Composite materials are very important to the aerospace industry because they maximise weight reduction in aircraft as well as providing several other advantages, for example, reduced fuel consumption. Although composite materials already provide great benefits to the aerospace industry, their full potential is not currently being realised due to their susceptibility to delamination. Delamination is a type of failure mode suffered by laminated materials in which constituent layers debond and separate from each other. It results in a significant loss of structural stiffness and is often accompanied by catastrophic structural failure. To combat delamination, composite parts are often over-designed increasing the cost, weight and volume of a structure. This is in great part because the resistance to fracture, the 'fracture toughness', of a laminate, is not easily predicted while the consequences of delamination are severe. Fractures deform in different modes: in mode I opening, mode II shearing and mode III tearing. Since the fracture toughness of each pure fracture mode is typically different, the overall fracture toughness of a mixed-mode fracture depends on the relative proportions of each fracture mode, and this is called the 'fracture mode partition'. Determining the fracture mode partition is therefore a very important task. It has however turned out to be a complex and highly controversial problem. Many researchers have worked on the problem over the years by deriving analytical theories and carrying out numerical simulations; however, reliably and accurately validating these results with experiments has proved problematic. The conventional mixed-mode fracture experiment applies loads to a cracked specimen until the crack grows and then uses the measured critical load to calculate the total fracture toughness. The fracture mode partition cannot be directly determined nor the in-depth mechanics of delamination understood. Instead comparisons can only be made between the measured fracture toughness and the material's failure locus to approximate the partition. This indirect measurement has made it very difficult to validate any of the partition theories proposed in the literature and has no doubt contributed to the confusion and controversy surrounding the topic. Digital image correlation (DIC) is a technology that is becoming increasingly available. It is an optical method that can provide full-field non-contact accurate measurements of deformation. It has great potential to circumvent the shortcomings of the existing mixed-mode fracture experiments because it can accurately reveal the mechanics near to the crack tip. This research project will respond to this need for a test method to directly measure fracture mode partitions. It aims to develop a methodology to determine the fracture mode partition of a crack by examining its near-crack tip strain field using DIC. This will allow the various partition theories in the literature, including the principal investigator's (PI's) own ones, to be either validated or invalidated, new partition theories to be developed and tested, and the conditions of applicability of a particular partition theory to be determined. There are however several challenges to overcome, in particular related to the application of DIC to this problem and the scales of observation required. The proposed research has great potential to result in new test standards for the direct measurement of fracture mode partitions, considerably enhancing the knowledge and skills of the structural mechanics research community, and also providing industrial engineers with a method to accurately characterise the mixed-mode failure behaviour of the laminated materials they use. The in-depth physics of the fracture mechanics of advanced composite materials will be revealed, which will contribute towards their full potential being harnessed without over-design against the danger of delamination.

Vertebrates, including humans, are made up of about 70% water. Balancing water intake and output is obviously vital for health, but most people don't realise the vast internal movements of water going on all the time within their bodies. For example, the kidney, gut and pancreas collectively transport 8 times our total body water volume in and out of these tissues each day. Understanding the mechanisms these organs use, and how the cells that line them (called epithelia) operates this water transport is therefore important. Despite this importance, the mechanism of water transport is still the subject of much debate. Having said that, for more than 50 years it has been understood that the net transport of water requires salts (especially sodium chloride, or NaCl) to be transported in one particular direction first, to then drive fluid transport (secondarily) in the same direction by a process known as osmosis. Despite this consensus the precise route that water transport takes across epithelia is hotly disputed. For example, does it pass through the cell membranes, via special protein called aquaporins? or does it squeeze between the cells? The novelty of the present proposal lies in the discovery of two new mechanisms for influencing water transport that are conceptually very different to the other current areas of debate. These ideas challenge the established dogma by not relying on salt being transported in the same direction as water, representing a fundamental change in our understanding and providing a novel model for the mechanism of water transport in animal epithelia. The discovery has been made by studying how marine fish drink seawater and process this fluid through the intestine to avoid dehydration. Like humans drinking ordinary fluids, these animals first transport NaCl from the gut into the blood, and water then follows by osmosis. However, marine fish have another trick up their sleeve that maximises their water extraction capability. They secrete a different compound called bicarbonate (same as found in baking soda) into the intestine, in the opposite direction to water absorption. This causes a chemical reaction within the swallowed seawater that causes the high levels of calcium it contains to precipitate as solid, white clumps of calcium carbonate (like limestone). These 'gut rocks' are eventually excreted but the advantage to the fish is to reduce the total dissolved compounds in the gut fluid, which in turn makes it easier to extract water into the blood. We propose to study this novel process further by using 3 different species of marine fish (flounder, tilapia and trout) that produce very different quantities of bicarbonate, and are therefore predicted to have different efficiencies of water absorption. Cold and high pressure also inhibit precipitation, so we will compare water absorption in fish at cold temperature and high pressure (in a barometric chamber). Precipitation of carbonate occurs in human diseases such as kidney and pancreatic stones, so studying this process in fish may help us understand this pathological condition. A second novel process that fish use involves the high levels of magnesium and sulphate in the sea water that they drink. These are not absorbed, and would therefore be expected to get more and more concentrated as swallowed fluid moves down the intestine as water is extracted. This would eventually retard the osmosis of water into the blood. However, magnesium and sulphate are unusual in only having half the potential of other compounds to causes osmosis. It is only because seawater happens to have such high levels of magnesium sulphate that fish extract water so efficiently. This will be explored using samples of gut tissue taken out of the animal and studying its water transport properties in a test tube (in vitro). Many human laxatives use magnesium sulphate (Epsom salts) so this research could reveal insights into how these treatments actually work.

Permanent oxygen minimum zones (OMZs) that extend to over 10 million km3 of ocean (ca. 8% of ocean volume) are expanding geographically and vertically due to climate-driven reductions in dissolved oxygen (DO). Potential impacts on marine animal distributions and abundance may be particularly significant for high-oxygen-demand apex predators, such as oceanic pelagic sharks, by reducing habitat volumes through OMZ shoaling and concentrating them further in surface waters where they become more vulnerable to fisheries. But predictions of how exploited oceanic fish actually respond to OMZ expansions are not based on mechanistic understandings, principally because direct measurements of oxygen tolerances during normal behaviour have not been determined for large predatory fish in the open ocean. The proposed research will bring about a step change in our understanding of OMZ impacts on oceanic ecology by applying our existing expertise in animal movement studies and by deploying new telemetry technologies for measuring oxygen environments actually encountered by free-living oceanic sharks moving above/within OMZs. This will enable major unknowns to be addressed concerning how oceanic sharks respond physiologically and behaviourally to OMZs, how oceanic shark habitats change with predicted OMZ expansion, and whether this will increase shark vulnerability to fishing gear. The project will achieve its objectives through linked field and modelling studies on two Red-Listed species, the warm-bodied (endothermic) shortfin mako, Isurus oxyrinchus, and the ectothermic blue shark, Prionace glauca, that are the two pelagic shark species most frequently caught in high seas fisheries. By focusing in depth on key processes underlying shark responses to DO in situ, our new modelling approaches will establish effects of future warming and OMZ shoaling on fish niches and determine how these shift distributions and alter capture risk by fisheries. The project represents a discipline-spanning approach linking physiology to ecology and oceanography, with wide-ranging outcomes for understanding global biotic responses to warming and ocean deoxygenation with direct relevance to sustainable fisheries and species conservation.

Stem cells are of central importance in the development of both plants and animals, since they are a self-maintaining reservoir of unspecialised cells that provide the precursor cells for tissue and organ formation. Stem cells have the ability to maintain temselves and also to produce daughter cells with different characteristics (called 'differentiated' cells). The maintenance of stem cells is therefore crucial for all multicellular organisms and is of outstanding significance for regenerative biology in medicine and agriculture. Given the life-long importance of stem cells, they are tucked safely from harm's way, in so-called stem cell niches that provide a microenvironment promoting self-renewal and inhibiting cell differentiation into different cell types. Plant stem cell niches are located in meristems at root and shoot tips, and are pivotal to the production of new organs and tissues throughout the plant life cycle that in some species can span several thousand years. In woody plants a further specialised cylindrical meristem within the stem, the cambium, is of particular importance in secondary thickening that results in production of woody material, and this also contains stem cells. In this proposal, we seek to use microarray analysis to identify the genes that control behaviour of these different populations of stem cells. Microarrays allow simultaneous measurement of the expression of all genes in a sample. We will combine this with advanced cell sorting technologies and techniques to increase the number of stem cells by transgenic regulation, and this will allow us to identify common and distinct mechanisms that control the proliferation of different stem cells and whether and when they differentiate to give rise to different cell types in their respective tissues. In plants, these signals that specify and maintain stem cells and the genes involved are poorly understood. We also seek to understand how stem cells respond to cues from the environment. We propose a European network composed of the world leading groups involved in understanding (1) root stem cells [Ben Scheres, Utrecht, Netherlands], (2) shoot stem cells (Thomas Laux, Freiburg, Germany], (3) the cambial stem cells (Yka Helariutta, Helsinki, Finland), together with the group of Jim Murray (Cambridge, UK) who are experts in the control of cell division, and Aurelio Camphilo (Porto, Portugal), experts in image analysis of growing plant tissue.

Smart Shrinkage Solutions - Fostering Resilient Cities in Inner Peripheries of Europe is a project that offers the best practice and most feasible solutions to the problem of urban shrinkage - a continuous population decline affecting more than 1,500 cities all over Europe. By learning from the experience of the cities that once were on the edge of an abyss but have bounced back to life, by sharing the key ingredients of their success across Europe and beyond, this project enables as many shrinking cities as possible to adapt, transform, and thrive in the face of continuously and often dramatically changing circumstances.