Melanie Barboni, an assistant researcher at UCLA’s Earth, Planetary and Space Science department, is known as an expert in geology and volcanic activity among her colleagues, but those who haven’t worked with her before know her only as the “hummingbird whisperer”. She has always been fascinated by the tiny birds, and after moving to Los Angeles, she has nurtured a colony of over 200 hummingbirds right outside her office window.

Growing up in Switzerland, a country with an almost non-existent population of hummingbirds, Melanie Barboni admired the colorful birds in books, but dreamed of one day seeing them up close, so when she learned that her next job assignment would lead her to Los Angeles, California, where hummingbirds live all year round, she was overjoyed. She has spent the two years since developing a colony of 200-plus hummingbirds right outside her office window, by hanging four nectar-filled feeders for them. Melanie has gotten so close to her hummingbirds that she “cannot go to a place where they are not there”.

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Mario Hvala, a barber from Novi Sad, Serbia, recently made international headlines for trimming a detailed portrait of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on the back of a client’s head, but that was only his most recent achievement. He has been creating “hair tattoos” for the last eight years, and there’s nothing he can’t trim on the scalps of his customers.

33-year-old Mario claims he started doing hair tattoos eight years ago, while working in Slovenia. A customer had asked him for two straight lines on his head, but the hairstylist was feeling adventurous, so he proposed a more intricate design, and the guy went home with a tarantula design on his head. Inspired by the success of his first attempt, Hvala kept honing his skills, and upon his return to Serbia, four years ago, he quickly made a name fr himself at the House Damian hair salon, in Novi Sad, carving all kinds of design and celebrity portraits on customers’ heads.

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We’ve seen people grow their hair ridiculously long before, but what sets 81-year-old Trinh Thi Nghien is that her 3-meter-long locks are bundled together in a thick mass that looks like a snake curled on her head. She claims it just started growing like this 22 years ago, and it hasn’t stopped since.

Trinh Thi Nghien’s “dragon hair” recently went viral on Vietnamese social media, with people asking how the 81-year-old woman could bare living with what looks like a pile of unkempt hair for so long. But the woman claims that it wasn’t by choice. Her hair was perfectly normal until 1995, when she noticed a bun of tangled up hair on the back of her head. She tried untangling it with a comb, but to no avail, so she just cut it off. However, it started growing back the same way, and the longer it got, the thicker it became. After cutting it off several times, she decided to just let it grow, and today, 22 years later, her dragon hair measures a whopping 3 meters long.

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A jealous woman was somehow able to control her ex-boyfriend’s life – forbidding him from seeing other women and even going to certain bars – for two years, by posing as police officers and convincing him that he was part of an investigation.

21-year-old Lauren Adderley and Mitchell Lloyd, 22, both from Shrewsbury, UK, were in a romantic relationship for only two months, in 2014, but even though Lloyd made it clear he wanted nothing more to do with her after that, the young woman spent the next two years making his life a living hell. She put together a sophisticated blackmail plan that was put into motion right after the breakup. Lauren told her ex that she had been the victim of a crime and asked him to provide a statement to the police. He accepted, and was soon contacted by a certain Robert Hay, supposedly a police officer and a friend of Adderley’s family, asking for the statement by email. Little did Mitchell know that Robert Hay was actually an online alias of Lauren’s, and that he would become his biggest nightmare.

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Last year, 20-year-old Mekhi Alante Lucky got himself arrested in North Carolina for speeding and driving a stolen vehicle. Little did he know that this even would completely change his life for the better. The young man’s mugshot soon went viral and he recently signed with an Atlanta modelling agency.

True to his name, Mr. Lucky managed to avoid jail time when he was arrested, in May of last year, but managed to get himself in trouble several times since then, amassing quite the criminal record. Between April 2016 and December 2016, he was booked for alleged assault on a female, alleged breaking and entering plus resisting a public officer, and twice, for misdemeanor violations of his parole. But his troubled past didn’t stop Atlanta-based St Claire’s Modeling Agency from signing Mekhi to its roster, as soon as they saw his original mugshot on social media.

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31-year-old Jeffrey Shaver recently became an overnight internet sensation after being photographed protesting in front of a courthouse wearing only green Speedo-style underwear, next to two signs that read “RETURN MY BONG” and “RETURN MY MARIJUANA”, while smoking a bong.

Shaver, of Cambridge, Ontario, claims that he was wrongfully arrested last October for possession of marijuana, despite having a card for medical marijuana on him at the time. Police also confiscated a small amount of pot and his bong, and now he wants them both back. He has been periodically protesting at police stations in Cambridge and Kitchener, and at the courthouse in Kitchener, hoping to get the mattered resolved. To catch people’s attention, he also researched indecent exposure and decided to wear as little as possible without breaking the law.

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Saja Pahad, a small village in Chhattisgarh, India, has been dealing with severe water shortages for as long as anyone can remember. With only two wells available, locals were barely able to secure enough water to feed their cattle, let alone irrigate their crops. Villagers didn’t know what to do and the government ignored their plight, but one “crazy” teenager took matters into his own hands.

Shyam Lal was only 15-years-old when he took it upon himself to solve his village’s water problem. He identified a spot in a nearby forest and decided to dig a pond to collect rainfall that could then be used by the entire village. Lal shared his idea with the rest of Saja Pahad, but instead of volunteering to help, they just laughed at his crazy plan and called him a lunatic. But the young man didn’t let the people’s reaction get him down. Instead, he grabbed a spade and started digging the pond himself. He kept on digging for the next 27 years.

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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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New York rapper Joey Bada$$ recently announced that he had to cancel several of his upcoming shows due to “unforseen circumstances”. Seeing as he had previously boasted on Twitter that he was staring at Monday’s eclipse without eye protection, it wasn’t hard for his fans to figure out what had happened.

“Am I crazy for watching the eclipse today w no glasses? I’ve sungazed before and afterwards saw colors for a whole day. I didn’t die tho,” Joey Bada$$ tweeted on August 21. “This ain’t the first solar eclipse and I’m pretty sure our ancestors ain’t have no fancy eyewear. Also pretty sure they ain’t all go blind.”

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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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