Despite its tiny size, the brown thornbill is quite capable of protecting itself in the wild. Its survival strategy is simple yet effective – it scares other birds away by ‘crying hawk’!

It seems that most birds use certain calls to warn their kin of impending danger, especially when hawks and other birds of prey are approaching. The thornbill is not only aware of this fact, but can reproduce the danger signals of several species, including the much larger pied currawong. Predators are fooled by the false alarm, and the thornbill earns its chicks a few extra seconds to escape.

The thornbill’s talent for mimicry was discovered by researchers from the Australian National University (ANU). “I am amazed that such a tiny bird can mimic so many species, some much bigger than itself. It’s very cunning,” said one of the researchers, Dr. Branislav Igic.

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Mbongeni Buthelezi, an artist from South Africa, has shunned paint in favor of plastic. He melts discarded plastic bags and uses the molten material to produce stunning works of art. The 49-year-old has been working with the unique medium for the past 23 years, ever since he graduated from art school.

Buthelezi said he decided to work with plastic because he wanted to stand out, and this was an innovative, original idea to do that. “With watercolor and other mediums that I have experimented with in the past, I felt that I’m hitting the ceiling,” he told Euronews. “I’m not growing anymore. I wanted to be noticed and I wanted to catch attention, because I knew also that I’m moving into a career where you have to be really special to be able to even make a living out of it.”

According to Buthelezi, his chosen medium also serves as a metaphor for life. “I collect rubbish and create something beautiful from it,” he wrote on his website. “That’s what we can do with ourselves and our lives.”

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When 24-year-old Bhanu Prakash, from Hyderabad, India, realised that his job was eating into his precious selfie-time, he decided to quit working altogether. He now spends all his time taking pictures of himself, and training to break the world record for most selfies in an hour. The record currently belongs to American football player Patrick Peterson, who managed to click himself 1,449 times!

Bhanu, who studied pharmacy in college, was working as a research assistant at a hospital in Hyderabad. He was already into the selfie trend big time, ever since his brother got him a smartphone with a front-facing camera, three years ago. “Almost the first thing I did when I got the phone in my hands was click a picture,” he recalled.

But his obsession reached new heights in May this year, when he overheard a conversation between a few kids on a bus – they were talking about Dwayne Johnson’s feat of clicking 105 selfies in three minutes. “It immediately struck me that it was a guy who did this,” Bhanu said. “I mean, people keep saying selfie is a very girly thing, but here Dwayne Johnson was doing it. And I knew I was up for it now.”

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Umoja is literally a no man’s land in Kenya – a matriarchal refuge where men are not allowed. The village, founded 25 years ago by Rebecca Lolosoli, is meant to be a safe haven for women and girls who want to escape abuse in the otherwise patriarchal society of the Samburu people, in northern Kenya.

Rebecca, a member of the Samburu tribe, now serves as the chief matriarch of ‘Umoja Usau Women’s Village’. Having witnessed occasional violence as a child, she slowly came to the conclusion that some of the traditional Samburu practices were inherently abusive towards women. So she began to speak out against these practices, in favour of widows, orphans, and victims of rape, female genital cutting, and forced marriage.

Rebecca’s outspoken attitude was met with a lot of resistance. Things got out of hand when she spoke up for a few women who were raped by British soldiers training nearby. Men in her village beat her up, and her husband did not protest on her behalf. So in 1990, she led a female exodus and started her own village.

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UPDATE: The whole story below is nothing but a Big Media fabrication. Unfortunately, we fell for it being true without doing proper research, and for this we apologize to both Dorina Rosin and you, the readers. In a post on her blog, Dorina clarifies everything in great detail, but long story short, she never intended to have a dolphin-assisted birth, and actually had the baby on dry ground, assisted by a human midwife. The only support provided by the dolphins was a spiritual one. Dorina says she has always been aware of the dangers posed by a dolphin assisted birth, especially in the ocean, and has been upset by all the negative feedback she has gotten as a result of this FALSE story spreading on the internet. It’s truly unfortunate and unfair, as she seems like a decent, down-to-earth person who really didn’t deserve this. Again, you have our sincerest apologies!

A Hawaii couple might be taking their quest for a natural childbirth too far – they’ve decided to deliver the baby in the ocean, surrounded by dolphins! Dorina Rosin and her husband Maika Suneagle claim to be “dolphin people” and believe that their baby will be able to “speak dolphin” after the birth.

It sounds bizarre, but as it turns out, dolphin-assisted births are really a thing. The trend has been around for a few years now, and it appears to be gaining popularity. The idea apparently sprung from immersion or water births that are quite popular the world over. But couples aren’t satisfied with just water any more – they want to be surrounded by friendly dolphins as well.

According to the Sirius Institute in Hawaii, which runs a dedicated dolphin-attended birth centre, the idea is quite “reasonable”. Their website states: “Since birthing in water is beneficial, and dolphins are able to heal or improve a wide range of medical conditions, it is reasonable to suppose that their presence at water births could be beneficial.”

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You might not make it to heaven in the afterlife, but you sure can go as far as the moon. Celestial funerals are now a possibility, thanks to San Francisco startup Elysium Space. For a ginormous fee of about $12,000, the company will privately transport your cremated remains to the moon!

Founded by former NASA engineer Thomas Civeit, Elysium boasts of bringing space and funeral experts together to provide the unique service. “Families now have the historic opportunity to commemorate their departed loved ones every night through the everlasting splendour and soft illumination of the Earth’s closest companion: the moon,” they stated in a press release.

Although the company was founded in 2013, the service only offered in August of this year, after Elysium managed to seal a deal with space logistics company Astrobotic Technology. They’re currently taking orders, and the first batch of ashes will travel to the moon on Griffin Lander spacecraft – Astrobotic’s inaugural lunar mission – in 2017.

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Drunk driving might be against the law, but there’s no such rule about drunk horse riding. And believe it or not, it’s actually a sport in Guatemala!

Traditionally, Skach Koyl – a drunken horse race – is meant to mark the end of Day of the Dead celebrations. Drunk riders gather every year on November 1 at the town of Todos Santos to participate in the much awaited race. As you’d expect, there aren’t any rules to the race, no start or finish, and riders stop whenever they please to gulp more mouthfuls of booze. The chaotic race continues for seven hours straight, with no visible concern for safety.

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A creepy new trend in Thailand has people caring for supposedly haunted dolls, for good luck and prosperity.

The Look Thep (Child God) dolls are believed to be inhabited by children’s spirits, created through special rituals. They’re considered to be an updated version of the ancient kuman thong, the practice of worshiping human fetuses that died in the womb. Look Thep allows people to revere the spirits of children without having to actually obtain dead fetuses.

Several locals, including Thai celebrities, are vouching for the effectiveness of Look Thep dolls. Like DJ Bookkoh Thannatchayapan from 94 FM, who claims that his doll Wansai has made him successful in show biz. “The first day I got him, I took him out shopping for clothes in the baby section,” Bookkoh said. “Right after I paid for his clothes, I got a call that my canceled job was back on!”

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They might be homeless, but that’s not stopping this Brooklyn couple from doing their bit for the city. They spend their nights at a tiny park and during the day, do a better job of cleaning it than the local administration!

57-year-old Chris and 54-year-old Tammy are from Pennsylvania, but they drifted to Brooklyn after falling on hard times. Since then, they’ve been living on this small traffic island in the heart of Bay Ridge, and are doing everything they can to keep their surroundings clean.

“I’m homeless, my wife is homeless and what we do is we clean up the park,” Chris told Pix11 news. “We like to make it clean. We’re keeping it clean in many ways.”

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Although he grew up believing that homosexuality was a sin, in 2010 Timothy Kurek, of Nashville, Tennessee, spent the entire year pretending to be gay in an attempt to truly understand and empathize with what homosexual people go through.

Kurek’s social experiment is extraordinary, given the kind of upbringing he had as a conservative Christian deep in America’s Bible belt. “You learned to be very afraid of God,” he said. “The loving thing to do is to tell my friend who is gay, ‘Hey, listen, you are an abomination and you need to repent to go to heaven.’ I absolutely believed in that lock, stock, and barrel.”

In fact, Kurek was so devout as a teenager that his parents’ friends would routinely ask him to set their kids straight for misbehaving. “I would be on the phone until four in the morning, asking them to repent for their sins,” he said.

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For the past 60 years, this Florida couple have been celebrating their anniversary by eating a piece out of their wedding cake – not a replica, the original one!

Ann and Ken Fredericks were married on 19 August, 1955 and Ann’s grandmother had baked a three-layer fruitcake for the occasion. The top layer of that cake, baked six decades ago, still exists in a metal Maxwell Coffee House can. “Every year, we unwrap it, pour brandy over it – because you need to moisten it – and we break off a piece,” Ann said.

“Everybody just looks at us with amazed looks when they hear about it,” she added. “Our children are appalled that we would be eating something that’s 60 years old. But believe me, it’s quite tasty, as long as it’s got enough brandy on it. And it’s never made us sick.”

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When high school teacher Jessica Hayes decided to get married, she settled for no less than the son of God himself. The 38-year-old from Fort Wayne, Indiana, tied the knot with Jesus Christ in an elaborate church ceremony last weekend. The groom, of course, was not present.

Hayes, a theology teacher at Bishop Dwenger High School, said that she made the decision to marry Christ after years of prayer and soul-searching. She is now part of an elite group of ‘consecrated virgins’ – women who lead chaste lives, but are not required to live in convents or obliged to work for the Catholic Church. Hayes plans to continue her normal life at home, but she will not be able to marry or have sex with anyone for the rest of her life.

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A leading Russian geologist recently made the bizarre claim that the mysterious groove like markings found in the Phrygian Valley of central Turkey were made by giant, pre-historic cars, millions of years ago.

Dr Alexander Koltypin, director of the Natural Science Scientific Research Centre at Moscow’s International Independent University of Ecology and Politology, made his statement after returning from a field trip to the site along with three of his colleagues. He revealed that the fields were completely covered in ruts that are millions of years old. “As a geologist, I can certainly tell you that unknown antediluvian all-terrain vehicles drove around Central Turkey some 12-to-14 million years ago,” he said.

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Believe it or not, there’s actually an association in China that believes in the miraculous healing power of urine. So much so that members meet up every day for pee-drinking sessions!

The meetings take place at the China Urine Therapy Association office, where members first visit the bathroom to collect their urine. Then they make their way to the roof terrace – with warm urine laden plastic cups – and toast to each others’ health before gulping it all down.

The association, which was set up in Hong Kong in 2008, isn’t officially recognised by China’s Ministry of Health, which makes sense given that the medical consensus about urine therapy is pretty much that it stinks! But that hasn’t stopped about 1,000 people from joining the association. They apparently believe that drinking urine prolongs life, improves health, and can even cure cancer. Read More »

Potato Parcel has got to be the most ridiculous business idea since the Pet Rock. It’s so silly that when entrepreneur Alex Craig told his girlfriend about the idea, she laughed right in his face. But Craig went right ahead with his plan, and now he’s the one laughing all the way to the bank.

The business model is rather simple – anonymous messages sent via potatoes. Users go online to order a potato, add a custom message and send it to whomever they like, anonymously. 24-year-old Craig said that he came up with the idea for the service while having dinner with his girlfriend earlier this year. “She said, ‘You will not sell a single potato. This is the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard.’”

Yet, to everyone’s surprise, Craig’s idea caught on. “On our second day that we were live, and we started promoting it on Reddit, and we got $2,000 in orders, I just knew this was it,” he said. He’s sold over 2,000 potatoes so far and he’s been making a neat profit of $10,000 per month since May.

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