Most of us heard the word ‘covid’ last year, in reference to the coronavirus that caused the ongoing pandemic, but it’s actually the name of an Arizona company that has been operating for about four decades.

Covid.inc is a company based in Tempe, Arizona. It specializes in high-quality audiovisual wall plates and cables, and sells its products all over the world. It has been in business for decades, but it as only last year that it  started making news headlines, for obvious reasons. Covid.inc CEO, Norm Carson, recalls the first time he learned that they shared the name of the disease that caused the latest pandemic in human history. He and his team were at a big audiovisual show in Amsterdam in February 2020, on the day that the name Covid-19 was uttered for the first time, and Carson remembers posing for countless pictures in front of his company’s sign at their booth.

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A 70-year-old Chinese woman has been dubbed “Super Grannie” after it was revealed that she is an avid runner, with over 100 marathons completed in the last two decades.

Most people choose to take it easy after they retire, but Liaoning-based Wang Lang is definitely not one of them. She only started running at the age of 50, as a way to keep in shape, but soon realized it was her passion. She ran her first marathon in 2004 and hasn’t stopped since, racking over 100 completed marathons under her belt. From 2005 to 2017 she completed the annual Beijing Marathon thirteen times, and this year she set a new record, becoming the oldest person to ever complete the 168-kilometer Liaoning marathon, within some 40 hours.

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An industrial design student has created a high-tech third eye that can be affixed to a person’s forehead and look out for obstacles as they walk, while their real eyes are glued to their smartphone.

There’s no denying that smartphones have become an integral part of modern life. Most of use spend hours every day staring at our handhelds, and some even do it as we walk or drive. You’ve probably seen funny clips of people falling into water fountains or holes  because they were looking at their phones, or maybe you’ve actually experienced something similar. Well, thanks to Minwook Paeng’s Third Eye, you’ll be able to text or browse Instagram as you walk, without fear of accidents.

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South Korean clothing brand Leje has been the talk of the town on Twitter after unveiling two very bizarre new jeans designs that look like wearable trompe l’oeil illusions.

Called “Slash Jeans”, the newest clothing items in Leje’s 2021 collection actually make your legs look like they’ve been slashed by a samurai or a ninja. At least that’s what they look like in the photos posted on the company’s Instagram, it remains to be seen if the effect is the same in real life. So how did Leje’s designers create this illusion? Well, it looks like they actually sliced the jeans and then stitched the pieces together unevenly, which is both simple and clever.

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Johnny Dawes, one of the influential rock climbers in history, and a true living legend in certain circles, has been getting a lot of attention in recent years for his no-handed climbing feats.

Dawes, aka the Stone Monkey, the Leaping Boy, the Dawes, has always been famous for his dynamic rock climbing style and bold ascents, but his most recent endeavors are probably the most impressive, at least to the untrained eye. Now in his late 50s, the English rock climber has dedicated himself to the esoteric discipline known as no-handed climbing, which as the name suggests, is all about climbing steep rock faces without using your hands. It sounds crazy, but it looks even more so.

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John Sevier Austin, a video editor from North Carolina, has a very unusual superpower – his brain allows him to speak and sing backwards, and is fluent in the unique “language”.

Ever since he was a young boy, Austin knew that he was a bit different than most children his age. Try as he might, he never fit in with the other kids, he could never be on the same page with them, and that really messed with his head growing up. It wasn’t until a few years ago that he found out he had Asperger’s syndrome, a neurodevelopmental disorder on the autism spectrum, which explained both his social awkwardness and his strange superpower – the ability to speak and sing backwards.

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A 23-year-old university student was recently sentenced to two and a half years in prison for swindling KFC out of about $31,000 in fast food, by taking advantage of an ordering loophole.

The student, surnamed Xu first discovered the glitch in 2018, and not only continued to use it to his benefit for the next six months, but he also shared it with friends and even profited financially from it. The Jiangsu-based student accidentally realized that he could order free food by paying for it using coupons in the official KFC app, and then immediately asking for a refund of the coupons using the company’s WeChat account. It was any KFC’s fan dream come true, all the fried chicken you could eat, totally free.

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Designer Yuru Zhang recently won a design competition with a thin, card-like lipstick inspired by the way Chinese women applied lip makeup hundreds of years ago.

The humble lipstick tube feels like it has been around forever, doesn’t it? It hasn’t obviously, but it has become some widely adopted that it is basically the only way most of us visualize lipstick. Well, one designer wants that to change and he has come up with an ingenious design for lipstick that looks nothing like the good old tube Maurice Levi invented back in 1915. Instead, he has come up with a slick, card-like design inspired by the sheets of pigment-infused paper that Chinese women used to apply lip makeup centuries ago.

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A small, oval-shaped face with a well-defined and pointy V-line chin is one of the most coveted female beauty features in many Asian countries, and they can apparently get it by simply sucking on a bottle-shaped gadget for 10 minutes a day.

You can buy pretty much anything online these days, but every once in a while we stumble upon products so bizarre that they make us scratch our heads an wonder who would ever pay money for them. Case in point, this weird beauty accessory on Chinese shopping platform TaoBao, which is supposed to help reshape users faces, if they suck on it for just 10 minutes a day. Marketed as an electric facial exerciser, the bottle-shaped gadget apparently vibrates up to 880 times per minute and it’s these high-frequency vibrations that somehow stimulate facial muscles and reshape your face.

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Scientists the world over have been struggling to contain the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus for almost two years, but one Indian numerologist believes we can cure the world of this pandemic just with the help of bad spelling.

SV Annandd Rao, a stenographer and numerology hobbyist from Ananthapuram, in India’s Andrash Pradesh state, believes that simply spelling “covid” and “corona” the wrong way can cure not only his home district, but the entire world of coronavirus. Apparently the numbers corresponding to the letters in the current spelling of these words add up to a very dangerous number, which will bring the world to its knees. But if we could change that terrible number to something beneficial, by simply adding some letters, than all will be well…

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Who knew watching and listening to a bartender chop block of ice into translucent jewels with a santoku knife could be so satisfying?

A Tokyo bartender recently got his five minutes of online fame after a video of him carefully turning blocks of ice into beautiful jewels went viral on Twitter, getting over one million views. It doesn’t sound like anything remotely interesting, but I spent close to an hour today just watching him slice the ice into almost perfects cubes and then cut the corners and sharp edges to create these crystal-like cubes for his patrons.

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Bugatti, a company known for its exclusive sport cars, recently unveiled a $300,000 luxury pool table that relies on highly advanced gyroscopic technology to remain perfectly level in any conditions, making it usable on yachts.

There are a few things in this world that money can’t buy, and until now, playing pool at sea was one of them. Try as they might, engineers could not design a table to negate the rocking of the boat and remain level. Until now, that is, because Bugatti apparently managed to create a self-leveling pool table that will allow the rich and powerful to enjoy a game of billiards on their expensive yachts.

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Egor Onopko, an up-and-coming blogger from Vladivostok, Russia, managed to attract a lot of media attention and make some nice pocket money by turning the right side of his neck into advertising space for interested individuals and businesses. No one really believed Onopko, who goes by “onokonda” on social media, would go through with the idea when he first announced it on Instagram, but last week, he posted visual proof that he had gone through with it, adding that he made around 1 million rubbles ($13,500) from the 10 sold advertising spots.

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A 47-year-old woman who went missing almost half a year ago in a canyon in Utah was recently found living in a small tent, surviving mostly on a diet of grass and moss.

The woman, whose name has not been released, was declared missing last November after her car and camping equipment were found in a parking lot near Spanish Fork Canyon, about 40 miles south of Salt Lake City. Utah County Sheriff’s Office searched the area, but could not locate her, and attempts to contact her relatives proved unsuccessful. In the end, authorities impounded the car and held her equipment, assuming that she had crossed into Colorado. Still, search and rescue teams continues to scour the area both on foot and from the air, and last weekend they finally found her.

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Austrian company Tec-Innovation recently unveiled smart shoes that use ultrasonic sensors to help people suffering from blindness of vision impairment to detect obstacles up to four meters away.

Known as InnoMake, the smart shoe aims to become a modern alternative to the decades-old walking stick that millions of people around the world depend on to get around as safely as possible. The currently available model relies on sensors to detect obstacles and warns the wearer via vibration and an audible alert sounded on a Bluetooth-linked smartphone. That sounds impressive enough, but the company is already working on a much more advanced version that incorporates cameras and artificial intelligence to not only detect obstacles but also their nature.

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