A rare phenomenon commonly described as a ‘rainbow cloud’ was recently spotted above Tokyo and pictures of it went viral on social media.

On June 26th, reports of an iridescent cloud visible above Tokyo started being shared on Twitter, and soon, photos of the intriguing phenomenon made their way to the popular social media platform as well. It was as the rumors described, a multicolored cloud that oddly resembled a rainbow, only in reality this optical phenomenon was closer to an ice halo than a rainbow.

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An-18-year-old girl from Illinois has been getting a lot of attention on social media lately for her one-of-a-kind prom dress which she single-handedly created out of dozens of rolls of duct-tape.

When Peyton Manker decided to enter this year’s Stuck at Prom contest this January, she never thought it would turn her into an overnight internet sensation. The long-running competition challenges high-school graduates to make their own prom attire using as much Duck-brand duct tape as possible, for a chance to win a $10,000 scholarship. Peyton had set out to create her prom dress around a Leonardo Da Vinci heme, but then the Covid-19 pandemic happened and she decided to build her dress around that instead.

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Manusia Silver, or “Silver Men” is a special type of beggar that has become a common sight on the streets of several Indonesian cities.

Beggars have been around for as long as anyone can remember, and Indonesia is no exception, but the South-East Asian country has recently seen the rise of a new type of beggar, the so-called Silver Men. Inspired by the street performers who used metallic paint to transform themselves into living statues and wow passers-by with their doll-like movements, the Silver Men or Manusia Silver, as they are called in Indonesian, simply adapted the look of these performers to their own skill – begging.

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Think of a toy store, only instead of toys you have every Covid-19 accessory imaginable, from hand sanitizers to no-touch door openers. That’s the COVID-19 Essentials pop-up store in a nutshell.

Located on the second floor of Miami’s Aventura shopping mall, COVID-19 Essentials is described as a one-stop shop for all your Covid-19 needs. From a plethora of hand sanitizers and disinfectants to really niche gadgets like portable UV light sterilizers and shoe cover dispensers, this specialized store really has it all. According to the entrepreneurs behind Miami’s currently most talked about business, the demand was there and all they had to do was give the people what they wanted, but the shop has been getting some criticism online, with people calling it an opportunistic cash-grab.

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Photos of an unusually-tall cactus growing on the side of a three-storey building in Tokyo, Japan, have been doing the rounds on social media, raising the question: ‘is this the world’s tallest cactus?’

Last Wednesday, Japanese Twitter user =Yang= (@0okome0) posted a bunch of intriguing photos of a building he had spotted in Takinogawa, Tokyo Metropolitan Area. It wasn’t the building that drew people’s attention, but a green pole on the side of it. =Yang= himself admitted that at first he thought it was simply a green-painted utility pole, but the deformed top, which stretched onto the roof of the building, told him otherwise. As he approached the strange sight, he realized that it was actually a thick cactus stretching from the bottom all the way to the roof of the three-storey residential building. He snapped some pics and posted them on Twitter, where they quickly went viral.

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An 84-year-old retired farmer from Melbourne, Australia, has been trying to get his own daughter evicted from his apartment for eight years, but despite spending a small fortune on legal fees, he has been unsuccessful.

Peter Grundy, a retired wheat farmer from the Australian state of Victoria, has been trying to sell his apartment so he can move into a retirement home. He isn’t entitled to a pension, so in order to secure his place there he needs to pay up front, but in order to do that he has to sell the apartment. The only problem is Peter has been trying to do just that for the last eight years, only his 49-year-old daughter, Katrina, has been doing everything in her power to stop him. Despite his best efforts to get her evicted from his property, including taking her to court, Katrina hasn’t budged and legal experts say the pensioner has exhausted all legal options.

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A Taiwanese pensioner who once made international headlines for strapping almost a dozen smartphones to his bicycle so he could catch multiple Pokemon in Pokemon GO! faster has now taken his passion for the mobile game to new heights, with a whopping 64 phones attached to his bike.

We originally featured Chen Sanyuan in August of 2018, shortly after photos of him taken by passers-by in Taipei City had gone viral. It was easy to see why photos of the then 70-year-old were getting so much attention – here was this old man riding his bicycle around town with multiple smartphones hooked on to the handlebars. After  reaching the front page of Reddit, Chen was approached by Taiwanese gaming website EXP.GG and he explained that he had come up with the bizarre setup so he could operate multiple Pokemon GO accounts at the same time. He had fallen in love with Niantic’s hit game after being introduced to it by his grandson, and now couldn’t get enough.

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Photos of a vibrantly-colored fish that looks too flashy to be real have gone viral on Japanese social media, prompting many to ask if it was the result of too much digital editing.

Last Friday, popular YouTube channel Fishing Gang Azusa took to Twitter to post a very intriguing picture of their latest catch – a flashy fish that almost looked painted. People started asking if it was real or just a case of too much Photoshop, but it wasn’t before Azusa posted a video on YouTube of them catching the fish that the photos went viral. The footage shows the alien-looking fish in all its splendor, leaving many viewers with their mouths wide open at the thought that such a creature actually exists.

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Russian media recently reported the shocking case of a 42-year-old woman who had not set foot outside her family home for 26 years, despite being in perfect health, because he mother didn’t allow it.

Until this month, 42-year-old Nadezhda Bushueva hadn’t left her mother’s house in the village of Arefinsky, in western Russia, since she was 16. The only reason she decided to venture into the village was because her mother, Tatyana, had become ill and needed to be hospitalized. For the first time in 26 years she didn’t have to listen to her mother, who reportedly kept her isolated for all these years to “protect her from the dangers of the outside world”. Nadezhda had reportedly not washed her hair in 12 years, as evidenced by the giant clump on her head, and hadn’t had a change of clothes in even longer. Despite all this, she allegedly said she doesn’t need any help…

According to the women’s neighbors, Tayana had always been very protective of her daughter, but things really got out of control when the woman retired. Nadezhda was in 8th grade when her mother started forbidding her from going out with other teenagers in the village, and in a couple of years the two had become complete recluses. Nadezhda didn’t go to school anymore, and her mother rejected anyone who tried to interfere, telling them that they were fine and that they should mind their own business.

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Vladimir Ilich Lenin, the founder and first leader of the Soviet Union, lives on in the hearts and minds of the Russian people, but also in one little-known geoglyph in the country’s Siberia region – pine tree forest that spells “Lenin” in Cyrillic letters.

Russian photographer Slava Stepanov was planning a business trip to the city of Omsk, when he remembered a fascinating Google Earth satellite image captured in that region a few years earlier. Taking a day off from work, Stepanov decided to drive to the town of Tyukalinsk and look for a very common-looking grove on the outskirts of the settlement. Planted in straight rows, typical for man-made forests, the pine grove only revealed its secret when Stepanov released his drone to get a view from high above.

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If you thought creative jobs like acting would be among the last to be taken over by AI-powered robots, think again, as ‘b’, the world’s first film to feature an AI robot in the lead role was just announced.

The upcoming film, which reportedly revolves around “a scientist who discovers dangers associated with a program he created to perfect human DNA and helps the artificially intelligent woman he designed (Erica) escape,” stars Erica, a humanoid robot powered by artificial intelligence which is also conveniently immune to the highly contagious novel coronavirus.

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Father Sergei Romanov, a controversial, ultra-conservative Russian priest, has taken control of the Sredneuralsk convent outside the city of Yekaterinburg and challenged authorities to force him out.

Romanov,  a former policeman who reportedly spent 13 years in a prison colony for murder before repenting and dedicating his life to religion, has been very vocal about the social distancing measures taken in Russia in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, accusing church leaders of “working with the forerunners of the Antichrist” by closing churches. Because of his controversial rhetoric, the Russian Orthodox church suspended Romanov and prevented him from preaching, and in May he was forbidden to wear a cross, after he continued to encourage people to disobey public health orders. Last Tuesday, he entered the Sredneuralsk convent, which he helped found in the early 2000’s, and seized control with the help of several armed militiamen.

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Board shoe racing is the traditional sport of the Zhuang people of China’s Gunaxi province, a unique discipline that has three people sharing the same “shoes”, which requires perfect coordination and concentration.

Board shoe racing can be traced back to the Ming Dynasty, when legend has it that a famous heroine of the Xhuang people used it as a way to train soldiers against invading Japanese pirates. The legendary Mrs. Wa used long pieces of wood to teach the men to march together in perfect synchronization, which greatly improved their combat qualities and boosted their fighting spirit, helping them repel the invaders. The traditional sport has been passed on from generation to generation since then.

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Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past decade or so, you’ve probably seen pictures of Japan’s square watermelons doing the rounds online. I know I have, but what I never knew was that these weird-looking fruit are basically inedible.

Perfectly sized and shaped fruits are big business in Japan, and it’s not uncommon for the rarest and most coveted varieties to sell for thousands of dollars a piece. Back in 2016, a supermarket owner made international news headlines after paying $11,000 for a bunch of Ruby Rose grapes, the world’s most expensive grape variety. But it’s not just grapes, specialty fruit shops charge hundreds, even thousands of dollars for fruits of all types, which may seem strange, but it is closely tied to Japanese culture. Rare and expensive fruits are traditionally offered as gifts to clients, business partners or relatives, and people will gladly spend a small fortune on a single fruit just to show their respect for someone. But while most of these expensive fruits can be savored by the recipient, there is one that has a purely decorative purpose – square watermelons.

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The county of Staffordshire, in central UK, is home to a mysterious and rather eerie attraction – an old oak tree with branches shackled in heavy metal chains tied to a creepy local legend.

The story of the Chained Oak near the village of Alton is the most famous legend in Staffordshire. It is said that one day during the 1830’s, as the Earl of Shrewsbury was returning home to his home at Alton Towers estate a beggar woman stopped his carriage in the middle of the road and asked him if he could spare a coin or two. The earl cruelly dismissed her and urged the driver to move on, at which point the woman allegedly cursed him to lose a member of his family whenever a branch fell off a magnificent oak on the side of the road.

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