Austrian designer Klemens Schillinger has created a therapeutic replacement for smartphones called Substitute Phones. The Vienna-based designer made a series of five of these non-devices which feature a row of stone beads to imitate various motions typical to smartphone use, such as scrolling, zooming, and swiping.

By using stone beads to emulate interaction with a phone’s touchscreen, Schillinger aims to create therapeutic tools that can provide the physical simulation that frequent smartphone users crave, and help them cope with the withdrawal symptoms of being away from their phones for long periods of time

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The German town of Staufen is falling apart at the seams. The town of 8,100 residents, located on the edge of the Black Forest, decided to invest in geothermal energy back in 2007, aiming for a green energy future. Unfortunately, the decision backfired when the underground drilling went wrong causing hundreds of buildings to begin cracking apart.

The town rests on a layer of soft anhydrite, below which is a layer of groundwater confined to an aquifer. It was this combination which proved to be fatal for the Baden Württenburg hamlet. When the drills hit the groundwater, it poured into the anhydrate, which soon formed gypsum and expanded by about 50 percent. Over 270 buildings have suffered fractures in the ten years since and things don’t appear to be getting any better.

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What comes to mind when you think of Siberia? Maybe vast expanses of snow-covered land, teeth-chattering cold, Lake Baikal, and the Tunguska meteorite mystery. How about gun-totting brown bears? One such animal recently gave a hunter quite the fright, but more importantly, took off with the man’s bag, which happened to contain two firearms.

The incident took place in the Irkutsk region of Siberia, where an unnamed 57-year-old hunter stopped at a cabin in the woods, miles away from the nearest human settlement. He left his belongings there and went to get some water, only to find a brown bear prowling around the cabin. The man panicked and ran into the woods, leaving his guns behind. He only notified the local police about the incident after several days of searching for the weapons to no avail. For all we know, the furry offender may now be roaming the taiga with a Vepr carbine and an IZH shotgun in tow.

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There’s strange eating habits and then there’s crazy eating habits. Sometimes the latter can be life-threatening, as in the case of 35-year-old Maksud Khan. The Indian man was recently admitted into hospital on suspicions of having severe food poisoning, but as it turned out, his three months of stomach pains were the result of having seven kilos (15.4 pounds) of foreign objects in his belly, including 263 metal coins.

The doctors who took Khan’s case got a massive shock when an endoscopy revealed that food poisoning had nothing to do with the problem. The surgeons at Satna’s Sanjay Gandhi Hospital in the state of Madhya Pradesh rushed Khan to the operating room and proceeded to extract 263 coins, 100 nails, a hefty piece of rusted iron shackle, dozens of razor blades, glass shards, and stones from his stomach.

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A new Chinese app called Miao A or “Seconds” allows celebrities and socialites to sell their time to fans, by the second. The unusual service has recently come under scrutiny, however, as investors are also able to buy and trade celebrity time, causing the app to operate as an illegal stock exchange.

The Beijing-based app describes itself as the first time-trading platform that helps fans get access to their favorite celebs. The company buys time in bulk from stars or their agents and then sells it in one-second packets to the public. The platform charges a 3% service fee on all exchanges, and all transactions managed through the Chinese online payment platform NetEase. An average month sees an exchange of 300 to 400 million yuan ($45-60 million) worth of celebrities’ time.

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Emigration is a big problem nowadays, and even breathtakingly beautiful mountain villages in Switzerland are not immune to its bite. But that doesn’t mean they are willing to give up without a fight. Just look at Albinen, where the local council will vote soon on proposals that could save it from extinction.

Exactly how does a shrinking mountain village plan to ensure its survival? Well, the 240-member community in the canton of Valais is betting that the gift of 70,000 Swiss francs (about US$71,000) will lure outsiders into settling there. The amount above is what the village will pay to a family of four willing to move to Albinen. Adults stand to receive 25,000 francs and the allotment per child is 10,000 francs.

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A Malaysian man is protesting what he claims was an unjust termination from oil giant Chevron Malaysia Limited (Caltex) by supergluing his hand to their headquarters floor.

Fadzilah Abdul Hamid worked as a Caltex petrol station operator for the past 17 years at two sites in Kelana Jaya and Kampung Subang, Selangor, until being served an unexpected notice in May ordering him to vacate both locations within 30 days. The letter claimed that his termination was due to unpaid charges outlined on a circular regarding the Implementation of Self-Service at Petrol Stations.

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Pakistani actress Irtiza Rubab, 40, known by her stage name Meera, has spent the past seven years entangled in a court case over whether or not she is married.

Meera is best known for her commercially successful and critically acclaimed Pakistani films, as well as making forays into Bollywood. She is also famed for her social media presence, mainly her videos and her presentation style. Recently, however, she has been making headlines for a different reason, a bizarre court battle against a man alleging to be her husband.

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Photos of 40-year-old Kiyenia Booker and her two teenage daughters have recently went viral on social media, because people just can’t tell which one’s the mother.

Booker, from Nova Scotia, has been posting pics of herself and her two daughters – K’Lienya, 18, and Kolieya, 16 – on her popular Instagram account for a while now, but things got crazy a few days ago, after she shared a collage of photos from when her girls were very young compared to now. It showed just how much the girls had grown, but people couldn’t help noticing how Kiyenia didn’t seem to have aged at all in the years that passed between the two photos.

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Gun violence is a very serious issue on the streets of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, so much so that people have begun using a smartphone app similar to the popular “Waze”, only instead of heavy traffic, they’re trying to avoid gun fire.

Rio de Janeiro is facing a crisis of gun violence, as police raids and shootouts between drug gangs echo daily through the streets of Brazil’s second largest city. Civilians are continuously caught and killed in the crossfires, with harrowing stories, such as that of a pregnant woman being shot in the stomach, continually emerging from the beleaguered city. The hardest hit area is the Maré complex of poor favela neighborhoods, the residents of which fear even walking down the street, both at night and during the day.

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Ten of the twelve water companies operating in the UK have recently admitted to using the medieval practice of water dowsing to locate pipes or underground water sources, despite the lack of any scientific evidence proving its effectiveness. Numerous studies have, in fact, discredited dowsing as pseudoscience after multiple experiments failed to demonstrate its eficacy. The disclosure that the firms are still using the practice, and passing the cost on to their customers, has prompted calls for The Water Services Regulation Authority, or Ofwat, to intervene.

Dowsers claim that their divining rods, two bent pieces of metal – typically copper or silver – cross over each other to make an X when they detect the presence of water below ground. Despite the claim being long discredited, some water companies insist that the practice is as effective as modern methods, such as drones or satellites.

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Dutch beachcomber Wim Kruiswijk has amassed a collection of 1200 messages-in-bottles over the course of 34 years and has responded to almost all of them.

68-year-old Kruiswijk says that his unusual hobby began in 1983 when he found three bottles on his local beach, each containing letters and return addresses. He wrote to all three addresses and was surprised to receive responses from each one. It was this experience which sparked his interest in hunting and collecting messages in bottles, and he hasn’t stopped looking for them since.

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A woman in Thailand was left unable to recognize her 22-year-old son after he underwent a drastic plastic surgery makeover in South Korea for a popular television show. Looking at the man’s before and after pictures, who can really blame her?

Noppajit Monlin, a 22-year-old factory worker from Thailand, had always been ashamed of his twisted jaw, blemished complexion and his other facial imperfections. At work, he avoided his colleagues as much as possible, eating his lunch alone, instead of joining them, for fear of being laughed at or having to put up with their stares. So when he got selected for the Thai edition of “Let Me In”, a popular South Korean TV show that focuses on extreme plastic surgery transformations, he knew he had a chance to drastically change his life for the better.

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Blue eyes have historically been a significant measure of attractiveness, and although they’re commonly found among actors and models, only 17% of the global population has them. For the majority of people, approximately 80% of the population, blue eyes have been attainable only with the aid of colored contact lenses or artificial iris implants. But that will soon change with the introduction of a new medical procedure, pioneered by California company Stroma Medical, that can turn brown eyes blue.

The laser procedure works by eliminating the melanin -, the pigment that also colors hair and skin – from the surface of the iris, which then allows light to enter and scatter in the stroma, the fibers seen in light-colored eyes. The effect is similar to Rayleigh scattering, in which wavelengths of sunlight hit much smaller molecules in the air and then scatter, which makes the atmosphere appear blue.

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If you’ve been having trouble finding the right cocktail to suite your taste, look no further than the Vockatil, a high-tech cocktail glass that relies on three layers of sensory stimulation to trick your senses into thinking that the plain water you’re sipping is the most amazing thing you’ve ever tasted.

The Vocktail – short for virtual cocktail – glass technically lets you turn water into wine, or pretty much any other drink imaginable. It accomplishes this messianic miracle through multisensory stimulation, essentially tricking your eyes, nose and taste buds that you’re consuming something completely different. The revolutionary glass comes equipped with LED lights that allow you to change the color of the drink, sliver electrodes on the rim of the glass which stimulate the tongue so that it tastes the liquid as salty, sweet or sour, and three micro air pumps equipped with flavor cartridges, which are activated when a person sips from the glass, fooling their nose into detecting a far greater variety of subtle flavors.

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