The sky and stars have always fascinated us and life outside our planet remains one of the great mysteries facing mankind. Monday, NASA announced that it has serious evidence of water on the surface of Mars. We asked MEP and astrophysicist Giorgos Grammatikakis (S&D, Greece), to talk to us about Mars and what this discovery means.

Lithuania and Ukraine have signed an agreement on cooperation in the area of science and technology (S&T) in 2016-2020.

Last week the agreement of strategic collaboration between Kaunas University of Technology (KTU) and Vilnius University (VU) was signed. "Trying to achieve results on your own takes a lot of time and effort, and the solutions for improving the quality of higher education in Lithuania are needed now. We need internationally competitive universities today. We are convinced that only by maintaining similar position towards the most important issues we can be heard by our society and by our government", said Petras Baršauskas, the KTU's Rector.

On 1 October at KTU's Santaka Valley an opening of the exhibition Design to Feed the World will take place. The design projects, created by young artists, invite the visitors of the exhibition to explore topics of food and sustainable consumption from unexpected angle. The exhibition will be open to the public throughout October.

Vilnius University organized the Business Forum entitled „DEVELOPING TALENTS FOR INNOVATION-BASED ECONOMIES", one of the sessions of the Thematic University, recently. The session focused on the challenge to bridge the gap between academia and business.

On September 24–25, Vilnius and Kaunas hosted the Forum "Developing Talents for Innovation-based Economies", the main theme of which – business and scientific cooperation. Vilnius Gediminas Technical University (VGTU), a partner of this event, payed attention to the conversion of scientific knowledge into the economically useful product and moderated presentations on the topic "Turning Knowledge into Economic Sustainability."

On 6th of October Alvaro Hernández will be visiting VGTU and giving the lecture „Corporate SOFTWARE Responsibility". A. Hernández is a well know speaker internationally in the databases area and comes to Lithuania to speak in the Big Data Strategy conference.

Van Williams, CIO, Chief of Product Engineering and the manager of Virtustream development centre in Lithuania at says that Baltic countries should be more active in attracting global funding. Also, he is convinced that the main asset of any business are innovative professionals, discovered and fostered by universities.

The world premiere of Persona Non Grata, a new film about the famous Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara, will be held in Kaunas, at the historical Romuva cinema (Laisvės al. 54, Kaunas), on 13 October. This will be the first exclusive opportunity to not only see the movie but also to meet with its American director Cellin Gluck and the main actors Toshiaki Karasawa and Koyuki.