Август 2001 г.

Российская наука и мир (по материалам зарубежной электронной прессы)

CONTENTS / ОГЛАВЛЕНИЕ


• Asia symposium on advanced technologies
• Academy Backs Off Cold War-Style Rules
• Kim will meet scientists during stopover in Novosibirsk
• ASEAN ambassadors visit enterprises in Novosibirsk rgn
• Fear, Horror and Awe in Europe Over Human Cloning
• Forest Saving Efforts Should Focus on 15 Countries: UNEP
• Digital Element Uses NewTek's LightWave 3D to Retrain Russian Nuclear Scientists to Make Art Tools Instead of Weaponry
• Suitcase Bomb Plutonium
• ALEXANDER BOROVOI: He stalks the Chernobyl nuclear reactor
• Zhores Alferov nominated honorary professor in Georgia
• About Ten Wild Tigers Found Living in NE Province
• Russia Snaps Together a New Supercomputer
• Russia's bargain supercomputer
• Putin proposes setting up National Education Council
• Cancer Studies Begin on ISS

В Новосибирском Академгородке состоялся симпозиум, на котором главы академий наук из 15 азиатских стран, обсуждали вопросы адаптации и обмена передовыми технологиями. Большое внимание на симпозиуме было уделено таким проблемам, как загрязнение окружающей среды, переработка ядерных отходов, глобальное потепление

NOVOSIBIRSK, Aug 22, 2001 (Itar-Tass via COMTEX) -- Heads of the academies of sciences of Asian countries discussed questions of adapting and exchanging advanced technologies in the scientific township near Novosibirsk on Wednesday. The symposium attended by scientists from 15 countries is held in the framework of the second general assembly of the Association of Asian Academies of Sciences.
President of the Association, South Korean professor Mu Shik Jon, told Tass Russia has a very high level of the development of fundamental science but the problem of Russian scientists is that they have yet little experience in commercial realisation of their projects. Mu Shik Jon said the international symposium will help Russian scientists learn how to sell their technologies to other countries.
The symposium gave much attention to such general problems as environmental pollution, reprocessing of nuclear waste, global warming.
Academician Nikolai Dobretsov, the chairman of the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told Tass that scientists are ahead of politicians despite differences and conflicts between some Asian countries. Dobretsov said one of the tasks of the symposium is to suggest to governments ways of establishing contacts.
After the symposium scientists plan to visit the site of archaeological excavations in Denisov Cave in the highland Altai.

MOSCOW -- The Russian Academy of Sciences has quietly rescinded a controversial directive requiring its 55,000 researchers to report their foreign contacts to the RAS governing presidium. The rule, ostensibly to protect Russian intellectual property, has been replaced by one that simply seeks to help institute directors keep tabs on their more Western-oriented researchers. Watchdogs say that the new rule should calm the fears of scientists who saw a return to Soviet-style authoritarianism.

Северокорейский лидер посетил новосибирский Академгородок и познакомился с последними разработками сибирских ученых

NOVOSIBIRSK Aug 10, 2001 (Itar-Tass via COMTEX) -- North Korean leader Kim Jong-il will visit the Academic City in Novosibirsk, the last lengthy stop on his way back home, on August 11 to get acquainted with the Siberian scientists' latest developments, including minor power units and catalysts for oil and oil-processing industries.
He said North Korea could apply many of the Institute's "know-how", including water purification and disinfection installations. The Catalysis Institute was formed in Novosibirsk in 1958. It has 740 scientists who deliver reports on catalysis at international congresses. Many of them work on contracts with leading chemical companies from the United States, France, Britain, South Africa and Germany.

NOVOSIBIRSK, Aug 24, 2001 (Itar-Tass via COMTEX) -- Ambassadors of countries of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) familiarised themselves with enterprise and research institutions of the Novosibirsk region. The delegation includes ambassadors extraordinary and plenipotentiary of Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and the Philippines.
The chief purpose of the visit is familiarisation with the region to establish its potential and embark on cooperation, said Malaysia's ambassador Yahya Baba, the chairman of the Moscow committee of ASEAN.
Members of the delegation met with Viktor Tolokonsky, the head of the Novosibirsk regional administration, visited the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a number of research institutions and plants. "We witnessed large potential for cooperation", Yahya Baba said.
Diplomats were much impressed with the work of the Institute of catalysis in oil and gas processing, as well as with generators manufactured by Elsib plant. It was decided to organise a mission of business circles of ASEAN countries to Novosibirsk which could be followed by a reply visit of Siberian business people.
"We are inspired by Tolokonsky's promise to reduce bureaucratic barriers to cooperation to the minimum". Yahya Baba said.

VATICAN CITY, (Reuters) -- From Vatican (news - web sites) pulpits to newspaper front pages and doctors' surgeries, some in Europe expressed fear and horror and others awestruck tolerance on Wednesday in response to plans to create the first cloned baby.
As wary scientists in Washington, DC, grilled two colleagues who see cloning as a natural next step to a brave new world, the strongest condemnation came from the Vatican.
"In a certain sense, Hitler was ahead of his time as far as some modern developments are concerned," said Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Vatican's doctrinal department. Ratzinger, a German who lived through World War II as a teenager, said it was "terrifying" that some of the countries that defeated Hitler were now considering opening themselves up to "anti-human" scientific practices.
In Washington, Drs. Severino Antinori and Panayiotis Zavos told a panel of the National Academy of Sciences that they would proceed with plans to provide cloned children for infertile couples. The panel is gathering information for a report expected by the end of September on whether the United States should impose a moratorium on human embryo cloning. While Antinori and Zavos want to create clones for reproductive purposes, many more scientists wish to use cloning techniques to create embryonic stem cells for research into disease treatment.
But there is no doubt at the Vatican. "The value of a man is not the same as the value of a rat," said Monsignor Elio Sgreccia, vice president of the Vatican's Pontifical Academy for Life and an adviser to Pope John Paul. "Humans have a dignity that goes beyond time," Sgreccia told Reuters, saying he agreed with scientists who feared techniques used for animals would be fraught with risks if applied to humans. "Cloning is immoral.. Someone said that cloning is the worst manifestation of human slavery and I agree with this."
The debate over the ethics of human cloning could make the controversy the world has seen over abortion pale by comparison.
Lev Kiselev of the Russian Academy of Sciences said that while it was acceptable to write off substandard animals after experiments, "writing off a human being is absolutely inadmissible but will be unavoidable if human cloning begins." Kiselev added that cloning would "impoverish the human gene pool to a colossal extent" and repeat genome defects while imparting no new qualities.
In Germany, where only half a century ago Hitler dreamed of creating a "master race", cloning is a subject that hits home. "Contrary to his colleagues, the Italian (Antinori) seems unable to recognize any ethical boundaries", the conservative daily newspaper Die Welt said in an editorial. "Anyone who wants to create cloned successors does not really want to help others have children, but wants to boost their own ego. The damage Antinori is inflicting on biomedical research is enormous". Speaking on German ZDF television, Detlev Ganten, a professor of molecular medicine and a member of the German government's ethics council set up to investigate such issues, said he was opposed to all attempts to clone human beings. He said what Antinori and Zavos intend to do was "ethically and morally irresponsible" and called for international conventions to forbid human cloning.

Open Mind but Vigilant Eye

В письменном заявлении UNEP (Программа по окружающей среде ООН) сказано, что усилия по спасению лесов, прежде всего, должны быть сосредоточены на 15 странах, среди которых Россия, Канада,Бразилия, США

NAIROBI, Aug 21, 2001 (Xinhua via COMTEX) -- Efforts to save the world's last, critically important forests should initially focus on just 15 countries, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) said in a written statement available here Tuesday.
A satellite-based survey has found that over 80 percent of the remaining closed forests, which include virgin, old growth and naturally-regenerated woodlands, are located in these countries.
UNEP believes that targeting scarce conservation funds on these 15 key countries may pay dividends in terms of environmental results, the statement said. Importantly, the survey also reveals that the pressure from people and population growth on most of these remaining closed forests, such as those in Bolivia and Peru, is low.
Others, such as the remaining closed forests in India and China, are under more pressure from human activity and may require a bigger effort to conserve and protect, according to the statement.
But overall an estimated 88 percent of these vital forests are sparsely populated, which give well-focused and well-funded conservation efforts a real chance of success. The findings have come from scientists with UNEP working with other researchers including ones from the United States Geological Survey and NASA, the United States space agency. Klaus Toepfer, executive director of UNEP, said that "the importance of healthy forests cannot be underestimated. Forests are vital for the well being of the planet. They provide a variety of socio-economic and ecological goods and services".
He pointed to the fact that forests around the globe remain under increasing threat, despite their important role and numerous international conferences, conventions and agreements.
"Short of a miraculous transformation in the attitude of people and governments, the earth's remaining closed-canopy forests and their associated biodiversity are destined to disappear in the coming decades", he said.
"Knowing it is unlikely that all forests can be protected, it would be better to focus conservation priorities on those target areas that have the best prospects for continued existence", he noted.
The survey estimates that the 15 countries, including Russia, Canada, Brazil, the United States, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, China, Indonesia, Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, Venezuela, India Australia and Papua New Guinea are home to 2.3 billion hectares of closed forests.
UNEP called on governments in the key 15 countries concerned to draft action plans detailing how they propose to conserve their remaining closed forests. "Wealthy countries should invest in the protection of the last remaining closed forests situated in poorer countries", the statement said.

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 10, 2001 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- The Oakland, California-based technology company, Digital Element, with the help of NewTek and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under the auspices of the Department of Energy's Nuclear Cities Initiative, has been working in Russia to transform what were called "Closed Cities" into modern centers for software technology development. These cities did not appear on maps and were strictly military R&D and production sites. Digital Element trainers and engineers have helped form new Russian software development teams, which are located in the closed city of Snezhinsk, to help them integrate into the Western market and become economically viable.With LightWave 3D, provided by NewTek's Education and Training program, Digital Element has created software development teams that specialize in creating 3D art tools, and familiarized its engineers with the latest technology and trends in the Western software market. Digital Element also facilitates work-for-hire technology development contracts, which employ these "closed city" resources. "This chance to work with Digital Elements and NewTek has been an excellent opportunity for everyone involved. It provides an excellent team to work with Digital Elements and NewTek and an opportunity for these Russian scientists to switch from weapons research to commercial work", says Dr. William Dunlop, head of the nonproliferation programs at LLNL.
"We are honored that LightWave 3D is being used in retraining these nuclear scientists", said Brad Peebler, NewTek's executive vice president of 3D graphics. "By helping Digital Element to use LightWave 3D through our educational division, we are privileged enough to be the 3D animation software used in this program. We plan to continue to work closely with Digital Element to ensure an even more seamless workflow between our two applications, and hope to continue assisting with the retraining project for a long time to come".
"There are very few real opportunities to change the world..." says Don McClure, CEO of Digital Element, "and this is one of them. It's a rare opportunity to bring a new, peaceful industry to a part of the world where the only technical profession was weaponry design. We're proud to be the solution".
California-based Digital Element is the exclusive distributor of the premiere 3D software art tool, WorldBuilder, which models and renders ultra-realistic artistic nature scenes. Although users can import and export objects between WorldBuilder and LightWave 3D, Digital Element and NewTek are working together to create an advanced plug-in to allow artists the highest possible level of interactivity between the two packages.

Стареющие ядерные ракеты России - постоянная угроза национальной безопасности США

What's the biggest national security threat the United States faces? China? North Korea? Despite the fall of the Berlin Wall, the answer remains: Russia's thousands of nuclear missiles. The Bush administration is trying to develop a prohibitively costly missile defense to counter Russia, China, rogue states and terrorists when it should be facing an older, bigger problem with aging Russian missiles. A solution exists. But not only is the administration avoiding this solution, it's trying to kill it.
In June 1993, then-Vice President Al Gore, working with then-Russian Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, announced a joint commission for U.S.-Russian cooperation that was, among other things, supposed to assist Russia in decommissioning and disabling nuclear weaponry. The U.S. would also pay to move Russian nuclear scientists to peaceful projects. This program failed because of corruption in Russia. But one plan did emerge that still makes sense: taking plutonium out of warheads. The idea was that the United States and Russia would each convert 50 tons of plutonium by turning it into fuel or combining it with nuclear waste to immobilize it.
Now the Bush administration is trying to back out, complaining that at $6.6 billion it is too costly. As opposed to what? The administration is requesting $8.3 billion for missile defense for fiscal 2002, a 57% increase over current spending. The U.S. should be doing all it can to disable plutonium before corruption spreads it around. It's precisely the idea of a suitcase bomber armed with bootleg plutonium that should concern the administration.
The governing assumption in Washington these days appears to be that all Clinton-Gore foreign policy should be abandoned. But Gore had this one right.

Группа ученых под руководством физика Александра Борового исследует 4-й корпус чернобыльского ядерного реактора, чтобы убедиться , что он никогда больше не возобновит работу

Abstract:
Profiles physicist Alexander Borovoi and his involvement in analyzing reactor fuel remaining from the Chernobyl nuclear power station catastrophe in the Ukraine in 1986. Details of how Borovoi and his team venture into the reactor; Exposure of the men to radiation

Disasters demand heroes, and the explosion of the No. 4 reactor at the V. I. Lenin nuclear power station was a disaster on an unimaginable scale. During 10 days beginning April 26, 1986, the burning reactor belched over 100 times more radioactive material than the Hiroshima bomb. Dozens died, and fallout settled on millions downwind. Since then, thousands of youngsters in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia have come down with thyroid cancer. The catastrophe caused untold social disruption and dealt a heavy blow to the tottering Soviet Union.
The line between hero and victim was thin in the first frantic weeks after the accident. Firemen fought the flames but lacked instruments to tell them they faced lethal doses of radiation. Military helicopter pilots hovered in the radioactive smoke plume to smother the burning reactor with tons of sand and lead, but their bombing runs missed the mark.
Yet the catastrophe - and the chance for heroism - did not end when the fire burned out. In the months and years that followed, a band of scientists led by physicist Alexander Borovoi explored the reactor's corpse to make sure it could not reawaken. Working in a hot, dark labyrinth where lingering radiation could kill within minutes, they mapped and analyzed tons of reactor fuel remaining. It was heroism of a quieter and more effective order than had come before. "Borovoi knew what he was doing", says Harvard University nuclear physicist Richard Wilson, "and he had the imagination and common sense" to succeed.
Now, 15 years after the accident, the miles of deserted countryside around the plant are turning to wilderness. Pripyat, once a gleaming city of some 45,000 plant workers and their families, is a nuclear ghost town, silent except when wind rustles the weeds or bangs a door. Inside the concrete "sarcophagus" built over the ruin, Borovoi still searches for signs of danger. A bearish, white-haired man of 63, he did not expect to crown his career this way. But he says that when asked, he and his colleagues "could not say no. We had to go and do it [because] we understood that our work was very important for other people".
At the prestigious Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, Borovoi studied neutrinos, wispy subatomic particles that stream harmlessly through the human body. But he spent the spring and summer of 1986 calculating the radioactive hazards from the ruined reactor. He stayed in Moscow because his mother was dying. But by the fall he was at Chernobyl, where he faced a simple question: Could the remnants of the reactor fuel explode again? The lives of the thousands of workerserecting the sarcophagus were at stake.
To find the remnants, Borovoi and his men had to venture into the heart of the destroyed reactor. Robots were not up to the job; they got stuck in debris or ran amok, circuits scrambled by radiation. "We had only one kind of robots [that worked]", says Borovoi. "Biorobots--ourselves". They called themselves "stalkers". Coveralls, gloves, and a respirator were their protection-lead suits were too bulky for dashes through the reactor. A fall or wrong turn could be fatal. Late in 1986, beyond a gantlet of highly radioactive rooms and narrow passages, the stalkers discovered a glassy, black formation resembling a giant elephant's foot. Getting a piece to analyze was not easy. It was so fiercely radioactive that the scientists could spend only seconds near it, and its surface shrugged off a drilling machine and an ax. Finally a marksman took aim with a Kalashnikov rifle. The shards gave the first clues to what had happened to the nuclear fuel and the chance of a future catastrophe.
When Borovoi and his colleague Eduard Pazukhin analyzed the fragments, they found the elephant's foot was made of uranium and zirconium from the reactor fuel rods and silicon from sand packed around the reactor vessel. As the reactor core burned at thousands of degrees, molten fuel had apparently eaten through the concrete floor and oozed into the warren of rooms below, where it cooled and hardened. The uranium in this "Chernobyl lava", it turned out, was too dilute to threaten a new nuclear reaction.
That was good news, but the elephant's foot was only a small fraction of the 180 tons of fuel. Dividing his time between Moscow and Chernobyl, Borovoi went on exploring the bowels of the reactor. He and his colleagues found more glassy lava - heaps of it, lakes of it. In May 1988, they drilled through concrete walls into the reactor pit itself--and found it empty. All of the fuel, it appeared, had either been blown out in the explosion or had oozed into the lower rooms as a dilute lava. The reactor seemed unlikely to reawaken.
To win this peace of mind, the stalkers had to brave radiation exposures that are a health physicist's nightmare and may ultimately raise their risk of cancer. Borovoi will not reveal his own dose. "Top secret", he says with a laugh, adding that his supervisors might bar him from the reactor if they knew. So far, he and his men have suffered "no specific radiation illnesses", he says. Strokes and heart attacks have taken a heavy toll on the stalkers, but he attributes that to the stress of their work.
He continues exploring trouble spots: rooms where dangerous, unmelted fuel may be buried in the rubble, outcrops of lava crumbling into toxic dust. The hastily built sarcophagus itself is riddled with holes and rests on the ruined reactor's weakened walls. A collapse would raise clouds of radioactive dust in a second, smaller Chernobyl. An international project is underway to plan and build a second, secure shelter over the existing one. Until then, Borovoi will be bound to the ruined reactor he calls "my main enemy, and my main friend".

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