Trying to move on from a failed romantic relationship can be hard, especially when your most beautiful travel photos feature your ex. A lot of people reluctantly delete such digital memories as part of a ritual known as “post-breakup purge”, but thanks to a new online service called Edit My Ex, that’s no longer necessary.

As the name suggests, Edit My Ex allows people who want to erase any evidence of their ex from meaningful digital photos to just have them edited out and keep the photos. All you have to do is upload a photo to their website, let the image editing experts know what exactly you’d like erased and pay a £8.99 ($11.90) fee. In up to 48 hours, you’ll get your photo back, ex-free.

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Romanie-Jade Tulloch, a 20-year-old self-taught makeup artist from Nottingham, in the UK, combines her love of makeup and art to create mind-blowing optical illusions on her face.

Romanie has always been into makeup, but she only started focusing on it two years ago, in the hopes of becoming a freelance makeup artist. She never studied professional makeup, preferring instead to hone her skills by watching online tutorials and experimenting with various cosmetics. Having studied fine arts for two years in college, she naturally drifted from conventional makeup to painting artistic optical illusions on her face and posting her best work on Instagram. Before she knew it, she had hundreds of thousands of followers on the popular social network.

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A young man from Vietnam allegedly had his ID card tattooed on his arm, because he always forgot it when going out drinking with his friends and couldn’t prove he was old enough to buy alcohol.

Photos of what looked like an ID card tattooed on someone’s forearm went viral on Vietnamese social media. The person who posted it claimed that a friend of theirs had had it done after becoming exasperated with failing ID checks at nightclubs. He almost always forgot his national identity card at home and couldn’t prove he was old enough to drink. To make sure he never got kicked out of nightclubs again, he decided to have his ID card tattooed on his forearm.

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A Dubai-based startup has its eyes set on literally taking coffee roasters to new heights by launching a space capsule full of coffee beans into space and use the heat generated by atmosphere re-entry to roast them.

Anders Cavallini and Hatem Alkhafaji, the two founders of Space Roasters, believe that the absence of gravity could be the secret to roasting coffee perfectly. On Earth, beans tumble around, break apart and are roasted unevenly as some of them come into contact with the hot surfaces of a conventional roaster, but in zero-gravity conditions, beans would float freely in a heated oven, with heat being distributed evenly, resulting in a near-perfect roast. That’s just a theory, but they’re prepared to put it to the test by sending a capsule filled with 300kg of coffee beans to a height of 200km.

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A California woman swallows about five live Chinese weevils every day as a way to prevent the growth of cancerous tumors and boost her immune system.

Marcela Iglesias, a mother-of three from Los Angeles, California, believes that consuming live Chinese Weevils every day could be the best way to prevent cancer, treat chronic pain, arthritis and various digestive problems. Swallowing them alive is critical as these bugs allegedly release a toxin called “coleotoxin” when they die, and you want that to happen when they reach your digestive system. This theory is supported by a 2011 study which found that coleotoxin reduced tumor cell growth by more than 70 per cent. That research is heavily contested by many in the scientific community, but Iglesias doesn’t really care, saying that even if the bugs don’t actually help prevent cancer, they are still a great source of protein.

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The democratic Republic of Tajikistan is probably the only country in the world where celebrating a birthday outside the family home can earn offenders a hefty fine.

The recent case of Tajik pop star Firusa Khafizova, who got fined 5,000 somoni ($530) for celebrating her birthday in the company of friends outside her home, has once again drawn attention to one of Tajikistan’s most bizarre laws. According to the “Regulation of Traditions and Customs in the Republic of Tajikistan” the celebration of birthdays anywhere except in the privacy of the family circle is strictly forbidden, with offenders risking hefty fines. As strange as that may sound, the law is actually enforced, with authorities going as far as using social media pictures and videos as proof against suspected offenders.

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Tech giants Google and Apple have come under fire for hosting a controversial smartphone app that allows Saudi men to monitor how and where women travel and effectively prevent them from leaving the country without permission.

Developed by the government of Saudi Arabia, Absher has been around for a while, but it only started making waves in western media after an article in ThisIsInsider highlighted one of its most controversial features – allowing male “guardians” to track and restrict women’s movements via their smartphones. In Saudi Arabia, women are placed under the authority of a male guardian regardless of their age. Women must ask the permission of their guardians to get married, open bank accounts and travel to certain places, and thanks to Absher, tracking an restricting the travel options of women is easier than it’s ever been.

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Vaggelis Chatzis’s life is considered by many the ultimate underdog story. After having his right forearm amputated from below the elbow when he was only a baby, he grew up to become the world’s only one-handed professional boxer.

Chatzis was born with a cancerous tumour in his right hand which would have ultimately killed him if doctors didn’t amputate part of his arm to stop the cells from spreading. He was only three months old at the time, so the young Greek has had to rely on his left hand alone for as long as he can remember. Growing up was tough, as the other kids would often bully him and make fun of his three-fingered prosthetic hand, calling him things like Captain Hook. That caused him to grow up into a very angry young man, and that anger got him in a lot of trouble. He started hanging out with the wrong crowd, spent his nights drinking and partying, and got into fights a lot. But then he discovered boxing and he fell in love.

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A Malaysian woman ended up with a pet duck after buying a fertilized egg from a restaurant and using a makeshift incubator to hatch it instead of eating it.

39-year-old Erica Lim, a creative professional from Kuala Lumpur, in Malaysia, recently sat down with online magazine Star2 to talk about life with a pet duck in a high-rise apartment building. She spoke about Daisy’s love of water, her friendly and adventurous nature, and how she adapted to life in the big city, but Erica’s most interesting revelation was the story of how the duck came into this world. Apparently, she was meant to be eaten as “balut”, a controversial Asian snack that consists of a cooked partially-developed duck embryo.

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A 27-year-old man from New Delhi, India, wants to take his parents to court for bringing him into this world without first asking for his consent.

Raphael Samuel is an anti-natalist, a person who believes that people should abstain from procreation because giving birth to sentient beings without asking for their consent is morally wrong. Samuel doesn’t have anything against children or life itself, he simply believes that a life form which has not given its consent to live should not be brought into the world and thus to be subject to the hardships of life. Because he considers himself a victim of life without “forced life”, the young Indian plans to take his parents to court.

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If you though excavating a basement was hard work, try doing it with R/C miniature construction machinery. One Canadian man has been doing it for 14 years and he’s still not done. Luckily, he’s in no hurry to finish.

Joe Murray, a farmer and radio-controlled construction machinery enthusiast from Saskatchewan, Canada, started excavating a basement under his house in June of 2005. In the beginning, he had a hands-on approach, using a pickaxe and an air chisel hammer, but then he started acquiring miniature radio-controlled digging machinery and he took a back seat, letting them do all the dirty work. By 2010, his fleet of trucks and excavators were already doing all the work, while he controlled them from a distance. But the problem with using miniature machinery to dig a life-size basement is that it takes a long time. And I mean a really long time.

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Dave Asprey is mostly known as the man behind the “Bulletproof” lifestyle brand and the guy who came up with the idea of adding butter to coffee, but he’s also one of the world’s boldest biohackers. By constantly tweaking his diet and exercise, as well as experimenting with all kinds of new technology to improve his general well-being, Asprey expects to live to at least 180.

45-year-old Asprey’s quest to live longer than any other human in history started during the 1990s, when he was a young, overweight tech entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. He tried the standard ways of losing weight – lowering his calorie intake and working out for 90 minutes – but although he was stronger and healthier than before, he still weighed the same. So he stopped listening to doctors – who thought he was sneaking Snickers bars into his diet anyway – and started experimenting with less conventional options. This kickstarted his appetite for bio-hacking.

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Most people would never use a tissue that someone else sneezed in, let alone pay $80 for one, but one Los Angeles startup claims to have already sold close to a thousand sneeze-filled tissues to people who want to catch a cold virus now so they don’t get sick with the same cold later. Does that make any sense?

Vaev bills itself a “wellness brand” although technically it’s helping people get sick by selling them tissues that complete strangers sick with the cold have allegedly sneezed into. But who in their right mind would pay $79.99 on a germ-contaminated used tissue? Well, that would be “open-minded people” who appreciate the luxury of being able to get sick “on their own terms”. Vaev founder Oliver Niessen, 34, claims that these expensive used tissues should be viewed as alternatives to conventional medicine, in that they allow you to purposely catch a cold whenever you want, in order to decrease the risk of catching that same cold at a later date. It’s basically all about choice and getting “sick on your own terms”.

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A public utility company in the Russian city of Irkutsk has come up with an ingenious way of reminding people to pay their bills if they want to continue using their indoor toilets.

In November of last year, the Irkutsk Northern Housing and Utility Systems Directorate installed a wooden cabin toilet outside an apartment building with a sign that read “Toilet for Debtors” on the front door. This was the company’s unique way of reminding residents that it could cut off their utilities if they didn’t settle their debts. The measure was apparently so successful that the company has been moving the outdoor toilet to problem areas of the city for the last couple of months.

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Sixteen brave runners recently gathered in the Russian village of Oymyakon, also known as the world’s pole of cold,  to compete in the coldest official race in history.

Oymyakon is the coldest permanently inhabited place on Earth, with temperatures constantly dropping to under -50 degrees Celsius in winter time. This place is so cold that a person’s unprotected face can suffer frostbite in a matter of seconds, and sometimes the mercury in thermometers freezes. Oymyakon can barely be called inhabitable, let alone suitable for a marathon, and yet at the beginning of this year, 16 runners gathered here to take part in a series of extreme races.

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