Self-incompatibility (SI) is a genetic system that promotes outcrossing by rejecting self-pollen. In the Brassicaceae the SI response is mediated by the pistil S-locus receptor kinase (SRK) and its ligand, pollen Slocus cysteine-rich (SCR) protein. Transfer of SRK-SCR gene pairs to self-fertile Arabidopsis thaliana enabled establishment of robust SI, making this transgenic self-incompatible A. thaliana an excellent platform for SI analysis. Here we report isolation of a novel A. thaliana self-incompatibility mutant, AtC24 SI mutant, induced by heavy-ion beam irradiation. We show that the AtC24 SI mutant exhibits breakdown of SI, with pollen hydration, pollen tube growth and seed set resembling the corresponding processes in wild-type (self-fertile) A. thaliana. Further reciprocal crosses indicated that some perturbed SI factor in the stigmatic cell of the AtC24 SI mutant is responsible for the observed phenotype, while the pollen response remained intact. Our results demonstrate successful application of heavy-ion beam irradiation to induce a novel A. thaliana self-incompatibility mutant useful for SI studies.

In the era of an aging society, age friendly cities planning is gaining in importance. Due to the low mobility of these people, it is important to plan their immediate living environment, ensuring access to facilities and areas that meet the basic needs of this special group of urban space users. The paper analyzes the potential accessibility of older people to green areas, sports and recreation facilities, service and commercial facilities, culture and health care facilities, and public transport stops, in order to delimit problem areas characterized by functional and spatial deficits in this area. In addition, the level and quality of accessibility of older people to the abovementioned elements of development.

In the Act on Revitalization of 9 October 2015, for the first time in Poland, the legal act introduced the necessity to apply the principles of universal design (Article 3 paragraph 2 point 3). The practice of investment processes in crisis areas shows that the requirements set out in the Act are not properly implemented. Regeneration processes require attention to improve the quality of life of residents. The article presents issues related to the implementation of universal design principles during revitalization processes. There is a noticeable lack of interest in this issue despite the fact that it is one of the three tasks set before local governments in the Revitalization Act, after social participation and support for people at risk of exclusion in the area of housing. The reasons for this state should be seen in a small knowledge of the issue, deficiencies in the educational process of designers and poor control on the part of local governments and central authorities. This is due to conservation conditions, which often misinterpret the right to protect cultural heritage. The self-government as its own task should guarantee the possibility of using the positive effects of the revitalization process, in particular the implementation of residents’ rights to an independent and dignifi ed life, which is required by the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

Access logs may offer service providers a lot of information about specific users. Depending on the type of the service offers, the operator is capable of obtaining the user’s IP, location, communication habits, device information and so on. In this paper, we analyze a sample instant messenger service that is operating for a certain period of time. In our sandbox, we gathered enough data to correlate user communication habits with their localization, and even contacts. We show how seriously metadata may impact the user’s privacy and make some recommendations about mitigating the quantity of data collected in connection with this type of services.

The state of development, the existing and emerging forms of development, the intensity and legibility of settlement systems, all this is essential for the living conditions of urban residents, their surroundings and peripheral systems. The purpose of the article is to assess the accessibility to market and public services by estimating the distance to these services from housing facilities in Poland. The use of the residential dispersion ratio (RDR) and an analysis of the spatial distribution of municipalities with the highest values of the coefficient allows to identify areas where accessibility to public and market services is weak.

Optimization in mine planning could improve the economic benefit for mining companies. The main optimization contents in an underground mine includes stope layout, access layout and production scheduling. It is common to optimize each part sequentially, where optimal results from one phase are treated as the input for the next phase. The production schedule is based on the mining design. Access layout plays an important role in determining the connection relationships between stopes. This paper proposes a shortest-path search algorithm to design a network that automatically connects each stope. Access layout optimization is treated as a network flow problem. Stopes are viewed as nodes, and the roads between the stopes are regarded as edges. Moreover, the decline location influences the ore transport paths and haul distances. Tree diagrams of the ore transportation path are analyzed when each stope location is treated as an alternative decline location. The optimal decline location is chosen by an enumeration method. Then, Integer Programming (IP) is used to optimize the production scheduling process and maximize the Net Present Value (NPV). The extension sequence of access excavation and stope extraction is taken into account in the optimization model to balance access development and stope mining. These optimization models are validated in an application involving a hypothetical gold deposit, and the results demonstrate that the new approach can provide a more realistic solution compared with those of traditional approaches.

The fate of European citizens living in the United Kingdom was a key issue linked with Britain’s departure from the European Union. Official statistics show that some outflow has taken place, but it was no Brexodus. This article investigates Brexit’s impact within a theoretical (push–pull) framework using a survey of long-term Polish migrants in the UK (CAPI, N = 472, conducted in 2018). Our results show that the perception of Brexit as a factor discouraging migrants from staying in the UK was limited. Still, those with experience of living in other countries, those remitting to Poland, and those on welfare benefits, were more likely to find Brexit discouraging. However, many claimed that the referendum nudged them towards extending their stay instead of shortening it. In general, when asked about what encourages/discourages them from staying in the UK, the respondents mainly chose factors related to the job market. Therefore, we argue, in line with Kilkey and Ryan (2020), that the referendum was an unsettling event – but, considering the strong economic incentives for Polish migrants to stay in the UK, we can expect Brexit to have a limited influence on any further outflows of migrants, as long as Britain’s economic situation does not deteriorate.

This paper draws on an anthropological perspective on social security to explore the complex ways in which Czech- and Slovak-speaking migrants living in Glasgow negotiated their healthcare concerns and built security in the city and beyond. It is based on 12 months of ethnographic research conducted in 2012 with migrants who moved to Glasgow after 2004. Inquiring into healthcare issues and the re-sulting insecurities from the migrants’ perspective and in their everyday lives, the paper demonstrates how these issues were largely informed by migrants’ experiences of ‘uncaring care’ in Glasgow, rather than due to their lack of knowledge or understanding of the Scottish/UK health system. Furthermore, the findings reveal how these migrants drew on multiple resources and forms of support and care – both locally and transnationally – in order to mitigate and overcome their health problems. At the same time, the analysis also highlights constraints and limitations to the actors’ care negotiations, thus going be-yond a functional approach to social security, which tends to overlook instances of ‘unsuccessful’ or unrealised care arrangements. In conclusion, I propose that migrants’ care negotiations can be best understood as an ongoing process of exploring potentialities of care by actively and creatively opening up, probing, rearranging and trying out sources of support and care in their efforts to deal with per-ceived risks and insecurities in their everyday lives.

The aim of this article is to provide an empirical test of the model of non-economic transfers by migrants such as values, attitudes, behaviours, lifestyles, transnational social networks, know-how, skills and knowledge. The first part of the article discusses the current state of Polish society, identifies the direc-tion of social change in Poland since 1989 and analyses the mutual dependency between social change and migration. The second section offers the analytical model and describes how existing empirical data from official statistics and research reports as well as the author’s own research projects have been analysed. The crucial element of the model is the notion of ‘closure’, defined as any factor that makes the migrants’ non-economic transfers difficult or impossible. Within each of the three categories of closure – socio-economic, cultural and psycho-social – more specific barriers to non-economic trans-fers are tested, e.g., lack of cohesive policy towards return migrants, social narratives on migration or ‘homecomer syndrome’. The analysis leads to the conclusion that, however difficult the measurement of the impact of return migration on social change at this stage, return migrants’ transfers are accelerating the process of social change in Poland towards the model of well-developed, post-modern Western societies, whereas closures impede this process.

This article proposes and examines a solution in which the base-station for the fifth generation radio access network is simplified by using a single millimeter-wave oscillator in the central-station and distributing its millimeter-wave signal to the base-stations. The system is designed in such a way that the low-phase-noise signal generated by an opto-electronic oscillator is transmitted from the central-station to multiple base-stations via a passive optical network infrastructure. A novel flexible approach with a single-loop opto-electronic oscillator at the transmitting end and a tunable dispersion-compensation module at the receiving end(s) is proposed to distribute a power-penalty-free millimeter-wave signal in the radio access network. Power-penalty-free signal transmission from 10 MHz up to 45 GHz with an optical length of 20 km is achieved by a combination of a tunable dispersion-compensation module and an optical delay line. In addition, measurements with a fixed modulation frequency of 39 GHz and discretely incrementing optical fiber lengths from 0.625 km to 20 km are shown. Finally, a preliminary idea for an automatically controlled feedback-loop tuning system is proposed as a further research entry point.

An Internet application was developed to support the design process of the WLAN access network. The whole program was designed as a desktop application using the following languages: HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The main task of the application facilitates the planning process of the WLAN access network, including the location of multiple base stations. There is an example of using the program in the WLAN network planning process. The main purpose of this application as the ability to carry out network planning using multiple base stations and provide radio coverage for the entire area served by Wireless Internet Service Provider, is obtained.