EDUCATION
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Warsaw School of Economics (SGH) is one of the country’s most prestigious universities. |
The most important centres for higher education are in Warsaw, Kraków, Wrocław, Poznań, Łódź and the Tricity area (Gdańsk / Gdynia / Sopot). Poland currently has nearly 2,000,000 students (including 15,800 foreigners) attending its 458 institutions of higher education (132 state-owned, 326 private).
The most popular courses of studies are economics, business and public administration (23% of students), social sciences (13.9%), education (12%), liberal arts (8.8%), engineering (6.8%), medicine (5.8%), computer sciences (4.9%), public services (3.7%), law (3.1%), environmental protection (1.4%) and other (16.4%).
Warsaw’s 66 universities and colleges, attended by 300,000 students, give it by far the largest concentration of post-secondary education in Poland. The capital city is home to such renowned institutions as Warsaw University, the Warsaw School of Economics, the Warsaw School of Social Science and Humanities, the Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw University of Life Sciences, the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music and the Warsaw University of Technology.
The ‘Most’ programme enables students to participate in parallel studies at several different universities at the same time and is extremely popular among Polish students. The Erasmus programme brings a growing number of foreign students to Poland. Many of them begin their stay in the country by learning Polish at the School of Polish for Foreigners at the University of Łódź (www.sjpdc.uni.lodz.pl).
SCIENCE
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Graphene is so thin that it would take three million sheets of it to form a one millimeter layer. |
A century may have passed since Poland’s last Nobel Prize in science (for Maria Skłodowska-Curie), but the spirit of innovation lives on. Polish scientists are patenting global industrial production of graphene, a miraculous material that is set to revolutionise electronics over the next decade.
Poland is the first country in the world to be capable of producing it on an industrial scale. Graphene means smaller, cheaper and much faster computers. One gram of graphene can cover several football pitches. But that is not all. With better conductivity than copper it is one hundred times stronger than steel. The Institute of Materials Technology (ITME) is now working on obtaining an international patent for mass production. Scientists from the ITME devised a way of transferring production of graphene from the laboratory to industrial scale using equipment that had been used for years in the manufacture of semiconductor structures. Scientists believe that in 10 years the full miniaturization of silicon-based systems will end and graphene will replace it. It is likely that EU funds will be available to support the development of graphene, with the 10-year Flagship programme starting in 2012 and a budget of EUR 100 million.
Robert Firmhofer
Director of the Copernicus Science Centre in Warsaw, recommends three exciting new projects by Polish scientists
Gallium nitride
The first noteworthy project is a new technology developed by the company Ammono. This small company, which has yet to make a name for itself, has developed a new method for synthesizing the best, biggest and purest crystals of gallium nitride. This discovery has put Ammono on the cutting edge of innovation in the 21st century. PhD students at the Warsaw Polytechnic and Warsaw university founded the company 10 years ago. Much like silicon, gallium nitride is a semiconductor, although it has many additional physical properties, such as the capacity to emit light. Gallium nitride crystals are already used to produce Blu-ray lasers and in the future they will most likely revolutionise the market for laser projectors. The new technology makes it possible to miniaturize equipment while maintaining high resolution and colour quality.
Thanks to the methods developed in Poland, computers should soon be shrunk down to unthinkably small dimensions and miniature devices will be able to project high - quality images on-demand wherever we want, for example on any wall. Gallium nitride is also used to produce light-emitting diodes and in electrical switching devices.
New gallium-nitride based semiconductors will increase the capacity of electrical circuitry to handle higher voltages and frequencies, resulting in greater energy efficiency for many types of equipment, including electrical and hybrid automobiles. One of the biggest problems for electrical cars is their limited range. More efficient gallium nitride crystals will make it possible to extend considerably battery capacity without an increase in size. The team of young scientists at Ammono are continuing the best Polish traditions in semi-conductor research, harking back to Jan Czochralski, the inventor of the method for synthesising single crystals. The Czochralski method of growing single crystals of silicon is used to this day in the mass production of microprocessors.
Cardiac surgery robots
The second important project brings together high technology and the medical sciences. Scientists at the Foundation for the Development of Cardiosurgery (founded by the late Dr. Zbigniew Religa) have created a series of cardiac surgery robots known as the Robin Heart Family. The team is also working on an artificial heart. The Robin Heart robots are high-precision surgical devices for use in cardiac surgery. Currently, the only country that produces cardiac surgery robots is the United States. The Polish-designed robots currently being developed will represent an advance on American technology in this area and are the only such under development in Europe. The robots greatly reduce the invasive nature of cardiac surgery and decrease risks associated with surgery for the patient. They also make it possible to conduct operations at a distance (teleoperations). During such an operation, an advisor supports the robot operator with an intelligent database containing all clinical data on the patient.
The new Polish robot is still being tested and has not yet been used to operate on a human being. The most advanced operations to date have been on pigs, including open-heart surgery conducted via tele-operation in February 2011 by two clinics miles apart from each other in Silesia, in southern Poland.
Plant nervous system
The third project presents a discovery by the Polish biologist Stanislaw Karpinski. After many years of working in Sweden, and thanks to the Welcome programme of the Foundation for Polish Science, Prof. Karpinski recently returned to Poland. His team discovered that plants have a primitive nervous system. They noted that plants have the capacity and a mechanism to share information about the type of light that shines on particular leaves of a plant. The team researched how plants record information about the intensity of sunlight and its colour. Intra-leaf communication is facilitated, as it turns out, by a flow of electrical impulses, similar to an animal’s nervous system, but functioning at a much slower speed. This highly complex mechanism also involves processing of signals from quantum to analogue/electro-physiological information. Karpiński’s discovery means that to fully understand plant life we need not only biology, but also to look to the realms of physics and mathematics. This not only expands our understanding of the plant world, but also shows us that plants are much more closely related to animals than we previously thought. The manner in which plants process information suggests analogies with quantum computers.
ECONOMY
The DNA Research Centre in Poznań uses the latest technology for early diagnosis of cancer .
Nothing is impossible in this country. That should be its motto. A place that thrives at the crossroads of many business cultures.
Poland now has Europe’s sixth-biggest economy. It was the only country in the European Union to note economic growth in 2010.
Poland has a balanced economy, big on energy, agriculture, manufacturing, high tech research and development. It also has a large internal economy. Since 2004, when Poland joined the EU and had access to EU structural funds, unemployment has remained perniciously high, but inflation is lowish (at about 3-3.5% – close to the upper limit of the National Bank of Poland’s target rate).
Clean energy and high tech manufacturing are areas that Poland can thrive as it moves away from the old models, a post-industrial economy based on diversified services and high tech solutions. Poland’s shale gas potential, for example, has been estimated at between 1.5 trillion cubic meters (tcm) and 3 tcm. Shale gas potential of 1.5 tcm would mean that Poland has a near 200 year supply of gas beneath its soil. Insiders said the sector could become commercially viable in the next 5-10 years.
Another interesting area, that highlights how potentially decaying industrial areas, and communities, can reinvent themselves is the luxury yacht market. Poland’s yachting industry is experiencing phenomenal growth and is set to become a European yacht-building hub, whose products are marked by high quality and low prices. Poland’s yacht production sector has grown more than fivefold over the last five years. In 2010, the value of its sales reached almost $500 million, giving Poland about five percent of a global market that is currently valued at around $11.5 billion. Overall about 95 percent of all luxury yachts made in Poland are sold abroad and about 90 percent of this figure is sold to clients in the EU and the USA. Italy, the world’s largest luxury yacht maker, exports 65 percent of its total production.
