Zach Skitmore, a 9-year-old boy from Norwich, in Norfolk, UK suffers from a rare genetic condition that makes him immune to pain. That may sound like a real-life superpower, but in reality, it only makes him more vulnerable.

Zach’s parents started noticing something strange about his reactions to pain very early on. When he was just an infant getting his first shots, he didn’t so much as squeak when the nurse poked him with the needle. At age one, he bit through his tongue without even realizing, then, when he was four, he dislocated his hip on a bouncy castle and had it popped back in without any kind of pain relief. When he was six, he broke his leg and walked on it for three days before anyone noticed it was broken. Unfortunately, not being able to feel pain isn’t the same as not getting hurt, and all this physical abuse has already taken a heavy toll on Zach’s body.

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If you’re of the opinion that fights are the most exciting part of ice hockey, you’re probably going to love Ice Wars, a new combat sports league that pits ice hockey enforcers against each other.

Take away the sticks, the puck and the nets, and you’re left with hockey players with nothing better to do than beat each other to a pulp for the entertainment of paying spectators. That’s essentially the idea behind Ice Wars, a soon-to-debut combat sports league featuring ice hockey enforcers fighting for money. A match will consist of two, one-minute rounds with a 30-second “ice breaker” round in the event that the fighters each win one round.

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Imagine going from having nothing to your name to winning over a quarter of a million dollars only to be unable to claim it due to a lack of ID. That’s exactly the problem an Algerian undocumented immigrant in Belgium is facing right now.

A few ago, the lottery winner, whose name has not been disclosed for obvious reasons, went into a shop in Zeebrugge, a Belgian port city and popular transit point for migrants and refugees, and bought a lottery scratchcard. he paid 5 euros for it and ended up winning a whopping 250,000 euros ($270,000). He was so stunned that he had a friend verify the prize, and then they both double-checked with the shop owner. He had won 250,000 euros and his life was about to change for the better. Or so he thought…

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New York City is full of unusual plots of land left over from various construction projects, but none as small and emblematic as the Hess Triangle, a private property barely larger than a pizza slice.

The story of the Hess Triangle began in 1910 when the city of New York claimed eminent domain in order to expropriate and demolish 253 buildings, including the Voorhis, a 5-storey apartment building owned by David Hess. The businessman and his family fought the decision, but by 1913, they had exhausted all legal options and had to watch their property be demolished. However, in 1928, while checking property papers, Hess’s heirs discovered that the city had neglected to seize a tiny corned of Plot 55, and quickly filed a notice of possession for it. That’s how the Hess Triangle, the smallest piece of real estate in NYC came to be.

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Every year, Yoro, a small town in northern Honduras, allegedly experiences a mysterious phenomenon known as “Lluvia de Peces”, a literal rain of fish.

The rain of fish phenomenon has been reported in many places around the world, but Honduras’ Yoro department is the only place where the bizarre rain reportedly occurs every year, sometimes several times per year. The now-famous Lluvia de Peces takes place sometime between May and June, usually after a very powerful storm. The weirdest thing about this unusual occurrence is that, despite it being a yearly event, no one has ever actually seen the fish fall from the sky. There is however photographic and video evidence of hundreds of fish covering entire areas following powerful storms, so it definitely can’t be dismissed as just a simple legend, and scientists have actually investigated the phenomenon in order to provide a plausible explanation.

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The Opuses restaurant at The Royal Park Hotel in Ginza, Tokyo recently got a lot of attention because of an intriguing dessert shaped like pieces of wall plaster.

On the list of least appetizing things in the world, wall plaster ranks pretty highly, so most people wouldn’t call it the most inspired choice for designing a dessert. Still, that’s exactly what the chefs at Opuses, a high-class restaurant in Tokyo, Japan seem to have done. Photos of this dubious-looking dish were recently posted on Twitter by user @mimimimimitsu32 and ended up getting over 200,000 likes, 26,000 retweets and hundreds of comments. The general sentiment was that the dessert looked remarkably like plaster.

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Vozrozhdeniya was once an isolated island in the Aral Sea. Today, it’s a wasteland infused with tonnes of anthrax, as well as other exotic and deadly diseases.

The Aral Sea was once the fourth-largest sea on planet Earth, but after the rivers that fed it were diverted by the Soviets to irrigate cotton fields, its waters receded and today it is nothing but a salty-sand wasteland where temperatures frequently reach 60 degrees Celsius and signs of life are scarce to non-existent. But you know what’s worse than a salt-covered wasteland – a salt-covered wasteland infused with anthrax and a plethora of other exotic diseases that the Soviet Union experimented with for years. That’s what makes Vozrozhdeniya one of the deadliest places in the world.

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Celebrity lookalikes are nothing new, but it’s rare to find one that resembles the original as closely as Brazilian Priscilla Beatrice resembles pop icon Rihanna.

Priscilla Beatrice may not be Rihanna’s only lookalike, but she’s definitely the most famous one. With over 450,000 followers on Instagram and 2.4 million followers on TikTok, you could say she is a social media sensation in her own right. She has made a name for herself impersonating the Barbadian superstar both online and in various cities around the world, with fans of Rihanna flocking to get an autograph or have their picture taken with her. And who could blame them? The resemblance is so uncanny, you’d be tempted to think she was Rihanna’s identical twin sister.

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A team of welders from Mazda Motor Corporation in Japan recently showed off their skill by painstakingly welding the faces of a 1mm die.

Photos of a metallic die barely visible on a person’s fingertip and a magnified up-close photos showing the elegant welding keeping all six facets together recently went viral on Japanese social media, leaving a lot of people impressed. Although you’d be hard-pressed to use this type of die in a real-life situation, the fact that people are actually capable of this sort of impressive feat is incredible. It goes to show you that nothing is impossible, regardless of how hard it is.

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An unnamed 61-year-old man in German reportedly got 90 doses of Covid-19 vaccine injected into his body so he could make money selling vaccination certificates to people who didn’t want to get vaccinated.

The man from the eastern German city of Magdeburg, whose name was not released, allegedly managed to receive up to 90 shots of Covid-19 vaccine at various vaccination centers in the eastern state of Saxony for months, before finally being caught earlier this month. He was finally discovered when he came to a vaccination center in Eilenburg, Saxony for the second day in a row, asking to get a Covid-19 jab. It turns out the man kept getting Covid-19 shots in order to sell forged vaccination cards with real vaccine batch numbers to people not wanting to get vaccinated themselves.

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The Metaura Pro claims to be the world’s first wearable air-conditioning device capable of constantly blowing cold air to keep the wearer cool.

Conventional wearable cooling systems only circulate ambient air, and thus don’t do a very good job of cooling people down. The Metaura Pro, on the other hand, allegedly relies on a portable cooling solution to produce genuinely cold air that is 7 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than that of the ambient, in fan mode, and up to 18 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than ambient air, in cooling mode. The device has a dedicated app and relies on artificial intelligence to regulate air temperature.

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A Japanese couple who can’t agree on their last name has agreed to divorce and remarry every three years so they can take turns using their respective last names.

Japanese law clearly states that couples must agree on a single last name to use after they get married, but what happens when two lovers just can’t decide which one of their family names to use? That was the conundrum a young couple from Hachioji city, on the outskirts of Tokyo, found themselves in when they decided to tie the knot, after a few months of dating. Only when it came to settling on their last name, she made it clear that she intended to keep her maiden name, something that her husband didn’t agree with at all. They argued about it for a while, but then they decided that they weren’t the first couple to have this problem and that there was a way to solve it.

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A Vietnamese man had to be rescued by a Thai fishing boat after attempting to cross the Andaman Sea in an inflatable boat in order to search for his wife.

On Wednesday, March 23rd, the Royal Thai Navy received a report from the captain of a fishing trawler about a small inflatable boat they had spotted in the Andaman Sea, about 80 kilometers from the shore. Apparently, there was a man inside with some luggage, an almost empty tank of drinking water and some instant noodles. The man didn’t speak Thai or English, and fearing that he could get himself killed, the fishing boat decided to tow him and his boat back to safety.

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Haider Ali, one of Pakistan’s most famous truck art masters, has recently discovered a new and lucrative niche – sneakers painted in traditional, bright motifs.

Truck art is an iconic part of Pakistani culture. For decades, it has been used to turn simple means of locomotion into driveable works of art to be looked at and admired. Now, this traditional art style is branching out to other mediums, the latest of which is sneakers. Haider Ali, a Pakistani truck art specialist was one of the first to jump on the truck-art-sneakers bandwagon, after getting an order for a custom pair and seeing his outrageous price being accepted by the client.

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Deinococcus radiodurans is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as “the world’s toughest bacterium,” and it is fully deserving of that title.

Scientists discovered the red, spherical bacterium that later came to be known as deinococcus radiodurans about 70 years ago, when examining a can of ground meat that had spoiled despite having been sterilized by exposure to doses of radiation in the megarad range. Research would later show that this lowly bacterium can withstand 10,000 times the amount of radiation that would normally kill a human being, thanks to a miraculous ability to repair numerous DNA double-strand breaks in a matter of hours.

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