Genomic analysis of longevity offers the potential to illuminate the biology of human aging. In a study, recently published in Nature Communications, a genome-wide association meta-analysis of 606,059 parents' survival, helped discover two regions associated with longevity (HLA-DQA1/DRB1 and LPA). Previous suggestions that APOE, CHRNA3/5, CDKN2A/B, SH2B3 and FOXO3A influence longevity have also been validated. Next, the study shows that giving up smoking, educational attainment, openness to new ...

All'inizio di quest'anno, la Incontinentia Pigmenti Genetic Biobank (IPGB) ha ricevuto l'approvazione per entrare a far parte del network Registry & Biobanking del "Biobanking and Biomolecular Resources Research Infrastructure" (BBMRI), specifico per malattie rare, uno strumento indispensabile per il progresso delle ricerche sulle malattie genetiche rare. Il BBMRI è una struttura europea che raccoglie tutte le biobanche europee che rispondano a requisiti di qualità del materiale e dei dati ...

As every year, the Institute of Molecular Genetics of CNR organized a conference to commemorate the scientific and human figure of Arturo Falaschi, first Director of the Institute and a great scholar of the mechanisms that govern DNA replication. This event is part of the IGM-CNR contribution to the Course of Doctorate in Genetics, Molecular and Cellular Biology, University of Pavia. The Sixth edition of the 'Arturo Falaschi Lecture' will be held by Professor Tomas Lindahl who, along with Paul ...

The real possibility of a revolutionary approach to new-generation antivirals demonstrated by a study of the University of Siena and the Italian CNR. A single drug against all viral infections, capable of hitting the protein that the virus uses to multiply. And this is the goal that will be made possible thanks to a study conducted in collaboration between the University of Siena and the CNR, which has identified new molecules capable of inhibiting the human protein DDX3. The research, ...

Educational attainment is strongly influenced by social and other environmental factors, but genetic factors are estimated to account for at least 20% of the variation across individuals1. Here we report the results of a genome-wide association study (GWAS) for educational attainment that extends our earlier discovery sample1, 2 of 101,069 individuals to 293,723 individuals, and a replication study in an independent sample of 111,349 individuals from the UK Biobank. We identify 74 genome-wide ...

The Microscopy School, in collaboration with the Digital Microscopy Center at "Istituto Ortopedico Rizzoli" in Bologna, aims to provide the basic information for the use of the main optical microscopy techniques such as SIM Super Resolution, STORM, STED , TIRF and deconvolution. Super resolution microscopy is one of the most significant developments in imaging in biology since the light microscope was invented. The course is opened to researchers, students and technicians who are interested in ...

The research group of Dr. Claudia Ghigna (Institute of Molecular Genetics of the National Research Council, CNR-IGM of Pavia) supported by the AIRC-Italian Cancer Research Association and in collaboration with the group of Dr. Ugo Cavallaro (IEO of Milan) showed that in the blood vessels of the ovarian tumor, one of the most common causes of death from cancer in the female population between 50 and 69 years, is present a new variant of the L1 protein. This variant (called L1-deltaTM) was ...

AIRC rewards this year two young researchers at the IGM-CNR of Pavia: Elisa Belloni (with a three years fellowship) and Anna Di Matteo (with a one year fellowship). Both researchers are involved in a research project in the group directed by Dr. Claudia Ghigna aimed at identifying the molecular mechanisms driving the development of tumor vasculature, a fundamental process in cancer progression since cancerous cells stimulate the formation of new blood vessels in order to support their growth and ...

Sulla prestigiosa rivista 'Accounts of Chemical Research' è stato recentemente pubblicato da ricercatori dell'Istituto di fisica applicata 'Nello Carrara' del Cnr (Ifac-Cnr), insieme a un collega della National Gallery of Art di Washington, un lavoro di rassegna dedicato ad alcune delle più significative applicazioni dell'imaging iperspettrale su opere policrome di grande pregio storico artistico. La tecnologia dell'imaging iperspettrale rappresenta oggi una delle più avanzate frontiere ...

The so-called Cyber-Physical Convergence is one of the main trends of the research in the Future Internet domain. It argues that the pervasiveness of mobile devices with networking capabilities is fostering a convergence between the physical world and the cyber world, whereby smart objects and humans interact with the cyberspace via sensing, computing and communication, generating huge volumes of data flowing between the two worlds. To address this vision, IIT-CNR researchers focus on several ...

Modern wireless communication systems employ large bandwidth digital modulated signals with very high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) to enhance spectral efficiency and maximize the data rate. However, high PAPR digital modulations schemes are strongly detrimental for the radiofrequency (RF) amplifier that must operate most of the time several dB in back-off with respect to the nominal power and, therefore, with very low efficiency. A common technique to improve the RF high power amplifier ...

The objective of the PETRA project is to develop a service platform that connects providers & controllers of city transport with the travellers in a new way. Cities get an integrated platform to enable the provision of citizen-centric, demand-adaptive city-wide transportation services. Travellers get mobile applications that facilitate them in making travel priorities and choices for route and modality. The result of the project is a city-wide transportation system comprised of several ...

Magnetic recording is presently the leading technology for mass data storage. Its dominant role has been reinforced by the success of cloud computing, which requires huge amounts of data to be stored and managed on a multitude of servers. Nonetheless, the hard-disk storage industry is presently at a crossroad as the current magnetic recording technologies are unable to achieve storage densities beyond 1Tbit/in2. Pushing the recording density to the terabit regime requires new storage materials, ...

In our everyday life, we are used to picture social relations - as well as countless other interactions - as mutable, dynamic and often short-term bonds. Research studies have extensively shown that networks inferred from social ties can be used to observe, characterize and forecast different aspects of human activities (such as predict new connections [1] or the usage of online communication services [2]) and that, in order to correctly describe the social phenomena we study, it is often ...

Phytochemicals trigger cellular pathways leading to the prevention of pathological conditions associated with cancers, cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases. Although this positive association evidenced by interventional and observational studies is debated and subjected to criticism, biochemical and genetic studies on cellular and animal models on the mechanism(s) of action of phytochemicals provide a functional explanation of how and why a diet rich in fruits and vegetables can protect ...

The restoration of the Neptune Fountain in Bologna (Italy) started in 2016 and will be terminated in the first half of 2017. This action is funded by Comune di Bologna and it is joint project of Bologna University, Istituto Superiore per la Conservazione ed il Restauro del MiBACT (ISCR) and CNR-ISTI. This restoration qualifies as a major restoration action both for the complexity of the artwork (a complex multi-material monument, with parts in stone and bronze showing different conservation ...

Context Mobile devices are today noticeable means by which people disseminate digital tracks of their everyday activities: movements, purchase transactions, preferences, opinions, and so on. In particular, mobile phones and the data they produce revealed as a high-quality proxy for studying people mobility in different domains, such as environmental monitoring, transportation planning , smart cities and social relationship analysis and innovative demographic indexes. Opportunities Currently, a ...

The processes behind the functioning of modern Public Administration (PA) are characterized by increasing complexity and continuous evolution. In most cases these processes require a collaborative activity shared among different offices, both within an administration and also across more organizations. Moreover, as related laws and regulations are frequently modified, the administrative processes are constantly transformed requiring the intertwined adaptation of related services and data. At ...

The EU-funded DOREMI project (Decrease of cOgnitive decline, malnutRition and sedEntariness by elderly empowerment in lifestyle Management and social Inclusion) showed that in elderly people cognitive decline can be counteract and social inclusion can be improved with the help of cognitive games and a virtual companion to be used with PCs, TVs and tablets. The decline of cognitive ability is strongly related to lifestyle, as well as social engagement, cognitive stimulation, nutrition and ...

The face is the pre-eminent channel of communication among humans: it is a mirror of status, emotions, mood. This is the base principle of Medical Semeiotics, which looks at the face as a revealer of the healthy status of an individual, through a combination of physical signs (e.g., skin colour, subcutaneous fat) and facial expressions. Medical Semeiotics dates back as far as Aristotle's time; nevertheless it is still used by medical practitioners today, who rely on their ability to read the ...

In recent years, European maritime countries had to face new situations involving the traffic of illegal vessels. The fight against unauthorized fishing, irregular migration and related smuggling activity has become an international priority. Image processing and computer vision methods can contribute to find a solution to these problems by using the large scale data which is nowadays made available by satellite constellations. With this aim, researchers at the Signals and Images Lab of ...

We live in times of increasing opportunities of sensing and analysing data describing human activities at extreme detail and resolution. Unfortunately, this comes with unprecedented risks, since this data can be related to personal and sensitive information about individuals. Data are tipically stored in the databases of companies (e.g., telecom, insurance and retail companies), which use legal constraints on privacy as a reason for not sharing it with science and society at large. Clearly, this ...

The design and development of flexible software able to match the many possible user needs and provide high quality user experience is a major open issue, further complicated by the recent explosion of mobile technology and the Internet of Things (IoT), which have highly increased the variability and heterogeneity of the possible contexts of use of smart applications. In this scenario, such applications need to address extremely contextualized user needs, thus their complete behaviour cannot be ...

A common way to evaluate the latent long-term environmental impact of an orbiting object, refraining from running thousands of complex simulations based on quite uncertain scenario assumptions, is to devise an indexing scheme grounded on reasonable premises. The main advantage of these heuristic approaches is the adoption of simple to understand and simple to apply rules, while the main drawback is the lack of a validated cause-effect foundation, unavoidable if the uncertain, stochastic and ...

The structure of a social network is fundamentally related to the interests of its members. People assort spontaneously based on the topics that are relevant to them, forming social groups that revolve around different subjects. Online social media are also favorable ecosystems for the formation of topical communities centered on matters that are not commonly taken up by the general public because of the embarrassment, discomfort, or shock they may cause. Those are communities that depict or ...

Researchers of the Networked Multimedia Information System (NeMIS) laboratory of Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione "A. Faedo" in Pisa have developed a deep learning-based image search model that works by taking in input a short textual description of the image the user is looking for, e.g.: "a group of skiers in a sunny day". They implemented the actual search process as a similarity search in a visual feature space, by learning to translate a textual query into a deep neural ...

With specific reference to production processes, industrial security may be defined as the set of the studies, development and the applications of strategies, policies and operative plans, finalized to prevent, manage and solve adverse behaviors against people, environment and properties, either within or outside the industrial site, and against company resources, which are essential to ensure competitiveness in short or long period. In this perspective, industrial installations can represent ...

In un mondo sempre più globalizzato, gli abiti sono il frutto di un lungo processo produttivo dove origine delle materie prime, luoghi di lavorazione e consumo diventano più lontani tra loro. Così le scelte delle imprese e dei consumatori hanno ricadute economiche, ambientali, sociali ed etiche sempre più complesse e difficili da controllare da parte del singolo attore socioeconomico. In questo panorama, sta lentamente avvenendo quanto si è già verificato per il cibo: si fa strada una ...

Magnetic recording is presently the leading technology for mass data storage. Its dominant role has been reinforced by the success of cloud computing, which requires huge amounts of data to be stored and managed on a multitude of servers. Nonetheless, the hard-disk storage industry is presently at a crossroad as the current magnetic recording technologies are unable to achieve storage densities beyond 1Tbit/in2. Pushing the recording density to the terabit regime requires new storage materials, ...

The Institute of Research on Combustion (IRC) is one of the partners of the research project Waste2Fuels 'Sustainable production of next generation biofuels from waste streams' that has been funded under the European Union's research and innovation program Horizon 2020 under the grant agreement no. 654623. The project is coordinated by the Spanish company IRIS Advanced Engineering with the participation of 20 partners from 8 countries, among these the 'Dipartimento di Ingegneria Chimica dei ...