Slovakia Today, English Language Current Affairs Programme from Slovak Radio

Bloopers, piano tuning and music. Lots to check out.

Following the news bulletin we will talk about the upcoming Easter holidays and their online forms. Then, on the eve of April Fools' Day, we will also delve into the 1980s American comedy and their fascination with two brothers from Czechoslovakia - the Wild and Crazy Festrunk brothers from the famous SNL skit.

If you were offered a chance to travel to the surface of the planet Mars, would you go? What if they told you that you could never come back? This is exactly the decision that a few people will be making sometime in the next 15-20 years, according to Jiří Šilha, a researcher in the Division of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Bratislava's Comenius University. Jonathan spoke with him about this – as well as about the current mission of NASA's Perseverance Rover, which is now on the surface of Mars investigating, among other things, how humans might be able to survive on that planet in the future. –– Repeat: In 2016, the Artificial Intelligence programme AlphaGo, having learnt and developed its own strategies for playing the board game "Go", defeated one of the top Go players in the world in a highly publicized match. The programme was developed by Google's Deep Mind AI laboratory, where Slovak scientist Michal Valko now works in Paris. Jonathan speaks with Michal about AlphaGo and its successor programmes, in which Michal has been able to pursue his goal of developing AI software which is able to learn more and more on its own, with less and less human intervention.

News and Topical issue. The integration of foreigners from countries outside the EU on the labour market in Slovakia- interview with Roman Hlatky the co-author of a recent published study on this topic; Reactions to the healthcare chapter of the national draft of the Recovery plan.

On the Friday show, mortgage specialist Bruno Gabel explains how pandemic affected the prices of flats, mortgages and consumer behaviour in this segment. Ice hockey player Dávid Skokan shares his feeling about the season at the start of the playoffs.

Marking 95 years of radio broadcasting in Slovakia, we now present to you popular yet hidden heroes of the WWII era in Slovak Radio. People working in this institution saved lives, gave hope, and not only documented history but also created it.

After the regular news bulletin we will look on the historic season of the skier Petra Vlhová, who has become the first Slovak skier ever to win a Large Crystal Globe. Then Romana Grajcarová will speak to one of the biggest Slovak slowness advocates, Viktor Suchý, about why is it worth to slow down from time to time.

The development of so-called 'nanocomposites' - materials made by combining nanoparticles with other materials - has become a hot topic these days, offering the possibility of new applications which until recent years were not thought possible. One of these is a possible future treatment for cancer patients, by injecting so-called 'nano-platforms' into the blood which have the ability to find and identify cancer cells anywhere in the body. Jonathan speaks with nanotechnology expert Mária Omastová of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, a finalist in the 2020 ESET Science Award, about these interesting developments. Are new Artificial Intelligence technologies going to cause a social upheaval by putting large numbers of employees out of work? This is already happening in some fields, and developments in AI are threatening to make the problem much more widespread. Jonathan speaks with Martin Spano, an AI enthusiast, about the social impact of his favourite technology.

News and Topical issue. They are all over politicians' lips when it comes to promises but fail to become reality after elections- the saga of new modern public hospitals in Slovakia seen through the eyes of the project manager of one of them.

News and Topical issue. In today’s programming, we are going to talk about libraries in times of the pandemic. Are people more interested in borrowing books now? And what is a book quarantine? You will find out in the first story followed by an interview with Foreign Ministry state secretary Ingrid Brocková, who will discuss the issue of women in Slovak diplomacy.