Terrorismustrends: Jihadistische Propaganda auf sozialen Medien im deutschsprachigen Raum

Soziale Medien spielen für Propagandazwecke eine entscheidende Rolle. Terroristische und extremistische Organisationen haben diesen Umstand längst erkannt und ihre Aktivitäten in diesem Bereich professionalisiert. Der vorliegende Text befasst sich mit der Online-Welt der Dschihad-Subkultur rund um den Wiener Attentäter und gibt einen Einblick in ihre Diskurse und Ästhetik. Mit dem Niedergang des Kalifats hat sich ein Großteil der Jihad-Aktivitäten des IS ins Internet verlagert. Auch das Projekt des Kalifats selbst entfernt sich langsam von der Realität eines "Staates" und bekommt den Charakter einer Utopie. Das führt dazu, dass im Kontext der gesamten IS-Propaganda die Aktivitäten von Sympathisanten in Europa ein größeres Gewicht bekommen, auch wenn sich FTFs (foreign terrorist fighters) weiterhin vor Ort in Syrien und im Irak befinden. Das heißt auch, dass die Ereignisse in Europa und die Debatten, die hier geführt werden, stärker von der IS-Propaganda aufgegriffen werden. Gleichzeitig wird weiterhin Überzeugungsarbeit zum Zweck der Auswanderung und des Aufbaus des utopischen Staates geleistet. Die katastrophalen Zustände in den Gefangenenlagern werden zur Mobilisierung von Kämpfern instrumentalisiert. Nach Analyse der Online-Aktivitäten werden abschließend in einem Fazit konkrete Handlungsempfehlungen eruiert

Terrorismusszenarien und -trends; Inklusive der Auswirkung von COVID-19

Die regelmäßigen Szenario-Monitoring Berichte erfassen die für Österreichs Sicherheit wahrscheinlichsten Bedrohungsszenarien, sowie die Entwicklungen der relevantesten Trends innerhalb dieser Szenarien in Bezug auf Faktoren, die zum Terrorismus beitragen. Dieser Bericht befasst sich insbesondere mit den Auswirkungen der COVID-19-Pandemie auf diese Trends und Faktoren. Die wahrscheinlichsten Bedrohungsszenarien sind weiterhin: chemische, biologische, radiologische und nukleare CBRN Bedrohungen sowie cyberterroristische Anschläge von geringem Ausmaß; und jihadistische Anschläge von mittlerem bis hohem Ausmaß vor allem in der Sahelzone und in Südostasien sowie Anschläge von geringem bis mittlerem Ausmaß durch Einzelgänger aus dem jihadistischen und rechtsradikalen Bereich in Europa und Nordamerika. Die Pandemie hat einen "positiven" Effekt auf CBRN- und cyberterroristische Anschläge von geringem Ausmaß; jedoch keinen starken Einfluss auf das Wesen und die Intensität von konventionellen Anschlägen. Jihadistische und rechtsradikale Propaganda und Aktivitäten haben sich während der Pandemie sogar intensiviert - teilweise aufgrund der Instrumentalisierung der Pandemie. Es werden außerdem negative Konsequenzen für die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung und staatliche Fragilität erwartet

Functional interdependence of the actin regulators CAP1 and cofilin1 in control of dendritic spine morphology

The vast majority of excitatory synapses are formed on small dendritic protrusions termed dendritic spines. Dendritic spines vary in size and density that are crucial determinants of excitatory synaptic transmission. Aberrations in spine morphogenesis can compromise brain function and have been associated with neuropsychiatric disorders. Actin filaments (F-actin) are the major structural component of dendritic spines, and therefore, actin-binding proteins (ABP) that control F-actin dis-/assembly moved into the focus as critical regulators of brain function. Studies of the past decade identified the ABP cofilin1 as a key regulator of spine morphology, synaptic transmission, and behavior, and they emphasized the necessity for a tight control of cofilin1 to ensure proper brain function. Here, we report spine enrichment of cyclase-associated protein 1 (CAP1), a conserved multidomain protein with largely unknown physiological functions. Super-resolution microscopy and live cell imaging of CAP1-deficient hippocampal neurons revealed impaired synaptic F-actin organization and dynamics associated with alterations in spine morphology. Mechanistically, we found that CAP1 cooperates with cofilin1 in spines and that its helical folded domain is relevant for this interaction. Moreover, our data proved functional interdependence of CAP1 and cofilin1 in control of spine morphology. In summary, we identified CAP1 as a novel regulator of the postsynaptic actin cytoskeleton that is essential for synaptic cofilin1 activity

Loss of Secreted Frizzled-Related Protein 4 Correlates with an Aggressive Phenotype and Predicts Poor Outcome in Ovarian Cancer Patients

Background: Activation of the Wnt signaling pathway is implicated in aberrant cellular proliferation in various cancers. In 40% of endometrioid ovarian cancers, constitutive activation of the pathway is due to oncogenic mutations in β-catenin or other inactivating mutations in key negative regulators. Secreted frizzled-related protein 4 (SFRP4) has been proposed to have inhibitory activity through binding and sequestering Wnt ligands. Methodology/Principal Findings: We performed RT-qPCR and Western-blotting in primary cultures and ovarian cell lines for SFRP4 and its key downstream regulators activated β-catenin, β-catenin and GSK3β. SFRP4 was then examined by immunohistochemistry in a cohort of 721 patients and due to its proposed secretory function, in plasma, presenting the first ELISA for SFRP4. SFRP4 was most highly expressed in tubal epithelium and decreased with malignant transformation, both on RNA and on protein level, where it was even more profound in the membrane fraction (p<0.0001). SFRP4 was expressed on the protein level in all histotypes of ovarian cancer but was decreased from borderline tumors to cancers and with loss of cellular differentiation. Loss of membrane expression was an independent predictor of poor survival in ovarian cancer patients (p = 0.02 unadjusted; p = 0.089 adjusted), which increased the risk of a patient to die from this disease by the factor 1.8. Conclusions/Significance: Our results support a role for SFRP4 as a tumor suppressor gene in ovarian cancers via inhibition of the Wnt signaling pathway. This has not only predictive implications but could also facilitate a therapeutic role using epigenetic targets

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Modifying immune responses to adeno-associated virus vectors by capsid engineering

De novo immune responses are considered major challenges in gene therapy. With the aim to lower innate immune responses directly in cells targeted by adeno-associated virus (AAV) vectors, we equipped the vector capsid with a peptide known to interfere with Toll-like receptor signaling. Specifically, we genetically inserted in each of the 60 AAV2 capsid subunits the myeloid differentiation primary response 88 (MyD88)-derived peptide RDVLPGT, known to block MyD88 dimerization. Inserting the peptide neither interfered with capsid assembly nor with vector production yield. The novel capsid variant, AAV2.MB453, showed superior transduction efficiency compared to AAV2 in human monocyte-derived dendritic cells and in primary human hepatocyte cultures. In line with our hypothesis, AAV2.MB453 and AAV2 differed regarding innate immune response activation in primary human cells, particularly for type I interferons. Furthermore, mice treated with AAV2.MB453 showed significantly reduced CD8+ T cell responses against the transgene product for different administration routes and against the capsid following intramuscular administration. Moreover, humoral responses against the capsid were mitigated as indicated by delayed IgG2a antibody formation and an increased NAb50. To conclude, insertion of the MyD88-derived peptide into the AAV2 capsid improved early steps of host-vector interaction and reduced innate and adaptive immune responses