It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Wednesday, March 06, 2024
Infotainment is coming for your news, warns Concordia Ph.D. student Robert Marinov
Personal foibles and horse races competed with substantive coverage and discourse during the 2019 federal election, according to a new analysis of Canadian newspaper coverage
There are plenty of reasons to worry about the quality of contemporary Canadian journalism, beyond shrinking newsrooms and attention spans.
Once considered a vital pillar of a healthy democracy, the country’s biggest newspapers have been embracing the type of content critics refer to as “infotainment,” which uses entertainment-style methods to communicate politically relevant information.
In a new paper published in the Canadian Journal of Political Science, PhD candidate Robert Marinov examines, measures and evaluates the scope and nature of infotainment in Canada’s largest newspapers. Using the 2019 federal election as a case study, Marinov analyzed news stories from the Globe and Mail, TorontoStar, the National Post, MontrealGazette, Calgary Herald and the VancouverSun. Given the high volume of duplicated articles between the latter four Postmedia newspapers, they were grouped together for the purposes of analysis.
Marinov collected 969 distinct hard news items over the campaign’s 41 days. Using a mixed-methods mode of discourse analysis, he assigned them a score of one to five, one being predominantly informative and five being predominantly entertaining.
He found that 51 per cent — more than half — of all hard news articles showed clear evidence of substantial infotainment traits (rating three to five), and 42 per cent demonstrated strong to very strong infotainment characteristics (four or five).
On the other end, almost 49 per cent of the articles in the dataset showed no (rating one on five) or few (two on five) entertainment characteristics.
Articles with significant infotainment characteristics (four to five rating) comprised 52 per cent of Postmedia hard news items. That number drops to 39 per cent for the TorontoStar and 35 per cent for the Globe and Mail.
“There is a fair amount of research that shows more conservative or right-wing political narratives tend to engage in more emotional discourses compared to more left-wing discourses, which tend to be more rationalist,” Marinov says. “We did hypothesize that these ideological differences might contribute to some of the results we found in Postmedia, which is typically more right-leaning than the Globe and Mail or TorontoStar. But it is hard to quantify by how much or to confirm this without further research.”
Still ‘a strong amount’ of analytical and investigative coverage
Marinov synthesized previous literature on infotainment to create a comprehensive framework that could stand up to robust investigation. Three categories emerged.
The first was personalization. This entails a focus on politicians and their personal characteristics, their private lives, their appearances, their manners of speaking, their behaviour and actions during an election campaign.
The second is sensationalization. This focuses on gaffes, scandals, the sensational framing of topics and emotionally driven narratives.
Both combine to serve the third category, decontextualization, where the focus is on speculation and strategic game-framing — who is ahead in the latest poll, who scored points on the campaign trail, who performed a good trick or stunt — without any focus on actual policy options.
Despite the large volume of infotainment found in mainstream Canadian newspapers’ political coverage, Marinov says he is still somewhat relieved that it is not any higher.
“It is promising to see that there is still quite a strong amount of coverage that adopts an analytical or investigative tone, that presents more concrete, substantive information about policy options and debates,” he says. “But the numbers also show that the infotainment approach has a lot of purchase in Canadian newspaper coverage. This can have important impacts on how voters are being informed during an election.”
Paul Saurette of the University of Ottawa co-authored the study.
Infotaining Canadian Politics? Measuring Infotainment in English-Language Newspaper Coverage of the 2019 Canadian Federal Election
Photosynthetic secrets come to light
JOHN INNES CENTRE
IMAGE:
SEEING THE POLYMERASE MOLECULE THAT TRANSCRIBES PHOTOSYNTHETIC GENES IN THE PLANT CHLOROPLAST. IMAGES OF INDIVIDUAL MOLECULES COLLECTED WITH AN ELECTRON MICROSCOPE WERE SORTED AND ALIGNED TO REVEAL DETAILS OF THE STRUCTURAL ARCHITECTURE OF THE PROTEIN COMPLEX.
Secrets of photosynthesis have been discovered at atomic level, shedding important new light on this plant super-power that greened the earth more than a billion years ago.
John Innes Centre researchers used an advanced microscopy method called cryo-EM to explore how the photosynthetic proteins are made.
The study, published in Cell, presents a model and resources to stimulate further fundamental discoveries in this field and assist longer term goals of developing more resilient crops.
Dr Michael Webster, group leader and co-author of the paper said: “Transcription of chloroplast genes is a fundamental step in making the photosynthetic proteins that provide plants with the energy they need to grow. We hope that by understanding this process better - at the detailed molecular level - we will equip researchers looking to develop plants with more robust photosynthetic activity.”
“The most important outcome of this work is the creation of a useful resource. Researchers can download our atomic model of the chloroplast polymerase and use it to produce their own hypotheses of how it might function and experimental strategies that would test them.”
Photosynthesis takes place inside chloroplasts, small compartments within plant cells that contain their own genome, reflecting their past as free-living photosynthetic bacteria before they were engulfed and co-opted by plants.
The Webster group at the John Innes Centre investigates how plants make photosynthetic proteins, the molecular machines that make this elegant chemical reaction happen, converting atmospheric carbon dioxide and water into simple sugars and producing oxygen as a byproduct.
The first stage in protein production is transcription, where a gene is read to produce a ‘messenger RNA’. This transcription process is done by an enzyme called RNA polymerase.
It was discovered 50 years ago that chloroplasts contain their own unique RNA polymerase. Since then, scientists have been surprised how complex this enzyme is. It has more subunits than its ancestor, the bacterial RNA polymerase, and is even bigger than human RNA polymerases.
The Webster group wanted to understand why chloroplasts have such a sophisticated RNA polymerase. To do this they needed to visualise the structural architecture of the chloroplast RNA polymerase.
The research team used a method called cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) to image samples of chloroplast RNA polymerase purified from white mustard plants.
By processing these images, they were able to build a model that contains the positions of more than 50,000 atoms in the molecular complex.
The RNA polymerase complex comprises 21 subunits encoded in the two genomes, nuclear and chloroplast. Close analysis of this structure as it performs transcription allowed the researchers to start explaining these components' functions.
The model allowed them to identify a protein that interacts with the DNA as it is being transcribed and guides it to the enzyme's active site.
Another component can interact with the mRNA that is being produced that likely protects it from proteins that would degrade it before it is translated into protein.
Dr Webster said: “We know that each component of the chloroplast RNA polymerase has a vital role because plants that lack any one of them cannot make photosynthetic proteins and consequently cannot turn green. We are studying the atomic models carefully to pinpoint what the role is for each of the 21 components of the assembly.”
Joint first author Dr Ángel Vergara-Cruces said: “Now that we have a structural model the next step is to confirm the role of the chloroplast transcription proteins. By revealing mechanisms of chloroplast transcription, our study offers insight into its role in plant growth and adaptation and response to environmental conditions.”
Joint first author Dr Ishika Pramanick said: “There were many surprising moments in this remarkable work journey, starting with the very challenging protein purification to taking stunning cryo-EM images of this huge complex protein to finally seeing our work in a printed version.”
Dr Webster concluded: “Heat, drought, and salinity limit a plants’ ability to perform photosynthesis. Plants that can produce photosynthetic proteins reliably in the face of environmental stress may control chloroplast transcription differently. We look forward to seeing our work used in the important effort to develop more robust crops.”
Structure of the plant plastid-encoded RNA polymerase appears inCell.
When certain species of wild birds and primates discover new ways of finding food in the wild, it can serve to measure their flexibility and intelligence.
In the largest experimental study ever conducted on this topic, a team of researchers from Rockefeller University headed by postdoctoral fellow Jean-Nicolas Audet have shown, in collaboration with McGill’s Louis Lefebvre, that foraging problems requiring overcoming obstacles, such as removing the lid off a container of food, are the only predictors of brain size and innovative behaviour in the wild.
They also studied two other cognitive traits but did not find them to be associated with innovation rate in the wild.
The results of the study – which included 203 individual animals from 15 species, 13 of which were wild-caught – integrate observational studies of animal intelligence in the wild and experimental studies in captivity.
“Our results provide an effective way to study innovations in the lab using appropriate behavioral tasks in controlled conditions, allowing future investigations on their precise neurobiological, psychological, and ecological underpinnings,” said Audet. “We now have a more valid model to study the evolution of intelligence.”
When certain species of wild birds and primates discover new ways of finding food in the wild, it can serve to measure their flexibility and intelligence.
In the largest experimental study ever conducted on this topic, a team of researchers from Rockefeller University headed by postdoctoral fellow Jean-Nicolas Audet have shown, in collaboration with McGill’s Louis Lefebvre, that foraging problems requiring overcoming obstacles, such as removing the lid off a container of food, are the only predictors of brain size and innovative behaviour in the wild.
They also studied two other cognitive traits but did not find them to be associated with innovation rate in the wild.
The results of the study – which included 203 individual animals from 15 species, 13 of which were wild-caught – integrate observational studies of animal intelligence in the wild and experimental studies in captivity.
“Our results provide an effective way to study innovations in the lab using appropriate behavioral tasks in controlled conditions, allowing future investigations on their precise neurobiological, psychological, and ecological underpinnings,” said Audet. “We now have a more valid model to study the evolution of intelligence.”
In Colorado, people flock to the Rocky Mountains when the summer heat gets unbearable. Animals seek shelter too when temperatures become extreme, and forests serve as critical sanctuaries for small tree-dwelling animals like lizards.
In a new study published March 5 in the journal Nature Climate Change, scientists from the University of Colorado Boulder and Tel Aviv University in Israel revealed that deforestation combined with climate change could negatively impact 84% of North America’s lizards by the end of the century. Nearly one in five could face population decline.
Unlike mammals that can maintain their body temperatures in a variety of ways—sweating when it gets too hot and relying on warm fur when it gets too cold—cold-blooded animals like lizards have limited strategies to thermoregulate. Tree-climbing lizards move around tree trunks to bask in the sun for warmth. When the ground gets too hot, they climb higher or move into the shade.
“What's really interesting about lizards is that they just need to be able to move a short distance around the tree trunk to get to a very different climate and habitat environment,” said Keith Musselman, an assistant professor in the Department of Geography and CU Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. “These microhabitats are particularly important when we think about how we modify our natural environment and make conservation decisions.”
Using computer simulations, the team showed that global warming can actually benefit lizards living in colder regions or at higher latitudes in North America. Warmer weather increases the animals’ activity time, meaning they have more time to look for food or mates during the day. However, deforestation would largely reverse these positive effects by reducing opportunities for shade in hotter climates that help them cool down.
The team simulated lizard models for different climate regions across North America. They found that tree loss could decrease lizards’ activity time by an average of 34% by the end of the century. Without trees, the animals would have to hide under rocks or in caves to avoid overheating. The impact would be especially prominent for species that already live in warmer regions, where future summers will become too warm for activity on the ground.
The team estimated that deforestation would accelerate population declines for 18% of lizards in North America.
“Our work provides new insights into the mechanisms by which deforestation may cause population declines in the face of climate change,” said Ofir Levy, a zoologist and Musselman’s collaborator at Tel Aviv University. “The decline in lizards can lead to a cascading effect as they are an important part of almost every ecological system.”
Despite international pledges to halt deforestation, tree clearing continues to happen globally. From 2001 to 2022, about 459 million hectares, or 12%, of global tree cover disappeared.
“Deforestation is a worldwide problem, and our conclusions can help decision-makers on other continents in designing conservation and habitat restoration programs that consider climate change,” said Omer Zlotnick, the paper’s first author and a Ph.D. student at Tel Aviv University.
Lizard populations are already at risk because of climate change. In one study, scientists estimated that 54% of lizard populations in Mexico would go extinct by 2080 because of their inability to adapt to the rapidly warming planet.
Deforestation would further exacerbate the threat by taking away these animals’ refuges.
“Here in the Rocky Mountains, elevation provides an escape for animals that can travel longer distances, including us humans. On those summer days when it hits 100 degrees, many of us will go into the mountains. But small animals like lizards can’t travel far. They heavily depend on the refuge provided by the local landscape, including tree trunks,” said Musselman. “The study highlighted the importance of understanding which elements in the environment can serve as refuges for other organisms on this planet.”
Deforestation poses deleterious effects to tree-climbing species under climate change
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
5-Mar-2024
Call for articles: Trends in Peace and Sustainability
HIROSHIMA UNIVERSITY
The Network for Education and Research on Peace and Sustainability (NERPS) at Hiroshima University is inviting submissions for Trends in Peace and Sustainability (TRENDS), an innovative academic platform dedicated to exploring the complex interplay between peace and sustainability. TRENDS aims to become a forum for scholars, professionals, and advocates to share their research, insights, and viewpoints on the pursuit of peace amid sustainability challenges. It aims to promote interdisciplinary engagement, stimulating conversation and catalyzing efforts towards a sustainable and peaceful future.
Contributors are invited to submit short articles, analyses, and commentary that explore the peace and sustainability nexus. More details are available through the TRENDS submission portal: https://bit.ly/nerpstrends. Submissions will undergo a thorough review and editorial process. The editorial team consists of Dahlia Simangan, John Lee Candelaria, and Joshua Fisher.
Check out the submission guidelines here. Download TRENDS' call for submissions flyer here.
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About Hiroshima University
Since its foundation in 1949, Hiroshima University has striven to become one of the most prominent and comprehensive universities in Japan for the promotion and development of scholarship and education. Consisting of 12 schools for undergraduate level and 4 graduate schools, ranging from natural sciences to humanities and social sciences, the university has grown into one of the most distinguished comprehensive research universities in Japan. English website: https://www.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/en
Beyond the ink: Painting with physics
Scientifically-proven suggestions for crafting a masterpiece.
Falling from the tip of a brush suspended in mid-air, an ink droplet touches a painted surface and blossoms into a masterpiece of ever-changing beauty. It weaves a tapestry of intricate, evolving patterns. Some of them resemble branching snowflakes, thunderbolts or neurons, whispering the unique expression of the artist's vision.
Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) researchers set out to analyse the physical principles of this fascinating technique, known as dendritic painting. They took inspiration from the artwork of Japanese media artist, Akiko Nakayama. During her live painting performances, she applies colourful droplets of acrylic ink mixed with alcohol atop a flat surface coated with a layer of acrylic paint. Beautiful fractals – tree-like geometrical shapes that repeat at different scales and are often found in nature – appear before the eyes of the audience. This is a captivating art form driven by creativity, but also by the physics of fluid dynamics.
“I have a deep admiration for scientists, such as Ukichiro Nakaya and Torahiko Terada, who made remarkable contributions to both science and art. I was very happy to be contacted by OIST physicist Chan San To. I am envious of his ability ‘to dialogue’ with the dendritic patterns, observing how they change shape in response to different approaches. Hearing this secret conversation was delightful,” explains Nakayama.
“Painters have often employed fluid mechanics to craft unique compositions. We have seen it with David Alfaro Siqueiros, Jackson Pollock, and Naoko Tosa, just to name a few. In our laboratory, we reproduce and study artistic techniques, to understand how the characteristics of the fluids influence the final outcome,” says OIST Professor Eliot Fried of OIST’s Mechanics and Materials Unit, who likes looking at dendritic paintings from artistic and scientific angles.
In dendritic painting, the droplets made of ink and alcohol experience various forces. One of them is surface tension – the force that makes rain droplets spherical in shape, and allows leaves to float on the surface of a pond. In particular, as alcohol evaporates faster than water, it alters the surface tension of the droplet. Fluid molecules tend to be pulled towards the droplet rim, which has higher surface tension compared to its centre. This is called the Marangoni effect and is the same phenomenon responsible for the formation of wine tears – the droplets or streaks of wine that form on the inside of a wine glass after swirling or tilting.
Secondly, the underlying paint layer also plays an important part in this artistic technique. Dr. Chan tested various types of liquids. For fractals to emerge, the liquid must be a fluid that decreases in viscosity under shear strain, meaning it has to behave somewhat like ketchup. It's common knowledge that it's hard to get ketchup out of the bottle unless you shake it. This happens because ketchup's viscosity changes depending on shear strain. When you shake the bottle, the ketchup becomes less viscous, making it easier to pour it onto your dish. How is this applied to dendritic painting?
“In dendritic painting, the expanding ink droplet shears the underlying acrylic paint layer. It is not as strong as the shaking of a ketchup bottle, but it is still a form of shear strain. As with ketchup, the more stress there is, the easier it is for the ink droplets to flow,” explains Dr. Chan.
“We also showed that the physics behind this dendritic painting technique is similar to how liquid travels in a porous medium, such as soil. If you were to look at the mix of acrylic paint under the microscope, you would see a network of microscopic structures made of polymer molecules and pigments. The ink droplet tends to find its way through this underlying network, travelling through paths of least resistance, that leads to the dendritic pattern,” adds Prof. Fried.
Each dendritic print is one-of-a-kind, but there are at least two key aspects that artists can take into consideration to control the outcome of dendritic painting. The first and most important factor is the thickness of the paint layer spread on the surface. Dr. Chan observed that well-refined fractals appear with paint layer thinner than a half millimetre.
The second factor to experiment with is the concentration of diluting medium and paint in this paint layer. Dr. Chan obtained the most detailed fractals using three parts diluting medium and one part paint, or two parts diluting medium and one part paint. If the concentration of paint is higher, the droplet cannot spread well. Conversely, if the concentration of paint is lower, fuzzy edges will form.
This is not the first science-meets-art project that members of the Mechanics and Materials Unit have embarked on. For example, they designed and installed a mobile sculpture on the OIST campus. The sculpture exemplifies a family of mechanical devices, called Möbius kaleidocycles, invented in the Unit, which may offer guidelines for designing chemical compounds with novel electronic properties.
Currently, Dr. Chan is also developing novel methods of analysing how the complexity of a sketch or painting evolves during its creation. He and Prof. Fried are optimistic that these methods might be applied to uncover hidden structures in experimentally captured or numerically generated images of flowing fluids.
“Why should we confine science to just technological progress?” wonders Dr. Chan. “I like exploring its potential to drive artistic innovation as well. I do digital art, but I really admire traditional artists. I sincerely invite them to experiment with various materials and reach out to us if they're interested in collaborating and exploring the physics hidden within their artwork.”
Instructions to create dendritic painting at home
Everybody can have fun creating dendritic paintings. The materials needed include a non-absorbent surface (glass, synthetic paper, ceramics, etc.), a brush, a hairbrush, rubbing alcohol (iso-propyl alcohol), acrylic ink, acrylic paint and pouring medium.
Dilute one part of acrylic paint to two or three parts of pouring medium, or test other ratios to see how the result changes
Apply this to the non-absorbent surface uniformly using a hairbrush. OIST physicists have found out that the thickness of the paint affects the result. For the best fractals, a layer of paint thinner than half millimetre is recommended.
Mix rubbing alcohol with acrylic ink. The density of the ink may differ for different brands: have a try mixing alcohol and ink in different ratios
When the white paint is still wet (hasn’t dried yet), apply a droplet of the ink with alcohol mix using a brush or another tool, such as a bamboo stick or a toothpick.
Enjoy your masterpiece as it develops before your eyes.
Snapshots of the ink droplets containing 50 vol% alcohol (isopropanol) as they spread on a surface coated with 400 μm-thick acrylic paint with different paint concentrations (11%, 20% and 33%), captured over approximately 40 seconds. The images on the rightmost column show the zoomed-in views of the droplet edges. Higher paint concentration leads to increasingly refined and fractal-like droplet edges.
Images courtesy of Akiko Nakayama.
Fractal-like branches created with dendritic painting.
Researchers built a model that can predict with 73.5% accuracy when a person will experience aesthetic chills: shivers, goosebumps, or a feeling of cold down the neck or spine elicited by aesthetic stimuli, such as beautiful music or an inspirational speech. Felix Schoeller and colleagues surveyed 2,937 people from Southern California, through an online platform, gathering data on their personalities, demographic backgrounds, and emotional state. The authors then exposed survey respondents to 40 emotion-evoking audiovisual clips sourced from social media, selected because commenters had reported experiencing aesthetic chills while watching and listening. The clips included choral performances, a commencement speech by a minister, readings of poems by Charles Bukowski and Mary Oliver, pop songs by Radiohead and Sigur Rós, and scenes from the films Hunger Games and Everything Everywhere All At Once, along with many others. The authors then built a model that identified demographic, psychological, and contextual factors that would predict whether a given person would experience aesthetic chills when watching or listening to a clip. People who reported being alert and in a good mood were more likely to feel chills than those who were tired or in a bad mood. Other factors that correlated with high probabilities of experiencing chills were being 35–44 years old, being male, being a Democrat, and having a graduate degree. Psychological characteristics such as extraversion and conscientiousness were also predictive of experiencing chills, as were high scores on specialized psychological scales that measure a person’s propensity to be emotionally moved (the Kama Muta Frequency Scale) and absorbed in the moment (the Modified Tellegen Absorption Scale). According to the authors, additional research into how emotional experiences are shaped by psychological, demographic, and cultural variables could eventually inform the use of aesthetic chills as a non-pharmaceutical treatment for affective disorders such as depression.
Examples of goosebump-inducing stimuli are available at the project website: http://chillsdb.com.
JOURNAL
PNAS Nexus
ARTICLE TITLE
Predicting individual differences in peak emotional response
Text-to-image generative AI systems like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALL-E can produce images based on text prompts that, had they been produced by humans, would plausibly be judged as “creative.” Some artists have argued that these programs are a threat to human creativity. If AI comes to be relied on to produce most new visual works, drawing on what has been done before, creative progress could stagnate. Eric Zhou and Dokyun “DK” Lee investigated the impact of text-to-image AI tools on human creativity, seeking to understand if these tools would make the human artists less or more creative. The authors examined art made with and without AI on an online art-sharing platform. Artists who adopted AI showed increased productivity, compared to their pre-AI pace, and adopters tended to see an increase in favorable responses to their work on the platform after adopting AI. While artists who used AI showed decreasing average novelty over time as compared to controls, both in terms of the content of their images as well as pixel-level stylistic elements, peak content novelty among AI adopters is marginally increasing over time, suggesting an expanding creative space but with inefficiencies. Still, artists of all levels of creative ability are evaluated more favorably after adopting AI if they successfully explore new concepts but are generally penalized for using AI for exploring novel visual styles. According to the authors, this result hints at the potential complementarity between human ideation and filtering abilities as the core expressions of creativity in a text-to-image workflow, thus giving rise to a phenomenon they term as “generative synesthesia” – the harmony of human idea exploration and AI visual exploitation to discover new creative workflows.
JOURNAL
PNAS Nexus
ARTICLE TITLE
Generative artificial intelligence, human creativity, and art
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
5-Mar-2024
Unveiling the future: A comprehensive dive into Web3's revolutionary ecosystem
Web3, symbolizing the internet's next evolution, embodies a decentralized and user-empowered framework built upon blockchain technology. Researchers has offered an extensive overview of Web3 technology, encompassing its infrastructure, applications, and popularity. This exploration into the decentralized web underscores significant insights into the categorization of Web3 projects and their reception in the digital domain.
Web3 represents the next evolutionary phase of the internet, emphasizing decentralization and user empowerment. It is built on blockchain technology, aiming to transform the digital landscape by offering enhanced data ownership, privacy, and security. This new era of the web introduces a paradigm shift towards a democratized internet, where users have more control over their data and interactions. Through its innovative infrastructure, Web3 seeks to establish a more open, transparent, and accessible internet, challenging traditional centralized models and potentially reshaping the digital economy and social interactions.
In a recent study (doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bcra.2023.100173) published in Blockchain: Research and Applications on 1 March 2024, researchers have delved into the decentralized internet, providing crucial insights into how Web3 projects are categorized and received within the digital realm, highlighting the significant advancements and user engagement in this burgeoning technological space.
In this pivotal study, researchers meticulously analyzed the landscape of Web3 technology, breaking new ground by categorizing it into infrastructure and application layers. The infrastructure component lays the foundational framework, consisting of blockchain networks and protocols that enable decentralized operations. On the application side, the study delves into diverse domains such as Decentralized Finance (DeFi), Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), and the Metaverse, illustrating how these innovations are reshaping online interactions and transactions. By examining 200 leading Web3 projects, the study not only maps out the existing ecosystem but also evaluates the popularity and adoption trends of these technologies. This in-depth analysis reveals the emerging patterns and growth trajectories within the Web3 space, providing valuable insights into its potential to disrupt traditional internet paradigms and foster a new era of digital interaction that prioritizes user sovereignty and decentralized governance.
"The findings from our study illuminate the vast potential and current standing of Web3 technology. By dissecting the infrastructure and applications that form the backbone of Web3, we can better understand its trajectory and the areas ripe for innovation," stated Renke Huang, lead author of the study.
Web3's decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and Metaverse applications not only redefine user interaction within the digital space but also herald new business models and opportunities for innovation.
This work is partially supported by fundings from the National Key R&D Program of China (2022YFB2702203), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61972359).
Blockchain: Research and Applications is an international, peer reviewed journal for researchers, engineers, and practitioners to present the latest advances and innovations in blockchain research. The journal publishes theoretical and applied papers in established and emerging areas of blockchain research to shape the future of blockchain technology.
