Category archives: Science

Controlling visually guided behavior with holographic optogenetics

Controlling visually guided behavior with holographic optogenetics

NeurobiologyNeuroscience

By DIPC

Cortical neurons often fire together as a group, rather than independently, and these coactive groups, also known as neuronal ensembles (or chains, assemblies, attractors, clicks, motifs, songs, bumps, etc.), could constitute emergent functional units of the brain, as modular building blocks of memories, thoughts, motor programs, computations, or perceptual or mental states. In order to […]

Computation can push optical microscopy towards unsuspected limits

Computation can push optical microscopy towards unsuspected limits

BiologyComputer sciencePhysics

By Daniel Moreno Andrés

Man does not live by hardware alone. Indeed, great material and conceptual improvements in the machinery of optical microscopes have occurred in recent decades. The examples are numerous (some example here; https://mappingignorance.org/2013/12/23/bessel-beam-plane-illumination-microscopy-another-smart-solution-for-an-old-challenge/). However, what is being achieved only with software and computing power seems a matter of magic. It is not only that programs and […]

The origin of our Galaxy

The origin of our Galaxy

Astrophysics

By Tomás Ruiz-Lara

A group of astrophysicists (to which I have the pleasure to belong to), led by scientists from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC, Spain), have recently published an article in Nature Astronomy in which the early events shaping the current view of our Galaxy, the Milky Way, have been unveiled . Such discovery has […]

Using an optical antenna to launch phonon polaritons in a low-dimensional van der Waals crystal

Using an optical antenna to launch phonon polaritons in a low-dimensional van der Waals crystal

Condensed matterMaterialsNanotechnologyQuantum physics

By DIPC

The so-called van der Waals materials consist of two-dimensional layers bound by weak van der Waals forces. After the isolation of graphene, the field of two-dimensional van der Waals materials has experienced an explosive growth and new families of two-dimensional systems and block-layered bulk materials have been created. This growth has been fueled mainly by […]

The extreme nanophotonics of the plasmonic nanopatch

The extreme nanophotonics of the plasmonic nanopatch

Condensed matterMaterialsNanotechnologyQuantum physics

By DIPC

For centuries, metals were employed in optical applications only as mirrors and gratings. New vistas opened up in the late 1970s and early 1980s with the discovery of surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) and the use of surface plasmon (collective electronic oscillations at the surface of metals) resonances for sensing. In a simplified picture and in […]