If you’re not into liquors, they probably all taste bad to you, but there’s a particular liquor that everyone agrees tastes horrible. It’s called malört and, over the years, it has been compared to battery acid, pesticide and gasoline.

Although Jeppson’s Malört is most often associated with the American city of Chicago, its true roots are in Sweden, where where “malört” is the word for wormwood, the key ingredient in this ghastly spirit. Wormwood is a notoriously bitter herb known for its ability to kill stomach worms and other parasites. The Swedes started infusing it in alcohol and using it as medicine for digestive problems in the 15th century, and it reached US shores with the first Swedish immigrants. The awful taste didn’t appeal to many, so it’s no wonder that malört faded into obscurity pretty much everywhere, except Chicago. For some reason, people here not only accepted its horrible aroma, they actually embraced it.

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A talented art and design student recently stunned Japanese social media with his collection of delicious-looking sushi made exclusively of stone.

Hama, a student of the Joshibi University of Art and Design, in Kanagawa, Japan, has been exhibiting his stunning stone sushi at various universities across his country, to great success. And it’s easy to see why; his work is absolutely amazing, with some bite-sized pieces looking so realistic that you can hardly tell them apart from the real thing.

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A Chinese man who spent a small fortune as well as a lot of time and effort turning a small wasteland into a pink paradise in order to impress his ex-girlfriend, has received a clot of compassion online, after failing to win back his old fling.

It’s fair to say that Xiao Xu, a young man from Hetou Village, in China’s Guangdong province, went above an beyond to win back the heart of his ex-girlfriend. Over the course of a month, he spent around 100,000 yuan ($15,500) turning a small patch of wasteland rising up from a lake near his village into a fairytale Love Island complete with fake cherry blossom trees, swings, river rock arrangements, and more. He even convinced some locals to give him a hand and turn this place into the ultimate love letter to his former partner. Unfortunately, things didn’t turn out the way he had hoped…

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The world is full of pampered pets, but while some depend on their owners wealth, a lucky few have their own fortunes. And no animal is as wealthy as Gunther IV, a beautiful German shepherd and member of the world’s richest dog dynasty.

It’s hard to imagine any animal being the beneficiary of a fortune of nearly $400 million, but such a lucky pet actually exists. Gunther IV, a descendant of Gunther II, the original world’s wealthiest animal, is worth a reported $375 million. He lives in a multi-million-dollar mansion in Miami, has a full staff looking after him, included his own maid and butler, spends his days playing and swimming, and eats only the finest food money can buy, including caviar and truffles. Gunther also has his own corporation, whose employees manage his assets and make sure the dynasty’s fortune keeps growing.

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A 26-year-old Vietnamese man claims to have radically changed his appearance with the help of plastic surgery, after being laughed at during a job interview, because of his looks.

TikTok user Đỗ Quyền has been getting a lot of attention on Asian social media, after posting photos of what he claims is his former self before undergoing nine plastic surgery procedures. Looking at the difference in appearance, it’s easy why people are shocked; the guy looks like a completely different person, from the shape of his face, to his eyes and nose. He claims that he turned to plastic surgery after trying to get a job and being laughed at by the interviewer, because of his unattractive looks.

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The marbled crayfish or marmokreb, a mutant species that didn’t exist 25 years ago, is considered one of the most invasive freshwater creatures in the world, and it’s all due to its remarkable capacity to clone itself.

The rise of the the marbled crayfish as an internationally recognized invasive species can be traced back to the mid 1990s, when German aquarium hobbyist whom experts prefer not to identify, for privacy reasons, bought a large crayfish described to him as a “Texas crayfish”. The man was immediately stunned by its size and the enormous batches of eggs it could lay. He started bragging about it to his friends, and giving away specimens. Marmokreb-mania was in its infant stages, but as marbled crayfish started appearing in pet shops, aquarium hobbyists started noticing something peculiar…

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A 32-year-old man nicknamed “Mr. McDonald’s” has been eating at the world’s most popular fast food chain every other day for the past two decades, and has invested a small fortune in McDonald’s-related clothes and memorabilia.

David Geyer, a gardener from Bergheim, Germany, first ate at a McDonald’s fast food restaurant in 1997, and the moment he took a bite of that very first burger, he knew that the iconic fast food brand would become a part of his life forever. He came back for more every chance he got, but he realized just how passionate he was about McDonald’s when he got his first job and started spending more time at the local McD’s than he did at his mother’s dining table. His love for the fast food chain has since transcended food, as he has since gotten permanent McDonald’s tattoos and invested in burger-themed clothing and memorabilia as well.

If you’ve ever used a pencil, you know how brittle and delicate the pencil lead is. Somehow, Japanese artist Shiroi is able to carve that fragile material into stunningly detailed micro-artworks.

Mr. Shiroi (@shir0003) took up pencil lead carving seven years ago, after watching a segment on renowned Japanese pencil carver Toshiyuki Yamazaki on TV. He was blown away by the level of detail the master lead carver could achieve, and decided to give it a try for himself. As you can imagine, simply keeping his hand steady enough to keep from breaking the fragile lead was a huge challenge in the beginning, but he kept at it. Today, Shiroi is a pencil lead carving master in his own right.

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A popular Taiwanese streamer recently sparked controversy on Asian social media, after earning around $3,000 by simply streaming herself sleeping for five hours to thousands of her fans.

Wang Yiming, a former member of Chinese-Malaysian pop group AMOi-AMOi, joined Twitch late last year, soon after her music group disbanded, and quickly became one of the most popular Twitch streamers in Taiwan. She usually plays video games and chats with her fans, but yesterday evening, she decided to try something new. She logged into her Twitch account at around 5pm, but instead of her usual desk, fans were treated to Yiming’s bed, which she proceeded to lie on and go to sleep until about 10pm. During that time, she managed to attract tens of thousands of viewers, with a peak of 11,200 concurrent viewers.

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Bruna Barbie, a Brazilian influencer whose love for everything pink has drawn comparisons to the world’s most popular doll, makes a living by showcasing her unique lifestyle on social media.

Born Bruna Carolina Peres, the Brazilian Barbie hails from the southern state if Paraná and claims that she has been fascinated with pink for as long as she can remember. In fact, it all started with pink, she didn’t become a Barbie fan until later on in life. In her teenage years she decided to showcase her love for pink by dressing only in that color, and was offered compare to Reese Whitherspoon’s character from the movie ‘Legally Blonde”, by her colleagues. Then, at one point, people started calling her Barbie, and she just rolled with it, adopting the persona of a real-life Barbie.

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Two Florida women were recently caught trying to get their second doses of the Covid-19 vaccine by disguising themselves as old ladies, to pass as eligible for the sought-after jab.

Florida Department of Health in Orange County recently reported the bizarre case of two women, aged 34 and 44, who went to a coronavirus vaccination site “dressed up as grannies,” in order to appear over 65, and thus eligible for a vaccine. Speaking at a conference, last Thursday, Dr. Raul Pino, the health administrator for Orange County said that the women were wearing bonnets, gloves, and glasses in an attempt to make themselves look older. Staff at the center noticed that they “looked funny”, and police were called.

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A Minnesota company has created what it calls “the world’s cleanest underwear”, an innovative self-cleaning undergarment that can be worn daily for weeks, even months, without becoming smelly.

HercLéon, a material innovation group known for creating the world’s first self-cleaning socks, t-shirts and bedsheets, is now taking on the underwear industry with Kribi, a line of undergarments made from a bacteria-fighting fabric. This revolutionary material, called HercFiber continuously destroys all bacteria and stays clean without needing a wash. All you have to do is let the underwear “air out” for a bit after wearing them, and you can safely put them on again the next day.

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In winter, Siberia’s Lake Baikal becomes the scene of a rare natural phenomenon known as “Baikal Zen”. Large stones balance on thin ice “legs” above the surface of the lake, making it seem like they are floating in the air.

Lake Baikal is a fascinating body of water. It’s so large it can easily be mistaken for a sea, it is also the deepest and oldest lake on Earth, as well as the largest freshwater lake by volume. But these are only the most well-known facts about Lake Baikal. There are other more mysterious things going on there, some of which give the place a mystical, almost magical aura. Take the phenomenon known as Baikal Zen, for example – large, Zen-like pebbles balancing precariously on a thin ice pillar, above the frozen surface of the lake. Scientists have been studying this rare phenomenon for years, and we still don’t have a unanimously accepted explanation for it.

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A young Ukrainian couple decided to really put their relationship to the test by linking their hands together with a thick iron chain for a period of three months.

This year, Alexander and Viktoria, a young couple from the Ukraine, decided to celebrate Valentine’s Day a bit differently. On February 14, they traveled to Kiev to have their hands chained and sealed together by a representative of the country’s national register of records. Their goal is to literally be next to each every moment, for the next three months. That includes sleeping, bathing together and, obviously, even going to the toilet together.

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Indonesian police are investigating the strange case of a 25-year-old woman who claims that she gave birth just an hour after a gust of wind got her pregnant.

The young woman, identified as Siti Zainah, ahs become the subject of widespread ridicule in Indonesia after claiming to have been impregnated by a gust of wind, on February 10. Furthermore, Zainah added that she gave birth to a baby girl just an hour after the alleged impregnation. According to several Indonesian news outlets, the 25-year-old was relaxing at home in Cianjur, West Java, with her first child, when she felt the wind enter her body. A few minutes later, she went into labor.

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