Created by Japanese manufacturer Shimadzu Corp, the Aether Clock OC 020 is a strontium optical lattice clock advertised as the most accurate clock in the world and sold for over $3 million.

The world’s most accurate clock looks less like you’d imagine and more like a small refrigerator. Its rectangular case is around three feet tall and has a volume of 250 liters. Frankly, it doesn’t look like much, but this contraption is so precise that it would take about 10 billion years for it to deviate by a single second, according to Kyoto-based manufacturer Shimadzu Corp. The Aether Clock OC 020 is reportedly 100 times more accurate than cesium atomic clocks, which set the standard for the current definition of a second. Although optical lattice clocks have been around for a while, the Aether Clock OC 020 is the world’s first commercially available model.

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Garlic is probably the world’s most popular seasoning, but most of us hate pealing it about as much as we love to eat it. Having to go through over a dozen clovers per garlic bulb is just not fun, but what if I told you there was such a thing as single-clover garlic?

If you live in China, Germany or Northern Europe, you’re probably wondering why you’re reading about a vegetable you regularly see at your local supermarket on a blog about oddities, but the fact is that most of the world is oblivious to the existence of this holy grail of garlic. I myself only recently found out about it after seeing a photo of what looked like an onion labeled as ‘solo garlic’ on Reddit. What I thought was a digitally altered photo turned out to be a real thing that has been around for decades and that is apparently very popular in some parts of the world.

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An Italian man recently had to fight charges of manslaughter after his five-year-old son hit an 87-year-old pensioner while learning to ride a bicycle in a Milan park.

What was meant to be a rite of passage for a young boy, turned into a nightmare for his entire family and that of an 87-year-old woman who had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The woman was strolling through a Milan park with a 74-year-old friend when a boy crashed his bicycle into her causing her to fall and hit her head on the pavement. Although the pensioner claimed to be alright, the boy’s father, who was teaching him to ride a bike and had seen the crash, insisted that he call an ambulance. Unfortunately, the woman’s condition abruptly changed for the worse and, despite the efforts of the paramedics, she tragically lost her life.

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Frank Tavares was born a man in the Dominican Republic, but for 22 years of his life, he lived as Sister Margarita in two different convents, posing as one of the nuns there without anyone suspecting anything.

The unusual story of “nun-man”, as Frank came to be known following his shocking reveal, began when he was only four years old. He and his family were involved in a serious car accident that claimed the lives of his parents. His grandparents were too poor and ill-equipped to deal with a child, so he was placed in the care of nuns at a Dominican convent. Tavares recalls that, as a young boy, his genitals were so small that even he had trouble finding them, which is probably why he was raised as a girl at the convent. He wore girl’s clothes, adopted the habits of the nuns there, and became fully engaged in the daily activities of his new home. It wasn’t until age seven that he realized he was a man, but he continued living as a girl, to avoid being cast out.

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At age 16, Pavel Stepchenko joined the school of Russia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs as a student, and by age 23, he had already retired, becoming the country;s youngest pensioner.

Retirement is traditionally associated with old age, and while today’s youth dream of retiring young to focus on living their best lives, that usually means retiring by age 40 or so. Well, one Russian youth managed to do something most of us can only dream of – retire with a full pension in his early 20s. Pavel Stepchenko’s story is an unusual one. He enrolled in the educational institution of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs at age 16 and after five years of diligent studies, he began working in the territorial division of the internal affairs system. The young man from Donetsk only worked there for two years, because at age 23, he officially retired, taking full advantage of a special provision stating that for each month of service during a period of martial law, a person received three months of credited length of service.

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El Marco, a small rustic bridge connecting the Spanish village of El Marco to the Portuguese village of Varzea Grande, is the world’s smallest international bridge.

Crossing the 19ft (6 meters) long and 4.7ft (1.45 meters) wide El Marco wooden bridge, you’d think you were just crossing a small stream in a rural area of Western Europe, but you couldn’t be more wrong. By taking these few steps over El Marco, you are not only crossing from one country into another, but you are also changing time zones, as Spain operates on Central European Time (CET/CEST), while Portugal follows Greenwich Mean Time (GMT/BST). You can think of it as the easiest way of time-traveling.

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A journalistic investigation by the Chinese newspaper The Paper revealed the widespread commercialization of “fake meats”, such as fox or raccoon meat being sold as beef, mutton, or rabbit to restaurants.

The Paper reports that in Chinese areas known for fur production, such as Tangshan, Hebei, Weifang, Linyi, or Shandong, animal farms resell fox and raccoon ‘white strips’ (carcasses with the internal organs and subcutaneous fat removed) all over the country, passing them off as beef, mutton or rabbit. Some vendors even go through the trouble of braising and grilling their fake meats before freezing them and selling them to restaurants to make them even harder to tell apart from meats meant for human consumption. Experts warn that the hormones and medicines used in the breeding of animals for fur, but also the pathogens they carry make these meats extremely dangerous.

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Known as the Garbage Mountain of Delhi, Ghazipur Landfill covers an area of about 70 acres (over 50 football) and is almost as tall as the iconic Taj Mahal.

Established in 1984, on the outskirts of Ghazipur, in the eastern district of Delhi, Ghazipur Landfill reached its maximum capacity in 2002, but it has since grown into a small mountain up to 72 meters high. It is already one of the world’s largest landfills, but it continues to receive hundreds of tons of garbage from Delhi every day and is expected to grow even more. Consisting of more than 14 million metric tonnes of waste, Ghazipur Landfill has long been a plague on the millions of people who call Delhi home. The stench it emanates is almost unbearable, especially in the summer, fires routinely break out engulfing the surrounding area in a thick, toxic smoke, and its winding slopes sometimes collapse burying people and vehicles under millions of tons of garbage.

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A Swiss motorist was fined over $100,000 for driving too close to the car in front of him on the motorway. That’s about double the worth of the car he was driving.

Switzerland is notorious for its strict driving laws and staggering fines. The European country is one of the few where fines are calculated according to the taxable income of the offender, to ensure that they are felt by the poor and rich alike. For example, a fixed $300 fine may bother someone earning minimum wage, but for a millionaire, it’s like a drop in the ocean. In Switzerland, the wealthier you are, the more you pay, even for minor offenses, which leads to unlikely scenarios where people are fined huge sums of money, sometimes more than what their cars are worth. Case in point, a Swiss lawyer who was fined over $110,000 for driving too close to the car in front of him on a motorway.

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Efecan Kultur, a Turkish Tiktoker who rose to prominence for his “mukbang” binge eating streams, tragically lost his life at the age of 24 due to obesity-related health complications.

The “mukbang” trend, in which people costume copious amounts of food on camera to the delight of their fans, originated in South Korea but quickly spread all over the world raising concerns about obesity and mindless food waste. With more than 156,000 TikTok followers and 12,000 Instagram followers, 24-year-old Efecan Kultur was one of Turkey’s most popular mukbang streamers, but his popularity came at a cost. As he continued ballooning in size, he started experiencing various health problems, including heart disease, and in October of last year, he announced that he would be going on a diet and avoiding extra salt to try and lose weight. Sadly, earlier this month, the 24-year-old died as a result of his obesity.

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Chinese people desperate to get rich by any means necessary are putting their faith in bags of “bank soil” sold online as wealth-bringing talismans.

Bank robberies usually involve cold harsh cash or gold ingots, but several Chinese banks have recently become the target of an unusual type of theft, that of soil from potted plants or from around the buildings housing them. Several online shops in the Asian country are selling small bags of ‘bank’ soil as get-rich-quick talismans that can cost as much as 888 yuan ($120), and demand for the unusual products is steadily increasing. Some sellers boast a “999.999 percent success rate in generating wealth,” while others record the harvesting process to guarantee the authenticity of their bank soil.

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The Murmansk branch of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia political party made the controversial decision of gifting meat grinders to mothers of soldiers killed in the war with Ukraine to celebrate International Women’s Day.

Over the past three years, the meat grinder has become a symbol of the Russian military’s high casualty rate in its assault on neighboring Ukraine, so the decision of the United Russia party in the northern Murmansk region to celebrate mothers whose sons died in the war by gifting them meat grinders on March 8 can be considered questionable, at best. Photos published on the party’s social media account last Wednesday show the executive secretary of the Polyarnye Zori United Russia branch, Anna Makhunova, alongside Maxim Chengaev, representative of the “Defenders of the Fatherland in the Murmansk Region Foundation” posing next to women who lost their sons in the war against Ukraine, smiling and holding meat grinders.

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The CL1 is an innovative biological computer that combines living cultured human brain cells with silicon hardware in an advanced computer case that also acts as life-support for the cells.

Australian biotech company Cortical Labs recently made international news headlines by announcing what it calls “the world’s first code deployable biological computer.” The innovation behind the CL1 consists of placing brain nerve cells cultured from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) on a silicon chip. These cells respond to electrical signals, forming networks that process information similarly to a living brain. These responses are recorded and analyzed by AI software allowing it to learn faster than traditional artificial intelligence systems. Cortical Labs believes that integrating biological elements like neuron-based systems can improve efficiency in tasks that traditional AI struggles with, such as decision-making in unpredictable environments and situations.

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Chilean-born artist Marco Evaristti has come under fire for trying to starve three little piglets to death as part of a controversial art installation meant to raise awareness about animal welfare.

Marco Evaristti sparked controversy when he originally announced plans for his “And Now You Care?” exhibition, but he really attracted criticism both from animal rights activists and the general public when it actually became a reality. Located in a former butcher’s warehouse in the Meatpacking District of Copenhagen, “And Now You Care?” featured three little piglets on a pile of hay, trapped in a cage made up of two metal shopping carts and surrounded by paintings of slaughtered pigs and the Danish flag. It was already an unsettling display, but it was his plan to only give the piglets water and let them starve to death that really shocked everyone.

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A 19-year-old Chinese girl has gone viral after posting a video demonstrating her unusual ability to pop her kneecaps out and then back in painlessly because of a condition she was born with.

The unnamed girl from Jiangssi claims that she never even knew her kneecaps were special until schoolmates saw her popping them out of their sockets randomly and then casually popping them back in. Some of them freaked out and told her to see a doctor, but her knees had been like this for as long as she could remember. Nevertheless, she decided to follow her friends’ advice and see a doctor, who confirmed that she had congenital “patella dislocation”, which caused her patellas (kneecaps) to pop out randomly and pop back in just as easily. The physician said that the condition was rare in girls, but reassured the youth that, as long as it didn’t cause her pain or impede with day-to-day activities, it wasn’t a problem.

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