Seeing Zhang Ziyu towering over her classmates at the Cultural East Road Primary School, in Jinan, China, it’s hard to believe that they are all in the sixth grade. The 11-year-old already measures 6ft 7in (210 cm), and many believe she is the tallest girl in the world.

Zhang’s parents are both former professional basketball players, and they are both over 2 meters tall, so it’s pretty clear that genetics played an important role in her physical development, but reaching 210 cm by age 11 is still very unusual. Zhang has always been taller than all the other children, and one of her colleagues remembers that in the first grade, she already stood at 1.6m (5ft 3in) tall. That’s already considerably taller than the average Chinese sixth-grade girl (4ft 6in or 1.38m).

Read More »

Looking at the new running shoes unveiled by Spanish start-up FBR you would be forgiven for thinking it incomplete, but the missing heel in the sole is actually by design.

Athletic trainer Franc Beneyto came up with the idea for a heelless running shoe five years ago, after reading the book “Running with the Kenyans”, by Adharanand Finn, a journalist and amateur runner who lived for a few months in Kenya with athletes and coaches to investigate why they were able to run more, faster and get injured less frequently than others. In the book, Finn wrote that Kenyans had refined a natural running technique that didn’t require the support of the heel, but instead relied on the Achilles tendon, plantar arch, soleus and calf muscle. That got him thinking, and one day he just cut off the heel of a running shoe to see what running in it would feel like.

Read More »

A wannabe ‘killer clown’ who dressed like popular Batman villain The Joker was recently jailed for terrorizing the people of Nottinghamshire, in England, for three months.

29-year-old Damien Hammond, a homeless and jobless man who styled himself like Heath Ledger’s character in the hit movie The Dark Knight Rises, has been jailed for 22 weeks and banned from Nottingham for three years, after going on a three-month crime spree just a few miles from the real-life Gotham village. Hammond, who is well known around Nottingham for his obsession with The Joker, reportedly pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct towards staff in various retail stores, waving a gun-shaped cigarette lighter while standing in traffic, and striking a police officer, among other charges. After hearing his sentence, the accused, who showed up to court with bright green hair, said “Send me to prison, I don’t care”. Typical Joker…

Read More »

A man managed to get himself jailed for 16 weeks and miss the birth of his child, after lying to his pregnant girlfriend that he had been kidnapped, just so he could get drunk with his buddies.

This kidnapping prank gone wrong took place in January, when Leigh Ford, a 45-year-old man from Blackpool, England, made several frantic phone calls to his pregnant partner Zoe Doyle, telling her that he had been kidnapped and that he was going to be tortured unless she transferred all the money she had into the kidnappers’ bank account. At first, the woman thought he was kidding, but he sounded really scared, and there were other men shouting in the background, threatening to cut off Leigh’s legs, and pour hot water on him. So she complied, but she also called the police.

Read More »

English artist Anna Brownsted left 100,000 pennies in an abandoned public fountain in Cambridge, over the weekend, in a bid to explore human nature. The money was all stolen in just one day.

The coins worth £1,000 were placed in the fountain at Quayside, in Cambridge, at 8 am on Saturday, and were supposed to be left there for 48 hours. However, by 9 am on Sunday, over 99% of the coins had been removed from the fountain, despite clear signs informing passers-by that the fountain was under constant CCTV surveillance. Only £1.66 worth of pennies were left, but organizers didn’t consider it theft, but a “provocative outcome”.

Read More »

Doctors from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi, India, recently documented the strange case of a 4-year-old boy with a mysterious “squeaky cough”.

Writing in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, Doctor Suresh C. Sharma reported that the boy’s parents had brought him to the otorhinolaryngology outpatient clinic after noticing something strange about his cough. For the past couple of days, their 4-year-old son made a squeaky, whistling-like sound whenever he coughed. He had had no history or symptoms of viral infection of the upper respiratory tract, and was in good health, but during the physical examination, doctors did notice an expiratory wheeze in the middle and lower left lung.

Read More »

An English army captain recently smashed his way out of a barracks toilet after being stripped naked and locked in there by soldiers during a drunken prank. He is now being investigated and will most likely have to pay for the damages.

The incident took place last last week, in the barracks of an Army bomb disposal unit, at Carver Barracks in Essex, England. The unnamed captain and his soldiers started drinking last Tuesday, right after he attended a formal ceremony to mark the reformation of 49 Field Squadron. Army sources who preferred to remain anonymous claims that at one point, the captain fell asleep, and the soldiers stripped him naked and locked him in a disabled toilet, as a prank.

Read More »

The term “stalker” first came into use in the 20th century, to describe the harassment of celebrities by obsessed strangers. The problem continues to this day, with public figures such as Queen Elizabeth II and Miley Cyrus suffering from stalking campaigns from captivated individuals. These stalkers are generally mentally unstable, yet highly resourceful.

With these high profile cases, the victims can take comfort in the fact that they have dedicated security who will work tirelessly to protect them from these volatile obsessives. But what if you’re just a normal person who becomes the target of a manic stalking?

Read More »

Wallace the Great, an 11-year-old rescued mule from Gloucestershire, recently made history by becoming the first ever mule to win an official horse dressage competition in Britain.

Wallace and his trainer, Christie Mclean, had been turned down from official dressage events several times on grounds that he wasn’t a true horse, but a cross between a horse and a donkey, which technically makes him a totally different species, with different chromosomes. However, earlier this month, British Dressage finally ruled in favor of allowing mules to compete in official dressage competitions alongside horses and ponies, as a testament “to inclusion and diversity in dressage, making the sport more accessible to all.” Wallace the Great finally had a chance to prove that when it came to dressage, mules could be just as good, if not better than purebred horses, and on July 22nd he did just that, winning his first British Dressage competition.

Read More »

If you thought you needed a steering wheel to actually drive a car, let this story be an example of the opposite. A man in Norfolk, England, was really caught by police driving a battered car by using a metal bucket as a car seat and pliers for steering.

You might think that this guy was extremely unfortunate to get pulled over by cops, but you’d be wrong. What first caught the attention of police officers patrolling the streets of King’s Lynn, in Norfolk, was the battered state of the car this man was driving. It had no front wing, bumper or headlights and to top it all off, it also had a flat tire. Hardly what you’d call a roadworthy vehicle, but this was nothing  compared to what awaited the officers inside.

Read More »

Doctors in Russia recently reported the unusual case of a woman who noticed that a number blemishes appeared to move around her face every few days. Those blemishes turned out to be a live parasitic worm crawling under her skin.

The unnamed woman first noticed a small bump under her left eye, but didn’t pay too much attention to it until, five days later, when it disappeared only to be replaced by three larger blemishes above the eye. Then, 10 days later, those disappeared as well, but her upper lip became swollen. Disturbed by these symptoms, the Moscow-based woman sought medical help and ultimately learned that those strange bumps were actually a live parasitic worm called Dirofilaria repens slithering under her skin.

Read More »

A 24-year-old man from Southampton, England, was banned from contacting his parents for five years after they got so fed up with his constant pestering for money that they got a restraining order against him.

A restraining order was issued against Matthew Kerley last year by the Crown Prosecution Service, after his parents complained that his constant begging for money had caused them extreme anxiety and stress. He was also jailed for 32 weeks on charges of harassment, but continued to contact his mother and father after that, despite the restraining order preventing him from doing that for five years. For example, last month, he called his parents for money over 30 times in 24 hours, with some of the calls being made in the middle of the night.

Read More »

O’Neal Mahmoud, a 3-year-old from an Arabic-speaking Druze  family in the Golan Heights, Israel, has amazed doctors with his ability to speak English with a British accent without ever having been exposed to the foreign language.

Named after legendary basketball player Shaquille O’Neal, O’Neal Mahmoud didn’t speak at all until he was 2-years-old. Then he started making these unintelligible noises, and at one point started speaking fluent English and using phrases like “my dear” and “oh my goodness”, which are hardly ever used in his home village, near the Druze town of Majdal Shams, in northern Israel. Stranger still is the fact that O’Neal doesn’t actually know the Arabic equivalents of the English words he speaks. A speech therapist and clinical linguist who examined the toddler concluded that his level of English was that of a three-year-old who grew up in an English-speaking family, while his level of Arabic – his native language – was far below that.

Read More »

A 40-year-old man allegedly traveled almost 10,000 miles from England to an art gallery in Aspen, Colorado, where he used a sharp object to slash a $3 million dollar painting by New York artist Christopher Wool, before storming out. It was later revealed that the painting was owned by his father.

The bizarre incident occurred last year, on May 2, when a man wearing sunglasses, black jeans, a black jacket, a hat, gloves and a full beard entered the Opera Gallery in Aspen and walked directly up to a painting called “Untitled 2004”. He then took a knife or other cutting object out of his jacket pocket and slashed the painting twice before running out of the gallery. A one-year investigation recently revealed that the man who carried out the slashing was none other than Nicholas Morley, son of the painting’s owner, one Harold Morley.

Read More »

Can you imagine going a whole month without taking a dump? One suspected drug dealer in Harlow, England has gone a record-breaking 34 days without passing stools for fear of providing police with evidence after allegedly swallowing drugs right before his arrest last month.

24-year-old Lamarr Chambers was arrested on January 17, after failing to stop his car when police put their lights on. Officers claim that during the chase, the suspect was “moving his head towards his hand and his hand towards his head as if he was eating something”, but when he finally pulled over, Chambers casually told them that he had been eating fried chicken. Police have reason to believe that he actually swallowed crack cocaine and heroin that he intended to sell around Harlow, so they have been holding him in custody and waiting for him to take a number two. But he simply refuses to do it.

Read More »