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Chris Knight's avatar

It was one of the most tantalizing mysteries of the Twentieth Century. And had I not been so busy with other things, I would not have missed the announcement about three weeks ago that the last members of Tsar Nicholas II’s family had finally been found…


Nicholas II, the last tsar of Russia, and his family in a photo taken in 1911

Nicholas and his family, along with several faithful servants, were executed by the Bolsheviks in the town of Yekaterinburg on July 17th, 1918, a little over a year after his abdication from the throne. Rumors and legend have persisted over the decades that at least one of the Romanov children survived the slaughter. Most fancifully, it’s been suggested that Nicholas’ only son Alexei and youngest daughter Anastasia had somehow been secretly spared.

In 1991, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, the remains of Nicholas II and most of ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

That’s one helluva carbon footprint …

Near the small town of Darvaz in Uzbekistan is a place that the locals call “The Door to Hell”. Thirty-five years ago some geologists were drilling for natural gas there and hit upon a cavern. Poisonous gas was detected down in the hole, so the excavators ignited it in the hopes that it would “burn off” and clear out the air so that they could explore further.

It’s been burning ever since, non-stop, for more than three decades.

Mash down here for more photos and one scary video clip of “The Door to Hell”.

EDIT 2:28 pm 03/30/2008: Someone noted in the comments that Darvaz is actually located in Turkmenistan, not Uzbekistan. So I stand corrected. But in my own defense, I just took the original website at its word that this was Uzbekistan 🙂...

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One of the biggest achievements in human history took place 50 years ago today on October 4th, 1957. That was the day that the Soviet Union launched Спутник-1, better known to we in the western world as “Sputnik 1” (it means “Co-Traveler 1”), the first artificial satellite to be launched into Earth orbit.

For something about the size of a beach ball, Sputnik raised a hella big furor back in the day, especially for Americans. Cartoons such as the one on the right bemoaned the fact that the Russians could now put something in the sky right over the United States and there wasn’t anything that could be done about it. My personal favorite cartoon from the time was one where a Russian dude is telling an American woman “Who else can give you a moon?” Less than a month later the Soviets triumphed again when they launched Sputnik ...

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Researchers from the University of Bologna in Italy have identified what might be a crater from the Tunguska blast in 1908. The alleged crater is a bowl-shaped lake that seems to be a recent geological feature. There’s evidence of buried rock beneath the lake that could have come from an asteroid or cometary remnant. And a few other details seem to jibe well, too. Very cool stuff if this bears out: the Tunguska event is perhaps the most frustrating natural disaster in modern history, since it was two decades before the Russians were able to send a team out to study the site. We still don’t know what happened that day, ‘cept it was detected as far away as England and it knocked horses plum off their legs for hundreds of miles around....

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