Российская наука и мир (дайджест)

Археологические находки времен палеолита на берегах Дона на юге России, по мнению ученых, являются самым ранним из известных поселений современного человека в Европе. Согласно одной из теорий, первое переселение людей современного антропологического типа из стран Африки, расположенных к югу от Сахары, произошло около 50 тысяч лет назад. Возраст находок - около 45 тысяч лет, и это означает, что здесь обитали самые старые из известных предков современного европейца.

Modern humans who first arose in Africa had moved into Europe as far back as about 45,000 years ago, according to a new study by an international research team led by the Russian Academy of Sciences and the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The evidence consists of stone, bone and ivory tools discovered under a layer of ancient volcanic ash on the Don River in Russia some 250 miles south of Moscow, said John Hoffecker, a fellow of CU-Boulder's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. Thought to contain the earliest evidence of modern humans in Europe, the site also has yielded perforated shell ornaments and a carved piece of mammoth ivory that appears to be the head of a small human figurine, which may represent the earliest piece of figurative art in the world, he said.
"The big surprise here is the very early presence of modern humans in one of the coldest, driest places in Europe," Hoffecker said. "It is one of the last places we would have expected people from Africa to occupy first."
A paper by Michael Anikovich and Andrei Sinitsyn of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Hoffecker, and 13 other researchers was published in the Jan. 12 issue of Science.
The excavation took place at Kostenki, a group of more than 20 sites along the Don River that have been under study for many decades. Kostenki previously has yielded anatomically modern human bones and artifacts dating between 30,000 and 40,000 years old, including the oldest firmly dated bone and ivory needles with eyelets that indicate the early inhabitants were tailoring animal furs to help them survive the harsh climate.
Most of the stone used for artifact construction was imported from between 60 miles and 100 miles away, while the perforated shell ornaments discovered at the lowest levels of the Kostenki dig were imported from the Black Sea more than 300 miles away, he said. "Although human skeletal remains in the earliest level of the excavation are confined to isolated teeth, which are notoriously difficult to assign to specific human types, the artifacts are unmistakably the work of modern humans," Hoffecker said.
The sediment overlying the artifacts was dated by several methods, including an analysis of an ash layer deposited by a monumental volcanic eruption in present-day Italy about 40,000 years ago, Hoffecker said. The researchers also used optically stimulated luminescence dating - which helps them determine how long ago materials were last exposed to daylight - as well as paleomagnetic dating based on known changes in the orientation and intensity of Earth's magnetic field and radiocarbon calibration.
Anatomically modern humans are thought to have arisen in sub-Saharan Africa around 200,000 years ago. Kostenki also contains evidence that modern humans were rapidly broadening their diet to include small mammals and freshwater aquatic foods, an indication they were "remaking themselves technologically," he said. They may have used traps and snares to catch hares and arctic foxes, exploiting large areas of the environment with relatively little energy. "They probably set out their nets and traps and went home for lunch," he said.
While there is some evidence Neanderthals once occupied the plains of Eastern Europe, they seem to have been scarce or absent there during the last glacial period when modern humans arrived, he said. The lack of competitors like the Neanderthals might have been the chief attraction to the area and the reason why modern humans first entered this part of Europe, Hoffecker said.
"Unlike the Neanderthals, modern humans had the ability to devise new technologies for coping with cold climates and less than abundant food resources," he said. "The Neanderthals, who had occupied Europe for more than 200,000 years, seem to have left the back door open for modern humans."
The ivory artifact believed to be the head of a small figurine, discovered during the 2001 field season, was broken and perhaps never was finished by the person who began crafting it more than 40,000 years ago, said Hoffecker. "This is a really interesting piece," he said. "If confirmed, it will be the oldest example of figurative art ever discovered."
Buried under 10 feet to 15 feet of silt, the artifacts at Kostenki include blades, scrapers, drills and awls, as well as sturdy antler digging tools known as mattocks that resemble crude pick-axes, he said. Mattocks have been found at other Old World sites and the arctic and were used to dig large pits for the storage of foods and fuel, although traces of such pits have yet to turn up at the lowest levels of Kostenki, he said.
Large animal remains at Kostenki include mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, bison, horses, moose and reindeer. A bone chemistry analysis from 30,000-year-old human remains indicates a high consumption of freshwater aquatic foods - either water birds, fish, or both - more evidence for efficient food gathering techniques, he said.
The study also included researchers from the University of Arizona, the Kostenki Museum-Preserve in Kostenki, the University of Illinois-Chicago, Boston University, the University College London and the Institute of Environmental Geology, Climate and Geoengineering in Rome. Research at Kostenki has been funded by the Leakey Foundation and the National Science Foundation.
Except for some early sites in the Near East, the oldest evidence modern humans outside of Africa comes from the Australian continent roughly 50,000 years ago, said Hoffecker, who was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2006. Several modern human sites in south-central Europe may be almost as old as Kostenki, he said.

© Regents of the University of Colorado.

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Science Daily (press release) - USA / January 16, 2007

New Technique For Extracting Cardiovascular Drug Ingredient From Plants

Ученые из Государственного научно-исследовательского института органической химии и технологии и Всероссийского института лекарственных и ароматических растений Российской Академии сельскохозяйственных наук разработали новый метод получения сердечно-сосудистого препарата дигоксина.

Science Daily - The flora of the Earth is a huge inexhaustible "well" of remedies. There are over 12,000 species of medicinal plants and they have been used to treat many different illnesses for several thousands of years. However, using only herbal infusions is not enough to achieve a curative positive effect, medicines have to be obtained from vegetable raw materials and knowledge is required on the mechanism of its action.
For example, to prepare the highly active cardiovascular medication digoxin effective methods have to be developed to extract medicinal substances - glycosides. Such a problem is solved successfully by scientists from the State Research Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology under the direction of the Project Manager Galina Mikhailovna Komissarova and All-Russian Institute of Medical and Aromatic Herbs under the direction of the Corresponding Member Dyumaev Kirill Mikhailovich. The International Science and Technology Centre supports the scientific research.
During a 200-year history of the application of cardiac glycosides in medical practice views on the mechanism of their action and the methods of obtaining the medications of the series of cardiotonic glycosides have changed considerably. But one thing remains unchanged - the application of cardiac glycosides at the initial or latent stage of heart failure can correct available functional cardiac abnormalities and prevent the development of obvious heart failure.
A number of patented methods of preparing digoxin from Digitalis lanata with the use of natural enzymes are presently available. However, these patented methods have a number of major shortcomings. "The most essential among them, - says Galina Mikhailovna Komissarova, - is low stability of the fermentation process owing to the quality of herbal raw materials". Secondly, toxic and explosive solvents, which are costly materials, are used in these methods. Besides, a great number of technological purification stages have to be performed to obtain the final medication; this is a very laborious process.
During project realization the developers from the State Scientific Centre "State Research Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology" succeeded in avoiding all of the above shortcomings, owing to totally new techniques of growing, picking, drying and storing Digitalis lanata. The obtained plant raw materials are characterized by a stably high content of highly active enzymes. The technique of preparing digoxin by means of enzymatic degradation in aqueous media at 45°C was elaborated, with the process proceeding completely without hindrance to the subsequent extraction and cleaning stages.
The advantages of the proposed method are controlled standard conditions in aqueous media during the formation of digoxin and the modification of conventional stages of digoxin extraction.
The novelty and uniqueness of the proposed Project is that it proposes a method for controlling the activity of enzymes in the raw material; it is designed to facilitate the production of a protein concentrate with certain enzymatic activity, and examination of activity standards required for effectively performing the raw material fermentation stage in the production of digoxin. Using novel techniques, the developers have managed to obtain a test sample - 50 grams of digoxin. In future it is planned to modernize the extraction and purification methods of cardiotonic glycosides and methods of analytical production control that will help to provide medical organizations with the necessary quantity of this medication and it will give people the chance to recover from this serious illness.

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Seattle Post Intelligencer - Seattle, WA, USA / Thursday, January 11, 2007

Russian space legend would be 100 Friday

By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV, ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

12 января исполняется сто лет со дня рождения выдающегося конструктора ракетно-космических систем Сергея Павловича Королева.

MOSCOW - His work and even his name were once top Soviet secrets. It wasn't until after his death that Sergei Korolyov became known to the world as the man who led the team that put the world's first satellite into orbit and sent the first human into space. Russia marks the 100th anniversary Friday of the birth of Korolyov, who suffered years of torture, starvation and hard labor in Josef Stalin's gulag before becoming chief of the Soviet rocket program.
His daughter, Natalia, recalled how her father, who was forced to mine for gold in a labor camp amid freezing cold and hunger, loathed the precious metal for the rest of his days. "He kept repeating: I hate gold," she said in an interview published in the daily Rossiiyskaya Gazeta.
Korolyov, an aeronautical engineer, was arrested in 1938 during Stalin's Great Terror and sentenced to hard labor for anti-Soviet activities. Stalin's henchmen broke his jaw during interrogations, he lost all his teeth, and after two years in the camp was on the verge of death with heart and other ailments.
He survived, thanks to aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev, who asked authorities to transfer Korolyov in 1940 from the labor camp to join a design team working on new combat planes. The team worked behind bars, like many other Soviet design bureaus, and it was only in 1944 that Korolyov was freed.
When he saw his family for the first time, he talked for hours about his life in prison and then asked them to never question him about it again. "I want to forget that nightmare," he said, according to his daughter.
She said his ordeal made him immune to fear of authorities. "Father simply wasn't afraid of anything after that. He could boldly tell leaders that he categorically disagreed with something."
After the Nazi defeat, Korolyov led a team of engineers who flew to Germany to gather information on V-2 rockets designed by Wernher von Braun, Korolyov's future rival in the U.S.-Soviet space race. Korolyov's team started by copying the German rocket but quickly developed its own designs.
After the first Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile designed by Korolyov was put in service in 1956, he offered to use one to launch a satellite into orbit. Korolyov's deputy Boris Chertok recalled the top brass opposed the idea as a distraction from the military program, but Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev backed it.
"Korolyov was primarily a designer gifted with a rare insight, but he also was an excellent organizer," Chertok told a news conference Thursday. "He realized that any big project requires a huge amount of organizational work."
When Korolyov became aware of U.S. plans to launch the first American satellite in 1958, he shelved a complex Soviet project in favor of building a simple version quickly. On Oct. 4, 1957, Sputnik opened the Space Age.
Korolyov's name was only known to Soviet leaders and a narrow circle of space workers, anonymity that sometimes made him sad. "We are like miners - we work underground. No one sees or hears us," his daughter recalled.
Rossiiyskaya Gazeta said Khrushchev twice rejected an offer from the Nobel Prize Committee to nominate the man who designed Sputnik and the spacecraft that carried the world's first human, Yuri Gagarin, into space on April 12, 1961. "We can't name one single person. It's the entire people building the new technology," Khrushchev was quoted as saying.
Korolyov's daughter said her father dreamed about flying to space himself. After Gagarin's flight, Korolyov told the family he wanted to be in his place: "I should have done it, but age is a problem and they wouldn't let me do it anyway."
She said Korolyov was superstitious - opposing launches on Mondays and barring women from the launchpad. He carried two coins in his pocket and was distressed he couldn't find them on the day he was hospitalized in January 1966. He died of a heart attack during surgery just after turning 59.
It was the official obituary that first told the Soviet people - and the rest of the world - who Korolyov was.
Korolyov's death dealt a crushing blow to the Soviet moon program, which collapsed in a series of booster explosions while the United States sent Neil Armstrong on his moon walk in 1969.
"Our successes would have been much greater if Korolyov lived longer," Chertok said.

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DailyIndia.com - Jacksonville, FL, USA / Jan 14 2007

India needs to focus on solar energy, says Russian scientist

By Indo Asian News Service

Нобелевский лауреат, академик Жорес Алферов считает солнечную энергетику единственным перспективным направлением в решении проблемы энергетической безопасности.
По мнению академика Алферова, который находится в ознакомительной поездке в Индии по приглашению одного из национальных научных фондов, если сейчас уделить должное внимание этой сфере, через 10-15 лет на долю преобразованной энергии Солнца будет приходиться 5 процентов общемировой выработки, а через 30-40 лет - более трети. Совместные исследования в области преобразования солнечной энергии представляются академику очень важным направлением сотрудничества российских и индийских ученых.

Chennai, Jan 14 (IANS) India needs to focus research on solar energy and cheaper photovoltaic cells that hold the key to Earth's future, according to a Russian researcher.
Russian physicist and Nobel laureate Zhores I. Alferov told a science meet here that solar energy was "the only inexhaustible source of energy".
Speaking at the Albert Einstein Annus Mirabilis Centennial Public Lectures, he said that while solar cells were expensive, the new hetero-structure technology made them efficient and capable of handling high power.
So, with concentration of light on them (using lenses or reflectors), the solar cells will soon be economically competitive with other energy sources like oil and atomic energy.
Research in this field was important for India and should be supported, he stressed at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc) during a four-day meet that ended Saturday.
Alferov spoke about semi-conductor structures known now as "hetero-structures" for which he was awarded the Physics Nobel prize in 2000.
Alferov, born in Vitebsk in Belarus, obtained his doctoral degree in physics from the A.F. loffe Physico-Technical Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, Russia. He has been its director since 1987.
Apart from Alferov, English scientist Anthony J. Leggett was the other Nobel laureate at the meet. Renowned Indian theoretical physicist E.C. George Sudarshan was also present.
Sudarshan, who hails from Kottayam in Kerala, "is the originator of the quantum theory of optical coherence", said IMSc senior professor R. Simon, in his introduction. "This work was chosen for the 2005 Physics Nobel prize, but not its originator."
After faculty positions at the Universities of Rochester and Syracuse, Sudarshan is director of the Center for Particle Theory at the University of Texas. He is also known for his V-A theory, which explains the nature of weak interactions and has found faster-than-light particles called tachyons.
A collection of his work was released here on the occasion.
Leggett, who obtained his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Oxford, is currently professor at John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and also at the Center for Advanced Study of Physics at the University of Illinois in US. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2003.
Leggett has demonstrated that liquid helium can become a "super-fluid" - that is, its viscosity vanishes at low temperatures and it forms an isotope that can bond with metallic superconductors.
The IMSc in Chennai is a national institution for fundamental research in the physical and mathematical sciences. The department of atomic energy and the Tamil Nadu government support this.
Institute members work primarily in areas of theoretical physics, mathematics and theoretical computer science.
The lectures and workshops were organised jointly by the IMSc and the Delhi-based Centre for Philosophy and Foundations of Science. The visitors are on a our of India and giving lectures at centres of excellence in New Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata and Mumbai.

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Investir en Russie - Villeurbanne, Rhône, France / vendredi 19 janvier 2007

Russie-Inde: un centre d'échange de technologies pourrait être ouvert à Moscou

В Москве предполагается открыть совместный российско-индийский центр обмена технологиями.

NEW DELHI, 19 janvier - RIA Novosti. La Russie et l'Inde envisagent d'ouvrir à Moscou un centre d'échange de technologies, a déclaré vendredi lors d'un séminaire le coordinateur du programme de coopération scientifique et technique à long terme, Y.P. Kumar.
Il est prévu de signer un accord sur l'ouverture d'un centre de transfert de technologies au cours de la visite officielle en Inde du président russe, Vladimir Poutine, les 25 et 26 janvier, a-t-il expliqué.
Un séminaire sur le thème "Russie - Inde : coopération dans le domaine de l'énergie, des transports et des innovations", organisé par l'Association des chambres de commerce et d'industrie en Inde (ASSOCHAM) et la fondation Eurasia, a rassemblé, côté russe, des chercheurs et des chefs d'entreprise de Saint-Pétersbourg.
L'année 2007 marquera le vingtième anniversaire de la signature de l'accord sur le programme de coopération scientifique et technique à long terme entre la Russie et l'Inde. Le programme prévoyait des recherches conjointes dans les domaines de la biotechnologie, de l'immunologie, des sciences naturelles, des technologies laser, de la catalyse, des sciences et technologies spatiales, des technologies de l'information, de l'électronique, des mathématiques, de la mécanique appliquée, etc. 55 instituts indiens et 71 établissements russes sont actuellement engagés dans le programme.

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