An anonymous person is responsible for over 90 percent of the noise complaints received by Dublin International Airport last year, a whopping 12,272, or an average of 34 complaints per day.

2021 wasn’t the best year on record for airports, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and Dublin Airport is no exception, but that didn’t stop one unidentified individual from lodging noise complaints regarding the flights that did land or take off from the airport. In fact, this person managed to double the number of noise complaints they made in 2020, a respectable 6,227 of them, even though plane traffic was only up around 10 percent from the previous year, because of pandemic restrictions.

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The boss of a small company in Wuhan, China, recently sparked controversy online after it became known that he asks employees to send him screenshots of their phone battery usage before leaving work.

Convinced that the poor performance of his company in recent months was somehow related to how much time employees spend on their smartphones instead of working, a company boss in Wuhan decided to address the issue by checking their phone use daily. According to one employee who took to social media to expose the controversial productivity-enhancing method, he and his colleagues are required to go into their phone settings and take screenshots of the battery usage graph for the day and send it to their boss.

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Imagine going from having nothing to your name to winning over a quarter of a million dollars only to be unable to claim it due to a lack of ID. That’s exactly the problem an Algerian undocumented immigrant in Belgium is facing right now.

A few ago, the lottery winner, whose name has not been disclosed for obvious reasons, went into a shop in Zeebrugge, a Belgian port city and popular transit point for migrants and refugees, and bought a lottery scratchcard. he paid 5 euros for it and ended up winning a whopping 250,000 euros ($270,000). He was so stunned that he had a friend verify the prize, and then they both double-checked with the shop owner. He had won 250,000 euros and his life was about to change for the better. Or so he thought…

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New York City is full of unusual plots of land left over from various construction projects, but none as small and emblematic as the Hess Triangle, a private property barely larger than a pizza slice.

The story of the Hess Triangle began in 1910 when the city of New York claimed eminent domain in order to expropriate and demolish 253 buildings, including the Voorhis, a 5-storey apartment building owned by David Hess. The businessman and his family fought the decision, but by 1913, they had exhausted all legal options and had to watch their property be demolished. However, in 1928, while checking property papers, Hess’s heirs discovered that the city had neglected to seize a tiny corned of Plot 55, and quickly filed a notice of possession for it. That’s how the Hess Triangle, the smallest piece of real estate in NYC came to be.

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The Trapp family in Esko, Minnesota is officially the tallest family in the world with an average height of 203.29 cm (6 ft 8.03 in).

Krissy Trapp loves saying that she is the shortest person in the world’s tallest family. At 191.2 cm (6 ft 3 in), she definitely qualifies as very tall, especially for a woman, but she is indeed the shortest of her immediate family. Her husband, Scott, is a towering 202.7 cm (6 ft 8 in), while her two daughters, Savanna and Molly, measure 203.6 cm (6 ft 8 in) and 197.26 cm (6 ft 6 in), respectively. The youngest member of the Trapp family, Adam Trapp, is also the tallest at 221.71 cm (7 ft 3 in). Together, they have a combined height equal to the length of half a tennis court!

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Every year, Yoro, a small town in northern Honduras, allegedly experiences a mysterious phenomenon known as “Lluvia de Peces”, a literal rain of fish.

The rain of fish phenomenon has been reported in many places around the world, but Honduras’ Yoro department is the only place where the bizarre rain reportedly occurs every year, sometimes several times per year. The now-famous Lluvia de Peces takes place sometime between May and June, usually after a very powerful storm. The weirdest thing about this unusual occurrence is that, despite it being a yearly event, no one has ever actually seen the fish fall from the sky. There is however photographic and video evidence of hundreds of fish covering entire areas following powerful storms, so it definitely can’t be dismissed as just a simple legend, and scientists have actually investigated the phenomenon in order to provide a plausible explanation.

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Robbie Balenger, a vegan ultra-runner known for competing in unique races, recently went up against a Tesla Model 3 electric car in what was described as a modern take on the man-vs-horse concept.

Every year, hundreds of people show up in Llanwrtyd Wells, Wales to compete against real horses in the traditional Man vs. Horse Marathon, a 22-mile-long endurance race where speed matters little. Everyone knows horses are faster, but over long distances, humans actually have a shot, and we’ve actually won the race at least a couple of times in the last four and a half decades. It was the concept of Man vs. Horse that recently inspired famous ultra-marathon runner Robbie Balenger to compete against a Tesla Model 3 electric car in a man-vs-machine-type race.

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A 28-year-old man from Pakistan has become known as the Tarzan of Karachi after spending the last eight years of his life living in a makeshift treehouse in the city.

Farman Ali became somewhat of an overnight social media sensation after footage of his unusual home went viral on social media a few weeks ago. People were fascinated by the young man who managed to live in a modest treehouse for over eight years, but as he keeps telling everyone who asks, he didn’t do it by choice. After losing both his parents, Ali was simply too poor to afford any kind of conventional housing, and after living on the streets for a while, he decided to build his own home in the only place where no one would bother him or drive him away – in a tree on public property.

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With a height-to-width ratio of 24:1, Steinway Tower, an 84-story luxury apartment building in Manhattan, is officially the world’s thinnest skyscraper.

Steinway Tower is an impressive architectural achievement. Not only is it the third-tallest building in the Western Hemisphere – after One World Trade Center (1,776 feet) and Central Park Tower (1,550 feet) – but it’s actually the most slender skyscraper in the world. Despite standing a dizzying 1,428-feet-tall, Steinway Tower is just 60 feet wide. It’s so thin that The Guardian newspaper has dubbed it “the coffee stirrer”. For comparison, Steinway Tower is as wide as a bowling alley is long.

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Of the more than 1,200 varieties of watermelon grown around the world, none is more expensive or more sought-after than the famous Densuke black watermelon.

Grown only on the northern island of Hokkaido, in small quantities that rarely exceed 100 units per year, Densuke is regarded as one of the rarest watermelons in the world. It’s not the type of fruit you expect to find at a market or a grocer. Instead, the few fruits available every year are auctioned off to the highest bidder in highly anticipated events, for hundreds, and even thousands of dollars. The most expensive Densuke watermelon in history was auctioned off in 2019, for a whopping 750,000 Japanese yen ($6,000). Prices have dropped in the last two years, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, but the black watermelon remains the most expensive variety in the world, by far.

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Taylor A. Humphrey, a 33-year-old woman from New York, works as a professional baby name, charging people thousands of dollars for helping them pick out the perfect names for their offspring.

It’s hard to believe that someone could make a living helping expecting parents select a suitable name for their child, but Taylor A. Humphrey is living proof that it can be done. She has been a full-time baby name for years, charging clients between $1,500 and $10,000 for providing suitable baby names based on a variety of factors. Her services range from a simple phone call and a list of bespoke names based on the answers to a questionnaire, to a $10,000 option that involves genealogical investigations and selecting a name on-brand with the family business.

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The Opuses restaurant at The Royal Park Hotel in Ginza, Tokyo recently got a lot of attention because of an intriguing dessert shaped like pieces of wall plaster.

On the list of least appetizing things in the world, wall plaster ranks pretty highly, so most people wouldn’t call it the most inspired choice for designing a dessert. Still, that’s exactly what the chefs at Opuses, a high-class restaurant in Tokyo, Japan seem to have done. Photos of this dubious-looking dish were recently posted on Twitter by user @mimimimimitsu32 and ended up getting over 200,000 likes, 26,000 retweets and hundreds of comments. The general sentiment was that the dessert looked remarkably like plaster.

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The gumboot chiton, a marine mollusk also known as the Wondering Meatloaf, has teeth made of the hardest biological material known to man.

Magnetite is a geologic mineral commonly found in the earth’s crust, but it’s also somehow produced by the gumboot chiton and synthesized into rows of small teeth hard enough to scrape algae off of rocks. The top of these teeth is layered with magnetite, which makes them literally as strong as steel, but the root is also incredibly tough, thanks to another iron-like material that has never been observed in living creatures before – santabarbaraite. This unique combination makes the chiton’s teeth the hardest biological material in the world.

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Celebrity lookalikes are nothing new, but it’s rare to find one that resembles the original as closely as Brazilian Priscilla Beatrice resembles pop icon Rihanna.

Priscilla Beatrice may not be Rihanna’s only lookalike, but she’s definitely the most famous one. With over 450,000 followers on Instagram and 2.4 million followers on TikTok, you could say she is a social media sensation in her own right. She has made a name for herself impersonating the Barbadian superstar both online and in various cities around the world, with fans of Rihanna flocking to get an autograph or have their picture taken with her. And who could blame them? The resemblance is so uncanny, you’d be tempted to think she was Rihanna’s identical twin sister.

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A Buffalo couple is suing a fertility clinic that had allegedly promised to determine the sex of the embryo before it was implanted into the client’s womb, only to deliver the wrong sex.

Heather and Robin Wilhelm-Routenberg had decided to only have a baby if they could guarantee it was a girl, because of emotional trauma Heather had experienced earlier in her life. To that end, the two women approached the CNY fertility clinic in Latham, New York, which, they claim, guaranteed them that it could determine the sex of an embryo created using an egg from Robbie and donor sperm. However, 15 weeks into Heather’s pregnancy, the couple was shocked to learn that they were having a boy, despite specifically asking for a girl. The two women are now suing the clinic for malpractice and breach of contract, among other things.

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