Learn about Life and Life Sciences

Last year's fantastically popular response has inspired the Biology Department of the Natural Sciences Faculty to organize another Night of Biology. During this event, visitors will again be able to glimpse into the secrets of biology and receive answers to many intriguing questions about the creation and survival of living creatures and cells that inhabit our planet.

Last year's fantastically popular response has inspired the Biology Department of the Natural Sciences Faculty to organize another Night of Biology. During this event, visitors will again be able to glimpse into the secrets of biology and receive answers to many intriguing questions about the creation and survival of living creatures and cells that inhabit our planet. (more)

In order to make the interesting biology secrets as accessible to and understandable by “common” people, the professors and students of the Biology Department of Zagreb's Faculty of Natural Sciences will once again organize, for the third year in a row, the exciting Night of Biology. The unique event will be held on March 25th from 4 P.M. to 11 P.M. at four locations across the city. Around 50 or so different educational programmes will be featured and the main event of this exciting Night of Biology will be the open laboratory door where visitors will be able to participate in workshops, presentations, experiments and chat with experts. Programmes, experiments and professional lectures will again cater to all ages.

After a visit to the laboratories, participants will be able to join experts on a popular tour of the most important biology points in town: the Botanical Garden and its large herbarium, as well as the collection of vertebrates and invertebrates held by the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics of the University of Zagreb.

Simple and interesting experiments are designed so as to enable every visitor to learn to appreciate science, i.e. biology, as one of the very interesting and useful aspects of human activity. The Department of Biology consists of several different institutions: the Botanical Institute with the Botanical Garden, the Department of Zoology, the Department of Animal Physiology and the Department of Molecular Biology. Thus, visitors can expect to receive answers to all their intriguing questions about the creation and survival of living creatures and cells that inhabit our planet.

To make biology even more accessible to the general public, various topics and research projects have been given interesting names and a few of those clever titles include: From fossils to molecules; A velociraptor’s claw – a lethal weapon or a climbing hook?; The war of the grasses; The nucleus, a processor or a hard disk; A green leaf or a colour palette; Do you speak ribosome? Since the year 2011 has been proclaimed the Year of the Bat, the Bat section of the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics will present four different topics to show visitors how important the species is to the overall balance in nature. The Night of biology programmes will take place in the following locations: The Botanical Garden, Marulić square, Roosevelt square, and the faculty building at Horvatovac.