A 50-year-old woman in Wuhan, China, was recently diagnosed with severe spinal neuron damage caused by a lack of vitamin B12. The woman had been on a strict vegetarian diet for over thirty years, and did not take any B12 supplements.

The woman, surnamed Chen, reportedly turned to a vegetarian diet in her 20s, in order to lose weight, and after seeing some truly amazing results, decided to stick with it for the rest of her life. Standing at 160-cm-tall, Chen told doctors that she used to weigh 55 kg when she was young, but managed to drop to 45 kg after becoming a vegetarian, a weight that she was proud of having maintained for over three decades. However, she never imagined that her seemingly healthy diet would put her at risk of becoming paralyzed.

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Doctors in New York recently reported the case of a 34-year-old man who wound up in the hospital with severe headaches and neck pain after trying to eat a Carolina Reaper during a hot pepper eating competition.

The unnamed man reportedly started dry heaving immediately after sampling a Carolina Reaper pepper. It’s unclear whether he stopped after a few bites or finished the whole thing, but what we do know is that over the following days, he began experiencing intense headaches and neck pains that lasted only a few seconds. At one point, the pain became so hard to bare that he had to be taken to the emergency room.

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If you’ve always dreamed about climbing into a nine-foot-tall mecha suit and actually showing off your sci-fi fantasies to the whole world, now’s your big chance. A Japanese company is actually selling custom mecha suits for only 10 million yen ($93,000).

Skeletonics have been around since 2011, when a group of students at the Okinawa National College of Technology showed off their very first fully-mechanical exoskeleton. It didn’t do much except turn the wearer into a metal giant with increased reach, but it definitely looked cool, so the project made international headlines at the time. But while the team came up with several improved Skeletonics over the years, they were merely showed off online and at special events, so only a few fans ever got to give them a try themselves. However, everything changed last month, when Skeltonics finally announced that it would finally begin producing commercial versions of its popular exoskeleton.

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Police inspectors in Pilar, Argentina’s Buenos Aires province, were recently questioned about the disappearance of 540 kg of marijuana from the evidence room, and the best explanation they could come up with was that addicted rats ate it all.

It all started in April 2017, when Commissioner Emilio Portero relieved his partner Javier Specia, as head of the police department in Pilar, a town located 60 km from the Argentine capital of Buenos Aires. Protocol dictates that in the case of such a transfer of command, a sort of inventory of everything left in the hands of his successor by the officer who is transferred to another unit be signed. Although the inventory was allegedly conducted, it was never signed by Specia, which made Portero suspicious. He notified the Division of Internal Affairs of the Police, which in turn tasked the National Gendarmerie with conducting an official inventory.

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The Mexican town of Ojinaga, in the state of Chihuahua, made international headlines recently for a rather unusual raffle. Instead of being awarded to the winner, the prize – a brand new car – was buried as a time capsule, to be used by the winner’s relatives, 50 years from now.

Who knows if we’ll even be driving cars in 2068, but one thing is for sure – one Mexican family will be the lucky winner of a brand new, unused 2018 car built in the Ojinaga town square, earlier this month. Dubbed “El Viajero Del Tiempo” (The Time Traveler), the car was bought by members of the local association in charge of organising the yearly “El IV Reencuentro Ojinaguense” festival. To make this year’s event special, they thought it would be a good idea to each put up a small sum of money so they could buy a new car, hold a raffle with only one winner, and then bury the car as a time capsule.

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Apart from the sound they make while chewing on leaves, the vast majority of caterpillars are silent creatures. However, the Nessus sphinx hawkmoth caterpillar is able to produce clicking noises that sounds a lot like static, as a self-defense mechanism, and scientists believe they discovered how.

Insects have no lungs, but some of them can be really noisy. While humans and most other vertebrates make noise by forcing air out of their bodies, insects and larvae don’t have that luxury. Some of them have adapted, rubbing, knocking or vibrating parts of their bodies to produce distinctive sounds, the kind you hear when you open a window on a quiet summer night, but the Nessus sphinx hawkmoth caterpillar doesn’t fall into that category. When threatened, it produces a strange sound that resembles a combination of cracking and spitting, by pushing air through a constriction between its two foregut chambers, even though it has no lungs.

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Slovenian artist Sašo Krajnc creates incredibly detailed portraits by tightly winding a single sewing thread on a circular wooden frame to create overlapping straight lines.

That’s actually the most impressive thing about Sašo Krajnc, that he’s able to create such detailed facial features, like the curvatures of the eyes and lips, using only straight lines. He starts out with a circular frame made of wood or aluminium and lined with metal nails. He then takes a long sewing thread and begins winding it around these nails creating hundreds, or even thousands of black straight lines that crisscross and overlap to emphasise the features of his subjects.

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They say “no good deed goes unpunished” and one Chinese billionaire learned that the hard way after spending tens of millions of dollars on hundreds of luxury villas for all the residents in his home village, only to see them remain deserted as greedy recipients continue to argue over who should own multiple houses.

Five years ago, Chen Sheng, the founder and chairman of drinks company Tiandi No 1 Beverage Inc, committed 200 million yuan (US$31.9 million) to the construction of 258 luxury villas on a plot of land offered by authorities in the village of Guanhu, China’s Guangdong province. Each property measures 280 square meters and the three-story villas feature five bedrooms, two reception rooms, a garage and a small garden. The new village also has a small stream passing through it, several pedestrian bridges, basketball and badminton courts and even a public stage for various cultural events, but even though everything was completed last year, the place remains deserted.

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Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja lived among wolves for 12 years in the mountains of Spain’s Cordoba province, before being discovered by the Civil Guard at age 19 and brought back into civilization. But even now, at age 72, Pantoja still hasn’t completely adjusted to life among humans.

Born in Añora, Cordoba, in 1946, Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja lost his mother when he was only three years old, and soon after, his father abandoned him to live with another woman in a neighboring town. As a young boy, he was taken to the mountains to replace an old sheepherder and look after a heard of 300 sheep. He remembers that the old man taught him to make a fire and use various tools, but in 1954, when Marcos hadn’t even turned eight years old, the sheepherder died, living him all alone.

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Tweezers have been around for thousands of years, but they’ve never really been regarded as one of the coolest tools man ever invented. Well, a Japanese company is looking to change that with its awesome Tweezers of Legend.

Having to pluck a rogue hair strand from your eyebrow or nose is not the most exciting task, but what if your tweezers looked like a legendary sword, the like of which you only see in over-the-top fantasy anime or video games? Now we’re talking, right? Well, thanks to Japanese company wāqwāq Inc., you can now battle your body hair like a fabled hero.

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Police in Youngstown, Ohio, have received over a dozen reports of zombie-like raccoons coming out in the daytime, flashing their teeth and just falling on their backs for no apparent reason.

Youngstown has always had a raccoon population, but the furry mammals usually stayed out of people’s way, only coming out at night to search through their trash cans for food. However, last month, some of the raccoons started acting really strange. They would come out in broad daylight, sometimes walking up all the way to people’s front doors, flash their sharp teeth in a threatening manner and then fall on their back and enter a comatose-like state. Over the past three weeks, such raccoons came to be known as “zombie raccoons”.

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A Japanese animal lover risks her life every single day by venturing into the Fukushima exclusion zone to feed a heard of 11 cows abandoned after the 2011 nuclear disaster.

The earthquake and subsequent tsunami that hit Fukushima in 2011 claimed the lives of over 20,000 people, and forced another 160,000 to leave everything behind and flee to safety. But while people were able to escape the threat of radiation from the damaged reactor at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, animals could not. The area was home to over 3,500 cattle which became known as the “nuclear cows of Fukushima” after being exposed to high levels of radiation. Most of them are dead now, killed by starvation or euthanized by the government, but the few surviving cows now rely on the kindness of humans brave enough to risk their lives to bring them food and water.

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A Chinese art student sparked a heated debate online after using the wings of over 500 butterflies to create a series of artworks symbolizing rebirth. While some consider her “sick” for using butterfly wings as an art medium, others think her creations qualify as original art.

Li Zheng, a fourth-year art student at Quanzhou Normal University in Fujian province, China, created a series of artworks consisting of meticulously arranged butterfly wings as part of her graduation piece. She and her colleagues were instructed by their lecturer to recreate famous artworks using different materials. Li decided she wanted to recreate some of the masterpieces of Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh, but at first, she had no idea what materials she was going to use.

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A 9-year-old boy from Kerala, in India, has become a social media sensation after videos of him lighting rechargeable LED light bulbs just by touching their electrical contacts with any part of his body went viral online.

Abu Thahir, who hails from Muhamma near Alappuzha, Kerala, discovered his unusual power only recently, while returning home with his father after buying a rechargeable LED light bulb. His father, Nizar, who happens to be an electrician, told reporters that when he passed the light-bulb to his son, it just lit up in his hand. At first, he thought it was some sort of prank, but then he noticed that the bulb lit up whenever the electrical contacts on its bottom touched any part of his son’s body.

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When it comes to metallic wire artworks, you’ll have a tough time finding a more talented artist than @tdaiki1216, a young Japanese art graduate who seems able to twist copper and brass wire into pretty much anything he sets his mind to, from sculptures that look like drawn manga, to slithering snakes and giant insects.

@tdaiki1216, whose real name is Tsutamoto Dawiki, first made headlines in Japan two years ago, when his incredibly detailed wire sculptures imitating manga drawings went viral on Twitter. Fixed into square wooden blocks and placed against a white background, his artworks looked exactly like manga comics, even though they were actually twisted pieces of wire. Those were impressive enough, but @tdaiki1216 has stepped up his game even more over these last few years, and is now specializing in more complex wire sculptures, some of which are simply mind-blowing.

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