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Stories of a species of "wild man" have been coming out of Central Asia and Mongolia for years.Similar in concept to Bigfoot or the Yeti, the "Alma" or "Almasty" is said to be a large hairy hominid that lives in the wilderness. What makes this particular legend different to the others however is the fact that while the more well-known cryptids are speculated to be an unknown species of large ape, the Almasty is thought to more closely resemble Neanderthal man. While it seems unlikely, could there be a surviving pocket ofMesolithic hunter-gatherers living in the wilds of Russia ?One particularly intriguing encounter is said to have occurred in 1944 when a group of men patrolling on horseback came upon a huge bipedal creature which shot away from them at an incredible pace.

They later cornered it at a nearby cabin in an effort to capture it but it charged and escaped, leaving the men scrambling to safety. The identity of the mysterious assailant was never determined. Nick Redfern: Across what used to be Soviet Central Asia, as far west as what are parts of Europe, and as far east asMongolia, reports have long proliferated of hairy creatures known as Almas or Almasty that seem to be far more akin to men than they do apes; although they reputedly demonstrate clear and undeniable characteristics of both.  

View: Full article |  Source: Mania.com  

Despite recent setbacks, a reform of the Russian space agency will see a large output increase by 2020.Russia"s space endeavors have met with a slew of setbacks recently including a failed Mars probe and a botched telecoms satellite launch. To combat these errors, a new state program has been released detailing efforts to increase space industry development and obtain a 16-percent sharein the space technology market by 2020.The projects listed in the reform include the construction of Russia"s new Angara launch vehicle, development of the Vostochny space port and improvements to the Glonass satellite navigation system.

The overall price tag of the new program is thought to be as much as $69 billion with hopes for additional contributions from private investors in the not-too-distant future. An ongoing reform ofRussia’s ailing space industry should double its output by 2020, according to a new state program published on Saturday.  

View: Full article |  Source: Rian.ru  

Scientists now believe that they may have got the backbones of some early animals back-to-front.The remarkable revelation not only means that the textbooks will need to be rewritten but that there is clearly still much to learn about some of the earliest quadrupedal species. New 3D models of the first four-legged animals known as tetrapods have now corrected the inaccurate depictions by turning several of thevertebrae the opposite way around.The resulting models could help researchers learn not only about these early species but about how the spine evolved over time.

"Their vertebrae are actually structurally completely different from what everyone for the last 150 or so years has pictured," said Prof John Hutchinson of the Royal Veterinary College. "The textbook examples turn out to be wrong." Textbooks might have to be re-written when it comes to some of theearliest creatures, a study suggests. Researchers have found that our understanding of the anatomy of the first four-legged animals is wrong.  

View: Full article |  Source: BBC News  

Viking settlements in Greenland persisted for over 500 years, so why did they decide to leave ?It"s a question that has puzzled researchers for years. For several centuries the descendants of the Vikings etched out a living in settlements across Greenland only to pack up and abandon the country at the end of the 15th century. Some believe that disease and starvation may have pushed the settlers in to returning to their ancestral homes, but research in to what they left behind has shown that they would havehad plenty to eat, switching to hunting seals when the Medieval Warm Period had come to an end.Instead it is now believed that economic issues and isolation may have been the deciding factors in their return to Scandinavia.

Increasingly cut off from their ancestral homes and finding it more and more difficult to attract traders, circumstances would have eventually become sufficiently intolerable to make returning to their homelands the only viable option. For years, researchers have puzzled over why Viking descendents abandoned Greenland in the late15th century. But archaeologists now believe that economic and identity issues, rather than starvation and disease, drove them back to their ancestral homes.  

View: Full article |  Source: Spiegel.de