If you’re not a confrontational person, having to argue with someone can be a daunting task. Luckily, Chinese online marketplace Taobao now offers people the chance to hire a “professional quarreler” to argue on their behalf.

There’s a good reason why Taobao is considered the world’s largest e-commerce platform. You can find virtually anything there, from popular products like smartphones to homework-writing robots and even bizarre services like hiring people to eat your favorite treats so you don’t have to. The latest addition to Taobao’s seemingly infinite list of goods and services is ‘quarreling by proxy’, which gives people the chance to hire strangers to argue or simply harass someone on their behalf, for a small fee.

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We’ve seen some crazy internet challenges go viral in recent years, but this latest one takes the cake as the most disgusting of all. The Cockroach Challenge has people putting live cockroaches on their faces, taking a selfie and sharing it on social media.

It’s hard to say for sure how and when the Cockroach Challenge came to be, but according to several sources, the craziness began last month, when Alex Aung, a young man from Myanmar, posted a photo of himself with a large cockroach on his face to his Facebook account, captioning it “new challenge, Can you do this?”. The photo quickly went viral, and at the time of this writing, it has over 5,600 reactions and 18,000 shares. But most importantly, people in Myanmar, the Philippines and Indonesia started sharing their own selfies with creepy crawlies on their faces, and the Cockroach Challenge was born.

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Dog weight pulling is an increasingly popular yet highly controversial sport in which dogs of various breeds compete against each other by pulling a trolley loaded with several tons of bricks or concrete blocks 15 feet in less than 60 seconds.

Dog weight pulling has been around for decades, but it has become increasingly controversial in recent years as more and more animal welfare activists started condemning the sport as animal cruelty. The fact that weight pulling is also a known training method for building stamina and making canines more powerful for dog fighting hasn’t exactly helped the reputation of the sport either. Still, dog weight pulling enthusiasts claim that even though some animals end up pulling several dozen times their own weight, the risk of injury is minimized by great conditioning and a genetic predisposition to pulling heavy loads. They also claim that the sport can be beneficial to dogs, as it gives them much needed exercise and strengthens the bond to their owners.

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A year and a half ago, Caitlin Little, a sophomore at Southeast Guilford High School in Greensboro, North Carolina, suffered a concussion during a cross-country practice which left her with a rare form of amnesia. All of her new memories are erased each night, so every morning she wakes up thinking it’s October 2017.

Caitlin’s case sounds a lot like the plot of hit romantic comedy 50 First Dates, in which Drew Barrymore’s character was involved in a serious car accident which left her unable to create new memories after that terrible event, causing her to wake up every morning thinking it was the day of of the accident. In 2004, when 50 First Dates Came Out, the amnesia Barrymore’s character was suffering from was nothing more than a fictional condition called ‘Goldberg’s Syndrome’, and one clinical neuropsychologist even wrote an article about it, claiming that it “bears no relation to any known neurological or psychiatric condition”.  However, several real-life cases of short-term memory resetting have been reported since then, and today that once fictional condition is a medically-recognized disorder known as anterograde amnesia.

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Authorities in Binalonan, a small Filipino town about 200 kilometres north of Manila, have made gossiping illegal under a new local law aimed at preventing rumors from spreading within the community.

Trash talking someone in Binalonan could see offenders literally picking up trash under a new local law designed to make people take responsibility for the things they say. First-time gossipers risk a fine of 200 pesos ($3.8) and three hours of collecting garbage in the streets, while repeat offenders would have to pay up to $20 and put in eight hours of community service. The law isn’t very clear on what qualifies as gossip, but mayor Ramon Guico cited peddling rumours of residents’ relationships or financial situations as examples of punishable offences.

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Everyone feels the need to stretch their neck every once in a while, but in rare cases it can cause more than a satisfying pop. A 28-year-old Oklahoma man ended up in the hospital after tearing his vertebral artery by stretching his neck to alleviate neck soreness.

Josh Hader was working from his home in Guthrie, Oklahoma when he felt a familiar soreness in his neck and tried to alleviate as he had done many times before, by stretching his neck a bit. Only this time, as he used his hand to apply a bit more pressure, he heard a loud pop and instantly knew something was wrong. His left side went numb almost immediately, so he quickly checked to see if his face was drooping, one of the most common signs of a stroke. His face looked fine though, so he assumed he must have just pinched a nerve and went to get some ice packs. That’s when he noticed he couldn’t walk straight.

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Chris Advansun is a Toronto-based sleep writer that creates his stories with one thing in mind – to make them interesting enough to get adults’ attention, but dull enough to put them to sleep.

39-year-old Advansun is a screenplay writer who sort of just got into sleep writing and fell in love with it. He just adores the challenge of balancing his grown-up bedtime stories in such a way that they gently pull the listener away from the thoughts that usually keep them up at night and then gently allow them to drift off to sleep. He has to stay away from anything attention-gripping to keep the listeners from becoming too involved in the story, but also make it interesting enough to keep them listening. For Advansun success means never reaching the end of his stories.

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An Oklahoma man who was once diagnosed with small-cell lung cancer and told hat he only had three months live claims he is now tumor-free thanks to a $5 deworming drug usually meant for dogs.

Joe Tippens was diagnosed with small-cell lung cancer in 2016. Despite undergoing treatment for the disease, by January of 2017, the cancer had spread to other organs, including his stomach, neck, pancreas and even his bones. The cancer was everywhere and doctors advised him to go home and say his goodbyes because he only had three months to live. When small-cell cancer spreads as wide as it had in his case, the chances of survival are around one percent. Tippens thought he was going to die, and with nothing left to lose, he was willing to try anything in hopes of a miracle, even a dog dewormer called fenbendazole.

The desperate cancer sufferer stumbled upon the bizarre treatment while browsing a forum of his alma mater, Oklahoma State University. The post that caught his eye read “If you have cancer or know someone who does, give me a shout”. Joe had already signed up for an experimental treatment that doctors said wouldn’t save him but might extend his life expectancy from three months to a year, enough to at least meet his grandson. But he decided that contacting that forum poster couldn’t hurt either. To his surprise, that person was a veterinarian who had a very interesting story to tell.

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Looking at the stitched patch tattoos of Eduardo “Duda” Lozano, it’s hard to believe that he only pioneered the new style three months ago. Photos of his amazing creations have been doing the rounds online ever since and he’s already been invited to tattoo conventions all over the world.

The Sao Paolo-based artist has been doing tattoos since 2002, but he only recently got the idea for the stitched patch style, as a throwback to his days working as a logo designer for caps and embroidered shirts. Three months ago, he created a Garfield patch tattoo design as an experiment, and that very same day improved on the new style with a tattoo of Courage the Cowardly Dog. After posting the photos on his Instagram and receiving positive feedback from his fans and other tattoo artists, Lozano realized he was on to something special and decided to focus on stitched patch tattoos going forward. He is now recognized as the pioneer of the style.

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K-pop culture has been gaining popularity across the globe, but in China it is considered a decadent trend that threatens to destroy the nation’s future. To combat this menace, a former schoolteacher has founded the Real Man Training Club, a children’s boot camp that promises to turn boys into alpha males.

The Beijing-based Real Man Training Club offers members a variety of activities meant to boost their masculinity, such as American football, wrestling and boxing, as well as character-building treks through deserts and mountains. Founder Tang Haiyan leads the boys in chest beating and slogan shouting to build up their confidence, and makes them wear headbands with the words ‘Real Man’. Even their shirts and tracksuits feature English phrases like ‘Anything is Possible’ or ‘Power Leader’. All this is meant to develop the boys’ macho character to fit Tang’s perception of manliness, and make them immune to the taint of K-pop culture.

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The aptly-named Masterpiece Hospital in Bangkok, Thailand, recently went viral for offering a plastic surgery procedure that gives patients instant six-pack abs.

Despite what many gym-addicts will tell you, getting defined six-pack abs is really hard, and for some of us downright impossible. No matter how much we work out, we just can’t seem to get that layer of fat on our abdomen to go away, so those well-developed ab muscles remain concealed underneath. That’s where the plastic surgeons at Masterpiece Hospital come in. By performing a procedure called abdominal etching, they remove some of the fat on your abdomen to make that hidden six-pack visible. There are no plastic or silicone implants involved, just some abs-focused liposuction.

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Fasting for over a year sounds like the stuff of legends and many actually consider it an urban legend, but an old medical journal offers scientific proof that there once was a man who didn’t eat anything for 382 days and lived to tell the tale.

A case study published in the 1973 edition of the Postgraduate Medical Journal documents the unbelievable story of a 27-year-old “grossly obese” Scottish man who stopped eating for a total of 382 days in a desperate attempt to lose weight. He not survived the extreme challenge, but remained in good health and managed to go from 456 to 180 pounds (81 kilograms from 206 kilograms). According to doctors at the University of Dundee School of Medicine, the man’s weight remained stable at 196 pound (88 kilograms) five years after undergoing the unusually long fast.

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A Chinese man recently took a supermarket chain to court after allegedly being cheated out of 0.04 yuan ($0.008) because the checkout clerk rounded down the change he was owed.

The plaintiff, named only as Xiao, claimed that after shopping at a branch of Yonghui Superstores and offering 55 yuan ($8.16) for groceries worth 54.76 yuan ($8.12), he was given only 0.20 yuan as change instead of the 0.24 yuan he was owed. He didn’t really need the 0.04 yuan, but he considered the supermarket’s rounding off system to be cheating, so he decided to sue them and draw attention to the practice, hoping it would get fixed.

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A 45-year-old man from rural Kenya is being hailed a hero by his community after single-handedly digging a one-mile road through a bushy area in oly six days, using only rudimentary tools.

The people of Kaganda, a small village 80km north of the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, had long been appealing to local government officials to start work on a short stretch of road that would shorten their daily trips to a nearby shopping center. Although the bushy area on which the road was supposed to be built had been earmarked by authorities, local leaders kept stalling the project. After a shorter footpath that Kaganda villagers used to get to the shopping center was fenced off because it passed through private property, the people were left with no option but to walk 4km every day. That’s when a local hero decided to take matters into his own hand and dig the much-awaited road himself, for free.

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A Chinese man was recently ordered to pay tens of thousands of dollars in compensation after his firecracker celebration killed over 10,000 of his neighbors’ rabbits to death.

This unusual tragedy occurred at the beginning of 2018, when a man named Cai Nan decided to celebrate the renovation of his home in Xuzhou, China’s Jiangsu Province, with a bang. He and the workers set up dozens of firecrackers on the roof of the house and reportedly fired them off for a period of 3 to 4 minutes. Cai never imagined that the loud bangs they made would affect the rabbits on his neighbors’ farm, let alone scare thousands of them to death.

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