Ondra unexpectedly passed away in the midst of diligent work on November 10, 2023. For those who would like to hear Ondra once again, we send a link to his lecture on magnetism from last year's online workshop on Jana. We won't hear this year's lecture.
Swapping your left shoe for the right one while putting them on is unpleasant, but swapping molecules in the same way when making medicines can be fatal - instead of a drug poison is produced. A new method invented by a team of international scientists led by Lukas Palatinus from the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences will help prevent this. The unique procedure for determining the position of atoms in crystals was published last week in the Nature Chemistry journal.
On September 28, the Neuron Endowment Fund awarded two leading scientists of the Institute of Physics. In the Pantheon of the National Museum, Václav Petříček received the highest prize awarded, Neuron Prize for Contribution to World Science, and Prokop Hapala was ranked by the Neuron Board among seven promising young scientists awarded.
Crystals are as a construction set. They are made up from tiny building blocks which often are molecules. Lukáš Palatinus is able to determine what molecules look like and how they are put together in a crystal. He can thus create new models of crystal structures. An imperfect crystal, which is characterised by errors and inaccuracies in the cube structure, is another scientific challenge for Lukáš Palatinus.
A work published Science in March 2020 shows that the development of crystallographic calculations also plays an important role in top physical research.
Authors extended the application of the method further to the fields where the knowledge of the so-called absolute configuration of molecules is indispensable, such as pharmaceutical research or molecular biology. The new method will be used in laboratories and the development of drugs will become faster, simpler and more effective.
A medal received a Slovak experimental scientist in the field of elementary particles, doc Brunckov. The second medal went to the department of physical chemistry at Munich University. Other honoured fields were the geophysics, philosophy or literature science.
Czech scientists were awarded during the 9th International Conference on Nanomaterials – Nanocon 2017 in Brno.
Among other successes, he developed a program Superflip, which has been widely adopted by the crystallographic community and is one of the most commonly used programs in the field today.
The method of analysis is so accurate that it can be used to detect the positions of even the lightest of all atoms – the hydrogens.
Václav Petříček has been awarded for his contribution to the practical application of the theory of aperiodic structures in his computing system JANA. The Max Perutz Prize is one of two highest appreciation in the field of crystallography. Currently, almost every modulated structure is solved with JANA, and the program gets about 300 citations per year.
