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AFP - Jailed Pussy Riot band member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova is on her way to a new penal colony in Siberia, her husband said Tuesday, following fears after two weeks without information about her whereabouts. Tolokonnikova, 23, who alleged major prison abuses in her previous colony in central Russia, is on her way to a new prison colony deep in the Krasnoyarsk region, her husband Pyotr Verzilov wrote on Twitter, saying the information comes from a reliable source. The penal colony number 50 in the town of Nizhny Ingash lies about 300 kilometres (185 miles) from the regional centre Krasnoyarsk, four...

An immigrant living in America sent her daughter home to Novosbirsk in 2011 because she allegedly misbehaved. She tried to commit suicide in Siberia, according to reports from American television company WUSA 9 and publication USA Today that Sib.fm’s correspondent examined. 17-year-old Sofia Roberts was born in Russia, but left to live in America when she was two years old with mother Natalia. According to the broadcaster, in 2011 the mother sent her daughter, then 15, from the town of Chantilly, Virginia to Novosibirsk to meet her biological father. But after Sofia arrived in Russia, her mother changed her plans...

Earthquake off Siberian land mass was the 'largest deep earthquake' ever recorded By The Siberian Times reporter 21 September 2013 Scientists are puzzling to explain the tremor, 8.3 on the Richter scale, by far the largest since records began The quake broke other records, too, as outlines in journal Science. The rupture extended about 180 km, by far the longest known rupture. Picture: Picture: Alexey Yemanov via copah.info The earthquake struck 609 km beneath the Sea of Okhotsk on 24 May this year, and is seen as 30% larger than its nearest rival, a 1994 earthquake 637 km beneath Bolivia,...

August 5, 2013 – SIBERIA - Having an official task to draw up a geological map of the region, a young geologist ended up running into something so unique, outstanding and mysterious that it would still puzzle scientists more than six decades later – the Patomskiy Crater. A host of theories have been put forward in the intervening years: that the crater was created by an ancient civilization, or by prisoners at a top secret Stalin labor camp, or by volcanic activity, or by a meteorite, or by an underground hydrogen explosion, or by a UFO. And even more...

Contrary to their hunting reputation, Stone Age Siberians killed mammoths only every few years when they needed tusks for toolmaking, a new study finds. People living between roughly 33,500 and 31,500 years ago hunted the animals mainly for ivory, say paleontologist Pavel Nikolskiy and archaeologist Vladimir Pitulko of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Hunting could not have driven mammoths to extinction, the researchers report June 5 in the Journal of Archaeological Science. On frigid tundra with few trees, mammoth tusks substituted for wood as a raw material for tools, they propose. Siberian people ate mammoth meat after hunts, but food...

The 1908 explosion over the Tunguska region in Siberia has always been an enigma. While the leading theories of what caused the mid-air explosion are that an asteroid or comet shattered in an airburst event, no reliable trace of such a body has ever been found. But a newly published paper reveals three different potential meteorite fragments found in the sandbars in a body of water in the area, the Khushmo River. While the fragments have all the earmarks of being meteorites from the event – which could potentially solve the 100-year old mystery — the only oddity is that...

Only 40 genes separate your pet dog from a wolf By Roger Highfield, Science Editor (Filed: 22/11/2005) The difference between an obedient, friendly dog and a big bad wolf could be down to as few as 40 genes, according to a study into tameness. The research also found that to adapt to a life on the farm or in the home takes many more changes in gene activity than that required to love humans. A Swedish team compared two groups of farm-raised silver foxes in Siberia, one where for 40 generations the foxes have been selected for their friendly nature,...

A very well-preserved 33,000 year old canine skull from a cave in the Siberian Altai mountains shows some of the earliest evidence of dog domestication ever found. But the specimen raises doubts about early man's loyalty to his new best friend as times got tough. The findings come from a Russian-led international team of archaeologists. The skull, from shortly before the peak of the last ice age, is unlike those of modern dogs or wolves. The study is published in the open access journal Plos One. Although the snout is similar in size to early, fully domesticated Greenland dogs from...

In 1978, Soviet geologists prospecting in the wilds of Siberia discovered a family of six, lost in the taigaSiberian summers do not last long. The snows linger into May, and the cold weather returns again during September, freezing the taiga into a still life awesome in its desolation: endless miles of straggly pine and birch forests scattered with sleeping bears and hungry wolves; steep-sided mountains; white-water rivers that pour in torrents through the valleys; a hundred thousand icy bogs. This forest is the last and greatest of Earth's wildernesses. It stretches from the furthest tip of Russia's arctic regions as...

Photo: Telegraph  REUTERS/Marian StriltsivSpare a thought for people in Russia. Its the coldest winter since 1938. Temperatures may hit -25 in Moscow this weekend. They have already hit -50C in Siberia. Twenty-one people froze to death in one day. (See the Telegraph photo gallery) Down to -50C: Russians freeze to death as strongest-in-decades winter hits Russian TimesRussia is enduring its harshest winter in over 70 years, with temperatures plunging as low as -50 degrees Celsius. Dozens of people have already died, and almost 150 have been hospitalized.­The country has not witnessed such a long cold spell since 1938, meteorologists said,...

Did desperate fishermen cannibalise their friends in extreme cold in remote Siberia? In the most extreme conditions, the unimaginable can happen. Police in Siberia are now trying to piece together a mystery that unfolded after four friends went on a fishing expedition in August in the endless taiga. Three months later, only two men came back from their adventure along the remote Sutam River, after they were located in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia) by a rescue helicopter from the Russian Emergencies Ministry, which saved their lives. Alexander Abdullaev, 37, and Alexei Gradulenko, 35, were found alive - but only just....

'Yeti' Sightings On The Rise In Russia A group of yetis are on the loose in Sibera, fishermen and a forestry worker have claimed. There were three reported sightings in recent weeks. One person who reported spying the beast said “We shouted, ‘Do you need help?’ They rushed away, all in fur, walking on two legs, making their way through the bushes and with two other limbs, straight up the hill. The person who made the report added: “It could not be bears, as the bear walks on all fours, and they ran on two. Then they were gone.” On...

It sounds like a mash-up of Indiana Jones' plots, but German researchers say a heavy Buddha statue brought to Europe by the Nazis was carved from a meteorite that likely fell 10,000 years ago along the Siberia-Mongolia border.

The ancient mummy of a mysterious young woman, known as the Ukok Princess, is finally returning home to the Altai Republic this month. She is to be kept in a special mausoleum at the Republican National Museum in capital Gorno-Altaisk, where eventually she will be displayed in a glass sarcophagus to tourists. For the past 19 years, since her discovery, she was kept mainly at a scientific institute in Novosibirsk, apart from a period in Moscow when her remains were treated by the same scientists who preserve the body of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin. To mark the move 'home', The...

What Caused Argentina's Mystery Craters? By Ben Harder for National Geographic News May 9, 2002 For more than a decade, planetary scientists have been puzzling over a mixed bag of meteorite evidence scarring Argentina's plains. They gradually pieced together clues to reconstruct what seemed to be a rough-hewn but generally accurate account of a prehistoric meteorite impact. A mere 10,000 years ago, scientists deduced in the original theory, a sizable meteorite came hurtling through the atmosphere at a bizarrely low angle, smacked the ground with a glancing blow, and broke into numerous pieces that gouged separate, miles-long scars in the...

The most dramatic cosmic impact in recent history has gathered up almost as many weird explanations as it knocked down trees, writes Duncan Steel. Sooner or later, it was bound to happen. On June 30, 1908, Moscow escaped destruction by three hours and four thousand kilometers — a margin invisibly small by the standards of the universe. So begins Rendezvous with Rama , a 1972 novel by Arthur C. Clarke in which mankind learns the hard way about the dangers posed by incoming asteroids. The 2077 impact in northern Italy that Clarke goes on to describe is fictional: the 1908...

It's bad enough when, every few million years, an asteroid rocks our planet. It's worse if the impact triggers regional or global volcanic activity, which is not only hazardous to nearby plants and animals but can choke Earth's atmosphere with deadly gases for months or years. But there's also a possible bright side, like the birth of nice places like Hawaii. For more than three decades, scientists have explored the question of whether an asteroid impact could cause significant volcanic eruptions, hot spots that spring up out of nowhere and create new landforms or rearrange old ones. The process might...

Astronomers may have solved the puzzle of what it was that brought so much devastation to a remote region of Siberia almost a century ago. The asteroid was probably a pile of space rubble - like Mathilde In the early morning of 30 June, 1908, witnesses told of a gigantic explosion and blinding flash. Thousands of square kilometres of trees were burned and flattened. Scientists have always suspected that an incoming comet or asteroid lay behind the event - but no impact crater was ever discovered and no expedition to the area has ever found any large fragments of an ...

Tuesday, 8 October, 2002, 11:05 GMT 12:05 UK Cash plea for Russian meteor chasers The impact happened in Siberia on Thursday By Dr David Whitehouse BBC News Online science editor Scientists investigating what is believed to be a "significant" fresh meteor crater in a remote part of Siberia are begging for funds to mount an expedition. A British meteorite expert has called on the international scientific community to help Russian scientists get to the impact site, which may be of major scientific importance. It is imperative that US and UK funding bodies to support our Russian colleagues in their investigation...

Russian scientists in bid to solve Tunguska Event Last Updated: 1:18AM BST 02/07/2008 Russian scientists will this week attempt to solve the mystery of a giant explosion 100 years ago that turned night to day across western Europe and flattened a large swathe of Siberia. Trees lay strewn across the Siberian countryside, in 1953, 45 years after an 'unexplained explosion' near Tunguska, Russia A century after reindeer herdsmen saw a column of light that shone with the intensity of the Sun moving across the Siberian dawn sky, the Tunguska Event remains one of the modern era's most abiding scientific riddles....