ChemCafé

Swiss people usually share a deep love for their mountains. So it is not such a surprise to see that researchers from IBM Research in Zurich, after having developed a new ‘nano-carving’ method, wanted to show it at work by sculpting a nanometric version of our most famous peak.
In a recent article in Science, Pires [...]

Still reporting from Nürnberg (where the EuCheMS meeting takes place this week), I had the opportunity this morning to observe and think on how people behave at a conference.
In my imagination, conferences in the past involved a passionate speaker (usually wearing a hat) who was disclosing his/her latest discoveries, vehemently speaking or writing on a [...]

Hi, I’m back on ChemCafé after a long, moreless justified, interruption.* I’m now reporting almost live from Nürnberg (Germany) where the 3rd edition of EuCheMS (unpronounceable acronym for European Association for Chemical and Molecular Sciences) chemistry congress takes place this week. I’ll try to send regularly short posts reflecting the atmosphere of this event.
Today was [...]

This afternoon came to EPFL Prof. Achim Müller from University of Bielefeld (Germany) to give a talk to our institute. Among a series of impressive giant molybdenum-based spheres (see figure below) he mentioned molecules belonging to either Archimedean or Platonic solids… Although the talk itself was quite fascinating, the question I was asking to myself [...]