Chichibugahama Beach is a popular tourist destination in Mitoyo City, Japan which rose to fame thanks to photo-sharing social media platforms like Instagram.

If you ever find ourself doubting the power of social media, just remember the story of Chichibugahama Beach. A once obscure seaside destination in Japan’s Kagawa Prefecture, this place turned into a magnet for Instagram influencers virtually overnight. It all started in 2016 when authorities in Mitoyo City organized a photo competition to boost local tourism. One of the most eye-catching entries featured two children reflected in the shallow waters of Chichibugahama, and the visual effect was so stunning that the idea of using this mirror effect as a tourist draw turned into a marketing success story.

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Dexter, a 7-year-old Brittany Spaniel from Colorado, has become an inspiration for many around the world after he taught himself to stand up and walk on his hind legs after suffering an accident.

When he was only a puppy, Dexter escaped his owners’ yard in Ouray, Colorado, darted into traffic and got hit by a car. One of his front legs had to be amputated and the other was severely damaged. But he survived, and that’s all his owners cared about. They assumed he would need some kind of wheelchair to get around without his front legs, and he did use one for a while, but only until he learned he could walk much faster on his hind legs alone. Since then, he has been walking like a human, turning heads around town and inspiring the entire world.

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Kaketsugi – literally ‘invisible mending’ in Japanese – is an amazing cloth mending technique from Japan that involves repairing damaged cloth to the point where you can’t even tell it was ever damaged.

With fast fashion being more popular than ever, cloth mending isn’t nearly as necessary as it once was. Got a tear in one of your socks? Just throw it in the trash and get a new pair, they’re cheap and readily available. The same goes for virtually any other garment, so needle and thread mending is a slowly disappearing craft. But what about special garments, what happens when something truly special and dear to our hearts becomes damaged? You can’t just go out and replace something of sentimental value, but you can’t wear it with a hole in it either. That’s where the magical art of kaketsugi comes in.

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French tattoo artist Veks Van Hillik specializes in clever black and white artworks that change shape when the person bends their arms or legs.

Tattoo artists usually steer shy of elbows and knees, because of the way their designs are warped when the client bends their arms or legs, but Veks Van Hillik embraces the challenge, creating mesmerizing tattoos that turn into something completely different when people bend and unbend their joints. Examples of these ingenious designs include an elbow-positioned scarab that opens its wings when the person straightens their arm or an expanding koi fish.

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KFC fast food restaurants across South Korea recently introduced a bizarre new dip for its fried chicken and it has been raising eyebrows for both its unusual color and flavor – mint chocolate.

In case you didn’t know, a mint chocolate craze is sweeping South Korea these days, and companies are trying to take advantage of it. Major South Korean companies like Starbucks Korea, Haitai Confectionery and Foods, or Orion have all added mint chocolate-flavored products to their lineups. The latest to do so is fast food giant KFC, which recently launched a mint chocolate dip. Featuring a somewhat off-putting light blue color and gooey texture, the unique fried chicken dip recently went viral on social media.

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Chrysina limbata is a species of beetle native to the tropical rainforests of Central America known for its metallic reflective silver color which makes specimens look like living pieces of jewelry.

Chrysina limbata is regarded as one of the most beautiful insect species on Earth, and for good reason. These beetles have a reflective silver metallic appearance that is so clear one can actually see their reflection in them. According to Wikipedia, this stunning visual effect “is achieved through thin film interference within layers of chitin. These layers of the chitin coating are chirped (in layers of differing thicknesses), forming a complex multilayer as each layer decreases in depth; as the thickness changes, so too does the optical path-length. Each chirped layer is tuned to a different wavelength of light”.

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A Ugandan man allegedly packed his bags and left his growing family after his wife recently gave birth to their fifth pair of twins.

While some people would give anything to have one child, let alone two, others have no problem abandoning their offspring. Case in point, a Ugandan man who couldn’t cope with the fact that his wife recently gave birth to their fifth set of twins. Nalongo Gloria never underwent IVF treatments to get pregnant, yet she can’t stop having twins. The Ugandan woman recently brought her ninth and tenth children into this world, which reportedly made her husband, Ssalongo pack up his things and leave, saying that “it wasn’t normal” and that he couldn’t take care of her and their children anymore.

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Built according to the “Bagua”, or the Eight Trigrams used in Taoist cosmology, Tekesi County has a unique and eye-catching layout that allegedly renders traffic lights obsolete.

Bagua represents the fundamental principles of reality, seen as a range of eight interrelated concepts. It is a complex concept of Taoist cosmology which also has correspondences in astronomy, geography, anatomy, martial arts, medicine, and other disciplines. It’s also an essential tool in the majority of Feng Shui schools, used to map a room or location and see how the different sections correspond to different aspects in one’s life. But one thing the Bagua isn’t really used for is city planning; with one notable exception – Tekesi County, a city of 150,000 people in Northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

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Arsenic Junior, a talented self-taught artist from the Philippines, creates stunningly-detailed portraits of celebrities and popular fictional characters by scribbling on pieces of paper.

Scribbling isn’t usually associated with high-quality art, but artists like Arsenic Jr. prove that it can be a viable technique, even when working on detailed portraiture. Even though it might seem messy and careless at first glance, scribbling, when done by a true artist, can be awe-inspiring. Looking at the portraits below, it’s hard to believe they consist exclusively of scribbles, but a careful inspection reveals that to be the case.

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A young English woman is being accused of trying to hire a killer on the dark web in order to have a co-worker and love rival murdered so she could have their boss all to herself.

26-year-old Whitney Franks allegedly tried to have a female co-worker murdered because she had started a romantic affair with her love interest, their boss. Franks reportedly started working at a Sports Direct store in Milton Keynes in 2015, a year after the store manager, James Prest, took over the branch. By 2016, the two had become romantically involved, despite the fact that Prest had a long-term partner and was a father-of-two. Things started going south for Franks in 2017, when another woman, Ruut Ruutna joined the store. By 2018, Prest and Ruutna had also begun an affair, which Franks couldn’t come to terms with. That same year, she left the Milton Keynes store to join another Sports Direct branch in nearby Bletchley, but jealousy just didn’t let her move on…

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Two Japanese companies are teaming up to produce upright ‘nap boxes’ that they claim will help solve the Asian country’s notorious overwork problem.

Tokyo-based furniture specialist Itoki Corporation and Koyoju Gohan, a plywood supplier from Hokkaido, recently signed a license agreement to start production of a bizarre-looking contraption that they claim will tackle the overwork phenomenon in Japan’s offices. It basically consists of an upright wooden pod that will allow users to enter and use as a private space to sleep standing up…

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A New England distillery specializing in bourbon whisky has joined the fight against an invasive crab species by using the crustaceans to create a surprisingly tasty crab-infused spirit.

“When life gives lemons, make lemonade,” the old saying goes, and the folks at New Hampshire’s Tamworth Distillery adapted it to their region-specific problem. New England’s fishermen have been complaining about green crabs devouring their shellfisheries for a while now, but with no natural predators to worry about and increasing sea temperatures working in their favor, there is little anyone can do to stop them. But little isn’t nothing, and Tamworth Distillery has come up with a way to fight the invasive species while expanding its business. They created a crab-infused bourbon aptly-named Crab Trapper.

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A 25-year-old man from Zhengzhou recently got his five minutes of online fame after photos of him went viral online because of his unusually old appearance.

Mr Zhu doesn’t suffer from a rare condition that makes him look unnaturally old for his age. He just has the look of a man in his mid-40s, despite being only 25 years old. Photos of him wearing out-of-fashion garments, sporting eyeglasses and a much too serious hairdo have attracted a lot of attention on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, spurring a number of humorous comments.

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A staple of Huaiyang cuisine, hydrangea tofu soup is a testament to the impressive knife-cutting skills of chefs specializing in this type of Chinese cuisine.

Looking at a bowl of hydrangea tofu soup for the first time, you’d be forgiven for mistaking the slender tendrils swaying in chicken broth for anything but tofu. It looks like a white hydrangea, hence the name of the dish, but it could also be some sort of edible sea anemone. In reality, it’s a block of soft tofu carefully cut 60 times in one direction, then turned around and cut another 60 times in order to create 3,600 delicate tendrils. It’s challenging to make, as the tofu needs to be sliced just three-fifths in, otherwise, it will break apart and the flower illusion will be ruined.

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A 47-year-old man recently became the envy of every male idol fan on the planet after it became known that he managed to marry his favorite idol.

Let’s face it, we’ve all fantasized about getting noticed by our celebrity crush at some stage in our lives, but deep down we always knew it was nothing but a dream. However, for one Japanese idol fan, that dream became a reality. Not only did he get noticed by his favorite idol, but they ended up having a romantic relationship and eventually getting married, despite a 27-year age difference.

In 2020, Yuki Tomoe debuted as a substitute member of an Osaka-based idol group. The moment he laid eyes on her, Mitsuo, who was 44 years old at the time, knew there was something special about her. She was only 17, but he thought she was very talented and charismatic, so he decided to support her.

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