Japanese field voles can seriously impact the profits of apple orchard owners, if left unchecked. For centuries, many farmers have relied on owls to keep vole numbers to manageable levels, and research has shown the night predators to be incredibly efficient.

Ural owls have been setting up their nests in orchards with high rodent populations for a very long time, but Japanese apple growers were the first to notice the beneficial effect the winged predators had on their orchards and actively try to use them as a means of natural pest controls. Apart from allowing the owls to set up nests in tree hollows, they also started installing man-made tree houses to encourage owls from settling on their properties. They soon noticed that the owls brought the vole population down significantly, which meant healthier trees and bigger profits.

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Possibly the smallest theater in the world, and a strong contender for a Guiness record, the Kremlhof Theater is located in Villach, Austria. It’s so tiny, it can only fit eight guests, all of whom get front row seats.

In fact, it look doesn’t look at all like a theater, more like a cabin of sorts. The stage inside measures 1.30 by 1.30 m, and runs regular shows. Built by Felix Strasser and Yulia Izmaylova, irregularly puts on shows of the opera, ballet and plays for the privileged limited audience. The guests are required only to make a mere donation, as the theater doesn’t sell tickets. The Kremlhof Theater was opened 2 years ago in 2009, with the help of the theater organization for the stimulation of the dramatic appetite (der Verein zur Anregung des dramatischen Appetits or VADA). Also involved were the drama companies, ONEX and kärnöl. Their first production ever was called “Schnee” and began in January 2010.

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I remember seeing a set of photos from Google’s offices in Zurich, and thought that was pretty cool, but Google has nothing on Inventionland’s fairytale workplace.

Inventionland, like the name suggests, is a company that invents stuff, over 2,000 new inventions every year. To come with that many inventions, the Inventionland team must really be inspired by something, but what could it be? Believe it or not, it’s actually everything that surrounds them in their Pittsburgh headquarters.

The 70,000 square feet facility looks like nothing you’ve ever seen before, featuring 15 different fantasy sets, from pirate ships to tree houses and even a house shaped like a giant shoe. And it’s not only the world’s most creative workplace, it’s also equipped with the latest in sound, video and animation technology to help creationeers come up with the best ideas. Oh, that’s right, Inventionland employees are called “creationeers”, they get to wear lab coats and they brainstorm for ideas in a room called “Inventalot”. Now, how cool is that!

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The Shrinking Mill of Port Colborne, in Ontario, Canada, is an intriguing optical illusion that makes a giant grain elevator shrink the closer you get to it.

Usually, things tend to appear smaller in the distance and grow in size the closer you get to them, but that rule does not apply to the grain elevator located in Port Colborne’s Sugarloaf Marina. As motorists turn left onto Lakeshore Road west from Cement Road, they have their view filled by this massive concrete building in the distance. It’s so big it literally fills the horizon, but as you drive forward, instead of getting even bigger, it starts to shrink, and by the time you make the left-hand bend, it’s just an average industrial building in the distance. The mind-bending optical illusion has such a strong effect that nine out of ten people who see it for the first time drive back to get another look.

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Police in Oviedo, Spain, recently rescued three young children who had been isolated in a house for over three years by their parents, who seemed obsessed with keeping them from getting infected with the coronavirus.

People usually complain about nosy neighbors who can’t seem to mind their own business, but one woman in Oviedo, Spain, has been hailed as a hero after alerting police about unusual things going on in the house across the street from her property. The woman, referred to only as Silvia by Spanish media, had been keeping records about the activity in her neighbors’ house ever since they moved in, during the COVID pandemic. She had noticed that only the patriarch of the family was allowed to leave the house, mostly just to pick up groceries delivered at the front door, and that the family’s three kids only had their window blinds raised for short periods of time. However, the thing that prompted her to notify the authorities was the constant purchase of diapers, even though the children were eight and ten.

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Buriticupu, a town of roughly 55,000 people located in the Brazilian Amazon, risks being swallowed by giant ravines that have been growing “exponentially” over the last few months.

Authorities in Buriticupu have already evacuated 1,200 people from the highest-risk areas of the town, but with no solution in sight, the giant ravines threaten to eventually swallow the entire settlement. Buriticupu’s sinkhole problem dates back roughly three decades and is reportedly the cause of a combination of factors, such as erosion-prone sandy soil, poor urban planning, and deforestation, but it has been exacerbated by recent heavy rains which caused the sinkholes to expand at a rapid pace. A couple of years ago, experts identified 26 giant holes advancing toward the town, some of which have since merged to create ravines up to 20 meters deep.

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A Chinese man who refused the Government’s generous offer to buy his property for the construction of a new motorway now finds himself living in the middle of said motorway.

A few years ago when Chinese authorities knocked on his door in Jinxi, a town southwest of Shanghai, offering to buy his two-storey house for a fair bit of money and three other properties, Huang Ping decided to play hard-to-get in hopes of getting an even better deal. Unfortunately, his bet didn’t pay off, as the Government simply decided to build around his property instead of giving in to his absurd demands. In the end, all the other property owners in the area sold their land to the Government, leaving Huang isolated in the middle of a soon-to-be-inaugurated highway.

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‘El Inmortal’ (The Immortal), is an iconic building in the Ecuadorian city of Machala famous for its precarious look due to having an unusually narrow ground floor.

Located on the corner of Pichincha and Buenavista streets in the center of Machala, The Immortal has been defying earthquakes in Ecuador for more than 30 years. Looking at it, you would think that the slightest tremor would be enough to bring the four-storey building down, but you would be wrong. It has survived serious quakes, including one in 2023 measuring 6.5 degrees on the Richter scale, with minimal damage. It’s most famous for having the upper three floors overhanging a whopping five meters without any pillars for support. Its now legendary resistance to earthquakes despite its precarious appearance has earned it the nickname ‘The Immortal’.

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The city of Vadodara, in the Indian state of Gujarat, is crawling with giant crocodiles following the overflowing of a local river caused by record rainfall.

As if having to deal with the water flooding their homes and streets wasn’t enough, the people of Vadodara have to be on the lookout for giant crocodiles waiting to snatch their animals or even attack them. Videos of giant reptiles walking through the streets, chilling on house roofs, or swimming in canals with dead animals between their jaws have been doing the rounds on Indian social media ever since the Vishwamitri River overflowed last week. The river is home to hundreds of freshwater crocodiles, at least two dozen of which were caught in Vadodara between August 27 and 29.

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The town of Kudrovo, in Russia’s Leningrad Region, is home to the country’s largest residential building, a giant oval-shaped monstrosity featuring 3708 apartments and 35 different entrances.

Completed in 2015 as part of the massive ‘Novyy Okkervil’ residential complex on the outskirts of Kudrovo, Russia’s largest residential building got its first international coverage in 2021 when aerial photos of it made it to the first page of Reddit, getting over 50,000 upvotes and thousands of comments. People were equally fascinated and freaked out by the enormous building, and many compared it to a human anthill. The comparison is not as farfetched as it might seem, because the concrete oval of Kudrovo is home to between 11,000 and 18,000 people (reports from Russian media vary) all technically living under the same roof.

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Hosun, a South Korean dog who suffered severe injuries and was thought to be dead after being hit by a truck, gained legendary status after crawling out of its grave and walking home.

Hosun the “miracle dog” first made news headlines in South Korea six years ago, after going through a terrible car accident and coming back from the dead. She was only a four-month-old puppy when she was hit by a truck close to his owners’ home in the city of Yeongcheon, and her injuries were so severe that a neighbor who found her on the side of the road thought her dead. The man buried Hosun in a shallow grave in a nearby field and delivered the bad news to her owners when they came home. However, four days later, Hosun’s owners heard an animal’s wailing coming from a roadside ditch near their home and were shocked to find their beloved pet, terribly injured, but alive.

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British millionaire and pro golfer Francis McGuirk narrowly avoided jail time for reportedly setting fire to his family home just so his wife couldn’t have it following their breakup.

In a trial that recently ended and saw Francis McGuirk barely avoiding prison time, the 50-year-old golf pro was accused of setting fire to the £900,000 ($1.4 million) house in Sandwich, Kent last year, just to spite his life partner. On June 25 last year, knowing that there was no one home, the father-of-three entered the house he owned with his soon-to-be-ex-wife Sarah, locked himself inside, and snapped the keys inside the locks before texting his partner to let her know that he was about to set the place on fire. He proceeded to do just that, and it was only thanks to the neighbors calling emergency services that the house suffered only minor damage.

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When a three-year-old girl from Charlotte, North Carolina, started complaining to her parents about monsters in the walls of her room, they thought she was imagining things, but there really was something in the walls.

Little Saylor Class had recently watched DreamWorks’ ‘Monster Inc’ animated movie when she started talking to her parents about monsters in the walls, so they didn’t really take her seriously. In fact, they even gave her “a bottle of water and said it was monster spray so that she could spray away any of the monsters at night,” but her complaints only got stronger over the following months. Saylor’s parents started taking her more seriously when her mother Massis noticed bees swarming near the attic and chimney of their old farmhouse. Massis Class thought the daughter could hear the bees buzzing through the ceiling, but things were even worse than that.

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For 50 Years, the Rogan Megane Hakubutsukan or Spectacles Museum in Ikeburo, was the most iconic place to go shopping for eyeglasses and sunglasses in all of Japan, probably the world.

Located on the Higashi-dori shopping street in Minami-Ikebukuro, Tokyo, the Spectacles Museum was one of the most Instagram-worthy places in the Japanese capital. Although this was once a simple warehouse, under the guidance of founder and longtime owner Yutaka Takei, it became a giant advertisement for the products being sold inside. What really put the Spectacles Museum on the map was its unique facade, which consisted of thousands of pairs of colorful sunglasses attached to a giant metal frame. It was meant to attract attention, and that’s exactly what it did, in time becoming one of Ikebukuro’s main tourist attractions.

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An Atlanta man who lost his house after the city tore it down by mistake is now facing a lawsuit to have the entire property foreclosed unless he pays the $68,000 demolition costs.

Everett Tripodis’ property in Atlanta’s historic West End is now an empty lot, but until a few months ago he actually owned a home there, one that the city demolished without so much as a warning. Technically, they did send out letters notifying the owner that the property had been labeled unfit for habitation, but they sent them to the wrong address, in a different zip code, about 1.4 miles away. Tripodis and his mother had bought the century-old house as an investment and had been working on remodeling it when the city decided to tear it down. To make matters worse, the city of Atlanta is now suing the owner of the property and threatening to foreclose on the empty land unless he covers the cost of the demolition, $68,000.

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