The tropical islands of the Seychelles archipelago are home to a legendary palm tree that produces the world’s largest plant seed – a suggestively-shaped thing that can weigh up to 20 kilograms.

Lodoicea maldivica, also known as the double coconut, or coco-de-mer is a remarkable species of palm tree that grows between 25 and 34 meters tall and yields giant seeds that measure 12 inches long, nearly 3 feet in circumference and have a weight of over 40 pounds. Because of their suggestive shape – they look like a pair of female buttocks – they inspired a number of legends and were highly sought after by both monarchs and other people of influence throughout the years. Even today, their rarity makes coco-de-mer seeds highly sought after by collectors.

Read More »

Float festivals take place all around the world, but you’ll have a hard time finding intricate, illuminated works of art quite like the ones paraded in Japan.

When it comes to designing and creating colorful, eye-catching floats that illuminate the night sky, no one does it better than the Japanese. The sheer size of these mesmerizing floats is impressive enough, but most times they also feature intricate designs inspired by Japanese history, mythology and culture. From the record-setting giant floats of the Tenkū no Fuyajō festival in the city of Noshiro, to the impressive works paraded during the world-famous Tachineputa Festival of Goshogawara, there are plenty of reasons why Japan is probably the best place to visit for giant illuminated floats.

Read More »

An 82-year-old Mongolian man has dedicated the last three decades of his life to nurturing a green oasis in the middle of the Gobi Desert.

Baraaduuz Demchig is often mentioned as living proof that man can fight desertification. His 16-hectare oasis rises up defiantly from the barren Gobi Desert, with no other plant life visible for miles. It’s nothing short of a miracle, but one that has been carefully planned and nurtured over the years by Baraaduuz and his family. It all started in the early 1990s, when the Mongolian farmer decided to plant vegetables in the arid land, only to see his work literally blown away by the wind. That’s when he realized he needed strong trees to protect his garden and started planting elm trees.

Read More »

The people of Upla, a small village in India’s Maharashtra state, allegedly hold the local monkey population in such high regard that they have had land registered in the animals’ name.

Farmland is very precious in India, a country where land disputes between humans are fairly common. That only makes the situation in Upla, a village of 1,600 people and around 100 Rhesus macaques that much more intriguing. Indians have always held the monkeys in high regard, feeding them and including them in various rituals, but the people of Upla have gone beyond that, registering 32 acres of land in the monkeys’ name, a fact acknowledged by the village head.

Read More »

A 48-year-old Colombian woman died after allegedly swallowing and choking on her dental prosthesis while sleeping.

Doctors always recommend removing dentures at night, to avoid any kind of accidents, a piece of advice that María Farías Guzmán, a 48-year-old woman from Colombia’s Armenia region did not follow. The woman reportedly went to sleep with her dental prosthesis in her mouth, only to accidentally swallow it, and become lodged in her throat somehow. Maria’s family would later tell investigators that they heard unusual noises coming from the woman’s room, so they decided to check on her, only to find that she wasn’t breathing.

Read More »

A 33-year-old artist from Chenzou, China, has been getting a lot of attention for turning trees, utility poles, and road signs into optical illusions that blend into their backgrounds.

Huang Yao is a talented 3D painter who showcases his skills by turning local infrastructure and plant life into original artworks. The young Chinese specializes in creating perfect camouflage for his creations, which makes them blend into the background perfectly. But that would mean that most people either walk right by them without even noticing his stunning work, or run straight into them and injure themselves. Neither case is ideal, so Huang usually adds certain elements to make his optical illusions stand out.

Read More »

An English man recently shocked his whole country after claiming to have been pulling off his own teeth for over 10 years because he could never book a dentist appointment.

David Sergeant, a former butcher from Leeds, in the United Kingdom, claims that he has been forced to use pliers or his bare hands to pull out painful teeth due to being unable to see a professional dentist. The 50-year-old man said his financial situation makes it impossible to get private care, so he has had to get an appointment through the state-funded National Healthcare Service (NHS), which hasn’t really been working out too well. He has had to wait so long to see a dentist that he has pulled out several of his teeth over the past decade.

Read More »

An arts venue in Glasgow, Scotland features an innovative dance floor that creates renewable energy from the body heat of dancers.

SWG3 hosts some of Glasgow’s largest dance parties, with thousands of people getting together to dance the night away throughout the year. Starting this month, the dancers won’t just be burning energy by busting out moves but also help keep it warm or cool, depending on the season. That’s thanks to “Bodyheat” an aptly-named dance floor that harnesses the body heat of dancers and converts it into energy. The innovative system has been three years in the making and is a joint project of SWG3 and geothermal energy startup TownRock Energy.

Read More »

Rutin chicken, a domestic hybrid dubbed ‘the world’s smallest chicken’ has become incredibly popular in China lately, fueling a veritable pet craze.

Technically, the rutin in chicken is not a chicken. It is a cross between a quail and a partridge, but people have dubbed it the “world’s smallest chicken” and the nickname stuck. To be fair, it fits too, as the birds are about the size of an average human fist and weigh only about 50 grams. They are super cute as well, and their size makes them suitable for relatively small enclosures that come with lights, plants, stairs, and even dollhouse-like sleeping quarters.

Read More »

For thousands of years, the eggs of a species of water insect have been consumed as a ‘food of the Gods’ which has come to be known as Mexican caviar.

Lake Texcoco, a shallow body of water on the outskirts of Mexico City, is home to an aquatic insect of the corixidae family, which is technically a water fly that most locals refer to as a mosquito. That confusion is less important, though, as it’s the insect’s eggs that people are interested in. Known as ahuautle – loosely translated as ‘seeds of joy’ – the tiny delicacies are about the size of quinoa seeds and have a pale golden color. They have been consumed since the days of the Aztec Empire, but today only a handful of fishermen are known to still be harvesting the eggs, and few young people even know about the existence of this unusual ‘caviar’.

Read More »

A 27-year-old man dubbed the “unluckiest man alive” suffers from a rare disease that causes him to experience flu-like symptoms whenever he orgasms.

The unnamed man’s case was recently reported in the medical journal Urology Case Reports by a team of doctors who successfully managed to treat the condition with antihistamine. Scientists described the man’s rare illness as an allergic, or autoimmune, response to his own sperm, which caused flu-like symptoms like fever, a cough, sneezing, muscle weakness, as well as concentration, memory, and even speech issues. Because of these debilitating symptoms associated with his own orgasm, the man had actively been avoiding sleeping with his girlfriend for a long time.

As bizarre as the case described above may sound, it is certainly not unique. Scientists have so far uncovered almost 60 cases of people affected by this rare and serious condition known as Post-Orgasmic Illness Syndrome (POIS). In fact, it is increasingly being recognized as a debilitating cause of sexual dysfunction in males, but because it’s so rare and unusual, it is often misdiagnosed.

Read More »

A young biology graduate and former taxidermist from Ghent, Belgium, creates warrior figurines out of hundreds of dead insect body parts.

28-year-old Joos Habraken typically spends between 20 and 30 hours working on each of his ‘Frankenstein bugs’, fantastic creatures born out of his imagination and featuring intimidating names and impressive backstories. He uses body parts sourced from his own impressive collection or from a network of people he has collaborated with over the years. He only uses body parts from already dead bugs and would never even consider killing insects simply to fuel his hobby.

Read More »

A California ophthalmologist recently shocked the internet by posting a video of herself extracting 23 forgotten contact lenses from a patient’s eye.

Last month, Katerina Kurteeva, an eye doctor out of Newport Beach, California, posted an Instagram video of herself carefully removing a few contact lenses from a patient’s eye. ‘A few’ maybe isn’t the right word to use in this context, seeing as Kurteeva claims to have removed no less than 23 old contact lenses that her patient, an elderly woman, had forgotten in her eye for months, maybe even years. The video went viral a few days ago, leaving millions scratching their heads about someone could simply forget that many contact lenses in their eye.

Read More »

A unique “gadget funeral” service allows people to preserve outdated and broken devices that they have become attached to.

They say you shouldn’t get attached to material things, but most of us can’t really help it. Whether it’s our first car, the house we grew up in, or even an old phone, we tend to get attached to our worldly possessions. And since mobile phones and tablets have become almost an extension of ourselves, it makes sense that some of us have trouble upgrading even when it is obvious that our old gadgets are struggling. That’s where China’s gadget funeral service businesses come in, allowing users to preserve their obsolete devices as framed, deconstructed works of art that can be hung around and admired forever.

Read More »

A Spanish law school teacher recently shared one of the ingenious methods that one of her students used to cheat on an exam –  a dozen of artistically etched BIC pens.

Yolanda de Lucchi, a teacher at the University of Malaga, in Spain, recently shared a couple of very interesting photos on her Twitter account. She was apparently cleaning up her drawers when she came across one of the more ingenious cheating methods she and her colleagues had confiscated. A few years back, one of her students tried to cheat on an exam by finely etching the Criminal Procedural Law onto eleven BIC pens. A close-up of the pens really showcases the skill of the student, who obviously put a lot of time and effort into his intriguing cheating technique.

Read More »