Claw machines are infamous for being deceptively easy, but actually excruciatingly difficult to master, and one Japanese man found out just how difficult after failing to win a single price after 200 consecutive tries.

Twitter user Ogarun, who happens to be a big fan of claw machine games, or “UFO Cathers” as they are called in Japan, visited an arcade earlier this month and was so frustrated with one claw machine there that he ended up calling the police. He reportedly tried his luck 200 times in a row and failed to catch a single price, and after getting into an argument with the staff at the arcade, he called the authorities. Interestingly, the police asked the arcade operator to demonstrate that the machine could be beat, but the guy failed 300 times in a row as well…

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Researchers at the Powdermill Nature Reserve in Pennsylvania recently came across a “once in a lifetime discovery” – a half-male, half-female rose-breasted grosbeak.

Annie Lindsay and her colleagues at Powdermill Nature Reserve were catching and banding birds with identification tags on September 24, when a fellow researcher called her over via walkie-talkie to supposedly see something extraordinary. The moment she saw her colleague’s find, Annie knew what she was looking at, an extremely rare half-male, half-female creature known as a gynandromorph. The rose-breasted grosbeak exhibited male-characteristic plumage on one half of its body, and female coloration on the other.

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A Chinese video production startup has been getting a lot of attention on social media because of its adorable office pet – a two year-old llama-alpaca mix.

We’ve written about companies bringing pets into the office to help their human staff unwind, but that usually meant cats and small dogs. Now, a Wuxi-based company has ‘hired’ Tuo Baiwan, a young llama-alpaca mix to strut around the office and just be his adorable self. The furry animal loves attention and treats, and his human colleagues are more than willing to give him both. In return his simple presence help relieve stress and puts a smile on employees’ faces.

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A 29-year-old woman in China has suffered paralysis in the left side of her face after having wrinkle fillers injected at a cosmetic clinic. Doctors fear that the symptoms may be permanent.

On September 12, Ms. Zhao, from Hangzhou City, Zhejiang Province. went to the local cosmetic hospital for a procedure she had undergone several times in the past – filler injections to remove some visible wrinkles on her face. Only this time things didn’t go as smoothly as usual. On September 19, a week after getting the filler injections, the 29-year-old woman woke up with half-face paralysis. Her mouth was crooked, she had a permanent frown in her left brow, and she couldn’t completely close her mouth and her left eye. She is still unable to chew food correctly or drink liquids, and has to use a straw.

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A number of popular TikTok and Instagram influencers have been exposed for faking their luxurious lifestyle by renting a Los Angeles studio designed to look like the inside of a private jet.

Reports of wannabe social media celebrities faking their posh lifestyles have been making headlines for years, and faking flights on private jets isn’t new either. A few years back, a Moscow-based company went viral for renting private jets by the hour to influencers wanting to impress their followers, only the gam has come a long way since those days. It turns out that there are now full-blown studios designed to look like private jets, complete with the appropriate lighting, and several notable influencers have been using them to deceive their fans.

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An entomologist from the University of Melbourne lets thousands of mosquitoes bite his arm regularly in order to keep them fed for research on eradicating Dengue fever.

Dr Perran Stott-Ross has been involved in mosquito research at the University of Melbourne for many years now, trying to find effective ways of curbing the spread of the Dengue virus, passes between humans via mosquitoes. One of the most promising strategies has been infecting swarms of mosquitoes with Wolbachia, a bacteria that naturally blocks the transmission of dengue fever and is passed on over generations of mosquitoes. But in order to further this research, Dr. Stott-Ross has to monitor thousands of blood-sucking bugs, and as part of that monitoring he offers his own arm as an all-you-can-eat buffet…

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Mikishi, a 25-year-old girl from Japan, has been getting a lot of attention on Asian social media lately, because of her drastic plastic surgery transformation.

Ever since taking to Twitter to confess that her appearance is the result of several bouts of plastic surgery, back in March of this year, 25-year-old Mikishi has become somewhat of a poster-girl for early plastic surgery. She had her first cosmetic procedure, a facial reshaping, on the first day after graduating high-school, and she has since turned to plastic surgery several more times, spending about 4 million yen ($40,000) in the process. But she considers it money well spent, as plastic surgery changed her life, giving her back her self-esteem and helping her lead a happy life, instead of sinking into a depression. Today, Mikishi actually advocates for plastic surgery for people who really feel like they need it, and she has even founded a company that provides consultancy  services to such individuals.

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According to his birth certificate, Denis Vashurin was born in 1987, but looking at him you would swear he was still in his early teenage years.

Denis became one of the hottest topics on Russian social media after doing an interview with popular YouTube personality “Vasya na sene”. People can’t seem to get over how incredibly young he looks for a 32-year-old man, and Denis himself admits that whenever he reveals his age to people he doesn’t know he almost always gets reactions of disbelief. That’s why he prefers living in a small village in Russia’s Krasnoyarsk region, instead of moving to the city. Everybody knows him there, and he gets to spend time alone doing what he likes – hunting, fishing and spending time with his girlfriend.

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All Kabaddi World is a popular Facebook channel that popularized a bombastic, over-the-top version of the ancient wrestling art of kabaddi. It’s basically a Pakistani version of World Wrestling Entertainment.

The first time I watched a clip posted by All Kabaddi World, I was confused yet enthralled by these two topless men that seemed to chase each other around a dirt ring while slapping the hell out of each other. They were slapping each other on the cheeks, the chest, their bellies, all to the cheers of a huge crowd. Every once in a while one of them got thrown to the ground and fell in a really exaggerated manner that explained the “wwe” in the Pakistani title I didn’t understand. This was a really unique, yet strangely-entertaining take on American wrestling.

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A South-African female engineer has become an inspiration for other women looking to succeed in fields dominated by men, after photos of her constructing an extension to her house went viral on social media.

Last month, South Africa celebrated Women’s Month and a 26-year-old woman from Pietermaritzburg became the unlikely poster girl for this year’s celebration, after photos of her single-handedly working on an extension to her house went viral on Facebook and other social networks. The pics showed the woman preparing the cement, making all the measurements and stacking the building blocks all by herself, which not only won her a lot of praise, but also empowered other women to follow their dreams even if the odds are stacked against them.

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Chinese social media has been abuzz about the controversial story of a couple who took their own daughter to court in order to make her raise her toddler brother, because they couldn’t afford to.

According to several news reports in China, a couple who for several years had survived on their child’s monthly allowance alone decided to have a second child. They soon realized that they couldn’t actually afford to take care of the child, so they asked their 22-year-old daughter to raise the toddler on their behalf. The girl, referred to only as Le Le in the media, had managed to support herself through college and was dreaming about building a career for herself when she got the news of her new “job” from her parents. She flat out refused to bring up her brother by herself, so her parents sued her.

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Photos of a so-called “mushroom house” sitting on a narrow concrete staircase have been doing the rounds on Japanese social media and leaving viewers scratching their heads in disbelief.

The viral photos were originally posted by Japanese Twitter user Yuko Mohri, but have since been shared over 20,000 times on the popular social network alone. They show what looks like a one-storey house perched on a very narrow concrete staircase, somewhere in Japan. Such a sight would raise a few eyebrows anywhere in the world, but even more in the island country, where powerful earthquakes occur fairly often.

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A 10-year-old Vietnamese boy has been turning heads on Asian social media after photos of his unusually muscular physique went viral.

Nguyen Hoang Nam’s parents claim that he was always more muscular than other kids his age. Even at birth, doctors noticed that he had more developed muscles than other babies, and by age 6, his body was so unusually toned that his parents took him to a hospital for a checkup. It’s here that Vietnamese media reports get blurry, as they mention “superman syndrome” as the cause of Hoang Nam’s impressive physique, but that is a chromosomal disorder with very different symptoms. The articles also claim that other than muscle stiffness and a general lack of flexibility, the 10-year-old boy is in perfect health.

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Thirty-five young women were caught trying to cheat on their entrance exam into schools for teachers in the Mexican state of Michoacán; they allegedly had the correct answer pattern painted on their nails.

The entire admission process into teaching schools in Michoacán had been under suspicion of fraud since the first stage of exams, on the last day of July, when it was revealed that several of the students had bought the answers for 15,000 or 25,000 pesos. Although officially unproven, the claim was virtually confirmed by the astonishing test results in several Michoacán municipalities. According to Mexican media reports, 50 applicants who took the exam had answered all 100 question correctly, while another 300 had scores of 99 and 90 correct answers. This was unusual, as in other municipalities the highest score was 71 correct answers.

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Photos and videos of a functional Banco del Bienestar branch seemingly located in the middle of nowhere have been getting a lot of attention on Mexican social media this week.

Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador was one of the very first people to get blamed for wasting government money on useless buildings after the photos and videos of a Banco del Bienestar branch located a long way from any human settlement, somewhere in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. The building was used to mock Obrador’s “Fourth Transformation” of Mexico initiative, but a representative of the bank was quick to explain that although bizarre, the location of the branch actually makes sense.

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