How long do you reckon you could last in solitary confinement and total darkness? How about for a prize of $100,000? One daring poker player bet his friend that he could spend at least 30 days in such extreme conditions and underwent a high stakes 30-day experiment to prove it.

It all started last fall, as a friendly discussion between friends. Australian poker player Rory Young asked his buddy and fellow poker enthusiast Rich Alati how long he thought he could last in a small, dark room without any human interaction. Alati’s answer of 30 days seemed unrealistic to Young, and from there the stage for an unusual “prop bet” was set. Prop bets are designed to test the mental toughness of card players away from the poker table, and usually have very high stakes. This one was no different, with both players depositing $100,000 of their own money in an escrow account and agreeing to pay the other side if they lost the bet. Alati stood to win $100,000 if he managed to spend a full month isolated in a small, dark room, and Young would pocket the same amount if his friend quit before the deadline. The game was on!

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Police in the Taiwanese city of Taipei were accused of wasting taxpayers’ money on solving stupid cases, after local media revealed that they recently conducted DNA tests worth hundreds of dollars to find out who drank a student’s $2 yogurt bottle.

Sharing a fridge with roommates in college usually means accepting that, from time to time, some of your treats will mysteriously disappear. It’s like a tradition, but for one Taiwanese woman sharing a house with five other women studying at the Chinese Culture University in Taipei, it was a serious crime that had to be solved at any cost. Last month, the unnamed woman came home to find one of her yogurt bottles empty in the garbage bin. None of her housemates had asked her permission to drink the yogurt, so she fished the empty bottle from the trash, convened an emergency house meeting and asked the other five women which one of them had stolen her yogurt. When none of them owned up to the crime, the infuriated woman took the empty yogurt bottle to the police and demanded that they carry out an official investigation and bring the criminal to justice.

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A Polish mountain climber who recently scaled his country’s highest peak was surprised to find a domestic cat waiting for him at the very top.

Wojciech Jabczynski couldn’t believe his eyes when he reached the top of the 2,500-meter-high Rysy mountain and spotted a ginger cat nonchalantly licking its paws. No one knows exactly how the feline got to the mountain top, or why, but Jabczynski suspects it may have climbed up from a small tourist hut under the peak. Surprised by its presence there, the experienced climber took out his phone and took some pictures and recorded a video, just to make sure people believed him when he told the story.

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Yungar, a remote town in the Peruvian Andes, has been receiving worldwide attention in the past couple of weeks, because of the efforts of a man named Lenin to stop one of the candidates, named Hitler, from running in the upcoming municipal elections.

Hitler Alba Sánchez, also known as ‘Hitler of the Andes’ or ‘The Good Hitler’, has already served as mayor of Yungar between 2011 and 2014, and he is now trying out for a second term. However, his candidacy was challenged by a local man called Lenin Vladimir Rodríguez Valverde, who claimed that Hitler wasn’t eligible because of his previous term as mayor. The attempt to sabotage The Good Hitler’s election ultimately failed, but the bizarre coincidence of these two men’s names has become an international news topic.

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The Temple Institute, a religious organization dedicated to “every aspect of the Holy Temple of Jerusalem”, recently announced the birth of a completely red heifer in the Holy Land – the first one in the last 2,000 years – which is an essential element of a biblical prophecy that theologians believe will bring about the second coming of Jesus and Judgement Day.

According to the Hebrew Bible, the events leading up to the apocalypse should play out like this: Jews would return to Israel after 2,000 years – the Holy Temple would be rebuilt – billions of people would perish during seven years of natural disasters – the antichrist would rise and rule the world – the battle of Armageddon would commence somewhere near Israel – Jesus would return to defeat Satan’s armies and then preside over Judgment Day. The Jewish people may have returned to Israel, but in order for this prophecy to move forward, a perfectly red heifer is needed.

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Japanese company Thanko recently launched a handheld, battery-powered device that allows you to wash the dishes without getting your hands dirty.

Let’s face it, most people hate washing the dishes. And it’s not just the chore itself that’s putting them off, but the fact that they have to touch those disgusting food scraps while they’re doing it. Well, if you’ve been hoping for a solution to this problem, your prayers have been answered. Introducing “Kurasa Wash” a quirky handheld device that does all the dirty work for you. Just take any dirty dish or bowl, grip it with the two crab-like arms of the device and then just push a button. Kurasa Wash will add detergent and start spinning the dish while scrubbing it with brushes and sponges. All you have to do is hold the dish under running water for rinsing and you’re done.

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The head of a Russian advertising agency tasked with creating large building facades to promote the 2018 World Cup in Russia has come under fire for using one of the nearly 50-meter-tall facades to pay tribute to his wife, by using her as the model.

Ivan Panteleev, director of advertising agency Novatek Art has been criticised by street artists and members of the general public for putting a giant portrait of his wife Daria on a building facade funded by the Moscow city budget. Four murals were commissioned and co-sponsored by the city’s public relations committee in 2016, to remind the people of Moscow of the upcoming (now ongoing) World Cup, and some people didn’t like that Panteleev used his wife, of all people, as the model for one of the giant artworks.

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Ren Keyu, an elementary school student from Leshan, in China’s Sichuan province, is only 11-years-old but already measures 2.06 meters and thinks he may just be the tallest 6th grader on the planet.

The average 11-year-old Chinese boy measures 1.453 meters, according to data released last year, but Ren Keyu was that height when he finished kindergarten. At 2.06 meters tall, he just towers over his classmates and requires a special chair just to be able to sit at his desk comfortably. Teachers mistake Ren for a much older student and ask him to return to his own classroom, the first time they see him, some students make fun of him for his unusual height and people often stare at him in the streets, but the 11-year-old hopes that his stature will be an advantage for once, as he tries to get his name into the Guinness Book of Records. He wants to apply for the record of world’s tallest 6th-grader.

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Limbo, a spinning top developed by Fearless Toys, was recently recognized by the World Guinness Book of Records as the world’s longest-running mechanical spinning top after spinning continuously for a whopping 27 hours, 9 minutes and 24 seconds.

Limbo may look like an ordinary spinning top, but it actually houses a high-tech mechanism that allows it to spin for hours on end. Hidden inside the metallic toy – if you can even call it that – are a variety of components that work together to make the magic happen – a special asymmetric flywheel motor, a high-end motion sensor, a rechargeable battery and an advanced system-on-a-chip that constantly monitors Limbo’s stability and applies dozens of motion corrections every second to keep it spinning.

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A Mexican mayor who incurred the wrath of his constituents by not fulfilling his campaign promises was recently detained in the town hall until he agreed to pay a considerable ransom.

Alfonso Hernández Montiel, the mayor of Chichiquila, had only five months left from his mandate to fulfil the promises he had made during his electoral campaign. However, dissatisfied locals decided they weren’t going to sit around and wait for his term to end while he continued to lead them on with more empty promises. On Sunday, a large number of Chichiquila residents staged a massive protest in front of the city hall, demanding that he deliver on all the things he promised during his campaign, including the construction of an important bridge.

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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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12-year-olds get into arguments with their parents all the time, but most of them just storm off to their room to cool off. Not Drew (made-up name), a boy from Sydney, Australia, who, after a fight with his mother, stole her credit card, got on a plane and flew to the island of Bali for an unforgettable 4-day vacation.

Drew’s name may be fake for privacy reasons, but his incredible story is not. After a quarrel with his mother, Emma, the 12-year-old boy decided it was time to do something drastic, and a vacation to the family’s favorite holiday destination, Bali, seemed like just what the doctor ordered. Only this time, he would go all by himself and experience the freedom of being alone in one of the most beautiful places on Earth, at his parents’ expense. For that, he needed his mother’s credit cards and a way to board a plane without having to answer too many questions. Sounds like a tall order, but this kid had it all figured out.

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José Arno Appolo do Amaral, the mayor of Alvorada, a city in Brazil’s Rio Grande do Sul state, recently became a popular meme in his country after a photoshopped picture of him and his subordinates seemingly inspecting a municipal construction site went viral online.

The photo showing mayor do Amaral, and his deputy Valter Slayfer at a dredging site in Alvorada was originally posted on the official Facebook page of the Alvorada Municipality, along with a long caption detailing the visit. The two officials had allegedly overseen part of the operation and had declared themselves satisfied with the work of the hydraulic dredger. Only people soon became suspicious of the photo, which showed Amaral and Slayfer in the distance, flanking the site supervisor. The two officials’ position in relation to the road they were supposed to be standing on, as well as their color compared to the rest of the photos just seemed odd, so Facebook users started sharing it and questioning its authenticity.

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As a child growing up in Japan, engineer Masaaki Nagumo always dreamed of climbing into his very own Mobile Suit Gundam mecha. As an adult, he finally made that dream a reality.

Nagumo created the 28-foot-tall, 7-tonne-heavy LW-Mononofu robot as a project for his employer, industrial machinery maker Sakakibara Kikai, in Japan’s Gunma Prefecture. The metal colossus took six years to finish, and is probably the world’s largest anime-inspired robot that you can actually ride in and control. It can move its arms and fingers, turn its upper body, and walk forward and backward at a snail-like speed of 1km/hour. As any respectable mecha, it also has a weapon – a metal gun that fires sponge balls at a speed of 87 mph.

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We’ve heard of robots and artificial intelligence taking human jobs, but I bet mayors didn’t really think their jobs would be threatened any time soon. They were wrong, and the AI running for mayor of a Tokyo district is clear proof of that.

Artificial Intelligence can’t legally run for high-ranking public administration positions yet, but one mayoral candidate from Tama City, Tokyo, intends to maximize the use of artificial intelligence in running municipal affairs, so he’s running his campaign as ‘AI Mayor’. Basically, he’s proposing replacing human public officials with AI and having them collect city data and create fair and balanced policies that will benefit everyone.

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