The dust cycle is a fundamental component of climate, but remains one of the least understood aspects of the Earth-system. Dust in the atmosphere affects oceanic productivity and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, cloud formation and the amount of radiation absorbed or reflected by the atmosphere, all driving climatic change. However, how dust production and emission is controlled by environmental change in the past is poorly understood, preventing quantification of its effects on climate, fact acknowledged in the recent IPCC 2007 report. This project addresses this gap by attempting to pinpoint the precise sources of the world's largest and longest active dust sink, the Chinese Loess Plateau. The Chinese Loess Plateau contains a 22 million year archive of loess (deposited dust) deposition, covering one of the most significant time periods for understanding the Earth's history. Chinese loess has made crucial contributions to understanding past changes in the Asian monsoon and dust storms and is one of the most valuable climate archives available. However, its interpretation relies on detailed constraint of the precise sources of this dust, and the pathways by which it reaches the Loess Plateau. Unfortunately, despite investigation using the geochemical properties of bulk samples there are multiple competing hypotheses over 1) the precise loess source regions, 2) the environmental controls on dust production, 3) whether sources shift through time, 4) the atmospheric mechanisms are for dust transport and indeed 5) whether the oldest part of the record (8-22 Ma) is indeed wind-blown at all. These disagreements severely limit our understanding of the very origin of these deposits, preventing us from constraining the past atmospheric, tectonic and oceanographic conditions responsible for the emission and transport of dust and undermining the use of certain climate proxies in loess. In turn this restricts our understanding of the dominant environmental processes operating in China in the past, and the origin of the current atmospheric circulation systems. Key to overcoming this gap is to properly constrain the sources of loess. Our pilot work has demonstrated that widely applied bulk sediment geochemical analysis of sediment from loess and source regions will mask the detail of the multiple sources of loess dust. Only individual grains of certain heavy minerals (> 2.8 specific gravity) can be source diagnostic as each grain will have one source and certain of its geochemical and geochronological characteristics may be diagnostic of this. Thus analysis of multiple single grains of zircons and other heavy minerals isolated from loess and adjacent desert deposits will be undertaken using a multi-proxy single-grain geochemical approach to maximise the likelihood of success. Until our pilot work this has not been conducted on Chinese loess previously. Samples for these analyses will be taken from multiple, typical loess sequences in China, allowing determination of source variance through time and space. Sampling will concentrate on key intervals, such as the uplift of Tibet, the onset of Ice Age glaciation and the enhanced intensity of glaciation in more recent times. The results will allow us to test between conflicting hypotheses of loess dust source and transport, enabling constraint of the fundamental controls on dust emission and the atmospheric mechanisms involved in their transport. In turn and through comparison with independent records, this will allow us to assess the effect of global and regional climatic, tectonic and oceanographic changes on dust. This is currently a poorly understood yet critical component of the Earth-system. Finally, the results will test the validity of widely used sedimentary proxies such as mass accumulation rates and grain size in reconstructing past environmental changes from loess.

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a common form of arthritis affecting about 1 in 100 people at some stage in their life. Rheumatoid arthritis causes inflammation, pain, and swelling of joints. It is a persistent disease and over time can damage affected joints with a severity from mild to severe. There is no cure for RA, but treatments can reduce symptoms. Treatments include disease-modifying medicines to suppress inflammation. They usually need to be taken indefinitely and may have side-effects. If disease modifying medicines do not work the alternative is biological medicine such as anti-TNF, which blocks the inflammatory response. Problem with biological medicines includes that they need to be given by injection and they are expensive. Therefore they are only given if a patient has not responded to other treatment for at least 6 months, during which time, the joint can be severely damaged. Therefore new treatments are required. Recently a new treatment involving transplantation of stem cells has been proposed as a cure for RA. The stem cells are called mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) and and are thought to be able to stop inflammation permanently. They are taken from the bone marrow of patients or healthy volunteers, treated in the laboratory and given to the patient to stop inflammation. So far this has worked on occasion but not in all patients and not indefinitely. The same results are seen when the procedure is tested in animal models of RA. Here we want to understand why that is and determine whether we can improve this procedure to permanently stop inflammation and cure RA. Recently scientists have discovered that there are two types of mesenchymal stem cells, ones that increase inflammation, called MSC1 and ones that stop it, called MSC2. We want to test whether with RA the number of MSC1 stem cells is greater than MSC2, and whether patients who are not responsive to current therapies have the greatest numbers of MSC1 compared to MSC2. We also want to test whether we can find ways to treat MSC1 cells in the laboratory and make them become MSC2 cells so that inflammation can be stopped when they are given to the patient. We want to test this hypothesis in animals and verify some of our findings in patients affected by RA. This will allow us to think of new ways to make transplantation of MSC in patients affected by RA more effective.

Different numbers of species are found in different regions of the globe and in different environments. The tropics house incredible numbers of species, whereas polar environments house far fewer. This pattern of decreasing number of species from the equator to the poles is referred to as the latitudinal biodiversity gradient. The spatial distribution of life on Earth is well characterised today, but we know relatively little about how spatial patterns of biodiversity have varied over millions of years, during times in which Earth's climate and continents were dramatically different to today. This knowledge gap prevents us from understanding the causes of variation in richness among regions and environments, leaving a fundamental and unanswered question at the heart of biodiversity studies. We will characterise how latitudinal biodiversity gradients in the oceans have varied during the past 545 million years, using the rich fossil record of skeletonising marine invertebrates. This will allow us to ask what environmental factors control the distribution of biodiversity among regions and environments. These deep time patterns will provide important historical context for understanding the distribution of life on Earth, yielding unprecedented insight into the generation and maintenance of marine biodiversity. It will also help us to understand the long-term effects of major shifts in climate state, such as those occurring today, on biodiversity.

Charles Darwin's great dilemma was why complex life in the form of fossil animals appear so abruptly in rocks around 520 million years ago (Ma), in what is widely known as the Cambrian explosion. During recent decades, exceptionally preserved animal fossils have been found throughout the Cambrian Period, which began 20 million years earlier, and arguably even through the entire, preceding Ediacaran Period, which directly followed the worldwide 'Snowball Earth' glaciations (~715 - 635 Ma). Most of these exceptional deposits were discovered in South China, which possesses the best preserved and dated geological record of the marine environment for this time. In this genuinely collaborative UK-China project, we propose to use the South China rock archives to construct a much higher resolution, four-dimensional (temporal-spatial) picture of the evolutionary history of the earliest animals and their environment. Towards this endeavour, our group combines complementary expertise on both the UK and Chinese research teams in: 1) geochronology - the dating of rocks; 2) geochemistry - for reconstructing nutrient and the coupled biogeochemical cycle (O and C); 3) phylogenomics - for making a genetically-based tree of life to compare with, and fill gaps in the fossil records; and finally 4) mathematical modelling, which will enable us to capture geological information, in such a way as to test key hypotheses about the effects of animal evolution on environmental stability. Our project aims to address three central scientific questions: 1) How did the coupled biogeochemical cycles of C, O, N, P and S change during these evolutionary radiations?; 2) Did environmental factors, such as oxygen levels, rather than biological drivers, such as the emergence of specific animal traits, determine the trajectory of evolutionary change?; and 3) Did the rise of animals increase the biosphere's resilience against perturbations? This last question has relevance to today's biosphere, as the modern Earth system and its stabilising feedbacks arose during this key interval. By studying it in more detail, and establishing temporal relationships and causality between key events, we can find out how the modern Earth system is structured, including which biological traits are key to its continued climatic and ecosystem stability. One further goal of this project is to strengthen existing and establish new, and genuinely meaningful collaborations between the UK and Chinese investigators. We will achieve this by working jointly in four research teams, by integrating all existing and new data into an international database, called the Geobiodiversity Database, sharing a joint modelling framework, and by providing collaborative training for the early career researchers involved in this project each year of the project.

This project will focus on the central theme of Urban Narrative Environment, seeking to introduce recent research findings on narrative environment into the field of urban studies and to establish an international research network on this subject.\n\nToday we live in a world of cities: almost 50% of world population inhabits cities (89.7% in UK). 'It is vital that we understand the impact of this urban growth on people and the environment, as the links between architecture and society become both more complex and more fragile.' An understanding of urban conditions, including the conflicts, values and memory as well as human experience of them, necessitates multidisciplinary approaches and offers a challenge to the arts and humanities.\n\nNarrative is integral to human experience: on the one hand, we live in a world abounding with stories of various forms; on the other hand, narrative is one of the fundamental ways we organize and understand the world. Narrative is one of the prior schemes that are 'actively used to organize and interpret a person's encounter with the environment, both internal and external.' Narrative offers a distinctive approach to understand how our knowledge and experience of the environment is constructed and in return, how to organize the environment that conforms to human experience and memory and facilitates human interactions with the environment. \n\nThis project will examine urban environments through investigations into the interaction between temporally structured narratives and their spatial configurations, in other words, to investigate how 'space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.' This project aims at revealing the hidden 'narrative landscape' in urban environments as a collage of narrative strata corresponding to the natural ways of experiencing an environment, namely gaze, route and survey modes. This 'narrascape' provides a particular layer to analyze and assess the values, organizations and representations of urban space. The concept and methodology of 'narrascape' will be developed through four multidisciplinary workshops with separate but correlated case studies. Digital media, especially moving images and virtual reality, with their extraordinary power in representing (and creating) human experience, will be employed and explored as the primary tools in presenting and developing urban 'narrascape'.\n\nThe Digital Studio is part of the Martin Centre for Architectural and Urban Studies, Department of Architecture, University of Cambridge. It is directed by Dr. François Penz and has for years successfully led EPSRC, AHRC and EU funded researches into narrative organization of space, non-linear narrative forms and the expressive use of digital media to facilitate design and communications on architectural and urban issues. This project seeks to extend Digital Studio's investigation into urban studies and to examine previous research outputs in the urban contexts of UK and China.\n\nThere is growing interest for UK and China to carry out research collaborations on the global issues of urban environments and urban conditions. The Martin Centre has strong track record of collaborative projects with Chinese universities on architectural and urban studies. This project will initiate a new network to bring together researchers and professionals from both countries to discuss and explore the narrative values, organizations and representations of urban environment. This project will consist of workshops, conference, translation and publication works, and dissemination activities. The foci are the workshops on the case studies of three historic cities: Cambridge in the UK, Nanjing and Changsha in China. Each case study addresses a sub-theme of 'narrascape'. Through these workshops, this project seeks to advance our understanding of urban narrative environment and to establish a network that will foster future research and practice opportunities.