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Which brain lobes should we stimulate to improve our short-term memory? What is ‘warm radiation’ and why it is so important that people help each other? Which manufacturing systems will artificial intelligence master the fastest? Scholars from HSE University offered their scientific opinions on all these and more at the ZIL.Nauka festival.

Russian respondents positively assessed trends of co-authorship between students and teachers in the learning and teaching process, the need to ensure equal access to education for all categories of the population, and the trend towards ‘humanising’ education.

Not so long ago, postcards were a popular way to congratulate someone or send a message. Today the postcard can instead be described as an exotic means of communication, and a rich field for research. This is what encouraged the students and teachers from Fundamental and Applied Linguistics at the Faculty of Humanities to embark on a flash mob project called ‘Send a Postcard to a Linguist’. Deputy Dean Timur Khusyainov of the Faculty of Humanities (Nizhny Novgorod), the curator of this flash mob and an experienced postcrosser, discusses whether postcards can be helpful for researchers and how they relate to digital humanities.

Galina E. Volodina has been the Campus Director in Perm since 1997. Under her leadership, the Perm campus has turned into the major player in shaping the region’s future—be it general education, retaining of talents, or R&D. In her interview for the HSE Look, Galina Volodina shares how HSE Perm’s development agenda has been altered and what are its current priorities.

A team of researchers from HSE MIEM joined colleagues from the Institute of Non-Classical Chemistry in Leipzig to develop a theoretical model of a polymeric ionic liquid on a charged conductive electrode. They used approaches from polymer physics and theoretical electrochemistry to demonstrate the difference in the behaviour of electrical differential capacitance of polymeric and ordinary ionic liquids for the first time. The results of the study were published in Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics.

Durrell in Russia, a book written by renowned writer and zoologist Gerald Durrell and his wife Lee after their 1984–1985 journey across the Soviet Union, has been published in Russian for the first time. The publication was initiated and coordinated by Asya Veksler, Associate Professor at the HSE School of Integrated Communications.

There are usually three main parts to working at a university: teaching, research, and administrative tasks. However, professors at Russian universities are still mostly occupied with the demands of a very heavy teaching load. As HSE International Laboratory for Institutional Analysis of Economic Reforms Senior Researcher Ilya Prakhov discovered, even at leading universities with a focus on science, professors spend 2.5 times more time on classroom work than on research. Given this situation, is it possible to advance research at universities?