In the late 1990’s, when a Texas farmer decided to clear up some new grazing land for his cattle by leaving up just enough trees to spell his name in giant letters, he probably never imagined that his signature would one day be used by NASA to evaluate the quality of their satellite cameras.

Jimmie Luecke was a young Texas state trooper who left the highway patrol in 1980 to try his luck in the oil business. He was lucky enough to do so during the chalk oil boom, became a millionaire, and invested most of his profits in land outside the town of Smithville. He started raising cattle on it, and by the late 1990’s his heard had gotten so large that he needed to clear up some more of his land of trees for grazing. Only he didn’t just settle for bulldozing all the trees, he decided to write his name in the process, thus creating the world’s largest signature.

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Turtles may be cute, but they are also slow and clumsy, which doesn’t really help them when they are trying to cross train tracks. Luckily, for the turtles in Japan’s Hyōgo Prefecture, railway operators and a local aquarium teamed up to find a solution.

Between 2002 and 2014, disruptions of train operation caused by turtles were reported 13 times, with many more probably going unreported. That is why, in 2015, West Japan Railway Co. and Suma Aqualife Park in Kobe joint forces to prevent tragic turtle deaths on the tracks and unnecessary train delay. After running a series of tests and experiments, they came up with a U-shaped ditch that collects the turtles, preventing them from getting stuck between the metal tracks and getting squashed to death.

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A Kansas-based businessman tired of online dating has announced that he will pay $25,000 to whomever manages to find him a suitable girlfriend.

47-year-old Jeff Gebhart doesn’t need someone to complete him, but he would like to meet someone to share his amazing life with, and he is willing to pay a small fortune to make that happen. The eligible bachelor claims that he has grown tired of traditional dating and hates online dating services, so he decided to try something special. Last week, he launched the website “Date Jeff G.” and announced that he would gladly pay $25,000 to the person who can find him a girlfriend that matches his criteria.

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The coronavirus has the whole world on edge, but in China, where the epidemic originated, people are taking every precaution to avoid catching the virus, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.

A Chinese woman identified only as Ms. He went viral recently after being video-recorded while visiting a hospital in Luzhou, China’s south-western Sichuan Province, in a rather unusual getup – a giant inflatable giraffe costume. In the short clip posted by Chinese video platform Pear Video, the woman can be seen walking around in the awkward brown plastic costume with only a small window of clear plastic film to see through.

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A 70-year-old Japanese man who describes himself as a professional “fundoshi”, or “poop soil master” has been moving bowels outdoors for almost half a centuries, and encouraging others to follow his example.

Masana Izawa, a published mushroom and moss photographer, is famous for avoiding indoor toilets as much as he can. In fact, he prides himself with the fact that he has only pooped indoor 14 times in the last 20 years, and then only because he had no other choice. Whether he is at his home in Japan’s Ibaraki Prefecture, in an urban environment or in the middle of nature, Izawa always does his number two outdoors. He believes that relieving ourselves in the soil rather than in dead plumbing is our responsibility as humans, and he has taken it upon himself to convince people that their poop isn’t worthless at all.

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Joleen Diaz, a 43-year-old woman from California has been dubbed “the world’s hottest mom” on social media, with millions commending her for her incredibly youthful looks, which often get her and her 19-year-old daughter confused for siblings.

Ab elementary school teacher by profession, Joleen says that she doesn’t mind getting mistaken for her daughter’s sibling, and neither does she. She had Meilani when she was very young, so it’s not entirely possible to believe that they could be sisters; plus, while growing up Meilani would always hear people tell Joleen they thought her mother was her sister, so she is used to it. Still, the 43-year-old looks pretty incredible for her age, which she attributes to her religious skin care.

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A Louisiana man is facing up to 70 years in prison for burning down three churches last year in a bizarre attempt to build up his reputation as a black metal musician.

22-year-old Holden Matthews has admitted to burning down three churches in  St. Landry Parish, Louisiana, to “promote himself” among fans of black metal, a subgenre of heavy metal. The son of a sheriff deputy, Mathews reportedly wanted to mimic the church burnings carried out in the 1990s by Norwegian black metal musicians as a crusade against Christianity. Matthews single-handedly set fire to three churches, using gasoline and oily shop rags in the middle of the night, in a span of 10 days.

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A nutritionist who claims to not have consumed any water for a year has sparked controversy online by suggesting that her long-term dry fast has greatly improved her health and well-being.

35-year-old Sophie Partik used to suffer aching joints, puffy eyes, food allergies, bad skin and digestive issues, but claims that all these problems went away when she started dry-fasting. She doesn’t touch any liquids for 13-14 hours a day, and when she does it’s only living water, like the juice of fruits and vegetables. The most she has gone without any liquids was 52 hours, but she dreams of the day when she will be able to dry fast for 10 days. Sophie hasn’t drunk bottled or faucet water in a year, and claims that the need for water is only in our heads.

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A temporary waterfall in Yosemite National Park has become a popular tourist attraction in the mouth of February, because under the right conditions sunlight makes the water flowing down the rock face look like fire, hence its nickname, Yosemite Firefall.

Every year, from December to April, water from melting mountain snow flows toward the eastern edge of El Capitan, forming the temporary Horsetail Falls. The waterfall itself is quite a sight to behold, but it becomes truly breathtaking for a few days (7 -10) in February, when, under the right conditions, it turns into a firefall, with the water looking like flowing lava and swirling flames. The Yosemite Firefall is considered one of the most amazing spectacles one can behold in Yosemite National Park.

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A Polish man who was allegedly blind for twenty years, miraculously recovered his vision after being hit by a car while crossing the street.

Until a couple of years ago, Janusz Goraj, from the city of Gorzow Wielkopolski, was completely blind in his left eye, and could only discern shadows and light with his right one. He had lost his eyesight 20 years ago, as a side-effect of severe allergies, and had become accustomed to living in almost total darkness. But one day in 2018, a miracle happened. Janusz was crossing the street on a crosswalk when he was violently hit by a car. He hit his head on the car’s hood as well as on the asphalt as he fell. To make matters worse, he also damaged his hip, and ended up needing surgery on it. But little did he know that the accident was a blessing in disguise.

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After struggling to convince members of his community to join him in making their streets and beaches cleaner by picking up trash, an Indonesian man put on a superhero outfit in hopes of becoming more convincing.

Rudi Hartono, a cafe worker from Pare-Pare, South Sulawesi, had long been struggling to persuade residents of his small coastal community to get more involved in keeping their home clean by picking up the plastic trash strewn on streets and beaches, but had had little success. But then he put on a Spiderman suit just to amuse his nephew, and people took notice. He accidentally became somewhat of a local role-model, and people started following his example.

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A six-year-old Labrador Retriever from Canandaigua, New York recently set a new world record befitting his playful personality – most tennis balls held in a dog’s mouth at once.

Finley the dog loves tennis balls so much that he has developed a very special skill – picking up and holding up to six balls in his mouth, without any assistance from a human. His owners, the Molloy family, first noticed the pooch’s talent when he was two years old. Back then, he could fit up to four tennis balls in his mouth at once, but before they knew it, Finley started showing up with five balls between his teeth, and then finally with six, which stretched his cheeks to the extreme.

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A dog food company CEO ate nothing but canine chow for a whole month, to show that if it was good enough for him, it’s good enough for dogs too. If that makes any sense…

Mitch Felderhoff, president of Texas-based Muenster Milling, ate nothing but dog food made by his company for 30 days, from January 3 to February 2. Muenster Milling produces high-quality dog foods and treats, horse food, chicken feed, and the executive wanted to demonstrate the quality of the dog food by eating it himself for a month. It wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to do, as Felderhoff himself admits, but he found the strength to stick to the diet for the full 30 days.

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Colombian artist Diana Beltran Herrera creates incredibly realistic bird sculptures by carefully attaching bits of colored paper.

To say Diana Beltran Herrera’s hands are super-precise instruments would be an understatement. The talented artist uses her innate dexterity and years of practice to create amazingly-detailed models of various birds, from the common sparrow to tropical parrots, out of bits of glued paper. To represent the birds as they are in nature, Herrera makes her sculptures life-size. Over the last decade, she has created paper sculptures of hundreds of bird species.

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The town of Ingham, in Northern Queesnland, has reached “crisis point” after hundreds of thousands of fruit bats invaded the place last month. Things have gotten so bad that kids are afraid to go to school anymore, and rescue helicopters can’t land at the local hospital.

Flying foxes, also known as fruit bats currently outnumber humans in Ingham by hundreds of thousands. And they’re not the only bat species that decided to make the Australian town their home over the last month. According to local sources, people here have been invaded by four different species of bats, each of which mates at different times, making it really hard for authorities to intervene. To make matters worse, the bats are protected by law, so locals can’t take matters into their own hands either.

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