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.

The discovery that matter is made up of atoms ranks as one ofmankind's greatest achievements. Twenty first century science isdominated by a quest for the mastery (both in terms of control andunderstanding) of our environment at the atomic level.In biology, understanding life (preserving it, or even attempting tocreate it) revolves around large, complex, molecules -- RNA, DNA, andproteins.Global warming is dictated by the particular way atoms are arrangedto make small greenhouse gas molecules, carbon dioxide and so on.The drive for faster, more efficient, cheaper computer chips forcesnanotechnology upon us. As the transistors that make up themicroscopic circuits are packed ever closer together, electronicengineers must understand where the atoms are placed, or misplaced, inthe semiconducting and insulating materials.Astronomers are currently, daily, discovering new planets outside oursolar system, orbiting alien stars. The largest are the easiest tospot, and many are far larger than Jupiter. The more massive theplanet the higher pressures endured by the matter that makes up itsbulk. How can we hope to determine the structure of matter at theseconditions?The atomic theory of matter leads to quantum mechanics -- a mechanicsof the every small. In principle, to understand and predict thebehaviour of matter at the atomic scale simply requires the solutionof the quantum mechanical Schroedinger equations. This is a challengein itself, but in an approximate way it is now possible to quicklycompute the energies and properties of fairly large collections ofatoms. But is it possible to predict how those atoms will be arrangedin Nature - ex nihilo, from nothing but our understanding ofphysics?Some have referred to it as a scandal that the physical sciencescannot routinely predict the structure of even simple crystals -- butmost have assumed it to be a very difficult problem. A minimum energymust be found in a many dimensional space of all the possiblestructures. Those researchers brave enough to tackle this challengehave done so by reaching for complex algorithms -- such as geneticalgorithms, which appeal to evolution to breed ever betterstructures (with better taken to mean more stable). However, Ihave discovered to my surprise, and to others', that the very simplestalgorithm -- throw the collection of atoms into a box, and move theatoms downhill on the energy landscape -- is remarkably effectiveif it is repeated many times.This approach needs no prior knowledge of chemistry. Indeed thescientist is taught chemistry by its results -- this is critical ifthe method is to be used to predict the behaviour of matter underextreme conditions, where learned intuition will typically fail.I have used this approach, which I call random structure searching to predict the structure of crystals ex nihilo. My firstapplication of it has been to silane at very high pressures, and thestructure I predicted has recently been seen in experiments. Butprobably the most impressive application so far has been to predictingthe structure of hydrogen at the huge pressures found in the gas giantplanets, where it may be a room temperature superconductor.In the course of my fellowship I will extend this work to try toanticipate the structure of matter in the newly discovered exoplanets,to try to discover and design materials with extreme (and hopefully,extremely useful) properties, and to help pharmaceutical researchersunderstand the many forms that their drug molecules adopt when theycrystallise.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

This research network will record and begin to analyse what we have termed 'the decorated school'. For our purposes, 'the decorated school' means those aspects of the school building and surrounds that were worked on by artists and sculptors to integrated art works intended to project ideas about education in relation to notions of local or national identities. Mural decoration has been characteristic in school design in the past and is often a feature in the present design of new schools and today is frequently used as a vehicle for pupil or community participation. But in the past there was a deep appreciation of how the best design and art might act as a kind of educator and in England regional education officers such as Henry Morris in Cambridgeshire, Stuart Mason in Leicestershire and John Newsom in Hertfordshire ensured that new school buildings would contain works of beauty and excellent design. The post-war period was a time when the renewal of school buildings led to artists working collaboratively with architects and educators to decorate school interiors and grounds. The artifacts installed ranged from ceramic tiles to large scale murals and sculptures. These items were carefully considered to project a particular image of childhood, adolescence or education to a specific local audience. \nThe research network will meet at sites where there are existing examples that have survived to date. Additionally, the research will document what has existed, and what remains, making this data publicly available through a website and publication. This is urgent work as many school buildings that were built in the past are threatened with demolition as the renewal of the building stock progresses.\n

The context of the proposal mainly concerns singular stochastic PDEs and related statistical physics models. By saying singular, we mean that the solution (or some of its derivatives) has wild oscillations with a frequency and magnitude blowing up to infinity at small scales. The singularities in the solutions to stochastic PDEs are typically almost everywhere. As a consequence, nonlinear operations of the solutions may not make sense as they take these high frequency oscillations into quantities that are typically infinity. Thus, the correct interpretation of the solutions to these equations usually requires renormalisation. In the past three years, there have been major advances in the development of solution theories to a number of important singular SPDEs, including the three dimensional stochastic quantisation equation, the KPZ equation and the parabolic Anderson model in two and three dimensions. These equations are widely believed to be the universal models for the large scale behaviours of many systems in statistical mechanics. The successful construction of the solutions opens a way to study in detail these equations as well as the natural phenomena they represent. In this proposal, we aim to deepen the understanding of the quantitative behaviour of the solutions to these equations, and rigorously prove the universality phenomena for their related statistical physics models. We will also investigate how certain perturbations of the system (for example, asymmetry in phase coexistence models) can force its large scale behaviour to deviate from the expected universal limit.