25-year-old Varanya Nganthavee will likely remember her first day as a doctor at at Rajavithi Hospital in Bangkok for a very long time. After all, it’s not every day that you find a live gecko in a patient’s ear.

The young doctor recently posted her unusual experience on Facebook. She had nearly finished her first day on the job when a patient walked in complaining of an ear ache that had been pestering him for two days. Using an otoscope to inspect the ear canal, as is routine, Varanya was shocked to see something moving inside. She dripped some antibiotic drops into the man’s ear and asked him to tilt his head to ton side hoping that whatever bug had crawled inside the year would get out by itself. That didn’t happen, so a nurse had to use tweezers to yank it out. Only it wasn’t an insect, but a small gecko lizard commonly known as Jing Jok in Thailand.

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Zack Pinsent, a 25-year-old tailor from Brighton, in the UK, burned his last pair of jeans over a decade ago, and has been wearing elegant Regency-period costumes ever since.

Zack claims he never enjoyed wearing the modern clothes that most of us put on every day. Instead, he was always fascinated by the elegant fashion of Britain’s Regency Era and other historical styles going back to the 1600s. He taught himself how to make the clothes he dreamed of wearing and once he became good enough at it, he decided to cut modern clothes from his life forever. The talented tailor remembers ceremoniously burning his last pair of jeans at age 14 as a turning point that changed his life. Dressing as a Regency Era gentleman every day gave him a huge confidence boost, and he wouldn’t dream of going back to regular clothing.

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A 19-year-old convicted killer in Turkey managed to escape from prison by allegedly switching places with his twin brother when he came to visit him.

Murat A. was serving a long prison sentence for murder at the E Tipi Kapası Prison in Mersin, southern Turkey when his twin brother, Huseyin, came to visit him last Thursday. They were apparently allowed to meet face to face and they used this opportunity to swap places. A photo of the two shows that they are not exactly identical, but it turns out they looked enough alike to trick prison guards into allowing Murat to just walk out of the detention facility. It’s not yet clear why the inmate’s brother agreed to take his place in a maximum security prison, but an investigation is ongoing.

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Spanish police reported that a woman who hired her son-in-law to kill her partner recently turned up to file a complaint against him after he failed to live up to his end of the bargain.

Earlier this month, an unnamed woman and her daughter went to a police station in central Madrid to file two separate complaints. One was against the woman’s romantic partner, who had allegedly scammed her out of more than €60,000 ($60,000) over several years, and the second was against her own son-in-law who had agreed to kill her partner and then sell his organs on the black market to recover the substantial amount of money he had swindled. Unfortunately, things didn’t go very well after the latter revelations, as both women and the would-be hitman were immediately arrested.

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Valerie Sanders, a 58-year-old woman from the UK, spent 17 hours in jail after being charged with “controlling behavior” after allegedly nagging her husband to clean the house instead of his car.

Valerie’s troubles with the law began in April of 2018, when during a routine check at her husband Michael’s workplace Jobcentre UK staff noticed he was in a bad mood. After asking him about it, they learned it was because his wife was constantly asking him to clean and polish the family home and complaining that he spent too much time at the gym and cleaning his car. Apparently, this qualified as “coercive or controlling behavior”, an offense punishable by law, so police turned up at the Sanders residence in Catterick, arrested Valerie and threw her in jail for 17 hours. She was charged with controlling behavior and was forced to fight a legal battle for over a year.

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A Maryland man trying to raise awareness about the confusing nature of expiration dates on consumer products ate expired food for a whole year and lived to tell the tale.

Scott Nash got the idea for his unusual experiment began three years ago, when he did something most of us wouldn’t even consider – he ate a yogurt that was six months past his expiration date. The “staunch environmentalist” and owner of MOM’s Organic Market, a D.C.-are grocery store chain, had forgotten the yogurt in the fridge of his old cabin in Virginia in the Spring and only found it again when returned in the Fall. By that time it was already half a year past its expiration date, but that didn’t stop him from mixing it with his smoothie and chugging it down. It didn’t taste funny and he didn’t experience any health problems after consuming it. That got him thinking about the way companies use expiration dates nowadays.

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Crotalaria cunninghamii, a legume native to northern Australia, is known as the “green bird flower” for a very good reason – its green flowers look like tiny hummingbirds with their sharp beak attached to the plant’s stem.

A photo of two Crotalaria cunninghamii flowers recently went viral on Reddit, leaving many users scratching their heads and asking whether their uncanny resemblance to hummingbirds was an adaptive evolutionary development or a simple illusion. Apparently, the latter would be the most likely answer. There are no hummingbirds in northern Australia, and apart from humans, it is unlikely that any creature would mistake these flowers for real hummingbirds, so the shape does not result in any kind of benefit to the plant. Plus, the flowers only resemble hummingbirds when viewed from a certain side-angle. It’s purely a case of simulacrum, seeing shapes and forms that look like something that they’re clearly not. It’s still pretty cool, though.

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If you’ve visited a news site over the last couple of days, you’ve probably read this incredible story of a Russian “mummified” man who was found more dead than alive after being attacked by a brown bear and somehow survived for a month. Well, it case you haven’t already guessed, it’s fake.

The story of Alexander, a Russian man who had allegedly spent a month in a bear cave somewhere in Russia’s emote Republic of Tuva before being discovered by hunters, went viral yesterday, after major UK publications like Mail Online, Metro and The Sun picked it up and pretty much reported it as fact. In their defense, the news did originally appear on Siberian Times, a Russian news website that covers national events in English. They all claimed that the emaciated man who appeared in a very short clip was the unlikely survivor of a gruesome bear attack that had left him paralyzed. He allegedly told reporters that the beast had then dragged him to its den and kept him around as “tin-can” food to be eaten later. Luckily, he was found by hunters who ventured into the bear’s cave after being alerted by their dogs’ barking. The story ends with Alexander recovering on a hospital bed. Now let’s talk about how the story began.

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A baby in Indonesia has been awarded the title of “world’s strangest name” after it was revealed that his parents legally registered him as “Google”; no surname or middle name, just Google, just like the search engine.

The eight-month-old boy’s father, 31-year-old Andi Cahya Saputra, told Indonesian media that he first contemplated the idea of giving his child a tech-related name when his wife was seven months pregnant. Before that, he had considered more common names, like Albar Dirgantara Putra, or names mentioned in the Quran, but in the end he decided that none of them were quite right. So he ended up looking at names of technology companies and products like “Windows, iPhone, Microsoft and iOS”, and ultimately settled on Google. Although the mother didn’t really like the idea at first, she ultimately agreed and now they have a boy named after the world’s most popular internet search engine.

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The North American hognose snake, aka “puff adder, aka “zombie snake”, has a taste for the dramatic. When threatened, this natural-born artist likes to play dead in the most overacted way imaginable.

The hognose snake got its first nickname, “puff adder”, for its main defense mechanism. To scare away threats, it sucks in air and spreads the skin around its head and neck like a cobra, hissing loudly and pretending to prepare for a vicious snake. But if that doesn’t work, it has another intriguing trick up its sleeve. And that’s where the second nickname, “zombie snake”, comes in. According to the Amphibians and Reptiles of North Carolina, if a predator isn’t impressed by the snake’s threatening display, it “will then feign death by opening its mouth, rolling over on its back, and writhing around. If turned over onto its belly, it will immediately roll again onto its back”.

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In an effort to promote sustainable agriculture, Irish as agency Rothco teamed up with German artist Diana Scherer to create The Book That Grew – a 22-page tome created by manipulating the roots of living plants to grow in the shape of letters and diagrams.

We wrote about plant root manipulation for artistic purposes in the past, but this is probably the most ambitious and impressive such project we’ve ever come across. All elements of The Book That Grew, including the ink and binding, were made from grass to show farmer just how powerful a resource it can be, when managed properly. That’s actually the main point of the book, which contains 10 simple yet valuable lessons designed to help maximize sustainability of one of the most valuable agricultural resources, grass. And what better to convey the message to farmers than in the form of an all-organic book grown from that very grass.

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A 39-year-old former hostess and model from Japan recently went on national television and revealed that she spent over 30 million yen ($280,000) on cosmetic procedures in the last 21 years, after becoming traumatized that her mother had never been satisfied with her looks growing up.

Tsubaki Tomomi had her first plastic surgery when she turned 18, right after graduating high-school. By the time she turned twenty, she had already fixed her teeth, had eye shaping surgery and gotten breast implants. She has been on a never-ending quest to enhance her physical appearance ever since, and doesn’t plan on stopping until the day she dies. Although Tsubaki claims to have embraced plastic surgery as a way of keeping herself looking youthful, she says that her obsession with it started in her childhood. Her mother used to always complain about her looks, calling her “unsightly” in front of other people, so she just got it into her head that she had to make herself look more pleasing. As soon as she got old enough to undergo plastic surgery, she did so. She claims to have spent over 30 million yen ($280,000) on cosmetic procedures since then.

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Butterfly pupae are easy targets for predators in search of an easy protein-rich meal, and one would think that the flashier the cocoon, the higher the chances of being spotted and eaten , but the Mechanitis polymnia, aka the orange-spotted tiger clearwing and its shiny, gold-like pods are proof that the opposite is true.

The orange-spotted tiger clearwing butterfly lives in the jungles of Central and South America, from Mexico all the way to the Amazon rain-forests. It’s a colorful little thing, with a wingspan of 65 to 75 millimeters, but it’s not exactly the most eye-catching of butterflies. Its pupae however are pure gold, literally. Well, not really literally, but they look just like elaborate gold jewelry hanging on the back of plant leaves, and even on the walls of houses in rural areas. But unlike actual gold jewels, these shiny, metallic-looking chrysalises are not meant to draw attention, but distract predators and even discourage them from getting to close. It’s a natural defense mechanism, and a very effective one at that.

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Located on a jungle-covered hillside in Malaysia, the new 1,140-meter-long water slide being built at Penang’s Escape Theme Park will most likely be declared the longest in the world when it opens, in August 2019.

The current Guinness record for the world’s longest water slide has been held by the 605-meter slide at Action Park, in New Jersey, since 2015, but in just two months time it will be claimed by a new water slide currently under construction in the Malaysian state of Penang. Already 65 percent complete, the slide already measures 705-meters-long, and when finished will take thrill-seekers on an epic 4-minute ride from the top of a hill, through a lush jungle before, dropping them into a large swimming pool at the bottom. Escape Theme Park announced that the remaining 435-meter section of the water slide will be completed in time for its August inauguration.

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An elderly couple in the UK claimed that they were held hostage by a pair of seagulls nesting on the roof of their Lancashire home. Every time they tried to leave the birds would become aggressive and attack them.

Roy and Brenda Pickard’s story sounds like a real life version of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Birds”. The elderly couple were held hostage in their own home by a pair of adult Herring Gulls after the birds’  chicks slipped on the roof of the house and landed onto the canopy directly above the front door. Every time Roy tried opening the front door, he was confronted by two angry squawking adult seagulls. One time, when he decided to take his chances and go outside, the 71-year-old was hit so hard on the back of the head that he had to be taken to the hospital for help. Local authorities have installed a gazebo outside the couple’s home, which should offer some protection, but that’s the best they can do for now.

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