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The Oxford handbook on the United Nations
This Handbook provides in one volume an authoritative and independent treatment of the UN's seventy-year history, written by an international cast of more than 50 distinguished scholars, analysts, and practitioners. It provides a clear and penetrating examination of the UN's development since 1945 and the challenges and opportunities now facing the organization. It assesses the implications for the UN of rapid changes in the world - from technological innovation to shifting foreign policy priorities - and the UN's future place in a changing multilateral landscape. Citations and additional readings contain a wealth of primary and secondary references to the history, politics, and law of the world organization. This key reference also contains appendices of the UN Charter, the Statute of the International Court of Justice, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. -- Provided by publisher.
Book
Mice Against Ticks: an experimental community-guided effort to prevent tick-borne disease by altering the shared environment
Mice Against Ticks is a community-guided ecological engineering project that aims to prevent tick-borne disease by using CRISPR-based genome editing to heritably immunize the white-footed mice (Peromyscus leucopus) responsible for infecting many ticks in eastern North America. Introducing antibody-encoding resistance alleles into the local mouse population is anticipated to disrupt the disease transmission cycle for decades. Technology development is shaped by engagement with community members and visitors to the islands of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard, including decisions at project inception about which types of disease resistance to pursue. This engagement process has prompted the researchers to use only white-footed mouse DNA if possible, meaning the current project will not involve gene drive. Instead, engineered mice would be released in the spring when the natural population is low, a plan unlikely to increase total numbers above the normal maximum in autumn. Community members are continually asked to share their suggestions and concerns, a process that has already identified potential ecological consequences unanticipated by the research team that will likely affect implementation. As an early example of CRISPR-based ecological engineering, Mice Against Ticks aims to start small and simple by working with island communities whose mouse populations can be lastingly immunized without gene drive.
This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘The ecology and evolution of prokaryotic CRISPR-Cas adaptive immune systems’.
Journal Article
The Avengers. Kree/Skrull War
When Ronan the Accuser seizes control of the Kree Empire and launches an attack against Earth, the Avengers must face the threat, while the shape-shifting Skrulls, hiding among the human population, reveal themselves to wage war.
Book
80 questions for UK biological security
Multiple national and international trends and drivers are radically changing what biological security means for the United Kingdom (UK). New technologies present novel opportunities and challenges, and globalisation has created new pathways and increased the speed, volume and routes by which organisms can spread. The UK Biological Security Strategy (2018) acknowledges the importance of research on biological security in the UK. Given the breadth of potential research, a targeted agenda identifying the questions most critical to effective and coordinated progress in different disciplines of biological security is required. We used expert elicitation to generate 80 policy-relevant research questions considered by participants to have the greatest impact on UK biological security. Drawing on a collaboratively-developed set of 450 questions, proposed by 41 experts from academia, industry and the UK government (consulting 168 additional experts) we subdivided the final 80 questions into six categories: bioengineering; communication and behaviour; disease threats (including pandemics); governance and policy; invasive alien species; and securing biological materials and securing against misuse. Initially, the questions were ranked through a voting process and then reduced and refined to 80 during a one-day workshop with 35 participants from a variety of disciplines. Consistently emerging themes included: the nature of current and potential biological security threats, the efficacy of existing management actions, and the most appropriate future options. The resulting questions offer a research agenda for biological security in the UK that can assist the targeting of research resources and inform the implementation of the UK Biological Security Strategy . These questions include research that could aid with the mitigation of Covid-19, and preparation for the next pandemic. We hope that our structured and rigorous approach to creating a biological security research agenda will be replicated in other countries and regions. The world, not just the UK, is in need of a thoughtful approach to directing biological security research to tackle the emerging issues.
Journal Article
Recommendations for environmental risk assessment of gene drive applications for malaria vector control
Building on an exercise that identified potential harms from simulated investigational releases of a population suppression gene drive for malaria vector control, a series of online workshops identified nine recommendations to advance future environmental risk assessment of gene drive applications.
Journal Article
Measured spin–orbit alignment of ultra-short-period super-Earth 55 Cancri e
A planet’s orbital alignment places important constraints on how a planet formed and consequently evolved. The dominant formation pathway of ultra-short-period planets (P < 1 day) is particularly mysterious as such planets most likely formed further out, and it is not well understood what drove their migration inwards to their current positions. Measuring the orbital alignment is difficult for smaller super-Earth/sub-Neptune planets, which give rise to smaller amplitude signals. Here we present radial velocities across two transits of 55 Cancri (Cnc) e, an ultra-short-period super-Earth, observed with the Extreme Precision Spectrograph. Using the classical Rossiter–McLaughlin method, we measure 55 Cnc e’s sky-projected stellar spin–orbit alignment (that is, the projected angle between the planet’s orbital axis and its host star’s spin axis) to be λ=10+17∘−20∘ with an unprojected angle of ψ=23+14∘−12∘. The best-fit Rossiter–McLaughlin model to the Extreme Precision Spectrograph data has a radial velocity semi-amplitude of just 0.41+0.09−0.10 m s−1. The spin–orbit alignment of 55 Cnc e favours dynamically gentle migration theories for ultra-short-period planets, namely tidal dissipation through low-eccentricity planet–planet interactions and/or planetary obliquity tides.Measurements of the Rossiter–McLaughlin effect for the ultra-short-period super-Earth 55 Cancri e reveal a signal with a semi-amplitude of 0.41+0.09-0.10 m s−1, in close alignment with its star and potentially misaligned with the other planets in the system. Such a configuration favours a non-violent migration pathway for 55 Cnc e.
Journal Article
When All Research Is Dual Use
Governing new biosecurity threats is not merely a matter of good intentions and better training; it requires a paying proper attention to the social contexts of science. In a Mar 2022 paper in Nature Machine Intelligence, researchers from a US pharmaceutical company who were building artificial intelligence systems for virtual drug discovery issued a wake-up call to their colleagues. After years of working on a suite of models to improve toxicity prediction, the researchers were invited to an international security conference to give a presentation on how such models could be misused to create chemical and biological weapons--something they had not previously considered, even though they had worked with neurotoxins and Ebola.
Journal Article