Humans have back pain ‘because we're not from this planet’
And other stories from the stranger side of life

Humans suffer from back pain because we are an alien race from another planet, according to a scientist. Dr Ellis Silver says the human race was transplanted between 60,000 and 200,000 years ago from another star system – Alpha Centauri. Our original planet had lower gravity, which means our backs are prone to pain in our new home of Earth, he explain.
Man finds tooth growing in nostril
A man with a blocked nose was stunned to discover that the cause was a tooth growing in his nostril. Zhang Binsheng had been struggling to breathe out of his nose for three months when he went to the doctors. An X-ray discovered that a tooth, which had been knocked out of his mouth in an accident 20 years previously, had lodged itself in his nose and taken root.
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Message in a bottle reply arrives nine years on
A Massachusetts teenager who threw a message in a bottle into the Atlantic Ocean when he was 10 has received a reply from a French man nine years later. Max Vredenburgh said: “When I first read his letter, my heart, my stomach just dropped. I was like, ‘Oh my God. My 10-year-old wish just came true.’”
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