Khecarī Mudrā is an obscure and somewhat controversial yoga practice that involves gradually severing parts of the tongue and then curling it back until it enters the nasal cavity.

Can you even imagine pulling your tongue back enough for the tip to slide into the nose through the mouth? It sounds impossible, and even if you could do it, wouldn’t that pose a risk of choking? Well, diehard hatha yoga practitioners must not worry about that too much, because that’s exactly what the advanced stages of a practice called “khecarī mudrā” require. Well, that, and gradually cutting the frenulum, the small piece of skin connecting the tongue to the floor of the mouth…

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Haider Ali, one of Pakistan’s most famous truck art masters, has recently discovered a new and lucrative niche – sneakers painted in traditional, bright motifs.

Truck art is an iconic part of Pakistani culture. For decades, it has been used to turn simple means of locomotion into driveable works of art to be looked at and admired. Now, this traditional art style is branching out to other mediums, the latest of which is sneakers. Haider Ali, a Pakistani truck art specialist was one of the first to jump on the truck-art-sneakers bandwagon, after getting an order for a custom pair and seeing his outrageous price being accepted by the client.

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Julio, a 30-year-old Swiss educator has an impressive collection of four, five, six and even seven-leafed clovers, which just might make him the world’s luckiest man.

Clovers with more than three leaves are considered lucky charms in many cultures, and if a person’s luck would be measured in the sheer number of such clovers in their possession, a Swiss collector of rare clovers would almost undoubtedly be the world’s luckiest man. 30-year-old Julio has been collecting lucky clovers since he was only nine, and has since amassed an enviable collection of 3,467 four, five, six and even seven-leafed clovers laminated to protect them from the elements.

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Inspired by Harry Potter’s iconic invisibility cloak, these real-life invisibility shields can make anyone who hides behind them disappear into thin air.

Invisibility Shield Co. is a UK-based startup that has been working on an affordable invisibility mechanism for over two years. The company recently revealed a line of invisibility shields that rely on surprisingly simple technology to make users invisible to the naked eye. Apparently, the shield uses a “precision-engineered lens array” to deflect light from the subject sitting behind the shield away from the observer. The lenses are oriented vertically to allow light from the subject to diffuse when it passes through the shield. The light from the subject’s background is refracted towards the observer who cannot see the subject hiding behind the shield.

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Cliff Young is a legend among ultra-marathon runners, and for good reason – at age 61, the Australian potato farmer became the unlikely winner of the grueling Westfield Sydney-Melbourne Ultra Marathon.

Every year, thousands of seasoned runners from all over the world gather in Australia to take part in one of the most difficult ultra-marathons on the planet. As the name suggests, the Westfield Sydney-Melbourne Ultra Marathon has competitors running from Sydney to Melbourne, a distance of 543.7-miles (875 kilometers). The first man to win this endurance race remains its most famous participant to date – a 61-year-old potato farmer who ran the whole thing wearing overalls and work boots, and beat the runner up by 10 hours.

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Souki Socks, a small sock factory in Japan’s Nara Prefecture, has devised a machine that allows people to knit their own socks by pedaling on a stationary bicycle.

Unless you’re a fan of knitting, making socks doesn’t exactly sound like a fun experience. This was the reality that the brilliant minds Souki Socks were confronted with when they set out to make sock-making exciting for the masses. Luckily, despite having the odds stacked against them, they managed to come up with an ingenious contraption that combined a mechanical sock knitting machine and a bicycle to allow virtually anyone to knit their own socks just by pedaling. Named “Charix,” the machine has been very popular with tourists ever since it was inaugurated in 2017.

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If your idea of a nice meal out on the town happens to include rude restaurant staff that’s actually paid to insult and ridicule you, booking a table at Karen’s Diner should be on your priorities list.

“Great Food, Terrible Service” is the motto of Karen’s Diner, a new and intriguing fast-food restaurant chain that is currently operating in Australia and the UK. In case you haven’t made the connection yet, the name plays on the popular American slang for an obnoxious and entitled middle-aged customer who is never satisfied and wants to talk to the manager about the most trivial issues. Well, some bright minds decided that this sort of attitude would be perfect for the staff of a restaurant in order to offer patrons a truly memorable experience.

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Stipe Petic, a 57-year-old Bosnian man with no nordic background, was so impressed by the ‘Vikings’ TV series that he started calling himself Ragnar Kavurson and making axes for a living.

The Bosnian Ragnar claims that his fascination with Viking culture started with a binge-watching session of History’s hit series, ‘Vikings’. Coming back to his hometown of Tomislavgrad in southern Bosnia after ten years of working on construction sites in Germany, he became fascinated by the saga of the legendary hero Ragnar Lothbrok and his wife Lagertha. After changing his look to mimic that of a nordic warrior of legend, and borrowing the name of his favorite Viking character, Ragnar, the “Bosnian Viking” started making intricately decorated Viking axes and shields.

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The Areia Preta beach in the Brazilian city of Guarapari is famous for its black sand which has external radiation levels of almost 400 times the normal background radiation recorded in the US.

Brazil has hundreds of miles of beaches, but none are quite like “Praia Da Areia Preta”, in Guarapari. The sand in this region, particularly the black sand, contains moderate quantities of monazite, a phosphate mineral rich in several rare-earth elements, including uranium and thorium. Research has shown that background radiation on Areia Preta can reach 175 mSv per year, or 20 μSv/h, while some spots, particularly those with lost of black sand, have radiation levels of up to 55 μSv/h. To put that into perspective, the average radiation exposure level across the United States is about 0.34 μSv/h, while an X-ray gives people a one-time exposure to about 100 μSv.

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The western hook-nosed snake, a small snake endemic to the deserts of the United States and Mexico, is famous for the shape of its snout and for farting to confuse its enemies.

Cobras and rattlesnakes have their deadly venom, constrictors like pythons and Boa have their strong musculature, but the western hook-nosed snake doesn’t have either, so it relies on a more unusual defense mechanism – farting. When threatened, it emits rumbling air bubbles from the cloaca – the common opening for excretion at a snake’s rear end. Known and cloacal popping or defensive flatulence, this strange means of defense is designed to confuse predators long enough for the snakes to escape.

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Japanese tech giant Kawasaki caused a lot of raised eyebrows at the world’s largest robot trade show in Tokyo, with Bex, a rideable robot goat.

The 2022 International Robot Exhibition featured a lot of ingenious creations, but few as attention-grabbing as Kawasaki’s latest invention, a robot goat that can carry approximately 220 pounds of cargo. Named after the Ibex, a species of large wild goat native to parts of Eurasia and Africa, the Kawasaki Bex can transport human riders or different materials, but it also has a fully modular top half, so it doesn’t need to be a rideable goat. But let’s be honest, why would you want to ruin a good thing? After all, what’s cooler than a robot goat?

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As the name suggests, the Hummer H1 X3 is three times the size of a standard Hummer H1, making it the largest Hummer in the world, by far.

The Hummer H1 is one of the largest street-legal SUVs ever made, but it literally looks like a toy car next to the behemoth that is the Hummer H1 X3. Measuring 6.6 meters high, 14 meters long, and 6 meters wide (21.6 x 46 x 19.6 feet), this metal monster is the largest Hummer in existence, at least according to its owner, Sheikh Hamad bin Hamdan Al Nahyan, aka the Rainbow Sheikh, one of the most eccentric car owners in the world.

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A Wisconsin dentist was recently found guilty of intentionally damaging his patients’ teeth so he could charge them more after fixing them.

61-year-old Scott Chamolli faces up to 10 years for each of his five healthcare fraud charges, and a maximum of five years for two other charges. The experienced dentist allegedly made millions by purposely drilling or breaking his clients’ teeth and then charging them extra to fix the damage. According to prosecutors, after causing the unnecessary damage, Chamoli would pressure his patients into unnecessary procedures just to boost his profit. Even though many of the victims thought their teeth were fine, they trusted him as the professional and paid for the unnecessary procedures.

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Lal Bihari is probably India’s most famous living dead, one of many people killed off in official records so that relatives can claim their possessions for themselves.

Killing off somebody on paper is apparently not that hard to do in India. All you need is some bribe money and local officials willing to do some dirty work in exchange for that money. Victims are usually people who have been away from their birthplace for a long time, and the culprits are greedy relatives trying to claim their land or their family homes. But once you’re dead in official records, proving that you’re actually alive is a much more difficult endeavor, especially when the people you are trying to convince are the very same who were paid to kill you off in the first place.

Lal Bihari’s story is probably the most famous example of a “dead man’s” struggle in India. His woes began in 1976, when he returned to his birthplace, the village of Khalilabad, in Uttar Pradesh, for residence, income and caste certificates, needed to secure a loan for his heirloom business. When the clerk first looked up at him and told him that Lal Bihari was dead, he smiled, but the clerk didn’t smile back…

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Deinococcus radiodurans is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as “the world’s toughest bacterium,” and it is fully deserving of that title.

Scientists discovered the red, spherical bacterium that later came to be known as deinococcus radiodurans about 70 years ago, when examining a can of ground meat that had spoiled despite having been sterilized by exposure to doses of radiation in the megarad range. Research would later show that this lowly bacterium can withstand 10,000 times the amount of radiation that would normally kill a human being, thanks to a miraculous ability to repair numerous DNA double-strand breaks in a matter of hours.

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