20 years ago, a couple of ecologists fighting for the conservation of Costa Rica’s tropical ecosystems convinced a large orange juice producer to donate part of their forestland to a national park in exchange for the right to dispose of massive amounts of orange peels on a degraded plot of land within that same park. No one had any idea what an impact that would have.

In 1997, Daniel Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs, a husband and wife team of ecologists working with the Área de Conservación Guanacaste national park, in Costa Rica, came up with a plan to save a piece of unspoiled, completely forested land from a big fruit juice company, by offering something very attractive in return. If the company, Del Oro, agreed to donate part of its forested land to the Área de Conservación Guanacaste, they would be allowed to deposit massive amounts of waste in the form of orange peels on a 3-hectare piece of degraded land within the national park, at no cost. Disposing of tons of leftover pulp and peels usually involved burning them or paying to have them dumped at a landfill, so the proposal was very attractive.

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A Brazilian judge recently presided over one of the most difficult cases of her career – an 18-year-old boy who sued his absent father for emotional abandonment, seeking no financial compensation, only a favorable verdict that would allow him to move on with his life.

Gabriela Jardon, a judge at Brazil’s Federal District Court, recently recounted one of the most emotional experiences of her career, the hearing of an 18-year-old trying to hold his absent father responsible for being completely absent from his life. The experience of growing up without a father apparently had such a traumatizing effect on the young man that as soon as he legally became an adult, he felt he needed to take his father to court and hold him accountable.

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Sisun Lee used to work as an engineer at Elon Musk’s Tesla Motors. Many would call that a dream job, and he loved it, but he decided to walk away so he could focus on a higher goal – giving the world a hangover cure that works.

Lee, who previously worked as a product manager for Uber and Facebook, says he got the idea for “Morning Recovery”, his science-based hangover cure, about a year ago, after a vacation in his native South Korea. He and his friends spent most of their time partying and getting drunk, but thanks to the traditional anti-hangover drinks his buddies gave him after a wild night on the town, he always woke up feeling great. He was fascinated by their effect, and started looking for similar products as soon as he got back to the United States.

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Every year, the Clifton Chili Eating Club holds a popular eating contests where competitors have to go through several rounds of eating increasingly hotter peppers. It’s a grueling competition, but one that a middle-aged woman by the name of Sid Barber has been dominating since 2014, earning herself the nickname “Unbeatable Sid”.

If you like spicy food and think you could handle the heat in a serious chilli contest, than you’ve probably never seen how these event go down. They start off easy, with reasonably hot peppers like Red Fresno, or Jalapeno, which pretty much anyone can eat without serious side effects, but the challenge gets tougher with every round, and before you know it, you find yourself eating Ghost Chillies and Naga Vipers, flaming hot chillies with Scoville ratings averaging over 1 million unit . And if you can somehow push through, the final round has remaining contestants feasting on several Carolina Reaper peppers, the hottest chillies in the world, with an average Scoville rating of 1,569,300.

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Lulu Hashimoto is the world’s first “living doll fashion model”, and you can actually become her by putting on a realistic body suit consisting of  doll head mask, a wig and stockings patterned with doll-like joints. As you can see in the photos below, the effect is pretty disturbing.

Becoming a living doll used to be mostly about applying thick layers of makeup, putting on the right clothes and posing in a doll-like position. You’ve probably heard about famous such “living dolls”, like Kina Shen, Kotakoti or Valeryia Lukyanova, but they could never achieve the level of realism displayed by Lulu Hashimoto, a true living doll and Japan’s newest fashion sensation.

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Miquela Sousa, or @LilMiquela, as she’s known to her fans, behaves like your typical Instagram influencer. She posts lots of selfies, attends the hottest parties and events in her city, promotes designer clothes and generally strives to create the illusion of a perfect lifestyle. There’s just one thing that makes her special – she’s not a real person, but a very realistic-looking computer-generated model.

@LilMiquela only set up her Instagram account last year, but she already has over 250,000 fans, called “Miquelites”, who like and share her every post, complimenting her on her beauty, makeup skills, and sense of style. Miquela keeps them coming back by regularly posting new content and engaging them in the comments section, thanking them for their kind words and even swapping makeup tips. She does everything a human social media star would do, but she’s not human, we don’t think.

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Claire and David Burke have been together for 16 years, happily married for 7 years, and even have a son together, but they’ve never moved into the same house. They spend their free time as a family, but when it’s time for bed, they say their goodbyes and head to their separate homes. It may not be the most conventional marriage arrangement, but they say it actually it helps make their relationship stronger.

Claire, 49, says that they never seriously considered moving in together, and after spending their wedding night in the same bed feeling tired and miserable, she and David, 43, decided that giving each other space was the best thing they could do for their marriage. They realized that they both liked the way things were at the time, and that moving in together wasn’t worth ruining their relationship. Claire and David have been living in separate homes, about 4 miles from each other, ever since, and things between them couldn’t be better.

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Bai Shufang, a doctor at a vitiligo hospital in Beijing, China, has been dressing up as a traditional opera character, complete with elaborate facial makeup, as a way to make her patients feel more relaxed.

After noticing that many of her patients had trouble opening up to her about their condition, which affected her ability to prescribe the best treatment for them, Chinese dermatologist Bai Shufang decided to help them relax by adopting a different persona. Many people are uncomfortable and tense around doctors, so she thought that by radically changing her appearance, she should help them get over their nerves. For the past couple of weeks, Bai Shufang has been spending about an hour every morning, dressing up as a Chinese opera performer, and putting up layers of thick traditional makeup.

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Kids, and teens in particular, are apparently really good at ignoring their parents’ messages, which is why one London Father created ReplyASAP – a messaging app that takes over the home screen and sounds an alarm that can’t be turned off until a message is answered.

45-year-old Nick Herbert, from London, UK, came up with the idea for ReplyASAP after realizing that simply giving his son a mobile phone didn’t make getting in touch with him easier. He wasn’t answering his messages as fast as Nick had expected, and often kept his phone on silent. It was driving the father crazy, so he set out to create a messaging app that would make reaching kids easier for parents. It took eight months and a considerable investment to complete the project, but Nick thinks ReplyASAP could really take off, as it has the potential to give parents some peace of mind.

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It was September of 2004, when Mary Grams, of Alberta, Canada, lost her diamond-encrusted engagement ring, while working on her family farm. She spent days looking for it, but to no avail. Last week, nearly 13 years later, her daughter in law plucked a weird-looking carrot from the garden, with a diamond ring tightly wrapped around it.

“I went to the garden for something and I saw this long weed. For some reason, I picked it up and it must have caught on something and pulled [the ring] off,” 84-year-old Mary Grams recalls about the day she lost her engagement ring, in 2004. She had worn it on her finger since 1951, a year before she married her husband, Norman. “We looked high and low on our hands and knees. We couldn’t find it. I thought for sure either they rototilled it or something happened to it.”

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Japan’s fascination with robotics and all things high-tech is legendary, but did you know thy make robot scarecrows now? Well, Super Robot Wolf is meant to scare a lot more than crows, but still, Japan may be taking their love for technology a bit too far.

When I was growing up, farmers kept birds and other wild animals away from their crops with old fashioned scarecrows. You know, some rags hanging on a cross structure made of sticks with some chimes or small bells for added effect, and that worked ok. But those things couldn’t hold a candle to this Japanese robot scarecrow with the coolest, most over-the-top name imaginable – Super Robot Wolf. They say ii can scare away any wild animal, from deer to bears, and it definitely looks terrifying enough to do it.

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In a story of unbelievable grit and determination, a semi-paralyzed man in Kerala, India, spent three years digging a road straight through a small hill in front of his home, using only rudimentary tools.

63-year-old Melethuveettil Sasi has never even heard the story of Dashrath Manjhi, the famous Mountain Man of Bihar, who spent two decades carving a road through a mountain with just chisels and hammers, but he managed a very similar feat. Sasi, who can barely walk and move his right hand, spent three years of his life digging a 200-meter dirt road through a hill in front of his house, so he could finally support his family again.

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Lisa Theris, a 25-year-old radiology student from Louisville, was reported missing on July 23rd, and was believed to have gotten lost in the Alabama wilderness, after running away from the two men that she was with. Just one everyone had nearly given up hope that she was still alive, Lisa was spotted by the side of a rural road in Bullock County, by a woman who initially mistook her for a deer.

Judy Garner told police that was driving along Highway 82 in Bullock County, on Saturday, when she saw something moving in a bush, and thought it was a wild animal, probably a deer. The curious woman pulled her car over and went to investigate, only instead of an animal, she found a naked woman covered in scratches and insect bites. Her hair was matted, there was dirt embedded deep beneath her nails, and she looked like she had been living in the wild for a long time. The young girl told Garner that she had survived on berries and muddy water, and was so scared that she begged her not to leave her side.

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A single night of insomnia is enough to drive some people crazy, but can you imagine struggling to fall asleep every night? A shocking one in three people suffer from some degree of insomnia, with a few forced to stare into their smartphones until morning to make the hours go by faster. But, if counting sheep doesn’t help, insomniacs are swearing by a “magic” UK-made body lotion that can allegedly help you sleep like a baby.

Aptly named “Sleepy”, this intriguing beauty product recently went viral on Reddit, with dozens of of users swearing by its sleep-inducing properties. Some of these people claim to have been suffering from chronic insomnia that no medication could cure, but then they discovered Sleepy and were able to get a good night’s sleep. The official website of Lush, the company that makes this lotion also features over 60 reviews from people going on and on about how it helped them get over their worst sleepless nights.

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A top-tier Chinese football team recently painted their whole stadium from their traditional color, blue, to bright gold, in order to change their luck. It may sound stupid, but they don’t care, because it actually worked!

Last month, after a dismal run that saw their team win a single home game in four months, the Guangzhou R&F football club made the desperate decision to repaint the whole stadium and surrounding facility gold, to improve their feng shui. The decision sounds even crazier if you consider that they had just renovated the stadium last year, painting the whole thing blue, to match their club colors. But the team had only won a single match on home turf since March 12, and they had run out of people and things to blame for their results, so, in desperation, management decided to follow the teachings of feng shui. They chose gold, because it apparently symbolizes completeness and fulfillment.

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