Data-Gouv-ML/pcri-erc-participations-et-projets-laureats huggingface dataset:
Projet ERC : SUBNORDICA (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Moesgaard Museum — Pays : Danemark — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : MOMU
Type d'entité : Autres
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1597780.13 €

The landscapes that extended for millions of square kilometres offshore of the world’s coastlines due to low sea-level during the last glaciation and were then drowned by sea-level rise, are known to preserve valuable archives of landscapes, palaeoclimatic change and stratified archaeological remains, with the potential to transform understanding of human history in this period of dramatic change. The absence of archaeological sites across much of this vast area prevents realisation of this potential. In SUBNORDICA we propose a systematic approach to develop new methods for recreating the submerged landscapes and human settlement of NW Europe and assess the impact of postglacial sea-level rise. We will address two questions: (1) What changes to the topography and environment of the submerged landscape were brought about by rising sea level and climate change? (2) How was the distribution of archaeological settlements and other traces of cultural activity impacted by this changing palaeolandscape, and can we recover them in sufficient detail to investigate human impact and human response? Combining information from 4 regions in the southern North Sea and the southern Baltic, we will use artificial intelligence to develop machine-learning routines to (a) integrate existing and newly acquired geophysical and geological data to map key areas of the changing landscape, and (b) combine this information with data from known underwater archaeological sites to identify new targets of archaeological potential for more detailed investigation. Investigating these targets will use high-resolution geophysical methods, sediment coring, archaeological excavation, and geochronological, palaeoenvironmental, sedimentological and biological analyses of recovered deposits. We will reveal a new chapter in human prehistory, provide a world-leading model for the investigation of submerged landscapes, and offer improved policy guidance for underwater cultural heritage management.

Mots-clés : submerged landscape archaeology
Projet ERC : LAST NEANDERTHALS (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Université de Pise — Pays : Italie — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 723900.0 €

Our closest relatives, the Neanderthals, abruptly disappeared 40 thousand years ago (ka) after having endured for 350 thousand years in a territory ranging from the Iberian Peninsula to southern Siberia. Decades-long research attempted to address the cultural aspects and the demographic and environmental factors that triggered their demise. Yet, there are no widely accepted scenarios that satisfactorily explain the extinction of the Neanderthal. These shortcomings are in part because the data available originated from a limited number of sites mainly in western and central Europe, which we now know were peripheral to the range of the last Neanderthals. To compellingly reconstruct the chain of events that led to Neanderthal’s extinction, the scientific community needs new extensive archaeological data, possibly from the core regions of the last Neanderthals’ range. Areas of western and central Asia and eastern and southeastern Europe were at the core of this range, served as gateways to marginal areas, and witnessed Neanderthals’ bio-cultural interactions with Sapiens and Denisovans. For the first time, three PIs with vast expertise on Neanderthals’ culture, biology, and paleoenvironments will synergistically attempt to bridge the knowledge gap between the core and the periphery of their range at the time of their decline between 60-40ka. Project LAST NEANDERTHALS will 1) accurately collect, date, integrate, and model new high-resolution cultural, bio-genetic, and environmental data from understudied areas in western and central Asia and eastern and southeastern Europe; 2) provide an unprecedented perspective on the last Neanderthals’ population dynamics; 3) offer a comprehensive and compelling explanation of the mechanisms that led to their extinction by integrating data from their entire range and formulating and testing nuanced hypotheses using new models and simulations; 4) serve as a proxy for the fate shared by all archaic human groups.

Mots-clés : middle paleolithic,early upper paleolithic,homo sapiens,ancient dna,neanderthal,western and central asia,eastern and southeastern europe
Projet ERC : RevLogRedux (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Université McGill — Pays : Canada — Rôle : Partner
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 552500.0 €

Bad arguments have never been in short supply. The same holds for the scholarly interest they have elicited both in their own right and as a cautionary tale about everything that can go amiss when we argue. This is hardly surprising. Asking what is wrong with flawed arguments is tantamount to investigating the very rules and principles of argumentation – only in reverse. Fallacy Studies have flourished in recent years (especially under the label of «critical thinking»). Without notable exception, the ever-growing literature on argumentative failures suffers from a conspicuous lack of interest in medieval fallacy theory – arguably one of the most creative stages in the whole history of argumentation theories. The standard story is that after Aristotle got off to a tentative start, the study of fallacies lay dormant until people at Port Royal and John Locke revived it. RevLog Redux will show that this narrative is misleading and will replace it with a new account which will bring to bear the full resources of medieval treatments of illegitimate argumentative moves within and across the Latin West and the Greek East, as well as in the Arabic and the Hebrew traditions. In an unprecedented attempt to explore how medieval authors discussed fallacies, RevLog Redux will lay the groundwork for more conscious and historically sound ways to describe, classify and theoretically assess the laws and flaws of argumentation. To that end, RevLog Redux will develop an integrated computational infrastructure to manage the wealth and complexity of data, information and knowledge the project is expected to produce: namely, AskSten (as in «Ask Sten Ebbesen»), a multi-layered virtual research environment whose digital archive, knowledge base, Semantic Web architecture and on-line deployment will dramatically enhance the formal expressivness and coherence of the project’s findings. AskSten will also include a curated open access Encyclopaedia of Illegitimate Argumentative Moves.

Mots-clés : medieval philosophy,history and analysis of logic and argumentation,cross cultural medieval intellectual history
Projet ERC : X-MESH (Horizon Europe, appel 2022, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Centrale Nantes — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : ECN
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 484508.75 €

This project will develop an innovative approach, X-MESH, to overcome a major difficulty associated with engineering analysis: we aim to provide a revolutionary way to track physical interfaces in finite element simulations using extreme deformation of the meshes.  Unprecedented low computational cost, high robustness and accuracy are expected as the proposed approach is designed to avoid the pitfalls of the current methods, especially for topological changes. The key idea of the project has emerged in a synergistic brainstorming between J.-F. Remacle (meshing methods) and N. Moës (computational methods). This key idea is to allow elements to deform up to zero measure. For example, a triangle can deform to an edge or even a point. This idea is rather extreme and totally revisits the interaction between the meshing community and the computational community who, for decades, have striven to interact through beautiful meshes. Six areas in fluid and solid mechanics as well as heat transfer are targeted. Interfaces will be either (i) material, i.e. attached to particles of matter (the interface between two immiscible fluids or the dry interface in a wetting and drying model) (ii) immaterial, i.e. migrating through the material (a solidification front, contact front, yield front in yield stress fluid flow or a crack front). Successes brought by X-MESH are expected in the following engineering areas: safety design and maintenance, manufacturing processes, coastal engineering, energy efficiency, ocean modeling to cite a few. The project takes place in a stimulating environment mixing senior staff with PhDs and Post-docs to produce and disseminate publications with open source pieces of software. It also intends to create a synergy at large with the computational communities dealing with interfaces and fronts in all fields of science: topology optimization, superconductivity, tissue growth, hydrogel swelling, crystal growth, ferroelectric crystal etc.

Mots-clés : mesh generation,finite element analysis
Projet ERC : HYROPE (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Centre national de la recherche scientifique — Pays : France — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : CNRS
Type d'entité : Recherche
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2498812.5 €

HYROPE proposes to combine unique, fundamental skills of four European laboratories to perform atmospheric and high-pressure experiments coupled to high-performance simulations of an innovative concept for gas turbines to burn zero-carbon, hydrogen-based fuels. Due to their high-power density, it would be a potential game-changing technology that can deliver energy on demand for both power and aviation. Gas turbine technology has evolved from an abundance of hydrocarbon fossil fuels but has the unique potential to be fuel flexible and burn renewable, zero-carbon hydrogen-based fuels such as hydrogen or ammonia. However, these fuels raise several fundamental issues as they have very different combustion properties and emission properties when compared to hydrocarbon fuels. Hydrogen is highly diffusive, extremely reactive, and its turbulent burning rate exhibits an unexplained strong pressure dependence. Predicting whether hydrogen flames that are stable at atmospheric pressure will be stable at higher pressures, as needed in gas turbines, remains an unsolved fundamental problem. Ammonia is a convenient hydrogen carrier that can be partially decomposed to hydrogen but requires careful control of NOx emissions. How to handle the effects of pressure on these fuels is a major gap in our scientific knowledge. HYROPE will study the effects of pressure on the combustion of hydrogen-based fuels in a fuel flexible, staged combustion approach where the first stage is controlled by flame propagation and the second one by autoignition. This configuration offers enormous potential that has not yet been exploited for such fuels. This can only be achieved through a joint work combining state-of-the-art tools, from novel experimental facilities at high pressures, advanced optical diagnostics to high-performance computing. The project will accelerate the development of new, high-power density, fuel-flexible combustion systems and unleash the potential of zero-carbon gas turbines.

Mots-clés : hydrogen,thermal power,zero carbon fuels,power generation,gas turbine
Projet ERC : PROTOS (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Toulouse INP — Pays : France — Rôle : Partner
Acronyme de l'entité : Toulouse INP
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 308228.75 €

All information humankind has of the ancient past of our planet comes from analyzing the geological record encoded in rocks. There is, however, no rock record of the first 600 million years of Earth’s history. Unlocking the secrets of this earliest period –the Hadean– is a fundamental task for science, as it is key to understanding how the planet became habitable, when the first forms of metabolism and self-replication developed, and life appeared. The lack of a geological record has led scientists to use computational modeling to make inferences about the conditions in Early Earth’s environments. Less common are laboratory experiments specifically targeted to simulating Hadean conditions. Based on ubiquitous carbonaceous chert deposits in the oldest rock record, it is widely accepted that many early Archean aquatic settings were reducing and rich in silica and some basic carbon-based molecules. We reason that such aquatic conditions were already established during the early Hadean, and inevitably led to the existence of a large-scale factory of simple and complex organic compounds, many of them relevant to prebiotic chemistry and to the route to biomimetic hybrid microstructures able to self-organize and catalyze prebiotic reactions relevant to the origin of life. Our project is aimed at understanding the crucial role of silica in directing the geochemical and protobiological processes, creating habitats for early life, and preserving early biomass on Earth’s surface during the first billion years of its history. PROTOS will use an array of laboratory experiments (the Hadean Simulator) to systematically study ab-initio reactions of water and gases with the earliest rock types in order to determine compositions of aquatic habitats and subsequent silica precipitation mechanisms, organic synthesis processes on silica/iron surfaces, and the preservation of the first remnants of life. PROTOS will change our view of the infancy of the planet.

Mots-clés : hadean,early earth,mineral self organization,serpentinization,silica,self organization,prebiotic,chemistry,life detection,origin of life
Projet ERC : ALCEMIST (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Université de Cambridge — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2782734.0 €

ALCEMIST challenges the conventional engineering mindset where passive static components (beams, wires, joints) are driven by active dynamic ones (motors, dampers, sensors); our innovative materials enable the combined functionality in a single component. This bold ambition is feasible because our research will unlock the full potential of liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs), unique responsive materials that reversibly change shape, colour, adhesive or damping properties, triggered by stimuli like heat, light, humidity or strain. We propose a radically new sustainable materials platform based on polysaccharides, functionalising precursors such that anyone-using click chemistry-can make LCEs that are powerful yet biocompatible and biodegradable, at one tenth of the cost of state-of-the-art LCEs. Further, using bond-exchange chemistry, ALCEMIST LCEs will be re-processable and re-usable. We also present a ground-breaking processing approach based on flow patterning to make large-scale LCEs of complex shapes and actuation modes. The synergy of three perfectly complementary and highly productive scientists, each a recognised leader in their field, enables this transformative approach to making atypical LCEs. As all our methods are ideal for industrial upscaling, we will also demonstrate the yet untapped potential of LCEs when they are applied in atypical contexts, totally different from the current mainstream academic focus. These range from adhesives that can be reversibly debonded on demand or sun-powered adaptive building elements which save energy and improve indoor atmosphere, to microhearts and peristaltic vasculature that can remove the growth limits of lab-grown organs, or smart threads that give doctors critical feedback on suture tension when conducting robotic surgery. By overthrowing multiple conventions in the ways LCEs are synthesised, studied and engineered, ALCEMIST will enable and stimulate new lines of research, basic and applied, across large communities.

Mots-clés : liquid crystals,liquid crystal elastomers,cellulose chemistry and physics
Projet ERC : Synergy-Plague (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Université de Cambridge — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 1749748.0 €

Synergy-Plague is a multi-disciplinary project to bring our knowledge and understanding of plague, past and present, to new heights. Focussing on the environmental, biological, and societal aspects of plague outbreaks in Eurasia between circa 1300 and 1900 CE, it will address four main questions: (1) Why/how did plague re-emerge in 14th century Central Asia? (2) Why/how did plague re-occur and spread in Eurasia after the Black Death? (3) Why/how did clinical and demographic patterns of plague infection differ across space and time? (4) Why/how did plague disappear from Europe and the Middle East in the 18th and 19th centuries? Our project is based on the hypothesis that plague waves and clinical differences resulted from unique alignments of multiple events: environmental (climatic and soil-chemical), biological (from individual to ecosystem) and societal (demographic, socio-economic and political). Four PIs from the natural sciences and humanities, together with their team members, will jointly study how plague re-emerged in 14th century Central Asia and radiated repeatedly from Eurasian wildlife reservoirs in the following centuries, only to disappear in the 18th-19th centuries. We will develop and analyse new dendrochronological and (paleo-)soil data, textual documentary evidence, and epidemiological models. To understand how plague reached and spread in human populations, paleo-environmental and historical data together with relevant experimental work will be combined with statistical and mathematical modelling. To appreciate why clinical signs and mortality rates varied in space and time, historical evidence will be examined together with new entomological data and ancient DNA (aDNA) of historical plague strains (from humans and anthropophilic rodents). Synergy-Plague will revolutionise our understanding of plague and contribute to our ongoing struggle with epidemic diseases, present and future.

Mots-clés : black death,plague pandemics,rodent burrow systems,human and rodent ectoparasites,plague reservoirs,soil properties,past cimate,epidemiology,statistical and mathematical modeling,experimental work
Projet ERC : CombaT7 (Horizon Europe, appel 2024, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Université de Newcastle upon Tyne — Pays : Royaume-Uni — Rôle : PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Université de Newcastle
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2436923.0 €

Bacteria interact with their environment via specialised secretion systems that deliver proteins outside of the cell. Due to a bias in research efforts, for many years such systems were assumed to be unique to Gram-negative bacteria. A major exception is the type VII secretion system (T7SS), which is widespread in Gram-positive bacteria and actinobacteria, including the important human pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis. The T7SS is a complex secretion apparatus that exports folded proteins and even protein complexes. While secreted substrates are well-known for being crucial players in host-pathogen interactions, our recent data indicate that specific substrates of the relevant opportunistic pathogen Mycobacterium abscessus and the fish pathogen Mycobacterium marinum are also involved in interbacterial antagonism. This makes T7SSs important factors to understand microbial interactions, also for the understudied part of the microbial world. While the mechanism of secretion via T7SSs remains little understood, our preliminary data show that not only their roles but also their substrates are more diverse than thus far thought. Here, we unite leading experts in microbiology, structural biology, cell biology, and biophysics to spearhead research on mycobacterial T7SSs and their roles in both interbacterial and host-pathogen interactions. In this unique consortium, we will (i) define the full trans-envelope T7SS by atomic force microscopy and cryo-electron microscopy, (ii) study the mechanism of transport by creating translocation intermediates, (iii) expand the set of T7SS substrates by extensive proteomics and bioinformatics analysis, and (iv) visualise the role of T7SS in bacterial warfare and host-pathogen interactions using microfluidics, innovative lung-on-a-chip infection models and time-lapse microscopy. This will deliver a deep mechanistic understanding of the diverse roles of mycobacterial T7SSs and provide clues to exploit these systems to combat infections.

Mots-clés : type vii secretion tuberculosis mycobacterium membrane complex toxin host pathogen interactions cryo electron tomography single particle analysis atomic force microscopy microfluidics time lapse microscopy
Projet ERC : Archean Park (Horizon Europe, appel 2023, Synergy grants)
Entité participante : Université de Münster — Pays : Allemagne — Rôle : CO-PI
Acronyme de l'entité : Universität Münster
Type d'entité : Enseignement supérieur ou secondaire
Financement ERC de l'entité : 2333634.0 €

The biological conversion of inorganic to organic carbon, autotrophic CO2 fixation, is arguably the most important biosynthetic process on Earth. Having been established early in the Archean Eon, a period characterized by an atmosphere rich in CO2, this metabolism helped spark and fuel the evolution of early microbial life. Mounting evidence suggests that exceedingly high levels of CO2 select for energetically efficient CO2 fixation pathways, immensely affecting carbon cycling. We hypothesize that CO2-rich subsurface ecosystems still harbor microbes that prefer or even require extremely high CO2 concentrations; we refer to these microbes as carbodioxyphiles. Accordingly, elevated CO2 levels would impact the thermodynamics of the microbial central carbon metabolism, enhancing autotrophy and hindering remineralization of organic matter by heterotrophs. To this end, we will study microbial life in CO2-rich subsurface environments and elucidate ancient metabolic pathways rendered obsolete by the CO2 levels of most modern environments. Each of the research team’s members has contributed to prior breakthroughs in novel autotrophic pathways, environmental genomics, metabolomics, and/or the biogeochemistry of deep subsurface environments. Establishing optimal synergy in this wealth of expertise and experience, we will describe novel modes of microbial carbon fixation in CO2-rich settings and elucidate the importance of carbodioxyphily for microbial evolution. Archean Park will provide a unique window through which to study a new mode of cellular biochemistry, the relicts of primordial carbon fixation, and Earth’s earliest carbon cycle. We will comprehensively characterize the metabolic mechanisms exploited by microbes to achieve evolutionary dominion in these relict environments. Our findings will stimulate biotechnological and geotechnical innovations ranging from enhanced autotrophic biomass production to improved carbon sequestration and storage.

Mots-clés : autotrophy,metabolism,carbon cycle,deep biosphere,microbial physiology