Radio Prague International - latest articles

Listening to classical music, it is often said, has beneficial effects on both the mind and body. But does some music have more healing power than others? Scientists from Brno have tried to answer this question by testing the impact of Mozart and Haydn on epileptic patients. The results of their study have been published in the prestigious European Journal of Neurology.

Early last spring, when the coronavirus first wave hit the Czech Republic and the first “lockdown” was imposed to contain its spread, directors Martin Müller and David Laňka set out to make a documentary. Only the title was certain: “Life in Quarantine”.

An annual fund-raising run for the Memory of the Nation institute kicks off on Thursday. In years past, the event has raised close to a million crowns towards recording interviews with eye-witnesses to major events in modern Czech history, including those who fought against Nazism and Communism, or fell victim to those regimes.

Archaeologists are currently excavating an early-Medieval burial ground near the city of Písek in South Bohemia. The sight was partly damaged during the winter, when a wood harvester drove through the wooded area. Similar damage has become quite common in recent years.

The medieval statue of the Pilsen Madonna, the town’s most treasured artefact, goes on display at the Gallery of West Bohemia on Thursday. The rare work of art, considered a masterpiece of European Gothic sculpture, will be showcased as part of the ongoing exhibition More Beautiful than the Sun, along with several dozen medieval Madonnas.

Parkinson’s disease, a neurodegenerative brain disorder that leads to tremors, stiffness, and difficulty maintaining one’s balance, often goes undiagnosed in the early stages. A Czech neurologist is working with IT specialists to develop artificial intelligence to make it easy for GPs to detect its presence via ultrasound images.

Scientists from the University of Pardubice are working on a simplified method of testing taste buds, which can be used by patients at home. The test uses an app which can be installed on a mobile device. It should be ready for use by the end of summer this year.

The government has rubberstamped a further easing of Covid measures that will enable hotels, theatres and cinemas to reopen as of May 24. Primary and secondary schools will go back to full in-class learning and it will once again be possible to do collective sports, indoors and out.

The Multi-robot Systems group (MRS) at the Czech Technical University in Prague has been busy testing drone swarms in the deserts of the United Arab Emirates over the past few weeks. The project seeks to explore the possible application of such massed drones in humanitarian search and rescue operations. To find out more, I spoke to the man in charge of the MRS group, Dr. Martin Saska.

How do Czechs contribute to carbon emissions? And how would different social groups be affected by measures adopted against climate change, such as climate taxes? These are just some of the questions which Czech Radio tried to answer by commissioning a large-scale sociological survey across the Czech society.