Август 2021 г.

Российская наука и мир (по материалам зарубежной электронной прессы)

CONTENTS / ОГЛАВЛЕНИЕ


• Russian scientists develop new desalination tech using solar energy
• Scientists expected thawing wetlands in Siberia’s permafrost. What they found is "much more dangerous"
• "Notably clever": If Russia’s vaccine is so good, why isn’t it more widely used?
• Easier and cheaper method of measuring blood
• An underwater holographic camera was tested in Baikal
• TPU scientists research danger of fire break-out around Lake Baikal
• What’s going on with Russia’s space program?
• Bionic arms and blue-eyed bots: How Russia aims to nurture a tech hub in its Far East
• Discovery of "unique" burial containing 140 pieces of amber jewellery
• Russia’s Sputnik V protects against severe COVID-19 from Delta variant, study shows
• Study compares expressive and receptive language abilities of Russian children with ASD
• Non-magnetic shell coating of magnetic nanoparticles as key factor for cytotoxicity, NUST MISIS reports

Специалисты Уральского федерального университета совместно с иракскими коллегами разработали гибридную технологию опреснения воды, совместив солнечный дистиллятор, коллектор и вращающийся цилиндр. Новая технология позволяет заметно снизить затраты на опреснение и увеличить объем производства в четыре раза.

Russia’s Ural Federal University (UrFU) power engineers have developed a new desalination technology, which is expected to significantly reduce the cost of desalination and quadruple the volume of production. The results of the research are published in the journal Case Studies in Thermal Engineering. Desalination plants deserve, and have attracted research efforts because of their high demand, especially in the Persian gulf region, as well as the high energy consumption involved, which demands higher application of renewable energy to keep their carbon emission down.
A popular and simple way of desalination is the distillation of water with the help of solar energy. UrFU scientists, together with colleagues from Iraq, have developed a hybrid technology to increase the efficiency of evaporation inside a solar distiller by means of a rotating hollow cylinder and a solar collector.
"We created a desalination technology by using a rotating hollow cylinder inside the solar distiller to accelerate water evaporation in the vessel by forming a thin film of water on the outer and inner surface of the cylinder, which was constantly renewed with each turn. To increase the temperature of water under the cylinder we used a solar collector," said Sergei Shcheklein, head of Nuclear Power Plants and Renewable Energy Sources Department at UrFU.
As part of the experiment, the rotation speed of the cylinder inside the solar distiller was 0.5 rpm. This intensity and time is enough to evaporate a thin film of water from the surface of the cylinder. Experimental tests were held in Ekaterinburg for several months (June-October, 2019) and showed high efficiency and reliability of the developed device. In addition, the scientists noted that the relatively high intensity of solar radiation and low ambient air temperature also contributed to the performance of water distillation.
"The performance improvement factor of the created solar distiller, compared to traditional devices, was at least 280% in the relatively hot months (June, July and August) and at least 300% and 400% in the cooler months (September and October), at the same time, the cumulative water distillation capacity reached 12.5 l/m2 per day in summer and 3.5 l/m2 per day in winter," commented Alharbawi Naseer Tawfik Alwan, a research engineer at the Department of Nuclear Power Plants and Renewable Energy (UrFU) and an employee of Northern Technical University (Iraq).
The developed desalination technology with its simple design and low cost could be of interest abroad - especially in the Middle East and Africa - in countries with high solar energy potential and a shortage of fresh water.
According to the UN, more than 40% of the world’s population suffers from water shortages: more than 700 million people on the planet have no access to clean water, and more than 1.7 billion people living in river basins need additional sources of fresh water.
In the future, the scientists plan to improve the technology and increase the performance of the solar distiller at the lowest possible capital and operating costs for different climatic conditions.
India got its first solar-powered desalination plant with a capacity to generate 10,000 liters of fresh water a day, in March 2019. The plant is built on 120sqm near Vivekananda Memorial at Kanyakumari, Tamil Nadu. The ministry of earth sciences funded Rs 1.22 crore for the project developed by IIT-Madras.
Another solar-powered desalination plant in a small east Indian town, backed by beer maker Carlsberg Group, was built by Desolenator in the Sundarbans delta in West Bengal state in November last year. The plant was expected to start operating this year. The Sundarbans plant will produce about 20,000 liters of clean water per day.

Исследование, проведенное учеными из Германии, Швеции и России, показало, что аномальная жара в 2020 году привела к всплеску выбросов метана из нового источника - оттаивающих твердых пород в арктической вечной мерзлоте. Такой метан в виде газогидратов более опасен, чем бактериальный метан, возникающий в болотах в результате жизнедеятельности микроорганизмов.

Scientists have long been worried about what many call "the methane bomb" - the potentially catastrophic release of methane from thawing wetlands in Siberia’s permafrost.
But now a study by three geologists says that a heat wave in 2020 has revealed a surge in methane emissions "potentially in much higher amounts" from a different source: thawing rock formations in the Arctic permafrost.
The difference is that thawing wetlands releases "microbial" methane from the decay of soil and organic matter, while thawing limestone - or carbonate rock - releases hydrocarbons and gas hydrates from reservoirs both below and within the permafrost, making it "much more dangerous" than past studies have suggested.
Nikolaus Froitzheim, who teaches at the Institute of Geosciences at the University of Bonn, said that he and two colleagues used satellite maps that measured intense methane concentrations over two "conspicuous elongated areas" of limestone - stripes that were several miles wide and up to 375 miles long - in the Taymyr Peninsula and the area around northern Siberia.
The study was published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Surface temperatures during the heat wave in 2020 soared to 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit above the 1979-2000 norms. In the long stripes, there is hardly any soil, and vegetation is scarce, the study says. So the limestone crops out of the surface. As the rock formations warm up, cracks and pockets opened up, releasing methane that had been trapped inside.
The concentrations of methane were elevated by about 5 percent, Froitzheim said. Further tests showed the continued concentration of methane through the spring of 2021 despite the return of low temperatures and snow in the region.
"We would have expected elevated methane in areas with wetlands," Froitzheim said. "But these were not over wetlands but on limestone outcrops. There is very little soil in these. It was really a surprising signal from hard rock, not wetlands."
The carbonates in the outcroppings date back 541 million years to the Paleozoic era, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
"It’s intriguing. It’s not good news if it’s right," said Robert Max Holmes, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center. "Nobody wants to see more potentially nasty feedbacks and this is potentially one."
"What we do know with quite a lot of confidence is how much carbon is locked up in the permafrost. It’s a big number and as the Earth warms and permafrost thaws, that ancient organic matter is available to microbes for microbial processes and that releases CO2 and methane," Holmes said. "If something in the Arctic is going to keep me up at night that’s still what it is." But he said the paper warranted further study.
The geologists who wrote the report usually study things such as tectonic plate boundaries and the way those geologic plates fold over one another. But they have worked in the Arctic and that has piqued their interest.
The biggest sources of methane in the world are agricultural, such as rice growing, and leaks and flares from oil and gas operations, such as in the U.S. Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico where production has soared in the past decade. But Froitzheim said that in the permafrost "the question is: how much will come, and we don’t really know."
Normally the frozen permafrost acts as a cap, sealing methane below. It also can lock up gas hydrates, which are crystalline solids of frozen water that contain huge amounts of methane. Unstable at normal sea-level pressure and temperatures, gas hydrates can be dangerously explosive as temperatures rise.
The study said that gas hydrates in the Earth’s permafrost are estimated to contain 20 gigatons of carbon. That’s a small percentage of all carbon trapped in the permafrost, but the continued warming of gas hydrates could cause disruptive and rapid releases of methane from rock outcrops.
"It will be important to continue to compare methane in future years to really pinpoint how much additional geologic methane is being emitted to the atmosphere as the permafrost thaws," said Ted Schuur, professor of ecosystem ecology at Northern Arizona University. "We know the heat wave was real, but whether it triggered the methane release cannot be determined without additional years of methane data."
The Arctic has also delivered other sobering news. Polar Portal, a website where Danish Arctic research institutions present updated information about ice, said last week that a "massive melting event" had been big enough to cover Florida with two inches of water.

Автор статьи задается вопросом, почему при всех своих достоинствах российская вакцина против COVID-19 «Спутник V» до сих пор так мало используется. Причин несколько: споры с международными регулирующими органами, в результате чего EMA и ВОЗ еще не одобрили вакцину, вопросы к мониторингу возможных осложнений, невыполненные обещания по экспортным поставкам, наконец, закрытость России и недоверие к вакцине самих россиян.

Even before Russia’s brand-new COVID-19 vaccine was tested on monkeys, the director of the institute that made it had injected himself. So had his staff. Fortunately, the shot has proven both safe and effective, boasting one of the highest efficacy rates of any COVID vaccine on the market. "Australia could have done worse than ordering it," says epidemiologist Mike Toole. "But politics are what they are, and Russia hasn’t done itself any favours by being secretive."
Indeed, as questions linger over how closely Russia is monitoring for rare side effects and export supply fails to live up to the Kremlin’s big promises, Russia’s new tool of influence on the world stage is proving volatile. It’s already brought down the prime minister of Slovakia, spawned both propaganda and anti-vax misinformation campaigns and triggered a defamation suit between Russia and Brazil. So, what is the Sputnik V vaccine and does it live up to the scientific heights of the satellite it was named after?
What is Sputnik V?
That’s right, it’s named after the satellite. Russia stunned the world when they became the first to launch into space in 1957, and the vaccine shares the name for again coming first. In late August 2020, when President Vladimir Putin announced the Sputnik V vaccine had been granted emergency approval, data from its phase one and two clinical trials was not yet published. (One of Putin’s own daughters had already had the vaccine, though, and was "feeling fine".) As China did with its own vaccines, Russia leapfrogged the final phase of clinical testing into a "live trial" rollout of sorts, offering assurances via press conference rather than the standard rigorous data.
But, come February, when Sputnik’s results were at last peer-reviewed and published in leading medical journal The Lancet, much of the scepticism around the world evaporated. "It’s an excellent vaccine," Toole says, more than 91 per cent effective at stopping a symptomatic case of COVID. That puts it almost on par with the Western vaccines using new mRNA technology by Pfizer and Moderna.
Sputnik V is now authorised in 69 countries, and, because it doesn’t require the deep-freeze storage of the mRNA vaccines and is about 73 per cent effective at stopping COVID even after just one dose, it’s proving an attractive option for developing nations and those needing to move fast in the face of outbreaks (as well as countries at odds with the West such as Iran).
How does it work?
Vaccines train your body to kill a virus without you ever having to catch it. In the case of COVID, the vaccines introduce your immune system to a tiny piece of the coronavirus (the signature spike protein it uses to hack into our cells). This won’t make you sick but it will help your body hunt down the virus if it shows up for real. The Sputnik vaccine, as with AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, uses another harmless virus, known as an adenovirus vector, to deliver the spike. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines use new mRNA technology to insert a segment of the coronavirus’ genetic code, while China’s Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines use a dead version of the coronavirus itself to build immunity.
Sputnik’s design is "notably clever", Toole says, for using one type of adenovirus in the first shot and another in the second. This reduces the chance that, by the second shot, the immune system will remember the adenovirus used as the Trojan horse to package the vaccine, and so start attacking it instead of the coronavirus. It’s the same reason scientists think pairing an AstraZeneca shot with different kinds of vaccines, such as Pfizer for the second dose, has proven so effective in mixed trials overseas. The first dose of Sputnik (known as Sputnik Light) has itself been paired with AstraZeneca, Moderna and Sinopharm in a large trial in Argentina. Results are still to come but the agency that markets Sputnik V, the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) says so far all combinations appear safe.
There is a long tradition of medical researchers experimenting on themselves, one that has not declined in Russia as fast as it has in the West. (Just as American Jonas Salk tested his polio vaccine on himself and his family, the Russian researchers who developed the first oral inoculation for polio tested it first on their own children, who, as it happens, have now grown up to be virologists working on COVID vaccines themselves.) At the well-respected Gamaleya Institute in Moscow where Sputnik V was made (and which Toole has visited), the 100-odd scientists who injected themselves with the vaccine back in April 2020 reported no ill effects. That included institute director Alexander Ginzburg who said the team did it to reduce the chance that they themselves would fall sick. They made the vaccine so fast, he said, by tweaking one they were already working on for MERS, another dangerous coronavirus cousin of both COVID and SARS.
What about these side effects?
Sputnik can cause the same mild cold and flu symptoms sometimes brought on by the other vaccines but no adverse complications have been linked to it so far. Gary Grohmann a virologist who consults for the World Health Organisation, says he has no doubt Sputnik is a very good vaccine, based on both its trial and real-world data so far. But given it uses the same kind of technology as AstraZeneca and J&J, both of which have recorded rare clotting cases (AstraZeneca more prominently), Grohmann says it makes sense to be searching for cases in Sputnik, too.
"The fact there is nothing immediately raises a flag for me," says Grohmann, who previously worked at Australia’s regulator the Therapeutic Goods Administration. "Either they are not doing the monitoring and deaths are being attributed to other causes, or the vaccine is marvellous. And if it’s that good, then we should look at it closer to understand the difference with the other vector vaccines."
Toole agrees Russia’s monitoring is dubious but notes none of the other 60-odd countries using the vaccine have reported a link to clotting either, including during trials in Argentina, Italy and the tiny republic of San Marino (which has been almost entirely vaccinated with Sputnik).
Deakin University epidemiologist Catherine Bennett notes that Sputnik is mostly being used in less affluent countries with poorer monitoring. "That’s part of the inequality of the [global vaccine rollout]," she says. "We all have an obligation to understand these vaccines or you can have this kind of closed shop. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad choice to roll out those vaccines, they could be the thing that saves a population, but it makes it harder to make decisions, how well they last or stand up against Delta, whether to use them as boosters."
What countries are using Sputnik?
Many eastern European countries such as Serbia and Hungary are already using Sputnik, though it is yet to be approved by the European Union’s regulator, the EMA, while places such as India and South Korea have signed deals to make it. But there are cautionary tales, too. Countries such as Iran and Mexico are still waiting for many of the millions of doses promised by Russian suppliers, weeks or months behind schedule. And Slovakia’s prime minister, Igor Matovic, was forced to step down in March after it was revealed he had secretly arranged to import 200,000 doses of Sputnik V without informing his coalition partners in government.
Russia’s big push at "vaccine diplomacy" has also been hampered by disputes with international regulators who say it has not been forthcoming with all its paperwork. The EMA has reportedly faced repeated delays in its review of Sputnik due to a lack of data, and a separate delegation of French scientists encountered similar roadblocks, despite hopes Sputnik would speed up Europe’s initially-slow vaccination campaign. The RDIF, which has previously said it is co-operating with regulators, did not respond to requests for comment before deadline.
Meanwhile, in Brazil, the country’s regulator has been hit by a defamation lawsuit from the Sputnik team at RDIF. Brazilian authorities had cited concerns that the inactivated viral vector in the vaccine might still be replicating, saying Russia did not appear to have a zero-tolerance policy for such a possibility in its regulation back home, as other countries do. But RDIF and most scientists say this claim appears to have been a misunderstanding of the paperwork by Brazil, not evidence of replication. When the vaccine batches were independently tested, there was no replication found; the shots safe, Science reported.
Still the WHO is also yet to approve the shot, recently citing some issues with a production facility filling Sputnik vials in India."I’m not sure why the WHO is taking so long," Toole says. "They’ve already approved China’s Sinovac and that’s not as effective and has its own [data] transparency issues."
Like Grohmann, Toole thinks that politics are playing a role in resistance to Sputnik too, perhaps nowhere so much as in Russia itself, where vaccine hesitancy is among the highest in the world. (About a year after Sputnik was approved for emergency use in Russia, fewer than 20 per cent of Russians are vaccinated, despite a deadly new outbreak). "They should never have authorised it before the data was in, that alienated a lot of Russians," Toole says. "They already don’t trust the government."
The Kremlin, having spent most of the pandemic so far playing down its toll in Russia, has launched an urgent push to get more people vaccinated. Suddenly, there are local COVID patients on state television, not just horror stories from Europe. In some cities, bars and restaurants, even workplaces, are open only to those with the QR codes to prove they have been vaccinated.
But the U-turn is up against conspiracy theories with long tentacles, not unlike the misinformation the Kremlin itself has been accused of spreading against rival Western vaccines.
Putin, usually not shy about taking off his shirt for the camera, was only vaccinated in recent months behind closed doors, fuelling speculation he didn’t really get the jab, or at least not Sputnik V. And already, a black market in these coveted vaccination QR codes has sprung up - for people happy to pay for a vaccine certificate, there are reports some doctors will tip your dose of Sputnik V straight down the sink.

Ученые Уральского федерального университета нашли замену ферментным катализаторам, используемым в приборах для измерения уровня сахара в крови. Новые тест-полоски с осажденными на поверхности палладием и серебром точнее, долговечнее и дешевле в производстве.

Scientists at Ural Federal University solved the problem of synthesizing enzyme-free catalysts for more accurate and less expensive determination of blood glucose concentration. The proposed solution lies in the joint layer-by-layer electrochemical deposition of palladium and silver on the surface of the electrode (test strip). The co-authors published an article about the work in the Russian Chemical Bulletin. This is the first description in the scientific literature of the method of layer-by-layer deposition of palladium and silver.
"We used a printed electrode for deposition - a miniature substrate with a suspension of multi-walled, that is, carbon nanotubes embedded in each other. Water from the suspension applied to the electrode evaporates, and the nanotubes remain on the electrode, thus increasing its specific surface area. Then we deposited first silver and then palladium on the modified electrode surface several times alternately," says Andrei Okhokhonin, associate professor of analytical chemistry at Ural Federal University and head of the research group.
The authors suggested an innovative method of layer-by-layer deposition of silver and palladium. The electrode is dipped alternately in solutions of silver salt AgNO3 and palladium salt K2PdCl4 in dilute sulfuric acid. In this form, the silver and palladium lack one and two electrons, respectively, before they become insoluble metal state. By placing the electrode in the solution, an electric current is applied to it. The current reduces the metals, and this leads to the formation of solid particles on the surface of the electrode. The operation is repeated four times.
"Such a technique has not yet been used, it proved to be effective. The new material has significant catalytic activity in the electrochemical oxidation of glucose. Moreover, unlike analogues, the oxidation reaction efficiently proceeds in neutral phosphate buffer solution medium, which corresponds to the acidity of human blood. Other similar systems are either markedly less sensitive to glucose or work in an alkaline environment and involve an additional step of blood sample dilution, in certain cases by a thousand times. All this complicates procedures and reduces the reliability of analysis results," emphasizes Andrei Okhokhonin.
According to the developers, the unique characteristics of the obtained system open up broad prospects for its practical application in creating an enzyme-free electrocatalytic sensor for determining glucose in whole blood. The research was supported by the Russian Science Foundation (Project № 20-13-00142).
Continuous monitoring of blood glucose levels plays a key role in modern therapy of diabetes, one of the most widespread diseases of mankind. Blood glucose concentration analysis using glucose meters uses complex protein compounds - glucose oxidase or glucose dehydrogenase enzymes, which are produced by microorganisms. The enzymes are attached to the sensitive part of the test strip (sensor), where a drop of blood is fed. As biological catalysts, the enzymes enable the glucose oxidation reaction, and the glucometer records the reaction and converts the result into a numerical value. A blood glucose level of 5.5-6.5 mmol/l is normal for adults.
Enzyme-based test systems are widespread, but have a number of drawbacks. Because enzymes are protein-based and degrade under heat or light exposure, their lifespan is limited. Therefore, enzyme production by microorganisms is a constantly reproducible and expensive process. This affects the cost and availability of sensors. The solution to the problem of making them cheaper is to use more stable and cheaper oxidation catalysts of synthetic rather than enzymatic origin instead of enzymes.
As such, science considers, in particular, palladium nanoparticles, a metal from the noble group.
The advantages of palladium nanoparticles include the necessary stability and increased sensitivity to glucose. At the same time, they exhibit significant catalytic activity only when pretreated in a saturated alkaline solution, which is then fed a blood sample. This complicates and slows down the analysis procedure. To date, only one method of direct blood analysis using enzyme-free catalysts based on palladium nanoparticles and in a neutral environment, the composition of which is close to the physiological properties of blood, has been developed. However, the low concentration of nanoparticles on the electrode surface does not provide the required sensitivity of the system and hence the accuracy of the analysis results.
It is known that the catalytic activity of palladium is enhanced in combination with silver: the two elements coated on the electrode part of the test strip improve the catalytic properties of each other, which increases the sensitivity of blood glucose analysis. But the existing technologies of creating such compounds do not allow complete control over the processes.
Thus, an urgent task is to synthesize enzyme-free catalysts for more accurate and cheaper determination of blood glucose concentration.

Томский государственный университет и Лимнологический институт СО РАН провели испытания подводной голографической камеры. Камера расположена на глубине 5 метров и передает данные в режиме реального времени.

Tomsk State University, in collaboration with the Limnological Institute of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, is testing an underwater holographic camera created at TSU.
The holographic camera is situated 5 meters deep underwater and transfers data in real-time to the data center. The camera gathers unique information about concentration, distribution by size, speed, shape, and orientation of each particle in the investigated volume in the natural habitat. To check and interpret these data, scientists collect samples of zooplankton manually every hour using a plankton net.
The camera is situated near an autonomous water quality profiler, Rinko AAQ-177 (JFE, Japan). The profiler measures pH, redox potential, dissolved oxygen concentration, temperature, chlorophyll, turbidity, salinity, and conductivity every ten seconds and transfers it in real-time mode. There are also water level and meteoparameter testing stations.
As the scientists explain, it is necessary to measure background environment parameters to study the phototropic response of plankton in the natural habitat in real-time. That is the end goal of the researchers from the TSU Laboratory of Radiophysical and Optical Methods for Studying the Environment. This reaction depends on the quality of the environment, which is why in the future scientists will be able to detect water pollution early based on the results.
At the moment, the station at the village Bolshiye Koty accommodates a high-tech system that can fully and frequently describe the variability of the biotic and abiotic parameters of Lake Baikal. Creating stations like this under the project "Digital Baikal" will significantly improve methods of monitoring the ecological state of the shallow water zone of the lake.

Исследователи из Томского политехнического университета, Горно-Алтайского государственного университета, Института физического материаловедения СО РАН, Института общей и экспериментальной биологии СО РАН и Университета Париж Дидро разработали метод прогнозирования лесных пожаров на основе атмосферно-почвенного измерительного комплекса.

Scientists of Tomsk Polytechnic University have developed a methodology for forecasting forest fires on the example of the surroundings of Lake Baikal. The methodology is based on an atmospheric soil measuring complex (ASMC). The research was supported by the grant of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research No. 17-29-05093. The research findings are published in the International Journal on Engineering Applications.
Since 2018, the project has been implemented under the supervision of Nikolay Baranovsky, Associate Professor of the TPU Butakov Research Center. The project aimed at developing techniques for monitoring of inflammability of forests in the conditions of human impact on the area of Lake Baikal basin.
"Lake Baikal is the largest natural reservoir of fresh water and characterized by unique flora and fauna. The lake life cycle is mainly dependent on the processes occurring in the coastal area: natural and human, including forest fires. It can influence the lake drainage and change the regime of its functioning. Therefore, assessment of forest fire break-out from human impact is crucial for understanding the processes influencing the activity of Lake Baikal," Nikolay Baranovsky notes.
Scientists of Tomsk Polytechnic University, Gorno-Altaisk State University, Institute of Physical Materials Science of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of General and Experimental Biology of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Paris Diderot University (France) took part in the research work.
Using the ASMC, the researchers conducted monitoring of meteorological conditions and soil characteristics, i.e. they recorded the air humidity and temperature, speed and wind direction, the amount of rain precipitation and soil temperature. The measurements were carried out in the surrounding of Khurumsha (a rural locality in the Republic of Buryatia). The data of some specific days of summer 2019 were used to conduct the research. Based on these data, the scientists offered to use a number of mathematical formulas to assess fire danger.
"The analysis of data has shown that there may be a situation in the forest area when a ground fire turns into a crown fire. Some special conditions are required for that.
First, the canopy of a forest stand must possess the sufficiently small value of the lower limit of the branch position. Second, the speed of the ground fire must be quite fast. It mainly depends on the wind speed inside the forest area. In this case, the wind is a driver of turning the ground fire into the crown fire. Presumably, there will be various values of critical wind speed for miscellaneous types of forest areas. This problem requires additional study," Nikolay Baranovsky explains.
Despite the fact that the project possesses a fundamental character, the scientists claim the research findings can form the basis of applied developments. In particular, the scientists from Institute of Physical Materials Science of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences under the supervision of Alexander Bazarov are planning to create a network of ASMCs in the Republic of Buryatia to monitor, assess and forecast forest fire danger. The research work within the project of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research No. 20-31-51001 on analysis of the influence of human impact from main railway lines on forest fire danger is ongoing as well.

В июле этого года впервые более чем за 10 лет на орбиту был отправлен новый российский модуль Международной космической станции. Лабораторный модуль, получивший название «Наука», успешно пристыковался, однако через несколько часов его двигатели самопроизвольно включились снова из-за программной ошибки, в результате чего МКС начала вращаться. Автор статьи рассматривает непростую историю строительства и старта модуля и задается вопросами о его дальнейшей судьбе.

Last month, something that long-time observers of the space program thought might never happen actually took place 450 kilometers above Earth: Russia’s 20-ton Nauka ("Science") module successfully docked to the International Space Station. It was the first expansion of the Russian segment of the station in more than a decade. All the other ISS partners largely completed construction of their facilities years ago.
As its name suggests, Nauka is designed as a laboratory, complete with a workshop, a glovebox for experiments, attachment points for exterior payloads, an airlock, and a European-built robotic arm that will allow cosmonauts to install equipment outside the station - the first such capability on the Russian segment. Nauka also adds more sleeping space for the cosmonauts and a new toilet hooked up to a sophisticated water-recycling system.
The new module launched to the station on a Proton-M rocket on July 21. After eight days of mostly silence from the Russian space agency Roskosmos about Nauka’s trouble-laden trek to its destination and nerve-racking final approach to the ISS the successful docking was met with fanfare in Moscow. "Starting today, foreigners are learning to pronounce a new Russian word - Nauka," declared Roskosmos head Dmitry Rogozin. Meanwhile, on Russian social media an army of online trolls went into overdrive to trumpet the success.
Just three hours later, though, the mood turned dramatically. People monitoring communications from the station heard alarming reports from the cosmonauts reporting that Nauka’s thrusters were firing for no reason, sending the entire station into an uncontrolled cartwheel. Live broadcasts from orbit showed a blizzard of flakes outside the station - apparent engine exhaust. There were some tense moments on the ground as other station modules had to be fired to counter the unexpected thrust and bring the station back under control. The emergency ended only when Nauka ran out of fuel.
The inadvertent engine firings, which could have damaged the $100 billion ISS, were the result of a software error. Another programming mistake days earlier had also caused propulsion problems, wasting fuel and leaving mission controllers only one attempt at docking.
As usual, Roskosmos has been mostly silent about the mishaps, leaving it largely to independent researchers to sort out what actually happened. Coincidently, the Russian Duma is now preparing a law that would criminalize virtually any reporting on Russian space and military activities.
What has happened to Russia’s once elite human spaceflight program?
Nauka’s journey, like other events in the international spotlight, even the Olympics, are now treated in Russia as part of a propaganda war with the West. Every Kremlin success, no matter how small, is overhyped. Any hint of corruption or mismanagement is glossed over or hidden from view. Often, blame is shifted to the United States or elsewhere. In a post-docking interview that aired on a Russian TV show known for its ultra-nationalist rhetoric, Rogozin blamed Ukrainian-built bellows in Nauka’s propellant tanks for the module’s propulsion problems.
In truth, Nauka’s dangerous post-docking failure was only the latest snafu in a long string of embarrassing technical problems that have plagued the project over three decades. The pervasive software issues were only part of a drama that included changing contractors and major redesigns of Soviet-era systems whose warranties expired years before they had a chance to fly.
Nauka is the last Russian spacecraft that can trace its roots to a transport ship known as TKS, which was developed in the 1960s and ’70s by the collective of the prolific Soviet space pioneer Vladimir Chelomei. The TKS was originally intended for the top-secret Soviet military space station called Almaz. The same design was later used for the modules of the Mir space station, and was then adopted for the first Russian piece of the ISS.
In the 1990s, as the components of the international station were being built around the world, the hardware that eventually became Nauka was planned for launch before the end of that decade. But various financial and technical problems kept it and the rest of the Russian segment on the ground for nearly a quarter of a century.
In the early 2010s, engineers found severe contamination in the module’s critical propulsion system, reportedly the result of workers mistakenly thinking they were supposed to dismantle it. All attempts to fully clear the system failed, but after years of delays, Nauka’s engines were certified to fly anyway. In the final days before launch, Nauka had to be taken off the fueling facility because press photos of the module posted on the Internet revealed the lack of thermal blankets on critical flight control sensors. The blankets had to be urgently fashioned from leftover materials.
What’s next for the troubled science module?
Nauka arrives at an awkward time, as the ISS is approaching an uncertain retirement date. With the Kremlin’s long-proclaimed lunar exploration program stalled by money problems, Russian officials have switched to talking about building a new station in a different orbit from the ISS, although no new money has been allocated to the project so far. This proposed smaller facility would be visited only occasionally by cosmonauts, and could overfly the strategically important Arctic region if multiple technical issues associated with the new orbit can be resolved. In the new orbit, the future Russian station could be reached by crew vehicles and cargo ships spacecraft launched from Russia, rather than from Kazakhstan, as with vehicles bound for the ISS.
Under these circumstances, adding more Russian modules to the current station would seem to make no sense. Yet Roskosmos has kept the next module, called Prichal ("Pier"), on schedule for a launch to the ISS this November. Beyond that, another major component is currently under construction in Russia. This upgraded new-generation version of Nauka, known as the Science and Power Module or NEM, was intended to make the Russian segment truly independent from the rest of the ISS in terms of energy supplies and flight control.
However, this year, Roskosmos publicly committed to making the NEM the core of the new station rather than send it to the ISS. After a closed-door meeting on July 26, the Council of Chief Designers - which has charted the direction of Russia’s space program since the days of Sputnik - deferred all critical questions about the post-ISS base to some unspecified future.
That means Nauka and Prichal may have a relatively short life in orbit compared to their predecessors. And flight controllers on both sides of the world will be left hoping there are no more in-space emergencies like the one that happened last month.

На острове Русский недалеко от Владивостока планируется создание инновационного центра в области робототехники и искусственного интеллекта. Остров, уже получивший прозвище «Территория киборгов», предполагается превратить в особую зону с отдельной экономической юрисдикцией.

To see Russia’s ambitions for its own version of Silicon Valley, head about 5,600 miles east of Moscow, snake through Vladivostok’s hills and then cross a bridge from the mainland to Russky Island. It’s here - a beachhead on the Pacific Rim - that the Kremlin hopes to create a hub for robotics and artificial intelligence innovation with the goal of boosting Russia’s ability to compete with the United States and Asia. A new name for the area has already been suggested: "Cyborg Island."
"We have a dream," said Artur Biktimirov, a neurosurgeon partnered with high-tech prosthetics developer Motorica, which has some operations on Russky Island and plans to expand its presence. Biktimirov hopes Motorica is the first in a tech boom there.
So does Russian President Vladimir Putin. For years, Putin has emphasized the country’s need to keep pace in the artificial intelligence arena. In 2017, speaking to a group of students, Putin said that "whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world." At an AI conference late last year, he warned that "history knows many cases when large, global corporations and even countries literally slept through a technological breakthrough and were swept off the historical stage overnight."
But Russia has struggled as heir to the Soviet Union’s once-formidable legacy of innovation during the arms and space races of the Cold War. Foreign investors are nervous over Western sanctions. And many young Russians leave for better-paying opportunities abroad in tech and other fields, adding to a national brain drain.
Russia’s Far East - on the doorstep of China, the Korean Peninsula and Japan - has been tapped for the fix. A Putin-commissioned government fund is investing in projects ranging from Motorica’s prosthetics to Promobot, which creates eerily lifelike robots. Local robotics schools for children as young as 4 have become trendy - a potential homegrown pipeline.
"You’re still trying to force something that in the West is much more of an organic, bottom-up kind of thing," said Jeffrey Edmonds, a senior researcher at the CNA think tank in Arlington, Va. "The United States government doesn’t have to foster AI research because companies here want to do it."
Real to the touch
With its steep hills and sweeping bridges, Vladivostok has a bit of San Francisco in its ambiance. It’s seven time zones and an eight-hour flight from Moscow - a corner of Russia where people often say they feel like an afterthought for the Kremlin. But for the past six years, the government has been trying to persuade people to move to the sparsely populated East, even offering a free hectare (about 2.5 acres) of land in the area. Some foreign visitors to Vladivostok can receive a simplified, free electronic visa for up to eight days - an economic outreach to the nearby Asian markets. There are also regional tax breaks for entrepreneurs and investors.
In 2018, Putin created the Far East High Technology Fund to invest in technology companies willing to have at least a portion of their operations based in the area. One beneficiary was Promobot, founded in 2015 and among the largest manufacturers of autonomous service robots in Russia. In the past three years, its portfolio has expanded to humanoid robots with blue eyes and skin that feels real - but not warm - to the touch.
That’s how Peter Chegodayev ended up in the basement of a building in downtown Vladivostok, sharing the space with a bakery that makes his lab smell like bread. Chegodayev considers himself an artist - a sculptor, to be exact - rather than an engineer. His masterpieces: robots adorned with lifelike skin, hair, eyes and even facial muscles.
"We subconsciously communicate more openly with what looks like us," Chegodayev said. "So I think this is all important for a better share of information between humans and artificial intelligence, to get the full use out of it."
Chegodayev’s background includes a decade in the film industry, where he worked on visual effects. To the uninitiated, his lab now looks like something out of a horror flick. Busts of human-looking heads are scattered across the tables. They’re all identical - modeled after Promobot co-founder Alexei Yuzhakov. The goal is to one day have Yuzhakov stand next to his robot clone and for the pair to be indistinguishable. With small magnets precisely placed under the silicone skin, Promobot’s humanoid robots can replicate nearly all the facial movements of people. Chegodayev has designed them so that they essentially have 38 of the 42 facial muscles of humans. But they can be programmed to always smile. Hair is hand-sewn row by row in a painstakingly slow process - it can take a month for one robot. Eyes are individually painted. The faces even have dimples.
The robots are mainly used by educational institutions, Promobot development director Oleg Kivokurtsev said. For example, Russian medical students can practice surveying a patient with one. Older iterations work as customer service bots in museums and government offices in Moscow and Perm, Russia, where the company is headquartered. Kivokurtsev said the advantage of opening a division in Vladivostok is a cheaper workforce compared with Moscow - and even more so compared with tech powerhouse countries. It also could be a new launching point. "Now we plan to actively enter the Asia-Pacific region from Vladivostok," he said. "And we have already started this work."
"Humans of the future"
On Russky Island, a short drive from the Promobot office, another company has cyborgs in mind - or "humans of the future," as Ilya Chekh, the chief of Motorica, calls them. So far they have an arm. Chekh said artificial organs and bones could be next.
Motorica’s bionic arm prosthetics use sensors connected to a patient’s muscle tissue to enable some movement, such as grasping a bottle. The long-term goal is to launch a prosthesis that will completely simulate the mobility of the hand, using artificial intelligence. Motorica’s expected move to Russky Island will make it one of the first tech companies with a base there. With a population of fewer than 6,000 people, Russky Island remains largely undeveloped beyond the Far Eastern Federal University campus, which opened in 2013. The campus hosts an annual economic forum and was the meeting site for Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in 2019. The university also has its own program for nurturing start-ups. Motorica has proposed making the 38-square-mile island (nearly twice the size of Manhattan) into a special zone that would eliminate the regulatory and legal barriers on implantable devices and sensors, essentially accelerating development for such medical technologies. Hence the idea of "Cyborg Island."
"It would have its own regulations, simplified ethics committees, simplified certification, an ability to conduct some pilot operations without going all the way through clinical trials and so on," Chekh said.
Motorica’s current base is the Skolkovo Innovation Center in Moscow, a government site for start-ups. The plan is to gradually move more of the operations to Russky Island and help spark a new tech cluster. "If you take China and the U.S., then naturally, Russia is much worse at developing, but not in all areas," Chekh said. "I see such initiatives related to invasive technologies as much more promising in terms of technological leadership than AI."
"For AI it seems that it’s a little late, but we have the best programmers in the world at least," he added.
Tots with bots
In a classroom at Vladivostok’s Robocenter, a private robotics academy, three 5-year-olds are standing around a makeshift track holding remote controls. Their creations - basic automated bots made out of Legos - are crashing into each other. The one girl in the group victoriously shouts that her "princess" bot is beating the boys’. Meanwhile, a student at the main workstation calls over to the teacher for help. "I can’t figure out how to program this," he tells her.
In seven years, the Robocenter has branched out to seven locations in Russia’s Far East, with 2,500 students. By the time they graduate, they will have learned everything from programming to building underwater robots to 3-D modeling and often will have competed in international robotics competitions.
"Before, it was trendy to go to dancing classes or sports," director Sergei Moon said. "And now it’s robotics. I know people often ask others, ‘Do you take your kids to robotics clubs?’ I mean, this is becoming almost a must-do thing for many families."
Russia has long bragged about its robot innovations, which include launching a life-size humanoid bot, Fedor, into space in 2019. Earlier this year, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Russia was beginning the "serial production of combat robots," adding that they are "robots that can be really shown in science-fiction films, as they are capable of fighting on their own."
But at Vladivostok’s Robocenter, 16-year-old Dmitry Sapinsky, one of the academy’s top students, looks at U.S. robotics with awe, admiring in particular Boston Dynamics’ work, such as programming robots to dance in sync. The dream is to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but a university in Moscow or St. Petersburg is more likely, he said.
Even with the Kremlin’s vision to make the Far East its tech base, the reality is that the draw is still to the West. And there’s a long way to go before that changes.
"People have to want to come here, you know?" Moon said. "We need to offer them affordable housing, decent salaries, many companies with favorable conditions for businesses."
"We need to clearly distinguish between the ostentatiousness that our rulers broadcast and the real situation," he added. "The real situation is that robotics in Russia is poorly developed, and in terms of industrial robotics, Russia is not in the top 10."
Mary Ilyushina in Moscow contributed to this report.

Археологи Петрозаводского государственного университета обнаружили на берегу Онежского озера захоронение возрастом около 5500 лет. Среди погребального инвентаря обнаружилось 140 янтарных украшений, в основном пуговиц и подвесок, судя по всему, когда-то нашитых на кожаный полог, укрывавший покойного.

Archaeologists from the Petrozavodsk State University has discovered a "unique" burial whilst exploring ancient settlements on the western shore of Lake Onega, in the territory of the Republic of Karelia, Russia.
The researchers unearthed the burial of a high-status individual in a narrow oval pit lined with red ochre.
When clearing the grave, they discovered 140 pieces of amber jewellery (examples of which have previously only been found in the Eastern Baltic), consisting of buttons, pendants, and various flint items.
The amber buttons were arranged face down in rows, and were sewn into a leather cover placed over the deceased, whilst along the edges of the pit were deposited amber decorations that formed two tiers.
By comparing the analogy with amber decorations from sites located in the Eastern Baltic, archaeologists have proposed that the burial dates from around 3400 BC during the Chalcolithic or Copper Age (a transition between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age).
During this period, the mining of metal and stone was particularly developed in some areas, along with the processing of those materials into valuable goods.
The Baltic region is home to the largest known deposit of amber, called Baltic amber or succinite. It dates from 44 million years ago (during the Eocene epoch) and was appreciated for its colour, natural beauty, and ability to shape into complex shapes through polishing.
Workshops for the production of axes and adzes are currently being investigated by the university expedition, discovered just adjacent to the burial site.
The researchers theorise that the deceased may have been a trader from the Eastern Baltic States, who arrived on the western shore of Lake Onega to acquire axes in exchange for amber. This could suggest ancient trading links between the people living in Karelia, with the tribes that lived on the southern coast of the Baltic Sea.

Результаты исследования команды санкт-петербургских ученых, изложенные в опубликованной на сервере препринтов medRxiv статье, показывают, что вакцина «Спутник V» вполне эффективно действует против штамма Covid-19 «Дельта», снижая риск госпитализации на 81%. В исследовании приняли участие около 14 тысяч человек.

Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine is holding up well against the Delta variant, a paper posted yesterday on the preprint server medRxiv shows. The study of nearly 14,000 people showed the two-dose vaccine reduces the risk of hospitalization with COVID-19 by 81% and helped prevent severe lung injury.
Surges of COVID-19 in many countries and an increasing number of "breakthrough" cases in vaccinated people have raised concerns that vaccines don’t protect as well against Delta as against earlier strains, or that vaccines’ protection may be short-lived. Israeli data on breakthrough infections point to limited protection offered by messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines; however, a recent study of the Pfizer-BioNTech and AstraZeneca vaccines found the two were largely effective against Delta.
Like other cities in Russia, St. Petersburg has set up triage centers, where patients with a confirmed SARS-CoV-2 diagnosis and COVID-19 symptoms receive a brief physical examination and a low-dose computed tomography (CT) scan of their lungs to determine whether they need hospitalization. A team led by epidemiologist Anton Barchuk of the European University at St. Petersburg asked doctors at two such centers to inquire about patients’ vaccination status. (They did not ask which of the vaccines available in Russia a patient had received, but government data suggest about 96% of vaccine recipients in St. Petersburg got Sputnik V.) The analysis included 13,894 patients, 1291 of whom were fully vaccinated. Of the participants, 495 were referred to hospital.
Sputnik V offered completely vaccinated patients - who had had their second shot at least 2 weeks before coming to the triage center - 81% protection against being hospitalized, the study found. (The effectiveness was slightly better in women than in men, 84% versus 76%.) The study included too few people to detect a statistically significant benefit of partial vaccination. "Our data confirm that the benefits of vaccination include attenuating disease severity in breakthrough cases," Barchuk says.
Even though the study did not confirm which viral variants patients had, Russian health authorities attributed 95% of COVID-19 cases to the Delta variant in July and August, when the study ran.
The researchers also found that Sputnik V had 76% effectiveness at protecting against severe lung injury from COVID-19, meaning more than 50% of the lung is visibly affected on a CT scan. "We were able to get this rather unique data because no one in the world seems to perform as many CT scans for patients with mild disease as Russia does," Barchuk says.
The study did not measure protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection or mild forms of disease. But the authors’ calculations, based on city-level vaccination numbers, offer an indirect estimate of effectiveness against symptomatic disease of about 50%.
John Moore, an immunologist at Weill Cornell Medicine, says the study results "seem credible and also consistent with expectations." He adds that 81% protection against hospitalization is a bit lower than the recent effectiveness of mRNA vaccines seen in the United States and elsewhere, but still "very good."
Sputnik V, developed by the ‎Gamaleya National Center of Epidemiology and Microbiology, works in the same way as the vaccines produced by AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson (J&J): A nonreplicating adenovirus delivers a bit of DNA coding for the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein into the recipient’s cells. But whereas AstraZeneca uses the same adenovirus for both doses, Sputnik V uses two different types, to prevent antibodies against the first dose from rendering the second one ineffective. (J&J only uses one dose; a trial of a two-dose regimen is ongoing).
"The Sputnik V design principle has always been considered a good one, better in my view than the AstraZeneca/Oxford and J&J vaccine designs, assuming J&J soon moves to two doses," Moore wrote in an email to Science. "The concern some people have expressed is the validity of data published under the control of the Russian government." The St. Petersburg study was done independent of the government and Gamaleya.
Sputnik V is now authorized in 69 countries, and some 10 million to 15 million doses are produced monthly, according to media reports. The European Medicines Agency and the World Health Organization (WHO) are still reviewing the vaccine. WHO authorization would mean the vaccine can be distributed under the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access Facility, a program to give low- and middle-income countries access to COVID-19 vaccines. (A WHO spokesperson said this month it does not have a possible decision date.)
But the global rollout has been delayed because the Russian Direct Investment Fund, the government organization that funded the vaccine’s development and markets it internationally, failed to deliver second doses to Argentina, the Philippines, and other countries that had received shipments of the first doses. The fund said it would be able to resolve the shortages in August.
The new study’s encouraging results are likely to highlight those logistical troubles, says Judy Twigg, a Virginia Commonwealth University professor of political science who follows the development of Sputnik V. "Russia’s vaccine diplomacy has been breaking down not because of issues with the perceived quality of the product, but instead due to broken promises for its delivery," Twigg says.
In Russia, which authorized Sputnik V more than 1 year ago and started mass vaccinations in January, the rollout has progressed slowly: About 22% of the country’s population is fully vaccinated, according to government figures, despite vaccine mandates for certain professions in many regions. Surveys suggest hesitancy is fueled by distrust of the government and conflicting messages from state media. Russia is now in the grip of its third wave of infections, with daily new cases at more than 20,000.
Only a handful of studies of Sputnik’s effectiveness have been done. Barchuk hopes more will follow, especially given the global spread of the Delta variant. "Unfortunately, there is an evident shortage of studies for Sputnik compared to other vaccines," he says, "which only adds to controversies around this vaccine, both in Russia and globally."

Исследователи из Центра языка и мозга НИУ ВШЭ совместно с российскими и американскими коллегами впервые провели исследование порождения и восприятия речи на разных лингвистических уровнях у российских детей с расстройством аутистического спектра (РАС). Полученные результаты опровергли гипотезу о том, что дети с РАС понимают речь хуже, чем говорят сами, разница зависит скорее от лингвистического уровня (слово - предложение - текст), а также от невербального IQ ребенка.

Researchers from the HSE Centre for Language and Brain and their Russian and American colleagues have become the first to compare expressive and receptive language abilities of Russian children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) at different linguistic levels. Their work helped them refute the hypothesis that children with ASD understand spoken language less well than they produce it. The study was published in Research in Developmental Disabilities.
Almost 75% of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have language impairment, although it is not a diagnostic criterion of ASD. The studies, however, disagree on the difference in the degree of impairment between expressive and receptive language in ASD.
Some researchers have argued that expressive language is more intact in children with ASD than receptive language, and some consider the expressive-better-than-receptive pattern in language to be a unique hallmark of ASD.
Researchers from the HSE Centre for Language and Brain, the Federal Resource Centre for ASD (Moscow State University of Psychology and Education), and Haskins Laboratories (New Haven, United States) decided to check this hypothesis. They tested 82 Russian-speaking children with ASD and compared expressive and receptive language at different linguistic levels within the same group. The scientists used the RuCLAB (Russian Child Language Assessment Battery), which was developed at the HSE Centre for Language and Brain. The comparison was conducted at three levels: vocabulary (word production and comprehension), morphosyntax (sentence production and comprehension), and discourse (text production and comprehension).
The analysis shows that there is no a single expressive-receptive language pattern in children with ASD. For example, it is impossible to say that expressive domain is more intact than receptive. Furthermore, the results show that the difference in expressive and receptive language depends on the linguistic level: single-word production was more affected than single-word recognition in children with ASD, sentence production and comprehension were equally affected, and production of texts was more intact than the comprehension of texts.
In order to understand whether non-verbal intelligence (IQ) affects the difference between receptive and expressive language at different linguistic levels, the children with ASD were divided into two groups. One group included children without intellectual disabilities (non-verbal IQ at normal range), and the other included children with intellectual disabilities (non-verbal IQ lower than the normal range). Word, sentence and text production and comprehension were then compared between the two groups separately.
The results of the study show that non-verbal IQ partially impacted expressive and receptive language patterns. No difference between the two groups was observed at the vocabulary level: in both groups, single-word production was more impaired than single-word comprehension.
The researchers did observe a difference between the two groups at the morphosyntax level: in children without intellectual disabilities, sentence production and comprehension were equally affected, while in children with intellectual disabilities, sentence comprehension was more intact than sentence production.
A difference in expressive and receptive patterns between the two groups was also observed at the discourse level. Children without intellectual disabilities displayed no difference between expressive and receptive domains, while text production in children with intellectual disabilities was more intact than comprehension.
'The difference between word, sentence and text production and comprehension partially depends on non-verbal intelligence. But it is still too early to talk about any ASD-specific patterns,' Vardan Arutiunian believes. 'There are still only a few papers that systematically compare expressive and receptive language at different linguistic levels while taking non-verbal IQ levels into account. Our study is one of the first of its kind, and we will continue our work using neuroimaging methods such as magnetoencephalography, electroencephalography and magnetic resonance imaging.'
The researchers believe that understanding the neurobiological mechanisms of expressive and receptive language in children with ASD will help with the objective diagnosis of language impairments, as well as with speech therapy and rehabilitation.

Магнитные наноматериалы имеют большой потенциал в медицине, например, для точечного уничтожения раковых клеток. Российские ученые обнаружили, что дополнительное немагнитное покрытие из оксида кремния на наночастицах позволяет им дольше сохранять свои эффективные свойства и повышает их цитотоксичность.

Russian scientists have found that coating magnetic nanoparticles with a non-magnetic silica shell coating significantly decreased the viability of cancer cells in a low frequency alternating magnetic field. The coating increases nanoparticles stability, preventing aggregation in endosomes and keeping them as effective magneto-mechanical actuators in a low-frequency alternating magnetic field. The study was published in Colloids and Surfaces B: Biointerfaces.
Biocompatible magnetic nanomaterials have been intensively studied for various applications in biomedicine. They can be remotely controlled over by an external magnetic field, which makes it possible to specifically affect target molecules on the molecular level.
Magnetic nanoparticles cytotoxicity depends on acting magnetic field parameters, the most significant of which are magnetic field amplitude, frequency, and the duration of action. In a low frequency alternating magnetic field, they rotate, causing mechanical damage to cells.
Scientists from NUST MISIS, M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University, V. Serbsky National Medical Research Center for Psychiatry and Narcology, Siberian State Medical University, National Research Tomsk Polytechnic University, Skoltech, D.I. Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology of Russia, Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland and N.I Pirogov Russian National Research Medical University have found that a non-magnetic shell coat significantly increases the cytotoxicity of magnetic nanoparticles. Two types of iron oxide nanoparticles with the same magnetic core with and without silica shells were synthesized. Nanoparticles with silica shells significantly decreased the viability of human prostate cancer cells in a low frequency alternating magnetic field according to the cytotoxicity test, unlike uncoated nanoparticles.
The study has shown that cell death results from the intracellular membrane integrity failure, and the calcium ions concentration increase with the subsequent necrosis. Transmission electron microscopy and dynamic light scattering images showed that uncoated nanoparticles are etched by acidic media in the endosome and form aggregates. As a result, they encounter high endosomal macromolecular viscosity and become unable to rotate efficiently.
The scientists assume that effective rotation of nanoparticles causes cell death in a low frequency alternating magnetic field. In turn, silica shell coating increases nanoparticles stability, preventing aggregation in endosomes.
"Our fundings have both theoretical and practical value. We discovered that the non-magnetic phase increases the colloidal stability of nanoparticles, thus being the key to their effective magneto-mechanical actuation. This is important for the fundamental understanding of the mechanism of magneto-mechanical actuation and what the structural features of nanoparticles should be in order to maximize their cytotoxicity. On the other hand, we have shown that our nanoparticles work, they do cause cell death. The next step would be testing their effectiveness in vivo," noted Artyom Ilyasov, NUST MISIS Biomedical Nanomaterials Laboratory.

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