Январь 2001 г.

Российская наука и мир (по материалам зарубежной электронной прессы)

CONTENTS / ОГЛАВЛЕНИЕ


• Distance Learning: Russia Is Reaching Out
• Russian lessons on school agenda
• Russia Must Secure Nuclear Stockpile
• Turner Funds Effort Against Nuclear Arms
• Eavesdropping on Doomed Sub
• Hope Soars in Russia for an Earthbound Bird
• Russian Prime Minister Signs Decree to Deorbit Mir
• Cold War Over, But Nuclear Contamination Lingers On
• New View of a Nursery of Stars

UZHNO-SAKHALINSK, Russia -- As Nikolai Lugin, a regional agriculture official, entered his barn and stomped the snow from his boots, he expounded on the economic future of Sakhalin Island. Sakhalin is a remote former penal colony where the sea freezes for four months a year and villagers have been known to sleep in tents pitched in their bedrooms when the heating fails. But Mr. Lugin has a business plan that involves large flightless birds better known for trotting across the savannah.
"Let's go for a walk, my little ones, my darlings", Mr. Lugin cooed, flushing four young ostriches from the barn into an attached greenhouse, where the Fahrenheit temperature hovered in the 20's. The birds frantically gobbled cabbage from Mr. Lugin's hand, occasionally pecking at a photographer's camera or a stray belt buckle. "There's only 40 grams of brains in that head", Mr. Lugin said apologetically.
Mr. Lugin's plan - starting an ostrich ranch that would sell the birds' meat and leather to buyers here and in nearby Japan - is only the latest in an unlikely phenomenon fluttering across Russia. At least 30 farms are raising an estimated 1,000 ostriches all told, said Svyatoslav Sinitsyn, general director of a Moscow-area poultry farm and ostrich ranch called Lemek. Mr. Sinitsyn alone has sold ostriches to a score of buyers, the northernmost in the eastern Siberian city of Surgut, which can have winter temperatures colder than 40 below.
"I am absolutely sure the business will soon spread all over Russia, given that during the last year alone, 20 new farms have started", Mr. Sinitsyn said.
To animal-husbandry historians, the early optimism in Russia over ostriches has a familiar ring. A few years ago, half a world away in Texas, speculators drove up the price of emus - ostrichlike birds with small brains and long blue necks - in hopes of a booming market for emu meat and leather. The boom never came, and embittered Texas emu ranchers, having lost a fortune, let the birds wander into the wild.
But that has not happened in Russia, at least not yet. Russian ostrich farmers can look to entrepreneurs in Finland, Canada, the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido and other cold climates who are also trying to establish profitable businesses.
OSTRICHES grow to 8 feet tall and as much as 350 pounds. Despite their long, bare legs, they can endure outdoor temperatures as low as 22 below, Mr. Lugin said. Still, he keeps a coal stove burning in the barn to warm his 99-pound, 5-foot-tall juveniles; after paying $600 for each bird, he is not ready to risk sending them into the bitter weather.
Mr. Sinitsyn, on the other hand, lets even his chicks venture outside. He started importing birds from ranches in Israel, Belgium and Cyprus in 1998, and now has 300 birds, but the ostriches from warmer climes seem to adapt well. Still, every year, the Russian winter flabbergasts the youngest ones. "It just started snowing today", Mr. Sinitsyn said in late November. "For three or four minutes, the baby ostriches, who were seeing their first winter, were stunned, and they looked out at the snow, amazed.
Because they react to color, this was something unusual. Then one of them dashed out of the barn, and the others followed him. Then they started dancing, and they tried to sit down on the snow and peck at it". Contrary to myth, ostriches do not hide their heads in the sand - or, for that matter, the snow.
This is not the first time that the birds have found a toehold in Asia. Five million years ago, flocks of ostriches galloped across what is now southern Russia, India and north-central China.
Ostrich farming was once lucrative and widespread in Africa, Australia, the United States and elsewhere, too. For centuries, ostrich plumes decorated helmets of knights, and the feathers were later sold for women's hats and boas. But when the feathers went out of style after World War I, the market collapsed.
In recent years, the demand for ostriches' supple leather and their meat - reputedly beeflike and low in cholesterol - has led to the opening of new ranches.But in Russia, it remains to be seen how successful the business will be. Mr. Sinitsyn supports his ostrich ranch with a large poultry company, and it will take a year and a half before the ostriches are profitable. He figures that he will need 1,000 birds to make the venture self-supporting.
For now, each bird gobbles a mere $75 worth of food a year. (In addition to cabbage, they eat carrots, hay and a mixed feed.) Mr. Sinitsyn slaughters only undersized birds, selling the meat for $15 a pound in Moscow. His real efforts are in breeding birds to sell; an 8- to 10-month-old chick fetches $900.
Eight years ago, Igor Mikhailin quit his job as a mechanic in Moscow, and moved with his wife, Valentina, to Banevo, a village in central Russia. They earn their income from a traditional farm, raising cattle, horses and sheep. But two years ago, Mrs. Mikhailina saw a television program about ostriches in Finland, and she was inspired. "I was impressed with the footage of how they ran on the snow", she said. "And I thought: 'Why not? They can do it here, too.'
The couple now have six adult ostriches and three chicks, and plan to earn money by selling the young birds. Mrs. Mikhailina added that an ostrich could be 20 times as profitable as a cow. But it is a long-term investment: Ostriches do not lay eggs until they are 2 or 2 1/2 years old. The animals live to 50 in the wild, and ranchers say they can live 20 more years in captivity.
In their African habitat, ostriches live in flocks of 5 to 50. In captivity, though, some males appear socially challenged. Ostriches like to kick, and the thoroughbred black African variety is especially aggressive, Mrs. Mikhailina said. Her older male ostrich is always fighting with a younger one. "So I can't say that the new one is happy", she said.
Even some of Russia's underpaid government workers have gotten in on the business. In a central Russian village near Arzamas-16, the formerly secret laboratory city, Rescue Team No. 147 of the Emergency Situations Ministry has been raising ostriches donated by colleagues in Israel, according to news reports.
FOR ostrich owners, Russia's vast spaces present another challenge: how to transport the big birds home. Mr. Lugin had to fly his four birds more than 6,000 miles from Moscow to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk in the baggage compartment of an Aeroflot jet.
Trying to diversify, Mr. Lugin also brought along a crate of coypus, otter-sized South American rodents with webbed feet and long tails. He is trying to convince skeptical Sakhalin residents that, when barbecued, the ratlike coypu tastes better than pork. As a bonus, fur hats can be made from the skin.
Perhaps sensing their fate, the rodents bolted from their cage in the baggage compartment high over Siberia, with at least one finding its way into the ostrich cage.The ostriches were a little flustered, but managed to avoid trampling their fellow traveler.
Even in Russia, there remains something essentially African about ostriches, with the snakelike movements of their necks and their mincing gait. It is hard to imagine them becoming common amid the wrecked tractors and abandoned apartment blocks of Russia's failing collective farms.
Indeed, anyone willing to raise an ostrich in Surgut or Sakhalin is necessarily an optimist. Although ostrich meat is still beyond the means of all but a tiny minority of consumers, ranchers are confident that the cost will fall as the popularity of the meat spreads.
"In Moscow, they have big lines at restaurants to get their meat; here, people are not yet ready for ostrich", said Mr. Lugin, adding, "but I think that in three years, the tastes will change".

MOSCOW, -- Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov has signed an edict to deorbit the Mir space station, an aide to the high-ranking official told Spacenews.com.
The aide, who asked not to be named, said Kasyanov signed the decree Dec. 30 to send the $3 billion, 136-ton station into a controlled dive into the Earth's atmosphere. No exact date has been set for the deorbiting, said the aide, who declined to elaborate.
Last month, a Russian state commission comprised of the country's leading space officials issued a vaguely worded resolution to sink Mir, but left it to the federal government to formally seal the fate of the 15-year-old outpost.
The resolution was signed by several top space officials including Valery Grin, head of the Mir state commission and deputy commander of Russia's Strategic Missile Force, and Yuri Semenov, president of Rocket Space Corporation Energia, which operates Mir.
A Progress M1-5 cargo ship will be launched Jan. 18 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to dock with Mir and then give the station a deorbiting impulse, according to a senior Energia official, who asked not to be named.
The official told Spacenews.com Jan. 5 that a cosmonaut crew will be launched if the Progress vehicle fails to dock with Mir in automated mode, or if the space station's main computer malfunctions.
He said a group of top officials from Energia and the Mir Flight Control Center met in Korolev Jan. 4 and decided that Energia will proceed with efforts to deorbit Mir using the Progress vehicle while the two-cosmonaut crew stands by in case of an emergency.
Rosaviacosmos spokesman Vyacheslav Mikhailichenko told Spacenews.com Jan. 4 that the recent loss of communications with Mir, which has been flying without a crew for months, "only strengthened our belief that the station has to be downed to avoid an uncontrolled crash".
The Korolev control center lost contact with Mir Dec. 25 and managed to restore communications 19 hours later - after power levels on several of the station's batteries dropped to low levels. Even after restoring contact, the center continued to experience problems receiving telemetry from the outpost, an official at the center told Spacenews.com Jan. 5.
Visit SPACE.com for more space-related news, information, entertainment and multimedia, including videos, launch coverage and interactive experiences. Check out cool space images at our photo galleries. Follow the latest developments in the search for life in our universe in our new SETI: Search for Life section.

The Cold War may be long gone, but it has left a legacy of nuclear contamination that will endure and may have far-reaching environmental effects.
Scientific investigations in the Russian Arctic into how radioactivity is transported through rivers and ocean currents reveal dangerously high levels of radioactive elements in the marine environment that could even eventually affect the waters off the coast of North America.
Environmental concerns about such radioactive contamination have led to studies of Russian waste dumpsites, rivers, nuclear fuel reprocessing plants, and off-shore locations.
In one study, URI Graduate School of Oceanography chemical oceanographer Dr. S. Bradley Moran, along with a team of U.S., Canadian and Russian scientists, has found some of the highest levels of radioactive plutonium ever measured in the marine environment in the sediments of Chernaya Bay, a former Soviet Union nuclear weapons test site. These elevated levels could threaten the local fishing industry.
Moran's work is funded by a multi-year grant from the U.S. Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation. His research was recently published in Continental Shelf Research and Earth and Planetary Science Letters. It is also featured in the latest issue of Maritimes, the University of Rhode Island's marine science research magazine.
Moran and his colleagues have investigated this part of the Arctic Ocean to determine how much radioactivity has settled into the sediments around Chernaya Bay and what effect, if any, this has had on the food chain. "These questions have a bearing on radioactive plutonium in Arctic marine sediments and the environmental impact of the only recorded detonation of nuclear weapons in the Arctic Ocean", said Moran. "They also address an important issue underlying many similar studies of the area: namely, the extent to which the Russian contamination represents a significant source of nuclear contamination for North American off-shore waters".
Moran's research has revealed not only elevated levels of plutonium in the sediments, but also high levels of radioactive cesium and cobalt. Measurements taken of organisms in the sediments indicate that radioactive contamination has spread to the food chain.
Because of restricted water flow from Chernaya Bay, contamination to the Barents Sea seems to be limited. However, measurements of sediments in the Barents Sea also indicate that the transport of plutonium from Chernaya Bay did occur, probably at the time of the original nuclear tests.
Moran and his colleagues are currently investigating the possibility of another transport pathway that is bringing plutonium from Chernaya Bay to the central Arctic ocean.

LIVERMORE, Calif. -- The stunning picture of the Eagle Nebula taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in November 1995 has become an icon of the age of space exploration, along with the Apollo bootprint in lunar dust and images of Earth as a glistening blue-and-white jewel set against the dark velvet of infinity.
So sublime and stately are the Eagle Nebula's huge cloud columns, standing like towering thunderheads in the light of bright stars. So brooding are the dark clouds and the sprinkling of emerging dense globules the size of the solar system, or larger, which appear to be cradles of newborn stars. The majesty of the prospect and the intimations of cosmic regeneration left even astronomers awestruck. Forsaking the usually dispassionate language of their profession, astronomers dubbed this most famous of Hubble pictures the Pillars of Creation. Since then, scientists have examined the picture more closely and searched their theories and knowledge of astrophysical processes to render a less romantic judgment of what is going on in the Eagle Nebula. The nebula, also known as M16, is about 7,000 light-years away in the Serpens constellation. Its pillars are almost 6 trillion miles high.
Astrophysicists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory here have tested some of the ideas with computer simulations and say they think they understand the natural forces that may have created such dazzling cosmic architecture. They hope to firm up their thinking with experiments using lasers, one of the promising new approaches to ground-based astrophysics research.
On the basis of a recent analysis, Dr. Jave Kane, a young theoretical astrophysicist at the laboratory, has suggested a modified hydrodynamic explanation for the nebula's structure. This involves a revision of a theory on instability at the boundary of lighter and denser fluids, known as the Rayleigh-Taylor principle. The principle in this case applies to a heated gas on top of a cold, dense cloud. "In simulations, our revised Rayleigh- Taylor model shows it has a very good chance of explaining the Eagle Nebula", Dr. Kane said. In this chain of events, the bright ultraviolet light from nearby stars heats the surface of the original molecular cloud. Such clouds are ubiquitous, composed mostly of hydrogen and helium, the stuff out of which stars form. If heated, these clouds become unstable. The surface matter boils away. This hot, low-density matter pushes against the colder, denser matter left in the cloud, much as rocket exhaust accelerates a space shuttle in the opposite direction.
If there are irregularities at the interface between the light and dense matter, some of the dense matter in time falls out of the cloud. In 1954, Dr. Lyman Spitzer Jr. of Princeton proposed the Rayleigh-Taylor principle as the likely explanation for the tongues or "elephant trunks" of obscuring clouds that astronomers were seeing in many nebulas, including the then-cruder images of the Eagle Nebula. But in 1998, astronomers making radiotelescope observations of the nebula cast doubt on the hypothesis. Dr. Marc W. Pound of the University of Maryland said the observations revealed velocities and densities of matter flowing from the bottom to the tip of the cloud columns were "inconsistent with those expected from the Rayleigh-Taylor instability".
As a result, Dr. Pound said he favored an alternative explanation, an earlier theory known as the cometary model. He said that a dynamic front of stellar radiation "eats away" at the molecular cloud until it is stalled by a denser cloud core. The shock of the impact on the core presumably results in much of the nebula's structure. The clump of residual core matter remained in what resembled the head of a comet, while the evaporating matter stretched out like a comet's tail.
"That's where we started", Dr. Kane said, acknowledging Dr. Pound's observations and motivating influence. "The Rayleigh-Taylor model was not defeated that easily". In computer simulations of astrophysical phenomena, Dr. Kane explained, one works backward from the present to the beginning. Since the initial conditions for what is being simulated are not known, he said, "You take the result you see and tweak parameters of possible initial conditions to get the result you sEE".
Much of the foundation for the research was laid by Dr. Dimitri D. Ryutov, a former Russian theoretical astrophysicist who now works at Lawrence Livermore. Following his lead, Dr. Kane broke with the past practice of assuming steady-state conditions in favor of a more dynamic model. He thus introduced three assumed conditions modifying the standard tests of the Rayleigh-Taylor principle. One is that the stellar energy acting on the cloud is not constant and so the rocketlike accelerations will vary. A second condition takes account of the cloud's thickness. And a third is that, unlike classical Rayleigh-Taylor models assuming incompressible matter, some of the matter in the cloud is compressible; the heated gas is definitely compressible. Then, in computer simulations, Dr. Kane said, the results showed that the velocities and densities of matter in the columns in fact conformed to the Rayleigh-Taylor principle. And this, he concluded, could be a more satisfactory explanation for the Eagle Nebula than the cometary model. But the imposing columns, scientists think, are a recent and passing spectacle. They cannot be more than a few hundred thousand years old, a brief span in cosmic terms, or else they would have disintegrated by now.
Next, Dr. Kane and other scientists at the Lawrence Livermore laboratory want to put the simulation results to a more rigorous test - experiments with lasers supplying the energy in trying to reproduce such cosmic phenomena.
"Simulations are good up to a certain point", said Dr. Bruce A. Remington, leader of the laboratory's laser astrophysics group. "Experiment is the ultimate test of everything".
For most of its history, astronomy was a strictly observational science, and earlier astrophysicists based their theories largely on what astronomers could see. That has changed as high-energy physicists use particle accelerators to probe subatomic matter for clues to the origin and evolution of the universe, and others experiment with their computer modeling for insights into why the universe looks the way it does.
When much of the laser technology used in making and testing nuclear weapons was declassified in 1994, the Lawrence Livermore laboratory, primarily a nuclear-weapons development facility under the Department of Energy, looked into applying lasers to astrophysics experiments. The big obstacle, Dr. Remington said, was the uncertainty that astrophysical phenomena could be scaled down for laboratory research.
Dr. Ryutov developed the concept and equations for scaled tests of an exploding star, or supernova, in the laboratory. "Dimitri jump-started this thinking", Dr. Remington said.
One of the more successful experiments so far, scientists said, has been the use of intense laser light to explore the dynamics of the shock waves moving through the remnant debris from a supernova, in particular the relatively nearby one first observed in 1987 in the Southern Hemisphere and originating in a galaxy known as the Large Magellanic Cloud. The laboratory has now looked into other laser experiments to model the formation of planets, the atmosphere of Jupiter, aspects of gamma-ray bursts and jets of electrified gas, or plasma, radiating from some objects deep in space.
Dr. Remington conceded that astrophysicists outside the laser field were at first skeptical of such modeling experiments, but are now showing interest. "Of course, if we start competing with them for funds, there will be a rivalry", he said. Lawrence Livermore is building the much-delayed National Ignition Facility, now expected to be completed no earlier than 2008.
Although its main purpose is to allow bomb makers to study the physics of nuclear weapons without exploding them, the powerful laser system would also enable engineers to explore new types of nuclear power plants and offer scientists the chance to investigate matter under conditions never before created in a laboratory.
For any further tests of the Eagle Nebula's structure, however, present laser technology should be sufficient, Dr. Remington said. The Omega laser system at the University of Rochester would probably be used. Other countries - Britain, France, Japan and Germany - have also begun research in laser astrophysics. Japan has indicated an interest in conducting laser experiments to explore the dynamics of the Eagle Nebula.
A decision on when or whether to put the revised Rayleigh-Taylor model for the Eagle Nebula structure to a laser test is expected before the end of the year. For the time being, and most beholders other than astrophysicists might settle for indefinitely, the beauty of the Hubble portrait should be more than sufficient to appreciate the "Pillars of Creation", however they were sculpted, as a sublime work of natural art.

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