A scientific session of the Division of General Physics and Astronomy of the Russian Academy of Sciences was held on April 23, 1997 at the P L Kapitza Institute for Physical Problems. The following reports were presented at the session: (1) Simonov V I (Institute of Crystallography, RAS, Moscow) ’Structural investigation of single crystals and the structure-properties correlation’; (2) Fridman A M (Institute for Astronomy, RAS, Moscow) ’Giant curls in galaxies’; (3) Balaev A D, Val’kov V V, Gavrichkov V A, Ivanova N B, Ovchinnikov S G, Chernov V K (Kirenskii Institute of Physics, RAS, Krasnoyarsk) ’Quantum oscillations of resistance and magnetization in magnetic semiconductors and semimetals; (4) Brazhkin V V, Lyapin A G, Popova S V, Voloshin R N (Institute of High Pressure Physics, RAS, Troitsk, Moscow Region), Lyapin S G (Institute of High Pressure Physics and University of Oxford, Clarendon Laboratory, Oxford), Klyuev Yu A, Naletov A M (All-Russia Scientific-Research Institute of Diamonds), Mel’nik N N (P N Lebedev Physics Institute, RAS, Moscow) ’New crystalline and amorphous carbon modifications produced from fullerite at high pressure’; (5) Ragul’skii V V (Institute for Mechanical Problems, RAS, Moscow) ’An experimental study of the optical isotropy of space’; (6) Kravtsov A V, Komberg B V, Lukash V N (Astro-Space Centre of the P N Lebedev Physics Institute, RAS, Moscow) ’Large-scale structure of the Universe and quasars’. Summaries of the four (1, 3, 4, 5) reports are given below.