Sick of the skinny bodies and perfect faces of K-pop boybands like BTS? Looking for something more ordinary? Check out Produce Pandas, China’s first chubby boyband.

As their band name suggest, the five members of Produce Pandas all resemble cute pandas – “huggable, chubby shape, relaxed and happy attitude. At least that’s lead dancer Mr 17 claims. Although their mission is very similar to that of the hundreds of cookie cutter boybands in China – to promote positivity and act as good role models – they have adopted a very different look. Instead of the anime-inspired looks and eyeliner usually associated with Asian boybands, Panda Produce members just look like average joes, and that’s apparently by design.

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You’ve probably experienced foul smells before, but as bad as you remember them stinking, scientists say it’s nothing compared to the stench of thioacetone, the world’s smelliest chemical compound.

Trash left in the can too long on a summer day, sewage, or the smell of public toilets uncleaned for multiple days, we can all agree that they stink, but their stench is not classified as dangerous to human life. However the foul aroma of the rare chemical known as thioacetone, is. This simple molecule is somewhat tricky to produce, as at temperatures above -20°C it will clump together to form a solid called trithioacetone, but on the rare occasions that humanity did create it, thioacetone managed to make its presence felt, quite literally.

The most famous story about the stench of thioacetone dates back to1889, when workers at a factory in the German city of Freiberg attempted to produce the simple yet potent chemical, and accidentally created panic among the city’s residents. Their success led to “an offensive smell spreading rapidly over a great area of the town, causing fainting, vomiting and a panic evacuation”.

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Japanese artist Kotetsu blends illustration photography and kirie (Japanese traditional paper cutting) to create beautiful works of art that bring anime heroines into the real world.

Instead of using ink or colored pencils to color the outfits of his illustrations, Kotetsu cuts out the paper canvas and juxtaposes his creations against various backdrops, thus letting Mother Nature do the coloring for him. The result is stunning, often-times bordering on breathtaking. From autumn foliage, and fields full of flowers, to picturesque sunsets and starry night skies, Kotetsu uses nature’s most beautiful elements to complete his artworks.

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A former beauty pageant winner from Guinea has taken a Swiss skin-care product company to court for allegedly ruined her once healthy complexion and ruining her modelling career.

25-year-old Mariama Diallo, who previously won Miss Guinea, Miss West Africa and participated in the Miss World pageant, had a successful modelling career until three years ago, when trying a new skincare product left her face full of blemishes and scars. She has been struggling to find work since 2018, as the healing process has been very slow and no company would hire her. Diallo has now taken the manufacturer of the product she claims ruined her career to court.

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Touching your girlfriend isn’t generally considered a punishable offence, but things change considerably when your date for the day is a rental.

A Taiwanese university student learned that the hard way, after getting a bit too close to a girlfriends he had rented by the hour, and getting sentenced to jail for it. In July of 2019, the boy, identified only as ‘Chen’, paid 7,200 Taiwanese dollars ($260) to rent a girlfriend for three hours, from a company called “Love Acting-Extra”. The service had very specific rules detailing what the client was allowed to to with his rented girlfriend, but also what was forbidden. Unfortunately for Chen, he got carried away, and paid a steep price for it…

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Respected Indian herpetologist Neelam Kumar Khaire has a very interesting record to his name. In his youth, this reptile lover spent 72 hours in an enclosure with 72 venomous snakes for company. He proved that the snakes only bite when provoked, and set a Guinness record in the process.

Khaire’s legendary feat dates back to 1980, when the then 28-year-old receptionist at a hotel in Pune decided to challenge the record set by South African Peter Snyemaris, a year before. Snyemaris had spent 50 hours with 18 venomous and six semi-poisonous snakes in Johannesburg, South Africa, but Neelam believed that an Indian deserved the world record more, seeing as India was known as a land of snakes. Despite opposition from local authorities like the police, which would neither take him seriously nor permit him to go ahead with his plan, on January 20, 1980, Neelam Kumar Khaire stepped in a glass enclosure with 72 venomous snakes.

Neelam Kumar Khaire fell in love with snakes in his early 20s, while working as the manager of a holiday home at Matheran, near Bombay. Snakes were frequent visitors of that place, and even though the other members of the staff simply killed them on sight, he could never do the same.

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44-year-old Niel Kenmuir suffers from aphantashia, a rare and strange medical condition that prevents him from visualizing things in his head.

Niel first realized that there was something different about his brain when he was in primary school. He had trouble falling asleep at night, so his step-father told him to close his eyes and visualize a flock of sheep and count them as they jump over a fence, one by one. The problem was he couldn’t see anything when he closed his eyes, no sheep, no fence, nothing. Later on, he would discover that he had a blind mind’s eye, which means he cannot visualize anything, not even the face of loved ones.

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Doctors recently reported the strange case of a 30-year-old man who injected magic mushrooms into his bloodstream, only to find that they had started growing in his veins.

The Journal of the Academy of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry published a case report about a man who sought to self-medicate for opioid dependence and depression by injecting magic mushrooms directly into his blood. Referred to as “Mr. X”, for anonymity purposes, the man had reportedly been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and had stopped taking his prescribed medication. Instead, he had started researching the therapeutic effects of psilocybin, a naturally occurring psychedelic found in over 200 species of mushrooms, as a way to treat his condition and decrease his reliance on opioids. The compound had been shown to be effective in treating symptoms like depression and anxiety in numerous medical trials, but only when consumed orally. Mr. X had other plans…

The protagonist of this strange story reportedly managed to get his hands on psychedelic mushrooms, which he boiled to obtain a “tea”, which he then proceeded to filter through a cotton swab, and then inject directly into his bloodstream.

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A 58-year-old French woman has been fight to get her life back, after being wrongfully declared dead by a court, during a long-running dispute with a former employee.

Jeanne Pouchain has been trying to prove she is alive and well for three years, ever since a labor court declared her dead, allegedly acting on information provided by one of her former employees, who she was in a legal dispute with. The verdict not only ended a decade-long lawsuit between Pouchain and her ex-employee, it also ruined her life as a citizen. Her name was wiped from official records, she lost her ID card, her driver’s license, medical insurance, bank account, everything. It was like she didn’t exist anymore.

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A computer programmer who years ago wrote down the password to a cryptocurrency wallet on a piece of paper, has since lost the said paper, and with it access to around $220 million in Bitcoin.

Can you imagine having over $200 million and no way to ever access it? That’s exactly the story of San Francisco-based programmer Stefan Thomas, who has been trying to remember the password of his IronKey, a special hard-drive that contains the private keys to a digital wallet with 7,002 Bitcoin. He received the digital currency 10 years ago, while living in Switzerland, from an early Bitcoin adopter, as payment for an animated video he made, titled “What is Bitcoin?”. He lost the password to his IronKey that same year, but since a Bitcoin was only worth around $5 back then, it didn’t bother him that much. Things have changed a bit since then, though…

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An unnamed wannabe driver from the UK has reportedly managed to pass the driving knowledge test after failing to answer enough questions correctly a whopping 157 times.

The United Kingdom’s Driving and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) recently reported a new record for the number of times someone failed the driving knowledge test before finally passing. A man, whose name was not disclosed for privacy reasons, reportedly managed to pass the theory test after previously failing it 157 times, and spending £3,000 ($4,100) in the process. The man was billed a candidate for the title of world’s worst driver by several media outlets, but others called him an example of perseverance.

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The D’Cruz siblings, whose ages range from 75 to 97 years, recently set a new Guinness World Record for the highest combined age, 1042 years and 315 days.

The idea of setting a Guinness record was first mentioned among the D’Cruz family members during a reunion in 2018. 75-year-old Genia, the youngest of the 12 siblings, recalls one of her nephews going “This is amazing. I’m going to write Guinness,” after seeing the family together. They all laughed it off as a joke, but two years later, on December 15, Guinness actually called to let them know that they had been recognized as having the highest combined age of any siblings in the world, 1042 years and 315 days.

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A popular plant-based meal subscription service is offering the ‘UK’s biggest meat-eater’ the chance to earn £50,000 ($68,000) by going vegan for three months.

Vibrant Vegan recently announced that it is on the lookout for a Vegan Curious Coordinator, a die-hard meat-eater willing to experience an exclusively vegan lifestyle for at least three months. The selected person will have to sign a contract, pledging to not consume any animal-based foods during the three-month trial, while at the same time encouraging others to give veganism a go on social media. If they abide by the agreement, they stand to earn the the equivalent of a £50,000 salary.

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Coquitos, also known as pigmy coconuts or dwarf coconuts, are the tiny equivalent of the coconuts we all know (and some of us love).

It’s hard to believe that I spent over three decades on this Earth and only learned that there is such a thing as a tiny, marble-sized coconut, today. Well, it may be common knowledge to a lot of people – especially if you’re from, or have travelled to South America – but it’s definitely news to me, so I thought I’d share it with similarly clueless people like myself. Known as coquitos, these miniature coconuts are the fruit of  Jubaea chilensis, a feather-leaved palm native to Chile, and, just like regular coconuts, they have a brown exterior, a white interior with a hollow center, and very similar taste.

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Photos of a young topless man wrapped in plastic foil and tied to a tree in Hanoi for allegedly failing to pay for his tattoos have been doing the rounds on Vietnamese social media.

It’s winter in Vietnam right now, with temperatures dropping under 10 degrees Celsius, so seeing topless men on the streets isn’t what you would call normal, especially ones wrapped tightly in plastic foil and tied to trees. And yet this was the sight some in Hanoi were treated to last week – a young shirtless man wearing a bike helmet, wrapped in see-through plastic and tied to a tree, with a sign that read “I hate paying for tattoos“. Photos of the man were posted online, and quickly went viral.

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