Vol 193, No 8 (2023)

This review is devoted to the 110th anniversary of the birth of Bruno Pontecorvo, an outstanding physicist who made an invaluable contribution to the development of modern neutrino physics, having predicted, inter alia, nonzero neutrino masses, mixing, and oscillations that were experimentally discovered in the early 2000s. Significant progress has been made over 20 years of experiments in determining the parameters of three-flavor neutrino oscillations. The status of and prospects for establishing neutrino mass ordering and the leptonic $CP$-violation phase $(\delta _{CP})$, unknown parameters of this theory, are discussed. It is expected that they will be measured in long-baseline experiments in the next decade. The ongoing accelerator experiments NOvA and T2K, which are currently the most sensitive to neutrino mass ordering and $\delta _{CP}$, are described in detail. For ease of comparison, NOvA and T2K techniques and results, including all aspects of data collection and analysis, are presented on a stage-by-stage basis. Possible reasons for the disagreement between the $\delta _{CP}$ values measured by NOvA and T2K are discussed. Future accelerator (DUNE and Hyper-Kamiokande) and reactor (JUNO) megaprojects are considered, along with experiments designed to use atmospheric neutrinos: IceCube Upgrade, KM3NeT (ORCA), and ICAL at INO, which can measure unknown oscillation parameters and refine the ones already determined.

An overview of modalities that are new for biomedical diagnostics and that have emerged in recent years in optical coherence tomography (OCT)—optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) and optical coherence elastography (OCE)—is given. These modalities are extensions of OCT imaging technology, which is based on the principles of low-coherence interferometry and celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2021. The basic principles of OCTA and OCE are outlined, the appearance of which was largely stimulated by earlier similar functional extensions in medical ultrasound. A number of results are presented that illustrate previously inaccessible possibilities opened up by the new modalities for biomedical applications. The article is an extended version of the report presented at the Scientific Session of the Division of Physical Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences, held on December 13, 2021.

It is shown that one of the significant results of human creativity in the 21st century has been the creation of android robots equipped with artificial intelligence. The level of perfection of these robots is becoming so high that it will soon be impossible to establish differences between them and living people by their external features and behavior. This leads to a logical fallacy: to equate humans and android robots, assuming that both have consciousness. Today, scientific research has expanded the understanding of the phenomenon of consciousness, but problems with its definition have not disappeared. The article provides evidence that the application of the term consciousness to android robots is a mistake that can lead to serious consequences.

The effect of the appearance of ‘phantom sources’ in a theoretical model of an image formed by an ideal Veselago lens has been investigated by transformation optics (TO) methods. It is shown that this effect cannot be used to explain the mechanism of superlensing. A method is proposed for eliminating phantom sources in the construction of image models by TO methods. An expression is given for the electromagnetic field which forms an ideal image of a point radiation source when its distance from the front surface of the lens is equal to its thickness. An explanation is given as to why a rigorous model of the ideal image of a dipole source cannot be constructed if the distance between the source and the lens is shorter than its thickness.