A heartwarming 3-minute video showing a young girl guiding her blind father to work on a coconut plantation in the Philippines recently went viral on Facebook and changed the lives of its protagonists.

The video shows five-year-old Jenny, walking barefoot as she guides her blind father, Pepe “Dodong” Nelson, around a coconut farm, using a small wooden stick. She can be seen helping him avoid other people as they make their way through the coconut trees and guiding him to his lunch of crackers and water. With her help, Nelson manages to climb around 60 trees every day, for a pay of around 300 pesos ($6), barely enough to put food on their table.

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San Francisco-based startup Impossible Foods might have just achieved the impossible – making plants tastes like meat. Their Impossible Burger is made entirely of plants, but sizzles on the grill, oozes fat and reportedly tastes like a delicious cooked beef patty.

Red meat consumption around the world is at an all time high, but producing high quantities of meat to satisfy demand is not sustainable and it’s already taking a heavy toll on the environment. In recent years, experts have been busy coming up with alternatives to animal meat, like switching to a protein-rich insect-based diet, growing meat in the lab and even artificial meat made from sewage mud. But one San-Francisco company may have discovered a much more viable solution – a mashup of plant-based ingredients that tastes just like real meat. Impossible Foods has been working on an alternative to meat for the last five years, and its soon-to-be-launched Impossible Burger is already receiving high praise for its likeness to beef patties in taste, texture and appearance.

When former Stanford biochemist Patrick Brown founded Impossible Foods, he set his goal on creating a product that would change the world, and the Impossible Burger might do just that. He and his research team have spent years analyzing meat molecules to find out what makes a burger taste, smell and cook the way it does, in the belief that everything animal can be replicated using plant-based compounds. And judging by the testimonies of the few people who have actually sampled this revolutionary burger, Brown was right.

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North Korea may be one of the world’s least tourist-friendly countries on Earth, but its strategic location along the avian East Asian Australasian Flyway and complete lack of development is preventing the extinction of several once plentiful species of migratory birds.

Around fifty million birds, from tiny song birds to cranes, journey across the East Asian Australasian Flyway every year, and eight million of them are shorebirds or waders. For many of these, North Korea’s west coast is the only stop for tens of thousands of miles, which means that without it, they would probably couldn’t finish their epic trip. But what makes this otherwise inhospitable place so important to birds?

A group of New Zealand bird watchers asked permission from the North Korean government to enter the country and observe the migratory birds. Armed with binoculars, powerful telescopes and cameras they counted the birds making their stop from the southern hemisphere all the way to the top of the northern one. “As we lose habitat elsewhere, the birds are going to get more and more pushed into remaining habitat, which by default means North Korea,” birder David Melville told the BBC. Because the shorelines of neighboring countries China and South Korea have witnessed rapid developments, with most of the mudflats having been converted to dry land for agriculture and industrial projects, the birds have virtually no place to stop and refuel.

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The minimalist lifestyle trend has been gaining popularity in the Western world for a while now, but we’re still far from the hardcore minimalism Zen-loving Japanese have adopted in their quest to achieve a stress-free life.

Space has always been an issue in crowded Japanese cities, so from that point of view it makes sense that people try to keep their homes junk free, but some are taking minimalism to such an extreme that they are virtually living in empty houses surrounded by only the barest of necessities. For them, minimalism is not just about de-cluttering their living space, but also about evaluating what material possessions truly bring to their lives and focusing on the things that they consider important. To Japan’s hardcore minimalists, less is more in every sense that actually matters.

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Every year, hundreds of millions of Monarch Butterflies from Canada and the United States journey as far as 2,500 miles to the forests of Michoacan, Mexico in what is known as the world’s largest insect migration. Countless butterflies cluster together both on the trees and on the ground, covering large areas into carpets of orange and black. It’s a breathtaking sight to behold, but as always, human greed is threatening to destroy it.

The great monarch migration is one of nature’s most fascinating mysteries. Tiny butterflies from places like Toronto, Winnipeg or Detroit embark on this epic transcontinental journey and somehow make it all the way to central Mexico. Nobody knows exactly how they do it, but some experts believe they are guided by celestial navigation and magnetic fields.

The Monarch butterflies start to arrive in Michoacan in late October to make their winter home in the trees high up in the mountains of the natural reserve. Once here, they will spend the next five months clustering together in large masses made up of thousands of tiny bodies that often look like colorful beehives. Often times, these clusters become so heavy that they cause tree branches to bend or even snap. But there’s a purpose to all these clustering – it allows the monarchs to survive in the low nighttime temperatures at these high altitudes.

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In an attempt to increase respect for grave digging and attract more people to the job, three dozens of the best gravediggers in Hungary competed in a unique grave digging competition, last Friday.

The bizarre competition took place at a graveyard in the city of Debrecen. 18 two-man teams were assigned their plots arbitrarily by pulling numbers out of a hat, and supplied with regulation-size shovels, rakes, axes and pickaxes to use in digging the best grave in the shortest amount of time. Contestants were judged on speed, grave neatness and whether they complied with the regulation size: 200 cm long, 80 cm wide and 160 cm deep (7 feet by 2 feet 7 inches by 5 feet). Enjoying the home advantage, the local team came out victorious, digging their grave in less than half an hour. That’s pretty impressive considering some of the other teams took almost an hour to complete theirs.

Each team had their own technique. Some preferred to dig simultaneously and clean up after the hole was finished, while others had one man digging and the other arranging the dirt into neat piles around the grave site. They all agreed that the conditions were just right on the big day, with the earth being “quite soft and humid.”

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American company Cabot Guns has recently unveiled a pair of “extra-terrestrial pistols” made almost entirely from a piece of Gibeon meteorite that crashed on Earth approximately 4.5 billion years ago and was discovered in Namibia, in the 1830’s.

“It hasn’t been done before and that’s the kind of thing that drives me,” Rob Bianchin, founder of Cabot Guns, said last year, when the company first announced its intention to forge twin 1911 handguns out of Gibeon. “Meteor is rare, more so than terrestrial precious metals and I wanted to create a set of guns that were formed from a material that had intrinsic value,” he added.

For the last five months, the expert gun makers at the respected company that many refer to as the “Rolls Royce of firearms” have been hard at work, trying to cut as many necessary pieces from the expensive lump of meteorite. It was a tougher job than most people realize, or as Bianchin puts it “we were sweating bullets. That first cut, when we sliced the meteorite chunk in two, was really scary.” Luckily, the team had some experience after using Gibeon to craft meteorite grips for one their standard 1911 handguns. That first success inspired them to push the envelope and create the world’s first meteorite firearms.

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‘The Plastic Bottle Village’ is just the sort of innovative idea that might eventually save the Earth from drowning in plastic. It’s a planned 83-acre community in Panama that, as the name suggests, is going to be entirely built out of discarded plastic bottles.

Located on Isla Colón, in the Bocas del Toros province, The Plastic Bottle Village will include approximately 120 homes of varying sizes. The design process begins with building frames of rebar and steel mesh, which are then filled with used plastic bottles. Once this step is complete, and various electrical and plumbing lines are inserted, the plastic walls are covered by concrete – both inside and out.

So the finished homes look just like conventional ones, and no one will actually be able to tell that the walls are made of plastic. What’s more, the unusual choice of construction material will keep the house a considerable 17°C  cooler than the temperature outside. The homes also come equipped with a septic tank system, standard windows, doors, and an exterior sidewalk.

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Quitting cold turkey is one of the toughest things to do, which is why this homeless shelter in Ottawa is helping chronic alcoholics by handing out measured quantities of alcohol by the hour. Miraculously, the Managed Alcohol Program (MAP) has not only improved the overall health of its participants, but also reduced their average alcohol intake and helped them refrain from criminal activity.

The existence of the MAP is a miracle in itself, given that most other homeless shelters have a strict no-alcohol policy. But at the Oaks shelter for the homeless, five ounces of white wine are handed out in coffee cups every hour between 7.30 am and 9.30 pm, seven days a week. That’s a calculated amount, just enough for each resident to be able to shake off the symptoms of alcohol deprivation. No alcohol is handed out to anyone who comes in intoxicated. The routine began in the early 2000s, and continues to this day, with several residents lining up every single day for their share.

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While most fashion designers prefer to sew their creations, 41-year-old Aniela Hoitink has chosen to ‘grow’ hers in petri dishes. The Amsterdam-based textile designer recently created a 100 percent biodegradable dress – good for the environment and your skin – using nothing but discs of mushroom root.

By sticking the discs together, Aniela created a surprisingly good-looking dress that seems to fit the female figure perfectly. She needed 350 discs to make a single dress, so she spent a week-and-a-half growing them in petri dishes before they were ready to be used. Because the dress requires no cutting or sewing, there is no leftover material that needs to be discarded. The material doesn’t require hemming either, so it can be cut to suit the wearer’s requirements of length or shape. And more discs can be added to create sleeves or length. The dress can be composted when it is no longer needed, so it doesn’t actually end up in landfills.

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Can you imagine never being able to sleep, thus denying your body and brain the chance to rejuvenate? It’s a scary thought, but sadly it’s what sufferers of a rare condition known as Fatal Familial Insomnia (FFI) have to go through until it eventually kills them. This mysterious genetic disease affects less than one in 10 million people worldwide and has no treatment or cure.

According to a BBC report, Fatal Familial Insomina is almost unheard of because most families who carry the gene have chosen to remain silent about it. It makes sense, given that most people might not want their children to know about the cruel fate that awaits them. There’s no way to predict when or which family members FFI will strike, and since there’s no cure, they tend to avoid talking about it for fear of tempting fate.

In recent times, however, a few families have chosen to open up about the illness that has plagued their genealogical tree. Like that of Silvano, a Venetian man who lost his father and two sisters to the fatal illness and succumbed to it himself in the 1980s, at age 53. But he left his brain to science in the hope that doctors might discover more about the condition. The family’s story became the subject of the book The Family Who Couldn’t Sleep, written by DT Max, who managed to trace the disease back to a Venetian doctor in the late 18th century.

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Urban Prep Academy, an all-male charter high school in Chicago, has set the bar really high for learning institutions in the US. Despite getting most of its students from the Windy City’s lowest income neighborhoods, it has managed to achieve and maintain a 100 percent graduation rate for nearly a decade. But even more impressive is the fact that every senior in the past seven years has gone on to attended college on a scholarship.

Most recently, the entire class of 2016 celebrated ‘College Signing Day’, with each student announcing the college or university he has chosen to attend. The class has collectively received over 1,500 college admissions, with over $15 million in scholarships and grants. “It’s a great day,” said senior Rudolph Long, speaking to CBS Chicago. “I feel great. We all made it. We all come from good environments so to see us all going to college is nice.”

The all-African-American, all-male charter high school’s unprecedented success has been attributed to its unique mission – to elevate the students’ self esteem while focusing on test scores as well. While most successful schools have stringent admission criteria, Urban Prep makes no distinction between applicants. Any Chicago resident is welcome to apply. A lottery selects 450 students out of approximately 1,500 applications each year, to attend Urban Prep’s three campuses in Englewood, West, and Bronzeville.

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Many of us living in tiny apartments can only dream about growing vegetables in our own backyards, but thanks to Foop, an ingenious home gardening pod developed by Japanese company C’estec, we can now grow veggies in the comfort of our own home.

Foop (a combination of the words ‘food’ and ‘people’) is a small-size hydroponic agriculture kit that allows users to grow plants in water instead of soil. Its designers claim that you can use Foop to grow small crops of popular vegetables, including lettuce, arugula, basil, parsley or shiso, all of which can be raised from seeds and will develop faster than non-hydroponic plants.

The elegantly-designed wooden frame of the Foop is is produced by craftsmen from Hida, in Gifu Prefecture, one of Japan’s most famous woodworking regions, but the device also comes with a clear acrylic cover that lets you check the progress of your crops. There are no buttons or switches visible on the Foop, because all the settings – temperature, humidity, light, water levels, etc. – are done via a smartphone app. The Foop will also regularly send notifications regarding the state of your indoor garden and alert you when the crops are ready to be harvested.

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Take a look at the photo below. Can you believe this is not a photograph, but an (almost) pixel-perfect pencil rendition of a stock photo? Neither could eye (pun intended), but it’s true. This is the kind of work Italian artist Flavio Apel is capable of.

Apel says his passion for drawing started out as a simple hobby, which makes his amazing artworks that much more impressive. He definitely became quite serious about drawing at some point in his life, because he is currently able to draw human eyes and skin to perfection. From the tiniest of wrinkles to the slim veins in the eyeball, Flavio’s works seem flawless black-and-white photographs and you probably need an expert to tell them apart.

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Adding to the madness of the 2016 US presidential election is American lawyer Andrew Basiago. He claims to have traveled through time nearly all his life, and is pretty sure that he’s going to become “either president or vice president” between 2016 and 2028. Polling data is obviously of little use to this guy.

Basiago, a Washington-based attorney, first started talking about his experience with time travel in 2004, with Project Pegasus – a top secret organisation studying the effects of time travel and teleportation on children. So between 1968 and 1972, when Basiago was a young boy of seven, he claims to have participated in several experiments that transported him through time, space, and even parallel universes. His mission, supposedly, was to provide the US President at the time with important information about past and future events.

Now, Basiago is using the ‘knowledge’ gained over years of time travel to further his political ambitions – he’s running for president this year as an independent candidate, and is fairly confident he’s going to win. “I have prior knowledge that not only will I run for president, but that during one of the elections – which would have to be between 2016 and 2028, because I’m not running past that – I’m either elected president or vice president,” he explained, confidently.

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