A Danish museum loaned artist Jens Haaning tens of thousands of dollars and asked him to recreate two of his most popular artworks, which involved the use of real banknotes, only he took the money and ran, an act he describes as an original work of art.

The Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg asked Jens Haaning to recreate two of his most popular artworks, one he had produced in 2011 called An Average Danish Annual Income, which featured krone banknotes in a frame, and an earlier version, An Average Austrian Annual Income. For the original works, Haaning had borrowed the money from banks, but this time the museum agreed to loan him the cash from its limited reserves. He required 328,000 kroner for the Danish annual salary and €25,000 for the Austrian salary. Only instead of recreating the artworks, he just sent the museum two empty canvases, and the message that him keeping the money they had lent him was the actual artwork.

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When it comes to “spicy” liquor, you’ll have a tough time finding something hotter than this crazy combination of overproof rum infused with the world’s hottest pepper, the Carolina Reaper.

The World’s Hottest Shot comes in a deceptively small and harmless-looking 45ml bottle that you can just pour in a shot glass and gulp in one go. But before you do that, you should know that this is no ordinary drink. Not only is the rum overproof (over 63% alcohol by volume), but it also has also been infused with Carolina Reaper peppers for at least three months. The result is a barely stomachable concoction that is almost guaranteed to make you gag, sweat and scream in agony as you wait for the fire inside you to stop burning.

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The Slovenian city of Maribor is home to the world’s oldest grapevine still producing fruit, a resilient plant that dates back to the year 1570, when the city was facing an Ottoman invasion.

The Old Vine is the only plant in the world with its own dedicated museum, the Old Vine House, once part of the city wall. It grows on the side of this historic building and still produces an annual harvest of around 35 to 55 kg of grapes, enough to produce 15 to 35 liters of wine, which is bottled in special 2.5 dl bottles designed by famous artist Oskar Kogoj. Only about 100 bottles are produced every year, most of which are used as a special protocol gift. The Old Vine bears grapes of the “Žametovka” or “Modra kavčina” variety, one of the oldest domesticated noble vines in Slovenia.

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What was supposed to be the best night of his life turned into a nightmare for a young Romanian man, after being thrown into the air and dropped by his friends during his own wedding, and suffering spine fractures.

31-year-old Liviu Filimon was enjoying his wedding party in Baile Felix, north-western Romania when some of his friends decided that it was time to celebrate Liviu’s union with his new bride by throwing him into the air. It’s a common celebratory custom all over the world, but in order to avoid tragedy, it’s key that the person being tossed into the air also be caught on their way down. Sadly, that second part didn’t go according to plan in this case, and the young groom wound up in the hospital with multiple spine fractures.

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When you think of the rarest, most precious materials on Earth, things like diamonds, platinum, or gold probably pop into your head, but did you know that a special type of wood is actually more expensive than any of those?

Kynam, or “kyara” as it’s known in Japan, is an extremely rare type of agarwood used in the perfume and incense industries for its complex and very strong fragrance. It is the most sought-after type of “oud”, the name used in the Arab peninsula to describe the dark resinous wood produced in the heartwood of the aquilaria tree, in specific circumstances. A single gram of kynam can fetch well over $10,000, making it by far the most expensive wooden on the planet, and also one of the most expensive natural materials.

Essentially, kynam is the best kind of agarwood that money can buy, and it’s important that all types of agarwood are relatively expensive. Also known as aloeswood, eaglewood, or simply oud, agarwood has been an important part of Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Arab and Southeast-Asian cultures for thousands of years. It has always been a precious commodity, but demand for it has increased dramatically in recent years, and with it, the price.

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A Muslim man from India’s Uttar Pradesh reportedly tried to divorce his wife of two years because she doesn’t bathe daily, and they fight every time he asks her to.

Personal hygiene is an important part of a relationship, and in some cases, it can become a serious enough issue to warrant the end of said relationship. Case in point, a Muslim man in India who decided to divorce his wife because she refused to bathe every day. He claimed to have repeatedly asked his wife to bathe more often, but every time the issue came up, their discussion ended in a verbal spat. Ultimately, he turned to the controversial “triple talaq” to break off the marriage, even though the two had a one-year-old child together.

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The caterpillar of the Brazilian Skipper Butterfly has translucent skin that offers an eerily clear view of its insides, especially the circulatory system.

Brazilian skipper butterflies are larger than most skipper butterflies, but it’s not their size that sets them apart as a species, it’s their appearance during the caterpillar stage. What really makes this tiny critter special is its translucent skin, which offers a very clear view inside the caterpillar, revealing the organs and especially the circulatory system. This see-through skin gives the Brazilian skipper caterpillar a very strange look, especially when you realize that the twitching dark line that runs down its back, from its head to the rear of the abdomen, is the heart.

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Sicilian Rouge High GABA is a special type of tomato designed to contain high levels of gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), an amino acid believed to aid relaxation and help lower blood pressure.

Tokyo-based startup Sanatech Seed Co. teamed up with scientists at the University of Tsukuba to develop a new variety of tomatoes using CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technology. Named Sicilian Rouge High GABA, this new type of tomato contains five to six times the normal level of a type of amino acid called gamma-aminobutyric acid, or GABA. According to Japanese media, the company removed an inhibitory domain within the tomato’s genome to enable it to produce these high levels of GABA.

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Every year, athletic youths in Wisconsin’s Woworth County try out for a unique summer job – mail jumping. They need to prove that they can jump off of a moving boat onto a private dock, deliver the mail and then jump back on the boat before it has passed by.

The residents of Lake Geneva have been getting mail delivered by boat since before roads were built in the area, so the practice has become somewhat of a local tradition, one that attracts loads of tourists to the area. In fact, during the summer months, the mail boat can take approximately 160 tourists along on mail delivery runs and operates at full capacity almost every day. Watching and recording the jumping mailmen deliver the mail to the around 60 homes on Lake Geneva is something that many will gladly pay to be able to do.

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The benefits of cupping as a way to relieve stress, improve athletic performance and overall health have been debated at nauseam, but did you know cupping could help you cosplay as popular Nintendo villain Bowser, aka King Koopa?

Although modern cupping is usually associated with the use of glass cups, the practice can be traced back to the year 1500 B.C., when glass didn’t even exist. Back then, healers used hollowed-out animal horns to create suction, and even though bamboo and glass cups became mainstream in recent times, some street therapists still rely on buffalo horns to practice their trade. As you can see, the visual effect is quite striking.

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The larvae of a certain species of gnats have been known to migrate by assembling into a large snake-like shape numbering tens of thousands of individuals and crawling on the ground as one. The bizarre phenomenon is known as “Pleń” in Poland and “Heerwurm” in Germany.

As far back as the 17th century, the larvae of sciaria militaria, a species of dark-winged fungus gnats found throughout Central Europe, have been observed moving on the ground as a giant slithering unit ranging from 50 centimeters to a reported 10 meters. Called Pleń by the Polish people who first documented the rare and poorly understood phenomenon, this method of migration numbers between a few thousand to several tens of thousands of tiny larvae. They crawl on the ground as one unit, towards an unknown goal that scientists have so far only speculated on.

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Indonesia’s remote Sumba Island is famous for a great many things, but above all its uniquely shaped mangroves, dubbed “dancing trees” for the way they seem to sway with the setting sun in the background.

Calm waters, a white sandy beach, and inviting waters are all things you can expect to find at Walakiri Beach, one of the top tourist spots on Sumba Island. But that’s not why people flock to this small tropical paradise, as they can all be found somewhere else as well. What draws people to Walakiri are the dozens of unique mangrove trees lining the beach, some of which are so bizarrely shaped they almost look like they are frozen in a dancing motion.

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Every year, dozens of teams from all over Japan travel to the Japanese town of Ito to compete in one of the world’s most unique sporting events – All-Japan Pillow Fighting Championships.

Pillow fighting is an age-old pastime practiced by children of all ages all over the world. Japan is no different, only here the game has been elevated to the status of national sport, with teams made up of people of all ages competing against each other for fame and fortune. After first battling it out in regional qualifying events, winning teams meet up in the small fishing town of Ito, south of Tokyo, to compete in the All-Japan Pillow Fighting Championships, for the title of Japan’s best pillow fighters.

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An Australian man who had been on the run for nearly three decades turned himself in recently, after being rendered homeless by the pandemic and struggling to find work.

On the night of August 1, 1992, 13 months into his three-and-a-half-year sentence for growing marijuana, Darko “Dougie” Desic escaped from the Grafton Correctional Centre in New South Wales, using tools, including a hacksaw blade and bolt cutters. Despite an extensive search, authorities were never able to locate Desic, and he remained a fugitive for the next 29 years. So imagine everyone’s surprise when he just turned up at a police station one day to turn himself in after all this time. As it turns out, it was all because of the Covid-19 pandemic, as the lockdown in NSW had left Desic homeless and with no way to support himself.

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A Japanese YouTuber recently sparked controversy after apparently cooking and eating a piglet that he had raised on camera for the previous 100 days.

In May of this year, a Japanese man started a peculiar YouTube channel named “Eating Pig After 100 Days“. True to its name, the channel was all about raising a small piglet for 100 days, before cooking and eating it. The idea was intriguing enough to attract a decent audience of over 100,000 on the world’s most popular video platform, but few of its followers actually believed the man behind the project would actually go through with it. After all, what kind of monster would slaughter and eat the adorable piglet that won the hearts of so many, right? Well…

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