Adrien Locatelli, a young bio-hacker from the French city of Grenoble, has been called an “idiot” for undergoing a bizarre DIY experiment in which he injected himself with a DNA pattern made from translated passages from the Bible and the Koran.

Locatelli, who is believed to still be in high-school, started off by selecting passages from the Christian and Muslim holy books that he wanted stored in his body in the form of DNA. He then assigned one of the four letters corresponding to the chemicals that DNA is made of (ACGT) to every character in the passages, in the order GACT. Using a free online tool, the daring experimenter translated the nucleotide information into protein sequences that he ended up injecting into his thighs. Why? Simply because he was curious to know if it could be done.

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They’ve been called the “world’s most beautiful cats”, and they’ve been mesmerizing social media users with their heterochromatic eyes for the past couple of years. They are Iriss and Abyss, the feline twins taking Instagram by storm.

Iriss and Abyss have nearly 200,000 followers on Instagram who love nothing more than to watch the two gorgeous white cats show off their differently colored eyes. Many of their fans are convinced that the two are pure-bred Angora or Turkish Van specimens, but they are in fact cross-bred from a white domestic cat and a black and white cat, and owe their social-media fame to winning the genetic lottery. Their Russian owner says that the fact that the two felines were born with white coats and heterochromatic eyes – yellow and the other one blue – is nothing short of a natural miracle.

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Imagine working as a shop assistant at a jewelry store and having to jump over the glass counter to stop a potential client who’s sprinting towards the door with an expensive necklace around their neck. You’re about to lay your hands on them when they abruptly stop in front of the mirror to admire the jewelry, as if they had never planned to run off with it. That’s the world Chinese shop assistants are living in these days, because of a viral jewelry-stealing prank trend.

Chinese social media has been flooded with videos of people putting on expensive jewelry at jewelry stores and then pretending to run out only to stop in front of a mirror, while an accomplice films the poor shop assistants desperate attempts to stop the apparent theft. Some will leap over the glass counters, others will try to go around them, but they all embarrassingly turn around the moment they realize the potential client’s intentions. It’s funny to watch, I will say that, but you kind of feel bad for the poor jewelers at the same time.

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Paying $645 for a pair of pants that wasn’t created by a well known fashion brand might seem ludicrous, but what if that said pair of pants would last you forever? That’s the promise of adventure clothing brand Vollebak, which claims that its new “100 Year Pants” will last at least a century.

Vollebak cofounder Steve Tidball claims that the company stands behind the 100-year guarantee, because the new pants are made of materials so tough you can walk through fire in them. Technically, the 100 Year Pants are made of an innovative three-layer material designed to withstand various threats. The outer layer repels water and is designed to resist abrasions, the middle layer is fireproof and also expands as an airbag at high temperatures, acting as a barrier between your legs and the flames, while the third layer is an aramid fiber, a nylon-related synthetic doesn’t burn or melt, offering extra protection.

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Kanathip Nathip, a 53-year-old man from Phitsanulok, Thailand,  never has to worry about locking the door of his home whenever he goes out, as anyone foolish enough to try and rob it would get the surprise of a lifetime. The Thai man shares his house with a full grown crocodile that’s free to move around as he pleases and doesn’t take kindly to uninvited guests.

Nathip got the crocodile 20 years ago, as a pet for his two children. He had taken them to a crocodile farm in Nakorn Sawan and they loved the reptiles so much that he ended up buying not one but two of them. At first both Thong (Gold) and Ngern (Silver) lived in the family home, but as time went by, it became clear that Ngern wasn’t meant to be a house pet, so they built a small pond in the yard and moved him there. Thong, on the other hand, seemed much more comfortable in the house, so he’s been living there for the past two decades. Even though Nathip’s two sons have grown up and moved out of the house, the 53-year-old still has Thong, who he considers his third son.

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A Thai conman was recently arrested and charged with robbery after successfully pulling out a sophisticated plan that involved setting up a fake jewlery store and luring an Indian businessman there so he could steal a valuable diamond.

59-year-old Pipatpongpat Suksawatpipat, the man arrested for the ingenious robbery, was once a prosperous jewlery trader himself, but fell on hard time when he became addicted to gambling a few years back. He went from being one of the richest people in Chanthaburi to having just 40,000 baht ($1,200) to his name, but he recently put that small amount of money to good use and pulled off a scam that would make any self-respecting conman jealous. In just a week’s time, he managed to rent a commercial space and turn it into a fake jewelery store, lure an Indian jeweler there with a 10 million baht diamond, and eventually steal that diamond before riding out into the sunset. Alas, his success was short-lived.

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Khai Ho, 38-year-old self-described breatharian from Birkenhead, in the UK, claims he can last up to three months at a time on only 100 calories per week, surviving only on air, sunlight and the occasional mint leaves.

Ho, who works as a pizza deliveryman, claims that he has never taken much interest in food, constantly refusing his mother’s meals as a child, but only started giving up food completely over long periods of time four years ago, with the help of Hindu meditation. He says can last up to three months without consuming any kind of food, apart from some mint leaves to help with bitter taste in his mouth, and drinking water only rarely, sometimes just once per week. Apparently, meditation helps him absorb all the nutrients he needs from thin air and sunlight.

The 38-year-old breathrian said that before turning to meditation, he would eat normal food once every three or four days, but now doesn’t need to do that because he gets necessary nutrients from sunlight and can even absorb moisture from the air around him. He admits that most people think his crazy for fasting for months at a time, but claims that some consider him “incredible at the same time.

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A Chinese man has been making national headlines after it was revealed that he has been waiting in a bookstore in Beijing for over 50 days hoping to meet a girl he has “fallen in love with” after making eye-contact for 10 seconds.

To say that this 26-year-old man is a firm believer in love at first sight would be an understatement. He is so convinced that the woman he saw in a popular Beijing bookstore back in September is the girl of his dreams that he quit his job and has been staying in the bookshop every day from 11am to 7pm, hoping to meet her again so he can tell her how he feels. To improve his chances of bumping into the mystery woman again, the man, surnamed Sun, has been passing out hand-drawn sketches of her to other bookstore visitors, and recently tried to sue her for emotional distress, even though he doesn’t even know her name.

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33-year-old Alena Kravchenko, a real-life Rapunzel from Ukraine, had her last haircut at age five, 28 years ago. Today, Alena’s hair is around two meters long and the young Ukrainian claims that she sometimes trips on it.

Alena’s mother had always told her that a woman’s feminine beauty stems directly from her hair, and she took her words to heart. The last time she allowed anyone to cut her blonde locks was 28 years ago, and today, even though her extremely long becomes problematic, she is still convinced that her mother was right. “There is nothing more beautiful in the world than a woman with natural, flowing hair,” Alena says.

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Ratchadapong Prasit, a 25-year-old man from Thailand, has been making headlines around Asia for the last couple of years after drastically altering his appearance with the help of plastic surgery. After undergoing 30 cosmetic procedures, Prasit now looks like a Korean K-pop star.

Comparing photos of Ratchadapong Prasit before and after he turned to plastic surgery, you’d swear they were two different people, but that just goes to show you what a difference a few nose jobs, some chin sculpting and eye reshaping procedures can make. Although, to be fair, Prasit had a lot more than that done to his face. He reportedly underwent at least 30 cosmetic procedures over the course of two years, for which he spent around 300,000 Thai Baht ($9,100). But he claims it was worth every penny as it allowed him to completely change his life around, going from a shoe seller to a successful cabaret dancer at a theater in Pattaya. The ladies seem to love his new look as well.

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Storm, an eight-year-old Haflinger mare from the Netherlands, has become a star on social media networks like Instagram thanks to her long, wavy locks.

24-year-old student and entrepreneur Naomi Beckers bought Storm from her previous owner two years ago after falling in love with her incredible hair, which interestingly, closely resembles her own blonde, curly locks. The gorgeous mare hand’t had her hair cut since she was only two-years-old, and she already had a decent number of social media fans when Naomi got her. So she decided to set up a new Instagram account where Storm’s human admirers could follow her progress, but never imagined it would become so popular. Storm’s Instagram now has nearly 35,000 followers, making her one of the most popular horses on the photo-sharing social network.

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Fuerteventura, the second largest of Spain’s Canary Islands is mostly known for its white sandy beaches, but few people know that this island also hosts one of the world’s most stunning attractions, a beach that has popcorn for sand.

There are plenty of tourist spots named after things they resemble, even if just vaguely, but that’s not the case of Popcorn Beach. This amazing place genuinely looks like it’s covered with million of white, puffy popcorn, but don’t go putting them in your mouth, as they are actually stony pieces of coral shaped like popcorn by the elements.

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Police in the Taiwanese city of Taipei were accused of wasting taxpayers’ money on solving stupid cases, after local media revealed that they recently conducted DNA tests worth hundreds of dollars to find out who drank a student’s $2 yogurt bottle.

Sharing a fridge with roommates in college usually means accepting that, from time to time, some of your treats will mysteriously disappear. It’s like a tradition, but for one Taiwanese woman sharing a house with five other women studying at the Chinese Culture University in Taipei, it was a serious crime that had to be solved at any cost. Last month, the unnamed woman came home to find one of her yogurt bottles empty in the garbage bin. None of her housemates had asked her permission to drink the yogurt, so she fished the empty bottle from the trash, convened an emergency house meeting and asked the other five women which one of them had stolen her yogurt. When none of them owned up to the crime, the infuriated woman took the empty yogurt bottle to the police and demanded that they carry out an official investigation and bring the criminal to justice.

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The Amazon rainforest is home to many frightening creatures, like giant Anacondas, flesh-eating piranhas, just to name a couple, and now you can add a new one to the list, a species of wasp that lays its eggs on the abdomen of spiders and then hijacks their brain, essentially turning them into zombies.

The previously unknown wasp of the Zatypota genus was discovered by researchers with the University of British Columbia (UBC) working in the Ecuadorian Amazon basin. They documented its symbiotic relationship with a species of so called “social spiders” and recently published some truly terrifying findings in the Ecological Entomology scientific journal. This newly discovered wasp is apparently able to hijack the nervous system of its host, forcing it to leave its colony, which it otherwise rarely does, protect the wasps larva and ultimately get eaten alive. It essentially turns the social spider into a zombie-like drone that then does the wasp’s bidding.

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A 65-year-old woman from a village in India’s West Bengal has allegedly spent every day for the past two decades submerged up to her neck in the waters of a nearby lake, due to an unknown disease.

Before getting into this strange story, I have to disclose the fact that it is unverified. It went viral in Russia (of all places) last month, and I’ve been trying to find a credible source ever since. Unfortunately, I’ve had no luck. Apart from dozens of Russian news sites and a few dubious English blogs, I have found no mention of this woman anywhere. Normally, I wouldn’t even have bothered writing about something like this, but what really intrigued me about this story is that it comes with a video of this woman siting idly in a lake, all by herself, as other people look on from the shore. There’s definitely a story here, I just don’t know if it’s the one I’ve found. So if you’re reading this and can provide any credible insight about this news story, I’d love to hear from you. Anyway, here’s the Russian version:

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