Март 2022 г.

Российская наука и мир (по материалам зарубежной электронной прессы)

CONTENTS / ОГЛАВЛЕНИЕ


• US and Russian scientists are still working together to solve salmon mysteries
• Materials science and AI are Russia’s leading tech innovation fields
• "It looks like Iron Curtain 2." Arctic research with Russia curtailed
• The Arctic seafloor is degrading and could be a climate time bomb
• Siberian Federal University: From blue to red: Scientists experiment with the "living light" of jellyfish
• Archaeologists find amulet made of human bone in Siberia
• Scientists created complete online database of water masers
• L’Agence spatiale européenne met son programme ExoMars et sa collaboration avec les Russes sur pause
• The future of research collaborations involving Russia
• TSU and IISER are studying microplastic in living beings
• Russian government bars its scientists from international conferences
• Researchers shed light on the behavior of graphene oxide at extreme temperatures
• Last of the giant camels and archaic humans lived together in Mongolia until 27,000 years ago
• Russian participation in salmon survey cut short in Gulf of Alaska
• Genetically modified proteins convert carbon nanotube to programmable optoelectronic device
• Siberian Federal University: Krasnoyarsk and Tyumen scientists to team up for green tech development

Пан-Тихоокеанская зимняя экспедиция, начавшаяся в феврале 2022 года, - масштабное исследование экосистемы лососевых рыб в северной части Тихого океана. Ученые из пяти стран (США, Канада, Россия, Япония, Южная Корея) собираются составить карту распределения рыб в северной части Тихого океана, чтобы понять, как они существуют в условиях меняющегося климата.

Tensions continue to simmer between Moscow and Washington. Oil companies are canceling partnerships with Russian firms. State legislators are calling for the state’s sovereign wealth fund to dump Russian investments. President Joe Biden announced Tuesday the U.S. would close its airspace to Russian aircraft. But the United States and Russia are still working together on at least one issue: salmon.
There’s a map scattered with orange, green, blue and red dots spanning most of the North Pacific above 46 degrees latitude. On the map are three flags of Arctic nations: the U.S., Canada and the Russian Federation.
"This interaction between the countries in this is really something that has never happened to this scale before," said Mark Saunders, the executive director of the five-country North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission. He’s talking about the 2022 Pan-Pacific Winter High Seas Expedition. Vessels from both sides of the Pacific are braving gale-force winds and 13-foot seas as they crisscross the ocean from the edge of the Aleutian Chain to the Strait of Juan de Fuca. All in the name of research into the challenges to wild salmon runs that are important to people on all sides of the north Pacific Rim.
A historic shortfall
Last year, the chum salmon run on the Yukon River collapsed.
"This past summer, the Yukon River did not fish for food. Zero," said Mike Williams Sr. He’s the chair of the Kuskokwim Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, an organization that manages and researches fisheries using a combination of traditional knowledge and Western scientific methods. Never before had so few fish swum up the nearly 2,000-mile river. Regulators closed all fishing on the Yukon to preserve what little of the run remained.
Williams says in recent years, he’s watched runs on the Kuskokwim dwindle, too. In the past, he says fishing was relatively unrestricted. Residents would return to their fish camps shortly after the ice on the river broke up in the spring. But in recent years, he says residents have had to wait until June - long after breakup - to start stockpiling fish.
"We depend on the salmon to sustain us through the winter, and we’re very concerned about the returns of our salmon in all of the rivers in Western Alaska" Williams said in a phone interview Wednesday.
It’s not clear what was behind the collapse. The Inter-Tribal Commission - and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, for that matter - spend most of their effort studying what happens in freshwater. But that’s just a small part of a salmon’s life.
‘Something happens in the ocean’
"The salmon spawn in our headwaters, they go down to the ocean, and something happens in the ocean," Williams said. And it’s not just Western Alaska that’s struggled with salmon runs in recent years - in Southeast, chinook runs from Haines to Ketchikan are listed as stocks of concern. Salmon fishing on the Unuk River has been banned outright for years.
Some, including Williams, say too many salmon in the Bering Sea and the North Pacific are pulled out of the ocean as bycatch from trawlers that scrape the seabed for sole and flounder. Others say fish from hatcheries all over the north Pacific Rim are outcompeting native fish. Some say climate change is affecting the food web - or that it’s a combination of all these factors. But one thing is clear: something is happening to chum and chinook salmon in the open ocean.
"We know that a lot of the poor survival for chum and other salmon is related to the marine environment," Saunders, of the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission, said Tuesday from his home office on Vancouver Island. There’s quite a bit known about how the ocean is changing, "but you need to know where the fish are and have actually had your hands on them, and understand how they’re interacting with the environment," Saunders said. "I think a lot of that is a large black box - in particular, this winter period we know very little about," he added.
He says the goal of the survey, the largest ever conducted, is to shine some light in that black box.
Scientists are hoping to map out the distribution of salmon across the North Pacific using new DNA techniques developed over the past decade or so to understand where salmon interact with predators, prey and each other - not to mention a generally warmer, more acidic ocean.
"And the big question is, how is the changing North Pacific Ocean affecting our salmon? And improving our ability to understand how that change is going to impact people and fish and fisheries into the future," he said.
That brings us back to the map.
A long-planned voyage meets geopolitical realities
Earlier this winter, ships from the U.S., Canada and Russia set sail for the North Pacific. Each is assigned its own area to sample: The U.S. and Canada are tackling areas in the Gulf of Alaska and west of British Columbia, and a vessel from Russia is surveying an immense swath of ocean spanning areas south of the Alaska Peninsula all the way out the Aleutian Chain southwest of Adak.
The Russian vessel’s survey work started late last month - it actually tied up in Dutch Harbor a day after Russian troops started their assault on Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv. Unalaska’s port director told KRBD the visit was tightly scrutinized by U.S. border agents.
Alaska’s chief salmon scientist, Bill Templin, says a few thoughts crossed his mind as he watched the invasion unfold.
"My first concerns were for the people of Ukraine," Templin said by phone Wednesday. "But then when I walked into my office and I sat down, I was thinking, Oh, OK, so what does this mean?"
He says it’s not the first time international tensions have come up in his work with the five-country commission. He recalls Russian scientists including islands disputed with Japan on maps of salmon stocks - all in good fun, as he recalls it. "The first two years, they got it past me, and the Japanese had to come over and correct me very politely," he said.
But this is more tension than usual.
Saunders, the head of the anadromous fish commission, says an American scientist was scheduled to board the Russian vessel to allow it to survey within the 230-mile U.S exclusive economic zone. That didn’t happen. And that means the Russian research vessel can’t work close to the Aleutian Chain, where some salmon are thought to spend the winter. Templin says that means salmon activity within that zone will remain a blank spot for now.
"It doesn’t ruin the results. It’s not a failure - but it is going to limit what we get," he said. "And it’s taken years to get this winter coordinated, so it’s a little disappointing."
But Templin says scientists from Japan, Canada, South Korea, Russia and the United States have always put their work first, and their political leaders’ policies second. And he says that’ll continue.
"The salmon all go to the same place. So they’re all grazing in the same field, so to speak. For all of us to work together to understand what’s happening out there, and the way it affects our nations, is - I think it’s a pretty huge deal," he said. "And I’d hate to see it go away."

Согласно Докладу ЮНЕСКО по науке, вышедшему в 2021 г., российские ученые в последнее время наиболее активно публиковали работы по материаловедению, искусственному интеллекту и робототехнике.
Доклад выходит раз в пять лет и отражает основные тенденции развития мировой науки.

Across all strategic technologies, Russian scientists were most active in publishing research on materials, artificial intelligence and robotics in recent years, according to 2021 UNESCO science report.
Materials science was a clear leader between in 2018 and 2019, with scientists putting out over 8,000 publications on the subject each year.
The second largest field was AI and robotics where Russian scientists published around 5,700 pieces of research in 2019. This is a small percentage of overall global peer reviewed output which surpassed 120,000 publications that year.
As of 2020, one in five Russian companies are involved in tech innovation. In the pharmaceutical sector, the number climbs to 48%, while in computers and electronics it is 60%, the same level as EU member states. However, total corporate expenditure on innovation has stagnated since 2015.
Innovation may also not be translating into new products sold abroad, with UNESCO reporting that exports and imports of technology-related goods and services have been growing slowly and unevenly.
In total, in 2018, Russia devoted 0.99% of its GDP to research and development, with more than two thirds coming from the government.

Совместные арктические исследования российских и зарубежных ученых свернуты из-за санкций, а семь из восьми арктических стран приостановили свое участие в Арктическом совете, международной организации, координирующей сотрудничество в области устойчивого развития и охраны окружающей среды.

This year, polar bears will cross from Alaska to Siberia as they do every spring, plodding across the frozen Chukchi Sea to their summer home on Russia’s Wrangel Island. But this time, U.S. scientists won’t be following them.
"There’s no way," says Eric Regehr, a University of Washington (UW), Seattle, polar bear biologist who was planning to travel to the island in October along with Russian researchers. "The idea of it being legal and safe and practical to go over there is zero."
The fate of this annual science expedition, which offers a critical window into the fate of thousands of bears, is just one sign of how the Russian invasion of Ukraine is curtailing research collaborations all over the globe. As other countries shun and sanction Russia for its aggression, Arctic research focusing on topics such as salmon, polar bears, and migratory birds is emerging as a casualty.
"It looks like Iron Curtain 2 has come down between us," says James Morison, a UW oceanographer whose polar research began in the 1970s, during the Cold War. "A small concern relative to the suffering of the Ukrainian people, but an unfortunate wrinkle nonetheless."
The Arctic is ringed by global powers with intertwined claims to a region rich in resources and scientific puzzles, including the effects of a climate that is warming four times faster than the rest of the world. On Thursday, seven of the eight Arctic nations - the United States, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden - announced they were "temporarily pausing" their participation in the Arctic Council, the intergovernmental body that coordinates Arctic policy, which Russia now leads. The countries also said representatives would not travel to council meetings in Russia "in light of Russia’s flagrant violation" of Ukrainian sovereignty.
The move is "very unfortunate but seems necessary," says Marisol Maddox, an expert in Arctic policy at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, a nonpartisan think tank. Although the Arctic Council doesn’t directly fund research, it helps set the scientific agenda for collaboration among member countries, says Marisol, who advises a council working group on sustainable development. For example, under Russian leadership, the council was planning research on thawing permafrost, a pressing issue in northern Russia. The international rupture "does not bode well for cooperation on climate change research, unfortunately," she says.
It could take months or years for the decisions of international bodies like the Arctic Council to trickle down to specific research projects, but scientists such as Regehr are already feeling the effects of the break with Russia.
A 2000 treaty between the United States and Russia governs management of roughly 3000 polar bears that cross between the two countries. In recent years, U.S. and Russian scientists converged on Wrangel Island, where as many as 1000 of the animals spend part of the summer. There, the researchers count and monitor the bears.
The pandemic scuppered those annual visits in 2020 and 2021, leaving Russian scientists to collect information on their own. But until last month, Regehr and scientists with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) had planned to resume work on the island this year. On 23 February, Regehr was among U.S. and Russian scientists who discussed the potential effects of the growing tensions at the Ukraine border. "Everybody said, ‘Well, we've kind of been there before. … It’s always worked out,’" Regehr recalls.
The next day, Russia launched its invasion. FWS ordered government researchers to stop communicating with their Russian partners. Regehr's efforts to get a ride aboard a private ship to the island went nowhere "Everything is just kind of grinding to a halt," he says.
Although missing a year of data might not have a huge impact, if the breakdown persists, Regehr fears it could threaten a species already facing difficulties because of climate change. The data are used in deciding how many bears Indigenous people can hunt without harming the bear population. "It’s a bad time to stop the data collection."
FWS referred ScienceInsider’s questions to the Department of State, which issued a statement. "There continue to be challenges that all countries, including the United States and Russia, face where consultations will be necessary to enhance global stability," the statement said. "Now is not the time for those conversations."
Salmon scientists have been also forced to change course, just as they were mounting a widely publicized collaboration involving Russian, U.S., and Canadian research vessels. The mission aims to better understand salmon ecology in the North Pacific Ocean, the winter home for salmon that spawn in rivers in all three countries. A U.S. scientist was supposed to travel on the Russian vessel Tinro, so that the ship could collect samples within U.S. waters.
But on 24 February, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration told project leaders that the U.S. scientist couldn’t board the Russian ship, says Mark Saunders, a marine biologist coordinating the research through the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission, an intergovernmental panel involving countries in the region.
Although the Russian research vessel is continuing to collect data at sea, it can’t visit sites along the southern edge of the Aleutian Islands, Saunders says. Those areas are thought to be a destination for sockeye salmon originating from critical fisheries in Alaska’s Bristol Bay and Canada’s Fraser River. Even with the data gaps, information about salmon in this part of the ocean is "so rare that even this reduced survey area will be hugely important," he says.
Meanwhile, Jan van Gils, an ecologist at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, had to abandon plans to return to Siberia’s Taymyr Peninsula this summer, where he is studying the plight of the red knot. The shorebird summers in Russia and flies 9000 kilometers to Mauritania, in Africa, for the winter. Working with Russian scientists, he has found that red knot body sizes are shrinking, because of their diet shifting as climate change alters the timing of insect emergence on the tundra. Van Gils had hoped to gather evidence this summer that would clarify the timing of the migrations and its link to the birds’ winter diet in Africa. But today the Dutch government’s science funding agency told him to halt all work with Russian scientists.
Then there are research partnerships that might never begin. Today, sensor-laden buoys in the Arctic Ocean are concentrated near North America, which Morison suspects has skewed pictures of ocean currents. He was hoping to work with Russian scientists to collect data from the Russian side of the Arctic.
Now, he fears such collaboration won’t be possible if there is a return to the secrecy and divisions that marked his early Arctic research at the height of the Cold War. Several days ago, he emailed a friend who is a prominent scientist in Moscow. "He hasn't answered. So I kind of worry that they’re afraid to talk to anybody now," Morison says. "It’s just horrible."

Исследования Восточно-Сибирского арктического шельфа показывают прогрессирующую деградацию подводной вечной мерзлоты, сдерживающей выбросы метана из донных отложений. По последним оценкам объем газа может доходить до триллиона тонн, что в сочетании с малой глубиной на большей части шельфа делает его климатической бомбой замедленного действия.

Trouble is bubbling up from the depths of a vast region of Arctic seafloor that is little explored, but nevertheless could have major repercussions for the global climate, reports a new study.
The East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS) extends for some 770,000 square miles - an area bigger than Mexico - off the coast of Siberia, making it the widest and shallowest continental shelf in the world’s ocean. The shelf contains enormous reserves of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, that have been locked up for thousands of years under an impermeable layer of permafrost, which is a type of frozen sediment.
However, expeditions to the shelf led by Evgeny Chuvilin, a geoscientist at Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) - a private university founded in partnership with MIT - in Moscow, Russia, "demonstrate progressive degradation of subsea permafrost which controls the scales of [methane] release from the sediment into the water-atmospheric system," according to a recent study published in the journal Marine and Petroleum Geology. While this degradation is primarily occurring due to natural pressures, human-driven climate change may also be playing a role.
The new research confirms previous studies that raised alarms about the potentially catastrophic release of methane from icy gas-rich solids known as hydrates, while also revealing new insights about the shelf with much-needed in-situ measurements from the field.
"The East Siberian shelf remains a poorly studied area, especially regarding the thermal characteristics of bottom sediments and the conditions for the existence of subsea permafrost and gas hydrate accumulations," said Chuvilin in an email.
"The degradation of underwater permafrost on the Arctic shelf may result in large amounts of greenhouse gasses, predominantly methane, escaping into the atmosphere," he added. "It is unknown precisely how many methane reserves exist in subsea permafrost and sub-permafrost horizons on the Arctic shelf. Still, current estimates suggest that there can be up to a trillion tons of methane on the East Siberian shelf alone."
For comparison, an estimated 570 million tons of methane are released into the atmosphere globally each year, a number that is dwarfed by the reserves locked up in the ESAS. Scientists are concerned both by the gargantuan volume of gas reserves and the shallow depth of the ocean over much of the shelf, which makes it easier for greenhouse gasses to bubble up to the surface and into the atmosphere, compared to deeper waters that can absorb these emissions.
That’s why researchers are racing to better understand the murky layers within the shelves and produce more accurate projections of the volume of gas that might be released from them in the coming years.
To that end, Chuvilin and his colleagues embarked on Arctic sea expeditions in 2019 and 2020 that extracted cores from the ocean floor.
"Our task was to study the composition and various physical characteristics of bottom sediments on the Arctic shelf, including their temperature, thermophysical properties, and freezing and thawing points," Chuvilin said. "We took samples of the bottom sediment core during the Arctic expeditions to do this. The samples were taken aboard very quickly, within minutes, to immediately measure temperature, thermal conductivity, and heat capacity," which were analyzed with a handheld device called a KD2 Pro.
"In addition, we took samples of bottom sediments for detailed lab studies of their characteristics, such as dispersion, humidity, salinity, and mineral composition," he noted. "Our lab research also identified the sediments’ freezing point using an in-house technique that we described in the paper."
The results revealed both anomalously cold and hot bottom sediments in different parts of the shelf. At depths of about 330 meters along the continental slope of the Laptev Sea, sediments reached -1.8°C, which is colder than expected and could be the result of interior seabed processes or frigid water cascading along the shelf.
However, at shallower depths, the team saw abnormally high temperatures reaching 2°C, which is warm enough to degrade permafrost. The researchers think these areas might be warmed in part by Siberian river systems that flow into the sea. While subsea permafrost decay is primarily caused by natural pressures, including seismic and tectonic activity, these warm river flows are exacerbated by human-driven climate change.
"The role of human-caused climate change has yet to be assessed, but apparently, it manifests itself as warming of sea waters and Siberian river flows," Chuvilin said. "The available data shows that the flows of Siberian rivers strongly affect the temperature of bottom sediments and subsea permafrost on the shallow Arctic shelf."
Human-driven climate change, which is caused by greenhouse gas emissions from our consumption of fossil fuels, is particularly devastating to polar regions. The Arctic is warming at least twice as fast as any other region on Earth, which has resulted in many severe consequences for Siberia and its huge swaths of permafrost.
In recent years, the region has suffered record-breaking temperatures and severe wildfires as a result of climate change. Chuvilin and his colleagues are also studying Siberia’s bizarre natural gas explosions linked to permafrost thaw, which have left massive craters in the landscape. The effects of global warming have, of course, been much more noticeable on land, but the new research suggests that more attention should be paid to the potential time-bomb of methane emissions locked away in the Arctic shelf.
"We plan to continue studying the thermal state of bottom sediments on the Arctic shelf and assess the mode of occurrence of subsea permafrost and gas hydrates," Chuvilin said, noting that these efforts will include "mathematical and experimental modeling of the evolution and degradation of permafrost and gas hydrates on the Arctic shelf."
"Aside from the thermal characteristics, this comprehensive study will involve geophysical research to glean more knowledge about subsea permafrost’s top and bottom, probing deeper horizons of bottom sediments using drilling, and monitoring intensive methane emission areas on the Arctic shelf," he concluded.

Ученые Сибирского федерального университета, Института биофизики КНЦ СО РАН и Шанхайского технического университета изучили фотопротеин обелин. Фотопротеины способны излучать свет во время химической реакции и могут использоваться для создания биолюминесцентных тест-систем для диагностики различных заболеваний.

Scientists of Siberian Federal University in collaboration with colleagues from the Institute of Biophysics of the Federal Research Center, Krasnoyarsk Scientific Center, SB RAS and researchers from ShanghaiTech University (China) studied the photoprotein obelin, which can be used to create bioluminescent test systems. Since photoproteins, in particular, obelin, can emit bright light when calcium ions are added, they are actively used as intracellular markers for monitoring various cellular processes. Also, obelin can be used in test systems for enzyme immunoassay, which allows you to diagnose various diseases caused by bacterial cells, viruses, fungi, protozoa and parasites. The study considers obelin activated not by a natural substrate, but by its synthetic analogue.
Photoproteins are bioluminescent proteins capable of emitting light during a chemical reaction. The substrate necessary for the bioluminescent reaction of photoproteins to occur is a special molecule, coelenterazine. In nature, photoproteins are found in many marine organisms, such as luminous marine hydroid polyps. These inhabitants of seas and, more rarely, freshwater form large colonies and lead a predatory lifestyle.
To date, an urgent task is to change the properties of photoproteins in order to expand the range of their application. For example, it is well known that the tissues of living organisms poorly transmit blue light and transmit red well. Therefore, in order to effectively use photoproteins to visualize internal processes in tissues, it is better to make their luminescence shift to the red region of the spectrum. However, natural photoproteins glow blue. It is possible to chemically modify the substrate molecule in such a way that the resulting glow of the protein turns yellow or red. Coelenterazine-v will help in this. It is a well-known chemical analogue of the natural substrate of photoprotein bioluminescence - coelenterazine.
Coelenterazine-v is just able to change the color of the radiation to a redder one. However, photoproteins activated by this analog glow very weakly, with low efficiency, which significantly reduces their practical potential. A group of scientists, which included SibFU experts, found out the reasons for the low efficiency of photoproteins with coelenterazine-v.
"Using the methods of crystallography and X-ray diffraction analysis, our scientific team, together with colleagues from China, managed to solve the three-dimensional spatial structure of obelin activated with coelenterazine-v (obelin-v)", said Elena Eremeeva, co-author of the study, associate professor of the Department of Biophysics and the Basic Department of Biotechnology of SibFU, senior researcher of the Institute of Biophysics of the Federal Research Center, Krasnoyarsk Scientific Center, SB RAS. "This made it possible to see how and in what form the new substrate is integrated into the active center of the protein, and to make sure that the structure of the protein is not disturbed".
According to the researcher, the comparison of the structure of obelin-v with that of obelin activated with conventional coelenterazine revealed important differences between the two protein variants that may underlie the low efficiency of obelin-v bioluminescence. The study also describes in detail the bioluminescent and fluorescent properties of obelin-v and considers their relationship with the structural organization of the protein.
The scientists reported that the next stage of their work would be to obtain a different spatial structure - obelin-v after a bioluminescent reaction. By comparing all available structures with each other, before and after the reaction, with natural and chemically modified substrates, scientists hope to identify the reasons for the low bioluminescent activity of photoproteins with coelenterazine-v and to correct this shortcoming in the future. Then photoproteins can be used as a sensor for visualizing processes in tissues with much greater efficiency.

В 2021 г. во время полевых работ в Хакасско-Минусинской котловине сотрудники Института археологии и этнографии СО РАН обнаружили в тагарском захоронении бронзового века необычный амулет с фрагментом человеческой кости. Это первая находка подобного рода в регионе.

From the dawn of history, people been obsessing over our mortal nature. Some cultures tried to preserve the appearance of life for their dearly departed, for instance through mummification. Others disposed of the dead more completely, for example by cremation.
Yet others approached commemoration through manipulations of the remains, such as secondary burial which was common throughout the Middle East since prehistory. In any case the passage to the afterlife was usually marked by ritual, often involving burial with grave goods to serve the dead in the next world.
Each culture found unique ways to mark the evil day, according to their perception of life and death and the journey one must take to reach to the other side. The ancient Egyptians even wrote manuals to instruct the living on their next phase.
Throughout the years, archaeologists, digging up the monuments of the dead and studying the clues left by the ancients, have strived to envision and reconstruct these elusive rituals. Now an extraordinary artifact found in a Bronze Age grave in Siberia, which the archaes suspect may be nothing other than a prehistoric amulet, may shed rare light on the thoughts and perceptions of our ancestors regarding the path to the afterlife.
In southern Siberia, in the fertile Minusinsk basin, home to multiple cultures over history, a cemetery known as Kazanovka 1 from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age was excavated in 2020. It is associated with the Tagar people, one of the most prominent cultures of the ancient Siberian steppe.
The Tagar culture is named after an island in the Yenisei River, and was the dominant archaeological culture in the Minusinsk basin in Khakassia from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age, i.e., from approximately the eighth to the third century B.C.E. It was preceded by the Bronze Age Karasuk culture and itself came before the Tashtyk culture, and existed in parallel with the more famous steppe culture, the Scythians in Crimea and the northern Black Sea. The Tagars were first recognized back in the 18th century, at the very birth of Siberian archaeology. Previously called the "Minusinsk kurgan culture", it was renamed "Tagar" in 1929. More than a thousand Tagar burial mounds have been excavated; dozens of settlements; hundreds of petroglyphs have been found - and thousands upon thousands of bronze items, many of which are displayed in the Khakass National Museum in Abakan. But never before, in such an early Tagarian context, had the archaeologists found anything like the artifact discovered in a salvage dig, carried out ahead of infrastructure works by Evgeniy Bogdanov from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography SB RAS Novosibirsk, Russia, under the leadership of Anton Vybornov.
An enigmatic artifact
The last season revealed a large burial ground consisting of 16 stone enclosures, organized in rows at the foot of a mountain in the Minusinsk Basin. The construction techniques, spatial organization, and other burial features are characteristic of the early Tagar culture. The most exciting find of the season was unearthed in one of the graves of Kurgan (burial mound) no. 15.
Kurgan no. 15 contained two enclosures fenced by vertically-positioned sandstone slabs. The main enclosure contained four graves: three adults in the middle of the mound, and one child in a corner. Two other children from the same period were buried in a smaller enclosure added to the outside. Two of the graves in the center were roofed by logs and capped with rectangular-shaped flagstones. The southern of the three central graves contained a very different burial, not only above the ground but also below. This was of a woman.
The mourners dug a 2.5-by-4.45-meter pit and built a step-like border around the perimeter, on top of which big stone slabs were laid. A horse skull was placed on the grave cover, and the gaps between and around the slabs along the step were covered with small flagstones. The woman’s body was found a meter beneath the surface. She had been placed on her back with her head to the west, her arms stretched out by her body and her fingers slightly curled. Pottery vessels were placed by the body, a circular bronze mirror with the remains of a leather case was found next to her pelvis, and bronze plaques and pins were laid next to her right shoulder.
In an apparent contuinuation of mortuary rituals in the earlier Karasuk culture, Vybornov tells Haaretz, the woman was laid to rest with chunks of meat as well as the carcasses of a calf and sheep, next to which lay a bronze knife and an awl inside a leather case. Other sheep bones were found around her body as well. But the most exciting find in the grave was next to the woman’s right elbow. Its purpose is exceptionally enigmatic, but the archaeologists suspect it was an amulet. The upper part was an X comprised of threaded tubular bronze and cap beads interspersed with carnelian beads. The lower part was also made of bronze tubular beads, with white argillite beads. A boar fang hung from this lower part. And in the center, between them, the archaeologists detected shreds of what may have been a silken cloth bag, and a fragment of human rib bone. Other burials in the region have beads, animal bones, fangs of boars or musk deer, and bird claws. It is also worth noting that similar amulets have been found in the basin, almost always been found in association within female burials.
Rituals generally involve "special" items. The human bone in the amulet buried with the woman could theoretically have been ascribed with magical or some other special purpose and played a role in the mortuary ritual. In later phases of the Tagarian culture, archaeologists have found evidence of rituals involving manipulation of human remains. Two examples of this were found in Kurgan no.2: a human rib bone was found inside a big pot in one grave, and in another grave, a human carpal bone was found in a small vessel.
Vybornov finds this very interesting, he says. Ethnographic parallels might shed some light on these ancient practices. The Yukaghir people, for example, living in in the Kolyma river basin in the far northeastern regions of Siberia, were documented at the end of the 19th century has having a tradition of dissecting the body of a shaman into amulets. Something similar might be one of many or similar explanations for the human bone found in the Tagarian burial, Vybornov surmises.
Even though the Tagar culture is one of the most studied of all the southern Siberian cultures, much remains to be learned about them, especially about their rituals and use of funerary costumes, Vybornov says. Unhappily, that is largely because so many Tagarian burials have been looted. Also, the post-depositional conditions are not the friendliest for preserving organic and delicate materials.
Thirdly, many of the sites have been excavated hastily in the course of salvage works, without methodological documentation, leaving delicate garments thousands of years old overlooked. When, after millennia, beads are found scattered around the body - it’s hard to know what their initial place was, making it much harder to know what part of the costume or body they adorned.
Meanwhile Kazanovka 1 brought us a glimpse at the magical world of the ancient Siberians. Hopefully, further investigations and excavation of Tagarian and other burials will help us venture into the ancestors’ minds and gain a better understanding of how they perceived life and death, and the relationships between them.

Уральские астрономы совместно с нидерландскими коллегами создали наиболее полную и удобную онлайн-базу водяных мазеров - космических источников микроволнового излучения. С помощью этой базы можно будет обнаруживать новые закономерности развития областей звездообразования, а также выявлять и изучать наиболее перспективные объекты нашей галактики.

Scientists from Ural Federal University, the Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Moscow), and the Joint Institute for VLBI ERIC (the Netherlands) have created the most comprehensive and convenient online database of water masers, the cosmic sources of microwave radiation. This will allow discovering new patterns of star formation regions, identifying and investigating the most promising objects in our galaxy. An article describing the database was published in The Astronomical Journal.
Masers in star-forming areas (mainly of three types: water, methanol, and hydroxyl) are frequently encountered in our galaxy, and they are variable: their emission is brighter, then weaker. Therefore, studies of masers require reference to data on their former state, while the volumes of information are growing at a great speed.
"Our database of water masers in the Galaxy is the most substantial. It covers 95% of all observations of water masers in star-forming areas, published since 1989, and almost 100% of the sources. The database is constantly being updated and will soon concentrate all the information on water masers in star-forming areas. The database contains full observational characteristics of masers: position, radiant velocity, emission intensity and other," says Dmitry Ladeishchikov, the project manager and senior researcher at the Kourovka Astronomical Observatory of the Ural Federal University.
As source material, the developers used data from more than 140 articles, from which they extracted not only numerical data, but also images (spectra) and text descriptions of maser sources. The researchers divided the article into several categories: general maser studies, maser variability studies, maser flare studies, etc. In addition, data in the infrared, millimeter and other wavelength ranges are made available through the database. This is especially important for a comprehensive study of maser sources.
The database is equipped with technological solutions for selecting sources, presenting information online. New data is entered semi-automatically with the support of a specialized information system created by Dmitry Ladeishchikov.
"In this way the database opens up the possibility of quick and convenient access to almost the entire corpus of observational archives. Previously, maser researchers had to find and analyze a large amount of heterogeneous data scattered in different articles on their own. Now the comprehensive information is systematized and the search process takes a few seconds. This makes it much faster to analyze the data and draw conclusions from it," says Ladeishchikov.
The database on water masers is part of a large project that has been underway at the Kourovka Astronomical Observatory for the past five years. The goal of the project is to accumulate comprehensive data on observed masers of all types. Previous work performed by Ural Federal University astronomers was devoted to creating a similar database on methanol masers, as well as on masers in circumstellar sources. There are plans to create a database on hydroxyl masers. According to Dmitry Ladeishchikov, statistical analysis of the information collected, including machine learning methods, will make it possible to predict the location of previously unknown masers and effectively plan future observations.
Based on the previously created database on methanol masers and comparing them with water masers, scientists at the Kourovka Astronomical Observatory at UrFU confirmed that water masers are among the earliest indicators of star formation processes.
Masers are sources of microwave radiation, much more powerful than that from stars. Therefore, by targeting masers, scientists can explore distant parts of space.
For example, the emission of masers in the water vapor line indicates active star formation processes. In addition, the emission of such masers is detected in the disks of pro-evolved stars, as well as in the outer galaxies. Water masers are formed in shock waves at high gas temperatures and densities, and can be associated with both massive and low-massive objects.
Water masers in star formation areas are the most common type of water masers. Of the 2,600 water masers known to science, about 1,600 belong to this type of water masers. According to estimates by scientists at the Kourovka Astronomical Observatory, there are about 3,000 star-forming areas in the Milky Way galaxy with a high probability of detecting a water maser. Thus, in the future, it is possible to detect about 1,400 objects with maser emission in the water vapor line in the star formation areas.
The leader in the number of known maser objects is the group of hydroxyl masers (about 3,000). The total number of galactic maser sources of different types known at the moment is about 8,000.

Европейское космическое агентство приостанавливает программу ExoMars, в которой Европа и Россия сотрудничали в течение десяти лет. На сентябрь этого года была запланирована отправка европейского марсохода на российской посадочной платформе, теперь же судьба марсианской миссии оказалась под вопросом.

L’Agence spatiale européenne suspend son programme ExoMars et réfléchit à d’autres pistes pour envoyer son rover sur la planète Mars sans les Russes. De nombreux satellites, privés de fusée Soyouz, doivent aussi trouver un nouveau lanceur pour les envoyer dans l’espace.
Comment faire sans les Russes ? C’est la question qui a agité le conseil de l’Agence spatiale européenne (ESA), réuni à Paris, mercredi 16 et jeudi 17 mars 2022, en mode gestion de crise. Deux jours à peine après l’invasion de l’Ukraine et en rétorsion des sanctions imposées par les Occidentaux, Moscou avait annoncé le 26 février cesser tout lancement de fusée Soyouz depuis le port spatial européen de Kourou, et rapatrier ses 90 salariés russes présents en Guyane. Les missions européennes qui étaient programmées ces prochains mois pour un lancement en Soyouz doivent maintenant trouver une place sur un autre véhicule si elles veulent un jour atteindre l’espace.
«Nous étudierons toutes les options. On doit s’assurer d’avoir un plan de lancement solide pour nos satellites», a résumé le directeur général de l’ESA, Josef Aschbacher, en conférence de presse à la sortie du conseil. Il s’agit notamment de quatre satellites Galileo, qui devaient élargir la flotte du système GPS européen, un satellite militaire français, le télescope spatial Euclid qui devait partir fin 2022 à la recherche de la matière noire, et EarthCARE, un programme scientifique d’observation de la Terre en collaboration avec les Japonais.
Les pistes privilégiées pour remplacer le lancement en Soyouz consistent à trouver une place à bord des fusées européennes, et notamment les toutes nouvelles Vega C et Ariane 6. Mais chacune a son lot de complications.
Vega C et son moteur ukrainien
Vega C est un petit lanceur, une version améliorée de l’actuelle fusée Vega. Son vol inaugural est prévu pour le mois de mai, mais combien d’exemplaires de la fusée sera-t-on capable de construire après cette inauguration ? Le moteur du deuxième étage des Vega C est produit par des entreprises ukrainiennes, Yuzhnoye (pour la conception) et Yuzhmash (pour la construction). Trois premiers exemplaires de ce moteur RD-843 ont déjà été livrés à l’ESA pour les trois premiers décollages. Désormais, dans le contexte de la invasion, il n’est pas sûr du tout que l’activité puisse continuer. Les usines de Yuzhmash sont installées dans la ville de Dnipro, qui a été bombardée ces derniers jours. «Nous sommes en contact quotidien avec nos collègues de Yuzhmash», a précisé Daniel Neuenschwander, directeur du transport spatial à l’ESA, et «nous sommes en train d’évaluer les disponibilités pour les prochains mois».
Se rabattre sur un autre moteur équivalent du RD-843 est toujours possible. Neuenschwander explique qu’il préférerait trouver un moteur conçu dans un Etat membre de l’ESA et qui pourrait être adapté rapidement au second étage de Vega C. Mais «nous étudions aussi les options non européennes, car le facteur temps est essentiel ici, donc nous devons travailler avec un moteur qui a le bon degré de maturité». Le choix se jouera à celui qui sera prêt le plus tôt.
Ariane 6, une fusée à ne pas retarder
Quant à la grande Ariane 6, elle n’est pas encore mûre dans l’immédiat. Son vol inaugural est prévu pour la fin de l’année 2022, et Josef Aschbacher a assuré qu’il n’était pas question de prendre des risques en accélérant le planning (le souvenir de la toute première Ariane 5 volant en éclats en 1996 incite à la prudence). Il n’a pas non plus l’air très chaud pour faire embarquer dès le premier vol l’un des satellites privés de lanceur Soyouz - l’idée n’est pas exclue, mais pas privilégiée. D’autant plus que ça retarderait le jour J, et il vaut mieux «garder le timing actuel et ensuite augmenter la cadence». Pour l’instant, il est prévu que la première Ariane 6 emmène des démonstrateurs et des mini satellites pour faire des expériences scientifiques.
Reste ensuite l’alternative radicale de chercher une place sur les lanceurs d’autres pays. «D’abord et avant tout, nous allons nous concentrer sur les lanceurs européens. Et après, s’il reste des lacunes, nous nous pencherons sur les autres partenaires», tranche Aschbacher. Rendez-vous est fixé dans un mois pour faire un nouveau point sur la répartition des lancements perdus.
ExoMars suspendu
Le sujet le plus douloureux de ces deux jours de conciliabules a sans doute été celui d’ExoMars, la grande mission martienne sur laquelle Europe et Russie collaboraient depuis dix ans. Au départ, il s’agit d’un projet européen : l’ESA voulait envoyer un atterrisseur pour s’entraîner à se poser en douceur sur la planète rouge en traversant son atmosphère si ténue, un satellite en orbite martienne pour jouer les relais de communication et un rover au sol pour explorer la planète à la recherche de traces de vie passée. En 2012, l’ESA annonce avoir signé un deal avec l’agence spatiale russe : Roscosmos se chargera des lancements avec leur fusée Proton, et de l’atterrissage du rover avec son «véhicule» d’entrée dans l’atmosphère et ses parachutes géants.
La première partie de la mission ExoMars lancée en 2016 a été une semi-réussite : le satellite TGO s’est bien mis en orbite autour de Mars, mais l’atterrisseur Schiaparelli s’est crashé (à cause d’un problème informatique). La deuxième partie devait quitter la Terre à l’été 2020, envoyant vers Mars le rover européen Rosalind Franklin en même temps que le rover Perseverance des Américains. Mais la pandémie de Covid-19, cumulée à des soucis techniques avec les parachutes, a poussé l’ESA à reporter le décollage en 2022. C’est que, pour aller sur Mars en consommant un minimum de carburant, la bonne fenêtre de tir ne s’ouvre que tous les deux ans, à cause de la position respective de la Terre et de Mars autour du Soleil…
Bon. Ce n’était pas pour 2020 et ça ne sera toujours pas pour 2022. Le conseil de l’ESA a conclu la réunion ce jeudi en votant à l’unanimité la suspension de la mission ExoMars, en raison de «l’impossibilité de continuer la coopération avec Roscosmos».
Reconstruire un véhicule d’atterrissage
Le rover européen Rosalind Franklin est archi-prêt. Actuellement stocké dans une salle blanche des usines Thales Alenia Space à Turin, il attendait d’être transféré à Baïkonour au Kazakhstan pour son décollage à destination de Mars cet été. Il va finalement rester en Italie, et il va falloir remplacer certains de ses instruments internes fournis par la Russie. Il faudra aussi concevoir et construire à partir de zéro une nouvelle plateforme pour faire atterrir le rover, car il est désormais hors de question d’utiliser «Kazachok», celle des Russes, qui patiente aussi à Turin. Et, enfin, trouver une fusée, et une date de lancement. Un travail monstre qui prendra encore des années, mais c’est la seule option si l’Europe veut sauver sa mission à 2 milliards d’euros. «C’est une déception pour toutes les personnes impliquées dans le projet, regrette David Parker, responsable de l’exploration robotique à l’ESA. C’était une décision extrêmement difficile à prendre.» Parker voit deux issues possibles : une réconciliation avec Roscosmos, qui permettrait peut-être de décoller en 2024, ou une reconfiguration totale de la mission qui l’emmènerait vers 2026 ou 2028.
Une porte ouverte à la Nasa
Désormais, chaque partie rebat ses cartes pour continuer la mission seule. Le patron de l’agence spatiale russe, Dmitri Rogozine, a pris acte avec regret de la décision européenne et affirme que la Russie réussira à aller seule sur Mars d’ici quelques années.
De son côté, le conseil de l’ESA a lancé un plan d’attaque pour trouver de nouveaux partenaires. Frapper à la porte de la Nasa pourrait être une bonne idée : c’était son partenaire initial quand ExoMars a été envisagée, mais le retrait des Américains - qui ont préféré se concentrer sur leurs propres missions avec Curiosity et Perseverance - a forcé l’Europe à se tourner vers la Russie. Aujourd’hui, l’agence spatiale américaine sera sans doute plus encline à accompagner ses partenaires occidentaux. «La Nasa a exprimé sa très forte volonté de nous soutenir», a déclaré Josef Aschbacher. Le patron de l’agence européenne a tenté d’apaiser la frustration de ses centaines d’ingénieurs et de chercheurs, sans compter tous les enthousiastes amateurs d’espace : «Même si on décollera plus tard, les résultats scientifiques que produira ce rover seront toujours exceptionnels, et les meilleurs au monde.»

В базе данных Nature Index, которая отслеживает аффилиации в исследовательских статьях в 82 высококачественных научных журналах, доля российских аффилиаций в период с 2019 по 2020 год возросла почти на 10%, в результате чего страна заняла 18-е место в рейтинге 2021 года. Сейчас этот прогресс находится под угрозой, поскольку некоторые из западных санкций напрямую запрещают научное сотрудничество с Россией на неопределенный срок. Однако мнения по этому поводу разделились и ряд ученых полагает, что разрыв научных связей допускать нельзя.

On the banks of the Moskva River, just upstream from the Kremlin and Red Square, sits a grandiose network of interconnected concrete buildings. The tallest two are bejewelled with bulky bronze structures, and this unique aesthetic has earned the Moscow-based Russian Academy of Sciences its nickname - ‘golden brains’. Until very recently, the organization had every reason to think that Russian science was deserving of such an epithet.
After years of stagnation in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, scientific output in Russia had been rising steeply. In the Nature Index database, for example, which tracks affiliations in research articles across 82 high-quality science journals, Russia’s overall share of affiliations jumped by almost 10% between 2019 and 2020 alone, placing the country 18th in the 2021 rankings.
This progress is now in jeopardy, however, as scientists around the world shun their Russian counterparts, either voluntarily or at the behest of their governments in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
It’s unlikely that things will carry on as normal, says Daniel Treisman, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose research focuses on Russian politics and economics. "Inevitably, there’s going to be a decrease in collaboration because it’s harder to travel to Russia now. Available funding is going to decrease, and so on a practical level it’s harder," he says. "Then there’s the moral dilemma. Academics will have to ask themselves whether they should work with a Russian state university, which may not be directly related to the invasion, but is nonetheless funded by the Russian state."
Can Russian science survive in a vacuum?
Some of the sanctions imposed against Russia by the West explicitly prohibit research collaborations. The German government has taken one of the most hawkish approaches, officially suspending all scientific cooperation with Russia from 25 February until further notice; its stance has been backed by the German Research Foundation. German politicians are lobbying other countries to follow suit; Christian Ehler, a German member of the European Parliament, urged the European Union to halt funding to Russian participants of the EU’s flagship Horizon Europe research programme. "I call on the European Commission and the Council of the EU to cut off all scientific relations," he said in a statement.
Eckart Rühl is a physical chemist at the Free University of Berlin and a scientific coordinator for the German-Russian Interdisciplinary Science Centre (G-RISC), an organization that aims to nurture cooperation between the two countries. Some of his research involves working with Russian scientists to develop and test molecules for use in topical medicines. He says he got a telephone call from the German Academic Exchange Service, the world’s largest international exchange funder, within hours of Russia starting its invasion on 24 February to explain that official collaborations between Russia and Germany would be paused indefinitely. "It was extremely fast," he says. "The authorities were well prepared." But this speed of change means that Rühl is unsure how the salaries of some of G-RISC’s staff in Saint Petersburg will be paid in the long run, and some of his German colleagues in Russia are struggling to return home amid widespread flight cancellations. "One had to get the bus to Finland and fly back from there," he says.
Studies show that international collaborations, such as those encouraged by G-RISC, improve the quality and impact of research. Before the invasion of Ukraine, Western countries were eagerly embracing Russian scientists as research partners. More than 19,000 papers were co-authored by scientists in Russia and the United Kingdom during the past decade, according to the British Council. Meanwhile, data from the Nature Index shows that Russian scientists rely heavily on the West for the bulk of their international research projects. Of Russia’s ten biggest collaborators, only China has refrained from issuing sanctions in response to the invasion of Ukraine. Even Switzerland has eschewed its conventionally neutral stance to match restrictions imposed by the EU.
Difference of opinions
It’s unclear how or whether Russian science will cope in this newfound isolation, and opinions are split over whether the West should end its scientific exchanges with Russia.
"I hope that research collaborations will continue in an open way that respects the values for honest research and academic freedom," says Treisman. "Many people in Russia’s higher-education system are the most pro-internationalist of Russian society."
At the time of writing, close to 8,000 Russian scientists and science journalists had signed an open letter to unequivocally condemn the invasion of Ukraine.
Igor Abrikosov, a Russian physicist who works at Linköping University in Sweden, is one of the co-signatories. He talks passionately about the invasion, holding back tears of frustration over the actions of his homeland. "All my thoughts go to the people whose lives are in danger. We must stop the invasion, and the destruction, blood and tears it brings," he says.
But he, too, fears that cutting scientific links could do more harm than good. "Why shouldn’t people outside of Russia cooperate with the scientists who signed the letter?" he says. "I worry that the authorities in Russia would be interested in cutting scientific collaborations even more than the West."
Christian Dunn, a wetland ecologist at Bangor University, UK, who works on peatland biogeochemistry with scientists in Siberia, says it has been challenging to strike a balance between these two viewpoints. "The science we’re doing with Russia is absolutely essential in terms of climate change," he says. "We’re looking at ways to supercharge peatlands to sequester more carbon." He was invited by the British Embassy in Moscow to attend a climate seminar in Siberia in January 2020, which he says turned out to be something of a watershed moment. "It was astounding to find peatland scientists there doing similar work to us, yet we didn’t even know about each other’s work," he says. They’ve collaborated ever since.
Ultimately, however, he has decided to officially pause the partnership, out of solidarity with Ukraine. "The argument that science is above politics could be applied to any sector - like sport, for example," he says. "It’s with a heavy heart that I say we have to play our part in this."
The loss of such projects will come as a blow to Russian science, which performs well in the physical sciences, but lags behind in the ecological sciences. From 1 December 2020 to 30 November 2021, just 7.5% of Russia’s research papers that are tracked by the Nature Index related to earth and environmental sciences, and before the invasion of Ukraine, the country was taking steps to diversify its science output with a particular focus on climate research such as Dunn’s. There were plans, for example, to build a year-round international research station in northern Siberia before the end of 2022, at a cost of more than US$12 million, although news reports suggest that its opening might now be delayed until 2024.
Looking east
Dunn hopes to restart his collaborations soon, but Treisman says that the sanctions are likely to persist for some time.
The exception when it comes to sanctions is China, which was Russia’s third biggest scientific collaborator between December 2020 and November 2021, according to the Nature Index. Joint research projects will carry on undisturbed by the current shifts in geopolitics, catalysing a trend of closer cooperation between the two nations. Russia is already a leading member of China’s Alliance of International Science Organizations, and Nature has previously reported on how Beijing is helping to awaken "the sleeping bear of Russian science". In the long run, the decision makers who occupy those golden brains of the Russian Academy of Sciences might decide that their future lies not with the West, but with the East.

Команда ученых из Биологического института Томского государственного университета и Индийского института науки, образования и исследований (IISER) изучает наличие микропластика в живых организмах. Сейчас они анализируют концентрацию и происхождение пластиковых микрочастиц в рыбе, обитающей в реках Томь и Нижняя Тунгуска.

Scientists from the TSU Biological Institute and Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER Kolkata) are studying the presence of microplastic in living organisms. Currently, they are analyzing the concentration and origin of microparticles in fish in two Russian rivers, the Tom and Nizhnyaya Tunguska.
"The team led by Gopala Krishna Darbha focuses on how nano- and microparticles accumulate in living organisms and what effect it has on them, as well as developing cheap and effective technologies for cleaning pollution," explains Julia Frank, director of the Center for Microplastics in the Environment of the TSU Biological Institute. "IISER Kolkata has cutting-edge equipment that ensures accurate results of the Raman microspectroscopy. It allows us to study microplastic in biological objects and, most importantly, identify the type of polymers discovered."
As Julia Frank says, in Russia the analysis of microparticles in biosamples is still in the developmental stage, and therefore TSU biologists gladly accepted the proposal of colleagues from India to analyze the fish samples collected in Siberian rivers. The IISER laboratories studied samples of common dace. In the gastrointestinal tract of the fish they found microfibers and microfragments of polypropylene, PET, PVC and other polymers, whose source might be municipal wastewater and fragmentation of plastic trash in river waters.
TSU plans to send to India samples taken during monitoring of the Tom, Ob, and Yenisei. For 2021-2023 the project is being implemented with the support of the Russian Science Foundation. Joint research with colleagues from India will significantly broaden our understanding of the spread and accumulation of microplastic in Siberian fish populations.
"In laboratory studies, we concluded that microplastic is toxic for living organisms. The level of toxicity depends on the typе of polymer, fragment size, and the presence of chemicals and other pollutants associated with plastic fragments," explains Dr. Gopala Krishna Darbha, of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research. "The research team led by Julia Frank is one of the leading experts in Siberia in the field of microplastic water pollution, as we gathered from their articles. Therefore, we wanted to collaborate with this team and learn which types of plastic accumulate in clear water fishes of Siberia, and if there is any variation in Siberian and Indian (or global) situations. The topic is very important, because from fish, microplastic travels up the food chain to other species."
TSU biologists intend to continue their studies and broaden them under a special consortium organized on TSU’s initiative in 2021. The consortium united researchers in microplastic studies, both those with some research experience and those who only plan to engage with this topic.
Studying microplastic pollution aligns with one of the main areas of Strategy of Scientific and Technological Development of the Russian Federation. Aside from the support from the Russian Science Foundation, Tomsk State University is developing this research area under the federal program Priority 2030.

Минобрнауки РФ сообщило, что в этом году российские ученые не будут участвовать в международных конференциях, также введен мораторий на показатели публикаций в зарубежных научных журналах.

Russian scientists will not participate in international conferences this year, the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation said via its Telegram channel. The decision comes as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has strained the relationships between Russian scientists and the international research community.
Minister Valery Falkov also said during a meeting with universities that scientific schools should no longer emphasize when publications are indexed through the two major international scientific databases, according to a recap sent through the Ministry’s Telegram channel.
Scientists aren’t banned from publishing research in international journals indexed in the two databases, Web of Science and Scopus, but will not lean on them as indicators of the quality of the work. The two databases are major sources of scientific information and have metrics that are widely used to evaluate the relative importance of scientific research.
The moves are a reversal of nearly a decade of efforts to make Russian research institutions more internationally competitive. The country actively recruited international scholars and pushed for Russian scientific organizations to vet their researchers’ work based on metrics in the Web of Science and Scopus. International rankings organizations can use data from those databases to develop their lists of the world’s best universities. Publications from Russian scientists in international journals went up between 2013 and 2016 after that push, according to one analysis.
Two weeks ago, the Russian government decided to stop rating scientific research more highly if it was published in Web of Science- and Scopus-indexed journals. The government also said it would no longer require research done with grants from government research programs to be published in indexed journals.
Clarivate, which runs Web of Science, had already closed its Russian office and said it would not evaluate new journals from Russia and Belarus.
Other research organizations have also cut ties with Russian research organizations. The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, said that it would not collaborate with the Russian Federation. The International Congress of Mathematicians will be held virtually in July rather than in Russia as scheduled.
Many Ukrainian scientists have spent the past few weeks calling on journals to bar research from Russian scientists, but prominent journals like Nature have pushed back against a publishing boycott, saying that it does not want to block scholarly exchange. At least a handful of journals, including the Journal of Molecular Structure, have said they will not accept work from Russian institutions.

Российские ученые выяснили, почему оксид графена не сгорает при высоких температурах, а наоборот, приобретает хорошие структурные свойства. Оказалось, что под воздействием лазерных импульсов в графеновых листах одновременно происходят два противоположных процесса: по краям атомы кислорода окисляют и разрушают материал, а в центре начинается отжиг кристаллической решетки, в результате чего она не распадается, а упорядочивается, образуя стабильную конфигурацию. Это делает оксид графена дешевым и перспективным средством для получения графена.

Researchers from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Joint Institute for High Temperatures of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, Saint Petersburg State Marine Technical University, Institute of Nanotechnology of Microelectronics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Bauman Moscow State Technical University and Emanuel Institute of Biochemical Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences have found the reason why instead of burning down at high temperatures, graphene oxide opens the door to a promising and inexpensive graphene production method.
The search for a cheap and efficient route of graphene fabrication is still ongoing. Graphene reduction from graphene oxide by laser irradiation appears as a promising route: with graphene oxide produced from ordinary graphite using chemical methods, the laser-aided reduction technique holds much promise in terms of cost and controllability of the resulting material quality.
A few years ago, a group of Skoltech researchers discovered that heating graphene oxide to 3300-3800 K, even under atmospheric conditions, can produce graphene of fairly high quality.
"The result came as a big surprise for our colleagues: the temperature was very high, yet they obtained well-structured material. Carbon materials burn readily in atmospheric oxygen at 600-800 K or higher, whereas in the experiment at much higher temperatures graphene acquired good structural properties", said Nikita Orekhov, deputy head of the MIPT Laboratory of Supercomputer Methods in Condensed Matter Physics. "To figure out the reason for this unexpected effect, we decided to study the high-temperature graphene oxide reduction process using supercomputer atomistic modeling and perform additional research following on our colleagues’ experiment design."
The researchers found that, on the one hand, at high temperatures (T > 3000 K) oxygen atoms from the gaseous environment interact intensively with graphene, oxidizing and destroying it. On the other hand, fast annealing of the crystal lattice begins at the same temperatures, which allows to eliminate defects. During the annealing, the lattice structure straightens out instead of falling apart.
"It turns out that two opposite processes occur concurrently in different places within a material exposed to laser pulses: burning, or destruction, is localized near the defects and boundaries of graphene sheets where carbon atoms are the most chemically active, while annealing occurs primarily in the center of the sheet where atoms prefer to settle back into a stable configuration," Stanislav Evlashin, leading research scientist at the Skoltech Center for Materials Technologies (CMT), explained.
The findings of this new work shed light on the behavior of graphene oxide at extreme temperatures, where straightforward experiments are hardly possible. Understanding the processes described in the paper can help further develop and optimize the methods for obtaining high-quality graphene with large-area monocrystals.

Ученые из Института археологии и этнографии СО РАН, Института земной коры СО РАН, Института археологии Монгольской академии наук и Аризонского университета пришли к выводу, что всего 27 тысяч лет назад на территории современной Монголии еще жили гигантские двугорбые верблюды эпохи плейстоцена Camelus knoblochi. Достигавшие трех метров в высоту и весившие около тонны животные сосуществовали с людьми, которые, возможно, как раз и стали одной из причин их окончательного исчезновения. Другими причинами могли быть изменения климата и конкуренция с верблюдами-хавтагаями (Camelus ferus), более приспособленными к постепенно превращавшемуся в пустыню ландшафту.

A species of giant two-humped camel, Camelus knoblochi, is known to have lived for approximately a quarter of a million years in Central Asia. A new study in Frontiers in Earth Science shows that C. knoblochi's last refuge was in Mongolia until approximately 27,000 years ago. In Mongolia, the last of the species coexisted with anatomically modern humans and maybe the extinct Neanderthals or Denisovans. While the main cause of C. knoblochi's extinction seems to have been climate change, hunting by archaic humans may also have played a role.
"Here we show that the extinct camel, Camelus knoblochi, persisted in Mongolia until climatic and environmental changes nudged it into extinction about 27,000 years ago," said Dr. John W Olsen, Regents' professor emeritus at the School of Anthropology of the University of Arizona, Tucson, US.
Paradoxically, today, southwestern Mongolia hosts one of the last two wild populations of the critically endangered wild Bactrian camel, C. ferus. The new results suggest that C. knoblochi coexisted with C. ferus during the late Pleistocene in Mongolia, so that between-species competition may have been a third cause of C. knoblochi's extinction. Standing nearly three meters tall and weighing more than a ton, C. knoblochi would have dwarfed C. ferus. The precise taxonomic relationships between these two species, other extinct Camelus, and the ancient Paracamelus aren't yet resolved.
Olsen said, "C. knoblochi fossil remains from Tsagaan Agui Cave [in the Gobi Altai Mountains of southwestern Mongolia], which also contains a rich, stratified sequence of human Paleolithic cultural material, suggest that archaic people coexisted and interacted there with C. knoblochi and elsewhere, contemporaneously, with the wild Bactrian camel."
Steppe specialists driven into extinction by desertification
The new study describes five C. knoblochi leg and foot bones found in Tsagaan Agui Cave in 2021, and one from Tugrug Shireet in today's Gobi Desert of southern Mongolia. They were found in association with bones of wolves, cave hyenas, rhinoceroses, horses, wild donkeys, ibexes, wild sheep, and Mongolian gazelles. This assemblage indicates that C. knoblochi lived in montane and lowland steppe environments, less dry habitats than those of its modern relatives.
The authors conclude that C. knoblochi finally went extinct primarily because it was less tolerant of desertification than today's camels, C. ferus, the domestic Bactrian camel C. bactrianus, and the domestic Arabian camel C. dromedarius.
In the late Pleistocene, much of Mongolia's environment became drier and changed from steppe to dry steppe and finally desert.
"Apparently, C. knoblochi was poorly adapted to desert biomes, primarily because such landscapes could not support such large animals, but perhaps there were other reasons as well, related to the availability of fresh water and the ability of camels to store water within the body, poorly adapted mechanisms of thermoregulation, and competition from other members of the faunal community occupying the same trophic niche," wrote the authors.
Towards the end, the last of the species may have lingered, at least seasonally, in the milder forest steppe - grassland interspersed with woodland - further north in neighboring Siberia. But this habitat probably wasn't ideal either, which could have sounded the death knell for C. knoblochi. The world would not see giant camels again.
Preyed upon or scavenged by humans
What were the relations between archaic humans and C. knoblochi?
Corresponding author Dr. Arina M Khatsenovich, senior researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Archeology and Ethnography in Novosibirsk, Russia, said, "A C. knoblochi metacarpal bone from Tsagaan Agui Cave, dated to between 59,000 and 44,000 years ago, exhibits traces of both butchery by humans and hyenas gnawing on it. This suggests that C. knoblochi was a species that Late Pleistocene humans in Mongolia could hunt or scavenge."
"We don't yet have sufficient material evidence regarding the interaction between humans and C. ferus in the Late Pleistocene, but it likely did not differ from human relationships with C. knoblochi - as prey, but not a target for domestication."
First author Dr. Alexey Klementiev, a paleobiologist with the Russian Academy of Sciences' Siberian Branch, said, "We conclude that C. knoblochi became extinct in Mongolia and in Asia, generally, by the end of Marine Isotope Stage 3 (roughly 27,000 years ago) as a result of climate changes that provoked degradation of the steppe ecosystem and intensified the process of aridification."

Международная Пан-Тихоокеанская экспедиция по исследованию экосистемы лососевых рыб в северной части Тихого океана, организованная усилиями пяти стран (США, Канада, Россия, Япония, Южная Корея), прошла успешно, несмотря на то, что из-за санкций российской стороне пришлось завершить свое участие раньше времени.

An international expedition to study salmon in the Gulf of Alaska lost its Russian vessel part-way through the venture as a result of sanctions in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine.
The chartered Russian vessel R/V Tinro had to turn back after it was not allowed to fuel up in Dutch Harbour in the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. The ship was among four vessels carrying about 60 scientists that headed out in February for a month to the North Pacific Ocean on the largest-ever pan-Pacific research expedition to study salmon.
The team included the Canadian Coast Guard vessel Sir John Franklin, which left from Victoria, the chartered fishing vessel Raw Spirit from Port Alberni, a U.S. vessel and the R/V Tinro. The Franklin recently returned to the coast guard base in James Bay.
Russia has carried out salmon surveys for decades and was very involved in planning the expedition, said Mark Saunders, who is with the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission serving as the director for the north Pacific region for the International Year of the Salmon. The expedition was supported by governments, the private sector, academia and fisheries-related organizations.
Researchers are seeking to understand how salmon survive in the high seas as the climate changes. Salmon were caught and studied by scientists who looked at factors such as their location, numbers, size and condition, and prey species. Canada is involved because salmon returns in B.C. have dropped significantly in recent years.
The Tinro, which sailed from Vladivostok, initially fuelled up at Dutch Harbour but was not permitted to do so again, Saunders said. Without more fuel, the Tinro was unable to complete its work, doing about half as much as initially planned, he said. Each vessel had designated areas to survey. Russia covered the costs of the scientists it sent on the expedition.
The Tinro was chartered for $2.1 million, with expedition supporters, including Canada, covering the cost. Because not all funds were used due to its shortened end date, Saunders is working on lining up another vessel to complete the survey. When the four vessels were in the North Pacific, they shared daily findings, said Saunders, who doesn’t know if that will continue.
Despite the Russian ship’s curtailed efforts, Saunders said the expedition was a success. "We’ve got some tremendous results in terms of catches," he said. "I think this is going to give us what we need to plan going forward." The goal is to develop a "full-blown ocean science intelligence system," using additional technology to collect data, he said. Saunders remains committed to the idea of international scientific collaboration, saying that’s what is needed to ultimately understand the ocean.
"We have demonstrated that there is a lot to be gained by working together."

Российские ученые совместно с британскими, финскими и сербскими коллегами создали оптоэлектронное устройство из одной молекулы флуоресцентного белка и углеродной нанотрубки. В зависимости от того, какой стороной белок прикреплен к трубке, устройство может работать либо как светодиод, либо как ячейка памяти.

Russian researchers and their international collaborators have developed a full-function bioelectronic photocell using one molecule of a fluorescent protein attached to a carbon nanotube. When exposed to light, the system can change its electronic properties and operate either as a spotlight or memory cell depending on how the protein is attached to the tube. The team’s findings open the door to new environmentally friendly electronic elements, memory devices, and solar cells. The research supported by the Russian Science Foundation (RSF) grant was published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.
Optoelectronic devices capable of storing and transmitting information by responding to various wavelengths of light lie at the core of lasers, light emitting diodes (LED) and some memory devices. Of particular interest are hybrid systems that contain biomolecules, such as proteins, alongside electronic elements. Thanks to their low cost, environmental safety and good optical performance, hybrid systems can be used as components in molecular electronics, LEDs, advanced lasers, and optical transistors.
Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Electronic Technology (MIET), Lebedev Physical Institute of RAS and Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) in Moscow and their colleagues from UK, Finland and Serbia modified carbon nanotubes using the green fluorescent protein (GFP).
"In the configuration examined, a single-walled carbon nanotube (SWCNT) functions as an active conductor and carrier for a protein molecule, while the phenylazide group provides covalent crosslinking for common charge carriers between the device’s components," Skoltech professor Albert Nasibulin, head of the Laboratory of Nanomaterials, explains.
Looking at the structure of the resulting compounds, the team found out that the protein can help control the type of the future optoelectronic element. Since the system can exchange both energy and charge carriers with the environment, the authors benefited from this capability to build new nanodevices.
"The carbon nanotube is indispensable for biomimic sensor structures, since it helps register even the slightest changes in the structure and the charge of individual biomolecules it is linked to," Nikita Nekrasov, a postgraduate student at MIET, comments.
Carbon nanotubes have plenty of free electrons that can migrate to GFP and back via the phenylazide bridge. The researchers tried different GFP attachment options, placing the barrel upright or sidelong, to see how the photocell would behave. They discovered that if the protein was placed sideways with its water-repelling side attached to the tube, the entire system behaved like a spotlight controlling the tube’s conductivity. This happens because turning the excitation light on and off causes intensive exchange of electrons between the nanotube and the protein. However, if the protein’s water-retaining bottom was attached to the tube, the charge got caught between the nanotube and the protein, allowing the device to store information for dozens of minutes. At the same time, the element remained stable for a long time thanks to the protective protein shell.
"Our findings will help create powerful and compact light-controlled devices for information storage and transmission. In addition, both parts of our elements are biodegradable and, therefore, can be used for creating environmentally friendly solar cells," Ivan Bobrinetsky, Doctor of Technical Sciences, RSF grant project manager and leading researcher at MIET, notes.

Сибирский федеральный университет и Тюменский государственный университет подписали меморандум о сотрудничестве в области климатических проектов, в том числе в рамках комплексного инвестиционного проекта «Енисейская Сибирь».

On 3 March 2022, within the Krasnoyarsk Economic Forum, Siberian Federal University and Tyumen State University signed a memorandum on the development of cooperation in implementing joined climate projects including Yenisey Siberia research and educational centre.
The memorandum indicated the readiness of partner universities to create joint working groups to implement projects on the environmental and climate agenda. The participants named two most promising areas of cooperation. The first implies the involvement of both universities in projects to create and implement technologies in managing the regional balance of greenhouse gases by implementing large-scale scientific and technological projects and testing the results at industrial enterprises. The development of this direction will result in new technologies for carbon absorption and utilization and forming joint experimental sites for implementing the achieved outcomes.
The second direction involves the creation of a joint working group to develop the Charter of the CE&D (Carbon Education & Development) consortium. In the future, the consortium is intended to bring together scientific and educational organizations, large industrial companies and businesses to create a system of modular programs for training specialists and teams for the development and launch of climate projects.
"The ESG agenda is one of the priorities of our university. Cooperation in climate initiatives, the greening of the economy of our regions and the creation of advanced industrial technology following sustainability principles is essential for our universities. By joint efforts, we will initiate new and support existing network and cluster associations with the engagement of higher educational institutions, research and innovation organizations and companies aimed at the effective use of available human, intellectual, material, financial and other resources," said Ruslan Baryshev, vice-rector for research, Siberian Federal University.
Andrey Latyshev, vice-rector of Tyumen State University, noted that global climate projects, in particular, the development of carbon grounds and implementation of the ESG strategy are crucial for the Russian economy as they have significant potential for the territories economic growth, training of engineering and technical specialists, and development of professional retraining programs.
"Tyumen State University is consistently working on projects in decarbonisation and climate change. The topic is extremely relevant since climate conservation is a global challenge for humanity. Sustainability principles are what our universities should, can and do follow. Signing the memorandum with Siberian Federal University, Krasnoyarsk Territory, and Krasnoyarsk research and educational centre will boost this work. Now that our friendly team includes the Kemerovo Region, Novosibirsk and Tyumen Regions, Krasnoyarsk and Perm Territories, our work will become visible on the map of Russia," stressed Andrey Latyshev.
ESG stands for Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance. The rise of the ESG agenda reflects the interest of modern society in doing business not only for income but also for taking care of the environment and reasonable consumption of resources.

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