Corvid Cleaning, a Swedish startup specializing in training crows to pick up litter in exchange for food, claims that its program could save communities a fortune in cleaning costs.

According to the Keep Sweden Tidy Foundation, over a billion cigarette butts are left on Sweden’s streets every year which represents about 62 percent of all litter. Teaching humans not to throw cigarette butts on the street has so far proven impossible, but a Swedish startup claims it can teach crows to pick up after us and save local communities millions of krone in cleaning fees every year. Corvid Cleaning teaches wild crows to do our dirty work through a step-by-step learning process, that involves rewarding the birds with food for every cigarette butt they collect.

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A tattoo artist in Thailand has been getting a lot of attention online after it was revealed that he shares his home with eight young wives, all of whom get along great with each other.

Ong Dam Sorot, a young tattoo artist specializing in the traditional yantra style, recently sat down with a popular Thai comedian for an interview about his controversial marital status. Sorot is married not to one woman, but to eight, all of whom live under the same roof and consider themselves one big happy family. On the show, which has so far garnered over 3 million views on YouTube alone, Ong Dam Sorot introduced each of his wives and spoke about how they met. The eight women described their husband as the kindest, most considerate man on Earth and claimed to get along wonderfully.

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A Gentiana flower discovered only a couple of years ago in Tibet has been dubbed the world’s shiest flower for its ability to close in as little as seven seconds after being touched.

Chinese scientists recently published a study conducted on four species of Gentiana discovered in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, focusing primarily on the flowers’ ability to quickly respond to being touched. Plants are generally perceived as static organisms, with the only notable exceptions being carnivorous plants capable of movements designed to trap inspects inside. However, the four new species of Gentiana flowers discovered in the plateaus of Tibet have faster reactions than any other plants observed before. According to the above-mentioned study, these flowers can close completely in just 7 seconds. This ability has earned the Gentiana the unofficial title of ‘world’s shiest flower’.

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A team of Japanese high-school students recently won a regional innovation competition with a high-tech device that divides cake and pizza into equal portions every single time.

It’s a problem as old as the world – cutting a round treat into more than two equal parts. You either end up with portions that are not exactly the same size, or you’re left with a smaller extra slice that everyone has their eye on. Well, thanks to the ingenuity of a group of Japanese students from Kundong High School in Japan’s Oita Prefecture, dividing a cake or a pizza into perfectly equal portions need no longer be an issue. They have created a high-tech device that calculates the angle at which the tasty treat needs to be cut, depending on the number of necessary slices.

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Bubbles are fragile structures that only last a few seconds before popping, but a team of scientists has apparently found a way to keep bubbles from bursting for over a year.

Soap bubbles are subject to a series of processes that cause them to pop in a matter of seconds, minutes at best. They lose liquid through evaporation or gravitational drainage, and the gas trapped inside also diffuses through the membrane of soap and water back into the environment. However, a team of scientists at the University of Lille, in France, have been working on ways to address the fragility and ephemerality of bubbles, and they’ve apparently come up with a way of creating bubbles that maintain their shape and size for over a year.

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An 87-year-old Iranian man who has been living on the streets and hasn’t taken a bath in almost seven decades recently baffled scientists with his good health.

We first wrote about Amou Haji in 2014, dubbing him ‘the world’s dirtiest man‘. At the time, he was living in a small village in Southern Iran’s Fars province, surviving on roadkill and dirty water, and staying as far from bathwater as possible, thinking it would make him sick. He was 80-years-old at the time and appeared to be in good overall health, despite his questionable hygiene and living conditions. Well, apparently not much has changed since then, as a team of doctors recently conducted a series of tests that showed he was in surprisingly good health.

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Japanese lingerie manufacturer Wacoal recently launched a line of lace boxer briefs for men that are said to be both beautiful and functional.

Lace lingerie doesn’t sound like the most masculine thing ever, but reputed underwear company Wacoal didn’t just jump into this project blindly. In November of last year, they tested the waters of this ultra-niche market by offering the Lace Boxer on Japanese crowdfunding platform Makuake. The company knew it had a winner on its hands when its product smashed its modest crowdfunding goal of 300,000 yen ($2,627.87) by 1,090 percent, earning about 3.27 million yen ($28,578.92) in pledges. The Lace Boxer went straight into production, and now Wacoal offers an entire line that consists of seven colors.

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An 85-year-old man from India’s Bihar state is being investigated after claiming to have received 11 Covid-19 vaccine doses in less than a year.

Brahmdeo Mandal, a retired postman from Bihar’s Madhepura district was stopped from getting what he claimed would have been his 12th Covid-19 shot at the beginning of January. Although it’s unclear how exactly word of Mandal’s vaccination marathon reached authorities, it is believed that he boasted about the positive effects of the repeated jabs on his general health to someone, and they tipped off the police. You see, instead of the terrifying potential side effects touted by anti-vaxers, Brahmdeo Mandal claims that the Covid-19 vaccine has made his ailments, many of them considered normal at his age, disappear.

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Saskatchewan’s Crooked Bush, a small grove of aspen trees that grew in a very unusual way, is a botanical oddity that has fascinated both tourists and scientists for years.

Aspen trees don’t usually grow crooked. Like most other threes, they grow straight up, towards the sun, but not the specimens that make up the Crooked Bush. Located near Hafford, in Canada’s Saskatchewan province, this anomaly is the world’s only known crooked aspen tree grove. The strange appearance of the trees was first observed in the 1940s and it has since attracted thousands of tourists to this place. The advent of the internet only made the Crooked Bush more popular and there is now even a wooden walkway that visitors can use to avoid stepping on new growth.

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Indian police recently arrested a disgruntled charity worker accused of setting fire to a bank branch in Karnataka after being denied a loan.

33-year-old Wasim Hazaratsab Mulla, a charity worker from Haveri, approached state-run Canara Bank for a loan of 1.6 million rupees ($21,600) in December of last year. His application was eventually denied, because of discrepancies in the submitted paperwork which broke the bank’s credit policy. Wasim allegedly didn’t take the news too kindly, riding his motorcycle to the bank branch on Sunday, January 9th, breaking open a window to spray a flammable liquid inside and setting the building on fire.

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A 57-year-old Tongan man who reportedly swam for 28 hours after being washed to sea by a tsunami has been dubbed a real-life Aquaman.

On Saturday, the island nation of Tonga was hit by a devastating tsunami caused by the eruption of an underwater volcano. Lisala Folau, who lived on the small island of Atata, which is about 8km northwest of Tonga’s capital Nuku’alofa, was alerted about the incoming tsunami by his brother and managed to take refuge in a tree. However, he came down after the tsunami passed and was taken by surprise by a second, even bigger wave that swept him and his family out to sea. Despite having serious mobility issues, Folau managed to swim for a total of 28 hours and eventually reached the southern tip of Tongatapu, on the other side of the country.

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A 79-year-old man who underwent a series of cosmetic procedures to make himself look young found himself unable to fully close his eyes, and having to tape them shut at night.

Pete Broadhurst decided to go under the knife in 2019, after the mother of his two children allegedly broke up with him over his looks. A dental procedure he had done earlier had left him with puffy hamster cheeks, so he decided to get those fixed and smooth out some of the wrinkles on his face as well. He ended up paying £11,000 for a neck lift, under-eye blepharoplasty and a rhinoplasty, but despite being discharged from the hospital soon after the nine-hour procedure, he immediately knew something was wrong.

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Once driven close to extinction, the blue cows of Latvia, a proud symbol of the Baltic country, have been making a comeback over the last couple of decades.

Originally found only on the Baltic coast in the Kurzeme region, cows with light blue or dark ultramarine hides can now be found grazing all over the Latvian countryside. In the Soviet era, they were rendered almost extinct, with only a few specimens surviving the culling. Even back in the year 2000 there were only 18 blue cows in Latvia, but today they number around 1,500. The unique breed is now considered a symbol of national identity.

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The Tamaskan is a relatively new and rare breed of dog created with the specific purpose of mimicking the looks of a grey wolf without any genetic relation to the wild predator.

In the 1980s, a group of British dog breeders set out on a mission to develop a new dog breed with a wolf-like appearance. To that end, they combined German Shepherds, Siberian Huskies, Alaskan Malamutes, and Samoyeds, and the Tamaskan was one of the breeds they came up with. However, some experts believe that crossing this new breed with the Czechoslovakian Wolfdog made the Tamaskan what it is today. But while the Tamaskan may look like an actual wolf, or at least a close cousin, genetically speaking, there is no relation between the two species. The Tamaskan is all dog.

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Two LAPD police officers ended up losing their jobs after ignoring calls about a robbery so they could drive around hunting pokemon in the augmented reality mobile game Pokemon Go.

Last week, California’s court of appeals upheld a previous decision according to which officers Louis Lozano and Eric Mitchell were rightfully terminated from the Los Angeles Police Department almost five years ago. Court documents showed that in April 2017 the two men were driving in their patrol car and discussing Pokemon Go, when they were asked to respond to a robbery in progress with “multiple suspects” at a Macy’s in southwest LA. The officers chose to ignore the call, with Mitchell reportedly saying ‘Aw, screw it,’ choosing to hunt for a nearby pokemon called a Snorlax instead.

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