Июнь 2011 г.

Российская наука и мир (по материалам зарубежной электронной прессы)

CONTENTS / ОГЛАВЛЕНИЕ


• Periodic table gets heavier after 10 years with addition of 2 elements
• NNSA chief highlights U.S.-Russian cooperation on reactor conversion
• Russian forest fires could be even worse this year
• Des sous-marins russes envahissent le lac Léman
• Russia Accelerates Scientific Innovation With GPU Supercomputers
• Russia will release stress test data by end of year
• Russian Coal Output May Rise 32% by 2030, Institute Estimates
• Alien encounters "within twenty years"

Через 10 лет после открытия элементы 114 и 116 официально включены в таблицу Менделеева. Сверхтяжелые трансурановые элементы были открыты группой ученых из Ливерморской национальной лаборатории им. Э.Лоуренса (Калифорния, США) и Объединённого института ядерных исследований (Дубна, Россия).

It's time for scholars and fans of applied science to update their periodic tables after more than a decade's wait: Two elements officially have been added.
"Elements 114 and 116 were discovered more than 10 years ago by a team from Livermore and Russia," said Anne M. Stark, a spokeswoman for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California. "They have just been accepted into the periodic table."
Even when an element is discovered, its essence must be evident and supported by strong documentation before it can be considered for inclusion on the table.
The new elements, which meet the LLNL criteria of existing "beyond reasonable doubt," appear for less than a second.
Martyn Poliakoff, a research professor of chemistry at the University of Nottingham, explained in his recording for Periodic Videos.com that the empirical process for determining the existence of the two radioactive elements involved the collaboration of a Russian and Californian team that collided curium atoms.
"When they create an atom, it bangs into a target and then sits in the target and begins to decay," he said.
"And each time it decays, it goes from one element to another. Gamma rays [energetic waves] are given out, and these are detected."
It this case, 116 decayed into 114. Mr. Poliakoff showed typed reports from the research teams that detailed conclusive data from their experiments.
"This is what the scientists saw, and they believed that this is really good evidence that they had made the elements," he said.
After reviewing the reports, which covered elements 113 through 118, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry accepted elements 114 and 116 as periodic table mainstays June 1.
Their tentative titles are ununquadium and ununhexium, based on their atomic numbers.
In the video, Mr. Poliakoff showed his cutting-edge mug designed with a periodic table that sports the two newest elements.
The additions are superheavy elements, which means they have atomic numbers equal to or greater than 112.
According to the chemistry section on the LLNL website, superheavy elements are produced artificially in cyclotron experiments.
Speculations about the official names are flerovium for element 114 and moscovium for 116, but the LLNL has not confirmed any official titles.
"When they were first discovered, it was quite a boon for the community," Ms. Stark said. "We will collaborate with the Russians to decide on names."

О сотрудничестве США и России в сфере ограничения использования высокообогащенного урана в исследовательских ядерных реакторах.

MOSCOW - National Nuclear Security Administration Administrator Thomas P. D'Agostino on Wednesday highlighted the strong cooperation between the United States and Russia on minimizing the use of highly enriched uranium in civilian research reactors.
During remarks delivered during a symposium co-hosted by the Russian Academy of Sciences and the U.S. National Academies of Science, Administrator D'Agostino said converting research reactors to the use of low enriched uranium is "a vital international security priority" and called it "vital to the nuclear security agenda outlined by our two presidents."
His speech came during U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu's weeklong visit to Russia, during which the Secretary is highlighting the cooperation and shared economic opportunities with Russia in the areas of innovative clean energy technology, safe and reliable civilian nuclear power, best practices in energy efficiency, and nuclear non-proliferation. In addition to discussing the research reactors program, D'Agostino highlighted the strong partnership between the United States and Russia on global nuclear nonproliferation efforts.
According to a news release, following are excerpts of D'Agostino's remarks:
• ON THE PEACEFUL USE OF THE ATOM: "Humankind's relationship with the atom is a complicated one. The same technologies that hold the key to lifesaving medical treatments or the promise of clean and abundant sources of energy also have the potential to bring about unthinkable dangers. No one understands that paradox better than the people in this room."
• ON THE ROLE OF SCIENCE IN SECURITY: "Science, technology and engineering are the core of everything we do. I am grateful for the contributions all of you have made to science and to the U.S.-Russia nuclear security partnership. That partnership continues to grow. It is stronger than ever. And it is vital to global peace and security, as well as the safety and security of our two nations."
• ON MINIMIZAING THE USE OF HEU: "Our topic today is one that is vital to the nuclear security agenda outlined by our two presidents. Minimizing the use of highly enriched uranium is a vital international security priority. It is also an area in which the great minds gathered in this room can play a critical role."
• ON U.S.-RUSSIAN COOPERATION ON NUCLEAR SECURITY: "Together, we have accelerated our efforts to secure, convert and remove U.S.-origin and Russian-origin HEU at facilities around the world. Working together and with international partners, NNSA and Rosatom have completed 43 successful shipments since 2002, returning approximately 1,590 kilograms of HEU fresh and spent fuel to Russia from third countries. That is the equivalent of over 60 nuclear weapons."
• ON REDUCING THE ROLE OF HEU: "Each reactor converted reduces the amount of HEU in international commerce, reduces the global demand for HEU fuel, increases the demand for LEU fuel and thus greatly decreases the odds that the wrong people will gain possession of this dangerous material. As the countries with by far the largest civilian nuclear complexes, the United States and Russia have a unique responsibility to lead in these efforts."
• ON REACTOR COVERSIONS IN THE UNITED STATES: "This work in Russia is taking place in parallel with our ongoing efforts in the United States to develop a new LEU fuel that will allow for the conversion of six U.S. high performance research reactors.
All research reactors in the United States that can be converted using existing qualified LEU fuel have been converted or verified as shutdown."

Экологи считают, что в этом году лесные пожары в России могут оказаться еще хуже, чем в прошлом. Уничтожение грозит миллионам гектаров леса.

MOSCOW - A devastating wave of wildfires across Russia could ravage millions of acres of forests and cause worse damage than last year's catastrophic blazes, environmentalists and officials said Thursday.
"We're burning, burning badly," Greenpeace's forestry expert, Alexey Yaroshenko, said. "This year's situation is already much worse than last year's."
In 2010, an unprecedented heat wave triggered fires that killed 55 people, destroyed thousands of houses and torched 2.6 million hectares (6.4 million acres) of forests - an area slightly larger than Oregon.
This year, three firefighters have died and dozens of wildfires have already engulfed more than 600,000 hectares (1.48 million acres) of mainly Siberian forests - nearly three times more territory than this time last year, the Emergencies Ministry said.
Greenpeace claimed the Russian government is silencing information about fires, especially about the renewal of peat-bog fires around Moscow that last year cloaked the capital with acrid, toxic smoke.
"There are dozens of them around Moscow," Greenpeace's Grigory Kuksin told journalists. "It's technically impossible to put out some of them already."
Once ignited, peat bogs can smolder for months or years, surviving even heavy rains and snow. While burning, they emit acrid smoke that can aggravate asthma, bronchitis and heart conditions.
Moscow last year was engulfed in a thick blanket of smog that, combined with the intense heat, doubled the death rate.
In the Soviet era, authorities extensively drained numerous peat bogs around Moscow and other cities in western Russia to extract peat for fuel. Once coal and oil replaced peat as fuel, the drained peat bogs were left unattended.
Moscow authorities have allocated some $150 million to flood the peat bogs, but Greenpeace said that little has been done due to corruption and bureaucracy.
"What's been done is a drop in the ocean," Yaroshenko said.
Russia's forestry agency chief played down the threat to Moscow this year, but admitted that a surge in forest and peat-bog fires is imminent.
"The summer will be tense and uneasy," Viktor Maslyakov told journalists.
He said the government should declare an emergency situation in three Siberian regions, where unusually hot and dry weather has caused multiple wildfires.
Russian forests constitute 22 percent of the world's total woodlands, an area larger than the continental United States.
"Our planet has two lungs - the Amazon rain forest and the Siberian taiga," said Vladimir Gandzha of Russia's Nature Protection Society, the nation's oldest environmental group. "The latter is blazing now."
A top government official accused illegal loggers of starting some of the Siberian fires to conceal the traces of their work.
"They set it all afire - and covered it all up," Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov was quoted by the Itar-Tass news agency as saying.

Российские глубоководные обитаемые аппараты "Мир-1" и "Мир-2" начали погружение в Женевское озеро, где они в течение трех месяцев будут вести научные исследования. В составе экспедиции около 20 российских исследователей, а также ученые из Швейцарии и Франции.

C'est à bord de MIR 1 et MIR 2, deux submersibles russes, que des équipes internationales de chercheurs vont durant près de trois mois explorer, radiographier, analyser et suivre de près les vibrations des profondeurs du Lac Léman.
Mais pourquoi ces chercheurs portent-ils un intérêt tout particulier au Lac Léman ? L'objectif de la mission est simple : il s'agit d'analyser et de déterminer les fluctuations du lac afin de mieux comprendre son fonctionnement. Une connaissance poussée des profondeurs qui permettra ensuite d'établir les meilleures façons de préserver et protéger le lac français.
Et cette étude est de grande envergure puisqu'elle ne mobilise pas moins de dix institutions de recherche. Après trois mois d'observation sur place, il s'agira pour les équipes d'analyser au sein de leur laboratoire respectif les résultats et ce durant des années. Parmi les institutions de recherches qui participent à ce projet, on compte l'Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), une école spécialisée dans les micro-polluants. Fait également partie de l'aventure l'Université de Savoie ou encore l'INRA. S'ajoutent aux écoles, des physiciens, biologistes, ou encore géologues, qui viendront compléter de leur savoir les études faites. Il s'agit d'additionner les domaines de connaissances pour dresser un portrait fidèle, multiple, complet et complexe du Lac Léman. Un état des lieux qui permettra ensuite de proposer des solutions adéquates afin de protéger le lac et les espèces qui y vivent.

Московский государственный университет оснастил свой суперкомпьютер "Ломоносов" гибридным расширением, состоящим из полутора тысяч графических процессоров NVIDIA Tesla X2070 и такого же числа четырехъядерных CPU. Производительность системы достигает 1.3 петафлопс, что делает ее самым быстрым суперкомпьютером в России и одной из самых быстрых вычислительных систем в мире.

SANTA CLARA, CA., June 15, 2011 - As Russian scientists increasingly deploy GPU-enabled supercomputers to tackle scientific challenges, Moscow State University is upgrading its Lomonosov system with NVIDIA Tesla™ GPUs to be one of the world's fastest supercomputers.
The upgraded system couples 1,554 NVIDIA Tesla X2070 GPUs with an identical number of quad-core CPUs, delivering an expected 1.3 petaflops of peak performance, placing at number 1 in Russia and amongst the fastest systems in the world.
The system is used for research focused on computationally intensive areas such as global climate change, ocean modeling, post-genomic medicine, and galaxy formation.
"Our research requires enormous computational resources, and we need to deliver this performance as efficiently as possible," said Victor Sadovnichy, academician, Rector of Moscow State University. "The only way for us to achieve these twin goals is with a hybrid GPU/CPU based system."
Supercomputing centers all over the world are looking at ways to increase performance without exceeding power budgets. GPUs deliver high performance per watt, an advantage that is being leveraged across many research centers in Russia including the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics; Lobachevsky State University of Nizhni Novgorod (NNSU); and the Scientific and Educational Center of Parallel Computing at Perm State University.
The Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics uses the computing power of 192 Tesla C2050 GPUs for research in the fields of atomic energy, aircraft building and oil extraction. NNSU is Russia's first CUDA Research Center, actively using GPUs across projects such as studying living systems via solid mathematical modeling and large-scale computation. NNSU will install a GPU-enabled cluster with a peak performance of 100 teraflops this year, with a plan to increase this to 500 teraflops by the end of 2012.
"There is a staggering potential for GPU/CPU-based systems hybrid solutions to help us address a great number of scientific challenges such as studying living systems, bio-photonics and computational mathematics," said Victor Gergel, Dean of the computational mathematics and cybernetics department at NNSU, director of Scientific and Research Institute of Applied Mathematics and Cybernetics.
"In cooperation with NVIDIA, NNSU is able to give more of our students and researchers access to computational resources that will significantly increase the pace of their work."

Результаты стресс-тестов российских АЭС, начатых после аварии на японской АЭС "Фукусима-1" (с целью проанализировать вероятность и дальнейшее развитие критических событий) станут известны до конца текущего года одновременно с данными подобных тестов Евросоюза.

Results of stress-tests of Russian NPPs will be known by the end of the current year, at the same time as data of similar tests in the European Union, according to a report to the Russian parliament by head of Russian nuclear regulator Rostechnadzor, Nikolay Kutyin.
He said that the work has already revealed some weaknesses connected with equipment ageing.
Stress-tests for the NPPs, according to Kutyin, will allow analyzing probability and development of beyond-design-basis events.
Speaking about the Fukushima Daiichi emergency, Kutyin said that the incident flags up the possibility of a nuclear accident at any plant, anywhere in the world. "I would like to note that the accident did not happen because of the earthquake and tsunami: at the time of the accident the NPP safety systems were working in a regular mode, and stopped the reactors. The accident happened later because of activity of the NPP personnel, and the NPP's technological features," Kutyin said.
Rostechnadzor and Rosatom have been carrying out an estimation of the standards regulating operation of nuclear objects for two months, and examined the NPP construction projects.
Kutyin has noted that there has been an active discussion on the location of the planned Nizhniy Novgorod NPP; Rosatom has defined the site for the NPP, and the scientists surveyed this territory.
At the same time as the regulator issued a site licence for the plant, it has also required that the nuclear developer Rosatom install a geological monitoring system before it will consider granting construction permits.

По оценке Института энергетических исследований (ИНЭИ РАН), к 2030 г. добыча угля в России может возрасти до 420 млн тонн в год.

Russia's annual coal production may rise almost a third to 420 million metric tons by 2030, according to the Energy Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
The estimate is the institute's most optimal for the industry, Deputy Director Yuri Plakitkin said today at the 5th Coaltrans Russia and CIS conference in Moscow. Exports of the commodity may increase to between 170 million and 180 million tons under that forecast, he said. Russia produced 317 million tons of coal in 2010 and shipped about 115.7 million tons, according to the Federal State Statistics Service.
"The outlook for Russian exports growth and coal production generally is certainly very positive," Steve Hulton, principal coal supply analyst at Wood Mackenzie, said at the conference.
While transportation expenses as a portion of production costs are higher than in other nations, Russian metallurgical coal is competitive on the world market because its higher quality bolsters margins, Hulton said.
Annual Russian coal output may come to between 320 million and 330 million tons by 2030 under the institute's midrange forecast, Plakitkin said. Exports in that case may amount to 120 million to 150 million tons, he said.
The institute's least optimistic projection is for production of at least 290 million tons of coal a year by 2030 with exports of between 80 million and 90 million tons, according to Plakitkin.
The estimates depend on world oil prices and the state of the coal market, he said.

Директор Института прикладной астрономии РАН Андрей Финкельштейн считает, что внеземные формы жизни будут обнаружены в ближайшие 20 лет. 10% известных планет в нашей галактике похожи на Землю, а там, где можно найти воду, можно найти и жизнь.

A top Russian astronomer say he expects humans to encounter extraterrestrial civilisations within the next two decades Russian scientists expect humanity to encounter alien civilisations within the next two decades, a top Russian astronomer said on Monday.
"The genesis of life is as inevitable as the formation of atoms ... Life exists on other planets and we will find it within 20 years," said Andrei Finkelstein, director of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Applied Astronomy Institute, according to the Interfax news agency.
Speaking at an international forum dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial life, Finkelstein said 10% of the known planets circling suns in the galaxy resemble Earth.
If water can be found there, then so can life, he said, adding that aliens would most likely resemble humans with two arms, two legs and a head.
"They may have different colour skin, but even we have that," he said.
Finkelstein's institute runs a programme launched in the 1960s at the height of the cold war space race to watch for and beam out radio signals to outer space.
"The whole time we have been searching for extraterrestrial civilisations, we have mainly been waiting for messages from space and not the other way," he said.
In March a Nasa scientist caused controversy after claiming to have found tiny fossils of alien bugs inside meteorites that landed on Earth.
Richard Hoover, an astrobiologist at the US space agency's Marshall space flight centre in Alabama, said filaments and other structures in rare meteorites appear to be microscopic fossils of extraterrestrial beings that resemble algae known as cyanobacteria.
Writing in the Journal of Cosmology, Hoover claimed that the lack of nitrogen in the samples, which is essential for life on Earth, indicated they are "the remains of extraterrestrial life forms that grew on the parent bodies of the meteorites when liquid water was present, long before the meteorites entered the Earth's atmosphere."

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