The mayor of a small town in Peru managed to make international headlines after police caught him lying in a wooden casket in an attempt to fool them into thinking he was dead, after breaking curfew to go drinking long into the night.

Jaime Rolando Urbina Torres, the mayor of Tantará, a rural district in Castrovirreyna, had long been criticized by his constituents for not taking the threat of the ongoing SARS-Cov2 pandemic seriously and not taking the necessary measures to protect them, but last week the elected official really went above and beyond to show his contempt for the lockdown enforced by the Peruvian government. Last Monday Torres and several of his friends broke curfew, going out to drink late into the night. Around midnight, residents alerted by the ruckus the inebriated mayor and his friends were making called the police and the troublemakers came up with an ingenious way of avoiding arrest…

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Andoni Bastarrika, a multi-media artist from Spain’s Basque Country, has been getting a lot of attention for his ultra-realistic animal sculptures made almost exclusively with sand.

Bastarrika has been entertaining beach-goers in his native Basque Country region for almost a decade now, but he only recently garnered international acclaim, after a photo of one of his sand sculptures – a life-size sitting bull – recently went viral on Reddit. People couldn’t stop talking about how lifelike the sculpture looked, from the subtle muscle definition to the hair-like sand detailing on its forehead. Soon photos of other of Bastarrika’s realistic sand animals started circulating on various social media networks.

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Photos of chicken eggs with a dark green yolk have been doing the rounds on social media these days, puzzling both veterinary experts and the general public.

Originally thought to be the result of digital image editing, the viral photos were eventually traced back to Ak Shihabudheen, a chicken farmer from Malappuram, who confirmed that some of his poultry do in fact lay eggs with green egg yolks. To prove his claims, the young farmer even posted a video of himself cracking open an egg and revealing the dark green yolk. He recently told reporters that journalists and veterinarians from all over India have contacted him about his strange eggs in recent days, but he declares himself just as puzzled as everyone else.

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Restaurants have been among the most hard-hit businesses by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, but one venue in Bangkok, Thailand has come up with an ingenious way to stay afloat in these troubled times – using hunky models as food deliverymen.

76 Garage, a restaurant in Bangkok’s Lat Phrao District, was known for its attractive and friendly staff long before the new coronavirus turned the whole world upside down, but now the owners of this popular eatery are actively relying on their reputation for having attractive male staff to boost their revenues. Last month, 76 Garage launched an ingenious promotional offer, which allows anyone in a 5-kilometer radius to have their food delivered by a muscular hunk if they order costs 300 baht ($9.5) or more. Not only do customers get some eye-candy with their food, but they can also have their picture taken with the friendly deliverymen, if they so desire.

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A Japanese mother-of-three who took up food art as a way to entertain her daughters struck gold on Instagram after specializing in cute fried egg artworks.

Etoni Mama is often described as a master of kyaraben (or Charaben), the Japanese art of arranging various foods as elaborate, eye-catching designs, but it was her fried egg ideas that really helped her made a name for herself on popular social networks like Instagram and Twitter. Using fried eggs as the main element of her artistic kyaraben pieces, and various other edible ingredients as accessories, the Japanese mom creates all kinds of edible renditions of popular cartoon characters, iconic scenes and cute animals.

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Yartsa Gunbu, a fungus that infects ghost moth caterpillars on the Tibetan Plateau, is considered by far the most expensive parasite in the world, fetching up to $50,000 a pound.

A close relative of the tropical parasite that infects ants and turns them into zombies, Ophiocordyceps sinensis is only found on the Tibetan Plateau, where it infects the larvae of ghost moths while they are buried deep underground and feeding on plant roots. The larvae are most vulnerable in the summer, when they shed their skins, becoming more easily infected. The parasite slowly grows in its hose by consuming it during the fall and winter, and just when the snow starts to melt, it pushes its dying larvae host upward and grows a plant-like, spore-filled stalk that pierces the ground, becoming the way to spot the valuable Yartsa Gunbu. It is then harvested by local villagers and sold modest prices that turn into a fortune as the fungus passes through several middleman, costing the final client more that three times its weight in gold.

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I imagine that having to split you time and attention between two families is hard enough, but things really become complicated when you’re forbidden to go outside. Which family do you quarantine with and how do you visit your second family?

Those are just two of the questions Kuwaiti polygamists, which make up about 8 percent of the Arab country’s population, are struggling with these days. Kuwait has imposed some of the strictest rules to stop the spread of the SARS-Cov2 virus in the Middle East, including a nationwide, lockdown until May 30, suspending all but essential private and public sector activities, and enforcing a curfew which only allows people to go out for groceries once every six days. The strict measures are expected to slow the spread of the coronavirus, but they are also making life much harder for polygamists.

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A 34-year-old man abducted and sold to a childless family more than 1,000 kilometers from his home was recently reunited with his parents, who had never stopped looking for him, after 32 years.

Mao Yin was just 2-years-old when he was snatched by a stranger on October 17, 1988. He and his father, Mao Zhenjing, were walking home from nursery in the city of Xian in Shaanxi province when the boy asked for a drink of water. The pair stopped in the entrance of a hotel, and when the father turned his back on the boy for only a few moments while trying to cool some hot water, Mao Yin was gone. His family started looking for him right away, putting up posters and contacting police, but it was like he had vanished into thin air. Now, 32 years later, he was miraculously reunited with his birth parents.

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A Honk Kong entrepreneur has come up with an ingenious way of keeping the semi-autonomous city’s recent protests for democracy alive in people’s memories – by introducing a pungent, throat irritating ice-cream flavor reminiscent of tear gas.

The shop owner, who preferred to remain anonymous, told reporters that he created the new “tear gas” ice cream flavor as a reminder “of the pungent, peppery rounds fired by police on the streets of the semi-autonomous Chinese city during months of demonstrations last year”. After trying several ingredients and combinations, including wasabi or mustard, the owner settled on black pepper, both because of its pungent smell and the way it can irritate the throat, just like actual tear gas.

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Chinese media recently reported the bizarre case of a heartbroken young woman who took revenge on her cheating boyfriend by sending a tonne of onions to his doorstep so he could cry as much as she did over his treason.

For most young Chinese couples, May 20 is a very special day, the equivalent of the western Valentine’s Day, but for one heartbroken woman who recently caught her boyfriend cheating, the day will only make her suffering worse. Known only as Miss Zhao from Zibo, in Shandong province, the young woman reportedly went through her boyfriend’s phone a few days ago and was shocked to see that he had been texting other girls and had already cheated on her. Unable to cope with the pain, she ended the relationship and cried her heart out for three days after that. Meanwhile, her ex was out having the time of his life, which only made her more angry…

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Crysomallon squamiferum, commonly known as scaly foot gastropod is a fascinating sea snail that inhabits one of the most inhospitable environments on the planet and has evolved a natural iron armor in order to do so.

“Scaly foot gastropod” has to be one of the most boring names ever picked for one of the coolest creatures on Earth – a sea snail living 2.78 kilometers (1.7 miles) underneath the surface of the Indian Ocean, around hydrothermal vents are spewing out water around 350°C (660°F). Not to mention that this badass snail is the only known creature to have developed a natural metallic armor that is unlike any other known natural or synthetically engineered armor. Did I mention that it doesn’t even need to eat, as a bacteria in its gut produces all the nutrients it needs to survive? Surely such a creature deserved a cooler name…

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Authorities in Cairo, Egypt, have come under fire for approving the construction of an “essential” highway bridge literally half a meter from several apartment buildings.

Egyptian social media has been abuzz over a new high-speed bridge currently under construction in Cairo’s Al-Haram district, for the simple reason that it is being built right next to a number f residential buildings on Nasr El-Din Street. And when we say “right next to”,  we mean that in the most literal sense, as the bridge is just 50 centimetres away from people’s homes. However, in a surprising twist, authorities announced that the bridge had all the necessary permits, and that it was the residential buildings that had been built without a permit. Therefore, an order for their demolition has already been issued.

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A Chinese family recently sued Chinese gaming giant Tencent after their two children were left fighting for their lives a after jumping off of a building to see if they would come back to life like their favorite video game characters.

The two siblings, aged 11 and 9, reportedly became addicted to popular video games Mini World and Game of Peace during the lockdown caused by the spread of the SarsCov-2 virus. Their parents had bought them a smartphone, and they would spend up to eight hours a day playing the two mobile games at the family home in Handan, China. On March 22, the two children jumped off of the family’s 50-foot-tall residential building to see if they would come back to life, just like their video game avatars. The pair were critically injured, breaking numerous bones, and required several surgical procedures.

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Idaho’s natural environment is famous for many things, including breathtaking beauty and fascinating wildlife, but perfect geometry isn’t among them. That’s why this photo of a forest area along Priest River taken from the International Space Station has been getting a lot of attention online.

In January of 2017, astronauts aboard the International Space Station shared a picture of what resembled a near-perfect chessboard pattern located in an area around Whitetail Butte in northern Idaho’s Bonner County. Apparently, the squares in this landscape are the result of a forest management technique dating back to the 1800s, where alternate one-square-mile parcels of land were granted to the US Government to the US Railroad and various other companies. This method ensured the sustainability of forest areas while also enabling logging operations.

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Believe it or not, the Vietnamese province of An Giang, in the Mekong Delta, is less known for its breathtaking natural attractions than for the giant loaves of bread that went viral online a couple of years back.

It all started in 2018, when lifestyle and entertainment website Brightside published a list of the world’s strangest foods, including a giant loaf of bread that was supposedly very popular in Vietnam’s An Giang province. There were those who claimed the accompanying photos of the bread were either photoshopped or shot from a certain angle to create the illusion that they were much larger than ordinary loaves, but then other photos and videos of the unusual bread started going viral online. Vietnamese media started giving the giant loaves a lot of attention, and soon the whole world knew about the now famous giant bread of An Giang.

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