Every year, Yoro, a small town in northern Honduras, allegedly experiences a mysterious phenomenon known as “Lluvia de Peces”, a literal rain of fish.

The rain of fish phenomenon has been reported in many places around the world, but Honduras’ Yoro department is the only place where the bizarre rain reportedly occurs every year, sometimes several times per year. The now-famous Lluvia de Peces takes place sometime between May and June, usually after a very powerful storm. The weirdest thing about this unusual occurrence is that, despite it being a yearly event, no one has ever actually seen the fish fall from the sky. There is however photographic and video evidence of hundreds of fish covering entire areas following powerful storms, so it definitely can’t be dismissed as just a simple legend, and scientists have actually investigated the phenomenon in order to provide a plausible explanation.

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Japanese beverage maker Kirin Holdings teamed up with researchers at Meiji University in Tokyo to create smart chopsticks that reportedly make food taste more savory.

Meiji University professor Homei Miyashita has been researching electrical stimulation as a way to alter the way people experience food and flavor for years. In 2016, along with fellow researcher Hiromi Nakamura, he made international news headlines for developing a revolutionary electric fork that could make any food taste saltier than it actually was. And last year, he got even more attention for his Taste the TV (TTTV) project, a lickable TV screen that could imitate the taste of various foods. Now, he’s once again the talk of the interwebs thanks to his latest invention, a pair of smart chopsticks that can allegedly make food more savory.

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The Manuscript Writing Café in Tokyo, Japan only caters to writers working on tight deadlines, providing the motivation and assistance required to make sure they meet those deadlines.

Japan is no stranger to offbeat cafes that sometimes inspire worldwide trends. Remember cat cafes? That popular trend originated in the Asian country, as did, maid cafes, owl cafes, reptile cafes, and even a cafe dedicated to female thighs. And those are just a handful of examples; in reality, Japan has come up with a plethora of intriguing cafe concepts, and somehow keeps coming up with new ones. The latest example is the Manuscript Writing Café in Tokyo’s Koenji neighborhood, a venue that only welcomes writers struggling to meet their deadlines.

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A colonial house in Virginia has become the talk of the internet after going on sale for $800,000 with a serious catch – a basement dweller or two who won’t be required to pay rent.

Located in Fairfax, Virginia, the 3,548-square-foot five-bedroom, four-bathroom house apparently needs some serious work. According to the Zillow listing, the original windows have some rot, one of the toilets leaks and has been shut off, the flooring needs to be replaced, as does the carpet on the lower level, and some of the appliances don’t work. But that’s nothing compared to the surprise waiting in the basement. While the house itself can be fixed, it’s unclear what the potential buyer should do about the basement dweller or dwellers that it comes with, who don’t pay rent and can’t be evicted…

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The Opuses restaurant at The Royal Park Hotel in Ginza, Tokyo recently got a lot of attention because of an intriguing dessert shaped like pieces of wall plaster.

On the list of least appetizing things in the world, wall plaster ranks pretty highly, so most people wouldn’t call it the most inspired choice for designing a dessert. Still, that’s exactly what the chefs at Opuses, a high-class restaurant in Tokyo, Japan seem to have done. Photos of this dubious-looking dish were recently posted on Twitter by user @mimimimimitsu32 and ended up getting over 200,000 likes, 26,000 retweets and hundreds of comments. The general sentiment was that the dessert looked remarkably like plaster.

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The gumboot chiton, a marine mollusk also known as the Wondering Meatloaf, has teeth made of the hardest biological material known to man.

Magnetite is a geologic mineral commonly found in the earth’s crust, but it’s also somehow produced by the gumboot chiton and synthesized into rows of small teeth hard enough to scrape algae off of rocks. The top of these teeth is layered with magnetite, which makes them literally as strong as steel, but the root is also incredibly tough, thanks to another iron-like material that has never been observed in living creatures before – santabarbaraite. This unique combination makes the chiton’s teeth the hardest biological material in the world.

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Vozrozhdeniya was once an isolated island in the Aral Sea. Today, it’s a wasteland infused with tonnes of anthrax, as well as other exotic and deadly diseases.

The Aral Sea was once the fourth-largest sea on planet Earth, but after the rivers that fed it were diverted by the Soviets to irrigate cotton fields, its waters receded and today it is nothing but a salty-sand wasteland where temperatures frequently reach 60 degrees Celsius and signs of life are scarce to non-existent. But you know what’s worse than a salt-covered wasteland – a salt-covered wasteland infused with anthrax and a plethora of other exotic diseases that the Soviet Union experimented with for years. That’s what makes Vozrozhdeniya one of the deadliest places in the world.

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Celebrity lookalikes are nothing new, but it’s rare to find one that resembles the original as closely as Brazilian Priscilla Beatrice resembles pop icon Rihanna.

Priscilla Beatrice may not be Rihanna’s only lookalike, but she’s definitely the most famous one. With over 450,000 followers on Instagram and 2.4 million followers on TikTok, you could say she is a social media sensation in her own right. She has made a name for herself impersonating the Barbadian superstar both online and in various cities around the world, with fans of Rihanna flocking to get an autograph or have their picture taken with her. And who could blame them? The resemblance is so uncanny, you’d be tempted to think she was Rihanna’s identical twin sister.

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A Japanese startup is trying to blur the line between reality and virtual reality with technology that allows the wearer to feel the pain experienced inside the metaverse in real life.

H2L Technologies, a Sony-backed technology company based in Tokyo, recently unveiled a wristband that dishes out small electric shocks whenever the wearer suffers pain-inducing damage in the much-hyped metaverse. The device is supposed to do a lot more than that, including mimicking a range of sensations from catching a ball to a bird pinching the wearer’s skin, as well as conveying weight and resistance. It’s all meant to make the metaverse this immersive experience that the people and companies involved in its creation have been pushing over the last year or so.

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Souq Waqif is a state-of-the-art hospital in Doha Qatar, where 150 patients are treated every day. Only patients here all have feathers, as Souq Waqif is a hospital for falcons.

To say that Qatar’s Souq Waqif Falcon Hospital is a medical facility unlike any other would be fairly accurate. But then again, few countries around the world have a falconry tradition as old as the small Arab nations. Keeping the birds in the best possible physical shape is considered an essential duty by those who choose to keep and train falconids, and many of them spare no expense doing it. So it’s really no wonder that Souq Waqif is better equipped and staffed than many human hospitals in some of the world’s most developed countries.

Founded in 2008, the Souq Waqif Falcon Hospital is located in one corner of the main square in Doha’s old city. Everything, from the shiny glass doors at the entrance to the comfortable sofas of the waiting room, lets you know that falcons are the most revered animals in Qatar.

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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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The Joanina Library of the University of Coimbra Alta and Sofia is one of two Portuguese libraries to house colonies of bats as natural deterrents for bugs that would otherwise feed on old books and manuscripts.

As unusual as having a colony of Common pipistrelle bats living behind the bookshelves of one of the most beautiful libraries in the world, the curators of this historical marvel swear that the flying rodents provide an indispensable service – they feast on bugs that would otherwise damage or feed on old books. And with some of these ancient manuscripts being virtually priceless, it’s no wonder that the bats are regarded as helpful guardians.

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Cliff Young is a legend among ultra-marathon runners, and for good reason – at age 61, the Australian potato farmer became the unlikely winner of the grueling Westfield Sydney-Melbourne Ultra Marathon.

Every year, thousands of seasoned runners from all over the world gather in Australia to take part in one of the most difficult ultra-marathons on the planet. As the name suggests, the Westfield Sydney-Melbourne Ultra Marathon has competitors running from Sydney to Melbourne, a distance of 543.7-miles (875 kilometers). The first man to win this endurance race remains its most famous participant to date – a 61-year-old potato farmer who ran the whole thing wearing overalls and work boots, and beat the runner up by 10 hours.

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If your idea of a nice meal out on the town happens to include rude restaurant staff that’s actually paid to insult and ridicule you, booking a table at Karen’s Diner should be on your priorities list.

“Great Food, Terrible Service” is the motto of Karen’s Diner, a new and intriguing fast-food restaurant chain that is currently operating in Australia and the UK. In case you haven’t made the connection yet, the name plays on the popular American slang for an obnoxious and entitled middle-aged customer who is never satisfied and wants to talk to the manager about the most trivial issues. Well, some bright minds decided that this sort of attitude would be perfect for the staff of a restaurant in order to offer patrons a truly memorable experience.

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The Areia Preta beach in the Brazilian city of Guarapari is famous for its black sand which has external radiation levels of almost 400 times the normal background radiation recorded in the US.

Brazil has hundreds of miles of beaches, but none are quite like “Praia Da Areia Preta”, in Guarapari. The sand in this region, particularly the black sand, contains moderate quantities of monazite, a phosphate mineral rich in several rare-earth elements, including uranium and thorium. Research has shown that background radiation on Areia Preta can reach 175 mSv per year, or 20 μSv/h, while some spots, particularly those with lost of black sand, have radiation levels of up to 55 μSv/h. To put that into perspective, the average radiation exposure level across the United States is about 0.34 μSv/h, while an X-ray gives people a one-time exposure to about 100 μSv.

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