A 24-year-old Russian woman recently got the shock of her life when learning that she had been married to an Egyptian citizen since 2022, about a year after losing her passport.

The unnamed St. Petersburg resident lost her passport in the summer of 2021, but despite declaring the loss to the local police, she never bothered getting her travel document reissued. She didn’t really need a new passport after that and she never imagined that the old one could be used by anyone else, but earlier this year, while trying to have a birth certificate issued for her baby, the young woman learned that her husband, an Egyptian man named Mustafa, needed to be present as well. She had never met Mustafa, let alone married him, but the Russian registry listed him as her spouse.

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A 90-year-old Chinese woman unknowingly used an old hand grenade to crack nuts and hammer nails for two decades after finding the unexploded ordinance in a field one day.

The woman, surnamed Qin, told Chinese reporters that she was working on her farm in Xiangyang, Hubei province when she found this strange “metal lump” with a wooden handle. Convinced it was a makeshift hammer, she took it home and used it to pound all kinds of tough objects, from nuts to metal nails. It was only last week when a team of men working on demolishing her old house noticed the hand grenade that the retired woman learned she had been gambling with her life every time she used it. And she used it a lot, as police reported that the grenade’s wooden handle had become smooth and glossy from years of use, while the metallic head was full of dents.

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A Missouri woman is facing multiple charges for allegedly spiking her husband’s Mountain Dew with Round Up herbicide because he was unappreciative of the birthday party she had thrown for him.

“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” and one Missouri man learned that first-hand after incurring his wife’s wrath for not being appreciative enough of the 50th birthday party she organized for him. On June 24, the man, whose name has not been revealed for personal privacy reasons, notified the Laclede County Sheriff’s Office that he had reasons to believe his wife was trying to poison him. He had noticed that one of the bottles of Mountain Dew in the refrigerator had a bizarre taste, and after experiencing troubling symptoms like diarrhea and vomiting, he decided to check the surveillance system which showed his spouse tampering with his soda bottle and a container of Round Up weedkiller.

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Designed and built by eight Dutch engineers, the world’s longest rideable bicycle is 180 feet long (55.16 meters), roughly the same length as four double-decker buses.

39-year-old Ivan Schalk had been thinking about building the world’s longest bicycle since reading about it in a Guinness Book of Records when he was a child, but he only embarked upon this project in 2018, as a way to fill up his free time. He knew it wasn’t the kind of thing he could build himself, so he sought the help of like-minded people in his home village of Prinsenbeek, which is apparently well-known in the Netherlands for its tech-savvy residents. Together, they spent about four years –  not counting the two years of interruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic – working on the world’s longest bicycle, a metal behemoth that needs at least two riders.

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A Southern collegiate baseball team has been getting a lot of attention for hosting “cosmic baseball” games played at night, under black lights, with players using UV-reactive uniforms, balls, and bats.

With balls flying toward players at breakneck speeds, baseball isn’t the kind of game that can be played in less-than-perfect lighting conditions, but one Southern collegiate baseball team has found a way to make it playable in the dark. Using massive black light installations and UV-reactive uniforms, balls, bats, and bases, the Tri-City Chili Peppers have been putting together ‘cosmic baseball’ games that look like something out of a Tron movie. Despite the seemingly pitch-black atmosphere, players claim that after a bit of practice, playing under UV lights becomes second nature, as does seeing the ball, no matter how hard it’s hit or thrown.

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45-year-old Yoshiharu Watanabe can rightfully consider himself the world’s luckiest man after setting a new Guinness Record by growing a clover with 63 individual leaves.

What is luckier than a four-leaf clover? Well, a five-leaf clover, of course. By that logic, the more leaves a clover has, the more luck it brings, so Yoshiharu Watanabe may just be the luckiest man alive because he is the first to ever grow a clover with 63 leaves. His amazing story began in 2009 when he started picking up clovers with more than three leaves and planting them in his home garden. The little plant is pretty resilient, so all he had to do was cross-pollinate to obtain exceptional specimens with up to 20 leaves. It was at this moment that he started dreaming about setting a new world record, but he never dreamed of doing so with a 63-leaf clover.

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A New Zealand woman attempted to take her former boyfriend to court for failing to take her to the airport as he had promised, which resulted in her losing her flight and incurring additional costs.

According to legal documents released by New Zealand’s Disputes Tribunal, which deals with small claims up to NZ$30,000 ($18,384), the woman had asked her boyfriend of six and a half years to drive her to the airport ahead of a concert she was to attend with some friends. The man had also agreed to stay at her place while she was gone and look after her dogs, but he ultimately failed to do all the things he had verbally agreed to, which caused her to miss her plane, and incur unplanned financial costs, such as taking a shuttle to the airport and paying a dog kennel to keep her pets. She filed a complaint with the Tribunal hoping to be reimbursed by her now-former partner.

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A 20-year-old Indian man claims to have been subjected to a sex change operation without his consent by another man who planned to marry him for his family’s land.

Mujahid, a 20-year-old man from Sanjak Village in Uttar Pradesh, has become the talk of an entire country after claiming that a male rival tricked him into going to the Begrajpur Medical College in Mansoorpur where a team of doctors sedated him and performed a gender change operation on him without his consent. The victim told authorities that a man named Omprakash deceived him into believing that he was suffering from a serious medical condition and then offered to take him to Mansoorpur to be treated. Mujahid claims that shortly after arriving at the hospital, he was sedated and then operated on by a team of doctors who had colluded with Omprakash. When he woke up the next day, he was told he was no longer a man, but a woman.

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A Kansas woman set a new Guinness World Record for ‘most tattoos of the same musician on the body’ with 18 portraits of legendary singer Madonna.

Tara Berry has been a fan of Madonna since 1983 when the pop icon put out her hit single ‘Borderline’, but she only started getting tattoos of her in 2016, at a time when the artist was actively looking for fans who had her tattooed on her bodies to appear in one of her videos. Tara had been wanting to do it for a while, and this gave her an extra incentive to finally go under the tattoo gun, but little did she know that it was just the beginning of her tattooing journey. She ended up getting a whopping 18 tattoos of Madonna on her body, enough to claim the Guinness record for ‘most tattoos of the same musician on the body’.

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A Japanese company has developed an artificial intelligence filter that can detect angry screams and translate them into calm speech in order to reduce the stress experienced by call center operators.

Large tech companies have long been aware of the stress their call center operators are exposed to every single day, with many customers taking out their anger and frustrations on them. Some of them have even introduced stress management programs that include relaxation techniques, meditation, yoga, or therapy meant to irritability and anxiety. However, one Japanese company may have come up with a much more efficient solution – using AI to completely take screaming and aggressive speech out of the equation. SofBank claims to have spent three years creating a voice filter that detects screaming and automatically translates it into calm speech.

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Two French biking enthusiasts recently set a new Guinness World Record for the ‘tallest rideable bicycle’ by building a 7.77-meter (25 ft 5 in) behemoth that can (barely) be ridden.

Nicolas Barrioz and David Peyrou came up with the idea for the world’s tallest bicycle 5 years ago, while drinking at a pub, but they actually decided to go through with the project and spent months putting together a plan to make it work. Made from metal alloy, steel, and wood, the unique bike took hundreds of hours to complete in a way that made it rideable, even for a short distance. It may not seem like a challenge, but building a 25-foot rideable bicycle is definitely not as easy as riding a bike. For example, the pedals are connected to the wheels via a 16-meter (53-ft) chain, and because of its extreme height, the bicycle has to move at a speed of around 15-20 km/h (9-12 mph) for the rider to maintain balance.

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Shogo Yoshida, a young hairdresser from Nagoya, suffers from a genetic condition that causes his fingertips to swell up like ping-pong balls, but he has managed to turn this physical defect into an asset.

Yoshida, who goes by Bachi Yubi-san (Mr. Drumstick Fingers) on social media, started attracting attention in Japan in late 2022 by posting photos and videos of his deformed fingers on social media. The feedback wasn’t always positive, as some called his hands ‘gross’ or ‘grotesque’ and scolded him for trying to make money off of his disability, but the young Japanese man had been used to criticism for a long time. Ever since he was diagnosed with pachydermoperiostosis (PDP), a rare genetic condition that caused his fingertips to swell up like small balls, Shogo Yoshida had to face the ridicule and disgusted looks of his peers, but as he grew older, he learned to manage his uniqueness and turn it into something positive.

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A military buff in China alerted authorities after discovering that the discarded books he had bought from a recycling station for just one dollar were classified military documents.

China’s Ministry of State Security recently took to social media to praise the actions of a military enthusiast surnamed Zhang who had alerted authorities after buying some military books from a recycling station without knowing that they actually contained confidential military secrets. Realizing the seriousness of the situation, Zhang called a hotline to report the incident and then handed over the documents to the appropriate authorities. The Ministry praised his responsible reaction, acknowledging that things could have been very different had the military secrets ended up in the hands of bad actors. But how do such secrets end up on the open market, especially in a strict country like China?

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A French woman is taking telecom giant Orange to court for “moral harassment and discrimination at work,” accusing the company of paying her for 20 years without giving her any tasks.

Laurence Van Wassenhove was recruited as a civil servant by France Telecom in 1993 before the company was taken over by Orange. Her original employer knew that she was hemiplegic – partial paralysis of the face and limbs – from birth and suffered from epilepsy, and offered her a position adapted to her medical conditions. She worked as a secretary and in the HR department until 2002 when she asked to be transferred to another region of France. Her request was approved, but her new workplace was not adapted to her needs, and an occupational medicine report confirmed that the position was not suited for her. Despite this, Orange allegedly failed to make any adjustments to her job, preferring to pay her full salary for the next 20 years, without giving her anything to do.

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A Turkish university candidate was recently arrested after being caught using an AI-powered system to obtain answers to the entrance exam in real-time.

On June 8th, thousands of high school graduates took the Basic Proficiency Test (TYT), the first session of the Higher Education Institutions Examination (YKS) in Isparta, but one incident made international news headlines. One candidate, referred to only by the initials M.E.E. by Turkish media, was reportedly caught cheating using an ingenious system involving an internet connection, a concealed camera, and an AI-powered software that could read the questions on the test and provide answers in real-time. Unfortunately, the man’s behavior during the test attracted the supervisors’ attention and upon closer inspection, his cheating method was discovered.

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