Despite its tropical climate, parts of Bangalore city in southern India have been experiencing what looks like snow. Except, it’s not actually snow, but a toxic foam from a severely polluted lake!

The 9,000-acre Bellandur lake is the largest one in the city, and also the most polluted. Decades’ worth of untreated chemical waste and sewage in the lake get churned into a white froth that’s as thick as shaving foam, every time it rains. This froth contains effluents like grease, oil, and detergents that sometimes catch fire, leading to one of the rarest sights in the world – a flaming lake.  

Many local residents are unnerved by the unnatural phenomenon. “Every time it rains and the water flows, the froth raises and navigating this stretch becomes risky,” said Visruth, who lives 30 meters away from the lake. “Due to the froth, visibility is reduced and the area also smells bad. Cars and bikes that pass this area get covered with froth.”

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A company in Zhengzhou, China’s Henan Province, has caused outrage online after some of its employees were spotted crawling on their hand and knees around a local lake because they couldn’t meet their sales targets!

The shocking corporal punishment was publicised by various local media outlets. According to the reports, at least a dozen people were seen dragging themselves on all fours on a wooden path along the lake. Their clothes were worn out and some of them were bleeding with bruises and scrapes.

When questioned about their unusual behavior, one of them told the reporter that they were being punished by their employer for their poor performance at work. One member of staff was stationed at the lake to make sure everyone finished their prescribed number of laps.

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Robot Taxi Inc., a Tokyo-based company, is gearing up to bring self-driving robot taxis to Japan’s roads early next year. They’ve invited residents to try out the taxi service in Fujisawa, in Kanagawa Prefecture. 50 people are all set to take part in the experiment.

According to Robot Taxi, the new cabs will take residents to pre-decided supermarkets about three kilometers from their homes. A company attendant will be present in the driver’s seat for safety reasons. The self-driving cars will be equipped with GPS, millimeter-wave radar, stereo vision cameras, and image analysis technologies.

The local government is fully supportive of the firm’s initiative, given that they’ve already tested automated cars on expressways before. But this will be the first time on local roads with residents. “This time, the robot taxi experiment will be conducted on actual city streets,” said government official Yuji Kuroiwa.

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Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID) is a serious psychological condition that gives able-bodied people a strong desire to be disabled. It’s what made this woman from North Carolina purposely blind herself by dropping drain cleaner into her eyes!

Jewel Shuping, 30, revealed that she’s been obsessed with blindness since childhood. “My mother would find me walking in the halls at night, when I was three or four years old,” she said. “By the time I was six, I remember that thinking about being blind made me feel comfortable.” So she would spend hours staring at the sun, hoping that it would damage her eyes.

The obsession increased as she aged, and by the time she was a teenager, Jewel had taught herself to move around in thick black sunglasses. She got her first cane at age 18 and became fully fluent in braille by age 20. “I was blind-swimming, which is pretending to be blind, but the idea kept coming up in my head and by the time I was 21 it was a non-stop alarm that was going off,” she said. Read More »

Desperate to raise funds for her ailing father’s treatment, a teenager in China’s Anhui province has taken to wearing a cow mask and charging people 5 yuan to ride her. She’s been at it for the past three months, but Hefei locals have branded her a fraud.

Now, news reports are featuring photographs of 15-year-old Hao Dongdong with her paralysed father, proving that she’s been telling the truth all along. “My dad needs 5,000 Yuan each month for medical treatments,” she told reporters. “My brother and sister need to go to school. I have no identity card [for work] so I have to beg.”

Dongdong’s father Hao Xinli used to be a farmer, but a back injury forced him to move to the city in 2000 to set up a small shop. Last year, when he and his wife were shopping in Hefei, they saw a mobile store giving away freebies as a promotional offer. They ran to the shop and tried taking what they could, but soon got into an altercation with the sales staff. Xinli was beaten badly, and his back pain became excruciating.

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Shridhar Chillal, from Pune, India, hasn’t cut his fingernails in over six decades. He began growing them when he was still in school, and now holds the Guinness World Record for the ‘Longest Fingernails on a Single Hand Ever’. The super-long talons on his left hand now have a cumulative length of 909.6 cm!

Chillal’s thumb nail is the longest at two meters and curls into a tight coil at the end. The middle finger nail comes a close second at 186.6 cm. The ring finger nail measures 181.6 cm, the little finger nail is 179.1 cm, and the index nail stands at 164.5 cm. As you can imagine, his nails have sabotaged every aspect of his life, including work and love.

“I can’t move much, so every half an hour or so I wake up and move my hand to the other side of the bed,” he admitted.

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A group of Russian scientists believe that the secret to eternal youth might actually lies in the permafrost of Siberia. They’re experimenting with a strain of bacteria that has managed to survive for millions of years in the permafrost. One enterprising scientist has even injected himself with the ancient bacteria discovered in 2009, in Sakha Republic, Siberia.

Anatoli Brouchkov, head of the Geocryology Department at Moscow State University, is the man behind the remarkable discovery. Two years ago, he volunteered to become a guinea pig for the 3.5 million year old bacteria after several successful trials on mice and human blood cells. And he claims to have become healthier and more energetic ever since.

“I started to work longer, I’ve never had a flu for the last two years,” he told The Siberian Times.

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Thanks to a couple of Swedish entrepreneurs, it might soon be possible to get a clean shave without the little nicks and cuts. They’ve done away with blades in their new invention ‘Skarp’, a futuristic razor that magically makes hair fall away when waved over skin!

Well, it’s not exactly magic. Skarp uses laser beams to assist in hair removal. The concept isn’t new, lasers have been used to eliminate body hair cosmetically and medically since 1989, when Morgan Gustavsson invented the IPL (Intense Pulse Light). He also wanted to bring lasers into everyday hair removal, but he couldn’t really do it before because the wavelengths could only cut through dark hair, not light or grey hair.

But now, Morgan and his partner Paul Binun claim to have discovered a part of hair molecules called chromophore shared by all humans irrespective of hair color. Chromophores can be cut easily with a particular wavelength of light. So they used the discovery to develop a commercial laser razor that can be used on any part of the body, by men and women.

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If you ever happen to visit Taiwan, you might be greeted to the sight of scantily-clad women in neon-lit glass kiosks by roadsides, waiting for men to pull over. Well, they’re not what you think!

These women are ‘Betel nut girls’ who peddle small snacks of tasty, stimulative betel nuts wrapped in betel leaves. They dress provocatively to attract potential buyers, but nuts is pretty much the only thing they sell.

The main roads are filled with around 60,000 such phone booth-style kiosks; they’re so much a part of the nation’s identity that they’re actually featured on old tourist guides. The women who operate the stalls are usually from poorer families, but according to news reports, the job pays more than housekeeping, waiting tables and other conventional jobs.

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A 70-year old man from Bursa, Turkey died last week, after spending the last 47 years in the city hospital, not because he was seriously ill, but because he didn’t have anywhere else to go.

Abdullah Kozan walked through the doors of Bursa State Hospital in 1968, just after completing his mandatory military service. He was admitted with a severe headache, but soon asked the doctors if he could stay there a while longer, because he really didn’t have anywhere else to go. He got along with the staff from the beginning and claimed that he actually enjoyed living in the hospital, so the administration kept registering him as a new patient every time he got discharged at the end of his treatment.

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If your childhood memories are filled with summers spent chasing fireflies, then you’re going to love this new theme park in China. It’s completely dedicated to the glowing insects that naturally illuminate their habitat at night.

The park, located at the East Lake Peony Garden in Wuhan city, central China’s Hubei province, is home to about 10,000 fireflies. The insects are divided into five separate zones – the flying zone, the observation zone, zero-distance contact zone, breeding zone, and the science popularization area. Each zone is meant to cater to different categories of visitors, right from casual visitors to researchers.

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When Abigail Kingston got engaged, she almost immediately decided on her wedding attire – a 120-year-old dress that’s been worn by 10 other brides from her mother’s side of the family since the late 1800s.

The ancient two-piece dress is a family heirloom, first worn by Kingston’s great-great-grandmother Mary Lowry Warren in 1895. None of Lowry’s daughters were interested in the large gown, so it was first re-worn by her granddaughter in the ’40s. Later, Kingston’s mother and aunts continued the tradition of getting married in the same dress.

Abigail herself has known about the dress since she was a little girl. “When I was younger, while I was playing piano at my parents’ house, there was a framed picture of the first six brides wearing the dress, so I would think, ‘Someday,’” she said. But when the day finally arrived, she and her mother Leslie had to track the dress down.

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Desperate for revenge, a spurned Chinese man wrote his girlfriend the most expensive hate mail ever. He claims to have scratched his message on to the screens of nine brand new iPhone 6s smartphones, just to show her how wealthy he’s become since she dumped him for an iPhone 6.

The messages, when put together, read: “Last September, you dumped me for my friend because of an iPhone 6. Thanks to you looking down on me, I could work harder (and become successful). On the first anniversary after we broke up, I present to you nine iPhone 6s to mourn our doomed relationship.”

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Stan Herd, a Kansas-based landscape artist, recently completed his very own museum-worthy masterpiece. Only, it can’t be moved because it’s actually made out of plants growing in a field!

The 1.2-acre crop art ‘painting’, located on field near Minneapolis, is a replica of Van Gogh’s 1889 masterpiece ‘Olive Trees’. Herd was commissioned to create it by the Minneapolis Institute of Art, where the Van Gogh original currently hangs. It took him six long months of digging, planting, and mowing a giant grass field before the ‘earthwork’ was finally complete on September 11. It is best viewed from high above, especially if you happen to be flying in to the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

“When you’re on ground level you can’t tell what the cuts even look like, but when you get up there you can see the patterns,” said Rick King, board member of the Minneapolis Museum and the Metropolitan Airports Commission. “If you are landing from the southeast and flying northwest, it will be on your left-hand side as you approach the airport.”   

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If you love building sandcastles then here’s your chance to actually live in one. ‘Zand Hotels’ – the world’s first hotels constructed out of sand have opened in two Dutch towns – Oss and Sneek – to commemorate sand sculpture festivals held there each year.

The two pop-up hotels have fully furnished one-room suites, hidden inside eight-meter sculptures. One is modeled after the iconic Bedrock homes from the Flintstones, and the other has a Chinese theme, with dragons, the Great Wall of China, and the Terracotta Army as decorations. Believe it or not, these sand hotels have all the modern amenities, like electricity, running water, glass windows, king size beds, soft carpets, luxurious bathrooms and Wi-Fi!

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