Lungs of Steel – Chinese Man Inflates Tyre Tube with His Nose

Tong Junhai, a 44-year-old man from China, recently achieved international fame, after a video showing him inflating a tyre tube using only one of his nostrils has gone viral online.

On February 25, Tong Junhai stunned a crowd at Huancheng Park, in the city of Xi’an, northwestern China, with a very unusual stunt. Dressed as a Kung Fu master, the man started boasting that he could inflate a medium-size tyre tube using only his nose. And to show people just how difficult the task is for a regular person, he invited a naysayer to try it himself, using his mouth. The man tried blowing into the rubber house, but to no avail.

When it was time for Junhai to show off his bizarre skill, he got into a half-squat position, put the hose to one of his nostrils, blocked the other with his thumb, and started pumping air into the tube. You can see the blood veins on his forehead popping out as he struggles to push the air out of his lungs and into the tyre tube, but eventually, he pulls it off.

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This Brooklyn Parking Space Can Be Yours for “Only” $300,000

Finding a place to park your car in Park Slope, Brooklyn on a daily basis is apparently an almost impossible task, which is why some people are willing to pay a whopping $300,000 for a simple parking space.

$300,000 is enough to buy an apartment in some parts of New York, but on Union Street, in Park Slope it will only buy you a parking space in a garage condominium. The last spot at 845 Union Street sold for $280,000, but the most recent one available is already $20,000 more expensive, and experts predict that prices will keep going up.

Howard Pronsky, the owner of the 300-space parking garage at 845 Union Street, said that three decades ago he bought the place for $29,000 per space, and while the price has steadily gone up since then, it only started growing exponentially when other garage owners in the area sold their properties to residential developers. Park Slope is running out of parking spaces, and people are willing to spend a fortune for peace of mind.

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Reptile Breeder Spends 8 Years Creating Unique Emoji Pattern Snake

Justin Kobylka, a selective reptile breeder from Georgia, claims that he spent eight years trying to create a snake specimen with detailed smiling emoji patterns. He finally did it, and the result looks as unreal as you can imagine.

As a selective breeder, Kobylka specializes in taking relatively common reptile species and creating specimens with striking physical features which he then sells for a much higher price. He has created a number of visually-impressive over the years, but none as stunning as the Emoji Ball Python, a Lavender Albino Piebald Ball Python with three orange smiley emojis on its skin.

The unique pattern is caused by recessive mutations, and while these occur naturally, the chances of them occurring in the wild are “astronomical”, according to Kobylka. He claims his Piebald Ball Python is the world’s first to have three detailed smiley face emojis on its slithering body.

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74-Year-Old Man Dresses as a Woman to Make His Mother Happy

Every weekend for the past 14 years, Li Yinglai, an elderly gentleman from Kunming, China, has been entertaining visitors at the city’s Green Lake Park by dressing up in traditional women’s clothes, dancing and posing with tourists. But while he loves the attention, he claims that he’s not your usual busker, he’s just doing this to make his dear mother happy.

74-year Li Yinglai says that his 96-year-old mother always wanted a daughter, but only had two sons. When he was 60, he decided to do his best to make his mother’s wish come true by putting on colorful women’s clothes and accessories and going out into the streets to show off his girly dance moves. He apparently made quite an impression, as he’s been doing it every weekend since.

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Smart Bracelet Allows Dads-to-Be to Feel The Movements of Their Unborn Children

In an effort to help expecting fathers feel more involved in the pregnancy, a Danish tech company has developed a smart bracelet that lets them feel the kicks and movements of their unborn children in real time.

Fibo is the newest development in wearable technology. It looks like a cross between a fitness tracker and a smart watch, but its purpose is completely different. By pairing it with a patch -like baby kick monitoring device worn by the mother on her belly, Fibo can accurately imitate the movements of the fetus right after they occur. The bracelet features rotating beads that create a natural movement, rather than the usual sharp, unrealistic vibration that most notification devices rely on.

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The Promised Land of Pigs – A Retirement Home for Pigs Saved from Slaughterhouses

For the last 22 years, the Promised Land of Pigs, a unique farm in Amstelveen, the Netherlands, has been a haven for hundreds of pigs that would have otherwise been slaughtered and sold piece by piece at a supermarket. Here, they enjoy a peaceful, comfortable existence complete with hugs and weekly massages until the end of their natural lives.

The Promised Land of Pigs (Beloofde Varkensland) is a non-profit organization founded by Dafne Westerhof, an activist militating for the humane treatment of farm animals. For over two decades she has saved hundreds of pigs, either by buying them straight from slaughterhouses, or taking them in from breeders who no longer had use for them or had become too attached to them to have them butchered. Whatever the reason, she’s always been more than happy to accept new pigs into her “Lucky Family” (Familie Bofkont) and give them the life she thinks they deserve.

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Russian Entrepreneurs Give Women the Chance to Rent Flower Bouquets and Expensive Gifts for Women’s Day Photo Shoots

With Women’s Day just around the corner, social networks like Instagram and VKontakte have become flooded with ads from Russian entrepreneurs offering women in Moscow the chance to rent impressive 101-rose bouquets and designer shopping bags for 10-minute photo shoots.

If your boyfriend is cheap, but you want to spark the envy of all your girlfriends without actually breaking the bank, or if you just want to make your boyfriend jealous, and you live in Moscow, Russia, there are a number of online services that you can use to have a gorgeous bouquet and an expensive-looking gift delivered at your doorstep for a 10-minute photo session. You can then post the pics online on March 8 and watch everyone go green with envy.

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Bizarre Smartphone App Lets You Take Photos, Talk with the Dead

In an effort to help people cope with the loss of their loved ones, a South Korean tech company is developing an app that lets them take photos and converse with digitally-rendered models of deceased friends and family.

Called “With Me”, the controversial app was developed by ELROIS, a Korean firm that specializes in creating realistic 3D avatars, and requires the featured person to sign up for an avatar while they are still alive. Currently, they have to visit a special booth where their bodies are scanned using special technology, but ELROIS hopes that smartphones will soon come with built-in 3D-scanning technology to streamline the process. The company then proceeds to create a “realistic” 3D avatar based on the scanned images, followed by reshaping and auto-rigging to make it animated.

Not only can users of the With Me app take selfies with these digital avatars of their loved ones, but thanks to artificial intelligence, they can also converse with them, or have them react to certain commands or information uploaded to the app. “When a user puts personal information in the app, the avatars remember the user from that time and recognize if there’s some changes in the of users as well,” an ELROIS spokesperson said. “For example, if there is a change in appearance or an emotional change and the avatar will mention something about it, such as ‘you look younger today, what is your secret?'”

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Man Spends $50,000 on Plastic Surgery to Transform Himself into Genderless Alien

Vinny Ohh, a makeup artist and part-time male model from Los Angeles, California, has so far invested over $50,000 into 110 cosmetic procedures in an effort to turn himself into an asexual alien.

People have many reasons for turning to plastic surgery, but becoming an alien is definitely not the most common one. Vinny Ohh claims that he doesn’t identify as either male or female and this ongoing process of transforming into an alien being is meant to mirror how he feels inside. He began his unusual project at age 17, when he got his first lip fillers, followed by two rhinoplasties, several cheeks and brow bone fillers, and many more after that. But the most extreme procedures are yet to come, as Vinny plans to spend $160,000 having his genitalia, nipples and bellybutton removed and his forehead realigned.

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Entrepreneur Sells World’s Most Expensive Mountain Air at $167 per Bottle

If you’ve ever been to Switzerland you already know that pretty much everything is expensive there, and the fresh mountain air is apparently no exception. Well, most of it is actually free, but if you want to order a liter of Swiss mountain air collected from a secret location in the Alps, you’ll have to cough up a whopping $167. This is not a joke!

John Green, a British expat living in Basel, Switzerland, is the brains behind “Genuine Mountain Air from Switzerland”, a fledgling online business that promises to ship fresh, high-quality Swiss air anywhere around the world, if you can afford it. Green claims to collect the air from a “secret location” near the town of Zermatt, then bottles it up in glass containers, labels it and ships it to buyers.

Described as “the ultimate present for the man or woman that has everything,” the bottled mountain air also comes with a certificate of authenticity and the exact GPS collection of the place it was collected from.

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Semi-Permanent Freckle Face Tattoos Are Apparently a Beauty Trend Now

While some women cover their faces with thick layers of foundation to cover up natural freckles, others are apparently getting them tattooed. Yup, freckles are in, and some people would even go under the needle to get them.

Freckle tattooing is reportedly one of the fastest growing beauty treatments available today. Similar to microblading, an eyebrow enhancing procedure, freckle tattooing involves the use of pigments to ink freckle-like dots onto a person’s face that eventually blend in with the client’s skin tone. As with any tattoo, there is some inevitable swelling, but it subsides after a few months, and the initial dark coloring of the freckles fades to a light brown.

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Lonely Teen Robbed of a Childhood by Leukemia Advertises for Friends Online

Jordan Kosovich developed leukemia when he was just seven years old. He battled the disease for the next four years, and even though he eventually beat it, the experience took a heavy toll on his social life. Now, the 19-year-old is so desperate to find some friends that he advertised for them on a classifieds website.

The Australian teen from Perth says that leukemia robbed him of a normal childhood. He was forced to quit school for two years until the end of Year 3, while undergoing hellish chemotherapy treatment. When he was finally able to return to school, he became the target of bullies, as the drugs he had taken made him overweight. He describes the whole school experience as “hell” and claims that he wouldn’t go back to it for all the money in the world.

“It’s the worst thing to have happen to you because the drugs they give you are so strong you lose all your hair, and you get really overweight because one of them makes you eat a lot,” Jordan said. “I was too weak to defend myself, being overweight due to the cancer, plus I was a really shy, quiet kid which made me the perfect target.”

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Meet FORPHEUS, the World’s First Robot Table Tennis Tutor

An advanced robot developed by Japanese electronics company Omron has recently been certified by Guinness World Records as the world’s first robot table tennis tutor. FORPHEUS (Future Omron Robotics Technology for Exploring Possibility of Harmonized Automation with Sinic Theoretics) used machine learning to asses the skills of a human player, adjust its game accordingly and provide tips to help opponents improve their technique.

Unveiled at the Ceatec electronics show in Japan in 2014, FORPHEUS has come a long way in the last three years, especially after developers made a breakthrough in artificial intelligence. Originally designed to showcase Omron’s sensor technology, the table tennis-playing robot has now become a Guinness-certified tutor thanks to machine learning. It analyzes data like the human player’s movement, the speed of the ball and the trajectory to determine his opponent’s skill level with around 90% accuracy. FORPHEUS then uses this information to adjust its play style – slow and and easy for beginners, faster and more unpredictable for advanced players.

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Chilean Police Report Paranormal Activity While Investigating Domestic Disturbance

People report cases of paranormal activity somewhere around the world virtually every day, but it’s not often that you hear police officers actually confirming these occurrences. However, that’s exactly what happened a couple of days ago in a Chilean city, when police investigating a domestic disturbance were allegedly attacked by mysterious forces.

On February 26, 2017, a group of Carabineros – Chilean police force – were called to investigate a home in Puerto Montt, after the desperate owners called the emergency number to complain that they were being terrorized by unnatural forces. When they arrived at the house in the municipality of municipality of Fe y Esperanza, they noticed several broken windows and a partially burned mattress in the yard. The owners were outside and as soon as they saw the police approaching they started telling them that there was strange paranormal activity inside the house. Obviously, the Carabineros didn’t believe them, but they quickly changed their mind once they went inside to investigate.

Second corporal Boris Olavarría González, of the Sixth Police Station in Puerto Montt, told reporters that he and his colleagues were questioning the owners inside the house when a trowel fell from the attic like somebody had thrown it down. After checking the attic and confirming that it was empty, González claims that he called out the “demon” asking it to leave. After receiving no response, he decided to go back outside, but on his way to the front door he was struck from behind by a knife.

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World’s First Cannabis Gym Wants to Get You High and Pumped

Weed and fitness apparently go well together, and the Power Plant Fitness gym, in San Francisco, wants to prove that once and for all by allowing clients to consume cannabis in various forms, while they work out. Power Plant Fitness advertises itself as the world’s first cannabis-friendly gym.

Before you get the wrong idea about this place, it’s important to mention that Power Plant Fitness “won’t be a place to get high and just screw around,” quite the opposite. Co-founders Jim McAlpine and Ricky Williams claim that they are “focused on the athletic side, not the cannabis side,” and that they want to tackle the stereotype that pot users are lazy. The new gym will use cannabis as a tool to improve members’ concentration and speed up their post-workout recovery. McAlpine says he experienced the positive effects of weed while skiing, and that gave him the idea to try it in a gym environment.

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