Russian Spy Whale

Russian Spy Whale - Antarctica News Journal

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 […]

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Russia has plans to nuke Earth-bound asteroids, if necessary

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 […]

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The sad state of warehoused children

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, […]

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Scientist Injects Himself With ‘Eternal Life’ Bacteria

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 […]

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The children can’t take it anymore

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 […]

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The sky falls in the land of rumors

meteor shower

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 […]

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