🤩 From an Idea to the Factory of Technology — that is the 14-year story of Skoltech.

📷 For Skoltech's birthday, our photographer Timur Sabirov has prepared a special collection of his work. The lens captures familiar and unfamiliar angles of the campus, showcasing the institute's architecture, atmosphere, and life.

🆕 Researchers from Skoltech, ITMO University and their colleagues have reported new findings about the behavior of microbubbles exposed to ultrasound. The work was published in the journal Acta Biomaterialia and was supported by grants from the Russian Science Foundation.

Microbubbles are already used in diagnostics, but their potential for therapy is immense. The study's results pave the way for creating safe and stable bubbles for noninvasive therapeutic technologies, such as activating anti-cancer drugs directly inside a tumor and delivering drugs to the brain through the blood-brain barrier.

“Rather than work with living tissue, we aimed to figure out the physics of the bubbles,” said the lead author of the paper, Junior Research Scientist Tatiana Estifeeva from Skoltech Photonics. “When we know precisely how the bubbles behave at every stage, we can purposely design stable and safe chemical compositions to keep a handle on everything from the state of the protein molecules in the bubble shell to the effects on blood. In the future, such thoroughly researched bubbles could be used not just for visualization but for therapies that employ ultrasound as a very targeted and mild intervention.”

The research showed that stabilizing additives make the bubbles more resilient and "calm," reducing the intensity of their pulsation by almost half. This transforms the process from chaotic bubbling into controlled pulsation. The shape and mobility of red blood cells were unaffected by the bubbles, so they do not disrupt the normal flow of blood and are potentially safe for administering into the body.

The work demonstrates that understanding the physics of microbubbles is the key to future noninvasive treatment methods where ultrasound becomes a tool for precise and safe interaction with the body.

🆕 Researchers from Skoltech, the University of Potsdam, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have discovered a fundamental physical law that governs the seemingly chaotic motion of chromosomes inside a living cell. The results have been published in the Physical Review Research journal and are supported by grants from the Russian Science Foundation and the German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

This discovery helps solve a long-standing biological mystery of how two-meter long DNA molecules, packed into dense chromosomes, remain mobile enough for vital processes such as turning genes on and off.

Kirill Polovnikov, the lead author of the study and an assistant professor at the Skoltech Neuro Center: “We developed a statistical physical model that shows that the motion of chromosome sections, as long polymer chains, obeys a universal physical law independent of the minute details of their structure. The key to the solution lies in considering not the point-like, but the collective motion of entire DNA segments. It turns out that the ability of a gene on a chromosome to shift as a whole (i.e., the diffusion coefficient of its center of mass) is inversely proportional to the number of letters in its nucleotide sequence. This is a universal principle of polymer chains, valid both in thermodynamic equilibrium and under cellular activity conditions, and is fundamentally linked to Newton’s third law.”