Февраль 2023 г.

Российская наука и мир (по материалам зарубежной электронной прессы)

CONTENTS / ОГЛАВЛЕНИЕ


• How tensions with Russia are jeopardizing key Arctic research
• Bringing back the wooly mammoth is one big genetic gamble, scientists say
• Siberian Federal University scientists measure risks of outbreaks of insect pests in the Siberian taiga
• Fusion progress in Russia
• Another Russian spacecraft docked to the space station is leaking
• Ces mollécules pourraient nous permettre d’en finir avec la tuberculose
• Cell type found to unlock new immunotherapies for chronic viral infections
• LHC physicists resolve stalemate over Russian authors
• Data hint at Russia’s shifting science collaborations
• Rare embroidered deisis depicting Jesus Christ found in medieval burial ground
• Neural network algorithm predicts Arrhenius crossover temperature with 90% accuracy

Прекращение международного сотрудничества с Россией в области арктических исследований ставит под угрозу усилия по противодействию растущим экологическим рискам в Арктике, от таяния вечной мерзлоты и сокращения площади морского льда до торфяных пожаров.

Biologist Eric Regehr and his colleagues at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began studying polar bears from the American side of the Chukchi Sea, which stretches from Alaska to Russia, in 2008. But as the region warmed, and the increasingly thin spring sea ice off the Alaskan Coast made helicopter landings unsafe, he knew he would need to find another base from which to survey the health and size of the population.
Russia’s remote Wrangel Island made an ideal alternative: a large proportion of Chukchi Sea polar bears take refuge here during the summer, and the Russian Federation had, in 2000, signed an agreement with the U.S. to protect this population. Collaborating in the field, Russian and American scientists were eventually able to confirm, in 2016, that the population of 3,000 animals appeared to be faring well, despite the rapidly receding sea ice and Indigenous subsistence hunting.
After a two-year hiatus because of Covid-19, Regehr, now with the University of Washington, was eager to return to his research on Wrangel. But when Russia invaded Ukraine last February, his plans abruptly changed. So did those of virtually every government, university, institute, and nonprofit scientist working with Russian colleagues. Suddenly, nearly every international collaborative effort with Russia in the Arctic - from polar bear and whale studies to research on commercial fishing, permafrost thaw, sea-ice retreat, peatland ecology, and wildfires - was on hold.
"So much of what we need to know about these impacts is being lost," Regehr says. "It’s hard to see how we are going to be able to resume the science without the government and non-government funding [for] us and the Russians, and without us being there to work with their scientists."
The cessation of scientific collaboration comes at a precarious moment for the Arctic. Environmental risks associated with sea ice loss, pollution, and shipping are increasing; Russia and other Arctic states are proposing new boundary lines along the continental shelf that would expand their claims over the Arctic Ocean seabed; and peatlands have been continuing to burn after a year of record-setting wildfires in northern Russia, adding substantially to the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions. (Russia is the world’s fourth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases.) In addition, China is ramping up its economic interests in the Arctic.
"The Arctic has long been a model for optimism and international cooperation," says Evan T. Bloom, a senior fellow at the Wilson Center, in Washington, D.C., and a former U.S. diplomat engaged for nearly three decades on Arctic governance. "The disruption of cooperation is necessary because of the [Ukraine] crisis, but there can be no progress on pan-Arctic issues without Russian participation."
Scientists from around the globe have collaborated in the Arctic at least since the Cold War. Three years after the Cuban missile crisis, representatives from the Soviet Union attended the first of many circumpolar meetings on the study of polar bears, which were in serious decline from overhunting. The Soviet Union was a signatory to the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships, which went into effect in 1973, and the five-nation Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears, which went into force three years later.
The Russians have also been intimately involved with the International Maritime Organization and the World Meteorological Organization, which provides the framework for international cooperation on weather, climate, and water cycles both in the Arctic and around the globe. And they have been a key player in the Arctic Council, the leading intergovernmental forum promoting cooperation among the eight Arctic states. The Council meets regularly - with nations holding two-year rotating chairmanships - to work on issues related to sustainable development and environmental protection.
Now, much of this international collaboration is on pause, partly because the other seven Arctic Council states have suspended communication with Russia. Other projects have halted completely as government scientists and non-governmental organizations in Russia have fled the country, been silenced by Russian authorities, or denied the international funds, expertise, and infrastructure needed to keep their joint work going.
An October 2022 report commissioned by the Finnish Prime Minister’s Office summed up the impact of Russian aggression on international Arctic cooperation by acknowledging that, while conditions may change, "one thing is certain, there will be no return to the pre-war reality."
The loss of Russia, both as a collaborator and as an active member of the Arctic Council is profound, notes Bloom, because the country has half the Arctic’s land mass, jurisdiction over most of the Arctic Ocean, is home to nearly half of the Arctic’s population, and oversees most of the region’s economic development.
Prior to the 2022, scientific and diplomatic progress was being made on many emerging environmental issues, including the Agreement to Prevent Unregulated High Seas Fisheries in the Central Arctic Ocean. Most of this region is covered by ice year-round, preventing the possibility of a commercial fishery. But as the ice retreats, fishing countries could eventually move in and wipe out fishery stocks, as happened with walleye pollack in an unregulated area of the Bering Sea in the 1980s. The key element of the Central Arctic Ocean agreement, which takes a science-based approach to fisheries management before permitting commercial fishing, is in peril without Russian scientists verifying data that would form the basis for launching future fisheries.
Some Russians did show up at an international meeting on Central Arctic Ocean fisheries that was held in South Korea in November of 2022, says Bloom, who was invited to speak virtually on the significance of the fisheries agreement at the meeting. "But they were low level and without the authority to make decisions about future scientific participation," he says.
The events in Ukraine has also put a halt to many climate-based collaborations within Russia. Russia has more peatlands than any other country. Carbon-rich, many of these peatlands have been badly degraded by mining, agriculture, forestry practices, and oil and gas development. And climate change has made them vulnerable to wildfires. In 2010, Russia had 30,000 fires in more than 20 regions. Wildfires and peatland degradation currently account for 5 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Following the catastrophic 2010 fire season, the German government offered money and expertise to help restore the hydrological regimes that keep Russia’s peaty bogs, fens, and marshes wet and their carbon sequestered. But on the day that Russia invaded Ukraine, German institutes - including the Succow Foundation - withdrew their support.
Tatiana Minayeva, a Wetlands International scientist who previously worked as a researcher and scientific consultant for the Russian government, says much progress had been made in Russian peatland restoration. But with little chance of collaborations resuming, she hopes the remaining funds from international donors will go to other peatland sites in Central and Eastern Europe.
Most of Russia’s peatlands are frozen in permafrost, which is thawing faster than permafrost in other Arctic nations. Much of the data on this thawing come from the Germany-based Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, which in February of 2022 pulled its support from the Samoylov Island research station in Siberia’s Lena Delta. The station can host up to 20 scientists at a time and has been collecting reliable data on permafrost since 1998.
Following Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 and of Crimea in 2014, the Arctic Council found ways of navigating through crises without pausing communications with Russia. And nonprofit organizations with offices in or close ties to Russia helped keep back channels open when the Arctic Council wasn’t willing or able. Following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, for example, the Pew Charitable Trusts persuaded Russia, the U.S., Canada, Iceland, and other countries to meet in Shanghai in 2015 to discuss the proposed Central Arctic Fisheries Accord.
But today’s situation is quite different, says Clive Tesar, former head of communications and external relations for the World Wildlife Fund’s Global Arctic Programme. Many of those back channels are now closed or silenced, and now that the seven other Arctic Council states are no longer communicating with Russia, it’s unclear how international collaborations on a non-governmental level can move forward.
The World Wildlife Fund has worked in Russia since the 1980s, when it financed the establishment of the Great Arctic Reserve, the largest nature reserve in Eurasia. Since then, it has been involved in more than 1,000 field projects, many of which led to the protection of more than 200,000 square miles of unique territories, most of them in the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions. "It’s going to be very difficult to get things back on track" says Tesar.
Evan Bloom, who helped to establish the Arctic Council and served as the lead U.S. negotiator in establishing the world’s largest marine protected area, in Antarctica’s Ross Sea, has been through many international crises and notes that the future of Arctic research is "not all gloom and doom." Multilateral research on the Arctic will continue in Canada, Alaska, Greenland, and in Ny-Ålesund, on Norway’s Spitsbergen Island.
But the Arctic Council is a forum regulated by consensus, Bloom says, and "nothing goes forward there unless all parties agree." If the situation in Ukraine gets worse, "there is ample opportunity for Arctic governance to get much worse."
With Arctic Council communications with Russia suspended indefinitely, the seven other Arctic Council states could continue working on plans that don’t involve Russian territory, Bloom says. But that might anger and alienate Russia, preventing its future return.
Even if the Arctic Council did find a way to reconcile with Russia, or to forge a different path forward, it’s hard to imagine the research community returning to yesterdays normal.

Намерение американской биотехнологической компании Colossal к 2027 г. возродить мамонтов путем внедрения сегментов их ДНК в ДНК азиатских слонов и вернуть их в экологическую нишу сибирской тундры (в сотрудничестве с проектом российских ученых «Плейстоценовый парк») должно восстановить прежний экологический ландшафт и в конечном итоге замедлить изменение климата. Другие ученые считают эту генно-инженерную затею авантюрой: в лучшем случае получится просто слон с ДНК мамонта, в худшем - в Сибири появится инвазивный вид, угрожающий другим ее обитателям, поскольку со времен ледникового периода тундровая экосистема претерпела значительные изменения. Наконец, причины вымирания мамонтов достоверно неизвестны, а стало быть, они вполне могут вымереть еще раз.

At first blush, it sounds like a line from Jurassic Park, the fictional dream of resurrecting creatures long dead: "We have the DNA, the technology and the leading experts in the field. Next, we will have the woolly mammoth. Alive again."
But this is a very real statement from Dallas-based biotech company Colossal, which is serious about its genetic engineering mission to recreate a version of the six-ton animal that roamed the Siberian tundra 10,000 years ago. The company’s de-extinction project aims to fill an ecological niche by letting woolly mammoth 2.0 pound the Arctic tundra once again - as soon as 2027. "Most importantly, it will inhabit the same ecosystem previously abandoned by the Mammoth’s extinction," according to Colossal’s website.
Ecological researchers aren’t convinced.
The vision of herds of insulated elephants roaming the northern plains is a pipe dream for several reasons, they say. While the new animal will have woolly mammoth DNA, it will not exhibit the same behavior, and it won’t be living in the same Ice Age ecosystem. Plus, the logistics of establishing hundreds of mammoth-sized animals on the Arctic tundra to recreate the "Mammoth Steppe" - an expanse of land in far northern regions that was once home to both the woolly mammoth and other large prehistoric mammals like rhinos and musk oxen - is an extremely challenging undertaking, even if it does work out.
Recreating a Lost World
First, researchers have to figure out why woolly mammoths failed in the first place. The most likely factors for the downfall are human over-hunting and a changing climate, which made their home on the tundra inhospitable. Shortly after the last Ice Age, which began about 1.8 million years ago and lasted until about 11,700 years ago, a warmer, wetter climate began taking over. Mammoths weren’t the only casualties - more than three-quarters of the large animals in their prairie-like environment died out shortly after this geological cold period, called the Pleistocene epoch. The final home of the very last woolly mammoths 3,700 years ago was on Wrangel Island, just off the northeastern Siberian coast.
Researchers have discovered intact curved tusks and other wooly mammoth bones and specimens under the Siberian ice. Using CRISPR-Cas9, a gene-editing tool, Colossal’s scientists plan to splice DNA segments carefully retrieved from these body parts into an Asian elephant’s DNA, which is 99.6 percent identical to the extinct mammal’s genetic code. The animal this procedure would birth (from a surrogate African elephant’s uterus) would be similar to a woolly mammoth, though not exactly the same in looks or behavior. The company hopes to produce the first of these "mammophants" by 2027.
Colossal then plans to introduce the animal into parts of Siberia or other regions that share similar characteristics with the bygone home of the Ice Age mammoth. The project website lists ten main arguments for putting a mammoth-like animal back on the tundra.
For instance, not only will it help boost numbers of elephants, whose populations are shrinking, but new herds roaming the mammoth’s old stomping grounds would help restore the ecological landscape to its former self, in part by compacting the snow cover to prevent greenhouse gas emissions from escaping the permafrost. This may ultimately slow down climate change, according to Colossal’s website. The company also expects that this project will help bolster knowledge of how to apply genetic tools to lost-species recovery efforts.
Colossal co-founder George Church says that the company is focused on resurrecting woolly mammoth genes to improve the diversity of an endangered species. The resulting mammophants would also have genetic tweaks that would give them resistance to Elephant endotheliotropic herpesvirus, a viral disease that is fatal and contributing to the downfall of Asian elephants. Like the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone National Park - which had a cascade effect on restoring an ecosystem - a modified elephant has a better chance of surviving in the long run, and would fill a missing large animal niche in the ecology of the tundra, Church says.
"We would like to start with regions of the Arctic with high soil carbon and low human population density," he tells Popular Mechanics in an email.
Conservation in an Age of Extinction
We are losing species of plants and animals at a faster pace than ever before in human history. A landmark 2019 report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services found that about 1 million animal and plant species are currently under threat of extinction.
Research funding should be spent on work that makes a difference in preserving current ecosystems and their species, ecologist and conservation biologist Douglas McCauley tells Popular Mechanics. He studies the ecology of rapidly changing ecosystems at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The concept of reintroducing a long-extinct species is mired in problems, McCauley says.
At the core is the inescapable fact that the passage of 10,000 years makes an animal belonging to that earlier time a poorly adapted time traveler. The ecosystem itself has changed in myriad ways, including climate, geological, and biological differences. All of these alterations amount to a monumental challenge for integrating a modern mammoth, McCauley says; mammoths had evolved to perform a unique ecological function when they were alive. "They were thought to actually move micronutrients across vast areas. And a lot of their trampling would pack soils and promote nutrient cycling," he explains. You need a large herd of mammoths to be able to recover these functions - but that would be tough to do with such a large creature, McCauley says. At one time, hundreds of mammoths populated the Arctic tundra.
Not to mention, a mammophant would be a different creature than the original woolly mammoth - a hybrid elephant with mammoth DNA. Even if 100 percent of the physical characteristics turn out the way Colossal plans, how the animal will actually behave will remain a genetic gamble, McCauley says. It may not live day-to-day exactly as the woolly mammoths did, which could impact the ecosystem in an unintended manner.
To add another layer of complexity, an animal that could truly replace the woolly mammoth would also need to contain its bygone era’s microbiome. This is the microscopic world of billions of microbes living inside animals’ guts. A microbiome significantly influences physical functions, like digestion, and potentially even behavior. It’s impossible to replicate a long-extinct microbiome, McCauley says. Lastly, increased human presence in the modern world presents an ethical risk, as it introduces potential for human-elephant conflict.
At worst, the mammophant could become an invasive species with a considerable negative impact, such as driving other species out by using up resources, or altering the environment too much, vertebrate paleoecologist Samantha Hopkins tells Popular Mechanics in an email. "In the case of a mammoth, you can imagine the possibility of a lot of alteration of the vegetation and the landscape given how proboscideans [an order of large mammals with tusks and long snouts] use plants, stripping bark, breaking branches, and trampling undergrowth."
Church says knocking down trees would, in fact, help restore the earlier grassland ecosystem of the tundra.
It’s also possible that the circumstances which drove the woolly mammoths to extinction in the first place will quickly derail their numbers again if they are reintroduced, says Hopkins, who specializes in the evolution of mammalian ecology at the University of Oregon in Eugene. Those reasons could include changes in the climate and habitat since the mammoths last thrived.
Hopkins considers the potential of new mammoths, too. Because lands like North America have a paucity of large vertebrates, mammophants might close that gap, and restore an ecosystem function that’s been missing for thousands of years. Hopkins adds that "the loss or abundance decrease of one species can be compensated for by another. It may also be that mammoths would restore other species interactions that we’re not even aware of now; we won’t know unless we try."
Yet, because we don’t know for sure why they went extinct, or what exact role they played in their Pleistocene-era ecosystem, wooly mammoths are a questionable choice for de-extinction efforts, Hopkins says.
"It’s worth thinking about how we should make decisions about what sort of ecosystem we’re trying to rebuild. ... It’s easy to say we’re trying to put it back the way it was, but you have to ask: when? It’s been in a lot of different states, and it’s a choice to shoot for one or the other."
Using caution is definitely part of Colossal’s strategy, Church says. He points to an ongoing long-term experiment to restore nine herbivore species to Pleistocene Park, a project by Russian scientist Sergey A. Zimov, director of the Northeast Science Station in Yakutia, in northern Siberia. Its main goal is to recreate the Ice Age ecology, and slow the thawing of Arctic permafrost. The animals in the park, including musk oxen and horses, have been helping to do that since 1997.
"Given the goal is to restore the species-rich grasslands and herbivores, then there will be ‘winners and losers’ in terms of species ratios," Church says. The introduction of the mammophants would be done in a thoughtful way, with attention to precedents from "rewilding" other keystone species. That also means also being careful not to turn a beneficial, keystone species into an invasive one that would negatively impact its environment, he adds.
Using Genetic Tools to Make Conservation Work
With global species diversity diminishing with each passing year, McCauley is worried that efforts to reinstate long-dead animals is a distraction that "downplays the gravity of the [current] extinction crisis."
On the other hand, research on genetic conservation tools is a growing field that has the potential to save many at-risk animals that play unique roles in their ecosystems. For example, the black-footed ferret, now one of the most endangered mammals in North America, is considered a flagship species, because its existence affects many other species in its prairie home. The black-footed ferret is now one such object of biotech efforts to restore its numbers.
"I think there’s a great potential to use really exciting techniques from genetic engineering from genetic conservation research. I just would not do it with woolly mammoths," McCauley says. "It’s harder to fundraise around, say a black-footed ferret, than it is around the mammoth. But from a conservation standpoint, it stands to actually make a difference."
Unfortunately, research dollars are too scarce to go to risky projects like trying to resurrect species from thousands of years ago. "Sometimes I worry that they’re appropriating conservation methods for something that will not actually create conservation gains," McCauley says.
De-extinction for long-dead species is not "the smartest investment for limited conservation dollars. [Extinction] is a crisis of our time, but it’s not the time to be creating zoos full of eco-zombies. It’s the time to take this on intelligently."

Ученые Сибирского федерального университета и Красноярского научного центра СО РАН изучили динамику численности пяти видов насекомых, питающихся хвоей деревьев в сибирской тайге, изучив данные за 1979-2017 годы. Это поможет определить, как различные факторы влияют на динамику численности насекомых и оценить риск вспышек массового размножения каждого вида.

Scientists from the Siberian Federal University and specialists from the SB RAS’s Krasnoyarsk Research Centre have studied the population dynamics of five species of forest insects that feed on tree needles in the Siberian taiga. To do this, they created and analyzed a series of data on the dynamics of the number of insects for the period from 1979 to 2017. This information helps to assess how various factors - food, natural phenomena, human intervention - affect the dynamics of the development of the insect pest population and make it possible to identify the zone in which an outbreak may begin.
As is known, outbreaks of mass reproduction are another most important factor in the death of taiga forests, the second only to fires. To predict and take measures to prevent outbreaks, it is necessary to understand the mechanisms of their occurrence. For example, how the growth in the number of different species of forest insects in one habitat or one species in different habitats relate to each other. At the same time, these data need to be accumulated over decades, and such field studies are carried out quite rarely.
"In total, three of the longest series of data on the dynamics of insect abundance are known in world forest entomology - a 120-year series of the larch tortrix in the Swiss Alps and a 60-year series of the pine looper in Thuringia (Germany) and the Southern Urals. Our series for five species of needle-eating insects in the Krasnoturansk pine forest in the south of Krasnoyarsk Territory, the number of which we annually estimated from 1979 to 2017, apparently, is the fourth in the world in terms of length. There are much more short time series, but it is practically impossible to obtain reliable statistical estimates of the relationships between pest densities in different years," said Olga Tarasova, one of the authors of the work, professor of the Department of Ecology and Environmental Management at the School of Ecology and Geography, Siberian Federal University.
According to Ms. Tarasova, the work proposes a method for calculating the regulatory characteristics of the population dynamics of phytophagous insects. It allows determining the characteristics of the dynamics of these populations and assessing the risk of outbreaks of mass reproduction of each species of insects.
Interactions between generations of insect populations are characterized by positive feedbacks (when the insect population density increases from generation to generation) and negative feedbacks (when the current population density decreases relative to the density in previous years). It is safe to say that the combination of positive and negative feedbacks locks the population in a stable state, prevents outbreaks of mass reproduction, and stabilizes the ecosystem. However, these relationships do not always hold the population in a stable state, and in order to assess the risk of loss of stability, it is necessary to evaluate the regulatory properties of the populations.
"To assess the nature of the regulation of population dynamics, we used such an indicator as the stability margin. This indicator helps to quantify the possibility of a population "ejection" beyond the boundaries of the system’s stability. Calculations of the stability margins for different species of insects in various habitats showed that the minimum stability margin is typical for populations of the pine looper in habitats where an outbreak of mass reproduction of this species was previously observed. The results we obtained make it possible to assess the risks of outbreaks of mass reproduction and approach the solution of the problem of predicting such outbreaks more accurately," summed up Vladislav Soukhovolsky, co-author of the study, professor of the Department of Hunting Resource Studies and Nature Reserve Management of the School of Ecology and Geography, Siberian Federal University.

В Институте ядерной физики им. Г.И.Будкера СО РАН на экпериментальной установке СМОЛА (спиральная магнитная открытая ловушка) удалось увеличить плотность плазмы в 1,5 раза и снизить ее отток в 10 раз. Цель подобных исследовании - достичь температуры, плотности и времени удержания плазмы, необходимых для термоядерного синтеза.

The GI Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (INP SB RAS) has succeeded in increasing the plasma density by 1.5 times in its SMOLA fusion facility. It also slowed down plasma outflow by 10 times. Research in the field of controlled thermonuclear fusion is being carried out using experimental facilities based on various magnetic confinement systems. They all have the same goal - to achieve the temperature, density and plasma confinement time necessary for thermonuclear fusion.
While many fusion projects, including the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in France, use a closed-type magnetic trap for the plasma - a tokamak - others use open magnetic traps. Researchers at INP use several open type experimental facilities, including SMOLA, which is an open trap with a spiral magnetic plasma confinement. The scientists recently published two scientific papers detailing the results of their experiments in the Journal of Plasma Physics.
One of the advantages of open systems is that they, unlike tokamaks, they can achieve a high ratio of plasma pressure to magnetic field pressure. Specialists from the INP have already managed to achieve a ratio of 0.6 and are striving to reach unity. However, while open magnetic traps are simple in geometry, similar to a bottle with two necks, they permit a strong outflow of plasma at the end holes. To solve the problem INP developed and built its experimental SMOLA (Spiral magnetic open trap) facility.
"The lines of force of the magnetic field in open traps are not closed, as, for example, in tokamaks, therefore, the plasma is retained only in the middle of the installation, and can flow out at the ends," explained senior researcher Anton Sudnikov. To reduce this outflow magnetic "plugs" are put in place that increase the magnetic field. At another INP facility, RESIN, a different type of magnetic plug was tried. "RESIN differs from other open traps in that at one end, instead of the usual magnetic plug, we installed a screw plug. It is the helical magnetic field that can ‘drag’ the outflowing plasma back to the centre of the trap," Sudnikov said.
In recent experiments using a strong helical magnetic field INP specialists were able to reduce the flow of the outflowing plasma to such an extent that they could no longer register it. "Theory predicts that in the presence of a helical field, plasma confinement should be enhanced. This is what we observed in the experiment," Sudnikov noted. "But the most important result of our experiments… is that when a helical field is added, the plasma density also increases by 1.5 times. The dependence is simple: the more the plasma is confined in the trap, the denser it becomes, and the more efficient our entire multi-mirror system with screw confinement works in general."
Thanks to the results obtained, scientists were able to move further in the study of controlled thermonuclear fusion. Thus, for example, at thermonuclear parameters of a plasma, for its effective confinement in a multiple-mirror trap, it is necessary that the ions collide and scatter more frequently. But with useful thermonuclear parameters, this just does not happen - the ion is scattered by other ions too rarely and can fly through the trap, then even the helical field will not pull it back.
INP scientists have since made further progress towards controlled fusion using another open trap facility - the GOL-3 (corrugated open trap. The next major step will be the development of an installation for confining thermonuclear plasma using a gas dynamic magnetic trap (GDML). INP hopes the GDML will demonstrate the possibility of designing a compact, economically and environmentally attractive thermonuclear reactor based on open-type magnetic traps.
"The letter ‘M’ in GDML means that the trap will be multimirror. In the basic version, this is just a magnetic field constricted by magnetic plugs. But if all our new achievements are applied in this project, then it will be possible to add a screw plug at the ends of the GDML, as on RESIN," Sudnikov said. "The results of our experiments allow us to hope that the screw sections will increase efficiency. The size and complexity of the facility will remain the same, but we will increase the density and improve the quality of confinement and, accordingly, we will be closer to the fusion parameters that we need."

Еще один российский корабль, пристыкованный к Международной космической станции, дал течь и разгерметизировался - на сей раз это оказался грузовой «Прогресс МС-21», у которого упало давление во внешней системе охлаждения. Инцидент произошел 11 февраля, почти сразу после того, как к МКС успешно пристыковался второй грузовой корабль «Прогресс МС-22».

Russia's state-owned space corporation, Roscosmos, reported Saturday that a Progress supply ship attached to the International Space Station has lost pressure in its external cooling system.
In its statement, Roscosmos said there was no threat to the seven crew members on board the orbiting laboratory. NASA, too, said the hatch between the Progress MS-21 vehicle and the space station was open. Notably, the incident with the supply ship came within hours of the safe docking of another Progress ship, MS-22, which is in good health.
Although the initial Roscosmos statement was vague about the depressurization event, Dmitry Strugovets, a former head of space agency Roscosmos' press service, later clarified it was a coolant leak. "All of the coolant has leaked out," he said via Telegram.
This is the second Russian spacecraft to suffer a cooling system leak in less than two months at the space station.
Déjà vu
On December 14, 2022, as two cosmonauts were preparing to conduct a spacewalk outside the space station, the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft docked nearby began to leak uncontrollably from its external cooling loop. This system carries heat away from the interior of the spacecraft.
This Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft had been due to bring cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin, as well as NASA's Frank Rubio, back to Earth in March. Russian engineers eventually declared that a micrometeorite had struck the external cooling loop of the spacecraft and deemed it unsafe to fly home.
In January, officials from Roscosmos and NASA said a replacement Soyuz spacecraft will launch to and autonomously dock with the station in February. The crew that would have flown in the damaged Soyuz MS-22 vehicle, including Rubio, will instead fly home in this Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft later in 2023. The leaky Soyuz MS-22 vehicle will make an autonomous return to Earth, bereft of crew, likely in March.
It is not clear how directly the leaks in the Progress and Soyuz spacecraft are related. According to one NASA source, however, there was some preliminary data received from the Progress vehicle that indicated a similar cooling system issue. External cameras showed flakes moving away from the Progress vehicle - frozen coolant - similar to that observed with Soyuz MS-22.
Growing list of failures
Roscosmos said Saturday the Progress incident "will have no impact on the future station program." This is likely true for Progress MS-21, at least. The spacecraft already has been packed with trash and other material to be removed from the station and was due to leave next week, burning up in Earth's atmosphere during reentry.
However, it seems too early to make such a conclusion for future missions. A critical question is what caused the depressurization event observed Saturday. It seems improbable that a second micrometeorite would have struck a second Russian spacecraft in less than two months. This raises doubts about whether the Soyuz MS-22 failure was indeed a micrometeorite issue - Russia has never released images of the impact site - and instead perhaps a manufacturing defect.
A few hours after the Progress depressurization Saturday there are more questions than answers, but none of this will comfort NASA as it partners with Russia to continue operating the space station. These latest Soyuz and Progress failures are just two in a long line of recent issues, including the Nauka module's misfiring thrusters in 2021, a Soyuz booster failure in 2018 that forced Aleksey Ovchinin and Nick Hague to make an emergency return to Earth, or another leaky Soyuz vehicle.
These are the kinds of problems that one might expect from a space industry in Russia that is reliant on aging infrastructure, aging technology, and quality-control issues due to inadequate budgets.

Российские исследователи изучили структуру ферредоксинов из туберкулезной палочки - небольших белков, обспечивающих протекание некоторых химических реакций внутри клетки, например, клеточного дыхания. Геном палочки Коха содержит пять ферредоксинов, два из которых связаны с генами цитохромов Р450, а последние, в свою очередь - потенциальные мишени для нового поколения противотуберкулезных препаратов.

Des chercheurs russes ont récemment fait une découverte qui permettrait de faire avancer la lutte contre la tuberculose. Ces travaux menés par l’Institut des sciences et des technologies de Skolkovo (Skoltech) en partenariat avec l’Institut de physique et de technologie de Moscou (MIPT), l’Institut de chimie bioorganique (IBOCH NAS) et l’Institut de recherche, d’analyse et de stratégie (RAS) ont porté sur les ferrédoxines du bacille tuberculeux.
Les scientifiques ont notamment étudié leurs structures ainsi que leurs relations avec des protéines partenaires. À noter que les ferrédoxines jouent un rôle central dans les principales voies métaboliques des cellules.
Ces petites protéines sont indispensables au bon déroulement de la série de réactions chimiques qui se produisent à l’intérieur d’une cellule.
Des molécules indispensables, mais encore peu connues
Les ferrédoxines comptent parmi les protéines les plus anciennes de la planète. Elles remplissent diverses fonctions importantes pour la survie de la cellule grâce à un groupement fer-soufre. Le rôle de la ferrédoxine dépend de la structure du groupement fer-soufre ainsi que des acides aminés qui la composent.
Ces petites protéines sont responsables de la réduction du dioxyde de carbone, de la respiration cellulaire et sont impliqués dans d’autres processus cellulaires liés au transfert d’électrons. Les scientifiques savent déjà quels gènes codent les différents types de ferrédoxine. Ils ont déjà pu identifier les molécules avec lesquelles elles interagissent. Seulement, les mécanismes d’action de la plupart d’entre elles restent largement méconnus jusqu’à présent.
On pourrait cibler les ferrédoxines dans les futurs médicaments
Dans l’étude qu’ils ont publiée dans la revue scientifique Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences, les chercheurs russes ont rapporté que le génome du Mycobacterium tuberculosis contient cinq ferrédoxines. Deux d’entre eux sont situés juste à côté des gènes qui codent le cytochrome P450, un enzyme très important. Ils ont également mis en évidence une relation d’affinité entre ces deux molécules.
Ces résultats laissent à penser que ces ferrédoxines peuvent devenir des cibles potentielles pour tuer les bactéries responsables de la tuberculose. Cette étude est donc d’une grande importance pour la médecine. Elle pourrait permettre de mettre au point la prochaine génération de médicaments antituberculeux.

Международная команда испанских, японских, норвежских и российских ученых обнаружила, что дендритные клетки XCR1+ могут играть важную роль в иммунотерапии хронических вирусных инфекций. Эти клетки влияют на реактивацию истощенных лимфоцитов, ответственных за очищение инфицированных клеток и поддержку низкой вирусной нагрузки.

An international study led by researchers from the Infection Biology Laboratory at the UPF Department of Medicine and Life Sciences (MELIS) establishes that one type of dendritic cells is crucial for the success of immunotherapeutic treatments to control chronic viral infections. These dendritic cells have been found to be key in reactivating exhausted lymphocytes responsible for clearing infected cells to keep the viral load low.
Chronic viral infections, such as those caused by human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) or hepatitis B and C viruses, are characterized by a persistent viral load. This is maintained by a balance between the expansion of the virus and the expansion of exhausted T lymphocytes, which, once the viral load increases, become active, multiply and eliminate infected cells.
In HIV-infected patients, infection has been controlled with antiviral therapy that reduces the viral load to below detectable levels. However, this is transitory, as the viral load increases dramatically when treatment is stopped. With 650,000 people worldwide dying from HIV and 1.5 million acquiring the virus each year, there is a need to find a functional cure that controls the virus without causing disease and avoids the side effects and burden on health systems that antiviral therapy entails. Hence, immunotherapies based on checkpoint inhibitors that block proteins that prevent the immune system from attacking infected cells, are considered a promising therapy.
The study published in Cell Reports determines that the various types of dendritic cells differ in their ability to reactivate exhausted lymphocytes during checkpoint immunotherapy. It also identifies XCR1+ cross-presenting dendritic cells as key elements that trigger exhausted lymphocyte reactivation in checkpoint inhibitor-based immunotherapies. Therefore, XCR1+ cross-presenting dendritic cells are a promising therapeutic target to improve virus control during chronic viral infection.
The study, performed in a mouse model of the chronic lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus -that partly resembles human chronic HIV and hepatitis virus infections-, opens the possibility of considering combination immunotherapies including checkpoint inhibitors that target cross-presenting dendritic cells as an interesting therapy option for HIV-infected individuals.
"Our findings are an important step forward in understanding the requirements for cure strategies in chronic infections", says Eva Domenjo, first author of the manuscript. "The next steps now are to improve the duration of the therapeutic benefits and translate the data from the model system to the clinical practice", adds Andreas Meyerhans, who coordinated the work together with Jordi Argilaguet.
Considering analogous findings in cancer immunotherapy, this not only argues for immunological similarities between chronic infections and cancers but also gives hope for a timely translation into clinical applications.

Европейский центр ядерных исследований (ЦЕРН) наконец урегулировал вопрос о научных статьях с участием российских ученых. С марта прошлого года их публикация была приостановлена, из-за чего в подвешенном состоянии оказались более 250 работ на серверах препринтов и около 100 работ, уже принятых в журналы. Теперь российских ученых решено указывать с международным идентификатором ORCID, но без аффилиации с институтами РФ и указания финансирующих организаций. Впрочем, некоторые детали еще обсуждаются, и последние два пункта могут быть включены в метаданные.

Physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) say they have settled a dispute over how to acknowledge authorship of Russian and Belarusian scientists on their research papers - one of the tensions that has affected global physics collaborations since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Since March 2022, more than 250 manuscripts reporting LHC results have been posted on preprint servers without any author names, affiliations or funder details. But their progress to peer-reviewed publication has been frozen while scientists disagreed about how to list authors. Journals have formally accepted more than 100 of these papers and sometimes made them available on their websites, described as ‘in press’ - but without an author list. The agreements, reached quietly in early February 2023, should mean that journals can now proceed with formal publication.
CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, manages the LHC accelerator, while the detectors along its 27-kilometre ring are built and run by independent collaborations, made up of researchers from countries worldwide. More than 1,000 Russian scientists work at CERN, many of them on experiments at the LHC. After February 2022, CERN’s council decided to allow researchers with Russian affiliations to continue working there, but to let its existing agreements with Russia and its ally Belarus lapse when they end in 2024. The council also voted to suspend new collaborations and contracts with the two countries.
Meanwhile, some researchers working on LHC experiments said that they did not want their work co-authored by Russian scientists - or that they could accept sharing authorship as long as their colleagues’ Russian institutions or funding agencies were not mentioned. Some governmental science funders, including those in Poland and Ukraine, supported this stance. But Poland’s science ministry pointed out that the country’s institutions must annually list all of their publications with proof of the ministry’s funding support - nixing the idea that journals could simply publish papers with author names only, with no funding details or affiliations.
After almost a year of debate, researchers on the collaboration boards of the LHC’s four largest experiments - ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb - have now voted by majority to reach a technical solution. Papers will list most authors with their affiliations and their Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID), which leads to a profile page on which scientists can list their institutions. But Russian and Belarusian researchers will be listed only with their ORCID, and a note that they are affiliated with an institute or laboratory "covered by a cooperation agreement with CERN", a CERN spokesperson tells Nature. Journals will be allowed to include full author and affiliation lists in metadata. The spokesperson said that some details are still under discussion, including guidelines for the use of metadata, and how details of funding agencies will go into papers. (One suggestion is that Russian funders won’t be visibly mentioned, but could be included in the metadata.)
The solution differs from a compromise reached by researchers with another international physics experiment, Belle II, at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) in Tsukuba, Japan.
In June 2022, the organization declared that papers would list only the names of authors. Then, in October, its board revised that position, saying that authors would be listed with their ORCID but not their affiliation, and that funders would be recognized in an acknowledgments list, with a footnote adding that the acknowledgments "are not to be interpreted as an endorsement of any statement made by any of our institutes, funding agencies, governments, or their representatives".
A spokesperson for Poland’s science ministry says that the Belle II collaboration’s policy still doesn’t meet its requirements, but adds that Polish researchers at Belle II don’t currently use science ministry financing.

Журнал Nature проанализировал статистику совместных публикаций в 2022 году по базам данных Scopus и Dimensions. Результаты показали, что доля российских статей, написанных в соавторстве с западными учеными, снизилась, при этом увеличилась доля статей с соавторами из Китая и Индии. При этом следует учитывать, что многие статьи, опубликованные в прошлом году, были отправлены в журналы задолго до сворачивания международных коллабораций, а сами реферативные базы данных из-за особенностей индексации будут пополнять свои коллекции 2022 года еще несколько месяцев. Кроме того, Китай активно развивает научное соавторство с большинством стран, кроме США, поэтому пример с Россией не является чем-то исключительным.

A year into Russia’s invasion in Ukraine, its effects on global research collaborations might be starting to show up in the scientific literature.
Nature analysed co-authorship patterns on papers in the Scopus database. The results suggest that, in 2022, an increased share of Russia’s internationally collaborative papers had co-authors from China and India, whereas the proportion co-written with US or German authors fell. Ukraine, meanwhile, has sharply reduced its scholarly ties with Russia, and seems to have increased research connections with Poland.
The data available so far can only hint at possible changes, which will become more apparent later this year. Many of the papers published in 2022 were submitted to journals well before Western institutions halted scientific partnerships with Russia in response to the full-scale invasion, which began on 24 February. And databases of scientific papers will continue filling up their 2022 collections for another month or two, owing to routine indexing delays, so the raw numbers of papers will continue to increase. (Relative proportions of co-authorship are unlikely to vary at this stage.)
Co-authorship changes
Last year, just over a quarter of Russia’s papers and review articles - as recorded in Scopus - were internationally co-authored, a similar proportion to the year before. China is now close to overtaking the United States and Germany to become Russia’s top research partner, and India has soared up the rankings to seventh place (see ‘Russia’s top partners’). Among Russia’s top 25 collaborators, the only other countries that have increased their share of its international co-authorships in 2022 are Kazakhstan and Iran.
Kieron Flanagan, a science-policy researcher at the University of Manchester, UK, cautions that co-authorships are an imperfect proxy for real research-collaboration patterns, and that it’s too early to draw conclusions from the available data. But he says that it does look like Russia has seen a long-term relative decline in research collaborations with Western countries, and this trend could have accelerated in 2022.
China is increasing its scientific co-authorship share with most countries except the United States, so its rising influence on Russia might not be particularly unusual, says Caroline Wagner, a science and policy researcher at the Ohio State University in Columbus. "The Russia-Ukraine conflict does not appear to have interrupted Russia and China’s cooperation," she says.
In Ukraine, meanwhile, the proportion of papers with Russian co-authors fell sharply in 2022, and Poland is the country’s clear leading research partner (see ‘Ukraine’s top partners’). Around 38% of Ukraine’s papers in 2022 were internationally co-authored - a slightly higher proportion than in previous years.
Nature found similar patterns in a parallel analysis of scientific papers in a different scholarly database, Dimensions (which differs from Scopus in its choice of journals to index). But according to the Dimensions data, Ukraine’s collaboration with Poland has not increased: it has remained at around the same level since 2021.
Cutting research ties
Many research organizations cut collaboration activities with Russia shortly after its invasion of Ukraine. Some funders, including those in Poland and Germany, strongly discouraged researchers from continuing to co-author papers with Russian scientists. The German Research Foundation (DFG) - the country’s main funding agency - said that this didn’t apply to work that had been completed or submitted to journals before the invasion, and a DFG spokesperson adds that the agency is not monitoring its recommendations or introducing punishments for researchers who go against them.
The research community has also discussed individual boycotts of Russian work - including in journals. International journals have generally not banned the consideration of Russian-authored work, and some researchers and journals have warned against indiscriminately isolating the country’s scientists. But at least one title, Elsevier’s Journal of Molecular Science, has said it will no longer consider manuscripts from scientists at Russian institutions. Its editor-in-chief, Rui Fausto, a chemist at the University of Coimbra in Portugal, says that the policy still stands, although Nature’s analysis found at least nine articles published in the journal that had Russian authors and had been submitted after the Russia’s invasion began. (Fausto says that he is looking into them.)
The Ukrainian government has strongly discouraged collaboration with Russian researchers and publication in Russian journals, says Michael Rose, who studies the economics of science and innovation at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Munich, Germany.
The armed conflict has come in a general period where nations have become more aware of the competitive geopolitical aspects of research collaboration, Flanagan adds, with countries expanding export controls and introducing restrictions on overseas collaboration in certain activities that have been deemed sensitive to national security.

Экспедиция Института археологии РАН обнаружила под Муромом средневековое поселение с кладбищем. Одной из находок стал вышитый на золототканой ленте Деисис - одно из традиционных иконических изображений Христа. Вышивка выполнена с большим мастерством, а сама лента, скорее всего, была частью женского головного убора.

Archaeologists from the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences have unearthed a rare embroidered deisis depicting Jesus Christ in a medieval burial ground. The discovery was made during construction works for the Moscow-Kazan high-speed highway, where archaeologists found a medieval settlement covering an area of 8.6 acres and an associated Christian cemetery.
Excavations have exhumed 46 graves, one of which contained a woman aged between 16 to 25 years of age, who was buried with an embroidered Deisis depicting Jesus Christ and John the Baptist.
In Byzantine art, and in later Eastern Orthodox art generally, the Deisis is a traditional iconic representation of Christ in Majesty or Christ Pantocrator. In traditional examples, Mary (mother of Jesus) and John the Baptist are shown facing towards Christ with their hands raised in supplication on behalf of humanity.
The archaeologists suggest that the embroidered fabric was once a headdress made from a dark silk samite. Similar examples have been found at the Ivorovsky necropolis near Staritsa depicting the image of Michael the Archangel with a spear, or the embroidered faces of saints and crosses found in the Karoshsky burial ground in the Yaroslavl region.
The fabric measures 12.1 cm long by 5.5 cm and is made up of two parts connected by a vertical seam consisting of a woven gold ribbon with a braided pattern. The lining of the fabric has not survived; however, a microscopic inspection has found remnants of birch bark and needle punctures along the lower and upper edges.
The central figure on the fabric depicts a frontal image of Jesus Christ in a blessing gesture, while on the right is John the Baptist in a prayerful pose facing him. The inspection has revealed that on the left was once another figure, likely Mary, however this figure is now lost.
Speaking on the discovery, the researchers commented that the: "highest level of craftsmanship, jewellery subtlety and elegance went into making this miniature embroidery."

Российские физики разработали алгоритм на основе нейронной сети, позволяющий с точностью 90% определять температуру Аррениуса (при которой начинается изменение агрегатного состояния) для большого количества материалов. Алгоритм был протестирован на металлических, силикатных, боратных и органических соединениях.

A joint paper by the Department of Computational Physics and Modeling of Physical Processes and Udmurt Federal Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences published in the journal Materials introduces an algorithm that allows for the correct estimation of the crossover temperature for a large class of materials, regardless of their compositions or glass-forming abilities.
The algorithm can help speed up the production of many materials, including metal alloys, and simplify quality control during such production. An algorithm based on a neural network created at KFU makes it possible to accurately calculate the Arrhenius temperature from several physical parameters of the material.
Among the parameters used by the team for modeling were melting temperature, glass transition temperature, and brittleness value. They are used to describe phase transitions and structural changes in liquids during cooling.
Co-author, Associate Professor Bulat Galimzyanov says, "Many solid materials, such as glass, metals, plastics, initially have the form of melts - they are viscous liquids that solidify at a certain temperature, turning into a solid state. The temperature at which a change in the state of aggregation begins is called the Arrhenius temperature. When approaching it, the atoms of matter begin to move in groups and more slowly than before. This indicates the preparation of the liquid for solidification."
The algorithm was tested for metallic, silicate, borate, and organic glasses. According to Galimzyanov, "We found out that for the created neural network, the melting and glass transition temperatures of the material are significant and sufficient characteristics for estimating the Arrhenius temperature. From these two values, the algorithm determined the Arrhenius temperature for all analyzed liquids with an accuracy of more than 90%."
The scientists worked out an equation linking the Arrhenius temperature with the melting temperatures and the glass transition temperature.
"Glass transition and melting temperatures are easily measured in lab condition. Furthermore, they can be found in literature. Thus, determining the Arrhenius temperature has now become easier. We can analyze the properties of liquids faster and estimate the characteristics of resulting solid materials more precisely," says Galimzyanov.
The team further plans to adapt the created algorithm to more complex materials, such as polymers.

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