The breakthrough comes from the Irkutsk Technical University and the Irkutsk Chemical Institute under the Russian Academy of Sciences, Siberian branch. A united think-tank made a long search for effective low-price polymer additives to bitumen, which makes the bulk of asphalt cement. Hidrolytic and styrole industrial waste, and waste heptile-a rocket fuel-turned out to be the best raw materials.
The research crew came on necessary equipment quite far from its Siberian base, in a space rocket works near Moscow. Outdated reactors for manufacturing hard rocket fuel proved to be good for making bitumen binders. The crew bought a discarded reactor, and reassembled it in its new home to launch production.
An initial 30-ton batch of modified polymer bitumen went to pave a small stretch of the permanently congested Irkutsk-Krasnoyarsk highway, where it will prove its worth in deed.
Cutting-edge portable receivers allow a school kid in whatever part of the world to observe the Earth in real time, as seen from space satellites. The receiver, of the Cosmos M1 class, is brainchild of the federal research and high tech center, All-Russia Research Institute for Civil Defense and Emergencies. The center is affiliated to the federal Emergencies Ministry.
As the Moscow-based daily Izvestia has it in an on-line science news supplement, the tiny gadget decodes satellite information to project it on a screen. The techniques can work as teaching aid in almost all disciplines on secondary school curricula.
With no analogue throughout the world, the gadget comes from an R&D crew led by Professor Mikhail Shakhramanyan, institute director. It is a small adapter box plus a roof aerial, and goes at affordable prices. A school needs no more than one device to establish a local net, through which boys and girls get assignments on classroom monitors to gauge weather in a particular area, detect conflagrations, floods, and suchlike-superb training to get to understand the world we live in.
The receivers, complete with software and sets of manuals, have for today found their way to more than fifty schools in all parts of Russia.
