In what can only be described as the real-life plot of a horror movie script, a homeless man was wrongfully arrested and locked up in a mental hospital for over two years, after being mistaken for a man he had never even met.

Joshua Spriestersbach’s nightmare began on a hot day in 2017, while waiting in line for food outside a homeless shelter in Honolulu. When police woke him up, he thought he was being arrested for breaking the city’s law against sitting and lying on public sidewalks, but little did he know that things were a lot more serious than that. What Spriestersbach didn’t realize was that the police officer had somehow mistaken him for one Thomas Castleberry, who had a warrant out for his arrest for violating probation in a 2006 drug case. The fact that the two didn’t even look similar didn’t seem to matter to anyone, and instead of simply checking photographs or fingerprints of the two men, the homeless man simply became Castleberry.

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Welwitschia is a fascinating plant that can not only survive for several thousands of years, but it can do so in one of the most inhospitable environments on the planet, the Namib Desert.

Named after Austrian botanist Friedrich Welwitsch, who discovered it in Angola in 1859, Welwitschia is actually called ‘tweeblaarkanniedood’ in Afrikaans, which translates to “two leaves that cannot die”. That’s a surprisingly accurate name for a plant that grows only two leaves and can survive thousands of years in the world’s oldest desert. Some parts of the Namib Desert receive less than two inches of precipitation a year, but that’s apparently all Welwitschia needs to survive, thanks to its extremely “efficient, low-cost genome”.

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Someone just managed to sell a small plastic bag they claim contains air from a recent Kanye West listening event for a whopping $7,600 on eBay.

It’s no secret that the Kanye West brand is synonymous with commercial success, but not even that explains how someone can pay almost $8,000 for an empty plastic bag simply because it is in some way related to the popular American artist.  West recently hosted the much awaited Atlanta DONDA listening event on the Mercedes-Benz stadium in Atlanta, and one fan allegedly lucky enough to be in attendance took the opportunity to make some money out of it. He took a plastic zip-lock bag, labeled it as ‘AIR FROM DONDA DROP’ on eBay, set the price at $3,330.00 and waited for the bids to roll in. And sure enough, roll they did…

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A contractor who didn’t receive the payment he was promised rented an excavator and destroyed the façade of an apartment building he himself built.

Tenants were supposed to move into a newly completed apartment building in Blumberg, a small town in Germany’s Baden-Wurttemberg, in the next couple of weeks, but a bizarre incident has delayed their plans by at least three months. Late last month, a man operating an excavator showed up at the building and began meticulously tearing down the façade, breaking glass windows and destroying balconies, ultimately leaving the place looking like it had been in a war. Stranger still was that the man responsible for the devastation was allegedly the contractor who had been responsible for building the edifice in the first place.

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A group of gamers in the Philippines recently made international news headlines for continuing to play their favorite video game despite being waist-deep in floods from a typhoon.

Surreal footage showing the young video game enthusiasts simply ignoring the rising water level was captured last Thursday, at an internet cafe in the town of Cainta in Rizal, which had been heavily battered by typhoon Ying-fa. Despite being half-submerged in muddy flood water and a very real risk of being electrocuted, the kids appear glued to their monitors, ready to engage in multiplayer matches. It was only when the owner of the cafe realized the danger they were in that the computers were shut down and the gamers finally left.

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A young Vietnamese-born woman has gone to extreme lengths to shrink her waist to just 46 centimeters in circumference, including eating just one meal a day and wearing a corset almost all the time.

An Ky, a part-time dancer living in the United States, was discovered by popular Vietnamese entertainer Thuy Nga, during the latter’s American tour, las winter. While visiting a milk tea cafe where Ky happened to be working, the Vietnamese comedian and television personality noticed the young girl’s incredibly tiny waist and decided to do a video about it. She showcased the young woman’s tiny waist and also asked her a few questions about how she managed to get her waist circumference down to a whopping 46 centimeters and how she maintains the extreme hourglass figure.

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A 37-year-old father of one from Texas woke up one day ready to go to school, thinking it was the 1990s, after losing the last two decades of his life, including ever marrying his wife and having a daughter.

In July of last year, Daniel Porter, a hearing specialist from Texas woke up in his bed just like any other morning, only something was wrong. A woman who he had never seen before was sleeping next to him, and when he looked in the mirror, an “old and fat” man was looking back at him. Daniel had gotten up thinking it was time to go to school, not knowing that he had graduated high-school nearly two decades before, and that the strange woman in his bed was his wife, with whom he had a 10-year-old daughter.

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The “Class of Life” is a controversial program introduced in various Japanese middle-schools where students spend months raising and getting attached to fish, before having to decide whether to eat them or not.

A part of the Sea and Japan Project sponsored by Nippon Foundation, the Class of Life was introduced in a number of schools across Japan in 2019, with the goal of teaching young students about the work that goes into land-based aquaculture, the challenges the activity involves, and last but not least, the importance of life. To this end, students in classes 4th to 6th are entrusted with a number of small fish and tasked with raising them to maturity for at least six months and up to a year. The controversial aspect of the program is that at the end, the students need to decide the fate of the fish, whether to release or eat them…

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“Remote cohabitation” has become a hot topic in Japan over the past couple of days, after a popular TV show reported that young couples prefer to live separately and keep in touch using free video call apps.

On July 21st, TV Asahi’s ” Hatori Shinichi Morning Show” featured remote cohabitation as a growing trend among young Japanese couple who either prefer or are forced to live separately. It involves the use of free video call apps like Line or Skype to keep in touch for hours on end, even all through the night. A couple used as an example during the show, said that they leave the app open during the night so they can “wake up together”, and only turn it off when they are at work. This way they feel like they are together, even though one lives in Tokyo and the other in Ibaraki Prefecture.

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South Korean media recently reported the bizarre and sad story of an elderly couple who spent the last decade of their lives hoarding tons of trash for their 40-something son who refused to leave the house and find a job.

SBS, a South Korean national television network presented the shocking story of Choi, a 75-year-old man from Gwangju, who over the last decade turned his two-storey house into a dump full of garbage gathered from the city streets and from trash cans. Convinced that one man’s garbage is another man’s treasure, the pensioner literally filled up his entire house with junk, before doing the same with the balconies and even the yard. As you can see from the photos below, the house was quite literally buried in trash.

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Gijs Schalkx, a Dutch inventor and engineering student, modified his motorcycle to run on methane harvested from roadside bogs and ponds.

Aptly named Sloot Motor (sloot means ‘ditch’ in Dutch), Gijs Schalkx’s ingenious vehicle features a modified Honda GX160 motorcycle engine, with a hole into the airbox, through which it receives the methane. The bright inventor than hooks a balloon filled with methane to the hole, which acts as the fuel tank. The engine still starts with gasoline, but once it starts, it uses the methane to keep going. But what truly makes Gijs’ project special is the fact that he manually harvests the methane himself from roadside swamps and ponds, a labor that takes approximately eight hours. The methane only lasts 12 miles at a top speed of 27mph.

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One of the last thing you expect to see in the middle of an urban paved street is a grave complete with a large tombstone, but that’s exactly what you’re treated to when driving through the Turkish city of Sivas.

Yeni Mahalle Hamzaoğlu is one of the several streets that traverse the relatively new Şarkışla district of Sivas, in central Turkey, but there’s something special about it. At one point, motorists need to make sure that they don’t drive straight into a grave located right in the middle of the asphalt. It’s been there for several years now, but only recently gained national attention, after photos and drone footage went viral on social media.

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36-year-old Juan Dual likes to joke that he is empty inside, but in his case the phrase has a literal meaning. Over the years, he has had his stomach, colon, rectum and gallbladder removed, but he has learned to live without them.

Juan’s sad but inspiring story began when he was only 13-years-old. It was then that he was diagnosed with a terrible hereditary condition called familial multiple polyposis, which left him with a 99.8% chance of developing cancer of the digestive system. His grandmother and an uncle of hers died of colon adenocarcinoma, and his father had undergone surgery of the bowels to avoid succumbing to the same fate. At age 19, right after finishing high-school, Juan underwent a tough operation to have his colon and rectum removed. Sadly, it was only the beginning…

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Convinced that their home is haunted by a ghost, a French couple have been sleeping in a small tent installed on the balcony of their apartment for over a month.

Patricia and David C. and their two children moved into an apartment in the social park of Semcoda, in Replonges, France, last September. Built in 2016 on land that previously accommodated an old hangar, their new home was spacious, well-lit and modern, but the family didn’t get to enjoy it for two long, as bizarre things started happening. Patricia claims that her daughter started seeing strange things around the house soon after they moved in, and after a while the whole family became convinced that paranormal activity was at play inside their apartment. Things got so bad that they had to install a tent on the balcony to get a peaceful night’s sleep, and they have been using it for over a month.

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A video of a high-tech sink that comes with a special slot for cleaning your smartphone as you wash your hands has been getting a lot of attention on social media.

Sadly there isn’t much context to go with this viral TikTok clip originally posted by @kensei_prochari_, but then again, the video itself is pretty self explanatory. Here we have what looks like a fancy sink that features a thin slot where users can place their smartphones while they wash their hands. But that slot is more than just a holder; it “sucks” the phone inside where it proceeds to purge any and all viruses and bacteria by exposing the handheld to UV rays. When you’re done washing your hands, the cleaned smartphone is pushed out through the same slot.

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