Russian Science: top-10 according to RIA Novosti

RIA Novosti's choice: the main achievements of Russian scientists in 2013

In the past year, Russian researchers have made significant progress in various fields of science – from astronomy to molecular biology. The results of their work have been published in the world's leading scientific journals. RIA Novosti has selected the ten most important achievements of Russian scientists.

"Biographers" of the Chelyabinsk meteoriteThe meteorite that exploded over Chelyabinsk in mid-February gave abundant "food" for research to Russian specialists.

Astronomer Viktor Grokhovsky from South Ural Federal University and his research team quickly calculated the trajectory of the fall of the "guest from space" and were able to determine the place where most of its fragments landed – namely Lake Chebarkul. Based on these calculations, Grokhovsky's expedition was able to extract 5.5 kilograms of fragments from the lake and adjacent territories and a large fragment from the bottom of Chebarkul weighing 570 kilograms. Grokhovsky got into the "top ten" of the most notable world scientists of the outgoing year according to the journal Nature.

In turn, geochemists from the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) found out the "biography" of this former 20-meter asteroid. The analyses of fragments carried out at the Vernadsky Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry (GEOHI) showed that the Chelyabinsk "guest" belongs to the class of ordinary chondrites by its composition. Such objects have never been found on the territory of Russia before.

According to experts from GEOCHA, the age of the asteroid was 4.56 billion years, which is approximately equal to the age of the Solar System. This space object once split off from a relatively large "progenitor". In addition, an asteroid about 290 million years ago got into an "accident", colliding with another cosmic body – this was indicated by the isotopic composition of the remnants of the asteroid.

On the way to Earth, the asteroid may have flown very close to the Sun, scientists from the Institute of Geology and Mineralogy of the Siberian Branch (IGM SB RAS) suggested. They determined that some fragments of the asteroid bear traces of melting and crystallization processes that took place long before the fall of this body to Earth.

Discoveries from orbitIn the past year, a number of discoveries have been recorded in their "asset" by Russian scientific spacecraft operating in orbit.

The Radioastron radio telescope has discovered new properties of the interstellar medium – it turned out that turbulence is present in it, which "work" as lenses focusing the radiation of astronomical objects. This result may lead to a revision of the models of the interstellar medium.

In addition, Radioastron has found a "water" cloud the size of eight diameters of the Sun, located more than five thousand light-years from Earth, which will allow scientists to better understand the process of formation of massive stars.

Finally, thanks to Radioastron, it was possible to set a record for angular resolution – the telescope was able to "see" objects with an angular size of 40 microseconds.

Lightning discharges, like the thunderclouds themselves, turned out to be extremely unusual, resembling fractals in their physics – for example, a "big" lightning consists of many cells identical in their properties and shape -"micromolnies" – this was indicated by data from the Chibis-M microsatellite.

Biomedicine on the satelliteIn 2013, Russian scientists successfully carried out the first experiments on board a biosatellite since 2007.

The Bion-M1 spacecraft with animals on board spent a month in space in the spring, after which it landed in the Orenburg region.

In particular, the results of the Meteorite experiment performed at Bion demonstrated that life on Earth could have appeared as a result of microorganisms hitting its surface together with falling asteroids.

To conduct the experiment, scientists from the Institute of Biomedical Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences placed "tablets" with bacterial spores in the basalt shell of the "Bion". During re-entry into the atmosphere, the ship's skin melted. It turned out that at least one strain of microbes survived, which allowed us to talk about the possibility of bringing microbes to our planet from space.

The results of another experiment allowed scientists to find out the possible reason for the decrease in vision in astronauts – it is possible that the whole thing is a strong, 40% decrease in the capacity of the arteries of the brain, according to the IMBP.

Proteins of the "Russian" chromosomeDomestic molecular biologists within the framework of the international project "Human Proteome" by the end of this year have successfully completed the description of the main (not modified) proteins encoded by the genes of the 18th human chromosome, which is "recorded" for the domestic participants of the project.

"Human Proteome" has been running since 2010, this is a large-scale continuation of the Human Genome project completed in 2001. The main goal of the current work is an inventory of all human proteins and finding out the interactions between them. It is assumed that the accumulated knowledge will contribute to the creation of cheap and affordable methods of early diagnosis.

From the Russian side, the project involves, in particular, specialists of the Orekhovich Research Institute of Biomedical Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences (RAMS), the Institute of Biomedical Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Shemyakin and Ovchinnikov Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Kurchatov Institute, the Bioengineering Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Semiconductor Physics of the Siberian Branch SB RAS.

Success of immunologistsScientists from the Engelhardt Institute of Molecular Biology of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) and the Belozersky Research Institute of Physico-Chemical Biology (NII FKHB)

MSU together with its foreign colleagues have discovered a new mechanism of "management" of immune reactions, which is associated with the regulation of the composition of bacterial microflora in the intestine.

The authors of the work discovered a new function of the lymphotoxin protein-alpha – it turned out that this molecule indirectly regulates the production of antibodies belonging to the class of immunoglobulins A by immune cells of the intestine, and the amount of which, as previously shown, depends on the composition of the intestinal microflora. This result may be important for the treatment of autoimmune diseases in humans.

Siberian geneticsThe outgoing year was significant for Siberian geneticists.

Scientists from the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IMKB SB RAS) have deciphered the mitochondrial DNA of an ancient horse whose remains were found in the Denisova cave in Altai, where the remains of an extinct species of people – "Denisovans", who lived about 50 thousand years ago, were previously discovered. The results obtained allowed us to assert that the ancestral form of some of the horse populations lived in the Altai, and did not disappear without a trace.

Now scientists will try to "collect" the complete genome of an ancient horse. If we analyze it, we can find out how often the "traces" of ancient animals are found in modern ones, look at certain markers and say whether the "Denisov" horse was the one that began to be domesticated or the object of hunting.

In addition, the staff of the IMKB, together with foreign colleagues, found out that the oldest domestic dog known today in Asia, which lived about 33 thousand years ago in the Altai, turned out to be genetically closer to modern American dogs, and not wolves. The sequence of the control region of the D-loop of the mitochondrial DNA of an ancient dog was deciphered in the IMDB, and the first stages of comparative analysis of the obtained sequence were performed.

Finally, Russian scientists in cooperation with international experts evaluated the genetic contribution of ancient Europeans to the genomes of native Americans. It turned out that this share is on average 20%, and the rest is accounted for by the genes of the indigenous population of Asia.

Employees of the Institute of Cytology and Genetics SB RAS, the Institute of Biochemistry and Genetics of the Ufa Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Medical and Genetic Research Center of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, the Yakut Scientific Center for Complex Medical Problems participated in this work.

A fork in the evolution of the brainRussian molecular biologists have found that one of the ancient endogenous retroviruses, a kind of molecular parasites that were once embedded in the human genome, "conducts" the work of a gene that plays an important role in the nervous system.

We are talking about the gene of the enzyme prolindehydrogenase, which is involved in the synthesis of chemicals that transmit signals between neurons in the brain.

Since chimpanzees do not have the same retroviral "insertion" before the prolindehydrogenase gene, the authors of the work believe that this "insertion" into our DNA could become one of the key factors of human appearance during evolution.

This discovery was made by scientists from the IBH RAS, the Research Institute of the FKHB and the Faculty of Fundamental Medicine of Moscow State University, the Center for Pediatric Hematology, Oncology and Immunology of the Ministry of Health, the Institute of Higher Nervous Activity and Neurophysiology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Russian National Research Medical University.

Nitric oxide and agingNitric oxide (NO), a small "universal" molecule involved in many processes in a living organism, also "conducts" genes related to the protection of cells from stress and aging, a group of scientists, which included employees of the Moscow State Genetics Center and their colleagues from Russia working in the United States, found out.

The object of biologists' attention was a small round worm Caenorhabditis elegans – one of the most popular organisms used in the study of aging. These worms, which received nitric oxide from the cells of the bacteria hay bacillus, which is part of the food "diet" of Caenorhabditis elegans, lived longer than their counterparts, "deprived" of NO. It turned out that the oxide in the intestinal tissues of C. elegans affected the work of several dozen genes, some of which are associated with aging and the reaction of cells to stress. Now the authors of the work intend to find out the specific contribution of these genes to aging and other processes in the body.

Neutrons from lightningScientists from the Lebedev Physics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (FIAN) for the first time discovered neutrons emitted by artificial lightning – this will help solve the mystery of the origin of neutrons that occur when natural lightning is discharged.

The authors of the study reproduced lightning discharges in the laboratory using an installation that created "sparks" with a voltage of 1 million volts per meter and a current strength of about 10 kiloamps.

The results showed that most of the neutrons detected by the detectors are "fast" neutrons with initial energies of about 10 megaelectronvolts. Now physicists intend to find out the exact localization of the birthplace of lightning neutrons in order to determine what types of nuclear reactions generate them.

Storms, permafrost and methaneRussian climatologists from the Pacific Oceanological Institute of the Far Eastern Branch (FEB)

RAS and the Institute of Chemistry of the FEB RAS in partnership with American colleagues found out that the East Siberian permafrost on the continental shelf releases unexpectedly a lot of methane into the waters of the Arctic Ocean due to the high salinity of the soil and periodic "churning" by storms.

It turned out that the reason for this was two factors – increased salinity of the soil in the bottom areas and periodic storms that often occur in the Laptev Sea. Thus, the high salinity of the soil allows the water inside it to remain liquid even at subzero temperatures, which explains the increased rate of permafrost melting and methane release.

Storms affect this process indirectly – they "shake up" the waters of the Laptev Sea, as a result of which methane microbubbles in their waters begin to rise to the surface noticeably faster than in calm weather. Thanks to these factors, the Siberian permafrost melts much faster and releases more methane than we used to think, climatologists concluded.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru23.12.2013