A unique house in London’s Richmond neighborhood has been dubbed “the invisible house” as the giant mirror walls reflect everything around it, making it very hard to notice.

Located on the busy A316 road by the Richmond Circus roundabout, near Richmond Underground station, London’s Invisible House isn’t some fancy art installation, but an actual home. Redesigned by architect and artist Alex Haw in 2015, the property has been inhabited since 2019, and the family said that living there has been interesting, to say the least. Even though passers-by can’t see inside, the owners can see outside perfectly fine, and they sometimes spot people fixing their hair or clothes in their mirrored walls and windows.

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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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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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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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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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Ring-necked parakeets are native to the foothills of the Himalayas and temperate regions of North Africa, but for the past century and a half, they’ve also made a home for themselves in London.

No one knows exactly when and how London became a home for feral parakeets. In fact, there are so many urban myths tied to these green exotic birds that it’s hard to settle on just one explanation. Many of the theories going around on the streets of London as well as on the internet involve legendary artists like Jimi Hendrix or Audrey Hepburn, but no one can truly say how the birds came to the English capital. One thing is for sure, though – London’s parakeets are here to stay, they are thriving, and they are expanding, with recent estimates placing their number in the tens of thousands.

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Shenshayba Bazaar, an Afghan village near the city of Herat, has become known as Afghanistan’s ‘one kidney village’, because of the large number of residents who have sold one of their kidneys in order to make ends meet.

Afghanistan wasn’t doing too well economically before the Taliban came to power last year, but the brutal takeover caused the economy of the Asian country to collapse and left many struggling to put food on the table for their families. In some cases, things got so bad that people decided to sell one of their kidneys in order to pay their debts and buy food. One small village in Herat Province has become known as the ‘one kidney village’, because of the large number of residents who sold one of their kidneys on the black market.

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Panzhiga, a remote mountainous village in China’s Yunan Province has been dubbed “Tesla Village” for the unusually high number of Tesla electric cars owned by the locals.

The popularity of electric cars around the world is growing at an unprecedented pace, but there are still many skeptics who believe the rapid adoption of electric vehicles is hampered by infrastructure and logistic problems. For example, while rapid charging stations are being built in cities and along busy roads, using an electric car in remote areas is considered inefficient. However, that theory is being challenged by a small mountainous village in China where Tesla is by far the most popular car brand.

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This year, the Nikola-Lenivets art village in Russia celebrated Maslenitsa by burning a 23-meter-tall wooden Tower of Babel, a biblical symbol of discord.

Every year since 2001, Nikola-Lenivets, a popular art park about 220 kilometers from Moscow, has celebrated the Slavic holiday of Maslenitsa by burning a specially-made artwork. Maslenitsa symbolizes the passing of winter and the coming of spring, a new beginning, but this year, the artistic tradition has been more grandiose and more meaningful than ever. A 23-meter-tall wooden tower of Babel designed by young architect Ekaterina Polyakova was set ablaze in a ceremony designed to symbolize the end of discord between nations.

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The workers of several ant species have large, flattened, and slightly concave heads that they use as plugs to block entrance to their colonies’ nests.

The so-called ‘door head ants’ are soldier ants with armored heads that match both the size and the shape of the entrance to their colonies’ nests almost to perfection. They function as living doors, using their heads to plug shut the nest and only allow access to other members of the colony while keeping unwanted guests out. Door head ants can be found in several ant genera, including Cephalotes and Carebara. How these species developed the exact size and shape as the entries to their nests is the result of millions of years of evolution.

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A London bachelor is taking extreme measures to increase his chances of finding a wife – renting subway advertising banners in the English capital to get as much exposure as possible.

If you’ve passed through the Oxford Circus subway station in London during the last few days, you’ve probably seen a couple of unusual advertising banners plastered on the walls. They show a man in a pink suit who is apparently looking for a suitable wife. That man is 31-year-old Jeevan Bhachu and he wants everyone to know that he is not kidding. He really is looking to get hitched, and since the pandemic has made conventional dating problematic, he decided to go for a more straightforward approach.

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A UK man claims that a hypnosis session triggered vivid memories of his past life as an airplane photographer and gunner during World War One.

Steve Mulligan was born in 1961, in the city of Manchester, but also has very clear memories of growing up in Llandudno, Wales, in the beginning of the 20th century. He claims that he grew up as Sydney Sutcliffe, and died at the age of 24, after his plane was shut down on the Western Front during WWI. He always had these strange memories that played out in black and white, of him looking down from high up in the sky, but he could never really make sense of them. And then he went in for a hypnosis session and discovered that he was remembering his past life.

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