A 21-year-old woman from Dongguan, China, was recently diagnosed with with retinal artery obstruction in her right eye, after playing a popular smartphone game almost non-stop.

The woman, known only as Wu, apparently noticed that she couldn’t see anything with her right eye on October 1st, while playing her favorite mobile game, King of Glory. Thinking she was just tired, she went to bed, but when she woke up the next day, she was still blind in her right eye. Her parents took her to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with a serious condition known as retinal artery obstruction. This usually only occurs in older patients, but doctors said that Wu’s eyes were incredibly fatigued by the stressed of constantly staring into the small smartphone screen.

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A family in Forest Hill, Toronto, has taken their neighbors to court for copying the design of their multi-million dollar house when renovating their property, thus decreasing the value of their own home. They are asking for $2.5 million in damages.

It turns out you can’t just copy design elements of a house you like without suffering the consequences. Barbara Ann and Eric Kirshenblatt learned that the hard way three years ago, when they were taken to court by their neighbors, Jason and Jodi Chapnick, whose home they had allegedly used as inspiration when renovating their own property. The Chapnicks claimed that the defendants had fixed up their house to look “strikingly similar” to theirs, including using matching stonework the same shade of blue. They were asking for $1.5 million in damages, $20,000 in statutory copyright damages, $1 million in punitive damages, and for the defendants to change the look of their house.

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Treepex is a portable barrel-like device that allegedly uses living tree cells compressed in replaceable cartridges to turn carbon dioxide into oxygen, emulating a tree’s ability to transform polluted air into mineral-enriched air. It sounds like a game-changer for sure, but nobody knows if it actually works, plus, it looks kind of funny.

Developed by a Georgian, Tbilisi-based, startup with the same name, Treepex claims to provide a real solution to the world’s growing air pollution problem. Using a new technology called CRISPR, the company was apparently able “to extract the DNA of actual trees to recreate the living cells that are responsible for photosynthesis”, and compress them into cartridges that absorb polluted air and release clean fresh air for the user. All you have to do is plug a cartridge into the tubular Treepex, stick it into your mouth, and breathe.

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If you’re planning to go on a diet, or if you suffer from serious conditions like diabetes, knowing exactly what and how much you’re eating is essential. In this day and age, we have calorie and nutritional calculators even on our smartphones, but they act only as guides, whereas Panasonic’s revolutionary new device, CaloRieco, actually analyzes the food on your plate and provides accurate information about in just a few seconds.

You’ve probably used calorie calculators before, and you know that they only offer general information. For example, a calculator will tell you the average number of calories in a burger, but it can’t tell you exactly how many calories are in the burger at your favorite fast food joint. The same goes for nutrients like protein, carbohydrates or fats. And this is what makes the new Panasonic CaloRieco so special, it can actually give you accurate information on exactly what is on your plate.

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The Carolina Reaper has been the undisputed world’s hottest pepper for over 4 years now, but its days at the top are numbered. There’s a new kid on the block and it’s apparently twice as hot as the Reaper. This is “Pepper X”.

Pepper X is the brainchild of Smokin’ Ed Currie, “founder, president, mad scientist & chef of PuckerButt Pepper Company”, and the same man who created the now world famous Carolina Reaper. Apparently, he started working on this scorching hot chilli some 10 years ago, crossing various pepper variety and constantly upping the Scoville rating, to the point where it now scores a mouth burning 3.18 million Scoville units. To put that into perspective, Jalapenos are rated at between 10,000 – 20,000 units, while the current Guinness record holder for world’s hottest pepper, the Carolina Reaper, scores an average of 1.6 million units on the Scoville scale. So it’s safe to say that Pepper X is pretty hot.

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Feel free to add mosquito-repellent to the already huge list of useful of smartphone features. South-Korean manufacturer LG has recently released the world’s first mosquito repellent smartphone, which uses ultrasonic sound waves to keep the pesky bloodsuckers at bay.

Called the LG K7i, the innovative handheld was unveiled at the  India Mobile Congress last week, and judging by early feedback, it’s set to become a best-seller in mosquito-infested countries. While advertised as a budget smartphone with relatively unimpressive technical specs, the K7i has a very unique advantage – it features LG’s “Mosquito Away” technology which can allegedly repel mosquitoes with the help of ultrasonic sound waves.

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After realizing that many of the men using online dating services were trying to find extra wives, an Indonesian software developer decided to make it easier for them by creating a dedicated polygamy dating app.

A year ago, while browsing through various Indonesian dating websites, Lindu Pranayama noticed that many of the visitors were actually married men searching for a second or third wives. Unfortunately for them, the vast majority of online dating services don’t offer any options for polygamists, so he decided to create “AyoPoligami” – which translated as “Let’s Do Polygamy – a new smartphone app that caters specifically to their needs.

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53-year-old Juana Escudero is alive and well, but she’s been struggling to prove it for the last seven years. Following an administrative error, she was registered as deceased, and has been unable to accomplish simple tasks, like renewing her driver’s license or scheduling a doctor’s appointment, ever since. Escudero has become so desperate to fix things that she now wants to dig up her own grave to prove that she’s not the one buried there.

It all started seven years ago, when a woman whose name and date of birth matched Juana Escudero’s perfectly died in Malaga, Spain. Even though the protagonist of this story was alive and well in Alcalá de Guadaíra, a town near Seville, the strange coincidence caused their Social Security data to clash, and the living Escudero has been dead to the Government ever since. She and her family thought it was funny at first, but they’ve stopped laughing at it for a long time now.

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Sick of playing the same old Halloween pranks every year? Want two pull an original bone-chilling Halloween prank on your friends or family? One Dallas doughnut shop has you covered with a scary clown doughnut delivery service.

Riding the wave of the recent Box Office hit Stephen King’s It, the Hurts Donut shop has decided to implement a new, Halloween-themed delivery option for their delicious treats . For just $5 extra, you can have your donuts delivered by a person dressed as a menacing real-life Pennywise and subsequently scare the pants off of your unsuspecting friends and family members. Not only will this clown deliver a fantastic fright, but he will immediately make amends for your prank by handing the recipient a dozen of Hurts’ delicious treats! Who can stay mad while chowing down on homemade donuts, glazed to perfection?

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Getting a divorce is never easy for anyone involved, but it is particularly difficult at the Yibin People’s Court, in China’s Sichuan Province, where one magistrate recently implemented a divorce exam that both the husband and the wife must fail in order for their divorce application to be approved.

The divorce exam is the brainchild of Wang Shiyu, a judge at the People’s Court of Yibin County, who, after noticing that divorces accounted for an alarmingly large percentage of the court’s cases, decided to do something about it. His intention was to make couples think twice before ending their marriage, and also give them an opportunity to reminisce the good times they had together. So he came up with a series of questions for both husband and wife, which they must answer separately. If they score under 60, Wang approves their divorce application, if not, well, they have to keep working on their marriage, whether they like it or not.

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As a teacher,  if you want your middle school students to get off their smartphones phones and and actually pay attention in class, you have to get creative. Take Oregon teacher Kyle Hubler for example, who transformed his classroom into an amazingly detailed, Harry Potter inspired dreamland – equipped with wands, owls, and costumes!

Hubler, who teaches seventh and eighth graders at Evergreen Middle School in Hillsboro, first implemented Harry Potter-themed elements to his classroom, last year, and the students loved it. So when he heard that he would moving to a new classroom for the 2017-2018 school year, he decided to go all out and turn into a real-life version of Hogwarts.

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Some people dream about getting married on a mountain top, others in a beautiful church with stained glass windows, but not Sue Berkeley. All Sue cared about is that she and her husband-to-be, Eli Bob, tie the knot in a place near and dear to her heart, surrounded by all the things and all the people that make her happy. Which is why the Australian couple decided to hold their ceremony at their local Costco store, in Sydney.

At first, the idea of getting married in a store was purely sarcastic. “We were joking one Friday,” Eli explains in an interview with The Daily Telegraph. “People were asking when were were getting married – so I suggested Costco. I know how much she loves it there.”  

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Spirit Payton is one of YouTube’s unlikeliest stars. In just under two years, she has grown her channel, ASMRTheChew, to over 160,000 subscribers and had several of her videos go viral, with millions of views, all by making chewing noises into a microphone.

From popping giant pimples to squashing bread with their faces, we’ve seem people come up with all kinds of crazy ways of attracting attention online, so I guess it’s not that big of a surprise that someone managed to make it big on YouTube by making loud eating noises into a high fidelity microphone. Spirit Payton does post the occasional makeup tutorial, but her eating videos are pretty much her bread and butter. She takes requests from her fans and eats their preferred foods on camera, chewing it slowly and loudly as part of what is known as an ASMR therapy session.

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Between deforestation, climate change, and poaching, the number of orangutans living in the wild is dropping at an alarming rate, but one orangutan in particular has made it through all this torment and her story is giving us all hope. Her name is Alba, and she is truly one of a kind. Alba is an albino – currently the only known one in the world.

The five year old ape was rescued in an Indonesian Village by the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation (BOS). She had been illegally captured and kept in a cage without proper care for a couple of days before rescuers got to her. Researches believe Alba was orphaned at a young age and caught not long after. When they found her she was suffering from a parasitic infection, dehydration, and low body weight. However, she still displays wild behaviors, meaning she can be released in the wild.

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A self-proclaimed veterinarian in Chengdu, China, is currently under investigation for operating an unlicensed “clinic” on the street, and charging around 50 – 100 yuan to remove the vocal chords of noisy dogs.

Why would any dog owner want to remove their pet’s vocal chords, you ask? In this particular case, most of the shady vet’s customers told police officers that they had received complaints from their neighbors that the animals barked too loudly, so they decided to have them devocalized. That’s a gruesome thing in itself, but to have the procedure done by some random guy on the side of the street, with unclean surgical instruments is simply appalling.

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