Scientists in Ecuador have discovered a new species of frog that is able to morph the texture of its skin – from spiny to smooth – within a matter of minutes. Aptly named ‘mutable rain frog’, the tiny, finger-nail sized creature is the first shape-shifting amphibian to ever be found.

According to a Livescience report, the mutable frogs were found in Reserva Las Gralarias, a protected cloud reserve forest on the western slopes of Ecuador’s Andes Mountains. The incredible discovery is credited to biologist Katherine Kryna and naturalist Tim Krynak, who have spent the past decade combing the reserve for rare frog species.

The duo first spotted the frog in 2006, when they had captured it on camera. On closer inspection of the photograph, they realised that it could be a new species. The frog’s spiny-textured skin stood out, so they started calling it ‘punk rocker’. “It wasn’t until we saw the amazing texture of its skin that we thought, ‘wow, this is something different,’” said Katherine.

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A father-and-son duo from Hunan, China, have come up with a fun and profitable business idea – creating giant Transformers robots replicas from used car parts and scrap metal.

Although they are farmers by profession, Yu Zhilin and his son Yu Lingyun switched to building the models in 2007, when they realised the potential in the Chinese market. And their hunch has proved right – they’ve managed cash in on the nation’s obsession with Transformers, the highest grossing film of all time in China. They now make one million yuan a year (nearly $170,000), selling their army of robots.

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A heavy downpour can spoil the best of plans, but who says you can’t have fun with a bit of rain? Proving the fact is Seattle-based magician and artist Peregrine Church, with his rain-activated street art, called ‘rainworks’. These paintings are invisible to the naked eye when dry, only making an appearance when it rains!

Church said that he’s passionate about making things that make the world a more interesting place. “Rainworks are pieces of street art that only appear when they’re wet,” he explained, “and they’re messages or images designed to make people’s rainy day a little bit better.” He calls it the “ideal Seattle art” because of the constant rains in the city.

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Located in the city of Chelyabinsk, in Russia, is a unique house built almost entirely of champagne bottles. The architectural oddity is the handiwork of a local resident, 52-year-old Hamidullah Ilchibaev. Fondly referred to as ‘Palace Oz’, the place is now a popular landmark in the region.

The idea for the house was not a random one – Hamidullah has always been interested in constructing things out of beer and vodka bottles. His children had always admired his work, and encouraged him to build a house someday. But he always thought it was impossible to do.

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Not many people working in the film industry are aware of a 1930’s Hollywood actor-turned-agent named Marty Martin, so it’s rather baffling that 10-year-old Ryan is familiar with the man’s life and work. In fact, Ryan is able to recount vivid and stunningly accurate descriptions of the actor and the era he lived in, even those that have never been documented. And he’s able to do so because he claims to be the incarnation of Martin himself!

Ryan, who lives in Muskogee, Oklahoma, was born to Baptist parents in 2005. When he was only four years old, he started having nightmares that his parents had no idea how to stop. He would often talk about his heart exploding, and of Hollywood, a place that is several thousands of miles away from Oklahoma. According to Ryan’s mom Cyndi, he would always talk in a matter-of-fact manner during these incidents.

After a year, Cyndi said that Ryan confided to her about his  reincarnation. “He said, ‘Mom, I have something I need to tell you. I used to be somebody else,’” she said. Being a Baptist, Cyndi’s first reaction was to deny everything and hide it from her husband, but she slowly became curious as Ryan revealed more details of his past life, especially because he would cry and beg for his mom to take him ‘home’. “His stories were so detailed and extensive, that it just wasn’t like a child could have made it up,” Cyndi said.

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Texas-based artist John Bramblitt perceives the world and everything in it through color. Fear, for instance, he says is a “red with a lot of black mixed in. It’s almost like the color of blood and dirt or soil – it’s really deep.” His paintings are stunningly vivid, bursting with color and texture. Ironically, Bramblitt is blind.

The 37-year-old has been suffering epileptic seizures since the age of two. As he grew older , the seizures became more and more frequent. “There would be months I’d have so many seizures I couldn’t count them,” he said. His vision gradually began to deteriorate since age 11 – at first it would become blurry and then eventually clear up. But with time, it cleared up less after each episode, and by 2001 he had become completely blind.

The loss of vision was a terrible blow for Bramblitt, sending him into what he calls the “deepest, darkest hole” of depression. “All of the hopes and dreams that I had for my life; all of the plans for what I would do after I graduated school were gone,” he said.

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If the claims of a group of Siberian entrepreneurs are to be believed, their new product might just give Viagra a run for its money. They aren’t selling another expensive pill, just a can of fresh air!

According to Vladimir Makuta, head of the local Tashtagol district, air from Azasskaya Cave and its surrounding area, which is where the fabled Yeti (a.k.a Bigfoot) was supposedly sighted on more than one occasion, is crystal-clear, full of goodness, and has a healing effect. It can apparently help strengthen immunity and positively impact mental state. But most importantly, it is said to works wonders for people who want to perform better in bed.

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If you found our post about bodybuilders consuming breast milk hard to stomach, wait till you hear what this woman in England puts in her smoothies. Kathryn Beale makes controversial birth placenta smoothies in her own kitchen and sells them to new mothers for £25 ($38) each.

The 41-year-old from Wiltshire county, in South West England, got involved in placentophagy – the consumption of birth placenta – a couple of years ago, after meeting the founder of the Independent Placenta Encapsulation Network. Her most popular product is a placenta capsule, priced at £150 ($224) per batch, but her most talked-about creation is a smoothie that contain a fist-sized chunk of chilled placenta blended with berries and bananas.

Kathryn insists that these products are perfectly safe and have several health benefits. “Most species of mammal eat their own placenta straight after birth, raw – it is normal in the animal kingdom,” she explained. “We are unusual in that we don’t routinely do it. It is full of iron, stem cells and hormones, and is reputed to help with milk production and post-natal depression.” The placenta products aren’t meant for everyone, though – just new mothers. “Women who want to use their placentas are tested during pregnancy, and if we know the placenta carries any blood-pathogens we will not use it,” she explained. “After the birth it then stays with the mum in cold bags with ice packs. I collect them very quickly, usually within 24 hours.”

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It’s good to get  in touch with your inner child from time to time, and apparently some people are willing to pay big money for the chance to do so in a proper environment. A Brooklyn-based preschool for adults is charging clients between $333 and $999 for the chance to act like a kid again.

At ‘Preschool Mastermind’,in New York, adults get to participate in show-and-tell, arts-and-crafts such as finger painting, games like musical chairs, and even take naps! The month-long course also has class picture day where the adults are expected to dress to their ‘four-year-old best’, a field trip, and a parent day when students get to bring two adults of their choice.

30-year-old Michelle Joni Lapidos, the brains behind the adult preschool, studied childhood education and has always wanted to be a preschool teacher. She’s always on the lookout for new ways to get people in touch with the freedom of childhood – she had started a skipping club in Brooklyn in 2013, but a friend encouraged her to start the mastermind course instead.

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The semi-nomadic Moken people, living along the coasts of Burma and Thailand, are hunter-gatherers who for centuries have harvested the sea’s bounty. They use traditional diving methods to this day, instead of modern masks or scuba gear. And their underwater vision is so evolved that they are able to gather tiny shellfish and other food from the ocean floor at depths as low as 75 feet!

Diving for food sounds like a difficult way to survive, but scientists have discovered that young Moken children have underwater vision that’s twice as good as European children of the same age. Scientist Anna Gislén, of Sweden’s Lund University, studied the children’s unique vision after hearing about them from a colleague.

“Another scientist, Erika Schagatay, was in the south of China working with sea nomads and their diving response,” she said. “She noticed that the children were picking out small brown clams from among brown stones. To her, this was incomprehensible, as she could hardly see them with her goggles, and the children used no such thing. It was not her area of science, so eventually it ended up on my desk.”

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A Chinese man was recently presented with the ultimate test of love – he was forced to choose between saving his current and ex girlfriends! The two love-struck women jumped into a river to see which one he would save.

The poor man in question is 21-year-old Wu Hsia, who recently broke up with his long-time girlfriend Jun Tang, 20, after falling in love with 22-year-old  Rong Tsao. The ex-girlfriend took the split rather badly and began to harass Wu in the hope that he would leave Rong and come back to her.

Tired of the bickering women, Wu decided to meet with both of them and make his intentions clear. “I was sick of being nagged from both sides,” he said. “Rong was moaning about Jun and Jun was moaning about her and it all got too much.” Unfortunately, the meeting turned out to be a bad idea. Jun and Rong got into an argument, which ended with Jun throwing herself into the river. Rong quickly followed suit.

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When the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant went into meltdown, after the devastating tsunami in 2011, most of the locals fled to overcrowded temporary shelters. So did Naoto Matsumura, but the brave man soon decided return to his home town of Tomioka, just to take care of the many animals left behind! And even though the radiation levels are dangerously high (17 times higher than normal) in this area, Matsumura says he isn’t going anywhere.

He now spends most of his time running a charity along with a few supporters, taking care of animals left behind in the evacuation zone. “I have two cats, one dog, one ostrich, one horse, 31 cows and four wild boars,” Matsumura proudly declared.

He started off by taking into his care the animals that were abandoned in his hometown. He described how most of the pets were still tied up, because locals had believed they would be back home soon. Matsumura took it upon himself to feed the animals every day. “They couldn’t stand the wait, so they’d all gather around barking up a storm as soon as they heard my truck,” he recalled. “Everywhere I went there was always barking. Like, “we’re thirsty” or, “we don’t have any food.”

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While traditional forms of pointillism involve adding distinct dots of color in patterns to form an image, Korean artist Jihyun Park does the opposite. He inverts the art of pointillism by puncturing dots into paper instead of adding them.

Using incense sticks, Park burns thousands of tiny holes into rice paper, until recognisable patterns of clouds, mountains and trees emerge. His project, titled ‘Incense Series’, consists of completed drawings mounted on varnished canvases. So the holes in the paper allow the viewer to see shadows while the white canvas reflects light.

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Wang Weibu is one of the few remaining Chinese hairdressers practicing the ancient hair-cutting art of ‘Dahoujia’. The rather extreme technique involves the use of a pair of red hot metal tongs to burn hair off, instead of cutting it!

Weibu, 72, starts by heating the clamp in a wooden fire until it is red hot, and cooling it slightly in water. He then uses it like scissors to chop of the hair to the desired length. Later, he slides the hot metal all over the remaining hair. The technique is rather baffling – after all, who would want to walk around with a head of scorched hair? But surprisingly, the final effect is rather nice – sort of like a perm – and lasts for about three months.

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While most rosaries these days consist of glass or wooden prayer beads, there was a time when wealthy Europeans used ‘prayer nuts’ – minutely detailed, small-scaled boxwood carvings. Each nut was a masterpiece in itself, decorated on the interior and exterior with intricate carvings representing Biblical stories.

The delicate wooden orbs were designed to be worn on a rosary, or on a belt by members of the nobility or wealthy merchant classes in northern Europe. At times, fragrant substances may have been inserted into the orbs, so that the nuts may have served as pomanders as well.

Recent studies suggest that prayer nuts of the early 16th century were reduced to such a small scale that they might have become impractical to use. The religious significance might have faded away, and these nuts may have later been made just to be studied and marveled at, as private collectors’ items.

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