Shikoku Bank’s leadership has come up with a bizarre way of reassuring clients of its commitment – promising to pay with their lives if found guilty of ‘financial irregularities’.

Banking executives are always held to high ethical standards, considering that they handle the wealth of thousands, sometimes millions of people, but while they face serious punishment in case of fraud or embezzlement, they aren’t quite expected to pay with their lives. That is not the case with the management of Shikoku Bank, a financial institution whose top 23 executives, including President Miura, signed a blood oath requiring them to commit seppuku if found guilty of engaging in financial irregularities, embezzlement or other fraudulent activities. Rooted in the code of honor of Japan’s samurai era, the bizarre pledge posted on Shikoku Bank’s website went viral sparking reactions varying from admiration to disbelief.

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Chinese robotics company Robot Era recently unveiled Star1, the world’s fastest bipedal robot capable of reaching and maintaining speeds of up to 8 mph (12.98 km/h).

Photos and videos of a sneaker-wearing robot running through the Gobi Desert went viral on Chinese social media last month, inspiring all sorts of humorous comments from the public, but few people realized they were watching the world’s fastest humanoid robot in action. Developed by Robot Era, a Chinese robotics company, STAR1 is powered by high-torque motors and AI algorithms and can tackle all sorts of surfaces and environments, including sand and grassland. Its advanced motors help the robot move efficiently, while high-speed sensors and communication modules let it process information about its surroundings in real-time, but what really helps put it above other bipedal robots in terms of speed is old-fashioned human footwear.

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A 26-year-old South Korean man was recently sentenced to one year in prison for deliberately binge eating in order to become obese and be declared unfit for mandatory military service.

Military service is no trivial matter in South Korea. It doesn’t matter if you’re a globally-known singer, a successful actor, or a billionaire; if you’re a healthy adult male between the ages of 18 and 35, you have to spend at least 21 months in the army. The most you can do is postpone the compulsory service, but you’ll have to go through it at some point. However, if you are declared unfit for service because of health issues, you’re off the hook. One young South Korean man allegedly tried to avoid serving in the military by binge eating and becoming obese. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out quite as he had planned and he now has to spend a year behind bars.

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A 33-year-old Japanese man has been getting a lot of attention for his ingenious way of putting a roof over his head – asking total strangers to let him sleep over.

Shuraf Ishida has slept in over 500 different homes over the last five years. After quitting his job, he decided to sell all his belongings except for a few essentials that fit into his backpack and travel around Japan using his savings. Normally, accommodation would have ranked highest on his list of expenses, but the 33-year-old man found an ingenious way of putting a roof over his head for free. Every day, Ishida stands in crowded areas sometimes for hours at a time, holding up a sign that reads “Please Let Me Stay Over Tonight!” As weird as it sounds, he almost always finds someone willing to take him in, mostly lonely homeowners in need of someone to talk to.

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Ligament tears occur about 60 milliseconds, but a startup claims to have created a knee airbag that inflates in just 30 milliseconds, enough to prevent ACL and MCL injuries.

Hippos, a startup founded by Kylin Shaw and Bhavy Metakar, recently raised a $642,000 pre-seed round from investors Possible Ventures and Silicon Roundabout Ventures for their revolutionary “knee sleeve,” a sort of high-tech airbag for the knee that uses sensors to rapidly detect incoming stress and deploy tiny air canisters that fill up small airbags around the knee, thus preventing critical injuries. It only takes 30 milliseconds for the knee airbag to inflate, considerably faster than the 60 milliseconds that ACL injuries typically occur in. If the device works as presented by the company, it could save athletes thousands of dollars in medical expenses and much more in inactivity.

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Axel Pons, formerly a competitor in the Moto2 World Championship, changed up his lifestyle dramatically six years ago when he decided to travel the world barefoot.

Son of the legendary Sito Pons, two-time MotoGP winner, Axel Pons had a lot to live up to early in his career as a motorcycle racer. Expectations were very high, but so was the pressure on his shoulders, and despite some promising results in the Moto2 World Championship – a 16th place finish in the 2016 season being the apex of his racing career – he decided to take a break from motorcycle racing and focus on fashion. He did some work as a fashion model, then disappeared only to resurface in 2019 to do an interview with Spanish newspaper El Pais in which he said he wanted to slow down and put his past life behind him. But no one expected the kind of change that was coming.

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Osaka-based showerhead maker Science Co. has developed a cutting-edge washing machine for humans aptly named “Mirai Ningen Sentakuki” (Human Washing Machine of the Future).

At the 1970 Osaka Kansai Expo, Japanese tech giant Sanyo Electric Co., now Panasonic Holdings Corp., launched the world’s first-ever human washing machine. Its futuristic egg shape and bubble technology captured people’s imagination and drew huge crowds to the manufacturer’s booth. Yasuaki Aoyama was one of the many people who got to see Sanyo’s washing machine in action. He was only a curious fourth-grader at the time, but the feeling of awe stuck with him all through adulthood, and today, as the chairman of Science Co., a company specializing in bathtubs and showerheads, he is preparing to launch his very own modern washing machine for humans.

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A middle-aged Russian man suffering from diabetes and poor blood clotting tragically lost his life after being scratched on the leg by his pet cat.

On November 22, Dmitry Ukhin, a 55-year-old man from the Kirishi district, in Russia’s Leningrad region, went looking for his pet cat Styopka around the neighborhood. The feline had an independent streak and liked nothing more than to walk around the neighborhood freely. Eyewitnesses later told police that Ukhin found his beloved pet and took it home with him, but couldn’t really explain why or how the cat scratched his leg so badly that he bled to death in a matter of minutes.

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The newly-opened Surat Diamond Bourse in Gujarat, India, is a massive office complex made up of nine rectangular buildings interconnected through a central “spine”.

For 80 years, the Pentagon held the title of the world’s largest building, but it was recently dethroned by the Surat Diamond Bourse, a massive diamond-cutting and trading hub, that exceeds the Pentagon’s area of 66,73,624 sqft by almost 55,000 sqft. The sprawling 15-story complex covers more than 35 acres of land on the outskirts of Surat, in India’s Gujarat state and features over 4,700 office spaces and workshops, as well as 131 large elevators that make traveling between the nine buildings of the Surat Diamond Bourse a breeze. Interestingly, surpassing the Pentagon was never the plan; instead, Indian architecture firm Morphogenesis just struggled to meet the huge demand for space.

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Laibo 2, a quadruped robot developed in South Korea, has become the first robot to ever complete a full marathon on a single charge after running the 42.195-km Sangju Dried Persimmon Marathon.

Developed by Professor Hwangbo Je-min and his team at the Korea Advanced Insitute of Science and Technology, Laibo 2 is an advanced quadruped robot designed with a focus on endurance. It recently became the first robot to run a full marathon after completing the 22nd Sangju Dried Persimmon Marathon in Sangju, South Korea with a respectable time of 4 hours, 19 minutes, and 52 seconds, on a single charge. The 42-kg robot had to navigate difficult terrain, including two relatively steep hills, gauge its distance from the other runners, and maintain course, all the while mitigating power consumption to ensure it reached the finish line.

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A fluffy Pomeranian is lucky to be alive after miraculously serving a fall from the 12th floor of an apartment building in Cali, Colombia, onto the roof of an adjacent three-storey building.

On November 19, a Colombian family experienced moments of terror after realizing that their pet Pomeranian was nowhere to be found in their 12th-floor apartment in the city of Cali. They looked everywhere for him, and when it became clear that he was not in the house, they decided to check the windows, and that’s when they spotted a small hole in the roof of an adjacent building, three floors below. Using a pair of binoculars, the desperate dog’s owners could spot their beloved Paris through the small hole. The floor that Paris had been spotted on was locked, so his owners immediately called the local fire department to have the pooch rescued. Miraculously, he was found alive and well, with not so much as a scratch on him.

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A Wisconsin man who had been missing since August after going kayaking on Green Lake recently resurfaced to confess to faking his death and moving to Eastern Europe.

On August 12, the tranquility of the town of Watertown, Wisconsin, was shattered by the disappearance of Ryan Borgwardt, a 44-year-old husband and father of three. Borgwardt had gone on a short kayaking trip on Green Lake but disappeared completely, and an emergency search found his capsized kayak on the lake and his vehicle and trailer in a nearby park, suggesting that he had fallen in the lake and drowned. A day later, local fishermen found Ryan’s fishing rod and then a tacklebox containing his belongings. All the signs pointed to Borgwardt’s accidental demise, but then, one day, during the investigation that followed, local law enforcement found evidence that suggested Ryan had crossed into Canada, and border authorities there confirmed that they had indeed run his passport a day after his disappearance. It was this discovery that led to the uncovering of Ryan Borgwardt’s elaborate plan to fake his death and leave his family behind.

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A Belarusian blogger managed to convince dozens of Russian teachers to make and wear tinfoil hats as means of protection against radiation from NATO satellites.

Vladislav Bokhan, a Belarussian blogger and activist known for his elaborate pranks, made headlines earlier this month when he released several photos of dozens of Russian teachers wearing tinfoil hats decorated with the Russian flag. He reportedly contacted multiple schools in Russia’s Voronezh region, introducing himself as an official from the local branch of United Russia (the country’s ruling party), and ordered them to hold a patriotic master class called “Helmet of the Fatherland.” Bokhan demanded that teachers working at these schools make tinfoil hats to “demonstrate their readiness to protect themselves from radiation from NATO satellites,” and to his surprise, seven of the schools he contacted actually followed his instructions without question.

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An entrepreneur and early crypto investor recently announced a public treasure hunt for five different treasure chests containing valuable items allegedly worth around $2 million.

Jon Collins-Black once dreamed of finding valuable treasure, but he managed to become rich by investing in Bitcoin early, so he has spent the last five years planning an epic treasure hunt for other treasure hunters. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the crypto investor started acquiring a collection of valuable items to fill five different treasure chests with before burying them at undisclosed locations across the US. None of the chests are on private property, so technically, anyone can find them, although Collins-Black points out that you need to follow a series of clues and have a sharp mind in order to find even one of the chests.

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An Indian family recently went viral for their decision to send their old Suzuki Wagon to the grave rather than the scrapyard in a lavish burial ceremony attended by around 1,500 people.

They say you shouldn’t get too attached to material possessions, but try telling that to the Polara family in Padarshinga Village, Gujarat, who recently said goodbye to their 18-year-old Suzuki Wagon R by laying it to rest in a lavish burial ceremony attended by over 1,500 locals. The Polara believed the popular hatchback to be their “lucky” car so they wanted to say goodbye to it properly, rather than abandoning it at a scrapyard after nearly two decades of faithful service. Patriarch Sanjay Polara told reporters that he owns several more expensive cars, including an Audi, but credits the old Wagon R for being instrumental in achieving prosperity for his family, so he wanted to do something special for it.

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