Once called a madman and laughed at by members of his community, an Indonesian man is now being hailed as a hero after spending a quarter of a century covering 250 hectares of barren hillsides around his home with banyan and ficus trees.

The story of Sadiman, the Indonesian man who singlehandedly brought a forest back to life, began in the early 1990s, but the problem he helped fix can be traced back to the 1960s. It was then that great forest fires ravaged the forests on the southern slope of Lawu Mountain, in Central Java, turning hundreds of hectares state-owned pine forest to ash and leaving barren hills in their place. For decades dozens of villages in the Regency of Wonogiri battled draughts and famine, until an unlikely hero took it upon himself to bring back the forest and create a better life for him and his community.

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Xiao Zhu, a young “online supervisor” from Xinyang, China, specializes in helping people combat procrastination by texting and calling them to make sure they fulfill their daily tasks.

With so many distractions literally just a click or finger swipe away, it’s no wonder that procrastination is considered a modern-day “plague” that keeps many of us from reaching our full potential. Whether it be fulfilling work-related tasks, sticking to a weight-loss routine, or studying for a fast-approaching exam, we always find excuses to put them off and do something more fun instead. That’s where online supervisors like Xiao Zhu come in. They spend most of their day keeping track of their customers’ schedule, constantly reminding them that they have things to do.

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Budimir Buda Šobat, a 54-year-old man from Croatia, managed to set a new world record for the longest time breath held underwater, after spending 24 minutes and 33 seconds underwater without coming up for air.

The incredible feat was achieved in a swimming pool, in the town of Sisak, under the supervision of doctors, reporters and supporters, and saw the 54-year-old diver push his body to the limit. After spending a few minutes hyperventilating on pure oxygen, to increase body oxygenation, Šobat spent close to half an hour face down in the pool, without coming up for air. It sounds like an impossible achievement for a mere mortal, but for the Croatian daredevil it’s the crowning achievement of years of training and conditioning.

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A Filipino man who had been experiencing sharp chest pains in cold weather, learned that he had a four-inch-long knife blade lodged in his chest after doing a routine X-ray.

25-year-old Kent Ryan Tomao was more than a bit confused when doctors told him that he had an an “object resembling a knife” stuck in his chest, very close to one of his lungs. He had undergone an X-ray exam required to apply for a mining job in Agusan del Sur, and never imagined there was anything wrong with him. He told doctors in Kidapawan City that he had sometimes experienced stabbing pains in his chest on unusually cold days, but didn’t think too much of them. He certainly didn’t think there was a knife blade in his chest.

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A tire startup has teamed up with NASA to bring the world’s first space-age alloy bicycle tires to the mainstream market.

The SMART Tire Company recently announced an innovative airless bicycle tire originally developed and tested by NASA for future Mars Rover missions. Dubbed METL, the revolutionary tire is made from smart memory metal that ,unlike stretching, rearranges its molecular structure when you bend it, but instantly goes back to its original shape. It basically has the flexibility of rubber but is as strong as titanium, which means that you probably won’t have to change another bicycle tire in your lifetime.

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A 31-year-old “emotional counselor” specializes in breaking up married Chinese men from their mistresses and making sure they return to their wives, who are also his clients.

Xiao Sheng has been in the business of breaking up married men from their mistresses for six years, and has come a long way since he first started his unique business. He now has an 8-person staff working alongside him, including a situation analysts, and a customer service manager, as well as actors and directors ready to assist him when certain scenarios need to be staged. His techniques can get very complex, and very expensive, with the average contract costing the client a hefty 150,000 yuan ($23,000).

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A California couple who thought they were buying their dream home, ended up in a real-life nightmare after the old owner refused to move and is still living there over a year since the transaction.

On January 31, 2020, Tracie and Myles Albert put down money on a beautiful four-bedroom home in Riverside, California, but over a year since, they are still unable to move in, because the former owner refuses to leave. The man collected the asking price of $560,000, but after the contract was signed, he refused to turn over the keys and move out. Although the Alberts have tried appealing to the authorities, a California moratorium prevents evictions during the Covid-19 epidemic, so there’s nothing anyone can do.

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For years, Aprilia Santini Manganang and the Indonesian Women’s Volleyball Association had been fighting off accusations that she was actually a man, but this year, Manganang was finally confirmed to actually be male.

A member of Indonesia’s national women’s volleyball team, Aprilia Manganang also played in several local club teams in Indonesia, as well as in Thailand. She led the Jakarta Electric PLN women’s team to become the champion of the Proliga in 2015, 2016, and 2017. In 2019, she became champion again with the Jakarta PGN Popsivo Polwan team, before transferring to the Generali Supreme Chonburi-E Tech team in the Thai Volleyball League and winning the championship that same year. Manganang won multiple Most Valuable Player awards in her career, and helped the Indonesian national team win the bronze and silver medals at different editions of the Southeast Asian Games (SEA). But her amazing achievements were always put into question, because of haw she looked.

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A Thai teenager recently got his five minutes of internet fame, after going online to buy a cheap iPhone, only to receive a coffee table shaped like the Apple smartphone.

Usually, when a luxury product is being sold for much cheaper than its market price, you owe it to yourself to check that everything is legit, but sometimes you just get carried away and push that ‘buy’ button to make sure someone doesn’t snatch it from under your noise. That’s exactly what this teenage Apple fan from Thailand did recently, in hope of getting a much-coveted handheld for cheap. Only he knew that something was definitely wrong when the package was delivered…

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Did you know there was a way to simply pull off the wool of sheep as you would a sweater, thus making classic shearing obsolete? It’s actually been around for decades, but for some reason, it never caught on.

When BioClip was first introduced in the early 1990s, it was supposed to completely replace sheep shearing in a matter of years. To be honest, it was a truly revolutionary product that relied on an effective biological agent to harvest sheep wool in a totally different way. A singly injection of BioClip caused a temporary break in the wool
follicle fiber synthesis process, essentially detaching the wool coat from the animal, and allowing owners to remove it as they would a piece of clothing. Videos of the process have been doing the rounds online for years, and they just never get old.

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Japanese television recently featured the unusual story of a young couple who, despite being married for two years, still go Dutch about everything from expenses to house chores.

39-year-old Aiko and her 42-year-old husband, Kazuki, met at a video-game production company, and after going out on a few dates, they quickly realized that they had very different interests. That didn’t mean they were incompatible, though, so they decided to continue their relationship, while remaining as independent as possible. And even though they tied the knot very early into their relationship, they continued to go Dutch, and have done so to this day. Their unusual arrangement recently attracted the attention of a popular TV show in Japan, where they revealed exactly how they make it work.

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Doctors recently reported the bizarre case of a 25-year-old woman suffering from an incredibly rare medical condition that caused her to bleed from her eyes during her monthly period.

Haemolacria, the condition that causes people to cry blood, is extremely rare, but Indian doctors documented the case of a woman with a similar, but even rarer condition called “ocular vicarious menstruation”. As the name suggests, it causes female sufferers to bleed from their eyes, but only during their monthly period. The 25-year-old woman, whose name was not revealed for privacy reasons, visited the emergency room at a hospital in Chandigarh, complaining about crying blood. All her tests came back normal, and it was only after the woman revealed that the same thing had occurred around the same time the month before that doctors made the connection to menstruation.

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An attractive female Twitter user in Japan recently shocked her tens of thousands of fans after going on a national television show to unmask herself as a 50-year-old man using a popular smartphone app to alter her appearance. I think it’s safe to say that after reading this story, you’ll never trust another internet photo again. Nor should you!

Azusa Gakuyuki, a young, attractive girl who had been entertaining her Twitter followers with photos of herself indulging in her biggest passions (motorcycle riding, mountain hiking, skiing and other outdoorsy activities) went on popular television program Monday Late Show (から夜ふかし) to reveal something that left everyone flabbergasted. The beautiful girl, who appeared to be in her early 20s, was actually a 50-year-old man using the popular app FaceApp to alter his appearance and pass himself off as a woman.

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For at lest 300 years, hikers in California’s Santa Lucia Mountains have been reporting sightings of shadowy, mysterious silhouettes popularly known as “dark watchers”.

The first reports of giant figures ominously perched on mountaintops date back to the 1700s, when the Spanish first came to California. They were actually the first to dub these mysterious strangers “los Vigilantes Oscuros” (the dark watchers), but the first Anglo-American settlers that came after them reported similar sightings, and the figures eventually became part of the local folklore. The strange thing is that dark watchers still show themselves to hikers in the Santa Lucia Mountains, and some have even been captured on camera.

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Media outlets worldwide have been reporting the shocking case of a young Turkish woman who had allegedly been allegedly conning her poor mother into sending her money by claiming that she was studying medicine at the prestigious Oxford University, in the UK. In reality, she was living it up while working as a real estate agent in Istanbul.

25-year-old Merve Bozkurt has attracted a lot of criticism for her actions, after it was revealed that she had been lying to her penniless mother for years, as a way of getting extra money from her. The woman went to great lengths to make her parent believe that she had been admitted at the prestigious English university, where she was studying to become a doctor. She even sent her mother photos of herself wearing a white robe and face mask, to create the illusion that she was doing hands-on medical training. All the while, the poor mother was selling flowers in front of a cemetery in the city of Antakya, to support her daughter.

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