Frenchman Cycles from Paris to Moscow Without Moving an Inch to Set New World Record

53-year-old Pascal Pich, a legendary ultra-athlete with several endurance records to his name, is set to complete the longest, and at the same time shortest, race of his career – over 3,000 kilometers (the distance between Paris and Moscow) pedaled on a stationary bicycle.

“You have to be a little crazy to say ‘I will pedal for 6 days without moving'”, Pascal Pich says about his unusual challenge. But being a little crazy is exactly how he managed to become one of the world’s most acclaimed extreme athletes and set 10 endurance world records. So yes, cycling around 600 kilometers a day on a stationary bike with only 2-3 hours of sleep may sound crazy for anyone else, but not for him.

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Fantasy Fan Undergoes Plastic Surgery, Skin Bleaching and Eye Coloring in Quest to Become Real-Life Elf

Luis Padron, a 25-year-old fantasy fan and cosplay enthusiast from Argentina, has spent tens of thousands of dollars altering his looks in his desire to become a real-life elf.

Luis says he became obsessed with fantastic beings like elves and angels after being bullied as a child. He used to get picked on because he dyed his hair and had a different dress style than most boys his age, and since he didn’t have many friends growing up, he spent all of his free time reading fantasy books and dressing as his favorite characters. By the end of high-school, his unusual looks and natural quirkiness let to him becoming admired, and that just fueled his desire to be different. Now, he’s trying to make the changes permanent with the help of cosmetic medical procedures.

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This Startup Makes Cow Milk Without the Cow

It turns out we no longer need cows to produce cow milk, we can just brew it with yeast, just like beer. Well, it’s actually a bit more complicated than that, but that’s how a company called Perfect Day explains the basics of their innovative new product – a “synthetic milk” that looks and tastes a lot like cow milk.

Perfect Day was co-founded by Ryan Pandya and Perumal Gandh, two young scientists with a background in biomedical engineering. Three years ago, one was working on next-generation vaccines in Boston, and the other on tissue engineering, in New York. They didn’t know each other but they had a mutual acquaintance who knew that they both had this crazy idea about making milk without cows, and he put them in touch. They hit it off and started working on a way of making their dream a reality.

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Woman Swallows $9,000 in Cash to Avoid Giving Half to Her Ex-Partner

A 28-year-old woman recently ended up in the emergency room at University Hospital of Santander (HUS) in Bucaramanga, Colombia, after swallowing over $9,000 in $100 bills to make sure that her ex didn’t get half of it.

The bizarre incident took place on April 22, when Sandra Milena Almeida showed up at the hospital complaining of severe stomach pain. Doctors quickly realized that the 28-year-old woman had a gastric obstruction so she was rushed into the operating room for emergency surgery. When they opened her up, doctors were shocked to find that Almeida’s stomach was full of rolled up $100 bills. They managed to extract most of the money from the small intestine, with the rest making its way through the colon to be evacuated naturally.

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Popular Retailer Sells See-Through Plastic Jeans for $100 a Pair

Jeans are usually synonymous with denim, but British fashion company Topshop seems to think plastic works too. Its 100% polyurethane see-through jeans went on sale last months for a whopping $100, and got some not so-positive reactions online.

Why would anyone ever think that plastic pants, be they jeans, leggings or what-have-you, are a good idea? Well, nobody knows, and Topshop has yet to comment on what inspired the unusual garment, but somehow it seems to be a huge hit with shoppers. A few weeks after showing up on the Topshop online store, the MOTO Clear Plastic Straight Leg Jeans are currently out of stock.

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Texas Artist Turns Popcorn into Pop Art

Harry Kalenberg has a unique hobby – he turns pieces of popcorn into tiny works of art using only colored felt markers and pens. From miniature models of celebrities like Elvis or Donald Trump, to popular cartoon characters and animals, Harry has a gift for spotting the craziest things in a bowl of popcorn.

It all started 28 years ago, when Harry Kalenberg and his wife Esther were sitting on the couch one evening, eating popcorn. At one point, the artist spotted a strange-looking piece of popcorn that resembled a gorilla. His wife wasn’t interested in the discovery, but he wouldn’t let her lack of enthusiasm curb his. He took out a ballpoint pen and started painting the details he saw with his mind’s eye, eventually bringing the popcorn gorilla to life. And that’s how his career as a popcorn artist started.

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Legend Has It That This Spicy Pizza Induces Child Labor

According to a popular rumor among pregnant women, spicy food can help induce child labor, and while that has yet to be confirmed by medical specialists, a pizza place in Charlotte North Carolina has become a popular destination for mothers-to-be eager to bring their offspring into the world sooner.

Hawthorne’s New York Pizza and Bar in Charlotte is considering changing the name of its Buffalo Wings Pizza into “The Inducer” after dozens of pregnant women have credited it with helping them deliver their babies ahead of schedule. Tales of the labor-inducing properties of this medium-hot pizza have been circulating around Charlotte for over half a decade, and some women actually swear by it.

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The Cat Man of Kyushu Walks His Nine Furry Felines in a Baby Stroller

Taking nine pet cats on daily strolls through the city is kind of unusual, but having them sit in a baby stroller while you’re pushing them around is bound to catch some eyeballs. So it’s no surprise that the Cat Man of Kyushu attracts attention wherever he goes.

Masahiko Suga, a 55-year-old retired electronics company worker, first made headlines back in 2014, when photos of him walking nine beautiful cats in a baby stroller on the streets of Tokyo went viral. Japan is no stranger to weird sights, some of them involving cats, but this was new, even for them, so everyone took out their cameras and smartphones and started snapping photos. They made the rounds online for months, and Masahiko earned the nickname the Cat Man.

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Artist Paints with the Sun Using Magnifying Glass as His Brush

The word heliography usually refers to a photographic process invented in 1822, but Colorado-based artist Michael Papadakis has given it a new meaning after using it to describe his art of harnessing the sun to burn intricate artworks onto wooden panels with a magnifying glass.

Up until five years ago, Michael Papadakis used to create art the old fashioned way, with painting and drawing supplies, but on a trip along the Silk Road from Asia to Europe, he discovered a new and ingenious tool – the magnifying glass.

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Man Pays 200 Strangers to Act as Guests at His Wedding, Ends Up in Jail

What was supposed to be the happiest day of their lives turned into a complete nightmare for a young couple in China, after it was revealed that the groom had hired 200 random people to act as his friends and relatives at the wedding.

The groom, known only by his surname, Wang, and his fiancee, Xiaoli, were supposed to tie the knot on Sunday, April 30th, during a big wedding banquet at a hotel in Xian, China’s Shaanxi Province. Everything was going according to plan up to the point when the family of the bride noticed that half of the tables reserved for the groom’s guests laid empty. Wang kept telling them that they were on their way, but the bride and her parents really became suspicious of him after talking to the few guests that were seated at his tables and noticing that while they all said that they were Wang’s friends, they couldn’t really say how they knew him.

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Rare Condition Allows Woman to Remember Everything She Has Ever Experienced

Can you imagine being able to remember every single experience of your life, every conversation you have ever had, every meal you’ve eaten, every word in your favorite book and even the feel of the clothes you wore on your very first birthday? That’s what Becky Sharrock’s life is like, and as amazing as that ability sounds, she says it can also be quite terrifying at times.

Three years ago, Rebecca Sharrock was reading a newspaper article which mentioned that it was impossible for people to remember details of their lives that had occurred during the first four years of their existence. “What absolute nonsense,” she thought to herself, because she could clearly remember her life all the way back to when she was just 12 days old. Her parents had carried her to the driver’s seat of their car and laid her down for a photo. She remembers looking around and wondering what the seat cover and steering wheel above her were. But it wasn’t nonsense, she was just one of only 80 known people suffering from a mysterious condition called Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM).

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Turkish Artist Recreates Iconic Movie Scenes Using Hundreds of Thousands of Tiny Colored Dots

Seen from afar, the works of Turkish artist Çağatay Odabaş look like large-scale printed movie posters, but as viewers approach them to take a closer look, they discover that they are actually made up of hundreds of thousands of tiny hand-drawn circles.

37-year-old Odabaş says that his art is largely influenced by his two most favorite activities growing up in the 80s and 90s – playing with LEGO bricks and watching movies. He starts out by picking out the movie stills he wants to recreate from his collection of thousands of films, which he considers his research library. He then proceeds to split this image into several pieces, mapping out each one with tiny circles, which are all assigned a certain code, to serve during the coloring process. Then, like a complicated but fascinating LEGO model, he puts all the pieces together to create these ultra-realistic masterpieces of pointilism.

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Couple Spend 25 Years Turning Barren Patch of Land into Paradise of Biodiversity

In 1991, Anil and Pamela Malhotra bought a 55 acres of unused farmland in Karnataka, India, and started planting native trees on it. Over the last 25 years, their small forest has turned into a 300-acre wildlife sanctuary that hundreds of endangered plants, animals and birds call home.

Anil and Pamela met and married in New Jersey, USA, during the 1960s. They both shared a love for wildlife, and after visiting Hawaii on their honeymoon, they fell in love with the archipelago’s lush forests and fascinating fauna. They bought some land and decided to settle there. “That is where we learnt the value of forests and realized that despite threats of global warming no serious efforts were being made to save forests for the future,” Anil said.

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This 98-Year-Old Yoga Instructor Is in Way Better Shape Than You

They say age is just a number, and watching 98-year-old V Nanammal effortlessly execute a wide range of difficult yoga poses that practitioners decades her junior still struggle with, I’m inclined to believe that they’re absolutely right. Recognized as the oldest yoga instructor in India, and the second oldest in the world, Nanammal has inspired a whole generation of Indian youths to take the ancient art.

V Nanammal started doing yoga when she was 8, picking up the basics from her father, who was a martial artist. She then continued learning the secrets of the practice under the guidance of her grandfather, in her home town of Coimbatore, India’s Tamid Nadu state. After getting married, Nanammal continued learning yoga from her father-in-law, and soon started teaching others. The elderly yoga instructor says that she never stopped practicing yoga for the last nine decades of her life, and credits it for her good health and incredible flexibility. She claims to have never been to the hospital or even taken any kind of medicine. “I never stopped practicing yoga at any point in my life. That’s the secret of my health,” she says.

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The Brave “Spiderman Cleaners” Risking Their Lives to Keep China’s Mountains Trash-Free

With millions of Chinese visiting the country’s sacred mountains every year, keeping them trash-free is incredibly difficult. Luckily, that’s where the Spiderman cleaners come in. These dedicated men an women risk their lives on a daily basis, rappelling down steep cliffs to reach plastic bottles, bags and various other garbage thrown there by uncivilized tourists.

Spiderman cleaners get their name from the dangerous nature of their job. Photos released in the media show them dangling thousands of feet above ground on the side of steep mountain cliffs, supported only by ropes or cables, as they attempt to collect hard-to-reach trash. In an attempt to highlight the danger of their work and make tourists think twice before littering, some of the cleaners actually exchanged their regular uniforms for Spiderman costumes. This has made them a hit with visitors, who often stop to watch these real-life versions of their favorite superhero descend into the abyss to pick up a piece of trash, rewarding them with applause and cheers when they complete their mission.

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