Press releases

As a reaction to the invasion of Ukraine by Russian and Belarusian troops and the unprecedented violation of international law, the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS) will terminate or suspend contracts of scientific collaboration with institutions from the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus. It will also stop all other scientific activities realized by any of the 54 CAS institutes until further notice.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has established two new world records for megaflashes of lightning in notorious hotspots in North and South America. The new record for the longest detected megaflash distance is 768 ± 8 km and the longest duration for a single lightning flash of 17.102 ± 0.002 seconds.

The draft state budget (SB) for 2022 submitted at the end of summer 2021 by the outgoing government of Andrej Babiš planned for expenditures of 1,928 billion CZK. That would be 394.5 billion CZK, and 25.7% more than the actual expenditure of the SB in 2019. Such a significant increase in expenditure, unaccompanied by an adequate increase in revenues, would significantly increase the structural deficit of the SB. The new government of Petr Fiala has therefore decided to revise the original draft budget in a new provisional budget.

Forest trees emit scents when attacked by caterpillars and other herbivores. They use these to attract predatory insects and even birds, thus getting rid of their pests. This had only been demonstrated in laboratory or garden experiments so far. A team of researchers led by Martin Volf from the Biology Centre of the Czech Academy of Sciences, could now demonstrate this phenomenon for the first time in a natural habitat – in the 40-metre-high canopy of the Leipzig floodplain forest.

The international team, which also includes Czech researchers from České Budějovice and Třeboň, received the Newcomb Cleveland Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for the best research article or report published in the scientific journal Science in 2021.

The HiLASE Centre in Dolní Břežany is celebrating another success; another world record. At the end of January, the High Energy Slab Lasers scientific team managed to break their own world record on the BIVOJ laser system by 40%. Converting to the second harmonic frequency, they demonstrated 515 nm, second harmonic pulses with an energy of 95 J at a repetition rate of 10 Hz.

Have you ever been interested in what fish do at night, where they hide in winter, or where that bird that frequently visits your bird feeder flies? The current revolution in animal movement tracking technologies may soon provide you with answers to such questions. A review of the ongoing advances in understanding animal movement was recently published in the journal Science. with input from scientists from the Biology Centre of the Czech Academy of Sciences.

The Czech Academy of Sciences is planning to offer support in the form of fellowships to university students, postdoctoral researchers and scientists working in the territory of invaded Ukraine.

Scientists from the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences in collaboration with their Korean colleagues successfully demonstrated an experiment to create and destroy solitons with non-integer charge. They achieved this by using electrical pulses from the tip of a scanning microscope. The new procedure is an important step in the development of quantum computers based on solitons. The result was published in the Nature Nanotechnology journal.

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.