Stipe Petic, a 57-year-old Bosnian man with no nordic background, was so impressed by the ‘Vikings’ TV series that he started calling himself Ragnar Kavurson and making axes for a living.

The Bosnian Ragnar claims that his fascination with Viking culture started with a binge-watching session of History’s hit series, ‘Vikings’. Coming back to his hometown of Tomislavgrad in southern Bosnia after ten years of working on construction sites in Germany, he became fascinated by the saga of the legendary hero Ragnar Lothbrok and his wife Lagertha. After changing his look to mimic that of a nordic warrior of legend, and borrowing the name of his favorite Viking character, Ragnar, the “Bosnian Viking” started making intricately decorated Viking axes and shields.

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The Areia Preta beach in the Brazilian city of Guarapari is famous for its black sand which has external radiation levels of almost 400 times the normal background radiation recorded in the US.

Brazil has hundreds of miles of beaches, but none are quite like “Praia Da Areia Preta”, in Guarapari. The sand in this region, particularly the black sand, contains moderate quantities of monazite, a phosphate mineral rich in several rare-earth elements, including uranium and thorium. Research has shown that background radiation on Areia Preta can reach 175 mSv per year, or 20 μSv/h, while some spots, particularly those with lost of black sand, have radiation levels of up to 55 μSv/h. To put that into perspective, the average radiation exposure level across the United States is about 0.34 μSv/h, while an X-ray gives people a one-time exposure to about 100 μSv.

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The western hook-nosed snake, a small snake endemic to the deserts of the United States and Mexico, is famous for the shape of its snout and for farting to confuse its enemies.

Cobras and rattlesnakes have their deadly venom, constrictors like pythons and Boa have their strong musculature, but the western hook-nosed snake doesn’t have either, so it relies on a more unusual defense mechanism – farting. When threatened, it emits rumbling air bubbles from the cloaca – the common opening for excretion at a snake’s rear end. Known and cloacal popping or defensive flatulence, this strange means of defense is designed to confuse predators long enough for the snakes to escape.

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Japanese tech giant Kawasaki caused a lot of raised eyebrows at the world’s largest robot trade show in Tokyo, with Bex, a rideable robot goat.

The 2022 International Robot Exhibition featured a lot of ingenious creations, but few as attention-grabbing as Kawasaki’s latest invention, a robot goat that can carry approximately 220 pounds of cargo. Named after the Ibex, a species of large wild goat native to parts of Eurasia and Africa, the Kawasaki Bex can transport human riders or different materials, but it also has a fully modular top half, so it doesn’t need to be a rideable goat. But let’s be honest, why would you want to ruin a good thing? After all, what’s cooler than a robot goat?

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As the name suggests, the Hummer H1 X3 is three times the size of a standard Hummer H1, making it the largest Hummer in the world, by far.

The Hummer H1 is one of the largest street-legal SUVs ever made, but it literally looks like a toy car next to the behemoth that is the Hummer H1 X3. Measuring 6.6 meters high, 14 meters long, and 6 meters wide (21.6 x 46 x 19.6 feet), this metal monster is the largest Hummer in existence, at least according to its owner, Sheikh Hamad bin Hamdan Al Nahyan, aka the Rainbow Sheikh, one of the most eccentric car owners in the world.

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A Wisconsin dentist was recently found guilty of intentionally damaging his patients’ teeth so he could charge them more after fixing them.

61-year-old Scott Chamolli faces up to 10 years for each of his five healthcare fraud charges, and a maximum of five years for two other charges. The experienced dentist allegedly made millions by purposely drilling or breaking his clients’ teeth and then charging them extra to fix the damage. According to prosecutors, after causing the unnecessary damage, Chamoli would pressure his patients into unnecessary procedures just to boost his profit. Even though many of the victims thought their teeth were fine, they trusted him as the professional and paid for the unnecessary procedures.

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Lal Bihari is probably India’s most famous living dead, one of many people killed off in official records so that relatives can claim their possessions for themselves.

Killing off somebody on paper is apparently not that hard to do in India. All you need is some bribe money and local officials willing to do some dirty work in exchange for that money. Victims are usually people who have been away from their birthplace for a long time, and the culprits are greedy relatives trying to claim their land or their family homes. But once you’re dead in official records, proving that you’re actually alive is a much more difficult endeavor, especially when the people you are trying to convince are the very same who were paid to kill you off in the first place.

Lal Bihari’s story is probably the most famous example of a “dead man’s” struggle in India. His woes began in 1976, when he returned to his birthplace, the village of Khalilabad, in Uttar Pradesh, for residence, income and caste certificates, needed to secure a loan for his heirloom business. When the clerk first looked up at him and told him that Lal Bihari was dead, he smiled, but the clerk didn’t smile back…

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Deinococcus radiodurans is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as “the world’s toughest bacterium,” and it is fully deserving of that title.

Scientists discovered the red, spherical bacterium that later came to be known as deinococcus radiodurans about 70 years ago, when examining a can of ground meat that had spoiled despite having been sterilized by exposure to doses of radiation in the megarad range. Research would later show that this lowly bacterium can withstand 10,000 times the amount of radiation that would normally kill a human being, thanks to a miraculous ability to repair numerous DNA double-strand breaks in a matter of hours.

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Ring-necked parakeets are native to the foothills of the Himalayas and temperate regions of North Africa, but for the past century and a half, they’ve also made a home for themselves in London.

No one knows exactly when and how London became a home for feral parakeets. In fact, there are so many urban myths tied to these green exotic birds that it’s hard to settle on just one explanation. Many of the theories going around on the streets of London as well as on the internet involve legendary artists like Jimi Hendrix or Audrey Hepburn, but no one can truly say how the birds came to the English capital. One thing is for sure, though – London’s parakeets are here to stay, they are thriving, and they are expanding, with recent estimates placing their number in the tens of thousands.

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Most people go on cruise ships for vacations, but for Mario Salcedo, cruise ships have been his home for the last 23 years, and this continuous life on the water has made him “the world’s happiest man”.

Calling Mario Salcedo a “super cruiser” would probably be an understatement. The retired financier has been on hundreds of cruises in the last 23 years, and with the exception of a recent 1.5-year break due to the Covid pandemic, he has rarely spent more than a day or two on dry land. A native of Miami, Florida, Salcedo spent much of his life working for a number of large finance companies, including Federal Express, traveling the world and seeing other people have fun. Then, one day, he decided it was his time to have fun, so in 1997 he quit his job.

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Shenshayba Bazaar, an Afghan village near the city of Herat, has become known as Afghanistan’s ‘one kidney village’, because of the large number of residents who have sold one of their kidneys in order to make ends meet.

Afghanistan wasn’t doing too well economically before the Taliban came to power last year, but the brutal takeover caused the economy of the Asian country to collapse and left many struggling to put food on the table for their families. In some cases, things got so bad that people decided to sell one of their kidneys in order to pay their debts and buy food. One small village in Herat Province has become known as the ‘one kidney village’, because of the large number of residents who sold one of their kidneys on the black market.

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Panzhiga, a remote mountainous village in China’s Yunan Province has been dubbed “Tesla Village” for the unusually high number of Tesla electric cars owned by the locals.

The popularity of electric cars around the world is growing at an unprecedented pace, but there are still many skeptics who believe the rapid adoption of electric vehicles is hampered by infrastructure and logistic problems. For example, while rapid charging stations are being built in cities and along busy roads, using an electric car in remote areas is considered inefficient. However, that theory is being challenged by a small mountainous village in China where Tesla is by far the most popular car brand.

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This year, the Nikola-Lenivets art village in Russia celebrated Maslenitsa by burning a 23-meter-tall wooden Tower of Babel, a biblical symbol of discord.

Every year since 2001, Nikola-Lenivets, a popular art park about 220 kilometers from Moscow, has celebrated the Slavic holiday of Maslenitsa by burning a specially-made artwork. Maslenitsa symbolizes the passing of winter and the coming of spring, a new beginning, but this year, the artistic tradition has been more grandiose and more meaningful than ever. A 23-meter-tall wooden tower of Babel designed by young architect Ekaterina Polyakova was set ablaze in a ceremony designed to symbolize the end of discord between nations.

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Vaguito, a dog who spends his days on a beach in Punta Negra, Peru, waiting for his fisherman owner to return from his last fishing trip has melted the hearts of millions around the world.

Vaguito’s heartbreaking story was made public by Jolie Mejía, a Peruvian woman who happened to be walking on the coast of Punta Negra, one of the districts of Lima Province, when she noticed a dog staring pointedly at the ocean. The animal looked clean and well-fed, so Jolie assumed that his master would come back to get him. She spent minutes petting the dog and talking to him, but no one came. Eventually, a man walked by, who, noticing the concerned look on the woman’s face, proceeded to tell her the animal’s sad story.

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The workers of several ant species have large, flattened, and slightly concave heads that they use as plugs to block entrance to their colonies’ nests.

The so-called ‘door head ants’ are soldier ants with armored heads that match both the size and the shape of the entrance to their colonies’ nests almost to perfection. They function as living doors, using their heads to plug shut the nest and only allow access to other members of the colony while keeping unwanted guests out. Door head ants can be found in several ant genera, including Cephalotes and Carebara. How these species developed the exact size and shape as the entries to their nests is the result of millions of years of evolution.

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