Japanese artist Ei Wada discovered that old cathode ray tube television sets make great percussion instruments by mistake, but he managed to turn this accidental discovery into an art. Today, his unique Braun Tube Jazz Band is famous all over the world.

Wada first became interested in percussion music at age four, after attending a Gamelan music performance in Indonesia. He was impressed by the sound of the percussion instruments, recalling that he felt “taken to another world”. This memory stuck with him, and a few years later, while tinkering with some old cassette tapes, he realized that the off-key sounds they produced were very similar to the Gamelan music that had made such a big impression on him. Since then, he has been focusing on producing otherworldly sounds with obsolete gadgets that people usually throw away.

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When you gotta go, you gotta go! But what if you’re in space, stuck in a spacesuit for hours on end, even days? The current solution is the good ol’ diaper, but NASA is looking for something better, and is offering a prize of up to $30,000 to whoever comes up with the best idea.

Astronauts have access to some of the world’s most advanced technologies, but when it comes to human waste management, they rely on a diaper. NASA spacecrafts do feature more advanced waste systems, but they can only be used when the astronauts aren’t wearing their space suits. So during launches, landings, or in case of emergencies, they have to put on an uncomfortable space diaper. But that is only a temporary solution, as keeping the waste so close to the skin for longer than a few hours can lead to infection, and even sepsis. NASA’s scientists have apparently been unable to come up with a solution to this problem, and the agency is now looking to the rest of the world for suggestions. The newly launched Space Poop Challenge give anyone the chance to submit their ideas and designs for an alternative to the space diaper until December 20, for the chance to win up to $30,000.

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In what can only be described as a touching display of kindness, the residents of a neighborhood near Shenzhen, in southern China, came together to help a total stranger sell 32 tonnes of potatoes in a single day, after he was rejected by a local wholesale market.

60-year-old Ma, a potato farmer from Qinghai Province, in northwest China, had been duped by a businessman to bring all his stock to Shenzhen and sell it at a higher price. Enticed by the prospect of a earning a higher profit for a year’s work, he paid 16,000 Yuan ($2,312) in transportation fees and traveled 2500 miles across China, a journey that took four days and four nights. But upon reaching his destination, on November 5th, Ma had his hopes shattered by the wholesaler who had promised to take his entire potato harvest off his hands, after he backed off on the deal, claiming that the potatoes were too small.

Left without a buyer, Ma had no choice but unload all 32 tonnes of potatoes on the side of the road near an industrial park in Guanlan, and try to sell some of it to passers-by. Going back home with nothing to show for his trip than the expenses incurred was not an option. But his idea wasn’t working as well as he had hoped either. “Some of his friends from Qinghai helped him contact people to buy the potatoes, but it hasn’t helped much as he has so many potatoes,” the owner of a nearby grocery store told Shenzhen Daily. But just when he was ready to give up and go home, a miracle happened.

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29-year-old Johanna Watkins suffers from an extremely rare condition which makes allergic to literally hundreds of things, including the scent of her husband. For the past year, she has been living alone in a specially-built “safe zone” of her house, and claims that every times she leaves this space her body “goes into attack” mode.

Johanna met her husband Scott five years ago, at Hope Academy, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she worked as a first grade teacher Scott as a second grade teacher. They got married in 2013 and started making plans about their life together, but just two years into their marriage, the allergies that Johanna had suffered from all her life started getting considerably worse. At first they though it was just food allergies, and changed their diet, but that didn’t help. In 2015, she was diagnosed with Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS), a rare genetic disorder that causes her body to develop life-threatening anaphylactic reactions to virtually everything.

MCAS causes  mast cells, which release chemicals that tell our immune system how to react to various stimuli, to build up and go haywire. Basically Johanna’s mast cells release the wrong chemicals, to the wrong place, at the wrong time. The cells react to all sorts of triggers, releasing chemicals that overwhelm the body, leading to anaphylaxis. Unfortunately, the condition was discovered just nine years ago, so little is known about it.

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Pastor Lethebo Rabalago of Mount Zion General Assembly, in Limpopo, South Africa, has recently been accused of endangering his congregates’ lives by spraying them with insect repellent, as a healing method.

This bizarre practice first made news headlines in South Africa after photos showing Pastor Lethebo Rabalago spraying what looked like Doom bug spray in the faces of various congregates, were posted on the Facebook account of the Mount Zion General Assembly. One photo of a woman was captioned: “Mrs Mitala. The Prophet called sick people to come forward. She went to the forth and told the Prophet that she suffers from ulcer. The Prophet sprayed doom on her and she received her healing and deliverance. We give God the glory!”

Doom is a popular brand of insect repellent with serious adverse effects if inhaled (vomiting, seizures, or the loss of consciousness) or if it comes in contact withe the eyes, but Pastor Rabalago doesn’t seem too concerned about it. In a telephone interview with enca, the controversial “holy man” admitted to spraying his sick congregates with Doom bug spray as a way to heal them, adding that so far none of them have reported any side-effects following the ritual.

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Urban Rigger, a housing and architect firm in Denmark, has come up with an eco-friendly way to provide affordable and comfortable accommodations to cash-strapped students living in big cities. Their innovative “container dorms” are made up of modified shipping containers floating on a platform in urban harbors.

For many students, having to save money for rent every month is one of the most stressful aspect of their lives, but for a few hundred lucky youths studying in Copenhagen, things are about to get a lot easier. Urban Rigger hopes to ease the financial burden on students by building ingenious modular container homes that only cost $600 a month. In the Danish capital, that’s practically a steal.

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Joe Chandler, from Brunswick, Georgia, may just be the only person in the United States of America who doesn’t know who won this year’s presidential election. Two weeks since the final election day, the unconventional artist is still trying very hard to remain oblivious to the result.

It all started when Joe Chandler was invited to a party at a friend’s house on election night, where he figured everyone would be biting their nails waiting to see who will become the next US president. “I was invited to an election party to stay up into the night with everybody gnawing their nails, hanging on and I thought, oh there has to be a better way,” he told Fox News. “All I wanted to do is give myself 24 hours of blissful ignorance.” It turns out that ignorance felt so good that he didn’t want to give it up the next day either, so he has been doing everything in his power to not find out who the president elect is.

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To help Japanese companies better deal with the increasing number of foreigners visiting the country, Panasonic has created an innovative megaphone capable of automatically translating Japanese into English, Chinese and Korean.

Remember that cool universal translator the crew of the Enterprise used to break down language barriers with alien species? Such technology is not yet available in real life, but if Panasonic’s ‘Megahonyaku’ is a sign of things to come, that universal translator doesn’t seem so sci-fi anymore. Megahonyaku is a pun on the Japanese words for ‘megaphone’ and ‘translate’, which actually makes a lot of sense because it’s a megaphone that can translate Japanese into several other languages in real time. When a user speaks Japanese into the megaphone, it recognizes and translates what is being said instantly, and outputs the phrase in English, Chinese or Korean.

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The Yangtze River Bridge in Nanjing, China, is one of the most popular suicide spots in the world, and also the place where one man has spent all his weekends and holidays over the last 13 years trying to convince people out of ending their lives. He has so far been able to save over 300 people.

Chen Si claims that he can approach and talk people out of jumping off the bridge, because he knows how they feel. Many of those who attempt to commit suicide on the Yangtze River Bridge are not actually from Nanjing, but migrant workers living far away from home. Mr. Chen was like them once, a migrant disappointed with his life, living far away from his family. But then he met an old man who offered him optimistic advice and helped him look at life in a positive way. Unfortunately, not longer after they met, the old man’s sons started arguing about their inheritance, and he got so upset that he stopped eating and eventually died. It was this tragic event that inspired Chen to help troubled souls overcome their difficulties and persuade them that life is worth living. He always believed that if he had visited the old man sooner, as he had planned to do, he might have convinced him of that as well. “What could be more important than life itself?” he asks.

So every weekend since 2003, Chen Si has been traveling 25 kilometers from his home to the Yangtze Bridge and patrolling it for hours, either on foot or on his scooter, looking for people who look like they might be thinking of jumping into the river. He pays particularly close attentions to loners staring into the muddy waters below. Chen says he has become an expert at spotting people contemplating suicide. “It is very easy to recognize,” he says. “A person walks without a soul.”

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Waterproof smartphones are becoming more common in Western markets, but they are hardly the norm. In Japan however, almost all phones are waterproof, and have been for nearly a decade now. According to statistics, 90% to 95% of phones in Japan are waterproof, because people need to be able to use them while they are showering.

Japanese users are apparently so attached to their phones that they even bring them into the shower. Manufacturers were aware of this unusual habit early on and realized that in order to succeed in japan, they had to make their devices water resistant. The world’s first waterproof mobile phone, the Casio Canu 502S, was release in 2005, and was soon followed by a series of Fujitsu waterproof handhelds. Before long, every company looking to enter Japanese market had to make their devices waterproof.

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A drinks vendor in Cologne, Germany was recently tried and convicted to ten months in prison for modifying a bottle recycling machine and cheating the swindling several tens of thousands of euros from the national recycling system.

Bottle-recycling machines in Germany are fairly straightforward – a person inserts one or more bottles into the machine and they receive a receipt for a few euro-cents, or euros, depending on the number of bottles recycled. But in a case presented in front of a Cologne court last week, one recycling machine ended up paying a whopping €44,362.75 ($47,000) without recycling a single bottle. It turns out that an unnamed local drinks vendor managed to modify one such recycling machine located in the basement of his shop so that he could earn a lot more than the usual spare change. Evidence presented during the trial showed that the 37-year-old defendant had installed a magnet sensor and a kind of wooden tunnel into the machine, which allowed him to insert the bottle into the mechanism, receive his receipt and then retrieve the bottle without it actually getting shredded inside.

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A team of doctors who recently performed surgery on an elderly woman suffering from severe gastrointestinal problems, were shocked to discover that her stomach was clogged with plastic threads that she had been eating for lack of actual food.

Tara Devi, a 52-year-old deaf-mute woman from the Sirmaur district of Himachal Pradesh, India, was brought to the emergency room of the regional hospital in Solan by a local who had noticed she was ill and suffering great pain. After running a series of tests, doctors spotted a sort of spherical mass tuck in her stomach, which they assumed was a large ball of hair and recommended immediate surgery to remove it. However, during the procedure, doctors discovered that what they had believed to be hair was actually a ball of tangled plastic threads from plastic gunny bags. Some of the plastic threads that formed the bird nest-like mass clogging up the woman’s intestines were reportedly up to 7-feet long.

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Home made bread has become very popular in Sweden over the last few years, so popular in fact that the country has its very own dough hotel – a place where people can drop off their precious sourdough knowing that it will be cared for properly until they return. No it’s not a joke, such a place actually exists.

Sweden’s first sourdough hotel opened in 2011, at the Urban Deli bakery, in Stockholm. For a fee of 200 Swedish kroner ($22) a week, they offered to take great care of your sourdough, if you couldn’t do it yourself. “We were just sat talking and thought of the idea of a nursery for sourdoughs. Then we took it further and came up with the hotel idea. It was just for fun really, we didn’t think it was going to get this big,” Åsa Johansson of Urban Deli said in an interview, five years ago.

They didn’t get too many paying customers during the first few months, but thanks to a collaboration with Josefin Vargö, a student at the University College of Arts and Crafts and Design (Konstfack) who started a sourdough archive for her master project, they did get to host a collection of dozens of sourdoughs, some of them as old as 130 years. That’s the thing about sourdough, if you take care of it properly, it can last for several generations, probably even indefinitely. And that’s what these uniquely Swedish dough hotels promise to do – keep the dough alive by “feeding” them water and flour, as well as treat them to regular massages.

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If-you’re looking for a painless, non-invasive way to get pointy elf ears, you’re probably going to love these cool-looking earbuds.

The Spirit E666 earbuds are the perfect accessory for elf-loving audiophiles. While earbuds are generally used by people who don’t want to stand out too much, this particular pair will grab a lot of attention due to their unusual shape. These things go into your ears like regular earbuds, but they also act as pointy extensions for the ear lobes, giving you that coveted elf look.

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Seeing his wife go through the excruciatingly painful process of passing kidney stones, a farmer in Jiangxi Province, China, created an ingenious bed that flips over and vibrates to help dislodge the stones.

Zhu Qinghua, a 52-year-old rice farmer from Jiangxi had been thinking of ways of helping his wife since 1993, when she had her left kidney removed because of kidney failure, and stones were discovered in her right one. Doctors told them that surgery to remove the stones was too dangerous for a person with one kidney, so she was advised to eliminate them naturally before they became too large. Zhu says inspiration struck in 1997, when doctors advised his wife to stand upside down for a few minutes every day, to help dislodge the kidney stones. That’s when he started working on his patented kidney stone-removing bed.

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