Focus

Membrane transport as the main cell organizer

2015
Il trasporto cellulare mediante vescicole opera, secondo gli stessi principi generali, in organismi differenti quali uomo e lievito. Tale sistema è cruciale per una serie di processi fisiologici in cui la fusione delle vescicole deve avvenire sotto stretto controllo, mediante il rilascio di ormoni e citochine. Difetti nel trasporto si traducono in vari tipi di malattie tra cui una serie di disturbi neurologici ed immunologici. Il simposio di una giornata organizzato dall'Istituto di Biochimica ...

The Laboratory of Computational Intelligence (CI Lab)

2015
The Cognitive Systems Lab is aimed at studying and realizing cognitive systems of new generation, able to learn, reason, and pervasively engage with humans in a natural, personalized, reactive and/or proactive way. Theoretical, experimental, and applied research activities will be aimed at designing and implementing cognitive systems able to: i) engage individually or collectively with humans by combining advanced visualization techniques with adaptive and proactive multi-modal mechanisms based ...

"Even the eye wants its part..." Innovative nanocarrier for ocular drug delivery

2015
Nanotechnology applied to medicine is the new frontier of drug therapy that aims to create personalized, safer and more effective treatments. Nano-structured systems that can facilitate the penetration, the site-specific transport and controlled release of a drug, improving efficiency and reducing the unwanted side effects, could have evolutionary implications for pharmacotherapy. This explains the great interest of the academic and industrial research in drug delivery nanotechnology. This ...

The Laboratory of Translational Bioinformatics (TB Lab)

2015
Translational Bioinformatics is an emergent field of health informatics that addresses the application of the scientific discoveries and technological innovations from the laboratories to the clinical practice. In the last decade, this area has seen a rising interest among the scientific community due to the development of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) techniques that allowed the availability of increasingly voluminous amounts of genomic data. In this context, the main objective of the TBLab ...

The Laboratory of Advanced Analytics on Complex Data (ADA Lab)

2015
ICAR laboratory ADA Lab conducts research in the area of Behavior Computing, a discipline aimed at modelling and analysing the behavior of heterogeneous entities in their environment. Behavior Computing is an important topic in different contexts including: consumer analytics, social computing, fraud detection, and group decision-making. The goal of ADA Lab in this context is twofold. First, defining mathematical models that allow to analyse, understand, and predict actions made by entities in ...

The Laboratory of Smart PErvasivE and Distributed SYstems (Speedy LAB)

2015
The Speedy laboratory investigates the principles, models, methodologies and tools needed for the design and development of high-performance, distributed and pervasive systems. Such systems are a complex ecosystem of heterogeneous entities (services, smart objects/M2M, people, etc.) that cooperate to provide the related functionalities, and are able to evolve and quickly adapt to changing requirements. The focus is on combining Cloud Computing and the Internet of Things (IoT), in order to enable ...

The Laboratory of Smart Data and Models

2015
Nowadays, companies and individuals are immersed in digital interconnected ecosystems in which huge amounts of heterogeneous data, the so-called Big Data, are generated at an unprecedented speed. In this scenario, approaches and technologies for Big Data have the aim to make computable problems that involve large volumes of data, highly heterogeneous in size and structure, often generated in real-time, which can not be dealt with the existing information technologies. The purpose of the ...

The Laboratory of Dependable & Scalable Distributed Systems (DS2 Lab)

2015
Computer science today is driven by two main trends: the use of computing resources on demand (outsourced computing) and the need of processing a huge amount of data coming from different sources (data-centric computing). The effects of these two trends will lead the future computing platforms towards hybrid systems composed of distributed specialized subsystems with specific and complementary features that operate synergistically. These systems will interact with the users by means of multiple ...

Distributed computation of PageRank

2014
On its website, Google describes PageRank as follows: "PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that are considered important receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results." The PageRank algorithm was introduced by the cofounders of Google in the late 1990s and has been implemented on the search engine of Google from the time of its launching. It continues to ...

Parkinson's disease: New therapies for motor complications has been discovered.

2014
The most efficacy drug therapy employed to treat Parkinson's disease is the levodopa but, for obscure reasons, after few years this induces motor complications called dyskinesias. The Institute of Bioimaging and Molecular Physiology-CNR of Catanzaro, in collaboration with the Institute of Neurology of the Policlinico "Magna Graecia" Catanzaro, has shed new light on the neurobiological correlates of this motor complication demonstrating the efficacy of neurostimulation. This research has been ...

Transparent Publishing

2014
Bernd Pulverer, Chief Editor of the EMBO Journal, will give an overview on the peer reviewed research paper which remains the main conduit for the exchange of research discoveries. With the growth and diversification of global research, publishing in selected journals and citation metrics are increasingly employed as surrogates for quality in research assessment. Consequently, the pressures to publish in only a handful of journals have increased, with the risk of hampering scientific progress. ...

Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Lasers (VCSELs)

2014
VCSELs are semiconductor micro-lasers, a Key Enabling Technology for many ICT applications, from datacom to sensors. Nowadays they are the main semiconductor optical source on the market and their production volume is exponentially increasing. Soon they will be part of every smart-phone and used for intra- and inter-chip communications in future microprocessors. VCSELs are complex dielectric resonator, composed of hundreds of layers and with plenty of possible transverse geometries, which can ...

P53, un numero antitumorale

2014
La proteina p53 è stata identificata nel 1979 da Arnold Levine della Princeton University (USA) e da David Lane, dell'Imperial Cancer Research Fund (Regno Unito), ma solo dopo dieci anni si è scoperta la sua importante funzione di gene soppressore tumorale indicandola una delle più interessanti nell'elaborazione delle terapie anticancro. Si attiva infatti ogni volta che le nostre cellule subiscono un alterazione, fermando la divisione delle cellule e consentendo la riparazione del Dna. Se il ...

"Metabolic Profiling": a new strategy for the study of metabolic diseases.

2014
"Metabolic Profiling": a new strategy for the study of metabolic diseases. Debora Paris, ICB-CNR Metabolomics describes the chemical profile of an organism in terms of metabolites, which are the end products of all chemical reactions of metabolism. The metabolic profile can be defined as a 'fingerprint' as it characterizes the biochemical phenotype of a biological system as a whole, by taking a snapshot of the overall metabolic levels. The study of the alterations induced by a disease, for ...

A ruthenium catalyst for the efficient production of hydrogen from methanol.

2014
A ruthenium catalyst for the efficient production of hydrogen from methanol. Elisabetta Alberico, ICB-CNR Hydrogen is an ideal fuel as its combustion releases energy and water as the sole by-product. Its widespread use would allow to successfully tackle several issues, the increasing demand for energy, the pollution and green-house gases arising from the use of fossil fuels. However, mainly because of its physical and chemical properties, hydrogen is not an ideal energy vector: it is a flammable ...

New natural-like agrochemicals and fungicides for agrofood application

2014
New natural-like agrochemicals and fungicides for agrofood application Giovanna Delogu, ICB-CNR The new chemistry has a key role to play in maintaining and improving the quality of life, such as protection of the environment and development of sustainable synthetic techniques to solve environmental problems and to produce compounds selective and active at low concentration, with decreasing toxicity and side effects to humans, animals and vegetation. Chemical challenger includes the discovery ...

Deja-Vù? An error in the mainframe

2014
Dejà-vù is a fascinating and mysterious psychological phenomenon investigated by philosophers, psychologists, psychiatrists and neurologists. However, until now there is not a clear scientific theory able to explain this phenomenon. The Institute of Bioimaging and Molecular Physiology-CNR of Catanzaro, in collaboration with the Institute of Neurology of the Policlinico "Magna Graecia" Catanzaro, has shed new light on the neurobiological correlates underlying Dejà-vù. This research has been ...

"Spice of life": polyphenol curcumin by-products may act on Parkinson's relates protein aggregation.

2014
"Spice of life": polyphenol curcumin by-products may act on Parkinson's relates protein aggregation. Paolo Ruzza, ICB-CNR Parkinson's disease (PD) belongs to the group of protein misfolding diseases and it is characterized by the progressive degeneration of the dopaminergic neurons from the substantia nigra of the brain. Among the biochemical mechanisms proposed for the pathogenesis of PD, our attention has been focused on the intracellular accumulation and aggregation of misfolded proteins, in ...

A Third of a Second to Understand Body language

2014
It takes just 300 ms to our brain to understand whether one person's facial mimic and body language are consistent with her inner feelings and mental states or with a verbal description of her feelings and mentations. And, when they are not, that person's verbal message has a short life in our brain. Indeed, our brain very quickly compares the inputs deriving from areas processing facial expressions, and face and body mimics (including the mirror neurons system) with the visceral feelings of ...

Hypoxia: the Brain is less vigilant

2014
A mild decrease of oxygen supply to the brain can selectively impair the brain's arousal levels and behavioral responses, but not orienting of spatial attention and executive control functions. This is indicated by the findings of a study carried out by the Institute of Molecular Bioimaging and Physiology in collaboration with the University of Milan Bicocca. These findings were presented at the "2014 Society for Neuroscience" Annual Congress, the largest and most influential Neuroscience ...

The "sharing-economy" of urban mobility

2014
Emerging phenomena like UBER, Car2Go, Enjoy, etc. are examples of the increasing trend towards a sharing of mobility resources. What are the effects of this trend on urban traffic? In principle, a better utilization of mobility resources (vehicles, bikes, etc.) hints to a more sustainable urban traffic, but can we provide a quantification of these benefits at the city level? To address this and related questions, jointly with MIT Senseable City Lab, we have introduced a novel, network-based ...

Secure and Compliant Data Sharing in the Cloud

2014
Nowadays, data sharing through Cloud platforms is widespread among the Internet users, think for example to services such as Dropbox and Google Drive, and it is also facilitated by the availability of such sharing tools on mobile devices . However, in some scenarios, in particular when organizations are involved (e.g., companies or public bodies), this data sharing must be regulated by real digital contracts, called Data Sharing Agreements (DSA), which must be paired with data. The researchers ...

Taxonomies and Coding systems for Healthcare

2014
In the Healthcare domain taxonomies or classifications and above all coding systems are fundamental for the "unique identification" of relevant clinical data in critical situations and emergencies. Medical coding systems are generally used: (i) to classify diseases and other clinical data unambiguously; (ii) to support epidemiological studies; (iii) to index and retrieve information of interest. General research activities performed in this area are: o Knowledge acquisition, terminology ...

Empowering Life in the Future Internet

2014
A driving force behind the new applications is empowering individuals in order to promote awareness and overall quality of life. The Web is the core technology at the heart of this process. Like the press and other media, the Web has expanded the knowledge base that everyone can access, revolutionizing the way we live and becoming the most frequently used tool for learning, reporting, informing, working, and socializing. With the increasing pervasiveness of mobile devices, the Web has the ...

Car-to-Car Wireless Communications for Virtual Traffic Lights

2014
Road safety and traffic congestions are among major concerns today. The Global status report on road safety 2013 indicates a worldwide total number of road traffic deaths of 1.24 million per year. A large part of them occurs at intersections. Intersection management is also critical to reduce the traffic jams in our cities. However, the percentage of intersections that are governed by traffic lights is inevitably limited and significantly increasing the number of traffic lights is not realistic ...

Nanostructured novel sensors for pollutants monitoring

2014
Sensors based on nanostructured materials, due to their extremely reduced size as well as electrical and optical properties related to the matter arrangement, are able both to communicate with the infinitely small world and to perceive and to reveal even a single molecule in the atmosphere or a single ion in the liquid. In addition the development of nanostructured sensing materials provides high surface-area-to-volume ratio layers mimicking the strong biological sensory systems. These sensors ...

Nanoparticelle d'oro identificano e uccidono le cellule tumorali

2014
Comunicato stampa CNR - 18 Dicembre 2014 Un team dell'Ifac-Cnr e dell'Università di Firenze mette a punto un nuovo tipo di trattamento del cancro: nanoparticelle d'oro riconoscono le cellule cancerose quando queste sviluppano un enzima che permette loro di sopravvivere senza ossigeno. La tecnologia, illustrata su Advanced Functional Materials, è protetta da brevetto. Utilizzare la temibile capacità delle cellule tumorali di sopravvivere anche in condizioni di scarsa ossigenazione per ...

GLI ETRUSCHI E IL MEDITERRANEO. LA CITTA' DI CERVETERI

2014
Approda a Roma, al Palazzo delle Esposizioni, la grande mostra archeologica "Gli Etruschi e il Mediterraneo. La città di Cerveteri", già allestita al Louvre-Lens con grande successo di pubblico e critica. Organizzata in partenariato dall'Azienda Speciale Palaexpo e dal Louvre-Lens, la mostra è stata curata dal CNR-ISMA, dal Louvre e dalla Soprintendenza per i Beni archeologici dell'Etruria meridionale. Un'ampia selezione di temi e oggetti (oltre 450) illustrano la nascita e lo sviluppo fino ...

Innovative techniques in spintronics and new possibilities for room temperature applications

2014
Spin control of single electrons is of great interest for future applications in electronics and spintronics. However, to observe these phenomena at room temperature it is necessary to confine the electrons to conductive islands with reduced size, almost atomic. Although this type of confinement is feasible today, the technological difficulty is to control independently the different conductive islands separated by a few nanometers. A goal almost prohibitive. Recently a group of researchers from ...

Demonstration of a phenomenon known as 'coherent perfect absorption' in a microcavity in the regime of strong light-matter interaction

2014
The perfect coherent absorption, observed for the first time 3 years ago in a silicon slab, has attracted a great interest in the scientific community because from a theoretical point of view it is the reverse of the laser: in fact it gives rise to a device that absorbs the light completely, contrary to the laser which generates it. In general the absorption of light by a material depends on its dielectric properties and increases in proportion to its thickness. However, when not one beam but ...