Smell undoubtedly contributes to a person’s attractiveness, but could it be the sole deciding factor in choosing a partner? Well, the creators of this New York matchmaking service decided to find out. At ‘Smell Dating’, the world’s “first mail odor dating service”, single people are paired up based on their reaction to each other’s body odor.

Created by Tega Brain, artist and teacher at New York’s School for Poetic Computation, and Sam Lavigne, an editor and researcher at New York University, Smell Dating is described more as an art project than a business. They based the project on the science behind pheromones, which are chemical signals that different species send out to attract mates. “Unlike sight and sound, smell is interpreted first in terms of memory and emotion before being mapped to language,” the project website reads. “When it comes to long-term romantic partnership, it may actually be riskier to ignore the powerful signal of scent than to rely on it.”

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Despite having graduated from Thomas Jefferson School of Law, in the top tier of her class, in 2008, Anna Alaburda still hasn’t been able to find work as a lawyer. The disgruntled 37-year-old is now blaming her alma mater for the unfortunate situation, claiming that the school manipulated the employment statistics of its graduates in a bid to lure students. She’s suing them, hoping to recover the $170,000 she still owes in student loans.

In an ideal situation, working as a lawyer would have more than made up for the cost of Alaburda’s law degree. But since her graduation in 2008, she claims that she’s only served part-time positions and temp jobs reviewing documents for law firms. In her lawsuit she mentions that if she’d known what was in store for her after graduation, she would have never attended the school. Anna also pointed out that the average student debt at Thomas Jefferson was about $137,000 in 2008, but the school’s bar passage rate has been consistently lower than 50 percent.

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Although he’s been homeless for two years, this Sacramento man refuses to accept money from anyone. Instead, Frederick Callison gives people copies of his resume in crisp white envelopes outside Smart & Final store at Watt Avenue and Arden Way, asking them to help him find a job if they really want to help him.

Callison, a former line cook with years of experience at several restaurants, also carries a Food Handlers certificate and Social Security card, in a bid to show people that he’s serious about wanting to work. “I don’t like to beg,” he told CBS Sacramento reporters. “And I won’t. I am handing off my presentation of myself of what I’m trying to achieve and what I’m trying to do. Because I don’t want to be out here.”

A nearby business apparently allowed him to use their supplies to print copies of his resume, which he hands out to people willing to help. Apart from a list of restaurant he has worked at in the past and his various qualifications, the 52-year-old’s resume also reveals his work ethics. “I am a firm believer in proactive productivity rather than reactive,” the piece of paper mentions.

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You might think it ridiculous and even dangerous to put dogs behind the yoke of a plane and let them try to fly it, but that won’t stop some people from trying. Case in point, Dogs Might Fly, a new TV show from the UK that plans to train some dogs to fly a plane.

While the internet has plenty of videos of dogs driving cars, planes are an entirely different matter. The sheer number of things that could go wrong makes it sound like a foolhardy exercise, but it’s a risk the makers of the show are willing to take in a bid to demonstrate that dogs have “distinct personalities and incredible levels of intelligence.”

“People give up on them too easily and this series will show us why we shouldn’t,” presenter Jamie Theakston told The Telegraph. “They are just as deserving and just as intelligent. Even if a dog has been deprived of human contact or has been badly treated, it is just as able and motivated to initiate a new relationship with a human very quickly.”

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At first glance, this rock, placed strategically in a small clearing in the woods part of an outdoor museum in Germany, seems like an ordinary boulder. But a closer look will reveal that the inconspicuous 1.5-ton boulder is far from ordinary. It’s actually an art installation with a fire-powered WiFi router and USB drive hidden inside!

Created by Berlin artist Aram Bartholl, the rock, named ‘Keepalive’, tries to highlight the contrast between ancient and modern survival techniques. Bartholl revealed that his inspiration to merge the concepts of primitive and modern survival came from the sight of people selling BioLite stoves during Hurricane Sandy. In the absence of electricity, people were actually using the flame-powered stoves to power their devices and stay connected. “It was funny – the power goes out, and people would buy these little stoves and make a fire to charge their phone,” he said.

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Moremi Game Reserve, located in Botswana’s Okavango Delta, is home to a pride of butch lionesses with deep roars and bushy, luxurious manes. They look so much like male lions, they easily fool competing prides into believing that they’re actually males.

The maned lionesses are regularly spotted by visitors to the Mombo Safari Camp, an area within the Reserve where these wild beasts reside. Wildlife experts believe that the lion population in the area might have a genetic condition that causes the phenomenon. The seasonal flood waters of the delta could have isolated these lions for decades, forcing them to inbreed their way to a genetic mutation causing a hormonal imbalance.

When National Geographic contacted Luke Hunter, president of the big-cat conservation group Panthera, for answers, he explained that masculine females are likely to occur when the embryo is disrupted – either during conception or while in the womb. “If the former case, the genetic contribution of the sperm – which determines the sex of the fetus in most mammals – was probably aberrant, giving rise to a female with some male characteristics,” he said.

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Most people would love nothing more than to quit their jobs and travel the world, but they simply lack the courage, and most importantly, the funds to do so. A young woman from Alabama has managed to do it though, by meeting rich men on the internet and having them pay for dates in some of the most exotic places on Earth. She’s now in a serious relationship with one of them, and he might just turn out to be ‘the one’.

It all started in December 2014, when 25-year-old Monica Lynn decided that her life was too boring and lacked adventure. So she quit her high-flying job as a financial advisor at Merrill Lynch in order to find something more interesting. Soon, she stumbled upon MissTravel, a website where people search for partners to go on holidays with.

“I came across Miss Travel in an article about weird websites,” Lynn explained. “I thought, ‘Yes, that sounds weird – but also kinda cool. This website attracts very successful men who don’t have the time to date in the normal way, so this allows them to accelerate the whole thing. They’re going on trips anyway, and they can afford to search through profiles and afford to bring one they like with them.”

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An anonymous blogger from Brooklyn has become an internet sensation for fearlessly documenting her bizarre fixation with bread. This woman films herself as she plunges her face into different types of bread, and posts the footage on her Instagram page, ‘Bread Face Blog’. The tagline reads: “Bread Face – giving the people something they didn’t ask for.”

Bread Face hasn’t revealed her name, but we do know that she’s 27 years old and works as a copywriter by day. With over 40,000 Instagram followers and thousands of likes on each video, her bizarre bread smashing habit has managed to catch the attention of various magazines like Buzzfeed, Vice’s Munchies, and The New York Times. Obviously, they’ve all had one common question to ask her: Why is she doing this?

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In a bid to de-stress and break free from the tensions of daily life, Japanese students and professionals are taking to a bizarre trend called ‘Zentai’. It’s a community consisting of people of all ages and walks of life, donning full-body lycra suits and meeting on internet forums, in clubs, at barbecue parties, and sometimes just on the street.

It’s ironical, but the tight suits are actually able to help stressed individuals loosen up, because such behavior is probably frowned upon in genteel circles. Many of the Zentai perceive the trend as a welcome break from the pressures of living in Japanese society that values conformity to tradition over individual desires.

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Gabrielle Newton-Bieber is possibly the world’s biggest Justin Bieber fan – she has five Bieber-tattoos, a wardrobe filled with Bieber clothes, and all of his records and merchandise. She also likes to pretend that she’s married to the Canadian singer so she has legally taken his last name and sleeps with a life-size Bieber cardboard cutout.

“I always call Justin my husband when I talk to people,” the 22-year-old supermarket worker said. “I say ‘I’ve got to go, my husband is just on the TV. They find it a bit weird because we’re not really married – if only we were. Just maybe, one day.”

Gabrielle has been obsessed with Justin Bieber since the very beginning, when his debut single ‘One Time’ released in 2009. “Justin released his first single ‘One Time’ when I was aged 16 and straight away I was obsessed,” the young woman said. “He was so cute with his floppy hair and riding his skateboard. I fell for him instantly. He makes us all so happy – Justin Bieber is my world.”

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Ford has come up with an ingenious way of showing young people the dangers of driving while under the influence of drugs. They’ve built a ‘drugged driving’ simulation suit that accurately replicates the effects of being high. Driving while wearing the suit will now be a compulsory module in the company’s worldwide driver education program, ‘Ford Driving Skills for Life’.

The suit, developed in collaboration with scientists from the Meyer-Hentschel Institute in Germany, is specially engineered to simulate distortion of the senses. It comes with padding, ankle weights, goggles, and headphones, all of which create the effect of reduced mobility and vision. So anyone wearing the suit will experience slower reaction time, distorted vision, and poor coordination. The goggles create tunnel vision while the headphones play random distracting sounds. Knee and elbow bandages slow limb movement, a neck brace limits head movement, while tremor generators make the hands shake uncontrollably.

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Following in South Korea’s footsteps is Moscow’s newest eatery, ‘Crazy Toilet Cafe’. The place offers its customers a highly realistic toilet-themed dining experience, complete with faecal-inspired dishes served in miniature lavatories and urinals!

The cafe, which opened late last month on the busy Arbat street, features about 50 real toilet bowls
that serve as seating. The tables are mini bathtubs propped on legs and covered with glass, showing cartoon characters using the toilet. Cafe management says they’re solely relying on the novelty of the place to attract one-time customers, as people are highly unlikely to pay the cafe a second visit.

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While most lifestyle and fashion magazines are full of photos of slender male and female models photoshopped to perfection that create an unrealistic image of the human body, a fresh Japanese men’s magazine is taking a different approach. Mr. Babe is targeted towards chubby men, a body type that is rarely represented in the mainstream fashion industry.

Launched early this month, Mr. Babe describes itself as  Japan’s first “fashion and lifestyle magazine of chubby men, by chubby men and for chubby men”. It’s main goal is to boost the confidence of its readers and convince them that they can lead happy successful lives regardless of the few extra pounds, by offering fashion tips, health and personal grooming advice and articles on romance and marriage. “Our magazine is in no way encouraging men to gain weight and become chubby,” editor-in-chief Norihito Kurashina said in a recent interview. “Our message is that chubby men can be attractive by making use of what they have now while being mindful of their health so as not to become obese.”

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The Van Girls are London’s first and only all-female packing and moving service – mostly hired by women, but sometimes men as well. “Guys who hire us kind of think it’s quite novel… and are really surprised by how strong we are,” said founder Emma Lanman.

Lanman started Van Girls in 2011, when she quit her job at the fire brigade and decided to start a business of her own. She’d seen people get excited about female firefighters, and realised it was something of a novelty for a woman to be seen doing a ‘man’s job’. She also figured that lots of women might feel safer hiring an all-female moving service.

“I thought it might actually be a valuable service,” she said. And Lanman was right – it turns out that plenty of women who live alone or don’t live with men are a lot more comfortable hiring the Van Girls – not just for safety reasons but for that feminine touch! Like 68-year-old Jean Hewitson, who moved down the street with her daughter and granddaughter last year. “We’re an all-female household,” she explained. “I thought, yes I want women packing up my house. I thought they’d be more sympathetic to my belongings really, and I’d get on with them better.”

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You can’t solve every problem with pure logic. Learning that the hard way is Zhejiang University economics professor Xie Zuoshi. He’s on the receiving end of a nation’s wrath after he suggested wife sharing to solve China’s gender imbalance issue.

News reports say that China’s gender ratio at birth is about 1.02 to 1.07 boys born for every girl, an imbalance created because of the one-child policy and the cultural preference for male children. As a result, men, especially in rural China, are finding it increasingly difficult to get married. In fact, the nation is expected to have 30 to 40 million bachelors by the year 2020.

In the face of such alarming statistics, Prof Xie wrote an essay highlighting what he believes is the most obvious solution – that men of lower incomes should share wives. He reasoned that the huge demand for wives would increase their value, making them unaffordable to poorer men. “Men with high incomes will have an advantage in finding women, because they can afford the high price,” he wrote. “And what about the low income men? One way is for several men to band together to find a wife.”

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