Czechmatediary

April of this year “celebrated” the 22nd anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster (1986)  - the worst nuclear power plant accident in history. Although we know that the Russians were performing some experiments, till this day no one really knows what the possible causes of the explosion were but everyone would soon found out about the after effects. Since Russia didn’t bother to notify the rest of the world, Europe found out about this “little” accident when the radiation levels set off alarms at the Forsmark nuclear Power Plant in Sweden. As far as  Czechoslovakia goes, the first signs of an approaching radiation cloud were signaled by the power plan in Dukovany. (more…)

There is a new interesting Czech book out there called “The Czech scientists in exile” and Radio Praha just recently published a shortened version of couple of those people’s biographies. For the sake of space I shortened their already shortened version even more but it is still a VERY interesting reading…

Josef Michl (Boulder, CO)

Why do people call him the “renaissance chemist”? Because Josef excels not only in theory but also in hands-on research work. He is currently also the most cited Czech-born researcher out there, having been cited about 15,000 times in various research articles. Another reason why they call him that nickname is that he teaches in 6 different languages but can get by speaking Japanese as well. (more…)

A new vaccine for a potential avian flu pandemic has been recently developed in a Czech town Bohumile. The US-owned production company is called Baxter International and their new “mirracle child” vaccine, Celvapan, has been more promising than any other such vaccines. Why? Because the researchers decided to use monkey cells instead of the traditional use of hen’s eggs. (more…)

5 brave guys from Brno (Czech Republic) will be soon immortalized in the Guinness book of world records. They all scuba-dive for living and one day they decided to take it up a notch and stay underwater for 1 hour with just ONE oxygen bomb. What does’ that mean? That means that each one of them could take only one breath from the oxygen tank per minute. Can you imagine to take only 60 breaths in one hour? (more…)

The tick-borne diseases such as encephalitis and borreliosis (Lyme disease) have been recently on the rise in the Czech Republic. The lyme disease is caused by a bacteria called Borrelia and it causes a flu-like symptoms as well as the musculoskeletal, neurological and psychiatric manifestations in the latter stages. There used to be a Lyme vaccine called Lymerix, however, it was taken off the market in 2002 because of poor sales and a need for frequent boosters (I personally remember getting this vaccine when I was a child). A Czech company called Bioveta has been selling its Lyme disease vaccinations for pets and farm animals for some time now but it only just recently came up with a vaccine for humans. (more…)