The people of Sommarøy, an island in northern Norway where the sun doesn’t set for a full 69 days during the summer, want to make time keeping obsolete making this the world’s first time-free zone.

After enduring the long polar night, when the sun doesn’t rise from November to January, the residents of Sommarøy try to make the most of summer, when the sun stays up in the sky from May 18 to July 26. During this time, conventional timekeeping is virtually ignored, and it’s not uncommon to see people doing all kinds of things at late hours of the “night” – say 3 a.m – like doing house chores, swimming or playing ball in their yards. Since it’s always daylight, everyone sleeps whenever they feel like it. It’s been like this for generations, but now the people of Sommarøy want to officially declare their island a time-free zone.

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Danny Schleibe, the creator of a unique art form called “tapigami”, spent a whopping 200 hours making an awe-inspiring portrait of actor Bill Murray exclusively out of hundreds of rolled pieces of vinyl tape glued to a wooden panel.

Sacramento-based artist Danny Schleibe has spent the last 14 years of his life refining the contemporary art of tapigami, which looks very similar to quilling, only with vinyl masking tape instead of rolled pits of paper. He recently perfected his technique to a level that allows him to create portraiture, and his first project was an amazing portraits of Bill Murray made out of tiny strips of rolled tape. It’s only when you get up-close and see how he nailed all the subtle details, like the actor’s beard and eyes, that you really start to appreciate all the work that went into the artwork.

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Cape Vyatlina, one of the most picturesque places in the Russian Far East, has come to be known as the Russian Stonehenge in recent years, after people started building stone towers on its rocky beach. Today, there are hundreds of them, and new ones are erected almost every day.

The tradition of building towers at Cape Vyatlina by stacking stones of various sizes on top of each other started in 2015, when a group of activists from Vladivostok built 155 such monuments in celebration of the city’s 155th anniversary. Many of these original towers, some up to 3.5-meters-tall, were destroyed by the collapse of a nearby grotto, but other locals and tourists took it upon themselves to restore them and even add to their number. Today, there are several hundreds of these hand-stacked stone towers covering the beach at Cape Vyatlina and building them has become somewhat of a superstition.

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‘Beautiful’ is probably not the first word most people would use to describe mold, but to an online community in Russia, the fungi commonly associated with death and decay truly is a thing of beauty, and they have the photos to prove it.

‘Mom, I Have Grown Mold’ is a growing community of mold enthusiasts who love uploading their own photos of mold and commenting on those uploaded by other members. The public group was created back in 2015 on popular Russian social network VKontakte, and has grown to over 50,000 members, many of which constantly post intriguing photos of mold cultured they grow in their own homes. Some of them are actually quite intriguing, if you can get past your disgust and really appreciate the beauty behind it.

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A young Norwegian woman recently went viral online for her very unusual skill – she can trot, canter, gallop and even jump over obstacles with same form and cadence as an actual horse.

If, like me, you’re an incurable procrastinator who wastes hours everyday watching random things on the internet, chances are you’ve already seen Ayla Kirstine in action. A video showing her trotting and cantering like a horse went viral on Twitter last week, getting over 18 million views on that social media platform alone. Ayla is so good at what she does that, seen from afar at the beginning of the video, she actually looks like a four-legged animal, which a lot of people found uncanny.

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Dog weight pulling is an increasingly popular yet highly controversial sport in which dogs of various breeds compete against each other by pulling a trolley loaded with several tons of bricks or concrete blocks 15 feet in less than 60 seconds.

Dog weight pulling has been around for decades, but it has become increasingly controversial in recent years as more and more animal welfare activists started condemning the sport as animal cruelty. The fact that weight pulling is also a known training method for building stamina and making canines more powerful for dog fighting hasn’t exactly helped the reputation of the sport either. Still, dog weight pulling enthusiasts claim that even though some animals end up pulling several dozen times their own weight, the risk of injury is minimized by great conditioning and a genetic predisposition to pulling heavy loads. They also claim that the sport can be beneficial to dogs, as it gives them much needed exercise and strengthens the bond to their owners.

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Sebastião Ribeiro Salgado is a world renowned social documentary photographer and photojournalist from Brazil, but few people know that he is also the mastermind behind one of the most amazing environment restoration projects in history. Together with his wife, Salgado has nearly completed the recovery of a single uninterrupted section of the Atlantic Forest, planting millions of saplings over the last two decades.

The story of Instituto Terra, the non-profit organization founded by Sebastião Salgado and his wife, Lélia Deluiz Wanick Salgado, began in 1998. The celebrated photographer had recently returned from Rwanda, where he had documented the tragedies of war. The horrors he witnessed during those troubled wars haunted him long after he left Africa, and at one point he completely lost both his faith in humanity and the desire to shoot photos. It was around this time that Sebastião’s parents offered him and Lélia the old farm he had grown up in, and he took the opportunity to return home thinking that the idyllic paradise he remembered would help him heal. However, he found that his home was nothing like he remembered it.

Salgado grew up on a 1,750-acre farm in the state of Minas Gerais 70 miles inland from Brazil’s Atlantic coast. He recalls that, when he was only a boy, the Atlantic Forest covered half his family’s farm and half the Rio Doce Valley, and that the fauna that called it home created a cacophony of sounds every day. But that wasn’t the sight he came home to in the mid 90’s.

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Diphylleia grayi is not the most striking of flowers, in fact many people pass by it without even noticing its white, rounded petals. But that’s because they don’t know about its most impressive feature, turning translucent in contact with water.

Native to wooded mountainsides in the colder regions of Japan, “skeleton flowers” bloom from mid-spring to early-summer. Their white petals are completely opaque in dry conditions, but as rain begins to fall, they become almost crystal clear, giving the flower an almost ghostly look. When the rain stops and the petals dry, the skeleton flower goes back to its plain white self.

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What started as a creative way to honor her late father turned into an obsession for Ella London, a 35-year-old woman from Los Angeles who has been wearing and surrounding herself with everything yellow for the last seven years.

Ella has always loved the color yellow, but it only became an important part of her life 11 years ago. She and her fiancee were organizing their upcoming wedding and trying to find a color theme for the event. London knew that she didn’t want the classic white, red made her think of Christmas and all the other colors she considered were way too overused. But when her fiancee suggested yellow, something in her brain clicked. It reminded her of her father, who had passed away when she was only two months old, of his love for the color yellow and how it seemed to perfectly reflect his happy nature. She picked it as a way to honor her late father, but the wedding was only the beginning of her love affair with the color yellow.

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Kazakhstan-based artist Kanat Nurtazin describes his leaf cutting art as a way of giving tree leaves a second life in which they can tell a new story through his intricate designs.

Four years ago, Kanat Nurtazin embarked on an project he named “100 Methods of Drawing” for which he experimented with various ways of expressing his artistic talent. It was through this project that he discovered leaf cutting, which became one of his favorite techniques. He likes the ephemeral nature of tree leaves, the fact that, much like human lives, they are perishable, but also that he can breathe new life into them as a medium to share stories with his audience.

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Ma Sanxiao, a 70-year-old double amputee and army veteran from Jingxing, North China’s Hebei province, has pent the last 19 years of his life planting thousands of trees and turning the once barren hills surrounding his village into a small forest.

Ma was diagnosed with blood poisoning in 1974, while serving in the Chinese Army. His condition got worse after he retired, and eventually had both legs amputated because of it – his right leg in 1985, and the left one in 2005. After seven major operations and constant medical treatments, he could barely afford to take care of his family, and ,because of his disability, finding a job proved very difficult. His veteran subsidy was enough to cover his medicine, but he couldn’t remain idle, so in 2000, after getting inspired by another tree-planting story on TV, the double-amputee started planting parasol trees in the barren hills around his remote village, with the intention of selling them for profit.

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If you love exotic fish and don’t mind hundreds of them eyeballing you while you answer nature’s call, you’ll probably love using this unique aquarium toilet in Akashi, Japan.

Hipopo Papa (formerly Mumin Papa) Cafe, used to be known as one of the most popular dating spots on Hayashizaki Matsue Coast. It still is, but ever since the owner decided to do something special with the women’s toilet, it’s become famous primarily for being the only cafe in Japan – and probably the world – to feature an aquarium toilet. It’s technically surrounded on three sides by a giant aquarium filled with hundreds of exotic fish and a male turtle, which, considering this is a women’s only toilet, is a bit weird.

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Beetles are generally regarded as harmless to humans. Out of the over 350,000 documented species of beetle, only three are actually known to bite people, and only if they feel threatened. However, there is another species that few sources mention. Onychocerus albitarsis, aka Scorpion Beetle, is the only known insect capable of stinging humans with its antennae and delivering a painful toxin.

First described in 1859 by famous English entomologist Francis Polkinghorne Pascoe, the scorpion beetle is considered by many experts a fascinating case of convergent evolution. While all other known insects deliver venom or toxins by biting with fangs or stinging with a structure used exclusively for this purpose, e.g. a bee’s stinger, the scorpion beetle does it through its two long antennae, which research has shown have evolved to closely resemble a scorpion’s segmented tail.

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Today, Dan Drake, aka ‘Dancakes’, is known as one of the world’s most talented pancake artists, but few people know that he never planned, nor trained for this career. He was just a guy flipping fried foods at a diner to make ends meet, but his artistic talent catapulted him to international fame.

Dan had always had a talent for drawing, but never really considered turning it into a career. In high-school, he would doodle and draw comics in the back of the classroom out of boredom, and dreamed of becoming a renowned musician with his band, Psychedelic Psycho Nuts. While trying to get his musical career off the ground, Drake got a job as a fry cook at the Courtesy Diner, in his home city of St. Louis. Because he needed to earn his chops, he was placed on the slow shifts, which resulted in few tips but a lot of time on his hands. It was on one of these shifts that he got his feet wet in the world of pancake art.

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Marine biologists in Brazil were stunned to discover the body of a young humpback whale on a remote island in the Amazon jungle, at a time of the year when it should have migrated 4,000 miles away, to Antarctica.

The whale’s body was found by members of the conservation group Bicho D’Água, after they spotted vultures circling a mangrove on Marajo Island, a large, forested island in northern Brazil. The marine mammal, approximately 26-feet-long, was lodged in thick shrubs and brush, about 50 feet from the shore. A team from the region’s Municipal Secretariat of Health, Sanitation, and Environment inspected the carcass and reported that it did not appear to have any visible injuries, so until officials conduct a necropsy, the cause of death remains a mystery. At this time, the two main theories are that a powerful tide launched the whale inland, or that it died at sea and was carried onto land by people.

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