The Italian science news that shaped 2021

Leggi in italiano

The year 2021 began with Italy in the grip of its second COVID-19 wave. In the first days of January, the country was recording on average more than 15,000 new cases and more than 450 deaths each day, as the vaccine rollout started. Despite early surveys showing high vaccine hesitance, Italy would become one of the European countries with the highest vaccination rate.

Science funding in the recovery plan

While the country was in semi-lockdown, the government approved the first draft of the National recovery and resilience plan (PNRR). Out of €209 billion from the European Union, the draft allocated more than €11 billion for research. Scientists welcomed the funding, but noted the emphasis on applied and industrial research, and feared that basic research will be overlooked. Many asked the government to adopt physicist Ugo Amaldi’s proposal to increase research funding up to 1.1% of GDP by 2026, prioritizing basic research. Four months later, on 30 April, a new government led by Mario Draghi presented the final version to parliament and sent it to the European Commission. Apart from a slight increase of the research budget, to €12.92 billion, the final plan was not significantly different from the first draft.

A new minister and a new CNR president

When Mario Draghi replaced Giuseppe Conte as prime minister on 13 February, Maria Cristina Messa became the new research minister. An expert in medical imaging and nuclear medicine, and former Rector of the University of Milan-Bicocca, upon taking office she pledged to reform university recruitment and careers, to streamline the management of funds and cut red tape, and to simplify the evaluation process for assigning public funds. One of Messa’s first decisions was to name Maria Chiara Carrozza, an engineer and herself a former research minister, as president of the National Research Council, Italy’s main research body. Her appointment ended an unusually long process.

Neanderthals remains discovered near Rome

In May, a team of archaeologists announced that the fossils of nine Neanderthals had been found in the Guattari Cave in San Felice Circeo, near Rome. A much-studied Neanderthal skull was discovered in the same cave in 1939, and the Italian Culture Ministry said the new finding confirmed that the site is “one of the most significant places in the world for the history of Neanderthals.” The fossilized remains include intact skulls, skull fragments, teeth and other bones. The remains come from different epochs, with the oldest ones dating from between 100,000 and 90,000 years ago, and the most recent ones to 50,000 years ago.

A new farming law angers scientists

A draft law on organic farming approved by the Senate at the end of May caused disquiet among Italian scientists for proposing that the biodynamic agriculture method could be considered organic farming. Biodynamic agriculture features the use of practices and preparations, from herbal and mineral additives, to field sprays prepared by stuffing manure and quartz into animal horns and burying it for months, with no proven impact on food and soil quality. Scientific societies, such as Accademia dei Lincei, the Italian Academy for Agriculture, the Italian Federation of Life Sciences, expressed opposition to the law and asked for its amendment. Several months later, the law still has to be discussed in the lower chamber. In a recent speech, Italy’s president, Sergio Mattarella, has suggested that it is unlikely to be approved soon.

Cosmic collisions

In June, scientists at the Virgo gravitational observatory in Cascina, near Pisa, and their colleagues at the LIGO observatory in the USA, announced the detection of two gravitational waves caused by black holes swallowing neutron stars. No observatory had ever observed such binary systems, let alone their collision. The two events were both detected in January 2020, but it took 18 months to analyse the data and rule out all other explanations. Later, in November, the collaboration released their latest catalogue of cosmic collisions, adding 35 new events to the previous release and bringing the total number of detections to 90.

Future uncertain for the Italian COVID-19 vaccine

In July, it became clear that Italy’s plan to develop its own Covid-19 vaccine was facing a roadblock. Since the summer of 2020 Reithera, a biotech company based near Rome, had been working on a candidate vaccine based on an engineered gorilla-derived adenovirus. With financial backing from the Italian government, the vaccine went through phase-1 and phase-2 trials, and on 12 July the company announced that it provoked a strong immune response and no major side effects. But a court’s ruling that blocked a €50-million public investment into the firm disrupted the company’s plans to fund late-stage clinical trials, and to expand its vaccine production facility. Clinical trials on the candidate vaccine have not advanced further.

An Italian Nobel prize winner

On 6 October Giorgio Parisi, a physicist from Sapienza Università di Roma and Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, and current vice-president of Accademia dei Lincei, was awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics. The Nobel committee highlighted his contributions to “the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales”. Parisi, an eclectic physicist whose research work has covered areas such as fundamental particles, condensed matter, statistical physics and disordered materials, was the sixth Italian scientist to win the Physics Nobel Prize.

The road from Milan to Glasgow

From 30 September to 2 October, climate and energy ministers gathered in Milan for the pre-COP26, the main preparatory event before the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference. The meeting was accompanied by the Youth4Climate event, where hundreds young delegates presented prepared proposals for climate action to world leaders. The pre-COP final statement approved in Milan stressed the need to accelerate actions during the next decade to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees, in line with the Paris Agreement, and to keep the pledge to invest $100bn per year to help poorer countries in reducing emissions and adapting to climate change. Negotiators met again in Glasgow a month later for the much-anticipated COP26. Despite some important achievements, including India’s first commitment to climate neutrality and a landmark agreement to curb methane emissions, the final outcome was a disappointment to climate scientists and activists.

Extreme events

This was also a year when Italy’s vulnerability to climate change became evident. In August, the highest temperature ever recorded in Europe was reported in Sicily. At the end of October, the south-eastern part of the same island was hit by a Mediterranean hurricane, known as a Medicane, when strong winds and intense rainfall which triggered landslides, floods and killed at least one person. According to the European Severe Weather Database, Italy was hit by 1499 extreme weather events in 2020 compared to 380 extreme weather events in 2010. MOSE, the system of mobile gates designed to protect Venice from high tides and rising sea level, was activated 20 times during 2021. The system, partially operational since October 2020 but still under construction, succeeded in preventing severe flooding, but couldn’t stop parts of the city, including Piazza San Marco, occasionally being submerged by water.

A new Italian space mission

On 9 December, the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) mission, a joint effort of NASA and the Italian Space Agency, launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Its three onboard telescopes rely on detectors developed by scientists from the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (Infn) and the National Institute of Astrophysics (Inaf), and funded by ASI. By measuring the amount and direction of polarization of X-ray light, IXPE’s instruments will help scientists understand why pulsars have such strong X-ray emission, and to study the evolution of the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. The mission continues a long tradition of Italian space-based high energy astrophysics, that includes national missions such as BeppoSax and Agile and the participation in NASA’s major Fermi mission.