Juan Carlos Alvarado, a young entrepreneur from Medellin, Colombia, claims he makes hundreds of dollars per day selling bottles of air from his home city.

Medellin, Colombia’s second-largest city, is known as the “City of Eternal Spring,” because of its pleasant climate all year round. But you can’t sell climate to someone thousands of miles away, now can you? Air is a whole other matter though, and it’s actually a tried-and-true business model. People have been selling cans of fresh air and bottles of fresh air to people in polluted countries like China for years, and it was actually these success stories that inspired Juan Carlos Alvarado, a native of Medellin, to start his own air-selling business.

Read More »

A Chinese company has sparked controversy online after it was reported that it forces employees to eat raw eggs as punishment for not meeting expectations.

It all started when a second-year university student surnamed Du took to social media to complain about his experience as an intern for a Zhengzhou technology company. He claimed that the said company had a bizarre rule where employees had to swallow raw eggs if they didn’t get enough orders in a set period of time or otherwise failed to meet management expectations. He claimed to have had his internship terminated after he refused to obey the rule, adding that management made him write down “personal reasons” as the reason for ending the internship to absolve the company of any liability.

Read More »

A gang in the Indian state of Bihar somehow managed to run a fake police station out of a hotel for eight months before finally being caught by the actual police.

Cases of fraudsters impersonating police officers and soldiers are not uncommon in India, a country where the fear of and the respect for those in uniform are widespread, but a gang in the town of Banka, Bihar state, took the scam to a whole other level by setting up a fake police station just 500 meters from a real one. Apparently, the scammers operated their fake station out of a local hotel, where they posed as actual officers wearing realistic uniforms, badges and even firearms. They are believed to have scammed hundreds of people, having requested bribes for registering complaints, helping them secure social housing or jobs in the police, or otherwise solving their problems.

  Read More »

The avocado is one of the most energy and resource-intensive plants cultivated around the world, but apparently, you can opt for a more environmentally-friendly alternative called ‘ecovado’.

The popularity of avocados has skyrocketed over the last couple of decades, with the World Economic Forum estimating that about 5 billion kilograms of avocados are consumed annually around the world. However, this significant increase in demand has come at a huge cost for the environment. Forests have been cut down to make room for avocado plantations, and water sources have been sucked dry by what is widely considered one of the most unsustainable crops. It was this worrying development that inspired the creation of the ‘evocado’, a more sustainable avocado alternative.

Read More »

Roberto Gabriel Trigo, are tired football player from Paraguay, is probably the only man alive who can say that he shot down a small plane with a football.

The legend of the football kick that brought down a plane has been doing the rounds through the locker rooms of Paraguayan football clubs for six decades. Some say it happened during an official game, others that it was during a practice, but they all credit the same man – Roberto Gabriel Trigo. He was 17 years old at the time and playing as a right back for the now-defunct General Genes football club of Asuncion. Annoyed by a small plane flying low over the local football field, Trigo allegedly kicked the ball outwards, hitting the aircraft’s engine and causing it to crash in an open field, just 200 meters away.

Read More »

Family Mart, Japan’s second-largest convenience store chain, recently started using AI-powered robots to restock shelves, as a way to deal with the country’s fast-shrinking workforce.

The decline in labor population is one of the biggest threats to businesses operating in Japan, and some have already started looking for ways to replace human workers. Case in point, major convenience store chain Family Mart, a company has recently teamed up with Tokyo-based robotics company Telexistence to introduce AI-powered robots in hundreds of its stores across the country. The new “employees” will be in charge of replenishing drinks in refrigerators and are expected to make human workers’ jobs easier and, in some cases, replace them completely.

Read More »

Unable to access his own savings, a Lebanese man recently decided to hold bank staff at gunpoint until management agreed to at least give him enough money to pay his father’s medical bills.

Lebanon’s devastating financial crisis was brought into focus this month by a very unusual story. Bassam al-Sheikh Hussein, a 41-year-old man from Beirut, was recently hailed as a hero after entering a branch of the Federal Bank in the capital city’s Hamra district and taking the staff hostage in order to coerce them into letting him withdraw his own savings. The stand-off ended peacefully after seven hours, and Hussein was allowed to withdraw $35,000 of the $210,000 in his bank account, which he claimed to need to pay his father’s hospital bills.

Read More »

An elderly couple in Germany has taken their next-door neighbors to court over a very active rooster that allegedly crows about 200 times a day, making it impossible for them to rest.

76-year-old Friedrich-Wilhelm and his wife Jutta, a couple from Bad Salzuflen, in Western Germany, claim that they haven’t had a quiet day at home in a long time, all because of Magda, their neighbors’ rooster. The domestic bird allegedly starts crowing every day at around 8 am, and doesn’t stop until sundown, when the owners lock it up with their other chicken. After years of trying to reason with their neighbors about Magda, Friedrich and Jutta have taken them to court in order to resolve the matter.

Read More »

A young Chinese woman allegedly quit her job of five years after being disappointed that only one of the seventy coworkers she invited to her wedding actually attended.

Chinese news outlet ETtoday recently featured the unusual story of a young woman who took to social media to complain about being humiliated by her coworkers on the happiest day of her life. The unknown woman had reportedly been working for the same company for five years and felt that she had a good relationship with her coworkers. She had attended the weddings of a third of her 70 colleagues, so when she decided to tie the knot, she was convinced that most of them would want to be there on her big day…

Read More »

A South Korean civil court recently ordered a 31-year-old man to pay his ex-girlfriend 1.5 million won ($1,150) as damages for urinating in her designer handbag.

This bizarre story dates back to last October, when the defendant in this case, a 31-year-old man from Seoul, South Korea, whose identity has not been revealed, for privacy purposes, allegedly got into an argument with his girlfriend at the time. The two were at the girlfriend’s house in Gangnam-gu, and somehow started fighting about the amounts of money the woman was spending and the debts she was racking up. At one point, the man allegedly went into the bedroom, brought out one of his girlfriend’s Louis Vuitton handbags, unbuttoned his pants, and started urinating in it right there in front of her. She didn’t like that very much, so she filed a complaint against him with the police.

Read More »

A couple of septuagenarians from India’s Rajasthan state recently welcomed their first baby after 54 years of marriage, which makes them one of the oldest couples in history to ever have a baby.

75-year-old Gopichand and his 70-year-old wife Chandravati, had long been trying to have a baby, but their dream never came true. For years they visited countless hospitals and clinics, undergoing various treatments and procedures, but nothing worked. About a year and a half ago, the husband approached an in-vitro fertility clinic in Alwar about the possibility of his wife finally becoming pregnant. The woman’s advanced age was a concern, but there had been previous success stories, like that of Jivuben Valabhai Rabari, another 70-year-old woman from rural Gujarat, who last year made news headlines when she delivered a healthy baby. After two failed IVF procedures,  Chandravati finally became pregnant, and recently welcomed a healthy baby boy.

Read More »

Kubota Glass, an allegedly revolutionary pair of glasses capable of curing people of myopia, aka nearsightedness, has recently gone on sale in Japan for a whopping $5,700.

We originally wrote about Kubota Glass in January of 2021, when Kubota Pharmaceutical first announced that it had come up with a non-invasive way of reversing the effects of an ophthalmological condition expected to affect half of the world’s population by 2050. Myopia, or nearsightedness, is an eye disorder where light focuses in front of, instead of on, the retina, making objects in the distance appear blurry, while close ones appear normal. Apart from genetic factors, myopia has been associated with environmental causes, such as the lack of exposure to normal visual stimuli normally found outdoors, in daylight conditions. With so many of us spending more and more time indoors in front of our TVs, monitors and computer screens, it’s no wonder that myopia cases are increasing at an alarming rate.

Read More »

A 15-year-old girl in India allegedly came up with a bizarre way of proving her love to her HIV-positive boyfriend – injecting herself with his blood.

Ah, the things we do for love… Are sometimes pretty darn stupid and dangerous. Take this bizarre story for a teenage girl from India’s Assam state, who apparently decided to show her boyfriend how much she loved him by injecting herself with his blood, knowing full well that he was HIV-positive. News of this unusual show of affection shocked not only the 15-year-old’s family, but the entire nation, with articles going viral on social media over the last week.

Read More »

A Chinese woman recently took a work colleague to court, after they allegedly broke three of her ribs by hugging her too hard.

This bizarre story started back in May of 2021, when the plaintiff, a woman from Yueyang city, in China’s Hunan province, was chatting with a colleague at her workplace. At one point, a male co-worker came over and greeted her with a hug, which allegedly caused her to scream in pain. The man had apparently hugged her so hard that she continued feeling pain in her chest even after leaving work, but she didn’t seek medical help right away preferring to rub some hot oil on her chest and go to bed instead.

Read More »

Cymothoa exigua, popularly known as the tongue-eating louse, is a parasitic isopod that attaches itself to the tongue of its fish host, severs circulation, causing the organ to necrose and fall off, and then becomes the new tongue.

We’ve covered a bunch of terrifying parasites on Oddity Central, but few can hold a candle to the tongue-eating louse in terms of creepiness. This critter is one of the few that actually does the phrase “what nightmares are made of” justice. It enters fish through the gills, attaching to them until it matures, at which point it changes sex from male to female. Once this process is complete, the parasite starts to make its way to the fish’s mouth, where it attaches itself to its tongue using its incredibly powerful legs. It then pierces the host’s tongue with its strong bite and begins to suck the blood out of it. The blood vessels can’t keep up with their appetite, and the tongue eventually withers and detaches from the fish.

Read More »