There is an increasing need for environment friendly materials with advanced and improved properties. Polyolefins produced by means of transition metal catalysed polymerisations, as pure hydrocarbons meet the requirements for sustainable development. Advances in novel soluble catalytic systems, with well defined structure, allow the synthesis of novel polymeric materials non accessible with traditional heterogeneous Ziegler-Natta catalysts: cycloolefin copolymers (COC) represent a new class of ...

The Italian textile and apparel manufacturing industry produces more than 30% of the EU garment production and engages nearly 700000. Besides sheep's wool, the raw fibres used by the fashion textile industry are the fine, noble hairs (speciality fibres) from domestic goats (mohair, cashmere, cashgora), camel and camelids (alpaca, lama, vicuna, guanaco), bovines (yak, musk ox), rabbit (angora). Price differences between the different kind of fibres are considerable and subjected to strong ...

Specific biomarkers useful to evaluate the soil degradation level and the soil response (resilience) to regeneration practices have been tested and evaluated by the research group of "Soil Biochemical Fertility" at the Unit of Soil Chemistry of ISE-CNR. The biomarkers are part of an enzymatic pool made up of some hydrolases and oxidoreductases which reflect soil metabolism and are responsible for the mineral nutrient release from natural organic macro-compounds (cellulose, proteins, lipids, ...

In several European countries, TSE (Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies) epidemic in cattle is a major economic problem for the sustainability of breeding activities. Moreover, concern is growing for public health with the transmission of TSE to human beings by consumption of contaminated meat (new variant of the disease). The soil can be contaminated and become a potential reservoir of TSE infectivity as a result of a) accidental dispersion from storage plants of meat and bone meal; b) ...

The sight of nature as an historical subject implies a change in the perspective when we reconstruct economic and social features, human relations, and technical innovation and finally the very idea of wealth. Researches in progress in the Institute are connected with the use of concept of "resource" in Northern and Southern Mediterranean regions. Researchers in the Institute are contributing on topics such as forests, seas, water resources. Part of these researches has already been published ...

Definizione e applicazioni. Gli Agenti Virtuali con Faccia Parlante costitutiscono la più recente proposta per una interazione uomo-macchina più robusta e più naturale rispetto agli attuali sistemi unimodali di sintesi e di riconoscimento automatico del parlato. Sono sistemi più naturali perchè si propongono di riprodurre l'interazione comunicativa umana faccia-a-faccia nella quale l'informazione viene scambiata lungo i canali uditivo e visivo attraverso messaggi verbali, intonazione, ...

Introduction The development of new technologies in the field of the automatic treatment of human language are essential for an effective utilization of new multimodal and multimedia systems built with the eventual goal of enabling people to communicate with machines using natural communication skills. Advances in human language technology (HLT) offer the promise of nearly universal access to on-line information and services. Since almost everyone speaks and understands a language, the ...