Residents of a housing estate outside Moscow are cooking food on portable stoves after their energy provider switched off electricity citing nonpayment. Turns out the head of their homeowners association is running a huge bitcoin mine in the garage.
A journalist has set up the first local radio station in the remote village of Suusamyr, in the Chuy region of Kyrgyzstan. The station is run mostly by volunteers, and combines reports on lost cows with music and sports.
There are few roads through the swampy tundra in western Siberia, so one resident is trying to build a tiny float plane that ordinary people can afford.
Akhshar Varziyev used old mining machinery to turn the power of a mountain river into electricity for his village.
Yury Dromashko got into bitcoin mining when he was going through tough times a few years ago. Now he runs one of the largest cryptocurrency-producing operations in Russia.
In Russia’s northeastern Sakha-Yakutia region, nearly 8,470 kilometers east of Moscow, ice both provides a living and makes for a daunting barrier. The region’s supply corridor, the Lena River, is iced over for six months a year. That means that workers need to know how to cut through thick ice in winter to repair ships for the spring. Unknown Russia traveled to the town of Zhatay to learn how it is done.
Unknown Russia travels to Nizhny Arkhyz, high in the Caucasus Mountains, to see Ratan-600, the world's largest radio telescope, and BTA-6, a gigantic optical telescope considered a scientific marvel. The Soviet-era astrophysical observatory that contains the two telescopes supplies most of Russia's information about optical and radio astronomy, according to the Russian Academy of Sciences, but, today, struggles to overcome financial constraints.
