More than 70% of Russians are unable to name a single scientific achievement of the country over the past decades - these are the results of a sociological survey by VTsIOM, carried out on the occasion of the Day of Russian Science. At the same time, at least ten discoveries of our scientists in recent years have left a noticeable mark on world science.
Gravitational waves
In August 2017, the LIGO detector detected gravitational waves caused by the collision of two neutron stars in the galaxy NGC 4993 in the constellation Hydra. The most accurate instrument sensed the disturbance of space-time, although its source was 130 million light-years from Earth. Science magazine named it the top discovery of the year.
Physicists of the Lomonosov Moscow State University and the Nizhny Novgorod Institute of Applied Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences made a significant contribution to it. The Russians joined the search for gravitational waves on the LIGO detector in 1993 thanks to RAS Corresponding Member Vladimir Braginsky (passed away in March 2016).
LIGO first detected gravitational waves (from the collision of two black holes) in September 2015.
Lake Vostok in Antarctica
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The Russians own the last major geographical discovery on the planet - Lake Vostok in Antarctica. The gigantic body of water is located under a four-kilometer layer of ice in the very center of the Sixth Continent. It was theoretically predicted back in the 1950s by oceanologist Nikolai Zubov and geophysicist Andrey Kapitsa.
It took almost three decades to drill the glacier. Members of the Russian Antarctic Expedition AARI reached the relic lake on February 5, 2012.
Lake Vostok has been isolated from the outside world for at least 14 million years. Scientists are interested in whether any living organisms have survived there. If there is life in the reservoir, then its study will serve as the most important source of information about the Earth's past and will help the search for organisms in space.
Space project "Radioastron"
In July 2011, the Spektr-R radio telescope was launched into orbit. Together with ground-based radio telescopes, it forms a kind of ear that can hear the pulse of the Universe in the radio range. This successful Russian project called Radioastron is unique. It is based on the principle of ultra-long baseline radio interferometry, developed by Academician Nikolai Kardashev, director of the Astro Space Center of the Lebedev Physical Institute.
Radioastron studies supermassive black holes and, in particular, ejections of matter (jets) from them. With the world's largest (recorded in the Guinness Book of Records) radio telescope, scientists hope to see the shadow of a black hole, which is believed to be in the center of the Milky Way.
Experiments with graphene
In 2010, Russian immigrants Andrei Geim and Konstantin Novoselov won the Nobel Prize in physics for their research on graphene. Both graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, worked at the Institute of Solid State Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Chernogolovka, and in the 1990s left to continue research abroad. In 2004, they proposed the now classic method of obtaining two-dimensional graphene, simply by tearing it off a piece of graphite with adhesive tape. Currently, Nobelists are working at the University of Manchester in the UK.
Graphene is one atom thick layer of carbon. They saw in it the future of terahertz electronics, but then discovered a number of flaws that have not yet been circumvented. For example, graphene is very difficult to turn into a semiconductor, and it is also very fragile.
A new kind of Homo
In 2010, a sensation swept the world - a new species of ancient people was discovered who lived simultaneously with the Sapiens and Neanderthals. Relatives were christened by the Denisovites after the name of the cave in Altai, where their remains were found. The place of the Denisovites on the human family tree was established after decoding the DNA isolated from the tooth of an adult and the little finger of a little girl who died 30-50 thousand years ago (more precisely, unfortunately, it is impossible to say).
Ancient people took a fancy to the Denisov cave 300 thousand years ago. Scientists from the Institute of Archeology and Ethnography of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences have been excavating there for more than a dozen years, and only progress in the methods of molecular biology made it possible to finally reveal the secret of the Denisovites.
Superheavy atoms
In the 1960s, Russian physicists predicted an "island of stability" - a special physical state within which superheavy atoms should exist. In 2006, experimenters from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna discovered on this "island" with the help of a cyclotron the 114th element, later called flerovium. Then, one by one, the 115th, 117th and 118th elements were discovered - respectively, Muscovy, Tennessin and Oganesson (in honor of the discoverer Academician Yuri Oganesyan). So the periodic table was replenished.
Poincaré's hypothesis
In 2002-2003, the Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman solved one of the millennium problems - he proved Poincaré's hypothesis, formulated a hundred years ago. He published the solution in a series of articles on arxiv.org. It took his colleagues several years to validate the evidence and acknowledge the discovery. Perelman was nominated for a Fields Prize, the Clay Mathematical Institute presented him with a million dollars, but the mathematician refused all awards and money. He also ignored the offer to participate in the elections for the title of academician.
Grigory Perelman was born in St. Petersburg, graduated from the Physics and Mathematics School No. 239 and the Mathematics and Mechanics Faculty of Leningrad University, worked in the St. Petersburg branch of the Mathematical Institute named after V. A. Steklov. He does not communicate with the press, does not conduct public activities. It is not even known in what country he now lives and whether he is engaged in mathematics.
Last year, Forbes magazine included Grigory Perelman among the people of the century.
Heterostructure laser
In the late 1960s, physicist Zhores Alferov designed the world's first semiconductor laser based on heterostructures grown by him. At that time, scientists were actively looking for a way to improve the traditional elements of radio circuits, and this was possible thanks to the invention of fundamentally new materials that had to be grown layer by layer, atom by atom, and from different compounds. Despite the laboriousness of the procedures, it was possible to grow such crystals. It turned out that they can emit like lasers and thus transmit data. This made it possible to create computers, CDs, fiber-optic communications, and new space communications systems.
In 2000, Academician Zhores Alferov was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.
High temperature superconductors
In the 1950s, theoretical physicist Vitaly Ginzburg, together with Lev Landau, took up the theory of superconductivity and proved the existence of a special class of materials - type II superconductors. Physicist Alexei Abrikosov discovered them experimentally. In 2003, Ginzburg and Abrikosov received the Nobel Prize for this discovery.
In the 1960s, Vitaly Ginzburg took up the theoretical substantiation of high-temperature superconductivity, wrote a book about it with David Kirzhnits. At that time, few people believed in the existence of materials that would conduct electric current without resistance at temperatures slightly above absolute zero. And in 1987, compounds were discovered that turned into superconductors at 77.4 Kelvin (minus 195.75 degrees Celsius, the boiling point of liquid nitrogen).
The search for high-temperature superconductors was continued by physicists Mikhail Eremets and Alexander Drozdov, who are now working in Germany. In 2015, they discovered that hydrogen sulfide gas can become a superconductor, and at a record high temperature for this phenomenon - minus 70 degrees. The journal Nature named Mikhail Eremets Scientist of the Year.
The last mammoths on Earth
In 1989, Sergei Vartanyan, a young employee of the Leningrad State University who studied the ancient geography of the Arctic, came to Wrangel Island, lost in the Arctic Ocean. He collected mammoth bones that were lying there in abundance, and using radiocarbon analysis determined that they were only a few thousand years old. It was later established that woolly mammoths became extinct 3,730 years ago. Island mammoths were slightly smaller than their mainland relatives, growing at the withers up to 2.5 meters, therefore they are also called dwarf mammoths. An article by Vartanyan and his colleagues about the very last mammoths on Earth was published in Nature in 1993, and the whole world learned about their discovery.
The genome of mammoths from Wrangel Island was deciphered in 2015. Now Sergey Vartanyan and his Russian and foreign colleagues continue to analyze it in order to find out all the features of the life of dwarf mammoths and solve the mystery of their disappearance.