Geography · Science · People · Nature

From June 1937 to February 1938, four Soviet researchers took part in the first expedition in history to the drifting station "North Pole-1"

The station was headed by the geophysicist Ivan Papanin; his team consisted of the meteorologist and geophysicist Yevgeny Fedorov, the radio operator Ernst Krenkel and the hydrobiologist Pyotr Shirshov. The organisation of the whole enterprise was directed by Otto Schmidt, head of the Soviet Arctic Expedition. The members of the

NB! · Archive · Geography · Science · People · Nature

The Meteorologist-Geophysicist Yevgeny Fyodorov Builds a Snow Pavilion for Magnetic Measurements on a Drifting Ice Floe in the Arctic

Archive · Moscow · Observations · Science

The Screen Around Us

The screen around us. A robot converses with visitors at the "Electrification of the USSR" pavilion. Do you know what year it was? 1959. It looks like the future, yet it was sixty years ago. So what is it that surprises us all so much now? Photo from

Geography · Science

This spring, astronomers of the international Event Horizon Telescope project plan to film the first video of a black hole in history, having chosen for the shoot a cosmic object the size of the Solar System with a mass of 6 billion suns

The Event Horizon Telescope is a network of 12 radio telescopes located at different points of the globe, from Antarctica to Spain and Korea. In 2019 the astronomers of this project published the world's first image of the shadow of a black hole

Archaeology · Museums · Science · Palaeontology · Nature

Bones from Alaska long thought to be a mammoth's proved to be whale remains

For more than 70 years, bones in the collection of the University of Alaska Museum of the North were mistaken for the remains of a mammoth. In 1951–1952 the anthropologist Otto Geist found these bones in the interior of Alaska and gave them to the museum, and from then

Archaeology · Faith · Science · People

The Theory of Alexander the Great's Body in Venice and the Fate of His Tomb in Alexandria

There is a theory that the body of Alexander the Great lies in Venice, passing as the relics of Saint Mark. The legend arises from the fact that in the 9th century the Venetians removed the relics of the Evangelist Mark from Alexandria and placed them in St Mark'

Science · Mores · Humour

Mercury is an ingredient of the cosmetic creams “Metamorphosis”, “Celandine”, “Spring” and “Youth”, and of the medicinal ointments “White Mercury” and “Yellow Mercury”

These are not your Granny Agafya's recipes

Sepia drawing of a bearded man at a desk with an open book and a tankard in his hand, with stacks of books and shelves behind him.

Observations · Science · Humour

Karl Marx and the subject of artificial intelligence

The new era differs from the old one chiefly in that the whip begins to imagine it is a genius. Karl Marx on artificial intelligence

Archive · Science · Society · People

Sergey Ivanovich Vavilov inspects the ruins of an astronomical observatory in 1946

Sergey Ivanovich, the younger brother of the geneticist Nikolai Ivanovich, was a physicist and the founder of a school of physical optics. In 1945 he became President of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR and held the post until 1951. Nikolai Vavilov was arrested in 1940 on charges of

Archive · Books · Monarchies · Science · Saint Petersburg

The Russian Tricolour in Carl Allard's 1695 Dutch Book on Shipbuilding and Flags

One of the earliest depictions of the Russian tricolour appears in a Dutch book on shipbuilding and flags of the late seventeenth century, where it is captioned as the Flag of His Tsarist Majesty of Muscovy. The book, «The New Dutch Shipbuilding», which contains essential information on the building of

Observations · Science · Society

Long before the Decembrists were admitted to the canon of the revolution's forerunners, Klyuchevsky called them a historical accident overgrown with literature, and Tyutchev remarked that Russian history was, to his taste, far too perversely arranged…

And now, two hundred years after the Uprising, one has the feeling that there is no longer a place for the Decembrists in the official pantheon, and that they will never again be as revered as they were in the middle of the twentieth century, when they were extolled as

NB! · Science · Society · Ethnography

Putin instructs the Ministry of Science and Higher Education and the Russian Academy of Sciences to draw up and approve a comprehensive programme of research devoted to the all-round ethnographic study of the Russian people

Putin has instructed the Russian Ministry of Science and Higher Education, jointly with the Russian Academy of Sciences, to draw up and approve a comprehensive programme of research devoted to the all-round ethnographic study of the Russian people. The instruction is to be carried out by 1 March 2026.