Game of Clones is a British dating reality show that has contestants describe the physical attributes of their perfect man/woman in great detail and then choose between several candidates that all look and dress the same. Apparently, the idea this new show is trying to promote is that it’s what’s inside that counts.

When it comes to the physical appearance of their perfect date, everyone has a type. Channel 4’s new dating reality show Game of Clones, gives singletons access the latest avatar building technology to virtually create their perfect partner, down to the tiniest details. Height, hairstyle, hair color, eye color, build, skin pigment, you name it they will enter it in a software and create your perfect partner based on your preferences. Once you’re satisfied with their rendition of your fantasy, Game of Clones will scour the U.K in search of eight people that fit your description and closely resemble each other, dress them all in the exact same clothes and put them all in a house with you for several weeks. With all contestants essentially being doppelgangers, it’s assumed that looks are no longer a criteria for selection, so participants will have to gradually eliminate seven of the eight candidates based on their personalities.

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Our senses of taste and smell are diminished at very high altitudes, and airlines apparently take this into consideration when developing their food menus, but until now, no one had tackled this issue when it came to beer. Luckily, one airline has recently announced a beer brewed specifically for consumption at 35,000 feet.

Betsy Beer, a brew formulated with the “ingredients, aroma and necessary carbonation to taste great both in the air and on the ground”, is the brainchild of Hong Kong-based airline Cathay Pacific in collaboration with McCann Worldgroup. It’s named after the company’s first ever airplane, and is produced Hong Kong Beer Co. using UK-sourced hops called ‘fuggle’, honey from Hong Kong, as well as dragon-eye fruit also known as ‘longan’.

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86-year-old Riccardo Bertani is an exceptional man. Born to a family of farmers in Caprara, a small settlement in Reggio Emilia, Italy, he abandoned his study right after elementary school and dedicated his life to translating and documenting over 100 extinct and rare languages from all around the world.

“It was castrating, I quit,” Bertani says about his decision to leave school right after completing his elementary studies. “I was interested in other things, and I have to say that only one teacher understood my decision.” Claiming to be “allergic to math”, the young boy started working in the fields, like most of the men in his village, but soon realized he wasn’t much of a farmer, either. That’s when he started focusing more on the things he was most passionate about, reading and learning languages.

Since Riccardo’s father was a member of the Communist party and former mayor of the village, most of the books in his house growing up were Russian tomes. Even though he didn’t understand the language, he was fascinated by them. He started looking up authors like Lev Tolstoy, reading their works in Italian, and then using a Russian grammar book to learn the original language they had been written in. For some reason, he was attracted to Eastern countries like Russia and the Ukraine and for the next 18 years he did nothing but translate whatever books he could find from those countries. And after diving deeper into their culture, he discovered all these different Siberian people, Mongolians, Eskimos, and developed a taste for rare and extinct languages.

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A 54 year old man from Kasugai city, in Japan’s Aichi Prefecture, was recently arrested after he confessed to stabbing himself in the hip area as an excuse to skip work. He had previously told police that a stranger had attacked him with a knife.

It happens to the best of us, we wake up one morning and at least think about emailing or calling the boss to tell him we’re too sick to come to work, and spend the rest of the day binge watching our favorite TV series. But some people really go all-out in order to make their excuses seem more legit. Case in point, 54-year-old Masaru Miura who wanted to skip work on February 22 so badly that he stabbed himself with a kitchen knife in the bathroom at Nagoya Municipal Subway station, Kasugai. He then proceeded to call the police and tell them that he had been attacked by a total stranger while he was relieving himself.

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Fans of white T-shirts have long been looking to a solution to their transparency problem. No matter how thick the fabric is, you can almost always see through them, and the nipples, being slightly darker than the rest of the skin, are the most visible. Well, a Japanese company claims to have come up with an answer to this issue.

According to a 2013 Japanese study, 84 percent of women find looking at male nipples through their see-through white shirts disgusting, and men don’t like wearing transparent white clothes too much either, but they don’t really have too many options, especially when it comes to t-shirts. But now, a Japanese company called the the Seiso Shiro T Production Committee claims to have come up with the ultimate male nipple-concealing technology. Developed over a period of two years, using special Japanese stitching techniques and high quality, pesticide-free cotton from Japan, the USA, Uganda, and India, their new white t-shirts promise to make visible nipples a thing of the past.

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Leave it to a man to come up with the  dumbest solution to one of women’s most uncomfortable problems – menstruation. Daniel Dopps, a chiropractor from Kansas, USA, has obtained a patent for the “Mensez Adhesive Vaginal Lipstick”, essentially a glue stick that seals the vagina shut to contain menstrual flow. Yes, really!

“Mensez feminine lipstick is a natural patented compound of amino acids and oil in a lipstick applicator that is applied to the labia minora and causes them to cling together in a manner strong enough to retain menstrual fluid in the vestibule above the labia minora where the vaginal opening and urethra exit,” Dr. Dopps explains on his LinkedIn page. “The Mensez compound is instantly washed away with urine, which releases the menstrual fluid along with the urine into the toilet every time a woman urinates. No pads or tampons are needed. Safe, secure and clean.”

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Abraham Poincheval is no stranger to daring performance art, but his latest project is probably the toughest one yet. The French artist will spend eight straight days sealed in a human shaped hole carved out inside a giant boulder. The purpose of this unusual performance – “to find out what the world is”.

On February 22, 2017, 45-year-old Poincheval was sealed in this carved out stone sarcophagus at Paris’s Palais de Tokyo gallery, where he will allegedly spend eight straight days, until March 1st. His temporary prison, a large boulder split in two with just enough room to fit the artist’s body in sitting position, and enough food and water to keep him in good physical condition over his eight days of isolation. His only connection to the outside world is a ventilation duct that keeps him from suffocating in the tight space.

“The purpose is to feel the aging stone inside the rock,” told media reporters. “There is my own breathing, and then the rock which lives, still humid because it was extracted not so long ago from the quarry. So there is that flow, that coming and going, between myself and the stone.”

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Going out to the same restaurants and bars every week can get pretty boring after a while, but if you like in a large UK city, you now have the chance to spice up your nights on the town in one of the most macabre ways imaginable, thanks to Anatomy Lab Live. The unique experience involves a fancy dinner followed by a live dissection of what looks to be a real human body.

There’s nothing like watching a pathologist sink his hands into a corpse and pulling out bloody organs to help the digestion after a hearty meal. At least that’s what Sam Piri, the man behind the Anatomy Lab Live experience seems to think. Sam, who works as a school teacher, claims to have been inspired by the excitement of his students while studying biology, and becoming familiar with pig organs. He decided adults might get a kick out of seeing a live dissection and learning more about the wonders of the human body, but why he thought it would be a good idea to feed his guests beforehand is a mystery.

Anatomy Lab Live, which debuted recently at the Village Hotel in Solihull, outside Birmingham, starts off with a fancy dinner of salmon, served with roast potatoes, green beans and roasted butternut squash and carrots. Dessert includes apple pie and custard or Eton mess, and for drinks, guests get to choose between wine and beer. As they feast on the generous spread, the only sign that something unnerving is about to happen is a center table full of syringes, medical waste bags and petri dishes. Read More »

They say love knows no boundaries, and the touching story of how a 28-year-old man in Indonesia fell in love with a woman 54 years his senior over the phone and ended up marrying her despite objections from both their families seems to confirm the old saying.

About a year ago, Sofian Loho Dandel, a 28-year-old warehouse worker from the Indonesian island of Mantehage, received a call from an unknown number. Upon answering, he learned that the women on the other end of the line had dialed his number by mistake, while trying to call someone else. Only instead of hanging up and moving on with their lives, the two started making conversation and getting to know each other. Little did either of them know that they were talking to their future spouse.

“A year ago, I received a phone call from an unknown caller, I answered and we came to know each other,” Sofian recently told Indonesian reporters. “Since then, we have constantly kept in contact without knowing her age. I had never dated before, I felt in love.”

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The machine-dominated world envisioned by James Cameron in “Terminator” once seemed like pure science fiction, but now, not so much. Just a few days ago, a Russian programmer from Perm unveiled his 3D-printed version of the T-800 robot featured in Cameron’s famous blockbuster, and while it can currently only move its head, it is equipped with a “brain” that allows it to speak and even answer various questions, by looking up the answers on the internet.

Perm-based programmer Alexander Osipovich knew he wanted to one day build his own Terminator robot as a child, after watching the 1984 movie featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger. In 2009, while studying programming at university, Osipovich started working on a program that would one day act as the brain of his real-life T-800 machine. Over the next two years, he developed multiple versions of it in Visual Basic, and in 2011 he decided that technology had come far enough to allow him to fulfill his childhood dream.

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What if your smartphones could send data about themselves to your iPhone? It sounds absurd, but Swiss sock manufacturer BlackSocks has been producing “Smarter Socks” that actually communicate with the owner’s smartphone ever since 2012. And yes, you can still buy them, but they’re definitely not cheap.

BlackSocks believes mankind is made for greater things than sorting socks, so in order to save their clients some valuable time, they came up with a high-tech way of helping them figure out which two socks go together. They might have overdone it a little bit, though, as this system involves Radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips on the socks, a handheld device that decodes the info on these chips, as well as a dedicated app for your smartphone. It sounds like a pretty complicated system for such a simple task as sorting out socks, but if you’re the kind of guy who likes to keep his socks paired, you’re going to love it.

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It is very dry in Kenya’s Tsavo East National Park, and the animals there are struggling to find vital water water sources. The bad news is that rain isn’t expected to fall again until November, but the good news is that there are people willing to bring water to the animals by the truckload until that happens.

Patrick Kilonzo Mwalua is the founder of Tsavo Volunteers, a group of animal lovers who look after the vulnerable wildlife of Tsavo National Park. Poachers are generally their biggest problem, but these days, the drought is threatening to kill even more animals . The prolonged drought has made water “a very precious commodity”, and thirsty animals sometimes have to walk long distances to find the few watering holes that haven’t dried up. Due to their scarcity, elephants often fight each other for the right to drink, which leaves the smaller, weaker ones at risk of dying. But Patrick and his team are not about to let that happen.

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A group of Chinese women recently made headlines after being photographed while lying in shallow graves on the outskirts of Chongqing City. It was revealed that they were taking part in a bizarre ritual called “graveyard meditation” which allegedly helps them cope with divorce.

Graveyard meditation is the brainchild of Liu Taijie, a 30-year-old divorcee who now helps other women get over romantic breakups. After getting married at the age of 19, and having a baby at 21, Liu went through a hard divorce in 2015, after also failing to launch her own business. It was a tough time, but she managed to pull through, and she now wants to help other women understand that life goes on and they have to put the past behind them, where it belongs.

“I know how a woman felt when she was feeling abandoned. I had the thought of committing suicide when I got divorced,” Ms. Liu said. When a person is desperate, he or she could almost feel they’re near death. By lying in the grave, my students could try to experience death. This will remind them that they have not done many things in their life and that they need to forget about the past and start a new life.” Read More »

UK-based company The Unseen has recently revealed a revolutionary hair dye that can change  between two colors whenever the temperature around the user fluctuates. This ingenious new product is called FIRE and despite being based on science, it looks like magic.

Within fashion circles, The Unseen founder Lauren Bowker is known as ‘The Alchemist’. It might sound like an exaggeration, but she and her team have indeed had some remarkable breakthroughs in design and fashion. The Unseen has patented color-changing technology that has allowed the company to create a variety of bespoke inks and coatings. These can in turn be used to create clothes and accessories that change color depending on certain factors, like temperature and humidity. But their latest creation, FIRE – a specially formulated hair dye that causes the hair to change color whenever the temperature fluctuates has been drawing the most attention.

A chemist, fashion designer and businesswoman, Lauren Bowker says that she came up with the idea for FIRE while watching a scene from the 90’s teen movie “The Craft”, more specifically a scene where Robin Tunney’s character goes from brunette to platinum blond by simply combing her fingers through her hair. “It was in that moment that the penny kind of dropped,” Lauren said. “I was like, ‘We could do that.'” And she did.

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He calls himself “Black Widow”, but his homemade spandex costume makes him look like a cross between Spiderman and Deadpool. He has been patrolling the streets of Norfolk, in Hampton Roads for the past two years, although not many people even know he exists. That may have something to do with the fact that he hasn’t done much crime busting so far.

Black Widow refuses to reveal his face and his real name, but goes by the alias Matsuda Yuuma, and claims to be 20 years old. He says he is a first Dan black belt, and has also tried karate and Muay-Thai, but he hasn’t had the chance to test out his fighting skills in a clash with wrong-doers. In fact, he spends most of his days helping out the homeless, performing first aid in case of accidents, and the little crime fighting that he does mainly resumes to preventing car break-ins and de-escalating potentially violent situations. Still, he always carries a trusty can of pepper spray and a retractable police baton, in case things get hairy.

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