Having youthful looks is usually regarded as an enviable asset, but for a 34-year-old man in Central China, looking like a boy less than half his age is apparently a curse. He cannot get married, and everyone considers him a child.

For Zhu Shengkai,a 44-year-old man from a rural area in Xiantao City, Wuhan, troubles began at the age of 6, when he was hit in the head with a stone, while playing with the other children. There was no bleeding, but according to Zhu’s parents he had a fever for three days straight. Worried, they took him to a hospital, where doctors discovered a blood clot in his brain and performed emergency surgery to remove it. The boy recovered well and his life seemed normal for a few years after that, but at age 9 his family noticed that Zhu looked undeveloped compared to other boys his age. In fact, he looked like he hadn’t grown at all since his accident…

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If you’re ever in Bangkok, Thailand, and you;re a fan of unicorns, ponies or just colors in general, there’s a place you simply must visit. It’s called “Unicorn Cafe” and, just like you’d expect, it’s full of plush unicorns, rainbows and lots of other colorful treats.

To say Unicorn Cafe is a colorful place would be an understatement. There’s colorful and there’s this place where even the food, including a multi-layered cake and spaghetti, come in all colors of the rainbow. There are plastic chandeliers and plush unicorns hanging from the ceilings, multi-colored couches, and tiny My Little Pony Toys decorating the tables. Did I mention you can put on a unicorn onesie to really get into a magical mood? It’s the kind of place you’d think only existed in someone’s acid trip, or in a pastel fantasy dream.

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Called an “e-broom”, Toyota’s latest mobility platform looks like a futuristic witch’s broom that users can ride to get around. Apparently, quidditch fans found the concept very intriguing.

Unfortunately, Toyota’s e-broom isn’t yet able to make quidditch players airborne, like in the popular Harry Potter books, but they are capable of propelling people on the ground, as long as they are wearing roller-skates. The e-broom is meant to be ridden like a witch’s broom, only instead of relying on magic to whisk its users towards the sky, it relies on an electrical motor and a wheel at the bottom to propel its rider forward at moderate speed. It’s not as impressive as we’d like it to be, but at least it’s a step toward a real life quidditch broom.

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A 650-kilogram bull that managed to escape from a Croatian slaughterhouse last Friday managed to get the attention and support of an entire nation as he continues to elude his owner, police and veterinarians.

The elusive animal, nicknamed Jerry, after the famous mouse in the “Tom&Jerry” cartoon, has been evading his would-be captors and roaming the Croatian coast, outside the town of Split, since last Friday. His owner had sold him to a slaughterhouse, but shortly before being put down, Jerry managed to escape a corral where cattle intended for slaughter were kept and vanish into the nearby woods. Slaughterhouse staff can’t explain exactly how Jerry escaped, but apparently this sort of thing doesn’t happen very often.

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Kumitaiso, a gymnastic formation in which students climb on top of one another to create a pyramid, has at the center of growing controversy in Japan, due to the high number of serious injuries reported by schools.

At its core, kumitaiso is a routine supposed to encourage teamwork and endurance among young students, and as such it has been a mainstay of annual school sport festivals across Japan. However, problems began to occur as the human pyramids organized by schools started getting higher and more difficult to support by the students at the bottom. Seeing dozens of students working together to create these complex structures is undoubtedly impressive to behold, which is why many schools kept pushing the limits over the years, with some devastating results. With hundreds of reported injuries reported every year, many in the Asian country are asking authorities to ban kumitaiso.

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A famed restaurant in Peru was recently fined $62,000 for discriminating against women by giving ladies who dined with men menus that didn’t feature any prices.

La Rosa Nautica, a pricey restaurant built on a peer overlooking the ocean in the Peruvian capital, Lima, was ordered to pay a 210,000 sol ($62,000) fine for offering women a different menu when they dined with men. While gentlemen were given a blue menu that featured both the dishes available and their prices, ladies got a gold version that mentioned no prices at all. The owner of the high-end restaurant defended the practice by calling it a way for women to enjoy a romantic night out without having to worry about costs, but Peruvian authorities ruled that it was discriminatory against women.

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We all know sitting at a desk for long periods of time has negative effects on our health, but if this life-size model of what an office worker could look like in 20 years is any indication, the future doesn’t look too bright.

Emma, as her creators have named her, doesn’t look so good. She has dry and red eyes from hours staring at a computer screen, a hunched back that makes you think she’s been ringing the bell at a recently burned down French cathedral, excess weight, swollen limbs due to poor circulation, and stress-caused eczema, among other alarming symptoms. Luckily, Emma is just a life-size doll created by a team of researchers led by behavioral futurist William Higham, but the world could be full of Emmas if we don’t do something to change the office environment and culture.

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They say crows have great memory and never forget those who have wronged them, and the story of an Indian tractor driver who claims to have been constantly attacked by crows ever since they saw him pick up some of their hatchlings, a year and a half ago.

Mohanan, a tractor driver from Ambalavayal, a town in India’s Kerala state, has been carrying a stick and an umbrella to work every day, for over a year. It’s not that he fears getting attacked by dogs or that he hates rain, but that he needs to defend himself against the crows that always attack him whenever he approaches a bus station where he once picked up two crow hatchlings from under his tractor and placed them on the side of the road. As Mohan recalls, the following day, he and his colleagues found a small puppy covered in tar and washed it clean with kerosene, and he assumes the crow must have seen him and confused the puppy for the hatchlings that he had handled the previous day. The crows have been on his case ever since, harassing and attacking him whenever they see him.

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The mud flats of Japan’s Ariake Sea are home to a creature that is reportedly as delicious as it is disgusting-looking. Introducing the “Warasubo”, an eel-like fish that for obvious reasons is known as the “Alien of Ariake Sea”.

If you’re familiar with H.R. Giger’s Xenomorph (the extraterrestrial creature featured in the ‘Alien’ movies), more specifically its iconic “inner mouth”, one look at the warasubo fish is enough to explain its comparison to the fictional alien. It literally looks like the piston-like appendage that Giger’s ferocious predator uses to pierce its victim’s bodies and even metal. The warasubo is a terrifying-looking thing, especially in dried form, which only makes its use as an ingredient for ramen and other Japanese foods that much stranger.

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The mother of a 17-year-old Colombian girl diagnosed with a very rare condition known as “Sleeping Beauty” syndrome has appealed to authorities for help as she is struggling to look after her.

Sharik Tovar, a 17-year-old girl from the Colombian town of Acacías, has been suffering from Kleine-Levin syndrome ever since she was two. The ultra-rare condition – only 40 cases have been reported worldwide – is characterized by recurrent episodes of excessive sleep as well as cognitive and behavioral changes. In Sharik’s case, hypersomnia episodes can last up to two months, during which time her mother, Marleny, has two liquefy her food and feed her every few hours. To make matters worse, after these long bouts of hypersomnia, the 17-year-old suffers from temporary or permanent memory loss.

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The owner of McKamey Manor, dubbed by many the world’s most terrifying haunted house, is promising anyone who can survive its scariest tour yet a prize of $20,000.

Many haunted houses claim to be the most terrifying, but there’s a general consensus among cheap thrill enthusiasts that  McKamey Manor is really the scariest of them all. And if its current reputation wasn’t enough, owner Russ McKamey is upping the ante by offering a prize of $20,000 to anyone brave enough to make it through a tour that can last up to 10 hours and takes participants to their physical and mental limits.

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Cocker Spaniels are known for having long, beautiful eyelashes, but canine pair Cloe and Nena’s lashes are unusually long even for their breed, and they’ve turned the two pooches into overnight Instagram sensations.

If there was such a thing as a canine beauty influencer, Cocker Spaniel twins Cloe and Nena would most certainly fit the bill perfectly. Not only do they sport luscious eyelashes measuring a whopping 6-cm-long, but they also appear to love getting groomed by their owner, 22-year-old Vittoria Di Castri, including having mascara applied on their lashes to highlight their main features. Some people have a hard time believing the two pooches’ eyelashes aren’t fake, but Di Castri insists they are all natural.

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If you can’t afford a diamond ring, or if you simply want to propose to your beloved in a really special manner, you may want to check out this tutorial for creating an engagement ring out of a year’s worth of nail clippings.

Kiwami, a Japanese DIY master famous for posting detailed how-to videos for making sharp knives out of virtually anything imaginable, recently took on a different kind of challenge – creating an engagement ring with a gem made out of nail clippings he allegedly collected for a year. He kept them all in a jar, and this summer turned them into a black gen that any woman would consider herself lucky to wear on her finger, provided she didn’t know what it was made of, of course.

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David Miles, an Australian inventor who has been peddling weather modification technology for almost 20 years, has been accused of preying on desperate farmers by charging up to $50,000 Australian dollars for delivering rain on demand without so much as explaining the technology behind his business.

On the official Miles Research website, controversial inventor David Miles explains that in the 1990’s he realised that “it was possible to incrementally influence weather patterns using a variant of the Einstein – Rosen Bridge hypothesised in the 1930’s, to effectively create a bridge between ‘the present’ in the physical space-time continuum, and a near-future event, forecast to exist from one to ten days ahead in time”. He found that by applying small amounts of energy intelligently, even a large, chaotic weather system approaching from the future could be mitigated.

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The male white bellbird, a 250-gram-heavy bird native to South America, produces the world’s loudest bird sound, according to a new scientific study.

Biologist Jeff Podos at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Mario Cohn-Haft of Brazil’s Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazonia recorded the mating call of the male white bellbird, aka Procnias albus, and concluded that it was a good nine decibels louder than the sound of the previous holder of the title “world’s loudest bird”, the screaming piha, also a species native to the Amazon rain forest. Peak sound levels recorded during the bird’s mating call reached a whopping 125.4 decibels, way above the human pain threshold and equivalent to the sound made by a pile driver.

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