Returning a book late at the local library usually gets you a scolding by the librarian, or maybe your permit revoked for repeat offenses, but failing to turn in a book on time at one Alabama library could actually land you in jail for 30 days.

With over $200,000 worth of overdue books to recuperate, the Athens-Limestone public library in Athens, Alabama, is taking extreme measures to deter patrons from returning borrowed books and DVDs way later than they should. Executive Director Paula Laurita announced that the library will be enforcing a new policy that includes fines of up to $100, a city jail sentence of 30 days, or possibly both. She added that the seemingly exaggerated rules were necessary to stop people from effectively stealing from taxpayers.

“We have too many outstanding books that haven’t been returned. People with several hundred dollars worth of library materials that are sitting at home,” Laurita told WAAY31. Sometimes we hear, ‘I lent my library card to my cousin’. I just want to ask, ‘Would you lend your cousin your credit card? If they go and get $700 worth of clothing and you’re responsible for the bill, would you do that?'”

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Tired of wasting 14 minutes driving to work every day, a crafty locksmith from the Czech Republic managed to cut his commute time in half by building himself an airplane and flying to work.

45-year-old Frantisek Hadrava, from the south-western Czech village of Zdikov, used to drive for 12-14 minutes for his 6 a.m. shift at Drevostroj, a small factory in the town of Ckyne, but he thought that was too long. So he spent the last two years building himself an ultralight plane based on the U.S.-design of Mini-Max planes. Now, whenever the weather permits it, instead of hopping in his car, he gets into the open cockpit plane and flies to his workplace in just seven minutes.

“It takes me about 12-14 minutes by car,” Hadrava told Reuters. “By plane, it would take around 4-5 minutes if I flew directly, but I take a bit of a detour so that I don’t disturb people early in the morning. So it takes about 7 minutes.”

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Located near Ismailia, about two hours from Egypt’s capital, Cairo, Serapium Forest is nothing short of an environmental miracle – a 240-hectare forest of both native and non-native trees thriving in the middle of the desert.

Advancing desserts have become a serious problem throughout the African continent, but a team of German and Egyptian researchers has come up with a very efficient way of stopping desertification and even reclaiming land from the dry sands. While forests have been used to stop the spread of deserts into fertile land for a very long time, the absence of rainfall makes nurturing the trees and keeping them healthy an almost impossible task in most African countries. But it turns out we don’t have to rely on water falling from the sky, as waste water works even better for plants and trees not intended for human consumption.

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After making some of the most delicious pizza on the east side if Indianapolis for the last three decades, the owner of D & C Pizza has come up with anew recipe that he hopes will take guns off the streets and reduce the high crime rate.

Donald Dancy wants to offer a free extra-large pizza to anyone who turns in a gun at his shop. It may seem like a strange tradeoff since pizza is relatively cheap while guns sell for hundreds of dollars on the street, but the pizza shop owner says he has lots of customers who carry illegal guns and would be more than glad to take advantage of the unusual promotion. His plan is to hold the guns in a safe place until police officers arrive to pick them up.

“I can see kids 14 through 18 coming in here and buying a pizza and their guns fall out,” Dancy said. “When you pass here right off of 36th and go all the way down to 25th street and over, it is like a war zone. It is not getting any better.”

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You may not of heard of it before, but Solid Rain has been helping Mexican farmers fights severe droughts for over a decade. The miracle powder is actually a super absorbent polymer that can soak up water up to 500 times its original size and keep it in the ground for up to a year.

The story of Solid Rain began in 1970, when the United States Department of Agriculture developed a super absorbent product made from a type of starch known as “super slurper”. In the U.S., it has mainly been used in disposable diapers, to help keep baby bottoms dry, but a Mexican chemical engineer saw this magic powder as an opportunity to effectively fight the drought plaguing his country.

Sergio Rico Velasco developed and patented a different version of potassium polyacrylate that could be mixed with soil and slowly feed water to plants over a long period of time. His company, Solid Rain, has been quietly selling the product to Mexican farmers for over 10 years now.

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Woralop, a 44-year-old homeless man from Thailand, only had nine baht (¢25) to his name when he found a Hermes leather wallet with 20,000 baht ($579USD) and several credit cards. It was more than enough to buy him food and even a place to stay for weeks, maybe months, but he chose to return it. The kind gesture would soon prove to be life-changing.

You’ve probably been asked what you would do if you found a wallet full of cash, at least once in your life. Would you keep, it, turn it in to the police, ask for a reward? This question always tests a person’s moral values, but for someone who has hit rock bottom, the answer seems pretty clear. And yet Woralop claims he didn’t even think about keeping the wallet, and even ran after the owner to return it, after seeing him dropping it by mistake. He couldn’t catch up with the man, but he went straight to the nearest police station to hand it over.

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The iBag2 is a digitally programmable handbag designed to flash and vibrate when “danger spending zones” are hit and even self-lock if these discreet warnings are ignored by shopaholics.

Launched by personal finance website Finder.com, the iBag2 is the result of a joint effort from a female-led team of engineers from robotics firm Colmac Robotics Ltd in Ireland and renowned New York-based fashion designer Geova Rodriguez. The first were in charge of the robotics of the accessory while the latter came up with the couture design. Finder claims it has created the unique products to help monitor and curb impulsive spending and avoid buyer’s remorse.

The iBag2 comes with a series of built-in features that remind shoppers of their spending goals whenever they reach for their wallet and even self-locks when it believes that they are most vulnerable. For example, the GPS tracking feature lets the iBag2 know when you are approaching one of your pre-programmed vulnerable spending zones, so it can warn you via flashing amber lights. An RFID system connected to LED lights and vibration motors also sends discreet warnings whenever you reach for your wallet, to remind you of your spending goals. But perhaps the most notable feature of this smart handbag is the self-locking mechanism. A magnetic field is used to snap two steel plates together to lock the bag whenever the built-in timer signals your most vulnerable spending moments during the course of a day or when you enter one of the vulnerable spending zones mentioned above.

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The Norwegian Environment Agency has recently released a series of haunting images of at least 323 dead reindeer – 70 of them calves – killed in what has been described as one of the deadliest lightning strikes ever.

It is unclear exactly when the natural disaster occurred, but the hundreds of dead bodies were discovered on Friday by a group of hunters in a remote area of the barren Hardanangervidda plateau, in central Norway. Spanning some 8,000 square kilometers, Hardangervidda is the largest high mountain plateau in northern Europe and the largest national park in Norway, with a population of 10,000 to 11,000 wild reindeer.

While the specifics of the mass death will probably never be known, experts say that animals tend to huddle together in extreme weather, which makes it easier for lightning to pass through their bodies. Norwegian officials say that multiple animal deaths caused by lightning strike is not very uncommon, but the scale of this event is definitely unheard of. “We are not familiar with any previous happening on such a scale,” Kjartan Knutsen of the Norwegian Environment Agency said. “Individual animals do from time to time get killed by lightning, and there are incidents where sheep have been killed in groups of 10 or even 20, but we have never seen anything like this.”

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Mbah Gotho, an Indonesian man from the island of Java, has official documentation that attests that he was born on December 31st, 1870. If confirmed, this would make him 23 years older than the than the official world record holder for world’s oldest human, French woman JeanneCalment who died at 122.

Authorities in Gotho’s hometown of Sragen told local media that they have verified their records and an ID card with his date of birth posted online, and that his claim appears legit. However, until his documents are independently verified, he cannot officially be named the oldest human being in history. Not that the title matters to much to Gotho, who in a recent interview told reporters that he has only one wish left – to die. While it may sound eerie, it’s an understandable desire, considering his current situation.

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Aware that once something is on the internet, it says on the internet, a man from Weifang, China’s Shandong province, actually destroyed the physical internet infrastructure in his neighborhood to prevent some embarrassing photos of himself from appearing online.

The man, only identified as Liu, had only recently arrived in Weifang in search of a job, when he attended neighborhood square dance. The popular activity is usually associated with middle-aged women, but that didn’t bother him. At least, not until he noticed bystanders laughing and taking photos of him showing his dancing skills. He quickly left the event after that, but couldn’t shake the feeling that the people who had photographed him would share the embarrassing photos online.

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Barbara Murphy, of Roy, Utah, is giving the phrase “walking dead” a whole new meaning. The 64-year-old woman is alive and in pretty good health, but, for some reason, the Social Security Administration believes she died on in July 2014 and is attempting to take back two years’ worth of Social Security payments and recuperate Medicare or Medicaid treatment costs.

Barbara first experienced the woes of being dead on paper despite otherwise perfectly alive two weeks ago, while out to dinner with her granddaughter. When it was time to pay the bill, the waitress returned with her credit card and told her it had been rejected. Her husband was able to pay for the bill, but when her granddaughter, who works at a bank, called the office to ask about the status of Barbara’s account, she learned that it had been frozen after the Social Security Administration issued notice of her death.

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48-year-old Emyr Mathias, a builder from Ceredigion, Wales, is preparing to embark on an epic 200-mile journey carrying a 25-kg wooden cross from St. Davids in Pembrokeshire to the top of Mount Snowdon, after getting a series of visions from the Lord.

A devout Christian for the past 31 years, Emyr says he is taking on the monumental challenge in response to a calling he received from God. It all started a couple of years ago, when he started getting these strange visions. In the first one he was carrying a St David’s flag from St David’s to Snowdon, but he dismissed it as silly, telling himself “I’m not carrying a flag on the road – that’s silly!” Then, he claims he had a second vision in which God told him “I want you to carry a cross from St David’s to Snowdon,” but again Emyr thought “I’m not doing that”.

Not long after having these visions, Mathias met Angie Taylor who, after the loss of her son, carried a cross from Land’s End to John O’Groats with amazing testimonies of what the Lord did along the way. After telling her about God’s message to him, she said “You daft bat! Get the cross made!” So he did.

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A Japanese tombstone company is using the augmented reality technology made popular by Pokemon Go to allow mourners to “catch” pre-recorded video messages from their deceased loved ones in cemeteries.

Named “Spot Message”, the new Pokemon Go-inspired app is the brainchild of Yoshiyuki Katori, president of Ryoshin Sekizai, a tombstone company based in Katori, Japan’s Chiba prefecture. He claims that the new technology realizes his longtime dream of preserving realistic memories of the dearly departed for the living. “My uncle, who ran a paint store, died eight years ago after he fell from a tall structure at work,” 33-year-old Katori said. “His death was so sudden, and it shattered the lives of his family. I also respected him a lot, so I would often visit his grave, consulting with him in my mind whenever I had issues concerning my business. I wondered how comforting it would be if he could talk to me at his grave, with messages like ‘How are you doing?’ and ‘Hang in there.’ ”

His desire to hear his uncle’s words at his grave inspired the Japanese entrepreneur to use augmented reality to plant pre-recorded messages from the dead at their graves and other places dear to them, for their living friends and family to discover using their smartphones.

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A young Vietnamese woman recently shocked police after admitting that she had paid someone to cut off her left hand and foot, so she could claim a health insurance payoff of roughly $180,000.

The extreme insurance scam reportedly began in May, when a 30-year-old woman named only as Ly Thi N convinced an acquaintance to cut of her left arm and foot in exchange for 50 million dong ($2,200). The plan was to make it look like she had been hit by a train, so the cold-blooded accomplice, named as Doan Van D, acted like a bystander who just happened to find her injured near a railroad in Hanoi. He was the one who called an ambulance and notified the police about the “accident”.

Ly Thi N was found lying in the ground with a severed hand and leg, and the woman told police that she had wandering near the railway track when a train passed by and dragged her under it. Doan Van D, who she described as a total stranger, just happened to pass by and ended up saving her life. At first, everyone thought that the victim was lucky to be alive, but policemen investigating the accident became suspicious after learning that the woman and the 21-year-old who allegedly found her by accident actually knew each other quite well. Read More »

In a bid to give their children a head start in life, wealthy Chinese parents are enrolling them in all kinds of early education programs, including CEO training courses.

Chinese state media reports that an early education institute in Guangzhou, China’s Guangdong province, is offering a ‘CEO training course’ for kids aged between 3 and 12, at a price of 50,000 yuan ($7,500) per year. Kids attend two classes per week, during which they engage in activities such as filing in missing words in sentences and stacking up toy bricks. That doesn’t sound like anything special, but according to a promotional brochure released by the institute, the course “enables young children to become a powerful, competitive leader”.

There’s no denying that China probably has the most competitive educational environment in the world, which means parents would do almost anything to make sure their children don’t get left behind, but experts believe such extravagant courses ultimately benefit the parents rather than the children. They regard their kids’ attendance to such classes as evidence of the family’s social status, completely disregarding the fact that the syllabus they offer is of no real value.

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