News

A team of secondary school students, representing the Czech Republic under the auspices of the Jaroslav Heyerovsky Institute of Physical Chemistry in Prague, has won the silver medal at the 35th year of the International Young Physicists’ Tournament held in Timisoara, Romania, earlier this year. In a tough international competition, they came second, losing only to the German team, following five demanding rounds.

Five years ago the researcher Barbora Špačková moved to Sweden to take up a postdoc position at the Chalmers University of Technology where she developed a unique imaging method called nanofluidic scattering microscopy using which she can see, as she puts it, “things that nobody else has ever seen before”. 

An international physics conference “Frontiers of Quantum and Mesoscopic Thermodynamics”, taking place in Prague in August 2022, dealt with small nanosystems with sizes from tents to hundreds of nanometres in non-equilibrium conditions. The behaviour of such systems is thought to have a significant impact on the future of nanotechnologies, quantum computers development but also on the future of chemistry and medicine. 

Scientists from the Laboratory of Biophysics contributed to the field of DNA nanotechnology with a recent systematic analysis. The authors, led by Oleg Lunov, have summarized the current state of knowledge about the interactions of DNA nanostructures (DN) with cells and identified the key challenges.

Dolní Břežany. The president of the Czech Academy of Sciences Eva Zažímalová has attended the tapping of the foundation stone ceremony for the construction of the Brain4Industry innovation centre today. The centre to be built has recently become part of the European Digital Innovation Hubs.

The Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences – as the only research institution in the Czech Republic – has been awarded the European Union’s prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions COFUND grant. Almost six million Euros, i.e. more than 146 million Czech Korunas, will be used to fund 60 two-years’ postdoctoral fellowships.

Maximize efficiency and minimize costs in the production of hydrogen using solar decomposition of water – this is what a team of scientists led by Zdeněk Hubička from the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic is trying to do. 

A device that uses a single blood drop to determine whether a patient has a melanoma, and, possibly, at what stage, is being developed by an international research team that includes researchers from the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences led by the researcher Jakub Dostálek. As part of the VerSiLiB project, they are building a device capable of capturing and detecting even very small amounts of molecules produced by tumour cells, which can be used as biomarkers.

A total of 59 women registered for this year's L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Talent Programme, including Evgenia Chitrova from the FZU. Together with two other scientists, Eva Krupičková Pluhařová and Zuzana Střížová, she has won an award for her work.