The Mid-Infra-Red Camera w/o LEns (MIRACLE) instrument is the proposed imaging camera for one of the the focal plane instruments on SPICA covering the wavelength range from 5-38 microns. Sub-micro-Jansky sensitivities are expected at wavelengths shortward of 10 microns, and sensitivities of the order of a few micro-Jy in the 10 - 40 micron range

Understanding the connection between normally evolving galaxies and those with extreme nuclear activity, the so-called Active Galactic Nuclei, is a fundamental problem in the study of both galaxy evolution and of AGN. From HST images of the 96 BL Lacertae objects observed in our Cycle 5 and 6 programs, we have determined the absolute magnitudes and

After revisiting the hierarchy problem of the Standard Model and its implications for the scale of New Physics, I consider the finetuning problem in two main scenarios beyond the Standard Model: Supersymmetry (both in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model and alternative models) and Little Higgs models. The main conclusions are that New Physics

At this meeting we presented a spinfoam model in which the fundamental "bubble amplitudes" (the analog of the one-loop corrections in QFT) are finite as the cutoff is removed. The model is a natural variant of the field theoretical formulation of the Barrett-Crane model. As the last, the model is a quantum BF theory plus an implementation of the

Between October 1999 and October 2000 an undistinguished high-galactic latitude patch of sky, the Hubble Deep Field South (HDF-S), was observed with the VLT for more than 100 hours under the best seeing conditions. Using the near-infrared (NIR) imaging mode of the Infrared Spectrometer and Array Camera (ISAAC, Moorwood 1997), we obtained ultradeep

About one year after the end of the first observational run and six months after the first CoRoT data delivery, we comment the data exploitation progress for different types of stars. We consider first results to illustrate how these data of unprecedented quality shed a new light on the field of stellar seismology.