Curiosities

Drone-hunting eagles

In 2016, Dutch police began training eagles to intercept unauthorized drones. The birds were taught to recognize the machines as prey, seize them in mid-air and carry them away in their talons. France followed with four golden eagles named after the Three Musketeers, raised around drones and rewarded with meat placed on them. The idea offered a remarkably medieval answer to a modern problem, but both programs were eventually abandoned in favour of electronic detection and jamming.

Mamuthones

The Mamuthones are masked figures who appear during Carnival in Mamoiada, Sardinia. Twelve men wear black wooden faces, dark sheepskins and up to 25 kilograms of cattle bells strapped across their backs. They advance in two rows, using synchronized steps and shoulder movements to make every bell strike together, while brightly dressed Issohadores circle them with ropes. The procession’s original meaning remains unknown.

Dynasphere

The Dynasphere was a ten-foot motorized wheel patented by British inventor J. A. Purves in 1930. The driver sat inside its iron latticework while the entire structure rolled around them. Purves imagined it as the future of transport and even built an eight-passenger version. It could reach roughly 25 miles per hour, although steering and braking remained unconvincing.

Kinshasa’s Traffic Robots

Since 2013, several intersections in Kinshasa have been governed by eight-foot aluminium robots. Designed by Congolese engineer Thérèse Izay Kirongozi and built by the women-led cooperative Wotech, they rotate at the waist, raise their arms and flash red or green lights from their palms. Solar panels rise from their heads like enormous hats, while cameras in their eyes record motorists. They were introduced partly because traffic lights were unreliable and human officers could be ignored—or bribed. The robots cannot pursue anyone, but drivers reportedly obey them.

Hvaldimir

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.

Sheikh Hamad bin Hamdan Al Nahyan

Sheikh Hamad bin Hamdan Al Nahyan is an Emirati royal and car collector better known as the Rainbow Sheikh, after ordering seven Mercedes in the colours of the rainbow. His collection contains hundreds of vehicles, including a giant Willys Jeep, a three-times-scale Hummer H1, a ten-wheeled SUV and an enormous Dodge Power Wagon with living quarters inside. Many are fully functional. For Sheikh Hamad, the boundary between an automobile and a building appears to be an unnecessary technicality.

Zangbeto

Zangbeto are traditional guardians of the night in Benin, Togo and Nigeria, appearing as towering cones of brightly colored raffia. During ceremonies, they spin and move without any visible person inside. According to tradition, the costumes are inhabited not by performers but by spirits.

Matthias Buchinger

Matthias Buchinger was a German artist, magician, calligrapher, and performer who was born without hands or feet and was 2'5" (74 cm.) tall. Buchinger was especially noted for his micrography, in which illustrations consist of very small text.

MV Lyubov Orlova

The MV Lyubov Orlova was a Soviet-built cruise ship that gained notoriety not for its voyages, but for its strange and mysterious fate after being abandoned at sea. Constructed in 1976 in Yugoslavia and named after the famed Russian actress Lyubov Orlova, the ship initially served as a luxury liner for expeditions in polar regions, ferrying passengers to destinations like Antarctica. For decades, it operated as a charter vessel, but financial troubles caught up with the ship, and it was seized in 2010 in Canada due to unpaid debts. In 2013, after sitting docked for years, the Lyubov Orlova was sold for scrap in the Dominican Republic. During its tow from Canada, the ship broke free from its tug in rough seas near Newfoundland. Efforts to secure it failed, and the derelict vessel drifted into international waters. Declared a hazard to navigation, it was to be monitored, but over time, tracking ceased, and the ship effectively disappeared.

Gyro monorail

The gyro monorail is a single rail land vehicle that uses the gyroscopic action of a spinning wheel to overcome the inherent instability of balancing on top of a single rail.

Opus

Encyclopædia of the sublime