Patrick Magno, from San Diego, California, recently won the grand prize in a fitness competition after he managed to lose 49 pounds and get into enviable physical shape in just three months.

After a medical exam revealed that he was 30 per cent body fat and at high risk of developing type 2 diabetes, Patrick Magno decided it was time for a drastic lifestyle change. He was a social worker and had to remove children from broken homes, abusive parents and other harmful situations for a living, a job that he says had a severe effect on his lifestyle and overall health. So he quit, proposed to his girlfriend of six years and set his sights on improving his health so he wouldn’t end up like his father, who had to deal with the terrible symptoms of diabetes.

“I couldn’t even recognize myself,” he said. “I was embarrassed. I was disgusted. I was ashamed that I had let myself get to this point.” So when he learned about Bodybuilding.com’s 250k Challenge, a contest that has entrants transform their bodies with the help of grueling physical workouts, meal-plans and supplements, for the chance to win a substantial sum of money, he decided to go all in. ‘hey said they would give tons of nutritional meal plans, options, workout guides and fitness advice absolutely free of charge, and offer a $250,000 (£190,000) in prize money. It sounded a little too good to be true,” Magno remembers.

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An Indonesian woman who went to great lengths to impersonate a man and even married another woman was recently detained by police after “his” wife alerted authorities about the deception.

40-year-old Surwati, who like most Indonesian goes by a single name, admitted to falsifying her identity and impersonating a man. She had taken the name Muhamad Efendi Saputra and told people “he” was a police officer. Her male impersonating skills were apparently stellar because she managed to full everybody and even convinced a woman into marriage. After a whirlwind romance lasting a couple of months, Muhamad married 25-year-old Heniyati in a ceremony on Java island. To avoid raising any suspicions, Surwati reportedly hired a number of people to pose as relatives of her male alter ego at the wedding.

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Computer geeks spend ridiculous amounts of money on high-end rigs all the time, but one digital electronics engineer from Cambridge, England, poured a small fortune into building a giant computer that he only uses to play Tetris.

James Newman’s supercomputer took five years to build, cost over $53,000 and takes up an entire room, yet it is a million times slower and has a million times less memory than a typical desktop. That’s because it’s actually just a mega microprocessor. “Computers are quite opaque, looking at them it’s impossible to see how they work. What I would like to do is get inside and see what’s going on,” Newman explains on the Megaprocessor project website. “Trouble is we can’t shrink down small enough to walk inside a silicon chip. But we can go the other way; we can build the thing big enough that we can walk inside it. Not only that we can also put LEDs on everything so we can actually SEE the data moving and the logic happening.” And that’s exactly what he spent the last five decades doing. As of June 22, the Megaprocessor is finally complete.

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Tom Currie, a 24-year-old Pokemon fan from New Zealand, recently quit his job so he could spend the next two months traveling all around the country to hunt all the Pokemon in the mobile game phenomenon Pokemon Go.

Currie was working at a Hibiscus Coast cafe in Auckland when he decided that in order to become the best Pokemon Go hunter the world has ever seen he would need to quit and focus all his attention on the app. Every morning, he fills up his flask with coffee, packs his lunch and heads out looking for new Pokemon to collect. He has already booked bus trips to various destinations around New Zealand, from Invercargill in the country’s South Island all the way up to Cape Reinga in North Island. When Newshub interviewed him two days ago, Tom had already managed to capture 90 of the 151 Pokemon released in the popular Nintendo app.

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Inspired by a vision to create a sustainable and healthy home and way of life for their family, Benjamin and Ingrid Marie Hertefølger have built a unique all-natural house completely covered by a glass dome, on a plot of land on Norway’s Sandhorney island, in the Arctic Circle.

The Hertefølgers knew they wanted to live in an eco-home made of only natural materials – cob (a mixture of sand, clay and straw), wood and glass – but also that it had to withstand the harsh weather conditions of the Arctic Circle. Aware of the robust properties of geodesic domes, they contacted Solardome Industries about a bespoke dome to cover their new house. It had to withstand the heavy snowfalls common to Northern Norway, maintain a uniform temperature throughout the year, reduce ultraviolet radiation, minimise maintenance and act as a greenhouse for the family’s organic vegetable and fruit garden.

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One of the last places you would expect to find a real Italian prince is driving a food truck on the streets of Los Angeles, California. But that hasn’t stopped His Royal Highness Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy, the only male heir of Italy’s exiled king, Umberto II, from trying his luck in the American mobile food business.

“I came to Los Angeles six months ago for an event and I realized there were various Mexican and Asian food trucks around,” the prince told Italian magazine, Chi. “I thought ‘why don’t I try it?’ With a food truck with fresh Italian pasta that is loved around the world.” So he bought himself a food truck, painted it in the colors of House Savoy and named it “Prince of Venice”, after one of his would-be titles which are not recognized by the Italian government.

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A pair of bold Ibiza entrepreneurs have come up with a way of making a bit of money by selling the island’s cheapest and most easily available commodity – air. “Aire de Ibiza” tin cans full of “pure and virgin” air cost just €5.90 ($6.5) and are apparently a big hit with tourists looking for special souvenirs.

Selling canned or bottled air isn’t exactly a new business idea. As far as we know, it all started in 2012, when Chinese billionaire Chen Guangbiao started selling cans of fresh air for about $0.80 a piece, as a way of raising awareness to the country’s air pollution problems. It wasn’t meant to be a real business venture, but it got people interested and before long, veritable bottled-air companies started popping out all across the globe. We even mentioned a few here on Oddity Central, like Vitality Air – a startup selling fresh Canadian air mainly to the Chinese market, Air de Montcuq – a company selling cans of fresh air from the French country side, or this group of Russian entrepreneurs selling air from Yeti’s cave.

But while the air cans sold by the companies mentioned above can be opened and savored, Aire de Ibiza tins are sealed shut on purpose, to prevent buyers from opening them. They are designed merely as souvenirs for tourists meant to bring back memories of their time on the island. While you’ll never be able to check for yourself, unless you’re willing to ruin the souvenir, the brilliant minds behind Aire de Ibiza claim that each can is filled with “100 percent pure air, no additives, made in Spain and gluten free”. The tongue-in-cheek description is a nice touch, but is it worth $6.5? Some people certainly don’t think so.

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A 28-year-old man from New Delhi was recently arrested for selling a rented car online and then stealing it back from the new owner on the same day. His scheme actually worked the first time, but he was apprehended when he got greedy and tried to pull it off a second time.

Mintoo Kumar, son of a retired Army captain and struggling entrepreneur, was looking for a way to make some money after his businesses failed, when inspiration struck. He rented a used Mahindra XUV 500 and soon also started looking for an identical one in New Delhi. Once he found it, the conman spent the next couple of months trying to get the registration details of the car and used them to forge a registration certificate for the rented vehicle. Once the paperwork was ready, he posted an ad for the car on an eCommerce website and waited for gullible buyers. He actually managed to sell the car pretty fast, but in order to complete his grand scheme he needed to steal it back again, fast. Using a GPS device, he managed to track down the rented vehicle to its new location, and since the owner hadn’t had time to change the locks, stole it using a duplicate key.

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When it comes to weird tourist attractions, it’s hard to beat a stuffed black bear that died of what many people consider the worst cocaine overdose in history. Nicknamed Pablo EscoBear, the unique tourist attraction is currently on display at the Kentucky for Kentucky Fun Mall, in Lexington.

On December 23, 1985, the New York Times reported about a 175-pound black bear that had apparently died of an overdose of cocaine in Georgia’s Chattahoochee National Forest. Three months earlier, drug smuggler Andrew Thornton II had dropped large quantities of drugs from an airplane over that area, before jumping from it himself. Unfortunately, Thornton got tangled in his parachute and fell to his death in someone’s yard, in Knoxville, Tennessee. Before turning to a life of crime, Kentucky blue blood Andrew Thornton II had worked as a narcotics officer of all things, and then as a lawyer. It is believed that he had built his network of connections during his time on the right side of the law, before becoming a drug smuggler. He was on a coke-smuggling run from Colombia when he dropped 40 plastic containers full of cocaine in Chattahoochee National Forest.

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They might look like something created in a laboratory, but these “octopus tomato trees” are merely hybrids that grow from a single tomato vine but spread on a large trellis. Their crown grows to about 40-50 square meters and they yield tens of thousands of tomatoes every season.

The first time I saw a photo of an octopus tomato tree online, I was convinced it was nothing more than a clever hoax. It looked pretty cool though, so I decided to do a bit of research, just to be sure. At first, I only found a couple of mentions of these impressive plants on some gardening sites, but they didn’t offer much info on them, like how they are grown and where they can be found. Luckily, I stumbled across a travel blog that mentioned these tomato trees as a tourist attraction at Walt Disney World Resort. It even had a few photos of the trees, so I was starting to believe they were actually real. Soon after that, I found a bunch of people selling tomato trees on sites like eBay and Aliexpress, and even a short YouTube clip, so I finally decided they would make a great addition to our collection of amazing things most people don’t even know exist.

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An old woman from Harbin, China, has almost gone blind after enduring numerous beatings as a form of therapy. The simple-minded lady actually believed that by getting hit in the head and other parts of her body would actually improved her health.

The woman, known only by her surname – Bao – started attending “punching therapy” sessions in 2011, at the recommendation of a therapist  from the “Natural Shock Health Club.” Somehow, receiving heavy blows to the head, eyes and body didn’t convince Bao that the treatment was a seriously bad idea, so she kept attending the painful one-hour sessions twice or three times a week. She was apparently convinced that getting hit repeatedly could cure all illnesses, although anyone with a bit of common sense would probably realize the beatings would only cause illnesses, not cure them.

After enduring punching therapy about 160 times in 18 months, Bao started noticing that not only was the bizarre treatment not curing her health problems, but it was also affecting her vision. After receiving hard blows to the head and eyes, the woman found that she couldn’t see clearly out of her right eye. She apparently informed her Natural Shock Health Club therapist, who reassured her that it was a “normal reaction” of her body and that it would go away eventually. So she kept playing punching bag in the name of health, only her sight gradually got worse. She could barely see anything with her right eye, and after visiting an eye doctor, she was diagnosed with cataracts.

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German company Kaffeeform combines dried coffee grounds and biopolymer to create stylish-looking coffee cups and saucers that are not only durable and dishwasher-safe, but even smell a bit like coffee.

For every cup of coffee you brew, about two tablespoons of grounds wind up in the trash. That doesn’t seem like a lot, but just think about the millions of coffees consumed around the world every single day, and you’ll start to see the problem. Sure, some of those coffee grounds are recycled as fertilizer or beauty products like face masks, but most of it ends up at landfills. It was while contemplating this issue that German designer product designer Julian Lechner came up with a radical new and sustainable way of recycling coffee grounds – turning them into tableware.

Lechner first came up with the idea of using coffee grounds to create eco-friendly crockery while attending university in the Italian city of Bolzano. “We were always drinking coffee at university,” he remembers. “Before classes, after classes, meeting friends, hanging out at espresso bars—all the time. And that’s how I started to wonder, What happens to all that coffee? It was all just getting thrown away.” He began consulting with his professors about ways of using coffee grounds to create a solid material, but it took him years to actually come up with a viable solution.

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How much would you pay for a truly one-of-a-kind pair of jeans featuring an abstract pattern of scratches and bite arks designed by lions at a Japanese zoo? Only ten pairs will be available this year, so you’d better be ready to break the piggy bank.

Zoo Jeans are part of a revitalization campaign for Japn’s Tohoku region, and were originally thought up at Sendai City’s Tohoku Gakuin University. The first pairs were originally launched in 2014, when lions, tigers and bears were given a series of toys wrapped in denim and allowed to literally leave their mark on the fabric. The toys were then retrieved and the denim was passed over to jeans makers who made sure the placement of claw and bite marks on the pants was just right. Although very pricey, Zoo Jeans proved extremely popular, so this year, the Tohoku Gakuin University is selling another 10 pairs designed by lions, via online auction.

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36-year-old Richard Kimberley, of Kidderminster, Worcestershire, has been running his “csmicros” computer repair business for the last 20 years, but he plans to close it down on July 22nd, claiming radiation signals from wireless technology have given him a rare condition known as electro-hypersensitivity (EHS).

Ever since he launched his business in 1996, Richard has been working around phones, computers and Wi-Fi signals on a regular basis, and he believes the constant exposure to technology has taken a toll on his health. “Due to an over-exposure to the radiation from wireless technology, my health has declined to the point where I cannot continue with the business that I have spent my life building,” he says. “I’d wake up five or six times in a night, my joints were aching, I’d have headaches during the day and my memory was awful – I felt atrocious and I had no idea why. I’ve had to rely on staff for the past 18 months since becoming EHS. I have persevered, battling with electro-hypersensitivity for as long as I can.”

Mr. Kimberley said that his problems began in 2013, when he moved into a dual shop and house premise on Stourport Road, Kidderminster. He started experiencing black outs, headaches and extreme tiredness, yet his condition improved when he removed wireless technology from the house. But wireless technology is everywhere these days, and his electro-hypersensitivity has made it really hard for Richard to live a normal life. Since October last year, he has been living in a van fitted with aluminium lining to block out radiation signals. He says the only way to avoid feeling sick is to park the van in spots he feels are safe, every night.

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Meat doesn’t sound like a great ingredient for desserts, but that’s probably because you’ve never tried ‘tavuk göğsü’, a creamy, sweet pudding with chicken breast as its main ingredient.

Legend has it that tavuk göğsü was invented centuries ago, when one of the sultans of the Ottoman Empire got a craving for something sweet in the middle of the night and cooks at the Palace of Topkapı had to work with the only ingredient left in their kitchen – chicken. That’s just a legend though, and even in Turkey, a country so proud of its rich culture, there are those who claim there isn’t any chicken at all in tavuk göğsü. It certainly doesn’t taste anything like chicken, but Turkish cooks specializing in this unique dessert say it’s because the meat is pounded into small bits and boiled until it dissolves in the pudding. Its main purpose is to give tavuk göğsü a different texture than regular puddings.

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