Benedict Jebakumar is a man on a mission. Ever since 2012 he has dedicated his free time to sweeping Bangalore’s Outer Ring Road of metal nails deliberately put there by nearby tire puncture shops to boost their profits. In the last five years, the Indian engineer claims to have collected over 50 kilograms of metal nails from the road.

It all started when Benedict Jebakumar realized that he would often have to deal with a punctured car tire when taking the Outer Ring Road from his home in Banashankari to his office, or vice-versa. He didn’t think much of it at first, but then he noticed the many tire repair shops lining the roads, most of which were often busy fixing the tires of seemingly unlucky motorists. It didn’t take long for him to figure out that whenever he got a flat tire it would always be because of metal nails conveniently located close to one of these puncture repair shops. He went to the local authorities to report his findings and ask them to take action, but they didn’t seem to eager to help. That’s when he decided it was up to him to keep the roads clean for himself and other drivers.

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M’Kenzie and Derek Tillotson, of Utah, USA, are planning to embark on an epic trip around the world with their three young children, and are looking for a travel nanny to assist them on their journey. They posted a Facebook video hoping to get a few dozen applications, but ended up with messages from nearly 20,000 people hoping to get the job.

The couple runs a family travel blog called ‘Five Take Flight’ and recently decided to sell their home in Utah and go on an unforgettable adventure around the world.  They plan to leave in July, flying from their home in Utah to New York City, then to Iceland, and the rest of Europe. They’ll return to their home city for a two weeks over Christmas, before flying to Hawaii, New Zealand, and finally Asia. It sounds like an incredible experience, but it’s also going to be pretty tough to manage with three kids, which is why they’ve decided to take someone to travel with them and lend a hand when necessary.

“We’re looking for somebody who’s going to love our children as much as we do, even when they’re acting like this,” M’Kenzie says in the video, while two of their children goof around in front of the camera. “You’ll be an honorary member of the family and will be treated with respect and be able to voice your opinion.” The travel nanny will be required to handle most of the homeschooling for the couple’s two boys, while also looking after their baby sister and also handle some of the cooking and cleaning.

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A Venezuelan woman was caught trying to get her detained boyfriend out of Puente Ayala prison by packing him in a large suitcase. They almost got away with it too, but guards became suspicious after seeing the woman struggling with the suitcase.

25-year-old Antonieta Robles Souda arrived at the Puente Ayala prison in Barcelona, Venezuela, last week, to visit her boyfriend, José Antonio Anzoátegui, who serving a sentence of 9 years and 8 months for car theft. She had brought their six year-old daughter and a large pink suitcase, which is not at all uncommon for overnight stays by family members in South American prison. Little did the guards know that Souda and Anzoátegui were planning to leave the prison together the next day, as a big happy family.

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French company Spinalli Design has recently unveiled a collection of smart vibrating jeans that connect to your smartphone to provide directions to your destination. Equipped with sensors on each side, the Essential jeans vibrate every time you need to turn left or right.

Recently featured at the 2016 CES show in Las Vegas, the Spinalli Design Essential jeans have been dubbed the dumbest ‘smart’ invention out of the consumer electronics show. Essentially, what it tries to do is eliminate the need to constantly check your phone when trying to use satellite navigation in an unknown neighborhood. All you need to do is pair the jeans with your smartphone, turn on the GPS feature, and let the jeans guide you to your destination. They do this via a couple of sensors located on each side, which vibrate alternatively every time you need to turn left or right. If you’re going the wrong way, both sensors vibrate at the same time. “This technology provides an easier, and above all more intuitive option to help you find your car or your meeting place, for example,” the Spinalli Design website explains.

The Essential jeans have a built-in, non-removable battery that the French company claims should last four years if you use the GPS feature once a week. If you use it less than that, it should last more.

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Let’s face it, red wine and sweat are the bane of stylish clothing. No matter how careful you try to be, you can only dodge wine stains for so long, and there’s really no escaping those yellowish sweat stains around the armpits. They’ll make you throw away an otherwise perfectly good shirt, but there’s really no other way around it. Or is there?

Amsterdam-based startup Labfresh claims to have come up with a range of cotton shirt and ties that make all sorts of problematic stains a non-issue. Not only that, but it supposedly prevents any smells from adhering to the fabric and is wrinkle resistant, requiring only minimal ironing. It sounds too good to be true, but Labfresh founders Kasper Brandi Petersen and Lotte Fink claim that their innovative INDUO technology can do all that and more, while preserving the cotton shirts’ natural feel.

“It is like cotton, but better!” Labfresh claims. “The INDUO technology blocks out all fluid and bacteria before it enters the fabric. Therefore you can rinse off almost any substance with ease. To achieve this we work on every aspect of the fabric – from the cotton selected to the way the yarns are spun and then woven. Our cotton is also treated so that the fibers are transformed to their very core, unlike other existing technologies, which can remain on the surface and wash off.”

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Japan has one of the highest adoption rates in the world, with over 80,000 legal adoptions recorded every year. Yet when it comes to adopting children, the Asian country is lagging way behind most developed countries. That’s because around 98% of Japanese adoptees are bright young men in their 20s and 30s.

At the same time, while studies have shown that family-controlled businesses are generally unsustainable over long periods of time –  mostly due to the fact that business acumen and intelligence are only partially inherited – it’s interesting to see that not only are a third of Japanese corporations family-run, but they are also clearly outperforming professionally managed companies in almost every way. Statistics show that family firms are more profitable, have a higher market valuation and increased sales compared to their rivals. Even more curious is that giants like Suzuki, Toyota or Matsui Securities have managed to keep it all in the family for over a hundred years, and other family businesses for even longer than that.

But what does the remarkable success of family business have to do with the high rate of adult adoption, right? Well, in Japan at least, these two curiosities are very closely linked. Prior to the Second World War, civil code in Japan decreed family wealth could only be passed down through male lines, traditionally to the first born son. So families with no male heirs or with sons deemed unsuitable to take over the family business turned to adoption, but not the kind most of us are used to. Instead of simply adopting a baby or a young boy, they adopted young men who displayed the intelligence and knowledge of business required to ensure that their name and legacy endured until the next generation. And while the law no longer prohibits people from passing down their fortune to female heirs, the age-old tradition of electing a ‘mukoyoshi’ (or ‘adopted son-in-law’) is still very popular in Japan.

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A 50-year-old woman has apparently been living in Changi Airport, Singapore, for the last eight years, despite owning her own three-room apartment, which she rents out for about $1,000 a month.

The woman, who asked to remain anonymous, told Singapore newspaper Lianhe Wanbao that she moved into Changi Airport in 2008, after being hit hard by the global financial crisis. “At the time, I was stuck in a rut and had no other choice,” she said, adding that in the beginning she was terrified by the idea of living in an airport, and only planned to do it for a short period of time, until she got back on her feet. She rented out her three-room apartment and leaned to survive in an environment that she quickly learned provides a person with pretty much everything they need. She apparently became quite comfortable with her new home, as those few nights she originally planned for turned into eight years.

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For the past four decades, billy barr – he insists his name be written with lower case letters only – has been living by himself in Gothic, Colorado, a ghost town deserted since the 1920s, passing the time by recording all sorts of data, from daily snowfalls, temperatures, snow melting, animal sightings, etc.. He never imagined that the results of his 40-year hobby would one day help scientists better understand global warming and earn him a cool superhero name – The Snow Guardian.

billy bar first came to Gothic in 1972 as a Rutgers University environmental science student doing water chemistry research. He liked the quiet life here so much that he completed his semester to get his degree and became a permanent resident of the mountainous ghost town. He had grown up in New Jersey, but never really liked being surrounded by so many people, so moving to this secluded ghost town was a chance to get away from social pressure. “I grew up in the city. It was too much for me,” he says.

barr began the winter of 1974 camping in a tent, which is not exactly ideal in a place where snow reaches twenty-five feet a year. Luckily, the owner of an abandoned mining shack was kind enough to let billy move in, to keep him from freezing to death. It became his home for the next eight years, and also the place where he started his impressive database on snow. The modern-day hermit claims that the sole goal behind his epic journal was to fight boredom. There’s not a lot to do in a ghost town in winter time, so he just started monitoring things like daily snowfalls, snow density, temperature, and anything else he could measure. “I didn’t have anything else to do. It was simple curiosity,” billy says.

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A great-grandmother from Brazil has accidentally been praying to a figurine of Elrond, and elf from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, after mistaking it for Saint Anthony, the late Portuguese priest and patron saint of lost things.

Gabriela Brandão, a make-up artist from Florianópolis, Brazil, made this hilarious discovery last week, posting a series of photos of the Elrond figurine on Facebook. “My daughter’s great-grandmother prays to this figure of Saint Anthony every day, but looking more closely…,” she wrote. She had noticed that something wasn’t right about the figurine, so she started doing some online research. She managed to find an exact replica on an online store, which listed it as Elrond, an Elven character from The Lord of the Rings fantasy universe. She called it the “funniest discovery of 2016.”

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A Thai woman living in Virgina was recently convicted for masterminding an elaborate designer purse scheme that involved buying hundreds of authentic accessories online and returning Chinese knock-offs for full refunds. She would then sell the originals on sites like eBay, for about $2,000 each.

Over a number of years, 41-year-old Praepitcha Smatsorabudh, a preschool teacher in Arlington County, used an ingenious scam to supplement her day-job paycheck. She would buy high end bags like Gucci, Burberry and Fendi online, and then return fake ones she had specially made in China and Hong Kong. Court documents revealed that in order to cover her trail, she traveled to over 60 T.J. Maxx stores in 12 states, to return the bags, and used 16 different credit cards when making new purchases. Smatsorabudh’s scheme was so incredibly successful that at one point she was T.J. Maxx’s number one online client in the world.

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The shortage of women caused by China’s one-child policy, combined with the country’s economic boom over the last two decades have made marriage a grim prospect for poor men in rural regions. These two factors have bumped up the “bride price” to hundreds of thousands of yuan, sometimes even millions, obscene amounts that most men can’t hope of raising without taking a bank loan.

The bride price is a a centuries-old Chinese tradition that survived and even thrived in the Communist era. It’s similar to the Western tradition of dowry, only it requires a prospective groom to pay the family of the bride for permission to marry her. In the 60’s and 70’s, the bride price was paid in modest gifts ranging from a simple thermos to bedding. During the 80’s television sets and refrigerators were popular gifts offered as bride prices, but since the economy started to grow in the 1990’s, the payment switched to hard cash and the sums demanded by the family of the bride have been rising ever since.

But perhaps the best explanation for the ever-increasing bride price is the gender inequality in China. During the days of the one-child policy, the preference for males strong enough to work and later look after their elderly parents led to a huge increase in sex-selective abortion and even infanticide of female babies. As a result, Harvard researchers claim that today there are 118 men for every 100 women in China, and the proportion is actually worse in poor rural regions.

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If you’re looking to get a head start before a wild night out with your friends, this Shower Beer created by Swedish brewery PangPang in collaboration with creative agency Snask will probably do the trick.

The shower hardly seems like the best place to enjoy a nice, cold brewsky, yet some people have been doing it for years. However, the problem with showers is that they’re usually quick, so you don’t have the time to gulp down a whole bottle of your favorite ale. To solve the problem, a group of ingenious Swedes have come up with a smaller, stronger beer designed to be consumed while showering.

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At age 67, Charlotte Guttenberg holds the Guinness record for the world’s most tattooed female senior citizen, with 91.5% of her body covered in artistic inking. Her life partner, 75-year-old Charles “Chuck” Helmke, holds the same record for the male category, with 93.75% of his body covered in colorful tattoos.

Charlotte only started getting tattoos 11 years ago, when she decided to get a butterfly inked on her chest, as a birthday present. She had always been fascinated with tattoos as an art form, but her late husband, who passed away in 2001, didn’t approve of them. She hadn’t planned on having almost her entire body covered in permanent artworks, but after that first tattoo, she couldn’t stop adding more of them, and over just one decade, she managed to cover 91.5% with ink. She is now pretty much a walking, talking body mural.

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Two Indian sisters recently got the shock of their lives after their 82-year-old mother showed up at their doorstep 40 years after they had laid her body to rest on the Ganges river, following a cobra bite.

It all started on a summer day in 1976, when 42-year-old Vilasa, a woman from Bidhoo village, India’s Kanpur district, went out into the fields to collect fodder for the family animals, as she had done countless time before. Only this time, she unknowingly got to close to a black cobra snake, and got bit. Upon returning home, her family immediately took her to a traditional healer, but his methods failed to alleviate the effects of the venom, and Vilasa soon lost consciousness.

Thinking she had died, her family wrapped the woman’s body in cloth, placed it on a wooden float and released into the sacred Ganges river, hoping it would bring her to life. Open-air cremation is practiced by millions of Indian Hindus, with the ashes of their loved-ones then scattered in holy bodies of water, but in the case of snake bites, some believe that the sacred river can wash away the poison from the body and bring the person back to life. It wasn’t something Vilasa’s family actually expected, though.

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An apartment tenant in Melbourne, Australia, has recently taken to Reddit to complain about his landlord installing a system that allegedly requires him to insert one dollar every time he wants to flush the toilet.

“Is it legal for my landlord to have installed a coin-operated flusher on my toilet?” the title of the tenants Reddit post reads. He goes on to explain that he understands having to pay for the communal washing machine when doing the laundry, but since he pays the water bill for the rented apartment, having to pay extra every time he needs to flush the toilet seems a bit much.

“He said it was a government incentive to save water. But then why does he get to collect the money?” the Redditor asks. “I see nothing on google about this so I can’t work out if I’m being duped?”

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