Science Without Borders is the motto of this year's Researchers' Night
This year's activities of the Researchers' Night festival, which takes place on Friday, November 27, are being transferred to the online space and schools throughout Slovakia due to the ongoing pandemic situation. This year's motto of the event is Science without Borders, with which the organisers want to point out to the fact that research and innovation cross not only "ordinary" geographical boundaries, but increasingly also the boundaries of common knowledge. This year, too, the SAS institutes will be present at the festival.
The program of the November´s Researchers´ Night will start from an online studio, where the festival will be inaugurated at 9 am and which will bring the audience engaging interviews and presentations by leading Slovak scientists. At 10.55 am, you will be able to listen to a lecture by Marek Semelbauer from the Institute of Zoology SAS in an online studio: From Insect´s Life; at 11.40 am, scientist Martin Nosko from the Institute of Materials and Machine Mechanics SAS, will present the Physicist´s Scientific Courier. At 2 pm, the President of the SAS, Pavol Šajgalík, will have a discussion in an online studio with Jozef Masarik, Chairman of the Research and Development Agency, and Lucia Mokrá, Dean of the Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences, Comenius University in Bratislava, on the topic: European research and development policies after 2020. At 3 pm, Vladimíra Čavojová, a senior researcher at the Institute of Experimental Psychology SAS, will join the discussion on the postCOVID period, and what it means for us. At 4 pm, Veronika Verešová from the Institute of Oriental Studies of the SAS will give a lecture called On the confines of periods and cultures - the borders in life and life on the border of ancient Egypt, in an online studio. Silvia Pastoreková, the director of the Biomedical Research Center SAS, will talk about the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2020. At 7 pm she will be replaced by another scientist from the SAS, Mário Ziman, from the Institute of Physics SAS, with a lecture on the Quantum Age.
The Researchers´ Night will also include an online science quiz prepared for the public by scientists from 15 institutes of the SAS. The contestants´ task will be to answer as many questions as possible, the winner from each category will receive a voucher in the amount of €100 for the purchase of books from the SAS Veda Publishing House.
Scientists from the Institute of Geography, Institute of Molecular Biology SAS, and the Ľ. Štúr Institute of Linguistics of the SAS will take part in online lectures at the Meet Your Scientist event in schools all over Slovakia.
The Researchers´ Night will include sixteen zoom webinars in two thematic categories from 1 pm to 9 pm: Man and Nature, within which Martina Gáliková from the Institute of Zoology SAS, will give a lecture on Wine Fruit Flies and Research into Civilisation Diseases, and the category of Man and Technology, where Marek Pribus and Peter Boháč from the Institute of Inorganic Chemistry SAS, will present a lecture Hybrid Materials - Chemistry of the 21st Century, and a team of scientists from the Institute of Experimental Psychology CSPV SAS will talk about the topic Why People Believe Nonsense.
During Researchers´ Night, there will be an online Science Café format called Science Without Borders, where visitors will have the opportunity to discuss and ask scientists and innovators questions directly.
Pupils, students and teachers can take part in various festival competitions.
Another novelty is the Scientific Courier activity, which will transfer the scientific work directly to the children. Teachers will receive packages with materials for experiments and the scientific-popularisation game called Researchers.
Detailed information about Researchers´ Night can be found HERE.
The scientific festival European Researchers´ Night is financially supported by the framework program of the European Commission to support research, development and innovation - Horizon 2020. The main organisers of the event are the Slovak Organisation for Research and Development activities in cooperation with the Slovak Academy of Sciences, EurActiv.sk portal, and the Slovak Centre of Scientific and Technical Information.
Text: Andrea Nozdrovická