Up until four years ago, Monet’s Pond, a small body of water just outside Seki City, in Japan’s Gifu Prefecture, didn’t even have a name, but thanks to social media and a catchy nickname, it has become one of the most popular tourist destination in the Land of the Rising Sun.

Before it became known as Monet’s Pond, this hidden gem was called Namonaki, or “Nameless Pond”, and what’s even more interesting is that it was never meant to be a tourist attraction. It was originally designed as an irrigation reservoir, but after it fell into disrepair during the 1990s, the owner of the neighboring  Itadori Flower Park took it upon himself to clear the overgrown weeds and clean it up. With the help of the neighborhood council, the man filled the lake with clean water from Mt. Koga, and planted beautiful water lilies. Later, Japanese carp were donated by local owners who could no longer care for them. But it would take over a decade and a half for this pristine body of water to reach its full potential as a tourist attraction.

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Not everyone chooses to use their superpowers for good; case in point, this Japanese store clerk who used his amazing photographic memory to memorize the credit card info of over a thousand clients in mere seconds of interacting with them.

34-year-old Yusuke Taniguchi was recently arrested for having stolen the credit card information of over 1,300 people and then using it to by things for himself on the internet. Apparently, Taniguchi worked as a part-time clerk at a shopping mall in Koto City, Tokyo, where he would use his trained photographic memory to steal people’s private information whenever they used their credit cards to buy something. In the few seconds it took to process a payment, the clerk would memorize the card’s 16-digit-number, the holder’s name, expiry date, and security code, all the elements needed to later use the card for online shopping.

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İbrahim Sedef, an experienced beekeeper from Turkey’s Black Sea Region, has come up with an ingenious way of having his honey tested by the same bears that used to steal it.

Agricultural engineer and beekeeper İbrahim Sedef had been struggling to deal with thieving bears for over four months, but nothing worked. When he tried covering his precious beehives with steel cages, the bears toppled to get to the precious honey, when he reinforced the cages with a cement base, they just dug in the ground and toppled them again. Even raising the hives higher up didn’t help as the bears just climbed up to reach them. So earlier this month, Sedef decided to stop looking for solutions and at least use the bears’ appetite for honey to his advantage.

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Tokyo’s Shin Obuko neighborhood recently became the home of what will undoubtedly become one of the most popular cafes in the Japanese capital – 2D Cafe, a place that lets you feel like you’re in a real-life illustration.

Most likely inspired by the success of Cafe Yeonnam-dong 239-20, the Seoul-based cafe that went viral around this time last year, the new 2D Cafe relies on the same illustration theme to draw in Instagram influencers looking for the next hottest selfie spot. Using an entirely monochrome decor that makes a 3d seting look 2D, this eye-catching venue tricks visitors into thinking they’ve set foot in a different dimension, you know, like that famous music video for A-ha’s Take on Me.

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Most roller coasters rely on speed, tight turns and steep slopes to get riders’ adrenaline levels up, but SkyCycle, a pedal-powered coaster ride in the Japanese city of Okayama is proof that roller coasters can be even more terrifying at low speeds.

Located on a greenery-covered hill at the Washuzan Highland amusement park in Okayama, SkyCycle is probably the world’s slowest roller coaster ride. That’s because it’s pedal-powered so it goes as fast as the rider can pedal. It doesn’t have any steep slopes or spectacular drops either, but it still manages to get your heart racing by constantly conveying an uneasy sense of danger and uncertainty. It may look like a quaint ride for people who are too scared to go on conventional roller coasters, but once you get on one of those flimsy carts and realize there’s nothing but a loose safety belt keeping you from falling to your doom, your pulse goes up instantly.

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The mystery of a Chinese man’s decade long pain in the butt has finally been solved after doctors in Hunan extracted no less than 8 embroidery needles stuck in his right buttock.

For the past 10 years, Chen, a 55-year old retired man from China’s Changsha Province, had frequently experienced a stinging, tingling sensation in the right part of his behind, but he never went to have it checked out by a doctor. He reportedly felt the stinging sensation most often when he ran, but because of his busy work schedule, he never went to the hospital. He finally made it to a doctor earlier this month and told him about the mysterious pain in the behind, but the explanation shocked both him and the physician.

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A 59-year-old Chinese man who had experienced frequent headaches and even seizures over the last 30 years is now able to lead a pain-free life after doctors extracted a 10-cm worm from his brain.

The man, surnamed Zhang, first started experiencing excruciating headaches and seizures in 1989. He was playing cards with friends when his arms and legs started twitching for no reason. He started foaming at the mouth and lost consciousness soon after. His worried family took him to a hospital in Guangzhou where he was diagnosed with epilepsy and prescribed anti-epileptic drugs. Despite taking the drugs regularly over the last 30 years, he still suffered occasional seizures and fainting, as well as frequent headaches. It wasn’t until last month that Zhang learned that his symptoms were actually caused by a worm stuck in his brain.

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The unlikely love story between a 27-year-old woman and an 83-year-old famous shaman in Indonesia’s Central Java province has been making headlines in the Asian country for the past week. Despite the controversy regarding the age difference between them, the young woman claims she fell in love with her new husband the moment she saw him.

27-year-old Nuraeni first met 83-year-old Sudirgo in July, when the girl accompanied her parents to the famous shaman’s house in Desa Jatilaba, to seek his advice. It was then and there that the young woman says she fell in love with Nuraeni, and even though she left with her family, she kept finding excuses to visit the grandfather of eight. She even asked him to visit her at her family’s home, and even though the signs were pretty clear, the 83-year-old says he didn’t even consider a romantic relationship because of his advanced age. However, he could only resist love so long, and after confessing his feeling to Nuraeni and asking her to marry him, she accepted.

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A sales company in Guizhou, China, has come under fire for forcing employees to eat live mud fish and drink chicken blood for failing to meet their set goals.

News of the extreme punishment employees of a Guizhou construction material store were recently subjected to broke out after a video of the ordeal was leaked online. It showed a man handing out live mud fish from a plastic bucket to about two dozen employees and instructing them to “bite it until it breaks”. The video also shows the poor people drinking a strange liquid reported to be chicken blood, and then grimacing and retching in discussed. Faced with video evidence, a spokesperson for the company admitted that the event took place, but claimed that employees volunteered to take part…

A representative of the construction material super-store told Chinese newspaper Beijing News that the incident did indeed take place on August 4 and involved about 20 employees who had failed to meet their sales quotas. However, he emphasized that employees volunteered to eat live fish and drink chicken blood, as a form of motivation to do better in the future.

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A 65-year-old man from eastern China needed to be hospitalized after an unusually long karaoke session allegedly left him with a serious medical condition known as a collapsed lung.

Identified solely by his surname, Wang, the elderly karaoke enthusiast realized something was wrong when he experienced shortness of breath and sharp pain on the left side of his back, last week, while singing his favorite songs. He Had sung these high-pitched tunes before and never felt any discomfort, but this time was different. He couldn’t reach the high notes and had trouble breathing normally.

Wang told Nanchang News that he chose to ignore his symptoms when he first noticed them, but they worsened after he got home from the karaoke marathon, and he had no choice but to go to the hospital the next morning. Peng Bin-fei, a doctor from emergency department at Nanchang hospital, told Wang that he had suffered a collapsed lung, also known as a pneumothorax, and asked for details as to what might have caused it. Upon learning about his recent karaoke marathon, the doctor concluded that it was the high-pitch singing that caused Wang’s lung to collapse.

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Ever since the remains of “Homo Florensis”, an extinct species of unusually short humans, were discovered on Flores Island, in eastern Indonesia, scientists have been fascinated with this patch of land, which apparently has the power to somehow make mammals shorter and smaller.

It all began in 2004, when the remains of a human who would have been about 1.1 m in height were discovered at Liang Bua cave. Partial skeletons of nine other individuals were subsequently unearthed and analysis showed that they were part of a yet unknown species of the “Homo” genus named Homo Florensis. It’s estimated that they lived on Flores Island roughly 190,000 to 50,000 years ago. With an average height of just 1.1 meters, they were shorter than modern pygmies which earned them the nickname of ‘real-life hobbits’. Scientists believed they were the ancestors of the pygmies currently living on Flores Island, which made perfect sense, only it turns out that the two have nothing in common. If anything, both species had been independently “shrunk” by the island itself.

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Dentists at a hospital in Chennai, India, were shocked to find over 520 teeth growing in the mouth of a seven-year-old boy who occasionally complained of toothaches.

7-year-old P. Ravindran was taken to Saveetha Dental College and Hospital in Chennai to have a swelling on his lower right jaw looked at. Dentists ordered an X-Ray and CT-Scan, which revealed that the abscess-like swelling was actually a  sac full of what looked like hundreds of teeth of various sizes. The growth, known as compound composite odontoma, is a benign tumour composed of dental tissue, but this was a particularly large one, made up of a total of 526 teeth.

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Azadar Hussain, a news reporter for Pakistani channel GTV News, shot to worldwide fame last week after footage of his daring reporting of local floods went viral online.

In a commendable attempt to show viewers what the people of Pakistan’s Kot Chatta region had to put up with following devastating floods, Azadar Hussain decided to conduct his on-location reporting submerged in floodwater to the point where only his head and the hand holding the microphone were visible. Hussain’s head is seen bobbing above the water as he clutches onto the microphone, but manages to remain calm and composed, offering a very clear and accurate depiction of the situation.

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When it comes to keeping your self awake while doing homework, I could think of much better techniques than inserting a 10cm metal needle through my urethra, but it seems that’s the best a 12-year-old boy in China could come up with.

The unnamed by from Shanxi, China’s Xi’an province, was apparently so desperate to stay awake while doing his homework that he did something most of us couldn’t even imagine – he took one of his grandmother’s long acupuncture needles and shoved it down his urethra, the sensitive tube through which urine is pushed out of the body. It’s not clear exactly how that helped him stay awake, but that’s what he told his mother pushed him to do it. He later learned that shoving it too hard made it impossible to retrieve, which in turn made him unable to walk normally without enduring stringing pain.

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An Indonesian man has been making news headlines around the world for embarking on a unique challenge to save the environment. 43-year-old  Medi Bastoni is walking backward some 800 kilometers, from his village in East Java all the way to the capital Jakarta, to meet the president.

Bastoni set off from his home village of Dono, in East Java, on Jul. 18 and opes to reach the presidential palace in Jakarta in time to celebrate Indonesia’s 74th Independence Day on August 17, alongside President Joko Widodo. The main goal of his unique endeavor is to ask Indonesia’s president for a symbolic tree seed, to be planted in the forests on Mount Wills, near his village, to raise awareness about preserving the rainforest. He claims activists are already fighting to preserve the environment, but a symbolic gesture by the president would boost their efforts even more. And his willing to walk backwards for 800km just to meet Indonesia’s leader.

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