Vol 87, No 4 (2017)

The major results in Russia’s power engineering of the 20th century were the design and mastering of production of practically the entire range of core power equipment with world-class technical characteristics. This made it possible not only to stop power equipment imports amid high growth rates of the country’s power industry but also to ensure its high exports and to occupy a significant position in the global market. Two decades of stagnation in the Russian power industry and the disruption of international relations have led to a notable degradation in domestic power engineering. Now, the initiated technological renovation is largely based on imported equipment. Primarily, this is the case of state-of-the-art gas turbines. The challenges encountered are analyzed, and immediate measures to provide Russia’s power industry with competitive domestic equipment that guarantees the country’s scientific and technological independence are substantiated.

The main goal of predictive medicine is to uncover risk factors of a disease to prevent its development and cure it at early stages. At present, the dominant role in disease prevention is attributed to genetics, the modern opportunities of which make it possible to assess the risk of the development of pathological processes. The tasks of predictive technologies in reproductive medicine are the development and introduction of early prophylactic measures to prevent a pregnancy with a genetically pathological fetus and the delivery of a child with an inborn hereditary pathology and to exclude the development of pregnancy complications.

This article is dedicated to the results of three years of labor by the team of authors on the creation of the first domestic national-scale archaeological map. The geoinformation system “Archaeological Sites of Russia” contains information about 15367 archaeological heritage sites and 11489 archaeological dig sites without traces of antiquities, obtained from scientific reports from 2009 to 2012. This sampling reflects the scale of recent archaeological surveys, the spatial distribution of archaeological sites over the country’s territory, and the degree and ways of development of these territories in various historical periods.

Careful attention at the state level has been paid of late to spatial aspects of the country’s economic and social development. At the same time, the basic category of spatial (or regional) development has not been defined conceptually either in the literature or in program documents. It is shown that the configuration of the economic space of the Russian Federation is rather conservative, which explains much of the assessments of the results of balanced development and the equalization of indicators that are subject matter of policy. It is stated that recent innovations, for all their positive significance, cannot eliminate methodological imperfections of the existing approaches to the management of spatial development. Considering Russian scientists’ developments and legislative initiatives, proposals are formulated, the implementation of which, in the opinion of the authors, will help resolve long-standing problems.

From the very first steps in the development of Russia’s network of nature reserves, academic science by means of its individual representatives, scientific establishments, and committees and commissions of the USSR and then Russian Academy of Sciences began to elaborate its scientific and methodological substantiation. This was implemented most effectively by the Central Department for Science, Art, and Museum Establishments (Glavnauka) of the People’s Commissariat for Education of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in the 1920s, the Scientific–Methodological Bureau of the Committee for Nature Reserves under the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Union (Department for Nature Reserves under the Council of People’s Commissars of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) in the 1930s, the Commission on Nature Reserves of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1952–1955), the Commission for Nature Protection of the USSR Academy of Sciences (1955–1963), the Commission for Coordination of Scientific Research in USSR State Nature Reserves (1982–2002), and the Section for Nature Reserves of the RAS Commission on the Preservation of Biological Diversity (from 2002). In addition to scientific-methodological support and coordination of the scientific activity of nature reserves, ideas about how to form a geographical network and integrate it into the country’s spatial development were also proposed by the above structures.