For over a year a couple angered their neighbors by keeping around 10,000 bees in the balcony of their high-rise apartment in the Chinese city of Ningbo.

Police were recently called to a residential building in the coastal city of Ningbo after a couple living there ignored numerous complaints from their neighbors about the thousands of pet bees they kept on their balcony. About a year ago, the unnamed couple installed a small beehive in their high-rise apartment with the intention of using them for “bee sting treatment”, a form of alternative medicine believed to help alleviate the symptoms of painful conditions like rheumatoid arthritis. However, the insects kept breeding and their number swelled to around 10,000, becoming a nuisance to the other residents.

Read More »

Russian social media giant VKontakte and online video subscription platform Amediateka recently launched a unique experiment where a person who has never watched Game of Thrones spends a week binge watching the series for 10 hours a day in a transparent glass cube.

The project, called “One More and I Sleep. Seriality”, is designed to promote the 8th season of Game of Thrones, which launches on April 15, in Russia. VK and Amediateka managed to find a young man who had never watched an episode of the popular HBO series and convinced him to binge watch all 7 previous seasons for 10 hours a day locked in a glass cube at the October Cinema Center, in Moscow. The protagonist of this experiment is not able to leave the cube – except the occasional trip to the toilet – until he finishes watching all the episodes of Game of Thrones, which organizers estimate will take about a week.

Read More »

A Brazilian judge ordered a pair of male identical twins to pay child support to a child whose paternity could not be determined after they both refused to assume responsibility and a DNA test proved inconclusive because of their genetic similarity.

Valeria, the mother of the child, originally filed a lawsuit for recognition of paternity against just one of the two twins, Fernando, with whom she believes she had a short romantic relationship with. He underwent a DNA test which showed that there was a 99.9% probability that he was the father of the child. However, after seeing the result, Fernando continued to deny that he had fathered the girl, claiming instead that it had been his identical twin brother, Fabricio. The man’s twin was also ordered to take the DNA test, which yielded the same result as Fernando’s, because the two have virtually the same genetic code. Left with no option, the judge ordered both of them to pay child support to the same child.

Read More »

A 40-year-old Oregon has been arrested for allegedly staging an elaborate home invasion to cover up the theft of his daughter’s Girl Scout cookie sales.

On March 6 the Forest Grove Police Department responded to a 911 call for a possible break-and-enter and assault. When officers arrived at the scene of the alleged crime, they found 40-year-old Brian Couture, the person who had made the emergency call, unresponsive. The man later told police that an unknown individual had entered his home through a sliding glass door, and despite his attempts to restrain him, the burglar managed to escape. A special K9 unit was dispatched in the neighborhood to search for the suspect, which reportedly caused panic among residents.

Read More »

Traffic police in the Chinese city of Liuzhou got the shock of their career after pulling over a motorcycle driver only to find that instead of a driver’s license he had a handwritten piece of paper with his picture glued to it.

Faking official documents is common practice all around the world, but in the vast majority of cases people actually go out of their way to make sure their forgeries look as genuine as possible. Not the protagonist of this news story, though, he just made sure to include all the necessary details on his fake driver’s license, even though all he did was scribble them on a piece of paper hoping it would be enough to fool police. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.

When police in Liuzhou pulled over a silver motorcycle for a routine check, on March 31, they didn’t expect to see the funniest driver’s license of their entire careers. The man, surnamed Tang, certainly didn’t seem nervous when the officers asked for his documents, and the driver license itself had a regular cover, so there was nothing to prepare police for what they were about to see.

Read More »

Catholic priests from an evangelical group in northern Poland recently sparked a heated online debate after staging a controversial protest against occultism, idolatry and sorcery by burning various “sacrilegious” items, including Harry Potter and Twilight books, traditional masks and idols, and even a Hello Kitty umbrella.

In photos posted on Facebook, several priests from the SMS from Heaven Foundation, in Koszalin, Poland, can be seen carrying baskets full of items they consider sacrilegious from their church to a stone fire area outside and setting them ablaze. Footage shows an African wooden mask, a small Buddhist figure, figurines of elephants and popular fantasy books like Harry Potter and Twilight being consumed by flames as the priests and a few altar boys watch. The objects were reportedly brought in by parishioners, who were encouraged by the priests to clean their homes of such evil items.

Read More »

Chinese social media users have been encouraging a 77-year-old man to apply for a Guinness Record after photos of his 5.5-meter-long hair went viral online. The man, who keeps his dreadlocks wrapped around his head as a turban, claims he hasn’t had a haircut in over 54 years.

The 77-year-old’s unusually long hair went viral on Chinese social media after his daughter-in-law accompanied him on one of his long and frequent visits to a hair salon in Leshan, Southwest China’s Sichuan Province, to have his hair washed. She recorded a video of the staff there untangling his long dreadlocks, washing them in a sink and then painstakingly drying them, a process that reportedly takes two or three people around three hours to complete. The man’s daughter posted the footage online, where it quickly went viral, with over 1.5 million view in just a couple of days. People are now urging the man to apply for a Guinness Record, but his reasons for growing his hair so long have nothing to do with fame or recognition.

Read More »

A pair of identical twin brothers in China who had been sharing the same driver’s license for 20 years recently got bused by police after one of them started going bald.

According to Chinese media, the two brothers, surnamed Yan, had been sharing a driver’s license without any issues until 2017, when the younger brother’s permit was suspended for driving under the influence of alcohol. That didn’t turn out to be too much of an issue, because they continued sharing the other brother’s license, until it too got suspended, also for drunk driving.Luckily, by the time that happened, the younger Yan had gotten his driving license back, so the pair continued sharing that one. It was the perfect scenario, whenever one of the identical twins happened to have his driver’s license revoked, they still had another one to fall back on. Then one of them started going bald…

Read More »

Dutch inventor and businessman Henk Hanskamp has developed an ingenious toilet that collects some of the 15 to 20 liters of urine that the average cow produces in a day.

Cows aren’t regarded as the smartest creatures in the animal kingdom, but Hanskamp claims they can be taught to use the toilet. It may sound like an April Fool’s Day joke, but Dutch agricultural machinery manufacturer Hanskamp has been working on the “Cow Toilet” for the last couple of years and according to early tests it could prove a viable solution to the world’s increasingly worrisome ammonia pollution problem. While most cows require stimulation in order to use the cow toilet, some of them have gotten so used to it that they just urinate in it naturally.

Read More »

Jo Cameron, 71-year-old woman from Scotland, is one of only two people in the world known to have a rare genetic mutation that makes them virtually immune to pain.

Interestingly, Cameron only learned about her “superpower” at age 65, when doctors found that she didn’t need any painkillers after a undergoing a serious operation on her hand. She had been warned to expect severe pain after the surgery, but she didn’t feel any at all, so her anaesthetist referred her to pain geneticists at University College London and Oxford University, where tests showed that she had a mutation in a previously unknown gene, which scientists now believe plays a major role in pain signalling, mood and memory.

The story of how Jo ended up having surgery on her hand is quite interesting. Every now and then, her hip would give way, making her walk lop-sided, but because she never reported any pain, doctors didn’t even bother doing an x-ray scan of her hip. When someone finally decided to investigate the problem more thoroughly, they discovered massive joint deterioration that for the average person would have been impossible to live with without painkillers. Cameron had her hip replaced and managed the pain with just two paracetamol tablets a day. While she was recuperating in the hospital, doctors noticed that her thumbs were deformed by osteoarthritis and scheduled her for double hand surgery, a procedure that many experts describe as excruciating. Yet Jo didn’t feel any pain at all.

Read More »

Buying a home is one of the important financial and lifestyle decisions a person can make, so knowing exactly what you’re spending your money on is kind of important. Well, a Belgian reality TV show is flipping that idea on its head by asking participants to trust a couple of experts both with their finances and choosing a house for them, without ever seeing it themselves.

“Blind Gekocht“, or “Bought Blind” is an original reality show on Belgian-Flemish channel VIER that invites couples to entrust one of the most important decisions of their life to a couple of strangers. The concept is similar to that of popular reality TV phenomenon “Married at First Sight“, where couples, paired up by relationship experts, agree to be married the first time they meet and live as a married couple for eight weeks before deciding either to divorce or stay married. However, couples who decide to go on Bought Blind not only agree to let experts choose their house for them, but also sign a legal document giving these two complete strangers power of attorney, allowing them to sign the deed to the house on their behalf, and spend their budget as they see fit. They only get to see their new home once the deed has been signed and the redecorating has been completed, so if they don’t like it, all they can do is sell it.

Read More »

Aspiring seagull imitators from all over Europe recently gathered in the Belgian town of Adinkerke to take part in the first European Gull Screeching Championship.

The wacky event took place in a local pub and required competitors to channel their inner gull, both vocally and physically. While the emphasis of the competition was on the sound produced by participants, with a maximum of 15 points being awarded for the best screeching sounds, participants could also score up to 5 points by putting on a proper performance. Some just flapped their arms in a gull-like manner, others wore seagull-style beaks on top of their heads, and a few actually wore gull costumes to impress the judges. It all sounds silly, but the Gull Screeching Championship actually has a serious goal.

Read More »

Two university pals from the UK who wanted to do something inspirational and epic decided to spend three weeks in a Malaysian jungle, naked and without food, to “show that it can be done”. They quit 16 days into their adventure after one of them cut his hand with a machete.

26-year-old Daniel Olifi, a financial tech worker, and James Moynihan, a 27-year-old cruise ship entertainer, wanted to see if they could survive in a harsh jungle with only minimal supplies, no food and a couple of large leaves covering their private parts. Their plan was to spend three weeks camping in the Kuantan rainforest, in Malaysia, but the challenge quickly proved much harder than they had anticipated. Within hours of setting up camp, last October, they almost ran out of water and while they eventually overcame that problem, they still had to endure swarms of mosquitoes, hypothermia and severe hunger. They eventually had to call it quits after 16 days, after Daniel cut his hand with a machete and his wound started smelling like rotten flesh.

Read More »

Australia’s Court of Appeal has been tasked with deciding whether farting can be considered a form of bullying, after an engineer sued his former employer for allowing a supervisor to harass him in several ways, including by farting in his presence, as part of an alleged conspiracy to end his employment.

56-year-old David Hingst sued his former employer, Construction Engineering, in 2017 , seeking damages of 1.8 million Australian dollars ($1.28 million). During the trial, Hingst, who chose to represent himself, claimed that his ex-colleague at the company, Greg Short, was a serial farter and had repeatedly bullied him by way of flatulence. The engineer told Justice Rita Zammit that Short would come in his small, windowless office and fart several times a day, which apparently caused him serious psychological stress. After hearing the testimonies of both parties, the judge ruled that this was not bullying, but “typical banter or mucking around” and dismissed the case. However, Hingst recently appealed the decision, claiming he didn’t get a fair trial.

Read More »

In recent years, cattle farmers in France’s Brittany region have lost hundreds of cows to deaths that veterinarians simply cannot explain. After running various tests on their land, some now claim that the solar panels and wind turbines in the area are releasing too much electricity into the ground, which is slowly killing their animals.

Although mysterious cattle deaths have been reported in various parts of Brittany, the situation is particularly dire in Cote-d’Amour, where several farmers have sustained hundreds of losses in mysterious conditions. According to local farmer Patrick Le Nechet, his cattle just started losing weight a few years back and many of them ultimately died. The strange thing was that the animals didn’t seem to be suffering from any diseases and the veterinarians couldn’t explain the cause of death. After conducting his own investigation, Le Nechet concluded that the mysterious deaths started occurring around the time that a photovoltaic installation appeared in the area.

Read More »