Issue #11 – Taken Apart, One Way or Another

Spotlight

How parties prise voters away from their rivals

Negative campaigning is well studied: who attacks, when, and whether it pays. Less is known about the aim. Increasingly, the ammunition is people. Parties accuse rivals of failing pensioners, abandoning the working class, ignoring the young. Such group appeals reach voters through identity rather than policy, which makes them hard to answer for the party on the receiving end.

A paper in the European Journal of Political Research by Lena Maria Huber at the MZES, University of Mannheim, with Martin Haselmayer of Hochschule Campus Wien | University of Applied Sciences and University of Vienna, asks how parties choose these targets. The two collected around 212,000 Facebook and Twitter posts from eight UK parties between 2016 and 2024, isolated some 8,600 that attack a rival through a social group, and matched them to British Election Study data on how well voters think each party represents each group. A party's own standing with a group made no measurable difference. The rival's did. Parties seen as poor representatives of a group were attacked on it more than twice as often, a little over 10% of the time against around 4%. The gap widens when the attacker is the better trusted of the two: from about 6% when it trails clearly to about 13% when it leads.

The authors call this strategic alienation. The attack is less a bid for the group than an attempt to pry it loose from the competitor, aimed where that competitor's hold is already weak. The Conservatives drew most of the fire; Labour fired most often.

Huber and Haselmayer are careful about reach: one country, official party accounts only, and no test of whether the attacks actually move voters. That leaves the open question for campaigns elsewhere: for Austria, where the strongest party in the last election campaigns from opposition against a three-party coalition of the former centre, or for a US midterm with two sides. What happens to group loyalties when every party has learned to aim at the other's loosest seam?

→ Huber, Haselmayer, European Journal of Political Research, 2026

Radar Scans

Cells take apart their splicing machine in two steps

Clemens Plaschka 's group at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP), with Stefan L Ameres at the University of Vienna, shows in Nature how cells take apart one of their busiest tools. Before a gene becomes protein, its RNA copy is edited: the parts that carry no instructions are cut out. The cutter, the spliceosome, is built from more than a hundred proteins and five RNAs, and has to be dismantled after every cut. How that happens was unknown. The same clean-up method also removes cutters stuck on faulty RNA. Splicing errors run through many cancers and inherited diseases, and earlier work ties several of these clean-up enzymes to cancer, which makes this last step a possible new place to look for treatments.

→ Boreikaitė, Faraway, Vorländer et al., Nature, 2026

Physicists name a new field: AI magnonics

AI's appetite for electricity has become a policy problem. One proposed answer is hardware that computes with spin waves, ripples in a material's magnetic order that carry information without an electric current. That field, magnonics, is well over a decade old. In the Journal of Physics D, Franz Vilsmeier, Florian Bruckner, Claas Abert, Dieter Suess and Andrii V. Chumak at the University of Vienna argue it is now merging with AI from two sides: algorithms design magnonic devices backwards, from desired function to structure, and magnonic devices are built to run machine learning. Their name for the overlap is AI magnonics. A name is often how a field earns its own conferences, calls and students.

→ Vilsmeier, Bruckner, Abert et al., Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, 2026

Wealth gaps widen, and the data disagree on how much

Franziska Disslbacher at the WU (Vienna University of Economics and Business), with Salvatore Morelli and Matteo Targa, takes a first global view in Oxford Open Economics using the new GC Wealth Project data warehouse. Since the early 2000s, wealth inequality has risen in roughly three in five countries in the sample: the top 10% gained, while the bottom half and the middle 40% both lost ground. The steeper rises came in Latin America, North America, India and China; Europe looks steadier. The harder finding concerns measurement. Estimates shift with the data source, and with whether individuals or households are counted. National trends hold up. Cross-country rankings may deserve more caution than they usually get.

→ Disslbacher, Morelli, Targa, Oxford Open Economics, 2026

A constitution asked to govern everything may govern less

In the 1930s, constitutional theorists decried the "total state": a state drawn into every corner of social life, and weakened by it. Alexander Somek at the University of Vienna borrows the idea, for heuristic purposes, in the European Constitutional Law Review. A "total constitution", expected not only to restrain state power but to steer policy, risks the same fate and becomes prey to the forces of the day, all the more when courts turn to symbolic politics. His test case is the European Court of Human Rights' KlimaSeniorinnen ruling against Switzerland. Climate lawyers will want to reply.

→ Somek, European Constitutional Law Review, 2026

Funding Moves

FWF approvals, 28 September

Five new Austrian Science Fund FWF projects at Vienna institutions, approved on 28 September and awaiting their start: Silke Körber (University of Vienna, EUR 349,732, the women of early analytic philosophy), James Mckevitt (University of Vienna, EUR 349,732, magnetic reconnection in solar plasma), Fabian Niess (Medical University of Vienna, EUR 442,478, brain glucose metabolism in ME/CFS), Dino Mehic (Medical University of Vienna, EUR 449,631, platelet function in bleeding disorders of unknown cause) and Christian Nitsche (Medical University of Vienna, EUR 191,067, heart-valve repair in cardiac amyloidosis).

WWTF Insight

This fortnight's Crossref data brought forward two papers in Artificial Intelligence credited to ICT19-065 (REVEAL-AI), led by Stefan Szeider with Stefan Woltran TU Wien. The project looks for the hidden structure that makes hard computing problems manageable. Markus Hecher, a member of the project team, is on both. The first, with Woltran, Matthias König and Viktor Besin, deals with a method in which a problem is written as rules for a computer to solve. Before it can search, the program has to spell out every case, and that list can outgrow any machine. The paper offers a way to keep it in check. The second, with Johannes K. Fichte, reviews three years of an international competition between programs that count how many solutions a problem has, the arithmetic behind many probability calculations. Both did part of that work as postdocs in Vienna and now work at Université d'Artois. A 2019 grant, still credited by researchers who have since moved on.

Stray Signal

A dark room for roots, built from LEGO

Roots live in the dark. In the lab, they often grow behind clear walls, in the light, so that someone can watch them. Verena Ibl's group at the University of Vienna, with the Vienna BioCenter Core Facilities (VBCF) and colleagues at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, built them a dark room instead: around 830 secondhand black LEGO bricks, 3D-printed root boxes and an infrared camera on a Raspberry Pi. Roughly EUR 520, an hour to put together, and more than 90% less light at the roots. The difference shows. Of 2,158 proteins tracked in barley, 1,236 shifted when the roots were lit. Its image data went open this month, for anyone to use; the paper itself dates from 2023. Some instruments come out of a toy box.

In Austria, an estimated 70,000 to 80,000 people live with ME/CFS, more than with multiple sclerosis, yet research into the disease has long been underfunded. Since 2024, WWTF and the WE&ME Foundation have committed around EUR 3.1 m. to it. This week brought the largest single awards so far: two Consolidation Grants of close to EUR 1 m. each, to teams at the Medical University of Vienna led by Lukas Haider (ME-CFS-CC26-004) and Matthias Wielscher (ME-CFS-CC26-003). Patients had a say in the selection: researchers who themselves live with ME/CFS, from the international Science for ME forum, took part in the review. With a specialised care centre due from 2027, Vienna is building on its pioneering role in both research and care. It is being noticed abroad. One of the forum's administrators called the programme "probably the most impactful I have seen".

→ Research Data, BioImage Archive, 2026 · Original paper: Dermendjiev, Schnurer, Stewart et al., Frontiers in Plant Science, 2023