È “La Stampa”, bellezza!

Non ci si può credere.

Ideona per il piano casa

Maggiori dettagli qui.

Made of Wood(y)

“The day I found out he could handle my account I was so thrilled I cut my wife’s head out of our wedding photo and put his in.”

La vicenda Madoff raccontata da Woody Allen sul New Yorker.  (Keywords: Bernie Madoff; Lobsters; Reincarnation; Attacks; Fraud; Ponzi Schemes; Investment)

Passera d’Italia

“Mi sembra una picconata alla Banca d’Italia un po’ eccessiva, pero’ noi siamo pronti a dare la piu’ completa collaborazione”. Lo ha detto l’amministratore delegato di Intesa-Sanpaolo Corrado Passera, rispondendo a Palermo ai giornalisti che gli chiedevano un parere sull’eventuale osservatorio delle prefetture sul credito come organo di vigilanza. “Siamo pronti a dare la massima collaborazione – ha detto Passera - a chiunque verra’ incaricato dal governo e dal Parlamento di svolgere ruoli di questo genere. Ma siamo un po’ preoccupati perche’ ci sono gia’ varie autorita’ che vigilano sulle nostre autorita‘” (Adnkronos).

Non so se il lapsus (“le nostre autorità” al posto di “le nostre attività”) sia di Passera o – com’è più probabile – del redattore che ha elaborato il lancio d’agenzia, fatto sta che, vista la situazione delle partecipazioni in Bankitalia, l’errore è esilarante.

L’impronta di Jesus

A ogni cosa la sua impronta. E se da una parte Gesù avrebbe lasciato la sua sul sudario, dall’altra la mitica affissione di Toscani ha lasciato il segno.

Ciò che è curioso però è che ora la Robe di Kappa, l’azienda torinese dei jeans dello scandalo (scandaloooo!), diventa sponsor dell’ostensione della sindone del 2010.

Millennium bag

Dal Corriere della sera di oggi, p.8:

peptidi per tutti

Peptides-on-demand: McGill researcher’s radical new green chemistry makes the impossible possible

Fast and simple ‘enabling technology’ being offered to the world on open basis

McGill University chemistry professor Chao-Jun (C.J.) Li is known as one of the world leading pioneers in green chemistry, an entirely new approach to the science which eschews the use of toxic, petrochemical-based solvents in favour of basic substances like water and new ways of making molecules.

The environmental benefits of the green approach are obvious and significant, but following the road less travelled is also paying off in purely scientific terms. With these alternative methods, Li and his colleagues have discovered an entirely new way of synthesizing peptides using simple reagents, a process that would be impossible in classical chemistry. Their results will be published Feb. 27 in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS),

Peptides are short oligomer and polymer substances made up of two or more amino acids linked in a chain. Proteins – also known as polypeptides – are themselves composed of longer chains of peptides. Peptides are enormously important to biological and proteomic research, but classical chemistry provides no easy way to synthesize them, making the potential impact of this discovery very significant.

“Currently, to generate peptides you must use a peptide synthesizer, an expensive piece of high-tech equipment,” explained Li, Canada Research Chair in Green Chemistry. “You need to purchase every single separate amino acid unit that makes up the peptide, and feed them into the machine one by one, which then assembles them. Every time you need a new peptide, you need to synthesize it individually from scratch.”

Li’s new process, by contrast, allows researchers to construct a single, simple “skeleton” peptide which can be modified into any other peptide needed with the addition of a simple reagent.

“If you want to make one peptide or 20 or even 100, you just use a different reagent each time,” Li said. “If you use 20 different reagents, you get 20 different peptides.”

“This could never have been discovered using the classical form of chemistry,” he continued. “Every amino acid unit is very similar to every other one, and classical chemistry simply cannot differentiate one from the other.”

The new method is considerably less expensive than traditional techniques, and can readily be adopted by labs anywhere in the world, Li said.

“This is really an enabling new technology,” he added, “and since McGill has decided not to patent it, we’re making our method available to everyone. We are paying the journal’s open access fee, so anyone in the world can access the paper.”

da Eurekalert!

scor(e)poro

Ma è mai possibile che Rovati con questa storia dello scorporo della rete Telecom si metta sempre nei pasticci?

Hangman, hangman, hold it a little while, I think I see my brother coming, riding many a mile

Malaysian twins spared death row

Malaysian identical twin brothers have escaped hanging for drug trafficking as a court failed to decide which brother was the criminal, and cleared both.

A judge in the capital, Kuala Lumpur, said the case was unique and she could not send the wrong person to his death.

In 2003 police arrested one brother found driving drugs to a house. The second twin arrived soon afterwards and was also arrested.

Neither officers nor a DNA test could identify which twin owned the drugs.

Sathis and Sabarish Raj, 27, cried in court when they heard the judge say that the prosecution had failed to prove which twin had been arrested first with a car containing 166kg of cannabis and almost 2kg of raw opium.

According to the New Straits Times, the judge told the court: “I can’t be calling the wrong twin to enter his defence. I can’t be sending the wrong person to the gallows.”

Execution is mandatory for convicted drugs traffickers in Malaysia.

where no dog has gone before

Su Italia Oggi ampio spazio stamattina è dedicato alla saga di Star Trek-cani. Una volta destinate allo spazio profondo le ceneri di Gene Roddenberry e consorte, la sceneggiatura e il cast devono passare il vaglio di Napolitano (che pare sia un lontano parente del capitano Picard).

Che dice il giornale? beh, il titolo dell’episodio doppio non lascia dubbi e varia nella sfumatura tra la seconda puntata: “Treccani, Napolitano boccia Pera” e la prima, firmata dal direttore: “Napolitano silura Pera“. Io proponevo anche: “Napolitano smaterializza Pera”.

Tutto questo per dire che rimane solo Amato. Resistance is futile.