3D-printed homes aren’t exactly new, but the rapid progress made in this new industry never cease to amaze us here at Oddity Central. Earlier this year we wrote about a Chinese company that used a specially designed 3D printer to create large ec0-friendly housing in record time. Another construction company has now perfected the process, making it possible to assemble a fully functional home in just three hours!

The revolutionary new technology was developed by Zhuoda Group, in Xi’an, central China. On July 17, they put up a two-storey sample villa built from pre-constructed components that were printed in a factory and later lifted into place using a crane. The instant villas cost only about 3,500 yuan ($564) per square meter, which is far lower than the current industry standard.

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Believe it or not, the villagers of Hokse, Nepal, are so poor that they’re forced to sell their own organs in order to make ends meet. The practice is so common there that the place has been nicknamed ‘Kidney Village’.

Organ brokers regularly visit the village and its surrounding areas and convince cash-strapped locals to part with one of their healthy kidneys. These agents are notorious for tricking innocent villagers into traveling to Southern India to have their operations. They cook up all sorts of tales, telling the poor villagers that humans only need one kidney for survival or that the organ, once removed, will grow back! That particular trick was used to fool Geetha, a mother-of-four who sold her kidney for only $2,000.

“For ten years people came to our village trying to convince us to sell our kidneys but I always said no,” Geetha said. But as her family grew, her desire to provide them with a house got stronger. “I have always wanted my own house and a piece of land, and with more children, I really needed it.” So she traveled with her sister-in-law, an organ broker, to India, and underwent the operation.

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Slugs are not what you’d normally call “cute” creatures, but the Jorunna Parva species is an exception. These marine slugs bear a striking resemblance to small rabbits, which has recently earned them the nickname ‘sea bunnies’.

Jorunna parva slugs were discovered by Japanese malacologist Kikutaro Baba in 1938, but the rest of the world has only become aware of their irresistible cuteness last year, when footage from a Japanese diving school was released online. The clip, featuring parva off the coast of Japan, has gone viral on the internet and people all over the world are going ga-ga over the adorable underwater creatures.

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The Yipao is a unique annual tradition in Colombia’s Coffee Triangle dedicated to the Willys Jeeps, the iconic American car the locals have been relying on since the 1940s.

For the people of Quindío district, Jeeps have been a source of livelihood and a significant part of daily life since the 1940s. The unpaved roads of the coffee mountains are filled with Jeeps that transport people and their belongings – including piles of coffee bags, livestock, harvested produce, and more. When families have to relocate, they often pile all their belongings onto one Jeep and move in a single trip.

Jeeps are such an integral part of life that they’re fondly known in Spanish as ‘mulitas mécanicas (mechanical mules). The country’s farmers use them to get to places that were previously accessible only by riding pack animals. Given how deeply Jeeps have impacted the life of locals, it’s only befitting that they pay homage to the vehicle during the annual Yipao parade.

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Every year, during the rainy season, trillions of midges – small flies – rise from the water of Lake Victoria, in Africa, and fly in giant swarms that are said to be so dense they can suffocate a person. However, for the people living on the shores of the great lake, they are just a welcome source of protein.

Some bird species migrate to Lake Victoria during the rainy season so they can take advantage of this free feast. The flies create a sort of constantly buzzing living smog and cover every available surface as they break off from their mating ritual. But no matter how many of them are gobbled up by birds and other natural predators, there are always more than enough for the locals. As disgusting as eating flies may seem, the reality is they make up a huge quantity of biomass equivalent with large herds of big game. People living on the shores of Lake Victoria simply can’t ignore the nutritious protein flying all around them, so they catch the flies and cook them as charcoal-black fly burgers.

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Chinese surgeons recently performed a bizarre surgery in order to save a man’s severed hand. They grafted it on to his ankle for a month, before reattaching it to his arm!

The innovative surgery was carried out on factory worker Zhou, from Changsha, China’s Hunan province. Zhou’s left hand was accidentally severed from his arm during an accident involving a spinning blade machine. He was immediately rushed to Xiangya Hospital, where Dr. Tang Juyu and his team realised that the damaged nerves and tendons needed time to heal. If they tried to attach the hand to his arm immediately, its cells would die from lack of blood supply.

“Under normal temperatures, a severed finger needs to resume blood supply within 10 hours, but that time is even shorter for a separated limb,” Tang explained. “If a limb is short of blood for too long, its tissues die and it will be unsalvageable.” Read More »

Armed with an X-acto knife and a pair of tweezers, Korean artist Yoo Hyun carves intricate, highly realistic portraits of celebrities. His paper-cut portraits look like abstract designs from up-close, but at a distance, the thin slits reveal the faces of movie stars, world leaders, and musicians.

Hyun’s signature style consists of zig-zag patterns, but he doesn’t carve in straight lines. Instead, he varies the thickness of each strip, to create facial features and expressions. Each line specifically adds to the three-dimensional illusion. The negative spaces are see-through, so layering the portrait over a colored surface or pattern adds even more depth. He mostly chooses a black ink-splattered surface, but sometimes he uses bold colors like blue and red to illuminate the portraits.

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Modern technology doesn’t exactly go hand in hand with witchcraft, but that doesn’t seem to be stopping Silicon Valley companies from employing the services of a Wiccan witch to help them deal with hackers, computer viruses and demonic possessions.

Reverend Joey Talley is a witch of the Wicca faith with more than four decades of experience in dealing with the occult and three master’s degrees under her belt. Based in Marin County, just outside Silicone Valley, the Wiccan witch is the-go-to person for computer programmers, software designers, and engineers facing problems that they feel are supernatural in nature. The fact that Talley has absolutely no background in technology or IT, or that she often refers to the tech industry as the “techno industry” doesn’t bother them one bit.

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In an effort to brighten up the image of undertaking, a profession often regarded as joyless, a German online portal for burial price comparisons recently held a unique beauty contest for female undertakers. 36-year-old Rachel Merks got the most votes and was pronounced Miss Farewell.

Merks, who runs an undertaking firm with her husband, in Lachheim, Baden-Württemberg, said she first heard about the Miss Farewell beauty contest from her brother-in-law. Intrigued by the idea, she submitted a few photos of herself along with a short description. Little did Rachel know that she would actually beat 46 other female undertakers from all over Germany and win the coveted title of Germany’s most beautiful undertaker. “It is wonderful to show this depressing taboo theme in another light for once,” the proud winner said.

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Researchers at Oregon State University have made the mother of all discoveries – they’ve recently patented a strain of seaweed that’s not only rich in protein, but tastes remarkably like delicious bacon when cooked.

Dulse (Palmaria sp.) is a red marine algae that grows along the Pacific and Atlantic coastlines and is sold for up to $90 a pound in dried form as a cooking ingredient or dietary supplement. However, Chris Langdon and his colleagues at Oregon State University have patented a new strain of dulse that’s bound to revolutionize the health food industry. Not only is it an excellent source of minerals, vitamins and antioxidants and contains up to 16 percent protein in dry weight, but it actually tastes amazing. How amazing? Bacon amazing, according to Langdon.

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Chen Yinxi, a 27-year-old motorist from China, stole the show at the 2015 Hainan International Automotive Industry Exhibition, last week, with an impressive-looking futuristic supercar he built by himself, from scratch.

Majoring in automobile engineering, Chen has always dreamed of doing car design, and spent two years studying it in school. However, his parents always had other plans – their son was to work in the family factory, which he will one day inherit from his father. They encouraged him to drop out of college to work at the factory, but have remained supportive of him working on car design as a hobby. Now that the young motorist has gained international attention for building an original-looking supercar by himself, their plans may have to change.

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Constantly having to look at your cat’s butt comes with the territory when you’e a pet owner. Luckily, however, now you don’t have to, thanks to a little accessory called Twinkle Tush.

Some people are apparently put off by the sight of a cat’s bare derriere, but now you can just cover that sucker up with some fake bling. Introducing the Twinkle Tush, a plastic jewel that hangs around the base of the feline’s tail and covers its butt. It was introduced to the world on July 8th, when the makers of Cat Crib, a cat hammock that attaches to chair legs, released a video of felines wearing the Twinkle Tush.Cats are usually don’t like it when you mess with their tales and will do anything to remove whatever you attach to them, but they seemed oddly comfortable wearing this concealing piece of plastic.

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The Epinard Nasu Hotel, in Japan’s Tochigi Prefecture, offers a highly unconventional wedding service – newlyweds can rent a cute, fluffy alpaca from a nearby zoo to act as a witness to their wedding.

No one really knows when the hotel started using alpacas to attract customers, or how they came up with the unique idea, but judging from the number of photos happy newlyweds have been posting on Japanese social media lately, it’s definitely becoming popular. It’s not that alpacas are good luck charms, nor are they part of some obscure Japanese ritual, they’re just cute and a sure way to make a wedding memorable.

The alpacas are escorted down the aisle by a professional trainer who makes sure they are on their best behavior during the wedding ceremony. Still, somethings not even the most experienced trainers can prevent, so if you smell something funny during the proceedings, just ignore it. Usually they just stand there as the newlyweds exchange vows and declare their love for each other, kind of like human witnesses do.

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When you think “kawaii” and “J-pop” the first image that comes into your head is probably not of a fit, hairy Caucasian dude wearing pony tails and tiny women’s clothes. Which is exactly what makes “Ladybeard” so unique and popular in Japan.

Richard Magarey hails from the Australian city of Adelaide, but moved to Hong Kong in 2006 to pursue a career in martial arts stunt career. Drama had been the only thing he was good at in school, and because he also practiced martial arts, he decided to pursue a career as a stunt actor. He worked as ‘Mirrorball Man’ for a while, a persona that required him to put on a giant mirror ball, go to clubs and get patrons grooving to dance music. As weird as that may sound, Magarey claims the gig changed his notion of what a performance could be. “I was in a costume and environment that stripped me of my usual physical, vocal and emotional expression,” he said, in an interview with Japan Today.

But it wasn’t until he got involved in wrestling and adopted a truly bizarre persona that the Australian entertainer discovered what destiny had in store for him. After training in a wrestling gym for over two months, Richard showed up for his first match wearing a skimpy Lolita dress and his hair tied in two childish ponytails. He still had his fuzzy beard and hadn’t bothered to shave his hairy body either. He remembers sitting backstage and thinking to himself “What am I doing? I’m wearing a dress, about to go do this thing that I’ve been doing for two months, in front of a bunch of people. What is wrong with me? Why did I make this decision?” But he eventually did it anyway, and everyone loved it. Ladybeard was born that night, and the rest, as they say, is history.

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A video of a piece of beef twitching as if it were alive has been doing the rounds online for the last two weeks creeping out viewers and even turning some of them into vegetarians.

Chinese meat has been getting a lot of news coverage lately. Just last week we reported about the now-famous “zombie meat” – cheap meat as old as 40 years smuggled into the country and sold to small restaurants – and these days everyone’s talking about “Frankenstein meat”. Luckily, this one is actually safe for human consumption, although it looks arguably creepier than zombie meat.

So what’s this all about, then? Around two weeks ago, Cheng Tan, a woman from Shandong Province, China, bought a piece of fresh meat, and just as she was getting ready to slice it on her kitchen table, she noticed it was moving. She quickly reached for her smartphone, recorded a video of the creepy twitching meat and posted it online. The minute-long clip was viewed tens of millions of times on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter and eventually found its way onto Western websites, where it went viral again.

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