Russian – praag.org

The wonder material graphene

Two Russian-émigré scientists at the University of Manchester, Andrei Geim and Kostya Novoselov, were playing about with flakes of carbon graphite in an attempt to investigate its electrical properties when they decided to see if they could make thinner flakes with the help of sticky Scotch tape.

The creation of graphene, a wonder material promises to transform the future.

When the two scientists won their joint Nobel prize in physics in 2010 for their ground-breaking experiments, the Nobel committee made a point of citing the “playfulness” that was one of the hallmarks of the way they have worked together.

The original idea of working with graphite was to see if it could be used as a transistor, the fundamental switching device at the heart of computing.

Graphene, a The creation of graphene, a wonder material that promises to transform the future, is a superlative material. It is the thinnest and strongest substance known to science – about 100 times stronger than steel by weight. A square metre of graphene, a thousand times thinner than paper, made into a hammock would be strong enough to cradle a 4kg cat, but weigh no more than one of its whiskers. It is a good conductor of electricity, is stretchable and yet is almost transparent. It conducts heat better than any other known substance. It acts as a barrier to the smallest atom of gas – helium – and yet allows water vapour to pass through.

“And then on top of that there are other excitements such as the very unusual electronic properties that we’ve never come across before. Then there are the unusual optical properties, chemical properties and many more.

“We have a really unique opportunity here in that quite a few unusual properties are combined in one material; the strongest, the most flexible, the most stretchable, the most conductive, optically transparent and something which is a good gas barrier. So you can invent quite a few new applications that were not possible before,” he adds.

The potential uses for graphene appear almost limitless. They range from new types of flexible electronics that could be worn on clothes or folded up into a pocket, to a new generation of very small computers, hyper-efficient solar panels and super-fast mobile phones. Yet at the heart of graphene is a honeycomb structure of carbon atoms – described as “atomic chickenwire”. Carbon is the basic element of life, which means that graphene could be the focus of a new industrial revolution based on electronic components that are biodegradable and sustainable. If there was ever a building material for a new, green economy, graphene could be it. As a result, the UK Government has actively supported a new National Graphene Institute (NGI) in Manchester, which will be completed by 2015 at the cost of £61m, of which £38m is coming from government research councils.

Wonder stuff: uses for graphene

Drinking water

Graphene could be used to desalinate seawater to make it drinkable. Scientists believe that passing seawater through graphene’s tiny pores, the crystal lattice could let water molecules through, while blocking out the atoms that make salt. Using a graphene filter, Lockheed hopes to transform salt water into drinking water by the end of the year.

Smartphones

Being both transparent and conductive, graphene could be perfect for the new generation of smartphones. Samsung are among the consumer electronics companies that are developing touchscreen interfaces.

Computers

It is hoped that graphene can replace silicon chips. Electronics firms are testing graphene in numerous electrical devices. IBM has already piloted computers that use the material to achieve the record-setting speed of 100GHz.

Satellites, planes and cars

Graphene has properties that provide light but super-strong composite materials for next-generation satellites, planes and cars. The new form of carbon could further reduce aircraft weight, subsequently cutting the burning of fuel and dumping of carbon in the atmosphere.

Building materials

Scientists believe that graphene’s flexible nature may prove the ideal building material, with the trick being to incorporate it into a matrix like a polymer or a metal, where the load is borne by the graphene layer.

Rust-free cars

Graphene repels water and is highly conductive. This combination keeps steel from coming into contact with water and delays the electrochemical reactions that oxidize iron. New York scientists designed a polymer coating containing this form of carbon and found that it protected steel from rusting for up to a month.

Military equipment

Graphene foam can pick up small concentrations of the nitrates and ammonia found in explosives. A postage-size sensor developed in the US could soon be mandatory for bomb squads. Australian researchers found adding an equal amount of graphene and carbon nanotubes to a polymer produced a super-strong fibre that could be spun into fabric used to make bulletproof vests.

Nuclear clean-up

Graphene oxide can absorb radioactive waste. Researchers at Rice University and Lomonosov Moscow State University found that tiny bits of graphene oxide bind to radioactive contaminants, transforming them into large extractable clumps. This could help after nuclear accidents like the Fukushima disaster.

Source: The Independent

Russia reminds UN that Ukraine agreed on Russian aid on August 12

Russia has sent a humanitarian convoy to the east of Ukraine, considering that it has received official authorization of Kiev government, Russian Ambassador to the UN Vitaly Churkin said.

The corresponding note was received on August 12, Churkin said, noting that the humanitarian aid to Syria was delivered without the consent of the authorities of the country.

“If we are talking about respect for sovereignty, we have received a formal agreement from them [the Ukrainian authorities]. We have discussed this issue with them, and if they decided to cheat, then it’s their problem,” Churkin told Russian reporters after the closed meeting of the UN Security Council on Ukraine on Friday.

The note that gave consent for the passage of the humanitarian convoy through the Ukrainian border was received on 12 August, Churkin said.

Meanwhile both President Obama and Angela Merkel condemned Russia for an “incursion” into Ukraine.

“And the fact that they have people saying they received no orders, while firing at Luhansk, is just unfair. We cannot tolerate this and so we’ve made a statement,” the permanent representative said.

Churkin also recalled that the UN Security Council had recently created “a legal innovation,” when it had adopted a resolution on the delivery of humanitarian aid to Syria without the consent of the government in Damascus.

“There is a certain political innovation that cannot be ignored, but in this case, we believe that we have received the official consent of the Ukrainian government,” Churkin explained.

“Some members of the organization were not interested neither in the fact that civilians are being killed in the eastern Ukraine, nor in the fact that there is a humanitarian catastrophe in the region. They were worried by the fact that Russia is providing humanitarian assistance to the people who are under fire,” the Russian envoy to UN said.

“But we explained that we are in contact with the Ukrainian authorities and hope that there will be no problems with humanitarian aid and its delivery. The situation in the Security Council around this matter has then calmed down,” Churkin said.

A convoy of 280 trucks carrying food, medicine and other essentials for people in eastern Ukraine set out from near Moscow on August 12. It had been stranded at the border with Ukraine for more than a week.

The humanitarian disaster in Lugansk occurred after the Ukrainian army had blocked approaches to the city. All food supplies to Lugansk were interrupted. The local people were left without drinking water or electricity. Power supply to social facilities had to be urgently restored after artillery shelling.

Language discrimination fuels Ukrainian conflict

The deepening crisis in Ukraine involves not only issues of political sovereignty, European integration and Russian hegemony, but also language and its relationship to nationalism and ethnic identity. Immediately after the removal of President Viktor Yanukovych from power on Feb. 22, the Ukrainian Parliament repealed a controversial law passed in 2012 that allowed the use of “regional languages” – including Russian, Hungarian, Romanian and Tatar — in courts and certain government functions in areas of the country where such speakers constituted at least 10 percent of the population. (In 1991, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the newly independent state of Ukraine established Ukrainian as its sole official language.)

Interim President Oleksandr Turchynov has since vetoed that repeal, but the episode has alarmed many of Ukraine’s Russian speakers and others. “Just as the law itself was meant to validate the continued use of Russian in Ukraine for a wide range of activities, the move to cancel that law was perceived as taking away rights enjoyed by the Russian-speaking population, and potentially a sign that there might be growing discrimination against them,” explained Olga Oliker, a security and defense analyst at the RAND Corp.

Indeed, after the 2012 law was passed, 13 of Ukraine’s 27 regions, mostly in the industrial eastern parts of the country, quickly adopted Russian as a second official language. (But even then, the passage of the law triggered demonstrations in the streets and even fistfights in Parliament.) Dr. Vitaly Chernetsky, associate professor in the department of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Kansas, commented that the 2012 language law was poorly written and roundly criticized by many experts at the time. “Additionally, no budgetary allocations were made at the time, so passing this law was, in effect, a purely symbolic measure intended to divert the attention of the Ukrainian electorate from corruption and economic problems,” Chernetsky said in an interview.

According to the CIA/World Factbook, the Russian language is spoken by about one-fourth (24 percent) of the Ukrainian population, while about one-sixth (17.3 percent) of the Ukrainian population are ethnic Russians. RT, a Russian television network, claims that 40 percent of Ukrainians speak Russian, (presumably including non-Russians). Russian speakers are concentrated in the southern and eastern parts of Ukraine – while in the southern autonomous region of Crimea (where the Russians have had a naval base on the Black Sea for more than 200 years), an estimated 60 percent of the population are ethnic Russians.

Oleksandr Turchynov: The Baptist Currently Running Ukraine
Ukraine Girls Really Knock Me Out: Women Playing Crucial Roles In Euro-Maidan Protests
The Ukraine Parliament reportedly will consider yet another language law in the coming weeks or months – it is unclear if it will again allow a multi-language framework for the country’s social and political life.

Svitlana Melnyk, a lecturer in Slavic languages and literatures at Indiana University-Bloomington, argued that the establishment of monolingualism formed a key part of solidifying Ukraine’s national identity. “For post-Soviet independent countries and Ukraine in particular, the state language has symbolic meaning and a great symbolic value in the process of nation-building,” she said. “This is a national symbol along with the flag and anthem. The language issue is highly politicized in Ukraine, and its future management heavily depends on the evolving political situation.”

Melnyk added that she thinks that Ukrainian should be “the only state language” in the country. “At the same time, the [new language] law should consider the current socio-linguistic situation and protect the languages of national and ethnic minorities in the country,” she said.

But the temporary repeal of the 2012 law sparked outrage from Ukraine to Moscow and even in the European Union. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev condemned the law’s abolition. “We do not understand what is going on there. There is a real threat to our [Russian] interests and to the lives and health of our citizens,” he said at a press conference, adding that the new interim government in Kiev lacks legitimacy. Similarly, Konstantin Dolgov, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s commissioner for human rights, characterized the law’s repeal as an “attack on the Russian language in Ukraine” and a “brutal violation of ethnic minority rights.”

Outside of Russia, the European Parliament even passed a resolution calling on the new Ukraine regime to respect the rights (and languages) of its minority population. “The Parliament of Ukraine has made what I believe to be a mistake… canceling a law on regional languages,” Poland’s Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski told CNN. “The new Ukrainian government should signal very eloquently to the ethnic minorities in Ukraine that they are welcome in Ukraine; that they are going to be part of the new Ukraine. And also Ukraine is a member of the Council of Europe, [with] its laws on protecting minorities.”

Separately, in response to the gathering storm in Ukraine, some nationalist lawmakers in Moscow, led by the far-right Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, have called for the fast-tracking of Russian citizenship to ethnic Russians in Ukraine. LPDR MP Ilya Drozdov has already tabled a bill that would grant Russian citizenship to Ukrainian-Russians within six months of proving their ethnicity. “The adoption of this amendment would allow [us] to lawfully use the migration potential of Ukrainian citizens of Russian ethnicity who desire to get Russian citizenship,” Drozdov explained. RT reported that more than 2 million residents of the former Soviet republics have received fast-tracked Russian citizenship since the fall of the Soviet Union – even including people not of ethnic Russian origin, like the South Ossetians of Georgia, who speak an Iranian-related language.

Meanwhile Ukrainian nationalists, particularly members of the ultra-right Svoboda (Freedom) party led by Oleg Tyahnibok, have even threatened to ban the Russian language completely and even strip the Ukrainian citizenship of the nation’s Russian speakers. Jean Asselborn, the foreign minister of Luxembourg, in a meeting with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov in Moscow, expressed their grave concerns about another Svoboda-proposed bill that would essentially ban all Russian language media in Ukraine (which Svoboda has defended by citing that Russian reports of the turmoil in Ukraine have been tarred with bias). That bill would prohibit from Ukraine any media from nations that have not ratified the European Convention on Transfrontier Television — Russia has signed the convention, but has not ratified it yet.

“Russia is not a party to the convention, but it does not prevent us from broadcasting all across Europe. No EU member makes any problems for our broadcasts. If such a decision is taken in Ukraine, it would be a serious violation of the freedom of speech,” Lavrov said at a media conference.

With respect to the prevalence of Russian language, Chernetsky also noted if one looks at an average Ukrainian newsstand, one will find that about 90 percent of the publications are in Russian, even in the areas where the majority of the population speaks Ukrainian. “The Russian language also dominates the radio,” he said. “The only segment of the media where the Ukrainian language predominates is the national-level television channels.”

Oliker noted that while Ukraine has some strident far-right groups, including Svoboda and Pravyi Sektor (Right Sector), there are also more measured voices that recognize that Ukraine is a multi-ethnic country and which have absolutely no interest in denying anyone their citizenship on ethnic grounds. “Emotions are of course running very high right now, but I think most Ukrainian leaders, including the leadership of Svoboda, know they stand to lose far more than they stand to gain by taking action against the ethnic Russian minority,” she noted. “That said, the situation bears watching, because people are very angry and frightened, because one cannot ignore the ethnic undertones to the anger or the fear, and because elements of Svoboda, and certainly Pravyi Sektor, do hold ultra-nationalist views.”

Russian and Ukrainian are closely related Slavic tongues, but they are also distinct languages with separate ethnic and national identities. The Christian Science Monitor reports that Russian-language activists in Ukraine have long wanted to make Russian a second official state language, citing such scenarios in multi-lingual countries like Canada and India. “There is this pervasive suggestion that if you speak Russian, you’re not a loyal or true Ukrainian. This makes Russian-speakers feel like second-class citizens,” Ruslan Bortnik, vice chairman of Russian-Speaking Ukraine, an advocacy group, told the Monitor.

Of course, Ukrainian nationalists fear the further encroachment of Russian into its national fabric. “If Russian were an official language, the main fear is that it would be a wide-open door for Russian influence in Ukraine,” said Oleksiy Kolomiyets, president of the Center for European and Transatlantic Studies in Kiev. – International Business Times