"scientists wanted them to scoop up the worthless stuff and ship it"
Odd means strange, unconventional, or different from usual or expected.
In the excerpt from "Marie Curie and the Discovery of Radioactivity," the author Mara Rockliff makes use of the word eccentric to describe the French couple of scientists - Marie and Pierre Curie. The reason is they wanted to collect the leftovers of the gathering of uranium, which was thrown away and considered useless. However, the extraordinary Curies knew about a new chemical element that they later named radium.
