A woman in Northern Ireland lived with a plastic painkiller packet stuck in her throat for 17 days, after unknowingly swallowing it in the middle of the night.

The 40-something woman, who preferred to remain anonymous, reportedly swallowed a Tramadol pill in the middle of the night, without first taking it out of its plastic packaging. The morning after the incident, she woke up with a foreign body sensation in her throat, and went straight to the hospital where she complained of discomfort and difficulty swallowing. However, the ear, nose and throat doctor at the hospital found that she was tolerating fluids, had no difficulties breathing and could mobilize her neck without feeling any pain.

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A public utility company in the Russian city of Irkutsk has come up with an ingenious way of reminding people to pay their bills if they want to continue using their indoor toilets.

In November of last year, the Irkutsk Northern Housing and Utility Systems Directorate installed a wooden cabin toilet outside an apartment building with a sign that read “Toilet for Debtors” on the front door. This was the company’s unique way of reminding residents that it could cut off their utilities if they didn’t settle their debts. The measure was apparently so successful that the company has been moving the outdoor toilet to problem areas of the city for the last couple of months.

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Imagine looking up to gaze at the moon on a clear summer night only to see the sky full of glowing advertising billboards. That’s the future envisioned by a Russian start-up which plans to launch billboard advertisements into low-Earth orbit as early as 2021.

Russian company StartRocket announced plans to introduce orbital advertising billboards made up of a grid of tissue box-sized satellites called CubeSats. These tiny satellites will orbit 400-500 kilometers above the Earth and use reflective Mylar sails around 30 feet in diameter to catch and reflect sunlight, creating a pixelated matrix. The ads would only be visible at night but could be seen from just about anywhere on the planet. The company already has a CubeSat prototype, and could start testing its sky advertisements next year.

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After being refused a loan at a bank in Kazan, Russia, a young woman tried to convince the bank manager to approve the loan by stripping in front of him.

Yulia Kuzmina, who is reportedly in her mid-20s, went to a bank in Kazan, the capital city of The Republic of Tatarstan in western Russia, to secure a loan for a new car. She filled out all the necessary forms, but her application was denied after the bank’s analysis determined that she was an unreliable borrower. After pleading with the loan manager, Kuzmina decided it was time for desperate measures and started taking her clothes off in front of him.

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Unscooped dog poo is a problem in most urban communities around the world, but one company is offering an advanced scientific solution to crack down on offenders – testing the poo for DNA and comparing it against a database of registered community pets to track down their owners.

Lazy dog owners who don’t clean up after their pets are a bane on any community, but catching them in the act or finding proof that a certain person is to blame can be very difficult. Or at least it used to be until BioVet Laboratories launched their PooPrints service, which allows housing complexes to test unscooped poo and compare the results against a database of genetic material from dogs who live in that community. Offending owners are then tracked down and fined up to $250. BioVet Laboratories are currently working with over 3,000 housing complexes in the US, Canada and the UK.

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TV viewers in China recently noticed something strange whenever certain male celebrities showed up on screen – their ears were digitally blurred as if to hide something. While Chinese television has yet to make an official statement on this issue, the measure seems meant to hide men’s earrings.

Last year, China’s media regulator banned TV stations from showing celebrities’ tattoos as well as other elements of “hip hop culture, sub-culture and immoral culture,” in an effort to minimize Western impact on China’s pop culture. It was only a matter of time before men’s earrings were targeted, and earlier this year people started noticing that earring-wearing male actors and other pop icons had their ears blurred. The hashtag #MaleTVStarsCantWearEarrings recently went viral online, with tens of thousands of people criticizing the move as discriminatory.

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A young Alabama vet student was recently arrested for allegedly pulling off one of the sickest scams imaginable. She took older horses from their owners, promising that they would live out the rest of their lives in a sanctuary, but later sold them to be slaughtered.

24-year-old Fallon Blackwood used her educational background as a veterinary student to gain the trust of horse owners who could no longer take care of their older animals. She told several of her victims that she owned an 18-acre farm in Boaz, Alabama, where she could look after the elderly horses, but only if they willingly placed them in her care, as she didn’t have the money to buy them. After taking the horses off their owners’ hands, Blackwood allegedly sold them to kill-buyers to be shipped to Mexican slaughterhouses. The third-year vet student is believed to be responsible for the disappearance of nearly 50 horses.

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A company in Shandong province, China, has come under fire for forcing six of its employees to crawl through the streets on their hands and feet as punishment for not meeting sales targets.

The humiliating procession reportedly took place in the city of Zaozhuang on January 14 and was recorded by shocked passers-by. Six people can be seen crawling on all fours through traffic behind a man carrying a red flag emblazoned with their company’s name. With no protection other than their office clothes, the punished staff struggles to keep up with the flag bearer, but somehow find the strength to keep going, probably fueled by the fear of losing their jobs.

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An Australian man from Mildura, in the state of Victoria, wanted to show the world just how hot the inside of a car can get on a hot day, so he left a raw steak inside his car for a few hours. When he came back, the steak was allegedly well done.

“Yesterday at 11am I put a porterhouse steak in my car which was parked in the shade and left it until 4pm,” the Mildura Dockside Cafe worker wrote on his Facebook page. “It was very well done upon my return. With this heatwave please remember never to leave children, elderly or animals in the car. Always check on elderly neighbors, ensure your pets have a way to keep cool and cool drinking water.”

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A circular, slow-turning sheet of ice in Maine’s Presumpscot River has captured the imaginations of millions around the world after photos and videos of it have been shared on social media.

It’s been called a “frozen crop circle”, a “frozen moon”, an alien ship”, but scientists say it’s a rare natural phenomenon at an unprecedented scale. Rotating ice circles have been reported in the US before, but they were in the 20- to 30-foot range, whereas the ice disk in the Presumpscot River, in the city of Westbrook, is roughly 100 meters wide. It is constantly rotating counterclockwise and it’s size appears to vary according to the outside temperature and sunlight – it’s larger in the morning, but shrinks when the sun is strong and the temperature rises.

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A Chinese polygamist who was secretly married to three women managed to keep them from finding out about each other despite arranging for them to live within a one kilometer radius, for his own convenience.

The 36-year-old man, surnamed Zhang, is facing up to two years in prison for polygamy, after he exploited a loophole in the system to legally marry three different women in a period of three years. He worked as a real-estate agent in Kunshan, eastern China’s Jiangsu province, and made a lot of money thanks to the country’s booming property market, so providing for three different families was no problem, but he admitted that traveling between three homes up to 10 times a week could be a bit tiring. Not as tiring as it could have been, though, as Zhang made sure to buy the three women apartments within a one kilometer radius, for his own convenience.

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Long haul truck driving is generally seen as a man’s job, but Rino Sasaki, a young female truck driver from Japan, is challenging this stereotype and conquering social media in the process.

Rino Sasaki grew up in Kochi Prefecture as the daughter of a long haul truck driver, but never really considered the idea of becoming one herself until seven years ago, when her father became sick. He continued working, but she couldn’t stand the thought of her father all alone on the road, thousands of miles away from home, with no one to care for him. So 21-year-old Rino, who worked as a traditional dance teacher at the time, got a truck driving license and decided to join her father on his long haul trips. She tried teaching her dance classes as well, but soon learned that driving thousands of miles around the country meant that she might not always be back home on schedule, so she eventually abandoned her old career and became a full-time truck driver.

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Pura Still is being advertised as the first spiked water that doesn’t need bubbles to keep things interesting. It’s still, but definitely not flat as it has an alcohol content of 4.5% by volume.

Alcoholic drink brands have been hard at work trying to come up with new and enticing products for the growing number of health-conscious consumers who like to consume of bit of alcohol from time to time, but hate the calories associated with it. Pura Still is the bet of FIFCO USA, formerly North American Breweries, to capture this important part of the market. It doesn’t have the “annoying carbonated bubbles” that spiked seltzer products are known for, and contains only one gram of sugar and 90 calories. The company describes Pura Still as “the perfect way for consumers to enjoy themselves without straying from their healthy lifestyles”.

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Researchers at the University of South Australia claim to have discovered clay materials in a certain type of dirt, which, if consumed with an evening meal can help soak up fat droplets from the gut.

Obesity costs the global economy an estimated $2 trillion every year, and countries around the world spend even more trying to prevent it, but a recently-published Australian study suggests that finding a cure to this modern-day epidemic could be as easy as dirt, literally. Researchers led by PhD candidate Tahnee Dening were investigating how clay materials can improve drug delivery when they discovered that one of the materials she was testing had the remarkable ability to soak up fat droplets in the gut. The serendipitous discovery immediately signalled Denning that they were on to something big, maybe even a cure for obesity.

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International workspace company Spaces recently teamed up with Dutch lifestyle brand Marie-Stella-Maris to create ‘Spirit de Travail’ a fragrance that can allegedly boost productivity and make people feel more at ease in the workplace.

Productivity at work can be influenced by a variety of factors, of which smell is one of the least obvious. According to research done by Prof. Gary E. Schwartz from the University of Arizona, negative feelings like irritation, annoyance and stress can effectively be countered by fragrances that induce positive effects like happiness, relaxation and productivity. The findings of this study inspired Spaces, a company that specializes in building custom workspaces for businesses and professionals, to come up with a fragrance that both relaxes users and boosts their productivity.

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