Октябрь 1999 г.

Российская наука и мир (по материалам зарубежной электронной прессы)

CONTENTS / ОГЛАВЛЕНИЕ


• Aim for better business sense to bolster Russian science
• The Strangest Home on Earth
• Russian institute challenged over seized fossils
• Element 107 May Soon Find Place On Chemists' Periodic Table
• Mobil buys into Russia's oil production know-how
• Russian Scientist Denies Whole Mammoth Unearthed
• Experts Lock Horns Over Siberian Mammoth
• Professor Hopes To Clone Mammoth
• Scientists Scoff at Mammoth Cloning
• Russia to Return to Phobos?
• Designers of the MIR Space Station to Receive the 4th Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Aerospace Prize at the Royal Aeronautical Society Luncheon, October 15, 1999
• U.S., Russian Astronauts To Train
• Duke Free-Electron Laser Breaks "Psychological" 2,000 Angstrom Wavelength Barrier
• MUSIC IN THE AIR

А.Тихонов, ученый секретарь комиссии по мамонту Российской Академии Наук, сказал, что в некоторых средствах информации было сообщно, что мамонт полностью сохранился. " Это неправильно, это - ошибка, " сказал он корреспонденту агентства Рейтер. А.Тихонов сказал, что главным достижением команды является создание методики извлечения останков мамонта из толщи льда. " Я думаю, что это - технический успех, " добавил Тихонов. " По нашему мнению там много шерсти мамонта, вероятно, несколько костей и часть кожи".

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Russian zoologist Wednesday said an international scientific team had dug up the remains of an adult woolly mammoth preserved 23,000 years ago in the frozen wastes of Siberia, but denied it was a complete specimen.
"We camped in the tundra during a severe frost, it was 10 or 15 degrees below zero, and with the help of local people we excavated a block of frozen ground," said Alexei Tikhonov of the Zoological Institute in Russia's second city of St. Petersburg.
Tikhonov, the scientific secretary of the mammoth committee of the Russian Academy of Sciences, was quick to dispel some media reports the mammoth was complete.
"That's wrong, it's a mistake," he told Reuters. He described the team's main achievement as having developed a technique that could enable a whole mammoth to be retrieved in one piece. "I think it's a technical success," he added.
"In our opinion there's a lot of mammoth wool, probably some bones inside and a piece of skin," he said. The month-long expedition included Dutch, French and United States experts.
The mammoth remains and surrounding soil, encased in a 20-ton block of ice with two huge curled tusks jutting out, were flown Sunday, slung beneath a helicopter, 200 miles to Khatanga inside the Arctic Circle. Scientists will then examine the extinct animal's remains in a dry, cold cave at Khatanga.
Tikhonov said the animal had not been preserved well enough to provide an intact specimen of the woolly mammoth, but he hoped one might be unearthed soon.The mammoth, dubbed "Zharkov" after a local man who first discovered its head sticking out of the ice in 1997, was a 9 foot-tall adult male that would have looked like a hairy elephant to the modern eye.

Cloning Mammoth Is Science Fiction For Now

Tikhonov, 40, said hopes of being able to clone a mammoth remained out of reach, since scientists have yet to get hold of a long enough chain of mitochondrial DNA, the longest-lasting form of DNA.
"During thousands and thousands of years of preservation in permafrost, dehydration destroyed the chains of DNA. Now we only have very small parts of the DNA chains," he said.
The best chances of finding a mammoth with well-preserved DNA, the building block of life, were on the island of Wrangel, off the Siberian coast near Alaska, he said.
"If we can find the whole body of a mammoth which only died 3,000 to 4,000 years ago, we have a chance to find a very long chain of DNA," he said.
Until radio carbon dating showed mammoth remains found on Wrangel were 3,000 years old, scientists had thought they died out 10,000 years ago. The herbivore was probably killed off when increasingly prolonged periods of wet weather eradicated the mammoths' food -- dry vegetation.

Российский ученый говорит, что вполне вероятно, что в толще льда находится немного костей и шерсти мамонта. "Лучше иметь глыбу льда и думать, что внутри что-то есть и говорить, что наука пока не в сосотоянии работать с этим". Пока что останки мамонта перевозят в Хатангу на вертолете

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Foreign and Russian fossil experts locked horns Tuesday over a spectacular find -- a block of ice holding frozen remains of a 23,000-year-old woolly mammoth.
If France's Bernard Buigues is right, the ice may contain a virtually intact carcass; careful thawing and dissection could unlock the secrets why the species, an ancient hairy cousin of the elephant, died out.
But Russian zoologist Alexei Tikhonov thinks there is much less in the ice than his French colleague hopes. He wants to keep the block of ice intact for visitors to see in a permanently frozen cave.
"Zharkov" -- named after a local man who found it sticking out of frozen tundra on the Taimyr Peninsula in 1997 -- became a TV star last week.
Viewers around the world saw the 20-tonne hunk of ice and frozen dirt lifted free by helicopter with two huge tusks curving out side by side, just as they must have from the living beast.
Scientists quickly discounted speculation that the carcass might yield genetic material from which the extinct species could be recreated by cloning.
But Buigues, a businessman, North Pole explorer and member of the excavation team, is still full of hopes.
"The scientific significance of this program is it will explain the disappearance of this species," he told a Moscow press conference. "If we can understand why the species died out, perhaps we can avoid the mistakes it made."
"We don't yet know exactly what's inside," he said, but he and another member of the team, Dutch mammoth expert Dick Mol, were discussing how the block of ice could be gently prized apart to free Zharkov's corpse.

Russian Expert Sceptical

Tikhonov, a mammoth expert at the Russian Academy of Sciences, told reporters his experience led him to believe there would not be much inside the block but a few bones and some hair. "The lower part is very, very hard, nearly clear ice. In this part we won't find any new palaeontological material because all fossils from this era are found in soft sediments." The top 80 cm (30 inches) contained sediment from which he had extracted some wool and found it was not attached to any skin. This supported his theory that Zharkov's carcass had shifted as land moved during its aeons underground, re-arranging the mammoth's bones, he said. "In my opinion it's better to keep the block as it is in its museum, because if we try to take it apart and then find some pounds of wool and two or three mammoth bones, all the journalists will be very sad," he said.
"It's better to have the block and say 'there's something inside'...and say our science is not ready to work with his.
" Zharkov" is now at an airstrip in Khatanga after a 200 mile helicopter lift from the excavation site. It will be moved by land to a frozen cave intended to become its museum.

Ученые из США, Нидерландов, Франции и России надеются клонировать мамонта, найденного в Сибири. Мамонт хорошо сохранился, и ученые попытаются взять молекулы ДНК для клонирования, а также образцы грязи, пыльцы и даже содержимого желудка.
Процесс клонирования включает в себя внедрение молекул ДНК, взятых у мамонта, в яйцеклетку азиатской слонихи, из которой будет удалены гены слона. Поэтому даже если слониха родит детеныша, он будет именно мамонтом, а не гибридом.

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz.AP) - It sounds like a movie plot come to life: A Northern Arizona University geologist aims to excavate and clone a woolly mammoth from DNA.
Larry Agenbroad concedes that cloning the animal is unlikely. Still, he says biologists remain optimistic and he is excited about the project.
Agenbroad is part of an international team of scientists whose first task is to cut the cloning candidate - the likes of which roamed the earth about 23,000 years ago - from a Siberian ice field. The adult male mammoth, estimated to be about 40 years old when it became frozen, was found by a 9-year-old nomadic reindeer herder in 1997. It's been named Jarkov, after the boy's family. "To feel the skin and touch the flesh of the mammoth will be quite spectacular. It's the closest I've gotten to an animal I've been chasing for more than 30 years," said Agenbroad, sitting in an office crammed full of mammoth bones, teeth, figurines and paintings.
Agenbroad and scientists from the Netherlands, France and Russia, are removing the ice-encased animal from the Taimyr Peninsula in Siberia and airlifting it more than 200 miles to the city of Khatanga. The mammoth will be kept frozen there in an underground tunnel, where scientists will study the 11-foot-tall animal.
Besides analyzing dirt, pollen, and even its stomach contents, a primary task is to extract DNA for cloning. The cloning process involves putting DNA from the mammoth into an Asian elephant's egg that has been stripped of elephant genes. So even though an elephant would give birth, the baby would be a mammoth, not a hybrid, Agenbroad said. "I don't think (the elephant) would know the difference, though she might wonder why her baby is so hairy." Agenbroad said he is not counting on success. "I guess it would be a rarity, but the biologists are quite optimistic," he said. A medical ethicist at the medical school and the department of philosophy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham is among the naysayers. "You need live nuclei and live eggs, plus a host mammoth mother to gestate the fetus. Because none of these are available, 'Jurassic Park' to the contrary, it won't succeed," Greg Pence said, referring to the movie in which cloning was used to resurrect dinosaurs.
But scientists at Texas A&M University proved last month that live cells are not needed for cloning. The team successfully cloned a steer from the hide of another that died a year ago. Still, the odds are slim for mammoth cloning, said Hessel Bouma III, a cell biology expert at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich.
"It would start with DNA not from a fresh cell, but from one haphazardly frozen by nature," Bouma said. "The chances of DNA being completely intact is very, very small." But why bring back the mammoth in the first place? "Why not?" asked Agenbroad. "I'd rather have a cloned mammoth than another sheep," he added, referring to Dolly, cloned in 1997 from the udder of a 6-year-old ewe. Agenbroad isn't the only one excited about the cloning prospects. "I think it would be a really wonderful thing," said Paul Martin, a retired professor of geosciences and a large mammals expert from the University of Arizona. "It would be a moon shot."

Российский ученый, который помогал извлекать недавно обнаруженного мамонта высказал сомнение, что это доисторическое животное можно клонировать.Прежде всего, для клонирования вы должны иметь живую клетку, а не хранившуюся в вечной мерзлоте, - сказал А. Тихонов на прессконференции.

MOSCOW AP) - A Russian scientist who helped excavate a newly found frozen carcass of the woolly mammoth has said that scientists excitedly predicting that the prehistoric animal may be cloned should calm down.
The announcement that an intact, 20,000-year-old mammoth carcass was excavated from the frozen tundra of northern Russia prompted wide speculation that cloning from the carcass's cells could bring mammoths back to existence after a 10,000-year absence. But top mammal expert Alexei Tikhonov's reaction to the idea was nearly as cold as the ice in which the carcass was found.
"You have to have a living cell for cloning, and not a single cell can survive in the permafrost," Tikhonov, chairman of the Mammoth Committee of the Russian Academy of Science, said Tuesday at a news conference with other scientists.
"All this talk about cloning is absurd and useless."
A French-led team with members from the United States, Netherlands and Russia - including Tikhonov - spent 25 days carefully digging out the carcass without destroying its soft tissue, skin and internal organs. A Russian helicopter airlifted it to a storage site on Oct. 17.
The carcass has been described as being in pristine condition - a claim Tikhonov also downplayed.
"The find is not unique," he said. "In fact, this example is far from being perfectly preserved. "What we have is about one-third of the animal's bones along with some skin and fur fragments."
Bernard Buigues, the French polar researcher who organized the excavation and airlift of the 23-ton carcass, was more upbeat. "I believe in miracles," he said at the news conference. "I think we will be able to find living cells. We don't know yet what is inside the ice cube."
Tikhonov just shrugged his shoulder as his French colleague talked. "Even if we find a mammoth carcass with its eyes wide open which would blink at you, it can't be cloned," the Russian said. The furthest scientists can go even with a fully-preserved carcass is describing its genetic map, but that could only be done in the distant future, he said.
However, at a news conference Friday in Paris, a French paleontologist and member of the team was also more optimistic, saying the find could lead to a breakthrough in cloning.
"It's a question of getting quality DNA," Yves Coppens said.
Tikhonov said the real value of the excavation is the development of techniques that can determine the exact location of a carcass, dig it out in an entire ice cube and airlift it to safe storage.
Another pioneering venture would be setting up a museum in an ice cave, holding the Jarkov carcass, and, possibly, other examples to be found in the future. It also may help attract foreign tourists, who would pour hard cash into the struggling northern region and help to continue excavations, Tikhonov said.
"We hope to find a full carcass intact," he said. "Now we know how to excavate it."
The mammoth has been named Jarkov for the family who discovered it while herding reindeer in 1997. Studying the animal's teeth and tusks, the excavation team determined that it was an 11-foot-tall male who died at age 47 near a watering hole on the remote Taimyr Peninsula.

Despite crippling budgetary shortfalls, Russia's planetary exploration program is hoping to get at least one mission off the ground soon: a probe to return a rock sample from Phobos, the largest martian moon. But the effort, led by the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics in Moscow, could be no more than a pipe dream unless the researchers do some major fundraising. Russia hopes to succeed in a try for Phobos where its predecessor, the Soviet Union, stumbled: In the late 1980s, two giant Soviet landers sent to Phobos failed en route. Disaster struck again when the Mars 96 spacecraft plummeted back to Earth shortly after launch. To many, the Mars debacle sounded a death knell for Russian space science (Science, 20 June 1997, p. 1780).
Whether the new Phobos probe rises like a Phoenix from the ashes may depend on just how big--and expensive--a bird it is. Rather than go with a pricey Proton rocket, Keldysh planetary scientist Mikhail Marov, at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society last week, unveiled plans to launch the new mission as early as December 2004 on a cheap Soyuz-type rocket.
Using an ion engine comparable to the one now powering NASA's Deep Space 1 probe, the $120 million spacecraft would reach Phobos in 28 months, then land and take pictures. Next it would drill into the surface and extract a few hun dred grams of samples to bring back to Earth in April 2008.
Although the Russians have had a Phobos trip on the books for years, most experts had presumed the project dead, or at least dormant, considering the country's money woes. Marov says his group will almost certainly need outside help. But they best not look NASA's way: According to Rich Terrile of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the agency's current Mars program has no room for a new mission with the Russians.

Пять российских ученых, исследователей космоса - Ю.Р. Семенов, А. И.Киселев, Г.И.Северин, А.И. Григорьев и П.И.Климук будут награждены премией за их вклад в разработку и совершенствование Международной станции Мир и системы ее транспортировки.

LONDON, Oct. 7 /PRNewswire/ -- Five Russian space scientists will be honored with the Fourth $250,000 Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Aerospace Prize for their contributions to the design and development of the Mir multi-modular space station and its transportation system, Sir Donald Spiers, past president of the Royal Aeronautical Society (RAS) announced here today. Spiers, also the Chair of the Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Aerospace Prize selection committee said that the award will be presented at a luncheon in their honor at the RAS here on October 15, 1999.
The 13-year-old Mir Space Station was cited by the selection committee for providing "a strong and solid foundation for future long-term space activities." The committee said that "the Mir Space Station had been used in space exploration for over 12 years, and had served as a laboratory for long-term crew activity, station servicing, automated cargo docking, over 500 hours of extra-vehicular activities and a wide range of scientific experiments." The scientists honored were: Messrs Yuri P. Semenov, Anatoly I. Kiselev, Gai I. Severin, Anatoly I. Grigoriev and Peter I. Klimuk. Expected to attend the awards luncheon are: Prince Michael of Kent, Countess Albina du Boisrouvray, mother of Francois-Xavier Bagnoud, Bruno Bagnoud, President of the Association Francois-Xavier Bagnoud and father of Francois-Xavier; Sir Donald Spiers, Royal Aeronautical Society; Thomas C. Adamson, Jr., Prize Board Chairman; and Alon Kasha, member of Prize Governing Board.
The prize was established in 1992 to honor Francois-Xavier Bagnoud, a young Swiss pilot who died at the age of 24 during a helicopter mission in the deserts of Mali. It is intended to honor the memory and ideals of the young aviator and thus to recognize outstanding accomplishments of those in the aerospace field. Previous winners of the biennial prize were:
1993 -- Dr. William Pickering for his seminal work in widening our vision of our planetary system.
1995 -- The US Apollo Program for its incredible achievements that culminated in trips to the moon. The cash award was used to finance six Master of Science Degrees in work related to manned space flight.
1997 -- Messrs. Joseph F. Sutter, Kenneth F. Holtby, Everette Webb, and Robert A. Davis for contributions in conceptualizing, designing, and developing the Boeing 747 jet transport and its many variants.
Further information on the Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Aerospace Prize can be found at: http://www.fxb.org
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Группа росийских и американских космонавтов приехала на космодром Байконур для тренировок на основном модуле международной космической станции во время ее подготовки к запуску.

MOSCOW — A group of Russian and U.S. astronauts went to the Baikonur cosmodrome Monday to train on a key module of the international space station while it is prepared for launch, a news report said.
The Zvezda module, which will house the crew of the international space station, has been at the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakstan since spring. The international station's back-up crew — four Russian cosmonauts and NASA astronaut Kenneth Bowersox — will test Zvezda's on-board systems during three days of training at Baikonur, the Interfax news agency said. They will be followed by the station's main crew, including NASA astronaut William Shepherd, who will command the first permanent space station crew.
The first two components of the international station were launched last November and December. The launch of Zvezda was originally planned for this fall, but was repeatedly delayed and is not expected to take place for some months.
The international space station project is already more than a year behind schedule because Russia's cash troubles have caused repeated delays in construction.

Построенный в России прибор OK-4, работающий в Университете Дьюка, стал первым лазером, который излучает лазерный свет при длинах волн короче 2000 ангстрем, в области, которую некоторые ученые называют "вакуумной" областью ультрафиолетового излучения.

DURHAM N.C. - The OK-4, a Russian-built machine operating at Duke University, has become the first free-electron laser (FEL) to emit laser light at deep ultraviolet wavelengths shorter than 2,000 angstroms, a region some scientists call "vacuum" ultraviolet.
One of two FELS at Duke's Free-Electron Laser Laboratory, the OK-4 successfully lazed at an extremely short 1,937-angstrom wavelength (one angstrom is about .0000000039 inches long) on Aug. 10, said Vladimir Litvinenko, the lab's associate director for light sources. "I call it our Y2K problem," Litvinenko said in an interview. "I think it was a psychological barrier for free-electron lasers to reach 2,000 angstroms before the year 2000."
Laser physicists considered 2,000 angstroms a special technical barrier because the mirrors normally used to create FEL light lose much of their reflectivity and also quickly degrade at such short wavelengths, said Litvinenko, who is also a Duke associate professor of physics.
Some conventional lasers, including excimer lasers, also can operate at such short light wavelengths using mirrors made of other materials. But those materials suffer damage from the X-ray radiation created by the magnets FEL use to generate light, so they cannot be used in free-electron lasers.
Seong Hee Park, a graduate student studying for her doctorate under Litvinenko, collaborated with the Lumonics Optics Group in Nepean, Ontario, to develop special new mirrors that can deal with both the X-ray and the ultraviolet radiation.
Ying Wu, a former research scientist at the Duke lab now at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, also played a key role in enhancing the quality of the electron beam that powers the OK-4.
That enhancement allowed the amount of light reflecting between the laser's mirrors to be substantially increased relative to the amount that is dissipated - a concept known as gain. "Gain is a measure of the amplification of light,"Litvinenko said. "Gain is very important to obtain lazing. What you are fighting against is losses in the optical cavity." To achieve their 1,937-angstrom milestone wavelength, Litvinenko's Duke group had to increase gain in the OK-4 by "a factor of 2," he said. He also credited the rest of the Duke lab's 15 member team. "This success would be impossible without the indispensable contribution from the technical staff of a very small but very efficient free-electron laser laboratory," Litvinenko said.
The OK-4 previously became the first FEL to emit laser light in the ultraviolet when it set a previous 2,400-angstrom wavelength record in October 1998 that endured for about eight years. It was then operating at its former home in Novosibirsk, Russia, under a team that included both Litvinenko and Igor Pinayev. Pinayev, another key research scientist now at the Duke lab, modified the OK-4 to allow its use in medical research.
All lasers work by coaxing electrons to emit light, which is then intensified and concentrated by bouncing it between mirrors within a laser "cavity." But FEL are the only kinds of lasers to use electrons that have been separated from their normal captivity within atoms. Because the electrons empowering FELs are thus "free," the light they emit can be "tuned" to a large range of different wavelengths, a flexibility that is strongly limited when electrons are under the control of atoms.
This tunability makes FELs especially useful research tools because investigators have the freedom to try out various laser wavelengths to learn which works best for a particular need. Medical researchers, for example, might be searching for the best wavelength laser beam to cut into bone or tissue. Materials scientists might want to find the best wavelength beam to act as a probe to study molecules. Another plus for the OK-4 is its ability to emit laser light either in a continuous beam or in pulses. Each option has its advantages, depending on the experiments that scientists want to use the ultraviolet laser to study. Excimer lasers operating at such short wavelengths can operate only in the pulsed mode and they are not tunable, Litvinenko said.
Ultraviolet light has wavelengths shorter than those humans can see. Those shorter wavelengths are also more energetic, which explains why extreme ultraviolet light can actually damage materials it strikes. Another special problem of laser light below 2,000 angstroms is that it is absorbed by water vapor in the air.
"There is a lot of deep ultraviolet light absorption, especially in North Carolina's humid air," Litvinenko said. As a result, to work successfully the beam must be contained within a vacuum. The OK-4 is empowered by a storage ring capable of operating at 1.1 billion electron volts of energy, though a number of technical problems have prevented the laser from taking full advantage of that power source.
Plans are in place to upgrade those systems and to increase the average power of the OK-4 to several watts,which will make it the most powerful tunable laser in the deep ultraviolet range, he said.
Editor's Note: The original news release can be found at ttp://www.dukenews.duke.edu/Research/ok499.htm
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Duke University for journalists and other members of the public. If you wish to quote from any part of this story, please credit Duke University as the original source. You may also wish to include the following link in any citation:

Символ инженерного мастерства, а может быть и науки, международная космическая станция собирается открыть по крайней мере, одну новую область: рекламу. Сеть ресторанов G. Pizza Hut предложила российскому агенству авиации и космоса украсить ракету Протон новым логотипом высотой 10 метров. Официальные лица агенства говорят, что деньги, полученные за рекламу будут вложены в космическую программу.

A symbol of engineering prowess if not of science, the international space station is about to open up at least one new frontier: corporate advertising at superlow G. Pizza Hut, a restaurant chain, has cut a deal with the Russian Aviation and Space Agency (RASA) to emblazon a Proton rocket with its new logo, 10 meters tall. The rocket is scheduled to blast off in late November to deliver the space station's living module.
Neither Pizza Hut nor RASA would confirm the ad's price, rumored at $1 million. RASA officials say the money will be invested in their space program.
"The Pizza Hut initiative is a major step toward commercializing space," says U.S. astronaut Rick Hie. That step could have been one crass leap: According to a Pizza Hut spokesperson, the idea for the rocket ad campaign grew out of a scheme, since abandoned, to project Pizza Hut's logo onto the moon.

Молодой российский ученый, профессор Теремин создал новый музыкальный инструмент. Воздух, из которого извлекается музыка - это пространство между руками музыканта и антенной инструмента.

A few years ago a scientific curiosity, now a musical instrument ready to take its place in homes and orchestras, such is the history of the invention of Prof. Thйremin, a young Russian scientist, for literally extracting music from the air. The picture on our cover shows this new instrument in its latest form, as demonstrated at the recent New York Radio Show, preparatory to being placed on the market.
The air from which the music is drawn is the space between the hands of the musician and the antennae of the instrument. Everyone who fooled with radio in the early days of 1922 remembers the squeals that so often used to emanate from the loud speaker, or head phones. With many of the old regenerative sets, the squeal would start if the hand was brought near, in order to turn the dials. This, of course, was the result of the changing capacity between the parts of the set and the hands of the operator. These squeals, that have long since been banished from radio, have been tamed by Prof. Thйremin, and made to produce sweet melody. At no time does the performer touch the instrument, but merely waves his hands back and forth. Bringing his right hand towards or away from the vertical rod regulates the pitch, while the distance of his left hand from the loop on the side controls the volume. In this way a musical sound of any pitch or volume may be obtained.
One advantage of the instrument over those of the present day is that jazz cannot be played on it. Only a legato can be obtained, as one note runs into the next.

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