To date, most research into the impact of microplastics in the environment has focussed on marine (coastal and ocean) environments. However, there is growing acceptance that microplastics are also pervasive within freshwater (river and lake) systems. The limited number of studies from rivers around the world have all found microplastics to be present within samples of river bed sediments or the water column. This is of concern as the ecotoxicological impact of microplastics will likely have a negative impact on a range of freshwater species with an additional public health concern if pollutants associated with microplastics then enter the human food chain. A fundamental issue regarding the science of microplastics in freshwaters is a lack of data with which to generate physically based models. This thus makes it very hard to establish what are 'normal' levels of microplastics within our rivers and hence whether such levels represent an acceptable level of risk to ecosystems or society more generally, or where clean-up or remediation strategies should be targeted. To make meaningful progress, this issue requires international consensus to be agreed quickly so that ongoing and future research efforts can be properly synthesised to provide meaningful evidence-based policy. The purpose of this proposal is to meet this challenge by assembling a new network of internationally leading freshwater microplastics experts. This network will undertake a focused programme of data collection. By pooling this data and using it to generate new numerical models at a series of workshops the network will be able to reach more robust conclusions as to the overall freshwater plastic flux to the oceans. This will address the significant stumbling block the discipline currently faces and thus allow further development of more physically based models. Such a significant deliverable can only be achieved by the sort of networking opportunity that is facilitated by the global partnerships seedcorn fund.

The extremely narrow bands of localised shear deformation known as Adiabatic Shear Bands (ASBs) appear in metals and alloys subject to intense, high strain rate loading such as ballistic impacts or high rate manufacturing. Despite their reduced dimensions, the bands act as dramatic weak spots because their microstructure and morphology is radically different from the surrounding material. ASBs form suddenly and unexpectedly, and predicting them is difficult. Their sudden appearance while in-service invariably leads to the catastrophic failure of aerospace and defence systems (turbine blades, armour,...). Equally, ASBs dominate high rate manufacturing (machining, additive manufacturing, forming): efficiency calls for the sort of high rate, fast loads that tend to introduce undesired ASBs, greatly weakening the manufactured piece be- low specification. Owing to the huge volumes of manufactured pieces and to the high cost of design cycles in the defence and aerospace industries, predictive methodologies able to address ASB formation would lead to vast cost savings and efficiencies. Despite decades of research, the micro- and mesoscopic processes that cause ASB remain elusive. Whereas their growth and ultimate failure are relatively well-understood as thermomechanical instabilities, ASB initiation takes places at pico- and sub-micron scales that fall beyond current experimental measurement capabilities. Equally so, the inherently dynamic (time-dependent) loading conditions under which ASBs form have hitherto precluded the theoretical modelling of the phenomenon. Across three work packages (WP), this project addresses the inherent difficulties in modelling the initiation of ASBs by developing an ambitious, truly dynamic, multiscale modelling protocol with which to study and predict the conditions (loading, composition, microstructure) that promote the onset of ASBs in cubic and hexagonal metals. WP1 Microscale delivers a fundamental understanding of the physical source of the instability that gives rise to ASBs, by employ atomistic models (MD & lattice dynamics) with which to study sources of dislocation generation and dislocation motion under loads known to promote ASB. WP2 Mesoscale develops an entirely new formulation of thermo-elastodynamic dislocation dynamics (DD) with which to model ASB initiation and emergence at the mesoscale; this formulation addresses all current modelling limitations unable to account for the materials' inertia and thermal effects long since postulated to play a dominant role in the initiation of ASBs. WP3 Multiscale then combines WP1 and WP2 to develop a predictive multiscale model for ASB with which to study formation conditions (loading, composition, microstructure) in target metallic systems (Ti6Al4V, W, Al) of high scientific interest and industrial relevance. The resulting modelling protocol will enable the study of ASBs at the mesoscale for the first time, and produce a methodology with which to (1) predict and diagnose ASB failure in metallic systems, and (2) guide materials selection so as to select the most desirable microstructures with which to avoid or promote ASB formation. These tools will streamline the design cycle of aerospace and defence pieces subject to impacts, and optimise manufacturing operations reliant on minimising ASB formation (additive manufacturing, machining).

The Life History of Me, Segilola, Endowed with fascinating eyes, the lover of a thousand men'\n\nIn 1929-30 the story of Segilola created a sensation in Lagos. It took the form of a series of letters to the editor of the weekly newspaper Akede Eko, from an aging prostitute now on her deathbed. In demotic Yoruba, Segilola tells of how in her youth she gradually slid from flirtation to gold-digging and finally to full blown harlotry. She mixes repentance and moral warnings with gleeful memories of her irrestistible sexuality. \n\nThe story was written by Akede Eko's editor-proprietor, I.B.Thomas. But he took such pains to make it appear true that many readers, apparently, were taken in - one, moved to pity by Segilola's sufferings, even sent in 10 shillings towards their relief. Others pleaded with Thomas to reveal the heroine's true identity. Regular contributors to the paper wrote columns drawing out the moral lessons of her tale; there was a spate of commentary on the increasing laxity of Lagos life and the culpable frivolity and greed of the city's women. \n\nSo popular was this serial that, after its conclusion in March 1930, I.B. Thomas immediately republished it as a book. The following year he serialised a somewhat abridged English translation for the benefit of those citizens who were avid to read the story but unable to read Yoruba.\n\nThe text has several claims to our attention. \n(1) It is generally credited with being the 'first Yoruba novel', and thus with standing at the head of a tradition of creative writing in Yoruba which later became one of the largest, richest and most diverse in Africa, boasting hundreds of titles and constant innovation. Both the seamy realism and the profuse moralising of Segilola were echoed in successive waves of Yoruba fiction. Any literary history that omits this narrative is incomplete. Yet it has been out of print for many years and there has been no detailed study of it.\n(2) The narrative, with its intense investment in realism, furnishes details of popular life and culture in late 19th and early 20th century Lagos which are not otherwise well documented: popular songs, fashionable dances, anecdotes, slang and popular sayings. It paints a picture of a cosmopolitan popular culture oriented along the coast to Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast rather than inwards to the Nigerian hinterland. \n(3) The linguistic interface between English and Yoruba is an important feature of 20th century culture in Yorubaland. English was spoken by the westernised elite. But as the first tentative experiments in electoral democracy were inaugurated, they increasingly used Yoruba to forge alliances with a less-elite primary-school educated population who could read Yoruba and could potentially be mobilised in the political contests of the day. The speedy creation of the English version of Segilola - and the significant ways in which it differs from the Yoruba version - provide a rich case study through which to explore the social and political implications of this linguistic interface.\n(4) The fascinating play with fact and fiction, revelation and concealment in this story allow us explore the question of the ways in which early print culture addressed and convened new publics. The text's strategies of addressivity are complex and shifting. The narrative is a confessional but reveals no inner life. The authorial pseudonyms are pasted over the identities of the highly visible members of a sociable elite whose activities were scrutinised minutely by their contemporaries. The putative community that is being convened through print expands and contracts from moment to moment.\n(5) The serial, epistolary form allows us to observe a new genre emerging almost under our very eyes. The readers' responses helped shape the narrative from week to week. Narration and interpretation grew up together. This enables us to investigate, close-up, how social and textual environment can inspire and sustain a new genre.

Black Holes and Neutron Stars are some of the strangest objects in the universe, containing more mass than the Sun packed into a sphere only a few kilometres across. They are formed from the remains of high mass stars, which burn their fuel quickly and end their lives in supernova explosions which can outshine a whole galaxy. There are different types of supernova for different types of stars: their masses, spins and composition all play a role in determining their eventual fate, although the details are not fully understood yet. What is left over after the supernova is an object so dense that its gravity warps the space-time around it: a neutron star is thought to contain the densest possible matter, denser than an atomic nucleus, which is the only material strong enough to support the star against its own gravity. Even more extreme are black holes, which form when a star has even more mass, and neutron star matter cannot support its weight. When this happens the star collapses into a black hole, becoming so dense that not even light can escape the gravitational pull. At this point an event horizon forms, hiding its contents from the rest of the universe. Since black holes do not emit light, they are impossible for astronomers to find unless they are actively accreting material from a companion star. But there is another way to detect them using a completely new astronomical tool: gravitational waves. According to Einstein's theory of General Relativity, when black holes and neutron stars are found together in a binary system, the movement of so much matter in such a concentrated space creates vibrations in space-time itself. These travel out across the universe at the speed of light, changing the dimensions of everything they pass through, but invisible to the eye. Back on Earth, physicists have long been searching for gravitational waves by making extremely precise distance measurements using gravitational wave detectors. So far no signs have been found, but soon the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo detectors will become operational with a sensitivity that ought to allow us to detect the gravitational waves from binary neutron stars within hundreds of millions of light years from Earth, and out to even greater distances for the heavier black hole binaries. The detectors are so sensitive that the change they can measure is equivalent of varying the distance between the Sun and Saturn by a hair's breadth. Encoded in the gravitational waves is information about the sources that emitted them, which will let us learn about the masses and spins of neutron stars and black holes. By measuring many signals, we will be able to piece together the physics that governs the evolution of massive stars, and how they end their lives.

The aim of the current research project is to model complex systems observed in nature using annotated graph representations. We shall then develop novel methods for a low dimensional non-Euclidean embedding of the system, that aims to preserve both structural and attribute information. We hope that such embeddings are able to provide insights into the underlying systems at study but uncovering a hierarchy in their formation. We also aim to use these embeddings to better predict both missing links in the observed structure of the system as well as missing labels for the nodes within the graph. Specifically, we will use methods derived from natural language processing to embed nodes close to similar nodes, while keeping them far apart from dissimilar nodes. We shall be the first work to adapt these techniques to embed to a Reimannian manifold in Minkowski Spacetime using attributes as well as topological structure. Following this, we shall research the use of features that can be extracted from these systems - groups of highly similar subnetworks of nodes that form dense regions of the embedding space. We hypothesise that these subnetworks will be useful in the task of classifying samples - a task that would be difficult otherwise, due to the enormous search space of the original network. We shall use the inherantly hierarchical nature of the embedding space to convert these subnetworks into decision trees. Using networks to guide the construction of Random Forests is a very new development (Dutkowski and Ideker, 2011), however, our work will be the first to directly incorporate prior knowledge into the forest construction, via the annotation of nodes with attributes, and also the first method to use network representation learning techniques in this process. Dutkowski, J., & Ideker, T. (2011). Protein networks as logic functions in development and cancer. PLoS computational biology, 7(9), e1002180.