Marine (or offshore) renewable energy has a large potential to deliver clean, secure and predictable energy. The United Kingdom has some of the largest natural resources (large waves, strong tidal currents and high winds) of any country in the world. The exploitation of these resources is critical to addressing the energy trilemma (of producing secure, cost affordable, low carbon energy). Indeed, it is likely that without marine energy the UK's ambitious 2050 carbon reduction targets cannot be met. However, Marine energy has significant challenges to overcome. Wave, tidal and wind turbines must be installed and operated in remote locations, where the water is deep and the ocean, weather and tides are highly energetic. To provide cost effective electricity, renewable energy devices must be inexpensive to manufacture, simple to install, reliable, easy to service and produce large quantities of energy. Achieving all of this within the hostile marine environment is quite a challenge, however the prize is significant, providing not only clean energy, but significant employment and export opportunities. The United Kingdom Centre for Marine Renewable Energy (UKCMER) is a virtual centre, funded under RCUK's Energy Programmes SUPERGEN initiative. UKCMER seeks to coordinate research in renewable electricity generation using the power of the waves, tidal currents and floating wind turbines. The UKCMER core comprises of The University of Edinburgh (who coordinate the programme), Cranfield University, Exeter University, Strathclyde University and Swansea University. In addition to conducting a core research programme UKCMER acts as a hub to coordinate the activities of four additional Grand Challenge projects (EP/N021452/1, EP/N021487/1, EP/N020782/1 and EP/N02057X/1) looking at specific challenges for the marine energy sector. Research in the fourth phase of UKCMER will focus on: methods to enhance the performance of tidal turbines that recognise that arrays of machines are affected by both the interactions of the water flowing passed the devices and the electrical infrastructure which collects the energy generated and sends it to the grid. The development of design tools to assist in the optimal design of wave energy converters, tidal turbines and floating wind turbines that account for the random nature of both the waves and turbulence in the marine environment. Methods to explore the response of wave energy converters, tidal turbines and floating wind turbines to extreme loading events, recognising that such events arise from a combination of steep (rather than large waves) and the state of the device when the waves reach it. Examining how the wakes of tidal turbines deployed in farms interact with each other so that the power production from the farm can be optimised. And finally, how new designs and materials can improve the structural integrity of offshore renewable energy converters. The research programme has been designed to be complementary to the existing grand challenge projects and will make use of early results from these projects. UKCMER leads the UK's international outreach activities and has developed strong links to programmes in Chile, Japan, Korea, Mexico and the USA which will be further strengthened under this grant. UKCMER staff continue to contribute to standardisation activities of the IEC helping to develop the 62600 series of international standards and contributing to the work of the International Towing Tank Conference (ITTC) and the International Ships and Offshore Structures Congress (ISSC).

'Language Acts and Worldmaking' argues that language is a material and historical force, not a transparent vehicle for thought. Language empowers us, by enabling us to construct our personal, local, transnational and spiritual identities; it can also constrain us, by carrying unexamined ideological baggage. This dialectical process we call 'worldmaking'. If one language gives us a sense of place, of belonging, learning another helps us move across time and place, to encounter and experience other ways of being, other histories, other realities. Thus, our project challenges a widely held view about ML learning. While it is commonly accepted that languages are vital in our globalised world, it is too often assumed that language learning is merely a neutral instrument of globalisation-a commercialised skill set, one of those 'transferable skills' that are part of a humanities education. Yet ML learning is a unique form of cognition and critical engagement. Learning a language means recognising that the terms, concepts, beliefs and practices that are embedded in it possess a history, and that that history is shaped by encounters with other cultures and languages. To regenerate and transform ML we must foreground language's power to shape how we live, and realise the potential of ML learning to open pathways between worlds past and present. Our project realises this potential by breaking down the standard disciplinary approaches that constrain Spanish and Portuguese within the boundaries of national literary and cultural traditions. We promote research that explores the vast multilingual and multicultural terrain constituted by the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds, with their global empires and contact zones in Europe, the Americas, and Africa. Understanding Iberia as both the originator and the product of global colonising movements places Iberian Studies on a comparative, transnational axis and emphasizes diasporic identities, historic postcolonial thinking, modern decolonial movements and transcultural exchange. Our research follows five paths linked by an interest in the movement of peoples and languages across time and place. 'Travelling concepts' researches the stories and vocabularies that construct Iberia as a cultural crossroads, a border between East and West, a homeland for Jews, Muslims and Christians. We examine the ideological work performed by the cultural semantics Iberia, Al-Andalus, and Sefarad in Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, German, Arabic, Hebrew and ladino (Judeo-Spanish), from the Middle Ages to the present, in Europe and beyond. 'Translation acts' turns to the theatrical narrative, investigating how words, as performed speech and embodied language create a world on stage. Through translation, we travel across time and space, interrogating the original words and bringing them to our time and place. This strand exploits theatre's capacity to (re)generate known and imagined worlds. 'Digital Modelling as an act of translation' examines the effects of digital, mobile and networked technology upon our concept of 'global' culture, and what kinds of 'translation' are enacted as information enters and leaves the digital sphere in the context of Hispanic and Lusophone cultures. 'Loaded Meanings and their history' demonstrates the centrality of historical linguistics to cultural understanding, by investigating the process and significance of the learned borrowings in Ibero-Romance. Such borrowings acquire 'loaded' meanings that reflect and shape people's attitudes and worldviews. Finally, the agents of language learning-teachers-are the focus of the fifth strand, 'Diasporic Identities and the Politics of Language Teaching'. This strand analyzes the life stories of native teachers of Spanish, Portuguese and Catalan to identify the vocabularies and narrative patterns that help them make sense of and interrogate their professional and personal identities as transnational cultural agents in the UK.

Despite the past and present successes of vaccination for the control of infectious diseases, new vaccines need to be developed that respond to the societal demands for improving disease prevention. Vaccines that are efficient in one administration, that protect against a variety of rapidly mutating pathogen variants, and that cure chronic infections and cancers are major pursued goals. New strategies from basic immunological research in the mouse revealed that antigenized immunoglobulin-based vaccines that target dendritic cells (DC)- the key cell that orchestrate immunity- generate an unequaled quality of immunogenicity. Furthermore, the specific targeting of DC subsets resulted in eliciting specific arms of immunity i.e. either strong antibody or cytotoxic responses. However given the limited predictive value of mouse results, the translation of this approach to “real” species, such as human and domestic animals, requires further demonstration. DC subsets are well represented in the skin that appears as a convenient and efficient site for vaccine delivery. Pig is a model of choice for skin delivery, as human and swine skin structures and their DC compositions share a high degree of similarities. In addition, pig and human are both sensitive to zoonotic pathogens, with influenza representing a permanent threat as demonstrated by the 2009 pandemic. The goal of “DCVacFlu” is to generate Flu-antigenized antibody-based vaccines that target swine skin DC subsets (Flu-DCVacAb), in order to provide novel veterinary vaccines and solid preclinical information for developing corresponding human vaccines. The French coordinator has identified the conservation of DC subset organization across mammals based on functional and transcriptomic comparative analyses. This led to the selection of molecular candidates that could allow (1) targeting the “antibody promoting” DC type with the c-type lectins DECTIN2, MANNOSE R and ASGPR2 and (2) targeting the “cytotoxic T cell promoting” DC type, with the c-type lectins DEC205, CLEC9A, CLEC12A and the chemokine receptor XCR1. Interestingly, the Mexican coordinator has already developed the anti porcine DEC205 (not published), what represents the first and unique anti-DC Ab in pig. Both partners will share the development of complementary DCVacAb. Two strategies will be compared for associating the Flu antigens (FluAG) to the DCVacAb. The Mexican teams will molecularly clone a selection of DCVacAb as Single Chain Fragment variables (ScFv) fused to the Flu antigens. The French partners will exploit their novel patented strategy which consists in expressing the FluAG in fusion with streptavidin (SA) for making complexes with biotinylated DCVacAb, thus providing a simple and flexible way to antigenize DCVacAb. The selected FluAG will be the nucleoprotein (induces cytotoxic T cells) and the external ion channel M2e (induces protective antibodies) that can both induce protective immunity against a large array of Flu strains. Finally a virulent challenge with influenza A H1N1 2009 will be done in the pigs vaccinated with the most immunogenic DCVacAb structures. In total, the expectations of “DCVacFlu” are the: - Demonstration of the proof of concept of DC targeting by DCVacAb in a relevant target species (pig) for efficient vaccination via skin, - Evaluation of novel molecular targets such as XCR1, DECTIN2 and ASGPR2, not yet fully tested in the mouse, for DCVacAb strategies, - Challenge the concept of biasing the immune response types by targeting specific DC subsets in a relevant species, - Comparison of efficacy between 2 strategies to antigenize the DCVacAb, i.e. FluAG fused to ScFV and Streptavidin-FluAG linked to DCVAcAb. DCVacFlu shall provide cutting edge vaccines for veterinary medicine and convincing preclinical date useful for translation to humans, validated for influenza and transposable to other pathogens.

Developing countries are the site of most landscape burning worldwide. They burn the most peatland and forest, have the highest deforestation and net fire-related greenhouse gas emissions, squander economic opportunity by burning agricultural residues, have infrastructure such as power lines and resources such as forest plantations and protected areas at risk from fire, and experience the most recurrent and worst air pollution events associated with landscape burning. Atmospheric impacts spread far beyond national borders, making this a regional problem through the spread of pollution, and a global problem through impacts on climate from carbon emissions. Billions of dollars have been spent on the ground- and space-based infrastructure necessary to provide real-time, continuous remote sensing observations that support meteorological forecasts worldwide. Our Project will harness this infrastructure in order to benefit developing country users who, because of the above issues, require accurate, actionable, and extremely up-to-date information on the location and characteristics of wildfires in their area of interest, and on the smoke that these fires are releasing into the atmosphere. Our project will make available real-time, accurate and actionable information on landscape fires and fire emissions through a combination of work by the UK team and our overseas partners. This new information will cover dozens of DAC-list countries in the tropics and sub-tropics that experience significant challenges from landscape burning, and so the benefits will be regional throughout the tropics and sub-tropics, rather than to only a few nations. We will use a source of new continuous and real-time (10 to 15 minute update frequency) meteorological satellite data to provide this real-time intelligence on wildfire state, exploiting algorithms developed under NERC funded research and working with Partners (IPMA, Portugal and UNAM, Mexico) who will implement these algorithms in their own satellite data processing chains to provide 24-hr guaranteed (99%) information availability on landscape fires. The resulting real-time wildfire information will be made available to users in all developing nations through the already extremely widely used Advanced Fire Information System (AFIS) run by our Partner CSIR, South Africa, who have tens of thousands of users already and as a result of this new pan-tropical information will greatly extend their reach throughout the tropics since this highest temporal resolution data is currently only available at the highest quality over North and West Africa. Our project will also provide the information required to turn the real-time fire information into real-time estimates of fire emissions - particularly focusing on health-impacting particulate matter and total carbon emissions, which will benefit developing country users who are focused on health-impacting particulate and GHG emissions assessments and the national programmes aimed at their reduction. Overall our project will provide a real step-change in actionable fire information available in the developing countries of South and Southeast Asia, Southern and East Africa, Mexico, Central and South America. Institutions and individuals in these regions will be able to identify fires burning close to power lines and/or other important critical infrastructure in order to take action (e.g. temporarily turn off the power line letting the fire pass underneath without problems), that have started within or close to forest reserves, plantations or protected areas (with the potential to dispatch fire response crews in a far more timely manner than currently), and which are impacting health and national GHG emissions (with information now available to better quantify these, ultimately in support at efforts to reduce them and thus gain through health improvements and/or REDD+ schemes. Keywords: Wildfires, smoke, satellites, infrastructure and area protection.

Fertility is a global-level multifaceted health problem where infertility and birth control are pressing concerns. Around 16% of couples worldwide are unable to procreate causing financial and emotional stress. One-third of male infertility cases cannot be diagnosed by any available test. In conjunction with this, sperm count has decreased in the last 50 years which suggests infertility will only increase. At the same time, population growth threatens sustainability given the finite availability of resources such as energy, farming land and non-renewable materials. These problems call for a better understanding of the biology of reproduction so the challenges of reproductive health can be addressed. With this new collaboration from the University of Nottingham and the National Autonomous University of Mexico, we aim to address some of the challenges of male infertility. We propose to use an interdisciplinary approach to use phonon microscopy, for the first time, to characterise the elasticity of sperm cells with sub-cellular resolution. We expect that elasticity can be used as a biomarker for sterility and can provide further insight into the understanding of the biology of fertilisation.