The ancient ruins of Baiae, near the modern city of Bacoli, in Italy are home to a botanical oddity known as the upside-down fig tree.

Looking at the tenacious tree growing out of the ceiling of an ancient Roman archway, it’s easy to see why it’s called the upside-down tree. It is literally inverted, growing toward the ground, which is quite rare. No one knows exactly how the fig tree ended up there, or how long it has been growing for, but one thing is for sure –  despite its bizarre location, the fig tree if Baia is growing stronger every year, and sometimes it even bears fruit.

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A Russian man was recently arrested after allegedly being tricked into throwing a Molotov Cocktail in a Moscow bank by scammers who also relieved him of his life savings.

A few days ago, Moscow police arrested a 48-year-old man from Ruza, a town in the Moscow region of Russia, for allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail in a Sberbank branch in the Russian capital. Bank employees were able to put out the flames before the firefighters arrived on the scene and police quickly identified and detained the perpetrator. But this was far from an open-shut case; the more the suspect tried to explain, the crazier his story got, and by the end, investigators didn’t know whether to throw the book at the guy or just feel sorry for him…

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A young dog believed to have been abandoned in the Nevada Desert as a puppy was recently rescued after spending at least six months as part of a coyote pack.

The people of Inspirada, a suburban neighborhood of Henderson, Nevada are used to seeing packs of coyotes running through the streets at night, but for the past couple of months, many of them have been reporting something strange. Apparently, a white dog was running with a pack of these wild predators, scavenging for food, playing in the moonlight and running away as soon as someone tried to approach him. Some called him the Coyote Dog, but he became more famous as Ghost, both for his white coat and his ability to disappear as soon as someone tried to catch him.

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MSCHF, an art collective specializing in unique and controversial products, has announced a new perfume inspired by the world’s most popular lubricant spray – WD40.

The versatility of WD40 is the stuff of legend. You can use it as a water displacer, to loosen nuts and bolts, fix squeaky hinges, prevent rust and keep mechanisms lubricated. The manufacturer of this legendary product lists over 2,000 applications for it, but body perfume is sadly not among them. In fact, the company specifically warns against applying their WD40 lubricant on the skin, but if you like the way it smells that much, you no longer need to risk your health, because the WD perfume is finally here!

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A California pest control company recently reported one of the most unusual cases it has ever worked on – a woodpecker filling the walls of a house with over 700 lbs (317 kg) of acorns.

Nick Castro of Nick’s Extreme Pest Control, a pest control company in California, thought he had seen it all in his 20+ years in the business, but even he was shocked by one of his most recent finds. Last month, Castro was commissioned by a California family to fix the “work” of a persistent woodpecker that kept pecking holes in the outer walls of their house and filling them with acorns. The woodpecker didn’t account for the empty space between the wall layers, so the acorns he kept bringing in didn’t stay put; instead, they fell to the bottom of the walls and eventually started coming out of various orifices inside. Nick knew he would find a few acorns if he searched well enough, but nowhere near the massive pile he ended up with…

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A Chinese man was shocked to find two human teeth embedded in his face days after accidentally colliding with another person during a basketball game.

The unnamed man was reportedly back in his home city of Dongguan, China’s Guangdong Province, for the Lunar New Year, when he was invited to a basketball game by some childhood friends. At one point while trying to recover a rebound, the man collided with another player; at first, he thought the man’s chin had hit the left side of his head, right above the eye, but then he saw the other guy bleeding from his mouth and saying that he had lost two of his teeth. While he went to wash the blood pouring from his wound, everyone else was busy looking for the other player’s teeth, but they were nowhere to be found…

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A young German woman stands accused of premeditated murder after allegedly seeking out a doppelganger on social media and then brutally killing her in order to stage her own death.

When police in Ingolstadt, Germany’s Bavaria region, received calls about a dead woman in the car abandoned on the banks of the Danube river, they had no idea they were about to get involved in one of the most shocking murder cases in the country’s history. The body of a disfigured young woman was discovered on 16 August 2022 by an Iraqi-born couple who immediately believed it was their 23-year-old daughter, Sharaban. The body was found in their daughter’s Mercedes and despite the severe injuries to her face, she had the same general features and the same hair. However, a thorough autopsy soon proved that the body belonged to an Algerian beauty blogger, also 23, from the neighboring state of Baden-Württemberg…

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The Indonesian city of Jakarta is home to one of the most unusual residential projects in the world – a suburb located atop a 10-storey shopping mall.

Over the past 20 years, Jakarta has become one of the world’s most crowded megacities. With over 10 million residents in its metropolitan area alone and up to three times that in the greater Jakarta area, the city is quickly running out of land to build on. While other crowded capitals, like Tokyo, are expanding vertically, Jakarta is expanding horizontally, with most residents preferring low-rise houses instead of apartments. With real-estate in increasingly short supply, developers have been forced to think outside the box, and that’s how urban oddities like Cosmo Park came to exist…

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In an attempt to explore the relationships people have with their modern accessories like smartphones and smartwatches, researchers recently created a smartwatch powered by a living organism.

Devices like smartphones, smartwatches, and laptops have become a part of our daily routine, and scientific experiments have shown that many people feel that they can’t function properly without them. Yet as a result of consumerism culture, most of us have no problem discarding our gadgets as soon as we can afford to buy new, more advanced ones, even if we don’t really need them. But what if there was a way to feel more attached to these gadgets, would that make us think twice before replacing them? Inspired by the Tamagochi, a Japanese toy that became an international phenomenon during the 1990s, scientists at Chicago University created a unique type of smartwatch that only functioned if the living organism inside of it was kept alive.

The Tamagochi was an egg-shaped device that allowed users to take care of a digital pet by feeding, training and disciplining it. If not given enough attention, the pet would die, and players would have to start over. It was immensely popular in the 1990s and early 2000s and is still available today. This toy was the original inspiration for a unique smartwatch where the digital pet was replaced by a living organism – a slime mold.

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A young Canadian woman needed to be hospitalized after a car key got lodged in her face when a friend casually tossed it to her.

Renée Lariviere, a 24-year-old woman from Sudbury, Canada was leaving her apartment to visit a local McDonald’s when she asked a friend to toss her the car keys she had forgotten. What was supposed to be an easy catch turned out to be a fumble and the car key somehow ricocheted from her hand into her face. It must have been a hell of a toss too, as when the metal part of the key hit Renée’s face it actually punctured her cheek and became lodged in her face.

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AI Suitcase is a smart suitcase developed by a blind computer scientist to aid the visually impaired in navigating their surrounding more efficiently without the aid of white canes or guide dogs.

65-year-old Chieko Asakawa has been completely blind since she was only 14, following a tragic accident. A computer scientist and also the director of the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation, also known as Miraikan, in Tokyo she is living proof that the visually impaired can overcome their disability to achieve great things. But as someone who has long struggled with navigating unfamiliar and crowded places, Asakawa came up with an idea to help the visually impaired get around easier. In 2017, her own experiences inspired her to come up with the idea of a smart suitcase that could guide its user with the help of built-in sensors and cameras. Six years later, the AI Suitcase is almost ready for its commercial debut.

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A Brazilian man sparked the outrage of his friends and family after he faked his death out of pure curiosity, to see who would attend his funeral.

As an experienced ‘ceremonialist‘, a sort of master of ceremonies for various kinds of events, 60-year-old Baltazar Lemos had conducted hundreds of funerals, some of which had been attended by as few as 2 people, others by as many as 500. Recently, he had been thinking about how many of his friends and family would come to pay their respects and bid him farewell when he died, and since he couldn’t really know if he actually kicked the bucket, he decided to fake his death and see how many people showed up to his funeral…

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Over twenty Argentinian farmers and massive fans of football legend Lionel Messi, grew a giant portrait of the popular player in their corn fields, as a tribute.

Lionel Messi has millions of fans all around the world, but nowhere is he more beloved than in his home country of Argentina, where most people see him as nothing less than a god of football. Messi recently led the Argentinian national team to win the 2022 World Cup, which made him even more popular than before, but his true fans were sure this was going to be his year even before the tournament started. For example, shortly before last year’s World Cup kicked off, more than 20 Argentinian farmers used a farming engineer’s planting algorithm to create giant portraits of Messi in their corn fields.

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The Tokay Stakes 2023 horse race at the Chukyo Racecourse in Nagoya, Japan was technically won by a racehorse that ran the entire race without a jockey.

While it’s true that a jockey can’t really help a slow horse win a race, their role in professional horse racing is undeniable. The jockey plays many roles during a race. They control the pace of the animal, either pushing it from the beginning in a race where setting the pace for the rest of the pack is important or conserving its energy for a final push. They are also responsible for how fast the horse comes out of the gates at the start and tactical movement during the race. At least that’s what most horseracing enthusiasts will tell you, but one animal recently proved that they are just dead weight…

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Several kids in Indonesia have reportedly suffered stomach burns after consuming a popular liquid nitrogen-containing street snack called ‘chiki ngebul’.

Commonly known as ‘dragon’s breath’ in Indonesia, chiki ngebul is an assortment of rainbow-colored candies coated in a cloud of liquid nitrogen mist that causes the person eating them to exhale that mist, like a dragon. However, health experts warn that if the snack is consumed before the liquid nitrogen has evaporated, it poses a very real risk of intestinal burns and perforations. So far, over 20 kids have been diagnosed with stomach burns after allegedly filming themselves eating chiki ngebul as part of a dangerous TikTok trend.

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