While most fashion designers prefer to sew their creations, 41-year-old Aniela Hoitink has chosen to ‘grow’ hers in petri dishes. The Amsterdam-based textile designer recently created a 100 percent biodegradable dress – good for the environment and your skin – using nothing but discs of mushroom root.

By sticking the discs together, Aniela created a surprisingly good-looking dress that seems to fit the female figure perfectly. She needed 350 discs to make a single dress, so she spent a week-and-a-half growing them in petri dishes before they were ready to be used. Because the dress requires no cutting or sewing, there is no leftover material that needs to be discarded. The material doesn’t require hemming either, so it can be cut to suit the wearer’s requirements of length or shape. And more discs can be added to create sleeves or length. The dress can be composted when it is no longer needed, so it doesn’t actually end up in landfills.

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Putting too much ice in iced drinks could potentially cost businesses millions of dollars, as Starbucks is learning the hard way. Chicago resident Stacy Pincus has filed a $5 million class action lawsuit against the coffeehouse chain for filling coffee cups with too much frozen water.

Pincus is alleging that although the company sells beverages in Tall, Grande, Venti, and Trenta sizes, there’s so much ice in them that customers are only getting half the amount they actually pay for. In addition, she’s accusing the chain of charging more for iced drinks than for hot drinks, which she believes is a huge rip off. The lawsuit mentions that in 2014, iced tea was actually the most profitable product on the Starbucks menu.

“In essence, Starbucks is advertising the size of its cold drink cups on its menu, rather than the amount of fluid a customer will receive when they purchase a cold drink – and deceiving its customers in the process,” the court documents filed by Pincus states. They also mention that while the Venti is supposed to be 24 ounces, the actual amount of the drink served is as little as 14 because “large pieces of ice take up more space.”

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Beef noodle soup might not be the most glamorous dish you could order at a restaurant, but a serving of the comfort food can certainly leave you feeling satiated. Is it worth a whopping $300, though? Because that’s what a bowl of the ‘world’s best noodle soup’ costs at this popular Taiwanese restaurant.

In case you’re wondering, the soup doesn’t contain bizarre ingredients like diamonds or dirt, and it isn’t infused with healthy stuff like collagen or anthocyanin. It’s a simple beef bowl recipe, albeit one that Chef Wang Cong-yuan has spent the past 26 years researching and perfecting. The special beef noodle soup is currently served at his small 40-seat restaurant, Niu Ba Ba (Daddy Cow), in Taiwan.

“From the age of forty, I have focused on making a good bowl of beef noodles,” Wang said. “It’s quality over quantity. My ultimate goal is to make the world’s best beef noodle soup.”

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Hikaru Dorodango, which translates to ‘shiny dumpling’, is a relaxing Japanese art that involves crafting shiny spheres from dirt. That might sound super simple, but it actually takes years to perfect and several hours to manipulate the dirt. It’s all worth it in the end though, because, in the hands of a true master, the end results are nothing short of mind-blowing.

To make a shiny Dorodango, you start by packing mud into your hand and squeezing out all the moisture. You then press into into the shape of a sphere and spend the next two hours rubbing on more layers of increasingly finer dry dirt. Once this is complete, you pack the dumpling in a plastic bag for three or four hours and later polish it with a cloth and varnish until it shines.

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In a bid to control the nation’s growing problem with food wastage, the South Korean government has started a unique initiative – ‘Pay as You Trash’. Residents are required to separate their food waste from the rest of their trash and dump it separately in a centralised bin. And in order to access the bin, they actually need to pay by the kilo!

As of now, the South Korean government has three methods in place to charge citizens for the food thrown away. One is through an RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) card – when users tap this card – embedded with their personal tag – over a specially designed food waste bin, the lid will open, allowing them to dump their waste. This waste is automatically weighed and recorded in the user’s account. The user needs to settle this bill on a monthly basis. Each RFID bin costs 1.7 million won ($1,500) and can cater to 60 households.

The second billing method is through pre-paid garbage bags. These specially designed bags are priced based on volume. For instance, in Seoul, a 10-liter garbage bag costs around 190 won (less than $1). There’s also a bar code management system in place, in which residents deposit food waste directly into composting bins and pay for it by purchasing bar code stickers attached to the bin.

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Adding to the madness of the 2016 US presidential election is American lawyer Andrew Basiago. He claims to have traveled through time nearly all his life, and is pretty sure that he’s going to become “either president or vice president” between 2016 and 2028. Polling data is obviously of little use to this guy.

Basiago, a Washington-based attorney, first started talking about his experience with time travel in 2004, with Project Pegasus – a top secret organisation studying the effects of time travel and teleportation on children. So between 1968 and 1972, when Basiago was a young boy of seven, he claims to have participated in several experiments that transported him through time, space, and even parallel universes. His mission, supposedly, was to provide the US President at the time with important information about past and future events.

Now, Basiago is using the ‘knowledge’ gained over years of time travel to further his political ambitions – he’s running for president this year as an independent candidate, and is fairly confident he’s going to win. “I have prior knowledge that not only will I run for president, but that during one of the elections – which would have to be between 2016 and 2028, because I’m not running past that – I’m either elected president or vice president,” he explained, confidently.

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After years of cheering for his favorite college football team, University of Southern California student Jake Olson has achieved the impossible dream – despite being completely blind, he is now a part of the team, playing as long snapper for the USC Trojans, approaching the game based on feel rather than sight.

Born with retinoblastoma, a rare cancer of the retina, Jake lost his left eye when he was only eight months old. “When the doctors found my cancer, it was completely taking over my left eye,” he said. “The greatest fear is the cancer spreading through the optic nerve to the brain.” So the eye had to be removed entirely, followed by several rounds of chemotherapy and laser treatment to prevent the cancer from spreading to the right eye. Sadly, it kept coming back.  At age 12, Jake received news that he would have to lose his right eye as well. “Realizing what I was going to be confronting… a life without sight, it was difficult. I didn’t feel completely hopeless, but there was this sense of ‘I don’t know how I’m gonna do anything anymore.’”

Being a lifelong Trojan fan, one of Jake’s last wishes before he lost his eye was to watch them play at Notre Dame and also to witness a practice session the night before the surgery. “There were nights of crying and stressful times when I couldn’t get the thought of going blind out of my psyche,” he said, speaking to the LA Times. “But every time I was up at USC or talking to one of the players or just being around, it was just pure fun. And truthfully, peace.”

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American artist Jason Borders uses a simple Dremel rotary tool to turn creepy animal skulls into intricate works of art that sell for hundreds of dollars.

Born in Lexington, Kentucky, Borders always had an interest in bones and started collecting them at a very young age. “I always had a little cabinet of curiosities in my room, and in the garage,” he says, but he didn’t start using them as a medium for his art until much later in his life. He always an artistic streak and used to take art classes at the Lexington Art League in his spare time. He later attended the Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio, but only worked with traditional materials like clay and paper. That was until a few years ago when he discovered an elk carcass while driving through the desert.

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Swedish designer Mikael Kjellman has created a unique vehicle that looks like a tiny car, but has the internal workings of an electric bicycle. He calls it the PodRide bicycle car.

“I really like to bike, but where I live in Sweden, the weather is not always very bicycle-friendly,” Mikael explained. “So I designed and built a four-wheeled bike with full fabric body to keep dry and warm in all weathers. I have driven it to work every day for a year now and it has proven to be a very practical and comfortable little vehicle.”

The ‘bicycle car’ has several advantages over a traditional electric bicycle – it comes with a waterproof body, heated windscreen, soft seat with back support, studded tires for snowy roads, and air suspension. It also has some trunk space in the back, as well as functional headlights and a tow bar in case someone wants to add a bike trailer.

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As bizarre as it sounds, smoking scorpions is not unheard of in South Asian countries, but according to regional media, the practice has recently been gaining popularity in several parts of Pakistan. The scorpion venom can apparently put the smoker on an intense high, becoming highly addictive with time.

So how does one smoke a scorpion, anyway? It’s a simple yet effective process – a dead scorpion is dried in sunlight for several hours or a live one is burnt on coal until it dies. The dried carcass is then lit on fire and the smoke is inhaled. Since it’s the tail that contains the poison addicts seek, some smokers prefer to crush the dried tail and mix it with hashish and tobacco, smoking it in the form of a cigarette.

In his 2007 book Drugs in Afghanistan, sociologist David MacDonald provides the account of a friend who witnessed first-hand the effects of scorpion smoke on an addict. “The effect was instantaneous with the man’s face and eyes becoming very red, much more than a hashish smoker. He also seemed very intoxicated but awake and alert, although he stumbled and fell over when he tried to rise from a sitting position … the smoke tasted “sweeter” than that of hashish, although … it smelled foul, and the intoxicating effect lasted much longer,” the book suggested.

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At age 23, Indian entrepreneur Srikanth Bolla is the CEO a company valued at INR 50 crore (over $7.5 million) . That’s a wonderful achievement in itself, but what’s truly inspiring is that he managed to do it despite being born completely blind. Today, he considers himself the luckiest man in the world, not for his success, but for having supportive parents who always stood by him.

When Srikanth was born blind, several of his parents’ friends and relatives advised them to abandon him. That would indeed have been the easier thing to do, given the fact that they were poor and uneducated, earning a mere INR 20,000 ($300) a year. But they chose to not only keep the boy, but also raise him in a positive, loving environment. “They are the richest people I know,” he often says.

And their excellent parenting has paid off – today, Srikanth is the CEO of Bollant Industries, a Hyderabad-based company that employs physically challenged staff to manufacture eco-friendly consumer packaging solutions made from leaves and recycled paper. The company has four manufacturing units in three states in southern India – Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Karnataka. Srikanth’s hard work and unprecedented success has impressed the business world, attracting investments from the likes of Indian business tycoon Ratan Tata.

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30 years of dedicated service have finally paid off for Kifleab Tekle, a retiring security guard at an elite all-girl’s school in Dallas. While most people in his position would retire quietly, he’s going out with a bang – a $185,000 check gifted to him by members of the school’s alumnae.

When they first got to know of Tekle’s retirement, many of the staff members and former students of Hockaday School started reminiscing over his unwavering service to the school and a few members of the class of 2005 even decided to raise $2,000 for him as a small token of their appreciation. So they started a GoFundMe campaign, which got so popular that it surpassed the original goal in no time at all.

“We know how much Kief means to everyone!” the campaign page reads. “It wasn’t an April fools joke, he is really retiring. We would love to collect money for a retirement gift for him. We are so excited that alumnae, current students, and parents are all donating.” The original plan was to hold a private meeting with Kief in the school grounds on Monday, April 11, and present him with whatever money they had managed to raise. But the amount turned out to exceed everyone’s expectations – a whopping $185,000. Kief was obviously beside himself, not only because of the generous gift, but also the fact that over 200 people turned up on Monday to wish him well. “I was not expecting such a big farewell,” he said, in a statement. “It means stability for my family.”

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British micro-engraver Graham Short is famous for creating detailed carvings that are so unbelievably tiny that they cannot be seen with the naked eye. On a never-ending quest to push his limits and create the tiniest engraving possible, Short has engraved specks of gold small enough to fit in the eye of a needle and even the edge of a razor blade. His secret – working between heartbeats.

To produce his tiny masterpieces, Graham works in complete silence, because even the slightest sound could produce vibrations that might ruin his work. He steadies his right arm by securing it with a strap attached to a piece of heavy machinery. His mobile is switched off, and he mostly works at night to avoid the vibrations of vehicles passing in the street. Starting at midnight, he works through the night until five or six in the morning, and continues for three to four nights in a row, until he gets too tired and his body clock needs readjustment.

As much as he tries to eliminate distractions, there is one vibration that Graham cannot silence – his own heartbeat. But he’s come up with a ingenius technique to work around that as well. Graham tapes a stethoscope to his chest and places the earpieces in his ears, keenly listening to his own heartbeat. With his carving tool in hand, he waits motionless, for as long as 20 minutes, until his heart rate is at its lowest. Then, listening intently, he only makes a carving at his stillest moments – in between heartbeats.

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Problems in identifying identical twins makes for excellent comedy, but in real life it can be quite frustrating, especially if you have two pairs of identical twins married to each other. That’s why these newlywed twins from China have decided to get plastic surgery in a bid to make themselves less identical and thus avoid the undesirable complications that could arise from failing to tell each other apart.

Zhao Xin and his twin brother Zhao Xun, from Yuncheng in China’s Shanxi Province, have been confounding relatives and friends ever since they started dating twin sisters Yun Fei and Yun Yang from a neighboring village. Although they went to the same high school in Shanxi, they only got together last year after being introduced by a matchmaker. A month later, the four of them were engaged.

Both pairs of identical twins look so alike that it’s apparently impossible to tell them apart, even by their voices.  On their wedding day, their guests and even their own parents had a tough time identifying them, checking and double checking that they weren’t marrying the wrong partners.

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Former gambler and businessman M.C. Davis placed the biggest bet of his life about 20 years ago when he decided to spend a considerable chunk of his fortune on nature. Over the past two decades, he spent $90 million purchasing thousands of acres of land all over Florida. And the risk paid off – he managed to revive forests and swamps across the state, saving several wildlife species in the process. Although he tried to do his conservation work without attracting too much attention, the positive effects of Davis’ efforts could not go unnoticed forever. Last year, he was featured in Smithsonian Magazine and on the National Public Radio website, and his story went viral.

Having grown up in a cramped trailer on a dirt road in the Florida Panhandle, Davis set out to make a fortune at a very young age, becoming a self-proclaimed gambler and hustler. He made hundreds of millions of dollars, but it took a simple traffic jam to bring about the epiphanic moment that would change the course of his life forever. “It’s drizzling rain, and I was just sort of frantic with exasperation,” he told NPR. “Stuck in traffic, and I looked up, and I saw on the marquee of the high school, ‘Black Bear Presentation’. Intrigued, he decided to pull over and attend the event.

At the time, Davis didn’t even know that Florida had black bears, but the lecture made by two women of the Defenders of Wildlife piqued his interest – the very next day he donated enough money to keep the Defenders campaign alive for two years. He also began to read more books written by environmentalists, and kept in touch with Laurice MacDonald, one of the Defenders that had oipened his eyes. “He had the steepest learning curve,” MacDonald later said. “We would begin with little debates. They were a little testy but fascinating.”  

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