Diego Monterrey

”For 35 years, the entire economy of the Soviet Union was based on Tatar oil,” said Nikolai Baibakov, Chairman of the State Planning Committee of the USSR, referring primarily to the Romashkinskoye field. The country applauded its discoverers. Of course, the first place in Russia in terms of reserves and the status of a unique super giant according to the international classification made it a legend. However, there was a scientist, who did the impossible - he could increase the economic significance of the field many times over…

The attempt to preserve an ”oasis” of pre-revolutionary monarchal life in the oldest building on Nevsky Prospect was doomed to failure. The Anichkov Palace is a less prestigious building than the Winter Palace. However, some pieces of furniture from the private apartments of Maria Feodorovna, wife of Alexander III and mother of the last Russian Emperor Nicholas II, were salvaged from the pawnshop and sold abroad in 1928. Their connection with mineralogy and mining helped.

The pre-revolutionary history of the Ural emeralds is a classic detective story. The stone itself encourages fraud and forgery. As for diamonds, there is a standard technique of evaluation with 10x magnification, but the quality of an emerald is defined by eye judging by its color hue and transparency. Sometimes it is not so easy to separate the wheat from the chaff. That is why there is such a wide price range: from $3 to $650 per gram.

Today, the phrase ”Hungarian dog” will instantly conjure up an image of a short-haired dog lynx, a masterpiece of Magyar hunting breeding. They have a bright golden color and a fine sense of smell for feathery game. In Russia 200 years ago, mining professionals associated it with a subject very distant from hunting. November 1839 was the brightest month in the life of Lieutenant Alexander Platonov: he had his first-born son, and published an article in the ”Mining Journal” about the improvement of rolling technology in the mines of the Perm plants.

It took hundreds of millions of years for geological processes to form a single supercontinent, Pangea, in the Late Paleozoic. About 220 million years ago, it split in two. Today, the six continents on Earth are very slowly but surely moving toward each other. The Mining Museum now has the opportunity to visualize the history of the Earth’s crust and its dynamics in the future, as well as many other natural processes on the Earth and other planets with its new acquisition - a digital demonstration complex with a spherical screen.

On the first Sunday of September every year, Russia celebrates Oil and Gas Industry Workers Day, often referred to simply as Oilman Day. Although the first mention of the sources of ”black gold” in the country can be found in the 10th century treatise of Byzantine Emperor Constantine Bagrjanorodny ”On State Management”, specialists of the key industry for the national economy got their professional holiday only in 1965 after miners, railwaymen, builders and metallurgists. What happened in the middle of the XX century?

According to Rosstat, in our country scientific research and development is carried out by 475 organizations, of which 990 are higher educational institutions. Moreover, if over the past 20 years the total number of organizations has not changed significantly, the share of research institutes in it has fallen by 40%, and the share of universities has increased almost threefold. There is an increase in the role of university science in the country’s research potential.

This year, significant changes have been made to the master’s curricula at St. Petersburg Mining University. Why did this happen?

The Safe Internet League presented updated statistics that clearly show that the influence of social networks on society continues to grow and is becoming more widespread every year

This year, the St. Petersburg Mining University’s curricula include the basic scientific competence ”Philosophy of Science” and a number of other innovations

On the first weekend in September, many European cities held rallies of many thousands, during which protesters demanded that their heads of state take action against the decline in living standards