Armenians among scientists who 'left much of a mark' on science

PanARMENIAN.Net - At least 10 discoveries made by Russian scientists in recent years have left much of a mark on the world of science, RIA Novosti says in an article about those findings, two of which were made by Armenian scholars.

One of the four new elements recently added to the periodic table – with an atomic number of 118 – was named oganesson (Og), which bears the name of physicist Yuri Oganessian, who led several elemental discoveries. This is only the second time an element has been named for a living scientist.

In 1989, Sergei Vardanyan, who then worked at the Leningrad State University and had studied the ancient geography of the Arctic, came to Wrangel Island, lost in the Arctic Ocean. He collected bones of mammoths that lay there in excess, and with the help of radiocarbon analysis determined that they were only a few thousand years old. As it was later established, mammoths died out 3730 years ago. The article by Vardanyan and his colleagues about the last mammoths on Earth came out in Nature in 1993, revealing the discovery to the entire world.

The mammoth genome from Wrangel Island was deciphered in 2015. Now Vardanyan and his colleagues continue to analyze it to learn all the features of life of the mammoths and unravel the mystery of their disappearance.