Da FOCUS CNR n.1 2015 L'Italia custodisce un immenso patrimonio storico-artistico, che costituisce una preziosa eredità da salvaguardare e tramandare alle generazioni future, sviluppando nuove tecniche di intervento non invasive e adottando efficaci strategie conservative. L'ultima frontiera nel campo della conservazione è l'impiego di impulsi laser per la rimozione di depositi e materiali applicati in precedenti restauri dalla superficie di un'opera d'arte. "La tecnica, solitamente, sfrutta ...

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 ...

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 ...

Nel 2014, 6,7 miliardi di telefoni cellulari hanno generato oltre due exabyte di dati relativi a una vasta gamma di servizi di telefonia mobile, tra cui la navigazione web, il social networking, video streaming, storage online ed il gioco on-line. Questa enorme quantità di attività può essere monitorato e geo-referenziata dagli operatori di telefonia mobile e divenire una fonte di informazioni senza precedenti su grandi popolazioni di individui. L'analisi dei dati di traffico di telefonia ...

The melting of glaciers coming with climate change threatens the heritage of the last glaciation of Europe likely contained in subglacial lakes in Greenland and Svalbard. This aspect urges specialists to focus their studies (theoretical, numerical and on- field) on such fascinating objects. Along this line, beneath Amundsenisen Plateau (Svalbard) the research groups, led by Jacek Jania (Dept. Earth Science, Univ. of Silesia) and Piotr Glowacki (Inst. Geophysics, Polish Academy of Sciences, ...

The climate changes related to CO2 emission from combustion of fossil fuels increased more and more in the last 50 years. According to Protocol of Doha, extending the Protocol of Kyoto, the European Union decided 20% (or even more) reduction of CO2 emission levels of 1990 by 2020. The Covenant of Mayors is a European movement where local/regional authorities, voluntarily commit to increasing energy efficiency and use of renewable energy. In this framework the Istituto di Ricerche sulla ...

One of the greatest challenges in biomedicine is to get a unified view of observations made from the molecular (microscopic) to the cellular (mesoscopic) up to the organism (macroscopic) scale. Towards this goal, multiscale models have been highly instrumental in contexts such as the cardiovascular field, angiogenesis, neurosciences and tumour biology. More recently, such models are becoming an increasingly important resource to address immunological questions as well. Multiscale modelling aims ...

Device-free radio vision is an augmented functionality provided by radio transceivers - typically heterogeneous, densely distributed and networked - that monitor the fluctuations of the electromagnetic (EM) field across the space. These monitoring devices may be pre-existing, deployed at arbitrary (or optimized) locations for communication purposes in the area of interest, and exchange digital information by any wireless communication protocol. Radio vision systems leverage diffraction, ...

The growing interest in metal nanoparticles (NP) is related to their increasing importance for a series of applications, ranging from nanoelectronics to magnetism, pharmaceutics (e.g. for biological labeling) and catalysis. It is now well established that the NPs' properties depend critically on their size and shape1-3 and that some peculiar geometries may appear when reducing the cluster size4. In spite of the vast literature on the topic, most of the attention has concentrated so far on metal ...

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 ...

Oxide based materials are often used for relevant technological applications in fields as catalysis, corrosion protection, micro- and nano-electronics, sensoristics, spintronics, drug delivery, etc. [1]. This justifies the great effort for a complete characterisation of such materials [1,2]. Ultrathin oxide films are of utmost importance, since they may show peculiar electronic and chemical properties different from those of the corresponding bulk materials and which are well known to depend on ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

"Multifunctional Materials" is a topic of increasing impact in the field of the material science and technology. The multiferroism is a property of matter defined as the coexistence of two or more primary ferroic orders, the most important are ferromagnetism and ferroelectricity; when they coexist the multiferroic defined as MagnetoElectric. This property is of great interest for a number of applications, such as sensors, advanced electronics and spintronics. Unfortunately, most of these ...

The GiraffPlus project (http://www.giraffplus.eu/) is funded by the European Community within the Framework Programme Seven (FP7) and involves several european countries, research centres, companies and national health services. The scope of the project is promoting the indipendent living of the elderly who often live alone through a long-term monitoring of their activities inside their houses and the prevention of health problems or emergency situations that may arise. Moreover tools for ...

Smart cities are nowadays subject of many innovation projects, as well as on the political agenda of many (local) governments. Often, in the design of smart services, and discussions in this regard, the emphasis is mainly on the importance of data collection and of communications, particularly with respect to the Internet of things. Less attention is instead directed to the necessary interactions between the various parts (humans, things, programs, communications systems, etc..) and to the need ...

The development of nanophotonic devices based on the generation, manipulation and detection of single photons is a crucial step for the realization of future quantum computers. Quantum computing logic will be no more based on classical bits, but on quantum bits (QuBits). Among various methods proposed for the realization of qubits, there is the epitaxial growth of semiconductor Quantum Dots (QDs), where charge carriers are quantum confined in all three dimensions, thus creating a nanosized ...

Photovoltaic devices, which directly convert abundant light into solar electricity, are important for the implementation of renewable energy supply systems. Today, silicon-based modules are dominating the photovoltaic market, but various emerging technologies based on thin-film inorganic semiconductors, dye-sensitized materials and organic materials are rapidly progressing. Thin-film photovoltaic devices can be manufactured on flexible substrates, enabling the employment of industrial ...

Mechanical oscillators operate in the degenerate parametric regime when their spring constant is modulated at twice the oscillator resonance frequency. In such regime, like in a child's swing, the response of the oscillator to an external excitation acting close to resonance is enhanced, and can easily reach a threshold marking the birth of self-oscillations (parametric resonance). More precisely, the response is amplified if the motion is in phase with the parametric modulation (quadrature), ...

The study of the reduction size effects on the material properties of nanostructured systems is fundamental for understanding physical phenomena otherwise not observed in bulk materials. In particular, below a critical size, nanostructured materials can present phases that are metastable in macroscopic crystals or can even crystallize as new polimorphs, with properties different from the usual ones. Pertanto, la scoperta, la caratterizzazione e l'ingegnerizzazione di tali fasi possono aprire ...

Il presente studio illustra i risultati di parte del Work Package (WP) 6 del progetto IN-TRAC con l'obiettivo di indagare il comfort degli operatori mediante un approccio sog-gettivo ed antropometricofunzionale. Il comfort percepito dagli operatori di macchine destinate ad essere utilizzate sui luoghi di lavoro, infatti, costituisce un elemento chiave nel determinare preferenze e comportamenti di acquisto e nel promuovere condizioni di impiego che aumentino la produttività e il benessere. Per ...

The new X-by-Wire systems under study for commercial and heavy-duty vehicles, as well as for Agricultural Tractors, are increasingly independent autonomous systems, capable to control the vehicle functionality, actuating the operator's commands, or managing in a complete autonomy a machine function. These applications need an higher Performance Level from the functional safety point of view, due to the risk of malfunction. IMAMOTER institute has developed and patented a new concept hydraulic ...

Supersonic molecular beams deposition is a powerful method to study the growth processes of organic molecular semiconductors. The possibility to tune the kinetic energy of the impinging molecules such as their momentum open different pathway not accessible with other vacuum deposition techniques. An example is given by the study made on pentacene growth (Chemical Communication [50 (2014) 7694]) where we demonstrated the role played in the growth processes by the perpendicular and parallel ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

DA Almanacco della Scienza CNR - N. 4 - 27 feb 2013 Un nuovo materiale 'intelligente', nanostrutturato e potenzialmente capace di rilasciare un farmaco in una superficie di pochi nanometri, nella misura e nella concentrazione desiderata e nei tempi prestabiliti. È l'esito di una ricerca condotta da due Istituti del Cnr fiorentino, quello di fisica applicata (Ifac) e quello di chimica dei composti metallorganici (Iccom), in collaborazione con il dipartimento di Chimica del locale ateneo ...