Most people are happy to use regular, homemade ice cubes in their drinks. But there is actually such a thing as a perfect, ‘luxury’ ice cube, available to those who can afford it. It is supposed be healthier and last longer than those measly chunks of ice we have lying around in our freezers.

The concept of healthy ice, I must say, sounds ridiculous. And so does the price – a whopping $325.50 for a bag of 50 cubes. That sure is a lot of money for frozen water, don’t you think? But according to the manufacturers, Gläce Luxury Ice Co, these cubes are definitely worth the dough, because they provide ‘minimum dilution and maximum cooling’. Their luxury ice is also tasteless, which allows consumers to ‘maximise the beverage experience’ at high profile parties and events.

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The northern clingfish is a species of salt-water fish that truly lives up to its name. The remarkably strong fish has such high suction powers that it can pick up and hold on to stuff that’s almost 300 times its own body weight. It can easily outperform all sorts of man-made suction cups. Scientists are now actively studying the fish so they can mimic its design and create a new class of suction devices.

There are currently around 160 known varieties of clingfish in the world, each with its own unique characteristics. There’s a tiny one that sticks itself to the individual spines of sea urchins, a deep-sea variety with not much of a sucker, and a giant one that’s about the size of your forearm. One of the most well-known varieties is the northern clingfish, thanks to studies conducted by biologist and researcher Adam Summers, from the University of Washington.

Native to the Pacific Coast of North America, the northern clingfish lives in rocky intertidal environments, where strong waves and currents can toss them out at any moment. In order to survive in its natural habitat, the clingfish has evolved an adhesion disc that covers about a quarter of its belly. Using this disc, it can stick on to almost any surfaces.

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For the past 25 years, Mani Manithan has been walking backwards in a bizarre bid to achieve world peace. He started in 1989, after a string of violent incidents in his home country India shocked him. Now he says that he’s gotten so used to it that he couldn’t walk straight even if he wanted to!

Manithan sells mobile phones for a living in Agraharam village, in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Since June 14, 1989, he has been breaking various records in walking backwards – all in an effort to achieve world peace. One of his very first acts after taking his vow was to walk backwards 300 miles,  naked, all the way from his village to Chennai city.

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Jay Freestyle, a South African tattoo artist based in Amsterdam, creates incredible, ethereal tattoos. And here’s the surprising bit – he works without a plan. It’s impossible to tell by looking at his work, but the 29-year-old inks freehand, making it all up as he goes. He works with only one motto: “Give me a piece of your skin and I’ll give you a piece of my soul.”

It doesn’t matter how many ideas you have in your head about your tattoo before you visit Jay. Once you speak to him and realize what he can do, you’re just going to turn around and say ‘Go for it, I trust you blindly’. So far, he has never disappointed a single client.

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When 80-year-old Ruan Tang had retired, around 14 years ago, she wanted to spend her time doing something useful for her community. And when she realized how much the flies were bothering people during the summer, she decided to do something about it. Tang is now a woman on a mission – to swat as many pesky flies as possible.

“I decided that killing flies was the best way for me to be useful – and I’ve been doing it now every day since,” she said. Tang, who belongs to the Changmingsixiang Community in eastern China’s Hangzhou City, has made it her full-time hobby – for the past 14 years she has spent eight hours a day, seven days a week, killing flies.

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It’s quite common these days for employees to get fired over their social media activity. Despite privacy settings, it’s amazing how many people manage to lose their jobs over ridiculous things they post online. And it’s not just about losing a job, it’s about getting one too – prospective employers just won’t consider candidates without scrutinizing their online profiles first.

Well, the job market sure is tough, but  there do exist a few kind souls who believe that our social lives and professional lives should be kept separate by law. Like Brian Zulberti, a Delaware lawyer who is currently on a hunger strike to raise awareness about this issue. He’s actually posted a number of naked photos of himself online, in the past, and he wants the right to keep doing things like that it without it affecting his professional career.

“This is about privacy and the advancement of technology,” said Zulberti. “Soon it will be the total informative age, privacy out the window. The best we can do is adapt the law to the future now so we don’t turn into 1984, George Orwell style.”

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It looks like a large drop of water, but it’s actually a cake. This Japanese invention is as delicate as it looks and sounds, but it needs to be consumed in only 30 minutes, after which it will simply turn into a sweet puddle of water.

The water cake looks like a large bowl of jelly without the color, but its makers insist that it’s cake. The strange dish is a variation of the well-known Japanese rice-cake confection, shingen mochi. Mochis are trademarked desserts, only created by the Kinseiken Seika Company. A regular type of shingen mochi is made from a particularly soft type of mochi rice cake, sprinkled with kinako soybean powder and eaten with brown sugar syrup. Traditionally, it is yellow in color, with a sticky and soft jelly-like consistency.

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25-year-old Ryosuke Ohtake is a master craftsman who recently tried his hand at ‘jizai okimono’ – the Japanese art of carving realistic wooden animals, complete with movable joints. He created a near-perfect lobster entirely out of boxwood. The sculpture is so life-like that when lifted, its claws, legs and tail move in the exact same way that a real, live lobster would.

A three-minute video clip that shows Ohtake working on the lobster with his various sculpting tools and blocks of wood, has become very popular online. In the video, he lifts the finished sculpture in his hands and shows exactly how each part moves. The details are simply mind-blowing.

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 The Great Horror Campout is a camping experience unlike any other. It’s basically the camping trip of your nightmares packed into a single night of spine-chilling fun, and it’s definitely not for the feint of heart

The horror campout is the latest project from Ten Thirty One Productions, the companythat previously created The Los Angeles Haunted Hayride. According to their official website, “The Great Horror Campout is a 12-hour overnight interactive horror camping adventure.

The scary stuff begins at 8 pm and continues uninterrupted until 8 am the next day. During this time, campers are welcome to sleep, but they might experience ‘erratic interruptions’. The event comes with a disclaimer: “During Great Horror Campout, you may be forcibly handled, moved, bound, hooded, chained and subjected to simulated torture by our actors. You may witness strong verbal content, which may be considered offensive in nature. The content is part of the experience and is presented for entertainment purposes only.”

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A Chinese tourist from Shenyang city, in Liaoning Province, known only as ‘Mr. Zhang’, is currently stranded in Korea for a very bizarre reason – his four -year-old son doodled on his passport! The two were on a short father-son bonding trip to Korea, organized by a local hospital, but had to extend their stay after custom officials denied the dad passage due to his doodled passport photo.

This is really serious business for Mr. Zhang, but this story had me laughing out loud, especially after seeing pictures of what the kid did with his dad’s passport. The little tyke apparently didn’t realize that it was an important document, and used it as a sketchbook. He drew animals, clouds, plants, people and unintelligible doodles all over the passport, and even ‘improved’ his dad’s photograph with a mustache and beard.

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Yangsi, a remote village in southwest China’s Sichuan Province, has baffling scientists for decades. Around 40 percent of its inhabitants are several heads shorter than the average human being. 36 of the village’s 80 residents are dwarfs – the tallest one is about 3 ft. 10 inches tall and the shortest, 2 ft. 1 inch. That’s too large a percentage to be categorized as random occurrence, but so far no one has been able to provide a better explanation.

Today, because of the large number of height-challenged residents, Yangsi is known as the ‘Village of Dwarfs’. According to village elders, their peaceful, happy life was ruined on a summer night many years ago, when a vile disease struck the region. Several locals suffered from a mysterious condition that mainly affected young children between the ages of 5 and 7. These children just stopped growing, remaining at the same height for the rest of their lives. Apart from their inability to grow taller, some of the victims also suffered from various disabilities.

Scientists and experts visited Yangsi, to study the water, soil, and grain in the region. They also examined the affected individuals in the hopes of gathering a few clues. However, they were unable to determine the cause behind the condition. It remains as mysterious today, as it was some 60-odd years ago.

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If you have access to a clean toilet at your workplace, you’ll probably appreciate it a lot more after reading this. We usually take common things like toilets for granted, without once thinking about how luck we are! Bus conductors in Bangkok, Thailand, don’t even get toilet breaks – they wear adult diapers instead, and are forced to answer nature’s call on the job.

That might sound gross, but it’s actually kind of sad. The story is the same in several parts of Thailand – blue collar workers aren’t even provided with basic amenities. Bus conductors have it the worst – without any work breaks to tend to their physiological needs, they have to wear adult diapers all day long . It’s no laughing matter – the diapers are actually making them ill.

One of those affected is Watcharee Viriya, a conductor who developed urinary tract infection because she spent several hours away from a restroom. So she started wearing diapers, which only made matters worse. “It was uncomfortable when I moved, especially when I urinated inside,” she said.

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Not all forms of wall graffiti are acceptable – most are viewed as vandalism. But in the case of French street artist Patrick Commecy, homeowners actually invite him to paint on their walls. Along with his team of muralists, he transforms boring, dull patches of wall into vibrant scenes, full of life. In fact unless you have a ‘before’ picture, you might not even realize it’s a painting.

Patrick and his team travel across France, painting hyper-realistic windows and balconies on bare walls that resemble the rest of the building. They dress up these painted windows with plants, birds and sometimes even rocks and waterfalls. It all looks so real that it’s confusing for a moment – it’s hard to tell the difference between a real tree and the painted one.

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As much as I hate packing, I do think this is overdoing it a bit – some rich mothers in New York are actually hiring professional organizers to pack their kids’ trunks for summer camp. Believe it or not, each bag takes a whopping four hours to pack and costs no less than $250 per hour.

So what exactly goes into a bag that needs four hours of packing, you ask? Well, the idea is to fit in all the comforts of home in the luggage, including scented candles, delicate soap and 1,000-thread count sheets (nope, not kidding).

According to Barbara Reich of Resourceful Consultants, several mothers have approached her to do the job. “For a lot of mothers, particularly when their child is going away for the first time, it’s very stressful,” she said. “Clients will say, ‘I need to touch and feel the sheets for softness.’ But these are the kind of things they can control. They’re paying $10,000 for sleep-away camp, so they shouldn’t feel so bad for their child.”

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There’s no denying the fact that many Koreans are obsessed with plastic surgery – some of them will do anything to look more ‘western’. So imagine my surprise when I read about this Brazilian guy who underwent 10 cosmetic procedures to look more Korean! It seems like no one is happy with their own native looks anymore

This man was perfectly good-looking to begin with, but he wanted the Oriental look so bad, he put himself through a series of procedures – silicone implants, lip surgery, and more – that cost him a small fortune. The 25-year-old, from Novo Hamburgo city in southern Brazil, goes by the name Xiahn; he doesn’t want to reveal his true identity to protect his family from internet scrutiny. Xiahn originally had blue eyes and blond hair, a look that he was perfectly happy with until he spent time as an exchange student at Dongseo University in South Korea. It was there that he got bit by the plastic surgery bug.

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