Life in the slums of Manila can be incredibly difficult, and putting food on the table every day is a big challenge. That’s what makes “pagpag” so popular. This Tarong term usually refers to the dust one shakes out of clothing or carpets, but in the slums it means meat picked out of the landfill, cleaned and recooked into cheap meals.

Pagpag has long been a staple of Filipino slum cuisine, but in recent years it has also become a lucrative business both for landfill scavengers and small restaurant owners who buy the discarded meat at cheap prices and recycle it into various dishes. Scavengers who were previously only interested in recyclable metal and plastic now focus on leftover and expired food coming in from fast-food chains and supermarkets, scouring for it alongside feral cats and rats, packaging it in plastic bags and selling it for a small profit.

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Scientists at Bar-Ilan University’s Institute of Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials, in Tel Aviv, Israel, claim to have created some truly revolutionary eye-drops that can heal damaged corneas and improve vision.

Described as “a new concept for correcting refractory problems”, the nanodrops developed by ophthalmologist  Dr. David Smadja and a team of scientists from Shaare Zedek Medical Center and Bar-Ilan University have so far been tested on pigs with damaged corneas. During a recent presentation, Smadja said that the eye-drops repaired the pigs’ corneas, producing improvements in both short-sightedness and long-sightedness.

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Junaid Ahmed, a 22-year-old man from Peterborough, UK, is obsessed with selfies. He can spend up to three hours getting himself ready for his daily photo-shoots, and claims to snap around 200 photos of himself, uploading the best of them to his Instagram page.

An ex-fashion student and model, Junaid treats every day like a photo-shoot and even calls himself the ‘selfie king’. To make sure he looks his best for his 50,000 Instagram followers, the young man gets weekly facials, has his eyebrows done and spends hours in front of the mirror applying makeup. Over the years, he has also undergone several cosmetic procedures, including veneered teeth, chin fillers, cheek fillers, jawline fillers, lip fillers, botox under the eyes and on the head, tattooed eyebrows and fat freezing. That’s a lot for anyone, let alone a 22-year-old, but Junaid claims it’s all worth it as long as he gets the attention he seeks on social media.

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A couple in Volvograd, Russia, were recently reunited with the child they had though had died seven years ago, right after birth. What’s even more astonishing is that the startling revelation was the result of a completely accidental administrative error.

In 2011, a young girl gave birth at a hospital in Volgograd, but was soon told that her child was not viable and that it would not survive a week. Advised to give up the child, the depressed mother agreed to sign a waiver leaving the newborn in the care of the state and went home. Five days later, guilt overwhelmed the two parents, so they returned to the hospital to retrieve their baby and look after it for as little as it had to live. They were told that they were too late, that the baby had died. After grieving their terrible loss, the parents went on with their lives, but last year, they were shocked to discover that the child had been alive all this time.

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Sally Dawly is a woman on a mission. Over the last three and a half years, the anti-littering activist has spent most of her free time picking up cigarette butts from the streets of her home city of Auburn, in California, and on this year’s Valentine’s Day she picked up her millionth butt.

Dubbed the “Butt Lady” by her local community, Dawly began her quest to rid the streets of Auburn of cigarette butts in October 2014. Armed with a broom, dustpan and a pair of tongs, the woman started scouring the streets of her town in search of discarded cigarette butts, picking them up and throwing them in the trash, where they belong. To keep a tab on how many butts she picks up, the Butt Lady has been using a clicker, and earlier this month, she hit a historic milestone – one million cigarette butts.

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Residents of Windsor, a Canadian city near Detroit, have been complaining about a mysterious noise interfering with their daily lives for over eight years now, but despite numerous attempts to establish its origin, nobody has been able to figure out what’s causing it.

Called the ‘Windsor Hum’, the mysterious noise plaguing the Canadian city of over 210,000 people reportedly varies in intensity and comes and goes at random intervals. Sometimes it can be heard for just a few hours, and other times it lingers for days, causing those who can hear it to suffer from symptoms like severe headaches, sleeplessness, irritability, depression, among others. Some residents have been so affected by the Windsor Hum that they packed up and moved far away just so they could escape it.

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Suchetha Satish, a 12-year-old Indian girl living in Dubai, recently shattered two Guinness World Records at the same time by singing songs in 102 different languages during an epic concert that lasted 6 hours and 15 minutes.

A seventh grade student at the Indian High School in Dubai, Suchetha only started preparing to break the world record for singing in most languages in a single concert just over a year ago. She already enjoyed singing in several Indian languages, like Hindi, Malayalam and Tamil, as well as English, but she had always been fascinated by foreign languages, and this was an opportunity to learn as many of them as she could and also leave her mark on the world. On January 25, 2018, she 12-year-old girl stunned the audience at the Indian Consulate in Dubai by singing in a whopping 102 languages, for 6 hours and 15 minutes.

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A young couple who quit their jobs and sold everything they owned in order to buy a boat and go on an epic sailing adventure had to put their bold dream on hiatus after their sailboat sank just two days into their voyage.

Tanner Broadwell and Nikki Walsh had been planning their once-in-a-lifetime adventure for over two years. They both had jobs they didn’t really enjoy and felt that there had to be more to life than constantly being involved in a rat race. Tanner, who had grown up in Cocoa Beach, Florida, convinced Nikki that sailing around the Gulf of Mexico, maybe even the world, was the escape they were both looking for, and they started working harder to make their dream a reality. They started saving money, he Ubered on the side, and last year they took the plunge. The couple quit their jobs, sold everything they owned and bought a 49-year-old sailboat in Alabama. The boat cost $5,000, but they had so spend that much more fixing it up.

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When it  comes to making sure that her disabled grandson gets the education he deserves, there’s nothing 76-year-old Shi Yuying won’t do. The elderly woman has been making eight daily trips pushing Jiang Haowen to and from his school in Guangxi Province, for the past 4 years, and plans to continue doing it for as long as she can walk.

9-year-old Jiang Haowen was diagnosed with cerebral palsy when he was 2-years-old, and his parents divorced a couple of years later. His mother remarried several times and his father went to work in Guilin to support the boy and pay for his treatments. So he fell in the care of his grandmother, Shi Yuying. She not only pushes the boy to and from school several times a day, but she also massages his limbs, prepares all kinds of herbal medicines for him in hopes of improving his condition, and also pushes him to walk with support. Pretty much everything she does is for Haowen.

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If you passed by Chris Arsenault’s home, in Medford, New York, and saw the 300 cats living there, you’d probably consider the 58-year-old retired train conductor a crazy cat person, but that’s only because you don’t know his history with them.

In the summer of 2006, about two months after Arsenault lost his son Eric, 24, in a motorcycle accident, the train conductor found a colony of young cats by some train tracks, in Long Island. There were over two dozen kittens, and Chris knew just by looking at them that if he left them there they would die. So he took them all home, doctored them back to health, fed them and gave them a home. They in turn helped the mourning father deal with the pain of losing his son.

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How far would you go to achieve that extreme hourglass figure you’ve always dreamed of? How about wearing a tight corset around your waist for 23 hours a day?

When Navy veteran Diana Ringo, 39, of Chula Vista, California gave birth to her twins three years ago, she felt that the loss of her curves had masculinized her once feminine figure. Diet and exercise alone weren’t giving her the desired results, and so she turned to waist training. She now wears a tight corset 23 hours day, only removing it to shower or work out. The mother-of-three currently has an 18-inch waist to show for her efforts, down from her post-birth 27-inch waist.

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Ten years ago, Abby, a year-old black lab, was playing with her human family outside of their Apollo, Pennsylvania home, when something caught her attention and she just wandered off. Her owner,Debra Suierveld, spent weeks searching for the pup, but she eventually gave up, assuming the dog had been killed. Life went on for Debra and her family, but last week they got an unexpected blast from the past.

On January 30th, 2018, the Suiervelds received a phone call from Animal Protectors of Allegheny Valley who claimed to have their dog. Debra told them that they must have made a mistake, because of the family dogs were within view, but then they mentioned the name of the dog, ‘Abby’, to which the woman didn’t know what to answer.

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It was 1997 when Muhammad Iwan, 41, saw some children playing with a newborn estuarine crocodile that fisherman had recently caught at Pangandaran Beach, in West Java. He bought the reptile for just 25,000 Indonesian Rupiah ($1.8), named it Kojek, and welcomed it into his family home in Sempur Sub-District, West Java, as a pet.

Fast forward two decades, that tiny crocodile has grown into a massive 200kg gentle giant that Muhammad claims would never hurt him and his family. It’s this gentle side of Kojek that has made him a star in Indonesia, with people traveling to Sempur from all corners of the archipelago just to see him interact with his human family . His already immense fame has recently reached new heights, thanks to social media. Amazing photographs  showing Muhammad bathing the large 2.7m (8ft, 8in) apex predator in his front yard just meters away from his small children aged 2 and 10, went viral last week, sparking all kinds of reactions.

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Fashion modelling has always been an industry  dominated by the young, with most models having to retire around the age of 30. One Russian modeling agency is going against the norm by working exclusively with models aged 45 and. The oldest model on their roster  is 85.

Moscow-based modelling agency Oldushka was founded by former street photographer Igor Gavar last year. He used to document the street style of retirees on his blog, and the agency was just a natural evolution of his hobby. As the name implies, Oldushka is committed to finding work for older models and broadening their professional opportunities. 18 models are currently represented by the agency, ages 45 to 85, and based in cities across Russia. With the exception of Sergey, a 45-year-old model whom Gavar hired  because he “looks older than he is”, the agency’s youngest model is 60.

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In 1980, when loggers for the Georgia Kraft Corp. cut a chestnut oak into logs they made a grim discovery. Lodged in a hollow stretch near the top of the tree was a mummified hunting dog. Rather than send the section of the tree on to the sawmill, the loggers donated it to Forest World, a tree museum in Waycross, Georgia. He has been a star attraction ever since.

The dog, named (slightly insensitively) “Stuckie” after a 2002 naming contest, had apparently been in the tree for approximately 20 years before the loggers discovered him. Experts believe that he had probably chased after some small game, wedging himself into the hollow tree and climbing a whopping 28 feet up before getting stuck.

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