Devices exploiting the principles of quantum mechanics can revolutionize the way we communicate, compute and measure. For example, communication links based on the exchange of single photons can generate secret encryption keys, detecting the presence of possible eavesdroppers. As for classical communication networks, quantum networks require local memories and processing units to store and process information. MOSQUITO investigates the physics related to the demonstration of a portable multi-qubit quantum networking node based on a compact and scalable silicon carbide (SiC) device. The device enables efficient storage of optical quantum states onto nuclear spins at cryogenic temperature, preserves them up to ambient conditions and is accessible at room temperature. The envisioned integrated device operates in the near-infrared optical region (close to telecom wavelength) and embeds for the first time spintronic, electronic and photonic functionalities on a single platform compatible with standard industrial processing. This break-through is enabled by the unique properties of silicon carbide, which features colour centres with excellent spin coherence, a bright spin/photon interface and established growth and nano-fabrication techniques. MOSQUITO will open the way to integrated quantum repeaters compatible with telecom networks. Additionally, it will lay the foundations for portable quantum networking nodes, a technology that could facilitate real-world deployment of quantum-enhanced communication security.

The global financial crisis of 2008 and the great recession that ensued have made economic inequality an urgent issue, sparking intense debate over the role of finance in modern life. Rise of the Rentier: France and the Making of Financial Modernity, 1830-1930 will explain how average people starting in the nineteenth century came to view financial investment as an ordinary, mundane activity, one increasingly entwined with their daily lives. This was the period in which capital experienced its first globalization, and the number of investors grew dramatically, incorporating even very small savers as members of a new investor 'class.' This research focuses on France, one of the largest capital-exporting nations of the modern era, but also one that pioneered techniques of the modern mass investor society. Paris was the world's second largest financial market by 1900, and the depth and breadth of France's investing public was exceptional among advanced capitalist countries. Particularly eager to send capital abroad, modest French investors rewrote landscapes and lives from Panama to South Africa, from California to Russia. Their steps into financial markets were supported by state, judicial, and corporate measures that made investment easier and more accessible, but which also helped turn the 'small saver' or 'petit rentier' into a potent political category, able to make demands on their representatives. The nature of France's investing public and the country's republican traditions placed finance at the heart of political contestation, allowing us to study how people simultaneously came to think of themselves as national citizens and members of a global economic order. Unlike conventional economic histories, which typically appraise financial markets chiefly as elements and indicators of national economic growth, this research approaches mass investment as a political and cultural as much as economic project, arguing that small investors are crucial to how financial systems gain legitimacy and persuasive capacity despite generating destabilizing inequality in democratic polities. It excavates the understandings, aspirations, and activities of ordinary people as they plunged - and were pulled - into finance, opening intimate realms in which individuals imagined and built their (economic) futures. These personal projections refracted through the political arena, helping configure relations between wealth and political power. From the pocketbook of the small investor, then, we can build a history of finance from the bottom up that takes seriously the hopes, anxieties, and traumas that both motored and resulted from financial development. This perspective demands new sources and voices in our histories of economic life, and the project will incorporate analysis of financial ephemera, like manuals and circulars; traveling securities' salesman; investor letters to state and financial institutions; journalistic accounts of financial scandal; and police surveillance of financial probity. It also requires new research strategies, such as approaching financial behavior through the lens of consumption studies; analyzing the aesthetics of investment instruments and advertising; reconstructing the spaces of financial engagement, from exchange districts to bank lobbies. I will privilege and expand on methodologies that allow us to incorporate lay knowledge and practice into our examination of rarified economic realms. Both the subject matter and methodology of this project thus encourages a more pluralistic and democratic engagement with the economic, within and outside the academy.

Over the last 25,000 years, East African climate has responded to changes in the Earth's orbit (mainly precession) that influence long-term variations in monsoonal rainfall and the migration of the intertropical convergence zone. But climate of earlier periods, back to 250,000 years, is less well understood as few continuous high resolution terrestrial records exist. This is a major gap in our understanding of equatorial climate from a region critical to the evolution of our own species. The African megadrought hypothesis states that droughts lasting many thousands of years occurred during the last interglacial (130,000 - 80,000 years ago) across tropical Africa. Evidence from the few sites investigated indicate they were of a severity greater than any droughts of succeeding time periods, and had major implications for evolutionary processes, for example continent wide migrations in Homo sapiens. Such long and intensely dry events in the history of African climate are an unexpected phenomenon, and their precise timing, origin and extent, has yet to be established. We hypothesise that megadroughts arose due to monsoon failure caused by changes in the shape of earth's orbit around the sun (the ~100,000 year eccentricity cycle), amplifying changes in the seasonal distribution of solar radiation (the ~21,000 year precession cycle). In order to fully understand these extreme climatic events, we will explore climate changes in the East African equatorial region spanning two glacial-interglacial cycles (i.e. the last ~250,000 years) giving critical context to the megadroughts and their causes. The project focuses on the sedimentary record from Lake Challa, a deep lake on the flank of Kilimanjaro. Unlike other studies from East Africa, the easterly position of Lake Challa places it beyond the direct influence of the Atlantic climate system, thus removing this aspect as a possible forcing and allowing us to isolate a record of monsoonal variation. The outstanding potential of these lake sediments to provide a long, sensitive repository of environmental change data has been established by a prior study of the last 25,000 years, that resulted in multi-disciplinary articles in 'Nature' on orbital forcing of climate, 'Science' on the laminated sediments and relation to ENSO, and 'Geology' concerning the seasonality of climate variations and the Kilimanjaro ice core. Additional data sets (published in other journals) confirm that the environmental proxies and dating methods proposed here will deliver a high quality record from this lake. The age of the deeper sediments has been estimated from seismic profiles of the sedimentary layers in the lake; new, absolute dates are required to identify the basal sediment age and rates of subsequent sedimentation. This project will lead in modelling of sediment ages from the new, deep cores through radiocarbon dates, palaeomagnetism to detect the presence of well-dated magnetic reversals and dating of volcanic ash layers through Ar/Ar dating and chemical correlation. Carbon and oxygen isotope data from diatom silica are excellent tools to reveal the megadroughts due to their sensitivity to humid/arid shifts as already demonstrated during the last 25,000 years. This project is part of an international consortium, partly funded by the International Continental scientific Drilling Program to recover cores from the lake. Our international partners have already gained support from their own national funding councils and will contribute complimentary environmental proxies (e.g. pollen, organic biomarkers) as well as additional dating (Ar/Ar) and, finally, climate modelling (ranging from local hydrology to global climate modelling) used to understand the global significance of our results in terms of forcing factors. We have Kenyan and Tanzanian collaborators, who will also act as conduits to ensure our discoveries help inform ongoing and future conservation needs and development strategies.

The creative industries are crucial to UK social and cultural life and one of the largest and fastest-growing sectors of the economy. Games and media are key pillars for growth in the creative industries, with UK turnovers of £3.5bn and £12.9bn respectively. Research in digital creativity has started to be well supported by governmental funds. To achieve full impact from these investments, translational and audience-facing research activities are needed to turn ideas into commercial practice and societal good. We propose a "Digital Creativity" Hub for such next-step research, which will produce impact from a huge amount of research activity in direct collaboration with a large group of highly engaged stakeholders, delivering impact in the Digital Economy challenge areas of Sustainable Society, Communities and Culture and New Economic Models. York is the perfect location for the DC Hub, with a fast-growing Digital Creativity industry (which grew 18.4% from 2011 to 2012), and 4800 creative digital companies within a 40-mile radius of the city. The DC Hub will be housed in the Ron Cooke Hub, alongside the IGGI centre for doctoral training, world-class researchers, and numerous small hi-tech companies. The DC Hub brings: - A wealth of research outcomes from Digital Economy projects funded by £90m of grants, £40m of which was managed directly by the investigators named in the proposal. The majority of these projects are interdisciplinary collaborations which involved co-creation of research questions and approaches with creative industry partners, and all of them produced results which are ripe for translational impact. - Substantial cash and in-kind support amounting to pledges of £9m from 80 partner organisations. These include key organisations in the Digital Economy, such as the KTN, Creative England and the BBC, major companies such as BT, Sony and IBM, and a large number of SMEs working in games and interactive media. The host Universities have also pledged £3.3m in matched funding, with the University of York agreeing to hire four "transitional" research fellows on permanent contracts from the outset leading to academic positions as a Professor, a Reader and two Lecturers. - Strong overlap with current projects run by the investigators which have complementary goals. These include the NEMOG project to study new economic models and opportunities for games, the Intelligent Games and Game Intelligence (IGGI) centre for doctoral training, with 55+ PhDs, and the Falmouth ERA Chair project, which will contribute an extra 5 five-year research fellowships to the DC Hub, leveraging £2m of EC funding for translational research in digital games technologies. - A diverse and highly active base of 16 investigators and 4 named PDRAs across four universities, who have much experience of working together on funded research projects delivering high-impact results. The links between these investigators are many and varied, and interdisciplinarity is ensured by a group of investigators working across Computer Science, Theatre Film and TV, Electronics, Art, Audio Production, Sociology, Education, Psychology, and Business. - Huge potential for step-change impact in the creative industries, with particular emphasis on video game technologies, interactive media, and the convergence of games and media for science and society. Projects in these areas will be supported by and feed into basic research in underpinning themes of data analytics, business models, human-computer interaction and social science. The projects will range over impact themes comprising impact projects which will be specified throughout the life of the Hub in close collaboration with our industry partners, who will help shape the research, thus increasing the potential for major impact. - A management team, with substantial experience of working together on large projects for research and impact in collaboration with the digital creative industries.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, there has been limited attention to congenital anomalies (spina bifida, cleft palate, limb defects, Down Syndrome and many others) which has led to a large gap in knowledge and understanding about their frequency and causes, how best to prevent them happening through public health programs, or how to meet the specialist healthcare and social needs of affected children and families in order to improve survival and quality of life. Currently, congenital anomalies are estimated to account for approximately 10% of child deaths under 5 years of age. There is a new urgency to tackle this problem. The Sustainable Development Goals set out targets for reducing neonatal and childhood mortality and morbidity, for reducing health inequity where vulnerable populations (such as those with congenital anomalies) are left behind, and to make sure that all children have access to quality healthcare. In addition, two recent events have shown the need to have better information about congenital anomalies in the population. Africa has the highest HIV burden in the world, and it is important that pregnant women receive the best antiviral medication for themselves and their babies, but a concern has been raised that one of the new antiretrovirals may raise the risk of congenital anomaly - much more data and research is needed to address this and related questions urgently. Recently in Latin America, the Zika virus epidemic focused the world's attention on the potential for maternal infections to cause congenital anomalies, and this again highlights the lack of knowledge about the effect of maternal infections in Africa, and lack of preparedness for new epidemics. This one year seed project will set up a Sub-Saharan African Network for Congenital Anomalies: Surveillance, Prevention and Care. The aim of the network is to promote the prevention of Congenital Anomalies, and care for affected children and families, by building an evidence base through surveillance and research, improving capacity for collaborative research, and paving a pathway to improve policy and practice. We have gathered together multiple stakeholders (academic researchers, ministry of health, patient organisations, healthcare professionals) from 9 African countries, including all those with the most experience in this area along with key international partners. By the end of one year, we will have agreed a governance structure, data sharing mechanism, "community of practice" website, and research priorities and further funding proposals. We will also have agreed a position paper setting out the burden of congenital anomalies at the individual, family and community level based on available data, modelling and estimation, and survey of policy and practice and experience in Sub-Saharan Africa. This position paper will be the basis for making the case with national ministries of health to raise the priority of congenital anomalies in their national health agendas. We will also scope the potential of new mobile and other technologies to be used or developed to assist data gathering and healthcare. The new network will meet in Kampala, and form committees which will continue to work throughout the year. In future, the network would be expected to expand to more countries in the region, and include more stakeholders. There has been huge enthusiasm from the partners in 9 African countries for this network. This is an exciting opportunity to make a step change in congenital anomaly prevention and care in Sub-Saharan Africa at a critical time.