Research & Expertise news at HSE University

In a competition for science bloggers held at HSE University, Vladimir Mikheev and Vikotria Zemlyak were among the top performers. The students of the English-taught Master’s programme ‘Cognitive Sciences and Technologies: From Neuron to Cognition’ produce ‘Neirochai’ (‘NeuroTea’), a science podcast. The duo spoke with the HSE News Service about their guests, their listeners and their future plans.

For a long time, it was mainly art and theatre critics who wrote for a wide audience about dance from a spectator’s perspective. Later, philosophers and ethnographers began to study dance from different angles. But only when people with first-hand experience, i.e. dancers, joined in, did dance and movement studies get off to a real start. Irina Sirotkina explains how dance studies evolved in the 20th century.

The International Centre for the History and Sociology of World War II and its Consequences at HSE University held a Graduate Student Seminar in Soviet History together with Sciences Po (France) on June 17 – 18, 2019. HSE News Service spoke with participants and instructors of the seminar, which examinedthe impact of WWII on the Soviet Union and surrounding regions, as well as aspects of the Soviet system from Stalin up to the 1980s.

The HSE University competition committee has announced the winners of an international competition for new physics laboratory proposals. Two proposed projects were selected: the Laboratory of van der Waals Heterostructures, headed by Davit Ghazaryan, and the Laboratory of Nanophotonics and Functional Materials, headed by Andrey Krasavin.

The existing approach to brain stimulation for rehabilitation after a stroke does not take into account the diversity of lesions and the individual characteristics of patients’ brains. This was the conclusion made by researchers of the Higher School of Economics and the Max Planck Institute of Cognitive Sciences in their article, ‘Predicting the Response to Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation in Stroke’.

On June 24-25, HSE University held the international academic conference, ‘The 1990s: A Social History of Russia’ organized by International Center for the History and Sociology of World World War II and its Consequences, the Boris Yeltsin Center, the Egor Gaider Foundation, and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. HSE News Service spoke with Roberto Rabbia, one of the international participants, about how he became interested in Soviet history, why he reads Soviet newspapers, and what he has learned from his research.

Andrey Savchenko, Professor at HSE University, has developed a method that can help to enhance image identification on videos. In his project, a network was taught by a new algorithm and can now make decisions on image recognition and classification 10 times faster than before.

It is believed that carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere are mainly regulated by ‘direct’ economic instruments - the carbon tax and the Emissions Trading System (ETS). However, a comparative analysis has shown that ‘indirect’ instruments, such as excise taxes on motor fuel and other energy taxes, did not yield any lesser impact than their ‘direct’ counterparts, and, over time, were even more effective. This is the conclusion drawn by HSE researcher Ilya Stepanov in his article, ‘Taxes in the Energy Sector and Their Role in Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions’.