Март 2001г.

Российская наука и мир (по материалам зарубежной электронной прессы)

CONTENTS / ОГЛАВЛЕНИЕ


• Rubles for Researchers
• Soros Freezes $1.5M in Aid to Avoid Tax
• Conference on social policy opens in Moscow
• Education Plans Meet National Protests
• Siberian scientists to compile Lake Baikal ecology atlas.
• Yandex Wins Big At Intel Ceremony
• Forum of high defence technologies under way in Moscow
• China, Russia Cooperate on High-tech Promotion
• Scrapping of nuclear munition needs global control -view
• Only every fifth newborn in Russia is practically healthy
• Russian Telecom Entrepreneurs Visit Kansas University
• Bush Targets Russia Nuclear Programs for Cuts
• Satellite to observe solar activity to be launched
• Kasyanov set to improve Russia's restitution law
• The real casualty may be science

По мнению генерал - майора, профессора Российской академии военных наук Владимира Белоуса процесс снятия с вооружения ядерного оружия требует международного контроля. Заряды из боеголовок можно повторно использовать для создания других типов оружия. Ученый также полагает, что "все соглашения по ограничению и сокращению стратегических вооружений предусматривают снятие с вооружения только носителей ядерного оружия"

MOSCOW, March 5 (Itar-Tass) -- The process of scrapping nuclear munition requires international control, Professor of the Russian Academy of Military Sciences Major-General Vladimir Belous told Itar-Tass on Monday. He said that the "charges within the warheads can be used once more for making other types of ammunition". The scientist also believes that "all the agreements on the limitation and reduction of strategic armaments stipulate only the scrapping of nuclear weapon carriers".
"These agreements describe in detail the procedures for scrapping missiles, missile firing submarines, and heavy bombers, but they do not stipulate similar measures in respect to nuclear warheads and their destruction under reciprocal control", Belous stressed. He noted that the cooperation of democratic nations to promote ecological security, including the process of nuclear disarmament, would help enhance the world community's safety on a global scale".

MOSCOW, Mar 10, 2001 (Itar-Tass via COMTEX) -- Only every fifth newborn in Russia can be regarded as practically healthy. A third of babies are born sick, and 44 percent of babies are in the risk group.
According to the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, the state of health of babies will continue to deteriorate. Under 10-12 percent of children are healthy among schoolchildren in junior grades.
The percentage stands at 8 among middle graders, and only five percent of schoolchildren can be regarded as healthy at senior grades. Half of children suffer from chronic diseases which can result in disability. Children mostly suffer from indigestion, respiratory diseases, as well as diseases of locomotive and nervous systems. Most teenagers suffer from myopia by 15.
Diseases contracted in childhood negatively tell on reproductive health of grownups. Many diseases turn chronic. As a result, every third married couple suffers from any form of sterility. Anemia and low immunity were registered among 40 percent of expectant mothers.

10 предпринимателей из России посетили университет штата Канзас и несколько компаний с целью наладить сотрудничество с исследовательскими центрами США в области телекоммуникаций

Mar. 10 -- The fall of communism also meant the fall of technology research in Russia. So on Friday, 10 entrepreneurs from the Russian telecommunications industry were at Kansas University seeking to develop research without government funding driven by Cold War competition with the United States.
"In the Soviet Socialist Republic, Russia was the biggest laboratory in the world", said Victor Korotkov, manager of a cellular communications company in Moscow. "Now its laboratory is crushed - destroyed".
The businessmen will be in the Kansas City area for three weeks, touring such companies as Sprint, VoiceStream Wireless and Lucent Technologies. Their visit is sponsored by the San Francisco-based Center for Citizenship Initiatives, which aims to strengthen the economy of newly democratic Russia.
On Friday, they toured KU's Information and Telecommunication Technology Center, which partners with government agencies and companies to conduct research. Research topics include networking, wireless communication, software development and radar systems.
With the booming technology industry, Technology Center director Victor Frost said that he is giving more speeches and tours to international groups.
"It's part of the university's role with an international flavor", Frost said. "They're a group of fairly high-level folks from Russia who want an understanding of the research enterprises we have here". The Russian businessmen also heard a presentation from Andrew Townsend Peterson, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and a curator at KU's Natural History Museum. He spoke about biodiversity and the use of technology to track animal species.
The men also toured the networking telecommunications department, which provides telephone, video and data networking for KU. Leonid Toder, who directs a company that develops, installs and maintains telecommunications systems, said he came to the United States to find ways to expand his business. He said the technology center could be a model for Russian re-searchers to follow.
"I think the most interesting part is the collaboration of systems of the educational entity and business/commercial structures", he said through an interpreter. "It is just starting (in Russia), and that's why it is interesting what you can achieve by partnering. We see the proof here that the collaboration can be successful".
To see more of the Journal-World, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to www.ljworld.com

Администрация Буша собирается резко сократить финансирование программ сохранения ядерных запасов России и создание рабочих мест для российских ученых - ядерщиков в других отраслях промышленности

WASHINGTON, Mar 18, 2001 (Xinhua via COMTEX) -- U.S. programs that pay to help Russia reduce and safeguard its nuclear weapons and materials have been targeted by the Bush administration for cuts of 12 percent below this year's level and 30 percent below the figures proposed in the Clinton administration's fiscal 2002 budget, the Washington Post reported Sunday.
Rose E. Gottemoeller, former director of nonproliferation and national security at the Energy Department, said she has been told that the 1.2 billion dollars proposed by the previous administration for Russian programs had been reduced by President Bush's Office of Management and Budget to 800 million dollars, which is 73 million below the current year's figure. Gottemoeller said the "Nuclear Cites" program, which this year provided 30 million dollars to help former nuclear scientists get non-military work, would be cut to 6 million dollars.
The nuclear materials protection and security program, which helps pay for improved security over Russia's stockpiles of plutonium and enriched uranium, received 154 million dollars this year. Under Clinton Budget, it would have risen to 217 million dollars. Under Bush, it is set to drop to 139 million dollars.
Energy Department's plutonium disposal program, in which the United States and Russia change weapons-grade material so it cannot be used for bombs, is set to rise from 200 million dollars this year to 217 million dollars under Bush.
That is well below the 400 million dollars proposed by the Clinton administration to enable construction of a facility to begin processing the nuclear materials. Sentiment appears to be growing in Congress to cut aid to Russia in response to Russian sales of weaponry and nuclear power plants to Iran, the report said.

С космодрома Плисецк будет запущен искусственный спутник Koronas-F для наблюдения за солнечной активностью

NEAR THE VILLAGE OF ZELENCHUKSKAYAKIEV, March 5 (Itar-Tass) - A satellite to observe solar activity is ready for the shipment to the Russian cosmodrome Plesetsk. Tass learnt this on Monday from the press service of Yuzhnoye state design office named after M.K.Yangel, which plays the main role in designing the spacecraft.
The satellite named Koronas-F, Koronas being the Russian acronym for "comprehensive orbital near-earth observance of solar activity", will be launched in the second quarter of 2001 by Ukrainian booster-rocket Cyclone-3.
The automatic universal orbital station Auos-SM-KF or Koronas-F has scientific equipment installed on it to register solar data in a broad range of electromagnetic emission.
Its launching will become the second stage in the implementation of the project for comprehensive orbital near- earth observation of solar activity. Three spacecraft are to be launched under this project.
Koronas-I satellite was put into orbit in March 1994. Institutes and enterprises of Russia, Ukraine, Poland and other countries participate in the project supervised by the Russian Academy of Sciences institute for terrestrial magnetism, ionosphere and radiowave propagation.

Российский премьер-министр Михаил Касьянов подписал решение о создании объединенного совета в который войдут руководители российских архивов, ведущих музеев, ученые Российской академии наук, представители Российского Министерства юстиции, ФСБ. Совет будет наблюдать за соблюдением закона о возвращении культурных ценностей, которые были перевезены в Советский Союз после Второй мировой войны и в настоящее время находятся в России

MOSCOW, Mar 15, 2001 (Itar-Tass via COMTEX) -- Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov on Thursday signed a resolution designed to improve the functionning of a law on restitution of cultural artifacts that were displaced to the former Soviet Union after World War II and are currently located in Russia. The resolution provides for creation of an interagency Council to be headed by Russian Culture Minister Mikhail Shvydkoi. The new body will also comprise the heads of Russian archives and leading museums, scientists of the Russian Academy of Sciences, representatives of the Russian Justice Ministry, the FSB and the Russian Interior Ministry criminal investigation unit. The State Commission for Restitution has been abolished.
The federal agencies have been ordered to establish the former state origins of the displaced works of art by the end of 2002. Their list will be published in a catalogue of the Russian Culture Ministry.

Mir's fall from orbit reflects the plummeting fortunes of its country's space researchers
Российская космическая наука умирала в течение нескольких лет. Конец станции Мир - это финальный смертельный крик
"We're all theoretical researchers now. When you can't afford to get into space to collect data, that's what you become - a theoretician" George Managadze, Moscow
"Сейчас мы все стали исследователями - теоретиками. Если вы не можете себе позволить выйти в космос для сбора информации, - что вам остается делать - стать теоретиком" - говорит Георгий Манагадзе, ведущий специалист Российского института космических исследований

FOR ASTROPHYSICIST, George Managadze of the Russian Space Research Institute, the final disintegration of space station Mir this Thursday will be a non-event.
"I might watch it on TV, but it won't mean much to me", says Managadze, Russia's top expert on detecting life forms in space. "Russian space science has been dying for years. The end of Mir is just about the final death cry".
Managadze dates the beginning of the end of Russian space science to 5:38 p.m., July 7, 1988. That's when the Soviet Phobos 1 probe blasted off toward Mars, carrying a sophisticated laser and particle beam probe he designed and built to detect the existence of life on Phobos, the largest of Mars' two moons. But after hurtling into the heavens, Phobos 1 was never heard from again. In 1989, while the country that sent the Phobos probe into space disappeared, its last space research venture was also determined to be lost, a victim of management failures.
For Managadze, 65, it was the end of an era in which he and other Soviet space scientists dazzled the world with brilliant and brave efforts to take humanity into space and bring knowledge of space back to humanity. "We thought we would get the Lenin Prize", he says, still relishing the thought of the Soviet Union's top honour. "But we ended up with nothing". Managadze and hundreds of scientists like him work at Russia's Space Research Institute, housed in a crumbling, fortress-like monstrosity of uneven concrete, cracked windows and unlit corridors in suburban Moscow. The institute has been almost penniless since the Soviet Union collapsed. "We're all theoretical researchers now", Managadze jokes. "When you can't afford to get into space to collect data, that's what you become - a theoretician".
Not surprising for a man who climbs mountains to get better views of the heavens when he's not in the lab, the cash crisis for space research in Russia didn't stop Managadze's work. He developed a miniaturized version of the sensory system lost on the Phobos 1 mission and holds the U.S. patent on it. Through collaboration with admiring American researchers, he hopes to get his sensors back into space.
His staff relies on the thin trickle of cash he earns in the U.S. to supplement research salaries as low as $30 a month in Russian labs. But the patent hanging proudly on Managadze's office wall is all he really has to show for the last decade's work.
Elsewhere in the institute, the situation is equally desperate. Two floors above Managadze's lab, Victor Egorov, Russia's leading expert on space-based Earth studies, also laments the effects of the devastating poverty that has hobbled his country, its space research program and his career.
"The last new data we received came from Mir several years ago", he says, "but even it wasn't trustworthy". For Egorov, a specialist in studying the effects of pollution and climate change on Earth using data collected from spacecraft, the timing of the collapse of Russian space science made the crisis seem especially bitter. "Just as we began to pull back the blindfold to start understanding what pollution is doing to the Earth, especially the growing carbon levels in the lower atmosphere and the effects of huge forest destruction, we stopped getting information". With no spacecraft of their own to build research instruments on, the only spark of possibility for Russian space scientists nowadays is the International Space Station.
But it is a dim hope. Echoing voices in Europe and North America, several Russian researchers strongly complain that the International Space Station offers next to no possibilities for research into space itself.
Its appeal is to industries and researchers interested in the physical condition of cosmonauts living in the station's zero-gravity atmosphere and to researchers probing zero-gravity chemistry and physics for industrial applications on Earth. Although Russian medical researchers are involved in the first batch of human experiments on the $130 billion station, these experiments do not involve the exploration of space.
Most of the principal institute researchers surveyed for this story say the new space station offers few research opportunities. While emphasizing the withering of Russian space science budgets, Alexander Zacharov, the institute's science secretary, points out that the space station will be a good platform for medicine and a handful of other industries.
"Unmanned platforms are more effective" for space experiments and solar and planetary research, he says. Still, he has hope. "Maybe, in future, the experience of the Mir station and the International Space Station will be used for manned interplanetary flights and planetary investigation", he says.
The head of the institute's department of space plasma physics, Oleg Vaisberg, bluntly rejects the space station's scientific potential. Politicians and the media have misrepresented it as a space research endeavour, he says, calling it a "human, political and technological adventure (that) has very little to do with science".
It's a criticism that finds a ready echo in Canada, where numerous research advisers for the Canadian Space Agency are deeply skeptical of the station's scientific merits. The agency, which is investing well over $1 billion in the space station, devotes only 6 per cent of its annual budget to science on the station. Agency adviser Gary Buttner, director of science for Ottawa-based space research company EMS Technologies, worries that the space station is too bureaucratic, too expensive and too restricted by vibration problems and its own pollution cloud to attract researchers' confidence. "Countries that have put money into the space station want to be able to demonstrate a scientific return on their investment, but are having a hard time doing so", he says. "Only the life-sciences scientists and microgravity scientists seem to be happy with the station as a base of operations".
Disappointed as many researchers in Canada are with the massive investment of Canadian and international space budgets in the International Space Station project, much more money is available for space science in Canada than in Russia, where the space station consumes both the entire space budget and further massive subsidies from the U.S.
That reality has persuaded Egorov to consider his research possibilities in Canada. His wife, a computer programmer, recently applied to immigrate to Canada. If her application is approved, Egorov would have to decide whether to go with her. That fills him with terrible sadness for the scientific legacy Russia lost in space long before the plans were laid for Mir's final Earth orbits.

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