A 79-year-old who spent most of her time begging at a train station in Hangzhou, China, was recently ousted as a relatively rich pensioner who lives in a 5-storey villa and owns several retail stores and rental properties in the city.

The woman’s story made national news headlines last week, after staff at Hangzhou’s East Railway Station started broadcasting an unusual message from loudspeakers warning passers-by not to fall for the granny’s story because she is not what she appears to be. In a surprising turn of events, even the woman’s son told reporters that their family is considerably wealthier than the average family in China. They live in a lavish villa, own several properties, some of which they rent to local business, and he himself manages a family factory. The man added that he told his mother to stop begging numerous times, but she refuses to listen.

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Ningen, a pop-up restaurant in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district, attracted a lot of media attention over the last two weeks for giving patrons the chance to order the last meals requested by infamous death row inmates before their execution.

The controversial eatery was opened by a Japanese art collective called Chim↑Pom and for two weeks served the last meals of infamous American criminals like armed robber and double-murderer Gary Mark Gilmore, Judy Buonoano, Florida’s “Black Widow”, or real-life killer clown John Wayne Gacy.

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The simplest way to describe Chrom is as a nail polish for your teeth. It lets you color your chompers in 10 various colors, doesn’t smudge and lasts for up to 24 hours.

If you’re bored with your pearly whites, or just want them to match the color of your fingernails or your outfit, you can now use an innovative ‘tooth polish’ to paint them any way you like. The formula for Chrom was reportedly created by dentists and consists of a grain alcohol base and pigments similar to high-quality coloring. It doesn’t stain the teeth, it’s not permanent and it doesn’t have any taste so you can enjoy your favorite foods while looking freaky.

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A self-described “whimsical scientist” locked himself in a small air-tight plastic foil tent with 200 plants to see if they could covert CO2 into oxygen fast enough to keep him alive.

Kurtis Baute sealed himself in a 3m by 3m plastic-wrapped biodome in his brother’s backyard in British Columbia, Canada, last week, but he announced his audacious plan to his YouTube fans, in August. He hoped to find out if by surrounding himself with plants, enough of the CO2 he breathed out could be converted into oxygen to allow him to survive in the sealed enclosure for at least three days. Unfortunately, he had to abort the experiment after only 15 hours, as CO2 levels reached a dangerous point where he risked suffering brain damage or even falling into a coma.

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Chihuahua Julep, a cocktail bar that opened in central Helsinki, Finland, in August, has banned patrons from using smartphones inside the venue to encourage real-world social interaction.

Initially, the owners of  Chihuahua Julep only encouraged visitors to put their smartphones away so that the light from their screens wouldn’t ruin the bar’s ambience, but after seeing that those who followed the recommendation seemed more relaxed and at the same time more engaged in conversations with their friends, they decided to impose an outright ban on handhelds. Now, anyone wanting to enjoy a drink inside the venue must store their phone inside a box on arrival.

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A 29-year-old American man decided to leave the United States behind and move to a remote jungle village in India so he wouldn’t have to constantly worry about paying back his student loan.

Like many other Americans, Chad Haag had to rely on a student loan to pay for his college education, but he struggled to find a college-level job after graduating, and going back school to pursue a master’s degree in comparative literature didn’t really help in that regard. His first job had him unloading trucks and constructing toy rockets on a factory assembly line, then he worked as an adjunct professor, but with only one class assigned per semester, he could barely make a living, let alone pay back his $20,000 student loan. At one point, struggling to pay the $300 monthly instalments became too stressful, so he just packed his bags, said goodbye to his life in the US and moved to a small village in India.

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Seen from afar, Craig Alan’s celebrity portraits seem made out of thousands of expertly placed paint dots, but as you draw nearer, you notice that those dots are actually tiny detailed human figures.

Craig Alan’s “Populous” series was inspired by a bird’s eye view from his mother’s 6th story condo, in Orange Beach, Alabama. He was watching the people down at the beach and photographing them when he noticed that their tiny figures forming patters. In one of his photos, the people appeared to have formed a eye, and the artist recalls that this was what first got his creative wheels turning. He started spray-painting tiny human figures on white canvases, positioning them in such a way that they and their shadows formed detailed portraits of some history’s most iconic personalities, from Michael Jackson to Marilyn Monroe.

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A Polish mountain climber who recently scaled his country’s highest peak was surprised to find a domestic cat waiting for him at the very top.

Wojciech Jabczynski couldn’t believe his eyes when he reached the top of the 2,500-meter-high Rysy mountain and spotted a ginger cat nonchalantly licking its paws. No one knows exactly how the feline got to the mountain top, or why, but Jabczynski suspects it may have climbed up from a small tourist hut under the peak. Surprised by its presence there, the experienced climber took out his phone and took some pictures and recorded a video, just to make sure people believed him when he told the story.

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If you’ve been looking for a way to prevent your pet cat from scratching you whenever you try to bathe or groom it, maybe try these bizarre anti-scratching boots. Don’t expect your beloved pet to thank you, though.

The first time I saw these adjustable anti-scratching boots for cats on Chinese online marketplace Aliexpress, I thought they were a prank, but it turns that they are a real product designed to help pet owners seal off their cats’ paws and prevent scratching completely. They are supposed to be used for certain situations like bathing, nail clipping or visits to the vet, but I know a few people crazy enough to leave these plastic contraptions on for long periods of time just to make sure their cat doesn’t ruin the living room sofa.

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A personal trainer on a quest to stop his 27-year-old obese client from “eating himself to death” has been distributing posters to local takeaway places instructing them not to serve him.

Every year, Mike Hind, a successful personal trainer from Middlesbrough, in the UK, takes on a client for free and tries to turn their life around in one year. Hind was named the best personal trainer in the UK last year, so he gets thousands of applications for his yearly giveaway, but this year he chose a 27-year-old man named Dibsy, after seeing him and his mom at his gym’s diner. He weighs 560 pounds (254 kg) and recently experienced heart problems that put him in the hospital for a week. The doctor’s verdict was very clear – ‘diet or die – and upon hearing his story, personal trainer Mike Hind decided to take him under his wing for a year. One of the first things the trainer did to help his new client was get him banned at local takeaway restaurants.

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A Chinese man swallowed an 8-inch metal spoon as a stupid stunt, a year ago. It got stuck in his esophagus, but seeing as he could eat and drink normally, he never sought medical assistance to have it removed. He claims that he only started experiencing chest pains a few days ago, after being punched in the chest.

The unnamed man from China’s Xinjiang autonomous region told doctors that he had swallowed a stainless steel spoon during a drunken bet. He told his friends that he could swallow the spoon and then pull it back up again by tying a string to its handle. It must of sounded like a good idea at the time, but things didn’t go according to plan, and the eating utensil got stuck in the man’s food pipe. Instead of going to the hospital immediately, the man waited to see if the spoon prevented him from eating and drinking normally. It didn’t, so he lived with it stuck in his esophagus for the last year.

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As if habitat loss and pesticide exposure weren’t enough to deal with for bumble bees, they also face increasing pressure from a parasitic fly that attacks them midair, injects them with eggs with hatch larvae which proceed to eat the pollinators from the inside before finally forcing them to dig their own graves.

It sounds like something out of a body snatchers horror movie, but the conopid fly is very much a real-life threat for bumble bee colonies already under a lot of pressure from human activities. The conopid fly is classified as a parasitoid, a parasite that not only feeds on its host, but ends up killing it in a gruesome, terrifying way. We’ve featured creepy body snatchers in the past, some that turn their host into zombies, others that simply take control of their bodies but leave their brains intact, but the conopid fly is even worse. It literally eats bumble bees from the inside, before somehow forcing them to land on the ground and dig a whole to die in. The injected parasite grows inside the host and ultimately bursts out of it as a mature conopid fly that attacks other bumble bees and continues this nightmarish cycle.

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Follow JC Go! is a religious take on the popular mobile game Pokemon Go. Instead of using augmented reality to roam around in the real world and catch virtual Pokemon, you get to catch saints and other religious figures.

Developed by Fundación Ramón Pané, a Catholic organization with headquarters in Miami and Honduras, Follow JC Go! is an augmented reality video game that combines technology and evangelization to teach players of all ages about the Catholic faith. It features the same principles as the immensely popular Pokemon GO app, allowing users to roam around real-life locations and use the camera of their smartphones to find and catch virtual characters. Only instead of Pokemon like the adorable Pikachu, players will be looking for saints and other religious figures.

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A Japanese Twitter user has been getting a lot of attention online for his ability to create large, dense clumps of foam out of tiny drops of lather or soap, using only his hands.

Ever wish you could produce the same kind of frothy, dense foam as an expensive foam dispenser using only your hands? I know, me neither, but Japanese Twitter user ‘Karin’ (@na_mi_da) has taught himself to do just that, and his seemingly useless ability has mesmerized hundreds of thousands of his countrymen. A video he posted, in which he rubs and squeezes his hands to turn a bit of lather into a fluffy clump of dense foam that then sticks to his hands has been retweeted nearly 140,000 times and received over 450,000 likes. For some reason, people just can’t stop talking about cool this man’s talent is.

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A Chinese woman recently found herself unable to use the fingers on her right hand after spending her entire week-long vacation playing video games on her smartphone.

The unnamed woman from Changsha, in China’s Hunan province, reportedly took a week off from work and spent all that time playing on her smartphone. According to a Pear video documenting her bizarre case, the only time she put down her phone was when she slept. After a few days, she started experiencing severe pain her right hand, but she kept playing until her fingers became stuck in smartphone-holding position and she found herself unable to flex them at all.

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