Chaco Chaco is a popular South Korean Youtuber whose claim to fame is the ability to reproduce popular songs on one or multiple musical calculators.

Calculators are handy when dealing with math, but one particular calculator is actually more popular as a musical instrument. The Egoelife AR-7778 and AR-8001 are designed as instruments and even come with instructions on how to use them as such. But, just like with any other musical instrument, you need talent and practice to produce music worth listening to, otherwise, you’re just using it as a cool toy. That’s what sets Chaco Chaco, a musical calculator artist with over 800,000 subscribers on YouTube alone, apart from pretty much any other musical calculator user.

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A South Carolina college professor is sounding the alarm on the use of advanced chatbots powered by artificial intelligence by students to complete various assignments.

Darren Hick, an assistant philosophy professor at Furman University, claims that one of his students used ChatGPT, an advanced AI-powered chatbot recently released by OpenAI and freely available to the public, to create a philosophy essay. While checking the essays turned in by his students, one caught his eye because of the unusual wording. It wasn’t grammatically incorrect, but it wasn’t language that a human college student would use. Hick compared it to the work “of a very smart 12th grader,” adding that the chatbot’s capacity to produce original works both terrorized and fascinated him.

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A Chinese man who recently bought 20 robot vacuums online for an unbelievable bargain price documented his experience to the delight of the internet.

The average price of a decent robot vacuum in China is around 1,000 yuan ($145), with more advanced models costing several times that much. So imagine finding a robot vacuum for just 27 yuan ($4) online! Can you blame this guy who bought 20 of them at once, just to make sure that their number compensates for performance only to learn the hard way that that’s not how these things work? As you can imagine, there was a reason those things cost next to nothing, but at least he got a good laugh and a lot of online attention out of it.

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What looked like a growing oil spill in Michigan’s Mackinac Straits area turned out to be a massive gathering of tens of thousands of ducks and other aquatic birds.

On December 21 of last year, the Mackinac Bridge Authority started receiving calls from concerned divers regarding a possible oil spill in the area. With each passing day, the number of calls regarding the oil spill kept growing, which makes sense, considering that the black mass that had formed on the water appeared to be growing. However, it wasn’t oil, but a record-setting gathering of Redhead ducks. In the beginning, authorities counted around 7,000 of them gathered together under and around Mackinac Bridge. Their number has grown since then, and there are now several tens of thousands of birds making up the “oil spill”.

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For about a year now, authorities in Salt Lake City have been trying to solve the mystery of a series of solar-powered antennas that keep popping up in the foothills around the city.

The first devices were discovered around a year ago. There was just a couple of them, but since then about a dozen have been reportedly located and disabled. According to the city’s recreational trails manager, the devices consist of a locked battery box, a solar panel, and an antenna. No one knows who keeps planting them and for what purpose, so for now all anyone can do is speculate and attempt to dismantle them, because they are installed on public land without a permit.

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A Welsh family has been living in the middle of a roundabout for over four decades, after refusing to leave as the circular road was built around them.

In 1960, when David John and Eirian Howatson moved into their bungalow in Denbighshire, Wales the area was just a regular neighborhood and things were pretty normal for about two decades, until authorities came knocking and let them know that their property was right where a new roundabout was to be built. The Howatsons refused to move away, so the roundabout was built around their home, and the family has been living there ever since.

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A 52-year-old “doctor” in Pakistan recently made news headlines for welcoming his 60th child and claiming he wants to have even more kids with his three wives.

Sardar Jan Mohammad Khan Khilji, a resident of Quetta, the Capital of Balochistan, has a very big family that he hopes to keep growing in the coming years. The Pakistani doctor, who runs his own clinic in the city, has three wives, and just welcomed his 60th child, a son he named Khushal. That’s a lot more than enough for most people, but Sardar said that he wants to take a new wife and continue having children.

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The Radar S-10000 measures 276 x 141 x 43 mm and weighs over 2.2 kilograms (5 pounds), making it one of the largest, if not the largest, commercially available erasers.

Japanese eraser maker Seed was founded in 1915, making it one of the oldest companies in the business. Its most popular product line, Radar, was launched in 1968 and quickly became a favorite in the Japanese market. The smooth texture and flawless erasing performance made the Radar a commercial success despite its premium price range of 20 – 50 yen, at a time when 10 yen erasers were the norm. The Radar line has been going strong ever since, with erasers of various shapes and sizes, including a gigantic 2,285-gram slab priced at an eye-watering 13,200 yen ($100).

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An Ecuadorian man sparked controversy after legally changing his gender to ‘female’, because the legal system allegedly favors mothers in custody cases.

René Salinas Ramos, the father of two daughters, is facing legal proceedings for the custody of the girls who currently live with his biological mother. Convinced that the Ecuadorian legal system stigmatizes men while prioritizing the rights of the mothers regardless of circumstances, the man decided to legally change gender in order to even the playing field. Ramos claims that this has nothing to do with his sexuality or gender identity and that it was only a “test of his love for his daughters”.

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Police in Santa Marta, Colombia, recently attracted criticism for publishing a wanted poster of alleged cartel members with no actual photos or names.

On January 2nd, the Santa Marta police department published a poster of 12 of the most wanted criminals in the Colombian town, asking the general public for help in apprehending the alleged criminals, who were all members of the “Los Pachenca” drug cartel. All 12 individuals were also suspects in a series of criminal acts committed in Santa Marta in recent months, so it made sense to ask locals for assistance in catching them as soon as possible. The only problem was that the published poster only mentioned the suspects’ nicknames instead of their actual names and the same generic graphic where their photos should have been…

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Lifte is a Japanese clothing brand that specializes in hospital patient gowns that are not only comfortable to wear but also look stylish.

Fashion is probably the last thing on most people’s minds when they need to spend time in a hospital, but Japanese clothing brand Lifte claims that dressing well is one important way to relieve stress as a hospital patient. You may not have your health, but that’s no reason not to dress nice. Lifte actually specializes in stylish, high-quality hospital gowns that not only look good on the wearer but are also considerably more comfortable to wear for long periods of time.

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Gregorio Romero, an 84-year-old man from Mexico’s Sonora state, owes his life to his pet dog, El Palomo, who led rescuers to him after becoming lost in the desert for a week.

On November 27, Gregorio Romero left his home in Moctezuma to go for a walk, but he didn’t come back. His family wasn’t concerned at first, as the octogenarian sometimes used to visit nearby villages in the area and return a few days later. However, after four days, the man’s niece, Ramona, alerted the authorities about his disappearance, and a search party was put together. They searched the area around Romero’s home, but a week after his disappearance, the octogenarian was nowhere to be found. In the end, it was the man’s faithful pet dog that saved the day.

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Smartwatch manufacturers are constantly trying to one-up each other with feature-rich devices, but one Japanese company prides itself on making the world’s dumbest smartwatch.

The Stone Watch is not a smartwatch, it’s just designed to look like one. Created by Japanese capsule toy maker Tama-Kyu, the low-tech accessory doesn’t even tell time, let alone feature advanced tech like heart rate measurement, or smartphone connectivity. It doesn’t even have a display, it’s just a glossy, black piece of plastic with a silicone band that does nothing but look nice on your wrist.

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Admont Abbey, a Baroque monastery in Austria, hosts the world’s largest monastic library, which also happens to be a stunning work of art.

Dating back to the year 1074 when the Benedictine monks of Salzburg decided to found their own abbey in the town of Admont, Admont Abbey is one of the most popular tourist attractions in the region of Styria. And while the entire monastic complex is impressive, the 70-meter-long library is undoubtedly the abbey’s main attraction. Featuring flamboyant ceiling frescoes, wooden sculptures, gold busts, gilded bookshelves, and no less than seven frescoes-decorated cupolas, this is definitely one of the world’s most beautiful libraries.

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A Japanese man reportedly spent a whopping 3 million yen ($23,000) on a handmade wolf costume to fulfill his dream of becoming a wolf.

Zeppet, a Japanese company specializing in special effects and special modeling, made international news headlines last year, when it revealed that it had created a special dog suit for a client who had always wanted to live like a dog. The high-quality rough collie dog costume, which Zeppet claims was designed to adapt human anatomy to that of a canine, got a lot of attention after going viral on Twitter. Recently, that same company announced that they had received an even more challenging order from a person who wanted to live out their fantasy of becoming a wolf.

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