The award for best PhD Thesis with significant contribution of microscopic techniques for the year 2022 was granted by the Czechoslovak Microscopic Society (CSMS) to Šárka Křížová for her thesis titled 'Chemical and physical properties of impact glasses. The award was announced at the annual “Microscopy 2023” conference in Olomouc.

Milan Chroust received a prestigious Polonez Bis grant project co-funded by the National Science Centre and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement. The name of the project is “Turtles from Czechia and Poland: An overview of their common evolution in central Europe from the Triassic to the Recent”. Previously published and new fossil turtle material from Poland and Czechia will be revised, and the Mesozoic to Cenozoic evolution of turtles will be assessed in the context of environmental changes. As of 1 June, Milan Chroust starts a two-yearsʼ postdoc stay at the Institute of Paleobiology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. ©CC-BY

Cadmium is a toxic metal occurring in 8 isotopes in nature. However, the ratios of these isotopes may vary slightly among individual environmental compartments. This is caused by a phenomenon called isotope fractionation, where one environmental compartment is enriched in a heavier or lighter isotope at the expense of another. This can be exemplified by the uptake of cadmium by plants whose leaves are often isotopically lighter than their cadmium source in the soil. A new paper published in the journal Science of the Total Environment investigated the isotopic composition of Cd in mushrooms and topsoils in western Bohemia. Compared to soils, many mushroom species show a distinctly lighter Cd isotopic composition and, as suggested by data, such isotope fractionation may depend on specific mushroom species.

This is the topic studied by geologists within the partial project Changes of the Earth surface, which is a part of the research programme Dynamic planet Earth (Strategy AV21). The forest fire in the Bohemian-Saxonian Switzerland (northern Bohemia) of summer 2022 was the most extensive one in the modern history of the Czech Republic. What was the impact of this event on sandstone cliffs? This is being studied by scientists of the Institute of Geology of the Czech Academy of Sciences. To date, photographic documentation was taken and a few tens of rock samples were acquired. Other works will be dome in the coming weeks, after the temperatures rise permanently above the freezing point. The study, involving both instrumental analytical and microscopic methods, will assess the effect of the fire itself but also the subsequent effects of the winter season when water freezes in the joints and pores of cliff faces and free-lying blocks. See also information at AV21 website.