Budimir Buda Šobat, a 54-year-old man from Croatia, managed to set a new world record for the longest time breath held underwater, after spending 24 minutes and 33 seconds underwater without coming up for air.

The incredible feat was achieved in a swimming pool, in the town of Sisak, under the supervision of doctors, reporters and supporters, and saw the 54-year-old diver push his body to the limit. After spending a few minutes hyperventilating on pure oxygen, to increase body oxygenation, Šobat spent close to half an hour face down in the pool, without coming up for air. It sounds like an impossible achievement for a mere mortal, but for the Croatian daredevil it’s the crowning achievement of years of training and conditioning.

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A Filipino man who had been experiencing sharp chest pains in cold weather, learned that he had a four-inch-long knife blade lodged in his chest after doing a routine X-ray.

25-year-old Kent Ryan Tomao was more than a bit confused when doctors told him that he had an an “object resembling a knife” stuck in his chest, very close to one of his lungs. He had undergone an X-ray exam required to apply for a mining job in Agusan del Sur, and never imagined there was anything wrong with him. He told doctors in Kidapawan City that he had sometimes experienced stabbing pains in his chest on unusually cold days, but didn’t think too much of them. He certainly didn’t think there was a knife blade in his chest.

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A tire startup has teamed up with NASA to bring the world’s first space-age alloy bicycle tires to the mainstream market.

The SMART Tire Company recently announced an innovative airless bicycle tire originally developed and tested by NASA for future Mars Rover missions. Dubbed METL, the revolutionary tire is made from smart memory metal that ,unlike stretching, rearranges its molecular structure when you bend it, but instantly goes back to its original shape. It basically has the flexibility of rubber but is as strong as titanium, which means that you probably won’t have to change another bicycle tire in your lifetime.

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A 31-year-old “emotional counselor” specializes in breaking up married Chinese men from their mistresses and making sure they return to their wives, who are also his clients.

Xiao Sheng has been in the business of breaking up married men from their mistresses for six years, and has come a long way since he first started his unique business. He now has an 8-person staff working alongside him, including a situation analysts, and a customer service manager, as well as actors and directors ready to assist him when certain scenarios need to be staged. His techniques can get very complex, and very expensive, with the average contract costing the client a hefty 150,000 yuan ($23,000).

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A black sand beach littered with huge chunks of glistening ice has become one of the most visited attractions in Iceland, and for good reason, it looks like something out of a fantasy movie.

Known as Breiðamerkursandur in Icelandic, Diamond Beach takes its name from the chunks of pristine ice scattered across the black volcanic sand and glistening like giant, uncut diamonds. It is located next to Jökulsárlón Glacier Lagoon on the South Coast of Iceland, about six hours away from the country’s capital, Reykjavik. Although it’s not part of the popular Golden Circle Tour, Diamond Beach has become one of the country’s top tourist attractions in recent years, and looking at photos of it, it’s easy to see why.

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Hand-made silk embroidery is a long-standing tradition in Vietnam, but the craft only recently reached its peak, when two artists – an embroider and a painter – decided to combine their skills and found the country’s most successful hand embroidery studio.

XQ Dalat was founded by Hoang Le Xuan, a talented artisan who inherited ancient embroidery techniques from her family, and her husband, painter Vo Van Quan. Together they came up with the concept of embroidered paintings and came up with new techniques to make it a reality. The unprecedented level of realism and detail displayed in the embroidered masterpieces of XQ Dalat catapulted the small family business to national and later, international success. Today, the company employs over 3,000 talented embroiders and caters to clients from all over the world.

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For years, Aprilia Santini Manganang and the Indonesian Women’s Volleyball Association had been fighting off accusations that she was actually a man, but this year, Manganang was finally confirmed to actually be male.

A member of Indonesia’s national women’s volleyball team, Aprilia Manganang also played in several local club teams in Indonesia, as well as in Thailand. She led the Jakarta Electric PLN women’s team to become the champion of the Proliga in 2015, 2016, and 2017. In 2019, she became champion again with the Jakarta PGN Popsivo Polwan team, before transferring to the Generali Supreme Chonburi-E Tech team in the Thai Volleyball League and winning the championship that same year. Manganang won multiple Most Valuable Player awards in her career, and helped the Indonesian national team win the bronze and silver medals at different editions of the Southeast Asian Games (SEA). But her amazing achievements were always put into question, because of haw she looked.

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A Thai teenager recently got his five minutes of internet fame, after going online to buy a cheap iPhone, only to receive a coffee table shaped like the Apple smartphone.

Usually, when a luxury product is being sold for much cheaper than its market price, you owe it to yourself to check that everything is legit, but sometimes you just get carried away and push that ‘buy’ button to make sure someone doesn’t snatch it from under your noise. That’s exactly what this teenage Apple fan from Thailand did recently, in hope of getting a much-coveted handheld for cheap. Only he knew that something was definitely wrong when the package was delivered…

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Did you know there was a way to simply pull off the wool of sheep as you would a sweater, thus making classic shearing obsolete? It’s actually been around for decades, but for some reason, it never caught on.

When BioClip was first introduced in the early 1990s, it was supposed to completely replace sheep shearing in a matter of years. To be honest, it was a truly revolutionary product that relied on an effective biological agent to harvest sheep wool in a totally different way. A singly injection of BioClip caused a temporary break in the wool
follicle fiber synthesis process, essentially detaching the wool coat from the animal, and allowing owners to remove it as they would a piece of clothing. Videos of the process have been doing the rounds online for years, and they just never get old.

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Photos of a moldy-looking bun sold on Chinese online marketplace Taobao have been getting a lot of attention on Asian social media lately, because of its unappetizing appearance.

Chinese company Nanjing Yican Foods has been turning a lot of heads with a rather unique-looking product – match and cheese bun that looks a few months past its expiration date. Underneath its light brown exterior, the cheese matcha bun has a light green appearance that looks just like the disgusting food mold that develops on old bread products. Only it’s actually worse than that, as squeezing the bun causes the green matcha and cheese mixture to ooze out of it…

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A Tokyo dessert shop has become famous for selling a soft-serve ice-cream covered with generous amounts of matcha powder that makes people choke when they eat it.

Remember the cinnamon challenge from about a decade ago? You should, it was one of the most popular internet challenges ever and even has its own Wikipedia page because of that. Anyway, the challenge was to eat a spoonful of ground cinnamon in under 60 seconds, without drinking anything, with the video of the attempt being uploaded to the internet as evidence. I don’t know how popular the cinnamon challenge was in Japan, but it seems that they actually have their own milder version, which involves eating a soft-serve ice-cream covered with matcha powder, without coughing or gagging.

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The regent honeyeater is already one of the world’s rarest birds, but experts are worried that it could soon go extinct, because they have forgotten how to sing.

Flocks of hundreds of regent honeyeaters could once be spotted all over south-eastern Australia on a regular basis, but today the species is critically endangered, with only 300 specimens believed to exist in the entire world. They were also known for the complexity of their mating songs, but as their numbers started dwindling, ornithologists started noticing this complexity diminishing, to the point where male regent honeyeaters didn’t even sound like their species anymore. Today, there is ample evidence that regent honeyeaters have forgotten how to sing, which could render the entire species extinct.

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Echo, a two-year-old Harlequin Dane, has been turning heads everywhere she goes after her owner dyed her coat purple, blue, pink and turquoise.

Sierra Schoon, a 22-year-old woman from Grand Junction in Colorado, has been coloring her psychiatric service dog, Echo, using pet-safe dye, ever since the dog was about six-months old. The young dog groomer said that she uses vegetable-based Arctic Fox hair dye, and that Echo loves to just sit there and be pampered for three or four hours, while she applies the dye. Apparently, the dog also loves the attention she gets when they go out for walks, as people tend to get very confused by her unusual look.

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Doctors recently reported the bizarre case of a 25-year-old woman suffering from an incredibly rare medical condition that caused her to bleed from her eyes during her monthly period.

Haemolacria, the condition that causes people to cry blood, is extremely rare, but Indian doctors documented the case of a woman with a similar, but even rarer condition called “ocular vicarious menstruation”. As the name suggests, it causes female sufferers to bleed from their eyes, but only during their monthly period. The 25-year-old woman, whose name was not revealed for privacy reasons, visited the emergency room at a hospital in Chandigarh, complaining about crying blood. All her tests came back normal, and it was only after the woman revealed that the same thing had occurred around the same time the month before that doctors made the connection to menstruation.

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An attractive female Twitter user in Japan recently shocked her tens of thousands of fans after going on a national television show to unmask herself as a 50-year-old man using a popular smartphone app to alter her appearance. I think it’s safe to say that after reading this story, you’ll never trust another internet photo again. Nor should you!

Azusa Gakuyuki, a young, attractive girl who had been entertaining her Twitter followers with photos of herself indulging in her biggest passions (motorcycle riding, mountain hiking, skiing and other outdoorsy activities) went on popular television program Monday Late Show (から夜ふかし) to reveal something that left everyone flabbergasted. The beautiful girl, who appeared to be in her early 20s, was actually a 50-year-old man using the popular app FaceApp to alter his appearance and pass himself off as a woman.

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