Pensamiento geográfico versus teoría de la comunicación. Hacia un modelo de análisis comunicativo del paisaje

The study of the communicative implications related to landscapes opens a wide range of possibilities concerning the treatment of the communication and landscape relationship. Issues such as the effects of the landscape on the processes of human communication (intrapersonal and interpersonal communication), the follow-up of the communicative processes by means of which the landscape becomes an object of trade (mass communication), the construction of individual and collective imaginaries arising from the citizenship and landscape exchange and, recently, the construction of territorial identities through the production of a brand image of a city or country (i. e., tourist promotion, city marketing and branding). All of them have important implications in the contemporary societies. For that reason, it appears almost essential to progress towards a communicative landscape model, a target which becomes possible if we interrelate geography and communication studies, two fields apparently unrelated one another concerning their origins and practice, although they are very close if we look at the recent evolution of their paradigms and the approach to certain concepts, such as space and landscape.

Revisión crono-tipológica de un grupo de cerámicas africanas de cocina: la forma Ostia I, 272 - Atlante CVII, 11-12

El hallazgo de diversos ejemplares completos en la villa romana de Els Antigons (Reus, Tarragona) de las formas Ostia I, 272 y Atlante CVII, 11-12 de la cerámica africana de cocina nos permite plantearnos la unificación tipológica de las mismas, así como la revisión de su cronología (segunda mitad del siglo II a mediados del III dC) y su relación con la forma Raqqada 1973, LIII, D1. Asimismo, se documenta su difusión en la costa mediterránea de la Hispania Citerior.

Comunicar la ciudad desde el paisaje: hacia una teoría del landscape branding

The need to decode landscape meanings, the society- landscape interaction (intra- and inter-personal communication) and, more recently, the uses of landscape as a territorial sight linked to advertising communication, citymarketing or place branding (mass communication) highlights the study of landscape persuasion, which includes clear emotional, symbolic and, therefore, communicative aspects. The landscape, as a territory image or face, gathers the essence of the implicit message in the space, thus working as a great metaphor for city communication. Regarding the foregoing, specific communication research with intangible landscapes —together with the recent emergence of emotional geographies— suggests a new territorial message theory based on the union of geographical, landscape, emotional and communicational variables. Landscape has historically been studied by geographers, architects, historians or sociologists, among others researchers, but it has not been analysed from communicational viewpoints. In this sense, the proliferation of analyses highlighting the role played by the territory as a communication mediator in the interaction process between society and its spaces (cognition and/or perception) is also remarkable. Current sales of territorial identities lead to increases in the production of territory brands, which have gathered a noticeable relevance within the last years.

A burst of segmental duplications in the genome of the African great ape ancestor

It is generally accepted that the extent of phenotypic change between human and great apes is dissonant with the rate of molecular change. Between these two groups, proteins are virtually identical, cytogenetically there are few rearrangements that distinguish ape-human chromosomes, and rates of single-base-pair change and retrotransposon activity have slowed particularly within hominid lineages when compared to rodents or monkeys. Studies of gene family evolution indicate that gene loss and gain are enriched within the primate lineage. Here, we perform a systematic analysis of duplication content of four primate genomes (macaque, orang-utan, chimpanzee and human) in an effort to understand the pattern and rates of genomic duplication during hominid evolution. We find that the ancestral branch leading to human and African great apes shows the most significant increase in duplication activity both in terms of base pairs and in terms of events. This duplication acceleration within the ancestral species is significant when compared to lineage-specific rate estimates even after accounting for copy-number polymorphism and homoplasy. We discover striking examples of recurrent and independent gene-containing duplications within the gorilla and chimpanzee that are absent in the human lineage. Our results suggest that the evolutionary properties of copy-number mutation differ significantly from other forms of genetic mutation and, in contrast to the hominid slowdown of single-base-pair mutations, there has been a genomic burst of duplication activity at this period during human evolution.