Last year, Russia’s president Putin took away all the assets of the Russian Academy of Science . Putin has also created a sort of mega-academy, merging the academies of Sciences, Agricultural Sciences and Medical Sciences. However, its control was not bestowed upon the forward thinking chairman of the RAS, Vladimir Fortov. Instead, it was attributed to one of Putin’s finance manager, creating fierce controversy in the country and abroad. These events have come to disrupt parallel attempts to put Russian science back on the world map. For example, through initiatives such as the creation of a Russian Silicon Valley and the support of a mega-grant programme to reverse the brain drain. Read more […]
Fifty three years ago, on 31 January 1958, the first satellite for the observation of Earth was launched. Explorer 1 was the first satellite sent into orbit by the United States of America. In October 1957 the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 into space thus beginning the Cold War space race. Read more […]
The scientific community have mobilised to save the threatened Pavlovks Experimental Station, which hosts a gene bank in the outskirts of St Petersburg. The facility holds genetic plant material – 90% of their plant seeds can not be found anywhere else in the world. Read more […]
Russian history advances in concentric circles – repeating the same mistakes (or courageous attempts). Once more the Russian government believes that lust and money is enough to realise the qualitative changes that the Russia economy needs. Read more […]
Grigory Perelman is the man who refused a million dollar prize awarded by the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge for proving the Poincaré conjecture, a century-old conundrum about the characteristics of three-dimensional spheres, regarded by mathematicians as a holy grail for its important implications for mathematics and cosmology. Read more […]
European science conversations by the community, for the community
