The gynecology ward at the Nong Krot Hospital, in Thailand’s Kamphaeng Phet province, looked more like a masked ball hall a couple of days ago, as both patients and staff wore masks to conceal their faces. The initiative was meant to make women more comfortable about getting a pap smear test.

Named after its inventor, Greek doctor Giorgios Papanikolaou, the pap smear is a medical test that can detect abnormal cells that have the potential to cause cervical cancer. It involves collecting cells with a small brush from the cervix, a procedure that many Thai women apparently find so embarrassing that they would rather risk their lives to avoid. So to make it more comfortable for them, the Sa Kaew sub-district office and the Nong Krot Hospital came up with an unconventional solution – providing masks to both patients and staff.

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For years, experts have suggested that 50,000 volts of static electricity is the highest threshold that the human body can withstand, but one Chinese scientist recently proved them wrong by passing 71,000 volts through his body and living to tell the tale.

Liu Shangshe, an academic at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, in Beijing, recently took a very hands-on approach to testing the human threshold for static electricity. In a controversial experiment to determine how much static electricity the human body can withstand, the Chinese researcher passed 71,000 volts of static electricity through his own body. According to Chinese media, Shangshe’s assistants started at 20,000 volts, ramping up the voltage in stages, causing all the hair on his body to stand on end with every discharge.

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Tattoos have always been considered a visual medium, but thank to an innovative blend of art and technology, you can now listen to your skin art by using a smartphone app. Be it the voice of a loved one, your favorite song or a motivational quote, you’ll be able to take it everywhere with you and listen to it anytime you like.

Los Angeles-based tattoo artist Nate Siggard came up with the idea for audible tattoos when two friends came in to get the opening line from Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” inked into their skin. The artist’s girlfriend casually said that it would be cool if you could actually listen to it, and her comment was apparently enough for Nate to pursue this seemingly crazy idea further.

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After losing his entire family a long time ago, a Chinese doctor built his own mausoleum in the mountains of Hunan Province and has been living in it ever since, waiting for his eternal rest.

92-year-old Liang Fusheng had a beautiful family once, but he lost both his wife and his three children to disease, years ago. Left with no one to take care of him in his old age and unwilling to become a burden for the villagers he had spent a lifetime looking after, the grieving doctor started building his own mausoleum in the 1990s. He paid the villagers to carry construction materials up the rocky terrain all the way to a steep cliff overlooking the deep valley he called home, and spent 14 years and 260,000 yuan ($38,000) building his eternal resting place.

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Luis Padron, a 25-year-old fantasy fan and cosplay enthusiast from Argentina, has spent tens of thousands of dollars altering his looks in his desire to become a real-life elf.

Luis says he became obsessed with fantastic beings like elves and angels after being bullied as a child. He used to get picked on because he dyed his hair and had a different dress style than most boys his age, and since he didn’t have many friends growing up, he spent all of his free time reading fantasy books and dressing as his favorite characters. By the end of high-school, his unusual looks and natural quirkiness let to him becoming admired, and that just fueled his desire to be different. Now, he’s trying to make the changes permanent with the help of cosmetic medical procedures.

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A 28-year-old woman recently ended up in the emergency room at University Hospital of Santander (HUS) in Bucaramanga, Colombia, after swallowing over $9,000 in $100 bills to make sure that her ex didn’t get half of it.

The bizarre incident took place on April 22, when Sandra Milena Almeida showed up at the hospital complaining of severe stomach pain. Doctors quickly realized that the 28-year-old woman had a gastric obstruction so she was rushed into the operating room for emergency surgery. When they opened her up, doctors were shocked to find that Almeida’s stomach was full of rolled up $100 bills. They managed to extract most of the money from the small intestine, with the rest making its way through the colon to be evacuated naturally.

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What was supposed to be the happiest day of their lives turned into a complete nightmare for a young couple in China, after it was revealed that the groom had hired 200 random people to act as his friends and relatives at the wedding.

The groom, known only by his surname, Wang, and his fiancee, Xiaoli, were supposed to tie the knot on Sunday, April 30th, during a big wedding banquet at a hotel in Xian, China’s Shaanxi Province. Everything was going according to plan up to the point when the family of the bride noticed that half of the tables reserved for the groom’s guests laid empty. Wang kept telling them that they were on their way, but the bride and her parents really became suspicious of him after talking to the few guests that were seated at his tables and noticing that while they all said that they were Wang’s friends, they couldn’t really say how they knew him.

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Can you imagine being able to remember every single experience of your life, every conversation you have ever had, every meal you’ve eaten, every word in your favorite book and even the feel of the clothes you wore on your very first birthday? That’s what Becky Sharrock’s life is like, and as amazing as that ability sounds, she says it can also be quite terrifying at times.

Three years ago, Rebecca Sharrock was reading a newspaper article which mentioned that it was impossible for people to remember details of their lives that had occurred during the first four years of their existence. “What absolute nonsense,” she thought to herself, because she could clearly remember her life all the way back to when she was just 12 days old. Her parents had carried her to the driver’s seat of their car and laid her down for a photo. She remembers looking around and wondering what the seat cover and steering wheel above her were. But it wasn’t nonsense, she was just one of only 80 known people suffering from a mysterious condition called Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM).

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They say age is just a number, and watching 98-year-old V Nanammal effortlessly execute a wide range of difficult yoga poses that practitioners decades her junior still struggle with, I’m inclined to believe that they’re absolutely right. Recognized as the oldest yoga instructor in India, and the second oldest in the world, Nanammal has inspired a whole generation of Indian youths to take the ancient art.

V Nanammal started doing yoga when she was 8, picking up the basics from her father, who was a martial artist. She then continued learning the secrets of the practice under the guidance of her grandfather, in her home town of Coimbatore, India’s Tamid Nadu state. After getting married, Nanammal continued learning yoga from her father-in-law, and soon started teaching others. The elderly yoga instructor says that she never stopped practicing yoga for the last nine decades of her life, and credits it for her good health and incredible flexibility. She claims to have never been to the hospital or even taken any kind of medicine. “I never stopped practicing yoga at any point in my life. That’s the secret of my health,” she says.

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With millions of Chinese visiting the country’s sacred mountains every year, keeping them trash-free is incredibly difficult. Luckily, that’s where the Spiderman cleaners come in. These dedicated men an women risk their lives on a daily basis, rappelling down steep cliffs to reach plastic bottles, bags and various other garbage thrown there by uncivilized tourists.

Spiderman cleaners get their name from the dangerous nature of their job. Photos released in the media show them dangling thousands of feet above ground on the side of steep mountain cliffs, supported only by ropes or cables, as they attempt to collect hard-to-reach trash. In an attempt to highlight the danger of their work and make tourists think twice before littering, some of the cleaners actually exchanged their regular uniforms for Spiderman costumes. This has made them a hit with visitors, who often stop to watch these real-life versions of their favorite superhero descend into the abyss to pick up a piece of trash, rewarding them with applause and cheers when they complete their mission.

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Climbing into a bed and just dozing off for 45 minutes doesn’t sound like the kind of thing you’d expect to be doing in a gym, but one UK fitness club claims that its “napercise” classes can help exhausted parents better deal with their hectic daily lives by regenerating the mind, body and even burning a few calories.

New research recently revealed that there is a dangerous “tiredness epidemic” currently sweeping the UK, with 86% of parents reporting that they suffer from fatigue and 26% saying that they get less than five hours of sleep per night. In an effort to promote the benefits of sleep and boost people’s mental and physical wellbeing, David Lloyd Club, which operates dozens of gyms and fitness clubs throughout Europe, recently launched a “napercise class” that invites people to get 45 minutes of shut-eye instead of instead of burning themselves out even more with traditional fitness exercises.

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A bizarre beauty craze has been sweeping Thailand for the last 5 years, with women spending thousands of dollars to have their upper lip reshaped as buffalo horns. Known as “krachap lips”, the cosmetic procedure is apparently only popular in Thailand.

Named after the water chestnut or buffalo nut – known as krachap in Thailand – because of its shape, which resembles a buffalo head or a flying bat, the controversial cosmetic procedure has become increasingly popular among young women over the last four or five years. It’s unclear how the trend began, but posts on the plastic surgery internet forum Dungdong reveal that people had been talking about the bow-like upper lip shape as early as 2009, in a desire to copy the look of actress Patcharapa “Aum” Chaichua. But it’s been getting worse in the last couple of years and plastic surgeons are desperate to stop it.

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17-year-old Brennan Agranoff started his custom sock business in middle school, with a small loan he got from his parents. He has so far sold over $1 million worth of socks online in the last four years and is now planning to get his wacky socks into retail stores as well.

Brennan came up with the idea for his custom sock company at just 13 years old. He was attending a high-school basketball game in his home town of Sherwood, Oregon, and noticed that many kids his age were wearing the same white Nike sport socks. The young entrepreneur told himself that if these plain white socks were so popular with kids, then some cool custom designs would surely be an even greater hit.

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Sitting in traffic, or trying to change lanes on a busy highway are not the most relaxing things in the world, but one Indianapolis entrepreneur thinks that sitting idly on the side of a highway and watching other drivers go through these daily ordeals can be quite entertaining and even therapeutic.

Most motorists drive past the big grassy space between the I-65 and I-70 highways in Indianapolis without giving it a second thought, but local businessman Tom Battista thinks the undeveloped land has the potential to provide entertainment in the form of traffic. He wants to turn it into a gathering spot where people can get together to socialize and relax by watching cars zoom by or just sit in traffic. Tom acknowledges that it’s a crazy idea, but he’s also sure that people will love it.

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If you thought your hairstylist was a little rough, you’ve probably never seen Russian hairdresser Daniil Istomin work. He taught himself to cut hair with a sharp hatchet instead of scissors, and while the process is allegedly very effective, it’s also about as brutal as you can imagine.

Like many other hairstylists, Daniil wanted to come up with an idea to set himself apart from the competition. Inspired by old stories about how rugged men once shaved their beards, he started experimenting with a very sharp axe about two years ago, and steadily improved his hair-cutting skills. He worked on mannequins at first, and as he built up his confidence, he started asking women if they’d  let him chop their head hair off. Some of them, the “crazy ones, as Daniil calls them, actually agreed.

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