A chamber inside Microsoft’s Audio Lab holds the Guinness record for the world’s quietest room. It’s a strange place that reportedly causes people to start hallucinating.

With everything moving at such a crazy pace in this day in age, we all crave a little peace and quiet from time to time, but it seems absolute quiet is absolutely terrifying. Luckily, it’s something you don’t have to experience, unless you want to challenge yourself because the only place you can experience total silence is in an anechoic chamber. There are only a few of them in the whole world and the absolute quietest of them all is inside the Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Virginia. Rated at -20.35 dBA, this room stops all outside noise, making any sound produced inside sound downright eerie.

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Sandry Riffard is a talented tattoo artist from France who specializes in macabre hyperrealism with a three-dimensional layer.

We’ve featured some amazing tattoo art over the last 15 years, from titans of the trade like Arlo DiCristina and Karol Rybakowski, to talented newcomers carving out their own niches, like Eduardo “Duda” Lozano or Mexican artist Yatzil Elizalde, but when it comes to hyperrealistic macabre tattoos, it’s tough finding someone better. The French artist has always had a thing for horror-inspired art, but he has come so far in the last few years, setting himself apart from other practitioners of the style with some incredible projects.

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The small village of Coyllurqui is famous for a controversial “blood festival”, the highlight of which is a symbolic battle between a condor and a bull.

The Peruvian Blood Festival known as the Yawar Fiesta is a big deal in Coyllurqui, a small mountain village a nine-hour bus ride away from the city of Cusco. It’s pretty much the only place in the South American country where tourists can experience the traditional bird vs. bull fight anymore. Formally known as ‘Turupucllay’ (Game of the Bull), it used to be held in cities like Cusco centuries ago, but animal rights activists managed to get it banned in Peru years ago. However, in remote rural settlements like Coyllurqui, enforcing the law is tricky, especially when that goes against the economic interest of the locals.

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At just three years of age, Zayn Sofuoğlu can barely reach the pedals of a car, and he can’t even see past the steering wheel, yet he somehow drives better than most people.

The youngest son of Turkish motorcycle racer Kenan Sofuoğlu, Zayn spent most of his young life around powerful motorcycles and supercars and he probably has more experience with them than most adults. Zayn wasn’t even two years old when his father, who holds a record of five Supersport World Champion titles, started posting videos of him riding a motorcycle in the driveway of their family home. Since then, the prodigy has been honing his motorist skills, and he is now able to expertly maneuver and park various supercars even though he can’t even see through the windshield…

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With a nearly perfect 4.9/5.0 stars out of thousands of Google reviews, Gacek, an overweight black-and-white street cat, is the top-rated tourist attraction in the Polish city of Szczecin.

Szczecin, a medieval city in northwestern Poland, close to the border with Germany, has plenty to offer visitors. The Pomeranian Duke’s Castle and Kasprowicza Park are two of its most popular tourist attractions, but when it comes to online reviews, both pale in comparison with the city’s top-rated attraction, a fat cat named Gacek. The tuxedo cat rose to fame in 2020, after local news site wSzczecinie featured the feline in a video that subsequently went viral on social media, and people have been showering Gacek with positive reviews ever since.

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A Thai man surprised his wife by tattooing their marriage certificate on his forearm as a Valentine’s Day present.

A tattoo parlor in Kaeng Khoi, Central Thailand’s Saraburi province recently shared a photo of one of their latest projects, a lifesize copy of a marriage certificate tattooed on a person’s forearm. Apparently, the client wanted to surprise his wife with unique proof of his love for her, so he asked the tattoo artists to permanently ink his official marriage certificate on his arm.

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A Japanese garment company recently made international news headlines for its newest creation –  a wearable beanbag that allows you to comfortably sit or lay down anytime, anywhere.

When thinking about ultimate comfort, a giant beanbag that you can wear is probably not the first thing that comes to mind, but according to Takikou, a garment company based in Japan’s Aichi Prefecture, that’s exactly what its new wearable beanbag is about. The seemingly wacky invention was reportedly inspired by the concept of a “cushion that ruins people”, a rather popular idea among Japanese designers that basically revolves around offering consumers extreme levels of comfort that they don’t ever want to move, thus ruining their lives.

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A Chinese man who concelaed a lottery win of 10 million yuan ($1.5 million) from his then-wife for two years has been ordered by a court of law to compensate the woman.

In 2021, the man, surnamed Zhou, won a lottery prize of 10 million yuan. After paying the mandatory tax, he was left with 8.43 million ($1.23 million). That was still lifechanging money for him and his family, only instead of sharing the wonderful news with his wife, he reportedly kept acting like nothing happened. On the day that the lottery prize was wired to his bank account, Zhou transferred 2 million to his sister and another 700,000 yuan to his ex-wife, to help her buy an apartment. He didn’t mention the lottery win to his wife for two years.

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A company in Chengdu, China has been praised for asking both job applicants and recruiters to wear masks in order to avoid discrimination based on looks.

Chengdu Ant Logistics recently made news headlines after a video showing its recruitment process went viral on Chinese social media. Shot by one of the interviewees, the short clip shows several masked people waiting to be interviewed by a recruiter, who was reportedly also masked. The company has since put out a statement on the matter, claiming that the video was shot at its recent biannual recruitment fair and that the masked were introduced to eliminate bias based on looks.

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A Canadian startup claims to have come up with the technology to create a plant-based salmon filet that looks, feels, and tastes like real wild salmon.

Plant-based meat alternatives have been around for years now, with brands like Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods being among the most well-known in the burgeoning industry. But fish and seafood alternatives haven’t gotten nearly as much attention from the media as meat ones. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist, or that they are in any way less technologically advanced. On the contrary, the progress in this niche has been nothing short of impressive, with one startup claiming to have created a raw plant-based salmon filet that looks, flakes, and tastes like wild salmon.

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Police in the Chinese city of Chongqing has begun using specially-trained squirrels in their war against drug traffickers.

The Police Dog Brigade of the Criminal Police Detachment in Hechuan District, Chongqing has successfully bred the first batch of drug-sniffing squirrels in China. The breakthrough was part of the country’s national key research and development project, which sought, among others, the creation of new training methods for anti-drug animals. Apparently, scientists have been aware of squirrels’ keen sense of smell for a long time, but rodent training methods were apparently not advanced enough until now.

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UK-born artist Jonny Hall is famous for being one of the first tattoo artists to introduce UV-reactive ink to the style of black-and-grey realism.

UVealism, a term coined by Hall himself, basically refers to the enhancement of already-impressive black-and-grey realist tattoos with the ethereal glow of UV-reactive ink. In plain light, UV tattoos are semi-invisible, but put them under an ultraviolet black-light bulb and you get to see a whole new dimension of the design. UV-reactive ink is a bit more difficult to work with than normal tattoo ink, because it’s a lot thinner, but when used correctly, the results are awe-inspiring.

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The ancient ruins of Baiae, near the modern city of Bacoli, in Italy are home to a botanical oddity known as the upside-down fig tree.

Looking at the tenacious tree growing out of the ceiling of an ancient Roman archway, it’s easy to see why it’s called the upside-down tree. It is literally inverted, growing toward the ground, which is quite rare. No one knows exactly how the fig tree ended up there, or how long it has been growing for, but one thing is for sure –  despite its bizarre location, the fig tree if Baia is growing stronger every year, and sometimes it even bears fruit.

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Kyawthuite is a transparent reddish-orange mineral of which only a single, tiny sample exists – an 0.3-gram gem – making it the rarest mineral in the world, by far.

There are around 6,000 minerals recognized by the International Mineralogical Association, and while many of them are classified as ‘rare’, none of them rival kyawthuite in terms of rarity. Named after Dr. Kyaw Thu, a Burmese mineralogist-petrologist-gemologist, this incredibly rare mineral was discovered in the bed of a stream in Myanmar’s Mogok region by sapphire hunters and recognized by the International Mineralogical Society in 2015. The only sample ever discovered weighs just 1.61 carats (0.3 grams) and is in the custody of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles.

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A Russian man was recently arrested after allegedly being tricked into throwing a Molotov Cocktail in a Moscow bank by scammers who also relieved him of his life savings.

A few days ago, Moscow police arrested a 48-year-old man from Ruza, a town in the Moscow region of Russia, for allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail in a Sberbank branch in the Russian capital. Bank employees were able to put out the flames before the firefighters arrived on the scene and police quickly identified and detained the perpetrator. But this was far from an open-shut case; the more the suspect tried to explain, the crazier his story got, and by the end, investigators didn’t know whether to throw the book at the guy or just feel sorry for him…

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