Patrick Magno, from San Diego, California, recently won the grand prize in a fitness competition after he managed to lose 49 pounds and get into enviable physical shape in just three months.

After a medical exam revealed that he was 30 per cent body fat and at high risk of developing type 2 diabetes, Patrick Magno decided it was time for a drastic lifestyle change. He was a social worker and had to remove children from broken homes, abusive parents and other harmful situations for a living, a job that he says had a severe effect on his lifestyle and overall health. So he quit, proposed to his girlfriend of six years and set his sights on improving his health so he wouldn’t end up like his father, who had to deal with the terrible symptoms of diabetes.

“I couldn’t even recognize myself,” he said. “I was embarrassed. I was disgusted. I was ashamed that I had let myself get to this point.” So when he learned about Bodybuilding.com’s 250k Challenge, a contest that has entrants transform their bodies with the help of grueling physical workouts, meal-plans and supplements, for the chance to win a substantial sum of money, he decided to go all in. ‘hey said they would give tons of nutritional meal plans, options, workout guides and fitness advice absolutely free of charge, and offer a $250,000 (£190,000) in prize money. It sounded a little too good to be true,” Magno remembers.

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An Indonesian woman who went to great lengths to impersonate a man and even married another woman was recently detained by police after “his” wife alerted authorities about the deception.

40-year-old Surwati, who like most Indonesian goes by a single name, admitted to falsifying her identity and impersonating a man. She had taken the name Muhamad Efendi Saputra and told people “he” was a police officer. Her male impersonating skills were apparently stellar because she managed to full everybody and even convinced a woman into marriage. After a whirlwind romance lasting a couple of months, Muhamad married 25-year-old Heniyati in a ceremony on Java island. To avoid raising any suspicions, Surwati reportedly hired a number of people to pose as relatives of her male alter ego at the wedding.

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It might sound like a silly idea, but it turns out that drawing eyes on the rumps of cattle might deter lions from attacking and prevent human retaliation against the mighty predators.

It sounds like a strategy to protect the poor cattle, but the idea is actually to protect endangered African lions from human retaliation. The majestic felines are on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, with numbers currently in the range of 23,000 to 39,000 and rapidly declining. “As protected conservation areas become smaller, lions are increasingly coming into contact with human populations, which are expanding to the boundaries of these protected areas,” says Dr Neil Jordan, a conservation biologist from UNSW’s Centre for Ecosystem Science. The lions attack livestock, and with no non-lethal way of protecting their livelihood farmers often shoot or poison the predators in retaliation.

To help humans and their cattle coexist with lions, Jordan has come up with a low-cost strategy that he hopes will prevent attacks and retaliatory violence. The idea behind painting a pair of intimidating eyes on the rumps of cows is that they will trick the lions into thinking they’ve been spotted, causing them to abandon the hunt. Scientists know that being seen can deter some species from attacking their prey. For example, Indian woodcutters have long been wearing worn masks on the back of their heads to trick man-eating tigers that they’ve been spotted, and butterflies with eye-patterns on their wings ward off predatory birds.

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Tom Currie, a 24-year-old Pokemon fan from New Zealand, recently quit his job so he could spend the next two months traveling all around the country to hunt all the Pokemon in the mobile game phenomenon Pokemon Go.

Currie was working at a Hibiscus Coast cafe in Auckland when he decided that in order to become the best Pokemon Go hunter the world has ever seen he would need to quit and focus all his attention on the app. Every morning, he fills up his flask with coffee, packs his lunch and heads out looking for new Pokemon to collect. He has already booked bus trips to various destinations around New Zealand, from Invercargill in the country’s South Island all the way up to Cape Reinga in North Island. When Newshub interviewed him two days ago, Tom had already managed to capture 90 of the 151 Pokemon released in the popular Nintendo app.

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A group of Buddhist monks from the Great Enlightenment Buddhist Institute Society, on Prince Edward Island, recently bought around 600 pounds of live lobsters from various restaurants and released them into the ocean.

600 pounds of lucky lobsters were spared the boiling cooking pot last Saturday when Buddhist monks in Little Sands bought as many of them as they could find around Prince Edward island with the purpose of setting them free. Enlightened Dan, of the Great Enlightenment Buddhist Institute Society, said the purpose of this unique mission was not to challenge people’s dietary options, but merely to send a message of compassion. “We respect everyone’s dietary choice, so we’re not doing this to convert everybody to be vegetarians or vegans,” he said. This whole purpose for us is to cultivate this compassion toward others. It doesn’t have to be lobsters, it can be worms, flies, any animals, drive slower so we don’t run over little critters on the street.”

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A grocery store owner in Japan recently paid 1.1 million yen ($11,000) for a bunch of grapes of the Ruby Roman variety. He now plans to put them on display in his store and then give them to customers as taste samples.

Special fruits are a status symbol in Japan, sort of like rare wines in the Western world. It’s also customary to give high-quality fruits for formal occasions like weddings, business meetings or hospital visits and there are specialized fruit shops that sell only the rarest, most perfect products, grown in special conditions to ensure they look and taste as good as possible. The truly exceptional fruits are regularly auctioned off to the highest bidder, who often gift them to people perceived to be of a higher status, as a sign of respect and appreciation.

The 30 grapes bought by Takamaru Konishi were the first of the Ruby Roman variety harvested this season. They were the size of ping pong balls, and the buyer himself called them “truly Ruby Roman gems”. Well, they better had been, to be worth $11,000, or $370 per grape.

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A pair of bold Ibiza entrepreneurs have come up with a way of making a bit of money by selling the island’s cheapest and most easily available commodity – air. “Aire de Ibiza” tin cans full of “pure and virgin” air cost just €5.90 ($6.5) and are apparently a big hit with tourists looking for special souvenirs.

Selling canned or bottled air isn’t exactly a new business idea. As far as we know, it all started in 2012, when Chinese billionaire Chen Guangbiao started selling cans of fresh air for about $0.80 a piece, as a way of raising awareness to the country’s air pollution problems. It wasn’t meant to be a real business venture, but it got people interested and before long, veritable bottled-air companies started popping out all across the globe. We even mentioned a few here on Oddity Central, like Vitality Air – a startup selling fresh Canadian air mainly to the Chinese market, Air de Montcuq – a company selling cans of fresh air from the French country side, or this group of Russian entrepreneurs selling air from Yeti’s cave.

But while the air cans sold by the companies mentioned above can be opened and savored, Aire de Ibiza tins are sealed shut on purpose, to prevent buyers from opening them. They are designed merely as souvenirs for tourists meant to bring back memories of their time on the island. While you’ll never be able to check for yourself, unless you’re willing to ruin the souvenir, the brilliant minds behind Aire de Ibiza claim that each can is filled with “100 percent pure air, no additives, made in Spain and gluten free”. The tongue-in-cheek description is a nice touch, but is it worth $6.5? Some people certainly don’t think so.

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An old woman from Harbin, China, has almost gone blind after enduring numerous beatings as a form of therapy. The simple-minded lady actually believed that by getting hit in the head and other parts of her body would actually improved her health.

The woman, known only by her surname – Bao – started attending “punching therapy” sessions in 2011, at the recommendation of a therapist  from the “Natural Shock Health Club.” Somehow, receiving heavy blows to the head, eyes and body didn’t convince Bao that the treatment was a seriously bad idea, so she kept attending the painful one-hour sessions twice or three times a week. She was apparently convinced that getting hit repeatedly could cure all illnesses, although anyone with a bit of common sense would probably realize the beatings would only cause illnesses, not cure them.

After enduring punching therapy about 160 times in 18 months, Bao started noticing that not only was the bizarre treatment not curing her health problems, but it was also affecting her vision. After receiving hard blows to the head and eyes, the woman found that she couldn’t see clearly out of her right eye. She apparently informed her Natural Shock Health Club therapist, who reassured her that it was a “normal reaction” of her body and that it would go away eventually. So she kept playing punching bag in the name of health, only her sight gradually got worse. She could barely see anything with her right eye, and after visiting an eye doctor, she was diagnosed with cataracts.

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German company Kaffeeform combines dried coffee grounds and biopolymer to create stylish-looking coffee cups and saucers that are not only durable and dishwasher-safe, but even smell a bit like coffee.

For every cup of coffee you brew, about two tablespoons of grounds wind up in the trash. That doesn’t seem like a lot, but just think about the millions of coffees consumed around the world every single day, and you’ll start to see the problem. Sure, some of those coffee grounds are recycled as fertilizer or beauty products like face masks, but most of it ends up at landfills. It was while contemplating this issue that German designer product designer Julian Lechner came up with a radical new and sustainable way of recycling coffee grounds – turning them into tableware.

Lechner first came up with the idea of using coffee grounds to create eco-friendly crockery while attending university in the Italian city of Bolzano. “We were always drinking coffee at university,” he remembers. “Before classes, after classes, meeting friends, hanging out at espresso bars—all the time. And that’s how I started to wonder, What happens to all that coffee? It was all just getting thrown away.” He began consulting with his professors about ways of using coffee grounds to create a solid material, but it took him years to actually come up with a viable solution.

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36-year-old Richard Kimberley, of Kidderminster, Worcestershire, has been running his “csmicros” computer repair business for the last 20 years, but he plans to close it down on July 22nd, claiming radiation signals from wireless technology have given him a rare condition known as electro-hypersensitivity (EHS).

Ever since he launched his business in 1996, Richard has been working around phones, computers and Wi-Fi signals on a regular basis, and he believes the constant exposure to technology has taken a toll on his health. “Due to an over-exposure to the radiation from wireless technology, my health has declined to the point where I cannot continue with the business that I have spent my life building,” he says. “I’d wake up five or six times in a night, my joints were aching, I’d have headaches during the day and my memory was awful – I felt atrocious and I had no idea why. I’ve had to rely on staff for the past 18 months since becoming EHS. I have persevered, battling with electro-hypersensitivity for as long as I can.”

Mr. Kimberley said that his problems began in 2013, when he moved into a dual shop and house premise on Stourport Road, Kidderminster. He started experiencing black outs, headaches and extreme tiredness, yet his condition improved when he removed wireless technology from the house. But wireless technology is everywhere these days, and his electro-hypersensitivity has made it really hard for Richard to live a normal life. Since October last year, he has been living in a van fitted with aluminium lining to block out radiation signals. He says the only way to avoid feeling sick is to park the van in spots he feels are safe, every night.

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About a month ago, a Russian vigilante wearing a Batman costume declared war on drug dealers doing business in the Khimki area outside Moscow. So far, he claims to have captured around 40 criminals.

It all started at the beginning of June, when a taxi driver witnessed a man dressed as Batman entering a building that later proved to be a drug den, in the middle of the night. He told police that he soon started hearing people screaming and things being thrown around inside. The mysterious man then walked out, threw some sort of fire bomb at the ground and disappeared into the shadows. A few minutes later, law enforcement arrived at the scene, entered the building and walked out with two men in handcuffs. The witness, identified only as Slava, said the men were beat up pretty badly.

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It’s quite natural for lizards and snakes to lie on hot rocks in the scorching sun, because they have to thermoregulate, but when middle-aged and elderly women in the Chinese city of Xi’an started doing it, people started raising their eyebrows in surprise.

It turns out lying on large stone boulders in the hot sun is this year’s summer health trend among the women of Xi’an. Elderly and middle-aged women can be seen hugging rocks or simply lying on them with towels on their faces all around the city, from parks to squares and pretty much wherever else large, sun-heated rocks can be found.

At first, people thought the women were engaging in some mysterious artistic performance, but local reporters approached them, they said it was a traditional medical treatment to help them cure various illnesses. One woman, identified only by her surname, Lo, said that she started lying on hot rocks to treat her synovitis and stiff muscles, after a relative suffering from similar ailments did it for an extended period of time and got cured. Apparently, the best time to practice laying on rocks is between 3 and 4 p.m., when the sun burns the hottest.

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Arya Permana, a 10-year-old boy from Indonesia, has been dubbed the fattest child in the world after it was reported that he weighs a whopping 192 kilograms. His heavy frame has left him unable to walk, attend school or find cloths that will fit him.

Arya, from the village of Cipurwasari in Indonesia’s Arawang Regency, started gaining weight rapidly at the age of two, when his parents noticed that he was much larger that his older brothers had been at his age. In the beginning, they were happy about his fuller figure and considered him a healthy child, but as the years went by and his appetite and weight got out of control, they realized something was wrong with the boy and he needed medical attention. They took Arya to several doctors, but none of them found his weight abnormal and told the parents to take him to a bigger hospital if they thought he needed help.

“They asked us to take him to better hospitals if we think he needs medical attention. I have spent money beyond my capacity on his treatment but I am a poor farmer and making ends meet is a big task for me,” the boy’s father, Ade, said. “I am exhausted now and I cannot afford expensive hospitals. But I hope to see my son perfectly normal one day.”

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A heartwarming 3-minute video showing a young girl guiding her blind father to work on a coconut plantation in the Philippines recently went viral on Facebook and changed the lives of its protagonists.

The video shows five-year-old Jenny, walking barefoot as she guides her blind father, Pepe “Dodong” Nelson, around a coconut farm, using a small wooden stick. She can be seen helping him avoid other people as they make their way through the coconut trees and guiding him to his lunch of crackers and water. With her help, Nelson manages to climb around 60 trees every day, for a pay of around 300 pesos ($6), barely enough to put food on their table.

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German sneaker company nat-2 has recently unveiled the world’s first vegan wooden sneakers which are up to 90% real sustainable wood.

Just last week, we wrote about Piñatex – a new material made from pineapple leaves that is all set to become a sustainable alternative to animal leather – and today we present yet another interesting innovation, wooden footwear. According to a press release by German high-end sneaker brand nat-2, to make it flexible “the wood is applied to an organic cotton and vector engraved in a way that the material bends and becomes soft and flexible like a fine nappa leather. The feel is very smooth and fine, while you can smell the wood and see the tree’s natural texture.”

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