An 80-year-old woman who had lost her eyesight over a decade ago due to glaucoma recently recovered her vision after being administered a placebo treatment for her chronic back pain.

One night, 12 years ago, Lynley Hood, an award-winning writer from Dunedin, in New Zealand, was reading a book when the vision in her left eye suddenly became blurry. She blamed it on tiredness and decided to turn in, but the next morning the blurriness in her eyesight had not gone away. She was soon diagnosed with a fairly rare form of glaucoma, and the doctor notified her that her condition would probably never improve and that it was now only a matter of keeping the condition from advancing. She eventually became legally blind, being unable to read and write due to her glaucoma, Then, over a decade later, an accidental miracle occurred, and Hood’s eyesight returned.

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An Australian landlord took to a Facebook group to vent his frustration with a tenant who deliberately underpays his rent by one cent every week.

The anonymous homeowner wrote on a landlord Facebook group asking his peers for advice on how to handle a cheeky tenant who reportedly underpays the rent by 1 cent every week. Apparently, the rent was set at AU$ 1,200 per week, but the person living in the house only pays AU$ 1,199.99. With 52 weeks in a year, it hardly seems like a massive loss for the tenant, but they claim to be losing their mind over the situation and are asking for advice in order to keep their sanity. Meanwhile, the tenant seems to think that they are well within their rights with the 1-cent weekly deduction.

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A 40-year-old woman’s decision to quit her job and become a ‘full-time daughter’ in the employment of her own parents has sparked controversy in China.

Last year, after 15 years of working for a news agency, 40-year-old Nianan quit her job. She had to be on-call virtually 24 hours a day and was constantly under tremendous stress. Luckily, her parents came up with a better employment offer if she just quit the job that made her so miserable. “Why don’t you just quit your job? We’ll take care of you financially,” the woman’s parents said, promising to pay her 4,000 yuan ($570) per month if she just came and lived with them. That obviously meant no more housing costs, and saving massively on food and various household items, as the parents would take care of such expenses. So Nianan quit her job and became a ‘full-time daughter’.

After a year in her parents’ employment, Nianan describes her profession as one “filled with love”. She spends her days accompanying her mother and father when they go grocery shopping, she cooks dinner with them every evening, drives them around when they need to, and even has an hour to dance with them every day.

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A 22-year-old man from Wisconsin who started experiencing coughing and heavy wheezing after an epileptic seizure was shocked to find that his silver grillz had become stuck in one of his lungs.

A case study recently published in the Cureus Medical Journal tells the story of an unnamed 22-year-old man who, after recovering from an epileptic seizure, started experiencing severe coughing and heavy wheezing. He immediately thought medical assistance and X-ray scans revealed that he had something lodged in the right main stem bronchus, an airway to his lung. This 4-cm-long mass looked like dentures, and the man told doctors that he was wearing his silver-plated grillz when he had the seizure, and he couldn’t find them when he recovered.

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Stott Hall Farm is the only farm in the world built right in the middle of a busy motorway, with crash barriers and a fence around it to keep livestock in and out-of-control vehicles out.

The M62 motorway connecting the cities of Liverpool and Hull in Northern England is famous for having an inhabited farm right in the middle of its roadways in Calderdale.  The unique farm is one of the ten best-known sights on the UK motorway network, and there are various stories and myths about its existence, the most popular of which claim that the motorway was split because the owners, Ken and Beth Wild, refused to sell. These stories would have you believe that Stott Hall Farm is essentially a ‘nail house’ the likes of which we’ve featured several times in the past. However, the reality of this infrastructural oddity is very different.

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7-year-old Max Alexander has been creating dresses since he was 4 and he insists that he was iconic Italian designer Guccio Gucci in a past life.

Most 7-year-old boys probably don’t even know who or what Gucci is, but Max Alexander, a fashion design prodigy from the US, not only knows all about the famous Italian designer, he claims to have been him in a past life. The boy’s mother, Madison, said that he revealed his passion for women’s fashion one evening in 2021, while they were all at the dinner table. He requested a mannequin to display his creations on, and after Madison made him one out of cardboard he started working his magic displaying incredible talent. At an age when other kids are just learning how to read and write, Max is a seasoned fashion designer with clients like Sharon Stone on his resume.

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The judges of the prestigious Gilbert et Gaillard international wine competition were duped into awarding this year’s gold medal to a €2.50 ($2.70) supermarket wine they deemed “exceptional”.

Ever wonder how the average person chooses wine at a supermarket? Well, it turns out that having one or more medals plastered on the bottle can increase sales by up to 15 percent, so it’s no wonder that wineries take wine-tasting competitions very seriously. But does winning such medals actually reflect the quality of the wine, or are these contests simple money-making events that charge winemakers hefty sums for participation and the chance to increase sales? Eric Boschman, once named Belgium’s best sommelier, and the team at On n’est pas des pigeons, a Belgian consumer magazine and television program, decided to find out by taking the worst supermarket wine they could find and registering it in a prestigious wine competition.

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A 29-year-old man who has been living in a tent in an abandoned parking lot for 200 days has become the newest symbol of China’s increasingly popular ‘lying down’ culture.

At the end of 2018, Li Shu quit his job in Sichuan Province and began spending most of his time chilling in his rented apartment. The 29-year-old quickly realized that, with no income whatsoever, he would quickly go through all his savings, so he cut his daily expenses to just 10 yuan ($1.5) per day. Even so, after years of having to pay rent, it became painfully obvious that he would either have to find a way to make money or move out. Since the first option wasn’t even considered, he sold most of his belongings, bought a 400 yuan ($57), and decided to continue his relaxed lifestyle in the great outdoors, among the debris of an abandoned parking lot. He has been living there for 200 days, and has no plans of joining the rat race of life anytime soon.

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Kambo is an ancient Amazonian ritual that involves putting the poisonous secretions of a frog into your body for a supposed detoxifying and health-boosting effect.

Named after the poisonous, waxy substance harvested from the backs of giant monkey frogs found throughout the Amazon, Kambo has always been a controversial cleansing ritual because of the severe side-effects od coming into direct contact with the poison of the giant monkey frog. That controversy recently reached new heights due to Australia’s investigation into the deaths of two unrelated people who had died shortly after attempting kambo. Although symptoms associated with kambo vary in severity, in some cases, they are enough to cause serious health concerns, even death.

The shamanistic ritual known as kambo has been used by the indigenous people of the Amazon rainforest to heal and cleanse the body for centuries, and it has been promoted by naturopathic practitioners for its detoxifying effects. However, unlike other, more mild methods of cleansing the body, kambo can be pretty brutal. Side effects of the ritual involve nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, loss of bladder control, dizziness, heart palpitations, and abdominal pain, among others.

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After wearing masks in public for three long years, many Japanese are signing up for smiling classes to learn how to smile again without looking awkward.

Smiling used to be a natural response, but apparently, three years of hiding behind a mask have left many Japanese unable to smile naturally. Some of them are now paying so-called smiling educators to teach them how to display their pearly whites again without looking awkward. They participate in specialized classes where they are taught how to stretch and flex various parts of their faces and even their neck muscles to smile properly and actually convey happiness without looking weird.

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A Colombian doctor has been ordered by a court of law to financially support a patient’s baby until it turns 18 after the patient ended up conceiving the baby despite undergoing a vasectomy.

Diego Naranjo, a doctor from Medellin, Colombia, will have to pay millions of pesos to support one of his patients’ baby after he assured the man that the vasectomy he had performed had been successful and he no longer needed to use other means of contraception. However, the man ended up leaving his wife pregnant and having an unplanned baby. Subsequent sperm tests showed that the vasectomy had in fact not been successful, and the parents of the baby sued the doctor, claiming that his mistake had had serious implications, both financial and emotional. A judge has now ruled that the doctor must support the baby until it turns 18 years old.

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A Mexican court of law recently sparked outrage by sentencing a young woman to six years in prison for “excessive use of legitimate defense”, because she killed the man who was raping her.

The sentencing of Roxana Ruiz, a 23-year-old single mother from Nezahualcoyotl, Mexico, on Monday has been making international news headlines all week. The young woman was charged with homicide with an excess of legitimate self-defense after she strangled the man who was raping her in her own home, and is now facing six years in prison, as well as an obligation to compensate her assailant’s family financially. Ruiz, who has already served nine months behind bars after her initial arrest in 2021, claims that she would have most likely been killed by the man raping her if she didn’t kill him first, but the judge ruled that a simple blow to the head would have been enough to incapacitate the assailant.

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A businessman from southern Thailand recently went viral for claiming that the secret to his good health is to drink crocodile blood mixed with alcohol twice a day.

Rojakorn Nanon, a 52-year-old man from Thailand’s Trang province, starts his day with a glass of crocodile mixed with a Thai spirit called lao khao, and has another such cocktail before bedtime. The businessman claims that he used to be physically weak and exhausted all the time, but ever since he started drinking crocodile blood, things took a massive turn for the better, and now he swears by the stuff. He believes the blood does wonders for several organs, for the blood, and for the nervous system.

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An extremely jealous woman in Argentina was recently arrested for keeping her boyfriend a prisoner in her house for three days to make sure he didn’t cheat on her.

On Saturday, police in the Argentinian city of La Plata rescued a 29-year-old man from a locked room in his girlfriend’s house. He claimed to have been locked in there for over 72 hours following an argument with his girlfriend of six months, who happened to be extremely jealous. After uninstalling WhatsApp from his phone and then smashing it against the floor to prevent him from talking to other women, the unnamed woman reportedly locked the man in a room. She kept him there for three days straight, until he was somehow able to steal her phone and text a friend for help.

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A family in Sidney, Australia is being praised for resisting the urge to sell their property to developers who have bought all the land around it, despite being offered tens of millions of dollars for it.

The Zammit family home has become one of the most famous properties in Sydney both because of the way it stands out among the dozens of cookie-cutter homes surrounding it and the resilience of its owners. While every one of their old neighbors agreed to sell their land to housing developers, the Zammits have refused every offer so far, and have no plans of moving away anytime soon. The Australian family has been praised for refusing to sell out and continuing to live on their five acres of land despite the financial temptation and pressure from developers.

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