A Chinese art student recently conducted an intriguing experiment in which she spent three weeks living the good life in Beijing without spending a dime, by pretending to be a well-off socialite.

Zou Yaqi, a 23-year-old art student at the University of Beijing has been getting a lot of attention for her unique graduation project which saw her disguising herself as a socialite in order to enjoy special treatment and help her survive for three weeks without spending any money. For most of May of this year, the young student slept on plush sofas in the lobbies of five-star hotels in the Chinese capital, sipping wine at various events and stuffing her face at free buffets. And she did it all just by pretending to be a rich socialite.

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An Australian man managed to break a decade-old Guinness record, after letting out a belch louder than the average electrical drill.

Neville Sharp, from Humpty Doo, Northern Territory, has been belching ever since his sister, Sandy, taught him how to do it when he was only six years old. He has been honing his “skill” ever since, but it was when his wife encouraged him to put his unusual talent to good use by going for a world record that he really started improving his belching. Neville has been practicing hard for the last five years, and in August of this year, the 51-year-old managed to break a record that had been standing for nearly 12 years, after letting out a 112.4-decibel burp.

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A Chinese man recently went through the worst week of his life after being arrested five times in only three days due to his uncanny resemblance to a prison escapee.

In October of 2021, a criminal by the name of Zhu Xianjian managed to escape from a prison in Northeast China’s Jilin Province. Authorities scrambled to locate him, but after spending valuable and time and resources they were forced to offer a 150,000 reward, which was then bumped up to 700,000 yuan, for any information on the fugitive’s whereabouts. This made Zhu a valuable target in a part of China where the average monthly income is only 2,000, and an unlucky doppelganger of the criminal suffered the most for it, after being arrested by police no less than five times in three days.

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A 50-year-old Italian man was caught trying to get a coronavirus vaccine certificate without actually getting the shot, by using a fake arm instead of his own.

Today, Italian media reported the bizarre case of a man who visited a vaccination center in Biella, northwest Italy on Thursday evening, claiming he wanted to get a dose of the Covid-19 vaccine. Everything went smoothly until the 50-year-old man, whose name was not made public for privacy reasons, was asked by the nurse to lift up his sleeve. He only partially revealed his upper arm, which the nurse thought was a bit odd, but she was only certain that something was wrong when she touched his skin and felt that it wasn’t quite the wrong texture…

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An Icelandic brewery has been getting a lot of attention because of its newest creation – a holiday beer that tastes like green peas and pickled red cabbage – which has been selling like crazy.

Ora jólabjór, the beer that has taken Iceland by storm, is brewed by RVK Brewing in a modest Rejkiavik brewery with an annual capacity of 50,000 liters. Master brewer Valgeir Valgeirsson had already made beer from unusual ingredients like seaweed or even dried fish, so when he received a call from preserved vegetable company Ora about a possible collaboration, he welcomed the challenge. Traditionally used as a side dish for smoked lamb leg and potatoes at Christmas, the preserved peas and pickled cabbage proved an excellent brewing ingredient, as the first batch of the unusual beer sold out in just six hours.

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Woodmere Avenue in Watford, UK, has become world-famous for an “evil” width restriction made up of six steel bollards after videos of cars crashing into it started going viral online.

On the 24th of March 1980, local authorities in Watford decided to combat rat-running through the city’s residential area by installing what would eventually become the most hated width restriction in the United Kingdom. Made up of six beefy steel bollards, this “abomination” limits the width of vehicles that can pass through it at 7 feet (2.1 meters), which, for a lot of motorists has proven too narrow, despite their vehicles being nowhere near 7-feet-wide. Despite countless complaints from local residents fed up with the mayhem of cars getting stopped in their tracks by the bollards, and motorists afraid they’ll suffer the same fate if they pass through, the width restriction has endured and recently achieved worldwide notoriety.

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Doctors at a hospital in Iraq recently conducted a complicated operation to extract a mysterious foreign body from the coccyx of a woman who had been paraplegic for two years.

Iraqi media recently reported the intriguing case of a 50-year-old woman who had been paraplegic for two years and recently found out that she had a mysterious foreign object lodged in her coccyx. Doctors from the Internal Medicine Department for Women at Al-Khalis General Hospital, in Al-Khalis conducted a series of tests, including X-rays, on the unnamed woman and noticed something odd in the coccyx area. There was a long foreign body that seemed to have penetrated her spine, so she was scheduled for emergency surgery.

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A 25-year-old man wound up in the emergency room with a collapsed lung after straining himself while singing karaoke at a friend’s birthday party.

Chinese media recently reported the bizarre case of a young man from Changsha, in China’s Hunan Province, who suffered a serious lung injury by trying to reach the high-pitch tones during a karaoke session. The man, known as Wang Zhe, reportedly attended a friend’s birthday party and decided to show off his voice by singing “New Drunken Concubine”, a song famous for the high-pitched tones it demands. When he reached the high-pitched part for the song, the 25-year-old man really gave it his all, only to feel a sharp pain in his chest which made him cut his act short. The pain was bearable, though, so he didn’t pay too much attention to it until the next day, when he found that he could barely breathe.

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Roberto Cazzaniga, a well-known Italian volleyball player, was scammed out of over $800,000 over 15 years by a scammer who posed as his online girlfriend and used photos of famous Brazilian supermodel Alessandra Ambrosio.

The current captain of the Gioia Del Colle volleyball club was introduced to his online girlfriend by a mutual friend, Manuela, who turned out to be the one behind this unbelievable scam. Using the fictional name ‘Maya’, the woman started sending Cazzaniga photos of Brazilian supermodel and Victoria’s Secret angel, Alessandra Ambrosio. The Italian athlete fell for her immediately and became involved in a very expensive 15-year-long online relationship with the scammer.

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Russian robotics company Promobot recently announced plans to buy the rights to use someone’s face and voice on its robots forever for the price of $200,000.

Known for producing hyper-realistic, humanlike robots, Promobot is currently developing “a humanoid robot-assistant which will work in hotels, shopping malls and other crowded places,” and is in the market for a “kind and friendly” face to use on it. To that end, the Russian startup has announced that it is ready to pay $200,000 to anyone willing to transfer the rights to their face to Promobot forever. The company clarified that it will accept applications from people of all races and genders, with the ‘age 25 and over’ being the only requirement mentioned.

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Three popular influencers were recently sentenced to over three years in a Russian penal colony for pranking the driver of a ride-sharing company by pretending to steal his car.

In March of 2021, the three bloggers decided to pull another one of their popular pranks and then post the footage on social media. They called an Uber-type taxi, and two of them got in the car and asked the driver to help their friend load some baggage in the trunk. When the driver got out of the vehicle, one of them got behind the wheel and drove off. The whole thing was caught on camera by one of their accomplices, who was filming from a few meters away, only to the driver, this seemed like an actual car theft, so by the time the vloggers brought the car back and explained that it had all been a joke, the police had already been notified. And they didn’t find the prank funny at all.

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Photos and videos of eggs with black yolks that were reportedly laid by a grey goose have been doing the rounds on social media and leaving experts scratching their heads.

The intriguing photos and videos of the black eggs were posted on Sina Weibo last week by a man surnamed Zhu from Hangzhou City, in China’s Zhejiang Province. He claimed that the eggs came from a friend of his who kept many grey geese on his farm, and who had gifted him batches of normal goose eggs before. Only this time, what looked like ordinary eggs of standard size and white color turned out to be somewhat of an oddity. When cracked, the eggs revealed a clear egg-white, but a dark grey, almost black yolk, instead of the normal yellow or light orange.

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In what can be described as one of the weirdest accidents of the year, a Filipino man was seriously hurt by a crocodile after climbing down into a pool to take a selfie with it, thinking it was just a realistic plastic model.

68-year-old Nehemias Chipada was visiting the Amaya View amusement park in Cagayan de Oro City, the Philippines, on November 10 when he spotted what he thought was a life-like model of a crocodile. It looked eerily realistic, so the Filipino man, who was celebrating his birthday with his family at the amusement park, climbed down to take a selfie with the cold-blooded reptile and even tapped it on the head. The thought that the 12-meter “model” could actually be a real crocodile never crossed his mind, at least until he got dangerously close to it and the reptile sank its teeth into his left arm…

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Keshav and Anjali Kumar, two young siblings from Jharkhand, India suffer from two rare conditions known as Cutis Laxa and Progeria, which make them look incredibly old for their age.

The Indian brother and sister originally made news headlines as the “Benjamin Button siblings” in 2016. Anjali was 7 at the time, and her younger brother was only 18-months-old, but they both already looked like octogenarians. And not only was their skin unusually wrinkly and saggy, but they both suffered from joint pain associated with old age. This paradoxical situation earned them the nickname ‘Benjamin Button siblings,’ after the fictional character in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story. Keshav and Anjali Kumar were diagnosed with progeria and cutis laxa, two exceptionally rare conditions that are, unfortunately, incurable.

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When it comes to telling when someone is lying, we currently have very few options, but a team of Israeli researchers claims to have come up with something better than anything we’ve seen before.

Using stickers printed on soft surfaces containing electrodes that monitor and measure the activity of muscles and nerves, a team of researchers led by Prof. Dino Levy from Tel Aviv University, discovered that some people involuntarily activate muscles in their cheeks and eyebrows when they lie. No sensors had been able to measure these subtle muscle contractions before, but the innovative ones invented by Prof. Yael Hanein and sold by Israeli company X-trodes proved sensitive enough. Tests revealed a 73% success rate of lie identification, better than any existing technology.

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