The meteor fallout may have stopped, but conspiracy theories are still raining down on Russians, said Alexander Malyshev. The 10-ton rock that screamed through the atmosphere over Chelyabinsk last week was captured on many of the dashboard cameras that are so ubiquitous in Russia to guard against police corruption and document traffic accidents. So there’s lots of footage of the […]
Read more
Kiev is putting Moscow to shame, said Yulia Latynina. Even after riot police beat up protesters last week, 1 million Ukrainians took to the squares to protest their president’s foreign policy. By contrast, Moscow, a city four times as large, could only muster 100,000 people at the peak of the December 2011 protests against fraudulent elections. What makes us different […]
Read more
In Siberia anthrax has been the cause of the death of a 12-year-old boy due to climate change in the area. The unusually warm weather has caused the release of bacteria from some dead animals that were infected with anthrax. The boy who died and 8 others who were sickened were of the nomadic herders who were hospitalized from the […]
Read more
A beluga whale has decided that it doesn’t want to leave a Norwegian port. It has decided that humans are something to play with. Russian Spy Whale On the harness there was an inscription – Property of St. Petersburg. A Russian spy whale? Since beluga don’t usually like being around humans it was very strange to spot this one outside […]
Read more
From 2012 to 2015, Russia researched ways of deflecting Earth-bound asteroids using nuclear weapons and came up with a best-case scenario. The Central Scientific Research Institute of Machine Building, an arm of Russia’s state-run Roscosmos space agency, worked on the asteroid problem with other countries (including the United States) in a program called NEOShield, which was largely funded by the […]
Read more
Russian orphanages are a scandal, said Jennifer Rankin. State institutions house nearly 400,000 children, a population larger than many cities. But less than one third of these children are actually orphans. Many “fall into the system when their parents, often fighting a losing battle with alcohol or drugs,” lose their parental rights. Even more of them—nearly half the total—have disabilities, […]
Read more
For showing a picture of a tube of toothpaste with the words “Squeeze Russia out of yourself” Andrei Bubeyev was arrested and sentenced to over two years in prison. He showed this to twelve of his friends on social media under his private setting and didn’t know that others besides his friends could see the post. Since 2010 there has […]
Read more
Anatoli Brouchkov, a scientist whose curiosity and thirst for knowledge drove him to go beyond the standard protocol of his experimentation by injecting himself with an ancient “Eternal Life” bacteria. In 2009, a 3.5-million-year-old bacteria strain called Bacillus F was discovered deep in the permafrost of Siberia’s Sakha Republic. Scientists later found that mice and fruit flies exposed to the bacteria seemed to […]
Read more
Russian teens are killing themselves en masse, and the authorities “seem oblivious,” said Alexander Tretyakov. The country has long had one of the world’s highest teen suicide rates, and in the past decade it’s gotten worse. Thousands of teens have joined “suicide forums” on Vkontakte, the Russian equivalent of Facebook. There they share stories of abuse and desperation and trade […]
Read more
Moscow No snow: In 2016, Russian health authorities feared that a rare lack of snowfall could cause a wave of depression across the country. It was the warmest December in Russia since 1870, and much of the country didn’t seen a single flake of snow. Winter days are extremely short in Russia, as it’s so far north, and people depend […]
Read more