Press releases

The oldest currently known human occupation of Europe lies near the town of Korolevo in western Ukraine. New findings by an international team led by Roman Garba from the Nuclear Physics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Institute of Archaeology of the CAS, Prague, have confirmed that the lowermost layer with the stone tools at Korolevo dates to 1.4 million years ago. Until now, the earliest inhabited location was thought to be Atapuerca in Spain, some 200,000 to 300,000 years later. The results, published today in Nature, also show that early hominins took advantage of warm interglacial periods to colonise Europe from the east or southeast. A recent advance in mathematical modelling combined with applied nuclear physics has enabled the precise dating of the Korolevo’s earliest occupation. The four-year long research project involved scientists from five countries and more than ten research institutions from around the world.

All animals undergo embryogenesis, the development of the embryo. Until recently, it was thought that the main goal of early embryogenesis was mainly to initiate developmental processes correctly. But an international team of scientists has found that in parasitic bitterling fish, the embryos already develop a set of important adaptations during this early stage that give them major survival advantages.

Controlling the chemical structure of matter at the atomic level with light seemed impossible until now. Now, scientists have developed a technique to control photochemical reactions at the level of individual molecules. An international team of researchers, including Tomáš Neuman from the Institute of Physics at CAS, has published a method for controlling molecular dynamics in Nature Nanotechnology. This breakthrough could open a new chapter in photochemistry research.

A breakthrough study, led by Czech scientists, has revealed how biological diversity originated in one of the world’s most significant biodiversity centres. The most extensive genetic study of African small insectivores, shrews, published in the Journal of Biogeography, unveiled secrets related to the origin, spreading patterns, and unusual diversification of mountain mammals in sub-Saharan Africa.

The decline of insect populations has attracted worldwide interest in times of global warming and changing environment, but we have only rudimentary knowledge about the biodiversity and abundance of insects in the high mountains in tropical regions. Even what nutrients limit insects in nature is still not well understood. This knowledge is important because of the increasingly frequent climatic extreme events that change the availability of food resources. An international team of scientists from six countries, led by researchers from the Biological Centre of the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS), conducted a unique field experiment on three tropical high mountains, in some of the last virgin forests in the world. In this intercontinental work, scientists offered ants different food in order to find out, which nutrients these important insects prefer most in nature. The results, which among other things led to the discovery of more than a hundred undescribed species of ants, were published in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography.

How did insect wings originate? This is a question that represents an unsolved mystery of insect evolution. Despite many years of research, it is still not entirely clear from which body structure insect wings actually evolved and what their original function was when they were not yet efficient enough to perform active flight. Scientists from the Biology Centre of the Czech Academy of Sciences were also involved in looking for answers to these questions in newly discovered prehistoric fossils of an ancient group of insects.

Researchers from IOCB Prague and their colleagues from Ghent University in Belgium have been working on improving the properties of gelatin-based materials, thereby expanding the possibilities of their use mainly in medicine. In a paper published in the scientific journal ACS Applied Engineering Materials, they have presented 3D-printable materials that can be easily monitored using an X-ray machine or through computed tomography (CT).

For the first time, an international team of scientists has successfully developed a polyradical nanographene by combining two concepts of pi-magnetism formation in nanographene: strong interaction between electrons and topological frustration, and they detected the magnetic signal using advanced scanning probe microscopy and quantum mechanical calculations. Graphene nanoparticles of certain shapes can exhibit magnetic properties, making them suitable for information storage and processing in quantum computing.

In an article published in Nature, an international team of scientists breaks down the traditional idea of dividing magnetism into two branches – the ferromagnetic one, known for several millennia, and the antiferromagnetic one, discovered about a century ago. Researchers have now succeeded in directly experimentally demonstrating a third altermagnetic branch, theoretically predicted by researchers in Prague and Mainz several years ago.

Up to two-thirds of all cancers are caused by errors that occur during DNA replication. This is the focus of the laboratory of Hana Polášek-Sedláčková from the Institute of Biophysics of the CAS, who has been awarded a prestigious EMBO Installation Grant (€50,000) to research new molecular pathways.