News and Views

The Hungarian member of the European Committee expects a long, struggling crisis intervention within the European Union. In his presentation about the monetary-economic crisis given at HAS’ Institute for World Economics, László Andor stressed that in order to eliminate the recession EU states must synchronize their government interventions concerning the economy. This process is likely to start at the beginning of next year, under the EU’s Hungarian Presidency.

“Although protons are the most frequent elements in the visible universe, some of their properties are still poorly understood by scientists”, said physicist Dezső Horváth, who being the only Hungarian in an international team, had taken part in the initial stages of a nearly two-decade long research project resulting in an unexpected finding: the radius of a proton is about 4% smaller than previously believed. The most significant results of the international research team have recently been published in the prestigious Nature magazine.

A co-operation of scientists, educators and policy-makers is needed for placing teacher training on a whole new foundation. A well-designed and effective education system is only possible when building on professionally trained, highly knowledgeable, and thus respectable and recognised teachers - with these thoughts the conference of the Association for Teacher Education in Europe (ATEE) was opened in Budapest.

“Those who were truly great tend to remind us of our smallness. Compared to their weighty past, our own present feels inevitably much-much lighter”, with those words HAS’ President József Pálinkás addressed the audience at the opening ceremony of the Bolyai Conference held between August 30th and September 4th in Budapest and Marosvásárhely, the city where Bolyai, a genius of mathematics died 150 years ago.

Péter B. Barna, doctor of HAS and professor emeritus at HAS’ Research Institute for Technical Physics and Material Sciences, has recently been awarded the International Union for Vacuum Science, Technique and Applications’ (IUVSTA) Prize for Science at the Union’s conference in Peking. The Hungarian physicist was recognised for his outstanding results in understanding thin film growth phenomena and structure-property relations in one and multiphase thin films.

Robots support human activity in several areas, moreover at places such as the hot and dusty mines of Australia intelligent devices are expected to completely replace humans in regard to certain tasks. Controlling them however, takes considerable effort and well-developed skills. HAS’ Computer and Automation Research Institute is collaborating with professor Tom Gedeon of the National University in Australia to produce controlling devices that are intuitive and easy to use for humans.