Specific research questions: 1. Can in-house scientific expertise enhance the quality of parliamentary policy-making, and how? 2. How does such expertise compare and relate to other input (e.g. Commission, interest groups) into policy-making in the particular case of the European Parliament (EP)? 3. Does strengthening the research resources of the EP significantly enhance MEPs' independence and role in policy-making, and to what extent can this help address the 'democratic deficit'? Background and rationale: Contemporary parliamentary democracies have seen a significant shift in control over policy-making from parliaments to executives that have easy access to abundant expertise. In the EU, the loss of control by parliaments over executive policy-making has not been compensated fully by a corresponding strengthening of the EP. While the EP now has co-decision powers, it has weak support for its policy-making role. The recent reorganization and expansion of the EP Research Service (EPRS) has been designed to address this problem by giving individual MEPs access to in-house scientific expertise to strengthen their independence from other institutions like the Commission or interest groups. The EP hopes that these changes can contribute to bolstering the quality of parliamentary policy-making and help address the 'democratic deficit'. This project will investigate which national templates (e.g. US, Germany) the reform drew on, how the in-house expertise is provided, how it is used, and how its quality and importance is assessed by various stakeholders. To answer its research questions, it will utilize quantitative (EPRS data sets on number and types of requests, nationality and political group affiliation of MEPs using the service, speed and type of response etc.) and qualitative (e.g. document analysis of EPRS papers; c. 30 semi-structured interviews with MEPs, MEP assistants, EPRS officials, scientific advisers etc.) research methods. Drawing on constructivist/sociological concepts of politics and policy-making, the project will focus on how those who produce, channel and use in-house scientific expertise perceive its quality, relevance and impact.

There are currently several important tensions in the measurements of cosmological probes. Firstly, the current expansion rate of the Universe is found to have fairly significantly contrasting values depending on whether expansion is inferred from nearby probes (e.g. supernovae together with the distance ladder) or distant ones (the Cosmic Microwave Background). Secondly, the amount of clustering of material in the current Universe is found to be different when inferred from nearby probes (e.g. weak lensing) or distant ones (the Cosmic Microwave Background). What is going on? This project will seek to (a) collate and assess the current reported measurements, particularly focusing on finding where the tensions really lie; (b) find the level of success with which new dark energy and gravity theories can account for the tensions; (c) engage in measuring the tensions with the full Dark Energy Survey. Embedding Gravitational

It is evident that service robotics has the potential to improve people's quality of life and it holds the key to a number of unmet applications related to health care and rehabilitation. According to the prediction of International Federation of Robotics, the global market for intelligent service robots is forecast to reach 24.3 billion USD worldwide by 2010. A multi-fingered robotic hand is the most complex and dexterous robotic system, whose development represents frontiers in service robotics research. Recent innovations in motor technology and robotics have achieved impressive results in the hardware of robotic hands such as Robonaut hand. However, the manipulation systems of robotic hands are hardcoded to handle specific objects in specific ways, which significantly limits their transfer to a range of different situations and applications. The control and optimisation problems involved in robot hand manipulation are very difficult to solve in mathematical terms, however humans solve their hand manipulation related tasks easily using skill and experience. Object manipulation algorithms are required to meet the market requirement that robot hand systems should have human-like manipulation capabilities and be independent of robot hand hardware. Hence, the main challenge that researchers now face is how to enable robot hands to use what can be learned from human hands, to manipulate objects, with the same degree of skill and delicacy as human hands. The proposed work aims to investigate artificial intelligence (AI) methodologies and practical solutions which will allow robotic hands to automatically adapt to human environments and thus to enable them to autonomously perform useful manipulation tasks involved in daily living, pontentially for health care and rehabilitation applications. The investigation will focus on the following areas. 1) To generate a series of responsive human-like finger gaits for a robotic hand given an object to manipulate. This will have the capability to iteratively build a knowledge base representing the features of human hand manipulation behaviour and to efficiently provide corresponding robot hand gaits and manipulation strategies for a given manipulation task in a human environment.2) To develop feasible friction models for the interaction of objects and a robot/human hand. This will enable the application of existing mathematical research findings in multifingered robot manipulation to realworld applications in human environments and will integrate related methods in engineering and AI domains. 3) To develop an AI-based control architecture to ensure robust object manipulation of multifingered robots in terms of manipulation feasibility and efficiency. This will allow robot hands to perform stable human-like object grasping and manipulation and will also provide an open architecture which has the potential to introduce human brain (EEG/MRI signals) and human muscles (EMG signals) information into robotic hand systems.4) To validate the proposed algorithms by implementing these into a set of defined scenarios with a set of simulated multifingered robot hands and three different types of physical robot hands.

Specific research questions 1. To what extent do governments deploy armed drones as a means of reducing political risk? 2. How is risk distributed across the strategic, operational and tactical levels of military interventions? 3. How are civilians affected by displaced risk from drone use? Background and rationale for the study Weaponised drones have introduced new capabilities and new understandings of war and military intervention to the international security domain since their advent in the early twenty-first century. Applications extend from the CIA's unconventional use of Predator and Reaper drones in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia to the UK's deployment of Reaper drones in conventional military roles in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Furthermore, drones have had an impact across multiple conceptual domains and academic landscapes: culture, identity, political violence, ethics, geopolitics and more (Stanford and NYU, 2012; Galliott, 2012; Sauer and Schörnig, 2012; Baggiarini, 2015; Williams, 2015). Drones are now explicitly used to 'minimise the risk to the forces we commit to battle' (Ministry of Defence, 2013: 2-8). This project seeks to research the ethical and social dimensions of the deployment of lethal drones as risk mitigation. Specifically, the extent to which use of drones mitigate risk in the political and military domains of the user, while increasing the degree of risk experienced by civilians in areas where drone strikes occur. Discourse analysis of open source government, UN and NGO policy statements, key speeches, and parliamentary debates will be used in the application and assessment of theories of risk across two case studies: CIA unconventional drone use and RAF conventional drone use. Findings from this research will help to provide a broader understanding of the ethical and social consequences of lethal drone use from a risk perspective. This, in turn, will enable more comprehensive and nuanced risk calculations in future policy decisions regarding the deployment of weaponised drones.

Nerve agents are amongst the most deadly chemicals known to man and continue to pose a significant societal threat. Nerve agents function by inhibiting chemicals in the brain that affect the nervous system. Thus, nerve agents cause seizures in the brain which can lead to severe brain damage and even death. Several drugs are used as initial treatments for nerve agent poisoning, but these are sometimes ineffective and can themselves be harmful. In addition, the greater the delay between exposure to the nerve agent and the provision of treatment, for example on the battlefield, the lower the likelihood of the effectiveness of these treatments. Consequently, new and better treatment options are needed to protect against the effects of nerve agents. Current methods used for testing new drug effectiveness for the treatment of nerve agent poisoning are largely reliant on the use of rodents. Such experiments are slow and costly, and usually involve severe procedures, such as the surgical implantation of electrodes in the brain and exposure to nerve agents. There is a requirement to develop higher throughput methods for identifying novel treatments, that are also more ethically favourable than those currently available. The non-protected 4-days post-fertilisation (dpf) larval zebrafish could prove invaluable as they have been shown to be responsive to a range of seizure-inducing drugs and can be tested quickly and easily in large numbers. Scientists from the universities of Portsmouth and Exeter will build on previous NC3Rs-funded work to transfer a non-protected larval zebrafish seizure model to Dstl, where the methods can be used to identify novel treatments for nerve agent poisoning. Dr Parker is a zebrafish behavioural expert, and will develop behavioural measures of seizures in 4dpf larvae. Many of the protocols were developed during Dr Parker's work on an NC3Rs project grant at Queen Mary, London (PI Caroline Brennan). Dr Winter is an expert in examining the brain during seizures in zebrafish using advanced imaging techniques, some of which have been developed during an ongoing NC3Rs studentship. His team will focus on developing approaches assessing seizure activity in the 4dpf zebrafish brain to understand model relevance for predicting effects in mammals. The end users at Dstl will utilise this approach for the identification and development of novel treatments for nerve agent poisoning. Dstl colleagues will promote the wider uptake of this approach, and the zebrafish as a model for assessing chemical toxicity, within the international defence research community. This approach could replace a significant number of rodents used in testing novel treatments against nerve agent toxicity, thus reducing overall rodent use by an estimated 75%. Limited rodent experiments would remain only for confirmatory purposes. Our approach could therefore prevent the yearly global use of at least 1500 rodents in these severe protocols. In addition to the direct replacement of rodents, the data generated in non- protected zebrafish larvae can also be used to refine remaining rodent studies to ensure that appropriate non-toxic doses are used. Refinement will also result from the identification and ruling out of any putative treatments with undesirable properties prior to escalation to rodent models. Dstl actively participates in a number of international research collaborations including bilateral arrangements with European countries and an important multinational agreement between the Australia, Canada, the UK and the USA, the CBR Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). Dr Kearn will use these arrangements and his position as UK lead for a predictive toxicology task under the CBR MOU to share data and methodologies from this project, champion its outputs and influence other Nations' programmes to encourage uptake of this technology.