We are trying to improve the way general practitioners and primary care nurses deal with coughs, colds and other common infections in children. Research evidence has shown that antibiotics help very little for most of these infections, yet they continue to be widely used, and their overuse is fueling a concerning rise in antibiotic resistance. Parents find these illnesses worrying and many complain that their concerns are not adequately addressed when they constult. We aim to address this problem through the development of a booklet for use in primary care consultations. The booklet, developed with help from parents and clinicians, will act as an information resource for the parent and a prompt to improve communication within the consultation. Clinicians will receive training in how to use it effectively. We will evaluate use of this booklet in a randomised trial. Some clinicians will be asked to use the booklet when seeing children with a respiratory tract infection, and others will continue their usual practice. Parents will then be contacted by telephone to identify whether or not the child has re-attended or received antibiotics, and to assess other outcomes. This will allow us to determine whether use of the booklet is effective and safe.

Schizophrenia is a common, severe and disabling disorder that in a majority of instances requires long-term medical and social care. It not only results in considerable personal suffering but also has major economic and social impact. In spite of many years of research we still have very little understanding of what causes the disorder. Perhaps the best clue comes from the fact that that we know that genes appear play an important role in influencing who develops schizophrenia from studies of families, twins, and people who have been adopted. However at present, of the 30 000 or so genes each person carries, we do not know which contribute to the disease. Broadly speaking, the main aim of study is to use modern molecular genetic methods to identify some of the specific genes involved in schizophrenia. Identification of these genes should, through further studies, enable researchers to understand what brings schizophrenia about and then to develop more effective treatments.

The principal objective of ‘The snows of yesteryear: narrating extreme weather’ is to reveal and relate past experiences, both historical and more recent, as ways of understanding and coping with phenomena increasingly regarded as markers of climate change. It will explore ways that these events are remembered and mythologised, and interpret what is ultimately learned from them as both warning and opportunity. The project builds on the work developed by the AHRC “Historic Weather” Network, by continuing to scope and assess arts and humanities documentary and narrative primary source materials and demonstrate their value for research of historic weather and climate. It draws into collaboration the Network Co-I Prof Lorna Hughes (now University of Wales) and Prof Mike Pearson (Aberystwyth University) as award holder in the ‘Landscape and Environment’ programme. The project will focus on archival collections in the National Library of Wales (NLW), a legal deposit library. The project’s aims are: • To research accounts of extreme weather events, specifically regional and national experiences of harsh winters, as they are recorded in journals, dairies and literary and art works including narratives, poetry, novels, paintings and other visualisations, especially accounts related to extreme events, for example the 1703 “Great Storm”; and as they are described from living memory, via interviews and web input. It focuses upon experiences in relation to particular sets of historical, social, cultural and environmental circumstance and tradition: of rural communities in Wales and their records – from medieval Welsh poetry to contemporary regional broadcast news. • To research, devise and encourage creative approaches to the exposition of such data from a variety of sources to provide an historical context and understanding of ways that communities have experienced, responded to and survived extreme events through resilience and adaptability. Through this it will draw upon and inform perceptions and discourse, and may inform policy decisions with regard to resilience and adaptability in face of extreme weather in rural contexts. The project involves two strands of enquiry: • scholarly research to identify and prepare potential material for exposition: from library and other archival sources, in collaboration with the NLW, climate scientists from the International ACRE (Atmospheric Reconstructions of the Earth) project at the Met Office, and historic weather researchers. Archival reserach will explore the ways in which extreme winters have been represented and depicted in a wide range of cultural texts and media. This will be augmented by web-based community fieldwork including interviews with local people, historians, geographers and meteorologists, to gather experiences, memories and emotions. • practice-led research to devise appropriate modes of public exposition to engage audiences: as live performance and through on-line platforms. We will use digital arts and humanities methods and approaches for selection and digital representation of material collected by the project. The ordering and exposition of material will also follow principles of dramaturgical organization of content, highlighting ‘performative’ aspects of the content. This will also demonstrate the impact of “thinking digitally” on performance development and narrative. It will result in: • the creation of a live performance to be presented locally and nationally, with a premiere in the National Library of Wales in early 2013. This will evoke past events and immediate responses to them: of both trauma and resilience. • the creation of a sustainable website: with a record of research materials; as the further creative exposition of assembled materials; as an interactive facility for the deposit of experiences of extreme weather, encouraging public engagement • a summative workshop and other academic outputs to ensure the dissemination of academic and public benefits

The French Revolution of 1789 was the defining event of the Romantic period in Europe. It unsettled not only the ordering of society but language and thought itself: its effects were profound and long-lasting. Over the last twenty years, scholarship in this area has radically changed our understanding of the impact of the Revolution and its aftermath on British and European culture. In literature, as critical attention has shifted from a handful of major poets to the non-canonical 'edges', we can now see how the works of women writers, self-educated writers, radical pamphleteers, religious enthusiasts and loyalist propagandists both shaped and were shaped by the language and ideas of the period. Yet surprising gaps remain. Even recent studies of the 'British' reaction to the Revolution are under-informed about responses from the regions, and Wales is particularly poorly served. The reasons for this are complex, but it is clear that many researchers working in this period are simply unaware of the kinds of sources available for comparative study. \n\nAt the time of the 1801 census the vast majority of people living in Wales spoke no English: eighteenth-century Wales, in other words, retained a markedly distinct cultural and linguistic identity. How, then, did the events in Europe and the British reaction to them come to be known and felt throughout the different levels of Welsh society? In what ways did Welsh responses differ from those in Scotland, Ireland or London? This project will explore these questions through a wide-ranging series of edited texts, chosen to reflect the dramatic increase in diversity and abundance of Welsh literature during the period 1790-1815. The volumes will be organized principally by genre (poetry, sermons, letters, and so on) and each volume will provide an in-depth critical introduction situating the material in its historical and literary context. An additional collection of essays, both literary and historical, by experts from inside and outside Wales will further explore the subject across a wide range of genres and themes (e.g. the presence of America, the role of translation, the London-Welsh networks). The on-going work of the project will be presented to the wider academic community by means of an international conference, and to the general public through a dedicated website.\n\nThe research team will be led by an investigator with ten years' experience in the field of European Romanticism; she has recently headed a five-year project on the Welsh Romantic forger and radical, Iolo Morganwg. Her co-investigator is an eminent historian of Wales, who has, over three decades, published widely on the period. A strong advisory panel will include scholars with expertise in Welsh history and literature and leading writers on British Romanticism from outside Wales. Towards the end of the project a technical consultant will assist the team in presenting the results of their work in web form.\n\nFrom ballads and pamphlets to personal letters and prize-winning poems, essays, journals, sermons and satires, the range of texts covered by our project will make it a stimulating reflection of the complexity of the period. The Wales we expect to emerge from this study will be neither purely radical nor purely loyalist; neither exclusively Welsh nor yet wholly British. The implications of this work, moreover, go well beyond the immediate 'Four Nations' context of the British response to the Revolution. Our findings will provide further much-needed material for ongoing international research into the subtle interactions of regional, national and international constructions of identity during this extraordinarily formative period of European history. \n

Every adult has about 1018 DNA damages per day to cope with, and much of this is normally repaired. The impact of defective DNA repair is seen in patients with the cancer-prone condition xeroderma pigmentosum, who have very high incidences of skin cancer due to being unable to remove sunlight-induced DNA damage. Simply put, un-repaired DNA damage causes mutations which contribute to the incidences of genetic defects and to cancer. Hence DNA repair is crucial to reduce the incidence of harmful mutations. Each microscopic cell in our body has about two metres of DNA in it, organised as chromosomes and where the DNA is wrapped up, somewhat like a ball of wool. DNA repair has to unravel this structure, repair the DNA and return it to its pre-damaged state to ensure each cell functions normally. We use yeast as a model organism to study how this is achieved because it has the same DNA repair pathway as us, but with it we obtain information more quickly. With this approach we are determining the events needed to afford DNA repair access to DNA. The work has implications for new predictive biomarkers for cancer risk and for devising new therapies for cancer.