The UN General Assembly has declared 2015 the International Year of Soils to raise awareness of the vital importance of soil, which is essential not only for food security and for cultivating plants for feed, fibre, fuel and medicinal products, but also for maintaining biodiversity as it hosts countless organisms. It plays a key role in storing and filtering water, in carbon and other nutrients cycling and performs other irreplaceable ecosystem functions. The Institute of Soil Biology of the CAS Biology Centre carries out biological research into many of those functions of soil in both natural and human–affected environments, including studies of the soil microstructure, soil organism communities and their dynamics and interactions and so on. Researchers at the Institute of Soil Biology focus, among other things, on the contribution of soil fungi to nitrous oxide emissions and on the production of methane. The latter is a potent greenhouse gas and a substantial part of atmospheric methane is produced by anaerobic microorganisms called Archaea found in the soil and in animal digestive tracts, while soil is also a significant methane sink. Research is also being concentrated on the characterization and risk assessment of antibiotic resistance-reservoirs in soil, which is connected with the massive use of antibiotics in the past five decades. Scientists examine ways of preventing the antibiotic resistance spreading in the environment through food chains as well as and on the role played by the soil microflora in those processes, as Doctor Dana Elhottová explains in the corresponding article. and Jana Olivová.
The third and final season of excavation on Pod Hradem Cave (Moravian Karst) reached bedrock at a maximum depth of 3.5 metres, although the bedrock in this part of the cave represents a very steeply sloping wall rather than the cave floor. Radiocarbon dates indicate that the basal layers in this part of the cave were deposited during the late Middle Palaeolithic period. The finding of amber and shell in layer 11 represents a curious discovery, but there is a possibility that these objects represent an intrusion from a different archaeological context., Ladislav Nejman, Lukáš Kučera, Petr Škrdla, Lenka Lisá, Šárka Hladilová, Miroslav Králík, Rachel Wood, Miriam Nývltová Fišáková, Duncan Wright, Marjorie E. Sullivan, Philip Hughes., and Obsahuje seznam literatury
The creation of Czechoslovakia in 1918 was the culmination of the long struggle of the Czechs against their Austrian rulers and of the Slovaks against their Hungarian rulers. At the outbreak of World War I, the Czechs and Slovaks showed little enthusiasm for fighting for their respective enemies, the Germans and the Hungarians, against fellow Slavs, the Russians and the Serbs. In 1916, together with Edvard Beneš and MIlan Rastislav Štefánik, Masaryk created the Czechoslovak National Council. In early October 1918, Germany and Austria proposed peace negotiations. On October 28, the National Committee issued a declaration of Czechoslovak independence. and Ivan Šedivý.