The research in this proposal tries to answer questions about how our solar system and its reservoirs first formed. We are proposing to focus our efforts on the issue of how terrestrial planets acquired their metallic cores (the same cores that drive planetary magnetic fields). In the process we will also determine how the silicate Earth's budgets of metal loving elements like Ni originated. We will make comparisons between the differentiated planets and asteroids, Earth, Mars, Vesta and the angrite parent body on the one hand and the Moon on the other and use these data to better constrain lunar origins. We use a combination of isotopic measurements using mass spectrometry, and experimental simulation at high pressures and temperatures. We have isotopic evidence that metallic cores of planets started forming very early; within the first million years or so of the Solar System's earliest objects, calcium aluminium refractory inclusions. These cores formed from molten rock created from accretional energy and, initially, radioactive decay. As metallic cores form they partition a variety of elements into the dense segregating metallic liquids partially removing these elements from the residual silicate planet. The degree of depletion and the magnitude of any associated isotopic fractionation will depend on the conditions under which these cores formed, in particular the pressure, temperature, oxygen fugacity and sulphur content. Therefore, by measuring the isotopic compositions of primitive meteorites and comparing them with those of samples of the silicate and metal portions of asteroids, Mars, Earth and the Moon one can deduce the environment under which different planetary objects first developed. To quantify these environments it is necessary to calibrate the isotopic and chemical effects with experimental determinations. We will focus our attention on vanadium, chromium, nickel, molybdenum, tungsten and, if time permits, ruthenium.

The shift from hunting and gathering to an agricultural way of life was one of the most profound events in the history of our species and one which continues to impact our existence today. Understanding this process is key to understanding the origins and rise of human civilization. Despite decades of study, however, fundamental questions regarding why, where and how it occurred remain largely unanswered. Such a fundamental change in human existence could not have been possible without the domestication of selected animals and plants. The dog is crucial in this story since it was not only the first ever domestic animal, but also the only animal to be domesticated by hunter-gatherers several thousand years before the appearance of farmers. The bones and teeth of early domestic dogs and their wild wolf ancestors hold important clues to our understanding of how, where and when humans and wild animals began the relationship we still depend upon today. These remains have been recovered from as early as 15,000 years ago in numerous archaeological sites across Eurasia suggesting that dogs were either domesticated independently on several occasions across the Old World, or that dogs were domesticated just once and subsequently spreading with late Stone Age hunter gatherers across the Eurasian continent and into North America. There are also those who suggest that wolves were involved in an earlier, failed domestication experiment by Ice Age Palaeolithic hunters about 32,000 years ago. Despite the fact that we generally know the timing and locations of the domestication of all the other farmyard animals, we still know very little for certain about the origins of our most iconic domestic animal. New scientific techniques that include the combination of genetics and statistical analyses of the shapes of ancient bones and teeth are beginning to provide unique insights into the biology of the domestication process itself, as well as new ways of tracking the spread of humans and their domestic animals around the globe. By employing these techniques we will be able to observe the variation that existed in early wolf populations at different levels of biological organization, identify diagnostic signatures that pinpoint which ancestral wolf populations were involved in early dog domestication, reveal the shape (and possibly the genetic) signatures specifically linked to the domestication process and track those signatures through time and space. We have used this combined approach successfully in our previous research enabling us to definitively unravel the complex story of pig domestication in both Europe and the Far East. We have shown that pigs were domesticated multiple times and in multiple places across Eurasia, and the fine-scale resolution of the data we have generated has also allowed us to reveal the migration routes pigs took with early farmers across Europe and into the Pacific. By applying this successful research model to ancient dogs and wolves, we will gain much deeper insight into the fundamental questions that still surround the story of dog domestication.

"Live fast, die young" famously describes the wild excesses of rock stars and Hollywood actors, but also encapsulates an important biological principle. Animals and plants that grow and reproduce quickly are more likely to be killed by natural enemies or environmental extremes. We usually explain this biological trade-off in terms of energy: more energy spent on growth means less energy invested in defence against enemies, the capture of essential resources, or into stores for surviving adverse conditions. A logical extension of this explanation is that, if the same growth could be achieved using less energy, more would be available for defence, resource capture and storage, thereby increasing survival. However, this prediction remains untested, despite its central importance for biology. The evolution of C4 photosynthesis in more than seventy plant lineages has increased the efficiency of photosynthetic energy conversion at high light and hot temperatures, in comparison with the ancestral C3 type of photosynthesis. To understand how this increase in photosynthetic efficiency influences growth, we have developed an experimental approach capable of comparing growth among hundreds of plant species in the same environmental conditions. We have discovered that, as well as a direct physiological effect of C4 photosynthesis in promoting faster growth, C4 leaves are unexpectedly less dense than C3 ones, further increasing growth efficiency. This allows C4 plants to be larger, with more growth invested in roots, which leads us to hypothesize that they may be able to accumulate greater storage, and have better access to water during drought than their C3 counterparts. Together, these hypothesized effects are expected to increase plant survival following repeated defoliation and drought events. If supported by experimental evidence, these ecological differences between C3 and C4 plants would have important global scale implications for the responses of plant communities to environmental change and land management. We propose to test these hypothesis using three large comparative experiments, capitalizing on our recent advances in developing high-throughput experimental screening methods. We are able to measure growth, allocation to roots verses shoots, storage and survival on thousands of plants in the same experimental set-up, and have developed novel statistical methods to analyze the large resultant datasets. We are also the first group to successfully apply metabolomic methods to identify and quantify storage compounds across multiple wild plant species. Our strategy for the proposed work will be to combine these approaches, investigating survival of experimentally imposed drought or repeated defoliation in seventy ecologically important grass species, representing seven independent evolutionary origins of C4 photosynthesis and their C3 sister taxa. Alternative hypothesized survival mechanisms will be tested by using plants of different ages to manipulate size. Since C4 photosynthesis also has a direct physiological effect on plant water use, by reducing stomatal aperture, we will make detailed measurements of plant hydraulics during the drought experiment. Findings from the three experiments will allow us to test the relative importance to survival of greater storage, deeper rooting, lower plant water use, and greater plant size in C4 then C4 species, and to gain a holistic understanding of the system. The work will enhance our mechanistic understanding of how a major physiological innovation changed growth-survival relationships and enabled plants to explore new phenotypic space. Throughout the project, we will work with mathematical modelers to ensure that the experiments will generate data that are useful for developing improved models of how global vegetation stores carbon and influences climate.

This project will assess a class of systems that blend electricity generation and storage, to understand the role that they could play in future energy systems. Their ability to deliver low-carbon energy on demand, at low system cost, will be investigated from technical, economic, and policy standpoints. With a growing fraction of electricity consumption being supplied by variable renewable energy sources, the ability to match energy generation and energy consumption is rapidly taking centre stage. Flexible ('dispatchable') coal and gas plants are being displaced to lower carbon emissions. At present, both nuclear and renewable energy technologies are generally configured to generate as much electricity as possible, regardless of the electricity demand at the time. Standalone energy storage, in which surplus electricity is converted to an intermediate energy form and then back again, is emerging as a vital partner to these generation technologies but it is prohibitively expensive for the duties that will be required in the near future. Active management of electricity demand (by shutting down or deferring loads) and electrical interconnections with neighbouring countries will also play important roles but these also have costs and they will not obviate the need for storage. This project will build a deep understanding of a class of system which takes a different and potentially much lower cost approach. These Generation Integrated Energy Storage (GIES) systems, store energy in a convenient form before converting it to electricity on demand. The hypothesis is that the lowest cost and highest performance storage can be achieved by integrating generation and storage within one system. This avoids the expense and inefficiency of transforming primary energy (e.g. wind, solar, nuclear) into electricity, then into an intermediate form, and later back to electricity. For example, the heat produced by a concentrating solar power plant can be stored at far lower cost and with lower losses than producing electricity directly and operating a standalone electricity store. A broad range of opportunities exist for low-carbon GIES systems, in both renewable and nuclear applications. The research team's expertise in wind, nuclear, and liquefied air storage will be applied directly to GIES systems in all three. The project will also establish a framework for the wider significance of GIES to energy systems. Technical and thermodynamic metrics that characterise high performing GIES systems will be developed, and used to compare with standalone generation and storage equivalents. The theoretical groundwork laid by this research will have applications far beyond the current project. Opportunities for current and future technologies will be mapped out and publicised, supporting and accelerating further work in the field. The deployment and operation of such technologies will be modelled by means of a pragmatic real options economic analysis. The unique policy and economic considerations of fusing generation and storage will be reviewed in detail, considering challenges and proposing solutions to regulatory and financial hurdles. Taken in concert, these will determine the value and scope for substantial deployment of GIES systems. In bringing to light the potential of the class of GIES systems, the research team will rectify a gap in energy systems thinking, in time to inform what will be a multi-billion pound expenditure in the coming decade. By providing the tools to analyse and deploy these systems, the research will open up a new avenue for cost-effective flexibility across the energy infrastructure of the UK and other regions worldwide.

Topological Insulators (TIs) are a class of quantum materials that exhibit topological surface states. These materials are usually small band gap semiconductors where the bulk of the material is insulating, but they exhibit special surface states that are conducting and topologically protected. The materials are usually made of heavy atoms that give rise to strong spin-orbit coupling and this leads to the formation of surface states that are not destroyed by scattering or impurities. TIs are proving to be ideal materials for study in condensed matter physics, as the physics of these materials is novel and they offer huge scope for developing new theories and for the discovery of new materials. Although the TIs have gapless edge or surface states that are protected and are in theory supposed to have an insulating gap in the bulk, most of the 3D TIs discovered to date are still fairly conducting in the bulk. Materials design and processing have emerged as being key to the investigation and the discovery of new TIs. The challenge for materials physicists is to create TI materials that are true insulators in the bulk, in order to facilitate the study of their exotic surface states. In this proposal, we describe the methodology to be adopted to obtain high quality materials, for the different experiments proposed. We propose to synthesize a range of materials, some of which are already known to be Topological Insulators and other new materials such as the Topological Crystalline Insulators (TCIs) and those with emerging topological behaviour. The project will investigate both bulk crystalline materials and nanomaterials (in the form of nanoplatelets and nanorods). The study of the emergence of superconductivity in the 3D TIs and TCIs will be undertaken. The existence of a full pairing gap in the bulk in the superconducting Topological Insulators, together with the gapless surface states in these materials, makes them extremely interesting. The physics of these materials will be investigated through detailed studies of the bulk properties of the crystals (including resistivity and Hall effect, magnetisation, heat capacity) in particular, to understand the influence that the bulk electronic and magnetic properties have on their topological behaviour. X-ray/electron diffraction and electron microscopy techniques will be used for the investigation of the structural properties of both the crystals and nanomaterials. Investigations of the surfaces of the crystalline and nanomaterials by XPS and ARPES will be carried out with our collaborators. Neutron scattering and muon spectroscopy techniques will also be employed. Valuable theoretical input from the Project Partner will be used in conjunction with the results from the experimental investigations, to inform the decisions for the design and fabrication of new materials exhibiting TI behaviour. A wide network of experts, including both therorists and experimentalists, as collaborators will contribute to successfully deliver the work described this project.