How did universities stop being spaces of freedom, politics turn into hatred, and art become a lifestyle? Why has everyone suddenly become obsessed with postcolonial studies, and what is AI still incapable of? And why, amid such tectonic shifts, write books about Ancient Greece? T-Invariant spoke with Mikhail Yampolsky, recipient of the George Gamow Award founded by the Russian American Science Association (RASA-America).

November 15–16, 2025, in New Jersey, the Gamow Prize ceremony, established by RASA, will take place. One of this year’s laureates is Professor of Chemistry at the University of Southern California, Anna Krylov. In October, she announced a boycott of the Nature Publishing Group, refusing to peer-review a manuscript for the journal Nature Communications — due to disagreement with the policy of promoting the social justice agenda. T-invariant spoke with Anna Krylov about why politics has no place in science, what scientists can be canceled for, and how to resist scientific censorship.

Laboratory-grown skin grafts are already part of the medical toolkit. However, a project from Tel Aviv University, supported by Zimin Institutes, promises a breakthrough in near-authentic skin transplant: dense, elastic, and multi-layered. In experimental mice, hair even grows at the burn site. T-Invariant explores how this technology was developed and how close it is to clinical application.

The Innopraktika Foundation of Vladimir Putin’s daughter, Katerina Tikhonova, has made a number of statements about its readiness to gather development institutions into “one perimeter”. The public speaker to promote these initiatives was Tikhonova’s friend Natalia Popova, a former photo model and now the first deputy general director of Innopraktika. Over the past few years, Popova has been lobbying for Innopraktika’s interests in Africa and the BRICS countries, and probably wants to continue the reform of development institutions that began in 2020 but was interrupted.

The Russian-American Association of Scholars has announced the names of the winners of the prize, which is awarded to members of the Russian-speaking scientific diaspora. This year they were Professor Ekaterina Zhuravskaya of the Paris School of Economics and Professor Vladimir Vapnik of Columbia University.

Aucune tolérance envers le régime de Poutine ! Un appel d’universitaires du monde entier

In Togliatti, in the local special economic zone (SEZ), they can build another plant for the assembly of Iranian combat drones. There is no official information about this and in words the plans are purely peaceful. The EFKO group of companies, the founder of enterprises producing drones in Tolyatti, pretends that it has nothing to do with the plant. T-invariant looks at how this big business moved from projects with GM and Volkswagen to assembling deadly machines for the war in Ukraine.

How do Russian-speaking scientists work in America today during the war in Ukraine? Why is it important to maintain contact with colleagues from the countries of the former USSR? What awaits Russian science after Putin? We talked about these and other topics with Igor Efimov, professor of biomedical engineering and medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago, first president of RASA.

The Special Economic Zone (SEZ) “Alabuga”, which has already hit the pages of all the world’s media this year with a series of high-profile scandals, this time swung at the solar system and acted as a collective Ostap Bender for all the money – namely 491 trillion rubles . Leading Russian astrophysicists responded by recalling the gravitsappa on the Yubileiny satellite (a loud anti-scientific failure of Roscosmos from 2008).