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This weekend saw the return of Robotic Day in Prague, organised for the 13th time by the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University. Teams, largely of students from either university or high school, who registered to compete, tested their designs in various competitions with colourful names like Bear Rescue and Ketchup House. Most importantly Sunday of the two-day event was open to the public, for anyone interested in seeing some of the robots for themselves.

What kind of challenges does migration present for cities around the world? How could cities benefit from the influx of migrants? And is Prague ready to accept new residents? These are just some of the topics at the core of this year's annual reSITE conference and festival which gets under way in Prague in just a few weeks’ time. I discussed some of the issues with Martin Barry, the founder of ReSITE, and I first asked him to explain the choice of the festival’s main theme, Cities in Migration.

Markéta “Peggy” Marvanová is a Czech mountain biker specialising in adventure racing. At the age of just 18, she won the annual 1000 Miles race across the Czech Republic and Slovakia for the first time. Since, she has taken part in gruelling contests including The Tour Divide, which stretches across America. Markéta is also well-known as the lone female rider in the ranks of courier company Messenger in Prague. In this edition of Czech Life, we discuss the thrill of mountain bike racing, the outback, and much more.

A year ago this week, Czech politician Vít Jedlička and several colleagues proclaimed the world’s newest micro-nation on a seven square kilometre stretch of disputed territory between Serbia and Croatia, known locally as Gornja Siga. Mr Jedlička and colleagues named it Liberland and the project went on to gain unprecedented attention, with articles by the BBC and the New York Times. But is it really so easy to found your own country, not least on disputed territory? And if you succeed in building it, who will come?

In this week’s Czech Life, we talk to Manfred Strnad, the editor-in-chief of the Czech edition of Mountain Bike Action (MBA). Discussed in our interview is the decades-old debate on the best frame material, if and how to get your child started in competitive cycling, and some of the best spots to ride in the Czech Republic.

A thousand-year-old lime tree from a small village of Tatobity in north Bohemia is representing the Czech Republic in the annual European Tree of the Year competition. The contest was established by the Czech Environment Partnership Foundation, Nadace Partnerství, in the city of Brno in the 1990s and gradually expanded to now include 15 European countries. I spoke to Miroslav Kundrata of the Czech Environment Partnership Foundation about this year’s Czech participant, but I first asked him to tell me more about the history of the competition:

Members of the Czech Technical University in Prague’s Faculty of Cybernetics, focusing on multi-robotic systems, have been cooperating with experts from the National Heritage Institute in Olomouc. They ran a first test using autonomous drones at a church in Sternberk in the Olomouc region to map the state of the building. Drones, unlike people, need little lighting and no scaffolding at all to get to otherwise hard-to-reach areas.

Anyone who saw the 2014 space opera Interstellar will remember that planets featured in the film, visited by a crew from Earth, orbited not a star but a massive black hole called Gargantua, its accretion disc the source of heat and light. Much of the science in the film was calculated by renowned physicist Kip Thorne and indeed the treatment of black holes in the film was a source of inspiration for scientists even here in the Czech Republic.

After an unusually mild start of winter, the Czech Republic has been gripped by a freezing weather and temperatures are likely to remain below zero in the days to come. Among the people most threatened by the cold snap are the country’s homeless and municipalities and NGOs around the country have already started providing various kinds of temporary shelters and services for them.

A decade ago the non-profit association Czech Board Games captured ‘lightning in a bottle’ with the first edition print run of the heavy strategy game Through the Ages. Since, it has run an annual competition to get at least one outstanding design published each year.