Luis Padron, a 25-year-old fantasy fan and cosplay enthusiast from Argentina, has spent tens of thousands of dollars altering his looks in his desire to become a real-life elf.

Luis says he became obsessed with fantastic beings like elves and angels after being bullied as a child. He used to get picked on because he dyed his hair and had a different dress style than most boys his age, and since he didn’t have many friends growing up, he spent all of his free time reading fantasy books and dressing as his favorite characters. By the end of high-school, his unusual looks and natural quirkiness let to him becoming admired, and that just fueled his desire to be different. Now, he’s trying to make the changes permanent with the help of cosmetic medical procedures.

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It turns out we no longer need cows to produce cow milk, we can just brew it with yeast, just like beer. Well, it’s actually a bit more complicated than that, but that’s how a company called Perfect Day explains the basics of their innovative new product – a “synthetic milk” that looks and tastes a lot like cow milk.

Perfect Day was co-founded by Ryan Pandya and Perumal Gandh, two young scientists with a background in biomedical engineering. Three years ago, one was working on next-generation vaccines in Boston, and the other on tissue engineering, in New York. They didn’t know each other but they had a mutual acquaintance who knew that they both had this crazy idea about making milk without cows, and he put them in touch. They hit it off and started working on a way of making their dream a reality.

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Harry Kalenberg has a unique hobby – he turns pieces of popcorn into tiny works of art using only colored felt markers and pens. From miniature models of celebrities like Elvis or Donald Trump, to popular cartoon characters and animals, Harry has a gift for spotting the craziest things in a bowl of popcorn.

It all started 28 years ago, when Harry Kalenberg and his wife Esther were sitting on the couch one evening, eating popcorn. At one point, the artist spotted a strange-looking piece of popcorn that resembled a gorilla. His wife wasn’t interested in the discovery, but he wouldn’t let her lack of enthusiasm curb his. He took out a ballpoint pen and started painting the details he saw with his mind’s eye, eventually bringing the popcorn gorilla to life. And that’s how his career as a popcorn artist started.

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According to a popular rumor among pregnant women, spicy food can help induce child labor, and while that has yet to be confirmed by medical specialists, a pizza place in Charlotte North Carolina has become a popular destination for mothers-to-be eager to bring their offspring into the world sooner.

Hawthorne’s New York Pizza and Bar in Charlotte is considering changing the name of its Buffalo Wings Pizza into “The Inducer” after dozens of pregnant women have credited it with helping them deliver their babies ahead of schedule. Tales of the labor-inducing properties of this medium-hot pizza have been circulating around Charlotte for over half a decade, and some women actually swear by it.

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Seen from afar, the works of Turkish artist Çağatay Odabaş look like large-scale printed movie posters, but as viewers approach them to take a closer look, they discover that they are actually made up of hundreds of thousands of tiny hand-drawn circles.

37-year-old Odabaş says that his art is largely influenced by his two most favorite activities growing up in the 80s and 90s – playing with LEGO bricks and watching movies. He starts out by picking out the movie stills he wants to recreate from his collection of thousands of films, which he considers his research library. He then proceeds to split this image into several pieces, mapping out each one with tiny circles, which are all assigned a certain code, to serve during the coloring process. Then, like a complicated but fascinating LEGO model, he puts all the pieces together to create these ultra-realistic masterpieces of pointilism.

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With millions of Chinese visiting the country’s sacred mountains every year, keeping them trash-free is incredibly difficult. Luckily, that’s where the Spiderman cleaners come in. These dedicated men an women risk their lives on a daily basis, rappelling down steep cliffs to reach plastic bottles, bags and various other garbage thrown there by uncivilized tourists.

Spiderman cleaners get their name from the dangerous nature of their job. Photos released in the media show them dangling thousands of feet above ground on the side of steep mountain cliffs, supported only by ropes or cables, as they attempt to collect hard-to-reach trash. In an attempt to highlight the danger of their work and make tourists think twice before littering, some of the cleaners actually exchanged their regular uniforms for Spiderman costumes. This has made them a hit with visitors, who often stop to watch these real-life versions of their favorite superhero descend into the abyss to pick up a piece of trash, rewarding them with applause and cheers when they complete their mission.

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A bizarre beauty craze has been sweeping Thailand for the last 5 years, with women spending thousands of dollars to have their upper lip reshaped as buffalo horns. Known as “krachap lips”, the cosmetic procedure is apparently only popular in Thailand.

Named after the water chestnut or buffalo nut – known as krachap in Thailand – because of its shape, which resembles a buffalo head or a flying bat, the controversial cosmetic procedure has become increasingly popular among young women over the last four or five years. It’s unclear how the trend began, but posts on the plastic surgery internet forum Dungdong reveal that people had been talking about the bow-like upper lip shape as early as 2009, in a desire to copy the look of actress Patcharapa “Aum” Chaichua. But it’s been getting worse in the last couple of years and plastic surgeons are desperate to stop it.

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Sitting in traffic, or trying to change lanes on a busy highway are not the most relaxing things in the world, but one Indianapolis entrepreneur thinks that sitting idly on the side of a highway and watching other drivers go through these daily ordeals can be quite entertaining and even therapeutic.

Most motorists drive past the big grassy space between the I-65 and I-70 highways in Indianapolis without giving it a second thought, but local businessman Tom Battista thinks the undeveloped land has the potential to provide entertainment in the form of traffic. He wants to turn it into a gathering spot where people can get together to socialize and relax by watching cars zoom by or just sit in traffic. Tom acknowledges that it’s a crazy idea, but he’s also sure that people will love it.

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Indonesian media has been abuzz with the unlikely love story of Ilaria, a young waitress from Italy, and Dzufilkar, a young man from a small village in Central Java. The two reportedly met on Facebook two years ago, and Ilaria has been saving money ever since to be able to meet and marry her soulmate. Her dream recently became a reality.

Internet romances are not exactly uncommon in this day and age, but they rarely involve leaving your old comfortable life behind to fly halfway across the world to a small Indonesian village just to be with the person you love, especially since you’ve never actually met them in person before. But that’s exactly what Ilaria did, after saving up her waitress salary for a couple of years.

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A Dutch physical therapist turned inventor has spent 15 years developing a tailor-made pillow that he claims will solve any sleeping problems. At a price of $57,000, it better!

Created by Thijs van der Hilst, who is supposedly some sort of neck specialist, the world’s most expensive pillow is made of Mulberry silk, Egyptian cotton, non-toxic Dutch memory foam and 24-carat gold fabric, while its zipper is  studded  with  four  diamonds and a huge 22.5-carat sapphire. It sounds pretty expensive already, but it takes more than high-quality materials and jewelry to justify such an outrageous price tag for a pillow.

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Heavy metal music and yoga may seem incompatible, but one New York yoga instructor with a passion for metal has mixed them together in a series of classes that help people relax and unleash their inner beast at the same time.

Headbanging, death growls or “devil horns” hand gestures, all executed to a background of loud metal music, aren’t exactly elements associated with yoga, but it’s exactly what you can expect while attending a Metal Yoga Bones class run by Saskia Thode. It’s not the most Zen experience in the world, that’s for sure, but the Brooklyn-based yoga instructor claims that her classes are just as liberating, if not more so, than regular yoga.

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Authorities in the Chinese city of Wuhan have recently equipped busy intersections with automatic pedestrian gates that only open when the traffic light turns green. The measure is aimed at preventing jaywalking, which has become a serious problem in many urban centers across China.

Chinese officials have been cracking down on jaywalkers for years. Jaywalking in the Asian country, often referred to as “Chinese-style street crossing”, often involves pedestrians completely ignoring traffic signals and crossing busy streets and roads, usually in large groups. This contributes heavily to traffic jams and bottlenecks in busy Chinese cities, and fines haven’t proven as effective a deterrent as authorities had hoped.

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Driven by a desire to improve the living conditions in his home, Huang Dafa, chief of Caowangba, a small village hidden deep in the mountains of Guizhou Province, China, spent 36 years digging a 10-kilometer-long water canal through three mountains.

The Chinese legend of Yu Gong speaks of an old man whose house was separated from the nearest village by two mountains. So he started digging away at them to make a direct route to the village. People mocked him for what they called a futile effort,  but he responded that while his descendants could dig for generations, the mountains couldn’t grow any higher. Moved by his determination, the gods moved the mountains, clearing the way for Yu Gong. Today, the saying “yu gong yi shan” – “the old man that could move mountains” – is used to describe ambition in the face on insurmountable odds.

But while the mythical Yu Gong was helped by divine intervention, Huang Dafa, village chief of Caowangba, in the mountains of Guizhou, could only rely on his will and the power of persuasion to build a long water channel through three karst mountains. His ambitious project began in 1959 and required 36 years of hard labor to complete. Today, his village is thriving thanks to constant running water, and he is celebrated as a real-life version of Yu Gong.

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Every year, the people of Kairuppala, a village in India’s Andhra Pradesh state, engage in an epic cow dung cake battle that often leaves dozens injured. They believe the tradition brings them good health and prosperity.

Legend has it that Lord Veerabhadra Swamy, a fearsome form of the Hindu god Shiva, and the Goddess Bhadrakhali fell in love and decided to marry. In order to tease his beloved, Veerabhadra Swamy declared that he did not want to marry anymore, which enraged Bhadrakhali and her clansmen, who decided to teach the deceitful groom a lesson by beating him with cow dung cakes. The other side retaliated, but the goofy battle ended in compromise and the much awaited celestial wedding. Today, the devotees of Kairuppala village celebrate their union by reenacting their mythical battle using the same unconventional weapons.

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GIFs are usually only a few seconds long, but Finnish artist Juha van Ingen has created one that will run for the next 1,000 years. Or so he hopes, anyway.

Named “As Long As Possible” or “ASLAP”, the world’s longest GIF is a “very optimistic” artwork because it relies on future generations to take responsibility and keep it running until it reaches its end, in the year 3017. Hopefully, someone will still be around then to see the last of the 48,140,288 frames that make up this record-breaking GIF.

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