French distillery Pegasus decided to celebrate its debut on the US spirits market with a unique product – an ultra-premium vodka infused with a real meteorite.

The aptly named Shooting Star Vodka starts off as organic, locally sourced wheat and botanicals from France distilled using iStill,  the most advanced distilling technology. The mixture is then slowly reduced over a month-long period using pure spring water from a well dug 150 meters below the Pegasus Distillery in Burgundy. But what really sets Shooting Star Vodka apart from other premium spirits is the aging process. Shooting Star Vodka is aged in small batches for at least one year using large terracotta jars with pieces of meteorite suspended in the middle. As the space rock partially dissolves into the vodka, it allegedly gives the spirit a mineral taste.

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After the owner of a Russian supermarket chain announced that he would be paying 1 million rubles to each person proven to have gotten food poisoning from the store’s products, many decided to take him up on his offer.

Earlier this month, Yekaterinburg-based supermarket chain Zhiznmart came under fire for allegedly selling compromised food products that had landed at least 18 people in the hospital with food poisoning. As a result, several suppliers refused to work with Zhiznmart anymore for fear of getting audited by Rospotrebnadzor, Russia’s federal agency in charge of consumer wellbeing and protection. Left with empty shells and a sullied reputation, Zhiznmart founder made a bold public statement, promising to compensate each person proven to have been poisoned by his products with 1 million rubles ($11,000). His promise went viral, and before long, people were trying to get food poisoning at Zhiznmart and get compensated.

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The organizers of a recent festival at a university in South Chungcheong Province, South Korea, were forced to apologize after the host decided to give away the water bottles used by the members of an idol group as prizes.

On May 22, the popular girl group Oh My Girl performed at a university festival in Asan, South Chungcheong Province. However, it was what occurred on stage after the group’s performance that made news headlines all around the country in the days that followed. On May 26, several videos were posted on South Korean social media showing the host of the event inviting male fans of Oh My Girl on stage and then collecting the used water bottles left behind by the members of the group. Fans were asked to participate in a talent show for the chance to win an unusual prize – the used water bottle of the Oh My Girl member of their choice.

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The Island of Sark, the smallest of the Channel Islands located between France and England, is home to the world’s smallest prison still in use today – a tiny building with only two cells.

There are no cars, no roads and no streetlights on Sark Island, but there is a small prison dating back to the year 1856. Featuring just two tiny cells – one measuring 6 feet by 6 feet and the other 6 feet by 8 feet – separated by a narrow corridor, it holds the Guinness World Record for the ‘world’s smallest prison’. It’s only fitting that an island measuring just under 5 kilometers long and 1.6 kilometers wide, with a population of under 600 people, be home to the world’s smallest prison. The two cells only have small, wood-slatted beds with thin mattresses for inmates to sleep on, and inmates can only be held here for a maximum of two days, after which they have to be transferred to the larger prison facilities on the neighboring Guernsey Island.

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China’s Guizhou Province is home to about a dozen conical hills known as the Anlong Pyramids because of their resemblance to the much more famous pyramids of Egypt.

In recent years, Anlong County has become a popular tourist destination thanks in no small part to its pyramid-like mountains which have captured the imaginations of millions of people around the world. Apart from their pyramid-like shape, these formations also feature layers of rock stacked on top of each other so neatly that you could swear they were placed like that by someone or something. Ever since photos and videos of the Anlong Pyramids started circulating online around 2018, conspiracy theories about their origin began appearing as well, and despite experts’ best efforts to convince the public that these pyramids are completely natural, some people still believe that they are the work of an ancient human civilization or of aliens.

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Clips of a man bearing a shocking resemblance to Keanu Reeves’ iconic film character John Wick selling street food in Thailand have been going viral online, fueling theories that the stylish assassin had retired in the Asian country.

A few days ago, a short video with the caption “John Wick stopped killing people and turned to selling coffee and grilled squid” went viral on Thai social media, because the man featured in it bore a shocking resemblance to the popular action film character. Only here, he was not gunning down or beating up people, but selling street food and cleaning food bowls. Soon enough, other videos of the mysterious John Wick lookalike followed, including some in which he wore a suit and white tie, just like the action hero. People joked that he must be on a mission in Thailand, while others said that he was done with killing bad guys and had retreated as a street food seller.

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CCTV cameras in Mexico recently recorded one of the strangest street fights in history involving a band of mariachi and a fire-breathing performer quarreling over busking territory.

They say life is stranger than fiction and a short video clip captured by surveillance cameras in the Mexican city of Morelia proves it! Not even the brilliant Quentin Tarantino could have come up with the idea of a fiery street fight between a group of guitar-armed mariachi and a street-performing fire-breather in broad daylight, but that’s exactly what occurred last week, at a busy intersection in the Mexican capital. The viral video shows a man being chased by a mariachi and then put in a headlock until more mariachi arrives. They punch and kick the man, but then he turns the tables on them, as he starts blowing plumes of flames at them, literally setting them ablaze. Not the kind of thing you see every day, that’s for sure!

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A 21-year-old Malaysian man recently underwent a cornea transplant after scratching his due to rubbing his eyes excessively for most of his life.

Muhammad Zabidi has suffered from allergies for as long as he can remember. As a child, he would rub his eyes until they turned red, but it wasn’t until his teenage years that this became a serious problem. At age 15, he started experiencing blurred vision in his right eye, and things only got worse as time went by. When he finally decided to see a doctor about it, he was told that he had severely scratched his cornea due to the constant eye rubbing and he now needed a new one in order to regain his vision.

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A Moscow woman recently got the shock of her life when she entered her bathroom and saw a full-grown white Boa constrictor snake hanging out on her toilet bowl.

Exotic snakes crawling up from toilets may not be a worthy news topic in countries like Australia or Brazil, where the slithering reptiles are virtually a part of everyday life, but as a European living in a bustling city, it’s not the kind of thing you ever expect to see. However, one Moscow resident almost had a heart attack when she entered her bathroom and found an albino boa constrictor coming out of her toilet bowl. The shocked woman slammed the bathroom door shut and immediately called emergency service. It turned out that the snake was a fellow resident of the apartment building who had simply gone out to explore its drain pipe system.

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Photos and videos of unmanned vending machines selling live animals like cats, small dogs, and rodents installed in various Chinese cities have been going viral and sparking outrage among the general public.

The significant technological developments of the last decade have created a fast-growing “unmanned economy” that continues to spread into almost every sector of the global economy. However, there are still some industries that are incompatible with unmanned, self-service devices. The pet-selling sector has so far been considered incompatible, but things are apparently very different in China, as more and more unmanned vending machines selling live pets are being spotted all around the country. One such video showing a pet vending machine in a busy part of Beijing recently went viral on Chinese social media, sparking a heated debate around the ethics of this controversial business model.

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Switzerland’s road maintenance authority has developed an ingenious mobile bridge that allows the paving of public roads without the need to stop traffic on the affected lanes.

Traffic jams are a necessary evil when it comes to road maintenance, and despite experts’ best efforts to come up with a solution to this logistic problem, motorists still have to deal with them whenever road work is required. However, Switzerland’s Federal Roads Office may have come up with an ingenious-enough solution to revolutionize road paving. Earlier this year, it unveiled the Astra Bridge, a 257-meter-long mobile bridge that allows traffic to pass over sections of road while infrastructure is being repaired below. It’s such a simple concept that it almost makes you wonder why engineers took so long to invent it, but there is a reason why the Astra Bridge is the first of its kind – it’s not as simple as it sounds.

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A football referee has been suspended for life for allegedly celebrating with a club he helped win by eliminating 3 players from the opposing side and granting 15 minutes of extra time, enough for the winners to score a necessary goal.

Earlier this month, Dutch football clubs St. George and SV De Valken met in a final match of the country’s fourth division to decide which of the two teams would be promoted to the third division. It may not seem like very high stakes, but they take football very seriously in the Netherlands and passions ride high, so this particular match was very important to both clubs. It was supposed to be a close game between the two most dominant team in the division, but the match played out very differently than expected because of the one person responsible of fair play, the referee. Jan Smit stands accused of not only rigging the game in one team’s favor, but also celebrating with its members after the win.

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A Chinese man wanted for murder managed to avoid police detection for over 20 years by pretending to be a deaf and mute scavenger in the mountains of Hubei Province.

On the evening of May 22, 2004, a young and quick-tempered man named Xiao got into a heated argument with a neighbor in his home village of Oumio Daying, in Xianyang’s Xiangcheng District. At one point, Xiao allegedly picked up a shovel and hit his neighbor over the head with it, killing him on the spot. That night, knowing that he risked spending the rest of his life behind bars or worse, getting the death penalty, Xiao decided to abandon his wife and 11-year-old child to go on the run. He ran into the mountains of Anxi County, in Fujian Province, where he became a scavenger selling scraps to survive. To make sure he never gave anything away about his past life, Xiao pretended to be deaf and mute for the next 20 years, only smiling at people and communicating through gestures.

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A 12-year-old boy who has never had his hair cut in his life and reportedly suffers from ‘tonsurephobia’, an uncontrollable fear of having his hair cut, has been threatened with expulsion by his school because of his long hair.

Farouk James has never had more than a trim of his impressive mane and his waist-long mane has earned him more than 250,000 followers on Instagram alone. However, ever since he started classes at his new school in September of last year, he has been pressured into cutting his locks so that they reach above his shirt collar, per school regulations. Farouk’s family has sent the school doctor’s notes that show he suffers from tonsurephobia’, an extreme fear of having his hair cut, but the school has apparently chosen to ignore them and enforce its rule.

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Researchers studying various species of animals on Australia’s Kangaroo Island stumbled upon a colony of Polyrhachis femorata ants that they believed was dead until one of its members moved slightly.

Feigning death, also known as thanatosis or tonic immobility is a well-documented defense mechanism observed in dozens of animal species, from insects and lizards to birds and mammals. Some of these natural actors are better than others at playing dead, but what they all have in common is implying this particular defense strategy on an individual basis. However, in what many consider a world-first, a team of researchers encountered an entire colony of dozens of ants that all played dead at the same time when threatened. And they all played their part so well, contorting their bodies in unnatural positions and remaining completely still, that the team was convinced they were all dead.

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