If you’re looking for a unique but sure way to let loose and forget about the stress of your daily life, head off to the Swiss country side for a session of cow cuddling therapy. It’s sure to do the trick!

Sibylle Zwygart’s family runs a dairy farm in Tenniken. Switzerland’s Basel-Landschaft canton. Three years ago she and her father were watching over one of their cows during calving, and while the birth of three adorable calves was usually a joyous event, this time was different. Her father’s trained eyes immediately noticed that two of the calves were sterile females, and the third was a bull, so none of them were of any use for their dairy business. Sibylle’s father planned to sell them all to the slaughterhouse, but she pleaded with him to let her keep them.

It took some convincing, but the farmer finally gave in to his daughter’s heartfelt pleas, on one condition – that she somehow find the money to cover the cost of their feed and veterinary bills. Sibylle agreed, and has spent most of her time since then looking after and training the three animals, which she named Svea, Sven and Svenja. As soon as they were old enough, she started putting them to “work”.

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Paan has been a part of Indian cuisine since Vedic times, and today, many varieties are served at street stalls all across the Asian country. But with competition as fierce as it is, paan vendors are constantly working on new types of paan, the most impressive of which is definitely fire paan – a flaming hot snack that is literally set on fire.

Found at nearly every street corner in India, paan regularly consists of a mixture of spices, mukhwas, dried fruits, and sugar wrapped inside a betel leaf. According to Ayurvedic medicine, paan can cure a variety of ailments, including coughs, colds and headaches, but it is also used a breath freshener and a virility booster. Fire paan is basically a regular paan that just happens to be on fire when it goes into your mouth.

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26-year-old Anna Cherdantseva, from the city of Ufa, in Russia’s Bashkortostan Republic is a full-time sofa tester, spending up to 10 hours every day trying out new sofas for comfort and safety.

Last month, Russian furniture giant MZ5 Group announced that it was taking application for a new position – full-time sofa tester. Although all new products are tested in a specialized laboratory, management decided that in order to better meet the needs of consumers it needed some feedback on real-life use of its sofas. In just a few days, MZ5 received over 5,000 job applications from people eager to spend most of their time sitting and lying on sofas.

“We were selected candidates in several stages,” MZ5 Group spokesperson Anastasia Russkih said. “Initially we checked their CVS, and then we let them tell us why they wanted the job.” Eventually, the furniture company shortlisted just 7 candidates, out of which Anna Cherdantseva, a 26-year-old marketing expert, proved to be the most suitable for the job.

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Remember the tragic yet heartwarming tale of Hachiko, the loyal Akita Inu who spent nine years waiting for his owner to return from work, not knowing that he had died of a brain hemorrhage? His legendary loyalty is now being emulated by Thor, a dog of the same breed, who goes on the same walk he and his departed owner used to go on, every day.

Every day, the people of Caçapava do Sud, a town in Brazil’s Rio Grande do Sul region witness a touching display of animal loyalty. In the morning, Thor, a white Akita Inu, takes to the streets, retracing the daily walk he and his owner used to take up until a year ago, when the 58-year-old man died. He stops at all the usual places his master used to spend time in, lets those who know him pet him on the head and even poses for pictures, before returning home to his adoptive family. That’s become his daily ritual for the last year or so.

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A hot-pot restaurant in Taipei, Taiwan, recently got a lot of attention online after photos of young bikini-clad waitresses serving and interacting with customers went viral.

The hot-pot restaurant business in Taiwan and mainland China is very competitive, and it’s very hard for newcomers to get an edge by relying solely on the quality of the food and impeccable service. So the owners of ‘Fresh Feast’, a new restaurant that opened in the Songshan district of Taipei, decided that they needed some extreme marketing in order to get the word out about their eatery and attract customers. For the grand opening, they hired five good-looking models and had them serve customers dressed only in skimpy bikinis.

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With Easter just around the corner, Christians around the world are stocking up on eggs and dyes for the traditional egg dyeing. But while most of us have grown used to chemical dyes, some still prefer the natural approach, like boiling white eggs with onion skins. This is apparently very popular in Switzerland, where people actually pay for bags of onion peels selected specifically for egg dyeing.

Dyeing Easter eggs with onion skins is not a Swiss tradition. In fact, I remember my mother used to do it when I was little, taking differed plant leaves, and placing them on the eggs before wrapping them in a large onion skin, putting them in a sock and boiling them in a pot of water with more skins thrown in for a more intense coloring effect. But she used orange skins saved up for weeks in advance, instead of buying them from the supermarket, like some Swiss do nowadays.

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The Adidas Yeezy Boost 350 “Turtle Dove” are some of the most expensive sneakers money can buy, so when one Vietnamese sneakerhead spotted them for sale at a discounted price, he decided it was too good a chance to miss. But you know what they say, ‘if something seems too good to be true, it probably is’.

Designed by Adidas in collaboration with superstar Kanye West, the Yeezy Boost 350 “Turtle Dove” sneakers were released on June 27, 2016, for a retail price of $200. They sold out almost instantly, and getting your hands on a pair has been next to impossible ever since. On Amazon, a pair of original Yeezy Turtle Doves costs between $2,000 and $5,000, so when Max Hoang Trinh found a pair for only $750 on eBay, he thought himself the luckiest guy in the world.

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If you’ve ever poured wine out of a glass bottle, you’re already familiar with that annoying yet inevitable stream of spillage on the side of the bottle. It’s been a bane of wine aficionados for centuries, but no more, thanks to this drip-proof wine bottle created by a biophysicist.

Humanity has come a long way in the last two centuries. We’ve found cures to deadly diseases, sent people into outer space and connected the world through the internet, but we still had to put up with the frustration of pouring wine. There’s no way to avoid spilling that delicious liquid when pouring it out of a classic glass bottle. Sommeliers know this and wrap a napkin around the neck of the bottle when they pour. But that just wasn’t a good enough solution for Daniel Perlman, a wine lover and biophysicist at Brandeis University. So he set out to find a cheap and effective fix to this centuries-old problem.

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For the last 8 year, about 200 residents of Strunino, a small town in Russia’s Vladimir Oblast region have not had to worry about buying bread, thanks to the generosity of a local grocery store owner who has been giving it away for free.

Mamoud Shavershyan came to Russia, from Armenia, 25 years ago. He worked as an engineer, before setting up his own business, a small grocery store no different than other such stores in Strunino. But everything changed one day, 8 years ago when, sitting behind the counter, Mamoud saw an old lady counting dozens of coins to pay for a couple of loaves of bread. He found it humiliating for the pensioner and ended up giving her the bread for free. That day, he made the decision to print coupons that pensioners in Strunino could exchange for white or black bread at his store. To make sure that people knew about his offer he advertised it a local paper.

But that was only the beginning. Soon, Mamoud extended his generous offer to people with disabilities, large families with low income, and the generally poor. News spread like wildfire, and soon poor people from neighboring villages started coming by his shop to receive coupons. Today, the “Eric” grocery store in Strunino gives away around 2,000 loaves of white bread and 1,000 loaves of black bread, every month. They also regularly donate gingerbread to local kindergartens, and to coupon holders during holidays. And for their kindness, Mamoud and his family are “rewarded” with insults, racial slurs and accusations of theft…

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Cold hands are apparently a big problem for professional gamers and office workers, so a couple of young Danish entrepreneurs set out to find an efficient hand-warming solution. This ingenious keyboard heat lamp is the result of their work and research.

One night in May 2016, Emil Frølund and Mats Sørensen were playing Counter Strike in Emil’s basement. They were getting “owned” by their opponents, and like any real gamer, they had all sorts of excuses – bad teammates, slow internet connection, cold hands. And while they couldn’t do very much about the first two, that last one was definitely not out of their hands. That night, in a small basement, in Aarhus, Denmark, the Heatbuff keyboard lamp was born.

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If you’re looking for a way to to make your property stand out on a real-estate website, dressing up as a colorful parrot and posing for photos seems to work wonders.

At least it worked for the owner of a house in Blackrod, UK, who had asked his estate agent to come up with a way of selling his home faster. Steve Laycock, of Platinum Properties, claims that he came up with the idea while talking with the unnamed property owner. “We came up with the idea as the owner asked us ‘what are you going to do to help sell the property?’ he told The Bolton News. “I said ‘are you up for a laugh? – What about a parrot in fancy dress?'”

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Luu Cong Huyen, a 58-year-old man from Yen Giao, in Vietnam’s Nam Dinh province, has been growing his fingernails for over three and a half decades, and takes great care to avoid any activity that might cause him to accidentally break on of his keratinous treasures, even bathing.

If you’re hoping to find a good reason for why anybody would want to grow their fingernails for over 35 years, you’re not going to find one here. For Mr. Huyen it simply started out as a hobby that he never really got over. “Others like raising birds, planting trees or collecting old vehicles… I just like growing long nails,” he says. “Raising nails is more difficult than parenting. I must be very careful in every move to keep my nails.”

Huyen is not exaggerating one bit. His fingernails, the longest of which measures about 55 centimeters, may look thick and sturdy, but he claims they can break very easily, especially when wet. Which is why he avoids even touching water as much as he can, and rarely bathes. When it rains outside, he covers his hands with plastic bags, so that the water doesn’t reach his precious nails.

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Kurt Minnaar, a 33-year-old math teacher at Cape Town’s Eben Dönges High School uses hip hop beats and rhymes to make math lessons more enjoyable for his students.

Singing or listening to music during math class is usually frowned upon, but in Kurt Minnaar’s classroom, it’s actually a pre-requisite. The former choreographer and hip-hop artist is using his musical background to make the process of learning math a lot easier and less boring for his students. Minaar says that most kids today are into music and beats, and he’s basically taking the traditional math curriculum and fusing it with what they love to make it easier to learn and remember.

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Bikini Beans Espresso is a coffee shop chain with branches in Arizona and Washington where patrons can have their favorite coffee prepared and served by beautiful women wearing bikinis, g-strings or just three strategically-placed stickers.

Thanks to its attractive dress code, Bikini Beans Espresso has become hugely popular, especially among its male clientele. Apparently, a simple visit to one of these coffee shops has a way of brightening up a man’s day, and it’s definitely not just the coffee. But despite encouraging sales, impressive 5-star ratings on Yelp and thousands of followers on social media, Bikini Beans Espresso has its fare share of critics, most of which claim that the mandatory dress code of the staff is degrading for women.

That’s definitely not how the owners of Bikini Beans Espresso shops see it, though. They claim that the girl’s skimpy “uniforms” actually empower women, helping them feel comfortable in their own skin.

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69-year-old Julieta Lorenzo, a frail old lady in the Philippines, has recently melted the hearts of thousands around the archipelago after photos of her carrying her 30-year-old disabled daughter to the bank to collect her pension went viral online.

The heartwarming photos were snapped by Facebook user Gilbred Cargason Alsagon Jr, who was at a branch of the Development Bank in the city of Roxas when Julieta and her daughter walked in. The sight of a small 69-year-old woman hunched over with a full grown woman on her back made a big impression on everyone present, Alsagon reported, but even though many offered to help them, the woman politely declined, saying that her daughter, Mary Jane, didn’t trust anyone else to carry her.

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