In this contribution, we give a short summary of experimental results on the production of strangeness, especially of charged kaons, in heavy-ion collisions at intermediate energies. In particular, we discuss the possible interpretation of these results, which suggests that properties of hadrons are modified in a dense nuclear matter. We point out to problems connected to this interpretation, for example, unknown cross-sections of the underlying elementary process. We discuss in detail an experiment that aimed at measuring these cross-sections at the normal nuclear matter density. We present experimental results on the production of neutral kaons in collisions of pions at 1.15 GeV/c incident momentum with C, Al, Cu, Sn, Pb nuclei. We focus on the inclusive production cross-sections and the phase-space distributions of the produced K0 mesons, which both shed more light on the problematic issues and point out to the modifications of the elementary reaction amplitudes as well as of the KN potentials in the baryonic matter at the normal nuclear matter density.
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