In what is believed to be the first ever such documented case, researchers in India came across a live frog with a small mushroom growing on the side of its body.

The Last of Us, the hit HBO series based on the namesake video game series, has popularized the fictional idea of mushrooms and fungi infecting humans and turning them into mindless zombies. In reality, fungi from the cordyceps family only infect insects, but a team of Indian researchers recently made a discovery that speaks to the adaptability of these microorganisms and their ability to survive and thrive in the most unusual conditions. While observing the fauna around a small pond in the foothills of the Kudremukha Ranges, India, hobbyist naturalist Chinmay Maliye and wetland specialist Lohit Y.T. came across a frog with a mushroom sprouting from its flank.

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A woman recently tried to sneak out of a private hospital in Istanbul, Turkey, hours after undergoing plastic surgery in order to avoid having to pay for the procedure.

The incident reportedly took place last week at a private hospital in Istanbul’s Sisli neighborhood and was captured on camera by passers-by. In a short clip that has been doing the rounds online, a woman wearing a hospital robe and white slippers can be seen arguing with doctors and nurses trying to stop her from leaving. The woman’s face is visibly swollen and almost completely covered in bandages, which makes sense when considering she had only undergone extensive plastic surgery just hours prior. What makes less sense is the woman’s motives for leaving her hospital bed as soon as her anesthesia wore off – trying to avoid covering the bill for the procedure.

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A TikTok plastic surgeon known as ‘Dr Kim’ has gone viral for his uncanny before-and-after videos showcasing the radical transformation of his patients who are sometimes left looking unnatural.

Dr Kim’s TikTok page originally went viral last year, when people first noticed his weird before-and-after clips, but one of his videos recently attracted even more attention, making headlines all over the world and sparking a heated debate online. While many users of the popular video-sharing platform are convinced that Dr Kim is either one of the world’s worst plastic surgeons or that his account is some kind of joke, some believe that people’s perception is skewed by the short period of time between the before and after shots. Patients’ faces are not completely healed and they often still have bruises or are visibly swollen, but that’s how Dr Kim chooses to share their transformation.

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A group of Chinese scientists claims to have created the world’s first ‘AI child’, an entity displaying behavior and capabilities similar to those of a three- or four-year-old human child.

Named Tong Tong or ‘Little Girl’, the world’s first AI child is considered a massive step in the direction of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). Unveiled at the Frontiers of General Artificial Intelligence Technology Exhibition, the innovative AI model is reportedly capable of autonomous learning and may display a level of emotional engagement that has not been seen in AI development until now. According to her creators at the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence (BIGAI), Tong Tong continually improves her skills and knowledge through interaction with humans and exploration.

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A Belarussian self-taught artist single-handedly built a functional ice boat that can hold at least one person and can be sailed.

Minsk-based Ivan Karpitsky’s passion for ice and snow sculpting is well-known in his home country. His name first appeared in Belarussian newspapers in 2020, when photos of his ice violin first went viral on social media. He has since kept busy every winter, coming up with ever more impressive projects, but this year he really outdid himself with a beautiful and functional boat made entirely of ice. Photos and videos posted on his Instagram page show the Belarusian man painstakingly carving blocks of ice and chiseling at them to create his impressive masterpiece.

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A Colorado pastor accused of conning his own congregation out of millions of dollars by promoting a useless crypto coin claims that God Himself told him to do it.

Eli Regalado and his wife Kaitlyn are being investigated for fraud after allegedly launching and peddling a useless cryptocurrency as a a low-risk, high-profit investment pegged to the average value of the top 100 cryptocurrencies. In reality, INDXcoin was “illiquid and practically worthless,” according to the Colorado Division of Securities, and only available through the Regalados’ proprietary crypto exchange, called Kingdom Wealth Exchange, which the pastor shut down last year, making the coin virtually useless. Now Regalado claims that the whole thing was God’s idea, although he admits that he may have “misunderstood” his message.

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Leda Bergonzi, the so-called Healer of Rosario, is a popular faith healer who managed to capture the attention of an entire country and even gain the backing of Argentina’s Catholic Church.

Argentina has had its share of religious faith healers throughout history, but none with a meteoric rise quite like that of 44-year-old Leda Bergonzi, a former seamstress and mother-of-five who one day realized she had received the gift of healing from God and decided to put it to good use. According to the Catholic Church, there are over a dozen faith healers throughout Argentina these days, but Leda stands out both through her wardrobe – she favors skinny jeans, T-shirts, and high-top sneakers – her charisma, and the official support of the Catholic Church. She draws tens of thousands of people from all over Argentina to her home city of Rosario and spends days at a time trying to heal them of all sorts of ailments, from paralysis to terminal cancer.

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Chinese company Betavolt recently unveiled its BV100 battery which is smaller than a coin in size but has a lifespan of around 50 years and doesn’t require recharging.

Atomic batteries aren’t new. Both the United States and the USSR produced such power units during the 1960s, but these nuclear batteries were large, dangerous, and expensive to make. Plutonium was used as the radioactive power source for the first atomic batteries, but science has come a long way since, and Betavolt’s revolutionary battery now relies on a much safer isotope, nickel-63, which decays to a stable isotope of copper. The diamond semiconductor material in the battery allows it to run stably in environments ranging from -60 to 120 degrees Celsius. Measuring just 15mm x 15mm x 5mm, the new Betavolt BV100 constantly generates electricity as the isotopes degrade, unlike conventional batteries which simply store energy.

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This is the heartbreaking story of a 9-year-old boy forced to live by himself in a cold apartment for two years after his mother moved in with her boyfriend 3 miles away.

French newspapers recently reported the sad and shocking story of a boy who lived alone in a low-income housing unit in Nersac for two long years after being abandoned by his mother who went to live with her boyfriend in a nearby town. Between 2020 and 2022, the unnamed boy survived mainly on sweets, canned food, and handouts from neighbors, while his mother lived comfortably at her boyfriend’s house, just 5 kilometers away, in Sireuil. She only came by once in a blue moon to check up on him and bring him some food, but she never stayed long and she never once took him to her place. It was because of these sporadic visits that neighbors took so long to realize that the boy was living by himself and finally call the police about it.

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An ingenious rice cooker designed to be used with rolled newspaper instead of gas or electricity has proven surprisingly useful during the recent earthquake that hit Japan.

The Tiger KMD-A100, aka ‘Tiger Kamado’ used to be ridiculed by people who simply didn’t believe in the premise that you could cook soft, fluffy rice with only a few newspaper pages as a power source. But the Japanese don’t mess around when it comes to rice, and the earthquake that rocked Japan on January 1st proved just how efficient and effective the ingenious Tiger Kamado could be. A Japanese man from the earthquake-affected Noto Peninsula recently took to X (Twitter) to praise the rice cooker his family had scolded him for buying last summer, claiming that it provided them all with hot meals at a time when gas and electricity were not available.

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For the past eight months, a mysterious man dubbed ‘Flexman’ by his motorist fans has been disabling speed cameras in several Italian regions by cutting their supporting metal poles with an angle grinder.

The angle grinder was invented in 1954 by a German company called Flex, and even today, in many European countries, the angle grinder is popularly known as a ‘flex’. Little did the creators of this useful tool know that many decades later, the flex would inspire the nickname of a vigilante specializing in disabling speed traps on the roads of Italy by taking an angle grinder to the metal poles supporting them. Flexman first made news headlines in May of last year, when he took down his first speed trap on a road near Bosaro, in Italy’s Rovigo region. Since then, he managed to disable at least seven other cameras in Rovigo and Veneto using his signature angle grinder, and authorities still have no idea who he is or how to stop him.

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An Indian man has been caught trying to take an exam at a Punjab university on behalf of his girlfriend by wearing lipstick, makeup, and female clothes.

Officials at Baba Farid University of Health Sciences in Punjab’s Faridkot district recently caught a young Indian man using a disguise and fake documents in order to take the exam of multi-purpose health workers on behalf of a woman believed to be his girlfriend. The youth, identified as Angrez Singh from Fazilka, showed up at the examination center in Kotkapura on January 7  dressed in full female attire, complete with red bangles, bindi, and lipstick, and carrying documents in the name of the woman he was trying to impersonate, one Paramjit Kaur. While his disguise may have fooled the staff, they couldn’t trick the biometric scanners when his data didn’t fit the one in the database.

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A Japanese company that has been developing crow repellants for 15 years claims that its Crow Buster, a translucent piece of yellow plastic, is more effective than any scarecrow.

Crows are auspicious omens in Japanese culture, but in day-to-day life, they can be quite pesky pests. Notoriously intelligent and highly adapted to both rural and urban environments, crows have been known to cause serious damage to fruit and vegetable farms, rummage through garbage in search of food, and attack smaller birds, animals, or even humans, if they perceive them as threats. Because of their higher-than-average bird intellect and excellent memory, crows can be very tough to deal with, so even the most realistic of scarecrows may prove ineffective. However, one Japanese company claims that all you need to keep crows at pay is its surprisingly simple Crow Buster.

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Maisie Matilda, a 24-year-old artist from the UK, is being credited for shining a bright spotlight on the fascinating but dying art of book fore-edge painting.

Matilda had been painting for a long time, but she only started experimenting with fore-edge painting during the first COVID-19 lockdown, when she found herself with lots of time on her hands. The self-taught artist went viral at the end of 2021, after posting videos of her work on the fore-edge of a J.R.R. Tolkien book on social media. Her TikTok videos got millions of views, and the young artist found herself giving interviews to some of the world’s largest news outlets. She has been riding this wave ever since, and she currently has over half a million loyal fans on Instagram alone.

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Researchers at MIT created a high-tech pill that starts to vibrate once it makes contact with gastric fluid in the user’s stomach in order to stimulate receptors in the stomach and create the sensation of fullness.

VIBES, short for Vibrating Ingestible BioElectronic Stimulator, was only recently unveiled in a study published in the Science Journal, but it is already being touted by the media as the future of weight loss. Although it has yet to be tested on humans, trials on pigs have yielded very promising results. After about 30 minutes of VIBES activity, pigs consumed on average almost 40 percent less food in the next half hour than they did without the smart pill. Apparently, the revolutionary device works by activating stretch receptors in the stomach, simulating the presence of food. This in turn signals the hypothalamus to increase the levels of hormones that make us feel full.

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