26 May, 5.30 pm
Revoltella Museum
via Diaz, 27, Trieste
Prion diseases are a class of encephalopathies that have very severe symptoms. The PRION conference, for the past 10 years the main meeting place for the world's leading experts in these neurodegenerative diseases, is being held in Trieste this year.
Sociality, cooperation and "prosocial" behaviours are the foundation of human society (and of the extraordinary development of our brain) and yet, taken individually, people often show huge variation in terms of altruism/egoism, both among individuals and in the same individual at different moments in time. What causes these differences in behaviour? An answer may be found by observing the activity of the brain, as was done by a group of researchers from SISSA in Trieste (in collaboration with the Human-Computer Interaction Lab, HCI lab, of the University of Udine).
Quattro tra i maggiori istituti del Friuli Venezia Giulia danno il via al nuovo corso di PhD JuMBO, iniziativa di eccellenza e particolarmente innovativa nell'ambito della Biologia Molecolare.
Only few days left to sign up to the JCOM Masterclasses. Four courses aimed at scientists, cultural managers, public sector and education professionals, architects, designers, journalists, museum workers and other specialists dealing with scientific/technological communication. These are the JCOM Masterclasses, top-level international training courses held by academics and professionals selected from among the greatest experts in the field.
Superconductors are promising materials, with applications ranging from medicine to transport. Unfortunately, though, their use is for the time being limited to the very low temperatures (close to absolute zero) necessary for superconductivity to occur.
Some materials, however, could be improved so as to obtain higher and energetically less "costly" critical temperatures. A team of researchers coordinated by SISSA investigated a class of conductors at high critical temperature, adding insight into the physics of these phenomena.
Sébastien Balibar
21 May 2014, 2.30 pm
SISSA – Main Lecture Hall
When looking for an answer to a problem we may come across a very different solution from what we expected and end up discovering new phenomena and expanding scientific knowledge.
That's what happened to Sébastien Balibar, director of research at the Statistical Physics Laboratory of the École Normale Supérieure of Paris, who was looking for a supersolid when he found "giant" plasticity. Balibar will tell us about these discoveries at the next SISSA colloquium, on May 21 at 2.30 pm.
Loren Williams
19 May 2014, 11.00 am
SISSA – Room 128
Via Bonomea 265, Trieste
Mapping the history of life by "peeling back" the layers of ribosome as if they were growth rings of a tree. This is the research focus of Loren Williams, a biologist from Georgia Tech (USA), who will be explaining his latest findings at a public lecture at SISSA.
One of the major challenges of astrophysics today is to trace the origin and earliest development of the Universe. Planck is one of the most important missions in this respect. Today about one hundred scientists are busy analyzing the picture of fossil radiation "taken" by the ESA Planck satellite.
Many of these researchers will be meeting on May 12 at SISSA in Trieste for the "Planck Joint Core Team" conference, to assess what has been discovered so far. The conference is organized by SISSA and INAF-OATS.
On May 6, the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) of Trieste will be paying tribute to the physicist and SISSA founder Paolo Budinich, who died last November, by dedicating the School's Main Lecture Hall to him. The ceremony will take place at 12 noon.
If spacetime were a fluid, it would have very low viscosity, just like a "superfluid". A study carried out jointly by the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) of Trieste and the Ludwig-Maximilian University of Munich shows how the "atoms" making up the fluid of spacetime should behave, according to models of quantum gravity.
Vincenzo Barone
8 May 2014, 3pm
SISSA, Main Lecture Hall
Via Bonomea 265 - Trieste
In order to study complex systems and compare the work of those who carry out empirical observations and those who do research using simulations we need new instruments.
Movement and the ability to divide are two fundamental traits of living cells. The origin of these abilities could rely on very simple physical mechanisms, which have been simulated by scientists of the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) of Trieste in a study just published in Physical Review Letters.
Elliot Lieb
June 17, 2014 - 3 pm
SISSA, Main Lecture Hall
Via Bonomea, 265 - Trieste
A public lecture at SISSA provides Elliott Lieb, professor of Mathematics and Physics at Princeton University, the opportunity to review the foundations of the second law of thermodynamics.
This is the physical law which introduces the concept of entropy of the Universe and establishes the direction of the flow of time. Lieb will offer the public his innovative point of view on this fundamental principle.
A team of physicists from SISSA and the Polytechnic University of Turin has developed and analysed a model that simulates the effect of migration on the genetic biodiversity of populations, and discovered that the effect is all but trivial.
Enrico Alleva
April 9, 2014 - 3 pm
SISSA, Main Lecture Hall
Via Bonomea, 265 - Trieste
Languages are learned, it's true, but are there also innate bases in the structure of language that precede experience? Linguists have noticed that, despite the huge variability of human languages, there are some preferences in the sound of words that can be found across languages.
So they wonder whether this reflects the existence of a universal, innate biological basis of language. A SISSA study provides evidence to support to this hypothesis, demonstrating that certain preferences in the sound of words are already active in newborn infants.
A map of how genes vary in biological tissues: a huge project that required the collaboration of dozens of laboratories worldwide, including the Neurogenomics Laboratory of the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste.
This is the result of a study just published in Nature by the FANTOM consortium (and signed by over two hundred authors). It is only the first of a series of more specific papers that will focus on how the single genes work in each type of tissue.
For astrophysicists neutron stars are extremely complex astronomical objects. Research conducted with the collaboration of SISSA and published in the journal Physical Review Letters demonstrates that in certain respects these stars can instead be described very simply and that they show similarities with black holes.
What happens to hydrogen when it is subjected to the same pressures as reached inside a planet? Scientists from SISSA simulated this situation to verify if and when hydrogen becomes "metallic". The paper has been published in the journal Nature Communications.
Researchers at SISSA are developing fast and efficient numerical methods to study the behaviour of molecules and materials. The latest work by Angelo Rosa, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, simulated the behaviour of concentrated solutions of "circular" polymers, providing a far more accurate description of the behaviour of these materials than available in the past.
