We talk to Igor Zubrycki, doctoral student at the Faculty of Robotics at the Institute of Automation at the Łódź University of Technology and winner of this year’s INTER competition of the Foundation for Polish Science, about robots supporting children on the autism spectrum disorder (ASD), artificial intelligence and dangers posed by machines.

Włodzimierz Zawadzki  

Most of us have had the opportunity to observe the sky and see the fleeting luminous streaks known as meteors. Such spectacles are caused by fragments of celestial bodies (meteoroids) entering the atmosphere at high speed. Some of them manage to reach the surface. How can these alien objects be told apart from Earth rocks and anthropogenic materials?

Dr. Magdelana Markowska from the University of Warsaw’s Faculty of Biology explains where emotions come from and why negative emotions are not the only ones that are problematic for the body.

The vast majority of the Earth’s lithosphere is formed of oceanic crust, which is in fact relatively young – no older than 200 million years. Only a small part of our planet’s lithosphere was formed at the dawn of Earth’s history, aging and experiencing tectonic shocks leading to the creation of mountain ranges, and facing episodes of major volcanic activity

The term “structure” is quite commonly encountered on the pages of ecology textbooks. It is especially popular in descriptions of populations in relation to their spatial, age, sex and genetic organization, and of course social structures, which describe interactions and links between individuals, and group configuration

Each cipher in which the key is shorter than the message being sent can be broken, as long as you have sufficient computing power. The only question is how efficiently that can be done. If breaking a certain cipher requires all computers that exist today to operate for a millennium, we can describe that cipher as quite secure - says Stefan Dziembowski.

Metamorphic processes – one of the key geological parameters responsible for shaping our planet – can be classified into varying types, each of them delimited by its own set of boundary conditions

Dominik Batorski  

There are two forms of liberalism in Poland: a social liberalism whose main enemy is traditionalism, and a market fundamentalism, used for very conservative ends – says Prof. Andrzej Walicki

Despite a significant drop in mortality rates, cardiovascular diseases remain the number-one cause of death in Poland. Funding for novel procedures, such as transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI), is nevertheless insufficient, compared to the scale of the problem in Poland and average implantation rates in Europe. That is one of the factors motivating the European Society of Cardiology’s a

The global demand for energy continues to grow while non-renewable energy resources are rapidly running out and their exploitation is damaging the environment and Earth’s climate. As such, there has been growing interest in scientific circles and among the public in reducing our reliance on fossil fuels and gradually replacing them with renewable sources such as biofuels

Machine linguistic tools are now so widespread that we barely notice them. But we don’t like to conform to their whims – rather, we want them to adapt to us, to start to understand what we say or write, be it in English, Polish, or otherwise. This requires effective text analysis methods, and digital tools are becoming increasingly sophisticated in response

They lived around 200 million years ago, and they resembled today’s squids and cuttlefishes. Belemnites can reveal a wealth of fascinating information about climate in past geological eras

Paweł Rowiński