An Australian company specializing in cultivated meat recently unveiled a giant meatball allegedly made from lab-grown meat using wooly mammoth DNA.

While most cultured meat companies are focused on producing alternatives to conventional meats like chicken, beef and pork, Australian start-up Vow is taking a different approach. It is focusing on mixing and matching cells from different unconventional animal species, even ones that have been extinct for thousands of years. To prove that it can be done, Vow took the DNA sequence for mammoth myoglobin, a key muscle protein in giving meat its flavor, and filled the few gaps in the strand with elephant DNA. They then put this sequence in myoblast stem cells from a sheep and grew the tens of billions of cells necessary to create the lab-grown meat.

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A Chinese woman stunned the internet with photos of a 20-year-old boiled egg that she had preserved as a young girl and then forgotten about. It has fossilized and now resembles a ruby.

The woman, surnamed Fu, posted photos of the fossilized egg on Chinese social media platform Douban, where they quickly attracted people’s attention and went viral. It wasn’t long before mainstream news outlets started contacting her about the unique egg, wanting to know its story. Apparently, the woman’s mother bought it for her 20 years ago, when she was still in primary school, because it was unusually small in size. Her mother boiled it for her to eat at school, but after storing it in a side pocket of her backpack, she forgot about it for three days and dared not eat if after that, thinking it had spoiled. But she didn’t want to throw the delicate egg away either, so she put it on top of their refrigerator and completely forgot about it for a couple of months.

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High up in the Swiss Alps, at an altitude of almost 3,500 meters (11,332 feet), lies Jungfraujoch, Europe’s highest train station, a wonder of human engineering that has been around for over a century.

The train doesn’t seem like the best means of transportation when trying to climb a mountain, but the Swiss would beg to differ, and they have proof to back up their claims. At the end of the 19th century, they began work on a project unlike any other – the Jungfraubahn, a steep railway through the Bernese Alps all the way to the ‘top of Europe’. And, at the end of the Jungfraubahn railway, they built Jungfraujoch, a spectacular train station perched on a rock between the Jungfrau and Mönch mountains, both of which soar over 4,000 meters. Today, Jungfraujoch is officially recognized as the highest train station in Europe and is one of Switzerland’s most popular tourist attractions.

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South African pastor Siva Moodley died in 2021, but his body was only laid to rest this month, after spending almost 600 days at a mortuary, because his family and parishioners were expecting him to come back to life.

Siva Moodley, the founder of The Miracle Centre in Gauteng, north of Johannesburg, died on August 15, 2021, after falling ill. However, instead of making preparations for his funeral, his family simply left his body at a mortuary, awaiting his resurrection. His wife and other members of his family came to the mortuary to pray for his return, but they stopped coming a few months after his death and refused to give their consent for Moodley’s burial or cremation. To make matters worse, they even refused to acknowledge the pastor’s death within the church, conducting services in his place until the day he decided to come back to life.

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A Chinese man whose best friend’s wife had introduced him to his online girlfriend of over a year recently learned that the woman he had fallen in love with had actually been his friend’s wife trying to scam him.

Mr. Zhou, a middle-aged man from Xuchang, China’s Henan province, had been trying to raise money to start a family by growing watermelons in Myanmar. He had been gone for years, but he still kept in touch with his best friend, Xiao Li, to whom he confessed last year that his business was going well and that he wanted to meet a good woman. Li told him that his wife had a girlfriend who was also single and that she could introduce them. Because Zhou was still abroad tending to his fruit business, online dating was the only viable option. The two hit it off and agreed to continue their long-distance relationship until Zhou returned to China.

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Kleine Johanna a 4,800-pound behemoth built almost entirely out of scrap metal, was recently acknowledged as the heaviest rideable bicycle in the world by the Record Institute for Germany, a national version of the Guinness Book of Records.

You’ve probably seen chunky bikes before, but surely nothing quite like Kleine Johanna. This unique contraption measures over 5 meters in length, is almost 2 meters tall, and weighs about 4,800 lbs (2,177 kg). That’s more than most sedans, so how on earth is anyone supposed to get it in motion with pedal power alone? Well, according to its creator, Sebastian Beutler, who lives in Köthen, a town in Germany’s Saxony-Anhalt state, it’s all thanks to the truck gearbox adapted to enhance the classic bicycle gear system. Kleine Johanna has 35 forward gears and 7 reverse gears and can not only be pedaled into motion by a single person, but it can also tow up to 15 tonnes, without any problems.

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Located alongside a motorway outside of Melbourne, in Australia’s Victoria state, lies Hotel EastLink. At least what looks like a high-rise hotel, because in reality, it’s just an unusual sculpture.

Designed by local artist Callum Morton, the Hotel EastLink was unveiled in 2007, and it has been confusing motorists ever since. It’s not as large as a high-rise hotel –  20 meters tall, 12m wide, and 5m thick – but driving past it at high speed for the first time, it’s really hard to tell, so it’s no wonder that people actually look it up online and actually call in for reservations. To make it even more confusing, at night, some of the windows are lit up, which makes it seem like some of the rooms are occupied. But there are no rooms, and the building itself can’t be entered, because the whole thing is a sculpture designed purely for ornamental purposes.

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A Japanese civil servant in Osaka was recently forced to return 1.44 million yen ($11,000) of his salary after being found guilty of smoking during work hours more than 4,500 times in 14 years.

When people say smoking is an expensive vice, they are generally referring to the cost of cigarretes, but in cities like Osaka, smokers risk having important sums of money deducted from their salaries if caught smoking on the job. A director-level civil servant recently found this out the hard way after being hit with a fine of approximately $11,000 for thousands of cigarettes smoked during work hours for 14 years. The 61-year-old employee who was found to have smoked a total of 4,512 times in the past 14 and a half years while he was at work, the equivalent of 355 hours and 19 minutes spent not doing his job.

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Nottingham’s Haunted Museum is home to many macabre and fear-inducing attractions, but few as disturbing as George, a 1930s doll reportedly made using a dead person’s eyes and hair.

Marrie Wesson, who founded the Haunted Museum of Nottingham with her husband in 2018, recently met antique expert Charlie Ross on BBC’s popular TV show Bargain Hunt. She brought along a couple of her most disturbing exhibits, one of which was George, a bizarre-looking doll dating back to 1930s Texas that managed to freak out Ross with its sulking expression and bright blue eyes. As it turns out, there is more to George’s creepiness than his facial expression. He comes from a time when people made such dolls in memory of their loved ones, only in his case, the person who made him used the loved one’s actual hair and their glass eyes…

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A 60-year-old man who used to work out for 8 hours a day, walking, jogging, and doing hundreds of situps, developed severe degenerative arthritis and is barely able to move because of the pain.

They say too much of a good thing is usually bad for you, and apparently, exercise is no exception. Chinese newspaper Shanxy Daily recently featured the tragic story of a 60-year-old man from Henan who only discovered exercising in his early 40s, only to start overdoing it to such an extent that he pretty much ruined his joints. The Zhengzhou-based man reportedly exercised about two and a half hours every morning, walking, running, and doing pull-ups, then swam for about two hours and then did 800 sit-ups a day, plus hundreds of push-ups, and some badminton to top it all off. Unfortunately, his body eventually gave in and he started experiencing severe pain in his joints.

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A popular Japanese tailor and adventurer recently went viral on social media after climbing Mount Kinabalu, the highest mountain in Malaysia, in a three-piece suit and stylish leather suit.

One of the last things you would expect to see at the top of the 4,095-meter Mount Kinabalu is a Japanese fellow wearing a pristine three-piece suit, classy leather suit, and an office ID tag around his neck and carrying a messenger bag. And yet that was exactly the unusual sight that mountaineers at the top of Malaysia’s highest peak were treated to this week as Nobutaka Sada, a Japanese tailor and adventurer, posed for photos and videos to post on his popular social media accounts. Sada owns his own bespoke suit label and he often pulls this kind of stunt to promote his brand.

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French luxury accessory brand Coperni recently unveiled a limited-edition “meteorite’ handbag that is hand-carved from a meteorite that fell on Earth thousands of years ago. It can be yours for just $40,000 euros ($43,000)

As part of its Fall/Winter 23 fashion collection, Coperni has created a unique handbag that ‘combines archeology, design, as well as classical and primitive art’. The Mini Meteorite Swipe Bag has the general shape of the brand’s iconic swipe bag, but a rougher finish, which makes sense considering that it’s hand-sculpted out of rock. And not just any rock, but a real meteorite, hence the name. The bag showcased on the Coperni online store supposedly contains a piece of meteorite estimated to have fallen on Earth 55,000 years ago, but because each purse is unique, the shape and color may vary slightly.

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Julia Popova, a talented soap maker based in Sankt Petersburg, Russia, creates amazingly detailed bars of soap that look like delectable desserts, liquor bottles or juicy fruits.

Nine years ago, when Julia started making her beautiful soap bars, she only made them as gifts for family and friends, but she received such positive feedback that she actually started showing them off on social media. And soon, orders started coming in and the OmNon Soap brand was born. In the beginning, she would buy regular soap bars, melt them, and them mold them into the desired shapes, but as she became more involved in the artistic process, she started buying the base ingredients and then making her own soap. Well, calling it soap doesn’t do it justice, as every one of her creations is more like a piece of art.

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A 29-year-old South Korean woman who forged her birth certificate in order to pose as a 16-year-old teenager and enroll at a New Jersey high school claims she did it only out of nostalgia.

In January of this year Hyejeong Shin, a 29-year-old South Korean woman and legal resident of the United States of America, made international news headlines after being caught pretending to be a 16-year-old girl at the New Brunswick High School in New Jersey. Just a few days into her high-school adventure, New Brunswick staff discovered that she had faked her birth certificate in order to gain admission. The discovery was made during the vetting process, but recently revealed information suggests that Shin was also reported by a number of students whom she had started acting weird with. The young Korean woman claims that she never intended to hurt anyone and that she merely wanted to relieve the experience that made her feel the safest growing up.

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Neuzeller Klosterbräu, a brewery in eastern Germany, claims to have devised a way to create a powdered beer that, when mixed with water, tasted almost exactly like the original liquid beverage.

The global beer industry is massive, but it’s also one of the least efficient in the world. Transporting large quantities of beer bottled in heavy glass bottles all over the world is expensive, but what if you didn’t have to? What if some of the world’s most famous breweries could just ship their products overseas in powdered form, and the company on the receiving end would just have to add water to it? German brewery Neuzeller Klosterbräu claims to have come up with a process to create any type of beer in powdered form, alcohol and carbonation included. All anyone has to do is add water and they are left with a regular beer.

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