Announcement of the issue

Start key (page 1)
Olga Zakutnyaya
The coming year is primarily associated with the 50th anniversary of human space flight. This is an important date and an important topic for our country. Therefore, the first issue of 2011 opens with material about astronautics, mainly domestic ones. What launches are planned in the near future, what problems there are, what tasks lie ahead - all this is in the editorial.

Results of the year: Science version (page 2)
Olga Zakutnyaya
Many materials in the issue are devoted to the results of the past year. This series of articles opens with a selection based on materials from the journal Science. We present to your attention the ten best scientific results of the year and the ten most significant discoveries of the first decade of the 21st century.

2011: you give a genome for $1000 (p. 3)
The theme continues with a selection of the most anticipated scientific events of the coming year, as chosen by Nature magazine. In addition to the drop in the price of sequencing one human genome below $1,000, the list included: the discovery of an Earth-like planet in the habitable zone of a star like the Sun, the discovery of dark matter (or traces of its annihilation), as well as other discoveries and achievements predicted by experts.

Science in the budget 2011 (p. 3)
Evgeniy Onishchenko
What does the coming year have in store for us in Russia? With a formal increase in spending on science, the funds allocated for “fundamental research” barely compensate for inflation. And funding from the Russian Foundation for Basic Research and some other funds will actually fall. Of course, the share of financing through these funds will also decrease.

How the Universe expanded in 2010 (pp. 4-5)
Sergey Popov, Maxim Borisov
Traditionally, in the first issue of the year we publish a large review dedicated to astrophysical and space research. The review includes some data on scientific satellites in orbit and the results of their work, on studies of the Solar System, as well as on materials that appeared in the astrophysical part of the Preprint Archive arXiv.org. First of all, people are probably hearing about the discovery of new exoplanets. However, interesting results were obtained not only in this area.

According to the Leiden account (page 5)
Another university ranking has appeared. This time only scientific results are taken into account. Experts from the Netherlands used the WoS database to rank leading universities in Europe and the world. Of the Russian universities, only Moscow State University and St. Petersburg State University were included in the list. But far from being in first place. Leaders change depending on the indices used for evaluation.

Food without chemicals, or the story of food (page 6)
Georgy Rurikov
Emulsifier, stabilizer, flavoring, coloring, sweetener... Studying the packaging of the next product purchased in the nearest store makes you wonder: what is the food we eat actually made of? Is it really impossible to do without all these numerous additives and substitutes?
After all, in fact, our ancestors managed without them! Maybe they are trying to deceive us, slip us some nasty stuff instead of high-quality natural products? The article talks about what we eat, how natural it is and how to treat it.

Battlefields. Entomological wars. part 1 (page 7)
Ruslana Radchuk
The rhetoric of anti-genetically modified organism activists still uses dubious examples of the negative impact of genetic modification on the environment, although subsequent studies have demonstrated their safety. However, the scientific discussion itself remained behind the scenes, and for some reason the final results are little known to the uninitiated public. In the process of establishing the truth, many copies have been broken, and now is the time to retrospectively take a closer look at these battles.

Biological journals of the Russian Academy of Sciences: Russian or international? (pages 8-9)
Evgeniy Lysenko
How international can biological journals published in Russia be considered international? In a large article, the author explores this issue in detail. Not everything is as bad as some might think, and not everything is good there, as Academician Osipov assures us. There are a couple of magazines that can be classified as international,
but in general, no, since the main (90 percent or more) share of works in almost all journals comes from articles by authors from Russia.

Filonov, artist (p. 10)
Rebekah Frumkina
The article talks about the life of a famous Russian artist

Everyone should see the planetarium. And more than once (pp. 12-13)
Since the mid-90s, the large Moscow Planetarium has not been operating. For the last few years, several times a year we have heard assurances from the Moscow authorities that it is about to open. Finally, it seems that the moment is coming when opening a planetarium does not seem so unlikely. Anatoly Vladimirovich Zasov, professor at Moscow State University and member of the Scientific Council of the Planetarium, told us about what is currently happening at the Moscow Planetarium, its history and plans for the near future.

Count Kochubey and the Imperial Botanical Garden (page 14)
Dmitry Geltman
There was an Apothecary Garden founded by Peter the Great in St. Petersburg. Became - Komarov Botanical Institute. But the latter would hardly have arisen from the first if not for Count Viktor Pavlovich Kochubey, who in the 20s. XIX century actually revived an institution important for Russian science.

Errors, errors and errors (page 15)
Alexander Samokhin
There are mistakes, there are Freudian slips, there are... There are different types of mistakes. There are mistakes that are worse than betrayal. You can read about some errors related to the organization of science and “pseudo-scientific discourse” in the note. Some will amuse you, some will outrage you. It is important to learn from mistakes.

AUTHOR'S COLUMNS:

Smallpox Party (page 11)
Anastasia Kazantseva

Raise a patriot (p. 12)
Irina Yakutenko

Elusive (page 13)
Irina Levontina

Patriotism and education (p. 15)
Ivan Ekonomov