The practice capacity of a railway junction depends, in addition to the effective operation’s conditions, by the potential risk factors related to the design plan of the railway station. With the aim of an approach based on the “fuzzy sets” it is possible to determine the numeric value of the practice capacity by the logic – qualitative relations between the features of the railway junction and the potential risk factors. This methodology permits to try out the absolute value of a suitable vector β, (less then the unit) for the utilization of the theoretic capacity in conditions of maximum reliability of the system related to the aspect of safety (technique “fail safe”).

Henryk Arctowski Station, the research station of the Polish Academy of Science in Admiralty Bay, King George Island, West Antarctica, is one of the most heavily visited bases in Antarctica. Between the seasons 1991/92 and 1996/97, 12884 tourists were recorded. A specially designed tourist trail was marked to divert visitors toward alternative attractions, not only the station buildings. Tourist management goals include: environmental protection, minimising waste and pollution, respecting the rules relating to protected areas, and prohibition of collections and souveniring.

Antarctica is a land of surprises. How low are the lowest temperatures ever recorded there? Is there life at –50°C? Is there anywhere on the continent tourists can actually enjoy swimming?

Poland has been active in Antarctica for 41 years and modernizes its infrastructure and research program in accordance with the recommendations of the Antarctic Treaty, SCAR, and international recommendations.

The authors describe the scope of Polish studies in the field of biology and ecology carried on during 20 years of activity of Polish Antarctic Station. Principal results are briefly summarized and ample literature is presented.

Polar stations became subject of keen interest of law-makers as the most effective manifestation of human activities in Antarctica. Legal procedures governing the establishment and regulations on operation and decommission of Antarctic stations are presented in this paper.

The names of stations in the Way of the Cross may be used as titles of pictures and sculptures, each corresponding to a particular event in the Passion of Christ, or as titles of meditations. The article focuses on the second meaning, but the trends of the development of both kinds of names are similar. The study is based on material consisting of about 200 texts of the service that have been published from the beginning of the 20th century to the present (2020). The purpose of the article is to describe the changes that have taken place in the 20th century, a period of particularly turbulent changes in religious discourse. The article deals with the function, syntactic structure and features of style, such as the use of archaic or colloquial vocabulary. These properties are considered in connection with social and cultural changes. At the beginning of the analyzed period, it was customary to use relatively long titles, which informed the participant or reader about a particular event using expressive and evaluative lexis. Those titles gradually gave way to short, schematic names. Since the Second Vatican Council, titles of a new type have appeared. Their purpose is to attract the attention of the recipient. They are based on a riddle, a contrast, allusions, etc. Therefore, the recipient derives satisfaction from deciphering the puzzle or finding the source of the quote or allusion. These phenomena are known from research on the language of press or fiction, but they can also be linked to current trends in the so-called new evangelization.

Water is the main source of daily life for everyone and everywhere in the world. Sufficient water distribution depends on the place and design of water tank in certain areas. Water storage tanks are relatively flexible structures and they can tolerate greater settlements than other engineering structures. Deformation of tanks may cause severe damages to tank or even loss of life and injury to people, so monitoring the structural deformation and dynamic response of water tank and its supporting system to the large variety of external loadings has a great importance for maintaining tank safety and economical design of manmade structures. This paper presents an accurate geodetic observations technique to investigate the inclination of an elevated circular water tank and the deformation of its supporting structural system (supporting columns and circular horizontal beams) using reflector-less total station. The studied water tank was designed to deliver water to around 55000 person and has a storage capacity about 750 m3. Due to the studied water tank age, a non-uniform settlement of tank foundation and movement of pumps and electric machines under tank’s body will cause stress and strain for tanks membrane and settlement of sediments. So the studied water tank can tend to experience movement vertically, horizontally or both. Three epochs of observations were done (July 2014, September 2014 and December 2014). The results of the practical measurements, calculations and analysis of the interesting deformation of the studied elevated tanks and its supporting system using least squares theory and computer programs are presented. As a results of monitoring the water storage tank, circular reinforced concrete beams and columns at three monitoring epochs. The body of water storage tank has an inclination to the east direction and the value of inclination is increased with the time.

This paper describes the spatial differentiation of topoclimatic conditions in the vicinity of the Arctowski Station (King George Island, Antarctica) during the summer season of the 2006/2007. The measurement stations were located in the Point Thomas oasis as well as on the Ecology Glacier and Warszawa Icefield. The paper analyses meteorological elements such as air temperature, air humidity (eight sites) and wind direction and velocity (three sites). Significant topoclimatic diversities resulting from denivelation, exposure, ground properties and local air circulation were recorded in the study area.

An attempt was made to determine the vertical momentum and heat exchange in the near-ground atmosphere layer in the specific conditions of a sub-Antarctic island. For this purpose, some of the results of the measurements of temperature and wind speed carried out at the levels 10, 2, 0.5 and 0.05 m, during the IVth Antarctic Expedition of the Polish Academy of Sciences in March 1980, were used. The vertical gradients of the two elements and the wind stress and the heat flux in the layers under study, were calculated.

The surface properties of particles emitted from six selected coal-fired power and heating plants in Poland have been studied in this work for the first time. Samples were collected beyond the control systems. Surface composition of the size-distributed particles was obtained by photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS).

The reflection of the smallest, submicron particles was also measured to calculate their specific/mass absorption. The surface layer of the emitted particles was clearly dominated by oxygen, followed by silicon and carbon. The sum of the relative concentration of these elements was between 85.1% and 91.1% for coarse particles and 71.8–93.4% for fine/submicron particles. Aluminum was typically the fourth or fifth, or at least the sixth most common element. The mass absorption of the submicron particles emitted from the studied plants ranged from 0.02 m2g-1 to 0.03 m2g-1. Only specific absorption obtained for the “Nowy Wirek” heating plant was significantly higher than in other studied plants probably because the obsolete fire grate is used in this heating plant.

The obtained results suggest that the power/heating-plant-emitted fine particles contain less carbonaceous material/elemental carbon on their surfaces than those that are typical in urban air.

Utilization of drones is going to become predominated in cellular networks as aerial base stations in order to temporary cover areas where stationary base stations cannot serve the users. Detecting optimal location and efficient number of drone-Base Stations (DBSs) are the targets we tackle in this paper. Toward this goal, we first model the problem using mixed integer non-linear programming. The output of the proposed method is the number and the optimal location of DBSs in a two-dimension area, and the object is to maximize the number of covered users. In the second step, since the proposed method is not solvable using conventional methods, we use a proposed method to solve the optimization problem. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed method has achieved its goals.

The occurrence of coreless winters in the South Shetland Islands region is related to increase in the intensity of cyclonic circulation and to the presence of massive and rapid advection of warm air northerly and westerly. Coreless winter developments depend on large-scale oceanic processes – the presence of positive anomalies in sea surface temperature (SST) in the Bellingshausen Sea over the range 080°–092°W and the retreat of sea ice extent southwards. When negative anomalies of SST in the same region are observed and the sea ice extent advances northwards, a winter with clearly marked cold core is experienced at the Arctowski Station on the South Shetlands.

The infections of four fish species, Trematomus newnesi, T. bernacchii, Lindbergichthys nudifrons and Harpagifer antarcticus with parasitic worms, in the coastal zone off the Vernadsky Station (Argentine Islands, West Antarctica) are described. Data on infections are compared with previous results from Admiralty Bay at the South Shetland Islands. Indices of infection are for each host-parasite relationship. In total, 16 taxa of parasites were recorded: 6 digeneans, 3 larval cestodes, 4 (adult and cystacanth) acanthocephalans, and 3 (adult and larval) nematodes. Fifteen of them have been previously recorded in Notothenia coriiceps from this area. Hence, the number of parasitic taxa recorded in this region increased from 21 to 22. Either the digenean Macvicaria georgiana or acanthocephalan Corynosoma pseudohamanni were dominants in different hosts. Trematomus bernacchii was the most strongly infected, especially with M. georgiana (prevalence 100%, mean abundance 113.7). The infection parameters of the majority of parasites were lower at the Vernadsky Station than in the Admiralty Bay, especially for host-parasite relations with larval cestodes and nematodes. The presently reported study have confirmed that the southern range of distribution of two acanthocephalans, Aspersentis megarhynchus and Corynosoma hamanni extends south to the area near the Argentine Islands.

A topographic map 1:12,500 scale of the SSSI No. 8 and the Arctowski Station region was prepared during the XXV Polish Polar Expedition (2000/2001) organized by the Department of Antarctic Biology, Polish Academy of Sciences. The map documents geomorphological changes which took place during the last 20 years. Several new place names have been introduced for the SSSI No. 8 area.