Press releases

A major new study of ancient DNA has traced the movement of people into southern Britain during the Bronze Age. In the largest such analysis published to date, scientists examined the DNA of nearly 800 ancient individuals. Czech expert contributed with both samples and expertise.

Researchers from the Czech Academy of Sciences have patented an invention that might fix the problem with batteries catching on fire. The experimental high-voltage aqueous battery, built as a joint effort of the Institute of Physics and the J. Heyrovsky Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS), is based on dual-ion electrochemical reactions. The new battery provides a life-cycle of 500 discharge/charge cycles, and its capacity is comparable to that of the commercially available nickel-metal hydride batteries. But unlike them, the aqueous battery is made of extremely cheap materials.

Graphene has very unique properties and could improve many components and devices. A detailed understanding of the physicochemical properties of this 2D material - including the role of structural defects - is essential for its successful use in practice. Scientists at the J. Heyrovský Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences have found that by combining two different measurement methods, they can determine the role graphene defects play in transitions between electronic states and electrochemical reactions.

An effective storage of solar energy, reactions of cells to stress, new strategies against cancer. Those ideas scored well in the competition of more than 4000 proposals and won the ERC Starting Grant. Four Czech proposals succeeded, three of them were submitted by experts from the Czech Academy of Sciences. The prestigious grants are funded by the European Research Council under the Europe Horizon programme. Grants worth on average €1.5 million are awarded to excellent and original projects that extend scientific knowledge or even provide a break-though.

Strategic Partnership Program Agreement between Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on performance ramping of the L3-HAPLS laser signed.

The Institute of Physics CAS (ELI Beamlines) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the National Synchrotron Radiation Research Center in Taiwan. The Signing Ceremony was held online and it is the beginning of bilateral scientific and technical cooperation.

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.