A Special Place for Blog Lovers with a Touch of Science!

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'Media is this layer that exists everywhere in our lives', said Dr Tanya Lokot as she explained the term 'mediatized' to Horizon Magazine. It gives her the title of the seven-country research project she leads from the School of Communications, Dublin City University (DCU).

'It's not just something we do for an hour or two.' We are drenched in media. In our personal, work, social and family lives, media has a meaningful role to play.

MEDIATIZED EU is examining the role of media in society and how it influences people's perceptions of the EU and the European project. It does so by analysing media discourses in the EU Member States of Ireland, Belgium, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Spain, and non-member Georgia.

Credit: crossref.org

Having joined the Crossref team merely a week previously, the mid-year community update on June 14th was a fantastic opportunity to learn about the Research Nexus vision. We explored its building blocks and practical implementation steps within our reach, and within our imagination of the future.

Read on (or watch the recording) for a whistlestop tour of everything – from what on Earth is Research Nexus, through to how it's taking shape at Crossref, to how you are involved, and finally – to what concerns the community surrounding the vision and how we're going to address that.

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Humans all share a common African ancestry, making African history everyone's history. Yet little is known about the genetic evolution of people living on the continent in the distant past.

Thanks to advances in genome sequencing technology, scientists are now able to compare the DNA of people alive today with DNA extracted from very old skeletons, giving us a unique snapshot of life in Africa from many thousands of years ago.

In the field of human genetics, the story of Mother Eve is a familiar one. It describes how all living humans descend from one woman who lived in Africa 200 000 to 300 000 years ago.

Credit: Photo by Jean-Louis SWINERS/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

Jean-Luc Godard

Jean-Luc Godard ( 3 December 1930 – 13 September 2022) was a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter, and film critic. He rose to prominence as a pioneer of the 1960s French New Wave film movement,[2] and was arguably the most influential French filmmaker of the post-war era.[3] According to AllMovie, his work "revolutionized the motion picture form" through its experimentation with narrative, continuity, sound, and camerawork. (via Wikipedia)

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Edvard Munch (12 December 1863 – 23 January 1944) is a Norwegian painter who is considered the father of expressionism and one of the most influential figures in the world of modern art. His childhood was darkened by illness, death, and the constant fear of inheriting a mental condition that ran in the family. However, he managed to maintain a relative mental composure. 

He studied Royal School of Art and Design in Kristiania (today's Oslo), where he became part of the bohemia and met the Norwegian nihilist writer Hans Jæger. The latter inspired Munch to begin to paint his inner emotional and psychological states, which was seminal for the development of his style.