Personal tools
Document Actions
News from ICTP 111 - Dateline
Slippery Science
Erio
Tosatti, former ICTP acting director and a condensed matter
physicist at ICTP and SISSA, published an article in the December
edition of Nature Materials exploring why cars tend to
slip on wet roads. We all know that wet roads are dangerous roads.
In fact, most of us have been terrified by the experience. But
scientists have never been able to devise a convincing quantitative
explanation as to why this occurs. Tosatti and his colleagues
showed, through a series of simple but illuminating calculations,
that wet road surfaces created during and after rainstorms yield
a 20-percent reduction in friction, matching in theory what has
been observed in practice. In scientific terms, by making the
surface effectively less rough, water on wet roads reduces the
tires' deformation and decreases the viscoelastic damping of the
mechanical energy in the rubber. Simply put, the results can be
harrowing. For additional information, see Nature Materials,
doi:10.1038/nmat1255. The findings were also reported by ScientificAmerican.com
(www.sciam.com) on 8 November,
and ABC News in the United States on 24 November 2004.
The New York Times on Strings
A feature article in The New York Times (7 December 2004) examined the state of string theory 20 years after the concept was first introduced as a theoretical construct that depicted the make-up of the universe as intertwined strings and not single points. The scientists quoted in the article have been among the most active participants in ICTP high energy physics research and training activities over the past two decades: former SISSA (International School for Advanced Studies) director Daniele Amati; Dirac Medallists Michael Green (Cambridge), David Gross (Kavli Institute, Santa Barbara), John Schwarz (Caltech) and Edward Witten (Institute of Advanced Study), and course directors Robbert Dijkgraaf (Amsterdam), Brian Greene (Columbia), Juan Maldacena (Institute of Advanced Study) and Cumrun Vafa (Harvard). Of the 24 scientists mentioned in the article, 19 have visited ICTP.
Nobel Prizes
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has announced that the Nobel Prize in Physics 2004 has been awarded to: David J. Gross, Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA; H. David Politzer, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA; and Frank Wilczek, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, USA, "for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction."
David Gross won the ICTP Dirac Medal in 1988 and Frank Wilczek won the Medal in 1994. Gross has been conference lecturer at several high energy physics research and training activities from 1989 to 2001. For further information, please see nobelprize.org.
In the News
ICTP director K.R. Sreenivasan published an editorial in Science examining the impact of ICTP over the past 40 years and the Centre's evolving strategies for improving science in the developing world. For the full text, see the 19 November 2004 issue. The November 2004 edition of Cern Courier published a 3-page feature article examining ICTP's accomplishments over the past 40 years, as well as an editorial by ICTP director K.R. Sreenivasan on its next 40 years. Physics World's staff writer Edwin Cartlidge, who visited ICTP just before the 40th anniversary conference, has written a feature article examining the Centre's wide-ranging programmes and impact. The article appears in the October edition of the magazine.
ICTP in Beijing
Sandro Maria Radicella, head of the ICTP Aeronomy and
Radiopropagation Laboratory (ARPL), represented Italy at the Workshop
on Ionospheric Research for Satellite Navigation and Positioning.
The workshop, organised under a Bilateral Agreement on Science
and Technology between China and Italy, was held between 29 November
and 1 December in Beijing, China. Radicella spoke about ionospheric
research at ICTP. He was joined by Roberto Coisson, Scientific
Counsellor for the Italian Embassy in Beijing.
2004 ICTP Prize
Bernardo Gabriel Mindlin, Department of Physics, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, has been named the winner of the 2004 ICTP Prize. The 2004 Prize is being given in honour of Arthur Taylor Winfree, a distinguished theoretical biologist and Regents Professor at the University of Arizona, Tucson, USA, who died in autumn 2002. Gabriel Mindlin is a theorist who has made important contributions to the fundamental, applied and interdisciplinary aspects of nonlinear dynamical systems. In his publications, which include over 50 well-cited papers and several books, he has made original contributions to such fields as diverse as solar activity, lasers, neural modelling, speech recognition and bird songs. The award's ceremony, which will take place on 17 May 2005, will feature a lecture by Mindlin. For additional information, see www.ictp.it.
Awards and Accomplishments
Massimo Altarelli has been promoted to the post of senior scientific director of Elettra Synchrotron Light Laboratory in Trieste. Altarelli, who came to Trieste in 1999 under a joint appointment with Elettra and ICTP, had previously worked at the physics department of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA; the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart, Germany; and the High Magnetic Field Laboratory and European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France.
Filippo Giorgi, a member of the ICTP Physics of Weather and Climate group, has been included in the Institute for Scientific Information's (ISI) list of Highly Cited Researchers. Based on ISI's citation index, the world's most authoritative index for measuring the impact of publications, Giorgi is included among the 295 most cited researchers in geoscience, placing him in the top 0.5 percent of the most cited researchers in his field.
Le Dung Trang, head of the ICTP Mathematics group, has received an honorary degree of sciences from the Vietnamese Academy of Sciences and Technology (VAST). Lê Dung Tráng has been recognised for his contributions to the development of education and science in Vietnam. The awards ceremony took place in Vietnam in December 2004.
Giuliano F. Panza, head of ICTP's Structure and Non-linear Dynamics of the Earth (SAND) group and professor of seismology at the University of Trieste, has been awarded the Central European Initiative (CEI) Medal of Honour for his "eminent services to the organisation" as chairperson of the CEI Committee of Earth Sciences. The award's ceremony was held in December in Trieste.
Jagadish Shukla, who was instrumental in the creation of ICTP's weather and climate research activities and then led the initiative from its inception in 1988 until 1997, has received the American Meteorological Society's (AMS) 2005 Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal. Shukla is currently professor of physics at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, and head of the Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies (COLA) in Calverton, Maryland (see "Profile", News from ICTP, Autumn 2004). The award, which represents the highest honour that AMS gives to atmospheric scientists, took place in January 2005 at the Society's 85th Annual Meeting, in San Diego, California, USA.
Alexei Smirnov, staff scientist, ICTP's High Energy,
Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics group, has been named a Humboldt
Research Fellow, one of Germany's most prestigious awards in science.
Smirnov was honoured for his lifetime achievements in physics.
The award enables outstanding scientists and scholars from abroad
to spend up to six months at the Humboldt Institute to carry out
research on projects of their own choosing. Smirnov will begin
his fellowship this year.
Back to Contents
Forward to Monitor
