Yesterday at a celebratory event held at RBI, the annual Director's Prize was awarded to some of RBI's most successful scientists. Almost 50 RBI scientists received the awards which were given for publication in high impact journals, successful grant applications (grants greater than 500,000 kn), projects of special importance to RBI, successful international patent applications as well as for scientific work honored with state awards for science.

Ideas that development of embryos mirrors evolutionary history are well known even outside biological circles. However, due to the lack of tools that would allow explicit quantitative testing, the scientific status of this elusive concept has been unclear. Evolutionary geneticists, Tomislav Domazet-Lošo and Diethard Tautz, from Ruđer Bošković Institute in Zagreb (Croatia) and Max Planck Institute for the Evolutionary Biology in Plön (Germany) devised a new approach that measures phylogenetic age of the expressed genes across ontogeny and showed that phylogeny-ontogeny correlation is real. The results are published in the 9th December issue of Nature as a cover story.

Dr. Jadranka Barešić from the Laboratory for Measurement of Low Activities in the Department of Experimental Physics and Dr. Branka Jeličić from the Laboratory for Molecular and Cellular Biology, Department of Molecular Biology have, together with 6 other European scientists, been awarded the Group of Eight European Fellowships for 2011. Each of the eight awardees will receive a stipend in the amount of 20,000 dollars to cover travel and experimental work in one of the prestigious Group of Eight Australian universities for up to six months.

As part of the series of Distinguished speakers at the RBI, internationally acclaimed academician Miroslav Radman will give a lecture on Wednesday, December 8th at 13:00 in the auditorium of Wing III at RBI. The title of his lecture is Resilient Microbes Reveal the Chemistry of Cell Death and Open New Visions for Public Health.

The second lecture in the Embassy Series entitled an Overview of the Austrian Research System was given yesterday by H.E. Jan Kickert, Austrian ambassador to the Republic of Croatia and Dr. Miroslav Polzer, chairman of the Austrian office for cooperation in science and technology in Ljubljana. The lecture gave an overview of the science and technology policies of Austria and various Austrian programs in this context.

A first meeting of the working committee responsible for planning of the celebratory events marking the 300th anniversary of the birth of Ruđer Bošković was held yesterday at the Dubrovnik city hall. The meeting was attended by the mayor of Dubrovnik, Andro Vlahušić, the deputy mayor Tatjana Šimac Bonačić, members of the Dubrovnik city committee for culture and Dr. Danica Ramljak, director-general of the Ruđer Bošković Institute.

On Thursday, December 2nd, 2010 beginning at 17:00 the second in the Embassy Series of lectures will be held in the auditorium of Wing III at RBI. The lecture will be given jointly by H.E. Jan Kickert, Austrian ambassador to Croatia and Dr. Miroslav Polzer, Chairman of the Austrian Science and Research Liaison office in Ljubljana. The subject of the lecture will be the science and technology policies and programs in the Republic of Austria with emphasis on leading research institutions and high technology industries.

Dr. Nela Pivac from the Laboratory of molecular neuropsychiatry at the Ruđer Bošković Institute, together with associates from the Faculty of Pharmacy and Biochemistry at the University of Zagreb have discovered a major advance in the diagnosis of the hyperactive disorder (ADHD) and autism. Their research article entitled Human plasma glycome in attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and autism spectrum disorders was published in the prestigious journal Molecular and Cellular Proteomics (IF 8.79) which is ranked as the second best journal in the field of biochemical methods.

A joint RBI-IBM workshope was held today on High Performance Computing. The aim of the workshop was to present a summary of the present and future requirements of RBI for centralized computer resources, and the possibility of upgrading these resources through collaborations with IBM. The workshop was attended by RBI Director-general, Dr. Danica Ramljak, RBI assistant director for international collaborations and projects, Dr. David Smith, Dr. Vuko Brigljević and several other RBI scientists who make use of supercomputers and computer clusters in their scientific research. Additionally, the workshop was attended by Dr. Paul Seidler, director of the department of Science and Technology in IBM's research center in Zurich as well as Mr. Alessandro Curioni and Mr. Maciej Remiszewski.

The first conference of the Croatian Society for Cancer Research, From basic Science to the Clinic, will be held at the Ruđer Bošković Institute (auditorium in Wing I) tomorrow beginning at 9am. The aim of the conference, which will gather over 160 scientists from Croatia and abroad, is to strengthen the collaboration among all areas of cancer research and particularly with clinical work, as well as to strengthen international collaborations.