China’s state news agency Xinhua unveiled two very realistic looking AI news anchors that can “tirelessly” report the news 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, from anywhere in the world.

We’ve known that robots and artificial intelligence were coming for our jobs, but somehow I never thought news anchors would be among the first to be replaced. However, if the two AI broadcasters who made their debut last week during China’s annual World Internet Conference are anything to go by, the future of human news anchors looks very bleak. The newest additions to Xinhua’s team of broadcasters not only look disturbingly realistic, but they can also move their mouths to match the audio, blink, nod their head in emphasis, or raise their eyebrows. But their most important quality is that they can work 24/7, both on the agency’s website and on social media platforms, greatly “reducing news production costs and improving efficiency”.

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A 12-year-old boy from Thailand has managed to reach celebrity status and make enough money to build his family a new house by showing off his makeup and cross-dressing skills on Instagram.

Nes (@nes_tyyy), a boy from Thailand’s Phang-Nga province, reportedly started playing with his mother’s makeup at a very young age, but instead of discouraging him, his parents not only supported his hobby, but also started giving him tips. Today, the 12-year-old boy has over 280,000 fans on Instagram alone and is able to support his family by posting makeup tutorials and photos of himself cross-dressing as a girl on the popular photo sharing platform. He recently made news headlines all over Asia after posting a photo of the new house he managed to build for his parents.

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A Russian scientist working at the Bellingshausen research station on King George Island, in Antarctica, was charged with attempted murder after he stabbed a fellow colleague with a kitchen knife for allegedly revealing the endings of books that he was reading.

55-year-old Sergey Savitsky and Oleg Beloguzov, 52, had been working together at Russia’s remote Bellingshausen for four years and they were both known to their colleagues as professionals. However, on October 9th, Savitsky reportedly took a kitchen knife and plunged it into Beloguzov’s chest, in what has been referred to as the first known attempted murder in Antarctica, ever. It will probably go down in history as one of the strangest as well, as investigators recently revealed that a possible explanation for the crime could be the spoiling of book endings.

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A 79-year-old who spent most of her time begging at a train station in Hangzhou, China, was recently ousted as a relatively rich pensioner who lives in a 5-storey villa and owns several retail stores and rental properties in the city.

The woman’s story made national news headlines last week, after staff at Hangzhou’s East Railway Station started broadcasting an unusual message from loudspeakers warning passers-by not to fall for the granny’s story because she is not what she appears to be. In a surprising turn of events, even the woman’s son told reporters that their family is considerably wealthier than the average family in China. They live in a lavish villa, own several properties, some of which they rent to local business, and he himself manages a family factory. The man added that he told his mother to stop begging numerous times, but she refuses to listen.

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A Chinese man swallowed an 8-inch metal spoon as a stupid stunt, a year ago. It got stuck in his esophagus, but seeing as he could eat and drink normally, he never sought medical assistance to have it removed. He claims that he only started experiencing chest pains a few days ago, after being punched in the chest.

The unnamed man from China’s Xinjiang autonomous region told doctors that he had swallowed a stainless steel spoon during a drunken bet. He told his friends that he could swallow the spoon and then pull it back up again by tying a string to its handle. It must of sounded like a good idea at the time, but things didn’t go according to plan, and the eating utensil got stuck in the man’s food pipe. Instead of going to the hospital immediately, the man waited to see if the spoon prevented him from eating and drinking normally. It didn’t, so he lived with it stuck in his esophagus for the last year.

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Angulas, the Spanish word for baby eels is one of Spain’s most expensive foods, but no one seems to understand why. They hardly have any taste at all, their texture is best described as slimy and they look like limp worms on a plate. So why are people paying hundreds of euros to eat angulas at expensive restaurants?

Legend has it that in the past angulas were used as fodder for chickens and pigs, and there is historical evidence that they were once a staple food of the working class in northern Spain. But today they sell for astronomical prices of up to 1,000 euros ($1,150) per kilo, so only the richest of the rich can afford them. So what happened? Well, scarcity definitely played a big part in their surprising transformation. River dams, the general degradation of the environment and overfishing have seriously affected the baby eel population, and the rarer they got the more expensive they became. They may not taste like anything, but apparently many people like to act like snobs every once in a while, so they pay a premium to enjoy a food that most people can’t afford.

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Mike Roman, a teacher from New Jersey, recently got his five minutes in the internet spotlight after coming on a podcast to discuss his unusual eating habits. The 41-year-old claims to have eaten pizza at least once a day for the last 37 years.

Roman’s longtime love affair with pizza began at age 3 or 4 (he doesn’t remember exactly), when his mother introduced him to the Italian dish for the first time. He apparently loved it so much that he kept asking for more every day until his parents finally gave in and stopped trying to convince him eat other foods as well. He has been eating pizza at least once a day ever since, all through his childhood, teenage years and into adulthood. Mike has reportedly eaten pizza for all three meals of his life, for many years, but he recently started switching between pizza and peanut butter sandwiches for lunch. He still has pizza for dinner every day, though.

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Many children dream of becoming entrepreneurs when they grow up, but very few start as early as, Jose Adolfo Quisocala Condori, a Peruvian boy who started a children’s savings bank when he was only 7 years old. Today, his bank serves over 2,000 clients and offers various financial services.

Jose got the idea for a children’s savings bank six years ago, after noticing that many of his peers were spending their money on sweets and toys, instead of saving it for more meaningful purchases. Despite his young age, he understood that saving money and accessing the financial system were two ways that adults – like his parents – solved many of their financial and social problems, so he decided to make them available to kids as well. He then started thinking of ways that children could generate money without the help of their parents, and recycling seemed like the obvious answer. Jose was sure that he was on to something, but when he pitched his idea for a children’s bank to his teachers, he was told that a 7-year-old couldn’t handle such a project. But he proved them all wrong.

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An Indian education organization recently sparked controversy by introducing an optional engineering course that teaches students that modern inventions like aeronautics, batteries, as well as knowledge of gravity existed in India during the Vedic Age, thousands of years ago.

Human Resource Development Ministry (HRD) decided to introduce into the country’s engineering curriculum a controversial book that makes all kinds of bombastic claims, from the fact that the Wright brothers didn’t really invent the airplane, to assertions that ancient Indian ‘scientists’ in the Vedic Age (1500 – 500 BCE) knew about gravity long before Isaac Newton. This book is seen as another attempt by Narendra Modi’s government to promote pseudoscience pushed by Hindu groups.

Entitled Bharatiya Vidya Saar, the controversial book is set to be introduced as part of an optional credit course in engineering colleges and universities affiliated with the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE). For some reason, the optional course, called Indian Knowledge Systems, will focus on Indian philosophical, linguistic and artistic traditions, as well as yoga and Indian perspective of modern scientific worldview. Those don’t sound like the kinds of things engineering courses should focus on, but wait until you hear what students will actually be taught.

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A man named Valery recently became the star of what may very well be the most epic fail in the history of iPhone launches. After becoming the first person in a monstrously long queue to set foot inside the Apple store in Moscow to buy an iPhone XS, he left empty-handed because he couldn’t afford to buy it.

On the morning of September 28, the Apple store in Moscow finally opened its doors to the crowd of people that had been lining up outside for over 24 hours to buy the new iPhone XS and XS Max. Apple fans have been queuing up for new iPhone launches all around the world for years now, but what made this particular event special was the amount of fail involved. For one thing, the first eight people at the head of the giant queue evaporated minutes before the store opened. It turns out they had never planned on buying a phone, hoping to sell their places in line for absurd amounts of money, instead. But they were actually the smart ones, because the ninth guy planned to do the same thing, only he didn’t have the brains to bail before the doors opened.

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Jesse Rix has been tattooing since 2005 and specializes in a wide range of styles, from realism to nature pieces, but it’s hid geometric, three-dimensional optical illusion tattoos that really get people talking. Some of his works are so trippy that you could swear you’re looking at a fantastic world underneath a person’s skin.

In most of his incredible tattooed optical illusions, Rix uses geometrical shapes like hexagons and cubes to “remove” pieces of skin from his subjects and reveal the colorful world beneath. However, his art and skills are constantly evolving, as shown in some of his latest works, which feature windows inked on to his subjects through which you can see the universe beneath their skin. The New Hampshire-based artist is obviously a master of the trompe-l’œil technique, and some of his tattoos are so insanely realistic they can be kind of creepy to look at.

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Le Nguyen Bao Trung, aka ‘Bin’, is a 5-year-old Vietnamese boy who reportedly spoke his very first words in English despite never having come into contact with the language. Today, Bin speaks and reads perfectly in English, but is only just learning Vietnamese so he can communicate with his mother.

Born in Dong Van village, in Vietnam’s Ha Tinh province, Bin said his first word when he was almost two years old. You could say he too a while, but no one knows if that was when he said his first word, it was just when people noticed it. His mother, Le Thi Lien, recalls that the boy kept pointing at a calendar and saying ‘Eleven’. She didn’t speak any English and mistook the word for mere babbling, but Bin kept saying it so she asked her older daughter about it and learned that it meant 11 in English. She went back to the calendar and saw that it did in fact show the 11th of the month. But that was only the beginning of this unusual story.

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The Temple Institute, a religious organization dedicated to “every aspect of the Holy Temple of Jerusalem”, recently announced the birth of a completely red heifer in the Holy Land – the first one in the last 2,000 years – which is an essential element of a biblical prophecy that theologians believe will bring about the second coming of Jesus and Judgement Day.

According to the Hebrew Bible, the events leading up to the apocalypse should play out like this: Jews would return to Israel after 2,000 years – the Holy Temple would be rebuilt – billions of people would perish during seven years of natural disasters – the antichrist would rise and rule the world – the battle of Armageddon would commence somewhere near Israel – Jesus would return to defeat Satan’s armies and then preside over Judgment Day. The Jewish people may have returned to Israel, but in order for this prophecy to move forward, a perfectly red heifer is needed.

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The owner of a restaurant in Binz, Germany, has come under fire for banning children aged 14 and younger from entering his establishment after 5 pm.

Rudolf Markl, the owner of “Oma’s Küche” (Grandma’s Kitchen), a traditional restaurant in Binz, on the German island of  Rügen got so fed up with children’s tantrums and unruly behavior that he recently made the extreme decision to ban them from his restaurant after 5 pm. He even put up a sign near the entrance letting patrons know that in the evening, Oma’s Küche is an adult-only restaurant. Despite being accused of discrimination, Markl said that this measure was a long time coming and that he plans to enforce it going forward.

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“When you see me, cry”. This is just one of the ominous messages carved into the medieval ‘hunger stones’ that have been revealed by sever drought in the Elbe River, near the northern Czech town of Decin.

Hunger stones, or ‘hungersteine’ as the Germans call them, are carved boulders or river plates that only become visible in severe droughts, when water levels drop particularly low. The inscriptions chiselled into them are believed to have once been used to warn people that hard times and famine were coming. The Elbe river, which starts in the Czech Republic and flows into Germany features dozens of hunger stones with inscriptions dating back to the 17th century, but other European rivers feature such ominous stones with carvings from as early as 1417.

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