A Moscow woman recently got the shock of her life when she entered her bathroom and saw a full-grown white Boa constrictor snake hanging out on her toilet bowl.

Exotic snakes crawling up from toilets may not be a worthy news topic in countries like Australia or Brazil, where the slithering reptiles are virtually a part of everyday life, but as a European living in a bustling city, it’s not the kind of thing you ever expect to see. However, one Moscow resident almost had a heart attack when she entered her bathroom and found an albino boa constrictor coming out of her toilet bowl. The shocked woman slammed the bathroom door shut and immediately called emergency service. It turned out that the snake was a fellow resident of the apartment building who had simply gone out to explore its drain pipe system.

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An Algerian man who had disappeared from his home one morning in 1998 was recently found alive in his neighbor’s cellar, just 200 meters from the house he had grown up in.

Omar bin Omran was only 17 years old when he disappeared from his home in Djelfa, Algeria, in 1998. It was during the Algerian Civil War, a time of great unrest in the African country, and many of his family and friends feared that he had ended up among the estimated 200,000 people killed, or the 20,000 kidnapped, during the conflict. Authorities stopped looking for him after a while, and his mother remained the only one who never gave up hope. Unfortunately, she died in 2013, and Omar bin Omran became yet another case that would likely never be solved. Only earlier this week, the brother of one of Omar’s neighbors took to social media to suggest that his sibling was involved in the teen’s kidnapping.

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Photos and videos of unmanned vending machines selling live animals like cats, small dogs, and rodents installed in various Chinese cities have been going viral and sparking outrage among the general public.

The significant technological developments of the last decade have created a fast-growing “unmanned economy” that continues to spread into almost every sector of the global economy. However, there are still some industries that are incompatible with unmanned, self-service devices. The pet-selling sector has so far been considered incompatible, but things are apparently very different in China, as more and more unmanned vending machines selling live pets are being spotted all around the country. One such video showing a pet vending machine in a busy part of Beijing recently went viral on Chinese social media, sparking a heated debate around the ethics of this controversial business model.

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Switzerland’s road maintenance authority has developed an ingenious mobile bridge that allows the paving of public roads without the need to stop traffic on the affected lanes.

Traffic jams are a necessary evil when it comes to road maintenance, and despite experts’ best efforts to come up with a solution to this logistic problem, motorists still have to deal with them whenever road work is required. However, Switzerland’s Federal Roads Office may have come up with an ingenious-enough solution to revolutionize road paving. Earlier this year, it unveiled the Astra Bridge, a 257-meter-long mobile bridge that allows traffic to pass over sections of road while infrastructure is being repaired below. It’s such a simple concept that it almost makes you wonder why engineers took so long to invent it, but there is a reason why the Astra Bridge is the first of its kind – it’s not as simple as it sounds.

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A football referee has been suspended for life for allegedly celebrating with a club he helped win by eliminating 3 players from the opposing side and granting 15 minutes of extra time, enough for the winners to score a necessary goal.

Earlier this month, Dutch football clubs St. George and SV De Valken met in a final match of the country’s fourth division to decide which of the two teams would be promoted to the third division. It may not seem like very high stakes, but they take football very seriously in the Netherlands and passions ride high, so this particular match was very important to both clubs. It was supposed to be a close game between the two most dominant team in the division, but the match played out very differently than expected because of the one person responsible of fair play, the referee. Jan Smit stands accused of not only rigging the game in one team’s favor, but also celebrating with its members after the win.

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A Chinese man wanted for murder managed to avoid police detection for over 20 years by pretending to be a deaf and mute scavenger in the mountains of Hubei Province.

On the evening of May 22, 2004, a young and quick-tempered man named Xiao got into a heated argument with a neighbor in his home village of Oumio Daying, in Xianyang’s Xiangcheng District. At one point, Xiao allegedly picked up a shovel and hit his neighbor over the head with it, killing him on the spot. That night, knowing that he risked spending the rest of his life behind bars or worse, getting the death penalty, Xiao decided to abandon his wife and 11-year-old child to go on the run. He ran into the mountains of Anxi County, in Fujian Province, where he became a scavenger selling scraps to survive. To make sure he never gave anything away about his past life, Xiao pretended to be deaf and mute for the next 20 years, only smiling at people and communicating through gestures.

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A 12-year-old boy who has never had his hair cut in his life and reportedly suffers from ‘tonsurephobia’, an uncontrollable fear of having his hair cut, has been threatened with expulsion by his school because of his long hair.

Farouk James has never had more than a trim of his impressive mane and his waist-long mane has earned him more than 250,000 followers on Instagram alone. However, ever since he started classes at his new school in September of last year, he has been pressured into cutting his locks so that they reach above his shirt collar, per school regulations. Farouk’s family has sent the school doctor’s notes that show he suffers from tonsurephobia’, an extreme fear of having his hair cut, but the school has apparently chosen to ignore them and enforce its rule.

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Researchers studying various species of animals on Australia’s Kangaroo Island stumbled upon a colony of Polyrhachis femorata ants that they believed was dead until one of its members moved slightly.

Feigning death, also known as thanatosis or tonic immobility is a well-documented defense mechanism observed in dozens of animal species, from insects and lizards to birds and mammals. Some of these natural actors are better than others at playing dead, but what they all have in common is implying this particular defense strategy on an individual basis. However, in what many consider a world-first, a team of researchers encountered an entire colony of dozens of ants that all played dead at the same time when threatened. And they all played their part so well, contorting their bodies in unnatural positions and remaining completely still, that the team was convinced they were all dead.

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A Chinese man recently lost his life while performing a controversial type of exercise that requires practitioners to hang only by their chins to relieve neck and spine pain by reducing pressure on nerves.

Over the past decade or so, a bizarre form of exercise has been getting traction throughout China. It basically involves swinging one’s body while hanging in the air supported only by a leather chin strap. Reportedly invented around 2017 by Shenyang native Sun Rongchun as a way to relieve back pain, neck swings quickly became a familiar sight in parks and outdoor gyms all over the country. Although hanging in the air by one’s chin doesn’t sound like the safest thing in the world, paractiotioners swear by it, claiming it does wonder for neck and back pain. Still, doctors have been warning about the dangers of neck hanging for years and a recent tragedy suggests that when performed incorrectly, this type of exercise can be lethal.

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In what can only be described as an unconventional love story, an Indian man fell in love and ended up marrying his mother-in-law with his father-in-law’s blessing.

This bizarre tale begins with a tragedy. After the death of Sikandar Yadav’s wife, the father-of-two moved in with his in-laws in Bihar’s Heer Moti village. Over time, the relationship between 45-year-old Sikandar and his mother-in-law, Geeta (55), evolved into a romantic affair that they could only conceal for so long. As rumors of their secret affair started spreading through the village, Geeta’s husband became increasingly suspicious and one day caught the two lovebirds in a romantic embrace that confirmed his fears. Furious, the man brought the affair to the attention of the Panchayat (village council), demanding that the matter be resolved.

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The Hongyancun subway station in Chongqing, China is 116 meters deep and the difference in air pressure will often leave users with clogged ears when accessed via its elevator.

When the air pressure outside of the eardrum becomes different than the pressure inside, you experience ear barotrauma. It occurs most often during steep declines and descents and is usually associated with plane takeoffs and landings, or driving up or down mountains. Most subway stations don’t usually cause ear barotrauma, because they aren’t deep or steep enough for your ears to register a significant enough difference in air pressure. But using the elevator to reach the world’s deepest subway station might actually clog up your ears. That’s because it is located 116 meters below the surface, the equivalent of about 40 floors underground.

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After plastering the whole of Manhattan with fliers for several months, a mystery man known as Cheeseball Man gathered a crowd of hundreds to watch him eat a whole tub of cheeseballs.

Meet Cheeseball Man, the superhero New Yorkers never knew they needed. His superpower? Mesmerizing crowds with his insatiable craving for cheeseballs. It all started with some fliers showing a man with an orange ski mask holding a large tub full of cheeseballs and inviting everyone to come watch him devour the cheesy treats in Manhattan’s Union Square Park, on April 27th. The fliers went up months before the big day, and although Cheeseman didn’t really expect a large crowd to accept his invitation, he was blown away by the size of his audience. Close to 1,000 people gathered in Union Square Park to watch him gobble down his jar of cheeseballs, and videos of the big event have so far been viewed millions of times online.

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A UK man was recently arrested in Thailand for allegedly causing damage to a Phuket restaurant by posting a number of 1-star reviews online following an altercation with the restaurant owner.

The 21-year-old British national was arrested in Thailand earlier this month when police showed up at his apartment in Bangkok, but the incident that led to his arrest dates back to 2022 when he was staying in a rented property in Phuket. According to Thai media, the easiest way for the man, known only as Alexander, to reach his abode passed through an Italian restaurant and he didn’t hesitate to use it. Noticing that the man passed through his restaurant several times per day, the owner confronted him and asked that he use the public road instead because he wasn’t a paying customer and he was disturbing his guests. Shortly after the heated exchange, the restaurant owner noticed that the Google rating of his business had dropped from 4.8/5 to 3.1/5 because of a number of allegedly fake 1-star reviews. Suspecting Alexander was behind this online defamation campaign, he filed a complaint against him.

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A morbidly obese macaque named Godzilla who gorged on treats offered by passers-by in Bangkok, Thailand, succumbed to a myriad of weight-related illnesses at the tender age of six.

On May 6th, Godzilla breathed his last breath at the Crystal Pet Hospital in Bangkok as his master held its tiny hand in his. However, the man and his family are facing criticism for killing the young macaque with kindness, indulging his addiction to sweets and other fattening treats, and turning him into a popular attraction at their market stall. Tourists would pass by the vest-wearing primate and feed him all kinds of junk food, which led to him ballooning to over 19 kilograms, more than double the weight of an average macaque. Sadly, his condition never really improved after he was taken away, and a number of obesity-induced illnesses eventually claimed his life.

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An Arizona woman was recently sentenced to three years probation for trying to poison her husband by mixing bleach in his morning coffee.

Melody Felicano Johnson was initially charged with attempted first-degree murder but ended up pleading guilty to two counts of the lesser felony charge of adding poison or a harmful substance to food or drink. She admitted to putting bleach in her husband’s coffee, although it is still unclear as to why. Her husband told investigators he “believes she was trying to kill him to collect death benefits,” but he explicitly told the court that he did not want her to spend time in prison, which apparently had a major influence on the final verdict.

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