Scientists from the Institute of Vertebrate Biology of the ASCR have proved that bats here suffer from the white-nose syndrome, a fungal disease that is threatening the ecosystem in North America. In the Czech Republic as well as in other parts of Europe, bats with this syndrome die only very rarely and the disease has not yet caused a decline in the bat population. Uncovering the cause of “European immunity” could save North American bats and avert also the disruption of the biological balance in that part of the world. New knowledge of the pathology of bats infected with the white-nose syndrome fungus in Europe was published by an international team of researchers in the Journal of Wildlife Diseases. and Natália Martínková.
The Institute of Plasma Physics of the ASCR has produced a book, Controlled Thermonuclear Fusion for Everybody, which covers the story of the human struggle to achieve controlled thermonuclear fusion on Earth. The book is “reader-friendly” in that special attention has been given to plain vocabulary and rich illustration. The topic is introduced with a detailed chronology of fusion history. The contribution of Oleg Lavrentyev, a pioneer of the Soviet fusion program, is recognized since he is credited as being the first to call attention to fusion in correspondence with his government in 1949 and 1950. These letters aroused the interest of physicists Igor Tamm and Andrei Sakharov who launched a fusion program that resulted in the creation of Tokamak, a device which uses a magnetic field to confine plasma in the shape of a torus (doughnut). and Luděk Svoboda.
The Institute of Philosophy of ASCR on November 26-27, 2012 hosted two lectures by Howard Hotson, professor of early modern intellectual history at the University of Oxford and steering committee chair of the Council for the Defence of British Universities. In his lecture Networking the Republic of Letters: an Introduction to Early Modern Letters Online Professor Hotson introduced his project on which he cooperates with scientists at the Institute of Philosophy of ASCR. In his lecture, Understanding the Global University Crisis: The Marketisation of English Higher Education in International Perspective, he criticizes the British government reforms of higher education. and Gabriela Adámková.
In 2010, the body a Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) was exhumed from a tomb in the Church of Our Lady before T9n in Old Town Square in Prague to authenticate the cause of his death. Brahe's death only eleven days after the onset of a sudden illness has been a mystery for over four hundred years. Over the centuries, a variety of myths and theories about his death were propounded. The most persistent theory has been that mercury poisoning caused Brahe's death. After studying samples for two years taken during the exhumation, the team of researchers from Aarhus University in Denmark, the University of Southern Denmark and the ASCR's Nuclear Physics Institute came to the unanimous conclusion that Brahe did not die of mercury poisoning. and Jan Kučera, Jan Kameník a Vladimír Havránek.