Август 2022 г.

Российская наука и мир (по материалам зарубежной электронной прессы)

CONTENTS / ОГЛАВЛЕНИЕ


• Scientists discover a new gene to protect plants from common diseases
• High-voltage sodium-ion batteries with up to 15% higher energy density
• Coin hoard discovery hints at prosperity of Black Sea region during medieval times
• Researchers find an unexpected cause of forgiveness
• Current warming is recorded as the strongest of the last 7,000 years

С помощью стильбен-синтазы, выделенного из винограда гена, отвечающего за синтез ресвератрола, российские биологи создали модифицированные растения, устойчивые к ряду распространенных бактериальных и грибковых патогенов.

Scientists from the Ural Federal University and the Pushchino Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences have discovered a new gene to protect plants from common diseases like fungi, bacteria and adverse environmental factors.
Stilbene Synthase is the gene responsible for the synthesis of resveratrol in plants. This compound is highly biologically active, helping plants protect themselves from drought, frost, salinity and other negative environmental factors. Scientists extracted the Stilbene Synthase Gene from grape leaves and used it to create modified plants that are resistant to a number of common bacterial and fungal pathogens.
"We have demonstrated that adding Stilbene Synthase to the genome of plants increases their resistance not only to physical and chemical factors, but also to infections. In the future, our results can be used to protect plants from diseases," said Alexander Ermoshin, Associate Professor at the Department of Experimental Biology and Biotechnologies, UrFU.
Stilbene Synthase-modified plants showed high resistance to pathogens dangerous to agroindustry, including Erwinia, Fusarium, Botrytis gray and other fungi and bacteria. These pathogens cause disease in a large number of crops, and infection with them can lead to the loss of a large part of the crop.
One of the tobacco species served as a model plant for the scientists of UrFU and the Branch of the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Special agrobacterium "loaded" with this gene was used to add Stilbene Synthase to the genome. According to the scientists, this is a completely natural process, repeating one of the mechanisms of natural plant mutation.
"An important part of the study was to analyze the effect of Stilbene Synthase on other characteristics of the modified plants. The tests showed that our transgenic tobacco does not differ from the usual tobacco, except for increased resistance to pathogens," said Alexander Ermoshin.
It should be noted that specialists from Voronezh State University of Forestry and Technologies and the Federal Budget Institution of Science "State Research Center for Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology" also participated in the study. In the future, the research team intends to investigate the beneficial effects of plant modification with other genes.

Сотрудники Сколтеха и МГУ использовали для создания катода натрий-ионного аккумулятора порошок фторид-фосфата натрия-ванадия. Это позволило повысить энергоемкость батареи на 15%.

Sodium-ion batteries continue to edge toward commercialization as a viable alternative to lithium-ion technology. And researchers from Russia’s Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) and Lomonosov Moscow State University have developed a new cathode material that promises higher energy storage capacity in sodium-ion batteries.
They developed a powder of sodium-vanadium phosphate fluoride (NaVPO₄F). It has a particular crystal structure that could ensure 10% to 15% higher energy density than current sodium-ion batteries.
"Our material also compares well with the class of layered materials for cathodes. It provides roughly the same battery capacity and greater stability, which translates into longer life and higher cost-efficiency of the battery," said Stanislav Fedotov, an assistant professor at Skoltech. "Remarkably, even the theoretical predictions for the competing materials fall short of the practical performance of ours, and this is far from trivial, because the theoretical potential is never fully realized."
The researchers confirmed the material’s superior characteristics through an experiment, after determining that the crystal structure could unlock the high energy storage potential of NaVPO₄F. The one they chose is known as the KTP-type framework and comes from nonlinear optics, which is not common in battery engineering. By combining a NaVPO₄F composition and KTiOPO₄-type framework via a low-temperature (e.g., 190 C) ion-exchange synthesis approach, the researchers managed to develop a high-capacity and high-voltage positive electrode active material.
When tested in a coin cell configuration in combination with a Na metal negative electrode and a NaPF₆-based non-aqueous electrolyte solution, the cathode active material enabled a discharge capacity of 136 mAh g⁻¹ at 14.3 mA g⁻¹, with an average cell discharge voltage of about 4.0 V. The scientists also reported a specific discharge capacity of 123 mAh g⁻¹ at 5.7 A g⁻¹ for the same cell configuration.
They described their research findings in "Development of vanadium-based polyanion positive electrode active materials for high-voltage sodium-based batteries," which was recently published in Nature Communications.
"Higher energy storage capacity is just one of the advantages of this material," said Fedotov. "It also enables the cathode to operate at lower ambient temperatures, which is particularly relevant for Russia."
As lithium prices continue to surge, the need for batteries based on cheap and abundant materials, such as alkali metal sodium, is pressing. The Russian scientists said that efficient materials for sodium-ion batteries could eventually supersede lithium-ion batteries in heavy electric vehicles, such as buses and trucks, as well as in stationary energy storage applications.

Фанагорийская археологическая экспедиция, работающая на Таманском полуострове, обнаружила клад из 30 медных монет - отчеканенных в Боспорском царстве статеров. Уникальность их в том, что боспорские монеты продолжали ходить на протяжении еще нескольких веков после прекращения чеканки.

Phanagoria was founded in the middle of the 6th century BC by Greek settlers on the shores of the Taman Gulf. The ancient settlement and necropolis include over 700 mounds and occupies 2223 acres.
The team found a purse between the remains of two burnt dwellings in the city, containing 30 copper staters, a type of Greek coin minted in the Bosporan Kingdom. The researchers suggest that the coins were lost or hidden during attacks on Phanagoria by the Turks or the Huns.
Last year, a similar hoard of 80 coins was found stashed inside an amphora not far from the latest discovery, while previous excavations along the Taman Peninsula have found hoards in Hermonassa and Kitey.
An analysis of the hoards allows archaeologists to evaluate the wealth of the people living along the peninsula, suggesting that the inhabitants had approximately 30-80 coins for their everyday needs. The team estimates that the savings of the combined inhabitants in each city within the region amounted to roughly 1,000 Bosporan coins.
The Bosporan coins are unique in that they were last minted in AD 34, but continued to be used in the region until at least the end of the 6th century. After Phanagoria became a Byzantine dependency, Byzantine gold also circulated in the territory which had a higher value than the Bosporan coins. Nevertheless, unlike copper staters, gold coins were used almost exclusively for large transactions, and only the richest medieval classes could afford them.
The Phanagoria Archaeological Expedition is a project by the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Российские исследователи из НИУ ВШЭ изучили связь между аутентичностью личности (способностью быть самим собой), умением прощать и уровнем стресса. Оказалось, что наибольшую аутентичность проявляют люди, испытывающие хронический стресс (вызванный тяжелой травмой с необратимыми последствиями), а меньше всего склонны к прощению те, кто подвержен повседневному стрессу (напряжение от рутинных обязанностей).

The relationship between personality authenticity (the ability to be oneself) and the ability to forgive under various stress levels has been researched by Russian scientists. They discovered that those who experience chronic stress are more likely to forgive, but those who experience everyday stress are less likely to do so. Authenticity is promoted by the ability to forgive. Life coaching programs could take advantage of the study’s findings, which were published in the journal Clinical Psychology and Special Education.
Authenticity, or the ability "to be oneself" aids individuals in overcoming a variety of difficulties in life. The ability to forgive - overcoming feelings of offense by the person who inflicted damage or challenging life circumstances - also contributes to psychological well-being. Despite the significance of these phenomena for personality psychology research, little is known about how they are related. In contrast to the scarcity of studies on its connections to other positive personality phenomena, the capacity to forgive is just now being studied in Russian personality psychology.
No studies have looked at stress levels, forgivingness as a moral virtue, or genuineness. Professor Sofya Nartova-Bochaver of the Higher School of Economics (HSE) Faculty of Social Sciences collaborated with Violetta Park to investigate how stress affects one’s ability for forgiveness and authenticity. 140 young men and women between the ages of 16 and 40 were questioned by the researchers to determine the associations.
When it came to the amount of stress they were going through, the respondents belonged to various cohorts. They included the relatively affluent (students from a teacher training institution residing in Moscow), the cohort dealing with chronic stress brought on by a serious trauma with permanent effects (patients of a rehabilitation center with severe spinal injuries), and students from one of Moscow’s international classical universities who experienced everyday stress. In the study, standardized questionnaires were used.
According to the research, those who experience chronic stress exhibit the most authenticity. The results for patients who are generally well-off are average, whereas the results for the group who experienced daily stress were the lowest. The ability to forgive follows the same pattern.
Researchers explain the high inclination to forgive among representatives of the chronic stress cohort by the post-traumatic growth effect. Despite the fact that these people face very severe life conditions - they depend physically on other people; their normal bodily sensations have changed, and many capabilities have been lost - they are more likely to discover their real purpose in life and the most important values. They feel "more like themselves" and are able to disregard the multiple misfortunes and imperfections in life by means of forgiveness in order to move on.
Representatives of the "relatively well-off" cohort adapt easily to themselves and the world, have moderately high authenticity and a readiness to forgive other people, themselves, and the circumstances that life presents them with. The lowest ability to forgive and the lowest level of authenticity was seen in the everyday stress cohort. Likely due to the "invisibility" and "unimportance" of everyday troubles, these people are unaware of their everyday stress until their reaction to it peaks. This is why people who believe that they deal with routine pressure well are in fact exhausted and become too demanding to themselves and others.
The researchers also looked into how authenticity correlates with the ability to forgive depending on stress levels. These phenomena are generally positively correlated: people who tend to show mercy and forgive others or under unfavorable life conditions are more likely to feel the authenticity of their own personality; however, the strength of this correlation varies depending on stress.
In the chronic stress cohort, authenticity has almost no correlation with the ability to forgive; rather, it appears that they develop in parallel. For the relatively well-off and those under everyday stress, the forgiveness of oneself has become the most important condition to experience authenticity, but only in the everyday stress cohort have researchers detected a high importance of forgiving life circumstances and events. The more developed the ability to forgive oneself and life circumstances is, along with a greater readiness to forget about vengeance or restore justice, the truer, more real-life people live.
The scholars concluded that an ability to forgive really contributes to feeling authenticity, but at different levels of stress and under different types of stress the factors that cause it may change.
Sofya Nartova-Bochaver, Leading Research Fellow, School of Psychology states, "In rapidly changing, highly ambiguous conditions, it is extremely important to have a wide range of life skills and personality qualities, among which the ability to forgive is undoubtedly essential."

Изучив найденные на Ямале древние деревья, дендрохронологи Института экологии растений и животных УрО РАН и Уральского федерального университета проследили изменения летней температуры за последние 7638 лет. Оказалось, что в течение нескольких тысячелетий температура в регионе постепенно снижалась, но в XIX веке начала резко повышаться и в последние десятилетия достигла самого высокого значения за 7000 лет.

The north of Western Siberia is recording the warmest summers of the last 7,000 years. While for several millennia the temperature of the region was following a general cooling, in the 19th century there has been an abrupt change with rapidly rising temperature that has reached its highest value in the recent decades. These findings were published today in Nature Communications.
Thanks to multiple field expeditions aimed at collecting subfossil wood performed over the last 40 years, dendrochronologists of the Institute of Plant and Animal Ecology, Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), and the Ural Federal University (UrFU), have eventually been able to create a unique and extraordinary-long tree-ring width chronology from the Yamal region allowing to track the course of summer temperature over the past 7,638 years. With support from colleagues of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, of the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, and of the University of Geneva, they have been able to perform analyses to confidently reconstruct and characterize the temperatures over the full period and with annual resolution.
"Due to changes in the Earth's orbit we would have expected a continuous, slow and gradual decrease of incoming summer solar energy and thus temperature at the subpolar latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere during last 8-9 millennia. However, how recorded by the trees growing in Yamal, this cooling trend has been interrupted in the middle of the 19th century, when temperature began to rise very quickly and reached the highest values in recent decades," says Rashit Hantemirov, Leading Researcher of the Laboratories of Dendrochronology of the Ural Branch of the RAS and Natural Science Methods in the Humanities of UrFU.
Independently of the period length considered (from 30 to 170 years), the most recent period was the warmest. Not only the temperature has reached unprecedented warm levels, but also the rate of temperature increase (i.e. since the last 160-170) hasn’t been as fast as after the middle of the 19th century.
"The exceptionality of the modern warming is corroborated by observations that the last century was characterized by a total lack of cold extremes contrasted by the occurrence of 27 extreme warm years, 19 of which have fallen in the last 40 years," specifies Rashit Hantemirov.
The authors of this research are confident that the human activities not only is influence climate change, but has become its major determinant, at least for the north of Western Siberia.
Research on tree-ring based climate reconstruction will continue. There is realistic possibility to extend the tree-ring chronology into the past for another 2,000 years.
"Thank to international cooperation it will also be possible to use other tree-rings parameters to further precise the climate reconstructions. With colleagues from Switzerland, we are working on the analysis of the tree rings cellular structures, and together with the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, we intend to perform a climate reconstruction based on the analysis of the oxygen-18 isotope in the annual rings", adds Rashit Hantemirov.
Reference
Stepan Shiyatov, a pioneer of dendrochronology in Russia, was the first who recognized the value of the ancient trees found on the Yamal Peninsula. Together with colleagues from the Institute of Plant and Animal Ecology, Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, he began 40 years ago with the systematic collections of the subfossil wood. Since then, more than two dozen expeditions have been carried out; with a current collection of more than 5,000 samples, which tree-ring widths have been measured, and which samples are currently archived at the Institute of Plant and Animal Ecology.
Approximately 2,000 samples of larch and spruce subfossils have also been dated (with the cross-dating method). This allowed to assign with absolute accuracy the year of formation of each annual ring over the last 8,800 years, being now the longest tree-ring chronology of the polar regions.
Tree rings are one of the best natural archives of past growing conditions (including air temperature). Trees growing in subpolar regions and at high elevation are usually the most sensitive to temperature changes. Remains of such trees that lived thousands of years ago, as in the Yamal Peninsula, provide the access to understand the past, which is the best foundation to assess the future.

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