After making some of the most delicious pizza on the east side if Indianapolis for the last three decades, the owner of D & C Pizza has come up with anew recipe that he hopes will take guns off the streets and reduce the high crime rate.

Donald Dancy wants to offer a free extra-large pizza to anyone who turns in a gun at his shop. It may seem like a strange tradeoff since pizza is relatively cheap while guns sell for hundreds of dollars on the street, but the pizza shop owner says he has lots of customers who carry illegal guns and would be more than glad to take advantage of the unusual promotion. His plan is to hold the guns in a safe place until police officers arrive to pick them up.

“I can see kids 14 through 18 coming in here and buying a pizza and their guns fall out,” Dancy said. “When you pass here right off of 36th and go all the way down to 25th street and over, it is like a war zone. It is not getting any better.”

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You may not of heard of it before, but Solid Rain has been helping Mexican farmers fights severe droughts for over a decade. The miracle powder is actually a super absorbent polymer that can soak up water up to 500 times its original size and keep it in the ground for up to a year.

The story of Solid Rain began in 1970, when the United States Department of Agriculture developed a super absorbent product made from a type of starch known as “super slurper”. In the U.S., it has mainly been used in disposable diapers, to help keep baby bottoms dry, but a Mexican chemical engineer saw this magic powder as an opportunity to effectively fight the drought plaguing his country.

Sergio Rico Velasco developed and patented a different version of potassium polyacrylate that could be mixed with soil and slowly feed water to plants over a long period of time. His company, Solid Rain, has been quietly selling the product to Mexican farmers for over 10 years now.

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For the past five decades, Nargis Latif  has been actively advocating for the recycling of trash in Pakistan as an alternative to simply burning it all and raising pollution levels. But perhaps her greatest achievement has been developing a technique of building cheap housing for the poor of Karachi out of blocks of dry waste.

Nargis Latif’s inspiring story began in the 1960s, with a quarrel over burning trash outside her apartment. She fought hard and managed to get the burning point moved, but that was not her real goal. She wanted people to start using their waste, instead of simply discarding it or burning it, but that meant arguing with individuals who simply did not understand the benefits of recycling. So she decided to use a language they would understand – money.

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Woralop, a 44-year-old homeless man from Thailand, only had nine baht (¢25) to his name when he found a Hermes leather wallet with 20,000 baht ($579USD) and several credit cards. It was more than enough to buy him food and even a place to stay for weeks, maybe months, but he chose to return it. The kind gesture would soon prove to be life-changing.

You’ve probably been asked what you would do if you found a wallet full of cash, at least once in your life. Would you keep, it, turn it in to the police, ask for a reward? This question always tests a person’s moral values, but for someone who has hit rock bottom, the answer seems pretty clear. And yet Woralop claims he didn’t even think about keeping the wallet, and even ran after the owner to return it, after seeing him dropping it by mistake. He couldn’t catch up with the man, but he went straight to the nearest police station to hand it over.

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With the remains of around 100 billion dead people currently buried or otherwise stored on this planet, it’s no surprise that we’re running out of space for final resting places. The phrase “six feet under” just isn’t sustainable anymore, so architects are now looking to the sky as an alternative to sprawling ground cemeteries. High-rise cemeteries are becoming increasingly popular all over the world, and the Memorial Necrópole Ecumênica, in Santos, Brazil, is the highest of them all.

When Pepe Altstut inaugurated the Memorial Necrópole Ecumênica cemetery, in 1983, it was only a very small building, but the demand for above-ground tombs with a view was so great that he kept expanding until his cemetery became the tallest in the world. Today, it measures 108 meters tall, features 25,000 storing units (tombs, if you will), several wake rooms, crypts, mausoleums, a peacock garden with its own small waterfall and even a chapel and snack bar on the roof.

While few regular cemeteries can be considered tourist attractions in their own right, the Memorial Necrópole Ecumênica is actually one of the most visited landmarks in Santos, and acknowledged as such by the local tourism board. Altstut himself admits that his cemetery is incredibly popular with tourists, and attributes it to the structure’s notoriety as the tallest cemetery on Earth. People from all over the world reportedly come to Santos to see the necropolis where people pay big money for tombs with a view.

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Viscous Coffee, a café in Adelaide, Australia, sells a cup of super-coffee that contains five grams of caffeine – 80 times more than a normal cup of java and half the dose considered to be lethal. Called the “Asskicker”, the strong beverage comes with a health warning for people with heart problems and blood pressure issues.

A cup of espresso has about 60mg of caffeine, while a serving of standard filtered coffee has about 150mg of it, depending on how it is prepared. The Asskicker contains five full grams of caffeine, which Viscous Coffee owner Steve Benington says is enough to provide 12 to 18 hours of “sustained up-time”. But the high caffeine content means it shouldn’t be consumed in one go, but slowly, over a period of four hours.

Benington says he came up with the idea for the Asskicker when an emergency department nurse asked him for something that would keep her awake and alert for an unexpected night shift. “She consumed her drink over two days and it kept her up for almost three days — I toned it down a little after that and the Asskicker was born,” he recalls. Nowadays, the complex concoction is made with four espresso shots, four 48-hour brewed cold drip ice cubes, 120ml of 10-day brewed cold drip and is finished with four more 48-hour brewed cold drip ice cubes. “Each cold drip ice cube is approximately equivalent of a bit more than two shots of espresso in caffeine,” Benington explains.

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The Norwegian Environment Agency has recently released a series of haunting images of at least 323 dead reindeer – 70 of them calves – killed in what has been described as one of the deadliest lightning strikes ever.

It is unclear exactly when the natural disaster occurred, but the hundreds of dead bodies were discovered on Friday by a group of hunters in a remote area of the barren Hardanangervidda plateau, in central Norway. Spanning some 8,000 square kilometers, Hardangervidda is the largest high mountain plateau in northern Europe and the largest national park in Norway, with a population of 10,000 to 11,000 wild reindeer.

While the specifics of the mass death will probably never be known, experts say that animals tend to huddle together in extreme weather, which makes it easier for lightning to pass through their bodies. Norwegian officials say that multiple animal deaths caused by lightning strike is not very uncommon, but the scale of this event is definitely unheard of. “We are not familiar with any previous happening on such a scale,” Kjartan Knutsen of the Norwegian Environment Agency said. “Individual animals do from time to time get killed by lightning, and there are incidents where sheep have been killed in groups of 10 or even 20, but we have never seen anything like this.”

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Barbara Murphy, of Roy, Utah, is giving the phrase “walking dead” a whole new meaning. The 64-year-old woman is alive and in pretty good health, but, for some reason, the Social Security Administration believes she died on in July 2014 and is attempting to take back two years’ worth of Social Security payments and recuperate Medicare or Medicaid treatment costs.

Barbara first experienced the woes of being dead on paper despite otherwise perfectly alive two weeks ago, while out to dinner with her granddaughter. When it was time to pay the bill, the waitress returned with her credit card and told her it had been rejected. Her husband was able to pay for the bill, but when her granddaughter, who works at a bank, called the office to ask about the status of Barbara’s account, she learned that it had been frozen after the Social Security Administration issued notice of her death.

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48-year-old Emyr Mathias, a builder from Ceredigion, Wales, is preparing to embark on an epic 200-mile journey carrying a 25-kg wooden cross from St. Davids in Pembrokeshire to the top of Mount Snowdon, after getting a series of visions from the Lord.

A devout Christian for the past 31 years, Emyr says he is taking on the monumental challenge in response to a calling he received from God. It all started a couple of years ago, when he started getting these strange visions. In the first one he was carrying a St David’s flag from St David’s to Snowdon, but he dismissed it as silly, telling himself “I’m not carrying a flag on the road – that’s silly!” Then, he claims he had a second vision in which God told him “I want you to carry a cross from St David’s to Snowdon,” but again Emyr thought “I’m not doing that”.

Not long after having these visions, Mathias met Angie Taylor who, after the loss of her son, carried a cross from Land’s End to John O’Groats with amazing testimonies of what the Lord did along the way. After telling her about God’s message to him, she said “You daft bat! Get the cross made!” So he did.

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Bruno, a 12-year-old brown Chesapeake-Labrador mix, has become the symbol of Longville, a small Minnesota community of just over 150 residents. Over the past 12 years, he has been taking daily 4-mile trips from his owners’ home to Longville, just so he can spend time with the locals.

To the people of Longville, Bruno is a legend, an ambassador of goodwill, the town mascot, and above all a free spirit. Every resident has either lived or heard a Bruno story, and he’s such a big part of the community that the town even commissioned a wooden statue in his honor. Even though he lives 4 miles away with his owners, Larry and Debbie LaVallee, the friendly brown dog walks to town every day to enjoy the company of his human friends, accept tasty handouts or simply bask in the attention he gets from both familiar locals and tourists. When the day is done, he just walks back home, only to return again the next day, regardless of weather conditions.

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A Japanese tombstone company is using the augmented reality technology made popular by Pokemon Go to allow mourners to “catch” pre-recorded video messages from their deceased loved ones in cemeteries.

Named “Spot Message”, the new Pokemon Go-inspired app is the brainchild of Yoshiyuki Katori, president of Ryoshin Sekizai, a tombstone company based in Katori, Japan’s Chiba prefecture. He claims that the new technology realizes his longtime dream of preserving realistic memories of the dearly departed for the living. “My uncle, who ran a paint store, died eight years ago after he fell from a tall structure at work,” 33-year-old Katori said. “His death was so sudden, and it shattered the lives of his family. I also respected him a lot, so I would often visit his grave, consulting with him in my mind whenever I had issues concerning my business. I wondered how comforting it would be if he could talk to me at his grave, with messages like ‘How are you doing?’ and ‘Hang in there.’ ”

His desire to hear his uncle’s words at his grave inspired the Japanese entrepreneur to use augmented reality to plant pre-recorded messages from the dead at their graves and other places dear to them, for their living friends and family to discover using their smartphones.

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A young Vietnamese woman recently shocked police after admitting that she had paid someone to cut off her left hand and foot, so she could claim a health insurance payoff of roughly $180,000.

The extreme insurance scam reportedly began in May, when a 30-year-old woman named only as Ly Thi N convinced an acquaintance to cut of her left arm and foot in exchange for 50 million dong ($2,200). The plan was to make it look like she had been hit by a train, so the cold-blooded accomplice, named as Doan Van D, acted like a bystander who just happened to find her injured near a railroad in Hanoi. He was the one who called an ambulance and notified the police about the “accident”.

Ly Thi N was found lying in the ground with a severed hand and leg, and the woman told police that she had wandering near the railway track when a train passed by and dragged her under it. Doan Van D, who she described as a total stranger, just happened to pass by and ended up saving her life. At first, everyone thought that the victim was lucky to be alive, but policemen investigating the accident became suspicious after learning that the woman and the 21-year-old who allegedly found her by accident actually knew each other quite well. Read More »

In a bid to give their children a head start in life, wealthy Chinese parents are enrolling them in all kinds of early education programs, including CEO training courses.

Chinese state media reports that an early education institute in Guangzhou, China’s Guangdong province, is offering a ‘CEO training course’ for kids aged between 3 and 12, at a price of 50,000 yuan ($7,500) per year. Kids attend two classes per week, during which they engage in activities such as filing in missing words in sentences and stacking up toy bricks. That doesn’t sound like anything special, but according to a promotional brochure released by the institute, the course “enables young children to become a powerful, competitive leader”.

There’s no denying that China probably has the most competitive educational environment in the world, which means parents would do almost anything to make sure their children don’t get left behind, but experts believe such extravagant courses ultimately benefit the parents rather than the children. They regard their kids’ attendance to such classes as evidence of the family’s social status, completely disregarding the fact that the syllabus they offer is of no real value.

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Watermelon plants usually yield only 1 to 4 fruit per harvest, but a new variety created by an agricultural technology company in China has recently set a new Guinness Record after yielding no less than 131 massive fruit.

The Chinese seem to be really good at creating super plants. Just weeks after we posted about their impressive “octopus tomato trees” that can yield over 30,000 fruits at a time, we bring you the “watermelon king”, a new breed of watermelon that can set over 100 viable fruits per plant. Created by the Zhengzhou Research Seedling Technology Co., Ltd., the plant has been acknowledged as the most productive watermelon plant in the world after yielding 131 fruit in just 90 days.

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Unable to cope with the death of her husband, a Russian woman reportedly spent at least four months trying to bring him back t life with the help of holy water and prayer.

The unnamed 76-year-old retired therapist from the central district of Volgograd stunned police investigators when she said she didn’t report the death of her 87-year-old husband because she believed she could revive him by sprinkling holy water on his body and reading prayers.

The woman’s bizarre secret was revealed on August 12, when she accidentally flooded the apartment below, and a neighbor forced his way into her home to turn off the water. He found the almost completely mummified of her husband laying on the living-room couch and immediately notified the police. Forensic pathologists determined that the man had been dead for four to six months, but found no traces of violence on his body and concluded he had died of natural causes.

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