A Brazilian doctor recently shocked millions on social media by posting an X-ray of a man suffering from cysticercosis whose body was riddled with calcified tapeworm eggs.

Last month, Doctor Vitor Borin de Souza, a resident at the Hospital das Clínicas in Botucatu, Sao Paulo, posted an X-ray of a patient on Twitter to show his followers how bad a tapeworm infection could get. The doctor explained that the white spots visible all through his midsection and his arms were calcified tapeworm eggs following infection with the common intestinal parasite. Luckily, the patient, who had come in for a checkup following a persistent cough, was in no danger from the eggs, as they were all calcified (unviable). Although the tapeworm eggs (cysticerci) posed no threat to the man’s health, they caused quite the stir on Brazilian social media.

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Cauzinho Neto, a muscular 12-year-old boy from Brazil, has become famous both for his impressive physique and his grueling training regimen, which apparently puts most adults to shame.

Carlos Augusto Pitanga Neto, aka ‘Cauzinho’, only started hitting the gym 2 years ago, under the watchful eye of his father, himself a fitness enthusiast, but he is already seen as a CrossFit prodigy able to deadlift more than twice his own body weight and do 700 ab crunches a day. Most 12-year-olds struggle to get out of bed for school on weekdays, but Cauzinho gets up at 5:30 am every day for a 5km (3.1-mile) run and a few dozen situps. After breakfast, he goes to school, and after finishing his homework he puts in two and a half hours of work in the gym, including deadlifts, squats, bench presses, and bicep curls.

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A Brazilian mayor sparked massive controversy earlier this month after legally marrying a 16-year-old girl and then appointing her mother Secretary of Culture and Tourism.

65-year-old Hissam Hussein Dehaini, the mayor of Araucária City, in southern Brazil, recently married a girl 49 years his junior the day after she turned 16, which is the legal age that someone can get legally married. This alone sparked controversy in the South American country, but the controversial union was also shadowed by serious accusations of nepotism and corruption. The Prosecutor’s Office in the Brazilian state of Paraná is investigating the appointment of the young bride’s mother to the position of Secretary of Culture and Tourism in Araucária just a day after the mayor’s wedding.

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A Brazilian man sparked the outrage of his friends and family after he faked his death out of pure curiosity, to see who would attend his funeral.

As an experienced ‘ceremonialist‘, a sort of master of ceremonies for various kinds of events, 60-year-old Baltazar Lemos had conducted hundreds of funerals, some of which had been attended by as few as 2 people, others by as many as 500. Recently, he had been thinking about how many of his friends and family would come to pay their respects and bid him farewell when he died, and since he couldn’t really know if he actually kicked the bucket, he decided to fake his death and see how many people showed up to his funeral…

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A new online “profession” is making news headlines in Brazil. Attractive women will attempt to seduce clients’ husbands and then provide proof of their faithfulness.

Brazilian loyalty inspectors have become very popular on social networks like TikTok and Instagram. They are usually young, attractive women who charge between 20 reals ($4) and 150 reals ($30) to test men’s loyalty to their wives or girlfriends online, and then provide proof to their clients. Testing usually involves sliding into their targets’ DMs, approaching them on WhatsApp or simply pretending to have obtained their contacts from a mutual acquaintance. They take screenshots of conversations with their marks, any photos that they send, and then hand them all to their partners as proof of their loyalty, or lack-there-of.

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A Brazilian man has been accused of kidnapping his ex-girlfriend and tattooing his name on the side of her face, as revenge for breaking up with him.

Tayane Caldas, an 18-year-old woman from the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo, was on her way to school last Friday, when she was approached by her ex-boyfriend, Gabriel Coelho, who forced her to get into his car. Afraid she would be attacked if she didn’t comply, the young woman got into the vehicle and was taken to her ex’s home in the municipality of Taubaté. There, the 20-year-old Coelho tattooed his full name on the girl’s right side of the face, from her ear, down to her chin. Although he doesn’t deny doing the tattoo, Gabriel Coelho claims that Tayane was more than happy to let him do it.

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Two young brothers, ages six and eight, were recently rescued after miraculously surviving almost four weeks alone in Brazil’s Amazon jungle.

Glauco and Gleison Ferreira left the family home near Manicoré, in Brazil’s Amazonas state, on February 18. They went into the nearby jungle to catch and hunt small birds but never came back. Around 260 people, including locals and professional rescuers, searched for them for over a week, but with the rainy season making the jungle even more inaccessible than usual, all efforts were unsuccessful. Still, even after the search was officially called off on February 26, locals kept searching for the boys through the vast wilderness, and their family never lost hope that they would be found alive. Luckily, after 27 days of pure agony, they received the news that they had been praying for.

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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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Carlos Henrique Raposo, aka Carlos Kaiser, is a Brazilian former football player known primarily for having a decade-long career without actually playing a single game.

As children, most people grow up dreaming of one day becoming sports champions, despite an obvious lack of athletic abilities. Most of us realize this to be nothing more than an impossible dream and move on, but a few still manage to find ways of making their goal a reality, by any means necessary. This is the story of Carlos Henrique Raposo, a Brazilian athlete who “wanted to be a footballer, but did not want to play football”. Believe it or not, he managed to be just, playing for top-ranked Brazilian and international clubs for over a decade. ‘Playing’ may not be the right word, though, as he never actually played an official game in his entire 12-year-long career.

Carlos Kaiser – nicknamed earned due to his alleged resemblance to German football legend Franz Beckenbauer – always knew that he had the physique of a professional football player, but not the necessary talent and skills to make the roster of top football clubs, so he relied on a variety of tricks to build himself up as this great player that every team was after.

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Authorities in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro are currently investigating how a local man was able to receive at least five doses of three different Covid-19 vaccines in just 10 days.

According to official records, the unnamed man started getting Covid-19 vaccines in May, and continued getting new jabs into June, until his vaccination marathon was finally discovered by staff at a vaccination station earlier this month while attempting to get yet another Covid shot. Records obtained by Brazilian media show that the man got his first Pfizer shot on May 12, the second dose of AstraZeneca on June 5, the second dose of Coronavac on June 17, another second dose of Pfizer, on July 9th, and the “first dose” of Coronavac on 21 July. It’s not clear what his sixth dose was supposed to be.

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Ever dreamed of swimming in a lake of Coca Cola? Well, you can actually do just that at the unique Coca Cola Lagoon in Rio Grande del Norte, Brazil, where the water has the exact same color as the popular soft drink.

Looking at the water of Lagoa da Araraquara, it’s easy to see why it is popularly known as Coca Cola Lagoon. It has the same dark hue, but very different ingredients and no carbonation. Instead of caramel, the water of this popular lagoon is colored by a concentration of iodine and iron, in combination with the pigmentation of the reeds near its shores.

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A Brazilian young man recently got a rather humiliating birthday party thrown for him by police after being arrested for theft right on the day that he turned 18.

Celebrating your 18th birthday should be a joyous occasion, but for one Paulo Rodrigo das Neves, from Brazil’s Rio Grande do Norte region, the event was anything but. Arrested on his birthday after being caught on camera stealing sound equipment and other parts from people’s cars, the birthday boy got to enjoy a humiliating celebration at the police station, with staff there singing him “Happy Birthday” and even serving cake and soda in his honor. To make matters worse, the whole thing was filmed and posted online.

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Almost every morning for the past two decades, Juliet the macaw has been visiting the local zoo in Rio de Janeiro to interact with others of her kind through the metal enclosure. She is the only wild macaw in the Brazilian metropolis, and this is her only opportunity to socialize.

Macaws are social birds, so loneliness is a tough burden to bare for Juliet, a beautiful blue-and-yellow macaw who calls Rio home. She is the only wild specimen seen in city since 1818, and no one really knows much about her. Zoo staff named the bird Juliet, but they don’t even know if she is actually female. It’s really hard to tell with macaws, and to establish her true gender they would need to capture the bird, and either examine her gonads or take blood or feather samples. And there’s really no need to put Juliet through all that stress just to satisfy human curiosity.

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Jacu Bird Coffee is one of the world’s rarest and most expensive coffee varieties. It is made from coffee cherries ingested, digested and excreted by Jacu birds.

At around 50 hectares, the Camocim Estate is one of the smallest coffee plantations in Brazil, but it still manages to rake it quite a nice profit thanks to a very unique and sought-after type of coffee. It all started in the early 2000s, when Henrique Sloper de Araújo woke up to find that his precious plantations had been overrun by Jacu birds, an endangered, pheasant-like bird species, protected in Brazil. They weren’t known to be coffee cherry fans, but they seemed to love de Araújo’s organic coffee. But they were going to pay him back for the meal in the most unusual way.

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The Brazilian city of Santos is famous as the birthplace of Pele, regarded by many as the greatest football player ever, but also for its unique looking waterfront skyline, which looks, well, a bit tilted.

The leaning apartment buildings of Santos have been around for decades, and even though the problem has been getting worse over time, so far authorities have chosen not to intervene, claiming the edifices are perfectly safe. The Santos skyline is made up of 651 buildings, all of which are somewhat tilted, some only about 5cm out of level, which counts as a construction flaw, others almost 2 meters, which makes them visibly tilted. But the issue isn’t only aesthetic, some apartments have windows and doors that no longer close properly, and others have plumbing issues. There have also been reports of inhabitants experiencing loss of balance issues on level ground, from spending too much time in their tilted apartments.

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