Being born is among the hardest things any creature will ever do. Going from a single cell to a fully formed organism ready to face the world is a path we all take. However, no two species face the exact same struggle to be born, and there are quite a variety of odd life cycles in nature.

It is no surprise, then, that some of the pregnancies contrived by evolution can seem extraordinarily weird, if not fodder for horror movies. Here are ten of the strangest ways animals enter the world.

10 Incest Cannibal Babies

Adactylidium mites have such a rapid life cycle that they emerge from their mother already pregnant. These mites survive by eating the egg of a thrips—a winged insect that is less than 1 milimeter long. A single egg supplies all the energy and nutrients the mite will require for her entire life. It also provides the energy needed for the mite to raise her brood.

The mite’s life cycle begins inside its mother. The eggs hatch within, producing a brood of six to nine females and a single male.^[1] The larvae proceed to devour their mother’s tissue. The larvae then develop into adults while still inside the exoskeleton of the mother. While there, the male mates with his sisters, impregnating them. Now carrying fertilized eggs, the mites burst out of their mother and look for a thrips egg of their own to eat. The male mite, his job done, makes no effort to feed himself and simply dies. The female mites wait for their own children to eat them.

9 Mammals From Eggs

Children learn in school is that one of the defining characteristics of mammals is that they give birth to live young. No one, it seems, told the monotremes. This group of mammals is identified by the fact that they all lay eggs. Today, only five species of monotremes exist—the duck-billed platypus and four species of echidna.

Monotreme eggs tend to be small and have a leathery, rather than hard, shell. The monotreme incubates the eggs for several days until the young hatch. Then, in the case of echidnas, the baby, or puggle, crawls into its mother’s pouch.^[2] Compared to other mammals, the newly hatched baby is tiny and practically helpless. For several months inside the pouch, the puggle laps up milk that is produced from mammary glands in the skin. Eventually, the puggle is developed enough for the mother to place it in a burrow, where she will return to feed it every several days until it’s mature enough to survive on its own.

8 Mouthbrooders

Fish are not always known for their parenting prowess. Often, eggs are released, fertilized, and the young left to fend for themselves. It is true that some species will defend their eggs and young, but for some fish, it is just too risky to leave them alone at all. These fish, known as mouthbrooders, carry their eggs in their mouths until they hatch and will often keep their young there well afterward.

In some species, like the pearly jawfish, it is the father who will have a mouthful of eggs. For the duration of their development, he will hold onto them, unable to feed himself until they hatch. African cichlids are maternal mouthbrooders. The mothers go up to 36 days without feeding. Once the eggs hatch, she will allow the young out to feed themselves, but she can signal them to swim back in for protection if she senses danger.^[3]

Unfortunately, not even this tactic can always protect their young. The cuckoo catfish attacks cichlids to get them to spit out their eggs. While the mother cichlid is gathering them back up, the catfish deposits her own eggs among them. The catfish eggs hatch more quickly than the cichlid’s and proceed to feast on the cichlid eggs inside the safety of the mother’s mouth.

7 Gastric Brooding

Sometimes, the mouth simply isn’t safe enough for a child to live in. For the gastric brooding frogs, eggs would be kept safe in the stomach. The mother would lay her eggs in the usual fashion but then eat them. Up to 40 eggs would be eaten, though no more than 20 young were ever seen to develop within a mother’s stomach. It is possible that the stomach acid digested some of the eggs. To avoid being dissolved, the eggs, and the tadpoles that hatched from them, produced a mucus which stopped production of the acid—leaving the mother unable to eat while carrying her young.

As the young grew, the stomach expanded with them until it took up the majority of the frog’s body space. The mother’s lungs collapsed to make room, and she had to breath through her skin. Only after six weeks would the mother release her fully formed young.

Unfortunately, the two species of gastric brooding frogs went extinct in the 1980s.^[4] But in 2013, scientists took the first steps in returning the frogs to life. Using cloning techniques, they were able to create living embryos. It is hoped that the gastric brooding frog will soon be swallowing her young again.

6 Three Vaginas

Kangaroos, as well as several other marsupials, have a female reproductive system that can seem a little confusing at first but is actually the key to reproducing quickly. In place of the standard single vagina, kangaroos have three. The two on the sides are used to pass sperm to the uteri (of which there are two), while the middle is the one that joeys pass through to enter the world.^[5] They have other developments which may allow them to remain almost permanently pregnant.

The kangaroo egg cell is fertilized by sperm and allowed to develop for just 33 days before the young joey emerges. Blind, pink, and shriveled, the joey must crawl up through the fur of its mother and make its way to the pouch and find a teat to feed from. For the next 190 days, it stays in the pouch feeding until it will begin to leave the pouch, returning to suckle. The mother kangaroo can then begin to develop another embryo that will crawl out and into the pouch. The mother will produce two different types of milk—one for the newborn and one for the older joey.

That’s not the end of it, though. The mother may get pregnant again at this point, even though she has no more room to feed a young one. Instead, any embryos created while a newborn is still suckling will be held in a form of arrested development in one of the uteri and only begin to grow again when there is a spare teat.

5 Birth Through A Pseudo-Penis

Female spotted hyenas can be hard to spot in the wild. This is not because they are particularly shy, far from it, but because they display what looks awfully like an 18-centimeter (7 in) penis. In fact, this appendage is a pseudo-penis formed from an elongated clitoris. The female pseudo-penis does pretty much everything a penis does, even getting erections, but it does not deliver sperm.^[6] To have sex, a female hyena must retract her pseudo-penis, and the male must deliver his sperm through a channel that runs directly through it.

As this is also the birth canal, childbirth in female hyenas can be very traumatic and is definitely not a laughing matter. A 1.8-kilogram (4 lb) cub must be passed through a hole barely 2.5 centimeters (1 in) across. For a first-time hyena mother, there is an almost 60-percent chance that the cub will become stuck in the pseudo-penis and die. If the cub is not eventually released, this can prove fatal to the mother, too. When the first cub is born, it tears the pseudo-penis, and a stretchy patch of scar tissue forms that makes subsequent births easier.

Why does the female spotted hyena suffer so much to have a pseudo-penis? As of yet, no researchers have come up with a compelling explanation.

4 Male Birth

In most species where eggs are cared for within the body, it is the mother who takes responsibility for nurturing them. For seahorses, pipefish, and leafy sea dragons, it is left to the fathers to get their offspring from eggs to hatchlings. All these fish perform lengthy mating rituals which involve the male and female wriggling and dancing for hours together. It is thought that their motions allow them to synchronize movements, enabling the female to accurately deposit her eggs into a pouch on the male before swimming away.^[7]

In male seahorses, the eggs are then fertilized and surrounded by fleshy tissue that regulates oxygen and nutrition for the eggs. The male can swell to a much greater than normal size, as up to 2,500 eggs develop within him. When the young are all hatched, the male with use muscle contractions to spill the tiny hatchlings out into the ocean. At this point, he is ready for his next batch of young and takes no interest in the babies he has just carried.

3 Under The Skin

The Suriname toad (Pipa pipa) is an unusually protective mother. Used to hiding from predators at the bottom of bodies of water, it will not allow its offspring to simply swim about until they are completely ready to survive on their own. When a male Suriname toad is ready to breed, it will signal its readiness by making a clicking sound with a bone in its throat. Once a female emerges, the male will cling to her back for up to 12 hours as they swim in flipping circles through the water.^[8] This allows the male to fertilize the eggs and hold them against the mother’s back.

Why is it important that the eggs remain against the mother’s back? Because it is where they will stay until they are fully developed. The mother will grow skin over the eggs and trap them within her flesh. As the young grow, they can be seen moving and quivering under the flesh. The Suriname toad will not even allow its babies to emerge as tadpoles. When the young have developed into toadlets, they will punch their way out of their mother and swim off as fully independent beings, leaving her with massive holes in her back.

2 Eating Siblings

The least you can hope for from life is that the struggle for survival will wait until after your birth. In nature, though, you can never rest easy, not even within your mother. A sand tiger shark may start with as many as 12 fertilized eggs inside her, but usually, only two will emerge. Once the eggs hatch, the largest baby sharks will kill and eat their brothers and sisters. This is called intrauterine cannibalism.^[9] This act of cannibalism allows the two survivors, held in the right and left uteri, to develop into roughly one-meter-long (3.3 ft) newborns able to survive on their own. The mother also provides unfertilized eggs for the baby sharks to eat during their nine-month gestation.

This method of motherhood gives the sand tiger shark the best chance of having strong offspring. The mother will mate with a number of males, but by allowing her children to eat each other in utero, only those with the best genes will survive.

1 Darwin’s Monsters

There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae . . .

While many see in nature the glory of an all-loving God, Charles Darwin thought it impossible that such a being could have knowingly made parasitic wasps. Only evolution is capable of making such wickedly efficient killers.

Parasitic wasps are incredibly common and target a huge number of other invertebrates.^[10] From spiders to butterflies to other parasitic wasps, they will hunt them down and lay their eggs within the still-living bodies of their prey. Some will paralyze their prey with venom, leaving them unable to move as the wasp’s larvae devour it. Others will attack caterpillars so that their own eggs can benefit from the caterpillar’s continued feeding. The larvae will often release chemicals that control the mind of their host to give them the best chance of survival, such as making a host spider spin them a cocoon. Whatever the host, the endpoint is the same—something you do not want to look too closely at is coming bursting out of you.

Stories of exorcisms have long captured the fear of the public. While generally associated with the Catholic Church, such accounts have existed since Mesopotamian times. From movies like The Exorcist and countless horror novels on the subject, it is clear that these demonic stories still hold sway over the general public’s imagination.

Demons and possessions are fears shared by many, especially among the religious world. Most experts nowadays agree that “demonic possessions” are simply treatable mental illnesses. After all, it’s not the Middle Ages anymore. Though exorcisms are rarely practiced now, they used to be much more commonplace and could be violent, dangerous, and downright creepy.

10 Clara Germana Cele

In 1906, Clara Germana Cele, a 16-year-old Christian schoolgirl living in South Africa, was allegedly possessed by a demon. Rumor has it that she made a pact with Satan and, very soon after, began to exhibit signs of possession. She could understand languages like Polish and French, which she had no former knowledge of.

More disturbing, however, was the fact that she would intermittently levitate, vertically or horizontally, 1.5 meters (5 ft) in the air. She attempted to choke the priest who was performing the exorcism on her to death, but it ended in success, and the priest was able to stop her symptoms.^[1]

9 Michael Taylor

Our next story begins in 1974. A previously unassuming family man, Michael Taylor lived in England with his wife and five children. By all accounts, this was a happy 1970s nuclear family. All of that changed when Mr. Taylor joined a mysterious church known as the “Christian Fellowship Group,” led by a charming and beautiful 21-year-old named Marie Robinson. Marie and Michael soon began spending inordinate amounts of time together, and even leading church services where they would speak in tongues and “exorcise” congregation members. Christine Taylor accused her husband of having an affair with Marie, due to his absences.

This all culminated in a 24-hour exorcism after which the priests, exhausted and terrified, claimed to have removed all but the demons of “insanity, anger, and murder” from the man’s body.^[2] Not two hours later, possibly overtaken by these demons, possibly not, he violently and brutally murdered his wife and their dog. Christine’s eyes and tongue were ripped out. Michael was found on the street naked and covered in blood. He was eventually sent to Broadmoor Hospital and has since spent time in and out of psychiatric wards and the court system.

8 Emma Schmidt/Anna Ecklund

Emma Schmidt, also known as Anna Ecklund, is said to have been possessed by demons in the early years of the 1910s. She was exorcised by the priest Father Riesinger, who would later become a prolific exorcist. While her first bout of demonic possession was cured easily, it was her second exorcism in 1928 (also performed by Father Riesinger), that was the most severe. The ordeal lasted 23 days total, across sessions in August, September, and December. During this exorcism, her eyes stayed closed the entire time, and she was inexplicably vomiting what might have been macaroni and tea leaves, had she eaten anything.

The exorcist asked the demons inside Schmidt how many there were—the response was that there were many but that they were led by Beelzebub and that she had been cursed by her father. Emma violently levitated toward the ceiling and clung there, speaking in tongues and vomiting the macaroni-tea leaves concoction. The nuns in attendance were shaken and terrified, but they managed to restrain her again. At the end of the 23 days, when Father Riesinger had been exorcising Emma for three days straight, she suddenly screamed praises to Jesus and God and was finally free. This is known as the first and last exorcism sanctioned by the Catholic Church.^[3]

7 ‘Julia’

To make things just a little creepier, this case is from 2008 and was performed and documented by Dr. Richard E. Gallagher of the New York Medical College.^[4] The patient, who remained anonymous for her safety, was referred to as simply “Julia.” Julia had been in and out of Satanic groups for years. She came to Dr. Gallagher, requesting an exorcism and claiming to be possessed by demons. While she was in her dissociative states, her voice would drastically change to something guttural, distant, and masculine. She would spout insults and threats and was specifically disgusted by religious and sacred artifacts. She would cause objects to fly around the room and spoke in tongues unknown to her.

While Dr. Gallagher was originally skeptical about Julia being afflicted with a true demonic possession, her uncanny knowledge of people on the psychiatric team (and their families, such as death records and illnesses) convinced him otherwise. Like most cases of demonic possession, she also levitated and verbally abused the attending nuns, nurses, and the rest of the medical team.

6 Arne Cheyenne Johnson

This incredible case is from the early 1980s and is also known as the “Demon Murder Case” or the “Devil Made Me Do It Case.” The incident in question occurred in the town of Brookfield, Connecticut. Arne Cheyenne Johnson, allegedly under the influence of a demonic possession, killed his landlord Alan Bono on November 24, 1981. Johnson was 19 when he murdered Bono by stabbing him repeatedly in the chest.

During the months prior, Johnson was involved with an exorcism of his younger brother-in-law and reportedly taunted a demon to possess him instead of the 11-year-old boy. The defense lawyer in the case, Martin Minella, attempted to use demonic possession as a defense against the first-degree murder charge. Minella wanted to fly exorcism specialists in from Europe and subpoena the priests involved in the original exorcism.^[5] However, this defense was eventually overruled after 15 hours of deliberation, and Arne Cheyenne Johnson was ultimately convicted of first-degree murder.

5 Ronald Hunkeler

Ronald Hunkeler, known usually “Roland Doe,” is one of the most famous exorcism cases in history. This exorcism shook the quiet community of Cottage City, Maryland, and was the inspiration for the famed 1973 The Exorcist movie. We now know where these events took place: 3807 40th Avenue, Cottage City, Prince Georges County, Maryland.^[6]

The first recorded events of demonic activity happened when Aunt Tillie, a close member of the family, died. Religious icons such as the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ flew off the walls unexpectedly, and there was frequent knocking and beating on the walls, seeming to come from within. This escalated until the unexplained events concentrated themselves on Ronald’s room. The first exorcism lasted from February 28 to March 3, 1949, during which scratches forming the words “Hell” and “Christ” appeared on his body, and objects seemed to move around of their own accord.

The exorcism of March 16, 1949, was the most important and was led by Father Bowdern. Eventually, the family was baptized Catholic, and on April 18, 1949, Hunkeler spasmed randomly, fell to the ground, and quietly proclaimed, “He is gone.”

4 Salvador Dali

Did you know that Salvador Dali, the famous artist, also underwent an exorcism in 1947? Friar Gabriele Maria Berardi received an original piece from the artist to signify his thanks.^[7]

This exorcism reportedly took place while Dali was having frequent episodes and had broken from the Surrealist movement due to ideological differences—perhaps a sign of the demonic possession he was suffering from.

3 Gottliebin Dittus

In 1843, Pastor Johann Christoph Blumhart freed a young woman from demonic possession.^[8] The woman, named Gottliebin Dittus, was a member of his congregation and reported many classic signs of being possessed—she would levitate and spew filth toward Christ, the Church, and specifically Blumhart. Dark apparitions would appear around Dittus, screaming about fallen angels and specific demons from Hell. During her moments of lucidity, she would plead to Jesus to be saved from the possession and to see the power of Heaven to free her from her torment.

Her convulsions would last periodically over the next year, and there would be regular exorcism sessions during which she was prayed over by the congregation, always led by pastor Blumhart. After one final, intense exorcism session, she was freed and never bothered by demonic possession, convulsions, dark apparitions, or otherwise.

2 George Lukins

In England in 1788, a 44-year-old man known as George Lukins was possessed and subsequently exorcised by British clergy. Lukins was leading a normal, quiet life when—it is said—seven demons possessed him, necessitating the services of seven clergymen to free him. This all began in 1770, when he was attempting to piously celebrate Christmas. He began to sing in demonic voices, backward in Latin, scaring bystanders.

In 1788, an exorcism needed to be performed after he professed to being inhabited by seven different demons. Seven clergymen, as well as other religious attendants, were called to perform the ceremony on a Friday the 13th at a church in the town. They prayed and sang over Lukins, while he shouted back at them in tongues and claimed to want to demonstrate demonic power to the world of men. Eventually, the demons shouted that they would return to Hell from whence they came and never bother the poor man again.^[9]

1 Elizabeth Knapp

During the colonial era in the New World, right in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, an indentured servant known as Elizabeth Knapp became possessed by demons. She was lured in by promises of riches and an easy life; such promises easily turned this 16-year-old girl to the dark side of Christianity.

She began to have convulsions and verbally abuse the reverend, who was attempting to heal her, as well as her father and other members of the congregation she was a part of. Her body and face became grotesquely contorted, and she would utter blasphemies with her mouth wide open and motionless.^[10] Her tongue was drawn out of her mouth at an inhuman length, and screams came from around the room. She was eventually successfully exorcised, but the trauma and memories the experience left on the girl were incurable.

Damien Rasberry is a spoken word poet, student, and cosmetologist hailing from Denton, TX. He is currently attending NCTC to get an associate’s degree in English and plans to go all the way to PhD level. Damien likes creepy, weird stuff.

Medicine has changed a lot over the years, but you’d be surprised at the unconventional nature of some of the medical procedures we’re still using today. These are 10 of the most bizarre medical treatments of our times.

10Fighting Skin Cancer With Cryotherapy

Cryogenics is a specific area of scientific research that deals with extremely low temperatures. You’ve almost certainly heard of the recent fad of getting frozen in a cryogenic chamber in the hopes of being revived by superior technology in the future. As it turns out, cryotherapy also has uses in current medicine and is being increasingly used to cure diseases like skin cancer.

The process largely consists of putting liquid nitrogen on a piece of cotton and applying it to the affected area. The only catch is that the part of skin treated with this method cannot be looked at or studied under a microscope because the frigid nitrogen literally burns it, so it’s hard to get an accurate biopsy of the diseased tissue after the treatment. There are also a few side effects—for one thing, you can expect pain and blisters for days due to the burning. There could also potentially be scars, but a little disfiguration is nothing compared to an effective treatment for cancer.

9Rebirthing Therapy

Rebirthing therapy is precisely what it sounds like—a therapy in which you pass through a very tight area in order to recreate your birth. The idea is to make you feel the same way you felt back then, which is supposed to refresh your senses and make you experience the miracle of infancy again. The therapy involves being passed through pillows, which are pressed together by the therapists to replicate the birth canal. Breathing might become difficult in the middle of it, but that’s just part of the process.

If that sounds a bit weird, law enforcement thinks so, too. The procedure has had its share of controversies, and quite a few people have reportedly died from it in the past—maybe because of the breathing thing we mentioned earlier. As it stands now, the therapy is illegal in Colorado and North Carolina.

8Symphysiotomy

Symphysiotomy is a procedure by which the pelvis of a pregnant woman is manually widened to allow for childbirth in lieu of a caesarean section. In places without apt medical equipment, saws are used to cut it wide enough for the child to pass through comfortably. That might sound like something from medieval history, but the procedure was widely used by Irish doctors between the 1940s and 1980s. The women were often not told in advance what the doctors intended to do, and the consequences were often horrendous. The victims weren’t able to walk, and they usually developed infections and back problems—basically, all the things you’d expect from having your body cut up with a saw.

The issue has only come to public light recently, and there are plenty of survivor groups fighting for justice even now. Some medical bodies have issued their apologies to the victims, and more survivors are now coming out with their stories in light of the increased media attention.

7Tooth In Eye Surgery

Osteo-odonto-keratoprosthesis is a procedure for blind patients with damaged eye tissue. It involves pulling one of your teeth out and implanting it in your damaged eye. And it works—the transplant is based on the idea that once the body senses a tooth instead of, say, a mechanical implant, the body won’t reject it. A part of the jawbone is surgically separated for the process, then they drill a hole through the tooth to hold a prosthetic lens.

Once the transplant is successful and it’s been accepted as a part of the body, the doctors can replace the tooth with an artificial hold. The procedure is not yet widespread, but it has helped a number of people regain their eyesight. The doctors who perform this surgery have had a fair rate of success, and it might be fairly common in the future.

6Malaria Injections

Julius Wagner-Jauregg was the first of the only three people to have ever received a Nobel Prize in the field of psychiatry. Wagner-Juaregg was also one of the few psychiatrists to treat his patients through biological means, such as infecting them with malaria to cure diseases like syphilis. He was one of the doctors in charge of the psychiatric asylums in early 20th-century Austria, where the patients were coming down with a range of illnesses like pneumonia and typhoid.

Inspired by these cases, he started experimenting with deliberately giving people malaria to see its effects on other, unrelated diseases, which largely turned out to be successful. Wagner-Juaregg was working at the same time as Sigmund Freud, who was also from Austria, and even though Freud never won a Nobel, his psychoanalytic approach to psychiatry became much more popular than Juaregg’s biological one in the rest of the world.

5The G-Shot

If you want your G-spot to perform better than it usually does, G-Spot Activation therapy is probably for you. The procedure is meant to make it easier for a guy to locate it by literally increasing its size. After numbing it with anesthesia, they inject the G-spot with chemicals to artificially increase its size for a healthier sex life. The criteria for getting the injection is quite strict, though—you should be a sexually functioning female who knows where her G-spot is, and you shouldn’t have any other problems, like allergies or a loose vagina.

The procedure is very brief, and you can probably get back to having sex within hours of getting the shot. It’s been surprisingly successful—in a study done on women who had gotten the procedure, about 87 percent were found to be satisfied with the results, with better orgasms, increased libido, and a general improvement in their sex lives.

4Laughter Therapy

We all know that laughter is good for the body, but you may not have known that raising your hands in the air and laughing like a maniac is an increasingly popular therapy in countries like India. The therapy is largely a result of the efforts of Dr. Madan Kataria in 1970s Mumbai, who can be credited with bringing laughter into mainstream medicine. Laughter therapy is usually done in groups, and Kataria set up the first “laughter group” 40 years ago. There are currently about 5,000 different groups around the world dedicated to just laughing together.

In places where it is the most popular, it’s not unusual to see a bunch of random people throwing their hands in the air and laughing loudly every evening at the local park. It’s not really a sham procedure, either—research does indicate that laughter helps the body produce more warrior cells to fight off diseases.

3Bee Sting Therapy

Getting stung by a bee isn’t a lot of fun, but apparently it’s good for you. Apitherapy is based around the idea of finding medical uses for bees, and some of that includes letting them sting you. Practitioners don’t even go through the trouble of injecting the bee venom with a needle—an actual, live bee is held near the skin by tweezers and forced to sting the patient. The bees are often raised by the patients themselves, and some treatments involve getting stung about 80 times a day.

Apparently, bee venom is beneficial against arthritic pain and inflammation, and has long been used against these ailments; the earliest examples of the use of bee venom come from the ancient Egyptians, who used it to treat arthritis. The patients often report positive results from the treatment, so it’s fast catching up as a viable therapy for problems related to pain, like multiple sclerosis and tendonitis.

2Desert Sand Therapy

In Siwa, an oasis in the city of Cairo, Egypt, it’s an ancient belief that the hot sand of the desert has some sort of medicinal properties, so travelers and locals routinely allow themselves to be buried in it to rid their body of skin problems and other diseases. First, they dig a hole in the ground in the morning, allowing it to absorb all the good rays of the Sun, and at about 2:00 PM the patient lies down in the Sun-soaked hole. It is believed that the hotter it is, the more effective the treatment will be.

Then they cover the whole body with sand except for the head, which is kept in the shade by blankets set on a couple of sticks. If the ground gets damp with sweat, the wet sand is replaced with dry, hot sand to keep the procedure going.

1Three-Parent Babies

Using three people to make a baby is a relatively new procedure, but it’s being increasingly seen as a legitimate practice. Though mired in controversy, several countries are currently in deliberation over whether or not they will allow three-parent embryos. The main draw is that it would give parents-to-be the ability to prevent genetic diseases from passing on to the offspring.

During the procedure, nuclear DNA from the mother is dumped into a donor’s egg, which has been cleared to leave only healthy mitochondrial DNA. The father’s sperm is added, and the baby is born with genetic material from the mother, father, and the donor. It works because only the mitochondrial DNA from a mother carries genetic diseases, so with that taken out of the picture, the baby is born healthy. Nuclear DNA carries the traits, like eye and hair color, so the baby will still effectively be the offspring of the true parents. The procedure is done through in vitro fertilization, and the embryo otherwise grows up normally.

As we mentioned, the procedure has had its share of problems. It raises questions on whether we should be tinkering with our original design, though it can really help the large number of people who suffer from genetic disorders. Researchers believe that three-way fertilization can revolutionize the medical field, but people opposing it say that if the procedure becomes widely accepted, the next step can only be human cloning—despite the fact that three-way fertilization doesn’t involve genetic modification.

You can follow Himanshu on Twitter, or check out his stuff over at Cracked.

Professional sports are highly competitive and feature the very best athletes and coaches from all over the world. The stakes are often quite high, as there is a great deal of turnover among coaches, executives, and players if success is not achieved very quickly. It’s no surprise then that professional sports teams are constantly on the lookout for any edge they can find to beat their opponents. What follows are 10 of the strangest ways pro sports teams try to gain an advantage.

10Using Facial Coding

Psychologists have been using facial coding to determine how a facial expression may betray an emotion, and animators have used facial coding to ensure that their characters possess realistic facial expressions. The Milwaukee Bucks, however, have turned to a facial coding expert in order to help evaluate the emotional stability of a player who may ultimately receive a multimillion-dollar contract.

The Bucks hired Dan Hill, a facial coding expert, for the evaluation process related to the NBA draft. With the help of Hill’s analysis, the team decided that Jabari Parker had the emotional wherewithal to be successful in the NBA, whereas another player, Dante Exum, might not hold up emotionally. The facial coding analysis played a significant role in their selection of Parker over Exum. The Bucks—along with other pro sports teams—are now analyzing “emotion metrics” in order to gain a better understanding of their players so that the team can get the most out of them from a performance standpoint.

9Employing ‘V Energy’

Fans of the Los Angeles Dodgers were understandably frustrated with the direction of the franchise under then-owner Frank McCourt, whose divorce proceedings revealed some of the financial mismanagement that had caused the Dodgers to have disappointing seasons during his reign.

One of the oddest things done by the McCourt regime was the use of “V energy,” for which the Dodgers paid a Russian scientist-turned-healer a six-figure salary. Vladimir Shpunt, living in Boston, was on the Los Angeles Dodgers payroll to send positive energy to the team from across the country.

Shpunt, who admittedly knew nothing about baseball, emigrated to the United States with the help of future Nobel prize winner Zhores Alferov, a physicist who stated that Shpunt was an “eminent scientist” and “outstanding inventor.” So for five years, Shpunt was paid a considerable sum to send positive energy to the Dodgers, and he was even asked to treat a player, Jayson Werth. The “V energy” did not work for Werth, and it is difficult to believe that it ever worked for the Dodgers, either. The team was, however, clearly committed to exhausting every available option in order to win a World Series title.

8Zen Teachings And Meditation

There have been many interesting coach/player pairings in the history of sports, but Phil Jackson and Shaquille O’Neal must have been a true joy to watch. O’Neal, now a commentator for TNT, has talked about Jackson’s triangle offense quite a bit, but one of the more interesting aspects of Jackson’s sessions has to be his use of meditation during practice, a tactic he employed with both the Chicago Bulls and the Los Angeles Lakers. On occasion with the Bulls, Jackson also had the team practice in the absence of light and in the absence of sound.

Jackson was also well known for giving out books to his players as gifts, usually because the book contained a lesson that was particularly appropriate for the player. Jackson once gave O’Neal a copy of the book Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, and then jokingly asked the jovial big man to give him a book report. O’Neal obliged after reading the book, saying, “Story about a young man who’s rich, famous, good-looking, and has a lot of women—just like me.”

7Developing New And Incredibly Specific Analytics

Professional sports teams have become heavily invested in properly analyzing players, including those they currently employ and those they may target in the future. In order to completely understand a player’s value, teams have begun using advanced analytics. An NBA general manager may have once looked at a player’s points-per-game and rebound averages while also relying on scouts for further analysis, but they are now looking at things like PER (player efficiency rating), win shares, and rebound percentage (the percent of the available rebounds grabbed while the player was on the floor).

In baseball, things have gotten very specific. It was once the case that a player’s batting line (batting average, home runs, and runs batted in) was used to tell most of the story, but teams are using reams of data to determine the true value of a player. One of the more interesting developments relates to pitch framing, a metric used to determine how well a catcher “frames” a pitch. Catchers can now be judged based on how many pitches they are able to get called as strikes, regardless of whether the pitch was in the strike zone or not. The accumulated value of pitch framing is quantified by runs saved, which can be as many as 50 over the course of a single baseball season.

6Emulating And Applying Wall Street Strategies

Being able to identify undervalued assets and market inefficiencies are of vital importance to those working on Wall Street, and given the deep understanding of advanced financial strategies, many investment bankers are finding that their experience has made them a hot commodity in Major League Baseball.

Andrew Friedman, formerly of the Tampa Bay Rays and now with the Los Angeles Dodgers, is a perfect example of this. After leaving his position as an analyst at Bear Stearns to join the Rays’ front office, Friedman began applying his Wall Street strategies to turn a losing team into a small-market monster. He worked feverishly at identifying market inefficiencies that allowed him to sign players to affordable, long-term contracts, allowing him to compete with other AL East teams that carried $100 million more in payroll each season.

Friedman values the information that he and his staff utilize so greatly that new hires are required to sign a non-disclosure agreement, allowing Friedman’s front office to maintain an information advantage.

5Cultivating A ‘Happy’ Atmosphere

For many years, it has simply been accepted that participation in competitive sports is going to involve quite a bit of yelling. Perhaps not on the level of a Bobby Knight tirade, but screaming and harsh criticism are generally considered par for the course when playing for a team that has championship aspirations.

But not for the Seattle Seahawks.

Pete Carroll, the head coach of the defending Super Bowl champions, has worked very diligently to ensure that his players enjoy a happy atmosphere. Everyone in the organization is instructed to maintain a positive disposition, with Carroll pushing his players to “do your job better than it has ever been done before,” rather than chastising them when a mistake is made. The Seahawks have adopted Phil Jackson’s practice of having players meditate as a part of practice, and they have also added yoga sessions and “imagery work,” which is a part of Seattle’s Neurotopia brain-performance testing.

4CIA-Type Surveillance

Although we wrote this list before the explosion of “Deflategate,” it isn’t the first time the Patriots have been in hot water. In one of the more infamous scandals in recent NFL history, Bill Belichick and the New England Patriots were heavily fined and penalized for an incident known as “Spygate,” in which the coach and other members of the team spied on the New York Jets in order to steal their sideline signals. A Patriots intern videotaped the opposing team’s defensive signals so they could be decoded, allowing the Patriots to know exactly what the Jets were doing well before they did it.

In order to make full use of the information the team had uncovered, the Patriots also set up a hidden radio frequency through which a member of the team’s personnel could communicate with the quarterback long after the NFL’s mandated time, which prohibits communication from the sideline to the field once the play clock is down to 15 seconds. This allowed Patriot coaches to talk to quarterback Tom Brady while plays were going on, and it has been reported that the coaches were telling Brady which receivers were open on each play.

A recently published book on the subject contends that the spying has not ended, and may be the reason that the Patriots’ home record has been so strong over the years—and why so few coaches have had success after leaving New England.

3Code Breaking

Because of the ease with which NFL sideline signaling can be deciphered by opponents, many teams now take protective measures to maintain the secrecy of their calls. The Philadelphia Eagles are a bit more paranoid than others, and have gone to extreme measures to ensure that no opponent can crack their code. Chip Kelly, the Eagles’ head coach, uses multiple assistants, each holding various placards at different times while wearing a specially colored shirt, arm band, or hat.

To see just how well Kelly’s code worked, ESPN tried to crack the code using a mathematician and a team of photographers back when Kelly coached at the University of Oregon, but were unable to discern how the placards and colors related to the plays that were ultimately run. Kelly also employs a sports sciences coordinator—Shaun Huls, formerly the strength and conditioning coordinator for none other than the Navy SEALS—in order to ensure that his players are mentally and physically prepared for the demands of the Eagles’ system.

2Early Morning Concert Performances

World Cup qualifying is taken very seriously by athletes and fans alike. In many cases, helping a team to victory becomes something of a national effort. Such was the case when the Swedish national team faced off against Portugal, and the home side attempted to find every advantage it could.

They first tried to leave the roof of the arena open despite freezing temperatures and the very high likelihood of snowfall. But while keeping the arena roof open only provides a small advantage to the home team, having a concert held outside of the opposing team’s hotel and scheduled for 7:15 AM does provide a decided edge. Markoolio, a singer/songwriter, scheduled the concert in order to keep Portugal from a solid night’s rest, rapping insults in a language unfamiliar to them.

This was not the first time a stunt like this was attempted, as Algerian fans also disrupted the sleep patterns of the Burkina Faso team by blowing car horns, setting off fireworks, and using the most infernal of all noisemakers, the vuvuzela.

1Total Lack Of Hospitality

The Boston Celtics were one of the best teams of the 1980s, and Red Auerbach was one of the most innovative executives in the history of basketball. So it comes as little surprise that Auerbach ensured that the visiting locker room was as hot as a sauna and its showers were freezing cold. It got so bad that, during the 1984 NBA Finals, the Lakers furiously demanded that their locker room include an air conditioner. So Auerbach gave them one, still in its package and on the floor.

The tactic worked for the Celtics, and Game Five in Boston saw the Boston Garden reach a temperature of 36 degrees Celsius (97 °F). Larry Bird excelled, scoring 34 points and collecting 17 rebounds, all while the Lakers’ players—including all-time scoring leader Kareem Abdul Jabbar—struggled, some needing oxygen just to make it through the game. Boston won the game and the series in seven games to earn their second championship of the 1980s.

J. Francis Wolfe is a freelance writer whose work can be seen daily at Dodgers Today. When he’s not writing, he is most likely waiting for “just one more wave,” or quietly reading under a shady tree.

These days, “Artists” live for innovation (historically they lived for transcendent beauty). Art is a creative act and artists have always been creative in how they use materials to create their art. Some of these materials can strike us as unusual, even when they become traditional. For hundreds of years artists that work in tempera use egg yolks to bind pigment in their painting.

Here are ten materials used in new, exciting, and sometimes disgusting ways by so-called artists. Be careful which ones you try at home

10 Crazy Things That Make Us Love Or Hate Art

10 Blood

If you are looking for a red paint you might think that blood would make a cheap alternative. Unfortunately blood dries to a dark brown colour. One modern artist, Vincent Castiglia, works exclusively with human blood to create his nightmarish visions. Perhaps the most famous use of blood in art was when Marc Quinn sculpted his own head out of his own frozen blood. Called ‘Self’ it takes 10 pints of blood to create each bust. Every five years he crafts a new one to show his ageing process.

There were reports in 2002 that the bust had melted after being stored in a freezer that was unplugged by builders working on art collector Charles Saatchi’s home. This is unlikely however because the artwork travels with its own refrigeration unit. Part of the meaning of the piece is dependency – if the freezer ever breaks then the art melts. Marc Quinn is fairly relaxed about what happens after his death. One thing is sure, with no more Marc there’ll be no more blood and these portraits will become a lot more valuable.^[1]

9 Toast

While some media used in art, like marble and bronze, are meant to last through the ages there are those who prefer their art to have a more ephemeral lifetime. One artist, Lennie Payne, was inspired by the artistic potential of toast when they cut smiling faces out of toast for their child. Payne uses a blowtorch to scorch bread black and then scrapes away at it to create the right pigment. Using a number of slices he creates portraits of famous people as a meditation on how quickly fame fades. Some of the portraits he creates in bread that will eventually go mouldy will barely outlive the fame of their subject.

To help his artwork survive a little longer Payne has experimented with soaking the toast in resin and painting them with varnish. This has not always been done in time and he once lost several slices of a portrait to the nibbling teeth of mice. Everyone’s a critic…^[2]

8 Fruit

The beauty of photography is that it can capture a moment and make it last forever. When you seductively finger fruit you no longer have to worry about the image being lost. For Stephanie Sarley her videos and photos have brought her fame and infamy – and brought her up against Instagram’s rules about sexually suggestive content.

But then challenging society’s standards is part of the point of the work. Some see Instagram and other social media company’s rules as being illogical. Why is a man’s nipple okay to see but a woman’s worth banning? If you photoshopped a man’s nipple over a woman’s would that be okay? By pushing her fingers into juicy fruit Sarley is pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable.^[3]

7 Cheese

Some people just love to smother their food with cheese. Who can blame them, it is pretty delicious. But does melting cheese all over everything make pretty art? Yes, according to Cosimo Cavalerro. Inspired by a time when he accidentally dripped some cheese on his chair Cavalerro has put cheese on everything from sheds, to entire hotel rooms, to dresses. Once applied he takes photos of the cheesy messes to immortalise them.

He has branched out into other media, as when he made a controversial statue of Jesus out of chocolate, but cheese is where his heart is. In 2019 to protest the building of a wall along the Mexican-US border Cavalerro constructed his own out of cheese nearby to show how absurd the wall was. “It sounds cheesy,” he remarked, “but just love one another.”^[4]

6 Ants

What would you do if you had 200,000 ants on your hands? Probably call an exterminator, but artist Chris Trueman decided that that was exactly what he needed to create his masterpiece. Ordering ants in batches of up to 40,000 at a time he would kill them and individually position them with tweezers to make the image he had in mind. When he was done his artwork “Self portrait with a gun” was put on sale for $35,000.

The ants would be killed by exposing them to nail polish remover but eventually even this relatively human death began to bother the artist. “It took several years, not because of the actual labour, but because at one point I started to feel bad about killing all of the ants and I stopped the project for over a year. Then I decided that the first ants would have died in vain if I didn’t finish the work so I decided to continue.” It is believed that the piece ended up being sold to Ripley’s Believe It or Not.^[5]

10 Tragic Cases Of Life Imitating Art

5 Fish heads

We tend to discourage children from playing with their food but we might be denying them a potentially lucrative source of income. For artist Anne-Catherine Becker-Echivard playing with food is at the centre of her work. Taking fish heads she crafts little scenes to place them in as if they were humans.

Her desire to play with animals, both living and dead, began in childhood when she would transfer her doll’s clothes to her pet rats. It was only when she started to train in the fish industry though that she discovered her love of severed fish heads. Her creations may not be everyone’s idea of high art but they make you smile and make you think. As the artist says:

“Take the fishes in my factories for an example, they are in uniforms. They are asexual and give a global message. That is neither the condition of women nor the condition of men. That is man, the human being, in general. The factories represent a state of conformity to the man, to the common citizen as there is so much work in the production line, ‘the modern times’. The dehumanization.”

Can fish be art? You’ll just have to mullet over for yourself.^[6]

4 Pencils

Artists have been using pencils for art for hundreds of years, so this entry surely isn’t that weird. But it is the way some modern artists are using their pencils that is strange. Instead of just drawing with them they are turning the pencils themselves into art. While some are attaching pencils together to construct large artworks others are cutting into the graphite core of the pencil to sculpt miniature masterpieces.

Salavat Fidai is just one artist making use of his very steady hands to work on a tiny scale. Using a very sharp blade to carve out the soft and brittle centre of pencils Fidai has recreated everything from world landmarks, to Game of Thrones swords, to astronauts. While the artist needs a steady hand to make them his viewers need good eyes to see them. Some of his works are less than 0.5 mm across.^[7]

3 Pennies

The face of Abraham Lincoln is one of the most recognisable in the United States. Featured on the 1 cent coin he appears in almost every handful of change. Those images of him are tiny however and Richard Schlatter decided he wanted to make a big one. Using over 24,000 pennies he created an image of Lincoln 12 feet high and 8 feet across.

Schlatter was inspired when he was counting out some pennies and noticed how they each varied in colour. Because of the difference in how they are handled pennies can appear as brilliant shiny copper or almost black, and all the hues in between. Schlatter decided to use these variations to create a portrait of Lincoln. Each year that Lincoln has been on the penny, from 1909 to 2017, was represented in at least one coin.

Overall it was not a bad outlay on the part of the artist. Using pennies worth around $245 he walked away with an art prize of $200,000.^[8]

2 Copper sulfate

In 2006 the artist Roger Hiorns took advantage of some high school chemistry to create some extraordinary art. Many students will be familiar with copper sulfate from a simple experiment where a blue crystal is dangled in a saturated solution of copper sulfate and the crystal is seen to grow over time. Hiorns took this crystal growth and applied it to a BMW engine – the copper sulfate crystals converting the metal into a glistening mass of deep blue jewels.

This was not large enough for Hiorns however. For his next work with copper sulfate he took an entire British apartment and flooded it with 90,000 litres of copper sulfate solution. Left to react for a month the artist returned and pumped the mixture out to reveal a home transformed into a cavernous blue geode. When the artwork was donated to a charity it took a great deal of effort to cut the whole apartment from its building without destroying either the art, or the neighbour’s homes.^[9]

1 Poop

There are many people with strong feelings about the effect of Facebook on society and democracy. Few people are willing to go as far as expressing their views via the medium of their own poop. Thankfully for art history KATSU, a graffiti artist, was willing to step up to the plate, or the toilet.

Using his own faeces KATSU created a more than passable likeness of Mark Zuckerburg, Facebook’s founder. KATSU apparently does not mind getting his hands dirty, though when painting with his poop he does admit to using many gloves and a face mask. But sometimes the medium an artist chooses perfectly captures their feelings towards their subject matter.

“Mark is Mark.” KATSU said. “He’s this mutation, this gross aspiration everyone idolizes… He deserves to be ridiculed… I want to let people know my beliefs.” With KATSU creating a series of poop portraits of the titans of Silicon Valley I think his beliefs are pretty clear, if not always pretty.^[10]

10 Fascinating Old-Timey Art Trends

Theft in itself isn’t that bizarre or mysterious. Thieves steal things like jewelry, cars, gadgets, and other material objects all the time, mostly because they want to have them without earning or paying for them. It gets baffling, however, when the stolen item in question falls outside the established norms of what can or can’t be stolen. Thieves around the world have taken to stealing all kinds of things you didn’t know could be stolen – from sharks to glaciers to manhole covers. 

10. Manhole Covers

In 2008, nearly 50 cast-iron manhole covers – each weighing around 150 pounds – were stolen from roadways and alleys in the Long Beach area of California, all within a span of just eight months. The frequency of the thefts only increased over time, as the covers were disappearing at a higher rate every week. While the stolen covers were promptly reported and replaced, they still cost the city around $500 per replacement. 

It might sound like a specific, unlikely crime, though theft of manhole covers has been a rising problem the world over in the past few years, particularly in developing nations like China. The soaring price of metal is contributing to an epidemic of these cases, as these covers could be melted down and sold as scrap at ever-increasing prices. Various cities have implemented their own measures to prevent it, like bolting covers, special locks, and plastic covers.

9. A Train Engine

Some time in 2022, an entire diesel train engine was disassembled piece-by-piece and stolen from a yard in India’s Begusarai district. The thieves gained access to the area via a tunnel they dug themselves, and the incident only came to light when a case was registered at a nearby police station. 

As the investigation progressed, three individuals were arrested after the authorities raided a scrap godown in another district called Muzaffarpur. During the search, they discovered 13 sacks filled with stolen train parts, including engine components, vintage engine wheels, and heavy-iron railway parts. According to local reports from that time, the police were still on the lookout for the owner of the godown.

8. George Washington’s Wallet

George Washington’s wallet, on loan to the Old Barracks Museum in New Jersey, was stolen from the museum in early 1992. It went missing for almost three weeks before it was found, only with two bills worth $1.66 in colonial currency missing from it. In a curious twist, it was returned by one Eric Davis, working as a lawyer for an unknown, anonymous client. 

The return was made on George Wasington’s birthday, and a $500 reward was offered and paid to the returner. According to Davis, it had been quite easy to steal, too, as his anonymous client just had to lift the protective glass holding the wallet to take it.

7. A Bridge

Ever look at a bridge and feel like stealing it? While we don’t advise it, it can be done, as proven by a group of men that did exactly that in India in April 2022. The gang, including government workers from the local irrigation department, worked for three days and dismantled an old 60-foot long, 550-ton iron bridge. Disguised in government uniforms, they used gas-cutting torches and earth excavators to remove all the individual parts, and proceed to transport it to a local scrap dealer’s warehouse. 

The local villagers were mostly unaware of the theft, and initially thought that the government was finally doing something about the dilapidated infrastructure in the area. However, they were sorely mistaken, and the theft went unnoticed until one of them contacted the officials. Eight people, including the government workers and one scrapyard owner, were arrested in connection with the incident. 

6. A Glacier

In 2012, a man was arrested in Chile for stealing and smuggling about five tons of ice from the Jorge Montt glacier in the Patagonia region. The truck was intercepted by local police, and the total value of the ice was estimated around $6,100. It’s believed to have been destined for Santiago, as gourmet polar-ice cubes fetch high prices at the upscale bars and restaurants scattered across the capital. 

The theft of glacial ice has captured popular attention in Chile in recent years, as it’s an increasingly valuable commodity in the regions bordering Patagonia. The Jorge Montt glacier located in the Bernardo O’Higgins national park, for example, is retreating by more than half a mile every year. 

5. Napoleon’s Penis

After Napoleon Bonaparte died in 1821, there were many speculations around what happened to his various body parts. One particular area of interest was his penis. According to some accounts, his doctor or his priest was responsible for removing it during the autopsy. It was allegedly then stolen by Napoleon’s chaplain, who smuggled it from St. Helena all the way to his home in Corsica. It remained under the protection of his family until 1916, before it was sold to a bookselling company based in London.

The organ was later shown to the public in 1927 at the Museum of French Art, New York. It drew mixed reactions from the crowd, including a bit of pointing and laughing, though that was more likely because of its decaying leather-like appearance than anything else. 

4. A Human Toe

In June 2017, the town of Dawson City in Yukon, Canada, was struck by a peculiar crime. Someone had stolen a severed toe from the prized collection of the Downtown Hotel, and it wasn’t just any toe, either. It was one of the ingredients used to make the hotel’s signature drink, the Sourtoe Cocktail, which – at least according to the reports – was loved by most of its patrons. 

The tradition goes back to the 1920s, when a rum runner preserved his amputated big toe in alcohol. It was found by a native about fifty years later, frozen in snow and clearly waiting to be put inside a drink, and it had been in use by the hotel ever since. 

Thankfully, the stolen artifact – if it can be called that – was mailed to the authorities within the next few days. It arrived with a note of apology, though the thief was never identified.

3. Einstein’s Brain

Albert Einstein, one of the most renowned scientists in history, died on April 18, 1955. His autopsy was done by a pathologist named Thomas Harvey, though he took it a step further and decided to remove Einstein’s brain, leading to him getting fired from Princeton hospital. Regardless, he obtained permission from Einstein’s son to study it, though not before he had already cut it into 240 pieces. 

By studying Einstein’s brain, Harvey had hoped to gain some insights into his extraordinary intellectual abilities, even if this didn’t sit too well with the rest of the medical community, as removing an organ from a dead body violated medical ethics and patient rights. The brain remained in his sole possession until 1978, when it was revealed to the public and the larger scientific community for the first time.

2. A Beach

In 2008, thieves in Jamaica stole hundreds of tons of valuable white sand – or an entire beach – from a planned resort on the island’s north coast. The case – leading to a loss of more than a million dollars to the owner – is only one of the many incidents of beach theft cropping up around the world. They’re largely thanks to a growing shortage of sand, as it’s a crucial ingredient in various large-scale, global industries, leading to theft, smuggling, and even violence due to the illegal sand trade. 

Still, the scale of the theft – to the tune of about 500 truck-loads of sand – baffled the authorities, and also sparked a political controversy of sorts. According to some, the crime was organized by rival hotel owners, as it appeared to be highly organized in nature. 

In response, the government suspended all operations at the planned resort and conducted an environmental study to further analyze the impact of missing sand on nearby ecosystems. Despite testing other beaches and other attempts at tracing the stolen sand, it was never found, and no arrests were made.

1. A Shark

In perhaps one of the most audacious attempts at marine theft in history, an entire shark was stolen from the San Antonio Aquarium in Texas back in July 2018. It was fully captured by surveillance, as the footage showed one of three suspects reaching into the tank and removing the two-feet long gray horn shark. After mixing a bleach solution into the aquarium’s water-filtration system, the thieves used a stroller to take the shark to their car outside. 

Sadly, at least for them, this plan had too many loopholes to succeed, as a manager noticed them leaving the aquarium and followed them to their car. The authorities tracked the suspects down to a house filled with sharks and marine animals in a small pool.

One suspect confessed to the crime, and one of their neighbors admitted to assisting them. The stolen shark, named Miss Helen, was safely returned to the aquarium the next day.

Celebrities are known for their expensive and unique taste in things, which is why items related to them usually sell for pretty large sums of money. Sometimes, however, these items include downright bizarre stuff you had no idea there was a market for, ranging from used tissues to broken nails, to even kidney stones belonging to famous actors.

10. Lady Gaga’s Fingernail

Lady Gaga’s famous black nail, also sometimes called the ‘monster claw’ by her fans, was sold at a 2013 auction for around $12,000. The fashion accessory, made with gold glitter and beads, first surfaced at the launch of Gaga’s fragrance line called Fame, and is said to have been hand-painted by her personal manicurist and nail artist, Aya Fukuda. 

According to the listing, the acrylic nail had gone missing during one of her concerts, which was eventually recovered by a crew member during one of her later concerts. Apart from that, the unknown recipient also received a photograph of the singer with the missing nail at the same concert. 

9. Justin Bieber’s Boa Constrictor

In 2011, Justin Bieber showed up at the MTV Video Music Awards with an unusual accessory – a live baby albino boa constrictor apparently named Johnson. Unfortunately, Bieber’s affection for Johnson didn’t last a long time, as he was put up for a charity auction within a few months. According to the catalogue listing, ‘the snake will grow to nearly four feet long. Keeping a pet snake is a long-term responsibility’.

Johnson was eventually bought by one Michael Kronick, who got so disgusted by Bieber’s decision to use him as an accessory that he made a public statement against it. The python was then donated to the Reptile & Amphibian Discovery Zoo in Owatonna, Minnesota.

8. Justin Timberlake’s Unfinished Toast

In March 2000, Justin Timberlake, then a member of the popular boy band NSYNC, had breakfast at a New York-area radio station. After his meal, the DJ noticed that Timberlake had failed to finish his sandwich, and proceeded to do what any normal person would do with a half eaten sandwich – put it up on eBay for sale. 

It turned out to be a wise decision, as the sale went through for the expected sum of money. The sandwich was bought by a 19-year-old from Wisconsin named Kathy Summers, who paid a surprising $1,025 for it. She also expressed her plans to preserve the toast by freeze-drying and sealing it, and then displaying it on her dresser. When the chef at the radio station asked why Timberlake didn’t finish his sandwich, he chose to stay silent on the subject, at least according to some first hand reports.

7. Britney Spears’s Pregnancy Test

In 2005, a pregnancy test kit purportedly used by Britney Spears was sold at an auction for $5,001. The radio station behind the sale claimed that the test had been retrieved from the hotel room where she stayed with her husband, Kevin Federline, though we haven’t been able to independently verify that.  

The acquisition was first announced by the internet casino, GoldenPalace.com, claiming themselves to be the buyer. As with many of their previous purchases, the proceeds from the sale were designated for charity, namely towards two organizations called the Candlelighters Childhood Cancer Foundation and the Easter Seal Society, which supports children with physical disabilities.

6. William Shatner’s Kidney Stone

William Shatner, famous for his role as Captain Kirk in Star Trek, successfully sold his kidney stone in 2006. Like Spears’ pregnancy test, it was also purchased by the online casino, GoldenPalace.com, for $25,000, which was later donated to the housing charity, Habitat for Humanity. The casino initially offered $15,000 for the stone, but Shatner was successfully able to negotiate a higher price.

The kidney stone became a part of GoldenPalace.com’s collection of curiosities, which includes items like a potato shaped like Pete Townsend, and a toasted sandwich that looks like the Virgin Mary, or what we assume Virgin Mary looked like, anyway. In an interview, Shatner added that the stone might turn out to be a diamond if it was subjected to extreme heat, though there’s no reason to believe that he made this claim seriously. 

5. iPhone Broken By Rihanna

During a Los Angeles Clippers NBA playoff game back in 2014, Rihanna accidentally dropped and cracked the phone belonging to Steve Soboroff – then the President of the Los Angeles Police Commission. According to reports from the ground, the incident happened while she was attempting to take a selfie with him. 

Rihanna later tweeted an apology and donated $25,000 to a charity fund for police officers and their families. Soboroff decided to auction the cracked iPhone on eBay to further support the Los Angeles Police Foundation. The phone, which Rihanna had signed with a message expressing her support for the LAPD, quickly garnered popular attention, raising its price on eBay to about $56,000.

4. John Lennon’s Tooth

John Lennon’s tooth was sold for £19,000 – or about $31,200 at that time – at an auction in England in 2011. It had been in the family of one of his previous housekeepers, Dot Jarlett. While he had originally given it to her to destroy it, he later changed his mind and advised her to give it to her daughter, who happened to be a big fan of the Beatles. 

While the tooth itself is now too weak to be DNA tested, the owner of the Omega Auction House expressed confidence in its authenticity. They had originally hoped to sell it for about $16,000, though it went for almost double the amount by the end of it. A Canadian dentist, Michael Zuk, claimed to be the buyer, though the auction house didn’t confirm that. According to Jarlett’s son, the tooth had been in his family’s possession for several decades.

3. Russell Crowe’s Jockstrap

In April 2018, it was revealed that the jockstrap worn by Russell Crowe in the film Cinderella Man was purchased by John Oliver’s HBO show, Last Week Tonight, for $7,000. Along with the jockstrap, the show also acquired other items worn by Crowe in various films, including a pair of shorts and robe from Cinderella Man, a hood from Robin Hood, and a vest from Les Miserables. He also announced that these items would be sent to the last remaining Blockbuster store in Alaska.

This decision was a part of one of the segments of the show that focussed on the decline of video rental stores and Blockbuster locations across the USA. Due to slower streaming services and higher costs in Alaska, video stores there are still able to remain open and sustain themselves. 

2. Elvis Presley’s Hair

In October 2009, a lock of hair believed to have belonged to Elvis Presley was sold at an auction in Chicago for $18,300. It was claimed to be from the time he joined the U.S. Army in 1958, and was only one of the many Elvis belongings put on sale by Gary Pepper – the late president of the Tankers Fan Club. 

The sale was confirmed by the Chicago-based firm called Leslie Hindman Auctioneers, when they posted the results of the auction on their website. According to them, the item far exceeded the range of $8,000 to $12,000 they were expecting. While they didn’t conduct any DNA testing to confirm its legitimacy, it was authenticated with other methods by one John Reznikoff – an expert in celebrity hair authentication. While we know that the sale was made, we’re still not sure about the true identity of the winning bidder.

1. Scarlett Johansson’s Used Tissue

In 2008, a tissue used by actress Scarlett Johansson was auctioned off on eBay for about $5,300. It was put up for sale by the TV network NBC after her appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, where she had presumably used it.

The proceeds from the sale went to the food-gathering charity called USA Harvest. While the bidding started at a low $0.99, it quickly reached $4,050 just before the sale was made. The final price was determined after a total of 83 bids, and the buyer eventually chose to remain anonymous.

You’re on vacation, and you want to immerse yourself in the culture. Yes, you can go see the sights. But if you really want to understand the people, what better way than to try some of the local food?

You may find yourself getting taken in by the bustling street stalls and happy local servers. But beware, those bubbling pots and sizzling pans could contain some pretty strange stuff. Here are some of the weirdest foods that you might be served as you’re wandering the streets.

10 Balut
The Philippines

So it’s a hard-boiled egg. What’s weird about that?

Think again because lurking beneath the innocent-looking shell is a tiny duck fetus that’s been boiled alive. Nice. To make it, fertilized duck eggs are incubated for up to 20 days and then cooked to create this gruesome delight.

Eating the balut is an involved process. Crack it open, and you’ll see a tasty broth. It’s here where sensible people stop while the fearless go full throttle for that embryotic goodness.^[1]

Take a trip to the Philippines, and you can casually devour this delicacy with a beer. But let’s be honest. It’s going to take more than that to wash this fowl dish down.

9 Winkles
England

Ah, the great English seaside—sand, sea, ice cream . . . and small edible snails. Those crazy Brits remove the excess sand and salt and boil their tiny snails of the sea before serving them with salt and vinegar.

Not only do they look slimy, but it’s tricky to get these slippery little things out of their shells and definitely far too much effort for the squidgy blob with which you’re rewarded. Many see seafood like winkles, whelks, and cockles as key to the sustainability of the seas, but we’d rather go veggie.^[2]

You’ll mainly get them on the West Coast of England. If you find yourself there, do the sensible thing and ask them to give you fish and chips with your salt and vinegar instead.

8 Mice Wine
China

Having a nice glass of wine is a much better idea . . . if it has baby mice in it. Then again, what’s wrong with a nice Merlot? Why is stealing mice from their parents and fermenting them in rice wine a better idea?^[3] Are we just throwing in all things that rhyme together? Let’s put some lice, dice, and an ancient sacrifice in there while we’re at it.

Anyway, the baby mice are left there for around a year. Then it’s “probably safe” to drink this “health tonic.” The Chinese believe that it can help with asthma, although it apparently tastes like gasoline. We’ll stick with the Merlot, thanks.

7 Casu Marzu
Sardinia

How about a little cheese snack with that wine? You can keep your Parmesan and your Pepper Jack. We want a rare cheese, one that is made using the larvae of flies and is infested with live maggots. Actually, no, we don’t.

But the good people of Sardinia are all over casu marzu, a cheese that takes well-aged to the extreme. The Sardinians take a traditional pecorino and have some local flies lay their eggs in it. The larvae munch through the cheese and then excrete it back into the cheese, apparently making for a unique, soft texture.^[4]

It looks horrendous and tastes worse. As arguably the world’s most dangerous cheese, casu marzu is actually illegal and banned by the European Union. So you might have to practice your Italian if you’re crazy enough to want to track it down on the black market.

6 Isaw
The Philippines

Everyone loves a barbeque, and the Filipinos are no different. Visit Manila, and the streets will be filled with the smell of grilled meats. But what’s on those skewers?

Possibly isaw, which is chicken or pork intestines. But don’t worry. They are cleaned inside and out multiple times, so it’s not like you’re eating an animal’s fecal matter . . . or are you?

Apparently, they are chewy and soft and best consumed piping hot off the grill and smothered in chili sauce—to avoid the acrid aftertaste.^[5]

5 Tuna Eyeballs
Japan

A good food mantra is: “If it appeared on the dinner table in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, don’t eat it.”

But the Japanese appear to have ignored that advice. Enter tuna eyeballs. Gross.

It’s hard to avoid them. Their gaze follows you from stalls and markets, daring you to give them a try. Normally boiled and seasoned with soy sauce and rice wine, they apparently taste like a cross between a hard-boiled egg and squid. Mmm, tasty.

They are packed with omega-3. So if you can get past the fact that you’re eating the chewy, rubbery eyeball of a tuna, your intelligence will soar. It may be a good thing that the Japanese are making the most of every tuna as overfishing is putting these animals at risk of extinction.^[6]

4 Andouillette
France

Andouillette is probably the stinkiest sausage you’ll ever meet. It’s made from pig intestines and smells like it’s been up close and personal with pig excrement on a regular basis. The pig intestines are chopped, crammed into a sausage casing, fried up, and often covered in cream and mustard sauce.^[7]

But no amount of sauce can mask the aroma and the taste of pigs’ butts. So if you’ve had too many glasses of vin rouge (“red wine”) at a French market, beware the innocent-looking sausage. You could get more than you bargained for.

3 Hakarl
Iceland

Talking of stinky, the Icelandic national dish of cured, rotten shark is putrid in the extreme. Made from the Greenland shark, hakarl is poisonous when eaten raw and fairly rank when eaten cured. It’s been fermented in Iceland for centuries and is even mentioned in the Icelandic sagas.

The tissues of the Greenland shark contain large amounts of ammonia-rich urea, a compound also found in that well-known delicacy called urine. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the horror is multiplied by curing the shark and then letting it decompose for a couple of months before hacking off chunks of pungent, decaying, rubbery flesh.^[8]

Some who have eaten hakarl say that it’s the most rancid food on Earth. We’ll take their word for it.

2 Rocky Mountain Oysters
United States

All oysters are strange, but Rocky Mountain oysters are especially weird because they aren’t oysters at all. They are cattle, pig, or sheep testicles that are peeled and coated in flour and then deep-fried for your “pleasure.”

You’re most likely to encounter them in the West where early ranchers needed access to cheap food and basically deep-fried anything they could find. The oyster fry continues to be a common ritual despite animal rights groups opposing the animal castration.

Rocky Mountain oysters are often served with hot sauce.^[9]

1 Mopane Worms
Zimbabwe

Finally, we’re heading to a market in Zimbabwe where you’ll see the locals carrying cups of their favorite snack—the mopane worm. They are big, brightly colored beasts that have been collected from trees and had their guts forced out. Then they are fried.^[10]

Mopane worms are a form of caterpillar that apparently tastes like chicken. We’ll be the judge of that. Well, actually, we probably won’t.

I’m an experienced writer, editor, and copywriter. I regularly write for http://the-mouthful.com/ and various others sites and clients. See my website angelwrites.co.uk for more info.

Desperate times call for desperate measures—what would you do to make some money if you really needed it? There are unusual paths to financial success, and some people get very creative. They see a unique gap in the market and take the opportunity to fill it. It’s a strange world, and things only get more interesting with each passing day. So why wouldn’t someone’s money-making scheme follow the trend? Here are the top 10 weirdest things people sell and actually make money on.

10 Virginity

Well, sex literally sells! Sex is a mostly taboo subject that initiates debates throughout the world. However, there is no doubt that virginity is a prize and something people hold in high regard across many communities. For men, getting to sleep with a virgin may be something of a conquest. For ladies, it may be a sacred act reserved only for the special person they choose.

But some women keep their virginity and then sell it to the highest bidder. With the amount that they get, they can set themselves up for a more comfortable life if they plan well. A night with a stranger may mean paying off student loans, opening an education fund, or a business downpayment. One lady actually sold her virginity for $3 million.    

9 Air

Air is free, found in nature, and just about everywhere, right? That isn’t always the case, depending on which part of the world you are in. Some parts are so polluted that some individuals would do just about anything to get to breathe in some fresh air. The cost isn’t such a big concern in these cases.

Air farming in fresh spaces is a solution to help those in polluted countries. Some enterprising people in the U.K. and Canada are cashing in by selling air, quite literally. For customers in China, air in a bottle is a prized possession and such a relief to their lungs, which are usually exposed to smog.

8 Toilet Paper

Answering the “call of nature” should not really be a luxurious experience. Or should it? Some may go to the bathroom just for some peace and quiet. They’ll stare at the wall or scroll on their phone while they do their business. But apparently, alone time isn’t the only priority when people go to the bathroom. Some people want to use nothing but the best, even when it comes to toiletries.

Some toilet paper manufacturers make luxury black, camouflaged, or Sudoku tissue paper to appeal to different markets. An example of the most expensive toilet paper is Toilet Paper Man’s 22 karat gold tissue, worth $1.3 million. There is a demand for this tissue in Dubai, and it is considered the perfect choice for golden toilet seats, which are more like thrones.

7 Human Waste

Although this may sound crazy, one man’s poop may be a life-saver for another. Some patients suffer from Clostridium difficile, a bacterial infection that is stubborn and fatal and responsible for 15,000 American deaths in a year. Doctors can treat this with a fecal transplant. Healthy microbes from the human waste of a healthy person are placed inside the intestines of the patient. This helps remove Clostridium difficile from their system. In 2015, one researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) sold his stool and earned around $1,000.

But not anyone can qualify to be an OpenBiome stool donor. You need to pass a thorough clinical assessment and be free of any infections. You also cannot have traveled to a country in which there is a risk of contracting diseases. You cannot be obese and should not have used any antibiotics or illicit drugs within a specific time frame.

6 Professional Mourning Services

Funerals and burials are somber affairs, and the ones mostly affected by the loss are usually the deceased’s loved ones. However, some people are actually making money selling professional mourning services. They put up an act and cry on demand.

Professional mourners research the person who passed on so they can get to ‘know them’ and talk a bit about them as they mourn. Professional mourning services are common in African, Asian, and Hispanic countries. However, they are also gaining popularity across Europe and the U.S. Some are known to charge different rates for crying and doing other activities such as rolling on the ground, threatening to jump into the grave, and actually jumping into the grave.

5 Used Underwear

To some, handling or having someone’s underwear may be down-right disgusting. However, to others, this is a fetish, and they may be willing to pay a premium price to get ahold of someone else’s used underwear. Apparently, there is a considerable demand for the undergarment. The grosser they are, the bigger the demand.

This creepy business thrives on the sale of used women’s underwear. You get a better price if the underwear is tight-fitting, worn out, and has weird stains. Gross, right? A pair goes for around $50 bucks at a fair price. What makes it more bizarre is the vast market available for these products. Japan had vending machines just for this business. Of course, the government shut it down, but only on concerns that it was men that were wearing the female undergarments.

4 Breastmilk

Yes, mothers vend breastmilk at a reasonable price, and it’s a lucrative business that has existed for quite a while. While this may seem suitable for infants whose mothers can’t breastfeed, it still tops the list of strange things people sell for cash. The World Health Organization advocates that infants should get breastmilk from other healthy mothers in the event their biological mother is unable to produce milk. So, yes, you can make money selling your breast milk. There are sites like onlythebreast.com that facilitate this sale. Still, we can’t completely ignore the concerns about online breast milk customers.

Whether it’s for a full-grown adult with a fetish for human milk, we can’t tell. There are also medical concerns about the health of the lactating mother selling her milk.

3 Selling Real-Life Horror Moments

For most of us, we like to keep our dark moments to ourselves. We seldomly want to remember those times life dealt us a cruel hand. However, for others, this a money-making opportunity. People are actually getting paid to narrate and sell their real-life misery moments to magazines and newspapers. As the old cliché goes, “when life hands you lemons, make lemonade.”

It may not work for everyone, but to some, it’s business as usual. These stories may range from your near-death experience, an illness, or even your spouse’s affair. The prices vary depending on the sensitivity of your story. It gets even creepier when the agencies require that you produce photographs or document proof to validate your story. Of course, they will publish these.

Even though it sounds callous, you can get between $200-$2,000 for a single story. If you are more aggressive with your bargaining skills, you can convince a magazine and a newspaper into a joint deal for your story.

2 Blood Plasma

Plasma is the clear fluid in which other blood components like platelets and red blood cells are suspended. This is why it is different from conventional blood donations. It takes much longer since the doctors have to extract the plasma from the blood. Apart from the fulfillment of knowing you’re helping a sick person somewhere, you also get paid well for it. To sell your plasma, you have to be screened for specific viruses, be 18 years old and weigh more than 110 lbs. If you are of the right weight and healthy, you can make two donations per week.

For each donation, hospitals pay anywhere from $20-$50. Hospitals pay you depending on the amount of plasma you can donate. The amount of plasma you can safely donate is directly proportional to your weight.

1 Selling Weird Jewelry on Etsy

Conventionally, jewelry is supposed to be beautiful and unique and probably shiny. However, there is an equally huge market for jewelry that is down-right weird and creepy. On Etsy, hundreds of sellers make creepy jewelry out of unconventional material like deer teeth.

Even more astounding is the market for such jewelry. You’ll see soap in the shape of mutilated human body parts and denture-inspired earrings and finger rings on the site. Now with the advances and capabilities of 3D printing, the array of weird stuff on Etsy just got bigger. Sellers get quite an impressive passive income selling bizarre jewelry.

Do you remember when you were curious about what happens when the toilet is flushed? If you were cheeky enough, you might have even flushed a toy or two to see whether they would magically disappear. In most cases, they were lost forever!

Well, it’s no secret that we’ve all had our fair share of close calls and scares at the toilet bowl, whether by mistake or by crooked planning. While most of us have dropped small items like coins or trinkets down the toilet, plumbers around the world can confirm that if you dig into the drain, you’ll be either fascinated or disgusted.

This list of the top 10 weirdest objects flushed down the toilet reveals that trips to the loo can turn crazy in a fraction of a second.

10 A Goldfish Grows to the Size of its Tank

All kids who watched Pixar’s “Finding Nemo” (2013) learned that all drains lead to the ocean. But as adults, we know that this is far from the truth. When many fish owners stress over disposing of unwanted fish, some make the mistake of flushing them down the toilet drain.

In a strange discovery by Buffalo Niagara Waterkeeper (BNW), when goldfish are disposed of incorrectly, they can undergo strange transformations. According to the nonprofit organization, a goldfish that might have been flushed down the drain grew to about 14 inches! This is pretty gigantic for the small breed.

Despite the goldfish surviving the harsh conditions in the drain, the discovery revealed that flushing might not be the best option for freeing a fish.

9 Counterfeit Poker Chips Worth $2.7 Million

If you’ve ever been to Vegas or any other casino in your town, you know that hitting jackpots and winning loads of cash is one of the best feelings in the world. But, while most gamblers see the fun in honest gaming, one player made headlines when he decided to use fake poker chips.

In Atlantic City, New Jersey, a man showed up to a 2014 poker event with fake poker chips worth $2.7 million. During the event, the meticulous schemer proceeded to play with his fake chips, winning about $6,814.

Later, perhaps from the fear of getting caught, he proceeded to flush the chips down the toilet drain in his room, a decision he would live to regret. The fake chips clogged the hotel’s pipes. After tournament personnel and the police intervened, they ended up catching him.

8 Man Caught Trying to Dump Drugs Down the Toilet

In movies, police raids are a hectic affair and once the door is “kicked down,” the “bad guys” have only a few minutes to dispose of their illegal drugs. In Auburn, police arrested a man who was trying to flush his pills down the drain.

During the raid, where police recovered mushrooms, fentanyl, Xanax, and cocaine, the man was caught in his toilet trying to dispose of the evidence. While the criminal mastermind failed in his mission, he is not the first to attempt this quick form of drug disposal.  

Experts often advise against flushing drugs in toilets since, even though they won’t clog the drains, they contaminate waters and create harmful effects for life in waterways.  

7 Millions, or Maybe Billions, of LEGO Bricks

Whether they are playing or just acting out, kids just love to throw any kind of object down their toilet drains. In 2016, a survey estimated that British children had flushed over 2.5 million square Lego bricks down the drain.

While the study revealed that kids in the UK are mischievous, they are not the only ones that think flushing things down the toilet is a fascinating pasttime. For most plumbers around the world, unclogging toilet drains usually leads to the discovery of favorite and hated toys of all kinds.

Now you see it, now you don’t! It seems that kids are truly mystified by objects magically disappearing in front of their eyes.

6 Golden Wedding Ring Encrusted with Diamonds

In the western world, rings are considered the symbol of relationships. For couples, wearing them is a sign of their union and that they treasure each other. So when a woman from New Jersey lost her diamond ring, it was both emotionally painful and overwhelming.

Paula Stanton received a gold ring encrusted with several diamonds for her 20^th wedding anniversary, an accessory she always wore with pride. But when she was cleaning one day, her ring slipped from her fingers and fell down the toilet to her shock and disappointment.

After efforts to retrieve the ring proved fruitless, Paula and her husband gave up, even purchasing a replacement. Remarkably, nine years later, a plumber discovered the ring only 400-feet away from her house. After being rejoined with her ring, the overjoyed woman remarked that the ring didn’t want to leave her family!

5 French Queen’s Hairpin

Being a member of the royal family might be one of the most exciting gigs ever and for modern scholars, learning about their lives is even more intriguing. Custodians at a Parisian royal residence were shocked to find a lavish piece of jewelry that belonged to Queen Catherine de Medici in the communal toilet.

The discovery of the 9 centimeter-pin, which had the Queen’s signature interlocking “Cs,” was a welcome surprise for the archaeologists. As a 16^th century artifact, the toilet is the last place anyone would look to find it.

The unearthing marked the first time that any possessions of Queen Catherine were found at Fontainebleau Palace. Over the centuries, most belongings of royalty have either been lost or stolen, making the piece a most valuable treasure.

4 Live World War II Bomb that was Ready to Explode

Have you ever eaten spicy food that didn’t sit well with your stomach? Sometimes, a trip to the bathroom can be quite explosive. Believe it or not, residents of Stockport, Manchester, were shocked when someone found a real-life World War II bomb in a toilet.

After someone reported seeing a “strange device” to the police, quick investigations revealed that it was a live bomb left over from WWII. To ensure that it didn’t go off, the police quickly secured the area surrounding the toilet and evacuated everyone to safety.

With the intervention of a bomb squad, the three-inch mortar the bomb squad carefully retrieved and took it to a nearby location where they detonated it. The controlled explosion made sure that the dangerous device posed no further harm.

3Woman’s $8,500 Rolex Went Down the Drain

Watches are used to tell time but if we are being honest, they are better known as indispensable fashion accessories. A woman from Chino Hills, California, was distraught when her fancy $8,500 Rolex went, “plop,” down the drain, just as she flushed!

After overcoming the initial horror of realizing that her precious wristwatch had disappeared, the woman called plumbers to help locate it. Unfortunately, after launching a serious search, the precious gift was nowhere to be found and after some time, she reconciled with the fact that the gift was lost.

In a wonderful twist of events, 18 months later, a plumber that was involved in the original search was working a mile downhill when he discovered a Rolex amidst the debris. Recalling the previous search, the plumber contacted the owner who was overjoyed at the surprise recovery. The amazing thing is that after a good polishing, the Rolex was as good as new and only missed one stone! Imagine that.

2 Janitor Found Loads of Money on the Toilet

You’ve probably heard that money doesn’t grow on trees but in Australia, you can find it in the toilets too. While doing his daily cleaning rounds, a janitor, discovered wands of cash in a toilet trash can and noticed that even more notes were sticking out of the bowls. These were $50 and $100 bills and at first, he thought it was just a prank.

But after touching the cash and realizing it was real, the janitor rushed to report the matter to the police. In the ensuing investigation, police found that a mysterious individual had dumped a total of $93,000 down the toilet!

When the police failed to explain the origins of the cash, the judge decided that the janitor should get a share of his catch. The most honest janitor in the world kept $76,000 while the rest was awarded to the state! Would you have done the same thing?

1 Kid Used a Toilet Bowl as a Jacuzzi for his Puppy

Have you ever looked at the toilet bowl and thought, “This could make a really cute jacuzzi?” If you’ve never had this idea, you’ll be amazed that a four-year-old boy decided to give his pup a special bath on the toilet.

Using the toilet bowl as a miniature bathtub, Daniel Blair from Middlesex, London washed his best friend after a muddy walk in the neighborhood. Sadly, the little kid ended up flushing the puppy down the drain while rinsing him off!

Luckily for them, a plumber was quick to locate the puppy in the drainage pipes using special camera equipment, making a quick rescue possible. You can bet that the duo never looked at the toilet seat the same way ever again!