Research & Expertise news at HSE University

HSE University held a round table devoted to science  documentaries. The participants discussed possible approaches to securing support for movie production and distribution, choosing topics of interest, and encouraging cinemas to show films about science.

An international team of scholars studied how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted Europeans’ stress levels and their trust in their national governments and the healthcare systems. They found that respondents were most stressed by the state of the national economy, and only after that, by the risk of catching COVID-19 and possibly being hospitalized. In Western Europe, people trust their governments more than in other EU countries. The results of the study were published in Royal Society Open Science.

On March 18, HSE University will host the international Neurotechnology & Freedom Conference, which will be held online. In an exchange with HSE News Service, Vasily Klucharev, director of the Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience and tenured professor at HSE University, discussed what views on the compatibility of these two concepts exist in modern science and art.

On average, women in Russia earn 30-35% less than men. According to this indicator, Russia is ahead of many developed countries. The difference in earnings is primarily associated with the uneven distribution of men and women in different industries and professions, but economists cannot explain a significant portion of the discrepancy. Aleksey Oshchepkov, Assistant Professor of the Faculty of Economic Sciences at HSE University, came to these conclusions after analyzing research materials and survey data. The results are published in a chapter of the volume, Gendering Post-Soviet Space, recently published by Springer.

Social isolation and limited interaction with other people during the COVID-19 pandemic have had adverse impact on the mental and physical health of Russian students. These are the findings of a survey conducted by HSE University and the Centre of Cross-Cultural Psychology and Ethology of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS).

HSE University postdocs share their thoughts on transitioning from PhD studies, as well as individual and collaborative projects they are currently engaged in. The participants include Adam Gemar and Daria Khlevnyuk (PhDs in Sociology), Nikita Lychakov (PhD in Finance), and Amanda Zadorian (PhD in Politics). We also talked to Ekaterina Paustyan, a postdoc at the University of Bremen and an excellent example of the connecting power of HSE University’s research centres.

Cancer is a disease surrounded by myths. Misinformation can lead to disastrous consequences when people wait too long to get screened and learn their diagnosis only at an advanced stage, facing a shortened healthy lifespan and an early death. Therefore, screening for prevention and early diagnosis of cancer should become a routine practice, according to participants of the roundtable 'From Carcinophobia to Oncology Awareness' held by the HSE Project Team 'Oncology and agency deficits: Russians' autonomous self-care practices in the context of a crisis in biomedicine'.

Italian and Russian researchers confirmed the hypothesis that the self-maintaining order in eukaryotic cells (cells with nuclei) is a result of two spontaneous mechanisms’ collaboration. Similar molecules gather into ‘drops’ on the membrane and then leave it as tiny vesicles enriched by the collected molecules. The paper with the research results was published in the journal Physical Review Letters.