All three projects from Poland have been awarded at the European Union Contest for Young Scientists (EUCYS). This means that all four Polish students taking part in the EUCYS have won! They will be rewarded with international internships at prestigious European research institutes. The contest results were announced in Prague on 24 September.
A 19-year-old Arkadiusz Jankiewicz from Wałbrzych was among the awarded Poles. He developed a non-invasive method of measuring the flight range of a honey bee based on flower pollen analysis. This discovery won him an internship at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Europe’s major research centre in this field.
Polish physicists, a 19-year-old Michał Gumiela from Andrychów and a 20-year-old Rafał Kozik from Bielsko-Biała, discovered a simple way to detect ionising radiation, which is caused e.g. by nuclear power plants leaks. It turned out that radiation can be located using smartphones. Their method uses CCD and CMOS, silicone image sensors commonly used in ordinary digital cameras and mobile phones which – as they found out – also register bright spots that stand for increased radiation. For their research, the young Poles were rewarded with an internship at the prestigious European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva.
A 18-year-old mathematician Aleksander Horawa from Warsaw refuted the hypothesis about the distances between points in a metric space, which the American professor Peter L. Clark from the University of Georgia had published on the Internet. The Polish student was awarded a special prize – he will take part in Intel ISEF, the world’s biggest science and technology competition for high school students organized in the US.
The EUCYS was established in 1989. It covers exact sciences, life sciences, technology, social sciences and economics. Participants must be aged between 14 and 21. Every country can submit three projects at most.
Poland has been taking part in the competition since 1995, winning 22 top prizes and many other awards. In this year’s finals, Poles competed with 126 participants from 37 countries.
Poland’s representation was selected from among 59 projects. In order for submitted projects to qualify, they must have been awarded in national school competitions or been recommended by a scholar holding at least a PhD.
Next year’s competition finals will be held in Warsaw. Students can submit their projects by 31 October 2013 .
More on EUCYS at European Commision web site or here (in Polish)