Carlo 

Fulvi Mari


Personal webpage


Academic degrees


Scientific miscellanea:

In vivo multi-neuron activity imaging 

Calcium fluorescence imaging of Olfactory Receptor Neurons located in the dorsal organ ganglion of the Drosophila larva, an analogue of the mammalian olfactory epithelium. The graph shows fluorescence intensity changes for each of four ORNs in response to pulsed exposition to 1-pentanol at increasing concentrations. Calcium influx ensues the binding of receptor and odorant molecule, not necessarily leading to the production of action potentials. The different sensitivities shown by the ORNs in the clip reflect the difference in binding affinity of their respective receptors to 1-pentanol. (Notice the actual time in abscissa.)   [Clip from VideoS1 of Si et al., Neuron  101: 950–962  (2019).]


Gravitational waves and gamma-ray burst from a merger

The gravitational-wave event GW170817 as observed by the LIGO detectors (bottom, the "chirp"), and the gamma-ray burst GRB 170817A as observed by the Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (top), generated respectively before and after the merger of two neutron stars. The frequency of the GWs increased as the two objects spiralled towards each other, with the production of a short gamma-ray burst following the merger by a few seconds, compatibly with model predictions. The merger had happened about 130 million years before the space-time ripples and the e.m. burst reached Earth.

(From The Astrophysical Journal Letters  848: L13, 2017.) 

The semantic network of the human brain

From Fig. 7 of Binder, Desai, Graves and Conant, Cerebral Cortex  19, 2767 (2009), a meta-analysis of 120 functional neuroimaging publications selected from hundreds.

Gold ions head-on impacts at 200GeV in the STAR detector of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Each impact may create a ball of quark-gluon plasma, at temperatures over 10^(12)K, on a typical length-scale of 10^(-15)m, that lasts about 10^(-24)s before transforming into a shower of over ten thousand particles. The quark-gluon plasma is thought to be representative of the conditions in the Universe about 1 microsecond after the Big Bang, just after GUT spontaneous symmetry breaking probably... possibly... perhaps...

Cortico-cortical connections

A coronal section in area TEO of the macaque inferotemporal cortex, with triple retrograde fluorescent tracing, from Fig. S1 of Ichinohe, Borra and Rockland, Sci. Rep . 2, 934 (2012). The length of the arrows corresponds to about 1mm. The RED stains are from an injection of one of the tracers in a small spot of area TE (not shown) and are due to white-matter projections from TEO to TE. The GREEN stains are from an injection (green arrow) of another tracer into the red spot and are due to grey-matter projections within TEO. The BLUE stains are from an injection (blue arrow) of the third tracer, away from the red spot, and are due to grey-matter projections. In YELLOW are neurons that are stained by both the red and the green tracers.

Some peculiar triangles:

Kanizsa triangle

Illusory contour and overlap

(tricking the brain, part I)

Sierpinski triangle

Self-similar fractal

(a peek at infinity)

Penrose triangle

Impossible object

(tricking the brain, part II)