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 Chinese father sparked outrage on social media after it was reported that he made his son beg at a Shanghai train station as punishment for not doing his homework.

Lat Thursday morning, Shanghai police responded to an emergency call about a young boy with a schoolbag on his knees begging for food in a local train station. When officers found the 10-year-old, he was holding a small bowl and asking people for food. Asked how he had gotten there, the child told them that his father had left him at the station about 45 minutes earlier, put the bowl in his hands and told him to beg from strangers as punishment for not doing his homework.

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Here is something you don’t see every day – a woman casually waiting for the subway train in Moscow with a full-grown pet fox perched on her shoulder.

A video of the unnamed blonde woman and her unusual pet has been doing the rounds on Russian social media for a week. Its origin is currently unknown, but it went viral after it was uploaded on Instagram by Russian fitness trainer @valerasupertrener. Footage shows a young blonde woman holding the leash of an adult fox perched precariously on her shoulder, as they both wait for the train in a Moscow subway station. The animal doesn’t seem particularly concerned about either the other subway riders staring at it, or the train as it storms into the station, which suggests that this is not its first train ride. As the doors open, the woman steps inside while trying to keep her back straight as not to affect the fox’s balance.

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A personal trainer on a quest to stop his 27-year-old obese client from “eating himself to death” has been distributing posters to local takeaway places instructing them not to serve him.

Every year, Mike Hind, a successful personal trainer from Middlesbrough, in the UK, takes on a client for free and tries to turn their life around in one year. Hind was named the best personal trainer in the UK last year, so he gets thousands of applications for his yearly giveaway, but this year he chose a 27-year-old man named Dibsy, after seeing him and his mom at his gym’s diner. He weighs 560 pounds (254 kg) and recently experienced heart problems that put him in the hospital for a week. The doctor’s verdict was very clear – ‘diet or die – and upon hearing his story, personal trainer Mike Hind decided to take him under his wing for a year. One of the first things the trainer did to help his new client was get him banned at local takeaway restaurants.

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The average energy consumption for 30 minutes of walking in regular sneakers is around 75 – 150 calories, depending on pace, but with the new Muscle Trainer sneakers you can apparently increase energy consumption to 300 calories in the same interval.

So what makes Muscle Trainer sneakers so special? Well, it’s the increased weight. The average sneaker weighs between 200 and 400 grams, but Muscle Trainer sneakers will add between 1,200 grams (for women) and 1,400 grams (for men) of extra weight to each foot. All the extra weight is concentrated in the internationally-patented sole, which contains hundreds of small iron balls. However, thanks to their high-cut design that protects the ankles, and high-quality materials, the sneakers are very comfortable while at the same time working your leg muscles.

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A 29-year-old love-struck man from Kolkata, India, recently made international headlines for his efforts to get in touch with a woman he exchanged glances with on a train. He made a short film that he then posted on YouTube, plastered several neighborhoods with around 4,000 posters, and has been wearing the exact same clothes he did when he saw her, in the hopes that she will see and recognize him.

Biswajit Podder, a government from Behala, claims to have “fallen in love” with a woman he only locked eyes with on a train ride home from work, on July 23rd. The girl and her parents boarded the same train and took the seats opposite Biswajit. The man instantly mesmerized by the girl’s beauty, but she caught him looking at her and didn’t appear to like it, so he didn’t bother anymore on that train. But it just so happened that they both got off at the next station, boarded another train, and she and her parents once again took the seats opposite Biswajit.

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Ryusei “Ryuji” Imai, an 8-year-old boy from Nara, Japan, has dedicated his life to imitating martial arts legend Bruce Lee. Despite his young age, he trains for four and a half hours every day, and has already developed a similar physique to that of his idol.

The world was first introduced to Ryuji three years ago, when a video showing him perfectly imitating Bruce Lee’s nunchaku routine from the 1972 movie Game of Death, went viral on social media. He was mentioned by some of the world’s biggest media outlets, gained hundreds of thousands of online followers and even made an appearance on children’s talent TV show Superkids. But he didn’t let the fame go to his head, instead focusing on toning up his physique and imitating even more of Bruce Lee’s famous martial arts scenes.

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Mobile phones being smuggled into prisons is a worldwide problem, but Costa Rica may have recently became the first country where people are using “trained cats” to deliver cell phones into prisons.

On Tuesday morning, the Costa Rican Ministry of Justice released a video of a cat intercepted while trying to make its way into La Reforma prison, in Alajuela. Footage shows the feline with a strange parcel strapped to its chest and tied around its neck. After struggling to remove the package from the animal, penitentiary staff cut it open and reveal that it contains a used mobile phone, as well as a charger, a replacement battery and earbuds.

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A young bargain hunter recently managed to show just how insanely expensive train tickets in the UK can be, by buying a car, petrol, insurance and road tax for it and still spending less than the cost of just one train ticket for a 100 mile trip.

27-year-old Tom Church, from London, wanted to visit a friend an colleague in Bristol, just 100 miles away, but was put off by the high cost of a train ticket. After seeing a photo of a £218 ($311) train ticket for the same route he was interested in, posted on Reddit, Tom was both outraged and inspired to come up with a cheaper alternative. After doing some research, he figured out that it would actually be cheaper to buy a used car for the trip.

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A woman traveling from Dongguan, in southern China, recently made international news headlines after climbing into a train station X-ray machine with her luggage, to make sure no one tried to steal it.

One of the millions of Chinese traveling home for the Lunar New Year holiday, the unnamed woman reportedly had a lot of money in her bag, so when staff at Dongguan East Railway Station told her that she needed to put into the X-ray machine for scanning, she got on all fours and went through the scanner herself, to make sure it didn’t get stolen.

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During the holiday season, the Nishi Tokyo Bus Company operates a rescue bus called the ‘Nesugoshi Kyusai’ bus (overslept rescue bus)  to pick up inebriated passengers who fell asleep and miss their stop. It meets passengers at the final station and delivers them back to their regular stop for the relatively small fee – when compared to a hotel room – of 880 yen (7.85 USD).

The rescue bus was the idea of a Nishi Tokyo Bus driver who pitched it to the company four years ago and they have been offering the service ever since. During the 2016 holiday season alone 75 passengers utilized the rescue bus, including 32 on the busiest night. This year, the rescue bus will operate every Friday evening throughout the month of December, as that is when the majority of company end-of-the-year drinking parties (called “bonenkai” in Japanese) take place.

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Alarmed by how many cigarette butts littered the parks of Amsterdam, two Dutch designers came up with an unusual plan to train crows to pick up the butts and trade them for tasty rewards.

Industrial designers Ruben van der Vleuten and Bob Spikman originally considered using robots to clean the streets of cigarette butts, but they presented a series of difficulties, particularly the complicated programming required to have them vacuuming the buts out of every nook and cranny while trying to avoid bicycles and passers-by. So they turned their attention to one of the most abundant resources of urban areas – birds. Pigeons were the first ones they considered, because they can be found in virtually every city in the world, but a quick search revealed that they aren’t really known for their intelligence, so training them would have been very hard. But the two designers soon found a bird that was both very common around human settlements and much, much smarter – the crow.

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Scientific evidence shows that when a person loses their sense of sight, the other four senses are enhanced, allowing them to be more aware of their surroundings even if they can’t see them. 17-year-old Jeet Trivedi is not blind, but he claims that he doesn’t need his eyes to perform tasks like driving, reading or even passing thread through a needle, after training his other senses to a superhuman level.

Jeet Trivedi is a controversial figure in India. There are those who see him as a real-life Daredevil, who can function as a normal human being without using his eyes, while others consider him and his mind training teacher, Bharat Patel, as frauds trying to make money by using deceitful tricks. To be honest, it’s hard to believe that someone could drive a gearless scooter for 40 km, on the world’s highest motorable road, while blindfolded, but Jeet allegedly did just that, in September of last year. How? Bharat Patel explains:

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This might look like an unimpressive photo taken in a train car, but it’s actually a room in the house of a Japanese train enthusiast.

The tetsudo fan (Japanese translation of the term “railfan”) community in Japan is known for its obsession with everything related to trains. Some members travel all over the country snapping photos of as many train models as they can, attending ceremonial events where old train cars are commissioned out of service and trying to get their hands on collectible memorabilia. But some tetsudo fans go even further. Like Twitter user @igaigaadjmadjml, a train enthusiast whose entire social media page consists of train-related photos and message. He recently decided he shouldn’t have to travel to a train station to be in a train car, so he converted one of the rooms in his house into a life size-replica of a Japanese train car.

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Due to the unique topography and high construction density of Chongqing, one of the most populated cities in China, architects and city planners had to come up with a unique way of developing a vital monorail line. Their solution – having the train pass straight through a 19-floor apartment building.

With the Daba, Wushan, Wuling, and Dalou Mountains to its north, east and south, most of Chongqing’s terrain is made up of hill slopes. That coupled with the lack of space due to the high building density and a population of around 49 million people, makes working on infrastructure a real challenge for architects and city planners. In 2004, when the Rail Transit No.2 was approved, they only had two choices – either tear down the whole apartment building to make room for the monorail, or clear up two floors and make a tunnel, so the train can pass through it. As unconventional as it seems, experts went for the second option, and 13 years later they are still convinced it was the right thing to do.

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