A Silicon Valley family was in the news recently for renting a $1,500-a-month living space for their two cats, because they didn’t get along with the dog they shared their previous home with.

David Callisch couldn’t be happier with the tenants living in the 425-square-foot studio apartment behind his house, in San Jose, California. They don’t drink, they don’t smoke and they never turn on the music too loud. That’s because Tina and Louise are two cats who live alone in the $1,500-a-month living space. Callisch planned to use it as an Airbnb, but when his friend Troy Good asked him if he could rent it from him for his daughter’s cats, he agreed. He was shocked by the request at first, but then decided he couldn’t ask for better tenants.

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A circular, slow-turning sheet of ice in Maine’s Presumpscot River has captured the imaginations of millions around the world after photos and videos of it have been shared on social media.

It’s been called a “frozen crop circle”, a “frozen moon”, an alien ship”, but scientists say it’s a rare natural phenomenon at an unprecedented scale. Rotating ice circles have been reported in the US before, but they were in the 20- to 30-foot range, whereas the ice disk in the Presumpscot River, in the city of Westbrook, is roughly 100 meters wide. It is constantly rotating counterclockwise and it’s size appears to vary according to the outside temperature and sunlight – it’s larger in the morning, but shrinks when the sun is strong and the temperature rises.

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A Chinese polygamist who was secretly married to three women managed to keep them from finding out about each other despite arranging for them to live within a one kilometer radius, for his own convenience.

The 36-year-old man, surnamed Zhang, is facing up to two years in prison for polygamy, after he exploited a loophole in the system to legally marry three different women in a period of three years. He worked as a real-estate agent in Kunshan, eastern China’s Jiangsu province, and made a lot of money thanks to the country’s booming property market, so providing for three different families was no problem, but he admitted that traveling between three homes up to 10 times a week could be a bit tiring. Not as tiring as it could have been, though, as Zhang made sure to buy the three women apartments within a one kilometer radius, for his own convenience.

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Long haul truck driving is generally seen as a man’s job, but Rino Sasaki, a young female truck driver from Japan, is challenging this stereotype and conquering social media in the process.

Rino Sasaki grew up in Kochi Prefecture as the daughter of a long haul truck driver, but never really considered the idea of becoming one herself until seven years ago, when her father became sick. He continued working, but she couldn’t stand the thought of her father all alone on the road, thousands of miles away from home, with no one to care for him. So 21-year-old Rino, who worked as a traditional dance teacher at the time, got a truck driving license and decided to join her father on his long haul trips. She tried teaching her dance classes as well, but soon learned that driving thousands of miles around the country meant that she might not always be back home on schedule, so she eventually abandoned her old career and became a full-time truck driver.

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Pura Still is being advertised as the first spiked water that doesn’t need bubbles to keep things interesting. It’s still, but definitely not flat as it has an alcohol content of 4.5% by volume.

Alcoholic drink brands have been hard at work trying to come up with new and enticing products for the growing number of health-conscious consumers who like to consume of bit of alcohol from time to time, but hate the calories associated with it. Pura Still is the bet of FIFCO USA, formerly North American Breweries, to capture this important part of the market. It doesn’t have the “annoying carbonated bubbles” that spiked seltzer products are known for, and contains only one gram of sugar and 90 calories. The company describes Pura Still as “the perfect way for consumers to enjoy themselves without straying from their healthy lifestyles”.

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Researchers at the University of South Australia claim to have discovered clay materials in a certain type of dirt, which, if consumed with an evening meal can help soak up fat droplets from the gut.

Obesity costs the global economy an estimated $2 trillion every year, and countries around the world spend even more trying to prevent it, but a recently-published Australian study suggests that finding a cure to this modern-day epidemic could be as easy as dirt, literally. Researchers led by PhD candidate Tahnee Dening were investigating how clay materials can improve drug delivery when they discovered that one of the materials she was testing had the remarkable ability to soak up fat droplets in the gut. The serendipitous discovery immediately signalled Denning that they were on to something big, maybe even a cure for obesity.

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International workspace company Spaces recently teamed up with Dutch lifestyle brand Marie-Stella-Maris to create ‘Spirit de Travail’ a fragrance that can allegedly boost productivity and make people feel more at ease in the workplace.

Productivity at work can be influenced by a variety of factors, of which smell is one of the least obvious. According to research done by Prof. Gary E. Schwartz from the University of Arizona, negative feelings like irritation, annoyance and stress can effectively be countered by fragrances that induce positive effects like happiness, relaxation and productivity. The findings of this study inspired Spaces, a company that specializes in building custom workspaces for businesses and professionals, to come up with a fragrance that both relaxes users and boosts their productivity.

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A 63-year-old Vietnamese woman who recently underwent a laparoscopic procedure to have a tumour from her throat removed was shocked to hear that the doctors removed a six-inch leech from her throat instead. The parasite had reportedly been living in the woman’s throat for about three months.

The unnamed woman from Vietnam’s mountainous Ha Giang Province had been complaining about severe headaches, frequent nasal congestion and a constant sensation of mucous fluid flowing down the throat, for several weeks. She eventually checked into a local hospital where ENT (ear nose and throat) specialists performed various tests and discovered an unidentified mass in her throat. The woman was scheduled for laparoscopic surgery to have the mass – believed to be a tumour – removed, but during the procedure, doctors were shocked to find a live leech attached to the woman’s throat.

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A Chinese woman recently made the news after being diagnosed with a very rare form of hearing loss which leaves sufferers unable to hear low frequency sounds, like men’s voices.

The woman from Xiamen, on China’s east coast, knew something was wrong when she woke up one morning and realized that she couldn’t hear anything her boyfriend said. She had been suffering from nausea and ringing in her ears the night before, but figured that a good night sleep would make everything better, so she went to bed. But when she woke up the next morning, she was shocked by the realization that she couldn’t hear a word the man beside her was saying. The woman, known only as Ms. Chen, was rushed to a local hospital where an ear, nose and throat specialist diagnosed her with a rare condition known as reverse-slope hearing loss.

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An extravagant barber has become famous in Moscow for offering a different kind of hair washing product. Instead of shampoo, clients can choose to have their locks washed with champagne.

Vilen Knudaverdyan says he came up withe unusual service after performing it on a colleague, as a joke. The woman was leaving for another job, and during the farewell party they organized for her at the hair salon they decided to wash her hair with champagne. She apparently loved it, so he decided to offer it as a paid service for clients as well. Now his Moscow salon is famous for the champagne hair wash.

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Sixteen brave runners recently gathered in the Russian village of Oymyakon, also known as the world’s pole of cold,  to compete in the coldest official race in history.

Oymyakon is the coldest permanently inhabited place on Earth, with temperatures constantly dropping to under -50 degrees Celsius in winter time. This place is so cold that a person’s unprotected face can suffer frostbite in a matter of seconds, and sometimes the mercury in thermometers freezes. Oymyakon can barely be called inhabitable, let alone suitable for a marathon, and yet at the beginning of this year, 16 runners gathered here to take part in a series of extreme races.

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Zhang Daming, an 18-year-old Malaysia, allegedly spent 10 days wandering through Singapore because he was too shy to ask for directions after becoming unable to find his way to the apartment building he was staying in.

Zhang reportedly traveled from Malaysia to Singapore last month in order to look for work, and was sharing an apartment in the island city with a friend who had been working there for some time. On the day of his disappearance, Zhang Daming’s roommate gave him SGD50 ($37) for food before leaving for work, as the 18-year-old only had Malaysian ringgit. He used some of that money to get some lunch at a nearby cafe, but didn’t bother keeping an eye out for markers to help him find his way back, and upon leaving the cafe, he quickly realized that he didn’t know how to get back to his friend’s apartment building.

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Eleven schools in the Chinese province of Guizhou have introduced micro-chipped uniforms that track and monitor the students even beyond school grounds.

Developed by local company Guizhou Guanyu Technology, the smart school uniforms feature two microchips embedded into the shoulder pads which allow both the school and the children’s parents to monitor their activity at all times. A GPS system tracks their movements and an alarm informs both teachers and parents whenever a student leaves the classroom or school grounds without permission, or if he falls asleep during classes. The smart uniforms also allow students’ parents to monitor their purchases at school and set spending limits via a mobile app.

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A California family recently notified police about a strange man who had expressed his love for their high-tech doorbell in an explicit manner, after security camera footage showed him licking the doorbell button for no logical reason.

The Dungan family had just returned to their Salinas home last Saturday morning when they decided to check the security footage. They had been automatically notified about unusual activity on the premises the night before, but they had been out of time. When they first started getting notifications from the security system, David Dungan thought it was just his stepson coming home from work. One thing’s for sure, the family weren’t expecting a strange man making out with their doorbell button. And yet, that’s exactly what the footage showed.

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A German pastor thinks he may have found a an effective way to approach the men in his community and it involves one of his greatest passions, whisky.

53-year-old Thomas Eschenbacher, a Franconian pastor from Hammelburg, in Bavaria, has long been looking for ways to approach men and talk to them about God and the Christian faith. It’s not the easiest thing to do, especially in this day in age, but Eschenbacher thinks whisky may just be the solution to his problem. A big fan of the Scottish spirit, the pastor noticed how easy it was to start a conversation about whisky during a leisurely whiskey tasting evening with friends, and decided to use the same catalyst to get through to men in matters of religion. He  recently announced that he was organizing a “whisky retreat” for men and all the 30 available spots were sold out almost instantly.

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