New manufacturing methods are required if we are to live sustainably on the earth. In the electronics industry there is enormous interest in the possibility of manufacturing devices using organic materials: they can be manufactured sustainably from earth-abundant resources at energy costs that are typically significantly less than those associated with the production of equivalent inorganic materials. Electronic devices based on organic components are now readily available in the high street. For example, organic light-emitting diodes are used to produce the displays used in some high-end TV sets and in smartphones (e.g. iPhone X). However, a fundamental problem prevents the realisation of the full potential of organic materials in electronic devices. When light is absorbed by molecular semiconductors, it causes the creation of excitons - pairs of opposite charges - that carry excitation through the device. However, the excitons in organic materials recombine and cancel themselves out extremely rapidly - they can only move short distances through the material. This fundamental obstacle limits the application of organic materials in consumer electronics and also in many other areas of technology - in quantum communications, photocatalysis and sensor technologies. We propose an entirely new approach to solving this problem that is based on combining molecular designs inspired by photosynthetic mechanisms with nanostructured materials to produce surprising and intriguing quantum optical effects that mix the properties of light and matter. On breadboards, threaded mounts hold optical components relative to one another so that rays of light can be directed through an optical system. This proposal also aims to design breadboards, but of a very different kind. The smallest components will be single chromophores (light absorbing molecules), held at fixed arrangements in space by minimal building blocks called antenna complexes, whose structures are inspired by those of proteins involved in photosynthesis. Antenna complexes are designed and made from scratch using synthetic biology and chemistry so that transfer of energy can be controlled by programming the antenna structure. Instead of using threaded mounts, we will organise these components by attachment to reactive chemical groups formed on solid surfaces by nanolithography. In these excitonic films, we will develop design rules for efficient long-range transport. In conventional breadboards, light travels in straight lines between components. However, we will use the phenomenon of strong light-matter coupling to achieve entirely different types of energy transfer. In strong coupling, a localised plasmon resonance (an light mode confined to the surface of a nanoparticle) is hybridised with molecular excitons to create new states called plexcitons that combine the properties of light and matter. We will create plexcitonic complexes, in each of which an array of as many as a thousand chromophores is strongly coupled to a plasmon mode. In these plexcitonic complexes, the coupling is collective - all the chromophores couple to the plasmon simultaneously, and so the rules of energy transfer are completely re-written. Energy is no longer transferred via a series of linear hopping steps (as it is in organic semiconductors), but is delocalised instantaneously across the entire structure - many orders of magnitude further than is possible in conventional organic semiconductors. By designing these plexcitonic complexes from scratch we aim to create entirely new properties. The resulting materials are fully programmable from the scale of single chromophores to macroscopic structures. By combining biologically-inspired design with strong light-matter coupling we will create many new kinds of functional structures, including new medical sensors, 'plexcitonic circuits', and quantum optical films suitable for many applications, using low-cost, environmentally benign methods.

A number of distinct and usually separate avenues of scholarship examine early modern border spaces, sometimes characterized as lines and sometimes as zones, including Atlantic history, maritime history, the 'frontier' or continental history of North America, hemispheric histories of the Americas, and Native American history. Each of these approaches is defined by a distinctive geographic perspective and set of questions. This network is innovative in challenging participants to bridge across space and methodology, reorienting perspectives and facilitating a comparative analysis of the early modern origins of and contests over the borders and bordered spaces that inform immigration debates today. With the discovery of routes to and around Africa and the Americas from the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries, the map of the world seemed to be redrawn, in the process casting up for debate which borderlines would persist. A range of people--political officials, merchants, and ordinary women and men--drew, debated, and denounced boundaries, observed or ignored them, fought over them, and forged networks that transcended them. Boundaries were meant to demarcate sovereignty and political control, assert claims to natural resources and inhabitants' loyalty, establish closed zones of economic activity, and in myriad ways determine who was in and who out. Some borders today are readily visible: a concrete wall, a motorway barricade, an airport immigration officer. Early modern boundaries were more amorphous for three reasons: first, in a newly 'Atlantic' world, the definition and practice of trans-oceanic empires had to be reconfigured, involving perpetual contest between Natives and newcomers, centres and peripheries, and among imperial rivals. Native Americans, Britain, Spain, and the United States all claimed West Florida, for instance, during the eighteenth century. Second, and simultaneously, newly emerging notions of the nation-state provoked internal debate about who had the right to claim territory and what determined membership in a national community; the United States struggled with these questions from the 1770s to the 1860s. Third, on a practical level, such boundaries were often impossible to define or defend because they existed in places where people couldn't see or enforce them, like the interior of a continent where Native Americans such as the Chickasaws marked out borders that Europeans did not recognise. These problems meant that however they were drawn, boundary lines were impermanent, particularly in places beyond the direct military and administrative oversight of European empires. Our network will bring together multiple scholarly conversations, to ask how early modern empires, on-the-ground inhabitants, and voyagers defined, defied, and took advantage of Atlantic World borders, be they on land or on water. We propose a network that will expand over time, bringing together scholars through three linked workshops. The first will take place at Temple University (Philadelphia, USA), and will feature a select group of participants, each of whom will commit to attending one of the two remaining workshops. This workshop will delineate additional questions that will help scholars think through best practices for working in these often disparate fields. The next workshop will take place at the University of Southampton (Southampton, UK), and will feature participants from the first workshop and additional attendees chosen through a call for papers. The last workshop will take place at the Institute of Historical Research (London, UK), and will focus upon early modern maps and mapping. In consultation with the IHR's archivists, each participant--including speakers from the first workshop and participants selected through a call for papers--will centre their paper on a historical map in the IHR collections. They will use the maps as tools to think through and ground their analysis about early modern borders.

The COVID-19 crisis is changing the shape of crime. Drawing on crime science, this research will inform evidence-based policy and practice. Lockdown requires people to stay home, leading to domestic violence and child abuse increases. Yet social distancing means police are arresting fewer suspects: reduced services at time of greater need. COVID-19 gives fraudsters a 'conversation starter' to approach people in-person, via text, email and online. Remote working and online leisure activities, furloughs and financial difficulties, provide more potential targets for online crimes of various types. Vulnerable groups including the elderly and disabled are more at risk. Yet a Harvard study (Kissler et al. Science, 14 April) suggests that, absent a vaccine, social distancing may continue into 2022, perhaps 2024. So we will anticipate crime effects of prolonged, graduated or cyclical exit strategies. We will also anticipate post-crisis scenarios, seeking to sustain declines in crimes like burglary, to avoid them returning to 'normal'. We will use (1) national police data, (2) detailed data from three police partners, (3) fraud and e-crime data from industry, and (4) sources from other agencies such as Childline (for unreported crime). Pre/post-change analysis will use a combination of time-series and spatial modelling. Nesting force-level analysis in the national and international context will allow us to gauge scalability. We have police and industry partners, national (Home office, National Police Chief's Council, College of Policing) and international advisors. The aim is to inform policy and practice, producing 16 deliverables including policy and practice briefings and research articles.

Generally speaking, modern domestic species are actively prevented from interbreeding with wild populations. The few exceptions to this rule involve the deliberate generation of novel hybrid pets such as those involving domestic and wild cat species. This practice of incorporating wild species in breeding lines is strongly discouraged amongst livestock species since the introduction of genes from wild populations reduces productivity and the degree of tameness in the hybrids. In the recent past, however, husbandry practices were far less restrictive. Recent ethnographic and genetic analyses have revealed that interbreeding between numerous species of domestic and wild species was, in fact, the rule and not a rare exception. While gene flow from wild populations can be detrimental, it can also have a positive impact on livestock populations. For example, by decreasing the risks associated with inbreeding and by introducing genetic variation that allowed for rapid adaptation to novel environments. Adaptive gene flow therefore potentially played an important role during the spread of domestic animals across the world. This is especially true of pigs since geographically and genetically differentiated populations of wild boar are present across Eurasia and adapted to a wide variety of climates and environments; thus providing raw material that could have been absorbed by arriving domestic pigs. In fact, we demonstrated that gene flow between wild and domestic pigs was common and that it began immediately following the introduction of pigs to Europe from the Near East where they were initially domesticated. Despite this gene flow, pigs in Europe maintained their integrity as domestic animals by retaining their morphological and behavioural distinctiveness, suggesting that though some wild boar genomic variation was incorporated into domestic stocks, many wild boar genetic variants were actively expunged. Here, we will determine whether some wild genetic variants were preferentially expunged and whether some were preferentially incorporated into domestic populations. Ultimately, this project will reveal not only the genomic basis for domestication, but also how domestic pigs adapted to novel environments, by identifying specific genomic regions that were rapidly incorporated, and which ones were resisted during gene flow. To do so, we will assess the DNA preservation of more than 1,000 ancient pigs and wild boar from Eastern and Western Eurasia over the past 10,000 years, and then sequence the entire genomes of the best preserved specimens. Armed with this data, we will establish the spatial and temporal differences in the proportion and genomic location of the incorporation of wild boar genes into domestic stocks. The results will allow not only an unprecedented understanding of the origins of domestic animals, they will also have important ramifications for the conservation of endangered wild boar populations and for pig breeders and consumers of pork for whom the authenticity of domestic and wild meat is crucial.