Clive Wearing, once an accomplished musicologist and orchestra conductor, is now known as the man with the 30-second memory, and for having one of the worst cases of amnesia ever recorded. Can you imagine being unable to remember most of your life or to make any kind of new memories? Most of us can’t even begin to understand what it must be like to do something or meet someone and then forget the entire experience in a matter of seconds. The most mundane things, like eating, waking up, or seeing a family member all melt like snow every 7 to 30 seconds, leaving a blank canvas that is wiped clean again at short intervals. It’s impossible to even imagine, and yet that has been the life of Clive Wearing, a former musicologist, conductor, tenor, and keyboardist, for nearly four decades now. Read More »

A young Florida fashion designer and tattoo-loving mother-of-one has been getting a lot of the online for covering her one-year-old son in hyperrealistic temporary tattoos. 29-year-old Shamekia Morris, a fashion designer from West Palm Beach, started putting temporary tattoos on her son Treylin when he was only six months old, and it has since become a habit that she shares with thousands of fans on social media. Although the effect is admittedly quite striking, not everyone is a fan of Shamekia’s idea, with some going as far as calling her irresponsible or a bad mother. Still, the mother-of-one, who herself is covered in tattoos, said that she won’t let the criticism stop her from living a lifestyle that both she and her son enjoy. Read More »

Esther Aular, a talented makeup artist from Bogota, Colombia, has been attracting a lot of attention on social media because of her impressive optical illusions. The 29-year-old influencer, who goes by ‘Nekita’ on TikTok and Instagram, has been posting photos and videos of her transforming herself into various pop-icons and fantastic creatures using only her makeup skills and rudimentary props. From characters of popular cartoons like The Simpsons or Naruto, to brain-twisting illusions that leave viewers scratching their heads about how she did them, Nekita always finds ways of leaving her tens of thousands of fans in awe. Read More »

A South African man recently sparked controversy in his home country for proposing to his girlfriend during her father’s funeral. When it comes to marriage proposals, location and timing are everything, and it’s fair to say that funerals aren’t exactly the perfect place to pop the big question. But that didn’t stop one South African man from staging one of the most awkward proposals in history, asking his grieving girlfriend’s hand in marriage right at her father’s funeral, with his casket in the background. The shocking scene was filmed by another attendant who subsequently posted it on TikTok, where it immediately went viral, sparking a heated debate among users of the popular video-sharing platform. Read More »

A couple in the Indian state of Uttarakhand has taken their son to court, asking him to either pay back the $650,000 they claim to have invested in him or give them a grandchild within a year. Sanjeev and Sadhana Prasad filed a highly unusual lawsuit against their own son on the grounds of “mental harassment”. They claim to have invested substantial sums of money into his education and professional training over the years, helped him financially when he couldn’t find a job, and arranged and paid for his wedding in 2016. In return, they were expecting a “grandchild to play with” during their retirement years, only their son didn’t deliver as expected, so now the couple is taking legal action against him. Read More »

Designer brand Balenciaga recently unveiled a new limited-edition line of footwear so damaged and dirty that most people wouldn’t be caught wearing it in public. There’s such a thing as “distressed clothing” and it can actually look pretty nice, but sometimes designers go too far and we end up with some really weird products. Now, when it comes to pushing the envelope, Balenciaga is right up there with some of the most daring fashion brands, but being cutting edge comes with a high risk of looking ridiculous. Remember that Balenciaga skirt designed to look like a car mat? Not the fashion house’s best garment, but even that pales in comparison with its line of $1,450 destroyed sweaters. But if you happen to have bought one such extremely distressed sweater, at least you now have some banged-up sneakers to pair them with. Read More »

Looking at Aboli Jarit, a young woman from Najapur, India, you would be forgiven for thinking her a child no older than six, even though she is really 19 years of age. Aboli, who stands only 3ft 4in-tall, recently became a viral internet sensation after sharing her story. As a baby, Aboli was diagnosed with renal rickets, a very rare condition that combines chronic renal disease with bone deformity. To make matters worse, she was born without a bladder, so she has to wear diapers all the time, as urine simply flows continually, as it has nowhere to accumulate. The girl’s bones got progressively weaker as time went by, and she eventually became unable to walk, which was brutal, as she had always loved to sing and dance. Every day is a struggle for the 19-year-old, but somehow she finds the courage to be optimistic and see the glass half full. Read More »

A couple that documents their family’s outdoor activities and athletic achievement on social media recently landed in hot water for encouraging their 6-year-old son to complete a 26.2-mile running marathon. Kami and Ben Crawford routinely share their family’s athletic exploits with their tens of thousands of fans on YouTube and Instagram, but their latest challenge attracted more criticism than praise. Last week, the couple took to social media to post photos of their entire family running the Flying Pig marathon in Cincinatti. There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with that picture, except for the fact that their youngest son, Rainier, is only 6-years-old and the Flying Pig marathon is a whopping 26.2-mile run. The fact that he had to run for 8 hours and 35 minutes to finish the race was viewed by many as nothing less than torture for the young child. Read More »

A Venezuelan man was recently arrested for allegedly implanting plastic lollipop sticks under the skin of dozens of people and tricking them into thinking that they were advanced contraceptive devices. 38-year-old Jose Daniel Lopez stands accused of tricking at least 25 women into paying him to implant simple lollipop sticks under their skin as contraceptives, thus causing some of them to become pregnant. Lopez, who had no medical qualifications, worked in health centers in La Victoria and Maracay, Venezuela, after falsifying his medical degree. He did have some notion of medical procedures, as he performed the subdermal implants himself, claiming they were “Implanon” an actual contraceptive procedure that involves small plastic rods being implanted under the skin of the upper arm. Read More »

Deep in the Tengger Desert of Inner Mongolia, surrounded by sand dunes as far as the eye can see, lies the world’s loneliest post office, a surprisingly bustling outpost of human connection. Measuring only 15 square meters, the wooden post office of Tengger Desert is not much to look at, but that’s ok, it doesn’t get too many visitors anyway. Besides, after being abandoned for over 35 years, it actually doesn’t look half bad. Thanks to the efforts of a few intrepid individuals who learned about the existence of an old abandoned desert post office by mistake, it has been given a new lease on life, and thanks to the magic of the internet, it has actually become quite a busy operation. Read More »

In an attempt to get the coveted six-pack abs in time for the summer holidays, a man who hates going to the beach got himself a hyper-realistic six-pack tattoo. It’s the same old story every spring. You try flexing your abs in the mirror only to find them covered by a thick layer of fat that you’ve been trying your hardest to ignore for months. You jump on the scale and are shocked to see you’ve put on a few pounds since last summer and with only a few weeks left until the beach season, you start to panic. It’s time to hit the gym, hard, but that’s just such a chore. If only there was a way to permanently turn that flabby belly into the chiseled physique of a bodybuilder. Well, as long as you’re not afraid of needles, there’s one goofy trick you may want to try. Read More »

Ever wish you could earn money by turning your daily life into a reality show that anyone could tune in to watch from anywhere around the world? It turns out you actually can. SpiedLife is a growing international docu-reality platform that essentially allows people to turn their lives into reality shows with the help of webcams. If you have no problem installing a few webcams in your home and broadcasting your life to total strangers 24 hours a day, your average life could become the next Big Brother. SpiedLife allows streamers to stay in touch with their audience through chat rooms, track their channel’s popularity, and pays them for sharing their lives on the platform. But in a time where privacy is being taken more seriously than ever, many think that SpiedLife could have a dark side. Read More »

Dozens of people taking part in a funeral in Peru were left shocked after the woman being laid to rest allegedly started banging on the casket from the inside. Late last month, Rosa Isabel Cespedes Callaca, a 36-year-old woman from Lambayeque, Peru, her brother-in-law, and three of her nephews were involved in a serious car accident that claimed the lives of both adults and left the boys with serious injuries. On April 26, Rosa’s relatives gathered in Lambayeque to lay her body to rest. The solemn procession was going according to plan, according to eyewitnesses, but at one point people started hearing faint banging from inside the woman’s coffin. When the lid was opened, the funeral attendees were shocked to see Rosa staring back at them… Read More »

A few miles north of the Panama Canal Zone lies the Valley of Square Trees, a unique tourist attraction where trees of the cottonwood family have rectangular trunks. Unique in the entire world, this group of square-shaped cottonwood trees grows in a valley created from the ashes of a giant volcano – El Valle de Anton. Featuring hard-right angles, the trunks of the square trees have baffled tourists and scientists alike for several years. Experts from the University of Florida took saplings of the mysterious trees to see if they retain the same characteristics in a different environment, and concluded that their square shape must have something to do with conditions unique to the valley in which they grow. Evidence that the cause of this bizarre phenomenon is deep-seated is indicated by the fact that their tree rings, which represent its growth, are also square. Read More »

Speech2Face is an advanced neural network developed by MIT scientists and trained to recognize certain facial features and reconstruct people’s faces just by listening to the sound of their voices. You’ve probably already heard about AI-powered cameras that can recognize people just by analyzing their facial features, but what if there was a way for artificial intelligence to figure out what you look like just by the sound of your voice and without comparing your voice to a database? That’s exactly what a team of scientists at MIT has been working on, and the results of their work are impressive, kind of. While their neural network, named Speech2Face, can’t yet figure out the exact facial features of a human just by their voice, it certainly gets plenty of details right. Read More »