The International Year of Crystallography at UB

The University of Barcelona (UB) has joined the International Year of Crystallography. It organises several activities addressed to students and the general public. On Wednesday 29 October, at 6.30 p.m., the Aula Ramón y Cajal of the Historic Building hosts the colloquium “Simetria: del cristall a Salvador Dalí”; it coincides with the 25th anniversary of Dalíʼs death. The personalities who participate in the event arre: Lourdes Cirlot, professor of History of Art and vice-rector for Institutional Relations and Culture, speaks about symmetry in Dalíʼs work; Miquel Àngel Cuevas, Emeritus Professor from the Department of Crystallography, Mineralogy and Mineral Deposits, analyses symmetry from the perspective of crystallography, and Jorge Wagensberg, professor from the Department of Fundamental Physics, describes Dalíʼs relationship with science.

The Day of the Crystal

The Faculty of Geology organises the first Day of the Crystal, an activity addressed to students which takes place on 5 November. It begins at 9 a.m. with the lecture “Un món de cristalls”, pronounced by Professor Miquel Àngel Cuevas. Then, the documentary El misterio de los cristales gigantes by Javier Trueba is screened. A debate takes place next; Àngels Canals participate in it. During the morning, students participate in a crystallography gymkhana. Moreover, the hall of the Faculty hosts the exhibition “Viatge al cristall”, which is the Catalan version of the French exhibition “Voyage dans le cristal”, composed by a series of posters that enable to discover the different stages of crystallography and crystals.

Finally, on 19 November, the exhibition “Cristalls a la llum dels raigs X” is opened at the CRAI Faculty of Chemistry and Physics of the UB. The CRAI Faculty of Geology also collaborates in this bibliographic exhibition. It commemorates the 100th anniversary of the birth of X-ray crystallography, thanks to the work of Max von Laue and W.H. Bragg and W. L. Bragg, who were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1914 and 1915, respectively, for the discovery of the diffraction and refraction of X-rays by crystals.

New edition of the crystallization contest

The UB organises the fourth Contest Crystallization at the School, an activity coordinated by the Scientific Culture and Innovation Unit (UCC+i) of the UB, and organised together with the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV) and the Fundació la Caixa. The contest is addressed to upper secondary students.

Crystals are everywhere in nature. They permeate our daily lives and are the basis to develop new materials. Throughout history, twenty-three Nobel prizes have been conferred on studies centred on this field of knowledge. This fact proves the relevance of a promising research area. The International Year of Crystallography coincides with the 100th anniversary of the birth of modern crystallography, with the discovery of X-ray diffraction, a technique used to determine, for example, the structure of proteins, which was key to determine DNA structure. The international year also coincides with the 400th anniversary of Keplerʼs observation of the symmetrical form of ice crystals (in 1611), thus beginning the wider study of the role of symmetry in matter.