Having your blood tested, getting a nutritional breakdown of every piece of food you out in your mouth and talking about high cholesterol and vitamin deficiencies sound more like a hospital visit than an enjoyable dinner party, but they are at the core of a new trend among health freaks – health optimization parties.

Keeping track of your calorie intake, drinking kale smoothies and eating quinoa salads are all fine and dandy, but if you’re really serious about your health, you’ll want to take things to the next level. That’s where health optimization parties come in. These social events allow health conscious friends and family to get an in-depth analysis of their actual health, while enjoying healthy foods and drinks and talking about the things that really matter, like cholesterol, vitamins and fitness routines.

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A woman in Norwich, UK, was recently banned from singing and playing loud music in her apartment, after neighbors complained that her screeching sounded like “a drowning cat”.

48-year-old Heather Webb has reportedly terrorized neighbors in her apartment building with her singing for at least four years. In 2014, her neighbors filled anti-social behavior forms and sent them to the local council, but she only received a community protection warning from the police. Then, in 2016, neighbors again complained to the council about her loud, disturbing singing, but no action was taken against the woman. Finally, in December of last year, a judge issued Webb a Criminal Behavior Order which legally banned her from singing in her apartment. But she didn’t let that stop her.

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Iranian actors dressed as Islamic State fighters recently stormed a shopping mall in Teheran, in an attempt to promote a new film about a father and son who travel to Syria to deliver humanitarian supplies but end up kidnapped by ISIS. Unfortunately, their performance was a bit too good, and caused some shoppers to run for their lives.

It was supposed to be a harmless publicity stunt for Iranian director Ebrahim Hatamikia’s new film, ‘Damascus Time’, with actors dressed as ISIS militants peacefully visiting the Kourosh Complex shopping mall and cinema, in Teheran, and posing for pictures. However, the actors decided to show off their acting skills, and really got into their characters, storming the shopping complex and shouting ‘Allahu akbar’ while waving their fake firearms and machetes around. One of them actually rode through the mall on a horse, while another pretended to connect the wires on a fake bomb.

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There are only a handful of glass beaches in the whole world, and it’s their rarity that makes them so popular. However, Japan is home to a beautiful glass beach that is so obscure it doesn’t even have a name.

Unlike California’s famous glass beach, or the one in Ussuri Bay, on Russia’s Pacific shoreline, where nature had to work hard to erode truckloads of sharp glass and porcelain shards dumped as trash into rounded pebbles that you can safely walk on, the colored glass grains of this nameless Japanese beach, in Omura City, were actually recycled beforehand. I guess the Japanese thought they’d give Mother Nature a break for a change and did the work for her.

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Wallace Leatherwood , a beekeeper from North Carolina, went through what most people would consider a living nightmare and came out unscathed. He drove 40 miles with thousands of bees loose in the cabin of his truck, and didn’t get a single sting.

Last Tuesday, Leatherwood bought about 18,000 bees from Wild Mountain Bees in Weaverville, and put them in the back of his truck. But before driving back home to Waynesville, he went to look at a job and then stopped at a local diner to get some lunch. Because he didn’t have anywhere shady to put the bees, he grabbed three of the boxes from the bed of his truck and moved them into the cabin. Only Wallace didn’t notice that one of them wasn’t as securely closed as he had thought, so when he came back from the restaurant, he found the cabin crawling with around 3,000 bees.

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A 15-year-old dog in in Chongqing’s Yuzhong district has been dubbed the ‘Chinese Hachiko’ for patiently waiting up to 12 hours a day outside a local metro station until his owner returns from work.

Xiongxiong, which translates as ‘Little Bear’, has reportedly been waiting outside the Liziba metro station, in Yuzhong district, every day for the past eight years, ever since his current owner started looking after him. The pooch is well-known by locals who often stop to pet him, but after a recent video of him patiently waiting for his master recently went viral on social media, Xionxiong has become a national celebrity, with people travelling to Chongqing from all over China, just to see him.

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A 40-year-old man allegedly traveled almost 10,000 miles from England to an art gallery in Aspen, Colorado, where he used a sharp object to slash a $3 million dollar painting by New York artist Christopher Wool, before storming out. It was later revealed that the painting was owned by his father.

The bizarre incident occurred last year, on May 2, when a man wearing sunglasses, black jeans, a black jacket, a hat, gloves and a full beard entered the Opera Gallery in Aspen and walked directly up to a painting called “Untitled 2004”. He then took a knife or other cutting object out of his jacket pocket and slashed the painting twice before running out of the gallery. A one-year investigation recently revealed that the man who carried out the slashing was none other than Nicholas Morley, son of the painting’s owner, one Harold Morley.

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A Russian woman who used her credit card to pay for coffee and a cake at a cafe near Zurich, in Switzerland, accidentally typed in her PIN code as the tip and ended up paying 7709.70 Swiss francs ($7,732) for a 23.70 francs ($23.76) bill.

Back in February, 37-year-old Olesja Schemjakowa and her son stopped for coffee and a cake at a New Point cafe in Dietikon, near Zurich. Little did she know that this would turn out to be the most expensive snacks she had ever paid for, and one of the most expensive in human history. When it was time to pay the bill, the woman, who lives in Mullhouse, France, opted to pay with her card, but somehow managed to enter her PIN code (7686) as the tip, and ended up paying a total of 7709.70 Swiss francs instead of 23.70. Interestingly Schemjakowa only realized her mistake at the end of the month, after receiving her credit card bill.

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A young passenger trying to get some fresh air on a crowded plane at Myanyang Airport, in China’s Sichuan Province, ended up accidentally opening the aircraft’s emergency hatch and triggering the inflatable escape slide.

Most passengers consider the flight crew’s instructions before a takeoff to be pointless, but this story is a clear example of why you should pay attention, especially if it’s your first time flying.

The 25-year-old man, known only by his surname, Chen, was waiting to leave the plane after touching down on Myanyang airport, when he decided that letting in some fresh air into the stuffy plane would do everyone good. So he pushed and turned the lever of what he claims he thought was a window, only to see a whole section of the fuselage pop out right in front of his eyes.

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It sounds like something out of a Black Mirror episode, but according to recent news reports, Chinese companies are using special helmets to monitor workers’ brain activity in order to reduce stress, manipulate break times with the ultimate goal of increasing productivity.

The South China Morning Post recently reported employee brainwave monitoring in China is used on an unprecedented scale. Sensors concealed in work helmets and lightweight hats constantly monitor and collect workers’ brain activity, which is then fed into computers that use artificial intelligence algorithms that detect “emotional spikes such as depression, anxiety or rage”. This data is then used by management to adjust the work schedule and pace of production or to change working conditions in order to increase productivity.

Hangzhou-based State Grid Zhejiang Electric Power  is one of the many companies relying on employee brainwave monitoring, and according to Cheng Jingzhou, the official in charge of the “emotional surveillance program”, it has definitely paid off. The company’s 40,000 employees manage the power supply and distribution network to homes and businesses in Hangzhou province, and this program has allowed them to that to a higher standard.

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South Korean ad agency Cheil Worldwide partnered with Molly’s Pet Shop, a popular pet shop chain, to provide stray cats with comfortable shelters on cold winter and spring nights, by recycling old jacket hoods into cozy homes.

Called Hood Houses, the ingenious cat cribs were created to raise awareness about South Korea’s stray cat problem, and also promote positive interaction between people and homeless animals. Last December, Goodwill shops and Molly’s Pet Shop branches started collecting old jacket hoods and other padded clothing, which were then recycled into portable dome homes, fitted with a waterproof roof, a bed as well as bowls for food/water. Over a two-week period, over 2,000 Hood Houses were given away for free to Molly’s Pet Shop customers who bought food for stray cats.

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For the past 60 years, every generation of freshman students at Izumo Agricultural and Forestry High School, in Izumo, Japan’s Shimane prefecture, has taken the “Class of Life”, a controversial six-month course during which the students help hatch and raise chickens, before having to slaughter and eat them.

Last year, the Class of Life at Izumo High School started in October, when they were presented with around 60 chicken eggs. Under the guidance of a teacher, they prepared them for incubation, washing them, arranging them in a special tray and learning to adjust the humidity and temperature on the incubator. For the next three weeks, they were in charge of monitoring the eggs and making sure that the right conditions for hatching were met. Once the chicks hatched, each student had to pick one and raise it as their own, knowing full well that in just a few months they would have to kill and eat it.

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Whether you’re a celebrity or a famous author who spends a lot of time giving autographs, or just a busy businessman who doesn’t have time to sign mountains of documents,  you can now spend $365,000 on a state of the art Signing Machine, and it’ll do it for you.

I bet you didn’t even know portable signing machines existed, did you? Well, technically they didn’t, until recently. Swiss watchmaker Jaquet Droz finally unveiled its impressive Signing Machine last month, at the Baselworld Watch Show, after reportedly working on it for the last four years. It showcases the company’s mechanical clockwork technology, only instead of doing it by accurately telling time, it replicates your signature to perfection.

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A remote radio tower near Mount Burr in South Australia has attracted millions of ladybugs for reasons no one seems to understand.

The unusual sight was recently reported by wildlife photographer Steve Chapple, who posted several photos and a video of it on his Facebook page. Contacted by ABC News Australia, Mr. Chapple said that he was told by a friend about this place where ladybugs would sometimes converge in the thousands, seven years ago, but their number has since increased manyfold. This year, there appear to be millions both on the ground and on the radio tower itself.

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In what the local community has named a ‘catastrophe’, a museum in Elne, Southern France, dedicated to the work of painter Etienne Terrus recently discovered that at least 82 of its 140 artworks were actually fakes.

The Terrus museum in Elne had bought the paintings, drawings and watercolors over a period of 20 years, for a total price of around 160,000 euros ($193,000), but concerns regarding their authenticity were raised only recently. Art historian Eric Forcada, who was entrusted with overseeing the entire Terrus collection while the small museum was being renovated, apparently noticed that some of the buildings depicted in the artworks had been built after the artist’s death, so they couldn’t possibly have been painted by him. But the buildings that weren’t supposed to appear in Terrus artworks led the historian to more unusual discoveries.

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