The CIA headquarters in Langley is home to lost of mysteries, but one in particular has captured the attention of professional code breakers and puzzle enthusiasts for the last three decades.

Kryptos, a coded sculpture created by American artist Jim Sanborn has remained unsolved ever since it was originally installed at the CIA headquarters in November of 1990. The agency’s code breakers as well as other professional puzzle solvers around the world have been struggling to unravel the secrets of the 1,800 characters carved into the 12-foot block of copper, and although they’ve succeeded in cracking three of the coded messages created by Sanborn, the fourth and final one remains unsolved. Experts have tried every technique in the book, transposition, binary, polyalphabetic substitution, even Morse code, but so far no one has been able to decipher the 97-character-long fourth part of the Kryptos Sculpture.

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You’ve probably seen wood artists carve impressive sculptures out of giant logs, be it with a chainsaw or hammer and chisel, but you probably haven’t seen anything quite like what Spanish artist Gerard Mas is capable of.

By tirelessly chiselling away at logs cut from mature tree trunks then smoothing out his artworks with fine sandpaper, Gerard Mas is able to produce these almost perfect animal sculptures that literally look like photos of living creatures. And as if his works weren’t impressive enough, the dark tones used to expertly recreate the fur of a doberman or the black snout of a German shepherd are achieved only by charring the wood with an open flame. The results are simply breathtaking.

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Russian Instagram users in search of the perfect selfie have been flocking to a lake near the Siberian city of Novosibirsk that boasts turquoise water and white sandy beaches similar to those in the Maldives. But unlike the popular Indian Ocean archipelago, there is nothing natural about its beauty.

Dubbed the “Siberian Maldives” or “Novosibirsk Maldives”, the gorgeous lake is actually a man-made toxic dump used to dump ash from a nearby coal plant. The water apparently gets its bright turquoise color from its depth and the calcium salts and other metal oxides dissolved in it. Alluring as it may seem at first glance, the Siberian Generating Company (SGC) warns that its ash-dumping pond has a high pH of more than 8 and cause an allergic allergic reaction in contact with human skin. That hasn’t stopped people from posing for photos on the lake’s beaches and even venturing on the water on paddle boards and inflatable unicorns.

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It’s not unusual for zoo visitors to leave with a stuffed animal as a souvenir, but one Los Angeles teen decided he wanted something better than that, so he stole North America’s oldest-living ring-tailed lemur.

After committing almost three dozen burglaries in the last few years, it’s safe to say that 19-year-old Aquinas Kasbar was used to just taking things that didn’t belong to him. So when he laid eyes on Isaac, a 32-year-old endangered lemur at the Santa Ana Zoo last year and decided he wanted it for a pet, he knew exactly what he had to do. On July 27, 2018 Kasbar reportedly snuck into the zoo after hours and used bolt cutters to cut a hole in the enclosure for lemurs and Capuchin monkeys to get to his prize. Several animals escaped in the chaos, but the teen managed to capture and run away with Isaac.

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It may be cute and tiny, but Lil’ Nitro is no joke. Sporting a Scoville rating reashing well into the millions of units, this chewy treat is 900 times hotter than a Jalapeno, making it the world’s hottest gummy bear.

After the world’s hottest lollipop and world’s hottest candy, the devious minds at Flamethrower Candy have created the world’s hottest gummy bear. Don’t be deceived by its cute and appealing appearance, as this little guy is holding a dynamite stick for a reason. It’s made with a special chili pepper extract that’s 900 times hotter than a Jalapeno pepper, and several times hotter than the Carolina Reaper, Dragon’s Breath and Pepper X, which are generally regarded as the hottest peppers on the planet.

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As part of an unusual social experiment, a Mexican mayor disguised himself as a disabled person in need of assistance to test the attitude of local public servants first-hand.

After receiving a number of complaints from disabled and other socially disadvantaged people about the treatment they received from social workers, Carlos Tena, the mayor of Cuauhtémoc, a town in Mexico’s Chihuahua state, didn’t know who to believe, the alleged victims or his co-workers. So he devised a plan to test the attitude of local social workers himself. Tena spent two months putting together a believable disguise and then visited public servants at both the Mayor’s Office and Social Services posing as a disabled man in need of help.

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Marie McCreadie was just 13 years old when she lost her voice to what doctors could only assume was a freak virus. 12 years later, she was shocked to discover that her sudden loss of voice had been caused by an old coin stuck between her vocal coins, which prevented them from vibrating. This is an old story that is once again getting a lot of attention because of Marie McCreadie ‘s newly published book, “Voiceless”, in which she details the traumatic experience of losing her voice at a young age and regaining it after 12 long years.

When 13-year-old Marie  – then Marie Heffernan – suddenly lost the ability to speak one day in 1972, doctors put it down to a bad bout of bronchitis, but even after recovering from the illness, she still couldn’t utter a sound. They performed all kinds of tests but nothing appeared to be wrong, so they eventually put it down to a virus and told the 13-year-old girl to just go back to school and lead a normal life, as a mute. She was frightened and confused, and her parents didn’t really know how to handle things in the beginning either. Luckily, Marie and her friends started finding new ways of communicating, like passing written notes to each other, which was fun and made getting used to a voiceless life easier. Things got worse as time went by and her voice didn’t recover, but the other children’s reactions were nothing compared to the treatment she got from her teachers.

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An Emirati entrepreneur and inventor has been working on an ambitious project that involves towing a giant iceberg all the way from Antarctica to the Arabian Gulf in order to provide fresh drinking water for the UAE.

Because of its arid climate, the United Arab Emirates doesn’t have too many options when it comes to water sources. In fact , the Arab country relies heavily on desalinated water, which is not only expensive to obtain but very harmful to the environment. But businessman Abdulla Alshehi thinks he may have found a much better, albeit unconventional alternative. For the last six years he has been working on a plan to tow a 2km x 500m iceberg from Antarctica and use modern technology to tow it 5,500 miles to the Arabian Gulf. The floating block of ice would not only provide drinking water for millions of people, but also determine positive weather changes in the region.

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Car-rental operators in Japan recently observed a very strange  trend – a considerable number of their clients were renting cars but logging an unusually low mileage or not driving the cars at all.

Renting a car is a very efficient and convenient way of getting from point A to point B, and operators prefer the distance traveled to be as long as possible, as they make more money. So when a number of leading car rental and car sharing companies in Japan noticed that a significant number of their clients were renting cars, but not driving them at all, they started getting worried. They couldn’t figure out why it was happening, though, so they did some surveys and got some pretty interesting results. It turns out that people are increasingly using car rental services for a variety of reasons, except driving.

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Finnish startup Solar Foods has come up with a way to produce a protein-rich food called Solein from electricity, water and air, by using an environment-friendly process similar to brewing beer.

Described as the world’s most environmentally friendly protein, Solein is is made by applying electricity to water to release bubbles of carbon dioxide and hydrogen. Living microbes are then added to the liquid to feed on the carbon dioxide and hydrogen bubbles and produce the Solein, which is then dried to make the powder. It’a natural fermentation process similar to beer brewing, but it requires a special reactor that reportedly resembles a hurricane lantern. The dried Solein has a protein content of 50 percent and looks and tastes just like wheat flour. It can be used in all kinds of diets and can be 3D-printed for added texture.

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A New York couple is suing suing the fertility clinic for mixing up the embryos used in in vitro fertilization, causing the woman to give birth to two babies that were of a different ethnicity and turned out to be related to two other couples using the clinic.

According to a federal lawsuit filed in US District Court, the unidentified plaintiffs turned to a company called CHA Fertility after having trouble conceiving naturally. They reportedly spent more than $100,000 on the in vitro fertilization services, including facility and doctors’ fees, specialist services, medication, lab expenses, travel costs, etc.. Early last year, the fertilization clinic collected sperm and eggs from the couple, who were Asian, and formed five euploid embryos, four of which were female. The first fertilization attempt did not result in a pregnancy, but in September of last year the couple were thrilled to learn that they were pregnant with twins. The only problems was that, according to a sonogram exam, both fetuses were male, even though only one of their five embryos had been deemed male, and it had not been used.

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A 20-year-old man in Lucknow, India, was almost buried alive this week after the private hospital he was admitted to wrongfully pronounced him dead.

Mohammad Furqan was involved in an accident on the 21st of June and was taken to a hospital for treatment. He was in critical condition and after his family exhausted their savings paying for his medical bills, doctors declared him dead. Furqan’s devastated relatives immediately started making preparations for his funeral, but after his body was brought home by an ambulance, his older brother was shocked to see that he still moved his limbs. He notified the other members of the family and after making sure that he wasn’t seeing things, they took him to another hospital where doctors confirmed he was still alive.

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What appeared as an amazingly generous gesture turned out to be an act of revenge, after a Florida woman left a $5,000 tip to a waitress using her boyfriend’s credit card to get back at him after an argument.

24-year-old Serina Wolfe was arrested on Monday on a felony theft charge for allegedly using her boyfriend’s credit card to leave an unusually generous $5,000 tip, or 10,000% of her total bill, at the Clear Sky Cafe in Clearwater Beach, on June 27. The waitress initially thought that Wolfe was simply incredibly generous, but later learned that the 24-year-old had gotten into an argument with her boyfriend and used his credit card just to take revenge on him.

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Unless you’ve been living under a rock your whole life, you’ve probably seen one of those souvenir statues of Maitreya, aka the Laughing Buddha. They’ve pretty popular even in non-Buddhist countries, and many people use them as good luck charms. But you know what’s better than a Laughing Buddha statue? A living, breathing Smiling Buddha.

Photos and videos of an overweight, bald man posing as the Laughing Buddha on a stage somewhere in China have been circulating on social media ever since last fall. Back then, Chinese newspapers reported that the man would get showered with money every time he performed, as people hoped their offering would earn them divine favor. He just sat there in the Buddha’s iconic position with his flabby belly exposed and a big smile on his face, but the audience loved it.

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Most people struggle to solve a 3×3 Rubik’s cube with their hands, but there are people out there who can do it in under 20 seconds, using only their feet.

You’ve probably heard of people solving Rubik’s cubes blindfolded, using only one hand and even while juggling them; all these different ways of solving the popular puzzle are impressive to watch, but there’s another way of doing it that will probably blow your mind – solving the colorful cube using nothing but your feet. For some reason, I never imagined solving a Rubik’s cube without touching it with your hands was even possible, but it turns out people can do it much faster than the vast majority can using our hands. The current record for the fastest Rubik’s cube solved exclusively with the lower extremity of the legs beneath the ankles is 16.9 seconds.

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