Analysis

The year 2024 is behind us, and it is time to assess the situation and look at the outlook for 2025.

The winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize awarded by the Central Bank of Sweden are three American economists working on the impact of social organization on the wealth of nations. The awardees are Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson. Why are some countries unexpectedly successful and others unexpectedly unsuccessful? Why is it that countries with such rich cultures as India and Mexico have consistently struggled economically, while Australia or Canada have been successful?

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded half to David Baker ‘for the design of proteins using computational techniques’ and the other half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper ‘for the prediction of protein structure’.

On Tuesday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that the Nobel Prize in Physics goes to American physicist John Joseph Hopfield and Canadian-British computer scientist Geoffrey Everest Hinton. Although the prize was awarded in physics, the justification reads that it was based on ‘discoveries and inventions enabling machine learning through artificial neural networks’, which is clearly associated with computer science.

When it seemed that all functions of ribonucleic acids (RNA) had been studied and described, scientists discovered new types of RNA at the end of the 20th century that influence inheritance, development, and diseases. This year, the Nobel Prize was awarded for the discovery of one of these new RNAs. According to the Nobel Committee's decision, two American biologists, Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, received the award in Physiology and Medicine for their "discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation".

However, I am certain that the egg is an excellent food product in our diet. Sometimes when I think about what I would pack for a deserted island, it would definitely be eggs, as their composition is almost perfect. They contain practically all the nutrients, maybe except for vitamin C. Of course, not all ingredients are in ideal amounts

From July 1 of this year, the so-called SUP Directive (Single Use Plastics) will come into force in Poland. According to it, among other things, plastic caps must be an integral part of bottles. This is the result of the threats associated with the still large number of waste accumulating in the natural environment.

The main difference between the seniority pension and the pension obtained under the current rules is that there is no requirement to reach the aforementioned retirement age. At the same time, there is a requirement to achieve a certain length of employment, much higher than with the current statutory pension, and which is also very important, to accumulate a certain pension capital.

The Royal Swedish Science Academy has awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics to three scientists. The laureates are Pierre Agostini of The Ohio State University, Columbus, USA, Ferenc Krausz working at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany, and Anne L'Huillier of Lund University in Sweden. The Nobel Prize committee recognized their achievements in experimental methods for generating extremely short, attosecond, pulses of light to study the behaviour of electrons in atoms and molecules.

On October 2, 2023, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to biochemist Dr. Katalin Karikó and molecular biologist Prof. Drew Weissman for their research on modifying the structure of mRNA, toward increasing its resistance to degradation in the cell and eliminating, observed with injections of unmodified mRNA, state of inflammation in a body.