Using their large feet and fast stride, the Western and Clark’s grebes can run as far as 20 meters on water, making them the only bird and the heaviest animal on Earth capable of doing so.

If you exclude Jesus Christ, whose biblical feat of walking on water is literally considered a miracle of the New Testament, only a handful of creatures are known to be able to walk or run on water. Most of them are small insects, but there is also a small basilisk nicknamed the Jesus Christ lizard for very obvious reasons, but the largest of them all are two bird species – the Western and Clark’s grebes. They can run on water for up to 7 seconds and distances of about 20 minutes as part of an impressive mating ritual.

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Aria, a talented Japanese artist who specializes in pencil drawings, has been getting a lot of attention for her jewelry series, a collection of hyper-realistic gem drawings that look better than their inspiration.

We first noticed Aria’s exceptional talent earlier this year, when we featured her most impressive drawings here on Oddity Central, but she has been honing her skills ever since and she is already going viral once again with an entirely new series, one that focuses on precious stones. One of her new works, entitled “Amethyst”, has gone viral on social media, with many users commenting that it actually looks better than an actual gem. Looking at Aria’s stunning drawing, I can’t say I disagree.

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If you’re looking for the simplest way to do your laundry on the go, this plastic zipper bag might be the answer to your problems.

Created by Japanese company Kao, the Attack Zero laundry bag is a 5-liter zipper bag designed to help users do the laundry pretty much anytime, anywhere. All you have to do is open the zipper lock put your dirty laundry inside along with some detergent – it comes included with the bag – and fill it up with water. Then close the zipper, shake the Attack Zero bag to make sure the laundry is nice and soaked, and then gently rub the bag as you would if you were washing the laundry by hand. Finally, unscrew the small valve on the side of the bag and spill the dirty mixture out. Then add fresh water to rinse the laundry and repeat the process as many times as necessary.

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The ‘Little Princess of Anfu Road’ is a Chinese woman from Shanghais believed to be in her early 50s who always goes out in elegant Lolita-style dresses.

Photos of the ‘Little Princess of Anfu Road’ started doing the rounds online a few weeks ago, drawing mixed reactions from the general public. Some called her a breath of fresh air, others a ‘crazy old lady’ who dressed well below her years, but everyone was intrigued by her, as she always seemed to have a new outfit on, and she seemed to ooze self-confidence despite all the criticism directed at her. As the days passed by, interest in this mysterious character of Shanghai grew, and soon everyone learned that there was a heartwarming story behind her extravagant wardrobe.

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In a competition where the goal is to do nothing but lie down for as long as possible, one man emerged victorious after spending 60 hours laying flat on the ground.

The village of Brezna, in Montenegro, recently held the 12th annual edition of its “Lying Down Championship”, an unusual competition where the end goal is to spend as much time lying down as possible. It sounds easy enough, but as time passes by, your bones and muscles start to ache, your limbs go numb, and you just feel the need to get up and stretch. This year, the champion managed to lie down for about 60 hours.

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Juan Carlos Alvarado, a young entrepreneur from Medellin, Colombia, claims he makes hundreds of dollars per day selling bottles of air from his home city.

Medellin, Colombia’s second-largest city, is known as the “City of Eternal Spring,” because of its pleasant climate all year round. But you can’t sell climate to someone thousands of miles away, now can you? Air is a whole other matter though, and it’s actually a tried-and-true business model. People have been selling cans of fresh air and bottles of fresh air to people in polluted countries like China for years, and it was actually these success stories that inspired Juan Carlos Alvarado, a native of Medellin, to start his own air-selling business.

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Located in Yokohama, Japan, Unco Shop specializes in producing and selling poop-themed apparel like T-shirts and sneakers, jewelry, accessories and more.

Poop-themed apparel and accessories are not that uncommon in souvenir shops, but did you there is a Japanese shop that only sells this kind of product? Named after the Japanese word for poop, ‘unco’, this unique venue is located in Seya Ward, an industrial district in Yokohama. Unco Inc., the company behind Unco Shop sells over 400 poop-themed products, and is popular with influencers and celebrities in the Asian country, but few know that the project began as a simple hobby.

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A Chinese company has sparked controversy online after it was reported that it forces employees to eat raw eggs as punishment for not meeting expectations.

It all started when a second-year university student surnamed Du took to social media to complain about his experience as an intern for a Zhengzhou technology company. He claimed that the said company had a bizarre rule where employees had to swallow raw eggs if they didn’t get enough orders in a set period of time or otherwise failed to meet management expectations. He claimed to have had his internship terminated after he refused to obey the rule, adding that management made him write down “personal reasons” as the reason for ending the internship to absolve the company of any liability.

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A mysterious geyser that erupted in the middle of a forest on the Japanese island of Hokkaido has been shooting up columns of water up to 40-meters-high for the past couple of weeks.

Every year, on August 9, the small Japanese town of Oshamambe holds an annual summer festival complete with a traditional procession at the local Shinto shrine. However, this year’s festival has been overshadowed by an unusual occurrence a day before the event, when a huge geyser erupted in the middle of the shrine grounds’ forest. Locals woke up to a steady roar, a column of water shooting up above the tree canopy, and the unmistakable smell of sulfur in the air. The mysterious geyser has been shooting up water for the past couple of weeks and is showing no signs of slowing down.

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A gang in the Indian state of Bihar somehow managed to run a fake police station out of a hotel for eight months before finally being caught by the actual police.

Cases of fraudsters impersonating police officers and soldiers are not uncommon in India, a country where the fear of and the respect for those in uniform are widespread, but a gang in the town of Banka, Bihar state, took the scam to a whole other level by setting up a fake police station just 500 meters from a real one. Apparently, the scammers operated their fake station out of a local hotel, where they posed as actual officers wearing realistic uniforms, badges and even firearms. They are believed to have scammed hundreds of people, having requested bribes for registering complaints, helping them secure social housing or jobs in the police, or otherwise solving their problems.

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The avocado is one of the most energy and resource-intensive plants cultivated around the world, but apparently, you can opt for a more environmentally-friendly alternative called ‘ecovado’.

The popularity of avocados has skyrocketed over the last couple of decades, with the World Economic Forum estimating that about 5 billion kilograms of avocados are consumed annually around the world. However, this significant increase in demand has come at a huge cost for the environment. Forests have been cut down to make room for avocado plantations, and water sources have been sucked dry by what is widely considered one of the most unsustainable crops. It was this worrying development that inspired the creation of the ‘evocado’, a more sustainable avocado alternative.

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After seeing its pork production decimated by African swine flu outbreaks, China has been investing heavily into so-called ‘pig hotels’, controversial multi-storey pig raising facilities.

Talk about elevating pig farming to new heights! For the last three years, farmers across China have been investing billions of dollars into massive high-rise hog-raising facilities popularly known as pig hotels. The trend started with two and three-storey facilities, but it quickly escalated into monolithic structures of over 10 levels, with tens of thousand of animals raised on each. At the end of this month, Zhongxin Kaiwei Modern Farming, a privately-owned company in Hubei, is set to complete a 26-storey pig hotel touted as the largest such structure in the world.

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Roberto Gabriel Trigo, are tired football player from Paraguay, is probably the only man alive who can say that he shot down a small plane with a football.

The legend of the football kick that brought down a plane has been doing the rounds through the locker rooms of Paraguayan football clubs for six decades. Some say it happened during an official game, others that it was during a practice, but they all credit the same man – Roberto Gabriel Trigo. He was 17 years old at the time and playing as a right back for the now-defunct General Genes football club of Asuncion. Annoyed by a small plane flying low over the local football field, Trigo allegedly kicked the ball outwards, hitting the aircraft’s engine and causing it to crash in an open field, just 200 meters away.

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Family Mart, Japan’s second-largest convenience store chain, recently started using AI-powered robots to restock shelves, as a way to deal with the country’s fast-shrinking workforce.

The decline in labor population is one of the biggest threats to businesses operating in Japan, and some have already started looking for ways to replace human workers. Case in point, major convenience store chain Family Mart, a company has recently teamed up with Tokyo-based robotics company Telexistence to introduce AI-powered robots in hundreds of its stores across the country. The new “employees” will be in charge of replenishing drinks in refrigerators and are expected to make human workers’ jobs easier and, in some cases, replace them completely.

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Lays, the world’s bestselling potato chip brand, recently launched a limited edition miniature washing machine for oily fingertips.

Let’s face it, there are few things in the world more addictive than potato chips, but if there’s one thing everyone hates about them – apart from getting us fat – it’s the grease they leave on our fingertips. You need to have napkins on hand, lick your fingertips (yuck!), or get up from that comfortable sofa and wash up when you’re done stuffing your face. Well, thanks to a rather ingenious marketing campaign, potato chip enthusiasts now have another option – a miniature washing machine designed specifically to clean oily fingertips.

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