Chinese School’s Football Field Has a Tree Growing in the Middle of It

Students at Beijing’s Yucai High School have to be very careful when playing football on the school’s well-maintained field. That’s because it has a 100-year-old tree growing smack in the middle of it, and keeping their eye on the ball too much can result in a painful collision.

Building a football field around a tree sounds pretty stupid, but it’s not like the Chinese school had a choice. Yucai High School is reportedly surrounded by various historical buildings, and this was the only available space for a football field. Before starting work on site, the school did ask permission to have the tree transplanted someplace else, but they were notified that it was hundreds of years old, and considered a national treasure. Having it transplanted was considered too risky, so they were left with no choice but to build the field around it.

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This Designer Wants to Make Flashing LED Eyelashes a Thing

You probably never even knew you wanted colored LED eyelashes, but just look at the pretty lights. Yeah, you want them!

Swedish Arduino designer Tien Pham has been getting a lot of attention lately for an unusual tech-inspired beauty product – interactive LED eyelashes that stick to your eyelids with regular eyelash glue. Called F.Lashes, these eye-catching accessories come in pink, red, blue, light blue, white, yellow and green, and feature different lighting modes, like follow, where the lights follow the movements of your head, dance mode, where they just blink at short intervals when you move your body, and sparkle, with the LEDs lighting up individually to create a sparkle effect.

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Long-Term Gas Leak Makes Woman Allergic to Virtually Everything, Including People

After being exposed to a long-term gas leak in her home for a long period of time, a Los Angeles woman’s immune system turned against itself, making her allergic to food, water, clothing, technology with an electromagnetic field, and even people.

30-year-old Pilar Olave, a Chilean-born actress from Los Angeles, California, has been living in her room, isolated from the rest of the world, for the last two years. Due to severe allergies, coming into contact with certain chemicals, foods and bacteria that most of us carry around can trigger a variety of symptoms, like acute stomach pain, headaches, nausea, heart palpitations and tight chest. For now, Pilar can’t even kiss or touch her own husband, because her body is hypersensitive to bacteria.

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This Smartphone Case Doubles as an Espresso Machine

Mokase is the world’s first smartphone case that also serves users a warm shot of espresso whenever and wherever they want. It’s aimed at people who are always on the go, whose hectic lifestyle prevents them from stopping by a coffee shop or even a vending machine for a dose of caffeine.

Smart K, the Italian company that came up with the concept for Mokase, claims that they were looking for a way to make coffee available anywhere, and pairing it with the smartphone just made the most sense. “We thought, ‘how to make it always available? Why not join it to a gadget that is already a piece of our lifetime?’ the smartphone is the answer,” Smart K stated in a press release.

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13-Year-Old Japanese Girl Sparks Debate about Age in the Modelling Industry

Momoka Kurita made quite an impression when she posed as a “race queen” during a superbike racing event in Japan, last year. Adult men showered her with compliments for her stunning looks, but little did they know that she was just 12-years-old at the time, and still in elementary school.

Her appearance at the 2016 48th MFJ Grand Prix, in Suzuka, kickstarted Momoka’s modelling career, but it also sparked a heated online debated about age in the industry. While recognizing her stunning looks, many argued that dressing a 12-year-old child in a sexy attire and having her participate in an adult event was just wrong. Most of them blamed the parents, but the now 13-year-old girl claims that nobody forced her into it, and that her parents are just supportive of her dreams.

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Man Wins 23-Kilometer Race He Ran in His Socks

Ibrahim Mukunga Wachira, a 27-year-old marathon runner from Kenya, became an overnight sensation in the small Baltic country of Estonia, after winning the 35th annual Tartu Half-Marathon, a 23-kilometer race he ran in his socks.

Just last week, we wrote about the monumental achievement of María Lorena Ramírez, a native Rarámuri woman from Mexico, who won a 50-kilometer ultramarathon in rubber sandals made from used car tires and wearing a long traditional skirt. Today, we cover the amazing story of a man who not only won a 23-kilometer marathon in Estonia, but also set a new speed record, after running with no shoes on. It’s definitely an incredible time for sports, and running in particular.

 

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New Service Has Couples Walking Barefoot on Broken Glass on Their Wedding Day

Couples looking for a unique and unforgettable wedding day experience can now add walking barefoot on broken glass on their list of options. A Spanish company recently introduced the service as a metaphor for marriage.

Some people wouldn’t dare walk barefoot on pieces of broken glass even if somebody paid them to do it, but a Spanish company believes that couples will actually pay them for the opportunity to do exactly that on the day of their wedding. Wedding Glass is the first company in Spain, and probably the world, to offer walking on broken glass as a wedding ritual, but they believe that it will soon become a trend in the business, as couples these days are no longer happy with just the classic church ceremony and subsequent party.

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Mexican Woman Wearing Long Skirt and Rubber Sandals Wins 50 Km Ultramarathon

People usually train for years and invest in professional running gear just to be able to complete an ultramarathon, but María Lorena Ramírez, a native Rarámuri woman from Mexico who had not have any professional training or even basic gear, not only managed to finish a 50 km race, but actually win it. And she did it wearing a traditional long skirt and sandals made of recycled tire rubber.

High quality running shoes, compression socks, Lycra suits, energy drinks, all these are considered essential by most runners participating in an ultramarathon, but they were of no importance to 22-year-old María Lorena Ramírez, a sheep herder from Chihuahua, Mexico, who showed up at the starting line of a women’s ultramarathon in Puebla in traditional clothing and equipped with just a bottle of water and a handkerchief. She stood out like a sore thumb among the 500 or so other runners from 12 countries around the world, but she didn’t seem to care.

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The Eerie Tree Carvings of Perryville Park, in Maryland

Maryland’s Cecil County is home to many interesting parks, but none more mysterious and disturbing than the Perryville Community Park, in Perryville, where around 100 trees are marked by eerie messages left by patients from a veteran psychiatric and rehabilitation center, decades ago.

Before becoming a public park, the land was owned by the nearby Perry Point VA Hospital, and some of its former patients carved their disturbed thoughts into the trees. Over time, the words and drawings etched into the tree bark have grown larger, drawing the attention of curious passers-by. Interestingly, even though the mark trees of Perryville Community Park have become quite popular among fans of eerie tourist attractions, and even gotten their own Wikipedia entry, few residents of the Maryland town know about them and their history.

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Disabled Pensioner Dedicates His Life to Building Secure Mountain Roads for Isolated Village, Out of His Own Pocket

76-year-old Zhang Jiwen is almost completely deaf, but he has two able hands and a strong desire to help those less fortunate. Ever since 2012, he has been carrying building materials up a mountain in Fuling Forest Park, near the city of Chongqing, and building safe walking paths leading up from the modern road at the base all the way to an isolated village near the top. He has already completed a safe path a few hundred meters long and has started work on another leading to the water source of the village.

Zhang grew up in a village in the forests of Fuling, and even though he moved to the big city as an adult, he never forgot about his roots. When he heard about an isolated mountain village whose children had to come down precarious slopes in order to reach their school, he decided that he just had to help. For the past five years he has been taking a bus from his home in Chongqing to Fuling Forest Park to work on a better road for the village located on a mountain there.

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Russian Model Protests Poor Road Conditions with Professional Pothole Photo Shoots

In an effort to draw attention to the poor state of roads in her home city of Saratov, a Russian model organized a professional photo shoot at one of the largest water-filled pot holes in her neighborhood, posing in a Baywatch bathing suit with a large inflatable flamingo.

Model/Fashion Blogger Anna Moskvicheva originally intended to have the photo shoot in the town of Mirny, where her aunt lives, but after heavy rains created giant road puddles right in her own city, she changed plans and had the photos taken on Tverskaya street, in Saratov. She put on a red Baywatch-style bathing suit, put on a large summer hat and stepped out into the flooded street to pose on a giant inflatable pink flamingo. The resulting photos have been shared on Russian social media thousands of times, with most people congratulating her on the original protest.

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Don’t Freak Out, But Those Digital Adverts at the Shopping Mall May Be Watching You

A pizzeria in Oslo, Norway, recently came under fire after it was revealed that its digital adverts were actually filming passers by, analyzing their facial features and displaying different adverts according to a variety of factors.

The monitoring system was accidentally revealed at the beginning of May, when the system crashed and software code was displayed on screen instead of the usual ads. Linus Tech Tips forum user “Nepturion” happened to be passing by Peppe’s Pizza, in an Oslo shopping center, when he noticed the bizarre code generated on the digital advertising banner. A closer look revealed a small camera concealed in the wooden frame of the advert, and after watching the screen for a few minutes, Nepturion realized that the messages generated by the computer were describing him, and changed every time a different person passed by.

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Farmer Buries His Faithful Truck After 48 Years of Service

Alcides Ravel, a farmer from Uruguay, bought his Ford F-350 in 1969, when he was 35 years old. Recently, the 83-year-old man finally put his faithful vehicle to eternal rest, after 48 years of service, by burying it on his farm.

For most people, trucks are mere tools to be used and sold when they outlive their usefulness, but that’s not the case of Alcides Ravel. Although his old truck had been broken down for over four years and mechanics had told him that it was beyond fixing, he couldn’t bring himself to sell it to the scrapyard. Instead, he kept it safe from the elements in a shed on his farm, near the town of Barker, until he was finally ready to part with it. Three weeks ago, he buried his faithful companion on his land, a “small gesture” in honor of nearly five decades of service.

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Woman Who Broke Her Neck Sneezing, Five Years Ago, Does It Again While Laughing

One morning, in 2011, Monique Jeffrey, of Rose Bay, Australia, was at home, in her bed, checking her emails. She sneezed and her head suddenly jolted forward, collapsing the C1 and C2 vertebrae in her neck. She had broken her neck in what experts called a “freak accident”, but the chances of something like this happening twice to the same person were apparently “slim to none”. And yet, last month, Monique suffered the same ordeal, this time while laughing with some colleagues at work.

“I texted Sam (her husband) just saying ‘help!’ and he called me and I answered on speaker phone, because I couldn’t put the phone to my ear,” Monique recalls about the bizarre accident she suffered over five years ago. “He came home and called an ambulance. It was pretty scary and it was such a strange sensation. I was in so much pain after just one little sneeze.”

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New World’s Hottest Chili Is Deceptively Tiny, Could Send You Into Anaphylactic Shock

When Welsh fruit grower Mike Smith set out to create a novelty chili pepper for a national grower’s show, he had no idea he would accidentally end up with the world’s hottest pepper. Called Dragon’s Breath – a tribute to its Welsh heritage – the record-breaking pepper scores a whopping 2.48 million units on the Scoville scale of hotness.

Intended to be a tiny thing of beauty, the Dragon’s Breath pepper turned out to be a sensory beast that can’t really be consumed unless you’re willing to put your life at risk. Just to put into perspective how hot this thing is, the Scotch bonnet, a chili usually eaten as a challenge, scores between 100,000 and 350,000 Scovilles, military-grade pepper spray registers at 2 million units on the same scale, and the previous world’s hottest pepper was rated at a maximum 2.2 million units. Dragon’s Breath blows them all away with an impressive rating of 2.48 million Scovilles.

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