Российская наука и мир (дайджест)

В журнале Science опубликованы результаты исследований, проведенных группой ученых из университета штата Мэриленд, возглавляемых Константином Винниковым. Наблюдаемое уменьшение площади поверхности льда примерно до 14,000 квадратных миль в год связано с глобальным потеплением и вызывается человеческой деятельностью.
В новом исследовании использованы два вида данных об объеме льда Арктического моря. Первые содержат измерения, проводимые с 1953, а вторые - охватывают данные за 20 лет с 1978 по 1998 и базируются на снимках, сделанных из космоса. Оба источника ясно показывают, что площадь поверхности льда уменьшается в среднем на 3 процента за десятилетие. В сообщении совместной Норвежско-Российской группы ученых говорится, что за 20 лет (1978-98) поверхность льда уменьшилась на 14 процентов.

The amount of sea ice in Arctic waters is shrinking, on average, by about 14,000 square miles a year, an area larger than Maryland and Delaware combined, probably because of global warming caused by human activity. That is the potentially controversial conclusion of a new international study that combined 46 years of data documenting the declining extent of Northern Hemisphere sea ice and analyzed the information using two leading computer programs that simulate world climate.
At issue is one of the most ominous questions in science and environmental policy: Is the disappearance of so much ice the result of ordinary natural variations in Arctic conditions? Or is it the byproduct of global warming caused by civilization's release of "greenhouse" gases into the atmosphere?
The results indicate less than a 2 percent probability that the melting of the past 20 years is due to normal climate variation. That is, a decline that large would be seen only about two out of 100 times in computer models that calculate the long-term interactions of water, air, land, sunlight and the like to simulate the way the world's climate changes naturally over time. The authors further found only a 0.1 percent chance that the whole 46-year trend could have occurred in the course of natural fluctuations. But when they compared the same data to the output of models incorporating recent greenhouse-gas and aerosol emissions, the computer and observed results were almost identical.
"This strongly suggests that the observed decrease in northern hemisphere sea ice is related to [human-caused] global warming," wrote the team of nine scientists headed by Konstantin Y. Vinnikov of the University of Maryland in today's issue of the journal Science.
Some other researchers have suggested that the shrinking Arctic ice may be related to global warming, but the new study is the first to bring together five independent data sets and show that the trends in each are extremely similar. The computer analysis technique the authors used is familiar in other global warming studies, but has never before been applied to Arctic ice.
The amount of the measured ice decline has not been in dispute. Whether the shrinkage is unnaturally large is a different matter. Even 50 years is a very short time in terms of global climate variation, and there are no measurements going back for thousands of years.
So the only possible comparison is to the results of computer models. The credibility of the result "comes down directly to one question: How good is the model at simulating natural variability?" said veteran ice researcher and co-author Claire L. Parkinson of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. And the team used models that are "very well known and reputable," she said.
The analysis is "as careful and robust a piece of work as you can do," said Jerry Mahlman, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J. Many climate researchers regard the laboratory's climate model, which was used in the new study, as the world's most sophisticated. Nonetheless, "I am not convinced that the natural variability of ice extent simulated by the model is realistic," said Richard E. Moritz, director of the multiyear SHEBA (Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic Ocean) Project Office at the University of Washington.
The other computer model, devised by the Hadley Centre research group in England, showed approximately similar results.
The Arctic ice covers an area roughly the size of the United States, or about 4 million square miles, and ranges in thickness from an inch in "seasonal" ice to 10 feet or more in "multiyear" formations that do not melt over the summer. It has a profound effect on heat exchange; open water absorbs as much as 100 times more solar energy than ice. The amount of ice also affects density, salinity and flow of sea water in much of the Atlantic and elsewhere. In theory, a substantial change in ice extent could prompt severe alterations in ocean circulation, and hence in weather.
The new study uses two kinds of data on Arctic sea ice extent. One consists of ground-based measurements beginning in 1953. The other covers the 19.4 years from 1978 to 1998 when comprehensive satellite images became available.
Both sources clearly show the extent of total sea ice decreasing by about 3 percent per decade. Another paper in today's issue of Science, by a joint Norwegian and Russian team, reports that multiyear ice shrank by 14 percent in the 20 years from 1978 to 1998.
Mahlman and many other computer model proponents don't find that surprising, since the Princeton laboratory's model "essentially nails the amount of [global] warming in the 20th century, especially the fast run-up in the past two decades," he said. So naturally, "it also predicts the sea ice" decline.
That is not, however, a universal opinion. Moritz finds it suspicious that the model shows the same amount of sea-ice variation over the 20th century as it does for the last 5,000 years. It is almost always the case, Moritz notes, that any climate trends over a long term show much more variability than in a short term. It is possible, he believes, that the Princeton model "underestimates the natural variability" because relatively little is known about the physics of sea ice and the way heat is transported in the Arctic.
Parkinson said the team is planning to compare the observations with other models. Her group also used the climate models to extrapolate ice loss into the next century. Both estimates indicated a decline of 20 percent or more from current levels, which are already approximately 8 percent below the measured ice extent early in this century.
If that were to occur, no one knows what impact it might have on the region, or the entire Northern Hemisphere. Certainly it would affect Arctic wildlife, since many marine organisms that live under the ice are the primary energy source at the bottom of the food web.
In addition, "if the Arctic Ocean quit being a heat sink, it would change the balance of heat transfer between the tropics and the pole in ways we can't predict right now," said Michael Ledbetter, director of the Arctic System Science Program at the National Science Foundation."But I don't know how many highly technological economies would want to go through that experiment."

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PRNewswire / Monday December 6, 8:07 am Eastern Time

SevenMountains Software Chosen by TELCOT Institute
for Telemedicine Project: 7M Integrate Allows Real-Time Collaboration Between United States and Russian Scientists.

SOURCE: SevenMountains Software, Inc.

Существуют две основные цели, которые преследует проект Telemedicine. Одна из них - разработать совместный программное обеспечение для телемедицинского обслуживания, которое удовлетворит потребности здравоохранения уральского региона. Это программное обеспечение будет использоваться для дистанционного анализа и лечения российских пациентов, которые были подвергнуты долговременному воздействию низких доз радиации после ядерного взрыва в 1957. Вторая цель состоит в том, чтобы создать деловые возможности для ученых Снежинска, занимая их в совместном исследовании и развитии программного обеспечения Telemedicine.

NEW YORK -- Java Business Conference, Dec. 6 /PRNewswire/ -- SevenMountains Software, a leading provider of collaborative computing solutions for intranets, extranets and virtual private networks (VPN), has been asked to join a project conducted by the TELCOT Institute at the California State University, Hayward, on behalf of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the City of Livermore to create a prototype for joint research among scientists in the Bay Area, California and Snezhinsk, Russia.
SevenMountains' 7M Integrate product will be utilized by the Institute as an intelligent data base management system. This system will provide control of patient records in multipoint collaborative satellite-terrestrial environments in which records are combined with medical images.
Third-party applications will include software currently being used by the TELCOT Institute, as well as imaging software provided by New Mexico Software that allows for the exchange and viewing of high-resolution medical images such as x-rays. This entire collaboration will take place within a real-time virtual private network using satellite communications as the primary source of data transfer.
SevenMountains CEO Morten von Krogh said, "As government agencies transition from a client-server model to a network computing model, SevenMountains wants to be at the forefront of new technologies such as telemedicine to show how government can expand their research using our unique, powerful solutions."

The Snezhinsk Project

According to TELCOT, there are two primary objectives to the project. One is to develop a collaborative telemedicine service provider that will meet the health care needs in the Ural Mountains. This undertaking will include remote analysis and treatment of Russian patients who have been exposed to long-term, low-level radiation that has plagued the region since a nuclear explosion took place in 1957. The second objective is to create business opportunities for Snezhinsk scientists by engaging them in collaborative research and development of telemedicine software. They will commercialize the resulting products in the US and more importantly, they will use the newly-developed tools to improve the quality of healthcare in the Snezhinsk region.
Dr. Alexander Bordetsky, Director of the TELCOT Institute said, "SevenMountains provided us with the missing link for the Snezhinsk project: a framework which allows us to seamlessly and securely integrate complex telemedicine applications and serve them up remotely via satellite to create a real-time collaborative environment."

The TELCOT-SevenMountains Partnership

The Telcot Institute will make the 7M Integrate application framework and groupware suite their standard global networking environment. Through this partnership domestic and global entities will connect via an ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) configuration over satellite or through the Internet. Participants will be able to publish and share any data, and collaborate in a secure private network. TELCOT and SevenMountains' strategic alliance includes co-development, co-research and the sharing of advanced testbed facilities. The focus of this venture will be on satellite and communications management, intelligent management of high-speed terrestrial communication, and collaborative teleconferencing and data exchange. All applications and tools that evolve from this alliance will be integrated into future versions of the SevenMountains' 7M Integrate framework.

About SevenMountains Software, Inc.

SevenMountains Software, founded in 1997 and headquartered in San Mateo, CA, provides a leading integration framework for creating server-centric solutions, complete with a tailored desktop environment and team-focused groupware suite. The company's flagship product, 7M Enterprise, is designed for use in cross-platform and thin client computing environments, providing a virtual private network that allows real-time collaborative computing over the Internet or via satellite. This solution provides organizations greater control over their mission-critical data and allows seamless integration with existing information resources and legacy systems. For more information, call 650-574-5023 or visit our Web site at www.sevenmountains.com.

About the TELCOT Institute

TELCOT (Telecommunications Management and Collaborative Technologies) is the telecommunications research and development arm of California State University, Hayward, and works in cooperation with worldwide partners to promote advances in telecommunications technologies into organizational management. Their work includes satellite, terrestrial and collaborative multimedia communications. Some specific areas of R&D include intelligent command and control, telemedicine, distance learning and virtual teamwork applications. Current partners include Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, NASA, Cisco, Stanford University, and New Mexico Software.

NOTE: All trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners.
SOURCE: SevenMountains Software, Inc.

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The Associated Press / Wednesday December 1 9:37 AM ET

Russian Weapons History Detailed

Три Российских эксперта в статье, опубликованной на этой неделе в Гааге, назвали 24 предприятия, производившие химическое оружие в бывшем СССР. Советский Союз был одним из крупнейших производителей смертельного химического вооружения, наряду с Соединенными Штатами. Детализируя планы уничтожения шести фабрик и перепрофилирования 18 других на коммерческие нужды, статья российских должностных лиц проливает свет на особенности оружейного производства. Организация по запрещению химических вооружений наблюдает за выполнением международного соглашения о запрете химического оружия 1993 года, которое Россия ратифицировала в ноябре 1997.

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) -- Detailing plans to destroy six chemical weapons factories and convert another 18 for commercial use, an article by Russian officials has shed light on weapons production in the former Soviet Union. The 24 former production sites are named in an article by three Russian experts published this week by the Hague-based Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. The OPCW oversees the international chemical weapons ban treaty of 1993, which Russia ratified in November 1997.
A chemical weapons expert, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the article establishes that the former Soviet Union was one of the world's two largest manufacturers of lethal chemical weaponry, along with the United States.
It was not clear from the article when the major periods of production were. However, it said that none of the facilities are currently being used for purposes banned under the treaty. Six sites slated for demolition formerly produced the extremely poisonous chemicals mustard, sarin, soman, VX, lewisite and munitions containing hydrogen cyanide and phosgene. It could take until 2004 to complete the job because of the lengthy process of decontamination, it said. Under OPCW guidelines, Russia must convert or destroy all the production sites by March 2007.
Of the 18 remaining factories, eight have already been stripped of their capabilities to make weapons and 10 others are still capable of manufacturing poison, but are being converted, the article says.
Due to a serious economic crisis, Russia is only capable of funding 10 percent of the $110 million plan, making assistance from other countries critical. Joint ventures with commercial chemical manufacturers hoping to exploit new Russian markets could also be a source of funding, it adds. OPCW officials could not confirm that three licenses have already been issued for demolition. Svetlana Utkina, a government scientist, Alexander Gorbovsky, a munitions expert, and Alexander Zhuchkov, an economist, authored the article for the November/December issue of Synthesis, an OPCW newsletter.
Dutch officials discussing Russian and East European disarmament on Tuesday stressed the need for higher contributions from donor countries. The Netherlands has already contributed $11.5 million to Russian programs.

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Reuters / Friday December 3 1:21 AM ET

Cosmonauts to Spend 110 Days in Trial Space Lab

Агентство ITAR-TASS сообщило в четверг, что четыре космонавта - добровольца проведут 110 дней на Земле в лабораторных условиях, приближенных к орбитальным. Ставится цель выяснить, как переносится длительное пребывание в космосе.

MOSCOW (Reuters) -- Four volunteer cosmonauts will spend 110 days in a laboratory on Earth under conditions similar to those in orbit to see how they cope with living in space, Itar-Tass news agency reported Thursday.
Tass quoted officials at a Russian institute as saying the four -- an Austrian, Canadian, Japanese and a Russian -- would be locked up Friday and their experiences filmed. The camera, which allows the cosmonauts to communicate with scientists outside the laboratory, could also be used on the International Space Station, a $60 billion venture by 16 nations including the United States and Russia.
The International Space Station has been delayed repeatedly due to Russia's failure to complete work on its sections of the station.
Last month, five prospective Russian-American crews started training to use the Russian-made living module called Zvezda (Star), which is due to go into orbit this month but could also be delayed.

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Nature / Vol.402, No.6762, 9 December 1999

... as Europeans lobby for reactor construction

В то время, как европейцы лоббируют строительство реактора...

ALISON ABBOTT

В Мюнхене прошли публичные слушания для получения поддержки строительства в Европе ядерного реактора. На прошлой неделе ученые - авторы проекта создания Международного термоядерного реактора представляли его Европейскому парламенту. Многие члены парламента выразили скептицизм по поводу термоядерного топлива в качестве источника энергии. Лоббирование происходит в тот момент, когда группа ученых Европы, Японии и России готовит детальный проект экспериментального реактора накануне обсуждения бюджета Японии 2001 года.

MUNICH -- European proponents of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) have launched a campaign to win support for the construction of the fusion reactor in the run-up to key budget decisions due next year.
The first of a series of public seminars took place in Munich last month, introducing the concept of a slimmed-down version of ITER intended to meet criticism of excessive cost. Last week ITER scientists held an exhibition at the European Parliament and lobbied members of the parliament, many of whom have expressed scepticism of fusion as a viable energy source.
The lobbying comes at a time when the ITER collaboration -- a partnership between Europe, Japan and Russia – is preparing a detailed design outline for the reactor before the opening in Japan next spring of budgetary discussions for 2001.
The design will also form the basis of a proposal for funding under the European Commission's sixth Framework programme of research (FP6), due to start in 2003. Discussions about the content of FP6 begin next summer.
Plasma physicists in the collaboration believe that the engineering design phase for ITER should not be further extended. It has already been extended for an additional three years to cope with cash shortages resulting from waning political confidence (see Nature 387, 746; 1997). The physicists believe the time has come to bite the bullet and start building, to test the validity of experimental plasma-physics predictions.
"Plasma-physics research will lose its dynamism without a close coupling to energy production," Umberto Finzi, director of the European Commission's energy programme, told the Munich meeting.
The ITER programme suffered a major blow earlier this year when the United States withdrew support. The remaining three partners are now promoting a concept, known informally as ITER-Lite, which reduces technical objectives and cost.
The cost of ITER-Lite, around US$3 billion, is less than half that of the original proposal, but the original goal of achieving ignition has been dropped. Ignition is an important phenomenon for physicists. But, to move confidently to the next step of a demonstration fusion power plant, ITER has only to demonstrate gain -- energy amplification.
Both Japan and Canada (on behalf of the European partner) are hoping to offer sites to host ITER during the next couple of years. Klaus Pinkau, recently retired director of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Garching, told the Munich meeting he was optimistic that, once a site had been established, the United States would consider rejoining. Pinkau is co-chairman of a working group set up to oversee the design of a cheaper ITER. A site in Canada would probably be more attractive to the United States because its geographical proximity would favour participation of US industry in the construction.
But the United States will need considerable persuasion to change its position. It argues that it does not need to look for a new, cheap source of power because it can rely on its own oil supplies.
It also has a substantial commitment to research into inertial confinement fusion, an approach that competes with ITER's magnetic confinement approach. But Pinkau said that the United States should recognize the political importance of ensuring stable energy supplies in other countries.