Our expertise has unambiguously shown that the regulation of the level of Lake Baikal by power engineers since 1959 has not brought any harm to the ecosystem of the lake. The omul population did not disappear, as predicted by the ichthyologists – the authors of the ban. Our direct echolocation survey showed that between 1995 and 2003 it increased from 20 to 50-70 thousand tons. The difference is 30 thousand tons of omul at a market price of 60 rubles. / Kg costs 1.8 billion rubles. The dumpling should be caught – otherwise he himself will die in vain. The entire annual budget of the Limnological Institute is about 40 million rubles. The budget of Buryatia is about 2 billion. Calculate the profit yourself.
Can science become a direct productive force, as they said before? Sometimes it can. Last year it was decided to electrify Olkhon Island. An important task – what is life without electricity? What is international tourism? In addition, women complain that they cannot iron the dress, there is nowhere to turn on the electric iron, and the old ones, on charcoal, are not released. It was decided to lay the power cable to Olkhon under water. That’s right, an overhead power line across the strait would not beautify the landscape. In addition, the legendary Sarma blows in the strait, and the construction of a hurricane-resistant power transmission line is very expensive. Over the years of research, we have accumulated a wealth of information about the Small Sea. We have a fleet, we have geologists and biologists-submariners, we have connections with Russian geophysicists. Under a contract with power engineers, we are examining the route of laying the power cable and will give recommendations on how to do it cheaper and more reliably.
Here is a small example: at the bottom of the strait, mysterious sandy banks with a height of about a meter with a distance between the crests of 20 meters were found. It is extremely important for the safety of the cable to know how they were formed. According to one scenario, these shafts are ripples waves from the current in the strait. If the currents are to blame – their speed is very high – this is dangerous for the cable. The second option: the ramparts are former dunes, flooded dunes (see figure on p. 141). During the last glacial period, 18 thousand years ago, when the climate was dry, the Selenga dried up, the level of Lake Baikal dropped by 30 meters, a sandy bottom was exposed, a strong wind blew – and dunes were formed. 15 thousand years ago, the humidity of the climate increased, the level slowly rose, and the dunes were flooded. In this case, there is no danger for the cable – next time the level will not drop by 30 meters soon. But there is no final answer yet, you can think of a dozen more scenarios. One thing is clear – even paleolimnology can become an immediate productive force! It is possible that the institute will take part in the laying of the cable itself – after all, we have a fleet.
Gas hydrate. Photo by V. Korotkoruchko
There are many ideas. You can’t tell about all of them. Perhaps one more. The famous Kovykta gas field is being developed to the northwest of Lake Baikal. A gasification program for the Irkutsk Region is currently being implemented. But sooner or later, gas will need to be exported. Designers frightened by environmentalists consider only such routes that bypass Baikal for many kilometers. And why? After all, gas is not oil, it cannot pollute Baikal water if a land pipeline breaks through. Moreover, the sediments of Lake Baikal contain huge amounts of gas hydrates, which constantly release methane into the water. There are other methane outlets not associated with hydrates, especially near the Selenga delta. Why not lay a pipe along a short path – along the bottom of Lake Baikal, as is done in the Baltic, in the Black Sea? If the pipe bursts, the gas bubble will go into the atmosphere, and there will be no harm to Baikal – a lot of methane is already dissolved in its water, and all endemics have adapted to this. But further it is possible to lay an export pipe through Ulan-Ude, through other industrial centers of Buryatia, to provide it with environmentally friendly fuel. There is no need to talk about GDP – it is clear and so. The idea is controversial, but worth considering.
If I had not been an academician, no one would have listened.
SCIENCE NEWS
Fluorographene – a new history of old materialsL.G. Bulusheva, A.V. OkotrubThe research group of the Nobel laureate A. Geim together with scientists from the Institute of Inorganic Chemistry of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Novosibirsk) obtained a new two-dimensional compound of graphene – fluorographene. In carrying out the synthesis of this material, an approach was used that was developed by Siberian chemists many years ago. The new material is resistant to heat and a number of liquids, and also has an acceptable bandgap.
Birch bark medicinesC.F. Vasilevsky, A.I. GovdiDue to the targeted chemical modification of natural plant substances with high biological activity, new effective medicinal preparations are included in modern medical practice. These remedies, as a rule, are much superior to natural ones in terms of their therapeutic effect, while they are more “physiological” for the body and often have fewer side effects than synthetic ones.A striking example of this approach is new medicinal preparations based on the natural betulin triterpenoid extracted from birch bark. By adding an acetylene fragment to betulin, Novosibirsk scientists obtained a new basic compound betulonamide, which belongs to the class of bioconjugates – medicinal “hybrids”. And since the acetylene fragment is highly reactive, it was possible to synthesize many different chemical derivatives on the basis of betulin modified in this way. The results of laboratory tests have shown that some of them exhibit higher anti-inflammatory and antioxidant activity compared to traditional pharmacological drugs.
The brightest SI generatorON. MezentsevSynchrotron radiation (SR) – a beam of photons emitted by a charged particle moving at near-light speed through a transverse magnetic field – was discovered more than a hundred years ago. But it took several decades before physicists found ways to use this radiation as a tool to study the internal structure of matter. For practical use, the narrowest possible beam of radiation is required, which is obtained in special devices – wigglers (“snakes”) or undulators.The world’s first superconducting “snake” – a source of synchrotron radiation with a sequence of short superconducting magnets – was developed and installed at the Novosibirsk Institute of Nuclear Physics of the SB RAS. This institute has created the “brightest” SR generator to date, which was installed in October 2011 at the ALBA CELLS synchrotron center (Spain). Its technical characteristics make it possible to conduct research on nanomaterials and fast processes.
Tomogram for tongueN.S. UrtegeshevToday, out of seven thousand “living” languages, most are under threat of extinction: according to UNESCO, if the situation does not change, by the middle of the century their number will decrease tenfold. An extensive phonetic archive created thanks to the collaboration of the academic institutions of the SB RAS: the Institute of Philology, the International Tomographic Center and the Institute of Chemical Biology and Fundamental Medicine is intended to help preserve rare and endangered languages.The archive contains over 500 digital X-ray images and 7.5 thousand magnetic resonance tomograms, reflecting the work of the speech organs when pronouncing the most characteristic words from more than twenty languages, dialects and dialects of Siberia. Such large-scale phonetic research has not yet been carried out in the world. The data obtained can also be used for purely practical purposes, for example, in the development of alphabets for unwritten languages or the revival of extinct ones.
What happened to the Baikal sponges?A.E. BormotovIn the summer of 2011, Irkutsk divers during a dive near the island. An unusual phenomenon was discovered on Lake Baikal on Olkhon: the color of some representatives of the unique family of Baikal sponges changed from green to dirty pink. As you know, the green color of the sponge is given by the chlorophyll-containing green algae that live in its cells. The color change indicates the death of these symbionts.The researchers from the Limnological Institute of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Irkutsk) are currently investigating the cause of the incident, whose expedition in early December revealed a fairly large area of distribution of sponges of an unusual color.
Baikal Museum: the effect of presenceIn the Baikal Museum of the Irkutsk Scientific Center of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, located in Listvyanka on the shore of Lake Baikal, work has been completed on the creation of a new large-scale exposition “Development of life in the process of abiotic changes on Earth.”Visitors can literally see the process of the origin and formation of the Baikal basin with their own eyes – thanks to advanced multimedia technologies. An unforgettable effect of presence is created by animations performed by the museum staff: the moment of the “Big Bang” is captured on widescreen screens, virtual bears wander outside the monitor window of a log cabin …
SCIENCE HORIZONS
Trityl radicals: 111 years of searching and findingV.M. Tormyshev, I.A. GrigorievMore than a hundred years ago, a significant event for chemistry took place: radicals were discovered – compounds carrying an unpaired electron. These paramagnetic organic structures of a fundamentally new type have changed the idea of what is the norm in chemistry. The rapid development of the revolutionary method of molecular spectroscopy – electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) – stimulated a targeted search for new stable radicals with a set of specific properties that can be used as spin labels and probes recorded by EPR methods.Recently, a number of trityl-type radicals have been synthesized, which have a very narrow and intense EPR signal, which makes it possible to significantly increase the sensitivity and application limits of the method. Now, on their basis, methods are being developed for determining the spatial distribution of oxygen in cell cultures and even in the whole organism. Since malignant tumors are usually characterized by a low oxygen content in cells, the method can be used to diagnose tumors in the course of specialized treatment.
In the footsteps of PrometheusO.P. Korobeinichev, A.G. ShmakovPrimitive people began to use fire more than half a million years ago, and today over 85% of the energy consumed in the world is produced by combustion. But both qualitatively and quantitatively, this process, which consists of 1984 book notes thousands of various chemical reactions, has been studied less well than many other natural phenomena.The most universal method for studying combustion is probe molecular beam mass spectrometry, which makes it possible to take a sample from a flame and identify all compounds in it, measure their concentration and spatial distribution. A unique installation for probing the flame, created at the Novosibirsk Institute of Chemical Kinetics and Combustion of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, was used for a joint Russian-American study of the combustion of organophosphorus compounds as simulators of chemical warfare gases. In this work, the purpose of which was to substantiate the method of destruction of chemical weapons, a new class of flame extinguishers was discovered, on the basis of which complex compositions for fire extinguishers were developed.
From solid to solid. Mechanics of chemical transformationsA.P. Chupakhin, A.A. Sidelnikov, A.A. Matvienko, S.A. ChizhikThe general regularity of the course of solid-phase transformations is the appearance and relaxation of mechanical stresses in them; influencing these processes, it is possible to regulate the very reactivity. The macrokinetic model, based on the concept of feedback between a chemical reaction and the destruction of a solid, makes it possible to predict into what size pieces the body will break during the reaction, which is important for practical purposes. And using a heat sink as an analogue of ion diffusion in the model, it was possible to describe the mechanism of formation of one of the wonders of nature – the basalt “colonnade” of the “Bridge of Giants” in Northern Ireland.
FACULTYSuch different radicalsV.A. ReznikovSecond half of the XX century. characterized by a fantastic surge of scientific interest in stable nitroxyl radicals – organic molecules, which include the nitroxyl group N – O, on which the unpaired electron is localized. The synthesis of new NRs and the study of their chemical properties is not an end in itself: these compounds are used in solving various problems using electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopy. The spin label and probe method is widely used today in various fields of chemistry, biology, and medicine, being a truly universal research tool.
HISTORY OF SCIENCE
“Desperate Protest Souls”I.S. DmitrievThe great Russian scientist D.I. Mendeleev is known throughout the world as the creator of the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements, but his area of interest was much broader.Mendeleev was the founder of the Russian metrological school – it was he who officially introduced the use of the kilogram and the meter and developed an original weighing method using a constant load. He devoted a lot of time to soil science, agriculture, and various economic problems – from customs tariffs to the development of the oil industry.As for the scientific community, being the last natural philosopher of the 19th century, the great chemist actually found himself in opposition to many major discoveries in natural science of that time, reproaching contemporary scientific thought for being too “entangled in ions and electrons.” Not everything he could understand in his era, but she was not able to fully appreciate his ideas, worries and insights, leaving it to future generations of researchers – chemists, physicists, historians of science.
One experience is more than a thousand opinions.M.F. HartanovichThe first scientific chemical laboratory in Russia appeared in 1748 thanks to the six-year efforts of the first Russian academician M.V. Lomonosov. Its building has not survived to this day, but visitors to the M.V. Lomonosov Museum of the MAE RAS have a unique opportunity to imagine how it looked more than two hundred years ago thanks to an accurate one-tenth of a life-size model made in 1948.On the basis of archival and literary sources, it was possible to carefully recreate not only the external and internal appearance of the laboratory, but also the equipment used by Lomonosov: laboratory ovens, scales, various chemical dishes. To create a feeling of authenticity for visitors, the details of the layout and interior items were specially aged, the stoves were smoked and electric bulbs were placed inside them, imitating hot coals.
SCIENCE IN PICTURESIn 3-D realityI. Konstantinov, Yu. Stefanov, A. Kovalevsky, E. VoroninAt the International Science and Engineering Visualization Competition, annually held by Science magazine and the National Science Foundation (USA), in 2011