Thyrinteina leucocerae, the caterpillar of the geometer moth, is targeted as a host for a species of parasitoid wasp that can lay up to 80 eggs inside its body. The caterpillar’s reward is a job as bodyguard for the very parasites growing inside it and a slow, agonizing death.

The Glyptapanteles wasp is one of nature’s most fascinating and, at the same time, terrifying body-snatchers. Not only does its lay dozens of eggs into caterpillar hosts, but scientists claim that the insect can somehow change the behavior of the host, turning into a mindless bodyguard whose only mission is to protect the wasp’s eggs against predators. Once the wasp grubs hatch out of its body and begin to spin their pupae, the caterpillar stops moving, stops eating, gets on its hind legs and goes into statue mode. But at the slightest threat for the wasp “babies”, it starts swinging its head violently to drive predators away.

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In a time when traveling the world isn’t as simple as it used to be, a site that lets you experience the view from a window halfway around the world sounds pretty interesting. That’s where Window Swap comes in.

Developed by Sonali Ranjit and Vaishnav Balasubramaniam, a husband and wife team from Singapore, as a quarantine project, Window Swap is an easy and ingenious way to travel all around the world, from the comfort of your own home. All you have to do is visit the Window Swap website and click on the “Open a new window somewhere in the world” button to instantly be transported in a stranger’s home in cities like London, Bangalore or Jakarta from the windows of whom you can admire the views they wake up to every day.

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After seeing his business affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, a Michigan jeweler decided to close shop and make money by using about $1 million in precious metals as treasure for would-be treasure hunters willing to pay for clues.

Johnny Perri has been a jeweler his whole life, after learning the business from his father, but the economic crisis caused by the coronavirus proved too hard for his shop in Macomb County, Michigan. He had to options: either sell everything and retire, or find a new way to make money using the jewelry. Perri and his wife chose option two, allegedly burying or otherwise hiding around $1 million-worth of jewelry in dozens of spots, from the Detroit metropolitan area through the Upper Peninsula. Now the jeweler is challenging people to go hunting for his treasures and claim them for themselves, if they can find it.

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Spanish glassblower Miguel Arribas spent around 500 hours making the world’s largest glass-blown sculpture, a whimsical castle fashioned after Cinderella’s castle, but it took a couple of children just a fraction of a second to ruin it.

Last weekend, the Shanghai Museum of Glass announced that Arribas’ Fantasy Castle exhibit had been broken into pieces after two children accidentally knocked it down while playing inside the museum. Presented as a gift to the museum in 2016 to mark its fifth anniversary, Miguel Arribas’ record-setting masterpiece was created using around 500,000 glass loops, weighed 60 kilograms and featured spires made with 24-karat gold. It was made up of approximately 30,000 individual parts and weighed over 60 kilograms. Its worth was estimated at around 450,000 yuan ($65,000).

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A bizarre love triangle between a 75-year-old woman, her 52-year-old ex-son-in-law and her 56-year-old daughter has sparked controversy in Russia after their story went viral this month.

Galina Zhukovskaya, 75, from St. Petersburg, Russia, married Vyacheslav Zhukovsky, a man 23 years her junior back in 2010, but it wasn’t the age difference between them that made their union controversial in the eyes of the world. The problem was that Vyacheslav had been Galina’s son-in-law after being married to her daughter, Elena, for three years. The couple broke up shortly after his realese from prison, allegedly due to Elena’s infidelity. Vyacheslav, found refuge with his mother-in-law, and the two tied the knot in 2010. They’ve been together ever since, but Galina claims that her daughter has always been envious of their relationship and has been trying to break them up.

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Photos of what many religious people are describing as a detailed representation of Jesus Christ discovered inside the branch of a recently-pruned willow tree have gone viral in Brazil.

Last Thursday, while pruning a willow tree in Itaquiraí, Brazil’s Mato Grosso do Sul, municipal maintenance workers noticed a strange pattern on the inside of a branch they had just cut with a chainsaw. After examining the pattern, some of them were convinced that it was a natural representation of Jesus Christ. Odimar Souza, a civil servant who was overseeing the pruning operation on Monte Castelo Avenue, in the Monte Castelo neighborhood, was intrigued by the discovery and took a piece of the branch home with him.

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A 15-year-old Chinese boy was rushed to a hospital back in March after passing out in his home in the city of Nannning. He reportedly suffered a stroke that left his left arm paralyzed, after spending the past month gaming and sleeping just two hours a night.

Like many other Year 9 students, the boy, identified only as Xiaobin in the media, had been confined to his home since February due to the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown in China. His parents told doctors that he had been spending most of his time in his room, under the pretext of taking online classes, but they later found out that he was in fact spending his days and most of his nights playing video games. According to medical experts at Jiangbin Hospital, that was the main cause of the boy’s unusual stroke, which left him with a paralyzed arm and hand.

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An Indian man is so obsessed with photography that he named his three sons after iconic camera brands – Canon, Nikon and Epson – and spent a small fortune on a three-story villa shaped like a giant camera.

You hear the phrase “passionate about photography” a lot among photography enthusiasts, but Ravi Hongal, a 49-year-old professional photographer from Belgaum, India, actually came up with some truly unique ways of showing off his passion for the art. After naming his three sons after some of the most iconic camera brands in the history of photography, Ravi recently spent around $95,000 on an impressive house shaped like a giant vintage camera, complete with a lens-shaped window, flash, and even a giant SD card.

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A 95-year-old man from India’s Karnataka state claims that he has never once cut his hair, which now measures an impressive 24-feet-long and has to be bundled into a huge, entangled mass on top of his head.

During this year’s lockdown, a lot of people were freaking out for not being able to visit the hairdresser for a few weeks, but one Indian man claims he has gone almost a century without getting his haircut even once. Doddapalliah, who is reportedly 95-years-old, is revered by many as a human deity in his home town of Molakalmuru, Chitradurga district, needs to have his hair wrapped into a giant ball on top of his head and secured with cloth just so he can move around. That’s because his entangled locks measure a whopping 24 feet (7.3 meters) in length.

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A Japanese former busker turned Zen Buddhist monk has been getting a lot of attention because of his unique music which combines beatboxing, sampling and a wide range of chants.

Before being ordained as a monk in 2015, 37-year-old Yogetsu Akasaka traveled the world as a full-time busker, making a living on his beatboxing skills. A friend had introduced him to the oral art of sound and instrument imitation in his early 20’s, and he was so impressed that he decided to give it a go himself. It turned out that he was pretty good at it, so good in fact that he was able to make a living as a busker in several countries, including the United States and Australia. After following his father’s example and becoming a monk, he realized he missed his music, so he came up with a way to blend his calling and his beatboxing talent in a unique way.

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A 50-year-old man from China has been exercising by moving around on all fours and climbing trees like a monkey every day for the past three decades.

Chen Haigang, a fitness enthusiast from China’s Shanxi province, attracts attention whenever he exercises in public, due to the bizarre routine he has been practicing for about 30 years. Instead of the popular tai-chi practiced by many of his countrymen, jogging or simple stretching, Chen acts like a monkey, walking on all fours, crouching his back and dangling his arms, and even imitating the primates’ tree-climbing techniques. He has been doing it for three decades now, ever since he was inspired by a monkey at the zoo, and claims that it’s been keeping him in perfect health ever since.

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While the rest of the world struggles to find a cure or even a treatment for Covid-19, Indonesia’s Agriculture Ministry  claims to have found a solution – wearing a eucalyptus necklace developed by one of its agencies.

The so-called “antivirus necklace” was developed by Balitbangtan, the Agriculture Ministry’s Health Research and Development Agency, and will go into mass-production next month. According to minister Syahrul Yasin Limpo, the necklace was made using a species of eucalyptus that can kill the novel coronavirus. Simply wearing the accessory for 15 minutes allegedly kills 42 percent of coronavirus, while upping the time to 30 minutes doubles its effectiveness. The eucalyptus necklace is just one of a whole line of all-natural products designed to prevent or treat Covid-19.

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Taipei’s Songshan Airport recently launched a unique “fake flight” service that gives melancholic travelers the chance to go through the check-in and plane boarding procedures without actually taking off.

Ever since Taiwan closed off its borders in mid-March, travelers have been forced to dream and reminisce about their past adventures in foreign lands, but on July 2nd, the Songshan Airport in Taipei introduced an offbeat service that gives people the full airport experience without the actual takeoff. The new fake flight service includes airport security checks, passport verification, the full check-in procedure, as well the boarding of an Airbus A330 airplane. Cabin crew give passengers the usual instructions as well as some relating to the Covid-19 pandemic, and serve them snacks and coffee, before preparing them for the fake landing.

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On a list of worst yet most original ways to strike up a conversation with the opposite sex, slashing their tires just so you could then come and offer assistance has to rank pretty high…

A 32-year-old man from Aichi Prefecture, Japan, was recently arrested after allegedly slashing a woman’s tire just so he could follow her and offer assistance when she eventually pulled over to check the wheel. On June 11, an unnamed 43-year-old woman walked out of the supermarket in Higashiura, went to her car and drove away. She didn’t get very far before noticing that her driver’s side front tire was almost completely flat, so she pulled over to check it out. That’s when a friendly man stopped his car next to hers and offered to help fix her flat. It’s not every day that you get to meet such kind souls, the only problem was that the woman quickly realized that the same thing had happened to her just a year before, and the knight in shining armor looked suspiciously familiar too…

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A Pune man has been getting a lot of attention on Indian social media after photos of him wearing a solid gold face mask as protection against the coronavirus started doing the rounds online.

Shankar Kurade, a resident of Pimpri-Chinchwad, on the outskirts of Pune City, has been fond of gold for as long as he can remember. He never leaves the house without gold chains on his neck and large rings on most of his fingers, so when people started wearing medical face masks to prevent getting infected with the novel coronavirus, Shankar knew he had to find a way to make himself stand out. Then he saw a news report about a man who had commissioned a silver face mask, and realized that he could do the same, only he would get a mask out of his favorite precious metal.

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