Science Slam in "Moscow Hall"
Bar, Science, rock and roll
But we must admit that the first steps of scientific slam in our country are confident and successful. Similar events are already taking place in ten regions and gather full halls of spectators who follow with interest what is happening on stage.
What is a scientific slam? This is a performance of scientists on the stage of the club, in which they must, having met a limited time, tell about their research in an accessible, witty and fascinating way. At the end of the evening, the best speaker is determined by the strength of the audience's applause.
The organizers of the slam were the companies "Paper Media" and "JetBrains", which had previously held scientific slams in St. Petersburg and other cities.
The evening began with a speech by a special guest – Doctor of Biological Sciences Mikhail Gelfand. He did not compete with other slam participants, but managed to warm up the audience well with a fascinating story about the bacteria living in each of us. Up to a quadrillion (10-15) bacteria live in the body of a completely healthy person, more than his own cells. If you want to find out your true weight, you can safely subtract one and a half kilograms from the readings of the scales, because that's how much your microscopic roommates weigh in total. The total genome of bacteria living in humans is much larger than the human genome.
Mikhail Gelfand spoke about recent studies that compared the bacterial flora of the intestines of twins, one of which was thick and the other was thin. It turned out that there are more types of bacteria living in the intestines of a thin twin than in a thick one. Moreover, when microflora samples from these intestines were transplanted to laboratory mice, those mice that got the intestinal bacteria of the fat man began to get fat, and those that received bacteria from the intestines of the thin brother remained thin. When fat and thin mice were placed in the same cage, the fat ones, gradually becoming infected with the bacteria of the thin ones, lost weight again.
The results of this and similar experiments led to the creation of a new method of therapy: "fecal transplantation" – transplantation of intestinal bacteria to the patient. This method is used to treat not only obesity, but also ulcerative colitis, Crohn's disease and even diabetes. "Transplantation" is performed through the mouth or through the intestines. Clinical trials are currently underway.
During one of these trials, the use of fecal transplantation for the treatment of intestinal disease caused by Clostridium difficile was investigated. This bacterium lives in the intestine often, and becomes pathogenic after many other bacteria die from the use of antibiotics. Clostridium difficile itself is resistant to most antibiotics. The disease occurs in hospitals or after discharge in people who have received antibiotics for the treatment of other diseases. Clinical trials have shown that fecal transplantation led to the cure of 94% of patients, whereas 31% recovered when treated with the powerful antibiotic vancomycin, and 23% in the control group.
One question arises: why it is necessary to resort to fecal transplantation. You can also grow cultures of the right bacteria and inject only them into the patient's body. It turned out that this is inefficient. Apparently, the success of envy comes from a complex relationship in the bacterial community, which is difficult to reproduce, but easy to obtain during transplantation. Currently, there are debates in the United States: what should be considered fecal transplantation, tissue transplantation or the use of medication.
After Mikhail Gelfand's speech, it was the turn of the main participants of the scientific slam. Six young scientists had ten minutes each to talk about their work.
In the ocean depthsThe first was marine biologist Alexander Semenov.
He and his colleagues have created the Aquatilis project, during which they are going to conduct a three-year sea expedition around the world, during which they will study the life of underwater inhabitants. Alexander has already managed to raise two million rubles with the help of a crowdfunding site to organize this expedition. The result should be an underwater odyssey of the XXI century. Modern video and photography technologies, robots equipped with cameras and capable of working at great depth, will allow biologists to demonstrate the results of their research on the Internet in real time.
Alexander also told about the object of his scientific interests – jelly-like plankton. These are organisms with a gelatinous body: jellyfish, combworms, salpas and many others that are carried under the influence of currents throughout the world ocean. It is ineffective to study them by conventional methods. In plankton nets, they often leave only lumps of mucus. The conditions of aquariums do not fully reproduce the natural environment, and how to plant a 25-meter-long cyanea jellyfish in an aquarium. But diving, underwater vehicles and underwater photography technologies allow you to study jelly-like animals in a natural environment. It would seem that animals that don't even have a solid body can hardly play a serious role. However, jelly-like plankton, in addition to an important place in food chains, sometimes also has a great impact on the environment. Outbreaks of mass reproduction of jellyfish, the causes of which have yet to be fully clarified, have already led to the shutdown of nuclear power plants, whose cooling devices were clogged with jellyfish.
Electricity from heatThe second speaker was Andrey Voronin, representing Metemp, which, with the support of the Skolkovo Foundation, is developing new thermoelectric materials.
He called his speech "The Partisans and the Rover Twitter." The audience learned that the thermoelectric effect, which consists in the emergence of an electric potential due to temperature differences, was already used by partisans in the Belarusian forests during the Great Patriotic War. They were charging the batteries of their walkie-talkies at the bonfires. And exactly the same principle of energy production is used by the Curiosity rover, which regularly pleases its Twitter readers with new views of Mars. Of course, no one has built a fire on Mars, and plutonium-238 serves as a heat source, releasing the necessary heat during decay. As for bonfires, today everyone can buy a thermoelectric power supply device and recharge their iPhone in the woods by the campfire.
But thermoelectricity has more important tasks than helping tourists in the forest to charge their phones. It serves as an important alternative source of energy, allowing, for example, to increase the efficiency of internal combustion engines. When the engine is running, most of the energy is wasted, for example, turning into heat. Thermoelectric elements convert this heat into electricity. In the 2000s, a number of automakers began working on the application of thermoelectricity. And BMW, according to Andrey Voronin, promises to use such technologies in production cars in a few years.
Andrey Voronin and his colleagues are creating new thermoelectric materials capable of operating at higher temperatures. This is not an easy task, since those materials that conduct electricity well also conduct heat well. And for the thermoelectric effect, a temperature difference is needed. This problem can be solved with the help of nanotechnology. Silicon and germanium alloys, which have a certain structure at the nanoscale, have the necessary electrical conductivity, but do not conduct heat well, which is what developers need.
The shrimp shell will stop the bleedingThe speech of Sergey Brusov, a graduate student of the Moscow State University of Fine Chemical Technologies, was devoted to new medical technologies that save people who have been injured.
Bleeding with an open wound is a great danger to life. Traditional tourniquets and bandages may not be effective enough. Recently, chitosan has come to the aid of doctors – a substance obtained from chitin, the basis of the shell of arthropods, for example, shrimp. Shrimp are now grown in large numbers on special farms, from where their meat goes to the food industry, and chitosan can be obtained from the shells.
Chitosan in powder form is applied to an open wound, where it quickly hardens, absorbing a significant amount of blood and stopping further bleeding. An untrained person can also use the drug effectively. After using chitosan, the victim is taken to a medical facility, where his wound is treated by professionals. Interestingly, cases of allergy to chitosan have not been recorded.
The company "New Biomedical Solutions", which was represented by Sergey Bruslov, synthesized a substance based on chitosan that can not only instantly stop bleeding, but also disinfect the wound.
The dead zone of attentionIgor Utochkin, head of the HSE Cognitive Research Laboratory, helped the girls answer the question: why does it sometimes happen that no one notices their new hairstyle.
The scientist investigates the peculiarities of human attention in visual perception. We see only a lot of objects at the same time, but we are able to focus our attention on only a few of them. This is what the pictures from the "Find 10 Differences" series are based on. At the same time, if a person finds a difference in some part of the picture, it is much more difficult for him to find the second one, located very close. If the second difference is far enough away, there are much fewer difficulties. Igor Utochkin also found that visual perception is difficult in the area adjacent to the place where our attention is particularly focused. This is the reason for the chagrin of the girls who made a new hairstyle. The face always gets into the focus of attention, but the hair turns out to be just in the "dead zone" surrounding the focus. This particularly persistent inability to notice objects or their changes near the center of interest leads to the fact that we do not see something exactly where we are looking.
Photons instead of electronsCandidate of Physical and Mathematical Sciences Maxim Shcherbakov devoted his speech to photonics, or rather its application in information transmission technologies.
If, since the 1970s, the speed of electronic devices has doubled almost every two years, then in the early 2000s this explosive growth stopped. It seems that the possibilities of electronics are close to exhaustion. In this area, the use of directional movement of photons instead of electrons can significantly increase the transmission rate. According to Maxim Shcherbakov, the use of laser pulses with a duration of 10 femtoseconds makes it possible to achieve a data transfer rate of 100 terabits per second. Figuratively, Maxim Shcherbakov compared the transmission speed over an electronic cable with driving in a traffic jam, and the speed in an optical cable ... no, not even with driving on the autobahn, but with flying on a spaceship, because the difference in speed is a thousandfold. Now fiber-optic communication systems are being used more and more, methods of optical recording of information are being created.
Three gigabytes written in four lettersThe last participant of the scientific slam was bioinformatician Andrey Afanasyev.
He and his colleagues on the iBinom project are busy using machine learning technology, which allows you to teach a computer to analyze a patient's genome and check it for mutations that cause diseases. Reading the human genome has given doctors a powerful diagnostic tool, but to use it in each case, you need to put a lot of effort. The result of the sequencer – a device that determines the sequence of nucleotides in DNA – resembles attempts to send the text of "War and Peace" by text messages, choosing random pieces of text in arbitrary places. As a result, it is not possible to send the entire text, but it turns out to be presented in the form of many passages that partially overlap with each other.
After the work of special programs that match fragments, a DNA chain of the patient is obtained. In fact, this is a text written in four letters-nucleotides (A, T, G, C). The volume of this text is three gigabytes. In these three gigabytes, the doctor must find those genes that can carry mutations dangerous to health and check them. It is clear that the volume of processed data is such that the task should be assigned to a computer program. The acceleration of processing is achieved by optimizing algorithms, using cloud technologies. As a result, doctors will receive a convenient and fast program for analyzing the genome of patients.
At the end of the program, the organizers used a noise meter to measure the level of applause for each of the speakers. It is worth noting that the volume level has never dropped below 101 dB, which is only slightly quieter than the sound of an airplane taking off. The winner was Andrey Afanasyev.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru03.03.2014