Most people wouldn’t dare touch a scorpion for all the money in the world, but in one small Indian village, people actually seek out the poisonous arachnids and put them on their faces, or eve in their mouths, as part of a worshiping ritual.

Every year, on Naga Panchami, when most of India worships the snake god, the people of Kandakoor, about 20 kilometers from Yadgir, in the state of Karnataka, worship their Scorpion Goddess, Kondammai. Men and women, children and the elderly, all queue to go up a nearby hill called Chellina Betta (Scorpion Hill) and reach an idol of Kondammai, to which they offer sarees, coconuts and oil, and pray for good health and prosperity. After this ritual is completed, everyone starts looking for scorpions to play with.

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To say French tattoo artist Eliot Kohek is a master of black and grey realism would be a gross understatement. Some of the works he has inked on his clients over the years look ready to jump off of their skin.

Judging by the level of detail in Eliot Kohek’s tattoos, it’s hard to believe that he has no formal artistic training. He has been fond of drawing for as long as he can remember, but it wasn’t until he attended a tattoo convention at age 19 that he knew that’s what he wanted to do with his life. He quit his job and found a talented tattoo artist who would let him watch as he inked his clients. For practical experience, Eliot would practice everything he learned on his friends. Today, he is regarded as one of the world’s most talented tattoo artists, and it’s easy to see why.

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A group of Japanese Minecraft enthusiasts have spent the last three years creating an insanely realistic city in the popular block-building video game, and the results of their work have been leaving people with their mouths open.

Sayama City was originally unveiled in 2016, on creative Minecraft community website Planet Minecraft, and got a lot of attention from fans of the game. The level of detail for every building shown in the feature video and in the uploaded photos was indeed quite impressive, with many people commenting that this was the most amazing Minecraft city they had ever seen. Well, the team behind Sayama City has been busy over these last few years and the latest photos of the fictional metropolis look so insanely detail that you could swear this was a real city.

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We are always looking for new and innovative ways to harness technology, and the industry of farming is no exception. A blueberry farm in Oregon was having big problems with birds stealing up to 25% of their crops and this year, they addressed the problem using a somewhat unconventional new technology.

At the start of the blueberry growing season, the farm installed 6 Agrilaser Autonomics—automated laser guns which are mounted on a pedestal. These laser guns shoot a steady green laser beam across the bushes. The birds seem to mistake the laser for an incoming predator, and will immediately flee whenever the laser comes close to them.

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A 21-year-old woman from Hong Kong who though she was undergoing a ‘mock wedding test’ to secure a job as a wedding planner ended up officially married to a total stranger from mainland China.

The woman, who wished to remain anonymous, told authorities that her ordeal began in May of this year, when she saw a social media posting about a job as a make-up artist apprentice. It offered a monthly salary of HK$14,000 (US$1,800) as well as free training, and required no previous work experience at all. Most people would call that “too good to be true”, but the young woman decided it was the opportunity of a lifetime. Turns out she was wrong.

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In 1980, Portugal was shocked by the story of Maria Isabel Quaresma Dos Santos, a 9-year-old girl who had spent her entire childhood in a chicken coop, deprived of any human interaction and affection. Because of the effects growing up with chickens had on her behavior, Isabel became known as “Chicken Girl”.

According to an article published by the Diário de Notícias newspapers in 1980, Maria Isabel Quaresma Dos Santos was born on July 6, 1970, on a farm in Tábua, in Portugal’s district of Coimbra. When she was only one year old, her mother, who doctors would later diagnose with severe mental problems, locked her away in the chicken coop, because she didn’t consider her as part of the family. Maria Isabel would spent the next 8 years of her life in this place, surrounded only by chickens and surviving on the same food as the birds – grains, cabbage leaves and whatever leftovers the family would feed them.

Interestingly, Maria Isabel’s older brothers did not share her fate. They lived normal lives, slept in the family home, went to school and interacted with other children from the local community. It was later revealed that everyone in Tábua knew about the girl growing up in the Dos Santos’ chicken coop, but no one ever denounced the family to the authorities or try to help her in any way. Tábua was a small rural community in those times, and people focused on working in the fields instead of getting mixed up in the affairs of their neighbors.

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If you were to see the Great Banyan Tree in the Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Indian Botanic Garden from a distance, you could be forgiven for mistaking it for a forest. Spanning more than 14,493 square meters, the tree is the widest in the world—so large that it covers more ground than the average Wal-Mart.

No one is quite sure exactly how old the Great Banyan Tree is due to a lack of official records, but experts estimate that the tree is at least 250 years old; the earliest references to the tree have been found in travel writing dating all the way back to the 19th century. Over the years, the tree has been through a lot. Not only has it survived 2 major cyclones in 1864 and 1867, but its main trunk was also infected with a deadly fungus. This infection meant that the main trunk of the tree needed to be removed in 1925.

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Do you buy too many clothes? Or do you often buy new garments only to wear them once before throwing them away? Research shows that you are not alone; a recent YouGov survey in Australia has shown that roughly a quarter of Australians have thrown away an article of clothing after wearing it just once.

Entrepreneur Sarah Freeman was so shocked by these findings that she decided to do something about it. She has founded a “clothes library” in Sydney, where customers can rent clothing instead of purchasing it; this way, you can still only wear it once, but without being wasteful.

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A young Russian artist was recently sentenced to 11.5 years in prison for bringing home two small bottles of ayahuasca – a famous spiritual medicine prepared by indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin  – that he bought while visiting Peru.

Maxim Gert, a resident of Nizhny Tagil, a city in Russia’s Sverdlovsk Oblast, had no idea that a simple souvenir he bought on a business trip to Peru could land him behind bars for over a decade. Maxim had long been suffering from back pain, and while in the South American country, someone suggested he meet one of the local shamans and try ayahuasca, a traditional spiritual medicine with known psychoactive properties. It’s unclear whether he noticed an improvement while consuming the brew in Peru, but he did decide to continue his ayahuasca treatment at home, so he took two small bottles with him on the flight home. That turned out to be a huge mistake.

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As human beings, one of the things we often overlook in our daily lives is physical touch; without it, we can fall into depression and a number of other mental health problems. To fulfill this need, a mother of 3 from Australia’s Gold Coast has become a “cuddle therapist”, and currently makes around $58,000 a year hugging people.

Jessica O’Neill claims that her hugs can help those who are suffering from loneliness, depression, or low self confidence. She didn’t get into this strange career overnight. Originally, Jessica was a massage therapist and counselor, quite ordinary professions. She noticed that when she hugged her clients during sessions, they dropped their guards and opened up to her more.

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A Russian nail salon has been slammed as ‘sick’ and ‘cruel’ on social media after posting photos and videos of live ants crawling inside models’ hollow acrylic nails.

Moscow-based Nail Sunny beauty salon has built a reputation for pushing the envelope, and several of their quirky ideas have gone viral on social media like Instagram or Facebook in the past. However, they may have gone a bit too far with their latest creation – hollow acrylic nails that act as display cases for live insects. While some of the salon’s 1.8 million Instagram followers commended its staff for the original idea, the vast majority of comments were negative.

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An 11-year-old girl was recently admitted at the Quy Hoa National Leprosy Dermatology Hospital, in Vietnam, under suspicion of suffering from hematidrosis, a very rare medical condition in which people sweat blood.

The young girl, identified only as N., to protect her privacy, allegedly started sweating blood three or four months ago, when her parents claim she was very stressed about her exam for fifth grade. They didn’t take her to a doctor when the first symptoms appeared, but things gradually got worse, to the point where the girl would sweat blood 3 or 4 times a day and suffer from severe headaches.

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Gongbang is the name of a growing live-streaming trend in South Korea, where people broadcast themselves studying in almost total silence for hours on end to dozens, sometimes hundreds of viewers who love nothing more than to watch them do it.

Ask most popular streamers and they’ll tell you that the keys to a successful live-streaming career are providing entertaining and exciting content, and viewer engagement. That’s what makes the Gongbang live-streaming trend, which has been growing in the Asian country over the last decade, so fascinating. Gongbang streamers almost never connect with their audience, and as for providing exciting content, the most excitement they offer is turning a page every once in a while. They simply broadcast themselves studying for many hours at a time, and, for some reason, people love watching them do it.

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Despite the amazing scientific advances we have made in the last century, there are still many medical cases that can’t be fully explained. Vanishing Bones Syndrome sounds like something straight out of an episode of House MD, but doctors at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh in Scotland encountered a case of this bizarre condition in a 44-year-old woman.

Also known as Gorham-Stout disease, this extremely rare condition causes the sufferer to experience progressive bone loss. The disease is so uncommon that there has only ever been 64 recorded cases in medical literature since it was first described in 1838. In a healthy person, bones are constantly rebuilding themselves to help maintain their strength, and Gorham-Stout disease is believed to be a malfunction of this process; the bone breaks itself down faster than it can repair itself.

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Kalaca Skull, a 22-year-old tattoo artist from Colombia, has been making headlines all over South America for undergoing extreme surgical procedures to make his face look like a skull.

Born Eric Yeiner Hincapié Ramírez, the young tattoo artist claims he had been fascinated by skulls ever since he was a child, but only started turning his face into one after his mother’s death, two years ago, because she didn’t approve of the idea. First, he had the lower half of his nose removed, because, well, skulls don’t have noses. They don’t have ears either so he had most of his ear lobes cut off as well. But his transformation didn’t stop there. After splitting his tongue and tattooing it to an unnatural blue-grey color, he had large black eye-sockets tattooed around his eyes, as well as large teeth and even the hollow space between the mandible and maxilla tattooed around his mouth.

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