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The deuteron, the only two-nucleon bound state, has a shallow character: its binding energy is strictly related to zero-energy parameters, the triplet scattering length 3anp and triplet effective range 3rnp. This fact places the deuteron inside the universal window, a region in which systems having a large value of the two- body scattering length are located. When the scattering length is large compared to the interaction range certain types of correlations can be observed. Increasing the number of nucleons these correlations are responsible for the particular spectrum of light nuclei as for example the lack of excited states in three- and four-nucleon systems. In this presentation some constraints imposed by the large values of the singlet and triplet scattering lengths in the spectrum of light nuclear systems are discussed.

We report on a determination of the Earth-Moon distance, performed by students of an Italian high school, based on measurements of the time delay of the 'echo' in the radio communications between NASA mission control in Houston and the Apollo astronauts on the lunar surface. By using open-source audio-editing software, the distance can be determined with a~0.1% accuracy, allowing us to observe the effect of the eccentricity of the orbit of the Moon. [DOI: 10.1119/1.3098261]

We report on our progress in the inclusion of the subleading 3N contact operators for the elastic p − d scattering below the deuteron break-up. We find that, with a nuclear interaction consisting of the AV18 2N potential, supplemented by the leading and subleading 3N contact operators, existing discrepancies between theory and experiment, like the well-known Ay puzzle, are substantially reduced.