Two more new episodes of It’s a Risky life!
I’ve got you, under my skin
Dr. Juan Aguirre (Helmholtz Zentrum München) explains, in this Biomedical Engineering Nature article, the challenges he went through in the development of a portable clinical Raster Scan Optoacoustic Mesoscope (RSOM) to image skin. With this device, it is possible to acquire images of structures under the skin, up to 5mm depth, with amazing resolution.
We helped them illustrate the physics of the device with this picture:
To me, the interesting part of this research is that from the very beginning, their goal was to build “a system compatible with the clinic that was easy to use, portable and fast enough to allow comfortable imaging sessions while keeping within light exposure limits (J. Aguirre)”.
This work has resounded strongly enough to get them the cover of this month’s Biological Engineering Nature. Congrats!
On how to build a synthetic cell
One of those things that make you wonder “is this even possible?” while your jaw is still dropping.
Then Netherlands are funding the consortium BaSyC in order for them to build a synthetic biological cell. It is hard to foresee what new pieces of knowledge and technology this research will produce. But in the short term, by building a cell bottom-up, we will learn to understand the cell at its most fundamental level.
The BaSyC consortium includes the University of Amsterdam, the Radboud University, the University of Wageningen, the Vrije University of Amsterdam, as well as our old friends in TuDelft. Actually they were the one that contacted us to make this animation illustrating the process.
Click here if you want to know more about the project.
Hybrid Nanoscopy of Hybrid Nanomaterials
Dr. Cristina Flors research group (IMDEA Nanoscience) is exploring the combination of complementary techniques to characterize materials at the nanoscale. This is a key step to the design and fabrication of new materials with improved properties and diverse functions. The combination of atomic force microscopy and super-resolution fluorescence imaging is investigated as a useful tool to characterize hybrid luminescent materials, specifically amyloid-like fibers functionalized with quantum dots.
Van der Waals made it!
Remember that beautiful picture we did for Prof. Shigeki Kaway (NIMS, Tsukuba, Japan)? Well, it made it to the cover of Chemistry today! And professor Kawai has been kind enough to send us the picture.
Workshop on NanoBioSystems
This 28th of April the workshop on NanoBioSystems will be held at Imdea Nanociencia Institute. And they’ve used an image we did for Dr. Cristina Flors on her research on Hybrid nanoscopy of hybrid nanomaterials.
China RRAM
The China RRAM International Workshop launches its first edition on June 12th-14th of 2017 at Soochow University. Resistive Random Access Memories and related applications will be discussed in this workshop.
They asked us to make a picture for the workshop website and this is what we came up with, with the help of Prof. Mario Lanza and Marco A. Villena.
A Graphene Odissey
I know I say this a lot, but one of the main benefits of this job is that you get to know about cool projects like that of GrapheneX. Simply put, the GrapheneX team from TUDelft, is studying the potential use of graphene-based materials as solar sails. Light from the Sun or a laser beam is used to transfer momentum to a sail making possible to move low mass objects.
This transport technology has already been successfully tested for low-Earth orbit applications, navigation control, and Solar System exploration. The main handicap is the low thrust generated by radiation pressure. The solution?, designing sails with very low density but still with high Young’s modulus, high tensile strength and highly stretchable. Does this ring a bell? yes, it is graphene again.
The multinational GrapheneX team (Santiago J. Cartamil, Rocco Gaudenzi, Vera A. E. C. Janssen and Davide Stefani) won the ‘Drop your Thesis 2017’ competition. This means, this November, they will start to make experiments on microgravity at the Bremen Drop Tower.
On a minor note, they asked Scixel to design the logo and here it is. And if everything goes as expected, there is more funny stuff to come. So stay tuned.
Hydrophobicity on rare earth oxides: the bare truth
For some time, rare earth oxides have been thought to be water-repellent. This march, scientists from the University of Basel, the Swiss Nanoscience Institute and the Paul Scherrer Institute, have found the real origin of this behaviour. They’ve shown that rare earth oxides do not present any significant hydrophobicity. Only when exposed to environmental conditions, they repel water. The explanation, it was only chemical reactions with gaseous hydrocarbons found in the ambient air that increased the surfaces’ roughness and reduced wetting by water.
Personally interested in the subject, we did this picture for them, advised by Dr. Laurent Marot.
2016 Scixel’s Overview
Finally we’ve found some time to produce our 2016 demoreel. It’s been a great year. We’ve worked with a lot of new people in Spain and abroad. Lots of amazing projects both artistically and scientifically. These are some of them:
This is a way of both showing off about the people we’ve worked with and expressing some gratitude. It is difficult not to feel lucky.