When I first read about trovants, I couldn’t believe they were real. They sounded like objects Captain Kirk and his crew would discover on an alien planet. Strange rocks that grow when it rains and move from one place to another without any assistance. Totally sci-fi, right?

As I kept reading about them, I discovered that trovants aren’t a part of science fiction, they are just an amazing geological phenomena. These stones seem to grow as if they are alive, even though they’re not. They are found in the small Romanian village of Costesti. The word ‘trovant’ is a synonym for the German term “Sandsteinkonkretionen” (try saying that really fast), which means ‘cemented sand’.

Cemented sand – that’s a strange name for a rock, isn’t it? But that’s what trovants are – spherical shapes of sand that appeared on earth after powerful seismic activity. In fact, the earthquakes that brought these strange rocks into existence are said to have occurred 6 million years ago. Trovants grow when they come into contact with water. Stones as small as six to eight millimeters end up as large as six to ten meters. Some of them even move on their own. When cut, trovants reveal spherical and ellipsoidal rings, similar to tree trunks.

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Melynda Moon, a 23-year-old Canadian model, has put herself through one of the most bizarre cosmetic surgeries I’ve heard of. While most people ask their surgeons to make their nose smaller or lips fuller, Moon aimed at making her ears pointier. Why? Because she wanted to look like an elf.

“I have always had fantasies about what it would be like to be something other than human,” Moon said. “So I decided to change my appearance to look supernatural.” In August 2011, she spent $400 on a painful surgery to have her ears modified.

To achieve the desired result, the tops of Moon’s ear cartilage were skinned. Pieces were cut from the tips to form points. Her ears were almost ‘carved’ into a triangular shape, reminiscent of the Elves from the Lord of the Rings.

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If you’ve always struggled to express your emotions, then you should seriously consider getting the Mood Sweater to do it for you. Sensoree, a San Francisco-based company, has created a new line of high-tech sweaters that display the wearer’s moods.

Along with the sweater, you need to wear a sensor on your hand. Information about your emotions are transmitted to the collar, embedded with LED lights that glow in a variety of colors. The wide turtleneck is white when unused, but glows in various colors, according to the wearer’s mood, when worn.

The emotive display is color coded: green for tranquil, Zen; blue for calm, relaxed; purple for ruffled, aroused or excited; red for nervous, in love; yellow for nirvana, ecstatic, blissful. The technology in the sweater is similar to that used in some lie detectors – it gathers information from the wearer’s sweat glands.

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I’m not sure why, but some of the strangest trends seem to emerge from South Korea. The latest one is dinner porn – people watching other people stuffing themselves with food. The Korean term for it is ‘mok-bang’, which roughly translates as ‘dinner broadcast’.

The dinner porn stars of South Korea film themselves eating copious amounts of food. They also provide moaning noises and a running commentary of their meals. The entire event is live-streamed and the protagonists end up making serious money.

Mok-bang isn’t about people eating a plate or two of food. We’re talking about humongous portions here. Like this one ‘broadcast jockey’ who calls herself The Diva. Consultant by day and food-porn star by night, this beautiful glutton wolfs down two medium pizzas, or 30 fried eggs and a box of crab legs, or five packets of instant noodles in one go. One night, she ate 12 beef patties, 12 fried eggs, three servings of spicy pork kimchi soup and a salad.

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Kimi Sands suffers from a very strange condition called Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), otherwise known as multiple personality disorder. The 23-year-old, from Cardiff, Wales, shares her body with 15 different personalities any one of which can take control at any time.

In the movies, people suffering from DID are often portrayed as dangerous criminals or serial killers. Not Kimi, though. None of her personalities make her do anything horrible. At worst, she and her partner Chris Lee need to buy Christmas presents for all 15, making the holidays more expensive for them.

“Including myself, there are 16 individuals to get presents for,” said Kimi. “These can be anything from alcohol for the older personalities to teddies for kids.” That’s right, the personalities all belong to different age groups. Among them are 22-year-old Japanese chef Satou, 17-year-old exercise addict Fiona, and four-year-old twins Jack and Safyer. There’s also a 23-year-old Yorkshire man, Ashy, and a party-loving bisexual, Theodore, aged 15.

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35-year-old Zack Hample has devoted 32 years of his life to creating a giant ball made of elastic rubber bands. Which means he started making the ball when he was just three or four years old. There’s something odd about a three-year-old trying to make a rubber band ball, at an age when most kids are just learning to play with a ball.

Perhaps this isn’t so surprising, considering all the odd things Zack has done in his life. Just last year, we had featured him here on OC for a completely different achievement. Zack is the world’s best bawl hawk. As of last year, he had collected over 5,800 balls at all the games he attended.

Now Zack is in the news again, for his giant rubber band creation. It cost him about $1,500 over the years to put bands together to make a large ball that weighs over 250 pounds. A video shows him rolling the ball around in his room, talking about how he created it.

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Rob Greenfield, a 27-year-old adventurer from San Diego, took up a unique cause. He wanted to create awareness about the large amounts of food wasted in the U.S, so he decided to travel the country and eat out dumpsters for a week.

It’s surprising, the kind of food Greenfield gets from the trash. His refrigerator is filled with fresh fruits, vegetables and bagels worth $200. And he hasn’t paid a penny for any of it. All he does is ‘dumpster dive’ behind grocery stores, which means he shuffles through the food discarded by store workers. “Some people call it nasty,” he says. “It’s just a matter of perspective.”

Greenfield has taken dumpster-eating to a whole new level. He created 21 Gourmet Dumpster Meals to showcase “the flaws in the American food system and inspire people to be part of the solution.” Surprisingly, Greenfield does not encourage people to follow him and eat from dumpsters. “I don’t recommend dumpster living to anybody. I recommend taking proper care not to put food in the dumpsters in the first place.”

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If you love the texture of apples but hate their taste, then Grapples are just the thing for you. These unique fruits look like nice fresh apples but have a completely different flavor. Produced by Todd Snyder of C&O Nursery in Washington, Grapples are apples that taste exactly like Concord grapes.

According to the Grapple website, these apples “begin either as Washington Extra Fancy Gala, or Fuji Apples, depending on the season. These premium apples are the ones that take on the grape flavor best.” The apples are put through a patented process and infused with 100 percent food grade grape flavor solution. The ‘relaxing bathing process’ does not contain any additional calories or sugar. The apples aren’t genetically altered either. “It’s as healthy as if you picked an apple off a tree,” the website claims.

Of course, the grape flavor isn’t natural. It is the “same synthesized grape flavoring agent used in hundreds of other retail food items.” Which means that the ‘natural and artificial’ taste of the fruit comes from the chemical methyl anthranilate, used in grape juices and candy. The flavoring permeates the apple fruit to the core, completely changing the way it tastes and smells.

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Caga Tio is a Christmas tradition in the Catalonian region of Spain. Caga is pronounced caca, and it means ‘poop’. Tio means ‘tree trunk’ or ‘uncle’. So it is basically a tradition of the pooping tree trunk. What does the trunk poop? Why gifts, of course!

The Caga Tio is a small log of wood with a painted face and two front legs. It makes an appearance in homes every year on the 8^th of December, on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Children keep the log as a pet until Christmas, feeding it and keeping it warm. They believe the log will grow if they feed it properly.

There is no such thing as a growing log, of course. The parents actually replace the logs every few days with larger ones. It’s easy for families who live in the country; they just go outside, find a piece of wood and paint a face on it. Urban parents have a tougher time. They have to trek into the woods to find larger Caga Tios. But mostly they just buy new ones from shops. The Caga Tio is done growing by Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. The full grown log is placed in the center of the living room and covered with a large red blanket. Children gather around, sing songs and hit the Caga Tio with sticks repeatedly, until it ‘poops’ out the presents. Earlier, the tradition was to place the log partially in fire, ordering it to defecate. There aren’t many modern households with fireplaces anymore, so now it’s just down to hitting the log.

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20-year-old Raul Oaida, a self-taught technology genius, has built the world’s first life-size LEGO car using 500,000 pieces. It’s not just a model, you can actually drive it. And the fuel costs nothing, because the car runs on air!

Oaida’s partner in this project was Australian entrepreneur, Steve Sammartino. The car was built in Romania, Oaida’s home country, and delivered to Melbourne, Australia for a test drive. Together, they named it the ‘Super Awesome Micro Project’ (I think the name is perfect!).

The engine of the car is also entirely made of LEGO. It has “four orbital engines and a total of 256 pistons.” According to the project website, the top speed isn’t very impressive, around 20 to 30 km. “We were scared of a Lego explosion so we drove it slowly,” the founders wrote. Steve and Oaida say that the project was possible only because of the internet. The two even met online, when Steve accepted Oaida’s Skype request. “I’m teaching him about business and he’s teaching me a bit about physics,” Steve told the press.

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Kyle Naegeli, a 15-year-old high school student from the city of Katy, in Texas, loves fishing with a twist. Instead of going to a lake far away from the city, he prefers fishing right beside his home – in a sewer. That’s right, sewer fishing is a real sport and Kyle is an expert at it.

The storm drain where Kyle goes fishing is located merely 40 feet from his home. He calls it an untapped fishing paradise. So far, he has managed to catch catfish and bluegills, species that you would hardly expect to find swimming around in a drain. Yet, he’s filmed himself getting a hold of these fish and posted the footage on YouTube. In the videos, Kyle drops a 10-foot line tied to a worm or a piece of hot-dog into the drain and returns later to pull out slippery, large fish. “I have a line out constantly, I set it and check it every night,” he said.

Many people have doubted his credibility, though, because of the time lag between putting in the bait and retrieving the fish. But some videos don’t have any cuts, because he catches the fish almost immediately. Kyle doesn’t think it’s hard to believe that he’s finding so many fish in the storm drain. “The pond is like 100, 150 yards away,” he said. “I think it connects somewhere and that’s how they’re getting in.”

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The Silic shirt is an amazing garment that just doesn’t catch a stain. No matter what you spill on it – water, soda, or even ketchup – it just rolls right off the T-shirt. Invented by San Francisco based student, Aamir Patel, the shirts are made from a material with billions of silica particles bonded to the fibers on a microscopic level.

Despite the unique material used, Silic shirts are said to feel no different from regular clothing. Patel has created a Kickstarter page for his unique invention and has already exceeded his target of raising $20,000. The campaign closes on 26^th January. The shirts are expected to go on sale online in May, at $50 apiece.

Patel has been working on the shirt project for a year-and-a-half now. For his first prototype, he simply sprayed a stain-resistant chemical on a shirt, but he realized it would last for only one wash. Then he started to think of a way to incorporate the technology right into the fabric. After several trials and errors, he finally managed to create a fabric that is stain-proof on a molecular level. Not only does the technology last longer,but  it doesn’t even irritate the skin, either. Patel says that most liquid molecules will not be able to touch the fabric because of a microscopic layer of air that forms between the liquid and fabric.

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Jatinga is a small village located in Assam, a state in northeastern India. The village is lush green and scenic, surrounded by serene mountains. But that’s not what it’s famous for. In fact, Jatinga is well-known for an entirely different reason – its Bird Mystery.

The Bird Mystery is a unique phenomenon that occurs at Jatinga between September and November each year. During these late monsoon months, several migratory and local birds commit mass suicide at the village. Just after sunset, between 7 and 10 pm, hundreds of birds descend from the sky, plummeting to their deaths by crashing into buildings and trees. Since birds aren’t known to be suicidal, the phenomenon has baffled villagers, visitors and scientists alike. For many years, locals believed that evil spirits living in the skies were responsible for bringing down the birds .

Of course, this isn’t true. After several scientific studies and experiments, it has been concluded that the birds are generally disoriented by the monsoon fog. So they are attracted by the village lights and fly towards them, sometimes hitting walls and trees during the descent. Some of the birds die, while others are grievously injured, becoming easy prey for the villagers to capture. These birds are often dazed and disheveled, and do not put up any resistance when villagers attack them with catapults or bamboo sticks.

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Turkish Halfeti Roses are incredibly rare. They are shaped just like regular roses, but their color sets them apart. These roses so black, you’d think someone spray-painted them. But that’s actually their natural color.

These stunning black roses would make excellent props in a movie about witches and black magic, or in a heavy-metal video. There’s something extremely attractive about them, in an intense sort of way.

Although they appear perfectly black, they’re actually a very deep crimson color. These flowers are seasonal – they only grow during the summer in small number, and only in the tiny Turkish village of Halfeti. Thanks to the unique soil conditions of the region, and the pH levels of the groundwater (that seeps in from the river Euphrates), the roses take on a devilish hue. They bloom dark red during the spring and fade to black during the summer months.

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Brian Lai, a brilliant Malaysian artist, has invented his own technique of drawing called ‘Invert Art’. Using the technique, he is able to make rough sketches materialize into full-fledged realistic drawings, when the colors are inverted using a Photoshop filter.

Lai has created a time-lapse video to demonstrate exactly how he creates these drawings. He first sketches and shades ‘normally’. Then, he completes the drawing by shading it inversely. After this, he takes a photograph of the drawing (he’s in some of the pictures too), and inverts the colors in Photoshop. The details appear, almost magically.

Some of the pictures on the internet of Lai’s work show how he’s successfully used his technique to make a drawing of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. At first, I thought he was holding up a real poster of the movie. Only when I read about his technique, did I realize it was a drawing.

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