Bruno Geyer, a passionate florist from the quaint village of Rougemont Le Chateau , in the Franche-Comté region of France, has been decorating his flower shop with water cans for the last 15 years. He currently has around 800 of them hanging from the walls and roof of his shop, and even covering a nearby hillside.

It’s hard to miss Bruno Geyer’s unique shop when passing through Rougemont Le Chateau. If the colorful flowers and climbing plants outside don’t give it away, the hundreds of hanging water cans definitely will. They are virtually everywhere and make the place look like it came out of an Alice in Wonderland illustrated book. And with new additions being installed every few days, you could say it’s a work in progress.

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When it comes to tasty food, nothing beats grandma’s cooking! Well, except maybe more grandmas cooking in the same kitchen, which is exactly what goes on at Staten Island’s Enoteca Maria, a charming restaurant that employs grandmas from various parts of the world, instead of professional chefs.

Enoteca Maria owner Jody Scaravella says that he came up with the idea of placing grandmothers in a restaurant kitchen about 12 years ago, after suffering a series of tragic losses. His grandmother, his mother and his sister had passed away within a few years of each other, and the idea of having an Italian grandmother in the kitchen just felt comforting to him. He got his first cooks by posting an ad in the paper seeking ‘Italian housewives to cook regional dishes’. “I was still building the restaurant then, so I asked them to come to my place to cook instead — I live in the neighborhood. And they came with dishes, and their husbands and a few grandchildren they were looking after for the day. The whole thing was like a Fellini movie,” Scaravella remembers.

But that was only the beginning. These days, the unique New York restaurant has a rotating staff of grandmothers from around 30 different places around the world, including Palestine, the Czech Republic, Argentina, Nigeria and Algeria. They are known as ‘nonnas’ – Italian for ‘grandmas’ – and take turns in cooking traditional recipes from their respective culture, offering patrons the chance to experience new and exciting dishes virtually every night.

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Faced with a shortage of eligible women back home, China’s successful businessmen are apparently turning their attention to Russia. They are apparently paying thousands of dollars to go on ‘wife tours’ in Siberia, hoping to find the brides of their dreams.

Elena Suvorova, head of a marriage agency in Novosibirsk, Russia’s third largest city, organized the first ‘wife tour’ for six Chinese bachelors last year. The event was apparently a success, with some of the men actually starting relationships with a few of the 25 girls invited to compete for their affection. So this year, Suvorova’s agency, OSD Center, held another wife tour for five Chinese men, aged 25 to 46, who came all the way from Beijing, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Shenzhen, in search for a suitable life partner.

“For them, a Russian woman is like a present,” Elena told the Siberian Times. “Men want to get married, and are committed for serious relationships.”

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Andrew Dyhin, an Australian inventor and founder of the PotatoMagic company, claims that he has spent the last 12 years researching ways of transforming common potatoes into a cheese-like product that is completely dairy-free.

“The product is called chato – cheese potato. It looks like cheese and melts like cheese, but it is nothing but potato,” Dyhin says. While he won’t reveal the exact production process, he says that the potatoes are peeled, liquefied and processed with no added ingredients into a basic product that can be melted, sliced, turned into cubes or mixed with water and other ingredients to make dips, just like cheese. The PotatoMagic founder said that he is confident that chato can become a sustainable plant based alternative to cheese, milk, custard and even ice-cream.

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It’s hard to let go of loved ones, especially when they pass away suddenly. But thanks to rapidly evolving artificial intelligence, you soon may not have to let go. Well, not completely, anyway. Case in point, Eugenia Kuyda, the co-founder and CEO of a Russian artificial intelligence startup called Luka Inc, who recently brought her best friend back to life as an AI chatbot.

Kuyda lost her best friend, fellow tech entrepreneur Roman Mazurenko, in November 2015, but just three months after his tragic car accident, she sent the first text message to his AI personality, Roman. With no grave to visit, because he had been cremated, the young programmer, decided to use every digital memory of him, including photos, news articles and thousands of SMS text messages he had sent to her over the years, and feed them into a neural network to create an AI chatbot that many of those who knew Roman say sounds just like him.

“It was the first death for me. I didn’t know how to react, so as soon as I could I shoved everything as deep inside as possible and tried not to feel anything. Half a year later I can say that it doesn’t go away. In the last couple of months our team at Luka managed to build a dialogue model using smaller datasets on top of a neural net. I put together all texts we sent each other, photos, articles about him and we built a Roman AI,” Kuyda wrote in a Facebook post. “You can text with him about his life or just chat like you normally would – he will reply like Roman would have.”

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Believe it or not, the best answer to your dog’s shedding problem may be a pair of skin-tight leotards. Reminiscent of 1980’s aerobic outfits, the Shed-Defender is a canine leotard that is supposed to keep falling hairs from covering your entire home.

Tyson Walters, founder of Shed Defender, recently revealed  that he came up the idea for the funny-looking leotard after failing to find an effective solution to his own dog’s shedding issue. “I had this huge Saint Bernard, called Harley, and I just couldn’t control her shedding,” he said. No matter how much I brushed and groomed her, she still left tumbleweeds of hair everywhere. I looked around on the internet and dog stores and I couldn’t find a solution to my product, so I decided to make one.”

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For the past 40 years, Ramon Archundia, has dedicated his life to the preservation of Mexico’s endangered iguanas. His magical ‘iguanario’, a reptile sanctuary in the center of Manzanillo city, is now home to 642 iguanas, as well as other wild animal species.

The story of Iguanario Archundia began over four decades ago. Sickened by the plight of iguanas at the hands of man, Ramon Medina Archundia rescued a pair of these majestic reptiles and set up a small enclosure for them in a marshy space in downtown Manzanillo, where two huamúchil trees offered the perfect place for sunbathing. But that was only the beginning, because Ramon and his father Juan, kept bringing in new rescued iguanas, and after word of their small ‘iguanario’ spread around the city and the whole Mexican state of Colima, other people started bringing in iguanas, knowing that they would be well taken care of. Today, Iguanario Archundia is home to over 640 iguanas, as well as other ‘donated’ animals like raccoons, badgers or turtles.

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The male boss of a company in Beijing, China, has recently come under fire for forcing female workers to line up and give him a kiss every morning, claiming that it enhances the corporate culture and improves relations between manager and employees.

Women working at a company that sells home brewery machinery, in Tongzhou District, Beijing, are required to line up between 9:00 and 9:30 each morning to kiss their boss. And we’re not talking about a little, innocent smooch on the cheek, although that would be pretty weird as well, but a kiss on the lips. China Press reports that while the women were initially reluctant to accept the bizarre daily ritual, they eventually gave in to the boss’ demands in order to keep their jobs. Only two of the company’s female workers refused to kiss their boss on the mouth and chose to resign instead. According to Chinese media reports, over half the unnamed company’s staff members are women.

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Shenki Maslani, a 30-year-old Albanian car salesman living in northern Macedonia, has taken on the unofficial name “Shenki Versace” to show off his obsession with the Italian fashion label. Virtually everything he owns has either the Versace name or the company’s iconic Medusa logo on it.

Shenki recently told Macedonian media that he first fell in love with Versace in 2009, and he has spent the last seven years surrounding himself with Versace branded items, from clothing and jewelry to his several luxury cars and even his house. The young car salesman claims that thanks to his lucrative business, he has been able to spend around €1 million ($1.1 million) on his obsession, and has no regrets.

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The two founders of Scottish brewery BrewDog have both legally changed their names to ‘Elvis’ after being threatened with legal action by the Presley Estate over their grapefruit and blood orange IPA, called Elvis Juice.

Formerly known as James Watt and Martin Dickie, the two Elvises sought to prove that their new name is not exclusive, so they went ahead and got their birth names legally changed, by deed poll. In a witty response to the King of Rocks and Roll’s estate, the two write:  “We’re caught in a trap and suggest the grey-suited hound dogs at the Presley Estate recognise that the name Elvis is not exclusive. So in an effort to patch it up, we’ve changed our names to highlight our burning love for the best grapefruit IPA out there. From this point forward, Elvis Juice is named after us, the brewers formerly known as James and Martin. We may even file a case against Mr Presley for using our names on all his records without our written permission.”

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Andy Pope, a Police Community Support Officer for West Midlands Police, in the UK, has come to be known as memory cop, thanks to his incredible photographic memory, which has helped him successfully identify over 850 suspects in the last four years.

Every day,  PCSO Pope arrives at work half an hour early, logs on to his computer, and browses the pictures of suspects in the day’s internal police briefing. He has been doing it even since he joined the West Midlands Police, in 2008, and as his brain stores more faces year-on-year, his record of recognizing bad guys keeps getting better. His exceptional identification skills have made him somewhat of a secret weapon, and when detectives exhaust all other possible options trying to put a name to a suspect’s face, they turn to him.

 

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For the past five years, Akihiko Koseki, has been putting on his bright yellow spandex suit and trademark poo-shaped hat, and going out on the streets of Tokyo to put a smile on people’s faces and teach them to be happier by not giving a crap.

In the beginning, Poop Man was merely a cheap marketing tool. Akihiko Koseki is an experienced mobile game developer who a few years ago came up with an idea for a game called Poo Pride. He had no money to promote it and decided that turning himself into a walking billboard for his game was the cheapest and at the same time most effective way of raising awareness about his game. So he had a yellow spandex suit and poop-shaped hat made, plastered the Poo Pride logo on his chest and started walking around as Poop Man. He’s been doing it for the last five years.

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Cycling enthusiasts in Lidzbark Warminski, a small town in Northern Poland, have recently received a unique, awesome present from the local authorities – a brand new sun-powered bicycle path that glows bright blue all night long.

Scientists at Polish construction company TPA Instytut Badan Technicznych in Pruszkow created the innovative 100-meter bicycle path using luminophores, a synthetic material that lights up when charged with sunlight. According to TPA president Igor Ruttmar, “The material we used for the track gives light for over ten hours. That means the road can radiate throughout the whole night and reaccumulate light the following day”. Apparently, the new material can emit light in a variety of colors, but designers chose blue because it went well with the surroundings in Lidzbark Warminski.

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A man hiking through the woods in Huntington’s Berkeley Jackson County Park recently came across what he described as a creepy ‘shrine to missing persons’ made up of over a dozen missing persons flyers posted on trees, close to the remnants of a shelter.

James Rankin says that he was hiking through the woods in Long Island when he came across the disturbing display. Instead of freaking out, he took out his smartphone and recorded a video which he later posted on Facebook. The footage went viral very quickly, racking up over 230,000 views in less than 24 hours. In the video, Rankin shows all the different missing persons flyers, who appear to be of people from several U.S. states and keeps wondering who in their right mind would do something like this in the middle of the woods. He ends his creepy adventure by running for his life, saying he hears voices in the area.

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Lee Su Jin, a female dentist from South Korea, is a very strong contender for the title of world’s youngest-looking 48-year-old. Judging by the photos posted on her online social media accounts, you’d think she was a beautiful college girl, but the woman recently revealed that she was born in 1969 and has been practicing dentistry for 16 years.

Lee became an overnight celebrity after appearing on a Korean TV show called ‘Same Bed, Different Dreams’, alongside her daughter. The girls claimed that her mother had become addicted to taking selfies and posting them on Instagram, where she had amassed thousands of loyal followers. It was later revealed that the 48-year-old dentist had turned to the popular social network in her need for social interaction, because her daughter had stopped talking to her after starting middle school. She enjoyed all the attention she got from other people online, and kept posting more and more photos of herself.

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