At the invitation of Director General Danica Ramljak, DVM, PhD, and Scientific Council of the Ruđer Bošković Institute (RBI), the Minister of Science, Education and Sports, Prof. Dragan Primorac, MD, PhD, visited the Institute today. The Minister has met with the representatives of the RBI governing bodies: the President of the RBI Board of Governors Prof. Slavko Krajcar, PhD, the RBI Scientific Council President Neven Bilic, PhD, as well as the division heads and representatives of RBI junior researchers.

The Croatian-Japanese Workshop on Advanced Materials Science will be held from 29 - 30 June at the Institute of Physics in Zagreb. This is the first joint workshop in the programme of cooperation between Croatia and Japan, jointly organized by the Ruđer Bošković Institute and the Institute of Physics, with the support of the Ministry of Science, Education and Sport (MSES), Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) and the Japanese embassy in Zagreb.

Head of Brookhaven Lab's Instrumentation Division and former RBI scientist, Veljko Radeka has been honoured with the prestigious Harold Wheeler award by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. (IEEE) for 'the outstanding leadership and accomplishments in detector development which enabled discoveries in many areas of science and technology in a career of sustained productivity spanning over 50 years'.

Aleksandra Turković, PhD, Senior Research Associate in Division of Materials Physics, has recently been nominated in the Management Committee of the COST Action MP0701 Nanocomposite Materials, which joins 18 countries and 20 companies.

Ruđer Bošković Institute was proud to welcome an outstanding Croatian scientists and one of the leading world mathematicians in the group theory professor Zvonimir Janko, professor emeritus at the Mathematical Institute, University of Heidelberg, Germany. On this occasion, professor Janko delivered a lecture in which he introduced listeners into the field of his current research - the theory of finite p-groups.

Mario Stipčević, PhD has recently been granted a patent for Quantum Random Number Generator (QRBG) by the State Intellectual Property Office of the Republic of Croatia. The QRBG patent is a result of many years of extensive scientific research and it is the third patent granted to RBI scientists so far.

RBI Division of Electronics has recently signed contracts for three projects on information technology applications. All three projects were initiated on a proposal by junior researchers Fran Supek (REVIGO), Nives Škunca (GORBI) and Ivan Ivek (GMDH) and supported by the Croatian Ministry of Science, Education and Sports.

The project 'Metallated bioconjugates for applications in biological and material sciences' led by RBI returnee scientist Srećko Kirin, PhD, was awarded with 100.000,00 € by the 'National Foundation for Science’ (NZZ). The 'Homing Program' for returnee scientists was open for a period of three years (2006 – 2008). During this period a total of 23 applications were submitted, of which 10 projects were granted support.

At the last Governing Board meeting of collaboration MAGIC (Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov), which was held on the Island of Elba, Italy, a Croatian team of scientists was unanimously accepted in full membership thanks to the support provided by their home institutions: Ruđer Bošković Institute (RBI), University of Split and the University of Rijeka as well as the support of the Ministry of Education and Sports and the National Foundation for Science.

The paper Comment on 'Mass Lambda and K coupling of the N * (1535)' by RBI scientists Saša Ceci, PhD, Alfred Švarc, PhD and Branimir Zauner, BSc from the Group for Hadron Spectroscopy at the Division of Experimental Physics, was published in the prestigious scientific journal Physical Review Letters.