As a male calf born on a small cattle farm in France, Aston was originally destined to be slaughtered for meat, but after forming a bond with a horse trainer he became a showjumping bull instead.

Five years ago, Sabine Rouas, a horse trainer from Strasbourg, France, had just lost a horse that she had spent 20 years of her life with and felt that she couldn’t get attached to a horse anymore. Instead, she became interested in a family of cows living on a nearby organic milk farm. One of the cows she spent time with was pregnant at the time, and Sabine believes that the calf may have gotten used to her voice while still in its mother’s womb, because soon after it was born, it started following her around whenever she came by. Unfortunately, the farmer wasn’t interested in keeping a bull on a milk farm, so he planned to have the calf, named M309 at the time, slaughtered at only three months. But Sabine wasn’t going to let that happen.

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A South African pastor has been making news headlines all over the world for staging a hilariously ridiculous prank in which he appears to bring a dead man back to life in front of a congregation of churchgoers.

Pastor Alph Lukau, of the Alleluia Ministries International church, in Kramerville, South Africa, has landed in hot water after a video showing him supposedly bringing a dead man back to life went viral online. The controversial religious figure can be seen putting his hands on the “dead” man’s chest and shouting “rise up!”. The man, who had supposedly died last Friday due to an undisclosed illness, opens his eyes and rises from the coffin with his mouth and eyes wide open, to the shouts and cheers of churchgoers gathered around him.

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They say you can tell a lot about a person by the way they walk, but one Chinese startup has apparently developed technology that allows it to identify individuals by their gait, even if their face is covered or they have their back to the camera.

Known as “gait recognition”, the technology invented by artificial intelligence startup Watrix analyses thousands of metrics about a person’s walk, from their body shape and the angle of arm movement to their posture and whether they have a toe-in or toe-out gait. All these individual traits go into a database that the software then goes through when attempting to identify people. According to an official statement from Watrix, the accuracy rate of gait technology at the laboratory level exceeds 96 per cent.

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On May 26, 2019, Manuel Germán Ramírez Valdovinos will have been in prison for 19 years, serving a sentence of 43 years for the murder of a man who is allegedly alive and well.

Valdovinos used to work as a music teacher at a school in the town of Texapan, in the State of Mexico. On May 26, 2000, he had just come back from work and was celebrating his son’s one-month anniversary with his wife, when a commando of eight judicial policemen stormed into his home, beat him, handcuffed him and put him into the back of a car with no license plates. He was arrested without a warrant and taken to the local police station where he was hung up by his hands with metal chains, tortured with electric shocks and accused of the murder of a person he barely knew. Manuel was only 22-years-old at the time.

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Marine biologists in Brazil were stunned to discover the body of a young humpback whale on a remote island in the Amazon jungle, at a time of the year when it should have migrated 4,000 miles away, to Antarctica.

The whale’s body was found by members of the conservation group Bicho D’Água, after they spotted vultures circling a mangrove on Marajo Island, a large, forested island in northern Brazil. The marine mammal, approximately 26-feet-long, was lodged in thick shrubs and brush, about 50 feet from the shore. A team from the region’s Municipal Secretariat of Health, Sanitation, and Environment inspected the carcass and reported that it did not appear to have any visible injuries, so until officials conduct a necropsy, the cause of death remains a mystery. At this time, the two main theories are that a powerful tide launched the whale inland, or that it died at sea and was carried onto land by people.

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Bobby Humphreys, a competitive bodybuilder from Boonsboro, Maryland, has always loved dogs, but until two years ago, he never really cared for small breeds. He always felt that his pets should fit his own image, and even made fun of his male friends who owned small dogs. But one day everything changed and today Bobby shares his home with no less than 37 adorable chihuahuas.

Humphreys used to be a “Big Dog Guy” and he and his wife of 17 years had owned three Rottweilers. He loved their tough, imposing look and never even considered the idea of ever owning a small dog. In fact, he went as far as to poke fun at his male friends if they ever allowed themselves to be seen walking their girlfriends’ small canines. It was an ego thing, but one that Bobby quickly put behind him when he fell in love with Lady, a tiny Chihuahua that he now credits for getting him through the darkest period of his life. She opened his eyes to the love and support that small dogs are capable of offering unconditionally, and the big, strong bodybuilder is now what many would call a Small Dog Guy who looks after dozens of chihuahuas.

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A 29-year-old insurance agent from Chongqing, China, has come up with an ingenious way to beat rush hour traffic. By paddle-boarding across the Yangtze River every morning he has cut his daily commute time from one hour to just six minutes.

Liu Fucao sells insurance in Chongqing’s Wanzhou District, but lives on the other side of the Yangtze, the longest river in Asia. Up until six months ago, he used to drive or catch a bus to work like everyone else, but then authorities started doing maintenance work on the bridge he had to cross every morning, and his daily commute got even longer than usual. It would take him an hour or more to get to work, and at one point he just couldn’t stand being stuck in traffic for so long. He has been paddle-boarding competitively for two years, and one day he decided to use it as an alternative means of transportation. It took him less than six minutes to paddle from one side of the river to the other, so he’s been doing it every morning since.

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The last thing you’d expect to find in the center of a Vietnamese rural district is a spectacular European-style palace, complete with a gilded roof, stunning facade and intricately decorated walls, and yet that’s exactly the sight you’re treated to in the heart of Gia Vien, in Vietnam’s Ninh Binh province.

I know what you’re thinking, Vietnam was a French colony for more than six decades, so this European-looking marvel must be a well-preserved relic from that period. But Thanh Thang Palace has nothing to do with French colonialism or Vietnamese history in general. This opulent complex is merely the residence of a local billionaire who reportedly spent between 300 and 400 billion dong ($12 – $17 million) to fulfil his dream of living in an actual palace. While the interior has yet to be completed, the outside is finished and it looks absolutely stunning.

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A viral video of a Filipino mother who goes to an internet cafe and hand-feeds her 13-year old son because he refuses to end his 48-hour gaming binge to eat has once again reignited the debate on youth video game addiction.

37-year-old Lilybeth Marvel first noticed there was something wrong with her son Carlito about two years ago, when he began staying up late at an internet cafe near the family home in Nueva Ecija, the Philippines. Things got progressively worse as time went by, to the point where the 13-year-old now spends days on end with his eyes glued to a monitor playing his favorite “battle royale” video game, Rules of Survival. Last week, Mrs. Marvel was filmed delivering her son’s breakfast to the internet cafe and hand feeding him while he continued to play, because he had been there for over 48 hours.

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China’s state-run news agency, Xinhua, yesterday unveiled its newest news anchor, Xin Xiaomeng. Why is this newsworthy? Well, because Xin isn’t a real person, but an ultra-realistic computer generated model powered by advanced AI technology.

The perfectly coiffed Xin Xiaomeng introduced herself to Xinhua’s viewers in a short clip, announcing that she will make her professional debut as news anchor in March. She was developed by the state-run news agency in collaboration with search engine Sogou, and her appearance and voice were inspired by those of a real-life Xinhua broadcaster named Qu Meng. In her introduction video, the perfectly coiffed AI news anchor spoke only in Chinese, and it’s unclear if she’ll be able to tackle English news reports as well.

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A young man from Vietnam allegedly had his ID card tattooed on his arm, because he always forgot it when going out drinking with his friends and couldn’t prove he was old enough to buy alcohol.

Photos of what looked like an ID card tattooed on someone’s forearm went viral on Vietnamese social media. The person who posted it claimed that a friend of theirs had had it done after becoming exasperated with failing ID checks at nightclubs. He almost always forgot his national identity card at home and couldn’t prove he was old enough to drink. To make sure he never got kicked out of nightclubs again, he decided to have his ID card tattooed on his forearm.

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Conch “Island” isn’t technically an island, but a mountain of conch shells discarded by fishermen in the same place over hundreds of years.

Located just east of Anegada, the second largest of the British Virgin Islands, in the Caribbean, Conch Island is both a stunning tourist attraction and a testimony to the popularity of conch meat in this part of the world. For centuries, local fishermen have been diving in the shallow waters on this side of Anegada in search of these, slow-moving, edible marine snails and many of them have been throwing their large shells in the same spot. The shell mountain that is Conch Island is a result of their perseverance.

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Vitiligo, a condition that causes the loss of skin color in blotches, affects around 1% of humans and is even rarer in animals. Elli, one of the few known cats suffering from Vitiligo, was born with a mostly black coat, but just one year after being diagnosed with this mysterious condition, her fur is almost completely white.

Nicole, the cat’s owner, found Elli and her sister on a farm in Germany, when they were only four-month kittens. They were both in poor shape and in desperate need of medical attention, so Nicole adopted them and nursed them back to health. Both cats were black with white spots on their chests, which made them look like they were wearing fur tuxedos, but one day, Elli’s tux started losing its color. It was just a tiny white spot at first, but as months went by, her black coat turned into a black and white mosaic.

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A Dubai-based startup has its eyes set on literally taking coffee roasters to new heights by launching a space capsule full of coffee beans into space and use the heat generated by atmosphere re-entry to roast them.

Anders Cavallini and Hatem Alkhafaji, the two founders of Space Roasters, believe that the absence of gravity could be the secret to roasting coffee perfectly. On Earth, beans tumble around, break apart and are roasted unevenly as some of them come into contact with the hot surfaces of a conventional roaster, but in zero-gravity conditions, beans would float freely in a heated oven, with heat being distributed evenly, resulting in a near-perfect roast. That’s just a theory, but they’re prepared to put it to the test by sending a capsule filled with 300kg of coffee beans to a height of 200km.

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A California woman swallows about five live Chinese weevils every day as a way to prevent the growth of cancerous tumors and boost her immune system.

Marcela Iglesias, a mother-of three from Los Angeles, California, believes that consuming live Chinese Weevils every day could be the best way to prevent cancer, treat chronic pain, arthritis and various digestive problems. Swallowing them alive is critical as these bugs allegedly release a toxin called “coleotoxin” when they die, and you want that to happen when they reach your digestive system. This theory is supported by a 2011 study which found that coleotoxin reduced tumor cell growth by more than 70 per cent. That research is heavily contested by many in the scientific community, but Iglesias doesn’t really care, saying that even if the bugs don’t actually help prevent cancer, they are still a great source of protein.

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