The “Gangs of Urban Turkeys” Terrorizing Massachusetts

After being nearly wiped out from New England in the 1800s, wild turkeys are apparently turning the tables on their human oppressors, wreaking havoc on the streets of Boston and other urban areas of Massachusetts. The number of residents attacked by the aggressive birds has increased dramatically in the last year, police say.

Wild turkeys once dominated the forests of the Northeast, but they seem to have taken a liking to cities and towns in Massachusetts, where finding better foraging beside dumpsters and in people’s backyards than in the woods. They’ve become so at home among humans that people have started referring to them as “urban turkeys”. They can be seen strutting their feathers on sidewalks, pecking shiny objects, blocking traffic, chasing after smaller pets and, in rare cases, even attacking people.

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Cheese-Topped Ice Tea Is Apparently a Thing, And People Are Queuing for Hours for a Cup

Cheese and ice tea doesn’t sound like a particularly tasty combination, but just try telling that to the thousands of people all across China standing in line for up to five hours to get their hands on a cup of it. Cheese tea is a nationwide sensation, making it hard to believe that it was created by a guy in his early 20s with no real knowledge of tea.

Only a few months ago, Hey Tea, the company behind China’s insanely popular cheese ice tea, was a small street-side shop in Jiangmen, Guangdong, but today they have over 50 branches in Guangdong Province alone, as well as new venues in bustling urban centers like Shanghai and Beijing. They are growing at an astonishing rate, but it’s still not enough to satisfy demand for their bizarrely-sounding cheese tea. People still have to spend at least 2 hours, and, in some cases, up to 5 hours in line to get their hands on a cup. It’s apparently so good that busy people pay others to wait in line for them, and the company sometimes has to hire private security to keep the lines moving and hustlers from cutting in line.

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Chinese University Requires Students to Lose Weight in Order to Receive Full Grades

In an attempt to tackle obesity on its campus, a university in Jiangsu, China, is offering overweight students the chance to enroll in a special weight-loss program, where they will receive their grades based on how much weight they shed and on how well they do in class.

Zhou Quanfu, a lecturer at the Nanjing Agriculture University, came up with the idea for the accredited weight loss program after learning that most of his overweight students didn’t exercise because they thought it was pointless. So he decided to motivate them by having their grades depend more on their physical shape than on their actual performance in school. Sixty per cent of each student’s grade is determined by how much weight they lose in a set period of time, with their curricular activity only accounting for 40 percent of the total score. Students enrolled in the program have to lose at least 7 percent of their original weight by the end of the semester in order to receive full grades.

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Japanese Man Invents Coffee Made Entirely of Garlic

When you think about coffee alternatives, garlic is probably one of the last things that comes to mind, but that exactly the ingredient that one Japanese inventor used to create a drink that looks and tastes like coffee.

74-year-old Yokitomo Shimotai, a coffee shop owner in Aomori Prefecture, Japan, claims that his unique “garlic coffee” is the result of a cooking blunder he made over 30 years ago, when he burned a steak and garlic while aiting tables at the same time. Intrigued by the scorched garlic’s aroma, he mashed it up with a spoon and mixed it with hot water. The resulting drink looked and tasted a lot like coffee. Making a mental note of his discovery, Yokimoto carried on with his job, and only started researching garlic coffee again after he retired.

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People Are Now Renting Grounded Private Jets for Instagram Photo Shoots

Inspired by popular Instagram accounts like ‘Rich Kids of Instagram’ or ‘Luxury Kids of Instagram’, as well as social media stars like Gianluca Vachi and Dan Bilzerian, people who can’t actually afford to fly on private jets are renting them on the ground for professional photo shoots, just so they can post their own lavish lifestyle photos on Instagram.

Just because you don’t have tens of thousands of dollars to spend on renting a private jet doesn’t mean that you can’t make your social media friends turn green with envy. With just a few hundred dollars, you can actually rent a luxurious Gulfstream G650 aircraft for a couple of hours and have a team of professional photographers and makeup artists create the illusion that you are actually living a life of luxury. You can then post the photos on Instagram and sit back as your friends and fans drool over them.

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Man Lives in the Woods for Five Years Just to Get Away From His Wife

A 62-year-old man from Birmingham, England, recently made news headlines after revealing that he had lived in the forest for five years before moving into a homeless shelter, just to get away from his nagging, controlling wife.

Malcolm Applegate worked as a gardener for most of his life, and enjoyed tending to people’s gardens. It wasn’t until he got married, about thirteen years ago, that his life took a turn for the worse. He claims that in the beginning, he and his wife got on pretty well, but as he became increasingly busy with work, she became more controlling, to the point where he had to cut his hours just to please her. At one point, all the arguments and his wife’s nagging got too much for Malcolm, so he just packed up his things and left her. But instead of moving to a friend’s house and filing for divorce, he just disappeared.

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50-Year-Old Mother Often Gets Confused with Her Sons’ Girlfriends

One look at Puspa Dewi is all it takes to understand why people often confuse her with her two sons’ girlfriends. At age 50, the Instagram star looks a lot better than most women in their 30s.

Puspa Dewi, an entrepreneur and mother-of-two from Jakarta, Indonesia, recently celebrated her 50th birthday, but you’d have a heart time guessing her age just by looking at the photos she uploads on Instagram. She doesn’t look a day over 30, in fact, she could easily pass for a woman in her early 20s. When she poses with her two teenage sons, people (that includes me) can’t believe that she is their mother, and not their girlfriend.

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Chinese Man Builds Elevator That Only Goes Up to His 6th Floor Apartment

Sick of listening to his lazy son-in-law complaining about how hard it was to climb the stairs to his 6th floor apartment, a man in Chongqing, China, built a private elevator that only goes up to his apartment.

The man, surnamed Xong, has been living in the Tongliang District apartment building for decades, but never complained about having to walk up to his apartment every day. But when his son-in-law moved in, he had trouble getting used to the daily climb, and always complained about how exhausted he was after walking up the stairs. Tired of his constant wining, Xong decided to do something about it.

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Company Uses Optical Illusion Floor Tiles to Prevent People Running Through Its Hallway

Casa Ceramica, a floor tile company from the UK, recently went viral on Twitter after creating an impressive optical illusion out of 400 floor tiles to discourage people from running through its hallway.

It’s not clear why anyone would be running through the hallway of a floor tile showroom, but they’re sure to think twice about doing it after taking a look at the floor ahead of them. Even though its designers assure us that it is perfectly flat, seen from a certain perspective, it looks like there is a big hole in the middle of it. Interestingly enough, seen from the opposite end, the hole actually looks like a bulge rising up from the floor. Both illusions are sure to prevent visitors from navigating the path at too fast a pace.

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This Children’s Tent for Adults Offers a Temporary Escape from the Stress of Modern Life

The Pause Pod has been mocked on social media as a really expensive children’s tent for adults, but its inventors claim it is actually a portable “private pop-up space free from stressful moments”.

Inspired by the blanket forts that most of us made as children, the Pause Pod is designed to offer user an escape from the pressure of modern life, anytime, anywhere. Whether you’re looking to take a quick nap, read a chapter of your favorite book, watch the latest episode of Game of Thrones or just meditate, at the office, at home or even on the street, all you have to do is take out your portable Pause Pod, step inside and take a break from the outside world.

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Plastic Surgery Tourists Stuck in Airport Because Their Passports Don’t Match Their Faces

Photos of three Chinese women allegedly stuck in a South Korean airport, because their passports no longer match their faces following plastic surgery, have been doing the rounds on Chinese social media.

South Korean plastic surgery clinics are renowned as some of the best in the world, so it’s no surprise that women from other Asian countries, like China and Japan, regularly fly to South Korea to get work done on their faces. The problem is that few of them stop at nose jobs, face lifts and Botox injections. Instead, they completely remodel their faces, making it difficult for airport personnel to identify them from their passport photo.

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Japan Now Has a Cafe Dedicated to Female Thighs

If you enjoy staring at women’s thighs while you eat, there’s now a place that allows you to do just that, without looking like a pervert. Welcome to Japan’s new World of Thighs Photography Cafe!

It’s no secret that Japan loves themed restaurants and cafes, but if you thought airsoft restaurants and reptile cafes were a bit too much, you’re going to love this new joint that is “colored by the world of thighs”. Young girls’ thighs, that it. Designed as an extension of Japanese photographer Yuria’s artistic exhibitions, the newly opened cafe in Tokyo’s Ebisu district is decorated with photos of women’s  thighs from Yuria’s existing portfolio, as well as some never-before-seen pics from a recent photo shoot in Guam. If you’re unfamiliar with Yuria’s body of work, it’s pretty much centered around female thighs.

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Woman Goes Blind in One Eye After Playing Mobile Video Game Almost Non-Stop

A 21-year-old woman from Dongguan, China, was recently diagnosed with with retinal artery obstruction in her right eye, after playing a popular smartphone game almost non-stop.

The woman, known only as Wu, apparently noticed that she couldn’t see anything with her right eye on October 1st, while playing her favorite mobile game, King of Glory. Thinking she was just tired, she went to bed, but when she woke up the next day, she was still blind in her right eye. Her parents took her to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with a serious condition known as retinal artery obstruction. This usually only occurs in older patients, but doctors said that Wu’s eyes were incredibly fatigued by the stressed of constantly staring into the small smartphone screen.

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Toronto Family Sue Neighbors for Copying the Look of Their House

A family in Forest Hill, Toronto, has taken their neighbors to court for copying the design of their multi-million dollar house when renovating their property, thus decreasing the value of their own home. They are asking for $2.5 million in damages.

It turns out you can’t just copy design elements of a house you like without suffering the consequences. Barbara Ann and Eric Kirshenblatt learned that the hard way three years ago, when they were taken to court by their neighbors, Jason and Jodi Chapnick, whose home they had allegedly used as inspiration when renovating their own property. The Chapnicks claimed that the defendants had fixed up their house to look “strikingly similar” to theirs, including using matching stonework the same shade of blue. They were asking for $1.5 million in damages, $20,000 in statutory copyright damages, $1 million in punitive damages, and for the defendants to change the look of their house.

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Bizarre Mouthpiece Allegedly Turns Polluted Air into Clean, Mineral-Infused Air

Treepex is a portable barrel-like device that allegedly uses living tree cells compressed in replaceable cartridges to turn carbon dioxide into oxygen, emulating a tree’s ability to transform polluted air into mineral-enriched air. It sounds like a game-changer for sure, but nobody knows if it actually works, plus, it looks kind of funny.

Developed by a Georgian, Tbilisi-based, startup with the same name, Treepex claims to provide a real solution to the world’s growing air pollution problem. Using a new technology called CRISPR, the company was apparently able “to extract the DNA of actual trees to recreate the living cells that are responsible for photosynthesis”, and compress them into cartridges that absorb polluted air and release clean fresh air for the user. All you have to do is plug a cartridge into the tubular Treepex, stick it into your mouth, and breathe.

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