We talk to Prof. Bożena Kamińska-Kaczmarek from the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology about treating cancer, obvious and impossible discoveries, and academic courage and strength.

We talk to Prof. Jerzy Jarzębski from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and the Eastern Europe State University in Przemyśl about Stanisław Lem and the future he foresaw, his cautionary tales and whether he is still an author often misunderstood.

The Bulletin of the Polish Academy of Sciences: Technical Sciences (Bull.Pol. Ac.: Tech.) is published bimonthly by the Division IV Engineering Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences, since the beginning of the existence of the PAS in 1952. The journal is peer‐reviewed and is published both in printed and electronic form. It is established for the publication of original high quality papers from multidisciplinary Engineering sciences with the following topics preferred: Artificial and Computational Intelligence, Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology, Civil Engineering, Control, Informatics and Robotics, Electronics, Telecommunication and Optoelectronics, Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering, Thermodynamics, Material Science and Nanotechnology, Power Systems and Power Electronics.

Journal Metrics: JCR Impact Factor 2018: 1.361, 5 Year Impact Factor: 1.323, SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) 2017: 0.319, Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) 2017: 1.005, CiteScore 2017: 1.27, The Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education 2017: 25 points.

Abbreviations/Acronym: Journal citation: Bull. Pol. Ac.: Tech., ISO: Bull. Pol. Acad. Sci.-Tech. Sci., JCR Abbrev: B POL ACAD SCI-TECH Acronym in the Editorial System: BPASTS.

Robotics specialists observe nature carefully and try to recreate the complex motions performed by people and animals with ease. Locomotion and the ability to manipulate flexible objects are especially challenging, but progress is being made.

“People generally associate my name with the first ever heart transplant in Poland. But I know that if I hadn’t tried to do it, then four, maybe five years later someone else would have. What I am sure of, however, is that no one else in Poland would have started working on developing an artificial heart. Had I not fought to create this device, a few hundred people would not be alive today because we wouldn’t have had ventricular assist devices which saved their lives and wellbeing.”

– Zbigniew Religa,

famous Polish cardiac surgeon

Dr. Maciej Maryl, Head of the Digital Humanities Center and Deputy Director at the Institute of Literary Research, Polish Academy of Sciences, talks about the table where innovations are born, the limits of literariness, and Polish humanities projects that can conquer the world.

Prof. Hanna Bogucka, head of the Department of Wireless Communications at the Poznań University of Technology, discusses unnecessary inhibitions, the usefulness of microphones, and the links between people and technology.

We talk to Prof. Małgorzata Kossowska from the Institute of Psychology at the Jagiellonian University about whether women are appreciated, the significance of openness and tolerance, and what makes a terrorist.

The Bulletin of the Polish Academy of Sciences: Technical Sciences (Bull.Pol. Ac.: Tech.) is published bimonthly by the Division IV Engineering Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences, since the beginning of the existence of the PAS in 1952. The journal is peer‐reviewed and is published both in printed and electronic form. It is established for the publication of original high quality papers from multidisciplinary Engineering sciences with the following topics preferred: Artificial and Computational Intelligence, Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology, Civil Engineering, Control, Informatics and Robotics, Electronics, Telecommunication and Optoelectronics, Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering, Thermodynamics, Material Science and Nanotechnology, Power Systems and Power Electronics.

Journal Metrics: JCR Impact Factor 2018: 1.361, 5 Year Impact Factor: 1.323, SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) 2017: 0.319, Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) 2017: 1.005, CiteScore 2017: 1.27, The Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education 2017: 25 points.

Abbreviations/Acronym: Journal citation: Bull. Pol. Ac.: Tech., ISO: Bull. Pol. Acad. Sci.-Tech. Sci., JCR Abbrev: B POL ACAD SCI-TECH Acronym in the Editorial System: BPASTS.

Prof. Przemysław Śleszyński from the PAS Institute of Geography and Spatial Organization in Warsaw (author of an extensive study of 122 medium-sized Polish cities) explains why Poland’s midsize cities are facing depopulation.

The story of the Polish nuclear research facility in Świerk has always been closely linked to the political and social changes underway in the country – as Ewa, Anna, Maryla, Agata, Maria, and Wanda have all borne witness.

Some works are smarter than their authors.

What can parasites do? According to Kathleen McAuliffe’s book This is Your Brain on Parasites, they can affect human thinking and behavior, and thus change us into obedient machines.

Mateusz Banaszkiewicz, from the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw, talks about the effects of thinking and acting automatically, and how to fight destructive habits.

We talk to Prof. Piotr Homola from the Niewodniczański Institute of Nuclear Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences in Kraków, about his search for cosmic ray ensembles.

People are trusting scientific expertise less and less, and increasingly rely on what can euphemistically referred to as the “wisdom of the crowds.” What are the effects of this, and what might be done about it?

Obtaining a pure product by mixing together raw materials, so as to carry out a chemical reaction at high selectivity, is a difficult part of manufacturing chemical products. How can we test reactors and mixers to ensure the efficient use of energy?

We talk to Professor Andrzej Trautman, Full Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Emeritus Professor at the University of Warsaw, about the consequences of the general theory of relativity, the theoretical foundations of gravitational waves and the difficulties in proving their existence.

The main aim of this paper is to analyse the effect of Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) subsidies on technical efficiency of Polish dairy farms. We have distinguished several types of subsidies and provided an analysis to find out which types are most likely to engender systematic differences in technical efficiency. A balanced panel of microeconomic data on Polish dairy farms over an eight-year period (between 2004 and 2011), taken from the Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN), is used. The translog production function is estimated by employing the Bayesian approach. The empirical results show that the elasticity of production with respect to livestock is the highest, whereas with respect to feed is the lowest. The mean technical efficiency in the covered period is 83%. The research reveals the negative effect of subsidies on technical efficiency.

The aim of the article is to construct an asymptotically consistent test, based on a subsampling approach, to verify hypothesis about existence of the individual or common deterministic cycle in coordinates of multivariate macroeconomic time series. By the deterministic cycle we mean the periodic or almost periodic fluctuations in the mean function in cyclical fluctuations. To construct test we formulate a multivariate non-parametric model containing the business cycle component in the unconditional mean function. The construction relies on the Fourier representation of the unconditional expectation of the multivariate Almost Periodically Correlated time series and is related to fixed deterministic cycle presented in the literature. The analysis of the existence of common deterministic business cycles for selected European countries is presented based on monthly industrial production indexes. Our main findings from the empirical part is that the deterministic cycle can be strongly supported by the data and therefore should not be automatically neglected during analysis without justification.

The purpose of this paper is to model daily returns of the WIG20 index. The idea is to consider a model that explicitly takes changes in the amplitude of the clusters of volatility into account. This variation is modelled by a positive-valued deterministic component. A novelty in specification of the model is that the deterministic component is specified before estimating the multiplicative conditional variance component. The resulting model is subjected to misspecification tests and its forecasting performance is compared with that of commonly applied models of conditional heteroskedasticity.

O niepotrzebnych kompleksach, przydatności mikrofonu i połączeniu ludzi i urządzeń mówi prof. dr hab. inż. Hanna Bogucka, Kierownik Katedry Radiokomunikacji Politechniki Poznańskiej.

O docenianiu i niedocenianiu kobiet, znaczeniu otwarcia i tolerancji oraz cechach terrorystów mówi prof. dr hab. Małgorzata Kossowska z Instytutu Psychologii Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego.