If you’re looking for the ultimate instagrammable coffee, you’ll have a tough time finding something cooler than Sweet Little Rain. That’s an odd name for a cup of coffee, but once you see it in action, you’ll realize it makes perfect sense.

Mellower Coffee, a Chinese coffee shop chain headquartered in Shanghai, owes much of its popularity to its gimmicky Sweet Little Rain, a large cup of Americano coffee served with a fluffy cloud of cotton coffee hanging over it. The steam rises up from the hot coffee melting the cotton candy and causing it to slowly rain down into the cup in the form of sweet sugar droplets.  At around $9 per serving, Sweet Little Rain isn’t the cheapest cup of coffee money can buy, but if you’re looking to impress your Instagram followers, it’s definitely worth it.

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Yoshiro Harada, a newspaper delivery man from Tokyo, Japan, was only 24 years old when he decided to live the rest of his life as a tiger and became Shinjuku Tiger. Today, at age 69, he is considered a living legend of the business district.

Born in Nagano Prefecture, Harada moved to Tokyo in 1967 to attend Daito Bunka University. He started delivering newspapers while he was still in school, and eventually decided to quit the university and dedicate himself to his job full time. He can’t really recall the reason he quit his studies, all he knows is that he wanted to quit. The same can be said about his beginnings as Shinjuku Tiger. One day in 1972, as he was attending a shrine festival in Kabukichō, an entertainment and red-light district in Shinjuku, he passed by a row of shops and noticed one of them was selling colorful, plastic tiger masks. That’s when it hit him, he was going to live the rest of his life as a tiger.

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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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PomPom, an adorable Pomeranian from Singapore, recently achieved celebrity status on social media thanks to the efforts of a freelance groomer who managed to turn him into a fluffy egg.

Back in January Andrea Aubrey Sim (@groomer_andrea), a freelance groomer from Singapore, posted photos and videos of one of her most ingenious projects yet, a cute Pomeranian styled to look like a giant egg. She posted the results of her labor on Instagram, but they only went viral late last month, spawning the now trending “Egg Dog” meme. In a video shot from just the right angle, Pom Pom can be seen sitting still, with his ears flat behind his head. while the groomer puts the finishing touches on her work of art – a living dog shaped like an egg.

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A Japanese tech startup claims to have developed an artificial intelligence software that analyzes surveillance camera footage in order to detect suspicious behavior and prevent shoplifting before it actually happens.

In 2002, when the movie Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise, came out, the concept of preventing a future crime before the perpetrator did anything remotely suspicious was nothing more than a cool sci-fi idea, but thanks to the rapid advancement of artifical intelligence, we already have an early version of the technology displayed in that movie. VaakEye, an AI software developed by Japanese startup Vaak, can allegedly detect shoplifting before it occurs by analyzing surveillance camera footage for discrete suspicious movements and behaviors of people caught in the camera’s field of view. If the algorithm decides that there is a high-enough probability of a person shoplifting, it sends an alert via a smartphone app so the crime can be prevented.

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A male student at the Universidad Mayor de San Miguel, in Cochabamba, Bolivia, was recently apprehended while trying to take the college entrance exam on behalf of a female applicant, disguised as a woman.

19-year-old Bryan G. was already a Systems Engineering student at the Universidad Mayor de San Miguel, but on February 6th, he tried to once again take the entrance exam at his college, this time on behalf of a female applicant. To fool university staff, he put on a wig, applied makeup on his face and dressed in women’s clothing. Unfortunately, he was seated at the front of the exam hall where all the professors and assistants could see him, and because he looked more nervous than the other applicants, he quickly attracted their attention. Just as Bryan was about to receive his exam sheet, an assistant came over, asked him who he was, and when he answered “Jocelin C.”, the man told him “You are not that person”.

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Azusa Sakamoto loves Barbie so much that she spent a small fortune turning her Los Angeles home into a shrine to the popular Mattel doll.

Sakamoto, who goes by “Azusa Barbie” on Instagram, didn’t get to play with Barbie dolls while growing up in Japan, because Mattel’s iconic doll just wasn’t very popular back then. She was already in middle-school when she first got her hands on a Barbie product – a lunchbox she found at an American imports store – but it was love at first sight. She has been collecting Barbie dolls and memorabilia ever since and estimates that she has spent over $80,000 turning her Los Angeles home into a life-size Barbie house.

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Sixteen brave runners recently gathered in the Russian village of Oymyakon, also known as the world’s pole of cold,  to compete in the coldest official race in history.

Oymyakon is the coldest permanently inhabited place on Earth, with temperatures constantly dropping to under -50 degrees Celsius in winter time. This place is so cold that a person’s unprotected face can suffer frostbite in a matter of seconds, and sometimes the mercury in thermometers freezes. Oymyakon can barely be called inhabitable, let alone suitable for a marathon, and yet at the beginning of this year, 16 runners gathered here to take part in a series of extreme races.

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Horse races are usually all about speed, but in Ban’ei, a form of horse racing unique to the Japanese island of Hokkaidō, it’s strength and stamina that matter most.

Ban’ei race horses, also known as ‘banba’, are very different from the fast thoroughbreds we associate with horse racing. They can weigh up to 1,200 kilograms and are more than twice the size of the small dosanko horses native to Hokkaidō. These horses are crossbred descendants of workhorses imported from France and Belgium at the end of the 19th century to help farmers work their land, and are now considered a Japanese breed in their own right. Depending on their size, these strong animals can pull up to a ton of weight, and that’s exactly the kind of strength required to win the world’s slowest horse race.

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S Legend, a red and white Koi Carp bred in Japan became the most expensive live fish ever sold, after fetching a mind-blowing price of 203 million yen ($1.8 million), more than $1.3 million more than the previous record.

The 101cm-long Koi Carp from the highly-regarded Kohaku variety was bought by a collector from Japan after a fierce bidding war  at the Saki Fish farm in the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The female carp won first prize at the prestigious All Japan Koi Show last year, and is expected to bag her second title this year, which greatly increased collectors’ interest. Fans and collectors of Koi carp are now expected to travel from all over the world to catch a glimpse of the most expensive fish ever sold.

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Japanese fashion design studio Mimi recently launched a collection of insanely realistic snake-print stockings that make your legs look like real snakes and, if social media feedback is any indication, they’ll soon be challenging animal print for supremacy in the fashion world.

Mimi claims its new snake pattern designs put all previous models to shame as they are based on scans of real snakes adapted to fit human legs. The upper portion is designed to mimic snake scales, while the part that goes over the foot replicates a snake head that changes its expression whenever the wearer moves their toes. Some of the pairs are even designed to make the back of the legs mimic the snake’s abdomen to enhance the optical illusion.

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A winery in Spain’s Galicia region recently unveiled a revolutionary wine-flavored water that allows consumers to enjoy the taste of red or white wine without worrying about getting drunk or putting on weight.

Called Vida Gallaecia, the enriched water is the result of a two-year collaboration between the Bodega Líquido Gallaecia winery and scientists at the State Agency of the Higher Council of Scientific Research (CSIC). It allegedly tastes like wine, but contains no alcohol and very few calories, making suitable for consumption anytime, anywhere. Although the secret formula behind the ingenious beverage is a well-guarded secret, its creators have revealed that it involves the use of flavanols from grapes and residues from the wine making process.

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Abdussalam Firdaus Abdul Aziz, a 22-year-old man from Malaysia, recently became an overnight internet sensation thanks to his feminine features that apparently make it hard for people to tell whether he’s male or female.

Photos of Aziz have been doing the rounds online ever since it was reported that at a recent soccer game that he attended, he was asked to show his identification documents, because male security guards refused to do a body check on him, thinking that he was a woman. The story made news headlines in Malaysia earlier this week before transcending national borders via the internet.

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A talented food artist from Japan has getting a lot of attention on Instagram for her ability to turn plates into delicious works of art by painting them with melted chocolate.

Most parents often tell their children not to play with their food, but if the melted chocolate of Japanese artist Norico are any indication, playing with your food can lead to some spectacular results. Using only her fingers and some basic kitchen utensils, Norico can painting anything from portraits of Japanese celebrities and popular cartoon characters, to abstract geometric motifs and wedding reception messages. The ephemeral nature of her art allows Norico to experiment at her heart;s desire, and in her Instagram and YouTube videos she often cleans her unusual canvas several times after creating some exceptional painting and start all over again.

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A viral video that has been viewed over 50,000 times shows a fish being frozen in ice at a fish market in Japan and then seemingly brought back to life in a tub of warm water.

The video starts with the fish being submerged in a vat full of crushed ice and then cuts to a thermometer that indicates that the temperature inside the vat is -2.10 degrees Celsius. A man than takes the fish, which at this point looks frozen solid, and passes it to a man wearing a black suit who then puts it into a plastic tub filled with warm water. The video then cuts again, this time showing the same man grabbing the fish by its tail and trying to turn it under the stream of warm water, at which point the fish starts to move. Gasps of amazement and laughter can be heard from the people witnessing the ‘miracle’, before the video cuts forward once again, showing the fish thrashing around in the warm water, to prove that its movements are not just involuntary nerve spasms.

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