It’s no secret that Japanese men have a thing for maids, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that some businesses try to use their popularity as an advantage over the competition. Like this new programming school in Shibuya, Tokyo, that is trying to attract male students by having cute maids studying alongside them.

MadeInMaidFamily is one of many trade schools in Tokyo, so its founders knew that they had to come up with something special to give them an edge in a very competitive market. Their solution – cute maids to keep male students coming back and motivate them to hone their programming skills. The lessons are designed to encourage interaction between students with the maids asking and offering help to the guys.

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In order to show people that basic healthcare needn’t be expensive and that recyclable trash has value, a young Indonesian entrepreneur came up with the ingenious idea of allowing the poor to pay for their healthcare with garbage.

The Garbage Clinical Insurance thought up by Indonesian health care entrepreneur Gamal Albinsaid may sound like a laudable idea that’s doomed to fail in the long-term, but it’s actually been working for seven years now, and the unique model has already been copied by others across Indonesia. Inspired by others’ desire to help the poor access basic healthcare by recycling waste, Gamal Albinsaid has actually put together a free 70-page startup manual for businesses looking to get into garbage health insurance, instead of franchising his innovation.

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Soon after launching her cake design business seven years ago, Maggie Austin was already producing edible works of art for Hollywood parties, royal weddings and even White House Christmas celebrations, and looking at her portfolio, it’s not hard to see why. Her designs, especially the incredibly realistic edible flower decorations, are beyond everything I’ve ever seen.

At first glance, Austin’s flowers look 100% real. In fact, the level of realism is such that no matter how long you stare at them, it’s hard to believe that they are actually hand-made edible decorations created with sugar, waffle paper and food coloring. From simple roses an hydrangeas to her signature peonies, it seems like there’s no flower that ballerina-turned cake designer Maggie Austin can’t reproduce.

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Sick of playing the same old Halloween pranks every year? Want two pull an original bone-chilling Halloween prank on your friends or family? One Dallas doughnut shop has you covered with a scary clown doughnut delivery service.

Riding the wave of the recent Box Office hit Stephen King’s It, the Hurts Donut shop has decided to implement a new, Halloween-themed delivery option for their delicious treats . For just $5 extra, you can have your donuts delivered by a person dressed as a menacing real-life Pennywise and subsequently scare the pants off of your unsuspecting friends and family members. Not only will this clown deliver a fantastic fright, but he will immediately make amends for your prank by handing the recipient a dozen of Hurts’ delicious treats! Who can stay mad while chowing down on homemade donuts, glazed to perfection?

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It’s an odd day when you have to question an old, devout Catholic woman’s morals for attending too many funerals. And yet, that’s the position many have been placed in by 65-year-old Theresa Doyle, from Slough, in the UK, who has been attending every wake at her church for over 14 years now. That would probably be considered commendable on her part, if not for the many accusations that she’s been doing it just to raid the free buffet. 

Theresa Doyle’s funeral crashing habit recently made news headlines in the UK, with several of her neighbors and family members of deceased people whose wakes and funeral services she has attended over the years, claiming that she intrudes on people in their time of grief just so she can fill her stomach. She just shows up, pretends to have known the deceased and sometimes even chats with their friends and family, before grazing the buffet “like there’s no tomorrow”. Sometimes, she allegedly even takes some of the food to go.

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On the surface, Japan’s newest stock exchange platform, Valu, may seem like an innovative game changer in that it allows users to sell shares in themselves. The goal of which, for many, is to raise money to start a business or work on personal/freelance projects within their profession. That being said, however, there is at least one kink the company still needs to iron out if they wish to take Valu to the next level – keeping stock buyers from being conned by those just looking to make a quick buck at others’ expense.

Which is exactly what happened this week when a Japanese Youtuber who goes by the name of Hikaru exploited one of Valu’s features to basically cash out on his popularity. While the concept of selling stocks in oneself may seem very similar to basic crowdfunding, Valu also allows the trading of tokens called “VA” between those who list them, and the tokens are also exchangeable with bitcoin. So Hikaru used his popularity to boost the price of his stocks, and then sold them at a huge profit.

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Every bride wants to feel like a princess on her big day, and thanks to these gorgeous Disney Princess-inspired wedding dresses, you can even look like one too.

Japanese wedding company Kuraudia Co. recently partnered with Disney to make the Dream of many Japanese brides-to-be a reality – becoming a Disney princess for a day. They have created a collection of colorful wedding gowns inspired by six of the most popular Disney princesses, from Snow White to Cinderella. The Kyoto-based company will start taking orders from hotels, wedding halls and dress shops all across Japan in November, and will also be offering matching Prince Charming tuxedos, for an even more convincing fairytale effect.

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Fall is here and so is the crisp sweater weather. This year, however, tree leaves won’t be the only thing changing color as it gets colder, thanks to this line of innovative thermo-sensitive sweaters from Stone Island.   Stone Island’s “Ice Knit” sweater made out of color changing yarn.

Italian high-end men’s clothing brand Stone Island is known for experimenting with unconventional fabric treatments and coming up with all kinds of impressive innovations. For their Spring 2017 collection, they introduced something called “hand corrosion technique” that allowed garments to be faded by hand, using a special corrosion paste, and for autumn, they recently unveiled a line of thermo-sensitive sweaters that change color depending on the air temperature.

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Getting a divorce is never easy for anyone involved, but it is particularly difficult at the Yibin People’s Court, in China’s Sichuan Province, where one magistrate recently implemented a divorce exam that both the husband and the wife must fail in order for their divorce application to be approved.

The divorce exam is the brainchild of Wang Shiyu, a judge at the People’s Court of Yibin County, who, after noticing that divorces accounted for an alarmingly large percentage of the court’s cases, decided to do something about it. His intention was to make couples think twice before ending their marriage, and also give them an opportunity to reminisce the good times they had together. So he came up with a series of questions for both husband and wife, which they must answer separately. If they score under 60, Wang approves their divorce application, if not, well, they have to keep working on their marriage, whether they like it or not.

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As a teacher,  if you want your middle school students to get off their smartphones phones and and actually pay attention in class, you have to get creative. Take Oregon teacher Kyle Hubler for example, who transformed his classroom into an amazingly detailed, Harry Potter inspired dreamland – equipped with wands, owls, and costumes!

Hubler, who teaches seventh and eighth graders at Evergreen Middle School in Hillsboro, first implemented Harry Potter-themed elements to his classroom, last year, and the students loved it. So when he heard that he would moving to a new classroom for the 2017-2018 school year, he decided to go all out and turn into a real-life version of Hogwarts.

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Some people dream about getting married on a mountain top, others in a beautiful church with stained glass windows, but not Sue Berkeley. All Sue cared about is that she and her husband-to-be, Eli Bob, tie the knot in a place near and dear to her heart, surrounded by all the things and all the people that make her happy. Which is why the Australian couple decided to hold their ceremony at their local Costco store, in Sydney.

At first, the idea of getting married in a store was purely sarcastic. “We were joking one Friday,” Eli explains in an interview with The Daily Telegraph. “People were asking when were were getting married – so I suggested Costco. I know how much she loves it there.”  

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The internet has revolutionized crowdfunding by creating an unprecedented interconnectedness that allows people from all over the world to hear each other’s stories and help those whose stories touched them in particular. Today, you can send aid to hurricane victims in Florida, help a single mother start her small business in Ohio, and even help this couple from Saskatchewan make their dream wedding a reality, all in just a few clicks.

Jason Mielke and Rebecca Winter Hansen from Saskatchewan, Canada are engaged to be married, but they need some help making their wedding a special one. Young couples ask friends and family for help planning their big day all the time, these two lovebirds are actually asking complete strangers to basically sponsor their nuptials. They’ve set up a website where they try to explain why they opted for crowdfunding to celebrate their union with a wedding that accurately captures their unwavering love instead of simply eloping, and hope that their love story will make people and corporations want to give them a hand.

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Spirit Payton is one of YouTube’s unlikeliest stars. In just under two years, she has grown her channel, ASMRTheChew, to over 160,000 subscribers and had several of her videos go viral, with millions of views, all by making chewing noises into a microphone.

From popping giant pimples to squashing bread with their faces, we’ve seem people come up with all kinds of crazy ways of attracting attention online, so I guess it’s not that big of a surprise that someone managed to make it big on YouTube by making loud eating noises into a high fidelity microphone. Spirit Payton does post the occasional makeup tutorial, but her eating videos are pretty much her bread and butter. She takes requests from her fans and eats their preferred foods on camera, chewing it slowly and loudly as part of what is known as an ASMR therapy session.

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Luo Dengping has become famous as the only woman in a group of “spider men” who climb vertical cliffs of up to 100 meters high, without ropes or safety equipment of any kind, for the entertainment of tourists in China’s Guizhou Province.

Men of the Miao people, in Southwest China, have been free-climbing steep cliffs for centuries. They originally developed this skill as part of a burial custom, to lift coffins of relatives up the cliffs and place them in small caves or just hang them on the cliffside, like the Tana Toraja tribe, in Indonesia. This practice fell into obscurity, but the Miao spider men continued climbing the perfectly vertical cliffs of Ziyun, in order to collect rare medicinal plants said to cure asthma and rheumatism. However, as Western medicine started taking precedence over traditional Chinese medicine, spider men found themselves struggling to support their families. Today, only a few members of the Miao people still practice this ancient tradition, and one of them is a woman.

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Between deforestation, climate change, and poaching, the number of orangutans living in the wild is dropping at an alarming rate, but one orangutan in particular has made it through all this torment and her story is giving us all hope. Her name is Alba, and she is truly one of a kind. Alba is an albino – currently the only known one in the world.

The five year old ape was rescued in an Indonesian Village by the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation (BOS). She had been illegally captured and kept in a cage without proper care for a couple of days before rescuers got to her. Researches believe Alba was orphaned at a young age and caught not long after. When they found her she was suffering from a parasitic infection, dehydration, and low body weight. However, she still displays wild behaviors, meaning she can be released in the wild.

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