Despite failing the dreaded gaokao university entrance exam 25 times in a row, a 55-year-old man in China is still not giving up on his dream of attending college.

At age 55, Liang Shi is the owner of a successful building materials company in Chengdu, the capital of southwestern China’s Sichuan province. He has enough money to do whatever he wants, but he doesn’t fell completely fulfilled. That’s because he has been dreaming of getting into Sichuan University ever since he was a teenager, and he has yet to achieve his goal. At an age when most people are starting to think about retirement, Liang Shi is only focused on studying hard for this year’s gaokao university entrance exam. It will be his 26th attempt to pass it, and hopefully the last.

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If you’re the type of person who struggles with the classic Rubik’s Cube, you should stay far away from this “impossible” version that recently went on sale in Japan.

Designed by the wicked minds at Bandai Namco’s MegaHouse Co., the Rubik’s Cube Impossible is being marketed as the most challenging variant of the popular toy invented by Hungarian sculptor Ernő Rubik. The differences from the original are hard to identify at first glance, as the principle is exactly the same, the number of facets is identical, with the only different thing being the coloring. The difficulty of the Rubik’s Cube Impossible lies in the duality of the colors. Nearly all 54 facets are iridescent, meaning that they change color when looked at from different angles. That apparently makes it a lot harder to align all the colors, as the rules of the classic cube no longer apply.

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After losing her husband to a heart attack, an Indian woman spent 39 years pretending to be a man so she could raise her daughter alone in a patriarchal society.

S Petchiammal had only been married for 15 days when her husband succumbed to a massive heart attack. She was 20 years old at the time and pregnant with her daughter. Soon after giving birth, she started working various jobs to make ends meet, but raising a child as a single mother in Tamil Nadu’s Katunayakkanpatti village, a dominant patriarchal society, was tough. The young woman worked jobs at construction sites, hotels, and tea shops, but she faced harassment and sexual taunts every day, so one day she decided that she needed to make a big change.

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A 75-kilometer stretch of mountain road in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region has been dubbed a car sick person’s worst nightmare for its hundreds of hairpin turns.

Known as Pamir Plateau Sky road or the Panlong Ancient Road, the winding road traversing the Kunlun Mountains of  Xinjiang is one of the most visually impressive roads in the world. Seen from above, it looks like a giant grey dragon slithering through the Kashgar region of the Uygur Autonomous Region in China. It officially opened in July of 2019 to facilitate the passage through the Kunlun Mountains for the region’s farmers, but soon became a tourist attraction for driving enthusiasts wanting to test their skills. With an alleged 600 hairpin turns, this road isn’t for the faint of heart or for the car sick.

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Clive Wearing, once an accomplished musicologist and orchestra conductor, is now known as the man with the 30-second memory, and for having one of the worst cases of amnesia ever recorded.

Can you imagine being unable to remember most of your life or to make any kind of new memories? Most of us can’t even begin to understand what it must be like to do something or meet someone and then forget the entire experience in a matter of seconds. The most mundane things, like eating, waking up, or seeing a family member all melt like snow every 7 to 30 seconds, leaving a blank canvas that is wiped clean again at short intervals. It’s impossible to even imagine, and yet that has been the life of Clive Wearing, a former musicologist, conductor, tenor, and keyboardist, for nearly four decades now.

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A young Florida fashion designer and tattoo-loving mother-of-one has been getting a lot of the online for covering her one-year-old son in hyperrealistic temporary tattoos.

29-year-old Shamekia Morris, a fashion designer from West Palm Beach, started putting temporary tattoos on her son Treylin when he was only six months old, and it has since become a habit that she shares with thousands of fans on social media. Although the effect is admittedly quite striking, not everyone is a fan of Shamekia’s idea, with some going as far as calling her irresponsible or a bad mother. Still, the mother-of-one, who herself is covered in tattoos, said that she won’t let the criticism stop her from living a lifestyle that both she and her son enjoy.

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Esther Aular, a talented makeup artist from Bogota, Colombia, has been attracting a lot of attention on social media because of her impressive optical illusions.

The 29-year-old influencer, who goes by ‘Nekita’ on TikTok and Instagram, has been posting photos and videos of her transforming herself into various pop-icons and fantastic creatures using only her makeup skills and rudimentary props. From characters of popular cartoons like The Simpsons or Naruto, to brain-twisting illusions that leave viewers scratching their heads about how she did them, Nekita always finds ways of leaving her tens of thousands of fans in awe.

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A South African man recently sparked controversy in his home country for proposing to his girlfriend during her father’s funeral.

When it comes to marriage proposals, location and timing are everything, and it’s fair to say that funerals aren’t exactly the perfect place to pop the big question. But that didn’t stop one South African man from staging one of the most awkward proposals in history, asking his grieving girlfriend’s hand in marriage right at her father’s funeral, with his casket in the background. The shocking scene was filmed by another attendant who subsequently posted it on TikTok, where it immediately went viral, sparking a heated debate among users of the popular video-sharing platform.

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A couple in the Indian state of Uttarakhand has taken their son to court, asking him to either pay back the $650,000 they claim to have invested in him or give them a grandchild within a year.

Sanjeev and Sadhana Prasad filed a highly unusual lawsuit against their own son on the grounds of “mental harassment”. They claim to have invested substantial sums of money into his education and professional training over the years, helped him financially when he couldn’t find a job, and arranged and paid for his wedding in 2016. In return, they were expecting a “grandchild to play with” during their retirement years, only their son didn’t deliver as expected, so now the couple is taking legal action against him.

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Designer brand Balenciaga recently unveiled a new limited-edition line of footwear so damaged and dirty that most people wouldn’t be caught wearing it in public.

There’s such a thing as “distressed clothing” and it can actually look pretty nice, but sometimes designers go too far and we end up with some really weird products. Now, when it comes to pushing the envelope, Balenciaga is right up there with some of the most daring fashion brands, but being cutting edge comes with a high risk of looking ridiculous. Remember that Balenciaga skirt designed to look like a car mat? Not the fashion house’s best garment, but even that pales in comparison with its line of $1,450 destroyed sweaters. But if you happen to have bought one such extremely distressed sweater, at least you now have some banged-up sneakers to pair them with.

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Looking at Aboli Jarit, a young woman from Najapur, India, you would be forgiven for thinking her a child no older than six, even though she is really 19 years of age.

Aboli, who stands only 3ft 4in-tall, recently became a viral internet sensation after sharing her story. As a baby, Aboli was diagnosed with renal rickets, a very rare condition that combines chronic renal disease with bone deformity. To make matters worse, she was born without a bladder, so she has to wear diapers all the time, as urine simply flows continually, as it has nowhere to accumulate. The girl’s bones got progressively weaker as time went by, and she eventually became unable to walk, which was brutal, as she had always loved to sing and dance. Every day is a struggle for the 19-year-old, but somehow she finds the courage to be optimistic and see the glass half full.

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A couple that documents their family’s outdoor activities and athletic achievement on social media recently landed in hot water for encouraging their 6-year-old son to complete a 26.2-mile running marathon.

Kami and Ben Crawford routinely share their family’s athletic exploits with their tens of thousands of fans on YouTube and Instagram, but their latest challenge attracted more criticism than praise. Last week, the couple took to social media to post photos of their entire family running the Flying Pig marathon in Cincinatti. There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with that picture, except for the fact that their youngest son, Rainier, is only 6-years-old and the Flying Pig marathon is a whopping 26.2-mile run. The fact that he had to run for 8 hours and 35 minutes to finish the race was viewed by many as nothing less than torture for the young child.

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A Venezuelan man was recently arrested for allegedly implanting plastic lollipop sticks under the skin of dozens of people and tricking them into thinking that they were advanced contraceptive devices.

38-year-old Jose Daniel Lopez stands accused of tricking at least 25 women into paying him to implant simple lollipop sticks under their skin as contraceptives, thus causing some of them to become pregnant. Lopez, who had no medical qualifications, worked in health centers in La Victoria and Maracay, Venezuela, after falsifying his medical degree. He did have some notion of medical procedures, as he performed the subdermal implants himself, claiming they were “Implanon” an actual contraceptive procedure that involves small plastic rods being implanted under the skin of the upper arm.

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Deep in the Tengger Desert of Inner Mongolia, surrounded by sand dunes as far as the eye can see, lies the world’s loneliest post office, a surprisingly bustling outpost of human connection.

Measuring only 15 square meters, the wooden post office of Tengger Desert is not much to look at, but that’s ok, it doesn’t get too many visitors anyway. Besides, after being abandoned for over 35 years, it actually doesn’t look half bad. Thanks to the efforts of a few intrepid individuals who learned about the existence of an old abandoned desert post office by mistake, it has been given a new lease on life, and thanks to the magic of the internet, it has actually become quite a busy operation.

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In an attempt to get the coveted six-pack abs in time for the summer holidays, a man who hates going to the beach got himself a hyper-realistic six-pack tattoo.

It’s the same old story every spring. You try flexing your abs in the mirror only to find them covered by a thick layer of fat that you’ve been trying your hardest to ignore for months. You jump on the scale and are shocked to see you’ve put on a few pounds since last summer and with only a few weeks left until the beach season, you start to panic. It’s time to hit the gym, hard, but that’s just such a chore. If only there was a way to permanently turn that flabby belly into the chiseled physique of a bodybuilder. Well, as long as you’re not afraid of needles, there’s one goofy trick you may want to try.

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