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October 2012

Rules and technological innovation: the Fastskin Revolution

Ever since the ancient Olympics athletes have tried in all ways and with all means to prevail over their competitors in sporting competitions. Some of the methods – for example psychophysical training and diets - have always been considered acceptable without any limits or checks and without establishing whether or not and to what extent they might affect the athlete’s physical or mental health. Other methods have been either tolerated or prohibited.

Gurdon and Yamanaka, the research victory

The announcement that the Nobel Prizes for Physiology and Medicine have been awarded to Sir John Gurdon (Cambridge) and Shinya Yamanaka (Kyoto) comes as no surprise. For decades now, genetic reprogramming of terminally differentiated somatic cells ("adult" cells) has been a hot topic and one of the most significant life science research themes.

Felix Baumgartner jumps from space

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Titolo originale: 
Felix Baumgartner Jump Live Sunday 14 October - Review Jump
Soggetto: 
To 120.000 and back, Felix Baumgartner jumps from space landing safely
Data: 
14 October, 2012

Felix Baumgartner landed on Earth after a 24 mile jump from the stratosphere, record-breaking feat that may also have marked the world's first supersonic skydive.

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The fourth paradigm

The EBI, the European Bioinformatics Institute, is a research center of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) based at the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus in Hinxton near Cambridge, Great Britain. Its mission is to provide, in a strictly free manner, data and more generally IT services to the entire scientific community. EBI's activity, therefore, is to collect, preserve, and then distribute the data obtained by researchers working in different fields of life sciences; anywhere from basic biology to clinical medicine to ecology. Well, in three years between 2008

Moderate effectiveness

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A group of researchers from the University of Rochester Medical Center found that the effectiveness of US influenza vaccines during the 2010-2011 season was moderate, even if all 3 vaccine strains were well matched to circulating strains.

The authors of the work, published on Clinical Infectious Diseases, performed a case-control study on around 5000 patients with flu-like illness during the 2010–2011 flu season. The estimated efficacy of either inactivated or live-attenuated vaccine ranged from 69% in children aged 6 months-8 years to 38% in adults older than 65 years.

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The CNR opens its doors

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The Chairman of the Italian National Research Council (CNR), Luigi Nicolais has signed up to the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (Berlin Declaration) which represents the European "charter" governing adherence to open access to research materials funded by public moneys. 

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Read time: 2 mins

The largest number in the universe

Googol. It is a large number, unimaginably large. It is easy to write in exponential format: 10100, an extremely compact method, to easily represent the largest numbers (and also the smallest numbers). With the smallest of effort, you can also present it in the full format: a “one” followed by one hundred “zeros”. However, in its exponential format, it can be easily read; in the full format, you may loose count of the amount of times you need to use the term, “billion” in “ten billion of billions

A research agency

When we consider the factors that shape the future, both on an individual and collective basis, such as knowledge, training, innovation, we must ensure good sense, analysis skills, independent judgment, humility, courage, imagination. The future scientific policies of a country must take lead from these aspects and not from the opinions of individual entities, immediate expectations, half-hearted motivations. They must also be able to rely on significant resources.