For some years now, the task of promoting the relationship between Scientific Research and Society has been increasingly attributed to Public Research Bodies.
This new perspective, which goes under the definition of "Third Mission" and also involves managerial and organizational aspects, recognizes the role of institutions for the dissemination of scientific and technological culture, as well as for the creation of an integrated strategy where research, dissemination and communication converge in a single project.
In the current "knowledge society", in fact, a public understanding of science allows individuals to improve personal decisions and daily life, but also an improvement in economic performance and public policies to the benefit of the collective national well-being.
INGV, the Public Research Body which is entrusted with the surveillance of the seismicity of the national territory and of the activity of the Italian volcanoes, promotes different types of communication interventions aimed at citizens, able to favor the diffusion of the results of the research activity so that these contribute to the increase of knowledge of natural phenomena such as, for example, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
The communication of science to society does not only take place in the fields of teaching and dissemination but seeks a wider audience in order to develop an approach where institutions assume a fundamental objective alongside the traditional ones of scientific and technological research: dialogue with society non-specialist civilian.
This very important theme was, among others, the subject of the annual conference of "Women and Science", dedicated to Environment and Climate: the present for the future. We could not miss the appointment to which, in this number of INGVNewsletter, the interview with Giuliana Rubbia, physicist and vice president of the Association is dedicated. We will also talk about the environment and society in the interview with Fabrizia Buongiorno, geologist of the Institute, who illustrates ARCH, the Horizon 2020 program created to preserve the cultural heritage of historic areas from the risks of natural disasters.
Guest of honor this month will be the biologist Carmelo Isgrò, Director of the MuMa - Museo del Mare in Milazzo, who in 2017 decided to build a meeting place between art and science around the skeleton of the sperm whale Siso, recovered on the beaches of Capo Milazzo after being entangled in an illegal fishing net off the Aeolian Islands.
Geological memory and human memory are marked by very different times and it is also for this reason that it is important to know the history of one's own territory.
In this issue Dante Mariotti, a researcher from the Bologna Section, will talk about the 1908 Calabrian Messina earthquake-tsunami, one of the greatest catastrophes that hit our country in the last century.
On the other hand, the discovery of a now extinct submarine volcanic complex in the Tyrrhenian Sea, just fifteen kilometers from the Tyrrhenian coast of Calabria, is very recent. Riccardo De Ritis, researcher at the Institute and first author of the research that led to this important result, will tell us .
The seismologist Lauro Chiaraluce, on the other hand, will tell us about the excellence of INGV's scientific research recognized by a ranking of the best scientists in the world drawn up by the journal Plos Biology.
Finally, we will visit the petrology and volcanology laboratory in the new branch of Pisa, where researchers try to reconstruct the physical processes that occur before and during an eruption, analyze physical and chemical aspects inherent in the genesis and ascent of magmas, and much more .
This is just a preview of the November Newsletter. Enjoy the reading!