The game of hide-and-seek may not yet be an Olympic sport – although efforts are being made in that regard – but it’s apparently popular enough to have its own world championship.

What started out as a fun one-time event thought up by small Italian publication CTRL Magazine, in 2010, eventually turned into an annual event that grew with every edition. This year, the 6th Nascodino World Championship – “nascondino” is Italian for hide-and-seek – will take place on the the 3rd and 4th of September, in the beautiful village of Consonno, once a bustling tourist attraction complete with its own zoo, sightseeing train and several eclectic buildings. It has since become a ghost town, but event organizers consider the settlement perfect for a grand hide-and-seek competition.

The rules of the tournament are a bit more complex than the childhood game we all used to play growing up, but then again, this is a contest for grownups (18-year-olds and above). Participants may register to take part in the World Nascondino Championship in teams of five, after paying a €125 fee per team. The teams are then divided into four groups and one person per group hides while a “neutral searching team” counts 60 seconds. The hidden player then has 10 minutes to come out of their hiding spot and reach a soft mattress (for diving purposes) placed in the middle of a field without being found or at least before a member of the searching team. If they fail to reach their target within the time limit, players are not awarded any points. The game goes on for two days until the ultimate winner is declared.

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A formerly-obese man from Arizona managed to shed 300 pounds of excess weight in three years after he challenged himself to walk to the nearest Wallmart every day to collect his food.

31-year-old Pasquale “Pat” Brocco used to weigh a whopping 605 pounds, but after his doctor warned him that his high blood pressure and high cholesterol were putting his life in serious danger, the Avondale man decided it was time to do something about his weight. He went home from his doctor’s appointment and took a photo of himself in the mirror. “My stomach was down to my thighs. My chest was hanging down here,” he told ABC News. “I was disgusted”.

Pat knew he needed to start exercising, but the gym was not an option. “I mean, at 600 pounds, I couldn’t even go to the gym,” he said. “I didn’t fit on the machines.” So instead, he decided that every time he was hungry, he would walk 1 mile to his closest Walmart to buy his food, then back home to eat the meal.

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Meet Mohit Kumar, a 10-year-old boy from Manaitand, India, who has been feasting on dog milk ever since he was four. His parents are desperate to get him to stop sucking the milk of stray bitches in their town, but so far they’ve been unable to find a way.

Mohit was weaned at two years, but at the age of four he developed a rather strange habit – sucking the milk of stray bitches. “Once Mohit was playing with stray dogs outside and happened to suck on the breasts of a bitch. Since then he does the same whenever he gets a chance to do so,” his mother Pinky says. “Bitches of the area have also taken a liking to him and feed him whenever Mohit wants them to.” His worried parents don’t even allow the boy to go outside without supervision, for fear that he will seek out stray bitches to get his milk fix, but he sometimes gives them the slip. “We do not even allow him to go to school fearing that this habit may only get worse,” Pinky adds.

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Guarding the border with North Korea is a very stressful job for the South Korean soldiers in the Demilitarized Zone that divides the two Koreas, but they recently found a very unconventional way to unwind – taking ballet lessons.

Once a week, the young soldiers of the Koran army’s army’s 25th Division switch their heavy army boots for ballet shoes and take part in a ballet class intended to relieve some of the stress of guarding the world’s most heavily fortified border. Under the guidance of Lee Hyang-jo, a ballerina at the Korean National Ballet who started teaching at the base a year ago, the young soldiers struggle to do splits pirouettes and other ballet moves, as a way of relaxing.

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Springbone Kitchen, a New York restaurant famous for its trendy bone broth, has found a way making the meaty liquid appealing even when it’s hot outside by turning it into a popsicle.

The bone broth diet trend has been around for a while, but it really picked up steam last winter when celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow, Salma Hayek and Shailene Woodley revealed they were big fans. Soup-themed stores and eateries started popping up in major U.S. cities and Dr. Kellyann’s “Bone Broth Diet” book became a bestseller, with many health dieters relying on the meat-flavored soup as a meal replacement. But while it’s understandable that the hot broth became popular during the cold winter months, it’s a lot harder to sell when it’s 90 degrees Fahrenheit outside.

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All astronauts have perfect eyesight before traveling to outer space, but some years ago medical tests revealed that their vision is severely impaired when they return. The exact cause of this problem is yet to be determined.

In 2005, about halfway through his mission working on the International Space Station, astronaut John Phillips looked out the window at Earth and noticed something strange. Although his vision had always been perfect, our planet seemed blurry and he had problem focusing on it. He didn’t report his problem to ground control thinking it was just temporary and would go away after a while, only it didn’t. When he returned to Earth, rigorous tests revealed that his eyesight had gone from 20/20 to 20/100.

To shed some light on this issue, NASA put Phillips through a series of procedures, including MRIs, retinal scans, neurological tests and a spinal tap. They found that not only had his vision deteriorated, but his eyes had changed as well – his optic nerves were inflamed, the back of his eyes had become flatter and his eyeballs had choroidal folds, which are like stretch marks. After six months, Phillips’ eyesight improved to 20/50, but remained there for the last 11 years. He went from being the guy with the best vision, the first one in the car to read a street sign to not being able to pass a DMV exam without glasses.

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Inspired by a vision to create a sustainable and healthy home and way of life for their family, Benjamin and Ingrid Marie Hertefølger have built a unique all-natural house completely covered by a glass dome, on a plot of land on Norway’s Sandhorney island, in the Arctic Circle.

The Hertefølgers knew they wanted to live in an eco-home made of only natural materials – cob (a mixture of sand, clay and straw), wood and glass – but also that it had to withstand the harsh weather conditions of the Arctic Circle. Aware of the robust properties of geodesic domes, they contacted Solardome Industries about a bespoke dome to cover their new house. It had to withstand the heavy snowfalls common to Northern Norway, maintain a uniform temperature throughout the year, reduce ultraviolet radiation, minimise maintenance and act as a greenhouse for the family’s organic vegetable and fruit garden.

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One of the last places you would expect to find a real Italian prince is driving a food truck on the streets of Los Angeles, California. But that hasn’t stopped His Royal Highness Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy, the only male heir of Italy’s exiled king, Umberto II, from trying his luck in the American mobile food business.

“I came to Los Angeles six months ago for an event and I realized there were various Mexican and Asian food trucks around,” the prince told Italian magazine, Chi. “I thought ‘why don’t I try it?’ With a food truck with fresh Italian pasta that is loved around the world.” So he bought himself a food truck, painted it in the colors of House Savoy and named it “Prince of Venice”, after one of his would-be titles which are not recognized by the Italian government.

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Meet Sajad Gharibi, a 24-year-old weightlifter from Iran who has stunned the internet with his impressive physique. Weighing a whopping 345 pounds – most of it sheer muscle – Gharibi is said to be able to lift up to 386 pounds. He certainly looks like a guy you never, ever want to get on the bad side of.

Lucky for us, those who know this mountain of a man say that, despite his grizzly appearance, he is actually a gentle giant with a very big heart. They mean that both literally and metaphorically, I presume. That’s reassuring as he is probably the closest we’ll ever get to seeing a real life The Hulk, and we don’t want him sharing both his looks and short temper.

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In what is one of the strangest stories of spousal devotion I’ve ever come across, a woman in China divorced her paralyzed husband, married his best friend, and together they are now taking care of her ex.

Xu Xihan and Xie Xiping, from the Chinese city of Ankang, in China’s Shanxi Province, got married in 1996, and had a daughter the very next year. Their life was happy one, and a few years later Xieping gave birth to a healthy baby boy who brought them even more joy. But tragedy struck in 2002, when Xu Xihan was involved in a terrible accident which left him paralyzed from the waist down. He received 40,000 yuan ($6,000) in compensation, but lost his ability to walk, forever. The man remembers their neighbors kept telling him that his wife was going to live him in just three months, but Xieping proved them all wrong, as years went by and she and the kids remained by his side.

However, Xu wanted her wife to be happy and started pressuring her into divorcing him and finding another man who could take care of her properly. The woman wouldn’t hear of it, though, and kept refusing his request for years. In 2009, Xieping finally gave in to the paralyzed man’s plea to divorce him, and married his colleague and best friend, Liu Zongkui. In 2012, she gave birth to Zonkui’s son, but she never abandoned her ex-husband. Instead, she and Liu began caring for her ex and the kids together.

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Red, white and rosé wines have been around for hundreds of years, and if you’ve gotten a little bored with them you’ll be happy to know that you can now enjoy a cup of bright blue wine, as well.

Spanish startup Gïk has spent the last two years working with scientists at the University of the Basque Country and food researchers at Azti Tecnecalia, and they have recently unveiled the fruits of their labor – the world’s first blue wine! Why blue you ask? “Gïk is born for fun,” the company’s official site responds. “To shake things up a little and see what happens. To create something new. Something different. Why a blue wine you wonder? And why not?”

Co-founder Aritz López told Eater that the inspiration for the unique color of the wine came from Blue Ocean Strategy, a book written by W. Chan Kim, a Korean-born business theorist. “He tells about red oceans in his book, representing business markets saturated by specialists (sharks) who fight for the same variables and for a reduced number of clients (fish), and end up in water turned red. And how it’s necessary to revert this, by innovating and creating new variables, back to blue. This seemed poetic for us to turn a traditionally red beverage into a blue one,” he said.

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As hard as it may be for you to believe, the woman in the photos below is not reality TV star Kim Kardashian, but a 24-year old talented makeup artist from Croatia.

Jelena Peric has attracted over 700,000 followers on Instagram thanks to her uncanny resemblance to socialite Kim Kardashian. It’s nowhere close to the celebrity’s 74 million followers, but for a young makeup artist from Zagreb, Croatia, it’s pretty impressive. Jelena says she is not very surprised by the high number of followers she’s been getting ever since she started posting photos of herself online, considering how popular her inspiration is, and the “very big effort” she has put into nailing not only her facial features, but also her curvy figure and clothing style.

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Most conferences tend to be boring, although not intentionally so. But there is one event that is deliberately dedicated to all things dull and tedious – the ‘Boring Conference’ hosted every year at London. Believe it or not, it’s a sell-out event where attendees are treated to talks on all sorts of boring things like paper bags, toilet roll quality control, lamp posts, and bricks.

How did such a thing as a Boring Conference come to exist, you ask? Well, it all started in 2010, when the man in charge of organizing an even called the Interesting Conference canceled the whole thing, saying that he was too busy. James Ward, an English book author and marketer, replied to the announcement, saying that he liked boring things and that they should be celebrated too. His social media post got a lot of people interested in a possible event about boring things and he started getting questions about where to buy tickets for it. That year, Ward organized the world’s first Boring Conference.

This year’s Boring Conference, held at London’s Conway Hall on 7 May, was the sixth consecutive event in the last six years and all 425 tickets were sold out in just a few days. Ward always opens up the event himself, because he likes to “set the bar low”. If people start with poor expectations, then the show can only improve, he says. Last year, he spoke about postcard photos of the old Post Office Tower.

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British theme park Alton Towers is giving fast food a whole new meaning with its-newly opened ‘Rollercoaster Restaurant’ where dishes are delivered to patrons via – you guessed it – tiny rollercoasters. For an attraction famous for its adrenaline pumping rides, this is the perfect eatery.

When you enter the Rollercoaster Restaurant, an employee will seat you at your table and explain how to use a tablet to order food, which will travel to your table via a 26-foot rollercoaster with two gravity-defying loop-the-loops. But here’s the catch – you share a rollercoaster with three other tables, so there’s no way of telling whether the dish on the way is the one you ordered or not.

Once it makes its way down to the bottom, the dish will plant itself on a massive lazy suzan, along with a flag displaying the table number. If it happens to be yours, you can simply rotate the lazy susan towards your table and help yourself. Thankfully, the food arrives in closed containers and drinks arrive in bottles to avoid spillage, while hot beverages like tea and coffee are served the regular way – by hand.

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A woman in the UK was left baffled by a swarm of about 20,000 bees that latched onto the back of her car and refused to budge for over 28 hours. The mystery was eventually solved when she discovered that they were actually following their queen, which had gotten stuck in the trunk of the car!

It all started last Sunday, when Carol Howarth, 65, parked her silver Mitsubishi Outlander in the town center at Haverfordwest, in Pembrokeshire, Wales, during a shopping trip. While she was away, thousands of bees began to gather around the car, much to the amazement of passersby. A rescue squad of three beekeepers and a national park ranger were called in to capture the bees in a special box and by the time Carol returned to the car, the situation was under control.

She was thankful for their help, but her tryst with the bees was far from over. Little did she know that as she drove back home, the rest of the swarm was following her . “The next day I realised that some of the bees had followed me home,” she said. “There were a lot less than the first swarm.” So she called the beekeepers once again and they arrived at her home on Monday evening.

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