A wider Europe? The view from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine

On the evidence of national surveys conducted between 2000 and 2006, there is a declining sense of European self-identity in the three Slavic post-Soviet republics of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. Attitudes towards the European Union and the possibility of membership are broadly supportive, but with a substantial proportion who find it difficult to express a view, and substantial proportions are poorly informed in comparison with the general public in EU member or prospective member countries. Those who are better informed are more likely to favour EU membership and vice versa. Generally, socioeconomic characteristics (except for age and region) are relatively poor predictors of support for EU membership as compared with attitudinal variables. But ‘Europeanness’ should not be seen as a given, and much will depend on whether EU member countries emphasize what is common to east and west or establish ‘new dividing lines’ in place of those of the cold war

On the way from SARS-CoV-sensitive mice to murine COVID-19 model

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a master killer which appeared suddenly and which has already claimed more than 200,000 human lives. In this situation, laboratories are in urgent need for a COVID-19 murine model to search for effective antiviral compounds. Here we propose a novel strategy for the development of mice that can be inoculated by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the COVID-19 causative agen

Transgenic mice Cre-dependently expressing mutant polymerase-gamma: novel test-system for pharmacological study of mitoprotective drugs

PolG-alpha is a nuclear-encoded enzyme which provides replication and repair of mitochondrial DNA. D257A mutation of PolG-alpha leads to change in the N-terminal "proofreading" domain, which deprives the enzyme of 3′-5′ exonuclease activity, resulting in accumulation of mutations in the mitochondrial genom

Better the devil you know:Threat effects and attachment to the European Union

The EU is facing unprecedented challenges and significant threats to its economic and political security. Austerity, the Eurozone crisis, rising immigration and heightened fear of terrorism all present serious challenges to the process of integration. How does this context of insecurity impact on what the EU means to its citizens? Will the public become increasingly Eurosceptic or will they discover a hitherto unrecognised attachment to the EU as the prospect of its collapse becomes real? Psychological research has demonstrated that individual exposure to threat decreases cognitive capacity, inducing a tendency towards rigidity or conservatism - a tendency to cling to the ‘devil you know’. So what might this mean for the European integration process? Using experimental techniques drawn from political psychology, the authors find a dual threat effect. The EU symbol has a negative (anti-EU) effect on EU-related attitudes when presented in neutral context. This is consonant with conceptualisations of the EU as a threat to national cultural and political norms. In contrast, however, visual priming of participants with EU symbols has a positive (pro-EU) effect on related attitudes when these are presented in a context that implies a subtle but imminent threat to the benefits of EU membership