Man vs Fat is a weight-loss phenomenon sweeping the United Kingdom and helping soccer fans lose weight and improve their fitness by getting involved in their favorite sport.

Soccer, or football, as we Europeans call it, is the most popular sport in the world, but nowhere is it more loved than in its birthplace – England. To say people there are crazy about soccer would be an understatement; with over 140 individual leagues, containing more than 480 divisions, and around 7,000 professional clubs, it’s safe to say that soccer truly is at home in England. People love to play it, love to watch others playing it, either in stadiums or from the comfort of their own homes, love to talk about it in pubs, it’s just a big part of daily life. So I guess it makes sense that soccer be so effective in helping to curb the country’s very serious obesity problem.

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Szinpetri, a quaint village of around 300 people located in northern Hungary, is mostly known for being home to the world’s largest handmade book, a 1.4-tonne heavy tome bound in the leather of 13 Argentinian cows.

The world’s largest handmade book was completed in 2010, by father-son duo Bela Varga and Gábor Varga, two masters in the art of traditional paper-making. It was crated using traditional book-binding techniques adjusted to a much larger scale than usual, and is currently on display at the Szinpetri paper mill, where Bela and Gábor Varga show off their paper-making skills to visitors. The book measures 4.18m x 3.77m, weighs a total of 1,420 kilograms and features 346 pages printed with information on the local flora and fauna.

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Hamit Hayran, Turkey’s number one egg carving artist, recently set a new world record for the most number of holes carved into a single chicken egg, 12,000.

It’s hard to imagine how anyone could puncture a chicken egg, even a big one, tens of thousands of times, but 62-year-old Hamit Haryran is an expert at it. After becoming disabled in 1988, due to an occupational accident, he dedicated most of his time to egg-shell carving, and has since become one of the most celebrated egg carving artists in the world. Apart from creating some stunning artworks, he has also been actively chasing the record for most holes punctured into a single egg. He first broke it when he carved  8,708 holes, beating the record of a Pakistani artist, then with 11,827 holes, and this last time with a whopping 12,000.

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Japanese model Kato Sari recently finalized her divorce from her husband, after getting separated from him just a week into their marriage, due to her uncontrolled money spending habits.

29-year-old Kato Sari has always been known for her luxurious lifestyle and love of expensive fashion brands, but her husband never imagined that her spending habits would end up putting his businesses at risk. The unnamed real-estate businessman reportedly started dating the model in May of 2019, and in the three and a half months before the pair tied the knot, she had managed to spend about 1 billion yen ($9.1 million) of his money. Still, the man went through with the wedding, but during the first week of their marriage, he allegedly told Sari to slow down her spending, as his businesses weren’t fairing very well. That didn’t sit too well with her, so she asked for a divorce.

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A Hong-Kong-based airline was forced to apologize for making a 25-year-old Japanese woman take a pregnancy test in order to board a flight to Saipan, a  a commonwealth of the United States in the western Pacific Ocean.

The controversial incident reportedly took place in November of 2019, but was only covered in the media last week. Midori Nishida was checking at Hong Kong International Airport, with low-cost carrier Hong Kong Express, in order to fly to the island of Saipan to visit her parents. The Japanese national was not pregnant and said so on a check-in questionnaire, but her body shape apparently made airline staff question her honesty. The 25-year-old woman was asked to give permission to an authorized medical provider to conduct a “fit-to-fly” assessment, which in this case meant a pregnancy test.

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Officials in the French city of Roubaix recently revealed that the 187 photovoltaic panels that were supposed to generate green electricity for the local library had been installed six months ago, but not connected to the building’s electrical grid…

In June of 2019, thew city of Roubaix announced with great fanfare that it had acquired 187 solar panels meant to generate part of the electricity required by the local library. The panels were installed by local company Sunretec at a cost of 103,000 euros ($113,000), but somehow everyone forgot to actually connect them to the library’s electrical grid, which means that for six months the panels didn’t produce any of the electricity consumed by the Roubaix library.

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Most yoga practitioners struggle to pull off the Niralamba Poorna Chakrasana contortion just once in their lives, but one 11-year-old girl recently managed to do it a whopping 21 time in one minute, setting a new world record.

On January 20, Riya Paladia, a gymnastics and yoga practitioner from the village of Gaulapar, in India’s Uttarakhand state, stunned a local crowd with her amazing flexibility and speed, performing the tough Niralamba Poorna Chakrasana yoga position 21 times in one minute. Described as one of the very hardest yoga contortions, the move didn’t seem to pose any problem to the 11-year-old girl who slid on her back with ease before rising up on her feet again, without using her hands as support. It almost looks like she is being pulled up by invisible strings.

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In a controversial case that has been the talk of a whole country these last few days, a 13-year-old girl went on TV to tell the world that she is pregnant with her 10-year-old boyfriend.

The two children, Darya and Ivan, recently appeared on Russian television show “On Air Live” to tell their story, get tested and be confronted by experts about their controversial pregnancy. Reports of Ivan having impregnated his 13-year-old girlfriend had been going around Russian social media all last week, but the couple’s parents gave their permission for them to finally show their faces to the world. The 13-year-old girl claimed that she had not been intimate with other boys than Ivan, and her version was believed by a psychologist, but then other experts produced evidence that Ivan was too young to leave anyone pregnant.

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It’s not every day that you hear about teenage girls turning to plastic surgery to make themselves look more youthful, but then again, not many 15-year-olds look like their grandmothers.

The story of Xiaofeng, a young girl from Liaoning, China, who suffered from a rare medical condition that left her looking like a woman in her 60’s, first made news headlines in December of last year. Media outlets throughout Asia wrote about how the first symptoms of the incurable condition known as progeria appeared when Xiaofeng was just one-year-old, and how by the time her teenage years rolled up, she looked like an old woman. Her saggy skin made her the target of cruel kids at school, and the constant abuse made her decide to quit her studies. The sad story melted the hearts of millions, many of which donated money for a surgery that could help the poor girl look her age.

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A professor of experimental psychology recently unveiled a wearable patch infused with bacon flavor that is supposed to help curb meat cravings.

Charles Spence, a professor of experimental psychology at the University of Oxford, teamed up with plant-based food company Strong Roots to create a patch that, when scratched, produces a smell similar to that of cooked bacon. The idea behind this strange invention is that the human mind is connected to our senses of taste and smell, and that certain smells can significantly reduce food cravings.

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A 16-year-old Indonesian boy suffered a horrific injury to his neck after a needlefish suddenly jumped out of the water and literally pierced his neck clean through, knocking him out of the boat he was fishing from.

The freak accident occurred on January 18, when 16-year-old Muhammad Idul and his friend Sari decided to go on a late-night fishing trip. The boys went out to sea in Buton, off the South East Sulawesi province, and everything went according to plan until Sari turned on his flashlight, which allegedly caused a needlefish to suddenly leap out of the water and lodge its pointy, long jaws in Muhammad’s neck, piercing it from his chin to the base of the skull. Not only did the force of the attack knock him out of the boat, but the thrashing fish, which remained dodged in his neck, almost made him drown.

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A 61-year-old postal worker from the Japanese city of Yokohama was recently arrested for hoarding around 24,000 pieces of mail that he had failed to deliver since back in 2003.

Officials at Japan Post, the government-owned mail service, noticed there was something peculiar about the unnamed postal worker’s activity last year, and he was let go. However, the cache of hidden mail was discovered later, because it was located in his home, “which is beyond the confines of an internal inspection”. The 61-year-old admitted to failing to deliver the tens of thousands of letters and parcels, claiming that doing his job “was too much bother”. But he didn’t want his younger colleagues to think he was less capable than them, so he just hid the mail at home.

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Vernon Kruger, a 52-year-old man from Dullstroom, a small town in South Africa, hasn’t set foot on the ground in 73 days, ever since he climbed into his “home in the sky”, a small barrel at the top of a 25-meter-tall pole.

The first time Kruger climbed into his now famous barrel was 22 years ago, as a dare. He was on a an exotic island, during a vacation, when one of his friends said ‘why don’t you break the record for sitting in a tree?’. It was a joke  at first, than it became a dare, so Vernon started looking into it. He learned that an Indonesian man had already broken the record by sitting in a tree for 28 days, but instead of letting it go, his friends suggested he try pole sitting instead. The record stood at 54 days at the time, so the South African set up his own pole and stood on it for 64 days. That was in 1997, and since no one managed to break his world record since, he decided to do it himself.

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The fluffy pillows of Norwegian artist Håkon Anton Fagerås look perfect for smashing your face into after a long, hard day, but I wouldn’t recommend it, since they are carved out of white marble.

For thousands of years, blocks of marble have been carved into awe-inspiring artworks by some of the most talented sculptors in human history. It is perhaps the most used material in the history of art, and for good reason. There is a certain elegance, even a delicateness to it, qualities that help artists use it to express the nuances of human emotion, despite its rigid nature. These properties of marble inspired Håkon Anton Fagerås to sculpt the rock into something that would embody its qualities perfectly.

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A Houston woman recently took to social media to complain about her daughter’s Elsa doll, which not only starts singing on its own even when switched off, but has also returned after being thrown away multiple times.

Emily Madonia recalls that the problematic Elsa doll became a part of her family’s life on Christmas 2013, as a gift for her daughter. It recited several lines from the Disney animation blockbuster “Frozen”, as well as the iconic song “Let It Go” when a small button was pushed on her necklace. Everything was fine for two years, but in 2015, she started alternating between English and Spanish, when before she had only recited lines in English. Then it started singing and speaking randomly, even when her switch was turned off, but the family brushed it off as some sort of glitch or wiring problem. But things got really weird lat December, when Emily decided to throw the doll out with the trash, and it somehow kept coming back…

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