A loving mother in China’s Henan province spent more than a million yuan ($154,000) building two metal footbridges in front of her son’s school, to make sure he and the other kids cross the road safely.

The woman, identified only by her surname, Meng, recently told Henan Television Station that the road outside her son’s school was always congested when parents dropped off or picked up their kids, and with no traffic lights installed in the proximity, crossing the road was a dangerous affair for both students and teachers. Another reason why she spent money out of her own pocket to build the footbridges over the road was that the school was located on lower ground and the puddles that constantly formed on the road caused her son to always come home with his feet soaking wet.

Read More »

With counterfeit luxury goods getting harder and harder to spot, China’s rich are paying thousands of dollars for  specialized courses on how to tell apart authentic luxury products from fakes.

China’s domestic luxury market is currently valued at approximately 4 trillion yuan ($617.7 billion) and that’s not even taking into account the second-hand luxury goods trade, but this boom has also given rise to sophisticated counterfeiting. Stories of bargain hunters being conned into parting with their money in exchange for hard-to-spot fake luxury products are very common on Chinese social media, so much so that there are now companies offering specialized courses on how to tell authentic luxury goods like Louis Vuitton or Chanel bags from counterfeit ones.

Read More »

Yin and Yang Fish is a controversial dish where the body of a fish is cooked, while the head is kept fresh so that it moves its mouth and eyes while it is being eaten.

From fish that smells like a public toilet, to a cheese as hard as rock and even a fish-head-stuffed pie, the world is full of weird foods, but few dishes can be described as truly disturbing. Well, the dish you’re about to discover is one such rarity. Reportedly invented in the early 2000s, by a restauranteur in Chiayi City, Taiwan, Yin and Yang fish, also known as “dead and alive fish”, is definitely not a dish for the faint of heart. It consist of a whole fish, usually carp, whose body has been cooked and covered in sauce, but whose head is maintained raw so that its mouth and eyes are still moving while it is being eaten.

Read More »

New dating app ‘Thursday’ is trying to make online dating fun and exciting again by only letting users access it on just one day of the week (yeah, you guessed it).

It’s hard to believe that a dating app that isn’t even active six days a week can have any success, let alone challenge big players like Tinder or Bumble, but George Rawlings and Matt McNeill Love, the two entrepreneurs behind Thursday, are very confident in their product. And judging by the interest Thursday has spurred – over 110,000 pre-registered singles around London and New York alone – they may be proven correct when the app finally launches this Thursday, May 6th.

Read More »

The “Golden Arches” McDonald’s logo is one of the most recognized commercial symbols in the world, but there is one place where the arches are actually blue instead of yellow.

On the inside, the McDonald’s fast-food restaurant in Sedona, Arizona, looks just like the thousands of other McDonald’s eateries around the United States, but step outside and you’ll notice something odd. The iconic Golden Arches logo is blue instead of yellow. It’s actually the only McDonald’s in the world that doesn’t have a yellow logo, and it’s all because of the stunning natural beauty, particularly the red rock formations that surround Sedona.

Read More »

The New South Wales resort town of Nowra was recently invades by thousands of corellas, a subgenus of white cockatoo, which made it look like the set of an Alfred Hitchcock movie.

Photos and videos of white birds gathered on the streets of Nowra have been doing the rounds online for about a week. The corellas can be seen hanging from lamp posts, converging on people’s lawns, roofs and digging trough their trash in search of food, and making an infernal ruckus. It’s definitely not something you see everyday, but even though media outlets around the world have described the footage as somewhat of a freak occurrence, for the people of Nowra, the events captured on camera recently on Jindalee Crescent street have become quite common. For years, people here have been sharing the town with corellas, and although many of them hate the birds, there’s not a lot they can do about it.

Read More »

A group of seven Zapatistas, indigenous Mexcian revolutionaries, is getting ready to set sale across the Atlantic ocean in an attempt to peacefully invade Spain and mark the 500-year anniversary of the Spanish conquest.

On May 3rd, the Zapatista’s conquering force – three men, three women and a transgender woman – will leave Mexican soil aboard a wooden boat named “La Montana”, or “The Mountain”, hoping to reach Spain by August 13, the day that the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan fell to the Spanish conquistadors in 1521. Only instead of drowning the land in blood, like the conquistadors, the Zapatistas are planning a peaceful takeover that even includes a party upon their arrival.

Read More »

Male and female Northern Flickers are popularly known as “machine gun woodpeckers” because of the sound they make when hitting their beak on metal, which sounds a lot like the sound of a real machine gun.

The Northern Flicker is a woodpecker native to most of North America, parts of Central America, Cuba, and the Cayman Islands. It is 7 to 15 inches long , with a brown, barred back and black spotted under-parts. From early spring and into midsummer, this bird likes to make its presence felt by making a loud, evenly spaced, rapid drumming sound by hammering their beaks against metallic surfaces. This sound is both a mating call and a way to establish territory, but to the human ear it sounds just like a machinegun, hence the bird’s nickname, machine gun woodpecker.

Read More »

Monstera adansonii is a common house plant that can be purchased for as little as $12 at any home & garden store, but a rare specimen recently sold for a whopping 1,799 euros ($2,200).

A garden center in Lovendegem, Belgium recently sold a rare monstera adansonii specimen for a small fortune, in just 30 minutes. The plant in question was only 15 centimeters tall, but featured an extremely rare mutation that caused its perforated leaves to grow yellow or white, instead of the usual green. This type of plant is virtually impossible to grow, so collectors are willing to pay a high premium to get their hands on it. In this particular case, an anonymous plant collector who had been looking for this rare specimen of monstera adansonii for a while, bought it within 30 minutes of it going on sale.

Read More »

An Indian man recently left an entire country confused after helping his wife of seven years marry the man she had been having an affair with for years.

Uttam Mandal and Sapna Kumari, from Bhagalpur, in India’s Bihar state, got married in 2014, and had two children together. They were happy together for a while, but at some point Sapna fell in love with a relative of Uttman’s, a younger man who came around their house every once in a while, and the two started having an affair. The husband learned about Sapna’s escapade and they fought over the issue many times, but seeing as Sapna couldn’t get over her lover, Uttman decided to do the unthinkable, step aside and help his wife marry the man she loved.

Read More »

Raynaud syndrome, also known as Raynaud’s phenomenon, is a rare medical condition that limits blood supply to fingers, and sometimes to the toes, causing them to temporarily turn white or blue.

Named after physician Auguste Gabriel Maurice Raynaud, who first described it in his doctoral thesis in 1862, this rare condition can be described as an overreaction to stimuli like cold or stress. In the case of the former, the body tries to conserve heat by slowing down the flow of blood to the farthest points, such as the fingers. To do that, the small arteries that carry blood to those points constrict, thus causing the extremities to temporarily turn white, and then blue, due to the prolonged lack of oxygen in the affected area.

Read More »

Suspended 35 meters above the ground, between two new residential buildings in London’s Nine Elms business district, the highly-anticipated Sky Pool makes you feel like you’re swimming through the sky.

Measuring 25 meters in length, the transparent outdoor pool was designed by HAL Architects. It is made out of acrylic and can hold up to 148,000 gallons of water. The impressive sky pool is the centerpiece of Embassy Gardens, a new 2,000-home development in the Nine Elms and Battersea Power Station regeneration zone. When it opens, next month, Sky Pool will become the most exclusive place to take a dip in all of Britain.

Read More »

An Indonesian man loves his workplace so much that he has named his son after it. His 5-month-old boy’s name is Statistical Information Communication Office…

Even before he got married, Samet Wahyudi knew that if he ever had a son, he wanted to name him after the department he worked in as a civil servant. He made that very clear to his fiancé before they got married, and she accepted his condition. Their first child was a girl, so Samet agreed on a more conventional name for her, but when his wife, Linda, gave birth to their second child, a boy, in December of last year, he knew exactly what his name would be – Statistical Information Communication Office.

Read More »

A 27-year-old Russian man who has been imploring viewers to vote him out of a Chinese boy band reality show for months, has finally got his wish, but not before making it all the way to the final.

Vladislav Ivanov, a translator and part-time model from Vladivostok, Russia, is finally free after two grueling months. Earlier this year, the 27-year-old, who speaks fluent Chinese, got a gig to support to Japanese contestants on a Chinese reality-show that would culminate in the forming of a new boy band. Ivanov agreed, but upon arriving on the tropical island where the show was to be filmed, his good looks kept getting him confused with the contestants. The show’s director noticed this, and knowing that he could speak Chinese, persuaded him to participate in the reality-show, and “live in a new way”. It turned out to be one of the biggest mistakes of his life.

Read More »

Hundreds of new sinkholes have been reported in Turkey’s agriculturally-focused Konya Province since the start of the year, almost double the number registered last year, and apparently it’s yet another man-made problem.

Konya Provine, located in the eponymous Konya Plain, has always been known as Turkey’s breadbasket or green silo, because of the vast sea of wheat spanning every which way, as far as the eye can see. But while Konya remains the country’s main agricultural center, the persistent drought plaguing farmers in this area has caused an unforeseen problem that has only been getting worse in recent years – sinkholes. As cultivators increasingly turn to groundwater to keep their crops alive, the giant caverns drained of water eventually collapse under the weight of the soil above, creating holes tens of meters across and up to 150-meters-deep.

Read More »