“8” ANNIVERSARIES IN CZECHOSLOVAK HISTORY
October 28 1918
The creation of Czechoslovakia in 1918 was the culmination of the long struggle of the Czechs against their Austrian rulers and of the Slovaks against their Hungarian rulers. At the outbreak of World War I, the Czechs and Slovaks showed little enthusiasm for fighting for their respective enemies, the Germans and the Hungarians, against fellow Slavs, the Russians and the Serbs. In 1916, together with Edvard Beneš and Milan Rastislav Štefánik, Masaryk created the Czechoslovak National Council. In early October 1918, Germany and Austria proposed peace negotiations. On October 28, the National Committee issued a declaration of Czechoslovak independence.
EVENT
First beam in the LHC
The first beam in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was successfully steered around the full 27 kilometers of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator on September 10. This historic event marks a key moment in the transition from over two decades of preparation to a new era of scientific discovery.
The DØ Experiment
The DØ Experiment consists of a worldwide collaboration of scientists conducting research on the fundamental nature of matter. The experiment is located at the world's premier high-energy accelerator, the Tevatron Collider, at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, USA. The research is focused on precise studies of interactions of protons and antiprotons at the highest available energies. It involves an intense search for subatomic clues that reveal the character of the building blocks of the universe.
SCIENCE AND RESEARCH
New Institute
The Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (AS CR) established a new public research institution, the Institute of Biotechnology AS CR, v. v. i. The primary ambition of this new institute is to develop cutting-edge basic and oriented research on topics opening for diagnostic and therapeutic applications in human medicine. In particular, the institute was established to serve as a nucleation center of BIOCEV, the joined Biotech & Biomed Research Center of the Academy of Sciences with Charles University, to be built at Vestec near Prague by the year 2012 with the support of the European Regional Development Funds in frame of the Operational Program R&D for Innovation.
ICTTD Bioinformatics workshop
The purpose of the workshop, which took place in 8–15 June 2008, was to train scientists to manage and exploit large EST datasets as well as compare whole genome sequences, with the aim of facilitating the application of genomic technologies to ticks and tickbornepathogens. The course provided an overview of the methods used to sequence, assemble, and annotate tick borne disease related genomes and EST datasets.
NEW PROJECTS
Microscopic detection
Aquatic microbial ecology group at Institute of Hydrobiology (Biology Center AS CR, v. v. i.) primarily deal with carbon and nutrient flows through microbial food webs in systems of different trophic status. In particular, members of this group have begun to study relative interaction of organisms and their function in nutrient cycling in the impounding reservoirs and the lakes.