Beau Jessup, a 19-year-old entrepreneur, has earned hundreds of thousands of dollars through her ingenious online service, Special Name, which helps Chinese parents choose an appropriate English name for their babies.

Finding a suitable name for a baby is a big deal in China. When picking out their child’s Chinese name, parents usually select two or three characters that have a carefully thought out meaning, but when deciding on an English name – to help them interact with native English-speakers easier – many of them struggle. That’s where 19-year-old Beau Jessup and her company, Special Name, come in. For a small fee, Special Name suggests several English names that have different traits, like honesty or ambition, associated with them. In the last three and a half years, Jessup has helped name 677,900 Chinese babies, and earned over $400,000 in the process, more than enough to cover her college expenses.

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A 19-year-old Missouri man admitted to spiking co-workers’ drinks with LSD because they were “too uptight” and “needed to have better energy”.

What’s the fastest way to change your co-workers’ mood and help them relax? Well, according to a young Enterprise Rent-A-Car employee, lacing their drinks with strong mood-altering drugs without telling them is one way of going about it.

Two employees at an Enterprise Rent-A-Car office in Arnold, Missouri, needed to be hospitalized last week after reporting symptoms like dizziness and uncontrollable shaking, for no apparent reason. Their manager called an ambulance, but also notified the police about the situation, after seeing another member of her staff holding a dropper and messing with everyone’s drinks. Confronted by the officers, the man nonchalantly admitted to spiking his colleagues drinks with LSD, because they had “negative energy”.

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A small batch honey producer in Oita Prefecture, Japan, recently sparked controversy online after it was reported that it sells a product aptly called Honey with Hornets, which actually contain a giant dead hornet suspended in the sweet liquid.

While the decision to put a dead hornet inside a jar of honey can definitely be called questionable, even more so is the fact that the giant Japanese hornets are actually placed inside the jar while still alive and left to drown in the viscous liquid. According to an article on SoraNews24, the hornets, which are known natural enemies of bees, are captured alive by beekeepers while trying to encroach on the bees’ territory to be used as macabre decorations for the company’s jars of honey.

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He Yuhong, a 27-year-old beauty blogger from China, has become an online sensation thanks to her amazing ability to transform herself into a doppelganger of celebrities and iconic characters, using makeup.

He, who posts photos and videos of her work on various social networks under the pseudonym Yuyamika, shot to fame last year, when she used her makeup skills to turn herself into a real-life version of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. The video of her remarkable transformation got tens of millions of views on China’s Weibo platform alone, and quickly went viral on Western social networks as well. Since then, Yuhong has been entertaining her growing fan base with more makeup magic, turning herself into doppelgangers of celebrities like Johnny Depp and Taylor Swift, as well as Albert Einstein or the Girl with a Pearl Earring.

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Fathers sometimes like to say that they can do anything mothers can, except give birth and breastfeed. Well, thanks to a new device developed by Japanese company Dentsu, breastfeeding babies may not be a problem for fathers in the near future.

Recently unveiled at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, the Father’s Nursing Assistant is an intriguing, if somewhat bizarre, gadget that aims to allow fathers to help out with stressful tasks usually reserved for mothers. Data shows that much of the parental stress and difficulties associated with taking care of a baby are related to feeding and sleeping, responsibilities in which fathers’ participation tends to be low. In order to get fathers more involved and relieve some of the burden off mothers, Japanese corporation Dentsu has created a wearable milk or formula tank shaped as a pair of female breasts, which allows men to breastfeed children.

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A North Carolina thrift shop recently sold a $1,000 hand-carved furniture set that came with a warning of haunting activity reported by its previous owners.

We’ve all heard stories about allegedly haunted furniture or memorabilia before, but it’s not everyday that we see these claims made on the price tags of stores selling them. However, the staff at Habitat for Humanity, a thrift shop in Salisbury, North Carolina, felt that the haunting activity reported by the previous owners of a queen canopy bed-frame and highboy chest of drawers was something they needed to disclose to potential buyers. Believe it or not, the eerie paranormal activity warning did nothing to dissuade people, if anything, it got more of them interested in the set.

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The small village of Dinoša, in Montenegro, is home to an old mulberry tree that turns into a water fountain every time it rains heavily.

As we all know, water doesn’t normally gush out of living trees, but at least in this case the phenomenon has a perfectly reasonable explanation. You see, the meadow that the mulberry tree grows in has many underground springs which flood during heavy rainfalls, and the additional pressure pumps the water up through the hollow trunk of the tree and out through a hole a few feet above the ground.

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A New Jersey man will never forget 62nd birthday after his sons posted his phone number on a large roadside billboard inviting people to call and wish him well. So far, he has gotten over 15,000 calls and texts from people all over the world.

Chris Ferry’s sons used to prank him when going to restaurants by telling waiters that it was his birthday just so they could watch him squirm uncomfortably as they brought him cake. This year, they took things to a whole new level by renting a billboard outside Linwood and posting their dad’s phone number on it, inviting people to send him their best wishes. They thought it would be something of a local joke, with their dad getting a few calls from random strangers, but after the photo went viral on social media, things got a bit out of hand.

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If the idea of getting paid a decent monthly wage to do nothing, or whatever you want, for the rest of your life sounds appealing, you may be interested in this Swedish experimental art project that plans to hire a very lucky person for a responsibility-free job with just one very simple requirement.

This government-funded conceptual art project/ideal employment opportunity in Gothenburg, Sweden will select one very lucky applicant to show up at a train station currently under construction in the city every day and punch a time clock. This will turn on a set of fluorescent lights over the boarding platform to let everyone know that the useless employee showed up at work that day. After that, the person is free to do anything they want, or nothing at all, just as long as they return to the station to clock out and turn off the lights when their shift is over. They don’t have to hang around the train station during working hours, and they can quit or be replaced by someone else anytime they want. As long as they don’t get another job, the position is guaranteed for the rest of their lives.

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Trying to move on from a failed romantic relationship can be hard, especially when your most beautiful travel photos feature your ex. A lot of people reluctantly delete such digital memories as part of a ritual known as “post-breakup purge”, but thanks to a new online service called Edit My Ex, that’s no longer necessary.

As the name suggests, Edit My Ex allows people who want to erase any evidence of their ex from meaningful digital photos to just have them edited out and keep the photos. All you have to do is upload a photo to their website, let the image editing experts know what exactly you’d like erased and pay a £8.99 ($11.90) fee. In up to 48 hours, you’ll get your photo back, ex-free.

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Romanie-Jade Tulloch, a 20-year-old self-taught makeup artist from Nottingham, in the UK, combines her love of makeup and art to create mind-blowing optical illusions on her face.

Romanie has always been into makeup, but she only started focusing on it two years ago, in the hopes of becoming a freelance makeup artist. She never studied professional makeup, preferring instead to hone her skills by watching online tutorials and experimenting with various cosmetics. Having studied fine arts for two years in college, she naturally drifted from conventional makeup to painting artistic optical illusions on her face and posting her best work on Instagram. Before she knew it, she had hundreds of thousands of followers on the popular social network.

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As a male calf born on a small cattle farm in France, Aston was originally destined to be slaughtered for meat, but after forming a bond with a horse trainer he became a showjumping bull instead.

Five years ago, Sabine Rouas, a horse trainer from Strasbourg, France, had just lost a horse that she had spent 20 years of her life with and felt that she couldn’t get attached to a horse anymore. Instead, she became interested in a family of cows living on a nearby organic milk farm. One of the cows she spent time with was pregnant at the time, and Sabine believes that the calf may have gotten used to her voice while still in its mother’s womb, because soon after it was born, it started following her around whenever she came by. Unfortunately, the farmer wasn’t interested in keeping a bull on a milk farm, so he planned to have the calf, named M309 at the time, slaughtered at only three months. But Sabine wasn’t going to let that happen.

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On May 26, 2019, Manuel Germán Ramírez Valdovinos will have been in prison for 19 years, serving a sentence of 43 years for the murder of a man who is allegedly alive and well.

Valdovinos used to work as a music teacher at a school in the town of Texapan, in the State of Mexico. On May 26, 2000, he had just come back from work and was celebrating his son’s one-month anniversary with his wife, when a commando of eight judicial policemen stormed into his home, beat him, handcuffed him and put him into the back of a car with no license plates. He was arrested without a warrant and taken to the local police station where he was hung up by his hands with metal chains, tortured with electric shocks and accused of the murder of a person he barely knew. Manuel was only 22-years-old at the time.

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The last thing you’d expect to find in the center of a Vietnamese rural district is a spectacular European-style palace, complete with a gilded roof, stunning facade and intricately decorated walls, and yet that’s exactly the sight you’re treated to in the heart of Gia Vien, in Vietnam’s Ninh Binh province.

I know what you’re thinking, Vietnam was a French colony for more than six decades, so this European-looking marvel must be a well-preserved relic from that period. But Thanh Thang Palace has nothing to do with French colonialism or Vietnamese history in general. This opulent complex is merely the residence of a local billionaire who reportedly spent between 300 and 400 billion dong ($12 – $17 million) to fulfil his dream of living in an actual palace. While the interior has yet to be completed, the outside is finished and it looks absolutely stunning.

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China’s state-run news agency, Xinhua, yesterday unveiled its newest news anchor, Xin Xiaomeng. Why is this newsworthy? Well, because Xin isn’t a real person, but an ultra-realistic computer generated model powered by advanced AI technology.

The perfectly coiffed Xin Xiaomeng introduced herself to Xinhua’s viewers in a short clip, announcing that she will make her professional debut as news anchor in March. She was developed by the state-run news agency in collaboration with search engine Sogou, and her appearance and voice were inspired by those of a real-life Xinhua broadcaster named Qu Meng. In her introduction video, the perfectly coiffed AI news anchor spoke only in Chinese, and it’s unclear if she’ll be able to tackle English news reports as well.

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