The Eton Wall Game is a form of football played only at Eton College, squeezed against a brick wall on a strip of ground barely five metres wide. Players gather in a dense, slow-moving mass and spend much of the match advancing the ball a few feet. Scoring exists, but largely as a historical possibility. In the traditional St Andrew’s Day match, only three goals have ever been recorded, the last in 1909.
Rhizanthella is a genus of five rare Australian orchids that have abandoned nearly everything expected of an orchid. They have no leaves or chlorophyll, live underground and, in most species, flower there as well.
The Codex Rotundus is a late-15th-century Book of Hours whose parchment pages and cover were cut into circles just 9.3 centimetres across. Its 266 pages contain prayers in Latin and French, three full-page miniatures and thirty illustrated initials.
The Morning Glory is a vast tubular cloud that regularly crosses northern Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria at dawn. It can extend for 1,000 kilometres while travelling at speeds of up to 60 kilometres per hour. The cloud forms inside a moving atmospheric wave created by opposing sea breezes: moisture condenses along its leading edge and evaporates behind it, making the entire cylinder appear to roll across the sky. Near Burketown, glider pilots gather each spring to surf the rising air along its front for hundreds of kilometres.
Scraper bikes are ordinary bicycles transformed with brightly coloured tape, foil and paint, usually arranged in geometric patterns across the wheels. The style emerged in East Oakland in the mid-2000s.
Hvaldimir was a beluga suspected of having worked as a Russian spy. He appeared off Norway in 2019 wearing a purpose-built camera harness marked “Equipment St. Petersburg.” He followed boats, retrieved objects and responded to human gestures, leading Norwegian authorities to believe he had escaped from a Russian military training programme. His name combines hval, Norwegian for whale, with Vladimir Putin. No espionage was ever proven, and Russia never acknowledged employing him.
Acoustic Kitty was a 1960s CIA project intended to turn an ordinary cat into a mobile listening device. Technicians equipped the animal with a microphone, transmitter and an antenna concealed in its fur, hoping it could approach conversations between Soviet agents without attracting attention. The electronics worked; directing a cat through real streets did not. The project was abandoned in 1967 as operationally impractical.
The Cashew of Pirangi in northeastern Brazil is a single tree covering approximately 8,500 square metres—the area of around 70 ordinary cashew trees. Its branches grow outward, bend beneath their own weight and form new roots wherever they touch the ground. These rooted branches become additional trunks, which produce further branches and continue the process. What appears to be a small forest is therefore one organism. The original trunk is now difficult to distinguish from the rest.
Colvillea is a genus containing a single species, Colvillea racemosa, a tree native to the seasonally dry regions of western and southern Madagascar. Its feathery leaves can approach a metre in length, but the main event is its hanging clusters of orange-red flowers, which resemble burning pinecones.
Reaching the 1912 Stockholm Olympics required Shizo Kanaguri to travel for 18 days by ship and the Trans-Siberian Railway, followed by five days of rest. Thirty kilometres into the marathon, he stopped at a house for water, lay down on a couch and awoke the following morning. Ashamed, he returned to Japan without formally withdrawing and was considered missing in Sweden for decades. In 1967, aged 76, he returned to complete the race. His final time of 54 years, 8 months, 6 days, 5 hours, 32 minutes and 20.3 seconds remains the slowest in Olympic marathon history.