the more the expansion of the universe shifts these lines to appear at longer wavelengths and lower frequencies than they would appear in a laboratory here on Earth. The size of this so-called “redshift” therefore gives the distance to the galaxy.

Early surveys of galaxy positions painstakingly measured such spectra one galaxy at a time, pointing the telescope at each galaxy in turn. Modern surveys can now record up to a few thousand galaxy spectra in a single exposure.

The camera has been tested using the William Herschel Telescope. wikimedia commons, CC BY-SA

PAUcam will revolutionise survey astronomy by measuring the distances to tens of thousands of galaxies it can see each time it looks at the sky. It does this by taking 40 photographs or images using special filters that isolate a portion of the light emitted by a galaxy. This allows a quick spectrum to be built up for each galaxy at a fraction of the traditional cost. This spectrum also acts like a DNA for each galaxy, encoding information about how many stars it contains and how quickly new stars are being added.

Looking for answers

My team here at Durham will build computer models of the evolution of the universe, which aim to describe how structures like galaxies have developed over 13.7 billion years of cosmic history. The cosmologist’s universe is mostly made up of an unknown substance called dark matter, with a small amount of “normal matter”.

PAUCam will allow cosmologists to test their models for building galaxies by measuring the lumpiness of the galaxy distribution in the new map. This is important because it tells us about the distribution of the dark matter, which we cannot see directly.

We know from previous observations that galaxy clusters contain dark matter. By counting the number of galaxies in a cluster, astronomers can estimate the total amount of (visible) matter in the cluster. By also measuring the velocities of the galaxies, they find that some are moving so fast that they should escape the gravitational pull of the cluster. The reason they don’t is because huge amounts of invisible dark matter is increasing the gravitational pull. If the galaxies are very clustered – or their distribution is lumpy – then the computer simulations show that this means the galaxies live inside more massive dark matter structures.

PAUCam will allow us to learn more about an effect called gravitational lensing, in which the mass in the universe bends the light from distant galaxies, causing their images to appear distorted. Scientists can study the distortions to calculate how massive the patch of the universe really is – including the dark matter. This is one of the key probes of dark energy that is planned for the European Space Agency’s Euclid mission, which is scheduled for launch in 2020.

The lensing distortion depends on the lumpiness of the dark matter, which is turn is determined by how fast the universe is expanding. If the universe expands at a fast rate, then it is harder for gravity to pull structures together to make bigger ones. PAUCam will help us to disentangle the signal from gravitational lensing from simple alignments between the orientations of galaxies which develop as they form.

A galaxy survey like PAUCam has never been attempted on this scale before. The resulting map will be a unique resource to help us learn more about how galaxies are made and why the expansion of the universe seems to be speeding up. We hope to have the answer once the PAUCam survey is finished by around 2020.

Government must invest in skills and police resources to tackle cybercrime

There aren't enough skilled investigators to tackle the cybersecurity problem. polygraphus/shutterstock.com

It is estimated that the cost of cybercrime to the UK economy is around £27 billion per year, around 2% of national GDP. Some experts suggest this is too small, excluding as it does important vectors of cybercrime such as malware.

Computer security firm Norton estimates that more than 12.5m people in the UK fall victim to cybercriminals every year – 34,246 cases each day – with an average loss of £144 each. Again, this is probably an underestimation when one considers that many people will be victims of hacks or malware without ever knowing, and so they go unreported.

A global study conducted by the UN Office of Drugs and Crime reported rates of cybercrime including hacking leading to theft and fraud at rates of up to 17%, significantly higher than rates of their conventional equivalents at less than 5%.

Fighting cybercrime is by no means easy. The wide range of technologies and vectors of attack available to cyber-criminals and the cross-border nature of these crimes make investigating them difficult. The fragile nature of digital evidence complicates matters, tracks and traces that skilled cybercriminals can erase behind them. And the intrusive nature of investigating cybercrimes – which typically requires removing computer equipment for analysis – raises privacy issues that make digital forensics an even more complicated task.

Policing cybercrime in the UK

In the context of UK policing, the National Association of Chief Police Officers (formerly ACPO) Core Investigative Doctrine provides a strategic framework and good practice guidelines for forensic investigation of e-crimes. Since 2011, the UK government has adopted a centralised approach as part of its National Cyber Security Program, with the National Cyber Crime Unit (NCCU), part of the UK National Crime Agency, the central focus for tackling cybercrime in partnership with government agencies such as GCHQ and the Home Office.

The government has committed £650m to the cybersecurity programme to improve the nation’s cyber-defences and resilience. But considering that around 60% of this is to go to GCHQ for intelligence activities, this leaves only £260m for investigation and law enforcement – a figure that does not compare favourably to the estimated cost (£27 billion) of the crimes the NCCU is to investigate.

According to the commissioner of City of London Police, Adrian Leppard, there are 800 specialist internet crime officers, yet it’s expected that a quarter of them will lose their job due to budget cuts in the next two years. Again, considering Norton’s estimation of 34,246 individuals falling victim to cybercrime every day in Britain, the remaining 600 investigators would need to address 57 cases each day of the year – a mission impossible.

Skills needed

So the imbalance between the capabilities of organised e-crime groups and the limited capacities of law enforcement agencies is not something that the UK can resolve in the near future. However, some solutions may narrow the gap and confine criminals’ opportunities.

Most obvious is how few university courses there are at undergraduate and especially at postgraduate level in cybersecurity and e-crime forensics that could train the skilled investigators required. Tackling the threat of organised criminals working in cybercrime over the long term requires knowledgeable experts to profile, track, detect, and ultimately provide the information that can lead to their arrest.

At a recent TechUK event attendees suggested the lack of prosecutions under the Computer Misuse Act in the 25 years since it was introduced suggests the law is not fit for purpose – and the skills required to bring a prosecution under it are at the moment in short supply.

While the lion’s share of resources goes to GCHQ, the targets of its intelligence are not necessarily the criminal gangs of interest to the police. More resources for police agencies are necessary to bring investigative capacities up to the same level of the gangs they’re investigating.

GCHQ has reported that 80% of cyber-attacks can be prevented through better education and awareness among users. Developing regional hubs to promote cybersecurity training and education among general users would be key.

The fact that the Anonymous self-styled “hacktivists” whose attacks on Paypal cost the firm £3.5m were sentenced only to seven and 18 months might suggest that cybercrimes are sentenced lightly. A better understanding among judges and juries of the serious implications of cybercrimes and greater punishments and fines for financial crimes could help make cybercrime less rewarding to criminals.