1. In the 1930s, farmers in New Zealand had an unusual problem: when they put their trousers out to dry, they had a tendency to explode. A popular herbicide — sodium chlorate — would cause anything on which it had been spilledto explode when even a small amount of heat was applied.
2. In 2016, the remote Japanese train station of Kami-Shirataki was scheduled to close, until the authorities realised that a single student was still using it for her commute to school. They rescheduled the closure until after she graduated.
3. Words rejected by the Oxford English Dictionary include wurfing (surfing the internet at work), sprummer (when summer and springtime can't decide which is to come first, usually hot one day, then cold the next) and nonversation (a pointless chat).
4. In January 2013, a truck carrying 27 tonnes of Brunost (brown goat cheese) caught fire in a Norwegian tunnel. The high temperature from the combusting fats and sugars caused the blaze to last five days and resulted in severe damage to the tunnel.
Prescient tale
"Anyone else rereading E M Forster's amazingly prescient short story The Machine Stops?" asks Ruth Lewis. "He writes of a universe where people live in cells connected to computers which provide access to food, medical needs, entertainment, socialisation etc.
The population is described as having pasty faces and white blobby legs atrophied from lack of use.
