Two firms, AREP of France and OMA of the Netherlands, are in the final contest for a Russian order to design the planned research and development centre in Skolkovo just west of Moscow (so called Russian Silicon Valley).

The winner is to be named before January.

Skolkovo managers say their miracle city will cost some 100 billion roubles, half of them from the Russian treasury.

Russian engineers have started drawing up a new “Kosmonet” project, and its implementation will provide an opportunity for the Runet users to enter the “Space” Internet.

The developers say that a rapid access to the Internet is only part of the task set before the “Kosmonet”. They give priority to guaranteeing communications between spacecraft and establishing control over flying objects from any point on the Earth and stable communications with remote regions of Russia.

Russian technology giant ROSNANO has started financing the production of explosives and drugs detectors.

The first tranche of project financing amounts to 50 million rubles.

The detectors are based on neutron activation analysis technology, which enable the identification of over 40 types of explosive, narcotic and poisonous substances. These systems will be used to examine rail, air and sea cargo.

A group of scientists from CERN, including Russian physicists, has developed an effective technique for synthesizing and trapping antimatter particles for a relatively long time. Antimatter particles were atoms of antihydrogen, consisting of antiprotons and positrons instead of protons and electrons, an article in Nature reveals.

The problem of antimatter, or to be more precise, antimatter’s absence in our Universe, has always been one of the major problems for physicists all around the world.

Russian researchers revealed that Rhodobacter sphaeroides bacteria can be a source of molecular hydrogen, an ecologically friendly fuel. Scientists studied various strains of the mentioned microorganism and demonstrated that hydrogen emission rate depended on pigmentation of cells. Less pigmented strains can be a promising source of molecular hydrogen. A search for new alternative energy sources is listed among burning problems of modern life.

RMT Ltd was founded in 1993 by a group of managers experienced in the field of semiconductor materials, devices for IR- and laser techniques. RMT Ltd works in the thermoelectric market since 1994. Company is a manufacturer of thermoelectric products and is focused in cooling microsolutions and thermal management for optoelectronics, laser technique and microelectronics.

RMT Ltd provides a wide range of thermoelectric (Peltier) cooling modules, cooling microsystems.

Russian physicists have developed a unique device – a photoelectrochemical supercapacitor condenser, able to directly convert sunlight energy into electricity and accumulate it with high density in double electrical layer of electrodes, made of various nanomaterials. New device can be an element of autonomous solar electric generating stations, or illumination systems, being a cheap alternative to foreign solutions.

Existing photovoltaic facilities, working on sunlight, directly transform solar energy into electricity by means of semiconducting solar elements.

The Supervisory Board of the Russian Corporation of Nanotechnologies has approved RUSNANO’s participation in three new investment projects. The projects have aggregate budgets in excess of seven billion rubles, including co-investment from the corporation of more than three billion rubles.

In accordance with the council’s decision, RUSNANO and company TMK will establish production of precision corrosion-resistant pipes at TMK’s Sinarsky Pipe Plant in Sverdlovsk Oblast.

Scientists from Tomsk Polytechnic University have developed a unique nano-sized magnetic fingerprinting powder.

New powder allows capturing fingerprints ninety-nine times out of a hundred, and these fingerprints will be brighter, and clearer than the ones made by any other existing means, forensic experts say.

New powder helps take fingerprints even from polyethylene and glossy paper, which are known to be “difficult” materials for this purpose.

Russian scientists have developed a new ecologically safe material for the bags, which gets degraded in the soil within two weeks.

Polyethylene, widely used for various kinds of bags, needs about 10 years to get degraded. Know-how of the Russian researchers from Stavropol State University consists of methyl cellulose and protein complexes.

New biodegradable material has the same strength as polyethylene, and is able to preserve food longer, because it’s not transparent for UV radiation.

The Science Development Foundation (SDFA) under the President of Azerbaijan Republic has started awarding grants for the top priority projects. The H. M.

NT-MDT Co. announced that its NTEGRA Spectra (AFM/ CONFOCAL RAMAN & FLUORESCENCE/ SNOM/ TERS) has won the prestigious Frost & Sullivan Best Practices Award 2010. This Award is presented to companies in recognition of making an outstanding contribution to their respective industries or achieving a competitive or customer-based leading position in the market.

Frost & Sullivan’s Global Research sees the TERS technology as a tool to overcome the difficulties related to understanding of phenomena at the nano level.

Vladimir Skulachev, well known Russian biotechnologist, who studies effects of mitochondrial antioxidants on various health problems, including aging, believes that treating agents for eyes disorders, based upon “Skulachev ions”, as mitochondrial antioxidants are also called, can appear in pharmacies by the end of 2011.As for aging cure-all, these drugs will be available for sale within nearest 5 years.

Treatment for glaucoma is currently undergoing second stage of clinical trials, “Mitotech” company, responsible for working with “Skulachev ions”, announced in September.

Physicists, operating Large Hadron Collider's CMS detecting facility, recently registered production of two Z-bosons, which can be an evidence of a «heavy» variety of Higgs boson. CMS is a Compact Muon Solenoid facility, a general-purpose detector, designed for studying different aspects of proton collisions at 14 teraelectronvolt, the center-of-mass energy of the LHC particle accelerator.

During of the experiment on October 10, 2010, CMS facility has detected production of four mu-mesons (muons).

The Prize Committee of Nanotechnology International Prize RUSNANOPRIZE-2010 in NanoDiagnostics awarded the Prize to Prof. Lev Feigin (Russia) and Prof. Dmitri Svergun (Germany) for the development of small angle X-ray scattering technique for structural diagnostics of nano-particles and systems. Hecus X-ray systems GmbH. (Austria) will also receive the Prize symbol for the development and production of small angle X-ray scattering equipment.

Prof. Lev Feigin and Prof.