science

Intimate partner violence against migrant women

Cristina Da RoldLascia un commento

Reblogged from Science on the Net

In the European Region, one in four women has been a victim of physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner in her lifetime, and one in ten has experienced non-partner violence. Violence between partners is endemic and widespread, but for immigrant women it is even worse, especially because of the conditions in which they often live in the host country.

In Spain, for instance, a cross-sectional study published in 2012 showed an intimate partner violence (IPV) prevalence of 27.9 percent in migrants, compared to 14.3 percent in Spanish women. But it is certainly not the only example. 43 percent of Roma women experienced physical violence and 36 percent suffered from psychological violence. At the same time, official data on IPV among ethnic minority women are often lacking, due to huge barriers that preclude immigrant women to report episodes of gender inequality.

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The first Italian to grab the Lise Meitner Prize

Cristina Da RoldLascia un commento

Reblogged from Science on the Net

For the first time the prestigious Lise Meitner Prize, which is awarded every two years by the Nuclear Physics Division of the European Physics Society (EPS), has been given to an Italian researcher: Paolo Giubellino, director of research and coordinator of the INFN international ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) at CERN in Geneva. Actually, the winner is ALICE itself, because Giubellino was just one of the four winners of the prize and they are all involved in ALICE. The other three are Johanna Stachel (Physikalisches Institut der Universität Heidelberg, Germany), Peter Braun-Munzinger (GSI, Germany), and Jürgen Schukraft (CERN, Switzerland). But why ALICE was rewarded? As Giubellino tells us, there are two different reasons for considering ALICE a flagship of global research: its contribution in clarifying the history of the universe and the structure of the matter.

Starting from the latter, ALICE allowed to elucidate the mechanisms of the so-called strong interaction, which is one of the four fundamental forces, the one that ties together the parts that make up the atomic nucleus, i.e., proton-proton, but also quark-quark.

“The point is that the strong interaction between two particles, unlike for example the gravitational force, increases with the distance between them,” Giubellino explains. “Therefore, if one attempts to free a quark by separating it from others, the energy of the interaction becomes so large that eventually it is enough to create a quark-antiquark pair. This feature is called confinement, and it means that we never can observe quarks if they are isolated but only when they are bound inside hadrons. However, the fact that force grows with distance indicates an alternative way to pursue the study of free quarks: if one can take many works and squeeze them together in a small volume, they will be very close to one another and therefore experience very little interaction point. They will be free, albeit in a small volume. How do we obtain this? Using the Large Hadron Collider.

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Juno will study chameleon neutrinos

Cristina Da RoldLascia un commento

Reblogged from Science on the Net

Last week in China was launched Juno, an international experiment that aims to reveal once and for all the mysteries of neutrinos, together with two other future experiments planned worldwide, Hyper-Kamiokandein Japan and LBNF at FERMILAB, and Italy could not miss. Hundreds of scientists from around the world gathered in these days at the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) in Beijing, in order to give birth to an international collaboration for the construction of a gigantic underground neutrino detector with liquid scintillator, which exploits a technology that is similar to that used by the experiment Borexino at Gran Sasso National Laboratories. We have talked with Gioacchino Ranucci of INFN, deputy coordinator of the collaboration. JUNO’s collaboration, in addition to China and Italy, also includes Czech Republic, France, Finland, Germany, Russia and the United States.

“Juno’s goal is to study the properties of neutrinos, that transform themselves into one another, which makes them like chameleons” said Ranucci. Today, we have three families of neutrinos, electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos and tau neutrinos, and what we observe is the transformation of one into the other, which is called “property of oscillation.” Certainly, this property is adjusted by a matrix, the mixing matrix, which gives the parameters expressed in trigonometric form, for instance as angles that, together with the mass differences between each couple of neutrino types, determine the probability of transformation of a neutrino from a family to another. It is therefore precisely the properties we want to investigate.”

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Horizon 2020 and Climate: which Work Program for Europe

Cristina Da RoldLascia un commento

Reblogged from Science on the Net

Waste. Water. Green Economy. Those are the main focuses of the recent Horizon 2020 Work Programmethat has been adopted on December 10th 2013 and definitively updated last July 22nd with the parts that relate to 2015. Within this Work Programme, Europe has set its objectives concerning climate action, environment, resource efficiency and raw materials. The estimated total budget including horizontal activities will be about 348 million of euro for 2014 and 377 million for the following year. The aim is to fill the gaps in the knowledge base necessary to understand changes in the environment, policies and methods.

Based on current trends, the equivalent of more than two planet Earths will be needed by 2050 to support the growing global population. It is evident that it implies a better use of our resources in order to decouple our economic growth. The project provides three calls, concerning the three main focuses – waste, water, green economy – and each call contemplates many other smaller calls concerning these three specific areas. Let us see more in detail.

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