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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Kagami Numa is a mythical Japanese lake that turns into a giant eye every spring, during the thawing process, hence its nickname, Dragon’s Eye Lake.

Located near the summit of Mount Hachimantai in north-eastern Japan, in the middle of a dense forest, Kagami Numa doesn’t look much different than the many other volcanic lakes in the area, most of the year. But for about a week – ate May to early June – it turns into a giant blue eye that inspired its intriguing nickname, Dragon’s Eye Lake. The unique appearance of the circular lake during this one week has inspired a legend of two dragons in love that chose this body of water as their meeting spot.

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A tree seemingly growing out of a pristine white salt island in the heart of the Dead Sea isn’t something you’d expect to see when visiting the world’s saltiest body of water, and yet that’s exactly the sight you’re treated to near the beach of Ein Bokek.

With a salt concentration over 10 times that of the ocean, the Dead Sea is incapable of sustaining any plant or animal life, so come there’s a tree growing there, and on an island made of salt, of all places? Within swimming distance of the beach in Ein Bokek, an Israeli resort near Arad, lies the iconic Dead Sea Salt Island, a surreal natural formation made of dazzling white salt and surrounded by turquoise water. At its center are a pool of shallow, inviting water, and a tree that has no place being there. And yet…

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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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A talented makeup artist has been getting a lot of attention online thanks to her short TikTok clips where she apparently uses her skills to turn into stars like Taylor Swift or Billie Eilish.

We’ve seen makeup artists use tricks of the trade to transform into doppelgangers of celebrities and iconic characters before, but not in the way the artist posting under the @gilianisme TikTok handle does it. The end result, in most of the clips I’ve seen, is suspiciously realistic, which make me wonder if she is using some sort of digital manipulation to achieve this impressive result. No way to no for sure, really, but if she can pull this sort of transformations only with makeup, she is more of a sorceress than a makeup artist.

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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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UK-based artist Justin Bateman creates some of the most amazing ephemeral artworks you’ve ever seen – intricate mosaics made up of hundreds, even thousands of colorful pebbles.

Looking at some of Justin Bateman’s masterpieces, it’s hard to believe that this level of detail can be achieved using only by arranging colorful pebbles and small rocks. And yet the English artist does in fact spend several hours putting each artwork together out of small fragments of rock. What makes his effort even more impressive is that his works are usually assembled on beaches, meaning they are only temporary. Can you imagine creating something as spectacular as these mosaics only to take a few photos of it and then walk away knowing it will be lost forever?

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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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A young  Vietnamese nail art expert who had to close down his business during the pandemic, used the time off to develop a stunning new kind of artificial fingernail art.

Le Dai Phat is recognized as one of the most talented nail artists in Ho Chi Minh City, and looking at his stunning hand-painted designs it’s easy to see why. From celebrity portraits to religion and Vietnamese culture-inspired designs, the 28-year-old artisan can create some truly impressive wearable artworks. But it was a new style he developed while quarantined at home because of Covid that really got people talking about him. Using up to 10 lined-up artificial fingernails, Phat is able to paint entire stories in the greatest of detail.

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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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