The current approach to food, nutrition, agriculture, and the environment is unsustainable and must change. There is no time to waste, say the130 national academies of science and medicine across Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe that compose the InterAcademy Partnership

When a musical group or orchestra play dissonant tones, listeners are disappointed and unlucky. In the nature of our planet there is an orchestra whose consonance can lead to disasters. It is known as El Niño. A Czech team from the Institute of Computer Science of the CAS has recently contributed to a better understanding of this phenomenon and its basic components or tones.

How an evolutionary conserved protein complex works in mitochondria, the powerhouses of eukaryotic cells, was published by researchers at Biology Center AS CR in the prestigious journal Current Biology. The editorial board selected the study as a featured article that is freely available to readers.

The Spanish Embassy organised on November 15, 2018, an event "From Nano to Geo" at the Czech Academy of Sciences, which aims to transform ladders into scaffolds.

Under the leadership of Petr Cígler from the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry and Martin Hrubý from the Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry, both of which are part of the Czech Academy of Sciences, a team of researchers has developed a revolutionary method for the easy and inexpensive production of irradiated nanodiamonds and other nanomaterials suitable for use in highly sensitive diagnostics of diseases, including various types of cancer. Their article was recently published in the scientific journal Nature Communications.

The simple transport of medicines directly into cells is one of the primary goals of the pharmaceutical industry. In large part, we still don’t possess a detailed understanding at the molecular level of the processes responsible for transporting substances into and out of cells. In collaboration with colleagues from the Czech Republic and Germany, the research team of Pavel Jungwirth from the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences (IOCB Prague) has discovered a previously unknown mechanism by which short peptides are able to penetrate cells and, in principle, could serve as carriers of medicine molecules.

Destructive cyclones are moving to new areas. This is the conclusion of a new study which documents a long-term shift of the zones affected by tropical cyclones. The study was presented by an international team of scientists under the lead of Jan Altman from the Institute of Botany of the CAS in the prestigious journal PNAS, published by the United States National Academy of Sciences.

A unique electron detector, presented half a year ago in Brno, has accomplished its first major discovery. Thanks to the detector, the team in Brno was able to view rotifers from the Brachionus calyciflorus species complex in their natural wet environment, gaining the worldwide primacy in this respect. What’s more, the detector has also helped the scientists discover several hitherto unknown species of these tiny organisms, invisible to the naked eye.

On October 25, CAS President Eva Zažímalová signed the first research collaboration agreement with an American research institution: the University of Memphis.

Leading scientists representing more than 75 European plant and life sciences research centers and institutes have endorsed a position paper that urgently calls upon European policy makers to safeguard innovation in plant science and agriculture. The scientists are deeply concerned about a recent European Court of Justice ruling around modern genome editing techniques that could lead to a de facto ban of innovative crop breeding. As a result, European farmers might be deprived of a new generation of more climate resilient and more nutritious crop varieties that are urgently needed to respond to current ecological and societal challenges.