In true entrepreneurial spirit, Boston-based Kyle Waring is trying to make the best of a difficult situation. Boston has experienced one of the worst winters this year, receiving a record-breaking 8.3 feet of snow. Instead of complaining about it like most people, Kyle is actually attempting to make a profit by selling the excess snow.

The Massachusetts native created a start-up called ‘Ship Snow’, through which he’s delivering chunks of snow to people living in warmer areas of the US where snow rarely falls. “This snow is wicked,” the official website reads. “This is historic snow. Boston Snow. This is your chance to not only own a piece of history, but also help save Boston from #Snowmageddon 2015! Every order counts!” The packaging options include a 16.9 oz snow bottle for $19.99, a 6 lbs. box of packed snow for $89, and a 10-pound package for $119. The website promises to deliver snow to any destination in the U.S. in 20 hours flat. But there’s an exception: “We will not ship snow to any states in the northeast! We’re in the business of expunging snow!”

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28-year-old Noortje Zijlstra is a part of a new group of Dutch artists who are gaining recognition for their fusion of taxidermy and art. Noortje, in particular, takes the macabre practice of taxidermy to the next level – some of her pieces include a white dove’s head mounted on a shuttlecock,  a stuffed squirrel standing on its hind legs with a test tube in its throat serving as a flower holder, and a single preserved baby chicken leg mounted on a wooden stand, covered in fluffy white feathers. Her studio is also home to a family of mice with their hides replaced by decorative colored sugar.

“My work fuses taxidermy and art, sometimes creating work that may shock or even revolt, but I hope it serves as a catalyst for conversation,” she said. Her latest work involves a frozen crow carcass; she’s not yet sure what it’s going to become, but she hopes that the final piece gets people talking. During an interview with AFP, she demonstrated how she cuts into the bird’s breastbone before removing its insides. “This is what I do,” she said. “I take its ‘jacket’ off and use it as a medium for art. As soon as that happens, it ceases to be a dead animal.”

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At 43 inches, Pedro, an adorable pint-sized Shetland pony, is so small that he can’t even see over his own stable door. Fortunately, a group of schoolchildren recently found a solution to his problem – they designed a special equine periscope just for him. The cardboard contraption, aptly named the ‘Pedroscope’, is fixed to the 60-inch gate and uses carefully placed mirrors in order to give 14-year-old Pedro a view of the world outside his stall.

Owing to his small stature, Pedro was given a home at Ebony Horse Club, a struggling charity in London that gives disadvantaged children a chance to engage with horses. But builders estimated that it would cost thousands of pounds to create a custom-made miniature stable for the cute pony. So the charity turned to local school children for help, and they rose to the occasion quite beautifully. They came up with the design for the cardboard periscope, which was later built by printing firm Print & Cut.

“We got an email from the Ebony Horse Club who were asking for our help, it was so nice, and a little bit funny, that we decided to give it a go,” said Andy Morris, owner of Print & Cut. “The sketch was sent to us and then I turned it into a 3D sketch with some software, and then it was sent to be made. It was all quite easy, and we did it for free to help Pedro. As soon as I saw it, I thought it was funny and knew it would be relatively easy for us to do, and we’d make the pony and children pretty happy.”

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In case you haven’t heard of it before, the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, also known as Pastafarianism (a cross between pasta and Rastafarian) is a movement that promotes a light-hearted view of religion, and is generally viewed by the media as a satirical take on organized religion. But 63-year-old German retiree Rüdiger Weida takes his Pastafarianism quite seriously – he established his own church chapter in the town of Templin, in September of last year, and is now trying his best to get it legally recognized by the state!

Weekly noodle worship at Weida’s church begins at 10 a.m. every Friday. The basic mass format is somewhat similar to mainstream Christian churches – there’s an altar, a time for prayers, scripture readings, hymns and a Holy Communion. But the similarities end there. The wine and bread are replaced by beer and of course, cooked strands of spaghetti, and parishioners hey say “Ramen” instead of “Amen” and chant “Beer-alleluia” at the end of the service. As the leader of this unusual church, Weida, who goes by the alias“Bruder Spaghettus”, acts as the “Noodler”, which means he presides over the service wearing a long yellow robe and a pink stole.

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If you’re looking for the finest dark chocolate money can buy, you might want to try , a delicate, handmade chocolate, made from the finest cacao beans Ecuador has to offer. At a hefty $260 per 1.5 ounce-bar, it is the most expensive chocolate in the world.

According to the makers of To’ak, 95 percent of the world’s chocolate is made from mass-produced beans, whereas they use rare cacao seeds harvested from the coast of Ecuador. These seeds are fermented and converted into liquid chocolate, which is then hand-moulded into bars. Each bar contains 81 percent cacao, and requires 36 different steps to create. Finally, a single, hand-selected, hand-measured, shelled cacao bean is placed in the center. The bean, measuring between 7 and 8 mm, has to fit perfectly.

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Alberto Frigo is a man on a mission – for the past 11 years the 36-year old Italian has been photographing every single object that his right hand has touched. And he plans on continuing the bizarre project until he reaches retirement in the year 2040.

Frigo said that he had been fascinated about the idea of recording his life many years before he began the project. He tried embedded cameras for a while, but found the experience frustrating. Writing a journal did not appeal to him either, because the writing eventually fades.

The idea finally came to him in September 2003, and he started photographing every object his right hand came into contact with. Soon, he got so addicted to it that he simply couldn’t stop. And now it’s become a habit. “At this stage, my left hand now naturally photographs my right hand using objects without me really thinking about it.”

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Developed by a Cambridge University affiliated laboratory, Esthechoc is being touted as the world’s first ‘beauty chocolate’. It’s a dark chocolate with 70 percent cocoa containing high levels of two powerful anti-oxidants which help reverse the skin’s natural ageing process.

A 7.5g piece of Esthechoc has as many cocoa flavanols as a 100g piece of regular chocolate, and the same amount of astaxanthin as 300g of wild salmon. These substances are believed to help improve blood circulation and increase blood supply to the skin, making it look healthier and younger. Cambridge-based bio-medical company Lycotec tested the chocolate on volunteers aged between 50 and 60, and recorded visible benefits in just three weeks.

“After 3-4 weeks of daily intake by 50-60 year old volunteers, the Beauty Chocolate was able to not only suppress markers of sub-clinical inflammatory damage in their blood, but also reverse their age-related depression of microcirculation and blood supply to such peripheral tissues as subcutaneous fat and skin,” Lycotec claims in a post on its website. “This consequently resulted in a significant boost of oxygen delivery to these tissues and restoration of their respiration – the essential physiological need in controlling and supporting skin health.”

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People often believe that female bodybuilders have to compromise on their feminine charm in order to lift heavy and win competitions, but Japanese bodybuilder Tomoko Kanda is proving them wrong. The 48-year-old has dedicated her life to bodybuilding and weight training, but also managed to retain her feminine beauty.

Tomoko, who lives in Abeno-Ku, Osaka, was introduced to the world of bodybuilding during her years working for the Department of Defense at Yokota Air Base. “I got fat very easily because of my body type, so a soldier there told me about weight training,” she recalled. “I first did it to lose weight. I was 23 at the time, a late bloomer.”

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The Lincolnshire Trust for Cats, in Lincolnshire, England is a charity that claims to be running the world’s only retirement home for cats. It is currently  home to nearly 80 elderly cats living out their last days in comfort.

The retirement home caters specifically to cat owners who are worried about what will happen to their pets if they outlive them. “Would you want your lifelong friend to be put in a pen for the rest of its life, with no hope of a home because of its age,” the trust website asks. “We all tend to think we live forever but we need to remember that our pets deserve our consideration and may well outlive us.”

So Lincolnshire Trust for Cats provides an alternative – a safe place where cats can grow old and die in peace. The unique home is located on seven acres of land on the outskirts of Osgodby village. It has three centrally-heated sitting rooms connected by enclosed outdoor areas, and every room is designed to be facing south, so that the cats can enjoy plenty of sun-bathing. Felines are fed top-quality food and enjoy a variety of amenities, like heated beds, sofas and even a fireplace.

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15-year-old New Yorker Noa Mintz is one of the youngest people in the world to own a successful start-up. The teen entrepreneur is the founder of ‘Nannies by Noa’, a popular baby sitting agency that she started after a number of bad personal experiences with babysitters, but because she is still in school she needed someone to handle business for her. So she just hired a CEO.

Although Mintz agency was doing well, she simply couldn’t find time to handle the ‘excruciating hours’ and ‘hundreds of emails’ along with homework. So she decided to delegate the responsibility of running the business, and her decision has paid off. The agency now serves almost 200 clients in the tri-state area, providing them with baby sitters as well as full-time nannies.

It all started three years ago, when Mintz, a sixth-grader, spent the first half of her summer vacation interning at a nonprofit. Subsequently, she spent the second half brainstorming for her nanny agency. It stemmed from the fact that Mintz, the eldest of four, always found flaws with her own babysitters. She realized that there must be a better way of pairing families with the right caregivers. “For what you’re paying, your kids should be more stimulated,” she explained. “At seven, I would tell my mom, ‘You need to get more bang for your buck.’ It would drive me insane.” So Mintz accepted a challenge from her mother to find a better babysitter for their family, and succeeded. Soon, she started helping out her mother’s friends too.

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Only in Japan can you find strange foods like garlic flavored cola, deep-fried maple leaves, and delicious water cake, but citrus-scented eggs are pretty strange, even by its standards. And yet these fruit-smelling eggs do exist thanks to a producer in Kochi Prefecture, in the southwest corner of Shikoku island.

The special eggs, called ‘yuzu tama’, supposedly smell and taste like yuzu – one of Japan’s most loved citrus fruits. A yuzu looks like a wrinkly cross between a lemon and an orange and tastes like a combination of grapefruit and mandarin. It grows in abundance in Kochi and is used widely in Japanese cuisine.

Surprisingly, the yuzu tama don’t contain any chemical additives or flavorings. They are produced merely by feeding chickens copious amounts of yuzu peel, along with kale, non-GMO corn and sesame seeds. The resultant eggs don’t look very different from regular eggs, but they supposedly smell tantalizingly citrusy, even before they’re cracked open.

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A Colombian woman recently changed her name to include all 26 letters in alphabetical order. So her first name is Abcdefg Hijklmn and her last name is Opqrst Uvwxyz. We’re not sure what she’s having people call her, but it’s probably something short, like Abc.

Before she turned to the alphabet, the 36-year-old Bogota resident used to go by ‘Ladyzunga Cyborg’, also a name that she fashioned for herself. In fact, the woman is known to have habitually changed her name several times in the past, but the alphabet name is probably her weirdest one yet.

Miss Abc revealed the reason behind her bizarre new name in a recent interview with a Colombian TV station. “I started looking for a name that nobody had in Colombia, or the world, so I thought ABCDEFG HIJKLMN OPQRST UVWXYZ,” she said. “I’ve changed my name so people wouldn’t know it’s me. It’s not because I was disturbed by it, but because I always wanted to bring an element of surprise.”

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Cicada 3301 is often referred to as the internet’s most elaborate and mysterious puzzle, one that often leaves cryptoanalysts and hackers scratching their heads. A sort of cross between a contest, job interview and highly complex puzzle, Cicada 3301 recurs each year, but no one knows who is behind it or what prize awaits the person who solves it.

The first internet puzzle appeared online on January 5, 2012, and two subsequent rounds were released on the same day of the following years. During the first year, Cicada 3301 started with a picture on 4Chan, along with the message: “Hello. We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test. There is a message hidden in this image. Find it, and it will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through.” The message was simply signed 3301.

The ensuing puzzle provided focused heavily on data security, cryptography and steganography. The clues were scattered in locations all over the world – from the US to France and Poland, within various forms of communication including the internet, telephone, bootable Linux CDs, digital images, and physical paper signs. The clues have also referenced several books, poetry, artwork and music. Clues are always signed by the same cryptic private key to confirm authenticity.

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When 29-year-old Didier Jacquemin set out to get the tattoo of his dreams, little did he know that it would turn out to be a huge disaster. While the image he desired was a beautiful forest scenery complete with birds in flight, the tattoo he ultimately got was the stuff of nightmares!

Didier, a resident of Liege, Belgium, said that he found the original pattern on the internet and immediately fell in love with it. So he printed the image and took it to a local tattoo parlor on January 15, asking for a replica. The artist agreed to do the artistic tattoo, but ultimately delivered something that seems drawn by a 4-year-old.

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In an attempt to make long-term inmates more comfortable with modern technology, a Chinese prison has built a fake mini city within its walls. Located in Beijing, the prison campus features a small supermarket, internet café, and even a fake subway station!

These structures are meant for inmates who have spent the last 20 years locked up and have no idea of the developments that have taken place outside during this time. “The project aims to give a micro view of the new society that now exists,” said guard Liang Chiu. “Prisoners were very often finding it difficult to adjust to life outside and now they are being taught how bank cards work, mobile phones and even computers, which most of them would have had no experience with before they ended up being jailed.”

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