This Wednesday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Moungi G.. Bawendi, Louis E. Bruce and Alexei I. Ekimov, for the discovery and development of quantum dots. These are the smallest components of nanotechnology, which are used to illuminate computer screens, televisions and lamps based on QLED technology, but which also serve to guide surgeons when removing tumor tissue, among many other applications.

Everyone who studies chemistry learns that the properties of an element are governed by the number of electrons it has.. However, when matter is reduced to nanodimensions, quantum phenomena arise.. The winners of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry managed to produce particles so small that their properties are determined by quantum phenomena. These particles, called quantum dots, are of great importance in nanotechnology today.. These are artificial structures, built in the laboratory, that are capable of confining electrons in regions of tiny size, thousands of times smaller than the thickness of a human hair.

“Quantum dots have many fascinating and unusual properties. “It is important to note that they have different colors depending on their size,” says Johan Åqvist, president of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.

Nanoscience seeks to study the phenomena that occur when materials are structured or patterned on a scale of less than about 100 nanometers (a nanometer is one billionth of a meter).. Nanotechnology is about taking advantage of these new properties to improve the performance of materials or to enable completely new applications.

Uses the tools of semiconductor physics, organic and inorganic chemistry, molecular biology and biotechnology. Applications range from modern electronics to industrial-scale catalysis, and from precision medicine to quantum technology.

In a sense, nanotechnology and nanoparticles have been used for many centuries. For example, a hair blackening formula originating from the Greco-Roman period has been shown to work by forming 5-nanometer lead sulfide nanocrystals within the hair cortex.. And the famous Roman Lycurgus cup has been shown to get its red color from gold particles contained in the size range of 5 to 60 nanometers.

Physicists had long known that, in theory, size-dependent quantum effects could arise in nanoparticles, but at that time it was almost impossible to reflect in nanodimensions. Therefore, few people believed that this knowledge could be put into practice.

However, in the early 1980s, Alexei Ekimov, born in the former USSR, and whose last position was chief scientist at Nanocrystals Technology Inc.. from New York, managed to create size-dependent quantum effects in colored glass. The color came from copper chloride nanoparticles. Ekimov showed that the size of the particles affected the color of the glass through quantum effects.

A few years later, American Louis Brus, a professor at Columbia University, was the first scientist in the world to demonstrate size-dependent quantum effects in particles floating freely in a fluid.

In 1993, Frenchman Moungi Bawendi, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), revolutionized the chemical production of quantum dots, resulting in almost perfect particles.. This high quality was necessary so that they could be used in applications.

Quantum dots now illuminate computer monitors and television screens based on QLED technology. They also add nuances to the light of some LED lamps, and are used by biochemists and doctors to map biological tissue.

Therefore, explains the Royal Academy in its argument, quantum dots provide greater benefit to humanity.. Researchers believe that in the future they could contribute to flexible electronics, tiny sensors, thinner solar cells and encrypted quantum communication, so we have just begun to explore the potential of these tiny particles.

“It is a Nobel Prize that focuses on new materials that do not exist in nature and in which we design the properties. Each material has its own properties.. We make these materials very small, in the form of quantum dots. By controlling, for example, their size we control the light they emit, that is, we control their properties.. We make custom materials and this has opened the way for many other materials: quantum dots, nanowires, nanoplatelets…”, points out Iván Mora Seró, professor of Applied Physics at the Jaume I University of Castellón, to the Science Media Center (SMC ).

This Tuesday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L'Huillier for developing experimental methods that generate attosecond light pulses to study matter.. An attosecond is approximately the time it takes for light to pass through an atom (equivalent to one trillionth of a second) and is the natural scale of electronic motion in matter.. But it was a scale that until recently was inaccessible for experimental studies due to the lack of light pulses with a short enough duration..

As the jury detailed this morning in Stockholm, the work of these three scientists “has provided humanity with new tools to explore the world of electrons within atoms and molecules.”. “Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L'Huillier have demonstrated a way to create extremely short pulses of light that can be used to measure the rapid processes in which electrons move or change energy.”.

And what does this mean? Attosecond physics or attophysics, as it is also called, has made it possible to see subatomic phenomena on the shortest time scale captured by humans, for example, direct observations of natural phenomena that previously could not be perceived by people..

“It is incredible, there are not many women who have achieved this award and it is something very special,” declared the French scientist Anne L'Huillier excitedly during her speech at the event in which the award was announced..

Anne L'Huillier (1958, Paris), researcher at the Pierre and Marie Curie University and professor at Lund University in Sweden, has today become the fifth woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in the history of these awards. , since 1901. Previously, Marie Curie herself (1903), Maria Goeppert Mayer (1963), Donna Strickland (2018) and Andrea Ghez (2020) were awarded.

Anne L'Huillier Bertil Ericson AP

Pierre Agostini, also French (1968), from Aix-Marseille University, is a professor at Ohio State University, in the USA, while the Hungarian Ferenc Krausz directs the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics. Both Anne L' Huillier and Ferenc Krausz received this year the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge award, shared with Paul Corkum.

To understand how the phenomena that occur in nature work at speeds as fast as those that occur in the world of electrons, the Nobel Jury compares the process with a movie: what we perceive as continuous movement is actually a set of still images. In the world of physics, specially developed technology is also needed so that these subatomic processes can be perceived by people..

Between 1987 and 2011, the three awardees successfully carried out discoveries about light transmission and experiments that have produced pulses of light so short that they have been measured in attoseconds, demonstrating that such short pulses can be used to observe the processes that take place inside atoms and molecules. Thus, in 2001 Pierre Agostini produced a consecutive series of light pulses, each of which lasted only 250 attoseconds, while Ferenc Krausz was able to isolate a single light pulse that lasted 650 attoseconds in a different experiment that took place more or less at the same time.

“Now we can open the door to the world of electrons. Attosecond physics gives us the opportunity to understand the mechanisms that are governed by electrons. The next step will be to use them,” said Eva Olsson, head of the Nobel Physics Committee..

Future applications

Among the possible applications of attosecond experiments are electronics (since it is important to understand and control how electrons behave in a material), the search for new clean sources of energy or medicine, since attosecond pulses can be used to identify different molecules, as is done in medical diagnoses. But as is usual in science, the practical applications of advances in the world of physics are often unpredictable and cannot be anticipated at the time basic research is carried out..

Donna Strickland, Nobel Prize in Physics 2020, last Friday in Madrid TERESA GUERRERO

Precisely the Canadian Donna Strickland, who last week collected the CSIC Gold Medal in Madrid, addressed the implications of this type of research during her visit to Spain. In statements to EL MUNDO during an event organized by the Canadian Embassy last Friday, the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for her pioneering research in the field of optics and lasers defended the importance of basic research and recalled how at the beginning of her career “I couldn't imagine the number of applications lasers would have, and today they are everywhere”.

The secretary of the Swedish Academy (c) Hans Ellegren, during the announcement Anders Wiklund AP

In the coming years, applications of attoseconds will also emerge. As Luis Roso, professor of Applied Physics in the area of Optics at the University of Salamanca, recalls in statements to the Science Media Center Spain (SMC), in Europe there are already two large facilities dedicated to them, “one is ELI-ALPS in Szeged ( Hungary), based on the techniques developed by these three pioneers. The other is the Eu-XFEL in Hamburg (Germany), where they have developed an alternative technique based on electrons accelerated to enormous energy.”.

If in 2023 the winners research in the field of photonics, last year, the Nobel Prize in Physics went to the field of quantum mechanics and was also shared by three researchers: the French Alain Aspect, the American John F. Clauser and the Austrian Anton Zeilinger.

On Monday, the award was announced in the Medicine category, which went to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman for their research that allowed them to develop the bases to design mRNA vaccines during the coronavirus pandemic.. The Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccines are based on this technology.. Tomorrow, Wednesday, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry will be awarded and on Thursday, the Nobel Prize in Literature.

There is a type of cancer that, like a parasite, is transmitted between cockles across the Atlantic Ocean.

It is a disease similar to leukemia. In it, the tumor cells are able to escape from the animal that houses them and, through the sea, reach a new specimen and cause a new tumor.

A team of researchers from the CiMUS of the University of Santiago de Compostela led by José Tubío, has managed to genetically sequence for the first time these two classes of tumors transmissible between cockles that “represent a paradigm in the world of cancer” and whose study “could reveal relevant questions about how transmissible cancers in particular and cancer in general evolve,” as Tubío explains.

The work, the details of which are published in the latest issue of Nature Cancer, is part of the ERC Starting Grant SCUBA CANCERS project, which started in 2017 to study the genetic causes of this cancer capable of being transmitted through the sea between bivalves.

“In 2017 we sampled the entire European coast, from Morocco to Russia, in search of these tumors. We found infected animals in Spain, Portugal, France, England and Ireland, while the most northern countries of the European continent seem, in principle, to be free of this disease.. In total, almost 7,000 cockles were studied, and about 400 individuals infected with this parasitic tumor were identified,” says Tubío.

With the infected animals in hand, the researchers proceeded to study their genomes with the aim of “studying the genetic causes of the disease and investigating questions about its origin.”

To do this, first, scientists had to obtain the reference genome of the cockle, “a brutal effort” that was not completed until 2020.

The analysis of the genetic sequences of the infected animals first revealed that the disease they had observed in cockles in different parts of the Atlantic were actually two types of cancer “that had arisen independently throughout history.” .

They are not transmitted to humans

“We have not been able to determine the exact longevity of these tumors, but the data lead us to conclude that, without a doubt, they are ancient tumors,” one of the oldest known cancers, which arose thousands of years ago and carry all that time being transmitted through the sea, says Tubío, who emphasizes that this type of tumors cannot be transmitted to humans and only spread among susceptible cockles.

The most surprising finding for the team of scientists was that these cockle tumors have a very unstable and unstructured genome.. Thus, they found that cancer cells within a single tumor contain very different numbers of chromosomes, something that is not observed in other contagious cancers.. According to Tubío, contagious cancers were recently discovered thanks to advances in the field of genetics.. Currently, contagious cancers are only known in dogs, Tasmanian devils, and several marine species.

In this case, the tumor cells had a great variability of chromosomes and a very altered structure.

The researcher José Tubío, in the laboratory. CIMUS

For example, according to the work, some cells contained only 11 chromosomes and others up to 354, while the number of chromosomes in healthy cells of a normal cockle is always 38 (16 pairs of chromosomes).

This is surprising, the Galician team indicates in a press release “since human cancer cells cannot survive high levels of chromosomal instability, although moderate levels often make tumors more likely to spread to other organs and become resistant to treatment”.

“We believe that these structural mutations are the secondary events that have caused the tumor to evolve.”. This last question represents one of the most important points of the work: how is it possible that a tumor that has such a damaged genome could survive for thousands of years? This question has no answer yet and will be the objective of future research,” comments the CiMus researcher.

The work also suggests that these contagious cancers, originating in the hemolymph tissue, the 'blood' of cockles, have slowly spread through European cockle populations, accumulating diverse mutations and occasionally capturing mitochondria from host cells as replacements. of their own when damaged.

“When I considered the project, I considered studying these contagious metastases in water, because at the end of the day they behave like metastases, which can help us better understand in general how cancer works and how metastasis works,” says Tubío.

“Once the project is concluded, I believe that one of the most interesting questions to continue investigating is genomic instability,” the researcher highlights.

“How is it possible that a tumor with such a tremendously degenerated genome can survive for thousands of years?” he asks.

“In the short term, the clearest impact of the research is in veterinary science, in merchandise control and monitoring of these parasitic tumors on the coasts,” but it opens many avenues to continue investigating the survival and evolution capacity of tumors, he concludes.