One of the world’s most important theoretical chemists, Hiroshi Nakatsuji, was awarded the honorary medal “De scientia et humanitate optime meritis” of the Czech Academy of Sciences. This award has been granted since 1996 to outstanding domestic and foreign personalities for particularly meritorious activity in the field of science and humanitarian ideas.

Czech scientists have discovered three new lakes in eastern Antarctica. Each is 20 to 40 kilometres in diameter. They lie at a depth greater than one kilometre under the ice and there are opinions that all three lakes are interconnected by a river flowing into Lake Vostok, the largest underground lake in the world.

Photosynthesis is an extremely important process, which makes it possible to convert solar radiation into chemical energy. This solves the problem of converting light into energy and, at the same time, saving it for later use. This process is used by green plants and a number of other organisms, and science has tried to fully understand it for over a hundred years. New findings are now available to scientists thanks to the development of lasers and the prestigious journal Nature Chemistry has published those results.

Without ionic hydrates of sodium, cells could not function, dissolving with salt. We find them in ionic drinks. The hydration of ions has its role in corrosion even in electrochemistry. “We have managed to fill one of the blank places in chemistry, biology and physics,” said Pavel Jelínek from the Institute of Physics of the CAS. The unique study by Czech and Chinese scientists has been published in the journal Nature in recent days.

The international group of Prof. Martin Hof at the J. Heyrovsky Institute of Physical Chemistry, CAS, unravelled the role of lipid molecules in a key process involved in the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. The brand new insight intothe molecular mechanisms involved in Alzheimer’s disease was possible by using single molecule fluorescence techniques developed in the group.

The Academy of Sciences of the CR concluded the evaluation of the research and professional activities of its 54 Institutes for 2010–2014. It was the most detailed evaluation not only in the Czech Academy of Sciences but in the whole Czech Republic. In these days, the CAS is publishing, in Czech as well English, the survey of the course and results of this evaluation. The evaluation was based on a method to this extent never before used in the Czech Republic, in which foreign experts assessed – within individual fields and in relation to the current international level of the given field – research and professional activities of the scientific teams. In this assessment over 1,400 experts, who came from fifty countries, mostly from Germany, the United States and France, took part.

Scientists from the Institute of Physics together with colleagues from Utrecht University developed a new method to image the electrostatic field of molecules at the atomic level. The work, which was published in the prestigious journal Nature Communications [1], advances our current possibilities to image individual molecules on a solid surface using atomic force microscopy (AFM) and scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM).

On Friday, 13 May, President of the Czech Academy of Sciences Prof. Jiří Drahoš awarded two significant world scientists prestigious medals of the CAS. The highest prize, the medalDe scientia at humanitate optime meritis, was awarded to Prof. Dr. Rolf-Dieter Heuer, director-general of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in 2009–2015, an important scientist in the field of experimental particle physics. An Ernst Mach Honorary Medal for Merit in the physical sciences was awarded to Prof. Dr. Jörg Neugebauer, director of the Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschung in Dusseldorf.

The Czech Academy of Sciences concluded the evaluation of the research and professional activities of its 54 Institutes for the period 2010–2014. It was the most detailed evaluation ever not only of the Czech Academy of Sciences itself but in all of the Czech Republic. It was based on a method never before used in the Czech Republic, which lay in foreign experts within the individual research fields assessing the professional activities of the scientific teams in the international context. The works of Czech researchers was assessed by over 1,400 experts, who came from fifty countries, most often from Germany, the United States and France.

Under the auspices of the president of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prof. Jiří Drahoš, the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, the Mozart Society in Czech Republic and the Don Juan Archiv in Vienna held the international “Current Issues of Mozart Research” conference, marking this year’s 260th anniversary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s birth and the 225th anniversary of his death. It was held on 16 and 17 April 2016 in the main building of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. In his opening salutary speech, the Vice-President of the Academy of Sciences, Dr. Pavel Baran, informed the foreign participants that upon its foundation back in 1890 the institution was called the Academy of Sciences and Arts, and added that its initiator, the architect Josef Hlávka, had 30 years previously built the Hofoper in Vienna. Hlávka was closely personally associated with the composer Antonín Dvořák, which resulted in, among other things, the creation of the Mass in D major, “Lužany”.