Despite the amazing scientific advances we have made in the last century, there are still many medical cases that can’t be fully explained. Vanishing Bones Syndrome sounds like something straight out of an episode of House MD, but doctors at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh in Scotland encountered a case of this bizarre condition in a 44-year-old woman.

Also known as Gorham-Stout disease, this extremely rare condition causes the sufferer to experience progressive bone loss. The disease is so uncommon that there has only ever been 64 recorded cases in medical literature since it was first described in 1838. In a healthy person, bones are constantly rebuilding themselves to help maintain their strength, and Gorham-Stout disease is believed to be a malfunction of this process; the bone breaks itself down faster than it can repair itself.

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Kalaca Skull, a 22-year-old tattoo artist from Colombia, has been making headlines all over South America for undergoing extreme surgical procedures to make his face look like a skull.

Born Eric Yeiner Hincapié Ramírez, the young tattoo artist claims he had been fascinated by skulls ever since he was a child, but only started turning his face into one after his mother’s death, two years ago, because she didn’t approve of the idea. First, he had the lower half of his nose removed, because, well, skulls don’t have noses. They don’t have ears either so he had most of his ear lobes cut off as well. But his transformation didn’t stop there. After splitting his tongue and tattooing it to an unnatural blue-grey color, he had large black eye-sockets tattooed around his eyes, as well as large teeth and even the hollow space between the mandible and maxilla tattooed around his mouth.

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Men often go to great lengths to fulfill their loved ones’ wishes, but this story is a bout a guy who went to extremes to ensure that he wouldn’t have to fulfill a promise he had made to his girlfriend, while at the same time making sure that she didn’t blame him for it.

Earlier this month, a man surnamed Tang, from Chengdu, China, promised his girlfriend that he would buy her a brand new luxury car, and she made sure to constantly remind him of his promise ever since. The problem was that Tang didn’t have the money, and with time running out, he had to come up with a way out of this mess that he had put himself in. His solution, though undoubtedly original, was pretty extreme.

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In Sweden, hundreds of refugee children are reportedly suffering from a strange condition known as “resignation syndrome”. These children fall into a coma-like state; they don’t eat, speak, or even open their eyes. Sufferers of resignation syndrome are often left bedbound for years at a time.

Their appearances suggest they have been involved in some sort of accident or suffer from some sort of neurological illness, but sufferers of resignation syndrome have nothing physically wrong with them—they have simply lost the will to live. The condition is known as “uppgivenhetssyndrom” in Sweden, and it is thought to only affect young members of the refugee population.

Research has linked resignation syndrome with the stress and disappointment of having asylum claims rejected. In recent years, regulations surrounding asylum cases have tightened, and those refugees who were not fleeing from an active war zone were likely to have their applications rejected. These rejections could often take years to be decided upon, leaving refugee families in a state of limbo. For many children, the weight of rejection proved too much to bear and they would shut down completely, entering a coma-like state, seemingly on the edge between life and death.

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Moses Lanham, a 57-year-old man from Michigan, has become known as ‘Mr. Plastic’ for his unusual ability to turn his legs along with his knees 180 degrees and walk backward.

Mr Plastic discovered his superhuman ability when he was only 14-years-old. He was climbing a rope in gym class when he lost his grip and crashed to the floor, landing awkwardly. At first, he thought something was dislocated, but he soon realized that he could easily turn his lower legs 180 degrees and back again without experiencing any pain. Medical tests revealed that he was able to do this thanks to of double cartilage in his hips, knees and ankles. He has been using this gift to freak people out ever since.

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In order to get the attention of the government in Moscow, the citizens of a small Russian village have launched an initiative to their name from Bungur to “Syria”. Their reasoning is that Russia has invested tens of millions of dollars in the middle eastern state, so surely they can spare some rubles for a Syria a little closer to home.

Bungur has been in a state of disrepair for a long time, and things are only getting worse. The roads are damaged, the electricity and water supply switch off intermittently, and healthcare services are nonexistent. While these kinds of complaints are not unusual for small Russian communities, this village’s way of trying to deal with the situation has raised some eyebrows.

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A man was recently injured after falling into an 8-foot-deep art installation at the Serralves Foundation Museum in Porto, Portugal. He apparently though it looked fake, so he decided to step into it to make sure.

Created by acclaimed British artist Anish Kapoor in 1992, “Descent Into Limbo” is an optical illusion that looks like a black circle painted on the floor. It’s designed to appear like a bottomless pit and staring into is is reportedly a dizzying experience, but one unnamed Italian tourist visiting the installation last week apparently wanted to do more than that. Despite several warning signs and a staffer tasked with keeping visitors safe, the man somehow managed to test the fake-looking pit by stepping into it. He got injured after taking an 8-foot fall, but at least he satisfied his curiosity.

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After waiting for local authorities to fix a massive pothole for several months, residents of  Poplar Plain Crescent, in Toronto, decided to make the best of it by transforming the hole into a community tomato garden.

It’s unclear who came up with the idea of plating tomato seeds into the neglected pothole earlier this summer, but as the plants sprouted and flourished, neighborhood residents started caring for them, even installing stakes to keep them from falling over. Photos of the fully grown tomato plants featuring dozens of juicy green tomatoes are a testament to both the locals care and sense of humour, but also of the indifference of local authorities.

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Many smokers pick up the habit at an early age, but there are probably not many who started as early as Rapi Pamungkas. This Indonesian 2-year-old apparently started smoking by picking up discarded cigarette butts nearby his mother’s market stall, which older boys would then light for him, and now reportedly goes through 40 cigarettes a day.

Soon after starting smoking, Rapi became hooked and soon became famous in his native city of Sukabumi for harassing passers-by and pestering them for cigarettes. Many locals found his antics amusing and would give him cigarettes, laughing as he lit them up. Videos of the extremely young child started doing the round online, and his story recently went viral worldwide. In some of these videos, people can be seen trying to take the cigarette from Rapi; he responds by scowling and pulling the cigarette back.

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The Fuxi Mountain Skywalk, a glass, horseshoe-shaped glass bridge standing 360 meters above a canyon floor, was recently the scene of one of the most bizarre wedding proposals in human history.

Xiao Jing, a 23-year-old woman from Xinmi City, in China’s Henan province, decided to pop the big question to her boyfriend of three years on the beautiful glass bridge of Fuxi Mountain. While lovers arrange marriage proposals here all the time, Jing’s reasons were a bit unusual. You see, her boyfriend, Xiao Yu, had always had a fear of heights and she could never really get over his “cowardice”, so before she married him, she needed to make sure that he was strong enough to conquer his fear.

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You need an exceptional pair of lungs to inflate a tyre tube by blowing air into it through your mouth, but one Chinese man has recently set a new world record by inflating 12 tubes at the same time, with one nostril.

43-year-old Tang Feihu accomplished the impressive feat in just two and a half minutes, during a recent event held at Nanjiang Grand Canyon. The stuntman reportedly started off by inflating 10 tyre tubes with a diameter of over 60 cm, a feat that took him 2 minutes and 39 seconds to complete. After taking a 5-minute break to catch his breath, Tang upped the stakes, this time using one of his nostrils to push air into 12 tyre tubes at the same time. It took him only 2 minutes and 30 seconds to finish the job, a new world record.

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This month, Kyle Messier, a 31-year-old bike mechanic, won the Big Red Gravel Run, a 100 kilometer bike race that takes place in Harrington, Quebec. While this is an impressive achievement on its own, what makes Kyle’s win truly exceptional is that he had already pedaled more than 650 kilometers to the race site, and a few hours after winning he got back on his bike and pedealed back home to Waterloo.

Messier’s journey from Waterloo to Harrington took him 3.5 days to complete. After winning first place in the rural cycling race,he celebrated with some pizza, slept for a few hours in his tent, and then got started on the 3.5-day journey back home. And it gets even more remarkable still; Kyle was not only completely new to bicycle racing, but he also managed to win the 100-kilometer Big Red Gravel Run while suffering from an abscessed tooth.

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A young Indian businessman who wanted to get back on his girlfriend’s good side after an argument put up 300 billboards and signs all over their local suburb, to let her know he wanted her forgiveness.

It’s not clear what 25-year-old Nilesh Khedekar had done to upset his girlfriend, but he clearly thought it serious enough to be worth the effort of an impressive operation to earn her forgiveness. Last week, after hearing that the girl, named Shivde, was returning from Mumbai to her home in Pimple Saudagar, a suburb of Pune, the young man decided he had to come up with a creative way of showing her just how sorry he was about their argument. He got in touch with a printer and commissioned hundreds of different-sized posters with the message “Shivde, I am Sorry!”. Then, on the night before the girl’s scheduled returned, he paid a group of boys to hang the signs and billboards all over her neighborhood.

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25-year-old Tomasz Nadolski, from Wroclaw, Poland,  suffers from a rare and cruel disease that has not only made his life a living hell, but also left him stuck in the underdeveloped body of a 12-year-old boy.

Tomasz’s health problems began when he was only 7-years-old. He would throw up after every meal and experience excruciating pain in his stomach, hands and feet. Because he couldn’t keep any food down, he lost a lot of weight and kids at school started teasing him about looking like a walking skeleton. For years, doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him, and some of them even claimed that his problems were mental rather than physical. It took 16 years for Tomasz’s condition to finally be diagnosed, but, unfortunately, knowing what he was suffering from didn’t make the young man’s life any better.

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Zhong Congrong, a successful businessman from Chongqing, China, has become known as the “the millionaire trash collector,” for his longtime habit of scouring the streets of his city armed with a trash-picking claw and picking up any garbage he finds.

The 52-year-old entrepreneur began cleaning up the streets of Chingqing three years ago, after a family trip to southern China’s Hainan province, for the Chinese New Year. There, he met a retired university professor who had reportedly been picking up trash from one of the local beaches every day, for the last four years. He was so impressed with the woman’s dedication and commitment to trash collecting that he decided to replicate her daily habit in his home city, as soon as he got back from his vacation.

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