A bizarre men’s toilet at a restaurant in Taiyuan city, in northern China’s Shanxi province, has a trio of realistic female mannequins placed behind the urinals. The weird arrangement has men standing face-to-face with these scantily-clad dolls while relieving themselves!

Predictably, several of the restaurant’s male customers have expressed discomfort with the toilet setup. They complained that they weren’t able to urinate because of the “sexy” models were staring at them.

“I walked back out again when I saw the women there because I thought at first I was in the wrong place, but then I realised it was the proper place and I tried to relieve myself, it just didn’t work,” said 24-year-old customer Sun Kao. “It was very off-putting having a good-looking woman even if it was a plastic one apparently staring at me as I tried to do my business.”

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Seattle-based Bridget Beth Collins mixes her love of nature with her interest in art to create stunning collages out of colorful flower petals, leaves, twigs and whatever plant materials she can get her hands on.

Collins, gathers materials for her collages from the areas surrounding her home in Ravenna, in Seattle. She then arranges the pieces into intricate shapes, using the natural colors to create a sense of depth. Through her intrinsic understanding or color and texture, she is able to transform flower petals into feathered birds, berries into sea creatures, and leaves into human faces.

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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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If you happen to be cruising along County Road 400, in Johnson County, Indiana, you’re bound to stumble upon one of America’s strangest landmarks – a grave located dead in the middle of the road.

The grave apparently dates back to before Amity village even had a paved road. In 1831, a 37-year-old woman named Nancy Kerlin died in the area, survived by her husband and 11 children. Keeping with her wishes, her husband William Barnett buried her at her favorite spot on a small hill, overlooking Sugar Creek. While road crews generally tend to flatten out such obstructions, in this case, they made sure to pour the asphalt around the grave. Why? Because they were terrified!

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San Francisco-based rock band ‘ArnoCorps’ is the world’s first musical group to feature lyrics that are based exclusively on the films of Arnold Schwarzenegger. The lyrics mainly parallel movie dialogs and plots from Arnold’s action flicks in the 1980s, like The Terminator, Predator and Total Recall.

ArnoCorps is generally regarded as the pioneer of Action-Adventure Hardcore Rock and Roll. Founded in 2001, the group consists of six members who look like highly-trained militant Austrian action-rock heros. Each member has a pseudonym and a heroic backstory. At every performance, they are clothed in combat fatigues and camouflage paint, and they address the audience in ‘ballsy’ accents.

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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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Nepalese eye doctor Sanduk Ruit is being hailed as a miracle worker – he has single-handedly managed to restore the eyesight of over 100,000 people across two continents. All it takes him is a simple, five-minute procedure!

According to WHO statistics, 90 percent of the world’s blind population live in low-income areas, and 80 percent suffer from easily treatable conditions. But because of poverty and limited access to public health services, they are unable to seek treatment. Sanduk Ruit, driven by a belief that the world’s poorest people deserve high-quality eye care, has made it his life’s mission to treat such people. So he devised a quick five-minute technique that enables large droves of patients to be treated in a short period of time.

His genius technique involves making a small incision in the patient’s eye through which the cloudy cataract impairing the vision is removed. He then replaces it with an inexpensive artificial lens. He offers this surgery to scores of poor patients all over the world, and also teaches it to countless eye surgeons in the hope of curing as many blind people as possible.

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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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51-year-old German artist Ragna Reusch-Klinkenberg is an expert at carving miniscule figures out of toothpicks and pencil tips that are so tiny you need a magnifying glass to actually see them properly! Some of Ragna’s figurines include animals like cats and giraffes, inanimate objects like toothbrushes, and even famous politicians.

Ragna, who holds a degree in graphic design, says her real passion lies in working with wood. She’s been passionate about carving since her childhood. She started carving erasers at school using small forks and later moved on to carving wooden clothespins and selling the miniatures she made at craft markets.

“Once I had forgotten my clothespin blanks, but I found a toothpick in my pocket,” she recalled. So she tried working with it, and fell in love right away.

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Given the fact that pigs are mostly raised for slaughter, it seems rather pointless and cruel to spend hours inking them with intricate tattoos. But believe it or not, tattooed pig skins are actually fetching a handsome price in China – up to $70,000 per hide!

These special pigs are inked under anaesthesia, with a variety of designs including Disney characters, Louis Vuitton logos, and even patterns that are popular with Russian prison inmates. Three artists work simultaneously on each pig, and their skin is later massaged and moisturised by carers. Once the pigs reach the end of their lives, their skins are sold to collectors for tens of thousands of dollars. One canvas featuring Disney characters, for example, was sold to Chanel and made into two bags.

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Cheating at exams is an age-old phenomenon, but the practice literally scaled new heights last week in the eastern Indian state of Bihar. News reports showed how parents and relatives of 10th-grade students climbing the walls of a school building to hand cheat sheets to the students taking their year-end exams inside!

Photographs and videos of the stupefying event went viral in India, even as police officers stood watching helplessly. Some videos also showed inspectors slapping young students as they pulled out cheat sheets from under their tables. It seems that several students were able to smuggle textbooks and notes into the exam centers despite tight security.

Cheating is apparently common in rural areas of the state, where the competition is fierce and opportunities are few. Just last month, dozens of 12th-grade students were expelled and parents detained in cases of cheating. But the sight of parents risking their life and limb to help their kids has truly shocked the nation.

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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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