The Polar Bear Hotel, part of the Harbin Polarland theme park in Heilongjiang, China, opened its gates this week to full bookings and criticism from animal lovers, after it was reported that all the rooms offer guests round the clock viewing of a polar bear enclosure.

Marketed as the world’s first “polar bear hotel”, the newest attraction at Harbin Polarland was jointly designed by famous Russian designer Kozylenko Natalia Yefremovna and Japanese theme park designer Shuji Miyajima. It’s built around a small polar bear enclosure, allowing guests to look at two captive polar bears both from the ground floor and from any of the 21 rooms available. The concept has attracted a lot of attention, both from people willing to pay a premium to book a room, and from animal activists who accused the establishment of profiting from the animal’s misery.

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Blackbird is a unique stone violin carved by Swedish sculptor Lars Widenfalk, based on drawings by Stradivarius, but with modifications that allow it to be played.

Lars Widenfalk came up with the idea of creating a violin out of stone in the late 1980s, while chiseling away at a piece of diabase and being impressed by the pleasant sound it made when hit with hammer and chisel. It wasn’t until 1990 that he finally got his hands on a piece of diabase large enough to be sculpted into a life-size violin, but as soon as he did, he got to work. In the end, he needed a second piece for the back of the violin, but after two years of hard work, Blackbird, the stone violin named after the homonymous bird, was finally completed.

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Deep Cave in Edwards County, Texas has more than one entrance, but daredevils prefer to use one so tight that it can make claustrophobes extremely uncomfortable just looking at it.

Videos of spelunkers literally squeezing themselves into Deep Cave through this incredibly tight hole in the ground have been doing the rounds online for years now, but frankly, they never get old. It’s terrifying, it’s electrifying, it’s something you don’t really want to see, but can’t really stop either. Even if you don’t really have a problem with tight spaces, seeing people going down this little hole is guaranteed to make your palms a little sweaty.

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Airparks, or fly-in communities, are residential neighborhoods designed specifically for people who own their own light airplanes and want to keep them parked in their driveways.

Apparently, there are around 650 airparks around the world, not exactly a small number, so why do so few people know they exist? Well, it may have something to do that most of us can’t afford out own personal airplane, let alone a house design to accommodate it. Living in one of these fly-in communities isn’t cheap. For example, the only available home in California’s Cameron Airpark Estates, one of the world’s nicest airparks, is currently listed on Zillow for $1.5 million. But that’s the price you pay for living in a place where light airplanes are as common, if not more so, than cars.

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It’s been 10 years since Yasuo Takamatsu lost his wife Yuko when a devastating tsunami hit the town of Onagawa, in Miyagi prefecture, but he continues to search for her every week.

On the day that Yuko disappeared, in 2011, Yasuo Takamatsu received one last text message from her. It read “Are you ok? I want to go home.” He has been looking for her ever since, and doesn’t plant to stop until he finds her or he stops drawing breath. In the beginning, the grieving husband searched for Yuko on land, starting at the bank where she was last seen, then along the beaches of Onagawa, in nearby forests and mountains. Two years after her disappearance, Yasuo contacted the local dive shop asking for diving lessons, so he could start searching for her in the sea. He has been going on weekly dives for the past seven and a half years, racking up almost 500 underwater searches.

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Japanese researchers recently the incredible ability of a sea slug to basically sever its own head and simply grow a new body, complete with fresh vital organs.

Autotomy, the behavior whereby an animal sheds or discards one or more of its own appendages, usually as self-defense mechanism, only to grow them back later, is well documented in the animal world. However, autotomy usually involves limbs or tails, appendages that don’t feature vital organs, whish is why a sea slug that can apparently sever its own head and then grow a new body complete with these vital organs has stunned scientists.

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Love Lake, a heart-shaped, man-made lake located in the desert near Dubai, is probably one of the most impressive attractions for romantic couples visiting the Middle-East.

From its iconic palm-shaped island, to skyscrapers like the Burj Khalifa, Dubai has no shortage of world-renowned attractions, but there is a lot more to discover in the desert around the most populated city in the UAE. One such hidden gems is the man-made Love Lake, technically two intertwined heart-shaped lakes situated near the Al Qudra Oasis. Measuring a whopping 550,000 square meters, this stunning tourist attraction is even visible from space.

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What do you get a man who has everything? Why, whiskey-infused luxury toothpicks, of course!

With so many things just one click away nowadays, it’s hard to surprise people with truly original gifts, but every once in a while you stumble across something special. For example, I was surfing the web yesterday, as I usually do, when something caught my eye. The words ‘whiskey’ and ‘toothpicks’ rarely go together in a sentence, but here they were in the name of a product I never imagined existed – whiskey-infused toothpicks.

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In a first-of-its-kind case in the UK, a 41-year-old unemployed Oxford graduate has taken his parents to court in a bizarre attempt to make them support him financially for life.

Despite being a trained lawyer and having a degree from the prestigious Oxford University, 41-year-old Faiz Siddiqui claims that he is completely dependent on his Dubai-based mother and father. In court filings obtained by the press, Siddiqui describes himself as a “vulnerable” grown-up child due to health issues, and insists that being cut-off by his wealthy parents would be a violation of his human rights.

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Colombian male model and influencer Yeferson Cossio recently shocked his millions of followers by showing off his new boobs, after undergoing a breast implant procedure as a challenge to himself.

Cossio, who has an impressive following on multiple social media platforms, like Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, specializes in pranks and edgy content, but even his most loyal fans were surprised by his latest stunt. Last month, the young model announced that he had made an interesting bet with his brother-in-law, fellow influencer Jhoan López. He had to reach the 3 million follower mark on Instagram in a certain period of time, and if he lost, he had to get breast implants. If he made it, than López had to get silicone implants. In the end, both men got boob jobs.

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A zoo in Xianning, Central China, has sparked outrage on social media after it was revealed that it had tried to pass off a Rottweiler as a wolf.

Footage showing a visitor to the Xiangwushan Zoo in Xianning, Hubei province, visiting the wolf enclosure only to find a Rottweiler resting inside went viral on Chinese social media last week. The man who recorded the video, a certain Mr. Xu, can be heard saying “Woof! Are you a wolf?” to the dog, which doesn’t seem to concerned with the fact that it looks nothing like a wolf. Xu later told Chinese journalists that he asked the zoo staff about the animal, and they told him that they used to have an actual age, but it died of old age.

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Nosy, an wearable air filter you put on your nose, has been getting a lot of attention because it makes wearers look like they activated the dog nose filter in real-life.

Designed to protect against airborne particles, Nosy is a slick and compact air filter and purifier that fits on your nose. Its patent-pending dual filtration system (Activated Carbon and HEPA filters) allegedly break down  toxic gases from fossil fuel emissions and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), while at the same time from particles down to 0.03 microns in size, like pollen, dust, mold spores, smoke, and more. But all anyone seems to be talking about these days is how funny people look wearing it. 

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Michelle Nguyen is a talented sugar flower artist whose creations are so insanely realistic that you can hardly tell them apart from the real thing.

Melbourne-based Michelle Nguyen is one of the world’s leading sugar flower artists, and looking at her portfolio, it’s easy to see why. From the life-like sugar petals, to the stunningly-detailed leaves, and the perfect color, there’s nothing separating her edible flowers from the actual plants that inspired them. Nguyen’s artworks are so impressive that she is constantly traveling the world attending events and teaching her craft to students wanting to master the art of making sugar flowers.

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Wilhelmstein Island, an artificial island on Lake Steinhude in the Hanover region of northwestern Germany, looks like the perfect place to isolate yourself during a pandemic.

The story of Wilhelmstein Island began in 1761, when Count Wilhelm von Schaumburg-Lippe, ruler of the County of Schaumburg-Lippe-Bückeburg and an important military commander in the Seven Years’ War, ordered the construction of a military fortress in the middle of Steinhude Meer, the largest lake in northern Germany. The military defensive complex originally consisted of 16 islands built on large foundations of stone transported to the middle of the lake by local fishermen in their boats. A star shaped fortress was built in the middle of the main island, and later a military college designed to train the leaders of the next generation.

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Minato-san, a 30-year-old male office worker and cosplay enthusiast, recently shocked Japanese social media with his transformation into an anime-inspired heroine.

It’s no secret that great cosplayers can alter their physical appearance to the extreme, but in some cases the change is downright scary. Take the case of Minato, a 30-year-old Japanese man who likes to cosplay as an anime girl, and is so good at it that it’s impossible to guess his gender by looking at him. With a clever use of makeup, modern accessories like prosthetic breasts, and a bit of digital manipulation, Minato-san can transform into a whole new person that often leaves the viewer confused.

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