An English teacher at a private school in China’s Inner Mongolia region was forced to make a public apology after having bought a fake tuberculosis diagnosis online, just so he could take a longer vacation for China’s National Day.

The teacher, identified only as Mr. Du, reportedly paid 470 yuan ($67) for a fake chest scan and doctor’s diagnosis on the internet, both of which showed that he was suffering from tuberculosis, a serious and highly contagious pulmonary disease. He then presented the documents to his employers, hoping it would convince them to approve a lengthier medical leave, allowing him to prolong his China’s National Day vacation. Only he never considered how serious his fake diagnosis actually was.

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Pinocchio may be just a children’s fairy tale, but Spanish scientists at the University of Granada recently investigated the so-called ‘Pinocchio effect’ and found that our noses don’t grow when we tell a lie, but actually shrink a bit.

Dr Emilio Gómez Milán and his team developed a lie detector test that used thermography to tell if people were lying, and found that whenever participants in their research were being untruthful, the temperature of the tip of their nose dropped up to 1.2 degrees Celsius, while the temperature of their forehead increased up to 1.5C. Scientist also found that drop in temperature at nose level actually caused it to slightly shrink, although the difference is undetected by the human eye.

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