A 29-year-old Chinese man can consider himself lucky to be alive after doctors removed a wooden toothpick stuck in the right atrium of his heart.

The man, known only by his surname, Zhou, underwent an open-heart operation on January 9, at a hospital in Nanning, southern China’s Guangxi Province, to have an excessive growth removed from his heart. He had been suffering from poor health, including constant lung inflammation and high fever, for about four years, and had spent a small fortune ($30,000) on medical care, but doctors had been unable to properly treat his illness. Some doctors claimed he had sepsis while others said he suffered from leukemia, but during his recent heart operation, surgeons discovered that the cause of his health problems was a simple toothpick.

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We’ve seen a lot of interesting dating services in the last few years, like Hater, an app that matches people by things they both hate, Dating AI, a service that lets you date people who look like your favorite celebrities, or Trump Singles, a dating site catering exclusively to Donald Trump supporters. But if you prefer a more scientific approach to dating, you may want to try Pheramor, a unique dating service that matches people by chemical compatibility, by analyzing and comparing their DNA.

Pheramor’s approach to finding suitable matches for singles is a bit different than that of most dating services. For $29.99, the company will ship users a DNA kit containing a buccal swab that they have to return for analysis after swabbing the inside of their cheeks. Pheramor will then analyze the samples and sequence 11 genes allegedly linked to attraction and compares the results with others in its database to determine chemical compatibility. The company then sends the user three potential match in their area (with their photos blurred) every day, each graded from 0 to 100, based on estimated compatibility.

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William J. Gallagher, a 68-year-old career criminal who had just been released from prison after a 20-year sentence, recently robbed a Wisconsin bank, with the sole purpose of getting arrested and sent back to prison.

Six months after finishing his 20-year prison sentence at a penitentiary in New Jersey for attempted homicide, Gallagher took an Amtrak train to Chicago, then another one to Milwaukee, in Winsconsin, where he headed straight to a Chase bank with the intention to rob it. But this wasn’t your usual bank robbery. Instead of getting as much money as possible and trying to escape before the police arrived, Gallagher demanded some $100 bills, then casually asked the bank teller to call the police, and simply waited for them to arrive and arrest him. His goal was never to escape with the money, but to get sent back to prison for his crime.

The New York native had spent so much time behind bars that he simply couldn’t adjust to life on the outside, and after remembering that a fellow inmate had once told him that prisons in Wisconsin were the best in the United States, he decided to travel there and commit a crime so he could go back to his old life.

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Most people can’t go a week without washing their hair, but one real-life Rapunzel from Britain claims she has never washed her six-foot long locks in the last 20 years and that she only needs to comb her hair thoroughly to keep it in pristine condition.

32-year-old Frankie Cluney, an artist from Brighton, in the UK, started growing her hair long when she was six-years-old, and by age 13, it already reached down to her waist. She used to hate washing her hair because getting all the shampoo and conditioner out of it with the shower and then drying it took so long, so when a friend of her mother suggested she simply stop washing it, she decided to do just that. The first few months her long hair was very greasy and her scalp was a bit itchy, but all those problems eventually went away, and she has reportedly done nothing but comb it thoroughly ever since.

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A 27-year-old man from New Delhi, India, wants to take his parents to court for bringing him into this world without first asking for his consent.

Raphael Samuel is an anti-natalist, a person who believes that people should abstain from procreation because giving birth to sentient beings without asking for their consent is morally wrong. Samuel doesn’t have anything against children or life itself, he simply believes that a life form which has not given its consent to live should not be brought into the world and thus to be subject to the hardships of life. Because he considers himself a victim of life without “forced life”, the young Indian plans to take his parents to court.

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For over a decade, residents of the O Calvario and A Doblada neighborhoods in the Spanish city of Vigo have been living in fear of finding their cars scratched or with toothpicks jammed in the keyhole. The culprit? A 79-year-old man who has reportedly vandalized over 1,000 cars in the last year alone.

Most often than not, vandals try to make sure there are no witnesses before damaging someone else’s property, but that’s not how Jose Antonio V., a 79-year-old man from Vigo, operates. He scratches parked cars and jams toothpicks into their keyholes in broad daylight, with a total disregard disregard for witnesses. And if someone dares to say something or try to stop him, the old man gets aggressive and often hits people with his cane. Police estimate that last year alone, the notorious vandal damaged around 1,120 cars, and he’s off to a “great” start in 2019 as well, with evidence linking him to over 120 vandalized vehicles.

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Pablo’s Escoburgers, a Melbourne  fast-food restaurant named after infamous Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, has been slammed for its controversial name and the fact that it serves one of its burgers with a line of white powder on top and a rolled fake dollar bill.

The backlash against Pablo’s Escoburgers started on Wednesday, when the pop-up eatery uploaded a photo of its “The Patron Burger” on Facebook, with a caption that read “infamous patron burger that people are lining up for”. It featured an otherwise delicious burger with a line of fine white powder on top and a fake rolled up $100 bill stuck into the top bun. That white powder turned out to be garlic powder, but a lot of people found the reference to snorting cocaine very offensive. The fact that other photos showed a small plastic bag with more garlic powder and a spoon, which allegedly come with The Patron Burger, only made things worse.

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FBI agents in Florida are investigating a potential bank burglary, after a small sinkhole in a road in Pembroke Pines revealed a mysterious 50-yard tunnel that appeared to be heading toward a local Chase bank.

It all started Tuesday night, when public works employees in Pembroke Pines received a complaint about a sinkhole in the middle of the road at 390 South Flamingo Road. The next morning a crew of workers was sent out to investigate and fix the damage, but after looking into the sinkhole and seeing what looked like a power cord running between a nearby bank and a wood line, they decided to hold off the repairs and notify the police. The sinkhole turned out to be linked to a narrow underground tunnel heading from an entrance near the tree line towards the bank, so police reported the matter to the FBI.

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An insurance agent in Singapore recently got himself arrested after attempting to scam clients by sending them threatening letters signed by “Lord Voldermort”, a misspelling of Lord Voldemort, the main antagonist of the popular Harry Potter books.

Ye Lin Myint, a Myanmar national working for the Singapore branch of Prudential Insurance, targeted potential or former clients who rejected him in the past. They were either potential clients who had refused to get insurance policies from him, or former clients who hadn’t turned up for scheduled appointments or had canceled their insurance policies. In July of 2017, Ye used his wife’s laptop to register an email account with a Switzerland-based email service that did not request any personal, using the name “Lord Voldermort”. He then created a Bitcoin wallet and linked it to the email account and started sending threatening letters to his victims, requesting one Bitcoin in exchange for their safety and that of their families.

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Kelsey Karter, a 24-year-old singer from New Zealand, has been getting a lot of attention these past couple of days for allegedly getting former One Direction member Harry Styles’ face tattooed on her cheek.

The self-confessed Styles fan shocked her fans three days ago, when she posted a photo of herself with what looked like a tattoo of the English heartthrob inked on the right side of her face. She had previously hinted that she was planning something special to celebrate Styles’ 25th birthday, tweeting “Finally know what I’m getting Harry for his birthday,” but no one expected her to get a facial tattoo of him.

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If you though excavating a basement was hard work, try doing it with R/C miniature construction machinery. One Canadian man has been doing it for 14 years and he’s still not done. Luckily, he’s in no hurry to finish.

Joe Murray, a farmer and radio-controlled construction machinery enthusiast from Saskatchewan, Canada, started excavating a basement under his house in June of 2005. In the beginning, he had a hands-on approach, using a pickaxe and an air chisel hammer, but then he started acquiring miniature radio-controlled digging machinery and he took a back seat, letting them do all the dirty work. By 2010, his fleet of trucks and excavators were already doing all the work, while he controlled them from a distance. But the problem with using miniature machinery to dig a life-size basement is that it takes a long time. And I mean a really long time.

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Azusa Sakamoto loves Barbie so much that she spent a small fortune turning her Los Angeles home into a shrine to the popular Mattel doll.

Sakamoto, who goes by “Azusa Barbie” on Instagram, didn’t get to play with Barbie dolls while growing up in Japan, because Mattel’s iconic doll just wasn’t very popular back then. She was already in middle-school when she first got her hands on a Barbie product – a lunchbox she found at an American imports store – but it was love at first sight. She has been collecting Barbie dolls and memorabilia ever since and estimates that she has spent over $80,000 turning her Los Angeles home into a life-size Barbie house.

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The air pollution crisis in Thailand has gotten so bad that authorities are trying some unconventional methods of clearing the air of dust and hazardous particles. For example, the local Government in Bangkok recently started spraying sugar-infused water in the atmosphere.

Yesterday, Thai media reported that in a desperate attempt to bring down critical air pollution levels in Bangkok, local authorities started experimenting with sweetened water, instead of regular one. The idea behind the bizarre pollution-fighting strategy is that by increasing the viscosity of the water using sugar will allow it to trap more dangerous particles when sprayed into the air. However, some experts believe that the unconventional approach could do more harm than good.

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Dave Asprey is mostly known as the man behind the “Bulletproof” lifestyle brand and the guy who came up with the idea of adding butter to coffee, but he’s also one of the world’s boldest biohackers. By constantly tweaking his diet and exercise, as well as experimenting with all kinds of new technology to improve his general well-being, Asprey expects to live to at least 180.

45-year-old Asprey’s quest to live longer than any other human in history started during the 1990s, when he was a young, overweight tech entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. He tried the standard ways of losing weight – lowering his calorie intake and working out for 90 minutes – but although he was stronger and healthier than before, he still weighed the same. So he stopped listening to doctors – who thought he was sneaking Snickers bars into his diet anyway – and started experimenting with less conventional options. This kickstarted his appetite for bio-hacking.

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Vishweshwar Dutt Saklani took his last breath on January 18, 2019, but he will live on in the memory of his countrymen as the “Tree Man of Uttarakhan”, a dedicated conservationist who planted over 50 lakh (5 million) trees and turned his once barren homeland into a lush forest.

Saklani had been fond of trees all his life. He planted his first sapling when he was eight years old under his uncle’s guidance, and kept at it for the next seven decades of his life, until he lost his sight and succumbed to the hardships of old age. However, by that time, the once barren hills in and around his native village of Pujargaon had already become home to a lush forest. Vishweshwar Dutt Saklani’s love for trees is well known, as he often used to call them his children or his closest companions, but few know that the legendary conservationist planted millions of trees to cope with the tragedies in his life.

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