Category Archives: outreach

Join the FTMC!

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Condensed matter physics is a big unknown, even for 2nd year physics students, let alone theoretical condensed matter physics. And funny enough, this branch of physics covers a huge percentage of the reality around us. It covers quantum physics, biophysics, fluids, materials, optics and acoustics, or low temperatures, just to name a few of its interests. Yet, few people know about it.

At the Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics department, at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid are actively trying to fill this gap. They’ve made a video to inform and try to bring closer students and young people to this beautiful and amazing area of science. And Scixel happened to be around.

 

We’ve spend a great time working with them, discussing and creating this piece. Hope you like it and pay them a visit!

Do electric neurons dream of…

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This is getting out of hand. At LanzaLab they try to emulate the behavior of neuron synapses using multilayered hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) . An interesting paradigm states that a biologically inspired computing architecture, will overcome the energy and efficiency limitations of classic computing architectures. To carry it out will require the design of electronic neurons and synapses. There are several features to be copied from mother’s nature design: it has to be fast, energetically efficient and it has to have a long term/short term plasticity. And at Lanzalab, they’ve achieved most of them. Their h-BN devices consume between 0.1 fW and 600 pW and they have a truly fast response: around 10ns.

We made this image supervised by Prof. Mario Lanza to illustrate their work published in Nature Electronics.

Dust: the origin

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We already talked about the project NANOCOSMOS in this website. This is a huge ERC funded project directed by Prof. José Cernicharo which has put together research groups from Spain and France. The researchers working in this project are trying to “unveil the physical and chemical conditions in the dust formation zone of evolved stars.”

A year ago, Natalia Ruiz Zelmanovitch (Public Information Officer of the project), approached me to create a short documentary explaining the aims of this research. Now, a year later, its been made public. Scixel worked both in the animations and the music. Hope you enjoy this piece as much as we enjoyed making it.

Apart from the pleasure that is to work with Natalia, the intrinsic beauty of this research, made this collaboration a big moment of Scixel’s short history.

Demoreel 2017-2018

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This demo has taken two years… documentaries, advertising, covers, pictures… we’ve been pretty busy lately.

Bioinformática con Ñ

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5 years ago now, several Spanish researchers, got together to write a book describing the principles of bioinformatics. Alberto Pascual-García and Álvaro Sebastián asked us to give a hand in this free, collaborative project by designing the cover of the book. And this is what we did, in the early days of Scixel.

NanoCosmos: the beginning

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About 4 years ago Prof. Jose Ángel Martín Gago approached me to talk me about the NANOCOSMOS project. As they explain in their website, “NANOCOSMOS will take advantage of the new observational capabilities (increased angular resolution) of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to unveil the physical and chemical conditions in the dust formation zone of evolved stars”.  Simply put, they are studying the debris stars create and the role this dust plays in the life/death recycling story of the universe.

This is a huge ERC funded project directed by Prof. José Cernicharo which has put together research groups from Spain and France.

And this is where Natalia Ruiz Zelmanovitch (Public Information Officer of the project) appears. She happens to be the most-committed-with-outreach-and-dissemination-of-science I’ve ever met. And she wants to tell the story of the NANOCOSMOS project. And she wants to tell it right.

She is behind the production of “NANOCOSMOS: un viaje a lo pequeño.” Here you can watch the trailer:

Scixel has been in charge of the 3D visualizations of the space: stars, nebulae, galaxies and planetary systems. We have been working with the Nanocosmos people for a few years now and I can tell you, if I know Natalia enough, this is just the beginning. So, stay tunned!

Splitting Miss Young

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We participate in outreach projects every time we can. And this is one of those. Nanokomik is a comic contest organized by the research centers CIC nanoGUNE and the Donostia International Phyisics Center (DIPC). Last year’s challenge was to create a graphic story about a female or male comic superhero with “nanopowers”, that is, sophisticated skills or powers acquired through nanoscience and nanotechnology.

 

We created Miss Young, a superhero with the ability of been everywhere at the same time when nobody is observing her.

We didn’t win the contest but it certainly was a great experience to make our first comic in a traditional way.