23-year-old Luiz Augusto Márcio Marques stopped growing after undergoing a surgical procedure to remove a very rare and aggressive tumor. Today he looks like a 13-year-old boy.

Luiz, who is better known as Guto in his native city of Passo Fundo, in Southern Brazil, had a perfectly normal life until the age of 7, when he started experiencing excruciating headaches that began manifesting more frequently as time passed. None of the doctors his parents took him to could diagnose his condition correctly, and the headaches started affecting his school activity and his daily life. Some claimed that it was just a virus, while others said that it was a psychological condition, or that he was just making everything up because he was lazy. It was only after the boy suffered a seizure that he was taken to the city hospital where the real cause of his headaches was finally revealed…

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Fran Mariano, an Argentinian fan of Latino superstar Ricky Martin, has undergone dozens of different cosmetic procedures in an attempt to copy the look of his idol.

Ricky Martin is one of the biggest names in the entertainment industry. He is a global icon with millions of fans all over the world, but few as obsessed as Fran Mariano, an Argentinian man who has been trying to become a ‘clone’ of Ricky Marin ever since the Puerto Rican singer was named one of the sexiest 100 men one the world. He has been trying all kinds of ways to transform himself into Ricky Martin, including having motor oil injected into his eyebrows, as well as dozens of other procedures that have left him with serious physical and psychological sequelae.

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Four siblings, aged 13, 9, 5, and 1, miraculously survived a plane crash in one of the most remote areas of Colombia, and then 40 days alone in the Amazon jungle.

On May 1st, 2023, a small Cessna 206 airplane en route to San Jose de Guaviare suffered an engine failure and crashed deep in one of Colombia’s most remote and dangerous regions. Three adults, including the pilot, died in the crash, but the four children on board miraculously survived. However, they were stranded with little to no supplies, in a jungle filled with dangerous snakes, spiders, and mosquitoes, where members of the ex-Farc military group are still active. For 40 days, thousands of volunteers searched for the siblings, and the hope of them being found alive kept millions of Colombians on the tip of their feet. Last week, the miracle everyone was waiting for materialized – the children were found alive and well in a jungle clearing.

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A Chinese mountain climber recently sparked controversy after reportedly refusing to pay the $10,000 resue fee of the sherpa who found her unconscious on Mount Everest.

On May 18, while making the climb up Mount Everest, Chinese mountain climber Fan Jiangtao stumbled upon an unconscious woman in her 50s. An experienced mountain climber herself, the woman had reportedly reached the summit and was on her way back to base camp when she started experiencing health problems. Fan and the sherpa decided to abandon their goal of conquering Everest in order to take Luo back to the base camp safely. During their descent, they met Xie Ruxiang, a Hunan Provincial Mountain Climbing Association member, who also abandoned his climb in order to help. His sherpa, however, was reluctant to join them, but they needed the extra hands so Xie promised him a fee of $10,000, to which the man agreed. No one asked the person being rescued, though…

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Created by Brazilian flip-flop brand Brizza, in collaboration with Pedigree and advertising agency Mirum Brazil, the world’s first unchewable flip-flops are made with the most bitter substance known to man.

Dogs’ love for chewing footwear is well documented. Pups do it to release pain as their teeth grow, other dogs do it out of boredom or some form of stress, and some just like chewing stuff. While most times we see humorous depictions of pooches ruining their owners’ shoes, the reality is that this habit puts them at risk of very serious gastrointestinal problems. Data shows that in a third of gastrointestinal surgery procedures to foreign objects from the intestines of dogs, the ingested substance is footwear rubber, mostly from flip-flops. Seeing as this can cause life-threatening problems for the poor animals., flip-flop brand Brizza decided to create the world’s first unchewable flip-flops.

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A scandal known as ‘Rat Head Gate’ has been getting a lot of attention on Chinese social media after a student found what looks like a rat head in their cafeteria meal. The school claims it’s actually a duck head.

The incident reportedly occurred last week at the cafeteria of the Jiangxi Vocational Technical College of Industry Trade in Nanchang, China. While eating their lunch, a student found what looked like a rat’s head in their bowl of rice and pulled out their phone to record the discovery. They then confronted the cafeteria staff about it but were told that it wasn’t a rat’s head, but a duck’s head. The latter, along with duck necks are an important part of Chinese cuisine, but it wasn’t what the student had ordered, and it certainly didn’t look like a duck…

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A rare condition called déjà vécu has been causing an 80-year-old man to perceive every event in his life as a previous experience, similar to the time loop described in the movie Groundhog Day.

Can you imagine watching TV and seeing the same thing over and over again, or trying to read a new book only to find yourself looking at the same pages you read the day before? How about driving and seeing the same cars behind you every day, or walking past the same people as you’re strolling down the street? It sounds like an eerie experience worthy of shows like The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror, but it’s actually the life of people suffering from an extremely rare condition known as déjà vécu. Believed to be a complication of Alzheimer’s disease, déjà vécu is the persistent impression that any new encounters are just repetitions of previous experiences.

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Mexican authorities are still struggling to find answers to the seemingly unexplained fainting of hundreds of middle school students all over the country in the fall of last year.

On September 23, 2022, 12 students (11 girls and 1 boy) at the Federal 1 public secondary school in Tapachula, Mexico spontaneously collapsed in their classrooms, in the bathrooms, and in the school courtyard. Another 22 middle school students reported symptoms like severe headaches and vomiting. Interestingly, some of the affected students reported smelling something smoky in the air, like the scent of burning leaves, which led investigators to believe that drugs like marijuana had probably been to blame, but tests came back negative. Other students reported seeing a mustard-color powder in the bathroom on that day, but toxicology analysis again revealed nothing of interest. Eventually, doctors concluded that the kids had suffered panic attacks, but in the following days, similar incidents started being reported at other schools across Mexico…

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Locals in the Indian state of Maharashtra were shocked to discover that their newly-laid road was actually just a carpet with a thin layer of asphalt poured over it.

According to the Lokmat Times, the people of Karjat-Hast Pokhari, a village in Maharashtra’s Jalna district, had long been pleading with elected representatives to rebuild their poor roads, and last month, their prayers were finally answered. Or, at least, that’s what they originally thought when they saw the layer of asphalt covering their dirt roads. Only their joy was short-lived, as it soon became clear that the company in charge of the project did a very shady job, laying a very thin layer of asphalt over a carpet-like canvas that could easily be lifted from the dirt base with little effort.

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A Belgian company has developed a water processing installation that allows it to convert pig’s blood into water fit for human consumption.

Based in Zwevezele, West Flanders, Veos specializes in producing animal proteins for the food industry by processing animal blood and collagen into high-quality protein powder used in human and animal food products. Until recently, the company relied solely on large quantities of groundwater to clean the massive tanks it stored pig blood in, but, thanks to a €2 million investment in a state-of-the-art water purification installation, Veos can actually use the stored pig blood to make drinkable water.

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A 57-year-old Nashville man claims that he has managed to lose 60 lbs (27kg) of body weight by eating McDonald’s fast food three times a day for 100 days straight.

If you’re trying to lose weight, fast food is probably the first thing you cut out, but one Nashville grandfather’s dieting experiment will probably make you see things from a totally different perspective. 57-year-old Kevin Maginnis had been doing a media tour explaining how he managed to lose a considerable amount of body weight by eating McDonald’s Big Macs, quarter-pounders, french fries, and apple fritters three times a day for 100 days straight. Maginnis also claims that the unusual diet also helped him bring down his cholesterol, blood sugar, as well as his heart attack risk rating. And all he did was cut the portions he ate in half…

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An Indian IT company recently sparked outrage online after it was reported that one of its managers ordered the exit of the office building padlocked to prevent employees from leaving without his permission.

A video of a security worker using heavy chains and large padlocks to seal off the exit of the Coding Ninjas office building in Gurugram, India, recently went viral on Twitter. In it, the guard claims that he had been directed by one ‘Anurag sir’, later identified as a manager with the company, to lock the exit to ensure no one can leave without his express permission. The video sparked outrage and once again brought issues like employee exploitation and a degrading working environment into the spotlight. As for the company, it recently issued a statement acknowledging the incident, describing it as an ‘anomaly’ rectified ‘within minutes’ of its occurrence.

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A 19-year-old Colombian pregnant woman who claims to have never been intimate with a man insists that she was impregnated by an ‘evil spirit’.

The young woman recently sparked controversy on Latino social media after telling TV Malambo, a local media outlet in Colombia, that she believes she was impregnated by a supernatural force. The unnamed woman said that after experiencing strange dreams and feeling supernatural presences in her room, she started missing her period and her mother took her to a gynecologist for a checkup. That’s when the 19-year-old ‘virgin’, who claims to have never slept with a man, found out that she was pregnant.

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A Brazilian doctor recently lost his job after allegedly prescribing chocolate ice cream and video games to a 9-year-old with a sore throat and flu-like symptoms.

On May 18th, Priscila da Silva Ramos, a 37-year-old mother from Osasco, in Greater São Paulo, took her 9-year-old child for a checkup at a state-owned clinic, after he started feeling sick and started vomiting. She claims that the doctor there was very unprofessional, asking her if she had looked at her child’s throat, but not bothering to do it himself. Instead of actually examining the minor, the unnamed doctor allegedly started writing a prescription for drugs like amoxicillin, ibuprofen, dipyrone, prednisolone, and N-acetylcysteine, as well as ice cream and daily sessions of gaming.

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A Japanese YouTuber recently sparked controversy by posting a video of himself cooking and eating a broth made with dozens of man-o-war jellyfish for his over one million subscribers.

Popular Japanese YouTuber ‘homosapi’ (ホモサピ) has been criticized as irresponsible for trivializing the cooking and consumption of one of the most dangerous marine organisms in the world, the Portuguese man-o-war. Commonly referred to as a jellyfish, the man-o-war is actually a marine hydrozoan, an organism made up of smaller units called ‘zooids’ which are genetically identical but perform different functions. It has been known to deliver a painful sting powerful enough to kill many animals, and occasionally even humans. It’s one of the last things you’d want to come close to, let alone eat, but hey, anything for views, right?

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