March 2004

Russian Science and the World (WWW Monthly Digest)

CONTENTS


• "Young brain import" may make up for brain drain from Russia
• Le logiciel russe sort de l'hibernation
• UCLA Conference Brings Together World-Renowned Scientists to Address Origin of Animals
• Arctique. Sauvetage reussi sur la banquise
• Russian academy honors IMA head
• Irradiated reactor compartments storage facility to be completed in 2007
• Soviet program can protect computers against viruses
• Relics of Past Give Proof that Balhae Is Kokuryo's Successor
• Water Is Purified From Fluorine
• Thermal Portrait Of Atherosclerosis Patients
• Nuclear plant in earthquake zone
• Alan Guth and Andrei Linde Win International Cosmology Award
• Boulder scientists ride train in Siberia to gauge pollution
• Physicists see golden needle in a micro-cosmic haystack

MOSCOW, March 1 (Itar-Tass)- -- The brain drain from Russia may be partly made up for by "importing young brains" from the CIS states, vice-president of the Russian Academy of Sciences Nikolai Plate said.
"While our young scientists go to industrialised countries in search of better life, their colleagues from ex-Soviet republics are interested in working in Russia," he told Itar-Tass on Monday.
At the same time, he thinks that "better living conditions, larger salaries and upgraded scientific infrastructure will stop the brain drain". In his view, "The state must not prohibit young scientists from going abroad and patent their inventions there". "Science is international by nature and the participation of young scientists in the international division of labour should be welcomed and encouraged," he added.
Acting Minister of Industry and Science Andrei Fursenko said, "The biggest problem in Russia today is not the outflow of technology but its effective introduction and use."
He explained this by the fact that "developers are not interested in having their technologies introduced, especially since there are no incentives whatsoever."
The situation is partially explained by the fact that developers are not interested in launching their technologies, due to a lack of any financial motivation, he noted.
At present, just 10 percent of Russian companies can be called active in terms of using innovations, compared to 70 percent in the United States. But even innovative companies that exist in the country spend only several percent on renewing their assets.
Not a single new deposit has been found in Russia in recent years. There are 2 to 3 percent of companies working with innovative technologies in the mining sector, whereas more than 34 percent of such firms operate in the food industry.

Les éditeurs insufflent du dynamisme dans un secteur n'ayant connu jusque-là qu'une croissance timide. Le marché informatique russe est estimé entre 1,25 et 1,5 milliard de dollars.
Le pays constitue un cas particulier du marché de l'industrie du logiciel. Au début des années 80, ce secteur entame une croissance mondiale qui durera près de deux décennies. Mais l'URSS, sur la voie de la Perestroïka, passe, elle, à côté des bénéfices de ce marché. Et en subit encore les conséquences.
" Pendant la Perestroïka, des milliers de Russes ont quitté le pays avec les résultats de leurs recherches. Ils ont fait la gloire de logiciels du marché international, sans que soit mentionnée leur origine russe ", déplore Valentin Makarov, président de Fort-Ross, un consortium de trente-sept sociétés technologiques russes.
Un marché estimé à 350 millions de dollars.
A cause de cette fin de siècle troublée, le marché russe reste jeune. Les plus anciennes entreprises - ParallelGraphics (éditeur de solutions 3D pour le Web), Abbyy (reconnaissance de caractères et linguistique) et Promt (linguistique) - ont été fondées entre 1989 et 1991. Mais ce retard se rattrape peu à peu. Abbyy a réalisé un chiffre d'affaires estimé à plus de 11 millions de dollars en 2002, dont la quasi-totalité à l'exportation.
Sur son marché interieur, la société connaît un certain succès avec ses solutions de gestion de formulaires. " Plus de 400 banques en Russie, dans les Balkans, en Ukraine, au Kazakhstan et en Pologne utilisent nos logiciels pour traiter plus de 350 000 ordres de paiement par jour ", se félicite Aram Pakhchanian, vice-président des projets d'entreprise, une branche d'Abbyy qui a généré 2 millions de dollars de chiffre d'affaires en 2003.
Le Trésor public russe, le fonds de pension russe et l'équivalent du ministère de l'Education pour le baccalauréat national figurent parmi les clients de l'éditeur. Parti quasiment de zéro, le marché russe du logiciel a, aujourd'hui, atteint une taille conséquente. " Nous estimons que la totalité du secteur informatique en Russie se situe entre 1,25 et 1,5 milliard de dollars, dont 350 millions de dollars au minimum pour le logiciel ", précise Valentin Makarov.
Et la croissance de cette jeune industrie ne fait que commencer, prédit Sergueï Andreyev, CEO d'Abbyy: " La grande tradition de recherche scientifique du pays nous a freinés a sortir des laboratoires de R&D, mais les choses changent et nos produits s'exportent bien. "

LOS ANGELES, March 10 -- A UCLA symposium on Friday, April 16, will bring together internationally renowned scientists to address the origin of animals.
Free to the public, the 15th annual symposium sponsored by UCLA's IGPP Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life (CSEOL) will be held in UCLA's Schoenberg Auditorium (near Hilgard and Westholme avenues) from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
The geologically "sudden" appearance of animals in the fossil record - known as the Cambrian explosion, the event that gave rise to the evolutionary line leading to humans - has long been shrouded in mystery. In "On the Origin of Species," Charles Darwin argued that the lack of a rich fossil record predating the rise of animals at the beginning of the Cambrian period of geological time (some 550 million years ago) was "inexplicable," an absence that could be "truly urged as a valid argument" against his theory of evolution.
"For more than a century, this problem remained unsolved and seemed unsolvable," said UCLA paleobiologist J. William Schopf, founder and director of CSEOL, author of the prize-winning book, "Cradle of Life," and one of the world's leading experts on the earliest life on Earth.
"But in recent years, the picture finally has changed," Schopf said. "A vast pre-animal fossil record, dating to billions of years ago, has been uncovered. New animal fossils have been discovered, some appreciably older than the oldest Cambrian-age deposits. In addition, new techniques have been devised, chiefly from molecular biology, that sort out this problem. This symposium brings together world experts to tell us about how and when animals first appeared in the Cambrian explosion of life."
Participants at the symposium will be:
Charles R. Marshall, professor of geology and biology at Harvard University, adjunct professor of geobiology at MIT, and former member of UCLA's department of Earth and space sciences. Marshall, recipient of the prestigious "young paleontologist" Schuchert Award of the Paleontological Society and a Guggenheim Fellowship, is an internationally recognized pioneering leader of the new wave of biologists and paleontologists deciphering how evolution works. He has applied in-depth understanding of mathematics, molecular biology, paleontology and the workings of evolution to studies of the incompleteness of the fossil record, extinctions in the history of life, and the molecular evolution and systematics of living systems. Marshall will speak at 9:10 a.m. on "The Cambrian Explosion of Animals."
Ellis Yochelson is past president of the Paleontological Society, the leading national scientific society in his field, and an historian of the geological sciences. He is the worldwide expert on Charles Doolittle Walcott, discoverer of the Cambrian explosion and the Burgess Shale fossils. Yochelson was recipient of the 2003 Geological Society of America's History of Science Medal. A paleontologist at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History until his official retirement, he remains an active researcher and a world-renowned specialist in the study of fossil mollusks (especially snails and their relatives). He served as president of the History of Earth Sciences Society and as editor or co-editor of major publications in paleontology. He is a recipient of the Distinguished Scientist Award of the Washington Academy of Sciences, an honorary lifetime member of the History of Earth Sciences Society and the 2003 award winner of the History of Geology Division of the Geological Society of America. Yochelson will speak about Walcott at 10 a.m.
Desmond H. Collins is a world expert on the Cambrian explosion as evidenced by the 530-million-year-old animal fossils of the Burgess Shale. He holds the position of senior curator at Canada's Royal Ontario Museum and is head of the department of paleobiology. He is also a faculty member of the University of Toronto's departments of zoology and geology. His work has been featured on science television programs in the United States, Japan, Canada and the United Kingdom. His honors include his selection as chair of the Geological Association of Canada's Palaeontological Division and distinguished lecturer of the Paleontological Society. From 18 seasons of fieldwork (1975-2000), Collins' experience has provided a new perspective on the ancient fauna of the Burgess Shale. He will speak at 11:10 a.m. about "The First Big Find: Fossils of the Burgess Shale, Canada."
Jun-Yuan Chen, research professor at the Chinese Academy of Science's Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, is one of China's most distinguished scientists. Chen is discoverer, with Chia-wei Li, of the oldest animal fossils now known: 580 million years old. Formally recognized in 1987 by China's National Scientific Council as that country's Outstanding Scientist, in 2003 Chen was honored as recipient of China's highest scientific accolade, the national First Class Award of Science. He was recognized early in his career for his seminal studies of Cambrian-age cephalopods, ancient relatives of modern squids; over the past decade his investigations of the remarkably well-preserved Early Cambrian Chengjiang fauna of South China have established his prominence worldwide. He is the author of 15 books, and his research on the Chengjiang fossils has contributed new understanding of the nature of evolution, rates of evolution and the development of biologic complexity. He will speak at 1:30 p.m. about "Amazing Fossils From the Dawn of Animals and the Cambrian explosion of Life."
Mark Webster, assistant professor of paleobiology at UCLA, is among the most accomplished young paleontologists in the United States. He is an expert on early-evolved fossil trilobites, ancient lobster-like animals that are the prize catch of every fossil hunter. He has carried out geological and paleontological fieldwork in Spain, Scotland, England and the United States. His honors include the Geological Society of America's 1998 Outstanding Student Research Award. Admired for his research and teaching, Webster is associate director of CSEOL and played a major role in organizing the symposium. He will speak at 2:20 p.m. about "Trends in Early Animal Evolution: Anecdotes and Evidence From Trilobites."
Kevin J. Peterson, assistant professor of biology at Dartmouth College, is an international leader in the interdisciplinary science involved in unraveling the origins of animals. A recent UCLA Ph.D., Peterson was recipient of a CSEOL Fellowship in 1990 and is the first former CSEOL Fellow to participate as a speaker in a CSEOL symposium. He conducted his graduate studies at UCLA under the tutelage of Charles Marshall and served as a visiting researcher in the department of palaeontology at the Natural History Museum, London. Peterson has given invited lectures at universities and national and international scientific meetings. He will speak at 3:30 p.m. about "Tempo and Mode of Early Animals Evolution: The Molecular Record."
David Bottjer, professor of paleontology in USC's department of Earth sciences and a research associate at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, will moderate a question-and-answer session, starting at 4:20 p.m., when the audience will have an opportunity to ask questions. He is the incoming president of the Paleontological Society. He is also editor-in-chief of the journal "Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology," and co-editor of the highly acclaimed book series, "Critical Moments and Perspectives in Paleobiology and Earth History." An active researcher, focusing especially on the evolutionary paleoecology of macroinvertebrate animals as evidenced in the Phanerozoic geologic record, he was honored in 2002 as CSEOL's Distinguished Scientist of the year.
Mikhail Fedonkin, corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Russia's leading expert in the field, is expected to attend the symposium and participate in the question-and-answer session. Previous topics in the CSEOL symposium series have included "Are We Alone in the Universe?" "The Endangered Earth," "Major Events in the History of Life," "Humans and the Environmental Crisis," "Evolution and the Molecular Revolution," "Origin and Evolution of the Universe," "Origin and Evolution of Intelligence," "Engineering the Human Germline," "Evolution in the Computer Age" and "Extinctions in the History of Life." Each symposium is later published as a book.

Quatre jours sur un bout de banquise au pôle Nord. Les douze hommes de la station russe Severny Polious 32 (SP-32), ont été ramenés sains et saufs, hier, sur l'archipel norvégien de Spitzberg, a 700 km du lieu de l ' accident. La station polaire SP-32 avait été presque entièrement engloutie dans les eaux glaciales mercredi, quand la banquise sur laquelle elle était installée s'était brisee. Il s'agirait d' un accident sans précédent.
Un enorme pan de glace
Le directeur de la station, Vladimir Kochelev, a raconté par téléphone à la télévision comment, soudainement, un pan de glace de plusieurs mètres de haut s'est dressé, engloutissant 90 % de la station dans les eaux polaires.
L'opération de sauvetage par hélicoptère , a été menée dans des conditions " exceptionnellement difficiles ", a déclaré Artour Tchilingarov, président de l'Association russe des explorateurs polaires et responsable de l'opération. Les sauveteurs ont dû accélérer la manœuvre car le temps menaçait de se dégrader aujourd'hui.
Deux chiens qui accompagnaient l'expédition scientifique ont également été sauvés. Les rescapés devraient bientôt être rapatriés en Russie et retrouver leurs familles " avant lundi ".
-30 degres
Disposant de réserves de fioul et de nourriture, les douze hommes ont survécu pendant quatre jours sur un morceau de glace, dans un abri rescapé de leur base, par des températures avoisinant les - 30 degres Celsius. Ils avaient préparé une zone d'atterrissage pour les hélicoptères venus les secourir. Le sort de ces scientifiques russes, tous expérimentés et familiers des expéditions polaires, tenait la Russie en haleine depuis mercredi.
Station dérivante
L'expédition se trouvait à 700 km du pôle Nord géographique, dans le bassin de Nansen, entre le Groenland et la terre François-Joseph .
Entrée en service en avril 2003, SP-32 était installée sur un morceau de banquise de 1,5 km sur 2, qui a parcouru 2.750 km en neuf mois dans la région du pôle. La station se dirigeait vers le sud.
SP-32, qui devait achever sa mission en avril, était la première station dérivante à reprendre l'étude du pôle Nord après une interruption de douze ans.

Dr. Yoram Blachar, chairman of the Israel Medical Association, will on Tuesday become the first Israeli to be inducted into the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences. The ceremony will take place at IMA headquarters in Ramat Gan, with the Russian ambassador to Israel and a Russian scientific delegation attending.
The Russian academy is the leading institution for medical sciences in that country and enjoys much prestige among doctors in Russia and the rest of the world.
Blachar is being cited for his contribution to international health and medicine, for his work in Israel and as chairman of the World Medical Association. In a statement issued by the Russian academy, it said that Blachar's membership "symbolizes the beginning of cooperation between Russia and Israel in the field of medicine and science."
Meanwhile, the Geha Mental Health Center of Clalit Health Services has signed a twinning agreement with the St. Petersburg's Baktereb Institute, which is the leading psychiatric research center in Russia. Geha director Prof. Shmuel Tyano said that at a time when Israel is diplomatically isolated, it is very important to continue cooperation with researchers abroad.
The agreement, he added, would not only serve patients and the advance of research but also promote cooperation between the two countries. The two centers will exchange know-how and researchers and carry out joint research.

On February 16-20, the meetings of the joint Russian-German managing and technical councils of the project on safe handling of reactor compartments from the retired submarines was held in Germany, Nuclear.ru was told by Victor Akhunov, Minatom's departmental head for the decommissioning of nuclear installations in Russia. The project is being implemented according to the agreement signed in October 2003.
According to Akhunov, the project consists of 3 parts. The first part is preparation of the compartments for long storage and their preservation. Shipyard Nerpa has the entire necessary infrastructure for these operations. The second part is transportation. It was decided to transport the reactor compartments ready for conservation to the storage facility by the floating dock PD-42. And the third part is creating infrastructure of the onshore storage facility. Reactors can be stored there for 70 years. Shipyard Nerpa, the Kurchatov Russian Science Centre and German Company Energiewerke Nord GmbH will manage the project.
According to the construction schedule approved at the meeting, the first reactor compartments should be placed in the onshore facility already in 2005, but the site is to be completed in 2007. The contracts for some works in 2004 should be signed by March 21. They will deal with site exploration in Sayda bay and technical documentation. "We hope that already in June this year we can have ground breaking ceremony of the facility", Akhunov said to Nuclear.ru.

MOSCOW,March 9 (Itar-Tass) -- Russian scientists believe that the Security Programme for computers, created in Soviet times, can protect computers against viruses almost totally, Boris Babayan, corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, director of the Institute of Microprocessor Computer Systems, told Itar-Tass on Tuesday.
According to Babayan, most of the computer viruses existing today attack the "weak areas" of the software and penetrate the computers through so-called "holes" in the operational systems. In the opinion of Babayan, "the principle on which the Security Programme is based is rather simple." When the programme detects the virus-infected file and establishes the type of the virus, it blocks at once the whole of the file. So, Babayan continued, "the virus can no longer spread inside the computer, much less penetrate Internet." At the same time, "the Security Programme neither reduces the working speed of the computer, nor overloads its memory."
Babayan believes the effective introduction of the Security Programme is impossible without its adaptation to the modern operational systems, like Windows, Mackintosh etc. "Some ten billion dollars are needed for its introduction, but the expenditures are a trifle in comparison with the damage, inflicted by numerous viruses spread in Internet," he said. Experts are of the opinion, that some 700 types of viruses are now spread in Internet. Each virus has several versions. Some 20 viruses are especially dangerous, including MyDoom, Bagle and Nelsky. According to the estimates, the damage inflicted by MyDoom alone has reached 36 billion dollars.

Russian scientists are receiving unusual interest from the academic world because of their discovery of remains from an unearthing expedition in the old territory of Balhae, including the Russian territory in Manchuria, which can prove the relationship between Kokuryo and Balhae.
The museum of Korea University in Seoul on Wednesday, said, "We invited Boalding, the director of archeological laboratory of the Russian Institute of Science, his assistant Geller, and Lickytin and held a meeting for the interim findings of Balhae's remains around the Russian territory in Manchuria."
This was the first time to define the relationship between two countries from the actual remains, even though there have been many similar assumptions.
Since the late 1990s, Russian scholars have found several ruins of Kokuryo in their territory in Manchuria. During the meeting, they reported to witnesses about "on-dol," which was Kokuryo's unique heating system in Balhae's old territory, and verified the similarity to an earthenware which followed Kokuryo's ways. They also mentioned, "We found the same type of items in the Korean museum which we did not know how they were used in the past." adding, "Russian scientists admit that Balhae's culture succeeded Kokuryo's." Chun Ho-sup, a researcher at the museum of Korea University, said, "These results, which were proven by the scholars from the third country through their unearthing efforts, will be very precious data for our recent studies of the history of Kokuryo."

Researchers of the Kola Scientific Center, Russian Academy of Sciences, have developed an efficient method for sewage water purification from fluorine ions. Fine purification of water can be achieved through utilization of sorbents containing titanium. In addition, the method solves the problem of recycling spent sorbents saturated with fluorine. The majority of contemporary toothpastes contain sodium fluoride as a fluorides agent to reinforce enamel. In the natural environment, this substance is found in the form of transparent deep cherry-colored crystals called will omits after a French traveller, whose collection of minerals from Guinea was the first to reveal this crystal. Williomits get washed out, this causing the fluorine ions' presence in the water. Normally, their concentration should not exceed 1.4 milligram per litre of water, however, the fluorine content should be twice lower that that in the water intended for fish industry activity: the fish accumulate fluorine in the organism and then it is consumed by people. The substance which in small amounts is contained in the toothpaste and strengthens the teeth has become the reason for serious problems in Kola Peninsula and other regions, where mining enterprises work intensely to process ores containing williomits.
This results in millions of cubic metres of sewage with high content of fluorine ions, their concentration exceeding the maximum allowable concentration by ten times, and this is very dangerous for human health. Abundant fluorine content in the organism may cause the fluorosis disease. As a result, the enamel decays, white spots appear on the enamel and turn yellow as time passes. In addition, abundant fluorine inhibits some enzymes' action in the organism. Poison is curative only in small dozes.
So far, there has been no inexpensive and efficient technology for water purification from fluorine ions. Researchers from the Tananaev Institute of Chemistry and Technology of Rare Elements and Mineral (Kola Scientific Center, Russian Academy of Sciences) suggested that various titanium compounds should be used as sorbents: titanyl hydroxides or sulphates, which tightly bind fluoride ions.
For example, when processing the mineral, which contains titanium, it is easy to get titanyl sulphate that can be efficiently used to purify water from ions of fluoride. This compound is added to the sewage water while mixing, it dissolves rather easily, and then, as a result of hydrolysis, it turns into the loose deposit. It is the deposit that plays the role of sorbent in purification of water from ions of fluoride.
After such processing, sorbents containing fluorine in the form of deposit can be simply filtered. This method provides for fine purification of water, decreasing the flurine ion content down to 0.5-0.6 milligram per liter, which poses no threat to human health. For example, if the water contains 10 milligrams of fluorine ions per liter, then processing of one liter of such water would require 80 milligrams of titanyl sulphate.
The new water purification method also solves the problem of disposal of spent sorbents with fluorine ions contained in them. Previously, fluorine saturated sorbents, accumulated, and fluorine penetrated the soil and contaminated the environment. Under the new method, spent solid sorbents may be processed with sulphuric acid, thus getting valuable hydrogen fluoride and fresh portions of water soluble titanyl sulphate, which can be reused. Therefore, the method suggested by the researchers will allow to purify water from fluorine, to obtain a valuable chemical product and to save sorbent.

Contemporary thermal imaging equipment may be applied to medicine for diagnostics and treatment efficiency control. Russian biophysicists used a thermal imager for recording the blood supply of atherosclerosis patients' extremities prior and after the treatment by gas-transport blood substitute injections.
Researches in this area by Russian biophysicists have been funded through the "Abstract Sciences for Medicine" research program (Russian Academy of Sciences), State Foundation for Promotion of Small-Size Enterprises in Scientific and Technical Areas and the 2003 Moscow Regional Grant.
Contemporary devices allow to measure the body surface temperature accurately within several hundredths of a degree. A domestic infra-red thermovision system (thermal imager) possesses the 0.03 degree thermal sensitivity and makes 25 measurements per second. Based on such devices, new methods can be developed for medical diagnostics and treatment efficiency control. Testing the method capabilities, Russian biophysicists (specialists of the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Biophysics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Biophysics of Cell, Russian Academy of Sciences, and Institute of General Physics, Russian Academy of Sciences) used the thermal imager to record the blood supply of atherosclerosis patients' extremities prior and after the treatment by perftoran gas-transport blood substitutes injections. The arterial blood temperature remains practically constant in a relatively wide range of environment conditions. The temperature of skin, on the contrary, changes significantly depending on the climate and genetic peculiarities of a person. The thermal imager registers the temperature distribution on the skin surface. The development of inflammations, burns, tumors or phlebitis is accompanied by intense heat release, therefore, in these cases the heating locations and reasons can be determined with rather high precision. If the blood supply is deranged, the skin cools. This can be caused by the capillary spasm due to significant loss of blood, lesion of walls of small or great vessels, or simply because a person is at rest. Russian biophysicists obtained the thermal portrait of a patient suffering from lower extremities atherosclerosis. On the thermogram, the diseased left leg, which is undersupplied with blood, looks notably darker than the right one, particularly its lower part.
To normalize the blood circulation, the patient was injected perftoran gas-transport blood substitute developed at the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Biophysics, Russian Academy of Sciences, based on the perfluoro-organic emulsion. Perftoran possesses high oxygen capacity and low viscosity; therefore, it can participate in the oxygen and carbonic acid gas transfer. Along with various other clinical uses, Perftoran is used to improve microcirculation of blood. Particles of the emulsion, which are more than 100 times smaller than the erythrocyte, do penetrate even capillaries narrowed due to organic lesion, and deliver oxygen to the tissue. The capillaries start opening, and normal gaseous exchange in surrounding tissues is gradually restored. Besides, particles of perftoran act as a sorbent, which cleans the walls of microvessels, thus increasing their lumens.
The patient felt better after two intravenous injections of perftoran. His legs "warmed up" straight away, the changes being particularly noticeable in the diseased extremity. The temperature of its surface rose significantly, particularly in the most remote and affected areas: the left foot heated up almost by two degrees. On the thermogram, both legs look bright and evenly light.
On the whole, although the "thermal portrait" of each person is rich in information, but it is exclusively individual, that is why the researchers still find it difficult to define the notion of "standard". For wide adoption of thermal imagers in medical practice, it is necessary to accumulate and analyze a large volume of thermographic information for genetically varying people and patients with different diseases. It is also necessary to develop the "thermal portraits" interpretation methods, comparing the same person's measurements carried out for a long time. However, this laborious effort will certainly pay back. Contemporary thermal imaging equipment can become a powerful research tool for medicine; it may be also applied for both diagnostics and treatment efficiency control, the proof of which is the effort by Russian biophysicists.

Director of the Institute of Environmental Problems of the North at the Urals Department of the Russian Science Academy Felix Yudakhin informed the press about that in January. The specialists of the Institute explored the ground in the area of the planned nuclear plant's construction and detected seismic variability. Yudakhin said, "although the research is not completed, we can absolutely confirm the fact that this territory is seismic".
In response to this statement the deputy governor of Arkhangelsk region on economic development Vladimir Kolomentsev, who is responsible for the nuclear plant's project, told the journalists that "the scientist did not make any discovery" and all this information is available from before, adding that the planned nuclear plant is designed to resist grade 9 earthquake on Richter scale. He also said that Rikasikha chosen as a staring point for the nuclear plant, but the final location would be determined this year after the state expert review. The State company Unified Energy System of Russia emphasized many times that Northwest of Russia has excessive energy supplies, but Vladimir Kolomentsev was sceptical about the idea to build power lines from the Kola nuclear power plant or Pechora hydroelectric power plant.
Agreement to build nuclear heat and power plant near Rikasikha was signed in the end of November 2001. The project's cost is about $700m and should be financed by Rosenergoatom concern's investment program, but no money has been allocated yet. The plant's capacity with the VK-300 type power unit is 600MW and it should be put in operation in 2010.

ST. THOMAS, U.S, Virgin Islands, March 18 /PRNewswire/ -- Leading theoretical cosmologists Alan Guth, Weisskopf Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Andrei Linde, Professor of Physics at Stanford University, who played prominent roles in developing and refining the theory of cosmic inflation, have been selected by an international panel of experts to receive the 2004 Cosmology Prize of the Peter Gruber Foundation.
The Foundation annually presents its gold medal and a $200,000 unrestricted cash award to an outstanding scientist, or scientists, who have made groundbreaking contributions in the field of cosmology. This year's award (which will be shared by the co-recipients) will be presented on June 4, at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
The official citation reads: "The Cosmology Prize of The Peter Gruber Foundation is hereby proudly presented to Professor Alan Guth, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Professor Andrei Linde, Stanford University, for their development of fundamental ideas of cosmic inflation, which has been one of the dominant themes of cosmology for more than two decades.
The original concept of inflation and its many variations, including chaotic inflation, proposed and developed by Guth and Linde, have led to a revolution in our approach to studying cosmology and to understanding the history of the universe."
Inflationary theory describes the very early stages of the evolution of the universe and its structure. A modification of cosmology's Big Bang theory, it holds that all matter in the universe was created during a period of inflation, as the universe expanded at an incredible rate: It doubled in size each 10 to the minus 37 seconds. (Imagine a pea growing to the size of the Milky Way in less time than the blink of an eye.)
Models of inflationary cosmology had been considered by others in the 1970s, but in 1981, Alan Guth pulled the ideas together and pointed out the cosmological problems solved by inflation, publishing his work as "The Inflationary Universe: A Possible Solution to the Horizon and Flatness Problems."
There were problems with specific details of Guth's model (acknowledged by him also), and later in 1981, at an international conference in Moscow, Russian cosmologist Andrei Linde presented an improved version, called "new inflation." Others added to the refinements, and Linde went on to propose additional versions of inflationary theory, including the chaotic inflationary universe scenario and the theory of eternal chaotic inflation. Inflationary concepts have influenced more of modern cosmology in the past two decades than anything since the hot Big Bang of the 1960s.
Alan Guth, 57, received his bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees in physics from MIT and worked at Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, and Stanford Universities before returning to MIT in 1980. Elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences, he is the author of many technical publications and of the popular general audience book "The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins."
Born in Moscow in 1948, Andrei Linde received a B.S. from Moscow State University and a Ph.D. from Moscow's Lebedev Physical Institute. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty in 1990, Linde worked at the Lebedev Physical Institute and at CERN, Switzerland. He also is the author of many scholarly papers and has written two books on particle physics and inflationary cosmology.
"We are extremely pleased to honor the work of Professors Guth and Linde and to pay tribute to the theory of cosmic inflation," said Peter Gruber, chairman of the Peter Gruber Foundation. "Their original ideas over more than 20 years have profoundly changed the field of cosmology."
The Cosmology Prize of the Peter Gruber Foundation is one of the premier international prizes in the field. Last year's prizewinner was Professor Rashid Sunyaev, a leading Russian astrophysicist and pioneer in the field of X-ray astronomy. Dr. Vera Rubin, Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Institution of Washington received the prize in 2002. The recipient in 2001 was Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal of the United Kingdom and Royal Society Research Professor at Cambridge University. Recipients of the Cosmology Prize in 2000 were Professor Allan R. Sandage, Staff Astronomer Emeritus, The Observatories (Pasadena, California) Carnegie Institution of Washington, and Dr. Phillip J.E. Peebles, the Albert Einstein Professor of Physics at Princeton University.
A distinguished Advisory Board selected the Cosmology Prize recipients for 2004 after a worldwide solicitation of candidates. Current members of the Advisory Board are: Professor V. Radhakrishnan of the Raman Research Institute in Bangalore; Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell of the University of Bath, U.K.; Dr. Robert Halleux of the University of Liege, Belgium; Professor Virginia Trimble of the University of Maryland and the University of California at Irvine; Dr. Katsuhiko Sato, Director, Research Center for the Early Universe at the University of Tokyo; Professor John Ball of the Mathematical Institute, Oxford; and Professor Robert Williams, Distinguished Research Scholar at the Space Telescope Science Institute in the U.S. Dr. George V. Coyne of The Vatican Observatory and Dr. Owen Gingerich of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics serve as special cosmology advisors to the Foundation.
Affiliation with International Astronomical Union
In 2000, the Peter Gruber Foundation and the International Astronomical Union (IAU) announced an agreement by which the IAU provides its expertise and contacts with professional astronomers worldwide for the nomination and selection of Cosmology Prize winners. Under the agreement, the Peter Gruber Foundation also funds a fellowship program for young astronomers with the aim of promoting the continued recruitment of new talent into the field. The International Astronomical Union, founded in 1919, is a worldwide organization of professional astronomers. Its membership includes more than 9,000 astronomers from 67 countries worldwide.
The Peter Gruber Foundation
The Peter Gruber Foundation was founded in 1993 and established a record of charitable giving principally in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where it is located. In recent years the Foundation has expanded its focus to a series of international awards recognizing discoveries and achievements that produce fundamental shifts in human knowledge and culture.

Three Boulder scientists boarded the Trans-Siberian Railway on Thursday for a 13-day journey to measure atmospheric pollutants along a 5,300-mile route. The Boulder researchers are part of an international team measuring levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, ozone-depleting chemicals, and pollutants that form smog. "We'd like to know how much Siberian pollution is contributing to the global total, so it's really quite a coup to arrange this with the Russian government," said James Elkins, a physicist at the National -Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder.
"Very little is known about pollution from the former Soviet Union," Elkins said.
"And we can't get the numbers from the Russians -because they don't know," he said. The Siberian data will be used to refine computer models used in -global change studies.
The project is a collaboration between American, Russian, Austrian and German scientists. The Russians contributed a new $2 million observatory car that carries the scientists and their analytical gear. The 50-foot car, trailed by more than 20 passenger cars, rides directly behind the electric locomotive. The trip began in Moscow and will end in Khabarovsk, in eastern Siberia. The train route is electrified over that stretch, so engine emissions won't contaminate air measurements.
Air samples are collected through intakes in the sides and top of the observation car. Once the researchers arrive at Khabarovsk, they will turn around and head back to Moscow - a round trip of 10,600 miles. The expedition involves coupling the observatory car to regularly scheduled passenger trains. NOAA provided $50,000 to fund the excursion and a gas chromatograph to measure levels of 12 gases, said Elkins, supervisory physicist at the agency's Climate Monitoring and Diagnostics Laboratory in -Boulder.
The three Boulder scientists on the trip are Dale Hurst, Debbie Mondeel and Pavel Romashkin. They work at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science, a collaboration between NOAA and the University of Colorado. The scientists will cross seven time zones in six days on their trip from Moscow to Khabarovsk.

UPTON, NY, -- An international team of physicists examining an extremely rare form of subatomic particle decay -- a veritable golden needle in a micro-cosmic haystack of 7.8 trillion candidates -- has discovered evidence for the highly sought process, which could be an indication of new forces beyond those incorporated in the Standard Model of particle physics. That long-standing theory of all particle physics precisely predicts the rate of such decays to be half that observed by the experimenters although it is still too soon to say if a deviation has occurred. The innovative experiment, which uses the most comprehensive particle detector ever built, is located at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory. The result is being presented at a colloquium at Brookhaven Lab today and has been submitted to Physical Review Letters.
The experiment detects the disintegration of an unstable subatomic particle called a K meson, which can decay, or break apart, in a variety of ways. One particular decay -- in which the K meson turns into other particles, a positively charged pion, a neutrino, and an antineutrino -- is extremely important due to the internal subatomic processes involved and its sensitivity to new physical effects not accounted for in the Standard Model. The decay is so rare that it was predicted to happen only once in all the decays ever observed by all of the experiments that have searched for it since the 1960s.
The latest evidence of the long-sought process was found in just-analyzed data. It followed two earlier sightings at Brookhaven in 1997 and 2002. The new data were obtained using improved apparatus that exploited higher beam intensities and achieved greater efficiency of detection than any previous experimental setup.
The current result indicates that this particular rare K meson decay occurs once in every 7 billion decays. The improved result continues to suggest a possible discrepancy with the Standard Model, although with only 3 events, the result is still consistent with this model's prediction of one in 13 billion decays.
"It is very important to establish whether these first few events represent a statistical fluke or an important breakthrough," said Douglas Bryman, Professor of Physics at the University of British Columbia, one of the experiment's spokespersons. "This can only be done with an enhanced event sample, which could be obtained by further running of the experiment. "Additional running would resolve the issue and firmly establish whether we are seeing an extremely significant departure from standard theory," Bryman said. Such further running would require program funding not presently planned.
The long trek leading to discovery
The experimental collaboration -- now composed of 70 scientists from Canada, Japan, Russia and the United States, -- has been conducting the search for the past decade at the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron, a particle accelerator at Brookhaven Lab that produces the world's most intense beams of K mesons. K mesons are elusive particles that exist for only 12 billionths of a second before decaying into other forms. So, to catch the fleeting events and identify the rare decay, the scientists built a state-of-the-art particle detector the size of a small house, capable of examining 1.6 million decays every second. Interesting events get recorded on tape, with several tens of thousands of gigabytes of data stored so far. The physicists then use sophisticated software to pore over the data to find the most interesting events and examine them in exquisite detail.
Although a neutrino and an antineutrino are also emitted in this K meson decay, these particles interact too weakly to be detected. Thus, evidence that one positive pion -- and only a positive pion -- was produced by the K meson decay must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, eliminating the possibility that other detectable particles are present. To establish the validity of the observations, the scientists must reject all background cases where a K meson decays in other ways, usually involving a charged particle or a neutral pion. In order to achieve the unprecedented level of filtering required, the group developed the most efficient particle detector system ever built.
The hard part here is that neutral pions immediately decay into two high-energy gamma rays (photons), and the experiment must not miss them more than once in every million decays. To do this, the detector stops the K mesons in their tracks -- in a scintillating fiber target -- before they decay. The decay products then travel through a particle-tracking chamber surrounded by a huge magnet and plastic scintillation counters, so their momentum, trajectories, and energy can be precisely measured to positively identify the types of particles detected. Events that emit photons are picked up by sensitive detectors and rejected, leaving only the rarest decays as candidates for the process the scientists are seeking.
Out of all the data analyzed, the scientists have now seen three events explicable by the rare K meson decay they've been searching for. Their goal is to increase the experimental exposure by five times. If their findings continue at the current pace, 20 or more events would be observed. Such a result could profoundly alter our current picture of particle physics, forcing an expanded view of the fundamental constituents of the universe and their interactions since the 'Big Bang.'

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