Февраль 2025 г.

Российская наука и мир (по материалам зарубежной электронной прессы)

CONTENTS / ОГЛАВЛЕНИЕ


• A year in isolation: 366-day mock moon mission wraps up in Russia
• Mammoth bones used to build mysterious 25,000-year-old site in Russia came from different herds
• Scientists discovered the oldest junipers in the Arctic
• Researchers zero in on original Indo-Europeans
• An appreciation: How physicist Evgeny Velikhov helped end the US-Soviet nuclear arms race
• 3D structure of the social amoeba genome sheds light on the transition to multicellularity
• Water salinity affects diatom structure and metabolism, study shows
• Russian scientists develop Arctic climate monitoring system
• Siberian river diversion may finally happen because experts say Russia needs it even more than Central Asia does

В конце прошлого года завершился эксперимент SIRIUS-23 по имитации полета на Луну, начатый Институтом медико-биологических проблем РАН в ноябре 2023 г. и направленный на изучение продолжительного пребывания людей в закрытой среде. Проведшие год в изоляции в специальном комплексе шесть членов экипажа воссоздали основные этапы лунной миссии и провели ряд тестов и исследований.

On Nov. 14, 2024, the Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP) of the Russian Academy of Sciences marked the successful completion of SIRIUS-23, a year-long biomedical isolation experiment simulating the conditions of deep-space travel and lunar surface operations.
For 366 days, a crew of six analog astronauts lived and worked in a sealed environment, a meticulously controlled Earth-based stand-in for interplanetary missions of the future.
The SIRIUS (Scientific International Research in Unique terrestrial Station) project, launched in collaboration with NASA's Human Research Program and the IBMP in 2017, had previously conducted shorter experiments lasting 17, 120 and 240 days. These missions, featuring international crews from Russia, the United States and the United Arab Emirates, aimed to replicate the isolation and psychological strain of long-term spaceflight.
However, after 2022, IBMP decided to proceed with the ambitious SIRIUS-23 experiment independently. The latest crew hailed from Russia and Belarus: Commander Yuriy Chebotarev, Flight Engineer Angelica Parfenova, Medical Officer Ksenia Orlova, and Researchers Olga Mastickaya, Ksenia Shishenina, and Rustam Zaripov - a mixed-gender team of two men and four women.
The mission reflected humanity's growing aspirations beyond Earth orbit. With plans to establish lunar bases and eventually launch crewed interplanetary missions, solving the challenges of isolation, resource scarcity and physiological stress remains critical. SIRIUS-23 aimed to address these hurdles by testing technologies, procedures and human resilience in the IBMP's Ground Experimental Complex (GEC) - a hermetically sealed habitat equipped with independent life support systems, atmospheric controls, and monitored 24/7 by engineers at mission control.
The SIRIUS program builds on decades of research, notably the Mars-500 experiment of 2010-2011, in which six participants spent 520 days in isolation to simulate a round-trip mission to Mars. Like its predecessor, SIRIUS-23 provided unparalleled insights into how human beings adapt - physically, mentally and socially - to prolonged confinement in extreme environments.
The SIRIUS-23 mission meticulously recreated key stages of a crewed lunar mission: transit to the moon, docking with an orbital station, surface operations and the return journey. The crew conducted five simulated landings, rotating teams of four to mimic lunar exploration tasks. Virtual reality systems played a dual role, offering both psychological support and immersive simulations of extravehicular activities (EVAs) on the moon's surface.
The experiment tackled critical scientific and operational objectives in multiple areas:
1. Biomedical research

Палеолитическая стоянка Костенки 11 была открыта в 1951 г., а одной из находок стали круглые постройки из костей мамонтов. Недавнее исследование, проведенное российскими, датскими, канадскими и британскими учеными показало, что мамонты были не только из разных популяций, но и жили с разницей до нескольких сотен лет. Это может объясняться тем, что кости были добыты не в результате охоты, а собраны в местах естественной гибели животных.

Roughly 25,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers completed an ambitious construction project: They built a circular, 40-foot-wide structure using the bones and tusks of more than 60 woolly mammoths.
The mammoth-bone structure, located at a site in Russia some 300 miles south of Moscow called Kostenki 11, has long perplexed archaeologists. Why were our Ice Age ancestors building things out of mammoth bones? What did they use the structure for? And where did they find so many skeletons?
Researchers can’t fully answer these questions yet. But they are starting to unravel some of the mysteries surrounding the massive mammoth-bone structure at Kostenki 11.
Now, scientists say most of the mammoths used to build the site were female, which suggests the Ice Age hunter-gatherers were hunting or scavenging from herds, rather than trapping lone males. In addition, some of the bones were much older than others, which indicates our Paleolithic ancestors might have been sourcing both newly dead and long-dead animals.
Researchers report these and other findings in a new paper published in the journal Quaternary Environments and Humans.
Kostenki 11 is not alone - archaeologists have discovered roughly 70 mammoth-bone structures throughout Eastern Europe. In 1951, they found Kostenki 11, and excavations during the next few decades revealed two mammoth-bone complexes, each spanning roughly 30 feet in diameter. Ever since, teams have been carefully excavating and studying the area, which is now a museum and archaeological reserve.
In 2014, archaeologists unearthed the biggest find at the site yet: the 40-foot-diameter circular structure at Kostenki 11, which was made up of approximately 2,982 bones that belonged to at least 64 individual mammoths. Researchers also discovered pieces of charred wood, as well as burned mammoth bones and the remains of plants similar to potatoes, carrots and parsnips. Nearby, they found three large pits.
The mysterious landmark was larger and older than other mammoth-bone structures found in Eastern Europe, which raised questions about how and why it was used. It could have been a shelter or dwelling, though it was probably too big for a practical roof. Another possibility is that hunter-gatherers used the site to butcher and process mammoth meat, which they then stored in nearby permafrost. Alternatively, the site might have had ceremonial or ritualistic significance.
The structure’s primary purpose is still unclear. But researchers were also curious about the bones, so for the new study, they gathered 39 samples to perform DNA and radiocarbon dating analyses.
All of the skeletons belonged to woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius), the extinct relatives of modern elephants. The bones sampled for the study represented 30 total individuals, including 17 females and 13 males. This "predominance of females," coupled with juvenile mammoth bones found at the site, suggests the hunter-gatherers were targeting herds or collecting the skeletons from bone beds, rather than setting traps, according to the study.
That’s because woolly mammoths are believed to have lived in multi-generational, female-led herds, with adult males wandering off on their own. If the hunter-gatherers had been trapping the mammoths, they likely would’ve caught more males, the researchers posit.
The DNA analysis also revealed that the mammoths were not all related to each other and likely came from several different herds.
Radiocarbon dating of the remains indicated that at least two bones - one from a male mammoth and one from a female - were several hundred years older than the other bones found at the site. This supports the idea that the builders were scavenging bones from somewhere else - likely a place that contained both older and newer skeletons. It’s also possible that humans used the site during two distinct phases of activity separated by hundreds of years.
"We don’t have evidence to say whether the humans directly hunted the mammoths, and we infer they were likely found in natural bone beds and transported to the site," says study co-author Eline D. Lorenzen, a molecular ecologist at the University of Copenhagen, to Phys.org’s Sandee Oster. "But perhaps mammoths may have died across many hundreds of years in the bone beds, and thus both old and new were used."
Scientists still have many unanswered questions about the mammoth-bone structure. But the new findings add to the growing picture of how Ice Age hunter-gatherers behaved - and survived - amid challenging weather conditions and frigid temperatures.
As a whole, the site is "giving us a real insight into how our human ancestors adapted to climate change, to the harshest parts of the last glacial cycle, and adapted to use the materials that they had around them," as study co-author Alexander Pryor, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter, told Smithsonian magazine’s Brian Handwerk in 2020. "It’s really a story of survival in the face of adversity."

Международный коллектив дендрохронологов (Италия, Дания, Германия, Россия) обнаружил самое долгоживущее древесное растение в арктических широтах - можжевельник обыкновенный (Juniperus communis). С помощью метода перекрестной датировки ученые изучили около 2000 кустов, как живых, так и засохших, от Гренландии до Полярного Урала. Самым старым оказался куст можжевельника на севере Финляндии, росший в течении 1647 лет, с 260 по 1906 гг., а самый старый уральский куст, возрастом 840 лет, был еще жив всего четверть века назад. С помощью годовых колец можжевельника можно реконструировать историю изменений климата, поскольку, в отличие от деревьев, можжевельник чутко реагирует на температурные перепады в течение всей жизни.

A group of dendrochronologists from Italy, Denmark, Germany and Russia has discovered the longest-lived woody plant in the Arctic. It was the common juniper (Juniperus communis). The oldest juniper bush, which was found in the north of Finland, is 1647 years old. In the Polar Urals, the oldest juniper bush lived half as long, yet it is the longest-living organism in the Urals. Scientists told about the long-lived junipers in an article in the journal Ecology.
"Many species in the genus Juniperus are long-lived woody plants. But there was a lack of reliable data on the most common species, the common juniper. There are legends about junipers that are two thousand years old, but there was no reliable evidence. Counting the number of annual rings, rather than estimating the age by trunk thickness, shrub size and other indirect signs, can be considered reliable evidence," explains Rashit Khantemirov, co-author of the paper, a member of the Laboratory of Natural Science Methods in Humanities at Ural Federal University and the Laboratory of Dendrochronology and IER&J of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Moreover, simple counting the rings does not always give the correct figure, the researcher adds. Some rings may be missing, called "dropouts", and so-called false rings may form in some years. The exact age can only be established by comparing the pattern of the year rings of many individuals, i.e. by using the cross-dating method.
"The cross-dating method is the main method in dendrochronology. With its help it is possible not only to identify fallen and false rings, but also to determine with absolute accuracy the year of formation of each ring. This makes it possible to determine both the age and the time of life of dead trees and shrubs. But for cross dating it is necessary to measure the width of all rings in all the studied trees or shrubs," says Rashit Khantemirov.
A group of dendrochronologists working in circumpolar regions, from Greenland in the west to the Polar Urals in the east, cross-dated almost 2,000 juniper bushes, both living and withered. The oldest juniper in northern Finland turned out to be the oldest. Dendrochronologists counted 1647 rings in one of them at the base of a branch cut from a bush. This individual grew from 260 to 1906 years, it is the oldest woody plant for the whole Europe, not only its polar part. Prior to that, the challenger for the title of the oldest woody plant in Europe was considered to be a representative of the Bosnian pine, growing in southern Italy. This tree even has its own name - Italus. Its age is estimated at 1230 years. But the annual rings in it counted "only" 1070. The central rings in the trunk of this tree have rotted away, and the number of missing rings was determined with the help of various tricks.
Four more shrubs, both living and withered, with a life expectancy of more than 1,000 years were found in northern Finland. Two more shrubs, both alive and over 1000 years old, were found in northern Sweden.
"The third in the ranking of areas where centuries-old junipers can be found was the Polar Urals. The oldest juniper, discovered in 1999 by Stepan Shiyatov, was alive and was 840 years old at the time. It is the oldest woody plant in the Urals. On the territory of Russia only Kayander larch can live longer, the modern representative of which grew in Yakutia for 945 years. And among the dried trunks of larch trees, specimens that have lived for more than 1000 years have been found," adds Rashit Khantemirov.
Determining the maximum age of the common juniper is important for understanding the history of this species, its survival strategy, and for developing measures to protect it, the scientists explain.
"For dendrochronologists, first of all, information about the potential of a given species to reconstruct the history of the natural environment is important. One of the important parameters in assessing this potential is the longevity of individual individuals and the preservation of wood from branches of long-dead junipers. In this respect, the Polar Urals offer more opportunities than areas in the north of Sweden and are almost as good as the north of Finland. In the mountains of the Polar Urals, dried juniper branches can be preserved for many centuries. Therefore, with the help of annual rings of Polar Urals juniper it is possible to reconstruct the climate history for almost 1,350 years, starting from the year 641," says Rashit Khantemirov.
The staff of the laboratory of dendrochronology of the Institute of Plant and Animal Ecology of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences found out a quarter of a century ago that the width of the rings of this species reflects changes in early-year temperatures quite well. Especially valuable was the discovered property of juniper rings to react sensitively to extreme temperature events during the entire life of the shrub, while in trees the sensitivity to extremes decreases with age.

Долгое время предполагалось, что индоевропейские языки начали распространяться по миру из Анатолии (Малая Азия), пока в 2015 г. два исследования не выявили масштабную миграцию представителей так называемой ямной культуры около 5500 лет назад. Вышедшие из Понтийско-Каспийской степи кочевники распространились почти по всей Европе и, возможно, принесли с собой протоиндоевропейский язык. Однако это никак не объясняло существование анатолийской ветви индоевропейской семьи, носители которой не имели никаких пересечений с ямниками.
Исследовав геномы более 400 древних людей, палеогенетики из 19 стран (в том числе российские) выдвинули еще одну версию. Результаты исследования позволяют предположить, что самыми ранними индоевропейцами были люди, жившие между Северным Кавказом и Нижним Поволжьем. Около 6000 лет назад они начали мигрировать в двух направлениях - на запад, в причерноморские степи, став предками людей ямной культуры, и на юг, через Месопотамию в Анатолию, где смешались с местным населением.

It's a mystery that has bedeviled researchers for hundreds of years. Why is it that many ancient languages, seemingly unconnected and spoken across a vast swathe of Eurasia, share so many similarities? How did it come to be, for example, that a deity is described as deus in Latin and deva in Sanskrit, or that brother in Latin, frater, sounds suspiciously like the Persian baradar?
An international team of geneticists and archaeologists have now analyzed ancient DNA sampled from hundreds of skeletons in the Russian and Ukrainian steppes to offer an answer to the longtime enigma on the origins of the so-called Indo-European languages. In a pair of studies published Wednesday in Nature, the researchers identify the earliest Indo-Europeans as a people who lived around 4000 B.C.E. in a region spanning from the Northern Caucasus mountains to the basins of the lower Volga and Don rivers.
The theory that the Proto-Indo-European language was first spread by the migration of steppe pastoralists across Eurasia has been around for decades. Hard genetic evidence supporting this idea came with research published in 2015, showing that most Europeans, from today going back nearly 5,000 years, share some ancestry with a people known as the Yamnaya.
These highly mobile herders originated in the steppes north of the Black Sea, in today's Ukraine, and around 3000 B.C.E. rapidly expanded into a vast area that ranged from Central Europe to the edges of China.
The Anatolian conundrum
So were the Yamnaya the original Indo-Europeans? Yes and no. They did massively contribute to the spread of Indo-European languages, but a 2018 study showed that ancient Anatolians (people from the Asian part of modern-day Turkey) had no Yamnaya ancestry - yet in the Bronze and Iron ages, Anatolians spoke Indo-European languages, like Hittite and Luwian.
This opened up two possibilities: Either the Anatolian Indo-European languages spread through contact, with little or no genetic admixture, or there was another ancestral population, which was responsible for both the emergence of the Yamnaya and the spread of the Proto-Indo-European language to Anatolia.
"The Yamnaya have to be involved," says Dr. Iosif Lazaridis of Harvard University, one of the leading researchers on the newly-published studies. "Every group listed in the dictionary of Indo-European languages can be tied it to them, except the Anatolians. So we have to roll back from the Yamnaya and see who contributed to them."
And this is what the studies published in Nature did, by reconstructing the genome of more than 400 people who lived between Russia and the Danube Valley from 8400 to 4000 years ago.
Within this sample, the team identified a genetic cline dubbed CLV, for Caucasus-Lower Volga, after the region that these people occupied in the Copper Age, more than 6,000 years ago.
These enigmatic CLV people appear to be the original Proto-Indo-Europeans, the new studies conclude. They provided four-fifths of the Yamnaya's ancestry. And - CLV ancestry is also found in ancient DNA from Anatolia starting from the Early Bronze Age, for example in a half dozen people buried near the Halys river, in northern Turkey.
"It's a kind of triangulation, a kind of 'x marks the spot'," says Lazaridis.
The CLV people (and we'll talk more about them in a bit) were highly mobile and responsible for a number of migrations and admixtures during the Copper Age, says Prof. David Reich of Harvard University, a leading expert on ancient DNA studies. These migrations reached as far as Eastern Europe and Mesopotamia, sometimes admixing with local populations and sometimes skipping them, Reich says.
"This is a very adventurous people who are moving back and forth within their region and throwing off sparks in different directions," Reich tells Haaretz. "Some of those sparks go through without mixture and some of them mix with various other people over an extended people of time."
We don't know exactly why the CLV people were running around Eurasia so much, but one factor may have been the development of extensive trade networks. "We see Balkan copper coming into the Volga region for the first time," Reich says. "So there are extensive goods exchange networks all the way to the Volga and maybe these people are moving back and forth along these connections."
And CLV begat Yamnaya
As far as the story of the spread of Indo-European languages is concerned, the key lies in two migrations by the CLV people .
Around 4000 B.C.E. there was a move westward toward modern-day Ukraine, where a CLV group admixed with local hunter-gatherers, the genetic data show. This gave rise to the so-called Serednii Stih culture in southeast Ukraine, which archaeologists and geneticists see as the direct antecedents of the Yamnaya.
Around the same time, between 4500-4000 B.C.E., there was also a CLV migration southwards, first through Mesopotamia and ultimately Anatolia - which is how CLV and Mesopotamian ancestry ended up in the genome of ancient Anatolians, Reich explains.
Because the CLV ancestry is the only link between the Yamnaya and the ancient Anatolians, it makes sense to conclude that they were the original spreaders of Proto-Indo-European language and culture. So is this the final answer to the question of whence came the family of languages spoken by roughly half the world's population?
"I think we definitely gave it a good shot," Lazaridis says. "But it's like an onion that you keep peeling and there are more and more layers, so it's ambitious to say this is a final answer to a centuries-old problem."
One issue is that the CLV people occupied a vast region ranging from the foot of the North Caucasus mountains to the villages north of the modern-day Russian city of Volgograd - an area roughly the size of California. Stretched over this vast territory, the CLV where themselves vary genetically diverse, incorporating multiple ancestries like Mesopotamian Neolithic farmers, who came in across the Caucasus, and hunter-gatherers from Siberia, Eastern Europe and the forests of Northern Russia.
Which exactly of the many, diverse CLV groups begat the ancestors of the Yamnaya remains to be seen, Lazaridis says.
A people with no name
And what do we know about these CLV people? And why do they have this very clinical name that simply relates to their geographical origins?
Generally, we don't know what prehistoric cultures, who didn't have writing, called themselves. So researchers typically name them based on their type site - the first place a particular culture was identified - or some distinctive cultural characteristic. The type site is the case, for example, with the Serednii Stih culture (the predecessors of the Yamnaya) named after the Ukrainian island on the Dnipro river where they were first discovered.
The Yamnaya themselves are named after the Russian word for pit - because they buried their dead in pits beneath a kurgan, a large burial mound.
In the case of the CLV, they occupied such a vast territory that different archaeologists from various areas have identified them with different names, rather than seeing them as a unified phenomenon, says David Anthony, emeritus professor of anthropology at Hartwick College and a leading expert on Indo-European migrations.
The modern political and military conflicts that involve the region also have a role in constraining research, Anthony notes. The bone samples that were analyzed in the new study partly came from his own excavations of burials in the modern-day Russian city of Samara in the 1990s and also from samples shipped by local archaeologists until 2016, after which things got "politically difficult," he says. This was only compounded by the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine: the final results of the DNA study had to be published as two separate articles because Russian and Ukrainian researchers couldn't appear on the same paper, Anthony says.
Going back to the enigmatic CLV people, we do know they had some fairly unified cultural features, particularly with their burial rites. Starting around 4500 B.C.E., they began burying their dead in kurgan burial mounds, on their back with their knees raised, a ritual that the Yamnaya inherited, Anthony says.
Unlike their nomadic Yamnaya descendants, the CLV were semi-sedentary, living mostly in settlements in the river valleys and subsisting on a complex combination of hunting, gathering and keeping domesticated animals, he says.
But as the centuries passed and the Yamnaya culture was founded, two new killer applications emerged that changed the economy of the steppes - and probably the face of the world: the wheel and the horse.
Rulers of the steppe
There is much debate on where the wheel was invented and which people first domesticated the horse, but there can be little doubt that the Yamnaya used these technologies to great effect, Anthony says. Mounted riders could mind three or four times more animals than a herder on foot, while wagons became mobile homes, with settlements pretty much disappearing from the archaeological horizon.
"They are the first to invent pastoral nomadism, a highly mobile form of multispecies pastoralism," Anthony says. "This, combined with their mobility, allowed them to exploit the Eurasian grasslands, which had been sitting there unharvested by humans, and spread out of the Caucasus to the steppes, all the way to the borders of China, 6,000 kilometers across Eurasia. It wasn't a conquest, it was the spread of a new economy."
There may have been other elements of Yamnaya culture that supported their expansion, possibly stemming from their emergence from the CLV melting pot.
"The Yamnaya were the heirs of a millennium of people having to deal with other people, on genetic and cultural frontiers, which was not the case, for example, for European Neolithic farmers, who were pretty homogenous," Anthony says. "That may have equipped them with institutions that facilitated their expansion, giving them tools to deal with other people beyond hitting them on the head with clubs."
These institutions, which are known to us from later Indo-European societies such as the Celts and Italic peoples, included fosterage, guest-host and client-patron relations, he says.
The finding that the Indo-Europeans emerged from the CLV people, which were themselves a very culturally and genetically diverse group, helps demystify the origins of the Indo-Europeans, Lazaridis says.
Even among scholars, early research popularized an image of the Proto-Indo-Europeans as developing in isolation in some distant land, perfecting their language and creating a powerful militaristic society that then set out to conquer the world, Lazaridis says.
"In fact the CLV people were not living in an isolated valley in Central Asia, they were in the middle of everything," he says. "They were regular people who mixed with others to create other people, they replaced some people, and other people replaced them."
There was nothing inherently superior in the CLV and their Yamnaya descendants, which could have foretold their expansion. They just had the right technology at the right time, leading them to have an outsize impact on human history, Lazaridis concludes.
"On the other hand, one does get an enhanced appreciation of their impact," he adds. Through a combination of sheer luck and a few favorable cultural features, a small random group of people that emerged just after 4000 B.C.E. somewhere in the Dnipro region managed to transmit their genes and language to half the world for the next six millennia, and beyond.

Академик Евгений Велихов (1935-2024) был не только выдающимся ученым, внесшим значительный вклад в исследования в области физики плазмы и разработку термоядерных реакторов - он также сыграл одну из важнейших ролей в уменьшении угрозы ядерного оружия во время и после холодной войны, прекращении гонки ядерных вооружений СССР и США и сокращении их ядерных арсеналов.

Evgeny P. Velikhov died on December 5, 2024, at the age of 89. He was the most important technical contributor to Mikhail Gorbachev’s successful efforts to end the Soviet-US nuclear arms race and to make deep cuts in their nuclear arsenals.
Born in 1935, Velikhov was educated in physics at Moscow State University and did his dissertation work at the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy in Moscow, where one of us (Sagdeev) met him and became his life-long colleague and friend.
Velikhov’s first paper, on magnetic rotational instability, later became important for understanding how the angular momentum of ionized matter circulating a black hole is transferred outward, enabling the matter to fall into the hole. But beyond physics, his many accomplishments in reducing the threat from nuclear weapons - during and after the Cold War - are what Velikhov will be most remembered for.
Early career
After receiving his doctorate, Velikhov became interested in magneto-hydrodynamic generators in which, for example, the ionized exhaust of a strapped-down rocket passing through a magnetic field generates an electric voltage. At age 30, he was allowed to establish an installation outside Moscow devoted to the subject that quickly grew to include several hundred researchers.
In 1974, Velikhov was elected to the Soviet Academy of Sciences and, in 1978, became the Academy’s Vice President for natural sciences. In part because of his interest in high-powered lasers, he also became a technical advisor on high-technology weapons programs to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party.
Around 1980, Velikhov participated in a central committee review of a proposal to establish a constellation of missile interceptors orbiting the earth to defend the Soviet Union from US nuclear-armed ballistic missiles. The system was rejected as too costly and vulnerable. This experience, however, helped prepare Velikhov for the internal Soviet debate over how to respond to President Reagan’s 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative.
In parallel, Velikhov became involved in international discussions of nuclear arms control pioneered by the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs and the associated Soviet-American Disarmament Study Group, during which he discussed with one of us (Garwin) the possibilities of deep cuts to the Soviet and US nuclear arsenals of 2,000 and then 1,000 warheads each from levels that were at the time 30,000 and 20,000, respectively.
In 1982, he became chair of a committee established within the Soviet Academy to engage with the newly created US National Academy of Sciences Committee on International Security and Arms Control.
In 1984, Velikhov accompanied Mikhail Gorbachev, then a rising star in the Central Committee, to meetings in London. After those meetings, UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously declared, "I like Mr. Gorbachev. We can do business together."
Engagement in arms control
In March 1983, President Ronald Reagan gave a speech in which he launched his Strategic Defense Initiative by calling upon American scientists to join in an effort to create defenses that would make nuclear-armed ballistic missiles "impotent and obsolete."
This galvanized Velikhov to create the Committee of Soviet Scientists for Peace and Against the Nuclear Threat (CSS). The committee carried out studies of likely effectiveness of the anti-ballistic missile systems being discussed in the United States and the destabilizing incentives they would create for both sides to strike first. Some of these studies were later translated and published in English. The CSS also addressed a public "appeal to scientists of the world," arguing that "there are no effective defense means in nuclear war" and "nuclear disarmament is the only way [to] ensure true security."
That April, Jeremy J. Stone, then CEO of the US Federation of American Scientists (FAS), a nongovernmental group established by veterans of the Manhattan Project to pursue nuclear disarmament, and one of us (von Hippel, FAS chairman at that time) responded positively to that call.
In November, the FAS leadership flew to Moscow and then Tbilisi in Soviet Georgia for discussions with the CSS leadership (including Sagdeev, who would succeed Velikhov as CSS chairman). Velikhov - always ebullient - met the US group at the Moscow airport wearing a Princeton tie. He had visited Princeton’s Plasma Physics Laboratory several times as head of the Soviet Union’s fusion energy program.
The following month, in response to an invitation from Sen. Ted Kennedy delivered by Stone, Velikhov and three colleagues testified at a US Senate forum on the possibility of nuclear war causing a "nuclear winter." In June 1984, Velikhov published a critique of the feasibility of space weapons in the Washington Post.
Banning nuclear tests
In March 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Central Committee and immediately launched a broad campaign to reform the Soviet Union and its foreign policy, advocating a policy of "glasnost" [openness]. His first initiative to end the nuclear arms race was on August 6, 1985, when he announced a unilateral moratorium on Soviet nuclear testing.
Underground nuclear testing had not been banned in the 1963 Soviet-UK-US Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty because of the Soviets’ unwillingness to agree to the US demand for up to five inspections per year inside the Soviet Union at the locations of suspicious seismic events.
In October 1985, at a conference in Copenhagen on Niels Bohr’s proposal for an "Open World," Velikhov informed von Hippel of an astonishing reversal of Soviet government secrecy: The Soviet Union would be willing to allow a foreign group to set up seismometers around the main Soviet test site near Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan.
One of us (Cochran), then with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), was already advocating for a joint project to set up seismic stations around both Soviet and US nuclear test sites.
In May 1986, Velikhov and von Hippel organized an international meeting at the Soviet Academy’s headquarters to discuss how to proceed with a demonstration of in-country test ban verification. The US delegation included Cochran, Bill DeWind (then NRDC chairman), and Charles Archambeau, a US theoretical seismologist. Velikhov had just returned from Chernobyl where he had been serving as a technical advisor to the effort to stop the release of radioactivity from Unit 4 and had accumulated a large radiation dose including in a helicopter hovering over the reactor trying to determine the condition of the core.
At the meeting, Cochran presented his proposal for joint verification of the principal nuclear test sites in the Soviet Union and the United States. Velikhov signed an agreement to proceed on behalf of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and DeWind signed on behalf of NRDC. Archambeau agreed to organize a team of seismologists for the NRDC. Velikhov urged that they come to the Soviet Union in about a month - long before a Soviet monitoring team would be allowed to go to the United States.
When the initiative was discussed in the Politburo, there was strong opposition to the proposed unilateral openness. But the NRDC had moved quickly and, in July 1986, US seismologists were already taking measurements less than 200 kilometers from the Soviet test site in Kazakhstan.
This astonishing demonstration of openness revived support for a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) within the US Congress. The House of Representatives voted immediately for a one-year moratorium on US nuclear testing above one kiloton if the Soviet Union continued its testing moratorium. Ultimately, in 1992, Congress ordered that, if other countries stopped testing, US nuclear testing would end by October 1996. In the interim, up to 15 final tests could be carried out if needed to deal with questions of warhead safety or reliability. The Clinton administration decided no further safety or reliability-related tests were required and ignored the few last nuclear tests of China and France. The halt in Soviet and US testing made possible the final negotiations on the CTBT, which opened for signature in September 1996.
As of today, 178 countries have ratified the CTBT, but the treaty has not yet come into force because of the lack of ratification by the United States and eight other countries. Nevertheless, it has become an international norm. Only India, Pakistan, and North Korea have tested since 1996.
Follow-on nuclear-glasnost efforts
The success of the nuclear-testing-glasnost initiative led Velikhov and the NRDC to organize others, which included as observers members of Congress and reporters from The New York Times and The Washington Post.
In 1987, they organized a visit to a site in Siberia where an early warning radar was being built. But the radar was not located at the edge of the country and looking outward as required by the 1972 Soviet-US treaty limiting anti-ballistic missiles. (A radar monitoring space over a country could be more effective in guiding missile interceptors.) Three years later, the Soviet government decided to remove this blot on the Soviet record of arms control compliance and began to tear the radar down.
Then, in 1989, the "Black Sea Experiment" demonstrated various approaches to detecting nuclear warheads using an actual Soviet warhead on a Soviet cruiser off Yalta, which had been provided for the bi-national experiment despite the objections of Yuli Khariton, the Soviet counterpart of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Follow-on visits were made to the Soviet Union’s first plutonium production complex, where the visitors could witness that the Soviets had begun shutting down their plutonium production reactors. They also visited a laser facility at the Soviet Union’s ballistic missile defense testing site that the US Defense Department had claimed had anti-satellite capabilities - erroneously, it turned out.
Ending the US-Soviet nuclear arms race
Meanwhile, in February 1987, Velikhov organized eight parallel international forums in Moscow to discuss how to achieve "A Nonnuclear World for the Survival of Mankind." The forums were attended by scientists, medical doctors, businesspeople, political scientists, religious leaders, cultural figures, retired generals, and environmentalists. They were followed by the presentation of each forum’s conclusions to Gorbachev and a speech by him.
The planning for this event put overwhelming pressure on the Politburo to allow Andrei Sakharov to return to Moscow for the event. Because of Sakharov’s essential contributions to the design of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, he had been allowed unusual latitude in his human rights activism, which resulted in him being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975 as the "conscience of humanity." In 1979, however, after he denounced the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Politburo exiled Sakharov to Gorky, out of reach of foreign journalists.
Sakharov was allowed to return to Moscow in time for the scientists’ forum and used that opportunity to call for the Soviet leadership to drop its condition for deep cuts to the nuclear arsenal, which was that the United States continue to comply with the limits of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. He argued that space weapons would be a "Maginot Line in space," conjuring up France’s impressive line of fortifications along its German border that the German army bypassed in World War I. And, indeed, after Reagan completed his two terms as president, the United States did quietly abandon his Strategic Defense Initiative.
Others, including Velikhov and Sagdeev, had been making the same arguments to Gorbachev but Sakharov’s public argument with no effective rebuttal helped persuade the Politburo to disconnect the negotiations on deep nuclear cuts from constraints on ballistic missile defense.
The 1987 scientists’ forum in Moscow also provided a platform for West European advocates of "nonoffensive defense" to lay out their arguments for deep cuts in the tanks and other heavy offensive conventional weaponry arrayed on either side of the dividing line between the territories defended by NATO and the Warsaw Pact. This confrontation had resulted in a huge parallel buildup of battlefield nuclear weapons in case either side crossed the line.
The following year, Gorbachev announced the Soviet Union would unilaterally withdraw 5,000 Soviet tanks and other offensive weaponry from East Europe. This enabled the 1990 Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe, in which the Warsaw Pact countries reduced their offensive weaponry down to NATO levels and, in the fall of 1991, the elimination of almost all Soviet and US land-based battlefield nuclear weapons.
Velikhov was therefore instrumental in the successful effort to end the Cold War nuclear arms race and in the subsequent downsizing of the combined US and Soviet/Russian nuclear arsenals by a factor of about eight from their 1986 peak.
After Gorbachev
Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, Velikhov continued to be influential in the newly founded Russian Federation. He persuaded Russia’s President Boris Yeltsin to sign an edict that the Kurchatov Institute would not be privatized and helped the Soviet Academy transition back to the Russian Academy of Sciences.
In 1991, in partnership with Junior Achievement USA, Velikhov and his wife launched a program in Russia to help youngsters learn "principled market-based economics and entrepreneurship." In his 2012 memoir, he estimated that "[n]early one million students a year from classes 1 to 11 are trained under this program."
Under Vladimir Putin, Velikhov served as the first chairman of the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation, which was established in 2006 "to help citizens interact with government officials and local authorities." Velikhov ends his memoir with a nuanced discussion of the Civic Chamber:
"The Constitution gives full power to the citizen, but all the previous constitutions declared that as well … [A] joke about a conversation between a commoner and a lawyer is still valid:
The commoner asks: "Do I have a right to…?"
The lawyer, without waiting for the end of the question, answered firmly, "Yes you do."
The commoner replies, "And can I…?"
"No, you can’t."
We live in a confused time in Russia, in a hellish mixture of wild capitalism and the remnants of serfdom and a socialist utopia. The authorities, still largely united with criminal money at the municipal level, seize public property and fiercely guard it both from the state and from the citizens. I think that the mission of the Civic Chamber, in collaboration with the legislative, executive and judiciary powers, consists of the liberation of society from those traps. This is a lengthy process, as is shown by the experiences of many countries; it requires perseverance, patience and a certain cultural level of both the authorities and the citizens."
As Velikhov told one of us in 1990, when the hard-liners were beginning to mobilize against Gorbachev, "You should not fall dead before you are shot."
Velikhov did not. His dedication and achievements in reducing the threat of nuclear war serve as a lasting model for creative activism on the largest scale.

Российские биологи изучили пространственную организацию хроматина (нуклеопротеида, составляющий основу хромосом) у амеб Dictyostelium discoideum. Большую часть времени эти одноклеточные существуют сами по себе, но при необходимости способны собираться в многоклеточный организм. Ученые проследили, как изменяются хроматиновые петли при переходе от одноклеточной формы к многоклеточной.

Each cell of the human body contains two meters of DNA. The whole secret lies in the intricate three-dimensional arrangement that allows DNA strands to be efficiently organized and compacted within the cell.
Packaging issues are associated with many serious diseases such as leukemia, glioma, autism, and cancer. Scientists worldwide are trying to understand exactly how specific diseases are associated with packaging disorders.
Scientists from Skoltech, the Institute of Gene Biology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and other scientific organizations have also made efforts in this direction.
In their new study, the researchers examined the spatial organization of chromatin, which includes DNA and related structural proteins, in one of the most interesting model organisms in biology, Dictyostelium. The transitional state of this social amoeba is intriguing, as it usually exists as separate cells, but when conditions worsen, they assemble into multicellular aggregates and differentiate.
The research results are published in the Nucleic Acids Research journal.
"Dictyostelium is a unicellular creature. If there is not enough food, cells assemble into a single multicellular organism and then transform into something resembling a miniature fungus. Cells that form the cap can turn into spores and scatter to start new colonies, but those who are not fortunate enough to stay in the stem, die. This is a very interesting point of transition from unicellularity to multicellularity," said Vice President for Biomedical Research at Skoltech, Doctor of Sciences in biology, Professor Mikhail Gelfand, a study co-author.
Experimental data obtained by colleagues from the Institute of Gene Biology of the Russian Academy of Sciences showed that Dictyostelium has a focus of organization in the nucleus, to which all the chromosomes are attached - they come out of it in a bundle.
Yeast also has the same way of organizing chromosomes, while in humans and other mammals, each chromosome occupies its own specific region in the nucleus.
"If we look at the average chromatin structures in human cells and many other organisms, we will see that chromosomes seem to be folded into clusters called topologically associated domains," said Ekaterina Khrameeva, Doctor of Sciences in biology, associate professor at the Bio Center of Skoltech and co-author of the work.
"This results from averaging of loops formed in separate cells. Dictyostelium does not possess these clusters, but it does have chromatin loops, which could be even more noticeable than in humans. We have studied how these loops change at different stages of the transition from the unicellular to the multicellular form."
The authors discovered that the genes at the formation of these loops are oriented towards each other. The formation mechanism of these loops is most likely related to a protein, RNA polymerase, which synthesizes RNA from a DNA template.
The movement of these proteins causes a loop, just as attempting to untangle a ball of thread from two ends causes a knot in the middle.

Кремниевые панцири микроскопических морских диатомовых водорослей представляют собой сложную конструкцию, способную выдерживать большие нагрузки, поэтому они используются в качестве моделей при создании высокопрочных наноструктурных материалов и компонентов датчиков для медицины и микроэлектроники. Российские ученые изучили, как диатомовые водоросли адаптируются к разным, в том числе экстремальным, уровням солености воды и как при этом меняется структура их панцирей. Это может помочь подобрать оптимальные условия для выращивания водорослей в биореакторах, кроме того, водоросли могут служить индикаторами изменения солености воды.

Scientists have found that an increase in water salinity in the cells of the marine diatom Nitzschia weakens the connections between the components of the photosynthetic apparatus and disrupts the formation of the cell shell.
The authors were able to track these changes using a wide range of advanced photonic methods that provide comprehensive information about the condition and functional properties of diatoms.
Thanks to their valuable silica shells, diatoms are widely used in the food and beverage industries, as well as in the treatment of drinking water and wastewater.
Diatomite - the fossilized remains of the shells - is used as a natural sorbent in filtration systems. The research was published in Scientific Reports.
An essential component of aquatic communities, the single-celled microscopic diatoms sequester about 20% of the planet's carbon dioxide, form the core of marine food chains, and synthesize and accumulate various chemical compounds, primarily, silicon derivatives - the main component of diatom shells called frustules.
Although the shape and structure of the frustule vary from one diatom species to another, the frustule itself is a rather complex and well-organized structure capable of withstanding heavy loads. This makes the diatom frustule a perfect model for high-strength nanostructured materials and components of sensors for medicine and microelectronics.
Researchers from the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology in Moscow and their colleagues from leading Russian universities and research centers have identified the effect of water salinity on the Nitzschia diatoms, which inhabit oceans, salt lakes, and freshwater reservoirs.
In nature, however, the salinity varies widely among different species of diatoms - from 0 (diatoms can exist for some time even in distilled water) to more than 150‰, when salt deposition begins. The researchers studied how Nitzschia adapts to changes in salinity from 10 to 150‰.
For comparison, the salinity of the Red Sea, the saltiest sea on Earth, is 41‰ and reaches 350‰ in some hypersaline environments. By choosing this range of salinities, the researchers were able to model stress conditions for the algae.
For the first time in the study of diatoms, the team used advanced methods, such as laser scanning microscopy, time-resolved fluorescence microscopy, photoacoustic imaging, and transmission electron microscopy, to obtain images of the cells and their subcellular structures, called organelles, with the required resolution and contrast.
Using laser scanning microscopy, the researchers discovered that larger lipid droplets form in the cells of the diatom when it is stressed by low or high salinity. Under these adverse conditions, the droplets store carbon and energy and deposit fatty acids for lipid synthesis.
When the salinity is high, the lipids accumulated in the droplets help to keep the membrane intact and prevent it from rupturing due to pressure imbalance.
The size of a lipid droplet, which was about 1 micron at 40‰, increased to 2.3 microns at 10‰ or 150‰. The pattern of silicon accumulation in the valves, and thus valve formation, also changed when the diatoms were exposed to stress. The largest anomalies in the frustule structure occurred at 60‰.
The team used a combination of time-resolved fluorescence microscopy and rapid fluorescence induction to study the effect of salinity on energy and electron transport in the cells.
Looking at the way chlorophyll interacts with light, the researchers found that an increase in cell salinity alters the processes of absorbed energy conversion. It turned out that at 80‰, the transfer of energy and electrons between the components of the photosynthetic system was the slowest, because fluorescence and heat losses accounted for a large proportion of the absorbed energy.
In addition, researchers at the Saratov National Research University discovered that as salinity increases, diatom pigments become more active in absorbing light and converting its energy into ultrasonic vibrations - an effect largely due to an increase in the concentration of "chlorophyll a" and other pigments.
Using transmission electron microscopy, the team found that salinity affects the structure of the diatom's polysaccharide layer located between the frustule and the cell membrane. This organic shell protects the cell, while contributing to the integrity and formation of the frustule.
In cells grown at 20‰, this shell is virtually invisible, while at 40‰ it appears as a thin layer next to the valve, and at 60‰ it reaches its maximum size.
Overall, the team showed that diatom cells grow at about the same rate across a wide range of salinities, allowing diatom cells to live in different bodies of water.
"Understanding how water salinity affects diatoms will potentially help select optimal conditions for their growth in bioreactors used to produce biogenic nano- and microstructured silica, bioactive compounds, and biofuels. In addition, diatoms can serve as indicators of changes in water salinity and as a biological sensor for monitoring the effects of climate change on marine biodiversity," says Dmitry Gorin, a professor at Skoltech's Photonics Center and the head of the project.

В Институте океанологии им. П.П.Ширшова РАН разработали первую в России систему мониторинга климата в Арктике, способную отслеживать уровень климатически активных веществ в атмосфере и поверхностном слое океана.

Scientists from Shirshov Institute of Oceanology of the Russian Academy of Sciences have developed Russia's first system for monitoring climate-active substances in the Arctic Ocean, local media reported on Friday.
"The system integrates both shipborne and autonomous environmental observation platforms. A key component of this newly developed system is the Sea-Air-Wave Station (SAWS), which was successfully tested during last year's Arctic expedition," TASS news agency quoted the press service of the institute as saying.
"Measurements of greenhouse gas concentrations demonstrated the high efficiency of the gas analyzers installed on SAWS," it said.
The station has undergone successful testing in Arctic conditions and its configuration will serve as the basis for a network of buoys in the subpolar Atlantic and the Arctic, it said.
According to the institute, the system will enable efficient monitoring of all parameters of the surface atmosphere and ocean layer, providing critical data for assessing regional gas and energy flux balances in the ocean.
The data collected from the hydrometeorological station have, for the first time, allowed researchers to obtain quantitative characteristics of energy and greenhouse gas flux variability between the ocean and the atmosphere in real time.
The Arctic is often referred to as the "engine of global weather" due to its heightened sensitivity to climate change.
The ocean serves as a long-term heat reservoir, absorbing approximately 92 percent of excess heat entering the atmosphere due to human activities.
The project, approved by the Russian government in 2022, is being conducted by six scientific consortia dedicated to monitoring processes on land, in oceans and forest ecosystems.

Академик РАН Михаил Залиханов и профессор МНЭПУ Станислав Степанов полагают, что несостоявшийся советский проект по переброске части стоков сибирских рек в Среднюю Азию мог бы получить продолжение - в новых климатических условиях и с учетом прежних ошибок. Перенаправлять воду предлагается посредством системы трубопроводов, в перспективе - трансконтинентальной.

For more than a century, Russians have talked about the possibility of diverting water from Siberia’s rivers to Central Asia to save the Aral Sea and help Central Asia overcome its water shortages; but these plans have been shot down in Moscow not only because they cost so much but also because they harmed Russia in various other ways.
But now two Moscow experts on hydrology argue that three developments have changed the situation and that as a result Russia would benefit far more than Central Asia. As a result, there is now a far better chance that the Russian government will back Siberian river diversion.
According to Mikhail Zelikhanov and Stanislav Stepanov of the Russian Academy Sciences, the three developments that have shifted the balance in favor of going ahead with this project are the following:
• First, global warming has increased the amount of water in Siberian rivers to the point that they flood Russian cities on a regular basis. The costs of repairing such disasters are so large than they make the costs of Siberian river diversion seem relatively small.
• Second, Russian technology has advanced to the point that any water shifted from Siberia to Central Asia could go through pipelines rather than via canals, thus limiting the amount lost by filtration and evaporation to the point that the costs of the project are much reduced.
• And third, in the wake of the redivision of the world following Putin’s expanded attack on Ukraine and the ensuing Western sanctions means that Moscow would benefit by creating a network of pipelines to carry water to Central Asia, China and other countries, not only financially but in terms of influence and getting investment from them.
These arguments are likely to be far more compelling that those advocates of this project have made in the past, although it is certain that many ecological activists and budget hawks will continue to oppose the measure. And in any case, its construction would take at a minimum several years.
But the appearance of the article by Zelikhanov and Stepanov is a reminder that the idea of Sbierian River Diversion is anything but dead, despite the veto the Gorbachev government imposed on it more than three decades ago.

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