Январь 2022 г.

Российская наука и мир (по материалам зарубежной электронной прессы)

CONTENTS / ОГЛАВЛЕНИЕ


• Russian bioinformaticians have created a neural network architecture that can evaluate how well an RNA guide has been chosen for gene editing
• Russia retires Chernobyl-era reactor at Kursk nuclear plant
• Upper stage from failed Russian rocket to make uncontrolled re-entry
• Russian scientists propose catching jellyfish to protect anchovy
• The Great Siberian Thaw
• Des chercheurs utilisent des nanotubes en carbone pour fabriquer les plus petits transistors du monde
• Enzyme from archaea found in Siberian oil well will help treat cancer and reduce carcinogens in food
• New discoveries in the "Siberian Valley of the Kings"
• Russian scientists have obtained a new substance with liquid crystal properties
• Rivers speeding up Arctic ice melt at alarming rate
• Ancient "scepters" were actually straws for communal boozing, researchers say
• Le mystérieux vol du coléoptère Paratuposa placentis qui lui permet de battre des records de vitesse
• Russian scientists create a model of scientific diplomacy in the Arctic
• Study probes Earth’s turbulent past to explain where oceans came from
• Russian Prof Tatiana Shaumyan conferred with Padma Shri award for contribution to literature, education
• Cultural differences impact the evaluation of creativity
• Ancient wolf gene responsible for different sizes of domestic dogs

Российские биоинформатики из Сколтеха под руководством Константина Северинова разработали новую архитектуру нейронной сети, позволяющую оценить, насколько удачно выбрана направляющая РНК для редактирования генов. Это позволит более эффективно изменять ДНК с помощью системы геномного редактирования CRISPR/Cas и поможет в поиске способов лечения тяжелых наследственных заболеваний.

A novel neural network design to assess how successfully a guide RNA has been chosen for a gene-editing procedure. This methodology will allow for more efficient DNA alteration using the popular CRISPR/Cas system, which will aid in the development of new tactics for making genetically modified creatures and finding ways to cure severe hereditary illnesses. The study, funded by the Russian Science Foundation, was published in Nucleic Acids Research.
Genomic editing, particularly the CRISPR/Cas technique, is widely employed in experimental biology, agriculture, and biotechnology. CRISPR/Cas is one of several weapons used by bacteria to resist viruses. As the pathogen’s DNA enters the cell, Cas proteins detect it as foreign hereditary material and break it because its sequences differ from those of the bacteria. To respond to the virus quicker, the bacterium saves pieces of the pathogen’s DNA - much like a computer antivirus retains a collection of viral signatures - and passes them on to subsequent generations so that its Cas can prevent future attacks.
Teams from different laboratories independently adapted the CRISPR/Cas system to introduce arbitrary changes into DNA sequences in human and animal cells. It made genomic editing much easier and more efficient. The critical components of the mechanism are guide RNA, which "marks the site," and the Cas9 protein, which cleaves DNA at that location. The cell subsequently "heals the wound," but the genetic code has already been altered.
The issue is that guide RNA targeting is not always accurate, leading to Cas9 misinterpretation. It is critical to transforming CRISPR/Cas technology into a useful high-precision tool, especially for medical treatments.
Deep learning, Gaussian processes, and other approaches were utilized by Skoltech researchers led to improve the accuracy of identifying suitable guide RNAs. The researchers created a collection of neural networks, trainable mathematical models represented as sequential multiplication of matrices, which are enormous arrays of numbers with complicated underlying structures. A neural network can learn because it contains "memory" in numbers updated in a certain way each time the system performs the computation in training mode. The models were trained on datasets including tens of thousands of experimentally confirmed guide RNAs that have demonstrated great accuracy in human and animal cells.
A method for calculating the likelihood of DNA cleavage for a particular guide RNA was introduced. The obtained scores can guide experimental design in any CRISPR/Cas-based application. They employed neural networks to generate a guide RNA set for precisely changing the genes on the 22nd human chromosome. This was made feasible by the extraordinary accuracy of cleavage frequency prediction and the inclusion of a prediction uncertainty assessment feature that none of the prior approaches provided.
The discoveries may be utilized for several CRISPR/Cas-based technological applications, such as genetic disorder therapy, farming technologies, and fundamental research trials. The team’s time- and resource-saving strategy made it easier to pick the proper guide RNA for high-precision DNA editing, which might aid in the development of novel treatment options for genetic disorders in the long run.

После 45 лет работы на Курской АЭС навсегда остановлен энергоблок № 1. Сделано это в рамках вывода из эксплуатации энергоблоков «чернобыльского» типа РБМК-1000. Остальные три энергоблока будут отключены к 2031 году, их заменят современные реакторы ВВЭР-ТОИ.

As 2021 drew to a close, the No 1 reactor at the Kursk nuclear power plant in Russia was permanently shut down after 45 years in operation, marking a major step toward retiring the country’s stock of Chernobyl-style RBMK reactors.
The closure is part of a gradual phase-down at the original Kursk nuclear plant, located 524 kilometers south of Moscow, that will see all four of the site’s RMBK reactors retire by 2031. The power produced by those reactors will be replaced by the two VVER-TOI reactors currently under construction at the nearby Kursk II nuclear plant.
In 2015, Bellona challenged the construction of those reactors over numerous inaccuracies in government-required environmental impact studies for the plant. The commissioning of the new reactors was initially intended to coincide with the retirement of the last of the RMBKs, but no official startup date has been set, Nuclear Engineering International reported.
Launched in 1976, the Kursk plant’s No 1 reactor was among the first of the RBMK line to be built in the Soviet Union. A reactor of the same model exploded at Chernobyl in April 1986 in the world’s worst nuclear accident, and Russian nuclear officials have been at pains to stress that Kursk’s No 1 reactor had operated safely throughout its career.
"During its operation since 19 December 1976, the unit has generated more than 251TWh of electricity," the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant’s Acting Director, Alexander Uvakin, said in a release. "This was enough to ensure the energy consumption of the Kursk region for 30 years, given the current consumption. The unit has worked reliably and safely."
The unit is one among three RBMK units that have been taken out of service by Russia’s nuclear industry in recent years - the first two at the Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant near St Petersburg. Another seven RBMKs operate throughout Russia, and two similar RBMK-1500 style reactors were constructed at the now-decommissioned Ignalina nuclear plant in Lithuania. The remaining three RMBKs at Chernobyl continued operations after the No 4 reactor there exploded, and were not shut down until 2000.
Obstacles to decommissioning RBMKs
While each of these Soviet RBMKs underwent comprehensive upgrades in the years following the Chernobyl catastrophe, no amount of remodeling has been able to finesse the reactors’ most deviling obstacle where safe decommissioning and dismantlement are concerned - their graphite stacks.
A graphite stack is essentially a bulky cylinder about 7 meters high and 11 meters across made of graphite bricks and weighing about 2000 tons. Fuel is fed into the reactor via channels cut in the masonry, and the graphite acts as the moderator.
The concept originated in the late 1940s when the Soviet Union and the United States began building reactors to produce weapons-grade plutonium - a time when considerations about how to dismantle nuclear installations were not a priority. While most reactors in commercial operation around the globe are of the pressurized water type, the Soviet Union’s first steps in civilian nuclear power were based on this unwieldy graphite moderated design.
But now, Russia’s RBMK fleet has reached retirement age. However, as Rosatom’s plans for dismantling them comes into focus, it’s clear that the question of how to safely dismantle RBMKs remains largely unanswered.
According to officials at the Kursk plant, the No 1 reactor will be treated essentially as an operational reactor, both financially and technically - a phase called "operation without generation,"
What this amounts to is removing the reactor’s fuel and decontaminating what remains of the reactor’s structure aside from its graphite stack. After that, it’s essentially a process of waiting until nuclear science catches up with advances geared to handle the safe dismantlement of the graphite stacks.
Presently, there are two Russian scientific studies underway - one in Seversk, underwritten by the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, and the other in Sosnovy Bor - aimed at solving the problem.

Российская космическая программа потратила более двух десятилетий на разработку семейства тяжелых ракет-носителей «Ангара», призванных заменить «Протон», которому уже более полувека. 27 декабря 2021 года состоялся третий испытательный полет «Ангары-А5» с новым разгонным блоком «Персей» и 2,4-тонным макетом спутника, который планировалось вывести на геостационарную орбиту. Запуск начался в штатном режиме, однако «Персей» сумел выполнить всего один из запланированных маневров, после чего его двигатель вышел из строя.

The Russian space program has spent more than two decades developing the Angara family of rockets, and government officials have expressed high hopes for the Angara A5 heavy lift variant. It is hoped that the Angara A5 rocket can replace the venerable Proton booster, which is more than half a century old and in recent years has had reliability issues.
But the long-running development program has been slow. The Angara A5 finally made its debut in 2014, successfully lofting a 2-ton mass simulator into geosynchronous orbit. But then, six years passed before a second development flight in December 2020. This flight was again successful, with the rocket putting a 2.4-ton mass simulator into orbit.
Why did it take so long between test flights? Costs, production issues, and a lack of demand all seem to have been factors. Although the Russian government has not been forthcoming, the expense of building the Angara A5 was probably the biggest factor. The Russian space program had hoped to make the Angara A5 competitive with SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket for commercial launches, but Russian media reported that Angara production costs to date have been about $100 million per vehicle.
In December, the Angara A5 rocket appeared ready to get back on track as technicians prepared it for a third and final development flight. Following this flight, Russia planned to begin flying military payloads on the Angara A5 and presumably would also use it to compete for commercial satellite launch contracts.
This configuration of the Angara rocket contained the same first stage as the first two flights, consisting of a single "Universal Rocket Module" core powered by an RD-191 engine, with four additional "URM" cores serving as attached boosters. However, for its third demonstration flight, the Angara A5 used a new upper stage named "Persei."
With this modernized upper stage, Russian officials hoped to move away from the toxic propellants - dinitrogen tetroxide and hydrazine - that power the Briz-M upper stage. Persei, by contrast, uses liquid oxygen and kerosene.
For its third test flight, the Angara A5 vehicle lifted off from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia on December 27, again carrying a dummy payload. The core stage and boosters performed nominally, as did a second stage. After the Persei upper stage and its mass simulator deployed, its RD-0124 engine performed a nominal initial burn. But a second burn to put the payload into a higher, stable orbit failed.
Curiously, Russian officials nonetheless celebrated the Angara rocket's test launch as a great achievement. Multiple Russian news sources heralded the success of the rocket's launch a week ago.
Two days after the launch, even, the state-controlled Russian news service RT published an article with a headline stating that the Persei upper stage would significantly improve the performance of the Angara A5 vehicle. However, the article mentioned that Russian space chief Dmitry Rogozin was still waiting for the upper stage to relight.
"Dmitriy Rogozin congratulated the military on the successful launch of the new booster, noting that we are still waiting for the Persei upper stage to work," the article states. They're still waiting. The Persei upper stage, of course, was never going to relight, and Russian officials had to know this.
The proof is in the sky. This Persei stage, tracked as IPM 3/Persey, is now well below 200 km and will likely make an uncontrolled re-entry into Earth's atmosphere on Wednesday. Hopefully, it will do so over an ocean.

Исследователи из Азово-Черноморского филиала Федерального российского научно-исследовательского института рыбного хозяйства и океанографии (ВНИРО) предложили начать промышленную ловлю медуз Aurelia aurita и Rhizostoma pulmo, растущая численность которых угрожает популяции хамсы в Азовском и Черном морях. Ученые также предложили методы последующей переработки медуз в продукты питания.

The Azov and Black Sea branch of the Federal Russian Research Institute Of Fisheries and Oceanography (VNIRO) is launching an initiative to harvest jellyfish in the Russian south in order to alleviate the threat to local anchovy and increase the country’s exports.
VNIRO scientists have been working on a method of catching and cooking jellyfish for a few years, according to a press release. The organization’s efforts have focused on how to regulated the jellyfish population in Russia’s southern seas.
Harvesting jellyfish, VNIRO hopes, will decrease populations of the species - as it has become a threat to anchovy. Jellyfish and juvenile anchovy compete for the same food source - zooplankton and small crustaceans - and juvenile anchovy often get out-competed and struggle for food. Globally, rising jellyfish populations has been highlighted by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization as a potential problem.
According to the Russian Federal Agency for Fisheries, the anchovy catch declined by 28.6 percent in 2020, with much of the blame being laid on jellyfish. A similar decrease in catch was estimated for 2021.
Currently, no companies harvest jellyfish in either the Sea of Azov or the Black Sea. In Russia’s Far East, a few companies are involved in the business, but the catch is small and the products are entirely bound for export to China. During the Soviet era, attempts were made by the agriculture industry to turn jellyfish into feed for pigs and birds, but those attempts all ended after a trial phase.
At a recent session of VNIRO’s Scientific Production Council, scientists prepared a few dishes cooked with jellyfish to demonstrate the possibilities. Cooking methods have been invented by VNIRO’s scientists to use raw materials and turn them into recognizable food items, with the demonstration menu including items like tomato soup, fish soup, marmalade confections, salads, and chips.
Scientists have also studied the chemical makeup of the jellyfish, its microbiological parameters, and other aspects to benefit a potential commercial fishing industry for the species.
The Sea of Azov and Black Sea contain two species, according to VNIRO, Aurelia aurita and Rhizostoma pulmo. The recommended annual catch, if an industry can be established, is 100 metric tons (MT) in the Sea of Azov and 300 MT in the Black Sea.

Об изучении вечной мерзлоты в СССР и в современной России. В результате повышения среднегодовой температуры и таяния промерзшей почвы меняется ландшафт, выделяются парниковые газы, а инфраструктура региона оказывается под угрозой разрушения, что может привести к новым катастрофам. С другой стороны, тающая мерзлота открывает вниманию ученых редчайшие биологические образцы.

Flying over Yakutia, in northeastern Russia, I watched the dark shades of the boreal forest blend with patches of soft, lightly colored grass. I was strapped to a hard metal seat inside the cabin of an Antonov-2, a single-engine biplane, known in the Soviet era as a kukuruznik, or corn-crop duster. The plane rumbled upward, climbing above a horizon of larch and pine, and lakes the color of mud. It was impossible to tell through the Antonov’s dusty porthole, but below me the ground was breathing, or, rather, exhaling.
Three million years ago, as continent-size glaciers pulsed down from the poles, temperatures in Siberia plunged to minus eighty degrees Fahrenheit and vast stretches of soil froze underground. As the planet cycled between glacial and interglacial periods, much of that frozen ground thawed, only to freeze again, dozens of times. Around eleven and a half millennia ago, the last ice age gave way to the current interglacial period, and temperatures began to rise. The soil that remained frozen year-round came to be known as permafrost. It now lies beneath nine million square miles of Earth’s surface, a quarter of the landmass of the Northern Hemisphere. Russia has the world’s largest share: two-thirds of the country’s territory sits on permafrost.
In Yakutia, where the permafrost can be nearly a mile deep, annual temperatures have risen by more than two degrees Celsius since the Industrial Revolution, twice the global average. As the air gets hotter, so does the soil. Deforestation and wildfire - both acute problems in Yakutia - remove the protective top layer of vegetation and raise temperatures underground even more.
Over thousands of years, the frozen earth swallowed up all manner of organic material, from tree stumps to woolly mammoths. As the permafrost thaws, microbes in the soil awaken and begin to feast on the defrosting biomass. It’s a funky, organic process, akin to unplugging your freezer and leaving the door open, only to return a day later to see that the chicken breasts in the back have begun to rot. In the case of permafrost, this microbial digestion releases a constant belch of carbon dioxide and methane. Scientific models suggest that the permafrost contains one and a half trillion tons of carbon, twice as much as is currently held in Earth’s atmosphere.
Trofim Maximov, a scientist who studies permafrost’s contribution to climate change, was seated next to me in the Antonov, shouting directions to the pilot in the cockpit. Once a month, Maximov charters the plane in order to measure the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere above Yakutia. He described the thawing permafrost as a kind of feedback loop: the release of greenhouse gases causes warmer temperatures, which, in turn, melt the permafrost further. "It’s a natural process," he told me. "Which means that, unlike purely anthropogenic processes" - say, emissions from factories or automobiles - "once it starts, you can’t really stop it."
A hose attached to the plane’s wing sucked air into a dozen glass cylinders arrayed on the floor of the cabin. By comparing the greenhouse-gas numbers over time, and at various altitudes, Maximov can estimate how permafrost is both affected by a warmer climate and contributing to it. When he started taking airborne measurements, half a decade ago, he found that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air above Yakutia was increasing at double the rate of historical averages. Methane has a shorter life in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, but it is more than twenty-five times as effective at trapping heat. According to Maximov’s data, methane is also being released at an accelerated rate: it is now accumulating fifty per cent faster than it was a generation ago.
At the moment, though, I was mainly concerned with the stomach-turning lurches the plane was making as it descended in a tight spiral. We had dropped to a few hundred feet above the ground so that Maximov’s colleague, a thirty-three-year-old researcher named Roman Petrov, could take the final sample, a low-altitude carbon snapshot. The plane shook like a souped-up go-kart. Petrov held his stomach and buried his face in a plastic bag. Then I did the same. When we finally landed, on a grass-covered airstrip, I staggered out of the cabin, still queasy. Maximov poured some Cognac into a plastic cup. A long sip later, I found that the spinning in my head had slowed, and the ground under me again took on the feeling of reassuring firmness - even though, as I knew, what seemed like terra firma was closer to a big squishy piece of rotting chicken.
Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as the Russian Empire expanded eastward, reports filtered back to the capital of a "firm body of ice" in the ground, in the words of one explorer, that "was never heard of before." In Yakutsk, the capital of Yakutia, early settlers struggled to grow crops and find sources of fresh groundwater. In the summer of 1827, a merchant named Fedor Shergin, whom the tsar had dispatched to Yakutia as a representative of the Russian-American Company, tried to dig a well. Shergin’s team of laborers spent the next decade chiselling a shaft, reaching three hundred feet down, only to find yet more frozen earth. Finally, in 1844, Alexander von Middendorff, a prominent scientist and explorer, made his way from St. Petersburg to Yakutsk and estimated, correctly, that the soil under the shaft was frozen to a depth of at least six hundred feet. His findings jolted the Russian scientific academy, and eventually reached the salons of Europe.
Today, the entrance to Shergin’s shaft, as it is known, is housed in a log cabin in the center of Yakutsk, wedged between a concrete apartment block and the burned-out shell of a former military academy. One afternoon last summer, I visited the site with Yuri Murzin, a scientist from the Melnikov Permafrost Institute, based in Yakutsk. "The study of permafrost began here," he said. "Before Shergin’s shaft, practically no one outside of Yakutia had any idea such a thing existed." Murzin and I wanted to have a look inside the shaft, which required lifting a series of heavy wooden lids. A column of cold air rushed upward. I looked down but saw only a wall of black. A musty aroma of dirt and ice wafted into the cabin. "It smells of antiquity, of time gone by," Murzin said.
In a widely read monograph published in the nineteen-twenties, a Soviet scientist named Mikhail Sumgin called the country’s frozen earth vechnaya merzlota, literally "eternal frost," a neologism that was later rendered into English as "permafrost." Sumgin was something of a permafrost romantic, writing that "vechnaya merzlota astounds the human intellect and imagination." He likened it to a "Russian Sphinx" - inexplicable, alluring, a riddle to be solved.
For others, permafrost posed a confounding engineering problem. Soviet ideology contained a strong Promethean impulse, encapsulated by Maxim Gorky’s axiom, paraphrasing Marx, that "in transforming nature, man transforms himself." The construction of the Trans-Polar Railroad was one of many infrastructure projects under Stalin that had to contend with the particularities of land that might sink by several inches in the summer or heave upward in the winter. As one scientist declared in the thirties, "It is necessary to defeat the enemy - vechnaya merzlota - and not surrender."
Fewer than two hundred thousand people live in the Arctic reaches of Alaska and Canada, and there are no large towns; the Soviet Union, by contrast, sought to populate its northeastern territories. With the influx of inhabitants, and the construction projects that followed, a new problem arose: buildings create their own heat, warming the permafrost and causing the ground to buckle and squirm. In 1941, the Yakutsk headquarters of the N.K.V.D., the Stalin-era secret police, sank into the earth, leading one of its walls to split open, spraying plaster over a room of operatives.
Yakutsk is one of two large cities in the world built in areas of continuous permafrost - that is, where the frozen soil forms an unbroken, below-zero sheet. The other is Norilsk, in Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia, where Gulag prisoners were sent in the nineteen-thirties to construct a new settlement. Norilsk is home to some of the largest nickel deposits on Earth. To service the mining and smelting industries, the city needed factories, apartment blocks, schools, hospitals, and auditoriums. Many of these early structures didn’t last long. Valery Grebenets, a professor of engineering at Moscow State University, worked in Norilsk in the eighties. Some of his colleagues there recounted stories of engineers facing severe consequences when their projects collapsed. "When your neighbors start getting shot, you begin to think a bit more vividly," Grebenets grimly remarked. As advances were made in the study of permafrost, he continued, "people started to understand its properties, to come up with new ideas."
One of the more outlandish proposals came from a Soviet scientist named Mikhail Gorodsky, who called for positioning an artificial dust ring - similar to Saturn’s rings - around Earth, to create a heat dome over the poles that would raise temperatures to the point that the permafrost would vanish entirely. In the mid-fifties, Mikhail Kim, an engineer who had first arrived in Norilsk as a Gulag prisoner, devised a more practical solution. His idea was to build on top of cement piles driven as far as forty feet into the permafrost. The piles would elevate a building’s foundation, keeping it from warming the ground below and allowing cold air to penetrate deep into the soil. An Arctic construction boom followed.
Soviet engineers came to treat vechnaya merzlota as exactly that: eternal, stable, unchanging. "They believed they had conquered permafrost," Dmitry Streletskiy, a professor at George Washington University, said. "You could construct a five- or nine-story building on top of piles and nothing happened. Everyone was happy." But, Streletskiy went on, "that infrastructure was meant to serve thirty to fifty years, and no one could imagine that the climate would change so dramatically within that span."
By 2016, a regional official had declared that sixty per cent of the buildings in Norilsk were compromised as a result of permafrost thaw. On May 29, 2020, a fuel-storage tank belonging to Norilsk Nickel, one of Russia’s largest mining companies, cracked open, spilling twenty-one thousand tons of diesel into nearby waterways and turning the Ambarnaya River a metallic red. Executives at the company said that the damage had been contained. But Georgy Kavanosyan, a hydrogeologist based in Moscow, who has a popular YouTube channel, travelled to Norilsk and took samples farther north, from the Pyasina River, which empties into the Kara Sea. He found pollutant concentrations two and a half times permitted levels, threatening fish stocks and ecosystems for thousands of miles.
The Kremlin could not ignore the scale of the disaster, which Greenpeace compared to the Exxon Valdez oil spill. In February, 2021, the state ordered Norilsk Nickel to pay a two-billion-dollar fine, the largest penalty for environmental damage in Russian history. The company had said that the piles supporting the tank failed as the permafrost thawed. An outside scientific review found that those piles had been improperly installed, and that the temperature of the soil was not regularly monitored. In other words, human negligence had compounded the effects of climate change. "What happened in Norilsk was a kind of demonstration of how severe the problem can be," Vladimir Romanovsky, a professor of geophysics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said. "But it’s far from the only case. Lots of other accidents are happening on a smaller scale, and will continue to."
To get a sense of how permafrost thaw is changing the landscape, I took a drive out of Yakutsk with Nikolay Basharin, a thirty-two-year-old researcher at the Permafrost Institute. Our destination was Usun-Kyuyol, the village where Basharin grew up, eighty miles away. His family, like many in Yakutia, had a cellar dug into the permafrost, where they stored meat and jam and lake ice, which they melted for drinking water. "You live on it for all these years but never really fully understand it," Basharin told me, explaining his decision to study permafrost science. We set off at dawn to catch the first ferry across the Lena River; because of the ever-changing effects of permafrost on soil structure, building a bridge has thus far proved unfeasible.
The area on the Lena’s right bank, a valley of some twenty thousand square miles, is known for its large deposits of yedoma, a type of permafrost that is especially rich in ice. Whereas some permafrost is nearly all frozen soil, yedoma contains as much as eighty per cent ice, forming solid wedges, invisible from the surface, that can extend multiple stories underground. This is problematic for several reasons. Water is an efficient conductor of heat, soaking up atmospheric temperatures and warming the permafrost below. As yedoma thaws, it can create depressions in the land that fill with water, a process known as thermokarst.
Yedoma is also a very absorbent carbon trap, accumulating organic matter in silt and sediment that, at a certain point in the past tens of thousands of years, froze underground. When it thaws, it can release ten times more greenhouse gases than other, sandier types of permafrost. Yedoma is found in parts of Alaska and Canada, but it is most prevalent in northeastern Siberia; in Yakutia, it makes up a tenth of the region’s territory.
Basharin and I drove past the pooling remains of thawing yedoma. Some areas were the size of small ponds, others were effectively lakes. We stopped at the edge of a large alas - a thermokarst lake that has dried up, becoming a kind of scooped-out crater. This alas had likely taken more than five thousand years to form. Basharin told me that fragments of hundred-and-fifty-year-old birch trees had recently been found at the bottom of a smaller alas nearby, suggesting that a process which once took thousands of years is now happening in little more than a century. "In geological terms, that’s no more than a millisecond," he said.
We drove on to Usun-Kyuyol, where Basharin lived until he was twelve. Cows grazed in front of wooden houses, their chimneys puffing out dark wisps of smoke. One stretch of road was pockmarked with oval mounds several feet high. Patches of yedoma had thawed, leaving steep pits where the tops of the ice wedges had once been. It started, Basharin said, around twenty years ago, following a silkworm infestation in a nearby birch forest. The trees died, leaving the permafrost vulnerable to sunlight and rising temperatures. "At first, people were happy - the next year was a good one for berries," Basharin told me. But, as the permafrost thawed, the road became so bumpy as to be impassable, a mogul skiing course turned horizontal. A number of houses cracked as the ground beneath them gave way. A few stood abandoned.
We stopped at the home of Basharin’s aunt and uncle, who invited us in for lunch. "We watch television, we hear about warming," his uncle, Prokhor Makarov, told me. "But we live in a village. Our main problem is making sure we have enough hay for the winter." Their house wasn’t in imminent danger of collapse, but the earth around it was craggy and dotted with small indentations. The fence around their property had the lurching quality of a person at the bar who’s had one too many. Makarov told me that, in the summer, he shovels dirt around to keep things level. "We’re used to it," he said.
After we left, Basharin told me, "People don’t understand the end of this story." Try as they may to adapt, he went on, "the thaw will reach them all the same."
Three days later, I caught a flight on a propeller plane leaving Yakutsk for Chersky, a speck of a town on the Kolyma River, near the delta where it empties into the East Siberian Sea. In the nineteen-thirties, Chersky was a transit hub for the Gulag camps; later, it served as a base for the planes that ferried Soviet explorers on Arctic expeditions. These days, in late summer, residents who have spent their vacations on the "mainland," as they call it, return for the start of the new school year, bringing with them items that are rare and expensive in the northernmost reaches of Siberia. The plane was packed, not only with people but with trays of eggs, bouquets of flowers, and boxes containing newly purchased televisions and blenders.
On arrival, I walked out of the Chersky airport - which is not much more than a small waiting room - and saw a Land Rover parked on a dusty road. A man with a flowing silver beard and a black beret sat behind the wheel. I immediately recognized him as Sergey Zimov, who is something of a permafrost soothsayer. "Get in," he said.
We sped off toward the Northeast Science Station, his research center, on the outskirts of town. Zimov, who is sixty-six, studied geophysics in Vladivostok and, in the waning years of the Soviet Union, moved to Chersky, along with his wife, Galina; a son, Nikita, was born shortly afterward. The Soviet collapse is but one of many events, past and future, that Zimov claims to have foretold. "When you know the history of civilization, it is very easy to make predictions, and, so far, I have not been wrong," he told me. During the next week, I heard Zimov hold forth on global population trends, Russian military logistics, and the gold standard. ("My rule is simple: if you get a dollar, use it to buy gold.")
But it was Zimov’s ideas on permafrost that had brought him scientific renown. In the early nineties, he was among the first to come to several related realizations: permafrost holds immense quantities of carbon; much of that carbon is released as methane from thermokarst lakes (the presence of water and the absence of oxygen produce methane, as opposed to carbon dioxide, which is released from upper layers of soil); and a sizable portion of those emissions comes in the fall and the winter, cold periods that Arctic scientists had previously considered unimportant from a climate perspective.
In the spring of 2001, an American Ph.D. student named Katey Walter Anthony, who had met Zimov at an academic gathering in Alaska, arrived in Chersky to help collect data on methane emissions. "When I first saw him in Alaska, I thought he looked so wild, with these big eyebrows and crazy eyes," Walter Anthony told me. "But when I got to Chersky I realized that, though nothing about him had changed, in that setting he looked totally normal."
Walter Anthony positioned methane traps, which she’d fashioned out of sheets of plastic, around Chersky’s thermokarst lakes. "Sergey had thought up these really excellent ideas," she said. "But he had collected just as much data as he thought he needed to prove his point, which was much less than what Western scientists would like to see." Walter Anthony returned the following year; this time, she stayed until the fall and the onset of the first frost.
One morning after breakfast, Zimov suggested that they visit one of the lakes. The ice was still thin and brittle, and Walter Anthony was nervous about walking on it. "Don’t worry," Zimov told her. "Autumn ice is friendly - it tells you before it breaks." He pointed down. Walter Anthony saw thousands of tiny air bubbles, giving the frozen surface the look of a starry night. "The ice was essentially a map pointing to where the methane was coming up," she said. She was able to place her traps precisely where methane was being emitted, rather than, as she put it, "shooting an arrow into the sky."
Walter Anthony found methane emissions five times higher than Zimov’s initial estimate. Radiocarbon dating showed that the gas was emitted from organic matter that formed between twenty and forty thousand years ago, during the Pleistocene era, indicating that permafrost thaw had reached layers that were deep and ancient. The research was published in a paper in Nature, in 2006, which immediately became a foundational text in establishing the impact of permafrost thaw on climate change.
When I was in Chersky, Zimov took me out to the lake. We walked through shrubs and felt the crunch of bright-red cloudberries under our feet. At the water’s edge, Zimov asked, "You see the bubbles?" Once I knew to look for them, they were impossible to miss. It was as if the lake were a giant cauldron on the brink of a very slow, barely perceptible boil, with a pop of air here and there. Methane.
Zimov explained that, even during Chersky’s frigid winters, temperatures under the lake’s surface remain above freezing. Unfrozen water allows microbes to keep digesting organic matter long after the surrounding landscape is covered in snow. Water also has a powerful erosion effect. "The bank is slowly thawing and collapsing, taking with it fresh pieces of permafrost into the lake," Zimov said - more fuel for the release of methane. As Walter Anthony, who is now a professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, put it to me, "Once permafrost thaws to the point where it creates depressions filled with water, the thaw starts to go deep and fast and expands laterally - you can’t really stop it."
The mean annual temperature in Chersky has risen by three degrees Celsius in the past fifty years. An equally pressing problem is snow cover. "Snow is like a warm blanket - it doesn’t allow the wintertime cold to penetrate all the way into soil," Zimov said. One of the effects of climate change is more precipitation in the Arctic ecosystem around Chersky. Yearly snowfall has increased by as much as twenty centimetres since the early eighties, adding two more degrees of warming effect. As a result, Zimov explained, permafrost that used to be minus seven degrees Celsius is now on the verge of thawing, if it hasn’t already.
Adecade ago, a paper about emissions from undersea permafrost led to a moment of hysteria over a so-called methane bomb in the Arctic, poised to release a devastating amount of warming gas all at once. In the years since, much of the scientific community has come to see permafrost thaw more as a slow-motion disaster. "The permafrost isn’t going to release a catastrophic explosion of carbon that would, say, double overnight the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere," Ted Schuur, who leads a project on permafrost thaw and climate change at the University of Northern Arizona, told me. "Instead, this carbon is going to leak out from all over the Arctic and, over time, add a substantial amount to the carbon humans have already added by burning fossil fuels."
In 2018, a report prepared by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gave humans a maximum carbon budget of some five hundred and eighty billion tons in order to have an even chance of limiting warming to one and a half degrees Celsius. The panel’s models have only recently started factoring in various permafrost-thaw scenarios, but they offer such a wide range of possible outcomes that permafrost has become, as Schuur put it, the "wild card" of climate science. He and his colleagues estimate that permafrost emissions might make up five to fifteen per cent of the I.P.C.C.’s allotment.
The I.P.C.C.’s models also miss a significant cause of greenhouse-gas emissions from permafrost. Its estimates presume that all thaw will be gradual, caused by rising air temperatures, and do not take into account thermokarst, or "abrupt thaw," as Schuur prefers to call it, which can trigger nonlinear events like rapid erosion or landslides. "Those events are essentially irreversible on human time scales," Susan Natali, a scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, in Falmouth, Massachusetts, said.
Average global temperatures are on track to rise by nearly two and a half degrees Celsius this century. At the latest U.N. climate-change conference, held in Glasgow in November, participating countries reaffirmed the goal of holding warming to one and a half degrees, even as plans for doing so remain vague. Most models presume that temperatures will surpass that limit, and that a successful global effort to keep warming at a manageable level will involve measures to bring them down again. "The problem is, you can’t just turn off, let alone reverse, permafrost thaw," Natali said. At a certain point, nature takes over. Even the most forward-thinking legislature in the world can’t pass a law banning emissions from permafrost. As Natali put it, "It won’t be possible to refreeze the ground and have it go back to how it was."
All across the Arctic, ecosystems are shifting from carbon sinks - which absorb more greenhouse gases than they release - to carbon sources. One day in Chersky, I visited a site along the river managed by a German research team from the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry. I was shown around by Mathias Göckede, the project’s lead scientist. We jumped between grassy tussocks sprouting up from the tundra and came to a spot where, seventeen years earlier, his colleagues had purposely degraded the upper layer of yedoma. The idea was to mimic permafrost thaw in order to see how the landscape would react and how the local carbon budget would change.
In the first year of the experiment, Göckede explained, the soil released more carbon dioxide than the vegetation could absorb, and the site switched from a sink to a source. Then larger shrubs and trees appeared, which sucked up emissions. The site settled into a new equilibrium, at a higher level of both emissions and absorption than before. "I find that encouraging," Göckede told me.
But trees can grow only so much. And, in the Arctic, light is limited to a few months in the summer, forming a narrow window in which photosynthesis can remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Microbes in the soil, meanwhile, can digest organic material in the thawed permafrost for a much longer season and, given the deep stores of carbon, with seemingly no end. "There is a limit to how much the vegetation can grow and absorb carbon," Göckede said. "But there is virtually no limit to how much the soil can heat up and release more carbon."
Earlier in the summer, I visited Yamal, a peninsula that juts into the Kara Sea like a crooked finger. Yamal is home to the Nenets, an ethnic group native to the Russian north, and one of the largest remaining nomadic populations. Nenets live in chums - the local version of yurts - and drive herds of reindeer up and down the peninsula, in search of seasonal pastures. In the Nenets language, Yamal means "the edge of the world."
After taking a passenger ferry up the Ob River, I stopped to spend a night in the chum of a Nenets family. I slept under a reindeer hide and, following a breakfast of fresh fish, headed farther upriver to Yar-Sale, a settlement that functions as an administrative center for the nomad camps in the tundra. There, I met Vitaly Laptander, a reindeer herder.
In July, 2016, a heat wave hit Yamal, with temperatures reaching a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Laptander was with his flock of two thousand animals near Lake Yaroto, in the middle of the peninsula. "I hadn’t felt such heat before," he told me. One morning, he came across a horrifying sight: fifty of his reindeer lay dead in the tundra. There was no power or cellular service. Laptander walked for ten hours to call for help, finally coming across a Nenets encampment with a satellite phone. By the time he had trekked back to his herd, two hundred more reindeer were dead. "I didn’t know what to do," he said. "Things were clearly really bad, and I was scared."
A helicopter arrived, and discharged a team of medics and veterinarians in hazmat suits. They took samples from the dead reindeer and flew off, delivering them to laboratories in Moscow and Siberia. Two days later, the helicopter returned, and officials told Laptander that his animals had likely been infected by anthrax.
Within days, specialists from the Army’s Radiological, Chemical, and Biological Defense forces had arrived in Yamal. They searched for reindeer carcasses, and burned them where they lay. After two weeks, quarantine measures and an accelerated vaccination campaign brought the outbreak under control. By then, more than twenty-five hundred reindeer had been lost on the peninsula; Laptander’s herd was cut in half. The contagion had also spread from animals to humans. Dozens of people were hospitalized; a twelve-year-old boy died.
The outbreak represented the first anthrax cases on Yamal since 1941. Just about everyone, from scientists to herders, had believed that the bacteria-borne disease was eradicated long ago. Two hundred thousand soil samples taken during the previous decade showed no evidence of anthrax spores. But in a normal summer the upper layer of permafrost in Yamal thaws to a depth of twenty inches or so; in 2016, it had reached nearly three feet in some places. In a subsequent report on the causes of the outbreak, a panel of Russian experts wrote, "The emergence of anthrax was triggered by the activation of ‘old’ infection sites following anomalously high air temperature and the thawing of the sites to a depth beyond normal levels."
Permafrost thaw has brought to the surface all sorts of mysteries from millennia past. In 2015, scientists from a Russian biology institute in Pushchino, a Soviet-era research cluster outside Moscow, extracted a sample of yedoma from a borehole in Yakutia. Back at their lab, they placed the piece of frozen sediment in a sterilized culture box. A month later, a microscopic, wormlike invertebrate known as a bdelloid rotifer was crawling around inside. Radiocarbon dating revealed the rotifer to be twenty-four thousand years old. In August, I drove out to Pushchino, where I was met by Stas Malavin, a researcher at the laboratory. "It’s one thing for a simple bacterium to come back to life after being buried in the permafrost," he said. "But this creature has intestines, a brain, nervous cells, reproductive organs. We’re clearly dealing with a higher order."
The rotifer had survived the intervening years in a state of "cryptobiosis," Malavin explained, "a kind of hidden life, where metabolism effectively slows down to zero." The animal emerged from this geological "time machine," as he put it, not just alive but able to reproduce. A rotifer lives for only a few weeks, but replicates itself multiple times through parthenogenesis, a type of asexual reproduction. Malavin removed from the lab fridge a direct descendant of the rotifer that had crawled out of the permafrost and placed it under a microscope. An oval-shaped plankton squirmed around; I imagined this blob, two-tenths of a millimetre in size, as a nervous explorer who awoke to find itself in a strange and unexpected future.
"Why be modest?" Malavin asked. Unlocking the secret of how an animal with a complex anatomy was able to shut down for tens of thousands of years and then turn itself back on might, for example, offer hints for using cryogenic conditions to store organs for donation. Neuroscientists at M.I.T. have been in touch. "I’m obviously not saying our findings will lead to people being put into long-term cryogenic slumber tomorrow," Malavin said. "But it’s a step in that direction."
Perhaps the most exciting biological specimens to come out of the permafrost are mammoth remains, many of which, thanks to millennia of natural cold storage, are remarkably well preserved. In Yakutsk, I visited the Mammoth Museum, a two-story facility full of bones and tusks and teeth. The mammoth appeared a hundred and fifty thousand years ago, roaming over grassland steppe that stretched from the Iberian Peninsula to the Bering Strait.
The species began to die out near the end of the Pleistocene era, around twelve thousand years ago, for reasons that were long the subject of debate. One camp held that the mammoth was among the first victims of anthropogenic extinction. "Mammoths didn’t have any natural predators - except for humans," Sergey Fedorov, the head of the museum’s exhibitions, told me. But in October an international team of scientists published a study in Nature that purported to settle the case. By analyzing ancient environmental DNA, they determined that rapidly warming temperatures melted the glaciers and inundated the tundra, wiping out the mammoth’s food supply. "Our results suggest that their extinction came when the last pockets of the steppe-tundra vegetation finally disappeared," the authors wrote.
Yakutia is the world leader when it comes to mammoth finds. These remains, the first of which were recovered by Russian scientists in 1806, have taught us a great deal about the Pleistocene in general: the gastrointestinal tract of one mammoth, found in 1971, was so well preserved that scientists were able to analyze its last meal. Fedorov told me about an expedition, in 2013, to Maly Lyakhovsky Island, off the northern coast of Yakutia; when researchers there dug up a frozen mammoth carcass, its flesh started to bleed. A British paleobiologist at the site later described the specimen as "really juicy," like a "piece of steak."
The prospect of forty-thousand-year-old hemoglobin was exciting for a coterie of scientists who have dreamed of using gene-editing techniques to reproduce a living mammoth. (In the end, the tissue samples from the Maly Lyakhovsky mammoth did not produce enough usable DNA to reconstruct the animal’s genome.) George Church, a prominent geneticist at Harvard Medical School, has co-founded a startup dedicated to the mammoth de-extinction effort, and hopes that his team will be ready to produce embryos of neo-mammoths within the next few years.
Fedorov brought me to a large walk-in freezer, where lumps of flesh and fur were piled on metal shelves; the crescent bend of a tusk was unmistakable. As Fedorov explained, these mammoth remains, dug up across Yakutia, were being stored at zero degrees Fahrenheit, awaiting further scientific study. The space was cramped and frigid - so this is what it’s like to be locked in the permafrost, I thought. I picked up a leg that once belonged to the Maly Lyakhovsky mammoth, a thick stump with reddish-brown hair. "Look, its footpad is very well traced," Fedorov said. "You can see its toenails."
One clue to how permafrost will survive this current era of warming is how it fared during the previous one. Five years ago, Julian Murton, a scientist and professor at the University of Sussex, led a team of researchers to the Batagaika Crater, a permafrost thaw slump in central Yakutia. A thaw slump is essentially a drawn-out landslide set off by thawing yedoma; the Batagaika Crater is the largest in the world, a half-mile-long gash in the earth with walls as high as two hundred and eighty feet. The crater is constantly thawing and collapsing, growing by as much as a hundred feet a year. Locals call it a "gateway to Hell." A more apt metaphor may be a geological layer cake, whose exposed walls allow a rare opportunity to look at hundreds of thousands of years of permafrost all at once.
Murton told me that the first thing that struck him during his time at the crater was the sound. "It’s like an orchestral piece," he said. "In the summer, when the head wall is thawing quickly, you hear the constant trickle of water, like first violins. And then you have these massive chunks of permafrost, up to half a ton, that fall to the bottom with a big thud. That’s the percussion."
Murton and his team drilled boreholes down the crater’s walls, and used a method called luminescence dating to estimate the age of the sediment that they extracted. The bottom layer of permafrost turned out to be at least six hundred and fifty thousand years old. As Murton explained, that means it survived the previous interglacial period, which began some hundred and thirty thousand years ago, when parts of the Arctic were as much as four or five degrees Celsius warmer than they are today. "The oldest permafrost in Eurasia has been kicking around for over half a million years," Murton told me. "Seeing as it survived intense global-warming events in the past, it must be pretty resilient."
That’s the good news. "If you like permafrost, as I do, we’re not going to be short on it in our lifetimes," Murton said. But his hypothesis on the resilience of permafrost applies to frozen earth that extends hundreds of feet below the surface. "The top several metres are certainly under threat," he said. That is exactly where the carbon is: the upper three metres of permafrost hold half as much carbon as similar soil depths in the rest of the planet’s ecosystems combined. Moreover, as Murton put it, "even as it appears that the ecosystem can protect permafrost from high air temperatures, if that ecosystem is disturbed, permafrost suddenly becomes very vulnerable." The Batagaika Crater itself formed after a large patch of forest was clear-cut, in the nineteen-sixties.
These days, fire is the biggest threat to the landscape. Last summer was Yakutia’s worst fire season in history, with eight million hectares ablaze - an area about the size of Maine - releasing the equivalent of more than five hundred megatons of carbon dioxide. It is hard to predict what sort of long-term effect fire will have on the permafrost. In some parts of Yakutia, the boreal forest has been able to regenerate itself, bringing new trees and underbrush that sequester carbon, and the situation has returned to equilibrium. But in other places - especially those full of ice-rich yedoma - fires have caused irreversible changes in the landscape, such as a thermokarst lake or a crater like Batagaika. Sander Veraverbeke, a climate scientist at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, who has done extensive field work in Yakutia, told me, "In that scenario, the permafrost never recovers."
One day in Chersky, Zimov showed me a site where he had tried to mimic the result of a fire on the permafrost. He drove us in a motorboat down the river, the wind slicing through my jacket and chafing my face. We tied the boat to some bushes, and set off through the spongy moss of the tundra. "I actually hate terrain like this," Zimov said. "Everything is soft and squishy, with mosquitoes everywhere."
Half an hour later, we came to a clearing that had the same bumpy features that I had seen in the village of Usun-Kyuyol. In 2003, Zimov had used a "very, very large bulldozer," which he borrowed from a nearby gold mine, to uproot shrubs and moss and remove the topsoil, much the way a fire might. ("This is the kind of experiment Sergey likes," Göckede had told me. "For him, a bulldozer is a scientific instrument.") Within a year, the ice in the yedoma began to melt, collapsing the ground and leading the permafrost to thaw at ever greater depths.
Zimov and I were each carrying a long metal probe, the permafrost scientist’s classic field tool. The point at which the tip hits hard ice reveals the depth of permafrost thaw. Zimov has an ear for frozen soil, able to judge its consistency by the sound it makes when struck by metal. "It’s loose, ready to crumble," he declared. Thirty years ago, during an average summer, the permafrost thawed to a depth of less than a metre. Now, at the bulldozed site, Zimov had to fasten two probes together, finally hitting solid ice at a depth of three and a half metres. All that thawed soil was producing carbon dioxide and, at deeper levels, where there is less oxygen, methane. "You’d need five very cold, raw winters in a row to freeze it again," Zimov said. "And I don’t quite believe we’ll see that again."
In May, Russia’s environmental minister proposed a nationwide system to monitor climate-induced changes in the permafrost, noting that its thaw could cause more than sixty billion dollars’ worth of damage to the country’s infrastructure by 2050. The next month, Vladimir Putin, who in 2003 had remarked that global warming simply means "we’ll spend less on fur coats," said of the country’s permafrost zone, "We have entire cities built on permafrost in the Arctic. If it all starts to thaw, what consequences will Russia face? Of course, we are concerned."
It’s possible to imagine technical solutions to avoid the worst effects of permafrost thaw on buildings, industrial facilities, or even whole settlements. In Yakutsk, I passed apartment blocks with large metal tubes installed near their foundations, filled with a cooling agent that, during the winter, condenses and flows belowground to keep the soil frozen. In Salekhard, the capital of Yamal, temperature sensors have been lowered into boreholes under the foundations of certain buildings - if the soil is at risk of thawing, scientists will get an alarm signal, presumably in time to make engineering fixes. Yaroslav Kamnev, the director of an initiative launched by the regional government to study the warming of the soil, told me, "You simply have to understand what is going on inside the permafrost, and everything will stay standing just fine."
But what to do with the huge reserves of carbon in the ground, waiting to be turned into greenhouse gas? You can’t effectively monitor, let alone cool, millions of square miles of uninhabited tundra. "Technological fixes are impossible," Merritt Turetsky, the director of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado Boulder, said. The most obvious answer, tragic in both its banality and its unlikelihood, is for humans to quickly and dramatically limit the burning of fossil fuels. "There is one way to keep permafrost frozen that we know is proven and demonstrated - reducing human emissions," Turetsky said. "A focus on other solutions might be intriguing, but it’s ultimately a distraction."
Zimov has his own idea. As a graduate student, during field visits to the Arctic, he was struck by the bones and other assorted remains he found: mammoths, horses, bison, elk, and wolves. On a walk around an eroding hillside by the river outside Chersky, I stumbled across the dark-brown skull of a wild horse. Zimov’s son, Nikita, who now runs the day-to-day operations at the research station, estimated that it was between twenty and forty thousand years old.
During the Pleistocene era, the Arctic was covered by grassy steppe, which acted as a natural buffer for the permafrost. The mammals that roamed this lost savanna depended on it for food and also perpetuated its existence. Zimov wants to re-create that ecosystem. "We must return nature to order," he said. "It will then take care of the climate."
The theory rests on the warming effect of snow. As Zimov explained, there isn’t much hope of quickly cooling air temperatures. But lessening the snow cover during the winter would allow more cold air to reach the permafrost. "You could do this mechanically, by sending three hundred million workers with shovels across Siberia," he said. "Or you can do the same, for free, with horses, musk ox, bison, sheep, reindeer." Those animals would break down shrubs and churn the soil, allowing grasslands to reappear. In summer, owing to the albedo effect - light surfaces reflect heat, dark ones absorb it - the pale grass would stay cooler than the brown shrubs that currently blanket the tundra.
In 1998, Zimov brought the first horses to what he called Pleistocene Park, a fenced tract of land an hour’s boat ride from the research station. Since then, the park has grown to eight square miles, and it is now home to a hundred and fifty animals, not just horses but bison, sheep, yaks, and camels. To give them a head start, Nikita sped about the territory in the family’s "tank" - a hefty, all-terrain transport vehicle on treads - knocking down trees and undergrowth.
Two years ago, Zimov and Nikita completed a study with a team of researchers from the University of Hamburg, which showed that the animals reduced average snow density by half, and lowered the average temperature of the permafrost by nearly two degrees Celsius. The researchers theorized that thirty-seven per cent of Arctic permafrost could be saved from thawing by the wide-scale introduction of large herbivores. (Not all scientists are so enthusiastic: Duane Froese, a professor of geology at the University of Alberta, who has done extensive research on the Pleistocene ecosystem, told me, "The kind of animal density you’d need in order to impact vegetation in the way Sergey is envisioning greatly exceeds anything that could be maintained naturally.")
Nikita, who is thirty-eight, has a degree in applied mathematics, but he is not exactly a scientist. His fluency in the world of permafrost came from years spent with Zimov around the station, an informal education that has made him an energetic steward of his father’s vision. For much of the time that I was in Chersky, he was tracking a shipment of a dozen bison that had begun their journey on a farm in Denmark, nearly five thousand miles away. They were on a container ship sailing on the Arctic Ocean, but because of storms at sea the journey was taking longer than planned. One morning, he announced that he was headed to the park to install a new greenhouse-gas flux sensor, which a group of scientists at the University of Alaska Fairbanks had sent to measure emission levels. I volunteered to go along.
It was a clear fall day on the river, with the golden leaves of the bushes and stunted trees of the tundra giving the scene the feel of a New England autumn in miniature. An hour later, we pulled up to the entrance of the park, marked by a few wooden steps built into the muddy riverbank. Nikita lugged the sensor in a backpack up a hundred-foot tower and tinkered with it for a while, without success. After he came down, we walked through the territory, with pockets of knee-high grasses rising out of the flat expanse. "We’re not reinventing the wheel here," he said. "This all existed at one point, we know that. How to re-create it now, though? That’s the question."
We came to a caravan of camels, munching on grass and craning their necks in wary avoidance of us. They looked out of place this far north, but the fossil record shows that camels once grazed all over the high Arctic, their fatty humps providing stores of energy during the long winters. Like the mammoth, the Arctic camel disappeared during the late Pleistocene era, along with giant beavers and sloths, horses and cave lions - a Noah’s ark of lost Arctic species.
The permafrost, sealed underground, has managed to survive a while longer. But it couldn’t stay out of harm’s way forever. Neither could humans, for that matter. Whether we are thawing the permafrost or fighting to keep it frozen, its presence, like that of so much on this planet, is far less eternal than we once convinced ourselves. "People didn’t start acting as gods fifty or a hundred years ago, or even one thousand, but ten thousand years ago," Nikita said. "The point isn’t whether it’s O.K. to act like a god but whether you’re acting like a benevolent or wise one."

Пять лет назад международная группа исследователей из Японии, Китая, России и Австралии начала проект, в результате удалось создать транзистор в 25000 раз меньше ширины человеческого волоса.

Une équipe internationale de chercheurs a utilisé un microscope électronique, pour créer un transistor 25 000 fois plus petit qu’un cheveu humain. Le projet, lancé il y a environ cinq ans, a connu la participation de chercheurs japonais, chinois, russes et australiens.
Les chercheurs ont créé le transistor en chauffant un nanotube de carbone composé de plusieurs couches. Les enveloppes extérieures du tube se sont séparées, ne laissant qu’un nanotube monocouche. La chaleur et la contrainte ont ensuite modifié la « chiralité » du nanotube. Cela signifie que la couche atomique constituant la paroi du nanotube a été réorganisée. Ce processus a conduit à la transformation du nanotube en transistor.
Selon Dmitri Golberg, coauteur de l’étude, il s’agit d’une « découverte fondamentale très intéressante ». Elle pourrait ouvrir la voie au développement d’un nouveau type de nano-transistors. Cela facilitera la conception de dispositifs informatiques avancés pour les générations futures.
Les transistors sont utilisés dans la plupart des circuits électroniques. Ils servent à contrôler et à amplifier les signaux électroniques. Ils sont indispensables dans la construction de tous types d’appareils électroniques.
Cette nouvelle découverte aidera les scientifiques dans leur quête de parvenir à des transistors de très petite taille. Bien qu’elle ne permette pas encore de fabriquer des nano-transistors en série, elle montre un nouveau principe de fabrication. Ce dernier pourrait s’avérer utile dans les prochaines années.

Биологи ФИЦ Биотехнологии РАН и Института биомедицинской химии исследовали свойства фермента L-аспарагиназы, выделенного из гипертермофильной археи Thermococcus sibiricus. Сам фермент много лет используется в медицине в противоопухолевой терапии. Новая аспарагиназа из археи, обитающей на глубине более двух тысяч метров в высокотемпературном Самотлорском нефтяном месторождении в Сибири, отличается повышенной стабильностью и избирательной токсичностью в отношении раковых клеток.

Together with colleagues from the Institute of Biomedical Chemistry, biologists from the Research Center of Biotechnology RAS have studied a new L-asparaginase from hyperthermophilic archaea Thermococcus sibiricus. These archaea live at a depth of more than two thousand meters in a high-temperature oil reservoir in Siberia. This biotechnologically important enzyme is used in the food industry, in the development of biosensors, and in medicine due to its antitumor activity. L-asparaginase from T. sibiricus was described for the first time by the authors of this research. This enzyme differs from the previously described analogs by its increased stability and selective toxicity to cancer cells. The results were published in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences.
L-asparaginase is an extremely important enzyme that catalyzes the conversion of the amino acid L-asparagine to L-aspartic acid and ammonia. It has been widely investigated with respect to its promising anti-cancer activity in the therapy of certain types of tumors. The application in medicine is the original and main but not the only field of use of L-asparaginase. This enzyme helps to prevent the formation of the potential carcinogen acrylamide in food products such as chips, baked goods, roasted coffee. Another field of enzyme application is the development of biosensors for monitoring of L-asparagine levels in biochemistry and food chemistry.
L-asparaginase was the first enzyme to be used in clinical practice as an anticancer agent. Some tumor cells are unable to synthesize their own L-asparagine, so they require exogenous asparagine to keep their rapid growth and proliferation. L-asparaginase exhibits a depletion effect on the concentration of L-asparagine leading to a deficiency of this amino acid and, subsequently, causes death of cancer cells.
"Despite the pronounced therapeutic effect, current commercial asparaginases have several serious drawbacks. The main ones are insufficient stability and low substrate specificity. Often, serious adverse reactions require termination of asparaginase treatment. In this view, highly stable asparaginases from microorganisms inhabiting extreme environments are considered as promising enzymes with superior performances compared to the currently used ones. These enzymes has unique properties," - says Maria Dumina, one of the authors of the study, Ph.D. in Biology, a researcher in a group of fungal genetic engineering in the Research Center of Biotechnology RAS.
Together with colleagues from the Institute of Biomedical Chemistry, scientists from the Research Center of Biotechnology RAS investigated new asparaginase from the hyperthermophilic archaea Thermococcus sibiricus, which lives at a depth of 2,350 meters in the Samotlor oil reservoir, one of the largest in Siberia. Scientists used E. coli cells for the production of recombinant protein, the properties of the purified enzyme were further studied under different conditions.
It was found that this enzyme is optimally active at 90°C - T. sibiricus lives at slightly lower temperatures - and at alkaline pH values. At the same time, it retains high activity in a wide range of temperatures and pH. It is also resistant to the presence of some metal ions and urea (can be found in biological samples).
The authors also tested the effects of the new L-asparaginase on cell lines. According to the results obtained, the enzyme inhibited the growth of different types of cancer cells, while normal cells were almost unsensitive to it.
"Our results show that this asparaginase can serve as a good alternative to currently used enzymes: it is active in a wide range of temperatures and pH, resistant to metal ions, and selectively toxic to tumors. This allows us to use it at least in biochemistry. Now we need to test asparaginase on animals - based on these future results, we will consider application of the protein in medical practice," - says Alexander Zhgun, one of the authors of the article, senior researcher, and head of the group of fungal genetic engineering in the Research Center of Biotechnology RAS.

Российско-польская команда археологов из Государственного Эрмитажа и Ягеллонского университета обнаружила два новых кургана возрастом 2500 лет на территории древнего некрополя «Долина царей» в Республике Тыва.

Archaeologists excavating in the "Siberian Valley of the Kings" have announced the discovery of a burial mound containing ornate treasures from 2,500 years ago.
Excavations were conducted by a Polish-Russian team from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, where the researchers conducted a study of an ancient burial necropolis (known as the "Siberian Valley of the Kings") in the Turano-Ujukska Valley of northern Tuva, an autonomous republic in the Russian Federation.
The site is associated with the Scythian culture, a nomadic people known from as early as the 9th century BC, who migrated westward from Central Asia into southern Russia during the 8th and 7th century BC.
The team identified two new mounds in the necropolis, for which the first mound held a wooden burial chamber constructed on a framework of solid beams, containing a 50-year-old woman and a very young child. Placed alongside the burial was various golden ornaments, an iron knife, a bronze mirror and an ornate crescent or moon-shaped piece of jewellery.
In addition, the remnants of several organic objects have been recovered, including an arrow shaft, an ice axe handle, a quiver fragment, and a wooden comb which was connected to the bronze mirror by a leather loop.
According to researchers, the burials date from the 6th century BC and was likely the deceased retinue of a Scythian noble, for which during this period the Turano-Ujukska Valley was one of the most important ritual centres of the entire Scythian-Siberian world.
Archaeologists have also found evidence that a treasure of bronze objects was most likely deposited around the perimeter of the mound. This is evidenced by a metal detector survey finding several dozen bronze items that has been scattered by deep ploughing during the 20th century when there was a collective farm near the necropolis.

Ученые Южно-Уральского государственного университета открыли новое вещество со свойствами жидкостей и кристаллов одновременно - 4,7-дибром[1,2,5]тиадиазоло[3,4-c]пиридин. Такие вещества используют в медицинской технике, оптоэлектронике и др.

Substances with the properties of both liquids and crystals are used in modern technology. Scientists at South Ural State University (SUSU) have discovered a new substance with the same properties. They published the article in the scientific journal MolBank (indexed by Scopus). Also, on the cover of the December issue of the graphic abstract configuration.
The article accepted for publication by MolBank is devoted to the [1,2,5]thiadiazolo[3,4-c]pyridine molecule. This substance belongs to the class of chalcogenadiazoles, which are used in different countries, for example, in medicine as medicines or in electronic devices to create semiconductors based on them. Scientists of South Ural State University emphasize that the [1,2,5]thiadiazolo[3,4-c]pyridine molecule with two thioalkyl chains exhibits the properties of liquid crystals, which was not previously known.
"For the first time, we have studied the behavior of the 4,7-dibromo[1,2,5]thiadiazolo[3,4-c]pyridine molecule in the following cases of nucleophilic aromatic substitution and Buchwald-Hartwig cross-coupling with thiol. There were essential conditions under which the molecules exhibited the properties of liquid crystals," said Timofey Chmovzh, Senior Researcher at the SUSU Nanotechnologies Research Center.
Liquid crystals are viscous liquids consisting of elongated or disk-shaped molecules, ordered vibrations. The most characteristic property of liquid crystals is the ability to orient the molecules under the influence of electric fields. Liquid crystals are popular in thermography: indicators for various temperature ranges, selecting the composition of the liquid crystal substance. Such an indicator on the patient's skin can determine latent inflammation and even a tumor. In addition, liquid crystals are applied in modern technology. SUSU scientists hope that the target substance will be used for optoelectronics and holography. The appearance of joint articles by scientists from SUSU and the Zelinsky Institute of Organic Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences on the cover indicates the recognized importance of developing social communities.
"Obtaining new promising compounds with unique properties is the future of science and technology. Such high attention to research suggests that we are moving with the times and are engaged in development that reduce the level of global risk," said Timofey Chmovzh.
South Ural State University is a university of digital transformations, where innovative research is carried out in most priority areas of science and technology. In the strategic co-strategy of scientific and technological development of the Russian Federation, the university focuses on the development of large scientific interdisciplinary projects in the field of compliance with digital research, materials science, and ecology. In the Year of Science and Technology, SUSU won the competition under the Priority 2030 program. The university performs the functions of the project office of the Ural Interregional Research and Educational Center.

Считается, что пресная вода, поступающая в Северный Ледовитый океан с континента, усиливает таяние арктических льдов, но степень ее воздействия до конца не изучена. Американские и российские климатологи под руководством Ирины Панюшкиной опубликовали результаты исследования влияния на Арктику крупнейшей пресноводной реки Енисей с учетом изменения ее течения за последние 300 лет. С помощью годичных колец деревьев ученые измерили расход пресной воды зимой и обнаружили беспрецедентный рост зимнего стока за последние 25 лет. Это почти на 80% превышает средний показатель за 100 лет.

Irina Panyushkina grew up in Siberia, near the Arctic Circle. She was raised on stories of explorers trudging through seas of ice to reach the North Pole. Now, she is a climate scientist and associate research professor of dendrochronology in the University of Arizona Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research. And she is trying to understand how a warming world is transforming the place she once called home.
Someday, the Arctic Ocean may no longer host ice, since the northern regions of the world are warming are faster than the rest - a trend scientists refer to as Arctic amplification. As Arctic ice melts, new opportunities and challenges for humans will arise, researchers say. Freshwater flowing into the Arctic Ocean from the continent is thought to exacerbate Arctic amplification, but the extent of its impact isn't fully understood. New research led by Panyushkina measures how the flow of the Yenisei River - the largest freshwater river that flows into the Arctic Ocean - has changed over the last few hundred years, and describes the impact freshwater has had on the Arctic.
Previous studies have attributed recent changes in wintertime freshwater flow into the Arctic to warming air temperature, seasonal precipitation changes or snowpack. But more recent research, including Panyushkina's study, suggests that the primary driver is actually degradation of permafrost - or frozen ground - as well as forest fires across southern Siberia. Panyushkina's research, funded by the National Science Foundation Polar Office, is published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
What trees can tell us
Data collected by instruments at the upper reaches of the Yenisei River in Tuva, in southern Siberia, only goes back so far. To overcome this, Panyushkina and her team used tree-ring data to double the number of years' worth of the stream flow data they had, allowing them to look back 300 years. Stream flow, or the amount of water that moves through a certain area of a river over time, can be inferred by measuring changing tree-ring thickness over the years. Measurements of stream flow over specific seasons can even be teased out of the data. Annual stream flow information is commonly used by water managers to reveal the average changes in stream flow trends. But Panyushkina and her team did something novel when they decided to also investigate winter stream flow specifically.
"We found an unprecedented increase in the winter flow rate over the last 25 years," Panyushkina said. This winter flow rate is nearly 80% above the average seen over approximately 100 years. "In contrast, annual flow fluctuated normally during the 300-year period, with only a 7% increase over the last 25 years," Panyushkina said. The winter stream flow data revealed the role of permafrost melt on Arctic ice. Since ice covers rivers during winter in Siberia, the team's stream flow measurements only captured information about river waterthat originated underground rather thanfrom the sky. That includes water from thawing permafrost, as well as water from sub-permafrost aquifers, as permafrost loss leads to an increased exchange of water between the river and aquifers. These two sources of groundwater are warm compared to the frigid air above, and when they eventually flow into the Arctic Ocean, they melt the ice.
An uncertain future
Forest fires are also thought to be a driver of Arctic ice melt. "We know the frequency and intensity of forest fires in Siberia have been increasing," Panyushkina said. "When fires happen in forests with permafrost, there is deep thawing under the fire event, and the affected area often doesn't recover for up to 60 years. When we have large-scale fires and long-burning fires and more frequent fires, we're maybe hitting the critical point when permafrost degradation cannot return to normal. Forest fires are also another process that increases connectivity between aquifers and stream flow."
The combined effects of permafrost degradation and fires are very strong at the Yenisei River basin, with more fresh water and heat flowing into the Arctic Ocean in recent decades, according to the study. In turn, melting sea ice also exacerbates global warming.
"Research interest in the region is booming because the surface temperature is warming much faster here than anywhere else in the world," Panyushkina said. "It's a hot spot for climate research, and because I grew up there and understand how the system works, it's a natural topic of study for me. I'm also very interested in knowing the impact of an ice-free Arctic on the surrounding landscape. Humans have never seen an ice-free Arctic before, ever. My mind still cannot comprehend how the Arctic Ocean can be free of ice."
By the middle of the century, changing sea ice conditions are expected to lead to greater navigability for open water-vessels crossing the Arctic. A future trans-Arctic shipping route called the Supra Polar Route will link the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through the Arctic, potentially paving the way for more trans-Arctic commerce. There is a need to quantify the Arctic amplification impacts to manage and regulate Arctic seas of the future, Panyushkina said.
"This strong prospect of the global trade fleet entering the Arctic opens the Pandora's box of near-future geopolitical and environmental issues and reinforces the urgency for a new regulatory framework by international organizations to ensure adequate environmental protections and vessel safety standards," she said.
To understand more about Arctic amplification and its consequences, Panyushkina and her team plan to study other rivers in Siberia.
"There are two more Siberian rivers similar in size to the Yenisei," she said. "If we can quantify the stream flow from those rivers, we'll have more precise and clear understanding of its impact on the Arctic."

Археологи Института истории материальной культуры РАН, ФИЦ «Фундаментальные основы биотехнологии» РАН и Института наук о Земле СПбГУ предположили, что хранящиеся в Эрмитаже почти 125 лет золотые и серебряные трубочки - соломинки для питья. Трубочки диаметром около сантиметра, длиной чуть больше метра и возрастом около 5 тысяч лет были найдены в 1897 г. при раскопках Майкопского кургана и сочтены ритуальными скипетрами или элементами балдахина. Новое исследование показало наличие в трубках остатков пыльцы и ячменного крахмала, а у древних шумеров был обычай совместного распития пива из общего сосуда через длинные тростниковые соломинки в ходе погребального обряда, который вполне могли позаимствовать жители древнего Кавказа.

Silver and gold tubes unearthed in an ancient tomb in southern Russia and long thought to be ceremonial staffs were, in fact, the earliest-known drinking straws, used by people 5,000 years ago to sip beer from a communal jar, according to research published Tuesday.
The practice mirrors a ceremonial method of drinking beer used by the Sumerians in ancient Mesopotamia, a thousand miles to the south from where they were found, and it suggests that trade in the early Bronze Age included ideas as well as commodities, archaeologists say. The discovery also underlines the importance of beer to ancient peoples.
The objects were discovered more than 100 years ago during excavations of a burial mound near the Russian city of Maikop, just north of the Caucasus Mountains, but no one had advanced the idea that they were ancient drinking tubes before now.
"It never occurred to anyone," said Viktor Trifonov, an archaeologist at the Institute for the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences, based in St. Petersburg, who is the lead author of a study of the objects published Tuesday in the journal Antiquity.
The ornate tubes, four of them decorated with bull figurines, were unearthed in 1897 from a large "kurgan" - a type of burial mound - beside the remains of a man thought to have been a king. The kurgan was filled with riches, including what was left of a garment decorated with semiprecious stones and gold, precious metal cups, weapons and tools. The remains of two women were also found in chambers of the tomb.
The objects now revealed to be drinking tubes were found lying beside the man’s body; the other items were lined up against the walls of the burial chamber. The archaeologist who led the 19th century excavation described the mysterious objects as "scepters" - ceremonial staffs wielded by rulers - and they were put on display at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg with other finds from the Maikop kurgan. Later, archaeologists theorized that they might be poles for a canopy held by servants during a funeral procession; another speculated that they might symbolize arrows that had killed a mythical bull, which was represented by the figurines. But none of the explanations sounded right to Trifonov, who knew about the Sumerian practice of drinking beer through long tubes and had a hunch that these might have been used for the same purpose.
"The idea of reinterpreting the "scepters" first came to me about a decade ago," he said in an email. His initial suggestions, however, found no support, so he started the latest study a few years ago to see whether he could find more evidence. His team focused its attention on what looked like a "strainer" of narrow slits in the ends of each of the tubes. Some Sumerian drinking tubes unearthed at archaeological sites had similar strainers made of small perforations at the end to filter out chaff and other impurities. So when analysis of a residue found in the slits of one of the Maikop tubes revealed ancient barley starch, as well as pollen grains and phytoliths - microscopic deposits of silica from plant cells - Trifonov and his colleagues knew for sure that the "scepters" were, in fact, tubes for drinking beer.
"Everything else fell into place," he said.
Trifonov and his team suggest that the Maikop people who built the kurgan used the tubes to drink beer from a communal vessel. A pottery jar was also found in the kurgan, large enough to provide each of eight drinkers - there are eight tubes - with about seven pints of beer. Trifonov said it seems likely that this way of drinking beer was part of aristocratic ceremonies the Maikop people had adopted from Mesopotamia. Although the Maikop tubes are the earliest to have been found, the practice is shown on Sumerian seals that are at least 1,000 years older.
Archaeologist Mara Horowitz, an assistant professor at Purchase College in New York who was not involved in the latest study, broadly agreed with the interpretation by Trifonov and his colleagues.
"Having a whole set of metal straws placed in the Maikop kurgan is an extraordinary find," she said. The discovery shows how such practices could spread between ancient people who were great distances apart, she said.
"It’s very exciting to see the degree of connectivity across the Caucasus at this early date," she said. "It is in the 3rd millennium B.C. that we have movements of culture and people across the Caucusus in both directions, with major effect on regional cultures."
Horowitz also said the bull figurines on four of the drinking tubes could have been positioned so that the drinkers saw each figurine from the side.
"With four bulls on straws in the jar at once ... it would look like a procession of little bulls going around in a circle," she said. "That’s really kind of adorable."

Обычно чем крупнее насекомое, тем быстрее оно способно летать, однако крошечный жук-перокрылка Paratuposa placentis ухитряется развивать скорость, сравнимую со скоростью насекомых втрое больше размером. Энтомологи МГУ выяснили, что, во-первых, крылья у перокрылки не перепончатые, а состоят из щетинок, что делает их легче и требует меньше мышечной силы, а во-вторых, жук машет ими совершенно особым образом, описывая восьмерки и гася излишнюю инерцию с помощью надкрыльев.

C'est l'un des insectes les plus petits au monde : seulement la moitié d'un millimètre en taille. Pourtant, l'asiatique coléoptère Paratuposa placentis est capable de voler à des vitesses atteintes seulement par des insectes trois fois plus gros ! Les secrets de ses prodigieuses aptitudes au vol viennent d'être analysés par l'équipe d'Alexey Polilov (Université Lomonosov, Moscou, Russie) dans les pages du dernier numéro de Nature.
Un coléoptère qui intrigue depuis longtemps
Normalement, plus un insecte est volumineux, plus il est capable de voler vite. Dans son cas, sa puissance surpasse alors la friction de l'air. Tel n'est pas le cas des petits insectes qui sont justement freinés par les frottements. Toutefois, certaines espèces échappent à cette règle, dont P. placentis. Cela fait plusieurs années que l'équipe russe s'intéresse à cet insecte, allant à chaque publication toujours un peu plus loin dans la compréhension de sa biomécanique. Cette fois, les chercheurs ont combiné des reconstructions 3D de la structure et du mouvement des ailes.
Comment expliquer sa vitesse stupéfiante ?
Une première explication de la stupéfiante vitesse atteinte par ce minuscule insecte réside dans la forme de ces dernières. Elles ne sont pas membraneuses mais hérissées de poils, les rendant plus légères et nécessitant moins de puissance musculaire. Mais l'astuce suprême de l'insecte n'a pu être dévoilée qu'en filmant l'animal en pleine action. En effet, les chercheurs ont été surpris de découvrir que ce mini-coléoptère battait ses ailes d'une façon très particulière et qui n'avait jamais été observée avant. Son cycle se décompose en effet de deux puissants demi-battements qui lui permettent de prendre de l'altitude, suivis de deux battements plus faibles qui produisent une force descendante. Ce cycle complexe présente l'intérêt d'accroitre artificiellement l'amplitude du battement des ailes, permettant ainsi au coléoptère de battre des records de vitesse. En cas d'oscillations excessives, l'animal actionne alors ses élytres qui fonctionnent à la manière de freins. Les auteurs sont persuadés que d'autres mini-insectes ont adopté ces mêmes stratégies pour voler. Il ne reste plus qu'à les dénicher...

Ученые Санкт-Петербургского государственного университета и Южно-Уральского государственного университета разрабатывают оптимальную модель российской научной дипломатии в Арктике.

A joint project of scientists from Chelyabinsk and St. Petersburg to create an optimal model of Russian scientific diplomacy in the Arctic received a grant from the Russian Science Foundation (2022-2023). The researchers plan to solve the problems of attracting young scientists to Arctic research and increasing the number of high-quality publications of Russian researchers in the Web of Science and Scopus databases.
Recently, the dialogue to protect national-state interests in the Arctic has become particularly relevant. Our country must be ready to resist various technologies of information influence and attempts to neutralize Russian influence in the region through diplomats, scientists, and international organizations. Head of the scientific team, Doctor of Political Sciences, Professor of the Department of Theory and History of International Relations (St. Petersburg State University) Alexander Sergunin. Maxim Gutenev, Ph.D. in Philosophy, Associate Professor of the Department of International Relations, Political Science and Regional Studies (South Ural State University), and Ekaterina Boyko, Analyst of the Situational Center of the Governor of the Chelyabinsk Region.
"We explore existing theoretical approaches to understanding the nature and nature of Arctic science diplomacy. In particular, we plan to study the positions of the main paradigms of the modern theory of international relations (neo-realism, neo-liberalism, globalism, and post-positivism) concerning Arctic scientific diplomacy. We analyze the foreign experience of Arctic science diplomacy to identify the strengths and weaknesses of this area of their Arctic strategy. We study the experience of such countries as the U.S., Canada, Nordic countries (Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Finland, Sweden), and non-Arctic states (European - Great Britain, Germany, Poland, France, Switzerland, as well as East Asian - China, the Republic of Korea and Japan) ", - Maxim Gutenev explains.
The team plans to conduct a comprehensive study of the current state of Russian scientific diplomacy in the Arctic. It involves an analysis of Russia's historical experience in this area, including a study of the successes and failures of its strategy in the field of Arctic scientific cooperation. A group of researchers needs to determine the goals and priorities of Russian scientific diplomacy in this region and answer the question: how conscious and systemic they are and how they are consistent with Russian national interests and strategic goals in the Far North. It is equally important to consider the specific tools of Russian scientific diplomacy and the platforms where it is implemented: conferences, forums, exhibitions, Arctic days and weeks, the Polar Year, joint expeditions, polar stations.
"We are developing a system of criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of Arctic science diplomacy, the indicators for monitoring the functioning of this type of Arctic diplomacy. We're going to create a high-quality model of Russian science diplomacy in the Arctic and describe its strategic and tactical goals, scientific program (research priorities), the institutional mechanism (state and non-state institutions responsible for this area of activity), means/tools for implementation, areas of application and feedback systems," Ekaterina Boyko says.
The scientists try to make practical recommendations for organizing interaction between universities, research centers, and government institutions involved in the development and implementation of the Russian Arctic scientific diplomacy.
The results of the project can be used in scientific, educational, and public administration areas, including measures to improve the Russian Arctic scientific diplomacy. The scientists are going to publish the research materials in the Web of Science and Scopus journals, on the sites of Thematic Network on Arctic Geopolitics and Security, University of the Arctic, St. Petersburg State University, and South Ural State University.
South Ural State University is a university of digital transformations, where innovative research is carried out in most priority areas for science and technology development. Following the strategy of scientific and technological development of the Russian Federation, the university focuses on the development of major scientific interdisciplinary projects in the field of the digital industry, materials science, and ecology. In 2021, SUSU won the competition under the Priority 2030 program. The university performs the functions of the regional project office of the Ural Interregional Research and Educational Center.

Российские и китайские ученые выдвинули теорию, объясняющую появление воды на Земле. С помощью компьютерного моделирования они предсказали существование древнего минерала, ныне исчезнувшего гидросиликата магния Mg₂SiO₅H₂. Минерал содержал 11% воды и был способен сохранять стабильность только при очень высоких давлениях в центре Земли, в тот момент еще не имевшей ядра. Именно он помог сохранить воду в первые 30 миллионов лет, когда планета была очень горячей и непрерывно подвергалась бомбардировкам астероидами. После того как сформировалось земное ядро, гидросиликаты были вытеснены в области с более низким давлением, где стали нестабильными и разложились на оксид магния и силикат магния, которые сегодня составляют мантию Земли, и воду. Спустя еще 100 миллионов лет вода поднялась на поверхность, образовав океаны.

The origin of water on our planet is a hot question: Water has immense implications for plate tectonics, climate, the origin of life on Earth, and potential habitability of other Earth-like planets. In a recent study in Physical Review Letters, a Skoltech professor and his Chinese colleagues suggest a chemical compound that - although now extinct - could have preserved water deep underground in the violent era when massive collisions must have evaporated the Earth’s surface water. Due to its importance and originality, the paper was highlighted as an "editors’ suggestion" and featured in the Physics magazine.
Besides being the all-important substance for the origin of life as we know it, surface water is important for stabilizing a planet’s climate over long periods of time, allowing evolution to happen. Even small amounts of water deep below the surface are known to dramatically increase rock plasticity, which is essential for plate tectonics - a process that shapes the continents and oceans, and drives earthquakes and volcanism. But despite its huge importance for the evolution of rocky planets like ours, we don’t know where the Earth’s water originated.
"Some scientists thought our water was seeded by comets, but this source seems to be very limited - the isotope composition of water in comets is quite different from that on Earth," says Professor Artem R. Oganov of Skoltech, who co-authored the study.
If the water did not come from above, it must have come from below, from deep within the mantle or even the core of the Earth. But how could it survive the violent first 30 million years or so in the Earth’s history, when the planet was very hot and was ceaselessly bombarded by asteroids and even underwent a catastrophic collision with a Mars-sized planet? These processes must have evaporated part of the Earth and what remained was molten at least several hundred kilometers down, removing the water. Until now, scientists did not know a stable compound that could lock up hydrogen and oxygen atoms within the planet’s interior long enough and then release them as water.
Oganov teamed up with a group of scientists lead by Professor Xiao Dong of Nankai University, China, and together they used Oganov’s crystal structure prediction method USPEX to discover a compound that fits the bill: magnesium hydrosilicate, with the formula Mg₂SiO₅H₂, which is over 11% water by weight and is stable at pressures of more than 2 million atmospheres and at extremely high temperatures. Such pressures exist in the Earth’s core. But everyone knows the core is a metal ball - mostly iron - so the elements making up magnesium hydrosilicate are simply not available there, right?
"Wrong. There was no core at the time. In the beginning of its existence, the Earth had a more or less evenly distributed composition, and it took the iron roughly 30 million years from when the planet formed to seep down to its center, pushing the silicates up into what we now call the mantle," Oganov explains.
This means that for 30 million years, part of the Earth’s water was safely stored away in the form of hydrosilicates at the depths of the present-day core. During that time the Earth withstood the heaviest phase of asteroid bombardment. By the time the core formed, the hydrosilicates had been pushed into lower-pressure areas, where they became unstable and decomposed. This produced the magnesium oxide and magnesium silicate that make up the mantle today, and water, which started on its 100-million-year-long journey to the surface.
"In the meantime, the Earth was being pummeled by asteroids and even a protoplanet, but water was safe, because it had not yet made its way to the surface," Oganov adds.
The researchers say their study shows how faulty human intuitions can sometimes be. Nobody had thought about silicates at core pressures, because the constituent atoms were supposedly not to be found there. And even then, people would not have expected a hydrosilicate to be stable at core conditions, because the extreme temperatures and pressures were believed to "squeeze" the water out of the mineral. Yet accurate modeling based on quantum mechanics proved otherwise.
"It’s also a story about how a material that existed for a brief moment on the planetary timescale had a massive impact on the Earth’s evolution," the materials scientist goes on. "This runs counter to the usual geological mindset, but come to think of it, an evolutionary biologist, for whom much of what we see today has evolved out of now-extinct species, would hardly be surprised, would they?"
The new hypothesis of water origin has implications for other celestial bodies, too. "Mars, for example, is too small to produce pressures necessary to stabilize magnesium hydrosilicate," Oganov says. "This explains why it is so dry and means that whatever water exists on Mars, it likely came from comets."
Or else, consider planets outside our solar system. "To be habitable, an exoplanet has to have a stable climate, which requires both continents and oceans. So there has to be water, but not too much," adds Xiao Dong. "There was an estimate that for an Earth-like planet of any size to be habitable, it should have no more than 0.2% water by weight. Our results imply that for large Earth-like planets, called ‘super-Earths,’ the story is likely different: In such planets, pressures stabilizing the magnesium hydrosilicate must exist even outside the core, locking up large amounts of water indefinitely. As a result, super-Earths can have a much greater water content and still support the existence of exposed continents."
It even has implications for a planet’s magnetosphere. "At temperatures of more than 2,000 degrees Celsius, magnesium hydrosilicate will conduct electricity, with hydrogen protons serving as charge carriers. This means that our hydrosilicate will contribute to the magnetic fields of super-Earths," Oganov explains, adding that the list of consequences of the new hypothesis goes on and on.

Российский индолог и руководитель Центра индийских исследований Института востоковедения РАН профессор Татьяна Шаумян награждена орденом «Падма Шри» за вклад в литературу, образование и укрепление дружбы между Индией и Россией. «Падма Шри» - одна из четырех высших гражданских государственных наград Индии.

Tatiana Shaumyan, a Russian scholar and champion of Indo-Russian friendship is being conferred with the Padma Shri award by the Indian government for her contribution to literature and education.
Taking to Twitter, Indian envoy to Russia Pavan Kapoor congratulated Prof Tatiana Shaumyan.
"Warm congratulations to Prof Tatiana Shaumyan, Institute of Oriental Studies (Russian Academy of Sciences) on being conferred the prestigious award Padma Shri by Government of India for your contribution to Literature and Education and deepening of India-Russia friendship", Ambassador Pavan Kapoor said in a tweet.
Earlier on Tuesday, the Union Home Ministry announced the recipients of one of the highest civilian awards Padma Awards 2021 in the field of education and literature.
Padma Awards are conferred in three categories, namely, Padma Vibhushan, Padma Bhushan and Padma Shri.
As many as 128 Padma awards were given this year. The Awards are given in various disciplines/fields of activities, viz.- art, social work, public affairs, science and engineering, trade and industry, medicine, literature and education, sports, civil service, etc.
This year, 32 awards are conferred in the field of Literature And Education. The list of awardees also includes 10 persons from the category of Foreigners.

Исследователи из НИУ ВШЭ выяснили, что представители разных культур по-разному оценивают чужое творчество. Например, россияне склонны считать, что чем необычнее рисунок, тем он креативнее, а жители Объединенных Арабских Эмиратов придерживаются прямо противоположного мнения.

Researchers from HSE University have found that people from different cultures evaluate other people's creativity differently. Russians tend to believe that the more unusual a drawing is, the more creative it is, while participants from the United Arab Emirates tend to believe just the opposite. The paper was published in Frontiers in Psychology.
Cultural specifics determine the way an individual evaluates other people's creative products. People unconsciously perceive ideas of creativity and creative work through their cultures. These, in turn, impact the evaluation of creative products. But it is still unclear how cultural differences manifest in the assessment of such products. To find this out, Anatoly Kharkhurin, Associate Professor at the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences (assisted by Sergey Yagolkovsky, Associate Professor at the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences) carried out a study as part of a project by the Human Capital Multidisciplinary Research Centre.
In the first stage of the study, the researchers used the Thomas Ward's Structured Imagination Test. The participants were students of HSE University and American University of Sharjah (UAE). The students were asked to imagine, draw and describe a creature living on another planet. This test was used to evaluate the respondents' ability to think outside the box.
The images were analyzed for three characteristics: bilateral symmetry, two eyes and four limbs. Alien creatures with all three properties resemble familiar depictions of humans and animals on Earth. However, an alien could be drawn without conforming to these rules.
Then, the drawings were evaluated by jury members from Russia and the UAE. The Russian jury included 53 students aged 17-20, while the UAE jury included the same number of participants aged 17-26. One hundred drawings were selected in equal numbers from both countries. The jury's task was to evaluate the drawings' creativity on a scale from 1 to 5.
The researchers supposed that representatives of different cultures would evaluate the drawings differently.
The Russian jury awarded points much more generously than their Emirati counterparts, regardless of the nationality of the author. Drawings by Russian students garnered 3.12 points from the Russian jury and 2.54 points from Emirati judges, compared to 2.33 and 1.94 points respectively for drawings by the UAE students.
Data analysis showed that the differences in scores were related to how familiar the aliens looked. In the first stage of the study, when drawing aliens, UAE students generally deviated from typical features less frequently than Russian students. This might be because Emirati students were less approving of a creative task that called for breaking the rules. The group from the UAE saw the more unusual drawings as less appealing and, therefore, evaluated them as less creative. The Russian participants, on the contrary, believed that the less an alien looked like a terrestrial animal or a human, the more creative the drawing.
"People from different cultures evaluate creative work differently. Representatives of 'western' countries value innovation and originality in artwork, while people from 'eastern' cultures value esthetics and authenticity of artwork. That's why in western countries, violation of common standards are appreciated, whereas in eastern ones, they are viewed with disapproval," said Anatoly Kharkhurin.
But, despite all the cultural differences in the perception of creativity, both the Russian and the UAE juries evaluated the creativity of the drawings by Russian participants more highly. This may be related to the fact that the rules of esthetics, unlike perceptions of creativity, are universal for different cultures, and both groups found the drawings by the Russian participants more esthetically pleasing.

Вопреки распространенному мнению, различие в размерах собак возникло не только в результате одомашнивания их человеком. Международная команда генетиков из девяти стран, включая Россию, обнаружила два разных аллеля гена IGF1, регулирующего гормон роста у собак. Мутация, приведшая к появлению аллеля, отвечающего за небольшие размеры, произошла более 50 тысяч лет назад у волков эпохи плейстоцена. Со временем малый аллель почти исчез, но снова активировался в ходе начатого человеком искусственного отбора прирученных собак.

Dog sizes in modern times were once believed to be based on our ancestors' domestication of ancient dogs thousands of years ago.
The long-held notion is starting to change based on a recent study that shows a mutation of an ancient gene from wolves over 50,000 years ago was responsible for the evolution of dog sizes.
Mutation of Ancient Wolf Gene
Contrary to popular belief that small dog breeds like Chihuahuas and Pomeranians existed because they were domesticated by ancient humans who preferred small companions, a new study shows that this is not the case.
Dog mutations that led to different dog sizes, from small to large, have been traced to a common mutation from an unexpected source: ancient wolves, as per the Smithsonian Magazine.
A genetic mutation of a growth hormone-regulating gene into small body-sized dogs was found in ancient wolves 50,000 years ago-long before domestication, according to a study published in the peer-reviewed journal Current Biology on January 27. The study was conducted by researchers of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The mutation is said to be near a gene called IGF1, which researchers have first discovered in 2007. This gene has a major role in the varying size of domestic dogs in our current time, as per Nature.
The 2007 study was led by Elaine Ostrander, a geneticist from the US National Human Genome Research Institute and the leading researcher of the study on the IGF1's connection in dog size. Following the discovery of the IGFI gene, research in this area has stalled for more than a decade until a post-doctorate, Jocelyn Plassais, in Ostrander's lab suggested that they look for sequences around the IGFI gene in the past and confirm any similarities between present dogs and ancient DNA.
Ancient Wolves as Ancestors of Domestic Dogs
Using the approach of Plassais, Ostrander's team found a reverse form of the IGF1 gene correlating to dog body size. Ostrander said they examined 200 dog breeds in order to get to the partial results.
Ostrander's team then sought the help of evolutionary biologists Greger Larson of Oxford University and Laurent Franz of Ludwig Maximilian University to look through the DNA of ancient wolves to see whether there is a potential IGF1 gene mutation.
In one of the research projects, the team examined fossils of 54,000-year-old Siberian wolves (Canis lupus campestris) and discovered that their DNA also contains the growth hormone gene mutation responsible for regulating the size of dogs.
Prior to these discoveries, the scientific community provided a theory that domestic dogs in modern times were once large but became small around 20,000 years ago when humans domesticated them. In relation to this old narrative, there is a paradigm shift in our approach of how dogs evolved into different body sizes, as per Science Daily.
The findings are true not just for dogs and wolves but also for African hunting dogs, coyotes, jackals, and other animals belonging to the same family group called canids, says Ostrander.

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