According to the fresh news from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory there is a chance that four pieces of hardware from a spacecraft that the Soviet Union landed on Mars in 1971 appear in images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Meet Irina Olkhovskaya, one of Playboy's 55th anniversary cover models. But she isn't just some has-been bunny, she's a car show host.

The MiG-15 dominated the skies when made its debut in the Korean war. One of the USSR's first successful swept-wing aircraft it has since become the most-built jet of all time. Our friends at Oobject have assembled the most soaring monuments to the Soviet's favorite fighter.

Today is International Women's Day, and yesterday was the birthday of Valentina Tereshkova. It's ok to admit you don't know who that is. Despite beating Sally K. Ride (and many men) into space by 20 years, Tereshkova and her comrade Svetlana Savitskaya are probably most notably remembered in a souvenir apron bearing…

We'd all love an obsessively detailed 1:18 scale Volvo 240 coupe on our desks, of course, but no collection of automotive tchotchkes is complete without some Soviet iron!

Saturday morning, the competitors of the Mutually Assured Destruction of Omaha 24 Hours of LeMons race had just entered the track for transponder testing laps when this hunk of vintage Soviet iron came screaming by at low altitude.

Once again, English Russia comes through with a great car photo.

Alex Severinsky, a Soviet emigrant who began his career developing antitank-warfare instrumentation, patented a system for powering gas-electric hybrids in 1994. Toyota used his system for the Prius without permission or payment. Until this week.

In the U.S.S.R. the winters are cold and the cars are strange. Here's your best choices for the ten most awesome and strange cars the collective ever produced.

Let's say you could go back to the early 1950s and snag a super-futuristic prototype automobile as your 2009 daily driver. Which side of the Iron Curtain would you choose?