A young man in Russia was hospitalized and treated for kidney failure after doing 2,000 squats to win a bet with a friend.

Doctors at the nephrology department at the Vladivostok Clinical Hospital No. 2, in Primorsky Krai, Russia, recently reported the unusual case of a man in his early 20s who was hospitalized with severely reduced kidney function as a result of physical overextension. The patient told doctors that his troubles began after winning a bet with a friend who challenged him to do 2,000 squats in a set period of time. Confident in his physical abilities, he accepted, but after completing the challenge, he began experiencing troubling symptoms. His legs, which had never failed him before, became sore and extremely swollen, his urine turned dark brown, and before long, he couldn’t urinate at all. Scared, he sought medical help and was diagnosed with rhabdomyolysis.

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Doctors at a hospital in Jilin, China recently reported one of their most bizarre cases yet – a woman who had gotten her hand stuck in her boyfriend’s mouth while trying to film a funny video.

Clips and photos of a couple walking into the emergency room of a hospital in Jilin Province have been doing the rounds on Chinese social media. The premise doesn’t sound very intriguing but what really attracted people’s attention was that the woman had her hand in the man’s mouth. Apparently, they had tried to shoot a funny video to post online in which they tried to see if the woman’s hand was small enough to fit in her boyfriend’s mouth. She managed to stuff her fist in his mouth just fine, but when she tried to pull it out, his mouth muscles stiffened and the hand became stuck. After repeatedly trying to pull out her hand from the man’s mouth, the young woman decided that they needed medical attention.

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Members of the State Duma (Russian Parliament) and activist organizations in Russia have called for the ban of Turkish soap operas because their perfect male protagonists put Russian men in a bad light.

Representatives of the “Veterans of Russia” movement have appealed to the Russian State Duma and Roskomnadzor (the agency responsible for monitoring and censoring the media in Russia) to ban Turkish soap operas, due to their projection of an “unrealistic image of men,” which makes women lose interest in Russian men, ultimately contributing to the country’s demographic decline. In its petition, Veterans of Russia proposed introducing the concept of ‘destructive propaganda,’ calling Turkish soap operas part of an ‘ideologic war for minds’ that target Russian women and threaten to destroy the institution of family in the country.

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From clothing and footwear to lifesize cars and wedding chapels, there is virtually nothing artist Joshua Vides cannot turn into black-and-white sketches.

Joshua Vides uses a technique he calls Reality to Idea (RTI) to revert different objects back to sketch form, but few people know that his success story began with a pair of Nike Air Force 1 shoes. About a decade ago, he came across a copy of the Nike designer’s original sketch for the popular footwear, so he came up with the idea of hand painting a real pair of Air Force 1s in black and white using his RTI technique. He posted the end result on his Instagram page and it blew up! Vides followed it up with several versions of sketch shoes and their success inspired him to take his Reality to Idea technique to the next level.

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Online scammers tricked a 63-year-old Los Angeles woman into thinking that she was in a romantic relationship with Spanish musician Enrique Iglesias.

Guadalupe Cepeda has been a fan of Enrique Iglesias for over two decades, so when the “Bailamos” singer approached on social media one day, she couldn’t believe it. He apparently found her on an online fan group and she didn’t find it at all suspicious that the man millions of women have been dreaming of for almost thirty years singled her out for a virtual relationship. Their “affair” began two years ago, and despite being married to another man, Cepeda believed that she would one day marry Iglesias. She planned to break up with her husband and run away with the Spanish superstar. Only before they could be together, Enrique needed her to send him some money.

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Popular Cambodian beauty pageant Miss and Mister Majestic has been getting a lot of attention after photos of its “ordinary-looking” participants went viral on social media.

The winner of Mister Majestic 2025 will represent Cambodia in the Mister Universe international beauty pageant, but the contest has created a lot of buzz online due to the questionable looks of some participants. Last month, organizers released the introductory photos of the 17 male participants selected to take part in the competition to become Mister Majestic, and, judging by the feedback on Cambodian social media, they were not what people were expecting. It’s true that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but many people complained that most of the guys competing for the title of Mister Majestic looked ordinary, and some of them had sub-standard looks.

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Created by Japanese manufacturer Shimadzu Corp, the Aether Clock OC 020 is a strontium optical lattice clock advertised as the most accurate clock in the world and sold for over $3 million.

The world’s most accurate clock looks less like you’d imagine and more like a small refrigerator. Its rectangular case is around three feet tall and has a volume of 250 liters. Frankly, it doesn’t look like much, but this contraption is so precise that it would take about 10 billion years for it to deviate by a single second, according to Kyoto-based manufacturer Shimadzu Corp. The Aether Clock OC 020 is reportedly 100 times more accurate than cesium atomic clocks, which set the standard for the current definition of a second. Although optical lattice clocks have been around for a while, the Aether Clock OC 020 is the world’s first commercially available model.

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Garlic is probably the world’s most popular seasoning, but most of us hate pealing it about as much as we love to eat it. Having to go through over a dozen clovers per garlic bulb is just not fun, but what if I told you there was such a thing as single-clover garlic?

If you live in China, Germany or Northern Europe, you’re probably wondering why you’re reading about a vegetable you regularly see at your local supermarket on a blog about oddities, but the fact is that most of the world is oblivious to the existence of this holy grail of garlic. I myself only recently found out about it after seeing a photo of what looked like an onion labeled as ‘solo garlic’ on Reddit. What I thought was a digitally altered photo turned out to be a real thing that has been around for decades and that is apparently very popular in some parts of the world.

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An Italian man recently had to fight charges of manslaughter after his five-year-old son hit an 87-year-old pensioner while learning to ride a bicycle in a Milan park.

What was meant to be a rite of passage for a young boy, turned into a nightmare for his entire family and that of an 87-year-old woman who had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The woman was strolling through a Milan park with a 74-year-old friend when a boy crashed his bicycle into her causing her to fall and hit her head on the pavement. Although the pensioner claimed to be alright, the boy’s father, who was teaching him to ride a bike and had seen the crash, insisted that he call an ambulance. Unfortunately, the woman’s condition abruptly changed for the worse and, despite the efforts of the paramedics, she tragically lost her life.

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Frank Tavares was born a man in the Dominican Republic, but for 22 years of his life, he lived as Sister Margarita in two different convents, posing as one of the nuns there without anyone suspecting anything.

The unusual story of “nun-man”, as Frank came to be known following his shocking reveal, began when he was only four years old. He and his family were involved in a serious car accident that claimed the lives of his parents. His grandparents were too poor and ill-equipped to deal with a child, so he was placed in the care of nuns at a Dominican convent. Tavares recalls that, as a young boy, his genitals were so small that even he had trouble finding them, which is probably why he was raised as a girl at the convent. He wore girl’s clothes, adopted the habits of the nuns there, and became fully engaged in the daily activities of his new home. It wasn’t until age seven that he realized he was a man, but he continued living as a girl, to avoid being cast out.

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At age 16, Pavel Stepchenko joined the school of Russia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs as a student, and by age 23, he had already retired, becoming the country;s youngest pensioner.

Retirement is traditionally associated with old age, and while today’s youth dream of retiring young to focus on living their best lives, that usually means retiring by age 40 or so. Well, one Russian youth managed to do something most of us can only dream of – retire with a full pension in his early 20s. Pavel Stepchenko’s story is an unusual one. He enrolled in the educational institution of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs at age 16 and after five years of diligent studies, he began working in the territorial division of the internal affairs system. The young man from Donetsk only worked there for two years, because at age 23, he officially retired, taking full advantage of a special provision stating that for each month of service during a period of martial law, a person received three months of credited length of service.

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A journalistic investigation by the Chinese newspaper The Paper revealed the widespread commercialization of “fake meats”, such as fox or raccoon meat being sold as beef, mutton, or rabbit to restaurants.

The Paper reports that in Chinese areas known for fur production, such as Tangshan, Hebei, Weifang, Linyi, or Shandong, animal farms resell fox and raccoon ‘white strips’ (carcasses with the internal organs and subcutaneous fat removed) all over the country, passing them off as beef, mutton or rabbit. Some vendors even go through the trouble of braising and grilling their fake meats before freezing them and selling them to restaurants to make them even harder to tell apart from meats meant for human consumption. Experts warn that the hormones and medicines used in the breeding of animals for fur, but also the pathogens they carry make these meats extremely dangerous.

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Known as the Garbage Mountain of Delhi, Ghazipur Landfill covers an area of about 70 acres (over 50 football) and is almost as tall as the iconic Taj Mahal.

Established in 1984, on the outskirts of Ghazipur, in the eastern district of Delhi, Ghazipur Landfill reached its maximum capacity in 2002, but it has since grown into a small mountain up to 72 meters high. It is already one of the world’s largest landfills, but it continues to receive hundreds of tons of garbage from Delhi every day and is expected to grow even more. Consisting of more than 14 million metric tonnes of waste, Ghazipur Landfill has long been a plague on the millions of people who call Delhi home. The stench it emanates is almost unbearable, especially in the summer, fires routinely break out engulfing the surrounding area in a thick, toxic smoke, and its winding slopes sometimes collapse burying people and vehicles under millions of tons of garbage.

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Efecan Kultur, a Turkish Tiktoker who rose to prominence for his “mukbang” binge eating streams, tragically lost his life at the age of 24 due to obesity-related health complications.

The “mukbang” trend, in which people costume copious amounts of food on camera to the delight of their fans, originated in South Korea but quickly spread all over the world raising concerns about obesity and mindless food waste. With more than 156,000 TikTok followers and 12,000 Instagram followers, 24-year-old Efecan Kultur was one of Turkey’s most popular mukbang streamers, but his popularity came at a cost. As he continued ballooning in size, he started experiencing various health problems, including heart disease, and in October of last year, he announced that he would be going on a diet and avoiding extra salt to try and lose weight. Sadly, earlier this month, the 24-year-old died as a result of his obesity.

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Chinese people desperate to get rich by any means necessary are putting their faith in bags of “bank soil” sold online as wealth-bringing talismans.

Bank robberies usually involve cold harsh cash or gold ingots, but several Chinese banks have recently become the target of an unusual type of theft, that of soil from potted plants or from around the buildings housing them. Several online shops in the Asian country are selling small bags of ‘bank’ soil as get-rich-quick talismans that can cost as much as 888 yuan ($120), and demand for the unusual products is steadily increasing. Some sellers boast a “999.999 percent success rate in generating wealth,” while others record the harvesting process to guarantee the authenticity of their bank soil.

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