A team of Japanese high-school students recently won a regional innovation competition with a high-tech device that divides cake and pizza into equal portions every single time.

It’s a problem as old as the world – cutting a round treat into more than two equal parts. You either end up with portions that are not exactly the same size, or you’re left with a smaller extra slice that everyone has their eye on. Well, thanks to the ingenuity of a group of Japanese students from Kundong High School in Japan’s Oita Prefecture, dividing a cake or a pizza into perfectly equal portions need no longer be an issue. They have created a high-tech device that calculates the angle at which the tasty treat needs to be cut, depending on the number of necessary slices.

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Bubbles are fragile structures that only last a few seconds before popping, but a team of scientists has apparently found a way to keep bubbles from bursting for over a year.

Soap bubbles are subject to a series of processes that cause them to pop in a matter of seconds, minutes at best. They lose liquid through evaporation or gravitational drainage, and the gas trapped inside also diffuses through the membrane of soap and water back into the environment. However, a team of scientists at the University of Lille, in France, have been working on ways to address the fragility and ephemerality of bubbles, and they’ve apparently come up with a way of creating bubbles that maintain their shape and size for over a year.

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A Palestinian man who spent 15 years in an Israeli prison recently explained how he was able to father four kids during that time, despite not being able to be intimate with his wife.

Rafat Al-Qarawi was arrested in 2006 for terror activity during the Second Intifada against Israel and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. During that time, he allegedly fathered four children, and in a recent interview with Palestinian Media Watch, he revealed just how he managed to pull that off, despite never being intimate with his wife. Al-Qarawi claimed that he smuggled his sperm out of prison in potato chip bags which were then picked up by his wife and taken straight to an infertility clinic for insemination. His remarks raised some eyebrows in the medical community, as human sperm is known to only last a few seconds, minutes at most, outside the human body.

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A 31-year-old man from the UK works as an “expert waiter” in his spare time, spending hours in long queues on behalf of rich people too busy to do it themselves.

For the last three years, Freddie Beckitt, a historical fiction writer from Fulham, in the United Kingdom, has been supplementing his monthly revenue by working as a professional queuer, waiting in line on behalf of wealthy clients to the tune of £20 ($27) an hour. By virtue of being a Londoner, Beckitt says he has queuing “down to an art” and will easily spend hours standing in line, as long as someone is willing to pay him for it. In fact, he only wishes he could spend more time in queues, so he could turn his service into a full-time job.

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An 87-year-old Iranian man who has been living on the streets and hasn’t taken a bath in almost seven decades recently baffled scientists with his good health.

We first wrote about Amou Haji in 2014, dubbing him ‘the world’s dirtiest man‘. At the time, he was living in a small village in Southern Iran’s Fars province, surviving on roadkill and dirty water, and staying as far from bathwater as possible, thinking it would make him sick. He was 80-years-old at the time and appeared to be in good overall health, despite his questionable hygiene and living conditions. Well, apparently not much has changed since then, as a team of doctors recently conducted a series of tests that showed he was in surprisingly good health.

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An 85-year-old man from India’s Bihar state is being investigated after claiming to have received 11 Covid-19 vaccine doses in less than a year.

Brahmdeo Mandal, a retired postman from Bihar’s Madhepura district was stopped from getting what he claimed would have been his 12th Covid-19 shot at the beginning of January. Although it’s unclear how exactly word of Mandal’s vaccination marathon reached authorities, it is believed that he boasted about the positive effects of the repeated jabs on his general health to someone, and they tipped off the police. You see, instead of the terrifying potential side effects touted by anti-vaxers, Brahmdeo Mandal claims that the Covid-19 vaccine has made his ailments, many of them considered normal at his age, disappear.

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Saskatchewan’s Crooked Bush, a small grove of aspen trees that grew in a very unusual way, is a botanical oddity that has fascinated both tourists and scientists for years.

Aspen trees don’t usually grow crooked. Like most other threes, they grow straight up, towards the sun, but not the specimens that make up the Crooked Bush. Located near Hafford, in Canada’s Saskatchewan province, this anomaly is the world’s only known crooked aspen tree grove. The strange appearance of the trees was first observed in the 1940s and it has since attracted thousands of tourists to this place. The advent of the internet only made the Crooked Bush more popular and there is now even a wooden walkway that visitors can use to avoid stepping on new growth.

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Once driven close to extinction, the blue cows of Latvia, a proud symbol of the Baltic country, have been making a comeback over the last couple of decades.

Originally found only on the Baltic coast in the Kurzeme region, cows with light blue or dark ultramarine hides can now be found grazing all over the Latvian countryside. In the Soviet era, they were rendered almost extinct, with only a few specimens surviving the culling. Even back in the year 2000 there were only 18 blue cows in Latvia, but today they number around 1,500. The unique breed is now considered a symbol of national identity.

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The Tamaskan is a relatively new and rare breed of dog created with the specific purpose of mimicking the looks of a grey wolf without any genetic relation to the wild predator.

In the 1980s, a group of British dog breeders set out on a mission to develop a new dog breed with a wolf-like appearance. To that end, they combined German Shepherds, Siberian Huskies, Alaskan Malamutes, and Samoyeds, and the Tamaskan was one of the breeds they came up with. However, some experts believe that crossing this new breed with the Czechoslovakian Wolfdog made the Tamaskan what it is today. But while the Tamaskan may look like an actual wolf, or at least a close cousin, genetically speaking, there is no relation between the two species. The Tamaskan is all dog.

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Most people can only dream of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on their dream home, but some are paying the same amounts, if not more, on intricate, fully-furnished playhouses for their kids.

Charmed Playhouses, a family business based in Letherbridge, Canada, claims to build the world’s most fantastic, luxurious and quality playhouses, and looking at some of their creation, we’re inclined to agree. But before you start dreaming about your very own backyard fantasy playhouse, you should know that some of these can cost an arm and a leg. Even though prices start at a respectable $3,500 for a basic playhouse, if you’re looking for something special, the bill can easily go into the tens of thousands, and even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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Two LAPD police officers ended up losing their jobs after ignoring calls about a robbery so they could drive around hunting pokemon in the augmented reality mobile game Pokemon Go.

Last week, California’s court of appeals upheld a previous decision according to which officers Louis Lozano and Eric Mitchell were rightfully terminated from the Los Angeles Police Department almost five years ago. Court documents showed that in April 2017 the two men were driving in their patrol car and discussing Pokemon Go, when they were asked to respond to a robbery in progress with “multiple suspects” at a Macy’s in southwest LA. The officers chose to ignore the call, with Mitchell reportedly saying ‘Aw, screw it,’ choosing to hunt for a nearby pokemon called a Snorlax instead.

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An Indian man who had become paralyzed and unable to speak after being involved in a tragic car accident 5 years ago, reportedly started walking and talking again after getting the Covid-19 vaccine.

We keep hearing about potential negative side-effects of getting vaccinated against the coronavirus, but Dularchand Munda, a 55-year-old man from India’s Jharkhand state will tell you that getting the Covid-19 vaccine was the best thing that ever happened to him. Bedridden and unable to speak ever since being involved in a serious car accident 5 years ago, Dularchand got the jab on January 4th and started regaining feeling in his legs within a few hours. Now, he is able to speak again and can walk with the help of a walking cane.

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Xavier Long, a 20-year-old man from Alabama, claims he is paid several thousands of dollars per week by men who want him to test their girlfriends’ loyalty.

Long has been conducting so-called “loyalty tests” on behalf of men who allegedly ask him to flirt with their female partners via texts to see if they give in to his advances. His tests involve checking whether the client’s partner can be trusted by sliding into their DMs, and reporting back any shady behavior. Apparently, there are a lot of insecure boyfriends out there, as Xavier has seen demand for his unusual service skyrocket and he now makes up to $2,000 a week from fees.

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A Bangladeshi woman who lived with constant pain in her abdomen for 20 years was shocked to discover that she had lived with surgical scissors forgotten in her body after an operation.

55-year-old Bachena Khatun had been living with constant abdominal pain ever since undergoing a gallstone removal operation at a clinic in Chuadanga, in 2002. After spending her life savings on the operation, the woman was discharged from the clinic with a prescription, but within a couple of days she started experiencing pain in her stomach. She went back to the clinic, but her surgeon – who had been supervised by two other doctors during the operation – dismissed her concerns, explaining that the pain was normal and that she shouldn’t worry. He was wrong, and he wasn’t the only one.

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An Ohio-based hairstylist has spent the last nine years of his life creating the world’s largest human hair ball out of the cut hair of his clients.

Steve Warden owns and operates a salon named Blockers in Cambridge, Ohio. In 2013, after his youngest child went off to college, he embarked on a quest to break the Guinness world record for the largest ball of human hair, and last month he did just that. Hoss the Hairball weighs a whopping 102.12 kg (225.13 lbs), which makes it over 25 kilograms heavier than the previous titleholder. And because lumps of human hair are constantly being added to it, Hoss is expected to keep growing for many years to come, making it really hard to dethrone.

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