The essentials of marine biotechnology.

Coastal countries have traditionally relied on the existing marine resources (e.g., fishing, food, transport, recreation, and tourism) as well as tried to support new economic endeavors (ocean energy, desalination for water supply, and seabed mining). Modern societies and lifestyle resulted in an increased demand for dietary diversity, better health and well-being, new biomedicines, natural cosmeceuticals, environmental conservation, and sustainable energy sources. These societal needs stimulated the interest of researchers on the diverse and underexplored marine environments as promising and sustainable sources of biomolecules and biomass, and they are addressed by the emerging field of marine (blue) biotechnology. Blue biotechnology provides opportunities for a wide range of initiatives of commercial interest for the pharmaceutical, biomedical, cosmetic, nutraceutical, food, feed, agricultural, and related industries. This article synthesizes the essence, opportunities, responsibilities, and challenges encountered in marine biotechnology and outlines the attainment and valorization of directly derived or bio-inspired products from marine organisms. First, the concept of bioeconomy is introduced. Then, the diversity of marine bioresources including an overview of the most prominent marine organisms and their potential for biotechnological uses are described. This is followed by introducing methodologies for exploration of these resources and the main use case scenarios in energy, food and feed, agronomy, bioremediation and climate change, cosmeceuticals, bio-inspired materials, healthcare, and well-being sectors. The key aspects in the fields of legislation and funding are provided, with the emphasis on the importance of communication and stakeholder engagement at all levels of biotechnology development. Finally, vital overarching concepts, such as the quadruple helix and Responsible Research and Innovation principle are highlighted as important to follow within the marine biotechnology field. The authors of this review are collaborating under the European Commission-funded Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) Action Ocean4Biotech – European transdisciplinary networking platform for marine biotechnology and focus the study on the European state of affairs

Weaving the dark web: legitimacy on Freenet, Tor, and I2P

An exploration of the Dark Web--websites accessible only with special routing software--that examines the history of three anonymizing networks, Freenet, Tor, and I2P

DOING INTERNET GOVERNANCE - STS-INFORMED PERSPECTIVES ON ORDERING THE NET

Internet governance - an important, but often overlooked area in Internet studies - is gaining increasing attention in the post-Snowden era which increased distrust of formal government institutions and their ‘dangerous liaisons with the private sector. User-driven, technology-embedded, decentralized approaches to contracts, currency, privacy protection keep on seeing the light. Politics and traditional purveyors of authority negotiate ways of reinventing and distributing themselves. Thus, investigating the ordering and governing processes as they relate to the network of networks is both timely and important.Traditionally, when talking about Internet Governance (with capital letters) researchers and practitioners refer to the new organizations and institutions that have been explicitly established to regulate, discuss, and negotiate issues of internet governance. This approach left the field mainly to legal scholars, political scientists, and institutional economists looking at institutions and processes such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Numbers and Names (ICANN), UN’s 2003 and 2005 World Summit on Information Society (WSIS), and the ongoing Internet Governance Forum (IGF). Recently, authors have criticized this institutional focus arguing for the need for a more comprehensive conceptualization of Internet governance (DeNardis 2012, Eeten/Mueller 2013, Musiani 2014, Hofmann et al. 2014).Among these recent developments, a small set of publications has drawn on perspectives from Science and Technology Studies (STS) in order to rethink and substantiate questions of ordering the net. These contributions highlight the day-to-day, mundane practices that constitute internet governance, take into account the plurality and ‘‘networkedness’’ of devices and arrangements involved, and investigate the invisibility, pervasiveness, and apparent agency of the digital infrastructure itself (Musiani 2014). In this way, STS-informed perspectives are increasingly instrumental for challenging and expanding our understanding and for informing our examination of ordering and governing processes in the digital realm.This panel seeks to nurture this nascent interest by pioneering a conversation on the governance of digitally networked environments from an STS-informed perspective. The papers grouped into this panel share a strong conceptual interest in understanding processes of ordering and governing the internet as a core infrastructure of our daily lives. With references to diverse controversies and phenomena (like data centers and cloud infrastructures, the negotiation of LGTB conflicts on different layers of internet architectures, discourses around multistakeholderism, the translation of copyright regulation into platform algorithms) the panel mobilizes perspectives from Science and Technology Studies (STS) to substantiate – and complicate in its best sense – our understanding of internet governance processes.This discussion is highly relevant beyond the core internet governance research community or groups of STS scholars interested in this specific “field-site”. First, it touches upon fundamental issues for all internet scholars: how the norms shaping the provision, design and usage of the internet are negotiated, de- and re-stabilized and subject to controversies. Second, for internet governance scholars, STS opens up new perspectives on digital uses and practices, delving into the variety of ways in which they are an integral part of today’s Internet governance -- not only because such practices reflect belonging and commitment to a community, but because they allow issues of sovereignty, autonomy and liberty come into play. Finally, using STS to expand the notion of governance in Internet governance opens this field to meaningful contibutions from scholars studying constitutional aspects of technology design and use, which are typically excluded from traditional Internet governance literature. This is an exercise in cross-disciplinary bridge-building