23-year-old Tapala Nadamuni holds the Guinness Record for the World’s Smallest Functional Vacuum Cleaner, with an electronically-powered suction device smaller than a pinky fingernail (0.65 cm).

If you ever find yourself searching for meaning in whatever it is you are aiming towards, remember that someone spent two years of their lives putting together the world’s smallest vacuum cleaner. Indian student Tapala Nadamuni previously held this record from 2020 until 2022, with a tiny gadget measuring just 1.76 centimeters. However, he lost the record to someone who managed to build a functional vacuum cleaner less than half the size (0.85 cm), so Tapala spent the last two years of his life trying to win it back. After having some of his attempts rejected by Guinness and pouring hundreds of hours into research and development, the 23-year-old student achieved his goal with a vacuum cleaner measuring 0.65 centimeters.

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A small Chinese company specializing in selling washing machines is facing a potential loss of 30 million yuan ($4.2 million) after an employee mistakenly labeled products with the wrong prices.

Little Swan Dongshan Franchise Shop, a small business based in Anhui, China, has been forced to ask customers to cancel their orders after one employee’s blunder caused a 20-minute online shopping spree that could result in a net loss of $4.2 million. Chinese news outlet Red Star News reported that on August 28, over 40,000 orders for various washing machines were placed on the small company’s Tmall online store until someone noticed the pricing errors and took the store offline. In that 20 window, Little Swan sold 70 million yuan worth of washing machines for only 40 million yuan, which means it might have to incur losses of $30 million yuan if forced to honor the orders.

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An Indian doctor is being accused of causing the death of a 15-year-old boy after operating on him while watching YouTube videos on how to surgically remove gallbladder stones.

Ajit Kumar Puri, a doctor at the Ganpati Hospital in Saran, India’s Bihar state, stands accused of causing the untimely death of a local teenager by operating on him without having the proper knowledge or skills. The boy’s family claim that they brought him to the hospital last week after he had vomited several times. He was admitted and his symptoms subsided, but Dr. Puri decided that he had to operate on the boy to remove a gallstone that was causing the vomiting. After sending the teen’s father away on an errand, the doctor operated on him without the family’s consent of the family, but this resulted in a sudden worsening of the boy’s condition. Eventually, Dr. Puri decided that he should be transferred to another hospital, but the patient died on the way, and the doctor went on the run after leaving his body on the steps of Patna Hospital before going on the run.

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A Chinese company is being accused of tricking hundreds of employees into conducting illegal activities so it could then fire them without severance pay.

Wuhan CITIC Design Institute, a company based in Wuhan, Central China’s Hubei Province, recently found itself at the center of a huge scandal, after several prominent news outlets reported that it had allegedly fired around 200 senior employees after accusing them of crimes one of its managers had lured them into committing. Apparently, the company had been looking for ways of getting rid of senior employees with high salaries without having to offer any financial compensation packages, so it had one of the senior managers lure such employees to various bars and clubs under the pretext of “after-work relaxation” where they were tricked into engaging in illegal activities.

Photo: Mohammed Hassan/Pixabay

According to some of the tricked employees, the manager set them up with sex workers and encouraged them to interact with them, while others claim that they engaged in gambling and even intentionally lost some money to their superior to maintain a good relationship with him, only to later realize that they had been lured into a trap.

After gathering dirty evidence on the employees, the manager would report everything to the company, and their contracts would be terminated without any compensation. Some Chinese sources claim that as many as 200 employees lost their jobs this way.

The company’s tactic was fiercely criticized online, with some social media users pointing out that the terminated employees would have a very difficult time trying to find other jobs because of their record of illegal activities. So not only did the employer fire its senior employees without severance pay, but it also compromised their chances of getting a job someplace else.

Although this level of trickery is rare among Chinese employers, finding ways to fire employees without financial compensation is definitely not! Companies are known to dig through their staff’s criminal records hoping to find any illegalities committed in the last five or ten years to use as an excuse to fire them. Some go as far as faking tempting job offers from other companies to trick ‘problematic’ employees into quitting.

Chinese authorities are investigating the case of an elderly man who died 13 days after having 23 teeth extracted and 12 implants inserted on the same day at a dental clinic.

Ms. Shu, a resident of Yongkang City, in China’s Zhejiang Province, recently filed a complaint with the Municipal Health Bureau against a local dental clinic after her father’s death. The woman presented evidence that her parent had had 23 teeth extracted and 12 new teeth implanted in a single session, which she claims caused his untimely demise 13 days later. Ms. Shu told authorities that her father suffered agonizing pain throughout the last 13 days of his life, before suffering a fatal heart attack on August 28. Now the woman wants those responsible to be brought to justice.

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A Chinese man who felt something crawling up his nose one night experienced particularly bad breath for three days before discovering he had a cockroach stuck in his trachea.

A 58-year-old man in Haikou, China’s Hainan Province, recently experienced an entomophobe’s worst nightmare. One night, as he was sleeping, he woke up with a strange sensation that something was crawling up his nose. Then he felt something go down his throat, so he started coughing, but nothing came out so he just went back to sleep. The following day, he put the whole incident to the back of his mind and just went about his business until he realized he had particularly bad breath. Even after three days, his breath still smelled disgusting, and he also started coughing up yellow sputum, so he decided to seek medical help.

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An Indian man with an incredible memory recently set a new world record by reciting a whopping 14,000 digits of Euler’s number in just 49 minutes.

Deepu V has always had an uncanny memory when it came to numbers. He once set a national record by reciting 2,000 digits of the irrational number pi faster than anyone else, and claims to have committed 500 telephone numbers to memory. But when he heard about a world record for memorizing the most decimal places of Euler’s number, he saw an opportunity to have his name featured in the renowned Guinness Book of Records. He spent four months preparing for this epic attempt and took under an hour to blow the previous record of 10,122 digits right out of the water.

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An Austrian neurosurgeon is currently under investigation for allegedly allowing her 13-year-old daughter to drill a hole in a patient’s skull during a brain operation.

In January of this year, a 33-year-old man had to be flown to the University Hospital Graz, in the Austrian city of Graz, following a serious accident in a forest that left him with head trauma. The female neurosurgeon on call, whose name has not been made public to protect her privacy, allegedly allowed her 13-year-old daughter to not only sin in on the procedure but actually drill a hole into the unconscious patient’s skull. Luckily, the operation was a success and the injured man was able to go back to leading a normal life. No one outside the operation room knew about the young girl’s active role in the procedure, but the cat was let out of the bag in July when an anonymous complaint was lodged with the public prosecutor’s office in Graz about the minor’s involvement.

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A Mexican family has been outed as scammers after being caught on video placing cockroaches on their plates at a restaurant just so they can then complain and leave without paying the bill.

The Puerto Chale restaurant in Guadalajara, Mexico, recently took to social media to shame a family of scammers who had threatened to make a scene because of a cockroach they had allegedly found in the dishes they ordered unless the restaurant agreed to not charge them for their meal. Although confused by the incident, as the restaurant reportedly has a very strict hygiene policy, management decided to give in to the patrons’ demands just to avoid an unnecessary scandal. However, as soon as the family left, they checked the surveillance cameras and found proof that the whole thing had been premeditated.

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The city of Vadodara, in the Indian state of Gujarat, is crawling with giant crocodiles following the overflowing of a local river caused by record rainfall.

As if having to deal with the water flooding their homes and streets wasn’t enough, the people of Vadodara have to be on the lookout for giant crocodiles waiting to snatch their animals or even attack them. Videos of giant reptiles walking through the streets, chilling on house roofs, or swimming in canals with dead animals between their jaws have been doing the rounds on Indian social media ever since the Vishwamitri River overflowed last week. The river is home to hundreds of freshwater crocodiles, at least two dozen of which were caught in Vadodara between August 27 and 29.

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Three remote villages in India’s Madhya Pradesh state have become famous for their ‘thief schools’ where children as young as 12 are trained in pickpocketing, theft, and robbery by seasoned criminals.

The three nondescript villages – Kadia, Gulkhedi, and Hulkhedi – located about 120 km from the state capital of Bhopal are reportedly nurseries for young criminals, with parents actually paying ‘tuition fees’ of  200,000 to 300,000 rupees ($2,400 to $3,600) to have their offspring trained in “dark arts” like pickpocketing and bag grabbing in crowded places, carrying out robberies, bank account thefts, evading the police, and even withstanding beatings in the event of being apprehended. These so-called ‘thief schools’ have produced some of the most infamous criminals in India’s history, so they are sought after by impoverished and less-educated families unable to give their children a proper education.

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María Carolina Herrera, an elderly soap maker from Peru, won a legal battle against iconic fashion designer Carolina Herrera over the right to use her surname as a brand.

María Carolina Herrera lives in Ate-Vitarte, a residential area in Lima, Peru, where she operates her small artisanal soap business. She has always lived a discreet, quiet life, but in 2021 she became known all across Peru and even in other South American countries after becoming engaged in a legal battle with the corporation owned by Venezuelan fashion designer Carolina Herrera. It all started when María Carolina’s son, Dario Morales, surprised her by submitting her soap brand, ‘La Jabonera by María Herrera,’ to the National Institute for the Defense of Competition and the Protection of Intellectual Property (INDECOPI). The request was immediately contested by Carolina Herrera Ltd., whose lawyers argued that another Herrera brand in Peru’s cosmetic industry would cause confusion among consumers.

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Saki Tamogami, a 37-year-old real-estate agent, is known as Japan’s most frugal woman for her commitment to spending as little money as possible on things like food, clothes, and self-care.

“Never buy anything that isn’t on sale!” This has been Saki Tamogami’s motto for the last 15 years, and she claims it has helped her save enough money to buy three houses, a goal she set for herself when she was only 19 years old. The first thing she did was stop buying new clothes, instead accepting handouts from family and friends and taking better care of the clothes she already had. She then started cutting down on food expenses, relying mainly on cheap dishes like udon noodles, toast, and discounted radishes for sustenance. After 8 years of frugal living, Tamogami was able to buy her first home, and by 2019, she had already achieved her goal of owning three homes.

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A short clip featuring two very hot “humanoid robots” being showcased at this year’s Beijing World Robot Conference has sparked a heated online debate about whether they are actual robots.

This year’s Beijing World Robot Conference features hundreds of international exhibitors and over a thousand special guests, but the event recently went viral for something that has less to do with technology and more with makeup and cosplay. Ex-Robot, a Chinese company that specializes in bionic humanoid robots, unveiled its latest creations in front of hundreds of journalists and visitors, and while they were definitely impressive-looking, two of them really stood out because of their doll-like appearance. Many X users were impressed by how attractive the two robots looked, while others wondered if they were actual robots or just real women cosplaying as androids.

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A 57-year-old man had to be hospitalized and put on morphine so he could endure the pain of 240 wasp stings after being attacked by a swarm of enraged wasps.

On August 18, Andrew Powell went outside his family home near Brecon, Wales, to inspect the fields, as he usually did, only to see a large swarm of wasps heading his way. He suspects that someone, maybe another farmer, messed with their nest because they came straight for him and started stinging him. Unable to defend himself against what he suspects were thousands of angry wasps, Powell ran toward his house while fighting off the insects as best he could. The insects followed him into the house, attacked his wife as well, and managed to land over 240 stings on the 57-year-old man, leaving him in agony and in need of medical attention.

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