Weird and wacky world US: Scientists put eyeball on tadpole’s tail

It’s hard to say what’s crazier: the fact that Tufts University researchers spent a year cutting out the tiny eyeballs of tadpole embryos and sticking them back on to the tadpoles’ tails, or: the fact that, when they hatched, a few of the tadpoles could actually see out of the eyes on their tails.

Thursday, March 07, 2013
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It’s hard to say what’s crazier: the fact that Tufts University researchers spent a year cutting out the tiny eyeballs of tadpole embryos and sticking them back on to the tadpoles’ tails, or: the fact that, when they hatched, a few of the tadpoles could actually see out of the eyes on their tails.As you know, this is not the way vision is supposed to work--your eyeballs are supposed to be connected to a big fat nerve that carries incoming signals back to your brain. Without that direct link to the brain, your eyeballs are useless.China: China imprisons four men for ‘ghost marriage’ corpse bride traffickingA county court in central China has sentenced four men to prison for digging up and selling corpses on the black market to enable "ghost marriages”, a millennia-old custom of burying deceased bachelors alongside newly deceased wives so that they will not grow lonely in the afterlife.The Xi’an Evening News reported that the Yanchuan county court in Yan’an City, sentenced each of them to more than two years in prison for stealing 10 female corpses, cleaning them up and counterfeiting their medical records to boost their prices, and selling them on the black market for a total of £25,000.Japan: Japanese man grows his hair to 8.6-inchIt took three cans of hairspray, one large bottle of gel -- and, of course, 15 years to grow it out -- but Kazuhiro Watanabe has made history.You can ask why he did it, but the answer is just too obvious: "I really wanted to be in the Guinness World Record book,” he told The Huffington Post through a translator. Without gel, his hair reaches to his knees.Germany:  86-year-old gymnast competes with toddlers 86-year-old Johanna Quaas, (born 20 November 1925, Germany) is the oldest gymnast and a regular competitor in the amateur competition Landes-Seniorenspiele staged in Saxony, Germany. She performed a floor-and-beam routine on the set of 'Lo Show dei Record' in Rome, Italy.