Researchers’ Night again enjoyed great success

Discovering and having fun learning—this was the goal of the Researchers’ Night event popularizing science, which CATRIN joined this time round again. On Friday, October 7, several hundred visitors visited the CATRIN-RCPTM building in order to solve at least some scientific mysteries. The central theme of this year was “Secret”. Compared to the previous years, this season attracted a significant number of foreign visitors, including children.

Traditionally, tours of the Centre are the highlight as they enable to look into the laboratories and provide at least brief insight into the major directions of the research carried out at the Centre. “The tour was very interesting and the commentary was great. Having seen specific examples, I understood the difference between basic and applied research and why science is important at all. The researchers were very well prepared, even for a small audience like this. It was nice to see how children engaged in the experiments,” said Valentina Tobolková from Jihlava.

Thanks to the experiments, adults as well as children unravelled some of the secrets of nanomaterials or of modern methods of plant breeding, learned about catalysis and radioactivity, saw a levitating magnet or the habitat of pollinators. Children in particular joined the search operation—to correctly break a secret code and earn a reward for it.

Visitors were even able to look into the microscopes that are used by scientists for their research. It is the development of microscopy and its benefits that is the main theme of the exhibition Journey into the Inside of Matter (Cesta do nitra hmoty), prepared by CATRIN experts and which can be seen in the UPoint, a university shop and information centre, at Horní Náměstí, Olomouc, until 20 October.