FESTIVAL DELL’ASTRONOMIA- IL 30 APRILE A ORATINO (CB)
Si intitola “Il fascino dell’infinitamente piccolo. Cercando l’essenza dell’universo” la quinta conferenza scientifica del Festival dell’Astronomia e dell’Esplorazione del Molise a cui l’Infn partecipa con eventi di divulgazione e con l’installazione MEET LHC allestita per l’inaugurazione del Festival. La conferenza, che si terrà giovedì 30 nel suggestivo borgo medioevale di Oratino, vede la partecipazione di Pasquale di Nezza, fisico dell’Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare e Marco Oriunno, ingegnere nucleare del National Accelerator Laboratory di Stanford (Usa). Conduce i lavori Leonardo De Cosmo, giornalista di Ansa scienza. A serata procede poi con l’osservazione del cielo stellato, dalle 21 in poi presso il Belvedere.
Last few weeks in space for Samantha Cristoforetti. The Italian astronaut of the European Space Agency (ESA), an Air Force Captain, who for nearly six months has been on board the International Space Station (ISS), before concluding her mission is undergoing new tests on blood circulation in microgravity conditions. The tests consist of wearing a number of sensors for measuring blood flow, called plethysmographs, which were made by the Department of Physics and Earth Sciences of the University of Ferrara in collaboration with the INFN Ferrara section, within the scope of the “Drain Brain” project, funded by the Italian Space Agency (ASI).
“These are non-invasive portable instruments - explained Angelo Taibi, INFN researcher and sensor development project manager - which measure the capacitance change associated with changes in blood volume”. And Cristoforetti herself, in her logbook “Outpost 42”, explained the test procedure, which she has already carried out in the past: “Wearing these sensors on my neck, arm and leg, I took a series of breaths at 70% of lung capacity staying still, or stretching and contracting my hand or ankle”. “And, while doing these activities - she added -, the software gave me instructions on when to start to exhale or inhale”. The objective of the tests is to study how the venous return from the head to the heart changes with the loss of gravity. “This is an aspect about which we currently know very little: a better understanding of these circulatory mechanisms could, for example, help to explain certain degenerative brain diseases,” concluded Cristoforetti.
Si rinnova anche quest’anno l’appuntamento con Sperimentando. Inaugura, infatti, domani, venerdì 17 aprile, alle ore 11.00 a Padova, la mostra interattiva di fisica, chimica e scienze, promossa da Comune di Padova, Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN), Università degli Studi di Padova, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR), Associazione per l’Insegnamento della Fisica (AIF) e Direzione Generale Ufficio Scolastico Regionale del Veneto, con il sostegno della Regione del Veneto e della Fondazione Antonveneta. Sperimentando sarà aperta al pubblico, dal 18 aprile al 25 maggio 2015, quest’anno in una nuova sede: il padiglione 6 di PadovaFiere, via Niccolò Tommaseo, 59, ingresso principale, cancello T.
Un evento e un’installazione celebrano il contributo dei ricercatori italiani al CERN di Ginevra, al suo superacceleratore LHC e alla scoperta del bosone di Higgs. Forse non tutti i Padovani sanno che gli scienziati della loro città hanno contribuito in modo determinante all’avventura del superacceleratore LHC del CERN di Ginevra e alla scoperta del bosone di Higgs. 
The prestigious prizes of the High Energy Particle Physics Board (HEPP) of the European Physical Society (EPS) have been awarded and three Italians have received the important international recognition. Guido Altarelli, from the University of Roma Tre, and Giorgio Parisi, from La Sapienza University, both INFN associate professors, won the High Energy and Particle Physics Prize “for having developed the scheme of a probabilistic field theory for the dynamics of quarks and gluons, enabling a quantitative understanding of high-energy collisions between hadrons”. Giovanni Petrucciani, who has worked for a long time at the INFN in Pisa, won the Young Experimental Physicists Prize “for his outstanding contributions to the optimisation of the tracer in the CMS detector at the LHC, to the discovery of the Higgs boson and to the measurement of its properties”. All three prizes, therefore, were awarded for work that has provided a valuable contribution to the LHC project and its experiments.
