Chemical weathering is a central biogeochemical process that shapes the Earth’s Critical Zone (CZ), regulates the global carbon cycle and sets the pace for nutrient delivery to soils and ecosystems. Most knowledge on the rates and controls on chemical weathering are from laboratory experiments and from the short-term observation of modern soil and river systems. In contrast, little is known about past changes of chemical weathering over hundreds to thousands of years, which limits our understanding of how long-lasting human-climate-ecosystem interactions have impacted the CZ trajectories. Because of this knowledge gap, it is not possible to fully understand the response and feedbacks of the CZ to the climatic and environmental perturbations of the Holocene period, nor to predict their future evolution during the Anthropocene. To fill this gap, LAKE-SWITCH aims to produce new quantitative weathering records over 10^2-10^4 year timescales, with a temporal focus on the Holocene period. There are 3 main challenges: 1) developing quantitative proxies of chemical weathering, 2) calibrating these proxies for paleo-reconstructions, 3) measuring these proxies in paleo-archives of 10^2-10^4 year timescale integration. To provide these records, we will measure lithium and strontium isotopic proxies in lake detrital and authigenic – carbonates and biogenic silica – sediment archives. To calibrate these proxies and archives, we will use a source-to-sink approach and track weathering product pathways from soils, through rivers, to lake deposits. Then we will apply these proxies back in time in Holocene lake cores. As rapidly-eroding mountain dominate the global chemical erosion budget, we will focus on the study of the European Alps. New data from Alpine watersheds and lake records spanning gradients in erosion, runoff and land use will serve to quantify and model the impact of climate and human drivers on soil trajectories from the onset of the Holocene to the Anthropocene.

The project consists in studying the arguments used by the Christian Churches (both Catholic and Protestant) to defend religious truths in contemporary Western societies, from the Enlightenment to the 21st century. This study mainly focuses on France, Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom and Spain, without refraining from occasionally taking advantage of US examples. The use of the word apologetics for describing a general system of response to the challenges of the times is quite recent (mid-nineteenth century/mid-twentieth century), and it allows to identify a specific period of reconfiguration of the relations between society and religion. The appearance of the word apologetics is largely prepared upstream, since Christian apologies changed at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries, and its rarefaction and its exclusion from the ecclesiastical field since the mid-20th century is then the manifestation of a new reconfiguration. The understanding of these scansions allows to grasp, according a long term historical analysis, the evolutions or the tensions of the believing discourse in its relations to modernity. Such an investigation first requires to approach ecclesial discourse from within. This approach is based on an abundant body of sources. However, the project mainly aims at using this corpus as a mirror of the changes experienced by contemporary Western societies: essentially "reactive", that is to say first of all defensive, apologetics is primarily a confrontation with all the difficulties that arise from the progressive transformation of the status of beliefs in contemporary societies. From this point of observation, it is possible to note that the difficulties, the blocking points (the opposition with philosophy, the “exact” or “social” sciences, the evolution of mores, etc.), allow to draw up an inventory of the characteristics of modernity in its relations with the Christian religion.

The project's overall concept is centred on the scaling up of novel, mass-production nano-manufacturing techniques invented by FAST-SMART partners for synthesis of nano-structured smart materials and component manufacturing for energy harvesting applications to significantly improve the material quality and structural reliability (>50%~100% improvement) and reduce overall materials and processing costs (by 30%) through shortening the process chains and improving material processing efficiency, being focused on less and free rare-element dependence materials (such as lead-free piezoelectric and Hf-free half-Heusler thermoelectric materials) as well as on new energy harvester designs considering environmental strategy, thus to bring about positive, environment-related impacts to Europe (greenhouse gas emission down by 50%, waste reduction by 50%), increased EU’s market share worthy hundreds million Euros initially, and to promote wide implementation of Internet of Things (IoT) and Digital Single Market (DSM) in Europe, due to introduction of the new energy harvesting products, design and manufacturing services created through the FAST-SMART’s partnership. Current obstacles to the large-scale introduction of energy harvesters that use materials with less rare-element dependence and/or that are toxicity-free are associated largely with inadequate material performance and reliability, high manufacturing cost, and inadequately developed product design strategy addressing needs for sustainable developments. The main driver of the proposal lies in a need to meet challenges particularly for the development and applications of Piezoelectric (PE) and Thermoelectric (TE) materials, associated structures and systems for new-generation energy harvesters, and for dealing with energy generation, storage and uses related issues with a systematic approach, and hence, to help to meet EU’s targets on the social, economic and environmental developments.

The cochlear implant (CI) in congenital deaf children is now widely considered as a highly efficient means to restore auditory functions. However, after several decades of retrospective analysis, it is clear that there is a large range of recuperation levels, and in extreme cases some CI recipients never develop adequate oral language skills. The major goal of HearCog to improve rehabilitation strategies in CI children, it is to better understand and circumscribe the origins of such variability in CI outcomes. The originality of HearCog project is to consider CI outcomes in a broad range of interdependent aspects, from speech perception to speech production and the associated cognitive mechanism embedded in executive functions. The novelty of the proposal is both theoretical and methodological. The goals will be first to evaluate the capacities of the visual and auditory system to respond to natural environmental stimuli and to analyse neuronal mechanisms induced by sensory loss and recovery through the CI using brain imaging techniques (Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy, fNIRS). In view of the co-structuration of speech perception and production during development, we will assess how deafness and CI recovery can alter speech production. But congenital deafness has deleterious impacts that extend beyond the auditory functions and encompass cognitive systems including higher-order executive processes. Based on the disconnecting model (Kral et al., 2016), our objective will be to relate neuronal assessment, using the fNIRS technique, of executive functions to auditory restoration in CI children. HearCog is based on longitudinal assessment on CI infants and age-matched controls, to search for prognosis factors of auditory restoration. We will also compare these measurements to data acquired in older CI children implanted for several years, and controls. In fine our goal is to acquire objective measures of brain reorganization that could be linked to variability in CI outcomes and therefore would constitute a predictive factor. HearCog is at the crossroad of cognitive neuropsychology, clinical research with a strong opening toward education. Consequently HearCog is translational and multidisciplinary with the unique objective to understand the compensatory mechanisms induced by congenital hearing loss to support both the social insertion as well as the insertion within the school system of cochlear implanted deaf children.

This project aims to study on a diachronic way (through Middle and Modern ages), the different original forms of Christianity that were to be found in the « border territories », located on political, religious and linguistic borders, i.e. the lotharingians territories, later on called during the Middle Ages the « inbetween lands » (from the North Sea to Savoy). This territories, along with the Milanese, formed the « catholic Ridge » during the modern era (the border of the catholic influence, between the Protestants in the east and the Catholics in the West). These specificities were asserted often by the historians, but rarely demonstrated, if it is not by case studies. The objective thus is to rethink the explanatory causes and the processes of such a multiplicity and variety of religious experiments, as well as their spread, their successes or failures, while highlighting more efficiently what is due to the circumstances and what is to be credited to the structural phenomenons, linked to the political and religious specificities of these regions. To cover this space and assure a really comparative and transverse approach, an international consortium with 7 historian research teams was established : 4 French teams (the CRULH of Lorraine – coordinator –, the LARHRA of Lyon, the LSH of Besançon, the CREHS of Arras) and 3 foreigners (Transitions of Liège, Institute of history of the University of Luxembourg, History Department of Università degli Studi of Milan). All in all, 37 people are committed in the project, which concerns essentially the history but also assures openings towards the art history and the musicology, to deal with the evolution of the liturgical practices : 12 medievalists, 21 modernists, 2 art historians, 2 musicologists. Given the tremendous size of the region and of the period to be studied, the project will focus on a comparative study of three main topics, by using in particular the methods of the historic anthropology, the gender studies, the prosopography : • The commitment of religious women (specificity of the feminine vocations ; the relations with the male management of the churches ; the feminine writings) : organization of three rounds tables and a final colloquium, with publication of the acts in the form of common synthesis ; three volumes of editions of texts ; on-line publishing and digitalizations of texts ; constitution of a database on these communities. • The pastoral models (episcopal models, formation and skills of the bishops, the organization of the diocesan staff, the legal or liturgical norms’ production, « clericalization » of the Protestant ministers) : organization of three round tables and a final colloquium with publication of the acts ; constitution of a prosopographical database on the episcopal staff (14th-17th c.). • Devotions and politics (promotion and spread of the devotional practices : specific ways of the Marian worship, « political » saints, specific devotion to the angels) : organization of two round tables and a final colloquium with publication of the acts ; one exhibition with realization of a catalog (Museum of sacred art from Fourvière in Lyon) ; on-line edition of an inventory of the editions of a devotion book, "best-seller" during two centuries in the considered region. All the works will give rise to the production of a web site and a global synthesis in the form of a book-atlas, which will contain hundred maps accompanied with long recapitulative notes and with iconography.