In a globalising economy, the agricultural sector as one of its elements is influenced by global processes and development trends and as such experiences both the positive and negative consequences of that influence. Entities wishing to develop and thrive on the market should concentrate their activities on the search for and implementation of new and more advanced and effective solutions. This serves as an explanation for the current high demand for innovation, which is perceived as a way to increase the competitiveness of sectors and whole economies. Innovation is by no means a modern-day invention. Humans since ancient times have been introducing modifications and solutions which hitherto had not been known – in order to fulfil their needs, improve their work and life circumstances. This means that innovation is not just a fad, but a feature of human existence, although humans have not always been aware of this fact.

Relatively seldom is the innovation aspect mentioned in relation to the agricultural sector of the economy. It is definitely more typical to speak of scientific and technological progress, a blanket term for all novelties introduced to agricultural production and the social life of the inhabitants of rural areas at a given time and place with a view to achieving better production-economic results and to improve living standards. It is also important that the new solutions employed in agriculture take into account the potential degradation of resources, including soil, water and ecosystems.

Introducing new solutions on farms is conditioned both by internal and external variables. Among the internal ones, a key role is played by the range of production factors at the agricultural producer’s disposal. Of critical importance is also the farmer’s attitude, which may vary from highly innovation-inclined to conservative. A huge impact on the progress and modernisation of agriculture comes from external variables, since most modern solutions that can be employed in this sector, e.g. new or improved plants or animals, devices or technology are produced outside farms. Of considerable significance is also the institutional environment, which serves as the vehicle for bringing the results of scientific research into farming practice and the regulations of the extant law.

Poland’s membership in the European Union and the incorporation of its farms into the Common Agriculture Policy has changed the landscape of everyday operations and intensified the changes going on in the country’s agricultural sector. It has also inspired research aimed at the role of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in the process of the modernisation of Polish agriculture. Because of the vast diversity of dairy production, it was decided that the research would concentrate on one of its branches – namely milk production.

Farms specialising in breeding dairy cattle and milk production are an important part of Poland’s agriculture. European integration has prompted many of them to introduce changes so as to meet specific norms e.g. health and quality. In this research project a survey has been carried out on more than 1,000 Polish dairy farms distributed all over the country.

The survey shows that the modernisation of production was directly connected to the process of investment. Investments were made on 976 farms, chiefly because of the need to conform to the CAP standards. Pursuant to the 2003 reform of the CAP, a farm was eligible for single area payment when it met criteria related to the process of registration of animals or concerning the conservation of natural environment, public health, animal health and welfare. The structure of adaptation of various Polish farm types depended, among others, on their production profile. Needless to say, farmers specialising in dairy production were forced to implement many modifications. In the sample group, 70 per cent have made investments to modernise or develop their agricultural buildings. Among them, 56.8 per cent have introduced improvements related to the welfare of animals, 50.9 per cent have had milking equipment installed, and 47.6 per cent have modernised the milk storage premises. But the most widely preferred investment has been that of machines and agricultural devices (84.5 per cent).

The modernisation of Polish farms would have been an arduous task to accomplish had it not been for financial transfers under the CAP. More than 36 per cent of dairy farms in the survey have invested spare resources from direct payments, while more than 40 per cent have secured support from the 2007-2013 Rural Development Programme. In 70 per cent of the farms, the solutions implemented thanks to the new investments had not been previously in use and their nature was that of a novelty for the farms in question. In slightly more than 10 per cent of the cases, the changes has been a novelty on the scale of their respective communes.

Reading is an amazing process. It happens quickly (a fluent reader reads around two hundred words per minute) and in a parallel order (the letters of a word are recognised all at the same time). The fascinating thing about reading is its relative novelty among human skills (we have only read for some 5,400 years), which could not evolve in the strict biological sense of the word. Since the skill is not innate, learning to read is the largest plastic transformation “forced” upon our brains by our culture. In the project we are interested both in how the development of this skill may be halted by dyslexia, and how mechanisms of fluent reading develop in a situation where the work is done not by means of sight but touch, with texts written in Braille.

Dyslexia manifests itself in difficulties learning to read, which occur despite normal intelligence, motivation and a favourable environment. Although the disorder affects as many as 5-12 per cent of the general population, no effective method for its treatment has been devised so far. A popular theory of reading dysfunction is the hypothesis of faulty processing of information in dyslexic people’s ventral visual stream, where a specialised brain region responsible for recognising written words is located. We asked ourselves whether the weaker activation patterns in that region were the cause or the result of the reading disorder. In other words, we wanted to know, whether those weaker activations prevent people with dyslexia from achieving reading fluency, or they are the result of a permanent reading disorder that emerged earlier. We thus examined children with developmental dyslexia diagnosed on the threshold of learning to read. We were able to show that, apart from the previously mentioned region in the ventral visual stream, differences can also be seen in children in the dorsal visual stream, i.e. the region of the brain involved in visual-spatial processing, such as managing the “order” of letters. Dyslexia may be therefore rooted in visual-spatial processing disorders.

We also tested the development of fluent reading mechanisms in the situation where the text is written in Braille. Biology textbooks want us to believe that the brain is divided into separate parts, each processing information from a separate sense. In order to see whether it really is the case, we decided to have people with normal eyesight learn to read Braille. It turned out that during the months-long process of learning that complicated tactile activity, changes in the brain were taking place not in the sensory but in the visual cortex. This shows that when we invest sufficient amounts of time and energy into learning a complicated activity, we may be able to develop new brain connections, functioning above the strict division. These results therefore show that when we learn complex activities such as playing the piano or driving a car, we can change the use of different regions of our brains thanks to our own effort and will. Our brain can overcome its own default division of duties. It can develop new connections which increase its potential. This surprising capability of our brain to transgress its own limitations, which we have discovered, may be one of the features that made us human and allowed us to develop a complex culture incorporating both pianos and Braille.

Since I was 12, I have had a passion for mushrooms and I spent all my free time in fields and forests, picking mushrooms and identifying them. As a student, I decided to shift to something more functional, dealing with fungal ecology and physiology: I developed a fascination for the mycorrhizal association. This symbiosis links the roots of 90% of land plants with soil fungi. One fascinating aspect is the weaving of the two partners into a dual organ, the mycorrhiza, made of living roots colonized by microscopic fungal filaments. A second one is the interwoven partners’ physiology: usually, the plant gives sugars issuing from its photosynthesis, while the fungus provides water and mineral nutrients collected in the soil. Moreover, this association protects both partners against pathogens and toxic soil compounds – so that neither can develop well without this symbiosis. As a mycologist, I am very interested in seeing how fungi help plants!

At the University of Gdansk, I joined a stimulating community of botanists. Together we built a research program using the latest research tools available – transcriptomics, molecular barcoding, isotopic chemistry, metabolomics – to better understand the functioning and diversification of the mycorrhizal symbiosis in realistic ecological and evolutionary frameworks. Most orchids rely on fungi for their mineral nutrition, as do most other plants. But excitingly, some orchids species that are not photosynthetic derive all their nutrients, including sugars, from their mycorrhizal fungi (mycoheterothophic plants). Some green orchids even combine both trophic strategies (mixotrophic plants). Orchids are therefore a good model to study the various roles of fungi in plant nutrition.

Thanks to the National Science Center that funded our ORCHIDOMICS project in MAESTRO7, we are currently building an international network of collaborators, linking mycologists and plant specialists who, within the newly established Laboratory of Plant Symbioses at University of Gdansk, will study the mycorrhizal relationship between fungi and plants, especially orchids.

What is the future of the Solar System? How long can we stay on our planet and where should we move to when it turns out that move we must? Answers to questions of this kind, once belonging mostly in the domain of science fiction, nowadays are offered by research projects committed to the search and study of other stars’ planets.

Since the discovery of the first extrasolar planetary system by A. Wolszczan & D.A. Frail in 1992, more than two thousand planets orbiting other stars have been found. The Penn-State-Toruń Planet Search (PTPS) started in 2007, an initiative of Pennsylvania State University’s professor Aleksander Wolszczan, who collaborated with professor Andrzej Niedzielski of Nicolaus Copernicus University. Initially the project was based solely on observations of stars carried out with the 9.2 m Hobby-Eberly Telescope in Texas. Currently the project also uses other telescopes, which allow for exact measurements of changes in the speed of about one thousand stars. PTPS is one of the largest projects of searching for planets in the proximity of stars older or larger than the Sun.

The aim of PTPS is to observe and study a number of new planetary systems that already show the impact of their hosting star’s evolutionary changes. This research will help explain how a star’s evolution affects its orbiting planets. The project draws on state-of-the-art observations using some of the world’s largest telescopes, such as the Hobby-Eberly Telescope in Texas and the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo on the Canaries. The material collected through the observations – high-definition stellar spectra – is used for detection of new extrasolar planets and for detailed analysis of their hosting stars.

Apart from describing new planets and their orbits, particularly interesting are all kinds of anomalies in the stars under investigation that might point to past disturbances of a planetary system in the wake of changes inside an aging star. Such singularities may take place in the chemical make-up of stars, their rotation periods, and they can also manifest as planets’ odd orbits. It was in the BD+48 740 star’s planetary system that for the first time traces were found of a past catastrophe where one of the planets was engulfed by a star. Next to HD 219415 and BD+49 828, planets similar to Jupiter were located, with very distant orbits of 5.7 and 7.1 year periods. In the planetary system of the TYC 3667-1280-1 star – its mass almost twice and its bulk six times that of the Sun – an extremely rare Jupiter-like planet was found, on an orbit twice that of Mercury’s. Since PTPS’s inception, over 20 planetary systems have been discovered, including 3 comprising two planets.

The research has its continuation in the project titled Planets of other suns (OPUS 10). Using a number of European telescopes, thorough examination will be given to planet candidates as well as very rare brown dwarfs (“failed stars”). An analysis will be presented of about a dozen stars overabundant in lithium, an element which should not be present in these stars; the relation of this chemical singularity with planets will also be investigated.