Январь 2002 г.

Российская наука и мир (по материалам зарубежной электронной прессы)

CONTENTS / ОГЛАВЛЕНИЕ


• Putin Promises to Fund Science and Culture
• Kudrin leaves for Tomsk to discuss development of Siberia
• Kremlin witnesses Putin presenting, receiving awards
• Number of students steadily growing in Russia
• Scientists plumb chips with miniature pipes
• Advanced technologies to revive Russian industry - Alferov
• Russia Attach Importance to TCM
• Russian Laser Pioineer Prokhorov Dies
• Barents Sea - the world's cleanest
• American Biogenetic Sciences Secures Vaccine Agreements With Russian Federation Entities
• Unique plant-protection substances produced in Novosibirsk
• Russian firm starts production of telecoms satellites
• Professor Sir Dimitri Obolensky
• Cuban-Russian boy termed a "genius"
• Myanmar gets a Russian nuclear reactor
• Russian Scientist, U.S. Poles Apart over Rescue
• Book on Siberian-Pole history published in Irkutsk
• Russia-USA flight to Mars so far unprofitable - expert
• Russia devises optoelectronic-controlled AA msl system

В Институте цитологии и генетики СО РАН создан уникальный препарат для защиты растений

NOVOSIBIRSK, Jan 25, 2002 (Itar-Tass via COMTEX) -- Unique substances for the biological protection of plants have been evolved here and are being introduced to production to Siberia.
Dr of Science (Biology) Viktor Chekurov, chief of the experimental mutagenesis laboratory of the Institute of Cytology and Genetics of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, has told Itar-Tass that the evolved substances lack poisonous chemical components while the plant protection effect is achieved resultant of plant immunity stimulation.
The substances obtained by Siberian scientists protect such crops as wheat, potatoes, sugar beet, tomatoes, etc. from most widespread diseases. The quality of crop has been improved resultant of enhancement of the immunity of plants. The price of the substances is 80-90 percent lower than that of the traditionally used imported chemicals.
The world's first research in gene therapy was started at the Cytology and Genetics Institute way back in 1971 with a view to developing regulators of the growth and development of plants without the use of chemical components. The first specimens of such substances were obtained in 1993. At present, orders for the development studies of Novosibirsk scientists have been placed by a number of European countries, as well as India and China.

Научно-производственное объединение прикладной механики в Красноярском крае запустило производство новых спутников связи

KRASNOYARSK, Central Siberia, Jan 24, 2002 (Itar-Tass via COMTEX) -- The scientific and production amalgamation of applied mechanics in Zheleznogorsk, Krasnoyarsk Territory, launched serial production of new Express-AM satellites, Tass learnt on Thursday at the company's press service.
Five spacecraft of this series will be equipped with three relays of the Japanese Nek firm and two relays of French Alcatel.
New satellites will replace spacecraft of the Express-A and Gorizont series. They will be put, one by one, on a geostationary orbit with a Proton launch vehicle to an altitude of 40,000 kilometers. The satellites are assigned to ensure the so-called fixed communications, including government telecoms. Apart from the above, they can be used for broadcasting TV and radio programmes. According to the press service, contracts were already signed to deliver special relays for these spacecraft. The Russian Kosmicheskaya Svyaz state-owned company acts as a customer of satellites, the first of which will be put into orbit in February 2004.

PROFESSOR SIR DIMITRI OBOLENSKY, who has died aged 83, was for nearly 25 years Professor of Russian and Balkan History at Oxford University, where his gifts as a lecturer were as evident as his outstanding scholarship.
As an academic, Obolensky was of a breed that is increasingly rare: he disdained careerism, and was enough of a democrat to treat students and lay people with the same respect and courtesy that he bestowed on his fellow scholars.
Those who heard him lecture never forgot the resonance of his voice or the superb manner in which he marshalled his material, which he often delivered without notes.
His readings of poetry (particularly of Pushkin) were famous. Some thought it astonishing that he was not more in demand from radio; but that might have been attributable to his natural inclination to self-effacement.
Dmitriy Dmitrievich Obolensky, the son of Prince Dimitri Obolensky and Countess Mary Shuvalov, was born on April 1 1918 in Petrograd, then ravaged by war and revolution. His was an ancient aristocratic family whose members had, over 500 years, given valued service to the Russian state.
Dimitri spent most of the first year of his life at the Vorontsov Palace (built by one of his forebears) at Alupka, near Yalta in the Crimea. But his family left Russia to escape the Revolution, being evacuated in a British warship that had sailed to the Crimea to rescue the survivors of the Imperial family.
The Obolenskys settled in comparatively modest circumstances in Paris. Dimitri was sent to prep school in England, at Eastbourne, and then attended the Lycee Pasteur in Paris.
Next, he went up as a scholar to Trinity College, Cambridge, where, having abandoned his original intention to study Moral Sciences, he took a First in Modern and Medieval Languages.
The presiding presence in Slavonic Studies while Obolensky was at Cambridge was the formidable Elizabeth Hill, who inspired him to study Russian history, and, more specifically, the Bogomils, a sect of medieval Balkan heretics. Obolensky later produced a book, The Bogomils (1948), based on the work he had done for his thesis.
In 1942 Obolensky was elected to a fellowship of Trinity. As a lecturer at the university, he was influenced by such older scholars as Sir Steven Runciman and (in particular) Francis Dvornik, while among his contemporaries he was closest to John Fennell; both Obolensky and Fennell went to Oxford in the late 1940s, where Fennell's post was in Russian Language and Literature.
The two men were soon related by marriage: in 1947 Obolensky married Elisabeth Lopukhin, also from an emigre Russian family, while Fennell married her sister, Marina. Obolensky and Fennell collaborated on several publications, but fell out in later life.
Obolensky was appointed to the Chair of Russian and Balkan History at Oxford in 1961, and the next year published the first edition of the work for which he is best known to a wider audience, the Penguin book of Russian Verse (1962).
This exemplary anthology, which he edited, is better than anything of its kind in Russia, and presents material from the 12th century up to the Soviet era.
His most important work, The Byzantine Commonwealth, was published in 1971. This was a thorough investigation into Byzantine civilisation and its meaning for Eastern European identity, and had its origins in an article in Oxford Slavonic Papers (1950), "Russia's Byzantine Heritage", which identified key moments and their significance in Russian cultural history.
In a long chapter on historical geography, Obolensky related human actions to their physical setting. This approach, astonishing 30 years ago, has become generally accepted, and the book itself has changed the way people in the West think about Eastern European cultural traditions.
Obolensky was also co-editor of the Companion to Russian Studies (three volumes, 1976-80), and on the day of his 80th birthday he completed Bread of Exile, a collection of memoir pieces by his older relatives, with one he wrote himself.
Despite his family's exile from their homeland - or perhaps because of it - Obolensky (who became a British citizen in 1948) remained highly conscious of his illustrious lineage. He could trace his ancestry back to St Vladimir, the ruler who christianised Russia in 988, and before him to the ninth century founder of Kiev, the Viking Rurik.
At the same time, Obolensky had no trace of snobbery: he avoided using his title of "Prince", and chose not to record, in Bread of Exile, that his grandmother had been courted by the future Tsar Nicholas II.
Obolensky's Russian roots were his great strength and manifested themselves particularly in his enduring commitment to the Orthodox Church. He was a lay delegate to the Moscow Millennial Church Council of 1988.
He was appointed to many visiting lectureships and fellowships in America, and was always happy to take on the chairmanship and organisation of conferences. The latter included the congress on Byzantine studies in Oxford in 1966, at which he showed a film of the Queen's coronation to illustrate Byzantine aspects of the ritual. He was vice-president of the British Academy from 1983 to 1985, and was knighted in 1984.
His marriage was dissolved in 1989; there were no children.
Patrick Leigh Fermor writes: Dimitri Obolensky felt a deep devotion to lost Russia, but none to the ideology which held her in thrall. It was odd, and perhaps not entirely by chance, that his first return there should be to the Crimea, and more particularly to Alupka, the amazing former palace of his first cousins the Vorontzoffs.
There must have been something distinctive or telling about his demeanour, for his fellow cultural tourists were astonished when an elderly cleaner - who must have been a young housemaid when the Revolutionaries took over the palace - dashed up to Dimitri and said: "You belong to this house."
Like his cousin and namesake the great Rugby international, he was of firm build; but his kind, youthful, scholarly and spectacled glance was one of great benevolence. He was an enchanting companion on the hills of Eubora, in the meadows near Oxford, or in the foothills of the Mani in the southern Pelopponese.
After Russian and the Classics, nothing surpassed his love of French and English poetry. I once heard him, as a joke, rush through Kennedy's Latin Gender Rhymes at breakneck speed; and I think he knew the whole of A E Housman by heart. Oxford, London, Paris and Greece were his background - and it was in Spetsai that his gifted kinswoman, Chloe Obolensky, nursed him through all the phases of his illness.
He was a most distinguished man, deeply loved by his friends and totally irreplaceable.

Десятилетний мальчик, сын кубинского морского инженера и русской женщины, живущий в г.Рубцовске, создал несколько рефрижираторных систем, которые признаны изобретениями

Moscow, Jan 16, 2002 (EFE via COMTEX) -- A ten-year-old boy Cuban-Russian boy genius living in the wilds of Siberia is said to have invented no less than seven refrigeration systems that do not require electricity or a compressor, Russian newsmedia reported Wednesday.
They said committees of scientists and special education experts are examining the inventions credited to Ernesto Yevgeny Sanchez Shaida, a 10-year-old resident of Rubtsovsk in southern Siberia. Ernesto is the son of a Cuban naval engineer, Ernesto Enrique Sanchez, and Tatiana Shaida, who moved to Rubtsovsk in the early 1990s, about the time that their son was teaching himself to read, aged two years and seven months. While still at the age when other youngsters might be devouring Dr. Seuss, Ernesto developed a penchant for perusing math and physics textbooks and the novels of Russian writer Vassily Shuskin. His teachers allowed him to skip grades so that now at he age of 10. he will shortly be finishing up high school. Ernesto says he has two ambitions in life: to get a computer and patent his inventions and to travel to Cuba to visit the relatives he has never met.

Summary:
Jan 3, 2002, (Wall Street Journal /FT Information via COMTEX) -- The impoverished nation of Myanmar is working on a nuclear research project with help from Russian scientists, a move that has upset neighboring China, which has worked hard to cultivate strong relations with the country. Russia's Atomic Energy Ministry initiated the project in February of last year with plans to build a 10-megawatt research reactor in Myanmar. Officials in Myanmar, formerly Burma, have refused to discuss the project, though the government recently established its own Department of Atomic Energy. As with everything in Myanmar, the research reactor will be under military control, but it is not thought that the reactor will have military applications. Quite what purpose the reactor will serve, however, is not clear. Usually they are used for medical purposes. Pakistani nuclear scientists are also thought to be involved in the project.

Благополучно вернувшийся из экспедиции в Антарктиду российский ученый-полярник и политик Артур Чилингаров,которому пришлось во время экспедиции просить помощи на исследовательской базе США, не знал, что самое страшное унижение еще впереди - Антарктическая программа США потребовала у правительства России 80 000 долларов за спасение полярников. Возмущенный Чилингаров заявляет, что он "лично не раз выручал американцев из сложных ситуаций, и делал это абсолютно бесплатно". По его словам, целью экспедиции было укрепить репутацию России как антарктической державы и продемонстрировать международный статус континента. Валерий Лукин, глава Антарктической Экспедиции российского правительства, однако, считает, что путешествие Чилингарова относится к разряду "экстремального туризма", и с научной точки зрения оно было пустой тратой времени и денег.

Antarctica: Charging his team for evacuation effort is coldhearted, explorer says.

MOSCOW -- An explorer flies all the way to the South Pole but has to ask someone else to fly him out. Question: What is it called? A triumph of aviation?
An embarrassment?
A diplomatic snafu?
Answer: All three.
On Jan. 8, Artur Chilingarov, a deputy speaker of Russia's parliament and a polar scientist, flew with some adventurous buddies to the South Pole. He claimed that their An-3 biplane, which flew about 750 miles over the Antarctic landscape before landing at the Earth's southernmost point, was the first single-engine aircraft to make the trip. Their derring-do earned them a congratulatory phone call at the South Pole from Russian President Vladimir V. Putin. But for some reason--some say that the engine wouldn't restart, others simply that the weather was bad--the plane couldn't make the trip out. So Chilingarov had to ask the United States, which has a research base at the South Pole, to rescue him. But the biggest indignity was yet to come--the U.S. Antarctic Program is billing the Russian government $80,000 for his rescue.
"We by law are not permitted to provide assistance to private expeditions", explained Peter West, spokesman for the U.S. government's National Science Foundation, which administers the program. "We reserve the right to recover our costs if we have to provide humanitarian assistance to private groups", he said Wednesday.
Chilingarov says he wasn't told that the rescue would cost money and that if he'd known he might not have accepted the help. Regardless, he insists, asking for money violates the spirit of cooperation on the continent, which is internationally recognized as nonmilitary territory for scientific exploration.
"It seems some American bureaucrats have forgotten the principle of polar cooperation", he huffed in an interview with the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily. "I myself have more than once pulled Americans out of very difficult situations, and I did it absolutely for free."
The U.S. State Department has gotten involved, certifying that, indeed, Chilingarov's expedition wasn't officially sponsored by the Russian government and so he is liable for the rescue costs. Chilingarov plans to discuss the matter with the U.S. ambassador in Moscow this week. The Russian government has so far remained mum on the incident.
"It seems some people aren't happy we made it to the South Pole", he groused at a news conference Wednesday. He didn't say who those people might be.
Expedition Defended
The incident appears to have embarrassed Chilingarov, one of Russia's most accomplished polar scientists, who grew defensive about questions as to the wisdom of his trip. At the news conference, he bristled at suggestions that he was on a high-risk joy ride with fellow travelers rich enough to buy into his Antarctic adventure.
"I don't deny that there is an element of adventurism in any expedition", Chilingarov said. "But for a polar explorer, common sense and cowardice are not the same thing."
Chilingarov, 62, trained as an oceanographer and geographer and has participated in Soviet and Russian Arctic and Antarctic programs steadily since the 1960s, earning a Hero of the Soviet Union award. Since 1993, he has been a member of the lower house of the Russian parliament, the State Duma, where he is now one of eight deputy speakers. Chilingarov said he set off from Punta Arenas, Chile, near the southern tip of South America, on Jan. 7 in a Russian Il-76 jet with the dismantled An-3 in the cargo bay. He and his party landed at Patriot Hills in western Antarctica, a common staging ground for private expeditions, and reassembled the An-3.
They left for the South Pole the following day, he said--seven Russians and seven other passengers who had contributed to the air fare. Chilingarov refused to identify the other passengers, but news reports said they included citizens of Ukraine, France, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States whose fares helped pay for the estimated $1-million trip.
The flight lasted about 6 1/2 hours, Chilingarov said. When they arrived at the U.S. Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, they were greeted warmly by the U.S. scientists, presented with certificates commemorating their journey and given a tour of the base. The scientists were "stunned", he said, when Putin phoned to congratulate the group. The Russians planted a Russian flag. From that point, things began to go wrong. And explanations of what happened next begin to diverge.
At the news conference Wednesday, Chilingarov said the major factor in the decision not to fly the An-3 back was the weather, which had taken a sudden turn for the worse.
"I want to emphasize that the plane was in working order", he said.
Some news reports, however, have said that the engine wouldn't restart after it had been shut off for several hours. West, of the U.S. National Science Foundation, said Chilingarov made a request to the State Department asking that his plane be refueled. It wasn't clear if that request meant that the aircraft was low on fuel.
On Jan. 10, West said, a C-130 Hercules operated by the New York Air National Guard picked up Chilingarov and the other Russians and flew them first to the main U.S. base in Antarctica, McMurdo, from which they were later flown to New Zealand The foreign travelers flew back to Patriot Hills with a commercial adventure tour company.
The rescue has been left out of most official Russian reports about the trip. "The expedition fully accomplished its program", the official Itar-Tass news agency quoted Chilingarov as saying. The pro-Kremlin ORT network, which provided Chilingarov with a cameraman, has run a number of reports this week on the trip, not one of which has mentioned the rescue.
Chilingarov said the point of his trip was to raise Russia's profile in the Antarctic and emphasize the international nature of the continent. The United States operates three year-round research bases on the continent, including Amundsen-Scott. The Soviet Union once operated five year-round stations, one of which Chilingarov directed in the 1970s. In the last decade, Russia has had to cut back its presence.
'A Waste of Time'
Valery Lukin, head of the Russian government's Antarctic Expedition, denounced Chilingarov's trip as a stunt.
"There is a good English term for it--adventure tourism", he said by telephone from his office in St. Petersburg. "This is what Chilingarov's trip to the South Pole can be most likely called. From the scientific point of view, the trip was a waste of time." Lukin also said the United States is entirely justified in charging private citizens for rescues. Since the Antarctic Treaty was signed, government expeditions have traditionally extended assistance to each other without regard to cost; the same assistance is not automatically provided to private adventurers.
"All private expeditions are encouraged to be self-sufficient", West said. If the bill ever arrives in his mailbox, Chilingarov said, he will pay for the rescue himself: "If we have any financial obligations, we will meet them". He said he took out insurance for the trip and insisted that the Russian government has not and will not finance the trip in any way. Meanwhile, the An-3 biplane remains parked near the 3-foot-high striped pole that marks the official bottom of the globe, awaiting rescue.
Chilingarov told Komsomolskaya Pravda that he plans to head south again later this month, this time with two monks in his entourage. They will erect a chapel at the pole and sing an Orthodox liturgy.
"In any case", he said, "for the honor of Russia, they will try."
* Alexei V. Kuznetsov of The Times' Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.

IRKUTSK, Jan 16, 2002 (Itar-Tass via COMTEX) -- A book entitled "Siberian-Pole History and Contemporaneity" has been published by the Baikal cultural education society Ognivo. The volume comprises articles by 50 authors, among them 18 scholars from Poland.
Boleslaw Szostakowicz, professor at Irkutsk State University, has told Itar-Tass that the book for the first time fully depicts the history and the present-day state of Polish communities in Siberia.
The first Polish communities appeared in Siberia way back in the 18th century. The most distinguishing mark was left by Poles who had come from the western governorates of the former Russian empire in the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century.
For example, there is the Polish village of Werszina, located 150 km north of Irkutsk. The villagers are the descendants of Poles who had come here of their own accord during the years of the Stolypin reforms. They maintain their language, culture and the customs of their ancestors. The village has a Catholic church and a school.

Главный специалист по изучению Марса профессор Василий Мороз из Российской академии наук полагает, что в настоящее время российско-американская пилотируемая экспедиция на Марс экономически не выгодна

MOSCOW, Jan 17, 2002 (Itar-Tass via COMTEX) -- A major specialist in the study of Mars from the Russian Academy of Sciences said on Thursday that he believed a Russian-U.S. piloted expedition to Mars was at present economically unprofitable.
According to Professor Vasily Moroz, "the launch of an expedition to Mars will at present cost 25 to 30 billion dollars, while the launch of an automatic station of the latest model costs only one billion."
He said that the necessity of a piloted flight to Mars had considerably reduced, as almost all the necessary information could be received from automatically controlled equipment.
Earlier, Russia's Rosaviakosmos aviation and space authority suggested to NASA its scheme of such a launch. Under that scheme, Russia would free of charge provide its booster, while the USA would pay the cost of the launch and the servicing of the space vehicle, Moroz said.
Focusing on the joint use of the International Space Station, the expert said that the ISS could also be used for the assembly and resupply of spaceships flying to Mars.
However, "we have no right to close for good the issue of a man's flight to Mars", Moroz stressed. "A man in the space is in principle not necessary nowadays, but the dispatch of people to Mars may serve a concrete practical aim - a man can be preserved as a specimen in case of a global catastrophe on the Earth", he explained.

В России создана новая уникальная противоракетная система "Панцирь-С1" с оптоэлектронной системой управления

MOSCOW, Jan 16, 2002 (Itar-Tass via COMTEX) -- A unique anti-aircraft missile system Pantsyr-S1 with an opto-electronic control system has been devised in Russia.
This new highly effective weapon has been developed by specialists at the "Instrument-making Design Bureau" State-run unitary enterprise under the direction of Academician Arkady Shipunov, Designer-General and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a Defence Ministry officer told Itar-Tass on Wednesday.
The main design feature of this AA system is a single turret mount which can be positioned on various carriers: wheeled and crawler-mounted vehicles, ships of various classes and be of stationary design as well.
The Pantsyr-S1 is capable of hitting any modern and advanced air attack means (primarily high-precision weapons) at a range of up to 20 kilometres.
In a combat situation, the AA system can be used to hit and destroy ground and seaborne lightly-armoured targets and manpower. It can fire while on the move, from a halt and during short stops.
In its main tactical performance specifications, the Pantsyr-S1 has no analogues in the world. General of the Army Anatoly Kornukov, Commander-in-Chief of Russia's Air Force, has stated that the new weapon will be phased into service with Russian troops in the near future. Weapon developers believe that this AA system can be bought by a wide circle of foreign customers.

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