For over 120 years England’s Norland College has been known as the most prestigious nanny-training school in the world, with graduates landing jobs with wealthy families and earning upwards of $100,000 per year.

Founded in the late 1800s by Emily Ward, who realized that there was no official childcare training at the time, Norland College soon became the most renowned nanny-training school on Earth, with clients including Royal families and wealthy couples looking for the best service money could by. And indeed, Norland-trained nannies are nothing if not expensive, with some graduates earning as much as $170,000 per year, and even students raking in around 40,000 working during their elite training. That’s more than four times the average salary of a nanny in UK, but somewhat justified by the unique curriculum taught at Norland.

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The Bass River Valley of South Gippsland, in the southeastern Australian state of Victoria is home to the world’s largest earthworms, which can grow up to 6.6 feet in length.

The giant Gippsland earthworm (Megascolides australis) is one of the world’s most elusive and fascinating creatures, able to survive in an environment completely changed by its human inhabitants and rarely showing up above ground. These enormous earthworms can only be found in a 150 square mile area, a habitat once blanketed by dense forests but that has now been completely converted to farmland. Apart from its size, this ability to survive in a landscape in which the native vegetation has been entirely removed is another fascinating trait of the giant Gippsland earthworm.

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Ever dreamed of swimming in a lake of Coca Cola? Well, you can actually do just that at the unique Coca Cola Lagoon in Rio Grande del Norte, Brazil, where the water has the exact same color as the popular soft drink.

Looking at the water of Lagoa da Araraquara, it’s easy to see why it is popularly known as Coca Cola Lagoon. It has the same dark hue, but very different ingredients and no carbonation. Instead of caramel, the water of this popular lagoon is colored by a concentration of iodine and iron, in combination with the pigmentation of the reeds near its shores.

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A young African man was recently placed under arrest after he tried to pass as a woman while trying to pass the graduation exam on behalf of his girlfriend.

22-year-old Khadim Mboup, a student of the Gaston Berger de Saint-Louis University, in Diourbel, Senegal, managed to fool faculty and supervisors at a Baccalaureate (high-school graduation exam) examination center into thinking that he was a female high-school student for 3 days. Mboup wore a long-hair wig partially covered with a traditional scarf, earrings, a dress, bra and even face makeup to pass as his girlfriend, 19-year-old Gangué Dioum. Just when the two lovers’ plan seemed to work, one of the supervisors noticed something odd about Khadim, and his true identity was discovered.

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Buying works of art can become an expensive habit, but what if you didn’t have to buy the artworks and instead lease them for however long you wanted? That’s the premise of an ingenious Japanese business that lets people rent paintings.

Casie is an innovative service that connects painters and art lovers in a whole new way. Instead of brokering the sale of artworks it offers clients the possibility of leasing them by the month. It sounds a bit strange, maybe because it just hasn’t been done before, but if people can rent designer clothes and expensive jewelry, why can’t they do the same with art? Apparently, this model benefits both artists, who are able to generate more revenue from their works in the long term, and clients, who get to keep the paintings until they get bored of them and decided to swap them for new ones.

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A Russian woman is reportedly taking fast-food giant McDonald’s to court for making her break fast during Lent with its aggressive advertising showing delicious burgers.

Ksenia Ovchinnikova, an Orthodox Christian from the Russian city of Omsk, is suing the world’s largest fast-food restaurant chain for allegedly making her break fast for Lent two years ago, with its delicious-looking ad banners. The woman accuses McDonald’s of breaking the consumer protection law and insulting her religious feelings by advertising delicious meat products during a time when Christians attempt to refrain from eating meat and other animal products. She is requesting 1,000 rubles ($14) as compensation for sustained moral damage.

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In what can only be described as the real-life plot of a horror movie script, a homeless man was wrongfully arrested and locked up in a mental hospital for over two years, after being mistaken for a man he had never even met.

Joshua Spriestersbach’s nightmare began on a hot day in 2017, while waiting in line for food outside a homeless shelter in Honolulu. When police woke him up, he thought he was being arrested for breaking the city’s law against sitting and lying on public sidewalks, but little did he know that things were a lot more serious than that. What Spriestersbach didn’t realize was that the police officer had somehow mistaken him for one Thomas Castleberry, who had a warrant out for his arrest for violating probation in a 2006 drug case. The fact that the two didn’t even look similar didn’t seem to matter to anyone, and instead of simply checking photographs or fingerprints of the two men, the homeless man simply became Castleberry.

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Located a church courtyard, in the picturesque town of Santa Maria del Tule, the Tree of Tule is a 2,000-year-old Montezuma cypress famous for having the world’s thickest trunk.

So just how thick is Mexico’s Tule Tree? Well, it takes thirty people with arms extended joining hands to fully encircle it, so that should give you an idea. Officially, it has a circumference of 42 meters, which sounds impossible for a tree trunk. In fact, in the past people  and scientists alike were convinced that the Tree of Tule had resulted from the merger of two separate tree, until DNA evidence showed that there was in fact just one tree.

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Chickens have been around for about 10,000 years, and they come in all shapes and sizes, but if you want to know what the world’s biggest chicken breed is then you’re in luck, because today we’re featuring the Jersey Giant.

As the name suggests, the Jersey Giant was developed in the state of New Jersey, and it is the largest and heaviest of all chicken breeds. It was created in the late 19th century by John and Thomas Black, with the specific purpose of replacing the turkey as the most popular poultry meat at the time. The two brothers produced the impressive breed by crossing Black Javas, Black Langshans, and Dark Brahmas, three other breeds of large chickens and for a while met the goal of creating an alternative to turkey meat.

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Built along the Nanxi River, between the steep mountains of China’s Yunnan Province, Yanjin county is widely regarded as the world’s narrowest city.

Looking at Yanjin county from above, it’s hard to believe that such a settlement actually exists in real life. The narrow stretch of usable land sandwiched between the troubled waters of the Nanxi River and steep mountains on either side hardly seems like a suitable location for a city of roughly 450,000 people, but that’s exactly what makes Yanjin so special. It looks more like something you’d expect to see in a fantasy movie, or in a building simulation game than a modern-day city.

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A Chinese man had to undergo a complicated gastroscopic operation to have a 15-cm toothbrush removed from his stomach, after accidentally swallowing it during his morning routine.

The unnamed man from Taizhou, in China’s Jiangsu Province told doctors that he got up one morning, about 10 days ago and decided to follow his usual routine, which included brushing his teeth before breakfast. Only he was sleepier than usual and while brushing the teeth at the back of his mouth, he accidentally dropped the 15-cm plastic brush and it slipped into his throat. Realizing his mistake, he tried reaching after it, but the slippery plastic handle proved difficult to grab, and he only managed to push it further.

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Welwitschia is a fascinating plant that can not only survive for several thousands of years, but it can do so in one of the most inhospitable environments on the planet, the Namib Desert.

Named after Austrian botanist Friedrich Welwitsch, who discovered it in Angola in 1859, Welwitschia is actually called ‘tweeblaarkanniedood’ in Afrikaans, which translates to “two leaves that cannot die”. That’s a surprisingly accurate name for a plant that grows only two leaves and can survive thousands of years in the world’s oldest desert. Some parts of the Namib Desert receive less than two inches of precipitation a year, but that’s apparently all Welwitschia needs to survive, thanks to its extremely “efficient, low-cost genome”.

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Someone just managed to sell a small plastic bag they claim contains air from a recent Kanye West listening event for a whopping $7,600 on eBay.

It’s no secret that the Kanye West brand is synonymous with commercial success, but not even that explains how someone can pay almost $8,000 for an empty plastic bag simply because it is in some way related to the popular American artist.  West recently hosted the much awaited Atlanta DONDA listening event on the Mercedes-Benz stadium in Atlanta, and one fan allegedly lucky enough to be in attendance took the opportunity to make some money out of it. He took a plastic zip-lock bag, labeled it as ‘AIR FROM DONDA DROP’ on eBay, set the price at $3,330.00 and waited for the bids to roll in. And sure enough, roll they did…

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A contractor who didn’t receive the payment he was promised rented an excavator and destroyed the façade of an apartment building he himself built.

Tenants were supposed to move into a newly completed apartment building in Blumberg, a small town in Germany’s Baden-Wurttemberg, in the next couple of weeks, but a bizarre incident has delayed their plans by at least three months. Late last month, a man operating an excavator showed up at the building and began meticulously tearing down the façade, breaking glass windows and destroying balconies, ultimately leaving the place looking like it had been in a war. Stranger still was that the man responsible for the devastation was allegedly the contractor who had been responsible for building the edifice in the first place.

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Hoshizuna-no-Hama, which translates to “Sand in the Shape of a Star”, is a small but charming Japanese beach famous for its star-shaped tiny grains of sand.

Located on Irimote, the second-largest island in Okinawa prefecture, Hoshizuna-no-Hama doesn’t look too different than the hundreds of other beaches in the Japanese archipelago, at least at first glance. Closer inspection reveals that many of the sand grains have a very recognizable shape – either a five or six-tipped star. That’s because Hoshizuna-no-Hama beach consists in part of billions of exoskeleton of foraminifers, marine protozoa that thrives on the ocean floor. Their calcium carbonate shells remain behind after their death and are constantly washed ashore by the ocean, creating this stunning natural wonder.

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