CNR.it Highlights 2009-2010

The 2009-2010 edition of CNR.it (the CNR Highlights) includes more than 200 scientific papers. Conceived and written in English to present to the international public the dynamic and multi-sided reality of the largest research organization in Italy, this review is a partial but significant collection of works carried out by CNR researchers and published on the main scientific journals. Articles have been selected on the basis of their impact factors among the 14.000 or so articles produced in the last two years, to present our best image to the world. The present one is only the second of the CNR Highlights, after a first one dedicated to the Italian public, but the series represent already a must for our researchers, to promote their works along best-practice lines followed in research organizations worldwide. In the present edition, with a more catchy new look, articles, images and scientific popularizations provide a broad outlook of the activities of CNR, reporting, side by side with research articles, about technology transfer and scientific support activities to national and local institutions. The 2009-2010 Highlights are divided into four sections, similarly to the previous edition. However, as the reader looks through the pages, the interdisciplinary nature of the works will not pass unnoticed, interdisciplinarity being the peculiar feature of CNR, an organization in which the different disciplines find a fertile breeding ground to communicate and share their different knowledges. In the final part of the Highlights, we illustrate how the CNR research network is organised. With its institutes spread all over Italy, CNR cooperates with academic, social, economic and institutional realities. It represents a model of scientific achievement and a chance of development for Italy. CNR activities extend beyond national frontiers, opened to collaboration with other major international research agencies and to the participation in international infrastructures.