Popular Q&A online platform AskFM recently launched its own cryptocurrency, ASKT, and decided to celebrate by hosting an original giveaway. Instead of simply giving away some tokens to randomly selected winners, they buried a crypto-wallet with 500,000 tokens in it on Mount Everest and challenged anyone brave enough to go find it.

The Dublin-based start-up is similar to Quora or Yahoo Answers, and is currently the world’s largest questions and answers platform in the world. But as part of its rebranding as AskFM 2.0, the company also launched it’s own cryptocurrency token, which it plans to use to reward users for quality content. In an effort to raise awareness about its new crypto, called ASKT, AskFM came up with a controversial publicity stunt that involves challenging brave people to climb Mount Everest and look for a cryptocurrency ledger with $50,000 in tokens buried somewhere on the summit. It’s ‘finders, keepers’.

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Georgina Ryland, a makeup artist and beauty blogger from Brisbane, Australia, creates incredible body art using her own body as the canvas.

We’ve all seen impressive body art before, but what sets Georgina Ryland’s works from those of other talented body painters is that she actually paints the artworks on her own body, instead of using a model. All I can tell you about the artistic process is that it involves using a mirror, as well as a steady hand and mountains of patience. I for one can’t understand how she can paint backwards, by looking in a mirror, but judging by the quality of her work, she’s gotten really good at it.

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Authorities in the Chinese city of Xi’an recently inaugurated a special sidewalk lane designed for “phubbers” – people who walk while staring at their smartphones and ignore everything around them.

Painted red, green and blue and featuring pictures of smartphones, the special lane is located on the busy Yanta Roan, in Xi’an, and is 80cm wide and 100m long. Chinese media reports that a large shopping mall overlooking the smartphone-user lane had been asking authorities for it over a month, which suggests that it’s just a marketing scheme. However, it turns out that the special sidewalk lane is actually a safety precaution for “phubbers”. Cars often come onto the pavement in front of the mall, sometimes barely missing pedestrians who have their eyebvalls virtually glued to their smartphones, so the lane is supposed to keep them out of harm’s way.

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Russian media recently featured the story of Taras Shelest, a highly-regarded passenger jet pilot who turned out to be a complete fraud. Despite having never attended aviation university and instead faking his diploma, Shelest allegedly flew thousands of people all around the world for several years, until a bizarre incident finally exposed him.

In August of 2015, Taras Shelest was a co-pilot on a passenger flight from Moscow to Cyprus. When entering Ukrainian airspace, he contacted the ground controller as per protocol, only instead of sticking to the strict technical language, he used a very peculiar greeting – “Glory to Ukraine!” This was apparently so unusual that Shelest was reported to his company’s security service, which in turn contacted the FSB, Russia’s federal security service. Taras’ fellow pilots were whispering to each other that he had lost his mind, for using that bizarre greeting, but the result of the investigation into his background revealed something even crazier – the man was not even a real pilot, but a flight enthusiast who had taught himself to fly using flying simulators and faked his aviation university diploma.

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Invented in the 1970s, ASCII art is still popular in online chats, on forums and websites, but one insanely talented tattoo artist is able to ink stunning portraits using only the 95 characters characters from the 1963 American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) standard on his clients’ skin.

31-year-old Andreas Vrontis has always been fascinated by ASCII art and “how a simple lettering pattern could create so much symmetry and detail in the end result”, so a few years ago, he started experimenting with ways to integrate the digital art style into his real-life tattoos. Vrontis has been tattooing for six years, but he made his first ASCII tattoo in 2015, a portrait of John Lennon. He was nervous about how it would turn out, but it ended up winning him the “Best in Show” prize at at the Cyprus International Tattoo Convention. He has been improving his technique ever since, and his latest works of art simply breathtaking.

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To the casual observer, the thousands of bent trees scattered throughout the North American continent look like mere freaks of nature, deformed by the elements of disease, but a more careful analysis reveals that these trees bend sharply into right angles, parallel the earth, which suggests that they were intentionally shaped long ago, for an unknown purpose.

Bent, splintered or otherwise deformed trees are not exactly uncommon, but the so called “trail trees” still growing in many US states have a very specific shape. At about four or five feet above the ground, their trunks bend sharply forming right angles, parallel the earth, and then sharply bend upwards once again. Various accidents can cause this shape to occur naturally, but another distinctive trait of these mysterious trees is that they feature no scars in their bent areas. While scientists have yet to agree that this is proof that the trees were purposely bent by humans centuries ago, there are many who believe that the bent trees were once used as markers by hunters and gatherers to help them find their way around the vast wilderness.

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Ordering a bag of herbal tea on the internet sounds harmless enough, but, as one young Russian man learned a couple of years ago, it can sometimes land you in prison for a very long time.

Alexei Novikov’s incredibly sad story began in September of 2015. The 34-year-old man was going to pick up his wife and daughter, who were living in Russia’s Samara region at the time, and decided to hitchhike instead of taking the bus. To cut his trip short, Novikov decided to cut through neighboring Kazakhstan, and in order to avoid any unnecessary trouble, he headed to the Isikul Road border post. Once there, he asked the border guards if he could cross the border on foot, but before answering him, they demanded that he present his backpack for inspection. And that’s when everything started going downhill for Novikov.

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A pregnant cow from Bulgaria has been sentenced to death for “illegally” crossing the border into neighboring Serbia. She apparently didn’t know that Serbia isn’t a member of the European Union and could not return to her home country without the appropriate paperwork…

Penka the cow sealed her fate last month, when she broke away from her herd near the Bulgarian village of Kopilovtsi and crossed the border into Serbia, a non-EU country. The cow’s owner, Ivan Haralampiev, and his sons relentlessly looked for her for two weeks, notifying border patrol, the local police and even the mayors of neighboring villages about her disappearance. Then, one day, Ivan received news that Penka had been located in the village of Bosilegrad, in Serbia, where it was being taken care of by the locals. The relieved owner went to retrieve his cow, but got some really bad news when trying to cross the border back into Bulgaria.

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A couple in Milan, Italy, who had chosen to name their baby daughter “Blu”, was recently ordered by a court to change the name to something more suitable for a girl or risk having it changed for them.

According to a presidential decree issued in the year 2000, “the name given to a child must correspond to their sex” and Italian authorities apparently don’t consider “Blu” – the Italian spelling for ‘blue’ – to be a suitable name for a girl. Despite having already registered the 18-month-old child’s name on her birth certificate and passport, the parents were recently summoned to appear in court last week in order to choose another, more feminine name.

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In an attempt to raise awareness about the ability to turn wastewater into safe drinking water, a brewery in Stockholm, Sweden has launched a new beer brand made with recycled sewage water.

Aptly called PU:REST, the new beer crafted by Stockholm’s Nya Carnegiebryggeriet (New Carnegie Brewery) in collaboration with the Swedish Environmental Research Institute (IVL) and Carlsberg is supposed to convince people that “second-hand water” can be as clean as normal tap water. IVL claims that the challenge to get people to drink recycled water is not a technological one, but a psychological one, so what better way to convince consumers of the purity of treated wastewater than using it to create a beer.

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Jesse Duplantis, one of America’s most popular prosperity preachers has his eyes on a new $54 million Dassault Falcon 7X private jet, but he wants his followers to pay for it.

Duplantis, who runs a ministry and a church in Destrehan, Louisiana, just outside New Orleans, already owns a private jet, in fact it’s already his third one. All of them have been paid for in cash with donations from his faithful flock, but he now wants them to once again come through for him so he can buy the three-engine Dassault Falcon 7X private jet which would allow him to fly “anywhere in the world in one stop,” increasing his global reach and reducing fuel costs, because he has his own fuel farm…

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Students at the No. 11 Middle School in Hangzhou, China, may want to think twice before dozing off or getting distracted in class as a new facial recognition system will be scanning their faces every 30 seconds to make sure they are paying attention.

Called a “smart classroom behavior management system”, the new monitoring solution recently installed at Hangzhou’s No. 11 Middle School is made up of three high-tech cameras positioned above the blackboard that constantly feed information to an AI-powered software that analyzes the students’ facial expressions and general behavior and assesses whether they are enjoying lessons or if their minds are wandering.

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A Dubai couple’s union is a serious contender for the title of shortest marriage in history, after the groom decided to divorce his bride less than 15 minutes after marrying her.

You may be wondering what on Earth could make a man to divorce his wife so fast. Well, in this case, the answer is money, more specifically the dowry payment he had agreed to pay the bride’s father. As per the contract the groom and his father-in-law had signed, the newly-married man agreed to pay the bride’s father 100,000 Dirhams ($27,224) in two installments – 50,000 Dirhams ($13,612) upon the signing of the marriage contract inside the Sharia office, and the other 50,000 Dirhams upon leaving the court building.

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Japanese social media was abuzz this weekend with news of a 13-year-old boy who can allegedly contact UFOs telepathically. The photos of unidentified flying objects that he took last year have attracted a lot of attention from other UFO enthusiasts.

13-year-old Haruya Ido is being referred to as “UFO BOy” by Japanese media, for his alleged ability to attract unidentified flying objects. Toshitaro Yamaguchi, a known paranormal researcher and the man who first shared Haruya’s photos with the world, has described the boy as a classic UFO contactee with the ability to contact UFOs via telepathy.

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Having to take a private call in a crowded workplace can be pretty awkward, but thanks to BolxVox, a special mask-like device that muffles speech, you can now talk as loud as you want without worrying about others hearing your conversation.

BloxVox is the brainchild of Greg Umhoefer, a financial technology expert who dedicated the last few years of his life to solving his “favorite” office problem – phone call privacy. Having worked in offices all over the world, Umhoefer constantly experienced this problem first-hand. Whenever he had to make or take a private phone call, he had to get up from his desk, find a quiet place, and often take his laptop and other peripherals with him. He describes the situation as inefficient and “frankly ridiculous”, so after researching the issue and learning that it was common in offices around the globe, he decided to find a practical solution.

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