Press releases

Discoveries at a major new fossil site in Morocco suggest giant arthropods – relatives of modern-day creatures including shrimps, insects, and spiders – dominated oceans 470 million years ago. Early evidence from the site at Taichoute, once undersea but now a desert, records numerous large “free-swimming” arthropods. More research is needed to analyse these fragments, but based on previously described specimens, the giant arthropods could be up to two metres long. The new study was published in the journal Scientific Reports.

A female scientist from the Astronomical Institute of the CAS was part of the team that for the first time achieved a long-term observation of an extremely rare event: a stellar tidal rip. Astronomer Christina Thönea was involved through her observing programmes on telescopes located at the Calar Alto Observatory and in the Canary Islands. The Nature journal has now published a paper on the research, called “A very luminous jet from disruption of a star by a massive black hole”.

From the lab to the store and the field. Scientists from the Laboratory of Growth Regulators, a joint facility of the Institute of Experimental Botany of the CAS and Palacký University in Olomouc, have prepared a new, highly effective plant growth stimulator called MTU. Under licence with a British partner, the product containing the patented Czech substance is already being sold to farmers in the UK. Next year, it will be available in other European countries, including the Czech Republic.

The management of one of the largest Large Research Infrastructures (LRI) currently being built in Europe, the FAIR accelerator laboratory, spent two hectic days in the Czech Republic on November 24 and 25, 2022. 

Thanks to the PILATUS project, there will be three pilot lines built in Europe by 2025, covering the entire production cycle of innovative silicon solar panels. Special technologies with contacts on the bottom side will allow solar cells to convert energy with efficiency higher than 26%. In the production of this photovoltaic "Ferrari", the experts also want to minimize its CO₂ footprint. In the project, a team from the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences under the leadership of Martin Ledinský will be involved as well.

Thanks to scientists from the Institute of Vertebrate Biology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, what used to take days to weeks and computers with huge computing capacity will be faster and more reliable. They developed "diem", a method of genomes polarization, thanks to which experts around the world across disciplines can more easily analyze genomes. It will be appreciated, for example, by archaeologists when searching for Neanderthal genes in the genome of modern humans or biologists who can track advantageous chunks of genomes and further use them as biomarkers.

Different characteristics between northern and southern bank vole populations in Britain, due to differences in haemoglobin types, could affect their ability to adapt to a changing climate. Research by scientists at the Institute of Animal Physiology and Genetics of the Czech Academy of Sciences has shown that northern populations of these small rodents will “borrow” a more favourable haemoglobin variant, critical for adaptation, from populations adapted to living in the warmer conditions of southern England to survive climate warming. The ability to take advantage of the diversity of traits already present in populations and adapt to climate change through them will be critical to the survival of many plant and animal species, including humans.

Martin Pivokonský, a hydrochemist specializing in water quality and treatment, Lucie Bačáková, a leading Czech expert in regenerative medicine and tissue engineering, and Viktor Černý, an anthropologist researching the earliest history of Africa and Arabia. Three outstanding scientists, who are among the world's leaders in their fields, received the Academic Award, Praemium Academiae, from the hands of the President of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Eva Zažímalová. The ceremony took place as part of the Week of the Academy of Sciences festival at the Library of the CAS.

The green world that we live in would not have been possible without hidden changes to the plant body over the last 400 million years. To grow beyond just centimetres tall outside of the wettest places on land, plants had to re-arrange their water-conducting tissues to keep them safe from drought. A new study by Martin Bouda of the Institute of Botany of the Czech Academy of Science and co-authors, published in the journal Science, shows how the solution to a hundred-year-old debate in botany reveals a key adaptation that allowed plants to colonise dry land.

Richard Stefl from CEITEC Masaryk University (MU) and Petr Svoboda from the Institute of Molecular Genetics of the Czech Academy of Sciences (IMG CAS) and their colleagues have revealed the unique mechanism of action of mammalian Dicer. Dicer is an RNA-cutting enzyme that is essential for the regulation of gene activities in cells. The research team described how Dicer could be reactivated to serve as an antiviral enzyme. This discovery provides previously unexploited opportunities for the design of new defence mechanisms against RNA viruses in humans. The research results were published on 3 November 2022 in the prestigious scientific journal Molecular Cell.