Oddity Central |
- A Bite From This Tiny Tick Can Turn You into a Vegetarian
- Japanese Artist Creates Amazingly Realistic Miniature Dioramas
- Retired Teacher Spends 60 Years Folding over 10,000 Paper Planes of All Shapes and Sizes
| A Bite From This Tiny Tick Can Turn You into a Vegetarian Posted: 25 Sep 2014 03:56 AM PDT The tiny Lone Star tick can succeed where countless health experts and diet planners have failed – this bug has the power to put people off red meat! The tick isn't vegetarian itself, but it sure can turn you into one for life. Scientifically known as Amblyomma americanum, these ticks carry a variety of diseases, but what makes them truly fascinating is their ability to make people allergic to meat. That's because they carry a substance called alpha-gal (Galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose), which is a type of carbohydrate found in non-primate mammals. Now, alpha-gal isn't present in the human body, but our guts can digest it without negative effects under normal conditions. So when we eat meat that contains alpha-gal, we're able to handle it without any problems. But when the stuff enters the bloodstream through the Lone Star's bite, it's a totally different ballgame – the human immune system recognizes it as a foreign substance and produces antibodies to protect against it. These antibodies remain in the system, so the next time meat containing alpha-gal is ingested, it can trigger violent allergic reactions. |
| Japanese Artist Creates Amazingly Realistic Miniature Dioramas Posted: 25 Sep 2014 02:10 AM PDT Satoshi Araki, an artist from Tokyo, creates highly realistic miniature models of towns, vehicles, and a lot of other objects from everyday life. He is particularly skilled at making small-scale dioramas of chaotic cityscapes that are affected by urban decay, pollution, or warfare. Satoshi mostly uses styrofoam board to make these incredibly intricate and complex models – he cuts them down to the desired shape and size, paints them, and then glues them together. He explains on his blog that he uses Google Image Search to pull up images that he later uses as a visual reference. These images help him create scenes that are very life-like, down to the smallest detail. |
| Retired Teacher Spends 60 Years Folding over 10,000 Paper Planes of All Shapes and Sizes Posted: 25 Sep 2014 01:58 AM PDT Xu Shuquan, a retired primary school teacher from Chengdu city in Sichuan Province, has dedicated the past 60 years to folding paper planes. The 70-year-old now has a collection of 10,000 planes of different sizes, colors and shapes, in addition to various paper dolls and models of the 12 zodiac signs. What's so great about a grown man making paper planes, you ask? Well, Xu's planes aren't like those simple ones that kids make. He uses a complicated ancient origami-like folding technique called 'Zhezhi' to make a variety of aircraft models – from jumbo jets to fighter planes. |
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