As happens in many countries, the brightest and best-educated young graduates in Slovakia often leave their home country to start their careers in wealthier and better-equipped parts of the world, in a well-known phenomenon dubbed the 'brain-drain'. To counteract this phenomenon, some public institutions have designed special programmes to attracts Slovaks back to Slovakia. Jonathan McCormick speaks to Prof Peter Samuely of the Slovak Academy of Sciences about the efforts and relative success of one such programme led by him. Malaria has long been a major problem in various countries of Africa, but new technologies are promising to lead to much earlier diagnosis of the problem, making successful treatment much more likely. Jonathan speaks with Filip Ayazi, a Slovak graduate student at Cambridge University, about the progress of this new technology.