Tsunaina is a young Tibetan model whose unconventional beauty has taken the fashion world by storm. Her beautiful eyes, luscious lips and chiseled jawline can only be described as striking, but it’s the unique structure of her nose that really catches people’s attention. From the front, it looks unusually wide and flat, and some people have even gone as far as to compare Tsunaina’s looks to that of the Na’vi women from the 2009 blockbuster Avatar.
A landfill near the small city of Marneuli, in Georgia, recently turned into a chick hatchery, after the scorching heat caused hundreds of spoiled eggs disposed of by a local poultry farm to hatch.
A video posted on Sunday by Facebook user Sahid Bayramov shows the landfill crawling with cute yellowish chicks chirping continuously and looking for their mother. Also visible in the video is a large pile of eggs which is presumably where all the tiny birds came from. As you can imagine, the video quickly went viral on social media, before being picked up by national and international media.
For over two centuries, treasure hunters, computer scientists and even the US military have been trying to crack a set of three ciphers and reveal the location of a legendary treasure worth tens of millions of dollars. All have failed, but maybe you can do better?
Thomas J. Beale’s fabled treasure – thousands of pounds of silver gold and precious jewels worth an estimated $60 million – is supposedly buried somewhere in Virginia. Over the last hundred years, many have tried and failed to pinpoint its exact location. Beale, a 19th century adventurer, is said to have discovered his coveted treasure on a hunting trip near the modern New Mexico-Colorado border, and brought it back to his home state of Virginia, where he buried it for safe keeping. He then created three separate ciphers to conceal the exact location, heirs and details of his treasure. So far, only one of the three codes has been solved.
The Gomi Hiroi Samurai – “trash collecting samurai” – are members of a street performance group who walk the streets of Japan collecting trash with their katanas and trusty garbage grabbers.
These modern-day samurai are part of “Issei Ichidai Jidaigumi”, a performance group that originated in Kyoto but has since opened branches in other Japanese cities as well. They sport a very similar look to the samurai of old, but often spice up their appearance with stylish hats, and modern footwear. They are known for performing samurai-inspired songs, dances, and sword shows at various public events, but in the last few years, the Tokyo branch of the Jidaigumi has been making national news headlines for their theatrical trash-cleaning endeavours. They basically turn collecting street garbage into a performance worth buying tickets to.
Some people would argue that life experience is crucial to being a motivational speaker, but an 11-year-old kid from Pakistan is proving that all you really need is an inspirational speech and confidence.
At just 11 years of age, Hammad Safi has accomplished what most of us won’t be able to do in a lifetime. He is the youngest motivational speaker in Pakistan, and probably the world, a freelancer, TV anchor and a lecturer at the University of Peshawar, where he teaches students twice his age. He has been referred to as a “super kid”, a “child extraordinaire”, “motivational guru” and even “the little genius of Pakistan”, but he hasn’t let the adulation go to his head. Instead he continues to inspire others and push his vision of an educated Pakistan, and access to technology in order to connect the youth to the modern world.
People turn to plastic surgery to copy the look of their idols all the time, but few of them, if any, manage to successfully turn themselves into lookalikes. One such case is that of He Chengxi, a young Chinese woman whose efforts to copy the look of famous actress Fan Bingbing have been so successful that she now gets confused with her all the time.
Despite currently being under investigation for tax evasion, Fan Bingbing remains one of China’s most popular celebrities. She is a successful actress, film producer, singer and a fashion icon, among others. Her attractive looks have captured the imagination of millions of people in China and abroad, so it’s no surprise that many women want to be just like her. Many have tried, but the only known successful attempt is that of He Chengxi, a 23-year-old social media star who reportedly spent tense of thousands of dollars on cosmetic surgery, over a period of 8 years, to make herself look just like her idol.
Popular Q&A online platform AskFM recently launched its own cryptocurrency, ASKT, and decided to celebrate by hosting an original giveaway. Instead of simply giving away some tokens to randomly selected winners, they buried a crypto-wallet with 500,000 tokens in it on Mount Everest and challenged anyone brave enough to go find it.
The Dublin-based start-up is similar to Quora or Yahoo Answers, and is currently the world’s largest questions and answers platform in the world. But as part of its rebranding as AskFM 2.0, the company also launched it’s own cryptocurrency token, which it plans to use to reward users for quality content. In an effort to raise awareness about its new crypto, called ASKT, AskFM came up with a controversial publicity stunt that involves challenging brave people to climb Mount Everest and look for a cryptocurrency ledger with $50,000 in tokens buried somewhere on the summit. It’s ‘finders, keepers’.
Georgina Ryland, a makeup artist and beauty blogger from Brisbane, Australia, creates incredible body art using her own body as the canvas.
We’ve all seen impressive body art before, but what sets Georgina Ryland’s works from those of other talented body painters is that she actually paints the artworks on her own body, instead of using a model. All I can tell you about the artistic process is that it involves using a mirror, as well as a steady hand and mountains of patience. I for one can’t understand how she can paint backwards, by looking in a mirror, but judging by the quality of her work, she’s gotten really good at it.
Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have trained an artificial intelligence algorithm to become a psychopath by exposing it to gruesome and violent images on popular social network Reddit.
Called Norman, after the iconic Anthony Perkins character in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic “Psycho”, the AI was trained to perform image captioning, a popular deep learning method of generating a textual description of an image. But there was a fun twist – for an extended period of time, Norman was only exposed to gruesome and violent images from an infamous subreddit dedicated to documenting and observing the disturbing reality of death. Researchers then used Rorsach inkblots to compare Norman to other AI which hadn’t been exposed to the same gruesome images.
Authorities in the Chinese city of Xi’an recently inaugurated a special sidewalk lane designed for “phubbers” – people who walk while staring at their smartphones and ignore everything around them.
Painted red, green and blue and featuring pictures of smartphones, the special lane is located on the busy Yanta Roan, in Xi’an, and is 80cm wide and 100m long. Chinese media reports that a large shopping mall overlooking the smartphone-user lane had been asking authorities for it over a month, which suggests that it’s just a marketing scheme. However, it turns out that the special sidewalk lane is actually a safety precaution for “phubbers”. Cars often come onto the pavement in front of the mall, sometimes barely missing pedestrians who have their eyebvalls virtually glued to their smartphones, so the lane is supposed to keep them out of harm’s way.
Anzhelika Protodyakonova, a young fashion blogger from Russia, shot to social media flame after photos of her huge eyebrows, which cover most of her forehead, went viral on the internet.
They say every cloud has a silver lining, and the story of how Anzhelika Protodyakonova became a popular online fashion blogger and a social media star in her native country is a perfect example of that. Seven years ago, while riding on a bus in Yakutsk, Russia’s Sakha Republic, Anzhelika drew the attention of another passenger who just couldn’t take her eyes off her unusually large eyebrows. The woman took a photo of her and posted it online, where it quickly went viral. Anzhelika soon became known as “Bushy Angie”, and while she admits being embarrassed by the photo at first, the young girl quickly embraced her new-found popularity and even managed to make a living off of it.
Russian media recently featured the story of Taras Shelest, a highly-regarded passenger jet pilot who turned out to be a complete fraud. Despite having never attended aviation university and instead faking his diploma, Shelest allegedly flew thousands of people all around the world for several years, until a bizarre incident finally exposed him.
In August of 2015, Taras Shelest was a co-pilot on a passenger flight from Moscow to Cyprus. When entering Ukrainian airspace, he contacted the ground controller as per protocol, only instead of sticking to the strict technical language, he used a very peculiar greeting – “Glory to Ukraine!” This was apparently so unusual that Shelest was reported to his company’s security service, which in turn contacted the FSB, Russia’s federal security service. Taras’ fellow pilots were whispering to each other that he had lost his mind, for using that bizarre greeting, but the result of the investigation into his background revealed something even crazier – the man was not even a real pilot, but a flight enthusiast who had taught himself to fly using flying simulators and faked his aviation university diploma.
Looking at Xiao Cui for the first time, you could swear he is at least 80 years old, but in fact he is only an 18-year-old high-school student suffering from a very rare health condition that has caused his facial muscles and skin to droop, making him look a lifetime older than he really is.
18-year-old Xiao Cui is a senior at a top high-school in Harbin, China, but you couldn’t tell just by looking at him. He looks more like a pensioner than a young man in the prime of his life, but it’s all due to a mysterious condition that has been causing his facial muscles and skin to sag. In a Pear video that went viral in China at the end of last month, Cui says that he noticed the first symptoms during middle school, and that his face has been getting saggier ever since, to the point where he now looks many decades older than his classmates. Doctors have yet to understand his condition, let alone find a way to stop it or undo its effects, so Xiao has no option but to accept it and stay positive.
Invented in the 1970s, ASCII art is still popular in online chats, on forums and websites, but one insanely talented tattoo artist is able to ink stunning portraits using only the 95 characters characters from the 1963 American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) standard on his clients’ skin.
31-year-old Andreas Vrontis has always been fascinated by ASCII art and “how a simple lettering pattern could create so much symmetry and detail in the end result”, so a few years ago, he started experimenting with ways to integrate the digital art style into his real-life tattoos. Vrontis has been tattooing for six years, but he made his first ASCII tattoo in 2015, a portrait of John Lennon. He was nervous about how it would turn out, but it ended up winning him the “Best in Show” prize at at the Cyprus International Tattoo Convention. He has been improving his technique ever since, and his latest works of art simply breathtaking.
To the casual observer, the thousands of bent trees scattered throughout the North American continent look like mere freaks of nature, deformed by the elements of disease, but a more careful analysis reveals that these trees bend sharply into right angles, parallel the earth, which suggests that they were intentionally shaped long ago, for an unknown purpose.
Bent, splintered or otherwise deformed trees are not exactly uncommon, but the so called “trail trees” still growing in many US states have a very specific shape. At about four or five feet above the ground, their trunks bend sharply forming right angles, parallel the earth, and then sharply bend upwards once again. Various accidents can cause this shape to occur naturally, but another distinctive trait of these mysterious trees is that they feature no scars in their bent areas. While scientists have yet to agree that this is proof that the trees were purposely bent by humans centuries ago, there are many who believe that the bent trees were once used as markers by hunters and gatherers to help them find their way around the vast wilderness.
