To fend off populism, we must stop believing in the will of the people

Populists rely on an idea of the people as a single, united force. Unfortunately, argues Luke Temple, traditional conceptions of democracy itself depend on a very similar notion. Unity and concordance is prized. This makes it difficult to challenge the underlying basis of populists’ arguments. But there is another way of understanding democracy – as a series of challenges and discords – and it is one that gives us an intellectual bedrock on which to build an opposition to populism

Book review: more sex, lies and the ballot box: another 50 things you need to know about elections edited by Philip Cowley and Robert Ford

Following the highly successful first volume, More Sex, Lies and the Ballot Box: Another 50 Things You Need to Know About Elections, edited by Philip Cowley and Robert Ford, offers fifty short chapters delving into UK electoral politics, covering topics including opinion polls, negative campaigning and the recent Brexit result. This is a refreshingly accessible book of nuanced, witty insights that will be a welcome salve for those grappling with the current state of British politics, writes Luke Temple

In a divided Britain, the pro-EU movement will have to be clear about what it wants

The Brexit vote has thrown different conceptions of democracy into sharp relief. Some are horrified at the conduct of the referendum campaign; others see the result as the revealed will of the people. Luke Temple uses tweets from the March for Europe event on 3 September to show how these views clash. He concludes that the pro-EU movement needs a clear aim if it’s to make any headway. Simply calling for a delay in invoking Article 50 is not enough

Could the Conservative Party have more to gain by enfranchising younger voters?

Using the 2017 and 2019 waves of the British Electoral Study, Alexandra Weir and Luke Temple explore potential differences between the political attitudes of young voters and those of young non-voters. They discuss why a strategy of engaging disenfranchised young people could have more electoral pay off for the Conservatives

Exploring the campaign space of non-party activism in the 2017 and 2019 UK general elections

In recent years there has been an increase in election-focused activity undertaken by non-party organisations. This activism concerns issues such as political education, cross-party collaboration, voter registration, and voter advice. Using the 2017 and 2019 UK general elections as case studies, we take a strategic action field approach to analyse how this campaign space is developing. We demonstrate the existence of competing logics of activism associated with the fields of social movements, electioneering, and ‘civic tech’. This leads to conflicts related to ethos, time, organisational hybridity, activism, funding and regulation, with such issues frequently shaped by the affordances offered by digital technology. Our findings contribute towards better understandings of how these actors operate in, and attempt to influence, the contemporary electoral landscape

Novel Testing to Study the Performance of Intumescent Coatings under Non-Standard Heating Regimes

Intumescent coatings (also called reactive coatings) are widely used to protect structural steel from fire. These thin coatings swell on heating to form a highly insulating char, protecting steel members and preventing them from reaching critical temperatures that could cause them to fail. As is the case for most structural materials and assemblies, intumescent coatings for use in buildings are typically developed and certified solely according to the standard cellulosic fire resistance test by exposure within a fire testing furnace. Reliance on furnace testing is expensive, non-representative of realistic fire conditions, and insufficiently versatile to gather detailed performance information on the response of reactive coatings under the full range of design fires which might be considered during a rational, performance-based design assessment. This paper presents a novel testing methodology for studying the performance of reactive coatings when subjected to non-standard heating regimes. The new approach is calibrated and validated using furnace test data, and is shown to offer considerable advantages over furnace testing in terms of reliability, repeatability, versatility, speed and cost. An investigation is then presented to study the effective variable thermal conductivity of a commercially available reactive coating when subjected to various timehistories of heat flux. It is shown that the heating rate and dry film thickness of the coating do not drastically affect the development of effective thermal conductivity with substrate temperature, leading to a proposal for a simplified method for specifying coating requirements and/or performing heat transfer design calculations when designing to non-standard heating regimes

Political values and extra-institutional political participation: The impact of economic redistributive and social libertarian preferences on protest behaviour

Previous studies have found that left-wing and libertarian individuals are more likely to engage in extra-institutional political activism. However, due to a lack of suitable data, studies to date have not analysed the relative influence of economic redistributive and social libertarian values for the intensity of protest participation. By analysing data from a unique cross-national dataset on participants in mass demonstrations in seven countries, this article addresses this gap in the literature and provides evidence of the relative impact of economic redistributive and social libertarian values in explaining different degrees of protest participation. We show that there are divergent logics underpinning the effect of the two value sets on extra-institutional participation. While both economically redistributive and libertarian social values support extra-institutional participation, economically redistributive protesters are mobilized to political action mainly through organizations, whereas the extra-institutional participation of social libertarian protesters is underpinned by their dissatisfaction with the workings of democracy

Directed Evolution of a Selective and Sensitive Serotonin Sensor via Machine Learning

Serotonin plays a central role in cognition and is the target of most pharmaceuticals for psychiatric disorders. Existing drugs have limited efficacy; creation of improved versions will require better understanding of serotonergic circuitry, which has been hampered by our inability to monitor serotonin release and transport with high spatial and temporal resolution. We developed and applied a binding-pocket redesign strategy, guided by machine learning, to create a high-performance, soluble, fluorescent serotonin sensor (iSeroSnFR), enabling optical detection of millisecond-scale serotonin transients. We demonstrate that iSeroSnFR can be used to detect serotonin release in freely behaving mice during fear conditioning, social interaction, and sleep/wake transitions. We also developed a robust assay of serotonin transporter function and modulation by drugs. We expect that both machine-learning-guided binding-pocket redesign and iSeroSnFR will have broad utility for the development of other sensors and in vitro and in vivo serotonin detection, respectively

Effects of antiplatelet therapy on stroke risk by brain imaging features of intracerebral haemorrhage and cerebral small vessel diseases: subgroup analyses of the RESTART randomised, open-label trial

Background Findings from the RESTART trial suggest that starting antiplatelet therapy might reduce the risk of recurrent symptomatic intracerebral haemorrhage compared with avoiding antiplatelet therapy. Brain imaging features of intracerebral haemorrhage and cerebral small vessel diseases (such as cerebral microbleeds) are associated with greater risks of recurrent intracerebral haemorrhage. We did subgroup analyses of the RESTART trial to explore whether these brain imaging features modify the effects of antiplatelet therapy