Growing bees indoors has never really been an option before, but an American startup called Living Interiors is changing that with their revolutionary new product – the BEEcosystem.
The BEEcosystem is a hexagonal cedar observational hive, “small enough to be manageable in non traditional beekeeping spaces,” but also large enough to produce cut-comb honey. The viewing window on the hive allows people to see the bees at work on the hive.
KBG84 is a one-of-a-kind girl band in Japan consisting of 33 singing and dancing grannies, with an average age of 84. The oldest member, Haru Yamashiro, is 97 years old!
The new band, based in the remote island of Kohama in Okinawa, is a huge hit in the country – so much so that the members are rather taken aback by their success. Their first single – titled Come on and Dance, Kohama Island – has made it to the top of the charts, and they’ve just completed a sellout tour of Japan.
Ganxi Dong, a small village hidden deep in the mountains of Tianzhu in central China, is gaining worldwide attention for its unusually skilled residents. Apparently, everyone who lives in the self-sustaining village is a martial arts expert!
The Dong people, one of the 56 recognised ethnic minorities in China, pride themselves for having shunned the outside world in favor of local tradition. Apart from farming, every villager is well-versed in the art of kung fu, each one pursuing a different style of the ancient Chinese martial arts. They use a range of weapons including sticks, pitchforks, and their own fists.
A nightclub in Amsterdam is getting ready to host the world’s first ‘blood rave’ this Halloween, with real blood! According to media reports, Dutch partygoers will be sprayed with gallons of blood from an overhead sprinkler system, based on the opening scene of the 1998 vampire film Blade.
The event’s official Facebook page states: “Blood Rave is a night-life community for likeminded individuals, on a discrete location in Amsterdam.” It also lists a link to an intro video (the scene from Blade), and another link to purchase tickets.
Drunk driving might be against the law, but there’s no such rule about drunk horse riding. And believe it or not, it’s actually a sport in Guatemala!
Traditionally, Skach Koyl – a drunken horse race – is meant to mark the end of Day of the Dead celebrations. Drunk riders gather every year on November 1 at the town of Todos Santos to participate in the much awaited race. As you’d expect, there aren’t any rules to the race, no start or finish, and riders stop whenever they please to gulp more mouthfuls of booze. The chaotic race continues for seven hours straight, with no visible concern for safety.
Sun gazing is a bizarre new weight-loss trend in China – it has women staring directly at the sun, hoping to magically melt away the excess pounds!
The therapy, believed to be of European origin, suggests that looking at the sun will provide you with enough solar energy to substitute for calories from real food. So dieters are hoping that if they stare at the sun long enough, they could skip eating entirely.
A creepy new trend in Thailand has people caring for supposedly haunted dolls, for good luck and prosperity.
The Look Thep (Child God) dolls are believed to be inhabited by children’s spirits, created through special rituals. They’re considered to be an updated version of the ancient kuman thong, the practice of worshiping human fetuses that died in the womb. Look Thep allows people to revere the spirits of children without having to actually obtain dead fetuses.
Several locals, including Thai celebrities, are vouching for the effectiveness of Look Thep dolls. Like DJ Bookkoh Thannatchayapan from 94 FM, who claims that his doll Wansai has made him successful in show biz. “The first day I got him, I took him out shopping for clothes in the baby section,” Bookkoh said. “Right after I paid for his clothes, I got a call that my canceled job was back on!”
A Russian company has created a menacing muzzle that can transform dogs into fierce-looking werewolves. Fitted with bloody, pointy, ginormous artificial teeth, the werewolf muzzle will make even the cutest poodle look so terrifying that no one’s ever going to try to pet it without your permission.
One of the first users of the werewolf muzzle is Marina Kurulyova, who became an internet sensation after posting pictures of her dog, a giant Schnauzer, wearing the muzzle. Marina said she doesn’t use it to scare people away though. “This muzzle is just a comic alternative,” she said. “It is rather made for fun than for training. Our friend has bought the muzzle for her dog, a Doberman, and we just tried it. That’s how the photograph was made. The Schnauzer and the Doberman were photographed together, the muzzles amplifying their aggressive personalities.
They might be homeless, but that’s not stopping this Brooklyn couple from doing their bit for the city. They spend their nights at a tiny park and during the day, do a better job of cleaning it than the local administration!
57-year-old Chris and 54-year-old Tammy are from Pennsylvania, but they drifted to Brooklyn after falling on hard times. Since then, they’ve been living on this small traffic island in the heart of Bay Ridge, and are doing everything they can to keep their surroundings clean.
“I’m homeless, my wife is homeless and what we do is we clean up the park,” Chris told Pix11 news. “We like to make it clean. We’re keeping it clean in many ways.”
It’s not clear what freelance journalist Shona Sibary hoped to achieve by making an online confession about her puppy-abandoning habits, but her article in the Daily Mail has sparked outrage among internet users who are condemning her for her actions.
In the article, Sibary admitted to having abandoned four dogs in the last four years, just because they weren’t cute puppies anymore. “Over the past four years, I have fallen in love with four puppies and, on each occasion, driven miles with hundreds of pounds of cash in my pocket to buy them,” she wrote. “Then, months later, I have turned my back on them and given them away.”
Sibary said she finds this habit “strange” because according to her, “no one is more welcoming and loving to a doe-eyed little puppy than me.” She claims that all four puppies had perfect lives – with comfy baskets, colorful collars, vaccinations, and microchipping. But in her own words, “the minute they become too much trouble – which they always do – I fall out of love and start advertising them in the classifieds section of our local newspaper.”
Pig’s meat is undoubtedly delicious, but I’m not so sure you could say the same about its milk. Nevertheless, a family-run farm in the Netherlands has produced the world’s first cheese made from pig milk. They’re selling it at a whopping £1,500 ($2,300) per kilogram – more expensive than the former world’s costliest cheese, made from Balkan donkey milk!
Erik Stenink, free-range pig farmer and owner of ‘Piggy’s Palace’ is the brains behind pig milk cheese. He decided to do it because mainly because he was curious to see if it would work, given that pig’s milk is richer in protein than cow’s milk. But milking pigs is quite a labor intensive process, so he only managed to produce half a kilo of the “chalky” cheese. A bit of it was sold to an anonymous buyer last week, and the proceeds were donated to a children’s cancer charity.
“It’s a product which has never been made before and a lot of people are very interested in it,” Erik said. “We’ve only just recently tried to milk the sows. We’re very happy with it all and although for us it’s a one-time thing, if someone wants to give us £1,500 we’ll make a kilo, but it’s too intensive to make without an order.”
Although she graduated from Florida State University four years ago, theater major Stephanie Ritter has yet to find a decent job in her field. Fed up of the situation, she’s actually put up her diploma for sale on eBay for $50,000 – $10,000 more than her student loan debt. She says that the drastic solution is the only way for her to validate her “use of time between 2007 – 2011.”
“I thought this piece of paper has so much worth to so many people, but for a theater major, it couldn’t mean less,” she said. “I’m doing the exact same things and probably getting paid the exact same amount as people that dropped out halfway through freshman year, except I’m still $40,000 in debt and they’re, well, not.”
So for $50,000 – or the best offer she can get – Stephanie is offering her original diploma in mint condition, which has “never been used to get a job before.” The price also covers her college experience in a nutshell. The buyer will be treated to a tour of the university, “including everywhere you would have gone/eaten/partied in your four years at FSU.” She’s adding access to all of her college memories and Facebook albums for six months, a show at the FSU School of Theatre, and a tour of all her favorite Publixes including sweet tea at each location.
Loki is the internet’s newest feline sensation – her pictures have gone viral and people can’t stop gushing over her evil vampire face. With over 50,000 followers on Instagram already, her distinctive appearance is only making her more popular by the minute.
Loki’s owner Kaetlyn Koch, from Portland, Maine, says that in real life, Loki is just as adorable as any other cat. She loves to to hide under bath towels and lay on her back for a rub. Her murderous stare only seems to emerge when she’s confronted with a camera lens. She looks downright scary with her fangs jutting out, even when she’s peeking out from under towels or lazing in Kaet’s lap. Loki’s eyes never seem to close, which is a bit of a mystery.
Kaetlyn didn’t know about the vampire look when she adopted the Siamese-mix cat from a shelter two years ago. “They didn’t give me many details about her looks,” she said. “They said it was healthy but she wasn’t able to close it (her eyelids). She’s been to the vet three times in the last year, and no one has made mention of her teeth or why she looks the way she does. Still a mystery.”
A team of six undergrads in the Netherlands have come up with a brilliant use for wasted fruit – they’re converting it into leather!
The eco-friendly project – titled ‘Fruitleather Rotterdam’ involves transforming rotten fruit into a durable, malleable, leather-like material. It started off as a school assignment at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, in which design students were supposed to set up a flash retail event. After brainstorming, this particular team decided to tackle the problem of food wastage as well.
“The academy gives us a perfect view over Binnenrotte Square in Rotterdam, where they have a market each Tuesday and Saturday,” said Hugo de Boon, one of the students involved. “We saw how the square would be completely littered with food waste (at the end of the day), so we realised this was a problem we would want to solve from a designer’s point of view.”
Chinese doctors are baffled by a bizarre, five-inch growth on an elderly woman’s head. They aren’t able to explain what it is exactly, but it bears an uncanny resemblance to a unicorn’s horn!
It all started when ‘Unicorn Woman’ Liang Xiuzhen developed a mole on her head about seven or eight years ago. “My mother complained about this mole-like growth on her head that itched all the time,” said her son Wang Chaojun. “We found ways to cure her itch using traditional Chinese medicine, and then left it be.”
But matters got out of hand a couple of years ago, when a tiny horn-like mass erupted out of the mole. It was quite small up until this February, when Liang accidentally broke it. Since then, a new horn has been rapidly growing in its place, now measuring a whopping five inches in length. “Now the horn hurts my mother and prevents her from sleeping. It also bleeds from time to time,” Wang Chaojun said. Read More »
