It’s the stuff fairy tales are made off: parents are parted from their child, years or decades pass, and then chance or fate reunites them. This, however, is no fairy tale but a very real one and involves a Chinese couple and the daughter they had to give up to ensure her survival. And as it happens in real life, things don’t always go smoothly. Qian Fenxiang and her husband Xu Lida finally met their daughter Jingzhi, 22 years after they left her as a newborn baby in a vegetable market. The girl was adopted by an American family and grew up as Catherine Su Pohler, or Kati for short.

The Kodak moment reunion was made possible by the note Qian left with her baby girl. Kati’s adoptive parents, Ken and Ruth Pohler of Hudsonville, Michigan, were deeply moved by the contents and decided they would tell the girl one day if she wanted to know. When the day of the revelation came in 2016, Kati was 21 and a college student. It took another year before she got to meet her birth parents on the famed Broken Bridge in Hangzhou.

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A 22-year-old woman from Hong Kong has undergone over 30 plastic surgery procedures in a bid to impress her boyfriend. Berry Ng began getting the procedures when she was only 17, as she wanted to look more like western supermodels. She now regrets her decisions.

Berry NG claims that her plastic surgery addiction began when she saw a beauty center offering affordable student packages that cost HKD 799 (102 USD) for three injections. However, over the course of a few hours, the beautician persuaded her to go for a more expensive package costing HKD 17,000 (2175 USD). Berry was so pleased with the results that she began to seek more treatments and soon found herself addicted to cosmetic surgery. However, things got even worse when she was 20 years old and entered into a romantic relationship with a man nine years her senior.

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Consider yourself a person of bold fashion choices AND have 210 pounds ($280) to spare? In that case, the tube scarf created by Bulgarian knitwear designer label Dukyana could be just the winter pick for you. Beware, though: this piece of woolen clothing has no arm holes and is really a beige mohair tube that covers the entire body from the neck down, folding over the shoulders. Lots of people have lots to say about this product, some declaring that it resembles a giant sock.

Dukyana is the trade name chosen by a Bulgarian woman called Milena Bunalova, who offers the clothes knitted by herself and her five-member team through third-party retailers and her own website. According to the label, the tube scarf (or sock dress or however you choose to describe it) is a fashion statement. Dukyana hopes the creation will become a hit this winter and sees it as an excellent solution for ladies who favor long walks out in the chilly air. The label also says that the fashion article does not stretch and hugs a woman’s body tightly.

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An interesting vacancy has just opened up in the Philippines: the country no longer has a “Cobra King” after the person holding that title has died. The irony is that Elies ‘Peter’ Lenturio, also known as the Philippine snake whisperer, met his end through an act of revenge on his pet cobra: he was bitten by the snake and retaliated by cutting its head off and drinking its blood.

It seems that Elies’s mistake was ingesting the blood. Cobras are extremely poisonous snakes and people in general would be terror-struck if bitten, not to mention dead without immediate treatment. However, the Cobra King had gotten numerous snake bites over the years and knew how to treat himself. He would not go to the hospital that day, choosing to have a few drinks instead and then head home to sleep it off. It turned out to be his last night on earth: he started foaming at the mouth and going rigid, much to the surprise of his family. Elies was rushed to hospital, but he was pronounced dead on arrival.

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What was supposed to be a bit of fun turned into a crying game for Arran Maye, a 28-year-old plumber from Leicester. While vacationing with 20 friends in the Spanish city of Benidorm, the Briton invested 9 pounds ($12) in a henna tattoo that left him sporting a handlebar mustache and a chin beard. The idea was to get into the spirit of Benidorm Fiesta, a local fancy dress festival, but things went from bad to worse when Arran experienced an intense allergic reaction to the henna ink, which may leave him with permanent scars.

Adam Lewis, another member of the British partying bunch, got the same tattoos as Arran, but while his tattoos faded within a few days, Arran’s were much more problematic. On top of the excruciating pain he experienced, his face ballooned and started oozing puss. It tuned out that the henna used on Arran was an illegal variety called black henna, which contains the chemical PPD. It caused a severe allergic reaction and ultimately landed him in intensive care, with one of the consequences being potentially permanent scars in the shape of a handlebar mustache and a small beard.

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We all have our phobias. Some people run for their lives at the sight of insects or reptiles, others hate tight spaces like elevators, or stepping on the roof of a tall building. And while most people can live perfectly normal lives despite their phobias, there are also those who let the fear dominate their lives. A case in point is a doomsday-fearing octogenarian in the U.S. state of Utah, who dedicated more than three decades of his life to building bunkers and cabins on state and Government land and stuffing them with provisions and weapons.

The Iron County Sheriff’s Office, which is investigating the case along with the FBI and other law enforcement bodies, has so far declined to identify the man, revealing only that he resides in the town of Parowan. According to official information released so far, the man acted out of fear that the world might end or that society as we know it might somehow collapse. The structures he built are located in a forest bordering the ski town of Brian Head.

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German architect Marc Wübbenhorst has to drink at least 20 liters of water a day or risk dying from dehydration. The 35-year-old suffers from the rare metabolic disease Diabetes insipidus, which causes intense thirst and the frequent excretion of large amounts of diluted urine. If Wübbenhorst stops drinking water, his body starts to dry out, and he can die of thirst in a matter of hours.

Constant thirst has been a part of Marc Wübbenhorst’s life for as long as he can remember. It’s nothing like the thirst a normal person experiences, because it doesn’t go away after drinking a glass or two of water. His body can’t hold any water, as his kidneys eliminate the fluids almost as fast as he ingests them. Marc can never ignore his thirst for more than an hour, because he starts to experience severe symptoms of dehydration, like cracked lips, dizziness and confusion. These are symptoms that most adults experience after two or three days of fluids deprivation.

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A 70-year-old widowed grandmother from Devon, England, was left homeless after thieves stole her 40-foot, £30,000 static caravan by lifting it from its base, putting it on a low loader trailer and just driving off with it.  They broke into the yard s.

The victim, Sonia McColl, believes that the unusual theft is somehow connected to her activity as the founder of the Park Home Owners Justice Campaign. She had been tirelessly campaigning to protect homeowner rights, an effort that didn’t sit very well with  unscrupulous mobile home site owners. McColl told reporters that she was in the process of moving from Dorset to Devon after suffering multiple death threats for her campaigning. She had recently bought a static caravan in Willand, near Cullompton, but never imagined it could get stolen. She now has nothing left but the curtains that she had intended to fit in her new home. The static caravan was unfortunately not insured, leaving McColl penniless.

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Ever heard of Russia’s healing pyramids? They are the work of Dr. Alexander Golod, a Ukrainian scientist who claims that they have the power to prevent diseases, enhance the potency of medicines, cure impotence and even control the weather.

Dr. Golod, a Moscow-based scientist and defense engineer, began building his mysterious pyramids in 1990. By 2001 he had completed 17 of them in various parts of Russia and the Ukraine. By 2010 that number had increased to over 50 pyramids worldwide, with the majority in Russia and the Ukraine. Each pyramid has an internal framework of PVC pipes that are then covered with sheets of fiberglass to form smooth faces. They were designed to fit the Golden Section phi ratio of 1 to 1.618, a standard ratio found in nature that can be used to create beautiful, natural looking compositions. This proportion makes the structures steeper than the Egyptian pyramids, with a slope of about 70 degrees. The top is nearly twice as high, relative to the perimeter of its base, making Golod’s pyramids look more like church steeples or obelisks.

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A Russian woman has left her husband after she recognized the view from her bedroom window in a photo on another woman’s Instagram account and realized that he was cheating on her.

Yulia Agranovych, a former model turned pediatric dentist, from St. Petersburg, was browsing through her Instagram feed one morning, when she noticed a familiar sight in a photo posted by a certain Vlada Abramovich. It was the same view she admired daily from her bedroom window, so she continued looking through other woman’s gallery and discovered several images of her husband, Nazar Grynko. Yulia decided to confront him about the photos.

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Sahar Tabar, a 19-year-old woman from Iran, has been the talk of the internet over the last couple of days due to her zombie-like appearance, which is a apparently the result of dozens of cosmetic procedures meant to make her look like Angelina Jolie.

We live in a world where super fans often go under the knife to make themselves look like their idols, but whereas most end up with doll-like features, Teheran-based Sahar Tabar looks like a real-life character out of a Tim Burton animation. She has in fact been compared to the “Corpse Bride”, and looking at some of her Instagram photos, you can see that the comparison actually makes sense. It’s obvious that the 19-year-old uses makeup and creepy contact lenses to enhance her undead look, but those prominent cheekbones, inflated lips and plastic-like nose seem to be her real features.

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A Vietnamese court recently sentenced 22-year-old blogger and journalist Nguyen Van Hoa to seven years in prison for reporting on the 2016 Formosa spill that devastated the Vietnamese coast. Arrested in April, Hoa had produced video footage, photos, and articles about Taiwan-owned Formosa Plastics Group’s April 2016 toxic chemical spill from its steel plant located at the port in Ha Tinh. According to state-run media, he stands accused of “propagating against, distorting and defaming the government.”

The People’s Court of Ha Tinh province found Hoa guilty of violating Article 88 of Vietnam’s Penal Code and also ruled that he be placed under house arrest for three years after his jail term is complete. No attorney was present to represent Hao in the closed trial.

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If alien conspiracy theories are your thing or you simply believe in extraterrestrial life and eagerly await the first contact, you’ll feel right at home at Akdeniz University in Turkey. This educational establishment, based in the province of Antalya, has made a course called “Ufology and Exopolitics” part of its latest curriculum. Its aim is to get students ready to give a proper welcome to visitors from space, which tutor Erhan Kolbaşi believes to have already touched down multiple times.

Practical preparations and interstellar diplomacy are only part of the course focus. As Kolbaşi told the Dogan News Agency, students will also learn about alleged government cover-ups of alien activity on Earth. Kolbaşi, who serves as deputy chair of Istanbul-based Sirius UFO Space Sciences Research Center, claims that fiber optic cable, microchips and night vision devices are technologies we have because of information collected at UFO crash sites.

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Imagine waking up one day and finding that your beautiful local beach is no more – gone, its fine white sand swept away by a freak storm. You go about your daily business for 12 long years and then suddenly the beach is back, all its glory restored by another storm. This is what happened on the island of Achill, off the coast of Ireland, where the inhabitants are celebrating the return of the beautiful Ashleam Bay beach that was taken from them in 2005.

That in itself is remarkable enough, but the story gets even better! You see, another beach in Achill did a disappearing act once, but took much longer to return. The beach at Doonagh, located only six miles (10km) away from Ashleam Bay, was restored earlier this year after waves created by spring storms had swept away all the sand in 1984, leaving just rock pools behind.

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Austrian designer Klemens Schillinger has created a therapeutic replacement for smartphones called Substitute Phones. The Vienna-based designer made a series of five of these non-devices which feature a row of stone beads to imitate various motions typical to smartphone use, such as scrolling, zooming, and swiping.

By using stone beads to emulate interaction with a phone’s touchscreen, Schillinger aims to create therapeutic tools that can provide the physical simulation that frequent smartphone users crave, and help them cope with the withdrawal symptoms of being away from their phones for long periods of time

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