British press attitudes towards the EU's global presence:from the Russian-Georgian War to the 2009 Copenhagen Summit

This article surveys the way in which British print media have presented the European Union (EU)'s global presence in the international arena by analysing two case studies which reflect two very distinctive areas of EU foreign policy: global climate change policy and the policy towards Russia. It employs frame analysis, allowing for the identification of the way in which the discourse of the press was categorized around a series of central opinions and ideas. Frames underscore the connections made by journalists between different events, policies or phenomena and their possible interpretations. The analysis highlights that acting through the common framework of the EU rather than unilaterally was a strategy preferred by the British press. These findings are in stark contrast with the deep Euroscepticism which characterizes press attitudes towards most policy areas, and is often considered to be rooted in the British political culture, media system, public opinion or the longstanding tradition of viewing the European continent as the other

Compendium of 4,941 rumen metagenome-assembled genomes for rumen microbiome biology and enzyme discovery

The Rowett Institute and SRUC are core funded by the Rural and Environment Science and Analytical Services Division (RESAS) of the Scottish Government. The Roslin Institute forms part of the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies, University of Edinburgh. This project was supported by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC; BB/N016742/1, BB/N01720X/1), including institute strategic programme and national capability awards to The Roslin Institute (BBSRC: BB/P013759/1, BB/P013732/1, BB/J004235/1, BB/J004243/1); and by the Scottish Government as part of the 2016–2021 commission.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

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

Multi-messenger observations of a binary neutron star merger

On 2017 August 17 a binary neutron star coalescence candidate (later designated GW170817) with merger time 12:41:04 UTC was observed through gravitational waves by the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo detectors. The Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor independently detected a gamma-ray burst (GRB 170817A) with a time delay of ~1.7 s with respect to the merger time. From the gravitational-wave signal, the source was initially localized to a sky region of 31 deg2 at a luminosity distance of 40+8-8 Mpc and with component masses consistent with neutron stars. The component masses were later measured to be in the range 0.86 to 2.26 Mo. An extensive observing campaign was launched across the electromagnetic spectrum leading to the discovery of a bright optical transient (SSS17a, now with the IAU identification of AT 2017gfo) in NGC 4993 (at ~40 Mpc) less than 11 hours after the merger by the One- Meter, Two Hemisphere (1M2H) team using the 1 m Swope Telescope. The optical transient was independently detected by multiple teams within an hour. Subsequent observations targeted the object and its environment. Early ultraviolet observations revealed a blue transient that faded within 48 hours. Optical and infrared observations showed a redward evolution over ~10 days. Following early non-detections, X-ray and radio emission were discovered at the transient’s position ~9 and ~16 days, respectively, after the merger. Both the X-ray and radio emission likely arise from a physical process that is distinct from the one that generates the UV/optical/near-infrared emission. No ultra-high-energy gamma-rays and no neutrino candidates consistent with the source were found in follow-up searches. These observations support the hypothesis that GW170817 was produced by the merger of two neutron stars in NGC4993 followed by a short gamma-ray burst (GRB 170817A) and a kilonova/macronova powered by the radioactive decay of r-process nuclei synthesized in the ejecta

Assembly of 913 microbial genomes from metagenomic sequencing of the cow rumen

The Rowett Institute and SRUC are core funded by the Rural and Environment Science and Analytical Services Division (RESAS) of the Scottish Government. The Roslin Institute forms part of the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies, University of Edinburgh. This project was supported by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC; BB/N016742/1, BB/N01720X/1), including institute strategic programme and national capability awards to The Roslin Institute (BBSRC: BB/P013759/1, BB/P013732/1, BB/J004235/1, BB/J004243/1); and by the Scottish Government as part of the 2016–2021 commission.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Interest Groups and the United Nations (UN)

Some of the most exciting controversies about transnational interest group politics revolve around the United Nations (UN), a major incuba- tor of ideas and a hub in global governance. This article foregrounds interest groups in the UN as private voluntary organizations pursuing political advocacy. Anchored in political science, this def- inition views interest groups as a subset of “trans- national actors,” which are typically more broadly referred to as any type of individual or collective “non-state actor” that is transnationally active and neither a state nor composed of states. Interest- ingly, a growing number of comparative politicsand international relations scholars have highlighted the overlap between “interest groups” and “international non-governmental organiza- tions (INGOs),” as both types of organizations typically seek to balance self-interested advocacy and normative aims. Drawing from both interest group and INGO research, this article discusses three core topics: political opportunity struc- tures, interest group strategies, and effects of inter- est groups. It discusses some evidence from the UN, identifies knowledge gaps, and pro- blematizes imbalances in interest group involve- ment and effects in the UN. Understanding the academic debate in interest group and INGO research around these themes is timely and impor- tant amidst UN reform debates on the occasion of the organization’s 75th anniversary in 2020

Climate Change Implications for Tidal Marshes and Food Web Linkages to Estuarine and Coastal Nekton

Climate change is altering naturally fluctuating environmental conditions in coastal and estuarine ecosystems across the globe. Departures from long-term averages and ranges of environmental variables are increasingly being observed as directional changes [e.g., rising sea levels, sea surface temperatures (SST)] and less predictable periodic cycles (e.g., Atlantic or Pacific decadal oscillations) and extremes (e.g., coastal flooding, marine heatwaves). Quantifying the short- and long-term impacts of climate change on tidal marsh seascape structure and function for nekton is a critical step toward fisheries conservation and management. The multiple stressor framework provides a promising approach for advancing integrative, cross-disciplinary research on tidal marshes and food web dynamics. It can be used to quantify climate change effects on and interactions between coastal oceans (e.g., SST, ocean currents, waves) and watersheds (e.g., precipitation, river flows), tidal marsh geomorphology (e.g., vegetation structure, elevation capital, sedimentation), and estuarine and coastal nekton (e.g., species distributions, life history adaptations, predator-prey dynamics). However, disentangling the cumulative impacts of multiple interacting stressors on tidal marshes, whether the effects are additive, synergistic, or antagonistic, and the time scales at which they occur, poses a significant research challenge. This perspective highlights the key physical and ecological processes affecting tidal marshes, with an emphasis on the trophic linkages between marsh production and estuarine and coastal nekton, recommended for consideration in future climate change studies. Such studies are urgently needed to understand climate change effects on tidal marshes now and into the future