In the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon lurks one of the strangest and oldest known organisms on planet Earth- a giant fungus that has been around for over 2,400 years. Armillaria ostoyae, also known as the “shoestring fungus” or “honey mushrooms”, covers an area of 2200 acres, or 3 square miles, making it the largest organism ever discovered. It began its life cycle as a single spore, too small to be seen by the naked eye, and is estimated to have been slowly spreading for at least the past two and a half millennia, although some experts estimate that it is around 8000-years-old.

The giant fungus spreads through the root system of the forest under which it resides and slowly kills whatever is in its path, making it not only the largest organism on the planet but also one of the most deadly. For a few weeks each autumn, the honey mushroom erupts in yellowish clusters with caps, gills and spores, but the rest of the year it takes the shape of a thin white layer, similar to latex paint. It is in this less conspicuous form, however, that the fungus is most lethal, as it can spread more easily through the trees.

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A poor dog has reportedly “died of a broken heart” after being abandoned by her owner at an airport in Colombia. She spent the last month of her life wandering around the airport in search of her master and eventually stopped eating as a result of severe depression.

The distressed dog, named Nube Viajera (Traveling Cloud) by the veterinarians who rescued her from Palonegro airport, near Bucaramanga, and looked after her until the very end, was only about two years old, but after a month of wandering around sniffing passengers and refusing to accept food and water, she had become so weak that she was barely able to stand. Witnesses said that in the last days of her life, the animal gave up her daily search and crawled into an isolated corner, refusing to accept any food that passengers and airport staff offered her. She was finally taken to a veterinarian clinic after someone alerted the Friends of Animals and Nature Foundation of Bucaramanga, but despite their best efforts, she died within 48 hours of being rescued.

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If you’ve been having trouble finding the right cocktail to suite your taste, look no further than the Vockatil, a high-tech cocktail glass that relies on three layers of sensory stimulation to trick your senses into thinking that the plain water you’re sipping is the most amazing thing you’ve ever tasted.

The Vocktail – short for virtual cocktail – glass technically lets you turn water into wine, or pretty much any other drink imaginable. It accomplishes this messianic miracle through multisensory stimulation, essentially tricking your eyes, nose and taste buds that you’re consuming something completely different. The revolutionary glass comes equipped with LED lights that allow you to change the color of the drink, sliver electrodes on the rim of the glass which stimulate the tongue so that it tastes the liquid as salty, sweet or sour, and three micro air pumps equipped with flavor cartridges, which are activated when a person sips from the glass, fooling their nose into detecting a far greater variety of subtle flavors.

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The untimely death of a 20-year-old video game streamer from China who used to play an insanely popular online game for 9 hours straight every night recently brought the addictive nature of video games into debate.

“Lonely King” was one of the most successful streamers of “King of Glory”, an incredibly successful mobile game with 200 million monthly active players. The 20-year-old reportedly had over 170,000 fans on his streaming platform, and used to showcase his gaming sessions for many hours on end, every single day. Lonely King’s last live playing session occurred on November 2nd, after which he simply disappeared. Used to watching his live streams at least once every 24 hours, Lonely King’s fans started speculating about his well-being several days after noticing his continued absence. Many of them anticipated that he might have succumbed to exhaustion, seeing as he had drastically altered his video game playing schedule – streaming from midnight to 9 in the morning, every night – since July.

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Jimmy Sabatino, one of Florida’s most notorious and prolific conmen, was recently convicted to 20 years of solitary confinement, after pleading guilty to running a $10.4 million (USD) fraud. He was already in prison at the time, but managed to run a successful racketeering operation with the help of associates on the outside. During his trial, Sabatino told the judge that he cannot stop himself from committing crimes, and requested that he be sentenced to solitary confinement at Supermax, one of the toughest prisons in the US. He claims that the lack of human contact is the only thing that can stop him from conning people.

Sabatino, who has spent most of his life since age 19 behind bars, was serving a sentence at the Federal Detention Center in Miami for violating the terms of his supervised release, in 2014, when he came up with an idea of another con, from inside the prison. He somehow convinced two correction officers at the detention center to smuggle 5 mobile phones for him, which he used to call victims and associates on the outside. Both officers lost their jobs, but neither of them faced criminal prosecution.

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In the quiet Canadian village of Horning’s Mills, 100 km north of Toronto, lies the 12.5-acre homestead of Bruce and Jean Beach. On the surface, the land appears to be a typical rural property, but buried deep under those green fields is the largest private nuclear fallout shelter in North America- The Ark Two.

Bruce Beach’s famous nuclear shelter measures a staggering 10,000 square feet, and is primarily made up of 42 old school busses encased in concrete and buried under 14 feet into the ground. The Ark Two was designed to accommodate 500 people for several months and is equipped with everything you could possibly need to survive, from giant supplies of food, a private well, full plumbing, redundant fuel generators, to a dentist’s chair and even a daycare.

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Manabu Kosaka, an artist from Saitama, Japan, has a very special skill – he can recreate virtually any wristwatch model exclusively out of high-quality Kent paper. The results of his painstaking labor are so utterly incredible that the saying “seeing is believing” doesn’t really apply.

So how does one go about recreating a seemingly perfect replica of a Rolex or Casio wristwatch out of nothing but paper? You could probably use a special 3D printer or some other advanced device, but Manabu Kosaka does it all by hand, first drawing the design on a sheet of Kent paper, and then using rudimentary tools like glue, dremels, an Xacto knife to cut tiny characters as small as 1 mm in size, and tweezers to place them at just the right place. I still can’t understand how he can mould the paper dials and the wristbands of the watches in such great detail, but they are certainly impressive to look at.

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In the pantheon of San Francisco, the oldest in Acapulco, lies the tomb of Raul “Raulito” González, who was born on April 2, 1932, and died on February 2, 1933, at the age of 10 months. The tomb is the cleanest in the pantheon, the most visited, and it is always full of flowers, candles, and toys. These are all offerings for Raulito, who many believe performs miracles from beyond the grave.

Raulito’s tomb lay forgotten for many decades, slowly deteriorating, until June of 2007,  when a woman from Sierra de Atoyac arrived at the cemetery with her young, dying daughter in her arms. Susana Curiel García, the administrator of the cemetery, recalls that the woman asked about a child’s grave that had been completely abandoned by his relatives and that had neither fresh flowers nor candles. García pointed towards Raulito’s tomb, where the woman then spent an hour and a half praying for her daughter, who doctors had said would not live to the end of the day.

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An extraordinary new restaurant in Semarang, Indonesia is on a mission to support locals trapped in poverty, many of whome are earning less than $25 (USD) a month, by providing them with an alternative way to pay for their food.

The Methane Gas Canteen, run by husband and wife team Sarimin and Suyatmi, is located in an unexpected place for an eatery – Jatibarang Landfill in Semarang, Central Java. The landfill is a mountain of putrifying waste, where poor locals spend their days scavenging plastic and glass to sell. Meanwhile, the couple, who spent 40 years collecting waste before opening the restaurant, is busy cooking.

What makes the restaurant unusual, aside from its location, is that no cash is required to pay for meals. Poor scavengers have the option to pay for their food with recyclable waste instead of hard currency. Saramin, 56, weighs the plastic customers bring in, calculates its worth, and then deducts that value from the cost of the meal, refunding any surplus value to the patron. The scheme is part of the community’s solution to reduce waste in the landfill and recycle non-degradable plastics.

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A mysterious condition has left a 30-year-old man in rural eastern China looking and behaving like a small child. He cannot speak, can only stand for short periods of time and needs round-the-clock care that his loving mother is happy to provide.

Looking at Wang Tianfang, you would swear that he couldn’t be a day over 4-years-old, but he was actually born in 1987, which makes him 30. His mother, Chu Xiaoping, says that both Wang’s physical and intellectual development stopped when he was between 2 and 3-years-old, and that despite being consulted by several doctors, the reason for his stagnation remains a mystery. The 30-year-old man is only 80-cm-high and is unable to speak or feed himself.

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A parasitic fungus, of the genus Ophiocordyceps, uses carpenter ants to complete its life cycle by turning them into zombies. The ant encounters the fungal spores while foraging and the fungus quickly infects and spreads throughout its body, hijacking the insect’s nervous system. It then forces the ant to climb vegetation, where it will clamp onto the underside of a leaf or twig, and then slowly die. The parasite then produces a spore-releasing stalk that sprouts from the cadaver’s head to discharge spores to the ground below, where more hapless ants can get infected.

Until recently scientists were uncertain as to the exact mechanisms or reasons behind this gruesome phenomenon. New research from Penn State University, however, has shed some light on the mystery. The researchers have suggested that the fungus invades muscles fibers throughout the insect’s body, which allows it to control the host’s behavior, but stays away from its brain.

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Mohamed Bzeek, a 62-year-old Muslim immigrant in California, has spent the past two decades caring for terminally ill foster children. These children are neglected by the foster care system, frequently spending the whole of their short lives in state-run hospitals, and rarely get to experience love, hope, and laughter.

About 600 of the 35,000 children monitored by the Los Angeles County’s Department of Children and Family Services fall under the care of the department’s Medical Case Management Services, which serves those with the most severe medical needs. There is a desperate need for loving homes for these children, but Mohamed Bzeek’s is the only foster home in the county known to take them in.

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Drugslab, an educational YouTube Channel funded by a public broadcaster in the Netherlands, has been accused of glamorizing drug use by having three young moderators take drugs on camera and documenting their effects for the viewers.

You can find YouTube tutorials on just about anything these days, and thanks to Drugslab, that includes snorting a line of cocaine and taking LSD or ketamine. In fact, if you want to learn about a certain illegal drug, all you have to do is post a comment, and the three young moderators will do their best to procure it from dealers and try it on camera. They will provide valuable tips on the proper dosing of the drug, how often you can take it, how it affects your heart rate and body temperature, and how it affects your mood. And, since one of the hosts actually takes the drug, you can see the effects yourself.

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The ghost of a child is supposedly haunting a man’s flat, and he now has photos to prove it. Adam Ellis, who lives in New York, achieved viral fame when he started documenting the paranormal activities allegedly occurring in his apartment, on social media. He claims that the ghost initially appeared in his dreams, but has somehow crossed over to the real world.

Adam’s bizarre expereinces began last month when he started documenting his vivid dreams featuring a deformed child, on Twitter. He claimed the child, called David, had a misshapen head and would sit in a green rocking chair at the foot of his bed while he experienced sleep paralysis. The horrifying story quickly captivated the masses and amassed a following of thousands on Twitter, with the initial thread already shared over 50,000 times.

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A tiny off-grid community in Snowflake, Arizona has become a refuge for people suffering from multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS). Often referred to as Environmental Illness, (EI), the condition is a chronic disorder in which exposure to everyday chemicals and technology causes symptoms of varying intensity.

Some of the symptoms of MCS are merely annoying and range from muscle pain to general fatigue. Others are reportedly crippling, such as intense nausea, migraines, sudden panic, and even vertigo. Sufferers claim that their symptoms coincide with exposure to chemicals and technologies around them, such as fragrances, synthetic fabrics, pesticides, and Wi-Fi. Most doctors hesitate to legitimise the condition, citing lack of scientific evidence, calling it a psycho-social condition with acute physical symptoms. For this reason, sufferers, who typically are self-diagnosed, often have difficulty finding medical help for the disease and have to resort to alternative treatments.

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