Press Releases

On the night of June 30, a large survey telescope designed to map the ever-changing universe began full-scale operations at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. This marks a major shift in how we gather knowledge about our planet’s immediate and distant surroundings. Over the course of three nights, the telescope captures images of the entire southern sky—and it will repeat this process for ten years. As a result, we will obtain an astronomical amount of data and records of what changes in the sky and how. This will allow us to explore the universe in ways that were previously inaccessible to us. 

Eight teams, six months of preparation, three days of physics competitions. The winners of this year’s 39th Young Physicists’ Tournament have been announced.

The Einstein Telescope is a European scientific project of extraordinary scope, aimed at building a next-generation gravitational wave detector capable of detecting minute distortions in spacetime itself with unprecedented sensitivity.

In the presence of representatives of the European Commission, the Czech Academy of Sciences, ministries, partner institutions, and industry, the Surface Science Laboratory Station (SSLS) research apparatus was officially inaugurated on February 12 at the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences. The apparatus was moved to Prague from the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Karlsruhe. 

How many nanometres does your hand measure? Why does nothing stand still in the nano- world? And what does atomic force microscopy allow us to do? This and more is revealed in the new comic book Secrets of the Nano- World, published by the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences. The comic book introduces the frequently mentioned, but rarely taught topic of nanotechnology to (not only) students and teachers.

A team of scientists from the Czech Academy of Sciences and Masaryk University has made a major contribution to research into the accumulation of impurities at the interface between crystals, a phenomenon having caused e.g. a series of accidents at nuclear power stations in the UK in the 1960s.

Multiscale materials are assembled from different types of nanomaterials, which themselves have unusual properties. By combining and integrating them into higher-order hierarchies, smart matter with unique functionalities and surprising applications in many different fields can be obtained. A consortium of eight partners from academia and research, led by the J. Heyrovský Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences, has received financial support from the Programme Johannes Amos Comenius of the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports. Specifically, it was the Excellent Research Call aimed at supporting research with the potential for excellent results applicable in practice.

Scientists from the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry, the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, and Palacký University Olomouc, have once again successfully uncovered the mysteries of the world of molecules and atoms. They have experimentally confirmed the correctness of a decades-old theory that assumed a non-uniform distribution of electron density in aromatic molecules. This phenomenon significantly affects the physicochemical properties of molecules and their interactions. This research expands the possibilities for designing new nanomaterials and is the theme of a paper that has just been published in Nature Communications.