A seasoned paraglider miraculously survived a rare and dangerous phenomenon that saw him being sucked up by clouds to an altitude of 28,210 feet (8,600 meters).

Photos and videos of Chinese paraglider Liu Ge trying to keep his cool (pun intended) as he experienced dangerously low levels of oxygen and temperatures as low as -40 degrees Celsius (-40° Fahrenheit) went viral on social media this week. In them, the experienced paraglider’s clothes and face are covered with ice, and he struggles to breathe and keep from passing out because of the low oxygen. On May 24th, Liu Ge took off from about 3,000 meters in the Qilian Mountains, on the border between western Gansu and northeastern Qinghai, but as he was paragliding, a cumulonimbus cloud appeared behind him and he ended up being lifted higher and higher, above the clouds.

Towering above the rooftops of Mulegns, a picturesque village in the Swiss Alps, the recently unveiled Tor Alva (White Tower) is the world’s tallest 3D-printed building.

Mulegns, a tiny village of only 12 permanent residents nestled at the foot of the Swiss Alps, hardly seems like the perfect place to install the world’s tallest 3D-printed building, but local authorities decided that the unique installation could help revitalize the slowly fading community. Tor Alva stands 30 meters high and has a modular design featuring a total of 32 individually printed columns connected by giant screws and steel cables rather than glued with cement. No steel frame was used when printing the tower’s pieces, but its creators claim that the technological innovations showcased by the tower make it both extremely safe and easy to dismantle and move, if necessary.

A Texas rheumatologist was sentenced to 10 years in prison for a cruel health care fraud scheme that involved diagnosing hundreds of healthy people with chronic diseases that required expensive and dangerous treatments.

Jorge Zamora-Quezada M.D. of Mission, Texas, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit fraud, several counts of healthcare fraud, and conspiracy to obstruct justice and received a sentence of 10 years behind bars and three years of supervised release. For years, the 68-year-old rheumatologist falsely diagnosed patients with chronic illnesses to bill for tests and treatments that they didn’t need, for his own enrichment. Evidence presented by prosecutors showed that his fraud scheme involved over $118 million in false claims and the payment of over $28 million by insurers, which allowed him to fund an incredibly lavish lifestyle. By profiting off of innocent victims, Zamora-Quezada was able to amass a sizeable fortune, including 13 real estate properties, a jet, and a Maserati GranTurismo.

A group of squatters who illegally took over a house on the outskirts of a village in Spain’s Burgos Province has installed an alarm system to prevent others from breaking into their illegally occupied home.

The people of San Miguel de Pedroso, a neighborhood in the village of Beldorado, are on high alert because of squatters who not only took over an unoccupied house in their community but also installed an alarm system there to prevent others from breaking in like they did. According to some local residents, “they have placed a sign belonging to the company that installed the alarm in the building” to prevent what happened to the owner of that house from happening to them. Some locals suspect that the squatters had been eyeing the property for some time, and after learning that no one had lived there for about two decades, they decided to move in. Now people are afraid that their houses could be at risk of being illegally occupied by strangers.

The CEO of a Dutch weather forecaster recently suggested that Belgian wind farms are inadvertently “stealing” wind from his own country’s wind farms in the North Sea.

In an interview with Belgian broadcaster VRT, Remco Verzijlbergh, the CEO of Dutch weather forecasting service Whiffle, claimed that Belgian wind farms in the North Sea have an advantage over Dutch ones because of their placement, adding that they are effectively “stealing” Dutch wind. Verzijlbergh claimed that Belgian wind farms are taking up to 3 % of wind energy from Dutch installations, adding that wind speeds measured behind a wind turbine are measurably lower. He clarified that the phenomenon is purely accidental because of the location of the wind turbines, pleading for better coordination between countries in the near future.

A UK woman started suspecting her husband of cheating after checking the data on her electric toothbrush companion app and noticing that they were brushing at odd times of the day.

Paul Jones, a British private investigator with over a decade of experience, recently recounted one of his most unusual cases. Catching a cheating partner in the act is rare, but rarer still is catching them cheating with the help of an electric toothbrush. And yet, it can happen! One of Jones’ clients, a married mother-of-two who was trying to improve her children’s brushing habits by monitoring their electronic toothbrush use via a smartphone app, noticed that the brush was being used at strange times of the day when her kids were supposed to be at school and her husband at work. After making sure her kids were indeed at school, she confronted her husband, who claimed to have been away at work all day.

Chinese robotics company Unitree showcased the fighting capabilities of its G1 robot model in what was advertised as the world’s first-ever humanoid robot fighting competition.

Remember Real Steel, the 2011 sci-fi flick starring Hugh Jackman as a struggling ex-boxer turned robot fighting coach? It was set in the “near future”, but who would have thought that we would really have robot fighting competitions just over a decade later? Just last week, Unitree, a robotics company based in China’s Zhejiang Province, held a unique kickboxing competition to show the capabilities of its G1 robot. Standing only 130 cm (4ft 3in) tall and weighing 35 kilograms (77lbs), the G1 is a small, lightweight robot capable of smooth, fluid movements, and displaying impressive balance and recovery ability. And what better way to showcase these features than having G1 robots go at it as part of the world’s first ever robot fighting competition?!

A Chinese woman with severe vitamin D deficiency caused by excessive sunscreen use suffered a bone fracture just by rolling in her bed.

Doctors at the XinDu Traditional Medicine Hospital, in Chengdu, China, recently reported the unusual case of a 48-year-old local woman who had apparently suffered a bone fracture just by casually rolling in bed. According to Dr. Long Shuang, tests performed at the hospital showed that the unnamed woman’s vitamin D levels were extremely low, which had accelerated bone loss and caused the onset of severe osteoporosis. Further investigation revealed that the patient had avoided sunlight since childhood, rarely wearing short-sleeved shirts and always applying sunscreen when going outside. Her case was presented as a warning for other sunscreen enthusiasts who might be overusing it and thus affecting their bone health.

Enhanced Games, a sports competition where performance-enhancing drugs are not only allowed but encouraged, will be held for the first time in May next year, in Las Vegas.

Ever wondered how much better top human athletes could be if they were allowed to use performance-enhancing substances in competitions? Well, in May of next year, these questions will be answered, as the first edition of Enhanced Games kicks off. Marketed as an event designed to remove the stigma of using PEDs and to safely push the limits of human athletic performance, Enhanced Games has rightly been nicknamed the “Olympic Games on Steroids”. Originally announced as a concept in 2023, the Enhanced Games will host its first ever edition in May of next year, in las Vegas, with eight different events in swimming (50- and 100-meter races in freestyle and butterfly), track (100-meter sprint and 100/110-meter hurdles) and weightlifting (snatch, clean and jerk).

A Mexican bank has been accused of lacking sensitivity after insisting that a bed-bound 96-year-old woman be brought to a physical branch to confirm her identity in order to release her pension.

Photos and video clips of an elderly woman being transported to a BBVA (Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria) bank branch in Oaxaca, Mexico, on an ambulance stretcher have been going viral on Mexican social media and sparking outrage among the general public. 96-year-old Fidelia Vásquez Nuño cannot move due to her advanced age and various illnesses, but despite her son’s attempts to file the necessary paperwork with the bank to verify her identity, she had to be brought to a local branch to correct a glitch in her biometric registration that had prevented her from cashing her pension for six months.

The pheasant-like hoatzin is the only bird species that ferments its food, an unusual digestive system that also makes it the stinkiest bird in the world.

The hoatzin is a very strange bird. Native to the backwaters of the Amazon, its chicks are born with clawed wings, it is the last surviving member of an ancient bird line believed to have branched off on its own around 64 million years ago, and its diet consists only of plants, which is very odd for birds. But this living oddity is most known for its strong manure-like smell, which has earned it the nickname ‘stinkbird’. The hoatzin is the only known bird species with a foregut fermentation system similar to the one found in cows, which releases significant amounts of methane via constant burping. The smelly burps and particularly stinky droppings give the hoatzin its signature odour.

Australian scientists have discovered that mutton birds on Lord Howe Island have so much plastic in their stomachs that they clackle and crunch under slight pressure.

Lord Howe, a tiny volcanic island on Australia’s east coast, is home to around 500 humans and over 44,000 shearwaters, aka mutton birds, a species of long-winged seabirds. It’s one of the last places you would expect to be affected by plastic waste, but Australian scientists have made a startling discovery – the birds on Lord Howe Island are so full of plastic that the little stomachs crackle and crunch when pressed. Last month, a team directed a mutton bird and found that almost a fifth of its entire body weight was plastic. Until then, the most plastic they had ever found in one bird was 403 pieces in 2024, but that record was blown away on their most recent visit to the island.

A 47-year-old woman from Western France has been speaking with a distinctively English accent ever since she had her tonsils removed 14 years ago.

Laetitia, a cashier from Montval-sur-Loir, in France’s Sarthe Department, doesn’t speak English. She only knows some basic words that she learned in school decades ago, but hearing her speak in her native tongue would have you believe she was born in England. For 14 years, Laetitia has been speaking with an English accent that makes most people think she is Anglo-Saxon. But the truth is much stranger – the 47-year-old woman has been stuck with her English accent ever since she woke up from a tonsil removal surgery. Her children had gone through the same procedure before, and they talked in a nasal voice, but it went away after a few days, so she wasn’t too worried in the beginning, but as the weeks passed, her weird accent remained just as strong.

The Harrisons Malayalam Plantation in Varandarappilly, Kerala, is home to India’s most beautiful cricket ground, a hidden oasis in a sea of green canopy.

A remote cricket ground in Kerala, India, has been getting a lot of attention online because of its unique location, tucked away in the center of a lush tree plantation. Seen from the air, the breathtaking site looks like a clearing in the Amazon rainforests of South America, but it’s actually one of the hidden gems of Kerala, aka ‘God’s Own Country’. Originally set up by the Harrison Malayalam company decades ago, as a place where its plantation workers could relax, the remote cricket ground, accessible via a narrow, tree-lined road that is invisible from above and on most maps, has become a sanctuary both for plantation employees and locals.

Chinese doctors were recently baffled by the curious case of a young woman who suddenly became unable to speak English, a language she had been fluent in.

Last week, Wan Feng, the director of the Department of Neurosurgery at Guangdong Provincial People’s Hospital in Guangzhou, China, posted a video of a 24-year-old woman who had suddenly fallen ill during class one day and developed a very curious symptom – the woman had been proficient in English prior to the classroom incident, but after, she could only speak Mandarin and Cantonese. The young woman could still read and understand English perfectly, but for some reason, she could no longer speak the language at all.