34-year-old David Dowell, a father of three from Brisbane, Australia, tragically lost his life after becoming infected with salmonella, which friends claim was the result of him eating a small gecko lizard as a party dare.

Dowell, who would have turned 35 last week, was brought in to Brisbane’s Mater Hospital in “absolute agony” on December 3, 2018, three days after some friends reportedly saw him eating a gecko at a party. He never mentioned it to his partner, Allira, and to this day no one really knows for sure if he actually ate it, but a few days after that Saturday party, he was in the hospital fighting for his life. At first, doctors thought he was suffering from gastroenteritis, but in reality he had become infected with salmonella, a foodborne bacteria, that causes diarrhea, stomach cramps, fever, and, in rare cases, even death.

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Kong Zhenlan, a 71-year-old woman from China’s Shanxi Province, has dedicated the last four decades of her life to adopting and raising orphaned children, making sure that they had food on the table and got access to education.

Even though she could barely afford to support herself on a modest income, Kong Zhenlan couldn’t bear to walk by the orphanage in Jixian County every day and see so many children struggling in abhorrent poverty. One day, she stopped by and picked one of the orphans in her arms; that’s when she knew she had to to something to make their life better. The modest woman started adopting these abandoned children and raising them as her own. Over the last 47 years, she has adopted 45 orphans, some of whom grew up to become doctors and lawyers.

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The “Delusion Splash T-shirt” is an intriguing Japanese garment that cleverly uses shading to trick people into thinking that you look much better than you actually do.

Japanese clothing designers seem to be on a quest to help consumers achieve the toned physique they’ve always dreamed of without actually stepping foot in a gym or turning to plastic surgery. After the Super Macho T, an inflatable undershirt that artificially enhanced skinny men’s muscles, and the Illusion Grid t-shirt, a women’s shirt that used distortion and shading to create the illusion of an ample bosom, we now have yet another white t-shirt designed to create the illusion of an enhanced physique. Created by the brilliant minds at ekoD Works, the new Faint Muscle Mousou Mapping T-shirt is designed to look sheer, revealing the wearer’s impressive assets.

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Imagine hearing someone chewing a piece of bubble gum loudly and being overwhelmed by a feeling of anger, disgust or panic. Sounds like loud chewing or slurping can be hard to put up with for most of us, but for people suffering from a rare condition called misophonia, it’s virtually impossible.

Misophonia, also known as Selective Sound Sensitivity, is usually described as a strong emotional or physiological response to the presence or anticipation of certain sounds that are usually human-generated, like the sound of someone biting into crunchy foods, clicking noises, knuckle cracking, even breathing. While anger is the most common reaction recorded in misphonia sufferers, anxiety and disgust are also possible responses. But these intense emotions are also accompanied by a release of adrenaline which causes symptoms like raised pulse, shakiness, sweating and a raised heart rate. This makes dealing with experiences most of us consider mundane almost impossible for people with misophonia.

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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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