Gijs Schalkx, a Dutch inventor and engineering student, modified his motorcycle to run on methane harvested from roadside bogs and ponds.

Aptly named Sloot Motor (sloot means ‘ditch’ in Dutch), Gijs Schalkx’s ingenious vehicle features a modified Honda GX160 motorcycle engine, with a hole into the airbox, through which it receives the methane. The bright inventor than hooks a balloon filled with methane to the hole, which acts as the fuel tank. The engine still starts with gasoline, but once it starts, it uses the methane to keep going. But what truly makes Gijs’ project special is the fact that he manually harvests the methane himself from roadside swamps and ponds, a labor that takes approximately eight hours. The methane only lasts 12 miles at a top speed of 27mph.

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Synsepalum dulcificum, aka the miracle fruit or miracle berry, is a unique plant known to produce fruits that, when eaten, make all sour foods and drinks subsequently ingested taste sweet.

For centuries, indigenous tribes of Ghana, in West Africa, used the fruits of the Synsepalum dulcificum plant to sweeten sour or tart fruits, foods, and drinks, but it wasn’t until 1968 that the miraculin protein that makes the fruits special was finally extracted and turned into tablets. That made it possible for virtually anyone in the world to experience the “taste tripping” that miracle berries are so famous for. Miraculin essentially alters your senses, causing things that should taste sour, like lemon or vinegar, to taste sweet, or even too sweet for up to 60 minutes after the protein is consumed.

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An amateur chef in Guatemala has become famous for turning the country’s Pacaya volcano into a pop-up pizzeria that serves fresh volcanically-baked pizza to tourists.

Mario David García Mansilla grew up in the shadow of Pacaya, one of Guatemala’s most active volcanos, and although he loved his home enough to know he never wanted to leave, he never imagined he would one day use the volcano as a pizza oven. Today, his now popular Pizza Pacaya has become one of highlights of visiting the active volcano, with tourists paying a premium to have Mansilla cook his delicious pies right on the smoldering volcanic rock, right next to flowing rivers of lava.

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Cookie-cutter sharks are a small species of shark about the size of a domestic cat that will attack predators several times their size, biting off conical chunks of their flesh, and even the soft parts of nuclear submarines.

The cookie-cutter shark (Isistius brasiliensis) was discovered in the early 19th century, by French naturalists, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that marine scientists realized just how brave and dangerous these small marine creatures could be. Up to that point, the conical, deep wounds that researchers often documented on all sorts of marine life, from small fish to dolphins and even great white sharks, were a mystery. It wasn’t until 1971, when Everet Jones discovered small conical pieces of flesh in the stomachs of cookie-cutter sharks that marine scientists began to realize that the deceptively small sharks could severely wound some of the ocean’s mightiest creatures.

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Located in the Russian Far East, the island of Sakhalin is allegedly home to giant versions of common plants like buckwheat, burdock and butterbur that can grow up to 5 meters tall.

Sakhalin is known for being the largest island in the Russian Federation, as well as a point of contention between Japan and Russia over the centuries. However, according to obscure reports going back over a decade, the northernmost island of the Japanese archipelago, as well as the nearby Kuril Islands are home to versions of ordinary herbaceous plants of truly gigantic proportions. Plants that normally reach the knee of an average adult, on these islands allegedly grow several times the height of a human.

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A Brazilian young man recently got a rather humiliating birthday party thrown for him by police after being arrested for theft right on the day that he turned 18.

Celebrating your 18th birthday should be a joyous occasion, but for one Paulo Rodrigo das Neves, from Brazil’s Rio Grande do Norte region, the event was anything but. Arrested on his birthday after being caught on camera stealing sound equipment and other parts from people’s cars, the birthday boy got to enjoy a humiliating celebration at the police station, with staff there singing him “Happy Birthday” and even serving cake and soda in his honor. To make matters worse, the whole thing was filmed and posted online.

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A 73-storey skyscraper in Shenzen, China, was recently evacuated after it reportedly started shaking for no apparent reason, sending inhabitants into a panic.

On Tuesday afternoon, SEG Plaza, a 20-year-old skyscraper in Shenzen, started wobbling visibly, prompting both people inside and those on the streets below to flee for their lives. Videos shared on social media by people in the vicinity at the time of the freak occurrence, show the giant edifice leaning from one side to the other,  and furniture on the inside shaking. By the time the Shenzhen Emergency Management Bureau evacuated the building, it had stopped shaking, but the plaza remained sealed off until the investigation into the cause of the wobbling was concluded.

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Almost every morning for the past two decades, Juliet the macaw has been visiting the local zoo in Rio de Janeiro to interact with others of her kind through the metal enclosure. She is the only wild macaw in the Brazilian metropolis, and this is her only opportunity to socialize.

Macaws are social birds, so loneliness is a tough burden to bare for Juliet, a beautiful blue-and-yellow macaw who calls Rio home. She is the only wild specimen seen in city since 1818, and no one really knows much about her. Zoo staff named the bird Juliet, but they don’t even know if she is actually female. It’s really hard to tell with macaws, and to establish her true gender they would need to capture the bird, and either examine her gonads or take blood or feather samples. And there’s really no need to put Juliet through all that stress just to satisfy human curiosity.

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In early 2021 Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince unveiled the concept of a futuristic urban development called The Line, which basically consists of a linear, 170-km-long city without roads of cars and built around nature.

During his presentation of The Line, back in January, Prince Mohammed Bin Salman described the future smart city as a direct response to growing challenges like human congestion, pollution, traffic and outdated infrastructure. Linking the coast of the Red Sea with the mountains and upper valleys of the north-west of Saudi Arabia, The Line will be powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI), continuously learning predictive ways to make life easier for both residents and local businesses. It will be powered by 100% clean energy and will feature an underground hyper-speed transportation system, instead of roads and cars.

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South Korean beauty brand Innisfree has attracted a lot of criticism after a bottle labeled as being made of paper turned out to be plastic simply wrapped in thin cardboard.

Innisfree,  a company that specializes in naturally-inspired beauty products, apparently didn’t expect anyone to actually check if the bottle for its face serum was actually made of paper, as suggested by the texture of the packaging and the “Hello, I’m paper bottle” branding printed on it. Only someone did check, slicing open the thin cardboard only to find a regular plastic bottle inside. This person posted photos of their discover on a Facebook group called “No Plastic Shopping,” and it didn’t take long for them to go viral.

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In Christian countries around the world, the Easter Bunny is a beloved symbol of one of the world’s most popular holidays, but in one New Zealand town, bunnies are such a plague for farmers that locals spend Easter wiping them out.

In New Zealand, rabbits are an introduced species that threatens both the country’s biodiversity and its agriculture. They are essentially pests that have to be culled in order to minimize the damage they cause. The town of Alexandra, in Central Otago, has turned the mass culling of rabbits into an event known as The Great Easter Bunny Hunt, which attracts hundreds of hunters from all over the country. The local Alexandra Lions club has organized the event for the last 25 years, which has become popular both with hunters and the local population, including kids, many of whom take part in the “celebration”.

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Once called a madman and laughed at by members of his community, an Indonesian man is now being hailed as a hero after spending a quarter of a century covering 250 hectares of barren hillsides around his home with banyan and ficus trees.

The story of Sadiman, the Indonesian man who singlehandedly brought a forest back to life, began in the early 1990s, but the problem he helped fix can be traced back to the 1960s. It was then that great forest fires ravaged the forests on the southern slope of Lawu Mountain, in Central Java, turning hundreds of hectares state-owned pine forest to ash and leaving barren hills in their place. For decades dozens of villages in the Regency of Wonogiri battled draughts and famine, until an unlikely hero took it upon himself to bring back the forest and create a better life for him and his community.

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A tire startup has teamed up with NASA to bring the world’s first space-age alloy bicycle tires to the mainstream market.

The SMART Tire Company recently announced an innovative airless bicycle tire originally developed and tested by NASA for future Mars Rover missions. Dubbed METL, the revolutionary tire is made from smart memory metal that ,unlike stretching, rearranges its molecular structure when you bend it, but instantly goes back to its original shape. It basically has the flexibility of rubber but is as strong as titanium, which means that you probably won’t have to change another bicycle tire in your lifetime.

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The regent honeyeater is already one of the world’s rarest birds, but experts are worried that it could soon go extinct, because they have forgotten how to sing.

Flocks of hundreds of regent honeyeaters could once be spotted all over south-eastern Australia on a regular basis, but today the species is critically endangered, with only 300 specimens believed to exist in the entire world. They were also known for the complexity of their mating songs, but as their numbers started dwindling, ornithologists started noticing this complexity diminishing, to the point where male regent honeyeaters didn’t even sound like their species anymore. Today, there is ample evidence that regent honeyeaters have forgotten how to sing, which could render the entire species extinct.

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Made out of a single, very expensive, crystal of silicon-28 atoms, and extensively analyzed for imperfections by both humans and computers, this “nearly perfect” sphere is the world’s roundest object.

The surface of the world’s roundest object is so smooth that if you were to blow it up to the size of our planet, the difference between the highest peak and the lowest valley would be between 3m and 4.5m (10 and 15 feet). It used to be around 15m back when scientists started making these amazing spheres, but technology has gotten better at smoothing out even the tiniest wrinkles. However, creating such a wonder isn’t cheap. The silicone crystal alone costs around $1 million, while the sphere itself, although often described as priceless, costs around $3.5 million.

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