It’s been a strange couple of years with worldwide issues that have affected us all. But here at Scixel, we can be nothing but grateful. First of all, the pandemic didn’t affect us in a serious way, neither us nor our families. Second, our clients continued with their usual hard work from home. And that […]
The study of single proteins has always been tricky. First of all you need to locate them. Until today, most of the solutions involved the labeling of the molecules an then their attachment to something else: links, surfaces, etc. And the problem gets trickier if you want to study their dynamics. A new promising technique […]
How do you cool radio waves? Do waves have a temperature in the first place? Common waves are hot meaning they are noisy. There are multiple sources of noise in the generation process of waves and some of them are related to temperature. One of these sources, and probably the most difficult to remove, comes […]
This has been a good year for nano optics. And the research group 2DNanoptica (Oviedo, Spain) is largely responsible for this. Leading international collaborations, they’ve published two major advances in high impact factor journals during 2021. In the first one, published in Nature Communications, they’ve presented a study on the refraction of light in highly […]
How can we map out traps on a surface? Ferry Prins, Michael Seitz et al. have developed a curious strategy. First, they’ve injected a small population of excitons (gaussian shaped) in a 2D metal halide perovskite. The flow of these excitons through the material will be affected by the traps, kind of how the flow of […]
We’ve been talking for quite a long time about the crazy things that happen in Andres Castellanos’s Lab. And they seem to be getting crazier. The ability of this people for outside the box thinking is amazing. Actually they don’t seem to know about the box at all! They are now working in the use […]
A research collaboration between IMDEA Nanociencia, DIPC and IFIMAC led by Roberto Otero has just proposed a new method to measure electronic temperatures in metallic nanostructures. In particular, they show that the electronic temperature can be derived from “the shape of the tunnel electroluminescence emission edge in tunnel plasmonic nanocavities”. This method, published in Nanoletters, […]
Ana Pizarro and colleagues are a sort of modern watchmakers to my eyes. But instead of using gears and springs, they work with atoms, bonds and molecules. They carefully tailor them to produce chemical reactions in specific places that are triggered by specific conditions. In particular, they’re putting a lot of effort in molecules that […]
Science is always teaching us how to do new things. But it is also important how it teach us how to do old stuff in a much better way. And with better we mean, in a faster, cleaner, healthier, more sustainable way. And that is kind of what Vincenzo Pecunia et al. do in their […]
Machine learning is already a thing and it is slowly percolating into the most unexpected places. AFM is its most recent victim and Juan F. Gonzalez-Martinez et al. (Biofilms-Research Center for Biointerfaces at Malmö Univerity) have put them together. Although deep learning techniques had already been used for AFM related analysis, for the first time […]