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Articles & Op-eds
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Italians in the Lab - Roman Stocker |
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Saturday, 14 August 2010 00:00 |
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Image credit
GIANTmicrobes
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A Peek Into Roman Stocker's Tiny World
 Roman Stocker * is the principal investigator of the Environmental Microfluidics Group at MIT Ralph M. Parsons Laboratory for Environmental Science and Engineering. An environmental fluid mechanician educated in Italy -- Stocker received his PhD in civil and environmental engineering from the University of Padova in 2003 -- he joined MIT's CEE faculty in 2005. Stocker has also worked at Perth, Australia, and claims other excellent international collaborations. Stocker Group's website allows a wonderful peek into his research interests and the "tiny world" that he passionately studies. On his desk, reportedly, four stuffed giant microbes. Most recently, with an international team of researchers, Stocker recreated in the lab a microcosm of the ocean environment, and, using microfluidic technology, was able to "visualize the behavior of marine microorganisms" just like "ecologists have done with macro-organisms for a long time." Stocker recorded microbes within a tiny channel, swimming toward the chemical dimethylsulfoniopropionate (DMSP) released into the channel. The scientist's report of chemoattraction throughout the ocean's microbial food webs has important implications regarding ocean chemical cycling processes and, most conspicuously, confirms that marine microorganisms' behavior may ultimately have "a powerful influence on Earth's climate" -- affecting the heat balance of the atmosphere. Read more...
* Roman Stocker is a member of ISSNAF
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Riccardo Giacconi -- Carneades or Archimedes? |
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Monday, 19 July 2010 21:33 |
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It requires "no very vast fund of erudition to know something about him" -- Riccardo Giacconi * -- and yet Italy reportedly relates to the nobelist more as a Manzonian Carneades than an Archimedes. Read the story in Giancarlo Meloni, Giacconi "Il Milite Ignoto della Scienza Italiana."
* Riccardo Giacconi, the first Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, received the Nobel prize in 2002 for his pioneering of the field of X-ray astronomy, discovering compact, variable, X-ray sources including black holes, and leading the development of the current generation of imaging X-ray telescopes. Riccardo Giacconi is a founding member of ISSNAF. |
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On the Air -- Toni Scarpa and Federico Soldani |
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Thursday, 03 June 2010 23:09 |
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 Toni Scarpa *, the Director of NIH Center for Scientific Review (CSR), and Federico Soldani *, Epidemiologist (Neurology and Psychiatry) Division of Epidemiology Office of Surveillance and Biometrics, CDRHUS Food and Drug Administration (FDA), interviewed by Sergio Nava for the weekly program on RadioSole24 Ore, talk about their personal experience overseas, and in Italy, comment on the pessimism that prevails among Italy’s talented researchers, and "brainstorm" on how things might change if…
Audio Here
* Toni Scarpa and Federico Soldani are members of ISSNAF |
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Two Men and a Greenland's Vast Meltwater Lake |
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Thursday, 03 June 2010 00:00 |
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 Geophysicist Marco Tedesco * has been using satellite data and ground based microwave technologies to "spy" on ice-melting trends in Greenland.
A recent fieldwork expedition to Greenland's "melt zone," allowed Tedesco and PhD student Nick Steiner to compare the information assembled in the lab with satellite readings of the depths of Greenland's supraglacial lakes. Their experience is part of the story published in the June issue of National Geographic by Mark Jenkins, himself one of the four companions who set up camp near Ilulissat. Given the proneness of Greenland's meltwater lakes "to draining unexpectedly and quickly," Tedesco and Steiner have used an unmanned research vessel, launched every morning to collect data.
* Professor Marco Tedesco, a member of ISSNAF, is currently a professor at the Dept. Earth
and Atmospheric Sciences,City College of New York - CUNY;
he is also Fellow, at University of Maryland, Baltimore County
and Affiliated, at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
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Wednesday, 02 June 2010 00:00 |
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| "The mice shown here both had a mutant gene named Hoxb8 that originated in bone marrow and caused the mice to groom themselves pathologically, pulling out their hair. The mouse on the left displays hair loss on its chest and flank. After receiving a bone marrow transplant from a normal mouse three months earlier, the mouse at right fully recovered from the pathological grooming mutation and regrew its lost hair. University of Utah geneticist and Nobel Laureate Mario Capecchi says the study is the first to show and direct cause-and-effect link between an immune system defect and a psychiatric disorder." (Credit: Shau-Kwaun Chen, University of Utah) |
The experiment, suggested Capecchi, has important therapeutic implications for disorders such as OCD, depression, autism, Alzheimer's, which tend to be associated with immune deficiencies in humans. Nobody however had previously established a direct connection between microglia -- cells that are derived from bone marrow and are found in the brain -- and mental illness. "That's the surprise" which, says Capecchi, is going to open "the spectrum of possibilities" for researchers looking for new treatments. The study -- Hematopoietic Origin of Pathological Grooming in Hoxb8 Mutant Mice by Shau-Kwaun Chen, Petr Tvrdik, Erik Peden, Scott Cho, Sen Wu, Gerald Spangrude, Mario R. Capecchi * -- is published in "Cell."
* Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 2007 and a Founding Member of ISSNAF
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