MIT researchers have made an important breakthrough in their quest to make plants that glow in the dark a reality. In what they call Plant Nanobionics, the engineers embedded nanoparticles into the leaves of a watercress plant that caused the plants to give off a dim glow for three and a half hours.

Their next goal is to create plants bright enough to illuminate a workspace, but, if successful, the technology could also be used to transform trees into self-powered streetlights, the scientists claim. The team’s ultimate goal is to engineer plants to replace many of the functions currently performed by electrical devices and appliances.

“The vision is to make a plant that will function as a desk lamp — a lamp that you don’t have to plug in. The light is ultimately powered by the energy metabolism of the plant itself,” said Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT and the senior author of a recently released study on plant nanobionics.

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Two male Irish friends, neither of which is gay, have decided to get married in order to avoid paying a hefty inheritance tax. It sounds like the plot of a Hollywood comedy, only in real life.

Michael O’Sullivan, from Stoneybatter, north Dublin, has been friends with Matt (surname not disclosed for privacy reasons) for almost 30 years. Both are in their 80s, and O’Sullivan is now Matt’s caretaker and stands to inherit his home and other possessions. Unfortunately, because of Ireland’s Capital Acquisitions Tax (Cat), which applies to gifts and inheritances over specified amounts, Matt would have to pay 33% to the government. However, the tax does not apply to gifts or inheritance given to a spouse or civil partner, so the two men decided that the best way would be to get married.

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With prices starting at 25,000 euros per bottle, AurumRed Gold is considered the world’s most expensive wine. It is made from Tempranillo vines that have to be at least 100 years old, using a mix of modern and traditional techniques, but what really sets it apart from other wines is the use of ozone therapy, an alternative medicine treatment generally used to treat cancer, AIDS, multiple sclerosis and more.

Hilario Garcia, who produces the AurumRed Gold wine on a small vineyard in La Mancha, Spain, became familiar with ozone therapy after using it to ease a condition of the spine that had left his lower body paralyzed. After experiencing success with the treatment, he decided to experiment with it in his lab, and attempt to apply it to winemaking by ozonating the water that irrigates the vines. Ozone therapy is merely the increase of oxygen in the body through the introduction of medical grade ozone, which is a highly reactive form of pure oxygen.

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Wilfa Soto Peguero, a struggling mother-of-four from the Dominican Republic, thought her life was finally going to become easier after hitting it off with a Welsh man she had met online. After six months of online conversations, 46-year-old Glyn Thomas Bailey told Wilfa he wanted to visit and help her raise her kids. She made the big mistake of accepting his offer, and she has spent the last month and a half trying to get rid of him.

Wilfa and Glyn met on online dating site Badoo, and despite having to use Google Translate to understand each other’s messages, they got along well, so when the Welsh man told her that he wanted to come meet her in person and help her raise her four children, Wilfa was thrilled. She told him to send her some money, so she could come meet her at the airport, but he never did. Glyn just told her when he would arrive, and she couldn’t just leave him hanging, so she borrowed some money and traveled to meet him.

The Dominican woman became even more suspicious of her online boyfriend after looking at his plane ticket and seeing that it was one-way. She would later realize that he also didn’t have any money whatsoever and that she would actually have to support him, not the other way around. Soto Peguero took the broke sugar daddy to her rented home where she tried to explain to him that raising four kids was hard enough and she couldn’t afford to look after him as well, but he just stared at her like he didn’t understand a word.

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Ever watch a whole season of your favorite TV show just to have a friend casually tell you how it ends just before the final episode? Or did you ever like a movie so much that you wish you could see it again without knowing anything about it, just to experience the same feelings? Well, thanks to a new and intriguing service, now you can!

UnSpoil Me is a service developed by Samsung Electronics Nordic in partnership with famous Swedish hypnotist and mental coach Fredrik Praesto, which allegedly allows users to hypnotize themselves into forgetting significant plot points and twists. Each self-guided session lasts 18 minutes and viewers are able to guide themselves through the process by following a series of on-screen prompts and listening to Praesto’s commands.

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A Berlin-based art collective known as Raubdruckerin – German for ‘pirate printers’ – has come up with a unique approach to creating textile patterns. They have been traveling around European cities turning utility hole covers into printing presses to decorate totes, t-shirts, hoodies, gym bags, and more.

Founder Emma France Raff began experimenting with the concept of ‘urban printing press’ in 2006 when she founded the project in partnership with her father, Johannes Kohlrusch. They started in Lisbon, but have since expanded to Paris, Amsterdam, and Berlin, the latter being their base of operations. The Raubdrucken team members find inspiration in the urban landscape and often overlooked surfaces of the city, such as utility hole covers and drains. Sustainability is a crucial component of the project, as they aim to offer an alternative perspective and approach to mass production.

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Imagine inheriting more money that you and your family could ever hope to carry. That’s exactly what happened to a family in Bremervörde, Germany, who received an inheritance of over 1.2 million coins weighing around 2.5 tonnes. In this particular case, however, counting the money proved a lot more difficult than carrying it.

It all started 30 years ago, when a German truck driver started saving  1 pfennig (0.01 Deutsche Mark) and 2 pfennig (0.02 Deutsche Mark) coins for his family. He managed to collect around 1.2 million coins until his death, earlier this year, all of which were inherited by his family. Now, Deutsche Marks haven’t been in circulation since 2002, but the Bundesbank  – the central bank of Germany – still exchanges the old currency, so the man’s family were still able to collect their inheritance. All they had to do was weight until the coins were all counted by hand. It took a while.

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We’re constantly told that parents know best and always act in the interests of their children. Except when they don’t, like Kaylene Bowen-Wright from Dallas, Texas, who subjected her son to 323 hospital visits and 13 major operations by convincing doctors that he was terminally ill. Now aged 8, Christopher has basically spent his whole life in doctors’ offices, and has undergone over a dozen surgeries that left him with several life-threatening blood infections.

The cycle began days after Christopher was born and continued until 2015, when physicians at the Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston noticed that his mother’s accounts clashed with the test results and overall visible condition of the young patient. They alerted Child Protective Services (CPS) and Bowen was arrested on charges of causing injury to a child. The 34-year-old woman admitted she had lied to doctors that her son was gravely ill, which resulted in numerous medical interventions.

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Remember that time when micro pigs were all the rage and made everyone go ooh and aah? Well, now seems to be the time of micro cows and the adorable tiny cattle are proving wonderful pets. There are very few micro-cattle breeders around the world. and Dustin Pillard, who has been breeding them on his farm in Iowa, is probably the most well-known. He has been featured in newspapers and TV news specials numerous times since he began breeding micro cattle in 1995, but his miniature cows are now the smallest they’ve ever been.

Dustin Pillard, a 46-year-old father of three, grew up in the city but regularly spent time on his grandparents’ farm near Cedar Rapids. In 1992, while in college, he attended a cattle auction where he saw micro-cows for the first time. He was fascinated with them, so three years later, when he became the owner of a 10-acre ranch, he knew he had to populate it with the tiny creatures.He bought five animals and started what is known today as the Oxen Ridge Miniature Cattle farm.

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On the banks of the Ruzizi River in Burundi lurks a monster of almost mythical proportions – Gustave, the man-eating crocodile. He has been around for over 60 years, and has allegedly killed over 300 people.

Since Gustave has consistently evaded capture, his exact size is unknown, but estimates from scientists and eyewitnesses place him somewhere between 18 and 25 feet long (5.5 to 7.5 meters). He weighs more than 2000 lbs (900 kg), or over half the weight of a typical car. He is the largest crocodile ever seen in Africa.  Due to his size, Gustave was initially estimated to be over 100 years old, but further observation revealed that he had a full set of teeth, which meant he was much younger than that. According to the 2004 PBS documentary Capturing the Killer Croc, he “should be nearly toothless,” and was thus estimated to be “probably no older than 60, and likely, still growing”.

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We trust doctors with our lives and often remember some of them for as long as we draw breath. But how would any of us feel if branded with the initials of a physician who has saved our life, and branded on the inside at that? A renowned English surgeon literally left his mark on the livers of two patients he operated on in 2013 and is now awaiting his verdict on charges of assault by beating. Simon Bramhall, 53, has pleaded guilty to the charges in a case without precedent in the British criminal justice system.

Bramhall carved “SB” on livers he transplanted into one male and one female patient at the Queen Elizabeth hospital in Birmingham, where he worked for 12 years before handing in his resignation in 2014. He might have gotten away with the deed if a colleague hadn’t noticed the initials while performing a follow-up operation on the female patient. They were left by an argon beam, which surgeons use to stop bleeding during liver operations. The harmless marks left by the beam usually disappear after a while, but in this case the tell-tale signs were still in place at the time of the follow-up surgery, and Bramhall was exposed, becoming the subject of an internal disciplinary investigation.

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Corporations are in business to make money and being popular is good for business, which is why we have advertising to hammer brand names into our minds and keep us buying and buying. But sometimes along comes a company which loves its product so much that it’s willing to sacrifice some revenue to give more consumers the pleasure of using or tasting its creation. Asahi Shuzo, the Japanese brewer behind the extremely popular Dassai sake, has resorted to a full-page ad in the country’s most read newspaper to kindly ask of people not to pay so much for its sake.

The price of goods and services is dictated by the market demand for them. Dassai has become one of Japan’s best-selling sake brands, and retailers are trying to squeeze as much profit as they can from the drink. However, Asahi Shuzo boss Kazuhiro Sakurai was anything but happy with the price tag of Dassai in most retail stores, so he decided to take a stand by directly instructing people not to spend so much money on their favorite sake. He did id by running a full-page ad in the Yomiuri Shimbin newspaper that read “A request. Please do not pay a high price for our sake”.

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A squirrel that was nearly killed eight years ago by an owl when she was just four weeks old, continues to visit the Greenville County, South Carolina family that rescued, raised and later released her into the wild.

In October 2009 the baby squirrel was left severely injured after being attacked by an owl. She would not have survived for very long in the wild, but fortunately, a wildlife rescue group happened to find her. They rescued her, treated her injuries and eventually placed her in the the care of Brantley Harrison and her family, in Greenville County. The Harrisons were no strangers to rescuing and rehabilitating wild animals, but, for some reason, they formed a very unique bond with this squirrel.

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They say that love brings out the best in people, but there are times when it just makes them commit unspeakable acts, murder included. This was the route taken by two Indian lovers, who hatched a plot worthy of a crime thriller. Swathi, 27, and her lover Rajesh murdered her husband and disposed of his body by throwing it away in a forest. In order to be together and claim the assets of the victim, they took another drastic step: Swathi used acid on Rajesh’s face to disfigure him and pass him off as her murdered husband.

The evil deed was comitted on November 27, when the lovers injected Swathi’s husband, 32-year-old Sudhakar Reddy of Nagarkurnool, with an anesthetic and then killed him with an iron rod. They later transported the body in a car trunk and dumped it in a Nawabpet forest area in the Mahbubnagar district.

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It may sound crazy, but a mere £10.50 ($14) could actually make you the owner of a swanky English mansion in Devon which also comes with a Rolls-Royce, £50,000 in cash and all sorts of extra goodies, including a fully stocked wine cellar, a 3-hole golf course, a tractor and the whole house staff for an entire year.

If you consider yourself a lucky person, and have a few bucks to spare why not enter the “Win a Millionaire Mansion Competition” launched by an actual English millionaire looking to make a profit and have some fun in the process. The owner, who prefers to remain anonymous, sees this offbeat lottery as a way to sell the property without too much hassle and make a lucky someone’s dreams come true.

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