A Japanese billionaire has announced plans to donate a billion yen (about $9 million) to 1,000 of his Twitter followers in an intriguing social experiment designed to show how money affects people’s lives.

On January 1st, Yusaku Maezawa, founder of Japan’s largest fashion retail website, tweeted that he would be giving away 1 billion Japanese yen ($9.1 million) to 1,000 random people, as part of an effort to find out if money really can buy happiness. All people had to do for the chance to win $9,118 was follow and ‘retweet’ him before January 7. At the time of this writing, Maezawa’s Twitter post announcing the giveaway had been retweeted over 4.5 million times.

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At just seven years of age, Mikail Akar is already a well-known name in the art world. His paintings sell for thousands of dollars all over the world, and he has already been given the nickname “Preschool Picasso”.

Born in Germany, Mikail’s talent for painting was discovered by mistake, three years ago. His parents bought him a canvas and some handprint paint and let him get creative with them. They has already bought him plenty of toys and action figures, so they thought they’d get him something different, but they definitely weren’t expecting him to paint a masterpiece. But Mikhail did such a good job with his first canvas that his father thought his wife had painted it.

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When it comes to hyper-realistic drawing, cats and other felines must be among the most difficult things to pull odd due to their fur. Getting every strand just right requires a steady hand and mountains of patience, and that’s what makes Yuki Kudo’s artworks so damn special.

Over the past decade, we’ve posted some pretty impressive hyper-realistic artworks on this website, so it takes some thing special to catch our attention. However, the first time I laid eyes on the color pencil drawings of Japanese artist Yuki Kudo, they took my breath away. I still find myself staring at some of his masterpieces, looking for clues that it’s just a drawing and not some digitally enhanced photo or CGI graphic. Oh, and did I mention he is only 18 years old?

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A viral Facebook post by a regular kid from the Philippines may prove to be one of the most effective marketing pushes for Nintendo’s new RingFit Adventure, a video games designed to get players moving rather than sit for hours.

Migui Gabriel, a young graphic artist from Pasig City, in the Philippines, recently took to Facebook to praise Nintendo’s RingFit Adventure video game for helping him lose about 9 kilograms (20 pounds) in 30 days. On January 4, he posted a short message, as well as before-and-after photos of himself, to show everyone that the transformation was in fact real. And all he allegedly had to do was play Nintendo’s  exercising action-RPG game for 25 minutes every day, although he admits cutting down on carbs and not eating after 7 pm probably helped too. Still, he says the game was key, as this wasn’t his first attempt at losing weight.

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Over the years we’ve featured some impressive hyper-realistic art on Oddity Central, but when it comes to animal portraiture, I’m pretty sure Canadian artist Nick Sider takes the cake.

Nick Sider knew he wanted to be an artist since he was just 5-years-old, but it took him another 20 years to build up the courage to dedicate his life to painting. At the age of 25, he quit his job and started teaching himself how to paint with acrylic paints. Looking at his works, you would think Nick has decades of experience behind him, but he’s actually only 31-years-old, so to say that he made up for lost time in just six years would be a serious understatement.

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Ukrainian-Russian art duo Asya Kozina and Dmitriy Kozin are taking paper craft to new heights with their elaborate and flamboyant wigs made entirely out of paper.

Inspired by Baroque and Rococo wigs, the talented couple and art duo create their own modern wigs out of pristine white paper. The unique choice of material only makes their creations stand out even more, so it’s no wonder that their amazing headgear has been getting a lot of attention both within the art world but also on social media. Looking at some of their most recent creations it’s really not that hard to see why people are so impressed with Asya and Dmitriy’s work – it’s really unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.

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While most 11-year-olds are mostly concerned with school, video games, and surfing the web, Timofey Klevakin, a boy from rural Russia, is busy training in the gym and breaking weightlifting records.

Ever since he was five years old, Timofey was interested in weightlifting, watching his father train at a makeshift gym in their home village of Shalya, in the Ural mountains. Noticing his boy’s interest, Arseny Klevakin started training him, despite his wife’s protests over concerns that he was too young. At the age of six, during a regional weightlifting competition, Timofey managed to amaze attendants and judges by deadlifting a 55-kilogram barbell. He’s been working hard ever since, and the now 11-year-old is getting ready to break the national deadlift record for his weight class by lifting a 105-kilogram barbell.

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A group of scientists from ETH Zurich and FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland recently filed a patent for a process that makes chocolates shimmer in rainbow colors without using food coloring.

The story of shimmering rainbow chocolate began on the corridors of a university building, when food scientist Patrick Rühs, materials scientist Etienne Jeoffroy and physicist Henning Galinski started chatting about chocolate during their coffee break. The main focus of their discussion is whether it would be possible to make chocolate in other colors than brown and white, and if so, how. Intrigued by the complexity of the topic, they started looking into chocolate, its properties and what makes it brown. Then they started conducting playful experiments in the kitchen of ETH University.

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Just three months after undergoing a bone marrow transplant to treat his acute myeloid leukemia, a Nevada man was shocked to learn that his DNA had been replaced by that of his donor.

For years ago, Chris Long, who happens to be working at the Washoe County Sheriff’s Department in Nevada, was suffering from acute myeloid leukemia and myelodysplastic syndromes and needed a bone marrow transplant. He was lucky enough to find a donor, a German man that he had never met and with whom he only exchanged a few messages before the surgery, but he had no idea that in a few months time he would turn into his donor, sort of. As soon as Chris’ work colleagues heard that he was undergoing a bone marrow transplant, they decided to “swab the heck out of him” to see how his DNA changed. And it’s a good thing they did, because the changes were fascinating.

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Long, relaxing bathroom breaks that allow people to read the news or get up to date with their social media feed may be coming to an end due to a new and controversial toilet seat design that is supposed to make sitting on the toilet for more than seven minutes becomes uncomfortable.

Called the Standard Toilet, the new design thought up by English consulting engineer Mahabir Gill slopes at a downwards angle of 13 degrees forcing the person who is sitting on it to use their leg muscles in order to keep from sliding off. According to its creator, the longest someone can comfortably sit on such a toilet seat is 5 to 7 minutes. Gill  said that the 13 angle slant is ideal, as it’s enough to cause some feelings of strain in the users legs, making them want to get up faster than they would from a horizontal toilet seat, but not enough to cause serious health problems. While the designer said that the Standard Toilet was inspired by his personal experience, he also added that it would be a great asset for businesses wanting to maximize employee work hours.

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The ripe berries of the genipa tree, called genipapo, have long been used throughout Central and South America to make syrups and liquors, but for a few years now unripe genipapo berries have become highly sought after for their ability to turn foods blue.

The coloring properties of unripe genipapo berries have been documented since the colonization of South America, when Europeans reported its use by local communities like the Tupinambás and the Pataxós as a temporary tattoo dye, but it wasn’t until 2014 that people learned about its potential to turn food blue as well. It was then that professor and biologist Valdely Kinupp published his book, Unconventional Food Plants in Brazil, where he detailed a process for extracting an edible blue pigment from genipapo berries. Natural blue pigments are very rare in the food industry, so Kinupp’s discovery caused quite a stir which eventually turned into a blue food craze.

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Moscow-based artist Alena Litvin has a very special gift – she can recreate a detailed photographic portraits using only colored pencils and mountains of talent. The results are often so impressive that you can barely tell the drawing apart from the photo.

Looking at her amazing drawings, it’s very hard to believe that Alena is a self-taught artist who has only been exercising her craft for the last eight years. From portraits of celebrities like Scarlett Johansson or Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, to regular people who commission her to draw portraits of their loved ones, there’s nothing the young Russian artist can’t pull off. She can take up to 10 days to finish a portrait, which may sound like a long time, but just look at the level of detail in some her artworks…

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A young Japanese couple have come up with an ingenious way of making their one-year-old son stop crying whenever he notices that his mother isn’t around – life-size cardboard cutouts of the woman placed strategically in the room he is playing in.

Fuki Sato recently became an overnight sensation after photos of her life-size cutouts went viral all around the world. It’s not that they’re unusually life-like – although they do seem very well done – it’s what they are used that has gotten the family so much attention online. Apparently Sato and er husband had been having trouble calming down their one-year-old boy, who would start to cry whenever he noticed that she wasn’t around. Since staying by his side 24/7 really wasn’t an option, they decided to have her be around the child all the time, while not really being there.

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You may think it’s the most wonderful time of the year, but I know one canine who definitely disagrees. Well, at least he looks like he does anyway, as Anuko, a five-year-old Siberian Husky has one of the grumpiest faces I’ve ever since on a canine.

Anuko first rose to internet stardom in 2015, when his owner, 22-year-old Jasmine Milton, from the UK, started posting photos of his  thoroughly unimpressed mug on social media, where they quickly went viral. He has been entertaining online audiences worldwide ever since, and has managed to build up quite a following on Facebook and Instagram. His fans are always on the lookout for new photos, but Anuko’s popularity always peaks around the Holiday Season, because his face simply doesn’t match the cheery atmosphere. We may have lost Grumpy Cat this year (RIP!), but his legacy is in good paws.

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Called ‘devil lips’, or ‘octopus lips’, a cosmetic procedure that allegedly involves inserting filler into the edge of the upper lip to give it a wavy look is getting a lot of attention on Instagram these days.

No one knows exactly when and where this unusual beauty trend originated, but some sources claim that the procedure was pioneered by Russian plastic surgeon Emelian Braude. One thing’s for sure, though, the unusual lip contouring technique has been raising eyebrows on social media, especially in Russia, where it’s supposedly the most popular. But before you pick up the phone and call your favorite plastic surgeon about the devil lips procedure, you should know that no one is yet clear if it actually exists. Some plastic surgeons say that getting this wavy contour through lip fillers alone is impossible, and attempting to to do can be very dangerous.

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