Authorities in the Indian state of Goa are encouraging farmers to adopt “cosmic farming” by chanting Vedic mantras to their fields for 20 days in order o improve the quality and quantity of their crops without the help of chemical fertilizers.

Promoting organic farming is definitely commendable, but the approach of Goa’s Ministry of Agriculture is questionable at least. According to several news reports, authorities in the Indian state are currently promoting cosmic farming as an alternative to conventional agriculture. This requires farmers to chant ‘Vedic mantras’ to their fields for 20 days, which is supposed to help attract the energy of the universe into the field and help the seeds sprout faster and ultimately provide better yields.

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American homeware retailer Anthropologie was recently mocked on social media for selling a bundle of 20 birch twigs for the astronomical price of $42. That’s over $2 for a stick you can probably find on the street.

Officially called a “Decorative Birch Bundle”, the handful of twigs tied with two pieces of brown strings was apparently designed for people looking to add a “rustic quality” to their homes, but ultimately did nothing but spark outrage online. Photos of the birch twigs along with the selling price of $42 started showing up on social media this weekend, enraging a lot of people and inspiring some truly hilarious jokes.

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Researchers have long been looking for ways to communicate with animals, but one ‘pet psychic’ from upstate New York claims she’s been doing just that for around 15 years. For a fee, she can tell pet owners what their animals are thinking, what they like and dislike, regardless of whether they’re alive or dead.

One of the most interesting things about Shira Plotzker’s career as a pet psychic is how it began a decade and a half ago. She was already working as a psychic and medium for humans, and was also well versed in tarot card reading and numerology, but while watching pet psychic Sonya Fitzpatrick display her talents during a TV show on Animal Planet, Shira realized that she too could hear what the animal was thinking. Imagine that… Since then, telepathic communication with pets – both alive and dead – has become a lucrative side business for Plotzker, who claims that there are plenty of pet owners who would gladly pay her fee of $100 per 30-minute session to hear what their animals have to say.

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A 23-year-old man has filed a criminal complaint against his ex-boss for dunking his face into a scalding hotpot at an office party, as a joke, causing severe burns to his face that required over a month to heal.

The shocking event reportedly took place at a company party on December 20, 2015, but was made public just last week, after a couple of videos recorded on mobile phones went viral online. One of the clips shows a group of people sitting around a table in a Japanese-style restaurant. In the center of the table is a “nabe”, a pot of boiling water used for cooking meat and vegetables over an open flame. At one point, a man whose face is not shown in the video grabs the one of the people around the table by the back of his head and dunks his face into the nabe, holding him down for a couple of seconds before he manages to wrestle free, knocking over the pot.

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A primary school teacher in China was recently dismissed for discriminating against a child suffering from cancer, by making him sit alone at the back of the class and not allowing him to take exams like everyone else.

The languages teacher is said to have complained about the boy ever since he transferred to the Liancheng Primary School, in Quanzhou, Fujian province, in September, in order to be closer to his parents while receiving chemotherapy treatment for Non-Hodgkin lymphoma. He reportedly thought that the child’s condition could be contagious, and he wasn’t the only one, as Chinese media reports that several children were withdrawn from the school following the sick 13-year-old’s transfer. Since then, he had gone out of his way to make the boy, named only as Zhou feel like an outcast, making him sit all by himself at the back of the class and even forbidding him to take exams.

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A Colorado man claims that he was on intense chemotherapy and painkillers for five long years, after being diagnosed with a rare form of cancer by multiple doctors, a cancer that he recently learned never existed.

The living nightmare of James Salaz, a resident of Montrose, in Colorado, began five years ago, when he went to a hospital to have an intense pain deep under his armpit investigated. His doctor told him that tests revealed two abnormalities inside his left lung. After undergoing a couple of open lung biopsies, Salaz was diagnosed with Langerhans Cell Histiocytosis, a rare form of cancer that causes cells to build up in parts of the body, damaging tissues and ultimately leading to death. Devastated by the news, he visited doctors in Montrose, Delta, Grand Junction and Denver, and they all confirmed that he had Langerhans. It turns out they were all wrong.

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A young cancer survivor from Argentina recently surprised the doctor he credits for saving his life with a very unusual display of gratitude – a large back tattoo of the surgical oncologist next to the hospital he works at.

A few months ago, Nano Salguero, a native of Alejo Ledesma, an Argentinian town located 333 kilometers southeast of the regional capital of Córdoba, was diagnosed with colon cancer by a local oncologist. He was  immediately referred to the Hospital de Clinicas in the regional capital for emergency surgery, where he was operated on by Dr. Paul Lada, a surgical oncologist with 42 years of experience under his belt. Nano’s operation was a success, and even though he is technically still in recovery, he recently showed his gratitude to Dr. Lada by sending him a photo of a large tattoo of his smiling face next to the hospital he works at that he had inked on his back.

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From giant wheels of parmesan cheese to watermelons and even truffles, it seems that there’s no solid food that talented artist Valeriano Fatica cannot sculpt into an incredibly detailed artwork.

Valeriano Fatica developed an interest in the arts from a very young age, but spent most of his time helping at his family’s restaurant in Oratino, Italy, so he didn’t have time to experiment with traditional mediums. Instead, he started expressing his artistic talent with what he had on hand, fruits and vegetables. Today, Fatica is considered one of the world’s best food artists, and has several achievements to his name, like becoming the world’s first and only truffle sculptor and creating the world’s largest watermelon carving.

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Seeing Zhang Ziyu towering over her classmates at the Cultural East Road Primary School, in Jinan, China, it’s hard to believe that they are all in the sixth grade. The 11-year-old already measures 6ft 7in (210 cm), and many believe she is the tallest girl in the world.

Zhang’s parents are both former professional basketball players, and they are both over 2 meters tall, so it’s pretty clear that genetics played an important role in her physical development, but reaching 210 cm by age 11 is still very unusual. Zhang has always been taller than all the other children, and one of her colleagues remembers that in the first grade, she already stood at 1.6m (5ft 3in) tall. That’s already considerably taller than the average Chinese sixth-grade girl (4ft 6in or 1.38m).

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A young Christian missionary has been killed after venturing to North Sentinel Island, a protected island in the Indian Ocean home to a 30,000-year-old tribe known to aggressively repel outsiders, in order to “declare Jesus”.

27-year-old John Allen Chau is believed to have been killed by a volley of arrows shot by members of the Sentinelese tribe shortly after encroaching on their remote island. He had been trying to make contact with the reclusive natives for years, and on Saturday he paddled to the island in a kayak, despite the warnings of several fishermen he had paid to take him close to it. According to eyewitnesses, Chau was hit by an arrow shortly after reaching the island, and his body was later dragged deeper inland and buried. In a journal he left fishermen before venturing to North Sentinel Island, the young explorer wrote that he knew he risked being killed but that it was “worth it to declare Jesus to these people”.

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The mayor of Parajito, a town in northern Colombia, recently announced a curfew forbidding the transit and gathering of minors under the age of 17 in public places between 7 in the evening and 5 in the morning, to protect them from evil spirits that have allegedly been spreading through the popular messaging app WhatsApp.

Since the beginning of this week, authorities in the Catholic town of Parajito have reported at least 14 cases of teenagers exhibiting strange behavior, including threats of jumping off bridges, self lacerations, convulsions, fainting and unexplained changes in their voices. Like most youths these days, all of the victims were reportedly using the popular messaging app WhatsApp, and rumors started going around that evil spirits spreading through the app were responsible for the unusual behavior. To protect the children from themselves, mayor Inocencio Perez decided to enforce a curfew that allows youths under 17 to leave their homes only under the supervision of their parents or custodians.

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In an effort to spare her young daughter from being ostracized by other children for not having a father, a Japanese single mother made the controversial decision to hire an actor who has been posing as the girl’s father for the last 10 years.

Megumi was only a baby when her parents separated and he father disappeared from her life. The mother, Asako, remembers that the girl started asking where her father was very early, but that her father’s absence didn’t seem like a big deal until she was about 10-years-old. That’s when Asako noticed a change in her daughter’s behavior; she stopped talking to her, became withdrawn, and eventually stopped going to school. Her mother soon learned that she wasn’t just blaming herself for her father’s absence, but she had also become a victim of bullying at school, as it often happens with children of single parents in Japan. Asako was heartbroken, and after appealing to Megumi’s teachers for help, she also decided to give her daughter the thing she wanted most, even if it meant lying to her.

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A young university student who ate only instant noodles for three weeks straight in order to save money for Singles Day – China’s version of Black Friday – ended spending all of her savings on medical bills after her unusual diet made her sick.

Instant noodles are standard fare for many university students. They’re cheap, easy to cook and they fill your stomach, but they’re definitely not the most nutritious meal. One young woman recently learned the hard way that surviving on instant noodles alone is not the smartest thing you can do, even if it means saving some money in the short run.

Hong Jia first made news headlines in China at the start of November, when it was revealed that she had been eating only instant noodles since October 15, in order to save a bit of money for Singles Day, the largest online and offline shopping day in the world. In a viral Pear video, Jia said that she had managed to save 749 yuan ($108) by switching to the ultra cheap diet, money that she planned to spend on the November 11 shopping extravaganza.

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A young Lithuanian couple recently got their five minutes of online fame after spending a whole day replacing over 100 framed stock photos at an IKEA store in Vilnius with photos of themselves without attracting any attention from the staff.

Erikas Mališauskas and his girlfriend found the stock photos at their local IKEA in Vilnius, Lithuania, so boring that they decided to do something about them. Last week, the young couple did a little reconnaissance in the furniture super-store and counted over 100 framed stock photos that needed replacing. It was more than they expected, but luckily their Instagram archive provided more than enough images of themselves to choose from. Next, they went to a local shop to print some of their social media photos, and on Saturday they went back to IKEA to make it their own, so to speak.

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The South African Government has sparked outrage around the world after it was reported that it plans to auction off a confiscated white lion to raise funds for the country’s nation conservation department. Animal activists claim that the buyers will likely be wealthy hunters looking for easy trophies or businessmen involved in the lion bone trade.

Mufasa the white lion was confiscated as a cub from a private owner three years ago, and placed in the care of WildForLife, an animal rehabilitation charity in northern South Africa. Despite numerous requests to have Mufasa relocated to a wildlife conservation sanctuary which offered to care for Mufasa and his companion, Suraya, free of charge for the rest of their lives, government officials refused. To make matters worse, a few months ago WildForLife was notified by the South African Government that the rare white lion was going to be auctioned off to private buyers in order to raise funds for the nature conservation department. The charity has been involved in a legal battle to save Mufasa ever since.

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