Math­e­mati­cian Vladimir Arnold, per­haps one of the best known and highly cited Russ­ian sci­en­tist, has died yes­ter­day today at the age of 72. He was receiv­ing treat­ment in France, but his dis­ease was stronger, reports lenta.ru, cit­ing a source close to the fam­ily. Arnold was one of the great­est math­e­mati­cians of the XX cen­tury and the author of the series of works on the topol­ogy, the­ory of dif­fer­en­tial equa­tions, alge­braic geom­e­try, the­ory of smooth maps and clas­si­cal mechan­ics. Con­tinue reading →

3rd June, 2010 Comments Off

After extract­ing ancient DNA from the 40,000-year-old bones of Nean­derthals, sci­en­tists have obtained a draft sequence of the Nean­derthal genome, yield­ing impor­tant new insights into the evo­lu­tion of mod­ern humans.[1] Among the find­ings, pub­lished in the May 7 issue of Sci­ence, is evi­dence that shortly after early mod­ern humans migrated out of Africa, some of them inter­bred with Nean­derthals, leav­ing bits of Nean­derthal DNA sequences scat­tered through the genomes of present-day non-Africans. Although, this is slightly off-topic for this blog, I could not resist to pub­lish this news.

Con­tinue reading →

6th May, 2010 View Comments

Nature Pub­lish­ing Group (NGP), per­haps, has a tra­di­tion every year in April to pro­duce a new mag­a­zine. This year this is Nature Com­mu­ni­ca­tions — a mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary online-only jour­nal. More­over, this is sec­ond NPG mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary jour­nal, 140 years after the first issue of Nature.

Sci­ence is now more mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary than ever – new fields are emerg­ing from the cross-fertilization of tra­di­tion­ally dis­tinct dis­ci­plines at an ever-increasing rate. How­ever, the num­ber of truly mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary pri­mary research jour­nals can be counted on one hand. Nature Com­mu­ni­ca­tions is a new, and unique, venue in this arena: an online-only jour­nal pub­lish­ing high-quality papers from all cor­ners of the phys­i­cal, chem­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal sci­ences, with an open-access option for authors. Con­tinue reading →

18th April, 2010 View Comments

A brief his­tory of the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tury accord­ing to russ­ian web designer:

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<I></I>
<©©©®>
<II></II>
</hiroshima>
</nospace>
<*></*****>
<chernenko/>
<nodrink></nodrink>
</©©©®>
<noeat></noeat>
<B><B>
</XX>

[via lepra]

2nd April, 2010 View Comments

Ever since the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, Russ­ian lead­ers have been vow­ing to trans­form their old-line, indus­trial soci­ety into a mod­ern, knowledge-based econ­omy dri­ven by inno­v­a­tive sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy. The cur­rent Russ­ian pres­i­dent, Dmitry Medvedev, has repeated that ambi­tion fre­quently — not least as a way to over­come Russia’s depen­dence on oil and gas exports. Unfor­tu­nately, that trans­for­ma­tion con­tin­ues to be hob­bled by out­dated atti­tudes at the top of Russia’s aca­d­e­mic hierarchy.

A small, but telling exam­ple came to light last month when the pop­u­lar online news­pa­per gazeta.ru pub­lished an inter­view with Yuri Osipov (in russ­ian), pres­i­dent of the Russ­ian Acad­emy of Sci­ences in Moscow. Pressed by the reporter about the very low cita­tion rate for arti­cles pub­lished in Russian-language sci­ence jour­nals, Osipov dis­missed the rel­e­vance of cita­tion indices, ques­tioned the need for Russ­ian sci­en­tists to pub­lish in for­eign jour­nals and said that any top-level spe­cial­ist “will also study Russ­ian and read papers in Russ­ian”. Con­tinue reading →

11th March, 2010 View Comments