Located near Ismailia, about two hours from Egypt’s capital, Cairo, Serapium Forest is nothing short of an environmental miracle – a 240-hectare forest of both native and non-native trees thriving in the middle of the desert.

Advancing desserts have become a serious problem throughout the African continent, but a team of German and Egyptian researchers has come up with a very efficient way of stopping desertification and even reclaiming land from the dry sands. While forests have been used to stop the spread of deserts into fertile land for a very long time, the absence of rainfall makes nurturing the trees and keeping them healthy an almost impossible task in most African countries. But it turns out we don’t have to rely on water falling from the sky, as waste water works even better for plants and trees not intended for human consumption.

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After making some of the most delicious pizza on the east side if Indianapolis for the last three decades, the owner of D & C Pizza has come up with anew recipe that he hopes will take guns off the streets and reduce the high crime rate.

Donald Dancy wants to offer a free extra-large pizza to anyone who turns in a gun at his shop. It may seem like a strange tradeoff since pizza is relatively cheap while guns sell for hundreds of dollars on the street, but the pizza shop owner says he has lots of customers who carry illegal guns and would be more than glad to take advantage of the unusual promotion. His plan is to hold the guns in a safe place until police officers arrive to pick them up.

“I can see kids 14 through 18 coming in here and buying a pizza and their guns fall out,” Dancy said. “When you pass here right off of 36th and go all the way down to 25th street and over, it is like a war zone. It is not getting any better.”

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You may not of heard of it before, but Solid Rain has been helping Mexican farmers fights severe droughts for over a decade. The miracle powder is actually a super absorbent polymer that can soak up water up to 500 times its original size and keep it in the ground for up to a year.

The story of Solid Rain began in 1970, when the United States Department of Agriculture developed a super absorbent product made from a type of starch known as “super slurper”. In the U.S., it has mainly been used in disposable diapers, to help keep baby bottoms dry, but a Mexican chemical engineer saw this magic powder as an opportunity to effectively fight the drought plaguing his country.

Sergio Rico Velasco developed and patented a different version of potassium polyacrylate that could be mixed with soil and slowly feed water to plants over a long period of time. His company, Solid Rain, has been quietly selling the product to Mexican farmers for over 10 years now.

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Woralop, a 44-year-old homeless man from Thailand, only had nine baht (¢25) to his name when he found a Hermes leather wallet with 20,000 baht ($579USD) and several credit cards. It was more than enough to buy him food and even a place to stay for weeks, maybe months, but he chose to return it. The kind gesture would soon prove to be life-changing.

You’ve probably been asked what you would do if you found a wallet full of cash, at least once in your life. Would you keep, it, turn it in to the police, ask for a reward? This question always tests a person’s moral values, but for someone who has hit rock bottom, the answer seems pretty clear. And yet Woralop claims he didn’t even think about keeping the wallet, and even ran after the owner to return it, after seeing him dropping it by mistake. He couldn’t catch up with the man, but he went straight to the nearest police station to hand it over.

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With the remains of around 100 billion dead people currently buried or otherwise stored on this planet, it’s no surprise that we’re running out of space for final resting places. The phrase “six feet under” just isn’t sustainable anymore, so architects are now looking to the sky as an alternative to sprawling ground cemeteries. High-rise cemeteries are becoming increasingly popular all over the world, and the Memorial Necrópole Ecumênica, in Santos, Brazil, is the highest of them all.

When Pepe Altstut inaugurated the Memorial Necrópole Ecumênica cemetery, in 1983, it was only a very small building, but the demand for above-ground tombs with a view was so great that he kept expanding until his cemetery became the tallest in the world. Today, it measures 108 meters tall, features 25,000 storing units (tombs, if you will), several wake rooms, crypts, mausoleums, a peacock garden with its own small waterfall and even a chapel and snack bar on the roof.

While few regular cemeteries can be considered tourist attractions in their own right, the Memorial Necrópole Ecumênica is actually one of the most visited landmarks in Santos, and acknowledged as such by the local tourism board. Altstut himself admits that his cemetery is incredibly popular with tourists, and attributes it to the structure’s notoriety as the tallest cemetery on Earth. People from all over the world reportedly come to Santos to see the necropolis where people pay big money for tombs with a view.

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The Norwegian Environment Agency has recently released a series of haunting images of at least 323 dead reindeer – 70 of them calves – killed in what has been described as one of the deadliest lightning strikes ever.

It is unclear exactly when the natural disaster occurred, but the hundreds of dead bodies were discovered on Friday by a group of hunters in a remote area of the barren Hardanangervidda plateau, in central Norway. Spanning some 8,000 square kilometers, Hardangervidda is the largest high mountain plateau in northern Europe and the largest national park in Norway, with a population of 10,000 to 11,000 wild reindeer.

While the specifics of the mass death will probably never be known, experts say that animals tend to huddle together in extreme weather, which makes it easier for lightning to pass through their bodies. Norwegian officials say that multiple animal deaths caused by lightning strike is not very uncommon, but the scale of this event is definitely unheard of. “We are not familiar with any previous happening on such a scale,” Kjartan Knutsen of the Norwegian Environment Agency said. “Individual animals do from time to time get killed by lightning, and there are incidents where sheep have been killed in groups of 10 or even 20, but we have never seen anything like this.”

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Aware that once something is on the internet, it says on the internet, a man from Weifang, China’s Shandong province, actually destroyed the physical internet infrastructure in his neighborhood to prevent some embarrassing photos of himself from appearing online.

The man, only identified as Liu, had only recently arrived in Weifang in search of a job, when he attended neighborhood square dance. The popular activity is usually associated with middle-aged women, but that didn’t bother him. At least, not until he noticed bystanders laughing and taking photos of him showing his dancing skills. He quickly left the event after that, but couldn’t shake the feeling that the people who had photographed him would share the embarrassing photos online.

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Bruno, a 12-year-old brown Chesapeake-Labrador mix, has become the symbol of Longville, a small Minnesota community of just over 150 residents. Over the past 12 years, he has been taking daily 4-mile trips from his owners’ home to Longville, just so he can spend time with the locals.

To the people of Longville, Bruno is a legend, an ambassador of goodwill, the town mascot, and above all a free spirit. Every resident has either lived or heard a Bruno story, and he’s such a big part of the community that the town even commissioned a wooden statue in his honor. Even though he lives 4 miles away with his owners, Larry and Debbie LaVallee, the friendly brown dog walks to town every day to enjoy the company of his human friends, accept tasty handouts or simply bask in the attention he gets from both familiar locals and tourists. When the day is done, he just walks back home, only to return again the next day, regardless of weather conditions.

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A young Vietnamese woman recently shocked police after admitting that she had paid someone to cut off her left hand and foot, so she could claim a health insurance payoff of roughly $180,000.

The extreme insurance scam reportedly began in May, when a 30-year-old woman named only as Ly Thi N convinced an acquaintance to cut of her left arm and foot in exchange for 50 million dong ($2,200). The plan was to make it look like she had been hit by a train, so the cold-blooded accomplice, named as Doan Van D, acted like a bystander who just happened to find her injured near a railroad in Hanoi. He was the one who called an ambulance and notified the police about the “accident”.

Ly Thi N was found lying in the ground with a severed hand and leg, and the woman told police that she had wandering near the railway track when a train passed by and dragged her under it. Doan Van D, who she described as a total stranger, just happened to pass by and ended up saving her life. At first, everyone thought that the victim was lucky to be alive, but policemen investigating the accident became suspicious after learning that the woman and the 21-year-old who allegedly found her by accident actually knew each other quite well. Read More »

Watermelon plants usually yield only 1 to 4 fruit per harvest, but a new variety created by an agricultural technology company in China has recently set a new Guinness Record after yielding no less than 131 massive fruit.

The Chinese seem to be really good at creating super plants. Just weeks after we posted about their impressive “octopus tomato trees” that can yield over 30,000 fruits at a time, we bring you the “watermelon king”, a new breed of watermelon that can set over 100 viable fruits per plant. Created by the Zhengzhou Research Seedling Technology Co., Ltd., the plant has been acknowledged as the most productive watermelon plant in the world after yielding 131 fruit in just 90 days.

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The game of hide-and-seek may not yet be an Olympic sport – although efforts are being made in that regard – but it’s apparently popular enough to have its own world championship.

What started out as a fun one-time event thought up by small Italian publication CTRL Magazine, in 2010, eventually turned into an annual event that grew with every edition. This year, the 6th Nascodino World Championship – “nascondino” is Italian for hide-and-seek – will take place on the the 3rd and 4th of September, in the beautiful village of Consonno, once a bustling tourist attraction complete with its own zoo, sightseeing train and several eclectic buildings. It has since become a ghost town, but event organizers consider the settlement perfect for a grand hide-and-seek competition.

The rules of the tournament are a bit more complex than the childhood game we all used to play growing up, but then again, this is a contest for grownups (18-year-olds and above). Participants may register to take part in the World Nascondino Championship in teams of five, after paying a €125 fee per team. The teams are then divided into four groups and one person per group hides while a “neutral searching team” counts 60 seconds. The hidden player then has 10 minutes to come out of their hiding spot and reach a soft mattress (for diving purposes) placed in the middle of a field without being found or at least before a member of the searching team. If they fail to reach their target within the time limit, players are not awarded any points. The game goes on for two days until the ultimate winner is declared.

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A number of restaurants in Germany have come up with a somewhat controversial way of fighting food waste – charging patrons a small fee if they cannot finish all the food on their plates.

Yuoki, a sushi restaurant in Stuttgart, Germany, is not your everyday all-you-can-eat buffet. For starters, there isn’t an actual buffet to fill your plate at. Instead, patrons are seated at a table and provided with iPads which they can use to order up to five small dishes every ten minutes. They can eat as much as they want for 120 minutes, but having the food delivered at short intervals allows diners to constantly assess how hungry they are and order accordingly, preventing food waste. Also, owner Luan Guoyu believes our “eyes are bigger than our stomachs”, so not being able to see the cooked food at the buffet prevents people from ordering more food that they can actually eat just because they like the way it looks.

But Luan Guoyu’s most effective way of fighting food waste, and the one that has attracted media attention, is his €1 ($1.15) fine for food still left on the plate. “It’s called ‘all-you-can-eat,’ not ‘all-you-can-chuck-away,’ he says, adding that the extra charge is not meant to increase his profits, but to act as a reminder not to waste food. In the two years since Yuoki implemented this “eat up or pay up” policy, Guoyu claims he has collected €900 ($1,020) to €1,000 ($1,133) in food waste fees, which he plans to donate to charity.

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Fashion Model Summer Rayne Oakes has been living in a 1,200-square-foot converted industrial space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for 11 years, and during in that time she has managed to turn it into a stunning oasis filled with 500 plants, including a living wall, an irrigated vertical garden, a closet garden, edibles and exotic species.

“I think that the only way I’ve really been able to survive in New York is by surrounding myself with plants,” Oakes told Modern Farmer Magazine, which makes sense considering she grew up in a country house on five acres of land in rural northeastern Pennsylvania, surrounded by domestic animals and lots of plants. It was fashion modelling that first brought her to the Big Apple, but that, and everything else she has been involved in since relocating to the big city, has been about raising awareness to the environment.

“It was the modeling at start because at that point in time I wanted to look at how I could bring environmental awareness out to a wider audience,” Summer said in an interview with 6sqft. “I got kind of stuck on the idea that I could do it through fashion. Not that I had ever really been involved or interested in it, and I didn’t even know how to get there other than by meeting people. Putting myself back into my 18-year-old self, it was the idea of wow, I think fashion could be a really cool way to disseminate environmental awareness.”

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An expectant mother from Tianping City, China’s Hunan province, may have set a new world record for the longest pregnancy. She claims that she was supposed to deliver her baby in November of last year, but eight months past her due date she was was still pregnant because her placenta was underdeveloped. The woman finally gave birth in her 18th of August.

Local media reports that Wang Shi became pregnant in February 2015, but when she turned up at the hospital nine months later hoping to have the baby delivered, doctors informed her that she was not ready to give birth due to an underdeveloped placenta, also known as placenta previa. Worried about the condition, Wang and her husband went to the hospital every 7 to 10 days after her due date passed for check-ups. By her 14th month of pregnancy, the woman was more than ready to welcome her baby into the world, but doctors once again told her that she needed to wait because the fetus was not developed enough for a C-section operation.

“I feel ashamed of being pregnant for so long. I hope I can successfully and safely deliver my baby next month,” Wang recently told reporters. “It has cost us more than 10,000 yuan ($1,500) just for the check-ups alone, and we’ve now lost our patience.” Because of her prolonged pregnancy she had gained around 26 kilograms, going from 52.2 kg to 78 kg, but she was otherwise in good physical condition.

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An Indonesian family got the shock of their life after their husband and father, 62-year-old Waluyo, just showed up at their doorstep one year after they had buried him. He was pronounced dead on May 15, 2015, after supposedly being involved in a car accident.

This bizarre story started last year, when Waluyo, from Suryoputran Panembahan village in Jogyakarta, left his home to work as a street cleaner in the city of Semarang, in order to support his family. It wasn’t long after his departure that his wife, Alim Eskatinah, got a call from the police who told her that Waluyo had been the victim of a serious car accident and was in critical condition at the emergency room. The whole family and even some of their neighbors rushed to the hospital to be by his side, but the injured man died after a few days. “In the hospital he was in a coma. Relatives and neighbors all visited him. He then died on May 7, 2015. Many came to his funeral, all the neighbors came,” Waluyo’s daughter, Anti Ristanti told Indonesian newspaper Detik.

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