Do you express your emotions? Are you able to name them, talk about them, relate to your feelings? If your answer is not an unqualified yes, you might be among the 10 percent of the healthy population who has difficulty processing the emotions they experience: a psychological condition known as alexithymia. An alexithymic individual has difficulty, to a greater or lesser degree, in relating to the sensations – ranging from joy to fear, from disgust to anger – which make up our experience.
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Saturday 28 October the concert by Polietnico, the choir of the "Politecnico di Torino", will take place at SISSA Main Hall. "Polietnico" was found in 2014 and has 120 performers, both students and professors, coming from 22 countries. Liceo Scientifico Oberdan's youth and senior choirs will perform in the show, too. The event will start at midday (12.00 pm). You are all invited!
The story of the mathematician Évariste Galois heralds the opening of the 2017 Trieste Science+Fiction Festival. The romantic legend of an absolute prodigy of mathematics, who was killed at a very young age during a fatal duel on 29 May 1832, comes to life in a documentary film by Giuseppe Mussardo and Diego Cenetiempo, produced by SISSA and ICTP.
“Flexible Mathematics, or… what is the h-principle?” is the title of SISSA new colloquium by Stanford University mathematician Yakov Eliashberg. Eliashberg is a world-renowned expert in the area of symplectic and contact topology. He was awarded the Crafoord Prize in Mathematics from the Swedish Academy of Sciences “for the development of contact and symplectic topology and groundbreaking discoveries of rigidity and flexibility phenomena”. The colloquium will take place at SISSA Main Hall on Tuesday 17 October starting from 5 p.m. (Image: Wikipedia)
The third edition of the National Conference on the Physics of Matter will take place at ICTP-SISSA Miramare Campus from 1 to 5 October. The Conference is organized by CNISM and CNR with the collaboration of SISSA and ICTP. Conference Chairs will be SISSA director Stefano Ruffo, Corrado Spinella from CNR and Ezio Puppin from CNISM. Topics of the event include Biophysics, Plasma Physics, Superconductivity, Nanotechnologies and Statistical Physics. (Image by Rost-9D, Istock by Getty Images)
A novel research path for a rare variant of Rett Syndrome might turn into therapy for several other neurological pathologies. This is what is hoped for by the project of the Cerebral Cortex Development Lab of Trieste’s SISSA, recent winner of a funding provided by the Jerome Lejeune Foundation, a French institution engaged, among other things, in supporting research on Rett Syndrome.
Glycine is the smallest amino acid. More than a decade ago a new polymorph of glycine was experimentally recorded. The glycine polymorph could not be identified, though, and, up to now, it has been unknown. In a study just published in IUCrJ journal, an international group has solved this 10 year old puzzle.
Registrations for the “De Rerum Natura – Science in a click” photographic contest organised by SISSA Interdisciplinary Laboratory in partnership with Circolo Fotografico Triestino are now open. There are two themes for the third edition: “The Beauty of Nature and its Laws” and “The Soul of a City of Science: Trieste – Light and Vision”. Registration is free and open to all amateur photographers of any age or nationality. There are three prizes per category worth €500, €300 and €200 respectively and a total of six prizes.
«It can be considered an instance of ‘embodiment’ in which our brain interacts with our body». This is the comment made by Raffaella Rumiati, neuroscientist at SISSA in Trieste, on the results of research carried out by her group which reveals that the way we process different foods changes in accordance with our body mass index. With two behavioural and electroencephalographic experiments, the study demonstrated that people of normal weight tend to associate natural foods such as apples with their sensory characteristics such as sweetness or softness.
Parkinson’s disease and prion diseases are very different from each other as regards both origins and course.
Like in a nail-biting thriller full of escapes and subterfuge, photons from far-off light sources, such as blazars, could go up against a continuous exchange of identity in their journey through the Universe.
To move a nanoparticle on the surface of a graphene sheet, you won’t need a “nano-arm”: by applying a temperature difference at the ends of the membrane, the nanocluster laying on it will drift from the hot region to the cold one. In addition, contrary to the laws ruling the world at the macroscale, the force acting on the particle – the so-called thermophoretic force – should not decrease as the sheet length rises, sporting a so-called ballistic behavior.
Her work tools are paper, pen and a whiteboard to use «when she needs to share ideas with others, discuss problems and look for solutions». Computers? «Yes, sometimes». Laura Foini fills everything with formulas and calculations – what is needed to study «systems out of equilibrium, my research sector, encompassed by the environment of statistical physics». It is a field in which this young researcher, born in 1984 in Brescia province, excels.
A deep understanding of the irreversibility of the arrow of time cannot ignore the quantum nature of the world that surrounds us. This is the key result of the work carried out by Vincenzo Alba and Pasquale Calabrese of the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) of Trieste, recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
A web that passes through infinite intergalactic spaces, a dense cosmic forest illuminated by very distant lights and a huge enigma to solve. These are the picturesque ingredients of a scientific research – carried out by an international team composed of researchers from the International School for Adavnced Studies (SISSA) and the Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, the Institute of Astronomy of Cambridge and the University of Washington – that adds an important element for understanding one of the fundamental components of our Universe:
An odour can trigger a memory, cause disgust or even save our lives. Nonetheless, although it is so important for our existence, olfaction still remains the most enigmatic of our senses. Its mysteries and marvels will be analysed by Nobel Prize Linda Buck during the ICTP-SISSA Colloquium open to the public, titled “Unraveling the sense of smell”. The American neurobiologist will share the main phases of forty years of research on the functioning of the olfactory system and its impact on emotions and behaviours. Buck will be in Trieste to participate in the “Conference on Frontiers in Olfaction” which will be held from 24 to 28 July at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics "Abdus Salam" (ICTP). The Colloquium will take place on Tuesday 25 July at 5:00 p.m at ICTP (Leonardo Da Vinci Building).
QUIET 2017 - Quantification of Uncertainty: Improving Efficiency and Technology - is focused on the review of recent mathematical, numerical, methodological advances and the development of new research directions for uncertainty quantification in the setting of partial differential equations with random inputs. As such, the workshop impacts the scientific, engineering, financial, economic, environmental, social, and commercial milieus, including modern themes such as data assimilation, data science and analytics.
The dichotomy concerns the so-called angular momentum (per unit mass), that in physics is a measure of size and rotation velocity. Spiral galaxies are found to be strongly rotating, with an angular momentum higher by a factor of about 5 than ellipticals. What is the origin of such a difference? An international research team investigated the issue in a study just published in The Astrophysical Journal. The team was led by SISSA Ph.D.
During a press conference held today at ICTP, Professor Stefano Fantoni announced that Trieste was finally selected to host the EuroScience Open Forum, the most important European event dedicated to science, technology, society and policy. The event will take place from 4 to 10 July 2020. Prof Fantoni declared: "We are looking forward to working with EuroScience to make Trieste 2020, with the theme 'Freedom for Science, Science for Freedom'.
The last event of SISSA SUMMER FESTIVAL 2017 will take place at SISSA's amphitheatre on Friday 14 July at 7 p.m. The Wind Orchestra of the Conservatorio G. Tartini, Trieste, will present a programme with music by Bob Mintzer, Jule Styne, Kenny Wheeler and many other authors. The concert will be held in the Main Hall in heavy weather. All interested are welcome! (Image: Pixabay)