During the trial of physicist Oleg Kabov, it emerged that the criminal case had been initiated by two of his former students. One of them, after threatening Kabov, joined the FSB (Federal Security Service of Russia), after which the second student filed a denunciation against his former scientific supervisor. It also became clear that the embezzlement case lacked any financial evidence, and that the allegations regarding the falsification of Kabov’s scientific results had been manufactured by FSB officers. The prosecution is demanding a seven-year prison term, a significant fine, and a three-year prohibition on conducting scientific research. The defendant has asked the judge to reopen the investigation. The judge must now decide whether there is sufficient information to deliver a verdict or if the case should be sent back for further investigation.

The sixteenth essay in the series “Creators” is dedicated to Evgenia Maksimovna Hanfmann, an outstanding psychologist, professor at Brandeis University. She was born in St. Petersburg, studied in Germany, worked in the USA, where she made a career in research and psychotherapy. Together with RASA (Russian-American Science Association) T-invariant continues publishing the series of biographical essays “Creators”.

The Novosibirsk prosecutor’s office has come up with such a way of correcting physicist Oleg Kabov, a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The prosecution asked for seven years in a general regime colony , a fine in the amount of his salary for three years, a restriction on leaving his place of residence and a three-year ban on scientific activity.

The ETH Zurich has adopted new security rules that effectively make it impossible for Russian students to enrol in the university’s master’s and doctoral programmes. T-invariant managed to speak to students who have lost the opportunity to study at this prestigious institution and to take comments from the ETH itself.

An international team of scientists analysed 1,371 reports of Gaza war casualties and found that the information circulated by the world’s leading media outlets was falsified. In episode 15 of the Invasion: Science in a Time of War podcast, we speak with the initiator of this study, sociologist Tatiana Glaser.

In November 2024, the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation recognized the International Association of Intellectual Games (IAIG) as an undesirable organization. This absurd, at first glance, decision was preceded by a long history of ethical transformation and split of the once united intellectual community. Today, this confrontation looks like it was caused by a war, and everyone writes about it. However, it is based on deep contradictions and psychological deformations that have been embedded since Soviet times.

on 30 November 2024, the five-year agreement between the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Russian Federation will end. T-invariant recalls how dramatically CERN and Russia have severed their relations over the past years and publishes an interview with a witness to these events – scientist Andrei Seriakov from St Petersburg.

Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin explored carnival and laughter culture in the stagnant years of the late Soviet Union and called such topics “material-bodily bottom. Half a century later, anthropologists held a conference about excrement in St Petersburg entitled Anthropopology: Brown Studies and the Unclean Turn.

St. Petersburg State University was the first Russian university to ban its employees from publishing in international open access journals published by Elsevier. There are good reasons for this: as Elsevier told T-invarinat, the funds received from Russian authors are indeed sent to Ukraine.