The traditional bouquet toss at a wedding is mostly a symbolic gesture, but to 37-year-old Utah resident Jamie Jackson, it’s a sport.  She has caught 46 bouquets since 1996, earning herself the nickname ‘The Bouquet Slayer’. Ironically, she’s still single, but that doesn’t seem to bother her.

It all started out when Jamie attended her cousin’s wedding in Layton, Utah, in 1996. “I’m kind of competitive by nature, so when his new bride tossed her bouquet, I went for it,” she said. “Some single girls might shy away from it, but not me. After that wedding, I just knew that I could do it again.”

“I’ve pretty much crushed that ‘next-to-be-married’ myth,” Jamie told People magazine. “I’ve had boyfriends, sure. But I’m liking the single life. Besides, if I were married, I’d have to give up my favorite sport.”

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A couple of Australian men claim to possess the world’s oldest burger – a 20-year-old quarter pounder with cheese that still looks remarkably edible!

Eduard Neetz and Casey Dean purchased the burger from a McDonald’s outlet in Adelaide when they were 13 and 14 years old respectively. They were out buying food for a party, when they decided to pick up an extra burger for their friend Jono, who never showed up. “It started off as a joke, you know we told our friend we’d hold his burger for him but he never turned up and before we knew it six months had passed,” Casey said. “The months became years and now, 20 years later, it looks the same as the day we bought it, perfectly preserved in its original wrapping.”

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Kristen Alyce is an eco-conscious designer who converts all kinds of trash, like discarded drink cartons, leaflets and concert tickets, into fashionable outfits for women. Her quirky designs include all sorts of clothing – right from cocktail dresses to floor length gowns, made under her label ‘Garbage Gone Glam’.

Kristen said that she started dreaming about recycling garbage into garments when she was still in college, after realizing just how much trash we humans produce every single day. “I realized as a college student living with three girls, we created so much waste it was incredible,” she said. “So I started saving the mass amounts of plastic bags, magazines, boxes and packaging we went through on a daily basis.”

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In a bid to curb violence among football fans, a Brazilian club employed the hooligans’ own mothers as stewards for a match held last Sunday. Sport Club do Recife hired and trained around 30 mothers for the derby against known rivals Nautico. The moms were put to work patrolling the pitch and were dressed in orange vests with the words ‘Segurança Mae’ on the back, Portuguese for ‘Security Mom’.

In recent years, the city of Recife has become one of Brazil’s footballing hotbeds, with hooligans causing problems at almost every match of their home team. “The idea was to make the most fanatical supporters aware and help in some way to bring peace to stadiums,” said Aricio Fortes, vice-president of Ogilvy, the PR company that came up with the idea. “At the end of the day, no one wants to fight in front of a mother, especially his own.”

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Lots of single people complain about how Valentine’s Day and other holidays are somehow designed to make them feel excluded, but this particular group of Japanese men have taken things even further – every year, they take to the streets to protest against the injustice of it all.

They are called ‘Kakumei-teki himote doumei’, which literally translates to ‘Revolutionary Alliance of Men That Women are Not Attracted To’. Popularly known as ‘Kakuhidou’, the group was founded in 2006, by Katsuhiro Furusawa, after being dumped by his girlfriend. He returned home dejected, and began reading the Communist Manifesto. That’s when he came to realize that being unpopular with girls is an issue of class and a form of discrimination. So on Christmas Eve that year, he stood outside JR Akihabara Station and handed out flyers with the slogan ‘Kurisumasu funsai!’ (‘Crush Christmas!’).

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Up until a few weeks ago, the proverbial thinking cap only had a figurative meaning, but apparently science has finally managed to catch up. A couple of American scientists have created a real thinking cap that could help people learn and make decisions quicker.

This unique device is the brainchild of psychology professor Geoff Woodman and Ph.D. student Robert Reinhart of Vanderbilt University in Tennessee and works by sending very low electrical shocks to the brain when worn. The duo claim that the electrical stimulation of certain parts of the brain could make the wearer learn new skills and make better decisions.

Indeed, studies performed on the human brain have revealed that negative voltage spikes occur in the medial-frontal cortex of the brain, milliseconds before we make a mistake. Woodman and Reinhart figured that a part of the brain can influence learning and decision making, helping us avoid the same mistakes later.

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Although the Angulo siblings grew up in New York, they had no idea what the city was like for almost 14 years. They spent their entire childhood confined to their parents’ four bedroom apartment, learning about the outside world solely through films. Their story is now the subject of The Wolfpack, a documentary made by filmmaker Crystal Moselle.

The siblings – Bhagavan, 23, twins Govinda and Narayana, 22, Mukunda, 20, Krisna, 18, Jagadesh, 17, and their sister Visnu – were kept indoors by their father Oscar, a Peruvian immigrant and Hare Krishna devotee. He was apparently convinced that the outside world would corrupt his children and kept the front door locked at all times. But after 14 long years, one of the brothers managed to escape, paving the way for his siblings to break free.

It was during one of those rare escapes in 2010 that Moselle spotted the six Angulo brothers on First Avenue – they were all walking in a ‘pack’, wearing sunglasses, inspired by their favorite film Reservoir Dogs. “It almost felt as if I had discovered a long lost tribe, except that it was not from the edges of the world but from the streets of Manhattan,” Moselle said.

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Lauren Singer is a sustainability-conscious entrepreneur who has produced almost no waste in the past two years, proving that a trash-free lifestyle is indeed possible.

Lauren majored in environmental science at NYU, and it was during her student years that she began working towards a ‘Zero Waste’ goal. Today, the New Yorker does several things on a daily basis to reduce waste, including making her own toothpaste, deodorant and laundry detergent. She also founded her own eco-friendly company, ‘The Simply Co’, through which she plans to sell her homemade products.

Lauren regularly writes about her experiences of a Zero Waste life on her blog ‘Trash is for Tossers’. “There were two moments that brought me to a trash-free, waste-free lifestyle,” she revealed. “The first was my senior year of college when my professor Jeffrey Hollender emphasized the importance of living of living your values, and made me think about my own personal environmental impact.”

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In the the past 40 years, New Jersey resident Bill Bresnan has written over 10,000 love letters, notes and cards to his wife Kirsten – that’s almost one for each night of their marriage. The couple’s unique love story was recently covered by the media, and Bill and Kirsten, both 74, spoke about the secrets of their successful marriage.

The couple met when Bill was teaching a class back in 1974, and Kirsten happened to be his student. “She was this beautiful Northern European woman who struck me like a bolt of lightning,” Bill said in an interview with ABC News.

“Not long after meeting in class Kirsten and I began commuting to and from Long Island, together, on the Long Island Railroad.” And that’s when the practice of writing notes began. “We exchanged notes, drawings, and little scribblings on paper napkins over coffee on the train.”

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As if snakes weren’t scary enough on their own, some apparently have spiders for tails to raise the horror factor to infinity . The aptly named ‘spider-tailed viper’ has a bizarre arachnid-shaped appendage that it uses to attract unsuspecting prey.

According to science writer Ed Yong, the fearsome snake was formally described only nine years ago, in Iran. Its existence has been known since the sixties, but because only one specimen had been spotted, its tail was dismissed as a deformity. However, further investigations in the area revealed the tail was actually a defining characteristic of a whole new species of snakes.

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If you’re not fully satisfied with the shape and size of your nose, but aren’t convinced invasive rhinoplasty is the way to go, may be you should consider Nose Secret.

This Korean invention consists of “a pair of curved and comfortable splints that you place at the inside edge of each nostril to make your nose look narrower and straighter, instantly,” according to the official website. The splints create a gentle pressure, lifting the top part of the nose and narrowing the nostrils. This results in a “more refined appearance of the nose” and “better harmony of the facial features.”

The splints aren’t visible at all once inserted in the nostrils, but they also won’t produce any dramatic changes to the shape and size of your nose. Nose Secret seems to be designed for those who want a higher, sharper looking nose, which is highly coveted by some Asians. The website states that the product will help anyone looking for a ‘slim and wide nose’, ‘lift a blended nose tip’, ‘straighten a crooked nose’, and ‘enhance the beauty of ethnic noses (Asian, African American, Hispanic, etc)’.

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While most people would love not to spend a single day of their lives in a hospital, one 55-year-old man in China refused to leave the hospital for three whole years, despite being healthy! When a Beijing court finally ordered him to leave, he chained himself down to his bed in refusal. The police finally had to intervene; they cut the locks and hauled a struggling man out of the building.

It all started in August 2011, when Mr. Chen was admitted to Beijing Jingmei Group Hospital to receive treatment for minor injuries he had sustained during an accident. He remained in the hospital for a month before going home, only to return a couple of months later complaining of leg pains.

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A group of hardcore pain addicts have taken Russian Roulette to the next level, by playing the game with tasers that shoot out 10,000-volt electric darts. Several pictures posted on Russian forums and social media pages show the competitors holding taser guns to each other’s heads or their own, ready to fire. Obviously, the goal of this bizarre new game is avoid getting shocked until only one competitor is left standing.

The game is named Perm, after the industrial city on the edge of Russia’s Ural Mountains, where it is currently practiced. Apparently, it was invented by former champion fighter Valery Eschenko while he was in the hospital, recovering from an injury.  Just as traditional Russian Roulette, Perm is a game of chance. Initially, each of the gun-like tasers contains only one live cartridge in the barrel of seven chambers, so there is a one-in-seven chance of a player experiencing a 10,000-volt shock, which players describe is a lot like getting punched really hard.

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Saying 19-year-old Alecia Pennington is suffering an identity crisis would be an understatement. Having grown up in a homeschooling Christian household, she never got a birth certificate or social security number, so from an identification point of view, she doesn’t exist.

Alecia is one of the nine Pennington siblings – children of James and Lisa Pennington, group leaders of the Texas Home School Coalition (THSC) and members of the Hill Country Home School Association. In a YouTube video Alecia posted on February 9, she claims that following her home-birth, her parents failed to file a birth certificate or record of any kind. She also alleges that they never got her a Social Security Number, have no school records or hospital records simply because she was never taken to a school or a hospital.

“This leaves me with nothing to prove my citizenship,” she explained in the video. “I am now 19 years old and unable to get a driver’s license, get a job, go to college, get on a plane, get a bank account, vote.”

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French Botanist Patrick Blanc, is known as a master of vertical gardens. During his long career, he has designed hundreds of lush “green walls” that cover both the inside and outside of buildings all around the globe, but none are as impressive as the small urban jungle he calls home, on the outskirts of Paris

61-year-old Blanc makes vertical gardens by attaching metal frames to walls, covering them with PVC and rot-proof felts, and then setting up an irrigation system that dampens the felt and keeps the plants well hydrated. Since 1988, he has created hundreds of these botanical tapestries in public and private spaces around the world – including the Marithé & François Girbaud boutique in Manhattan, the Siam Paragon shopping center in Bangkok and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan.

Expanding on his unique method, Blanc worked on his dream home in the outskirts of Paris, in collaboration with architect Gilles Ebersolt. But while most of his professional projects present nature through a formally elegant design, the plants in his home are a tangle of leaves with a mold-smudged ceiling. From the outside, the house doesn’t look too impressive. But once you step inside, it’s like entering a whole new world.

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