A young bargain hunter recently managed to show just how insanely expensive train tickets in the UK can be, by buying a car, petrol, insurance and road tax for it and still spending less than the cost of just one train ticket for a 100 mile trip.

27-year-old Tom Church, from London, wanted to visit a friend an colleague in Bristol, just 100 miles away, but was put off by the high cost of a train ticket. After seeing a photo of a £218 ($311) train ticket for the same route he was interested in, posted on Reddit, Tom was both outraged and inspired to come up with a cheaper alternative. After doing some research, he figured out that it would actually be cheaper to buy a used car for the trip.

Read More »

Remember Puspa Dewi, the 50-year-old Indonesian woman who people often confused with her two sons’ girlfriends? Well, she’s apparently not the only one with this “problem”. 50-year-old Liu Yelin’s incredibly youthful looks have the same effect on people.

50-year-old Liu Yelin, who goes by @queenyelin on Instagram, has been mesmerizing her social media followers with her youthful looks for a few years now, but she recently managed to attract worldwide attention with a series of herself posing in nothing more than a bikini and a pair of ski goggles at the frozen Lake Baikal, north of the Mongolian border. People just couldn’t believe how well she looked for her age, and the seemingly aging-resistant woman found herself in the media spotlight once again.

Read More »

Tiantian was born late last year in China, to a surrogate mother, four years after both his parents died in a tragic car accident. His grandparents fought a long and complicated legal battle for the chance to bring their grandchild into this world.

The child’s parents, Shen Jie and Liu Xi, were married for a couple of years when they finally decided to give fertilization a try, after failing to conceive a child. In 2013, just five days before they were scheduled to have one of the fertilized eggs transplanted into Liu, the couple died in a car accident in China’s Jiangsu province. But their heartbroken parents, who knew how much they wanted to have a baby, decided to make their dream a reality. For the next three years, they fought for the rights to four frozen embryos left by their children.

This case was particularly difficult because there was no legal precedent as to whether the four grandparents could inherit their children’s frozen embryos. After years of court battles, they were finally granted rights over the embryos, but they immediately faced new problems. For example, they could not take the embryos from the Nanjing hospital they were stored at unless they could prove that another hospital was willing to store them.

Read More »

32-year-old Dirar Abohoy spends about as much time on his hands as he does on his feet. Having trained to walk on his hands from a very young age, he can now climb mountains and perform all kinds of stunts with his legs hanging in the air.

Interestingly, Dirar, who lives in Tigray, northern Ethiopia, grew up watching Chinese and American movies, but as a kid, he didn’t know anything about editing. He thought all the stunts he saw on screen were real, so he started to train in order to emulate his heroes. By the time he learned that most of the action scenes in his favorite films were nothing more than illusions, Dirar had already become a master of hand-walking, so he kept on training.

Read More »

20-year-old Kasandra Smith, from Macon, Georgia, has shun all kinds of footwear for the last three years, and claims that despite occasionally stepping on glass shards or metal pins, going barefoot full-time has done wonders for her confidence and overall well-being.

Kassandra Smith was never really big on shoes. In school, she would often wear flips-flops just to have an excuse to get out of participating in gym class, but the more she wore them, the freer she felt, and the more she loathed the thought of putting on shoes. She started wearing flip flops when shopping or going to the restaurant, and after leaving school in 2015, she started walking completely barefoot as well. Just two months later, she decided to give-up footwear all-together, and she’s been walking barefoot ever since.

Read More »

Looking for an original business idea? How about renting out expensive things to poor couples to show off as dowry during their wedding? A Thai company has been doing just that for the past three months, and business has been booming.

Chiang Mai-based special event company Romantiese has been making news headlines in Thailand for their newest service – a dowry rental option for couples who can’t afford to properly honour their parents on their wedding day. Known as “sin sod”, the dowry system is still very deeply rooted in Thai culture, and considered both a of honoring your bride’s parents for raising their daughter well and proof that you are financially capable of starting a family. Unfortunately, not everyone can afford to have stacks of cash and gold bars on display at their wedding, which is where Romantiese comes in.

Read More »

Doctors in New York recently reported the case of a 34-year-old man who wound up in the hospital with severe headaches and neck pain after trying to eat a Carolina Reaper during a hot pepper eating competition.

The unnamed man reportedly started dry heaving immediately after sampling a Carolina Reaper pepper. It’s unclear whether he stopped after a few bites or finished the whole thing, but what we do know is that over the following days, he began experiencing intense headaches and neck pains that lasted only a few seconds. At one point, the pain became so hard to bare that he had to be taken to the emergency room.

Read More »

If you’ve always dreamed about climbing into a nine-foot-tall mecha suit and actually showing off your sci-fi fantasies to the whole world, now’s your big chance. A Japanese company is actually selling custom mecha suits for only 10 million yen ($93,000).

Skeletonics have been around since 2011, when a group of students at the Okinawa National College of Technology showed off their very first fully-mechanical exoskeleton. It didn’t do much except turn the wearer into a metal giant with increased reach, but it definitely looked cool, so the project made international headlines at the time. But while the team came up with several improved Skeletonics over the years, they were merely showed off online and at special events, so only a few fans ever got to give them a try themselves. However, everything changed last month, when Skeltonics finally announced that it would finally begin producing commercial versions of its popular exoskeleton.

Read More »

Apart from the sound they make while chewing on leaves, the vast majority of caterpillars are silent creatures. However, the Nessus sphinx hawkmoth caterpillar is able to produce clicking noises that sounds a lot like static, as a self-defense mechanism, and scientists believe they discovered how.

Insects have no lungs, but some of them can be really noisy. While humans and most other vertebrates make noise by forcing air out of their bodies, insects and larvae don’t have that luxury. Some of them have adapted, rubbing, knocking or vibrating parts of their bodies to produce distinctive sounds, the kind you hear when you open a window on a quiet summer night, but the Nessus sphinx hawkmoth caterpillar doesn’t fall into that category. When threatened, it produces a strange sound that resembles a combination of cracking and spitting, by pushing air through a constriction between its two foregut chambers, even though it has no lungs.

Read More »

They say “no good deed goes unpunished” and one Chinese billionaire learned that the hard way after spending tens of millions of dollars on hundreds of luxury villas for all the residents in his home village, only to see them remain deserted as greedy recipients continue to argue over who should own multiple houses.

Five years ago, Chen Sheng, the founder and chairman of drinks company Tiandi No 1 Beverage Inc, committed 200 million yuan (US$31.9 million) to the construction of 258 luxury villas on a plot of land offered by authorities in the village of Guanhu, China’s Guangdong province. Each property measures 280 square meters and the three-story villas feature five bedrooms, two reception rooms, a garage and a small garden. The new village also has a small stream passing through it, several pedestrian bridges, basketball and badminton courts and even a public stage for various cultural events, but even though everything was completed last year, the place remains deserted.

Read More »

Tweezers have been around for thousands of years, but they’ve never really been regarded as one of the coolest tools man ever invented. Well, a Japanese company is looking to change that with its awesome Tweezers of Legend.

Having to pluck a rogue hair strand from your eyebrow or nose is not the most exciting task, but what if your tweezers looked like a legendary sword, the like of which you only see in over-the-top fantasy anime or video games? Now we’re talking, right? Well, thanks to Japanese company wāqwāq Inc., you can now battle your body hair like a fabled hero.

Read More »

Police in Youngstown, Ohio, have received over a dozen reports of zombie-like raccoons coming out in the daytime, flashing their teeth and just falling on their backs for no apparent reason.

Youngstown has always had a raccoon population, but the furry mammals usually stayed out of people’s way, only coming out at night to search through their trash cans for food. However, last month, some of the raccoons started acting really strange. They would come out in broad daylight, sometimes walking up all the way to people’s front doors, flash their sharp teeth in a threatening manner and then fall on their back and enter a comatose-like state. Over the past three weeks, such raccoons came to be known as “zombie raccoons”.

Read More »

A Japanese animal lover risks her life every single day by venturing into the Fukushima exclusion zone to feed a heard of 11 cows abandoned after the 2011 nuclear disaster.

The earthquake and subsequent tsunami that hit Fukushima in 2011 claimed the lives of over 20,000 people, and forced another 160,000 to leave everything behind and flee to safety. But while people were able to escape the threat of radiation from the damaged reactor at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, animals could not. The area was home to over 3,500 cattle which became known as the “nuclear cows of Fukushima” after being exposed to high levels of radiation. Most of them are dead now, killed by starvation or euthanized by the government, but the few surviving cows now rely on the kindness of humans brave enough to risk their lives to bring them food and water.

Read More »

A Chinese art student sparked a heated debate online after using the wings of over 500 butterflies to create a series of artworks symbolizing rebirth. While some consider her “sick” for using butterfly wings as an art medium, others think her creations qualify as original art.

Li Zheng, a fourth-year art student at Quanzhou Normal University in Fujian province, China, created a series of artworks consisting of meticulously arranged butterfly wings as part of her graduation piece. She and her colleagues were instructed by their lecturer to recreate famous artworks using different materials. Li decided she wanted to recreate some of the masterpieces of Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh, but at first, she had no idea what materials she was going to use.

Read More »

When it comes to metallic wire artworks, you’ll have a tough time finding a more talented artist than @tdaiki1216, a young Japanese art graduate who seems able to twist copper and brass wire into pretty much anything he sets his mind to, from sculptures that look like drawn manga, to slithering snakes and giant insects.

@tdaiki1216, whose real name is Tsutamoto Dawiki, first made headlines in Japan two years ago, when his incredibly detailed wire sculptures imitating manga drawings went viral on Twitter. Fixed into square wooden blocks and placed against a white background, his artworks looked exactly like manga comics, even though they were actually twisted pieces of wire. Those were impressive enough, but @tdaiki1216 has stepped up his game even more over these last few years, and is now specializing in more complex wire sculptures, some of which are simply mind-blowing.

Read More »