New Mexico-based artist Justin Crowe first incorporated cremated human ashes into a dinnerware set, last year, as part of an art project, but after his friends learned about it and asked him to create bespoke items for them, he decided to turn the idea into a business. Today, his company, Chronicle Cremation Design, offers people the chance to keep their loved ones close by having their ashes incorporated into everyday items like coffee cups, bowls or candle holders.

“I wanted to create a dinnerware set that infuses a sense of mortality into everyday life,” Crow says about his original idea of mixing human ashes into tableware. In 2015, he purchased 200 human bones from a bone dealer, crushed them into a fine powder and mixed them into a coating glaze for a set of functional plates, cups and bowls. He ended up using them for an unconventional dinner party, with the guests eating off of repurposed human remains.

Interestingly, while searching for human bones for his artistic project, Crow put up an ad on Craigslist, asking for about two cups of ashes for $35. He got three responses on the first day,one of which was from a woman who threatened to have him investigated, quoting the Bible and telling him he was going to hell. “It’s a really polarizing idea,” the artist admits.

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Five years ago, the people of Cherán, a small town in Mexico’s Michoacan state, made international headlines for taking up up arms against the powerful drug gangs threatening their livelihood, driving off local politicians and police in the process. Today, the self-governed settlement is a beacon of hope for many other Mexican communities.

The inspiring story of new Cherán began in 2011. For three years, the locals had watched helplessly how loggers supported by drug cartels like the Familia Michoacana ravaged their ancient forests, carrying away the big tree trunks and burning the rest, to prepare the land for avocado plantations. They had asked the Government for help with the situation, but received none, and the corrupt local politicians and police simply chose to look the other way. Left with no other options, and with the loggers nearing one of the town’s water springs, the people of Cherán decided it was up to them to fight for the forest and their livelihood.

“We were worried,” Margarita Elvira Romero, one of the conspirators of the historic uprising, recently told the BBC. “If you cut the trees, there’s less water. Our husbands have cattle – where would they drink if the spring was gone?” She and a few other women first went into the forest to try and reason with the loggers, but they were verbally abused and chased away by the armed men. So they came up with a plan to stop the trucks when they passed through Cherán, and hopefully receive the support of the whole community.

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For the past 40 years, Ramon Archundia, has dedicated his life to the preservation of Mexico’s endangered iguanas. His magical ‘iguanario’, a reptile sanctuary in the center of Manzanillo city, is now home to 642 iguanas, as well as other wild animal species.

The story of Iguanario Archundia began over four decades ago. Sickened by the plight of iguanas at the hands of man, Ramon Medina Archundia rescued a pair of these majestic reptiles and set up a small enclosure for them in a marshy space in downtown Manzanillo, where two huamúchil trees offered the perfect place for sunbathing. But that was only the beginning, because Ramon and his father Juan, kept bringing in new rescued iguanas, and after word of their small ‘iguanario’ spread around the city and the whole Mexican state of Colima, other people started bringing in iguanas, knowing that they would be well taken care of. Today, Iguanario Archundia is home to over 640 iguanas, as well as other ‘donated’ animals like raccoons, badgers or turtles.

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You may not of heard of it before, but Solid Rain has been helping Mexican farmers fights severe droughts for over a decade. The miracle powder is actually a super absorbent polymer that can soak up water up to 500 times its original size and keep it in the ground for up to a year.

The story of Solid Rain began in 1970, when the United States Department of Agriculture developed a super absorbent product made from a type of starch known as “super slurper”. In the U.S., it has mainly been used in disposable diapers, to help keep baby bottoms dry, but a Mexican chemical engineer saw this magic powder as an opportunity to effectively fight the drought plaguing his country.

Sergio Rico Velasco developed and patented a different version of potassium polyacrylate that could be mixed with soil and slowly feed water to plants over a long period of time. His company, Solid Rain, has been quietly selling the product to Mexican farmers for over 10 years now.

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Five years after it was stolen from the yard of a home in the Hamptons and taken on an epic journey around the world, a large rubber duck has finally been returned to its rightful owners, although the mystery of who abducted it in the first place remains a mystery.

The large, yellow rubber duck came to the Troiano family about 10 years ago, when their daughter Alicia received as a gift from a neighbor for whom she babysat. She name it Baldie and enjoyed putting it in a makeshift pond that filled up on rainy days, as a lawn decoration. One day, five years ago, Baldie mysteriously disappeared, but the Troioanos didn’t think too much of it. At least not until a few months later when they received a postcard supposedly written by the ducky, postmarked from Kuwait City. In it, the rubber duck told the family of her travels to Amsterdam , Honduras and various other locations around the Middle East, instructing them to follow its travels on a Facebook page called “Gale Ducky”.

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Wouldn’t it be nice if you could enjoy a nice refreshing ice-cream on a hot summer day without having to constantly lick at it to keep it from dripping all over your hands? Well, thanks to Gastronaut ice Cream, now you can!

34-year-old Rob Collington, founder of Gastronaut Ice Cream, had always been a big fan of Astronaut Ice Cream, a freeze-dried ice cream sold at space museums and camping stores across the US. He has enjoyed eating it since he was a little boy, even though he admits it doesn’t very good, because it’s made with the cheapest ice-cream available and contains artificial ingredients. But it does have a big advantage over even the most delicious traditional ice cream – it doesn’t melt, no matter how hot the sun burns.

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The world’s most brilliant minds might have missed it, but this 15-year-old Canadian kid has managed to accurately locate a previously unknown ancient Mayan city, hidden deep in the Yucatan jungle of southeastern Mexico, without having to leave his house. William Gadoury, a high-school student from Quebec, has now named his discovery ‘K’aak Chi’, which means ‘Mouth of Fire’.

It all started three years ago, when William read about the Mayan calendar predicting the end of the world in 2012. That obviously didn’t happen, but his interest in the subject didn’t wane and he soon realised that the ancient Mayan people always built their cities far away from rivers, in inhospitable mountain ranges. Wanting to find the reason behind this, he looked up to the sky for answers, because he knew that the Mayans had worshipped stars. And it wasn’t long before he recognised a pattern – all their cities were built to line up with star constellations.

By analysing 23 Mayan star constellations, William figured out that when connected, the 142 stars indeed corresponded to the locations of 177 Mayan cities. No one had pieced together such information before. But he was stuck on the 23rd constellation because he could only find two cities to match its three stars. That’s when he realised that there had to be a Mayan city that had not yet been discovered. His research now had a new mission – to find that lost city.

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VietJet Air, Vietnam’s only privately-owned airlines, has worked up quite a stir in the aviation industry with its young, attractive, bikini-clad flight attendants. Female VietJet employees don colorful bikinis and even put up an inflight performance for their customers, mostly during inaugural flights to beach locations. The marketing gimmick has earned the company huge profits, and plenty of criticism to boot.

These ‘bikini performances’ are not a standard practice on all flights – they’re more like a featured bonus on certain routes. One of the earliest shows was staged on a 2012 flight from Ho Chi Minh City to the coastal city of Nha Trang. As reported by ABC News, “Clad in vaporous string bikini tops and sarongs that flaunted the company colors of red and yellow, young, beautiful women filed down the plane’s aisles for a bikini show.”

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Raymundo Corona, a farmer from Mexico, has gone and built a 22-foot Aztec pyramid in the desert, 74 km from the Mexico-US border. When people asked him why he went through the trouble of building a pyramid in the desert, he said he was simply following the instructions of an alien who paid him a visit three decades ago. 

Speaking to a local newspaper, Corona described the alien as a tall man with honey-colored eyes and white hair, by the name of Herulayka. He apparently came from a planet called Nefilin, which Corona says is 20 times the size of Earth and is located in the constellation of Orion.

The Mexican farmer added that Herulayka warned him that he would be taken for a drunk or a drug addict if he ever built the pyramid, but his conviction was so strong that he went ahead and did it anyway. He really believes that the alien paid him a visit in 1984, when he was 33 years old. His wife was pregnant at the time and about to give birth to their baby girl when he first saw the strange man in his dreams.

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Most people would love nothing more than to quit their jobs and travel the world, but they simply lack the courage, and most importantly, the funds to do so. A young woman from Alabama has managed to do it though, by meeting rich men on the internet and having them pay for dates in some of the most exotic places on Earth. She’s now in a serious relationship with one of them, and he might just turn out to be ‘the one’.

It all started in December 2014, when 25-year-old Monica Lynn decided that her life was too boring and lacked adventure. So she quit her high-flying job as a financial advisor at Merrill Lynch in order to find something more interesting. Soon, she stumbled upon MissTravel, a website where people search for partners to go on holidays with.

“I came across Miss Travel in an article about weird websites,” Lynn explained. “I thought, ‘Yes, that sounds weird – but also kinda cool. This website attracts very successful men who don’t have the time to date in the normal way, so this allows them to accelerate the whole thing. They’re going on trips anyway, and they can afford to search through profiles and afford to bring one they like with them.”

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It’s a little known fact that Nacho Libre, a character played by Jack Black in the 2006 eponymous movie, is actually based on a legendary real-life Mexican wrestling priest. In the film, Nacho Libre is the undercover identity adopted by Black, a monastery cook, in order become a luchador, a masked lucha libre wrestler. The idea of a priest donning a lucha libre mask is rather outlandish, but Sergio Gutierrez Benitez, a.k.a Fray Tormenta, actually did that in real life!

Born in 1945, Benitez is a Catholic priest who runs a home for orphans. As he struggled to support the kids, he decided on a rather radical means of raising money – becoming a wrestler. He designed his own red-and-yellow lucha libre mask (yellow for liveliness he must display in the ring, and red for the blood he must spill on behalf of the orphanage), and adopted the name ‘Fray Tormenta’.

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Icelandic artist Snorri Asmundsson recently made news headlines for a very bizarre request – he’s asking dying people to donate their corpses for his latest art project. He apparently plans to use corpses in a dance video, promising to return them to their families once he’s done.

Snorri first came up with the idea in 2008 – he received media attention back then for putting up a Facebook ad asking for people on their deathbeds to get in touch with him. “Looking for dead bodies in the name of art,” his ad read. “I need a few corpses for a video installation. If you are dying I would like to borrow your remains after you die. The bodies will be returned to the undertaker in the same condition.”

Understandably, the ad caused quite the controversy in the Nordic island. “It was in all the media in Iceland and I had strange articles written about me,” Snorri said. “Some people contacted vicars asking their opinion. People had decided that I was going to do something really unethical with those corpses. It’s nothing like that.” Read More »

Every year, in the month of May, women from the Nahua villages of Guerrero, Mexico, get together to beat the living daylights out of each other. All the blood they spill during the fight is collected in buckets, and later used to plough and water their lands. The villagers believe that this bizarre ritual will bring the rain and provide bountiful harvests!

The festival, like many others in Mexico, combines catholic and prehispanic traditions. On the first day, women wake up early to make large quantities of food. They prepare turkey, chicken, rice, boiled eggs, pozole, mole, and tortillas, which they take along with them to the fighting grounds. At the official site, they lay out the food and decorate the area with flowers and inflated turkey bellies. They recite prayers for the virgin Mary and for the local rain god Tlaloc, after which it is time for the fighting to begin.

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Mexican politician Renato Tronco Gomez has turned to social media to reduce his workload – he’s currently running a competition on Facebook to find a lookalike willing to attend official engagements in his stead. He’s offering the winner a prize of 40,000 pesos (US $2,700), apart from the obvious media attention the position will bring. Four people have entered the contest so far.

Gomez, an independent deputy in the eastern Mexican state of Veracruz, plans to thoroughly train the winner on speaking and acting like him, and taking care of his ‘many obligations’. The double will be on the payroll as his assistant, but some duties will remain off-limits, like official responsibilities and spending time with Gomez’s family.

“My double will not be able to attend sessions of parliament, because you vote with your fingerprint and I’m not going to cut off my finger to give it to my double,” Gomez joked. “There is going to be an agreement that he can’t sleep with my wife, nor live in my house, nor be father to my children.”

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American student Barclay Oudersluys is making headlines for attempting a 100-day coast-to-coast run, inspired by the movie Forrest Gump. He set off on the epic journey on Saturday, from California’s Santa Monica Yacht Harbor and Pier, and he plans to reach Marshall Point Lighthouse in Maine at the end of 100 days. That’s a total of 3,200 miles, with 32 miles to cover per day.

Barclay is calling his attempt ‘Project Gump’, as it was inspired by the protagonist of the 1994 film Forrest Gump. Although the route covered by Tom Hanks’s character isn’t completely revealed in the movie, Barclay has managed to chart a course quite similar to it, by studying contextual clues.

“I don’t really know what made me want to do it,” he said. “Forrest Gump is my favorite movie. And so when I decided to do this run, I looked up the two points where he had gone to and decided then.” The course he’s charted will take him through California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine.

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