Category: Oddities

Nobody wants to be in prison — if they do, then the prison’s doing it wrong. Plenty of prisoners have dreamed of escaping and living out their lives in freedom, but rarely do they get very far. In cases like…

These happy animals will make your smile! The animals that look like they’re smiling are bound to warm even the stone-cold jaded hearts among us. However, the scientific jury is still out on whether or not animals can/do actually smile….

Elaborate book covers have been Aniko Kolesnikova’s passion since 2009. The Latvian designer-artist, working under the name Mandarin Duck, specializes in creating dragon-, animal-, bird-, fantasy-, and nature-inspired polymer journals. She occasionally takes custom orders, too. Here is a fantastic collection…

The South Korean Beauty by Jaewoon U. He is a landscape photographer based in Seoul with a great eye for finding stunning landscapes reflected in mirror-like lakes and rivers. The reflections in his photos make for beautiful, harmonious compositions, but…

Flat earth. One of the great lies told to schoolchildren is that the whole round-earth thing was first proposed by Christopher Columbus, sailing toward the edge of the Earth in hopes of encountering India. The truth is Columbus knew exactly…

Dangerous railways. Nobody is actually really scared of trains, are they? Air travel, sure, and you wouldn’t be too surprised to meet someone who gets a bit nervous crossing oceans or driving on tight roads or even getting on a…

Have you ever wished for a fairy tale world to escape to? Well, if you’re furiously nodding at your screen right now then you’ll be glad to hear that it is in fact entirely possible to do so. We have just…

Artificial Intelligence, defined as intelligence exhibited by machines, is on everybody’s lips nowadays. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made many changes in our day to day life and has touched every industry, business, consumer and household in a meaningful way. Let’s…

The dark side of selfies. Our social media feeds are full of self-shot photos of our friends and family looking better than we do, doing things that are more exciting than the things we do, and just generally proving to…

Ryan Koopmans tells the story:   GQ Magazine assigned us to photograph the atmosphere and culture around Area 51, a highly secretive and much talked-about US airforce institution located in the desert of Nevada. We met with local business owners and…

Dave Pollot is a painter in the US who brings new life to old and forgotten thrift store paintings by adding pop culture characters. He uses these old paintings to combine his interest in painting with his love for popular…

The specific point on Earth that reigns as the planet’s hottest place turns out to be a very complex, loaded question. What defines ‘hottest’ exactly? Do we mean the place that reaches the highest temperature? The place with the highest…

Simon Beck, who bills himself as “the world’s first and most famous ‘Snow Artist,’” is back with a new work of unique art – a massive snow dragon that he drew by walking in the heavy snowfall near Yakutsk, Siberia….

Alone with their thoughts. In 1654, scientist and philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Now, there’s some science behind that statement. A study was conducted by the…

The Saurian Monster must have left a ghoulish sight in the wake of his macabre stride. It all started in October 1886 when workers found a sheep picked clean to the bones at the Frankton Junction slaughter yards, near Hamilton…

Be strong and withstand this cuteness overload! Our parents can probably not wait and are probably relieved to see us grow up!  But in all honesty, our furry counterparts could please just stay babies forever – giving us a cuteness…

Jeremy Mann (American, born in 1979) is a painter best known for his moody, dark cityscapes. Mann graduated from Ohio University with a degree in Fine Art painting, and later attended the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. Working…

Unlucky people. Have you ever got a sneaky suspicion that the universe is sometimes trigger-happy to assassinate you? However, you haven’t met Ann Hodges. She wasn’t particularly special but she was still in the universe crosshairs. Ann Hodges She lived…

Brain evolve or regress. There has been speculation about THE BRAIN as long as we remember. It has been prodded, poked and has been subject to just plain head-scratching ever since our thoughts started to function on a higher level….

The winners and runners up of the 2019 Nature Photographer Of The Year were announced recently. The standards were incredibly high, as usual. The award was presented at the Nature Talks Photo Festival in the Netherlands and over 14,000 images were…

Peter Stumpp (alternately spelled Stumpf, Stubbe or Stuppe) was a mid-16th century German farmer who was executed on Halloween in 1589. Unfortunately, we only have one surviving account of what happened in the town of Bedburg that autumn, but it’s…

Everyone knows of hypnosis because of four infamous words: “You’re getting very sleepy.” But aside from old Hollywood films and sideshow parlor tricks, hypnotism is viewed by many psychiatric professionals as a credible form of therapy when added to standard…

The grey wolf. The battle between wolves and farmers has been going on since the beginning of time, and has been largely uninterrupted over the course of American history. Western Europe, over the course of the twentieth century, has hunted…

Beijing-based MAD Architects earned themselves a place on the shortlist of the Southbank by Beulah competition with a green skyscraper that towers over the city of Melbourne. Twisting up as a single tower, the skyscraper is a multipurpose vision that spreads visitors across multiple…

Nursing cat. Radamenes is an angelic little black cat in Bydgoszcz, Poland and has been through hell and high water. He survived a respiratory infection, and now helps other animals at this Polish shelter to get better. After the veterinary center…

Anneliese Michel. Born in Bavaria in 1952, Anneliese Michel is perhaps the last embodiment of Satan you’d expect. Michel was part of a devoutly religious family, who believed that she needed to pay penance for her mother’s sins. Her older…

Abhartach. Information on just how real this person was is sketchy, but that’s not entirely surprising. Record-keeping from the 5th and 6th centuries leaves just a smidge to be desired. We do know that Ireland was once ruled by a scattering…

Cute sea slugs. Most of these “slugs” are actually snails that have lost their shells and gained new characteristics through evolution. For example, sacoglossans are sometimes called “solar-powered sea slugs” because they use chloroplasts from the algae they eat in…

Crow rides on the back of an eagle. Phoo Chan, a talented California-based bird photographer whose photos have been featured by National Geographic, has captured an incredible, once-in-a-lifetime series of photos of a crow landing and riding on the back of a…

Artist used LSD. Countless artists have experimented with the effect drugs have on their work. User whatafinethrowaway, inspired by the “Nine Drawings” series which was the result of an experiment by the US government in the 1950’s, asked her friend…