44-year-old Vladimir Fomin, from Kineshma, a town in Russia’s Ivanovo Region, is a very peculiar man. He became somewhat of a celebrity in his country after he was expelled from the University of Mathematics for refusing to wear pants and walking around in women’s clothing.

Vladimir certainly isn’t the only man in the world who prefers skirts and dresses to pants, but his reasons are definitely unique. He is not gay nor a transvestite, nor does he want to attract media attention. He just wants to stand up for the rights of men to wear whatever kind of clothes they like. After all, women are allowed to wear pants, so why can’t men wear dresses or skirts, why is that regarded as weird? But his fight for the rights of the stronger sex have brought him nothing but trouble. Despite being one of the brightest students at the Ivanovo University of Mathematics and earning a scholarship, he was expelled because of his fashion choices, he was shunned by most of his friends and relatives and even verbally abused and beaten by locals in his home town for walking around in women’s clothes. But in spite of all these problems, Vladimir Fromin continues his fight for the right to dress any way he likes, and hopes to one day be able to walk around in his skirts without being discriminated against. And he has a wardrobe of over 30 women’s garments prepared…

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Thanks to Japanese company Inodore, the days when passing gas in public was seen as a social taboo may  soon be behind us. If you can keep the noise level down, their odor-deodorizing fabric does the rest, absorbing up to 99% of gas smell.

I know what you’re thinking, fart-proof underwear have been around for a while now, but according to Professor Hiroki Ohge of Hiroshima University they didn’t do such a great job of neutralizing smells. Ohge first got inspired to work on this unusual type of underwear when he traveled to America to study how diseases could affect the smell of people’s flatulence. In theory, by analyzing the smell of gas, along with its main component, hydrogen sulfide, one could be able to tell if he was suffering from a disease without having to succumb to more complicated examinations. While researching in the US, the Japanese professor noticed stores were selling various cushions and shorts that used activated carbon and charcoal to deodorize body smells. After analyzing them he identified some flaws in their design and technology, and upon returning to Japan, he began working on his own improved smell-neutralizing fabric.

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If you’re a fan of spicy food, you may want to try the Red Dog Saloon’s Viper Challenge – eat six chicken wings smothered in sauce made from Naga Viper chillies, known as the world’s hottest chili peppers, in ten minutes. Sounds easy enough, doesn’t it?

I mean how hard can it be to munch on six wings in 10 minutes, right? I can go through a whole bucket of spicy wings in half that time. But these are six little piece of Hell that will make you feel like you’re feasting on molten lava. The Red Dog Saloon, in Londons’ Hoxton district, introduced its Viper Hot Chicken Wings Challenge in December 2011, and since then it’s really been separating the men from the boys. The requirements are pretty straightforward: in order to beat the challenge, a person has to eat six hot wings in ten minutes, and last an extra five minutes after taking the final bite without leaving the table or putting any other liquids or solids in their mouth. It’s that Burn Time that really affects daredevils crazy enough to take on the Viper Challenge. Just to give you an idea of how hot a Naga Viper chili is, Tabasco sauce ranks about 5,000 units on the Scoville Scale, whereas the tiny pepper is ranked at 1,359,000 units. That’s 2,500 times hotter than a Jalapeno.

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Held every year in the Dutch town of Zundert, Bloemencorso is the world’s largest flower parade made entirely by volunteers. Millions of flowers are used to decorate giant floats built from steel wire, cardboard and papier-maché.

The Netherlands is inextricably linked to tulips, but at the annual Bloemencorso flower parade, it’s all about dahlias, as these are the only flowers used to decorate giant floats made of steel wire, cardboard and papier-maché. Every year, members of 20 hamlets from the tiny town of Zundert (population 20,000) work hard to win the title of most beautiful flower float in show. Preparations begin months before the big event, as the older members of the hamlets are tasked with  planting and growing the colorful dahlias needed to cover the larger-than-life installations. Although Bloemencorso takes place on the first Sunday in September, tents are set up around town in May and June, and from then on, members of the competing hamlets start working on their masterpieces. They discuss design ideas and building techniques, but it’s the three days before the big event that are the most stressful. Because the flowers have to be fresh, contestants can only start applying the dahlias on the Thursday before Bloemencorso. If need be, hamlets will work night and day putting needles through the flowers, and sticking them in just the right spots on the cardboard body of their mobile installations. But all the effort pays off once these mind-blowing creations make their way through the streets of Zundert leaving crowds of spectators in awe.

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“So I’m a level 68 orc rogue girl. That means I stab things…a lot! Who would have thought that a peace-lovin’, social worker and democrat would enjoy that?!” This was the statement that won World of Warcraft gamer Colleen Lachowicz a seat in Maine’s State Senate.

Democrat Colleen Lachowicz has recently won a seat representing Maine’s Senate District 25, and believe it or not, her Republican adversaries helped her to it. It just so happens that Colleen is an avid gamer who spends a lot of time playing the incredibly popular online multiplayer video-game World of Warcraft. In this fantasy universe she is known as Santiaga, a level 85 orc rogue assassin, who as the player herself admits, spends a lot of time stabbing things. Little did she know that her gaming antics would actually help her win a seat in the State Senate. Apparently, her Republican Party rivals thought it would be a good idea to set up a website portraying Lachowicz as someone with a “bizarre double life”, and making her look like a violent person by describing her in-game behavior. This uninspired smear campaign actually won Lachowicz international support from the gaming community and eventually helped her won the race for the Senate.

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Hello Kitty has millions of fans around the world, but none are more in love with Sanrio’s iconic character than Asako Kanda. The 39-year-old receptionist from Japan has amassed a fantastic collection of over 4,500 Hello Kitty items.

Like many other girls of her generation, Asako’s fascination with Hello Kitty began during her elementary school days. At first, she just bought little things like pencils and erasers featuring the popular kitty, but by the time she turned 11 she was so obsessed with Sanrio’s creation that she made a Hello Kitty mug in her pottery class, and an embroided Hello Kitty apron for her home economics course. But she can’t be the only girl in the world who did this kind of stuff while growing up. But that’s the thing, while most other girls move on to idolizing boy bands or movie actors, Asako Kanda remained faithful to her childhood friend. “Kitty has always been with me, almost subconsciously,” she said in an interview a few years back. Some people call her infantile, other laugh at her bad taste, but none of this has ever affected her long-term love affair with Hello Kitty. She now holds the Guinness World Record for most Hello Kitty items, 4,519, as of August 2011.

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A Chinese metals and mining company has invested nearly 1 billion dollars into replicating an entire Austrian scenic village just an hour away from Huizhou city, in subtropical southern China.

Nestled deep in the breathtaking Northern Limestone Alps, the village of Hallstatt is one of Austria’s most popular tourist attractions. Featuring a rich culture and history dating back to prehistoric times, and gorgeous natural surroundings, this unique piece of heaven draws in hundreds of thousands of tourists every year. Did I say unique? I meant once unique, because Chinese company China Minmetals Corporation has recently completed a replica of the iconic Austrian village in a scenic location, close to the city of Huizhou. The cost of this knock-off project was around $940 million. The Chinese have always been known for their skill in creating knock-offs, from designer clothes to smartphones, and fueled by China’s economic growth, their projects are becoming even more ambitious. They started out by copying iconic landmarks from around the world, then they moved to whole districts inspired by western civilization  and now they’re building replicas of entire settlements. I’m betting they’ll be replicating entire countries pretty soon.

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If the years are starting to take their toll on your once flawless visage, there may yet be a way to turn back the clock, before turning to Botox injections and other cosmetic procedures. It’s called face yoga and is apparently allows practitioners to control the way their face ages.

Face yoga was developed by Annelise Hagen, who calls is the ultimate face-lift. The New York yoga instructor says her technique is meant to be a natural alternative to Botox and cosmetic procedures, which cost Americans billions of dollars every year. She started working on her unique set of facial exercises after she learned her students, most of them well-educated professionals, were practicing yoga, but also getting Botox shots during their lunch breaks to hide their wrinkles. Hagen just didn’t feel that was in the spirit of yoga, so she decided to create a proper alternative. Based on the premise that, like any other muscles in the human body, facial muscles need exercise to stay toned, face yoga offers a range of exercises to help people looking younger for longer. And the best part, face yoga poses, like Smiling Fish (purse your lips and smile slightly), the Marilyn (blow kisses while keeping your forehead smooth) and the Satchmo (puff out your face and transfer air from cheek to cheek), also give you a chance to act silly and release accumulated tension.

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London-based artist F. Conrad Engelhrdt has set up an ingenious recycling scheme by collecting discarded wine corks from various restaurants around the English capital and using them to create unique paintings.

This isn’t the first time wine and corks have been used as art mediums. In the past we’ve featured artists who paint with wine, and other who turn simple corks into miniature masterpieces. F. Conrad Engelhardt uses both of them to create his wonderful paintings. He has partnered with a series of restaurants in Shoreditch, London, to collect their discarded wine corks and recycle them into beautiful pictures. Looking at his works, you’d be tempted to think Engelhardt uses paints to achieve certain color tones, but in reality he uses only the different shades of the corks and the wine stains on them. The secret lies in choosing the perfect corks and arranging them in the best possible way.

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You probably thought those high-end mattresses people pay thousands of dollars for are hand-made. As it turns out, they’re also foot made, as someone is actually getting paid to jump on them hundreds of times in order to compress no fewer than 28 layers of cotton batting.

Growing up, you probably dreamed you would one day find a job that would require nothing else than jumping on beds. Well, it turns out such a job actually exists, only those doing it insist it’s not child’s play. “It’s work,” professional mattress jumper Reuben Reynoso says. “It’s not for everybody. There is a right way and a wrong way to do it.” It’s not about achieving a great height or doing back flips and somersaults, but using his soles to compress the mattress layers and detecting any pea-size lumps in the filling. To do that, Reynolds uses a very precise, grid jumping pattern, making sure he covers the entire surface. “This is not a game,” he says. “Not to me.” And I’m inclined to believe him. After all, we’re talking about $2,700 mattresses, here, not trampolines.

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Matthieu Ricard, a French researcher turned Buddhist monk was declared the happiest man on Earth by a group of scientists, after it was discovered his brain produces a level of gamma waves never before reported in the field of neuroscience.

A former molecular geneticist who left his life and career behind to discover the secrets of Buddhism, Matthieu Ricard is now one of the most celebrated monks in the Himalayas and a trusted advisor of the Dalai Lama. And while this transformation is impressive enough, there’s something else that makes Ricard a very special person. In 2009, neuroscientist Richard Davidson, from the University of Wisconsin, wired up the French monk’s head with 256 sensors as part of a research project on hundreds of advanced practitioners of meditation. The scans showed something remarkable: when meditating on compassion, Ricard’s brain produced a level of gamma waves linked to consciousness, attention, learning and memory that were never even reported before in neuroscience literature. Furthermore, the scans scans also showed excessive activity in his brain’s left prefrontal cortex compared to its right counterpart, giving him an abnormally large capacity for happiness and a reduced propensity towards negativity. These results earned Matthieu Ricard the unofficial title of “happiest man in the world”.

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Ray Bandar, a retired biologist from San Francisco, has spent the last 50 years collecting thousands of animal bones. He estimates he has 7,000 skulls, 200 pelvises and countless other limbs from animals he mostly found and cleaned himself.

“I enjoy removing the flesh from the skull and disarticulating the jaws,” Bandar recently said in an interview for National Geographic’s Taboo series. “I see nothing gross about this, whether it’s a fresh animal or a badly decomposed animal, makes no difference to me.” The native San Franciscan grew up in the Richmond District and started collecting different animal specimens in junior high. That’s when he got the nickname “Reptile Ray”. As time passed, his passion for collecting and cleaning dead animals grew, and he is now the proud owner of a collection of over 7,000 skulls, including 2,600 from California marine mammals. Over the years, his own discoveries have been supplemented from local zoos, museums, taxidermists, roadkill, and trips to Australia, Africa and Mexico. His house is like no other on Earth – every room is virtually crammed with bones and skulls from animals Ray decapitated himself, but he still roams the beaches of Northern California looking for new and exciting additions to his museum home.

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Would you be brave enough to spend a night in an old mortuary chapel surrounded by dozens of graves? One English family is more than happy to sleep in such a house every night, and say it’s actually their dream home.

Jayne Stead and partner Mike Blatchford didn’t seem to mind the creepy graves and spooky statues when they decided to move into an old cemetery keeper’s lodge, in Southampton, England. The cemetery didn’t put us off. We don’t spook easily, in fact I love watching scary films and television shows,” 52-year-old Jayne told reporters. When we first had a look around it was really run down, there were graves everywhere but it never really felt scary, there was very nice feeling about the place.” Self-employed builder Mike Bletchford spend a whole year and about £100,000 ($160,000) turning the chapel into a home for his family, and today you couldn’t tell the living room was once a mortuary… But, while they’ve never seen a ghost in their unusual home, the couple admit they have witnessed some bizarre occurrences:  “I’ve been sitting on my own in the living room and I’ve felt like there was someone standing behind me a few times,” Ms Stead said. “I’ve also found the dog barking at nothing in the corner of the room, but it’s not scary.”

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54-year-old Marla Lopez, from New York City, says the supermarket snack aisle has become her dinner aisle, as she will only consume three types of foods (potato chips, white breads and milk), and has never even tried fruits or vegetables.

Recently featured on Good Morning America, Lopez said her picky eating started as a baby, when she would gag on her baby food, and today, foods that most people consider mouth-watering, like spaghetti, sandwiches or omelets are just repulsive to her. Not to mention fresh produce – “When I look at this, I don’t see food. I would no sooner eat any of this, than I would your shoe,” she told correspondent Linsey Davis about fruits and vegetables. When it comes to her favorite food, there’s no doubt in Marla’s mind: potato chips. “They’re so salty, and fresh, and potato-y, I love them,” she said. Her daily diet is primarily made up of three basic foods: milk, white breads and potatoes. She enjoys eating ice-cream, crackers, pancakes, tortillas, chips and french fries. Sometimes she spices up her heart-stopping meals with a few slices of crispy bacon.

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You may be all happy and carefree today celebrating Halloween, but don’t forget that according to the Mayan calendar the end of days is less than two months away. Luckily, there’s a way around it – a survival pod built by a Chinese inventor who claims it can withstand the end of the world.

It’s big, it’s round, and apparently it will keep you alive in case of a natural disaster or a nuclear meltdown. Officially, it’s called the “Atlantis”, but everyone has started calling it a modern-day Noah’s Arc. Chinese entrepreneur and inventor Yang Zongfu worked on his survival pod for the last two years and spent around $150,000 making it as durable as possible. Back in August, he announced a series of public tests which would prove his Armageddon-proof survival pod was ready for the end of the world. On August 6, he climbed inside the Atlantis and was pushed down a 50-meter obstacle course on the side of a hill, over a bed of rocks and into a pool. Sadly, as soon as it hit the water, the arc’s door opened proving it was less than water tight. the inventor himself came out in one piece, but with a cut on his chin. But that didn’t discourage Yang, who moved on to the fire test, in which he set a smaller version of the Atlantis on fire, and pulled out a frozen ice-cream that had been perfectly preserved inside.

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