Research & Innovation

The phenomenology of pain distinguishes localised pain from existential suffering, discusses lived time and empathy, and defines the difference between pain and suffering: what happens when we feel pain? We discuss it, on the occasion of Pain Awareness Month, with Professor Francesca De Vecchi,...

From how organisations relate to other people to the search for a shared corporate purpose, philosophy helps organisations tell simple change apart from genuine progress. We discuss this with Prof. Roberto Mordacci, Vice-Rector for Human and Social Sciences, Full Professor of Moral Philosophy and...

Behind the word serendipity lies the tale of a lost camel in a Persian fable. As the story goes, King Giaffar of Serendip once dispatched his three sons into the world to gain experience of life. Along their journey, the princes encountered a man who had lost his camel. Before he could utter a...

Predictive testing estimates the probability that a person will develop a given condition. For potential patients, that information can be valuable: knowing about a risk in advance can support prevention, guide lifestyle choices and allow earlier diagnosis, in some cases improving the outcome of...

Biological aging explains why life expectancy in Italy has doubled in just a century, rising from 40 to over 80 years. A century ago, families rarely lived long enough to see their grandchildren grow up, and adults barely past forty already looked elderly. Today the picture has changed: couples...

In May 2026, early Alzheimer’s diagnosis took a concrete step forward: several blood tests received CE marking in Europe under the IVDR regulation. That approval allows them to run on automated platforms in clinical laboratories, at a scale that wasn’t possible before. As recently as 2024, blood...

Immunology research is redrawing the very idea of the immune system: not a uniform army that tells friend from foe, but a set of responses that shift from tissue to tissue, and sometimes within the same organ. That was the throughline at Tissue Immunity and Neuro-Immune Interactions, the first...

A new Bundibugyo virus outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has brought attention back to one of the lesser-known species in the ebolavirus family. The World Health Organization has reiterated that the risk of international spread remains low for the general population. For the scientific...

Eco-anxiety first appeared in a systematic report in 2017, when the American Psychological Association and ecoAmerica published “Mental Health and Our Changing Climate.” Since then, the age group most represented in climate-related psychological consultations has remained 16 to 24. It isn’t a...