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The St. Maurus reliquary, dating back to the early 13th century, is one of the Czech Republic’s biggest treasures. The Romanesque shrine which contains the relics of four saints is considered to be the second most important historical artefact in the Czech Republic, second only to the crown jewels.

Researchers from the Brno University of Technology have developed tailor-made joint replacements designed to last a lifetime. What's more, unlike current essentially one-size-fits all implants, the new 3D-printed prosthetic ones do not require healthy bone – or much tissue – to be removed.

A new gallery dedicated to documentary photography has opened in Prague’s Smíchov district. It was established by the 400 ASA association, which brings together seven distinguished Czech photographers, including Antonín Kratochvíl, Tomki Němec, Karel Cudlín and Alžběta Jungrová. The new gallery is located in a former electrical transformer station from the 1920s.

Albert Černý found fame at a young age when his first band Charlie Straight won three Czech national Anděl music awards following the release of their debut LP. The lively singer-songwriter later formed Lake Malawi; the group’s biggest moment to date was representing the Czech Republic in last year’s Eurovision Song Contest, where they finished a very creditable 11th. In recent times Černý (31) has also been doing some modelling and TV work.

The development of a Czech anti-coronavirus vaccine has passed the first stage of development, four months since the project began. Whether to continue developing the drug or not is one of the questions faced by the newly incumbent health minister, Roman Prymula. Any Czech vaccine would face tough international competition against more advanced big pharma projects if the aim were to send it commercially. However, according to one of the researchers, it was an effectiveness test of the Czech health system rather than an international competition.

Shooting has begun on a Czech miniseries called ‘Slovan’ set in the 7th century following the death of Samo, a Frankish merchant who founded the first recorded political entity of the Slavic people. “Samo’s Empire”, as it is sometimes called, was more of a loose union of West Slavic tribes, most likely centred in Moravia and the Duchy of Nitra but included Czech and Sorbian tribes, as well as some living along the river Danube.

Dr Robert Griesinger, a low-ranking Nazi official and SS Officer stationed in Prague in the final years of the Second World War, entered the life of British historian Daniel Lee quite unexpectedly. It began with an antique armchair, taken in for repair by a Czech émigré living in Amsterdam, unaware that sewn into the seat cushion was a stash of personal documents covered in swastikas. Lee’s new book The SS Officer’s Armchair tells two intertwined stories. One story is the life of Dr Griesinger, an ambitious young lawyer from Stuttgart who joined the Gestapo, served in the Wehrmacht, and became a Holocaust perpetrator – a ‘desk murder’ – in Prague. The other story is of the uncovering of the life of ‘an ordinary Nazi’, tracing how a historian accesses and uncovers new material, deals with ‘wilful forgetting’, and how disturbing revelations reverberate in the lives of generations to come.

A team of scientists from Charles University and the University of Oxford have developed a new computer translation programme called CUBBITT. After testing how the programme compared with its human counterparts, the team published a paper in the prestigious Nature Communications journal claiming that it challenges the long-held view that computers can’t translate as well as humans. I asked the main author of the study, Martin Popel from Charles University’s Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, why CUBBITT is so significant.

The newly appointed health minister, Roman Prymula, gave his first press briefing in office on Tuesday,  telling Czechs things were likely to get worse before they got better and urging them to  pull together to help overcome the coronavirus crisis. He said there were no plans for a lockdown, but greater discipline and more restrictive measures were inevitable for the effort to succeed.

The northern Moravian town of Kopřivnice this weekend officially launched a public collection to fund a statue of favourite son Emil Zátopek – arguably the greatest distance runner in history – in time for the 100th anniversary of his birth next September.