Zanichelli Aula di scienze • 23rd January 2025

La pericolosa “pazzia” dei cervi

Tra il 1967 e il 1979 una malattia mai registrata fino a quel momento aveva colpito 53 cervi muli (Odocoileus hemionus) tenuti in cattività in alcuni centri di ricerca in Colorado e Wyoming, negli Stati Uniti centro-occidentali. Venne chiamata sindrome del deperimento cronico (CWD, dall’inglese chronic wasting disease) o colloquialmente malattia dei cervi zombi. Gli animali colpiti diventavano letargici, digrignavano i denti, perdevano rapidamente peso e nell’arco di alcuni mesi morivano.

Nel 1...

Nature Italy • 18th April 2024

Will the Einstein Telescope be split in two?

The competition between Italy and the Netherlands to host the next generation gravitational wave detector might end in a draw if a new proposal to build two detectors instead of one gains momentum.Due to become operational by 2035, the Einstein Telescope was originally proposed as a triangle with 10-kilometer sides located nearly 300 metres underground to reduce noise sources. Around each vertex there would be a pair of V-shaped interferometers, optimized to detect low and high...

Nature Italy • 27th February 2024

A bridge too far? Messina Strait project could finally join Sicily to the mainland

Air View of the strait of Messina, that divides Sicily (on the right) from the Italian peninsula. Credit: Andrea Colantoni/Moment Open/Getty Images.A plan has been relaunched for a long-span suspension bridge crossing the Messina Strait to join Sicily and the mainland, an idea first mooted 60 years ago1. In 2012 a project was ready and some preparatory works were underway, but it was halted because of budget constraints.The publicly-owned company overseeing the project, Stretto...

Nature Italy • 31st October 2023

Weighing the risk at Campi Flegrei

A 4.3 magnitude earthquake hit Campi Flegrei, just west of Naples, on 27 September. It was the region’s strongest shock in 40 years, and part of a seismic sequence that has been rattling Campi Flegrei for several weeks. The government has earmarked €52 million for risk assessment and prevention.The seismic sequence...

Nature Italy • 1st September 2023

What scientists know about the blue crab invasion

The northern Adriatic Sea has been invaded by Callinectes Sapidus, a blue crab species native to the east coast of the United States. It is an adaptable species that reproduces very quickly, and it is threatening the clam farming industry of the Po River delta in the Veneto and Emilia-Romagna regions, which normally produces about 15,000 tonnes of clams per year. The Italian government has allocated nearly €3 million for the capture and disposal of the species, authorizing fish...

Nature Italy • 9th June 2023

Examining the role of climate change in the Emilia-Romagna floods

Operators of the Italian Red Cross and firefighters seek residents blocked in their homes on May 25, 2023 in Conselice, Italy, after heavy rains caused flooding across Italy's Emilia Romagna region. Credit: Antonio Masiello/ Stringer/ Getty Images News. After severe floods hit the Emilia-Romagna region in May, killing 17 people and displacing 37,000 more, questions emerged about the causative factors. Were the heavy rainfalls that caused the floods exceptional events, or were pr...

Nature Italy • 19th May 2023

Italy’s new seismic hazard map is back to square one

The tortuous path of the new Italian seismic hazard map has hit another roadblock. Nature Italy has learned that the National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology (INGV) has completed the internal evaluation of the map, and that the outcome was negative. This means the new map has effectively been rejected by the same institute whose scientists have worked on it for more than seven years. INGV was tasked in 2015 by the Civil Protection to develop a new map that would update...

Nature Italy • 5th April 2023

Scientists protest Italy’s ban on cultivated meat

The Italian government has approved a draft bill banning the production and commercialization of cultivated meat for human and animal consumption. The bill sets out to preserve the Italian food and culinary heritage, to protect human health and the national agri-food industry, and follows a petition launched by the national farmers’ association Coldiretti against ‘synthetic foods’ that collected nearly half a million signatures.Cultivated meat is obtained by taking fat and muscle cells from live...

Nature Italy • 26th February 2023

Sardinia’s push to host the next big gravitational wave detector

When he visits Lula, a small mining village in the heart of Sardinia, physicist, Alessandro Cardini, tells the story of the Swiss and French villages around CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Until the 1950s they had fewer than 1,000 inhabitants each. Today their populations are more than ten times bigger, and the area hosts a vibrant international community. Cardini, a physicist at the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) in Cagliari, explains to the...

Nature Italy • 21st December 2022

What the fusion breakthrough in the US means for Europe

On 5 December at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, in the US, 192 laser beams hit a small capsule filled with deuterium and tritium housed in a golden cylinder, causing what physicists call ‘ignition’. For the first time, the amount of energy produced by a controlled nuclear fusion reaction was larger than the energy carried by the lasers used to initiate it. The target absorbed 2.05 megajoules of energy, emitting 3.15 megajoules in return, a 54% energy gain. Why does...

Nature Italy • 29th June 2022

Internal rumblings over Italy’s new seismic map

Seismologists often say that earthquakes do not kill people, buildings do, when they collapse because of a shock that they were not designed to withstand. An earthquake-prone country such as Italy needs a reliable seismic risk map that indicates what kind of earthquakes can be expected in each area, for authorities to use in designing a building code. Better information reduces the risk of tragedies such as the Irpinia 1980 earthquake, that killed almost 3,000 people; the one in...