Beginner Question: Featured Blog Postings

Hi community, I am a WordPress newbie. I have two questions: I had the idea of communicating my research findings in a vivid way to interested people. Here is my website (it is still not available for search engines and it needs language tuning etc...): LINK. I love the idea with the featured content and the slider. As you can see, I use several pages to talk about my research, teaching etc, and I have a blog for frequent updates. I would like to use the large slider on the main page to promote some pages (e.g., my research areas). Additionally, I would like to use the featured content to promote some blog postings that I find most interesting. As far as I understand, I can only feature pages (not blog postings). Is that correct? If not, how can I link particular postings? (HERE is a screenshot of what I see) Also, I modified a little bit on the CSS file because I found that font sizes were too large (especially the date/comments etc text for each blog posting). When I changed that, all other icons (social media icons, search icons etc) on the top of the page also became much smaller. Hope you can help me! Thank you very much in advance. Phil