An online International Natural Sciences Tournament ("TEN") was held November 13th through November 15th. It is a team competition between students of universities of the CIS countries solving the beforehand-published scientific problems in the fields of physics, chemistry and biology, medicine, and engineering.
Twelve teams took part in the tournament. The "Young's Modulus" team («Модуль Юнга»), a joint team of South Ural State University and Chelyabinsk State University, was representing our university under the guidance of Aleksey Popov, an assistant of the Department of Technical Mechanics (Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, Institute of Engineering and Technology). The team members included Aleksandr Gorobets (Faculty of Physics, Institute of Natural Sciences and Mathematics), Olga Borodina (Faculty of Chemistry, Institute of Natural Sciences and Mathematics), and Elizaveta Orlova (Chelyabinsk State University).
The teams were given 48 hours to solve research problems. The participants were asked to solve urgent scientific problems: the creation of test systems to identify tooth decay at home, the improvement of the technology for creating a model of the lunar soil, the modernization of protective masks to improve their efficiency, and the engineering of self-replicating nanorobots.
The tournament was held in two stages: at the first stage, our team competed with the team of Moscow Pedagogical State University and presented their vision of the task of improving masks to determine their exact service life. During the final second stage, the team competed to become the "best" one against three very strong teams: a joint Tomsk Polytechnic University and Lomonosov Moscow State University for Fine Chemical Technologies team, a joint SkolTech and Belarusian State University team, and a Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (Ukraine) and the Aix-Marseille University (France) team.
According to the results of the final stage, the Young’s Modulus team took the 1st place in the tournament with a wide margin of 1.5 points from the team of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (Ukraine) and Aix-Marseille University (France), and was invited to the in-person tournament in 2021.