A Las Vegas limb-lengthening clinic has been getting a lot of attention online this week for offering people the chance to add a few inches to their stature through minimally invasive surgery.

The LimbPlastX Institute charges up to $75,000 to add up to six inches to patients’ height, a hefty price that many are more than willing to pay to overcome their height complex. Dr Kevin Debiparshad, a consultant at the clinic, said that 30 men sign up for the life-changing procedure in 2019 alone, with even more procedures lined up for 2020, especially after the recent media exposure. The procedure surprisingly lasts only 1.5 hours and involves incisions into the leg bones and the insertion of a special stretching device. The full results are only visible after about a year.

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Plastic surgery has always fascinated people, so it’s no surprise that shows like Botched or Extreme Makeover are so popular, but nowhere in the world is going under the knife more mainstream than in South Korea, so it makes sense that the Asian country’s own plastic surgery reality show is bigger than any Western shows can ever hope to get.

Let Me In is a hit reality TV show about transforming poor and socially excluded women through plastic surgery in order to give them better lives. But we’re not talking about a simple nose job, some lip fillers and lots of makeup here, most of the candidates chosen to go under the knife come out looking unrecognizable, with some displaying different bone structure and completely changed general features, like the shape of their eyes and mouth. Let Me In has been running for a decade now, and it continues to be a massive television success, although it has also attracted its share of criticism for glorifying plastic surgery.

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A 30-year-old from Sheffield recently made news headlines in the UK for spending £425 to rent a billboard on the side of a busy road in Manchester in hopes of finding a date.

Mark Rofe has been single for a year now, and using online dating apps hasn’t really made a difference, so after joking with a friend at a pub that he’d be better off advertising himself on a billboard, he realized that wouldn’t actually be a bad idea. So he set up a website featuring a witty biography where he invites female visitors to apply for a date with him. The billboard has been up for a few days now, but he has already been contacted by 100 people. Sadly, 50 of them have been men.

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Nyakim Gatwech is a Sudanese-born fashion model known primarily for her melanin-rich skin, which has earned her the nickname ‘Queen of Dark’.

As a refugee growing up in camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, Nyakim Gatwech was never ashamed of her super dark skin and her South Sudanese heritage, but when her family immigrated to the United States when she was 13-years-old, her different appearance made her the target of bullies. Some of the kids at her school in Buffalo, New York, could be very mean, and having never had to deal with racism before, she was confused. Some middle-schoolers were afraid to her, while others made fun of her dark skin tone, and she would come home crying unable to explain to her parents what was going on. Things improved when she moved to St. Cloud, Minnesota for high school, and became with other Sudanese and Somali kids, but she never really felt like she belonged. Even today, some of the things people say about her skin make her feel uncomfortable, but she has learned to take them in stride and educate instead of complaining.

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A 20-year-old Indian woman filed for divorce from her husband this week, claiming that he stank too bad, because he only bathed once every 10 days.

Soni Devi, a woman from Bihar’s Vaishali district, filed an application for divorce from her husband, on grounds that he did not maintain proper hygiene and did not have any manners. She argued that being married to her husband, a 23-year-old plumber had been a humiliation and had ruined her life. In her official divorce application, the 20-year-old woman wrote that her husband hardly ever bathed or brushed his teeth and didn’t follow any social etiquette rules. She asked the court to rid of her husband.

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Man vs Fat is a weight-loss phenomenon sweeping the United Kingdom and helping soccer fans lose weight and improve their fitness by getting involved in their favorite sport.

Soccer, or football, as we Europeans call it, is the most popular sport in the world, but nowhere is it more loved than in its birthplace – England. To say people there are crazy about soccer would be an understatement; with over 140 individual leagues, containing more than 480 divisions, and around 7,000 professional clubs, it’s safe to say that soccer truly is at home in England. People love to play it, love to watch others playing it, either in stadiums or from the comfort of their own homes, love to talk about it in pubs, it’s just a big part of daily life. So I guess it makes sense that soccer be so effective in helping to curb the country’s very serious obesity problem.

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Szinpetri, a quaint village of around 300 people located in northern Hungary, is mostly known for being home to the world’s largest handmade book, a 1.4-tonne heavy tome bound in the leather of 13 Argentinian cows.

The world’s largest handmade book was completed in 2010, by father-son duo Bela Varga and Gábor Varga, two masters in the art of traditional paper-making. It was crated using traditional book-binding techniques adjusted to a much larger scale than usual, and is currently on display at the Szinpetri paper mill, where Bela and Gábor Varga show off their paper-making skills to visitors. The book measures 4.18m x 3.77m, weighs a total of 1,420 kilograms and features 346 pages printed with information on the local flora and fauna.

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Hamit Hayran, Turkey’s number one egg carving artist, recently set a new world record for the most number of holes carved into a single chicken egg, 12,000.

It’s hard to imagine how anyone could puncture a chicken egg, even a big one, tens of thousands of times, but 62-year-old Hamit Haryran is an expert at it. After becoming disabled in 1988, due to an occupational accident, he dedicated most of his time to egg-shell carving, and has since become one of the most celebrated egg carving artists in the world. Apart from creating some stunning artworks, he has also been actively chasing the record for most holes punctured into a single egg. He first broke it when he carved  8,708 holes, beating the record of a Pakistani artist, then with 11,827 holes, and this last time with a whopping 12,000.

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Japanese model Kato Sari recently finalized her divorce from her husband, after getting separated from him just a week into their marriage, due to her uncontrolled money spending habits.

29-year-old Kato Sari has always been known for her luxurious lifestyle and love of expensive fashion brands, but her husband never imagined that her spending habits would end up putting his businesses at risk. The unnamed real-estate businessman reportedly started dating the model in May of 2019, and in the three and a half months before the pair tied the knot, she had managed to spend about 1 billion yen ($9.1 million) of his money. Still, the man went through with the wedding, but during the first week of their marriage, he allegedly told Sari to slow down her spending, as his businesses weren’t fairing very well. That didn’t sit too well with her, so she asked for a divorce.

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A Hong-Kong-based airline was forced to apologize for making a 25-year-old Japanese woman take a pregnancy test in order to board a flight to Saipan, a  a commonwealth of the United States in the western Pacific Ocean.

The controversial incident reportedly took place in November of 2019, but was only covered in the media last week. Midori Nishida was checking at Hong Kong International Airport, with low-cost carrier Hong Kong Express, in order to fly to the island of Saipan to visit her parents. The Japanese national was not pregnant and said so on a check-in questionnaire, but her body shape apparently made airline staff question her honesty. The 25-year-old woman was asked to give permission to an authorized medical provider to conduct a “fit-to-fly” assessment, which in this case meant a pregnancy test.

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Officials in the French city of Roubaix recently revealed that the 187 photovoltaic panels that were supposed to generate green electricity for the local library had been installed six months ago, but not connected to the building’s electrical grid…

In June of 2019, thew city of Roubaix announced with great fanfare that it had acquired 187 solar panels meant to generate part of the electricity required by the local library. The panels were installed by local company Sunretec at a cost of 103,000 euros ($113,000), but somehow everyone forgot to actually connect them to the library’s electrical grid, which means that for six months the panels didn’t produce any of the electricity consumed by the Roubaix library.

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Most yoga practitioners struggle to pull off the Niralamba Poorna Chakrasana contortion just once in their lives, but one 11-year-old girl recently managed to do it a whopping 21 time in one minute, setting a new world record.

On January 20, Riya Paladia, a gymnastics and yoga practitioner from the village of Gaulapar, in India’s Uttarakhand state, stunned a local crowd with her amazing flexibility and speed, performing the tough Niralamba Poorna Chakrasana yoga position 21 times in one minute. Described as one of the very hardest yoga contortions, the move didn’t seem to pose any problem to the 11-year-old girl who slid on her back with ease before rising up on her feet again, without using her hands as support. It almost looks like she is being pulled up by invisible strings.

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In a controversial case that has been the talk of a whole country these last few days, a 13-year-old girl went on TV to tell the world that she is pregnant with her 10-year-old boyfriend.

The two children, Darya and Ivan, recently appeared on Russian television show “On Air Live” to tell their story, get tested and be confronted by experts about their controversial pregnancy. Reports of Ivan having impregnated his 13-year-old girlfriend had been going around Russian social media all last week, but the couple’s parents gave their permission for them to finally show their faces to the world. The 13-year-old girl claimed that she had not been intimate with other boys than Ivan, and her version was believed by a psychologist, but then other experts produced evidence that Ivan was too young to leave anyone pregnant.

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It’s not every day that you hear about teenage girls turning to plastic surgery to make themselves look more youthful, but then again, not many 15-year-olds look like their grandmothers.

The story of Xiaofeng, a young girl from Liaoning, China, who suffered from a rare medical condition that left her looking like a woman in her 60’s, first made news headlines in December of last year. Media outlets throughout Asia wrote about how the first symptoms of the incurable condition known as progeria appeared when Xiaofeng was just one-year-old, and how by the time her teenage years rolled up, she looked like an old woman. Her saggy skin made her the target of cruel kids at school, and the constant abuse made her decide to quit her studies. The sad story melted the hearts of millions, many of which donated money for a surgery that could help the poor girl look her age.

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A professor of experimental psychology recently unveiled a wearable patch infused with bacon flavor that is supposed to help curb meat cravings.

Charles Spence, a professor of experimental psychology at the University of Oxford, teamed up with plant-based food company Strong Roots to create a patch that, when scratched, produces a smell similar to that of cooked bacon. The idea behind this strange invention is that the human mind is connected to our senses of taste and smell, and that certain smells can significantly reduce food cravings.

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