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.

On Wednesday, October 27th Her excellency, Beverley Mercer gave the first lecture in the Embassy Series sponsored by the Ruđer Bošković Institute. The lecture was given in the auditorium of the Croatian Chamber of Economy to an audience of scientific, business and diplomatic leaders and highlighted Australian science and the possibilities of cooperation with the Republic of Croatia.

On Thursday, November 4th, 2010 beginning at 14:00 in the auditorium of Wing III, Dr. Davor Ježek from the Faculty of Medicine, University of Zagreb will give a public lecture entitled Medical In Vitro Fertilization, Why this year's Nobel prize went to Edwards.

The RBI in collaboration with the French embassy in Croatia has the honor of inviting you to attend a meeting dedicated to French-Croatian scientific collaboration. The meeting will be held on November 3rd 2010 starting at 10:00am in the wing III auditorium at the Ruđer Bošković Institute, Bijenička 54, Zagreb. The theme of the meeting will be current and future scientific collaborations between Croatia and France.

The Laboratory for Ion Beam Interactions at the RBI will host the first workshop organized within the FP7 SPIRIT project valued at 7 million euros. The workshop entitled New detector technologies for advanced materials research using ion beam analysis will be held from October 24th to the 27th in the Hotel Jezero, Plitvice National Park.