Employees of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research took part in the Science Festival held at the Central Botanical Garden of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus (NASB) in Minsk on 6 September 2025. The festival, organized by the NASB, is a key popular science event of the Union State. The event brought together 170 participating scientific organizations and 38 000 visitors.

Photo: Ilya Grekhov (NAUKA 0+ Press Office) and JINR

Around 3000 people visited the booth of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research during the day, including schoolchildren, students, and teachers. The audience was introduced to the studies and main facilities of the Institute by a FLNP researcher Konstantin Vergel, a VBLHEP researcher Dmitry Dryablov, and a VBLHEP senior researcher Mikhail Shandov.

The event hosted the NAUKA 0+ international festival, one of the key events of the Decade of Science and Technology in the Russian Federation, the main goal of which is to popularise science.

At NAUKA 0+, leading scientists spoke about space travel, microbiology, virology, virtual reality, popularisation of science, and much more. During master classes, visitors to the Botanical Garden learned how to suture, control underwater and four-legged rovers, tried their hands at being palaeontologists, and launched their own rocket models. In addition, the programme included liquid nitrogen and oxygen experiments. Mikhail Shandov gave a talk entitled “The NICA Accelerator Complex: the universe in a laboratory” at the NAUKA 0+ lectures.

A round table for science popularisers was held as part of the Science Festival. The speakers discussed promoting the area of research and fresh strategies for a dialogue between science and society. The audience actively participated in the discussion and shared their impressions of the festival. The meeting was held as part of the BRICS+ Open Science Week aiming to form a professional community of scientific communicators and science popularisers from different countries.