Isamu Tomioka met his wife, Midori, when he was still in school. She was the mother of one of his classmates and 21 years his senior, but he didn’t let that stop him from marrying her.

Isamu and Midori’s unusual love story went viral in Japan after the Shizuoka couple spoke about their relationship on a popular television show. The 32-year-old man said that he first saw Midori at a parent-teacher at his school when he was a minor. She was the mother of one of his classmates, and he recalls thinking that the woman was very beautiful. When they met again, 20 years later, he was attracted by the woman’s mature and dignified look and contacted his ex-classmate in order to get close to her. Midori rejected his advances at first, thinking that the significant age difference made them incompatible, but she was eventually overwhelmed by his persistence and grew to like him too.

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Buriticupu, a town of roughly 55,000 people located in the Brazilian Amazon, risks being swallowed by giant ravines that have been growing “exponentially” over the last few months.

Authorities in Buriticupu have already evacuated 1,200 people from the highest-risk areas of the town, but with no solution in sight, the giant ravines threaten to eventually swallow the entire settlement. Buriticupu’s sinkhole problem dates back roughly three decades and is reportedly the cause of a combination of factors, such as erosion-prone sandy soil, poor urban planning, and deforestation, but it has been exacerbated by recent heavy rains which caused the sinkholes to expand at a rapid pace. A couple of years ago, experts identified 26 giant holes advancing toward the town, some of which have since merged to create ravines up to 20 meters deep.

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Mzee Ernesto Muinuchi Kapinga, a man from a small village in Tanzania, has a very special family. He is married to 16 women, has over 100 children, and a whopping 144 grandchildren.

These days, many men struggle with the idea of starting a family and having children, as even one extra mouth to feed feels like too much pressure. Taking care of more than two or three children is unthinkable for the vast majority of young people, but then you have guys like Mzee Ernesto Muinuchi Kapinga who dedicate their lives to expanding their families as much as possible. Hailing from a small village in Njombe, Tanzania, the African man currently has 16 wives, 104 children, and 144 grandchildren. His homestead looks like a small village, featuring a house for every one of his wives, and people running around everywhere doing chores, and looking after dozens of mall children.

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A Chinese woman subjected her fiancee to simulated childbirth pain for three hours as a sick pre-marriage test that caused the man to develop intestine necrosis and undergo emergency surgery.

It’s not uncommon for people to test their partners in various ways to see if they are right for each other, but some people take it a bit to far. Case in point, one young woman from Henan Province, China, who reportedly subjected her fiancee to three hours of electric shocks to the stomach as a twisted way of simulating the pain of childbirth. It’s unclear why the man accepted the test, or of he had any idea what he was getting into, but he clearly didn’t expect to develop intestine necrosis and have to get emergency surgery because of it. The horrific experience convinced him to not only break off the engagement but also sue the woman he was going tot marry for damages.

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A Turkish man who lost his home to a massive earthquake in 2023 has been living alone in a small cave for two years because he considers it safer than any man-made structure.

In February 2023, Southern Turkey was rocked by a Mw 7.8 earthquake that claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people and turned entire neighborhoods into rubble. Ali Bozoğlan, a father of three from the southern province of Hatay, lost his home to the February 6th earthquake and its aftershocks. Even though he and his family survived unscathed, Ali became so terrified of earthquakes that he decided he didn’t want to live in a man-made building anymore. Instead, he found a small and peaceful cave on the outskirts of his city and turned it into a cozy home. Although unable to convince his family to join him in his unusual home, Ali claims he is happy and at peace.

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A US woman is taking legal action against a fertility clinic after an error essentially made her an unwitting surrogate, carrying and eventually another couple’s baby, and having to give up custody.

The day Krystena Murray learned that she was pregnant after undergoing IVF treatment at the Coastal Fertility clinic in May 2023 was one of the happiest of her life, but that happiness soon turned to horror when she gave birth in December of that same year. Despite being white and having chosen a white sperm donor, Krystena gave birth to a black boy. She didn’t allow her family and friends to see that baby, and in January of last year, a DNA test confirmed that she and the baby were not genetically related. Murrya alerted the IVF clinic about the terrible mixup, but decided to keep the baby and even got to raise it for a few months until his biological parents filed for custody.

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A Frenchman appealed to the homeless thieves who stole his credit card to buy a jackpot-winning scratch lottery ticket, offering to split the €500,000 jackpot with them.

They say every misfortune can be a blessing in disguise, and that certainly seems to hold true for a Toulouse man who had his credit card stolen earlier this month and now stands to pocket over $250,000 because of it. On February 3rd, Jean David discovered that the backpack containing his wallet had been stolen from his car, but before he could contact the bank to block all his credit cards, someone used one of them to make a €52.50 ($55) purchase at a local convenience store. Upon visiting the store, the man learned that the two men who had used his credit card appeared to be homeless and attracted the cashier’s attention because they didn’t seem to know the PIN code of one of the cards they attempted to use. Jean David was also shocked to learn that one of the scratch lottery tickets the two thieves had purchased was worth €500,000 ($525,000).

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An Australian high school teacher has come under fire from concerned parents for allegedly identifying as cat and acting weird in front of students.

Australian media have been reporting on the bizarre case of a teacher at Marsden State High School in Logan City, Queensland, who reportedly asked students to refer to her as “Ms. Purr”, allegedly hissing at students and licking the back of her hand. Photos of the unnamed teacher show her wearing a cat-ear headband and a lanyard that reads “purr” in class, which further fueled parents’ concerns that she was behaving inappropriately in class. One parent claimed that the teacher made her daughter purr for a lollypop, while another said that the teacher growled at students if they weren’t paying attention in class.

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A team of Chinese plastic surgeons recently reported the bizarre case of a 33-year-old woman who had lost no less than five contact lenses behind her left eye.

The patient, referred to only as Ms. A, arrived at the Plastic Surgery Hospital of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, in Beijing, to have her hemifacial atrophy treated in order to improve her facial symmetry. The initial examination results showed that the left side of her face was atrophied and her left eyeball was slightly sunken. After carefully examining the woman’s face, the medical team decided to use autologous fat grafting to mitigate the effects of her condition. What they didn’t count on was finding not one but five different contact lenses while grafting fat into the empty space behind the eyeball. She told doctors that she had lost several contact lenses in the past few months, but never imagined they were stuck in her eye.

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A 55-year-old woman tragically had both her hands bitten off by a shark she was trying to photograph while on vacation in the Turks and Caicos islands.

The Canadian woman was reportedly trying to photograph a 6-foot-long shark in the shallow waters at a beach in the Turks and Caicos Islands when the marine predator attacked her. Alerted by her screams, the unnamed woman’s husband rushed into the water and bravely managed to scare the shark away and bring the victim ashore, but she had already suffered severe damage to both her hands. The attack occurred on February 7 and the victim was treated at a hospital before leaving the island for better medical care. Unfortunately, doctors could do nothing to save her mangled hands, both of which needed to be amputated.

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Many people struggle to hike using their legs, but one Chinese man has become famous for climbing his country’s most popular mountains on his hands.

38-year-old Sun Guo Shan only started practicing handstand climbing in May of 2023, but last year he embarked on a monumental challenge – to climb the 50 most popular mountains in China by Spring 2025. Previously employed in the education system, Sun realized the importance of health during the COVID-19 pandemic and decided to convey a message of health training but also honor his country’s mountainous scenic spots in a unique way. Sun Guo Shan began his unusual challenge in May 2024, but he only went viral in November 2024, when a clip of him tackling Haibat – the highest peak of Wudang Mountain at 1,612 meters – using his hands went viral.

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For more than a year, at the start of every month, the people of Beeston, a town in the United Kingdom, have been finding a plate of peeled bananas in exactly the same place.

Between the first and second day of each month, a plate stacked with 16 to 20 peeled bananas always shows up on the corner of Abbey Road and Wensor Avenue in Beeston and residents have no idea who is behind the strange custom or its meaning. All everyone can say is that the banks have been appearing in the same spot for more than a year, and despite several signs asking whoever puts them there to stop, it doesn’t look like the mysterious fruit is going away anytime soon. Some have speculated that the plate of honey-drizzled bananas has some sort of religious meaning, while others believe that it’s just someone feeding the local wildlife, although no animal ever touches them. So far, no one has come up with a real answer to this quirky mystery.

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A Singaporean man got fined thousands of dollars for forging his grandfather’s death certificate so he could get paid leave from his workplace.

Earlier this month, 29-year-old Barath Gopal was fined $4,000 after pleading guilty to forging a relative’s death certificate with the intention to commit fraud. In November 2023, while working as a security financing operation analyst, Gopal learned that his then-girlfriend had cheated on him and he was allegedly so devastated that he couldn’t focus on his job. But instead of applying for one of the several days of annual leave offered by his employer, the Singaporean asked for paid compassionate leave from Nov 8 to Nov 10, claiming that his grandfather in India had died in his sleep. His request was granted, but when his supervisor asked for his grandparent’s death certificate, things got complicated.

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Scientists at China’s Zhejiang University recently announced that their Black Panther robot has achieved a constant speed of 10 meters per second, a world record for quadruped robots.

Black Panther has been in development at Zhejiang University’s Hangzhou International Science and Technology Innovation Center since 2018, but over the first six years, scientists struggled to exceed the speed of 6 meters per second. In early experiments, once the robot went over this speed threshold, it suffered severe damage, such as ruptured “calves” and in some cases, the entire torso disintegrated. However, after numerous trials and attempts to mimic the joint and muscle structures of various animals and even humans, researchers managed to make important modifications, such as adding springs between the leg joints to cushion impact, and earlier this year Black Panther reached a record speed of 10m/s.

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An Italian doctor is currently being investigated for using hospital equipment to diagnose his injured pet cat and then operating on her in order to save her life.

Gianluca Fanelli , head of the simple structure of Interventional Radiology and Neuroradiology at the Parini Hospital in Aosta, Italy, recently split his home country into two camps – one that considers him a hero who values life over rules and regulations, and another that thinks he should face the consequences for knowingly breaking the rules of his workplace. On the evening of January 27, after taking his injured cat to a veterinarian and receiving a dire diagnosis, the radiologist took his feline, Athena, to Parini Hospital and put in the CT scanner to get an idea of the internal organ damage she had suffered. He then performed pneumothoracic surgery on her in the unit’s angiography room in order to save her life.

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