Just east of Afton town, at the foot of a rocky mountain in Wyoming, lies one of the world’s most mysterious natural wonders – a rhythmic spring that intermittently stops and starts flowing around every 15 minutes.

Only a few rhythmic springs exist in the world, and Intermittent Spring in Wyoming’s Swift Creek canyon is the largest of them all. As its name suggests, this peculiar spring flows intermittently. You will see a large quantity of water using out of a hole in the mountain and then flowing down forming a large creek for about 15 minutes, and then dry up for another 15 before the cycle starts all over again. The reasons for this intermittent flow are not entirely understood, but scientists have a pretty sound theory.

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Riding rodeo bulls is dangerous by definition, but one bull, in particular, gave even the world’s best riders such a hard time that he became known as the meanest rodeo bull in history. This is the story of the legendary Bodacious.

According to statistics, bull riding is the world’s most dangerous organized sport, recording more catastrophic injuries and fatalities than any other contact sport. Getting thrown around like a ragdoll or stomped on by a 900kg bull is anything but safe, and some bulls are particularly good at injuring the cowboys attempting to ride them. There are many legendary bulls in this sport, but none as famous and as feared as Bodacious, a mighty beast that was retired by its owner while in his prime for fear that he might end up killing a rider.

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Zhong Quanbin, a young teacher at Taiwan’s Shude University of Science and Technology, has been getting a lot of attention online thanks to his incredibly detailed anatomical blackboard drawings.

Using only a ruler and simple pieces of chalk, Zhong Quanbin can produce some truly astonishing anatomical blackboard drawings. From detailed depictions of the entire human bone structure to individual organs like the human eye seen from various angles, it’s clear to see that the young teacher has a very solid understanding of human anatomy, as well as an innate talent for drawing. It’s this unique combination that has won Zhong legions of fans in several Asian countries.

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Panta Petrović has been living in a cave in the canyon of Serbia’s Gradašnička river for over 16 years, away from modern civilization and in the company of both domestic and wild animals, including a 200-kilogram boar named Mara.

Serbia’s most famous cave dweller recently made international headlines after Agence France Press reported that even he had gotten a Covid-19 vaccine, even though he hardly interacts with other people. But in his home country, Panta has been making headlines for at least the last five years. Everyone in the area around Petrovac city, in south-eastern Serbia knows who he is, because of his unique lifestyle. He has been living as a hermit for the last 15 years, spending half the year in a wooden treehouse in the middle of nowhere, and the other half in a 25-meter-long cave hidden in the canyon of Gradašnička river. All because he wanted to go back to the basics and get away from modern civilization.

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An Indian woman who lost her husband in a tragic car accident years ago has built a small temple in his honor, and worships a marble bust of him.

Padmavathi, a woman living in Andhra Pradesh’s Prakasam district has been getting a lot of attention in her home country of India after it was reported that she built a small temple in honor of her late husband, complete with a white marble statue sculpted in his likeness. The woman claims that her husband, Gurukula Anki Reddy, appeared in her dreams soon after his death, in 2007, asking her to build a temple for him. She honored his wishes and has been worshipping there ever since.

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Feif Dong is an exceptionally talented artist who specializes in creating ultra-realistic, almost life-like three-dimensional fish paintings in transparent resin.

The art of 3D resin fish painting was made famous almost a decade ago by Japanese artist Riusuke Fukahori, whose amazing works we featured on Oddity Central back in 2012. Since then, the art form has been adopted and taken to new heights by other artists, one of whom we’ll be covering in this post. Feif Dong, who goes by @backgardenjewelry on Instagram, creates ultra-realistic goldfish that appear to be swimming in bowls or shells filled with transparent resin.

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The peacock mantis shrimp (Odontodactylus scyllarus) is recognized as having the fastest punch in the entire animal kingdom, with an acceleration comparable to a .22mm bullet fired out of a handgun.

One of several known mantis shrimp species, the O. Scyllarus is native to the seabed of the Indo-Pacific, from Guam to South Africa. It is an agile and active predator, using its club-shaped appendages to smash its prey, which mainly consists of other crustaceans, gastropods, and bivalves. The peacock mantis shrimp is known as a ‘smasher’ for a reason, as it uses its appendages to repeatedly deliver blunt force to its victims until it breaks their exoskeletons in order to reach the soft tissue underneath. Every blow travels at a speed of over 50 miles per hour (80 km/h), the fastest recorded punch of any living animal.

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Doctors performing a colonoscopy on a 59-year-old patient were shocked to discover a small ladybug crawling inside the man’s intestine.

I’m no doctor, but I imagine that one of the last things you’d expect to find in someone’s colon while performing a colonoscopy is a living ladybug. How the insect got inside the man’s intestines is one thing, but how on Earth does a ladybug make it into the colon alive? That was the question puzzling the team that discovered the ladybug during a routine colonoscopy in 2019. While exploring a 59-year-old man’s colon in search of scarring, ulcers or tumors, they noticed a live ladybug crawling on the inside of the man’s intestine.

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Japanese parents are sending bags of rice that weigh as much as their babies to relatives who can’t visit them because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

As is customary in many cultures around the world, when a Japanese couple welcomes a baby into the world, relatives come to visit the family and celebrate, but because of the pandemic and social distancing rules, that hasn’t been possible of late. However, a resourceful rice shop owner in Kitakyushu city, near Fukuoka, found an ingenious way of making money from the humble grain by selling it as replicas of newborn babies.  Rice babies, as the replicas are now known in Japan, are bags of rice that weigh exactly as much as the baby they are replacing, and that have photos of the baby printed on them. They are sent to relatives so they can hug the new human while looking at a picture of their face.

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Romantic relationships between humans can get complicated, sometimes messy or even downright toxic, but if being single isn’t an option, technology now offers a new alternative in the form of advanced AI chatbots that make you feel like you’re interacting with a real person.

Chinese youths are reportedly turning to AI-powered chatbots as an alternative to regular dating, either after going through traumatic relationships or breakups with regular people or simply as a way of keeping things, well, simple. While a real person can sometimes do or say things you don’t particularly like, the chatbots developed by companies like Microsoft-owned Replica or fast-growing Chinese startup Xiaoice are programmed to learn from the conversations you have with it, as well as from your social media feeds and even your writing style. So it’s no wonder that some people aren’t even considering going back to regular dating after using such services.

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Imagine enjoying a hot cup of java or your favorite soft drink in the middle of a pond filled with beautiful koi fish that you can actually hand-feed and you get an idea of what Vietnam’s koi fish cafes are like.

When it comes to fish-themed cafes, Ho Chi Minh City has a leg up on pretty much every other city in the world. Back in 2018 we featured Amix Coffee, a flooded cafe that allowed patrons to enjoy their favorite drinks with dozens of small fish literally at their feet, but this was apparently not the only cool fish-themed venue in town. In fact, the bustling metropolis apparently has about a dozen cafes that double as koi ponds, where the popular fish swim among patrons.

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Ram Kand Mool, a drum-shaped tuber that has been sold as a hearty snack on Indian street corners for at least several decades remains a mystery to scientists, as no one can figure out what plant produces it.

Indian botanists developed an interest in ram kand mool in the 1980s, after trying and failing to find out the origins of the almost paper-thin snacks cut out of giant reddish tubers by street vendors. None of them were willing to reveal the plant that produced it, and those that did gave conflicting answers. Some claimed that it was a root, others that it was the stem of a plant, but most either refused to answer or claimed that they bought the tubers from third parties and genuinely didn’t know the source. Stranger still was the fact that not even science could provide a clear answer to the botanists’ questions.

Ram kand mool is often advertised as the only food source of Lord Ram when he was exiled to forests along with his wife Sita and brother Lakshman, and vendors claim it can cool you down during the summer, quench both hunger and thirst, and provide all sorts of medicinal relief. It is served with all sorts of seasonings, from chili and salt, to lime and sugar. It’s cut and served as very thin slices out of tubers that can reportedly weigh up to 300 kilograms.

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Teleperformance, one of the world’s largest call center companies, recently sparked controversy after it was announced that it has been pressuring employees to agree to have AI surveillance cameras installed in their homes.

Call center work has been booming during the pandemic, because many businesses started operating online, and many of them preferred relying on outsourced workers from countries with cheap labor costs, like Colombia or the Philippines. The problem is that most of these call-center operators had to work remotely from home, due to pandemic-related restrictions, which has reportedly been making it harder for managers to monitor their activity. Now, one of the world’s largest call center companies, Colombia’s  Teleperformance, is pressuring its employees to accept being monitored in their own homes by artificial intelligence-powered cameras.

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Rotomairewhenua, also known as the Blue Lake of New Zealand’s Nelson Lakes National Park, is officially recognized as the clearest body of fresh water in the world.

Blue Lake is spring fed by the neighboring glacial Lake Constance, and the water passes through a natural debris damn formed a long time ago by a landslide. This debris acts as a natural filter that retains most of the particles suspended in the glacial water, making Blue Lake almost as clear as distilled water. New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) carried out scientific tests of the water and determined it to be the clearest natural body of fresh water known to man.

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Canelo, a pit bull suffering from a debilitating medical condition that forbids him from moving normally, may just have the best dad in the world.

The heartwarming story of Canelo and his owner was shared on TikTok by the man’s daughter, Jooseline. She posted a touching video explaining that her pet dog was suffering from canine hypertrophic osteodystrophy, a condition that drastically restricts his mobility, making it painful for him to run with the family’s three other pit bulls. Sadly, hanging out with his brothers and running through the fields was his favorite pastime, so in order to let Canelo enjoy the experience despite his condition, Jooseline’s dad routinely picks him up and runs with him in his arms alongside the other dogs.

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