The picturesque Ohau Waterfall on New Zealand’s Kaikoura coast is the only waterfall in the world that doubles as a seal creche, a place where the young marine mammals can play and socialize without having to worry about predators.

Ohau is a 15-meter-high horsetail waterfall (the water maintains contact with the bedrock as it falls). It’s not the most eye-catching waterfall in the world, but it has something that no other land waterfall has – adorable seals. For one to three months a year, the shallow pool at the bottom of Ohau waterfall acts as a creche for dozens of New Zealand fur seal pups. By playing and interacting with each other, the young seals learn important behaviors and develop social skills, all while putting on an unforgettable spectacle for human visitors.

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Scientists recently found that one of the world’s “toothiest” animals, the Pacific lingcod, keeps its 555 teeth razor-sharp by losing up to 20 of them every day and growing them right back.

The Pacific lingcod (Ophiodon elongatus) is a carnivorous fish found in the North Pacific. You couldn’t tell just by looking at it, but this 20-inch (on average) fish has one of the scariest mouths in the world. Instead of the incisors, molars, and canines we’re used to seeing, it has hundreds of nearly microscopic teeth lining its jaws. Their hard palate is also covered in hundreds of tiny spikes, as are the pharyngeal jaws, a set of accessory jaws that the lingcod uses to chew its food the way we use our molars. Now scientists have found that Pacific lingcod keep their hundreds of teeth sharp by losing and then growing dozens of them in a day.

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Some people spend most of their lives putting together a collection worthy of being recognized by the Guinness Book of Records, but one girl managed to achieve this feat at the tender age of six.

Scarlett Ashley Cheng is crazy about lip balm, and together with her sister, Kaylyn (8), owns the world’s largest collection of lip balms, numbering 3,388 different items. Their amazing collection features lip balms of different types, colors, textures and shapes, from known brands like Burt’s Bees, Eos, Humble or Nivea, as well as some obscure ones. Like most kids, Scarlett and her sister discovered lip balms when they started getting dry lips. Their grandmother introduced them to balms, and they just kind of went down the rabbit hole after that.

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MtoP is a parody religion created solely to give followers the chance to refuse things like working overtime simply by invoking “religious reasons”.

Short for “Motohiro to People”, the MtoP religion was created in 2018 by a young man named Motohiro Hisano, who acts as a deity/sage. He does point out that he doesn’t perform miracles and has no superpowers other than that of bestowing the power of “religious reasons” onto his followers. In fact, that is the only purpose of MtoP, as its founder does not wish to be worshipped, nor does he accept any sort of financial contributions. Although the parody religion does have its own doctrine, believers don’t have to abide by strict commandments. All they have to do in order to be considered followers of MtoP is to follow the religion’s official Twitter account.

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The people of Shenlongwan, a once-isolated village in the mountains of China’s Shanxi Province, spent 15 years carving through rock with chisels and hammers to connect their home to the world and escape poverty.

Benefiting from a very favorable climate, Shenlongwan has always been famous for its exquisite walnuts and pears, but getting their harvest to market used to be a serious challenge for the locals. That’s because until the year 2000, to reach the county seat of Changzhi City, they had to either detour through eight townships in three different provinces, or risk their lives climbing dangerous narrow ladders to reach a steep mountain pass. One day, the villagers decided that things had to change, and if the authorities wouldn’t build a road to their village, then they just had to do it themselves.

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The world’s oldest known wild bird is a Laysan albatross named Wisdom that biologists first identified and banded in 1956. She is now at least 70-years-old and just hatched another chick.

First banded in 1956, by biologist Chandler Robbins, who found her nest near a US navy base on the Midway Atoll that the world’s largest colony of albatross calls home, Wisdom has now outlived the man who discovered her, as well as all her male mates. Although cockatoos in captivity have been known to live nearly 100 years, for wild birds the odds of living over seven decades are extremely slim. Predators, food scarcity and, more recently, plastic waste, are all life-threatening factors that wild albatross deal with on a regular basis. And, yet, despite having the odds stacked against her, Wisdom has managed to live longer than any wild bird known to man.

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Mexican influencer Lore Garza caused quite the controversy online last week when she announced that the winner of the brand new KIA SUV she was raffling was her own mother…

Lore Garza, a popular Mexican social media personality with over 140,000 fans on Instagram alone, has been getting a lot of attention from news outlets over the past couple of weeks because of her latest attempt of “giving back” to her fans. In one of her most daring promotional efforts yet, Garza announced a raffle for a brand new KIA SUV. Anyone could enter for a chance to win, as long as they bought one or more tickets worth 350 pesos ($17). The raffle generated a lot of interest, so a lot of people tuned in to see who won the car, only to be left with their mouths opened when it was announced that Lore Garza’s own mother was the winner…

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A Chinese woman has sparked controversy online with her extremely frugal lifestyle, which involves spending as little money as possible, even if it means giving up on some of life’s small pleasures.

Consumerism may be at an all-time high in the developed world right now, but the minimalist lifestyle trend is also becoming increasingly popular. In China, hundreds of thousands of people share “money-saving tips” on private social media groups, with some members standing out through their frugal lifestyles. One such individual is Wang Shenai, a 32-year-old woman from Nanjing and member of a 400,000-strong online group called Frugal Women’s Federation. She has achieved celebrity status among her peers for her extreme money-saving techniques, but also sparked controversy among the general public, after a recent interview she gave went viral.

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A 12-year-old boy from Indonesia’s South Sumatra province recently made international news headlines because of his bizarre name – ABCDEF GHIJK.

Yes, you read that correctly, someone actually named their son after the first 11 letters in the English alphabet. The bizarre discovery was made accidentally when the 12-year-old boy took part in a vaccination drive organized by the local police in Muara Enim district. Health workers originally thought the boy’s name was a joke when they saw it in the appointment list, but their smiles turned to utter disbelief when they saw the same name, ABCDEF GHIJK, on his official ID. Photos of the boy’s documents and a name tag embroidered on his clothes went viral online this week after a police officer shared them on social media.

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To say the “Le Courage” restaurant in Sankt Petersburg, Russia, has a vintage look would be a gross understatement. The place looks to be in a state of severe disrepair, but it’s all by design, as the place just opened a couple of years ago.

Located in  Sankt Petersburg’s newly-built Russian House residential complex, Le Courage is a modern restaurant with a very unique look. It’s stylized as a 19th-century mansion in serious need of repairs, with deliberately worn walls, chipped stucco moldings, antique furniture, and deliberately worn floorboards. During the “renovation” phase, designers used a hammer to chip away at the stucco molds they had just glued onto the walls, they washed out the plaster to make it look like the ceiling had survived more than one serious water leak, and the 19th-century pattern wallpaper was left unfinished in places.

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According to a recently published scientific paper, a team of researchers has developed a wood processing technique that makes the material 23 times harder, making it possible to create sharp wooden knives and nails.

Material scientists at the University of Maryland have reportedly developed a type of hardened wood that can be used as a sustainable alternative to materials like steel and ceramics. To demonstrate the toughness of their chemically-treated wood, the team created a knife that is allegedly nearly three times sharper than a stainless-steel dinner table knife, as well as a wooden nail that can be hammered through wood without sustaining any damage, and that isn’t affected by rust.

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At an age when most women are either busy playing with their grandchildren or are long past thinking about having children, a 70-year-old Indian woman just gave birth to her first child.

Jivuben Valabhai Rabari and her husband had been trying to conceive ever since they got married, 45 years ago, but their every attempt had been unsuccessful. A couple of years ago, Ms. Rabari, a milk farmer from rural Gujarat, contacted a gynecologist about the possibility of trying an IVF treatment to finally fulfill her dream of having a baby. The doctor, Naresh Bhanushali, had helped several members of the woman’s family conceive, and she was convinced he could do the same for her. Despite receiving negative counseling and being told that her relatives were between 45 and 50 years old, not nearing 70 like her, she would not take ‘no’ for an answer.

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Tsovkra-1, a small village in the mountains of Russia’s Dagestan autonomous republic, is famous for being the only place in the world where the entire able-bodied population knows how to walk a tightrope.

No one knows exactly how the tightrope-walking tradition of Tsovkra-1 (named ‘1’ because of another Tsvokra village nearby) began, but one thing is for sure – for the last 100 years, every able-bodied man, woman, and child in the village has learned the walk a tightrope, and many have gone on to become circus performers. Although Tsovkra-1’s population has dropped from around 3,000 in the 1980s to under 400 today, all those who remain are trained in the art of tightrope walking.

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A woman who had exhausted all other options of treating her depression claims her life has become infinitely better since having a matchbox-sized implanted into her skull.

Having holes drilled into your skull and electrical wires connected directly to your brain sounds like a daunting proposition for most people, but for Sarah, a 36-year-old woman who had been battling depression for years, it was a desperate attempt to get back to a normal life. For years, she had been battling severe depression, and all other treatments, including anti-depressants and electroconvulsive therapy, had failed. Anything was better than the darkness she had been experiencing, and getting a brain implant proved a winning bet, as she has now been depression-free for over a year.

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A 28-year-old nurse from the Russian city of Irkutsk has been dubbed the “Russian Rapunzel” after it was revealed that her ankle-long hair hasn’t been cut for 23 years.

Anzhelika Baranova was only five when her hair was last trimmed. Neither she nor her parents planned to let her hair grow for over two decades, it just sort of happened, as if it was meant to be. She was always very proud of her hair, and taking care of it was never much of a chore. She claims she doesn’t do anything special to maintain her locks, she just washes it twice a week with regular shampoo and conditioner and gently brushes it with a comb to ensure she doesn’t break knotted strands.

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