Charles University’s hockey team successfully defended its title from last year in the Battle of the Universities. In the final this time, the team defeated players from the Czech Technical University in Prague. The triumph is the team’s ninth in the traditional competition of Prague universities.

During ceremonies of Charles University, you can’t miss him: he stands out even among esteemed guests, always the first to walk into the Great Hall in dignified historical dress, sceptre in hand. He is the university’s bedel or beadle. At the Carolinum that role is performed by Josef Šebek.

Charles University saw important changes over the last year-and-a-half, among them the relocation of student/employee services, CU Point, to Celetná 13. It is a central hub including the CU Staff Welcome Centre, helping foreign researchers with work stays.

Martin Hilský is one of the country’s most prominent translators of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets into Czech. In 2011, his translations were published in a single volume The Complete Works (Dílo). Now, Academia has followed up with Shakespeare’s England: Portrait of an Age.

A number of deadly viruses are believed to have originated in bats, including Ebola and the original SARS. The indications are that the novel coronavirus SARS-Cov-2 also made the jump from bats, most likely through an intermediary species.

“Most of my work still takes place on paper,” says theoretical mathematician Zdeněk Dvořák from the Computer Science Institute of Charles University. He focuses on combinatorics, graph theory, and theoretical informatics, and he received the ERC CZ Consolidator Grant for his research.

Earlier this month, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its Special Report on Climate Change and Land, mapping the state of the environment. The report focussed specifically on terrestrial ecosystems and how they are acted upon by - and at the same time contribute to - global warming.