Georgiana Murariu

In 2022, the smartphone, first introduced by IBM, will celebrate its 30th birthday. Most of us now use a smartphone every day—whether we like it or not. Previously associated with young people, these technologies have become ubiquitous around the world and among all age groups. But what exactly is a smartphone, and what are these devices doing to people’s connections with one another, especially across generations?

With the American Diabetes Association congress happening last week, there has been lots of discussion online among healthcare professionals about diabetes, including debates around diet improvements and their potential to lower risk, cardiovascular risk factors and links to conditions such as depression. Participants in the congress included patients and healthcare professionals, and discussion around the event spread worldwide via Twitter using the hashtags #2014ADA and #ADA2014.

It’s hard to write about Moldova without immediately resorting to “east-meets-west” type clichés, because to a foreigner, the immediate visual reality is that of a porous grey infrastructure adorned with symbols of what it might have meant to be comfortably capitalist in the 1990s. Europe’s least visited republic and poorest country, Moldova sits (un)comfortably between EU member and older sibling Romania and tense, socially fragmented Ukraine.