Scientists at the University of Chicago have developed a new algorithm that forecasts crime with up to 90% accuracy by analyzing data and learning patterns.

Minority Report is a very popular sci-fi film about a special police unit that can arrest murderers before they commit their crimes with the help of three clairvoyant humans called Precogs, which can visualize impending homicides. It’s a brilliant film, if you like sci-fi murder mysteries, or you’re simply a fan of Tom Cruise, but the reason we bring it up in this story is that a team of researchers claims to have come up with a real-world, AI-powered system that is also able to predict crimes with an accuracy of 90%. And their systems doesn’t require Precogs, just past data so it can predict the future.

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Kokenawa Inc., a startup based in Nagoya, Japan, produces the Pocketoilet, the world’s smallest portable toilet and a real life-saver when nature calls.

When you gotta go, you gotta go, but what if there’s nowhere to go? We hardly ever give the humble toilet a second thought in our day-to-day lives, but most of us could hardly imagine our lives without it. In war-torn regions and areas affected by natural disasters toilets are among the most sought-after amenities, but apart from insufficient portable toilets and unhygienic latrines, there aren’t too many options. Actually, there is also the Pocketoilet, a packet measuring 7 centimeters tall and 6.5 cm wide that can fit in virtually any pocket or purse.

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A Japanese IT engineer has created a creepy nigh lamp that crawls on robotic spider legs and leads you to the toilet in the middle of the night.

Don’t you hate when you have to answer nature’s call in the middle of the night? It’s pitch dark, you don’t know where you’re going and you don’t want to disturb the whole family by turning on the lights. Wouldn’t it be nice if a smart night lamp could light up the way from your bed to the toilet? Well, be careful what you wish for, because some night lamps can be downright disturbing. Case in point, this robotic spider lamp created by a Japanese IT engineer as a side project that has been freaking out Twitter for the past couple of days.

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A trio of origami and paper plane building enthusiasts recently obliterated the world record for the farthest paper plane flight by achieving a jaw-dropping distance of 77.134 m (252 ft 7 in).

On April 16, 2022, at an indoor sports venue in Daegu, South Korea, Kim Kyu Tae managed to shatter the world record for the longest paper plane flight with each one of his eight throws. The previous record of 69.14 m (226 ft 10 in) set by Joe Ayoob and John M. Collins had been standing for a decade, but Kim managed to break it on all of his eight measured attempts (71.813 m being the shortest and 77.134 m being the farthest). But Kim was just one part of a trio who worked hard on designing and building this simple-looking but remarkable paper plane.

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Japan is home to a variety of weird shops, from ones offering magic love-granting apples to others selling hoof sandals, but when it comes to services, this hard-disk crushing shop definitely stands out.

Dark Past Final Disposal Site is a unique shop where anyone can safely destroy their potentially sensitive digital data by crushing their old drive in a special machine, for just 100 yen ($0.80). The Akihabara-based shop introduced the service in 2020, when a growing number of personal computer owners began raising questions about what happened to their personal data when they changed their PCs. The owners of Dark Past Final Disposal Site bought a professional hard drive destroying machine and began offering people the chance to safely dispose of their potentially compromising data.

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A 28-year-old man from Pakistan has become known as the Tarzan of Karachi after spending the last eight years of his life living in a makeshift treehouse in the city.

Farman Ali became somewhat of an overnight social media sensation after footage of his unusual home went viral on social media a few weeks ago. People were fascinated by the young man who managed to live in a modest treehouse for over eight years, but as he keeps telling everyone who asks, he didn’t do it by choice. After losing both his parents, Ali was simply too poor to afford any kind of conventional housing, and after living on the streets for a while, he decided to build his own home in the only place where no one would bother him or drive him away – in a tree on public property.

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Vietnam’s latest cosmetic procedure trend has people injecting hyaluronic acid fillers into their ear lobes in order to achieve elongated lobes like those of Maitreya, aka Laughing Buddha, considered a good long charm.

Vietnamese media recently featured a beauty salon in Quang Ninh where an increasing number of people have been requesting ear lobe fillers in order to change their fortunes. They believe that by increasing the size of their ear lobes to emulate those of Maitreya, a symbol of wealth and good fortune, they will attract prosperity into their lives. Advertisements for this procedure have reportedly become very popular on social media as well, with many salons promising fast and painless procedures to superstitious customers.

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Food technology company Primeval Foods plans to launch an entire menagerie of exotic meats that didn’t actually come from animals, including lion burgers, tiger nuggets or giraffe ham.

As the meat-alternatives market becomes increasingly competitive, food tech companies are coming up with new and ingenious ways of making their products stand out. Primeval Foods, a London-based startup specializing in cellular agriculture, plans to start selling exotic meats cultivated in a laboratory. And we’re not talking expensive and hard-to-come-by beef either, but the types of meat most people never even imagined were edible, like lion or tiger meat.

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Julio, a 30-year-old Swiss educator has an impressive collection of four, five, six and even seven-leafed clovers, which just might make him the world’s luckiest man.

Clovers with more than three leaves are considered lucky charms in many cultures, and if a person’s luck would be measured in the sheer number of such clovers in their possession, a Swiss collector of rare clovers would almost undoubtedly be the world’s luckiest man. 30-year-old Julio has been collecting lucky clovers since he was only nine, and has since amassed an enviable collection of 3,467 four, five, six and even seven-leafed clovers laminated to protect them from the elements.

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Ring-necked parakeets are native to the foothills of the Himalayas and temperate regions of North Africa, but for the past century and a half, they’ve also made a home for themselves in London.

No one knows exactly when and how London became a home for feral parakeets. In fact, there are so many urban myths tied to these green exotic birds that it’s hard to settle on just one explanation. Many of the theories going around on the streets of London as well as on the internet involve legendary artists like Jimi Hendrix or Audrey Hepburn, but no one can truly say how the birds came to the English capital. One thing is for sure, though – London’s parakeets are here to stay, they are thriving, and they are expanding, with recent estimates placing their number in the tens of thousands.

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Inspired by geometry, nature and illustrations from vintage science books, Italian artist Michele Volpi creates some of the most unique tattoos you’ll ever see.

Known for his monochromatic fine-blackwork style, Michele Volpi combines his love for the color black with pointilism and with his passion for various sciences to create tattoos that simply stand out. Relying on his background of technical drawing, Volpi expertly renders anything from biological specimens to anatomical diagrams and mysterious physics formulas. Those don’t sound like great idea for tattoos, but the talented Italian artist somehow makes them work.

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A Chinese man who won the praise of his employer by working 12-hour shifts basically 30 days a month recently sparked controversy in his home country.

On February 18, pictures of a framed billboard depicting the “model employee” of a company in Zhengzhou, Henan went viral on Chinese social media, sparking a heated debate. The honorary billboard praises the man, one XueLintao, for working 12-hour days, basically 30 days a month, influencing both new and old employees through his actions, improving the company’s daily production, saving his employer money in labor costs and improving equipment utilization. But most netizens didn’t see Xue as an example, but rather as a “traitor” and as an “accomplice in overtime hell”.

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Every year, on January 17, the people of San Bartolome de Pinares, in Spain, celebrate St. Anthony by riding their horses, donkeys and mules through piles of burning tree branches in a celebration called Las Luminarias.

The unique tradition of leaping over and through flames dates back 500 years, but the men and women of San Bartolome de Pinares village still celebrate it religiously. They gather all the branches they find in the days leading up to the festivities, and when dusk falls on the eve of Saint Anthony’s, they light them ablaze. Riders lead their mounts through the burning piles of the village, accompanied by sounds of drums and Spanish bagpipes.

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The Japanese Bobtail is a rare car breed whose distinctive feature is the presence of a short, bunny-like tail, instead of the long, flexible tail of most other felines.

No one knows exactly when this unusual cat breed arrived in Japan, but it has been a part of Japanese culture for at least several hundred years, being frequently featured in traditional art and folklore. In the early 1600s, the breed played a major role in preserving Japan’s silkworm production, by taking on rodents, and by the next century, the bobtail was already the dominant cat breed being kept in Japan. No one knows whether it was because of its distinctive tail, which looked like it had been bent and broken, its friendly personality, or its talkative nature, but the Japanese Bobtail became extremely popular in the Japanese country and remains so today. However, it remains extremely rare outside the borders of Japan.

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Harold Lloyd is known as both one of Hollywood’s legendary stars of early 1900s silent comedy, and as the owner of a year-long Christmas tree adorned with over 5,000 colorful decorations.

If you think yourself the kind of person that goes over the top when decorating the family Christmas tree, don’t beat yourself up too hard, as you’ll probably never be as obsessed with Christmas decorations as Harold Lloyd. The Hollywood legend, who starred in such films as Safety Last! (1923) and High and Dizzy (1920), is said to have had a collection of over 8,000 decorations collected from all over the world. But what he is most famous for is using most of these eye-catching baubles to decorate an impressive Christmas tree that is now regarded by many as the most adorned Christmas tree that ever was.

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