Gongbang is the name of a growing live-streaming trend in South Korea, where people broadcast themselves studying in almost total silence for hours on end to dozens, sometimes hundreds of viewers who love nothing more than to watch them do it.

Ask most popular streamers and they’ll tell you that the keys to a successful live-streaming career are providing entertaining and exciting content, and viewer engagement. That’s what makes the Gongbang live-streaming trend, which has been growing in the Asian country over the last decade, so fascinating. Gongbang streamers almost never connect with their audience, and as for providing exciting content, the most excitement they offer is turning a page every once in a while. They simply broadcast themselves studying for many hours at a time, and, for some reason, people love watching them do it.

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Despite the amazing scientific advances we have made in the last century, there are still many medical cases that can’t be fully explained. Vanishing Bones Syndrome sounds like something straight out of an episode of House MD, but doctors at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh in Scotland encountered a case of this bizarre condition in a 44-year-old woman.

Also known as Gorham-Stout disease, this extremely rare condition causes the sufferer to experience progressive bone loss. The disease is so uncommon that there has only ever been 64 recorded cases in medical literature since it was first described in 1838. In a healthy person, bones are constantly rebuilding themselves to help maintain their strength, and Gorham-Stout disease is believed to be a malfunction of this process; the bone breaks itself down faster than it can repair itself.

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Kalaca Skull, a 22-year-old tattoo artist from Colombia, has been making headlines all over South America for undergoing extreme surgical procedures to make his face look like a skull.

Born Eric Yeiner Hincapié Ramírez, the young tattoo artist claims he had been fascinated by skulls ever since he was a child, but only started turning his face into one after his mother’s death, two years ago, because she didn’t approve of the idea. First, he had the lower half of his nose removed, because, well, skulls don’t have noses. They don’t have ears either so he had most of his ear lobes cut off as well. But his transformation didn’t stop there. After splitting his tongue and tattooing it to an unnatural blue-grey color, he had large black eye-sockets tattooed around his eyes, as well as large teeth and even the hollow space between the mandible and maxilla tattooed around his mouth.

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A non-religious man in Oakland managed to virtually eliminate neighborhood crime with nothing more than a statue of Buddha bought from a local hardware store.

The neighborhood of 11th Avenue and East 19th Street was formerly a rough part of Oakland, riddled with a variety of illegal activities ranging from littering and vandalization to drug dealing, robberies, prostitution, and assaults. That is until one local, Dan Stevenson, purchased a 60-cm-tall stone statue of Buddha and placed it on the street corner opposite his home. People were constantly dumping mattresses, couches and other junk there, and all kind of shady characters would hang around, so he figured the statue would be an improvement. But, in this case, calling the effect of the statue an improvement would be a gross understatement.

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Men often go to great lengths to fulfill their loved ones’ wishes, but this story is a bout a guy who went to extremes to ensure that he wouldn’t have to fulfill a promise he had made to his girlfriend, while at the same time making sure that she didn’t blame him for it.

Earlier this month, a man surnamed Tang, from Chengdu, China, promised his girlfriend that he would buy her a brand new luxury car, and she made sure to constantly remind him of his promise ever since. The problem was that Tang didn’t have the money, and with time running out, he had to come up with a way out of this mess that he had put himself in. His solution, though undoubtedly original, was pretty extreme.

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Chemotherapy has many nasty side effects, and one that patients often find particularly frustrating is dysgeusia. This side effect causes food and drink to taste bland, bitter, or metallic. Now, a Prague based cancer advocacy group has come up with a solution to that problem – a non-alcoholic beer called Mama Beer.

Mamma Beer has been formulated to help breast cancer patients overcome the symptoms of dysgeusia. Its flavor profile has been engineered to make it taste good to those undergoing chemotherapy, but in addition to it’s great taste, the beer also contains a range of vitamins and minerals that have been known to help people deal with cancer treatment. 

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In Sweden, hundreds of refugee children are reportedly suffering from a strange condition known as “resignation syndrome”. These children fall into a coma-like state; they don’t eat, speak, or even open their eyes. Sufferers of resignation syndrome are often left bedbound for years at a time.

Their appearances suggest they have been involved in some sort of accident or suffer from some sort of neurological illness, but sufferers of resignation syndrome have nothing physically wrong with them—they have simply lost the will to live. The condition is known as “uppgivenhetssyndrom” in Sweden, and it is thought to only affect young members of the refugee population.

Research has linked resignation syndrome with the stress and disappointment of having asylum claims rejected. In recent years, regulations surrounding asylum cases have tightened, and those refugees who were not fleeing from an active war zone were likely to have their applications rejected. These rejections could often take years to be decided upon, leaving refugee families in a state of limbo. For many children, the weight of rejection proved too much to bear and they would shut down completely, entering a coma-like state, seemingly on the edge between life and death.

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Moses Lanham, a 57-year-old man from Michigan, has become known as ‘Mr. Plastic’ for his unusual ability to turn his legs along with his knees 180 degrees and walk backward.

Mr Plastic discovered his superhuman ability when he was only 14-years-old. He was climbing a rope in gym class when he lost his grip and crashed to the floor, landing awkwardly. At first, he thought something was dislocated, but he soon realized that he could easily turn his lower legs 180 degrees and back again without experiencing any pain. Medical tests revealed that he was able to do this thanks to of double cartilage in his hips, knees and ankles. He has been using this gift to freak people out ever since.

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This is the story of Werner Jaisli, a Swiss man who in 2008 started building a giant, star-shaped ‘ovniport’ – a UFO landing spot – in an Argentinian desert, because aliens telepathically ordered him to.

It’s not clear exactly when Werner Jaisli arrived in Cachi, a small town in the Argentinian province of Salta, but it’s not hard to figure out what drew him to this place. The deserts of Salta have become famous among UFO enthusiasts around the globe, after several sightings of unidentified flying objects and other unexplained phenomena were reported in the area over the last few decades. On the night of November 24, 2008, Jaisli himself was allegedly contacted by aliens who gave him specific instructions on how to build a UFO landing port, aka ‘ovniport’.

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In order to get the attention of the government in Moscow, the citizens of a small Russian village have launched an initiative to their name from Bungur to “Syria”. Their reasoning is that Russia has invested tens of millions of dollars in the middle eastern state, so surely they can spare some rubles for a Syria a little closer to home.

Bungur has been in a state of disrepair for a long time, and things are only getting worse. The roads are damaged, the electricity and water supply switch off intermittently, and healthcare services are nonexistent. While these kinds of complaints are not unusual for small Russian communities, this village’s way of trying to deal with the situation has raised some eyebrows.

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A man was recently injured after falling into an 8-foot-deep art installation at the Serralves Foundation Museum in Porto, Portugal. He apparently though it looked fake, so he decided to step into it to make sure.

Created by acclaimed British artist Anish Kapoor in 1992, “Descent Into Limbo” is an optical illusion that looks like a black circle painted on the floor. It’s designed to appear like a bottomless pit and staring into is is reportedly a dizzying experience, but one unnamed Italian tourist visiting the installation last week apparently wanted to do more than that. Despite several warning signs and a staffer tasked with keeping visitors safe, the man somehow managed to test the fake-looking pit by stepping into it. He got injured after taking an 8-foot fall, but at least he satisfied his curiosity.

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After waiting for local authorities to fix a massive pothole for several months, residents of  Poplar Plain Crescent, in Toronto, decided to make the best of it by transforming the hole into a community tomato garden.

It’s unclear who came up with the idea of plating tomato seeds into the neglected pothole earlier this summer, but as the plants sprouted and flourished, neighborhood residents started caring for them, even installing stakes to keep them from falling over. Photos of the fully grown tomato plants featuring dozens of juicy green tomatoes are a testament to both the locals care and sense of humour, but also of the indifference of local authorities.

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Many smokers pick up the habit at an early age, but there are probably not many who started as early as Rapi Pamungkas. This Indonesian 2-year-old apparently started smoking by picking up discarded cigarette butts nearby his mother’s market stall, which older boys would then light for him, and now reportedly goes through 40 cigarettes a day.

Soon after starting smoking, Rapi became hooked and soon became famous in his native city of Sukabumi for harassing passers-by and pestering them for cigarettes. Many locals found his antics amusing and would give him cigarettes, laughing as he lit them up. Videos of the extremely young child started doing the round online, and his story recently went viral worldwide. In some of these videos, people can be seen trying to take the cigarette from Rapi; he responds by scowling and pulling the cigarette back.

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The Fuxi Mountain Skywalk, a glass, horseshoe-shaped glass bridge standing 360 meters above a canyon floor, was recently the scene of one of the most bizarre wedding proposals in human history.

Xiao Jing, a 23-year-old woman from Xinmi City, in China’s Henan province, decided to pop the big question to her boyfriend of three years on the beautiful glass bridge of Fuxi Mountain. While lovers arrange marriage proposals here all the time, Jing’s reasons were a bit unusual. You see, her boyfriend, Xiao Yu, had always had a fear of heights and she could never really get over his “cowardice”, so before she married him, she needed to make sure that he was strong enough to conquer his fear.

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You need an exceptional pair of lungs to inflate a tyre tube by blowing air into it through your mouth, but one Chinese man has recently set a new world record by inflating 12 tubes at the same time, with one nostril.

43-year-old Tang Feihu accomplished the impressive feat in just two and a half minutes, during a recent event held at Nanjiang Grand Canyon. The stuntman reportedly started off by inflating 10 tyre tubes with a diameter of over 60 cm, a feat that took him 2 minutes and 39 seconds to complete. After taking a 5-minute break to catch his breath, Tang upped the stakes, this time using one of his nostrils to push air into 12 tyre tubes at the same time. It took him only 2 minutes and 30 seconds to finish the job, a new world record.

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