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In 1971 , Russia put the first lander on Mars that survived its touchdown on the Red Planet, as Mars 3 was able to transmit data back from Mars to Earth -- for a grand total of nearly 15 seconds. After that amazing quarter of a minute, Mars 3 went dark for unknown reasons, and was never heard from again, becoming lost to the annals of space exploration. Now, though, a group of Russian Mars enthusiasts working with recent photos from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter think they've found the wreckage of the long lost lander.

The golden age of the American space program was all about beating Russia to important milestones. There's no longer that sense of competition based around our efforts in space. That's good, because we're about to get crushed. Vladimir Putin announced that the Russian government is putting $52 billion dollars into its space program and giving the program its own ministry. If you're curious, NASA's proposed budget for 2014 is only $17.7 billion.

There's an old rule of journalism that states, and I'm paraphrasing, "if a dog bites a man it's not a story, but if a man bites a dog, it is." This proverb may have found it's perfect expression (well, short of a man biting a dog, I guess) in a story coming out of Russia this week: While it is not necessarily a story if a man tries to blow up his ex-wife with a bomb, it's pretty newsworthy if he tries to blow her up with a bomb to win her back. Rarely has an idea on how to do a thing been so perfectly, woefully incorrect.

Some people hear an idea and then just can't get it out of their heads. That's apparently what happened to an unidentified Siberian man who read a magazine story explaining that it would be possible to dig a tunnel to an oil pipeline and siphon off the crude oil that flowed from it. After three years of work, the 52-year-old has been arrested for proving that yes, it is possible to do exactly that. As with many things that are possible, though, it's not exactly advisable.

Today in "Totally Reasonable Ransoms" news, a Russian man armed with a handgun and explosives took four people hostage on a college campus. In return for the continued safety of his captives, he had some pretty simple, if slightly confusing, conditions. It turns out, the hostage taker just needed a good meal, demanding only a pizza and a Sprite from police. Which is really shooting rather low, if you ask us. Dude could have gotten a helicopter!

It turns out last week's announcement of a new form of bacterial life discovered in Antarctica's Lake Vostok may have been a touch on the premature side. This weekend, the head of the lab that made the announcement walked back the comments of one of his employees, clarifying that rather than new forms of never-before-seen bacterial life, the Vostok samples had actually yielded contaminated specimens and nothing else, which, frankly, is much less exciting news.

Russian researchers working on samples from Lake Vostok -- a subglacial lake in Antarctica sealed away for eons by more than two miles of ice -- say they have found signs of a wholly new kind of bacterial life in water samples taken from the lake. It's a pretty impressive claim, if true, and one could quiet concerns raised late last year the lake may have been entirely devoid of life -- not to mention meaning new chapters in microbiology textbooks. Now we just have to wait and see if this bold announcement holds water.

Now that the dust has settled from last Friday's spectacular meteorite explosion over Russia, the facts are slowly coming in about just how big the explosion really was, and it's turning out to be a bigger blast than pretty much anyone initially suspected. According to an assessment released today by the European Space Agency (ESA), the meteorite that fell to Earth in Russia's Chelyabinsk region and injured nearly 1,000 people could have done much worse, as it exploded with the force of 30 atomic bombs. Keep reading for the full breakdown and another look at the unprecedented blast.

Stories are still coming in from the affected region, but we're keeping up as best we can with this quickly developing story, and we'll be updating all right here all day. To the burning question on most folks' minds, no, it doesn't appear the meteor that wreaked havoc in Russia earlier today had any connection to Asteroid DA14, which is due to make its closest pass of Earth later this afternoon. That's according to the European Space Agency. More details below as we get them.

So, Russia sure had an exciting morning, as a meteor zipping towards Earth shattered in the air over the nation's Chelyabinsk region, injuring hundreds of people and shattering windows, blowing the doors off of buildings and collapsing roofs. Thanks to the magic of omnipresent phone and dashboard cameras, lots of folks captured the meteor's flight -- and it's explosion an estimated 18 and 32 miles above the Earth's surface, which devastated the area -- and you can watch some of the amazing videos below.

Remember that sharply dressed monkey gallivanting about a Canadian IKEA, putting employees and store patrons on edge? Course you do, how can anyone not remember something as poignant as that? Well, in an obvious push to dethrone North America as the world's preeminent purveyor and manufacturer for viral and productivity-killing videos, Russia has presented its own version of the aforementioned primate in a coat. As much as it pains us to admit this, Mother Russia's snow-loving simian might just exceed the IKEA monkey in the lose-your-mind-over-the-unbridled-cuteness department. Honestly, how do you expect the IKEA monkey to compete with a tail warmer and monkey-sized scarf?

After years of failure, a team of Russian researchers and engineers working in Antarctica have succeeded in taking a clean sample of water from Lake Vostok, a liquid water lake sealed beneath two miles of ice sheets at the bottom of the world. Scientists hope that this first untainted sample of the water -- which has been largely untouched by the outside world since prehistory -- will provide them with new insights into some of Earth's earliest lifeforms.

What's a man to do when he finds himself with nearly half a ton of spare cattle feces and a few hours on his hands? If you're Siberian cattle farmer Mikhail Bopposov, the answer is clear -- craft, mold, and sculpt that dung into a cobra-shaped pooh statue to entertain the children in your village during the long Siberian winter. You read that right -- while it would be a  bizarre and troubling religious icon pretty much anywhere else on the planet, in Siberia, a 900-pound-snake hewn from frozen cow dung counts as a toy, verifying that Siberia is exactly the place that we all think it is.

It's one of those things you've seen thousands of times, but never knew there was a proper name for it. Case in point: Those oversized balls of transparent plastic you see people tumbling around in is a part of a sport known as "zorbing." When proper precautions are taken, zorbing can actually be a lot of fun and makes rolling down a hill all the more enjoyable. As previously stated, safety measures need to be considered for the seemingly innocuous activity since the momentum of the zorb is dependent on the slope of the incline, meaning that the steeper it is, the more likely you're going to roll away with a dangerous lack of control. Recently at Russia's Dombai ski resort, such an oversight led to a zorb careening down the nearby mountainside, turning what was supposed to be a fun day out to one rife with tragedy.

It's not unusual to hear people claim they'll leave the country if a candidate they don't like gets elected, or a policy they disagree with gets passed. Usually that's just talk though, but when Gérard Depardieu said he would leave France because he thought he was being taxed too highly, he meant it. He fled to Belgium last month, and has today been granted Russian citizenship. I wonder if this will affect the chances of a sequel to 1994's My Father the Hero.