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September 15th is the deadline for sending in nominations for the "Czech Head" award for outstanding Czech researchers and inventors.

Would you like your computer to understand you when you shout at it or when you are begging it to unfreeze? Well, that might soon be possible thanks to the work of Czech scientists from the Centre for Computational Linguistics at the Faculty of Mathematics in Prague. Among the projects they are currently working on is for example machine translation. But what is much more exciting is the one in which they teach computers to understand spoken language. In the case of Czech, it is especially difficult, as the spoken and written forms of the language

The sound of billiard balls colliding is something you would normally associate with smoky bars and beer halls. Now, however, in the Moravian city of Olomouc, billiards are set to become a common feature in the more salubrious surroundings of Palacky University.

I'm now standing by a waterfall in South Vietnam. Only five minutes ago I was watching tropical fish in South America and climbing the Andes in Venezuela. While the main character in the famous book by the French author Jules Verne could travel around the world in eighty days, anyone in Prague can now make it in less than eighty minutes.

Recently an unusual changing of the guard took place in Prague - not at Prague Castle but at the National Museum, when a worn-out stuffed elephant was "retired" and replaced by a new model.

On Monday, the Czech Republic became a Cooperating State of EUMETSAT. This is a Europe-wide organisation, based in Germany, operating several weather satellites which gather long term measurements from space. They provide data to weather forecasters but also monitor pollution and gather data for climate change studies. EUMETSAT has 18 member states and eight cooperating states, the Czech Republic now being one of them. Tillman Mohr is the general director of EUMETSAT.

Pioneering research by Czech scientists suggests that the quality of the air we breathe may affect our health for decades to come. In the early 1980s the most serious pollutant in this country was sulphur dioxide, produced mainly by coal-fired power plants and households using coal for heating.

Czech scientists have helped to identify a gene responsible for a debilitating hereditary disease. Charcot-Marie-Tooth or CMT disease is an inherited neurological disorder. Doctor Radim Mazanec from the Motol Teaching Hospital in Prague took part in the pioneering work.

This week, we take a brief look at the life and works of one Czech man who has had very little recognition in the world, despite his significant contributions to the field of medicine. Karel Rokitanski was born two hundred years ago on February 19, 1804, in the North Bohemian town of Hradec Kralove. At just fifteen, he moved to Prague to study medicine, but re-located to Vienna during his studies, to soon become one of the most recognised pathologists in the world.

April 1986: an American radio station announces news of what was soon found to be the greatest civil nuclear disaster in history at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine: "Radiation monitors in Sweden and Finland this morning are showing unusually high readings, in places three times normal levels. At the moment the source of those emissions is a mystery but speculation has arisen of a nuclear power plant accident inside the Soviet Union..."