A Rhode Island has been suffering from an extremely rare fungus-caused condition that literally causes black mold to grow in his brain.

Tyson Bottenus, a 35-year-old man from Rhode Island is only one of only 120 documented cases of infections with Cladophialophora bantiana, an exotic fungus known as “black mold”, since 1911. In his case, the fungus made its home in the brain, causing all sorts of issues that Bottenus has been dealing with ever since symptoms began, about four years ago. Tyson is lucky to be alive, as black mold kills over 70% of its hosts, and he is doing everything possible to fight and hopefully get it out of his brain, but it’s a tough battle, one that even modern medicine is struggling with.

Tyson’s ordeal began 4 years ago, when he and his fiancée, Liza, decided to celebrate their engagement by going cycling together in Costa Rica. Everything was well and good until the third day of their vacation when Tyson accidentally fell off his bike and scraped his left elbow. It wasn’t the most serious injury, so he just rinsed and bandaged the wound as best as he could, and had it looked at by a nurse early the next morning.

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Carlos Henrique Raposo, aka Carlos Kaiser, is a Brazilian former football player known primarily for having a decade-long career without actually playing a single game.

As children, most people grow up dreaming of one day becoming sports champions, despite an obvious lack of athletic abilities. Most of us realize this to be nothing more than an impossible dream and move on, but a few still manage to find ways of making their goal a reality, by any means necessary. This is the story of Carlos Henrique Raposo, a Brazilian athlete who “wanted to be a footballer, but did not want to play football”. Believe it or not, he managed to be just, playing for top-ranked Brazilian and international clubs for over a decade. ‘Playing’ may not be the right word, though, as he never actually played an official game in his entire 12-year-long career.

Carlos Kaiser – nicknamed earned due to his alleged resemblance to German football legend Franz Beckenbauer – always knew that he had the physique of a professional football player, but not the necessary talent and skills to make the roster of top football clubs, so he relied on a variety of tricks to build himself up as this great player that every team was after.

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A viral video showing a flock of hundreds of yellow-headed blackbirds flying straight into the pavement in the Mexican town of Cuauhtémoc has left a lot of people scratching their heads about the cause.

Footage from a security camera shows a large flock of yellow-headed blackbirds descending upon on a house before brutally crashing into the asphalt. Although most of the birds manage to take to the skies after the bizarre crash, many can be seen scattered on the street, barely moving. Subsequent videos showing dozens of bird carcasses confirm that the unusual descent had been fatal for some of the birds.

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A Catholic priest who has performed thousands of baptisms over the last two decades recently resigned after learning that they are all invalid, because of a simple mistake.

Father Andres Arango recently resigned as a priest from St. Gregory’s Catholic Parish in Phoenix, Arizona, after a 25-year career. He stood accused of botching thousands of baptisms while serving as a priest in California, Brazil, and Arizona, and he was recently found guilty. Interestingly, it all came down to a simple wording issue, which apparently mattered a lot more than Aango or anyone outside the Catholic CHurch ever imagined.

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A 39-year-old Vietnamese man recently went viral because of his obsession with gold, wearing kilograms of jewelry around his neck and on his hands, and driving gold-plated cars and motorcycles.

Tran Duc Loi, an entrepreneur from Vietnam’s An Giang province has been getting a lot of attention in his home country because of his fascination with the world’s most popular precious metal. For the last three years, Tran, who makes a living selling South American lizards as luxury pets, has been surrounding himself with gold, as a way of boosting his luck and prosperity. He believes gold attracts good fortune in business, so he makes sure to wear as much of it as possible whenever he goes out.

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Kjeragbolten is one of the most instagrammable places in Norway. It’s an ancient boulder wedged in a crevasse by the edge of Kjerag mountain, in Lysefjord.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably seen photos of people standing on this giant boulder wedged in-between two stone walls, above this seemingly bottomless abyss. Well, technically, the abyss is 984 meters or 3,228 feet deep, so in terms of chances of survival in case of a fall, it might as well be bottomless. However, despite its dramatic appearance, Kjeragbolten is relatively easy to access on foot without any special equipment, making it one of the hottest tourist spots in Norway.

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For over half a year now, border control points in Longzhou County, along China’s border with Vietnam have been using geese as part of their arsenal of detecting and apprehending illegal immigrants.

As part of China’s strategy to prevent the spread of Covid-19, the country has taken a very hard stance on illegal immigration, with border patrols and control points playing a big part role. However, China’s a big place with a long border, so keeping people out isn’t the easiest thing to do. In Longzhou, a county in Guanxi Province, the border with Vietnam stretches for 184 kilometers on land and 22 kilometers on waters, with many trails and paths for patrols to keep an eye on. Luckily, since last summer, they have had a new secret weapon in their arsenal – geese.

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Hikmet Kaya, a retired forest technician from Turkey, is being praised as the main driving force behind an impressive ecological achievement – turning a barren hill in Sinop city into a green oasis of million trees.

During his 24-year tenure as Head of Afforestation at Boyabat Forestry Operations Department in Sinop’s Boyabat district, Hikmet Kaya focused on afforestation, planting over 25 million saplings on a barren hill overlooking Sinop and turning it into a green oasis. He began work in 1978, and focused on afforestation in the steppe areas of Boyabat, relying both on specialized teams and the local community to transform inhospitable land into a green oasis for both humans and animals. Even though he retired in 2002, Hikmet Kaya’s project lived on, and today he is regarded as somewhat of a local hero.

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A South Korean porcelain painter specializing in watercolor-like designs, managed to adapt her art to a whole new, more sensitive canvas, the human skin.

Bucheon-based tattoo artist Abii had spent about six years working as a professional porcelain painter when her mentor encouraged her to start practicing tattooing as well. She had always wanted to expand the way she expressed herself artistically, so this was a welcome challenge. She started studying under a famous South Korean tattoo artist, and before long, Abii was inking the same beautiful motifs from her porcelain masterpieces on human skin.

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Idegami Baku looks like she should be in a popular idol group, only she is actually a 19-year-old boy with perhaps the most striking androgynous appearance in the world.

Men using makeup and photo manipulation technology to pose as women online has become a really popular trend in recent years, but no one does it better than”the most feminine boy in the world,” Idegami Baku. We first featured Idegami back in 2018, when he rose to fame following his participation in Japan’s popular talent contest JUNON Super Boy, where his feminine looks first caught the public’s eye. Even though he didn’t win the contest, people couldn’t get over how pretty he looked, and he amassed a massive online following on social media in record time.

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A 56-year-old man from Turkey has spent the last fourteen months of his life in isolation, testing positive for Covid-19 no less than 78 times ever since becoming infected in November of 2020.

Muzaffer Kayasan from Turkey has been confined to hospitals and his own home for over a year, and is desperately looking for a way to get back to his old life. After becoming infected with a strain of the coronavirus back in November of 2020, Kaysan was hospitalized and treated until his illness became less severe. He got over the worse symptoms of Covid-19, but the virus remained in his system, and every test he has undergone since has turned out positive, forcing him to remain in isolation, either in the hospital or at home.

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The Japanese Bobtail is a rare car breed whose distinctive feature is the presence of a short, bunny-like tail, instead of the long, flexible tail of most other felines.

No one knows exactly when this unusual cat breed arrived in Japan, but it has been a part of Japanese culture for at least several hundred years, being frequently featured in traditional art and folklore. In the early 1600s, the breed played a major role in preserving Japan’s silkworm production, by taking on rodents, and by the next century, the bobtail was already the dominant cat breed being kept in Japan. No one knows whether it was because of its distinctive tail, which looked like it had been bent and broken, its friendly personality, or its talkative nature, but the Japanese Bobtail became extremely popular in the Japanese country and remains so today. However, it remains extremely rare outside the borders of Japan.

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Chateau Erken, in the Russian Federation’s Kabardino-Balkaria autonomous republic, looks like an extremely well-preserved medieval castle, but in reality, this architectural wonder is just over a decade old.

Located in the vineyard-dominated countryside of Kabardino-Balkaria, Chateau Erken is a tourist attraction unlike any other in Russia. Not only does it mimic the fortress-like design of European medieval castles, but its location in the middle of a man-made lake full of fish and wild birds is just as impressive. People from all over the country come to this rural area in Southern Russia to see Chateau Erken in person. Photos and videos of this amazing castle have been doing the rounds on social media for years, but some people still can’t believe it exists and that it was built not by a king, but by a legendary businessman.

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Tropical rainforests are densely populated with a remarkable diversity of plant life, from various trees to vines, shrubs and flowers, but deep in the Amazon rainforest there are large areas that consist of a single tree species. These are known as Devil’s Gardens.

The indigenous tribes of the Amazon rainforest have known about Devil’s Gardens for hundreds, if not thousands of years, and they have eerie local legends that speak of evil spirits. In fact, it’s these stories that inspired the name of the mysterious tracts of vegetation randomly spread throughout the jungle. Many locals believe that they were planted by an evil spirit, and who can blame them? After all, how can one explain large areas of otherwise diverse rainforest where only a single tree species appears to thrive? Well, a few years back, researchers found that Devil’s Gardens are not the work of the devil, but that of a small ant that only aims to ensure the survival of its habitat.

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Residents of several villages in Russia’s Magadan region have recently reported black snow caused by the soot produced by an outdated, coal-powered water-heating plant.

In Omsukchan and neighboring Seimchan, two villages in the Siberian far east, snow doesn’t always look the way you’d expect. In fact, sometimes it’s quite the opposite. Instead of an immaculate white covering everything as far as the eye can see, locals are treated to a nightmarish view of black, soot-covered snow that the kids sometimes play in. Photos and videos of this disturbing scenery have been doing the rounds online every winter for years, but locals say that despite the temporary outrage they spark online, nothing ever changes.

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