Despite living under the same roof and raising their three children together, a Japanese husband hasn’t spoken a single word to his wife in the last 20 years.

No marriage is perfect, and spouses sometimes give each other the silent treatment when they’re upset. But either they go their separate ways or try to patch things up and move on. But not Okou Katayama. For the past two decades he has only answered his wife Yumi’s attempts at making conversation with occasional nods and grunts. Their unusual relationship was revealed by their 18-year-old son Yoshiki, who appealed to a Japanese TV show to help him fix things, as he had never heard his parents talk to each other.

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Technology is seeping into everything, even restaurant tableware. Quince, a Michelin-starred restaurant in San Francisco has recently swapped ol’ fashioned porcelain plates with Apple iPads for a couple of its most popular dishes.

Restaurants have been using tablets instead of classic menus for years now, and some have even introduced app-powered ordering and payment options, but until not too long ago, plating seemed to be immune to this high-tech trend. They’re feeling the heat now, though, as more and more restaurants swap them out for futuristic tablet-based dishes, in an effort to attracts tech aficionados with and appetite for fine cuisine.

The latest to join the exclusive restaurants where tablet plating is actually a thing is Quince, a San Francisco eatery run by Michael and Lindsey Tusk. They are serving a dish called ‘A Dog in Search of Gold’ on an Apple iPad that’s playing a video of a dog hunting for truffles. If you’re wondering about the connection, the dish is composed of white truffle croquettes. And in case you’re not into truffles, Quince also serves frog legs on top of iPads playing videos of frogs in a pond.

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Nexsey is a medical tape designed to make women’s necks look thinner and younger. All you have to do is pinch the loose skin, tape it at the back of your neck, and voila – you just rolled back the clock by a few years.

Nexsey is the brainchild of Linda Gomez, a seasoned beauty product inventor and author of the Baby Boomer Beauty Blog. She claims that she was inspired to create this unusual sticky tape after hearing from women all over the world who had problems with their neck area. Some of them just couldn’t afford corrective surgical procedures, and other were looking for non-invasive alternatives.

“As I started to learn about the options for sagging skin around the neckline, it became obvious that even for women who had undergone a facelift, many still showed signs of aging in the neck area,” Linda writes on her website. “I heard from women all over the world asking about options for other “trouble areas” and neck issues were at the top of the list!”

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After being told that she could not have a horse because they were too expensive, 11-year-old Sarah Simpson, decided to try the next best thing – riding a cow. Now 18, Sarah has her own horse, but she still rides her favorite cow, Lilac, just as much, if not more than she used to.

Sarah had been dreaming of having her own horse for as long as she can remember, but after her parents told her that buying one was to expensive, she discovered that riding a cow could be just as fun. It all started when her younger brother, Tim, dared her to try it, and even though she had no riding experience, she jumped on Lilac, a 6-months-old calf living on the family farm. The animal didn’t seem to mind, so she kept on doing it for the last six and a half years.

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HandEnergy is an ingenious apple-sized device that charges your phone anytime, anywhere. But what really makes this thing special is the fact that it uses your own personal energy to do it.

In a time where power-banks and solar-power devices have become mainstream, a device that lets you charge gadgets on the go doesn’t sound very special. But while power-banks have to be charged the old fashioned way, and solar panels need the sun to store energy, HandEnergy just needs a hand. And I mean that quite literally. To get this little guy to produce energy, which it then stores in built-in batteries, all you have to do is hold it in your hand and rotate your wrists.

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Coming up with effective hand protection in dangerous environments like construction sites has been an elusive goal for many years, but Chilean inventor Jorge Sgombic claims to have finally come up with a truly safe solution.

Boots with built-in toe protection have become a requirement on most construction sites these days, so foot safety is no longer an issue, but the human hands are an infinitely trickier problem. Protective gear companies are actively trying to strike the perfect balance between functionality, mobility and safety when creating new work gloves, but so far the results have been unimpressive. Workers still have to put up with the excruciating pain of banging their fingers with large hammers, or, even worse, slice part of them off in gory work accidents. But Jorge Sgombic’s  innovative Mark VIII safety gloves aim to fix this problem.

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Every holidays season for the past six years, Jim Glaub and Dylan Parker receive hundreds of letters to Santa Claus at their New York apartment. No one knows why this has been happening, or when exactly it started, but the two don’t much care. They’re just focused on making sure that every sender receives a Christmas present from Santa.

Even before 2010, Jim and Dylan used to receive a few letters addressed to Santa Claus, but they simply brushed them off as a “weird occurence”. But that year they got almost 400 of them, for some reason. “It was one batch after another,” Jim recalls. “We would dread opening up the mailbox because we knew 25, 30 letters would pour out.”

The letters are mostly from kids in the New York area, or from parents writing on behalf of their kids and asking for a miracle, explaining that they have fallen on hard times and could use a bit of help with presents from Santa Claus. Most letters ask for clothes, toys, and even turkeys for the Christmas dinner, and Jim and Dylan do everything in their power to make sure that their wishes get fulfilled.

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In India, it is expected that the bride’s family organize and especially pay for the wedding, so when a young woman’s father (the main bread earner) dies, she can almost certainly forget about having a wedding, especially if she comes from a poor family. Most often than not, widowed mothers simply don’t have the means to marry their daughters. That’s where Indian real-estate tycoon Mahesh Savani comes in.

Ever since 2008, Mr. Savani has organized weddings for over 700 fatherless brides, not only paying for the event itself, but also giving each one of his new “daughters” a substantial dowry  (gold, jewelry, furniture, home appliances, etc.) worth around 400,000 rupees ($5,900). At each wedding, the successful businessman also steps up to play the role of their father and perform their ‘kanyadaan’ – the traditional ritual of giving away the bride. From that moment on, the girls become his daughters.

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A London-based brewery has recently launched a unique service that uses cutting edge genetic profiling to create “the world’s most personalised beer”, based on the client’s DNA profile. And it “only” costs £25,000 ($30,550).

Ciaran Giblin, the brewmaster of Meantime Brewery, was the world’s first brewer to have a beer tailored to his own DNA, and was so satisfied with the result that he teamed up with a personal genetics company called 23andMe to offer this bespoke service to other beer enthusiasts with money to spare.

“Having been aware of the potential of at-home genetic mapping, I sent a simple saliva sample to 23andMe; the results gave me the tools I needed to develop a recipe based on the elements my senses are most attuned to enjoy,” Giblin said. “I’m delighted with the result and opportunity it has given us to really push the boundaries of innovative, personalised brewing.”

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Long distance relationships are always tough, and the lack of physical interaction is one of the main reasons for that. There’s no substituting human touch, yet, but rapidly-advancing technology already provides some intriguing alternatives. One such example is the Kissenger, a smartphone peripheral that allows users to kiss over long distances.

The concept of long-distance kissing has been an intriguing research concept for over half a decade now. Back in 2012, we wrote about the Kissenger, a solution created by Dr. Hooman Samani, Director of AIART Lab (Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Technology Laboratory) in Singapore. It consisted of two internet-connected bunny-shaped robots with big silicone lips that could send the touch of human lips between each-other to (sort of) simulate a kiss between two human beings. Samani described it as a “a physical interface enabling kiss communication”.

The Kissinger made international news headlines when it was originally revealed, but it never translated into an actual consumer product. However, the idea of transmitting human kisses over long distances remained popular, and, earlier this month, Emma Yann Zhang, a Computer Science PhD student at City University London, presented her own take on the idea, also called the Kissenger.

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Leading artificial intelligence expert David Levy recently said that he expects human-robot marriages to become commonplace by 2050, and the recently revealed romantic relationship between a French woman and a robot she 3D-printed herself seems to confirm the beginning of this trend.

The first time I saw this story circulating online, I was almost convinced it was just a prank, not because it seems impossible to believe, but because the media tends to blow things out of proportion to attracts as many eyes as possible. However, this one appears to be legit. The woman in question, known only as Lilly, or by her Twitter handle @LillyInMoovator, describes herself as a “proud robosexual” and told News.com.au via email that she is attracted only to robots and actually dislikes physical contact with human flesh.

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It’s getting and harder and harder for beggars to survive on spare change handouts these days. People have become too reliant on alternative payment options to carry cash around with them, and those that still have a few coins in their pockets are often afraid that recipients will just spend it on alcohol, drugs or cigarettes. However, a couple of Dutch advertising professionals have come up with an intriguing solution – a contactless payment jacket for beggars and homeless people.

Developed by Carsten van Berkel and Stefan Leendertse of N = 5, an Amsterdam-based advertising agency, the contactless payment jacket allows people to donate 1€ to the wearer using their contactless smart card. The unusual clothing item has a card reader sewn into it, and in order to donate 1€ to the wearer, all you have to do is hold the card close to the jacket for a few moments, and the sum is automatically debited from your bank account. The contactless payment jacket also comes with an LCD screen which constantly displays instructions of use.

“People have less cash in their pockets,” says Jan Jesse Bakker, the designer of the jacket. “And if you have a single euro on you and give it to a homeless person, then you do not know what happens to it.” That’s one of the big advantages of the contactless payment jacket. You’re not giving cash to a total stranger to do with it what he pleases. Instead, the fixed sum (one euro) goes into a bank account managed by a homeless shelter, and can only be used to purchase a hot meal, pay for a bath or spend a night at a homeless shelter (many such centers in the Netherlands require a contribution of 5€ per night). Homeless people who really want to turn their life around can also save money for various job certification courses or a down-payment for a home. “We can offer the homeless more than just a warm Christmas,” Bakker adds. “We give them back prospects.”

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Rubi Ibarra García, a 15-year-old girl from the small Mexican village of La Joya had arguably the highest attended quinceañera party in history, after thousands of people from all over Mexico, and even the U.S. turned up for the big event on December 26.

It all started earlier this month, when Rubi’s father, Crescencio, posted a video on Facebook inviting everyone to the girl’s birthday party. “We invite you on December 26 to our daughter Rubi Ibarra Garcia’s quinceañera in La Joya, everyone is cordially invited,” he wrote. Only he didn’t really mean “everyone”, just everyone in the village, but after setting the video to ‘public’ instead of ‘private’, people from all over Mexico started sharing it and Rubi eventually ended up with with over 1.2 million RSVPs from people she had never met before.

Crescencio later revealed that the invitation was meant for neighbors and friends only, but acknowledged his mistake, adding that he would not tun anyone away. In the weeks that followed, Rubi’s quinceañera became one of the most popular topic in Mexico, with the #XVdeRuby trending on social media and getting millions of shares, and TV stations scrambling to cover the story and get interviews with the García family. Actor Gael Garcia Bernal made a parody of the invitation video, while singer Luis Antonio Lopez “El Mimoso” composed a song especially for the birthday girl. Mexican airline Intejet even offered a 30% discount on flights to her home state for people wanting to attend. 

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Goldgenie, a luxury goods company famous for gold-plating just about anything for its wealthy clients, has recently launched a unique Donald Trump-themed iPhone 7 made out of solid 24K gold and encrusted with diamonds. And the best part is that this gem costs only $151,000.

The Goldgenie retail store in Sharjah, a city near Dubai, came up with the idea for this unusual product after it was specifically requested by a Chinese woman, last month. Frank Fernando, managing director of Goldgenie, declined to identify the customer by name, but said that he believes her family wants to give it to Trump himself after his inauguration, as a present. Anyway, Goldgenie loved the idea so much that they made it available to their other clients as well.

I guess I can see some of the world’s super-rich spending a whopping $151,000 on a gold iPhone 7 embellished with over 450 VS1 white diamonds within the Apple logo and around its edges, but who would want Trump’s grinning face stamped on it? Well, it turns out that the idea was very inspired, as Goldgenie claims that it has had nine more orders for its unique Trump iPhone.

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A school principal in China’s Henan province was recently suspended for making young students take tests outdoors in smog so thick that they could barely see their papers, despite receiving orders to close the school.

On December 20th, 480 students from the No. 1 Middle School in Linqi town, Linzhou, were forced to take their tests on the school’s an outdoor football field, in heavy smog. Photos taken by concerned parents and later sent to local media outlets show the children struggling to make out the writing on their papers, but the principal apparently decided that the smog was not “severe”.

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