UPDATE: Apparently, Noiva de Cordeiro isn’t exactly the bachelors’ paradise it was made out to be by Western media. According to a recent article in the Brazilian newspaper O Globo, the Belo Vale town isn’t that much different from any other rural settlement. Most of the women shown in the photos working in the field and doing chores are apparently happily married, and the population is made up of both men and women, in equal proportion. It’s just that the majority of men work in the city during weekdays, so they’re left tending to their homes and crops.

Unfortunately it’s been again confirmed that if something sounds too good to be true, it generally is. 

Noiva do Cordeiro, a picturesque Brazilian town in the hills near Belo Vale, is one of the very few all-female settlements in the world. Its 600-odd female residents are mostly between the ages of 20 and 35. They all live by a strict set of rules that allows only women to dominate society – but now they’ve extended an invitation to potential male suitors.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that the men they choose are welcome to live with them. All men – including husbands and sons above the age of 18 – are banished from Noiva do Corderio. They have to work away from home and can only visit during the weekends. Girl-power rules in this rural community, and women are in charge of every aspect of life including farming, town planning and religion.

It’s a interesting way of life, but the residents of Noiva do Cordeiro believe that it’s the best way to live. “There are lots of things that women do better than men.” said resident Rosalee Fernandes, 49. “Our town is prettier, more organised, and far more harmonious than if men were in charge.”

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A Tasmanian farmer-couple recently discovered what might just be the world’s woolliest sheep. They’ve named the super-fluffy creature ‘Shaun’, after popular cartoon character Shaun the Sheep from the British comedy series Wallace and Gromit.

As it turns out, Shaun has never had his coat cut, and it is at least half-a-meter thick now. In fact he appears to have been on the run ever since he escaped the shearers at his former farm on Tasmania’s east coast, at least 25 miles away. It is estimated that Shaun has been wandering across the island for the past six years!

Peter Hazel said that he and his wife Netty found Shaun wandering in scrubland on their property last Sunday. He was actually quite easy to catch, what with 20 kilograms of extra fleece weighing him down. His wool was just all over the place, even falling over his eyes and obstructing his vision.

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Mangetsu Man is a likable Japanese superhero whose only superpower is the determination to keep the streets of Tokyo clean, especially the Roppongi district, which locals say is always in need of a dust sweep. As you might have guessed, his arsenal of super-weapons consists of a broom and a dust pan.

Donning a purple suit and a big yellow ball for a head, Mangetsu Man – which translates as ‘Full Moon Man’ – spends a considerable amount of time sweeping the streets of Tokyo. He also puts on hilarious skits, recites Buddhist Prayers, and uses his amazing basketball skills to spread his message of joy, happiness and peace to the world

According to his official website, Mangetsu Man sprang into action in October last year, with a mission to ‘beautify Earth’. He also hopes his actions will inspire others into helping the greater good worldwide.

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Ravi Dalchand, senior brand manager at Bissell Canada, will stop at nothing to demonstrate just how great his company’s new steam vacuum cleaner is. Believe it or not,  he has actually eaten pasta off the floor of a busy subway station, after cleaning it with the vacuum.

The event in question took place at Toronto’s Bloor subway station (one of the busiest in the city), where Dalchand was present with the KBS+ Advertising creative team. At the station, the team shot a video while he used the Bissell Symphony All-in-One Vacuum and Steam Mop to scrub a single spot on the floor. After just a couple of minutes, the floor appeared nice and gleam.

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Artist Sandy Byers owns a vast collection of credit cards, but surprisingly, she doesn’t use any of them to shop. Instead, she uses them as a replacement for paintbrushes, especially when she doesn’t have any handy.

Sandy has always been rather unconventional – she actually quit her cushy job at Microsoft 12 years ago to become a full-time painter. And last year, she took another leap towards the bizarre – she completely abandoned the paintbrush and started using plastic credit cards to paint. Her finished pieces are so beautiful, it’s hard to tell that there were no brushes involved whatsoever.

She developed her unique technique when she visited Marymere Falls in Olympic National Park in 2013. She was about to start painting outdoors after a hiking for about a mile with her husband, when she realised that she’d forgotten her paintbrushes. Going back to the car to get them was simply out of question. “I did not have the heart to ask to go back and get my brushes,” she said. “So I looked around and I just took out my credit card and started painting with it. You gotta find something to paint with when the scene is there and you’ve done the work to get that far.”

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Trying out a coffin while you’re still alive can be a rather unnerving experience. But the Japanese seem to love it!  They even have a creepy ‘try-before-you-die’ festival where people can lay down in coffins, try out funeral garments and even get a morbid makeover.

Called ‘Shukatsu Festa’, the unique event has become very popular in recent years. In fact the whole ‘shukatsu’ trend, which translates as preparing for one’s end, has become really big in Japan. Apparently, people no longer think it’s bad luck to prepare for their death. Participants can choose their funeral outfit, put it on, slip into the flower-filled casket they like and have a picture taken. That way, they get to know exactly what they’ll look like on the day of their funeral. They can even have funeral make-up applied on their faces for a deathly pallor. They can also choose to be covered with white blankets have have the attendants softly close the lid. Read More »

Most people aren’t aware of this, but an alarmingly large number of cats die of leukemia every year. To raise awareness about the plight of these suffering cats, Maria Torero has converted her own two-story, eight-room apartment into a feline hospice. The 45-year-old nurse from Lima, Peru, currently has 175 patients residing with her, and spends over $1,500 a month just to care for them.

Maria has been caring for the diseased cats for the past five years now – she brings unwanted strays into her home and nurses them as they slowly succumb to their deadly illness. The mother-of-three doesn’t distinguish between her own children and her cat-patients. In fact, she says that she considers it her duty as a nurse to take in creatures that no one else wants to care for.

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The talented Sumie painters of Kousyuuya Studio in Nikko, Japan can paint the body of a dragon with a single stroke of the brush. The delicate technique is known as ‘hitofude ryuu’, which literally means ‘dragon with one stroke’, and it’s been around for four generations.

Watching these painters create a perfect dragon – with all the shades and scales – in just a couple of seconds is a true delight. It all looks so effortless, but there’s a lot of hard work and practice involved in getting the stroke right.

To create a single dragon painting, the Sumie artists first make the ornate head with various flourishes, using a smaller brush. Then, they dip a much larger sumie brush into the desired paint color and simply swipe it across the canvas in one swift movement. You really have to watch a video to realize the brilliance of the technique.

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16-year-old Ann Makosinski, from Victoria, Canada, has come up with a marvelous invention – a flashlight powered solely by body-heat. Her project won second prize at a local science fair, and made it all the way to the 2013 Google Science Fair, where she was declared the winner for her age group. She also updated it to a handsfree version this year – a body-heat powered headlamp, for which she won the 2014 Weston Youth Innovation Award.

Ann’s project is truly remarkable for its sheer simplicity and brilliance. I mean, it isn’t every day that you come across a light source that doesn’t use batteries, solar power, or wind energy. The device just powers on as soon as you hold it in your palm. If that isn’t genius, I don’t know what is!

The secret behind Ann’s invention is thermoelectric technology, and devices called Peltier tiles. And it’s really surprising that no one’s ever thought to use that kind of technology to power a flashlight before. Think of all the AA batteries we could avoid using!

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When millionaire Klaus Zapf passed away this week, the whole of Germany mourned his death. The eccentric tycoon, who always had millions at his disposal, actually lived a frugal life by choice. What endeared him most to the people of his nation was his generous nature – he gave most of his money away, while he lived on only $500 a month.

“I don’t need any money. It just makes us unequal,” Klaus once said. “There are just so many bloody idiots with money around, you don’t need another one.”

Zapf, 62, had made his fortune in the relocation business – he ran a company called Zapf Umzüge, which he often referred to as ‘West Berlin’s best removals collective’. His distinctive blue and yellow vans were quite well-known in city streets as they picked up and unloaded wares from across the country and the world.

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Looking at the detailed sculptures in the photos below, You’d be tempted to think they are made of wax, but believe it or not, they’re actually gourds! Enterprising Chinese farmers are able to grow these veggies into any shape they want. The most popular one is Chairman Mao, but there are many others as well – Buddha, Jesus, Santa Claus, babies, old men, monks, dragons, and pretty much anything else that attracts people’s attention.

You might think there’s some complex bioengineering or agricultural science going on behind these gourd-sculptures, but in reality, they’re just grown in simple plastic molds. It all started when a man named Xie Lyu Zhi visited the Thousand Year Temple in Sichuan Province. He claims that during the visit, a Buddhist monk told him about a dream he had about a gourd shaped like a deity.

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58-year-old oil investor Richard Gibson has one of the weirdest collections in the world. For the past 36 years, he has been religiously saving all his toenail clippings in a glass jar.

Collecting toenails is a strange hobby, but Richard says that he didn’t exactly plan for it – it sort of happened as a result of his curiosity, and he just never stopped. He happened to be clipping his nails one day in February, 1978, and instead of throwing them out, he just put them in a manicure box. He then started doing it repeatedly, just to see how long it would take to fill up the box. That didn’t take too long – only two years – and by then he was pretty much hooked. So he moved his collection to a large glass jar, which is what now uses to put the clippings in.

“I have no idea how many nails are in the jar,” Gibson admitted. “It’s well into the thousands.”

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Lillian Weber, from Iowa, is almost 100 years old, but she doesn’t let her age stand in the way of her life’s mission – helping those in need. She spends every single day making a dress from scratch, so that a child in need will have something to wear. She started the unique project in 2011, and she’s made over 840 dresses so far. Her goal is to  make 1,000.

Lillian, who was nominated for WQAD-TV’s ‘Pay It Forward’ award, gets started on a new dress every morning, takes a break at midday, and is finished by the afternoon. “It is just what I like to do,” she said. The dresses she makes are donated to Little Dresses for Africa, an organisation that distributes clothes to impoverished young girls in Africa and beyond.

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While most people prefer their ice-cream frozen, Baghdad-based artist Othman Toma likes it melted. He uses multi-colored melting treats as a medium for his art, instead of normal paint. And it works incredibly well. In fact, to the untrained eye, his artworks seem painted with regular watercolors.

Toma paints all sorts of stuff using ice cream – lions, tigers, women’s faces, popular monuments, and more. It’s  just marvelous how he manages to get such a wide array of colors with very few shades of the cold dessert. All he needs to do is reach out into his freezer, and he’s ready to paint!

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It’s hard to find a partner with similar interests, especially if you’re into weird things. That’s why I’d say Dan MacIntyre and Dunya Kalantery are quite lucky they found each other. The two lovebirds share an extremely rare and gross hobby – looking at ‘fatbergs’.

If you have no idea what a fatberg is, well, you’re not the only one. The relatively unknown term is used in the UK to describe a great lump of fat, sanitary items and other stuff that doesn’t break down when it goes down the toilet. These deposits are found underground in city sewer systems, and are known to cause problematic clogs.

Fatbergs are exactly as gross as they sound, so it’s really surprising that Dan and his girlfriend Dunya discovered a common interest in them when they got together last year. Well, as they say, birds of a feather… “Like wet wipes and congealed cooking oil, we are inseparable,” Dan wrote to Dunya in what they consider to be a ‘romantic email’.

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