A 23-year-old English man who has never been on a date in his life is trying to find a girlfriend by advertising himself on a large highway-side billboard near his home city.

Ed Chapman claims to have spent his teenage years and his early 20s trying to find a girlfriend using more conventional means, like socializing and using dating apps, but with no success. So the 23-year-old man from Leeds, in the UK, decided that it was time for desperate measures. He put up some serious money to rent a large advertising banner next to the M621 motorway that goes into Leeds and crossed his fingers. He has already had more success with it than he did in his entire life, as he claims to have been overwhelmed by the number of messages from potential girlfriends.

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Photos and videos of people walking futuristic robot dogs instead of actual canines have been going viral in China lately, signaling a trend among the younger generations.

Robotic dogs inspired by the impressive creations of Boston Dynamics have been available on Chinese shopping platforms for a while now, but they’ve only recently started actually becoming popular. Although they are sometimes being described as soulless machines that can never compare to real dogs who love their owners unconditionally, there is no denying the advantages of robot pets, and judging by the increasing number of people spotted walking their robot dogs in China lately, they may one day rival the animals they emulate.

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Hajime, Japan’s most popular YouTuber, recently surprised his millions of subscribers by covering his body with the world’s blackest commercially-available paint.

Musou Black, a special type of paint developed and sold by Koyo Orient Japan, isn’t the world’s blackest paint. That title belongs to Vantablack, an incredibly black coating capable of absorbing up to 99.965% of visible light. It makes everything look like a black hole, but it is obscenely expensive and currently unavailable on the open market. Musou Black, on the other hand, absorbs a respectable 99.4% of visible light, making it the world’s second blackest paint, and it is available on Amazon for $17 per 100ml. So it was the ideal choice for someone wanting to become a walking shadow, or the blackest man on Earth.

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Monte Testaccio, an artificial mound in Rome composed almost entirely of broken pottery, might be the largest trash heap in the ancient world.

At first glance, Monte Testaccio looks like an ordinary greenery-covered mound, the likes of which can be found all over the world. But underneath all that shrubbery and the thin layer of dirt that supports it lies the largest pile of discarded pottery in the history of the ancient world. Covering an area of 2 hectares and with a volume of approximately 580,000 cubic meters, Monte Testaccio consists almost exclusively of millions of broken ancient pottery containers known as amphorae. It is estimated that this man-made mound consists of  53 million amphorae, which would make it the largest trash heap in the ancient world.

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Emel Espiritu, a young, talented artist from the Philippines, has been drawing a lot of attention because of his hyperrealistic portraits which are almost indistinguishable from photographs.

As a young boy, Emel Espiritu loved to draw, so his father taught him the basics. However, as he grew up, his interest for drawing only grew, but his father didn’t want him to pursue an artistic career and pushed him toward a more practical profession. Emel studied “fisheries” in college, but he never really got over his passion. He never stopped drawing. Instead, he honed his skills by watching YouTube tutorials and working odd jobs so he could afford painting supplies. Luckily, it all paid off, as the young artist is now famous for his ultra-realistic painted portraits.

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Australian company Tarmac Linemarking is trying out a new glow-in-the-dark type of road line that makes every road appear straight out of the classic sci-fi movie TRON.

Tarmac Linemarking recently made news headlines in its home country, with multiple high-profile media outlets covering its latest trial run of photoluminescent line markings on a one-kilometer-long stretch of road in rural Australia. Created in collaboration with two other companies – OmniGrip and Vic Roads – this ingenious product uses the natural science of photoluminescence to absorb light during the day and emit it in low-light conditions, making the road markings very visible.

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Saint Malo, a historic French port on the English Channel coast, is famous for having the highest tides in Europe, with breakwater defenses barely keeping giant waves from slamming into residential buildings.

Seeing Saint Malo at low tide and then again at high tide is like looking at two completely different towns. The buildings and the way they are laid out are the same, but the existence of a beach as wide as the eye can see at one point, and the complete lack thereof just a few hours later is truly strange. And not only does the ocean come in hard at high tide, but it’s strong as well, with giant waves pounding against the waterfront and splashing up to the top of exposed buildings.

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After hearing that her husband and his ex-girlfriend still had feelings for each other, an Indian woman facilitated their religious marriage and agreed to the woman moving in with them.

This bizarre love story comes to you from Tirupati, a city in India’s Andhra Pradesh state.  Kalyan, a local video content creator, married a woman named Vimala, after the two hit it off on social media. Everything was fine until the woman learned that her husband had a romantic relationship with another Indian influencer from Visakhapatnam who had just moved into their locality and was looking to patch things up with Kalyan. But instead of trying to get the man to leave his current wife, the ex-girlfriend wanted to join their family.

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Glass Symphony, a Ukrainian family-owned company specializing in hand-made glass sculptures, has become famous for its anatomically-correct arachnids.

Using a centuries-old technique known as lampworking, the artisans at Glass Symphony, use glass rods, extreme heat and fine wrist movements to manipulate colored glass into intricate miniatures. A gas burner is used to heat the glass to a temperature of 1800 degrees, after which trained artisans shape the glass into various animal-inspired shapes, from different species of spiders and locusts to snails and octopuses.

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Het Brekkense Wiel, Dutch for “The Broken Wheel”, is a unique waterside residential area and tourist attraction in the Netherlands.

Located between the Frisian Lakes and IJsselmeer, the largest lake in the Netherlands, the aptly-named Het Brekkense Wiel is a suburb made up of several properties on small plots of land resembling broken wheels and surrounded by water. Every building consists of several homes, each accessible both by car and by both, which makes this place very popular with water sports enthusiasts. Because of its unique layout and visually-impressive design – especially when seen from above – Het Brekkense Wiel is often considered an example of ingenious waterside urban planning.

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Tulsi, a small village in India’s Chhattisgarh state, has become known as ‘YouTube Village” because a third of its population makes videos for a living.

Online video content is more popular than ever, and it’s no wonder that millions of people around the world are working hard trying to build careers as video creators. But nowhere is the concentration of would-be YouTubers than in Tulsi Village, a small rural settlement in Chhattisgarh, where over a third of the 3,000-strong local population is actively making videos and posting them on YouTube for profit. Many of these creators used to be farmers, but after hearing that some of their peers had doubled, even tripled their income making YouTube videos, they decided that it was time for a career change.

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A Japanese man obsessed with women’s raincoats has been dubbed ‘Raincoat Man’ after stealing a total of 360 raincoats over a period of 13 years.

A 51-year-old man was recently arrested in Osaka, Japan, after being identified as the locally-famous ‘Raincoat Man’, a mysterious thief who authorities had been trying to identify for over a decade. Yoshido Yoda, who worked as a newspaper delivery man, was apparently obsessed with a garment known as ‘kappa’, a plastic or vinyl poncho worn over one’s clothes to protect them from rain. Upon searching his home, police found a staggering number of kappas -360 in total – with the oldest ones having been stolen in 2009.

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Measuring around 10 cm, with a diameter comparable to that of a cooked spaghetti, the Barbados Threadsnake (Tetracheilostoma carlae) is by far the smallest snake in the world.

Spotting a Barbados threadsnake for the first time, you could swear it was an earthworm. They are actually comparable in size and diameter, with the largest specimen ever found measuring only 10.4 centimeters, and are also blind. They also typically weigh under one gram and are small enough to coil on an American quarter. The species was officially discovered slithering beneath a rock near a patch of Barbadian forest in 2008 by evolutionary biologist S. Blair Hedges, but little has been discovered about its ecology and behavior since.

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A Louisiana man has been labeled a medical mystery after his skin color started changing from white to brown after taking antidepression medication.

In January of 2021, Tyler Monk, a 34-year-old pest-control field inspector from Louisiana, decided to treat his anxiety and depression. He saw a psychiatrist and he was prescribed the antidepressant fluoxetine, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor commonly known as Prozac. Unfortunately, not only did the medication fail to change Monk’s mood for the better, but after several months, the father of two’s complexion became visibly darker, until part of his skin was brown. Even though it’s been more than a year since he began noticing changes to his skin color, no one really knows what caused it.

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Russian trolls have come up with a new way of triggering Europeans dealing with inflated gas prices – broadcasting cheap Russian gas burning 24/7 on video streaming platforms like Twitch.

It all started on September 11, when a new Twitch channel aptly named “russiangas1” started broadcasting. The premise was simple – a phone aimed at a stove top with all four burners turned on broadcasting gas being burned 24/7. And if that wasn’t enough, the streamer decided it would be a good idea to show just how cheap burning all that gas would be for them – 1.44 euros per month ($1.35) – at a time when gas prices in Europe are higher than they’ve ever been. A thermometer constantly showed the audience how nice and warm it was in the room, and a digital clock showed that the video was live and not on a loop.

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