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During the "International Day of Women and Girls in Science", established by the General Assembly of the United Nations to
promote and encourage STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) careers, on February the 11th
INFN organised two master classes, one in Cagliari and the other in Cosenza, and “Matinée of Science” at the Frascati National Laboratories (LNF), with a total involvement of almost 400 high school girls.
Organised in collaboration with IPPOG (International Particle Physics Group), theMaster Classes in Cagliari and Cosenza saw the girls engaged in the computer analysis of real scientific data, coming from the LHC accelerator at CERN. At the end of the day's work, the results obtained were compared to those obtained by other students in various universities abroad, during a video conference
moderated by CERN. The INFN Frascati National Laboratories, the “Matinée of Science” was, on the other hand, able to rely on the testimony of a number of scientists, who presented to participants the work and results obtained in their respective research activities at INFN. For the second part of February, moreover, the INFN Naples section, in collaboration with the Neapolitan Women in Science Coordination, has organised a cycle of meetings at the Leonardo da Vinci technical high school, to talk about women and science, stereotypes and gender statistics data.

Links:

Masterclass: http://physicsmasterclasses.org/index.php?cat=women_in_science 

Cagliari: http://divulgazione.dsf.unica.it/wp/international-day-of-women-and-girls-in-science/ 

Cosenza: http://agenda.infn.it/event/mc2017girls

Laboratori di Frascati: http://edu.lnf.infn.it/international-day-of-women-and-girls-in-science-2017/ 

Another Italian is heading one of the four major experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva. Federico Antinori, an INFN researcher, is in fact the new head of ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment), dedicated in particular to the study of quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter believed to have existed soon after the Big Bang. ALICE is an international collaboration of more than 1,500 physicists, engineers and technicians from 37 countries worldwide. Federico Antinori is a researcher of the Padua Section of the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN). A graduate of the University of Genoa with a thesis on the WA82 experiment, implemented at the SPS accelerator at CERN, already in the early 90s he started to study ultra-relativistic nucleus-

nucleus collisions. He has participated in numerous experiments with heavy ions, such as WA85, WA94 and WA97 at CERN. In 1996, he presented the proposal for the NA57 nucleus-nucleus collision experiment, for which he was responsible throughout the life of the detector. The results of NA57, along with those of WA97, contributed to determining the evidence of the existence of quark and gluon plasma, which was announced at CERN in 2000. Antinori has been part of the ALICE collaboration since its inception, acting as deputy director of the experiment 2007-2008, a period in which ALICE passed from the construction to the operational phase. Antinori has held numerous senior management

positions over the years, from 2012 to date, the years in which the experiment produced many of its key results, he has been the coordinator of the physics of ALICE. Antinori takes over from another Italian, Paolo Giubellino, who coordinated ALICE from 2011 to 2016

Elected head of KM3NeT, the international project for the construction of a new generation submarine telescope dedicated
to the study of neutrinos, Mauro Taiuti will coordinate the collaboration of scientists, as well as from INFN, from nearly 40 institutions from 11 countries: Cyprus, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Morocco, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Russia and Spain. Born in Genoa in 1957, Taiuti joined INFN as a researcher in 1984 and since 1999 he has been a professor at the University of Genoa. At the JeffersonLab, in the United States, he studied the effects of nuclear matter on baryon resonances with the AIACE experiment, for which he was national coordinator. Since 2001 he has been participating in the implementation of the telescope for the study of very high energy neutrinos, first in the ANTARES and NEMO experiments and subsequently in KM3NeT, he has been chairman of the Institute Board of the collaboration for four years. Since September 2011, he has been chairman of the INFN National Commission 3, which coordinates the institute's nuclear physics research.
Situated in the Mediterranean Sea, 3500 metres deep off the coast of Capo Passero, Sicily, where it will occupy, in its final configuration, a volume of several cubic kilometres of sea, the KM3NeT will exploit seawater as a detector to study neutrinos coming from distant astrophysical sources, such as supernovae or gamma-ray bursts. A recent research expansion project plans to extend the study to
the oscillations of atmospheric neutrinos, providing the infrastructure with a new detector. KM3NeT will also accommodate instrumentation for environmental studies and monitoring, making it a true multidisciplinary laboratory in the depths of the seas.

Also galaxy clusters shine with gamma light. This is the conclusion reached by a group of researchers from INAF, INFN, the Universities of Rome Tre, Turin, Aachen, Manchester, Beijing and the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), in analysing the data collected over six and a half years of the NASA Fermi space telescope mission, in which Italy is participating with the Italian Space Agency (ASI), INAF and INFN. From the study of galaxy clusters, astronomers obtain crucial information on high-energy photon emission and particle acceleration mechanisms. For this reason, they have been observed in

all regions of the electromagnetic spectrum with the exception, until today, of the gamma band. The team used the observations made by the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) in the very high energy gamma ray band, the processing of which led to the identification of different types of astrophysical

sources. In particular, the aim of the study was to identify the gamma radiation produced by galaxy   clusters, analysing the gamma radiation not associated with known sources. Most of the emissions detected by Fermi are produced by Active Galactic Nuclei inside or in close proximity to the cluster. However, there seems to be a second component which, in terms of spatial and energy distribution, could be associated with the cluster itself, the dark matter it consists of, rather than with the objects it contains. The study, of statistical nature, was published in January in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement: the results presented do not yet provide a definitive answer but definitely indicate the direction in which to move to understand it.