Апрель 2023 г.

Российская наука и мир (по материалам зарубежной электронной прессы)

CONTENTS / ОГЛАВЛЕНИЕ


• Stories of permafrost
• Fluorescent sensors developed to detect the concentration of mercury in water
• Woolly mammoths evolved smaller ears and woolier coats over the 700,000 years that they roamed the Siberian steppes
• Scientists are thinking about cloning an extinct, mummified bison
• Experts examine a reusable sorbent for wastewater treatment from hazardous dyes
• Russia wants to cooperate with BRICS countries on research on Svalbard
• Official: Russia extends ISS project until 2028
• PSR J0901-4046 is the most magnetized radio pulsar known, study finds
• Role of mutation in nucleoprotein SARS-CoV-2
• Des chercheurs russes découvrent de nouvelles indications thérapeutiques de la metformine
• Are certain languages intrinsically beautiful?
• Russian researchers unravel origins of dangerous coronavirus variants

Об мерзлотоведении в Российской империи, СССР и США, а также о современных проблемах изменения климата, таяния вечной мерзлоты и их экологических и социальных последствиях. Сам термин «вечная мерзлота» появился именно в СССР, впервые использованный геокриологом Михаилом Сумгиным в 1927 г. Английский аналог - permafrost - был введен в употребление почти 20 лет спустя.

After emerging from a deep dive into the terrific world of melting permafrost, typically defined as "ground (soil or rock and included ice or organic material) that remains at or below 0°C for at least two consecutive years" to use a low-hanging definition from The International Permafrost Association, I scribbled that question in one of my notebooks. From its intertwining tales of the microbes and viruses coming back to life to its role in provoking tsunamis in Greenland, permafrost is evidently teeming with life and in perpetual motion.
The contradiction that a world framed as functionally dead - or permanently frozen - is so ‘alive’ feels worth unpacking. As permafrost bubbles, erupts and collapses, it influences the trajectories of humans and non-humans on it, in it, and around the globe. Permafrost is far from dead and also far from permanently frozen. So, then, what is permafrost?
When I ventured into the socio-cultural history of the term permafrost, I did not anticipate stepping into the history of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and North American military expansion. In her book, The Life of Permafrost: A History of Frozen Earth in Russian and Soviet Science, Pey-Yi Chu begins by sharing the story of geologist Inna Poiré. Chu’s account of Poiré’s early life in the Russian Empire, her career as a senior geologist in the Leningrad Geological-Hydrological-Geodesic Trust, and her eventual journey to the United States to work for the United States Geological Survey is fascinating. Poiré’s steps followed and moulded the Soviet term vechnaia merzlota and its English translation, permafrost. Through telling her story, Chu brings many, often contesting, ontologies of permafrost to life.
To unpack the development of the term permafrost, it is necessary to first look at the backstory of Russian and subsequently Soviet understandings of frozen ground. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, conceptions of frozen ground developed and sparred in both the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. Faced with large-scale construction challenges between the Arctic and the Amur, some researchers preferred the interpretation of frozen ground as an aggregate material structure to be grappled with.
Meanwhile, a view of frozen ground which embraces its enmeshment with exchanges of matter and energy also flourished in the Russian Empire and then in the Soviet Union up until Stalinism in the 1930s. In the 19th-century Russian Empire, Humboldtian science, which posits the interconnectedness of phenomena and the natural laws explaining interactions, was influential. Later in the century, Russian soil scientist Vasily Dokuchaev advanced the idea that soil has a complex relationship with surrounding environmental factors, including the climate, geology, flora, and fauna.
In 1917, under Lenin’s Bolshevik government, Marxism-Leninism became the official state ideology. Intertwined with Marxism-Leninism is dialectical materialism which, when applied to ecology, means that natural phenomena develop through the conflict and synthesis of contradictions. Therefore, a dialectic materialist conception of frozen ground embraced its interconnectedness with other forces. However, with the Stalinist period in the 1930s, rapid, state-driven industrialisation crowded out systems-thinking approaches to frozen ground.
Under Stalinism, research had to help the regime’s economy and defence. Moreover, Stalinist media pushed a dualistic interpretation of the relationship between humans and ‘nature’, framing frozen ground as an obstacle to be conquered. It was during this time that Mikhail Sumgin, a Soviet scientist, coined the term vechnaia merzlota - vechnaia translating to ‘eternal’ and merzlota being an ambiguous term sometimes interpreted as a state, like being cold, or a material, such as cryophilic rocks.
Technically, vechnaia merzlota was defined as ground that remained below freezing for at least two consecutive years - a largely arbitrary definition that has persisted to this day in its translation to permafrost. Both vechnaia merzlota and permafrost connote permanence, making the technical definition which requires ground remains frozen a mere two years to fit into the definition is curious. The terms paired with their definition hide the power structures and aims embedded in them.
At the time, the term’s adversaries mostly pointed to the word vechnaia, contesting the assumption of continuity and asserting that frozen ground is connected to the planet’s thermal system and, therefore, changeable. However, the term fit the Soviet Union’s political project - engaging with frozen ground as an aggregate material structure with a technical definition helped engineers confront the challenges of building on frozen ground, which advanced the colonisation and development of the Soviet Union’s peripheries. Evidently, conceptions of frozen ground embodied several, often exclusive ontologies throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, reflecting the role of social, cultural, and political forces in shaping science and human relationships with the non-human. What is also clear is how influential the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union were in developing conceptions of frozen ground.
A few years before the dawn of the Cold War, the United States supported extensive translations of Soviet scientific articles, including those on vechnaia merzlota. Vechnaia merzlota was translated to permanently frozen ground or permafrost for short in a publication of the Office of the Chief of Engineers of the United States Department of War. Permafrost suffered from similar drawbacks as the Russian term. The use of the word permanent rather than eternal carried even more connotations of fixity, while frozen ground or frost was less flexible than merzlota, limiting interpretations to those deeming it an aggregate material structure.
However, because of these weaknesses, the literal interpretation of permafrost helped American and Canadian Cold War political projects as the nations constructed military bases and extracted resources in Alaska and across the Canadian Arctic. Therefore, research on frozen ground in the mid-20th century in North America institutionalised the concept of permafrost as a permanent aggregate material structure, despite pushback from many scientists, including Inna Poiré. Due to the hegemonic position of the English language, the translation of vechnaia merzlota to permafrost transformed frozen ground into a scientific and environmental object around the globe.
When we hear of permafrost, it’s usually in the context of greenhouse gas release and climate tipping points. Warming permafrost brings cryogenically frozen microbes ‘back to life’, which then feed on thawing organic matter, releasing immense amounts of greenhouse gases. While permafrost has melted in the past, climate change is accelerating the warming beyond previously recorded rates. The plants that can now grow on the thicker active layer of topsoil cannot compensate for the immense amounts of carbon released from the melting permafrost.
As greenhouse gases are released from the melting permafrost, they also contribute to climate change, creating an irreversible positive feedback loop. Meanwhile, mitigation techniques are almost non-existent, although significant research is going into cloning the woolly mammoth to compact Arctic soils and protect the permafrost beneath it. Regardless what a relational analysis of this option might show, clearly melting permafrost has far-reaching impacts that are bound to accelerate.
Greenhouse gas release is only one symptom of melting permafrost, most of which are felt locally. Before laying out the local impacts of melting permafrost, it is worth exploring how the definition of permafrost as perennially frozen ground abstracts the interconnectedness of permafrost with earth systems and the impacts of this abstraction. In The Life of Permafrost, Chu shows how framing permafrost as a permanently frozen structure, detached from earth systems, creates illusions that it can be ‘mastered’.
The simplified view that frozen ground can be fully understood in isolation from the earth system helps advance engineering breakthroughs which enable construction on frozen earth. She historicizes this idea, showing the connection between the ‘mastery’ of frozen ground and construction on frozen earth by the Russian Empire in the 1890s, followed by the Soviet Union in the 1920s, and the United States by way of Canada in the 1940s. In each context, Arctic industrialisation intertwines with colonisation and resource extraction in different, albeit sometimes similar ways. For this analysis, we’ll focus on the so-called Canadian Arctic.
Inuit Nunaat is the name of the four Inuit homelands that stretch the circumpolar Arctic from Chukotka to Greenland. Arctic Canada is Inuit Nunangat. The Inuit have lived in Inuit Nunangat for roughly 5,000 years. Like any society, they had complex political, social, and economic systems and rich cultures which persist to this day despite efforts by the Canadian state. With Euro-American colonisation and their quest to accumulate geopolitical power and capital, many of these systems were violently eroded through the spread of diseases, forced assimilation, residential schools, resettlement, and the destruction of livelihoods, to name only some colonial campaigns. Many of the Canadian state’s efforts to secure sovereignty in Inuit Nunangat and extract the bountiful resources in the north required building infrastructure on frozen ground.
Investment into engineering in Arctic environments picked up speed during World War II as the US army built strategic military defences across the Arctic frontier. There was the Northwest Staging route, a series of airfields from Montana to Alaska, which passed through the Inuit Nunangat. The airfields even helped serve the Lend-Lease Act, an agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union to supply military aircraft to fight Hitler’s regime. To strengthen Alaskan military defence, the governments also built the Alaska-Canadian Highway, which connected the United States mainland to Alaska via Canada. Covering almost 900 kilometres between the Northwest Territories and Yukon, they also built the Canol pipeline to deliver oil to bases in Alaska.
These projects, alongside mine construction, solidified the Canadian state’s claim over Inuit Nunangat, not only as a message to other nation-states but by institutionalising the theft of Indigenous land. Moreover, the projects disrupted Inuit communities and non-humans like caribou, muskox, Arctic char, and Arctic fox, as well as peatlands as their migration routes and food sources were compromised, or they were drudged up. The engineering feats that made this infrastructure development possible on frozen ground also enabled the development of more mine projects in Inuit Nunangat, which appears to take off after World War II.
Today, states are negotiating claims for offshore Arctic petroleum reserves and biotechnology companies are scouting out new frontiers as ancient microbes unearth from melting permafrost, creating a new turn in Arctic colonialisms. At this point in the story, it is interesting to imagine whether military, mining, and petroleum extraction infrastructure would have been as prolific if the debate on the permanence of permafrost had not been quelled.
Today, the impacts of these projects are compounding as the permafrost on which they sit or are embedded melts. As part of sovereignty claims and industrialisation of the Arctic, especially after World War II and with varying degrees of force from the Canadian state, largely nomadic Inuit communities were forced to settle in often coastal communities located on continuous permafrost. In one of the state’s most overt campaigns, they forcefully relocated 92 Inuit to the high-Arctic during the Cold War to assert Canadian sovereignty under false advertisements of abundant resources.
I spent the summer of 2022 in Tasiujaq, Nunavik living in the recently constructed school principal’s residence on the edge of town. The residence stood out from other buildings in the village which were a bit older for the most part, raised on steel stilts and cinderblocks overtop a layer of gravel to guard against warping from melting permafrost.
Sitting on the edge of the cluster of homes that make up the village’s core, the open-air waste dump, filled with scraps of treated wood, caribou hides, and various car parts, is affectionately known as "Home Depot". A perpetual stream of smoke billows from some part of the dump that’s on fire. When the town was designed, permafrost was considered permanent. Now that it is melting, toxins from the waste site permeate the protective membrane and contaminate groundwater and soil in the village. The same goes for the open-air sewage system a little further from the edge of town, beside the cemetery. Mounting evidence also shows that melting permafrost increases soil and groundwater contamination from surrounding mines.
The village of just over 400 people is renowned for being one of the most resource-rich villages in Nunavik, with plenty of caribou, muskox, black bear, Arctic char, trout, beluga, and seal in the region. However, toxins in the soil and groundwater are bioaccumulating in the game. There are now advisories from the state to limit the consumption of certain country foods. Meanwhile, hunting and fishing are central to Inuit culture, society, and sovereignty.
To quote Kyle Whyte, the impacts of climate change "…is a recent episode of a cyclical history of colonialism inflicting anthropogenic (human-caused) environmental change on Indigenous peoples". Moreover, the homes families were forced to move into are at risk of sinking as melting permafrost warps the ground, creating the possibility that the village will relocate again, as is happening further north in Salluit, Nunavik. As Inuit author and cultural commentator Zebedee Nungak put it, this is colonialism on steroids.
The impacts of melting permafrost extend far beyond Inuit Nunangat. In June 2017, a 100-meter-high tsunami hit Nuugaatsiaq, West Greenland, displacing 100 residents and killing four, after a slab of mountainside collapsed into the bay. The collapse was partially caused by melting permafrost, which helped trigger the slide. A much larger landslide is looming in the region as permafrost thaw erodes a mountainside ten times larger. This time, the waves are projected to destroy three villages and impact two others.
In the Hindu Kush Himalaya region, melting permafrost contributes to vegetation destruction, water quality issues, and geohazards, including landslides. On top of this, these changes deter tourism in the region, disrupting local livelihoods. On the Yamal peninsula in Northwest Siberia in 2016, permafrost thaw activated once-frozen anthrax spores, killing thousands of reindeer, leading to the hospitalisation of dozens of people, and killing a 12-year-old boy. In 2017 in Spitsbergen, Svalbard, The Global Seed Vault, designed to protect the world’s most precious seeds from any global disaster and ensure humanity’s food supply for eternity, was breached, sending meltwater into the tunnel. The vault was built into the permafrost. In the words of a Norwegian government official, "It was not in our plans to think that the permafrost would not be there and that it would experience extreme weather like that."
At the end of writing this piece, I am even further away from an answer to my earlier question, what is permafrost? What is clear though is that the ways that we conceive of permafrost impact how we live on and with frozen environments. Also, there isn’t one answer. Rather than search for a convenient definition, we can ask: How do the beings living with permafrost understand permafrost? What do stories from frozen environments tell us about conceptions of permafrost? What are the similarities and differences between these stories? What are the implications of thinking about permafrost differently?
Relegating dominant framings of permafrost is not a silver bullet solution, but it could help to open up discussions around the implications of the stories we tell. The narrative that permafrost is a material structure separate from earth systems served some purposes but has also led to catastrophe and injustice. It is time to center the voices of people living with permafrost, symmetrically embracing the plurality of perspectives.

Уральские ученые совместно с итальянскими и болгарскими коллегами синтезировали новые гетероциклические флуорофоры с повышенной чувствительностью к ионам ртути - четыре типа соединений 2-арил-1,2,3-триазола. Сенсоры на их основе помогут определять концентрацию ртути в воде.

Scientists from the UrFU, together with Italian and Bulgarian colleagues, synthesised new heterocyclic fluorophores - four types of carboxamides of 2-aryl-1,2,3-triazoles. Their photophysical properties have been investigated under different conditions - solvents and their binary mixtures with water. Sensors based on the fluorophores obtained were sensitive to mercury, so they can be used to detect mercury concentrations in water. Further research will focus on determining the possibility of using these fluorophores to target medicines to affected organs. The authors have published an article on their research and results in the journal Spectrochimica Acta - Part A: Molecular and Biomolecular Spectroscopy.
"A disadvantage of organic fluorophores is their poor solubility in water and aqueous environments. At the same time, when water is added to organic solvents, most dyes and fluorophores have fluorescence quenching. However, in 2001, Professor Ben Zhong Tan of the Chinese University of Hong Kong found that some fluorophores observed not quenching, but rather an increase the fluorescence intensity. This is due to the formation of much larger particles, or nano-aggregates, from the molecules of fluorophores. Tan’s discovery was of great significance. Much scientific effort has been devoted to studying the mechanism of his discovery, as well as to the design and synthesis of new fluorophores with the effect of increasing the emission. The fluorophores we obtained have also demonstrated in a mixture of organic solvent and water the effect described by Tang, and with a particular intensity. This opens the way to the practical application of the obtained fluorophores in various fields, especially in the aquatic environment," says Natalya Belskaya, Full Professor of the UrFU Department of Technology of Organic Synthesis and leader of the research team.
According to the scientists, not only the limited solubility of synthesised fluorophores in a water/organic solvent mixture, but also the unique architecture of the nanoparticles formed could be the reason for this strong effect. These include the presence and arrangement of specific functional groups in the structure of the molecules that form the nanoparticles.
The researchers have developed a model for the formation of such nanoparticles in a binary mixture, determined their size (about 100 nanometres), the approximate number of molecules that each of these nanoparticles can contain (about 2×106 molecules), and the energy that excited molecules lose during nanoparticle formation.
"The sensitivity of the fluorophores to a variety of metal ions was the next step in the study.These included both biogenic and toxic metal ions, the detection of which is an important task in environmental monitoring, including water. The synthesised fluorophores showed the ability to selectively detect mercury ions with high sensitivity. The selective detection of only mercury ions is an absolute advantage, as it reduces the probability of error in determining the concentration of this toxic metal in the presence of other metal ions. Another advantage is the possibility of using easy-to-make test strips for the registration of mercury ions. We made such strips from filter paper pre-treated with fluorophore solution," explains Natalya Belskaya.
According to Natalya Belskaya, the described scientific work is a continuation of design, synthesis and research of properties of 2-aryltriazoles and their derivatives with high blue fluorescence carried out at UrFU. In this way, the scientific group of the university, including both experienced scientists and students, Bachelor’s and Master’s students, created a series of 1,2,3-triazole-4-carboxylic acids and demonstrated the possibility of their application as sensors in the processes of monitoring and controlling the acidity of aqueous solutions.
Further work will involve investigating the potential use of synthesised fluorophores in the design and synthesis of new fluorescent molecular couriers for the study of cellular processes, as well as for the targeted delivery of diagnostic agents or medicines directly to the target - a diseased organ or tissue - in the diagnosis and treatment of socially dangerous diseases such as malignant tumours.
In addition, the synthesized fluorophores may serve as a tool to improve the accuracy of surgical procedures: modern fluorescence surgery has imaging technologies that allow more accurate detection of tumour boundaries and more efficient surgical removal of the affected area of the body.
The research was supported by the Russian Science Foundation (grant № 20-13-00089) and carried out using equipment from the Ural and Siberian Branches of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Группа исследователей из Швеции, России, Дании, Норвегии и Великобритании сравнила геномы 23 шерстистых мамонтов возрастом до 700 тысяч лет и 28 современных слонов, чтобы выявить гены, отвечающие за ряд морфологических особенностей ископаемых животных и проследить их эволюцию как вида. Оказалось, что 700 тысяч лет назад у мамонтов уже была длинная шерсть, хотя, возможно, не такая теплая, а вот уши были гораздо больше.

A team of researchers compared the genomes of woolly mammoths with modern day elephants to find out what made woolly mammoths unique, both as individuals and as a species. The investigators report April 7 in the journal Current Biology that many of the woolly mammoth's trademark features - including their woolly coats and large fat deposits - were already genetically encoded in the earliest woolly mammoths, but these and other traits became more defined over the species' 700,000+ year existence. They also identified a gene with several mutations that may have been responsible for the woolly mammoth's miniscule ears.
"We wanted to know what makes a mammoth a woolly mammoth," says paleogeneticist and first author David Díez-del-Molino of the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm. "Woolly mammoths have some very characteristic morphological features, like their thick fur and small ears, that you obviously expect based on what frozen specimens look like, but there are also many other adaptations like fat metabolism and cold perception that are not so evident because they're at the molecular level."
To identify genes that were "highly evolved" in woolly mammoths - meaning they had accrued a large number of mutations - the team compared the genomes of 23 Siberian woolly mammoth with 28 modern-day Asian and African elephant genomes. Twenty-two of these woolly mammoths were relatively modern, having lived within the past 100,000 years, and sixteen of the genomes had not been previously sequenced. The twenty-third woolly mammoth genome belonged to one of the oldest known woolly mammoths, Chukochya, who lived approximately 700,000 years ago.
"Having the Chukochya genome allowed us to identify a number of genes that evolved during the lifespan of the woolly mammoth as a species," says senior author Love Dalén, professor of evolutionary genomics at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm. "This allows us to study evolution in real time, and we can say these specific mutations are unique to woolly mammoths, and they didn't exist in its ancestors."
Not surprisingly, many genes that were adaptive for woolly mammoths are related to living in cold environments. Some of these genes are shared by unrelated modern-day Arctic mammals. "We found some highly evolved genes related to fat metabolism and storage that are also found in other Arctic species like reindeer and polar bears, which means there's probably convergent evolution for these genes in cold-adapted mammals," says Díez-del-Molino.
While previous studies have looked at the genomes of one or two woolly mammoths, this is the first comparison of a large number of mammoth genomes. This large sample size enabled the team to identify genes that were common among all woolly mammoths, and therefore likely adaptive, as opposed to genetic mutations that might only have been present in a single individual.
"We found that some of the genes that were previously thought to be special for woolly mammoths are actually variable between mammoths, which means they probably weren't as important," says Díez-del-Molino.
Overall, the 700,000-year-old Chukochya genome shared approximately 91.7% of the mutations that caused protein-coding changes in the more modern woolly mammoths. This means that many of the woolly mammoth's defining traits - including thick fur, fat metabolism, and cold-perception abilities - were probably already present when the woolly mammoth first diverged from its ancestor, the steppe mammoth.
However, these traits developed further in Chukochya's descendants. "The very earliest woolly mammoths weren't fully evolved," says Dalén. "They possibly had larger ears, and their wool was different - perhaps less insulating and fluffy compared to later woolly mammoths."
More modern woolly mammoths also had several immune mutations in T cell antigens that were not seen in their ancestor. The authors speculate that these mutations may have conferred enhanced cell-mediated immunity in response to emerging viral pathogens.
Working with ancient mammoth DNA comes with a slew of hurdles. "Every step of the way, things are a bit more difficult, from fieldwork, to lab work, to bioinformatics," says Díez-del-Molino.
"Apart from the field work, where we have to battle both polar bears and mosquitos, another aspect that makes this much more difficult is that you have to work in an ancient DNA laboratory, and that means that you have to dress up in this full-body suit with a hood and face mask and visor and double gloves, so doing the lab work is rather uncomfortable to put it mildly," says Dalén. "I would like to highlight Marianne Dehasque, the second author of this paper, who did the herculean effort of performing lab work on most of these samples."
All the mammoths whose genomes were included in this study were collected in Siberia, but the researchers hope to branch out and compare North American woolly mammoths in the future. "We showed a couple of years ago that there was gene flow between woolly mammoths and the ancestors of Colombian mammoths, so that's something that we will need to account for because North American woolly mammoths might have been carrying non-woolly mammoth genes as well," says Dalén.

Летом 2022 года в вечной мерзлоте Верхоянского района Якутии были найдены останки бизона возрастом около 8 тысяч лет. По степени сохранности тканей находка оказалась уникальной - настолько, что по оценке некоторых специалистов Северо-Восточного федерального университета, куда передали бизона, полученный биологический материал позволяет клонировать вымершее животное. Другие эксперты высказали сомнение как в шансах обнаружить неповрежденные хромосомы в образцах такой давности, так и в целесообразности самого клонирования.

Cloning extinct animals seems to be all the rage right now. From a woolly mammoth to an arctic wolf, scientists are continuously crafting ways to take DNA from known specimens of extinct animals and edit genes bring them back as closed creatures. Now, Russian researchers want in on the fun, and they plan to do so with a long-lost bison species, thanks to a 2022 find.
The newly discovered bison from an unknown extinct species is thought to have been around 1.5-2 years old when it died between 8,000 and 9,000 years ago, according to scientists at the Mammoth Museum of North-Eastern Federal University in Russia.
Found by locals in the summer of 2022 in the Verkhoyansk district of the Arctic Circle, the bison was preserved in the permafrost. The remains included a head, forelimbs, and part of the chest. Scientists conducted a necropsy - an autopsy for animals - and took samples of soft tissue, muscles, skin, wool, and even the brain.
Hwang Woo Sok, NEFU professor and director of the UAE Biotechnology Research Foundation, said in a news release that researchers are working with a unique find that could be cloned in the future thanks to selected materials. This news release was translated from Russian through the use of a free online translation service.
The bison necropsy allowed the extraction of samples and scans that the Russian researchers say will continue to be analyzed and kept in the museum freezer for future investigation. Cell research has already started, with the help of Korean colleagues, the university adds.
Though it is exciting to locate an extinct bison that has been well-preserved for thousands of years, one expert told Live Science that there isn't enough here to make cloning a reality. "In my view, it is not going to be possible to clone extinct animals from tissues like this," Love Dalén, a paleogeneticist at Stockholm University tells Live Science. "To make cloning possible, one needs to find intact chromosomes, but what we see even in the best specimens is that each chromosome is fragmented into millions pf pieces."
In fact, Dalén thinks it is so improbable that researchers will find a fully intact chromosome from the carcass that you'd have a better chance of flipping a coin and landing "heads a thousand times in a row." That's not a rousing endorsement of the cloning potential.
The only plausible scenario for the successful cloning of the extinct Russian bison, Dalén says, comes from the tedious process of sequencing the bison's genome, thanks to the help of DNA from this specimen and potentially others, along with living bison.
Maybe researchers are on that same path, already saying they plan to find more of these extinct bison lodged in the frozen tundra. Maxim Cheprasov, head of the NEFU Mammoth Museum, said in a news release (translated with a free online translation tool) that researchers are planning to visit the site where other remains of fossil animals may be found this summer.
Get ready for a bison hunt unlike any other.

Красноярские ученые исследовали сорбционные свойства наночастиц оксида железа в углеродной оболочке. Серия экспериментов показала их высокую эффективность при удалении из воды анионных и катионных органических красителей, с которыми полностью не справляются даже промышленные фильтры. Сами же наночастицы можно использовать в качестве сорбента неоднократно, а после использования - полностью извлечь из воды.

Scientists of Siberian Federal University and the Krasnoyarsk Research Centre of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences have studied the sorption properties of iron oxide nanoparticles in a carbon shell. Studying the structure of these particles, the experts conducted a series of experiments that showed their high efficiency in extracting organic dyes from water. Besides, these particles demonstrated suitability for the targeted destruction of lung carcinoma cells.
Iron nanoparticles are increasingly used in medicine and environmental management: scientists already know their ability to penetrate through the cell membrane thus purposefully destroying cancerous tumours. No less interesting is the use of such nanoparticles as reusable adsorbents for hazardous substances: heavy metals and organic dyes, the remains of which get into rivers and lakes with sewage.
"We studied the properties of nanoparticles made of iron oxide and wrapped in a carbon coat, and tested how they cope with the extraction of anionic and cationic organic dyes (rhodamine and eosin, which give shades of pink and red) from water. It is no secret that household and industrial filters cannot extract these substances fully - trace amounts of dyes remain and then get into drinking water and soil. It turned out that both types of dyes are well adsorbed by the surface of the nanoparticles, which is largely due to the carbon coating which, like a sponge, absorbs pollutants, while the magnetite core enables to quickly remove nanoparticles from water to speed up the purification process," stated Alexey Sokolov, co-author of the study, assistant professor at the Department of Experimental Physics and Innovative Technologies, SibFU.
Simple sorbents used to eliminate impurities work for a long time, they adsorb pollutants, and then they are either removed by specialists or they perish on their own if they are made from biodegradable material. The alternative offered by the scientific team of Krasnoyarsk scientists is a reusable sorbent, which works much faster and is completely removed from water after their mission is completed.
"Carbon-wrapped iron oxide nanoparticles are easily collected using a magnetic field - they can be chemically cleaned of collected contaminants and reused. An analogy with activated carbon suggests itself - it can also be restored and reused," continued the researcher.
The most obvious use of such reusable adsorbents are filters that enable to create recycling (circulation) of water with the concomitant disposal of toxic impurities - not only anionic and cationic dyes found in household chemicals and food products but also heavy metal ions such as copper and lead will be caught and neutralized.
By the way, specialists can analyse water using the magnetic sorption method even near open waters - they take a small sample and run it through a filter. According to the expert, this way, even the smallest impurities of toxicants, which can be missed by laboratory instruments that do not detect values below the maximum allowable concentration (MAC), can be detected.
The second area in which iron oxide nanoparticles with a carbon coat can be successfully used is medicine. Alexey Sokolov explained how nanoparticles work when they penetrate into a cancer cell.
"Nanoparticles have long been widely used to target drugs or kill cancer cells. There are experiments with gold-coated nanoparticles carried out, in particular, by SibFU chemists. The mechanism of operation of our nanoparticles is similar. Aptamer tags can be set on such particles and directed to the affected organ, where, under the influence of an alternating electromagnetic field, the particles will begin to vibrate, destroying cell membranes and destroying tumour cells from the inside. By the way, it turned out that carbon coating can completely replace expensive gold," the expert said.
The Ehrlich carcinoma cell disruption experiment was sequentially carried out using a low frequency alternating magnetic field. The number of cells destroyed as a result of their interaction with iron oxide nanoparticles in an alternating magnetic field is 27% more relative to control cells.

Российская государственная компания «Арктикуголь» на Шпицбергене (Свальбард) намерена создать международную арктическую научную станцию в сотрудничестве со странами БРИКС - Бразилией, Индией, Китаем и ЮАР.

Trust Arktikugol, the Russian state-owned company on Svalbard, will develop an international Arctic science station in cooperation with the BRICS countries - Brazil, India, China, and South Africa. That is announced by Russia's Minister of the Development of the Russian Far East and Arctic.
In the future of Trust Arktikugol lies the development of an international Arctic science station in collaboration with BRICS partners, according to Alexei Chekunkov, Russia's Minister of the Development of the Russian Far East and Arctic. Chekunkov announced this on Telegram last week, reports the Russian news agency TASS.
BRICS is a cooperation forum for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.
Many countries, such as the BRICS countries, have expressed interest in cooperating with Russia in the Arctic, said the Russian Arctic ambassador in March. Moscow itself considers it important to strengthen cooperation in the region with non-Arctic states when existing Arctic cooperation formats, such as the Arctic Council, are expected to be weakened, stated the ambassador.
Russia has a research center in the mining town of Barentsburg, which is operated by Trust Arktikugol. Apparently, this is what Minister Chekunkov believes should be developed.
Earlier this year, Russia also invited countries in Latin America and the Persian Gulf, as well as Vietnam, to research cooperation in the Russian Arctic. This is also reported by TASS.
China and India are already engaged in research activities on Svalbard through the research station in Ny-Ålesund, which is operated by the Norwegian company Kings Bay AS.

Россия передумала уходить с Международной космической станции в 2024 г., как неоднократно заявлялось ранее. Теперь срок работы российского сегмента МКС продлен до 2028 года.

Based on the decision of the Russian government, the operation of the Russian segment of the International Space Station was extended until 2028. This was announced by Yury Borisov, Director General of Roscosmos, during his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"And especially the time has come to discuss in detail the issues of the creation of the Russian orbital station, because according to the government’s decision, the work of the International Space Station has been extended until 2028" - Borisov said. He noted that time is running fast and Russia should not take breaks in manned space flight. According to Borissov’s information, the outline of the orbital station project will be ready by the summer of 2023, and during the meeting he spoke to the head of state about the station’s main parameters, appearance, and stages of its creation. Borisov said that the project will allow Russian specialists to learn, among other things, the technologies necessary for the lunar program.
In July 2022, Borisov reported to Russian President Vladimir Putin about the withdrawal from the ISS project and the development of the Russian orbital station. However, in November, the director thought it was too early to talk about Russia’s withdrawal. He explained that the timing depends on the technical condition of the Russian segment of the ISS and the date of installation of the Russian orbital station. According to Sergei Krikalyov’s statement at the end of December, Roscosmos proposed to the government to extend the operation of the Russian segment of the ISS until 2028, as the current agreement to operate the station has expired. According to him, the Council of Ministers requested additional materials that support the possibility of an extension related to the operation of the ISS. Last week, on April 6 to be precise, Roscosmos confirmed that this proposal had been sent to the government.
"Russia has no alternative to the ISS yet, so it must operate it" - said Maksym Surayev, former cosmonaut and former member of the State Duma. "The Russian segment really isn’t getting any younger, but I think it’s right to stay there. We cannot fall out of activities in space. The longer we stay uninterrupted in space, the better." According to his opinion, it will be possible to leave the ISS when Russia completes its own orbital station.
"It is a difficult question whether the installation of the Russian orbital station by 2028 is realistic, but RKK Energy is working with all this in mind" - said Ivan Moisejev, scientific director of the Space Policy Institute. Technologically, Russia is ready to create its own space station, but much depends on funding.
"The start of the installation of our own orbital station coincides exactly with the planned completion of work on the ISS" says a member of the Russian Astronautical Academy. He also agrees that a lot depends on funding. "The construction of the orbital station takes several years, at best five years. Of course, you can start work on it earlier, you don’t have to wait for the ISS to finish" - he told.
Many people assume that the Russian lunar expeditions could take place between 2032-2035. But the main task of the near future is to continue the work carried out in the framework of the ISS project and to create a domestic orbital station.

Сверхмедленный радиопульсар PSR J0901-4046, обнаруженный в 2020 г., оказался еще и сверхнамагниченным - астрономы из Физического института им. П.Н.Лебедева РАН установили, что напряженность его поверхностного магнитного поля составляет не менее 27 квадриллионов Гаусс.

Astronomers have investigated an ultraslow radio pulsar known as PSR J0901-4046, finding that it has an extremely high magnetic field - at a level of 30 quadrillion Gauss. The discovery, published April 7 in Physical Review D, makes PSR J0901-4046 the most magnetized radio pulsar known to date.
Extraterrestrial sources of radiation with a regular periodicity, known as pulsars, are usually detected in the form of short bursts of radio emission. Radio pulsars are generally described as highly magnetized, rapidly rotating neutron stars with a lighthouse beam of radiation that produces the pulsed emission.
PSR J0901-4046 was discovered on September 27, 2020, at 1284 MHz with the MeerKAT radio telescope and associated with an ultra-slowly rotating magnetized neutron star. It has an ultralong spin period of approximately 75.9 seconds - therefore it rotates more than three times slower than the former record holder PSR J0250+5854.
The strength of the surface magnetic field of PSR J0901-4046 was initially estimated to be at a level of 130 trillion Gauss, based on its period. However, further studies found that such a magnetic field is wholly insufficient for this pulsar to operate, excluding the hypothesis that PSR J0901-4046 may be a magnetar. Moreover, it remained unclear how such a slowly rotating source is still active in the radio band.
That is why a team of astronomers led by Denis Sob'yanin of the P. N. Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, Russia, decided to take a closer look at PSR J0901-4046.
"In this paper we address the problem of the origin of radio emission from the apparently dead PSR J0901-4046. Eschewing the model of magnetic-dipole radiation and solely using energy transformation during plasma multiplication above the polar cap of a strongly magnetized rotating neutron star, we show that the actual surface magnetic field of PSR J0901-4046 is 2 orders of magnitude higher than the conventional estimate," the researchers explained.
The study found that PSR J0901-4046 has a magnetic field of at least 27 quadrillion Gauss. Such a strong magnetic field explains the existence of plasma multiplication and the observed radio emission from this pulsar. Therefore, PSR J0901-4046 becomes the most magnetized radio pulsar so far discovered.
The astronomers explained that the ultraslow rotation of PSR J0901-4046 implies that the surface magnetic field strength should exceed the value of 25 quadrillion Gauss. This is needed for an efficient cascade multiplication of an electron-positron plasma generating radio emission.
The researchers added that the extremely strong magnetic field of PSR J0901-4046 indicates that the pulsar slows down not by magnetic-dipole radiation, but rather by an electric current of about 56 megaamperes, when rotational energy is expended in accelerating charged particles over the polar cap. In this scenario, the rotational energy of the neutron star fully transforms into the energy of primary particles in the acceleration gap, and not into the energy of magnetic-dipole radiation.

Сотрудники ФИЦ Биотехнологии РАН совместно с британскими и американскими коллегами выяснили, что человеческие белки 14-3-3, известные своей ролью в репликации многих вирусов, избирательно связываются с наиболее часто мутирующей областью нуклеокапсидного белка коронавируса SARS-CoV-2. Предположительно, в результате этой связи меняется как жизненный цикл вируса, так и 14-3-3-зависимые функции клеток. Результаты исследования будут полезны при создании препаратов против новых штаммов коронавируса.

Scientists from The Federal Research Centre "Fundamentals of Biotechnology" of the Russian Academy of Sciences together with foreign colleagues demonstrated that human 14-3-3 proteins, that are known for their role in replication of many viruses, bind differentially with more often mutating regulatory part of nucleoprotein (N protein) of coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. Presumably, the result of this correlation changes both the virus life cycle and 14-3-3-dependent cell functions. The interaction force of the 14-3-3 and N protein is greatly influenced by mutations in the particular parts of the latter; therefore, the results of the research, published in the Journal of Molecular Biology, may be useful in drug discovery against new strains of coronavirus. Research is supported by the national project "Science and Universities".
Nucleocapsid protein (nucleoprotein or N protein) is common for single-stranded RNA-viruses, including coronaviruses, and is responsible for replication, packaging and storage of viral genome. Its structure has a central regulatory part, consisting of about 30 amino acid residues (mainly the residues of serine and arginine, the so-called SR-rich region), where special cellular enzymes transfer phosphate groups from molecules of ATP (phosphorylate them). Such modifications trigger human 14-3-3 proteins to bind N-protein. 14-3-3 proteins participate in a range of crucial cell processes: regulate the activity of the protein partners, their intracellular distribution, and their interaction with each other, thus becoming involved in the regulation of cell cycle, metabolism, gene activity, and cell death (apoptosis).
"In our previous work, we demonstrated that 14-3-3 proteins recognise the nucleocapsid protein of SARS-CoV-2, and we were able to determine the precise area of their interaction. Now we decided to check whether other similar areas in N protein exist", explains Kristina Tugaeva, the first author of the work, the member of the group "Protein-protein interaction" of the Federal Research Centre "Fundamentals of Biotechnology" of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
This task is important since the 14-3-3-binding part of N protein is located in the SR-rich region, which is a hotspot of viral mutations. If in the case of S protein the consequences of mutations seem obvious - they make virus entry into the cell easier or help evade the immune system, whereas the effects of mutations in N protein remain mainly unknown, in spite of the fact that N protein is the main factor of pathogenicity.
The authors found that 14-3-3 proteins site-selectively recognize to either of two phosphorylated pseudo-repeats in the SR-region of the SARS-CoV-2 nucleoprotein: centred at Ser197, identified earlier, and a new site, centred at Thr205. Interestingly enough, the binding force (affinity) of the second area turned out to be tighter for all members of the 14-3-3 family.
Structural insights led to the conclusion that the Ser197 and Thr205 residues in the N protein are located too close to each other to allow 14-3-3 to bind both. Thanks to the interaction with 14-3-3, the regulatory SR-region of the N protein could be protected from cell enzymes that can influence the cell life cycle by removing phosphate groups.
"So we suggested that mutations in the N protein of the coronavirus affect the binding efficiency of 14-3-3. Moreover, precisely those disordered regions especially sensitive to mutations play a role in this interaction. The results of our new research could contribute to the discovery of drugs against new strains of coronavirus", concludes Kristina Tugaeva.

Сотрудники Института медико-биологических проблем РАН обнаружили, что прием препарата метформина, используемого для снижения уровня сахара в крови при диабете, замедляет атрофию мышц при гиподинамии и гипокинезии. Метформин регулирует баланс между скоростью синтеза мышечного белка и его разрушения, препятствуя перенакоплению в неработающих мышцах нуклеотида аденозинтрифосфата, обеспечивающего энергией почти все внутриклеточные реакции.

Une équipe de médecins et de biologistes russes a découvert que la prise de metformine, un médicament contre le diabète, ralentit l’atrophie musculaire induite par l’immobilisation, a annoncé la Fondation russe pour la science.
"Ce problème est observé à la fois par les cosmonautes en état d’apesanteur et chez les personnes en alitement prolongé en raison de certaines maladies. Avec l’aide de l’agent antihyperglycémiant metformine, nous avons réussi à réduire l’atrophie des fibres musculaires", a indiqué la Fondation, citant Timur Mirzoev, chercheur à l’Institut des problèmes biomédicaux relevant de l’Académie russe des sciences.
Les scientifiques ont attiré l’attention sur le fait que l’affaiblissement musculaire s’accompagne d’une accumulation de l’Adénosine triphosphate (ATP) dans les cellules musculaires, et d’une diminution de la concentration de l’adénosine monophosphate (AMP), issue de la désintégration de l’ATP.
Selon eux, l’AMP joue un rôle important dans le travail de l’une des principales enzymes musculaires, l’AMPK, qui stimule la formation de diverses protéines qui forment la base des fibres musculaires. L’utilisation de la metformine normalise l’équilibre de l’ATP et de l’AMP dans les cellules humaines et animales.
Guidés par cette idée, les scientifiques russes ont suivi l’action de la metformine sur les muscles de rats, dont la mobilité était limitée.
Selon les résultats d’une recherche menée sur des rats par Mirozev et ses collègues, la masse musculaire a diminué d’environ 21% chez les rongeurs traités avec le médicament, contre une baisse de 37% chez le groupe témoin.
Les chercheurs ont également enregistré des différences dans la structure et les propriétés des fibres musculaires en ce sens que les fibres musculaires des rats traités avec la metformine étaient 20% plus épaisses que chez les rongeurs du groupe témoin.
Sur la base des résultats obtenus, la metformine pourrait être utilisée pour prévenir l’hypodynamie (diminution des charges corporelles) et et l’hypokinésie (diminution de l’activité motrice) chez les cosmonautes et les astronautes, ainsi que chez les patients menant une vie sédentaire en se remettant d’une intervention chirurgicale ou d’une maladie grave, selon les chercheurs.

Согласно распространенному стереотипу, некоторые языки звучат красивее других. Но одинаков ли этот стереотип для разных культур? Российские и шведские лингвисты провели эксперимент, в ходе которого 820 носителей английского, диалектов китайского и семитских языков прослушивали записи на 228 других языках. Хотя участники отдавали некоторое предпочтение нетоновым языкам, а также языкам, которые казались им знакомыми, исследователям не удалось обнаружить каких-либо общих предпочтений в отношении конкретных языков или фонетических особенностей.

It’s often said that French is silky, German is brutish, Italian is sexy, and Mandarin is angry. But do those stereotypes of these diverse languages hold empirically across cultures? Are some languages intrinsically beautiful?
To find out, a trio of researchers from Lund University in Sweden and the Russian Academy of Sciences recruited 820 participants from the research subject site Prolific to listen to 50 spoken recordings randomly selected from 228 languages. The audio clips were taken from the film Jesus, which has been translated into more than 2,000 languages. For this reason, it is commonly used in linguistics research.
The subjects were native speakers of English, Chinese (either Mandarin, Hakka, or Cantonese), or Semitic languages (Arabic, Hebrew, or Maltese). After listening to different recordings, they were asked, "How much do you like the sound of this language?" They then could respond on a scale ranging from "not at all" to "very much." Participants were also asked if they recognized the language. If they marked yes, they were asked to identify it.
The familiarity effect
Analyzing data from the surveys, the researchers found that subjects rated languages that they recognized 12.2% higher, even if they actually had misidentified the language. The researchers expected this strong familiarity effect. So how did participants score unrecognized languages?
"There were only negligible differences between world regions when the language was not recognized," the authors reported, "suggesting that languages spoken in different parts of the world do not sound intrinsically beautiful or unpleasant, regardless of the listeners’ own first language."
Controlling for familiarity, the vast majority of languages scored within 2% to 3% of each other in pleasantness. Though not statistically separate from the pack, a couple of languages did surface at the top and bottom. At the very top was Tok Pisin, an English-adjacent Creole language spoken throughout Papua New Guinea. Six percentage points down from Tok Pisin at the bottom was Chechen, which is spoken by approximately 1.7 million people in the North Caucasus of Eastern Europe.
The researchers also monitored different acoustic characteristics of the recordings to see if these would affect how the languages were rated. Overall, there was a possible slight preference for nontonal languages, they found. In tonal languages, altering the tone of a spoken word changes the word’s meaning. The researchers also noticed that increasingly higher vocal pitches slightly lowered the score of the linked language. Additionally, if the clip featured a male speaker, the associated language scored about 4 points lower. On the other hand, if the clip featured a "breathy female voice," the language was rated as much more pleasant.
"Voices are more appealing if they sound healthy and sex-typical," the researchers commented, "presumably because we have evolved to look for signs of fitness in the voice, creating some universal standards of auditory beauty analogous to the appeal of… symmetrical faces and unblemished skin."
The experiment was fairly well designed but had its drawbacks. For example, it could have benefited from a greater number of raters from additional language backgrounds. Moreover, the spoken phrases they rated could have been better standardized to control for differences in speaking styles, loudness, and vocal characteristics.
Still, overall, the study constitutes a fascinating exploration of the spoken word, revealing that a language’s beauty is likely not intrinsic, but rather exists in the ear of the listener.

Исследователи из НИУ ВШЭ совместно с коллегами из Сколтеха и ЦНИИ эпидемиологии объяснили механизм появления новых вариантов коронавируса: альфы, дельты, омикрона и пр. Оказалось, что вероятность замены аминокислот на определенном участке поверхностного белка вируса зависит от замен на других участках. Это увеличивает количество замен в целом и объясняет, почему новые и более заразные штаммы появляются неожиданно и сильно отличаются от предыдущих.

HSE researchers, in collaboration with their colleagues from Skoltech and the Central Research Institute for Epidemiology, have uncovered the mechanisms behind the emergence of new and dangerous coronavirus variants, such as Alpha, Delta, Omicron, and others. They have discovered that the likelihood of a substitution occurring at a specific site of the SARS-CoV-2 genome is dependent on concordant substitutions occurring at other sites. This explains why new and more contagious variants of the virus can emerge unexpectedly and differ significantly from those that were previously circulating. The study’s findings have been published in eLife.
All viruses, including the SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for the coronavirus pandemic, change over time. The longer a virus circulates within the population and the more individuals it infects, the more changes (mutations) it accumulates. Typically, new strains of a virus are similar to their parental strains. However, in some cases, mutations may result in variants that are better adapted to the environment and pose a higher risk to human health. These variants tend to spread more quickly, may not respond to existing vaccines or treatments, and could be more difficult to diagnose.
Throughout the history of the coronavirus, there have been various instances of highly active variants unexpectedly emerging. The strains detected in the UK, as well as Delta and Omicron strains, seemingly emerged out of nowhere and spread at lightning speed. All these strains differ significantly from the original Wuhan strain and from each other by multiple mutations. However, scientists were unable to detect any intermediate or transitional variants that would show a consistent accumulation of these changes.
‘The evolution of a virus within a population can be likened to a journey across a vast terrain with ravines, valleys, and hills. The virus roams randomly through this landscape, dying quickly if it falls into a cavity, surviving longer in valleys, and thriving when on peaks. The fitness landscape of the coronavirus is more like a vast expanse of water with scattered islands representing the virus variants which differ from each other by a specific set of mutations. To move from one island to another, one must travel by boat for a long while and avoid drowning. Science does not yet have a precise answer as to how the virus travels between these islands’, says the study co-author, Senior Researcher of the HSE International Laboratory of Statistical and Computational Genomics Alexey Neverov.
Having analysed over three million genome sequences of different strains of SARS-CoV-2, the Russian researchers were able to identify particular sites on the surface protein of the coronavirus where amino acid substitutions occurred, differentiating the variants from both the original Wuhan strain and from one another. Many of these sites appeared to be concordantly evolving, so that changes in amino acids at one site were rapidly followed by changes at another site. All the active and dangerous variants of the virus were distinguished from the previously prevalent variants by patterns of multiple substitutions.
‘The process of moving from one island to another involves an accumulation of mutations. While the virus is "afloat," it is vulnerable and poorly adapted. Indeed, it can only reach another island if it has some kind of a boat. Regarding the coronavirus, individuals with long-term Covid-19 may potentially harbour an accumulation of variants which are poorly adapted for survival in the general population. However, over time, these variants can evolve into stronger forms that have the potential to spread widely and conquer the world’, Neverov explains.
The study authors suggest an explanation as to why intermediate variants that differ from the original virus by only one or two substitutions may not be visible. It’s possible that these ‘weak’ variants only become ‘strong’ when they gather the whole pattern of individually deleterious substitutions. As a result, predicting the emergence of a new highly adaptive strain is hard.
The statistical method employed by the study’s authors is versatile and can be utilised to investigate the evolution of numerous other pathogens. In particular, this approach has been successfully applied to studying the evolution of influenza and tuberculosis.

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