News

To celebrate the International Women and Girls in Science Day 2018 and to join forces to build an inclusive scientific community, ICTP, Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World (OWSD) and SISSA are organizing two events scheduled on 7 and 9 February 2018.

It was like finding the laws that govern the movement of planets inside a pond. Because that is where Euglena gracilis lives, a unicellular organism, which has allowed a group of scientists of mathLab and of Sensing and Moving Bioinspired Artifacts laboratory (SAMBA) at SISSA, in association with the National Institute of Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics – OGS, to rebuild the motion in three dimensions of single cells, using a very original approach, which looks to Space.

It is with great pleasure that we announce that the new SISSA website is online. This is the fruit of a participatory process which involved the School’s personnel through its delegates. They have all been working with passion to achieve such a high level result. The website, developed by Sissa Medialab, has been renewed in the graphics and presents a new organization, which makes it more user friendly and clearer. We would like to thank all the people who contributed to this important result, in particular Isabella Brumati and Andrea Delise who supervised the project.

It is the less known member of the nucleic acid family, superseded in popularity by its cousin DNA. And yet RNA, or ribonucleic acid, plays an essential role in many biological processes: not only as messenger molecule with the task of transmitting genetic information from the nucleus to the cytoplasm for protein production, but also as protagonist of different and significantly important cellular mechanisms.

Time maps, reading patterns, innovative numerical methods in fluidodynamics. These are the topics of the research projects led by Domenica Bueti, Davide Crepaldi and Gianluigi Rozza at SISSA that were just awarded by FARE – Framework per l’Attrazione e il Rafforzamento delle Eccellenze per la Ricerca in Italia. These fundings represent vital additional supports for ERC - European Research Council grant holders based in Italy. Three out of fifty projects awarded are carried out at SISSA: two in neuroscience, one in mathematics, for a total budget of 640,000 Euros.

“The world is our lab” is the title of the seminar held at the International School for Advanced Studies - SISSA of Trieste by Alessandro Curioni, director of IBM Research - Zurich and vice-Chairman of IBM Europe. This recent meeting launched the collaboration between SISSA and IBM. Local scientific institutions such as the University of Trieste, Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste, Area Science Park, ICTP, OGS Trieste also participated in the round table organised during the event.

The next Sciama Memorial Lecture will take place on 13 December 2017 at 5 p.m. at SISSA's Aula Magna Paolo Budinich. The event will be a "Special SISSA Colloquium" to commemorate the great theoretical astrophysicist Dennis Sciama. This year the seminar, entitled "How the green light was given for the gravitational wave search", will be given by Pawel Nurowski from Center for Theoretical Physics, Warsaw.

A two-day joint meeting between SISSA and the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon started in Lyon, yesterday, 5 December 2017. "ENS de Lyon meets SISSA" is devoted to explore recent trends at the interface between Computer Science, Mathematics and Physics. Among the participants: Pasquale Calabrese, SISSA professor in statistical physics recently awarded with a Consolidator Grant by European Research Council; Étienne Ghys, currently a CNRS "directeur de recherche" at the École normale supérieure in Lyon and a member of the French Academy of Sciences.

Are you born or do you become right-handed or left-handed? A study led by Valentina Parma, researcher at the International School for Advanced Studies - SISSA of Trieste, and Professor Umberto Castiello of the University of Padua, just published on Scientific Reports, shows that hand preference is already well defined at the 18th week of gestation. Analysing the characteristics of several foetal movements, the researchers have been able to accurately foresee the motor preference observed in the same boys and girls at age nine.

After the Starting Grant received in 2011, Pasquale Calabrese, Professor in statistical physics at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, proves his scientific excellence with the award of a Consolidator Grant. In this way SISSA reaches 21 grants in ten years of activity of the European Research Council - ERC. The project, worth 1.5 million Euros, will last for five years and will start next September.

It is a bit like business partners: if one of the two parties changes strategy – voluntarily or otherwise – to keep the business going, the other  has to adapt in turn. The leap from business ventures to the structure of proteins might seem a little bold. Yet, this concept of “balanced changes” is precisely the guiding principle of an important new study that just appeared in PNAS, the journal of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States.

“Our goal? To radically innovate numerical simulations in the field of thermal transport to take on the great science and technology issues in which this phenomenon is so central. This new study, which has designed a new method with which to analyse heat transfer data more efficiently and accurately, is an important step in this direction”. This is how Stefano Baroni describes this new research performed at Trieste’s SISSA by a group led by him, which has just been published in the Scientific Reports journal.

SISSA Club and Trieste Folk are pleased to announce a very special event to support the reconstruction of a cultural center in the areas affected by last fall's earthquake in Central Italy.
There will be a dance workshop, a wonderful aperitif and a night concert.

The appointment is in front of the "P. Budinich" Main Lecture Hall, SISSA, on Saturday, November 25.

«Today we know that our experience of beauty is linked to the activities of specific parts of the brain, and there is one area located in the emotional brain activity in which always correlates with the experience of beauty. Those who speak of reductionism or simply ignore this evidence, thinking that beauty is a matter only for philosophers, connoisseurs and art historians are committing a serious mistake». 

They come from the best scientific institutes in the world: Oxford University, America’s Princeton, Geneva’s CERN and Germany’s Max Planck. These are the members of ISAC, the International Scientific Advisory Committee, a pool of international revisers gathering world famous scientists will be spending three days at Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA). From 20th to 22nd November they will attend presentations, take part in meetings and debates and explore the institute’s research and organisation. What is their goal?

"Not Only Physics" is a series of informal meetings – not only for physicists – with former SISSA PhD students in Physics who are now employed outside academia, in major national and international companies. The two appointments are planned on 17 November and 1 December in SISSA.

“This film is a tribute to good education, which is a fundamental human right. I interviewed five SISSA PhD students from all over the world to present their stories. Their experience is similar to that of many other people who, one day, decided to leave their home to improve their education. Students I interviewed have talent, they have overcome many difficulties, they have worked hard to get good results. All of them are very special people who study in very special institutes like ICTP and SISSA”. This is how Rodrigo de León Ardón comments on the video he has conceived and produced.

One of the core aims of Neuroscience is to discover the neurobiology underlying human health, improving the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of brain diseases. Modern technologies allow investigating neurobiology at the single molecule level, including transmembrane proteins such as membrane ion channels. This will be the subject of "From mV to pA, from field potentials to single channels - Thank you Andrea!”, the lecture by prof. Lucia Sivilotti from UCL, UK, that celebrates SISSA professor Andrea Nistri’s retirement.

A laser pulse, a special material, an extraordinary property which appears inexplicably. These are the main elements that emerge from a research conducted by an international team, coordinated by Michele Fabrizio and comprising Andrea Nava and Erio Tosatti from SISSA, Claudio Giannetti from the Università Cattolica di Brescia and Antoine Georges of from the Collège de France. The results of their study have recently been published in the journal Nature Physics.