Vortices in fluids are familiar from everyday life, appearing when we stir a cup of tea or drain a bath tub. In superfluids, which flow without viscosity, vortices take on properties arising from the underlying quantum mechanics and behave very differently from what we are used to. Perhaps paradoxically, the consequence is that the fundamental properties of the vortices become relatively insensitive to details of how the particles in the superfluid interact. Instead, the essential features of vortices are understood generically from internal symmetries of the physical state using topology, the field of mathematics that studies what remains unchanged about an object as it is twisted or distorted. Phenomena arising from topology are therefore often universal across seemingly disparate parts of physics and have attracted considerable attention, highlighted by the 2016 Nobel Prize. Here we will apply theoretical methods to study particular vortices in spinor Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs). This is a superfluid state of matter that appears in certain atomic gases cooled to near absolute zero using techniques that do not freeze out the atoms' quantum-mechanical spin. The spin comes at integer values. We are interested in atoms where the spin is equal to 2, for the reason that the vortices that then appear can be what is called non-Abelian. Vortices are categorised by so-called topological charges. One charge can be added to another, but this addition does not always follow the familiar rules of arithmetics. For non-Abelian vortices, the order matters: A + B is not the same as B + A. This leads to highly counter-intuitive vortex interactions, such that if two vortices collide, they must form a new vortex that continues to connect them even as they move apart. This is not a mere curiosity: analogous objects, described by the same mathematics, can appear also in liquid crystals or in cosmological theories. It is no surprise then that a central goal for experiments is the controlled creation of non-Abelian vortices in the highly accessible spinor BECs, which could act as emulators of physics of much wider importance. The central task of our project is to provide the theoretical underpinnings for this effort. Several techniques exist for controlled creation of vortices in BECs. However, these cannot be used directly to create vortices that show the non-Abelian properties. We will propose specific protocols for the creation of such vortices and vortex ensembles. We will also, using computer simulations, determine what these vortices look like once they have been allowed to evolve. We can then provide the observable signatures necessary for interpreting the experiments. For this effort to succeed, the work will be done in close contact with experimental project partners at Amherst College, Massachusetts, USA. We will push the computational limits by simulating dynamical scenarios where topological defects such as vortices determine the physics. For example, the interface between two distinct phases of the same spinor BEC is analogous to similar boundaries in superfluid helium-3. We will determine what vortices are produced when interfaces collide. Importantly, this represents a laboratory scale simulation of processes analogous to those proposed in theories of the early universe. What role do non-Abelian defects play? What can spinor BECs teach us about such processes in general? Defects are also produced when superfluids pass through phase transitions, from one state to another (a familiar example is the freezing of water into ice). Such processes are enormously important also in other quantum systems as well as in cosmology. We will seek to determine whether non-Abelian vortices are produced in the phase transition and, if so, what differences that implies to phase transitions in systems with only Abelian vortices. Again we are motivated by the intriguing prospect of simulating cosmological phenomena in the laboratory.

What is a human? What makes human life what it is? In the 21st Century, potential answers come from innumerable fields of science, social science, philosophy or religion-above all after recent dramatic advances in biomedicine, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. Yet for the vast majority of history, law and legal thought were central to the definition of the human in Western cultures. From Roman Law's definition of the 'person' through to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, law has offered shifting but reliable definitions of the human, in at least three ways: through the normative content of rules, through the juridical conception of political community, subject and government, and through specific interpretative methods that defined the pursuit of justice. Today, all three have been decentred from popular understandings of human life. Yet law remains an important practical force shaping the human institution. From social justice to social networks, from reproductive medicine to moral rights in the age of technical reproduction, by its nature law cannot avoid tracing a human outline in legal language, processes, methodologies, regulations and judgments. As we stand on the cusp of a new technological and potentially "post-human" age, what image of the human emerges from the contemporary legal field? Given the successive challenges to law from (r)evolutions in science, social science and technology, how does law today think the human in new ways? This question remains relatively under-explored. Recent theoretical scholarship has focused on the "post-human", with legal scholarship also beginning to emphasize the agency of law's materiality. This network asks, instead, how law's notion of the human is impacted by widespread changes in technology, climate, and new orders of global economic and political life. Equally, this network supplements moral and juridical philosophies of the human that have dominated the attention of the legal field, by considering the above pressures placed on law's human by new practices and ways of thinking. The network brings jurisprudential thought into the technological and material turn, whilst retaining its focus on the human as a centrally important question. Featuring a collaborative workshop, a major conference and a public engagement event, in addition to dissemination via academic outputs, a project website, a presentation to industry, and a university curriculum, this network will facilitate a broad and sustained exchange about how law thinks the human today. It will foreground new ideas about the nature of human life, and enable further, deeper research in this area by uniting academics in interdisciplinary legal studies and bordering disciplines with industry practitioners, cultural industries, and policy developers. The broader public visibility and implications of the network's activity will also be a central consideration. Public knowledge about the network will be augmented by a website, social media, and print media appearances by the Investigators, as well as a symposium at Tate Modern on "the image of the human" that will incorporate arts practitioners. Direct engagement with the field of practice, particularly law-making and policy development, will be catalysed by a presentation to select All-Party Parliamentary Groups and NGOs. In addition, Advisory Group meetings and network events will explore ways of sparking new dialogues amongst researchers, legal professionals, legislators, and wider publics, to seek new modes of collaboration and potential future research. In this way, AHRC funding for this network will support the initial phase of a larger project with significant potential for further funding possibilities.

The TundraTime project will address climate change impacts in tundra ecosystems including how warming is shifting tundra plant phenology - the timing of life events such as bud burst or flowering - and productivity - the increase in plant growth and biomass over time. We will answer the fundamental research question of whether climate warming is leading to longer tundra growing seasons and thus increasing plant productivity in the Arctic, with important implications for carbon cycling and wildlife. Critical knowledge gaps in the field of global change ecology are what role the high latitudes will play in the global carbon cycle and how Arctic food webs will be restructured in the future with accelerated warming. A critical unknown is whether shifting plant phenology is altering tundra carbon cycling and wildlife habitats. Projections of climate feedbacks from high-latitude ecosystems remain uncertain as we do not yet know if carbon losses from warming soils will be offset by increases in tundra productivity. Tundra plant responses to warming could be key for understanding the fate of wildlife populations in a rapidly changing Arctic. Forty years of satellite and field observations have revealed widespread changes in the tundra's surface that protects large stocks of frozen carbon below. Field studies indicate that plants are coming into leaf earlier in spring, bare ground is becoming vegetated, and plants are now growing taller. While there is scientific consensus that climate change is reshaping Arctic ecosystems, great uncertainty persists about what the greening observed from space means in terms of change on-the-ground. The TundraTime project will answer the fundamental research questions of whether climate warming is leading to longer periods of plant growth and increases in plant productivity in the Arctic. We will test specific hypotheses of whether tundra ecosystems are experiencing: A) increases in productivity, B) shifts in phenology and C) asynchrony of above- and below-ground plant growth. To explore these questions, we will integrate high-resolution drone and time-lapse camera imagery with satellite and in-situ data from 12 focal Arctic research sites. Our findings will inform biome-wide projections of tundra vegetation change and global-scale predictions of climate feedbacks to unprecedented rates of warming. If tundra plant productivity is responding directly to the warmer and longer Arctic growing seasons then tundra productivity will trap more carbon in tundra ecosystems and restructure wildlife habitats. However, if instead tundra plant growing seasons are shifting earlier, then projections of increases in tundra vegetation with warming may be overestimates and earlier timing of key forage could alter migratory behaviour and ultimately wildlife populations. And, if the above- and below-ground responses of tundra plants are asynchronous, plant growth in the now extended snow-free autumns could instead be occurring below ground, which would overturn how satellite data and Earth-system models estimate plant productivity and carbon storage in warming tundra ecosystems. The TundraTime project will test the drivers of Arctic greening by resolving the uncertainty around what role shifting plant phenology plays in the increased tundra productivity with warming. This research will bridge critical scale gaps to resolve the uncertainty between satellite and in-situ observations of changes in the timing of plant growth with accelerating climate warming.