Most bridges in North Carolina have a 15-foot clearance, but the one at the intersection of Gregson and Peabody streets in Durham is over 100 years old, so it has a clearance of 11 feet 8 inches. That’s pretty rare, so many drivers don’t really pay attentions to the warning signs and they become a victim of the famous can opener bridge.

Over the years, Durham’s 11’8″ bridge in damaged well over 100 trucks. It has become such a problem that state authorities went out of their way to mark it as an unusually low clearance bridge, in the hope that most overheight truck drivers would turn back. But the thing is a lot o them don’t pay attention to the signs, and by the time they realize they may not fit, it’s too late. In the end, the state had no choice but to break the piggy bank and lift the old train bridge by 20 centimeters, to avoid accidents, but that doesn’t seem to have done much good, as the can opener recently claimed its 167th victim.

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South Korean clothing brand Leje has been the talk of the town on Twitter after unveiling two very bizarre new jeans designs that look like wearable trompe l’oeil illusions.

Called “Slash Jeans”, the newest clothing items in Leje’s 2021 collection actually make your legs look like they’ve been slashed by a samurai or a ninja. At least that’s what they look like in the photos posted on the company’s Instagram, it remains to be seen if the effect is the same in real life. So how did Leje’s designers create this illusion? Well, it looks like they actually sliced the jeans and then stitched the pieces together unevenly, which is both simple and clever.

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Johnny Dawes, one of the influential rock climbers in history, and a true living legend in certain circles, has been getting a lot of attention in recent years for his no-handed climbing feats.

Dawes, aka the Stone Monkey, the Leaping Boy, the Dawes, has always been famous for his dynamic rock climbing style and bold ascents, but his most recent endeavors are probably the most impressive, at least to the untrained eye. Now in his late 50s, the English rock climber has dedicated himself to the esoteric discipline known as no-handed climbing, which as the name suggests, is all about climbing steep rock faces without using your hands. It sounds crazy, but it looks even more so.

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John Sevier Austin, a video editor from North Carolina, has a very unusual superpower – his brain allows him to speak and sing backwards, and is fluent in the unique “language”.

Ever since he was a young boy, Austin knew that he was a bit different than most children his age. Try as he might, he never fit in with the other kids, he could never be on the same page with them, and that really messed with his head growing up. It wasn’t until a few years ago that he found out he had Asperger’s syndrome, a neurodevelopmental disorder on the autism spectrum, which explained both his social awkwardness and his strange superpower – the ability to speak and sing backwards.

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A 23-year-old university student was recently sentenced to two and a half years in prison for swindling KFC out of about $31,000 in fast food, by taking advantage of an ordering loophole.

The student, surnamed Xu first discovered the glitch in 2018, and not only continued to use it to his benefit for the next six months, but he also shared it with friends and even profited financially from it. The Jiangsu-based student accidentally realized that he could order free food by paying for it using coupons in the official KFC app, and then immediately asking for a refund of the coupons using the company’s WeChat account. It was any KFC’s fan dream come true, all the fried chicken you could eat, totally free.

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Poltys mouhoti, aka the Rolled-up Leaf Spider, is a fascinating arachnid that uses incredible camouflage to protect itself from predators during the day.

Native to Vietnam, but also spotted in other Asian countries like Cambodia, Thailand or Malaysia, the aptly-named rolled-up leaf spider is part of the Poltys genus of spiders, which numbers 43 known sub-species, most of which have this amazing ability to mimic plant parts as a self-defense mechanism. They accomplish this by tucking their legs in towards their abdomen, and extending a long, stem-like appendage outward. Even their body has a brown and green coloration and a shape reminiscent of a broken branch, which enhances the camouflage even more.

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Videos shot during a wedding in Pingdingshan, China’s Henan Province, have gone viral on social media, because of the three bridesmaids and their unusual gender.

The role of bridesmaid is traditionally reserved for women, but what happens if the bride doesn’t have any female friends, or if none of her friends can make it to the wedding? Desperate times call for desperate measures, and one woman in Pingdingshan, China, recently managed to surprise everyone in attendance at her wedding with three very unusual bridesmaids, all men. You couldn’t really tell at first glance, as they were all wearing pink sleeveless dresses, long-haired wigs and even makeup, but a closer look revealed clear manly features.

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Designer Yuru Zhang recently won a design competition with a thin, card-like lipstick inspired by the way Chinese women applied lip makeup hundreds of years ago.

The humble lipstick tube feels like it has been around forever, doesn’t it? It hasn’t obviously, but it has become some widely adopted that it is basically the only way most of us visualize lipstick. Well, one designer wants that to change and he has come up with an ingenious design for lipstick that looks nothing like the good old tube Maurice Levi invented back in 1915. Instead, he has come up with a slick, card-like design inspired by the sheets of pigment-infused paper that Chinese women used to apply lip makeup centuries ago.

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A Chinese woman who thought she had bought a pet micro-pig three years ago ended up with a 150-kg regular pig usually bred for its meat.

In 2018, Zhang Li, a young woman living in Shanghai, decided to get a pet animal for company. She wasn’t really a cat or dog person, so she started looking for an alternative, and thought she had found it when she saw an advertisement for a micro-pig. She did her research, and learn that the miniature pigs made great pets; they were adorable, grew only about the size of a small dog, and were very intelligent. So she decided to take the plunge and get one for herself, not knowing that she would end up with a 150kg beast as a pet.

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A small, oval-shaped face with a well-defined and pointy V-line chin is one of the most coveted female beauty features in many Asian countries, and they can apparently get it by simply sucking on a bottle-shaped gadget for 10 minutes a day.

You can buy pretty much anything online these days, but every once in a while we stumble upon products so bizarre that they make us scratch our heads an wonder who would ever pay money for them. Case in point, this weird beauty accessory on Chinese shopping platform TaoBao, which is supposed to help reshape users faces, if they suck on it for just 10 minutes a day. Marketed as an electric facial exerciser, the bottle-shaped gadget apparently vibrates up to 880 times per minute and it’s these high-frequency vibrations that somehow stimulate facial muscles and reshape your face.

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Almost every morning for the past two decades, Juliet the macaw has been visiting the local zoo in Rio de Janeiro to interact with others of her kind through the metal enclosure. She is the only wild macaw in the Brazilian metropolis, and this is her only opportunity to socialize.

Macaws are social birds, so loneliness is a tough burden to bare for Juliet, a beautiful blue-and-yellow macaw who calls Rio home. She is the only wild specimen seen in city since 1818, and no one really knows much about her. Zoo staff named the bird Juliet, but they don’t even know if she is actually female. It’s really hard to tell with macaws, and to establish her true gender they would need to capture the bird, and either examine her gonads or take blood or feather samples. And there’s really no need to put Juliet through all that stress just to satisfy human curiosity.

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Scientists the world over have been struggling to contain the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus for almost two years, but one Indian numerologist believes we can cure the world of this pandemic just with the help of bad spelling.

SV Annandd Rao, a stenographer and numerology hobbyist from Ananthapuram, in India’s Andrash Pradesh state, believes that simply spelling “covid” and “corona” the wrong way can cure not only his home district, but the entire world of coronavirus. Apparently the numbers corresponding to the letters in the current spelling of these words add up to a very dangerous number, which will bring the world to its knees. But if we could change that terrible number to something beneficial, by simply adding some letters, than all will be well…

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Serama chickens are the smallest in the world, but you really couldn’t tell by their attitude. Seeing them pose with their head pulled back and chest sticking out, you’d think they were some sort of feathered bodybuilders.

The Serama chicken breed can be traced back all the way to the 1600s, to the Kelantan province of Malaysia, but the current strain can be attributed to Wee Yean Een, a breeder who popularized it during the 1970s and even gave the chicken the Serama name, after King Rama of Thailand. However, the breed was rendered almost extinct by the bird flu pandemic of the early 2000s. Luckily, they had already been exported to many countries around the world by that point, including the US and UK, and were able to make a comeback.

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Who knew watching and listening to a bartender chop block of ice into translucent jewels with a santoku knife could be so satisfying?

A Tokyo bartender recently got his five minutes of online fame after a video of him carefully turning blocks of ice into beautiful jewels went viral on Twitter, getting over one million views. It doesn’t sound like anything remotely interesting, but I spent close to an hour today just watching him slice the ice into almost perfects cubes and then cut the corners and sharp edges to create these crystal-like cubes for his patrons.

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Bugatti, a company known for its exclusive sport cars, recently unveiled a $300,000 luxury pool table that relies on highly advanced gyroscopic technology to remain perfectly level in any conditions, making it usable on yachts.

There are a few things in this world that money can’t buy, and until now, playing pool at sea was one of them. Try as they might, engineers could not design a table to negate the rocking of the boat and remain level. Until now, that is, because Bugatti apparently managed to create a self-leveling pool table that will allow the rich and powerful to enjoy a game of billiards on their expensive yachts.

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