For five years two biologists and ardent nature photographers were traversing the most distant recesses of the Knyszyn Forest. They took pictures of flora and fauna. They discovered places where one can come across European Bison, weasels and red deer. Their journey culminated in an album, in which Prof. Marek Konarzewski, corresponding member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and Dr. Janusz Kupryjanowicz share the beauty of the Knyszyn Forest with us.
The Vistula Boulevards in Warsaw and the Augustów Canal won the most prestigious hydrological awards in Europe. The International Association for Hydro-Environment Engineering and Research (IAHR) appreciated boulevards for innovative hydrological solutions and canal for its historical and enginnering importance. The awards were conferred on February 18 during the 6 IAHR Europe Congress, organized by the Polish Academy of Sciences and Warsaw University of Life Sciences (SGGW).
“Without vaccination, after contracting COVID-19, out of a group of one million people, thirty thousand will not survive. This is approximately the risk of death due to the disease in Poland" – scientists from the COVID-19 Advisory Team to the President of the Polish Academy of Sciences wrote in a position paper dated 10 February.
The participants of the 6th IAHR Europe Congress will have the unique opportunity to talk about, among others, how to forecast floods or achieve the sustainable development in urban water supply systems. The congress agenda includes sessions and webinars combined with discussions with the audience. Europe Regional Hydro-Environment Heritage awards will be presented. This year’s congress, organized by the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw University of Life Sciences - SGGW and PAS Institute of Geophysics, will be attended by 400 experts from 53 countries.
Researchers have taken full advantage of the benefits brought about by the artificial intelligence and used artificial neural networks to detect schizophrenia and autism. Their findings has been recently published in Cognitive Computation journal. Among the authors are scientists from two institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
"Wetlands and Water" is this year’s theme for World Wetland Day. On this occasion, Prof. Tomasz Okruszko, one of the experts of the Advisory Team for Climate Crisis to the PAS President, explains why wetlands are so important to us. The 6th IAHR Europe Congress, co-organized by the Polish Academy of Sciences, the PAS Institute of Geophysics and the Warsaw University of Life Sciences, will be taking place shortly.
The number of costal floods in the Baltic Sea basin will increase within the next 30 years. What’s more, in a 100-year perspective the historic center of Gdańsk may disappear under water. The Interdisciplinary Advisory Team for the Climate Crisis to the President of the Polish Academy of Sciences issued a communiqué on sea-level rise.
One group that is particularly vulnerable to the impact of COVID-19 is children and adolescents. Although they are less succeptible to the severe physical manifestation of the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the psychological and educational effects of the pandemic can be very serious for them, sometimes lasting much longer than the pandemic itself.
An international consortium will be established under the leadership of the Institute of Human Genetics of the Polish Academy of Sciences to deal with pioneering research in the field of hemato-oncology. Three leading European institutions, together with the PAS institute will examine the origins of hematologic neoplasms, such as leukemia and lymphomas.
International team of researchers, led by Alberto García-Rodríguez from the PAS Institute of Nature Conservation, collected data about the number of different plant species eaten by brown bears. Scientists analyzed diet of 96 bear populations from Europe, Asia and North America. Their findings have been recently published in Scientific Reports.
An international team of scientists has developed new colloidal nanomaterials capable of giant photon avalanche upconvertion. This remarkable basic science breakthrough, in which the research group of Prof. Artur Bednarkiewicz from the PAS Institute of Low Temperature and Structure Research in Wrocław took part, has been described in the latest issue of Nature journal.
During the current pandemic our well-being has deteriorated. This is confirmed by an international survey conducted among 13 thousands inhabitants of 12 different countries. The Polish contribution to this study has been made by scientists from the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology.
Science team from the Space Research Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences will design and build an instrument for NASA’s mission, the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP). The PAS Center and the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Poland signed the agreement on this matter on January 13th.
Since the publication of our “Scenarios for 2021” we have received numerous questions about which of these scenarios is the most likely. However, it is not possible to provide a clear-cut answer. One of the reasons is that the probability of each of these scenarios becoming a reality depends not only on actions over which we have some influence (i.e. the efficiency of the vaccination system and people’s behavior), but also on factors over which we have little influence.
Dr. Michał Wandel and Dr. Piotr Gerlach have won the EMBO Installation Grants. Thanks to the funding they will be able to establish independent laboratories at the institutes of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The European Molecular Biology Organization awards funding to young scientists carrying out high-quality research.
Scientists from the Department of Molecular Genetics at the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences are the authors of groundbreaking works in the field of cancer genetics. The analysis appeared in the journal "Nucleic Acids Research".
The year 2020 has just drawn to a close. This is a good time to take stock and to plan for the new year we are now entering. Herein we present hypothetical scenarios for the development of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021 and beyond. From a scientific point of view, each of them could become a reality, so we should be prepared for them all.
The vaccine was created based on the mRNA technology developed by the German company BioNTech, which it had already began working on in January 2020, immediately after the publication of the genetic sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
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