Декабрь 2001 г.

Российская наука и мир (по материалам зарубежной электронной прессы)

CONTENTS / ОГЛАВЛЕНИЕ


• U.S. Civilian Research and Development Foundation for the FSU
• Life and Times of a Soviet Super Bug Designer
• Universal extractant removes multiple radioactive elements from nuclear waste in one step
• Scientists Say Salmon Getting Smaller
• Northeastern University's Alexander Gorlov wins prestigious Edison Patent Award for helical turbine invention
• Russia, Australia sign commercial cosmodrome deal
• Tycoon Wants to Experiment in Space

Russian universities receive US funding to improve basic scientific research capabilities
4 российских университета победили в конкурсе и получили финансовую помощь американского фонда и Министерства образования РФ для поддержки научных исследований

Washington, DC -- The U.S. Civilian Research and Development Foundation (CRDF) and the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation (RF Minobr) announced at a press conference in Moscow today the results of the third competition under their Basic Research and Higher Education (BRHE) program.
The four universities that will each receive a grant award of $1 million under BRHE and their areas or specialization are, in alphabetical order:

• Moscow State Engineering Physics Institute, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (joint award): Basic Investigation of Matter Under Extreme Conditions

• Perm State University: Non-Equilibrium Transition in Continuous Media

• St. Petersburg State University: Molecular Biology for Human and Environmental Health in Northwest Russia

• Voronezh State University: Wave Processes in Inhomogeneous and Nonlinear Media

Российский ученый Игорь Домарадский сделал для создания советского биологического оружия то же самое, что Роберт Оппенгеймер для создания атомной бомбы. В интервью агенству Рейтер 75-летний ученый рассказывает о своей жизни.

MOSCOW, (Reuters) -- In some ways, Russian scientist Igor Domaradsky did for the Soviet biobomb what Robert Oppenheimer did for the atomic bomb.
The parallel is not exact, for Domaradsky, a brilliant molecular biologist who became a world-beating specialist in the virulence of bubonic plague, was not a bomb builder.
But for 15 years he was one of the main brains behind the science which helped the Soviet military create a new type of weapon capable of destroying life on a monstrous scale.
Nevertheless, 75-year-old Domaradsky has revealed in an interview some of the same anguish expressed by U.S. nuclear scientist Oppenheimer in 1945 on witnessing the first detonation of the A-bomb in the Nevada Desert.
"I always believed that this program was an adventurist project in the form it took", Domaradsky said of the biological weapons program launched by the Soviet authorities in 1973.
"There were times when the results of my research were taken out of my hands and developed elsewhere, and I cannot help but feel sorry for that", he told Reuters at his Moscow apartment.
A small, intense man who walks with a stick because of ill-health, Domaradsky in some ways shared the fate of the father of the A-bomb.
Oppenheimer's opposition to the hydrogen bomb ultimately cost him his job, and Domaradsky says his attempts to steer his research away from warfare landed him in hot water. He was granted a foreign travel passport only in 1999.
Oppenheimer, the son of a German immigrant, had headed the Los Alamos laboratories which developed the atom bomb.
Bug Buster
Domaradsky's early career was quite different. After completing his studies interrupted by World War Two, he helped battle cholera outbreaks in the mid-1960s and early 1970s. The Rostov Anti-Plague Institute where he worked attracted the top scientists of the day. But Cold War politics was soon to muscle its way into the world of public ealth.
The Communist Party leadership, alarmed by rapid Western advances in molecular biology and genetics, set up an Inter-Departmental Scientific and Technical Council on Biochemistry and Genetics. Its tedious title masked a more sinister purpose.
"The council was to become the mastermind of a newly created system to create bioweapons", Domaradsky said.
Even as Moscow signed an international agreement banning the production of biological warfare agents, the Soviet Union was about to crank up its output.
The council's task was simple: to create genetically modified killer strains of a range of deadly diseases.
Domaradsky went on to become deputy director of the Obolensk complex, a top secret facility outside Moscow where 2,500 people eventually worked. Their task was to create bacteria totally resistant to antibiotics. Legionnaires' disease, smallpox and bubonic plague all came under the microscope.
However, it was anthrax - source of the current biowarfare panic in the United States - that provided the most potent, and stable, agent best suited for weaponry.
Divided Loylties
Domaradsky was a reluctant Cold War warrior. "Many of my family perished during the purges, before and after the war. In fact it is enough to say that I have practically no blood relations left", he said. "Officially I have the status of a victim of political repression. "On the other hand, I saw plenty of things with my own eyes. I lived through those difficult times and I became part of this adventurist project." He says his memoirs, provisionally entitled in the forthcoming English translation "Troublemaker: The Story of an Inconvenient Man", were an attempt to square the circle.
"When I was writing this book I was actually trying to provide myself with an answer to the question you asked - why?," he said.
Published privately in 1995, Domaradsky's memoirs recount his vain struggle to redirect his research - some of it ground-breaking - away from military uses.
In 1977 he discovered that the microbes that cause bubonic plague had plasmids, DNA which determines their virulence. A major breakthrough made several years ahead of Western science, it could be key in providing new treatments, but this and other discoveries were cloaked in Soviet secrecy.
"Unfortunately, because the military were in charge of these institutes they did not pay any attention to these things. They considered the creation of weapons their major task."
Over time, he says, he developed the reputation of an "inconvenient person" which led to his demotion on the grounds of "limited administrative ability."
"Unfortunately, I didn't manage to do everything I wanted to do, or what I could have done...I lost about 15 years when I could have worked and achieved significant results, because of my experience.
"Everything else I did later on, though well appreciated, in my personal opinion was not as significant as my work in the 1970s and 1980s".

Американские и российские ученые и инженеры создали новую технологию, с помощью которой можно удалять многие радиоактивные элементы из отработанных ядерных отходов и делать их более безопасными за один этап

Separating the wolves from the sheep in spent nuclear fuel disposal

A collaboration of U.S. and Russian scientists and engineers have made treating nuclear waste safer and cheaper with a new, one-step process that separates out much of the radioactive material.
"The idea is to segregate out this very small amount of radioactive material and concentrate this element of the waste into the smallest volume possible", said Scott Herbst, a chemical engineer at the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory.
This month, he and a team of scientists from the INEEL and Khlopin Radium Institute in Russia received an $800,000 three-year grant from DOE’s Environmental Management Science Program to study and improve their solution. The Universal Extraction, or UNEX, process is the first demonstrated technology of its kind capable of removing multiple radioactive elements from high-level nuclear waste in one step.
Just a sprinkling of radioactive elements turns volumes of waste into "high-level radioactive waste", subject to rigorous and expensive storage standards.
Such waste is a byproduct of nuclear energy and weapons development and usually contains a mixture of intensely radioactive fission products (e.g., strontium-90 and cesium-137) and long-lived radioactive elements (e.g., plutonium and americium, the actinide elements) plus hazardous and toxic materials. Separating most of the radioactive elements from the other materials can shrink the volume of high-level waste, reduce the total disposal cost and minimize potential harm to the people and environment surrounding it.
In the past, however, it has been difficult to remove more than one radioactive element at a time. The default process requires three separate steps. One solution removes cesium-137, the next takes out a group of similar elements called the actinide elements, and the last removes strontium-90. But sending waste through three different steps is time-consuming and expensive. At the moment, most countries don’t go to the trouble and expense of separating out radioactive elements. They simply take the entire volume of high-level waste, solidify it into a glass, and bury it whole in large stainless steel canisters for long-term storage.
In 1994, a few INEEL scientists traveled to Russia to exchange the technologies each country had independently developed for nuclear waste cleanup. "The idea in the Cold War was that we didn’t talk to each other. So the Russians developed separate separations techniques than we did", Herbst said. After examining what each had, they jointly came up with an extractant that works better than any of the original extractants alone. UNEX removes radioactive strontium, cesium and the actinides at once.
"We’re combining three separate operations into one", said Herbst. "I’m mesmerized that we’ve even been able to get this thing to work. It flies in the face of what everyone has attempted to do before."
Using the UNEX process, the scientists trim the volume of high-level waste at least twentyfold; each gallon shrinks to less than a cup. And the twentyfold volume reduction leads to a corresponding reduction in disposal costs. The majority of the waste left over after the UNEX separation is far less expensive to treat and store than the highly radioactive portion.
So why does UNEX work so well? At the moment, the scientists have only a general idea. "I would call the development efforts to date a brute-force method", said Herbst. He knows what happens in a simple extraction. The scientists mix an extracting solution - something that won’t mix with the waste, like oil and water - with the waste, and the extracting solution preferentially snatches radioactive molecules out of the mixture. But the UNEX extraction mechanism is far more complicated.
"When you start trying to pull out a number of things it becomes extremely hard to control the process", Herbst said. "The bottom line is you’ve got three different active extractants". The process can be likened to three soccer games occurring simultaneously on the same field. The players are bound to run into each other or in some way affect the other games, just as the extractants - or the molecules seizing out the hazardous radionuclides - bump into each other or otherwise affect each other’s work. In this case, Herbst, said, the extractants "tend to complement one another. There is a synergy between the extractants. Each extracts better in the presence of the others than they typically would alone."
To understand the nature of the extractions, and the intriguing synergy between them, the scientists will use three sets of tools.
First, they will apply what Herbst calls "wet chemistry". They’ll perform mini-extractions in the laboratory, and, through a numerical analysis, deduce the molecular structures in the extractant.
The second technique they will apply, spectroscopy, will help them figure out the arrangements of the molecules that form. Chemists use a variety of instruments to take advantage of a molecule’s response to light or a magnetic field and create a partial picture of a molecule and its environment. It is as if the chemists receive a photograph that has been cut up into small pieces.
They then try to puzzle out the correct place for each piece. Herbst doesn’t expect the pictures will be simple. Because the ability of one extractant is enhanced by the presence of the other extractants, large, elaborate complexes are forming. "It will really be unique," he said. "I’m not sure researchers often have the opportunity to examine complicated systems such as this."
The last tool they will use, also a spectroscopy technique, is a powerful technique for determining structures. X-rays generated at the Stanford Linear Accelerator at Stanford University can be used to give structural detail about the molecular compounds that form during the UNEX extraction. The instrument is like a powerful microscope that can show the arrangement of atoms inside a molecule.
In the end, the goal is to understand the one-step UNEX extraction well enough to improve it and further shrink the volume and cost of nuclear waste disposal.
Herbst’s team on the UNEX project includes Vasily Babain and colleagues at the Khlopin Radium Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Sue Clark at Washington State University. His colleagues at INEEL include Tom Luther, Fred Stewart, Terry Todd, Jack Law, Dean Peterman and George Redden. John Bargar from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center will assist with the X-ray spectroscopy. Their work supports DOE’s environmental management mission.
###
The INEEL is a science-based, applied engineering national laboratory dedicated to supporting the U.S. Department of Energy's missions in environment, energy, science and national defense. The INEEL is operated for the DOE by Bechtel BWXT Idaho, LLC.

По мнению российских и американских ученых, проводивших совместное исследование лососей, выловленных в реке Юкон на Аляске и реке Анадырь в России, размеры рыбы за последние 30 лет уменьшились почти на 25%.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) -- Salmon from two rivers in Alaska and Russia have shrunk in size in what scientists say could be a decades-old fight for food in the Gulf of Alaska.
Scientists at the University of Alaska Fairbanks used high-resolution digital imaging equipment to look at about 2,000 fish scales taken from chum salmon caught on Alaska's Yukon River and Russia's Anadyr River over more than 30 years.
The National Marine Fisheries Service the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and the Russian Pacific Fisheries Research Center joined in the study.
By looking closely at the width of the scales, scientists determined that chum salmon decreased in size by about 25 percent between 1965 and 1997, said William Smoker, director of the School of Fisheries at the university and lead investigator for the three-year, $262,000 federally funded study.
While scientists have known for years that the size of pacific salmon has decreased, the scale study reveals just when growth slowed during the life of the fish, Smoker said.
It was the first time that scientists looked at growth rates of salmon from both sides of the Bering Sea. The Anadyr River, which also empties into the northern Bering Sea, is almost directly across the Bering Sea from the Yukon River.
The study found that the fish grew well in the first year of life, but growth rates decreased when the fish foraged for food in the Gulf of Alaska before returning to rivers to spawn.
"These fish have grown more slowly as young adults at age 2, 3 and 4. What we know about their life histories, those are the years that are spent in the North Pacific Ocean", Smoker said.
Scientists used a digital camera and a dissecting microscope to analyze acetate images of scales from the archives at the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. The scales were taken from Yukon River chum salmon captured at test sites on the lower Yukon River. The Alaska collection dates back to 1960. The Russian collection is older.
Scientists looked at acetate impressions of the scales made for long-term storage. The impressions, which look a lot like human fingerprints, were made by pressing the scales' bony ridges onto sheets of acetate.
Fishermen and scientists have speculated that competition with hatchery fish for ocean food caused the crash in Yukon River salmon populations in recent years.
Smoker, however, doubts that the nearly 5 billion hatchery salmon released each year into the North Pacific Ocean are entirely to blame. Those fish are released from hatcheries in the United States, Russia, Canada and Japan.
``The hatchery programs have not been significant until the late 1970s and early 1980s", he said. "This trend toward a smaller body size and growth has older origins."
Genes could be responsible for why salmon are getting smaller, said Buel D. Rodgers, an instructor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University's School of Medicine who has been studying growth rates in fish.
Rodgers said the preference for larger fish by commercial and sport fishermen could be removing those bigger fish from the gene pool, leaving only the genetically smaller fish to reproduce.
``Fishermen always want to catch the big fish", he said. "If you are always selecting out the big ones ... what you are left with is genetically smaller fish." But Smoker doubts genes are the whole answer. He points to the downward size trend in other salmon populations, including chum salmon caught in fish traps in Japan and pink salmon caught by purse seiners near Juneau. Neither harvest method is selective about fishsize, but both yielded smaller fish.
``This size trend has occurred in a lot of different populations of salmon all across the ocean", Smoker said.
Barbara Belknap, executive director of the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute in Juneau, said the study's findings are perplexing, given that the average size of harvested chums in Alaska is increasing.
The average size of chums this year was 8.40 pounds, the fifth straight year when the average topped 8 pounds, she said, citing Department of Fish and Game statistics.
"To say it is overfishing and competition for food when the fish are getting larger on average doesn't make sense", she said.

Бывший российский ученый Александр Горлов, который сейчас работает в Америке и является заслуженным профессором машиностроения и директором лаборатории гидропневматической энергии в Северо-восточном университете, получил премию Томаса А. Эдисона за свое изобретение "Геликоидальная турбина Горлова".

Alexander Gorlov, Professor Emeritus of mechanical engineering and director of the Hydro-Pneumatic Power Laboratory at Northeastern University is the 2001 recipient of the ASME Thomas A. Edison Patent Award for his invention of the Gorlov Helical Turbine. The Edison Patent Award was established in 1997 to recognize the creativity of a patented device or process that has the potential of significantly enhancing some aspect of mechanical engineering. The innovation makes possible the high efficiency conversion of kinetic energy from relatively slow-moving and multidirectional fluid flows into electrical energy.
The Gorlov Helical Turbine was also named one of Popular Science's top 100 innovations of 2001.
In the pursuit of his lifelong dream of creating inexpensive, environmentally friendly hydro-power, Gorlov has developed helical turbines for use in river, tidal, and open ocean currents. His innovation has led to a series of patents for the Gorlov Helical Turbine, which shows great promise for alleviating the worldwide crisis in energy use.
The Russian-born Gorlov was branded an anti-Soviet activist and, in 1971, was expelled from his homeland by the KGB and hired by Northeastern in 1976. Since that time, Gorlov patented a device to foil car bombers and, in 1990, received a two-year grant from the U.S. Department of Energy for energy research. Gorlov also helped design the Aswan Dam in Egypt and other massive energy projects around the world.

Россия и Австралия подписали соглашение о строительстве коммерческого космодрома на одном из австралийских островов

MOSCOW, (Reuters) -- Russia and Australia have signed a deal to build a commercial cosmodrome on Australia's remote Christmas Island, Russia's space agency chief said Tuesday.
Only penalty clauses had to be agreed before work began at the equatorial site, Yuri Koptev told a news conference.
`This problem will be solved within two months and we can then begin to work on the realization of the project", he said, adding that the Asia Pacific Space Center would stage between four and five launches a year.
The station will launch commercial satellites aboard Aurora, a modified version of the Soyuz rocket, competing head-on with established commercial launch companies dominated by Europe's Arianespace consortium and International Launch Service, a joint U.S.-Russian venture.
Koptev, director of Rosaviakosmos, also told reporters the financial situation of the International Space Station (ISS), a joint project of several leading space agencies, was becoming increasingly difficult as costs ballooned.
"Russia definitely has serious problems with ensuring the Russian segment of the module is finished", he said. "The completion of the segment can go in many ways, and I hope that by the first quarter of next year we will decide on a strategy."
Koptev said NASA had already spent $4.9 billion on the station, well above original estimates, prompting the U.S. side to veto many construction decisions.
"They have stopped work on the living module, on the emergency shuttle and on the mobile module", Koptev said.
Russian construction proposals, incorporating the use of Soyuz shuttles, would allow six cosmonauts to work at the station at any one time, Koptev said, whereas U.S. proposals would not push the crew number above three before 2007.
The $95 billion space station initially designed for a seven-strong crew, currently houses only three astronauts. Still a work in progress, the ISS is a partnership of NASA and space agencies in Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada.
Koptev said relations with NASA were much improved, after millionaire Dennis Tito's space holiday last May under Russian auspices frayed tempers.
South African Mark Shuttleworth, set to become the second amateur to travel into space, has sparked none of the disagreements between the Russian space agency and NASA, who feared Tito's inexperience might endanger his flight and the still-incomplete ISS, Koptev said.
`Things have been much calmer this time", he told reporters. "Our American colleagues have understood that space tourism is legitimate."
Koptev, drawing a balance for Rosaviakosmos's year, said Russia's aerospace sector grew by 5.2 to 5.3 percent in 2001, only half last year's growth figure.

Южно-африканский миллионер Марк Шаттлворс собирается полететь в космос не просто как турист, а заняться научными исследованиями на борту Международной космической станции

A South African Internet tycoon set to fly to the International Space Station next April said he wants to concentrate on science during his mission and hated being referred to as the "second space tourist."
Mark Shuttleworth, 27, follows California tycoon Dennis Tito, who reportedly paid Russian space officials $20 million for an eight-day trip to the station in a Soyuz rocket in April and May.
Shuttleworth said Friday that he would pay the same price as Tito for his flight plus an addition for conducting scientific experiments aboard the station.
"The flight itself will cost me roughly what it cost Dennis Tito and the science program will be about 20 percent to 30 percent on top of that", the Cape Town native said in an interview at the Star City cosmonaut training center outside Moscow.
"I don't see myself as a tourist in any way", Shuttleworth said. "I'm trying to get up there to inspire people across Africa to embrace technology, to embrace science."
Russian space officials said last week that they had completed a contract with Shuttleworth, and NASA confirmed it had agreed to the plan. Shuttleworth said he is set to blast off for the station from the Baikonur Cosmodrome together with cosmonaut Yury Gidzenko and Italian astronaut Roberto Vittori of the European Space Agency. Shuttleworth said some of the medical tests and training he has been undergoing for the space flight in the Star City had been "very difficult", such as one test intended to make a candidate feel an extreme motion sickness in order to check limits of body resilience.
"That was very, very tough", Shuttleworth said. "Some of the physical tests have been daunting and challenging, but looking back at them it's exhilarating to think I have gotten through."
Shuttleworth said he was planning to do research connected with stem cells, cells that develop into every tissue or cell type in the body. Understanding how they develop may open ways for treating various diseases and healing grave injuries. Another experiment would deal with an attempt to create crystals of some human proteins - important for getting a better idea of how the human immune system responds to illnesses and, possibly, enhance its efficiency.
Shuttleworth said he also plans to conduct experiments in cardiology during which experts will monitor the functioning of his heart in zero gravity. Shuttleworth started a business trading in Internet security technologies in his parents' garage. Last year the company was bought by the U.S. company Verisign, netting Shuttleworth an estimated $500 million.

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