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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A Chinese man recently decided to spend more money on a set of special license plates that he did on the actual car they were installed on, in the hopes that it would bring him goof luck. The idea instantly backfired on him, as he was pulled over by police on the first day sporting the new plates.

After getting his license and buying a car for 30,000 Chinese yuan ($4,500), the man, surnamed Liu, decided to splurge on his license plate, spending a whopping 1 million yuan ($150,000) on a lucky license plate that he hoped would keep him out of trouble on the road. His plan didn’t go exactly as planned – he got pulled over by police on his very first day behind the wheel. And it wasn’t because of his driving, either.

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German sneaker company nat-2 has recently unveiled the world’s first vegan wooden sneakers which are up to 90% real sustainable wood.

Just last week, we wrote about Piñatex – a new material made from pineapple leaves that is all set to become a sustainable alternative to animal leather – and today we present yet another interesting innovation, wooden footwear. According to a press release by German high-end sneaker brand nat-2, to make it flexible “the wood is applied to an organic cotton and vector engraved in a way that the material bends and becomes soft and flexible like a fine nappa leather. The feel is very smooth and fine, while you can smell the wood and see the tree’s natural texture.”

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Last month, artist Aaron Chervenak drove from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, Nevada to finally take the love for his smartphone to the next level by marrying it at a small wedding chapel. And yeah, in case you’re wondering, he even put a ring on it.

A study conducted by internet security giant Kaspersky found that a quarter of people ranked their smartphone as more or equally important to them as their parents. For a lot of us, it’s the last thing we interact with before going to sleep and the first thing we check when we wake up. It’s with us pretty much 24/7, and we connect with it on so many levels. “We look to it for solace, to calm us down, to put us to sleep, to ease our mind, and to me that’s also what a relationship is about,” Aaron Chervenak said. So in a sense, my smartphone has been my longest relationship. That’s why I decided to see what it was like to actually marry a phone.”

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For the past few years, a man from Green Bay, has been threatening to sue big companies who perform background checks on him during the hiring process if they don’t pay him hefty settlements. Believe it or not, his plan is actually working.

Although he’s apparently been at it for years, Cory Groshek’s strategy was recently revealed by Time Warner Cable lawyers filed a motion to dismiss a case filed against the company by Groshek. It claims that within a recent 18-month stretch, Groshek applied to 562 jobs with high-profile companies, without any intention to secure long-term employment. Instead, he merely tried to  to catch companies violating the law during the hiring process, so he could threaten a class-action lawsuit against them and demand settlements.

Documents submitted by the lawyers show that Groshek has used this scare tactic to extract at least $232,000 in settlements from various businesses across the United States. The man himself has allegedly admitted to threatening over 40 companies with class-action lawsuits for technical violations of the federal law, specifically running a background check on him without properly informing him about it.

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China’s serious video-game addiction problem is once again in the news, after a 19-year old boy was found passed out in some bushes with badly infected feet, after a 6-day gaming marathon at an internet cafe.

Police discovered the avid gamer collapsed near some train tracks. They quickly called an ambulance as the man’s feet seemed badly infected and were giving off a strong putrid smell. When he woke up briefly to ask for some water, he told police officers that he had spent all his money playing video games and had not eaten or slept in several days. When he couldn’t afford to play anymore, he just started wondering around the city and eventually passed out from fatigue.

After identifying the man, local police contacted his father, who initially didn’t want to know anything about his son. It turns out all he did was play video games on the internet, and had run away from home 10 days prior. However, after hearing about the state he was found in, the man asked police to bring the teen home. Read More »

A 54-year-old man from Jilin, China, is making international headlines for his bizarre exercise routine. Cong Yan claims daily walks with a 40-kilogram rock balancing on his head have helped him lose 30 kilograms in the last three years.

Cong Yan is a familiar, albeit unusual sight in Jilin parks. Every day, he can be seen walking on the narrow pathways, ascending and descending steps alongside other health-conscious Chinese trying to keep in shape. But what sets him apart from everybody else is the heavy-looking block of solid concrete dangling on top of his head.

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The Scribble Pen is one of those awesome things that exist in our imagination, but that we never expect to actually become a reality. This high tech pen lets you draw in any color imaginable just by scanning things around you.

‘The world’s first color picking pen’ incorporates a color sensor and microprocessor to detect and process whatever color you want to  replicate. All you have to do is place the top of the Scribble Pen -where the sensor is located – on the object, flower or anything else that you want to scan, and the device will copy its exact color. Say you want to draw in the exact red shade of a beautiful rose, or in the vibrant green of a certain tree leaf, all you have to do is scan it with the Scribble Pen and you’re good to go.

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Meet Sajad Gharibi, a 24-year-old weightlifter from Iran who has stunned the internet with his impressive physique. Weighing a whopping 345 pounds – most of it sheer muscle – Gharibi is said to be able to lift up to 386 pounds. He certainly looks like a guy you never, ever want to get on the bad side of.

Lucky for us, those who know this mountain of a man say that, despite his grizzly appearance, he is actually a gentle giant with a very big heart. They mean that both literally and metaphorically, I presume. That’s reassuring as he is probably the closest we’ll ever get to seeing a real life The Hulk, and we don’t want him sharing both his looks and short temper.

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In a country where women are not allowed to drive, bumper cars have become an unlikely alternative to real automobiles. Unlike men, most of whom love nothing more than to bump each other when using the popular amusement park attractions, Saudi Arabian women prefer to cruise beside each other while honing their driving skills.

For reasons that are hard to understand in the Western world, women in Saudi Arabia are still forbidden to drive. Despite moves towards rights for women under King Abdullah before his death, current crown prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud recently said that the Saudi community “is not convinced about women driving”. It’s hard to predict if things will ever change in that regard, but in the meantime, Saudi women have found an ingenious way to practice driving – riding bumper cars.

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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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In what is one of the strangest stories of spousal devotion I’ve ever come across, a woman in China divorced her paralyzed husband, married his best friend, and together they are now taking care of her ex.

Xu Xihan and Xie Xiping, from the Chinese city of Ankang, in China’s Shanxi Province, got married in 1996, and had a daughter the very next year. Their life was happy one, and a few years later Xieping gave birth to a healthy baby boy who brought them even more joy. But tragedy struck in 2002, when Xu Xihan was involved in a terrible accident which left him paralyzed from the waist down. He received 40,000 yuan ($6,000) in compensation, but lost his ability to walk, forever. The man remembers their neighbors kept telling him that his wife was going to live him in just three months, but Xieping proved them all wrong, as years went by and she and the kids remained by his side.

However, Xu wanted her wife to be happy and started pressuring her into divorcing him and finding another man who could take care of her properly. The woman wouldn’t hear of it, though, and kept refusing his request for years. In 2009, Xieping finally gave in to the paralyzed man’s plea to divorce him, and married his colleague and best friend, Liu Zongkui. In 2012, she gave birth to Zonkui’s son, but she never abandoned her ex-husband. Instead, she and Liu began caring for her ex and the kids together.

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With the imminent rise of the machines and everyone anticipating that robots will be taking all our jobs, a proactive human jobseeker has decided to become a robot in order to improve his odd sof landing a tech job. If you can’t beat’em, join’em, right?

Meet Canu, a man trying to stay ahead of the times. Inspired by grim predictions that robots will be taking over our jobs in the next 30 years, he has set up a tongue-in-cheek website where he advertises himself as a human-turned robot, with 4 years of experience in marketing under his belt, but also the ability to “program and download any other skills as needed”. Just one of the perks of being a machine, I guess. His human side presents some advantages as well, like being “already assembled” and not requiring batteries. So there you go, tech companies, the perfect employee.

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Turkish artist Garip Ay’s masterpieces sometimes only last a few moments, but they definitely make a lasting impression. He uses the ancient Ebru technique to recreate famous Van Gogh painting on the surface of water.

A video recently gone viral shows Garip Ay starting his creative process by mixing black dye and carrageenan, a thickening agent, into a bowl of water. He then drops various oil colors and uses a metal rod to manipulate the paint into Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Once the piece is completed, he just swirls it away with the rod and starts from scratch on one of the Dutch artist’s best-known self-portrait. It turns out just as detailed as his first endeavor, only this time the Turkish artist decides to keep a permanent copy of the artwork, so he just places a piece of paper on the water, and the painting magically transfers to it. The impressive video has so far been viewed over 26 million times.

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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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