Meet Olivia Farnsworth, a British girl who doesn’t feel any pain and never feels the need to eat or sleep. At age seven, she’s able to go for days without sleeping and eating, and comes away from terrible injuries with nonchalance. In fact, she was recently run over and dragged down the street by a car, but she casually walked away from the accident without shedding a tear!

Olivia has doctors baffled. They know she suffers from a condition caused by something called chromosome 6 deletion, but this is the first time they’ve witnessed anyone displaying three rare symptoms at once. According to her mother Niki Trepak, the little girl has no sense of danger because she literally cannot feel pain, and neither does she feel the need to sleep or eat. Her doctors have nicknamed her ‘bionic girl’, while her mother says she’s “made of steel.”

“She got run over and dragged down the street by a car and she didn’t complain,” Niki said, shortly after the accident. “It was horrendous, I don’t think it’s something I will ever get over. I was screaming and all my other children were screaming as she ran out. But Olivia was just like, ‘What’s going on?’ She just got up and started walking back to me.”

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When Sally Bourne Interiors, a posh shop in Muswell Hill, London, decided to paint a few firewood logs for their Christmas window display, they had no idea they were actually creating the latest decor trend that would sell out in just a few days’ time. Believe it or not, they ended up selling about 60 logs of painted wood at £10 ($14) apiece!

“They were used as a window display over the Christmas period, but then we got lots of people asking if they could buy them when that finished,” the store manager said. “We didn’t want to throw them away so we decided to sell them as people thought they could make stools and side tables out of them. We had about 50 or 60 logs in total and most of them were the large ones, which were a good 50cm circumference.”

The logs were apparently sold out last Thursday, with the last one going at a whopping £30 ($40).

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For most people, the cinema experience is simply incomplete without a bag of crunchy popcorn, but believe it or not, there’s actually a guy trying to get popcorn banned in movie theaters.

Mike Shotton, from Newcastle, England, says that he’s never been able to enjoy himself at the theater because his experience is always ruined by having to put up with people chomping on popcorn. His patience finally snapped when he went to watch the newly released Star Wars movie as he just couldn’t get over children rustling and chowing down on popcorn.

“The noise is something that’s always bothered me, ever since I was a little kid,” Shotton said. “I’m the kind of person that if I hear something in the background, I focus on that until that’s all I can hear. But it was the popcorn noise ruining Star Wars that really did it for me. I was really looking forward to that film. I couldn’t believe the amount of noise during the film – it completely ruined it for me.”

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An anonymous blogger from Brooklyn has become an internet sensation for fearlessly documenting her bizarre fixation with bread. This woman films herself as she plunges her face into different types of bread, and posts the footage on her Instagram page, ‘Bread Face Blog’. The tagline reads: “Bread Face – giving the people something they didn’t ask for.”

Bread Face hasn’t revealed her name, but we do know that she’s 27 years old and works as a copywriter by day. With over 40,000 Instagram followers and thousands of likes on each video, her bizarre bread smashing habit has managed to catch the attention of various magazines like Buzzfeed, Vice’s Munchies, and The New York Times. Obviously, they’ve all had one common question to ask her: Why is she doing this?

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John Kennedy Brown, a sculptor from Wales, transforms scrap metal into incredibly realistic models of birds, insects, animals, and reptiles. As you can see in the photos below, he is really good at welding together discarded metal parts like nails and bicycle chains to depict delicate anatomical features. He then paints them in the likeness of various species like Holly Blue and red Red Admiral butterflies.  

On his Etsy profile page, Brown reveals that the inspiration for his art comes from having lived in rural West Wales for the past eight years. The valleys are so steep sided in his neighborhood that the native wildlife is naturally protected from modern farming and industrialization.

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‘Wingboarding’ is a new type of adventure sport that will soon be made available to thrill-mongers around the world. Developed by Wyp Aviation, a startup company trying to “take aviation to the next level”, the WingBoard provides riders with a stable platform that flies through the air rather than falling towards the ground.

It’s sort of a cross between skysurfing and wakeboarding and involves surfing through the sky on a board while being towed by a plane. The daredevil stunt is meant to emulate the comic book superhero Silver Surfer, who can travel through space on his surfboard-shaped craft. “The WingBoard is like a wakeboard, but instead of slicing through waves behind a boat, you’re being towed by a plane, carving through clouds,” said founder and lead engineer Aaron Wypyszynski.

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The story of a woman’s revenge on her ex-boyfriend and his family has gone viral on Chinese social media. After getting dumped because of her weight, the woman from Henan province proceeded to remove all her excess fat through liposuction and used some of that fat to create a bar of soap. She now plans to avenge herself by sending it as a gift to her ex’s mother.

The woman, who goes by the online name ‘Xiao Xiao loves beauty and eating’, posted a photograph of herself holding the unique bar of soap on Weibo on January 7, along with a scathing message. “Yang Xiaolei, do you still remember last Spring Festival?” she wrote. “Since I can’t accompany you to go home this year, I used my own fat to make a soap and give it to your mother for bathing. Spring Festival is a time to give a gift to those low-class men who judge women by appearance.”

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Up until August 2006, the tallest known tree in the world was a 369-foot California redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) nicknamed ‘Stratosphere Giant’, located somewhere in the Humboldt Redwoods State Park in California. To give you some idea about its massive size, that’s twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, minus the foundation.

But the Giant lost its status when two naturalists, Chris Atkins and Michael Taylor, stumbled upon group of trees in California’s Redwood National Park that were taller than any they’d ever seen before. They made preliminary measurements using professional laser equipment based on goniometry, and found not one, not two, but three trees that were taller than the Stratosphere Giant.

The tallest of the lot, named Hyperion, was found to be a good 10ft taller than the Giant, standing at a whopping a 379 ft. When Atkins and Taylor announced their discovery, a team of scientists led by Humboldt State University ecologist Steve Sillett arrived at the park to measure it again in September 2006. They were aiming for more accuracy, so they actually used a tape this time. They actually climbed to its very top and dropped the tape to the ground. The epic stunt was filmed for National Geographic.  

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The residents of Hiware Bazar, a remote village in the Ahmednagar district of the state of Maharashtra, India have managed to turn their fortune around in the span of just a few years – they’ve gone from being a drought-stricken populace in the mid-1990s to the richest village in the nation today. Their story is a truly inspiring one.

Hiware Bazar currently boasts of having the highest GDP among all the villages in India. Its 1,250-strong population enjoys an average income of INR 30,000 ($450) per month, also highest in the nation, up from a paltry INR 830 in 1995. 60 of the 235 families in the village are millionaires. Every year, their fields yield bountiful crops of millets, onions, and potatoes that make it hard to imagine that only a few years ago they were barren stretches of land that no one cared about.

Yet, up until the mid 90’s, Hiware Bazar was indeed a poverty-stricken village reeling in the aftermath of a severe drought in 1972. “The peace was shattered,” recalls Raosaheb Rauji Panwar, an 82-year-old villager. “People became irritable and restless as the struggle to stay alive became severe. Petty reasons were enough to trigger-off bitter quarrels, as there was so much despair and frustration. Villagers started consuming liquor and it added to our ruin.”

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In a bid to de-stress and break free from the tensions of daily life, Japanese students and professionals are taking to a bizarre trend called ‘Zentai’. It’s a community consisting of people of all ages and walks of life, donning full-body lycra suits and meeting on internet forums, in clubs, at barbecue parties, and sometimes just on the street.

It’s ironical, but the tight suits are actually able to help stressed individuals loosen up, because such behavior is probably frowned upon in genteel circles. Many of the Zentai perceive the trend as a welcome break from the pressures of living in Japanese society that values conformity to tradition over individual desires.

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A majestic new attraction at the Fortune Plaza Times Square in Wuhan, the capital of China’s Hubei Province, is being hailed as one of the city’s swankiest landmarks.

The massive redwood lion was carved out of a single giant tree trunk by renowned sculptor Dengding Rui Yao and a team of 20 sculptors in Myanmar, over a period of three years. Once complete, it was transported 5,000 kilometers, arriving in China in December 2015. At 14.5m long, 5m high, and 4m wide, the ‘Oriental Lion’ now holds the Guinness Record for the world’s largest redwood sculpture.

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Cutting hair can be a boring, repetitive task, but this globetrotting Russian hairdresser has found a unique way to add some zest to his job. Denis Yushin calls himself a ‘motobarber’, giving extreme haircuts as he rides his motorcycle across the globe.

It all started last year, when Yushin announced that he would be touring the world for six years, leaving behind his wife and five-year-old daughter in his hometown of Krasnoyarsk. His plan was to fund the trip by giving people haircuts along the way, and it’s been working very well for him so far. He’s been riding a special motorbike across international borders, equipped with special pockets and power sockets for his hair-dressing equipment. These are really important because Denis has to give plenty of haircuts in exchange for fuel, food, and thrilling experiences.

As a close friend put it: “He’s passionate about hairdressing, travelling, and his motorbike. Some may think he’s bonkers leaving his wife and daughter for six years, but they understand.” Yushin’s daughter will be 11 years old when he sees her next.

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In search of a simpler life, a corporate honcho from Australia decided to give up his career and become a caveman. But not before spending an eye-watering £160,000 ($230,848) to renovate a 250-million-year-old cave in England to suit his tastes!

Angelo Mastropietro, 38, was inspired to make the change after he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2007. The condition led him to become temporarily paralyzed, and he spent that time reflecting on the things that really mattered to him.

“My life before I became a caveman was really quite different,” the former recruitment boss said. “Like most people I had aspirations to work in the corporate world. I had a lapse that left me essentially paralysed, which was a catalyst to review where I was, where I was going with my lifestyle. I wanted to be in a place where I had a happier and healthier life.”

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Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood is home to a mysterious restaurant that serves delicious home-cooked Caribbean Food through a hole in the wall. That’s actually what the owner, a man named Papa who moved to Brooklyn from Jamaica eight years ago, and his patrons call the unique eatery.

The name ‘Hole in the Wall’ isn’t just clever wordplay, it’s as literal as it gets – from the outside, the restaurant is just a rectangular hole cut out from a storefront grate located on Kingston Avenue. There’s no sign, no hours, no menu, and not even a door to walk through. Papa simply opens up the hole each morning when the food is ready, and closes it when the stock for the day is sold out. His Caribbean dishes are fresh, tasty, and best of all, free from sales tax.

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Meet Yoshinari Nakamatsu, aka Dr. NakaMats, a prolific inventor and Japan’s very own ‘Patent King’. With over 3,500 patents to his name, the 87-year-old had no plans to retire – his dream was to live to the ripe old age of 144 and eventually produce at least 6,000 patents. Sadly, there’s a serious obstacle to that goal now – he’s been diagnosed with terminal cancer and isn’t expected to be around much longer.

But the eccentric mastermind and self-professed polymath doesn’t plan on going down without a fight. He’s been spending his last days doing the one thing he does best – inventing. Best known for licensing the floppy disk to IBM corporation in the 1970s, Dr. NakaMats has spent the past two years trying to invent a cure for his deadly disease.

The rare ductal prostate cancer was discovered in 2013, and his doctors told him he only had around two years left. However, Nakamatsu has been fortunate to make it into 2016 and he is still “investigating all kinds of therapy so people could live longer.” He is determined to continue doing so until the very end. “I’m going to discover a new treatment,” he asserted in a 2014 interview.

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