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—The agricultural landscape of Ivanovo oblast is now a sophisticated mosaic of a variety of types of lands in use and of abandoned lands at different stages of succession. This is mainly determined by the fauna, structure, and population dynamics of such open-field birds as waders. This paper reflects the correlation of the fauna and population of the waders of agricultural lands in Ivanovo oblast with such key factors in farming ecosystems as the stages of succession, haymaking, pasturage, and agricultural burning of vegetation. Twenty wader species have been noted on the agricultural areas of Ivanovo oblast, 13 of which are breeding, six species of which are typical inhabitants of overgrown agriculture lands (the lapwing, curlew, black-tailed Godwit, common redshank, common snipe, and great snipe). The moisture content of soil in a specific year is the determining factor for the common snipe to nest on agricultural lands; the species demonstrates no pronounced trends of population density related to succession processes, up to the development of shrub-arborous vegetation. The other species of waders actively populate unused, fallow lands at intermediate stages of the demutational succession, increasing their abundance just at the first stages and avoiding sites overgrown with shrub-arborous vegetation. The lapwing also inhabits lands in use, while other wader species avoid nesting on actively exploited agricultural lands. The common redshank and the great snipe somewhat avoid lands with haymaking sites. By means of correlation analysis, a positive correlation was tracked of the wader fauna and population on nonannual (irregular) spring burns of vegetation, which hold down succession at stages favorable for waders.

The X-ray diffraction method is used to study radiation-induced changes in the structure and phase state of a model Fe–5% Mo alloy after electron irradiation at room temperature and 400°C. The observed radiation-induced softening of the alloy is explained by a decrease in the Mo concentration in solid solution and an increase in the number of lattice defects. This conclusion is confirmed by the shift of the 200 diffraction maximum toward larger angles and its broadening. Irradiation leads to the oxidation of the alloy, and additional annealing at 400°C causes the formation of spinel Fe2MoO4 and alloy strengthening.

The SEE (Satellite Energy Exchange) mission was suggested and designed under NASA Project in 1992–2002 to make extremely accurate measurements on fundamental gravitation by observing the orbital perturbation of unconstrained orbiting test bodies in a femto-g to atto-g environment. The mission uses novel and original test body dynamics. Its broad objective is to support the development of gravity theory and its unification with other interactions by carrying out sensitive gravitational tests capable of discriminating among alternative theories. The SEE mission introduced and utilized new technology for near-zero-g environment creation, passive cryogenic temperature control, passive station-keeping capability, and non-contact sub-micron-accuracy distance measurements, all of which promise to have a wide variety of applications.

The gravitational D-dimensional model is considered, with l scalar fields, a cosmological constant and several forms. When a cosmological block-diagonal metric, defined on a product of an 1-dimensional interval and n oriented Einstein spaces, is chosen, an electromagnetic composite brane ansatz is adopted, and certain restrictions on the branes are imposed, the conformally covariant Wheeler–DeWitt (WDW) equation for the model is studied. Under certain restrictions, asymptotic solutions to the WDWequation are found in the limit of the formation of billiard walls which reduce the problem to the socalled quantum billiard on (n + l - 1)-dimensional hyperbolic space. Several examples of billiards in the model with {pmn} non-intersecting electric branes, e.g., corresponding to hyperbolic Kac–Moody algebras, are considered. In the classical case, any of these billiards describe a never-ending oscillating behavior of scale factors while approaching to the singularity, which is either spacelike or timelike. For n = 2 the model is completely integrable in the asymptotic regime in the clasical and quantum cases.

This paper is a brief review of integrable models of gravitation and cosmology in four and more dimensions which make up one of the proper approaches to studying the basic issues and strong field objects, the early and present Universe, and black hole (BH) physics in particular. The main results within this approach, obtained in the recent years by the research group founded by K.P. Staniukovich, are presented. Absolute G measurements and problems of its possible time and range variations, which are reflections of the unification problem, are discussed within these models. The choice, nature, classification and precision of determination of fundamental physical constants and their role in the expected transition to new definitions of basic SI units, supposed to be based on fundamental physical constants and stable quantum phenomena, are described. A need for further absolute measurements of G, its possible range and time variations is stressed. Themultipurpose space project SEE is shortly described, aimed at measuring G and its stability in space and time with a progress of 2–3 orders of magnitude against the present accuracy. It may answer many important questions posed by gravitation, cosmology and unified theories. A project of a laboratory experiment to test possible deviations from Newton’s law of gravity is also presented.

The influence of pulsed laser irradiation on mechanical properties of annealed and cold-worked pure aluminum is studied. Mechanical tests are performed by means of a miniaturized disk bend test technique using specimens with the diameter of 3 mm. It is established that laser irradiation does not influence the mechanical properties of annealed aluminum but leads to softening of cold-worked material. After 100 laser pulses, nearly complete recovery of aluminum strength occurs to the value characteristic of the annealed state. The plasticity of cold-worked aluminum is lower than that of annealed material and does not vary upon laser irradiation. Thermal and shock-wave mechanisms of laser impact are estimated, and it follows that, under the given parameters of irradiation, the main contribution to the variation of properties is that of shock-wave mechanism related to generation and propagation of acoustic waves which stimulate athermal annealing and recovery of dislocation structure.

The design of the high-voltage axial injection system for the DC-280 cyclotron that is being constructed at the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions (FLNR) at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) is presented. The injection system will make it possible to efficiently inject ions of elements ranging from helium to uranium with the ratios of their atomic mass to the charge varying from 4 to 7.5.

Two families of composite black brane solutions are overviewed, fluxbrane and black brane ones, in a model with scalar fields and fields of forms. The metric of any solution is defined on a manifold which contains a product of several Ricci-flat “internal” spaces. The solutions are governed by moduli functions $\mathcal{H}_s $ (for fluxbranes) and H s (for black branes), obeying nonlinear differential equations with certain boundary conditions. Themaster equations for $\mathcal{H}_s $ and H s are equivalent to Toda-like equations and depend on a nondegenerate matrix A related to brane intersection rules. The functions H s and $\mathcal{H}_s $ , as was conjectured and confirmed (at least partly) earlier, should be polynomials in proper variables if A is a Cartan matrix of some semisimple finite-dimensional Lie algebra. The fluxbrane polynomials $\mathcal{H}_s $ were shown to be used for the construction of black brane polynomials H s . This approach is illustrated by examples of nonextremal electric black p-brane solutions related to Lie algebras A 2, C 2, and G 2.

The DC-110 heavy ion cyclotron for industrial production of track membranes has been developed and created at the Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research. The cyclotron is equipped with an electron cyclotron resonance ion source operating at a frequency of 18 GHz. The accelerator complex was put into operation in 2012 and 40Ar6+, 86Kr13+, and 132Xe20+ ion beams with a energy of 2.5 MeV/nucleon and intensity of 13, 14.5, and 10.5 μA, respectively, were produced. Irradiation of a polymer film was carried out on a specialized channel and track membranes with a high uniformity of pores were obtained. The DC-110 accelerator complex can produce up to 2 million square meters of track membranes per year.

Bianchi type I cosmological model in (n+1)-dimensional gravity with several forms is considered. When the electric non-composite brane ansatz is adopted, the Wheeler-DeWitt (WDW) equation for the model, written in a conformally covariant form, is analyzed. Under certain restrictions, asymptotic solutions to the WDW equation near the singularity are found, which reduce the problem to the so-called quantum billiard on the (n-1)-dimensional Lobachevsky space H^{n-1}. Two examples of quantum billiards are considered: a 2-dimensional quantum billiard for a 4D model with three 2-forms and a 9D quantum billiard for an 11D model with 120 4-forms which mimics SM2-brane sector of D=11 supergravity. For certain solutions, vanishing of the wave function at the singularity is proved., Comment: 14 pages, LaTex, no figures, several typos are eliminated

We review spherically symmetric solutions with a horizon in two models: (i) with scalar fields and fields of forms, and (ii) with a multi-component anisotropic fluid. The metrics of the solutions are defined on a manifold that contains a product of n − 1 Ricci-flat “internal” spaces. The solutions are governed by functions H s obeying nonlinear differential equations with certain boundary conditions. Simulation of black-brane solutions is considered, and the Hawking temperature is calculated. For the fluid solution, the post-Newtonian parameters β and Γ corresponding to the 4-dimensional section of the metric are found.

Magnetic spectrometers of charged nuclear reaction products, properly matched with an accelerator beam line, have become a very effective setup for the performance of precise nuclear experiments involving ultrasensitive accelerator-based mass spectrometry and investigation of rare events, as well as experiments with radioactive nuclear beams. The procedure for increasing the efficiency and resolution of the available magnetic spectrometer at the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions by a few orders of magnitude by means of its matching with the beam line is described.