Tag "publications"

Researchers from the HSE Faculty of Economic Sciences have shown that the accuracy of birth rate forecasts for Russia can be improved by almost 50% by incorporating the dynamics of online search queries related to pregnancy and childbirth into forecasting models. In the best-performing models, the forecasting error fell from 4.6% to 3.2%. The findings have been published in Populations and Economics.

Scientists from HSE University, MSU, and Tallinn University of Technology have studied a fossil species of ancient brachiopods that lived in a warm sea in what is now northern Estonia more than 445 million years ago. These ancient brachiopods developed a cup-shaped shell with a protective 'cap' that shielded them from overgrowth by other marine organisms. The study has been published in Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology.

An international team of researchers, including scientists from HSE University–St Petersburg, has developed microlasers that emit deep-ultraviolet light at a wavelength of 255 nanometres. The devices operate at room temperature, and the smallest of them measures just two micrometres in diameter—roughly the size of a bacterium. These microlasers could be used in sensors, spectroscopic systems, photonic chips, and communication devices. The paper has been published in Optics & Laser Technology.

Psycholinguists from the Centre for Language and Brain at HSE University–St Petersburg have shown that words that are frequently misspelled are processed more slowly by readers, even when presented with the correct spelling. The researchers confirmed this effect for the first time using Russian-language materials and found that response speed is most strongly linked to how confidently individuals can distinguish the correct spelling of a word from an incorrect one. The study has been published in The Mental Lexicon.

Researchers at the HSE Centre for Language and Brain have developed a new digital tool for assessing children's phonological processing skills—the ZARYA (Sound Analysis of the Russian Language) test battery. It is the first standardised application in Russia designed to provide a fast and reliable assessment of children's ability to distinguish speech sounds, retain them in working memory, and perform phonemic analysis. The app runs on Android tablets and smartphones and is available for download from RuStore. Details of the test validation have been published in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.

Europium is a rare-earth metal responsible for the pure red glow in displays and other luminescent materials. For a long time, however, it refused to emit light when surrounded by certain organic molecules known as acylpyrazolone ligands. Chemists have now uncovered the reason: in europium complexes with these ligands, a 'black window' appears—a charge-transfer state in which the energy absorbed by the ligand is dissipated as heat rather than emitted as light. Understanding this mechanism opens the way to designing more efficient red-emitting materials for displays, fluorescent thermometers, and chemical sensors. The results have been published in Dalton Transactions.