Galaxies are truly the most astounding places in the universe. Colossal systems of stars (of which our sun is just one among trillions), these truly colossal objects have been rightly dubbed `island universes' in their own right. If you were to do the impossible and 'zoom out' our view of the universe to perceive it on the largest scales, you would see billions of galaxies scattered like glittering jewels on a pall of dark velvet. You would see the vast diversity in galaxy structure ('morphologies') with colossal, ancient elliptical galaxies and intricate, tightly wound spiral galaxies. This 'God's eye view' of the universe has existed only in the minds of Astronomers, until now. We call this project 'Astera'. Developed in-house at the University of Southampton, Astera generates a dazzlingly beautiful, but also scientifically accurate, interactive view of the universe on unimaginably large scales. Developed using the popular game engine Unreal Engine, Astera allows the user to voyage through the cosmos with dynamic and immersive first-person control. In this project, we will take Astera to the next level, by leveraging cutting-edge, STFC-funded research into computer modelling of galaxy evolution, to develop our project into an exciting and engaging video game. The player will have the ability to not only observe, but also influence, the evolution of galaxies themselves, in a fun and gamified way that will make players always want to come back for more. In this project, we will develop a prototype version of this game, which we will use to pitch for additional investment or partnership with an existing game studio. This project will also be shared with a group of preliminary testers, to secure feedback that is customer driven. Finally, we will further develop our contacts within the industry, to pave the way for a full commercial release of Astera.

Research aims and questions Research Aim 1 (lead supervisor's project): To evaluate the impact of The Enduring Principles of Learning in transforming pedagogy for the teaching of pupils with EAL in primary and secondary schools with a shared pupil demographic. RQ 1.1 What are the changes in and understanding of teachers' practice for EAL when trained in use of The Enduring Principles of Learning? RQ 1.2 Are changes consistent a) across staff within each school and b) across schools? Research Aim 2 (studentship project): To analyse the relationship between changes in pedagogy for EAL and the English-related academic outcomes of pupils with EAL in primary and secondary schools with a shared pupil demographic. RQ 2.1 Does training teachers to practice using The Enduring Principles of Learning lead to enhanced English language proficiency (vocabulary, reading comprehension, writing) in pupils with EAL? RQ 2.2 What are the drivers for/barriers to success as perceived by pupils? The lead supervisor, Naomi Flynn, is currently working with one school in Southampton, which is part of a network of schools, called Aspire Community Trust who are the collaborative partners in this studentship. Dr Flynn's work with these schools consists of applied research through which she is working directly with teachers by delivering professional development to improve their pedagogy with a view to improving pupils' attainment. The professional development framework is wedded to a proven-successful approach already developed and trialled in the US called The Enduring Principles of Learning (in publications this is referred to as The Standards, or The Standards for Effective Pedagogy). A rubric related to this approach is appended to this guidance. Dr Flynn has an established researcher partnership with Professor Annela Teemant of Indiana University who is the principle architect of this approach. Both academics have a longer-term goal of empowering schools to adopt and embed the Enduring Principles of Learning in practice independently. This project will generate data to evidence the successes and limitations of this approach to teaching. The studentship project is a mixed methods study with an emphasis on measuring pupil progress through quantitative data collection and analysis. It complements Dr Flynn's qualitative analysis of teachers' changing practice.

The public description for this project has been requested but has not yet been received.

At the beginning of the 20th century, scientists discovered how to measure the size and spacing of atoms using a technique called diffraction, which led to a revolution in the understanding of chemistry, biology and solid-state physics. X-rays and electrons behave like waves, but with a wavelength which is much smaller than the spacing between the atoms of a solid. These waves scatter and interfere with one another, producing strong beams coming out of the object at particular angles. By measuring these angles, and knowing the wavelength of the waves, the separation of atoms could be calculated. It was using this method that Watson and Crick determined the structure of DNA in the 1950s. However, diffraction is only useful if the object is a regular lattice structure. In order to look at more complicated atomic structures, scientists have relied on electron or X-ray microscopes. In a standard microscope, a lens is used to produce a magnified image, but the method still relies on the waves that make up the radiation (light, electrons or X-rays) interfering with one another to build up the image. With light, this is experimentally easy, but with very-short wavelength radiation (a fraction of an atomic diameter), the tiniest error in the lens or the experimental apparatus makes the waves interfere incorrectly, ruining the image. For this reason, a typical electron or X-ray microscope image is about one hundred times more blurred than the theoretical limit defined by the wavelength.In this project, we aim to unify the strengths of the above apparently very different techniques to get the best-ever pictures of individual atoms in any structure (which is not necessarily crystalline). Our approach is to use a conventional (relatively bad) X-ray or electron lens to form a patch of moderately-focussed illumination (like burning a hole in a piece of paper with the sun's rays through a magnifying glass). In fact, we do not need a lens at all! Just a moveable aperture put in front of the object of interest will suffice. We then record the intensity of the diffraction pattern which emerges from the other side of the object on a good-quality high-resolution detector, for several positions of the illuminating beam. This data does not look anything like the object, but we have worked out a way of calculating a very good image of the object by a process called 'phase-retrieval'. To make an image of an object we have to know what's called the relative phase (the different arrival times) of the waves that get scattered from it. In diffraction, this information is lost, although some of it is preserved (badly) by a lens. Our data is a complex mixture of diffraction and image data, but the key innovation in this project is that we can use a computer to calculate the phase of the very high resolution data which could never be seen by the lens alone. Other workers in the United States have demonstrated very limited versions of this new approach, but we have a much more sophisticated computational method which eliminates essentially all earlier restrictions.The new method, which has received patent protection, could be implemented on existing electron or X-ray microscopes, greatly enhancing their imaging capability. It is even possible to contemplate a solid-state optical microscope, built into a single chip with no optical elements at all. All the weakness and difficulties and costs of lenses would be replaced by a combination of good quality detectors and computers. Our ultimate aim is to be able to image in 3D directly (using X-rays or electrons) any molecular structure, although this will require a great deal of research. The work put forward in this proposal will build the Basic Technology foundations of this new approach to the ultimate microscope.

It is now widely accepted that the intensification in agriculture we have seen over the last 40-50 years has had a detrimental impact on the environment in the UK, Europe and across the globe. One conspicuous change has been the loss of biodiversity (populations of a range of different animal and plants species). As a result, UK and European Government policies now seek to promote what is termed 'multi-functional agriculture' in which the needs of agricultural production are reconciled with objectives for environmental protection, including the conservation of biodiversity. This is challenging because biodiversity health is often assessed at large spatial scales (e.g. national population trends of particular species) whilst agricultural change is implemented at the field and farm-scales. Linking field-scale changes in agriculture with large-scale risks to biodiversity is essential for assessing the sustainability of such changes with respect to biodiversity conservation. If we could understand the risks agricultural change poses prior to or during its introduction, it would allow us to design measures to reduce the risk, and in so doing make the change more sustainable in terms of biodiversity conservation. In response to these issues, we have recently developed a framework for assessing the biodiversity risk of agricultural change to over 400 species of animals and plants in the UK. Our approach links national population trends to field-scale management changes by assessing the extent to which an agricultural change detrimentally impacts the niche requirements of each species. For example, for bird species niche requirements would include nesting habitats, foraging habitats, and the type of food they eat. Using data from the recent past, we have shown that as the extent of these impacts increase population decline becomes more likely, and have subsequently applied this new system to a range of agricultural change scenarios. Although our previous work is promising, it is fundamentally limited in two main ways. Firstly, it only deals with risk. When agricultural land-use changes it might have both risks and benefits to particular species, and we need to understand the net impact rather than just the risk. Secondly, it relies on simple but crude assumptions about the spatial congruence of agricultural change and species' ranges in order to estimate national population trends. Ideally, the response of biodiversity at multiple scales needs to be understood, so that field- or farm-scale changes in agriculture can be linked to biodiversity responses at similar and at larger (i.e. regional or national) spatial scales. Our proposed project aims to address these limitations by developing a new approach for assessing the risks and benefits of agricultural change to biodiversity over multiple spatial scales. Our project will focus on UK farmland birds, which are a valuable indicator for wider biodiversity, and bird populations are an important component of the UK Government's commitments to biodiversity conservation and sustainable agriculture. We have developed a new idea that we call 'designer niches' that attempts to understand how agricultural land-use designs the niche components for about 45 bird species. This involves translating land-use into the quality of nesting and foraging habitats for birds. We will then use this information to understand how bird abundance and their population trends relate to land-use via niche design, and apply these ideas to help us understand how bird populations might respond to future agricultural changes. This work will then be fed into agri-environment policy, and we hope that this will allow us to plan agricultural change more effectively to conserve biodiversity.