Март 2003г.

Российская наука и мир (по материалам зарубежной электронной прессы)

CONTENTS / ОГЛАВЛЕНИЕ


• State Council, Security Council to discuss science situation
• A Challenge to the World's Scientists
• The Global Energy Foundation organized the Nobel Laureates Meeting «Sciences and mankind progress» in St. Petersburg
• InnoCentive to Host Global Conference at Moscow State University Featuring More than 600 World-Class Scientists
• An Eternal Fluorescent Protein?
• U.S. Project Prometheus to Gain Russian Nuclear Rocket Fuels
• Russians, Ukranians visit Permian Basin to learn energy industry developments from the experts
• New battles loom over Russia's great lake
• Reducing the Nuclear Threat
• CeBIT America Sets Stage for U.S. Alliances with the Russian Technology Community
• Nuclear Solutions, Inc. Opens Moscow Office
• Unusual robot awaits export to U.S.
• Drought busters
• U.S., Russia Quietly Testing Dirty Bombs
• Have No Fear, a Tsunami Will Not Appear
• A Rocket Ride Up the Corporate Ladder
• Local ecological catastrophe
• Women are from Venus but Men are to Land on Mars, say Russians

WASHINGTON, Mar 14, 2003 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Nuclear Solutions, Inc. (OTCBB:NSOL) today announced the opening of its new office in Moscow, Russia. This expansion will facilitate Nuclear Solutions' efforts to establish business, trade and technology development ventures in collaboration with Russian scientists and research institutions.
Nuclear Solutions, based in Washington, D.C., will work with private companies and National Laboratories in Russia to evaluate the viability of various technologies for product development and commercialization. Nuclear Solutions is establishing a network of prominent Russian scientists to advise the company in assessing technology opportunities.
"As Nuclear Solutions explored opportunities for business expansion, we immediately recognized the incredible scientific talent, skills and experience that is available in Russia," said Patrick Herda, Director of Business Development for Nuclear Solutions, Inc. "We also realized the commercialization potential that exists by combining our company's expertise in nuclear technologies with the vast knowledge base of Russia's scientific community."
Herda noted that Nuclear Solutions has two primary goals for its presence in Russia: First, the company will seek commercial opportunities that will emerge from the integration of processes which have been developed within the Russian scientific community. Second, Nuclear Solutions will seek individuals and organizations in Russia that can further advance the firm's own concepts and technologies.
Based on the background and qualifications of its Moscow personnel, Nuclear Solutions has a significant advantage in developing, negotiating and completing projects between Western and Russian entities. With on-site personnel who have experience in the Russian marketplace, Nuclear Solutions can expand its scientific expertise and global reach, enhance its ability to identify and develop viable technologies, and leverage opportunities for strategic alliances and joint ventures.
Nuclear Solutions, Inc. is dedicated to developing advanced nuclear technologies and solutions for the environmental, commercial nuclear and defense industries. The company's mission is to develop underlying technologies that empower industry partners to address outstanding issues more efficiently and to provide safe, new options in nuclear technology.

Vladivostok scientists say they have built an advanced underwater research vessel for a U.S. institute but haven't been able to deliver it to the customer for two years. The underwater robot possesses features so unusual that Russian federal agencies are still deciding whether to allow its export, said Yuri Sebto, scientific secretary for Vladivostok's Institute of Marine Technology Problems that created the machine. New Hampshire Autonomous Undersea Systems Institute paid the Russian partner several tens of thousands of dollars for the work, he added.
In an interview with the Vladivostok News on Wednesday, he said that unlike other devices of its kind, the robot can operate independently for months using solar powered batteries to recharge. Other such underwater vessels use power supplies from research ships that have to accompany them. Therefore, the new research robot developed in Vladivostok will be cheaper to use, Sebto said.
The robot is a two-meter cylinder-shaped unmanned vehicle powered by two solar panels. According to Sebto, it will be used to collect samples of ocean water throughout the night. During the daytime it will resurface to recharge.
While on the surface, it will be able to update its location using a Global Positioning System, receive commands from a remote user and offload data to a remote terminal.
On completing the work on the robot the Vladivostok institute, which is part of the Russian Academy of Sciences, found that a license to take it out of the country was hard to get. The robot's ability to float independently for a long period caused officials in Moscow to scrutinize whether it could be used for military purposes. The process has now taken two years, but it has shown progress, Sebto said.
Decision making in the field of technology export involves agencies such as the Defense Ministry and the Federal Security Service.

Ionogenics fashions itself a latter-day rainmaker -- but skeptics question its process of radiating electricity into the air.

If a radical technology is supposed to look radical, then Boston-based Ionogenics has a problem. Its new device is devoid of geeky eye candy. It's just a circle of steel poles set into the earth, with wires connecting them to each other and to another pole at the center of the circle. But Ionogenics officials say that this simple device can fulfill one of humankind's most persistent longings. They say this odd-looking machine will make the heavens open and pour forth moisture on the parched earth. Ionogenics a privately held company launched this month, is in the weather modification business. More specifically, they're rainmakers. The very word ''rainmaking'' calls up old-movie images of con artists and snake-oil salesmen, so it's no surprise that Ionogenics president Phillip Kauffman strives to downplay expectations for his product. He stresses that you can't just turn on an Ionogenics machine and then grab your umbrella.
"I don't think we'll ever be at a point where we can throw a switch" and produce rain, Kauffman says.
But he does say that steady use of the system leads to significantly larger amounts of rain. The technology has been on trial in various parts of Mexico since 1999, and Kauffman says it's produced about twice the normal annual rainfall in these areas. These results so impressed Kauffman, a former marketing executive at Digital Equipment Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co., that he invested his own money to launch Ionogenics. If the Mexican test results hold up, Ionogenics technology could offer a simple way to wring more water out of the sky. That could ease the threat of drought, enable the farming of once-barren land. It could even help stifle forest fires.
All this, Kauffman says, by simply radiating electricity into the air.
When a lightning bolt cracks across the sky, the surrounding air molecules are ionized - that is, they pick up a positive or negative electrical charge. And these ions can come in handy if it's rain you want.
That's because rain doesn't just happen by chance. Like steam on a bathroom mirror, water vapor in the atmosphere needs something to cling to in order to condense into raindrops. These are called condensation nuclei. Usually, they're dust particles. And ever since the 1940s, scientists have sprayed clouds with silver iodide particles to create artificial nuclei. This process, known as "cloud seeding," is commonplace in many drought-stricken areas of the United States, even though scientists are uncertain whether it actually works.
Ionogenics takes a different tack, though its system also has its skeptics. Its technology is based on work done by Lev Pokhmelnykh, the company's vice president of research and development, during his days as a physicist in Moscow. Pokhmelnykh had the idea that ionized air molecules can act as condensation nuclei.
The Ionogenics system uses an electric generator to create a constant flow of current through its circular grid of wires. This current, in turn, ionizes millions of air molecules, which are supposed to go wafting into the sky, where they attract water molecules that eventually develop into raindrops. Each ionizer takes up nine acres of space, and is supposed to boost rainfall within a radius of 25 miles.
The trick is controling the supply of ionized air molecules. Add enough, and water molecules start to clump together into raindrops. But add too many and the molecules become too dispersed to form the right-sized drops and the water just hangs there like a very fine mist. The science comes in figuring out how much ionized air to unleash.
"Building these systems is trivial," said Kauffman. "Operating these systems is very, very complicated."
But Gianfranco Bisiacchi, Ionogenics' director of operations and Kauffman's brother-in-law, says they're getting the hang of it. Bisiacchi, former director of the National University of Mexico's Space Research and Development Program, began working with Pokhmelnykh when the Russian scientist moved to Mexico three years ago With funding from the university and the Mexican government, Pokhmelnykh and Bisiacchi set up a network of 13 atmospheric ionizers dotting six Mexican states. The results, say Bisiacchi, is a marked increase in rain wherever the ionizers are used.
Bisiacchi admits that it's extremely difficult to prove that the ionizers are the reason for the increase. The tests cover such a short period of time that some natural phenomenon could also explain the difference.
"I am trying to be as cool and as impartial as I can," said Bisiacchi, "but of course I am very interested in this project." Still, Bisiacchi stands by his estimate that the ionizers have increased rain "by something on the order of 30 to 50 percent."
Brian Tinsley, professor of space science at the University of Texas at Dallas, says he's skeptical about the Ionogenics system. Tinsley hasn't studied the Ionogenics process, but he is a student of atmospheric ionization caused by cosmic radiation. He believes that this ionization can affect the weather, but says scientists are a long way from understanding how.
"We think there's some effect there, but the details are still not fully understood," says Tinsley. As a result, he doubts that the Ionogenics scientists can fine-tune atmospheric ionization to produce rain by request. "I wouldn't think these people would be very likely to have a scientifically valid approach," he says.
Ionogenics can expect a skeptical reception from scientists. After all, cloud seeding has been in use since the 1940s, and experts still argue over whether it works. The problem is that you can't test a weather machine in a lab, under controlled conditions. You can only do it in the real world. And real-world weather is so complex that it's almost impossible to know whether that much-needed thunderstorm was caused by human technology, or would have happened anyhow. "That is the biggest problem in the field, that you don't have a controlled experiment," said Earle Williams, a physical meteorologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Nature does not put that on a plate for us." Ionogenics' main competitors - companies that use silver iodide cloud-seeding techniques - suffer from the same disadvantage. That hasn't prevented 10 states in the Western United States from spending millions on cloud seeding in an effort to whip up more rain, or even snow. Colorado is spending $1 million this winter on cloud seeding in an effort to keep its ski resorts snowed under. Sure enough, there's more snow on the ground this year, even though Brant Foote, a weather modification expert at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, says there's no proof that cloud seeding is the reason.
Kauffman and his colleagues at Ionogenics think they can get a foothold in the business if they simply keep demonstrating consistently larger rainfalls in areas that use their system. People will gain confidence in the system and begin to apply it. Within three years, Kauffman said, he hopes to be generating $5 million to $10 million in revenues, rising into the hundreds of millions later in the decade.
Kauffman foresees a variety of likely buyers for his ionizers, which will cost $250,000 for a one-year lease. Farmers should be interested, as well as crop insurance companies looking to save on payouts of drought insurance and government agencies trying to fend off forest fires by keeping the trees damp. And since adding too many ions to the atmosphere reduces rain, Kauffman foresees a market in areas plagued by flooding.
His colleague Bisiacchi has an even grander vision. "One of my dreams is some time to be able to go to Africa and stop the advance of the Sahara desert," he said. If the Ionogenics system really can deliver rain, he believes, it could conceivably alter the geography of the planet.

В пустыне Нью-Мехико и Уральских горах, американские и российские специалисты проводили опыты с "грязными бомбами " чтобы проверить, каким образом ядерное оружие могло бы действовать на окружающую среду в случае его применения террористами.
На трехдневной конференции, которая закончилась в Вене, около 600 ученых, правительственных чиновников и специалистов обсуждали вопросы защиты от радиоизотопов при использовании ядерного оружия

VIENNA, Austria -- In New Mexico's desert and the Ural Mountains, U.S. and Russian experts are experimenting with simulated "dirty bombs" to see how such radiation weapons and potential terrorist tools might work, officials of the two countries say.
It's a sensitive area in which some information is withheld to keep clues to bomb-building out of terrorists' hands. But American and Russian specialists attending a global conference on dirty bombs disclosed some aspects of recent testing to a reporter because, as a high-ranking U.S. official said, the public should know everything is being done to deal with the threat.
These so-called RDDs, for radiological dispersal devices, haven't made an appearance yet, but the al-Qaida terrorist network, for one, is reported to have shown a serious interest in developing them.
Dirty bombs would combine conventional explosives with strontium, cesium or some other highly radioactive isotope used for such purposes as cancer radiotherapy, searching for oil deposits and sterilizing food.
They wouldn't cause the immediate mass casualties or devastation of nuclear weapons, but they are much simpler to make and the contamination and fear of radiation poisoning could cause general panic and shut down sections of cities for years.
Some 600 scientists, government officials and others at the three-day conference that ended Thursday focused on tightening protection of radioisotopes in use worldwide, stopping illicit trafficking and planning emergency responses to such attacks.
Others, meanwhile, are trying to learn how a dirty bomb would behave if detonated.
For the past six months teams at the U.S. Energy Department's Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico have been experimenting with basic designs of RDDs, said the U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Using materials that simulate the characteristics of the radioisotopes - except for the radioactivity - they have been exploding the devices to test the reach of the radiation effect as a result of blast and wind, he said.
Earlier computer modeling allows the testers to assess likely levels of radiation in various areas as a result of the blasts.
Formal results from the U.S. Defense Department tests haven't reached Washington yet. But researchers already know some things, such as that cesium chloride powder, used in large amounts in food irradiators and some older medical devices, is probably the material best suited for dirty bombs. "It's very radioactive, and the powder disperses well," the official said.
He said the tests will be stepped up to the level of radiothermal generators - devices packed with large amounts of isotopes, developed by the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War to power long-life aviation beacons and other remotely installed military equipment. Such generators often hold 40,000 curies - the basic measure of radioactivity - in strontium or other material. Experts say even 1,000 curies might make an effective dirty bomb. "A Russian admiral told us there have been many attempted thefts of RTGs reported," the U.S. official said, adding that apparently none was successful.
A Russian scientist, Alexander Agapov, told the Vienna conference it's possible 900 such devices were deployed by the old Soviet military, many with radio beacons or small lighthouses along Russia's Arctic fringe. Retrieving and securing that radioactive material will be a major challenge.
In his slide presentation, Agapov, safety chief for the Nuclear Power Ministry, described Russian computer simulations of dirty-bomb events. In a sign of the sensitivity, however, he blocked out the amounts of TNT and radioisotope used for simulated weapons.
He later told a reporter the Russians determined that radioactive particles from an explosion do not disperse in an oval pattern following wind direction, as usually theorized, but in a much more irregular pattern affected by crosscurrents.

Old research that has recently surfaced eases worries that a relatively small extraterrestrial impactor could cause a devastating tsunami.

For the past decade, many scientists have worried that an asteroid or comet could slam into one of Earth's oceans and create a huge tsunami that would destroy coastal communities. While kilometer-sized impactors could pose such a threat, a recently declassified government defense study suggests objects a few hundred meters wide do not.
"I think it is currently an overrated hazard," University of Arizona planetary scientist H. Jay Melosh stated Monday at the 34th Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference in Texas. Melosh explained that the concern first arose at a 1993 conference in Arizona discussing the hazards of comets and asteroids, where scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory proposed that ocean-impacting objects as small as 100 meters in diameter could produce waves tens or hundreds of meters high a thousand kilometers away. While other researchers have repeated the warnings of impact-induced tsunamis and agree that objects a kilometer in size or larger are a major worry, Melosh has remained skeptical about the tsunami-creating capabilities of smaller objects. He presented his position at a 1995 conference and afterward was approached by tsunami expert William Van Dorn. In 1968, Van Dorn told Melosh, the U.S. Office of Naval Research asked him to summarize decades of research into the wave hazards induced by TNT or nuclear explosions in the ocean. However, the details of his work were still classified at the time.
Late last year, Melosh and some colleagues began a hunt for Van Dorn's report. An Internet search provided them with the title, "Handbook on Explosion-Generated Water Waves," and a University of Arizona librarian helped the team track down a copy at a college library in San Diego.
The 173-page report is based on data from actual nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll and TNT tests at California's Mono Lake. In it, Van Dorn concludes that "no catastrophe or damage by flooding could result from explosion waves" and wrote in the manuscript that "this goes for bolide impacts, too," said Melosh. According to Melosh, one of Van Dorn's most important points is that explosions produce waves with periods unlike that for any other type of wave we're familiar with. Storm waves that surfers ride have periods from 5 to 20 seconds, while earthquake-induced tsunamis have periods of 100 seconds to an hour. Explosion waves have periods that are in between. Thus, Melosh writes in a conference abstract, "our intuition from ordinary surf or earthquake tsunami is not a good guide to the behavior of these waves."
Van Dorn also reported that large impact-generated waves would break on the continental shelf. "They don't get to shore," Melosh emphasized Monday. However, Melosh added that parts of Van Dorn's report seem to be missing because there isn't a full explanation behind this "Van Dorn effect," as it's called in the defense community.
For Melosh, these and other points in the Van Dorn report should dispel worries that impactors only a few hundred of meters wide could cause coastal devastation for humanity. The hazard, he said, "is probably greatly exaggerated," and that "we are not looking at a major hazard" from such small impacts.
Melosh continued to downplay impact-related doomsday scenarios in a second talk (given on behalf of his collaborator, Russian scientist Boris Ivanoff, who was unable to obtain a visa for this week's conference). In this talk, the Arizona scientist stated that impacts do not initiate volcanic eruptions, as has been postulated by many since the 1960s. A previous argument was that a large object could strike a "hot spot" on Earth that was on the verge of volcanism. "The trouble is that large impactors are rare and hot spots are not that prevalent," Melosh said. "So there are not a lot of hot spots waiting to be hit and not a lot of impactors waiting to hit them." Therefore, the probability of this kind of impact-induced volcanism is quite low, he concluded.

Yevgeny Novitsky wanted to be a cosmonaut. In pursuit of this dream, he entered one of the most highly regarded technical institutes in the Soviet Union in 1979.
Almost two decades later he did reach galactic heights -- of business, that is. During the country's heady days of political and economic transition, his interests migrated away from science and he climbed the corporate ladder, becoming president of AFK Sistema in 1995.
In addition to being one of Russia's top conglomerates, Sistema is also poised to retake a controlling stake in Mobile TeleSystems, the largest mobile operator in Eastern Europe. Indirectly, it was science that led him into business.
After graduating from Moscow's Bauman Technical University with a degree in aerospace engineering in 1985, 28-year-old Novitsky started a small software company with few of his classmates. This was back during perestroika and the government was doing all it could to promote such kooperativnoye dvizheniye, or small-business development initiatives.
"This was how my transformation from a scientist into a businessman began," Novitsky says. "It was a different life -- with more money than before, more interesting and eventful. Although I liked working in science, doing business was more appealing to me. I met more people, and I could have a role in more things."
Demonstrating his two-pronged interest, Novitsky went on to complete a three-year graduate program in aerospace engineering at Bauman University in 1989 and promptly enrolled in a year-long business program at the Moscow State Foreign Relations Institute.
"It's a scientific rule, you have to learn all the information about a certain field to understand the process," he says. "I went to business school to understand business as a process."
After wrapping up studies in 1990, Novitsky became manager of a computer assembly company owned by electronics-maker Kvant in the Moscow suburb of Zelenograd.
The 1990s were an exciting time for businessmen, Novitsky says. "You didn't have the settled [business] practices [that you have in the West], where everything is understandable. Everyone thought up his own way to do business."
Novitsky was put at the helm of a fledgling Sistema in 1995 by its chairman Vladimir Yevtushenkov, just three days after the two met.
In forging strategies for the business, his scientific background proved valuable, he says. "People with a technical degree have their mind structured properly, and they think logically." The same laws apply to science and business, and "that helps."
"You always need to monitor whether you're moving in the right direction, along the vector you had planned. That's when you need feedback." Novitsky looks to the profit margin of Sistema's many companies to know whether the holding is on the right track.
"My biggest responsibility is to make sure all our 70,000 employees get their salaries on time," he says. "The second responsibility I have is to shareholders, to make sure the business is developing successfully. And my third responsibility is to myself, to make sure things are going well so that I'm not a loser in my own eyes."
Novitsky says his leadership style involves setting targets, rather than tasks for his staff. "It's simpler to manage people by setting goals for them and letting them decide how they're going to reach those goals."
Novitsky's strategic goal is to further diversify Sistema's holdings from its concentration on telecom companies.
Its key asset is its 40.4 percent stake in cellular operator MTS, a company it owned in partnership with Deutsche Telekom. In March, the ailing German firm offered Sistema the chance to buy back 10 percent of the company, which would restore its controlling stake in the cash-generative firm, one of only a handful of Russian firms to earn a U.S. listing.
Besides MTS, Sistema holds shares in fixed-phoneline giant Moscow City Telephone Network as well as several leading alternative telecoms operators.
"The main thing is to balance our portfolio so that we don't have one key business, but two or three," he says. Heading a business, he says, "is like steering a plane on the right course." "In reaching a balance, we don't want to weaken our telecom businesses, but we want to develop our high-technology and insurance businesses so that they are equally strong," he says.
Sistema owns another holding called KNTs, which unites several companies that produce microchips, electronic equipment and home appliances. Sistema also owns Rosno insurance company together with Germany's Allianz AG.
Though he calls work his hobby, in his free time he works on improving his English and he reads up on the Kaplan-Norton "balanced scorecard "management method. He is also in the midst of writing a doctoral dissertation on strategic management, which he plans to defend at the Russian Academy of Sciences.
"It's important to be able to learn at any point of your career," he says.

MOSCOW, March 22 - The war in Iraq is fraught with a local ecological catastrophe because of the burning oil, said partakers in a Friday roundtable meeting in Moscow.
Burning oil wells will discharge poisonous substances and smoke into the atmosphere, chief scientist of the Russian academy of science's computer center Alexander Tarko said.
That will not affect much the neighbors of Iraq, while the Iraqi ecological situation will normalize in four to five years. If all the extracted oil of Iraq burns down, the discharge of carbonic acid gas into the atmosphere will thrice exceed the international industrial discharge of one year.
Director of the Russian academy of sciences' institute of geo-ecology Viktor Osipov thinks that the oil burning after effects may influence neighbor countries. Scientists believe that there will hardly be a harmful impact on Russia.

Female discrimination has crept-up into plans for a three-year mission to put the first humans on Mars. Russian space officials seek to bar women from the two-year, multi-million mile trek from Earth orbit to set the first human foot on Mars.
Russian space official Anatoly Grigoryev said there would be four or five people going: a commander, a pilot, a doctor and scientists and could take place between 2015-2020. He cited many problems to be sorted-out. Among them would be crew composition.
A single-sex crew is likely to be more "serene" with a lower probability of conflicts. The probability is low that it would be an all female Russian crew, he animated.
Combining men and women in the crews could lead to "space brawls" during the two-year trip. Thre crew will have to be screened more thoroughly to see how they would cope with being so far away from Earth, living closely with several others for so long.
"Everything may happen within two years of the flight: from appendix problems to a brawl," says Grigoryev, Director of the Institute of Medical and Biological Problems.
The Russian space program is currently underfunded and cash starved as recently evidenced by the sale of a seat to American millionaire Dennis Tito for $20-million dollars. Yet, Grigoryev points out that the Russian economy will not remain flat and plans are being made for a Russian manned Mars mission now.
"The manned flight to Mars is a super-task," says Dr Grigoryev, "but it is quite workable technically. Certainly, there are still details to be worked on for the next few years."
The Russian plan would consist of a number of rocket launches to assemble a large spacecraft in Earth-orbit. It would take nine months to travel to Mars where a small landing craft would touch down on the Red Planet.
After three months on the surface, there would be another nine-month trek back.
"The food question is serious," Dr Grigoryev says. "A food reserve for two years will take up too much space, so it cannot be carried from Earth. The cosmonauts will have to grow their own food."
To this end, the Institute for Medical and Biological Problems has conducted a series of experiments on the now defunct Mir space station to raise food.
But those experiments only raised quails and grew wheat. Much more work on providing food in space needs to be done.
NASA Administaror Dan Goldin recently told a scientic conference at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. that the United States will be prepared to lead a human mission to Mars before 2020.
The probablity that an all-male U.S. or European crew to Mars is low. NASA has several women among its active astronaut roster. Many are well qualified scientists in their own right. Many could serve a mission well on a two-year trek to Mars. Women are being included in long-duration studies for such a Mars trek in the second or third decade of the 21st Century.
American astronaut Susan Helms is currenlty living aboard the International Space Station with two men for a long duration, four-month stay. Women have become regular participants among the United States Space Shuttle crews since Sally Ride was launched aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger in the 1980's.
Science fiction writer and NASA Glenn Research Center scientist Geoffrey Landis says, "an all-woman crew could be the ideal personnel for a Mars mission." He notes that women on average are lighter and smaller than men and use less water, food, air, and living space. This means that a Mars spaceship with an all-female crew can be less massive than one with an all-male crew. This would in turn reduce the amount of material that must be launched from Earth, cutting Mars expedition launch costs.
The debate between and among men and women will continue on Earth for some time before the first human mission is launched.

Начало дайджеста за МАРТ 2003 года (часть 1)

предыдущий месяц

1998-2003

следующий месяц