Discovered almost two kilometers underground, this arthropod, known as Plutomurus ortobalaganensis, is the deepest dwelling land animal ever discovered. The arthropod was found in the cave Krubera-Voronja, fittingly the world’s deepest cave, located near the Black Sea in Abkhazia. The cave’s bottommost point is 2,191 meters below its mouth, and the arthropod was discovered 1,980 meters below the surface.

This is one of those stories that starts big, and then makes you go, “oh.” Here’s the big part: Sacramento, CA resident and FrontierVille player Cathy Matthews has acquired some one million comments on a single Facebook post. That’s quite a feat, but here’s the part that wrinkles the whole thing: Most of the comments were two-letter words. “Go” seems to have been a popular one.

When Barry Chappell’s son was born, like a good parent, he felt it was time to quit smoking. For most people, that isn’t exactly easy, and Barry enlisted the help of Nicorette gum. On a long flight to Europe back in 2006, Barry was chewing his helper gum, but when he was through, he found he had nowhere to throw it away. He chose to roll it into a tiny ball. Nicorette gum being a cigarette craving suppressant, Barry felt the need to chew more than one piece, and continued to add the finished pieces into the rolled-up ball. By the end of the flight, he had the obviously brilliant idea to create the world’s largest ball of chewed gum. Most amusingly, it’s made entirely out of Nicorette gum.

Technology just keeps getting smaller and smaller. That’s the general trend, right? Maybe the general trend, but some crazy dudes at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands decided to take it far, far in the other direction and made the world’s largest video game controller, Guinness approved. Benjamin Allen, Stephen van’t Hof, and Michel Verhulst –the aforementioned crazy dudes– are to be held responsible for this behemoth, a 12ft x 5ft 3 in x 1ft 8 in NES controller that weighs 265 pounds and cost $6,000 to build. Try bringing that to your buddy’s place.

In this day and age of MMOverflow (I just made that up!), MMOs need a way to stand apart from one another, especially since most MMOs (EVE Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online excluded) and  get stuck in the same routine of killing or collecting X of Y, leveling to the max level, then killing bosses that drop good equipment, so you can harder kill bosses that drop better equipment, so you can kill even harder bosses that drop even better equipment. Trion Worlds is looking to separate their MMO RIFT from the rest of the pack, not with gameplay mechanics, but by attempting to set a Guinness World Record. Which one, you ask? The most virtual marriages in a 24-hour period, of course!

Today in “Things Which Cost A Lot When Greatly Enlarged And Put On Your Wall,” is this Scrabble board from Hammacher Schlemmer. Covering a whopping 49 square feet, the ad copy claims that there are only nine of these boards in existence, made by artist John Kahn, which perhaps justify the $12,000 price tag. The board itself is an exact replica of the smaller, table-top version and uses magnetic letters on a steel board for play. Oh, and it’s claimed to be the largest Scrabble board in the world, to boot. While certain to turn some heads, it’s probably best that you talk over the purchase of this colossal game board any loved ones you cohabitate with lest you find “I-M L-E-A-V-I-N-G Y-O-U” spelled out one morning. Triple word score.

While those of us living in large U.S. cities might gripe about high prices, it turns out that New York and San Francisco are amongst the cheapest cities in PriceRunner’s survey of the most expensive cities in the world. According to their findings, the Norwegian capital of Oslo took top honors as the most expensive compared to an international average of prices, and Mumbai, India, the cheapest.

This is Kristina Rei. She’s a 22-year old nail technician in St. Petersburg, Russia, and she’s had over 100 lip-enhancing injections since she was 17. While some people’s motivation for getting cosmetic surgery can be extremely complex and personal, Rei sums up hers quite succinctly as quoted by The Sun: ”I loved Jessica Rabbit’s huge lips. She was my idea of the perfect woman.”

Sichuan University professor An Shi has been awarded a patent for a tea that uses panda feces as fertilizer. Pandas only digest about 30 percent of the bamboo they eat, and bamboo, similar to green tea, contains a cancer preventative. So, considering about 70 percent of bamboo is left in the panda excrement used to fertilize the tea, the tea is supposed to provide cancer preventative effects. The tea, due to using excrement from a rare animal, could cost upwards of $69,000 per kilogram.

Called “Rhein II” and taken by Andreas Gursky, the picture above is the world’s most expensive photograph. Sold Tuesday night at Christie’s for $4.3 million, Rhein II broke the previous record for the price of a photograph, which was set by Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled #96″ at $3.89 million. The auction doesn’t make clear why such a seemingly simple, somewhat boring picture would be sold for such a high price of $4.3 million, but hey, art is art.