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Popular Science: What all does solar activity cause?

The Sun is the most important source of energy for the Earth. That is clear. How else does the Sun affect the Earth? Radan Huth, a Climatologist from the Department of Physical Geography and Geoecology, the Faculty of Science, Charles University in Prague, researched the influence of solar activity on North Atlantic Oscillation together with colleagues from Romania.

Popular Science: Erratic boulders – witnesses of the past

Scientists from our Faculty are also working at the edge of the ice continent. Thanks to the facilities of Masaryk University’s Mendel Antarctic station on James Ross Island, Zbyněk Engel, a member of the Department of Physical Geography and Geoecology, can work there together with colleagues from the Czech Geology Survey and the University of Marseille. They dated the remains of glacier activity to clarify knowledge about the development of glaciation.

Popular Science: What to do with toxic wood? Let’s compost it!

Toxic waste is being produced with ease in vast quantities, but it is considerably more difficult to get rid of it gracefully afterwards. Stefano Covino and his colleagues from the Institute of Environmental Studies at the Charles University and the Institute of Microbiology at the Academy of Sciences focused on a 240-days detailed survey of the composting process, which can decompose creosote-treated wood.

Quo Vadis Chemie: Zeolite-templated 3-D graphene-like microporous carbons

The lecture will be held by prof. Ryong Ryoo of KAIST University in Daejeon, South Korea. He is the head of the Center for Functional Nanomaterials. Ryoo has won a variety of awards, including the Top Scientist Award given by the South Korean government in 2005. He obtained the KOSEF Science and Technology Award in 2001 for his work on the synthesis and crystal structure of mesoporous silica. The lecture will take place at Ch2 Lecture Hall on Monday 23th of May, 2 pm.

Popular Science: Are seagrasses capable of mycorrhiza?

Seagrasses are a special group of plants which shifted back from land to below the sea surface about 100 million years ago. Although their 50-70 species constitute a mere two hundredths percent of all angiosperm flora, they colonize the entire ten percent of the coastal ocean bottom. They make up one percent of the total marine plant biomass and are responsible for fifteen percent of the total carbon storage in marine ecosystems. For comparison – in terms of carbon storage per unit area, that is twice more than forests of temperate or tropical regions.

Professor Bohuslav Gaš Awarded Arnold O. Beckman Medal

Professor Bohuslav Gaš is known by most of us as the Dean of the Faculty of Science. Not many people know much about his career as a physical chemist, though. The Canadian town of Niagara-on-the-Lake recently saw Professor Gaš receive a prestigious award for his lifelong achievements in the field of electro-driven separation techniques (electrophoresis): a medal bearing the name of Arnold O. Beckman, one of the founders of Beckman Coulter.

Popular Science: From mining landscape to natural forest

A large portion of deposits of mineral and energy resources is located in the forests. Before mining, stripping the surface is necessary. But this means a loss of unique forest ecosystems. A question remains: what next? Scientists from universities in North America, Europe and Australia are working on a new approach to return the affected land to its natural state through reforestation.

Lecture screening in Great Zoological Hall: Viral and Cellular Noncoding RNAs: Insight Into Evolution

Joan Elaine Argetsinger Steitz (born January 26, 1941) is Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University and Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She is known for her discoveries involving RNA, including ground-breaking insights into how ribosomes interact with messenger RNA by complementary base pairing and that introns are spliced by small nuclear ribonucleic proteins (snRNPs), which occur in eukaryotes. Screening takes place in Great Zoological Hall on Thrusday 5th of May, 5. p.m.

Lecture screening in Great Zoological Hall: Harnessing Genetic Principals to Treat Human Disease

Stephen Philip Jackson, FRS, FMedSci, (born 17 July 1962 in Nottingham, England) is the Frederick James Quick Professor of Biology and a Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. He is a Senior Group Leader and Head of Cancer Research UK Laboratories at the Gurdon Institute, and an Associate Faculty member at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. He is also part-time Chief Scientific Officer for MISSION Therapeutics Ltd. Lecture screening takes place on Thursday, 7th of April at 5 p.m. at The Great Zoological Hall, Vinicna 7.

Summer School in Environmental History: The Undesirable - How Parasites, Diseases, and Pests Shape Our Environments

The Working Group for Czech and Slovak Environmental History in cooperation with the Faculty of Science at Charles University in Prague and the Institute for Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences and with the support of European Society for Environmental History are pleased to announce a four-day graduate summer school in environmental history which will take place in Prague in late August 2016. Application deadline is 20 May 2016.