Two Japanese companies are teaming up to produce upright ‘nap boxes’ that they claim will help solve the Asian country’s notorious overwork problem.

Tokyo-based furniture specialist Itoki Corporation and Koyoju Gohan, a plywood supplier from Hokkaido, recently signed a license agreement to start production of a bizarre-looking contraption that they claim will tackle the overwork phenomenon in Japan’s offices. It basically consists of an upright wooden pod that will allow users to enter and use as a private space to sleep standing up…

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A 47-year-old man recently became the envy of every male idol fan on the planet after it became known that he managed to marry his favorite idol.

Let’s face it, we’ve all fantasized about getting noticed by our celebrity crush at some stage in our lives, but deep down we always knew it was nothing but a dream. However, for one Japanese idol fan, that dream became a reality. Not only did he get noticed by his favorite idol, but they ended up having a romantic relationship and eventually getting married, despite a 27-year age difference.

In 2020, Yuki Tomoe debuted as a substitute member of an Osaka-based idol group. The moment he laid eyes on her, Mitsuo, who was 44 years old at the time, knew there was something special about her. She was only 17, but he thought she was very talented and charismatic, so he decided to support her.

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Tired of always buying new pairs of gym sneakers, a UK man had his favorite pair of Nikes permanently tattooed onto his feet.

Dean Gunther, a popular tattoo artist from Manchester, in the United Kingdom, recently went viral on Instagram and TikTok after sharing a short video of himself tattooing a pair of sneakers onto a client’s feet. Although drawn exclusively by hand, seen from a certain angle, the design really does create the illusion that the person is wearing a pair Vibram FiveFingers sneakers with built-in toe slots. The man apparently prefers Nikes, but they don’t make that design, so…

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Barbara Humbert, an 82-year-old great-grandmother from Val d’Oise, France, recently set a new world record after running a whopping 125 km (78 miles) in 24 hours.

At the end of last month, during the French Championships held in Brive-la-Gaillarde, 82-year-old Barbara Humbert broke the world record for the longest distance run in 24 hours for her age category. A German woman had run 105 kilometers (65.2 miles) on tarmac a few years back, and Barbara had her sights on improving that record by about 15 kilometers. She exceeded her own expectations, though, smashing through the old world record with a recorded distance of 125 kilometers covered in 24 hours. Not bad for an 82-year-old great-grandmother, is it?

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Randresson Vieira, a talented makeup artist from Brazil, can turn into virtually any cartoon and anime character using his insane bodypainting skills.

30-year-old Randresson Vieira, an architect and urban planner by training, puts his passion for fine arts to good use by turning himself into real-world versions of popular characters from beloved anime series like One Piece, Dragon Ball and Naruto. The young self-taught artist uses his insane bodypainting abilities to expertly apply layers of paint on his face and torso and completes the impressive transformations with hand-drawn paper cutouts of the characters’ hair.

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A middle-aged newspaper salesman in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was recently arrested for “hacking” dozens of credit cards and using them to make small purchases.

When crime-fighting authorities in Argentina received a complaint about hundreds of unauthorized purchases, they were sure they were dealing with an organized hacking group. However, all leads pointed to the house of a 56-year-old newspaper salesman in the Buenos Aires town of Villa Madero. Judging by the scale of the security breach, it seemed unlikely that one person, let alone one that operated a newspaper stand, could have pulled it off. And yet, upon searching the man’s house, they found a small notebook containing a hand-written algorithm that had apparently allowed him to figure out the CVC (Card Verification Code) of his victims.

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Intimate wellness brand INTIMINA recently released Period Crunch, a unique uterus-shaped breakfast cereal that also colors milk red.

Did you know that 82% of people are unable to correctly identify where the uterus is? That probably has a lot to do with the fact that we rarely talk about the female uterus, at least when compared to other, more well-known organs, like the heart or the liver. Well, Intima, a company that specializes in menstrual products, such as environmentally-friendly period cups and Kegel muscle training devices, would like to change that, and they’re going about it in an interesting way. Last month, the company announced its latest product, Period Crunch, a breakfast cereal that’s supposed to act as a conversation starter about menstruation in the average home.

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A Brazilian man has been accused of kidnapping his ex-girlfriend and tattooing his name on the side of her face, as revenge for breaking up with him.

Tayane Caldas, an 18-year-old woman from the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo, was on her way to school last Friday, when she was approached by her ex-boyfriend, Gabriel Coelho, who forced her to get into his car. Afraid she would be attacked if she didn’t comply, the young woman got into the vehicle and was taken to her ex’s home in the municipality of Taubaté. There, the 20-year-old Coelho tattooed his full name on the girl’s right side of the face, from her ear, down to her chin. Although he doesn’t deny doing the tattoo, Gabriel Coelho claims that Tayane was more than happy to let him do it.

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A dog owner in Eastern China’s Jiangsu province spent the last three years and a whopping 340,000 yuan ($51,156) building a miniature mansion for his 10 pooches.

Mr. Zhou, a 33-year-old businessman who made his money in the crayfish trade, started his pet project in 2019, soon after finishing another, much more modest abode for his dogs. Proud of his achievement at the time, he decided to share a video tour of it on Chinese streaming platform Douyin, hoping to get some positive feedback. However, most of the comments from viewers turned out to be negative, which only motivated the young businessman to start over and this time give the internet and his pets something special. After three years of hard work and hundreds of changes, Zhou finally completed his masterpiece, and this time people were indeed impressed.

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Ever wish you had the deep voice of James Earl Jones? Well, maybe that’s an unattainable goal, but if you’re willing to go under the knife for a deeper or higher voice, there’s a surgeon in Turkey who can help.

Dr Kursat Yelken has been performing voice deepening surgeries for 15 years and claims that demand for the procedure has been increasing. He currently operates on 100 – 150 people a year, from executives wanting to sound more assertive, to transgender people looking to make their voice match their new gender. The Turkish doctor, who trained at Harvard Medical School, can tweak patients’ pitch and tone, giving them a deeper or higher voice, depending on their preferences.

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A couple in the Indian state of Uttarakhand has taken their son to court, asking him to either pay back the $650,000 they claim to have invested in him or give them a grandchild within a year.

Sanjeev and Sadhana Prasad filed a highly unusual lawsuit against their own son on the grounds of “mental harassment”. They claim to have invested substantial sums of money into his education and professional training over the years, helped him financially when he couldn’t find a job, and arranged and paid for his wedding in 2016. In return, they were expecting a “grandchild to play with” during their retirement years, only their son didn’t deliver as expected, so now the couple is taking legal action against him.

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A Venezuelan man was recently arrested for allegedly implanting plastic lollipop sticks under the skin of dozens of people and tricking them into thinking that they were advanced contraceptive devices.

38-year-old Jose Daniel Lopez stands accused of tricking at least 25 women into paying him to implant simple lollipop sticks under their skin as contraceptives, thus causing some of them to become pregnant. Lopez, who had no medical qualifications, worked in health centers in La Victoria and Maracay, Venezuela, after falsifying his medical degree. He did have some notion of medical procedures, as he performed the subdermal implants himself, claiming they were “Implanon” an actual contraceptive procedure that involves small plastic rods being implanted under the skin of the upper arm.

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Ever wish you could earn money by turning your daily life into a reality show that anyone could tune in to watch from anywhere around the world? It turns out you actually can.

SpiedLife is a growing international docu-reality platform that essentially allows people to turn their lives into reality shows with the help of webcams. If you have no problem installing a few webcams in your home and broadcasting your life to total strangers 24 hours a day, your average life could become the next Big Brother. SpiedLife allows streamers to stay in touch with their audience through chat rooms, track their channel’s popularity, and pays them for sharing their lives on the platform. But in a time where privacy is being taken more seriously than ever, many think that SpiedLife could have a dark side.

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Speech2Face is an advanced neural network developed by MIT scientists and trained to recognize certain facial features and reconstruct people’s faces just by listening to the sound of their voices.

You’ve probably already heard about AI-powered cameras that can recognize people just by analyzing their facial features, but what if there was a way for artificial intelligence to figure out what you look like just by the sound of your voice and without comparing your voice to a database? That’s exactly what a team of scientists at MIT has been working on, and the results of their work are impressive, kind of. While their neural network, named Speech2Face, can’t yet figure out the exact facial features of a human just by their voice, it certainly gets plenty of details right.

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A Japanese startup is trying to blur the line between reality and virtual reality with technology that allows the wearer to feel the pain experienced inside the metaverse in real life.

H2L Technologies, a Sony-backed technology company based in Tokyo, recently unveiled a wristband that dishes out small electric shocks whenever the wearer suffers pain-inducing damage in the much-hyped metaverse. The device is supposed to do a lot more than that, including mimicking a range of sensations from catching a ball to a bird pinching the wearer’s skin, as well as conveying weight and resistance. It’s all meant to make the metaverse this immersive experience that the people and companies involved in its creation have been pushing over the last year or so.

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