Chinese media recently reported the unusual case of a girl who reached puberty at age seven, presumably because of sleeping with the lights on every night for the last three years.

At age 7, Dandan (pseudonym) is already 1.20m-tall, towering over most girls her age. When she first started growing, her mother was delighted, and didn’t even stop to wonder why the girl had grown by about 10 cm in a single year. It wasn’t until one day, when she was giving Dandan a bath, and she noticed that she had developed breasts, that the woman realized something was wrong. She took the 7-year-old to the hospital and was shocked to learn that her daughter had reached puberty at least three years earlier than usual.

Read More »

Dan Price, a former photojournalist from Kentucky, gave up his successful career to live in a dugout on the side of a hill in rural Oregon. He’s been living there for over 20 years and has no interest in going back to his old life.

Once a successful but stressed out photojournalist and family man, Dan Price got tired of the never-ending rat-race in 1990, after reading a 1974 book called Payne Hallow, about the rejection of modernity in favor of a primitive, more simple lifestyle. Up to that point he had considered waking up and going to work just to pay the bills a normal life, but after reading Harlan Hubbard’s book, he realized he wanted more, or rather, less. So he just quit his job, left his family behind and returned to his home state of Oregon to live by himself, in a meadow.

Read More »

A Russian iPhone user recently filed a one million ruble lawsuit against Apple, accusing the American corporation of indirectly turning him gay.

In a court filing that went viral on Russia’s internet, the plaintiff alleges that he became “mired in a same-sex relationship” after receiving the wrong kind of cryptocurrency on a virtual wallet app that he installed on his iPhone in 2017. The man, identified as one D. Razumilov claims that he received 69 GayCoins – a cryptocurrency designed for member of the LGBT community – from an anonymous sender. The mysterious transfer was accompanied the message “don’t knock it till you’re tried it”, which kind of made sense to Razumilov and eventually pushed him to become involved in a gay relationship.

Read More »

Wild animals usually get put down after attacking humans, but a Russian zoo keeper who lost one of her legs to a caged bear has been pleading with authorities to spare the animal, claiming that it wasn’t to blame for the tragic accident.

On September 25, experienced zoo keeper and animal activist Vera Blishch was instructing a new colleague at the Municipal Zoo in Ussuriysk when a bout of vertigo made her lean towards a bear cage for just a split second. Unfortunately, that was just enough time for Manyunya, a 20-year-old female bear, to reach through the bars and grab the zookeeper’s leg. She suffered severe injuries, including multiple fractures, and eventually needed to have her leg amputated below the knee at a Ussuriysk hospital. Knowing that animals that attack people are put down to eliminate the risk of them attacking other humans, Blishch’s first concern upon waking from her surgery anesthesia was for Manyunya’s well-being, insisting that the bear was not to blame.

Read More »

On September 21, volunteers across the globe, from Thailand to Hawaii, gathered on their local beaches to clean up trash and make a powerful statement about the poor state of our environment? But what about volunteers with no dirty beaches to clean? Well, some of them got a bit of help from local authorities.

Late last month, a South Korean mayor came under fire after revealing that he dumped a tonne of trash on a pristine beach just so hundreds of volunteers could clean it up the next day, in celebration of the International Coastal Cleanup Day. His office later apologized, saying that there wasn’t any trash for people to pick up, and that they only did it to “raise awareness about the seriousness of coastal waste”.

Read More »

Determined to get her money’s worth out of the wedding dressed she spent over $1,000, an Australian woman has been wearing her wedding dress everywhere, a year after her wedding.

43-year-old Tammy Hall adopted an anti-consumerism lifestyle in 2016, after a trip to India opened her eyes to how much we as a society consume. She vowed not to buy any new clothes or footwear for a whole year after she returned home to Adelaide, in Southern Australia, which turned out to be very easy, but last year, as her wedding day approached, she faced a puzzling dilemma. She wanted to look good on the most important day of her life, but how could she justify spending a small fortune on garment she would only wear on that day? In the end, she just decided to get her money’s worth.

Read More »

There are hundreds of grape varieties cultivated in japan, but only one so coveted that it can sell for several hundreds of dollars per grape (that’s individual grape, not bunch). The Ruby Roman was developed in Japan’s Ishikawa Prefecture and is considered one of the world’s most expensive fruits.

The story of  Ruby Roman began in 1995, when Ishikawa grape farmers appealed to the Prefectural Agricultural Research Center to create a large red grape variety. 400 experimental vines were planted into a test field, and two years later, they started bearing fruit. However, out of the 400 vines, only 4 turned out to be red grapes, and only one of them was deemed large enough to meet the farmers’ expectations. Over the next 14 years, researchers selectively bred this grape variety, constantly enhancing its size, taste, color and ease of cultivation, and today Ruby Roman is considered a “treasure of Ishikawa”.

Read More »

A 22-year-old Armenian woman who supposedly cries up to 50 jagged-edged crystal tears every day has been accused of faking her “biochemically and anatomically impossible” condition by placing glass shards in her eye sockets.

For most people, crying is the result of great pain or suffering, but for Satenik Kazaryan, a young woman from the Armenian village of Spandaryan, the act of crying itself is a source of excruciating pain. That’s because she allegedly cries solid crystal tears with jagged edges that scratch her eyes as they come out of the eye sockets. The 22-year-old first started crying crystal tears a few days ago, while visiting a dentist. It felt kike sand had gotten in her eye, and when she went to visit an ophthalmologist about it, the doctor extracted several crystals from her eye. Since then, her life has become a living hell, as she claims to cry around 50 crystals a day.

Read More »

One of the weirdest questions you can find on law forums is “can I sue for a broken condom?” (don’t ask me how I know that). Well, a woman in China went even further than that, suing the man who delivered the condoms she ordered too late, thus causing her unwanted pregnancy.

Chinese media recently reported the somewhat funny case of a young woman from Xuzhou, in Jiangsu province, who allegedly sued a deliveryman for bringing the box of condos she ordered online eight minutes late, and thus indirectly causing her to become pregnant. Apparently, the woman, referred to as Su (pseudonym), had her boyfriend over one evening in August, to watch a movie together. The movie lasted longer than expected, so the young man ended up spending the night. And that’s how the trouble started.

Read More »

A young Ukrainian man has managed to successfully avoid compulsory military service by staying married to a woman 57 years his senior for almost two years. Despite widespread criticism online, the man has the law on his side.

In late 2017, Alexander Kondratyuk, a young man from the Ukrainian city of Vinnitsa, received his conscription papers. He was to report to the nearest military commissariat for enlistment in his country’s one year military service. All able-bodied Ukrainian men aged between 18 and 26 are required to undergo military service, with one exception. If such a man were responsible for looking after a disabled wife, he would be exempt from service. So Alexander somehow convinced his cousin’s 81-year-old disabled grandmother to become his bride, and the couple have now been married for almost two years. Kondratyuk is 24, so after two more years he will become too old to undergo military service and probably divorce his octogenarian wife.

Read More »

Looking at 22-year-old Ian Francis Manga’s face it’s easy to see why some people have a hard time believing he is a kindergarten teacher, and not a student himself. Luckily, he towers over the children, but his face still looks uncanny.

A teacher in San Jose Del Monte, the Philippines’ Bulacan province, Ian Francis Manga has always looked younger than his years, and that became even more apparent in middle-school, when all the other boys started growing mustaches and armpit hair, but he did not experience any of the changes of puberty. In fact, his facial features remain those of a very young boy, but because he never suffered bullying from his schoolmates, he never felt the need to see a doctor and learn if there was anything wrong with him.

Read More »

There’s no denying that parenting can get really tiring sometimes, but you have to suck it up and push on. Well, not this Ukrainian couple who decided to take a break from their kids by abandoning them on the side of a road, near a homeless people camp.

Andrey, 3, and his younger brother Maksim, 2, lived for a week with homeless people and drunkards in Zaporozhye, southern Ukraine, after their young parents abandoned them on the side of a road under pretext of going to buy some food. The boys were placed in the care of total strangers allegedly for a few minutes, but their parents didn’t return for a week, and would have probably taken even longer to retrieve their kids if someone didn’t call the police. When asked why they had abandoned their two children, the young couple said that they felt tired and needed a break.

Read More »

Shocking photos of a popular beach in the Mexican state of Oaxaca sinking into the Ocean have been doing the rounds on social media, leaving people scratching their heads in disbelief. It turns out the sinking is being caused by a phenomenon known as “mar de fondo”, or “swell”.

Swells rarely occur at popular seaside destination, which only makes the repeated sinking of the beach at Puerto Escondito, in Oaxaca, that much more peculiar. Swells, also known as surface gravity waves, are created by storms thousands of miles away from the beaches on which they break, and are not influenced by local winds. They cause a rise in sea level, but are different than high tide, eating away at the sand they it, and causing large stretches of beach to simply sink into the ocean. This is what happened at Puerto Escondito last week, but the really strange part is that the exact same thing occurred in the same place, in May of last year.

Read More »

This past summer British media reported the bizarre job ad posted by an eco-conscious couple looking to pay a chef £5,000 to prepare a wedding banquet out of roadkill.

The unusual ad, featured on Bark.com, the UK’s leading online local service marketplace, mentioned that the couple had already sourced about 20kg of roadkill, including squirrel, pheasant, rabbit, partridge and deer, and were looking for someone with experience in preparing courses out of wild meats. The ideal candidate would able to skin, butcher and joint the cuts of meat, as well as prepare them in such a way that the guests wouldn’t know what meat they were eating.

Read More »

Doctors in Providence, Rhode Island, recently reported the case of a 25-year-old woman whose blood had turned dark blue after using medication containing a common numbing agent.

The unnamed woman reportedly walked into a Rhode Island emergency room complaining of general weakness and fatigue, shortness of breath and a symptom that made even seasoned medical staff do a double take – she was visibly turning blue. Doctors described the patient as “cyanotic,” the clinical term for blue and grey discolouration of the skin, which was attributed to the use of benzocaine, an active ingredient in over-the-counter toothache and cold sore medication.

Read More »