Август 2026 г.

Российская наука и мир (по материалам зарубежной электронной прессы)

CONTENTS / ОГЛАВЛЕНИЕ


• High-power pulses bring stable light equalization in multicore fiber
• Ceremonial headdress among Murom grave discoveries
• China-Russia cooperation helps Amur tigers roam freely across border, boosts wild population recovery, expert tells GT
• A moth species has killed off vast swaths of forest across Siberia, leaving so much dead, flammable wood behind that wildfires are now spreading faster than firefighters can contain them
• Pulsed radiofrequency magnetic fields may disorient migratory birds, experiments suggest
• Chersonesos unearths a girl’s gold, rouge and perfume after 1,900 years
• Superconductor junctions blur the line between two quantum effects
• Russian scientists make new critical mineral discovery
• Rare horse engravings found in Iron Age siberian burial mound
• Medieval warrior buried with horse and dog discovered in Russia
• 80,000-year-old arrowheads could rewrite the story of how humans reached Europe
• Russia bets on new research facilities to rebuild foreign ties

Многожильное оптическое волокно - новый тип волокна, содержащий несколько каналов для передачи света. Однако при низкой мощности свет в таких волокнах ведет себя непредсказуемо, хаотично перескакивая между каналами. Научный коллектив из Института автоматики и электрометрии СО РАН и Новосибирского государственного университета на примере семижильного волокна установил, что при увеличении входной мощности лазерных импульсов свет равномерно и стабильно распределяется по всем сердечникам, колебания заметно уменьшаются, а выходной луч преобразуется в ровный пучок колоколообразной формы.

Nowadays, cutting-edge scientific research is focused on finding new ways to transmit, control, and use light. Traditionally, optical fibers have been used in everything from telecommunication systems such as the Internet to medical equipment, because they provide low-loss light propagation over long distances. In recent years, researchers have also been exploring a new type of fiber that contains several light-carrying channels, called multicore fiber. This technology has the potential to improve how light is used in communication, imaging, sensing, and laser systems.
However, in the effort to make light transmission more efficient and reliable, a key question remained unaddressed: how would low-power and high-power laser pulses behave in a multicore fiber, and could the light be made to distribute more evenly and stably among the cores? At low power, light in such fibers was known to behave unpredictably, jumping between channels in an erratic and unstable manner. It was not clear whether increasing the power could change this behavior in a useful way.
This question was addressed by the research group of Prof. Sergey A. Babin from the Institute of Automation and Electrometry SB RAS and Novosibirsk State University, Russia, with post-doctoral researcher Dr. Alena Yu. Kolesnikova leading the study. To investigate how light behaves inside a seven-core multicore fiber, the researchers sent narrowband laser pulses into the central core and tracked how the output power was distributed among the individual channels under different input powers. They combined direct experiments with numerical modeling and analytical treatment to follow the evolution of the pulse along the fiber and to identify the physical origin of the observed beam stirring effect. The findings were made available online in Opto-Electronic Advances on June 21, 2026.
At low power, the light was found to propagate in a random and unstable manner, with strong fluctuations in the power carried by each core. As the input power increased, however, the behavior changed dramatically. The light began to distribute itself evenly among all seven cores, and the fluctuations were greatly reduced. The output beam also changed in character, shifting from a speckled and unstable far-field pattern to a smoother, bell-shaped profile. This equalization remained stable even when the fiber was exposed to disturbances such as bending and twisting, showing that the effect was not simply accidental, but robust.
As Prof. Babin noted, "the beam stirring effect shows that weakly coupled multicore fibers can self-organize under high-power excitation into a far more stable output state." Dr. Kolesnikova added, "what is especially remarkable is that the pulse does not just spread randomly; its internal temporal structure helps average out the power exchange between cores." The modeling showed that the effect has a statistical nature: at high power, the pulse breaks into many smaller sub-pulses, and their averaging over time leads to the stable equal distribution of light between the cores. In this way, nonlinear phase accumulation changes the direction of energy transfer along the pulse and makes the output progressively more uniform.
These findings are important for both fundamental science and practical applications. They suggest a new route toward more efficient high-power laser systems based on multicore fibers, where stable power sharing is essential. The work may also support future developments in light amplification, beam combining, imaging, and sensing technologies. More broadly, it expands the understanding of how light can be controlled in complex fiber structures and points to new ways of designing optical systems that are both powerful and resilient.

Во время полевого сезона этого года совместная экспедиция Института археологии РАН и Нижегородского музея-заповедника обнаружила при раскопках Звягинского 2-го могильника несколько десятков древнейших захоронений народа мурома - некоторые из них относятся к рубежу VI-VII веков. Одно из наиболее значительных открытий - погребение женщины в головном уборе, украшенном крестообразными фибулами, кожаными шнурами и оловянно-свинцовыми бусинами.

Archaeologists excavating the Zvyaginsky II burial ground in Russia’s Nizhny Novgorod Region have uncovered what they believe are the earliest known Murom burials on the right bank of the Oka River, offering fresh evidence about the origins of one of the Volga-Oka region’s least understood early medieval populations. The discoveries were made during the fourth field season of excavations at the site in the Vachsky District by a joint expedition from the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Nizhny Novgorod Museum-Reserve.
Over the course of the 2026 season, researchers excavated approximately 1,000 square metres of the cemetery, uncovering 43 burials, including 37 inhumations, one cremation and six horse burials, two of which shared a single grave pit.
Earliest Murom burials identified
While previous excavations focused on understanding the decline of the Murom people, this year’s work shifted attention to the cemetery’s oldest section, allowing archaeologists to investigate how the Murom culture first emerged. Evidence suggests that some of the newly excavated graves date to the late 6th and early 7th centuries - earlier than the traditionally accepted beginning of the Murom culture.
"This season has allowed us to move from asking when the Murom people disappeared to exploring where they came from," the expedition team said.
Rare female burial with ceremonial headdress
Among the most significant discoveries was the burial of a high-status woman wearing an elaborate ceremonial headdress decorated with eight cross-shaped brooches. Seven small brooches were arranged around her skull in a halo-like pattern, while a larger two-plate brooch was found behind the head. Researchers believe the ornaments were decorative rather than functional, as they lacked fastening pins and were likely sewn onto a textile headdress embroidered with tin-lead beads. The burial also preserved traces of leather cords bound with bronze rings, providing rare insight into the construction of elite Murom headwear.
Archaeologists say the arrangement closely matches similar headdresses previously found at several 5th- to 7th-century cemeteries across the Volga-Oka interfluve, including the Bezvodninsky, Akhmylovsky and Zheltukhinsky burial grounds. The consistency of the design across multiple sites points to a shared cultural tradition that extended across a wide geographical area.
Weapons, belts and military-style ornaments
Male graves contained a range of weapons typical of the period, including spearheads, darts, axes and celts. One burial preserved a complete warrior’s weapon set consisting of both a spear and a dart.
Researchers also uncovered several distinctive belt assemblages. Alongside iron-fitted belts common among Volga-Finnic peoples, archaeologists identified so-called "eastern belts", a style believed to have originated in Central Asia before spreading into the Kama region during the 7th and 8th centuries. Five examples have now been found at Zvyaginsky II.
One female burial contained one of these eastern-style belts worn around the pelvis, together with a rare tin-lead clasp featuring a "winged needle" motif. Although such clasps are generally regarded as military attributes, similar examples have previously been found in women’s burials at the nearby Podbolotevsky cemetery.
Earlier dates reshape Murom history
Dating evidence from jewellery, including boat-clasp torcs, syulgams, glass beads and decorated breast ornaments, places many of the burials between the late 7th and early 8th centuries. However, several children’s graves contained artefacts that appear to predate this period. A necklace of opaque red glass beads dates no later than the 7th century, while distinctive syulgams suggest two other burials belong to the late 6th or early 7th century. These finds indicate that Murom communities settled along the high banks of the Oka River earlier than previously believed.
Tracing the origins of the Murom people
The discoveries strengthen archaeological links between the Murom culture and the earlier Bezvodninsky-Akhmylovsky cultural tradition, represented by sites across the Volga-Oka interfluve.
Researchers believe comparisons between the new discoveries at Zvyaginsky II and earlier excavations at Podbolotevsky and Malyshevsky burial grounds are beginning to reveal broader cultural processes that shaped the region during the third quarter of the first millennium AD.
According to the expedition, these processes ultimately led to the expansion of Murom culture across the Lower Oka basin, where the population remained established for nearly 500 years despite being divided by the Oka River itself.
The Zvyaginsky II burial ground is now regarded as one of the most comprehensively studied Murom archaeological sites, with modern excavation methods - including advanced digital recording and scientific analysis - providing a far more detailed understanding of burial practices, costume traditions and social organisation than was possible during excavations carried out in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Северо-Восточный китайский национальный парк тигров и леопардов и российский национальный парк «Земля леопарда» впервые провели совместный мониторинг перемещения и состояния популяции амурских тигров по трансграничной охраняемой территории площадью почти 17000 квадратных километров. Использование общих методов идентификации животных, протоколов мониторинга и согласованных стандартов измерения позволило осуществить весь процесс сбора, сравнения, проверки и анализа данных в относительно короткие сроки и получить точную численности амурских тигров вдоль китайско-российской границы.

By improving cross-border ecological corridors, expanding joint monitoring, sharing scientific expertise and coordinating anti-poaching efforts, China and Russia have helped protect the movement of Amur tigers between the two countries, a Chinese expert with years of experience working with Russian counterparts told the Global Times, noting that such cooperation had strengthened habitat connectivity and provided critical support for the recovery of the species in the wild.
China's Northeast China Tiger and Leopard National Park has established a long-term partnership with Russia's Land of the Leopard National Park, carrying out joint population surveys, coordinating cross-border patrols, and sharing information of the Amur tiger. Together, the two sides have created a transboundary protected area covering nearly 17,000 square kilometers. Officials say 21 Amur tigers and 27 Amur leopards now regularly move across the China-Russia border, according to China's National Forestry and Grassland Administration (NFGA) on July 29, the International Tiger Day.
This year, China and Russia primarily compared data collected through their respective monitoring programs before jointly publishing the results on the cross-border distribution and population status of the Amur tiger, Jiang Guangshun, a professor at Northeast Forestry University, who has decades of experience in cooperating with Russia on protecting Amur tiger, told the Global Times.
Although China and Russia have long maintained close communication and mutual support in cross-border tiger and leopard monitoring and conservation, the joint monitoring of the same species across their shared border using identical identification methods, monitoring protocols and mutually agreed measurement standards marks the first such effort of its kind, both internationally and domestically, the Global Times learned from NFGA.
Completed in less than eight months, the joint China-Russia monitoring project brought together the full process of data collection, comparison, verification and analysis within a relatively short time frame. That helped avoid problems seen in earlier surveys conducted over longer periods, including the risk of counting animals that had died before the survey was completed, according to the NFGA.
NFGA said the findings provided the most precise and comprehensive assessment on record of Amur tiger and Amur leopard populations along the China-Russia border.
Discussing specific areas of China-Russia cooperation on Amur tiger conservation, Jiang said that the two countries' shared commitment to cross-border protection has helped strengthen ecological connectivity and create conditions for tigers to move more freely across national boundaries. Given the species' vast range, an individual tiger may roam in Russia one day and enter China the next, making it difficult to assign it to a single country and underscoring the need for coordinated cross-border conservation, he said.
Since 2023, China and Russia have begun opening wildlife migration corridors along their shared border on a trial basis to facilitate the movement of Amur tigers, leopards and other wild animals. The move has transformed what were once difficult border crossings into unobstructed routes for wildlife migration, according to NFGA.
Along these migration corridors near the China-Russia border, sections of the wire fences that once served as physical barriers between the two countries have been opened, allowing wildlife to move freely, expand their ranges, maintain genetic exchange and access more opportunities for breeding.
The expert added that China and Russia continue to cooperate in areas such as infrared camera monitoring, genetic monitoring and behavioral research, while sharing real-time data to track the cross-border movements of Amur tigers.
In practice, Russian experts uses satellite collars to track tigers' movements in real time and shares their location data and movement patterns with Chinese researchers in a timely manner. Based on the information, Chinese scientists conduct continuous monitoring and take preventive measures to reduce potential human-tiger conflicts, said Jiang.
Through years of data sharing and communication, researchers from both countries have gained a deeper understanding of the movement patterns of Amur tigers across the border, Jiang noted.
Jiang also said authorities in China and Russia have carried out long-term cooperation in joint monitoring, technical exchanges, experience sharing and coordinated anti-poaching efforts, which have helped strengthen cross-border conservation efforts.
He added that some of the most pressing questions in biology conservation require joint research by scientists from both countries. These include assessing the risk of disease transmission as tigers cross national borders, managing potential human-tiger conflicts as the animals expand into new areas, and building shared cross-border databases - efforts that require sustained cooperation over the long term.

Сибирский шелкопряд (Dendrolimus sibiricus) - опасный вредитель, который питается хвоей и способен превратить леса Сибири и Дальнего Востока в миллионы гектаров сухостоя. Это, в свою очередь, способствует распространению масштабных лесных пожаров. Вспышки численности шелкопряда повторяются примерно каждые десять-одиннадцать лет и обычно длятся два-три сезона. Новосибирские и красноярские ученые опубликовали исследование одно- и двухлетнего жизненных циклов шелкопряда, изучив физиологические и молекулярные механизмы, лежащие в основе перехода между двумя циклами.

The trees that are burning across Krasnoyarsk this year were, in a lot of cases, already dead. Not from fire, and not from drought, but from a moth.
Dendrolimus sibiricus, the Siberian silk moth, has spent the last several years stripping needles from fir, spruce, larch and pine across huge stretches of central Siberia, and a tree that loses its needles for enough consecutive seasons simply dies where it stands. It does not fall over.
It does not decompose quickly in a climate this cold. It stays upright, drying out, for years, until something eventually sets it alight, and this year that something has been an unusually hot, dry stretch of Siberian summer.
How a caterpillar kills a forest without ever touching fire
The Siberian silk moth’s caterpillars are defoliators, meaning they eat needles rather than wood, bark or roots, and a single bad outbreak year can strip a stand bare across an area running into the hundreds of thousands of hectares. Research into the moth’s life cycle, published this year in Frontiers in Insect Science, examined why some populations follow a one-year larval cycle while others take two - and found the split isn’t simply a matter of temperature or food availability. Laboratory tests that varied larval density, food supply and host plant didn’t reproduce the switch; the researchers found a distinct molecular signature instead, pointing to a more complex mix of cues and environmental history behind which path a population takes. Whatever sets the timing, a conifer can usually survive losing its needles once. It is much less likely to survive losing them in consecutive years, which is exactly the pattern an outbreak produces once it takes hold.
Remote sensing work tracking a more recent outbreak in central Siberia found the scale involved is not small. A study analysing satellite data from 2016 to 2020 documented Siberian silk moth damage across multiple sites in the Yenisei and Irbei districts, with the outbreak that ran from 2015 to 2018 alone disturbing an estimated 428,600 hectares of forest in the Yenisei region, and a second, smaller outbreak from 2018 to 2020 affecting a further 41,500 hectares in Irbei. Those are just two districts in one stretch of years. The moth’s outbreaks recur roughly every ten to eleven years and typically run for two to three seasons once they start, which means the deadwood now feeding Krasnoyarsk’s fires was very likely put in place by an outbreak that peaked years before anyone was thinking about this particular fire season.
This is not the first time, and it will not be the last
Russian forestry records on this moth go back further than most pest histories, and the historical numbers are large enough to be genuinely difficult to picture. A contingency assessment compiled for the UK’s plant health authorities, drawing on that longer Russian record, states that across the ninety years from 1855 to 1945, Siberian silk moth outbreaks killed at least 4 million hectares of Russian forest. A subsequent twenty-five-year stretch, from 1932 to 1957, saw the moth damage 7 million hectares of forest in Western Siberia and Chita Oblast alone, with the assessment noting that the insect killed the forest outright across roughly half that area rather than merely thinning it. These are not one-off disasters. They are what happens, repeatedly, when an outbreak-prone species with a ten-year cycle meets a forest type it is well adapted to defoliate, across a landscape too vast for any human intervention to meaningfully interrupt.
What makes an outbreak year different from a quiet one is not usually visible to anyone who is not specifically monitoring moth populations. The insect itself does most of its damage during a narrow larval feeding window each year, and by the time a stand’s needle loss is severe enough to be obvious from the ground, the underlying population boom that caused it may already be subsiding. The dead trees, on the other hand, do not subside. They remain part of the landscape for years afterward, and it is that lag, between an outbreak most people never noticed and the fire season that eventually finds the deadwood it left behind, that connects an entomological event to a wildfire emergency that looks, on the surface, like a purely meteorological one.
A predictable cycle that still catches everyone off guard
Part of what makes this connection so easy to lose track of is that the moth and the fire show up in completely different seasons, in front of completely different audiences. An outbreak plays out over successive spring and early summer feeding windows, tracked mostly by foresters and the handful of remote sensing researchers who specialise in this insect.
A wildfire emergency plays out in front of regional officials, emergency crews and, once smoke starts settling over towns, the general public. By the time the fire is the story everyone is watching, the outbreak that set the stage for it is old news, if it was ever news at all outside forestry circles.
That gap in visibility is one reason the deadwood explanation, when officials do offer it, tends to land as a surprising detail rather than something people already expected to hear.
Why this connection is easy to miss and hard to fix
Fire agencies fighting the current Krasnoyarsk fires have been explicit that the moth-killed deadwood is a major factor in how fast this year’s fires have spread, alongside the high temperatures driving the season generally. That is a useful diagnosis for understanding why containment has been difficult, but it does not translate into an obvious fix.
Clearing dead timber across hundreds of thousands of hectares of remote taiga, most of it far from any road, is not a realistic undertaking at the scale the outbreaks operate on, and the moth itself is native to the region, not an invasive species that can be targeted for eradication. Forest managers can watch for outbreak signals and plan around them, but they cannot meaningfully outpace an insect whose largest recorded outbreaks predate satellite monitoring by a century.
What the historical record does offer is a way of reading this year’s fires that goes beyond the weather report. A summer this hot would have produced a serious fire season regardless. It is the several hundred thousand hectares of standing dead timber, left behind by an outbreak most of the region never registered as news at the time, that is turning a bad fire season into one moving faster than heat and dryness alone would predict. The moth will not be back in force for years. The forest it already killed is still standing, and still burning, right now.

Чтобы определить направление полета, перелетные птицы полагаются на различные виды сенсорных сигналов, включая геомагнитное поле Земли. Однако вопрос о том, как они обнаруживают эти сигналы, остается предметом дискуссий. Одно из основных объяснений заключается в том, что магнитное поле изменяет химические реакции внутри светочувствительного белка криптохрома в сетчатке птичьих глаз. Биологи из СПбГУ и Зоологического института РАН провели исследование, результаты которого ставят под сомнение эту теорию и позволяют предположить, что птицы обладают отдельной сенсорной системой, способной обнаруживать радиочастотные магнитные помехи.

Every year, millions of migratory birds travel between different geographical regions on Earth to find food, escape cold weather or reach safe environments to raise chicks. To determine which direction to fly, these birds rely on various types of sensory cues and information, including the magnetic field surrounding our planet, known as the geomagnetic field.
While various past studies suggested that Earth's geomagnetic field plays a role in the orientation of migratory birds, how birds detect this invisible signal remains widely debated. A leading explanation is that magnetic fields subtly alter light-triggered chemical reactions inside a protein in birds' eyes called cryptochrome.
When exposed to light, this protein prompts the production of molecule pairs with correlated electron spins. Magnetic field-induced alterations in these molecule pairs have been hypothesized to guide birds, helping them determine which direction to travel.
Researchers at Saint Petersburg State University and the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences recently carried out a study aimed at further testing this theory. Their findings, published in Journal of the Royal Society Interface, challenge some previous assumptions about how birds perceive magnetic fields, suggesting that birds may possess a distinct magnetic sensory system that detects radiofrequency (RF) magnetic disturbances.
"In the early 1970s, Wolfgang and Roswitha Wiltschko published a seminal paper, proving that migratory birds use a magnetic compass whose operation is dependent on the presence of dim ambient light," Kirill Kavokin, first author of the paper, told Phys.org.
"In 2000, Ritz, Adem and Schulten proposed a photochemical theory of the birds' magnetic compass. According to this theory, the primary sensor of the compass is based on the protein cryptochrome, where absorption of ambient light creates pairs of electrons with correlated spins. The geomagnetic field exerts a force on the magnetic moments associated with the electron spins and thus affects their time evolution."
Past studies exploring the magnetic 'compass' of birds
The outcome of photochemical reactions in cryptochrome depends on whether an initial correlation of electron spins is preserved. This means that it could, in principle, also be influenced by the strength of a magnetic field and by the angle at which it passes through a cryptochrome molecule.
"Being fixed in the photoreceptor cells of the bird's retina, cryptochrome molecules can serve as compass needles," Kavokin explained. "This theory, called the radical pair model, though not ultimately proved experimentally, is now accepted by the majority of researchers in the field."
In the early 2000s, physicist Thorsten Ritz tried to test the radical pair model experimentally. Specifically, he proposed destroying electron spin correlations in cryptochrome by applying an additional weak magnetic field that oscillated at the specific electron spin resonance (ESR) frequency.
"The experiment was conducted in the Wiltschkos' laboratory in Frankfurt, yielding a striking result: The birds (European robins) subjected to weak oscillating magnetic fields with frequencies in the ESR range of the geomagnetic field (a few MHz) were indeed disoriented. Later, similar experiments were performed in our group and in the Oldenburg laboratory of Henrik Mouritsen, leaving no doubt that the radiofrequency magnetic fields disrupt birds' orientation by geomagnetic field."
While these initial experiments appeared to confirm the validity of the radical pair model, subsequent papers highlighted some potential issues. Specifically, some physicists noticed that the oscillating field amplitudes used by Ritz and other research teams were far too weak to induce ESR frequencies in organic molecules at temperatures found in living organisms.
"These concerns were first expressed in one of my previous papers," Kavokin said. "Subsequent efforts failed to overcome this difficulty with more elaborate theories, and an unknown amplification mechanism was proposed to temporarily explain the experimental results.
"Meanwhile, an alternative hypothesis was put forward by Joseph Kirschvink, who suggested the existence of a specific receptor for RF fields signaling the onset of a geomagnetic storm, which would switch the magnetic compass off to avoid orientation errors. Later, this idea was expanded to thunderstorms as a possible source of ominous magnetic perturbations that could be detected by this hypothetical receptor."
After the introduction of these two alternative hypotheses explaining the observed effect of RF fields on the orientation of migratory birds, Kavokin and his colleagues started planning new research aimed at testing them. This ultimately paved the way for their recent study, which simultaneously tested the two hypotheses.
New experiments with birds to test different theories
The researchers carried out various experiments involving pied flycatchers, migratory songbirds that have been found to become disoriented by weak RF fields. They exposed these birds to weak RF oscillating magnetic fields with two different radio frequencies (1.41 MHz and 1.5 MHz).
They also compared the effects of two distinct types of radio signals: unmodulated signals and amplitude-modulated signals. The main difference between these radio signals is that while the strength of unmodulated signals remains constant, the RF power in amplitude-modulated signals is rapidly switched on and off.
"This was like sending an AM radio signal to the birds," Kavokin explained. "Having less mean power, it would affect the electron spins in cryptochrome less than the unmodulated carrier wave. However, for the specialized detector of magnetic perturbations, the modulated signal might be more meaningful than the sinusoidal wave that carries no information."
To test the birds' orientation, the researchers used experimental tools known as Emlen funnels. These are truncated cones made of plastic, with a top diameter of 35 cm (14 inches) and a bottom diameter of 10 cm (4 inches). The team placed a bird inside the funnel and then exposed it to the RF oscillating magnetic fields.
"Pied flycatchers are night migrants, and during the migration season they demonstrate migratory restlessness (zugunruhe)," Kavokin said.
"This means that at night they start to jump in their cages and whirl their wings. In this state, when placed in the Emlen funnel and covered by a milky glass lid, they try to take off in the direction of seasonal migration, which they determine using the magnetic compass. During these attempts, they leave scratches on the sensitive film attached to the inner surface of the funnel."
Kavokin and his colleagues examined the funnels, particularly the scratches that appeared on them, after the birds had been kept inside them for 25 minutes at the beginning of the night. This allowed them to determine whether the birds were trying to fly in a specific direction and, if so, which direction that was.
"The essential part of the experimental arrangement was the RF equipment, purposely developed by our team for outdoor experiments to provide stable operation under changing weather conditions, including high humidity and temperature drops at night, typical for the location," Kavokin explained.
"We tested pied flycatchers in the normal geomagnetic field (control), and in two experimental conditions in which the RF field was applied in the form of either a continuous wave or the same wave modulated in amplitude by a train of rectangular pulses. In the latter case, the RF power was alternately on and off during intervals of 1 millisecond."
The results of the team's experiments contradicted predictions made by the cryptochrome-based photochemical model. Instead, they suggested that birds possess a separate sensory system that allows them to detect RF magnetic disturbances and orient themselves accordingly.
"For the cryptochrome-based receptor, millisecond RF pulses are too short to distinguish. It is the mean RF power that matters in this case, which is half as great for the pulsed signal as for the continuous wave," Kavokin said.
"Therefore, one would expect the disruptive effect of the pulsed signal on birds' orientation to be weaker than that of the continuous wave. However, the results of our experiments were exactly the opposite: The pulsed RF field always caused disorientation, even if the continuous wave field of the same amplitude did not disorient birds."
Surprising results that challenge existing cryptochrome theories
This recent study could improve the current understanding of bird navigation, particularly the biological processes that allow migratory birds to orient themselves using Earth's geomagnetic field. The team's findings could soon inspire other biologists, zoologists and physicists to investigate the sensory system that may allow birds to detect RF magnetic disturbances.
"The most important implication of our results is that the disruption of birds' orientation by RF magnetic fields is not related to their direct effect on the electron spins in the cryptochrome-based magnetic compass," Kavokin said.
"To the contrary, our results agree with the hypothesis of a separate sensory system aimed at detection of magnetic perturbations. The modulation frequency of 500Hz we used is in the range of natural magnetic disturbances, especially that of spherics - electromagnetic pulses induced by lightning."
While this study hints at the existence of a bird sensory system that can detect RF magnetic signals, this system and its underlying detection mechanisms have not yet been uncovered. In their paper, Kavokin and his colleagues suggest that this system relies on the so-called Faraday law of electromagnetic induction and could be supported by vestibular organs (i.e., structures in the inner ear of birds and other animals).
"We present calculations of the induction efficiency in semicircular canals of the inner ear of birds, which largely agree with the known frequency range of the RF effect on orientation of birds," added Kavokin.
"Our initial results raise many intriguing questions, such as: to what specific kind of natural magnetic signal is the new sensory system tuned and how is it involved in regulation of bird behavior during migration? We are now planning to subject birds to time-dependent magnetic fields mimicking natural perturbations (e.g., nearby thunderstorms), to see how they would respond."

Археологи Института истории материальной культуры РАН представили некоторые результаты изучения и систематизации обнаруженного в 2022 г. на южной окраине Херсонеса Таврического римского погребального комплекса I-II вв. н. э. Одной из примечательных находок стала гробница 18-летней девушки по имени Аннион, принадлежавшей к одной из самых влиятельных семей города. Вместе с Аннион были похоронены ее украшения, косметика и другие личные вещи. Помимо физической консервации и реставрации находок, ученые создали их подробные 3D-модели - почти 5000 объектов.

On the windswept southern edge of the ancient Greek city of Tauric Chersonesos, not far from where its gates once stood, archaeologists uncovered the undisturbed grave of a young woman named Annion, buried nearly two millennia ago with more jewelry, perfume, and personal belongings than almost anyone would expect to see intact after so much time. She was eighteen, and she came from one of the most powerful families in the city.
Now, after years of study and restoration, the team behind the discovery is ready to share the full story - not just of Annion herself, but of the larger family complex she belonged to, and of the work it took to bring her tomb back from the earth and into public view.
A Name Carved in Stone, Confirmed by a Bowl
The tomb was first excavated in 2022 in the Southern Suburb of Chersonesos, a UNESCO World Heritage site on the Crimean peninsula that has been continuously studied by Russian archaeologists for years. But the sheer scale of the find meant that cataloguing and interpreting everything inside it took much longer than the dig itself.
According to Viktor V. Vakhoneev, senior researcher at the Center for Rescue Archaeology of the Institute for the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IHMC RAS), and the archaeologist who led the study of the site, the tomb was built for a young woman named Annion - a member of what he describes as a genuinely powerful, ruling family in the city during the 1st-2nd centuries AD.
In an exclusive account shared with us, Vakhoneev explained that a grand tomb was raised for her just outside the city walls, decorated with a carved stela. The inscription, in ancient Greek, leaves no ambiguity about who lies within: "Annion, daughter of Aischines, son of Heroides, who died at the age of eighteen."
What makes this discovery unusually certain - almost unheard of in archaeology - is that the name on the stone and the name on Annion’s own belongings match exactly. Among the grave goods was a red-glaze bowl bearing her name, a rare and moving detail that removes any doubt about whose story this tomb tells.
What Was Buried Beside Her
Few burials from this period have yielded a personal assemblage as rich, or as intimate, as Annion’s. According to the excavation findings, her grave contained an extraordinary range of jewelry and cosmetic items, clearly meant to accompany her into the afterlife exactly as she had lived: gold ornaments, rings, pendants and decorative appliqués once sewn onto clothing, alongside a collection of glass vessels used for oils and perfumes.
Some of those glass containers were shaped with striking artistry - one modeled after a date fruit, another in the form of a cluster of grapes. Archaeologists also recovered bone pyxides, small boxes once used to store cosmetic rouge, and, remarkably, traces of the rouge itself, preserved for nearly two thousand years in the Chersonesos soil. Hairpins, two spindles, and a large quantity of beads - enough, researchers say, to eventually be restrung and reconstructed - rounded out what is unmistakably a deeply personal, distinctly feminine set of funerary belongings.
Anthropological analysis confirmed that the remains inside the tomb do indeed belong to a young woman, roughly twenty years old at the time of death - closely matching the eighteen years recorded on her memorial stela. The precise cause of her death has not yet been determined, though researchers note that broader scientific work on the necropolis, including bone-sample analysis using modern methods, has shown that seasonal respiratory illness was among the most common causes of death in the city during that era.
Today, Annion’s tomb stands on public display at the southern facade of the Museum of Antiquity and Byzantium in New Chersonesos, with one of its stelae bearing a carved image of the young woman herself.
Not Just One Tomb - A Family’s Memorial to Its Own
While the initial discovery captured attention as the story of a single, richly furnished grave, Vakhoneev was careful to clarify a crucial point that easily gets lost in a shorter retelling: Annion’s tomb was never an isolated burial. It was one part of a considerably larger Roman-period funerary and memorial complex, built and used by the same family across generations, located in the necropolis of the Southern Suburb near the ancient city gates.
That complex, as Vakhoneev described it, brought together several distinct structures: a slab-built, above-ground tomb; a crypt-columbarium designed to hold multiple burials within niches; and a number of funerary stelae carrying inscriptions and portraits. Alongside Annion’s name, these inscriptions also commemorate members of the Ariston family - meaning the site should be understood not as a single grave, but as a shared burial ground built to honor several relatives over time.
This distinction matters. It is tempting, when a name appears twice in a necropolis, to assume a simple pairing - a husband and wife, perhaps, sharing one final resting place. Vakhoneev addressed that assumption head-on, cautioning against the idea that Annion and a man named Ariston were buried together in a simple double tomb. Ariston, he explained, is present in the complex’s memorial program through funerary stelae, with the name recurring more than once across the family group - but the human remains actually recovered from the excavated burial chamber tied to Annion belonged to a young woman and a child of about six or seven years old, not to an adult man.
The chamber, in other words, holds a young woman and a child laid to rest together - a detail that adds a quieter, sadder dimension to a discovery already defined by loss.
Based on the material recovered, researchers date the main grave assemblage to the late 1st to early 2nd century AD, while the wider memorial complex - including its stelae - appears to have remained in use into the first half, or perhaps middle, of the 2nd century AD. The burial chamber associated with Annion was uncovered in 2022, but the study of the full funerary ensemble and its finds has continued in the years since.
From Waterlogged Ravine to Museum Centerpiece: The Restoration Effort
Perhaps the least visible part of this story - and one of the most demanding - is what it actually took to bring these structures out of the ground intact and put them in front of the public.
The Southern Suburb necropolis sits on the slopes of an ancient ravine, where water flowing along the bottom made in-place conservation impossible. High water levels and material erosion meant that preserving these tombs where they were found simply was not an option. Instead, the IHMC RAS team decided to relocate the monuments to a safer setting where they could be properly displayed - a project that, according to the restoration documentation shared with us, ultimately included six ancient funerary monuments in total, among them the tomb of Annion, the tomb of Ariston, a tholos, a columbarium-tomb, and a memorial exedra-crypt.
The scale of the digitization alone is striking: more than 4,600 individual architectural blocks were scanned during the project, which ran for roughly two years from the start of excavation at the first monument to the final reassembly of the structures at the museum site.
The process followed several careful stages. Archaeologists and conservators first assessed each object’s condition, identifying damage and its causes - for structures below sea level, this often meant flooding and material washout. Every block was then digitally recorded using laser total stations, drone-based geodetic surveys, and photogrammetry, building precise 3D models accurate to within a tenth of a millimeter using tools such as Artec Eva scanners. Each element was individually marked before being carefully disassembled using non-destructive methods, particularly important for stone already weakened by erosion or cracking.
From there, the digital models were integrated into architectural software to produce full restoration plans grounded in the principle of anastylosis - the practice of returning original elements to their original positions using traditional materials and methods wherever possible, rather than fabricating replacements.
The physical conservation work that followed included removing biological growth such as fungi, moss, and lichen from the stone, cleaning without damaging original surfaces, injecting resin into cracks to reinforce weakened blocks, and rejoining broken fragments using specialized adhesives and anchor pins. Structural stone consolidation relied on established conservation compounds, and in total, more than 800 stone blocks were restored through this process before final reassembly at the museum, using lime-based mortar formulated to match the original material.
According to Vakhoneev, the core conservation and restoration work needed for scholarly study, photography, and publication of Annion’s grave goods has now been completed, even as some specialist analysis continues.
It’s worth noting that this is not the first time this same team has carried out restoration work of this caliber. The IHMC RAS group behind the Chersonesos project also led the restoration of the Triumphal Arch of Palmyra in Syria - an effort that received international recognition, including praise from UNESCO - giving this Crimean project the benefit of a methodology already tested on one of the world’s most closely watched heritage sites.
Readers interested in the full restoration process, including step-by-step documentation and 3D models of the reassembled monuments, can find further detail through the Center for Rescue Archaeology of the Institute for the History of Material Culture, Russian Academy of Sciences.
We are especially grateful to Viktor V. Vakhoneev and the Center for Rescue Archaeology at the Institute for the History of Material Culture, Russian Academy of Sciences, for sharing these details directly and exclusively for this article, helping ensure that Annion’s story - and the story of the family who built her tomb - is told with the accuracy and care it deserves.

Исследователи из Института физики твердого тела имени Ю.А.Осипьяна РАН и НИУ ВШЭ проанализировали измерения электропроводности в трехконтактных структурах типа «нормальный металл - сверхпроводник - нормальный металл» и опровергли результаты более раннего эксперимента, проведенного немецкими и швейцарскими коллегами.

Researchers have measured the full differential conductance matrix, defined as G_ij = ∂ I_i/∂ V_j, moving beyond standard linear response measurements in three-terminal normal-superconductor-normal devices. These devices are based on topological insulator nanowires, and the work reveals how crossed Andreev reflection and elastic co-tunneling, two competing quantum processes, respond to applied voltages. Specifically, the team observed that crossed Andreev reflection is enhanced when V₁ = V₂, while elastic co-tunneling is enhanced when V₁ = -V₂, offering a potential pathway to control these subtle quantum effects.
Bias Voltage Symmetry Explained by Self-Gating Effects
Researchers at the Osipyan Institute of Solid State Physics, Russian Academy of Sciences, and HSE University analyzed transport measurements of three-terminal normal-superconductor-normal (NSN) devices constructed from topological insulator nanowires, focusing on how bias voltages influence the flow of electrons and holes. Their analysis challenges interpretations of earlier work suggesting a straightforward control mechanism for quantum processes within these devices, revealing a more complex interplay of effects.
The initial interpretation proposed that this bias voltage symmetry offered a means to systematically favor one quantum process over the other; however, the new analysis suggests this symmetry arises from a "fine tuned self-gating effect" rather than intentional control. This self-gating, a bias-related change in the potential landscape within the device, complicates the relationship between applied voltage and observed conductance, introducing an additional layer of influence beyond the expected crossed Andreev reflection and elastic co-tunneling contributions.
The researchers state that determining the relative values of crossed Andreev reflection and elastic co-tunneling probabilities solely from transport measurements is fundamentally limited. They explain that the measured conductance matrix, Gij, can remain constant even if the probabilities of local and non-local electron transfer change, particularly when moving beyond the linear response regime. This means that observing a specific conductance value does not definitively indicate the dominance of either crossed Andreev reflection or elastic co-tunneling, as previously suggested.
Their analysis, based on the scattering matrix formalism, reveals that the observed bias symmetry isn’t a direct consequence of controlling crossed Andreev reflection and elastic co-tunneling, but rather a result of the complex interplay of these processes and the self-gating effect. They state that the hypothesis about the origin of the bias voltages impact on the non-local conductances raised in a previous reference is not justified and an alternative explanation of the data is needed.
Differential Conductance Equations Relate Crossed Andreev Reflection and Elastic Co-tunneling
Recent advances in superconductivity research have focused on meticulously characterizing electron transport in nanoscale normal-superconductor-normal (NSN) devices, but distinguishing between competing quantum mechanical processes within these systems has proven remarkably difficult. Researchers are now challenging interpretations of experiments designed to differentiate between crossed Andreev reflection (CAR) and elastic co-tunneling (ECT), two mechanisms governing electron flow across superconducting junctions. A new analysis indicates that previously attributed bias-voltage control over these processes may stem from an unanticipated effect: self-gating within the device itself.
This detailed measurement is crucial because most conductance studies rely on simplifying assumptions that may obscure subtle effects. E.S. Tikhonov and V.S. Khrapai, in conversation with the author, observed indications that crossed Andreev reflection is enhanced for V₁ = V₂, whereas elastic co-tunneling is enhanced for V₁ = -V₂, in analogy with experiments on quantum dot devices, and used the former combination to investigate the gate voltage dependence of G_ij.
Based on the sign of the non-local conductance, Feng et al. made conclusions about the dominance of crossed Andreev reflection or elastic co-tunneling, and the case of the dominant crossed Andreev reflection was interpreted as evidence of unusually long-range crossed Andreev reflection. Here, the authors state that the interpretation of the experiment is misleading in two respects. First, the bias voltages impact the non-local differential conductance randomly, rather than systematically, and the bias symmetry of the non-local conductance can be explained by a fine tuned self-gating effect.
Second, complete knowledge of the G_ij is insufficient to make conclusions about the relative values of the crossed Andreev reflection and elastic co-tunneling probabilities. The researchers emphasize that correlating the sign of G₁₂ with the dominance of crossed Andreev reflection or elastic co-tunneling is ambiguous. The analysis highlights a fundamental limitation: determining the relative contributions of crossed Andreev reflection and elastic co-tunneling requires more than just transport measurements.
The team found that complete knowledge of the G_ij matrix is insufficient to conclude the dominance of either process. They suggest that future studies should incorporate additional measurements, such as shot noise analysis, to provide a more complete picture of electron transport in these complex nanoscale devices.
Non-Local Conductance Fails to Distinguish Crossed Andreev Reflection from Elastic Co-tunneling
E.S. Khrapai and others have challenged interpretations of recent experiments examining quantum effects in nanoscale devices. The team’s work scrutinizes claims made by Feng et al. regarding the ability to control these processes through applied bias voltages. Feng et al. Second, complete knowledge of the G_ij is insufficient to make conclusions about the relative values of the crossed Andreev reflection and elastic co-tunneling probabilities, particularly regarding the dominance of one of them.
They found that while Feng et al. The researchers emphasize that the sign of the conductance, G₁₂ > 0, does not necessarily imply a stronger crossed Andreev reflection process. The researchers emphasize that the sign of the conductance, G₁₂ > 0, does not necessarily imply a stronger crossed Andreev reflection process.

Ученые Кольского научного центра РАН, СПбГУ и Минералогического музея имени А.Е.Ферсмана РАН обнаружили в Кировском руднике Хибинского массива (Мурманская область) неизвестный минерал - редкоземельный силикат, похожий на ашкрофтин, открытый в Гренландии более ста лет назад.

A rare-earth rich mineral has been discovered by a team of Russian scientists in Kola Peninsula in Russia, emboldening the country’s critical mineral growth efforts.
Researchers from St Petersburg State University, the Kola Science Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Fersman Mineralogical Museum made the discovery of the new mineral, calling it Kola Ashcroftine. The mineral has been found to contain yttrium, silicon, potassium, sodium, calcium, manganese, fluorine and various rare-earth elements, making it a very rare find. Due to its rarity, researchers from the discovery say that the unique structure of the mineral would make it useful for ion-exchange processes and a benefit to a wide range of industries, including water purification, pharmaceuticals and nuclear energy.
According to Sergei Krivovichev, director general of the Kola Science Center, the crystal structure of the mineral is based on silicate nanotubes topologically linked to a zeolite framework, and is among less than 3.5% of the most complex minerals known to science.
The discovery could be a step in the right direction for Russia’s expansive rare-earth elements (REE) business. Despite sanctions, it is a lifeline for the EU’s critical mineral demand. Last year, Russia made up a quarter of the EU’s rare-earth imports.
Russia has developed a roadmap to expand its rare-earth mining and refining capabilities by exploiting its own vast reserves. Despite having the second largest reserves of REE, the country imports 90% of its REE, mostly from China.
Facing the same competitive bottlenecks as the US and Europe with China’s critical mineral dominance, Russia’s roadmap aims to increase REE production by 3,000 t/y by 2030 to meet future demand.

На каменной плите одного из тагарских курганов (VIII-III вв. до н. э.) в Усть-Абаканском районе Хакасии совместная экспедиция Института археологии и этнографии СО РАН и ФИЦ угля и углехимии СО РАН обнаружила выгравированные и выбитые изображения лошадей и человекообразных существ. Изображения относятся к разным периодам - это позволяет предположить,что и сам курган использовался не один раз.

Archaeologists excavating early Iron Age burial mounds in southern Siberia have discovered rare engravings of horses on a stone slab that appears to have been reused as an ancient cemetery expanded over time.
The discovery was made near the Domozhakov aal in the Ust-Abakansky District of Khakassia. Researchers are examining three burial mounds associated with the Tagar culture in a rescue excavation covering about 10,000 square meters.
The Ancient History of Kuzbass project reported the find. The excavation is being carried out by researchers from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Federal Research Center of Coal and Coal Chemistry in Kemerovo.
Petroglyphs found on burial enclosure
Between the 8th and 3rd centuries B.C., people in the Khakassia-Minusinsk Basin buried their dead in wooden log structures. They covered the graves with stone and built enclosures around the burial areas using stone slabs. Similar research into 3,000-year-old tomb art in Khakassia has shown how carvings incorporated into burial structures can help archaeologists date ancient rock art. Archaeologists found petroglyphs on one of those slabs. The stone carries images of two horses and a goat made by engraving, as well as human-like figures created with a different carving technique.
Ancient slab preserves images from different periods
Researchers currently believe the human-like figures are the oldest images. Similar figures are known from slabs and corner steles at other Tagar burial mounds. The orientation of the figures suggests the newly discovered slab may also have originally stood upright. The slab was apparently reused later when the burial enclosure was expanded. Researchers believe the horse images were added during this later phase. Such depictions of horses are rare in Khakassia, but scientists associate them with Tagar art.
Other recent discoveries across Central Asia include more than 1,200 ancient petroglyphs documented in Kazakhstan, with carvings spanning several historical periods.
The combination of images from different periods on a single stone is important for understanding the burial mound itself. Archaeologists say it supports the idea that the burials within the kurgan were not created at the same time. Instead, the site appears to have been altered and expanded over a longer period.
The Tagar culture developed in the Minusinsk Basin during the early Iron Age. Its burial mounds and decorated stones have left archaeologists an important record of the communities that lived in this part of southern Siberia.
Across the wider Eurasian steppe, archaeologists continue to uncover comparable Iron Age funerary sites, including a 2,300-year-old Scythian tomb in Moldova and a 2,700-year-old Saka burial site in Kyrgyzstan.
Excavation could refine the chronology
The latest discovery provides evidence not only of Tagar artistic traditions but also of how older stones could be reused as burial sites changed. Differences in carving techniques and the orientation of the figures give researchers clues about the order in which the images were created. That interpretation, however, remains preliminary.
Archaeologists are now clearing the stone coverings above the graves and preparing to examine the structures inside them. The work could help researchers reconstruct more precisely how the kurgan was built, used, and modified over time.
Evidence from inside the graves could also change the proposed sequence of the petroglyphs. Researchers say new findings may require them to revise which images were created first and when the slab was reused.
The ongoing rescue excavation is therefore expected to provide a clearer picture of the burial mound’s history. For now, the rare horse engravings offer another piece of evidence for the changing use of the site and the artistic traditions of the Tagar culture.

Во время раскопок под Суздалем, проводимых Институтом археологии РАН и Государственным историческим музеем, была обнаружена уникальная деревянная погребальная камера X века. До сих пор самые ранние подобные захоронения в этом регионе датировались XI веком. Мужчина 25-35 лет был похоронен с конем и собакой, а богатый погребальный инвентарь указывал на принадлежность к военной элите. Находка свидетельствует о том, что уже в то время Суздальское Ополье было частью военно-административной сети северо-восточной Руси.

Archaeologists excavating near Suzdal in Russia have uncovered an unusually well-preserved 10th-century chamber grave containing a man buried alongside a horse and dog, as well as weapons and riding equipment. The discovery provides new evidence that an elite military presence had reached northeastern Rus’ earlier than previously thought.
The burial was discovered at the medieval Gnezdilovo cemetery near Suzdal, about 200 kilometres northeast of Moscow, during excavations carried out by the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the State Historical Museum.
Researchers have been investigating Gnezdilovo for seven years, uncovering nearly 100 medieval burials dating mainly from the 10th to the early 12th centuries. The 2026 season added another 15 burials, but one discovery stood apart: an intact underground wooden burial chamber dating to the 10th century. The chamber contained the remains of a man aged between 25 and 35, buried with a horse and dog and accompanied by weapons and equipment associated with a mounted warrior. It is the first chamber grave of its kind discovered in the Suzdal Opolye and suggests that the region was connected to the military and political networks of early Rus’ by the 10th century.
A warrior, horse and dog
The rectangular chamber measured approximately 3.1 by 2.7 metres and had been sunk about one metre into the ground. Archaeologists found traces of its wooden ceiling, walls constructed from vertical planks and a wooden floor. Unlike an ordinary grave filled with earth after burial, the chamber had originally been left hollow. Eventually its wooden ceiling decayed and collapsed into the space below.
The man lay extended in the southern part of the chamber with his head facing west. On the northern side archaeologists found the skeleton of a horse, likewise oriented toward the west, together with the remains of a dog. The deceased had been buried with an extensive collection of objects. Two weight-shaped buttons were found near his neck, while a silver horseshoe-shaped fibula that once fastened his outer clothing remained on the right side of his chest.
An iron knife lay near his left hip. Near his right leg were a battle axe, with part of its wooden handle still surviving, and a horn comb. Between the man and the horse, archaeologists uncovered a spearhead with traces of its wooden shaft, stirrups, a bit with horn cheekpieces and part of a small balance used for weighing. A girth buckle found farther east may indicate that a saddle made from perishable materials had also been placed in the chamber.
The combination of the horse, weapons and riding equipment points to the high status of the man and his association with the mounted military elite of early Rus’.
A rare type of medieval burial
Chamber graves were elaborate underground wooden structures used for some high-status burials in northern Europe and Rus’ during the 10th century. Male chamber graves frequently contain weapons, while some include horses. They stand in contrast to many other 10th-century burials in Rus’, where cremation remained widespread. According to the Institute of Archaeology, chamber burial appeared in Rus’ toward the end of the 9th century in connection with people arriving from Scandinavia and continued until the end of the 10th century. The practice was never common. Archaeologist K.A. Mikhailov has estimated that only a little over 80 chamber graves have been excavated across nine cemeteries during the entire history of archaeological research into medieval Rus’. Examples have been found at major early centres including Staraya Ladoga, Pskov, Gnezdovo near Smolensk, Kyiv, Chernigov and Shestovitsy. In northeastern Rus’, 10th-century chamber graves had previously been excavated only at the Timerevo burial mounds near Yaroslavl.
The Gnezdilovo discovery is particularly valuable because the grave had never previously been disturbed. Many chamber burials were excavated during the middle and second half of the 20th century, when archaeological methods and documentation differed considerably from those available today. At Gnezdilovo, both the skeletal remains and the grave goods survived in good condition, giving researchers an opportunity to document the entire burial using modern techniques.
An earlier elite presence around Suzdal
The location of the burial may prove even more significant than its contents. Most chamber graves known from Rus’ are associated with its earliest urban or proto-urban centres and with places where political and military authority was becoming established. Suzdal and the surrounding Suzdal Opolye, however, emerged as important centres later than places such as Ladoga, Gnezdovo and Kyiv.
Until now, archaeologists had little evidence for the presence of a comparable military-administrative elite around Suzdal during the 10th century. Burials containing weapons and riding equipment previously excavated at Gnezdilovo and other cemeteries in the Suzdal region dated to the 11th century, with the earliest belonging to the beginning of that century. The chamber grave pushes that evidence backwards into the 10th century.
Its construction also resembles chamber graves found much farther west and south, particularly in the Smolensk region and the Middle Dnieper. Archaeologists believe the discovery demonstrates that the Suzdal Opolye was already attracting members of the elite and functioning as a point of military and administrative control over northeastern Rus’ during the 10th century.
Other discoveries made at Gnezdilovo this year reinforce the cemetery’s importance. Excavations across three areas uncovered female burials containing silver temple rings, necklaces made from glass, carnelian and crystal beads, and pendants fashioned from both Western European and Eastern coins.
Another grave contained a young man, possibly a teenager, buried with a battle axe. It is the ninth burial containing a battle axe excavated at Gnezdilovo in modern times.
Researchers have also found that burials containing weapons and equestrian equipment stretch for roughly 200 metres through the central part of the cemetery. Some of the graves were originally covered by burial mounds that disappeared through centuries of ploughing.
Together, the finds are giving archaeologists a much clearer picture of a community situated on what had traditionally been regarded as the northeastern periphery of early Rus’. The newly discovered chamber grave now provides evidence that high-status warriors and administrators were present there earlier than previously demonstrated.

Исследователи Института археологии и этнографии СО РАН, Университета Бордо (Франция), Льежского университета (Бельгия) и Национального археологического центра (Узбекистан) опубликовали первые результаты изучения каменных артефактов возрастом около 80 тысяч лет, найденных в пещере Оби-Рахмат (Узбекистан). Ученые предположили, что это могли быть наконечники для стрел. Трасологический анализ подтвердил, что по своим геометрическим и баллистическим характеристикам наконечники не подходили для дротиков или копий и могли крепиться только на древки стрел.

Microlithic projectile points from Uzbekistan may link Central Asia to a revised story of Homo sapiens’ early expansion into Europe.
Researchers have identified tiny triangular projectile points at the Obi Rakhmat site in Uzbekistan by studying the marks left when they struck targets. Found in the site’s oldest occupation layers, the points date back 80,000 years.
Their small size matches what would be expected for arrowheads, and they closely resemble points made by Homo sapiens during a later movement into Neanderthal territory in the Rhône Valley 25,000 years afterward. Published in the journal PLOS One, the study offers evidence that could change the story of how Homo sapiens first settled in Europe.
The chronological, cultural, and anthropological models used to understand prehistory were first developed in Western Europe, especially France, during the second half of the 19th century. Early versions of those models were linear and Eurocentric. Cro Magnons (European early modern humans), thought at the time to descend from Neanderthals, were used to support ideas of civilizational superiority in that part of the world.
Only about a century later did scholars widely recognize the African origin of Homo sapiens and the technological and social traits that defined the Western Upper Paleolithic (symbolic productions, long-distance networks, and diversified lithic and bone tools and weapons).
The oldest evidence for Homo sapiens in Australia, dating to about 65,000 years ago, is roughly 10,000 years older than the earliest evidence from Europe. Meanwhile, the route and timing of the first Homo sapiens colonization of Western Eurasia more than 45,000 years ago remain debated. The earliest Upper Paleolithic sites in Europe do not align neatly in time with those in the Levant, even though Levantine sites are often considered the closest match in tool types and technology.
This may be because the Levantine evidence comes from older excavations or because it does not fit the expected direct line of development. Although the Levant lies close to Africa, the origins of the Initial Upper Paleolithic there are still unclear. For that reason, the Central Asian origin proposed by archaeologist Ludovic Slimak in 2023 deserves serious attention.
A site in Central Asia
Depending on climatic conditions, Central Asia has served as a corridor facilitating movement between the western and eastern parts of the continent or as a refuge zone. The archaeological record in this region is limited but includes several significant Paleolithic sites.
Among them is the Obi-Rakhmat rock shelter in Uzbekistan, discovered in 1962, whose latest excavation campaigns were led by Andrei Krivoshapkin. At the south-western end of the Talassky Alatau range of the Tien Shan mountains, at an altitude of 1,250 meters, the settlement provides a remarkably consistent lithic industry, comprising points, large blades, and bladelets across a stratigraphic sequence spanning over 10 meters, dating from approximately 80,000 to 40,000 years ago.
This industry was initially classified as part of the Initial Upper Paleolithic, but it appears to derive from the Levantine Early Middle Paleolithic. The early Middle Paleolithic, associated with archaic Homo sapiens at the Misliya cave, disappeared from the Near East around 100,000 years ago. At Obi-Rakhmat, the skull remains of a child found in a layer dating back ~70,000 years show features considered to be Neanderthal and others to be anatomically modern, a combination that could be the result of hybridization.
Massive blades but microlithic points
In this context, our international multidisciplinary team has identified tiny, unretouched, triangular projectile points within the lithic debris of the oldest stratigraphic layers. These points were distinguished based on their macroscopic and microscopic impact marks, which were compared to experimental reference data.
Due to their small size (less than 2 cm in width and weighing only a few grams) and brittleness, they would have been unsuitable for mounting on heavy shafts. The width of their cutting edges corresponds to the diameter of arrow shafts documented ethnographically for low-poundage bows, consistent with transcultural invariants rooted in physical and ballistic constraints.
A question of ballistics
Thrown piercing weapons are complex systems whose components are not interchangeable from one type of weapon to another, as they meet different requirements in terms of intensity and nature of stress.
The significant impact force of spears held or thrown by hand makes the robustness of the weapon an essential parameter, both in terms of effectiveness and the hunter’s survival, with mass ensuring robustness, impact force, and penetration. In contrast, the penetration of light projectiles shot from a long distance depends on their sharpness, because their kinetic energy, which is much lower, comes mainly from their speed, which, unlike mass, decreases very rapidly along the trajectory and in the target.
As this speed cannot be achieved by the extension of the human arm alone, it necessarily depends on the use of a throwing instrument. Arrowheads and spearheads or javelin heads are therefore not designed according to the same criteria and cannot be mounted on the same shafts, the dimensions and degree of elasticity of which are also essential in terms of ballistics. Thus, as in paleontology, where the shape of a tooth reveals the type of diet and suggests the mode of locomotion, the characteristics of a point provide clues as to the type of weapon of which it is the wounding element.
Weaponry specific to ‘Sapiens’?
The tiny size of Obi-Rakhmat’s points cannot be regarded as a default choice, not only because there is no shortage of good-quality lithic raw material on site from which large blades were made, but microscopic examination of traces of use also shows that within this same assemblage there are also much more robust retouched points, 15 to 20 times heavier and 3 to 4 times thicker (the size of spearheads or javelin heads), similarly impacted by use as axial projectile points.
Returning to the bibliography and our own work on Middle Paleolithic tools, we found that the presence in the same assemblage of various types of projectile points and inserts, some of which were microlithic and produced for this purpose, is only known at Homo sapiens sites. The oldest documented occurrences are in South Africa in the Pre-Still Bay (more than 77,000 years old) and later cultural layers of the Sibudu cave.
In contrast, lithic points damaged by use as projectile heads are rare in the Neanderthal record. When present, they tend to be large and do not notably differ in size, manufacture, or type from points used for activities other than hunting, such as gathering plants, or butchery. This difference in the design of tools and weapons takes on anthropological significance.
Given their respective dates, the distance between South Africa and Central Asia (14,000 km) and the difference in the manufacture of the Obi-Rakhmat and Sibudu weapon heads (unretouched knapped stone points vs. shaped stone points or retouched inserts, shaped bone points), the hypothesis of independent centers of invention is the most likely.
From the foothills of the Tien Shan to the Rhône Valley 25,000 years later
The micro-points from Obi-Rakhmat have no known equivalents in the Eurasian Middle Paleolithic, except for identical projectile points identified by Traceology expert Laure Metz at the Mandrin site, in the Rhône Valley, France, in a layer dating to approximately 54,000 years ago - some ten thousand years before the disappearance of local Neanderthals. Notably, a Homo sapiens milk tooth was also recovered from this layer. The similarity between the micro-points from Obi-Rakhmat and Mandrin, despite being separated by more than 6,000 km and 25 millennia, is such that they could be interchanged without any detail other than the stone betraying the substitution.
Recent work published by paleogeneticists Leonardo Vallini and Stéphane Mazières defines the Persian Plateau, on the north-eastern edge of which Obi-Rakhmat is located, as a population hub where the ancestors of all present-day non-Africans lived between the early phases of expansion out of Africa - long before the Upper Paleolithic - and the wider colonization of Eurasia. This resource-rich environment may have provided a refuge conducive to demographic regeneration after the genetic bottleneck of the exit from Africa, interaction between groups and, consequently, technical innovations.
Obi-Rakhmat and Mandrin may represent two geographical and temporal milestones within the same process of dispersal, as suggested by Ludovic Slimak, characterized by the dissemination of a key technological innovation unique to Homo sapiens. So far unnoticed because they are unretouched, tiny, and fragmentary, it is likely that the micro-projectile points for which recognition criteria have now been defined will begin to appear at sites between Central Asia and the western Mediterranean.
Premises for a new scenario of the western peopling by ‘Homo sapiens’
This discovery is stimulating in several ways.
It validates the consistency of the research conducted at the Mandrin site, which came to the conclusion that Sapiens armed with bows made a brief incursion into Neanderthal territory. Several elements of this study had been criticized, which is, however, normal in science when a new proposal deviates too far from established knowledge - but its predictive dimension had not been considered at the time.
The similarity between Mandrin and Obi-Rakhmat’s micro-points cannot be a mere coincidence. It is not only their shape that is similar, but also the way they are made, which requires real expertise, as evidenced by the meticulous preparation of their striking platform and their function. One could debate the appropriate instrument for shooting arrows armed with such tiny tips, the bow being in filigree, or whether it is preferable to remain cautious and speak only of shooting, but this already contrasts with what we know about Neanderthal hunting weapons and their design.
Another remarkable aspect, which is still relatively uncommon, is the convergence and complementarity of data from material culture and from our genetic memory, which did not influence each other given the dates of the respective studies and publications. Together, they sketch out a rewriting of the scenario of Homo sapiens’ arrival in Europe: it was thought that he came directly from Africa by the shortest route 45,000 years ago, but we now discover that he had been established in the heart of the Eurasian continent for a long time, well before expanding in search of more territories.

Россия завершила строительство своего первого современного синхротрона - Сибирского кольцевого фотонного источника (СКИФ), одного из нескольких «мегапроектов», которые, как надеются, обеспечат российским ученым доступ к необходимой исследовательской инфраструктуре, а также позволят наладить новые зарубежные контакты.

Russia has finished building its first modern synchrotron, one of several "megaprojects" that leaders hope will boost the nation’s scientific community - and enable it to build new foreign collaborations to replace ties severed by the conflict with Ukraine.
On 11 August, the Russian State Atomic Energy Corporation announced it had completed the Siberian Circular Photon Source (SKIF) in Koltsovo, one of the nation’s official "science cities" near Novosibirsk. The $600 million machine, an advanced "fourth generation" synchrotron, will accelerate electrons around a circular track to produce bright x-rays, allowing researchers to probe matter at atomic scales in fields including materials science, drug discovery, archaeology, and many others.
SKIF and two other nearly operational megaprojects will provide Russian scientists with much-needed domestic infrastructure, observers say. They could also help relieve the isolation Russian scientists have experienced as scientists in Europe and the United States cut ties. SKIF "could become one of the draws for researchers from China, India," and other nations, says structural biologist Valentin Borshchevskiy of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.
The Russian government first announced plans to build six "megaclass research facilities" in 2011. At the time, the country participated in many international collaborations: Russian physicists worked at the world’s largest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, for example, and the country had invested in the European X-Ray Free-Electron Laser Facility, a powerful x-ray source in Germany. But Russian officials saw such relationships as "asymmetrical": Russian scientists and institutions went abroad, and few foreign researchers or investments came to Russia. The new facilities aimed to make Russia a more attractive scientific destination.
Three failed to progress, however. A plan to build a fusion reactor called Ignitor, for example, collapsed after the project’s Italian partners decided to focus on their own machine. And efforts to improve other facilities were delayed - first by the COVID-19 pandemic and later by trade sanctions imposed on Russia after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which have made it difficult to import equipment and materials.
At a ceremony marking SKIF’s completion, Russian President Vladimir Putin applauded its builders for overcoming the sanctions and other obstacles, saying they had helped strengthen Russia’s "technological sovereignty." Once fully operational next year, SKIF will be "among the world’s five most advanced facilities in its class," says Gleb Bourenkov of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, who works as a principal beamline scientist at the PETRA III synchrotron in Hamburg, Germany. In addition to enabling materials studies, it will serve as a testbed for technologies for a more powerful planned facility called SYLA (for Synchrotron and Laser), which is scheduled to open in the 2030s.
SKIF is working to build partnerships with countries the government calls "friendly," including India, China, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. In Brazil, accelerator physicists at the Sirius synchrotron are interested in exchanging expertise with their colleagues at SKIF, Borshchevskiy says. And Russian officials are drafting a cooperation agreement with China’s High Energy Photon Source, says SKIF Director Evgeny Levichev.
Although China has two modern synchrotrons of its own, they can’t meet the demand, says Dmitrii Semenok, a materials scientist at the Center for High Pressure Science and Advanced Technology Research in Beijing. "Chinese researchers are forced to travel all over the world to obtain beam time," he says.
In addition to SKIF, Russia is inviting foreign researchers to work at two other new facilities expected to be operating by the end of the year: the Nuclotron-based Ion Collider Facility in Dubna, designed to probe the building blocks of matter, and the PIK nuclear research reactor in Gatchina, which will produce streams of neutrons for studying materials.
Those efforts could accelerate Russia’s ongoing shift away from scientific collaboration with U.S. and European partners. Before the Ukraine conflict, for example, researchers based in the United States and Germany were by far the most frequent international co-authors with Russian scientists, according to an analysis of Scopus data by Ivan Sterligov, a Russian scientometrician now working in Berlin. But China is now the leader, he says, with the annual number of papers co-authored with researchers there rising by 22%, to 4400, from 2021 to ’25.
A similar shift is underway in space science. Before 2022, Russia placed instruments aboard European, Japanese, and U.S. spacecraft, and some are still operating on NASA’s Curiosity rover and other missions. Now, Russian researchers are sending an instrument to the Moon aboard China’s Chang’e-7 mission.
Cooperation with foreign scientists can, however, carry risks for Russian researchers. In recent years, the government has charged several high-profile scientists who partnered with Chinese researchers with treason. In addition, Putin has given Russia’s security agency authority to monitor scientists’ contacts and publications with foreigners.
Andrei Fursenko, an aide to Putin and former education and science minister who is an architect of the megascience program, insists Russia is eager to collaborate. U.S. and European moves to reject participation in the megaprojects "was not our decision and far from everyone withdrew," he said in a statement to Science, adding, "Under the present circumstances, we have had to rely above all on our own resources. And, it must be said, we have succeeded."

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