Swinging Bridge, a simple yet hard-to-master game that has been around for about a decade, has been growing in popularity all over China.

Ever try to keep your balance on a wobbly rope bridge as someone else was purposely shaking it to make you fall off? Welcome to Swinging Bridge, the competitive balance game that really puts players’ body coordination and balance to the test. It is usually played by a dozen or so players split into two teams on opposite sides of a wobbly bridge above a shallow pool filled with water or soft mattresses to cushion the fall of those who can’t keep up with the rhythm. Each team tries to swing the bridge from one side to the other to put the other team off balance until one side remains standing. It’s a simple premise, but staying on your feet as the bridge moves at dizzying speeds requires perfect balance and coordination.

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Raku Inoue is a talented Canadian artist who specializes in carefully arranging flower petals, leaves, and other plant parts to recreate pop culture characters, animals, and pretty much anything else you can think of.

Inoue’s journey into painstaking floral art began one windy day in 2017. He was in his Montreal home watching the strong wind shake dozens of pink petals from a rose bush in his backyard. Seeing these beautiful, delicate petals on the ground, he thought to himself “What a waste!” and went to pick them up. Looking at his ephemeral haul, the Japanese-born artist came up with the idea to actually use the petals to create art. He arranged them in the shape of a beetle with small twigs for legs, and his little project turned out so well that he kept at it. Today, Raku Inoue is famous for his impressive portfolio of plant art, which includes original recreations of popular characters like Super Mario or Godzilla, various insects and animals, and even brand logos.

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This year, the Beijing University of Chemical Technology (BUCT) printed its admission letters on an innovative carbon fiber composite material that is just 0.2 millimeters thick but as sharp and strong as a knife.

While most university admission letters are usually put away in a cupboard after students learn they have been accepted, freshmen accepted by the Beijing University of Chemical Technology have been busy using their admission letters as a multi-tool. Many of them have been sharing videos of themselves using the sturdy admission letters to cut all kinds of fruits, even melons, mincing pieces of meat, and holding them over open flames to prove they don’t burn or melt. After several of these videos went viral, a spokesperson from the Chinese university went public to clarify that this year’s admission letters were made out of an innovative material developed at the learning institution.

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The town of Kudrovo, in Russia’s Leningrad Region, is home to the country’s largest residential building, a giant oval-shaped monstrosity featuring 3708 apartments and 35 different entrances.

Completed in 2015 as part of the massive ‘Novyy Okkervil’ residential complex on the outskirts of Kudrovo, Russia’s largest residential building got its first international coverage in 2021 when aerial photos of it made it to the first page of Reddit, getting over 50,000 upvotes and thousands of comments. People were equally fascinated and freaked out by the enormous building, and many compared it to a human anthill. The comparison is not as farfetched as it might seem, because the concrete oval of Kudrovo is home to between 11,000 and 18,000 people (reports from Russian media vary) all technically living under the same roof.

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A Taiwan court of law sentenced a man to three months in prison for invading his adulterous wife’s privacy by installing hidden cameras around their home.

Chinese media recently reported the unusual story of a Taiwanese man surnamed Fan who managed to land himself behind bars for daring to expose his wife’s cheating by installing cameras around their home. The couple had reportedly been married for several years and had two young children in 2022 when Mr. Fan began suspecting that his spouse was having an affair. He installed a camera under the piano in the living room of the family home and another one next to the computer in the master bedroom. About two weeks later, the cameras caught Fan’s wife and a mystery man having intimate relations in the family home, footage that the husband later used as grounds for a divorce.

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Animal lovers and animal rights activists the world over are asking for a boycott of the Bully Cat, a hairless breed becoming increasingly popular among people fascinated by extreme body shapes.

The bully cat is a relatively new feline breed that takes the characteristics of the hairless sphynx to a whole new level while adding other problematic features. This particular hairless breed has stubby short legs and heavily wrinkled skin that animal experts claim is prone to horrifying health problems. Believed to have originated in the United States only a few years ago, the bully cat quickly became popular overseas as well, particularly in the UK where animal welfare organizations recently began sounding the alarm about what they are calling a designer fad with painful consequences for the animals being exploited by unscrupulous breeders.

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Crocs teams up with DC Comics to create a surprisingly cool-looking version of its ubiquitous Classic Clogs inspired by arguably the best Batmobile ever designed.

The Croc brand has always been associated with comfort, but rarely with style. Nevertheless, the company has always come up with ways of surprising its faithful fans, teaming up with various other brands for intriguing collaborations. Its latest such venture resulted in the recently-released Batman x Crocs Classic Clog “Batmobile”, a limited-edition version of its Classic Clogs inspired by the design of the Batmobile featured in the 1989 Batman movie and its sequel, Batman Returns.

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A Chinese company recently published a series of texts between its customer service and a woman who claimed her daughter had become pregnant after wearing underwear bought from the company.

The unnamed company made the allegations made by an alleged customer public as a warning that such stunts could put entrepreneurs out of business. Apparently, a woman claiming to have purchased underwear from the company on Taobao, one of China’s largest online retail platforms, contacted customer support to complain that her daughter had become pregnant after wearing a pair of brand-new underwear. Despite staff’s attempts to convince the disgruntled woman that such a thing wasn’t possible, she insisted that it was the only way her daughter could have gotten pregnant and demanded an explanation.

All attempts to convince the woman that her theory was physiologically impossible failed, so in the end customer service told her that its factory staff consisted exclusively of women and their boss had gotten a vasectomy, so the girl’s pregnancy had nothing to do with the company.

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A Russian man who got a vasectomy after fathering four children is preparing to sue the medical clinic that botched the surgery and caused him to father a fifth child.

In 2022, after becoming a father for the fourth time, Maxim, a 45-year-old man from the Russian city of Ufa, made the radical decision to get a vasectomy to ensure that he didn’t get his wife pregnant again. He visited “Promeditsina”, a local medical clinic that performed vasectomies, and agreed to pay 30,000 rubles ($330) for the operation. The procedure was successful and Maxim was discharged from the clinic after only a few hours. Everything was well and good until early last year when Maxim’s wife told him that she was pregnant again, which was quite a shock, considering the circumstances. Despite the man’s hopes of a false positive result on the pregnancy test, In November of last year, he became a father for the fifth time.

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The Nepalese capital city of Kathmandu is home to a peculiar shrine to goddess Vaisha Dev, the patron saint of toothache, where people suffering from dental problems nail rupee coins on an old tree trunk as offerings.

Located on a narrow street in Kathmandu, between Thamel and Kathmandu Durbar Square, the Toothache Tree is undoubtedly one of the most unusual tourist attractions in the Nepalese capital. The Vaisha Dev shrine is said to be a stump cut from the mythical tree known as Bangemudha, but it’s almost impossible to tell that it is a tree at all, as it is completely covered in Nepalese rupee coins nailed onto it. Although it is impossible to know just how old this unique shrine really is, some sources claim that it dates back to the Lichchhavi kingdom that existed in the Kathmandu Valley from approximately 400 to 750 CE. Even though modern dentistry has been practiced in Kathmandu for decades, people still come to the Toothache Tree to nail coins, hoping the goddess will release them of their dental problems.

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Two dangerous male criminals imprisoned at a correctional facility in Fortaleza, Brazil attempted a daring escape by disguising themselves as women and simply walking out during visiting hours.

Francisco Átila da Silva and Carlos Antônio da Silva Oliveira, suspected members of a criminal faction in Ceará with long criminal records including drug trafficking, robbery, and murder, were caught trying to escape the Itaitinga 3 prison in Fortaleza, Brazil while wearing rudimentary female disguises. The two men wore long black-hair wigs, pink skirts, and white t-shirts, and even had improvised breasts to fool the guards. They tried mingling with real women at the end of conjugal visiting hours to reduce the risk of getting noticed by the guards, but their sloppy getups were quickly spotted, and the two were detained before they set foot outside the prison.

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A Russian chess player is facing a lifetime ban from official competitions after allegedly trying to poison an opponent by spreading mercury compounds on her chess board.

Amina Abakarova, a 40-year-old chess player from the Russian Republic of Dagestan, stands accused of trying to poison another female player during a chess tournament in Makhachkala. Surveillance footage from the Dagestan Classical Chess Championship shows the 40-year-old woman spreading a substance later identified as mercury on the chess board and pieces that would later be used by another player, Umayganat Osmanova. CCTV footage clearly shows Abakarova walking to the table where Osmanova was about to play and tampering with the chess board and pieces before casually walking away so as not to draw attention. Her actions would have probably gone unnoticed had Umayganat Osmanova not begun to experience symptoms like nausea and dizziness just 30 minutes later.

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Antonio “El Diablo” Riano, a fugitive wanted by US authorities for almost two decades in connection to a fatal shooting in Cincinnati, was recently found working as a police officer in Mexico.

In December of 2004, four days before Christmas, Antonion Riano got into an argument with a 25-year-old man at a bar in Cincinnati, Ohio. Their bickering continued outside the watering hole where surveillance cameras caught Riano pulling out a gun and then shooting the other man in the face, killing him. The man nicknamed “El Diablo” (Spanish for ‘The Devil’) then went on the run and managed to escape authorities despite a nationwide manhunt. Riano went to visit his sister in New Jersey before disappearing again, this time for almost 20 years. He remained on the US’ most wanted criminals list, but investigators stopped actively looking for him after a few years, until recently when one detective found El Diablo through social media.

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Coca-Cola is consumed all around the world, but nowhere is it more popular than in the Mexican state of Chiapas, where the average person drinks 821.2 liters of Coca-Cola per year, roughly 32 times the global average.

The people of Chiapas consume more Coca-Cola than any other people on the planet, about 2.2 liters of it per day, which makes it more popular than drinking water. Coca-Cola is sold and advertised virtually everywhere in the state, and it’s almost as cheap as water, Most people don’t consume it as a treat, but as a way of keeping themselves hydrated throughout the day, and many have no clue that they are addicted to it. The iconic soft drink has been present in Chiapas for over half a century and is so deeply ingrained in the local culture and even in its religious practice, that people can’t imagine their lives without it.

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A suspension bridge stretching 150 meters over the Dadong River Gorge in Chongqing, China, has been dubbed the world’s scariest suspension bridge because of how unsafe it looks.

For the past couple of years, clips of heavy construction vehicles traversing a narrow, flimsy-looking bridge suspended about 300 meters above a wide river gorge have constantly been going viral on social media leaving people wondering about its safety. Although it spans 240 meters, this terrifying wonder of engineering has no towers or base for support, relying only on four steel cables to support vehicles up to 45 tonnes in weight. It’s only wide enough for one vehicle to traverse, and despite featuring safety nets on each side, one wrong move can spell disaster. It’s tricky enough to navigate in normal conditions, but imagine having to do so on a particularly windy day.

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