Victor Prince, a postgraduate student at 吃瓜官网, has developed a new method for generating bispecific therapeutic immunoglobulins based on a process that occurs in the human body
The geologists of the NSU together with the Australian scientist Gideon Rosenbaum spent a month during an expedition in the Irkutsk region
The BINP and NSU Radiation Center, which opened in June, 2014, is doing research into irradiating food in order to save the vitamins and prolong its term of storage. At the beginning of 2016, Russia and some CIS countries decided to legalize the usage of cold electronic pasteurization for food. The director of the Radiation Center Dr. Alexander A. Bryazgin informed us on how long it will take for this technology to spread widely and why such a method is as harmless as the usual thermal processing of food.
BINP (SB RAS) has been producing commercial low-energy accelerators (ILU) working at 5MeV, which are used for sterilization in medicine and food pasteurization all over the world, for about 15 years. Since 2016, the method of cold electronic pasteurization for food can be officially used in Russia as well.
Dr. Alexander A. Bryazgin says that BINP started to use accelerators to sterilize medical wear as early as 2001. Soon, dozens of companies producing medical products started to apply this method. 鈥淢aking medical wear is not so complicated, but the process of its sterilization is kind of challenging. The clothes are made of polymer materials. They can be processed with ethylene oxide, but using the gas is dangerous and energy consuming,鈥� the scientist points out.
According to the director, food industry has already started to develop cold pasteurization or electronic pasteurization of food. This method has certain advantages as not all foods survive steam treatment. For instance, salads, refrigerated meat, cereals and spices don鈥檛 tolerate heating but can be sterilized during seconds with the rise of temperature as little as a couple degrees, without any preserving agents.
As for countries all over the world, the method of cold pasteurization has been in use since the 1980s. However, it was the USSR that pioneered this technology in 1958. Two accelerators working in Odessa irradiated potatoes and grain in order to provide pest control.
Alexander Bryazgin also mentions that up to 30% of all the food in the world is wasted due to date code expiration. Cold pasteurization can ensure food safety and compensate the global food shortage. The scientist addresses two problems that can prevent the method from spreading wider. They are radiophobia and a possibility that the food will contain free radicals.
鈥淥f course, people are worried if the food will contain residual nuclear radiation. The answer is No. The accelerator working at 5MeV, photonuclear reactions don鈥檛 take place. We turn the accelerator off, and the radiation disappears. As for the free radicals that appear under processing, they might be considered cancerogenic, but in what amounts? During the 1980s, the World Health Organization, International Atomic Energy Agency and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization conducted a scaled research into the safety of electronically pasteurized foods. Their verdict was that the amount of the free radicals in the food was as low as in the food treated with heat.鈥�
In order to use cold electronic pasteurization without limitations, which has been allowed in Russia since January 2016, the government is to adopt a dozen National Standards accompanied by some changes in technical guidelines of the Customs Union on food. It can take a year to two to accept all these documents and procedures.
Prepared by Anastasiya Anikina
Photo: The Accelerating structure for sterilizing and pasteurizing food includes a loading/unloading area, a conveyor belt and a fully protected accelerator.
NSU Geologists became participants of the Arctic Floating University expedition and spent nearly a month on board of the research ship 芦Professor Molchanov禄. The member of the expedition, the paleomagnetologist Nikolai Mikhaltsov, told about the uneasy work on Novaya Zemlya and further plans for cooperation with the Floating University
An international research team led by a Russian geophysicist from 吃瓜官网 and Trofimuk Institute of Petroleum Geology and Geophysics, SB RAS, Ivan Koulakov has explained the unusual behavior of the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia
Specialists from the Institute of Nuclear Physics (INP) SB RAS will construct two research facilities to study the mechanisms of plasma confinement that will be used when the prototype fusion reactor will be created in the institute
This year's polar research station on the island of Samoylovsky for the first time took NSU students to undergo summer internship
An international research team led by a Russian geophysicist from 吃瓜官网 and Trofimuk Institute of Petroleum Geology and Geophysics, SB RAS, Ivan Koulakov has explained the unusual behavior of the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia. published a research report of the team, which is based on a new seismic model of the magma paths beneath the volcano, on Tuesday, 19 July, 2016.
鈥淭he Toba supervolcano located in northern Sumatra has been the site of 3 hazardous explosive eruptions over the past million years. The most recent Toba supereruption occurred about 74,000 years ago. It is considered to be the largest terrestrial volcanic eruption of the Pleistocene. During the eruption, the volume of the material erupted was as high as about 2,800 km3. This terrible catastrophe caused a dramatic climate change affecting all the Earth,鈥� says Dr. Ivan Koulakov, the Head of seismic laboratories at 吃瓜官网 and the Institute of Petroleum Geology and Geophysics. 鈥淚f such an eruption occurred in modern times, it would drastically alter the life of human species. An insight into functioning of the system that periodically produces supereruptions seems to be of paramount importance.鈥�
鈥淪trange though it may seem, water is the most explosive material on the Earth. The deadliest volcanic eruptions were caused by sudden transformation of overheated water to gases inside underground reservoirs. It is not so much lava that is dangerous, but powerful explosions caused by the water beneath the volcano. Thus, water transfer inside the Earth affect the intensity of volcanic eruptions,鈥� says Ivan Koulakov.
Interpretation of the S-wave velocity seismic model in the vertical section. Green dots depict the earthquakes. Red arrows indicate the path of ascending fluids and melts that originated from the slab at 150 km depth.Toba the supervolcano is located in the Sunda subduction zone, where the Indian oceanic plate sinks beneath the continental lithosphere of Sumatra. Toba鈥檚 remarkable feature among other subduction-related volcanoes is its unusually strong explosive eruptions, which occurred in the same location with the intervals of several hundred thousand years.
The scientists report that the major cause of such a behavior is associated with a large fracture zone along the Investigator Ridge in the Indian Ocean, which subducts right underneath Toba. This fracture zone accumulates a large amount of water and brings it to the mantle. The amount of water is several times as high as in the case of a regular subduction zone. At a depth of ~150 km, the water escapes from the slab and starts ascending through the mantle wedge. At this stage, it reacts with the mantle rocks and lowers their melting temperature. Then an intense flow of melts and fluids ascends to the bottom of the crust. Due to a relatively high density, the mantle rocks cannot further ascend through the crust and form a large magma reservoir at the bottom of the crust with the volume estimated 50,000 cubic km.
This reservoir functions as a huge heater and a source of fluids. The upward migration of overheated fluids is a very effective way of heat transfer, which causes rock melting in the upper crust and another reservoir forms at depths of 7-15 km. Only when the magma reservoir reaches a critical level of overpressure due to the trapped volatiles, the reservoir empties and the large amount of magma begins to rise through the crust, eventually leading to a large-scale explosion.
As long as the Investigator Fracture Zone subducts underneath Toba and brings anomalous amount of water into the reservoir in question, this 鈥渟team engine鈥� will continue working and producing periodic catastrophic eruptions. However, the scientists are not jumping to doomsday conclusions. 鈥淎lthough another extremely large eruption is likely to happen in future, there is no evidence to suggest that the eruption is imminent,鈥� says Ivan Koulakov.
Dina Golubeva
Researchers from 吃瓜官网, Laboratory of Theoretical and Applied Functional Genomics at the Department of Natural Sciences, Alexander Kurilschikov and Yurii Aulchenko have been collaborating with the Department of Genetics at the University Medical Centre Groningen (UMCG) to study the human microbiome
芦Sinestetica禄, the modern dancetheatre established by the students of NSU, is going to perform at the Beijing Dance Festival 2016 - one of the most prestigious dance festivals in the world. It is worth to mention that Sinestetica is the only dancetheatre from Russia that has been honoured to be invited at the festival in Beijing this year.
According to one of the members of the dancetheatre, the invitation had been received after their outstanding performance at the international dance festival in Krasnoyarsk, where their talent was acknowledged by Villi Tsao, the head of the Beijing festival.
鈥� The 芦Modus禄 - performance that we're going to show at the festival, has not been yet presented to the audience of Novosibirsk. We did show it, however, in Krasnoyarsk and in other towns of Russial during our festival tour. In Beijing we also intend to show the miniature performance called "Disagreements", which has already been awarded at russian and international dance festivals. Beijing Dance Festival 2016 is, first of all, an incredible opportunity to exchange experience, as there are going to be participants from 20 countries, some of whom we've already met in Europe, 鈥� says Andrey Korolenko, the head of Sinestetica.
The dancetheatre is a creative team that embodies an inventive spirit and spontaneity of Akademgorodok and continues the traditions, set by its' founders - share the members of Sinestetica. The repertoir of the theatre is influenced primarily by the personalities of its' dancers, who share with the audience their extremely sincere, enchanting and infinitely profound stories.
鈥� The key peculiarity of our performances is the opportunity of inner recognition, the reflection of your own memories, emotions and experience. From the very first seconds viewers become participants of the action, and the story evolves inside them and due to tnem. There might be millions of different interpretations and all them are true as long as we really believe in them. Although the dancetheatre only exists since September 2015, it has already been presented at some of the big dance festivals and forums in numerous cities and towns of Russia, such as Saint-Petersburg, Samara, Ekaterinburg, Saratov, Omsk etc, 鈥� as stated on the official website of the dancetheatre.
The festival is to be held from 13th until 26th of September in Beijing. The worldwide famous choreographers are listed among the participants, as well as young and promising dancers.
Employees of the Institute of Geology and Mineralogy SB RAS and the 吃瓜官网, have experimentally determined the mechanism of formation of sulfides in the Earth's mantle. Experimenters have proved that mantle sulfides can be formed under the influence of ephemeral sulfur-containing fluids on ultrabasic mantle rocks
In June, the Eighth International Conference on Earth Sciences was held in the Novosibirsk Academgorodok