Measuring about 1 millimeter in size, the oribatid mite or armored mite is recognized as the strongest creature on Earth. It can lift over 1,000 times its own body weight.

For us humans, being able to lift even double our own body weight is an impressive athletic achievement, but that pales in comparison to the strength displayed by creatures hundreds of times smaller. The Asian weaver ant, for example, can lift 100 times its own body weight, while the dung beetle can lift up to 400 times its body weight. That’s like a human being able to lift tens of tonnes, you know, Superman stuff. But even these impressive insects don’t come close to the strongest creature on the face of the planet, the tiny oribatid mite, which, thanks to an extremely strong exoskeleton, can lift a whopping 1,180 times its own body weight.

Read More »

Mihailo Toloto was a Greek monk who spent his entire 82-year life on Mount Athos without ever laying eyes on an actual woman.

Born in the year 1856, Mihailo Toloto faced adversity from the moment he came into the world. His mother died just four hours after his birth, and with no father to claim him as their own, he was abandoned on the steps of a monastery located on Mount Athos, the center of Orthodox monasticism. The monk there took him in and the monastery became his permanent home. Raised and educated within the walled monastery, Mihailo became a monk and reportedly never ventured off the mountain until his death, in 1938. And since women are not permitted to set foot on Mount Athos, Miahilo Toloto died without ever seeing a woman.

Read More »

A 40-year-old woman’s decision to quit her job and become a ‘full-time daughter’ in the employment of her own parents has sparked controversy in China.

Last year, after 15 years of working for a news agency, 40-year-old Nianan quit her job. She had to be on-call virtually 24 hours a day and was constantly under tremendous stress. Luckily, her parents came up with a better employment offer if she just quit the job that made her so miserable. “Why don’t you just quit your job? We’ll take care of you financially,” the woman’s parents said, promising to pay her 4,000 yuan ($570) per month if she just came and lived with them. That obviously meant no more housing costs, and saving massively on food and various household items, as the parents would take care of such expenses. So Nianan quit her job and became a ‘full-time daughter’.

After a year in her parents’ employment, Nianan describes her profession as one “filled with love”. She spends her days accompanying her mother and father when they go grocery shopping, she cooks dinner with them every evening, drives them around when they need to, and even has an hour to dance with them every day.

Read More »

A Mexican court of law recently sparked outrage by sentencing a young woman to six years in prison for “excessive use of legitimate defense”, because she killed the man who was raping her.

The sentencing of Roxana Ruiz, a 23-year-old single mother from Nezahualcoyotl, Mexico, on Monday has been making international news headlines all week. The young woman was charged with homicide with an excess of legitimate self-defense after she strangled the man who was raping her in her own home, and is now facing six years in prison, as well as an obligation to compensate her assailant’s family financially. Ruiz, who has already served nine months behind bars after her initial arrest in 2021, claims that she would have most likely been killed by the man raping her if she didn’t kill him first, but the judge ruled that a simple blow to the head would have been enough to incapacitate the assailant.

Read More »

A family in Sidney, Australia is being praised for resisting the urge to sell their property to developers who have bought all the land around it, despite being offered tens of millions of dollars for it.

The Zammit family home has become one of the most famous properties in Sydney both because of the way it stands out among the dozens of cookie-cutter homes surrounding it and the resilience of its owners. While every one of their old neighbors agreed to sell their land to housing developers, the Zammits have refused every offer so far, and have no plans of moving away anytime soon. The Australian family has been praised for refusing to sell out and continuing to live on their five acres of land despite the financial temptation and pressure from developers.

Read More »

An Iranian man claims he stopped consuming food one day in 2006 and has relied solely on sweetened fizzy drinks for energy ever since.

58-year-old Gholamreza Ardeshiri claims that the mere sight of food makes him nauseous and that he has been surviving on water and fizzy drinks like Pepsi and Coca-Cola for the last 17 years. It all started one night in 2006, when he woke up with a strange feeling in his mouth, one that he just couldn’t get rid of, no matter how many doctors he visited. In the end, he decided to shun food permanently and has been living a perfectly normal life ever since. His family doesn’t eat in front of him, because just seeing them makes him sick, and he gets all his energy from carbonated drinks. He drinks three large bottles of soda per day and insists that he never feels hungry.

Read More »

South Africa’s Mmabatho Stadium is famous for its unusual design, which features elevated stands that don’t actually face the pitch but other stands.

Built in 1981, during the apartheid era, Mmabatho Stadium is often cited as an example of impractical architectural design. It was commissioned by Lucas Mangope’s government which ruled the Bophuthatswana Bantusan and designed by Israeli architect Israel Goodovitch and engineer Ben Abraham. They came up with an unconventional concept that went against pretty much every basic principle of stadium design, and not in a good way. However, authorities apparently loved the idea and went ahead with the construction. After it was inaugurated, it didn’t take long for people to realize that its weirdly elevated stands didn’t offer the best view of the action on the pitch and actually required them to turn their heads to the side in order to watch the match.

Read More »

A Russian woman has been accused of hiring a contract killer to have her own daughter murdered in order to get her hands on the woman’s apartment.

A 67-year-old woman from Krasnoyarsk, Russia, is being accused of ordering the murder of her 48-year-old daughter so she could inherit her apartment. According to investigators, the pensioner shared her ominous intentions with a local acquaintance who told her that they knew someone who could pull it off, for a fee. On April 19, 2023, the acquaintance set up a meeting between the woman and the would-be perpetrator of the murder in a park on Odesskaya Street, in the city of Krasnoyarsk, during which they discussed the details and method of committing the crime. The woman allegedly promised to pay the contract killer 80,000 rubles ($1,040) once he produced evidence of her daughter’s murder.

Read More »

Japanese luxury ice cream brand Cellato recently set a new Guinness record for the world’s most expensive ice cream with a decadent treat priced at a whopping 880,000 yen ($6,700) per portion.

On April 25, a Guinness World Records representative certified Byakuya, Cellato’s new protein-rich ice cream, as the most expensive in the world. It consists of a velvety base made with milk, two types of cheese, egg yolks, and sake leek, and is topped with Parmigiano cheese, white truffle, truffle oil, and gold leaf. The ‘highest grade’ gelato has a faint sweetness, complex taste, and a luxurious, smooth texture. It comes packaged in a stylish black box. It includes a hand-made metal spoon created by Takeuchi craftsmen in Fushimi, Kyoto, using techniques and materials used in the construction of temples and shrines. One 130ml Byakuya ice cream is currently available on the Cellato website for 880,000 yen ($6,700).

Read More »

A Colombian woman has spent the last 4,000 days of her 39-year existence in excruciating pain because of a surgical needle forgotten in her belly after an operation.

María Aderlinda Forero’s decade-long nightmare began in 2012, soon after the birth of her fourth child. The housewife, who lives in the village of San Isidro, in the rural area of ​​El Retorno, decided to undergo tubal ligation surgery to close her fallopian tubes as a form of birth control. The operation was performed in the town of San Jose del Guaviare and seemingly went without a hitch. Maria left the hospital a few days later and return home to take care of her children. However, a few days later, she started experiencing severe pain in her abdomen, but every time she went to the doctor, they would just prescribe her paracetamol for the pain.

Read More »

Sułoszowa, a Polish village of around 6,000 people located in the Olkuska Upland, less than 30 km northwest of Kraków, has been dubbed ‘Little Tuscany’ because of its unusual layout.

The village of Sułoszowa has been around for many years, but it only recently started attracting international attention after bird’s eye photos and videos went viral on social media. Millions of people around the world were mesmerized by the unusual layout of the rural settlement – hundreds of houses on either side of a singular street, snaking through multi-colored agricultural fields as far as the eye can see. Every one of the 5.819 inhabitants – according to a 2017 census – lives on the same street, which stretches for over 9 kilometers.

Read More »

A new board game marketed as a ‘Christian’ version of the Ouija board has sparked quite a controversy among clerics, with one priest describing it as a ‘trap from the devil’.

It sounds like a clever April Fools prank for Christians, but it turns out that the Holy Spirit Board is an actual game that anyone can find on sites like Amazon. It’s basically a Ouija board, only instead of demons, ghosts and other unholy beings, ‘this is a one-way ticket straight to heaven’ that relies on the classic planchette system to allow users to communicate directly with “our lord and savior Jesus Christ!” The layout of the planchette is similar to that of a Ouija board, only it is decorated with Christian symbols like Jesus crucified on the cross, three angels, and a dove. Oh, and instead of the triangular pendant moved on the Ouija board, the Holy Spirit Board uses a golden cross.

Read More »

Every year, visitors of Peru’s Vilcanota mountain range are treated to a unique natural phenomenon, a river running blood red through the pristine rocky valleys of Cusco.

Located approximately 100 kilometers from the city of Cusco, near the well-known Palcoyo Rainbow Mountain, the red river is known as Palquella Pucamayu by the locals. It only runs red for about 5 kilometers before mixing with other streams and small rivers in the area, at which point the color becomes diluted, losing its unique hue. The best time to see the red river in person is during the rainy season (December – April), because the color of the water is directly influenced by the level of precipitation. For most of the year, Palquella Pucamayu is a muddy-brown color, but during the rainy season, large quantities of soil rich in iron oxide are carried down from mountains and color the water bright red.

Read More »

A Kenyan man recently made international news headlines after being caught taking part in a women’s chess tournament using a full burka as a disguise.

In what is considered a first for the Kenyan Chess Federation, a disciplinary committee is currently debating the proper punishment for a male player who disguised himself as a Muslim woman in an attempt to win a women’s chess tournament. 25-year-old Stanley Omondi was reportedly facing financial woes when he decided to try and get his hands on the £2,400 ($3,000) grand prize of a women’s chess tournament. To pull it off without attracting too much suspicion, the male chess player put on a black burka which only left his eyes and feet visible, and registered under the false name ‘Millicent Awour’. At first, organizers were none the wiser to the player’s gender, but it was his prowess at the game of chess that first drew their attention…

Read More »

Isolated on an island in the middle of the southeastern Pacific Ocean, the bees of Easter Island are free of all the pathogens and pesticides ravaging the global bee population, and therefore produce the purest honey on the planet.

The beekeepers of Chile’s Easter Island are fully aware that their bees may one day become the salvation of the world’s most important polinator. With bee colonies all over the world struggling to survive serious threats like pesticide poisoning, new diseases and climate change, the bees of Easter Island are probably the only ones in the world yet to be affected by such problems. And their owners hope to keep it that way. They have managed to convince the local government to ban the importation of bees, because of the significant risk of contamination.

Read More »