www.fips.fi/dataset.php

The measurement data was collected and documented by K. Hämäläinen, L. Harhanen, A. Kallonen, A. Kujanpää, E. Niemi and S. Siltanen. Our group used the walnut data for testing several tomographic reconstruction algorithms, as you can see in the homepage. You are free to use the dataset for scientific purposes, but please take care to cite the authors.

Have fun reconstructing!

L'articolo The "Helsinki walnut" dataset sembra essere il primo su Paola Elefante.

Maybe you have never heard of him, but Majorana was a gifted Italian physicist who had produced great theoretical results in particle physics and quantum mechanics. The discovery of neutrinos was bestowed on him and he speculated on the existence of Majorana fermions (evidence found in 2012), just to give you a hint of his merits. He studied Physics in Rome together with Segrè (Nobel prize in Physics in 1959) and Enrico Volterra.

He showed to be a bright science scholar already at the age of 5. During his university studies, he met Enrico Fermi, who showed him some of his current particle physics research, including a novel table summing up some particle potentials (the Fermi potential) he calculated. The day afterwards, Majorana went back to Fermi, asking him to show that table again, since the previous day he could only spot it for few seconds. He took a piece of paper from his pocket, with the same numbers on it: in the previous 24 hours he had calculated the same numbers and wanted to check that Fermi's table was correct.

He graduated at 23, under supervision of Fermi (of course!). Apparently he was no piece of cake: he was so surly and stiff that his colleagues named him "the great inquisitor". At some point he started working in isolation in his flat, warding off visitors and letters by writing on the envelope "Rejected for death of the receiver". After refusing professorship positions from Cambridge and Yale, he became full professor at University of Naples. In 1938 he suddenly disappeared after withdrawing a significant amount of money and sending some mysterious notes to his family and his closest friends. The money withdrawal is a clue fighting against the suicide hypothesis, together with some testimonies of his presence in Naples after the day of the disappearance.

Some say he had a mystical crisis and retired in a monastery for the rest of his life. The famous Italian writer Leonardo Sciascia wrote a book (*) about his disappearance. The most popular theory is that he was scared from his scientific discoveries and their possible social consequences. Let's not forget he lived during Mussolini's time and the dictator was very attentive towards discoveries that could help his war. The latest investigation of Rome's district place him in Venezuela during the 1950s. He took the name of Bini and lived there as an Italian immigrant. The proofs are a picture of Mr. Bini that has perfect correspondence with Majorana's facial traits, a testimony by another Italian immigrant who met him and a postcard from Quirino Majorana, Ettore's uncle and brilliant physicist himself, addressed to a certain W. G. Conklin and found in Bini's car. Unfortunately there are no other traces of Majorana after 1959 and a big part of the mystery remains. Why has he left? Why not coming back after the II World War?

If this story made you curious, you can read more in the book referenced below.

(*) I could not find an English edition, but if you can read Italian you can search for Sciascia's book. An English language biography can be found here.

L'articolo Ettore Majorana: is the mystery solved? sembra essere il primo su Paola Elefante.

Samantha Cristoforetti

Engineer, air force captain, but mostly astronaut! She is the first Italian woman ever to visit space and she was selected by ESA after beating 8500 candidates. Among the cool things she is experimenting on the IIS, I name the tests to 3D-print spare parts for the station itself, for the ship to be independent from Earth in case of damages.

Samantha is quite a girl. On the ESA webpage she lists Chinese language among her interests. Maybe Italian, English, German, French and Russian are not enough?!

If you want to follow her mission, check out her Twitter account: she's very active there!

Fabiola Gianotti

Not only she was coordinating the gigantic project - with 3000 scientists involved - that led to the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, but last year she became the new CERN director (first women, of course). Since having a doctorate in Physics did not seem enough, Gianotti decided to graduate also as a professional piano player.

If you speak Italian, I recommend to listen to this interview to Gianotti.

They are the latest examples of a long tradition of Italian women in science (*). If you do not know the social situation for women in Italy, you cannot fully appreciate such achievements. Despite being part of Europe, Italy is far away from reaching gender equality. Some figures (**):

• a study of 2009 shows that almost all women who leave their jobs after having a child are fired.
• a study of 2013 (page 74) shows that women with small kids (preschoolers) have 30% less chance of finding a job than women with older or no kids.
• Italy's global gender gap index is shameful.
• in 2013, a woman was killed in Italy every 2,5 days.
• in 2012, only 47,1% of women had a job (the average in Europe is 58,6%!).

This numbers are just devoted to underline the kind of obstacles that an Italian woman has to overcome to reach achievements as Cristoforetti and Gianotti, in fields who appear to be the reigns of men only. I think we should be twice as proud as we are of them, and I am sure they will set a great example for the current young generation of Italian women.

(*) I suggest to read this amusing article.

(**) Source is ISTAT (the Italian National Institute of Statistics).

L'articolo Italian women in science who made us proud in 2014 sembra essere il primo su Paola Elefante.

Stem cells and cancer

Stem cells are defined through three properties: (1) they can regenerate and repair themselves, (2) they are unspecialised but (3) can generate specialised cells. Even though stem cells are relatively few in all tissues (**), they play the very important role of "repairing" organs. During such process of division, there is a chance something goes wrong and a defective cell is generated.

Tomasetti - Vogelstein's study

The authors prove for many organs that there is a strong correlation (Spearman's rho 0.81) between number of stem cells divisions and lifetime risk. To underline the result, they show the following example:

Consequences

If further investigation confirmed this study, early diagnosis of cancer would result fundamental to save people's lives. As I discussed previously in the case of breast cancer, X-rays used in CT scans are considered one of the environmental factors causing cancer. Early diagnosis may translate into relatively frequent scans, hence low radiation dose becomes a central issue. The research group I participate in, develops algorithms to reproduce nice imaging outcomes with few measurement data (that is, lower radiation doses).

I really hope to read soon updates on this exciting research!

(*) To check other sources about the study: Time, The Guardian,

(**) Tomasetti and Vogelstein collected such datas in this appendix.

Featured image is courtesy of The Telegraph.

L'articolo What if getting cancer is mostly about bad luck? sembra essere il primo su Paola Elefante.

This episode made me think of another persistent debate going on in the recent years: the one about vaccines. Usually I am all about freedom of choice, but I think freedom is nice as long as it does not hurt others. The vaccine connection to diseases as autism, was brought to light by an impostor and based on absolutely no scientific investigations. Let's spend a couple of words on such Andrew Wakefield: not only his license was withdrawn, but he was found guilty of physical abuse on mentally-ill children and - hear hear - of corruption from an insurance company.

For some reason that I really do not catch, many people like this kind of conspiracy theories even when logic and facts are totally against them (I mean, they even proved the real conspiracy goes in the other sense!), and this story of harmful vaccination spread on. Problem is, such attitude can be really harmful sometime. Several studies have shown that anti-vaccine people are contributing to the spread of diseases (*). There is even an interactive map showing such damage in the world (I am happy to be in the blank space). After Wakefield's revelations, several articles where written supporting his theories BUT mainly by journalists and editorialists.

As a positive-minded scientist, I always wonder what we could have done more. How can we teach people about our methods, so that they can trust them more? How can we influence more politics, so that we do not get thrown out of the picture as it happened for the EU Scientific Adviser role? Is science too far from people and do we have the responsibility to communicate more with the press and the people, so that our research is more open?

(*) See for instance The Lancet (1998), this Time interview to Dr. Offit, this paper from the scientific journal "Vaccine".

The featured image is downloaded from this Reddit channel.

L'articolo Science to masses: why it doesn't work? sembra essere il primo su Paola Elefante.

I opened my favourite online news website last week, to find out a link to a piece of news titled about a mathematician called Alexander Grothendieck passing away. At first - I feel ashamed - I thought "who is this guy?", then I made a quick search on Google to find out that he was quite a character, not to mention a Fields medalist (wooops).

On his Wikipedia page we find some interesting facts on his bio, such as the fact he have been stateless most of his life, he left a prestigious academic position over a dispute on military fundings and he retired at the age of 60 and live in complete isolation until his death.

As a mathematician, Grothendieck published important works in functional analysis and at the time of his Ph.D. studies he was supervised by no less than Schwartz,but his major contributions belong to algebraic geometry. His most famous paper is the seminal work Sur quelques points d'algèbre homologique (1957), of which you can find a "simplified" and English version here. According to reviews, in such work Grothendieck managed to rise homological theory to a superior level of abstraction - if this is even possible.

A pacifist and a social activist, extremely focused on ethics and the serving purpose of science and research, not to mention a math lover. If you, as myself, got curious from these fragments of his life and powerful personality, I invite you to read this very well-written biography:

As If Summoned from the Void: The Life of  Alexander Grothendieck: part I, part II.

L'articolo Grothendieck: quite someone in Mathematics sembra essere il primo su Paola Elefante.