Ricerc@Sapienza

Old fountains, once they have lost their original function of providing drinking water, today often represent a problem for the public administrations that often own them, but they also constitute an excellent opportunity for revitalising the areas in which they are situated. This occurs because in the past this type of structure played an important role in the definition of the urban plan, a role that now seems to have been reinstated after a period of obscurity due to attempts to force the plan to conform to the necessities of contemporaneity.

Numerous scenarios exist for a cavitation bubble growing in a liquid. We focus here on cavitation phenomena within water under static tension in a confined environment. Drawing inspiration from the natural materials in plants, we design a novel experimental setup where a micrometric volume of water is confined by a hydrogel-based material. We show that, submerging the sample in a hypertonic solution, the water within the cavity is placed under tension and the acoustic emission produced by the resulting bubble nucleation is precisely detected.

Microplastics are nowadays considered as ubiquitous pollutants since have been found widespread in all environmental compartments, particularly in the water sources. In the urban water cycle, the drinking water treatment plants and the wastewater treatment plants are the first and last barriers to microplastics pollution, respectively. The present work aims at presenting the information available on microplastic presence in the urban water cycle, reporting and linking what is known at the different stages.

Te Cloaca Maxima is the most impressive and enduring infrastructure of Rome’s urban history: due to its topographical extension (which involves the districts of the Subura, the Argiletum, the Forum Romanum, the Velabrum and the Forum Boarium) and for its multiple phases of life (from the archaic age to the full Imperial period), it accompanies all the main architectural and topographical transformations of the center of the ancient city.

Water as hazard and water as heritage“ was an inter-national workshop which took place in the framework of the “Spazi Aperti“ (Open spaces) event at the Accademia di Romania in Rome, an event engaging international fellows in the capital of Italy. The workshop was a winner in the first selection of the European Geo-sciences Union co-sponsored meetings competition and as such participation was also multidisciplinary, from geosciences to archaeology, art history, urban planning and (landscape) architecture.

Soil is one of the fundamental components for life on Earth, but today, as a consequence of humans’ unsustainable actions, soil is polluted, distressed and spoiled. In contemporary practice design, we recognize the importance of the soil quality to structure new discourses in landscape practice. The central role in this process is undoubtedly played by the value a healthy soil has for the community and for the environment.

Hydrogels are an important class of biomaterials that can absorb large quantities of water. In this study, changes in hydration of natural hydrogels (agar, chitosan, gelatin, starch, and blends of each with chitosan) during storage and rehydration were studied by using near-infrared hyperspectral imaging (NIR-HSI). Moisture content was calculated based on changes in sample weight during hydration. The NIR-HSI data were acquired by using a push-broom system operating in diffuse reflectance in the wavelength range 943 to 1650 nm.

The paper addresses some issues on water and the water supply system of two cities of the Lycus Valley (Asia Minor) in the imperial age: Hierapolis of Phrygia and Laodicea on the Lycus. Many authors testify to the phenomenon of Hierapolis’ springs of hot waters. Vitruvius witnesses the use of water for the construction of fences in the first century BCE. So does Strabo more or less in the same time span, while the jurist of Augustan age, Antistius Labeo, refers precisely to the case of Hierapolis when treating the interdictum de aquis frigidis.

Human aquaporin 4 has been studied using non-equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations in the absence and presence of pulses of external electric fields. The pulses were 100 ns in duration and 0.005-0.015 V/angstrom in intensity acting along the pores' axes. Water diffusivity and the dipolar response of various residues of interest within the pores have been studied. Results show relatively little change in levels of water permeability per se within aquaporin channels during axially oriented field impulses, although care must be taken with regard to statistical certainty.

THz time-domain spectroscopy (THz–TDS) is a suitable approach to study the state of preservation of cultural heritage made of organic materials in a non-destructive way. This technique highlights, in particular, the low–energy vibrational properties of these materials and the presence of the H-bonds between molecules [1]. We focus in particular on the study of modern artificially aged and ancient paper samples in order to determine in the THz spectra the distinctive features as a possible fingerprint of their state of aging and/or degradation.