Cobalt is an essential element for modern world. Its use in metal alloys, rechargeable batteries, electronics and high-value chemicals make it critical for a low-carbon society. Cobalt has the largest global market value of any of the individual e-tech elements (US$2.1 billion in 2013). Cobalt is largely recovered as a by-product from the mining of other major metals and as a result, cobalt has not been the focus of study in ore-forming systems on its own. To address this knowledge gap we propose a systematic geological, geochemical and mineralogical approach to understanding the residence of cobalt in a range of important current and future ore minerals in diverse geological environments. A specific focus for this study are deposits forming in the Critical Zone of the Earth's crust where biological activity and weathering coincide and where cobalt is redistributed into forms where innovative bioleaching could change the way deposits are processed. Using new knowledge gained from the study of natural biological systems, advanced bioleaching techniques will be systematically applied to a range of deposits formed in the Critical Zone. Bioleaching also has great potential for reduced, sulfide-rich ores, particularly complex sulfide and often arsenic-rich ore-types where significant bioleaching has not yet been tested. This COG3 proposal builds on our catalyst grant which developed a multi-institute and multi-investigator consortium with internationally recognised expertise across the geosciences including geology, geochemistry, mineralogy, microbiology and bioprocessing based in leading UK academic institutes: Herrington (NHM), Schofield (NHM), Johnson (Bangor), Lloyd (Manchester), Pattrick (Manchester), Coker (Manchester), Roberts (Southampton), Gadd (Dundee), Glass (Exeter), Mosselmans (Diamond) and Kirk (Loughborough), with in-depth expertise on geology, geometallurgy and geomicrobiology applicable to developing recovery strategies for cobalt from natural deposits. This group is underpinned by the Partners including the major mining companies Glencore, FQML and KGHM; a mid-tier European-based mining company Oriel; a junior UK-based mining SME Brazilian Nickel, an internationally accredited commercial research laboratory RPC and finally the Cobalt Development Institute representing the cobalt industry throughout the supply chain. They have all pledged to engage with the project, some through direct involvement in research activities, some with financial support for research and training and others by facilitating access to natural deposits and datasets. Further support comes from research colleagues at CSIRO in Australia. Specific research will be delivered through a series of work packages which will address: 1) Geology and mineralogy of cobalt in natural systems; 2) Natural biogeochemistry of cobalt; 3) Bioprocessing of cobalt and development of new products; 4) Improving the cobalt supply chain through integrated studies and dialogue with stakeholders representing the supply chain. This research directly addresses the NERC Security of Supply of Mineral Resources (SoS Minerals) initiative Goals 1 & 2 with a fundamental aim to recognise the mineral residence and chemical cycle of cobalt (Goal 1) and provide geometallurgical information that will facilitate new opportunities for improvements to current recovery, minimising waste through geometallurgy; and thoroughly testing innovative, benign bioleach technologies for the extraction and downstream bioengineering of novel cobalt products (Goal 2). Through the collaboration of the PIs, Co-Pis, Partners and the development of PDRAs and PhDs, the program will produce high impact scientific publications for the international literature, highly significant public outreach and education on behalf of the NERC SoS programme and establish the UK COG3 consortium as a world leader in research into innovative cobalt recovery from natural mineral deposits.

CASCADE will be a keystone in the current aerial robotics revolution. This programme will reach across a wide range of applications from fundamental earth science through to industry applications in construction, security, transport and information. There is a chasm between consumer level civilian drone operations and high cost military applications. CASCADE will realise a step change in aerial robotics capability and operations. We will be driven by science and industry problems in order to target fundamental research in five key areas; Integration, Safety, Autonomy, Agility, Capability and Scalability as well as overall project methodology. In targeting these six areas, CASCADE will free up current constraints on UAV operations, providing case study data, exemplars, guidance for regulation purposes and motivating links across the science and engineering divide. The landscape of aerial robotics is changing rapidly and CASCADE will allow the UK to be at the forefront of this revolution. This rapid change is reflected by the wide range of terminology used to describe aerial robots including; Drones, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Remotely Piloted Aerial Systems, and Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (SUAS). Supporting technologies driving the aerial robotics revolution include improved battery technologies, actuators, sensors, computing and regulations. These have all significantly expanded the possibilities offered by smart, robust, adaptable, affordable, agile and reliable aerial robotic systems. There are many environmental challenges facing mankind where aerial robots can be of significant value. Scientists currently use resource intensive research ships and aircraft to study the oceans and the atmosphere. CASCADE will focus on reducing these costs and at the same time increasing capability. Some mission types involve prohibitive risks, such as volcano plume sampling and flight in extreme weather conditions. CASCADE will focus on managing these risks for unmanned systems, operating in conditions where it is not possible to operate manned vehicles. Similarly, there are many potentially useful commercial applications such as parcel delivery, search and rescue, farming, inspection, property maintenance, where aerial robots can offer considerable cost and capability benefits when compared to manned alternatives. CASCADE will focus on bringing autonomous aerial capabilities to a range of industry applications. For both scientific and industry purposes, CASCADE will consider a range of vehicle configurations from standard rotary and fixed wing through to hybrid and multi modal operations. These will bring unique capabilities to challenging operations for which there is no conventional solution. At present, because of concerns over safety, there are strict regulations concerning where and how aerial robots can be operated. Permissions for use are granted by the UK Civil Aviation Authority and operations are generally not permitted beyond line of sight, close to infrastructure or large groups of people, or more than 400 feet from the ground. These regulations currently restrict many of the potentially useful applications for aerial robots. CASCADE aims to undertake research into key underpinning technologies that will allow these to be extended or removed by working with regulating authorities to help shape the operating environment for future robotic systems. CASCADE will prove fundamental research through a wide variety of realistic CASE studies. These will be undertaken with academic and industry partners, focussing on demonstrating key technologies and concepts. These test missions will undertake a wide range of exciting applications including very high altitude flights, aerial robots that can also swim, swarms of sensor craft flying into storms, volcanic plumes and urban flights. Through these CASCADE will provide underpinning research, enable and educate users and widely support the aerial robotics revolution.

In this research programme, planetary scientists and engineers from the University of Glasgow and the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre have joined forces to answer important questions concerning the origin and evolution of asteroids, the Moon and Mars. The emphasis of our work is on understanding the thermal histories of these planetary bodies over a range of time and distance scales, and how water and carbon-rich molecules have been transported within and between them. One part of the consortium will explore the formation and subsequent history of asteroids. Our focus is on primitive asteroids, which have changed little since they formed 4500 million years ago within a cloud of dust and gas called the solar nebula. These bodies are far smaller than the planets, but are scientifically very important because they contain water and carbon-rich molecules, both of which are essential to life. We want to understand the full range of materials that went to form these asteroids, and where in the solar nebular they came from. Although they are very primitive, most of these asteroids have been changed by chemical reactions that were driven by liquid water, itself generated by the melting of ice. We will ask whether the heat needed to melt this ice was produced by the decay of radioactive elements, or by collisions with other asteroids. The answer to this question has important implications for understanding how asteroids of all types evolved, and what we may find when samples of primitive asteroids are collected and returned to Earth. Pieces of primitive asteroids also fall to Earth as meteorites, and bring with them some of their primordial water, along with molecules that are rich in carbon. Many scientists think that much of the water on Earth today was obtained from outer space, and consortium researchers would like to test this idea. In order to understand the nature and volume of water and carbon that would have been delivered by meteorites, we first need to develop reliable ways to distinguish extraterrestrial carbon and water from the carbon and water that has been added to the meteorite after it fell to Earth. We plan to do this by identifying 'fingerprints' of terrestrial water and carbon so that they can be subtracted from the extraterrestrial components. One of the main ways in which this carbon was delivered to Earth during its earliest times was by large meteorites colliding with the surface of our planet at high velocities. Thus we also wish to understand the extent to which the extraterrestrial carbon was preserved or transformed during these energetic impact events. The formation and early thermal history of the moon is another area of interest for the consortium. In particular, we will ask when its rocky crust was formed, and use its impact history to determine meteorite flux throughout the inner solar system. To answer these questions we will analyse meteorites and samples collected by the Apollo and Luna missions to determine the amounts of chemical elements including argon and lead that these rocks contain. Information on the temperature of surface and sub-surface regions of Mars can help us to understand processes including the interaction of the planet's crust with liquid water. In order to be able to explore these processes using information on the thermal properties of martian rocks that will soon to be obtained by the NASA InSight lander, we will undertake a laboratory study of the effects of heating and cooling on a simulated martian surface. Hot water reaching the surface of Mars from its interior may once have created environments that were suitable for life to develop, and minerals formed by this water could have preserved the traces of any microorganisms that were present. We will assess the possibility that such springs could have preserved traces of past martian life by examining a unique high-altitude hot spring system on Earth.

NHM has successfully delivered 11 events at 6 consecutive European Researchers’ Nights that have attracted increasing public participation and proactive engagement. SCIENCE UNCOVERED aims to build on this experience to deliver at least 10 captivating events in 5 locations across the UK in 2016 and 2017. Central objectives of SCIENCE UNCOVERED are to: [1] Actively breakdown existing public stereotypes of researchers [2] Create greater public awareness of the role of researchers and the value of science [3] Inspire the next generation of young researchers and demonstrate the varied roles and opportunities that are open to them for careers within science. An enhanced awareness campaign will make 34 million people aware of the ERN over two years. Awareness raising and a compelling array of activities will engage 20,500 participants directly. SCIENCE UNCOVERED aims to deliver deep public engagement with research as well as a greater dialogue between researchers and the wider public to further increase awareness of science and how future science benefits both European and global society. NHM strives to increase the public understanding of and engagement with science using extensive programme of high quality, innovative activities including media, capitalising on past experience and mobilising our network of providers in public engagement and research communities. NHM will be working with subcontractors to realise activities in 5 UK locations: London, Tring, Manchester, Newcastle and Belfast. The regional activities present an exceptional opportunity to reach “under-served” audiences including thousands of young people with limited opportunities to engage with research. SCIENCE UNCOVERED will deliver a high researcher-to-participant ratio of ca. 1:40 at all events as impact assessment demonstrates personalised interactions are particularly important to dispelling stereotypes and maximise the impact of this programme.

The inability to synchronise records precisely compromises palaeoenvironmental and prehistoric archaeological research. We address this challenge through a five year consortium bid that brings together expertise from four institutions. Our aim is to re-assess the precise timing relationship between environmental and archaeological events. Our objective is to test the long-accepted hypothesis that major shifts in human development coincided with, or immediately followed, specified abrupt environmental transitions (AETs). The RESET consortium builds on existing collaborations between the four institutions. It combines expertise in human palaeontology and Palaeolithic archaeology with earth and marine scientists and science-based dating. The purpose of the consortium is to combine these interdisciplinary strengths in order to overcome the current impasse to synchronising between the varied archives available to RESET members. We will achieve this by fully exploiting the potential of physical time markers co-registered within key sedimentary archives: volcanic ash deposits. Crucially, we include the detection and identification to source of microtephras, to refine the framework provided by conventional tephrostratigraphy. On this basis, we will create a European-wide 'lattice' for synchronisation of palaeo-environmental and archaeological archives. For this project's aims to be realised, several co-dependent, strategic prerequisites must be met: (I) archaeological events must be selected that are unambiguous in their interpretation and wide in geographical impact; (II) the archaeological events should occur within time windows that are characterised by marked AETs that also impacted over wide areas; (III) several tephras must be common to the selected archaeological and environmental records to provide the isochronous tie-lines between them; and (IV) the sequences selected for study must satisfy a number of stratigraphical and analytical criteria which optimise the potential for developing age models of decadal to centennial resolution. A consortium approach is the only feasible way to (a) successfully integrate these demanding scientific co-prerequisites, (b) develop the new schema and (c) test its success in less than 10 or more years; we estimate that RESET can achieve these goals within 5 years. RESET members have proved the feasibility and potential of the project by achieving sub-centennial resolution on cores from the Soppensee (Switzerland) and through the identification of 24 additional microtephras layers in core SA03-11 from the Central Adriatic. The project will comprise seven workpackages led led by a PI and resourced with PDRAs, tied PhDs and technicians. The secondment of an experienced researcher (Dr.Housley) as project manager, with a proven record of administration and data management (ORADS, NERC standard grants), will ensure the consortium's goal of providing a step change to the scientific challenge through a well-coordinated approach. Specifically, workpackage 4 (WP-4 Geochemistry of tephras) will extend the resolution obtained in the proof of concept to other tephras and microtephras and then applied to five related workpackages examining archaeological (WP1-3) and environmental archives (WP5-6 marine and continental). Age modelling (WP-7) will integrate all workpackages into a single synchronised record. For application of this approach, we target key events and processes in human prehistory, including the timing of modern human arrivals in Europe, the effect of a changing Sahara on North African populations, and the repopulation of Europe after the LGM. These target events for RESET's approach encompass key AETs of the last 130,000 years, which will exemplify the power and benefits of this approach to both our specific objective, and the wider palaeo-environmental agenda.