Biosphere and Minerals

This third volume of the series “Letture di Georisorse e Ambiente” publishes the lecture notes of the International School “Minerals and Biosphere” held in Campiglia Marittima in September 2011. This school and relevant proceedings are a clear example of how important is for scientists to communicate and exchange experiences across cultural fields, such as art and science. It is frequent in the world of science to have problems solved by approaching them with different methods borrowed from diverse fields, sometimes even without a direct approach, but just trying to solve ancillary questions. This school represents, indeed, an example of how different fields of science can converge in the interpretation of peculiar phenomena. Few of us only some years ago would have not thought to zeolites like pharmacological supports, neither was of so prompt intuition the use of metal tolerant plants and fungal strains to implement specific protocols devoted to heavy metal removal and bioremediation purposes, nor to use Porifera (the only animal organisms able to polymerize silica) to generate massive skeletal elements in a single reaction for the production of silicon materials. It is the spreading of scientific results and the possibility to cross information. It is the spreading of scientific results and the possibility to cross information and results that improves the possibility to have contact among different topics and methodologies. The extreme specialization of scientists could confine them in a specific field, where sometimes is hard to find new ideas and new points of view on the problems. Not to mention the serendipity (quite frequent today is to hear about serendipity), this School creates a place in which scientists from different fields can interact and find new perspective and different applications, innovative solutions for their “usual” studies.