According to a recently published scientific paper, a team of researchers has developed a wood processing technique that makes the material 23 times harder, making it possible to create sharp wooden knives and nails.

Material scientists at the University of Maryland have reportedly developed a type of hardened wood that can be used as a sustainable alternative to materials like steel and ceramics. To demonstrate the toughness of their chemically-treated wood, the team created a knife that is allegedly nearly three times sharper than a stainless-steel dinner table knife, as well as a wooden nail that can be hammered through wood without sustaining any damage, and that isn’t affected by rust.

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Les Grands Buffet à Narbonne is a unique all-you-can-eat buffet in Narbonne, France, where you can stuff your face with the most decadent dishes of French cuisine, in a luxurious environment, and without breaking the bank.

While the above paragraph may sound like the beginning of a sponsored post, that is most certainly not the case. I only discovered Les Grands Buffet yesterday, while on my daily session of internet surfing for interesting topics to write about, when some photos of what looked like a lobster fountain caught my eye. It turned out to be just one of the many eye-catching arrangements at the Les Grands Buffet in Narbonne, France, a unique all-you-can-eat-buffet that only serves the best dishes of French cuisine, from lobsters to foie gras and cassoulet. It’s the kind of place that, as a gourmand, you simply have to visit at least once in your life.

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An elevator button factory in Japan allows visitors to test its vast collection of buttons by pressing no less than 1,000 of them on a specially designed display.

Shimada Denki Seisakusho is a specialized manufacturer of custom-made elevator buttons and arrival lights based in Tokyo, Japan. Founded in 1933, the factory is a piece of Japanese industrial history and conducts guided tours for people interested in its early beginnings and the way it makes its vast array of elevator buttons. It’s a fascinating visit, I’m sure, but the highlight of the tour has to be the ‘1,000 Buttons’ display, which, as the name suggests, is made up of rows upon rows of different elevator buttons that light up when pressed.

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Walking through the streets of Sweden Hills, with its traditional read-and-white Swedish houses, Swedish flags and traditional Swedish outfits, you’d never guess you were on the island of Hokkaido, in Japan.

Located in Tōbetsu, about 30 kilometers from Sapporo, the largest city on Hokkaido, Sweden Hills (スウェーデンヒルズ) was inspired by the visit of a Swedish ambassador in the area. During their visit, the Swedish diplomat remarked how similar the climate and landscape were to his native land, and that inspired developers in the area to build a settlement modeled on idyllic Swedish towns. Planning started in 1979, and the actual construction began in 1984. Today, Sweden Hills or Suēden Hiruzu is home to about 400 permanent residents, as well several hundred who only vacation here. It’s safe to say they are all massive fans of Swedish culture.

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The European Hornet Moth (Sesia apiformis) looks terrifying at first glance, but its uncanny resemblance to a giant wasp is just an elaborate disguise meant to keep predators at bay.

The hornet moth is a prime example of Batesian mimicry, a form of mimicry where a harmless species has evolved to imitate the look and/or behavior of a harmful species in order to protect itself from predators. In this case, the yellow and back combination, the shape of the abdomen, and of the see-through wings do a great job of creating the illusion of a menacing wasp. It’s only on closer inspection that you notice the insect’s lack of a clearly defined, wasp-like waste, a furry body, and two uncharacteristically small eyes.

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A couple in Belgium has become famous for giving their 11 children first names based on different variations of just four letters from the alphabet – A, E, L, and X.

Gwenny Blanckaert and Marino Vaneeno are the proud parents of eleven children – seven girls and four boys – all of whom have four-letter names, the same four letters, in fact. Despite having 26 letters in the alphabet to work with, after making their first to children Alex and Axel, the two parents had a revelation and decided to use just the letters A, E, L, and X to name their other kids. And because they both wanted a big family, they ended up having to use variations of those four letters to name their next nine children as well, and plan to do the same when their twelfth child is born next year.

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At an age when most women are either busy playing with their grandchildren or are long past thinking about having children, a 70-year-old Indian woman just gave birth to her first child.

Jivuben Valabhai Rabari and her husband had been trying to conceive ever since they got married, 45 years ago, but their every attempt had been unsuccessful. A couple of years ago, Ms. Rabari, a milk farmer from rural Gujarat, contacted a gynecologist about the possibility of trying an IVF treatment to finally fulfill her dream of having a baby. The doctor, Naresh Bhanushali, had helped several members of the woman’s family conceive, and she was convinced he could do the same for her. Despite receiving negative counseling and being told that her relatives were between 45 and 50 years old, not nearing 70 like her, she would not take ‘no’ for an answer.

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Sri Ananthapura temple in north Kerala’s Kasaragod district is allegedly home to a vegetarian crocodile named ‘Babiya’ who has been living there for over 70 years.

Pictures of a large crocodile inside the Sri Ananthapadmanabha Swamy Lake Temple made international news headlines last year, boosting the small Hindu temple’s popularity. But in reality, this was one of the few times that the giant reptile had entered the temple, as it spends most of its time in an adjacent pond, waiting for the priests to bring it the daily meals, which are always vegetarian. If the priests are to be believed, Babiya the crocodile has been living solely on cooked rice for as long as he’s been at the temple, which adds up to over seven decades.

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Hitting a hole-in-one is one of the greatest things that can happen to a golf player, but in Japan, such a lucky shot can lead to such an expensive celebration that insurers actually sell hole-in-one insurance policies to mitigate the ‘risk’.

The average golfer has 1 in 12,500 chances of hitting a hole-in-one, while professional golf players have a 1in 2,500 chance of making the shot. Those are not particularly great odds, but they’re high enough to prompt many Japanese golfers to take hole-in-one insurance policies. You see, in the Asian country, it’s customary for whoever makes this incredibly lucky shot to through a celebratory party that can cost up to $10,000. That’s more expensive than most people want to pay, so in order to cut costs, many golfers take out special insurance policies for a few tens of dollars a year, just in case they get lucky.

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An Egyptian man had to undergo emergency surgery to have a mobile phone that he had swallowed six months ago removed from his stomach.

In a first-of-its-kind case in Egypt, doctors at the Aswan University Hospital in the city of Aswan performed an operation to remove a small mobile phone that had been inside a man’s intestines for half a year. The patient, an inmate named Mohamed Ismail Mohamed, was brought to the emergency room with severe abdominal pain, and a CT scan revealed that there was a foreign body in his intestines. The man was prepped for surgery, and doctors managed to remove the object which turned out to be a small mobile phone wrapped in plastic foil.

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Scientists have discovered that Temnothorax ants infected by a certain tapeworm parasite can live at least three times longer than their uninfected peers while maintaining a youthful appearance and getting special treatment.

A multi-year scientific study published in May of this year has revealed a phenomenon worthy of a science-fiction or fantasy blockbuster – a parasitic tapeworm that grants its host eternal youth while making them irresistible to their uninfected peers, who work harder just to bring them food and fulfill their every wish. It sounds unreal, but scientists at the  Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Austria have studied colonies of Temnothorax ants and found that when they are infected with the tapeworm Anomotaenia brevis, they become virtually immortal.

Temnothorax-nylanderi is a relatively common species of small ants that live in forests throughout Central Europe. They form small colonies on the forest floor, inside acorns or wooden branches, and most importantly, they serve as an intermediate host for the tapeworm Anomotaenia brevis. Up to 70 parasitic larvae can survive in the hemolymph, the body fluid of insects, but instead of competing for resources with their hosts and slowly killing them, the parasites appear to extend their lives considerably, possibly even indefinitely.

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Tsovkra-1, a small village in the mountains of Russia’s Dagestan autonomous republic, is famous for being the only place in the world where the entire able-bodied population knows how to walk a tightrope.

No one knows exactly how the tightrope-walking tradition of Tsovkra-1 (named ‘1’ because of another Tsvokra village nearby) began, but one thing is for sure – for the last 100 years, every able-bodied man, woman, and child in the village has learned the walk a tightrope, and many have gone on to become circus performers. Although Tsovkra-1’s population has dropped from around 3,000 in the 1980s to under 400 today, all those who remain are trained in the art of tightrope walking.

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A bank manager in the U.A.E. was conned into authorizing a $35 million transfer after receiving vocal confirmation from the account holder. Only that wasn’t who the manager thought they were…

Early last year, the manager of an undisclosed bank in the United Arab Emirates received a call from a longtime client – the director of a company with whom he had spoken before. The man was excited that his company was about to make an important acquisition, so he needed the bank to authorize a transfer of $35 million as soon as possible. The client added that a lawyer named Martin Zelner had been contracted to handle the acquisition, and the manager could see emails from the lawyer in his inbox. He had spoken to the client before, he recognized his voice, and everything he said checked out. So he proceeded to make the most expensive mistake of his career…

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This week, the people of Plounéventer, a town in France’s Brittany region, woke up to a very bizarre sight – a white van perched on top of a bus station.

Imagine waking up early in the morning to take the bus to work and finding a car on top of the bus station? It’s still night out, there’s hardly anyone around, and there’s a car in the last place you’d expect to see one. No, it’s not a lost episode of the Twilight Zone, but something that commuters in the French town of Plounéventer experienced on Monday morning. Some clicked a few photos of the white van perched on top of the Place de l’Eglise bus station and posted them on social media, where they quickly went viral.

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If you’re looking for an unusual and extremely expensive way of dealing with small pests, like cockroaches, may we recommend the world’s smallest working revolver?

The Swiss Mini Gun holds the Guinness World Record for the smallest functioning revolver in the world. It measures 5.5 cm long, 3.5 cm tall and 1 cm wide, weighing only 19.8g. It’s so easy to conceal that countries like the United States and the United Kingdom have made the Swiss Mini Gun illegal to import. But while its reduced size may be unusual, this tiny firearm has all the same features as a normal-sized double-action revolver. Its manufacturing was only possible by employing techniques used in the Swiss watchmaking and jewelry industries.

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