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The digital transformation has had a profound impact on political communication. It has lowered the access barrier for actors to become publicly visible and reconfigured predominantly vertical flows of information into horizontal communication networks. Media-centric studies hold that these 'hybrid media systems' do not subvert the analogue order tout court, as the media still occupy a central role in selection and distribution processes. In contrast to this, social movement scholars interested in digital forms of mobilization show that civil society actors can directly engage their base and the wider public. Because of this focus, the status and role of the media in these connective efforts has remained largely neglected. This study extends the view of both media-centric and social movement research by asking how the media are included in civil society mobilization efforts online and what status and role they have. Analysing the online communication around the UK climate change debate over a 30-month period, we show that while the media account for a substantial amount of the actors in the networks generated by civil society actors and bloggers, they become more marginal with respect to the authority they command. Not only are they replaced by bloggers as focal points in these digital political communication ecologies, they become next to irrelevant in allocating visibility and attention to other actors. This has ambivalent consequences for democratic discourse, as online debates become more inclusive but also more fragmented, lacking common points of reference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We seek to understand the role of the Internet in policy monopolies characterized by a dominant coalition in traditional political venues. In these settings, we identify coalitions and counter-coalitions on the Web and ask how these coalitions differ resource-wise and where these differences come from. To do so, we combine link tracing and quantitative content analysis in the field of climate change in Germany and the United Kingdom. Our results show that online contestation is indeed structured by competing coalitions of climate advocates and skeptics. Moreover, the counter-coalitions of climate skeptics turn out to be the true winners of online communication: they have not only incorporated conservative media as their allies, but also managed to make themselves more visible than climate advocates. This visibility stems from their own link setting activity, which makes climate advocates' passive online strategy of just ignoring the skeptical camp ineffective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research into hyperlink interaction patterns has been particularly interested in whether they integrate the online space or segregate it into "echo chambers." Concentrating on contentious politics in national settings, the existing studies have mainly examined the relationships between domestic actors, mostly bloggers. This study seeks to expand the focus by including several actor types, allowing their connective actions to reach beyond national borders, and employing a comparative approach that contrasts high- with low-contentious contexts. Analyzing climate change hyperlink networks originating in the US and Switzerland, the results show that their transnational dimension plays a crucial role in polarizing the discourse, regardless of the specific political context. We find similar patterns that segregate climate advocates from skeptics and lead to distinct transnational relationships within the camps. The results demonstrate that countermovement actors in particular are able to forge strong transnational alliances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the discursive resonance of online climate skepticism in traditional media in Germany, a country where climate skeptics lack public prestige and thus form a political counter-movement. We thereby differentiate two temporal dynamics: resonance can be continuous or selective, based on the exploitation of specific events. Beyond, we test whether such resonance is higher within the conservative media. We rely on news value theory to shed light on the mechanism facilitating or hindering such resonance and identify three indicators for resonance: frames, positions and actors. Using various computational methods as well as qualitative case studies, we examine the skeptical and traditional media discourses over a period of two years. Our analysis shows that there is no continuous resonance. However, our data reveal selective resonance: skeptics' manage to exploit specific events pushing their frames and positions onto traditional media's agenda. Thereby, conservative media did not give greater resonance to climate skeptical voices whereas they resort to downplaying the issue by allocating less space to it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simple Summary: Regenerative medicine using platelet-based blood products or adult stem cells offers the prospect of better clinical outcomes with many diseases. In veterinary medicine, most progress has been made with the development and therapeutic use of these regenerative therapeutics in horses, but the clinical need is given in dogs as well. Our aim was to transfer previous advances in the development of horse regenerative therapeutics, specifically the use of platelet lysate for feeding stem cell cultures, to the dog. Here, we describe the scalable production of canine platelet lysate, which could be used in regenerative biological therapies. We also evaluated the canine platelet lysate for its suitability in feeding canine stem cell cultures in comparison to equine platelet lysate used for equine stem cell cultures. Platelet lysate production from canine blood was successful, but the platelet lysate did not support stem cell culture in dogs in the same beneficial way observed with the equine platelet lysate and stem cells. In conclusion, canine platelet lysate can be produced in large scales as described here, but further research is needed to improve the cultivation of canine stem cells. Platelet lysate (PL) is an attractive platelet-based therapeutic tool and has shown promise as xeno-free replacement for fetal bovine serum (FBS) in human and equine mesenchymal stromal cell (MSC) culture. Here, we established a scalable buffy-coat-based protocol for canine PL (cPL) production (n = 12). The cPL was tested in canine adipose MSC (n = 5) culture compared to FBS. For further comparison, equine adipose MSC (n = 5) were cultured with analogous equine PL (ePL) or FBS. During canine blood processing, platelet and transforming growth factor-β1 concentrations increased (p < 0.05 and p < 0.001), while white blood cell concentrations decreased (p < 0.05). However, while equine MSC showed good results when cultured with 10% ePL, canine MSC cultured with 2.5% or 10% cPL changed their morphology and showed decreased metabolic activity (p < 0.05). Apoptosis and necrosis in canine MSC were increased with 2.5% cPL (p < 0.05). Surprisingly, passage 5 canine MSC showed less genetic aberrations after culture with 10% cPL than with FBS. Our data reveal that using analogous canine and equine biologicals does not entail the same results. The buffy-coat-based cPL was not adequate for canine MSC culture, but may still be useful for therapeutic applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]