Despite the increasing amount of games hardware and software being preserved in dedicated archives both nationally and internationally, it has been noted that histories of computer games have largely been ignored in current discussions of both game analysis and design (Guins 2014). Conferences and conference strands have started to emerge in order to facilitate discussions surrounding methods, game histories and the preservation of games yet these events only offer a small percentage of a vast area of study. Recent documentaries, such as From Bedrooms to Billions (Caulfield and Caulfield 2014), alongside books written by game journalists, including Replay (Donovan 2010), and Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (Anderson and Levene 2012), all expose British histories of game development in the 1980s. However, there is a tendency to focus on well-known game titles and developers thus masking other prominent developments during this time. The 1980s in particular marks a significant starting point for the development of the British computer game industry. A significant legacy of 1980s UK computing and gaming cultures is the do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos created through microcomputing magazines and books that printed listings of software code for users to type in and run in order to create and play their own games. These printed program listings now exist in memory institutions such as The British Library and The National Museum of Computing. Here the software code is preserved as a written text and not as an immediately playable artefact. This raises questions about the role of the program listing as software, source code, game object and process as modes of analysis for historical game research. The aim of this study is to analyse the different facets of game production and cultures from the 1980s by further examining the role of typing in program listings from magazines to emulate what these games once were. The research will be extended by tracing writers of these program listings in order to undertake oral histories as a way of recognising those involved in this industry and to provide a legacy of cultural memories for future researchers. Finally, interviews with those who worked in the games industry in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as those that continue to work in the industry today, will be undertaken as a way of tracing the legacies of 1980s DIY cultures and the drive for national computer literacy. These interviews will include developers and artists who worked for companies such as Automata, Martech, Virgin Interactive, Rabbit Software and BITS studios. This early career fellowship will facilitate career development through an international collaboration with the project partner, The University of Montreal. This collaboration will result in the co-chairing of the 2016 Annual Game History Symposium that will run alongside a co-curated exhibition of creative uses of computer game hardware and software from the 1980s and 1990s around the globe. The research will also be disseminated in a series of workshops in London and Nottingham and at an exhibition of magazine program listings from The National Museum of Computing archives. An experienced project mentor and an interdisciplinary, international advisory panel consisting of academics from various disciplines, curators, archivists and the games industry, will support the research. This will allow for these emerging networks to be consolidated during and beyond the life of the project. The panel will be able to further advise and support the dissemination of the research to their respective disciplines in order to ensure impact beyond the academy.

MRC : Tanyel Ashik : MR/N013700/1 Under healthy conditions, our body's fat cells act as important reservoirs to store energy, and they can also release hormones that influence how much we eat and how different cells in our body store nutrients. However, during the development of obesity, the capacity for these fat cells to store excess fat becomes impaired, as does the types of factors released by fat cells. This leads to profound problems with our normal regulations of blood sugar levels and increases the risk for developing other health conditions such as type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. There is therefore a need for effective long-term therapies to promote weight loss. Various proteins that influence the growth and development of fat cells have been identified. One such factor is 14-3-3zeta, a unique protein that can help to direct where proteins go in a cell. The host lab previously found that when 14-3-3zeta is deleted, this blocked the growth of fat cells, but unexpectedly, they have recently found that reducing 14-3-3zeta levels in fat cells causes them to lose their identity and revert to an immature state. While it was initially thought that 14-3-3zeta is expressed in every cell, this is not the case, especially in adipose tissue of mice. This suggests that a specific group of fat cells will lose their maturity if 14-3-3zeta levels are reduced, and whether this will have implications on overall metabolic health is not known. This will be addressed in the current project, which will use genetically modified mice expressing fluorescent proteins that allow purification of 14-3-3zeta-positive and 14-3-3zeta-negative fat cells from adipose tissues, and it will be determined if these different groups of fat cells behave differently. We will measure the expression of various genes and explore if the cells are functionally different. When fat cells are removed from adipose tissue, they cannot survive for extended periods of time so we will also develop a new method to promote the long-term culture of these different populations of fat cells to increase our ability to properly study them. The benefits of this research are two-fold: in the short term it will improve our understanding of the complexity of fat cell biology and in the longer term this advancement in knowledge may lead to the development of new approaches to treat obesity, a chronic disease that continues to increase in worldwide prevalence.

EPSRC : Max Hird : EP/T517793/1 Algorithms that learn and sample from probability distributions form an important part of machine learning, AI, and the natural sciences. One needn't look far to find such algorithms at the bleeding edge of methodology, and in everyday scientific pursuit. The Wang-Landau algorithm is an example. It combines a sampling step with a learning step, to learn a probability distribution about which our knowledge is limited. The probability distribution may be over physical states, so an efficiently running algorithm would allow the simulation of the dynamics of protein folding, for instance. The learning step incorporates information gained from the sampling step, forming a more complete picture of the distribution. The particular form of the learning step is foundational in many neural networks and is called stochastic approximation. Due to our incomplete knowledge of the distribution, we cannot apply standard sampling methods. We therefore need to employ a more exotic sampler. Coupling exotic samplers alongside stochastic approximation is underexplored, and potentially fruitful. We will try to assess the behaviour of such a coupling, an assessment not yet existing in the literature.

The global demand for smaller and more energy efficient devices has been sustained by a steady decrease in the scale on which silicon microelectronics can be manufactured, from 65nm processes in the mid 2000s to 14nm in the very latest Intel processors. To continue this trend beyond the mid 2020s devices with dimensions of just 1-2nm will be required, likely using alternatives to silicon. In this regime, the cross section of a wire might be no more than 2x2 or 3x3 atoms across, where the relevant materials physics is dominated by surface and confinement effects leading to dramatically different structural and electronic properties to the corresponding bulk material. Such wires can be formed by crystallisation of a molten salt within carbon nanotubes (CNTs) of "Buckytubes", leading to the smallest cross section nano crystals possible, sometimes referred to as Feynman crystals. Research into the fundamental materials physics of these CNT-encapsulated structures is still in its infancy, with UK experimentalists leading the way. Particularly exciting recent work by one of the applicants (Sloan) has demonstrated the possibility of these wires undergoing transitions between nano-crystalline structures with markedly different properties, in response to bending strain in the CNT. These "phase change" properties open the way for nanoscale electromechanical switches and non-volatile memory, as well as providing a playground for fundamental studies of phase changes at the smallest length scale possible in a material. Our aim with the current project, inspired by these results, is to develop a computational modelling capability to aid in interpretation of experiments, understand the origin of the phase change behaviour, and guide our experimental colleagues toward compounds with potentially advantageous properties. Counterintuitively, due to a reduction in symmetry, the computational expense of simulating nanowires can be more demanding when compared to bulk crystals. We will address the limitations of currently available modelling tools when applied to these systems. This will involve significant modifications to existing software and a rigorous study of the various approximations one might employ to increase the tractability of simulations. We will apply cutting-edge methods in structure prediction to these systems, a non-trivial exercise due to the possibility wires with non-crystalline (e.g. helical) symmetry, and connect directly to relevant experiments by computing spectra related to the encapsulated wire's electronic and vibrational properties. Finally, we will study the thermodynamics and kinetics of nano-crystalline phase change, developing an understanding of when and how rapidly structural changes are affected to assess the utility of this mechanism for device applications.

BBSRC : Gregory Milne : BB/M009513/1 Toxoplasmosis is caused by the globally ubiquitous zoonotic protozoan parasite Toxoplama gondii. T. gondii accounts for approximately 190,000 cases of congenital disease in humans each year in addition to exerting a substantial economic burden on agriculture, as a leading cause of spontaneous abortions in small ruminants. Moreover, immunosuppressed human patients are at high risk of reactivation of latent infection and severe, often lethal, disease. Increasing evidence also suggests that T. gondii may be responsible for a considerable burden of neurological disease, including affective disorders like schizophrenia. T. gondii is transmitted (horizontally, from animals to humans) via two main routes: either environmentally, by oocysts (containing infectious sporozoite stages) shed in the faeces of infected cats (or other felids), or via raw or undercooked meat contaminated with infectious bradyzoite cysts. Distinguishing between these transmission routes is relevant to identifying the source of infection in outbreaks, to the design of appropriate public health intervention strategies and potentially also to the prediction of disease sequelae in infected patients. The discovery of a sporozoite-specific protein, called T. gondii embryogenesis-related protein (TgERP), has made distinguishing between transmission routes possible using a serological (blood) test. However, the TgERP assay has hitherto only been successfully implemented in a single laboratory in the United States. The aim of this work is to validate the TgERP serological assay using human and animal serum samples. This will involve isolating TgERP from T. gondii cultures; testing the assay on animal samples with known infection route; maximising the sensitivity and specificity of the test and using the assay to identify the route of transmission from stored human sera samples. Dissemination of the results from this work will be key in facilitating the more widespread use of TgERP serology. This will assist public health practitioners with the implementation of effective measures to counter T. gondii outbreaks and with the design of appropriate intervention strategies to control transmission. Ultimately, validation of TgERP serology could be the first step towards the commercialisation of a point of care assay with a broad scope of clinical, epidemiological and public health utility.