Hangai, a clothing and miscellaneous goods store in Nagahama City, Japan’s Shiga Prefecture, has had the same sign board for 10 years – an adorable baby with a speech bubble that reads “We have lots of good, cheap things”. However, last year, after a particularly hot summer, the sign changed into an eerie sight, with the baby’s eyes and mouth becoming pitch black. Due to the intense heat and direct sunlight, the dark colors of the sign became charred, creating a terrifying sight. Things got even worse this year, after another scorching summer. The heat made the once-adorable store sign even scarier, with the baby’s entire face now strangely dark, as if it had come out of a fire.

Last summer, Masanao Itaya, owner of the Hangai clothing and miscellaneous goods store, told Japanese news agency FNN that he noticed the damage to his store sign in August and meant to change it, fearing that it would scare customers away. However, the Obon Festival came, and by the time he finally got around to changing it, he noticed something strange. People from all over the country were coming to his store to see and photograph the “possessed baby” sign, so he decided that taking it down would be bad for business.

Last month, after another record-breaking summer in terms of heat, the sign once again made news headlines in Japan. Due to the excessive heat, the dark areas around the baby’s eyes and mouth got bigger, and dark splotches started appearing on its cheeks and nose, making it even scarier. It’s unclear whether Itaya will finally take it down now, or if he will continue to take advantage of the free advertising on social media.

For more bizarre signs, check out these dogs used as walking billboards for political candidates in India.

The Tianjin-based beauty caused such a stir on Chinese social media that multiple outlets sought her out for an interview about her incredibly youthful looks. The unnamed woman, who preferred to remain anonymous, said that she was shocked by the attention her short video got on Weibo and other social networks, claiming that she just wanted to show off her beloved granddaughter. She never imagined that her appearance would cause such a stir online. The woman said that she was in her 40s, and that she had her daughter at a very young age, which allowed her to become a grandma at an age when many women today are only starting to consider having a baby.

Asked how she keeps herself looking so good, the youthful grandmother said that she doesn’t do anything out of the ordinary; she just takes very good care of her skin, exercises on a regular basis, and has a balanced diet. She even tried to play down her appearance, claiming that her trendy dress style makes her look younger than she really is.

We’ve featured other “goddesses of eternal youth” here on Oddity Central, but this grandmother is definitely one of the most youthful-looking.

It’s no secret that Instagram is full of young, attractive influencers who use their God-given or surgically enhanced assets to build a fanbase and gain popularity, but South Korea appears to have launched a whole new trend – digitally enhanced models who aren’t afraid to go all out with the editing. Last week, we featured Shasheile, an influencer whose photos were so heavily edited that people actually found them refreshing, but it turns out she is not the only one using this unusual social media technique. Seo Yoo A is another rising Instagram star whose conspicuous use of Photoshop and other editing tools has won her hundreds of thousands of fans.

Photo: See Yoo A/Instagram

At first glance, See Yoo A looks like your average social media pretty girl, but browsing through her Instagram feed, you can’t help but notice her uncanny doll-like face, immaculately white skin, wasp-like waist, and, last but not least, her long and slender limbs and neck. That’s only if you can take your eyes off her generous bosom…

There are plenty of girls out there who starve themselves to achieve almost impossible figures, but Seo Yoo A’s look requires more than one or two skipped meals. In some photos, her head looks like a peanut atop an impossibly long neck, while in others, her legs look like those of a Barbie doll. And while the digital retouching is obvious, there are plenty of thirsty fans who either choose not to notice or simply don’t give a damn.

Because of her porcelain white skin and flawless complexion, See Yoo A is often referred to as a living doll.

Like Shasheile, See Yoo A has a respectable following of over 640,000 people who constantly compliment her on her looks, and like any respectable influencer, she uses her popularity to promote all sorts of products, services and travel destinations to her followers.

On August 17, Japanese Twitter (X) user bochimushi posted a photo of hundreds of shiny dung beetles arranged by color – from deep blue to purple – forming an impressive gradient. Apparently, the eye-catching collection of beetles was created in August of last year, as a way to pass the time during the end of the Covid-19 lockdown. Bored out of his mind, the man started hunting dung beetles and then arranging them neatly in this gradient style for a stunning visual effect. Bochimushi’s collection consists of a whopping 450 dung beetles.

Photo:@bochimushi64/X

Interestingly, bochimushi isn’t the only Japanese person to have created a gradient collection of beetles. Mjinko, another Twitter user commenting on the viral photo of the shiny beetles, share their own collection, which looks surprisingly similar. Believe it or not, they also put it together during the pandemic, only a year earlier, in August 2021.

Photo: @mikinko116/X

Bochimushi’s photo was viewed over 1.4 million times on Twitter and got around 22,000 likes. In the Western world, you’d expect to get some kind of negative comments from animal lovers, but scrolling deep into the comment section on this photo, we were unable to find a single negative comment.

The woman, surnamed Fu, posted photos of the fossilized egg on Chinese social media platform Douban, where they quickly attracted people’s attention and went viral. It wasn’t long before mainstream news outlets started contacting her about the unique egg, wanting to know its story. Apparently, the woman’s mother bought it for her 20 years ago, when she was still in primary school, because it was unusually small in size. Her mother boiled it for her to eat at school, but after storing it in a side pocket of her backpack, she forgot about it for three days and dared not eat if after that, thinking it had spoiled. But she didn’t want to throw the delicate egg away either, so she put it on top of their refrigerator and completely forgot about it for a couple of months.

When the woman’s mother found the egg again, it had already changed color to a dark, burgundy red, so she decided to keep it in a small jewelry box instead of throwing it away. As the years passed, Fu moved out of her parents’ house and forgot about the preserved egg, but her mother recently found it while cleaning and showed it to her. Not only had the egg fossilized further, but it now had the smooth texture of a plastic ball, with fine cracks all over it.

The photos of the decades-old egg made quite an impression on social media users. Some called it a ‘pharaoh egg’, while others wondered why it hadn’t rotted all this time. Mrs. Fu didn’t have all the answers, but she said that it might have something to do with the fact that it might have something to do with the cold, dry winter conditions in the area where she grew up. Experts have yet to confirm her theory.

If you think this egg looks strange, you’ve probably never seen ‘century eggs‘, the Chinese delicacy that looks utterly inedible.

The elusive marble berry plant grows up to about meter-tall and sprouts clusters of up to 40 small, impressively-shiny fruits. Seeing a marble berry up close, you could swear it was coated in a layer of metallic blue paint. It looks a lot like a shiny miniature Christmas bauble, shimmering in the sunlight, which is unusual for a plant. The world is full of brightly-colored plants and fruits, but none of them are as iridescent as the marble berry. That fact intrigued scientists, who, after conducting a series of tests, concluded that the fruit of Pollia condensata was not only the brightest fruit in the world, but the brightest organic thing.

Photo: Juliano Costa/Wikimedia Commons

In countries like Ethiopia, Mozambique, Tanzania or Ghana, the marble berry has long been famous for its shiny, eye-catching exterior, but it wasn’t until a few years back that scientists finally learned what makes it so bright. A team of researchers at the University of Cambridge looking for plants that bent light in interesting ways stumbled upon a marble berry at the Kew Gardens in the UK. It had been brought there from Ghana in 1974, but it still retained its impressive coloring.

Even the brightest-colored plants usually rely on pigments for their appearance, and once they start to degrade at a cellular level, so does their coloring. The marble berry, on the other hand, remains impressively bright for decades, or even longer. That’s because it doesn’t owe it’s coloring to pigments, but to a unique type of cell structure that reflects light in a unique way to create this stunning visual effect.

Scientists call this sort of coloring “structural color”. It can be observed in various animals, like the peacock, whose feathers are pigmented brown but reflect blue, turquoise, and green light, as well as several butterfly and beetle species. A few plants display structural coloring as well, but the marble berry has to be the most impressive example in the plant world.

Upon analyzing the marble berry under a microscope, scientists found that the outer layer of the fruit consists of three to four layers of thick-walled cells, which in turn contain several layers made of cellulose fibers arranged in a spiral-like formation. When light hits the berry,  some of it gets reflected and the rest reaches the others where the same effect occurs. Essentially, the reflected beams of light amplify each other to produce this stunning shimmering blue.

Just in case you wore wondering, no, marble berries are not edible. That’s because, apart from their shiny exterior, they mostly consist of seeds. There are advantages to that though, the most obvious of them being that they retain their shape and bright color for several decades.

A few years back, food designers Bompas & Parr collaborated with jewelry designer Maud Traon to create a one-of-a-kind silver and marble berry bracelet.

“It’s surprising that they haven’t been used in jewelry before now, especially when you consider you don’t have to process them as you would an uncut diamond,” Parr said at the time.

Last month, Twitter user @mikel_cresson, a steampunk and fantasy enthusiast from Japan, went viral on the popular social network with a very intriguing prop – a vintage-looking book featuring mysterious text that glowed a vivid green in the dark. He called it a magic book, and it certainly looked the part; so much so that people started asking how much he wanted to sell it for and if he took commissions. However, the young DIY master did something even better – he shared exactly how he did it using only simple stuff anyone can buy on Amazon.

Photo: @mikel_cresson/Twitter

@mikel_cresson got the idea for his intriguing magic book while brainstorming ideas for a prop-selling event. He decided on something that could be used in a dimly-lit environment, and the first attempt was a magic ring. However, he discovered that his friend’s fluorescent tape couldn’t really be used for a circular shape, so, in the end he settled for cutting letters out of it.

Photo: @mikel_cresson/Twitter

The magic book’s vintage cover was the easiest part of the project, as all the DIY enthusiast had to do was order it from Amazon. The old-looking pages were first smeared with coffee and some were partially burned to give them a vintage look. Once that was done, it was time to do the text.

Photo: @mikel_cresson/Twitter

For the glow-in-the-dark writing, @mikel_cresson originally used regular scissors to cut abstract shapes of fluorescent tape, but ended up with text that looked like those cyber characters from The Matrix posters, and he wanted something more fantasy-inspired. He ended up buying a pair of scissors with a wavy cross section that yielded better results.

Photo: @mikel_cresson/Twitter

With all the tape cut into the desired shapes, it was time to piece them all together on the pages, a step that the DIY enthusiast believed would be the simplest of the whole project. He couldn’t have been more wrong, as filling just two pages took him over nine hours. It was painstaking work, and sometimes the alien-looking text didn’t turn out right, so he had to redo entire lines. This process is basically the reason why he said he would never attempt this project again…

Photo: @mikel_cresson/Twitter

But all that work paid off after he posted pictures and videos of the book on Twitter. His post got almost 200,000 likes, tens of thousands of retweets and loads of positive comments. People lost their minds when they saw the text light up green after being illuminated with a flashlight, and they started throwing their wallets at the original poster.

It’s unclear whether @mikel_cresson will start taking commissions from people too rich or lazy to make their own magic books, but at least his instructions are available for whoever wants to use them.

Believed to affect about 1 in 42,000 people, Waardenburg Syndrome is characterized by some degree of hearing loss and pigmentation deficiencies, which can include bright blue eyes (or one blue eye and one black/brown eye). It is caused by mutations in any of several genes that affect the operation of neural crest cells in embryonic development. The visual effect of Waardenburg Syndrome is particularly impressive in ethnic groups where blue eyes are a rarity, as you can see in the photos of members of the Buton tribe taken by Indonesian geologist and amateur photographer Korchnoi Pasaribu.

Photo © Korchnoi Pasaribu

Buton Island, which is located in Indonesia’s Sulawesi region, is home to the indigenous Buton people, some of whom suffer from the Waardenburg Syndrome and have the characteristic electric blue eyes (either one or both).

Korchnoi Pasaribu visited Buton Island last month and took some photos of its natives, focusing on their stunning electric blue eyes. He posted the photos on his Instagram, and they have since gone viral, being picked up by most major news outlets and shared massively on social media.

The owners of PB&J, which unintuitively stands for ‘Pizza, Beek & Jukebox’ not peanut butter and jelly, came up with the idea for the world’s most expensive peanut butter and jelly sandwich after stumbling upon the former record holder and realizing all it really had going for itself was a 24K gold toothpick keeping the bread slices together. They decided that they could do better, so ‘The Golden Goose’, a decadent treat featuring some of the finest ingredients in the world was born.

Photo: Kira Anderson

The Golden Goose is built around a whole loaf of bread that has gold dust baked into the flour and edible gold leaf topping. The slices of bread are sandwiched together with the most expensive jam in the world, a delicacy made from red and white currants that have been painstakingly de-seeded by hand using goose quills. Finally, The Golden Goose is drizzled with one of the rarest types of honey in the world (manuka honey) and packed with what is probably the cheapest ingredient, Adams All-Natural peanut butter.

While Matthew and Josh McCahill, the brothers behind PB&J, didn’t reveal what the gold infused bread costs to make, we do know that a 100-gram jar of Maison Dutriez jam costs 20 euros ($24), a 250-gram jar of manuka honey imported from New Zealand costs $371, and the peanut butter itself is only $5 a jar.

Photo: Kira Anderson

If you don’t mind spending $350 on a peanut butter and jam sandwich, stop by PB&J in Chicago, just make sure to call first, as the world’s most expensive peanut butter and jam sandwich has to be ordered at least a day in advance.

If peanut butter and jelly sandwiches aren’t your favorite, but you still want to try some spicy treats, how about the world’s most expensive taco, or better yet, the world’s most expensive potato chips?

Source: Robb Report

On June 26th, reports of an iridescent cloud visible above Tokyo started being shared on Twitter, and soon, photos of the intriguing phenomenon made their way to the popular social media platform as well. It was as the rumors described, a multicolored cloud that oddly resembled a rainbow, only in reality this optical phenomenon was closer to an ice halo than a rainbow.

Commonly known as a “fire rainbow” because it often looks like a multicolored flame in the sky, because of the shape of the fragmentary cirrus clouds it form in, this sky attraction is actually a circumhorizontal arc. Interestingly, it is a rather common phenomenon in some parts of the world, like the United States, where it can be seen several times each summer in any one place, and very rare in others, like in northern Europe.

“Apart from the presence of ice-containing clouds in the right position in the sky, the halo requires that the light source (Sun or Moon) be very high in the sky, at an elevation of 58° or greater,” Wikipedia explains. “This means that the solar variety of the halo is impossible to see at locations north of 55°N or south of 55°S. A lunar circumhorizon arc might be visible at other latitudes, but is much rarer since it requires a nearly full Moon to produce enough light.”

The circumhorizontal arc forms when sunlight enters horizontally-oriented, flat, hexagonal ice crystals in clouds. The ice particles act as a prism, and the light is divided according to the wavelength, so the colors are visible.