What looked like a growing oil spill in Michigan’s Mackinac Straits area turned out to be a massive gathering of tens of thousands of ducks and other aquatic birds.

On December 21 of last year, the Mackinac Bridge Authority started receiving calls from concerned divers regarding a possible oil spill in the area. With each passing day, the number of calls regarding the oil spill kept growing, which makes sense, considering that the black mass that had formed on the water appeared to be growing. However, it wasn’t oil, but a record-setting gathering of Redhead ducks. In the beginning, authorities counted around 7,000 of them gathered together under and around Mackinac Bridge. Their number has grown since then, and there are now several tens of thousands of birds making up the “oil spill”.

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According to NASA Earth Observatory satellites, the coldest place on Earth is a mountain ridge on the East Antarctic Plateau where temperatures can drop to -135.8 degrees Fahrenheit (-93.2 degrees Celsius).

For the past week, much of the US has been affected by an extreme winter storm that brought massive snowfalls, destructive winds, and freezing temperatures as low as -20 degrees Fahrenheit (-28 degrees Celsius). That’s low enough for the average person to suffer frostbite in just under 10 minutes of direct exposure, but it’s nowhere near as dangerous as the coldest place on Earth. NASA satellites recently a high mountain ridge on the East Antarctic Plateau where, on clear winter nights, temperatures drop to an abysmal -135.8 degrees Fahrenheit (-93.2 degrees Celsius).

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Elito ‘Amangpintor’ Circa is a Filipino artist who rose to fame for using his own blood to create canvas paintings that have attracted both praise and criticism over the years.

Born in a poor family that couldn’t afford to buy improper art supplies, Elito Circa experimented with a variety of unusual mediums as a child, including plums and tomatoes, but it was when he accidentally scraped his hand that he discovered the art medium that would mark his artistic career – his own blood. He quickly realized that the blood not only made his paintings more durable, as it was harder to erase from the canvas, but that it also made his artworks his own in a way that he had never imagined before.

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Eternity is an A.I.-generated virtual K-pop idol group consisting of 11 members created using advanced deep-fake technology.

K-pop has really taken the world by storm in recent years, with groups like BTS and Black Pink conquering market after market with their catchy songs and energetic dance routines. The genre has become one of South Korea’s main exports, generating tens of billions in revenue, but despite its massive international success, the massive corporations behind the K-pop wave aren’t resting on their laurels. Instead, they are constantly looking for ways to stay relevant in this constantly changing industry, and artificial intelligence is apparently the next big thing. So it’s not that big of a surprise that A.I.-generated virtual K-pop groups are already a thing.

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A Vietnamese man has become famous in his home province of An Giang for taking care of thousands of wild river fish who visit his house every day for food.

Muoi Phuc’s house in Long Kien, Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, is a popular attraction for both locals and tourists. People routinely stop by to watch the man feed a school of wild fish that visits him daily. When the 52-year-old man started feeding the fish, it was just a handful of pangasius, but over the last two years, their number grew at a steady pace, and now thousands of fish stop by his riverside home every day for a bite to eat. The fish are free to come and go as they please, and others have tried attracting them by throwing food into the river, but for some reason, they only stop at Muoi Phuc’s house.

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Motorcycle chariot racing is a modern take on one of the most popular sports in ancient Greece, Rome, and the Byzantine Empire.

We’ve featured our fair share of unusual sports here on Oddity Central, but motorcycle chariot racing is undoubtedly one of our most unique entries. Replacing the horses of old with some real horsepower in the form of two motorcycles, this unusual sport is making a comeback in the Land Down Under. Originally invented in the early 1900s in Australia, motorcycle chariot racing eventually spread to Europe and the USA before gradually being banned because of the danger to the riders. However, the adrenaline-fueled sport is currently making a comeback in Australia, thanks to a professional stunt rider.

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Lerik, a mountainous region in southern Azerbaijan, is famous for being home to an unusually high concentration of centenarians.

Regions where people tend to live longer than average are known as “blue zones”, and we’ve actually covered a couple of them in the past – Japan’s Okinawa island and Ikaria, Greece’s island of longevity. However, there are places famous for the longevity of the local population that are not officially categorized as blue zones. One such place is Lerik, a region in the Talysh Mountains of southern Azerbaijan, famous for its high number of centenarians and even the world’s only Longevity Museum.

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TinyCircuits, a hardware company specializing in creating tiny electronic devices, recently unveiled the world’s smallest television sets.

When it comes to modern TVs, the general consensus is that bigger is better, but one company is trying to prove that it can be successful by going against the trend. TinyCircuits, an open-source hardware company that makes all sorts of tiny electronic devices, has created the world’s smallest television sets – the TinyTV 2 and TinyTV Mini. While these retro-looking devices may be the size of postage stamps, they actually work about as well as regular-size TVs, featuring channel and volume-adjusting knobs, remote control, 8Gb of storage, and PC connectivity for uploading videos.

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Mayutamu, a 16-year-old male teenager from Japan, has been getting attention for his ability to pose as a girl, using makeup and female clothing.

The 16-year-old teen rose to fame thanks to his job at a unique maid cafe in Tokyo’s Akihabara district. Maid cafes are really popular in Japan, with Akihabara alone being home to dozens of them, but none quite like ‘NEWTYPE’. This establishment is known as a ‘pseudo-girl’ maid cafe, because all the waiting staff is actually made up of boys posing as female maids. Among all the maids, Maytamu stood out as the most feminine of all, with many people confessing that they would have never guessed he was a boy.

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A 33-year-old gorilla who has spent most of her life alone inside a metal cage on the seventh floor of a shopping mall in Bangkok, Thailand, has been dubbed the world’s loneliest gorilla.

Bua Noi was only one when she was put into the cage that would become her permanent home for more than three decades. She was one of the main attractions of a bizarre zoo – if one could even call it that – inside Bangkok’s oldest shopping mall, Pata Pinklao Department Store, and owners refused to relocate her to a more suitable location, despite numerous requests from animal rights activists and the Thai Government. Even today, Bua Noi’s owners refuse to let her live out the rest of her days in a sanctuary, with other members of her species.

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A young biology graduate and former taxidermist from Ghent, Belgium, creates warrior figurines out of hundreds of dead insect body parts.

28-year-old Joos Habraken typically spends between 20 and 30 hours working on each of his ‘Frankenstein bugs’, fantastic creatures born out of his imagination and featuring intimidating names and impressive backstories. He uses body parts sourced from his own impressive collection or from a network of people he has collaborated with over the years. He only uses body parts from already dead bugs and would never even consider killing insects simply to fuel his hobby.

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Photos and videos of people walking futuristic robot dogs instead of actual canines have been going viral in China lately, signaling a trend among the younger generations.

Robotic dogs inspired by the impressive creations of Boston Dynamics have been available on Chinese shopping platforms for a while now, but they’ve only recently started actually becoming popular. Although they are sometimes being described as soulless machines that can never compare to real dogs who love their owners unconditionally, there is no denying the advantages of robot pets, and judging by the increasing number of people spotted walking their robot dogs in China lately, they may one day rival the animals they emulate.

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The family of a 35-year-old man who died in April of last year due to Covid-19 have been living with his body ever since, thinking he was only in a coma and would eventually wake up.

Vimlesh Sonkar, a young Income Tax Officer in Ahmedabad was admitted to Moti hospital on 19th April 2021 and pronounced dead only three days later after becoming infected with the coronavirus. A death certificate was handed to the man’s family, but they refused to believe he had passed away and instead of giving him the last rights took his dead body home and cared for it as if he would eventually wake up. The man’s mummified remains were discovered a few days ago, when a team from his workplace was sent to investigate his long-term absence.

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Chinese iPhone 14 scalpers are apparently struggling to recover their investment as they are forced to sell the handheld for less than the MSRP.

Like it or not, scalpers are an integral part of the free market, and there is little anyone can do about them. Whether it’s the Playstation 5 or the newest iPhone, they’re always ready to scoop up whatever inventory is available and sell it for outrageous profits to diehard fans with little patience and loaded pockets. That said, scalping does have its risks, and the recent iPhone 14 launch is a clear example of that. Chinese media has been reporting that scalpers have been forced to sell their brand new iPhone 14 smartphones on the street for less than the official launch price just to cut their losses.

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After nearly three years of litigation with entertainment giant DC Comics, a small neighborhood bakery in Chile has retained the right to use the brand “Superpan”.

41-year-old Gonzalo Montenegro has been selling bread in his native Quinta Normal, a commune in the Santiago province, for over three decades. As a youth, he would promote his products by wearing a green “Peter Pan” t-shirt, and one with the iconic symbol of the “Man of Steel”. It was the second one that really stuck with people, and before long, they started calling him “Superpan”, a play on words combining “Superman” and “pan”, the Spanish word for ‘bread’. Over the last 28 years, Montenegro used ‘Superpan’ as a brand to sell his bakery products, but some three years ago, he learned that he was being sued by DC Comics, the owners of Superman.

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