28 years ago, Carmen Jiménez, from Madrid, Spain, became completely blind due to a serious eye injury. At least that’s what she told everyone, including her own family, because she was tired of having to say “hello” to people she didn’t actually want to greet.

The 57-year-old woman recently revealed that she had always been able to see perfectly, which left her family in shock, even though they had always suspected that something was of about her condition. Her husband told reporters that she would put on her makeup perfectly, and sometimes they would see her trying to look at the TV from the corner of her eyes. But she never admitted to faking her blindness, until recently

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Students at Beijing’s Yucai High School have to be very careful when playing football on the school’s well-maintained field. That’s because it has a 100-year-old tree growing smack in the middle of it, and keeping their eye on the ball too much can result in a painful collision.

Building a football field around a tree sounds pretty stupid, but it’s not like the Chinese school had a choice. Yucai High School is reportedly surrounded by various historical buildings, and this was the only available space for a football field. Before starting work on site, the school did ask permission to have the tree transplanted someplace else, but they were notified that it was hundreds of years old, and considered a national treasure. Having it transplanted was considered too risky, so they were left with no choice but to build the field around it.

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You probably never even knew you wanted colored LED eyelashes, but just look at the pretty lights. Yeah, you want them!

Swedish Arduino designer Tien Pham has been getting a lot of attention lately for an unusual tech-inspired beauty product – interactive LED eyelashes that stick to your eyelids with regular eyelash glue. Called F.Lashes, these eye-catching accessories come in pink, red, blue, light blue, white, yellow and green, and feature different lighting modes, like follow, where the lights follow the movements of your head, dance mode, where they just blink at short intervals when you move your body, and sparkle, with the LEDs lighting up individually to create a sparkle effect.

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Mokase is the world’s first smartphone case that also serves users a warm shot of espresso whenever and wherever they want. It’s aimed at people who are always on the go, whose hectic lifestyle prevents them from stopping by a coffee shop or even a vending machine for a dose of caffeine.

Smart K, the Italian company that came up with the concept for Mokase, claims that they were looking for a way to make coffee available anywhere, and pairing it with the smartphone just made the most sense. “We thought, ‘how to make it always available? Why not join it to a gadget that is already a piece of our lifetime?’ the smartphone is the answer,” Smart K stated in a press release.

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A DIY master from Tokyo, Japan, recently conquered the internet with a very unusual project. She set out to turn a pair of cheap high-heel shoes into realistic-looking pigeons to see if they would allow her to get closer to the real birds in a local park without them flying away. Did it work? Read on and find out.

47-year old Keiko Ohata creates all kinds of wondrous things and posts photos of them on Japanese DIY-themed community website, Nifty. She has shared dozens of interesting creations with her followers over the last 11 years, but it was her latest idea that attracted the attention of some of the world’s largest art blogs and news sites. Well, sort of, as all the articles I’ve seen got her name all wrong and linked to a Russian site as the original source, instead of her Nifty profile. Hopefully, they’ll make the necessary corrections, as Keiko deserves all the credit for this amazing pair of pigeon shoes.

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Ibrahim Mukunga Wachira, a 27-year-old marathon runner from Kenya, became an overnight sensation in the small Baltic country of Estonia, after winning the 35th annual Tartu Half-Marathon, a 23-kilometer race he ran in his socks.

Just last week, we wrote about the monumental achievement of María Lorena Ramírez, a native Rarámuri woman from Mexico, who won a 50-kilometer ultramarathon in rubber sandals made from used car tires and wearing a long traditional skirt. Today, we cover the amazing story of a man who not only won a 23-kilometer marathon in Estonia, but also set a new speed record, after running with no shoes on. It’s definitely an incredible time for sports, and running in particular.

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Couples looking for a unique and unforgettable wedding day experience can now add walking barefoot on broken glass on their list of options. A Spanish company recently introduced the service as a metaphor for marriage.

Some people wouldn’t dare walk barefoot on pieces of broken glass even if somebody paid them to do it, but a Spanish company believes that couples will actually pay them for the opportunity to do exactly that on the day of their wedding. Wedding Glass is the first company in Spain, and probably the world, to offer walking on broken glass as a wedding ritual, but they believe that it will soon become a trend in the business, as couples these days are no longer happy with just the classic church ceremony and subsequent party.

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People usually train for years and invest in professional running gear just to be able to complete an ultramarathon, but María Lorena Ramírez, a native Rarámuri woman from Mexico who had not have any professional training or even basic gear, not only managed to finish a 50 km race, but actually win it. And she did it wearing a traditional long skirt and sandals made of recycled tire rubber.

High quality running shoes, compression socks, Lycra suits, energy drinks, all these are considered essential by most runners participating in an ultramarathon, but they were of no importance to 22-year-old María Lorena Ramírez, a sheep herder from Chihuahua, Mexico, who showed up at the starting line of a women’s ultramarathon in Puebla in traditional clothing and equipped with just a bottle of water and a handkerchief. She stood out like a sore thumb among the 500 or so other runners from 12 countries around the world, but she didn’t seem to care.

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Maryland’s Cecil County is home to many interesting parks, but none more mysterious and disturbing than the Perryville Community Park, in Perryville, where around 100 trees are marked by eerie messages left by patients from a veteran psychiatric and rehabilitation center, decades ago.

Before becoming a public park, the land was owned by the nearby Perry Point VA Hospital, and some of its former patients carved their disturbed thoughts into the trees. Over time, the words and drawings etched into the tree bark have grown larger, drawing the attention of curious passers-by. Interestingly, even though the mark trees of Perryville Community Park have become quite popular among fans of eerie tourist attractions, and even gotten their own Wikipedia entry, few residents of the Maryland town know about them and their history.

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What started out as a simple job turned into an amazing friendship between a man and one of the most efficient predators on Earth. 10 years ago, Abdullah Sholeh became a “nanny” for a 3-month-old tiger cub, but they eventually became so close that even after the tiger matured, they spend almost every minute of the day together, and sometimes even sleep in the same enclosure.

Mulan Jamillah, a beautiful Bengal tigress, was donated to the Islamic school in Malang, Indonesia, when she was just 3-months-old, and then 25-year-old Abdullah Sholeh became her full-time caretaker. Her previous owner was unable to take care of her, but the young student was more than happy to dedicate most of his time to the adorable cub. The only problem is that what started out as a temporary job eventually turned into a full-time friendship, with Abdullah having to spend almost 24-hours with the tiger, which earned him the nickname “The Nanny”.

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76-year-old Zhang Jiwen is almost completely deaf, but he has two able hands and a strong desire to help those less fortunate. Ever since 2012, he has been carrying building materials up a mountain in Fuling Forest Park, near the city of Chongqing, and building safe walking paths leading up from the modern road at the base all the way to an isolated village near the top. He has already completed a safe path a few hundred meters long and has started work on another leading to the water source of the village.

Zhang grew up in a village in the forests of Fuling, and even though he moved to the big city as an adult, he never forgot about his roots. When he heard about an isolated mountain village whose children had to come down precarious slopes in order to reach their school, he decided that he just had to help. For the past five years he has been taking a bus from his home in Chongqing to Fuling Forest Park to work on a better road for the village located on a mountain there.

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Epicenter, a technology startup hub in Stockholm, Sweden, has been offering employees the chance to have a small microchip implanted in their hand, ever since 2015. So far, 150 of its 3,000-strong staff have taken bosses up on their offer, and they couldn’t be happier with their decision.

Implantable microchips the size of a grain of rice have been around for a while now, but they are usually used as virtual identification plates for pets, or as tracking devices for deliveries. Up until a couple of years ago, when Epicenter started offering its employees the chance to have them implanted into their hands, these tiny devices had never been used to tag humans on a large scale. For many people, having a chip inserted into their body sounds like something out of a dystopian future, or, at the very least, raises privacy questions, but the 150 Epicenter employees who have had them implanted say the technology just makes their life easier.

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In an effort to draw attention to the poor state of roads in her home city of Saratov, a Russian model organized a professional photo shoot at one of the largest water-filled pot holes in her neighborhood, posing in a Baywatch bathing suit with a large inflatable flamingo.

Model/Fashion Blogger Anna Moskvicheva originally intended to have the photo shoot in the town of Mirny, where her aunt lives, but after heavy rains created giant road puddles right in her own city, she changed plans and had the photos taken on Tverskaya street, in Saratov. She put on a red Baywatch-style bathing suit, put on a large summer hat and stepped out into the flooded street to pose on a giant inflatable pink flamingo. The resulting photos have been shared on Russian social media thousands of times, with most people congratulating her on the original protest.

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A pizzeria in Oslo, Norway, recently came under fire after it was revealed that its digital adverts were actually filming passers by, analyzing their facial features and displaying different adverts according to a variety of factors.

The monitoring system was accidentally revealed at the beginning of May, when the system crashed and software code was displayed on screen instead of the usual ads. Linus Tech Tips forum user “Nepturion” happened to be passing by Peppe’s Pizza, in an Oslo shopping center, when he noticed the bizarre code generated on the digital advertising banner. A closer look revealed a small camera concealed in the wooden frame of the advert, and after watching the screen for a few minutes, Nepturion realized that the messages generated by the computer were describing him, and changed every time a different person passed by.

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Coconut cream puddings are very popular in Thailand, but while they usually come in flower shapes, one dessert shop in Pathun Thani, north of Bangkok, decided to shake things up a bit by using puppy-shaped molds instead. Photos of the realistic-looking edible puppies made quite an impact online, sparking a heated debate.

Within six hours of posting photos of their new treats on Facebook, Thai dessert shop Wilaiwan had already gotten over 10,000 shares and hundreds of comments. But that was only the beginning, as the photos soon started making the rounds on blogs and news sites, and even attracted the attention of international news networks. Some people loved them and said that they would love to eat a slimy puppy, while others said they looked too much like their pets, and couldn’t even think about sticking a spoon in one.

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