We all know sitting at a desk for long periods of time has negative effects on our health, but if this life-size model of what an office worker could look like in 20 years is any indication, the future doesn’t look too bright.

Emma, as her creators have named her, doesn’t look so good. She has dry and red eyes from hours staring at a computer screen, a hunched back that makes you think she’s been ringing the bell at a recently burned down French cathedral, excess weight, swollen limbs due to poor circulation, and stress-caused eczema, among other alarming symptoms. Luckily, Emma is just a life-size doll created by a team of researchers led by behavioral futurist William Higham, but the world could be full of Emmas if we don’t do something to change the office environment and culture.

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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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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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A 24-year-old Chinese man who spent the last five months of his life living in the mountains after a painful breakup now looks at least twice his age and is called “uncle” by people older than him.

Remember Brandon Miles May, the 35-year-old man who looks half his age? Well, today we’re featuring his exact opposite, a young man who looks twice his age, not because of some rare genetic disorder, but simply because he has been exposed to the elements in the mountains of northern and western China. The unidentified man rose to fame in his native country after a video in which he showed his ID to the camera to prove he was in his early 20s went viral on social media. When referred to as ‘uncle’ by the person shooting the video, the balding, rugged-looking trekker says that he is only 24, and proceeds to hold up his ID card to the camera to show that he was born in December of 2000.

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Japanese police recently arrested a group of unlikely criminals, three grandpas in their late sixties, seventies, and eighties accused of breaking into at least two homes and suspected of ten other burglaries.

Hideo Umino, 88, Hidemi Matsuda, 70, and Kenichi Watanabe, 69 allegedly met behind bars and decided to team up after being released in order to commit crimes more efficiently. The trio, dubbed “G3S” by police (homophonous for ‘grandpas’ in Japanese), stand accused of breaking into an empty house in Sapporo, the main city on the island of Hokkaido in May and stealing 200 yen ($1.3) and three bottles of whisky worth about 10,000 yen ($65). the following month, they allegedly robbed another empty house and stole jewelry worth approximately one million yen (US$6,400). Police is currently investigating the group’s involvement in 10 other burglaries in the cities of Sapporo and Ebetsu.

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A Japanese couple known for uploading wholesome family videos on YouTube sparked controversy after filming their 2-year-old daughter crying inside a locked car on a hot day for about 30 minutes instead of getting her out.

At the end of May,  ラウなのファミリー (“Rau-nano Family), a YouTube channel that documents the daily life of a Japanese couple with their three children, uploaded a video titled 炎天下の中…2歳娘が車に閉じ込められました (“Under the blazing sun… my 2-year-old daughter was locked in the car,”).  The shocking title hints at the couple’s goal of grabbing attention and boosting viewership, but while the video managed to do just that, they didn’t anticipate the criticism coming with their new-found fame. That is surprising, to say the least, as the controversial video shows the father of the family casually filming his 2-year-old daughter as she cries desperately for about 30 minutes after accidentally getting stuck in the family car on a hot summer day with no windows open.

The disturbing video, which has since been removed from the Rau-nano Family YouTube channel, shows the head of the family placing the older daughter, two-year-old Nanoka, in the backseat of the family’s Toyota, and preparing to do the same with her younger sister. It is at this moment that Nanoka, who is holding the car keys as her father handles the little sister, accidentally locks herself in the car.

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Two French biking enthusiasts recently set a new Guinness World Record for the ‘tallest rideable bicycle’ by building a 7.77-meter (25 ft 5 in) behemoth that can (barely) be ridden.

Nicolas Barrioz and David Peyrou came up with the idea for the world’s tallest bicycle 5 years ago, while drinking at a pub, but they actually decided to go through with the project and spent months putting together a plan to make it work. Made from metal alloy, steel, and wood, the unique bike took hundreds of hours to complete in a way that made it rideable, even for a short distance. It may not seem like a challenge, but building a 25-foot rideable bicycle is definitely not as easy as riding a bike. For example, the pedals are connected to the wheels via a 16-meter (53-ft) chain, and because of its extreme height, the bicycle has to move at a speed of around 15-20 km/h (9-12 mph) for the rider to maintain balance.

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An Algerian man who had disappeared from his home one morning in 1998 was recently found alive in his neighbor’s cellar, just 200 meters from the house he had grown up in.

Omar bin Omran was only 17 years old when he disappeared from his home in Djelfa, Algeria, in 1998. It was during the Algerian Civil War, a time of great unrest in the African country, and many of his family and friends feared that he had ended up among the estimated 200,000 people killed, or the 20,000 kidnapped, during the conflict. Authorities stopped looking for him after a while, and his mother remained the only one who never gave up hope. Unfortunately, she died in 2013, and Omar bin Omran became yet another case that would likely never be solved. Only earlier this week, the brother of one of Omar’s neighbors took to social media to suggest that his sibling was involved in the teen’s kidnapping.

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A Chinese man wanted for murder managed to avoid police detection for over 20 years by pretending to be a deaf and mute scavenger in the mountains of Hubei Province.

On the evening of May 22, 2004, a young and quick-tempered man named Xiao got into a heated argument with a neighbor in his home village of Oumio Daying, in Xianyang’s Xiangcheng District. At one point, Xiao allegedly picked up a shovel and hit his neighbor over the head with it, killing him on the spot. That night, knowing that he risked spending the rest of his life behind bars or worse, getting the death penalty, Xiao decided to abandon his wife and 11-year-old child to go on the run. He ran into the mountains of Anxi County, in Fujian Province, where he became a scavenger selling scraps to survive. To make sure he never gave anything away about his past life, Xiao pretended to be deaf and mute for the next 20 years, only smiling at people and communicating through gestures.

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A team of German scientists studied a 62-year-old man who deliberately got 217 Covid-19 vaccine shots over 29 months and found that he suffered from no negative vaccine-related side effects.

Many people wouldn’t get a shot of Covid-19 vaccine if their lives depended on it, but a German man decided to compensate for many of them by getting as many shots as he could. Over a period of 29 months, the unnamed 62-year-old from Magdeburg, Germany, got no less than 217 Covid-19 jabs, an average of four doses per day. He is what you could call a ‘walking experiment’, so after hearing about him from a newspaper, researchers from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg contacted him and asked if they could study him in the name of science. The man agreed, and the team recently published a number of intriguing findings in the Lancet Infectious Diseases Journal.

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The Brazilian flea frog (Brachycephalus pulex) measures only between 7 and 8 millimeters in length, which likely makes it the smallest vertebrate on Earth.

In 2011, Mirco Solé, a researcher at the State University of Santa Cruz in Brazil, discovered the tiny Brazilian flea frog, an amphibian so small that it could comfortably fit on a small coin. The discovery made news headlines in the scientific community, but because of a small available sample, there was simply no way to provide conclusive information regarding the frog’s size. Now, over a decade longer, a team led by the same Mirco Solé has published an extensive study on the elusive frog species that can only be found on two forested hillsides in Bahia, Southern Brazil. It shows that the flea frog is a very likely candidate for the title of ‘world’s smallest vertebrate’.

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Biohazard Coffee is recognized as the strongest coffee in the world. It has a caffeine content of 928mg per 12-ounce cup, which is more than double the daily recommended dose of caffeine and a lot more than most energy drinks.

The title of ‘world’s strongest coffee’ has been attributed to various brands over the last decade. In 2013, we wrote about Death Wish, a blend that promised 200% the caffeine content of the average dark roast, and then there was Black Insomnia Coffee, a brand that boasted a caffeine content of 702 mg per 12-ounce cup. But now we have another title holder, and this one is going to be tough to beat. Launched in 2016, Biohazard Coffee has established itself as the strongest coffee money can buy, with a caffeine content that makes it barely safe to consume.

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A new water fountain in the Austrian city of Vienna has been described as the ugliest in Europe, possibly the world, despite costing 1.8 million euros ($2 million).

Created by the avantgarde Viennese art group Gelitin, the Austrian capital’s newest water fountain was commissioned by local authorities to commemorate 150 years of Vienna’s modern water system which provided the city with fresh water from streams in the green forests of the Alps and helped eradicate plagues like cholera. The new landmark’s design apparently symbolizes the “communal responsibility for water” and while it did win over the jury that selected Gelitin as the winner, it hasn’t done so well with the general public, especially considering its astronomical price, $2 million.

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A Lithuanian man has been arrested in Spain after allegedly faking heart attacks at 20 restaurants around the country in order to avoid paying the bill.

The unnamed 50-year-old man reportedly scammed at least 20 eateries, the majority of them in Spain’s Costa Blanca region, by theatrically faking a heart attack. After ordering food and drinks, he would put on an outrageous theatrical performance, clutching his chest and pretending to faint on the floor. The scam worked like a charm until one establishment owner saw right through the man’s act and started other local restaurants photos of him warning them not to fall for his heart-attack routine.

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China’s online store is becoming increasingly dominated by AI-powered clones that never tire of trying to sell you things and can literally work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

The Chinese online shopping scene is very different than what we’re used to in the West. Live streaming is by far the most lucrative marketing channel these days, with popular influencers on platforms like Taobao and Douyin able to close massive deals in just a few hours every day. However, these crazy achievements come at a cost for businesses and brands. It takes time and money to train a great online seller, and there is nothing stopping them from reaching an agreement with competitors, leaving you no option but to restart the process. Having camera crews and assistants around during the live stream also adds to the expenditures, and last, but definitely not least, every top influencer has to sleep at some point. That’s where AI-powered avatars come in…

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