Switzerland’s road maintenance authority has developed an ingenious mobile bridge that allows the paving of public roads without the need to stop traffic on the affected lanes.

Traffic jams are a necessary evil when it comes to road maintenance, and despite experts’ best efforts to come up with a solution to this logistic problem, motorists still have to deal with them whenever road work is required. However, Switzerland’s Federal Roads Office may have come up with an ingenious-enough solution to revolutionize road paving. Earlier this year, it unveiled the Astra Bridge, a 257-meter-long mobile bridge that allows traffic to pass over sections of road while infrastructure is being repaired below. It’s such a simple concept that it almost makes you wonder why engineers took so long to invent it, but there is a reason why the Astra Bridge is the first of its kind – it’s not as simple as it sounds.

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A Chinese man wanted for murder managed to avoid police detection for over 20 years by pretending to be a deaf and mute scavenger in the mountains of Hubei Province.

On the evening of May 22, 2004, a young and quick-tempered man named Xiao got into a heated argument with a neighbor in his home village of Oumio Daying, in Xianyang’s Xiangcheng District. At one point, Xiao allegedly picked up a shovel and hit his neighbor over the head with it, killing him on the spot. That night, knowing that he risked spending the rest of his life behind bars or worse, getting the death penalty, Xiao decided to abandon his wife and 11-year-old child to go on the run. He ran into the mountains of Anxi County, in Fujian Province, where he became a scavenger selling scraps to survive. To make sure he never gave anything away about his past life, Xiao pretended to be deaf and mute for the next 20 years, only smiling at people and communicating through gestures.

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A 12-year-old boy who has never had his hair cut in his life and reportedly suffers from ‘tonsurephobia’, an uncontrollable fear of having his hair cut, has been threatened with expulsion by his school because of his long hair.

Farouk James has never had more than a trim of his impressive mane and his waist-long mane has earned him more than 250,000 followers on Instagram alone. However, ever since he started classes at his new school in September of last year, he has been pressured into cutting his locks so that they reach above his shirt collar, per school regulations. Farouk’s family has sent the school doctor’s notes that show he suffers from tonsurephobia’, an extreme fear of having his hair cut, but the school has apparently chosen to ignore them and enforce its rule.

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A Chinese man recently lost his life while performing a controversial type of exercise that requires practitioners to hang only by their chins to relieve neck and spine pain by reducing pressure on nerves.

Over the past decade or so, a bizarre form of exercise has been getting traction throughout China. It basically involves swinging one’s body while hanging in the air supported only by a leather chin strap. Reportedly invented around 2017 by Shenyang native Sun Rongchun as a way to relieve back pain, neck swings quickly became a familiar sight in parks and outdoor gyms all over the country. Although hanging in the air by one’s chin doesn’t sound like the safest thing in the world, paractiotioners swear by it, claiming it does wonder for neck and back pain. Still, doctors have been warning about the dangers of neck hanging for years and a recent tragedy suggests that when performed incorrectly, this type of exercise can be lethal.

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In what can only be described as an unconventional love story, an Indian man fell in love and ended up marrying his mother-in-law with his father-in-law’s blessing.

This bizarre tale begins with a tragedy. After the death of Sikandar Yadav’s wife, the father-of-two moved in with his in-laws in Bihar’s Heer Moti village. Over time, the relationship between 45-year-old Sikandar and his mother-in-law, Geeta (55), evolved into a romantic affair that they could only conceal for so long. As rumors of their secret affair started spreading through the village, Geeta’s husband became increasingly suspicious and one day caught the two lovebirds in a romantic embrace that confirmed his fears. Furious, the man brought the affair to the attention of the Panchayat (village council), demanding that the matter be resolved.

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The Hongyancun subway station in Chongqing, China is 116 meters deep and the difference in air pressure will often leave users with clogged ears when accessed via its elevator.

When the air pressure outside of the eardrum becomes different than the pressure inside, you experience ear barotrauma. It occurs most often during steep declines and descents and is usually associated with plane takeoffs and landings, or driving up or down mountains. Most subway stations don’t usually cause ear barotrauma, because they aren’t deep or steep enough for your ears to register a significant enough difference in air pressure. But using the elevator to reach the world’s deepest subway station might actually clog up your ears. That’s because it is located 116 meters below the surface, the equivalent of about 40 floors underground.

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A UK man was recently arrested in Thailand for allegedly causing damage to a Phuket restaurant by posting a number of 1-star reviews online following an altercation with the restaurant owner.

The 21-year-old British national was arrested in Thailand earlier this month when police showed up at his apartment in Bangkok, but the incident that led to his arrest dates back to 2022 when he was staying in a rented property in Phuket. According to Thai media, the easiest way for the man, known only as Alexander, to reach his abode passed through an Italian restaurant and he didn’t hesitate to use it. Noticing that the man passed through his restaurant several times per day, the owner confronted him and asked that he use the public road instead because he wasn’t a paying customer and he was disturbing his guests. Shortly after the heated exchange, the restaurant owner noticed that the Google rating of his business had dropped from 4.8/5 to 3.1/5 because of a number of allegedly fake 1-star reviews. Suspecting Alexander was behind this online defamation campaign, he filed a complaint against him.

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An Arizona woman was recently sentenced to three years probation for trying to poison her husband by mixing bleach in his morning coffee.

Melody Felicano Johnson was initially charged with attempted first-degree murder but ended up pleading guilty to two counts of the lesser felony charge of adding poison or a harmful substance to food or drink. She admitted to putting bleach in her husband’s coffee, although it is still unclear as to why. Her husband told investigators he “believes she was trying to kill him to collect death benefits,” but he explicitly told the court that he did not want her to spend time in prison, which apparently had a major influence on the final verdict.

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The backbend is considered a crucial move in Chinese folk dancing, but it is also the main cause of severe spine cord injuries in children as young as five, leaving thousands of them paralyzed for life.

Ironically, the vast majority of parents pushing their beloved children towards folk dancing have their offspring’s best interest in mind, hoping to improve their physical fitness and overall health, but studies have found that one particular move taught in folk dancing schools is putting children’s lives at risk. Data analyzed by the Chinese Orthopaedic Association showed that the percentage of spinal cord injuries caused by the backbend exploded from just 4% between 1992 and 2002 to a whopping 33.9% of all pediatric spinal injuries between 2015 and 2019. Other reports show that, since 2005, over 1,000 children have been left paralyzed after doing backbends in dance classes, making this move the single greatest paralysis threat for young Chinese children.

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A homeless Michigan woman was found living in the rooftop sign of a Family Fare supermarket in Midland. She had been staying there for about a year without anyone noticing her.

The 34-year-old unnamed woman was found living inside the business sign when contractors curious about an extension cord on the roof of the Family Fare supermarket in Midland decided to follow the wire. It led them inside the rooftop advertising sign where the clandestine guest had set up a cozy nest complete with flooring, a computer, and a coffee maker. Police officers were called, and the woman told them that she had a job elsewhere but had no home and had been living there for about a year.

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Muluwork Ambaw, a 26-year-old woman from Ethiopia, claims to have gone the last 16 years of her life without eating or drinking anything.

Most people can hardly last a few hours without munching on something, but Muluwork Ambaw insists that she shunned food forever one day when she was only 10 years old, after her appetite vanished out of the blue. Apart from her complete lack of sustenance, Ambaw reportedly has a normal life, she is in good health and has plenty of energy to perform her daily tasks, which include cooking for others and running various errands. The young woman has undergone several medical tests in Ethiopia, but none could really confirm if she spoke the truth, although doctors at a hospital in Addis Ababa did confirm that there was no evidence of any food in her intestines at the time of the examination.

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During the month of May, camel riding is such a popular pastime at the Mingsha Mountain and Crescent Spring scenic spots in China’s Kumtag Desert that local authorities use camel traffic lights to avoid traffic jams.

One of the last things you would expect to find in the middle of a desert is a functional traffic light, but you can find several of them in the sand dunes of the Mingsha Mountain and Crescent Lake Nature Park, in northwestern China’s Gansu Province. During the annual holiday at the beginning of May, thousands of people flock to these natural tourist spots and engage in a variety of activities, the most popular of which is undoubtedly camel riding. In 2023, there were around 2,400 camels available for riding, as well as tens of thousands of tourists per day at the Mingsha Mountain and Crescent Spring scenic spots alone, which resulted in serious traffic congestion problems. Luckily, local authorities came up with an ingenious solution – camel traffic lights.

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A Chinese nanny has been forced to take care of a toddler for months without any compensation after the child’s parents disappeared without a trace with money they had borrowed from her.

Ms. Yu, the victim in this bizarre case that has been making headlines in China for over a month, claims that she was hired by a couple in Harbin, Heilongjiang province, to take care of their newborn son for a monthly salary of 7,000 yuan (around $1,000). Shortly after striking a deal, the parents told Ms. Yu that they needed to travel to Tianjin to receive a sizeable inheritance, including property and luxury goods, and asked if she could help them out with a loan for lawyers and paperwork. As insurance that they would pay her back, the couple showed her photos of the goods they had allegedly inherited, as well as of the ownership papers for a hotel. Furthermore, they decided to leave their child with the nanny while they sorted everything in Tianjin, so Ms. Yu assumed that there was no reason to worry. She was wrong!

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A young Indonesian man recently got the shock of his life after learning that his wife of 12 days was actually a man disguised as a woman.

Earlier this week, Indonesian media reported the strange case of a 26-year-old man referred to only by his initials, AK, who ended up calling the police after finding out that the woman he had married only 12 days prior turned out to be a man in disguise. The man allegedly met his bride-to-be on the internet and after hitting it off, the two decided to meet in person. AK admitted that he fell in love with his future wife the moment he saw her for the first time, and after meeting cordially a few times, he got the courage to ask her out on a proper date. In hindsight, the man admits that his fiancee had some quirks, but he never suspected her of being a man in disguise.

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A Chinese woman who had an affair with a married businessman who died in a car accident used frozen embryos to conceive a child she claimed was his and then sued his family for inheritance.

In a case that sparked a heated debate in China, a Guangdong woman surnamed Leng sued her deceased lover’s wife for part of his fortune as inheritance for her baby boy, who she claimed was her lover’s heir. The unusual dispute began in 2021, soon after the tragic death of the man, surnamed Wen, in a car accident. Leng claimed to have frozen some of her eggs prior to the accident which were later fertilised using Wen’s sperm at a private fertility clinic. In December of 2021, she gave birth to a healthy son she named Xiaowen, and in August of last year, she sued her former lover’s family, asking for a part of their estate as an inheritance for her son.

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