A 21-year-old woman from Dongguan, China, was recently diagnosed with with retinal artery obstruction in her right eye, after playing a popular smartphone game almost non-stop.

The woman, known only as Wu, apparently noticed that she couldn’t see anything with her right eye on October 1st, while playing her favorite mobile game, King of Glory. Thinking she was just tired, she went to bed, but when she woke up the next day, she was still blind in her right eye. Her parents took her to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with a serious condition known as retinal artery obstruction. This usually only occurs in older patients, but doctors said that Wu’s eyes were incredibly fatigued by the stressed of constantly staring into the small smartphone screen.

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Soon after launching her cake design business seven years ago, Maggie Austin was already producing edible works of art for Hollywood parties, royal weddings and even White House Christmas celebrations, and looking at her portfolio, it’s not hard to see why. Her designs, especially the incredibly realistic edible flower decorations, are beyond everything I’ve ever seen.

At first glance, Austin’s flowers look 100% real. In fact, the level of realism is such that no matter how long you stare at them, it’s hard to believe that they are actually hand-made edible decorations created with sugar, waffle paper and food coloring. From simple roses an hydrangeas to her signature peonies, it seems like there’s no flower that ballerina-turned cake designer Maggie Austin can’t reproduce.

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Do you have stubborn migraines that just won’t go away? Maybe you’ve recently been in an accident or contracted some life-threatening virus? Have you tried everything Western and Eastern medicine has to offer? Well, in that case, maybe you should look to the stars for your next treatment and give Jerry Sargeant a call. All you need is £90 (about $120), 15 minutes, and an open mind – the rest is up to Sergeant, or, as he prefers to be called “The Facilitator”.

It all started one day in Romania when Sargeant was in a life-affirming car accident. His taxi allegedly crashed into two women who were crossing the street. Sergeant claims that one woman came through the window – causing him to hit his head and the last thing he witnessed was “her soul hovering over her body”. This was apparently what kickstarted his abilities and awoken Sergeant to the healing powers that have always resided within him.

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For the past 13 years, Natalie Adler, of Melbourne Australia, has been battling a strange medical condition that causes her eyelids to close for up to three days at a time, rendering her completely blind. After countless tests and procedures, doctors still don’t have a proper diagnosis.

Natalie’s life changed dramatically one seemingly normal Sunday, when she was 17-years-old. She just woke up with extremely swollen eyelids and her eyes soon started closing intermittently for various periods of time. In a few weeks time, they were closing for three days, followed by three normal days, and she found herself having to get used to the unusual routine, because doctors could not figure out what was wrong.

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New York-based startup Entrupy has invented a small, portable scanner that rich people can use to check the authenticity of designer bags in mere seconds.

According to data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the global counterfeit industry is worth around 460 billion dollars, a big chunk of which involves counterfeit luxury goods from brands like Louis Vuitton or Channel. The thing about such fakes is that they are often so well-made that the human eye simply cannot tell them apart from originals. That’s where technology come in. Using a high-quality scanner and deep-learning technology, the brilliant minds behind Entrupy, have come up with a device that allows anyone to check the authenticity of luxury products, anytime, anywhere.

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Cricket fighting has been popular in China for thousands of years, and with the country in full economic boom, fans of the “sport” are investing more money into it than ever before. One town in particular has built an entire industry around the genetically-superior crickets living in the surrounding fields, and for good reason, as the best specimens can reportedly sell for up to 50,000 yuan ($7,661).

The tradition of cricket fighting can be traced back to the Tang dynasty (618-904), and the crickets found in the fields around the town of Sidian, in China’s Shandong province, have long been renowned for their large size and aggressiveness, both very important features among enthusiasts of the sport. It is said that several of China’s emperors favored Sidian’s crickets for their high win rate, and today’s rich spend absurd amounts of money for exceptional specimens that can give them an edge against their rivals.

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Most people could probably spend a whole year just looking at IKEA’s 2018 catalogue and still not remember all the details in its 328 pages. But then again, Yaanja Wintersoul is not most people, she is a two-time World Memory Champion so she only needed one week to accomplish the seemingly impossible task.

23-years-old Yaanja Wintersoul says that there’s no such thing as a photographic memory, and that it’s all about training your brain to memorize tiny details that most of us forget almost instantly. She knows what she’s talking about, too. Not only has she won the World Memory Championship twice, set a the world record for the the largest number of names and faces ever memorized by a person, but she’s also become IKEA’s “human catalogue”, memorizing most of the details in the company’s 328-page 2018 catalogue in only a week.

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Kimberly Joy Magbanua has always had a talent for drawing and painting, but never received any formal art training. Instead, she started working as a nurse, not knowing that she would one day be able to combine her profession and passion for the arts in a completely new art form – syringe painting.

The 24-year-old nurse from Valladolid, Philippines, says that she got the idea to use syringes instead of paintbrushes about a year ago, as she was getting ready to give a patient an injection. They were a familiar tool, and despite being completely unrelated to painting, they just made sense to Kimberly, because they allowed her to scribble paint on a canvas. She had been scribbling with pens and pencils for a while, but she always wanted to try it on an actual canvas, and syringes just felt like the perfect tool to do it.

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Bai Yan, a kindhearted police dog handler from Hangzhou, recently melted the hearts of millions of Chinese after it was reported that he had spent the last 7 years and around 1 million yuan ($150,000) on a retirement home for police dogs, where his former “comrades in arms” could live out their golden years in peace.

55-year-old Bai has been working as a police dog handler since 2004, during which time he has trained around 30 canines. Spending so much time with the animals, he became very attached to them, and having seen how some retired police dogs ended up, he knew he had to do something about it. The trainer recently told Chinese media that one of the things that convinced him to open a retirement home for police dogs was seeing  an old police dog who had been completely neglected by his new owner lying in the dirt with a chain around its neck and a bowl of spoiled food in front of him. Retired police dogs are usually put up for adoption with the general public, and there is very little vetting of potential owners.

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It’s been five years since we featured the touching story of Capitan, a loyal German shepherd who refused to leave the side of his owner, even though he had been dead for nearly six years. Well, believe it or not, the old dog still spends his days waiting by his deceased owner’s grave, 10 years after he passed.

Capitan’s undying loyalty for his master first made headlines in 2012, when local papers in the Argentinian town of Villa Carlos Paz reported that the dog spent every day waiting by the grave of his owner, Miguel Guzmán, who had died in 2006. The dog disappeared from the family home a few months later, and Guzmán’s widow, Veronica, was shocked to find him by her late husband’s grave, when she went to visit him at the cemetery. She and her son, Damian, tried taking him home several times, but he always ran back to be by Miguel’s side. Eventually, they understood that nothing they did could ever fill the void in Capitan’s heart, so they let him be with his beloved master.

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Some people spend a fortune trying to keep themselves looking young, but one Polish social media star admits he only found success after making himself look at least 10 years older than he actually is. Meet Pawel Ladziak, aka “Polish Viking”.

Pawel often gets mentioned as one of the hottest-looking men over 40, and admits that some people who see his photos think that he’s around 60-years-old. And who can blame them? After all, he must be pretty old for his hair to have gone completely white, right? Well, Pawel Ladziak is only 35-years-old, and dyes his hair and beard white frequently in order to maintain this older look. And for good reason, as he credits this transformation for his social media success.

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Families in Ghana are increasingly turning to troupes of dancing pallbearers to send their loved ones off in style, and bring some joy to what is usually perceived as a very sad event.

Dancing pallbearers not only lift the casket at a funeral, they also lift the mood of attendees by putting on a show. They parade the casket on their backs and shoulders, while at the same time executing a complex choreography that often involves spinning around, dropping to the ground and even pretending to drop the casket, all to the delight of the audience. It’s definitely an unusual display, but families in Ghana are increasingly paying for the services of such troupes to give their loved-ones an upbeat send-off.

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Most commuters in Munich, Germany, spend hours stuck in traffic or trying to squeeze into one of the overcrowded subway trains, every morning, but for 40-year-old Benjamin David, commuting is actually a relaxing experience. Every day, he jumps into the Isar River and swims two kilometers to his workplace in Kulturstrand.

Benjamin David used to be one of the thousands of Münchners trying to make their way to work on busy roads and cycling paths, but two years ago he decided that he needed to find a simpler alternative and the Isar River seemed like the obvious answer. It flows right past his apartment in Baldeplatz, and, even though no one has been using it for traveling purposes in decades, it used to be the best ways to get around. People traveled up and down the Isar using rafts, and, at one point, it was one of the most popular routes between Rome and Vienna. But instead of paddling on a raft, Benjamin decided to swim to work instead, and that’s been his main commute for the past two years.

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At age 10, Caden Benjamin, from Mpumalanga, South Africa already tips the scales at a whopping 90 kg. He suffers from a rare genetic disorder known as Prader-Willi syndrome, which makes him feel hungry all the time.

Caden was always a hungry child, but his mother, Zola, realized that there was something unusual about his appetite at age 3, when he already weighed 40 kilograms. He took the boy to several doctors, but no one could explain why he was so hungry all the time and gaining so much weight. Finally, a doctor at Steve Biko Academic Hospital in Pretoria ran some tests and diagnosed Caden with Prader-Willi syndrome, an incurable condition that affects about 20 000 people worldwide.

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When dogs get lonely, they sometimes keep themselves busy by wreaking havoc around the house, and that doesn’t really sit well with their owners. That’s why one German radio host, who also happens to be a dog owner, came up with the idea for a 24/7 program designed to relax canine listeners and make them feel like they are not alone.

When 30-year old Stephan “Stocki” Stock, a radio moderator at RadioTon, in Germany’s Baden-Württemberg region, announced the creation of a program aimed at dogs, everyone thought it was just a clever April Fools prank. Only it wasn’t. For the past three and a half months, “Hallo Hasso” has been pumping out music for lonely pooches both on the radio and online.

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