Category archives: Technology

Pulsed radiotherapy

Pulsed radiotherapy

MedicinePhysics

By Invited Researcher

Can radiotherapy with laser-produced ionizing radiation be an alternative to conventional radiotherapy? Can we deep our understanding of the basic mechanisms of radiation damage? Can we study the very early biological response of the living matter and use this knowledge to design more efficient radiotherapy treatments? Contrary to popular belief, when tumoral tissue is irradiated […]

Melodrama with happy ending for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy patients

Melodrama with happy ending for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy patients

BiologyBiomedicineGeneticsMedicinePharmacy

By Sergio Laínez

Patients suffering from rare diseases (defined by the European as those affecting less than 5 in 10000 people) have traditionally been overlooked by pharmaceutical companies. They are usually looking for the next blockbuster drug, so the lack of a large patient pool means they may not generate the revenue needed to justify the R&D financial […]

Quantum dots embedded in graphene nanoribbons

Quantum dots embedded in graphene nanoribbons

ChemistryCondensed matterMaterialsNanotechnology

By DIPC

Graphene nanoribbons (GNRs), are strips of graphene with ultra-thin width (<50 nm). Graphene ribbons were introduced as a theoretical model by Mitsutaka Fujita and coauthors to examine the edge and nanoscale size effect in graphene. GNRs are very interesting structures, partly due to their attractive electronic properties. Those properties vary dramatically with changes in the […]

Quantifying the screening of electrons in graphene heterostructures

Quantifying the screening of electrons in graphene heterostructures

Condensed matterMaterialsPhysicsQuantum physics

By DIPC

Beginning in 1928, Felix Bloch, an assistant to Werner Heisenberg in Leipzig, began to make some realistic assumptions in an attempt to formulate a more complete quantum mechanics of electrical conductivity. First, because he wanted to assign a definite momentum and energy to each of the electrons, but not a definite position or a time […]

Medical marijuana. Really?

Medical marijuana. Really?

HealthMedicine

By José Ramón Alonso

Marijuana is a preparation of the Cannabis sativa plant intended for use as a psychoactive drug, medicine and more rarely as religious or spiritual ingredient. It includes the dried leaves, flowers, stems, and seeds from the hemp plant. Its main active component is tetrahydrocannabinol (THC); one of 483 known compounds in the Cannabis plant, including […]

Simulating particle physics in a quantum computer

Simulating particle physics in a quantum computer

Computer scienceParticle physics

By Daniel Manzano

Particle physics is an interesting and complicated field of study. Its theoretical framework, the Standard Model, was developed during the second half of the twentieth century and it opened he possibility to explaining the behavior of the basic blocks of the Universe. It also classified all the particles, from the electron (discovered in 1897) to […]