On Wednesday, April 20, 2011, at 1 p.m, as part of the series Distinguished Scientists at the Ruđer Bošković Institute, a lecture entitled Particle Physics and the LHC Project will be delivered by Prof. Daniel Denegri.

Representatives of the city of Zagreb and the Ruđer Bošković Institute, led by Mayor Milan Bandić and the Director General of the RBI, Dr. Danica Ramljak, held a meeting today at which discussions included, among other items, joint domestic and international projects, competitions for structural funds and cooperation on strategically important environmental issues for the city of Zagreb.

The book Random Sequential Packing of Cubes by Prof. Yoshiaki Itoh of the Institute of Statistical Modeling, Tokyo, and and Mathieu Dutour, Ph.D., of the Ruđer Bošković Institute, Laboratory of Satellite Oceanography, Division for Marine and Environmental Research, was recently published by World Scientific in Singapore. It contains simplified mathematical models for understanding the random sequential packing of cubes.

What kind of educational system do we need in order to create a “land of knowledge“? Does our system of higher education have a strategic framework? What is the ideal structure for Croatia's labor market in 2015? Can we create an effective link between supply and demand on the labor market? These are only some of the questions that were posed yesterday during the round table discussion “Land of (Lack of) Knowledge” at the conference WinDays11 Business in Rovinj.

On Sunday, April 10, 2011, the Director General of the Ruđer Bošković Institute, Danica Ramljak, Ph.D., together with Ankica Marinović, Ph.D., the personal envoy of the President of the Republic of Croatia, Prof. Ivo Josipović, and Ivica Glavan, Mayor of Sinj, will open the Second Festival of Science in Sinj, which has a regional character this year.

The Association of University Teachers and Other Scholars in Zagreb presented its annual awards for 2010 in the presence of the President of the Republic of Croatia, Ivo Josipović. Twelve young scholars and artists received annual awards for enviable achievements in the fields of the natural, technical, biotechnical, humanistic and social sciences and the interdisciplinary field of art.

Today, a Croatian delegation consisting of Dr. Danica Ramljak, Director General of the Ruđer Bošković Institute; Dr. Ivan Pavić and Dr. Dragan Bolanča, Rector and Vice Rector of the University of Split; and Dr. Amir Hamzić, Dean of the Faculty of Science, University of Zagreb, visited the European Center for Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva, the largest scientific laboratory in the world. For a number of years, Croatian scientists from Split and Zagreb have made significant contributions to major CERN research projects.

With particular sadness, we announce that Professor Zvonimir Maksić, Ph.D., a scientist emeritus of the Ruđer Bošković Institute, has died at the age of 73. His sudden death ended an outstanding and fruitful scientific career and is a great loss to the Institute, his students, associates and colleagues. His creativity, clarity, scientific curiosity and conscientiousness will always be an inspiration and role model.

A paper entitled "Graphical Representation of Proteins" was recently published in the journal Chemical Reviews (Vol. 111, 2011). Chemical Reviews is the most widely cited journal of the American Chemical Society (with an impact factor of 36 and also the first among the 140 journals in the category of Chemistry, Multidisciplinary). Publication in this journal represents great recognition for scientists, in this case staff members of the Center for NMR, Dražen Vikić-Topić, Ph.D., and Dejan Plavšić, Ph.D. The coauthors of the paper are Professors Milan Randić, Ph.D. and Jure Zupan, Ph.D., of Ljubljana and Alexandru T. Balaban, Ph.D., of Galveston, Texas, USA. The graphical representation of biosequences has been a subject of research in bioinformatics for a quarter of a century, with particular momentum during the past ten years provided by our researchers.

Yesterday in the Conference Hall of the Croatian Chamber of Economy, as part of The Embassy Series Sponsored by the Ruđer Bošković Institute, the Ambassador of India to the Republic of Croatia, His Excellency Shri Pradeep Singh, delivered a lecture entitled "The Impact of Innovation on Indian Society". During the course of the lecture, which was attended by approximately 60 guests from the academic and diplomatic communities, Ambassador Singh presented the Indian economy and science.