We talk to Assoc. Prof. Paweł Gancarczyk from the PAS Institute of Art about how early music was perceived at the time when it was being composed, what modern musicologists regard as new discoveries and how our identities are shaped by sound.

Cartography is the study and practice of making maps. Although originally defined for Earth, the term is also a perfect description of the aims of the VIPERS team, whose members include Polish astronomers.

Prof. Anetta Undas from the Jagiellonian University Medical College discusses the sinister force of diseases, the commandments of scientific editing, and the patriotism of scientists.

We discuss waste, fuels, and air quality with Prof. Czesława Rosik-Dulewska from the PAS Institute of Environmental Engineering and the Department of Land Protection at the University of Opole.

When something is very, very far to the right, it actually becomes closer to the left – especially to the very, very far left.

Placoderms are the iconic prehistoric fish from the Devonian. Recent 3D scans have revealed their astonishing anatomical similarities with us humans.

The presence of women in science, methods of supporting them in pursuing careers in science, and the Polish Young Academy’s plans are discussed by Dr. Anna Ajduk of the University of Warsaw, who is chair of the Polish Young Academy, and its three deputy chairs – Assoc. Prof. Nicole Dołowy-Rybińska from the PAS Institute of Slavic Studies, Assoc. Prof. Monika Kędra from the PAS Institute of Oceanology, and Assoc. Prof. Monika Kwoka of the Silesian University of Technology.

The Baltic is a unique brakish sea. Its moderate salinity is the result of the fresh river water input and non-periodic inflows of salty, oxygenated waters from the North Sea. However, the balance continually fluctuates. What impact does that have on the sea?

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.

The Polish Academy of Sciences asks prominent experts about the problem with bark beetle outbreaks in the Białowieża Primeval Forest. Should the protection of this ancient forest include felling and removing infected trees?

Ultra-high-energy gamma rays are stopped by the Earth’s atmosphere before they can reach the planet’s surface. However, our atmosphere could also become a tool for detecting photons with energies in the teraelectronvolt range. By using instruments registering Cherenkov radiation, astronomers conduct observations of sources emitting ultra-high-energy photons with ground-based telescopes.

We discuss meal colors, food-drying secrets, and changing consumer demands with Dr. Anna Michalska from the PAS Institute of Animal Reproduction and Food Research in Olsztyn.

To find out what affected sea level fluctuations in the past, researchers have to turn to the mountains. In ancient geological epochs, today’s Alps and Tatras were actually once on the ocean floor.

When the temperature drops, rivers, lakes and seas become covered with ice, the water vapor in the atmosphere turns into snow crystals, and underground water turns into tiny ice lenses or veins. Glaciers and ice caps are formed in high mountains and in polar regions. All these large and small, visible and invisible forms of solid water on Earth together form what is known as the “cryosphere.”

When we mention mushrooms, our minds generally turn to grilled champignons for breakfast or gnomes lurking under toadstools. But the taxonomical kingdom to which they belong, the fungi, is actually vast and highly diverse: over one hundred thousand species have been described so far, and scientists estimate that the real number could be as much as fifty times greater. Some fungi have even taken a liking to aviation fuel!

According to some studies, the phenomenon of professional burnout has reached epidemic proportions in today’s world. This applies in particular to those whose jobs involve saving lives: firefighters, police officers, and doctors who perform operations as well as members of the so-called social professions, which are based on close relations with people. This also includes therapists.

Not everything which comes from the sky is good for us. But if we’re worried about comets or meteorites crashing into Earth, we should also remember that much of what comes to us from the sky can be the source of momentous discoveries.

Extremes in the natural world, such as extreme weather phenomena, are rather unpleasant for people. In turn, the extremes that permeate society have far-reaching consequences. But where should extremes be encouraged?

Dr. Paulina Szafrańska from the PAS Mammal Research Institute in Białowieża explains why weasels range so greatly in size.

In this paper we investigate the quantitative importance of efficiency wages of no-shirking type in explaining business cycle fluctuations in Bulgarian labor markets. This is done by augmenting a relatively standard real business cycle model with unobservable workers effort by employers and efficiency wage contracts, as well as through the inclusion of a detailed government sector. This imperfection in labor markets introduces a strong internal transmission mechanism that allows the model framework to capture the business cycles in Bulgarian data better than earlier models, and setups assuming perfectly-competitive labor markets in particular.

We estimated a structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) model describing the links between a banking sector and a real economy. We proposed a new method to verify robustness of impulse-response functions to the ordering of variables in an SVAR model. This method applies permutations of orderings of variables and uses the Cholesky decomposition of the error covariance matrix to identify parameters. Impulse response functions are computed and combined for all permutations. We explored the method in practice by analyzing the macro-financial linkages in the Polish economy. Our results indicate that the combined impulse response functions are more uncertain than those from a single model specification with a given ordering of variables, but some findings remain robust. It is evident that macroeconomic aggregate shocks and interest rate shocks have a significant impact on banking variables.

The main focus of this tutorial/review is on presenting Prospect Theory in the context of the still ongoing debate between the behavioral (mainly descriptive) and the classical (mainly normative) approach in decision theory under risk and uncertainty. The goal is to discuss Prospect Theory vs. Expected Utility in a comparative way. We discuss: a) which assumptions (implicit and explicit) of the classical theory are being questioned in Prospect Theory; b) how does the theory incorporate robust experimental evidence, striving, at the same time, to find the right balance between the basic rationality postulates of Expected Utility (e.g. monotonicity wrt. First-Order Stochastic Dominance), psychological plausibility and mathematical elegance; c) how are risk attitudes modeled in the theory. In particular we discuss prospect stochastic dominance and the three-pillar structure of modeling risk attitudes in Prospect Theory involving: the non-additive decision weights with lower and upper subadditivity and their relationship to the notions of pessimism and optimism, as well as preferences towards consequences separated into preferences within and across the domains of gains and losses (corresponding to basic utility and loss aversion), d) example applications of Prospect Theory.