For twenty years now the Charles University Grant Agency has been helping talented scientists to cover the costs of their research. One of the projects to receive financial assistance was that of hydrobiologist Mgr. Petr Jan Juračka from the CU Faculty of Science and his colleagues from the , who are interested in the morphological description of water fleas (Daphnia).

Friday, 29 November 2013, saw the preview of an exhibition organized by the Institute for Classical Archaeology and chronicling a decade of research in the Western Desert of Egypt. Located in the entrance hall of the Faculty´s venue at 20 Celetná, the exhibition is accessible free of charge to the academic and general public during the Faculty´s opening hours.

As soon as the news that a large meteorite had fallen near the town of Chelyabinsk started spreading around the world on February 15, Dr. Gunther Kletetschka, Ph.D., from the CU Faculty of Science, started organising an expedition to Russia. Together with his student Ladislav Nábělek and Darja Kawasumi, a specialist in international relations, they were the first foreign researchers to carry out field research in the area where the meteorite fell. One of the things they are searching for is, for example, whether some hitherto unknown organism didn’t fall to Earth with the meteorite.

How is Prague developing under the influence of the social and economic transformation that has been taking place in Czech society over the last twenty years? An answer to this question was sought by a team of social geographers from the Urban and Regional Laboratory of the Faculty of Science of Charles University in a study entitled Social Changes in the Districts of Prague. The study, published in the middle of this year, was edited by doc. RNDr. Martin Ouředníček, Ph.D., and RNDr. Jana Temelová, Ph.D.

On Thursday 18, 2013, a silver medal of Faculty of Arts was bestowed at the meeting of the Research Council. The person who received it for his contribution to international Bohemian studies, translation studies and didactics was British scientist and translator Patrick Corness. In the interview we talked about translation from Czech, problems with poetry and applications designed to make translators’ lives easier.

The new ‘Czechoslovakia 38-89’ educational game allows students to experience key moments of Czech and Czechoslovakian modern history from the point of view of a variety of characters.

Six students of the CU Protestant Theological Faculty have been given a unique opportunity to travel to Israel in the summer, together with CU Vice Rector docent Martin Prudký and Dr. Filip Čapek, and participate in research at the Tel Azekah archaeological site, which is organised by the Lautenschläger Azekah Excavation Project consortium.

A few days ago archaeologists from the Czech Institute of Egyptology, Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague, discovered a unique tomb belonging to the priest and chief physician of Upper and Lower Egypt Shepseskafankh.

Their aim is to make life in public spaces better, help town councils find the best way to develop their communities and also to increase public awareness of social anthropology. They call themselves the Anthropictures studio. The members of this studio are social anthropologists from universities all over the Czech Republic. One of them is Markéta Slavková, a postgraduate student at the CU Faculty of Humanities.

In the following interview, the main organizer of the Colloquium Biblicum, doc. ThDr. Martin Prudký, Charles University Prorector for Student Affairs and head of the Department of Old Testament Studies at the Protestant Theological Faculty, talks about this year’s symposium whose theme focused on the linguistic and rhetorical aspects of the “monotheistic” concept of god in Biblical and related traditions.