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Czech scientists have developed a synthetic peptide that could help treat obesity as well as several diseases. The patent for the substance has already been purchased by a major pharmaceutical company focused on diabetes. If further research goes well, the scientists hope it could be developed into a drug within six to eight years.

Despite being closed for three weeks now due to the coronavirus restrictions libraries around the Czech Republic are reporting record-high numbers of borrowed books. Czechs, who are known to be one the most avid readers in Europe, have apparently stocked up on reading material well in advance.

Thousands usually visit central Prague on the anniversary of the start of the Velvet Revolution. Given the Covid-19 situation, events on November 17 this year are set to look a lot different – though the organisers are offering people novel ways to celebrate.

The Czech government will again ask MPs to extend the current state of emergency as the coronavirus epidemic has not yet slowed sufficiently. At the same time, enough progress has evidently been made that some children are going back to school in only a week’s time.

An archaeological survey in the northern Bohemian city of Liberec has revealed the remains of an internment or concentration camp for Roma during the Second World War that later served to hold French prisoners, forced to work in a quarry.

Milan Kundera, born in 1929, is without question the most famous living Czech-born writer and among the nation’s most gifted thinkers. Although a celebrated poet during the Stalinist era and a lecturer in world literature, Kundera did not start working on his first novel, The Joke, until he was thirty-three. While visiting friends in a mining region of Moravia, he heard the story of a girl jailed for stealing flowers from a cemetery to give her boyfriend. Kundera began to imagine what life would be like – at the height of Stalinism – for a girl for whom sexuality and love were tragically discrete; of a man who seduces the wife of his old nemesis out of revenge, thereby turning the act of making love into an act of hate. The politically provocative book was a sensation in Czechoslovakia when finally published in 1967 – a year before Soviet-led tanks rolled in to crush the Prague Spring reform movement that had allowed for such a novel to be published in the Eastern Bloc country.

Nearly a half of total Czech economic output is dependent on exports. In view of this, the government is relying on a four-pronged strategy through which it aims to maintain, and possibly even strengthen, the country’s international trade position, the industry and trade minister said on Tuesday.

A new long-distance hiking trail has recently opened in the Czech Republic. Cesta Českem or Czechia Trail leads along the country’s northern borders from the westernmost point to the so-called Trojmezí, a point at which the Czech, Polish and Slovak borders meet. It measures 1,000 kilometres and takes approximately 40 days to complete, its creators say.

The Czech Customs Administration is currently training six dogs to assist in detecting people infected with Covid-19. After the training, which should be completed by the end of the year, the dogs could be used at Prague Airport as well in seniors’ homes around the country.

Many schools across the Czech Republic are still struggling to implement effective online learning programmes, despite lessons learned during the Covid-19 first wave. A big concern is that the digital gap among students has yet to be bridged. People in Need, a Czech humanitarian aid NGO that assists vulnerable communities, is calling for future teachers – those now studying at pedagogical faculties – to step in to help tutor children.