A series of thefts involving the use of ultra-realistic silicone face masks in China has ignited a debate about the legality of these widely available products.

In March of this year, four homes in Shanghai were broken into, and over 100,000 yuan ($13,760) in valuables were stolen. When the police identified the main suspect, they discovered that the 40-year-old man had a silicone mask that he had used to disguise himself as an elderly man when committing the crimes. Last month, police investigating a series of burglaries in Jiangsu Province identified a man who disguised himself as an electrical worker using a realistic mask in order to minimize the risk of being identified. These are only two examples of a growing trend in China that experts warn could lead to a crime spree unless the sale of realistic silicone masks is regulated.

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An Iowa woman was recently arrested for falsely reporting the man she was supposed to go on a date with to the police just because she “got cold feet” and didn’t know how to tell him.

18-year-old Sumaya Thomas was supposed to go on a romantic date with a man she had met through an online dating app, but when her date showed up on her doorstep on June 16, the young woman reportedly “got cold feet” and decided she didn’t want anything to do with her online match. Instead of simply ignoring him, making up some sort of excuse to cancel their date, or flat out telling the guy that she didn’t want to go out with him anymore, Thomas picked up the phone and called 911, making up a ridiculous story about the man at her door being her abusive ex with whom she was 7 months pregnant and asking police to have him removed from her property.

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Xiao Mai, a beautiful 25-year-old woman from China’s Heilongjiang province, has been having trouble finding a suitable boyfriend because of her height. She is 2.26 meters tall.

A few months ago, Xiao Mai introduced herself to the world in a short clip that quickly went viral on social media mainly because of the young woman’s impressive height. At 2.26 meters (7 ft 5 in), the 25-year-old dwarfs even the tallest of men, and that apparently makes her very intimidating to the opposite sex. Posting the first video of herself was Mai’s mother’s idea. She had watched a clip of a girl from Shanghai proposing to her boyfriend online and was inspired to use the same technique to find her daughter a boyfriend. Apart from showing off Xiao Mai’s impressive physical features, it also showed moments from her daily life as well as an appeal from her mother to everyone watching to suggest suitable boyfriends for her. The video went viral and before long, strangers started showing up at the family’s door in Heilongjiang asking to meet the girl.

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A 58-year-old man can consider himself lucky to be alive after being found by a fishing boat floating on a rainbow-colored swimming ring a few miles from the coast of Taiwan.

On July 7, the Wanli Princess 168, a fishing boat heading toward the port of New Taipei, spotted something strange in the water, a few miles from the shoreline. As the boat approached the strange object, it became apparent that it was a topless man in a colorful swim ring, the kind kids use at the beach. In a clip that has since gone viral online, the crew can be seen throwing the stranded man a life buoy and then pulling him into the boat before taking him back to port and calling emergency services. Although visibly weak and dehydrated, the 58-year-old man appeared in good health, which was a bit surprising considering that he had been drifting in his colorful swim ring for 19 hours before being miraculously spotted by the fishing boat.

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Chinese makeup artist @sakuralusi has been getting a lot of attention for her transformation videos where she turns her elderly grandpa into youthful, anime-inspired characters.

Looking at the photos below, you’re probably having a hard time believing that the guy on the left and the one on the right are the exact same person, especially knowing that they are 66 years old. But that is the power of makeup in the hands of a gifted master like @sakuralusi, a young Chinese makeup artist who has been showcasing her skills on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok. She has been posting makeup-related videos on the popular social network for a while now, but she really started getting attention when she began using her grandfather as a model, turning the 66-year-old man into anime-inspired idols that look at least 3 decades younger than his actual age.

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A 24-year-old Russian woman recently got the shock of her life when learning that she had been married to an Egyptian citizen since 2022, about a year after losing her passport.

The unnamed St. Petersburg resident lost her passport in the summer of 2021, but despite declaring the loss to the local police, she never bothered getting her travel document reissued. She didn’t really need a new passport after that and she never imagined that the old one could be used by anyone else, but earlier this year, while trying to have a birth certificate issued for her baby, the young woman learned that her husband, an Egyptian man named Mustafa, needed to be present as well. She had never met Mustafa, let alone married him, but the Russian registry listed him as her spouse.

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A Missouri woman is facing multiple charges for allegedly spiking her husband’s Mountain Dew with Round Up herbicide because he was unappreciative of the birthday party she had thrown for him.

“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” and one Missouri man learned that first-hand after incurring his wife’s wrath for not being appreciative enough of the 50th birthday party she organized for him. On June 24, the man, whose name has not been revealed for personal privacy reasons, notified the Laclede County Sheriff’s Office that he had reasons to believe his wife was trying to poison him. He had noticed that one of the bottles of Mountain Dew in the refrigerator had a bizarre taste, and after experiencing troubling symptoms like diarrhea and vomiting, he decided to check the surveillance system which showed his spouse tampering with his soda bottle and a container of Round Up weedkiller.

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Designed and built by eight Dutch engineers, the world’s longest rideable bicycle is 180 feet long (55.16 meters), roughly the same length as four double-decker buses.

39-year-old Ivan Schalk had been thinking about building the world’s longest bicycle since reading about it in a Guinness Book of Records when he was a child, but he only embarked upon this project in 2018, as a way to fill up his free time. He knew it wasn’t the kind of thing he could build himself, so he sought the help of like-minded people in his home village of Prinsenbeek, which is apparently well-known in the Netherlands for its tech-savvy residents. Together, they spent about four years –  not counting the two years of interruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic – working on the world’s longest bicycle, a metal behemoth that needs at least two riders.

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A Southern collegiate baseball team has been getting a lot of attention for hosting “cosmic baseball” games played at night, under black lights, with players using UV-reactive uniforms, balls, and bats.

With balls flying toward players at breakneck speeds, baseball isn’t the kind of game that can be played in less-than-perfect lighting conditions, but one Southern collegiate baseball team has found a way to make it playable in the dark. Using massive black light installations and UV-reactive uniforms, balls, bats, and bases, the Tri-City Chili Peppers have been putting together ‘cosmic baseball’ games that look like something out of a Tron movie. Despite the seemingly pitch-black atmosphere, players claim that after a bit of practice, playing under UV lights becomes second nature, as does seeing the ball, no matter how hard it’s hit or thrown.

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45-year-old Yoshiharu Watanabe can rightfully consider himself the world’s luckiest man after setting a new Guinness Record by growing a clover with 63 individual leaves.

What is luckier than a four-leaf clover? Well, a five-leaf clover, of course. By that logic, the more leaves a clover has, the more luck it brings, so Yoshiharu Watanabe may just be the luckiest man alive because he is the first to ever grow a clover with 63 leaves. His amazing story began in 2009 when he started picking up clovers with more than three leaves and planting them in his home garden. The little plant is pretty resilient, so all he had to do was cross-pollinate to obtain exceptional specimens with up to 20 leaves. It was at this moment that he started dreaming about setting a new world record, but he never dreamed of doing so with a 63-leaf clover.

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A New Zealand woman attempted to take her former boyfriend to court for failing to take her to the airport as he had promised, which resulted in her losing her flight and incurring additional costs.

According to legal documents released by New Zealand’s Disputes Tribunal, which deals with small claims up to NZ$30,000 ($18,384), the woman had asked her boyfriend of six and a half years to drive her to the airport ahead of a concert she was to attend with some friends. The man had also agreed to stay at her place while she was gone and look after her dogs, but he ultimately failed to do all the things he had verbally agreed to, which caused her to miss her plane, and incur unplanned financial costs, such as taking a shuttle to the airport and paying a dog kennel to keep her pets. She filed a complaint with the Tribunal hoping to be reimbursed by her now-former partner.

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A 20-year-old Indian man claims to have been subjected to a sex change operation without his consent by another man who planned to marry him for his family’s land.

Mujahid, a 20-year-old man from Sanjak Village in Uttar Pradesh, has become the talk of an entire country after claiming that a male rival tricked him into going to the Begrajpur Medical College in Mansoorpur where a team of doctors sedated him and performed a gender change operation on him without his consent. The victim told authorities that a man named Omprakash deceived him into believing that he was suffering from a serious medical condition and then offered to take him to Mansoorpur to be treated. Mujahid claims that shortly after arriving at the hospital, he was sedated and then operated on by a team of doctors who had colluded with Omprakash. When he woke up the next day, he was told he was no longer a man, but a woman.

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A Japanese company has developed an artificial intelligence filter that can detect angry screams and translate them into calm speech in order to reduce the stress experienced by call center operators.

Large tech companies have long been aware of the stress their call center operators are exposed to every single day, with many customers taking out their anger and frustrations on them. Some of them have even introduced stress management programs that include relaxation techniques, meditation, yoga, or therapy meant to irritability and anxiety. However, one Japanese company may have come up with a much more efficient solution – using AI to completely take screaming and aggressive speech out of the equation. SofBank claims to have spent three years creating a voice filter that detects screaming and automatically translates it into calm speech.

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Two French biking enthusiasts recently set a new Guinness World Record for the ‘tallest rideable bicycle’ by building a 7.77-meter (25 ft 5 in) behemoth that can (barely) be ridden.

Nicolas Barrioz and David Peyrou came up with the idea for the world’s tallest bicycle 5 years ago, while drinking at a pub, but they actually decided to go through with the project and spent months putting together a plan to make it work. Made from metal alloy, steel, and wood, the unique bike took hundreds of hours to complete in a way that made it rideable, even for a short distance. It may not seem like a challenge, but building a 25-foot rideable bicycle is definitely not as easy as riding a bike. For example, the pedals are connected to the wheels via a 16-meter (53-ft) chain, and because of its extreme height, the bicycle has to move at a speed of around 15-20 km/h (9-12 mph) for the rider to maintain balance.

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Shogo Yoshida, a young hairdresser from Nagoya, suffers from a genetic condition that causes his fingertips to swell up like ping-pong balls, but he has managed to turn this physical defect into an asset.

Yoshida, who goes by Bachi Yubi-san (Mr. Drumstick Fingers) on social media, started attracting attention in Japan in late 2022 by posting photos and videos of his deformed fingers on social media. The feedback wasn’t always positive, as some called his hands ‘gross’ or ‘grotesque’ and scolded him for trying to make money off of his disability, but the young Japanese man had been used to criticism for a long time. Ever since he was diagnosed with pachydermoperiostosis (PDP), a rare genetic condition that caused his fingertips to swell up like small balls, Shogo Yoshida had to face the ridicule and disgusted looks of his peers, but as he grew older, he learned to manage his uniqueness and turn it into something positive.

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