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Despite its territorial defeat, the Islamic State is rapidly evolving around the world with new extremist cells and recruits, experts warn.

Preventative, 'soft' counter-terrorism policies have proved internationally controversial, as criticisms of Britain's Prevent strategy show. However, there is a danger that change, complexity and contestation within approaches like Prevent are overlooked. This article examines Prevent's changing focus of 'responsibilisation' and, in response, changing experiences of contestation by both the local state and by local Muslim communities, including mediation and 'enactment' by organisations and individual professionals. In discussing this, the article argues for a more nuanced analysis of Prevent, around both the 'state' and the situated use of agency and policy space. This supports the contention that Prevent is 'complexly flawed'.

Godlee asks whether doctors should engage with counterterrorism. 1 As a doctor who worked through much of the terrorism in Northern Ireland, where paramilitaries killed over 3200 people, I am bemused, disturbed, and increasingly appalled at the over-reaction to the limited terrorist threat in Britain. Since 2005, no terrorist has used a firearm or explosives in Britain, and only six people have been murdered. Young Muslim men will start to ponder the risks of going to see a doctor if there is a strong chance they could be \"shopped\" to the state for arbitrary and non-medical reasons.

Introduction:Since 2001, a burgeoning interest by health care professionals in the growing asymmetrical terrorist threat and its impact on health care preparation and response has seen significantly increased academic output around this nebulous subject. Despite this, there has failed to be a consolidation of this sub-specialty.Discussion:This editorial argues for the consolidation of the body of experience gathered since 2001 into an initiative called Counter-Terrorism Medicine (CTM). It proposes that previously discrete sub-specialty areas can be consolidated, with improvements in collective understanding, and can build on previous work to provide a non-political health care focused definition of terrorist events, based on the triad of Violence, Intent, and Heath Care Impact. It notes the importance this defining triad has in health care planning and response considerations. Finally, it defines the parameters of CTM within the larger specialty of Disaster Medicine (DM).Conclusion:There is a growing body of academic work on the health care implications of terrorism. The time is right to coalesce these into an initiative referred to as CTM and to consider this as a discrete part of DM.

In consideration of the risks faced by soldiers during anti-terrorism tasks, a compact anti-terrorism robot has been designed. This robot effectively combines detection and attack capabilities while maintaining a weight limit of 12kg. This paper provides a detailed description of the robot’s structural design and its obstacle-crossing action plan for climbing steps. From a kinematic perspective, it analyzes the relationship between the tracked robot’s structural dimensions and the height of steps. By utilizing Matlab, relationship diagrams are generated to determine the maximum step-climbing height by the tracked robot. Furthermore, Recurdyn software is employed to simulate obstacle crossings performed by this crawler robot in order to validate theoretical analysis through obtaining torque curves during movement. The results demonstrate that both structural dimensions and center-of-mass positioning significantly impact obstacle-crossing performance.

Taxonomic identification of biological materials can be achieved through DNA barcoding, where an unknown \"barcode\" sequence is compared to a reference database. In many disciplines, obtaining accurate taxonomic identifications can be imperative (e.g., evolutionary biology, food regulatory compliance, forensics). The Barcode of Life DataSystems (BOLD) and GenBank are the main public repositories of DNA barcode sequences. In this study, an assessment of the accuracy and reliability of sequences in these databases was performed. To achieve this, 1) curated reference materials for plants, macro-fungi and insects were obtained from national collections, 2) relevant barcode sequences (rbcL, matK, trnH-psbA, ITS and COI) from these reference samples were generated and used for searching against both databases, and 3) optimal search parameters were determined that ensure the best match to the known species in either database. While GenBank outperformed BOLD for species-level identification of insect taxa (53% and 35%, respectively), both databases performed comparably for plants and macro-fungi (~81% and ~57%, respectively). Results illustrated that using a multi-locus barcode approach increased identification success. This study outlines the utility of the BLAST search tool in GenBank and the BOLD identification engine for taxonomic identifications and identifies some precautions needed when using public sequence repositories in applied scientific disciplines.

This article presents an eclectic review of the analytical study of terrorism that views all agents as rational decision-makers. This analytical literature began in earnest with the seminal study of US skyjackings by William Landes in 1978. After 11 September 2001, the analytical literature on terrorism grew rapidly. Based on policy relevance, my survey article identifies five key areas of intense research interests. These include analyses of terrorist attack trends, the economic consequences of terrorism, the study of counterterrorism effectiveness, the causes of terrorism, and the relationship of terrorism and liberal democracies. New developments in the field focused on distinguishing key differences between domestic and transnational terrorism. Additionally, recent game-theoretic advances permitted more active agents and stages to the games. Other major developments involved the study of networked terrorists and the role of counterterrorism foreign aid. Fruitful future directions include using advanced econometric methods to discern the true impact of terrorism on growth, applying spatial econometrics to the study of terrorism, ascertaining the determinants of terrorist groups' longevity, and learning how to foster international counterterrorism cooperation.