Russian Science: Discussion Thread

Scientists discover mammoth’s skeleton in Russia

A mammoth’s skeleton has been discovered in Yakutia

TASS, August 13. Scientists of the Ammosov North-Eastern Federal University and their counterparts from Japan during an expedition in Yakutia found a mammoth’s skeleton with soft tissues and wool, the University reported on Monday.

"On August 12, in Yunyugen, the Verkhoyansk District, 220 km down the Yana River, the expedition found during the digging a mammoth’s incomplete skeleton with soft tissues and wool," the University said. "The digging continues."

This is the only available information at the moment, the University’s expert Alexei Petrov said. Further information will be published after the expedition is over.


More:
http://tass.com/science/1017013

Bones of two fossils reptiles who lives 260 mln years ago found in Russia

Paleontologists have discovered fossils of two Pareiasaurs, reptiles who roamed the Earth some 260 million years ago

KIROV, August 16. /TASS/. Paleontologists in the Kirov Region, some 900 kilometers to the northeast of Moscow, have discovered fossils of two Pareiasaurs, reptiles who roamed the Earth some 260 million years ago, a local museum official said on Thursday.

The discovery was made at the Kotelnich fossil site on the right bank of the Vyatka river.

"The second skeleton is not as well preserved as the first one found during this season," said Leonid Kavardakov of the Vyatka paleontological museum. "Both discoveries were brought to the museum’s laboratory."

The first two skeletons of the ancient reptiles were unearthed at the fossil site in 1933 by a local hydrogeologist who was drilling for water wells. Excavation work has never stopped on the Vyatka river since the 1990s. The work is carried out here from May to October when the water level declines.

Therocephalians, cynodonts, gorgonopsians, anomodonts, dicynodonts, a Mastodonsaurus, Tarbosaurus and Ankylosaurus - all of these fossils were discovered at the Kotelnich site.

Pareiasaurs were large and awkward herbivores who measured to 2.5 meters in length, who most likely lived in damp lowlands. Sometimes they got trapped in mud and slowly died.

The Vyatka paleontological museum founded in 1994 houses some 3,000 items. The team of local paleontologists discovered over 20 new species of fossil animals in 25 years.


More:
http://tass.com/science/1017474

Russian scientists to synthesize 114th, 115th elements of Mendeleev’s Periodic Table

More:
http://tass.com/science/1042238

This article is not directly related to Russia, however, it may be the right time for Russia to consider conducting their own research in the field of genetics like this gene-splicing technology which would theoretically allow for the creation of the next generation of humans that will have like 1000x more intelligence/IQ than that of an average person. This technology, along with AI will give Russia a huge advantage over their competitors in the medium to the long term. The possibilities that would result from this technology are endless.

Superhuman? CRISPR Experiment Twins Might Have Genetically Enhanced Brains

New research suggests that Chinese scientist's gene-editing experiment to make children resistant to HIV may have also enhanced their ability to learn and form memories.

Two girls whose genes were modified before birth by a Chinese scientific team using the new editing tool CRISPR could have had their brains affected. New research reported by MIT Technology Review suggests that the alteration introduced into the girls’ DNA to a gene called CCR5, could not only make them smarter, but could also improve their brain recovery after stroke and may be linked to greater success in school.

The answer is likely yes, it did affect their brains,” said Alcino J. Silva, a neurobiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose lab uncovered a major new role for the CCR5 gene in memory and the brain’s ability to form new connections.
“The simplest interpretation is that those mutations will probably have an impact on cognitive function in the twins,” said Silva, yet he noted that the exact effect on the girls’ cognition is impossible to predict, thus “that is why it should not be done.”

The Chinese team, led by He Jiankui of the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, claimed they used CRISPR to delete CCR5 from human embryos, some of which were later used to create pregnancies. The gene was deleted in order to prevent HIV from entering human blood cells.

The experiment was condemned by other scientists as irresponsible and He is currently under investigation by the Chinese government over concerns about safety and the morality of gene-editing, which have been voiced by both Chinese and international scientists. However, there is no evidence so far that He actually set out to modify the twins’ intelligence. The scientists studying the effects of CCR5 on cognition told MIT Technology Review that the Chinese scientist never reached out to them.

The information about the connection between CCR5 and cognition was first published in a 2016 study, co-authored by Silva, which looked at more than 140 different genetic alterations to find which ones made mice smarter. He was aware of the study, as he acknowledged during a summit of gene editing scientists in Hong Kong that occurred two days after the announcement of the birth of the twins.
I saw that paper, it needs more independent verification,” He replied when asked about it during a Q&A, adding that he is “against using genome editing for enhancement.”

Silva, however, told MIT Technology Review that He contacted several scientists in the Silicon Valley and elsewhere who had an “unhealthy interest” in designer babies with better brains.

The CCR5 gene can have an effect on many aspects of human life. Silva and a large team from the US and Israel say they have new proof that CCR5 acts as a suppressor of memories and synaptic connections. Another report, published in the journal Cell, claims that people who naturally lack CCR5 recover more quickly from strokes.

“Could it be conceivable that at one point in the future we could increase the average IQ of the population? I would not be a scientist if I said no. The work in mice demonstrates the answer may be yes,” said Silva. “But mice are not people. We simply don’t know what the consequences will be in mucking around. We are not ready for it yet.”

https://sputniknews.com/science/201902221072641672-china-crispr-gene-altered-babies-enhanced/

Nobody will have 1000 times higher IQ, that would mean having an IQ of 10,000. A few greatedt geniuses alive have IQ of approx. 200

Ok i kinda exaggerated there but you get what I’m saying, creation of next generation humans that if compared, will make geniuses like Einstein look like an 8 bit computer next to a quantum computer. Now imagine slowly replacing your population with these next generation humans, you’ll have future doctors, engineers, scientists, even politicians that will lead the country that are super intelligent. Some people of course will argue that the processes involved in such research are unethical, but if you look at it, how many abortions happen not just in Russia but all around the world, but is there any serious global effort to stop such practices? No. Because nobody really cares. But then why are there suddenly people who protest against these genetically modified embryos? It’s not because they are honestly concerned with ethical issues, it is obviously just a smoke screen to make their campaign appealing. They are simply just the elites who are afraid of being ‘replaced’ by these new uber intelligent next generation humans.

Let them fight each other!

GarryB wrote:So if the AI robots don't kill us all and turn us into cattle then the Chinese gene soldiers will... big deal.

Either of those two taking over the world is countless times better than a world conquered by the Muslims. As long as the Muslims are eradicated I am happy.

Cost of DNA sequencing/editing is plummeting so fast that mass scale genetic engineering of humans is unavoidable now, and for everyone, not just the elites.

IT's like cell phones -first they were for the rich, then for slightly less rich, now they're for everybody.

The benefits simply far outweight the disadvantages. Ofc there will be people saying that it's against God, nature, unethical etc. To hell with them.

Walther von Oldenburg wrote:Cost of DNA sequencing/editing is plummeting so fast that mass scale genetic engineering of humans is unavoidable now, and for everyone, not just the elites.

IT's like cell phones -first they were for the rich, then for slightly less rich, now they're for everybody.

The benefits simply far outweight the disadvantages. Ofc there will be people saying that it's against God, nature, unethical etc. To hell with them.

Fixing illnesses prior to birth or making improvements is not against God nor unethical.

Issue is how do you make sure you are not creating unwanted side effects without knowing about them. Doing trial and error approach here is literally child abuse because children need to be born and to reach certain age before any problems manifest themselves.

You can't​ just euthanize defective child if procedure was unsuccessful. Or can you?

Would you want your child to be guinea pig?

As long as procedure is safe (as in no negative effects on child whatsoever) there will be no religious issues at least not with Serbian Orthodox Church.

Such things won't even be approved by government anywhere in the world before it's proven to be absolutely safe.

But after it's proven to be safe, it will be used on mass scale and for enhancement of every trait that could potentially be anhanced in humans.

In 50 years future generations will look at today's skeptics as we today look at early 20th century skeptics saying that cars can never replace a horse driven wagon.

Mendeleev’s Periodic Table of Elements celebrates its 150th anniversary

In the middle of the 19th century, over 60 chemical elements were discovered, whereas by the beginning of 2019, the Table listed 118

TASS FACTBOX. On March 6, 1869, exactly 150 years ago, Russian chemist Dmitry Mendeleev (1834-1907) presented his periodic table of chemical elements - a graphic description of what was destined to go down in history as the Periodic Law.
The story of the discovery

At the middle of the 19th century, 63 chemical elements were known to science. Before Mendeleev’s discovery, attempts at arranging them in some logical way were made by Johann Doebereiner (1829), Alexander Chancourtois (1862), Julius Meyer (1864), John Newlands (1866) and others.

In 1867, Dmitry Mendeleev, a professor at the St. Petersburg University, started working on a fundamental text called The Principles of Chemistry. At a certain point, the scientist arrived at the conclusion that the properties and atomic masses of chemical elements were interrelated in a certain way. With this in mind, in 1869, Mendeleev put together a table that he called The Experiment of a System of Elements Based on Their Atomic Weight and Chemical Similarity and sent it to the printer’s on March 1 (O.S. February 17). Mendeleev also sent copies of the table bearing this date to his colleagues in Russia and abroad. Four days later, he formulated the periodic law in an article entitled The Dependence Between the Properties of the Atomic Weights of the Elements, published in the magazine of the Russian Chemical Society (currently D.I. Mendeleev Russian Chemical Society). In his publication, he described the law he discovered in the following way: "The elements, if arranged according to their atomic weight, exhibit an apparent periodicity of properties."

On March 18, 1869, the news of the periodic system of elements was announced at a meeting of the Russian Chemical Society. The man who broke the news was the society’s editor, Professor Nikolai Menshutkin. He was speaking on Mendeleev’s behalf at the scientist’s own request. Mendeleev was out of town at the moment.

Mendeleev spent a little more than two years improving his periodic system. He introduced periods and groups of elements, the position of each of them in the table, corrected the atomic mass of some of them (such as beryllium, indium, uranium, etc.), predicted the existence of a number of new elements and described their properties. In 1871, he finalized the Basics of Chemistry to come up with the final definition of the periodic law and a version of the system of elements pretty close to the current one. The scientist formulated the periodic law in the following way: "The properties of simple bodies, the constitution of their compounds, as well as the properties of the later are periodic functions of the atomic weights of the elements, because these properties are themselves the properties of the elements from which these bodies derive."
Mendeleev’s Periodic Law earned universal recognition as one of the pillars of theoretic chemistry after the discovery of elements he had predicted - gallium (Ga, 31st element) in France in 1875, scandium (Sc, 21st) in Sweden in 1879, and germanium (Ge, 32nd) in Germany in 1886.

The Royal Society of London awarded the Davy Medal to Dmitry Mendeleev for his accomplishment in 1882.

Periodic table

Mendeleev’s periodic law has undergone certain changes and been complemented by new elements, including artificially synthesized ones. All in all, more than 500 versions of it have been published. Two are the most widely spread ones: the short version (has eight groups, horizontal rows of elements) and the long version (18 rows). In 1989, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, IUPAC) recommended the long version. In the modern system, the elements are arranged in a two-dimensional table, in which each column (group) represents the basic physical and chemical properties, and the rows are periods of elements largely similar to each other.

As at the beginning of 2019, the Periodic Table listed 118 chemical elements (the last three were added in 2016). The names of some are related with Russia. Ruthenium (Ru) is one of the ways of spelling Russia in Latin. Dubnium (Db) was calledin honor of the research cluster Dubna; Moscovium (Mc), in honor of the Moscow Region where the United Institute for Nuclear Research is located; Mendelevium (Md), in honor of Dmitry Mendeleev; Oganesson (Og), in honor of physicist Yuri Oganesian; Samarium (Sm), in honor of Russian mining engineer Vasily Samarsky-Bykhovets; and Flerovium (Fl) in honor of Soviet nuclear physicist Georgy Flerov.

The Periodic Table played an important role in studying the properties of chemical elements and expanding the knowledge of the structure of matter. It serves as the scientific basis for teaching general and inorganic chemistry and also nuclear physics.
Its first version, published on March 1, 1869, is kept at the D.I. Mendeleev Museum Archive at St. Petersburg University. The first version of the table made for demonstration in public (graphic image) at the request of Dmitry Mendeleev himself in 1876 can be seen in the Large Chemistry Lecture Hall of the Visileostrovsky Campus of the St. Petersburg University. A copy of the Periodic Table dated 1885 was discovered at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland in 2014.


More:
http://tass.com/science/1047675

kvs will have a hard time disproving this case of 'brain drain.'

Team Russia won four gold medals and one silver at the International physics Olympiad



The Russian team won four gold medals and one silver medal at the 50th International physics Olympiad, held in tel Aviv, reports the website of the Ministry of education. Russian students therefore repeated the result of last year's Olympic games in Lisbon, when they also won four gold medals and one silver.

Olympiad was held in tel Aviv from 7 to 14 July. According to information of "Olympics.ru", it was attended by teams from 78 countries around the world. In the theoretical round, the students had to solve problems about falling spiral spring "slinky", about the magnetron from the microwave, and thermoacoustic engine. In the experimental part of the competition had to investigate the optical properties of objects and find the relationship between electrical and thermal conductivity materials. View assignments and solutions on the contest site.

Gold medals in the Russian team got Grigoriy Bobkov, Alexey Shishkin, Vladimir Malinovsky (all three of the Moscow school № 1589) and Andrey Panferov from school-boarding school of a name of Kolmogorov at Moscow state University. Elisha Sudakov from the Vologda multidisciplinary Lyceum won the silver medal. For Bobkov this is the second gold in 2018, he occupied the absolute second place in physics Olympiad in Lisbon.

The preparation of the Russian team engaged teachers MIPT, the training itself took place at MIPT Educational center "Sirius".

In 2017 at the Olympic games in Indonesia Russian students won five gold medals, then it was the best result for the number of medals in the history of Russia's participation in the Olympics

https://translate.yandex.com/translate?url=https%3A%2F%2Fvpk.name%2Fnews%2F305053_komanda_rossii_poluchila_chetyire_zolota_i_odno_serebro_na_mezhdunarodnoi_fizicheskoi_olimpiade.html&lang=ru-en

What?

It is Radio Freedom/Liberty and other NATO propaganda orifices that bleat about some Russian brain drain and how Russians are
desperate to flee to the precious west. The brain drain was only in play during the 1990s during the super-depression when
scientists and engineers were not being paid on a routine basis. I know some of these researchers personally who moved to
western universities during the 1990s.

Any talk about brain drain "under Putin" is pure BS. Things in Russian academia got rather good by 2013. But the post 2014
period has been more rough. Sanctions have had an effect on Russian finances, but nowhere as bad as NATO hoped for. And
instead have led to massive import substitution. I personally blame the CBR and the monetarist clowns who are in charge for
making the sanctions more painful than they should be. The CBR is directly responsible for killing Russian banking growth
and for forcing Russian companies to search for money offshore. There is zero justification for the current 7.5% prime rate
(which translates into over 10% lending rates to consumers).

kvs wrote:What?

It is Radio Freedom/Liberty and other NATO propaganda orifices that bleat about some Russian brain drain and how Russians are
desperate to flee to the precious west.  The brain drain was only in play during the 1990s during the super-depression when
scientists and engineers were not being paid on a routine basis.   I know some of these researchers personally who moved to
western universities during the 1990s.

Any talk about brain drain "under Putin" is pure BS.  Things in Russian academia got rather good by 2013.  But the post 2014
period has been more rough.  Sanctions have had an effect on Russian finances, but nowhere as bad as NATO hoped for.  And
instead have led to massive import substitution.  I personally blame the CBR and the monetarist clowns who are in charge for
making the sanctions more painful than they should be.  The CBR is directly responsible for killing Russian banking growth
and for forcing Russian companies to search for money offshore.   There is zero justification for the current 7.5% prime rate
(which translates into over 10% lending rates to consumers).  

I was joking, if you couldn't tell from the link that I posted.

The first superconducting heavy ion accelerator launched in Dubna

magnumcromagnon wrote:The first superconducting heavy ion accelerator launched in Dubna

As usual all the fun is in the comments. Check out the retards who use the participation of Italy in the construction of a key component
as proof that Russia cannot into science.

Maybe those Russian untermenschen wanted to save some time and money instead of launching a factory for a one time single part.

If a western creature puts their finger on something, then they think the own it and made it.

Just made an article dedicated to their achievements in scientific progress as a country. https://qr.ae/pNcycH

Putin orders launch of world’s most powerful source of neutrons in Leningrad Region

ST. PETERSBURG, February 8. /TASS/. Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered the energy launch of the world’s most powerful source of neutrons at St. Petersburg’s B.P. Konstantinov Institute of Nuclear Physics, affiliated with the Kurchatov Institute research center.

"I am asking you to put the reactor into energy operation," Putin told the participants in the launch ceremony in a video conference mode.

https://tass.com/politics/1253791

Largest telescope in Northern hemisphere to begin operations at Baikal in March

The Baikal-GVD neutrino telescope is located at Lake Baikal and is designated for registration of the Cherenkov radiation, a pale fluorescence emerging in water or other transparent medium due to charged particles. In the Baikal water the Cherenkov radiation occurs due to neutrinos coming from space

MOSCOW, February 8. /TASS/. The largest in the Northern hemisphere Baikal neutrino telescope which Russian scientists plan to use in order to better understand the processes of emergence and evolution of the universe will be completed at Lake Baikal in March 2021, Director of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) Grigory Trubnikov said in an interview with TASS.

"Not far from Irkutsk, on Lake Baikal, at the 106th kilometer of the Circum-Baikal railway, we are building a giant neutrino telescope of a cubic-kilometer size which this year we want to expand to the largest volume in the Northern hemisphere. Practically, our country will soon have yet another megascience research installation which will become an important contribution of the JINR to Russia’s program of scientific megaprojects. The large-scale Baikal neutrino telescope should begin operations as early as March and this will be one of the milestones of the Year of Science and Technologies - 2021 program," he said.

There are several neutrino telescopes worldwide, including Antarctica. The goal of such a telescope is to study signals from the high-energy neutrino particles coming to Earth from the depths of emerging or dying galaxies and various exotic stellar objects. Scientists think that the neutrinos carry invaluable information about objects that produce them, shedding light on mysteries of emergence and evolution of our universe.

"The Baikal telescope will study streams of neutrinos ‘piercing’ the Earth from the South Pole and exiting in the Northern hemisphere near Baikal. The two largest neutrino telescopes - the Antarctic and the Baikal ones, - will therefore create a complete dimensional picture of the streams of the ultra-high energy particles piercing the planet. Additionally, these neutrinos from space as well as the neutrinos born in the depths of our Earth are also a sort of a tomographic scanner of our planet. Also, this telescope is an element of an ecological program of Lake Baikal itself," the scientist said.

The Baikal-GVD neutrino telescope is located at Lake Baikal and is designated for registration of the Cherenkov radiation, a pale fluorescence emerging in water or other transparent medium due to charged particles. In the Baikal water the Cherenkov radiation occurs due to neutrinos coming from space.

The JINR is located in Dubna, Russia and is one of the largest and distinguished international research centers.

https://tass.com/science/1253699

Discussion of the problems of infrastructure constraints of Russian science at the meeting of the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Does this have anything to do with Russias new technology development?

miketheterrible wrote:Does this have anything to do with Russias new technology development?

Well, this meeting literally discusses the creation of a Russian element base in the field of computing systems with a performance level of hundreds of teraflops or more. Does this have anything to do with the development of new technologies in Russia? Yes. The consequences of the decisions taken at this meeting will be observed in the next 10-20 years.
They also discuss recommendations to the Russian government to increase funding for science to at least 2% of GDP (current funding is 1.1%).