When you think about coffee alternatives, garlic is probably one of the last things that comes to mind, but that exactly the ingredient that one Japanese inventor used to create a drink that looks and tastes like coffee.

74-year-old Yokitomo Shimotai, a coffee shop owner in Aomori Prefecture, Japan, claims that his unique “garlic coffee” is the result of a cooking blunder he made over 30 years ago, when he burned a steak and garlic while aiting tables at the same time. Intrigued by the scorched garlic’s aroma, he mashed it up with a spoon and mixed it with hot water. The resulting drink looked and tasted a lot like coffee. Making a mental note of his discovery, Yokimoto carried on with his job, and only started researching garlic coffee again after he retired.

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Inspired by popular Instagram accounts like ‘Rich Kids of Instagram’ or ‘Luxury Kids of Instagram’, as well as social media stars like Gianluca Vachi and Dan Bilzerian, people who can’t actually afford to fly on private jets are renting them on the ground for professional photo shoots, just so they can post their own lavish lifestyle photos on Instagram.

Just because you don’t have tens of thousands of dollars to spend on renting a private jet doesn’t mean that you can’t make your social media friends turn green with envy. With just a few hundred dollars, you can actually rent a luxurious Gulfstream G650 aircraft for a couple of hours and have a team of professional photographers and makeup artists create the illusion that you are actually living a life of luxury. You can then post the photos on Instagram and sit back as your friends and fans drool over them.

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The vast majority of nutritionists claim that, if you want to lose weight, fast food is among the first things you should cut from your diet, but one man recently proved that you can actually eat pizza every single day and still maintain a healthy figure.

Brian Northrup, aka “Lord of Pizza” set out to prove that you can still lose weight while eating your favorite foods, by eating one medium Domino’s pizza every day for a 367 consecutive days. The New Jersey native documented the whole project on his Instagram page, posting photos of every pizza he ordered, and on YouTube where he posted videos of himself eating them. At the end of the year-long experiment, Northrup had lost about five pounds and was in tip-top shape. How did he do it? Well, the pizza fan claims that he just burned the extra calories by working out.

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Shayna Leib’s French desserts may look delicious, but they are only meant to be savoured with the eyes. While these exquisite treats may appear to be the work of a talented confectioner, Leib is actually a porcelain and glass artist.

If, like me, you have an insatiable sweet tooth, you’re probably wondering how anyone could be so cruel as to tempt us with these positively mouth-watering desserts that we’ll never get to try. Well, in Shayna Leib’s case, the idea for her “Patisserie” porcelain and glass series was inspired by her own inability to indulge in decadent desserts. Apparently, her body reacts to food with high histamine, salicylate, and copper content, like puff pastry and chocolate mouse, which results in many dietary restriction. So by salivating over photos of her porcelain and glass desserts, you get a taste of how she feels every time she walks by a dessert shop.

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A 62-year-old man from Birmingham, England, recently made news headlines after revealing that he had lived in the forest for five years before moving into a homeless shelter, just to get away from his nagging, controlling wife.

Malcolm Applegate worked as a gardener for most of his life, and enjoyed tending to people’s gardens. It wasn’t until he got married, about thirteen years ago, that his life took a turn for the worse. He claims that in the beginning, he and his wife got on pretty well, but as he became increasingly busy with work, she became more controlling, to the point where he had to cut his hours just to please her. At one point, all the arguments and his wife’s nagging got too much for Malcolm, so he just packed up his things and left her. But instead of moving to a friend’s house and filing for divorce, he just disappeared.

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One look at Puspa Dewi is all it takes to understand why people often confuse her with her two sons’ girlfriends. At age 50, the Instagram star looks a lot better than most women in their 30s.

Puspa Dewi, an entrepreneur and mother-of-two from Jakarta, Indonesia, recently celebrated her 50th birthday, but you’d have a heart time guessing her age just by looking at the photos she uploads on Instagram. She doesn’t look a day over 30, in fact, she could easily pass for a woman in her early 20s. When she poses with her two teenage sons, people (that includes me) can’t believe that she is their mother, and not their girlfriend.

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42-year-old Gabi Rizea only discovered his talent for wood carving three years ago, and has since put it to good use, saving dozens of old tree stumps from being completely removed, by turning them into impressive works of art.

A former forest engineer, Rizea became a wood carver completely by accident. Three years ago, after buying himself a new chainsaw, he started “playing” with it on a block of wood he had in his workshop. He tried carving a human face into the wood, and to his surprise, it turned out pretty good. He liked using the chainsaw for art, so he kept honing his skills. Today, he is so good at it that local authorities in his home city of Craiova, Romania, allow him to work his magic on the old tree stumps dotting the local parks.

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Sick of listening to his lazy son-in-law complaining about how hard it was to climb the stairs to his 6th floor apartment, a man in Chongqing, China, built a private elevator that only goes up to his apartment.

The man, surnamed Xong, has been living in the Tongliang District apartment building for decades, but never complained about having to walk up to his apartment every day. But when his son-in-law moved in, he had trouble getting used to the daily climb, and always complained about how exhausted he was after walking up the stairs. Tired of his constant wining, Xong decided to do something about it.

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Casa Ceramica, a floor tile company from the UK, recently went viral on Twitter after creating an impressive optical illusion out of 400 floor tiles to discourage people from running through its hallway.

It’s not clear why anyone would be running through the hallway of a floor tile showroom, but they’re sure to think twice about doing it after taking a look at the floor ahead of them. Even though its designers assure us that it is perfectly flat, seen from a certain perspective, it looks like there is a big hole in the middle of it. Interestingly enough, seen from the opposite end, the hole actually looks like a bulge rising up from the floor. Both illusions are sure to prevent visitors from navigating the path at too fast a pace.

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The Pause Pod has been mocked on social media as a really expensive children’s tent for adults, but its inventors claim it is actually a portable “private pop-up space free from stressful moments”.

Inspired by the blanket forts that most of us made as children, the Pause Pod is designed to offer user an escape from the pressure of modern life, anytime, anywhere. Whether you’re looking to take a quick nap, read a chapter of your favorite book, watch the latest episode of Game of Thrones or just meditate, at the office, at home or even on the street, all you have to do is take out your portable Pause Pod, step inside and take a break from the outside world.

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To say that Japanese artist Noriyuki Saitoh is a master when it comes to capturing the anatomical features of tiny insects using only bamboo would be a serious understatement. The level of realism displayed in his creations is simply uncanny.

From the wiry whiskers of grasshoppers to the veiny wings wings of dragonflies and cicadas, the attention to detail in Noriyuki Saitoh’s bamboo insects is breathtaking. It’s true that the natural versatility of bamboo really helps, allowing the artist and his team to bend, score and layer the material to capture every little detail almost to perfection. Or at least that what you’re tempted to believe when you look at his tiny insects, even though things are not quite as they seem.

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Alarmed by how many cigarette butts littered the parks of Amsterdam, two Dutch designers came up with an unusual plan to train crows to pick up the butts and trade them for tasty rewards.

Industrial designers Ruben van der Vleuten and Bob Spikman originally considered using robots to clean the streets of cigarette butts, but they presented a series of difficulties, particularly the complicated programming required to have them vacuuming the buts out of every nook and cranny while trying to avoid bicycles and passers-by. So they turned their attention to one of the most abundant resources of urban areas – birds. Pigeons were the first ones they considered, because they can be found in virtually every city in the world, but a quick search revealed that they aren’t really known for their intelligence, so training them would have been very hard. But the two designers soon found a bird that was both very common around human settlements and much, much smarter – the crow.

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Photos of three Chinese women allegedly stuck in a South Korean airport, because their passports no longer match their faces following plastic surgery, have been doing the rounds on Chinese social media.

South Korean plastic surgery clinics are renowned as some of the best in the world, so it’s no surprise that women from other Asian countries, like China and Japan, regularly fly to South Korea to get work done on their faces. The problem is that few of them stop at nose jobs, face lifts and Botox injections. Instead, they completely remodel their faces, making it difficult for airport personnel to identify them from their passport photo.

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If you enjoy staring at women’s thighs while you eat, there’s now a place that allows you to do just that, without looking like a pervert. Welcome to Japan’s new World of Thighs Photography Cafe!

It’s no secret that Japan loves themed restaurants and cafes, but if you thought airsoft restaurants and reptile cafes were a bit too much, you’re going to love this new joint that is “colored by the world of thighs”. Young girls’ thighs, that it. Designed as an extension of Japanese photographer Yuria’s artistic exhibitions, the newly opened cafe in Tokyo’s Ebisu district is decorated with photos of women’s  thighs from Yuria’s existing portfolio, as well as some never-before-seen pics from a recent photo shoot in Guam. If you’re unfamiliar with Yuria’s body of work, it’s pretty much centered around female thighs.

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A 21-year-old woman from Dongguan, China, was recently diagnosed with with retinal artery obstruction in her right eye, after playing a popular smartphone game almost non-stop.

The woman, known only as Wu, apparently noticed that she couldn’t see anything with her right eye on October 1st, while playing her favorite mobile game, King of Glory. Thinking she was just tired, she went to bed, but when she woke up the next day, she was still blind in her right eye. Her parents took her to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with a serious condition known as retinal artery obstruction. This usually only occurs in older patients, but doctors said that Wu’s eyes were incredibly fatigued by the stressed of constantly staring into the small smartphone screen.

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