Taylor Muhl, a model and singer from California, often says that she is her own twin, and as strange as that sounds, she means it quite literally. The 33-year-old was diagnosed with genetic Chimerism, an extremely rare condition explained as “an organism composed of cells from different zygotes”.

As a child, Taylor was obsessed with twins, constantly asking her mother if she had a twin sibling, and playing twins with her girlfriends, but little did she know that she actually was her own twin. Doctors say that the model absorbed her fraternal twin while in the womb, and parts of its DNA now exist in her body, making her a Chimera, of which there are only 100 known cases in the whole world. But even as a human Chimera, Taylor’s case is a rare and fascinating one, because while most Chimeras only display the symptoms internally or have very small skin marks, Muhl’s stomach is split down the middle into two skin tones.

Read More »

Thai women looking to date a walking ATM machine, but with no clue on how to catch one, can now rely on the services of “Madam Raya”, a seduction expert who claims to have dated 5,000 wealthy men. She is offering online course to help like-minded women bag the rich foreigner of their dreams.

24-year-old Praiya Suriya has been advising other Thai women in the art of seduction for four years now, via her popular Facebook page. She specializes in rich foreigners, and claims to have dated 5,000 of them, which, at her age is definitely an impressive achievement. Suriya recently made news headlines in Thailand after announcing a series of paid online courses that are 100% guaranteed to help takers find the perfect sugar daddy and teach them how to deal with them in order to get their hands on huge sums of money and expensive presents.

Read More »

Aílton Manuel da Silva is not your usual waiter. He dresses as one, carries himself as one and even sports a tray full of cold drinks and snacks, but instead of a restaurant or a cafe, he works in the streets, braving the hot sun and incoming traffic to provide for his family. He is the “traffic waiter” of Recife, and probably the world’s most elegant street vendor.

Every morning at 5 a.m., 43-year-old Aílton Manuel da Silva wakes up, puts on his creased pants, white shirt, bow tie and lacquered shoes and leaves for work. He arrives at the busy intersection of Avenida Almirante Dias Fernandes and Rua Emiliano Ribeiro at around 5:30 and gets ready for a long day of waiting through traffic. He prepares his bottles of cold water, cans of soda and snacks like popcorn and chips, sets them neatly on his metal tray, and at 7 in the morning he steps into traffic to offer motorists his assortment of refreshments.

Read More »

Scientific evidence shows that fasting for brief periods of time can have positive effects on our health, but one California couple say they haven’t eaten any real food in 9 years, as they live off “the universe’s energy” instead.

36-year-old Akahy Ricardo and his wife, Camilla Costello, 34, had their last real meal in 2008, before becoming “bretharians” and embracing a food-free lifestyle. They both claim that humans can easily live a healthy life without food, as long as they are connected to “the energy that exists in all things and through breathing.” Furthermore, Costello claims that this lifestyle is considerably cheaper, allowing her and her husband to spend money on travelling rather than groceries.

Read More »

A 57-year-old Italian conman was recently arrested and charged with fraud and document forgery, after its was revealed that he had been posing as a member of the Montenegro Royal Family for years. His con was so elaborate that he had even managed to fool many real royals and celebrities.

The man, whose real identity has not yet been revealed, called himself “His Imperial and Royal Highness Stefan Cernetic, Hereditary Prince of Montenegro, Serbia and Albania”, and claimed to be a descendant of the Roman emperor Constantine, and the head of the Montenegrin royal family. He travelled all around Europe in a black Mercedes sporting Montenegrin flags and fake royal insignia, and stayed in luxury hotels, free of charge. To make his claims even more believable, Cernetic set up a website and several social media accounts, where he regularly posted photos of him alongside known royals, like Prince Albert of Monaco, and members of famous aristocratic families, like Savoy, Hapsburg and Hohenzollern.

Read More »

A family of four from Scotland is offering a £50,000 ($64,000) to a professional nanny willing to work in a haunted house and put up with supernatural occurrences that have so far driven away five other nannies in the last year alone. This may be just a clever hoax, but even so, it’s a very entertaining story.

According to the ad posted on a popular childcare job site, the “friendly family of four with 2 children ages 5 and 7 living in a small village in the Scottish Borders” have been having trouble finding a stable nanny to look after their young ones. They apparently live in a “lovely, spacious, historic property” that offers “spectacular views” of the surrounding countryside, but that hasn’t been enough to keep previous nannies working there long-term. That might have something to do with the place being haunted, the person who posted the ad says.

Read More »

EverYoung, a technology company based in Seoul, South Korea, has an unusual yet strict condition when hiring new staff – candidates have to be at least 55-year-old. It’s been this way ever since EverYoung was founded, in 2013, and it now employs 420 seniors aged 55 to 83.

South Korea’s corporate culture is notorious for forcing workers into retirement before they reach the official retirement age of 60, but EverYoung founder, Chung Eunsung, hopes to change this practice by proving that seniors can be just as valuable to a company as young workers. In 2013, he set out with the clear goal of only hiring only individuals over the age of 55 and he has stuck with this rule for the last 4 years.

Read More »

Radomir Novakovic Cakan is a successful businessman from Montenegro, who has earned himself nicknames like “the best boss in the Balkans” and “Brother” by being incredibly generous to his employees.

Cakan, who owns “Cakan Sports”, the largest sporting goods store chain in Montenegro, and recently went into politics, has been making news headlines in Balkan countries for years, but not for his professional success. He is best known for the generosity he shows his loyal and hard-working employees, and the close relationship he has with them. The businessman firmly believes that his company can only thrive if he keeps his employees happy, and to that end, he has offered the best of them some pretty unbelievable presents.

Read More »

Retirement usually involves slowing down, taking it easy for a change, but not for 81-year-old Wang Deshun. For him, it’s all about commercial photo shoots, parading bare-chested on fashion runways and brushing shoulders with Chinese superstars. He is “China’s hottest grandpa” and the man praised for changing the country’s traditional view of old age.

Wang Deshun’s life changed one march evening, two years ago, when he got the chance to walk on the runway at the China Fashion Week in Beijing. With his chiseled physique, hipster beard, long silver hair and youthful attitude, the 79-year-old made quite an impression, and things just kept getting better for him after that. But how he ended up on the stage of an international fashion festival is quite a story in itself.

Read More »

For the vast majority of plants, an inability to produce chlorophyll is synonymous with death, but that general rule apparently doesn’t apply to the hundreds of documented “albino redwoods” in Humboldt Redwoods State Park, California. Some of them are almost completely white, others, known as redwood chimeras, are half green and half white, but they have one thing in common – they should be dead, and yet they are not.

These mysterious albino redwoods have been puzzling scientists for over 100 years. Their very existence is so preposterous that many of those who haven’t seen one up close question whether that are real or just a myth. Zane Moore, a young biologist working to unravel the mechanism that allows albino trees to survive, assures us that these elusive trees are very real, but their exact location is being kept a secret to protect them against hordes of tourists looking for unusual attractions.

Read More »

Maycon Wesley Carvalho dos Reis, a tattoo artist from the Brazilian state of Sao Paolo, was recently arrested and charged with torture, after punishing a young man who tried to steal his bicycle by tattooing “I am a thief and a loser” on his forehead.

A disturbing video of an alleged would-be thief sporting a “sou ladrão e vacilão” tattoo on his forehead has been doing the rounds on Brazilian social media since Friday. In it, two men ask the 17-year-old terrified boy to tell them what he wants to have tattooed on his forehead, and then force the answer out of him – “thief”. After the humiliating tattoo is completed, they again force him to say why he had received the bizarre “artwork”, and he admits that he had tried to steal a bicycle.

Read More »

Bas de Groot has always been a big fan of milk, drinking 3 to 4 liters of it every day, but he truly became fascinated with it after tasting raw farm milk for the first time. The strong, layered flavors inundated his senses and left him wondering what milk from different regions of the Netherlands tastes like. As the world’s only milk sommelier, Bas now travels the globe, tasting raw milk, and educating people about its special properties and benefits.

Up until just a week ago, I though the word “sommelier” only referred to wine, but then I read about Martin Riese, America’s first and only water sommelier, and today I learned there is also such a thing as a milk sommelier. Bas de Groot is the only person in the world to hold such a title, and while, unlike the best wine sommeliers, he is not yet able to recognize certain milks by flavor alone, he can detect certain differentiating notes based on the cows’ diet and the soil they feed off of.

Read More »

A property owner in Tiverton, Rhode Island used several tonnes of clams to pave an access road, but he apparently forgot to wash them first, and now the smell emanating from the decaying road is reportedly unbearable.

A few days ago, David Rose unloaded several truckloads of unwashed clam shells onto the access road to his property, as a cheaper alternative to gravel. As soon as they saw what was going on, Rose’s neighbors told him to use washed shells instead, as the ones he was unloading still had visible clam meat on them that would start to rot. He apparently declined and carried on with his original plan. After three rainy days, the sun came out over Tiverton, and with it came maggots, flies and a stench that neighbors describe as unbearable.

Read More »

Zhang Jian, the controversial owner of a multi-level marketing company and self-proclaimed “future richest man in the world” recently made headlines in Asia for throwing a lavish banquet in Malaysia. The entrance fee was 200 ringgit per person, but Jian offered to let those sporting “the right look” eat for free. Over 1,000 people showed up with their hair dyed gold.

On Sunday, June 4th, Chai Leng Park in Butterworth, Penang, looked like the scene of a blondies convention. Over 1,000 people, both men and women, dyed their hair gold just to be able to attend Zhang Jian’s epic banquet for free. The Chinese businessman had also announced that a lucky few who sported the right look for the event stood to win a 1,000 ringgit  cash prize. The temptation was apparently too hard to resist for a lot of people who didn’t let a thing like looking silly stand between them and a free meal. Some even sported tattoos of Zhang, to show their support.

Read More »

People usually visit cafes for a dose of energy-boosting caffeine to alleviate tiredness and keep themselves from falling asleep, but Mr. Healing, a popular cafe chain in South Korea actually encourages people to lie down, take a break, and even get some shut-eye.

Mr. Healing bills itself as a relaxation cafe, a place where people can come in, order a drink and lie down a comfortable massage chair, where they can even take a short nap to the soothing sound of ambient or classical music, with pleasant and relaxing scents inundating their senses. The experience is so popular among Koreans that the chain has expanded to 47 different venues throughout the Asian country.

Read More »