Social Media Responses to the Pandemic: What Makes a Coronavirus Meme Creative

The current pandemic and the measures taken to address it, on a global scale, are unprecedented. Times of crisis call for creative solutions, and these are not reduced to the work of scientists or politicians. In everyday life, both in online and offline spaces, people use their creativity to make sense of the current situation, to cope with it, and to learn its lessons. Social media is a privileged space for mundane and participative creativity through the production and sharing of coronavirus Internet memes. In this article, we examine the creativity of such memes from a dedicated Reddit community. We ask, in particular, what makes a coronavirus meme creative and what this creativity tells us about the pandemic and popular understandings of it. To answer these questions, we use a triangulation of quantitative and qualitative methods by having 480 memes coded by three social media users for surprise, meaningfulness, elaboration, humor, and creativity and qualitatively analyzing those memes that score highly on each dimension. An interesting finding concerns the importance of elaboration and humor for the evaluation of creativity in the case of memes, above the more traditional criteria of surprise (proxy for novelty) and meaningfulness (proxy for appropriateness), perhaps a feature unique for Internet spaces. The article ends with reflections on what these findings tell us about creativity on social media more generally and the creative processes involved in the generation and reception of coronavirus memes in particular.publishedVersio

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New Frontiers in Creativity, Learning, and Technology Research

This article offers a brief introduction to the special issue ‘New frontiers in creativity, learning, and technology research’ by situating the topic and explaining the events and previous publications that led to this new edition. It then gives an overview of the 12 papers included in the present collection and groups them under four main themes: a) conceptual overviews and ongoing research; b) teaching online in times of COVID-19; c) online platforms and virtual environments; and d) digital tools for creativity. It ends with final reflections about the value of exploring new frontiers in the emerging, interdisciplinary field of creativity, learning and technology studies.publishedVersio

The COSPIX mission: focusing on the energetic and obscured Universe

Tracing the formation and evolution of all supermassive black holes, including the obscured ones, understanding how black holes influence their surroundings and how matter behaves under extreme conditions, are recognized as key science objectives to be addressed by the next generation of instruments. These are the main goals of the COSPIX proposal, made to ESA in December 2010 in the context of its call for selection of the M3 mission. In addition, COSPIX, will also provide key measurements on the non thermal Universe, particularly in relation to the question of the acceleration of particles, as well as on many other fundamental questions as for example the energetic particle content of clusters of galaxies. COSPIX is proposed as an observatory operating from 0.3 to more than 100 keV. The payload features a single long focal length focusing telescope offering an effective area close to ten times larger than any scheduled focusing mission at 30 keV, an angular resolution better than 20 arcseconds in hard X-rays, and polarimetric capabilities within the same focal plane instrumentation. In this paper, we describe the science objectives of the mission, its baseline design, and its performances, as proposed to ESA.Comment: 7 pages, accepted for publication in Proceedings of Science, for the 25th Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics (eds. F. Rieger & C. van Eldik), PoS(Texas 2010)25

Flavonol-induced changes in PIN2 polarity and auxin transport in the Arabidopsis thaliana rol1-2 mutant require phosphatase activity

The phytohormone auxin is a major determinant and regulatory component important for plant development. Auxin transport between cells is mediated by a complex system of transporters such as AUX1/LAX, PIN, and ABCB proteins, and their localization and activity is thought to be influenced by phosphatases and kinases. Flavonols have been shown to alter auxin transport activity and changes in flavonol accumulation in the Arabidopsis thaliana rol1-2 mutant cause defects in auxin transport and seedling development. A new mutation in ROOTS CURL IN NPA 1 (RCN1), encoding a regulatory subunit of the phosphatase PP2A, was found to suppress the growth defects of rol1-2 without changing the flavonol content. rol1-2 rcn1-3 double mutants show wild type-like auxin transport activity while levels of free auxin are not affected by rcn1-3. In the rol1-2 mutant, PIN2 shows a flavonol-induced basal-to-apical shift in polar localization which is reversed in the rol1-2 rcn1-3 to basal localization. In vivo analysis of PINOID action, a kinase known to influence PIN protein localization in a PP2A-antagonistic manner, revealed a negative impact of flavonols on PINOID activity. Together, these data suggest that flavonols affect auxin transport by modifying the antagonistic kinase/phosphatase equilibrium

The ASTRO-H X-ray Observatory

The joint JAXA/NASA ASTRO-H mission is the sixth in a series of highly successful X-ray missions initiated by the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS). ASTRO-H will investigate the physics of the high-energy universe via a suite of four instruments, covering a very wide energy range, from 0.3 keV to 600 keV. These instruments include a high-resolution, high-throughput spectrometer sensitive over 0.3-2 keV with high spectral resolution of Delta E < 7 eV, enabled by a micro-calorimeter array located in the focal plane of thin-foil X-ray optics; hard X-ray imaging spectrometers covering 5-80 keV, located in the focal plane of multilayer-coated, focusing hard X-ray mirrors; a wide-field imaging spectrometer sensitive over 0.4-12 keV, with an X-ray CCD camera in the focal plane of a soft X-ray telescope; and a non-focusing Compton-camera type soft gamma-ray detector, sensitive in the 40-600 keV band. The simultaneous broad bandpass, coupled with high spectral resolution, will enable the pursuit of a wide variety of important science themes.Comment: 22 pages, 17 figures, Proceedings of the SPIE Astronomical Instrumentation "Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2012: Ultraviolet to Gamma Ray