Japan has long been known for both its strong traditions and being on the cutting edge of technology, and  this new inn combining the classic Japanese surroundings with high-tech, self-driving slippers and furniture is a perfect reflection of this.

Nissan Motor Co. developed a system in which slippers park themselves at the entrance of the traditional inn, called ‘ProPilot Park Ryokan,’ waiting for guests to use them upon arrival. When guests have finished using them, the slippers will drive themselves back to their original position. Each slipper features two tiny wheels, a motor, and sensors to drive it across the lobby’s wooden floor using a simplified form of Nissan’s ProPilot Park technology.

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We all have that one acquaintance who takes their pet everywhere with them, so from that standpoint, Lisa Foxcroft,  of Merseyside, in North West England, isn’t that special. But what does make her stand out is that her pet is actually a taxidermy fox cub named Baby Jesus. The two of them have been getting a lot of attention on Instagram lately, as you can imagine.

Baby Jesus was apparently hit by a car as he was trying to cross the road, but he was (sort of) given a second chance at live with the help of taxidermy,  and gifted to Foxcroft as a Christmas gift, by a friend. She named him Baby Jesus to celebrate the holiday,  and before you start accusing her of blasphemy, you should know that Lisa considers a devout Catholic who respects all religious beliefs. Anyway, most people would probably wince at the sight of such an unusual Christmas present, but Lisa absolutely fell in love with Baby Jesus the moment she saw him, and they’ve virtually inseparable for the past two years.

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A newly married Chinese couple has been making waves on the internet for their unorthodox match- she is a wealthy 38-year-old mother of one, and he is a 23-year-old whose mother is only a year older than his bride. The wedding, which was filmed on Jan. 10, took place in Qionghai, Hainan, China, where it first went viral and stirred up controversy.

The woman apparently fell pregnant after a romance with the younger man, after which he proposed marriage. Initially, the groom’s parents opposed the wedding, citing the 15 year age difference between them, as well as the bride’s 14-year-old child from a previous marriage. However, the bride – a wealthy real estate businesswoman – offered them a dowry of 660,000 yuan (USD 104,273) in cash, a real estate lot, and a Ferrari sports car, altogether worth an estimated a 5,000,000 yuan (USD 789,950). The parents gave their blessing immediately following the generous offer.

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Two years ago, Jessica Leigh Clark-Bojin didn’t even know how to bake, but today she is widely regarded as the world’s most talented pie maker. And, believe it or not, she’s entirely self taught.

Jessica Leigh Clark-Bojin’s amazing journey into the world of elaborate pies began a couple of years ago, as a New Year’s resolution to cut down on sugar. Pies just seemed like the safest way to satisfy her dessert cravings, but there was just one problem – she didn’t know anything about baking, or cooking in general for that matter. So she dedicated six months to developing her baking skills, and it paid off big-time. These days, Clark-Bojin’s fabulous pies are all the rage on social media and she’s able to make a living by selling how-to guides to like-minded pie enthusiasts who want to bake their own edible works of art.

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Here’s something you don’t see every day, a cow in Poland apparently got so bored of its life as a domestic animal on a farm that it escaped and joined a herd of wild bison on the edge of the primeval Bialowieza Forest, on the Belarusian border The copper-colored cow has been living with its new bison family in eastern Poland  for the past three months, and seems to have adjusted just fine.

The first person to spot the cow in the bison herd was ornithologist Adam Zbyryt. At first glance, he thought the small reddish brown specimen was a bison exhibiting a mutation. However, after focusing his binocluars on it, he realized it was actually a Limousin cow, a French breed that is popular in Poland. The young bovine appeared healthy and at ease with the bigger animals.

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British beekeeper and musician Bioni (pronounced BEE-own-ee) Samp has found an incredible way to combine his two greatest passions. He records the frequencies of his bees and uses them to create original electronic musical compositions.

Bioni – a pseudonym, as his real name is a closely guarded secret – produces abstract music that is rhythmic and dancey, but the 50-something Londoner has a higher goal than making people get jiggy with it on the dance floor. He uses his unusual music to raise awareness about colony collapse disorder (CDC), a plague that has wiped out millions of honeybee hives globally since 2006. Billions of bees are killed by CDC every year, and that’s not counting the ones that dies as result of climate change and pesticide poisoning. he feels that by using bees as a musical instrument he can get through to people easier than by preaching to them about the plight of bees and the dangers their extinction poses to humanity.

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Arthur Wagner, a leading member of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a far-right German political party whose slogan is “Islam doesn’t belong in Germany”, recently resigned after converting to Islam.

Originally created as an anti-euro party, the AfD has recently campaigned on an anti-Muslim, anti immigration platform, strongly criticizing Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to allow over a million refugees into Germany, since 2015. Just last summer, Arthur Wagner, who sat on the party’s executive committee in the state of Brandenburg, accused Merkel of “making a big mistake” by allowing so many Muslim refugees into the country, and warned that “Germany is mutating into a different country”. On January 11th, he left the party citing personal reasons, but it was later revealed that he had converted to Islam.

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Hair is not the easiest art medium to work with, especially when you’re trying to create detailed portraits of people and animals, but young Indian artist Midhun R.R. had developed a technique that allows him to manipulate thousands of short hair strands into impressive artworks.

All Midhun needs to create his art is some hair, obviously, a white sheet of paper for canvas and a long needle to manipulate the tiny hairs. He makes the whole thing look easy in the time lapse videos he posts on YouTube, but admits that arranging the hairs the way he wants is actually harder than it seems. To make it easier for himself he has the hair chemically treated before using it. The hair strands are then cut at various lengths, depending on the image he is trying to create, and carefully arranged on the paper canvas using the needle. Once Midhun is satisfied with the result, the artwork is sandwiched between two glass panes for long-term preservation.

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Save for a few symbolic sections in the center of the German capital, the Berlin wall was completely demolished in 1989 . However, a local hobby historian claims to have discovered an 80-meter-long section of which authorities apparently knew nothing about.

37-year-old Christian Bormann found the forgotten section of the Berlin Wall between two train stations in the Pankow district in the northeast of the city, back in 1999. The local government office responsible for monuments was unaware of the surviving segment, and records showed the section registered as demolished. Bormann kept his discovery to himself until recently, when he noticed that it had been damage by storms. Concerned about the slowly deteriorating monument, he finally revealed his secret in a blog post and contacted Pankow district authorities, calling on them to protect it as a historical monument.

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A 49-year-old man in South West China has spent the past decade living rough under a bridge trying to break the lottery code.

Wang Chengzhou used to work construction in Sichuan Province, but moved to Chongqing in 2008 after suffering a work-related injury. Instead of using the $50,000 yuan he had received as compensation from his former employer to start a new life, Wang spent it all on his obsession – cracking the lottery code. He cut off all communication with his family and settled under a bridge where he has been working hard on figuring out the algorithms behind the lottery. After 10 years of hard work, he claims to have finally cracked the secret to getting filthy rich overnight.

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When Sophy Ijeoma, a makeup artist from Nigeria, decided to comment on an acquaintance’s Facebook marriage advert as a joke, she never imagined she would marry the man just seven days later, but I guess she underestimated the power of social media.

The day before New Year’s Eve, Nigerian furniture maker Chidimma Amedu decided it was to find a wife. Instead of probing his friends or going on a dating site, he just posted an advert on Facebook, asking all women interested in becoming his wife to reply to his post. It read “Am of age to and I am ready to say I do and I am wasting no time. Send in your applications. The most qualified will be married on January 6, 2018. Application closes 12 midnight, December 31, 2017. I am serious about this… and don’t say you did not see it on time. Goodluck.”

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At just 30-years-old, Karol Rybakowski is already one of the biggest names in the world of tattoos, and looking at some of his works, it’s pretty easy to see why. His portrait tattoos look as if a picture has been slapped on the subject skin, and in many cases they turn out even better than the photos that inspired them.

It won’t surprise you to learn that Karol Rybakowski studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, in Warsaw, before becoming a tattoo artist, but while that explains his artistic style, I for one still can’t wrap my head around how a 30-year-old can create such stunningly-realistic tattoos. And apparently, I’m not the only one. About four years ago, just when his works started showing up online, people in the business who had never seen his tattoos in person actually thought that they were photoshopped. There was a particularly heated debate surrounding his tattoo of Bradley Cooper as sniper Chris Kyle in “American Sniper” with many people claiming that it looked too good to be true.

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A young Irish man whose teeth had almost rotted away completely due to his addiction to sweet fizzy drinks has recently been gifted a brand new smile by a dentist who noticed his excruciating pain when trying to take a bite from a sandwich.

Michael Sheridan, a father-of-three from Ashbourne, has endured constant pain for years and has had to live on a diet of soft foods as biting into anything solid caused him excruciating pain. He attributes his poor dental health to his addiction to fizzy drinks, of which he would drink up to six liters a day. Sheridan’s addiction was so severe that he would experience headaches and shakiness if he didn’t have a fizzy drink within half an hour of waking up every day. As his teeth began to rot, he would lay awake most nights in agony from toothaches. Over time he grew ashamed of his teeth and would hide his smile from even his partner and children.

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Five years ago, a compassionate Shanghai policeman took on the role of son to help comfort an elderly couple he had never met before. They had lost their own son in a tragic accident 15 years ago, and the policeman’s similar appearance helped comfort them.

In 2003, Liang Qiaoying and her son, Liang Yu, from North China’s Shanxi province, were exposed to poison gas, during a freak accident. The woman survived, but her young son did not. Liang, a former schoolteacher, was left paralyzed and mentally impaired following the accident, and her husband, Xia Zhanhai, could not bear to tell her the truth about their son. Instead, whenever his wife asked to see Liang Yu, he kept saying that he had gone to work in another city.

In 2010, while watching a television show about police work in Shanghai, Xia Zhanhai was stunned to see an officer that looked just like his deceased son. He immediately knew that the young man was the answer to making his wife smile again, but he had know idea how to get in touch with him. He hadn’t caught his name, and all he had to go by was that he was stationed in Pudong, 1,500 km away. But that wasn’t going to stop him.

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From Whatsapp to WeChat or Skype,the world has plenty of choices when it comes to messaging apps that connect friends and strangers on the internet. The market is so crowded this days that for a new competitor to even get noticed, they’d have to come up with something completely new. Enter “Die With Me,” a fresh chat app that can only be used when your smartphone has 5% or less battery remaining.

Die With Me allows total strangers with low battery to log into an online chatroom and converse as they wait for their handhelds to shut off completely. Or, as the developers so poetically put it, to “die together in a chatroom on your way to offline peace.” Using Die With Me requires nothing more than choosing a username and allowing the app to read your battery status. The idea behind the strangely poignant app was to turn the frustrating experience of dealing with low phone battery into a positive one.

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