News from FZU

Every year, the Czech Academy of Sciences gives out the Otto Wichterle Award. It goes to exceptional scientists under 35 who achieve top results at the very start of their careers. This year’s laureate from the Institute of Physics of the CAS is Aleš Vlk, who has been focusing on halide perovskites since 2018, materials with the potential to fundamentally improve the efficiency of harvesting energy from the sun.

Billions of them are passing through our bodies right now, and yet they are almost impossible to catch. For this year's Dvořák Lecture, we hosted one of the world's leading experts on neutrinos, Professor Stefan Söldner-Rembold, who heads the Department of Physics at Imperial College London.

In the photovoltaic tent, visitors got to experience the principle of generating electricity from sunlight. On a black hole model, they spun marbles that raced along orbits on a taut canvas. At the superconducting train exhibit, they watched as it levitated above the tracks and traveled with almost no friction. This was this year's exhibition by the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences (FZU) at the tenth-anniversary edition of the Science Fair (Veletrh vědy), the largest popular-science event in the Czech Republic.  

That was just one of the many burning questions tackled in last week’s conference ‘Re:vision of Science: From RDM to Evaluation Reform’ at the FZU. Guest speakers from across the Czech Academy of Sciences’ institutes and Czech universities as well as international keynote speakers shared best practice in open science, but also raised important points that need to be solved – such as the future of responsible data sharing and building truly global, resilient infrastructures.

Letošní Family Day se nesl ve znamení vesmírného dobrodružství. Téměř 150 návštěvníků z řad našich zaměstnanců a zaměstnankyň a jejich rodin strávilo 10. června odpoledne na FZU AV ČR, kde se děti i dospělí mohli vydat na cestu mezi hvězdy, planety a další tajemství vesmíru.