The global commitment to protect 30% of the oceans by 2030 faces several key challenges in preserving nature without exacerbating existing coastal resource conflicts. As ocean protection is rapidly increasing to halt biodiversity loss, we urgently need to understand why people value nature to better address these conflicts. The REVALSEA project will provide a novel theoretical approach and empirical evidence to quantify, predict, and integrate into marine conservation the diverse ways people express why they value their relationship with nature, i.e., relational values, in coastal systems. Relational values (RVs) emerge as a keystone in conservation efforts breaking with the traditional exclusively material valuation of nature and opening a new opportunity to adopt more inclusive and socially relevant strategies for biodiversity conservation. This aspect is rarely explored in marine systems, even when its consideration in conservation is critical to increase equity and reduce resource conflicts. Addressing RVs in marine conservation policies needs overcoming several intergenerational, methodological, and operational challenges. First, it must consider the intergenerational gap between what matters for those who influence decision-making (adults) and for those who have the potential to generate social-ecological changes (youth). Second, it requires the use of innovative interdisciplinary social-ecological research that integrates multidimensional datasets and uses novel machine learning technology to maximise data efficiency while minimising economic costs of data collection and analysis. Finally, it needs transdisciplinary cooperation with stakeholders and decision makers to co-generate specific recommendations for integrating RVs in conservation policies. REVALSEA will focus on the small-scale fisher’s community in Spain as a case study to address all these challenges and develop a cutting-edge and globally scalable approach in other socio-cultural contexts.

The Pierre Auger Observatory detects extensive air showers that are initiated by protons or nuclei reaching Earth's atmosphere with energies exceeding 10**18 eV (ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECR)). The center-of-mass energy of the initial interaction of the CRs in the atmosphere exceeds the energies reached at the LHC by more than an order of magnitude. One of the key results of Auger is the discovery that these interactions of UHECRs do not behave as expected. Compared to simulations the measured air showers contain many more muons. This discrepancy could be simply due to the uncertainty inherent in the extrapolation from the energy scale of the LHC, where we can measure interactions in detail, to UHECR energies. Or it could be new physics! This project proposes to distinguish the two scenarios by the detailed measurement of the shower-to-shower distribution of the muon content as the shape of the distribution is driven by the quantum fluctuations in the first UHE interaction which are sensitive to new physics and the details of hadronic interactions. The measurement will for the first time use hybrid data from the surface and radio detectors of the Pierre Auger Observatory.

TraffikGene-Tx: Targeted and Dynamic RNA Peptide Vehicles -Unmet Clinical Need and Problem Rare and complex genetic diseases lead to significant disability, death and associated cost burdens for society. Complex genetic diseases include cardiovascular diseases (CVD) and cancer, the two leading causes of death in the EU and up to 36 million Europeans suffer from rare genetic diseases. Nucleic acid therapeutics (NATs) represent a potential treatment, but they are hampered by the “delivery problem.” Systemically administered naked RNA is quickly degraded by endonucleases, can provoke adverse immune reactions and has off-target toxicity. Viral and lipid nanoparticle (LNP) delivery vectors have toxic side-effects and are difficult to produce and target. -The Solution TraffikGene´s RNA delivery platform is: Safe: biodegradable, non-immunogenic peptide carriers that cleave to avoid the detergent toxicity of LNPs. Targetable: beyond the liver, to the spleen, lungs and heart with excellent delivery to the cytosol. Scalable: Production is automated, simple and cheap. TraffikGene combines modular design with high-throughput screening which will feed into AI-enhanced SAR-based predictive vehicle design. This will accelerate and de-risk NAT drug development. -The Project TraffikGene will capitalize on the current breakthroughs in healthcare represented by NATs. RNA therapeutics (mRNA, saRNA, siRNA, lncRNA, miRNA) are now emerging driven by the success of mRNA vaccines and TraffikGene will deliver them to the tissues where they are needed. We aim to break new ground in the field of RNA, validate our delivery vehicles and start developing our pipeline to advance to the preclinical trial stage with therapeutic RNAs. We aim to launch our company of customised peptide carriers for any RNA medicine with a proprietary flagship RNA-based immunotherapy. Our products will bring many promising NATs to the market, and help millions of patients, while reducing health care costs.