Natalie Kuniciki, a 23-year-old paramedic from London, UK, was left partially paralyzed after her vertebral artery burst when she involuntarily cracked her neck, causing a blood clot to trigger a stroke in her brain.

We all crack our joints every once in a while, whether accidentally or on purpose, but apart from that satisfying “pop” sound, nothing really happens. However, in Natalie Kuniciki case, a simple and seemingly harmless thing like moving her head caused a stroke that left her partially paralyzed. The 23-year-old paramedic was watching a movie at her home in West Hampstead after a night out when she involuntarily stretched her neck. Only this time, the routine maneuver caused a loud “crack” sound in her neck. Natalie didn’t really feel any pain so she ignored it and went to bed, only to wake up 15 minutes later unable to move her left leg. When she tried getting up to go to the toilet, she collapsed, so the frightened young woman called an ambulance.

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52-year-old Simon Lee has been sleeping rough on the streets of Hong Kong for the last seven years, but unlike most homeless people, he didn’t just wind up there after some tragic, life-altering event. He actually chose to be homeless, giving up on his material possessions and a comfortable office job for a carefree, stress-free life.

You couldn’t really tell by looking at him, but Simon Lee graduated from university with a degree in chemistry, and until 1997 he had a steady office job. But one day he decided he didn’t need the stress of a white-collar job, so he quit and moved to neighboring Macau. He made a living tutoring children for a few years, but in 2004, he moved again, this time to Zhuhai, where he lived off of his savings, before going back to Macau two years later. The casinos were starting up and rich gamblers were more than happy to share a tiny fraction of their winnings with someone less fortunate than them, so Simon decided to live on the street and survive off casino hand outs.

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Diphylleia grayi is not the most striking of flowers, in fact many people pass by it without even noticing its white, rounded petals. But that’s because they don’t know about its most impressive feature, turning translucent in contact with water.

Native to wooded mountainsides in the colder regions of Japan, “skeleton flowers” bloom from mid-spring to early-summer. Their white petals are completely opaque in dry conditions, but as rain begins to fall, they become almost crystal clear, giving the flower an almost ghostly look. When the rain stops and the petals dry, the skeleton flower goes back to its plain white self.

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Doctors in Shenzen, China recently performed an emergency endoscopy to remove a 13-centimeter metal spoon from a woman’s duodenum, after she accidentally swallowed it while trying to dislodge a fish bone from her throat.

The reckless patient, known only as Lily, reportedly swallowed the stainless steel spoon before the Qingming Festival on April 5, but didn’t bother going to the hospital until four days later, because she didn’t feel any pain in her stomach. She had apparently tried to use the metal spoon to remove a fish bone that had become lodged in her throat, but it accidentally slipped from her fingers and she ended up swallowing it. Talk about things going from bad to worse, right?

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What started as a creative way to honor her late father turned into an obsession for Ella London, a 35-year-old woman from Los Angeles who has been wearing and surrounding herself with everything yellow for the last seven years.

Ella has always loved the color yellow, but it only became an important part of her life 11 years ago. She and her fiancee were organizing their upcoming wedding and trying to find a color theme for the event. London knew that she didn’t want the classic white, red made her think of Christmas and all the other colors she considered were way too overused. But when her fiancee suggested yellow, something in her brain clicked. It reminded her of her father, who had passed away when she was only two months old, of his love for the color yellow and how it seemed to perfectly reflect his happy nature. She picked it as a way to honor her late father, but the wedding was only the beginning of her love affair with the color yellow.

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Kazakhstan-based artist Kanat Nurtazin describes his leaf cutting art as a way of giving tree leaves a second life in which they can tell a new story through his intricate designs.

Four years ago, Kanat Nurtazin embarked on an project he named “100 Methods of Drawing” for which he experimented with various ways of expressing his artistic talent. It was through this project that he discovered leaf cutting, which became one of his favorite techniques. He likes the ephemeral nature of tree leaves, the fact that, much like human lives, they are perishable, but also that he can breathe new life into them as a medium to share stories with his audience.

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A 42-year-old man in Shenzen, China, was recently hospitalized with a stroke after the staff at a local internet cafe noticed that he hadn’t got up from his seat in 50 hours.

According to CCTV footage, the unnamed man arrived at the internet cafe on the morning of March 31st and never once got up from his chair for the next 50 hours. It was only on the evening of April 2nd that the staff checked CCTV cameras and noticed that he had been there for over two days. When they checked on him, they found that he was paralyzed, unable to speak and suffering from incontinence. When he arrived at the Longhua District People’s Hospital, he was barely conscious and couldn’t move the limbs on the right side of his body. Doctors diagnosed him with massive cerebral infarction on the left basal ganglia and frontotemporal lobe, otherwise known as a stroke.

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A 58-year-old street cleaner in China has been hailed as a hero after it was reported that he has donated over 180,000 yuan ($27,000) to dozens of poor children in the last 30 years, despite earning a monthly salary of just 2,000 yuan ($300).

Mr. Zhao, a street cleaner from Shenyang, in China’s northeast Liaoning Province, leads a very frugal lifestyle. Most of his meals consist of simple boiled noodles, he hasn’t bought new clothes in about 30 years, and he and his family live in a very modest house. Even though he earns just 2,000 yuan per month, he could probably have  much more comfortable life if he didn’t give most of his income away. Coming from humble beginnings himself, Zhao known all about poverty, so he has dedicated the last three decades of his life to helping impoverished children, while also taking care of his own family.

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A Malaysian man recently went viral after filming himself thrashing a brand new condominium in the heart of Kuala Lumpur because it wasn’t as luxurious as the developer had promised.

The unnamed man became an overnight internet celebrity thanks to a series of short Facebook clips in which he complains that the condo he allegedly paid $2million ringgit ($486,000) for is not up to his standards, then proceeds to spray-paint everything he dislikes about it, before taking a sledgehammer and breaking the furniture and marble floor. Talking to the camera, the man claims that he had tried contacting the developer, Tropicana Corporation Berhad, to voice his displeasure, but they ignored him, so he decided to turn his sub-par condominium into a showroom for the company, so that other buyers wouldn’t pay for the same level of “luxury”.

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Katya, a 36-year-old brown bear, is the only prisoner at the UK-161/2 penal colony in Kostanay, Kazakhstan, to be serving a life sentence. Ironically, even killers imprisoned here have sentences of no longer than 25 years.

So what could a bear do to end up in prison? Well, Ekaterina, or Katya as most of the 730 inmates at UK-161/2 call her, was put behind bars in 2004, after injuring two humans. Like a lot of her fellow inmates, the brown bear had a troubled life. Katya was abandoned by circus performers visiting Kostanay when she was still just a cub, and then locked in a cage near a popular camping site, as a tourist attraction. It was at the Belaya Yurta campsite that she committed the “crimes” that landed her in the strict regime prison, 15 years ago.

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If you love eating and drinking for free and are looking to make some pocket change, there’s a job in China with your name on it. A new type of online service allows people to hire others to eat or drink their favorite treats, either to cure their boredom or satisfy their craving without the calories that usually come with it.

Chinese media recently reported on an increasingly popular service on online commercial platform Taobao that’s as mind-boggling as it is intriguing. People can now go online and hire others to consume certain foods and drinks, and ask them to provide video evidence of them eating or drinking the said treats. Fees usually range between 2 yuan ($0.30) and 9 yuan ($1.35) plus the cost of the food that the client wants consumed. It’s not exactly a get-rich quick kind of job, but there are quite a lot of people willing to do it for the free treats alone.

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An Italian man who went to great lengths to convince everyone that he had lost the ability to walk after being involved in a staged car accident 12 years ago was recently exposed as a fraud.

The incredible story of Roberto Guglielmi, an Italian con artist who managed to fool everyone, including doctors, neighbors and even the Pope, that he couldn’t walk began over a decade ago. In 2007, he came up with a plan to pass himself off as a disabled person and collect the pension offered by the government, but he needed an accomplice to pull it off. At the time, he had someone living in his home who was behind on rent, so he proposed to forget about the payment he was owed if his housemate would pretend to hit him with the car while he was crossing the street. The man agreed and everything went smoothly. With the help of a false medical document, Guglielmi was able to become a paraplegic, even though he could walk like a normal person.

What’s most remarkable about this tale of deception is the extreme lengths that the Florentine went to in order to deceive doctors during mandatory visits to confirm his disability. According to prosecutors, he would inject lidocaine into his legs to numb his muscles, undergo traumatic therapies and use a wheelchair whenever he left his home. For over a decade, no one suspected that he was actually a healthy person with full use of his legs.

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Ron Thompson, a Zimbabwean hunter who killed over 5,000 elephants, hundreds of buffaloes and “many more” wild animals in his 50-year career, recently declared himself “totally unrepentant” about his resume, claiming that it’s conservationists who are the problem.

The 77-year-old retired hunter recently sat down with English newspaper The Independent and said that he was never driven by bloodlust, as many would assume, but by the knowledge that animal populations must be controlled to make sure they “don’t increase beyond the capacity of their habitat”. He claimed that despite the fraudulent lies spread by so-called conservationists, to him shooting thousands of animals dead was only a job.

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A 12-year-old boy from Meishan, in China’s Sichuan Province, has been hailed as a hero for making it possible for a disabled classmate to move around at school by carrying him on his back for the last six years.

When he was only 4-years-old, Zhang Ze was diagnosed with a debilitating and incurable condition called myasthenia gravis, which gradually caused him to lose control of the voluntary muscles in his legs, making it very difficult for him to walk on his own. While his parents dropped off Zhang to school every day they couldn’t help him move between classes or go to the toilet when he needed to. Luckily, one of the boy’s schoolmates stepped up to help. As soon as they met in 1st grade, Xu Bingyang offered to help Zhang Ze get to class, reach the toilet or get his lunch, and he’s been doing it for the last 6 years.

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The only thing worse than singing for over 100 hours straight is finding out that it was all in vain. That’s what happened to Dominican singer Carlos Silver who, after performing for 106 consecutive hours in an attempt to set a new world record, learned that his attempt was disqualified by Guinness.

Last week, Dominican artist Carlos Silver performed over 5,000 songs in an attempt to break the Guinness record set by Indian singer Sunil Waghmare, who in 2012 sang for 105 consecutive hours. This was Silver’s second shot at the record for world’s longest singing marathon by an individual, after his unsuccessful attempt in 2016, and this time it looked like he had done it. At the end of his epic 5-day performance, the timer showed that he had been singing for 106.7 hours, over one hour more that Waghmare’s record, but his elation soon turned to disappointment, as Guinness officials disqualified him for breaking the organization’s strict rules.

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