A rich man's game

Why is Russia’s third-wealthiest man entering politics?

Oh do grow up, Dmitry

ANYONE watching the Kremlin over the past week might have been left with a sense of deep confusion. On June 22nd, just after Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s president, had (again) urged more political competition, the authorities barred the liberal opposition Party of People’s Freedom, led by Mikhail Kasyanov, a former prime minister, and Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister, from taking part in a parliamentary election in December. “The election is losing legitimacy even before it started”, says Mr Nemtsov.

Three days later, however, the Kremlin embraced Mikhail Prokhorov, a billionaire oligarch and a friend of Mr Nemtsov, as the new leader of Right Cause, another liberal party, but one approved by the authorities. The imposing Mr Prokhorov received airtime on state television and an audience with Mr Medvedev (see picture). Analysts concluded the Kremlin was revitalising an old project to fake a sense of political process. Mr Prokhorov, they said, must have been made an offer he could not refuse.

That’s unlikely. One of Russia’s richest men, Mr Prokhorov ran and part-owned Norilsk Nickel, an immensely complex mining firm operating north of the Arctic circle, and is nobody’s fool. He has common interests with both Mr Nemtsov and Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister. Like Mr Nemtsov, he believes Russia urgently needs change. But like Mr Putin, he wants to avoid a revolution and a collapse that would jeopardise his wealth.

Related topics

• Vladimir Putin
• Russia
• The Kremlin
• Boris Nemtsov
• European politics

Mr Nemtsov says the difference between him and Mr Prokhorov is simple: “He wants to preserve this regime and I want to change it and build Russia without Putin and his friends.” Given that the Kremlin’s main objective is to hold on to power, perhaps it is unsurprising that it sees Mr Nemtsov as an enemy and Mr Prokhorov as an ally.

“We have to act, work and think like a professional and responsible party of power,” Mr Prokhorov told the party convention. “I suggest we exclude the word ‘opposition’ from our lexicon, because for our citizens [it] is long associated not with political parties, but with some marginal groups”. State television interpreted this as a sign of obedience. Mr Prokhorov meant it to show that he is serious about power.

His first goal is to get the party into parliament, which means winning over 7% of the vote in December. But his ultimate ambition may be to claw back influence from corrupt bureaucrats and security-service agents who turn their official positions to their own advantage. The prime minister’s job, Mr Prokhorov says, would be nice.

Those who know him say that he is both pragmatic and risk-driven. His speech at the convention was cautious in attacking the regime but ambitious in strategy: he wants to decentralise the country, bring back mayoral elections in Moscow and St Petersburg, and turn the local heads of the police, the tax inspectorate and the courts into electable posts. This would remove the levers of repression and violence from the current bureaucracy.

Unlike Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a jailed tycoon, Mr Prokhorov has done well over the past decade. “Today, I am [rolling] in chocolate, but being just rich is not interesting for me. I am still full of strength”, he had told party leaders a day earlier. The prospects for energetic, creative people in Russia are narrowing. Some 22% of people say they are considering emigrating. Mr Prokhorov appeals to people who are fed up with the system but have too much to lose by taking to the streets.

His move will certainly have been approved by Mr Putin. A generous explanation is that a regime fearful of approaching crisis wants to avoid an Egyptian scenario by co-opting the most active part of the population and offsetting the impact of Mr Putin’s likely return as president. (Mr Putin’s own United Russia has been dubbed a party of “thieves and crooks”, and is losing support so fast that the prime minister has created an “All-Russia People’s Front”, hoovering up millions of state workers, agrarians and nationalists.) It could also be that the Kremlin needs a sparring partner that it can convert into a lightning-rod for people’s anger with the rich and powerful when the time comes.

The Kremlin will doubtless try to use Mr Prokhorov. But he will have his own ideas about how to use the Kremlin. His chances of gaining the upper hand are slim, but with a new player the game will certainly become more lively
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Simple animation to explain complex principles

1, aircraft radial engine 2, oval Regulation 3, sewing machines 4, Malta Cross movement - second hand movement used to control the clock 5, auto change file mechanism 6, auto constant velocity universal joint 7, gun ammunition loading system 8 rotary engine - an internal combustion engine, the heat rather than the piston movement into rotary movement # Via World Of Technology. HowStuffWorks see from the attached three car engine diagram: 1, inline engine - it's cylinders lined up side by side

Ultimate Energy Efficiency: Magnetic Microprocessors Could Use Million Times Less Energy Than Today's Silicon Chips

Nanomagnetic computers use tiny bar magnets to store and process information. The interactions between the polarized, north-south magnetic fields of closely spaced magnets allow logic operations like those in conventional transistors. (Credit: Jeffrey Bokor lab, UC Berkeley)

Science Daily — Future computers may rely on magnetic microprocessors that consume the least amount of energy allowed by the laws of physics, according to an analysis by University of California, Berkeley, electrical engineers.

Such chips would dissipate only 18 millielectron volts of energy per operation at room temperature, the minimum allowed by the second law of thermodynamics and called the Landauer limit. That's 1 million times less energy per operation than consumed by today's computers.Today's silicon-based microprocessor chips rely on electric currents, or moving electrons, that generate a lot of waste heat. But microprocessors employing nanometer-sized bar magnets -- like tiny refrigerator magnets -- for memory, logic and switching operations theoretically would require no moving electrons."Today, computers run on electricity; by moving electrons around a circuit, you can process information," said Brian Lambson, a UC Berkeley graduate student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. "A magnetic computer, on the other hand, doesn't involve any moving electrons. You store and process information using magnets, and if you make these magnets really small, you can basically pack them very close together so that they interact with one another. This is how we are able to do computations, have memory and conduct all the functions of a computer."Lambson is working with Jeffrey Bokor, UC Berkeley professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, to develop magnetic computers.

"In principle, one could, I think, build real circuits that would operate right at the Landauer limit," said Bokor, who is a codirector of the Center for Energy Efficient Electronics Science (E3S), a Science and Technology Center founded last year with a $25 million grant from the National Science Foundation. "Even if we could get within one order of magnitude, a factor of 10, of the Landauer limit, it would represent a huge reduction in energy consumption for electronics. It would be absolutely revolutionary."

One of the center's goals is to build computers that operate at the Landauer limit.

Lambson, Bokor and UC Berkeley graduate student David Carlton published a paper about their analysis online in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Fifty years ago, Rolf Landauer used newly developed information theory to calculate the minimum energy a logical operation, such as an AND or OR operation, would dissipate given the limitation imposed by the second law of thermodynamics. (In a standard logic gate with two inputs and one output, an AND operation produces an output when it has two positive inputs, while an OR operation produces an output when one or both inputs are positive.) That law states that an irreversible process -- a logical operation or the erasure of a bit of information -- dissipates energy that cannot be recovered. In other words, the entropy of any closed system cannot decrease.

In today's transistors and microprocessors, this limit is far below other energy losses that generate heat, primarily through the electrical resistance of moving electrons. However, researchers such as Bokor are trying to develop computers that don't rely on moving electrons, and thus could approach the Landauer limit. Lambson decided to theoretically and experimentally test the limiting energy efficiency of a simple magnetic logic circuit and magnetic memory.

The nanomagnets that Bokor, Lambson and his lab use to build magnetic memory and logic devices are about 100 nanometers wide and about 200 nanometers long. Because they have the same north-south polarity as a bar magnet, the up-or-down orientation of the pole can be used to represent the 0 and 1 of binary computer memory. In addition, when multiple nanomagnets are brought together, their north and south poles interact via dipole-dipole forces to exhibit transistor behavior, allowing simple logic operations.

"The magnets themselves are the built-in memory," Lambson said. "The real challenge is getting the wires and transistors working."

Lambson showed through calculations and computer simulations that a simple memory operation -- erasing a magnetic bit, an operation often called "restore to one" -- can be conducted with an energy dissipation very close, if not identical to, the Landauer limit.

He subsequently analyzed a simple magnetic logical operation. The first successful demonstration of a logical operation using magnetic nanoparticles was achieved by researchers at the University of Notre Dame in 2006. In that case, they built a three-input majority logic gate using 16 coupled nanomagnets. Lambson calculated that a computation with such a circuit would also dissipate energy at the Landauer limit.

Because the Landauer limit is proportional to temperature, circuits cooled to low temperatures would be even more efficient.

At the moment, electrical currents are used to generate a magnetic field to erase or flip the polarity of nanomagnets, which dissipates a lot of energy. Ideally, new materials will make electrical currents unnecessary, except perhaps for relaying information from one chip to another.

"Then you can start thinking about operating these circuits at the upper efficiency limits," Lambson said.

"We are working now with collaborators to figure out a way to put that energy in without using a magnetic field, which is very hard to do efficiently," Bokor said. "A multiferroic material, for example, may be able to control magnetism directly with a voltage rather than an external magnetic field."

Other obstacles remain as well. For example, as researchers push the power consumption down, devices become more susceptible to random fluctuations from thermal effects, stray electromagnetic fields and other kinds of noise.

"The magnetic technology we are working on looks very interesting for ultra low power uses," Bokor said. "We are trying to figure out how to make it more competitive in speed, performance and reliability. We need to guarantee that it gets the right answer every single time with a very, very, very high degree of reliability."

The work was supported by NSF and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Plastic Found in Nine Percent of 'Garbage Patch' Fishes: Tens of Thousands of Tons of Debris Annually Ingested

These are two lanternfish and several bits of plastic collected during the SEAPLEX voyage. (Credit: J. Leicther)

Science Daily — The first scientific results from an ambitious voyage led by a group of graduate students from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego offer a stark view of human pollution and its infiltration of an area of the ocean that has been labeled as the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch."

Two graduate students with the Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition, or SEAPLEX, found evidence of plastic waste in more than nine percent of the stomachs of fish collected during their voyage to the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. Based on their evidence, authors Peter Davison and Rebecca Asch estimate that fish in the intermediate ocean depths of the North Pacific ingest plastic at a rate of roughly 12,000- to 24,000 tons per year.

Their results were published June 27 in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series.

During the SEAPLEX voyage in August 2009, a team of Scripps graduate students traveled more than 1,000 miles west of California to the eastern sector of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre aboard the Scripps research vessel New Horizon. Over 20 days the students, New Horizon crew and expedition volunteers conducted comprehensive and rigorous scientific sampling at numerous locations. They collected fish specimens, water samples and marine debris at depths ranging from the sea surface to thousands of feet depth.

Of the 141 fishes spanning 27 species dissected in the study, Davison and Asch found that 9.2 percent of the stomach contents of mid-water fishes contained plastic debris, primarily broken-down bits smaller than a human fingernail. The researchers say the majority of the stomach plastic pieces were so small their origin could not be determined.

"About nine percent of examined fishes contained plastic in their stomach. That is an underestimate of the true ingestion rate because a fish may regurgitate or pass a plastic item, or even die from eating it. We didn't measure those rates, so our nine percent figure is too low by an unknown amount," said Davison.

The authors say previous studies on fish and plastic ingestion may have included so-called "net-feeding" biases. Net feeding can lead to artificially high cases of plastic ingestion by fishes while they are confined in a net with a high concentration of plastic debris. The Scripps study's results were designed to avoid such bias. The highest concentrations of plastic were retrieved by a surface collecting device called a "manta net," which sampled for only 15 minutes at a time. The short sampling time minimizes the risk of net feeding by preventing large concentrations of plastic from building up, and also by reducing the amount of time that a captured fish spends in the net. In addition to the manta net, the fishes were also collected with other nets that sample deeper in the water column where there is less plastic to be ingested through net feeding.

The new study focused on the prevalence of plastic ingestion, but effects such as toxicological impacts on fish and composition of the plastic were outside of the study's goals.

The majority of fish examined in the study were myctophids, commonly called lanternfish because of their luminescent tissue. Lanternfishes are hypothesized to use luminescence for several purposes, including counter-illumination (thwarts predators attempting to silhouette the lanternfish against sunlight), mate attraction and identification and illumination of prey. Such fish generally inhabit the 200- to 1,000-meter (650- to 3,280-foot) depth during the day and swim to the surface at night.

"These fish have an important role in the food chain because they connect plankton at the base of the food chain with higher levels. We have estimated the incidence at which plastic is entering the food chain and I think there are potential impacts, but what those impacts are will take more research," said Asch.

Rather than a visible "patch" or "island" of trash, marine debris is highly dispersed across thousands of miles of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. The debris area cannot be mapped from air or space, so SEAPLEX researchers collected samples in 132 net tows (130 of which contained plastic) across a distance of more than 2,375 kilometers (1,700 miles) in an attempt to find the boundaries of the patch. The region, a "convergence zone" where floating debris in water congregates, is generally avoided by mariners due to its calm winds and mild currents. The North Pacific Subtropical Gyre has been understudied by scientists, leaving many open questions about marine debris in the area and its long-term effects on the marine environment.

"This study clearly emphasizes the importance of directly sampling in the environment where the impacts may be occurring," said James Leichter, a Scripps associate professor of biological oceanography who participated in the SEAPLEX expedition but was not an author of the new paper. "We are seeing that most of our prior predictions and expectations about potential impacts have been based on speculation rather than evidence and in many cases we have in fact underestimated the magnitude of effects. SEAPLEX also clearly illustrates how relatively small amounts of funding directed for novel field sampling and work in remote places can vastly increase our knowledge and understanding of environmental problems."

SEAPLEX was supported by the UC Ship Funds program, Project Kaisei/Ocean Voyages Institute and the National