Highlights

Every year, a committee of experts sits down with a tough job to do: from among all ICREA publications, they must find a handful that stand out from all the others. This is indeed a challenge. The debates are sometimes heated and always difficult but, in the end, a shortlist of  the most outstanding publications of the year is produced. No prize is awarded, and the only additional acknowledge is the honour of being chosen and highlighted by ICREA. Each piece has something unique about it, whether it be a particularly elegant solution, the huge impact it has in the media or the sheer fascination it generates as a truly new idea. For whatever the reason, these are the best of the best and, as such, we are proud to share them here.

LIST OF SCIENTIFIC HIGHLIGHTS

Format: yyyy

  • 3D Printing the Next Generation of Energy Devices (2020)

    Tarancón Rubio, Albert (IREC)

    view details
    CLOSE

    3D Printing the Next Generation of Energy Devices

    Three dimensional printing technologies represent a manufacturing revolution because of their unique capabilities for increasing shape complexity while reducing waste material, capital cost and design for manufacturing. However, the application of 3D printing technologies for the fabrication of devices remains an almost unexplored field due to their elevated complexity from the materials and functional points of view. The use of 3D printing technologies in energy and environmental applications is of special interest since the related devices usually involve expensive advanced materials such as ceramics or composites, which present strong limitations in shape and functionality when processed with classical manufacturing methods.

    Among other technologies, Solid Oxide Fuel and Electrolysis Cells (SOFC/SOECs) are one of the candidates to strongly benefit from 3D printing. SOFC/SOECs are ceramic-based multilayer complex devices able to efficiently generate electricity from clean fuels like hydrogen (fuel cell mode) as well as store renewable electricity in the form of transportable gases (electrolysis mode). In the last years, we have been developing an innovative 3D printing technology able to fabricate free-form complete SOCs with up to 60% of improved performance even using state-of-the-art materials.This work was reported this year in Journal of Materials Chemistry A (selected as HOT paper and cover image) and was recognized with the internationally reputed "Solar Impulse Efficient Solution" label. 

  • How does the replication of SARS-CoV-2 work (2020)

    Tartaglia, Gian Gaetano (CRG)

    view details
    CLOSE

    How does the replication of SARS-CoV-2 work

    The main question is which type of host proteins are exploited by the virus to spread.

    We produced an atlas of human proteins interacting with SARS-CoV-2. Our results were shared with the community since the very beginning of the pandemic.  The most important concept is that there are proteins binding to specific regions (3’ and 5’ ends of RNA genome) that regulate viral replication in a tight way. One of these interactions, if blocked, could be key to stop the infection.

    SARS-CoV-2 interactions tend to form blobs (phase separated assemblies in more technical terms) where specific components end up. These interactions help viral replication. Some of them are elements of the cell that are trapped to avoid the self-defence of the cell. How cool is that? Knowing these interactions is important to develop an anti-viral strategy, which would complement the current approach based on vaccination.

  • Sharp Remez inequality (2020)

    Tikhonov, Sergey (CRM)

    view details
    CLOSE

    Sharp Remez inequality

    Take your favorite function f(x) on an interval [a,b]. Let us slightly modify it as follows. On a smaller interval (or a couple of intervals), redefine it to be zero. Is it possible that the maxima of the original function f(x) and the modified one g(x) are comparable in some sense? In general, the answer is NO since the original function might be huge exactly on the smaller interval. However, this is true for some special classes of functions, in particular, for polynomials. A proof of this fact as well as the precise meaning of comparability are obtained in this work.

    More formally, we find a sharp constant C in the so-called Remez inequality max1 |f(x)| < C max2 |f(x)| in the case when f(x) is a trigonometric polynomial of a certain degree. Here the maximum max1  is taken over all x ∈ [a,b] and the maximum max2  is taken over all x ∈ [a,b]\B for a measurable set B. This problem was open for a long time even though a similar result for algebraic polynomials was obtained already in 1936.

  • The heart of darkness: Scientists detect a mysterious gamma-ray heartbeat coming from a cosmic gas cloud (2020)

    Torres, Diego F. (CSIC - ICE)

    view details
    CLOSE

    The heart of darkness: Scientists detect a mysterious gamma-ray heartbeat coming from a cosmic gas cloud

    An inconspicuous cloud in the constellation Aquila is beating with the rhythm of a nearby precessing black hole, indicating a connection between the two objects, as the team led by DESY scientist Jian Li and ICREA Professor Diego F. Torres at the Institute of Space Sciences (CSIC) reported in the journal Nature Astronomy.

    The research team is composed of international scientists from Germany, Spain, China and America. They rigorously analysed more than ten years of data from NASA's Fermi space telescope, looking at a so-called microquasar. The system catalogued as SS 433 is located some 15 000 lightyears away and consists of a giant star with about 30 times the mass of our sun and a black hole with about 10 to 20 solar masses. The two objects are orbiting each other with a period of 13 days, while the black hole sucks matter from the giant star, generating jets.

    The high-speed particles and the ultra-strong magnetic fields in the jet produce X-rays and gamma rays. The accretion disc does not lie exactly in the plane of the orbit of the two objects. It precesses, or sways, like a spinning top that has been set up slanted on a table. As a consequence, the two jets spiral into the surrounding space, rather than just forming a straight line. The precession of the black hole's jets has a period of about 162 days.

    Meticulous analysis revealed one gamma-ray signal with the same period from a position located relatively far from the microquasar's jets. It is located at the position of gas cloud. The found timing signal provides an unambiguous connection between the microquasar and the cloud, separated by about 100 light years. This is as amazing as is intriguing, opening questions regarding how the black hole powers the cloud's heartbeat thus far.

    [Based on press releases by DESY, Arecibo, CSIC. Commented worldwide, including by The New York Times, People's Magazine, Scify Channel, Astronomy Now, and in more than 150 other newspapers and news agencies, from Argentina to Fiji Islands. According to Nature Astronomy Altmetrics the impact of this work is in the top 5% of all that have been published in the journal.]

     

     

     

     

  • Why everyone should embrace "carbon pricing" (2020)

    van den Bergh, Jeroen (UAB)

    view details
    CLOSE

    Why everyone should embrace "carbon pricing"

    This article responds to criticism of carbon pricing, despite its already wide application (Figure). It stresses that carbon pricing – through a tax or market – deals optimally with market failures, such as negative/positive externalities and public goods/bads, and thus represent a clear systemic perspective on problems and policies. Carbon pricing (CP) is moreover a prime example of systemic policy as it shifts simultaneously choices of consumers, producers, investors and innovators in all sectors – essential to a low-carbon transformation.

    A common confusion is that the main advantage of carbon pricing is its efficiency or cost-effectiveness. But this requires effectiveness. In fact, carbon pricing is highly effective as no decision in the economy escapes its influence. As a result, it also limits energy/carbon rebound better than other instruments.

    It is often overlooked that carbon pricing is critical to innovation. It steers innovations towards low-carbon products and processes as private investors are influenced by price expectations since these co-determine profit opportunities. Furthermore, unlike other instruments, carbon pricing stimulates among ‘clean’ technologies the cleaner ones, like solar PV panels with low-carbon lifecycles.

    Carbon pricing represents a consistent economy-wide approach, which is better than sector-specific approaches that tend to be ad hoc, costly and susceptible to lobbying, while causing inter-sectoral carbon leakage. Moreover, policy harmonization among sectors and jurisdictions is needed to weaken freeriding and avoid leakage. A carbon price performs well as it facilitates comparison and harmonization of policies in distinct jurisdictions.

    While CP has been criticized as inequitable, this is not the case if complemented by appropriate revenue recycling. In fact, no other instrument generates revenues for compensation, while adoption subsidies use scarce funds and are inequitable as they disproportionately go to well-off households.

  • Holographic imaging inside cells (2020)

    van Hulst, Niek F. (ICFO)
    Álvarez Puebla, Ramón (URV)

    view details
    CLOSE

    Holographic imaging inside cells

    Holography is known for its ability to produce 3D images (holograms) by recording the amplitude as well as the normally invisible phase of coherent light. In biology though holography is less common, as the most suitable technique, combining sensitivity, resolution and specificity, is fluorescence imaging which is widely used in live cell imaging. It would be fantastic if one could combine fluorescence microscopy with holography, yet fluorescence is incoherent, with a very short path-length and phase memory.

    Now ICFO researchers Matz Liebel and Jaime Ortega-Arroyo implemented an interferometry scheme that measures the position-dependent phase change in wide-field fluorescence detection, to enable 3D imaging of individual molecules and nanoparticles with a resolution of 15 nm, over 8 micrometer depth. Teaming up with Hakho Lee at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, they showed how fluorescence holography can track the 3D motion of extracellular vesicles inside live cells.

    While fluorescence is preferred for its brightness, Raman response has the advantage of a label-free specific contrast, distinguishing different cellular and tissue contents. Spontaneous Raman scattering is very weak, but luckily can be enhanced dramatically on metal surfaces or in metallic nanogaps: surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS).

    Now, in collaboration with Nicolas Pazos-Perez and Ramon Alvarez-Puebla, of Univ. Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, Matz Liebel has realized Raman holography for the first time. They synthesized plasmonic superclusters from small nanoparticle building blocks, to generate very strong electric fields in 50 nm cluster size, yielding extremely bright SERS nanoprobes. Next, making the incoherent Raman scattering to “self-interfere”, they achieved 3D holographic imaging, to localize single-SERS-particles in a 3D volume from one single-shot image. Expanding on the fluorescence holography, they now managed to identify and track single SERS nanoparticles inside living cells, in all three dimensions. The SERS signal is bright, photostable and very specific, thus highly suitable for multiplexed single-shot 3D concentration mapping in many scenarios.

Pages