A museum in the German city of Wolfsburg recently removed a controversial art installation by English artist Damien Hirst after animal rights group PETA filed a complaint about it killing flies.

Flies are generally seen as annoying pests to be exterminated or at least kept at bay, but a controversial art installation featuring a fly-killing UV light has attracted the wrath of animal rights group PETA and sparked a heated debate about the rights of the flying insects. Titled “A Hundred Years (1990)”, the art installation by award-winning artist and entrepreneur Damien Hirst was recently removed from Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg after PETA filed a complaint claiming that it infringed on Germany’s Animal Welfare Act, which bans the killing or harming of animals without proper reason. Whether flies fall under that law or not is yet to be determined, but the decision has already sparked controversy in Germany.

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A blood-filled mosquito squashed in a burgled apartment in China’s Fujian Province helped investigators catch the mysterious criminal.

It sounds like the plot of a CSI episode, but according to Chinese news sources, authorities in Fuzhou, East China’s Fujian Province managed to bring a burglar to justice by analyzing the blood stain left on a wall by a squashed mosquito. While examining the crime scene – a burgled apartment in a high-rise residential compound – police noticed that the burglar, who appeared to have breached the home after climbing onto the balcony, may have spent the night there, and after finding a blood stain left by a squashed mosquito on a wall, they decided to have the blood tested for DNA.

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New Zealand-based tattoo artist, Benjamin Lloyd, specializes in impressive airbrushed tattoos for children designed to put a smile on his young clients’ faces.

It all started in 2016, when artist Benjamin Lloyd posted an image of a friend’s young son with a skull and roses design airbrushed on his arm and torso. It looked just like an actual tattoo, even though it was just spray painted on the young boy, and in only a day, Lloyd’s photo went viral, garnering over 400,000 likes in just a few hours. He had captioned the photo with a promise. If his post got at least 50 likes, he would go to a children’s hospital and give the kids there airbrushed tattoos to cheer them up. After his post got hundreds of thousands of likes, he had no choice but to keep his promise.

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The Richard Mille RM UP-01 Ferrari is the new world’s thinnest mechanical wristwatch, at just 1.75 millimeters thick. But whilst its frame may be diminutive, its price tag is anything but, at a whopping $1.88 million.

Unless you’re a wristwatch enthusiast, you’re probably not aware that there’s an exciting competition between watchmakers to create the world’s thinnest mechanical wristwatch.  In 2018, the world record was set by the Piaget Altiplano Ultimate Concept, with a thickness of 2 millimeters. Earlier this year, Bulgari unveiled the Octo Finissimo Ultra, a mechanical wonder with a thickness of just 1.8 mm. But its reign was shortlived as well, because Swiss watchmaker Richard Mille decided to celebrate its partnership with Ferrari by creating an even thinner mechanical wristwatch, the RM UP-01 Ferrari, at only 1.75 millimeters.

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An international network of scammers was recently dismantled after allegedly creating a fake version of India’s Professional Cricket League, with farmers posing as players, and broadcasting games live to unsuspecting betting enthusiasts.

When it comes to betting scams, the one recently dismantled in Gujarat’s countryside sounds pretty hard to beat. A criminal group coordinated by a “mastermind in Russia” allegedly created a fake version of the Indian cricket IPL, with farmers and unemployed men posing as players of teams like the Chennai Super Kings, Mumbai Indians or the Gujarat Titans in games broadcast live on YouTube to unsuspecting betting punters in Russia. The games looked real, but the players acted on command, hitting a six, a four, or getting out as directed.

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The Quwwat-ul-Islam Mosque complex in New Delhi is home to an ancient wonder of metal work – a 1,600-year-old iron pillar that is exceptionally resistant to rust.

The Iron Pillar of Qutub Minar, as this ancient monument is sometimes referred to, measures 7.21-meters-tall, has a diameter of 41 centimeters and weighs about 6 tons. It’s also more than a millennium and a half old, believed to have been erected during the reign of Chandragupta II, one of the most powerful emperors of the Gupta Empire. And even though it has spent all that time outdoors, the Pillar of Qutub Minar shows almost no sign of rust damage. For decades, scientists and metal workers from all over the world speculated about the properties of this unusual marvel, and it wasn’t until 2003 that the mystery was finally cracked.

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When a Ukrainian family returned to their war-ravaged home in Hostomel after four months, the last thing they expected to find was their beloved pet husky, Belyi.

In March of this year, when Russia started targeting Hostomel’s strategically important airport with its artillery, 35-year-old Kateryna Tytova and her family had to make a heartbreaking decision. Kateryna, her husband Olexandr and their two young children fled the city and left their white husky, Belyi behind. It sounds cruel, but those were desperate times. Russians were advancing, there was shelling around the airport, and there was no time to plan their escape. A photo of Kateryna holding her 5-year-old’s daughter as they run from artillery shelling has made international headlines. But despite leaving Belyi behind, the family always hoped he would be waiting for them when they came back.

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A Chinese woman reportedly spent the last decade of her life writing hundreds of bogus Wikipedia entries on Russian history and contributing to hundreds of others.

Wikipedia is nothing less of an online treasure! Whether you’re looking up general information out of pure curiosity, or you’re writing an important paper, Wikipedia almost always delivers the best results. But it’s not a perfect system, and this recent story from China is a perfect example of that. According to online reports from several established news sources in China, a mysterious woman is allegedly responsible for one of the biggest hoaxes in Wikipedia’s history – over 200 made-up articles on Russian medieval history, complete with fake locations, events and characters created over a period of 10 years.

This bizarre story began a while back, when Yifan, a Chinese fantasy novelist, started browsing Chinese Wikipedia as a source of inspiration for his new book. Focusing on Russian medieval history, the writer stumbled over the great Kashin silver mine, originally owned by the Tver, an independent state from the 13th to 15th centuries, and then by the Grand Duchy of Moscow, until it closed down in the 18th century, due to its resources becoming exhausted.

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Scientists at the University of Chicago have developed a new algorithm that forecasts crime with up to 90% accuracy by analyzing data and learning patterns.

Minority Report is a very popular sci-fi film about a special police unit that can arrest murderers before they commit their crimes with the help of three clairvoyant humans called Precogs, which can visualize impending homicides. It’s a brilliant film, if you like sci-fi murder mysteries, or you’re simply a fan of Tom Cruise, but the reason we bring it up in this story is that a team of researchers claims to have come up with a real-world, AI-powered system that is also able to predict crimes with an accuracy of 90%. And their systems doesn’t require Precogs, just past data so it can predict the future.

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Police in Nigeria recently released 77 people, including young children, from the basement of a church where they had been waiting for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ for several months.

The raid on the Whole Bible Believers Church in the Valentino area of Ondo Town came after a local mother approached police about the disappearance of her kids and told them that she suspected they had gone to the church. When they entered the place of worship, policemen found 77 people being kept in the basement by the Pastor and his deputy, who had told them that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Authorities claim that the church encouraged people to “stay behind” and wait for the Rapture, and some of them are believed to have lived in the church for several months.

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A Chinese premium ice-cream company has sparked controversy on social media because its products allegedly don’t melt even when kept at high temperatures for long periods of time.

Last week, Zhongxuegao, a Chinese ice cream company known for its high-quality products, went viral on social media, after someone posted photos and videos of a Zhongxuegao ice cream next to a thermometer that showed 31 degrees Celsius. The original poster claimed that the frozen treat had been kept at that temperature for around an hour and a half, but it had clearly not melted one bit. The post got a lot of attention and inspired other people to conduct their own experiments, including taking an open flame to the ice cream to see if it melts. Spoiler alert: it didn’t.

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Tiger Tomato, a father-son team from Melbourne, Australia, has been making waves online for their incredibly detailed and colorful pancake art.

We’ve featured some cool edible art in general and pancake art in particular here on Oddity Central, but the creations of Tiger Tomato are definitely a welcome addition to our growing collection. The father-son duo, who prefer not to be named, started posting videos of themselves making elaborate pancakes back in 2015, and in the seven years since, they’ve built quite a following on social media. Their vids regularly go viral, and once you watch some of them, you’ll understand why.

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A so-called ‘career exam taker’ in China was investigated by authorities for allegedly acing the world’s toughest university admittance exam three years in a row and reportedly earning $300,000.

The Gaokao is a notoriously difficult university entrance exam that many Chinese spend years, sometimes decades to pass. The King of Gaokao, for example, has been trying to get into his dream college for 25 years now, but China’s top schools are just too tough to get into for the vast majority of Gaokao takers. Then there are the lucky few that manage to get into these elite learning institutions, like Peking University or Tsinghua University, and finally, there are the ‘career exam takers,’ who earn high sums of money by acing the world’s toughest university exam year after year.

Because the Gaokao is so ridiculously hard to ace, many reputed schools in China offer their students considerable monetary prizes for getting into the country’s top-rated universities. And because there is no limit on how many times a student can take the Gaokao, some exceptionally-gifted individuals get to earn a nice living by simply acing the exam years in a row.

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A Japanese man who spent a whole year fishing small pebbles out of the soles of his sneakers may have inspired a new bobby in his home country.

Neruno Daisuki, an illustrator and manga artist from Japan, recently got his five minutes of fame on Twitter after showing off the collection of pebbles and glass fragments he fished out of the soles of his shoes over the last year. You know, small stones get stuck in the grooves of our footwear soles all the time, but who would ever think of collecting them? Well, this guy did, and after a year of painstaking work, Daisuki showed off his collection of 179 pebbles, 32 glass fragments, and 1 nut.

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A company in Russia’s Leningrad region recently laid a small section of strawberry-scented asphalt as an experiment to help solve the problem of unpleasant odors.

I don’t know if you’ve ever smelled hot asphalt when road sections are being laid or fixed, but it’s not the most appealing odor in the world. Luckily, we may not have to put up with it for much longer, as companies are beginning to come up with solutions to this issue. Just a few months after a Polish company came up with floral-scented asphalt to improve working conditions for the people working with it on a daily basis, a Russian company has successfully laid a 700-meter-long stretch of road using strawberry-scented asphalt.

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