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The greatest science, music and art festival STARMUS has come to an end in Bratislava on Friday. The festival brought a week full of stars - from scientific and musical fields, interesting lectures and beautiful messages mainly about the hope that "five minutes to 12" is not too late for our planet.

The event´s partner, Slovak Academy of Sciences, welcomed four major scientific figures to its premises - the SAS Main Hall on Patrónka in Bratislava. Each was different, each with its own scientific charisma, wit or insight, but all with one central message - that there is still hope to save the Earth. One of the first to give a lecture was Bernard Scholkopf, a German computer scientist, an expert in the field of machine learning, especially kernel methods and causality. On Wednesday, it was climatologist Maureen Raymo´s turn, whose research focuses on the history and causes of past climate change, including understanding the consequences of climate change on the future stability of sea levels and glaciers. The greatest interest was in Thursday's lecture by astrophysicist Michel Mayor, and no wonder - he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the first known extrasolar planet. The STARMUS lectures in the SAS Main Hall were concluded on Friday by Chris Rapley, who, among other things, led several important British institutions, for example, he was the Director of the British Antarctic Survey, the executive director of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, and his current interests are in the communication of climate science.

SAS also participated in the STARMUS festival within the STARMUS camp, which was held on Bratislava's Main Square. At the Academy's stand, the Institute of Geotechnics SAS, Institute of Materials and Machine Mechanics, Institute of Experimental Physics, which demonstrated experiments in the field of low-temperature physics, biophysics and vacuum physics; Plant Science and Biodiversity Centre SAS and Institute of Chemistry presented its results. SAS scientists also took the stage - visitors could listen to (and see) a live recording of the SAS scientific podcast about the materials of the future with the director of CEMEA - Centre for Advanced Materials Application SAS, Miroslav Hnatko. No less interesting was the dynamic lecture by neuroscientist Tomáš Hromádka of the Institute of Neuroimmunology SAS about artificial and natural intelligence.

In Tipos Arena, dozens of top world personalities of science presented themselves, many of whom received a standing ovation just by mentioning their names. Jane Goodall, the world's foremost expert on chimpanzees, was one of those who received a standing ovation that the arena usually experiences in case of musicians or exceptional sports events. Her research and works, as well as those of other scientists, have brought and are bringing revolutionary changes in scientific thinking about human evolution.

On Wednesday, the winners of the Stephen Hawking Prize were announced at a gala dinner - musician Laurie Anderson and oceanographer Sylvia Earle received the award in person, and natural history programme maker David Attenborough and filmmaker Christopher Nolan accepted the award "online".

Last but not least, STARMUS was also a festival of musical stars - and the most amazing star was the astrophysicist, guitarist and founding member of QUEEN, Sir Brian May, who is also the founder of the STARMUS event. And the Slovak Philharmonic, the Bratislava Boys' Choir and the Children's and Girls' Choir of the Slovak Radio certainly did not stay behind. They received huge applause from the audience of Slovak elementary schools, to whom the Thursday program was dedicated.

And now it is necessary to fulfil the hopes and words that we have applauded so enthusiastically since Sunday evening.

Photo gallery from the event

The STARMUS festival was brought to Slovakia thanks to ESET.

Edited by Andrea Nozdrovická

Foto: Katarína Gáliková, Martin Bystriansky