It’s stories like these that make me truly worried for the future of the human race. First we heard of people getting plastic surgery for the picture perfect selfie, and now, in a bizarre new trend, engaged women are getting hand jobs (no pun intended), to achieve the perfect ‘engagement ring selfie’.

It’s the latest thing on social media – as soon as the man pops the question, women click pictures of the ring on their finger, posting it online for the world to see. But not all women are happy with shape of their hands, so they turn to image altering tools like Photoshop to make them look better. Only now they have a new solution – cosmetic hand-lifts.

The procedure involves an anti-aging treatment called Juvederm, which is an injectable form of hyaluronic acid. Doctors use it to convert aging hands with visible tendons and veins into youthful, plump hands worthy of showing off a stunning diamond ring. Usually used on the face to fill in lines and wrinkles, Juvederm works wonders on the hands too, if the ‘before’ and ‘after shots are to be believed.

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A New York artist has been combining his love for staples and Star Wars to create stunningly intricate works of art. 40-year-old James Haggerty makes pictures of iconic Star Wars characters using tens of thousands of multi colored staples in organized patterns. Some of his most notable works are Darth Vader (made from 10,496 staples), C-3PO (33,580 staples) and Greedo (21,458 staples).

Haggerty’s work is incredible meticulous – he starts out with a thoroughly organized plan. He first creates five to ten ink drawings and picks his favorite one. He transfers that one onto a painted board, about 40 x 32 inches in size. He then patiently punches each staple on to the board. The dark background of the board fills in some of the negative spaces, while the metallic staples form the highlights, adding shine and depth to the picture.

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Rina Nanase, a 25-year-old Japanese idol has put herself through so much plastic surgery that she now sort of looks like Dobby the Elf from the Harry Potter films. The resemblance is uncanny – the large eyes, long nose, and pointed chin. The weirdest part is the once beautiful girl is actually proud of her new look…

In her original photographs, Rina looks like a sweet, normal young girl with a cherubic face. But in the past year, she underwent all sorts of transformations – all of which she chronicled on her Twitter account – that she seems like a totally different person. She has made several changes to her eyes, nose and chin that left her looking strange to many of her former fans. Still, Ms. Nanase was surprised to receive such negative reactions to her facial enhancements, as she doesn’t seem to think her looks have changed that much.

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58-year-old Ludvik Dolezal is considered to be the dirtiest man in Europe. He’s homeless, he has no access to a shower, and he’s been sleeping in a pile of hot ash every night for the past year.

Ludvik spends his days  in an abandoned old farmhouse in Novy Bydzov, Czech Republic surrounded only by ashes of what were once his personal belongings. “A year ago I simply decided to quit my job. Since then I’ve been staying here with the fire,” he said. He burnt all his material possessions at the time, even his mattress and duvet, to achieve the perfect mound of ash to sleep in. Now, he just burns whatever he finds to create his ash-bed. “Every night I lay down with hot ash in my clothes and cover myself to keep warm. I look like hell then.”

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Isac Walter from Echo Park, Los Angeles, loves his band T-shirts so much that he wore nothing else for 1,000 days straight. Well, there were a few exceptions, but for more or less 1,000 consecutive days he wore the tees without repeating a single band. Walter also created a Tumblr project to document the process – it’s called ‘Minor Thread’.

The home page of the Minor Thread blog states: ‘Click through and you can see Isac’s torso several hundred times, each time draped with a bit of fan memorabilia. He only revealed what he looked like from the neck up after the project was completed.’ And after the project, he also took a photograph with each of the 1,000 T-shirts placed neatly on a photo studio wall, just to show people what 1,000 blog posts look like in reality. It actually took him four days to arrange all the shirts and take the picture.

Walter’s challenge began in July 2011, when he sought out to wear a different band’s T-shirt every day for 500 days. When he accomplished that, he decided to just keep going. And on 7 April this year, he managed to reach the 1,000 mark. In an interview with a T-shirt company in 2013, he said: “T-shirts are like an analog version of social media and social networking. It’s amazing how I can wear a certain t-shirt out and immediately connect with people I’ve never met before. A band shirt alone can initiate new conversations and new friendships.”

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8-year-old Alani Santos is a special little girl – she claims that she can channel the power of Jesus Christ to cure people of various illnesses. Hundreds gather at the San Gonzalo church just to get a glimpse of the miracle child and be healed by her touch. Incidentally, Alani’s father is a pastor at the same church. Pastor Aduato Santos, a reformed car thief, has fondly given his daughter the name ‘missionarinha’ or ‘little missionary’.

Some of Alani’s healing sessions have been taped and uploaded on YouTube. One of the videos shows her healing a man who had been suffering from HIV for seven years. As the man stands with his head bowed, the pastor tells him: “You’re next. When the little missionary touches you, something will happen. You will be cured. You will feel the warmth.” As soon Alani puts her hand on the man’s head, he collapses on to the floor. The healing is then complete.

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This could be one of the most significant discoveries in human history. Or one of biggest hoaxes. John Hyatt, a 53-year-old professor at Manchester Metropolitan University, claims to have taken photographs of tiny fairies in the English countryside. His pictures show tiny winged humanoid creatures floating flying in swarms. The professor is now on a mission to get more and more adults to believe that the fairies are real, and ‘bring a bit of a magic into their lives’.

Hyatt is the director of the Manchester Institute of Research and Innovation in Art and Design (MIRIAD) at the Metropolitan  University. He is believed to have snapped the pictures while he was out photographing the Lancashire landscape over the past two years. The photographs are now on display in a special exhibition called Rossendale Fairies at the Whitaker Museum in Whitaker Park, Rossendale. Hyatt insists that they are 100 percent real and not Photoshopped. The pictures have gone viral ever since he released them to the public. People all over the world are quite baffled over his claims, and some are beginning to believe him.

“It was a bit of a shock when I blew them up, I did a double take,” he said. “I went out afterwards and took pictures of flies and gnats and they just don’t look the same. People can decide for themselves what they are.” Hyatt, a former member of The Three Johns punk band in the ‘80s and ‘90s, said that the message to people is to approach these creatures with an open mind. “I think it’s one of those situations where you need to believe to see,” he admitted.

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Now that we have Google Earth, world globes are almost obsolete. But there certainly is an undeniable old-world charm associated with them. Perhaps that’s what prompted sculptor Andy Yoder to spend the last two years building his own globe, entirely out of colored matchsticks. He painstakingly hand-painted thousands of matches individually and put them together to form a large model of our planet.

Yoder’s son, Reddit user ‘yoderaustin’, explained that underneath all the matchsticks is a frame of foam and cardboard inside a plywood skeleton. Once the frame was ready and the painting was done, his father used wood glue to attach the matches to the skeleton. And in case you’re wondering – the ‘matchstick globe’ isn’t a potential fire hazard. Yoder had the good sense to douse the entire structure in a flame retardant chemical.

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One day, the workers at a scrapyard in China recently decided to get creative with all the metal junk lying around by building a giant Transformer statue. And when the life-size replica of the popular Autobot  started attracting the attention of visitors and passers-by, they decided to keep going. The team built over 40 Transformers in four months, which have now become tourist attractions in their own right.

The scrapyard where the Transformers are on display is located on a remote farmhouse on top of a hill, in Jinan City, Eastern China’s Shangdong Province. As you travel closer to the hill, the sight of these giant action figures in the middle of nowhere is arresting. And once you get there, it’s quite amusing to see the pigs at the farm live happily among the inanimate Transformers.

21-year-old Li Hung, a part-time worker at the yard, built the very first Transformer. The PR and marketing student said he wanted to make something ‘eye-catching’ using discarded parts. “I thought if people could see something spectacular made from junk, it would highlight what we do here and we could get more customers,” he said. Li was right. The robot became immensely popular, winning a lot of praise from locals.

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‘Mies Container’ is a strange name for a restaurant. But its theme is unique and refreshing – factory-style décor and extremely good-looking male waitstaff. The restaurant, located in Gangnam District – one of Seoul’s most hip locations – has been dubbed ‘Hooters for Women’. In a city where people are not exactly known for their patience, Koreans are actually waiting in endless lines outside Mies Container – that’s how popular it has become. And about nine out of ten customers are always women!

The atmosphere inside Mies pretty much screams one word – Macho. The open loft structure is constructed like a factory, with the slogan ‘Wipe and Tighten and Oil!’ written on the wall in Korean. They even have numbered construction helmets to identify orders. All the waiters are young and hot (and male), and overly friendly towards customers, especially women.

One waiter was overheard telling a customer: ‘You have excellent taste in picking from the menu.’ Handsome men who are attentive and appreciative? No wonder this place is a hit with the ladies. And the customers aren’t exactly bashful while returning the compliments. There’s a wall right next to the cashier filled with little notes like: ‘Dear hot waiter, please marry me!’ – that’s just one of the decent ones.

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Would you spend $55,000 on a motorcycle that doesn’t run? Before you make a decision on that, here’s what you need to know – the motorcycle in question is actually made of animal bones. A Florida man created the beast using a lot of pieces from other dead beasts – three to four cow skulls, two to three alligator skulls, bones of goats, wolves, raccoons, turtles and pigs, and a cow spine for each of the wheels. The bike is rather cheekily named: ‘Cowasaki’.

Reese Moore, the bike’s creator, said it takes him about a year to collect all the bones from dead animals on the side of the road, or carcasses from hunters and farmers. It then takes him a week to sand the bones down and but the bike together. It’s not just bikes – the 65-year-old also makes a host of other things with the bones, including dinosaurs and choppers. And when he isn’t doing that, he trains whales and sea lions, builds museum exhibits and performs in Timucuan Indian re-enactments. He was also a snake wrangler at one point.

“I don’t do anything normal,” Moore observed. “I just go around and show off and make weird stuff.” He got into the bones business after using them to make Halloween decorations for his kids sometime in the early 1990s. That year, he made a dinosaur out of an assortment of bones for his sons. When the owner of Froggy’s Saloon asked him if he could take the model, Moore had a better idea. “I was kidding, and I said, ‘I’ll build you a motorcycle for Bike Week.’” The bar-owner said it couldn’t be done and Moore accepted the challenge. “In about three or four days I called him up and told him he could pick up his motorcycle.”

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Put mathematics and broccoli together and you have the two most hated things of my childhood. And that’s exactly what the Romanesco Broccoli is all about. But now that I’m an adult, I find that I’m actually able to appreciate the intricacy of this rare vegetable. The broccoli takes the form of a fractal – a complex geometrical shape that looks almost the same at every scale factor. So each broccoli is made up of smaller florets that mimic the fractal shape to perfection, which in turn are made of even smaller florets of similar shape… and this goes on and on to the tiniest florets.

If you break off a floret from the main head, it looks like a mini-version of the broccoli with its own mini florets. No matter which part of the fractal you zoom into, it will look like an identical version of the bigger picture. It’s fascinating to think that something like this naturally occurs in nature, let alone on a vegetable. A detailed pattern that goes on repeating itself is rare and certainly a thing of beauty.

The Romanesco Broccoli is nothing short of a mathematical marvel, reminiscent of the Fibonacci series – a sequence of consecutive numbers that add up to the next number. Like: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and so on. So how can a broccoli imitate a series of numbers? Simple. On closer inspection, the Romanesco is revealed to have a spiral starting from the center point. All the smaller florets are arranged around this spiral. In essence, this is the Fibonacci spiral – a series of arcs with radii that follow the Fibonacci sequence. If you count the number of spirals in each direction, they will always be consecutive Fibonacci numbers. A math lesson on a vegetable – isn’t that amazing?

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Fort Zverev, built in the 1870s by Russian engineer Konstantin Zverev, lies in complete ruins today. Nonetheless, it is as much of an attraction now as it was in its heyday. Located on an artificial island in the Baltic Sea, just north of Kronstadt, the fort is a derelict structure that can well be described as ‘hell on earth’. The rusting bunker hatches, water tubes and machine gun mounts scattered on the surface are hardly an indicator of what lies within.

Back when the fort was still in use, the Russians stored a type of fuel similar to napalm in the basement. Unfortunately, in 1970, an unexpected fire that started in the fort spread to the basement as well, causing an uncontrollable inferno. The incident was simply horrific – the burning fuel reached temperatures over 2000 degrees Celsius. It got so hot that the brick walls and ceiling literally melted and ran down like icicles.

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You need to have a map at hand when you’re making travel plans. Most people prefer packing one in their backpacks, but this one guy chose to put it some place he can never lose it – his back. Of course, he’d probably have to crane his neck to look at it in the mirror, but at least it isn’t going anywhere, right?

59-year-old Bill Passman is a travel nut. So far, he has been to at least half the countries in the world, and to keep track of every place he visits, he had the world map tattooed on his back, and very time he visits a new country, he has it colored by a tattoo artist. So far 60 different countries are colored on his back, and the rest are waiting to be filled.

Surprisingly, the lawyer from Louisiana only began travelling recently – at age 51, when he got his new passport. His first trip out of the country was to Tanzania and he has never looked back since. In 2010, he quit his job in order to travel full time. That was the year he got the tattoo as well. He travels most of the year, only returning home for about three months. While his adventures have taken him to all the seven continents (yes, even Antarctica), his favorite place is Guatemala.

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29-year-old Rene Koiter spent the past ten months exercising like a maniac. And now, all his efforts have finally paid off. After putting on 10 pounds of pure muscle, he has succeeded in perfectly resembling the terrifying Khal Drogo, leader of the Dothraki and husband of Daeneyrs Targaryen in The Game of Thrones TV series.

Koiter’s ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures are pretty unbelievable. He used to be this regular guy, and look what he’s transformed into! He’s now a major heartthrob and women are practically queuing up at his doorstep with marriage proposals.

A big fan of the Game of Thrones universe, Koiter pretty much had his heart set on looking like Khal for his company’s annual Halloween cosplay. “Blizzard Entertainment, the company I work for, has these yearly Halloween competitions where the most creative employees show off their costumes and stage skills for the chance to procure prizes and glory,” he said in an interview.

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