In what can only be described as an intriguing childhood experiment, a Japanese boy has been trying to stop weeds from growing in his backyard – without using chemical weedkillers – for the last three years. This year, he’s off to a promising starts.

It all started three years ago, when Twiter user @peco3575’s son finished elementary school and decided to conduct a “study” on weed annihilation solutions that didn’t involve the use of herbicides. He was inspired by his personal desire to clean his home backyard of weeds, because that summer they had grown so tall that he actually couldn’t play there anymore. He then started coming up with strategies to combat the weeds, write them down, apply them to his backyard, and note the conclusion. For the past three years, his ideas all failed, but 2020 is off to a surprisingly good start.

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A Japanese man is facing serious charges for allegedly causing serious financial losses to his favorite baseball club after reserving and then cancelling nearly 1,900 seats for two of their league games, so he could have more space and stand out on TV.

41-year-old Kiyoshi Shibamura, a fan of the Orix Buffaloes baseball club from the Japanese city of Osaka, came up with an ingenious-yet-costly plan to watch his favorite team compete against the SoftBank Hawks at Osaka’s Kyocera Dome on the 28th and 29th of September, last year. To make sure he stood out on TV and enjoyed some serious privacy, he went through the trouble of creating 1,873 fake names and reserving the same number of stadium seats online. He then cancelled all but his own reservation right before the end of the reservation period, making sure than no one else managed to snatch the seats.

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A Chinese migrant worker who lost his memory in 1990 due to brain injuries recently remembered his hometown while watching a news report about the coronavirus outbreak.

Thirty years ago, Zhu Jiaming, a young man from Guizhou Province in south-western China, left his home to work construction in the central province of Hubei. Unfortunately, that same year he suffered a serious work accident that left him with brain injuries and long-term amnesia. Too make matters worse, the migrant worker also lost his ID and ended up living on the streets until a kindhearted couple offered to let him live with them. Despite trying very hard to remember his past life, he could not remember much, including anything about his home and family.

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This is a somewhat older story that was originally reported by media primarily in Indonesia and other East-Asian countries back in 2018. It got a lot of attention because it touched on a very taboo topic – the romantic relationship between an adult male teacher and a 13-year-old schoolgirl.

Erwin Pangaila was 27 when he fell in love with a junior high school student at the SMP Negeri 2 Tenga school, in Sulawesi Utara, Indonesia. In fact, it was 13-year-old Vinda Virginia who first noticed and approached him. She happened to walk by his classroom saw him writing on the blackboard and immediately fell for his broad shoulders and athletic physique. She wasn’t the only girl in school to have a crush on Erwin, but she was determined to be the one that won his heart. She started staying behind after classes to ask him questions and eventually, their student-teacher relationship turned into a romantic one.

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A group of young motoring enthusiast from Vietnam have found success on the internet by making driveable cardboard replicas of expensive sports cars and motorcycles.

Too poor to buy your own Ferrari sports car or Ducati motorcycle? Well, so were the young guys behind the NHẾT TV YouTube channel, but they were resourceful enough to build their own using scrap metal, used card and motorbike parts, and lots of cardboard. The vehicles turn out rather goofy-looking, but they do actually work, and if the over 300k subs the channel currently has are any indication, people love the comedic charm.

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An agricultural field is one of the last places you would expect to find a tourist attraction for fans of Hayao Miyazaki’s anime, but this one farm in Japan’s Miyazaki Prefecture is actually home to a popular Totoro Bus Station.

If you’ve ever watched Miyazaki’s “My Neighbour Totoro” anime, you’re probably familiar with the simple yet iconic bust stop scene where Totoro appears next to the main character of the animated film as she waits for the bus in the rain. There are actually several real-life Totoro bus station across Asia, from the one in Saikai City, Nagasaki, to one in Taiwan’s Taichung area, but the most popular one these days seems to be the one created by an elderly couple in the middle of a field in Takaharu, as a present for their grandchildren.

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Saudi Arabia state-owned oil company, Aramco, has been forced to apologize for using one of its employees as a human stand for a hand sanitizing gel dispenser.

The oil giant attracted severe criticism this week after photos of one of its employees wearing a body suit with a hand sanitizer attached and a medical mask on his face started circulating on social media. The foreign employee can be seen standing as a virtual stand, as other employees use the gel dispenser he’s carrying. Although the intention may have been to raise awareness of the importance of cleaning your hands using sanitizer during the current Covid-19 pandemic, the humiliating role was harshly criticized.

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Ben Cullen, a former tattoo artist turned food artist extraordinaire, has been getting a lot of attention for his amazing cake illusions, which range from desserts disguised as fruits and vegetables, to treats shaped as realistic human hands.

Looking at Ben Cullen’s mind-blowing cakes, you would think that he has been baking all his life, but in fact he only got into cakes five years ago, when a client he was tattooing showed him some cake decorating models she had made, which he found to be fascinating. He felt like he needed to give it a try himself, an as soon as he did, he became hooked. He had no previous experience or even the faintest interest in making cakes at the time, but as soon as he saw what other food artist were capable of, he felt like he needed to master the craft.

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A young Canadian man who tattooed most of his body, including his face, hands and legs bright blue, claims that the “whimsical element” has really helped him enjoy his life way more than before.

Donnie Snider, a former forklift driver from Scarborough, in Canada’s Ontario region, started permanently coloring his body blue three years ago, and is now almost completely Smurf-like in color. It all started when he asked his sister to tattoo a part of his leg and foot with the bright blue hue; he liked it so much that he kept on turning part of his body blue, partly because of the psychological impact he experienced. If before he felt  trapped by conformity and had a “lack of confidence”, the permanent makeover really gave him a big boost.

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Chinese schoolchildren in Wuhan and other areas where school has been suspended because of the Covid-19 coronavirus outbreak have apparently been trying to have a homework app taken down from the App Store so they could enjoy their vacation.

The threat of Covid-19 is no joke, but for Chinese students the shutdown of schools in affected areas has been met with excitement as it basically meant an extra holiday period. Sure, they couldn’t hang out or even leave the house for weeks, but at least they didn’t have to attend classes and, most importantly, they din’t have any homework. At least that’s what they thought, because soon after schools closed, teachers started using an Alibaba-owned app to both hold classes online and issue homework to their students. But somehow the schoolchildren managed to coordinate a massive campaign to hopefully have the app taken down from the App Store so they could enjoy their time off.

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As part of a global effort to find a vaccine for the Covid-19 coronavirus, pharmaceutical companies are offering thousands of dollars to people willing to voluntarily get infected with a form of the virus and spend two weeks in isolation.

Being the first to come up with an effective vaccine for Covid-19 would undoubtedly prove very profitable for any pharmaceutical company, and many are spending big money to increase their chances of success. For example, several companies as well as public sector organizations have reportedly begun offering volunteers up to $4,500 to get infected with a form of the highly-contagious coronavirus to aid the search for a vaccine. It’s a tempting offer, especially for young, healthy and cash-strapped individuals, but there is a catch – they will be banned from contact with the outside world for at least two weeks.

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A French woman is facing up to 10 years in prison and a hefty fine of up to 150,000 euros ($170,000) for remarrying her ex-husband without his knowledge, in order to prevent him from moving on with his life.

The unnamed woman, who worked as a high-ranking judge in Hauts-de-Seine, France’s Ile-de-France region, reportedly decided to take revenge on her ex-husband, after he had left her for another woman. To add insult to injury, the woman had been dumped for the sister of a French minister that she herself had worked as a judicial adviser for. Her bizarre plan involved remarrying her husband without his knowledge or consent, so as to prevent him from moving on with his life alongside his new partner.

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Tatyana Dvazhdova, a 22-year-old female boxer from Russia doesn’t consider herself weaker than a man, and to prove this point she spent years hiding her gender and fighting male boxers under the fake name “Vladimir”.

During a conference called “International Women’s Day – Feminism, Socialism, Sexism”, Tatyana Dvazhdova revealed that a few years ago she posed as a male boxer in order to fight against other men and prove that she was their equal. The muscular woman cut her hair short, let her body hair grow and did everything she could to conceal her female traits. She even got a fake ID and fought under the name Vladimir Ermolaev , winning 9 out of her 17 boxing matches. Tatyana proved her point, that women can compete against men in boxing, but as soon as she revealed her true identity, she was banned from competing against men.

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When it comes to “package” size, most men are of the belief that bigger is better, but a new dating app is trying to help men better deal with the pressure of conforming to unrealistic body ideals by creating a space exclusively for individual with less than average size members…

The aptly named Dinky One is a dating app designed exclusively for men with appendages smaller than 5.5 inches, the global average erect penis length. Actually, woman and gender minorities can sign up as well, but as far as men go, only those with smaller packages that average are eligible to join. That’s because the main gist behind Dinky One is creating a space where less-endowed men can feel comfortable. To do that, Dinky One allows users to remain anonymous and doesn’t require people to upload a picture of themselves.

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Indian doctors recently reported the curious case of a young woman who underwent a double hand transplant almost three years ago and whose hands have changed color to match her skin tone.

21-year-old Shreya Siddanagowder lost both her hands in a freak road accident in 2016, when travelling from her hometown in Pune to her college in Karnataka. Doctors had no choice but to amputate both her hand and forearms, and she needed about a year to recover. As soon as she did, she visited the Amrita Institute to register for a double hand transplant, and doctors there miraculously managed to find a donor for her on that same day, August 9, 2017. There were almost 200 other people on the waiting list, some from foreign countries like Afghanistan or Bangladesh, but she was lucky enough to be compatible with the donor. Doctors called her at the hotel after her visit, and the transplant was carried out that same day.

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