The island of Kauai, in the Hawaiian archipelago, is home to thousands of feral chicken that have developed a complex relationship with the island’s human inhabitants.

From the pristine beaches of Lumbahai, to airports, gas stations, even urban parking lots, feral chickens are everywhere on Kauai Island. They roam freely, and have adapted to lead a a variety of lifestyles in this Hawaiian paradise, from eating garbage and cat food, to depending on tourists for food, or foraging on native arthropods. It’s because of this lifestyle variety that the chickens relationship with humans is so complex. On one hand, everyone agrees that they have brought down the populations of pesky Hawaiian centipedes, but then again, they also crow 24 hours a day and they tear up foliage and grass, even destroying whole gardens.

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Mount Fanjing, in southwestern China’s Wuling mountain range, is home to one of the most otherworldly sights on the planet: two small temples built atop a split rock spire, connected by an arched bridge, overlooking a stunning natural paradise.

Perched at the top of the natural rock spire known as the Red Clouds Golden Peak, the two small Buddhist temples have a history that goes back over 500 years, to the Ming Dynasty. How Buddhists managed to carry the needed materials up that precarious rock formation without modern technology remains a mystery, but the temple complex we see todays has been rebuilt according to its original look, only using sturdier materials like iron tiles, in order to resist the strong winds and overall harsh environment.

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Photos of a mysterious solitary white house on the side of a green hill, on a small, deserted island surrounded by ocean as far as the eye can see have been doing the rounds on the internet for years, earning the place the unofficial title of “loneliest house in the world”.

The Vestmannaeyjar  archipelago consists of a cluster of small islands off the southern coast of Iceland. Elliðaey (or Ellirey) is the most northeastern of these islands, and home to the iconic single house siting alone on a grassy, sloping pasture. It’s an idyllic place that has remained uninhabited since the 1930s, which only makes the existence of this seemingly well-maintained man-made building even more mind-boggling.

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The Salar Jung Museum in Hyderabad, India, is home to one of the most amazing wooden sculptures ever made – Mephistopheles and Margaretta, a double sculpture featuring two distinct characters on opposite sides.

Carved out of a single piece of Sycamore sometime in the 19th century, by an unknown French artist, Mephistopheles and Margaretta is not only the most photographed artwork displayed at Salar Jung Museum, but also one of the most recognizable images on the internet. Photos of this stunning sculptures have been doing the rounds on social media and capturing the imagination of millions around the world, for a very long time. And for good reason, the level of intricacy, and the binary design have remained unmatched in the last two centuries.

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The crew of a Auckland Westpac Rescue Helicopter flying over a forested region near Kaipara Falls, in New Zealand, spotted a bunch of trees planted in the shape of a heart, in the middle of a small forest.

Dubbed the “heart of the forest”, the unusual find went viral on social media last month, after a photo of it taken by helicopter crew chief Mark “Tinny” Cannell was shared on Facebook. This was the first time a Westpac Rescue team spotted the tree heart, so they didn’t have any story to share, but a number of comments on the original Facebook post claimed that it was the work of a certain Wayne Barnes, who also built a dwelling nearby, as a romantic gesture for his wife, Rosie.

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Fritillaria delavayi, a plant used in traditional Chinese medicine, has apparently evolved to match its background and become more difficult to spot as a direct consequence of heavy harvesting.

Scientists had known that many plants evolved to use camouflage as a way of hiding from herbivores that may eat them, but a recent study suggests that one particular plant species has developed the same mechanism to hide from human harvesters. Researchers found that fritillaria delavayi plants, which grow on the rocky slopes of China’s Hengduan mountains, match their backgrounds most closely in areas where they are intensely harvested by humans.

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Who would have though that simply painting a mural on the side of a building would one day have the same pollution-cleaning effect as planting 780 trees?

Organized by the sportswear company Converse as part of their City-Forests campaign, the latest mural in the Polish city of Warsaw is not only an aesthetically pleasing artwork, but also an ingenious way to tackle urban pollution. Painted using photocatalytic paint with titanium dioxide, on a building that faces the busy metro station Politechnika, the ingenious mural reportedly attracts airborne pollutants before converting them into harmless nitrates through a chemical process involving sunlight.

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Waterfalls are notoriously slippery, so trying to climb them without specialized gear is usually a bad idea, but at the Bua Thong Waterfalls in Thailand’s Chiang Mai province visitors can climb almost vertical falls using only their hands and feet.

The so-called Sticky Waterfalls get their name from the incredibly grippy limestone rocks that the water runs over. They feel like a very hard sponge to the touch and even though they can be described as prickly, you can easily climb them barefoot without hurting yourself. Because no algae or slimes adheres to this callous rock surface, the limestone creates enough friction to prevent slipping, allowing anyone in decent physical shape to climb even the steepest parts of the waterfalls.

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The Diabolical Ironclad Beetle is one of the most resilient beings on the planet. Its protective shell can withstand forces that would pulverize most other living things.

In 2015, when entomologists told Jesus Rivera that a beetle found primarily on the west coast of North America had this “superpower” that allowed it to survive being run over by a car, he didn’t believe them. So he staged a rudimentary experiment, laying this nondescript black beetle on a a pillow of dirt in a parking lot and had a friend run it over with a Toyota Camry, twice. The bug played dead afterwards, but as he was poking it, Rivera realized it was very much alive. The bug scientists were right, this beetle could easily survive being run over by cars. Jesus ended up spending his doctoral career studying the beetle’s superpower to find out what made it so strong.

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A stonecutting workshop that set out to carry on the legacy of legendary Russian jeweler Peter Carl Fabergé has managed to raise the art of volumetric mosaic stone cutting to a level never reached before in all of human history.

Volumetric mosaic is one of the most complicated and technical hardstone carving techniques. It involves combining volumetric fragments of various colored semiprecious and ornamental stones to assemble impressive sculptural compositions. It has been practiced by Russian craftsmen and artisans for over a century, but Alexei Antonov’s stonecutting workshop in Yekaterinburg has elevated the art form to a whole new level, by incorporating precious metals in the detailed sculptures and using modern technology to make the artworks stunningly detailed.

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A Scottish fan of rap superstar Eminem has set a new Guinness record for most tattoos of a single musician after getting 28 tattoos inspired by her idol inked on her body.

35-year-old Nikki Patterson got her first tattoo, a smiley face, when she was 18, and she has added dozens of them since then. Three years ago, she got her first portrait of Eminem, whose music she had adored ever since she heard “Stan” for the first time, and she kept adding to them. Today, out of the 52 tattoos on Nikki’s body, 28 of them are inspired by Eminem, and 16 of them are portraits of the musician.

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Hidefumi Yoshida, a self-described ‘tear teacher’, encourages people to shed a few tears every once in a while as a way to relieve stress and lead a happier life.

Japanese are among the least likely of all nationalities to cry, and some would go as far as to say that there is a stigma surrounding crying in the Asian country. But according to Hidefumi Yoshida, a man who has dedicated the last eight years of his life to bringing people to people’s eyes, Japanese people originally had a predisposition to cry easily, but that all changed to the point where children and adults alike are discouraged from crying and they end up becoming closed off. Yoshida has been trying to change this perception, by educating people on the benefits of crying as a way of relaxing and combating stress. He claims to have helped over 50,000 people shed tears over the last seven and a half years.

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Researchers at the Powdermill Nature Reserve in Pennsylvania recently came across a “once in a lifetime discovery” – a half-male, half-female rose-breasted grosbeak.

Annie Lindsay and her colleagues at Powdermill Nature Reserve were catching and banding birds with identification tags on September 24, when a fellow researcher called her over via walkie-talkie to supposedly see something extraordinary. The moment she saw her colleague’s find, Annie knew what she was looking at, an extremely rare half-male, half-female creature known as a gynandromorph. The rose-breasted grosbeak exhibited male-characteristic plumage on one half of its body, and female coloration on the other.

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A wildlife photographer recently captured one of nature’s most extraordinary camouflage masters on camera – a moth larva that looks like a mossy twig on a moss-covered tree.

Over they years we’ve featured a bunch of natural camouflage artists on Oddity Central, from the butterfly that looks like a dead leaf, or the moth with a disgusting scene painted on its wings, to the terrifying assassin bug, but the larva captured by wildlife photographer David Weiller in the Madagascar rainforest is definitely up there with the most impressive. Looking like a bulbous patch of moss and lichen with a twig-like body attached to a moss-covered tree, this fascinating creature looks like part of the tree, not a living thing.

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Heat tourism is a thing, with some people driving thousands of miles to Nevada’s Death Valley for a selfie with the thermometer listing one of the hottest recorded temperatures on Earth.

While most people see extremely high temperatures as a perfect excuse to stay indoors and turn up the air-conditioning, for some it’s a perfect opportunity for a memorable selfie. Last month the Death Valley National Park recorded the hottest temperature ever reliably measured on Earth, and so-called “heat tourists” have been flocking there ever since hoping to snap a picture with the now famous thermometer at Furnace Creek Visitor Center as is shows some of the highest temperatures ever recorded.

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