A German man who survived a terrible car crash six years ago was left unable to transfer short-term memories to his long-term memory, which means he forgets everything when he goes to sleep unless he writes them down.

Daniel Schmidt is lucky to be alive. In 2015, he was involved in a motorway accident that left him with severe physical and brain injuries. He underwent intensive phisyo and speech therapy to regain his ability to speak, but the one thing he couldn’t get back was his memory. After sustaining level three traumatic brain injuries, Schmidt was rendered unable to transfer short-term memories into long-term, which means that whenever he goes to sleep at night, he forgets everything that happened that day, the people he met, the places he visited, the things he did, everything.

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An Egyptian man had to undergo emergency surgery to have a mobile phone that he had swallowed six months ago removed from his stomach.

In a first-of-its-kind case in Egypt, doctors at the Aswan University Hospital in the city of Aswan performed an operation to remove a small mobile phone that had been inside a man’s intestines for half a year. The patient, an inmate named Mohamed Ismail Mohamed, was brought to the emergency room with severe abdominal pain, and a CT scan revealed that there was a foreign body in his intestines. The man was prepped for surgery, and doctors managed to remove the object which turned out to be a small mobile phone wrapped in plastic foil.

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A woman who had exhausted all other options of treating her depression claims her life has become infinitely better since having a matchbox-sized implanted into her skull.

Having holes drilled into your skull and electrical wires connected directly to your brain sounds like a daunting proposition for most people, but for Sarah, a 36-year-old woman who had been battling depression for years, it was a desperate attempt to get back to a normal life. For years, she had been battling severe depression, and all other treatments, including anti-depressants and electroconvulsive therapy, had failed. Anything was better than the darkness she had been experiencing, and getting a brain implant proved a winning bet, as she has now been depression-free for over a year.

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Raizel Calago is only 16-years-old, but you would never guess just by looking at her. She suffers from a rare condition called progeria which makes her look four times her age.

In only two years, Raizel Calago went from a beautiful young girl who attended beauty pageants, to an old-looking woman that many people mistake for a grandmother. The young Filipina says that she started noticing wrinkles in her skin just days after rashes erupted all over her body. Red, itchy patches that were painful to the touch appeared on her body, and when she went for a checkup, she was told that they had been caused by an insect. She was given medication, but that didn’t help, and soon she started noticing physical changes to her appearance. Now, it’s hard to believe she is just 16-years-old…

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Doctors recently reported the case of a 56-year-old patient who experienced chest pain and breathing difficulties because of a piece of cement that had pierced his heart and lung.

So how does one get cement stuck inside their heart? Well, in this particular case it was as a direct consequence of a procedure that the patient had undergone a week earlier. Doctors had treated what is known as a “vertebral compression fracture,” a painful condition in which part of a vertebra collapses into itself, most commonly as a result of osteoporosis. They had performed kyphoplasty, a procedure in which a special type of cement is injected into the vertebra to restore its normal height and keep it from collapsing further. Only in this case, the cement didn’t stay in the bone…

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Surgeons at a hospital in Lithuania spent over three hours saving the life of a man who, for some reason, had swallowed more than a kilogram of metallic objects over the last month.

Lithuanian media recently reported the shocking case of a man who arrived at the Klaipėda University Hospital in the Baltic port of Klaipeda complaining of severe abdominal pain but conveniently failed to mention that he had swallows over a kilogram of metal objects over the last 30 days. An X-ray examination revealed that the man’s stomach was full of metal objects of all shapes and sizes, including nails, screws, and blades. They prepped the man, whose identity has not been revealed, for emergency surgery and spent over 3 hours removing the metal objects.

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A 15-yer-old girl in rural India has reportedly been pumping out small stones out of her eyes every day for the past two months, and doctors don’t have any medical explanation for it.

According to the girl’s family, small stones started falling from her eyes on July 17, and she has been crying between 10 and 15 stone tears every day since. More than 70 so-called stone tears have been collected in the over two months since the bizarre phenomenon was reported. Apparently, 15-year-old Chandni starts eliminating small stones from her eyes from around 6 in the morning and continues to do so until evening. For some reason, the stones don’t form n her eyes during the night…

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The benefits of cupping as a way to relieve stress, improve athletic performance and overall health have been debated at nauseam, but did you know cupping could help you cosplay as popular Nintendo villain Bowser, aka King Koopa?

Although modern cupping is usually associated with the use of glass cups, the practice can be traced back to the year 1500 B.C., when glass didn’t even exist. Back then, healers used hollowed-out animal horns to create suction, and even though bamboo and glass cups became mainstream in recent times, some street therapists still rely on buffalo horns to practice their trade. As you can see, the visual effect is quite striking.

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A 13-year-old girl was diagnosed with a serious joint disease caused by being forced to jump rope 3,000 times a day by her mother, as a bizarre way of growing taller.

Chinese media recently reported the case of a 13-year-old girl in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province who developed traction apophysitis of the tibial tubercle after being forced by her mother to jump rope 3,000 a day in order to get taller. The girl had complained to her mother of knee pain, but she was initially accused of being lazy and was only taken to see a doctor after her symptoms worsened. After performing a physical checkup, doctors ruled out a meniscus injury but warned the mother that excessive exercise can cause serious injuries in children.

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A 23-year-old student in Germany can reportedly shrink and enlarge his pupils on command, a feat previously thought to be physically impossible.

The dilation and constriction of the pupil were believed to be completely automated processes triggered by various factors, like entering a bright or dark environment, but a recent case study suggests that isn’t always the case. A young student in Germany is believed to be able to voluntarily control the tiny muscles that adjust the size of the pupil, a feat once thought to be impossible. The authors point out that while some people can alter their pupil size via “indirect methods”, this person is instead able to directly control the sphincter muscle in his eyes to adjust the size of his pupils.

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Ashton Fisher, a 12-year-old boy from the UK spent over a decade living only on a specific brand of white bread and fruit yogurt before being diagnosed with food phobia.

Growing children require a healthy, balanced diet, but to say Ashton Fisher has had anything but that would be a gross understatement. Ever since he was two, the 12-year-old boy from Norfolk would get scared and begin to cry if his parents tried to feed him anything but Warburtons sliced white bread and strawberry and banana Munch Bunch yogurts. Although no one knows the exact reason why Ashton developed this bizarre food phobia, his mother, Cara, believes it might have been triggered by having reflux as a baby.

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Doctors performing a colonoscopy on a 59-year-old patient were shocked to discover a small ladybug crawling inside the man’s intestine.

I’m no doctor, but I imagine that one of the last things you’d expect to find in someone’s colon while performing a colonoscopy is a living ladybug. How the insect got inside the man’s intestines is one thing, but how on Earth does a ladybug make it into the colon alive? That was the question puzzling the team that discovered the ladybug during a routine colonoscopy in 2019. While exploring a 59-year-old man’s colon in search of scarring, ulcers or tumors, they noticed a live ladybug crawling on the inside of the man’s intestine.

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A 37-year-old father of one from Texas woke up one day ready to go to school, thinking it was the 1990s, after losing the last two decades of his life, including ever marrying his wife and having a daughter.

In July of last year, Daniel Porter, a hearing specialist from Texas woke up in his bed just like any other morning, only something was wrong. A woman who he had never seen before was sleeping next to him, and when he looked in the mirror, an “old and fat” man was looking back at him. Daniel had gotten up thinking it was time to go to school, not knowing that he had graduated high-school nearly two decades before, and that the strange woman in his bed was his wife, with whom he had a 10-year-old daughter.

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36-year-old Juan Dual likes to joke that he is empty inside, but in his case the phrase has a literal meaning. Over the years, he has had his stomach, colon, rectum and gallbladder removed, but he has learned to live without them.

Juan’s sad but inspiring story began when he was only 13-years-old. It was then that he was diagnosed with a terrible hereditary condition called familial multiple polyposis, which left him with a 99.8% chance of developing cancer of the digestive system. His grandmother and an uncle of hers died of colon adenocarcinoma, and his father had undergone surgery of the bowels to avoid succumbing to the same fate. At age 19, right after finishing high-school, Juan underwent a tough operation to have his colon and rectum removed. Sadly, it was only the beginning…

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A 42-year-man in India recently made international headlines for suffering from a condition that causes him to sleep 300 days a year.

Indian media recently reported the bizarre case of Purkharam, a middle-aged resident of Bhadwa village, in Rajasthan, who allegedly suffers from “HPA axis hypersomnia”, a rare condition that causes him to sleep for long stretches of time that can last up to 25 days. 23 years ago, when Purkharam was first diagnosed with the rare disorder, he slept for about 15 hours at a time, but his symptoms gradually got worse and by 2015 his family started counting his sleeping schedule in days instead of hours. The small shop owner would sleep for more than 7 or 8 days at a time, but the condition kept worsening, and he now sleeps for up to 25 days. Out of 365 days, he spends about 300 sleeping.

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