The people of Sommarøy, an island in northern Norway where the sun doesn’t set for a full 69 days during the summer, want to make time keeping obsolete making this the world’s first time-free zone.

After enduring the long polar night, when the sun doesn’t rise from November to January, the residents of Sommarøy try to make the most of summer, when the sun stays up in the sky from May 18 to July 26. During this time, conventional timekeeping is virtually ignored, and it’s not uncommon to see people doing all kinds of things at late hours of the “night” – say 3 a.m – like doing house chores, swimming or playing ball in their yards. Since it’s always daylight, everyone sleeps whenever they feel like it. It’s been like this for generations, but now the people of Sommarøy want to officially declare their island a time-free zone.

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British insurance company Endsleigh Insurance Services recently launched its “Spoiler Cover” package, which allows Game of Thrones fans to receive financial compensation for plotlines ruined by friends, family or social media.

With the HBO series’ grand finale expected to air in the UK at 9pm on Monday 20 May, a full 19 hours after the final episode airs in the United States, the chances of plot leaks ruining fans’ viewing experience are pretty high. One insurance company came up with the idea of appeasing disgruntled fans by offering them financial compensation up to the sum of £100 per person if they accidentally fall victim to spoilers or unwanted plot reveals.

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Three years ago, Corey Nielsen, a middle-aged man from Tolleson, Arizona, embarked on a journey to build the world’s largest pyramid of stacked pennies. He only had a few thousand coins and a dream at the time, but today he’s inching closer to finally accomplishing his goal.

The current record for the world’s largest coin pyramid stands at 1,000,935 coins. It was set in 2014 by Vytautas Jakštas and Domas Jokubauskis, in the small Baltic country of Lithuania, as a way to celebrate the adoption of the euro. In one of his videos, Corey Nielsen claims that they had a team of 100 people working on it – although I haven’t been able to verify if that is true – but he decided he could build an even bigger one by himself. He had built smaller penny pyramids before, but this was a much bigger project, one that would take daily work over multiple years to complete. Well, after almost three years of penny stacking, he’s nearly there.

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Copa Ataúdes or Coffin Cup, a yearly futsal tournament hosted by the Peruvian city of Juliaca, has been dubbed the world’s most depressing sports competition for offering coffins as prizes to the three best teams.

The Juliaca Coffin Cup is not your usual futsal tournament. It’s a competition between teams representing the twelve largest funeral houses in the  Puno Region of southeastern Peru, so it kind of makes sense that the main prizes be something representative of the funeral business. Still, fighting your heart out on the pitch for an expensive casket you have to share with five other teammates doesn’t exactly sound worthwhile. That didn’t stop the winning team from parading their $1,300 luxury coffin on their shoulders and singing “Olé, olé, campeon!” at the end of the final match, though.

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Heavy metal and knitting doesn’t exactly sound like a match made in heaven, but that hasn’t stopped some truly creative minds in Finland from combining them in the world’s very first Heavy Metal Knitting Championship.

Finnish Marketing Agency Tovari teamed up with Joensuu City Cultural Services and the Joensuu Conservatory in order to bring together two of the most popular things in the northern European country. Heavy metal is really big in Finland, with over 50 heavy metal bands per 100,000 Finnish citizens (more than anywhere else in the world), and knitting not less so, as hundreds of thousands of people out of a population of around 5.5 million are practising some kind of needlework crafts. After brainstorming for the best way to combine the two, the creative minds behind this initiative came up with the World Heavy Metal Knitting Championship.

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Golden Blood, or Rh-null blood is an extremely rare blood type that has only been identified in 43 people around the world in the last 50 years. It is sought after both for scientific research and blood transfusions, but also incredibly dangerous to live with for the people who have it, because of its scarcity.

To understand golden blood it’s important to understand how blood types work. Human blood may look the same in everyone, but it’s actually very different. On the surface of every one of our red blood cells we have up to 342 antigens – the molecules that trigger the production of certain specialized proteins called antibodies – and it’s the absence of certain antigens that determines a person’s blood type. Around 160 of these antigens are considered common, meaning they are found on the red blood cells of most humans on the planet. If someone lacks an antigen that is found in 99 percent of all humans then their blood is considered rare, and if they lack an antigen found in 99.99 percent of humans, their blood is considered very rare.

The 342 known antigens belong to 35 blood group systems, of which the Rh, or ‘Rhesus’, system is the largest, with 61 antigens. It’s not uncommon for humans to be missing one of these antigens. For example, around 15 percent of Caucasians miss the D antigen, the most significant Rh antigen, making them RhD negative. In contrast, Rh negative blood types are much less common in Asian populations (0.3 percent). But what if a human is missing all of the 61 Rh antigens?

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Members of the Aetherius Society, a fringe religious movement founded in the 1950s, believe that spiritual power is a tangible type of energy, like electricity, so they store it in special “spiritual power batteries” for release in case of global catastrophes. The Aetherius Society claims to have prevented several international crises by releasing the concentrated spiritual energy stored in these special batteries.

Founded in 1954 by a former taxi driver called David King the Aetherius Society is one of the earliest UFO-based religious movements in the world. Its members believe that some of the most famous religious figures in human history come from different planets. The Hindu god Krishna, for example, apparently comes from Saturn, which also happens to be home to a “Cosmic Hierarchy” or “Interplanetary Council”, while Jesus and Buddha are from Venus. The main goal of the Aetherius Society is to work with these “Cosmic Masters” to help humanity solve and prevent its problems so it can advance into the New Age. One of the ways it does this is with the help of spiritual power, which can be stored in special batteries indefinitely.

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Sheikh Hamad bin Hamdan Al Nahyan combined a military truck and a Jeep to create what he believes to be the world’s largest SUV.

Called Dhabiyan, the monstrous 10-wheel vehicle is based on the Oshkosh M1075 military truck with a Jeep Wrangler annexed to it as a driver cabin. It is powered by a 600hp, 15.2-liter, 6-cylinder Caterpillar C15 diesel engine, weighs a whopping 24 tonnes and measures 10,8m in length, 2.5 meters in width, and 3.2 meters in height. Dhabiyan was reportedly designed and built by Sheikh Hamad bin Hamdan Al Nahyan, one of the most well-known car collectors in the UAE.

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China’s state-run news agency, Xinhua, yesterday unveiled its newest news anchor, Xin Xiaomeng. Why is this newsworthy? Well, because Xin isn’t a real person, but an ultra-realistic computer generated model powered by advanced AI technology.

The perfectly coiffed Xin Xiaomeng introduced herself to Xinhua’s viewers in a short clip, announcing that she will make her professional debut as news anchor in March. She was developed by the state-run news agency in collaboration with search engine Sogou, and her appearance and voice were inspired by those of a real-life Xinhua broadcaster named Qu Meng. In her introduction video, the perfectly coiffed AI news anchor spoke only in Chinese, and it’s unclear if she’ll be able to tackle English news reports as well.

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Vaggelis Chatzis’s life is considered by many the ultimate underdog story. After having his right forearm amputated from below the elbow when he was only a baby, he grew up to become the world’s only one-handed professional boxer.

Chatzis was born with a cancerous tumour in his right hand which would have ultimately killed him if doctors didn’t amputate part of his arm to stop the cells from spreading. He was only three months old at the time, so the young Greek has had to rely on his left hand alone for as long as he can remember. Growing up was tough, as the other kids would often bully him and make fun of his three-fingered prosthetic hand, calling him things like Captain Hook. That caused him to grow up into a very angry young man, and that anger got him in a lot of trouble. He started hanging out with the wrong crowd, spent his nights drinking and partying, and got into fights a lot. But then he discovered boxing and he fell in love.

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A circular, slow-turning sheet of ice in Maine’s Presumpscot River has captured the imaginations of millions around the world after photos and videos of it have been shared on social media.

It’s been called a “frozen crop circle”, a “frozen moon”, an alien ship”, but scientists say it’s a rare natural phenomenon at an unprecedented scale. Rotating ice circles have been reported in the US before, but they were in the 20- to 30-foot range, whereas the ice disk in the Presumpscot River, in the city of Westbrook, is roughly 100 meters wide. It is constantly rotating counterclockwise and it’s size appears to vary according to the outside temperature and sunlight – it’s larger in the morning, but shrinks when the sun is strong and the temperature rises.

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Pura Still is being advertised as the first spiked water that doesn’t need bubbles to keep things interesting. It’s still, but definitely not flat as it has an alcohol content of 4.5% by volume.

Alcoholic drink brands have been hard at work trying to come up with new and enticing products for the growing number of health-conscious consumers who like to consume of bit of alcohol from time to time, but hate the calories associated with it. Pura Still is the bet of FIFCO USA, formerly North American Breweries, to capture this important part of the market. It doesn’t have the “annoying carbonated bubbles” that spiked seltzer products are known for, and contains only one gram of sugar and 90 calories. The company describes Pura Still as “the perfect way for consumers to enjoy themselves without straying from their healthy lifestyles”.

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Sixteen brave runners recently gathered in the Russian village of Oymyakon, also known as the world’s pole of cold,  to compete in the coldest official race in history.

Oymyakon is the coldest permanently inhabited place on Earth, with temperatures constantly dropping to under -50 degrees Celsius in winter time. This place is so cold that a person’s unprotected face can suffer frostbite in a matter of seconds, and sometimes the mercury in thermometers freezes. Oymyakon can barely be called inhabitable, let alone suitable for a marathon, and yet at the beginning of this year, 16 runners gathered here to take part in a series of extreme races.

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Horse races are usually all about speed, but in Ban’ei, a form of horse racing unique to the Japanese island of Hokkaidō, it’s strength and stamina that matter most.

Ban’ei race horses, also known as ‘banba’, are very different from the fast thoroughbreds we associate with horse racing. They can weigh up to 1,200 kilograms and are more than twice the size of the small dosanko horses native to Hokkaidō. These horses are crossbred descendants of workhorses imported from France and Belgium at the end of the 19th century to help farmers work their land, and are now considered a Japanese breed in their own right. Depending on their size, these strong animals can pull up to a ton of weight, and that’s exactly the kind of strength required to win the world’s slowest horse race.

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S Legend, a red and white Koi Carp bred in Japan became the most expensive live fish ever sold, after fetching a mind-blowing price of 203 million yen ($1.8 million), more than $1.3 million more than the previous record.

The 101cm-long Koi Carp from the highly-regarded Kohaku variety was bought by a collector from Japan after a fierce bidding war  at the Saki Fish farm in the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The female carp won first prize at the prestigious All Japan Koi Show last year, and is expected to bag her second title this year, which greatly increased collectors’ interest. Fans and collectors of Koi carp are now expected to travel from all over the world to catch a glimpse of the most expensive fish ever sold.

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