Press releases

Sean Coughlin from the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Republic wants to experimentally reconstruct the process of preparing several ancient Greco-Egyptian perfumes. He is working with a team of historians, Egyptologists, philologists and organic chemists on a project called Alchemies of Scent. Together, they explore how people in ancient times extracted, combined, and preserved the scents of plants. Each year for the next five years, they will experimentally revive one of the scents used in antiquity.

A team led by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and the Czech Academy of Sciences has uncovered a new piece of the puzzle of how gene expression is orchestrated. Published in the journal Science, the findings reveal a novel mechanism that coordinates the assembly of components inside cells that control gene expression. The mechanism not only is essential for normal cell function, but also has been implicated in cancer, neurodegeneration and HIV infection, and could suggest new ways to treat these conditions.

The BIVOJ laser system is once again a record holder in its performance class. This is BIVOJ's second world record this year and a third overall. Earlier this month the high energy output from BIVOJ was converted (via second harmonic frequency conversion) to 515 nm wavelength pulses with an energy of more than 68 J at a repetition rate of 10 Hz, which at the time of writing is the world's highest average power in the category of high energy (>1 J), high average power lasers.

Until now, observing subatomic structures was beyond the resolution capabilities of direct imaging methods, and this seemed unlikely to change. Czech scientists, however, have presented a method with which they became the first in the world to observe an inhomogeneous electron charge distribution around a halogen atom, thus confirming the existence of a phenomenon that had been theoretically predicted but never directly observed. Comparable to the first observation of a black hole, the breakthrough will facilitate understanding of interactions between individual atoms or molecules as well as of chemical reactions, and it opens a path to the refinement of the material and structural properties of various physical, biological, and chemical systems. The breakthrough was published in Science.

The BIVOJ laser has broken its own performance record that is set in 2016. In a recent test, the system was operated for an hour at a pulse energy in excess of 145 J (with a maximum of 146.5 J) in 10 ns pulses at a repetition rate of 10 Hz at a wavelength of 1030 nm.

The establishment of the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) ERIC opens the door for researchers, industry and countries to gain access to the world’s largest collection of super-powerful and ultrafast lasers for science.

Researchers from the Nano-optics research team have developed a new technology that allows composing a three-dimensional image from a constantly moving sample using an optical microscope. The prestigious journal Nature Communications reported about the new patented method today.

A small drone adapted for invasive plant species monitoring is one of the results of long-term cooperation between the Brno University of Technology and the Institute of Botany of the Czech Academy of Sciences.

An international research team headed by Michal Hocek of the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences (IOCB Prague) and Charles University and Ciara K. O’Sullivan of Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV) in Spain have developed a novel method for labelling DNA, which in the future can be used for sequencing DNA by means of electrochemical detection. The researchers presented their results in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Scientists from the Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry of the CAS have developed a new generation of medicinal products derived from the original product used to accelerate the healing of injuries called HemaGel. Medicinal products manufacturer company VH Pharma will launch gel HemaGel New and its new application HemaCut SPRAY this year. Both new medicinal products have been protected by patents.