Every summer, around 400 hunters scour a small, remote island in Iceland’s Breizafjörzur Bay in search of an unusual treasure – the world’s most expensive feathers

The hunt for the world’s most precious feathers has been held almost every year for over a millennia. People have known that Eiderdown, the feathers of the Eider polar duck, is one of the warmest natural fibers on the planet for a really long time, and nowadays they use it to make the best duvets and quilts money can buy. A kilogram of Eiderdown sells for thousands of dollars, as the feathers are only used to make luxury products. Eider ducks shed the precious down from their breast and uses to line their nests to insulate them during hatching. It’s these nests that the hunters are after during their annual Eiderdown hunt.

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A group of gamers in the Philippines recently made international news headlines for continuing to play their favorite video game despite being waist-deep in floods from a typhoon.

Surreal footage showing the young video game enthusiasts simply ignoring the rising water level was captured last Thursday, at an internet cafe in the town of Cainta in Rizal, which had been heavily battered by typhoon Ying-fa. Despite being half-submerged in muddy flood water and a very real risk of being electrocuted, the kids appear glued to their monitors, ready to engage in multiplayer matches. It was only when the owner of the cafe realized the danger they were in that the computers were shut down and the gamers finally left.

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A young Vietnamese-born woman has gone to extreme lengths to shrink her waist to just 46 centimeters in circumference, including eating just one meal a day and wearing a corset almost all the time.

An Ky, a part-time dancer living in the United States, was discovered by popular Vietnamese entertainer Thuy Nga, during the latter’s American tour, las winter. While visiting a milk tea cafe where Ky happened to be working, the Vietnamese comedian and television personality noticed the young girl’s incredibly tiny waist and decided to do a video about it. She showcased the young woman’s tiny waist and also asked her a few questions about how she managed to get her waist circumference down to a whopping 46 centimeters and how she maintains the extreme hourglass figure.

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Araucaria columnaris, also known as the coral reef araucaria, Cook pine or New Caledonia pine, is a species of conifer native to New Caledonia that tends to tilt sideways when planted outside its natural habitat.

First classified by Johann Reinhold Forster, a botanist accompanying Captain James Cook on his second voyage to circumnavigate the globe as far south as possible, the araucaria columnaris soon became popular all around the world, thanks to its distinctive narrowly conical shape and its height (up to 60 meters). Nowadays, these evergreen giants are planted as ornamental trees in various areas with warm and temperate climate on five continents, and they generally don’t attract too much attention, but in some cases they have one noticeable particularity – they lean heavily to one side, and when there are more of them planted in the same area, they all lean in the same direction…

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The Guoliang Tunnel connecting the clifftop village of Guoliang, in China’s Henan province, to the outside world was carved by hand using basic tools like chisels and hammers, and is now referred to as the eight wonder of the world.

For centuries, the people of Guoliang, a small Chinese village perched atop a cliff in the Taihang Mountains, were virtually cut off from the outside world. The only way in and out of the village was the “Sky Ladder,” 720 steps carved into the mountains during the Song Dynasty (960-1279). This made it extremely hard to get things in and out of the village, so most of the 300 or so inhabitants considered moving away in search of a better, easier life. However, everything changed in 1972, when the village council decided to carve a tunnel through the mountains to finally connect Guoliang to the outside world.

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A 37-year-old father of one from Texas woke up one day ready to go to school, thinking it was the 1990s, after losing the last two decades of his life, including ever marrying his wife and having a daughter.

In July of last year, Daniel Porter, a hearing specialist from Texas woke up in his bed just like any other morning, only something was wrong. A woman who he had never seen before was sleeping next to him, and when he looked in the mirror, an “old and fat” man was looking back at him. Daniel had gotten up thinking it was time to go to school, not knowing that he had graduated high-school nearly two decades before, and that the strange woman in his bed was his wife, with whom he had a 10-year-old daughter.

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The “Class of Life” is a controversial program introduced in various Japanese middle-schools where students spend months raising and getting attached to fish, before having to decide whether to eat them or not.

A part of the Sea and Japan Project sponsored by Nippon Foundation, the Class of Life was introduced in a number of schools across Japan in 2019, with the goal of teaching young students about the work that goes into land-based aquaculture, the challenges the activity involves, and last but not least, the importance of life. To this end, students in classes 4th to 6th are entrusted with a number of small fish and tasked with raising them to maturity for at least six months and up to a year. The controversial aspect of the program is that at the end, the students need to decide the fate of the fish, whether to release or eat them…

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Chinese media recently reported the case of a 14-year-old boy who shocked police when he accused his father of “illegal child labor”, because he had been forced to do chores around the house.

The bizarre incident allegedly took place this week in Ma’anshan, China’s Anhui province. Sick of seeing his son with his hands and eyes glued to his smartphone, and ignoring his homework and studies, a parent decided to give the boy a taste of life’s hardships, and asked him to put down the handheld and do some housework. Angry with his father making him take a break from his phone, the reportedly smartphone-addicted teenager snuck out of the house when his father wasn’t paying attention and went straight to the police station. There, he proceeded to accuse his father of “illegal child labor”.

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“Remote cohabitation” has become a hot topic in Japan over the past couple of days, after a popular TV show reported that young couples prefer to live separately and keep in touch using free video call apps.

On July 21st, TV Asahi’s ” Hatori Shinichi Morning Show” featured remote cohabitation as a growing trend among young Japanese couple who either prefer or are forced to live separately. It involves the use of free video call apps like Line or Skype to keep in touch for hours on end, even all through the night. A couple used as an example during the show, said that they leave the app open during the night so they can “wake up together”, and only turn it off when they are at work. This way they feel like they are together, even though one lives in Tokyo and the other in Ibaraki Prefecture.

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South Korean media recently reported the bizarre and sad story of an elderly couple who spent the last decade of their lives hoarding tons of trash for their 40-something son who refused to leave the house and find a job.

SBS, a South Korean national television network presented the shocking story of Choi, a 75-year-old man from Gwangju, who over the last decade turned his two-storey house into a dump full of garbage gathered from the city streets and from trash cans. Convinced that one man’s garbage is another man’s treasure, the pensioner literally filled up his entire house with junk, before doing the same with the balconies and even the yard. As you can see from the photos below, the house was quite literally buried in trash.

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Gijs Schalkx, a Dutch inventor and engineering student, modified his motorcycle to run on methane harvested from roadside bogs and ponds.

Aptly named Sloot Motor (sloot means ‘ditch’ in Dutch), Gijs Schalkx’s ingenious vehicle features a modified Honda GX160 motorcycle engine, with a hole into the airbox, through which it receives the methane. The bright inventor than hooks a balloon filled with methane to the hole, which acts as the fuel tank. The engine still starts with gasoline, but once it starts, it uses the methane to keep going. But what truly makes Gijs’ project special is the fact that he manually harvests the methane himself from roadside swamps and ponds, a labor that takes approximately eight hours. The methane only lasts 12 miles at a top speed of 27mph.

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One of the last thing you expect to see in the middle of an urban paved street is a grave complete with a large tombstone, but that’s exactly what you’re treated to when driving through the Turkish city of Sivas.

Yeni Mahalle Hamzaoğlu is one of the several streets that traverse the relatively new Şarkışla district of Sivas, in central Turkey, but there’s something special about it. At one point, motorists need to make sure that they don’t drive straight into a grave located right in the middle of the asphalt. It’s been there for several years now, but only recently gained national attention, after photos and drone footage went viral on social media.

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36-year-old Juan Dual likes to joke that he is empty inside, but in his case the phrase has a literal meaning. Over the years, he has had his stomach, colon, rectum and gallbladder removed, but he has learned to live without them.

Juan’s sad but inspiring story began when he was only 13-years-old. It was then that he was diagnosed with a terrible hereditary condition called familial multiple polyposis, which left him with a 99.8% chance of developing cancer of the digestive system. His grandmother and an uncle of hers died of colon adenocarcinoma, and his father had undergone surgery of the bowels to avoid succumbing to the same fate. At age 19, right after finishing high-school, Juan underwent a tough operation to have his colon and rectum removed. Sadly, it was only the beginning…

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Alexander Volchek, an obstetrician-gynecologist from Novosibirsk, Russia, has been dubbed “Doctor Chip” by Russian media, after he had several tiny chips implanted under his skin to help him perform daily tasks seamlessly.

Volchek recently made news headlines in Russia after announcing that he recently implanted a bank card chip in his arm, which he hopes will help pay for stuff just by swiping his palm instead of an actual credit card. The implant has been attempted several times before in Russia, but failed every time, so he hopes to become the first happy recipient of a contactless transmission chip in the country’s history. But this is only the latest addition to Doctor Chip’s growing collection of subdermal implants, some of which he had done as far back as 2014.

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Convinced that their home is haunted by a ghost, a French couple have been sleeping in a small tent installed on the balcony of their apartment for over a month.

Patricia and David C. and their two children moved into an apartment in the social park of Semcoda, in Replonges, France, last September. Built in 2016 on land that previously accommodated an old hangar, their new home was spacious, well-lit and modern, but the family didn’t get to enjoy it for two long, as bizarre things started happening. Patricia claims that her daughter started seeing strange things around the house soon after they moved in, and after a while the whole family became convinced that paranormal activity was at play inside their apartment. Things got so bad that they had to install a tent on the balcony to get a peaceful night’s sleep, and they have been using it for over a month.

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