‘Militsioner’ (what a policeman was called in the USSR and up until 2010) is a new indie game from Russian studio Tallboys, unveiled on Steam in July 2020. “Escape from the Giant Policeman before he catches you in this first-person open-sandbox game set in a mysterious world,” reads the project’s Steam page. The location is …
New game features AI-driven Soviet-era policeman “with a precise moral compass” Read More
With COVID-19 wreaking havoc with transportation worldwide, a Russian entrepreneur, Denis Sverdlov, has proposed innovative, and eco-friendly, solutions for our transit crisis. Sverdlov is the founder of the British-based company Arrival. Already the talk of the town in the electric-vehicle business, the firm has designed public transport buses, that not only promise to lower our …
Russian entrepreneur brings social distancing to bus transportation Read More
The Artemy Lebedev design studio created a neural network capable of creating its own designer logos. The AI was being developed in strict secrecy by a team of computer wizards working in isolation. The artificial intelligence itself was only known to the rest of the design bureau as ‘Nikolay Ironov’ – a pretty ordinary Russian …
How a Russian AI ‘graphic designer’ fooled the world for an entire year Read More
Russian state defense conglomerate Rostec has begun the pilot production of a new antivirus suit that aims to protect from any biological threats. The 500-gram costume is made from durable, membranous material and covers the body from head to toe. The suit can additionally be supplemented with gloves and a respirator. According to the company’s official website, …
Russian defense firm develops a new antivirus suit Read More
Since late 2019, Russian Orthodox priests have been spotted actively using TikTok, with some videos gathering over 500,000 views. A number of users of the new social network are unhappy with their presence, but the clergymen appear resolute about TikTok being the future for reaching young people. The first popular Orthodox Christian channel on TikTok …
What are Russian Orthodox priests doing on TikTok? Read More
Dymka the cat from Russia’s Siberian city of Novosibirsk tragically got all four paws and tail frostbitten and was rushed to a veterinarian clinic. Doctors knew they had to amputate all the damaged limbs – and usually stray animals are put down in such circumstances. However, local vet Sergei Gorshkov is not one to give …
Private banks and credit cards appeared in Russia relatively recently – in the early 1990s after the collapse of the USSR. The local banking system developed from scratch, and didn’t have to depend on old software solutions, thus avoiding many of the intermediate development stages that more advanced economies had to go through. As a …
10 Russian online banking features that you probably don’t have Read More
LED lamps brightened up our lives not too long ago as a more efficient alternative to the old-school incandescent lamps. Yet it already seems they’ve got a new competitor. Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT or ‘Phystech’) and Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences came up with a prototype …
Better than LEDs: Russian researchers have designed a revolutionary ‘eternal’ lamp Read More
Yandex, Russia’s biggest Internet company, has released an online game that invites players to guess where photos were taken. The images are taken from a database of photos uploaded by users to the Yandex.Maps app (similar to Google Maps). The human players compete against the specially trained neural network Alice, which is already used as …
It’s Sunday evening in Moscow, late January 2019. A nondescript fair-haired man is walking through the Tretyakov Gallery. All of a sudden, he approaches a picture, looks at it carefully, removes it from the wall, and calmly walks off with it under his arm in front of dozens of visitors. No one bats an eyelid. …
Are you safe from Big Brother’s prying eye in Moscow? Read More
Many people first heard about ToSky on June 2, 2019, when the company launched a toy Lada into space with a figure of Dmitry Rogozin, general director of the Russian State Space Corporation (Roscosmos), inside. To do so, the startup from Tomsk (3,000 east of Moscow) used an aerostat, basically a high-altitude balloon. But Nikita …
Siberian school-leaver launches pizza into space and chats with Elon Musk Read More
In March 2018, the users or Yandex, Russia’s most popular search engine, noticed a peculiar feature: if you typed “govno” – Russian for “sh*t” – in the Yandex.Maps search (who does that?!) the first address Yandex gives you is Moscow, Balchug Street, 7 – the headquarters of Google Inc. in Russia. Hours later Yandex explained …
Facebook and Google’s Russian rivals: Why are they winning? Read More
