Ученые Института катализа им. Г.К.Борескова предложили технологию, с помощью которой можно получить из метана "чистый" водород и углеродные нанонити.

Des scientifiques de l'Institut de catalyse Boreskov de Novossibirsk (Russie), affilié à l'Académie russe des sciences, ont élaboré une nouvelle méthode de synthèse d'hydrogène pur à partir du méthane. Le principe d'obtention repose sur le phénomène de dissociation catalytique du méthane à une température de 750°C.
La dissociation catalytique se fait à l'aide d'un catalyseur actif et stable contenant des nano-cristaux hautement dispersifs liquides Fe-Ni-Cu et des particules d'oxyde d'aluminium. Ces cristaux Fe-Ni-Cu permettent alors de provoquer une rupture des liaisons entre les atomes de carbone et d'hydrogène dans les molécules de méthane. Le processus de décomposition du méthane dépend aussi des faces de ces cristaux sur lesquels des amas de carbone dissocié conforme à une structure de graphite s'accumulent.
Ce nouveau procédé présente des atouts uniques, notamment du fait de son rendement élevé pouvant atteindre les 90%. En effet, non seulement le catalyseur ne rejette aucune substance toxique (monoxyde de carbone et autres gaz carboniques) mais il synthétise aussi des "nano-filaments" de carbone pur. Ces filaments nanométriques s'avèrent utiles pour le "remplissage" de certains matériaux afin d'optimiser leur conductibilité électrique. De plus le processus de catalyse peut être réglé de façon à modifier les proportions carbone/hydrogène à obtenir.

Из зараженной в результате чернобыльской катастрофы области были эвакуированы люди, но остались животные и растения. Получился невольный эксперимент - "растительный и животный мир в условиях радиоактивного загрязнения". Двадцать лет спустя ученые все еще спорят, что же фактически произошло с дикой природой в пределах загрязненной зоны и что еще может произойти.

On 26 April 1986, the worst nuclear accident in history occurred at the Chernobyl power station in the former Soviet Union. More than 135,000 people - and 35,000 cattle - living within 30 kilometres (19 miles) of the stricken nuclear reactor were evacuated and an unprecedented "zone of exclusion" was established around the site, close to the border between the Ukraine and Belarus.
Within this zone, nature was left alone to cope with the high doses of radiation released from the reactor. As a result, the exclusion zone effectively became a huge, unwitting experiment in what happens to animals and plants in the wild following catastrophic radioactive contamination.
In the immediate aftermath of the accident, when the emphasis was on the immense human cost of the fallout, few people thought about what would happen to the wildlife within the zone - or how to monitor it.
Radiation is known to cause genetic mutations and there were some early suggestions that wildlife would suffer widespread birth defects and other developmental deformities. Lurid reports of mutant animals were never confirmed. Twenty years later, a clearer picture has emerged, yet scientists are still arguing about what has actually happened to wildlife within the zone.
The latest spat has taken place within the pages of Biology Letters, one of the scientific journals of the Royal Society. On the one side is Anders Moller of the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris. Opposing him is Jim Smith, an ecologist at the University of Portsmouth, who has carried out his own studies of the zone's animals and plants. Moller believes that the radiation damage to wildlife within the zone has been dangerously underplayed, while Smith believes that much of the evidence collected so far points to a flourishing wildlife haven created when the area was abandoned.
There is no doubt about the severity of the accident itself and the great damage it did to the people whose lives have been irrevocably blighted. In addition to the tens of thousands of people who lost their homes and livelihoods, there have been several deaths - although not as many as some environmental groups have suggested. Three people died immediately as a result of the explosion and fire and a further 28 died a few weeks after the accident as a direct result of acute radiation poisoning. All were either staff of the power plant itself, or workers from the emergency services that attended the accident.
A further 19 people from the emergency services died of various causes between 1987 and 2004. There have been an estimated 4,000 cases of thyroid cancer in Belarus, Ukraine and parts of Russia, most of which are attributed to the radioactive fallout from Chernobyl. (Fortunately, thyroid cancer is treatable if caught early enough.) But there were also concerns about the longer-term genetic damage to humans, which is why the study of wildlife within the zone is so important.
Scientists have had access to limited data when it comes to assessing the true facts within the 4,000 square kilometres of the "zone of alienation". Photographs of the abandoned city of Pripyat, near Chernobyl, reveal that trees and shrubs have started to sprout through the roads and buildings. Nature has begun to reclaim what was originally lost to urban development and agriculture.
Scientists from the International Radioecology Laboratory in Slavutych have documented an increase in sightings of large animals that were rare or absent before the disaster. Several packs of wolves have appeared and they seem to have made easy meals of any stray dogs left behind by their owners. (Wolves Eat Dogs is the title of a novel based on the exclusion zone by Gorky Park author Martin Cruz Smith.)
The rare Przewalski's horse from the Russian steppe has been reintroduced, along with European bison. Beavers and boars are beginning to reshape the forest ecosystems, European lynx have been sighted and many rare birds, such as the black stork and white-tailed eagle, have returned, along with many swans and owls.
For some scientists, the sight of wildflowers growing through the cracks in the concrete roads of Pripyat and the many and varied species of larger animals within the zone are signs that something positive has come out of the disaster. These researchers believe that the detrimental effects of the radioactive fallout have been exaggerated, while the true impact of human activity has been overlooked.
"The benefit of excluding humans from this highly contaminated ecosystem appears to outweigh significantly any negative cost associated with Chernobyl radiation," said Robert Baker, a biologist at Texas Tech University, who has made more than a dozen scientific excursions into the zone. Baker believes that the diversity of animals and plants within the zone is what could be reasonably expected to be seen in a nature park dedicated to conservation. Indeed, there have been calls to turn the Chernobyl exclusion zone into what would become Europe's largest nature reserve.
But this has cut little ice with Anders Moller, a controversial Danish-born scientist who was once accused of scientific misconduct in his home country. Writing with his colleague Timothy Mousseau of the University of South Carolina, Moller says that reports of a thriving ecosystem around Chernobyl are not actually based on standardised censuses. "Surprisingly, there is little data on how the abundance of animals varies with levels of radiation, and there has been no effort to census animals in relation to local levels of radiation around Chernobyl," say Moller and Mousseau.
The two scientists carried out their own birdlife census at eight different sites within the zone. They recorded some 1,570 individual birds from 57 species and compared their observations with records of local radiation levels. They found that the higher the background level of radiation, the lower the number of birds, which they say is a clear indication of a possible cause and effect. The abundance of birds differed by as much as 66 per cent between the most contaminated sites and those with normal, background levels. And the variety of species varied by more than 50 per cent depending on radiation levels, they say.
One possible explanation they put forward is that the birds are affected by the loss of their main source of food, such as worms and insects living in contaminated soil. "The effect was differential for birds eating soil invertebrates living in the most contaminated top-soil layer. These results imply that the ecological effects of Chernobyl on animals are considerably greater than previously assumed," they say.
Previous work by the two scientists found that barn swallows in the exclusion zone tend to suffer a high level of albinism and carry a significantly higher level of "germ line" mutations to their sperm and eggs compared with barn swallows elsewhere. They have followed up this work with similar research on house sparrows and black redstarts, and they claim to have found individuals from these two species that also carry more germ-line mutations if they live within the exclusion zone compared with birds living elsewhere.
Professor Mousseau says that the findings point ominously towards what may also happen in humans. "Our work indicates that the worst is yet to come in the human population. The consequences for generations down the line could be greater than we've seen so far," he says.
Jim Smith disagrees. He questions the methodology of Moller and Mousseau, saying that their statistical analysis wrongly clumps sites of widely varying radiation dose rates under one category. He also points out that the apparent fall in numbers of barn swallows and other birds living in parts of the zone may be due to the absence of people rather than increases in levels of radiation.
"Barn swallows are commonly associated with human habitation and their population is influenced by farming practices... [Moller and Mousseau] do not apparently consider the abandonment of contaminated lands to be a potential confounding factor." Smith says that given the limitations of Moller's work, it is "premature" to extrapolate the findings to the controversial and potentially emotive issue of human health.
For their part, Moller and Mousseau ask why there has been no concerted effort to monitor the long-term effects of Chernobyl in free-living organisms and humans, despite it being possibly the biggest-ever environmental disaster. "Scientific inquiry," they say, "depends on rigorous analysis of data rather than rendition of anecdotal evidence."
But perhaps this last point is where both sides can reach agreement. Chernobyl has spawned a vast rumour industry based on anecdote rather than science. They include stories as varied as two-headed mutants breeding in the exclusion zone to the blogs of "Elena", a mysterious "girl on a motorcycle", whose claims about illicit rides through the exclusion zone were taken seriously - until she was exposed as a hoax by Mary Mycio, a foreign correspondent of the Los Angeles Times and author of Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl.
If the true long-term effects of the world's biggest nuclear accident on the surrounding countryside are ever to be known, it has to be based on science rather than anecdote.

16 декабря исполнилось 50 лет со дня открытия российской внутриконтинентальной антарктической станции Восток.

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia, Dec. 16 (UPI) - Scientists and relatives of polar explorers Sunday celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Russian polar station Vostok in the Antarctic. There are five permanent Russian polar stations situated in the Antarctic, but Vostok is the only one on a glacial plateau situated over a quarter mile above sea level, the head of Russia's Antarctic Expedition, Valery Lukin, told Itar-Tass Sunday. Lukin said explorers with the second Comprehensive Antarctic Expedition team established the polar station in the late 1950's as a year round meteorological and geophysical monitoring station. Explorers discovered a subterranean lake beneath 2.5 miles of ice near the site and named it Vostok, meaning "east." The station recorded the coldest temperature on Earth in July 1983 at 89.2 Celsius degrees below zero. The station monitors energy flow of the solar winds and conducts "unique scientific experiments that made Russia one of the leading nations in the international Antarctic community," Lukin said.

Лактоферрин, содержащийся в грудном молоке, служит надежной защитой от бактерий и вирусов, пока у ребенка не сформируется собственная иммунная система. В случае искусственного вскармливания лактоферрин необходимо добавлять в смесь, а предварительно - добыть его. При помощи микроорганизмов (основной способ производства белковых препаратов) лактоферрин получить нельзя, поэтому возникла мысль о создании трансгенного животного, вырабатывающего лактоферрин человека с собственным молоком.
Начали, как это водится, с мышей, а промышленное производство лактоферрина человека планируется создать на основе трансгенных коз. После 10 лет работы ученым Института биологии гена РАН и Научно-практического центра НАН Беларуси удалось вывести двух "генетически модифицированных" козлят.

Human beings consume lactoferrin with breast milk since the very birth. Lactoferrin protects the baby from bacteria and viruses until the infant's own immunological protection mechanism is formed. Since not all mothers have milk nowadays, human lactoferrin addition into the artificial feeding mixtures will assist in health care of new-born children. Their enteric infection death-rate will decrease by several times. Besides, lactoferrin possesses multiple other extremely useful properties, including the ability to suppress anticancer activity.
Unfortunately, a woman's organism produces only 4-5 grams of lactoferrin per liter of milk, besides, donor milk can be infected by HIV or other dangerous viruses. So, it is impossible to fully rely on female donor milk. As the researchers failed to get lactoferrin with the help of transgenic microorganisms (the main manner of production of multiple protein drugs), there is an opportunity to make a transgenic animal which produces human lactoferrin with its own milk.
"The idea of getting lactoferrin from the milk of transgenic animals awoke our interest about ten years ago. We started our experiments with genetic construction, made great progress, after which we received transgenic mice. As a result of lengthy and laborious efforts with more than 5,000 transgenic mice, it was ascertained that the transgene was inherited by posterity, and the lactoferrin concentration is several times higher than that in the feminine breast milk. The "record-holder" mice produced up to 40 grams of human lactoferrin per liter of their milk. At that, human lactoferrin obtained from the mouse milk has turned out to be absolutely identical to the natural protein of feminine milk. Drugs and medical cosmetics based on human lactoferrin will be developed jointly with colleagues from other organizations," says the initiator of the work I.L. Goldman, Director of Transgenebank, Institute of Biology of Gene, Russian Academy of Sciences.
Human lactoferrin industrial production is planned to be based on transgenic she-goats. A good she-goat produces as much milk as a bad cow 1,000 liters per lactation. That is why successful efforts on creation of transgenic goats are being undertaken all over the world, their milk containing certain useful proteins. "Experiments on she-goats are limited by three circumstances: the goat is a seasonal animal in terms of the type of reproduction, the pregnancy period lasts for almost half a year. Besides, dairy goat-faming in Russia and Belarus is absent as a stock-raising branch," says E.R.Sadchikova, Head of Transgenosis Laboratory, Institute of Biology of Gene, Russian Academy of Sciences.
The researchers from the Institute of Biology of Gene, Russian Academy of Sciences, have for the long time strived to obtain funding of this work from the Government of the Russian Federation, however, they failed. Instead, they have managed to establish a special BelRosTransgene program of the Federal State of Russia and Belarus. In 2003, the Biotechnological Center was set up in the scope of this program at the farm of the Scientific and Practical Center of the National Academy of Sciences for stock-raising in the town of Zhodino. Within four years of operation, the Belarus and Russian researchers jointly carried out a large number of experiments on creation of transgenic she-goats via "implantation" of the human lactoferrin gene into them. In the beginning, a lot of failures occurred. Finally, in late autumn of 2007, first transgenic kids were born at the biotechnological farm in the town of Zhodino, the lids were called Luck 1 and Luck 2.
"Unfortunately, since January 1, 2007, when the term of BelRosTransgene program funding expired, the Scientific and Practical Center for stock-raising of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus had to undertake further financing of work to support the goat flock. It is assumed that when he-goats come into the "virile strength", the first posterity will be received from them," says Alexander Budevich, head of laboratory of the Center.
Now, the researchers are preparing a new BelRosTransgene-2 program of the Federal State of Russia and Belarus to ensure financial support for the work in the next ten years. The goats should be fed, kept warm, guarded, and the lactoferrin drugs should be developed and tested, their patents should be protected. Only after these obstacles have been overcome, it can be assumed that she-goats, which provide milk with the unique human protein, will be able to start earning their living, and that the next break-through of the native science will also turn out to be the break-through in high-technologies business of the 21st century.

РКК "Энергия" разработала несколько проектов нового пилотируемого многоразового корабля.

Alors que l'on croyait le programme spatial russe habité moribond, ce ne sont pas moins de six nouveaux projets de navette que la société RKK Energya vient de concevoir, dont deux seront présentés officiellement à Roskosmos, l'agence spatiale russe.
Ce n'est pas réellement une surprise, car Sergueï Krikalev, constructeur en chef adjoint (et cosmonaute) de RKK Energya, avait déjà indiqué voici quelques mois que son entreprise présenterait un projet de navette à l'agence spatiale. Plus tard, on apprenait de même source que la Russie comptait bien installer sa propre section sur la Station spatiale internationale, alors que ce projet avait été pratiquement abandonné suite aux difficultés économiques du pays et que les Etats-Unis semblent délaisser le projet dans son ensemble au profit du vaste programme de retour sur la Lune.
La nouvelle navette spatiale russe
Selon un porte-parole officiel de RKK Energya, la nouvelle navette sera entièrement réutilisable et remplacera les vaisseaux Soyouz. Son usage devrait être étendu aux vols vers la Lune et Mars, sous réserve bien entendu que Roskosmos débloque les fonds nécessaires à sa mise en œuvre.
Plus confortable, cinq fois plus spacieuse et conçue pour des vols de longue durée, elle comportera six sièges et pourra, dans une version "touristique", emporter deux pilotes et quatre passagers payants. Nous n'en savons pas plus actuellement, si ce n'est que différentes variantes du projet prévoient l'adjonction d'un module de transport additionnel pouvant augmenter la charge utile de 12 tonnes.
Anatoli Perminov, directeur général de Roskosmos, a annoncé la prochaine mise en chantier d'un nouveau cosmodrome dans la région du fleuve de l'Amour (non loin de la frontière chinoise), qui serait dévolu aux missions habitées au moyen de nouveaux vaisseaux. Suivant sa déclaration, les infrastructures primaires du nouveau projet seront créées en cinq ans pour une mise en service en 2018-2020.
"Avant 2010, on élaborera des projets et abordera la première étape du chantier du site. Un cosmodrome moderne représente au fond une ville entière, avec des ateliers d'assemblage, des usines, des routes automobiles et des voies ferrées. Tout cela doit être construit en cinq ans", conclut-il.
Une stratégie payante ?
Dans le cas de l'ISS comme celui des navettes, la stratégie semble la même. Les bénéfices potentiels de l'exploitation de la Station spatiale, comme d'un véhicule de transport polyvalent semblent dérisoires voire négatifs, sauf si… la concurrence est absente. Et c'est bien le cas ici, puisque non seulement les ambitions de la Nasa semblent constamment rabotées en ce qui concerne l'ISS (dont les trois uniques occupants passent plus de temps en maintenance qu'en expériences scientifiques), mais surtout dans le domaine du transport spatial habité car l'agence américaine sera incapable de véhiculer ses propres astronautes entre 2012 (date du retrait des navettes) et 2016-2018 (date de mise en service du CEV, le successeur).
Un créneau sans aucune concurrence, un programme pouvant s'auto-financer par le tourisme spatial (à 30 millions de dollars le billet actuellement, tout de même…) et une vaste expérience dans le domaine des vols pilotés, faut-il s'étonner dès lors que la Russie ait l'intention de s'engouffrer dans cette brèche ? Le contraire eût surpris…

По мнению западных обозревателей, из-за выделения метана в результате таяния болот Западная Сибирь медленно, но верно выходит на первые позиции в списке глобальных экологических угроз.

When the sun rises in Yakutsk this morning, about an hour before lunch, it will be minus 38°C. Tomorrow it's forecast to be minus 45, which is about as cold as it gets in the inhabited northern hemisphere - cold enough, as Siberians love to tell you, to freeze the moisture on your eyeballs if you forget to blink.
This may be why Siberia got so little play in Bali. With the best will in the world, and all the glacial earnestness of the UN climate change mitigation process, it can be hard to focus on global warming's projected impact on the deep-frozen Russian hinterland when Tuvalu is already slipping beneath the South Pacific. But this is about to change. Between now and the Copenhagen climate change conference in 2009 on which the habitability of the planet we bequeath to our children may depend, Siberia will race up the global eco-worry list.
There is little argument about the two main reasons for this. The first was symbolised by the titanium flag planted on the ocean floor 14,000ft under the North Pole by a Russian mini-sub in August - an explicit signal that Moscow intends to take advantage of global warming to drill for gas and oil throughout its Arctic territories and beyond as retreating ice and softening permafrost make them easier to get at. The second is the gas this permafrost releases as it melts. The romantically-named west Siberian bog, bigger than France and Germany combined, contains 70 billion tonnes of methane primed to vent upwards and outwards as it thaws and rots. Since methane is 30 times more efficient than carbon dioxide at trapping heat, that equates to more than two trillion tonnes of CO₂, or two thirds the total amount already in the atmosphere.
No one blames Russia for its bogs. Nor is anyone seriously arguing that Russia should unilaterally forgo its Siberian fossil fuel bonanza (except where offshore deposits are claimed on the spurious basis that the undersea Lomonosov Ridge is an extension of the Russian landmass). What is alarming is the spectacle of the warming process feeding on itself so that even the most pessimistic climate change projections of five years ago could soon look hopelessly conservative.
Is Russia worried? Yes and no. It was the world's only Permafrost Institute, based in Yakutsk, that alerted the world to bubbling methane "hotspots" in western Siberia and to the region's vertiginous three-degree mean temperature rise in 40 years, which is faster than almost anywhere in the world. But at the same time another Russia - the Russia of Kremlinised (as opposed to nationalised) industrial "champions" and 7 per cent annual growth rates - stands to reap an extraordinary harvest from climate change, and is unsurprisingly unbothered by it.
Thirteen years ago, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet empire, Walter Russell Mead, the American historian and provocateur, wrote a lengthy, poker-faced appeal to Boris Yeltsin and Bill Clinton urging Russia to sell Siberia to the US for four trillion dollars. At a stroke, Mead said, the deal would solve Moscow's apparently terminal financial problems and guarantee US energy self-sufficiency for generations to come.
Four years later a Western press trip to Yakutsk produced the first rash of media predictions of entire Siberian cities sinking into the melting permafrost. Four years after that, the World Bank offered grants to coax the jobless indigents of Siberia's stranded outposts to start better, warmer lives near the Black Sea. And in 2003 a scholarly work by two Western academics, titled The Siberian Curse, urged Moscow to reverse the "great errors" of communist planning and "shrink" Russia's physical presence in Siberia back towards Europe and the Urals, creating in western Russia a dense new First World economy and leaving behind only Canadian-style mining camps.
Siberia wasn't sold. Its cities haven't sunk (yet), and their people, by and large, have chosen to stay put. In the meantime, soaring oil prices as well as warmer weather have enabled President Putin's favoured energy barons, and their increasingly cowed foreign partners, to consider drilling in places even Stalin thought too inhospitable or uneconomic to be worth it - among them the Barents Sea and the Far Eastern continental shelf off Sakhalin.
From those barons to whom much has been given, much is expected. For Roman Abramovich the quid pro quo is his continuing multimillion-dollar subsidy of the entire Chukotka province of which he is Governor. (Mikhail Khodorkovsky, formerly of Yukos, thought Mr Putin's rules did not apply to him and so languishes in jail near the Chinese-Siberian border.)
A thousand miles to the north, the North-West Passage is now free of ice in the middle of summer, bringing the prospect of a 5,000-mile short cut for some inter-ocean shipping, and of floating nuclear power stations to the once destitute reindeer herders of Siberia's Arctic coast. Back in more temperate latitudes, a Berlin-Vladivostok highway is open at last. By next year it may even be paved. Three thousand miles of pipeline are being built to connect the oilfields of eastern and central Siberia to the Pacific Rim, and climatologists believe wheat will be growable to within two degrees latitude of the Arctic Circle within the four decades.
There are potential catches. Yakutsk may yet collapse - though it turns out that many of its structures are tottering less because of melting permafrost than shoddy building. And a warmer Yakutia may prove to be a desert rather than a prairie, since almost no precipitation falls here. But even if it does prove barren, there will be plenty of Siberia left to cultivate. The builders of the labour camps, and those who went east after Stalin's time for extra pay rather than as slaves, were told "not to expect favours from nature but to wrest them from it". It's a lesson Russia shows no sign of forgetting.
Meanwhile, the best that can be hoped of the west Siberian bog is that its flatulence persuades the rest of us to emit less.

Сотрудники Института молекулярной биологии РАН уже более 20 лет работают над созданием биологических микрочипов для эффективной и быстрой диагностики туберкулеза и других заболеваний.

Researchers of the Institute of Molecular Biology, Russian Academy of Sciences, have been working for more than 20 years on designing biological microchips for efficient and quick diagnostics of tuberculosis and other diseases. The BIOCHIP-IMB company was set up at the Institute for production of domestic microchips. During the press-tour on November 15, 2007, the researchers told journalists about progress and achievements. The project of the laboratory of biological microchips at the Institute of Molecular Biology (Russian Academy of Sciences ) is one of the winners at the contest of projects on the "Living Systems" priority direction of the Federal Target Program guided by the Federal Agency for Science and Innovations (Rosnauka).
"The main property of biological microchips is massive parallel analysis of biological material", explains Dmitry Gryadunov, researcher of the laboratory. The biochip per se is the glass upon which multiple microcells are located, each of the cells being a miniature analogue of a test-tube, where the reaction is taking place. The cells contain the DNA-probes, each of them being able to recognize any section of the patient's DNA. Biological material - a drop of blood or other bioliquid - is applied at the glass, and interaction occurs in microcells between the DNA-probe and the DNA section complementary to it - that is hybridization: they match each other like the key and the lock. If the reaction has taken place, luminescence occurs in the cell, the luminescence can be discovered with the help of the "Chipdetector" analyzer device.
The very first biochip was developed by the researchers of the Institute of Molecular Biology for detection of various forms of tuberculosis. Insidious mycobacteria mutate very quickly and become immune to drugs. To understand how the patient should be treated, it is necessary to know precisely which mutant form of pathogene the patient is infected with. For this purpose, biochip is simply indispensable as instead of multiple lengthy analysis it gives the opportunity to find out the answer at once via a single analysis. The DNA-probes reveal peculiarities of mycobacteria's DNA.
"The price per analysis with the help of our biochips is about 500 Rubles, and this is several times less than that of foreign analogues, says Victor Barsky, Director General, BIOCHIP-IMB, Doctor of Biology. Now, we are producing 1,500 to 2,000 biochips per month, but in the future we are planning to pass on to 3 to 4 thousand per month. However, the demand for this diagnostics method is much higher." Besides tuberculosis biochips, the researchers have also created other kinds of diagnostic biochips. They help to discover chromosomal abnormalities in case of different types of leucosis, to analyze varieties of influenza viruses, including, bird flu, to detect pathogens of herpes, hepatite, mycoplasma, cytomegalovirus with pregnant women and new-borns, predisposition to oncological diseases, including, breast cancer and cardiovascular diseases, to identify the blood groups and to reveal various drugs intolerance. Not all of the above-mentioned biochips have been certified. As Victor Barsky explains, it is particularly difficult to certify predisposition identification biochips: even provided the individual has predisposition, he/she may or may not fall ill. Therefore, tremendous statistics should be collected so that this method could be applied in clinics. So far, it is applied along with others to confirm the diagnosis.
In Russia, tuberculosis biochips are applied in 20 tuberculosis centers. Employees of these centers take method learning at the Institute. Partners and customers of the Institute of Molecular Biology are the Institute of Virology (Russian Academy of Medical Sciences), French hospital in Toulouse (the hepatite C biochip production is being developed with French colleagues), biochips and devices for analysis are delivered to Belarus, Ukraine, Kirgizia, South Korea, Brazil, and they are passing clinical trials in the USA.
The excursion to the laboratory of biological microchips was carried out by Alexander Zasedatelev, Deputy Director of the Institute, Doctor of Biology. Before entering the sterile zone for biochip production, the journalists put on disposable smocks, caps and shoe covers. The biochip "stuffing" - DNA-probes - is being produced here. In a different manufacturing premise, robots are working round the clock, without rest to methodically apply these probes into microcells under the computer control. It is good that the most laborious and lengthy part of work can be trusted to robots! However, all production is man-checked on a special device with a monitor. And after that, the biochips that have passed the checkup can be entrusted with diagnostics of human diseases. In contrast to physicians, they make no mistakes.

Специалисты шести научно-исследовательских институтов Пущино, Москвы и Санкт-Петербурга исследовали способность белков теплового шока семейства HSP70 предотвращать развитие сепсиса, который до сих пор остается главной причиной смерти в клиниках интенсивной терапии.

Scientists from six Scientific-Research Institutes in Puschino, Moscow and St. Petersburg have jointly undertaken a research effort to investigate the HSP70 heat shock protein's ability to prevent development of septic shock.
Sepsis remains the main death cause in clinics of intensive therapy despite many years of scientists' continuous research. In the USA and European countries, sepsis develops annually with over 500,000 patients, on top of that the number of confirmed cases is growing by 1.5% every year. Sepsis occurs as a result of the activity of endotoxins, Lipopolysaccharides of bacteria. Endotoxins stimulate immune system cells, and in the long run this causes hormonal and biochemical dysfunctions of the main bodily organs, in particular, the liver and kidneys. The body tries to protect itself with the help of different means including the heat shock protein. The heat shock protein protects cells and the overall organism against various diseases, including ischemia, inflammation, cancer, as well as metabolic or neurodegenerative diseases. Since that time there have been developed various methods of getting and clearing one of the heat shock proteins - HSP70 - which scientists are currently trying to accommodate for therapeutic purposes. Russian experts have investigated the effect of the HSP70 as the sepsis prevention factor on rats.
The scientists simulated sepsis having injected endotoxins intravenously - Lipopolysaccharide of the Colibacillus, or Salmonella. Ten minutes before or 10 minutes after the endotoxin injection, the rats would be injected the heat shock protein, derived from the bull muscles and thoroughly refined. The reference group rats were injected the physiological solution. The researchers took measurements of the blood biochemical parameters of the laboratory animals, such as glucose and the whole protein concentration, albumin, triglycerides, creatinine and bilirubin tests. The blood tests would be taken in some cases before the injection, in other cases - 20 minutes after and in some other cases - 5 hours after the injection. Before the experiment the scientists had confirmed that the heat shock protein itself did not impact the blood composition, therefore it was harmless.
The experiment proved the following: if the heat shock protein is injected 10 minutes before the infection, it produces positive protective effect and stabilizes some of the blood indexes. If the protein is injected after the endotoxin injection, the effect is much weaker. In this case, the protein positively affects values of two blood indexes only: concentration of the whole protein and albumin, and only provided that the Escherichia coli endotoxin was used for the injection.
However, the researchers believe that the discovered heat shock protein's antiseptic effect is an important factor in terms of possibility to reduce the animal death-rate caused by endotoxins of different origins. They assume that later on this protein can be used to produce a drug or as a preventive protection agent against sepsis in human beings treatment.

На Общем собрании Российской академии наук было принято решении о создании отделения нанотехнологий. С этой целью будет преобразовано отделение информационных технологий и вычислительных систем, которое возглавляет президент Российского научного центра "Курчатовский институт", академик Евгений Велихов.

During a General Meeting of Russian Academy of Sciences its members decided to open a new department, dealing with nanotechnologies.
The new department will open on the base of the department of information technologies and computer systems of the Russian science centre "Kurchatov Institute". The new science branch requires at least ten more academics and twenty corresponding members to become part of the Academy.
Appropriate amendments to the Academy's regulations were approved by the majority of Academy members.

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