News archive

Over the next five years, three new Strategy AV21 programmes of the CAS will help decipher the unknown variables of our world: Identities in a World of Wars and Crises, Fungi – New Threats and Opportunities, and Space for Humankind, which builds on an eponymous completed project but asks new questions. How do the research programmes fulfil the motto of Strategy AV21, “Top research in the public interest”, and what will they specifically focus on?

It may be Earth’s similarly sized neighbour, but not even the toughest organism on our planet could survive there. Venus is sometimes called Earth’s infernal twin. Its atmosphere is mostly made up of carbon dioxide and its average surface temperature is over 460 degrees Celsius. And yet, once upon a time, Venus apparently had oceans full of water. What happened? Why is present-day Venus a hellscape? Was there ever life on Venus, and can there still be? The ESA-led EnVision mission, scheduled to launch in 2031, may provide some clues. Researchers from the J. Heyrovský Institute of Physical Chemistry of the CAS, the Institute of Geophysics of the CAS, and the Czech Geological Survey, as well as a number of Czech companies, are working on the preparation of the EnVision space probe.

How did insects get their wings? A still unsolved mystery of evolution. Despite years of research, it is not entirely clear which body structure insect wings actually evolved from and what their original function was prior to being able to handle active flight. Scientists from the Biology Centre of the CAS offer a possible answer to this question, having found a clue in newly discovered prehistoric fossils of an ancient group of insects. The study is published in Communications Biology.

Radomír Pánek, Director of the Institute of Plasma Physics of the CAS, has been elected the new General Assembly Chair of EUROfusion, the European Consortium for the Development of Fusion Energy. The EUROfusion consortium brings together nearly 5,000 scientists from 193 research institutions, universities, and companies across Europe. It operates with a budget of almost €1 billion, provided by the European Commission and EU Member States. The Czech scientist was elected Chair of the EUROfusion General Assembly in December 2023 for a two-year term.

Her entire scientific career revolves around cancer. In an ironic twist of fate, the diagnosis recently came into Veronika Vymetálková’s private life as well. But it certainly didn’t wipe the smile off her face or take the wind out of her research sails – quite the opposite! The interview with the researcher from the Institute of Experimental Medicine of the CAS was published in the A / Magazine.

At the start of each new year, people usually look to the future to speculate what it will bring. Experts from CzechGlobe have looked back into the past, however, to map the drying of the planet’s soil. They discovered that in the one third of our planet that is not permanently glaciated, soil moisture has been declining significantly over the last four decades. In contrast, only five percent of non-glaciated land has seen a long-term and significant increase in soil moisture. The study was published in the international scientific journal Environmental Research Letters.

The Czech Academy of Sciences is deeply shocked and saddened by the tragic events that occurred on 21 December 2023 at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague.

The Czech Science Foundation (Grantová agentura ČR) is our most important institution that provides earmarked public funding for basic research. In its 30 years of existence, it has supported over 20,000 projects and allocated more than CZK 71 billion. Since November 2021, it has been headed by Petr Baldrian, a researcher affiliated with the Institute of Microbiology of the CAS. Does the Foundation have sufficient support from the Czech state in times of austerity measures? What sort of innovations is it planning?

Multiscale materials could find practical applications in electrical engineering, medicine, and environmental technologies. Their research and development is being carried out by researchers as part of the AMULET project led by the J. Heyrovský Institute of Physical Chemistry of the CAS. The consortium of eight partners from academia and research has received funding in the amount of nearly half a billion crowns in the ‘Excellence in Research’ call from the Johannes Amos Comenius Programme of the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports.

In the tenth jubilee year of the in-house photo contest of the Czech Academy of Sciences, the winner became the photo by Dušan Tichoň from the Institute of Physics of Materials of the CAS entitled “The Life Form of Iron”. All the photographs which were awarded are on view in large format as part of the exhibition at the Science and Art Gallery at the CAS headquarters on Národní Street in Prague until 31 January 2024. Admission is free.