Tag "research projects"

Researchers from the Higher School of Economics (HSE) have developed a novel system for assessing the potential of renewable energy resources. This method can help to assess the future exploitable technical potential of wind and solar PV energy, as well as their capacity to replace exiting generation assets. Furthermore, it can forecast fossil fuel savings and facilitate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Their research has been published in journal Energy: “Wind and Solar PV Technical Potentials: Measurement Methodology and Assessments for Russia”.

Since World War II, people in many countries have enjoyed a better sense of wellbeing, which has resulted in survival values giving way to emancipation values. Threats no longer lurk at every turn, and each new generation sees more opportunities and fewer barriers to empowerment. The book Freedom Rising by LCCR Chief Research Fellow Christian Welzel offers some ideas on how widespread this process is, whether it is irreversible and where human emancipation can lead.

Residents of provincial Russian towns put it differently when talking about their towns to Muscovites, foreigners, and tourists from other Russian regions. Such an ‘individual approach’ is spontaneous and may be useful in creating city tourist brands, concluded Nadezhda Radina as a result of her experiment, which involved over 800 residents of Russian provinces.

Several studies have indicated that schizophrenic patients are likely to show high levels of nicotine dependence. Scientists from Higher School of Economics (HSE), Institut Pasteur, the CNRS, Inserm and the ENS employed a mouse model to elucidate how nicotine influences cells in the prefrontal cortex. They visualized how nicotine has a direct impact on the restoration of normal activity in nerve cells (neurons) involved in psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia. These findings were published in a paper that appeared in the journal Nature Medicine.

While mortality in Moscow is much lower than in other Russian regions, it does not compare favourably with death statistics observed in metropolitan areas of other countries, according to Evgeny Andreev, Ekaterina Kvasha and Tatiana Kharkova, Senior Research Fellow of the HSE Institute of Demography Centre for Demographic Studies.

Russia has a problem with the under-utilisation of education. Almost 30% of employees with university degrees report no connection whatsoever between their training and current occupation, according to Elena Varshavskaya's paper 'Where and in what jobs highly educated Russians work.'

Researchers from the Higher School of Economics, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, Indiana University and the Russian Academy of Sciences Nizhny Novgorod Institute of Applied Physics have identified potential alcoholism mechanisms, associated with altered dopaminergic neuron response to complex dynamics of prefrontal cortex neurones affecting dopamine release.

A regular research seminar aimed at sharing the results of research conducted as part of of the Strategic Academic Unit ‘Mathematics, Computer Science, and Information Technology’ and determining prospective interdisciplinary fields was recently held at HSE. This seminar will be organized regularly by different departments within the Strategic Academic Unit.

In deciding whether or not they will register a particular incident or offence and whether they will investigate it according to the rules or in exchange for a bribe, Russian law enforcement officers tend to act from one of four different perspectives: state, departmental, commercial or professional, according to Elena Berdysheva's study 'Varying Worth of Crimes in the Eyes of Policemen in Russia'.

Researchers from HSE, Northumbria University, and Aarhus University have experimentally confirmed the hypothesis, whereby comprehension of a word’s meaning involves not only the ‘classic’ language brain centres but also the cortical regions responsible for the control of body muscles, such as hand movements. The resulting brain representations are, therefore, distributed across a network of locations involving both areas specialised for language processing and those responsible for the control of the associated action. The results have been published in the journal Neuropsychologia.