World’s Strangest

Situs Inversus is a rare birth defect in which a person is born with organs facing backwards. A patient in India may be the only living person known to have the affliction: In Mr Shivnani’s case, they discovered the aorta and inferior vena cava, which pump clean blood in and impure blood from the heart were [...]

There is a glacier in Antarctica that seems to be weeping a river of blood. It’s one of the continent’s strangest features, and it’s located in one of the continent’s strangest places — the McMurdo Dry Valleys, a huge, ice-free zone and one of the world’s harshest deserts. So imagine you’re hiking through this – – [...]

Science is wonderful of course, but it can also be vaguely terrifying if you take things to their logical (or not so logical) conclusions. Take batteries that run on human blood: So scientists have developed a battery that is powered by human blood. The idea is a cybernetic power source, to keep your pacemaker or whatever [...]

Jin Zhang, a professor at the University of Western Ontario, is developing contact lenses that change color with the user’s blood sugar level. This could allow diabetics to monitor themselves without frequent blood samples. The technology: …uses extremely small nanoparticles embedded into the hydrogel lenses. These engineered nanoparticles react with glucose molecules found in tears, causing [...]

Medical researchers have developed artificial blood cells by layering proteins into a molded shell and then dissolving away the mold, leaving functional blood cells 7 microns wide. They hope that these cells can be used to deliver pharmaceuticals more effectively than ever before. In the magazine Discover, Andrew Moseman writes: To make red blood cells in [...]

Sure, bad blood and a shared border may be all two teams need to spark a rivalry, but a really bizarre trophy doesn’t hurt, either. Let’s find out how well you know which teams are fighting for giant axes and phones this fall. Take the Quiz: College Football Trophies

Blood rivers, stone forests and perched pillars of chalk may sound like features of an alien planet dreamed up as a set for a new SyFy show, but our own Mother Earth is a lot stranger and less predictable than we give her credit for. Take for example the Spotted Lake in Canada. It certainly seems [...]

Uterus transplants have been thus far unsuccessful because the transplanted uteri do not maintain a blood supply strong enough to keep a fetus alive. But now British medical researchers may have solved that problem. The Guardian reports: They have worked out how to transplant a womb with a good blood supply which could mean it lasts [...]

Police found a leech at the scene of a robbery in Tasmania eight years ago. They took a sample of the blood the leech had consumed. In 2008, Peter Alec Cannon was arrested on an unrelated drug charge. The DNA from his blood matched the blood from the leech! Cannon would probably have got away with [...]

Let’s take a look at some of the real-world events and phenomena that may have inspired the creation of vampires, werewolves and zombies. Vampires One dark and stormy evening, Spanish neurologist Juan Gomez-Alonso was watching a vampire movie when he realized something strange; he noticed that vampires behave an awful lot like people with rabies. The virus [...]