The next Sciama Memorial Lecture will take place on 13 December 2017 at 5 p.m. at SISSA's Aula Magna Paolo Budinich. The event will be a "Special SISSA Colloquium" to commemorate the great theoretical astrophysicist Dennis Sciama. This year the seminar, entitled "How the green light was given for the gravitational wave search", will be given by Pawel Nurowski from Center for Theoretical Physics, Warsaw.
«Today we know that our experience of beauty is linked to the activities of specific parts of the brain, and there is one area located in the emotional brain activity in which always correlates with the experience of beauty. Those who speak of reductionism or simply ignore this evidence, thinking that beauty is a matter only for philosophers, connoisseurs and art historians are committing a serious mistake».
One of the core aims of Neuroscience is to discover the neurobiology underlying human health, improving the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of brain diseases. Modern technologies allow investigating neurobiology at the single molecule level, including transmembrane proteins such as membrane ion channels. This will be the subject of "From mV to pA, from field potentials to single channels - Thank you Andrea!”, the lecture by prof. Lucia Sivilotti from UCL, UK, that celebrates SISSA professor Andrea Nistri’s retirement.
“Flexible Mathematics, or… what is the h-principle?” is the title of SISSA new colloquium by Stanford University mathematician Yakov Eliashberg. Eliashberg is a world-renowned expert in the area of symplectic and contact topology. He was awarded the Crafoord Prize in Mathematics from the Swedish Academy of Sciences “for the development of contact and symplectic topology and groundbreaking discoveries of rigidity and flexibility phenomena”. The colloquium will take place at SISSA Main Hall on Tuesday 17 October starting from 5 p.m. (Image: Wikipedia)
The third edition of the National Conference on the Physics of Matter will take place at ICTP-SISSA Miramare Campus from 1 to 5 October. The Conference is organized by CNISM and CNR with the collaboration of SISSA and ICTP. Conference Chairs will be SISSA director Stefano Ruffo, Corrado Spinella from CNR and Ezio Puppin from CNISM. Topics of the event include Biophysics, Plasma Physics, Superconductivity, Nanotechnologies and Statistical Physics. (Image by Rost-9D, Istock by Getty Images)
For more information: The event website
An odour can trigger a memory, cause disgust or even save our lives. Nonetheless, although it is so important for our existence, olfaction still remains the most enigmatic of our senses. Its mysteries and marvels will be analysed by Nobel Prize Linda Buck during the ICTP-SISSA Colloquium open to the public, titled “Unraveling the sense of smell”. The American neurobiologist will share the main phases of forty years of research on the functioning of the olfactory system and its impact on emotions and behaviours. Buck will be in Trieste to participate in the “Conference on Frontiers in Olfaction” which will be held from 24 to 28 July at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics "Abdus Salam" (ICTP). The Colloquium will take place on Tuesday 25 July at 5:00 p.m at ICTP (Leonardo Da Vinci Building).
MARS42 is a Summer School aimed at providing Master and PhD students or Post-Doc researchers with useful tools for seeing their studies in a new light. The school represents a unique opportunity to acquire important skills in the field of companies’ R&D and to learn how to transform scientific research into innovative business projects. The MARS 42 Summer Entrepreneurship School will be held at SISSA between 10 and 23 July 2017. (Image: Wikipedia)
The conference will be centered on the hottest research topics in formal theoretical physics, mathematical physics and in geometry focusing on exact aspects in quantum field theories, integrable systems and the refined underlying geometric and algebraic constructions. As a topic "geometric correspondence" includes the phenomenon of duality in physics and the counting of topological invariants in mathematics.
Optical phenomena visible to everyone have been central to the development of, and abundantly illustrate, important concepts in science and mathematics. The phenomena considered include rainbows, sparkling reflections on water, mirages, green flashes, glories, daylight, and the crystals. The concepts include refraction, caustics, wave interference, dispersion, complex angular momentum, polarization singularities, geometric phases, and visual illusions.
In recent years, social networks have become a primary source of information for citizens and, sometimes, for journalists. In particular, in emergency situations - like earthquakes, floods or terroristic attacks – they have proved themselves to be a fundamental tool for real time updating. A reliability problem exists, though. Are they really such a good source? Are we able to understand how to use them in emergency communication?
