The PRIMA project will redefine our understanding of how culture was produced and disseminated in Early Modern Europe (1575-1800). PRIMA will uncover the importance and the scale of manuscript production and publication for literature, science, music, and other areas, for a period when print is believed to be the dominant (if not the only) technology for publication. By investigating the indissoluble connection between text and carrier, PRIMA will explore how manuscripts have shaped society for much longer than believed. The PRIMA project will unveil the rich manuscript culture that hides in the plain sight of scholars and answer why so many manuscripts were produced, by whom, for whom and how. We will assess the existence of modern scriptoria, uncover monastic writing practices in the modern period, and focus on manuscript production within universities and academies. For literature, particularly satyric and lyric poetry and theatre, it is our argument that manuscript dissemination is the norm and that print is exceptional. We will focus particularly on Italy while allowing for significant openings towards other cultures. Italian manuscript production and consumption are both exceptionally rich and understudied. Adopting qualitative and quantitative methods and innovative computational approaches for data mining, production, and retrieval will ensure the project's feasibility. The investigation of post-print manuscripts will uncover unknown works, which will help redefine our understanding of literary production for the 17th through the 18th centuries by fighting teleological prejudices about the inferiority of manuscripts with respect to print from the 16th century onwards. Finally, PRIMA will also investigate cases of print/manuscript hybridisation, where manuscripts imitate print or include printed sections. The project's main outcomes are the creation of a new discipline and a centre for Modern Manuscript Studies, a book collection and an OA.

This interdisciplinary project will reveal how musical life in Renaissance Avignon (c.1500–1630) was directly interlinked with events happening on a broader religious, social and political level. Alongside being the first in-depth study of Avignon’s musical life during this period, it represents a significant and much-needed departure from the Parisian/royal court focus that has typified almost all previous scholarship on French Renaissance music. Two fundamental issues will provide the basis for this investigation: a) the question as to whether Avignon’s musical life can be said to reflect localised and/or nationalised trends; and b) the effect that Avignon’s unique status as a Papal enclave had on its institutions and musical practices (for example, in the presence of Italian personnel or musical developments). These broader issues will serve as a backdrop for exploring the full spectrum of musicians’ professional activities, as well as the various contexts within which they made the city resound – i.e. from its ecclesiastical establishments (such as Notre-Dame des Doms Cathedral and the Collégiale Saint-Agricol), to the instrumentalists attached to the city’s guilds, to the various civic spectacles within which musicians participated (like ceremonial entries). The results of this innovative survey will thus constitute a major contribution to the fields of early modern soundscapes and cultural studies; by extension, they will also shed new light on Avignon’s urban identity at this time, thereby leading to a better understanding of music making in France during the long sixteenth century.

Greenhouse gas emissions for refrigeration systems worldwide were in 2019 equivalent to the whole EU emissions. Long-term sustainability requires improvements in energy efficiency, with a huge return on investment obtained from even slight improvements. The mechanocaloric effect, which refers to adiabatic temperature changes induced by stress or pressure, is one of the most promising energy-saving new technology for cooling systems. Mechanocaloric research produced in only 14 years highly performing materials, overcoming electrocaloric and magnetocaloric materials. Furthermore, mechanocaloric materials use non-critical, cheap, abundant and non-toxic elements. Recent papers evidenced colossal barocaloric effects around the Spin CrossOver (SCO) temperatures for some molecular complexes. The FROSTBIT project overall objective is to develop the first operative refrigerator based on a radically new solid-state technology by using barocaloric materials in a regenerative cooling device. In more specific objectives, the project aims to 1) Design sustainable syntheses of compounds for barocaloric applications, exploring synthetic pathways to optimize costs and low environmental impact/low carbon footprint vs. barocaloric performances; 2); Shape SCO materials in order to obtain densified objects with centimetric sizes, study extensively their thermal, mechanical and barocaloric behaviour and explore the optimization of those properties through the preparation of composites ceramics 3) Model, design and build the constituting elements of a barocaloric refrigerator: barocaloric regenerator, thermal and pressure fluid circuits. While the technology could potentially address a wide range of temperature, as an initial step we propose to specifically design and build a refrigerator yielding 100 W of cooling power at room temperatures and providing a temperature span of at least 20 K with a target COP between 4 and 6 (corresponding to 30% of Carnot efficiency).

Despite their well-recognized potential, marine bioactive molecules are still difficult to source due to a lack of controlled culturing and processing infrastructures, and their chemical synthesis is hampered by their chemical complexity. The marine environment is largely affected by global change and wild harvesting of marine bioresources does not represent a sustainable supply of these biomolecules. The main sources of the high-value biomolecules are corals, sponges, algae, involving industrial end-users in the medical and pharmaceutical, food, and cosmetic sectors. Therefore, new approaches are urgently needed in marine biotechnology as microbial engineering has not fully met the expectations for producing the marine bioactives identified in invertebrates and seaweeds. Recent advances in thesynthetic biology of terrestrial natural products are offering unique opportunities to supply bioactives of terrestrial origin. Omics technologies have also transformed the way the complexity of the marine holobiont can be viewed and today the integration of omics data such as genomics and metabolomics can increase our understanding of the functioning and processes of living organisms including their metabolic pathways. COMBO will allow the transfer of knowledge from terrestrial to marine biotechnology through the engineering of marine metabolic pathways using Omics approaches. The rationale behind COMBO lies in the power of synthetic consortia of host cells and microbial cells based on the concept of holobiont and auxotrophy. To this end, we will exploit the recent advances in co-cultures systems. Indeed, the development of synthetic consortia has been shown to support specific ecological dynamics, promote microbial species growth, and syntheses of valuable chemicals. COMBO will therefore expand the potential offered by underused marine sponges and seaweeds known to produce bioactives such as terpenoids and alkaloids for the cosmetic and pharmaceutical markets.

The European Consortium "Antiviral Therapeutics for Rapid Response Against Pandemic Infectious Diseases" (AVITHRAPID) aims to support the search for novel broad-spectrum antiviral compounds by advancing multiple approaches. Building on a pre-existing set of bioactive small molecules, which are at least at the validated hit level, AVITHRAPID strives for the development of pre-clinical candidates targeting several viruses. This will be achieved by combining the relevant expertise for pre-clinical drug discovery, including molecular modeling, biochemical and cell-based assays, X-ray crystallography, medicinal chemistry, biophysical binding studies, ADMETox profiling, in vitro and in vivo PK, as well as animal disease models. In addition, the consortium aims to conduct a Phase 2a clinical trial for a small molecule developed against Zika virus. Moreover, the consortium aims to identify and validate further viral targets and thereby contribute to the search for novel antiviral targets. As a consequence of the activities in AVITHRAPID, an early-stage drug discovery pipeline will be established that can be used to rapidly identify and develop novel antiviral compounds against emerging diseases.