All talk, no yeti
By Alex Ballingall - Tuesday, October 18, 2011 - 0 Comments
A mountainous region of Siberia plays host to yeti hunters from around the world
Saurabh Das/AP
Everyone from ancient Aboriginal legend-tellers to pimpled camp counsellors have propagated the notion that, deep within the backwoods of the world, beyond the grasp of certain discovery, there dwell hairy humanoid beasts—sometimes called sasquatch; sometimes Bigfoot. For a group of scientists who met this month in a remote Siberian town, the elusive creature is called the yeti.
From Oct. 6 to 8, the town of Tashtagol held an international yeti conference, hosting representatives from countries such as Russia, China, Canada and the U.S. Described by Voice of Russia as anthropologists, geneticists and biologists, the attendees gathered to share “surprising findings, unique photographs and audio recordings” that suggest the apelike animals are real.
The mountainous region where the conference was held has a reputation for yeti sightings. Local authorities have even issued “yeti warnings” out of fears that wildfires might drive the creatures down from the hills in search of food, Der Spiegel reported.
After sharing their evidence, participants were scheduled to embark on an expedition to search nearby caves where sightings have been reported. Want to guess what they found?
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After millennia, bison roam Siberia again
By Nicholas Köhler - Wednesday, February 16, 2011 at 9:52 AM - 2 Comments
An unusual export from Canada ends a 10,000-year bison drought
Photo by Andrey Mukhoplev
In the spring of 2006, wildlife biologists with the Canadian government loaded 30 wood bison calves, 15 males and 15 females, into three modified horse trailers and drove them from Elk Island National Park, in Alberta, to Edmonton International Airport an hour away. There they watched as a crane extended from the bowels of an Ilyushin Il-76, the Russian counterpart to the Lockheed Hercules, and collected the trailers one by one from the tarmac. During the 15-hour flight that followed, the Il-76 was kept a cool 10° C; wood bison grow uncomfortable in heat.
When they reached Yakutsk, capital of the Republic of Sakha—located in northeast Siberia and also called Yakutia—then-president Vyacheslav Shtyrov greeted the wood bison with a retinue of ministers. Alongside him, a crowd of some 200 Yakutians, many in traditional garb, performed dances and serenaded the herd with toyuk—a blessing song. To the visiting Canadians they offered raw horse liver and wood goblets filled with kumis, an alcoholic beverage made from fermented mare’s milk. Sakha newspapers later delighted in running photographs of one Canadian, mid-sip, visibly distressed by the taste of the milk.
Despite the pomp, few in Sakha had ever seen bison, which haven’t lived in Siberia since the steppe bison, an animal twice the wood bison’s size, died out 10,000 years ago. If the Yakutians celebrated the herd’s arrival, Parks Canada employees simply fretted over the transfer. Wood bison, at upwards of 900 kg, are the largest land mammal in North America, and are classified as a threatened species. Yet, five years on, their foray into Siberia has proven a success: the animals, who live on a wildlife preserve, began reproducing a year after their arrival, earlier than expected, and have grown larger than their Alberta cousins thanks, it’s thought, to the Sakha cold.
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Why children are horrifically good soldiers
By macleans.ca - Monday, November 8, 2010 at 10:30 AM - 3 Comments
Plus, Antonia Fraser’s marriage to Harold Pinter, the fakeness of statistics, and Stephen Sondheim
Tim A Hetherington/Panos Pictures
THEY FIGHT LIKE SOLDIERS, THEY DIE LIKE CHILDREN
Roméo DallaireThe former Canadian general and head of the UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, Dallaire has always been brutally open about the horrors he saw there and their effects upon him. Only “constant therapy and an unrelenting regimen of drugs” keep the memories at bay, he writes in his new book. But nothing has managed to soothe the shock Dallaire experienced when he saw preteen killers, armed to the teeth with machetes and rifles, advancing upon him.
In some 30 wars across the world, he notes, hundreds of thousands of child fighters—their ranks endlessly renewed by kidnapping or by scooping up kids orphaned by AIDS, famine or violent conflicts—have become “the ultimate, cheap, expendable, yet sophisticated human weapon.” Children are, in fact, horrifically perfect for the job. They’re small enough to transport easily in large numbers, yet big enough to handle modern lightweight arms, and heavy enough also to set off land mines so adults can safely follow. They have no real sense of fear and, when indoctrinated young enough, their capacity for loyalty and for barbarism exceeds that of adults. The girls—40 per cent of child soldiers—double as sex slaves and, in long-lasting wars, as mothers of the next generation of fighters.
For Dallaire, almost as bad as the war situation he describes with such cold eloquence is the fact that the world seems to be doing little about it. The better to bring home the emotional truth of his subject, he crafted three fictional chapters on the abduction, indoctrination and killing (by a UN peacekeeper) of a child soldier. Dallaire pulls off fiction with considerable skill, but readers who are more interested in solutions will be relieved when he turns to practical suggestions. One in particular would make children far less useful to their adult controllers: a serious effort to stamp out the trade in lightweight weapons.
- BRIAN BETHUNE -
The word from afar
By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, December 2, 2009 at 10:57 AM - 18 Comments
After tabling his economic update over Siberia, the Prime Minister responds to last night’s House vote from Beijing.
“The government of Canada has taken all necessary actions in all instances where there is proof of abuse of Afghan prisoners,” Harper said. “I think the opposition has nothing to do when it is talking about something that happened three years ago.”
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Week in Pictures: October 2nd – October 9th, 2009
By macleans.ca - Friday, October 9, 2009 at 3:03 PM - 0 Comments
The best pictures from the last seven days
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Look out below!
By Kate Lunau - Thursday, June 25, 2009 at 8:40 AM - 1 Comment
A new telescope system will keep watch for killer asteroids from space
In 1908, the skies over Siberia lit up in a sudden and massive explosion: an asteroid, 40 m wide, had entered earth’s atmosphere and was breaking up in a multi-megaton burst. Although the asteroid itself didn’t make it to the ground, the shock wave and massive fireball that resulted destroyed 2,000 sq. km of forest, laying waste to the ground below. The Tunguska Event, as it’s called, took place in a remote area, so no human lives were lost. If the blast happened over Toronto, London or Shanghai, it would be another story.Thousands of asteroids, most of them untracked, swarm around our planet; some are over 10 km wide. “Right now, the most probable amount of warning we’ll have for an asteroid impact is zero, because we don’t know where most of them are,” says Robert Jedicke, 46, a University of Hawaii astronomer originally from Niagara Falls, Ont. Jedicke is part of a team at UH’s Institute for Astronomy that’s working to change that. A new program, called Pan-STARRS, will combine the world’s most powerful asteroid-tracking telescope with the largest digital camera ever built. The first of four planned telescopes is set to begin its full scientific mission any day now. “In the past 200 years, we’ve discovered half a million asteroids,” he says. The first telescope alone “should find a comparable number in a single year.”
