Liam Derbyshire was born with a very rare congenital disease that causes him to stop breathing every time he falls asleep. Doctors told his parents that he wouldn’t live past six weeks, but the boy has defied the odds and will soon turn 18-years-old.

Liam suffers from a condition known as central hypoventilation, or “Ondine’s Curse”, after a nymph from French folk stories. Ondine fell in love with a man called Palemon, and at their wedding, he vowed to love her with his every breath. So when the nymph later discovered his infidelity, she cursed him: “You pledged faithfulness to me with your every waking breath and I accepted that pledge. So be it. For as long as you are awake, you shall breathe. But should you ever fall into sleep, that breath will desert you.” Totally normal stuff for a folk tale, but a similar curse actually exists in real life.

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Some people have problems sitting through a 2-hour movie without falling asleep, but that’s merely a blink of an eye compared to Ambiencé, an upcoming film by Swedish director Anders Weberg, which will last for a whopping 720 hours. That’s 30 days of continuous screening time.

After working in the field of visual arts for over two decades, Anders Weberg plans to end his career in 2020. But he wants to go out with a bang, by creating the longest film in the history of cinema. Called Ambiencé, the epic 720-hour work of art will be screened simultaneously on all continents, for one time only, after which the Swedish director plans to destroy all copies, so that it can never be screened again.

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An unnamed man from Guilin, China, has melted the hearts of millions after it was reported that he has been dressing as a woman ever since his sister passed away, 20 years ago, in order to console his grieving mother.

A Pear video showing a man wearing a traditional cheongsam dress while looking after his mother, recently went viral, having been watched over 4 million times. He isn’t just any cross-dresser, in fact, he doesn’t even prefer women’s clothes, but he has been wearing them exclusively for two decades, in order to make his old mother happy. The woman had begun showing signs of mental illness following the death of her daughter, so one day he put on a woman’s dress, just to make her happy. She liked it so much that he kept doing it for 20 years.

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Egypt’s Al Nour Wal Amal orchestra is one of the world’s most remarkable musical ensembles. It consists of around 48 blind women from Cairo who have to rely solely on their memory when performing complicated compositions by classic composers like Mozart, Brahms, Strauss or Tchaikovsky.

Learning to play instruments like violin, chello or flute is a difficult process, but can you imagine mastering any of them without ever being able to see them? That’s what would-be members of the Al Nour Wal Amal orchestra have to do in order to become a part of the ensemble. And, once they’ve finally mastered their chosen instrument, they have to train their memory in order to be able to store up to 45 composition pieces in their heads, to be able to perform a concert, all while keeping in sync with the other members during a performance. It seems impossible, but these incredible women are living proof that it can be done.

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In January 2017, a series of fires in central Chile’s La Maue region burned down over 457,000 hectares of forest, leaving behind nothing but charred ground. Now, three border collies are helping replant it all by doing what they love most, running.

Das, Olivia, and Summer, three female border collies have been working hard to bring the fire-devastated forest back to life, since March. Not that they know how hard or how important their work is, since they are essentially running and playing. The dogs’ owner, 32-year-old Francisca Torres, takes them to various areas of charred forest in her truck, equips them with special vests that come with special satchels which she fills with seeds of endemic plants. Then the dogs are sent out to run around and spread as many seeds as they can. When they return, she rewards them with snacks, fills up their satchels and sends them out on another run.

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The raincoat and the umbrella have been the staples of rainwear for decades, probably even centuries, but Chinese designers are attempting to challenge that with a bizarre new product currently called an “umbrella raincoat”.

As the name suggests, this innovative rainwear accessory combines the raincoat and the umbrella with questionable results. For starters, it looks kind of ridiculous, and sellers on Chinese websites like Aliexpress actually list this fact as the only downside of the product. They actually phrase it a little differently – “You will get 100% rate of second glances” – but that’s just a fancy way of saying it looks weird. Also, like the good ol’ umbrella, it only shields your upper body from the rain, with the lower torso and legs being almost completely exposed. On the upside, it does free up both your hands, which is apparently the main advantage of wearing an umbrella raincoat. Read More »

If anyone ever puts together a list of the world’s most unappetizing dishes that actually taste great, they should definitely consider this version of the popular fish and chips cooked in an activated charcoal batter. It looks like a scorched stick, but reportedly tastes amazing.

Activated charcoal is commonly used in cosmetic products and toothpaste, for its ability to trap toxins in its micro-pores and clean the body, but people have also been using it as an eye-catching food ingredient for a few years now. Back in 2014, we wrote about a jet black Cheddar cheese that got its unique coloring from activated charcoal, and last year, black ice-cream almost broke the internet after photos of it went viral on Instagram and Twitter. Now, a cafe in Melbourne, Australia is getting its five minutes of internet fame for combining the classic fish and chips with activated charcoal to create one of the least appealing dishes in history.

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Ginza Ladis 1, a private investigation services company in Japan, seems to think that having someone talk your cheating partner’s lover into ending the relationship is the best way to get your love life back on track.

Welcome to Japan, the country where you can rent a person for virtually anything, from posing as your boyfriend and cuddling, to hanging out and even wiping your tears at work. Whatever your needs, you can probably find someone willing to cater to them, for a fee. Now you can add relationship fixer to that list, thanks to the unique services offered by a private investigation company in Tokyo. Ginza Ladis 1 is renting out actors to befriend your cheating spouse’s partner and convince them to break up with them, so you don’t have to.

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Can’t find your contact lenses? They’re probably still in your eye sockets. Someone should have probably told this to a 67-year-old woman from the UK who has forgotten a whopping 27 contact lenses in her eye, over the last 35 years.

The bizarre discovery was made last November, when the unnamed patient came to the Solihull Hospital, near Birmingham, for cataracts surgery. Upon checking her eyes, ophthalmologists spotted a large mass on one of her eyes, which turned out to be 17 disposable contact lenses that had apparently been in the eye for so long that they had become stuck together. A more thorough investigation revealed another 10 contact lenses in that same eye. How someone could live with a whopping 27 contact lenses in her eye for years is still a mystery.

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Danish avante-garde artist Kristian von Hornsleth recently drew criticism for his latest project, which involves turning London homeless people into real-life Pokemon that can be tracked 24/7 via a special app. To make matters worse, every “human Pokemon” can be bought for $32,700.

Von Hornsleth, whose previous artistic endeavours include paying poor African villagers to change their name to Hornsleth in exchange for aid, describes his latest idea as an “ethical boundary-smashing work” that “fuses homelessness, privacy invasion, inequality and reality TV, with present day cultural decadence and interactive conceptual art.”

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If you’re the kind of person who always complains about their daily work commute, this story will probably make you feel a bit better about your situation. A Los Angeles man who works in San Francisco has a daily six-hour commute, most of which is done by plane.

Every workday, Curt von Badinski, a mechanical engineer and the CTO of San Francisco-based tech company, Motiv, wakes up at 5 in the morning, takes a shower, gets dressed, has breakfast and hops into his car for a 15-minute drive to Bob Hope Burbank airport, where he boards a single-engine commute plane. He takes a 90-minute flight to Oakland, a city located 353 miles (568km) north west of Los Angeles, and, from there, he gets into his other car and drives to the headquarters of his company, in San Francisco. He gets to work at around 8:30, and does it all over again at 17:00, when he leaves for Los Angeles. He usually gets home around 21:00.

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When receiving an order from Amazon, most people throw way the packaging box immediately, but one Japanese man loves Amazon boxes so much that he has spent the last 9 years collecting them.

So what posses a man to start collecting Amazon cardboard boxes? In the case of Kosuke Saito, from Osaka, Japan, it was the discovery of a pattern of numbers. It all started one day, in 2008, when, while unpacking an Amazon product, he noticed the serial number “XM06” on the packaging and remembered seeing “XM08” on another Amazon box. That got him thinking that if there was an XM06 and an XM08, surely there must be an XM07 as well. He wanted to know what that box was like, but it was only the beginning, because he soon discovered that Amazon boxes come in all shapes and sizes, and he was curious about all of them.

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People are always looking for legal loopholes to help them get away with various crimes, but when it comes to murder, the chances of avoiding a criminal trial are pretty slim. Unless they commit the heinous act in the “Zone of Death”, a remote area of Yellowstone National Park where one can apparently kill someone, openly admit to it, and not face legal consequences.

Brian Kalt, a law professor at Michigan State University, discovered the judicial no-man’s land in 2004, while looking for interesting material for an article. He was researching legal gray areas when he stumbled upon a reference to the unusual jurisdiction of Yellowstone National Park, and red flags went up in his head. He quickly realized that that because of the way that the vast park geographically covers three US states, but only one of them has legal jurisdiction over all of it, getting a murderer on trial would be virtually impossible.

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If you’re a fidgety billionaire looking for a distraction worthy of your financial status, this $17,000 fidget spinner made of solid gold may be just the thing you’ve been waiting for.

We first wrote about Caviar, a Russian company offering all kinds of expensive accessories, in April, when we featured its Credo line of religious-themed gold iPhones priced around $3,500 each. Well, they’re back in the news, this time with their own expensive take on the most popular toy in the world – the fidget spinner. Although, with a price tag of $17,000, I’m not even sure that their version qualifies as a toy.

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Garlic, onions or fish may taste great on your plate, but they also leave your hands smelling disgusting after cooking, and their odor is tough to get rid of. Apparently, this stainless steel soap bar can help with that.

Designed by Amco, the Rub-A-Way Stainless Steel Soap Bar is just that, a piece of stainless steel shaped like a bar of soap that apparently works wonders when you want to remove the smell of garlic, or other sulfurous vegetables from your hands. All you have to do is rub it on your hands, as you would a regular soap bar, while rinsing with water. And, best of all, it lasts forever.

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