Vozrozhdeniya Island Vozrozhdeniya Island Vozrozhdeniya Island () was an island in the Aral Sea. The former island's territory is split between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. In 1954, the Soviet Union constructed a biological weapons test site called Aralsk-7 there and on the neighboring Komsomolskiy Island. Vozrozhdeniya was once a small island; it was only in the nineteenth century. However, in the 1960s, the island began to grow in size as the Aral Sea began drying up as the Soviet Union dammed its feeder rivers for agricultural projects. The shrinkage of the Aral continued and accelerated over time. Vozrozhdeniya became a peninsula in mid-2001
Science and technology in Uzbekistan from these contracts have ‘generated USS 680 billion (almost US$ 300 million), providing US$7.8 million in import substitution’, according to the report. One-quarter (26%) of the proposals vetted concerned biotechnologies, 19% new materials, 16% medicine, 15% oil and gas, 13% energy and metallurgy and 12% chemical technologies. In the region, research spending has hovered around the 0.2–0.3% mark for the past decade but, in 2013, Uzbekistan boosted its own commitment to 0.41% of GDP, distancing Kazakhstan on 0.18%. Not to be outdone, Kazakhstan has vowed to raise its own research effort to 1% by 2015, according to the State Programme