Декабрь 2011 г.

Российская наука и мир (по материалам зарубежной электронной прессы)

CONTENTS / ОГЛАВЛЕНИЕ


• Livermore and Russian scientists propose new names for elements 114 and 116
• NSF Director and Russian Science Minister Sign Historic Agreement for Bilateral Collaboration
• Russian Scientist Apologizes for Failed Mars Moon Mission
• Time for Russia to rethink its Mars exploration plans
• Russia's doomed Mars probe may not be a total waste
• Russian satellite crashes into Siberia after launch
• In Russia, the lost generation of science
• Le cabaret des dissidents sibériens
• India, Russia open scientific, technological centre
• Russia slams Kyoto Protocol
• Methane discovery stokes new global warming fears
• Japan, Russia see chance to clone mammoth
• Clone a mammoth? Not so fast
• Science Classic: 1880-1996 - Academics Throughout Russia Gain Access to the Science Classic Digital Archive
• Russian space designer Boris Chertok, key architect of Soviet space glory, dies at 99
• Rashid Sunyaev wins 2012 Franklin Medal in Physics

Россия и Индия открывают научно-технологический центр с целью коммерциализации результатов совместных разработок.

MOSCOW: Aiming to commercialise the spinoff from joint projects, India and Russia today opened a scientific and technological centre here ahead of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's arrival.
"This new Centre will seek to commercialise the results of joint India-Russia R&D efforts. This initiative is of particular importance to both countries in their effort to encourage innovation and modernisation," Indian Ambassador Ajai Malhotra said after inaugurating the centre.
The Moscow-based centre would commercialise innovative technologies developed jointly or independently by Indian and Russian scientists.
It is headed by Dr Sergei Sukonkin, who is the Director of Experimental Design Bureau of Oceanological Engineering.
The Centre is expected to be of considerable mutual benefit. Malhotra announced that a similar centre would be opened in New Delhi early next year.
Both units will work in close coordination to intensify interaction between Indian industry and Russian scientific/production institutes and will go a long way in meeting mutual needs
The Russian-Indian Scientific and Technological Centre is to build on existing linkages between Indian and Russian scientific establishments, to facilitate and channelise commercial and industrial applications of technologies developed in the two countries.
Integrated Long-Term Programme (ILTP) - the flagship program of Indo-Russian S&T Cooperation, has already resulted in successful completion of over 500 joint R&D projects, including the setting up of 9 joint R&D centres in India.
During the 2010 Summit in New Delhi the ILTP programme has been extended for further 10 years, with particular focus on innovative technologies.
However, the existing programme does not explicitly address issues related to technology transfer and commercialisation.

Россия поддержала решение Канады о выходе из Киотского протокола на том основании, что разработанное в 1997 г. соглашение устарело и не обеспечивает эффективного решения климатических проблем.

MOSCOW (AP) - Russia supports Canada's decision to pull out of the Kyoto Protocol, says its foreign ministry, reaffirming Friday that Moscow will not take on new commitments.
Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich told Friday's briefing that the treaty does not cover all major polluters, and thus cannot help solve the climate crisis.
Canada on Monday pulled out of the agreement - initially adopted in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, to cut carbon emissions contributing to global warming. Its move dealt a blow to the treaty, which has not been formally renounced by any other country.
"This is yet another example that the 1997 Kyoto Protocol has lost its effectiveness in the context of the social and economic situation of the 21st century," Lukashevich said, adding that the document does not ensure the participation of all key emitters.
The protocol requires some industrialized countries to slash emissions, but doesn't cover the world's largest polluters, China and the United States.
Canada, Japan and Russia said last year they will not accept new Kyoto commitments.

Масштабные выбросы метана в Арктике были обнаружены в начале 2000-х годов. Согласно опубликованным в 2010 году оценкам, ежегодный выброс составляет 8 млн тонн метана. Однако последние исследования российских и американских ученых, изучавших дно Восточно-Сибирского шельфа, говорят о том, что данная цифра, скорее всего, сильно занижена.

Dramatic and unprecedented plumes of methane - a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide - have been seen bubbling to the surface of the Arctic Ocean by scientists undertaking an extensive survey of the region.
The scale and volume of the methane release has astonished the head of the Russian research team who has been surveying the seabed of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf off northern Russia for nearly 20 years.
In an exclusive interview with The Independent, Igor Semiletov of the International Arctic Research Centre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who led the 8th joint US-Russia cruise of the East Siberian Arctic seas, said that he has never before witnessed the scale and force of the methane being released from beneath the Arctic seabed.
"Earlier we found torch-like structures like this but they were only tens of metres in diameter. This is the first time that we've found continuous, powerful and impressive seeping structures more than 1,000 metres in diameter. It's amazing," Dr Semiletov said. "I was most impressed by the shear scale and the high density of the plumes. Over a relatively small area we found more than 100, but over a wider area there should be thousands of them," he said.
Scientists estimate that there are hundreds of millions of tons of methane gas locked away beneath the Arctic permafrost, which extends from the mainland into the seabed of the relatively shallow sea of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf.
One of the greatest fears is that with the disappearance of the Arctic sea ice in summer, and rapidly rising temperatures across the entire Arctic region, which are already melting the Siberian permafrost, the trapped methane could be suddenly released into the atmosphere leading to rapid and severe climate change.
Dr Semiletov's team published a study in 2010 estimating that the methane emissions from this region were in the region of 8 million tons a year but the latest expedition suggests this is a significant underestimate of the true scale of the phenomenon.
In late summer, the Russian research vessel Academician Lavrentiev conducted an extensive survey of about 10,000 square miles of sea off the East Siberian coast, in cooperating with the University of Georgia Athens. Scientists deployed four highly sensitive instruments, both seismic and acoustic, to monitor the "fountains" or plumes of methane bubbles rising to the sea surface from beneath the seabed.
"In a very small area, less than 10,000 square miles, we have counted more than 100 fountains, or torch-like structures, bubbling through the water column and injected directly into the atmosphere from the seabed," Dr Semiletov said.
"We carried out checks at about 115 stationary points and discovered methane fields of a fantastic scale - I think on a scale not seen before. Some of the plumes were a kilometre or more wide and the emissions went directly into the atmosphere - the concentration was a hundred times higher than normal," he said.
Dr Semiletov released his findings for the first time last week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. He is now preparing the study for publication in a scientific journal.
The total amount of methane stored beneath the Arctic is calculated to be greater than the overall quantity of carbon locked up in global coal reserves so there is intense interest in the stability of these deposits as the polar region warms at a faster rate than other places on earth. Natalia Shakhova, a colleague at the International Arctic Research Centre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said that the Arctic is becoming a major source of atmospheric methane and the concentrations of the powerful greenhouse gas have risen dramatically since pre-industrial times, largely due to agriculture.
However, with the melting of Arctic sea ice and permafrost, the huge stores of methane that have been locked away underground for many thousands of years might be released over a relatively short period of time, Dr Shakhova said. "I am concerned about this process, I am really concerned. But no-one can tell the timescale of catastrophic releases. There is a probability of future massive releases might occur within the decadal scale, but to be more accurate about how high that probability is, we just don't know," Dr Shakova said.
"Methane released from the Arctic shelf deposits contributes to global increase and the best evidence for that is the higher concentration of atmospheric methane above the Arctic Ocean," she said.
"The concentration of atmospheric methane increased unto three times in the past two centuries from 0.7 parts per million to 1.7ppm, and in the Arctic to 1.9ppm. That's a huge increase, between two and three times, and this has never happened in the history of the planet," she added.
Each methane molecule is about 70 times more potent in terms of trapping heat than a molecule of carbon dioxide. However, because methane it broken down more rapidly in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, scientist calculate that methane is about 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a hundred-year cycle.

Российские и японские ученые (якутский Музей мамонта и японский Университет Кинки) не теряют надежды попробовать клонировать мамонта - недавно был обнаружен подходящий генетический материал, а в следующем году планируется начать совместный исследовательский проект.

TOKYO - Scientists from Japan and Russia believe it may be possible to clone a mammoth after finding well-preserved bone marrow in a thigh bone recovered from permafrost soil in Siberia, a report said Saturday.
Teams from the Sakha Republic's mammoth museum and Japan's Kinki University will launch fully-fledged joint research next year aiming to recreate the giant mammal, Japan's Kyodo News reported from Yakutsk, Russia.
By replacing the nuclei of egg cells from an elephant with those taken from the mammoth's marrow cells, embryos with mammoth DNA can be produced, Kyodo said, citing the researchers.
The scientists will then plant the embryos into elephant wombs for delivery, as the two species are close relatives, the report said. Securing nuclei with an undamaged gene is essential for the nucleus transplantation technique, it said.
For scientists involved in the research since the late 1990s, finding nuclei with undamaged mammoth genes has been a challenge. Mammoths became extinct about 10,000 years ago.
But the discovery in August of the well-preserved thigh bone in Siberia has increased the chances of a successful cloning.
Global warming has thawed ground in eastern Russia that is usually almost permanently frozen, leading to the discoveries of a number of frozen mammoths, the report said.

Возможно ли клонировать мамонта в течение пяти лет (как планирует российско-японская группа ученых), и стоит ли вообще это делать?

Reports from Japan suggest that long-extinct woolly mammoths could be cloned back into existence within five years, but don't hold your breath.
"C'mon, it'll never happen. Not in my lifetime," said Webb Miller, a Penn State computer scientist and genomicist who helped decipher the genetic code of a woolly mammoth.
Japanese and Russian researchers have been working for years to find a suitable woolly mammoth specimen in the Siberian permafrost, and they recently told Japan's Kyodo news service that they recovered what they hope will be viable bone marrow from a frozen thigh bone recovered near Batagay in eastern Russia's Sakha Republic (a.k.a. Yakutia).
Their plan is to take the nuclei from bone marrow cells, transplant them into egg cells extracted from elephants, and implant the cloned embryos into the wombs of mama elephants for gestation. This is the technique that has given rise to cloned mammals ranging from Dolly the sheep to pigs, cats, dogs and monkeys.
Kyodo's report says "there is a high likelihood" that biologically active nuclei can be extracted from the frozen marrow. Researchers on the case include Russian experts from Yakutsk's Mammoth Museum and Japanese biologists from Kinki University in Osaka Prefecture. Kyodo said a full-fledged joint research project would be launched next year.
Woolly mammoths haven't walked the earth for thousands of years, but the idea of resurrecting the species seems to have a powerful hold on the collective psyche. Some folks have even talked about setting aside a "Pleistocene Park" for mammoths and other Ice Age animals.
Miller, however, isn't buying it.
"DNA from a woolly mammoth is a mess," he explained. "It's fractured into very short pieces, and there's a lot of postmortem DNA damage other than just breakage. The code gets damaged a lot."
Even if the DNA is intact and the nuclei are successfully merged with elephant egg cells, the success rate for cloning animals - and particularly extinct and near-extinct species - is not good. Generally speaking, there are scores of failures for each successful pregnancy brought to term.
A couple of years ago, scientists succeeded in producing a Pyrenean ibex from tissue that was taken from the last representative of the subspecies in 1999, but the cloned progeny survived for only seven minutes. Attempts to clone an Asian gaur didn't end much better. Australian researchers had to scrap plans to clone the Tasmanian tiger back from extinction, although they later succeeded in transferring part of a Tasmanian tiger gene into mouse embryos.
These cases suggest that there's not much of a chance of re-creating the mammoths. Genetic engineering may eventually produce a "hairy elephant" with mammoth-like characteristics. But a creature genetically identical to the behemoths of the Ice Age? "If somebody does that, I will eat my hat," Miller said. "And I'll wonder why they did it."
Miller said studying the DNA of long-extinct species has value, even if the efforts don't result in a resurrection.
"I'm looking out my window, and 13,000 years ago, there were some really interesting animals out there," he mused. "They're gone now, and I'd like to know why. ... Understanding which species survived and which ones didn't, looking at their genome and trying to figure that out, that's interesting to me."
But when it comes to living, breathing animals, "I'm personally more interested in keeping the species we have," Miller said. "I'd like to keep tigers around for a while."
Despite Miller's qualms, the quest to re-create the woolly mammoth could well continue for the next five years or longer. And that's not all. Paleontologist Jack Horner is moving ahead with his plan to modify chicken DNA and make the barnyard birds look more like the dinosaurs they descended from. Dino-chickens vs. woolly mammephants? That sounds like a great plot for the next "Jurassic Park" sequel.

Американская ассоциация содействия развитию науки (AAAS) объявила о том, что Минобрнауки РФ выбрало Science Classic (цифровой архив статей журналов за 1880-1996 гг.) в качестве своего первого приобретения в рамках крупномасштабного проекта обеспечения национального доступа к архивам научной информации.
600 некоммерческих и научных учреждений получат доступ к архиву статей журналов Science за 116 лет на платформе, разрабатываемой Национальным электронно-информационным консорциумом (НЭИКОН).

WASHINGTON and MOSCOW, Dec. 22, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ - The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) announces that the Russian Ministry of Education and Science has selected Science Classic, the digital archives of Science (1880-1996), as the first acquisition in a major project to provide national access to scientific archives. Russian students, scientists, and professors can now access 116 years of Science's archive through a local platform provided by the National Electronic Information Consortium (NEICON).
The Ministry's project, established in Summer 2011 to create a scientific archive within the Russian Federation, will provide 600 non-profit and academic institutes with access to the digital archives. "We are pleased that such a large project is beginning with the acquisition of the Science Classic archive," said Dr. Olga Moskaleva, head of the scientific research department of St. Petersburg State University. "This journal is always in demand and we are happy to have access to the full content since 1880." Through the NEICON Consortium, Russian researchers and academics receive access to both Science Online (1997-current) and Science Classic (1880-1996), the complete catalogue of Science content.
"Students, scientists and educators in Russia will now have immediate digital access to science news and research from our weekly journal," said Dr. Bruce Alberts, Science's editor-in-chief. "I look forward to further contributions from Russia's scientific community to Science."
Science Classic, maintained and preserved by AAAS, delivers more than a century's worth of full-text news articles, commentary, reviews, perspectives, and peer-reviewed research papers from the annals of the world's largest general science journal. With every issue from 1880 to 1996 now available, Science Classic allows readers to access the PDF version of the full-text article, plus bibliographic citations, abstracts, and references. To view the complete digital archive, please visit www.ScienceOnline.org/archive.
NEICON Consortia
The not-for-profit National Electronic Information Consortium is one of the biggest Russian library consortia. It was created and given juridical registration in 2002 and since that time has been continuously growing. Today, NEICON comprises more than 730 Russian institutions all over the country that represent universities, research institutions, and public libraries. Since 2005, NEICON has been partially funded by the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation. It provides access to hundreds of databases belonging to dozens of Russian and foreign publishers and information owners.
About AAAS
The American Association for the Advancement of Science is the world's largest general scientific society and publisher of the journals Science (ScienceOnline.org), Science Signaling (ScienceSignaling.org), and Science Translational Medicine (ScienceTranslationalMedicine.org). AAAS (AAAS.org) was founded in 1848 and serves 262 affiliated societies and academies of science, reaching 10 million individuals. Science has the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general science journal in the world, with an estimated total readership of 1 million. The non-profit AAAS is open to all and fulfills its mission to "advance science and serve society" through initiatives in science policy, international programs, science education, and more. For the latest research news, log onto EurekAlert!, the premier science news website, a service of AAAS.

14 декабря в возрасте 99 лет скончался академик РАН Борис Евсеевич Черток, ученый-конструктор, один из основоположников российской космонавтики, соратник и заместитель С.П.Королёва.

MOSCOW - Boris Chertok, a Russian rocket designer who played a key role in engineering Soviet-era space programs, has died. He was 99. The state-controlled RKK Energiya rocket builder where he worked as a top consultant said Chertok died in Moscow on Wednesday after contracting pneumonia.
For many years, Chertok served as a deputy to the father of the Soviet space program, Sergei Korolyov. He was closely involved in putting the world's first satellite in orbit on Oct. 4, 1957, and preparing the first human flight to space by Yuri Gagarin on April, 12 1961.
Chertok was born in Lodz, Poland, when it was still part of the Russian empire and his family moved to Moscow at the start of World War I. After graduating from the Moscow Energy Institute in 1940, he started working as an aviation engineer. When World War II ended, Chertok was selected to lead a group of Soviet experts to travel to Germany to tap the Nazi know-how in rockets. He first met Korolyov there, and the two worked closely together until Korolyov's death in 1966.
Chertok, who specialized in control systems for rockets and spacecraft, has published memoirs chronicling the rise of the Soviet space program from its early days to the moon race the Soviet Union lost to the United States.
"Each of these first rockets was like a beloved woman for us," Chertok said at a meeting with reporters. "We were in love with every rocket, we desperately wanted it to blast off successfully. We would give our hearts and souls to see it flying."
Even the names of Chertok and other leaders of the space program were a tightly-guarded secret, and he only was permitted to travel abroad only in the late 1980s, after Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev liberalized the Soviet Union.
Chertok's voluminous work for the first time revealed to the public details of the endeavors which had been hidden by the veil of Soviet-era secrecy.
"I deeply regret the loss of this brilliant and genuinely humane person," said James Oberg, a NASA veteran who has written books on the Russian space program and who now works as a space consultant.
"A man like him should live forever," Oberg said in an emailed message. "He will do so, in his accomplishments and his books." In recent years, Chertok has frequently appeared on national television and participated in events marking historic achievements.
Chertok made stinging criticism of the Russian leadership for losing the nation's edge in space.
"The new elite consisting of the superrich and corrupt officials feeding on windfall energy revenues don't care about the national space program," he said in an interview published earlier this year.

Медаль имени Бенджамина Франклина, одна из самых авторитетных научных наград, присуждена российскому астрофизику, академику Рашиду Сюняеву за «фундаментальный вклад в понимание ранней Вселенной и свойств чёрных дыр». Об этом объявил Институт имени Франклина (США).
До этого медаль присуждалась российским физикам дважды: нобелевскому лауреату Петру Капице (1944) и выдающемуся физику-теоретику Николаю Боголюбову (1974).
Медали имени Бенджамина Франклина (Benjamin Franklin Medal) присуждаются ежегодно по семи дисциплинам: химии, компьютерным наукам, наукам о Земле и окружающей среде, электротехнике, наукам о живом, механике и физике. Первая медаль была присуждена в 1915 году.

On 19 December 2011 the Franklin Institute announced that the 2012 Franklin Medal in Physics goes to Rashid Sunyaev, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, for "his monumental contributions to understanding the early universe and the properties of black holes."
The Benjamin Franklin Medals are awarded annually and span seven disciplines of science: chemistry, computer and cognitive science, earth and environmental science, electrical engineering, life science, mechanical engineering, and physics. The first Franklin Medal in Physics was awarded in 1915 and it is one of the most prestigious awards in Physics. Among previous Laureates are: 1926 - Niels Bohr, 1927 - Max Planck, 1935 - Albert Einstein, 1980 - Lyman Spitzer, Jr.
The gold medals will be awarded to the 2012 laureates during the annual Franklin Institute Awards Ceremony on Thursday, 26 April 2012. During the Awards Week, the 2012 Laureates will take part in a seminar or lecture focusing on their specific area of expertise at various universities throughout the city.
Rashid Sunyaev works on many fields in theoretical astrophysics, ranging from cosmology and high energy astrophysics to X-ray astronomy and space research. He is interested in the interaction of matter and radiation under astrophysical conditions and has provided many important contributions to observational cosmology. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, together with his colleague Yakov Zeldovich he described how the cosmic background radiation is altered when passing through the hot gas in galaxy clusters, which is now known as the Sunyaev-Zeldovich-Effect. Together with Nikolai Shakura he published a paper about the structure of accretion discs around black holes, both stellar black holes in binary star systems and massive black holes in active galactic nuclei. For all his influential works in astrophysics he received many international awards and honours and is member of many academies and professional societies.

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