Police in the Russian city of Sevastopol are scrambling to find the vandals responsible for destroying over a dozen speed cameras in the last month.

Reports of damaged stationary speed cameras and the solar panels that power them started coming in at the start of December, and police soon realized that these weren’t just isolated incidents. Someone was targeting them and even getting creative with the means of destruction. First, they started by shooting the cameras with metallic pellets fired from air guns, then they moved to sledgehammers, tearing down the concrete posts the speed cameras were mounted on, and recently they even began setting the expensive cameras on fire. Sevastopol authorities claim that the capture of these vandals is now inevitable, but with 16 destroyed speed cameras reported so far, police has yet to arrest any suspects.

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Australian celebrity chef and Instagram wellness guru Pete Evans has come under fire for saying that “sungazing”, the act of looking directly at the sun, is a one of the best forms of free medicine.

“Every day I love to immerse myself in an experience within the cleansing ocean water as well as a brief gaze into the radiant light of the early rising or late setting sun,” Evans posted on Instagram. “These simple, yet powerful practices have got to be two of the best forms of free medicine on the planet for body, mind and spirit.”

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A winery in Spain’s Galicia region recently unveiled a revolutionary wine-flavored water that allows consumers to enjoy the taste of red or white wine without worrying about getting drunk or putting on weight.

Called Vida Gallaecia, the enriched water is the result of a two-year collaboration between the Bodega Líquido Gallaecia winery and scientists at the State Agency of the Higher Council of Scientific Research (CSIC). It allegedly tastes like wine, but contains no alcohol and very few calories, making suitable for consumption anytime, anywhere. Although the secret formula behind the ingenious beverage is a well-guarded secret, its creators have revealed that it involves the use of flavanols from grapes and residues from the wine making process.

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Adrien Locatelli, a young bio-hacker from the French city of Grenoble, has been called an “idiot” for undergoing a bizarre DIY experiment in which he injected himself with a DNA pattern made from translated passages from the Bible and the Koran.

Locatelli, who is believed to still be in high-school, started off by selecting passages from the Christian and Muslim holy books that he wanted stored in his body in the form of DNA. He then assigned one of the four letters corresponding to the chemicals that DNA is made of (ACGT) to every character in the passages, in the order GACT. Using a free online tool, the daring experimenter translated the nucleotide information into protein sequences that he ended up injecting into his thighs. Why? Simply because he was curious to know if it could be done.

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You know you have a serious pollution problem when you have to paint the snow white just to hide the soot and ash covering it. Authorities in Mysky, a town in the Siberian region of Kemerovo, have come under fire after covering a children’s snow slide in white paint to make the coal dust from the nearby quarries less noticeable.

Russian media started reporting about the painted snow situation in Mysky a couple of days ago, after a local resident posted video evidence on YouTube. In the now viral video, Svetlana Zelenina demonstrates how merely touching the snow slide with her hands leaves her fingers covered in a sticky white substance, which she believes to be water-based paint. She adds that parents whose children had used the slide reported that it left them looking like “Indians wearing war paint”.

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The Ayaidah, a Bedouin tribe in north-eastern Egypt is the last to practice the Bisha’h, an ancient ritual used to determine whether a suspect in a crime is innocent or guilty. They have to lick a red-hot spoon or rod in the presence of tribal authorities, and if their tongue blisters, they are guilty, if it’s left unscathed, they are innocent.

Believed to date back to ancient Mesopotamia, Bisha’h was used by most Bedouin tribes throughout the centuries, but all except the Ayaidah eventually abandoned it. The ritual is banned in countries like Jordan and Saudi Arabia, but not in Egypt, although religious groups in the African country view it as unislamic. Considered by many the world’s oldest lie detection system (but definitely not the most accurate), Bisha’h was mostly used in situations where a crime was committed, but there were no witnesses. Suspects had to lick a heated spoon to prove their innocence, and regardless of the result, the verdict could not be contested.

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Doctors at Dell Children’s Medical Center in Austin have been stunned by the unexpected recovery of an 11-year-old girl whose inoperable brain tumor miraculously disappeared.

Earlier this year, Roxli Doss was diagnosed with diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG), a rare and extremely aggressive brain tumor with a very low survival rate. It was well-incorporated into her brain stem, making it impossible to remove surgically, so the doctors told the girld’s parents to make the most of the time they had left with her. However, they also decided to try radiation therapy, as it had been shown to extend a patient’s life by three to six months. Radiation isn’t a cure; in fact DIPG is an incurable condition , so therefore the diagnostic is considered terminal. But in Roxli’s case, the treatment literally worked wonders. After six weeks of radiation, an MRI showed almost no signs that the tumor ever existed.

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Paying $645 for a pair of pants that wasn’t created by a well known fashion brand might seem ludicrous, but what if that said pair of pants would last you forever? That’s the promise of adventure clothing brand Vollebak, which claims that its new “100 Year Pants” will last at least a century.

Vollebak cofounder Steve Tidball claims that the company stands behind the 100-year guarantee, because the new pants are made of materials so tough you can walk through fire in them. Technically, the 100 Year Pants are made of an innovative three-layer material designed to withstand various threats. The outer layer repels water and is designed to resist abrasions, the middle layer is fireproof and also expands as an airbag at high temperatures, acting as a barrier between your legs and the flames, while the third layer is an aramid fiber, a nylon-related synthetic doesn’t burn or melt, offering extra protection.

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A Missouri poacher who is suspected to have illegally killed hundreds of deer over the past decade has recently been ordered to watch the Disney classic ‘Bambi’ at least once a month for one year, as part of his sentence.

It’s not clear exactly how many deer David Berry and his two sons – David Berry Jr. and Kyle Berry – have poached in the forests of southern Missouri over the last nine years, but investigators suspect that the number reaches into the hundreds. The three men hunted the defenceless animals mostly at night, cutting off their heads and antlers as trophies and leaving the bodies to rot where they fell. Although their cruel and illegal activities were financially motivated, police evidence suggests that cutting off the heads of the deer was mostly about satisfying the poachers’ personal egos. Now, one of the twelve men accused in what has been described as one of the largest deer poaching cases in the history of Missouri will have to watch the Disney classic ‘Bambi’ repeatedly to hopefully realize the error of his ways.

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A Thai conman was recently arrested and charged with robbery after successfully pulling out a sophisticated plan that involved setting up a fake jewlery store and luring an Indian businessman there so he could steal a valuable diamond.

59-year-old Pipatpongpat Suksawatpipat, the man arrested for the ingenious robbery, was once a prosperous jewlery trader himself, but fell on hard time when he became addicted to gambling a few years back. He went from being one of the richest people in Chanthaburi to having just 40,000 baht ($1,200) to his name, but he recently put that small amount of money to good use and pulled off a scam that would make any self-respecting conman jealous. In just a week’s time, he managed to rent a commercial space and turn it into a fake jewelery store, lure an Indian jeweler there with a 10 million baht diamond, and eventually steal that diamond before riding out into the sunset. Alas, his success was short-lived.

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It turns out that smelling your own socks is not only gross but potentially deadly. A Chinese man was recently hospitalized with a severe pulmonary fungal infection, which he allegedly developed by constantly sniffing his used socks.

When he was brought in to the No 909 Hospital in Zhangzhou, China’s Fujian Province, the 37-year-old man, surnamed Peng, complained of chest pain and frequent coughing. An X-ray showed that he was suffering from a severe lung infection, and subsequent tests revealed that it had been caused by a bacteria typically found in used footwear. After being questioned by his doctors, Peng admitted that he had long developed a habit of sniffing his dirty socks every day after coming home from work, before throwing them in the laundry basket.

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Enhanced water company Vitaminwater recently launched a contest challenging entrants to give up their smartphones and tablets for a whole year. That’s a tough thing to do in this day and age, but the Coca Cola-owned company is ready to make it worth your while by putting up a $100,000 prize.

Vitaminwater’s #nophoneforayear challenge requires entrants to go a full 365 days without using a smartphone. That means giving up their own phone and tablet as well as agreeing not to use anyone else’s handhelds either. The selected person will have to sign a contract committing to no smartphone usage for the duration of the contest, and if they are found to have adhered to the strict rule for the duration of the contract, they will be rewarded with $100,000. Sounds easy enough, but first you have to convince the company that you’re the right person for the job.

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Abdussalam Firdaus Abdul Aziz, a 22-year-old man from Malaysia, recently became an overnight internet sensation thanks to his feminine features that apparently make it hard for people to tell whether he’s male or female.

Photos of Aziz have been doing the rounds online ever since it was reported that at a recent soccer game that he attended, he was asked to show his identification documents, because male security guards refused to do a body check on him, thinking that he was a woman. The story made news headlines in Malaysia earlier this week before transcending national borders via the internet.

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At just 12-years-old, Leonardo Nicanor Quinteros is still in secondary school, but he already runs his own free private school to help other children, and even some adults, with their studies.

Leonardo loves to study, but he also wants to transfer his passion for education to his peers. After seeing some of his colleagues struggling to keep up at school, and other children spending too much time playing on the streets and completely neglecting their studies, he decided to do something about it. Last year, he told his grandmother, Ramona, that he wanted to operate his own school and asked her to help him build it next to her house, in the Argentinian town of Las Piedritas, near San Juan. She obliged, and today’s Nico’s free private school caters to nearly 40 young students. The 12-year-old acts both as teacher and principal and is proud that his initiative has already made a big difference for many of the children attending there.

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Food waste is one the greatest challenges of our time, and fruits and vegetables are particularly problematic, as an estimated 52% of harvests go bad before reaching consumers. But one Malaysian company claims to have come up with a simple and effective solution to this problem – a tiny sticker that keeps fruits from spoiling for up to two weeks.

You’ve probably seen stickers on fruits before, but not like the ones created by Stixfresh. Those common stickers are used solely to provide consumers with information about the grower and how the fruit was grown, but Stixfresh has a completely different purpose. It contains a special, all-natural formula that slows down the ripening process, keeping the fruit fresh and juicy for much longer.

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