Enhanced water company Vitaminwater recently launched a contest challenging entrants to give up their smartphones and tablets for a whole year. That’s a tough thing to do in this day and age, but the Coca Cola-owned company is ready to make it worth your while by putting up a $100,000 prize.

Vitaminwater’s #nophoneforayear challenge requires entrants to go a full 365 days without using a smartphone. That means giving up their own phone and tablet as well as agreeing not to use anyone else’s handhelds either. The selected person will have to sign a contract committing to no smartphone usage for the duration of the contest, and if they are found to have adhered to the strict rule for the duration of the contract, they will be rewarded with $100,000. Sounds easy enough, but first you have to convince the company that you’re the right person for the job.

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Abdussalam Firdaus Abdul Aziz, a 22-year-old man from Malaysia, recently became an overnight internet sensation thanks to his feminine features that apparently make it hard for people to tell whether he’s male or female.

Photos of Aziz have been doing the rounds online ever since it was reported that at a recent soccer game that he attended, he was asked to show his identification documents, because male security guards refused to do a body check on him, thinking that he was a woman. The story made news headlines in Malaysia earlier this week before transcending national borders via the internet.

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At just 12-years-old, Leonardo Nicanor Quinteros is still in secondary school, but he already runs his own free private school to help other children, and even some adults, with their studies.

Leonardo loves to study, but he also wants to transfer his passion for education to his peers. After seeing some of his colleagues struggling to keep up at school, and other children spending too much time playing on the streets and completely neglecting their studies, he decided to do something about it. Last year, he told his grandmother, Ramona, that he wanted to operate his own school and asked her to help him build it next to her house, in the Argentinian town of Las Piedritas, near San Juan. She obliged, and today’s Nico’s free private school caters to nearly 40 young students. The 12-year-old acts both as teacher and principal and is proud that his initiative has already made a big difference for many of the children attending there.

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Food waste is one the greatest challenges of our time, and fruits and vegetables are particularly problematic, as an estimated 52% of harvests go bad before reaching consumers. But one Malaysian company claims to have come up with a simple and effective solution to this problem – a tiny sticker that keeps fruits from spoiling for up to two weeks.

You’ve probably seen stickers on fruits before, but not like the ones created by Stixfresh. Those common stickers are used solely to provide consumers with information about the grower and how the fruit was grown, but Stixfresh has a completely different purpose. It contains a special, all-natural formula that slows down the ripening process, keeping the fruit fresh and juicy for much longer.

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Khai Ho, 38-year-old self-described breatharian from Birkenhead, in the UK, claims he can last up to three months at a time on only 100 calories per week, surviving only on air, sunlight and the occasional mint leaves.

Ho, who works as a pizza deliveryman, claims that he has never taken much interest in food, constantly refusing his mother’s meals as a child, but only started giving up food completely over long periods of time four years ago, with the help of Hindu meditation. He says can last up to three months without consuming any kind of food, apart from some mint leaves to help with bitter taste in his mouth, and drinking water only rarely, sometimes just once per week. Apparently, meditation helps him absorb all the nutrients he needs from thin air and sunlight.

The 38-year-old breathrian said that before turning to meditation, he would eat normal food once every three or four days, but now doesn’t need to do that because he gets necessary nutrients from sunlight and can even absorb moisture from the air around him. He admits that most people think his crazy for fasting for months at a time, but claims that some consider him “incredible at the same time.

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A Chinese man has been making national headlines after it was revealed that he has been waiting in a bookstore in Beijing for over 50 days hoping to meet a girl he has “fallen in love with” after making eye-contact for 10 seconds.

To say that this 26-year-old man is a firm believer in love at first sight would be an understatement. He is so convinced that the woman he saw in a popular Beijing bookstore back in September is the girl of his dreams that he quit his job and has been staying in the bookshop every day from 11am to 7pm, hoping to meet her again so he can tell her how he feels. To improve his chances of bumping into the mystery woman again, the man, surnamed Sun, has been passing out hand-drawn sketches of her to other bookstore visitors, and recently tried to sue her for emotional distress, even though he doesn’t even know her name.

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Yesterday, during the opening of Russia’s annual “PROJECT” scientific forum in the city of Yaroslavl, the audience got to see Boris, a highly-advanced robot that major news channel Russia24 called “the country’s most modern robot”. Only Boris wasn’t really all that advanced, or even a robot, for that matter.

Very similar in appearance to Honda’s famous Asimo humanoid robot, Boris can reportedly walk and talk, do mathematical calculations and even dance, feats he demonstrated on the stage of the “PROJECT” forum, on December 11. The audience, made up primarily of young students, was blown away by the Russian robot’s advanced capabilities, as were several news outlets, including Russia24, which dedicated a news segment to Boris, showcasing his performance at the forum and calling it “Russia’s most modern robot”.

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33-year-old Alena Kravchenko, a real-life Rapunzel from Ukraine, had her last haircut at age five, 28 years ago. Today, Alena’s hair is around two meters long and the young Ukrainian claims that she sometimes trips on it.

Alena’s mother had always told her that a woman’s feminine beauty stems directly from her hair, and she took her words to heart. The last time she allowed anyone to cut her blonde locks was 28 years ago, and today, even though her extremely long becomes problematic, she is still convinced that her mother was right. “There is nothing more beautiful in the world than a woman with natural, flowing hair,” Alena says.

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A Vietnamese businessman has been attracting a lot of attention on Asian social media sites for his obsession with gold. 36-year-old Tran Ngoc Phuc wears a total of 13kg of gold wherever he goes, and is always accompanied by at least 5 bodyguards who make sure that no one tries to steal it.

Phuc first started making headlines in Vietnam last week after a series of YouTube videos of him showing off his massive jewellery went viral,  getting several millions of views. Since then, photos and videos of him wearing his huge gold necklace, bracelets and rings have been doing the rounds on Vietnamese social media, and even on several websites in China and Thailand. While some people expressed their doubts that the jewels are real gold, most commenters wondered how he can stand walking around with so much extra weight. The businessman admitted that wearing the jewellery took some getting used to , but claimed that it was worth it as all the gold has boosted his good luck and prosperity.

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A photo of a tattooed man’s hand with the top layer if skin damaged by a minor kitchen burn sparked a heated debate on social media site Reddit last week. That’s because the section where the skin was burned off revealed a tattoo so bright you could swear it was just inked.

The photo, posted by Reddit user uhmodijia, reportedly shows the hand of a “friend of a friend” who had just suffered a minor burn which only affected the top layer of his skin, exposing the dermis. The man had a blue rose tattooed on his skin a while ago, and like all tattoos do in time, it had started to fade. However, the patch of burned skin that had peeled off because of the burn revealed a much more vibrant copy of the same tattoo on his dermis. Apparently, tattoo guns reach deep into the skin, and while the tattoos on the first layer begin to fade just months after they’ve been inked due to multiple factors, they remain vibrant under this first layer of protective skin.

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Ratchadapong Prasit, a 25-year-old man from Thailand, has been making headlines around Asia for the last couple of years after drastically altering his appearance with the help of plastic surgery. After undergoing 30 cosmetic procedures, Prasit now looks like a Korean K-pop star.

Comparing photos of Ratchadapong Prasit before and after he turned to plastic surgery, you’d swear they were two different people, but that just goes to show you what a difference a few nose jobs, some chin sculpting and eye reshaping procedures can make. Although, to be fair, Prasit had a lot more than that done to his face. He reportedly underwent at least 30 cosmetic procedures over the course of two years, for which he spent around 300,000 Thai Baht ($9,100). But he claims it was worth every penny as it allowed him to completely change his life around, going from a shoe seller to a successful cabaret dancer at a theater in Pattaya. The ladies seem to love his new look as well.

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A Chinese mother allegedly faked the kidnapping of her 11-year-old son as a way of testing whether her husband really cared about her and their child.

The boy’s mother, a 33-year-old woman named Chen, filed a fake missing persons report in Yueqing City, on Friday. She told police that her son had last been seen near his school and gave them a description of his clothes. The case was declared a top priority and huge resources were allocated to an ample search operation in Yueqing and neighboring Wenzhou. The kidnapping attracted national attention, particularly because of the 500,000 yuan ($72,000) reward offered by the family for any information about the boy’s whereabouts, and online articles about his disappearance were read hundreds of millions of times just on social media platform Weibo. Everyone was fearing the worst, but it turned out that 11-year-old Huang had been safe and sound in the care of a relative all along.

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A 70-year-old man from Scotland ruined his winter holiday and got himself banned from the United States forever after accidentally declaring himself a terrorist on an online visa form.

John Stevenson and his wife, Marion, an elderly couple from Inverclyde, Scotland, were supposed to vacation in New York this month, but they ended up losing both their flight tickets and their advance for accommodation in The Big Apple, after John got permanently banned from entering the United States for declaring himself a terrorist on an online visa form. Despite several attempts to convince US officials that he had just made a mistake, he remains banned, so the couple can’t even reschedule their trip, as they don’t know if they’ll ever be allowed into the United States.

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The owner of a clothing store in the UK is taking an unconventional approach to preventing theft. The woman, who preferred to remain anonymous, wants to hire skilled thieves to come in and steal from her store and then tell her how they did it, so she can prevent it from happening again.

The witty entrepreneur posted a job offer on Bark.com, which quickly went viral, offering thieves £50 ($64) an hour to come in and try to steal from her store, plus the chance to keep three of the things they manage to steal. Candidates would need to visit her store on a number of occasions over several weeks and then produce a report of all the things they stole and how they did it. Realizing that her job may come off as strange, the woman explained that she is simply taking a different approach to theft prevention after years of suffering significant loses during the holiday season.

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Police in the Taiwanese city of Taipei were accused of wasting taxpayers’ money on solving stupid cases, after local media revealed that they recently conducted DNA tests worth hundreds of dollars to find out who drank a student’s $2 yogurt bottle.

Sharing a fridge with roommates in college usually means accepting that, from time to time, some of your treats will mysteriously disappear. It’s like a tradition, but for one Taiwanese woman sharing a house with five other women studying at the Chinese Culture University in Taipei, it was a serious crime that had to be solved at any cost. Last month, the unnamed woman came home to find one of her yogurt bottles empty in the garbage bin. None of her housemates had asked her permission to drink the yogurt, so she fished the empty bottle from the trash, convened an emergency house meeting and asked the other five women which one of them had stolen her yogurt. When none of them owned up to the crime, the infuriated woman took the empty yogurt bottle to the police and demanded that they carry out an official investigation and bring the criminal to justice.

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