From 3D cheese printers to multimillion-dollar number plates, these are 2016’s oddest oddities

As part of the product and service innovation company Fluxx, it is my business to dig around the odder side of Earth. Here is a list of the 52 most surprising things I learned in 2016, from hologram receptionists to Iran’s six million secret iPhones and playable petri dishes.

1. Call Me Baby is a call centre for cybercriminals who need a human voice as part of a scam. They charge $10 for each call in English, and $12 for calls in German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Polish.
2. Google $GOOGL’s advertising tools can track real-world shop visits. If a customer sees an ad then visits the relevant store a few days later, that conversion will appear in Google Adwords. Customers are tracked via (anonymized) Google-Maps data. They’ve been doing this since 2014.
3. In a mixed-gender group, when women talk 25% of the time or less, it’s seen as being “equally balanced.” If women talk 25–50% of the time, they’re seen as “dominating the conversation.”
4. In July, 800,000 volunteers planted 49 million trees in Uttar Pradesh, India.
5. 40% of adults aged 16 to 60 in OECD countries can’t use a computer well enough to delete an email.
6. A Japanese insurance company is offering policies that cover social-media backlash.
7. Abu Dhabi numberplate “1” sold for Dh31m ($8.5 million) in November. However, the cheque bounced, and the buyer was arrested.
8. Australian musicians have performed with a synthesizer controlled by a petri dish of live human neurons: “The neurons were fed dopamine before the gig and went ballistic. The interaction with the drummer was very tight. .”