Plougastel, a small village in France’s Brittany region, is offering a prize of €2,000 ($2,250) to whoever can decipher a 230-year-old inscription carved into a nearby rock-slab.

Discovered just a few years ago, the mysterious rock is located in a cove accessible only at low tide. It features 20 lines of writing in a “language” that so far no one has been able to crack, two years  – 1786 and 1787 – as well as carved images of a ship with sails and rudder, and a sacred heart. Local academics have been struggling to decipher the centuries-old images for some time now, but so far all they’ve come up with is theories. Some believe that the writing may be in old Breton or Basque, while others think that whoever carved it into the rock slab may have been semi-illiterate.

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Last weekend, a series of photos that seemed to show a very young boy getting married to an adult woman went viral on Mexican social media. There was speculation of arranged marriage and child trafficking, but the true story turned out to be more tragic, and at the same time heartwarming, than everyone thought.

Mexican media recently reported that the protagonists of the viral photos did indeed get married during a two-day celebration in their native town of Xaltianguis, Acapulco. However, although the groom looks like a primary school student, he is actually a 19-year-old man named Jonathan who suffers from a rare disorder that stems his growth and makes him look much younger than his years. Despite his condition, Jonathan managed to find the love, and last weekend he and his fiancee tied the knot in front of family and friends.

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Three years ago, Corey Nielsen, a middle-aged man from Tolleson, Arizona, embarked on a journey to build the world’s largest pyramid of stacked pennies. He only had a few thousand coins and a dream at the time, but today he’s inching closer to finally accomplishing his goal.

The current record for the world’s largest coin pyramid stands at 1,000,935 coins. It was set in 2014 by Vytautas Jakštas and Domas Jokubauskis, in the small Baltic country of Lithuania, as a way to celebrate the adoption of the euro. In one of his videos, Corey Nielsen claims that they had a team of 100 people working on it – although I haven’t been able to verify if that is true – but he decided he could build an even bigger one by himself. He had built smaller penny pyramids before, but this was a much bigger project, one that would take daily work over multiple years to complete. Well, after almost three years of penny stacking, he’s nearly there.

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A vlogger from China who live-streamed herself trying to eat a live Pacific octopus ended up screaming in pain after the marine creature used its suckers to attach itself to her face.

The young woman, who goes by “seaside girl Little Seven” on popular Chinese video platform Kuaishou, was allegedly planning to eat the octopus on camera, although the video begins with the creature already stuck to her face. She can be heard calmly telling her fans “look how hard it’s sucking” before realizing that she can’t actually remove it without pulling on it really hard. At one point, it looks like her left cheek might come off as she struggles to detach the octopus while screaming “painful” and “I can’t remove it”.

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We’ve featured some impressive body art on Oddity Central, like Luca Luce’s face-painted optical illusions or the colorful chest artworks of Georgina Ryland, but nothing quite like the detailed lip art of Ryan Kelly. The talented makeup artist paints tiny yet intricate portraits of celebrities and popular characters on her lips.

Looking at the kind of detail Ryan Kelly is able to produce on such a tiny and unusual canvas, it’s hard to believe that her lip art started out as a joke. Four years ago, Ryan and her husband were on the couch watching Katy Perry’s Superbowl halftime show, when their attention was caught by one of her dancers, who later went viral as “Left Shark”. He was fumbling through the choreography, but looked cool doing it, and they both found him hilarious. It was the makeup artist’s husband who suggested that she paint a shark on her lips and the fins on her fingers so she could puppet her very own Left Shark performance. She did just that and posted a photo of her facial makeover on social media. The response was overwhelmingly positive and inspired her to delve deeper into lip art.

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We’ve seen some crazy internet challenges go viral in recent years, but this latest one takes the cake as the most disgusting of all. The Cockroach Challenge has people putting live cockroaches on their faces, taking a selfie and sharing it on social media.

It’s hard to say for sure how and when the Cockroach Challenge came to be, but according to several sources, the craziness began last month, when Alex Aung, a young man from Myanmar, posted a photo of himself with a large cockroach on his face to his Facebook account, captioning it “new challenge, Can you do this?”. The photo quickly went viral, and at the time of this writing, it has over 5,600 reactions and 18,000 shares. But most importantly, people in Myanmar, the Philippines and Indonesia started sharing their own selfies with creepy crawlies on their faces, and the Cockroach Challenge was born.

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Authorities in Binalonan, a small Filipino town about 200 kilometres north of Manila, have made gossiping illegal under a new local law aimed at preventing rumors from spreading within the community.

Trash talking someone in Binalonan could see offenders literally picking up trash under a new local law designed to make people take responsibility for the things they say. First-time gossipers risk a fine of 200 pesos ($3.8) and three hours of collecting garbage in the streets, while repeat offenders would have to pay up to $20 and put in eight hours of community service. The law isn’t very clear on what qualifies as gossip, but mayor Ramon Guico cited peddling rumours of residents’ relationships or financial situations as examples of punishable offences.

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Ever wish you could attend a protest, but couldn’t do so because of location, timing or other constraints? Well, thanks to Wistand, an online platform that allows people to hire proxies to protest on their behalf anytime, anywhere, you can get involved and support the causes you care about.

Before you get too excited about the idea of proxy protesters, you should know that Wistand is currently only available in France, a country that has seen weekly “yellow vests” protests for nearly six months now. But while the idea for this online service may have been inspired by the Yellow Vests anti-government protesters, it is not affiliated with the movement in any way, and can be used for any type of protests. All you have to do is go on the Wistand website, start a “cause” or find one that you care about, and then donate a set fee that will go toward funding a “messenger”, a person to attend that protest on your behalf.

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Everyone feels the need to stretch their neck every once in a while, but in rare cases it can cause more than a satisfying pop. A 28-year-old Oklahoma man ended up in the hospital after tearing his vertebral artery by stretching his neck to alleviate neck soreness.

Josh Hader was working from his home in Guthrie, Oklahoma when he felt a familiar soreness in his neck and tried to alleviate as he had done many times before, by stretching his neck a bit. Only this time, as he used his hand to apply a bit more pressure, he heard a loud pop and instantly knew something was wrong. His left side went numb almost immediately, so he quickly checked to see if his face was drooping, one of the most common signs of a stroke. His face looked fine though, so he assumed he must have just pinched a nerve and went to get some ice packs. That’s when he noticed he couldn’t walk straight.

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Chris Advansun is a Toronto-based sleep writer that creates his stories with one thing in mind – to make them interesting enough to get adults’ attention, but dull enough to put them to sleep.

39-year-old Advansun is a screenplay writer who sort of just got into sleep writing and fell in love with it. He just adores the challenge of balancing his grown-up bedtime stories in such a way that they gently pull the listener away from the thoughts that usually keep them up at night and then gently allow them to drift off to sleep. He has to stay away from anything attention-gripping to keep the listeners from becoming too involved in the story, but also make it interesting enough to keep them listening. For Advansun success means never reaching the end of his stories.

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An Oklahoma man who was once diagnosed with small-cell lung cancer and told hat he only had three months live claims he is now tumor-free thanks to a $5 deworming drug usually meant for dogs.

Joe Tippens was diagnosed with small-cell lung cancer in 2016. Despite undergoing treatment for the disease, by January of 2017, the cancer had spread to other organs, including his stomach, neck, pancreas and even his bones. The cancer was everywhere and doctors advised him to go home and say his goodbyes because he only had three months to live. When small-cell cancer spreads as wide as it had in his case, the chances of survival are around one percent. Tippens thought he was going to die, and with nothing left to lose, he was willing to try anything in hopes of a miracle, even a dog dewormer called fenbendazole.

The desperate cancer sufferer stumbled upon the bizarre treatment while browsing a forum of his alma mater, Oklahoma State University. The post that caught his eye read “If you have cancer or know someone who does, give me a shout”. Joe had already signed up for an experimental treatment that doctors said wouldn’t save him but might extend his life expectancy from three months to a year, enough to at least meet his grandson. But he decided that contacting that forum poster couldn’t hurt either. To his surprise, that person was a veterinarian who had a very interesting story to tell.

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The Indian Army is being mocked after recently tweeting that one of its mountaineering teams spotted mysterious footprints of the mythical Yeti in an isolated mountainous area between Nepal and Tibet.

“For the first time, an #IndianArmy Mountaineering Expedition Team has sited Mysterious Footprints of mythical beast ‘Yeti’ measuring 32×15 inches close to Makalu Base Camp on 09 April 2019,” the official Twitter account of the Indian Army tweeted a couple of days ago. “This elusive snowman has only been sighted at Makalu-Barun National Park in the past.” Humans have been searching for proof of Yeti’s existence for centuries, but so far it’s all been debunked by science. So why is the Indian Army tweeting about Yeti, and more importantly, why does its tweet imply that it actually exists?

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K-pop culture has been gaining popularity across the globe, but in China it is considered a decadent trend that threatens to destroy the nation’s future. To combat this menace, a former schoolteacher has founded the Real Man Training Club, a children’s boot camp that promises to turn boys into alpha males.

The Beijing-based Real Man Training Club offers members a variety of activities meant to boost their masculinity, such as American football, wrestling and boxing, as well as character-building treks through deserts and mountains. Founder Tang Haiyan leads the boys in chest beating and slogan shouting to build up their confidence, and makes them wear headbands with the words ‘Real Man’. Even their shirts and tracksuits feature English phrases like ‘Anything is Possible’ or ‘Power Leader’. All this is meant to develop the boys’ macho character to fit Tang’s perception of manliness, and make them immune to the taint of K-pop culture.

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The aptly-named Masterpiece Hospital in Bangkok, Thailand, recently went viral for offering a plastic surgery procedure that gives patients instant six-pack abs.

Despite what many gym-addicts will tell you, getting defined six-pack abs is really hard, and for some of us downright impossible. No matter how much we work out, we just can’t seem to get that layer of fat on our abdomen to go away, so those well-developed ab muscles remain concealed underneath. That’s where the plastic surgeons at Masterpiece Hospital come in. By performing a procedure called abdominal etching, they remove some of the fat on your abdomen to make that hidden six-pack visible. There are no plastic or silicone implants involved, just some abs-focused liposuction.

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Fasting for over a year sounds like the stuff of legends and many actually consider it an urban legend, but an old medical journal offers scientific proof that there once was a man who didn’t eat anything for 382 days and lived to tell the tale.

A case study published in the 1973 edition of the Postgraduate Medical Journal documents the unbelievable story of a 27-year-old “grossly obese” Scottish man who stopped eating for a total of 382 days in a desperate attempt to lose weight. He not survived the extreme challenge, but remained in good health and managed to go from 456 to 180 pounds (81 kilograms from 206 kilograms). According to doctors at the University of Dundee School of Medicine, the man’s weight remained stable at 196 pound (88 kilograms) five years after undergoing the unusually long fast.

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