We talk to Prof. Magda Konarska from the Centre of New Technologies at the University of Warsaw about the “spliceosome,” the ongoing need for basic research and the importance of diversity in science.

The habilitation degree in Poland ends not with a bang but with a whimper: in spite of grandiloquent announcements from Minister Czarnek about restoring its due prestige and role, the increase in the number of schools entitled to grant habilitation leads to a hyperinflation of this degree, and in the long run – to its demise. In our article, we are discussing briefly the pros and cons of habilitation system, the status quo after most recent reforms, the quantitative analysis of the numbers of schools receiving the habilitation granting rights, and the consequences of the change. We end with a short description of possible scenarios of the current crisis.

This article is an attempt to identify the essence of new positivism, described by Ludwik Ehrlich as a method of interpretation of international law. The evolution of his views on international law is examined with respect to the place of this method from the beginning of 1920s until his retirement in 1961. The article expounds on both the theoretical and methodological aspects of new positivism, according to which judicial decisions should be taken into account in addition to international treaties and customs for the determination of international law. The question of the obligatory force of international law is discussed as being related to the principle of good faith, which is at the core of Ehrlich’s views on international law. The article offers suggestions on how the method of new positivism might be used and what tasks it can fulfil today. It also makes an attempt to critically analyse Ehrlich’s method and to characterize it both in general and in the context of the theory of international law.

The author analyses the history of scientific and public discourses growing around the phenom-enon of Głuchoniemcy (Deaf‑Germans) in Poland. In the literature, this term refers to the des-cendants of the German‑speaking colonists who settled in the Polish‑Ruthenian border in the mid‑fourteenth century. The history of interest in this phenomenon from the eighteenth to the twentieth century reflects the cultural changes and social tensions over time. These descendants of the German‑speaking colonists living in the Carpathian Foothills were mentioned for the first time in the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century as a regional phenomenon of cultural diversity. In the era of Romanticism, when the importance of national identity in Europe grew, so‑called Deaf Germans were portrayed as fully assimilated Polish settlers with only relics refer-ring to German culture. At the end of the nineteenth century, after the publication of Józef Szujski, they became the subject of a political debate and were placed in the context of peasant history. Finally, the socio‑political situation of the interwar period led to the term “Głuchoniemcy” being removed from scientific and public discourses for many decades. After World War II, the absence of the topic became permanent, still directly related to the Polish‑German antagonism that set the directions of scientific interests of ethnographers and historians in Poland. The article tries to answer the question about the course of these changes in the perception of Deaf Germans by looking for external causes as well as those resulting from the nature of the subject of interest.

The Poznań Branch of the PAN Archive in Warsaw was established in May 1956. From April 1974, the headquarters of the Branch was located in the building of the Poznań Society of Friends of Sciences in Poznań. The Archive collects, processes and makes available archival materials on the activities of the Polish Academy of Sciences and legacies of scholars. The legacies that form the backbone of archival resources are gathered through purchases, donations and deposits. Then they are compiled in the form of inventories and made available for research purposes. The collections of the Archive of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Poznań contain rich documentation of the history of science in Poznań and in Poland. They concern both scientific institutions, including laboratories, editorial offices and some institutes of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the University of Adam Mickiewicz in Poznań and other Poznań universities, as well as biographies of individual scientists, especially those connected to Poznań and Greater Poland. Archival collections with valuable materials related to groundbreaking events in the post-war history of Poznań and Poland are also interesting. Archival collections are also displayed at exhibitions and during scientific conferences. Archives from two legacies are available on the CYRYL portal – the Poznań Local Digital Repository.