Январь 2012 г.

Российская наука и мир (по материалам зарубежной электронной прессы)

CONTENTS / ОГЛАВЛЕНИЕ


• Mars probe "crashes into Pacific": military
• Siberia was a wildlife refuge in the last ice age
• Russian river water unexpected culprit behind Arctic freshening near US, Canada
• Drill, Don't Kill: Lessons From Two Underground Lakes
• In Russia, a new judicial system - on intellectual property rights
• Anthropologists clarify link between Asians and early Native-Americans
• Permafrost bacteria may slow down ageing: scientists
• Russian physicists protest government consolidation
• Manned Soyuz launches from South America doubtful
• Russia wants to build manned base on surface of the moon
• Russia makes progress cleaning up pollution, but hot spots remain
• Russia found failing on pollution curbs
• How to Tag a 3,700-Pound Walrus
• 2011, année la plus chaude dans l'Arctique depuis cinquante ans
• U.S., Russia to examine Antarctica
• Russia will replace Soyuz for next ISS mission: source
• Russia Explores New Phobos-Grunt Mission to Mars
• Russia to join search for exoplanets
• Mikhail Lomonosov and the dawn of Russian science
• Russian Researcher Suggests Venera-13 Imaged Life on Venus
• Life on Venus: An Interview with Dr. Leonid Ksanfomality

Из списка мест чрезвычайного загрязнения в России впервые исключены три пункта. Осталось еще тридцать девять, причем все они находятся на северо-западе страны, в районе Баренцева моря. Два из них - города Мончегорск и Мурманск на Кольском полуострове.

For the first time, three so-called "hot spots" (extremely polluted areas) have been removed from a list of 42 hot spots in northwest Russia.
This conclusion was reached in November, when Sweden handed over the chairmanship of the Barents Euro-Arctic Council to Finland. However, 39 extremely polluted areas remain on the list of hot spots, all in the Russian Barents region.
Sameradion visited two of them in the Kola Peninsula: Monchegorsk and Murmansk.
Some progress in Murmansk
Murmansk, a city of around 310,000 residents, is located on the Kola Bay, just a few miles south of the Barents Sea coast. Here, vast quantities of polluted waste water are released into the nearby Kola Bay. Seventy percent of wastewater is completely untreated when it is flushed into the bay.
The wastewater treatment system will be modernized in a project financed by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the Nordic Environment Finance Corp. (NEFCO) and with Russian money from the local water treatment plant, Vodokanal.
Two water-treatment districts will be joined together and new water mains will replace the old ones. The project will be completed within five years, at which point 25 percent less polluted waste water will be released into the fjord.
The figure will be down to zero by 2015 and by then, the third water treatment district will also be able to purify waste water before it is released into the fjord, as ruled by a local court in late 2011.
Residents turn to spring water
Many residents of Murmansk do what Dr. Alexander Larionov does. On weekends, he drives to a spring located 40-50 kilometers outside of the city and fills several water jugs with fresh, clean spring water.
"We boil the water from the faucet in the kitchen at home before drinking it, because it doesn't look clean," he says, filling his water jug with spring water from a faucet at the spring. The family uses the spring water primarily for tea.
But many modernizations have recently been made in Murmansk, according to Mikhail Egorin, head of the local water company Vodokanal.
The water company's environmental director, Irina Verestehagina, says it has been good for the Russians to receive a push in the right direction from their Swedish partners. The water purification problem will be completely solved just in time for the city's 100-year anniversary in 2016.
"Hopefully by then, the Kola Bay will be less polluted," says Mikhail Egorin.
Monchegorsk: "The Metallurgy City"
Monchegorsk is located several miles south of Murmansk in the middle of the Kola Peninsula. Emissions from mines and smelting plants pollute the city's air and water, but visitors are welcomed by a sign reading "Monchegorsk - Metallurgy City". It is beautifully situated in a long valley surrounded by mountains.
An enormous factory area in the outskirts of the city releases massive amounts of lead, heavy metals and sulfur dioxide into the air. Bellona, the Norwegian environmental organization, estimates the sulfur dioxide emissions to be five times greater than the sulfur dioxide emissions of all of Norway's industries combined.
The population has long been plagued with lung and skin diseases believed to be caused by the emissions. Factory workers are diagnosed with cancer three times more often than nonfactory workers and have a lower average length of life.
Coping with pollution
In a school, we meet Tatyana Egoshina, a teacher who moved to Monchegorsk nine years ago.
"When I came here, I just saw mountains and lakes, no trees," she says.The forest around Monchegorsk has been dead for a long time due to the emissions, but new trees were planted a few years ago. Egoshina believes the environment has improved, but says that one day last fall, the entire city was engulfed in a potent yellow fog.
"We didn't know if we should dare go outside or if we should leave the city," she says. She sought further information from the factory, which is owned by Norilsk Nikel, one of the world's largest nickel makers. Production was halted on that particular day because the thick fog trapped the emissions low to the ground.
A 17-year-old, Mascha Kitaeva, invites us for tea at home in her kitchen. She knows the water is polluted, but says it is fine to drink as long as it is run through the water purifier first. A pitcher with a filter sits on the counter, and she demonstrates how the family uses it to purify water.
But Kitaeva wants to move to Moscow. Her future holds a career in television, and better health. "Maybe it would be good for me to move away from here, from the pollution," she says.
"More talk than action"
In Murmansk, Anna Kireeva, who is Russian, works at the office of Bellona, the Norwegian environmental organization. Bellona is closely following the development on the Kola Peninsula, which borders both Norway and Finland. She worries about the hazards the emissions pose to people and the environment.
"We can clearly see how the emissions destroy the natural surroundings, how the grass and trees look," she says.
Kireeva says that although the Russian political agenda has indeed addressed the environmental issues in recent years, there has still been more talk than action. Bellona is demanding an intensification of Russian environmental legislation, that more rigorous limits are imposed on Norilsk Nikels' emissions and that environmental fines are raised.
Pressure on the company to reduce its negative environmental impact has increased in Russia compared with the Soviet era, according to Anna Kireeva. She says Norilsk Nikel is devoting substantial resources to shedding the "environmental villain" label.
"They are well aware of the international interest and that the share could benefit from a more environmentally friendly profile," she says. "Today it's harder than ever for large quantities of sulfur dioxide emissions to go unnoticed."
She describes an incident that took place a few years ago in which the people of the city of Nikel called Bellona because the rain was causing holes in umbrellas.
"We tried to interest the press in the story, but their interest was minimal," she says. "We turned to the Norwegian media instead, and they wrote about the major scandal, revealing the story to the Russian population as well. Several weeks later at a seminar in Kirkenes, the mining companies on the Kola Peninsula apologized for the incident."

За первые десять лет нового века Россия опустилась на одно из последних мест в мировом рейтинге по вопросам борьбы с загрязнениями и правильной эксплуатации природных ресурсов.

Russia's bleak environmental record has pushed it to the bottom of a new global ranking of how countries have been tackling pollution and managing their natural resources in the first decade of the century.
A "severe breakdown" in environmental public health in Russia between 2000 and 2010, as well as a worsening performances on overfishing and forest losses, means it has shown the least improvement of 132 countries studied in a report by researchers at Yale and Columbia universities in the US.
"This is one of the big stories [of the study]," said Daniel C. Esty, a Yale professor, pointing out that Russia's exploitation of its vast natural resources appeared at times to be "unchecked by basic regulation" - hitting its air and water quality.
"What this reflects is a society that looks to be suffering serious consequences of lack of good governance," he said.
"This is what happens when you have a degree of non-transparency and an economic system that has not got boundaries."
Latvia, on the other hand, topped the study's list of which countries were improving, and by how much, between 2000 and 2010, followed by Azerbaijan, Romania, Albania and Egypt.
The elimination of coal from Latvia's electricity generation mix and other measures such as reforestation helped push it to the top of the table, says the study, which was conducted with the World Economic Forum and is being released during this week's annual WEF meeting in the Swiss resort of Davos.
The report comes amid concern among some global leaders that environmental issues are receiving less attention at present because of the more immediate focus on economic problems.
This year's Davos meeting will feature a host of events focusing on problems affecting the environment and resources. A survey of delegates in advance of the event shows the business and policymaking community is uneasy about the problems of resource constraints.
A report from the WEF and a group of financial services companies, for example, shows that delegates consider the prospect of water supply shortages, food shortages and extreme volatility in commodity prices to be the second, third and fifth ranked risks of current concern.
However, other environmental concerns, such as greenhouse gas dangers or climate catastrophes, are not considered to present such an immediate threat.
Switzerland tops a separate ranking in the Yale and Columbia report, known as the 2012 Environmental Performance Index, which is a regular research snapshot, produced since 2000, of countries' records on environmental policies.
The Swiss earned their top ranking this year because of a strong performance on air pollution control and biodiversity and habitat protection. Latvia came in at number two, following by Norway, Luxembourg and Costa Rica.
The worst five performers were South Africa, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Iraq.
National income was not the only factor behind environmental standards, the study found. Among large emerging economies, China and India ranked 116 and 125 respectively in the "snapshot" list of environmental performance - far behind Brazil, which was placed 30th.
"Policy choices matter when it comes to environmental progress," said Angel Hsu, director of the 2012 Environmental Performance Index.
Overall, the report suggests there are positive global trends in terms of falling child mortality rates and better access to safe drinking water.
But it says "performance on some other challenges, notably climate change, has declined globally".
The study's authors said they were "particularly distressed" at the lack of accurate, comparative global data on critical issues such as waste management, recycling and toxic exposure.
Marc Levy, deputy director of Columbia's Center for International Earth Science Information Network and one of the EPI project leaders, said: "Although there was an effort at the 1992 Earth Summit to launch the world on a path towards environmental sustainability, we have witnessed the opposite - stagnation on many critical issues.
"The meagre data we have available clearly demonstrates this fact. It makes no sense to enter a period of heightened pressure on the environment with such inadequate monitoring of those pressures."

Совместная русско-американская группа ученых приступает к изучению поведения и миграции моржей в Чукотском море. Но перед тем как моржей изучать, их надо найти и снабдить спутниковыми радиомаяками.

A new joint effort by American and Russian scientists will offer new insights into the behavior and movements of walruses around the northern Chukchi Sea. But before the walruses can be tracked, they have to be tagged - with a mix of new and old technology.
The American scientists, from the U.S. Geological Service, use a cross-bow to embed a small satellite-linked transmitter into the walrus's fatty back. The tag has a harpoon-head on one end, and the researchers need to get within 10 yards to pull off the winning shot.
At 10 yards, most of the tension comes from waiting for a walrus to be in the best position - lying on its side with its back facing the researcher. That way, the transmitter has the best chance of reaching the sweet spot in the walrus' hide where it will stay for a few weeks or months.
"It's exciting," said Chad Jay, a research scientist with the project. "It's interesting to be that close and really see some of their behaviors and facial expressions at that level. They are big but they're more likely to try to flee than to attack you." Jay said he's become accustomed to being so close to the animals, which can tip the scales at 3,700 lbs.
Transmitters like splinters
The team attached satellite radio-tags on 40 walruses in the northern Chukchi Sea in mid-July and on 34 walruses on the coast of northwest Alaska in late August. Russian colleagues will soon deploy additional tags on walruses on the Russian shores of the Chukchi Sea.
It's important to gather data quickly because the transmitters don't stay in for more than six to eight weeks. The walrus's body works out the device similarly to a splinter, Jay said. "We are trying to work on ways to keep tags on animals as long as possible. Six to eight weeks is fairly short-lived compared to other animal tracking," he told OurAmazingPlanet.
Jay and the other scientists hope to discover more about how the decline in the coverage of Arctic sea ice in recent decades is affecting the animals' behavior. Each transmitter sends back information about an animal's location and also gives pressure and conductivity (how well a material conducts electricity) readings - data that can let the scientists know each hour if the walruses are hauled out on land or ice, or if they are swimming in the sea. (Water has different conductivity than the air.)
Feeding and Foraging
Though they don't have much behavioral data for walruses from before the ice started shrinking, Jay says that they use reports from aerial surveys to make comparisons.
Walruses feed on sea worms and clams that live in shallow coastal waters. Typically, ice would cover part of the shallow areas and the animals would pull their bulky bodies onto the ice for a rest in between bouts of feeding.
Now, with ice retreating far to the north during the summer and the fall, the animals have to choose whether to haul out on land or not haul out at all. The scientists are examining the questions of how the land haul-outs impact the energy output and mortality of the animals.
Jay says that so far models predict a continued decline in walrus population, but the team has one more field season to deploy transmitters and track the movements of the giant animals.

2011 год стал самым теплым в Арктике за последние 50 лет, сообщил заместитель директора по научной работе Арктического и Антарктического научно-исследовательского института Александр Данилов.

L'année 2011 est la plus chaude enregistrée dans l'Arctique depuis cinquante ans, a indiqué mardi 24 janvier le directeur adjoint de l'Institut russe de recherche scientifique pour l'Arctique et l'Antarctique, Alexandre Danilov. "Il y a déjà des conséquences visibles de ces changements", a ajouté le scientifique, précisant qu'en Antarctique, le réchauffement était en revanche nettement moins marqué.
En août 2011, les services météorologiques russes avaient déjà indiqué que la banquise dans l'Arctique était proche de son niveau minimum de 2007. Sur l'année, la température moyenne annuelle de l'air près de la surface de l'océan glacial Arctique était d'environ 1,5 °C plus élevée que durant la période de 1981 à 2010, selon un rapport publié en décembre par l'Agence nationale océanique et atmosphérique américaine (NOAA).
La Russie a fait du développement de l'Arctique une priorité stratégique, convoitant les larges ressources naturelles de la région, notamment hydrocarbures, et ambitionnant d'ouvrir une nouvelle voie commerciale, dont elle aurait le contrôle. Grâce à la fonte des glaces et au réchauffement climatique, ce passage maritime du Nord permettrait de rejoindre plus rapidement et plus facilement l'Europe et l'Asie.

Совместная российско-американская комиссия МИДа России и Госдепартамента США проинспектирует иностранные научные станции, работающие в Антарктиде на предмет выполнения обязательств по ограничению воздействия на окружающую среду.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 23 (UPI) - Russian and U.S. scientists started a five-day inspection to review environmental effects of foreign stations in Antarctica, the U.S. government said.
The U.S. State Department announced it was teaming with the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to inspect foreign stations in Antarctica.
"The U.S.-Russian team will review adherence by treaty parties to their obligations, including with respect to limiting environmental impacts, ensuring that Antarctica is used only for peaceful purposes and that parties honor the prohibition on measures of a military nature," the State Department said in a statement.
The United Nations' International Maritime Organization announced in August that ships traveling through parts of Antarctic are prohibited from using fuels containing "bitumen, tar and their emulsions."
With melting sea ice exposing unexplored oil and natural gas deposits, Russia, meanwhile, is trying to convince the international community its claim to the arctic extends beyond limits spelled out in a 1982 convention.
Moscow will present its findings to the United Nations once the study is finalized by 2013.

Корабль «Союз-ТМА-04М», который должен был доставить новый экипаж на МКС, будет заменен из-за обнаруженных неполадок - негерметичности спускаемого аппарата. Назначенный на 30 марта запуск перенесен на 15 мая.

MOSCOW - Russia will replace the Soyuz spacecraft set to take the next crew to the International Space Station after a fault was found in testing, a space industry source said Wednesday.
The Russian space agency had previously said that only a capsule used for the crew's re-entry to Earth would be replaced after tests found it was not hermetically sealed, delaying a mission originally set for March 30.
"A decision has been taken to completely replace the Soyuz TMA-04M ship, not just the damaged re-entry capsule," the source told the Interfax news agency, saying the crew would fly in a Soyuz built for the following mission, which will in turn be delayed.
The source said the decision was taken because it was easier to use an entirely new Soyuz than to switch the re-entry capsule, due to modifications to the hatch of the newer craft.
The Soyuz will be ready in the next two weeks and then tests at Russia's Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan will take a further six weeks, the source said.
The head of Roscosmos, Vladimir Popovkin, said Tuesday that the launch of the next Soyuz would be most likely be postponed until the end of April, with the final decision to be taken after talks with NASA on Thursday.
The fault in the Soyuz craft, which is now the only means to ferry crews to the ISS after the retirement of the US shuttle, is the latest in a series of embarrassing setbacks to Russia's space programme.

Россия намерена создать вторую межпланетную станцию - «Фобос-Грунт-2» - взамен рухнувшей, но только в том случае, если не удастся договориться с ЕКА и НАСА об участии в проекте ExoMars (отправка орбитального зонда для исследования Марса). Вторая станция может быть готова к 2018 г. и обойдется вдвое дешевле первой .

Russian space scientists this week floated the idea of building a new version of the Phobos-Grunt sample return spacecraft after the first model failed to escape Earth orbit and crashed in the Pacific on 15 January. But according to the head of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos), Vladimir Popovkin, a new mission will depend on the outcome of talks with the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA about the possible inclusion of Russia in the ExoMars project, which plans to send missions to the red planet in 2016 and 2018.
Phobos-Grunt, Russia's most ambitious planetary probe in decades, was launched on 9 November with the aim of depositing a lander on Mars' moon Phobos and bringing back samples to Earth. It also carried a Chinese-made Mars orbiter, that country's first interplanetary probe. Although the spacecraft was lifted into Earth orbit faultlessly, it then failed to respond to commands from the ground and did not ignite its booster rockets which would set it on course for Phobos. Despite desperate attempts to reestablish contact by Roscosmos and ESA, the craft remained mute and its orbit degraded until the spacecraft plummeted into the ocean off southern Chile.
Lev Zelenyi, director of the Russian Academy of Science's Space Research Institute (IKI), said at a 1 February press conference that the team behind the mission was keen to try again. A repeat would only cost half as much as the first time round, he noted, because the infrastructure for the mission is already in place. Zelenyi told Science that this is still just an IKI proposal and is not yet funded. Phobos-Grunt-2 would be "improved and simplified," he says, and would use a Soyuz Fregat booster rather than the Zenit booster of the original craft.
But RSA chief Popovkin told the press yesterday that this all depends on ExoMars. Originally an ESA-only lander mission, it was merged with NASA plans in 2009 and ended up as a two-craft mission: the first in 2016 will be an orbiter devoted to atmospheric sampling, followed by a large lander in 2018 which would have the capability to dig below the surface. When budget cuts last year led to a reduction in U.S. participation in the project, Russia was invited to join in and perhaps provide launchers as well as instruments. Discussions are expected to be concluded this month; if Russia takes a significant role, then Phobos-Grunt-2 will be off the table.
Meanwhile, the Web site Russianspaceweb.com reports that the interagency commission that has been investigating the failure of Phobos-Grunt submitted its report to Popovkin on 30 January. Russian officials have made numerous suggestions that the failure was due to malign foreign influence, including U.S. scientific radars or covert military action, or natural phenomena such as solar flares and cosmic rays. But leaks reported on Russianspaceweb.com suggest the commission will point the finger at design errors and inadequate preflight testing of the spacecraft's flight control system.

Российские астрономы из Пулковской обсерватории займутся поиском планет за пределами Солнечной системы - так называемых экзопланет. Сейчас такие поиски ведут США (космический телескоп Kepler) и Франция (космический телескоп CoRoT). В Пулково искать экзопланеты планируется с помощью наземных систем.

MOSCOW, Feb. 1 (UPI) - Russian astronomers say they will start their own search for planets outside our solar system following U.S. and French successes in finding such exoplanets.
"Scientists from the Pulkovo Observatory are planning to use ground-based instruments to study the transit of planets around their parent stars," Lev Zelyony, head of the Institute for Space Research told RIA Novosti in Moscow Wednesday.
The U.S. Kepler space telescope and France's CoRoT space telescope have been successful in identifying exoplanets but ground-based projects could also be effective, Zelyony said.
Ground-based telescopes can be used for the observation of a star's small drop in brightness occurring when the orbit of a planet passes in front of the star, known as a transit detection, he said.
He pointed to the example of the ground-based Hungarian Automated Telescope Network which so far has discovered 29 exoplanets. "It is an interesting research, which should be pursued," Zelyony said. "It will also help us look at our solar system from a different perspective."

Статья в журнале Physics Today (American Institute of Physics) представляет собой текст выступления Владимира Шильцева, директора Центра ускорительной физики лаборатории Fermilab (США) и президента Ассоциации русских ученых в Америке, по случаю трехсотлетия со дня рождения М.В.Ломоносова.

Curiously unsung in the West, Lomonosov broke ground in physics, chemistry, and astronomy; won acclaim as a poet and historian; and was a key figure of the Russian Enlightenment.
On 7 December 1730, a tall, physically fit 19-year-old, the son of a peasant-turned-fisherman, ran away from his hometown, a village near the northern Russian city of Archangel. His departure had been quietly arranged. He had borrowed three rubles and a warm jacket from a neighbor, and he carried with him his two most treasured books, Grammatica and Arithmetica. He persuaded the captain of a sleigh convoy carrying frozen fish to let him ride along to Moscow, where he was to fulfill his dream of studying "sciences." He left behind a kind but illiterate father, a wicked and jealous stepmother, prospects of an arranged marriage into a family of means, and his would-be inheritance - a two-mast sailboat named Seagull. The young man's name was Mikhail Vasilevich Lomonosov.
He thought that ahead of him lay a month-long trek along a snowy, 800-mile route. In fact, it was the beginning of a much longer journey that would usher in the modern era of Russian science. Young Lomonosov couldn't have known that after years of hardship and a decade of scientific training, he would become the first Russian-born member of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences, a nobleman, and Russia's most accomplished polymath. And although his name was forgotten in scientific circles for nearly 50 years, he has reemerged during the past two centuries as a cult figure in Russian science.
Russia's native son
Lomonosov was born 19 November 1711 into a family of peasants of the state. His mother died when he was nine, and his stepmothers despised his adoration of the village's few available books, including the Bible and Lives of the Saints, both of which he had learned to read in the village's church. Reading, they claimed, distracted him from being a proper help to his father.
Not long after Lomonosov's departure, his father tracked him down in Moscow at the boarding school of the Spassky Monastery, where he had been admitted under the false pretense that he was the son of a nobleman. His father asked him to come back, but the young runaway chose instead to continue his studies, even though that meant half-starving on a daily stipend of three kopeks - roughly $4 today - and being ridiculed for being considerably older than his classmates. In four years he had nearly finished an eight-year course in Latin, Greek, Church Slavonic, geography, history, and philosophy, but when his true parentage was revealed, he was threatened with expulsion. It was only by virtue of his impressive academic record that he was allowed to continue the course, and in 1736 he was transferred as one of 12 top students to continue his education at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences.
Lomonosov's talents were quickly recognized at the academy as well, and in the fall of 1736, he and two other students were sent to the University of Marburg in Germany. For three years he studied natural sciences and mathematics with Christian Wolff, a renowned encyclopedic scientist, philosopher, and epigone of Gottfried Leibniz. (On his own initiative, Lomonosov also studied German, French, art, dance, and fencing.)
From Wolff he acquired a logical, schematic style of scientific thought, which served him well throughout his life.
In the summer of 1739, Lomonosov and his classmates traveled to Freiberg, Germany, to study practical mining with Johann Henckel. Within a year, having acquired a great deal of knowledge about mineralogy and metallurgy, Lomonosov left Freiberg and spent a large part of 1740 chasing the Russian ambassador through Germany and Holland in search of funds to return to Russia. Later that year, in Marburg, he married Elizabeth Zilch. In 1741 Lomonosov returned to Russia and was appointed an adjunct professor of physics at the academy, an institution with which he would remain affiliated until his death on 4 April 1765.
The Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences was founded in 1724 by a decree of Emperor Peter the Great. In its early days, it consisted of a dozen or so academicians (or professors) and a similar number of adjuncts instructing in the natural sciences, rhetoric, history, and law. Fully supported by the state, the academy enjoyed auspicious beginnings; its liberal scientific environment and more-than-generous salaries resulted in the influx of the highest-caliber scholars. Daniel Bernoulli and Leonhard Euler were the most notable of the first wave of faculty members. The ultimate goals of the academy were to train Russian scientists and to establish the country's science and education. In its infancy, however, the academy was dominated by foreign-born scientists and, due to continual budget issues, limited in its educational activities.
By the time of Lomonosov's arrival, the academy was in a state of crisis due to financial problems, bureaucratic infighting, and the departure of Euler, Bernoulli, Joseph Nicholas Delisle, and other luminaries. The task of educating Russian students had been mostly neglected, and by the end of its second decade, the academy had only three Russian adjuncts. Lomonosov, elected an academician in 1745 and later appointed to the academy's triumvirate chancellery, fought hard to improve the situation. He succeeded in increasing the number of scientific publications and lectures in Russian, as opposed to Latin or German; recruiting more Russian interns and students to the academy's gymnasium; and by 1765 bringing the number of Russian-born faculty up to 10, including 7 academicians.
A corpuscular world
As a scientist, Lomonosov was equal parts thinker and experimenter. He tested his theories and hypotheses with experiments that he planned and carried out himself. Although proficient in math, he never used differential calculus. He would work on research topics for years, even decades at a time, always with an eye toward turning discoveries into new practices or inventions.
Lomonosov believed physical and chemical phenomena were best explained in terms of the mechanical interactions of corpuscles - "minute, insensible particles" analogous to what we now know as molecules. Giving name to the philosophy, he coined the term "physical chemistry" in 1752.
He is perhaps best known for being the first person to experimentally confirm the law of conservation of matter. That metals gain weight when heated - now a well-known consequence of oxidation - confounded British chemist Robert Boyle, who had famously observed the effect in 1673. The result seemed to implicate that heat itself was a kind of matter. In 1756 Lomonosov disproved that notion by demonstrating that when lead plates are heated inside an airtight vessel, the collective weight of the vessel and its contents stays constant. In a subsequent letter to Euler, he framed the result in terms of a broad philosophy of conservation:
All changes that we encounter in nature proceed so that ... however much matter is added to any body, as much is taken away from another ... since this is the general law of nature, it is also found in the rules of motion: a body loses as much motion as it gives to another body.
In analogous experiments 17 years later, French chemist Antoine Lavoisier progressed further, showing that the increase in the weight of the metal is exactly offset by a reduction in the weight of the air's oxygen. But contrary to Lavoisier, who considered heat to be a "subtle caloric liquid," Lomonosov understood it more accurately as a measure of the linear and rotational motion of corpuscles. In 1745, more than a century before Lord Kelvin introduced the absolute temperature scale, Lomonosov proposed the concept of absolute cold as the point at which corpuscles neither move nor rotate.
The corpuscular framework also led the Russian scientist to correctly predict a deviation from Boyle's law: Because the particles themselves occupy a certain volume of space, argued Lomonosov, the air pressure wouldn't remain inversely proportional to the gas volume at high pressures. Lomonosov's deductions presaged molecular kinetic theory, which wouldn't be fully developed until the 19th century.
Electricity in the air
Lomonosov began studying electricity with Georg Wilhelm Richmann in late 1744. Together, they pioneered a quantitative approach: Lomonosov had proposed a technique that called for measuring an object's charge based on the electrostatic forces it exerts on a metal scale; Richmann's simpler but more effective invention, a silk thread connected to a vertical metal rod, might be considered the first electrometer. The angle of the thread's tilt gave a measure of the rod's charge.
In 1753 their progress in understanding atmospheric electricity suffered a tragic interruption. While performing an experiment in a heavy thunderstorm, Richmann was killed by ball lightning. Lomonosov, who had been simultaneously performing a nearly identical experiment just three blocks away, reported having "miraculously survived" thanks to being momentarily distracted by his wife.
To prevent the impending cessation of the academy's atmospheric-electricity studies and to eulogize his friend, Lomonosov wrote A Word on Atmospheric Phenomena Proceeding from Electrical Force. In it, he theorized that lightning was electricity generated by friction between warm, upward-flowing air and cool, downward-flowing air, with the electric charge accumulating on "oily" microparticles.
He described the vertical drafts as resulting from air-density gradients, which he could estimate based on temperature and pressure profiles. All of that marked an advance beyond Benjamin Franklin's earlier discovery of the connection between lightning and electricity. (See box 1 for a comparison of the two men's lives.)
Looking to loft meteorological instruments and electrometers into the air, Lomonosov designed and built the contraption. A forerunner to the helicopter, it boasted two propellers - powered by a clock spring - that rotated in opposite directions to balance out torque. During its demonstration to the academy in July 1754, the model managed to lift itself slightly, but no practical device emerged.
In 1756 Lomonosov compiled 127 notes on the theory of light and electricity, presented a mathematical theory of electricity, and in a public meeting of the academy read his paper on the wave nature of light and on a new theory of the colors that constitute light.
Venus's atmosphere
The transit of Venus across the Sun's disk on 6 June 1761 afforded a rare opportunity to measure the Earth-to-Sun distance using Edmond Halley's method, which calls for comparing various apparent paths of the transit as measured from different Earth latitudes. As a leader of the academy, Lomonosov helped to organize a worldwide observation effort that included more than 170 astronomers dispatched to 117 stations, 4 of which were in Russia. He was alone, however, in having realized that a dense Venusian atmosphere, if one existed, would bend the Sun's rays to produce a visible aureole, or ring of light, during the very beginning and very end - the ingress and egress - of the transit. Expecting the aureole to be faint, he viewed the ingress and egress using only a weak optical filter; to mitigate the considerable risk of damage to his vision, he observed the process in brief glimpses and only with well-rested eyes.
To his excitement, he observed an arc of light lining Venus's shadow at the end of ingress and at the beginning of egress. Later, several other astronomers confirmed seeing the arc, but only Lomonosov recognized its significance. Within a month he published a report summarizing the observations and explaining how the atmosphere refracts light to produce the aureole, or "bulge," as he called it. He proclaimed that "Venus is surrounded by a distinguished air atmosphere, similar (or even possibly larger) than the one around Earth."
In an addendum, Lomonosov suggested that there might be life on Venus - a possibility that he argued wasn't necessarily at odds with the Bible. Moreover, he contended Venusians might not necessarily be Christians. It was a bold stance to take in 18th-century Russia, where just 20 years earlier the Holy Synod had gone out of its way to denounce as heresy the heliocentric Copernican model of the universe.
The academy quickly published 200 copies of Lomonosov's report in German and sent them abroad in August 1761. Inexplicably, they went virtually unnoticed in Europe. Other astronomers, including American David Rittenhouse, made similar observations of the aureole during the 1769 transit. But for nearly two centuries, the discovery of Venus's atmosphere was credited to German-born astronomers Johann Schrцter and William Herschel, who - unaware of their predecessors' work - observed a different effect related to Venus's atmosphere in 1790.
Lomonosov's priority wasn't widely acknowledged until the mid 20th century.
Similarly overlooked was Lomonosov's 1756 invention of a single-mirror reflecting telescope. Isaac Newton's reflecting telescope, invented a century prior, consisted of two mirrors: a curved primary one and a small, diagonally oriented secondary one that reflected the primary image into a viewing piece. But given the low reflectivity of the brass mirrors of the day, the two-mirror scheme presented a substantial cost to brightness. Lomonosov obviated the secondary mirror by tilting the primary mirror 4° so that it formed an image directly in a side eyepiece. In 1789, however, Herschel used a similar approach to build what was then the world's largest telescope, and what might have been appropriately known as a Lomonosov-Herschelian telescope is now named solely for Herschel.
Another of Lomonosov's inventions, the so-called night-vision tube, sparked so much controversy that his colleagues at the academy rushed to publish theoretical tracts proving its implausibility. Demonstrated in 1756 and used during the Russian navy's Arctic expeditions of 1765 and 1766, the simple telescope had just two lenses - to minimize optical loss - and a large objective aperture. Crucially, the short-focus lens at the eyepiece had a larger-than-usual diameter of about 8 mm, roughly the size of a fully dilated human pupil.
His colleagues saw no novelty in the design. At first glance, Lomonosov's tube looked no different from the familiar Keplerian telescope, and it was well known that brightness can't be increased by magnification. Lomonosov, however, argued that the device's increased optical flux actually had allowed him to see better in the dark. He invited his critics to test the apparatus for themselves, but they remained unconvinced. The controversy survived until 1877, when Ricco's law established that the minimum brightness detectable by a human eye is inversely proportional to the area of the image formed on the retina. Lomonosov was vindicated, and nowadays anyone can see the effect even with ordinary large-aperture binoculars.
During the severe winter of 1759, Lomonosov and colleague Joseph Adam Braun used a mixture of snow and nitric acid to chill a thermometer to -38 °C and obtain - for the first time on record - solid mercury. Upon hammering the frozen metal ball, they found it to be elastic and hard "like a lead." Mercury, shrouded in mystique at the time, was shown to be not all that dissimilar to the more common metals. It was among the most widely discussed discoveries in Europe.
A firm, lifelong believer in corpuscular mechanics, Lomonosov was suspicious of Newton's gravity and its action at a distance. The Russian spent the last five years of his life carrying out pendulum experiments in a futile attempt to overthrow it; his efforts were documented in hundreds of pages of logbook notes.
A peculiar polymath
At more than six feet four inches tall and physically strong, Lomonosov reminded many of his idol, Peter the Great. Anecdotes of the scientist's exploits depict a daring existence. He and two other Russian interns are said to have so out-reveled German students in Marburg that the city sighed with relief when the trio left for Freiberg. German hussars once got him drunk and enlisted in the Prussian army, which he later escaped. And as a 50-year-old academician, he once fought off three unlucky sailors attempting to rob him; he beat the men and stripped them of their clothes.
Lomonosov was also known to argue fiercely with inept colleagues at the academy. For one quarrel that ended in physical violence, he paid dearly. Then just an adjunct, his salary was halved, he was placed under house arrest for eight months - one of the most scientifically productive periods of his life, he later noted - and he was freed only after a public apology. Lomonosov's hot temper and rebellious character were integral to his rise as a legendary figure, as were his immense self-esteem and dignity, rare traits in imperial Russia.
He once admonished his patron, Count Ivan Shuvalov, saying, "Not only do I not wish to be a court fool at the table of lords and such earthy rulers, but even of the Lord God himself, who gave me my wit until he sees fit to take it away." Had it been said to a less-enlightened count, such a statement might have been met with severe repercussions. Shuvalov, however, remained a lifelong friend. It was he who embraced Lomonosov's charter of the first Russian university and who convinced Empress Elizabeth to sign a decree establishing Moscow University on 25 January 1755, a day still celebrated annually in Russia as Students' Day. The university offered education to a wide stratum of Russian society and was key to the country's intellectual progress. In 1940 it was named after Lomonosov.
Originally, Lomonosov was recognized mainly as a historian, reformer of Russian grammar, rhetorician, and poet. His eulogistic odes to empresses were well accepted at the court. One of them earned him 2000 rubles, three times his annual academic salary at the time. For almost a century, Lomonosov's poetry overshadowed his natural philosophy - not only abroad, where his science often failed to make an impact, but even in Russia.
As Lomonosov himself used to say, however, "Poetry is my solace; physics, my profession." With a 1500-ruble grant from the Russian senate, he set up Russia's first research chemical laboratory, which he led for eight years. He also won a 4000-ruble grant to start a mosaic factory and, subsequently, an 80 000-ruble commission (roughly $12 million today) to create 17 mosaics celebrating the deeds of Peter the Great. Only one was finished before he died - the grandiose Battle of Poltava, now displayed in the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Only in the mid 19th century did his scientific accomplishments begin to be fully appreciated in Russia and abroad. Through the works of Boris Menshutkin, Nikolai Vavilov, Nobel laureate Peter Kapitza, and many others, Lomonosov has reemerged as the most renowned figure in Russian science (see box 2). Among his namesakes are a city, an Arctic ridge, lunar and Martian craters, a porcelain factory, and a mineral.
The complete works of Lomonosov consist of four volumes on physics, chemistry, and astronomy; two on mineralogy, metallurgy, geology, Russian history, economics, and geography; two on philology, poetry, and prose; and three of correspondence, letters, and translations. Lomonosov's tercentennial in 2011 was celebrated statewide by a decree of the Russian president.
How could such an accomplished figure remain so obscure for so long? Kapitza pointed to Russia's relatively primitive scientific society, in which few people could appreciate Lomonosov's genius, and to Lomonosov's weak personal connections with most influential European scientists. Lomonosov never left Russia after he was a student, and he had a sustained exchange of ideas only with Euler, who was in Berlin at the time. Robert Crease adds that polymaths tend to be underappreciated due to their breadth, a shortcoming in the eyes of the public, and that Lomonosov in particular was rarely written about in English. Also, Lomonosov lived a relatively short life; he died at age 53, while many of his contemporaries, including Newton, Bernoulli, Franklin, and Herschel, lived to see 70, 80, or more. Moreover, he chose to divert much of his energy into promoting Russia's science and education and modernizing its industry and military.
Another factor bears consideration: Lomonosov's natural philosophy was based on Cartesian explanations of mechanical models, whereas his European counterparts at the time were increasingly turning to Newtonian-inspired reasoning that relied on caloric, electric, and other "imponderable fluids." (Euler was an exception.) Only 19th-century physics, buttressed by the mechanical theory of heat and wave optics, provided the requisite background to appreciate Lomonosov's discoveries and ideas.
Box 1. The parallel lives of Lomonosov and Franklin
Mikhail Lomonosov is often compared with his American contemporary Benjamin Franklin; both are considered scientific patriarchs and key figures of the enlightenments of their respective homelands. They each lived in the epoch of their nations' emergence into Western civilization - Russia through wars and reforms initiated by Peter the Great, the American states through prerevolutionary developments and the War of Independence.
The biographical similarities between the two scientists are striking: Both devoted their lives to scientific observation and experiment, both made major discoveries regarding electricity and lightning, and both were deeply interested in public education. Lomonosov founded Russia's first university and played a leading role in the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences; Franklin was the founder and first president of the American Philosophical Society. Both men tried to reform their languages' grammars; Lomonosov succeeded, Franklin did not. And both were interested in geography: Lomonosov worked on finding an Arctic path to America; Franklin discovered the Atlantic Ocean's Gulf Stream.
Lomonosov and Franklin are widely regarded as self-made men. Born into working-class families, both fled restrictive environments - and told lies as needed - in pursuit of opportunity. Both married their landladies' daughters, unsophisticated women who did not share their husbands' interests. Both were accomplished polymaths who rose to prestigious national rank, shaped their countries' scientific cultures, and left enduring legacies. The religious views of Lomonosov, an enlightened Russian Orthodox who regarded God as a "wise clock-master," were close to those of Franklin, a well-known deist.
Although they never met, the two men knew of each other, and each held the other's scientific reputation in high regard. Lomonosov laboriously explained to his contemporaries the difference between his theory of atmospheric electricity and that of the "celebrated master Franklin." Franklin advised Ezra Stiles, an amateur scientist and cofounder of Brown University, on how to best communicate with Lomonosov about temperature regimes in the Arctic Sea.
Franklin, however, enjoyed the advantages of being an Englishman (until 1776!) and a citizen of Philadelphia, perhaps the most liberal city in the world at the time. He flourished in a society that asserted, as a matter of principle, every man's right to self-realization. Lomonosov, by contrast, lived in the backward society that defined Russia after Peter the Great. As one important Russian scholar put it, "Russia could not have produced a Franklin. But what an opportunity Lomonosov would have had, if he had been born in America!"
Box 2. Genius, society, and time
The chart shown here illustrates the evolving popularities of Gottfried Leibniz, Isaac Newton, and Mikhail Lomonosov - the three key figures of the national enlightenments of Germany, England, and Russia, respectively. The plot shows the frequency of appearances of each man's last name as a fraction of the sum total of words published in his native language in a given year. By that metric, the three men are the most frequently recurring names among representatives of the natural sciences, and the chart illustrates their unique paths to fame.
Newton (1642-1727) enjoyed enormous recognition during his lifetime, a peak in celebrity during the decade right after his death, and then centuries of posthumous recognition. Leibniz (1646-1716) rose to fame in more dramatic fashion. Presumably due to having lost the argument with Newton over priority in developing differential calculus, Leibniz went unrecognized for almost 150 years after his death. Not until the second half of the 19th century, when a unified German state was created, did he gain fame. Since then, Leibniz's prominence in the literature of his native tongue is unrivaled by any other scientist, likely owing to consistent scientific awareness on the part of German society.
Lomonosov (1711-65) rose to prominence via an equally remarkable path. He was posthumously forgotten in the Russian literature for some 40 years but then reemerged in the early 1800s during Russia's cultural awakening, of which the appearance of renowned author Alexander Pushkin was the climax. Since then, Lomonosov has consistently been the most frequently mentioned scientist in the Russian literature, followed by Dmitri Mendeleyev, creator of the periodic table, and Nobel laureate Ivan Pavlov, pioneer in understanding physiological reflex mechanisms.
Lomonosov's peaks in popularity during the 1860s and 1950s correspond to publicity campaigns - the most recent initiated by Joseph Stalin to popularize science and technology and to venerate Russia's scientific heritage. Notably, those brief surges did not change the baseline level of Lomonosov's popularity. The true value of a person in a nation's eyes, it would seem, holds steady through the decades and centuries.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This article is an edited version of a talk given at Fermilab in November 2011 on the occasion of Mikhail Lomonosov's tercentennial anniversary.

Главный научный сотрудник Института космических исследований РАН, профессор Леонид Ксанфомалити считает, что на снимках, сделанных советскими автоматическими межпланетными станциями на Венере в 1975 и 1982 гг., могут присутствовать объекты, «имеющие свойства живых существ»: некоторые детали на серии последовательных снимков то появляются, то исчезают.
Опубликованная в порядке дискуссии статья в «Астрономическом вестнике» вызвала самые разные отзывы - от скептических, объясняющих появление странных объектов искажениями при передаче радиосигнала, до вполне позитивных, признающих за предположением Ксанфомалити право на существование.

Dr. Ksanfomality is a senior researcher and a head of the Laboratory on Photometry and Thermal Radiometry at the Space Research Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, and a contributor to Venera missions in 1970-80s.
In the discussion paper, published in the January issue of the journal Astronomicheskii Vestnik (Solar System Research), the researcher re-examines panoramic images taken by the Soviet landing probe Venera-13 and describes three objects which he claims have some characteristics of living organisms.
This probe successfully landed on Venus in the Navka Planitia in the eastern part of an elevated region known as Phoebe Regio on March 1, 1982. It survived for some 127 minutes and returned panoramic images of Venus' surface.
Dr. Ksanfomality analyzes a few series of images taken by two cameras (V-13-1 and V-13-2) of the Venera-13 in attempt to identify objects or phenomena associated with their appearance, disappearance or change of their forms.
"A few relatively large objects were found with size ranging from a decimeter to half meter and with unusual morphology. The objects were observed on some images, but were absent on others, or altered their shape," the researcher writes in the paper.
"Among the relatively large disappearing or changing elements, first of all, there is a "disk". The object has a regular shape and refers to the planet's surface as no parts of the lander similar in shape were detached. "Disk" is cut by the upper boundary of the image, only its lower half part is seen. It is about 0.34 m in diameter."
Dr. Ksanfomality hypothesizes that a position of the "disk" changed a little relatively to the upper limit of the image due to heating of the lander and a slight change in a position of the optical axis of the scanning camera.
"The figure shows a sequence of images of "disk" and its surroundings. In the first two frames of the figure, the shape of "disk" and "broom" almost do not change. At the 72 minute at the bottom of the disk a short arc appeared. In frame (86 min) the arc lengthened by several times, and the "disk" was divided into fragments. In the next frame (93 min), instead of the "disk" the symmetrical bright object appeared of about the same size and of a regular shape. It is formed by numerous angular folds, such as chevrons," he writes.
The second object, which attracted attention of Dr. Ksanfomality, is a "black rag". "In the image, obtained in the period of 0-13 min after landing, one can see that a vertically elongated black object of unknown origin, "a black rag", measuring about 60 mm in height, emerged, wrapping along its full height the measuring cone (for soil mechanical properties measurements). On the two subsequent images taken in 27 and 36 min respectively, the object disappeared without a trace."
The most interesting object is a "scorpion". It appeared together with the adjacent "semiring" at its right side around the 90th min after landing on an image taken by the V-13-1 camera.
"Before the appearance of the "scorpion" the lander has been working for more than 1 hr 27 min. Thus, our first assumption was that this regular structure was a product of destruction of some part of the lander. But the lander Venera-13 continued to work after it for a full hour. The systems' operability showed that the crash had not happened yet, otherwise the lander would have failed due to catastrophic overheating," Dr. Ksanfomality analyzes.
"On the first image (7 min), on the ejected soil is a shallow oblong groove visible, with its length about 100 mm. In the second image (20 min) sides of the grooves are raised, and the length increased to about 150 mm. The orientation of the grooves is the same as that of the "scorpion". In the picture of the 59th min a part of the regular structure of the "scorpion" appeared," the author describes in detail.
"On the 93rd minute, the "scorpion", apparently, recovered completely from the soil that filled it, that was consisting a layer probably not exceeding a 1-2 cm. Thus, the rescue operation of the object took about 1.5 hr. One can assume that this indicates its limited physical abilities. On the 119th min it was no longer visible."
"Analysis of the available technical documentation also showed that all the external operations (e.g. throwing away of the lids, drilling of the ground) had been completed for a minimum period of time, not exceeding 30 minutes, and that nothing else had separated from the lander. The assumption of a separated part contradicts also the fact that in the subsequent images the object "scorpion" is missing."
Dr. Ksanfomality also emphasizes that no retouching or adding details was applied to the image processing.
The author explains that there was a strong impact on the surface when the probe landed and that it destroyed the soil to a depth of about 4.5 cm ejecting it aside.
"Because of the small side speed of the lander, directed approximately to the side of the V-13-1 camera, the soil was ejected in one direction. Therefore, both powdered buffer and surface are visible mainly at the V-13-1 camera's side. On the same side the spectrophotometer on board Venera-13 recorded 2-fold decrease in the signal, duration for 7-10 s, probably because of the cloud of dust."
Dr. Ksanfomality concludes that "Initially, the lander produced a strong noise, firing pyropatrons and working a drilling unit that also used pyrotechnic mechanisms. It can be assumed that the "inhabitants" at the V-13-2 camera side (if any existed there), had left the dangerous area. But from the V-13-1 camera side they did not have time for escaping and were buried by the ejected soil. Apparently, the physical capabilities of buried objects were low, since they released slowly from the soil, which explains the 1.5 hr delay in their appearance."

Интервью с профессором Леонидом Ксанфомалити.

In the interview with Sci-News.com, Dr. Leonid Ksanfomality comments on his recent claims that the Soviet landing probe Venera-13 imaged several objects resembling living beings.
Dr. Ksanfomality is a senior researcher and a head of the Laboratory on Photometry and Thermal Radiometry at the Space Research Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, and a contributor to the Venera missions in 1970-80s.
Q: Dr. Ksanfomality, when did you make the decision to review panoramic images taken by the Venera spacecrafts for the possible presence of living organisms and why?
A: Over the years, I have constantly studied all aspects of physics of Venus. Among my other experiments, people know about the discovery of thunderstorms on this planet (1978). I am proud that the International Astronomical Union (IAU) has named an asteroid in honor of me, in recognition of my works and books on Venus.
The idea that some signs of life can be found on Venus had come to me much earlier. It happened when the first panoramas of the Venus surface were obtained in October 1975. I was at the radio receiving station and working with the data from the Venera-9 and 10 spacecrafts. One object on images, looking like a "sitting bird" and measuring about 20 cm, attracted my attention. Later, geologists called it a "strange stone".
I had been repeatedly returning to the obtained images, and in 1978, I put a view of this object as a possible inhabitant of Venus in my first popular scientific book "Planets Discovered Anew". The negative pressure from the administration and my colleagues at the Space Research Institute, of course, affected partly, but not convinced me.
Inspired by the growing number of exoplanet discoveries, I have re-analyzed images from the Venera missions using new processing tools. The fact is that a large portion of exoplanets has physical conditions rather close to the Venusian, than to those on Earth, with high temperature and high pressure of the atmosphere, similar to the Venusian in composition.
I succeeded in improving the images in the period of 2003 to 2006, but the major result was achieved in 2009. Since that time, more and more Russian academic institutes have been interested in it.
The first article has been recently published, the second will be much more interesting. Within a triptych of concepts: "what a nonsense!" - "it is something there" - "who does not know this," I'm between the first and second stage.
Q: Your hypothesis has been criticized from various sources. How do you respond to skeptics?
A: One often hears: "I do not believe it! It's something like a theology, it cannot be helped, to believe or not is not my area of expertise." Strange enough, our hypothesis sparked skepticism and even outrage among some readers and listeners. Well, almost aphoristically, put one of the authors of the Venera TV-experiments Dr. Ju. M. Gektin: "We do not like the hypothesis that life may exist on Venus. But the problem is that we cannot offer any other explanation to what we see on the Venera panoramas."
One can propose many artificial situations to explain the observed phenomena. For example, someone in the internet authoritatively discusses the form of modulation of radio signals and uses different technical terms, but apparently, understands poorly what he says, because he states that an image's content depends on a type of modulation.
This resembles the following situation: you're listening to the same radio program, but if you change the type of amplitude modulation to the frequency modulation - by changing, say, from the middle or short waves to FM - instead of Tchaikovsky's Symphony, the Mozart's Requiem appears. You are curious about those who came up with this tricky modulation, who brought it and who has built it into your receiver and why. Something like this explanation can be found in the internet. As an argument, two blurred images are provided, which are the different images at all after the processing. Whether it has been done by mistake or as a deliberate fraud, I do not know.
In general, to scrutinize who said and what - life is not enough. In science there is a principle, if you believe the author has made an error, you can submit a proof of the error to a journal for publication. It is true that the matter may be complicated if the result is on the edge of yes/no as, for example, it was in the case of the interpretation of the inclusions in the ALH84001 meteorite. In our case, the images are clear enough, so the shadow of Hamlet's father is introduced by opponents.
Q: Are you planning to undertake additional research e.g. to further process the images or study the objects in detail?
A: Yes, the published paper is a small part of findings. The second paper has been just submitted to a journal, where together with new spotted objects a question on the liquid stuff on Venus is raised. I have enough findings for many papers.
Q: Does the Russian Federal Space Agency Roscosmos or the Space Research Institute plan new missions to Venus for searching life?
A: The Space Research Institute is the research institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, while Roscosmos is a bureaucratic bureau with rules, which are unclear for me. Venera-D lander has been for a long time expected as the next mission to Venus, but the problem of its funding is still not resolved. Unfortunately, there is nothing to announce at the moment about new missions for searching life on Venus.

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