Март 2006г.

Российская наука и мир (по материалам зарубежной электронной прессы)

CONTENTS / ОГЛАВЛЕНИЕ


• Mammoth is the brother of the Asian elephant, and the African elephant is their grandfather
• Peat Absorbs Oil
• 2005 AAAS ISC Award goes to a team of Russian and American scientists
• The Russians may be winning a new, very "cold war" in Antarctica
• New Skull Analysis Gives Information About Gene Pool
• Le renouveau des réacteurs à neutrons rapides
• InnoCentive signe un accord de partenariat avec l'Institut des problèmes de physique chimique l'Académie des sciences de Russie
• Russian-Hungarian International Nanotechnology Center Foundation
• Director of the Institute of the Earth Crust, SB RAS, asks Putin to protect Baikal
• Incineration as a fuel source
• Protected by the "Phoenix"
• Hydrogen Accumulation
• Greenhouse Theory Smashed by Biggest Stone
• Efimov: obtention d'un nouvel état de la matière!

В рамках Программы Российско-Венгерского сотрудничества в области нанотехнологий будет создан Центр нанотехнологий, который планируется зарегистрировать на территории Венгерской Республики. Деятельность Центра будет заключаться в осуществлении совместных научных и технологических исследований и разработок, включая обмены технологиями, а также совместное использование результатов, полученных при реализации сотрудничества.

On February 28 - March 1 there was an official visit by Russian President Putin to the Hungarian republic accompanied by Chief of Federal Agency for Science and Innovations Sergey Mazurenko. Among many actual investment projects discussed in Hungary, one of the main important issues was collaboration in nanotechnology sphere. As a result of negotiations the Program of Joint Cooperation in Nanotechnology Development was signed. According to this Program the Hungarian Center of Nanotechnology will be founded for realization of combined Russian-Hungary science and technological researches including technologies and now-how exchange as well as joint cooperation results utilization.
The Program was worked out by Russian Federal Agency for Science and Innovations, and it was specially mentioned by it's Mr. Mazurenko that "The world is on the threshold of new industrial revolution which relates for the first round with nanotechnology development. By estimation of leading experts this revolution could be comparable only with transistor and antibiotic invention or with information technologies taken together by its influence on community. In the nearest future we will evaluate countries' economical, social and political level of development by their national nanoindustry evolution."
The Head of Russian Federal Agency for Science and Innovations specially emphasized the NT-MDT company's contribution to Russian nanotechnology development: "Russian scientific centers and companies actively participate in nanotechnologies elaboration and usage. On a base of main innovation project of national importance Russian company NT-MDT developed a full line-up of scanning probe microscopes. Now company has distributors in more then 40 foreign countries."
Evaluating the Program signing there was a conclusion made that "Today in Russia we have very favorable conditions for bankroll attraction into nanotechnology and nanomaterials area, what may give us a boost for world's high technology market gain. The foundation of nanotechnology Center in Hungary is an evident demonstration of our achievements' acknowledgement in Europe."

26 февраля к президенту обратилась группа крупных ученых, представляющих научные институты Сибирского отделения РАН. Письмо на имя Владимира Путина с просьбой не допустить прокладки нефтепровода в 800 метрах от озера Байкал, также подписали 14 тыс. человек.
В редакцию REGNUM поступило открытое письмо директора Института земной коры СО РАН, члена-корреспондента РАН Евгения Склярова президенту России Владимиру Путину в связи с проведением государственной экологической экспертизы (ГЭЭ) материалов проекта первого пускового комплекса трубопроводной системы "Восточная Сибирь - Тихий океан" (ВСТО), разработанного компанией "Транснефть".

REGNUM has received an open letter of the director of the Institute of the Earth's Crust of Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences, correspondent member of RAS Yevgeny Sklyarov to Russian President Vladimir Putin concerning the conduct of a state ecological examination of the Transneft state company's project to build the first launcher of the Eastern Siberia-Pacific Ocean (ESPO) pipeline system.
To remind, Feb 26 a group of big scientists, representing the research companies of the SB RAS sent a letter to President Putin to ask him to protect Lake Baikal from oil population danger. Signing under the letter were also 14,000 citizens. Bellow is the full text of Yevgeny Sklyarov's open letter (translated from Russian).
Once Henry Ford said a now popular phrase - "Ford (car) can have any color as long as it's black." The same is the situation with the laying of the Eastern Siberia-Pacific Ocean oil pipeline. The president has ordered to lay, so we must lay. Nobody objects, but why should the pipeline be laid through the basin of Baikal? Why do all Transneft's scenarios run through Baikal - a world treasure (Ford is only black!)? Aren't there other routes? There are. There is a bypassing route via Lena. Yes, it is longer and may be more expensive, but may be not. The project to lay a pipeline in one of Russia's most seismic areas (10-11 points), across several mountain ranges, will require serious additional security measures. Add permafrost, landslides and other charms of wild nature and you will get a delayed action bomb laid for many years, while low seismic risks in the Lena valley (6-7 points) and relatively flat area fully compensate for the high construction expenses that ensure from the low operation costs. I know what I am talking about, as our institute has high professionals in seismic risk assessment, geo-engineering, hydro-geology, experts who have studied the region for years.
But the point is not even in the economic profit. In our time, we (Russia) proposed including Baikal in the world legacy list and they in UNSECO decided that this unique lake is worth it. This is certainly a national pride, but this is also a responsibility - particularly, for introducing additional (and voluntarily accepted by the very fact of address to UNESCO!) limitations for economic activities around Baikal. And now a pipeline laid right by the lake is a straight and explicit challenge to the world community. And also a signal that Baikal must be moved from the list of "world legacy" to the list of "world legacy in danger." This is nothing but a national shame!
So what is going on around the pipe? In Jan a commission of the State Ecological Inspection rejects the Transneft project. What comes next is an elegant bureaucratic move: the commission is "watered down" with 34 new non-ecologist members, and the new commission approves the project Feb 28. Not unanimously and with no voting by ecologists, seismologists, geo-engineers (Kommersant daily, # 36, 2006). 24 of 89 commissioners were strongly objecting. But the paradox is that those who know how to lay pipelines (and are related to those who will lay) are pro, while those who understand (and realize!) where the facility will be build are strongly contra. Don't they look to you as a team of builders who consists of mutually misunderstanding blind and handless people?
There is already a sad experience of the willful building of a pulp and paper mill on the Baikal shore. There already is one abscess we'll be long unable to heal. And now it turns out that we (ourselves) are causing ourselves a new one?
Mr. Putin, you have ordered to lay the pipeline, but it is actually important where and how to lay! If you can't stop the zeal of officials and businessmen to do the business at any price (we just prefer not to think that statesmen can be short-sighted), then nobody will. And we (Russia) will certainly be ashamed when somebody decides for us that a world treasure is in danger (half the trouble) and will have to invest a whole lot of effort and money to save Baikal when the pipe begins to work.
Director of Institute of Earth Crust of SB RAS
Correspondent member of RAS Yevgeny Sklyarov.

Бытовой мусор, промышленные отходы и тому подобное можно превратить при сжигании в свет и тепло - в соответствии с методикой, которую разработали сотрудники Института проблем химической физики РАН при поддержке Международного научно-технического центра и Российского фонда фундаментальных исследований. Суть разработки состоит в том, чтобы все так называемое псевдотопливо сначала в токе воздуха превратить в газ, а потом этот газ сжечь.

Enormous benefit for humans and without harming the environment can be extracted from domestic waste, old car wheel casings, industrial wastes and even silt, that remain after cleaning sewage outflows. It transpires that all this can successfully be turned into light and heat when incinerated, under methodology, developed by scientists from Chernogolovka in the Moscow Region, staff from the Institute of Problems of Chemical Physics RAS. The scientists were aided by the International Science and Technology Centre and the Russian Fund for Fundamental Research. The research is headed by RAS Corresponding Member Georgi Manelis.
This technology has a rather complicated name - filtration combustion with superadiabatic warm-up. The essence of the development lies in the fact that all of the so-called pseudo-fuel is first transformed to gas in an airflow; then this gas is combusted. As a result we get the same light and heat for which to date it has been necessary to literally let natural gas, coal and oil go up in smoke, fuel reserves which are far from endless in supply.
Externally the main part of the installation is a vertical shaft furnace, filled with these waste products that have to be processed. From below the pipe is blasted with air. This is where the ash is poured in - the mineral residue that does not burn at all. From above, as necessary, new portions of what in a domestic sense you would not call fuel are added into the pipe; these include poor coal, for example, in which there is so little carbon that you cannot make then burn easily.
The particular feature of the installation is that the walls of the shaft furnace, the gasifier, do not allow even a little of the heat obtained from the combustion of the waste to disperse into the surrounding space. From below the front of smouldering rather than burning, air blows heated ash onto the lower sections of the pipe. As a result the temperature of the process becomes pretty high, superadiabatic, meaning it is greater than under regular heating in a closed space. And now it is sufficient for all the compounds which contain carbon atoms to either burn or be subjected to pyrolysis, as if splitting into pieces, which is what happens if there is insufficient oxygen for combustion. The soot from burning car wheel casings that we all know well are indeed the very same products of this pyrolysis; only in the installation devised by the scientists, they enter at the second stage of the reprocessing.
Thus, at the first stage gasification takes place in superadiabatic regime; in other words, the transformation of carbon-containing wastes into so-called generating gas. The molecules that make it up store a fair amount of heat and the non-combustible slag has already poured into the bottom of the furnace. A gas like this will combust wonderfully in a power-generating installation, giving the much needed heat and electricity.
"Our method has very high performance efficiency, almost 95%, and a record high ecological cleanliness", explains Candidate of Physics and Mathematics Valery Steinberg, Head of Department of Combustion and Detonation of the Institute Problems of Chemical Physics RAS, where the basis of the technology was created. "Such incineration, performed in phases, and the high temperatures facilitate the practical suppression of the formation of dioxins. Their content in the furnace gases, without any additional purification, amounts to ten-thousandths of a microgram per cubic metre of smoke; an excellent figure."
What is also surprising is that the method is incredibly non-demanding in terms of the primary fuel. Naturally, the air supply regime and certain other parameters have to be selected for each specific type of waste that predominates in the combustible mass. However, under the new technology, almost everything burns: domestic rubbish, oil slime and oil-refinery wastes, wheel casings, plastic, just as wastes from the coal mining and coal refinery, pulp and paper, chemical and paint-varnish industries, providing us with heat and with light.

Российские ученые разработали устройство для защиты в атмосфере, отравленной токсичными аэрозолями и газами - при пожаре или аварии. Устройство представляет собой нечто среднее между противогазом и пластиковым пакетом и называется "защитный капюшон "Феникс". Выдерживает температуру не меньше 800 градусов, весит чуть больше 150 грамм. Фильтр состоит из нескольких слоев различных сорбентов, рассчитанных на вылавливание и надежную фиксацию самых разных ядовитых газов.

Twenty minutes of grace, the opportunity to save oneself in an atmosphere that has been poisoned with toxic aerosols and gases, is what a device developed by specialists from the Russian company Epicentre Market will give you.
The device is a kind of hybrid of a gas-mask and polythene bag. Not a simple polythene bag, of course, but one supplied with a unique filter that is universal and very effective. During a fire or accident the device dramatically increases one's chances of not suffocating, meaning they will stay alive.
The specialists call this protective hood the "Phoenix", as it withstands temperature of no less than 800 degrees and comes with a filter with a mouth-piece. In its package it looks like a small bag that weighs a little over 150 grams. The filter is comprised of several layers of various sorbents, designed to catch and reliably hold the most varied of poisonous gases, such as the toxic products of combustion, from which people die during fires, or genuine poisonous substances such as chloropicrin and phosgene.
The authors tested their device in a special test laboratory of the Military University of Radiation, Chemical and Biological Protection. It was learnt that the hood is indeed able to protect a human from several tens of harmful or even fatal hazardous vapours and gases.
The entire device is more alike a clear plastic bag which, in case of danger, should be placed over the head. You breathe with the mouth through a filter that can withstand temperature up to 450 degrees. The bag will fit a head of almost any size (for children the hood is smaller), with any hairstyle, spectacles or beard. The plastic does not mist over from breathing, so everything around will be visible. Unfortunately, the operating time of this wonderful life-saving device is limited, as the capacity of the sorbent is restricted. But 20 minutes of comparatively safe air to breathe is what is guaranteed.

Ученые из Академии перспективных технологий (Москва) разработали и запатентовали устройства для хранения водорода. Это аккумуляторы на основе микропористых структур, прежде всего микросфер и капилляров. Несмотря на кажущиеся изящество и хрупкость своей "начинки", устройство это прочно и надежно удерживает много водорода в маленьком объеме.

The hydrogen storage devices developed and patented by the scientists of the Academy of Advanced Technologies (Moscow) break all records. These are hydrogen accumulators based on microporous structures, first of all - microspheres and capillaries. Despite seeming elegance and fragility of its "filling", the device strongly and safely retains a lot of hydrogen in a small volume. A lot of hydrogen means more than 45 grams per litre. By the way, this figure is planned by the US Department of Energy only for 2010.
These accumulators' principle of operation was described by the author A. Chabak, Doctor of Science (Engineering) at the recent international forum "Hydrogen Technologies for Power Generation" in Moscow. Speaking simplistically, these devices operate as follows.
The covering balloon is filled with some microporous structure. These can be glass microspheres or thin capillaries made of special lightweight and durable plastics, for example, of polymers based on poly-p-phenyleneterephthalamide, better known as aramid, terlon, kevlar. Microspheres and capillaries are hollow inside, and on the outside, they are fastened to each other with the help of a current conducting material. This can be metal, graphite or conductive adhesive.
First, the balloon and its content are heated rather heavily and filled with hydrogen under pressure. Hydrogen is penetrating through glass and plastic walls inside spheres and capillaries, filling them up. Then the device is cooled off, and the precious gas remains in the cold trap - spherules or capillaries. Of course, part of hydrogen also remains inside the balloon, in the space between microspheres.
Now, to obtain hydrogen, these microcontainers should simply be heated. To this end, it is sufficient to pass current through the material fastening capillaries or spherules. Along with that, the entire microstructure would get warm, and hydrogen will be able to "leak" outside the microcontainers. First, it would leak into the internal space of the balloon, and from it - directly to the engine. As a result, such accumulator allows at any time to feed hydrogen from a peculiar buffer capacity - space between microspheres. Heating allows to "feed" into this capacity if required. Other technologies of hydrogen filling and extracting from microcontainers are also being developed.
According to the authors, such accumulator cartridges can be installed, for example, into containers of 20x20 centimeters in size and 1 meter long, 16 pieces per each container. Three containers of this kind would find room for 4.3 to 6.35 kilograms of hydrogen. It is quite safe to keep hydrogen in these containers. In contrast to balloons, where all of the gas is stored in a single common volume (and if it explodes - all of it would blow up at once), in this case, hydrogen is distributed among multiple smallest volumes, and the explosion, at least a powerful one, is practically excluded. This is of no small importance, particularly, in case of hydrogen.

На встрече учёных в университете Лестера (University of Leicester) Владимир Шайдуров, глава Института вычислительного моделирования СО РАН, представил новую теорию глобального потепления. По расчётам Шайдурова, на климат Земли гораздо больше влияет изменение баланса воды в верхних слоях атмосферы, нежели все парниковые газы, вместе взятые. Согласно этой теории водный баланс серьезно нарушился между 1906 и 1909 годами, после того, как в атмосфере взорвался метеорит. Тот самый - Тунгусский.

A new theory to explain global warming was revealed at a meeting at the University of Leicester (UK) and is being considered for publication in the journal "Science First Hand". The controversial theory has nothing to do with burning fossil fuels and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.
According to Vladimir Shaidurov of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the apparent rise in average global temperature recorded by scientists over the last hundred years or so could be due to atmospheric changes that are not connected to human emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of natural gas and oil. Shaidurov explained how changes in the amount of ice crystals at high altitude could damage the layer of thin, high altitude clouds found in the mesosphere that reduce the amount of warming solar radiation reaching the earth's surface.
Shaidurov has used a detailed analysis of the mean temperature change by year for the last 140 years and explains that there was a slight decrease in temperature until the early twentieth century. This flies in the face of current global warming theories that blame a rise in temperature on rising carbon dioxide emissions since the start of the industrial revolution. Shaidurov, however, suggests that the rise, which began between 1906 and 1909, could have had a very different cause, which he believes was the massive Tunguska Event, which rocked a remote part of Siberia, northwest of Lake Baikal on the 30th June 1908.
The Tunguska Event, sometimes known as the Tungus Meteorite is thought to have resulted from an asteroid or comet entering the earth's atmosphere and exploding. The event released as much energy as fifteen one-megaton atomic bombs. As well as blasting an enormous amount of dust into the atmosphere, felling 60 million trees over an area of more than 2000 square kilometres. Shaidurov suggests that this explosion would have caused "considerable stirring of the high layers of atmosphere and change its structure". Such meteoric disruption was the trigger for the subsequent rise in global temperatures.
Global warming is thought to be caused by the "greenhouse effect". Energy from the sun reaches the earth's surface and warms it, without the greenhouse effect most of this energy is then lost as the heat radiates back into space. However, the presence of so-called greenhouse gases at high altitude absorb much of this energy and then radiate a proportion back towards the earth's surface. Causing temperatures to rise.
Many natural gases and some of those released by conventional power stations, vehicle and aircraft exhausts act as greenhouse gases. Carbon dioxide, natural gas, or methane, and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are all potent greenhouse gases. Carbon dioxide and methane are found naturally in the atmosphere, but it is the gradual rise in levels of these gases since the industrial revolution, and in particular the beginning of the twentieth century, that scientists have blamed for the gradual rise in recorded global temperature. Attempts to reverse global warming, such as the Kyoto Protocol, have centred on controlling and even reducing CO₂ emissions.
However, the most potent greenhouse gas is water, explains Shaidurov and it is this compound on which his study focuses. According to Shaidurov, only small changes in the atmospheric levels of water, in the form of vapour and ice crystals can contribute to significant changes to the temperature of the earth's surface, which far outweighs the effects of carbon dioxide and other gases released by human activities. Just a rise of 1% of water vapour could raise the global average temperature of Earth's surface more then 4 degrees Celsius.
The role of water vapour in controlling our planet's temperature was hinted at almost 150 years ago by Irish scientist John Tyndall. Tyndall, who also provided an explanation as to why the sky is blue, explained the problem: "The strongest radiant heat absorber, is the most important gas controlling Earth's temperature. Without water vapour, he wrote, the Earth's surface would be 'held fast in the iron grip of frost'." Thin clouds at high altitude allow sunlight to reach the earth's surface, but reflect back radiated heat, acting as an insulating greenhouse layer.
Water vapour levels are even less within our control than CO₂ levels. According to Andrew E. Dessler of the Texas A & M University writing in 'The Science and Politics of Global Climate Change', "Human activities do not control all greenhouse gases, however. The most powerful greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is water vapour", he says, "Human activities have little direct control over its atmospheric abundance, which is controlled instead by the worldwide balance between evaporation from the oceans and precipitation."
As such, Shaidurov has concluded that only an enormous natural phenomenon, such as an asteroid or comet impact or airburst, could seriously disturb atmospheric water levels, destroying persistent so-called 'silver', or noctilucent, clouds composed of ice crystals in the high altitude mesosphere (50 to 85km). The Tunguska Event was just such an event, and coincides with the period of time during which global temperatures appear to have been rising the most steadily - the twentieth century. There are many hypothetical mechanisms of how this mesosphere catastrophe might have occurred, and future research is needed to provide a definitive answer.
Professor Vladimir Shaidurov is an expert in Numerical Analysis and Mathematical Modelling, and the Corresponding member of Russian Academy of Sciences. For development of multigrid methods he achieved the highest Russian prize in science (together with Profs Fedorenko and Bachvalov) - the State Prize (2004). He visited University of Leicester in April 2005.
Shaidurov's paper "Atmospheric hypotheses of Earth's global warming" is under consideration for publication in the journal "Science First Hand", Published by Russian Academy of Sciences (Editor-in-Chief, Acad. Dobretsov, Vice-President Russian Academy of Sciences, President of Siberian Branch RAS). A preprint is available online at http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0510042 which was published originally as University of Leicester Technical Report No. MA-05-15.

Физики впервые смогли получить предсказанное еще в 1970 году советским ученым Виталием Ефимовым состояние вещества, которое называют "три мушкетера". При температуре, близкой к абсолютному нулю, три атома цезия ведут себя как единое целое, образуя так называемые кольца Борромео - три кольца, продетые друг в друга. При перемещении одного атома перемещаются и два других, при попытке отделить один элемент, распадается вся система.

Une équipe internationale de physiciens rapporte dans l'édition courante du journal Nature avoir converti trois atomes ordinaires en un nouvel état de la matière, donnant ainsi vie au concept défendu dès les années 70 par le scientifique russe Vitaly Efimov. Dans cette configuration, les atomes se comportent comme les Trois Mousquetaires, avec cette devise : "Un pour tous, tous pour un" !
Dans ce nouvel état de la matière, les atomes se repoussent deux à deux, mais s'attirent lorsqu'ils sont considérés trois par trois. L'expérience décrite dans l'article de Nature, et menée par l'équipe de Rudi Grimm (Innsbruck), a permis aux physiciens d'observer pour la première fois un nuage d'Efimov. Celui-ci a été obtenu dans une chambre à vide, à une température flirtant avec le milliardième de degré au-dessus du zéro absolu.
Dans ce nouvel état de la matière, les atomes adoptent la forme d'anneaux de Borromée, des symboles composés d'un entrelacs de trois cercles, qui tirent leur nom d'une célèbre famille de princes italiens de la Renaissance. "Ce symbole signifie que les trois objets sont entrelacés: si vous prenez l'un d'entre eux, les autres suivront." Par contre, aucun des couples d'anneaux ne s'interpénètre, et donc, "si vous sectionnez l'un des objets, l'ensemble se disjoint" explique Chin, auteur principal de l'article de Nature. Un comportement digne des Trois Mousquetaires !
L'expérience menée dans le laboratoire de Grimm, à Innsbruck, a permis à trois atomes de césium de former un anneau de Borromée, et d'atteindre l'état d'Efimov. Cependant, en théorie, cet état de la matière pourrait être obtenu à partir de n'importe quel groupe de trois atomes, en le soumettant à des températures ultra froides.
Maintenant que l'état d'Efimov a été obtenu, les scientifiques comptent étudier ses propriétés, et essayer de l'apprivoiser. Ainsi, leur objectif est à présent d'avoir un contrôle total sur les atomes au cours de l'expérience, de les faire passer à l'état d'Efimov, puis de les faire revenir à l'état "ordinaire". Reste à savoir si les Trois Mousquetaires atomiques ne se montreront pas aussi réticents que les personnages épiques d'Alexandre Dumas!

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